The Moral Mind

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The Moral Mind

 

 

What goes on in a person’s mind when he or she makes a moral judgment and acts on it? It is an interesting fact that this question is hard to answer. If we ask what goes on in a person’s mind when she makes a judgment about the weather, we have no great difficulty answering: she has a belief to the effect (say) that it’s raining. Similarly for choosing to eat a banana or having a pain in one’s toe: the relevant mental state is a desire or a sensation, respectively. We know where to look in the mind to find the kind of mental occurrence that is involved. But in the case of moral judgment philosophers have offered very different accounts of what goes on in the mind: some say it’s a belief, others say a desire, others an emotion, others a prescription, others an intuition, others a remembered parental prohibition. Thus we have the debate between cognitivism and non-cognitivism in moral psychology, with subdivisions of these two categories. What is perhaps surprising is that the question can’t be resolved by introspection (or folk psychology—or experimental psychology). It is not obvious what goes on in the mind when it is morally engaged: hence the plethora of theories.

            There is also the question of whether a single thing goes on in everyone’s mind. Is it true that in all cultures, in all ages both historical and personal, the same mental state characterizes the moral standpoint? Do atheists and theists have the same thing going on in their minds when they reason morally? What about children and adults, or African tribes and New York intellectuals? What about humans and Neanderthals? Might some people have emotions and others cognitive states like belief? The content of their mental states might vary (consider the utilitarian and the deontologist). What about moral objectivists and moral subjectivists? And why should we suppose that it is a single thing in a single mind? Maybe moral subjects undergo several types of mental state when they act morally: beliefs and desires and emotions and intuitions and… Are both cognitivism and non-cognitivism true? None of these questions has an easy answer—moral psychology is a difficult subject. It is obscure what constitutes moral consciousness.

            It might be said that the answer lies in the distinction between fact and value: what happens in moral judgment (if we are permitting ourselves this tendentious word) is that a norm is accepted or acted upon, as opposed to a fact being registered. So what goes on in the morally engaged mind is that norms take control—we recognize that we ought to act in a certain way. That is certainly not wrong, but it doesn’t supply what we need, since norms are not distinctive of morality; other areas also involve the recognition of norms. Consider prudence and etiquette: here too we judge what we ought to do in the light of what is good for us and what counts as good manners, but the judgment is not moral in nature. Is anyone an emotivist about prudence and etiquette? When I judge that eating too much cake is not good for me am I expressing my emotions about eating? Emotivism is meant to apply to specifically moral judgment. And here we sense a general problem: a theory of moral psychology needs to specify what is common and peculiar to moral states of mind, but the materials invoked tend to be general and not restricted to morality. We are told that moral attitudes are beliefs or desires or emotions, but lots of things are beliefs or desires or emotions—what is distinctive of the moral attitude? What is it that specifically goes on in the mind when morality is its concern? Not the general type of attitude apparently, since that is widespread—so is it the content of the attitude? Is it that the (general) attitude has a (specific) moral content—for example, the belief that doing x would be morally wrong? Or desiring to do what is morally good or feeling an emotion of moral approval or intuiting the Good? Is what is going on something whose intentional object is morality itself? Is it that moral norms qua moral norms enter the psychological arena, running through, or coming before, our minds? Is the concept of morality part of what makes our moral reactions what they are? That sounds implausible—too intellectualist, too explicit, too reflective. When I act to help someone in an emergency, am I thinking about morality itself—am I consciously thinking I should do what is morally right? Also, this answer is uninformative, because we wanted to know what makes an attitude moral, and putting morality in its content doesn’t answer that. Is there really no distinctive state of mind implicated in morality except in respect of content? Is it just belief in a different thing that distinguishes the moral attitude from ordinary belief about the physical world, and similarly for varieties of non-cognitivism? Isn’t there some sort of architectural distinction—some specific way the mind is configured or organized? Isn’t the moral mind sui generis?

            Some moralists have supposed so and expressed the matter poetically. Plato spoke glowingly of apprehending the Form of the Good, pictured as a kind of revelation or enlightenment achieved after prolonged education. Kant compared the moral law within to the starry heavens above, invoking a special kind of awe. For these thinkers, it is not that we merely have beliefs or emotions of a standard sort about a moral subject matter; rather, the mind’s engagement with morality puts it into a unique state—something like a mystical perception of the sublime. Following this path, we could say that what goes in the mind when morality is involved is that the mind feels itself to be in the presence of the sublime—rather as people have conceived an awareness of the reality of God in this way. Prudence and etiquette don’t strike us that way—they are humdrum and immanent, not sublime and transcendent. A certain kind of joy is held to pervade the moral mind. Freudians by contrast have contended that what characterizes the moral attitude is dread and oppression—the overbearing and punitive parent thwarting the child’s natural impulses. What goes on in the superego is suppression of the natural instincts, so that morality is experienced as distinctively restrictive—not joy but fear characterizes the moral point of view. At the extreme the moral agent acts under the threat of divine banishment to hell—that’s what goes through the moral agent’s mind (see James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). This also is distinctive, since we don’t experience prudence and etiquette that way. These views may seem extreme and antiquated to us but they point to an important intuition, namely that the moral mind is in a special kind of state, unusual and unique. It may not be a sense of guilt and shame and fear of punishment, or an uplifting glimpse of the divine order, but something special happens in us that is characteristic of moral immersion.

            We edge closer to an answer by noting the importance and binding necessity of morality as we engage with it. Kant’s categorical imperative provides the model: we are unconditionally obliged to do what is right, no matter what we may wish or feel. We are governed by an absolute necessity: the moral must is diamond hard. This sounds highfalutin, but it is rooted in a common sense observation, namely that when morality beckons we must drop everything and obey its dictates. Suppose I am driving to the mall to enjoy an evening of dinner and a movie—my desires are propelling me in this direction. I turn a corner and see that an accident has happened and someone needs help immediately: but there is no one around to help, so it’s up to me to stop and do what I can. Do I weigh up the situation and determine whether my desire to help is stronger than my desire to have dinner and see a movie? No, I simply ignore my personal desires and hurry to help; I don’t judge that everything considered I’d rather help than not—as I might judge that it would be sensible for me to stop to buy some milk on the way. What I do is bracket my desires, suspend them, setting them to one side, decoupling them from my will. I may not likedoing this (I’m hungry and I really want to see the movie), but I feel that I have no choice, that I am subject to an unconditional necessity—I must stop and help this injured person, whether I like it or not. So what happens to me mentally is that my desires are put offline; they are no longer driving my will. Instead my judgment of right and wrong drives my will. This is a peculiar state of mind (in both senses of “peculiar”): I switch from being a desire-driven being to being a morality-driven being. That is, the desires that were operative before no longer shape what I do—they have been demoted, shelved. This is not true for prudence and etiquette, in which we weigh our desires one against the other (I may not act on a present desire because I know that in the future I will have other desires). But in the case of morality my desires are rendered nugatory, or at least not calling the shots. And this is a standing feature of morality: I am always ready to suspend my desires in this way qua moral being (this is the burden of morality). My mind thus undergoes reorganization when morality asserts itself: from desire propulsion to desire suspension. In a sense I become alienated from my desires for the nonce—that is, I renounce them as the sole determinants of my actions. This provides the answer to our question: what happens in the mind when a person judges and acts morally is that his or her desires are bracketed in this way—and this is an architectural, functional, and causal alteration. It isn’t merely that your beliefs or desires or emotions have taken on a specifically moral content; rather, your mind has shifted into a special gear in which personal egoistic desires have lost their usual authority, having ceded it to the moral faculty. You are no longer a slave to your passions but a slave to your sense of right and wrong, if I may put it so. Morality is unique in bringing this mental reorganization about. It specializes in desire deactivation.

            This is why there is always something disagreeable about acting morally: no one wants his desires put on hold, discounted and disregarded. We want to do what we want to do! Moral judgment upends this natural order; it makes things happen in our mind that go against the grain (Freud was right about this at least). Perhaps we can feel some joy at the self-abnegation involved, but self-abnegation is still the operative principle (Kant was right about this at least). To be sure, we can cultivate our desire to be good, but that desire will always conflict with other desires of an egoistic nature. In any case, this is a theory that does what a theory of moral psychology needs to do, viz. find something distinctive about the moral state of mind. It’s that sinking feeling you get when you know you have to do your moral duty, irrespective of what you personally desire. It’s when your own desires lose their importance in the light of other people’s desires. It’s when you know yourself to belong to a kingdom of ends—a moral community of respect-worthy beings. It’s acknowledging the reality of others. So the moral mind is a thing unto itself.  [1]

Colin McGinn

  [1] I observed my cat in the back yard with its paw on a reptile chewing its tail off. The reptile was still alive (in fact I saved it from further damage) and the cat obviously had no idea that this wasn’t a nice thing to do. There was nothing going through its mind of a moral nature. So my question in this essay can be put thus: What is it that my cat did not have in its mind that a moral agent would have in a similar situation? A conjecture: there is no desire suspension in animals (though I don’t say that such suspension never happens in certain social animals).

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The Meaning of Realism

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The Meaning of Realism

 

 

The task of saying what realism is is not a trivial one. We need an account that generalizes across all areas in which philosophers have found it natural to speak of realism and anti-realism. So the account must be abstract and topic-neutral not restricted to one or two specific examples. A standard attempt invokes the notion of mind-independence: to be a realist about a certain subject matter is to hold that this subject matter is mind-independent. The trouble with that formulation is that it doesn’t apply to realism about the mind itself—it is not mind-independent! Also, why exactly is this thought to be the import of realism? How can mere independence from the mind constitute realism? It might be thought that we need to bring in the notion of existence explicitly: to be real is simply to exist. But that doesn’t work either because even an anti-realist believes that the subject matter in question has existence—for example, material objects exist for an anti-realist just because they are constructions from sense experiences, and they exist (similarly for behaviorist anti-realism about the mind). The intended meaning of realism in these cases is surely something like the following: material objects exist apart from sense experiences (as mental states exist apart from behavior). The mind-independence idea was not wrong for realism about material objects but only as a general rubric; instead, we can generalize by saying that realism about the mind takes it to be independent of something else, namely behavior. Schematically: to be a realist about X is to hold that X exists independently of Y, where Y is the thing an anti-realist identifies with X. Thus to be a realist about material objects is to hold that material objects exist independently of sense experiences, while to be a realist about mental states is to hold that mental states exist independently of behavior. The realist holds these things to exist separately, while the anti-realist denies this: separate existence is the crucial point. Common sense affirms such separate existence and philosophical realism endorses it—while anti-realism disputes the thesis of separate existence. Realism thus asserts ontological plurality while anti-realism denies plurality (e.g., material objects are not different in kind from sense experiences). A metaphysical realist is a metaphysical pluralist: she insists that there are two things at issue not just one.

            Here we glimpse an essential feature of the realist position: the world is conceived as laid out in separate compartments connected in various ways, where these compartments exist apart from other compartments. That is the pluralism characteristic of realism: objects are not experiences; minds are not bodies. The realist is a pluralist separatist. The same structure is at work in other areas: properties (universals) are not predicates; moral values are not empirical facts; numbers are not numerals; possible worlds are not mental constructions. The global realist thinks that the former categories exist separately from the latter categories, while the global anti-realist asserts unity and assimilation. The realist denies the assimilationist tendencies of the anti-realist—that is the essence of her position.  Similarly for realism with respect to time: to be a realist about the past or the future is to hold that the past and future exist separately from the present—that they are distinct compartments of reality. The anti-realist contends that past and future can be viewed as somehow aspects of the present—constructions from it (memories, expectations). Even in cases where there is ontological dependence, the realist will claim that there is ontological separation: the mind may depend upon the brain but it exists separately from the brain, i.e. it has its own mode of existence (its own irreducible properties). Thus a materialist cannot be a realist about the mind—not really. He thinks there is one thing not two, so he denies separation. This is why monism always turns out to be a form of anti-realism. Take a case where anti-realism looks plausible—say, about color or fictional characters. Here the realist would double the ontology: in addition to dispositions to appear and creative mental acts there are alsocolors and fictional characters—they exist separately. This strikes us as too much pluralism: colors are just projections from appearances and fictional characters are just another way to talk about an author’s imagination. It is the thesis of separation that makes the difference between a realist view and an anti-realist view: the idea of ontological division, or the lack of it. If you were to draw up a big map of Reality, you would find different continents located in different places, according to the realist; by contrast, the anti-realist contends that there are fewer landmasses than we tend to suppose—it might all be Greenland, say.

            I just used the idea of spatial separation to explain the meaning of realism, and indeed I think this is the root of the general notion. Spatial separation is the paradigm expression of realism: when things exist in separate places they cannot be assimilated and must be regarded as existing independently. Let me illustrate this idea with a model case designed to bring out the conceptual structure of realism and its opposite. Consider a fishpond with surface swimming fish and a chalky bottom. People like to gaze into the pond and follow the antics of the fish, a lively reddish species. But there is something curious about this pond: there are also fishlike shapes moving around at the bottom of the pond, though they are difficult to see clearly. What is odd is that their movements are synchronized with those of the surface fish, as if the two are joined invisibly together: there are correlations, predictable dependencies. There are two schools of thought about these bottom-dwellers: one school holds that we have here a second species of fish that mimics the behavior of the surface species, perhaps for reasons of camouflage; the other school believes that there is only one species in the pond and these fishlike shapes are merely shadows of that species (a third group maintains that they are actually after-images caused by looking at the brightly colored surface fish). That is, one school believes in a separate species of fish in addition to the species open to plain view, while the other holds that the flitting shapes are just shadows cast by the fish they can see (or after-images of them). According to the latter, there is just one species of fish in the pond not two (no fish pluralism) and a kind of natural error occurs as a result of how the light is cast onto the bottom of the pond. According to the former, we have a separately existing species that happens to lie somewhat out of sight, but is no less real for that. The two schools of thought label themselves “realists” and “anti-realists” about the shapes glimpsed in the depths. The realists believe in a duality of separately existing species, while the anti-realists insist that there is only one species of fish in the pond, though our perceptions lead us to postulate two (we mistake shadows for fish). Intuitively, the issue turns on whether the shapes on the bottom have an independent existence relative to the fish near the surface. Let’s suppose that they don’t and the shadow school is right: then anti-realism turns out to be true–fish monism, no separately existing species.

            The realist view has it that there is a spatially separated species of fish in the pond: that is what makes their view realist. The anti-realists deny that there is any such species existing in a separate region of space: that is what makes their view anti-realist. And surely it is sufficient for realism that entities of a certain kind exist separately in a certain region of space. But is it necessary? Does the issue always turn on the contents of regions of space? In the case of material objects we can certainly say that realism is the view that material objects exist in space separately from sense experiences (which may or may not be in space); but what about realism concerning the mind—should we say that mental states exist in space separately from behavior? That presupposes that the mind exists in space, and realism about the mind surely does not depend on making that assumption. However, it has been common to formulate the matter in terms of subjective space and objective space: does the mind exist in a subjective space separate from objective space? If so, we have mental realism; if not, we have mental anti-realism. The important point is that the mind is conceived as occupying a quasi-space that exists alongside physical space—and this is what qualifies the position as realist. There is some sort of realm or region in which the mind has its being, and this realm or region is not the same as the realm or region occupied by the body (compare the bottom of the pond and the surface of the pond). Thus the situation is analogous to the situation in the pond: regions of physical space form the paradigm, but we can extend the notion of spatial separation beyond the simplest kind of case. The mind does not occupy the same kind of space as the body, but it exists in something analogous to that space, something that allows the notion of separation to gain purchase. The heart of mental realism is the thesis that the mind exists in a part of reality separate from the part occupied by the body—in a separate space in the simplest formulation. It is not that the mind coincides with the body (as the external world does not coincide with sense experience): that would deliver anti-realism. Realism involves parallel existence not single existence.

            But there are more difficult cases to contend with. What about Platonic realism? The allegory of the cave fits the general idea nicely: the world of forms exists outside the cave and can be reached only by an arduous climb—here the idea of spatial separation is rendered explicit. An anti-realist about universals would hold that there is nothing more to so-called forms than the shadows cast on the walls of the cave, no separate realm existing at some remove. In the cave allegory Plato even supposes that we could travel to the region of space in which the forms exist. But this is just a metaphor—how does Plato literally conceive the existence of universals? Well, the idea of Platonic heaven is regularly invoked: not another region of physical space, as in the cave allegory, but an analogous quasi-space. Without some such conception it is hard to see how Platonic realism could be given cogent content: for how could we make sense of a separate realm populated by universals except by means of some quasi-spatial way of thinking? The anti-realist will certainly insist that such a conception is deeply mistaken (while accepting that it captures what the realist has in mind): there is nothing to talk of universals except the earthbound language in which we describe things (the familiar space of linguistic use). So we can accommodate realism and anti-realism about universals by adopting some natural extensions of the basic idea of spatial separation.

            What about moral realism? Here things take a murkier turn and even metaphors are in short supply. In what sense are moral values for a realist located in some other region or type of space? Could we travel to the place in which they independently reside? Is there some moral quasi-space that houses them? Maybe we could devise a “parable of the pearls” according to which moral values exist in a splendid museum of shiny baubles, but no such ideas have gained traction in the history of thinking on this topic. Maybe the quasi-space of the divine might be recruited to contain moral values, but the moral realist surely doesn’t want to be committed to anything like that. All we have is the rather thin idea of the fact-value distinction—but nothing to give substance to the idea of separate existence. There is no grand pond at the bottom of which values might languidly swim. The anti-realist is thus tilting at windmills to some extent, finding nothing to get his dismissive teeth into. By the same token the moral realist is left with a rather schematic thesis; all she can say is that values are not reducible to facts.  [1]Perhaps this is because we are dealing with metaphysical questions about values, unlike the other questions that attract realist and anti-realist rhetoric. My own imagery in this area tends towards depicting values as some sort of iridescent color unlike any color seen with the human eye—with a softly glowing quality. But this is fanciful stuff.

            Realism about modality requires yet further extensions of the spatial paradigm. The idea of logical space presents itself. The actual world exists in one part of logical space, but possible worlds extend out from there across logical space. To be a realist about necessity is to accept that necessity resides in the existence of the space of possible worlds—a space removed from that of the actual world. The modal anti-realist, by contrast, holds that talk of necessity adverts to nothing beyond the actual world—there is no separate logical space in which modality has its being. The enormous size of logical space is testament to the robustly separate reality occupied by necessity and possibility; it is a very large pond in which possible worlds swim. Or maybe we should compare modal realism to what might be called “galaxy realism”: the thesis that those patterns of light we observe in the night sky are not just local optical phenomena in our atmosphere but remote collections of stars and planets just like our sun and its planets. The astronomical anti-realist denies the separate existence in space of other stellar systems, while the realist asserts that space is replete with star systems every bit as vast as ours. Similarly, our talk of necessity and possibility indicates no world beyond the actual world for the anti-realist, while the realist insists that a vast totality of possible worlds extends far out into logical space. Modal reality, like astronomical reality, consists of enormous objects made up of innumerable parts, according to the realist; while the anti-realist insists that there is nothing beyond the local and observable—no other possible worlds but this one, and no galaxies apart from the one we live in. Again, it is the idea of separate existence that captures what is at issue.

            We should not expect the issue between realists and anti-realists to be capable of rigorous formulation. These are intuitive and impressionistic concepts deployed to correspond to metaphysical pictures. Still, we should at least try to elucidate what constellation of ideas underlies these labels, aiming to articulate what is driving philosophical thought. The idea of separate existence in space, suitably extended and qualified, seems to be at the heart of the dispute between the realist and the anti-realist.  [2]

 

  [1] Could this be why moral realism has comparatively few takers? We just don’t have a vivid picture of what it would be for it to be true. The case contrasts sharply in this respect to realism about material objects. (None of this refutes the claim that it is true.)

  [2] The background to this essay is Michael Dummett’s attempt to find a definition of realism adequate to the full range of metaphysical debates in which that notion has been employed. He tried to make bivalence into the touchstone of realism; I think we need a richer and more metaphysically substantive notion if we are to do justice to the intended meaning of the word “realism”. 

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The Freedom Machine

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The Freedom Machine

 

 

It is often supposed that psychological determinism is incompatible with freedom. The more a desire compels an action the less free that action is. The more we can predict a person’s actions from his desires the less free that person is. Liberation from desire is thus the key to freedom. Suppose a society accepts this position and sets out to increase freedom within its population. It sets up a Ministry of Freedom charged with increasing freedom by moderating desire. Fortunately it has the means to carry out its mandate, since it possesses a Freedom Machine that can control the strength of desire (it sends signals into people’s brains or some such). Freedom destroying desires, such as drug addiction and sexual appetite, can be reduced in intensity so that the agent is free to resist their urging (similarly for intense puritanical desires). The authorities can (they think) increase the degree of freedom by reducing intensity of desire. Let’s suppose the machine works and everyone’s desires become moderate to the point of lukewarm. No one feels compelled to do anything; no one is overwhelmed by his desires; everyone can take it or leave it, whatever “it” is.

            Would this really increase human freedom? I think not. Consider moral desire, and suppose it to have been especially strong: people really wanted to act morally and almost always did—they were quite predictable in that regard. After the Freedom Machine has done its work, however, they are far less morally ardent and far less predictably moral. Are they now freer than they were? That seems like a bizarre thing to say: they are neither more nor less free than before. And it is the same for non-moral desires: you don’t make me freer by reducing the strength of my desire to play tennis or to eat oysters. Strength of desire has nothing to do with it. And this means that the degree of psychological determinism (if we are going to use that iffy phrase) has nothing to do with it. The machine is merely a device for diluting desire not for increasing freedom (it should be called the Desire Dilution Machine).

            You might reply that if desires are too strong they negate freedom. What if there was a desire that could notbe resisted, say a desire to eat figs: wouldn’t a person in the grip of that desire fail to be free? What if the desire necessitated action taken to satisfy it? Wouldn’t the agent be helpless in the face of his desire to eat figs, quite unable to withstand its force? It seems to me not clear that this would negate freedom—after all, the agent would always be doing exactly what he most desired—but the point I want to make is that this hypothetical situation is dubiously coherent. For the following strikes me as a conceptual truth (certainly an empirical truth): no desire is such that it is inherently irresistible—and this is an important part of our understanding of human freedom. Desires always coexist with other desires and those other desires can always in principle override any given desire. A desire is not an unstoppable unitary force; it always operates in competition with rival desires. In some people moral desires have great potency, while in other concupiscence rules. We all know in our own case that any of our desires could in principle be resisted, difficult though that may be. We can see that there is nothing necessitating about a desire: it is not that kind of thing. We know that at other times and for other people the weight of a present desire is not determinative, so it is not determinative for us now. Sure, I desperately desire that drink right this minute, but I know that the desire cannot force me to drink. That is simply not in its nature. You can’t ratchet up a desire to the point that no one could ever resist it. Certainly no human has ever experienced a desire so strong that no one could fail to act on it. That is the beauty of desire: it inclines but it never compels. And that is why our actions are free—because there is always slack between desire and deed. We could always have done otherwise. The inclining desire is always up against other desires, even if they are as bland as “Avoid making any effort”, so it never operates as an unconstrained cause. A strong desire is not one that has no competition; it is one where the competition is relatively weak. No matter how strong the desire is there is always a gap between it and action. There is no analogue for desire of the Cartesian notion of an inescapable belief—one that simply cannot be overridden. Desires are intrinsically things that admit of being overridden. For any desire D there is an agent A at time t such that D fails to prevail in A at t.

            Thus acting from a strong desire is not in any way a departure from freedom. I am not less free simply because I really really want to do what I am doing. Such a desire is not one that admits of no alternative, and reducing its strength in no way enhances freedom. A person with weak desires is not someone with a higher degree of freedom than a person with strong desires.

 

Colin McGinn

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The Bundle Theory of Belief

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The Bundle Theory of Belief

 

 

We have a tendency to suppose that beliefs are discrete states of mind, cleanly separated from each other. They exist like so many peas in a pod or sentences printed on a page. But this is not a realistic picture: beliefs come in groups. The unit of belief is the bundle. Take my belief that the goldfish in my pond are thriving: that belief comes with a set of other beliefs about how I acquired the goldfish, how they are cohabiting with the frogs, how they look, the number of them, the fact that I have a pond in my garden, that I don’t live in an apartment any more, etc., etc. This collection of beliefs may not be endless, but it is certainly large; and one belief gains comfort and support from the others. Many of my beliefs don’t belong to this bundle, having their own bundles, but it is really not possible to have a single belief in isolation. Beliefs proceed from premises or assumptions and they have consequences as well as corollaries and associations; they nestle in among these ramifying beliefs. Psychologically speaking, a belief is a component of a belief package, not merely one belief set beside others. Just as properties of objects always coexist with other properties, so beliefs coexist with other beliefs. I don’t just believe, I co-believe—I harbor bristling bundles of organically connected beliefs. The idea of a single isolated belief is an artificial abstraction; the psychological reality is more holistic (if I may appropriate an overused term). Words make up sentences (word bundles) and have no existence independently of that; similarly, beliefs make up belief bundles and have no existence otherwise.     

            We fail to see this, or to grasp its implications, because we like to individuate beliefs by their content: distinct content, distinct belief. Thus an array of distinct propositions is supposed to generate an array of distinct beliefs—one for each proposition. But that is really a non sequitur, since an array of propositions might be the content of a single complex psychological state. Call such a state of belief a T-belief (“T” for “total”): then we can say that the subject T-believes the whole set of propositions (those that make up its bundle). The idea, then, is that from a cognitive point of view the basic unit of assent is T-belief—a pattern of assent. Talk of isolated beliefs is just so much abstraction. Assent is always to multiple propositions, so we may as well recognize that psychologically beliefs are members of a family—they travel as a team. They are parts of something larger—though parts that cannot be broken off and expected to survive intact.

            Let me illustrate the point with a well-worn example. Suppose someone knows well enough that Hesperus is Phosphorous, so that they will assent equally to “Hesperus is F” and “Phosphorous is F”. We can agree that the two propositions are not identical, but surely there is no difference in the belief the subject has in respect of those propositions. It is a matter of indifference whether they express their belief state using “Hesperus” or “Phosphorous”. They have a single state of belief that can take either proposition as its content—just as many sentences could be used to express this belief. The distinct propositions correspond to no psychological distinction for them. If you ask them whether a certain planet (Venus) is pretty, they will respond with either name, since they believe the names refer to the same thing. Maybe the beliefs were once different, before the subject discovered the identity, but now they have merged, despite the distinction in the propositions. Or consider the beliefs of animals: we needn’t fuss over the precise proposition that captures the belief state of a dog or orangutan because any of a range of propositions will do to capture their tendencies to assent—their psychology is just not that fine-grained. In the case of my belief bundles all that matters is the overall pattern of assent—I assent to all of them simultaneously. I T-believe in a certain set of propositions: that is the basic fact, not the many discrete beliefs beloved of philosophers. I certainly don’t introspect discrete belief states that make up one of my bundles, as if each belief is an isolable inscription.

            Compare desire. Suppose I desire to see a certain film: isn’t this really a whole bundle of desires? I want to see a particular star, I want to see a certain genre of film, I want to sit in the dark and be entertained, I want to sit next to my significant other, I want to forget my troubles, I want to pass the time, etc. I have a complex desire state in respect of seeing this film, a whole set of pro-attitudes. If you ask me why I want to see the film, I could cite any of a large number of desires that motivate me. There is never just one; I contain multitudes. Desires come in bundles not as isolated elements. When I desire one thing I desire many things. The unit of desire is the collection—that is what motivates me. It makes little sense to try to abstract a single desire unconnected to other desires—what would it mean to say that I desire to see a film but have no other desires that go with that? The proposition is distinct enough, but the psychological state is embedded in a larger totality. All desire is really T-desire. We mustn’t reify propositions into psychological realities.

            The ontology of belief-desire psychology should therefore follow the bundle conception: bundles are what dispose to action and have functional properties. It is never the case that an action is prompted by a single belief and a single desire; rather, the action results from an interconnected web of beliefs and desires. The model of an ordered pair of belief and desire causing an action is at best an oversimplification. This is not merely the point that individual beliefs and desires necessarily belong with other beliefs and desires; it is the further point that psychological reality is not well represented by the model of discrete beliefs and desires. Instead we are to think of the mind as operating in larger more inclusive units—what I have been calling bundles.

            Think of the way you form beliefs. You don’t form them one at a time, now this one, now another. There isn’t a sequence of isolated beliefs laid out in time, like a series of inner explosions. Rather, a package inserts itself in toto—as when you take in a scene perceptually. Hundreds of beliefs may be formed in a matter of seconds. Nor is this the case only in perception: even in testimony cases we form multiple beliefs—about the speaker’s appearance, his history and character, the consequences of what he is asserting, and so on. At every waking moment you are updating your set of beliefs in big chunks not seriatim. It is done by the bundle, and without effort. It is entirely natural to operate with belief ensembles, because beliefs like to work in groups; lonely isolation is not their preferred mode of existence. So let’s recognize the gregarious character of belief: it’s never merely the belief that pbut always the beliefs that p, q, r, etc. We don’t so much have individual beliefs as we have belief patterns. If we think of beliefs as dispositional, then it is the bundle that has the disposition not beliefs singly.  [1]

 

  [1] Wittgenstein would say that we are captivated by a picture of belief (and desire—knowledge too) according to which beliefs are laid own like exhibits in a glass case, each self-sufficient and separate. This picture has many sources, some deriving from the physical world, some from language, some from aspects of the mind itself; but we should resist the picture and accept that our talk of belief implies something like a holistic pattern of assent. I have tried to avoid putting the point in Wittgenstein’s terms, but it may be helpful from an expository point of view.

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The Anti-Ontological Argument

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The Anti-Ontological Argument

 

 

The ontological argument proceeds from the premise that God contains all perfections to the conclusion that God exists. The anti-ontological argument proceeds from the premise that God contains all perfections to the conclusion that God does not exist. It thus precisely reverses the traditional argument deriving from Anselm.  [1] Anselm argued that God could not be merely imaginary, because his definition as the most perfect conceivable being logically implies his existence, existence counting as a type of perfection. The anti-ontological argument contends that God must be merely imaginary, because his definition as the most perfect conceivable being logically implies his non-existence, since no absolutely perfect being can possibly exist (though such a being can certainly be imagined). This argument, like its traditional counterpart, operates with a very simple principle, which may be stated thus: For any kind K, nothing that exists could ever fall under the concept perfect K. Consider, for example, the kind hammer and form the concept perfect hammer: you have now gone from a concept with existent instances to a concept with no existent instances. Why? Because there can be no such thing as a perfect hammer, since every existent hammer will be imperfect in one respect or another. Only imaginary hammers are perfect; real hammers always have flaws and drawbacks and weaknesses. Every hammer will fail to hit the nail on the head once in a while; every hammer will occasionally hit your finger instead; every hammer costs money to buy; every hammer gets rusty and decays; every hammer weighs something; every hammer takes several knocks to drive the nail home. There is no point in going into a hardware store and asking for the perfect hammer; there is no such thing. There are only more or less imperfect hammers. True, you can conceive of a perfect hammer stipulated to have none of the defects listed, but there can’t be such a hammer. That’s not how the world works: there are always downsides and side effects and boundary conditions. It is the same for knives, motorcars, houses, musical instruments, and other artifacts. Ditto for organs of the body, and indeed whole organisms. Nor are persons any different: there is no perfect teacher or perfect policeman or perfect violinist. Everything is flawed in one way or another. Everything fails to live up to our imaginary ideals. Only non-existent objects lack any imperfection, because they are so stipulated. The real world always carries attributes that exceed and diverge from the ideal function of a type of object; thus no object functions ideally, as a matter of principle. Nothing is functionally perfect.

            But God is defined as all perfect, absolutely perfect in every respect, without flaw or failing of any kind. The ancient Greek gods were not so defined, so there is no logical or metaphysical obstacle to their existence: but the god of monotheistic Christianity (and other religions) is decreed to be entirely without imperfection. Certainly we can imagine such a being, given the powers of the human imagination; but by our principle this being could not exist in the real world. The more we stipulate God’s supreme perfection the more we remove him from the realm of reality. In the real world God’s great powers and virtues would come with accompanying drawbacks, such as unintended side effects or large expenditures of energy or the exclusion of alternative desirable states of affairs. But we are told that none of this is true of God: when God acts there are no unfortunate correlates, no cons to the pros. His being and his actions are perfection through and through. He doesn’t even take up space thereby preventing other good things from existing! But this is simply defining him out of existence, like allowing that no actual terrestrial hammers are perfect while insisting that there are perfect hammers somewhere else in the universe (“transcendental hammers”). If someone were seriously to claim that, you would naturally ask what kind of hammer this could be: what material is it made from, how does it escape the laws of nature, how does it operate? In the case of God we are schooled not to ask these kinds of question, but the price is that we are merely confusing the imaginary with the real. The concept perfect being has no existent extension, where being is taken to mean some sort of person-like entity. Thus that concept logically implies the non-existence of whatever falls under it (i.e. imaginary objects). If we take the concept of perfection to imply something functional, such as performing the office of a god perfectly, then no existent entity could ever be functionally perfect in the sense intended. In fact, when God is conceived as imperfect, as he sometimes is in the Old Testament, we have a clearer idea of what an existent entity of this kind might be like; but once we stipulate that there is nothing imperfect about him we enter the realm of the unreal and merely imaginary. Just as there are no perfect circles in the real world, only ideally, so there are no perfect gods in the real world, only ideally. The only circles that exist are imperfect.

            Here it might be objected that perfect circles can exist in Plato’s heaven—the same kind of place in which God is supposed to exist. But this is a confused thought, because such ideal entities do not act in the real world: they may be claimed to have genuine existence (as opposed to be being merely imaginary idealizations) but they don’t do anything to change the course of events. God does: he is supposed to be an active agent, a powerful force, a driver of change. That is, he is supposed to be as other active agents are—a type of (very superior) person, not an inert abstract form. God isn’t a piece of abstract geometry eternally at rest; he is capable of intervening in history. But then he must have whatever imperfections come with the territory: he can’t be both of the world and yet not of it. If he has a will, he has to have whatever imperfections come with that—anything else is merely imaginative stipulation. To deny this is like saying that a perfect knife has an ideal cutting edge without recognizing that no existent knife can have a cutting edge free from all imperfection. We can say the words but no real knife could live up to them (it would have to be unable to cut the flesh of its user for one thing). Why should a god be any different?

            You might say that an existent God could have all moral perfections. That is not as easy as it sounds, but anyway it won’t preserve the traditional Anselmian notion of God, since it is compatible with accepting multiple imperfections of other kinds. That is, there might be a morally perfect being with bad teeth, a limp, a weakness for chocolate, poor taste in music, and a horrible dress sense. Such a being could exist without violating our principle, but he doesn’t add up to God. It is the requirement that God be perfect in every way and in every particular—absolutely and totally perfect—that puts him beyond the realm of actual existence. We just can’t comprehend what this would be—just as we can’t comprehend an actual perfect circle (one drawn with the intention to approximate the platonic ideal). If we define God in this way, we define him out of existence: we place conditions on his existence that can’t be realistically met. Suppose we say (with Spinoza) that God is composed of an infinite immaterial substance: that substance will exclude other substances like it, thus precluding a second all-perfect God from existing (itself a drawback); but it also raises the question of how such a substance might operate and what prevents it from malfunctioning. How could any substance exist and yet be incapable of failing to function as intended? How could it not at least contain the seeds of imperfection? To think otherwise is to lapse into a fairytale land subject only to the laws of imagination. It is to deal in metaphysical nonsense. We can appreciate this point easily for hammers, knives, and policemen, but in the case of God piety prevents us from applying our principle consistently. We tacitly concede this when we ignore the question of God’s aesthetic properties: is God perfectly beautiful too? No existent thing is ever perfectly beautiful—the very idea is a fantasy—so how can God be perfectly beautiful? What does that even mean? Is he superlatively handsome? Does he have a lovely form than which no lovelier form can be conceived? Is his beard finer than the finest silk? None of this makes sense—so how does God possess all aesthetic perfections? The anti-ontological argument contends that any actual being with aesthetic qualities will have aesthetic imperfections or limitations; aesthetic perfection obtains only in the realm of the ideal or imaginary. The right thing to say is that we can conceive of an all-perfect being (or at least we can say those words) but that no such thing could exist in reality. Thus the definition of God as an all-perfect being logically implies that God is not real—just like the definition of an all-perfect knife (call it “Excalibur”) implies its unreality. If we knew there to exist gods that are less than perfect, we would accept no counter-example to our principle; suggesting that there is a different type of god that is perfect in every way would naturally arouse our suspicions, for it would violate our general conception of reality. We know that reality is less than ideal, and we know that we can conceive of things that are ideal; so we naturally reject the idea of the ideally real. We find the conjunction of the attributes of complete perfection and real existence to be contrary to reason.  [2] The concept of absolute perfection is hyperbolic and fails to characterize the real world. It is this concept that is deployed in defining God as Anselm does in the ontological argument: but that definition asks too much of any actually existent entity. Thus the Anselmian definition of God, so far from entailing God’s existence, logically precludes it.

 

  [1] In what follows I don’t attempt to say where Anselm’s argument goes wrong; instead I offer another argument with the opposite conclusion. If this argument is sound, we know that Anselm’s argument has to go wrong somewhere. For the record, I think he is wrong to take existence as a type of perfection.

  [2] I hope no one will protest that perfect numbers exist (a positive integer that is equal to the sum of its proper positive divisors): that is not the notion of perfection at issue. And of course there is no objection to the loose use of “perfect” in conversational contexts.

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The Alleged Limits of Moral Philosophy

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The Alleged Limits of Moral Philosophy

 

 

Bernard Williams wrote a book entitled Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.  [1] This title invites interrogation. What kind of limitation might be meant? We can all agree that philosophy is limited in some way: it cannot do what science does, for example, or history or geography or literature or painting. In that sense everything is limited: there is no point in using one’s philosophical faculties in order to answer non-philosophical problems. Someone could write a book called Ethics and the Limits of Science and we could be persuaded that science is not the answer to ethical questions, since it is not the answer to many questions, especially normative ones. But isn’t ethics precisely moral philosophy—so how could philosophy be limited in doing the philosophy of right and wrong? What if Williams had called his book Moral Philosophy and the Limits of Philosophy? Of course, real ethical questions involve factual matters, and hence are not properly part of philosophy, but what could be meant by saying that philosophy is limited in dealing with the philosophical aspects of ethics? And is philosophy limited in other areas traditionally designated philosophical too? As it turns out Williams doesn’t really mean that philosophy is limited with respect to ethics (or moral philosophy): he means a certain kind of philosophy is so limited. He doesn’t mean that a more historically rooted and humanistic philosophy is limited when it comes to ethics; he means the kind of philosophy exemplified by Kant and Bentham along with their successors. He means something theoretical, abstract, systematic, monistic, context-independent, non-psychological, ahistorical, absolute, and scientific-sounding. So his title is misleading: he thinks that a certain dominant strand of Western philosophy is limited when it comes to ethics. Not that this strand might not contain important truths and be valuable in its way, but that it has limits—it doesn’t cover the full territory of ethics. This is a less resounding thesis than that suggested by the title of his book. He might more accurately have called it Ethics and the Limits of a Certain Kind of Philosophy. The book would then have gone on to argue that the kind of philosophy in question omits certain important considerations, to be remedied by adopting a different kind of philosophical approach or style or method.

            The question I want to raise is whether Williams would wish to extend his thesis to other parts of philosophy. Is it just ethics in which a certain kind of philosophy has inherent limits? Let us call this kind theoretical philosophy, meaning thereby to sum up the list of features I cited in the last paragraph. Would he complain that epistemology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and so on, are not sufficiently historical or humanistic or contextualized? Is his critique of theoretical philosophy as too limited itself limited to ethics? Is it that the other areas traditionally covered by philosophy are perfectly well suited to the theoretical style, but that right and wrong are not? If so, what is it about this domain that makes it stand out so? It can’t be merely that it is a normative domain, because so are aesthetics and epistemology (which concerns what we oughtto believe and is shot through with normative notions), not to mention logic. And why exactly would the normative preclude theoretical treatment while everything else invites it? I don’t recall Williams ever addressing this question—though he certainly contrasted the “absolute conception” of science with philosophical investigations. My question is whether he would be prepared to extend his critique to all of philosophy or whether he intended it as restricted to the case of ethics.

            It seems to me this is an uncomfortable dilemma for him. For it is hard to see on what grounds he could restrict it, and yet extending it surely proves too much. It proves too much because clearly theoretical philosophy is not limited in any non-trivial way when it comes to these other areas. How could it be argued that logic and philosophy of language are objectionably limited in their methods and results? Of course, they can be supplemented by other disciplines, but in what way are they just the wrong way to approach the subject? Similarly for epistemology and philosophy of mind: why do they fail to provide an adequate way to approach the questions that constitute their domain of interest? Would Williams be prepared to write a book entitled Knowledge and the Limits of Philosophy or The Mind-Body Problem and the Limits of Philosophy? What other approach to these questions would he favor over the one traditionally practiced by philosophers? Does he think logic should be more historically situated and psychologically realistic? What about the analysis of knowledge or the nature of intention? I myself see no reason to distinguish ethics from other branches of philosophy methodologically, and I also believe that there is no real alternative to the usual way of doing things. So I would see no point in a book paradoxically entitled Philosophy and the Limits of Philosophy, even when that last phrase is understood to mean “limits of a certain kind of philosophy”.

            In fact, Williams’ chief targets were Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. He found them too abstract and oversimplified as well as psychologically unrealistic. I can see a point to that critique, but it is an unwarranted leap to suppose that ethics in general has been blighted by the same failings. What about the work of W.D. Ross? What about Aristotle? These are theoretical thinkers in the sense intended—they purport to offer a systematic treatment of ethics valid for all times and places—but they are more pluralistic and realistic than the abstract monistic formulae of Kant or Bentham. True, philosophers are prone to defend oversimplified monistic theories, but it is no abnegation of theory as such to move in a more complex pluralistic direction. Is that all Williams is asking for? Evidently not, but I fail to see why ethics should be held to a different standard than other philosophical topics. In epistemology we can distinguish a rule-based from a consequentialist view of justification: either you follow the rules of induction, deduction and abduction, or justification is defined as simply what makes the best predictions (or has the best results for humans if you are a pragmatist). This is analogous to the distinction between deontology and consequentialism in ethics. We can certainly oppose either view as being partial or limited, but combining them is hardly a move away from the theoretical to something more historically grounded or humanistic. Similarly, we can oppose the monolithic systems of Kant and Bentham without thereby abandoning a broadly theoretical approach to ethics. Pluralism is not inherently anti-philosophical or an indication that philosophy has reached its limits. To reject bad theories, or theories that oversimplify, is not to reject theory altogether.

            And is it that Williams finds nothing of value in the theories he criticizes? No: for they crystalize important aspects of morality—moral rules and good consequences, respectively. They are idealizations intended to bring out what matters, much as other philosophical theories are idealizations. There is nothing wrong with that so long as we realize what we are doing. Maybe they are too idealized, but again that is not a point against theoretical philosophy as such. Nor do I see any real alternative to theoretical philosophy if we are going to keep on doing philosophy at all. Certainly, merely describing the moral attitudes and practices of societies present and past is not a kind of moral philosophy worthy of the name. So I don’t really see what Williams is getting at by accusing moral philosophy of failing to recognize its limits.  [2]

 

Colin McGinn

  [1] Harvard University Press: 1986.

  [2] I considered Bernard Williams a friend. I admired him as a philosopher. I enjoyed talking to him. We once appeared together on television discussing animals and ethics. I taught a seminar with Malcolm Budd on Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy when it came out. But I never felt I really understood his position in ethics—either what he objected to or what he favored. I got the flavor of it, if course, but the actual content of his views eluded me.

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Strengths of Realism

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Strengths of Realism

 

 

Realism and anti-realism are conventionally presented as dichotomous: you must be either one or the other with nothing in between. This is supposed true across the board, from material objects to moral values. But on reflection the dichotomy is too simple—there are finer distinctions to capture. We can approach the matter by examining the paradigm case: realism and anti-realism about the external world. What is it to be a realist about material objects? Several points might be mentioned: propositions about material objects must be logically independent of propositions about sense experience; material objects must be the cause of sense experiences; material objects cannot be mental constructions of any kind; material objects must differ in their intrinsic nature from sense experiences; material objects must exist in a different space (or region of space) from that occupied by sense experiences; material objects must pre-exist and post-exist sense experiences; material objects must have properties that sense experience does not reveal or perhaps cannot reveal. These points affirm that material objects in no way reduce to or depend upon sense experiences; and they are precisely what is denied by someone who cleaves to an anti-realist view of them. So realism here consists in a conjunction of separate claims that are not necessarily jointly true. Consider Berkley’s idealism: he regards so-called material objects as ideas in the mind of God that can exist whether we have corresponding ideas or not, but he does not suppose that they have an intrinsically different nature from sense experiences, since that is what they are. He also believes they exist in a space separate from that occupied by human minds, but he doesn’t think they pre-exist existence in God’s mind. Nor does he hold that propositions about material objects are logically independent of propositions about God’s mind. So is Berkeley a realist or an anti-realist? The question has no sensible answer: he accepts some of the claims of the cluster I mentioned but not all. It seems right to say that he is not so strong a realist as someone who accepts all the claims of the cluster but that he is also not an outright anti-realist who rejects all of them. We might say (not very illuminatingly) that he is a weak realist about material objects, and then go on to specify exactly what claims he accepts and what he rejects. The traditional dichotomy is just too crude to capture the full range of metaphysical opinion in this case.

            Or consider realism and anti-realism about the mind itself. You can hold that there is nothing in the mind except what shows itself in actual behavior; or you can weaken this to maintain that mental states consist in dispositions to behavior; or you can identify mental states with brain states that underlie such dispositions; or you can hold that it must be at least logically possible to manifest a mental state behaviorally. Correspondingly, you can assert that mental states exist in a separate immaterial substance that is logically independent of the body and behavior, or you can weaken this position in various ways. The result is a spectrum of possible positions not a simple dichotomy. Some positions are intuitively more realist than others. The closer the position gets to the analogous position with respect to material objects the more or less realist it becomes (existing in a separate space and having a different intrinsic nature make the position strongly realist). But it is artificial and distorting to try to force a position into one or the other of two categories, realist or anti-realist. Someone might reasonably maintain that he is moderately realist about X but not mad-dog realist about X —soft-core but not heavy-duty. On a realism scale of 1 to 10, he might describe himself as a 7.

            Much the same pattern is discernible with respect to mathematical realism. You can be an extreme platonic realist holding that numbers exist in a separate sphere difficult to reach from the human point of view, eternal and unchanging, far from the madding crowd of empirical particulars; or you can weaken this position in various ways, holding (say) that numbers are constructions from sets of particulars combined with logic, or even concrete aggregates of particulars. Again, there is room for manoeuver in articulating a position deserving the name of realism, with some positions stronger than others. An anti-realist might accept nominalism or some form of psychologism, where again different strengths of position might be distinguished (for example, numbers are nothing but actual inscriptions in contrast to possible inscriptions). There is a wide spectrum of possible positions that may be adopted and it would be procrustean to try to force all of them into one of two categories. Similarly with scientific realism: one might hold that unobservable entities are real and causal while also holding that they consist in potentialities not actualities; or one might accept particles as real but jib at fields. There is room for half-hearted scientific realism as well as the full-throated kind.

            I have made these points as a preparation for considering moral realism. For here there are difficult questions of formulation and it is helpful to have a clear view of the full range of options. We don’t want to lapse into anti-realism just because we have a limited view of the varieties of moral realism. If we want to keep the analogy with the external world, which gives the issue clarity and bite, we need to identify features of the moral case that match the features I listed earlier—such as intrinsic difference of ontological kind or separation in space. Thus moral values may be said to exist at some remove from the moral subject and to differ in kind from any fact about that subject. They must also pre-exist recognition by the subject and be logically independent of anything she might believe, feel, or experience. Presumably they will not be said to act as causes, but that view is logically available under some ingenious conception of causation. Moral values might exist and yet not be discoverable by moral agents, and they may be quite other than what is generally believed. Again, it is possible to endorse some of these claims but not others: for example, one might hold that what is morally right cannot be inferred from what people believe but that morality must be in principle accessible to moral believers—belief-independent but not completely mind-independent. One might believe in Plato’s Form of the Good or in Moore’s indefinable non-natural property of goodness; but it would also be possible to style oneself a moral realist while rejecting such views, opting instead for a view in which the existence of objective reasons constitutes the sole content of a reasonable moral realism. There is no point in fighting over labels, which is a temptation if the issue is conceived dichotomously; better to accept a plurality of possible views each inviting the label “realism”. Some types of moral realism will be stronger than others, i.e. closer to the paradigm of realism about material objects. To insist that certain views are not really realist is to be in thrall to binary thinking, though no doubt certain views will count as anti-realist if any view does (emotivism, for instance).  [1]

            One response to these observations would be to abandon all talk of realism and anti-realism as misleadingly simplistic; and that response is not without its merits. But then there is the question of what might be put in its place—what other terminology could we use? And the current terminology is not without intuitive force, especially in conjunction with the paradigm supplied by the external world. To be a realist is definitely to be an identifiable kind of thing—to adopt an intelligible position. The concept is not empty. It is just that it is not quite as black and white as it has seemed from traditional debates. We need to make room for the partial, qualified, and week-kneed realist—as well as the modest and lukewarm anti-realist. Certainly, we must avoid pinning caricatures on positions that attract the label “realist”, as if anything so called must be of the most extreme and implausible kind.                

 

  [1] In ethics we find a contrast between subjectivism and objectivism, as well as between relativism and absolutism, but we don’t find these contrasts in the case of the external world and other subject matters. It is an interesting question why this is so, but it must surely be connected to the fact that there is a strong tendency in ethics for people to believe that thinking it makes it so, which is not the case for the external world. Thus moral realism is often framed as the denial that moral belief implies moral truth (suitably relativized). I would prefer to label this position “moral objectivism” and keep the label “moral realism” for views that model ethics more closely on the external world: but this is all a matter of words (not that words can’t be philosophically important).

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Speechless Language

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Speechless Language

 

 

Normally when a human being learns a language he or she learns to speak and be spoken to. Sounds are produced and understood. An acoustic ability is acquired. But this is not always so: some people learn language (e.g. the English language) without the aid of sound. They neither hear sound nor produce it. Instead they rely upon vision and gesture (or writing). Their language ability is not notably inferior to those that speak and hear. What does this tell us about human language? What, in particular, does it show about the initial state of the human language faculty?

            Presumably there is no analogous phenomenon in the case of other species that use language (or a communicative symbol system). A deaf and mute bird doesn’t cleverly exploit its eyes to substitute for hearing sounds, resorting to a sign language or the written word. Similarly for whales, dolphins, and bees. For these species if you can’t speak you don’t have a usable language (dance in the case of bees). The innate language faculty is specifically geared to speech—to a particular sensory-motor system. There is no flexibility in mode of expression and reception, unlike with humans. Does this mean that human language ability is intrinsically purely cognitive? Is speech just a learned add-on to innate linguistic competence? We learn to speak in a particular accent in a particular language, but this is not a matter of innate endowment—is it the same for the sense modality we adopt? Each of us could have learned to communicate by sight and gesture, and without much difficulty, so is the human language faculty neutral with respect to sense modality? Is it just a convention or accident that we end up speakinglanguage? Could it even be that our language faculty initially evolved as a visual-gestural system and only later became connected to our ears and vocal organs?  [1] What if most people used a non-auditory medium for language—wouldn’t we then suppose that this is the “natural” way to communicate? We have chosen the acoustic route, but we could have gone visual without loss or inconvenience. Is the language faculty inherently indifferent to its mode of externalization? It certainly isn’t indifferent to syntax and semantics, but phonetics seems like one option among others.

            It seems true to say that human language (unlike the language of other species) is more of a cognitive phenomenon than a sensory-motor one. For one thing, we use language in inner monologue not just in communication with others (I doubt this is true of bees and whales). The structure of language is a cognitive structure that can be present in a variety of sensory-motor contexts. But it would surely be wrong to suggest that we are not genetically disposed to speak: speech is biologically programmed in humans and it follows a fixed maturational schedule. Human speech organs are designed to aid speech; they are not just accidentally coopted for this purpose.  [2] We don’t need to use these organs in order to master language, but it is surely natural that we do—it is certainly not a conscious choice!  So is the human language faculty inherently acoustic or not? Neither alternative looks very plausible: it is possible (easy) to learn language without sounds and we are built to favor sounds. One might suppose that the case is somewhat like walking on the hands when born without functioning legs—an option of last resort. Do the deaf feel an inclination to speak and listen as infants, but find they cannot, and so resort to sign language? That doesn’t appear to be the case—they take quite naturally to the visual medium. There is certainly something modality-neutral about human language. On the other hand, we are clearly designed to speak—as we are not designed to play cricket.

            Here is a possible theory: humans have two language faculties, one cognitive, and the other sensory-motor. Call this the dual capacity theory. Both are innate and genetically coded, but they can be disassociated, as they are in the deaf. We are familiar with the idea of distinct components in language mastery—the semantic component, the syntactic component, and the phonetic component—well, there are actually two linguistic faculties coded into our genes. This idea will not surprise those who favor the notion of a language of thought: this language might exist separately from our language of communication in our mental economy. They might not even have the same grammar. What the dual capacity theory suggests is that the faculty we use when we speak is itself divided into two—and the deaf use one of them but not the other. They use the same innate grammar as the rest of us, but they don’t use the same sensory-motor system (though there is no reason to deny that it is programmed into their genes). The eliciting or triggering stimulus for normal language development isn’t operative in their case, but they use exactly the same internal schematism. This explains why their language skills are comparable to the sound dependent, while not denying that speech is the natural human condition (in a non-evaluative sense). That is, we are born to speak, but we don’t have to in order to master communicative language. There are two separate psychological modules. It would be possible in principle to retain the sensory-motor module while lacking the cognitive module, so that articulate speech is possible but there is no real understanding of the principles of grammar (this would be like those “talking” parrots).  [3] Thus there can be double dissociation. Quite possibly the two modules evolved separately: maybe the cognitive module initially evolved as an intrapersonal aid to thought, to be followed later by a communicative faculty that recruited the older faculty. We tend to speak of the language faculty, as if we are dealing with a unitary structure, but in fact there are two of them—there is more structure here than we thought. The cognitive faculty has nothing intrinsically to do with speech, though it obviously gets hooked up to speech during ontogenesis, while the sensory-motor faculty has everything to do with speech. No such duality obtains in the case of other linguistic species, which is evidenced by the fact that deafness spells an end to language ability for them. At its core, we might say, human language is not a sensory-motor capacity—though there is nothing wrong with saying that speech embodies linguistic competence. We really have two kinds of competence (and two kinds of performance): competence in the universal principles of grammar, possessed by the hearing and the non-hearing alike; and competence in the production and perception of speech. The former has nothing intrinsically to do with the ears and vocal organs, while the latter is dedicated to that sensory-motor system. When it is said that a language is a pairing of sound and meaning that is strictly speaking inaccurate (witness sign language), but it is true enough that the understanding of speech is such a pairing. Clarity is served by firmly distinguishing language and speech, but there is no need to deny that speech is the operation of a language faculty. To put it crudely, “language” is ambiguous.

            The case might be compared to memory. We speak loosely of “the faculty of memory” but enquiry reveals that different things might be meant—there is not a single faculty of memory. There is long-term memory and short-term memory (and maybe others): these memory systems operate differently, permit of double dissociation, and no doubt have different genetic bases. Both are rightly designated “memory” and they have clear connections, with neither deserving the name more than the other, but they are distinct psychological faculties. Similarly, “language” applies to two psychological faculties, which can be dissociated, and which recruit different kinds of apparatus. When someone makes a general statement about “language”, we do well to ask him what human faculty he is referring to–speech or the more general capacity possessed by the deaf. Indeed, even that is too parochial, since we can conceive of language users who don’t have sight either but communicate by means of touch: they too have mastery of the grammar of human language (both universal and particular), but they don’t hear or see the words of language—they feel words (and cause others to feel them too). Their underlying linguistic competence is more “abstract” than any particular sense modality: but so is ours, despite our saturation in the acoustic. What is truly universal in human language is this abstract faculty that exists in people with different modes of expressing it—universals of speech are relatively confined.

            Once we have made this distinction we can distinguish different domains of study: are we studying the universal abstract language faculty or are we studying its expression in specific peripheral sensory-motor systems? What is called “psycholinguistics” could be about either of these. Which properties of language belong to which faculty? No doubt the type of externalization will impose specific conditions on the form of what is expressed, but there will probably be universal patterns found across all modes of externalization (subject-predicate structure, say).  [4] The temporal dimension of speech will affect its structure, along with the memory limits that accompany this, while the recursive property is likely to stem from the internal universal language. Combining phonemes is not the same as combining the lexical elements that constitute the common human language. Particularly intriguing is the question of maturation: do the two language faculties develop in the same way and at the same time? It could be that the internal language develops more rapidly and serves as the foundation for the development of speech (or sign language). It is not constrained by motor maturation and may be more “adult” than its external counterpart. If we think of language development as a process of differentiation, it may differentiate at a different rate from external speech—and proceed from a different basis. It may permit inner speech before the onset of outer speech. We certainly can’t infer its maturational schedule just by observing the growth of outer speech. With respect to evolution, it may be that the cognitive language faculty evolved much earlier than the vocal language faculty, which is thought to be relatively recent (about 200,000 years ago). We might have been using language for much longer than we have been speaking it. The larynx is a late accretion to language use, and a dispensable one.  [5]

 

  [1] I consider this hypothesis in Prehension (2015).

  [2] Caution: not originally so designed—vocalization long preceded speech in humans—but refined in the direction of speech since speech began (compare hands and tools).

  [3] It is a question how language-like the sensory-motor system would be without the backing of the cognitive system. Subtracting speech from the human subject leaves language intact, as shown by the deaf, but what if we subtract the internal language faculty from the activity of speech?  Would we still have full productivity? Would grammar really exist for the sounds that emanate? This is an empirical question and not an easy one to answer. My suspicion is that we would get substantial degradation, but it may be that humans have evolved a good deal of autonomy in the speech centers of the brain, so that speech might exhibit many of the properties of the internal modality-neutral language faculty. Just as language ability is largely independent of general intelligence, so speech ability might be largely independent of cognitive-language ability. Certainly it is logically possible for there to be an autonomous faculty of productive grammatical speech in addition to a similar faculty for the inward employment of language—that is, one faculty for speaking and another for thinking in words.  The question is like the question of how much of perception would survive without cognition.

  [4] Chomsky makes this point. The internal language could be a lot simpler, structurally, than external speech, because of the constraints imposed by the sensory-motor system. There might be no gap between deep and surface structure in the internal language, with no transformations linking them.

  [5] To simplify somewhat, there are three possible positions: language is only speech (traditional linguistics); language isn’t speech at all (Chomsky today); language is both speech and something else (an internal cognitive structure) (me). These questions remain murky and it is helpful to open up the theoretical options, though the speech-centric position is surely indefensible. (I’m grateful to Noam Chomsky for helpful comments.)

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