Metaphysical Necessity

We appear to have (at least) two concepts of necessity, usually known as epistemic necessity and metaphysical necessity. Epistemic necessity concerns what could turn out to be the case—what might be true “for all we know”; it correlates with certainty (the Cogito is an epistemic necessity). Metaphysical necessity concerns what could really be the case—how things could be in themselves; it has to do with objective essence. The word “metaphysical” isn’t doing much work here: we could as well speak of non-epistemic necessity, since metaphysical necessity is defined by contrast with epistemic necessity. We could add analytic and nomological necessity to the list: what is conceptually necessary and what is necessitated by natural law. Standard examples of metaphysical necessity belong to neither of these categories, being both synthetic and modally stronger than nomological necessity. What is striking is that we have no analysis of metaphysical necessity, as we have an analysis of epistemic necessity. We can say that epistemic necessity is certainty and epistemic possibility is uncertainty (or ignorance), or we can analyze the concept in terms of epistemic counterparts^[1]; but we have nothing comparable to say about metaphysical necessity—here we have to take the concept as primitive. We have to take it as a brute fact that this table is necessarily made of wood or that a person necessarily has his or her actual parents. We have intuitions, but we have no account of these intuitions. This is quite puzzling: why should we have such intuitions, and where do they come from? Am I simply directly aware of the objective essence of things? Do I have a basic unanalyzable concept of non-epistemic metaphysical possibility? In the case of the other types of necessity we can see where they come from: from our state of knowledge, from concepts, or from the laws of nature. But metaphysical necessity appears ungrounded and unexplained: our concept of it appears primitive and inexplicable. This can fuel skepticism about the whole notion of metaphysical necessity (and possibility): is it perhaps just a trick of the imagination? What is its epistemology and what its conceptual underpinnings?

            There is one form of modality we have not mentioned: what I will call agent modality. This concerns what we (and other agents) can and cannot do. What we are free to do is what we can do and what it is possible for us to do. We are aware of this kind of necessity and possibility from our own case, and we recognize it in others. We are, in fact, painfully conscious of the limitations on our possible actions, yet also conscious of what lies within our power. We can make comparative judgments about this kind of thing. We have the idea of beings with superior agential powers—God, in the extreme case. Thus I am now aware of my possible courses of action today, and of my life decisions (I could have been a psychologist instead of a philosopher). But I have no power to change my height or my species or my parents, and I know it. There are agential necessities as well as agential possibilities. These are not epistemic: it isn’t that I might turn out to be a psychologist after all, or that I am certain of the identity of my parents. Rather, these are objective facts about my powers of action—about my abilities. So here is a category of objective non-epistemic necessity to set beside the usual category of metaphysical necessity. Of particular interest is the ability to change things: I can change my location, my clothes, my hairstyle, and even my occupation; but I can’t change my parents or my species or my identity. So there is a correspondence between agential and metaphysical modality, and an affinity of nature. Is this a coincidence?

            Consider Hesperus and Phosphorus: they (it) can change their location, but they can’t change their identity with each other. Planets have the ability to move, but they don’t have the ability to cease to be self-identical. Thus the concept of agential modality can be generalized to them: it isn’t a matter of free decision, to be sure, but it is a kind of power. Tables, too, can move, but they have no ability to change their material composition. Animals can walk around, choose a mate, and eat, but they can’t change their parental origin or species. Nor can other agents change the traits in question: it isn’t that we can change the identity of planets or the composition of tables or the origin of animals. No one can alter these things: they are agential necessities tout court. Not even God has the power to change these facts: he can’t make 3 even or water not H2O or Queen Elizabeth the daughter of Bertrand Russell and Gertrude Stein. God can do a lot—a lot is possible for God—but he can’t do just anything. Some actions are perfectly possible, within the agent’s powers, but some are impossible, even for the most powerful of agents. This is beginning to sound a lot like metaphysical modality, is it not? We might, then, venture a hypothesis: our concept of metaphysical necessity is an outgrowth of our concept of agential necessity (and similarly for possibility). We understand metaphysical modality on the model of agential modality—that’s where we get the idea from. We know what agential possibility is, originally from our own case, and then we generalize it to include metaphysical possibility. Accordingly, the examples of metaphysical necessity with which we are familiar are special cases of agential limitations, specifically limitations on God’s agency (or any conceivable agent). To be metaphysically necessary is to be such that no possible agent could change it. No possible agent could change this table from being made of wood to being made of ice—because that would make it a different table. You could replace each wood part with a similarly shaped chunk of ice, until the whole thing was changed to ice, but that would destroy the original wooden table, replacing it with a new ice table. Our intuition of necessity can thus be cashed out as an intuition of agential inalterability. That is what we are really thinking when we think that this table is necessarily made of ice: that no one could make it otherwise. This is not a conceptual reduction of the concept of metaphysical necessity (for one thing, it uses the concept of a possible agent); it is an attempt to link the unmoored concept of metaphysical necessity to something more familiar, more part of everyday life. It is a conceptual domestication—an elucidation or genealogy. It tells us from where the metaphysical concept derives. It tells us what family of concepts it belongs to, what its conceptual relatives are. It is true that the metaphysical concept transcends these practical origins, but it doesn’t entirely leave them behind: it builds on them, feeds off them, and exploits them. We might even offer that without them the concept of metaphysical necessity would not be available to us: we would draw a blank on questions of metaphysical modality if we had no prior notion of agential modality. The latter concept is a necessary precondition of possessing the former concept. It gives us the leg up we need. This is a case of conceptual leapfrogging or ladder climbing. Like many philosophical concepts, it takes its rise from something homelier.

            We can test the hypothesis by asking how changeability correlates with necessity: are the least changeable things the things with the most metaphysical necessity? Numbers are notoriously changeless, but they are also heavily endowed with necessity: everything about them (almost) is charged with necessity. If we ask what can be changed about the number 3, the answer is hardly anything. By contrast, the self admits of a great many changes—of place, activity, psychology, perhaps even physical composition—and it is also highly contingent. Almost everything about the self is changeable and contingent: you can even in principle put the self in another body by brain transfer, and selves are not necessarily tied to a given body. The more a thing can be changed by a suitable agent the more imbued with contingency it is. Organisms and physical objects are intermediate between numbers and selves: quite a bit can be changed, but quite a bit can’t be. You can easily change the location of a cat, but not its body type (if you put a cat’s brain into a dog’s body, you don’t get a cat—though you may get the cat’s self). Tables will accept changes of location and color, but they resist being converted into TVs or repaired by being recast in a different material.^[2] This is all to say that our thoughts about what is metaphysically necessary or contingent are shot through with thoughts of what it is possible for agents to do. Two seemingly extraneous concepts thus intrude on these metaphysical matters: concepts of agents and actions. We are thinking of agents and we are thinking of their actions when we think about metaphysical modality. We aren’t just thinking of objects and their properties: we are thinking of what agents can and cannot do in relation to those objects and properties. When I think that I could have a had a different career I am thinking that I could have acted differently; when I think that a table could have been in a different place I am thinking of its powers of movement and of possible external causes of its movement (say, someone picking it up). When I think that I could not have had different parents I am thinking that, while I could have left my parents’ house earlier, it was not within my power to sever myself from them biologically. I am thinking, that is, of agency and action. My thought is not just about my possible properties, barely considered. Similarly, my modal thoughts about the table are not confined to the table and its properties; I am taking in other objects and other properties, specifically agents acting on the table. I am placing the table in a wider and richer conceptual context. So the concept of metaphysical necessity is not as bare and ungrounded as it may appear; it has its roots in a rather practical and useful set of concepts having to do with action. Epistemic necessity has its roots in concepts of knowledge, justification, and certainty; metaphysical necessity has its roots in concepts of agency, power, and action. Neither is self-standing and primitive.^[3]

Colin McGinn

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^[1] This is Kripke’s notion of epistemic modality in Naming and Necessity (1972): roughly, a situation is epistemically possible if we could be in an epistemic situation qualitatively identical to the actual situation and yet the facts are otherwise. It is notable that Kripke says virtually nothing to articulate the concept of metaphysical necessity, beyond noting (correctly) that it has a strong intuitive content. My aim here is to remedy that lacuna—so I am seeking to save metaphysical necessity not bury it. I want it to seem less strange. Less exotic.

^[2] We can allow for grades of metaphysical necessity, according to how easy it is to change a given property. It is very easy to change one’s location, but not so easy to change one’s career or color or personality, so one is morepossible than the other. And that is intuitively correct: it does seem more possible to move to a different place than to acquire a different personality—since one condition is easier to achieve than the other. The binary opposition of metaphysical necessity and metaphysical contingency is too simple, too black and white. Similarly, epistemic necessity also admits of grades: some things are less epistemically possible than others—we can be more certain that the sun will rise tomorrow than that the stock market will rise tomorrow. Both types of modality come in degrees.

^[3] Here is another point: the logical analogy between modal concepts and deontic concepts is well known, and deontic concepts concern agents and actions. Obligation maps onto necessity and permissibility maps onto possibility. Locating the source of modal concepts in agential concepts therefore comports with the general tenor of the concepts in question; certainly deontic modalities are explicitly agential. 

Logic and Morality

Are there any affinities between logic and morality? The question may appear perverse: aren’t logic and morality at opposite ends of the spectrum? Isn’t logic dry and abstract while morality is human and practical? Isn’t one about proofs and the other about opinions? I think the affinities are real, however, and I propose to sketch them. Both concern guides to conduct: how we should behave, cognitively and practically. Logic gives rules to reason by; morality gives rules for action. These rules purport to be correct—to yield valid reasoning and right action. Thus logic and morality are both normative: they tell us what we ought to do. They are not descriptions of what we actually do but prescriptions about what should be done. These prescriptions can take a number of forms: on the one hand, logical laws, rules of inference, and avoidance of logical fallacies; on the other hand, moral laws, rules of conduct, and avoidance of immoral actions. Thus we have the three classical laws of logic (identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle) and the utilitarian principle, or a list of basic duties (corresponding to consequentialism and deontology). We also have rules for making inferences: modus ponens and the Kantian principle of universalizability, say—as well as warnings against fallacious inference (don’t affirm the consequent, don’t try to infer an “ought” from an “is”). Neither subject is concerned to establish “matters of fact” about the natural world; both are concerned to improve reasoning, make us better people, keep us on the right track. It is good to reason validly and to do what is morally right. Thus logic and morality are procedural and prohibitive, rule-governed and critical. We apply them to facts in order to produce desirable results—true beliefs, right actions—but they are not a form of fact gathering analogous to physics or history.^[1] They are practical not theoretical. They are active and engaged not laid-back and detached.

            It would be wrong to contrast the two in respect of formality. It is true that we have formal logic as taught in university logic courses, while morality can scarcely claim anything comparable (though there is deontic logic). But the logic and morality I am talking about are pre-formal—they are embedded in our natural competence at dealing with the world and are probably innately based. Logical reasoning existed before Aristotle tried to codify it, and morality pre-dates attempts at explicit refined statement. These are primitive forms of human competence, not dissimilar to language competence before grammarians came along. The distinction between logic and morality is relatively recent and may not have been salient to early humans. We know quite well what is meant by the “ethics of belief”, and we are not shy about pointing out fallacies in other people’s moral reasoning. Sound reasoning is sound reasoning—and it is what we should be aiming at. The distinction between logic and morality is not as sharp as we tend to think these days (I suspect it is less sharp in the ancient world than in the post-Christian word). Shoddy logical reasoning is deplored, as immoral action is. You should keep your promises and you should follow modus ponens; we can worry about fine points of logic versus morality later. If we suppose that animals possess rudimentary forms of logic and morality, are they really distinct modules in the animal mind? Logic and morality bleed into each other.

            Where does prudential reasoning fit? It is surely only logical (rational) to consider one’s own future wellbeing—so we might assign prudence to logic. But prudence is also behaving well to one’s future self, so that it falls within morality. Some moralists have even supposed (I think rightly) that prudence is a special case of morality—we have moral duties towards ourselves, as one sentient being among others. So prudential reasoning is both logical and moral—it has a foot in both camps. Or should we say that the idea of a dualism of camps is mistaken? Isn’t the line more blurred than contemporary culture recognizes? We think there is no morality in logic textbooks and that moral issues can’t be resolved by formal logic: but that is surely too narrow a view of both fields. Logic is up to its ears in normative notions, and morality is a domain of logical reasoning. If you are trying to resolve a complex moral issue, such as abortion or animal rights, you will find yourself invoking principles drawn from logic and from normative ethics—as we currently understand those fields. But from a ground level perspective these distinctions are blurred and irrelevant: you are just reasoning with whatever bears upon the topic. You are applying your logical and moral competence to a real world problem with a view to doing what is right. When you avoid deriving an “ought” from an “is” are you doing logic or morality? When you declare that all sentient beings have rights is that intended as a moral principle or a logical one? It functions as an abstract axiom used to draw conclusions—it is irrelevant whether it crops up in a standard logic text (they don’t even include modal logic). We shouldn’t have too narrow a view of logic, and we shouldn’t neglect the abstract character of much moral reasoning. I am inclined to say simply that moral reasoning just is logical reasoning—logical reasoning about questions of value.^[2]   

            What about the point that logic is fixed, rigid and universal while morality is changeable, fluid and relative? Isn’t morality controversial and logic indisputable? But this is a naïve and tendentious way to think: logic has its controversies and morality is a lot more universal than many people suppose. I won’t rehearse the usual criticisms of moral relativism, subjectivism, emotivism, etc.; suffice it to say that morality is really a subject in objectively good standing. Also, logic is not free of internal strife: some find modal logic suspect, others favor intuitionistic logic, still others adopt a highly inclusive conception of logic (even accepting logical contradictions). Not much in human thought is not controversial in some way. Skeptics of the normative will object to “ought” in both logic and morality, but that simply underlines the affinity of the two areas. The essential point is that both logic and morality are normative systems designed to facilitate desirable outcomes; and both admit of a degree of formal articulation rooted in intuitive human faculties. We can all agree (if we are sane) that pain is bad and everything is identical to itself: why one should be assigned exclusively to something called “logic” and the other to something called “morality” is obscure. Both are self-evident propositions capable of functioning as axioms in a train of reasoning: the affinity is more obvious than the difference. You should keep your promises and not be cruel; you should existentially generalize and not affirm the consequent. Where exactly is the deep difference here? And this is before we get to non-standard logics like modal logic, epistemic logic, indexical logic, and deontic logic. They are all about reasoning and validity—but so is morality about reasoning and validity. If morality is about moral reasons, it is about moral reasoning: but then it is a logical enterprise. Logic is capacious enough to subsume morality, being the general theory of sound reasoning.

            Recognizing the affinity is helpful in resisting certain deforming conceptions of moral language and thought. Emotivism, prescriptivism, naturalism, psychologism, non-cognitivism, Platonism, contractualism: are any of these remotely plausible when applied to logic? People have toyed with such accounts of logic, but generally they have not found favor, so why should we seriously entertain them for morality? Moral discourse is like logical discourse—objective and normative—and should be treated as such. It is what it is and not some other thing. Thus its similarity to logic can work to legitimate it and avoid procrustean and reductive reinterpretations. Notably, the difficulty of finding justificatory foundations applies to both areas—some things just have to be taken for granted (pain just is bad, modus ponens just is correct). And in so far as logic should not be construed as a descriptive science of the platonic realm but as a normative system of rules of correct reasoning, so morality should not be thought of as describing the Good but as a normative system of rules of right action. If we cleave to the logical analogy, we can steer our way through dubious assimilations and deformations. Just to simplify matters, I recommend that we assert outright that morality is logic (part of it anyway): that way we have a neat antidote to various bad ideas about morality. This does not remove all philosophical questions about morality, but it raises the right kinds of questions. Logic, too, raises real philosophical questions, both metaphysical and epistemological, but these questions are the right ones to raise concerning morality. Morality, we might say, has a logical structure—and a logical role. It functions logically. Logicism is true of it (“moral logicism”). But I also think that logic needs to shed its antiseptic image and confess to its normative heart: it is really about how we should reason, what goodreasoning is. To be sure, we can treat logical systems formally, as mathematical objects; but the thrust of logic is prescriptive and critical—evaluative. It is concerned with a certain human value (viz. good reasoning), and therefore naturally belongs with morality. It is part of “value theory”. Accordingly, it belongs with such practices as praise and blame, conscience and shame, reward and punishment, respect and disrespect.^[3] An illogical person is not a moral person; irrationality is a vice. Moral goodness and logical goodness are inseparable attributes, seamlessly connected; indeed, we shouldn’t even speak in such disparate terms. The distinction between logic and morality is an untenable dualism, an artificial separation.^[4]   

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^[1] Thus the tradition has supposed both logic and morality to be known a priori, possibly to be synthetic a priori. This leads to reactionary attempts to demystify them: logic consists only of tautologies and morality is cognitively empty.

^[2] In fact, I don’t believe there is a non-arbitrary definition of logic (or of logical constant) that separates off one kind of entailment from others, but I won’t go into this now.

^[3] The awe and reverence Kant felt for the moral law has its counterpart in an idolatry of logic—as if logic has a godlike status (there should have been a Greek god dedicated to logic). This is logic as something sacred and sublime (to use Wittgenstein’s term).

^[4] It may be useful for designing an academic curriculum but it doesn’t capture the real nature of our logical and moral being. Both are expressions of our underlying rationality.

Memory and Knowledge

What is the connection between memory and knowledge? To judge from the standard literature, very little—in a typical treatise on knowledge memory is hardly mentioned. I wish to urge a strong connection: all knowledge is memory knowledge. Memory enters into every instance of knowledge; all knowledge presupposes memory knowledge. That is, all present-tense knowledge depends upon knowledge derived from the past. I don’t just mean that inferential knowledge derives from premises stored in memory—though that is true enough—I mean that even the premises rest upon antecedently possessed knowledge. If I now judge that there is a cup on my desk, this piece of present-tense knowledge requires that I possess knowledge acquired in the past. The reason for this is that in order so to judge I must already know what a cup is: I must have that knowledge stored in my memory. I must have the concept of a cup (as well as the concept of a desk and myself), and having a concept is an epistemic state. My memory interacts with my current experience to deliver the knowledge that there is a cup on my desk. If my memory were blank in this respect, I would not be able to make such a judgment. This is a point about human knowledge not about all logically possible types of knowledge: it is conceivable that a being should acquire knowledge of the same proposition at the same time as acquiring the concept of a cup. But as things are with humans that is not the case: we first have the concept and then use it to formulate the knowledge in question. According to traditional empiricism, the concept derives from perception of cups in the past, traces of which are stored in memory—a concept is an abstraction from perceived objects retained in the mind over time. According to nativism, a concept is an innate item of knowledge that persists in the mind over time. Strictly speaking, it is not stored in memory but in something analogous to memory: an informational storehouse of some sort. At any rate, it exists in the mind as a result of past events—it functions like a memory proper. It exists in the mind unconsciously and occasionally reaches conscious awareness in the form of explicit knowledge. Thus for both theories present knowledge depends upon past knowledge, because it depends on the prior existence of suitable concepts. You can’t know something now unless you already knew something earlier. Knowledge is a cross-temporal phenomenon.

            This makes knowledge different from experience. You can have an experience now without having had any prior experience: I can see a cup now without having seen one before, or seen anything before. Present experience doesn’t depend upon past experience. It is like bodily sensation: having a pain now doesn’t depend on having had pains in the past, or having had any sensations. Pain is an at-a-time phenomenon. Accordingly, it is perfectly possible to have an experience of a cup and yet fail to recognize the presented object as a cup. You could lose your memory of what a cup is and still see one. Similarly, you could forget who John is and yet still see him: you no longer know the identity of the presented person yet he can still come within your field of vision. But you can’t know that John is in front of you without knowing who John is—that is, having the individual concept John. Knowledge is made of concepts, and concepts are remnants of the past (whether stored in individual memory or “species memory”). Present knowledge always depends on past knowledge. Note that this is not regressive: the past knowledge is not knowledge-that but knowledge-what. To know that there is a cup on the desk you have to know what a cup is, but this latter knowledge is not a type of knowledge-that. If it were, knowledge would be impossible: for then the knowledge would depend on an antecedent piece of propositional knowledge, which would require another piece of propositional knowledge, and so on ad infinitum. But conceptual knowledge is not propositional knowledge, so there is no regress. The thesis being defended might more cautiously be stated as follows: all propositional knowledge presupposes non-propositional knowledge (which takes the form of memory). First we have conceptual knowledge (knowing-what), and then we have propositional knowledge (knowing-that). We never have a piece of propositional knowledge that is independent of our past epistemic state (this applies equally to self-knowledge). We never know anything about the present that derives wholly from the present.

            This position stands opposed to acquaintance models of knowledge—theories that regard knowledge as simply a type of perception. But we can never know a proposition simply by being acquainted with its subject matter at a given time, as if this knowledge were splendidly cut off from the past. Seeing is not the same as knowing. For knowledge requires classification—bringing something under a concept—and concepts pre-date their exercise in acts of propositional knowledge. I can’t even know that I am in pain by pure acquaintance, since I need to apply the concept pain, and that concept stems from my epistemic storehouse. I must already know what pain is in order to judge and know that I am currently in pain. I can feel pain without any antecedent preparation, but I can’t know that I am in pain without already knowing something about pain. Such knowledge is a coordination of past and present not merely a momentary act of acquaintance. That idea is a myth—an empiricist myth—born of modeling knowledge too closely on perceptual experience. There is a deep distinction between knowledge and experience; the former is never a special case of the latter.

            How does this conception of knowledge fit the case of the a priori? The answer is: not smoothly, but this shows something important about a priori knowledge. Suppose I judge that the number 3 is prime: to do this I need to know what a prime number is and what the number 3 is. Does my knowledge result from applying this prior knowledge to my current experience of 3? It does not: I don’t have any such experience. I am not presented with the number 3 and then dredge up my concept of that number, along with the concept of a prime. There is no analogue of perceptual experience to combine with antecedently possessed concepts. If I didn’t have the concept three, I couldn’t be confronted with the number 3. Numbers can only come before the mind as so conceptualized. There is no perception of numbers that leaves it open whether the object in question is a number, or the number it is. There is no pre-conceptual apprehension of numbers.^[1] Still, in order to make the judgment that 3 is prime I need to bring to bear my prior knowledge of numbers, i.e. my mathematical concepts. So the basic thesis applies to the case of a priori knowledge: propositional a priori knowledge depends on non-propositional conceptual knowledge. Knowing-that depends on knowing-what. It is just that we don’t have the combination of experience and cognition that we have in the empirical case. This is one way that the a priori differs from the a posteriori: such knowledge is not “by experience”, i.e. it requires no triggering perceptual input. Putting the point in terms of memory, propositional mathematical knowledge requires memory knowledge concerning what the objects of interest are—numbers, sets, geometrical forms. Thus mathematical knowledge involves a type of remembering, as empirical knowledge does: both are excavations of the cognitive past. The faculty of memory is being exercised as knowledge is acquired; and this is a deep-seated fact about human knowledge (if not all logically possible knowledge). Knowledge is not separable from memory. As memory takes us back to the past, so knowledge takes us back to the past—it is backwards looking. Remove someone’s memory and you remove his knowledge. New knowledge is inseparable from old knowledge. This is obvious for inductive knowledge, since we need to remember past observations, but it is also true for non-inductive empirical knowledge and for a priori knowledge. In acquiring any item of knowledge the past is always operative in the present. When knowledge is defined as true justified belief (or some such), not only is the justification typically derived from past observation; the very possibility of forming the belief in question derives from a prior epistemic state. Recollection is always in the picture. Both empiricism and nativism tacitly recognize this necessary involvement with the past: empiricism by holding that all knowledge depends on past experience in the form of stored perceptual encounters; nativism by locating the basis of knowledge in what is cognitively present at birth. Knowledge always has a history—in the individual and in the species. Only a kind of misplaced epistemic atomism could suppose otherwise—the idea of knowledge as an isolated quality of a time-slice. Perhaps experience can be conceived that way, but not knowledge. Realistically, knowledge always builds on the past, cumulatively and derivatively; it never descends from the sky and installs itself in the mind ab initio. Memory is what makes knowledge possible.^[2]

Colin McGinn                  

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^[1] The same can be said of other entities of which we have no experience: concepts themselves, platonic forms (the Good), and the self. In these cases we have no pre-conceptual experience of the entity in question, so that there is no presentation of these entities to the mind that leaves open what they are. We are never in doubt about what is before our mind. For example, we can never misidentify the Good as something else—an elephant or the Bad, say. 

^[2] As a corollary, skepticism about memory always dogs human knowledge: if our memories are radically in error, our knowledge is doomed. Memory is fallible, so knowledge based on it is always subject to doubt. 

Phenomenological Behaviorism

Could it be that there is an element of truth in behaviorism? Behaviorism is usually presented as a third-person view of the human mind—what we know of the mind by external observation. It often goes with a materialist metaphysics. It therefore naturally incurs the charge of ignoring the first-person perspective—of overlooking the mind’s phenomenology. But can’t we also motivate it by taking an inward view—by considering what the mind is like from the inside? Thus consider pain: isn’t the experience of pain essentially bound up with avoidance behavior? When you feel pain you instinctively avoid the painful stimulus—you withdraw from it, are averse to it, avoid it at all costs. You don’t feel pain and find yourself attracted to the painful stimulus, or indifferent to it—you want to get away from it, so that it stops hurting you. You behave in a certain way as a result of the pain, and this behavior is written into the experience: pain is inherently that which initiates avoidance behavior. Even if you can’t actually behave this way, you are strongly inclined to—you desire to, urgently. Pain is not behaviorally neutral; and this is a matter of its phenomenology, not just something tacked on. The same can be said of pleasure, only now the behavior is attraction not repulsion, approach not avoidance. Desire is much the same: you want to do what will satisfy your desire—you want to behave in a certain way, e.g. eat. These mental states are partly behavioral: not wholly, because there is also a subjective aspect, but partially. The state is a kind of hybrid of the phenomenal and the behavioral, to put it crudely. Behaviorism might thus be said to be partly true: behavior (or dispositions to it) is certainly not the whole of the mind, but it is at least a part of it—necessary if not sufficient. And this is a phenomenological fact not the result of a methodological stipulation: the mind feels behavioral–from the inside, from the first-person point of view. Just remember your last serious pain and how intensely your body wanted to escape the painful stimulus. The pain is subjectively behavioral—its subjective mode is AVOID.

            This is not to say that actual behavior is necessary to the existence of mind: paralysis is possible with full mental preservation. It is to say that behavioral inclinations, desires, plans, tendencies and urges are part of the experience of pain. Let me put it this way: the body image is integral to sensation—if not the physical body itself. We mentally represent our own body—proprioception being the main vehicle of bodily representation—and this representation is built into our sensations. Sensations are intertwined with the body image, including its dynamic aspects. This is equally true of perceptual sensations: visual experience is intertwined with awareness of the eyes as they point and move; tactile experience with the whole touchable and mobile body; auditory experience with the ears; smell with the nose; taste with the mouth. All of this is behavioral, because the sense organs move and orient themselves: they are behaving organs. The same is not true of the brain: we have no brain image that accompanies our every mental episode—as we have no liver image or kidney image. The muscles and the mind, however, are deeply interconnected—those makers of movement, large and small. Emotions too have their behavioral expression: flight, fight, laughter, and copulation. They are not indeed exhausted by their behavioral manifestations, but the behavior is part of their phenomenological character—as real as any other part. We are accustomed to recognizing that mental states have intentionality—they are about things—but we must also recognize that they have a kind of secondary intentionality in relation to the body: they represent the body in its active mode. Time is also part of their phenomenology, in addition to the objects they are about; and the body is yet another dimension of phenomenology. A visual experience, say, is made of the following components: an intentional object, an experienced time, a subjective mode, and an ocular organ.^[1] It is not some sort of primitive atom of subjectivity, as in the mosaic model of consciousness, but a tightly structured other-referring entity—and the body’s (apparent) behavior is part of this complexity. The movement of the eyes, much studied by psychologists, is built into the phenomenology of vision: I experience the visual object as seen by my mobile eyes, detected and scanned by those nimble bodily organs. Visual experience is behaviorally imbued. Thus behaviorism is a phenomenological fact—subjective first-person behaviorism. Mentalistic behaviorism not materialistic behaviorism: behavior as initiated and apprehended from within, part of the body image. Consciousness itself is behaviorally inflected. Phenomenology is always bodily phenomenology—partly at any rate.

            Consider those tireless winging bats again (our philosophical helpmates): when they use their sense of echolocation they simultaneously and inextricably mentally represent their own flying bodies, particularly ears and mouths (where the echoing shrieks originate). That is the behavioral phenomenology of bat echolocation. This is something we can in principle grasp—for we know what it’s like to be aware of our ears and mouths. We may not grasp the subjective modality of the bat’s experience entirely, but we do grasp an aspect of it—the behavior-directed aspect. We know what it’s like to be a sense-organ aware creature. We grasp the nature of the bat’s body, so we grasp the behavioral aspect of bat experience (they are mammals after all). There is, we might say, an objective aspect to the bat’s subjective experience—the aspect corresponding to the bat’s behavioral phenomenology. Just so, the blind man can grasp the objective aspect of visual experience, i.e. the part that involves ocular awareness (he is aware of his eyes by proprioception). So sensory experience is partly objective, because partly behavioral, though not wholly so. Partial behaviorism affords partial objectivity, i.e. general availability. The mistake of old-time behaviorists was to push the element of truth in behaviorism too far: first, by exaggerating its reach; and second, by adopting a third-person perspective. But there is room for a type of phenomenological behaviorism that acknowledges the first-person perspective; indeed, such a behaviorism seems unavoidable, given the embodied nature of the mind. The mind is phenomenologically in the body, directing it, responding to it: it is part of what the mind is constantly aware of. We (and other animals) are phenomenological activists, steeped in awareness of our own behavior.

            But here is the puzzle, the enigma: how does a mental state combine its behavioral dimension with its subjective (“qualitative”) dimension? It is not as if pain consists of an ordered pair of a quale and a behavioral disposition: the two do not just sit side by side without meshing together. On the contrary, the avoidance aspect is integral to the felt aspect: pain could not be anything other than an avoidance-inducing sensation. There could not be a being that experienced pain and yet felt no avoidance with respect to it (contrary to what is sometimes said about masochists): the sensation of pain is essentially an aversive phenomenon. This is, in the jargon, an a priorinecessity.  Moreover, the subjective and behavioral are internally connected not merely externally conjoined. We have a two-factor theory in which the factors are inseparable from each other. The sensation breaks down into two elements, but the elements are not really separable: we have a conceptual distinction without an ontological distinction. This is puzzling (more so than two-factor theories of propositional content)—the objectively behavioral seems to have taken up residence in the most subjective aspects of the mind. The eyes are a part of seeing! So let us accept that the truth of partial behaviorism leads to a deep puzzle, which may help to explain why it has not occupied a place in thinking about the mind. Total behaviorism at least avoids the problem of the subjective-behavioral nexus—as total subjectivism also does. The hybrid conception courts the problem without solving it. Not that this counts against the theory for a resigned mysterian—indeed, mystery is par for the course. The truth is often mysterious. Still, we should acknowledge that partial phenomenological behaviorism does give rise to a difficult problem (analogous to the general mind-body problem): the problem of integrating the behavioral with the subjective—or seeing the subjective as imbued with the behavioral. The behavioral follows from the subjective, rather than being opposed to it—and that is a puzzling fact. What is it like to be a bat? Look at the bat’s body and imagine its internal mental representation of its own body: that is part of what it’s like for the bat—along with the more elusive matter of its specific subjective experience. And that latter thing embeds the former thing inextricably.

            Nor are the puzzles quite over yet. What about thought, particularly abstract thought—does it have a behavioral aspect? That is not so obvious: does introspection reveal a phenomenological aspect relating thoughts to a bodily organ or part? Are there specific things that thought inclines us to do (like desire, pain, emotion, etc.)? Doesn’t it seem pretty damned disembodied? Maybe thought is an exception to partial phenomenological behaviorism—it has zero behavioral phenomenology. Maybe it belongs to the immortal incorporeal soul, as some have regarded Reason. One possibility is that it is connected to language and thence to speech: vocal behavior is its behavioral accompaniment (or sign language). It is just that its behavioral aspect is more remote than normal, but still essential. Or is the head somehow involved—clutching it, cradling it (as in Rodin’s Thinker)? It does seem right to distinguish degrees of behavioral involvement: some mental states have a larger behavioral component than others—pain a lot, perception rather less, belief even less. Maybe thought is just at the far extreme of behavioral disengagement—only tinged with the behavioral not flooded with it. It may not be purely subjective (removed from everything behavioral in its essential character) but has its finger lightly on the behavioral pulse. On the other hand, if it were resolutely non-behavioral that would be an interesting result, meriting the headline, “Thought Not Behaviorally Contaminated According to Scientists”. I won’t attempt to resolve the issue here, having merely noted it. The important point is that for many types of mental state a (partial) behavioral phenomenology is strongly indicated. The doctrine of behaviorism, which held sway for quite some time, is not completely without merit of motivation—though, ironically, its main rationale stems from introspection. The introspectionist psychologists should have been behaviorists! For we necessarily appear to ourselves introspectively to be behaving beings. Our consciousness is (partly) a behavioral consciousness. This is just to say that the body exists on the horizon of the mind.^[2]

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^[1] More controversially, we could add the self to this list: an experience presents an object to a subject in such a way that the subject is part of the phenomenology too. There is a reference to the self in every mental act. An experience is thus a phenomenological quintuple consisting of a subject, an object, a subjective mode, a time, and a behaving body. This is a far cry from the simple “idea” or “impression” of traditional philosophy of mind—the analogue of an elementary atom of matter. I would call it a multi-aspect theory of mental phenomenology. The mental points in several directions simultaneously. 

^[2] This is to be distinguished from the idea that the mind is as a matter of objective fact essentially embodied; it is rather the thesis that the mind is experienced as embodied (and no doubt is). The mind is embodied as a matter of its phenomenology, even when its intentional object is not the body itself. The behaviorism is virtual rather than real (though no doubt it is also real).