Stereotypes

Wittgenstein warned against the “craving for generality”: the mistaken desire to find uniformity where there is only diversity. Thus philosophers are apt to suppose that all words are names, all sentences are assertions, and all states of mind are experiential—despite a heterogeneity that is evident to unbiased inspection. In a word, they overgeneralize, often based on preconceived ideas. Hence his admonition: “Don’t think, look!” Evidently this is a natural tendency of the human mind, which we need to resist. At roughly the same time Nabokov was inveighing against what he called “generalities”, particularly on the part of historians. He begins his 1926 essay “On Generalities” with these words: “There is a very tempting and very harmful demon: the demon of generalizations. He captivates human thought by marking every phenomenon with a little label, and carefully placing it next to another, also meticulously wrapped and numbered phenomenon.”  He goes on to excoriate historians for indulging in the tendency to find spurious similarities, thus erecting oversimplified “epochs”, “ages”, and “periods”. Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book Public Opinion first introduced the word “stereotype” in its modern sense (before that it was used in the printing industry), i.e. as connoting a tendency towards social overgeneralization and simplistic grouping. Here again the fault lies in not looking, observing and recording, but instead relying on overly simple and homogenizing ideas. Thus, according to these three thinkers, we find people mistakenly supposing (a) that all words are names, (b) that all authors of a certain period are to be classified as (say) Romantics, and (c) that all people of a certain culture or ethnic group have such and such characteristics. In each case we have what we would now call stereotypical thinking; and the problem with it is that it is false and can be very harmful. Yet people keep on doing it: they keep on ignoring the facts, the details, and the individualities, preferring instead the meritless generalization, the lazy grouping, and the prejudiced espousal of alleged commonalities. In some cases this is clearly deplorable, contemptible, and just plain stupid; but human beings seem intent on indulging their craving for generality no matter the cost. It is as if they have a demented love of identity.

            I emphasize the pervasiveness of the phenomenon because social stereotyping is not some isolated and unique failing: it is built into the fabric of human cognition (which is not say it is incurable). It is entirely possible to stereotype animals, fictional genres, popular music, athletes, professors, and even rocks. Overgeneralization and preconceived ideas are the stuff of weak minds. Today there is a tendency to stereotype certain individuals as “powerful white males” and then run away with all sorts of misguided and erroneous ideas about this supposed class. Philosophers and other academics are not immune to this, shameful though it may be.  [1] Often it is done in order to advance a certain political agenda, but it is also just plain lazy thinking and good old-fashioned stupidity. It needs to be identified for what it is and condemned in the strongest terms. Stereotyping is never an acceptable way to think (sic). No doubt it has its biological origins in a need to economize on time—to make thinking more efficient. Fine, but not at the cost of accuracy and justice: because stereotyping people is a vicious and idiotic habit. It needs to be stamped out (is jail time too much to ask?). Children need to be educated strenuously in its fatuity and danger. It has to go.

            Under what circumstances does stereotyping take hold? I think it’s when people feel overwhelmed by the sheer diversity of the world (of course, there can also be emotional reasons, meme transmission, indoctrination, imitation, and the like). If the world is perceived as intolerably complex, people will want to simplify it and make it more manageable: it’s easier to think that every word is a name, every writer from a certain period belongs to a certain “school”, and that every person of a certain appearance is thus-and-so (generally a negative thus-and-so). This is no doubt understandable, but it is not commendable, or even forgivable. In a society like America, which has a very diverse population, the urge to oversimplify and classify is particularly strong: it’s just easier to try to subsume everyone under certain crisply defined categories. The task of education should be to combat this cognitive weakness. This is a type of therapy (as Wittgenstein recommended therapy for the disease of philosophical overgeneralization): people need to be cured of their stereotyping, as if it were a disease. In fact, it really is a type of mental disease—just an exceptionally common one (like the common cold). The first step here is to get a proper sense of its pathological character, its demonic morphology, its onset and progression. A stigma needs to be firmly attached to it. As it is stereotyping gets reinforced and solidified, but it needs to be exposed and ridiculed. But don’t count on academic philosophers to do any of this good work; they seem as prone to it as anyone else, sad to say. It really is a problem, despite its obvious malignity.  [2]

  [1] In fact academics are professionally prone to it, because they make a living erecting generalizations, producing taxonomies, and promoting theories; they would feel thwarted if restricted to reporting the facts. Recalcitrant facts are the enemy of the ambitious theoretician.

  [2] This is generally recognized, though people seem oddly blind to it in themselves (they just have betterstereotypes). I am attempting here to describe it succinctly and clearly so that its malign presence can more readily be eradicated.

How Things Really Look

I wish to defend the legitimacy of a metaphysical concept that I have not seen discussed before: the concept of what might be called objective appearance. We are familiar with the concept of subjective appearance—the ways things appear to specific organisms with specific sensory faculties. These vary from case to case and may involve distortions, errors, and biases; perceptual illusions fall into the class of subjective appearances. Appearances in this sense are supposed to contrast with objective reality: there is only one objective reality, but there are many ways it can subjectively appear to organisms. Some appearances can be wildly inaccurate; others close to fully veridical. The same physical stimulus can elicit widely divergent types of appearance in different creatures, e.g. bats and humans. There is thus a question as to whether appearance matches reality: does reality appear to us as it really is or only as our contingent sensibility paints it (to use Hume’s metaphor)? This can be a matter of degree: appearances can approximate more or less closely to objective reality. It makes sense to say that one appearance is more veridical than another. But does it make sense to speak of how things objectively appear, i.e. how they appear when perceived as they objectively are? Is there such a thing as ideal appearance—the kind that gets things exactly right? We might picture God as enjoying such appearances: when things appear to God’s mind they appear exactly as they objectively are without any distortion, error, or specific viewpoint. His is a view from nowhere: things appear to God purely in their objective nature. When God sees an object it appears to him as it really is in itself sans any sensory specificity. Thus we arrive at the idea of how things really look: there is the way things look to imperfect terrestrial organisms such as ourselves and the way they look to a being that sees things as they objectively are. We can ask what difference there might be between how things actually look and the way they really look (say to a being like God—though we can drop this heuristic). The way an object really looks is the way it looks to a being that sees it purely as it objectively is—the way it looks in its own being, as it were.

            This is a commonsense idea, at least in its origins. If you see something in the dark you can ask what it looks like when properly illuminated. If you see someone in heavy makeup you can wonder what he or she really looks like without makeup. If you are subject to the Muller-Lyer illusion you can form the idea of what the lines would look like to someone not subject to that illusion (whether or not such a being exists). This is the concept of an ideal perceiver, analogous to the concept of an ideal observer in ethics: an ideal perceiver sees things according to how they really look not how they happen to look in particular circumstances. So there are subjective appearances of the kind ordinary perceivers experience and there are appearances of the kind that an ideal perceiver would experience. It is true that things really look a certain way to given perceivers even when the appearance is subjective, but there is also the notion of how things look to perceivers that see them as they really are.      [1] There is how something looks to me now and there is how it really looks when we exclude all subjective intrusions. This gives rise to philosophical questions such as: “How would the world look if it were seen as it really is?” That is, how would an idealized perceiver experience the world? Would such a perceiver see the world as colored, as Euclidian, as containing discrete objects? How would an ideal perceiver see space? How would such a perceiver see the physical world as described by Einstein? How would the quantum world look? How does the world really look when all subjectivity is subtracted leaving only the naked object? We even have questions like, “What would people look like if we could see into their souls, a la Dorian Grey?” That is, we have the idea of how things would look if we could see them just as they are in themselves. Maybe we never have such experiences, but we can conceive of them—we can apply our concept of vision in such a way as to allow for their possibility. We can conceive, that is, of objective visual appearances: how things would look if the mask were removed, so to speak.      [2]

            We can even ask this kind of question about colors: what does red really look like when you remove its specific appearance to humans? Maybe it looks the way it looks when the perceiver has taken LSD—brighter, deeper, sharper, and more resonant. We ordinarily see colors through our limited visual system (rods and cones, the optic nerve, the occipital cortex), but maybe other perceivers would see them differently, more accurately. An ideal perceiver of color confronted with our perception of color might assure us that there is a lot more to red than we think given our limited perspective on it. This would be the analogue of a dog telling us that there is a lot more to the scent of freshly mown grass than we suppose. The way things really smell far exceeds our contingent olfactory resources, as the way red really looks transcends our impoverished sense of sight. Similarly, the way the world of physical objects really looks is far removed from the way it looks to us, given the truth of relativity and quantum theory. If you could see the world as it really is, you might see far more dimensions to space—that’s what the world really looks like if you have the sense to see it right. There is the way pond water looks to the human eye and there is the way it really looks when you have eyes that can see the microorganisms swimming in it. If there were people with eyes this acute, they would assure us that the way we see things is not the way they really look—any more than actors on a movie screen really look the way they do when so presented.

            The metaphysical point of all this is that we need to replace the appearance- reality distinction with a threefold distinction between subjective appearance, objective appearance, and reality. Subjective appearances are not the only kind; we need the category of objective appearances, whether there are any such items in actual reality or not. But we also need to distinguish objective appearances from reality itself: although objective appearances represent nothing but reality, they are not the same thing as reality. Objects and their properties are never the same as conscious representations of them: here as elsewhere we need to respect the act-object distinction. So we need a robust division between these three items; total reality has a place for all three, none reducible to the others. Centrally, we need to acknowledge a double level of appearance—actual and ideal, subjective and objective, relative and absolute. This bears on the question of idealism: is reality to be identified with subjective appearance or objective appearance? In effect, Berkeley’s idealism is of the latter kind, since reality for him consists in ideas in the mind of God, which are not to be regarded as in any way biased, erroneous, limited, or subjectively tinged. Or it might be maintained that reality consists in a realm of ideal appearances in the mind of no actual conscious being but existing as potentialities (a kind of Platonic idealism). Reality, according to this conception of idealism, isn’t a motley collection of all the subjective appearances enjoyed by actual biological creatures but a far more streamlined and unified set of ideal appearances. We might call this “ideal idealism” or “objective idealism”. It certainly has advantages over the subjective type of idealism, which is wide open to charges of excessive plurality or stipulated favoritism. In any case, we have a new metaphysical option once we accept the category of objective appearances. We also have a new imaginative option: we can try to imagine how the world  would appear if it appeared as it is really constituted. We already do this, to some extent, but we could adopt it as an intellectual project: don’t just tell us how things really are; tell us how they would look if we could see them as they really are. We could call this “real phenomenology”: the phenomenology of reality as such—how reality would present itself to an ideal consciousness. This is the study of objective appearance: not a form of empirical psychology but a philosophical study of a certain ideal subject matter. It is an investigation of how things really look—rarified, no doubt, difficult, certainly, but not outside the realm of possibility.      [3] I would like to read a work of physical phenomenology that describes what electrons look like, or fields of force, or curved space-time: that is, what their objective appearance consists in under idealized conditions. This would enable me to link these things with the world I normally perceive—or explain what kind of alien sense perception would be necessary to perceive them. Think of it as a kind of conceptual empiricism: finding a link between reality and sense perception—though this is not empiricism of the classical type. Some enterprising theorist might even try to resurrect the empiricist view of concepts by proposing that concepts are equivalent to ideal sensory appearances not actual ones. Like possible worlds, objective appearances give us new theoretical entities to play with, opening up new theoretical options. We might even manage to elicit some of those “incredulous stares” of which David Lewis was so fond (I prefer to call them “stupefied frowns”). Do we dare to quantify over these entities? Sure, go right ahead and quantify over them, there’s no harm in that, quantification being a enjoyable diversion; but more seriously we should suppose that reality contains not just objective things and their subjective appearances to sentient beings but also objective appearances that are written into the very nature of things. Reality itself consists of how things are and how things (ideally) look. Even before perceiving beings came along things looked a certain way—ideally, objectively. Eyes just picked up on that fact. Reality can’t avoid appearing a certain way, even if there is no one to appear to. If that sounds paradoxical, consider the fact that square things have a square-like appearance no matter how, or whether, actual perceivers perceive them. That is just how the concept of appearance works.      [4]

      [1] Color blindness provides a good example: we say that the color blind fail to see things as they really appear, since they really appear to have colors. Of course, compared to other perceivers normal human color vision might be similarly limited with respect to how things really appear. We might not be sensitive to the full appearance of things (obviously that is true of the reality of things).

      [2] When things look blurry that is not part of how things really look, since things in themselves are not (generally) blurry, this being a feature of a specific sensory apparatus. Objective appearances would not be blurry appearances.

      [3] I don’t rule out the possibility that we can’t know what certain things look like, even though they do look a certain way; we might be imaginatively limited in this regard. Still, we can make a concerted effort to come to know how things look to ideal perceivers.

      [4] I am well aware that this is an especially thorny area, conceptually speaking. We need to recognize and then hang onto certain basic distinctions, and fight against the propensity of language to confuse and bamboozle us. The concept of appearance is by no means simple and straightforward.

Pathological Belief

There is something funny about belief: belief isn’t quite right in the head. The human belief system leaves a lot to be desired. Philosophers have been onto this for a while, noting the peculiarities of belief. Early on it was noticed that belief reports are referentially opaque: you can’t substitute co-denoting terms and be guaranteed to preserve truth-value. Someone can believe that Hesperus is the moon’s best friend and not believe that the Phosphorus is. So belief reports don’t have the logical form of a predicate applied to a subject; they are logically anomalous. This discovery provoked a lot of handwringing and even skepticism regarding the notion of belief. Perhaps there is no such thing as belief—that supposition would certainly remove the logical puzzlement belief occasions. And when are two beliefs the same? What makes one belief differ from another? Criteria of identity are sorely lacking. A properly scientific psychology might wish to eschew or otherwise scorn this element of folk psychology (the folk are a primitive and superstitious crowd). We don’t even know whether beliefs are “in the head”, and if they are not their causal powers look distinctly iffy. Then Kripke delivered his puzzle: belief is not only logically problematic; it is positively paradoxical. Pierre believes both that London is pretty and that London is not pretty—and yet he is a perfectly reasonable man. It is belief that is at fault in allowing such contradictory beliefs, not our friend Pierre (he reasons impeccably). If contradiction is not ground for banishment, then what is? Perhaps we should simply stop believing things, since belief is so fraught with logical and conceptual problems. We have stopped believing in specific propositions as human thought has progressed; maybe we should stop believing altogether. Why court paradox and conceptual incoherence? Belief just isn’t a very wholesome commodity, logically speaking; we would be better off without it. True, we would then have no means of assenting to a proposition, but that is a mixed blessing at best. Animals seem to get on quite well without full-blown belief (except those similarly afflicted), so maybe we should take a leaf out of their book. It is human belief that is problematic; other animals have different ways of negotiating the world (without indulging in referential opacity and contradiction-generating assent behavior). Time to refashion the human cognitive system and let belief quietly expire.

            That utopian hope is reinforced by a feature of belief that is less well explored by analytical philosophers, namely its irrationality. Not only is belief opaque and paradoxical; it is prone to the worst excesses of irrationality. People believe the strangest things on the slenderest of grounds: they positively leap at belief without pondering its reasonableness or possibly errant causes. This wouldn’t matter so much if it weren’t for another feature of belief—its connection to action. People act on these wacky beliefs: hard to believe, I know, given their wonky foundations, but lamentably true. Just consider the out-there ideologies that have permeated human culture and the horrific actions they have prompted. History would not be the same if belief were more responsible and controlled. Irrational belief is the cause of most of the atrocities that have marred human history. It is our capacity to believe crazy things (inter alia) that has led to massacres, pogroms, prejudice, religious wars, genocide, and all the other grotesqueries that bring such shame on the human race. Granted, we have some pretty nasty emotions too, and plenty of evil intentions, but it is our ability to believe garbage that really sets us splendidly apart. Our belief system is sorely lacking in proper regulation and rational self-criticism: people will believe anything if you say it enough times, and if it suits them so to believe. Belief is just too malleable, easily manipulated, prone to fantasy, emotion-driven, and just plain bonkers.  [1] It is a biological adaptation riddled with design flaws, faulty wiring, and damaging malfunction—a real lemon. It’s a wonder natural selection let it pass at all! It should have been eliminated long ago—and maybe it will be in due course.

            To get a sense of belief’s failings, imagine if its proneness to error resulted in something like visual illusion or hallucination: whenever you have a false belief about something it looks to you as if reality is that way. You believe that someone is an animal or a devil and lo and behold that’s what they look like—fur, four legs, no clothes, or horns, hooves, a demonic countenance. That is, your belief system intrudes on your visual system so as to make things appear as they are believed to be. This would result in massive visual illusion, a malfunctioning perceptual system, and a potential for accidents on a grand scale. Suppose you believe in ghosts: then ghosts would appear before you all night long. Or you falsely believe your husband is unfaithful and are promptly visited by vivid scenes of marital infidelity. Surely you would want to consult a doctor and get your eyes examined. But in the case of false belief we have a similar level of delusion that fortunately doesn’t commandeer our senses. Still, we might want to consult a belief specialist who can rid us of these wild suppositions and preposterous opinions. The whole problem is that people find their beliefs perfectly reasonable just because they have them, no matter how groundless and absurd they may be. The illusory nature of belief is not written on its surface, so falsehood can survive undetected and uncorrected. This is a dangerous way for a belief system to be. It leads to belief perseverance that is very difficult to curb.

            The problem, evidently, is that beliefs are just too unencapsulated (in roughly Jerry Fodor’s sense): they are far too prone to elicitation by factors quite irrelevant to their truth. Notoriously, beliefs are influenced by wishes and desires: people have a tendency to believe what they want to believe. This is a disastrous way to build a belief system—the very antithesis of what belief production ought to be. Why on earth did the genes ever construct brains that have this grievous flaw? Surely a minimal requirement on a good belief system is that it should notallow for desires to influence the course of belief formation—that’s the last thing that should happen! But that is exactly what the human belief system permits with giddy abandon (I see no evidence that animals are prone to such misfiring). Hopeless! Beliefs should only be formed by processes involving strict adherence to rationality, but in fact they come into existence for the strangest of reasons, or for no reason at all. This is a grievous fault in the whole system—like having teeth that break whenever you bite into something nutritious, or a tail that whips you in the face whenever you wag it. I can’t emphasize this point strongly enough: the human belief apparatus is appallingly designed, a complete mess, an utter balls-up. It needs to be totally overhauled, or simply consigned to the rubbish heap. It is true that it is possible by diligent effort and proper training to avoid the worst excesses of this defective contraption, but why should our brains present us with such a daunting task—which most people decline to undertake anyway? Animals don’t need rigorous drilling in critical thought and rational belief formation, so why are we so lacking? If there were a little white pill that could put an end to our chronic doxastic disease, wouldn’t we swallow it without hesitation? Surely we want to have healthy beliefs, like healthy teeth, and it is clear enough that our beliefs are all too often rotten misshapen embarrassments. I am not exaggerating: take a look at the average person’s belief system—it’s a complete mess in there (a hot mess, as they say). Who among us is sure that his belief teeth are as sound as they should be? Who can be certain that his desires are not exerting undue influence on his beliefs—after all, nothing in the brain is set up to prevent such a thing from occurring?  [2] We are saddled with a deeply flawed psychological apparatus that we are powerless to regulate with any guarantee of success. What we might call “Descartes’ nightmare” haunts us all: that our much-cherished beliefs are riddled with error and are products of irrational forces. For nothing about belief as it exists in humans can preclude large-scale lapses in veracity—beliefs are just too labile, too susceptible to manipulation. Shakespeare’s Othello can be read as a lamentation over the dire state of the human belief system: the title character has his beliefs manipulated and toyed with by a skilled exploiter of the weaknesses inherent in the human belief system. Othello is not a particularly dull or gullible man, but his beliefs are susceptible to influence from other parts of his psyche that have no place in rational belief formation. He represents us all: we are all the victims of a pathetically vulnerable psychological set-up that leaves us at the mercy of hucksters, tricksters, and our own weaknesses. The entire apparatus needs to be radically redesigned, or removed if the problems are too deep-seated. That was certainly the view of Mr. Spock as he bore witness to the frailty of human belief: he exemplifies the proposition that human belief can only be fixed by excising all emotion—an extreme position, no doubt, but one whose force is not lost on us. Humans diverged from other animals psychologically by developing a belief system with no precursor in the animal cognitive system; the result was something with an enormous downside, to put it mildly. Perhaps human language abetted this regrettable development by enabling excessive flexibility in the belief apparatus, in which case language has a lot to answer for. In any case, what we have to live with now is light years away from ideal. We could be forgiven for supposing that human belief is intentionally irrational—and hence intentionally harmful. I repeat: irrational belief is responsible for the worst excesses of human history. Just consider the ill effects of the belief that the white European races are naturally superior to all other races. Case closed. This is all possible only because belief in humans is so prone to error (motivated error, no doubt). If only we could stop Believing!

            This is why I speak of pathological belief: the problem lies in the nature of belief itself, or at least in the way that belief is embedded in the human psyche. It needs badly to get encapsulated, i.e. insulated from outside interference from other parts of the psyche (it needs to be more modular). We could simply cut the fibers linking the belief centers of the brain to the emotion centers (Chief Science Officer Spock would favor simply removing the emotion centers altogether), but one imagines ethical and other footling objections to such an evidently sound plan. Short of that I can only urge greater awareness of the architectural catastrophe that is human belief. We should regard our beliefs with extreme caution, as if they are dangerous animals, being conscious of their deceptive and credulous tendencies: they love to do stupid things and then conceal the fact under a mantle of apparent rectitude. They are not our friends; we should not trust them; we should question them at every turn. Wasn’t that Plato’s main message and Socrates’s constant plaint? We should regard our beliefs as potentially dangerous viruses not as cuddly little pets that will never let us down. There is definitely something funny about belief, and it isn’t funny.  [3]

  [1] In this respect it resembles fear, which is also highly labile. We easily acquire phobias that are hard to shed. There should be an analogue notion for belief: types of belief that are wildly excessive and out of sync with reality. This seems to be the state of most political belief.

  [2] It would be nice if there were something analogous to homeostasis in relation to belief—a mechanism that would automatically cool them down when they get too hot. As it is we have something like a positive feedback loop, as beliefs feed off each other to create ever more furnace-like conditions.

  [3] I am hoping that my rhetorical excesses here will be forgiven: it is hard not to get worked up about the perils of belief when one surveys the course of human history (including today). People are just far too in love with their beliefs.

Mind and Behavior

Philosophical behaviorism has a curious reputation: on the one hand, it can seem eminently reasonable, on the other, completely wrong. Thus it is natural to be uncomfortably ambivalent about it, veering from acceptance to rejection as the mood strikes. On the side of rejection we have the inverted spectrum, behaving zombies, paralyzed conscious subjects, and basic repugnance at the idea that phenomenology could be reducible to bodily movement. On the side of acceptance we have clear connections between mind and behavior, the problem of other minds, the functional necessity for bodily deeds, and the evident plausibility of functional definitions. Behaviorism doesn’t strike us as just completely wrongheaded: mind and behavior are intimately related. Watson, Carnap, Ryle and Wittgenstein don’t seem to be barking preposterously up the wrong tree. Isn’t it simply true that pain is a state that mediates between harmful stimuli and adaptive responses? Isn’t belief precisely a state that is typically caused by perceptual stimuli and leads to utterance and other action? Isn’t desire what inclines organisms to behave in certain ways, as when an organism drinks when thirsty? Isn’t bravery a trait that leads to courageous action? Maybe it is true that we can envisage color inversion combined with behavioral equivalence, but surely it is not true that mental states can be freely combined with just any behavioral profile—you can’t have pains that are functionally equivalent to beliefs, or beliefs that function just like desires. It seems to be part of the essence of a given mental state that it operates in a certain way; the connection is not just contingent and adventitious. Mental states can’t just swap functional roles ad libitum. Mind and body are not stuck arbitrarily together; they are made for each other. Isn’t behavior the point of having a mind? Isn’t behavior how we know what someone else thinks and feels?

            So we have conflicting intuitions: viewed from the inside, it can seem that behavior is just a dispensable extra; viewed from the outside, behavior looks like the whole story. We seem to be forced either into accepting that phenomenology and behavior are completely separable or that the former reduces to the latter. Neither alternative is attractive. Both sides in the debate seem to have a point, but pain (say) can’t be both behavioral and non-behavioral—behaviorism can’t be both true and false! Or can it? Aren’t we making an assumption here, namely that the ontology of the mental is essentially simple? That is, we are assuming that pain is a simple property, a one-dimensional state, a unitary phenomenon. But what about the idea that pain is actually a composite state, a combination of two (or more) components? What if mental states have a dual nature? They are combinations of a felt quality (a phenomenology) and a behavioral disposition (a bodily expression). When we respond to the first component we see the point of asserting the non-behavioral character of the mind; when we focus on the second component we respect the evident link to bodily behavior. Pain really is behavioral—partially; and it is also non-behavioral—partially. Pain isn’t a simple one-dimensional affair; it is a kind of compound or assembly. Compare meaning: we have grown accustomed to thinking of meaning multi-dimensionally (sense, reference, force, tone); and now we are pondering whether the same might be true of the mind generally. Is the ontology of the mind inherently plural, composite, and componential? Every mental state is really a complex of constitutive elements—a construction from distinct components.  [1] To put it simply, pain is made of a phenomenological component and a behavioral component. Thus we are given space to accept that mental states are partially behavioral: behaviorism is partially true. It is completely true of part of the mind. But the part it is true of doesn’t exhaust the whole nature of the mind; there is a part of the mind that is not behaviorally definable. So philosophical behaviorism is both true and false—but not of the same simple unanalyzable property. It is true of one component of the mind, but false of another component. The components can be pulled apart, at least to some extent–as with the inverted spectrum, zombies, and paralysis–but that only shows how compound mental states are: it doesn’t show that the mind is wholly non-behavioral. This is why these kinds of thought experiment affect us strangely: we are invited to detach a component from our ordinary concept while leaving the other component intact, but we find ourselves unsure whether we have enough left to ground that concept–hence the ambivalence. It’s like detaching reference and leaving sense, or detaching sense and leaving reference: sure, something semantic is left, but it seems to fall short of the genuine article—as if meaning has been dismantled and dismembered. The solution to these quandaries is to recognize that mental states are a congeries, a juxtaposition of elements, a duality. Accordingly, it is possible to be a behaviorist about one aspect of the mind—that is, to accept that an aspect of the mind is essentially and intrinsically bound up with behavior. Pain really is (in part) a disposition or tendency to respond in a certain way (viz. avoidance) to harmful stimuli, as belief really is a state that prompts certain kinds of behavior. Or perhaps we do better to say that functionalism is partly true—allowing that functionalism improves on classical behaviorism in familiar ways. Mental states essentially interact with other mental states in concert with external inputs to generate behavioral outputs. But they also have qualities that transcend such functional features, being hybrid entities. There is nothing materialist about this conception of the mind; there is no such metaphysical agenda. We are simply seeking descriptive adequacy. We are trying to do justice to the range of intuitions that cluster around this topic. We are explaining how it is possible to be a card-carrying behaviorist (functionalist) without eliminating the essential nature of the mind. The mind is a phenomenological-behavioral compound. The mistake was to presuppose an ontology of simple properties capable of only a single analysis—the analogue of pre-Fregean views of meaning. We need to acknowledge a more fine-grained and variegated ontological structure to the mind.  [2]

            Having distinguished the two components of mental states we can ask which component preponderates in a given case. It seems intuitively correct to report that sensations have a larger phenomenological component than beliefs (and certainly traits of character): thus we can envisage inverted spectrum cases with relative ease, but we can’t easily envisage exchanging beliefs and preserving functional role. So we should leave open the possibility that some types of mental state are more behavioral than others: some are more a matter of qualia (e.g. color sensations) and some more a matter of abilities to act, dispositions to behave, and competences to perform (e.g. belief, linguistic understanding, and character traits). You can in principle be very behaviorist about some things and only slightly behaviorist about others, according to the magnitude of the behavioral component. Why there should be such variations of magnitude is no doubt an interesting question, and one that could profitably engage the attentions of a researcher who has seen the merits of the dual component conception. I rather think it has to do with the fact that experience is low on the behavioral component but knowledge is high on it: in knowing the deed dominates, but in experiencing the feeling does. In the beginning was the deed, as some like to say, but the deed is only part of the story; the feeling is also a leading character, sometimes eclipsing the deed. At any rate, the mind is a feeling-deed combo.  [3]

  [1] I leave aside the question of whether there is a third component corresponding to the neural correlates of the mental state, but this possibility is certainly worth exploring: see my “A Triple Aspect Theory”.

  [2] Motto: things are often more complicated than we initially suppose (duh).

  [3] As to the problem of other minds, we can venture the following: given that mental states are partly constituted by behavioral facts, we are in a good position to know that other people (and animals) have part of a mental state—for example, we can know that an organism has one component of pain (the part that consists in behavioral facts). Thus we have partial knowledge of other minds even if we don’t have full knowledge. This might explain our sense that the mind is not quite as elusive as some philosophers suppose—those that identify the mind exclusively with the inner phenomenological component. There is something to Wittgenstein’s insistence that the mind is visible in behavior, even though it is not plausible to think that all of mind is so visible. The mind is not entirely private, but it is not entirely public either: it has a foot in both camps. The concept of mind is the concept of a pairing of elements, neither exclusively inner nor exclusively outer. By rough analogy, it is like the concept of knowledge—a pairing of both belief and truth; or wide content and narrow content, or character and content, or connotation and denotation—all cases of duality within apparent unity.