Skepticism and Self-Knowledge

From the point of view of skepticism, self-knowledge is an anomaly. How is it that facts about a person’s psychology can be known with certainty when everything else is uncertain? It’s not as if first-person ascriptions of mental states are analytic or a priori; they report the same facts as give rise to the skeptical problem of other minds. We might think of this as the puzzle of first-person infallibility: how come we can’t be wrong about our own inner lives when we can be wrong about everything else? Of course, not everyone has accepted that we are thus infallible, even about whether one is in pain, but I think they fail to appreciate the force of the anti-skeptical position in this area; in any case, I will not attempt here to parry these assaults on introspective certainty. Instead I will offer a mixed position that accepts the standard claim of infallibility but finds one place at which the infallibility breaks down—so that such beliefs are not completely infallible, though they are largely so. General skepticism does not then run into an outright counterexample: all (empirical) knowledge is fallible one way or another.

So suppose I am in considerable pain as a result of stubbing my toe. I judge this to be so, uttering the words, “That hurts!” Could I be wrong? There are two places at which possible error might be supposed to creep in: with respect to the type of sensation I am feeling, and with respect to who has that sensation. Could I really be feeling another sensation altogether and misidentify it as pain—say, a pleasant sensation or a sensation of red? I could of course use the wrong word to describe my sensation (perhaps my English is shaky or I have some sort of language pathology), but that doesn’t mean that I misapply the concept of pain. I would agree with those who insist that no such thing is possible: I couldn’t be feeling a sensation of pleasure or a sensation of red and mistakenly suppose it to be a sensation of pain. I can’t misidentify my sensations in this way: I know with certainty what kind of sensation I am having—I feel that sensation directly and I apply the correct concept to it. What about the identity of the person feeling pain—could I misidentify him? I know that somebody is in pain and I mistakenly take that person to be me (actually it’s the person sitting opposite me). That again looks like a rank impossibility: I can’t judge that someone is in pain and wrongly suppose that I am that person. If I judge that I am in pain, I must be right about the identity of the sufferer: I know for sure that it is I who is in pain. Thus I cannot be informed that I am in pain once I have judged that someone is: I know it’s me just by knowing my own pain, unlike knowing (say) that someone in this room has won the lottery and being informed that it’s me. The pain presents itself as mine when it is mine. It is as if the pain has a little sticker on it saying, “This belongs to you”. Taking these points together, then, there seems no room for error in the self-ascription of pain: both possible points at which error might occur are blocked, so I know infallibly that I am in pain. I could never believe that I am in pain when I am really seeing red, or that I am in pain when it is really the person opposite me. By contrast, I could believe that my house is on fire when really it is merely well illuminated, or when it’s the next-door neighbor’s house that is in flames not mine.

So far, then, the case of self-knowledge is not parallel to the case of knowledge of the external world (or other minds). But there is one point of potential fallibility that we have not explored—the time of the pain. For I do not merely judge that I am pain at some time but at this time—I judge that I am in pain now. Could I be wrong about that? Could I misidentify the time of the pain? In particular, could a past pain be mistakenly attributed to the present time? Philosophical astronomers are fond of pointing out that the light reaching us from distant galaxies might have originated from a source that is now very different from what it was when the light departed from it, and might not now even exist. We have the impression that the object of sight is now as it seems to be, but that may not be so—and it is often not so. If we judge that that object is now thus and so, we make a mistake; rather, it wasthus and so. There is a time lag between when the light started out and when it reaches our eye, and this time lag can produce erroneous temporal belief. For instance, what looks like a contemporaneous stellar explosion could have occurred long ago. Taking a cue from this case, let us imagine a mind that is spread out across the universe at a scale of billions of miles: the brain that serves this mind is distributed as widely as galaxies are. In one part of it sensations of pain are processed, while in another part beliefs are processed, specifically beliefs about pain. Suppose it takes many years for signals from one part of this distributed brain to be received by the other part. Then the person whose brain this is may judge that he is in pain now when in fact the pain ceased long ago, say two centuries ago. He is quite correct to suppose that pain occurred in him but he gets the time of its occurrence wrong (we may suppose that he doesn’t know about the time lag). He thinks he is in pain now but in fact he isn’t. He makes temporal errors in his self-ascriptions of pain (as well as beliefs, emotions, etc.).

Now the skeptic sees his opportunity: couldn’t the human brain be subject to a similar time lag? In fact it is: it takes time for nerve signals to travel from the pain centers of the brain to its cognitive centers (located in the frontal lobes). It may be that by the time you judge that you are in pain the pain has receded, though no doubt you are usually still in pain at the time that you judge you are. The skeptic will then conjure the possibility, based in neurophysiological fact, that in any case of self-ascription of pain it is possible that the pain has ceased by the time you judge it to exist. You judge that it exists now, simultaneously with the judgment, whereas in fact it existed at a previous time, possibly a few milliseconds earlier or even months ago (maybe your brain is extremely slow). Perhaps you have been hooked up by a super scientist so that there is a time lag of five minutes between having a mental state and judging that you have it, so that all your self-ascriptions are false with respect to time (assuming the mental states don’t persist till the moment you make the judgment). Thus self-ascriptions of mental states are fallible, we might now be systematically making mistakes about the time of our mental states, and skepticism extends to self-knowledge (at least in this one respect). Nothing is therefore completely immune from skepticism; error is always possible (with regard to the empirical world anyway).

The reason that error is always possible is that fact and belief do not necessarily coincide. It is thus possible to believe that something is happening now that is not happening at that time: I might think that a certain lecture is happening now but in fact it happened an hour ago; likewise I can think that a pain is happening now but in fact it happened a second ago. There is the fact on the one hand and there is the judgment about it on the other. This division is as true for mental states and self-ascriptions of them as it is for anything else, so it is not surprising that error is possible here too; what is surprising is that it is confined to the temporal content of such judgments, having no parallel with respect to the identity of the state ascribed and who it is ascribed to. I can’t be wrong about what state I am in and about it being I that is in it—but I can be wrong about when the state occurs. I know for sure there has been pain in my life, but exactly when is subject to skeptical doubt. Maybe all my pain happened years ago and I am only now getting round to self-ascribing it: it just takes that long for the fact to make itself known to my introspective faculty. And the same is true of it seeming to me that I am in pain: this too could precede the act of judging that it so seems to me. The neural correlates of pain actually do precede the neural correlates of judging that you are in pain, granted that the relevant signals have to travel across the cortex in a finite time, so there is always a bit of a lag time between fact and report.[1] The skeptic simply amplifies this point to construct fanciful scenarios that dramatize the gap between fact and judgment. So we should add to the usual brain-in-a-vat case what might be called the brain-in-a-time-lag case.

Co

[1] It is of course equally true that there is a lag between the time a stimulus leaves an external object and the time we have a perception of that object, which is particularly noticeable in the case of sound. This implies the possibility of error about the time of external events, as when you think that thunder (the physical phenomenon) occurs at the same time you hear it. Everything outside us thus happens slightly earlier than when we perceive it and make the corresponding judgment. It turns out that the same is true of events in one’s mind and judgments about them, which opens the case up to skepticism.

Evolution and the Self

We must assume that the self evolved, given that it exists and is not a social construct. That means it arose by mutation and natural selection, serving some biological purpose. And not just in humans but also across the animal kingdom: all those animal selves are biological adaptations, like limbs and brains and senses. The reference of “I” is a biological entity—its characteristics are biologically adaptive. An organism without a self is at a reproductive disadvantage compared to one with a self (other things being equal). The self does something valuable, survival-enhancing. One of its characteristics is unity (or at least felt unity), so this unity must have a biological function—it must make the organism better at propagating its genes (having offspring). There must be a “gene for self unity”, as there is a gene for vision or language or sexual desire (many such genes presumably). The architecture of the self must be connected to its functionality, just as in the case of the body. This doesn’t mean that the self is reducible to the genes or anything else of a material nature; it just means that the self is biologically functional.

But what job does it do—how does it aid survival? We are now accustomed to the idea of the modularity of mind, according to which the mind consists of an ensemble of separate faculties, each with its own inner structure and function. This is the orthodox ontology in the study of the mind: each module is an evolved organ, to some degree independent of the others, though interacting with them—a suite of innate capacities much like the organs of the body. This picture has fuelled some skepticism about the ontological status of the self: what need is there for a self in addition to the several components that compose the mind? Is it just a pre-scientific holdover from common sense, dispensable from the science of the human organism? What job could the self perform that is not performed by the modules we already have on board? Why not go Humean about the self and regard it as at best a misleading way to talk about psychological modules? There are the modules and there is the set of them, with nothing else needed. But this position flies in the face of a stubborn conviction that the self is real—we feel it inside us, we refer to it with “I”, and ethics is built around it. We should at least inquire if there is some adaptive purpose that it plausibly serves.

Actually I think the answer to this question is not far to seek: the self serves an integrative function. The self imposes unity on what would otherwise be disorganized plurality. The modules by themselves are a mere motley, separate departments or agencies of the mind, with distinct (and sometimes competing) voices. They need to be brought harmoniously together: but interaction is not enough—we need unification. The self is a superordinate entity that creates this unity. Let me put the point in terms of the brain: each module corresponds to a brain region (possibly widely distributed) that interacts with other brain regions; but in addition to these there is a further brain region corresponding to the unifying self—the self-center, as we may call it. It has its own identity and is not just the sum of the several brain regions corresponding to the mental modules. Just so, the self is a real entity apart from the modules it integrates, but it exists because of its integrative function: it evolved as a distinct “organ” so as to perform the job of unifying the separate modules that make up what we call the mind. For example, the visual and speech centers are connected—this is why we can report on what we see—and the self is the entity responsible for creating that connection. Hence the perceived unity of the self: its job is to create order from chaos—to unite the several voices belonging to the modules. Without it the mind would be a cacophony of voices, an unruly choir, instead of the unified entity we know it to be. If we imagine the mind evolving one module at a time, starting with a single module, we can see that there is a problem of integration to be solved: the self is the solution to that problem, and in due course it evolved. The self is the means by which the senses (etc.) come together. Thus it is a mental faculty in its own right—a distinct component of the organism. The human organism has a heart, kidneys, a brain, vision, touch, thought—and a self. These are all adaptations occasioned by the usual biological pressures. The self has an adaptive biology just like the heart, which is not to say that it doesn’t differ from the heart in important respects (there is no need to say that both are “physical”). It is not epiphenomenal or fictitious or a mere by-product of something else: it has its own biological rationale. Biology needs to expand to include it (it is one aspect of the biological adaptation we call the mind). We may assume that the self made its entrance long ago, well before humans ever came on the scene; for its unifying powers were needed just as soon as organisms developed multiple modules that needed integration. Of course, selves became more sophisticated over time, as the mind became more thickly populated with faculties, but the basic element is presumably very ancient, no doubt evolving in the seas.[1] Then organisms could sense their own unity instead of being just a collection of autonomous modules. Selves piggybacked on modules, but they are something over and above modules; they certainly did not evolve before modules, since modules are their raison de’tre. They are how modules found their groove (the “groove theory” of the self).

It may be objected that there has to be something wrong with this picture, since modules contain mental states and mental states require subjects. If there is a pain module, it needs a subject for the pains to occur in—there is no subject-less pain. Experiences need bearers. But then the self could not have evolved subsequently to the modules and their contents: it was already present in the mere fact of experience. The point should be conceded, but it doesn’t refute the scheme I have presented, though it does call for a necessary distinction. Let us agree that the modules contain states that logically require bearers; that doesn’t imply that the self as it now exists doesn’t have an integrative function. The correct position is that the self has two basic ingredients: the primitive ingredient included in all conscious states (notice that this doesn’t imply a single self for each organism), and the higher-order integrative self that constitutes the reference of “I”. The structure of the self is thus two-tiered: the first tier as ancient as the first experiences to evolve, the second coeval with the onset of module integration. Your visual experience now has a subject-place logically built into it, but it also figures in the integrative actions of the self that unites it with other mental elements. We might call these the “subject self” and the “integrative self”. Both are evolved features of organisms, and both are presumably very old. Evolution builds on pre-existing structures, exploiting and repurposing them, and the self is no exception; it is a kind of tinkered together construction, made of primitive consciousness and higher-order integration. First, we have individual modules and the primitive subject; second, we have collections of modules and their unification into a single self. As is typical in evolution, there are no clear lines or unprecedented breakthroughs; everything is gradual accumulation and happy accident. The biological self evolved over eons, proceeding from earlier traits and driven by adventitious demands.

Animal selves are not all alike: it depends on the integrative needs of the organism in question. The bat must integrate its sonar experiences with its sense of touch, and both with its cognitive capacities. Thus we don’t know the nature of bat experiences and we don’t know what it’s like to be a bat self, since our selves don’t perform this kind of integration. Other animals don’t know what it’s like to be a human self, since our selves perform linguistic integration and theirs don’t. Integrative acts are common to different species, but not the items integrated. We know what module integration in general is like, but not the specific character of the integration an experientially alien species performs. What we would find really difficult to comprehend is a mind that lacked integration altogether—a purely modularized mind. Our minds are unified by our selves, but some possible minds may not be so unified; and this fragmentation is alien to us. We don’t know what it’s like to be a fragmented mind. Is it like having many selves or no self? Is there even a viable conception of self for such a mind? A new version of the problem of other minds would be this: How do I know that other minds are unified by a self as mine is? Maybe other people have fragmented modular minds with no unifying self to hold it all together (though their behavior may exhibit signs of unity). In some species there may be no single unitary self but several sub-selves (e.g. the octopus)

None of this is intended to solve the philosophical problem of the self, i.e. what the nature of the self is. The account is purely a theory of the biological function of the self—why it exists from an evolutionary point of view. It is easy to come to the conclusion that the self is biologically pointless–a remnant of the old notion of the soul perhaps–but the integration theory provides a rationale for the existence of the self as a product of evolution. How the integration works, what the nature of the self is, how it is realized in the brain—these are separate questions. But it may be helpful to start from a theory of what the self is designed to do, considered biologically. The existence of selves, in our species and others, is surely a biological fact, so we would expect there to be some biological function that selves serve. If consciousness helps us know the world, the conscious self helps us knit this knowledge together. It acts as a kind of counterweight to module plurality.[2]

[1] To some extent we are all piscine selves, originally designed to integrate information from a watery world, joined with fishy feelings. Simple selves (actually not so simple) peek out from behind aquatic eyes, the ancestors of our dry-land selves. The fish self is the prototype of us all.

[2] Notice that in a classic case of modular divergence like visual illusion it is the same self that entertains both mental representations–there are not two selves corresponding to the two representations. We don’t have one self that sees the lines as of unequal length in the Muller-Lyer illusion and another self that insists that the lines are equal; instead one self brings both representations together. I see the lines as unequal and I (the same thing) believe them to be equal. The modules pull apart, but the self holds them together. The self operates as a device of module convergence. Are there any psychopathologies in which modular divergence is experienced as a splitting of the self?

Ethics and the Self

The self is perhaps the most elusive subject in philosophy. It seems impossible to say what the self is. Doubts about its existence are perfectly understandable, if exaggerated. The self seems intensely real, but its nature remains opaque. This is why all the standard theories are wide of the mark: the body, the brain, a series of mental connections, a transcendental ego. We are convinced of its unity, but the basis for this unity is unclear. It seems bound up with consciousness, but it is not an object of conscious awareness (as Hume noted). The self is a conundrum locked in a mystery surrounded by an enigma. Yet it is what we care about most, the thing about which we are most anxious, the entity most dear to us. Our life centers around something we find baffling. Every time you go to the supermarket you are surrounded by a phalanx of these baffling beings, each focused intently on itself, peeping out from behind anxious eyes. We don’t even have adequate language for them, these secret unities: we give them proper names, we apply pronouns to them, we call them “persons” (or just “people”), we invent fancy terms for them (“selves”, “souls”, “subjects of consciousness”); but none of these labels really provides anything by way of illumination—they are just words for we-know-not-what. Selves are a magical mystery tour (John, Paul, George, and Ringo—who are you really?).

None of this uncertainty might matter much except for one thing: selves are central to ethics. Ethics is about the right way to treat selves (animal as well as human)—whatever selves may be. What we owe to each other we owe to other selves. Selves are what suffer or prosper; they are what we have duties towards; they are what we make contracts with. Yet they make no explicitly articulated appearance in standard ethical theories: no account of their nature underpins the prescriptions offered. This is most obvious in the case of utilitarianism. We are told to maximize utility, utility being a mental state: but it is a mental state of persons (selves, subjects, sentient beings)—what is maximized is the wellbeing of persons. There is no such thing as maximizing wellbeing in the absence of selves—like maximizing the amount of grain in the world. We are trying to make people happy. We are trying to create facts of which people are essential constituents. But we don’t really know what people are. So the theory rests on an epistemic abyss. If we knew what selves are, we might appreciate better the soundness of the utilitarian position—we might see why the happiness of persons is so important. Or conceivably we might come to doubt that importance. As things stand, however, we are asserting the ethical centrality of personal happiness without having much idea what it is that is happy or unhappy. If selves are particles of the divine spirit that fact might be morally relevant, while if they are actually non-existent fictions that might be relevant too (how can it matter whether persons are happy if there are no persons?). There is thus a lacuna at the heart of the utilitarian theory. That might be acceptable from a practical point of view—we are ignorant of many things yet we get on with life regardless—but theoretically it is far from satisfactory. Wouldn’t it be better if ethics were not predicated on an enigma?

Kant’s ethics is instructive because of the explicit reference to persons. We are told to have “respect for persons”—autonomous rational beings, supposedly. Persons create obligations; the principle of universalization quantifies over them. It is regarded as self-evident that persons are the source of our moral duties (though Kant has a problem with animal ethics). But elsewhere in his philosophy Kant tells us that selves are noumenal beings—their essence is unknown to us. So the categorical imperative applies to beings whose nature we do not and cannot know. We know they are rational and autonomous (allegedly), but we don’t know what grounds these traits. We are admonished to respect entities whose real nature escapes us. Wouldn’t it be better to have an ethics that rests on knowledge of its essential subject matter? Maybe knowledge of the noumenal nature of selves would make us see that these entities are of supreme moral worth—one would assume that this must be so. But we are not granted such knowledge, so our ethical convictions lack the grounding necessary to them. This is a dramatic statement of what is implicit in common sense: we have only a vague idea what a self is, our own or others.[1] Our attitudes towards these elements of nature are solicitous, to be sure, but we don’t really know what grounds them, if anything. Maybe a better understanding of selves would convince us that we underestimate their value (that is particularly true in the case of animals), but we are not in a position to say. Also, moral skeptics might be kept at bay by a more penetrating understanding of the nature of selves: as things stand they can rightly complain that the basis of ethics rests on ignorance. The skeptic may protest, “Why do you say that selves matter so much?” and we have little to say in reply except to appeal to self-evidence. What if complete knowledge of the self were to demonstrate not only the validity of ethics but also the correctness of one ethical theory over others? What if knowledge of the noumenal self were to vindicate Kantian ethics as against utilitarian ethics? The trouble is that the ethicist is proceeding in profound ignorance; or worse, knowledge combined with ignorance. For we do know some of the attributes of the self—consciousness, rationality, will—but not its full nature; and the known attributes may bias us in a direction full knowledge would contraindicate.

We are familiar with the point that ethics depends on the persistence of the self over time: you can’t, for example, blame someone for what his earlier self did.[2] The metaphysics of the self is not irrelevant to the ethics of selves. But the point is more general: ethics cannot be independent of the nature of the self at a time either. If ethics were concerned with biological organisms as such, with no reference to psychological subjects, then it would have a clearly articulated subject matter and its prescriptions would be solidly grounded in knowable fact. But as things stand it is concerned with those mysterious entities called “persons” or “selves” or “subjects of consciousness”; and these are philosophically problematic. It’s a bit like applying ethics to mathematics without knowing what numbers are: doesn’t it matter whether numbers are abstract platonic entities or marks on paper or ideas in minds? But the self is even more elusive, to the point of being under suspicion of non-existence. A Humean about the self can hardly base her ethics on the principle of respect for selves! That would be the equivalent of a utilitarian who denies the existence of mental states. The problem of the self is the dirty little secret of ethics.[3]

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[1] We have only indexical ideas of the self not descriptive ideas: the self is what I am and what you are and what heis—it is this (pointing inwards). As Hume would say, we don’t have an “adequate” idea of the self, based either on experience or reason.

[2] Derek Parfit emphasized this point based on considerations about identity through time: see Reasons and Persons (1984).

[3] I don’t at all mean to assert that ethics is impossible without a resolution of the problem of the self; I just mean that it lacks solid theoretical foundations without a clearer conception of what the self is. That, at any rate, is a possibility we do well to take into account. My own feeling is that our rather glancing conception of animal and human selves leaves our ethical appreciation of selves seriously etiolated.

World and Head

When Hilary Putnam made the claim that meanings are not “in the head” he emphasized the indexical character of natural kind terms. His point was that terms like “water” have their reference fixed by demonstratives like “that liquid”, and demonstratives have their reference as a function of context not descriptions in the mind of the speaker. In David Kaplan’s terminology, context yields content in conjunction with character—character alone cannot determine reference. Thus two people could be internally indistinguishable and yet refer to different things with “that liquid” depending on the actual physical context (H2O or XYZ). Since the anchoring demonstrative fixes the reference of “water”, that term too will vary its reference according to context—hence Twin Earth cases. Strictly speaking, Putnam overstated his conclusion, since all that follows is that an aspect of meaning is not in the head—the aspect Kaplan calls content; character does not vary in this way, being completely context-independent. He should have said that part of meaning is not in the head, the part that is “in” the context. The meaning of an indexical is always a two-component affair: the component that results from context and the component that is “in the head”. In the case of a demonstrative like “that liquid”, the first component corresponds to the external natural kind being demonstrated, while the second component may be identified with something like the perceptual appearance presented by the demonstrated object or kind. If someone were to claim that the meaning of a demonstrative is completely outside the head, the reply would be that an aspect of its meaning is clearly inside the head—the aspect Kaplan calls character. Indexical meaning is double-aspect.

So far, so familiar: what I want to ask is whether the natural kind itself is wholly “outside the head”. Is what we mean by “water” something completely divorced from its appearance to human minds? Is the reference of “water” purely an objective matter? Or is the reference partly constituted by what is in the mind? Water has both a hidden essence, captured by “H2O”, and a superficial appearance, captured by “transparent, tasteless liquid”: is only the first of these constitutive of water? It might be tempting to suppose so—it is necessary and sufficient for something to be water that it be H2O. But that has to be wrong: in a possible world in which something is H2O but has none of the manifest properties of water we would not say that that stuff is water. If it had all the manifest and dispositional properties of honey, it would be wrong to classify it as water, no matter that it is composed of H2O. This might prompt the retort that nothing could be H2O and have the manifest properties of honey, because of the necessary connection between chemical composition and manifest properties; but (a) not all the manifest properties of water follow simply from its being H2O, and (b) this is to concede that manifest properties also count as necessary conditions of being water. In fact, being tasteless and colorless are parts of the nature of water, along with its chemical composition. Natural kinds really have a double nature—underlying real essence and apparent nominal essence (to use Locke’s terminology). Both are necessary to being water, neither being sufficient.

Now we come to the more difficult question: is nominal essence tied essentially to the mind? Is it “in the head”? There is an obvious precedent for such a claim, namely colors and other secondary qualities: objects only have colors in relation to minds—so colors are “in the head”. That means that colored objects (qua colored) are partly in the head: an object is red only because of its relation to a mind that perceives it as red. Colored objects are partly in the world and partly in the head—they have both aspects. In the case of water we can likewise claim that being colorless and tasteless are also secondary qualities: things only have these qualities because there are minds that respond with certain types of sensory experience to them. But there is a further point: the very concept of a manifest property is tacitly mind-relative. Manifest to whom? Properties are only manifest in relation to minds that can perceive them; to beings with different senses from ours chemical composition might be manifest while color and taste are inferred. Real and nominal essence could conceivably be reversed. As things stand, however, the properties we attribute to the surface of water are mind-relative, so that this aspect of the nature of water is mind-dependent. It is a function of how our senses represent the world. Water, as we commonsensically conceive it, is thus partly “in the head”. In fact, the part that is in the head coincides with the part of meaning that is in the head, viz. the sensory appearance. Thus meaning has two aspects, one in the head and one not, and likewise natural kinds have two aspects, one outside the head (chemical composition) and one not (sensory appearance). Meanings have a worldly component and a mental component, but so do the objects we refer to. In the sense that meaning is not “in the head”, so objects are not “in the world”, i.e. they are partly so. It is the fact that objects have a foot in both camps that enables meaning also to have a foot in both camps. Surface properties correlate with demonstrative modes of presentation, while hidden properties characterize the reference, as it exists independently of such modes of presentation. The duality of meaning thus maps onto a duality at the level of reference: the inner component of meaning contains the manifest properties of the reference, while the outer component corresponds to the non-manifest properties. Meaning is a hybrid of internal and external, as the character-content analysis of demonstratives suggests, while objects themselves divide into an objective aspect and an aspect that is tied to perception. The distinction between the scientific image and the manifest image is mirrored in the distinction between content and character, respectively—what is fixed by context or environment or causation and what is wholly subjective or “in the head”. To put it differently, the objects of common sense have a dual component analysis corresponding to real and nominal essence.[1] The abstract structure of objects is thus reflected in the abstract structure of meaning: a bit in the head plus a bit not in the head. Character goes with surface and content goes with hidden. There is more to meaning than what is in the head, and there is more to objects than what appears to heads—but we must not forget that the head-involving aspects are also part of meaning and of objects. Meaning is not only what lies beyond the head, and objects are not only what is independent of appearance; meanings and objects are both hybrids. Meanings are composites of two factors, as Putnam taught us (with a little help from Kaplan), but so also are objects.

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[1] Here we might be reminded of Eddington’s two tables: the table of science and the table of common sense. The former has nothing mind-dependent about it while the latter is a projection of mind. Eddington in effect reifies the distinction of aspects or components that I am suggesting. Frege’s sense-reference distinction also finds a counterpart in the distinction between real and nominal essence—roughly, the distinction between the known and the unknown properties of objects. Senses are necessarily known by one who grasps them, but it is possible to refer to things and know little about them. Then too, we have Kant’s bifurcation into the phenomenal and the noumenal. In philosophy later distinctions often trace back to earlier distinctions. And what seems unitary often turns out to be divided.