A Psychology of Philosophy

 

 

Most philosophers would agree that philosophy is a very difficult subject, in their heart of hearts if not in their practice. The problems of philosophy are difficult problems. They are not easily solved (sometimes not easily stated). The difficulty might be rated differently by different philosophers—from moderately difficult to extremely difficult to impossibly difficult. In any case there is a widespread perception of pronounced difficulty. I am concerned with the psychology that goes with that perception: what kind of mind is formed by the perception that philosophy is exceptionally difficult? Better: what kind of personality is created by the perception of philosophical difficulty? If a person gives his or her life to philosophy, while fully recognizing its exceptional difficulty, what kind of psychological formation will flow from that? If you devote your life to a subject that admits of relatively easy answers, you will likely experience satisfaction and a sense of achievement (as it might be, the flora and fauna of the Hebrides); but if you devote your life to a set of questions you believe you probably (or certainly) can’t answer, what will this do to you?

            The obvious reply is that you will not meet with success and you will suffer the pangs thereof. You want to know the answer and you strive to discover it, but you accept that you won’t succeed, probably or certainly. Suppose you have been struck with the problem of skepticism and you long to find an answer to the skeptic, but you accept that the problem is extremely difficult and that you have not discovered an answer, and probably never will. You could simply accept this fact, maybe reducing your efforts at solution, given that your chances of success are miniscule; that would be rational enough, considering. But you might also react by overvaluing your less-than-perfect efforts or by downplaying the difficulty of the problem. You might decide you were wrong about the difficulty of refuting the skeptic, or you might congratulate yourself on devising a highly ingenious or insightful response that has escaped the attention of others. This would be understandable, if not completely rational: you have succumbed to a kind of intellectual dishonesty (given that you are tacitly aware that your proposed solution doesn’t really measure up to the severity of the problem). You are engaging in intellectual bad faith. You do this because your earlier response was psychologically uncomfortable: why keep trying to solve what you believe you (probably) can’t solve? Why put so much effort into something pointless? And even if you think you might solve the problem, you still have to wrestle with the strong probability that you won’t solve it—given its extreme difficulty. It is psychologically uncomfortable to strive to do what you think you (probably) can’t do, so it is natural to revise your view of things.  [1]

            What I have just described is a situation in which cognitive dissonance is apt to occur. Cognitive dissonance theory was invented by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s and has become a standard part of psychology.  [2] The outlines of the theory are as follows. People are equipped with an overall drive towards psychological consistency. This drive is not restricted to belief consistency but applies also to harmony among desires, actions, emotions, and beliefs. If there is a lack of harmony, the subject will experience mental stress or discomfort or anxiety. This will lead to attempts at dissonance reduction by a variety of stratagems in order to restore harmony. The magnitude of the stress is a function of the magnitude of the dissonance. So a person will not be happy to act in ways contrary to his desires, or make statements contrary to his beliefs, or desire what he knows he cannot possess, or feel what he knows he shouldn’t feel, or believe what he has evidence against. Cognitive dissonance leads to dissonance reduction by modifying the dissonant psychological configuration. In Festinger’s original example, a member of a cult who is confronted by evidence undermining the tenets of the cult will be apt to deny the evidence or invent some ad hoc explanation for the evidence that preserves his cherished beliefs. Or a person compelled to work in an occupation that violates her values is likely to abandon or modify those values, or to insist that the occupation really serves to further them despite appearances (as it might be, pollution is actually good in the long term). The central point is that the drive for psychological consistency leads to bad faith of one kind or another. Dissonance is intolerable, so the subject strives to minimize or deny it, often by mental contortions and self-deception. Living with cognitive dissonance is harder than conforming one’s attitudes so as to avoid it. This is the realm of motivated belief and fake emotion and fabricated desire.

            How does this apply to philosophy? Simple: the acknowledged difficulty of philosophy induces cognitive dissonance, which is then massaged in various ways to reduce the mental discomfort. Difficulty produces dissonance because the life of a philosopher is predicated on denying or underestimating it. For the philosopher is investing time and resources in a project she knows is unlikely to bear fruit. She is working on impossible problems—problems she knows (or strongly suspects) she can’t solve. Suppose she is gripped by the problem of skepticism and is working hard to provide a convincing answer to the skeptic—burning the midnight oil, neglecting her family, not having any fun—all the while believing that her efforts have close to zero chance of success (after all, no one else has come up with anything). That is not a tolerable mental state to be in, because of the dissonance between will and belief: she wants and wills what she believes is not within her reach. Various dissonance-reducing reactions are possible: she can give up working on the problem, pretend that the difficulty is not as great as has been supposed, overestimate the value of whatever ideas she can come up with, become a dogmatist. In the extreme she could always declare that philosophical problems are pseudo problems or are meaningless or reflect mental illness. That way she can deflect the dissonance, restore her mental equilibrium, and relieve the stress. She might have started her philosophical life brimming with optimism—she will get to the bottom of these problems where others have failed (through insufficient attention to ordinary language, or by relying on a primitive type of logic, or by not knowing enough science, or because of general sloppiness). Then she felt no dissonance, because her beliefs were consistent with her desires and actions (such as protracted and expensive study of philosophy). But as her philosophical life wears on and the futility of her efforts becomes more apparent, she is likely to arrive at a more pessimistic view of her philosophical prospects—she comes to believe that she will likely not solve the problems that so gripped her (and still do). Then cognitive dissonance is apt to set in: she knows that she can’t achieve what she wants desperately to achieve. She could try to learn to live with this fact, though it would no doubt modify her practical motivations, or she could adopt a variety of dissonance-reducing stratagems. The two most obvious ones are denying the difficulty and overestimating her feeble efforts (“Yes, the problem is devilishly difficult, but my theory finally lays it to rest!”).

I take it this will seem familiar. My suggestion is that cognitive dissonance lies behind some of the characteristic types of philosophical posture. Hence the psychological appeal of logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy, the latest brand of scientism, dedication to formal logic, post-modernism, Wittgensteinian quietism, neurophilosophy, descriptive phenomenology, experimental philosophy, eliminativism, and engaging in purely historical studies. These are all attempts to avoid or downplay the recognition of the difficulty of philosophical problems. Not that they might not have arguments in their favor, but the psychological attraction of such doctrines stems from their promise to free us from cognitive dissonance. It is not that any of them are prima facie all that plausible—they are commonly represented as revisionist—but we feel compelled to accept them because of the stress produced by acknowledging philosophical difficulty. Add to this purely internal source of disharmony the institutional pressures of teaching or studying at a place of higher learning: how can you justify teaching a subject to students that you admit consists of insoluble (or at least unsolved) problems? What truths are the students supposed to learn as a result of such teaching? What results are you conveying to them? How can they justify the expense to their parents? Also: what justifies tenure in a field where no one ever makes any substantial progress? How can you be paid to work on problems no one thinks you can solve? There is a lot of pressure to deny that philosophy is as difficult as it seems to be and has proven to be. We just need that nice fat grant and we will finally answer the skeptic! The latest fad (as it might be, neuroimaging) will resolve those age-old problems, so we need not accept that things are as dire as they appear. We need not accept that we are striving to do what we know we can’t do. That is the fundamental problem, psychologically speaking—the cognitive dissonance at the heart of the philosophical enterprise.

Other subjects do not writhe under this kind of pressure. In them progress is made, large and small, so that the striving to achieve results is gratified, with the hope of further achievements in the future. True, they can contain great difficulties, but history has been kind to them, and there are many areas in which substantial progress has been made. The physicist never feels under pressure to deny that his questions are meaningful, or to resort to ordinary language, or to eliminate what he finds puzzling (“There are no receding galaxies!”). Nor does the biologist have to accept that she is getting nowhere—she has many discoveries to occupy her time. But in philosophy the main questions—the questions that bring us to the subject—remain maddeningly recalcitrant: the mind-body problem, skepticism, the nature of moral truth, free will, the meaning of life, space and time. Not that noprogress is made; rather, the core problems are so difficult that meaningful progress can hardly be expected. Once this fact is acknowledged (assuming it to be a fact) cognitive dissonance is the natural response: if it’s so difficult, why even attempt it? To that question we need a dissonance-reducing answer. Other disciplines are not so afflicted: they are not defined by problems of this magnitude of difficulty. So their practitioners are not subject to the same mental torment as philosophers; they have no dissonance to reduce (maybe psychologists have an inkling of what we go through in some of their more baffled moments).

Imagine a subject of study S that expressly advertises itself as dealing only with the most difficult problems known to man. Some people find themselves going into S. These peculiar people don’t just explain what the problems are and then sit back and marvel at them—they try to solve them. Isn’t S a ripe subject for cognitive dissonance? No one has solved a problem in S for hundreds of years and there is widespread pessimism about solving any of them; yet people persist in trying to solve them and promoting their subject as a worthwhile investment of time and resources. There is thus a lack of harmony here between beliefs about S and life commitment to S—and there is much frustration, self-doubt, neurosis, self-deception, etc. It wouldn’t be surprising if people occasionally sprung up proclaiming that they have discovered a new method for solving their problems (say, studying Sanskrit) or insisting that the problems of S are really pseudo problems—and they would no doubt find their relieved followers. It’s tough devoting your life to problems you don’t think you stand a chance of solving. That way lies acute cognitive dissonance, with its strategies of avoidance. Better not to go into S at all, despite its intrinsic interest; people only go into it because they believe (unrealistically) that they alone can solve the problems of S (ego trumps realism). Doesn’t S sound a lot like philosophy, psychologically speaking? It needn’t bephilosophy, but it would feel like it—it would reproduce philosophy’s characteristic psychological contours. The difficulty of S combined with devoting one’s life to it sets up psychic tensions that lead naturally to certain kinds of reaction—mostly involving bad faith. This is the psychological landscape occupied by the philosophical mind. In particular, we philosophers are always trying to find ways to make philosophy easier than we know it to be.

I have spoken of the individual psychology of the philosopher, which may be taken to be more or less universal given the nature of the subject, but there are also some more local sociological pressures conducive to cognitive dissonance. I mean those pressures (mentioned earlier) stemming from the institutional structure of a typical university and of the profession of philosophy, as it exists today. It is necessary to publish and compete and establish oneself as defending a certain position. You have to show that you are good at philosophy, in the sense of being capable of producing it; and this leads to excessive optimism about what can be achieved in the subject. In particular, you have to show yourself superior to others in solving philosophical problems. Thus you will develop a tendency to overestimate the quality of what you do while underestimating the quality of what other people do. Your views and theories are clearly correct while theirs are clearly incorrect. In teaching the subject you will be tempted to make it seem easier to make progress than it is, so that certain views will be favored as the demonstrably true ones, as opposed to those radically misguided alternatives. This will lead to a culture of exaggeration and overconfidence—a lack of humility in the face of difficulty. How can you stand out professionally if you meekly suggest that it is all very difficult? The cognitive dissonance created by the confrontation between the intrinsic difficulty of philosophy and the institutional structures within which it is practiced will lead to extreme ways of trying to reduce the dissonance—such as declaring your own position definitively correct and everyone else’s hopelessly confused.  [3] Thus it is that factions are formed and feuds triggered. Professionally, you have to have a thesis—a position, a doctrine. But this conflicts with the recognition that it is incredibly hard to come up with anything convincing in philosophy—there are always opponents and objections. So we have cognitive dissonance built into the structures of the institution of professional philosophy, and with it those dubious and dishonest strategies of avoidance—particularly, overestimating one’s own position and underestimating the difficulty of the problem. And isn’t this exactly what we in fact find in professional philosophy—the blowhard and the minimizer, to put it crudely? Also the cult of personality, the formation of “schools”, the withering contempt for those who refuse to see the light, the ever-changing fads and fashions, the dogmatism, the willful blindness, the haggard looks, the neurosis, the swaggering and posing—all attempts to deal with the cognitive dissonance created by philosophical difficulty as it interacts with professional existence. Just consider the familiar figure of the philosopher who thinks (or purports to think) that he has it all figured out: emotivism in ethics, materialism in metaphysics, nominalism in logic, naïve realism in epistemology—everything is bathed in sunlight with not a mystery in sight. This philosopher can see, and will brook, no objection to any of these firmly held views; all alternatives he rejects as absurd and dishonest. Philosophy contains no difficulty for this jolly optimist. Mustn’t we wonder at such a person’s brash confidence? Can he really believe it is all so simple and straightforward? Isn’t his breezy conviction the result of an underlying cognitive dissonance? He knows that things are not really so easy and yet this causes him such acute mental discomfort that he has decided to act as if he has it all figured out.  [4] This is intelligible enough from a psychological point of view, but it amounts to nothing more than a strategy for avoiding cognitive dissonance. At the other extreme someone might feel the difficulty with particular force and decide to give up the study of philosophy altogether. That would also resolve the dissonance and might impress us by its intellectual integrity. But most of us are stuck between these two extremes, suffering the symptoms of cognitive dissonance: it is only partially resolved in us, if at all. We have our cherished theories, so desperately cobbled together, but deep down we realize that they may be wide of the mark or just grotesque errors. To take an example more or less at random: there was a time when people convinced themselves that Davidson’s use of Tarski’s theory of truth supplied all that could be asked of a philosophical theory of meaning; and this position was held with almost religious fervor. It is hard not to see this in hindsight as a kind of bad faith prompted by the felt difficulty of the problem of meaning combined with the need to say something positive about it. The problem isn’t so hard after all–all we need to do is throw some fancy formal logic at it and it will disappear in a flood of biconditionals! Either that or we have to admit that we are trying to solve a problem we haven’t the faintest idea how to solve (or even formulate).

There is a psychology to philosophy, generated by the peculiar character of the subject, and Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance seems like a good theory of what that psychology is.  [5] It explains many of the phenomena we observe and fits the way philosophy feels from the inside. It is an empirical psychological theory like any other and should be judged accordingly. It won’t solve any of our philosophical problems, but it might alert us to psychic forces in us that distort our thinking and practice.

 

  [1] It is often noted that you can’t intend to do what you believe it is impossible for you to do, so no one could intend to solve a philosophical problem he believed could not be solved. But that leaves room for intending to do what you think it is quite improbable for you to do. However, that attitude is inherently unstable and disagreeable, especially as the failures and sense of futility mount. At what point do you give up? (Desire, of course, is perfectly possible in the presence of a belief that the desired state of affairs is impossible.)

  [2] Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford University Press, 1957).

  [3] I have noticed over the years that people always seem to believe what they learned in graduate school, causally dismissing what has happened since. Pure cognitive dissonance.

  [4] It is not always a “he”, but statistically speaking…

  [5] What would a Freudian explanation of the philosopher’s psychology look like? Perhaps this: The difficulty of philosophy is experienced as a form of castration anxiety (of the intellect not the body), which is naturally repressed, and which manifests itself either as a denial of the castrating power of philosophy or as an assertion of the phallic prowess of the philosopher. Thus the philosopher rejects philosophical problems as meaningless or phony (and hence incapable of castrating him) or he elevates himself to superhuman levels of problem solving (phallic invincibility). The anxiety is thus allayed (how this fits the case of women philosophers is left for future research.) Maybe there was a time at which such an explanation would be taken seriously (in fact I invented it in the shower), but I prefer the Festingerian explanation to the Freudian one, having more to do with logic than libido. 

                                   

 

 

A Plurality of Selves

 

 

1. Human beings are persons or selves and they have a specific nature: they have a certain type of psychology and a certain type of biological make-up. Not all possible sentient beings share this nature. For instance, humans have personal memories, consciousness, self-reflection, rationality, and a brain with two hemispheres that is in principle detachable from the body. Arguments about personal identity take these facts for granted and contrive various thought experiments on their basis: transferred brains, divided brains, memory loss, memory upload, personality alteration, and so on. Thus we arrive at theories of personal identity for humans. One well-known argument proceeds from the possibility of brain splits to conclude that personal survival does not logically require personal identity.  [1] But what about other possible types of being that don’t share our human nature? Can’t they be persons or selves too? If so, we can’t expect to derive general “criteria of personal identity” just by considering the human case: we need to look at the full range of possible cases if our theory is to have the generality we seek (and it might turn out not to have that generality).

            Consider sentient beings that don’t have brains that can be divided or transferred: the brains of these beings don’t have two equipotential hemispheres and they are distributed throughout the organism’s body (rather like an octopus). There are thus no possible scenarios in which their brain is divided and the hemispheres placed in separate bodies, so there is no way that they can survive without being identical to some future being (at least so far as the standard fission arguments are concerned). We can’t consult our intuitions about what we would say under conditions of brain bisection and relocation, since these are not possible (such surgeries would result in certain death). For these beings there would be no survival under the imagined conditions. In fact, a theory that ties personal identity to the body would be more plausible for them than in the human case: having that brain in that body would be tightly correlated to future survival. There would be no pressure to accept psychological continuity theories if it were not possible to dissociate survival from bodily identity, as in the standard thought experiments. Lesson: be careful not to accept a general theory of personal identity based on the contingent peculiarities of the human organism. That might lead to chauvinism about personal identity, i.e. ruling out bona fide persons as not really so.

            Now consider this hypothetical case: sentient beings without personal memories. We can allow that these beings possess general factual memory; what they lack is memory of their past experiences and deeds. Their earlier life is a complete blank to them, though they live and love. They clearly persist through time, but this persistence cannot be a matter of remembering different periods of their existence: they don’t persist through time because of the power of memory. So for these beings personal identity cannot consist in memory links to earlier selves, however it may be for us. We can’t say that A is identical to B because A can experientially remember what B did. These beings may have the anatomy described in the previous case, so their identity is better explained in terms of bodily continuity, not in terms of memory links. Not that bodily continuity will work for everyone: for some possible beings the body changes over time to become a different body, as with bodily metamorphosis (including the brain). Butterfly persons would persist through time while they acquired a brand new body at puberty. So it would be wrong to generalize from the no-memory type of person to all possible types, as it would be wrong to generalize from the human case to all possible cases. The butterfly adults might have vivid memories of their pupa childhood while not sharing their body with that being; in their case a memory criterion might well seem attractive. It all depends on the being.

            Here is an even more radical case to consider: the no-consciousness self. It might be claimed that personal identity consists in the persistence of a subject of consciousness over time: and certainly for conscious beings that theory has some appeal (though it doesn’t seem very explanatory). But consider a hypothetical case in which a conscious being loses consciousness during the course of life yet retains an unconscious mind; or a species that was once conscious but now, through natural selection, has abandoned that trait and survives by means of unconscious psychological mechanisms. Such beings might have memories, beliefs, desires, personalities, and so on—they just aren’t conscious. They are, if you like, zombie selves (though with an elaborate unconscious psyche). They would look and sound like conscious persons, living their lives like such persons to outside observation (maybe a bit wooden in certain respects). So they exist through time and possess the usual attributes of persons (except one)—picture them on a remote planet with a functioning civilization. For these beings a theory based on continuity of a conscious subject would be wide of the mark—more like continuity of an unconscious subject.  [2] They have a psychology and they exist through time, but there is no consciousness in there: “unconscious self” is not an oxymoron.

            We can thus refute bodily theories, memory theories, and consciousness theories as general theories of personal identity by considering the full range of possible persons.  [3] Maybe there is no general theory available just different theories for different types of being, or maybe some other theory can be contrived; what is clear, however, is that the human case is a special case, not characteristic of all possible cases. Methodologically, then, it is unwise to proceed from this case alone; that will only lead to parochialism and special pleading. We have personal memories, consciousness, and divisible transferable brains, but that is not true of all possible selves, and perhaps not of all actual ones (animals, aliens). The case is unlike theories of persistence for material objects in that the material objects around us are characteristic of material objects in general: if material identity is explicable in terms of spatiotemporal continuity or some such for the objects on earth, then it will be explicable in this way for objects elsewhere, actual and possible. There are no non-spatiotemporal objects to deal with and accommodate. Similarly for set identity: the criterion in terms of identity of membership generalizes to all possible sets—it isn’t limited to the sets we encounter every day. The thing about selves is that they can be “multiply realized” both physically and psychologically, so we don’t want to tie the concept down to a specific type of self—as it might be, adult humans with consciousness, memory, and a divisible anatomy. That would be like defining set identity purely in terms of sets of elephants or ants. The plurality of possible selves imposes a constraint on theories of personal identity, and one that is not easy to meet.

 

2. Let me now turn to a different question involving plural selves, namely whether I could have been a different self: that is, is there a plurality of selves in metaphysically possible worlds that could be said to be possible selves of mine? The question is tricky because I clearly could not have been a different human being: I am necessarily Colin McGinn, given that a certain human being is denoted at both places. Any human being in a possible world that is not identical to this human being is not me. Someone could look and sound like me, but if they are not the same human being they are not me. No member of an animal species can ever be identical to a different member of that species. But it doesn’t follow that I could not have been a different person (associated with the same human being). In fact, this is quite easy to imagine: we just have to suppose that I undergo very different experiences in some possible world. Suppose my experiences in world w involve being born into poverty in a war-stricken land where abuse is rampant and education non-existent: I suffer various life-altering traumas and end up with emotional problems radically unlike those I now have. My personality, my memories, and my abilities are totally different in w: am I not then a different person from what I am today? The person you become is a function of your life experiences, among other things, but these are contingent, so you could have become a different person. You could even be subjected to chemical attacks that rewire your nervous system, or suffer genetic alteration in the womb. It would be the same organism, but it wouldn’t be the same person, because psychology counts in the latter respect. If we call that person you could have become “Albert”, then we can say that you might have been Albert, in the sense that the human being you are could have been associated with (“housed”) another person, namely Albert. You quaperson could not have been identical to Albert, but your organism could have been his residence instead of yours. Thus we derive the paradoxical-seeming proposition, “I could have been a different person”, which translates roughly as, “My organism could have housed a different person”. The word “I” can slip from referring to a human being to referring to the person housed by that human being, but there is a clear sense in which it is true to say, “I might not have been me”: that is, “This human being might have housed someone other than my actual self” expresses a truth. Indeed, I might have been any number of people in this sense, given the plurality of possible lives I (sic) might have led. What my name actually stands for is an interesting semantic question: is it a human being or a person (self)? It seems ambiguous between the two in actual use, which is why I can say, “Colin McGinn might not have been Colin McGinn” without sensing contradiction, where the first occurrence of the name refers to a certain human being and the second refers to the person currently occupying that human being. I am necessarily the person I am, and I am necessarily the human being I am, but that person is not necessarily identical to that human being—in fact, they are not identical at all. In one sense “I am not a (particular) human being” is true, and in another sense “I am not a (particular) person” is true; but it is equally true that I am a human being and also a person! The word “I” is flexible enough to allow for all these statements to be true under the right interpretation.

            We can say, then, that across modal space I have many counterpart selves that could each have occupied this particular organism. I have no such human being counterparts—in this respect I am a unity. But I am (associated with) a plurality of selves in the sense that possible worlds contain many such selves corresponding to me. This is not a denial that proper names are rigid designators, since each of these entities has its own name: it isn’t that my counterpart selves are all designated by “Colin McGinn”, construed as a name of a particular person in the actual world. It is quite true that Colin McGinn is necessarily Colin McGinn (under the right interpretation), even though I might have had many numerically distinct counterparts that inhabit my actual body (and were all called “Colin McGinn”). This can be verbally confusing, but the underlying logic and metaphysics are not: one human being, many selves, with names for each of these separate entities. This enables us to say such potentially confusing things as, “Colin McGinn (human being) might not have been (associated with) Colin McGinn (person)”. The name seems capable of referring to both.

 

3. I now take up another issue in which the notion of a plurality of selves suggests itself, namely whether we actually contain more than one self. It is commonly assumed that we contain at most one self, though there have been dissenters to that conservative opinion (as we will see). Hume argued that we contain zero selves, having conducted an internal survey; but most people put the number at unity after no survey at all. It is an interesting question why we do this so readily: has anyone ever actually counted the number of selves he or she contains? Is it that you can tell just by looking that you contain a single self, as you can tell by looking that you have a single body? But you can’t look at yourself and then proceed to count the number of selves in the vicinity. Is it that the ordinary use of “I” suggests unity? But that seems a flimsy way to get at the cardinality. Is it perhaps just a lazy prejudice like assuming there is only one type of person in the world? At any rate, it is apparently a general belief on the part of (human) selves that there is only one of them per organism. If we ask for a demonstration, we are apt to be dismissed as blind to the obvious. Is this just how we appear to ourselves? Maybe, maybe not, but maybe the appearances are misleading: we need a reason to accept that we really are thus unitary. At least we should be open to evidence that such unity is illusory. People used to think there was only one sun in the universe, but more careful investigation revealed a plurality of suns; might the same thing be true of the self in our own personal universe?

            Let me list some putative reasons for dissent from the common assumption: the Freudian division into ego, id, and superego; the phenomenon of multiple personality; brain bisection experiments; modular conceptions of mind; the theatrical conception of the self; division into private and public self; a general sense of self splintering (R.D. Laing, The Divided Self). I don’t propose to discuss each of these in detail; I am more interested in the general idea of multiples selves. I certainly think it is logically possible for a single organism to house more than one psychic entity deserving the name of self; and I think there is good empirical evidence that this is normal for ordinary adult humans. I am with Erving Goffman (and William Shakespeare) in believing that a given individual presents a number of distinct selves in different social contexts, and that these are deeply entrenched. The person is something dramatically constructed—and we can construct a plurality of these things. I myself have always felt that I am made up of three distinct selves—an intellectual self, an athletic self, and a musical self—with little overlap between them; and I fancy I am not alone in having this kind of impression. Is my impression to be disputed? I also wrote a novel, The Space Trap, in which I played with the idea of a phobic self and an imaginary self in addition to the self we ordinarily recognize. Such ideas are quite common in writers trying to represent the complexity of human psychological reality. People feel they are not the simple unity that we tend to speak of; there are significant divisions and separations (hence the famous Walt Whitman remark, “I contain multitudes”). Just as people feel themselves to change dramatically over time, becoming “a different person”, so they feel that at a given time there is a plurality lurking inside. Pathological conditions like schizoid personality or multiple personality are not so far from the norm, maybe just extreme cases of it. If someone sincerely believes himself to have a divided self, what evidence can be used to refute him? What kind of counting procedure would undermine such a claim? Might there not be degrees of division with the normal case of personal separation just at the far end? Whence the dogmatic conviction that there must be only one self each? We have got used to the idea that we possess more than one mind, what with the unconscious and generalized modularity, so why should the self be treated as uniquely unitary? If I contain many minds, don’t I thereby contain many selves? If Freud were right about the unconscious, surely he would have discovered another self in us in addition to the conscious self—an autonomous agent with its own agenda. True, the conscious self that is encountered in introspection has a certain salience, but why should that determine the full extent of our selfhood? And that self might divide into a number of sub-selves upon closer examination. We are often torn, internally conflicted, and doesn’t that suggest a separation of selves? No one ever told the genes, or our life experiences, that they were to construct only a single self, so the possibility is open that they construct a plurality of selves uneasily (or easily) conjoined. We are more like a constellation of selves than a single unified self, a galaxy not a solitary star.

            If this is so, then our identity through time consists of the persistence of many selves, not one.  There is not a single self that exists from one moment to the next but a plurality of selves. Some of these selves may perish while others march on; all may perish at some point to be replaced by new ones. What we call our personal identity, and picture as a single persistent capsule, is really a mixture of separate elements held tenuously together: an identity of selves in the plural not the singular. Conceivably, these selves might have different conditions of identity: for example, there may be a biological self fixed by the genes that is tied to the constitution of the organism, existing alongside a number theatrical selves freely constructed to serve suitable social purposes and revocable at will. A theatrical self may disappear at a certain time when the context no longer demands it, while the biological self goes on regardless. Once we accept a plurality of selves we have the possibility of separate existence through time. It is really too simple to speak of “personal identity” as if we had a single well-defined thing called a “person” whose identity is at issue; the human psyche is too complex for that. Surely we can imagine a being that regards himself as such a plurality and speaks spontaneously of one of his selves going out of existence while others continue. If we insist on his answering the question whether he survived such and such an event, he might give us a puzzled look and reply, “Well, this self and that self survived, though that other one didn’t”. For this being it would be wrong by stipulation to speak only of a single self that survives or fails to. To what extent we approximate to his condition is an empirical question, and one that has a good deal of evidence in its favor.

            I believe it is true to say that we experience our body as more of a unity than it really is. It comes as a surprise to discover all those separate organs each doing its specific job—and illness can deliver a jolt to our assumption of unity. If we ask after its persistence conditions, we quickly come to see that many organs are involved, and some can survive what others may not. If we insist on asking whether the body survives such and such an event, we can see that this question is too simple, given the complexity of the body (the plurality of its organs). The person is a bit like that: in principle some parts may survive while others perish (consider Alzheimer’s). I can lose one hand while retaining the other because I have two hands; why couldn’t I have more than one self where each can survive separately? If the brain realizes human personality in more than one location, then damage to one location may destroy one instance but leave another: wouldn’t this be the loss of one self and the retention of the other? Here we would have different tokens of the same type, or similar types, but different types may also coexist with one another. It may be convenient to talk as if we are a single entity, as it is convenient to talk of the body as a single entity, but both are made up of other units. What we call the self is really a plurality of distinct self-like entities.  [4]

            There is a plurality of types of self; there is a plurality of possible selves corresponding to each human (and animal) individual; and there is a plurality of actual selves within each individual. There is not just the human type of self; there is not just a single possible self for each individual; and there is not just a single actual self for each individual.      

              

Colin McGinn

           

  [1] Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons.

  [2] In considering these beings it might help to adopt a higher-order thought theory of consciousness.

  [3] I haven’t considered so-called psychological continuity theories in relation to hypothetical persons. This is because I am not convinced such theories have ever been properly formulated, and because they seem open to obvious counterexamples concerning sufficiency (continuity is a “cheap relation”). And couldn’t there be beings that revel in their psychological discontinuities, changing their beliefs and desires dramatically from day to day? They might regard this flexibility as essential to their identity.

  [4] Of course, the parts of the body are not themselves bodies but organs of the body, and parts of the self may also not themselves be selves; but there is reason to accept that some parts of what we call our self are also self-like. If they existed alone, we would still call them selves.

                                   

 

 

A New Theory of Color

 

 

I will first state the theory as simply and clearly as possible, and then I will consider what may be said in its favor. I call the theory “Double Object Dispositional Primitivism” (DODP) or just “the double object theory”.  [1] Its tenets are as follows: When you see an ordinary object the color it is seen to have is a simple monadic property of the object’s surface (not a disposition). This property is generated from within the mind and is projected onto the seen object. The mind has a disposition (power) to project color qualities onto seen objects, and it is a necessary and sufficient condition for being (say) red that the object should elicit this disposition. The object is red in virtue of the fact that it triggers the mind’s disposition to project redness onto objects. Another type of mind might have a disposition to project blueness onto the same objects (say, Martians) and then the object would be blue for them. Color is relative. In addition to this object there is another object (intuitively, an object of physics) that is not itself red but which has a disposition to interact with the first disposition to give rise to experiences of red. This disposition is by no means identical to redness, but it is closely related to it: the object that has it triggers perceptions of the primitive property of redness. The physical object interacts with a mind to make that mind activate its disposition to see things as red; it is “red-inducing”. The object induces perceptions of red (in certain perceivers) in which the primitive property of redness is projected onto an object that is not identical with the inducing object. So there are two connected ontological levels: a perceptual object that has the primitive property of being red, and a physical object that lacks that property but which has a disposition to cause perceptions of red (in conjunction with the mind’s disposition to see certain objects as red). It is strictly false to describe this second object as red, though it is natural to do so given its actual role in producing experiences of red. In short: perceptual objects are primitively red while physical objects are dispositionally red (i.e. not really red). We see the primitive property of redness, but we never see the dispositional property associated with it. These two properties are possessed by two distinct objects (think the manifest image and the scientific image).

            The mind has a disposition to see certain objects as red and this disposition can be triggered by physical objects. When this happens an object is seen as red, but that object is not the triggering object. The mental disposition can in principle be triggered in other ways too, as when a brain in a vat sees things as red because of stimulation of the visual centers. Here no physical object operates to trigger the disposition (i.e. an object in the perceiver’s environment acting on the eyes) and yet an object is seen. Hallucinated objects can be red too. This is hard to account for under the classical dispositional theory, since that theory supposes that only (existing) physical objects with certain dispositions can be red. But to be red is not just to be a physical object that is disposed to produce red experiences by normal perception, because hallucinated objects can also be red. The important factor is the mind’s disposition to generate such experiences, not the de facto dispositions of the physical world. Generally the mental disposition is triggered by the usual environmental objects, but it can also be triggered in other ways, as with the brain in a vat scenario. Suppose I say, “That tomato is red”: this is true if I am referring to a perceptual object of a certain kind, whether real or hallucinated, but not if I am referring to the physical object associated with that object. The objects of physics have no color (they lack primitive color properties), though they do have dispositions to produce color experiences (in conjunction with suitable minds). Those objects had no color before perceivers came along and they have none now, though they do now possess a disposition they lacked earlier. They do not have secondary as well as primary qualities (or else physics would be required to mention them). The objects that have colors are different objects—perceptual objects. And colored objects can be perceived even by a brain in a vat. To use a familiar terminology, phenomenal objects are red but noumenal objects are not, despite being closely tied to phenomenal objects.  [2]

            What nice things can be said about the double object theory? First, we do justice to the phenomenal primitiveness of colors, their manifest simplicity, and to the fact that we can see them (as we could not if colors were identical to dispositions).  Second, we acknowledge the role of mental dispositions in grounding attributions of color, as well as the role of external objects in eliciting perceptions of color. We are not completely wide of the mark in calling physical objects colored—though it is a question how often we really do this, given that we are normally talking about perceptual objects not the objects of physics. The relationship between our ordinary ontology of tables, tomatoes, and tulips, on the one hand, and the objects described in physics, on the other, is obscure; and it is by no means obvious that we speak of the latter when referring to the former. In any case, according to DODP there are two objects at play here, one of which is red, and the other of which is not (though it has a disposition to cause experiences of objects of the first kind to look red). It is not one and the same entity that is both red and disposed to look red. Certainly, the color red is not the categorical basis of the disposition to appear red—that will be a matter of the physical properties of the object belonging to physics. There are three levels at work here: the physical properties of the physical object that ground its disposition to give rise to appearances; the disposition itself; and the primitive property that perceptual objects possess (and appear to possess). Only the last of these is perceptible. The crucial component is the disposition of the mind to see things a certain way: once that disposition is activated color comes into the world, projected by the mind.

            What might be said against the theory? Perhaps some will find the doubling of objects objectionable—they will prefer to attribute color to the objects of physics. In fact the spirit of the theory would be largely preserved by this move, with the primitive color properties instantiated in the same object as the disposition to cause color experiences—we can still keep these properties distinct, as well as invoke projection to explain the presence of the primitive property in the object. I have formulated the theory in the double-object way because I favor this position on independent grounds (having to do with hallucinations, intentional objects, and brains in vats). I also think it undesirable to locate colors in the world studied by physics, since physics makes no mention of these properties (their relativity to perceivers disqualifies them to begin with). I think of perceptual objects as an ontological layer over and above the objects described by physics (compare Eddington on the “two tables”). Artifacts and organisms, in particular, should not be seen as individuated and constituted by the categories proper to physics, but as a distinct ontological layer (though no doubt dependent on the physical level in some way). Color properties attach to this common sense level not to the rarefied level occupied by physics (the “absolute conception”). Still, it would be possible to apply the apparatus of DODP to a single-level ontology, the essential idea being that colors are primitive properties bestowed on the world by dispositions of the mind (coupled with the action of physical objects).

            That idea might itself provoke further dissent: for how can the mind generate these properties from within its own resources? Isn’t this mysterious and magical-seeming? I totally agree: how the mind (brain) manufactures color properties is indeed mysterious, like many things about the mind. But this is not a fatal objection to the theory, simply a fact about the mind that needs to be acknowledged, i.e. that there is much about it that we cannot explain. Other theories avoid such mysteries by advocating reductive accounts of color—as that colors are reducible to electromagnetic wavelengths or that they are logical constructions from subjective qualia conceived as inner sensations. But these attempts at reduction are implausible (for reasons I won’t go into), the primitive property theory emerging as superior—though it does indeed lead to problems of intelligibility. Where do these remarkable properties come from? Does the mind create them itself or find them elsewhere (in a Platonic world of color universals, say)? How exactly are they “projected” onto objects? The theory raises plenty of puzzles, to be sure, but it might yet be true, since the truth is sometimes mysterious.  [3] What the theory does is arrange the facts into an intelligible structure, aiming to respect phenomenology and logical coherence. Instead of working just with physical objects and their dispositions, it invokes an extra layer of non-dispositional properties and places them within a mind possessing certain projective dispositions. Perceptual objects thus have exactly the properties they appear to have, while we avoid treating colors as mind-independent. Colors have no place in physics, but they are front and center in our ordinary experience of things, just as they seem to be.

 

Colin McGinn  

  [1] I first wrote about color in The Subjective View (1983), then in “Another Look at Color” (1996), and now in this paper (2018). At each point I have modified the position that came before, while retaining the basic outlook. The successive theories have become more complicated as time has gone by.

  [2] This terminology is not strictly accurate because “noumenal” is generally taken to entail “unknowable”, but the objects of physics are not unknowable. Still, the terminology may be helpful in capturing the structure of the position.

  [3] It is true that we should not multiply mysteries beyond necessity, but necessity sometimes requires that we face up to mysteries.