Knowledge, Opinion, and Fantasy

 

 

Plato wished to know the difference between knowledge and opinion. His idea, much elaborated over the centuries, is that something needs to be added to opinion to get knowledge. Knowledge is opinion plus something—truth, justification, reliability, etc. Certainly we can agree that knowledge is more than opinion, but could it also be less? Do we need to subtract something from opinion to get knowledge? Does opinion have properties that knowledge lacks? Might it have properties that disable it from counting as knowledge? In order to answer these questions we need to be clear what we mean by “opinion”, allowing that the word may be more inclusive than the concept we intend to single out. There are two sorts of case to consider: bad opinions and acceptable opinions. Acceptable opinions would include a scientist cautious about the data tentatively suggesting that a certain hypothesis might be true: she isn’t at all dogmatic about it, agreeing that she might well be wrong; she proportions her belief according to the available evidence. Bad opinions would include those influenced by prejudice or propaganda and reflecting animosities in the believer—for example, the belief that Mexicans are murderers and rapists. I include here opinions based on wild conspiracy theories as well as superstitions and urban legends. The question then is how these kinds of opinions differ from knowledge.

            It would be wrong to claim that such opinions can be converted into knowledge by the mere addition of certain conditions. Suppose one of these bad opinions turns out to be true, and suppose also that the believer has evidence for his belief: does that entail that he has knowledge? No, because the way he arrived at his belief deprives it of the ability to count as knowledge—at any rate, there is something defective about the belief that casts doubt on its claim to knowledge. In the Meno Plato suggested that opinion differs from knowledge in that it is transitory (“untethered”) while knowledge is fixed and stable. That fails to allow for rigidly held prejudicial beliefs or deep-seated errors of judgment. But the suggestion is interesting because it finds in opinion a feature that distinguishes it intrinsically from knowledge—a feature that prevents opinion from qualifying as knowledge. That is, it identifies in opinion a positive disqualification, not merely a remediable lack. And this corresponds to an intuition that pervades the philosophical literature on the analysis of knowledge, namely that knowledge cannot be defined as true justified opinion. It is not an accident that the first condition in the analysis of knowledge is stated using the concept of belief, because that concept is neutral on the question of knowledge; but no one finds it natural to start out stipulating that x knows that p only if x is of the opinion that p. That would quickly lead to counterexamples in the light of the kind of case I mentioned earlier: a prejudicial belief that happened to be true and justified would not count as knowledge (it would be a type of Gettier case). Bad opinions cannot be magically converted into knowledge by the addition of truth and justification. Such opinions differ intrinsically from knowledge. Plato conjectures that they are essentially unstable, flighty, and malleable—and one can appreciate his point. But even if that were correct, we would still need to ask why they are thus mutable. So we have the question: in virtue of what do opinions of this type differ from knowledge (or rational belief)?

            The answer I propose is that they are governed by fantasy. There is a class of beliefs that are controlled by fantasy, and that is the mark that distinguishes them from knowledge. I won’t be able to say much about fantasy here; I will take it for granted that fantasy plays a significant role in the human psyche, affecting almost every aspect of our psychological lives. Clearly the mind of the human child is riddled with fantasy, and this fantasy life affects the child deeply: a great many of a child’s convictions stem from fantasy—indeed there no clear line at this stage between fantasy and belief. As we mature the control of fantasy lessens, as the “reality principle” sets in (Freud wasn’t wrong about everything); but it never entirely disappears, and it is more powerful in some people than others. It can still shape belief even as the years accumulate. We can imagine beings that lose all vestiges of fantasy at puberty, becoming fantasy-free zones, never having their views shaped by what their imagination presents to them: but human beings are not like this, being prone to fantasy throughout their lives. Thus we are open to the fantasies promoted by conspiracy theorists, as well as to our own self-manufactured fabrications and fancies. The suggestion, then, is that opinion (in the intended sense) is the result of fantasy while knowledge is not. Knowledge is the rejection of fantasy; opinion is its embrace. Thus opinion can never count as knowledge, because fantasy-based belief can never be knowledge. There is a class of human beliefs (if that is the right word) that are disqualified from counting as knowledge by their genesis, no matter whether they may be true or justified. Thus we don’t analyze knowledge as true justified opinion just as we don’t analyze it as true justified fancy or feeling: we don’t say that x knows that p only if x fancies that p or feels that p (or fantasizes that p), because that suggests the wrong sort of psychological state to count as a case of knowledge. If a view (position, attitude, stance) results from fantasy it is disqualified from being knowledge; it is “mere opinion”.

            But why is that? Why is fantasy so disqualifying? Because it roots belief in the self: it makes belief dependent on personality, emotion, idiosyncrasy, and waywardness. Fantasy reflects the urgings of the psyche–its preoccupations, insecurities, and aggressions. But knowledge must be rooted in the world beyond the self not inthe self—in the reality principle not the fantasy principle. Fantasy drags the mind away from the world and into its own dark labyrinth, but knowledge must face the bright objective common world. Opinion therefore tracks what lies within not what prevails without. Opinion is the expression of the self not its negation or transcendence. Thus opinion differs fundamentally from knowledge: you can’t just add to it and hope that its dubious origins will magically remove themselves. The OED defines “opinion” as “a view or judgment not necessarily based on fact or knowledge”. One supposes that this definition took some crafting: notice that it avoids the word “belief” and uses “necessarily” to expand opinion beyond rational inquiry; also it opposes opinion to knowledge, as if these are two very different kinds of thing. But what it doesn’t do is provide any positive definition of the word; it simply says what opinion is not based on. Then what is it based on? It is based on something in the psychological subject evidently—and “fantasy” is its name. It is what the mind comes up with when facts and knowledge are lacking—conviction without evidence, without the control of the reality principle. Freud might call it the pleasure principle, and that is not wide of the mark, but fantasy is not always about pleasure. Fantasy is about disconnection from the world, possible (and impossible) worlds, madness, deception, self-deception, fiction, the absurd, the undisciplined, the puerile, and the paranoid. Fantasy is the antithesis of knowledge, not a precursor to it. Knowledge cannot have fantasy as a component. Opinion controlled by fantasy is not a suitable basis for knowledge. It needs to be thrown out not supplemented. People whose minds are stocked with such opinions are not on the road to knowledge; they have disqualified themselves from the start. They are going about the cognitive life in the wrong way.

            Two distinctive Platonic doctrines fall into place under the present theory. The first is Plato’s attitude to the arts, particularly drama: he famously opposed them, regarding them as disruptive to the search for true knowledge (suitable only for watching on cave walls perhaps). We can now see that if opinion is based on fantasy it is based on what the arts are all about—the fabricated, the imagined, the unreal. If the mind confuses fantasy with reality, then mere opinion is the upshot, and true knowledge is precluded. Second, Plato’s hostility to the Sophists acquires a theoretical foundation: they trade in human fantasy, using it to sway opinion (note the word), exploiting the fragilities of the self. Plato seeks to banish fantasy from rational discourse, and discourage its role in human cognition—in the formation of our “views”. We can envisage different degrees of prohibition in the ideal Platonic society: completely excise fantasy from the mind (surgically or by indoctrination); suppress it as far as possible while tolerating its existence; or assign it to its proper place—dreams, romantic love, the arts. What we cannot accept is its intrusion into the serious business of acquiring knowledge—not if we take Plato’s strictures to heart. Practically, we must train our young to form their beliefs without any reliance on the promptings of fantasy—no conspiracy theories, no wishful thinking, no succumbing to the temptations of the compelling narrative (as if the world has to fit your favorite plotlines). The Sophists among us will always seek to inflame our imaginations in an effort to warp our beliefs, but we must train our young to resist their incursions. Let “That’s just a fantasy!” be our mantra. (Not that any of this will be easy: some catchy songs might help.)

            Presumably fantasy is more powerful in some areas of thought than others. People tend not to fantasize about numbers (there are exceptions) or elementary particles, but when it comes to the biological world fantasy is strong—notably with respect to humans. Obviously animals have proved a rich source of fantasy and many weird beliefs have been held about them (mainly to their detriment), but humans are clearly the most fertile ground for the flowering of fantasy. We look at each other through a blinding haze of fantasy, not just people from other places, but also our own kith and kin. Marriage is a rich source of fantasy thinking, and so a hotbed of non-knowledge (the problem of other minds providing the slack needed to allow fantasy to flourish). I think of Othello and other Shakespeare plays (isn’t Iago the ultimate fantasy-monger?). So we need to be more alert to the depredations of fantasy in some areas than others; we need to beware of “opinion” in the areas in which it is most likely to take root. Marriage counselors should take a “fantasy studies” course, specializing in “spousal fantasy disorder”. At any rate, the recognition of the possibility of fantasy should inform all our personal interactions, from the most casual to the most intimate.

            We must acknowledge our dual nature. On the one hand, we have the rational faculty, whose object is knowledge; on the other, we have the imaginative faculty, whose work product is fantasy. The latter has a tendency to leak into the former, to deform and distort it. There could be beings without the imaginative faculty (they would be pleasing to Plato) as there could be beings without the rational faculty (maybe pleasing to some Romantics). The beings without imagination would be all knowledge and no opinion; the beings without reason would be all opinion and no knowledge. We have both faculties and the problem is leakage: too many people have their views shaped by the operations of fantasy. And they don’t realize it; or rather, they can’t think in these terms, as children can’t. They stand at rallies shouting and shrieking, their heads full of fantasies, brimming with “opinions”, and with no actual knowledge in sight: if only their fantasies could be abolished! History is largely the history of fantasy, of “opinions”, of the antithesis of knowledge. When a person tells you he is “entitled to his opinion” he really means he is entitled to his fantasies; maybe he is, but he is not entitled to confuse his fantasies with reality.

            I want to emphasize that what Plato dubbed “correct opinion” is not to be confused with knowledge. An opinion is not saved from criticism by being correct (true, justified) given that it arises in a certain kind of way—by fantasy, according to the present hypothesis. Correct opinion might not lead us astray practically (because it’s correct) but that doesn’t mean it reduces to knowledge: it just happens to be correct, because it arose by a means that is inimical to correctness, viz. fantasy. Knowledge is more valuable than correct opinion because of its origin not because of its effects (to answer Plato’s question in the Meno)—because of its freedom from fantasy and fantasy’s dependence on the self. Knowledge is not self-directed, unlike opinion. This is why it would be wrong to define knowledge as correct opinion, as if opinion could redeem itself by being (accidentally) correct.  [1]

            Since we are in Plato territory let me propose an allegory of knowledge and opinion. There is a war going on between two factions: the adherents of fantasy and the adherents of reality (call this the Allegory of the War). We are the ground on which this war is being fought. The fantasy side wishes to acquire as much ground as possible, seizing as much doxastic real estate as it can; the reality side is defending its territory against the marauding forces. The battle ebbs and flows, with bits of land exchanging hands. The forces of fantasy are winning the war in certain areas (politics, ethics, the law) while the forces of reality hang on to their strongholds in science, mathematics, and philosophy. Some ground is hotly contested—history, economics, parts of psychology. The fantasy side is fuelled by rage and self-regard, not to mention insecurity, while the reality side is stoical and stone-faced, dispassionate to a fault. The war has been going on for millennia, ever since man acquired his dual nature (back there in old Africa). Sometimes fantasy holds most of the territory, sometimes reality manages to capture a chunk of land previously held by fantasy. The tide has been shifting in the reality direction in recent centuries, but nothing is ever securely held; for the fantasy side is wily and determined, and full of brute energy. There are setbacks, reversals of fortune, and humiliating defeats. Who will win in the end (this a zero sum game)? It’s hard to say, but there seems to be no end in sight.

 

  [1] I have not recurred to the category of tentative belief as a species of opinion, as with the cautious scientist. I don’t think this is the kind of case Plato had in mind, and anyway my main interest is in the category I called bad opinion. In the former kind of case we don’t need the concept of opinion because we can speak simply of knowledge without fear of solecism: the scientist knows that the probability of the hypothesis is n where nrepresents her degree of belief. There is nothing untoward about that belief and fantasy played no part in its formation. It is proportional to the evidence and is not resistant to new evidence, unlike the bad kind of opinion. The kind of opinion I have been concerned with corresponds to the groundless psychologically motivated opinions we observe all around us.

                                               

 

 

Is Psychology a Science?

 

 

The question is only as precise as the word “science”, which isn’t very precise. But I don’t propose to quibble about that word (I incline to a wide application of it); instead I will compare psychology to some established sciences and note various gaps in what psychology has accomplished compared to these sciences. We might express the upshot of these reflections as denying that psychology is a mature science, or that it is a real science, or that it is an explanatory science; what matters is the reality of the distinctions I identify. Psychology is not as other sciences are, dramatically so. It is signally lacking in the chief characteristics of the sciences, as they now exists. It is weak science, proto science, science in name but not in substance.

            First consider the physical sciences—physics (pure and applied), cosmology, astronomy, and chemistry. What has physical science achieved? I would say that it has achieved success in three (interconnected) areas: origin, structure, and dynamics. To summarize: it explains the origin of the physical universe (big bang cosmology); it has uncovered the hidden composition of physical things (atoms, molecules, fields); and it has developed a dynamic theory of how the physical world evolves over time (specifying the basic forces and the laws that govern them). I shall say that it has achieved OSD success: it has established theories of how matter came to exist in its present form, how it is composed, and how it changes its properties with time. This is what we would expect of an adequate empirical scientific theory of some aspect of reality: an account of its origins, its underlying structure, and its behavior over time. Not to have answered these questions would make physics into a merely embryonic science, hardly worthy of the name (think physics in the age of Aristotle or earlier). Now turn to biology—anatomy, physiology, evolution, and genetics. It too can boast real achievements in the three areas identified: how life originated, the structure of living things, change of biological forms over time. We now know that life on earth began with bacteria some four billion years ago (though we don’t have a clear idea of how bacteria came to exist), and it has been evolving by means of mutation and natural selection ever since. We also know about the fine cellular structure of organisms, as well as the molecular structure of the genetic material. And we have a well-established theory of how organisms change over time (the aforementioned evolution by natural selection), as well as how individual organisms function biologically (blood flow, enzymes, digestion, photosynthesis, etc.) Granted, we don’t know everything about life–as we don’t know what preceded the big bang or how to integrate quantum physics and gravity—but we have made serious progress in understanding these three aspects of the biological world. Biology is well advanced in OSD studies. It is not that a student of the subject would have fundamental questions in these three areas about which biology has established nothing. What we expect of a reputable science is that it can tell us where its proprietary entities came from, how they are internally structured down to the microscopic level, and what explains change in them over time. Biology and physics satisfy these criteria.

            But what about psychology–can it boast comparable achievements? The short answer is no. What theory in psychology plays the role of big bang cosmology in physics and Darwinian evolution in biology? None: psychology has no theory of how minds as they currently exist came to be. The best it can do is piggyback on biology, but there is no explanatory theory of how minds with their characteristic properties came to be—subjectivity, consciousness, intentionality, reason, introspection, and more. How did these develop from more primitive traits? How did the whole process begin? If a mind is like a galaxy, how did the mental galaxy form? Psychology just accepts minds as they are, animal and human, but it doesn’t explain how they came to be, what triggered them, what shaped them. There is no origin story in psychology. What about structure? We can say what the parts of the mind are—the analogues of bodily organs—but we have nothing to say about the ultimate constituents of the mind, especially its hidden structure. People mumble about “bits” of information, as if these were the atoms of mentation, but really this is hand waving, not solid science. There are no microscopes of the mind, no diffraction chambers, no spectral analyses, no supercolliders. Psychology makes do with commonsense divisions into belief and desire, memory and perception, emotions and sensations; but there is no elaborated theory of fundamental constituents analogous to atoms and molecules, cells and DNA. We don’t know how our mental life is built up. And what about dynamics? How does psychology explain the flow of conscious thoughts or the changing behavior of the organism? What laws are cited to predict how one thought will follow another, or how emotions influence overall mental state, or how a subject will act in a novel situation? Psychologists like to talk about various “effects” (e.g. the Zeigarnik effect), but where is the analogue to Newton’s three laws of motion? We just don’t have a theory of how a psychological system changes over time; at best we have rough hints about what might lead to what (as in “laws of association”). Where is the unified theory of psychological dynamics? Where are the equations of thought and action? A physicist or biologist encountering psychology for the first time might wonder how the subject accounts for origin, structure, and dynamic change—the basic facts she is familiar with in her own discipline—but her psychology professor will have little to say about these questions. He will report some experiments, maybe some established “effects”, but he won’t have comprehensive theories to offer in these three areas. He won’t say, “I’m glad you asked that question because we have great theories of how minds originated, what composes them, and how they change with time”. If he is honest, he will mutter in a low voice, “Good question, we’re working in it”, perhaps followed by some boilerplate about psychology being a young science and all that (but is it really any younger than physics and biology?).

            Compare linguistics. Chomsky has long pointed out areas of ignorance in that field, mainly relating to the evolutionary origins of language and in the free use of language in speech (“performance”). The evolution of language is largely a mystery, especially the origins of the lexicon, and the stimulus-freedom of speech makes language use hard to subsume under predictive laws. Some progress has been made with linguistic structure, but even here it is reasonable to wonder whether we have reached linguistic bedrock. So linguistics has not achieved what the established sciences have. Linguistics is really a branch of psychology, and it looks as if psychology in general has the limitations Chomsky finds in this branch of it. There is some grasp of structure, basically extrapolated from commonsense psychology (including commonsense linguistics), though it has nothing like the depth we find in physics and biology. But the origins of the language faculty in evolutionary history, and how that faculty is manifested in action, are shrouded in mystery. Whether the mystery is temporary or permanent, contingent or necessary, is another question; what is clear is that psychology and linguistics do not have the kinds of explanatory success found in the established sciences. And what holds for linguistics and psychology also holds for sociology and anthropology (and maybe economics): how social structures and cultures came about is unexplained except in the most rudimentary terms, and there is no generally accepted dynamic theory of how they change over time (Hegel and Marx anyone?). Human history is not like the history of the physical universe or of the biological world. Freud made some heroic efforts to do for psychology and human history what physics and biology have achieved in their domains, but his efforts are not generally lauded. The simple fact is that the psychological “sciences” are nowhere near as advanced as the physical and biological sciences. They suffer from OSD deficiency. This is not, of course, the fault of psychologists, who are just too lazy or incompetent to bring the subject to maturity; it is inherent in the subject itself. It is very difficult to explain how minds originated, what their compositional structure is, and how they change over time.  [1] I intend no aspersions on the field or its practitioners; I merely point out certain significant asymmetries. Presumably the mind has some sort of intelligible origin (it didn’t just spring into existence from nothing), and some sort of internal structure (the “cells of thought”), and some dynamic principles (not just stochastic chaos): but we are far from understanding what any of these might be. Nor do I see any relief on the horizon. It is pretty amazing that we have achieved the kind of insight in physics and biology that we have, and it didn’t happen overnight; there is really no guarantee that psychology will ever repeat these successes. Psychology might always remain a semi-science.  [2]

 

  [1] Note the contrast with the brain as an organ of the body. There is no more difficulty explaining its origin than other organs of the body; it is composed of cells that are composed of molecules; and its dynamic mode of operation is the nerve impulse that changes the brain’s state over time. We have a science of the brain, much as we have a science of matter and life, though of course it still has a long way to go. But that doesn’t provide us with the right level of explanation to account for the mind. Perhaps this is (partly) why people tend to favor neural reductionism: it enables psychology to mirror the theoretical successes of the other sciences.

  [2] That is not to say that it can’t be useful or illuminating, just that it may never mimic the OSD successes of physics and biology.

                                    Is Descriptive Metaphysics Possible?

 

 

 

Strawson draws his famous distinction between two types of metaphysics in these words: “Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure”. This formulation raises puzzling questions. One might have thought that descriptive metaphysics (hereafter DM) aims to describe the actual structure of the world, since that is generally the aim of metaphysics (or ontology); but Strawson inserts the words “our thought about”—so that DM is describing the “structure of our thought”. Thought is an attribute of persons, a psychological attribute. So DM is concerned to describe an aspect of human psychology, not the world outside of human psychology. Our thought is about the world (what else could it be about?), but DM focuses on thought itself, not the world it purports to be about.

Two questions now arise: (a) why is DM construed to be about human psychology? and (b) what is meant by the “structure of thought”? With respect to (a), the natural objection will be that DM, so characterized, is not a type of metaphysics (a general philosophical theory of reality) but a type of psychology (a description of human thought). DM would therefore be wrongly so called: it is not a general description of the world (a metaphysics) but a general description of the human mind. Maybe answering question (b) can help with this objection, depending on what is meant by the “structure” of thought. It is hard to know what Strawson intends by this word, given that “structure” is usually opposed to “content”. Presumably he does not mean the logical form or grammatical structure of thoughts, since that will not bear on what the subject matter of thought is. Nor can he mean some sort of psychological theory of thought—such as an imagistic theory, or a language of thought theory, or a division into conscious and unconscious thought. If he had written “language” and not “thought” into his definition of DM, we might have naturally taken his talk of “structure” that way—as grammatical or logical structure—but that is hardly the right basis for metaphysics. No, Strawson must mean by “structure” content—what it is that we think. He uses “structure” to mean something like “general” or “basic”, not “local” or “particular”. DM is not about our thoughts concerning weasels and warblers but about our thoughts concerning material bodies in general, as well as space, time, persons, events, causation, and such other typical metaphysical topics. So his idea is that DM describes what we think—the content of it—in very general or basic terms. It will tell us, for example, that people think there are material bodies in space and time, and also persons, with events occurring, and causal relations between the events. It will not tell us that there are such things, just that people think there are. As Strawson modestly says, DM is “content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world”—content to say what we in fact think, without trying to discover what is objectively the case (he could have written “content merely to describe the actual structure of our thought”).    

            But that project is not, properly speaking, metaphysics, which should endeavor to tell us what is the case, not merely what we habitually take to be the case. What Strawson calls “descriptive metaphysics” is simply not a type of metaphysics—it is a type of psychology or anthropology. It might be pursued using standard psychological or anthropological methods: surveys, experiments, even brain science. It would try to discover what it is that people universally think about reality at a basic level. That task has no logical bearing on what is really the case—it is just the attempt to find out what humans in fact believe. Psychologists do investigate this kind of question: they seek the genetically fixed basic concepts and beliefs that humans share; and they find that concepts like material body, person, space, time, causation, and animal show up everywhere. But they don’t take themselves to be doing metaphysics (that’s a job for philosophers), just empirical psychology. To be doing metaphysics one would need to claim (at least) that such beliefs are true: but that is to go beyond merely describing what beliefs people have, and hence beyond what DM, as defined by Strawson, is intended to achieve. His aim, as he clearly states, is the modest one of merely describing human thought.

The problem with this formulation can be brought out by considering other areas in which the Strawsonian distinction might be applied: what about the idea of descriptive ethics, or descriptive philosophy of mind, or descriptive logic? In those cases the project would be to describe the “actual structure of our thought” about value, mind, and logical validity: what do we in fact think about these various areas? No doubt such a subject could be pursued, and it might turn up something of value, but it would not be a type of ethics, or philosophy of mind, or logic. It would tell us what people think in these areas, but not what is true in them; and surely, as philosophers, we want to know what is true about value, mind, and logic—not merely what people think is true. For they might be quite wrong, and anyway that is not our proper subject matter—we are interested in the thing itself not in people’s beliefs about it. What would we think if someone proposed a new type of physics called “descriptive physics”, the job of which is to describe what people think about the physical world? We might regard this as an interesting venture in anthropology, but we would not suppose that they had identified a new type of physics—which concerns what is true of the physical world, not what people think is true. What they think is often false or incomplete, and anyway physical belief is not our proper subject matter—the physical world is.

The upshot is that the concept of “descriptive metaphysics”, as defined by Strawson, is a confused and misbegotten concept: it seems to denote a type of metaphysics, but it does not, being really a misleading label for a type of psychology or anthropology. Maybe this type of psychology would be of interest to philosophers if it engaged in some substantial conceptual analysis, but it would still be psychology unless it claimed that our conceptual scheme (another phrase of Strawson’s) actually reflects the way reality objectively is. Only then would we ascend to the level of metaphysics: but then we would be doing much more than modestly and contentedly describing “the structure of our thought”. And some reason would have to be given for supposing that what we think is true, as opposed to other metaphysical views that might be proposed. Actively endorsing our conceptual scheme carries much greater intellectual commitment than merely describing what it contains. After all, people often believe a load of rubbish.

            This brings us to “revisionary metaphysics”: does that concept fare any better upon close examination? Of course, all metaphysical systems are revisionary in one sense—they are rivals of each other and aim to supplant the opposing system. But Strawson obviously means revisionary with respect to the metaphysics of common sense—that system of belief that he thinks will be revealed by “descriptive metaphysics”. That is, he supposes that some metaphysical systems contradict the metaphysical beliefs held, explicitly or implicitly, by ordinary people; and if so, these systems are to be called “revisionary metaphysics”. Strawson cites Aristotle and Kant as examples of non-revisionary metaphysicians, and Leibniz and Berkeley as revisionary metaphysicians. So some philosophers endorse the metaphysics of the ordinary person and some reject it, according to Strawson.

All this is highly problematic. First, it is exceedingly unclear whether a given philosopher’s metaphysical system really contradicts common sense: Berkeley notoriously insists that he is at one with common sense, merely differing from its materialist interpreters; and Leibniz might say the same of his system—that nothing in what we actually believe in common sense is really inconsistent with the Monadology. Where does Plato fall? Didn’t he think he was in conformity with common sense, since the existence of universals is taken to be implicit in our ordinary language and thought? Universals are not taken to be alien imports from outside, but to be woven into our ordinary practices. What about David Lewis’s modal realism? What about Hume’s view of causation and the self? Is Descartes’ dualism inconsistent with common sense? I can’t think of a single clear case of a metaphysical system that flatly contradicts ordinary belief, and is taken by its proponents so to do. Indeed, such systems often derive their support from evidence drawn from within our ordinary beliefs and commitments: they are offered as interpretations of common sense, and hence are sensitive to how we spontaneously speak and think. Surely metaphysicians characteristically oppose other metaphysicians, while hoping not to violate basic assumptions of common sense. If they preserve nothing of ordinary belief, they have no leg to stand on, and hence have no claim on our credence. They might jettison a part of common sense, but they cannot realistically reject the whole thing—and in practice they never do. So it is difficult to see who might count as a hard-core revisionary metaphysician in Strawson’s sense.

            Strawson makes a fundamental error in the way he sets up the contrast he is aiming to capture: he supposes that our ordinary thought actually contains substantial metaphysical commitments or theories. But it doesn’t: it merely commits us to various kinds of entities, properties, and relations. Thus, as he says, we believe in bodies, space, time, persons, events, causal relations, colors, shapes, and so on. But those are not metaphysicalcommitments; they are merely the commonsense things that metaphysics tries to provide theories of. We ordinarily believe in tables, chairs, and other bodies, but the metaphysician tries to tell us what the nature of these things is, which is clearly a further question. Are they mind-independent entities or are they possibilities of perception? Are they reducible to their atomic components? What is their precise relation to space and to events? We ordinarily believe in persons, but what exactly is a person—a body, a brain, a soul, a connected sequence of mental states, or an ontological primitive? We ordinarily believe in space and time, but are space and time absolute or relative, finite or infinite, continuous or granular? We ordinarily believe in events, but are they a separate ontological category or can they be reduced to objects, properties, and times? We ordinarily believe in causation, but how is causation to be analyzed–by means of necessity, counterfactuals, or constant conjunction? We ordinarily believe that objects have colors and shapes, but are these qualities objective or subjective? In all these cases the metaphysician is discussing something accepted by common sense; he is not arguing with common sense—not usually anyway. He is explaining common sense not seeking to revise it.

The mistake is to suppose that our ordinary thought contains actual metaphysical theses—as that everything is mental, or everything is material, or abstract objects exist, or causation can be defined counterfactually, or objects are mind-independently colored. Then a metaphysical system could be genuinely revisionary of what we ordinarily believe about the world. But what we have are ordinary beliefs about ordinary things that are up for metaphysical interpretation and theory. Strawson appears to suppose that a commitment to ordinary things is already a type of metaphysics, but it isn’t—it is just the subject matter of metaphysics. That is precisely why metaphysicians can plausibly claim to be in conformity with common sense, because common sense is not committed with respect to the usual range of metaphysical positions (say, materialism versus idealism). Common sense underdetermines metaphysics, in the sense that it is not committed to any specific metaphysical system—merely to the entities such systems seek to explain or analyze.  Strawson may well be right that bodies, persons, space, time, and so on, are indispensable commitments of our conceptual scheme: but such things are the topics of metaphysics not the results of metaphysics. If someone were to assert outright that there are no bodies, persons, space or time, etc, but only lumps of floating ectoplasm, then he would certainly be revising common sense. But no actual metaphysical system in the history of philosophy ever maintains such crazy things—for what conceivable ground could one have for asserting such a proposition? Such systems claim, rather, to say what these generally acknowledged things are (what their nature is), without trying to deny their existence or replace them with a brand new set of objects and properties.

            The idea of revisionary metaphysics, as Strawson understands the concept, is therefore entirely toothless and quite irrelevant to the metaphysical disputes that have occupied the history of philosophy. It is simply not a useful or well-defined notion. Nor, as we have seen, is the notion of descriptive metaphysics useful or well defined. So what is the right conception of metaphysics? The answer is easy: it is the attempt to describe the general structure of the world. This is not the same as the attempt to describe the general structure of our thought about the world; nor is it committed to supposing that metaphysics, so conceived, might contradict common sense. It might, wisely, be completely neutral as to whether it is consistent with common sense, holding that common sense is simply not metaphysically opinionated; or it might strive to demonstrate consonance with common sense. But what it actually aims to do is just to discover what is true of reality, without particularly caring one way or the other about its relation to common sense belief. It certainly will not see itself as being “content to describe the actual structure of our thought”, but will seek instead to assert truths about reality outside of thought—claiming, say, that the world is completely material. We might call this, just to have a label, “veridical metaphysics”—truth-seeking metaphysics. It fits neither of Strawson’s categories, and is really the only kind of metaphysics there is. This subject is the analogue of ethics or epistemology or philosophy of mind or physics or geography. None of these disciplines could call themselves “descriptive X” or “revisionary X” in Strawson’s sense: they are neither descriptive of what people think nor intentionally revisionary of what people think—they simply seek to discover the truth about their domain of interest. Whether that truth contradicts common sense, or supports it, is of no interest to them, since their aim is simply to describe (and possibly explain) reality as it is.

            None of this is to deny that the metaphysician may (or must) appeal to common sense in coming up with his theories: that is a question of methodology or evidence. What it does deny is that we can define metaphysics as describing what people think (or “the structure of our thought”). That’s not what it is about—its subject matter, its domain of interest. Typically, a metaphysician will develop a theory of reality by appealing to the way we naturally think or talk about it–for example, theories about modality; but he does not suppose that his topic is human thought—his topic is the nature of necessity itself. If Strawson had said that the descriptive metaphysician aims to describe the general structure of the world by appeal to the structure of our thoughts about it, then he would have defined an intelligible and useful concept; his mistake was expressly to limit DM to what humans think, i.e. a psychological matter, without regard to the truth about the world. Perhaps at some level that is what he really meant, but it is certainly not what he said. And the point is not trivial, because the project I just defined is precisely the one that would draw the fire of positivists and other skeptics about metaphysics: for how, they would ask, can we ever verify such speculative claims about the general structure of reality, and how can common sense belief ever be evidence for what is true of the objective mind-independent world? Strawson’s project, by contrast, has the look of something not open to such objections, since it limits itself to verifiable matters concerning what humans believe: it is perfectly empirical, verifiable, and even scientific. We just have to find out what people in fact believe—we don’t have to engage in unverifiable abstract speculations about reality.

The trouble is that this innocuous project is simply not a kind of metaphysics; so Strawson has done nothingto rehabilitate traditional (or even non-traditional) metaphysics. He is talking about something else entirely. He is talking, in effect, about folk psychology, not about the fundamental nature of reality. It is ironic that he is often celebrated for bringing metaphysics back into philosophy, after its banishment by the positivists and ordinary language philosophers. If he did have such an influence, it was contrary to his official doctrines and words. It might be thought that he smuggled metaphysics (the veridical kind) back in under the guise of something else entirely: he described it as merely reporting what people think, but in fact he was talking about the genuine article—thus allowing philosophers to go back to what they enjoyed with a clear conscience. The idea of descriptive metaphysics made real metaphysics seem acceptable to people, but they misunderstood what Strawson actually said, and then proceeded to carry on where they had left off. Real metaphysics came back, but only by disguising itself as Strawson’s modest and empirically verifiable “descriptive metaphysics”.

            Strawson makes two basic mistakes, which lead him into the misconceived distinction I have criticized. The first is to suppose that common sense (“our conceptual scheme,” “the structure of our thought”) contains a determinate metaphysics that might compete with standard metaphysical systems—such as the view that bodies are possibilities of sensation (phenomenalism), or that persons are a primitive ontological category (Strawson’s own metaphysical position), or that space and time are absolute and mind-independent, or that causation is a matter of constant conjunction, or that events are logical constructions from objects, properties, and times. If it did contain such a determinate metaphysics, it would be obviously inconsistent with a variety of metaphysical theories: but that appears not to be so. Common sense is just not that specific and metaphysically sophisticated. It accepts the existence of various things, but it ventures no opinion on their ultimate nature. The second mistake is to conflate describing our conceptual scheme with endorsing it; or rather, not to keep these as separate as they need to be kept. It is one thing to say what we think; it is quite another to declare what we think to be true. So even if common sense contained a determinate metaphysics, capable of clashing with typical metaphysical systems, that would not show that its metaphysics was correct. To reach the latter conclusion one would need substantial further argument, going well beyond the official business of DM. These assumptions are what would be needed to show that so-called descriptive metaphysics was really a kind of metaphysics (when supplemented with the veridicality claim), and to show that revisionary metaphysics had something to get its teeth into in attempting to revise common sense metaphysics. As it is, neither assumption holds up under examination. The conclusion, then, is that DM is not possible (as a type of metaphysics) and that RM is ill defined. All we have are different (veridical-type) metaphysical systems, proposed by theoretical philosophers, clashing with each other—just as things were before Strawson introduced his influential but misconceived distinction.

            The right thing to say is that all metaphysics is descriptive (of reality) and revisionary (of other metaphysics). No metaphysics is merely descriptive of our thought, that being part of psychology, anthropology, or possibly philosophy of mind. How much metaphysics can plausibly be read into common sense is at best moot. We are committed to various kinds of entities and properties, to be sure, but whether these commitments reach the level of metaphysics proper is dubious at best—substantial theory construction and interpretation is required before we can move from common sense commitments to real metaphysics. It is highly implausible to claim that common sense selects one metaphysical system over other competing metaphysical systems. What Strawson calls “the structure of our thought” (whatever exactly that might be) does not yield a unique and recognizable metaphysical system. Nor is it credible to suppose that common sense is fixed and impermeable to outside supplementation or even revision. Clearly, science has entered common sense at various points, changing it quite fundamentally: the theory of evolution, the extent of the universe, the nature of motion, gravity, electricity, etc. These additions have altered our common sense views of force and causation, of the nature of matter, of how animals came to exist, and so on. Our common sense views of animals and material bodies have changed substantially as a result of biology and physics. Our conceptual scheme is not as conservative and static as Strawson sometimes suggests, though at a very abstract level it has been stable for many thousands of years. His picture appears to be that our ordinary thoughts provide the last word on general questions about reality, but that is far too sanguine a view of what ordinary thought comprises. Also, defending such a view would require doing something quite different from the job Strawson assigns to descriptive metaphysics. It would require a systematic evaluation of ordinary thought, not merely recording what we do in point of fact think. I have said nothing about how such an evaluation might proceed or where it might lead; my point has been just to distinguish it sharply from the project Strawson labels “descriptive metaphysics”.  That project is entirely descriptive, not evaluative.

             Let me make a final point about epistemology. If we try to generalize Strawson’ distinction to epistemology, the picture changes because of the role of skepticism. Skepticism can quite legitimately be described as “revisionary epistemology” because it clearly contradicts many of our ordinary beliefs about knowledge and justification: we think we know and can justify a great many things that the skeptic says we cannot know and justify. Our common sense epistemology is quite firmly committed, and so skepticism can easily be seen to fly in its face. So we should have no objection to calling skepticism “revisionary epistemology”. What about “descriptive epistemology”? It is a perfectly feasible enterprise: find out what we ordinarily believe about questions of knowledge and justification. This may be worthwhile and interesting, but again it would be a non sequitur to move from such information to claims about what really is known or justified—and the skeptic would obviously contest such a move. All this is quite above board and sensible; in particular, we can read a clear epistemology into our ordinary beliefs, so that skepticism can be seen to clash with common sense. It isn’t that common sense is indeterminate with respect to whether we know ordinary facts about the external environment.

I suspect this model was influencing Strawson and his followers, with revisionary metaphysics playing the role of skepticism. That would explain why he set the issues up as he did. But the analogy is imperfect, because the alleged clash between common sense and specific metaphysical views is either unclear or non-existent. Metaphysical theories are offered as theories of the world that may or may not fit with common sense, and which are sometimes justified by appeal to common sense belief (or possibly by science, or direct metaphysical insight); but skepticism is offered expressly as a criticism of common sense, and hence as explicitly revisionary. If you are a philosopher who has little time for skepticism, you will be inclined to go with the epistemological opinions of common sense—as in fact Strawson was himself. This may then color your views about metaphysical theories, which you will see as skeptical with regard to common sense metaphysics. But the cases are crucially dissimilar, and the conceptual apparatus used to deal with one (epistemology) will not carry over smoothly to the other (metaphysics). If so, Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics owes its origin to a misplaced obsession with skepticism.  [1]

 

C

  [1] For the record, Peter Strawson was my teacher and friend, and I had (and have) great admiration for him as a philosopher. Individuals is a brilliant book.

                                               

 

 

Interrogative Closure

 

 

Nearly thirty years ago I coined the phrase “cognitive closure” to mean “things that can’t be known”. I now want to introduce the phrase “interrogative closure” to mean “questions that can’t be asked”—to be contrasted with “affirmative closure” meaning “answers that can’t be given”. Just as there may be answers to questions that are beyond us to discover, so there may be questions that are beyond us to ask. We can ask some questions about nature, but maybe there are questions that we are not equipped to ask, because of a paucity of concepts or a theoretical blind spot. The human question generator may not be able to output every question that can be coherently formulated. This is a species of cognitive closure because it depends upon a cognitive limitation; it is a lack of knowledge that leads to the inability to ask questions (or the right questions). Questions require concepts and the requisite concepts may be lacking. This is presumably true of many or most animals: they may well be capable of interrogative thought, but they are not capable of asking every possible question. Questions of explanation are likely to be beyond their cognitive capacities: they may wonder what the sun is but they can’t ask what explains the sun’s movements. Nor could they come to be able to ask such questions save by substantial neural reprogramming; they couldn’t do it simply by thinking harder or being forced to sit in a chair while lectured to. They may have the interrogative construction in their cognitive apparatus, but they cannot formulate every meaningful question that can be asked about reality—not by a long chalk.

            Humans are adept at interrogation, as every parent of a young child knows. We are always asking questions, thirsting for answers, not letting go of a question. If we are natural thinkers, we are also natural questioners. Descartes questioned whether everything is open to doubt before he came up with his answer—questions precede answers. But despite our prodigious questioning—we can ask infinitely many questions, as we can produce infinitely many affirmative sentences—we are not guaranteed to be able to ask every question that can in principle be asked. It would be biologically anomalous if we were; and it is notorious that asking the right question often takes genius—it isn’t routine. Interrogative omniscience is not to be expected. This is surely obvious. What is not so obvious is that this is not an all-or-nothing matter: it isn’t that every question is such that we can either clearly ask it or clearly not ask it. Let me distinguish extreme interrogative closure from moderate interrogative closure: the extreme kind implies that we cannot ask the question at all, in any form, not even close; the moderate kind implies that we can formulate a question in the neighborhood of a given question but can do so only inadequately, ineptly, inaccurately, and obscurely. We don’t grasp the right question, but we grasp a question that gestures towards the right question, albeit feebly and misleadingly. The question that we ask might involve conceptual confusions that are cleared up by the correct question, or it might have false presuppositions. There are facts that we are asking about, but our way of asking contains conceptual errors. And it may be that this moderate closure is incurable: we can never ask the question in its proper form, only the inferior substitute. But at least we are not completely blocked from asking the relevant question, unlike animals. We are semi-closed to the question.

            It is hard to find an example where we can see that this is the situation, since that would require grasping a formulation of a question that we by hypothesis cannot grasp. If this is our position with respect to a certain question, we will not be aware that it is—we will suppose that we are more or less on the right track. We will be like children asking ill-formed questions without realizing it (“When does dreaming become waking?” “Why doesn’t Tuesday follow Sunday?”). Maybe there is some coherent thought in the vicinity of the question, but it is so ineptly put as to be unanswerable. What I want to suggest is that we are in this kind position with respect to the mind-body problem: we suffer from moderate but not extreme interrogative closure. We are on the verge of asking the right question, but we are not really there; or better, we are far from formulating the right question correctly, but we at least recognize that there is a question. We glimpse the question from afar, obscurely, but we cannot get it into focus. Perhaps we can never get it into focus, given our conceptual limitations.

Consider then how we talk about the mind-body problem. We speak of the mind “depending” on the brain, “resulting” from it, being “caused” by it; or we introduce technical terms like “emergence” and “supervenience”. Then we form questions like these: “In virtue of what does the mind depend on the brain?” or “How does the brain cause the mind?” or “Is the mind strongly or weakly emergent on the brain?” or “What makes the mind supervenient on the brain?” Thus we contrive to state the question that encapsulates the mind-body problem—or we think we do. But how solid are these formulations? First, the concepts invoked add to the underlying facts: these are that changes in the brain are accompanied by characteristic changes in the mind. But it is another thing to start speaking of “dependence” and “causation” and “emergence”.  That is to import concepts into our description of the case that have their original home elsewhere. We know what we mean when we use these concepts in their usual context, but they become loose and metaphorical when applied to mind and body.  This is why people appeal to models drawn from other domains to explain the meaning of the technical term they re-deploy: water and liquidity, crystals and molecules, embryogenesis. But it is far from clear that we can subsume mind and body under such concepts: isn’t this just sheer hand waving? Isn’t it a forced resort to concepts that work elsewhere and are wheeled in just so that we have something definite to say? Maybe the relation between consciousness and the brain is correctly captured in terms quite alien to us (even using the word “relation” here is tendentious); we are forcing it into a conceptual box that suits our actual concepts. A conceptual lacuna is papered over with concepts drawn from elsewhere and quite unsuitable for the task. Instead of asking, “How does the mind depend on the brain?” where the word “depend” is taken from its original home in describing things like architectural forms and weather patterns, we should be asking, “How does the mind stand in relation R to the brain?” where R is a relation alien to our conceptual scheme. Let’s not pretend that we know what we are talking about in invoking these words and admit that they are poor substitutes for more adequate and accurate concepts. They are stopgap measures, crutches.

            We say that the brain “generates” the mind, “produces” it, “gives rise” to it, but we have no idea what these labels mean, except the meaning given by their original context, which has nothing to do with the case at hand. We feel there is some general relation between mind and brain, something like causation or generation; but we really don’t have any clear conception of what sort of relation holds between the two—so we just stick a label on it. Then we proceed to formulate a question using the appropriated label hoping thereby to make sense. But that question may be quite inept, confused, and misleading, given its dubious genesis. Of course, we can’t make such a judgment directly by comparing our concocted question to the question as it should be formulated (by God or super-intelligent aliens), since we don’t know what that formulation would look like; so we blunder blindly on, not realizing that our question falls short of capturing the nature of what we are attempting to describe. Interrogative closure, extreme or moderate, never announces itself as such. Still, we may reasonably suspect that something like this is what is going on, given how we set about formulating our question and the peculiar nature of what we are asking about. The general character of the relation between mind and brain is not apparent to us, so we can’t just refer to it directly and ask how it works; instead we postulate a relation and give it a name—“dependence”, “emergence”, “supervenience”, etc. All that warrants the term are the basic facts, namely that changes in the mind are correlated with changes in the brain. It is not that the chosen terms are clearly false or confused, so that the question we ask is simply meaningless; it is rather that the question as formulated falls short of the formulation that best captures the real relation between mind and body. I can’t tell you what that relation is, for obvious reasons, but I have an inkling that it needs to be conceptualized in ways that are unavailable to us. For one thing, it would need to be a relation holding between something inner and private and something outer and public. And it could never be observed: we could never see that mind and brain stand in relation R.

            It is difficult to find analogies for the case of mind and body precisely because it is unique. We are asking for an explanation of “dependencies” between mind and body not between bodies or within minds. We can ask about how emotion depends upon belief and about how air currents depend upon temperature, but it is another thing to ask how consciousness “depends upon” neural activity. In what sense does the former “depend on” the latter? All we get in reply is some sketchy business about correlation.  [1] Presumably the relation is much stronger than mere correlation, so we reach for more full-blooded language; but we may be reaching in the wrong direction and seizing upon whatever happens to fit our cognitive grip regardless of suitability (a hammer to do the job of a screwdriver). The standard analogies used to explain what the relation is supposed to be between mind and brain encourage us to be complacent about our capacity to frame the right question; we may be quite far off target. The very fact that our formulations of the question don’t lead anywhere satisfactory suggests that we are not asking the question as it needs to be asked. For a being that knows how to ask the question the answer might not be so elusive. Its elusiveness to us is a sign that we are in the presence of interrogative closure: we can’t find the answer because we can’t ask the question (properly, adequately). There is affirmative closure because there is (moderate) interrogative closure: our inability to get the question right is bound up with our inability to answer the question. In addition, our cluelessness about the inadequacy of our question leads us to false optimism about answering it: if we knew how bad our formulation of the question was, we would be more inclined to think we cannot answer it. But of course if we knew that we would be on the road to answering it. Our predicament is that we are (moderately) closed to the right question but we find it hard to recognize that fact, and so we think we are conceptually on the right track to solving the problem. I believe we are completely closed to the solution and moderately closed to the question, but I have not argued for that composite position here.  I have suggested only that it is probable that we suffer from moderate interrogative closure with respect to the correct formulation of the mind-body problem.  [2]

 

  [1] It may be suggested that we can help ourselves to a very abstract notion of dependence, perhaps defined in terms of counterfactuals, just as supervenience is abstractly defined. But that abstract notion will not do justice to the specific relation that holds between mind and brain—the notion that distinguishes it from other applications of the abstract notion. We want to know how that relation holds between mind and brain. We want to know how the actual specific relationship between mind and brain is set up—how this part of nature operates. This is why people invoke concepts like emergence: because it promises to identify the explanandum clearly and distinctly. But it does so only by means of dubious analogies and assimilations that serve to obscure the proper formulation of the issue. This is why it is more hygienic to express the question as, “What is the explanatory basis of the relation R that holds between mind and brain?” and remain agnostic about the identity of R. Using words like “depends upon” is at best a crude and uninformative description of how mind and brain connect up (and that phrase too is loaded). There is a good way to ask the question out there in interrogative space, but it is not to be found in our formulations heretofore (and perhaps permanently). 

  [2] Imagine that we are extremely interrogatively closed to a large number of questions—as every other animal on our planet is. There are thousands of questions about nature that we are not equipped to ask. Then it will not be surprising if there are some questions to which we are partially open—which are only moderately closed to us. These exist on the border between the humanly accessible questions and the humanly inaccessible questions. I have suggested that the question that constitutes the mind-body problem might be one of these borderline cases (other philosophical questions might also belong in this class). Isn’t this a realistic way to look at the human ability to ask questions? Some we can ask clearly, some we can’t ask at all, and some we can ask only unclearly.