Being Queer

In section 196 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein writes: “In our failure to understand the use of a word we take it as the expression of a queer process. (As we think of time as a queer medium, of the mind as a queer kind of being.)” Earlier (section 93) he remarks: “One person might say ‘A proposition is the most ordinary thing in the world’ and another ‘A proposition—that’s something very queer!’… Why do we say a proposition is something remarkable? On the one hand, because of the enormous importance attaching to it. (And that is correct). On the other hand this, together with a misunderstanding of the logic of language, seduces us into thinking that something extraordinary, something unique, must be achieved by propositions.—A misunderstanding makes it look to us as if a proposition did something queer.” In Part II of the Investigations (p.215) he tells us of an experience of wrongly imagining a city to be on the right and comments: “’But what is this queer experience?’—Of course it is not queerer than any other; it simply differs in kind from those experiences which we regard as the most fundamental ones, our sense impressions for instance.” And there are other places in which he speaks of a “queer fact” (p.200) and a “queer reaction” (section 288) and says the following (section 428): “’This queer thing, thought’—but it does not strike us as queer when we are thinking. Thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking, but only when we say, as it were retrospectively: ‘How was that possible?’ How was it possible for thought to deal with the very object itself? We feel as if by means of it we had caught reality in our net.” From these scattered remarks we must glean what we can about how Wittgenstein understands the concept of queerness in philosophy. Two ingredients immediately stand out: (i) the queer is unusual and (ii) the queer is not something we should accept at face value. When we speak in this way something has gone wrong in our thought. Wittgenstein thus contrasts the queer with the ordinary; he regards it as unique and remarkable (as we conceive it); he thinks it goes with thinking of something as mysterious; and he takes it to be distinctly dubious and ultimately illusory.  [1] Still, we have more work to do in order to elucidate the concept of the queer fully.

            The OED provides a wonderfully succinct definition: “queer: strange; odd”, noting its old sense of “slightly ill” and adding a second meaning of “a homosexual man” described as derogatory. We can see ingredients (i) and (ii) at work in this definition: first, there is the statistical notion in which to be queer is to be infrequent or rare or contrary to the norm; second, there is the pejorative connotation of “strange” and “odd”, as in “oddball” or “strange brew” (though the negativity is not pronounced). Something is queer if it is uncommon and vaguely discreditable (though it can also be seen as remarkable or possibly supernatural). The term “queer” for a homosexual man certainly carries (or did carry) a negative evaluation, no doubt deriving from attitudes towards its designation. The word itself appears in the English language in the sixteenth century and began to be applied to homosexual men only in the nineteenth century, reaching its pejorative height in the twentieth century. Perhaps it was initially used to express rarity (statistical sense) and only later gained a pejorative tone. I suppose Wittgenstein was familiar with this use of the word, though whether its connotations featured in his philosophical use of it I hesitate to say (he was reputed to be an instance of the category himself). Other uses of the term, especially earlier, are not pejorative, but merely descriptive, as in Mr. Rochester’s comment to Jane Eyre: “I sometimes have a queer feeling in regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it’s as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame”. Here the queer feeling is not understood as disagreeable, perhaps the contrary—though rareness is implied (tenderness too). Then we have expressions like” A queer expression came across her face”, where the meaning appears close to “curious”. So the meaning is not irredeemably negative (this will be important in what follows). We must also not forget the old Yorkshire saying, “There’s nowt so queer as folk”, where the meaning is not that homosexuality is universal, but rather that people can be unpredictable and inscrutable (“a rum lot”).

            Returning to philosophy, we also have John Mackie’s use of the phrase “the argument from queerness” summed up as follows: “If there were objective moral values, then there would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.” Here we observe the use of “strange” as a synonym for “queer”, and also the claim that such objective values would be different from everything else—hence rare, out of the ordinary. I suppose Mackie got the word from Wittgenstein, though he doesn’t cite Wittgenstein in this connection, and his meaning is clearly close to Wittgenstein’s, especially in its pejorative overtones. I think it is fair to report that in this usage the word combines the following elements:  unusual, puzzling, queasy-making, mysterious, discreditable, and dubiously applicable to anything real. The queer is what gives us a queer feeling or sensation; it’s how something strikes us not how it is objectively.  [2] Wittgenstein lists time and mind along with meaning in 196—his point being that these two things elicit impressions of queerness from us, though there is nothing objectively queer about time and mind (or meaning). Let’s make a fuller list of the queer and not-queer as these categories are apt to occupy the philosophical intelligence: queer—mind, time, values, meaning, numbers, universals, necessity; not-queer—matter, space, facts, symbols, objects numbered, particulars, actuality. An enormous amount of philosophy has been generated around these contrasts, spurring many a reduction or rejection. The queer is generally frowned upon, maligned, and shown the door. Hence Mackie’s appeal to the concept in arguing against the objective reality of value—“Get away values, you’re queer!”

            Now I am not concerned to adjudicate these issues here; my concern is with the concepts involved and how they shape debate (this is meta-philosophy). The word “queer”, like the word “stupid”, is apt to invite the intensifier “fucking”, as in “That’s fucking queer!” It is built for strong disapprobation (consider that intensifier used in conjunction with “queer” for a homosexual man). But such terms often provoke a backlash, an attempt to reclaim them from the lowlands of insult and prejudice. Thus we have the use of “queer” to describe certain kinds of men by those very men—gay men proudly proclaiming themselves queer. We even have “queer studies” and “queer rights” and “queer eye for the straight guy”. And these uses are not etymologically wide of the mark, since “queer” does have a non-pejorative meaning, suggesting uniqueness, interestingness, nonconformity, specialness, exceptionality. Isn’t genius pretty queer? The word became pejorative because of prevailing attitudes, but it is not beyond redemption, so maybe it can be worn as a badge of honor (a bit like “cockney” or “scouser” or ethnic labels generally). Who wants to be commonplace, ordinary, easily understood, and humdrum? Better to be queer! This suggests a comparable move in philosophy: embrace the word “queer” if it describes a view you agree with. Thus one might say in response to Mackie: “Yes, objective values are queer (strange), but that is no objection to them—some things are very different from everything else!”  There is no need to tremble in shame as the dreaded label is thrown in your direction—own it, accept it, revel in it. The model here is the use of “mystery” and cognates as labels for certain philosophical positions: maybe the first use of “mysterian” was intended pejoratively, but semantically it is quite apt, so why not embrace it? Just as there is a problem-mystery distinction, so there is a commonplace-queer distinction—and some philosophers might wish to occupy that last niche.  If so, they can adopt the label and wear it proudly. Thus we can christen certain philosophers “queerians”, in some instances “new queerians”, while others can be called “anti-queerians” (compare realists and anti-realists). The general doctrine could be labeled “queerianism”, and it can come in different varieties (say, epistemological and metaphysical). Who in particular might be so labeled? Opinions may differ on this but Plato, Frege, and Meinong are good candidates for the label, being generally unconcerned about affronting common sense; I suppose some dualists might accept the label too (“Cartesian queerianism”). There are some things that give us a queer sensation when we contemplate them, but that is perfectly reasonable given their special nature (e.g., abstract unchanging universals, truth-values conceived as objects, non-existent but nevertheless real entities). Moral realists might welcome the label as a way to accentuate their position, better than the bloodless “non-natural” they have been saddled with. Is God queer? Why not—he is certainly not commonplace. Some may even point out, timorously, that matter has got pretty queer in the last three hundred years—queer physics! The word well expresses our feelings when we contemplate certain subject matters, and those feelings are real and appropriate. (Gravity is so queer.) Philosophy has been in flight from the queer given the fearful connotations of that word, but maybe it is time to resist this kind of name-calling by adopting it proudly (assuming it describes your actual position). At least the issues should be debated in these terms and not prejudiced by blatantly derogatory language. What other labels do we have, after all, except those formed by negation from the opposite term (“non-natural”, “nonsensical”, “unintelligible”)? Wittgenstein was onto a genuine and useful philosophical category, despite his disapproval of it; so we should keep it, suitably refurbished. It colorfully adds to our theoretical vocabulary. I would even say it forms a vital part of philosophical consciousness—how our minds work when they are engaged with philosophical problems. It captures the phenomenology.

            Once the concept of the queer has been properly absorbed we can ask questions employing it. Is all queerness epistemic or is some found in reality (metaphysical queerness)? Is the queer ever reducible to the non-queer? How are queerness and mystery related? What exactly is the phenomenology of feelings of queerness? Are there different types of queerness (e.g., fact queerness, value queerness)? Are some queer things queerer than other queer things? What is the queerist thing of all? Might everything turn out to be queer? Is non-queerness ultimately an illusion?  [3]

  [1] Thomas Nagel informs me that Wittgenstein used the German world “seltsam” (“strange”) which Anscombe translates as “queer”. This word is never used in German to refer to a male homosexual, so presumably he did not intend any such association. Nagel suggests that Anscombe chose “queer” to emphasize the disturbing element.

  [2] It might thus be taken as a secondary quality–as something conferred on the world by our sensibility not found in it already present. To be queer is to be disposed to produce queer feelings.

  [3] It would be queer indeed if everything we think we know about turned out to be queer. Empiricists took sense impressions to be clearly not queer, but now we recognize that they have a queerness of their own (they stand in a queer relation to the brain). Classical materialists of the mechanistic variety took matter be devoid of queerness, but physics has proved otherwise. Everything can come to seem queer if you think hard enough about it. What is a particular? Isn’t instantiation itself a queer relation (recall Plato’s view of it)? What about causal necessity? How queer is truth? Maybe that old Yorkshire saying needs to be generalized.

Beauty and Life

Judgments of beauty are always comparative and contrastive. One thing is deemed to be more beautiful than another or to contrast to something thought dowdy or ugly. There is no such thing as maximal or absolute beauty; the concept is essentially ordinal. If someone says that a certain bird is beautiful, she has in mind other less beautiful birds (or some other standard of beauty); you can’t judge something beautiful but be unprepared to compare its beauty to other things. The concept of beauty is like the concept of health: the primary notion is “x is healthier than y”. It is not like the concept of truth (or arguably the concept of good or right). We can conceive of an aesthetic judge as operating against a background of aesthetic judgments that form a standard of comparison, and this background can vary from judge to judge. Someone surrounded by a plethora of beautiful things will judge differently from someone surrounded by aesthetic dross, proceeding from a different aesthetic baseline. The example of clothes perhaps illustrates this best: a dress will be judged beautiful according to how it compares to other dresses with which the wearer is acquainted or can imagine.

            Is there some basic standard that applies universally? Is there some object that forms a baseline of comparison for everyone at all times and places? Do we judge the beauty of a given object by comparing it to thatobject? For example, do we judge beauty by comparison with the starry sky? Something is deemed beautiful or not according to whether it is more or less beautiful than the stars. That could be so for some conceivable species of being: the sky is available to everyone (more or less) and it is certainly an object of aesthetic evaluation, so it might form a universal standard of comparison. It is a better candidate than, say, a particular species of bird or a certain tradition of painting, which are only selectively available, as well as arbitrary. But it is hard to believe that the night sky could play such a pivotal and pervasive role in the case of ordinary human judgment. Do we ever refer our judgments of beauty to such a standard? Do we ever say: “Yes, this is a nice diamond ring, but not as beautiful as the starry sky”?

            Judgments of beauty by different people converge fairly closely, suggesting that there is a universal point of comparison—something with which everyone compares the things that come his way. There is something fixed that anchors aesthetic comparisons, but what is it? I suggest the following: human life. We judge the beauty or otherwise of our life as a human being and we compare other things to that life. And the point I want to make is that human life is not beautiful and is recognized to be so. That is why we judge beauty as we do—because we sense the contrast between ourselves and other things. Things in general tend to be more beautiful than we are and we know that to be the case. We are somewhat beautiful, or beautiful in certain respects, but mainly we are not. There are two main aspects to this: our organic nature and the shape of our lives. Birth and death are not beautiful, nor are diseases and injuries, and we live daily with the disgusting aspects of our biological nature. However outwardly beautiful, a human being is intimately acquainted with his or her less attractive aspects—and hence aware of the contrast between these and other objects (paintings, birds, etc). These objects represent an aesthetic ideal to which no human being can aspire, because of the lack of beauty manifest in human existence. But the second aspect is equally compelling: the narrative arc of human life is formless and chaotic, poorly plotted, incoherent, just not the product of an artist. We feel this keenly—the formlessness of life. Hence we tell ourselves consoling stories in which our life has some inner coherence or point or destiny, but we are well aware from our day to day existence that it is just one damn thing after another. It’s mainly a jumble, dependent on chance and exigency, on the accidents of our place and time, with no more aesthetic form than the life of any animal. A ballet it is not, nor an opera. So we cannot find in ourselves the kind of beauty we seek, except in certain pockets—we are far from aesthetically ideal. We are thus susceptible to art in which we are represented as more perfect than we are—as idealized beings. We also appreciate the perfectly formed and immortal: crystals and stars, symphonies and sculptures. Likewise, we sometimes make comparisons favorable to ourselves: the rat or worm is ugly compared to us, and scenes of devastation have even less form than our lives. In both cases we use ourselves as aesthetic yardstick.

            Two consequences of this account of aesthetic judgment may be noted. The first is that it presupposes a certain type of self-consciousness: we make such judgments against a background of awareness of our own aesthetic condition. We judge our own beauty first and other judgments are referred back to this. Animals don’t have this kind of self-consciousness; and this may have something to do with their lack of aesthetic experience. Our outer-directed aesthetic experience is conditioned by our self-directed aesthetic experience—by our sense of ourselves as aesthetic beings (very much a mixed bag). Judgments of beauty are not like judgments of color and shape, though we may speak of perception in both cases; they are far more conceptually sophisticated and dependent on our conception of ourselves. Animals and babies see color and shape, but they don’t see beauty, because that requires a structure of self-reflective thought that they lack. Judgments of beauty take place against a cognitive-affective background of comparison and contrast, with ourselves at the center, casting a jagged shadow.

The second consequence is that judgments of beauty depend upon the beauty of the judger: is the object more or less beautiful than myself with such-and-such a degree of beauty? Consider the gods: being beautiful themselves, they find little in art or nature to compare to them; their ascriptions of beauty are therefore restricted and qualified. They are not much impressed by Michelangelo’s David or Leonardo’s Mona Lisa: for they outshine such merely human products in their own divine nature. Works of art leave them cold, though they see why we imperfect beings might be impressed by them given our own dismal point of comparison. The gods live with beauty in themselves day in and day out; they need no relief from their own want of beauty. Who needs art if you are art? The sublime can be found without ever looking outwards, just by self-examination. The gods may be utter philistines when it comes to anything outside themselves.

            The human aesthetic sense is governed by an awareness of comparisons anchored in our assessment of our own aesthetic nature: it is, in one sense, anthropocentric. This baseline, common to all humans, determines the way we rank objects in our environment from an aesthetic point of view, and it shapes the way we produce art and respond to nature. To put it simply, when I say, “This object is beautiful” I am saying, “This object is more beautiful than I am”.  [1] A great many things count as beautiful by this criterion, anything with more aesthetic value than one’s own dull and dreary (and ugly) life. We don’t live beautiful lives, but the consolation is that we find beauty outside ourselves, thus beautifying our lives. Such beauty as we find in our lives springs from the lack of beauty ofour lives. Our urge to create and appreciate beautiful things stems from our awareness of the lack of beauty within us. We are aesthetic beings because we are unaesthetic beings.

Colin McGinn                  

  [1] This is a bit too simple, but it serves to get the point across: judgments of beauty are shaped by our aesthetic response to our own lives.

Analysis of Matter

What is the general nature of concepts of matter? How are such concepts to be analyzed? Is there a general nature or only a plurality of concept-types? Ryle wrote a book called The Concept of Mind (note the uniqueness implied by “the”), arguing that mental concepts are generally dispositional in form; what would a book called The Concept of Matter contain? I will begin to answer this question by considering the concept of motion (someone could write a book with this title too), a concept vital to physics. So I am concerned with the analysis of matter-in-motion: how do we conceive of matter-in-motion, and how should we conceive of it? What is the “logical structure” of this concept? This question is not to be distinguished from the question of what motion is—or what it is for a material object to move. What is the logical form (conceptual analysis) of, say, “The earth moves”?

            Immediately we are confronted by a difficulty, because there is controversy about the nature of motion. Some say it is absolute and some say it is relative (I say it is both, but we will get to that). We don’t need to settle the question for present purposes, since we can consider my question under either assumption. So suppose it is relative: motion only makes sense against the background of a plurality of objects, consisting in relative change of position. Then we can say that motion statements are relational in form: roughly, “the earth moves” means “the earth changes position relative to some object x”. The object in question may be indefinitely distant from the object said to move, so motion is not a local property of an object (the motion of the earth is usually referred to the sun). This is not apparent on the face of the statement we are analyzing, but that is not generally any objection to an analysis. We say, then, that the predicate “x moves” means “x moves relative to y”. I shall say that the concept of motion is an object-introducing concept, meaning that it refers us to an object not initially supposed essential: it is as if we can’t speak of x moving unless we are first introduced to another object y. We can’t speak of motion in isolation but only in the context of a system of objects. Motion is essentially relational. To put it differently: motion is not locally supervenient; it depends on what is going on in the environment of the object in question. It is not internal to the object that is said to move. It is not an individualistic property. We need to be externalists about motion, recognizing that motion only occurs in a certain context—it is object-dependent or object-involving. The moving object is only so in virtue of being embedded in world in which other objects exist that confer motion on it. The state of motion of one object incorporates the state of motion of other objects.

            I have put the point in these ways because I want to explore an analogy between motion and mental content. According to a dominant tradition, motion was conceived as an inherent property of an object, intrinsic and internal. An object could be in motion even though no other object existed. But a counter-movement arose that questioned this idea: motion is something that essentially involves other objects, even remote ones. Similarly, there was a tradition that located mental content within the subject, so that what you mean or think is independent of anything in your environment: it is a matter of your brain or your inner subjective state. But a counter-movement arose that questioned this idea: content is something that essentially involves other objects, even remote ones. Thus we are treated to twin earth cases and other ways of demonstrating the object-dependence of mental content. The environment fixes content—as it fixes motion. Externalism about meaning and motion became received wisdom. And these doctrines were intended to capture the actual character of our concepts, which had previously been misunderstood. As the slogan goes, “meanings are not in the head”; and neither is motion “in the object”—it’s in the relation between objects. In my terms, the concepts of meaning and motion are object-introducing concepts. That is their logical structure—what they logically imply. Thus all the characterizations that are applied to the mind can be carried over to matter-in-motion: externalism, anti-individualism, non-locality, non-supervenience, relationalism, environmental determination, object-dependence, etc. We thought that motion was internal to objects, part of their inner nature; but now we see that motion lies in the connection between one object and another, a matter of their external relations. The concept of motion is therefore a concept with an internal complexity that extends beyond its initial appearance—dyadic not monadic, two-factor not one-factor. Note, particularly, that it characterizes a fact that extends across space to possibly remote objects, and indeed brings in every object in the universe. It is not just a property of an isolated object doing its thing locally, sublimely unconcerned about everything else. It isn’t like shape or mass or atomic structure. It is more like size or length or being up or down: things have these attributes only relative to other things not intrinsically.

            One might think that the relational analysis only works if we accept relative motion not absolute motion. But that is not quite right, because so-called absolute motion is not really absolute: it is motion relative to space, conceived as eternally static and at rest. As Newton understood it, the motion of a body occurs against the background of an unmoving spatial manifold: space stays where it is while objects pass through it. So all motion is relative to something, though not to other material bodies. This something, however, is highly local, being either contiguous with the moving body or pervading its volume. So motion is relative but local on this conception: moving through an enveloping space. And what it is relative to is of a different nature from the moving body itself—space not being a kind of matter. So the concept of motion relates the moving object to a surrounding entity—viz. space—relative to which it moves; it is still a relational entity-introducing concept (I say “entity” not “object” because space is not a material object in the style of the relative theory of motion). Logically, then, the two views are not that far apart, despite the difference of ontology. A truly internalist view of motion would suppose that motion is entirely intrinsic to the object, not even relative to space. Thus this kind of absolutist would insist that even if the surrounding space did not move relative to the object the object might still be moving: for both the object and surrounding space might both be moving! Only if we suppose space to be necessarily at rest can this possibility be ruled out, but even then the following counterfactual might be true: “If space were to move along with an object, that object would still be moving”. That is, the concept of motion allows for the conceivability of motion without change of relative position with respect to space. This makes motion super-intrinsic—independent even of space (as presumably shape is: things are not triangular relative to their surrounding space).

            Here our analogy proves helpful. Consider a super-internalist who holds not merely that mental content is independent of the environment but also is independent of the subject’s brain and inner subjective state. This internalist holds that content is completely intrinsic to concepts themselves and is not dependent on anything outside of it—not the brain and not the subject’s subjective experiences. He might maintain that the mind is not the brain but an immaterial substance, and that we could vary a person’s subjective state and keep his concepts constant. For example, we could vary his senses and their phenomenology while not changing what he thinks and means: his concepts are not supervenient on his brain states or sensory states. They are supervenient on nothing but themselves (and possibly the immaterial substance). The usual kind of internalism supposes that the independence concerns only the external environment, but this extreme kind of internalism takes concepts to be independent even of states internal to the subject (not including concepts themselves). Thus we have externalism, internalism, and super-internalism (“intrinsicalism”); and similarly we have three views of motion—relativity to remote objects, relativity to space, and relativity to nothing save itself. That last view may not be plausible—it may not even be coherent—but it exists as an option that someone might adopt. After all, geometric properties are not defined relative to space: a circle is not circular only in relation to non-circular space, whatever that may mean. In any case, the two leading contenders for the nature of motion both regard it as fundamentally relational—much as mental content is regarded as fundamentally relational. Reflection in both cases has persuaded us that a superficially monadic concept is really a dyadic one. In the case of the relative theory of motion the extra object can be remote from the given object, while in the case of the absolute theory (so-called) it is as proximate as could be. The absolute theory should not be saddled with the idea of completely non-relative motion, which makes dubious sense; instead it is a question of which entity motion is relative to and where that entity is located. The absolutist might say, “Of course motion is relative, only not to remote objects but to surrounding space!”

            But which theory is true? I will not attempt to adjudicate that question; I will merely note that both could be. That there is such a thing as change of relative position there can be no doubt, and if we choose to call that motion (not unreasonably), then relative motion exists. But it doesn’t follow that no other kind of motion exists: maybe there is absolute motion as well. Objects could move relative to each other and relative to space. If I say to you, “Don’t move till I get back!” I don’t intend to blame you for your motion as the earth moves; I mean relative to the room you are in. But I can also talk about motion with respect to space and mean precisely that (rightly or wrongly—rightly in my view). Thus we have two concepts of motion that coexist in our conceptual scheme, and hence two types of conceptual analysis.  [1] They vary in their ontology but they are similar in logical form. Accordingly, we recognize two types of property when we use motion words, so we conceive of matter in two different ways: bits of matter change relative positions, but they also change their relation to space—they are capable of doing both. It follows that our concepts of motion have different analyses. This is analogous to the claim that we have two concepts of content, wide content and narrow content, which can coexist. Both are legitimate and useful, though they are differently defined and serve different purposes.

            Do all concepts of matter fit this pattern? I have already suggested that concepts of shape or configuration don’t: here there is no submerged relationality, whether remote or proximal–internalism rules. Geometric concepts are not covertly object-introducing; they are self-enclosed and just as they appear. I think the same thing is true of the concepts of mass and charge: these are not defined relative to some environmental variable—we would not be right to be externalists about these properties. They look like dispositional concepts, and as such refer to interactions with other things; but the same thing is true of all dispositional concepts, mental or physical. No one is surprised by this kind of relationality; by contrast, it comes as something of a revelation to discover that motion is relative (it is somewhat similar with size and length). Motion is a bit like color in this respect: we start off thinking color is intrinsic to objects and then are surprised to find that it depends on relations to perceivers. Whether a given object is red depends on whether other distant objects (i.e. perceivers) see it as red; color isn’t written into the object considered in itself. So it seems that we have three types of physical concept in our repertoire: intrinsic (shape), dispositional (mass and charge), and object-introducing (motion and size). There is not a single homogeneous type; physics is made up of three distinct concept-types with three different kinds of analysis. It would be pleasant to report that psychology is likewise made up of three such types, and arguably it is  [2]; in any case, conceptual heterogeneity holds in the case of the science of matter. This is a result in the conceptual science of science.

Colin McGinn

  [1] Imagine a possible world stipulated to contain both sorts of motion: it contains an absolute space with respect to which objects move, as well as the more humdrum kind of relative motion. Then inhabitants of that world would need two concepts to cover the facts. It seems to me that in our world we have two sorts of concern to which talk of motion answers—practical and theoretical, to put it briefly—so we naturally employ two concepts. The case is somewhat like the concepts of weight and mass. Put tendentiously, one kind of motion might be designated realand the other apparent.

  [2] There are mental states with content like beliefs and desires, which are object-introducing; there are mental traits like irascibility and generosity, which are dispositional; and there are occurrences like being in pain or feeling moody that are non-relational and non-dispositional.

Against Causal Epistemology

It has been suggested that knowledge of the natural world enjoys a causal foundation not enjoyed elsewhere. Thus such knowledge is deemed intelligible while other kinds are not. Accordingly, we can accept a notion of robust truth in relation to propositions about the natural world while other kinds of proposition must remain under suspicion of non-truth. Empirical science emerges as both true and knowable while mathematics and morals make dubious claims to truth and knowledge.  [1] It would be mysterious how we can have knowledge in the latter two cases, given that their subject matter doesn’t causally interact with our cognitive faculties. We must therefore seek some sort of non-cognitive account of those areas, accepting that knowledge is impossible as far as they are concerned.

            I propose to question this bifurcation at its root: causal epistemology is a misguided idea, applicable nowhere; it therefore provides no standard whereby we can judge other domains of thought and discourse. It isn’t just that causal epistemology isn’t generally required for respectability and intelligibility though it delivers those virtues in the case of some domains. Rather, there is really no such thing anywhere—it is a chimerical ideal. These are subversive claims given a longstanding orthodoxy, but they serve to undermine subversion in areas that matter to us.

            The idea of causal epistemology includes a picture and a promise. No one supposes that we currently possess a complete causal account (explanation, science) of human knowledge acquisition in the case of our knowledge of the natural world, but the idea of such an account is supposed to make us feel safe about human knowledge in the areas to which it applies (though not in others)—it provides a reassuring picture of what is going on. The promise is that this picture will be converted into a full-blown causal theory of how knowledge is acquired, which will vindicate such knowledge. The world makes a causal impact on our sense organs via physical stimuli (light, sound, pressure, chemical diffusion) and as a result we form beliefs about the world outside our skin. Empirical knowledge is an effect of physical stimuli; the causal relation puts us in “contact” with the world beyond, mediating between mind and reality. For example, I know that there is a cup on my desk because the cup on my desk is causing me to believe it is there: it is operating causally on my senses and my nervous system transmits this operation to my belief centers. Thus the connection between belief and fact is rendered intelligible; thanks to causation we can know such things. Moreover, this causal connection can be investigated by the empirical sciences, thus “naturalizing” such knowledge. By contrast, nothing like this is possible with respect to putative knowledge of mathematics and morals: numbers, sets, and moral values don’t causally impinge on us, generating the kind of “contact” required for knowledge. Such knowledge would be altogether mysterious and unintelligible; and so the truth status of mathematical and moral claims is brought into question.

            But the picture and the promise are precisely that—they are programmatic. Moreover, they are deeply mistaken about how empirical knowledge works. First we must make an important distinction—between the existence of a causal relation between belief and fact, on the one hand, and our having knowledge of such a relation, on the other. There is all the difference in the world between the cup’s causing me to believe in its presence and my thinking that this is so. This bears on the question of what my reason for belief is: is it that I seem to see a cup or is that I think that a cup is causing me to seem to see it? The latter suggestion is problematic: I don’t normally have such thoughts (I may even reject them); they presuppose the very item of knowledge they are supposed to ground (that there is a cup on my desk); and it is obscure how they can be explained in the favored causal terms—for how can the existence of a causal connection between a part of the world and my mind itself be a cause of a belief of mine? How does causation produce knowledge of causation, and how does the mind register psychophysical causation? No: the reason I have for forming my belief about the cup is simply that I have an experience as of a cup—not that I have an experience as of a cup causing me to believe in it (whatever that might mean). I have various sensory experiences as of the world being a certain way, and they function as my reasons for forming beliefs about how the world is. The concept of causation does not enter my deliberations or the reasons that figure in them. If there are such causal relations, they are not part of my reasoning process. My belief is justified to the extent that I have good reasons of this sort, but these reasons don’t advert to causal relations between mind and world.

            This raises a natural question: does it matter whether such relations exist so far as knowledge is concerned? Granted they do, but what is the relevance of that to epistemology as a normative enterprise? Here is a quick way to see the problem: suppose we abrogate the normal causal relations that (we believe) obtain between natural facts and our beliefs about them, replacing them with some other sort of relation—does that abolish knowledge? Suppose we postulate a pre-established harmony between belief and fact, superintended by God or Nature, with no causal interaction between mind and world, but exhibiting reliable counterfactual-supporting connections. By hypothesis there is no causal epistemology applicable to beliefs formed in this world, yet it is hard to deny that knowledge can exist in it: people have reasons based on their experience and there is a reliable link to truth. What if our world is like this (as Leibniz thought): does that mean no empirical knowledge is possible? Hardly. The ingredients necessary and sufficient for knowledge are present; it is just that there is no causal dependence between world and mind. The existence of causal dependence is thus extraneous to knowledge. What if physics abandons the notion of causality (as some have claimed it should): does that mean knowledge also undergoes defenestration? Rational reasons for belief would still exist in the shape of sensory evidence, despite the absence of causal relations.

            We should also note that causation by itself is never sufficient for knowledge and has nothing intrinsically to do with knowledge. The world is constantly impinging on our bodies, but it doesn’t generally produce knowledge thereby. Most of the time we don’t even notice it. And certainly causal interaction between inanimate objects has no tendency to produce knowledge in them. Epistemology is normative, but causality is not. Reasons are not merely effects. Nor is it true that a belief is simply triggered by an outside stimulus; belief acquisition operates against a background of other beliefs that are normatively relevant (“holism”)–it is not just stimulus-response psychology. Then there is the old problem of deviant causal chains. Suppose there exists an opaque barrier interposed between me and the cup preventing any light from it reaching my eyes, but by some strange quirk of nature the cup releases a chemical that enters my skin and causes me to hallucinate a cup (I know nothing about this). We have here a causal dependence between my belief and the cup—but do I know there is a cup in front of me? I don’t see the cup despite the causal connection, and it is doubtful that I have perceptual knowledge in this situation (why, is an interesting question). It can’t be just any old causal connection that leads to the kind of cognitive “contact” deemed essential to knowledge. Then too there is the question, bequeathed to us by Hume, of whether causation itself is intelligible: do we really know what causation is? Causation involves necessary connection, but isn’t that epistemologically problematic? Is knowledge of causation a secure foundation for epistemology? What if we can’t really know causation as it exists in objects? What if causation is itself a mystery? The causal theorist is remarkably sanguine about the epistemology of causation. Maybe all we are entitled to is the notion of contingent correlation, so that any attempt to invoke full-blooded causation is a mistake. It is certainly not a notion free of puzzlement.

            And there are the notorious difficulties concerning inferential knowledge. Not all of empirical knowledge is of singular facts that we can observe by means of the senses; some things we must infer. But these things are not the causes of our beliefs, so the causal theorist must resort to an indirect way of extending the causal theory in their direction (consider knowledge of the future). Knowledge of generalizations is particularly problematic, since general facts don’t impinge on our senses (e.g., laws of nature). Really the causal theory applies at best to a small subclass of knowledge claims—those that concern directly perceptible particulars. The rest get consigned to hand waving. The case of introspective knowledge is instructive: we don’t sense our own mental states yet we know about them. So we can’t apply our (rudimentary) causal understanding of sense perception to introspective knowledge: my pain doesn’t transmit physical signals to a special sense organ that enables me to perceive it. Whether the causal account of knowledge can be extended to introspective knowledge is a moot question; yet it is hard to deny that the mind makes “contact” with its own inner states. Knowledge of what I am now thinking hardly fits the supposed paradigm of perceptual knowledge: isn’t it just a straight counterexample to such a theory of knowledge in general?

            The upshot of these considerations is that a causal theory of knowledge hardly sets the standard for respectable epistemology. It is really just a vague picture of the mind linking itself to reality. This is not how knowledge works generally, and even in the cases most favorable to it there are serious problems. So it can’t be a point of criticism of some putative area of knowledge that it fails to live up to the high standards demanded by causal epistemology. So what if mathematics and morals fail to conform to the causal model? That model is defective even in the areas it is designed to cover. It is just massively tendentious to demand that other kinds of knowledge imitate this supposedly perspicuous model. Knowledge comes in many forms, covering many subject matters, and each form obeys its own distinctive principles and methods—perceptual, introspective, inferential, general, innate, logical, mathematical, modal, moral, aesthetic, political, historical, psychological, etc.  [2] Reference is much the same, and it would be equally misguided to insist that all reference conform to the case of reference to a perceptible particular. Maybe it is hard to devise a theory of reference suitable for all types of reference—and similarly for all types of knowledge—but that is no reason to deny that reference and knowledge have wide (and univocal) application. Equally, it may be that these concepts give rise to genuine mysteries, but again that is no reason to deny that they apply to the real world. We should not seek to deform (or reform) our ordinary understanding of a region of thought or discourse in an effort to squeeze that region into the causal model, given the problems inherent in that model (“theory” is too grand a word). We shouldn’t try to revise the semantics of a piece of discourse just because we can’t see how to subsume it under a causal model derived from another piece of discourse. Knowledge varies with the subject matter and is as heterogeneous as it is.

Colin McGinn      

  [1] This issue is raised by Paul Benacerraf in “Mathematical Truth” (1972).

  [2] This pluralist position is advocated by T.M. Scanlon in Being Realistic About Reasons (2014).