Only Consciousness is Physical

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                                         Only Consciousness is Physical

 

 

As formulated by Descartes and others, mechanism is the doctrine that the objects of sense (“material bodies”) are characterized by extension, solidity, and contact causation. Specifically, the causation involved does not require divine intervention (“occasionalism”) or a scholastic notion of the transfer of forms or Aristotelian teleology (“final causes”) or spooky action at a distance (Newton’s “occult” force of gravity operating across empty space). For mechanism causation works purely by impact and collision, as one moving object touches another and thereby imparts motion to it: extended solid objects come into contact with each other and thus interact causally. The causation is “mechanical”.

With mechanism so understood we can now define physicalism as the doctrine that everything in nature is subject to mechanism—in particular, the mind is subject to mechanism. Everything mental is extended, solid, and causally mechanical. The science of mechanics thus suffices to provide a complete description of reality. This doctrine stands opposed to traditional Aristotelian and scholastic doctrines, as well as doctrines that put God and agency at the center of nature. No occult powers, no spiritual forces, and no teleological processes—just clashing particles in the void. If it were to turn out that we had to recognize such non-mechincal things, then mechanism would be false for material bodies, and so physicalism would also be false.

            It is now generally accepted that mechanism as so understood is false of material bodies. There are questions about the extension and solidity components of the doctrine in the light of modern physics, but the causation component is the one that has come under the most serious attack–because of gravitational action at a distance, electromagnetic fields, and causation at the quantum level. To put it simply, causation does not in fact require actual contact between the interacting bodies (or their surfaces). The billiard ball model of the causal structure of the universe has been shown untenable. So the world of bodies has been shown to be non-mechanical and non-physical (in the sense defined). One reaction to this is that, since there is no other well-defined notion of physicalism than that supplied by mechanism, the doctrine of physicalism has been shown to be false. The only clear definition of “physicalism” has turned out to be empirically false, so the doctrine of physicalism has no formulation under which it is true. I accept that conclusion: physicalism is not true of the physical world, i.e. the objects of sense. My question is whether physicalism in the sense defined might yet be true of the mind: granted it is not true of the physical, might it still be true of the mental?

            The question may seem absurd or obviously answered in the negative. But not so fast: it is true that it is not easy to show that mental entities are extended and solid without making a prior commitment to a universal mechanism, but these concepts are arguably not essential to the mechanistic world-view. What if it had turned out (as some claim to be actually the case) that bodies are not definable in terms of extension and solidity—that the so-called physical world is not constituted by precisely bounded geometrical objects that are solid and impenetrable? What if it is fields of force all the way down, fuzzy and wispy, potentialities not hard nuggets of matter? Must we then give up mechanism? Not necessarily, because the causation might still conform to the mechanist’s picture: it might consist of things touching (possibly just fields) without any remote causation or teleological causation or transfer of forms. The causal relation might be fully mechanical, even though the ontology departs from the Cartesian paradigm. So we can accept that mental entities are not extended and solid and still ask whether mental causation is a species of contact causation. If so, the mind is causally mechanical; and that will be sufficient to establish a mechanistic view of how the mind works. Then we can say that the mind is physical in the sense that it works mechanically: all we need is mental causation by means of contact causation. It doesn’t work by divine intervention or teleological causation or spooky action at a distance. If that is so, then the mind, including consciousness, can be rightly characterized as “physical”, since that notion is to be understood in terms of the nature of the causation involved, i.e. whether the causation is mechanical.

            But now the tricky question is whether mental causes and effects make contact. If we accept that mental entities are not in space and have no boundary or surface, then it is indeed difficult to see how they can make contact in the way bodies make contact (or fail to given the facts of physics). Can the occupants of the mind toucheach other? But what is the significance of that notion in relation to ordinary physical causation? It doesn’t logically presuppose extension and solidity, or even location in three-dimensional space; what it connotes is the idea of direct unmediated connection—as opposed to final causes, action at a distance, or scholastic forms flitting from one object to another. It is the idea of immediate localized proximate efficient causation—a prior state of affairs directly bringing about a later state of affairs without any outside divine assistance or teleological targeting or crossing of spatial chasms. When Descartes and others spoke of “mechanical” causation that is what they meant to exclude—the conception of causation handed down from Aristotle and the scholastics. But there was no reason to resist that conception for mental causation, since no one had suggested that mental causation operated in such strange ways. Mental causation was clear and intelligible compared to the kinds of causation contemplated for material bodies. How could there be puzzling action at a distance if there is no distance in the mind to start with? How could anyone think that the motion of the mind arises from naturally given ends if the mind didn’t move?

            Mental causation operates by something analogous to physical contact between bodies; or perhaps we should say that we model the idea of physical contact on the kind of intimate connection that holds between items in the mind. When a visual experience causes me to make a judgment the causation is direct and unmediated—not acting across empty space or aided by God. It is transparent and intelligible. When a desire causes me to make a choice the connection is plain to see: the desire is tied explicably to the choice. If we think of the mind as a mental substance consisting of parts, then these immaterial parts are in “contact” with each other—they impinge on and influence each other. In particular, we have discovered nothing analogous to action at a distance in the mind—the causation is just old-fashioned proximate causation. So the mechanistic picture of causation is not violated by mental causation, despite the fact that mind and body are distinct. This means that even a Cartesian dualist can accept the mechanistic picture of mental causation—though he must reject mechanism for physical causation, given what we have empirically discovered. It is not as if Newton had also discovered action at a distance in the mind and hence was forced to postulate an occult brand of causation operating in the mind. Mental causation could therefore be conceived according to the mechanical model, suitably tweaked to fit mental ontology. We can even have a Cartesian dualism of substances combined with a view of mental causation that conforms to the mechanical model—as opposed to the causation that actually operates in the physical world. Thus mechanism applies to the mind but not to the body: for causation is “occult” in the latter case but not in the former.

            But if the only coherent notion of physicalism is tied to mechanism, then it turns out that physicalism is true of the mind but not the body! The mind is physical (i.e. operates by means of mechanical causation) while the body is not physical (i.e. does not operate by means of mechanical causation). The mind is more of a “machine” than the body. That is, the mind does not work by means of the kinds of unintelligible causation that appear to pervade the physical universe—in particular, gravitational and electromagnetic causation. Descartes’ mechanism of the physical world was ruined by the science of physics, beginning with Newton; but nothing in the science of psychology has ever upended common sense views of mental causation as proximate efficient causation. The core component of classical mechanism was its conception of causation (extension and solidity being optional), but that conception was empirically refuted for the physical world. However, in the case of the mind an essentially similar conception of causation has not been refuted by science, so mechanism holds for mental causation—the mind is machine-like in its mode of causal operation. The mind better fits Cartesian mechanism than the body does. The mind is therefore physical, according to the doctrine of physicalism as defined by reference to mechanical causation.  [1]

            Now it is not that I wish to advocate the metaphysical thesis that the mind is physical while the so-called physical world is not—that physicalism is true of consciousness but not of the brain (or the kidneys). My point is just that if we insist on defining a metaphysical doctrine of physicalism in these kinds of terms then that is the consequence we must accept. And it is not that some other definition of physicalism leads to less counterintuitive results, since it is doubtful that there is any other workable definition of physicalism.  The right lesson to draw is that the concept of physicalism is too contestable and up for grabs for such metaphysical doctrines to make much sense. Surely it is a reductio ad absurdum of this entire way of thinking that the traditional definitions lead to the conclusion that only consciousness is physical: not brains or hearts or planets or atoms, but thoughts or pains or perceptions. But that is the inevitable result if we persist in trying to apply these doctrines in the traditional style. Physics has made physicalism obsolete with regard to the physical world. We don’t want to find ourselves resurrecting it for the mind.  [2]

 

Col

  [1] Some have suggested eliminating the concept of causation altogether from physical science, given the demise of mechanism, but such a demand has not been made for psychology—we just don’t have the same reasons for disquiet over causation in the case of psychology. For instance, the problems for causation inherent in quantum theory have no counterpart for psychology. Compared to physics psychology is a causal oasis.

  [2] This is by now a familiar story; my point has been that classical physicalism (the well-defined kind) leads to the conclusion that only the mind is physical—not a happy result. We don’t want to end up saying that immaterial mind is physical while material body is not!

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Contradiction

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Contradiction

 

 

Contradictions arise quite naturally in several areas of thought and it is not easy to resolve them.  [1] It is generally felt that contradictions are unacceptable for two reasons: (a) contradictions entail anything and (b) they violate the logical law of non-contradiction. But some have questioned these reasons for rejecting contradictions, developing what is called “para-consistent logic”. There are even those who stoutly maintain that contradictions can be true (as opposed to necessarily false). For example, in the case of the Liar paradox a sentence can be both true and false (not true); and an author might describe a fictional character in contradictory ways (knowingly or unknowingly) both of which must be accepted as true. The point I want to make is that even accepting that kind of view we can still insist on the universal applicability of the logical law of non-contradiction, properly understood.

            Suppose we allow that a proposition of the form “x is F and x is not F” is true. We are then saying that an object x has both the property of being F and the property of being not-F, so that these two properties don’t logically exclude each other (of course, traditional logicians deny this, holding that these properties do exclude each other). What we are clearly not saying is that x lacks one of these properties: we are saying that x has both of them. Suppose now that we say explicitly that x lacks one of the properties, say the property of being F: “x is F and xlacks the property of being F”. That surely is impossible: no object can both have a property and lack it—if the property is present, it is necessarily not absent. We could call this law “the Law of Non-Exclusion”: if an object has a property, that fact excludes lacking that property. I don’t think there are any areas in which we are forced, or even tempted, to accept any exception to that law. In the case of the Liar paradox, accepting the contradiction as true is a matter of accepting that a proposition can be both true and false—it is not a matter of accepting that a proposition can be true and yet lacks the property of being true (similarly for the property of being false or not true). In other words, saying that an object is not F is not the same as saying that it lacks the property of being F, since the latter logically excludes being F while the former does not (if we accept true contradictions).

            Suppose an author describes a character, Ned, as tall early in her novel but as not tall later in the novel, having forgotten her earlier description. We then seem entitled to say that Ned is both tall and not tall—at least one can sympathize with the temptation to say that. But this is not tantamount to saying that Ned both has and lacks the property of being tall: he has both, though they contradict each other. It would be quite wrong to say that Ned lacks the property of being tall because he is later described as not tall, since the author’s earlier description is sufficient to confer tallness on Ned (like her later description of Ned as not tall). That is, accepting such contradictions as true, as some recommend, is not the same as accepting that objects can have properties but also lack them: it is accepting that objects can actually have contradictory properties. If this is right, then accepting contradictions as true is not in violation of the correct formulation of the logical law of non-contradiction, since that law states that objects cannot lack properties that they have. To accept that objects can have contradictory properties is not the same as accepting that they can have properties and also lack them; on the contrary, it is accepting precisely that they have both properties. So we can accept contradictions without violating the law of non-contradiction, correctly understood, i.e. the law of non-exclusion. Or perhaps we should say that there are really two laws of non-contradiction, one of which has exceptions (if we choose to go that way) and one that does not. To accept that there can be true contradictory statements is not to accept that there can be states of affairs in which objects both have and lack the same properties.

We thus have some wiggle room when it comes to areas that easily generate contradictions: it becomes easier to accept the existence of true contradictions—for example, accepting that the Liar sentence is both true and false. This does not require us to give up on the law of non-exclusion, which is arguably what the law of non-contradiction was saying all along. The disturbance is nowhere near as great as would be occasioned by accepting that something can both have and lack a given property. However, there is no reason to contemplate that possibility stemming from any of the areas that generate contradictions, and it is surely logically ruled out. We are naturally led to entertain propositions of the form “x is F and x is not F”, but nothing requires us to contemplate the (alleged) possibility expressed by “x is F and x lacks the property of being F”. In the problematic cases these two propositions come apart.

            Contradictions don’t arise everywhere but only in special cases; maybe they could not arise everywhere. Contradictions are restricted in scope. This means that we need not tinker with the law of non-contradiction for the majority of cases, since there cannot be naturally occurring contradictions in these cases. It is only in certain special cases that we might contemplate accepting true contradictions: but even here we need not contemplate abandoning a universal law of logic, namely the Law of Non-Exclusion. We can tolerate contradictions without tolerating objects simultaneously having and lacking properties.  So the para-consistent logician need not be quiteas radical as he appears to be.  

 

  [1] I won’t discuss any of these areas in detail, but I have in mind not only the semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes but also the following: contradictions arising in fiction, contradictions arising through vague concepts, and Kripke’s argument that our practices of belief ascription license contradictory ascriptions of belief. In all these cases there are apparently cogent reasons to endorse contradictions—reasons to accept contradictions as true. My question is how drastically revisionary it would be to succumb to those reasons.

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Bivalence and States of Affairs

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                                    Bivalence and States of Affairs

 

 

It is sometimes maintained that bivalence fails for certain kinds of sentences or propositions. What I will argue is that if bivalence holds for states of affairs it holds for sentences and propositions. Moreover, it is plausible that bivalence does hold for states of affairs, so we can conclude that it also holds for sentences and propositions.

            By “state of affairs” I mean “possible condition of objects”, i.e. ways objects might be. States of affairs can be said to obtain or not to obtain: if they obtain they are called facts, while if they fail to obtain they are merely possible (sometimes impossible). For instance, there is the state of affairs of my cup having coffee in it, which happens to be actualized (a fact). Now I want to say that any such state of affairs either obtains or does not obtain—there is no other alternative. States of affairs are bivalent. There may be truth-value gaps for statements but there are no obtainment-value gaps for states of affairs. Either coffee is in the cup or it’s not in the cup. This says nothing about propositions or sentences; it is purely a point about how the world can be. Reality either is a certain way or it isn’t. There may be exceptions, such as vagueness and borderline cases, but generally speaking states of affairs either obtain or don’t. What I want to argue is that in cases in which states of affairs are bivalent propositions about them must be bivalent too. The only way for bivalence to fail for propositions is for it to fail for states of affairs.

            The argument is simple: propositions are representations of states of affairs and their truth-value depends completely on whether the represented state of affairs obtains or not. If the state of affairs obtains the proposition is true, while if it does not obtain the proposition is false—and the state of affairs either obtains or it doesn’t (bivalence). This is intended to rule out a certain kind of interpretation of sentences about non-existent things, such as “The king of France is bald”: we cannot say that this sentence expresses a proposition that is neither true nor false. For every proposition represents a state of affairs that either obtains or does not—so the question must be whether the state of affairs represented by this sentence obtains or not. According to Russell’s theory, it does not obtain, so the proposition is false. According to Strawson’s theory, we cannot say whether the state of affairs obtains or not, because it lacks a constituent object to instantiate properties or fail to instantiate them. But we should not characterize this as a case of a proposition that is neither true nor false, since every proposition must represent a state of affairs subject to bivalence. And we need not speak that way: we can say instead that the sentence simply fails to express a proposition, since it depicts no determinate state of affairs. Then we can indeed conclude that the sentence suffers from truth-value gaps, since it expresses no proposition—and hence no proposition that is neither true nor false.  [1] The same would be true of “Vulcan was hit by lightning”: since there is no such planet, there is no such possible state of affairs, and hence nothing to make true the proposition that Vulcan was struck by lightning. The right thing to say is that there is no state of affairs here and hence there is no proposition representing a state of affairs—on pain of allowing for propositions that represent no state of affairs. Propositions and states of affairs go hand in hand: there is no sense in the idea of a proposition that does not represent the world as being a certain way, i.e. certain objects having certain properties. So bivalence for states of affairs carries over to bivalence for propositions (but not sentences, i.e. meaningful strings of words).

            Knowledge of states of affairs is another matter entirely: it is not true that every state of affairs is either known to obtain or known not to obtain, since we may be ignorant about reality. But propositions don’t represent (stand for) our knowledge of reality or its lack; they represent reality. Therefore propositions are bivalent, because reality is. If bivalence fails for a proposition, it must always be because it fails for reality; it cannot fail for a proposition yet hold for the state of affairs the proposition represents. Propositions stand for states of affairs, and they are true or false according to whether the state of affairs obtains or not. Given that states of affairs either obtain or don’t obtain, propositions must either be true or false—never neither.  [2]

 

  [1] Anything that fails to express a proposition will trivially suffer from truth-value gaps, i.e. be neither true nor false—for example, my left shoe or a nonsense sentence.

  [2] If we define logical laws over states of affairs not sentences, as I think we should, then bivalence will be a logical law even if some sentences exhibit truth-value gaps.

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Difference and Necessity

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Difference and Necessity

 

 

Essentialists have found in identity a shining example of their creed. Any object is necessarily identical to itself—how could that not be so? It has even been thought that the necessity of identity can be proved from Leibniz’ Law: given that a is necessarily identical to a and that a is identical to b, it follows that b is also necessarily identical to a. But far less attention has been paid to the modality of difference: if a and b are different objects, is that a necessary fact or a contingent fact? If objects are distinct in the actual world, are they distinct in every possible world? Given that I am actually distinct from Saul Kripke, are there any worlds in which we are identical? Is there any world at which the statement “Colin McGinn is identical to Saul Kripke” is true? We can clearly lack certain of our actual properties in a possible world—neither of us are philosophers in some possible world–but could we lack the property of being numerically distinct? Are there worlds in which London is identical to Paris or the moon is identical to the sun? Could twins be numerically identical in a possible world?   

            The answer is intuitively obvious: none of these things is possible. If objects are different, they are necessarily different—different in all worlds in which they exist. If a is different from b, this is part of a’s essence—it is essentially different from b. Thus objects have an enormous number of difference essences, as many as there are objects from which they are distinct. They only have one identity essence, viz. identity to themselves, but they have hugely many difference essences, according to all the objects in the universe. In fact, they have infinitely many difference essences, given the infinity of numbers or points in space: I am different from the number two, say, in every possible world, and so for any number. These essences come cheap and plentiful. Furthermore, they are a distinct species of essence, not to be assimilated to the other kinds—origin, composition, etc. Nor are they derivable from the necessity of identity; they cannot be proved from Leibniz’ Law, for one thing. The difference of a given thing from everything else is essential to what it is, as a primitive modal fact. No amount of merging or fusion can make two actually distinct things into the same thing. For instance, you might think two rivers that flow side by side could be one river in a world in which the dry land separating them is removed; but such a world is really one in which a new river exists, not a world that contains the old two rivers joined in a single river. Those actual rivers don’t exist in this possible world; we have fused two rivers into a broader river and eliminated the actual rivers. Physical merging or joining is not two things existing as one, for those things will no longer exist—any more than fission is one object existing as two, and hence not being self-identical. There are no worlds in which McGinn and Kripke both exist and yet are one person—though there is a world in which an individual has characteristics belonging to each of us.

            That is all at the level of metaphysical possibility—what could really be. I have said nothing yet about epistemic possibility, and here matters assume a different shape. For it is an epistemic possibility that McGinn and Kripke are the same individual: it might turn out that we are identical—some very elaborate trick has been performed. To take a simpler example, suppose I am dating a woman I believe to be an only child but in fact she has an identical twin. I have been seeing both twins but don’t realize it: I have mistakenly believed of different women that they are one woman. Isn’t it possible that this is true of a great many people I know? I am always assuming identity from one meeting to the next, but in fact there is a plurality—different people where I thought there was one person. We can conjure ample grounds for a skeptical argument here. So it is not an epistemic necessity that what I take to be one individual is really one individual—it might turn out that I know many more people than I realize. Just as you can mistakenly suppose that what is in fact a single object is two, as in a classic Frege case, so you can mistakenly suppose that what are in fact two objects are a single object. Judgments of identity and difference are fallible. But none of this has anything to do with questions of metaphysical necessity: just because one object can be mistaken for two, or two objects mistaken for one, has no bearing on whether identity and difference are metaphysically necessary relations. We should not confuse metaphysical and epistemic questions. How things might turn out is a quite different question from how things could be. It might turn out that there are many things where you thought there was one, or that there is one thing where you thought there were many, but these possibilities don’t show that one thing could be many things or many things one thing.

            Frege used identity statements to prove that distinct senses can correspond to the same reference, since this is what explains someone’s inability to know the identity a priori. But an exactly parallel argument leads to the conclusion that there can be many references corresponding to a single sense, namely that a person can think he is referring to one object when he is really referring to two. If I call the woman I am dating “Joan” in the morning and “Joanie” in the evening (she always seems more fun-loving in the evening), I will subscribe to the truth of “Joan is Joanie”, even regarding it as analytic. But given that I am seeing twins and don’t know it, we have to say that I really have two references, while meaning the same by the name. The twins are perceptually presented to me in the same way and I intentionally use the names “Joan” and “Joanie” as synonyms, but I refer to different individuals when I use the name in relation to the women in question. This is a case of sameness of sense combined with difference of reference. To me the statement “Joan is Joanie” is analytic, but the context of use generates distinct references.

            The same points apply to natural kinds: people can fail to realize identities and fail to realize differences. You can fail to realize that water is identical to H2O and you can fail to realize that gold is different from copper (you think they are the same metal). Nevertheless, it is part of the essence of water to be H2O and part of the essence of gold to be different from copper. There are no worlds where water is identical to some other chemical compound and no worlds where gold and copper are the same metal (though one metal might be called both “gold” and “copper” in a possible world). If pain is identical to C-fiber firing in this world, then it must be so in all worlds; and if sensations of red and sensations of green are different in this world, then they must be different in all worlds. In order to create pain all God had to do was create C-fiber firing (according to the identity theory); and in order to create gold and copper God must perform two acts of creation—he can’t skip one of these creative acts and more economically create both metals in the form of a single metal. Different things can never be other than different, and identical things can never be other than identical. Hesperus is Phosphorus in every world and Venus is not Mars in every world—despite the fact that both these propositions are not known a priori. Modality behaves in the same way for both identity and difference: the essentialist can also find in difference a shining example of his creed. We find necessity not just in the relation a thing has to itself and to no other thing but also in the relation a thing has to other things and not to itself.     

 

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Psychic Structures

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                                                Psychic Structures

 

 

It is interesting to read a book like Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures while thinking about thinking. To what extent does the structure of thought mirror the structure of language? Does thought have a grammar in the way languages have a grammar? Does the apparatus of linguistic theory carry over to thinking? Are there psychic structures parallel to syntactic structures?

            There are two sorts of reason for supposing that linguistic and psychic structure might march in parallel, both familiar. First, syntax has “psychological reality”: it is an aspect of linguistic competence—what the speaker or hearer must grasp and process. The grammar of a language is reflected in the understanding of that language. So a theory of grammar is a theory of a psychological capacity. Second, every sentence of a language like English expresses a potential thought: whatever you can say you can think (more or less). All of the resources of grammar are available to thought: it isn’t that thought sits in an impoverished corner of the mind while language flaunts its wealth elsewhere. For any sentence S of a language L there is a thought T such that speakers of L can have T. For example, a verb like take can assume many forms, e.g. takes, has taken, will take, has been taken, is being taken, etc (the example is from Syntactic Structures, p. 38). Sentences formed from these so-called auxiliary verbs correspond to a range of thoughts that a normal human thinker is capable of forming, such as the thought that the cat has been taken to the vet. This is not the same as the thought that the cat will be taken to the vet. Thus a normal thinker can have any thought expressed in the language of which he is a master. But this means that the thinker must have the conceptual resources to think such thoughts; and that includes structural resources—the mental analogue of grammar. There must be at least as much psychic structure as there is syntactic structure. Indeed, one might be forgiven for supposing these structures to be, at a deep level, identical.

            If this is so, there is a branch of psychology that mirrors linguistics. The same issues that arise about language can arise about thought. I will list a few of these. There is the question of what kind of grammar applies to both: is it a Markov process grammar, a phrase structure grammar, a transformational grammar, or something else? There is the question of how finite resources can generate an infinite number of strings (sentences or thoughts—strings of concepts). There is the question of acquisition: how is the capacity to have all these thoughts acquired by the child? How much is innate and how much learned? Are there psychic universals as there are linguistic universals? Is there a competence-performance distinction for thoughts? What is the abstract structure of a theory of thought? How much of the machinery of thought is unconscious? Are there rules of thought construction as there are rules of sentence construction? In both language and thought we have a capacity to combine elements into complex wholes, and the capacities are clearly related: so both raise the same kinds of explanatory questions that will receive similar kinds of answers. It is true that language takes the form of external sounds while thinking is inner and silent, but this is surely a superficial difference—the structure of both capacities is the same or similar.  [1]

            Thus Chomsky could have written a companion volume Psychic Structures and pursued many of the same questions at the level of thinking; indeed, we might suppose that he has already written that volume in writing Syntactic Structures. All we need to do is change some of the descriptive vocabulary and Chomsky will be interpretable as writing about thought not language. Now that cognitive science has liberated itself from behaviorist strictures we can directly pursue the question of psychic structure; and maybe that was our topic all along.  [2]

 

  [1] I am here assuming that the linguist is studying the grammar of spoken languages: then my point is that the psychologist has very similar questions about thought.

  [2] Invoking a language of thought will effect an immediate unification: the structure of thoughts will be a syntactic structure in the head. Then Chomsky could be taken to be writing about syntactic structures in the language of thought, as well as external public languages. But we need not presuppose such a theory in order to appreciate the theoretical parallels between language and thought.

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Inner and Outer

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                                                Inner and Outer

 

 

We have the concepts of the inner and outer, but how are they to be defined? Is one more basic than the other? The following seems true: the outer is not the inner and the inner is not the outer. Alternatively, we could say the private is not the public and the public is not the private. But this doesn’t help as a definition, owing to circularity: we can’t define the inner as what is not the outer and then go on to define the outer as what is not inner. I propose that the concept of the inner is basic and not to be defined as the negation of the outer, while the concept of the outer is derivative and can be defined as the negation of the inner. We know what we mean by the inner before we get to the concept of the outer, and we can use the former concept to define the latter. The outer or public is simply that which is not inner or private; but it is not true that the inner or private is to be understood as what is not outer or public. The inner comes first conceptually.

            It is not easy to prove this, though it has strong intuitive appeal. We really do have a robust conception of the inner derived from our acquaintance with our own consciousness. Our concept of the outer is acquired by way of contrast: it is what does not lie within the realm of the inner. The outer is what lies beyond consciousness, outside of it. But the inner is not what lies beyond outer objects—say, objects of perception. We don’t understand the inner simply as what is not an outside object. We don’t conceive of a sensory experience, say, as simply what is not the outer object of that experience; we have a direct grasp of the concept. Our concept of the inner is not a negative concept. But our concept of the outer is a negative concept—the concept of what is not included in the inner. The outer is what exists on the other side of the inner—yonder, over there. The public is what is not private.

            Let us accept this conceptual primacy thesis: the inner is fundamental in the order of definition. Then the consequence to which I would like to draw attention is that the inner cannot be reduced to the outer, nor eliminated from our ontology. We need the concept of the inner in order to ground the concept of the outer—we can’t have the one concept without the other. This doesn’t yet entail that the inner has to exist, since it is possible to have the concept of Fs without there being any Fs (consider unicorn). But the best explanation of why we have the concept of the inner is surely that we are acquainted with things that are inner: we are acquainted with inner things and hence we have the concept of the inner. To deny this one would have to maintain that we have the concept of the inner, and apply it liberally, yet we have never encountered anything satisfying that concept. That would seem an unlikely state of affairs. Far more plausible is the simple thought that we have the concept of the inner because we have encountered things that are inner—namely, our states of consciousness. So (a) we need the concept of the inner to give sense to the concept of the outer, and (b) we can’t have the concept of the inner without there being instances of the inner. Therefore we cannot reduce the inner to the outer (say, behavior), nor eliminate it. It cannot be that only the outer exists.

            This refutes behaviorism. Granted that behavior is something outer, the doctrine of behaviorism maintains that there is only the outer—nothing is inherently inner. But the concept of outer behavior is defined by reference to the concept of the inner, and the concept of the inner rests upon acquaintance with inner things. So behaviorism entails the existence of the inner! There cannot be only public things because the concept of the public is defined by contrast with the concept of the private, and the concept of the private can exist only if private things exist. Put simply, I can only formulate behaviorism because I know that I have inner states that contradict it. I arrive at the idea of behaviorism by deploying the concept of the outer, in contrast to the concept of the inner, but then I need the concept of the inner, which I would not have but for the existence of the inner. So I cannot consistently assert that there is nothing but the outer: for the only way I can assert this is if it is false. Since I come to grasp the concept of the outer or public via my grasp of the concept of the inner or private, and since that latter concept is grounded in acquaintance with my own inner private consciousness, it cannot be that there is nothing in the world except what is outer and public. The simple fact is that our grasp of the distinction between inner and outer depends on our awareness of our own states of consciousness: we apprehend our consciousness as inner.

 

Colin McGinn

 

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Speech

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Speech

 

 

When a person speaks he or she enunciates words one after the other, producing a temporal sequence of words. Normally these words are used not mentioned. It is natural to assume that nothing meta-linguistic is going on: one word is used, then another, then another, until the utterance is complete. A theorist may mention the words uttered by the speaker, but normally the speaker doesn’t. Speech normally consists of sequenced word use, with no mentioning in the vicinity.

            But is this right? Isn’t it true to say that the speaker combines words to form phrases and sentences? There is an operation called “combination” that the speaker (or his brain) applies to words. This operation permits a synthesis to be formed—there is an act of synthesizing words. But combination and synthesis are precisely operations on words. They take words as arguments and produce wholes composed of words as values. These operations are psychological in nature—indeed, they are intentional. The speaker intends to combine words into a sentence, or to produce a particular synthesis of words. The operations thus incorporate reference to words: “Combine ‘John’ with ‘ran’ to get ‘John ran’”. They are meta-linguistic; they involve the mention of words. But then speech inherently involves mention as well as use: the words uttered are used and mentioned simultaneously. We use words in grammatical combinations, and those combinations are the result of meta-linguistic acts or operations. The same goes for writing, perhaps even more clearly: writing a sentence is performing a combinatory operation on words. We use words in sentences as we write, but we do so by representing (denoting) them in acts of mental combination. When I wrote that last sentence I intentionally selected certain words and combined them in a certain way, referring to them mentally. Words are thus objects of intentional mental acts in both speech and writing: they are referred to as well as referring. The hearer or reader must apprehend words, taking them as objects of intentionality, but the speaker or writer is no different—he too must take words as intentional objects. The mind must mention the words it uses.

            We can think of the speaker as following instructions (rules) for the production of sentences, and these instructions refer to words. That is essentially what a grammar is. So there is mention wherever there is use; use depends upon mention. Logicians and linguists talk about the concatenation operator, which connects quoted expressions–as in “John”^”ran”, to be read “the word ‘John’ concatenated with the word ‘ran’”. Grammatical rules can be written by invoking the concatenation operator. If we think of the act of linguistic combination or synthesis as (rule-governed) concatenation, we can say that speakers perform an act of concatenation on words whenever they utter a sentence—they in effect join one quoted expression with another. They are quoting themselves as they speak—mentioning what they are using. There is a double act of reference going on: “John” is being used to refer to John, but it is also being referred to itself in the act of concatenation.  The total speech act consists of using words and also mentioning them. This is because speech is not just uttering words in temporal sequence but also selecting and combining them according to rules. In other words, there is a plan behind the utterance and this plan involves arranging words in a certain order. You choose words and you choose the order in which to arrange them: both of these are meta-linguistic intentional acts. Speech is therefore always about words as well as about things. Speech is always conscious of itself as speech.  [1]

 

Colin McGinn  

             

  [1] Or unconscious of itself: we are not generally conscious of the mental operations that generate speech. But the operations necessarily take words as objects, so the mind-brain mentions them—the internal computations are defined over words. Of course, sometimes we quite self-consciously select what words to utter and we assemble them with care: then we are clearly consciously thinking of words as a preliminary to using them. In speech we focus on referring to things in the world by using words, but we also direct our minds to the words we use.

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Raindrops and Persons

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                                                Raindrops and Persons

 

 

Consider a single raindrop: it exists for a certain period of time, eventually meeting its end through evaporation. But suppose instead that it divides into two before that happens—by wind or human intervention. Now we have two raindrops where before we had one: what is the relationship between the original raindrop and the resulting raindrops? The first thing to say is that the case is not like evaporation: the raindrop is in some sense still around after division, unlike with evaporation. It survives division, though now existing as two separate drops. It could easily be reconstituted, simply by joining the two drops together again. It has not simply gone out of existence or been totally destroyed. Yet we cannot say that the original drop is identical to the resulting drops, since they are not identical to each other; nor can we choose one of them as identical to the original and not the other. We might try saying that the original is identical to both drops together, but then we have to admit that one raindrop can exist as two.  [1]

Evidently there is a bit of a puzzle about division and identity—identity seems too simple to handle the case. So we might be inclined to say that raindrop survival does not depend on raindrop identity: a raindrop can survive even though no future raindrop (or collection of raindrops) is identical to the original. Still, we should note that a weaker identity claim is true: each of the resulting raindrops is identical to a part of the original raindrop. It had parts and they became separated, but they are the very same parts that existed earlier. And the survival of the original raindrop seems bound up with the fact that parts of it are identical with raindrops that exist in the future; the raindrop still exists because certain future raindrops are its parts. So identity is playing a role in survival, though a slightly more complex role than when the raindrop continues to exist in an undivided state.

            Now consider cell division. A cell can either divide or perish: if the latter occurs it has not survived, but if the former occurs we are inclined to say that it has survived—as two cells. Division is not the same as death. Again, we have a bit of  a puzzle about identity, since the future cells are not simply identical with the original, but one thing is clear: the future cells are identical to parts of the original cell. So identity is playing a role in survival, even if it is not the role it plays in cases of undivided survival. We can admit that in cases of cell division there is survival without identity between the original and any of its progeny, but still we have identity at the level of parts. Certainly, there is no reason to abandon identity altogether in accounting for survival in such cases, replacing it with some such notion as causal continuity or mere similarity. Future cells are literally identical with parts of earlier cells, and that is why we distinguish division from sheer destruction. The general principle seems to be that if the parts of an object are identical with any future objects then that object can be said to survive in those future objects. No doubt this principle would need to be qualified, but it roughly fits our intuitions about certain cases.  [2]If I disassemble a car engine and scatter its parts, we may suppose that the engine survives, even though it is not identical to any of these parts; still they are identical with parts of the original. Or if I saw an eight-legged table into two, thereby creating two tables, it may be said that the original table survives, despite not being identical with either table (and possibly not with the sum of both). The table certainly has more of a claim to continued existence than a table that is burnt to ashes.

            Then we come to brain division. Here again it is awkward to say that the brain survives in virtue of identity with the future brains, but we can still say that the future brains are identical with parts of the original brain—its two hemispheres. If the brain is a mouse brain and I put the two halves in separate mouse bodies, then we have two mice as a result–neither of which is identical to the original mouse. But it is still true that each mouse has a brain that is identical to a part of the original mouse brain. This is why we are inclined to say that the original mouse survives—certainly more than if it had been incinerated. An intelligent mouse would have a reason to favor brain division over brain incineration. We have survival without identity of mice—no future mouse is identical to any past mouse—but not survival without identity to any past part of a mouse. The part lives on, identically, though now separated from the other part, which also lives on, identically. It is not that identity is playing no role in survival, so that we must resort to some other notion, such as causal continuity. So far as these cases show, survival is still conceptually demanding—it doesn’t collapse into some weak notion of causal connection between successive states. It is not that these entities survive merely by causing future things to have certain states; they survive by virtue of there being future objects that are identical to original objects—but parts not wholes.

            It is the same with human persons. Fission cases show that survival doesn’t depend on identity with any future person, but they don’t show that survival is possible without identity between person parts. The cases are convincing precisely because half the brain of the original person sits in another body—and that half brain is identical to part of a past whole brain. The person survives because his two brain hemispheres are identical to the brains of two descendants—that, at any rate, is the intuition tapped into by brain fission cases. I would survive in one hemisphere because it is my hemisphere, and doubling up doesn’t undermine that; but if the future person did not possess a brain literally identical to half of my brain, I would not be so sanguine. I would certainly not be so sanguine if I was assured merely that the future person would be causally continuous with me in certain ways. Survival, intuitively, does require identity, but it can be identity at the level of parts not wholes.

            Does any of this conflict with our commonsense view of persons? No, it is all part of common sense. It no more conflicts with common sense than the analogous view of raindrops, cells, and mice: we quickly see that in cases of division we need to tinker with identity to explain our sense that there is survival in such cases. But we are not metaphysically committed to a mistaken view of the nature of persons—any more than with raindrops and cells. Nothing radical is demonstrated by fission cases in any of these areas. If personal fission were as common as other kinds, we would have no hesitation in describing fission cases as survival without identity (of whole persons); but we quickly see the point once an imaginary case is constructed. Our concept of a person prepares us for the possibility of fission cases, and our knowledge of the brain makes this concrete because of the facts of brain anatomy (two separate hemispheres). There is no revisionary metaphysics here, no deep error about the ontology of persons. We don’t need to replace our ordinary notion of the self with a new one that weakens it to something like mere continuity of psychological state. Brain division cases by themselves have no such dramatic consequences.

            It is sometimes claimed that we have an unduly simple view of the self and its survival because of the word “I”: the word looks simple, so we suppose that its bearer must be. This is a preposterous suggestion: who would commit such a gross non sequitur? Simple things can have complex names and complex things can have simple names. Do we have overly simple views of time and space because of the simplicity of “now” and “here”? And people often have long proper names, as well as lengthy descriptions, not just short personal pronouns. It would be absurd to infer a simple view of the self merely from the syntactic simplicity of some terms for selves.

Nor is it true that we naturally have an all-or-nothing view of personal survival, failing to recognize the possibility of degrees of survival. We don’t have an all-or-nothing view of survival in general (sand dunes, cities), and we recognize that the person of childhood may not fully survive into adulthood, as well as that dementia can weaken personal survival. We are well aware that personal survival requires psychological overlap and that survival can be a matter of degree. Just consider pushing fission cases further so that we halve each hemisphere and retain only certain aspects of the original person—we rapidly conclude that full survival is not guaranteed in such cases. There may be partial survival, which is something, but not survival of everything that matters. We don’t have an all-or-nothing view of the survival of persons (or animals). We know that in certain cases there is no survival at all, but we don’t have the naïve idea that survival is always either complete or completely absent. Maybe there are some people who do, but it is not part of general common sense. So common sense has no need of revision in this regard.

            If there is anything especially puzzling about personal fission, it is that we don’t have a clear idea of a person having parts in the way a physical object has parts. A person’s brain has literal parts and that is what guides our intuitions in fission cases, but it doesn’t follow that persons have parts: I don’t divide into two person-like hemispheres. Thus we cannot easily say that the resulting two people are identical to parts of the original person, because we don’t normally think that persons have persons as parts. But split brain cases suggest that we really do have parts that are persons—that our sense of the unity of the self is mistaken. In any case, puzzles about the divisibility of the self should not be taken to show that fission cases undermine the basic model supplied by raindrops and cells, namely that survival arises from identity as to parts. Raindrops and cells, like brains, are complex entities that have parts; these parts can be detached from each other and the results are also raindrops, cells, and brains; these results count as the survival of the original entity, in contrast to more drastic changes. We have no more reason to revise our common sense view of persons than we do of raindrops and cells in the light of fission cases. No doubt the self is philosophically puzzling, and skepticism about its existence can be pressed, but brain fission cases show nothing remarkable about personal survival. Survival without identity is commonplace, intelligible, and non-revisionary; and it involves identity anyway (as to parts). By judicious deployment of parts you can make two persons from one: in such a case the original person can be said to survive—in virtue of those parts. Similarly, you can make two raindrops from one, and you also get survival from the persistence parts. Logically, the two cases are on a par.  [3]

 

  [1] I won’t explore this possibility further in this essay, but I don’t think it is absurd. For purposes of argument I will suppose that it is ruled out; we can still maintain an identity view of survival, as I shall argue.

  [2] No just any parts: reducing an object to its atoms looks a lot more like destruction than other sorts of division into parts. I won’t here consider what notion of part is needed to make the right distinctions.

  [3] As will be obvious to many readers, I have been discussing views associated with Derek Parfit without going into questions of precise attribution. If Parfit’s views differ from those I discuss, my criticisms don’t apply to him. However, I think the views I discuss correspond closely with what he has maintained. I have not considered whether it is possible to motivate a continuity view of the persistence of the self on the basis of considerations independent of fission cases; my point is that such cases fail to take us in that direction.

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