Naming and Memory

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Naming and Memory

 

Two theories of naming have dominated recent discussion: the description theory and the causal chain theory. But there could be others: descriptive fitting and causal connection are not the only conceivable relations that might underlie the naming relation. Earlier theorists might have suggested that a resemblance relation is the relation that underlies naming: the reference of a name on a given occasion of utterance is the object that resembles the mental image in the mind of the speaker. Such theories have not been popular since Wittgenstein’s criticism of image theories of meaning, and for good reason. But images do have referents, so they are the kind of thing that might logically qualify as determining the naming relation. Perhaps there are speakers elsewhere in the universe that invariably have detailed images corresponding to every name they use, and in fact these are the determinants of a name’s reference. This is the correct theory for them. We might want to modify it to accommodate the conceptual point that objects and images can’t really resemble each other, being entities of quite different types; but that is easily accomplished by saying that the image resembles the percept that speakers have in mind when they perceive the reference of the name. It appears that such a theory is pretty hopeless empirically for human name users, given their paucity of imagery, but in principle the theory could be correct for differently constituted beings. However, the theory suggests a wider range of options than is commonly recognized. Might there be a better theory that has some affinity with the image theory but avoids its pitfalls?

            I want to suggest that memory provides such a theory. The basic idea is simple: the reference of a name is the individual the user of the name is remembering when he or she utters the name. More precisely, the user associates the name with a certain memory (possibly a memory image) of its referent. The name evokes a specific memory of particular person or thing, and it refers to the entity thus remembered. For example, I have memories of Saul Kripke derived from meeting him, and “Saul Kripke” refers for me to the person I am remembering when I use that name. So there are two relations that go into fixing the reference of a name: the memory relation itself (“m is a memory of object x”) and the association relation between a name and a particular memory (“m is associated with name n”). We need not go into what constitutes these two relations—it could be a causal relation and a relation of psychological association of ideas—what matters now is that the two together supply an alternative to the usual two theories of naming. In short: you are naming what you are remembering when you use the name. The remembering relation between memory image (trace, engram, etc.) and object is what underlies the naming relation. We are not limited to invoking descriptive relations and causal relations—that is, semantic fitting and social transmission. We need to consider the suggestion that the basic relation in naming is remembering x.

            There is an immediate objection: what about naming things of which we have no memories? The objection must be conceded: we often refer to people and things of which we have no memory, that we have never seen, met, or experienced in any way. For example, I can refer to Plato (I just did) and yet I have no memories of Plato. But this is not a real problem for the theory, because we can simply take a leaf out of the chain-of-communication theory’s book: those with no memories of the bearer of the name refer to that individual by using the name with the intention of referring to the same individual as the speaker from whom they learned the name. So the theory is really a two-part theory: there are the in-the-know speakers with memories of the individual in question, and there are the speakers that are parasitic on these privileged speakers. This resembles the standard theory that combines an initial baptism with an historical chain of linked uses, but we substitute memory for baptism. Instead of saying that the reference of the name is fixed by a description or demonstrative in an initial baptismal act we say that speakers acquire memories of an individual and these memories fix the name’s reference.  [1] Intuitively, you encounter someone, perceive that individual in some way, and form a memory of the individual in question; you then decide to call that individual by a certain name. To ascertain the reference of a speaker’s use of a name we need to know which individual is being remembered when the name is used. The mechanism of reference is the memory-name connection—who or what the accompanying memory image is a memory image of. The material of the memory trace can be of any type—sensory, linguistic, computational, analogue, digital, etc.—what matters is that it is a memory of a specific thing. Other speakers can then defer to these original speakers in their use of the name, relying upon their memory of the referent to gain referential traction. The original reference is fixed by something in the speaker’s mind but it isn’t a definite description or a conceptual content that uniquely individuates the reference; it is simply a memory of the object, whatever form that memory takes.

            It might be countered that some names don’t rely on memory to achieve a referent: for example, we can just stipulate that the name “Albert” will refer to the first person born in the next century—and no one has a memory of such a future person. And does naming myself require that I have memories of myself? What about names of numbers? What about names of past objects that no one was around to remember? The answer to these natural questions is that no theory of naming should try to encompass every kind of name. There are different ways that names can hook up with objects: by descriptions, by demonstratives, by mental images, by memories, even by intellectual intuition. There is no such thing as the naming relation, if that means a single kind of grounding relation applicable in all cases. But the memory theory is a good empirical theory of most human names; it captures the most central cases, viz. our typical reference to people and places by means of ordinary proper names. The human institution of naming, as it now exists, is founded on human memory. If speakers were subject to widespread amnesia naming would not be possible in its current form: you have to remember the people you have met and you have to remember what names are associated with these remembered people. There doesn’t have to be a formal baptism for names to get introduced into the language, but there does have to be a general capacity to remember things. What all names do have in common is that they are a dependent mode of reference: they rely on other ways of singling objects out. This is not true for descriptions, demonstratives, images, perceptions, or memories; these don’t depend on some other type of reference to make them possible. But names have to piggyback on other referring devices, which can be of various kinds. We could justifiably speak of the “varieties of naming”. Still, for the vast majority of cases memory is central to our naming practices. We accordingly need to add the concept of memory to our account of names, as they mainly exist for us now, not just the concepts of description and referential link. The right final account probably includes all three elements suitably combined: memories, descriptive contents of memories, and interpersonal referential links.

            The theory I have in mind combines features from both the classic description theory and the newfangled causal chain theory. Causality enters through memory itself as well as through the historical chain of uses; and the memory theory locates naming in a certain state of mind, viz. possession of a memory image. Memories are always partial and perspectival, like Fregean senses, so that aspect of the description theory is preserved—remembering Hesperus is not the same mental state as remembering Phosphorus. Memories don’t have reference by means of uniquely identifying descriptions, any more than perceptions do, but there is clearly a definite content embedded in a given memory. Hence the associated name can have sense as well as reference in virtue of these memories. Descriptions and demonstratives don’t invoke memory in this way: you don’t need to remember anything in order to employ these referential devices (except what their constituent words mean). But you can’t successfully use a name unless you either remember its bearer or are suitably connected to someone who does (for those names that actually do depend on memory). Naming is a bit like knowledge: knowledge too is either memory-based or testimony-based, with the latter radiating out from the former. Similarly, naming is either grounded in memory or it radiates out from that basis by mean of interpersonal linguistic links. We might call this “the extended memory theory if names” just to have a label. We often don’t remember people’s names, but we don’t typically forget name’s people: say the name and we reliably remember the person referred to. This is fortunate or else we would be unable to use names in the way we do. Naming and memory go hand in hand.  [2]

 

Colin McGinn            

  [1] Note that babies are usually already named before a formal baptism is performed, so the baptism can’t be the mechanism whereby names are bestowed. The baptism is more a legal confirmation than an original source of naming.

  [2] I haven’t discussed names for natural kinds as well as names for perceptible qualities like colors, but the same considerations apply mutatis mutandis to these. For example, the use of “red” to name the color red depends on our ability to remember what red is, as well as our ability to associate such memories with color words. In general we must not underestimate the role of memory in linguistic understanding and use.

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The Virtuous Lie

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The Virtuous Lie

 

Kant held that all lying is wrong, even when the consequences of telling the truth are terrible. Most people have disagreed: sometimes lying is the right thing to do in cases in which truth telling would have bad consequences (e.g. the Nazis looking for the fleeing Jewish girl). The idea is that lying is always prima facie wrong (to use Ross’s terminology) but that in some cases net utility overrides this wrongness; not perhaps any degree of negative consequence but when the bad consequences are extreme enough. Surely it is right to lie if a whole civilization is at stake! What is not considered, however, is whether it can be right to lie even when the consequences of telling the truth are not bad. Can it ever be right to lie when the consequences of doing so are worse than the consequences of telling the truth? That sounds impossible, since consequences are the only conceivable way that the prima faciewrongness of lying can be overridden; there has to be something to counterbalance the wrongness of lying—and what could that be but the securing of good consequences? The only morally permissible lie is the beneficial lie: there can be no other valid reason for telling a lie.

            But this ignores another possible reason for lying: the binding force of a promise. Suppose you have a friend, Phil, who is rather short; and suppose Phil has an enemy, Bert, who is pettily obsessed with Phil’s height in relation to his own (he is an inch taller than Phil). Bert has been trying to find out Phil’s height so that he can loudly boast of his vertical superiority to Phil, but hitherto has been unable to ascertain this information. Phil asks you to promise not to tell Bert his height because he knows it will fill Bert with unseemly glee, and you agree. Bert subsequently asks you to tell him Phil’s height. If you tell the truth Bert will be overjoyed, relishing his petty rivalry with your friend Phil; but if you lie Bert will be disappointed and grumpy. Should you lie or tell the truth? If you tell the truth you break your promise to your friend, possibly being motivated by utilitarian considerations; but if you lie, you fail to maximize the amount of happiness in the world (let’s suppose Phil knows nothing of your encounter with Bert). This would be a lie that has no good consequences defined in terms of net utility. I say it would be right to lie in these circumstances, yet utility cannot be the reason. The reason is obvious: you made a promise to Phil, and that promise imposes a moral obligation on you. Now if it turned out that keeping that promise would result in the death of innocent people even Phil would agree that the promise should be broken, but not just because Bert would be made marginally less happy than the alternative. Promises must be kept even when utility is not maximized—as when you keep a promise to meet someone for lunch even though a more attractive option has presented itself.  [1]So lying can be the right thing to do just because you have promised (for good reasons) to lie—even when utility is not maximized. The promise overrides the lack of utility maximization. So virtuous lies can occur even in cases where consequences indicate otherwise. This is one of those cases in which your moral duties all things considered favor lying but not because one of these duties is to ensure the best possible outcome in respect of consequences.

            But isn’t the example abnormal? We don’t usually promise to lie, though we often promise to tell the truth. That may be true as a matter of statistical fact, but it doesn’t reflect a necessary truth. Consider a society ravaged by disease in which visible signs of the disease mar people’s physical appearance. There may be a general promise, implicit or explicit, not to remark on such signs—it just hurts people’s feeling to be reminded of their condition. This promise has binding force even if it is slightly worse for people in the long run if they don’t know what they look like—not catastrophic but real. Once the promise is in effect it creates a prima facie obligation to maintain the lie, even when the consequences of doing so may be slightly worse than insisting on the truth. Promising to lie is like promising to do anything: it creates a duty to act as promised—except in cases in which the consequences are dire enough to overrule the promise. Thus there could be a society in which this kind of virtuous lying is common and expected. There will be no general prohibition in this society against lying. We can even formulate a moral rule: it is morally wrong to tell the truth if you have promised to lie (insert the usual caveats). You ought to lie if you have promised to lie, just as you ought to do whatever you have promised. So Kant was wrong even by his own non-consequentialist standards: a pure deontologist can accept that lying is sometimes right, because the rule of promise keeping applies to lying too. Lying can be required by the rules of morality even when its consequences are less than optimal.  [2]

 

  [1] Ross gives the compelling example of carrying out a deceased person’s will: if the deceased has willed his property to John, it is wrong to allocate it to Jim on the ground that you think (correctly) that Jim will be made marginally happier than John. Promising as such carries moral weight irrespective of consequences.

  [2] It is tempting to conclude that lying is never intrinsically wrong, i.e. wrong just by being a lie. In the case of Phil and Bert you do nothing wrong in lying; the wrongness of lying, which is indeed generally wrong, depends on the surrounding context.

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Emotions

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Emotions

 

Emotions are consequent upon desire and belief not freestanding mental episodes. The subject has certain desires, such as the desire to stay safe, and also certain beliefs, such as the belief that a looming animal is dangerous, and the result is fear directed at the animal in question. It is hard to see how an emotion like fear would be possible without antecedent desires and beliefs of these kinds. Similarly, an individual has the desire to form loving relationships with other individuals and believes that this one is a good candidate; as a consequence love blooms in that individual’s bosom. You want something and you believe this thing will give it to you; a suitable emotion supervenes. The desire and belief are necessary conditions of the emotion. What sense would it make to have emotions in the absence of desires and corresponding beliefs? Don’t emotions exist to serve desires—wishes, needs, appetites? Presumably they evolved with that purpose: they are the servants of desire, with belief as the method of tying them down.  [1] They are desire-dependent. But desires are not emotion-dependent: an organism can have needs and desires and no consequent emotions. Do all animals have emotions? Unlikely: consider insects, snakes, sharks, lobsters, etc. Here it seems plausible to attribute needs and desires, as well as sensations and perceptions, but no emotions—no love, hate, fear, joy, sadness, etc. Or consider that Vulcan animal Mr. Spock, chief science officer of the USS Enterprise: he is equipped with standard terrestrial psychology except for emotion. He has his needs and desires, his hopes and wishes, his values and aesthetic sense; but he feels no emotion, not a jot (much to Bones’ consternation). Mr. Spock is logically possible and perfectly intelligible; there may well be rare humans in like case (just destroy the amygdala). So we have an asymmetry between desire and belief, on the one hand, and emotion, on the other, with emotion emerging as the derivative phenomenon.

            This reflection might lead us to suppose that emotion is reducible to desire and belief: an emotion just is an appropriate desire-belief pair (compare reducing intention to belief and desire in standard belief-desire psychology). If a creature desires to stay safe and believes that avoiding a certain animal is the way to do it, then this creature will feel fear towards that animal. But this is very implausible because the emotion is not functionally and phenomenologically equivalent to the desire-belief pair: the emotion is a feeling that triggers certain distinctive sorts of behavior. There is indeed a lawlike connection between the two, and a desire-belief pair is necessary for emotion, but it is not logically sufficient for emotion—not what emotion consists in. Emotion is a genuinely distinct type of mental state over and above desire and belief (the same thing is true of intention). It depends on desire but isn’t a type of desire. Spock lacks this type of mental state though he is not bereft of the other types; he has a localized psychological lacuna. Captain Kirk throbs with something Spock genuinely lacks; he has something Spock doesn’t have just in virtue of having desire and belief. Still the connection is intimate, which is why Spock is otherwise so similar to Kirk: he has normal desire and belief, he acts much like a regular human, but he lacks this one psychological trait. He is preternaturally calm, is not given to humor, and speaks rather slowly, but he isn’t completely alien to us—he is our conative twin (well almost). He is living proof that there is more to emotion than desires modulated by beliefs; but he also tells us that emotion is not the be-all and end-all—it can be removed without drastic psychological impairment.  [2]

            This presents a puzzle: why does emotion exist? Spock does perfectly well without it, even better in some respects than the average emotional human. For one thing, he is always rational. Why would the genes engineer a psychological trait that causes irrationality? What good is that to survival? Yet emotion is common, especially among mammals; so it must have some useful function. Emotions often make us feel bad, take the wind out of our sails, and interfere in our life-projects—wouldn’t we be better off without them (that is certainly Spock’s opinion)?  [3] It is true that they can imbue in us a sense of urgency, especially the aversive emotions, but couldn’t that be supplied by desire all by itself? The downside can easily seem to outweigh the upside, and the functional role of emotion seems not logically unique to it (Spock is perfectly capable of prompt decisive action). Sharks are pretty successful survival-wise and they are emotionless killing machines (unless they harbor a soft fuzzy side that we never witness). A pure desire-belief psychology seems both possible and advantageous, sans emotion. Nor does it look as if emotion is some kind of evolutionary remnant or contingent side effect: it presents itself as vital and vigorous. But the principle of its adaptive value is elusive and perplexing: emotion is a biological puzzle (like sex, consciousness, creativity, altruism, etc.) You can build an excellent survival machine employing only desire and belief (or more primitive analogues of these), so why insist on installing emotion too? We humans find our emotions tough to deal with—and it must be admitted that we are more than usually replete with them—so why equip us with so much emotional baggage?  [4] Why aren’t we more like Mr. Spock? Why aren’t we affective zombies? Let’s call this the Spock Problem—the problem of why emotions exist in so many animal species. They seem surplus to requirements, inherently prone to pathology, and dubiously functional; yet they are extremely widespread in the animal kingdom. What is going on? Why emotion?

 

  [1] I focus here on the connection between desire and emotion, but we should not forget that emotion is also highly belief-sensitive. Human emotions, in particular, are shaped by thoughts and theories, opinions and ideologies. Other animals do not have emotions that are so cognitively laden.

  [2] Emotion is no doubt largely innately based not acquired by learning and instruction. There are thus human emotional universals. It isn’t that Spock was brought up in a culture without emotion while Kirk was: both have their emotional make-up (or lack thereof) as a matter of genetic endowment. Why did Spock’s evolutionary background lead to an absence of emotions while Kirk’s left him with a plethora of them?

  [3] From Spock’s affectless point of view human emotion is a straight psychopathology, and it must be admitted that it is responsible for tremendous amounts of suffering and death.

  [4] Emotions seem most common in social species, suggesting that their function has to do with living successfully in a social environment. Might they result from sexual selection not natural selection? Do they operate mainly as signals to others not as motivational factors in their own right? We humans have a rich emotional life (too rich!) and we are also a deeply social species; most of our emotions are social (love, hate, envy, jealousy, pride, shame, disgust, etc.). Emotion is the currency of social life. We often evaluate each other by reference to them.

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Conceding Intelligence

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Conceding Intelligence

 

In footnote 76 of Naming and Necessity Kripke writes: “I have been surprised to find that at least one able listener took my use of such terms as ‘correlated with’, ‘corresponding to’, and the like as already begging the question against the identity thesis. The identity thesis, so he said, is not the thesis that pains and brain states are correlated, but rather that they are identical. Thus my entire discussion presupposes the anti-materialist position that I set out to prove. Although I was surprised to hear an objection that concedes so little intelligence to the argument, I have tried especially to avoid the term ‘correlated’ which seems to give rise to the objection.” (p.149) He then goes on to point out that such terms don’t presuppose the anti-materialist position, being quite neutral on it. The identity of this “able listener” is not disclosed and I would expect that he must feel a surge of acute embarrassment whenever recalling this artful footnote (I especially like Kripke’s use of “so he said”). The “objection” in question is utterly ridiculous and Kripke’s reply to it perfectly devastating; one wonders how anyone could say anything quite so idiotic. I can almost hear the dripping sarcasm in Kripke’s voice as he stoops to deal with this nonsense.  What could possess a person, able or otherwise, to voice anything so silly? Was he simply not thinking at all? Was Kripke’s ready answer not even contemplated by this “able listener”? What did this individual think Kripke would say? Did he not notice that Kripke is pretty astute logically and would be unlikely to make such a glaring and obvious mistake? At most a point of clarification might have been requested—but not an accusation of grotesque logical blunder. One imagines Kripke thinking as this “objection” is raised, “Does this guy really think that I am capable of such an elementary mistake? Does he think I am that dumb?” And then he has to manufacture a way of replying that doesn’t expose the questioner as a compete fool—hence the tiptoeing around with “able listener” and “so he said”. He has to try to maintain a degree of politeness in the face of abject imbecility. This is a highly unedifying occasion, but not an uncommon one.

            And so he came up with the timeless and convoluted phrase “concedes so little intelligence to the argument”: that is, the objector is not allowing even a minimal degree of intelligence to the person offering the argument, viz. Saul Aaron Kripke. Consider that for a moment: the guy is listening to Kripke’s groundbreaking and (to put it mildly) highly intelligent lectures and says to himself, “This supposed big shot has just committed an elementary blunder and I am going to speak up and expose his stupidity for all to see”. He thinks he has the perfect gotchawhile in fact he has shown how desperate he is to score points off the speaker, or is perhaps as dense as his question suggests (can anybody be that dense?). I think this episode should be engraved on the heart of every American philosopher young or old—and isn’t it a distinctively American moment? Hesitate before ascribing an elementary mistake to an obviously sharp and distinguished philosopher! Maybe you have got something wrong; maybe you have misunderstood: it is vanishingly improbable that such a speaker would be guilty of an error of this magnitude. Don’t just leap into the fray and accuse the speaker of logical ineptitude or total ignorance! You will only go down in history as the biggest twit ever to walk the face of the planet. Do you really want to be that guy? Do you want to be the guy who told Kripke he doesn’t understand what the identity theory says? Try to find the intelligence in what is being said by an obviously intelligent person! Don’t daydream of the glorious and spectacular takedown you imagine is within your reach! The kind of stupidity exhibited by this anonymous “able listener” (and has he ever come forward to own the “objection” Kripke so deftly demolishes?) deserves to be given a special label so that it is always at the forefront of the eager objector’s consciousness: maybe the Failed Kripke Gambit or the Reverse Stupidity Mistake or the Unintelligent Unintelligence Accusation. By conceding so little intelligence to Kripke’s (highly sophisticated) argument the objector revealed himself to be the one sorely lacking in that quality. To put it simply: Don’t make dumb objections! Think before you speak! Don’t just assume that smart people say silly things! If you think that the speaker has made an obvious mistake, frame your question carefully so as not to impute a complete lack of intelligence to said speaker. I can’t tell you the number of times in my career I’ve been reminded of Kripke’s footnote as I say to myself, “Does this guy really believe I am capable of the kind of foolishness he is attributing to me?”  [1] Then I have to come up with some polite way to avoid replying, “The person not thinking clearly here is you not me, for the following obvious reason…” So I urge would-be objectors to bear Kripke’s footnote in mind and try to concede a little more intelligence to the speaker. Just keep in mind the simple words “footnote 76” and you won’t go far wrong.        

           

  [1] And of course it’s not only guys who come up with this kind of stuff—but it is mainly guys. No doubt it springs from a misguided desire to compete, or else a simple lack of thoughtfulness. The same point applies to book reviewers (I name no names).

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Fundamental Discoveries

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Fundamental Discoveries

 

What are the most fundamental discoveries we have made about the universe? I don’t mean what are the most fundamental things we know about the universe; I mean to ask about what we have discovered (revealed, unearthed, found out unexpectedly). I think there are three: atoms, universals, and forces. We have discovered that ordinary objects are made of invisible particles agglomerated together; we have discovered that there are universals as well as particulars; and we have discovered that the universe contains forces as well as the vehicles of forces. We can credit the first two discoveries to the ancient Greeks (specifically Democritus and Plato) and the third to Newton (though his discovery had antecedents). These basic discoveries have been deepened and elaborated, and much of science and philosophy is built around them: types of atoms, types of universals, and types of forces. But the fundamental discovery in each case consists in a single general idea—the idea of invisible particles composing visible objects, the idea of general properties in addition to the particulars that instantiate them, and the idea of a small number of forces that govern how things behave. None of these things is evident to the senses or known innately or easily verified: they are speculative, bold, and open to controversy. To make these discoveries the human mind had to transcend common sense; evidently no other animal has succeeded in duplicating this feat. We might say that they represent scientific knowledge, construed as including the discovery of universals. They have in common the property of attributing an extra layer of reality to things—a kind of additional world. We have the world of atoms, the world of universals, and the world of forces: there is thus more to the universe than visible objects, particulars, and bodies in motion. In so far as these extra realities are hidden, we have discovered that much of reality is a hidden reality. The big general discovery is that the universe is more than appears to us: this is a discovery about our limited powers of perception, or equivalently the indifference of reality to our contingent minds.

            As a consequence the three discoveries have been resisted and reformulated: maybe atoms are just abstractions form ordinary perceptions of objects; maybe so-called universals are logical constructions from particulars; maybe talk of forces is just disguised talk of the behavior of objects. We have thus discovered that such discoveries are controversial, but the discoveries themselves cannot be gainsaid. We need to incorporate these insights into any comprehensive picture of reality. And together they point to an important truth about nature: nature is rife with generality. The atoms are of only a few basic types (especially when we venture into their internal structure); there are many fewer universals than particulars and they are repeated everywhere; and the forces are limited to just four, gravity and electromagnetism being the basic two so far as ordinary observation is concerned. The multitude of particular things we observe is accompanied by relatively few discovered general things; so we have discovered that the world is more parsimonious than we might have supposed. The laws governing atoms are indicative of a basic uniformity: a few types of atoms, a few properties of these atoms, and a handful of forces acting on them. We have discovered that nature is fundamentally simple, almost miserly, not the rich variegated pageant we naively supposed. This is a startling discovery that took a long time to mature and crystalize. Nature is all about uniformity and repetition.

            Once we have these discoveries firmly in mind we can ask a vertiginous question about them: are they true of all of nature? They are true of the parts of nature we have examined, but might they be false of other parts? Do they have only a local validity? We can ask this regarding parts of actual space and time, but we can also ask it more broadly of other universes that might exist alongside ours, and also of merely possible universes. Is matter everywhere made of atoms? Do we always find a sharp distinction between particulars and universals? Is there always a force-vehicle distinction? What about the universe before the big bang when atoms had not formed and the four forces of our current universe had not yet emerged? Are there conceivable forms of matter that don’t divide neatly into the particular and the general? Might the mind be an area of reality in which these distinctions don’t really hold up? Are there mental atoms? Does the mind admit of a clear particular-universal distinction? Are thoughts and emotions subject to gravity and electromagnetism? It appears conceivable that our prized trinity of discoveries has only a relatively local application, being derived from an analysis of what confronts our senses on a daily basis. They could have turned out not to be true of our local world, and they might not be true of every actual or conceivable world. Our most fundamental discoveries might be parochial or even atypical compared to reality as a whole. Maybe what we have investigated hitherto is an unrepresentative sample.

 

Colin McGinn       

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Evolution of Language

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                                                Evolution of Language

 

 

Consider a hypothetical species with the following profile: they have evolved by mutation and natural selection a language of thought, an internal symbolic system of infinite scope and finite base. This they use as the medium of their thought. They have not yet, however, evolved a public language of communication, so their use of language is wholly internal. Let us suppose that this language, call it IL (internal language), is fully conscious to members of the species: the words, phrases, and sentences that comprise it pass through the consciousness of its users. It is not an unconscious language, employed by the brain, but a language that can be introspected in all its glory—rather as we can introspect the language we speak when we employ it in inner speech. Let us suppose that it is innate and universal. In addition to IL the species has a vocal signaling system V that they use to warn each other of predators or to express their emotions, but V is not a real language in the sense that IL is—just a few unstructured sounds. We can suppose that V evolved well before IL in some ancestor species and has been inherited from those ancestors. The signaling system V is a separate faculty from the language IL, both in its evolutionary origin and inner nature. V cannot express the full semantic content of IL and members of our hypothetical species don’t expect it to. The two faculties merely coexist.

            Now suppose that at a later time something novel happens: the species develops an external communicative language. This language EL is a sign language not a vocal language, and it recruits the earlier internal language of thought. It is, in fact, the externalization of IL, though it serves a different purpose—communication not cognition. The external language EL is capable of expressing all that is expressed in IL—the two languages are inter-translatable. EL is rather like a human natural language, except that it is paired with an internal language that is as accessible in its structure and lexicon as a natural language. It may be that EL will gradually diversify over time, so that there will come to be many versions of it, though all derive from IL. Notice that EL does not derive from the old signaling system V and isn’t even a vocal language; in no way does it share in the neural basis of the signaling system. This system predated both IL and EL, but those languages evolved without any reliance on it. We can say that IL was a preadaptation for EL and essential for its appearance, but the system V played no role in the origin of either. Exactly why and how IL evolved is not known, though it certainly greatly expanded cognitive power; and it is also a question why EL evolved, given that the species did perfectly well without it for thousands of years. In any case, IL came first and EL built upon it, without input from V.

We can imagine that speakers of EL might wonder whether this new capacity deserves to be called a language, since they originally applied this term to IL and take that to be the paradigm case of a language. The fact that it is public and embodied might for them count as reasons to withhold the name “language” from it, because for them a genuine language should be something interior and hidden. For them, a language is by definition a mental language not a public physical language, though they can appreciate the motivation for extending the notion to the external language. Some cautious souls might insist on putting the word in scare quotes when speaking of the external means of communication. And there may be bolder types who write books with titles like The Language of Communication or External Syntactic Structures, well aware that they are flouting linguistic convention and received opinion—for it is generally held that there is no real language but the language of thought and no syntax of anything outside the head. After all, they can introspect the language of thought within their own consciousness, and there is no doubt that a language is what it is (some skeptics maintain that we can never be certain that an external language exists, though it is apodictic that an internal language does).

This hypothetical species appears perfectly logically possible. It contrasts with another hypothetical species, which may not be logically possible, that first develops a public language and only later internalizes that language to produce inner speech; and that public language evolved from a prior signaling system like V. The former hypothetical species first develops a language of thought and then develops an external language of communication, with no contribution from its inherited signaling system; that system need never have existed in order for language to evolve. The latter hypothetical species models what many have believed about the origin of actual human language, namely that primitive vocal signaling came first and formed the basis for the evolution of sophisticated human language. But the former is also a coherent story that should be evaluated on its merits; it may, in fact, be the true theory. The question is an empirical one (though issues of logical possibility also arise); certainly we cannot just assume that the other theory is correct. It is not easy to see how we could set about answering the question, what with the remote origins of language and the difficulty of understanding thought, but there are some facts about human spoken language that are suggestive.    [1]

First, natural languages mirror thought, but they do not mirror animal signaling systems: thought has the complexity and structure of language, but signaling systems don’t. If we maintain that human languages somehow derive from primitive signaling systems, we have the problem of the poverty of the precursor: those systems just don’t have the internal structure that is present in a normal human language. But a system of inner thought, especially when coded in an internal language, has exactly the right kind and degree of structure to provide a platform for external language to develop. People tend to suppose that just because signaling systems and human languages are both vocal the one must have evolved from the other, but this is a superficial point of view—in my hypothetical species the external language is stipulated to be a sign language (visual) not a vocal language (auditory). It is not physical form that matters but constitutive structure—the formal object not its contingent physical medium.

There is a lot to say, and a lot that has been said, about these matters, but I don’t propose to delve into the evidence and arguments now; my point has been to set the issue up in a perspicuous manner by describing a stipulated hypothetical species. The question is whether that species models how things actually are (were) with humans. Is spoken language externalized symbolic thought or is it elaborated vocal signaling? Once we have accepted the prior existence of a language of thought, isn’t this the obvious place to look for the origin of spoken language? I would venture that the more advanced mammals all have fairly sophisticated thought but that their signaling systems fail to do justice to their thought processes—they can’t properly express what they think (this is why we always have to guess what dogs and cats want and think from their rather limited sounds and gestures). They thus lack what humans manifestly possess—a full-blown articulate external language. Why this should be is hard to say, but it is clearly a fact. We have IL, EL, and signaling; they have (primitive) IL and signaling. The idea that both thought and language evolved from signaling by some process of augmentation is hard to believe—like thinking that eyes might have evolved from fingernails. Of course, the linguistic behavior we observe in humans today incorporates vocal signaling, alongside the linguistic competence that derives from the internal language; but that doesn’t mean these have the same evolutionary origin or intrinsic structure. Natural languages as we find them are really hybrids of distinct systems with distinct evolutionary origins: they result from a combination of the initial language of thought, contingent embodiment in a specific sensory-motor system, and the ancient system of calls and cries that we inherited from our ancestors. These three systems are now interwoven in the phenomenon of human communication, but that doesn’t mean they don’t retain their separate identities. If I shout out the sentence “Your hair is on fire!” I exploit my vocal apparatus, my instinct to warn, and my internal competence in an abstract computational structure—all in one. But these are separate psychological systems with complex interrelations. Thus language as we use it can be both “cognitive” and “expressive”—reflecting its origins in inner thought as well as in more primitive forms of communication.

The naïve view of thought and language is that thought comes first, in the species and the child, and that we then go on to express it in spoken words. That view has been challenged, particularly by twentieth century thinkers, who invert the order of explanation: spoken words come first and from these thought develops. Thought is language internalized, instead of language being thought externalized. The naïve view seems to me to have more going for it, and my hypothetical species agrees. To them it is quite self-evident that a language of thought precedes and explains a language of communication and not vice versa.

 

Col

    [1] This is complex contested territory; I intend only to skim over the subject here. For those familiar with modern linguistics, I am siding with Chomsky on these matters: my hypothetical species closely follows the view of language he has defended, most recently in Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky, Why Only Us: Language and Evolution (MIT Press, 2016).

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Topics Covered

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Topics Covered

 

I thought it would be helpful to list the main topics covered in the papers published on this site, so in no particular order they are as follows: truth, identity, existence, necessity, color, knowledge, persons, consciousness, the unconscious, belief, intention, skepticism, realism, induction, free will, concepts, language, speech, names, descriptions, performatives, properties, mathematics, psychology, biology, physiology, action, behavior, genes, morality, meta-philosophy, fiction, pain, science, causation, meaning, mystery, life, the Cogito, emotion, metaphysics, thought, democracy, time, motion, memory, perception, food, appearance, reference, analysis, sex, matter, evolution, God, infinity, beauty, the a priori, dispositions, entailment, substance, solipsism, logic, evil, value, negation, injustice, ontology, intentionality, disgust, the brain, culture, introspection, music, definition, subjectivity, experience, privacy, modularity, seeing-as, reduction, animals, manners, nature, instantiation, nihilism, nothing, death, religion, paradox, personality, punctuation, and the universe.

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The Necessity of Necessity

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There are necessary truths, but might there not have been? The actual world contains necessities, but are there possible worlds in which nothing is necessary? Is necessity necessary?

            If necessity were a matter of language or human convention, the answer would be that necessity is not necessary, since language and human convention do not necessarily exist; but what about good old-fashioned Aristotelian de re necessity? Things have essences as matters stand, but could there be things that lack essence—a world in which everything is contingent? The question divides into several sub-questions, according to the type of necessity we are considering: logical and mathematical necessity, analytic necessity, necessity of identity, necessity of kind, necessity or origin, necessity of constitution. If logical laws and mathematical truths hold in all worlds, then presumably the attendant necessities will also hold. In every world it will be necessary that there are no contradictions; there is no world in which 2+2+=4 is not necessary; the number 2 exists in every world and in every world it is necessarily even. In the case of analytic necessity it depends on whether every world contains concepts: if some do not, then there will be no analytic necessities concerning concepts in that world. What about the necessity of identity? Surely this will hold in every world, since all it takes is for the existence of things with self-identity, i.e. things of any conceivable kind. But the really interesting cases are the last three on my list, and here the answers are less obvious.

            If a given world contains such things as chemical elements and animal species, it presumably instantiates the relevant necessities: it will be necessary that water is H2O and a cat will necessarily be a cat. There are no worlds in which volumes of water are not necessarily H2O and cats are not necessarily cats. It is not just that all (actual) cats are necessarily cats but that necessarily all (possible) cats are necessarily cats. There are no possible cats that are not cats in their essence. But it doesn’t follow that every possible object is necessarily of the kind that it is—couldn’t there be a type of object that had no essence at all? The idea does not seem manifestly contradictory or absurd. What about a basic point particle? It would occupy a particular position in space but that would be a contingent property of the particle—and couldn’t that be its only property? But this is not so obvious on reflection: Is it not necessarily a point-like entity? Would it not have such properties as mass or charge and wouldn’t they be essential properties of it? In fact, given that every possible existent has a nature, must it not follow that it has an essence? If something constitutes an object’s nature, isn’t it part of that object’s essence, i.e. what it could not lack?

            It might be retorted that we need to strip the object down still further—not an elementary material particle but a bare particular—something that simply is but without any determinate nature. But doesn’t even this putative particular also have a nature of sorts—as bare and as a particular? So aren’t these its essence? Even if the notion of a bare particular makes metaphysical sense, it doesn’t avoid necessity, because it is necessarily what it is intrinsically, i.e. a bare particular. Everything must be of some kind, and that kind will form its essence, however thin and simple the kind may be. Nothing has only contingent properties. It is not that some things have essences but others don’t.

            Necessity of origin is trickier. Again, we need not assume that all worlds will contain organisms or artifacts, so this kind of necessity of origin will not hold across all worlds, while other kinds may (planets, particles). But might there be worlds in which there are objects that lack any origin and hence don’t exhibit necessity of origin? What about a world of eternal objects or a world in which nothing comes from anything distinct from itself? Consider a world of eternal and immutable material particles–they come from nothing and have no time of origin: how can they be subject to the necessity of origin? To be concrete, do electrons exhibit necessity of origin? Actual electrons had their origin in the big bang, so this might be necessary to their identity as the electron they are (thiselectron could not have originated in anything but the actual big bang); but what about conceivable electrons that originate from nothing at all? Numbers cannot have necessary origin because they have no origin, and electrons might follow suit. But isn’t there room for an extended necessity of origin thesis, namely that these (non-actual) electrons necessarily come from nothing? That is, they are necessarily causeless and timeless—these electrons could not exist in a world in which they were caused and temporally finite. They necessarily don’t have an origin—or they necessarily have an origin that is confined to themselves and the reaches of eternity (the necessity of non-origin). So again, it is hard to avoid these kinds of de re necessity, though we may have to modify and extend such necessities to fit the merely possible entities we are postulating.

            Similarly with necessity of constitution: we can postulate a world in which things have no constitution—in which everything is a primitive particular—but we can’t rid that world of an analogous modal thesis, namely that every such particular is necessarily not constituted by something other than itself. Even if the objects don’t break down into parts or stem from something with which they are not numerically identical, we can still formulate the thesis—which appears true—that they are necessarily constituted by themselves or necessarily not constituted at all. We are still trafficking in essence as it relates to constitution; we have not got beyond such questions.

            None of this is to say that necessities must necessarily be recognized: the point is metaphysical not epistemological. There can clearly be worlds in which the prevailing necessities are not recognized by any thinking being, since such beings may not exist in those worlds; but that has no relevance to the question of what worlds are metaphysically possible. The world would exhibit the necessities it does irrespective of anyone’s knowledge of necessity. People could entirely repudiate the existence of necessities in every world, but that doesn’t show that there are no necessities. The point I have been urging is that it is hard to escape the existence of necessity: no matter what world you travel to, even some very fanciful ones, necessity will be staring back at you, even if it exists in an unfamiliar form. Reality always contains necessities, no matter what kind of reality it is.

            This raises a difficult question: Why is necessity so deeply embedded in reality? What is the reason that necessity is (metaphysically) inescapable? On the face of it the world could have consisted of nothing but contingent truths (this is what many philosophers still believe about the actual world), so why is it that necessity is so deeply embedded in reality? Why did God have to make a world exhibiting necessities? Don’t say, “Because everything has to have a nature”: that is no doubt true, but it just re-raises the question, viz. why must everything have a nature? Everything must have properties, to be sure, but why must these properties form a nature in the strong modal sense, i.e. properties that a thing cannot lack and still be itself? Why can’t things instantiate all their properties contingently? And yet nothing does, either actual or possible. The universe is necessarily a home for necessity—necessity is not just an accidental feature of the universe. Nor can God do much about it: even he could not choose to create a world devoid of necessity—the “null necessity world”. Once he creates anything he necessarily builds necessity into it, even the barest of bare particulars. However, it is not clear what the explanation of this metaphysical fact is, or whether there could be an explanation of it: but fact it appears to be. No one said modal metaphysics would be easy.

            And then there is this puzzle: if necessity is as pervasive and inescapable as it appears to be, why has it been so controversial? Why have so many people rejected its very existence, let alone its ubiquity? Why has it been so difficult to get people to take it seriously? If it is present in everything—actual and conceivable—why is it so hard for people to recognize?  [1]

 

Colin McGinn     

             

 

 

  [1] Of course, necessity cannot be literally seen, but it is difficult to believe that crude empiricism could be the reason for the widespread suspicion of necessity. It must have to do with how different necessity is from other aspects of reality (space, time, matter, causality, etc). Modality presents itself as another dimension of reality—another plane of existence (all those worlds). It is tempting to postulate a dualism of the modal and the non-modal so different are the two. If the essence of matter is extension, as Descartes maintained, then the fact that matter is necessarily extended is not itself a mode of extension—so it cannot be a material property: hence matter-modality dualism. Modal realism is metaphysically disturbing.

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