Inside Knowledge

Let’s try to recover some of the insights of seventeenth century philosophy which have been obscured by twentieth century philosophy.[1] I am referring to instrumentalism, operationalism, positivism, phenomenalism, and behaviorism. I offer for your consideration the following two propositions: we don’t know the nature of matter, and we do know the nature of mind. I want to understand why these propositions are true. We know matter by means of perception, particularly vision; we know mind by means of what is called introspection. The thesis, then, is that perception doesn’t reveal the nature of matter, while introspection does reveal the nature of mind, specifically consciousness. Perception is a way of knowing about a wide variety of things, such as animal bodies, but it doesn’t get to the bottom of what it knows; introspection on the other hand is a way of knowing about a relatively narrow band of things, such as human minds, but it does tell us the true nature of what is known. Thus, we know about bat bodies as well as human bodies, but we don’t know about bat minds as we know about human minds. We know what bat bodies are like, but we don’t know what bat minds are like (in respect of echolocation). But we do know what we know of minds extremely well, while we only graze the surface of bodies: we know the essence of consciousness, but we don’t know the essence of matter. Perception is weak vertically but strong horizontally; introspection is weak horizontally but strong vertically. I really know what the essence of consciousness is, but I don’t really know the essence of matter—I just know how it appears to me. Matter is a mystery deep down; but mind is not a mystery when it comes to its nature as mind. I know very well what it is to be conscious, but I don’t know at all well what it is to be material. That is the bit of seventeenth century philosophy I want to retain, alien though it may sound to the twentieth-century (and later) mind. I know myself better than I know the world outside of me. Inside knowledge is superior to outside knowledge in point of depth, if not breadth. The reason is that introspection perspicuously reveals its object whereas perception does not. We might say that perception purports to reveal matter while not delivering the goods, but introspection makes good on its promise. Perception gives putative knowledge while introspection gives perspicuous knowledge.

Before going further let me dispel a possible line of objection. This is the idea that the essence of matter (bodies, physical substances) is extension and perception represents matter as extended; thus, it delivers knowledge of the essence of matter. Accordingly, there is no asymmetry such as I have alleged. Just as introspection reveals the mind as characterized by thought, so perception reveals the body as characterized by extension (as Descartes contended). There are a number of problems with this line of objection, however. First, it is not clear that extension is the essence of matter or body: space is also extended, and there are other theories such as cohesiveness and solidity. Second, it is doubtful that we perceive actual objective extension, as opposed to mind-generated phenomenal extension, which is not the essence of matter as it objectively exists. Third, do we really know what extension itself is? To know that we would need to know what matter and space are, which takes us back to our original question. Fourth, there are illusions of extension in which no existing object is really extended: would this make hallucinated extended objects into matter? The obvious point is that when we see extended objects this does not tell us the essence of matter as it objectively exists: matter is what constitutes extended objects not (perceived) extension itself—but what is that? Simply perceiving objects doesn’t tell us. So, we are in the dark about the nature of matter, i.e., the non-mental physical world. We don’t know its real essence, as Locke would say, only its nominal essence. We don’t know what that stuff is (note the demonstrative).

Perception brings together mind and matter (or purports to): the mind of the perceiving subject and the matter of the external object. These are different kinds of things. But introspection brings together the mind with itself, since its objects are mental. The mind doesn’t need to apprehend anything alien to itself. Perception, though, is an attempt by the mind to transcend itself—to reach out into the non-mental world. In this it is only partially successful (if that)—it strikes a glancing blow. The heart of matter, so to speak, remains out of reach as far as brute perception is concerned. This can no more be seen than consciousness can be seen in another mind. That is why we have the feeling that the essence of matter might be anything, because perception doesn’t preclude different hypotheses (e.g., Berkeley’s idealism). But we don’t think consciousness allows for various hypotheses, e.g., materialism or behaviorism, because such hypotheses strike us as violating its very nature—they strike us as unacceptably reductive. Perception is more metaphysically neutral than introspection. Perceptual experience doesn’t preclude being a brain in a vat, but introspective experience does preclude there being no inner life. Perception is not as closely connected to its objects as introspection is to its objects. The latter is more intimate, revelatory, finely tuned. Perceptual knowledge is relatively lacking; it doesn’t provide a transparent account of what matter is. It doesn’t have the authority that introspection has. The eyes don’t see into matter. These are the two fundamental truths of epistemology: we know mind, but we don’t know matter. A philosophically satisfying physics is thus harder than a philosophically satisfying psychology. In this sense matter is more mysterious than mind (very seventeenth century). Our knowledge of the external world is more remote and dubitable than our knowledge of the internal world, because of the very nature of our epistemic faculties (this is not the usual skeptical argument from justification). It leads to such startling doctrines as that the mind can only truly know itself; the rest is conjecture, speculation, blind faith. In other words, the mind can only have acquaintance with itself; it cannot be acquainted with matter as it is in itself.

This epistemological point has a bearing on the mind-body problem. For how can something truly knowable by introspection be reducible to something not knowable—how can the introspectable be identical to the perceptible? That would make the mind essentially unknowable, granted that its mode of existence coincides with the mode of existence of matter. But the mind is knowable in its real essence, as we all can see. It would be as mysterious as matter if identity held. In the seventeenth century, it was generally accepted that matter is fundamentally unknowable, though its behavior could be mapped to some degree; and it was also accepted that the mind, by contrast, is fundamentally knowable, i.e., in its defining real essence. The problem lay in physics not psychology (theory of mind). The mind-body problem was at bottom the matter problem. This is a problem located in our epistemic faculties: our perceptual faculty fails to disclose the true nature of matter, while our introspective faculty provides an accurate picture of (our) mind. It isn’t a metaphysical problem—a problem in the ontology of matter. Matter might well be the basis of mind, as Locke famously conceded, but we have no means of knowing, because perception doesn’t tell us everything we need to know about matter (specifically, the brain). For all we know, the brain is up to the task, but we lack the perception-based knowledge to be sure. The basic point in all this is simply that perception, and the ideas derived from perception, is unable to penetrate to the real essence of matter. We don’t have the necessary knowledge, and never will if empiricist epistemology is correct (nor will rationalism help). In the end it is not deficiencies in our knowledge of the bat’s mind that poses the problem but deficiencies in our knowledge of its brain and matter in general. Perceptual knowledge is the wrong kind of knowledge to provide the materials for a solution to the mind-body problem. The difficulty is already apparent in our ordinary visual perception: how does that provide information about the ultimate nature of the material world? This is the problem as it was conceived in the seventeenth century, and it can’t be said to have been solved (rather, ignored).[2]

[1] For background see Michael Ayers, Locke and Knowing and Seeing.

[2] The question of why perception is so limited is not difficult to answer: it’s because perception is an evolved cost-cutting adaptation and there is no pressing need to build in metaphysical eyes (cf. Locke’s “microspical eyes”). Do you think our animal ancestors needed to see the ultimate constitution of nature? And why should light be able to carry the requisite information? Compare our perceptual knowledge of the stars.

Back to School

It is now twelve years since I stopped teaching philosophy, after thirty-eight years of doing it. There is no back-to-school for me. That always meant stopping work on my own stuff, beginning to teach classes again, meetings and hellos. What are my feelings on the subject? Many–some good, some bad. I think of my ex-friends and erstwhile colleagues back at work; I feel no fondness for them, only a simmering contempt. But on the broader question my main feeling is a sense of freedom: I don’t have to waste my time and energy on footling tasks. I don’t have to evaluate, grade, assess, reward and punish. I don’t have to stand there and spout, give my opinion, decide someone else’s fate. I don’t have an office to keep tidy, a mail-box to manage. I don’t have to pretend to like people I don’t like. I don’t have to write excruciating letters of recommendation full of artful unmerited praise. I can be genuine now, not diplomatic. I don’t have to be a “good citizen” (dreadful phrase). I don’t have to compromise my values in order to keep people happy. I don’t have people sucking up to me in order to gain my good opinion of them. That is all to the good.

But twelve years is a long time; memory fades. I can hardly remember most of it, spread across half a dozen departments on two continents. It would feel strange now to go through the motions. It would be positively surreal to set examinations, read them, and hand out grades—what a grisly job that was! Although I have given thousands of lectures and taught untold numbers of students, it now seems like another person performing that role. Because that’s what it was—a role. The benign yet principled professor, attentive to the students’ needs and to my nervous junior colleagues. I am amazed now at how nice I was to everyone: but it was my job. I became absorbed in my professional role, a kind of adopted (and fake) identity (see Erving Goffman). I think it affected my philosophical work, making it more socially conscious in the bad sense—less really me. Less honest, real, cutting, bold. I won’t say it was shit, but it was infected by the need to fit in—to conform, in a word. I am a different person now, and one I greatly prefer. I am not a department-member, that wretched specimen of academic life: smarmy, dull, vulgarly ambitious, mediocre. I am now the real thing, not a pale copy of it. So, I am glad not to be going back to school this fall—not to be treading the linoleum halls of academe. Did I hate it? Good question. Sort of. I sort of hated it. I sort of hated myself in it. Being a professor is no way to be a professor. The phrase “professional philosopher” verges on the oxymoronic.

A Bombing

The recent bombing of a boat off the coast of Venezuela is probably the worst atrocity committed by the Trump administration so far. It was suspected of being a drug-smuggling boat and summarily blown up, killing all on board. No interception, no search, no due process—just destroyed under suspicion of illegality. The US coast guard routinely intercepts such vessels and apprehends anyone caught smuggling drugs, putting them in jail if found guilty; so, the bombing was not necessary in any sense. Then why do it? To “send a message”, i.e., tell anyone thinking of smuggling drugs that they are at risk of summary execution. That is, the intention was to instill fear in potential criminals (people who transport drugs to the US) by killing people. This is precisely what terrorists do: kill some people to instill fear in others. So, the United States has aligned itself with state terrorism—it has made itself a terrorist organization. It has murdered with the intent to instill fear. What if turns out it was not a drug boat? What if other innocent boats are targeted? Even if it were laden with drugs, was it a good idea to bomb it this way? Don’t you think innocent boating enthusiasts might be deterred from boating off the coast of Venezuela? Wasn’t this outright murderous terrorism? And apparently Venezuela is not a big player in illegal drug trafficking anyway, so this was mainly a performative act—an act designed to generate publicity. You murder people for show, not worrying too much about guilt or innocence, or the rule of law. It is theatrical terrorism. And we haven’t even gone into the complicity of Americans in enabling and encouraging the flow of drugs (supply and demand). The main point is the lawless murderous terrorism perpetrated by the American government.

Other Ontologies

It would be generally agreed that ethics, logic, and mathematics suffer from ontological uncertainties. We don’t know what they are about. There are ontological disagreements that never get resolved. The metaphysics is obscure. I don’t need to spell this out. Is ethics about certain special objects and properties—the Good, the non-natural property of being good—or is it about human emotions or imperatives or the divine will? How should ethical statements be analyzed? Is logic about sentences (type or token) or abstract propositions or states of affairs? Is it about mind-independent matters or is it a kind of psychological projection? Is mathematics (number theory and geometry) about Platonic universals or marks on paper or pebbles and biscuits? We don’t have similar doubts about physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, zoology (psychology is another matter). In these areas the old Aristotelian framework works well enough: matter and form. There is a stuff called matter and it takes a certain form (shape, organization). This combination produces things called substances—individual perceptible objects that have properties (attributes, accidents). But with ethics, logic, and mathematics we don’t have the idea of matter and form: the Good (or being good) is not made of matter and has no shape; same for propositions and numbers; geometric figures have form (this is where the concept comes form) but where is the matter that constitutes them? In short, the substance ontology breaks down. We might find ourselves saying that only states of consciousness can be good or bad, but we don’t have an ontology in terms of which we can make sense of this—what substance has the attribute of being good? Is being good really an attribute of anything? Hence, emotivism, prescriptivism, nihilism, etc. We likewise speak of one proposition entailing another, but we have no clear idea what these objects may be or what their logical relations look like—it is nothing like one animal giving birth to another, say. It seems “queer”. And what kind of thing is a universal—is it a proper subject of predications? Can we see universals? Where do they exist? How is one different from another? But if we switch to particulars, we seem to lose the essence: numbers are not scribbles and geometric figures are not perceptible shapes. These are far too human-dependent. In all three cases the substance ontology breaks down, but we have nothing to replace it.

Ethics, logic, and mathematics are therefore ontologically akin to the mind or consciousness: odd, anomalous, extraordinary. They are apt to induce ontological vertigo. This produces philosophical perplexity. The problems are not just metaphysical; they ramify into epistemology and philosophy of language. For how can we know such “queer” facts, or talk about them? It’s nothing like seeing a physical object and noticing its attributes. Can we even use subject-predicate sentences to describe these things? In what sense, if any, are they things? We come down with a bad case of ontological incomprehension. And all because we think in terms of the substance ontology—matter and form, object and attribute. We try to force them into a mold they don’t fit, or we flirt with nihilism: reduction or elimination. The driving force here isn’t empiricism or materialism; it’s more fundamental—substantialism. But we can’t just give up on this ontological framework, because we lack another. We are imprisoned within it. The framework doesn’t fit all subject matters. It isn’t the content of our conceptual scheme that produces the problems; it’s the form of it, its most general categories (thing, property, relation, instantiation). What we are pleased to call reality (that most descriptively empty of terms) doesn’t have a homogeneous structure (and even that word is too parochial). We think and talk about things for which we have no adequate ontological conceptual scheme. Why? Because we are substantial beings living in a world of other substantial beings, yet privy to other “realities”. One part of our thought fails to fall under another part. Thus, those intellectual cramps and contortions.

And there is a further inconvenience: philosophy itself suffers from the same problem. We don’t really know what it is about. Plato would say it is about the world of universals; Aristotle would say it is about substances in general; Locke would say it is about substances and ideas; Hume would say it is about impressions and ideas; Berkeley would say it is about ideas and the mind of God (a spiritual substance); Hegel would say it is about the World Spirit; Husserl would say it is about human phenomenology; Frege would say it is about inhuman Thoughts; Russell would say it is about human knowledge (its scope and limits); Wittgenstein would say it is about pictorial propositions or (later) language-games; Quine would say it is about science in general; linguistic philosophers would say it is about ordinary language; conceptual analysts would say it is about concepts; and so on. There isn’t much consensus here. There is a lot of tendentious rhetoric. It clearly isn’t about clearly defined natural substantial objects, animal, vegetable, or mineral (where is the periodic table of philosophical elements or a taxonomy of philosophical species?). Accordingly, meta-philosophy exists—what exactly are we talking about? Philosophy has no well-defined ontology to call its own. This makes scientists feel complacent and superior, but the same problem arises in ethics, logic, mathematics (and yes, psychology). Call it the problem of ontological indeterminacy, in both the metaphysical and epistemological sense. Does philosophy even have an ontology? What is philosophical discourse ontologically committed to?

What is to be done about all this? Not very much, except to be aware of the problem. Our minds and brains have evolved on a certain planet with a certain kind of environment. They descend from the minds and brains of earlier animals. Conceptual schemes evolve under the usual evolutionary constraints, for better or worse. They incorporate a workable ontology and serve our biological purposes well enough. But they may not fit everything that comes our way; they may not be hospitable to ethics, logic, mathematics, and philosophy. We can do these things surprisingly well, but we don’t perform so admirably when we try to comprehend their general ontology. We are much better at the primal ontology of substances and their attributes—objects in space equipped with perceptible properties and relations. Anything else is annoyingly hazy, a bit of a jumble, rather makeshift. This doesn’t mean these aren’t worthwhile subjects, well worth knowing about, but at a reflective level they are apt to flummox. I myself am a keen student of these subjects, though I don’t really know what they are about. I can’t quite get their subject matter in my sights (literally).[1]

[1] You can aim at substances with a gun, but you can’t aim at moral values, or propositions, or numbers, or concepts, or essences (and not because they won’t sit still). See my earlier papers on substance ontology and its limits, especially “Ontology of Mind”. The duality inherent in reality is not between two types of substance, material and immaterial; it’s between substances on the one hand and non-substances on the other (or whatever underlies this human distinction).