Consciousness and Qualities

 

 

There are good reasons to suppose that the qualities we perceive the world to have do not belong to it objectively. The most obvious example is color, but it can also be argued that perceived shape is not an objective property of things.  [1] I am concerned here with the consequences of this position for the nature of consciousness and for the general veracity of our view of reality. So suppose that color and shape, as we perceive them, are indeed projected qualities of things, not belonging to the austere objective conception of reality; in particular, suppose that we do not derive such perceptual categories from the antecedently existing physical world. What does that tell us about the powers of consciousness and about the relation between appearance and reality?

            It tells us, first, that the sensible qualities of things originate in the mind: consciousness is the cradle of these qualities. Consciousness creates these qualities; it doesn’t find them existing already in the observable world (nor are they handed down by God). The qualities are projected outward, but they have an inward origin. This is a remarkable power: qualia (if there are such) depend for their existence on consciousness, but so too do the qualities that we sense in the external world. How does consciousness generate these qualities? It doesn’t itself instantiate them, but it manages to conjure them from somewhere—or nowhere. If it is puzzling how the physical world generates consciousness, it is also puzzling how consciousness generates the external world of color and shape (and other qualities). Before consciousness came to exist there were no such qualities, but with consciousness they blossomed into being—as flowers once did in evolutionary history. If physical reality consists wholly of powers, which are not themselves perceptible, then qualities were introduced by the mind in order to render the world perceptible; but how is this achieved—how are qualities manufactured? Whatever theory of consciousness we develop, it needs to explain how consciousness has this originative power. I don’t think we have even the beginnings of such a theory.

            How closely does the world of perception correspond to the objective world? Is the world the mind projects the same as the world that independently exists? No, it is not the same, since the projected qualities don’t exist in the world as it is in itself. So much is commonly accepted: the qualities that constitute appearance are not found in the reality that appears (considered independently of appearing). There may well be structural correspondences, but the two worlds diverge in what they contain. What I want to draw attention to is a point not often (if ever) noted, concerning the nature of instantiation. Our understanding of instantiation must be shaped (likely constituted) by the way qualities strike us in perception—by how things look, primarily. What it is for an object to instantiate a quality is exemplified by things looking red to us (say): this is how instantiation appears to us. But such qualities are projected from our own mode of sensibility not derived from reality, as it exists independently; so it is to be expected that instantiation, as we conceive it, is likewise projected. It is not just the quality red that is projected but being red. The mode in which objects have properties is conceived on the model of perceptual seeming, which results from the way we impose qualities onto reality. But there is no guarantee that objective instantiation will conform to this aspect of appearance—maybe the way things actually instantiate properties is remote from the way we represent such instantiation in perception. What this means is that the structure by which we grasp reality is conditioned by our mode of sensibility—the structure of objects instantiating properties. To put it differently, our notion of a fact is an offshoot of subjectively imposed qualities. The paradigm of a fact is an object being red or square, but if these facts reflect projected qualities, not objective conditions, then our whole conception of reality is shaped by our psychological make-up. The very idea of objects having properties, as we conceive of it, is infected with subjectivity, i.e. the mode of sensibility we bring to the world. We try to extend our notion of instantiation beyond the appearances, but it is bound up with appearances from the beginning, because the qualities that appear originate in us.

            Suppose the picture of the world presented by current physics is on the right lines: physical reality consists of fields of force exhibiting certain powers at certain spatiotemporal points. Does the presence of these powers in a field mirror the way objects appear to us to be red or square? Is that the way powers are instantiated in objective physical reality? Certainly we can’t sense these powers as we sense color and shape, so we can’t apprehend their mode of instantiation in that way. Powers are not qualities and fields are not perceptible objects, so the mode of instantiation involved will not mirror the kind that we perceive; perhaps we have little idea of what it involves. We vaguely think of it as like colors-as-perceived, but it may not be like that at all. Thus the physical facts don’t necessarily have the structure of the facts we perceive—facts that arise by projection. Our concept of instantiation may be as parochial and subjective as the qualities we project onto the world.

            There is something Kantian about this picture of things, but it is not committed to the total inaccessibility of the objective world. Nor does it regard space and time as merely subjectively imposed categories. It says rather that the world of appearance is constituted by qualities and structures that derive from the conscious mind not from objective reality. These qualities and structures are not “copies” of the world, derived by some sort of imprinting, as classical empiricism supposed; they are products of human consciousness (mysteriously so). The mind needs to find a way to cope with the world, to represent it, and the imposition of perceptible qualities is the way it has come up with. If the world consists purely of powers, something like the imposition of qualities is necessary, because powers cannot be perceived. The point I have wanted to make here is that consciousness must have the power to generate the imposed qualities, in addition to its other characteristics. Further, the structure in which these qualities feature inevitably reflects their status: the instantiation of projected qualities is itself projected—and whether objective instantiation fits this model is a moot point. Consciousness has to be the origin of (perceived) instantiation as well as of the qualities instantiated—form and content. The world we perceive is thus an upshot of consciousness not of antecedently existing reality—which can only be described as a type of idealism. I don’t doubt that there is an objective world and that it stands in some sort of correspondence relation to how things appear to us, but the constituents of our perceptual experience—of the world as we perceive it—derive from the mind’s own resources (ultimately from the brain). In this respect perceptual representation resembles language: language is a product of the mind, constrained by the mind’s inner nature, not some sort of imprint of objective reality—similarly for the structured qualities that form our perceptual world.

 

Colin McGinn

    

  [1] This has to do with the geometry of space, relativity theory, and so on; I won’t get into this now. I will only say that there is really no a priori reason to suppose that how we perceive extension and its modes coincides with the actual structure of matter (though there may be a correspondence of sorts). Do other species perceive the real objective nature of matter and space accurately? Are the qualities that mice attribute to the world in their perceptual experience the very qualities that feature in the correct objective conception of reality? Is the correct geometry of the universe already written into the forms of animal experience?

                                               

 

 

Colored Surfaces: A Puzzle

 

 

Colors appear to be on the surfaces of things. The surface seems saturated with color, as if the color has been painted on. Colors seem as much an intrinsic property of surfaces as textures. They are not experienced as properties of the perceiver’s body or of the intervening medium. They coincide with the object spatially.  [1] Yet, according to tradition, they are projections of the mind, arising from the perceiver’s inner resources: they are transferred from inside to outside—from “in here” to “out there”. In the cinema we experience the film image as on the screen in front of us, though it emanates from somewhere behind us in the projection room. Similarly we see color as inhabiting the surface of objects while in fact it issues from somewhere in our minds (unlike shape or texture). According to some views, colors are dispositions to produce experiences; but dispositions are not perceived as if they are on things, so there is a mismatch between appearance and reality. Colors are creatures of the mind and yet are perceived as distal features of objects.

            The point I want to make is that they are unique in being thus outwardly perceived: among so-called secondary qualities they are the only ones experienced as being literally on the object of perception. They are the only secondary qualities experienced as objective features of things (in one sense of “objective”). This is puzzling. Why aren’t they experienced as the subjective phenomena they really are, like other secondary qualities? Couldthey be so experienced? We don’t perceive smells and tastes as on things: smells are experienced as in our nose not in the remote object, and tastes only coincide with the object tasted because it is typically in our mouth (it would be different if we tasted things remotely). Likewise we don’t hear sounds as if they are on objects—we don’t project the sound out onto the source of the sound (the noise is loud not the object making it). We hear sounds as in the proximity of our ears (consider the flash of a distant cannon followed a few seconds later by the sound of the shot). Indeed, we hear sounds not objects, so we don’t experience sounds as remote qualities of objects. In the case of heat and cold we locate these qualities in our body not in the object. It is true that hot and cold objects are typically touching the body, so that the qualities are experienced as spatially coincident with the object, but again that is a contingent circumstance—and there are cases in which we have such sensations emanating from remote objects (e.g. the Sun). When I feel the heat of a remote object I don’t project the hotness onto the object; I feel the hotness in the region of my body. The object causes my body to feel this way, to be sure, but I don’t perceive it as having the sensory quality in question on its surface. Thus we are not so inclined to make an error about the status of such secondary qualities: we recognize that they are subjectively constituted (unless we are philosophically opinionated). There is no illusion of objectivity for these cases. Someone might be of the opinion that objects are intrinsically hot or cold, independently of perceivers, but it would be pushing it to claim that they experience these qualities to be on objects, as they perceive colors to be on them. I perceive the Sun as yellow on its surface, but I don’t perceive it as hot on its surface.

            It is an interesting question whether this is a contingent truth or a necessary truth. Could there be a perceiver that experienced color as he experienced other secondary qualities? Is the perception of color necessarily outward in the way it actually is? Here are two reasons to doubt that. First, we can ask whether all organisms that perceive color perceive it as intrinsically qualifying the surface of objects. Do insects see colors as intrinsic properties of surfaces? Might they not have sensations of color that are detached from sensations of surfaces, perhaps because they have deficient spatial perception? Color sensations are triggered in them by external objects, but they don’t engage in full-blooded projection onto distal surfaces, so that they perceive color rather as we perceive smells or sounds. This seems logically possible. Second, not all of human color experience involves distal projection onto physical surfaces—consider mental images, after-images, and those sensations you get when you press your eyeball or close your eyes. In these cases you don’t experience a remote surface as suffused with color, alongside shape and texture; the experience is felt as more internal, more subjective. If so, it would be possible for objects to elicit such color sensations without the perceiver painting their surfaces with color. So color could be perceived in the way other secondary qualities are perceived, not as it is now for us in ordinary color vision.

            And herein lies the puzzle: why is color perceived as on surfaces, suffusing and saturating them, as if it were an objective property like texture, when it could be perceived as other subjective qualities are? Why is it accorded special treatment? Why is the projection so extreme? One possible answer is biological utility: it is more effective or convenient to experience color in this external objectifying way. But why is that—why does color differ from other secondary qualities? Why don’t they follow the model of color if it is so effective and convenient? And what does this biological utility consist in—what selective advantage does it incur? Another possible answer is that vision has a special kind of phenomenology that requires the qualities that are perceived to be perceived as distal. But why should that be, given that not all of visual experience involves projection onto remote surfaces? It is perplexing why we perceive color as a property of surfaces in the way we do—why we perceive colors as onobjects. Colors are not really on surfaces, objectively speaking, so why make an error in color perception when other secondary qualities involve no such error (or not one of the same magnitude)? Why paint the world with color it doesn’t have when you could stick to a mode of experience that involves no such effort and illusion? Why not see the world more as you feel it or smell it, without the projection of secondary qualities beyond their proper sphere? This is the puzzle presented by colored surfaces.

 

Colin McGinn   

 

 

 

  [1] If you place a colored filter in front of a white surface you will see the surface as having the color of the filter. The eye projects the color from the proximal filter onto the remote surface. Thus you see the surface as being (say) pink in virtue of an act of projection performed by the visual system. But projection operates even in cases where there is no such intervening medium.

 

 

 

Can There Be Subjective Facts?

 

 

I invite you, intrepid reader, to accompany me on a journey into the heart of darkness—into a region of utter obscurity. It will test us both, but it should be worth the effort, including the bouts of sickness and insanity. No, it won’t be that bad—just a bit of a headache and some mild nausea.  [1] For I propose that we explore the question of whether reality could include facts that can only be grasped subjectively. By that last phrase I mean grasp that depends on occupying a particular point of view. The background is familiar from bats and blind people and alien forms of consciousness: we can’t grasp what it’s like to be a bat because we don’t share bat experience (we don’t occupy the bat’s “point of view”) and blind people can’t grasp the nature of color experience because they don’t have color experience (they don’t occupy the “point of view” of color perceivers). Some facts (properties, meanings) can be grasped without oneself instantiating them—for example, being an elephant or being a dodecahedron—but others (allegedly) can’t be grasped without being an instance of them oneself. You can’t know what it is like to see red without seeing red yourself, though there is no difficulty about knowing what a mountain is without oneself being a mountain. This suggests that there are subjective facts—facts that can only be grasped subjectively, i.e. from a specific point of view, i.e. by instantiating those facts oneself. It suggests that it is in the nature of certain facts that they can be apprehended only by beings equipped with specific types of experience, viz. those they are endeavoring to apprehend. Such facts might be called “intrinsically subjective”. By contrast, there are other facts that are “intrinsically objective”, i.e. they have a nature that allows them to be grasped from many points of view (or from nowhere). Thus some facts are subjective and some are objective, and this classification is written into them, part of their essence. The facts dictate the conditions of their being known (grasped, apprehended). My question is whether this is the right way to look at the matter.

            Facts about consciousness are supposed the primary kind of subjective fact. If we define consciousness as consisting of the realm of facts there is something it is like to obtain, then we can say that facts about what states of consciousness are like are subjective facts, i.e. they can only be grasped by sharing them. It will be convenient to introduce some abbreviations here, so let us call facts about what it is like “W-L facts” and let us call knowledge that depends on sharing the facts in question “S-I knowledge” (short for “self-instantiation-dependent knowledge”). Then we can say that W-L facts are intrinsically known in an S-I manner: that is, we can only grasp facts about what an experience is like by ourselves having experiences of that phenomenological type. In brief: W-L entails S-I. This is a move from the metaphysical to the epistemological: it is built into the nature of the facts (metaphysical) that they are grasped or known subjectively (epistemological). This thesis figures in an argument against materialism: mental facts can’t be physical facts because the former are S-I while the latter are not, i.e. the former are subjective while the latter are objective (understood in the epistemic way defined).  [2] One response to this argument is to maintain that so-called objective facts are not as objective as you might think; in fact, they are subjective. This is because what we call the “physical” really consists of facts about consciousness, though consciousness of a primitive and alien type (I am talking about panpsychism and its spiritual cousins). The thought is that the problem of emergence can be solved by supposing that matter is shot through with mind, perhaps ismind at a fundamental level. That certainly looks like a promising strategy: straddle the mind-body gulf by edging the body in the direction of the mind. Mind arises from mind—not so inconceivable a feat. The point I want to make about this sort of approach is that it sharpens a more fundamental problem about consciousness, viz. how it is that consciousness has being at all. If reality consists of consciousness, and consciousness is W-L, and W-L requires S-I, then reality is intrinsically such as to be knowable only from a specific point of view. If the basic mental level of reality consisted of elementary consciousness of the type exemplified by bats, then only beings equipped with this type of consciousness could grasp the nature of reality. Reality would be intrinsically subjective in the sense that only certain types of being could have an adequate conception of it—and that could be a small subclass of the class of all possible knowing beings. Reality would (could) exist only for this privileged class of being—for everyone else it would be strictly inconceivable. The question is whether that is intelligible: could reality consist of such essentially subjective facts, partially or totally? Could there be facts that could only be grasped from a particular point of view? Could there be facts that rule out any objective conception? Specifically, could W-L facts rule out a non-S-I mode of conception? In yet other words, could facts about consciousness resist any attempt to include them in an “absolute conception” of reality? Are they inconceivable objectively? My thesis will be that this is wrong—such facts cannot be intrinsically subjective. Facts about consciousness are not necessarily grasped subjectively: even W-L facts must be graspable objectively. To put the point as strongly as possible, everything about consciousness must be conceivable objectively—and this is a fundamental metaphysical truth. There cannot, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, be purely subjective facts. There can be purely subjective conceptions, and we might well be confined to conceiving consciousness in this subjective way, but no fact (property, states of affairs) can be subjective in the intended sense. It is a category mistake to describe facts as subjective of objective; those appellations belong only to conceptions of facts—thoughts, representations, or ideas. The subjective-objective distinction is an epistemic distinction not an ontological one. But this leaves us in a very precarious position with respect to our understanding of what consciousness is, as will emerge.

            First, let us note that experiences admit of several types of objective characterization drawn from within our current conceptual scheme. We can bring conscious experiences under causal descriptions (“the cause of this”, “the effect of that”), and we can express their relations with physical facts (such as correlated brain states). It is also possible to characterize them in abstract structural terms as well as mathematical terms (as in psychophysics). There is more to a conscious experience than what it is like for the subject: we can conceive such states in many different ways. The hard question is whether the W-L aspect can in principle be conceived in a way that doesn’t depend on sharing the point of view implicit in it. Is there a way of conceiving it that is available to beings that do not themselves instantiate the property in question? We naturally think of God here, but that raises questions it would be best to avoid (Does God instantiate all points of view? What is his knowledge like anyway?). One possibility is that this property exists but is completely ineffable (recall my warning about dark obscurity at the beginning): there are objective W-L facts, but no being could ever conceive them. All beings must conceive these facts subjectively or not conceive them at all: if the latter, then reality contains ineffable ingredients. A less alarming position is that possible beings might be able to grasp W-L facts without reliance on their own point of view: they might be able to form a conception that captures these facts and yet is independent of how they view things.  [3] For example, they might be able to forge structural descriptions that encapsulate the facts and yet can be grasped by anyone whether they instantiate these facts or not. Then the nature of the facts would not dictate adopting a subjective conception of them; an objective conception would be available too. Of course, we find it hard to understand what such a conception would look like, given our own concept-forming faculties, but the general idea is intelligible enough—other beings (or us in the future) might be able to conceptualize consciousness in ways that transcend our current self-centered subjective conceptions. Then reality would not contain properties that can only be conceived subjectively; it would not be populated by properties that inherently favor one way of viewing the world over another.

            Here it is important to make a distinction between two ways in which a fact might resist being conceived objectively. We have the modal truth: Necessarily it is impossible for us (fully) to conceive consciousness otherwise than subjectively. That truth might, however, have two possible sources: it might stem from the very nature of the fact in question—it decides how it can be known; or it might be that our faculties restrict us to subjective conceptions—not the facts themselves. And we must not assume that just because we can’t conceive of W-L properties in objective terms that it is in the nature of those properties that this is so—the reason might stem from our own cognitive make-up. We necessarily can’t conceive them in any other way, but they impose no restrictions on how they can be conceived; it is how we interact with them not what they are in themselves that gives rise to the necessity. It seems to us that it is in the nature of color experiences to preclude a blind man from grasping them, but it may be that the difficulty arises rather from our distinctive human way of forming concepts of experience. Perhaps the blind man in other types of cognitive being has no trouble conceiving of experiences that he happens to lack. What is a necessary truth for us need not be true for everybody; in particular, it may not be the property itself that is the source of the problem. Thus the facts in question can be grasped objectively as a matter of principle even though we can never so grasp them. Then we would not have to admit that reality contains facts that are intrinsically tied to a specific point of view.

            The general point here is that the terms “subjective” and “objective” are not descriptive of facts themselves but of ways of conceiving facts: no facts are subjective or objective considered in themselves. Physical facts can be conceived subjectively or objectively, relatively or absolutely, and the same is true of mental facts. If we are confined to subjective conceptions of mental states, that is a truth about us not about them: “subjective fact” is an oxymoron, unless it means “fact we happen to know about subjectively”. So consciousness exists neutrally between subjective and objective, despite our bias in conceiving it towards the subjective. But that means that we don’t grasp the manner of its existence: how we conceive it doesn’t tell us how it exists in reality, as an objective conception of it would. Thus we have an inadequate grasp of consciousness—in an important sense we don’t know what it is. What it is would be revealed from an objective standpoint, but that standpoint is inaccessible to us; we are limited to a standpoint that gives at best a partial conception of it. So we don’t understand what the existence of consciousness amounts to—what it is for it to exist. That is the really hard problem: trying to figure out what we are talking about—trying to arrive at an adequate conception of consciousness itself. Even if we could solve the problem of emergence, say by invoking panpsychism, we would still be left with the more fundamental problem of discovering what the existence of consciousness really consists in. Granted, we know something about consciousness, but we don’t know the most vital and basic thing—what its mode of existence is. We only grasp its existence-for-us not its existence tout court. It must, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, have an existence apart from our subjective mode of conceiving it, but we are blocked from discovering what this objective existence amounts to; at any rate, we presently have no conception of what it might be. This means, of course, that we don’t grasp the nature of our own experiences, let alone the bat’s, since they too must have an existence qua experiences that is accessible from all points of view. We don’t grasp what it is like to be us (as that would be represented in an objective conception of what it is like to be us).

            I have drawn a sharp line between two concepts: the concept of what an experience is like and the concept of a subjective conception. The former does not entail the latter: what it is like pertains to the nature of consciousness (its metaphysics) while the subjectivity of a conception pertains to how we think of a certain subject matter (epistemology). It is a substantive claim that the metaphysical property requires a subjective conception; and I have disputed this, suggesting instead that all facts must be accessible to an objective conception, even if not one of which we are capable. This logical point is lost if we carelessly use the world “subjective” to refer to a feature of consciousness itself and to the way we tend to conceive of it (by using our own case as model). Consciousness cannot be necessarily conceivable only via a subjective conception, i.e. one that relies on self-instantiation, because that is an unintelligible idea of what reality is like. To repeat, reality cannot be relative to a particular point of view—only conceptions of reality can be. Facts are just facts: how we conceive them is another matter. This means that idealism cannot be restricted to how we now think of the mental: if the world is really the mind, then mental facts can’t be limited by the ways we generally conceive of them. Mental reality would have to be conceived objectively not subjectively, because its existence must be independent of the point of view a given type of creature brings to it. We may not be capable of acquiring the concepts needed to make sense of the objective existence of mental reality. At any rate, mental facts must have a nature that goes beyond what is contained in our present subjective conceptions. Those conceptions cannot even reveal what it is like to be a bat, though that latter fact is something that must be accessible in principle to different points of view. There must be a way of conceiving bat experiences that is accessible to beings that lack such experiences, on pain of making reality point-of-view-dependent. In other words, it is only a contingent fact that bat experiences can only be grasped by beings that share those experiences. There are no inherently subjective facts; subjectivity is in the eye of the beholder (which is not to say it is unreal).  [4]

 

Colin McGinn                   

 

 

 

 

  [1] Note to American readers: tongue is in cheek here.

  [2] This argument is presented in Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a Bat?” (1972), as is the general notion of subjective and objective I am working with.

  [3] Nagel discusses the possibility (necessity) of objective descriptions of mental facts in The View From Nowhere(1986), chapter II.   

  [4] Of course there are subjective facts in other senses of the word: there are facts about conscious subjects, mental facts, facts about personal opinions.

                                   

 

Biological Philosophy of Language

 

 

Linguistics has grown accustomed to viewing human language as a biological phenomenon. This view stands opposed to two other views: supernaturalism and cultural determination. Ancient thought conceived of language as a gift from God, closely adjoined to the immaterial soul: this accounted for its origin, its seemingly miraculous nature, and its uniqueness to the human species (we are God’s chosen ones). Recent thought instead insisted that language is a cultural product, a human invention, an artifact: this too accounts for its origin, nature, and uniqueness to humans (only humans have this kind of creative power). Both views deny that language is a species-specific adaptation driven by natural selection and arising in the individual by a process of organic maturation—rather like other natural organs. The “biological turn” in linguistics maintains that language is not supernatural or cultural but genetically based, largely innate, founded in physiology, modular, a product of blind evolution, organically structured, developmentally involuntary, invariant across the human species, and part of our natural history. Biological naturalism is the right way to think about language.  [1] No one would doubt this in the case of the “languages” (systems of communication) of other species like bees, birds, whales, and dolphins; human language is also part of our biological heritage and our phenotype (as well as our genotype). But this perspective, though now standard in linguistics, is not shared by contemporary philosophy of language: we don’t see these questions framed as questions of biology. Not that existing philosophy of language overtly adopts a supernatural or cultural conception of the nature of language in preference to a biological conception; rather, it is studiously neutral on the issue.  The question I want to address is whether the received debates in philosophy of language can be recast as questions of biology, in line with the prevailing biological perspective in linguistics. And I shall suggest that they can, illuminatingly so. I thus propose that philosophy of language take a biological turn and recognize that it is dealing with questions of natural biology (if the pleonasm may be excused). This will require no excision of questions but merely a reformulation of them. Philosophy of language is already steeped in biology.

            Let’s start with something relatively innocuous: the productivity of language. Instead of seeing this as a reflection of God’s infinite nature or the creative power of human invention, we see it as a natural fact about the structure of a certain biological trait, analogous to the structure of the eye or the musculature. Finitely many lexical units combine to generate a potential infinity of possible sentences—that is just a genetically encoded fact about the human brain. It arose by some sort of mutation and it develops during the course of individual maturation according to a predetermined schedule. It is humanly universal and invariant just like human anatomy and physiology. It should not be viewed as a purely formal or mathematical structure but as an organic part of the human animal. So when the philosopher of language remarks on the ability of speakers to construct infinitely many sentences from a finite set of words by recursive procedures he or she is recording a biological fact about the human species—just like bipedal posture or locomotion or copulation or digestion. Nothing prevents us from saying that the human phenotype includes an organ capable of unbounded productivity—the language faculty. It isn’t supernatural and it isn’t cultural (whatever exactly this means). It is, we might say, animal.

But what about theories of meaning—are they also biological theories in disguise? The biological naturalist says yes: truth conditions, for example, are a biological trait of certain biological entities. The entities are sentences (strings of mental representations—“words”) and their having truth conditions is a biological fact about them. Truth conditions evolved in the not too distant past, they mature in the individual’s brain, and they perform a biological function. Truth conditions constitute meaning (according to theory), and having meaning is a trait of certain external actions and internal symbols. Meanings are as organic as eyeballs. So a theory of meaning is a theory of a certain biological phenomenon—a biological theory. It says that the trait of meaning is the trait of having truth conditions. Suppose we base the theory on Tarski’s theory of truth: then Tarski’s definition of truth for formalized languages is really a recursive theory of an organic structure. It is mathematical biology. Sentences are part of biology and their having truth-conditions is too; so a theory of truth is tacitly an exercise in biological description. No one would doubt this for a theory of bee language or whale language, because there is no resistance to the idea that these are biological traits—a theory of truth conditions here would naturally be interpreted a theory of a biological phenomenon. Bee dances don’t have their truth conditions in virtue of the bee god or bee culture, but in virtue of genetically based hardwired facts of bee physiology. It isn’t that bees collectively decide to award their dances with meanings—and neither do human infants decide such things either. Sentences have truth conditions in virtue of biological facts about their users, whether bee or human. Semantics is biology.

Consider Davidson’s project of translating sentences of natural language into sentences of predicate calculus and then applying Tarski’s theory to them. Suppose that, contrary to fact, there existed a species that spoke only a language with the structure of predicate calculus; and suppose too that we evolved from this species. It would then be plausible to suppose that our language faculty descended from theirs with certain enrichments and ornamentations. Then Davidson could claim that their language gives the logical form of our language and that it can in principle translate the entirety of our language. This would be a straightforward biological theory, claiming that one evolved trait is equivalent (more or less) to another evolved trait. The “deep structure” of one trait is manifest in another trait. Likewise, if we view a formalized language as really a fragment of our natural language, then a claim like Davidson’s is just the claim that one trait of ours is semantically equivalent to another trait—that is, its semantic character is exhausted by the formalized fragment, the rest being merely stylistic flourish. For example, the biological adaptation of adverbs is nothing more than the surface appearance of the underlying trait of predicates combining with quantification over events. Thus we convert the Davidsonian program into a biological enterprise—to describe one trait in terms of other traits. This is the analogue of claiming that the anatomy of the hand is really the anatomy of the foot, because hands evolved from feet—just as our language evolved from the more “primitive” language of our predicate-calculus-speaking ancestors in my imaginary example. Our language organ is both meaningful and combinatorial, and Davidson has a theory about what these traits consist in: he is a kind of anatomist of the language faculty.

Then what is Dummett up to? He is contending that the trait of meaning is not actually the trait of having truth conditions but rather the trait of having verification conditions.  [2] We don’t have the former trait because it has no functional utility so far as communication is concerned (it can’t be “manifested”). So Dummett is claiming that a better biological theory is provided by verification conditions. This is a bit like claiming that the function of the eye is not to register distal conditions but to respond to more proximate facts about the perceiver, these being of greater concern to the organism (cf. sense-datum theory and phenomenalism); or that the function of feathers is not flight but thermal regulation (as apparently it was for dinosaurs). Dummett is a kind of skeptic about orthodox descriptions of biological traits. He might be compared to someone who claims that there are no traits for aiding species or group survival but only traits for aiding individual or gene survival (“the selfish meaning”). Quine is in much the same camp: he claims that no traits have determinate meaning, whether truth conditions or verification conditions. The alleged trait of meaning is like the ill-starred entelechy—a piece of outdated mythology. A proper science of organisms will dispense with such airy-fairy nonsense and stick to physical inputs and outputs. For Quine, meaning is bad biology. Nor would Quine be very sanguine about the notion of biological function: for what is to stop us from saying that the function of the wolves’ jaws is to catch undetached rabbit parts? Our usual assignments of function are far too specific to be justified by the physical facts, so we should dispense with them altogether. We need desert landscape biology: no vital spirits, no meanings, and no functions, just bodies being stimulated and responding to stimulation—Pavlovian (Skinnerian) biology. Quine is really a biological eliminativist.

Where does Wittgenstein fit in? He emerges as a biological pluralist and expansionist. He denies that morphology is everything; he prefers to emphasize the biological deed. He forthrightly asserts that language is part of our “natural history” (not much discussion of genetics though).  [3] The Tractatus employed an austere biology of pictures and propositions, while the Investigations plumps for a great variety of sentences and words as making up human linguistic life. Wittgenstein is like a zoologist who once thought there were only mammals in the world and now discovers that there are many types of species very different from each other. He also decides it is better to describe them accurately than try to force them into predetermined forms. His landscape is profuse and open-ended, like a Brazilian jungle. He is resolutely naturalistic in the sense of rejecting all supernatural (“sublime”) conceptions of language. What he would have made of Chomsky I don’t know, but he would surely have applauded Chomsky’s focus on the natural facts and phases of a child’s use of language. His anti-intellectualism about meaning (and the mind generally) is certainly congenial to the biological point of view.

What about Frege? Frege is the D’Arcy Thompson of philosophical linguistics, seeking the mathematical laws of the anatomy of thought. He discerns very general structures of a binary nature (sense and reference, object and concept, function and argument) and finds them repeated everywhere, like the recurrent body-plans of the anatomical biologist. The human skeleton resembles the skeletons of other mammals and indeed of fish (from which all are derived), and Frege finds the same abstract structure in the most diverse of sentences (function and argument is everywhere, like the spinal column or cells). But these abstract structures are not antithetical to biology, just its most general features. When a laryngeal event occurs it carries with it a cargo of semantic apparatus that confers meaning on it, intricate and layered. The speech organs are impregnated with sense and reference as a matter of their very biology, not bestowed by God or human stipulation (the underlying thoughts are certainly not imbued with sense and reference as a matter of culture). Thus it is easy to transpose Frege’s logical system into a biological key—whether Frege himself would approve or not. Again, we should think of the developing infant acquiring a spoken language: his words have sense and reference as a matter of course not as a matter of cultural instigation—this is why language precedes culture for the child. Acquiring language is no more cultural than puberty is cultural (and I have never heard of an ancient theory to the effect that puberty is a gift from God). Meaning comes with the territory, and the territory is thoroughly biological.

Ordinary language philosophy? Why, it’s just ecologically realistic biological theorizing, instead of rigid attachment to over-simple paradigms. It’s rich linguistic ethology instead of desiccated linguistic anatomy.  It’s looking at how the human animal actually behaves in the wild instead of clinically dissecting it on the laboratory table. Austin, Grice, Strawson—all theorists of in situ linguistic behavior. Nothing in their work negates the idea of an innate language faculty expressed in acts of speech and subject to biological constraints. When Austin analyzes a speech act into its locutionary meaning and its illocutionary force he is dissecting an act with a biological substructure, because the language faculty that permit the act is structured in that way. Words are strung together according to biologically determined rules, and the same is true of different types of illocutionary force. Zoology took an ethological turn when scientists stopped examining rats and pigeons in the laboratory and turned their attention to animal behavior in its natural setting; ordinary language philosophy did much the same thing (at much the same time). This led to considerable theoretical enrichment in both cases as the biological perspective widened. One can imagine aliens visiting earth and making an ethological study of human linguistic behavior, combining it with organic studies of speech physiology. They would add this to their other investigations of bee and whale linguistic behavior. All of it would come under the heading of earth biology.

Of course, biologically based language activity interacts with cultural formations, as with speech acts performed within socially constructed institutions (e.g. the marriage ceremony). But the same thing is true of other biological organs—say, the hands: that doesn’t undermine the thesis that basic biological adaptations are in play. It is not being claimed that everything about language and its use is biologically based. But the traits of language of interest to philosophers of language tend to be of such generality that they are bound to be biological in nature. For example, the role of intention in creating speaker meaning, as described by Grice, introduces a clearly biological trait of the organism—purposive goal-directed action. We don’t have intentions as a result of divine intervention or cultural invention; intention is in the genes. Intention grows in the infant along with motor skills and doesn’t depend upon active teaching from adults. Intentions will play a role in cultural activities, but they are not themselves products of culture. The same is true of consciousness, perception, memory, and so on—all biological phenomena.

According to Chomsky, a grammar for a natural language simply is a description of the human biologically given language faculty. Following that model philosophical theories of meaning have the same status: they are attempted descriptions of a specific biological trait. Semantic properties are as much biological properties as respiration and reproduction. Philosophy of language is thus a branch of biology. The standard theories are easily construed this way. Semantics follows syntax and phonetics in making the biological turn. Fortunately, existing philosophy of language can incorporate this insight.  [4]

 

  [1] For an authoritative study see Eric Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language (1967) and the many works of Noam Chomsky. If we ask who is the Darwin of language studies, the consensus seems to be Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835).

  [2] The positivists may be construed as claiming that no sentence can have the trait of meaning without having the trait of verifiability. One trait is necessary for the other. This is like claiming that no organ can circulate the blood without being a pump or that no organ can be the organ of speech without expelling air. Thus a metaphysical sentence can’t be meaningful because it lacks the necessary trait of verifiability. No evolutionary process could produce a language faculty that included sentences that mean without being verifiable. Put that way, it looks like a pretty implausible doctrine—why couldn’t there be a mutation that produced meaningful sentences that exceed our powers of verification? Meaning is one thing, our powers of verification another.   

  [3] “Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.” Philosophical Investigations, section 25.

  [4] It would be different if existing philosophy of language tacitly presupposed some sort of divine dispensation theory, or a brand of extreme cultural determination; but as things stand we can preserve it by recasting its questions as biological in nature. There is nothing reductionist about this, simply taxonomically correct.