Externalism and the Cogito

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Externalism and the Cogito

 

 

The basic meaning of the Cogito is that the existence of a conscious state implies the existence of a subject of that state. Thus thinking implies a thing that thinks, where that thing is not identical to the thought itself. We might say that something external to the thought is implied by the thought—a distinct existence. If selves were material objects, this would give us the result that conscious states imply the existence of material objects—though that is not the only conception of the self that might be invoked. Still, the idea is that something of another nature is implied by consciousness: it isn’t thoughts that are the subject of thoughts, but something of a different order. To have a thought it is necessary for this other entity to exist; the thought is not a self-subsistent entity capable of independent existence. It depends on the existence of something outside of it. This contrasts with the position that the mind is merely a collection of free-floating states of consciousness, owing nothing essential to anything outside of those states. Only what is internal to thought is essential to its existence. Thus we cannot validly propound anything like the Cogito: from the existence of thoughts we can infer nothing but the existence of thoughts. Accordingly, thoughts could exist in a world consisting of nothing else as a matter of metaphysical possibility, whereas the Cogito asserts that thoughts require the existence of other things in order to exist. Thoughts require the existence of selves in order to have being at all, according to the Cogito, while they are conceived as ontologically autonomous by the contrasting position. This is why Descartes held that the Cogito provides leverage against the skeptic: it enables us to get beyond the mere existence of states of mind into a broader reality.

I have stated the Cogito in such a way as to bring out its analogy with externalism about mental states.[1] For that doctrine also asserts that thoughts imply the existence of something beyond themselves—not the self, however, but the objects of thought. That is, it asserts that thoughts cannot exist in the absence of external objects that give them content: they draw upon objects distinct from themselves in order to be thoughts at all. There is thus an analogue to the Cogito: “I think, therefore the objects of my thought exist”; for example, “I think that London exists, therefore London exists”. The direct reference, Russell-Mill-Kripke-Kaplan, view of names implies a modified Cogito, now relating to the subject matter of thought not merely to its subject. Generalizing, thoughts are not self-subsistent autonomous entities that can go their merry way without reliance on anything else; they depend upon an ontological realm beyond themselves—what we are pleased to call the “external world”. Put differently, they are not merely subjective entities locked up in the mind but possess objective conditions of existence: no external world, no thought. The contrasting view is that thoughts only contingently have objective correlates; in themselves they are free-floating entities beholden to nothing outside their own boundaries. They exist entirely within the subject and could exist in the complete absence of an external world. As a corollary, their content cannot vary without some variation in their internal characteristics, notably their introspectively available nature: same inner appearance, same content. The externalist, by contrast, claims that content can vary while inner appearance remains the same (Twin Earth etc.). Here we have an analogue in the case of thoughts and their subjects: identity of thoughts implies identity of subject for the internalist about subjects, while the externalist maintains that the same thoughts could correspond to different selves thinking them. Consider psychological twins having exactly the same thoughts: one view says they must be the same self, since selves cannot transcend collections of thoughts, while the other view says that two distinct selves could have the same thoughts. In both cases the internalist insists that no reality beyond thoughts themselves need enter the picture—neither subjects nor objects—while the externalist holds that thoughts essentially involve an extra level of reality. The externalist sees thought as reaching out to selves and external objects, drawing them in so to speak, while the internalist sees thought as standing apart from everything else. The question at issue between them is whether the mind incorporates other regions of reality or whether it is sealed up in itself.

The point I am driving at is that externalism and the Cogito are in the same line of business seen from a broader perspective. The Cogito is a kind of externalism: it regards thought as incorporating an “external world” of selves—entities that are not reducible to thoughts and might even pre-exist them (depending on what exactly selves are). Similarly, the modern externalist holds that thoughts incorporate objects in the environment existing at some distance from the subject and generally pre-existing thought. The externalist thinks that thoughts have existential implications beyond themselves, just as Descartes thinks that thoughts imply the existence of selves distinct from themselves. And just as he argued that the Cogito thwarts the skeptic, so the modern externalist contends that externalism undermines radical skepticism: for both take thought to involve more than merely inner states whose nature is exhausted by introspection. Thoughts drive us in a direction beyond themselves, thus delivering us from the walled-in world of pure subjectivity—so at least it is supposed. Ironically, then, Descartes is the first externalist—the first to claim that thought is possible only because of things outside of thought. He is opposing the idealist notion that there could be nothing but ideas, i.e. states of consciousness, because ideas themselves require the existence of non-ideas—the selves that have them. Externalism merely pushes this point a stage further by contending that thought content is not independent of non-mental reality (particulars, natural kinds, properties, etc.). Thought involves the world at both ends so to speak. It embraces the world; it doesn’t shun the world.

In fact, according to the clear-headed externalist, thought doesn’t exactly “reach out to” or “embrace” or “incorporate” or “include” things beyond itself—though those locutions are immensely tempting—since it alreadyembodies the world in its inner architecture. A thought just is a subject apprehending objects; it doesn’t achieve this condition by starting from a different position. There is no reaching out to do, no implying or extending or grasping, since that is what a thought constitutively and originally is. The fact of thought contains subjects and objects as part of its inherent make-up, according to the externalist; it doesn’t need to stir itself into miraculous acts of inclusion, as if employing a magical lasso. It is not an essentially inner thing with remarkable powers of attraction; it is an outer thing from the start. That is, the Cogito and its externalist counterpart merely express what a thought is in its original nature. A thought is a subject-object complex for the committed externalist, where the subject and object are not themselves instances of something mental. If we are materialists, subject and object are both material things, so thought (in addition to its material realization in the brain) embeds both a material self (perhaps consisting of the body) and a material external world (tables and chairs, water, tigers, etc.). The Cogitoand its modern externalist counterpart situate the mind in a world of things whose nature is not inherently mental—selves and freestanding objects. Thus both oppose the idealist position that thoughts can exist in a world devoid of non-ideational being, as if they need neither a subject to possess them nor an object to be what they are about. There is no clean separation of mind and world of the kind the idealist presupposes.[2]

 

[1] I won’t defend, or even much articulate, externalism here, but bear in mind that the doctrine comes in several varieties and that the external entities invoked can vary from material particulars to Platonic universals and numbers—anything that isn’t mental in nature. A relatively weak version of it says simply that thoughts concern properties and properties are non-mental attributes of external things: see my Mental Content (1989).

[2] Clearly I am sympathetic to externalism (of a suitably restricted kind), but in this paper I am suspending the question of its truth and merely exploring an analogy with the Cogito. It is perhaps surprising that such a famously Cartesian thesis should be so consonant with modern externalism, which prides itself on rejecting a (supposedly) Cartesian view of mind. Actually, I don’t think Descartes would have much objection to Twin Earth cases and the like.

 

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Being Conscious

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Being Conscious

 

 

What is consciousness? What is its basic and essential character? I shall suggest the following: consciousness is the feeling of being. This terse formula will need some elaboration but it is useful as a summary statement. I mean to be speaking of consciousness in the broadest sense—the kind of consciousness (sentience) found in birds, reptiles, fish, even insects, as well as humans. Mainly this is sensory consciousness, though other kinds branch out from the basic kind (presumably it was the earliest kind of consciousness to evolve). There are two sides to the characterization I propose, corresponding to feeling and being. By the latter I simply mean existence: to be conscious is to feel the existence of something. Here two historical figures come into play: Brentano and Descartes. Brentano maintained that to be conscious is to be conscious of something, generally something other than oneself, say objects in the environment. Descartes maintained that being conscious implies one’s own existence (the Cogito)—consciousness carries within it the knowledge of the existence of a self. Putting these two thinkers together, we can say that being conscious carries a double existential implication: it implies the existence of a subject of consciousness and the existence of something other than the subject. It is existentially committal in two respects. Possibly these intimations are misleading (illusions etc.), but they are real intimations nonetheless. Consciousness posits a duality of existences. The suggestion is that these are universal features of consciousness, as Brentano and Descartes supposed; they are necessary and definitive. I think that is basically right, but I won’t here go into the pros and cons. The important point is that conscious states are being-directed while non-conscious states are not (being square doesn’t imply the existence of anything). We can see this in the grammar: to be consciously seeing (say) is for a subject to see an object—there is no subject-less seeing of non-objects.[1]

What about the feeling part? I intend by this word to capture the primitiveness of consciousness in its most basic form—it is a primordial type of feeling. It is not a judgment or a mental act or a belief or an emotion; it isn’t “conceptual”. To be conscious is to feel a certain way—to feel consciously. Thus consciousness is rightly classified as a sensation: whenever an organism is in a conscious state it has a characteristic sensation, the sensation of consciousness. There are sensations of red and sensations of pain, but there is also the sensation of consciousness itself. You can feel this sensation in yourself during your waking hours; it attends your every conscious move. A being might not this have this sensation, in which case it would not be conscious. If you attend now to your visual experience, you will detect various visual sensations, but in addition to these you will find the sensation of consciousness itself. This is why you are aware of your consciousness—because you have sensation of consciousness that you know about. So the feeling of being is a sensation directed toward being—you sense being, you have a sensation of it. It is not that you believe in being whenever you are conscious or that you make a judgment about it; rather, you have a primitive sensation of being. But this sensation cannot occur in the absence of consciousness, as arguably other sensations can, since it is what consciousness is—it is precisely the sensation of consciousness (the consciousness-sensation). If you have a conscious sensation of pain, say, you have both a sensation of pain and a sensation of consciousness. The latter sensation accompanies all conscious mental states uniformly despite their phenomenological variety. When you recover consciousness upon waking up you start to have a sensation that will be present throughout your waking hours—not a higher-order judgment that you keep making or a certain type of omnipresent emotion or a mental act repeatedly performed. You have the consciousness-sensation, a specific feature of mental life.[2]

The view I am describing has points of contact with Sartre’s view of consciousness.[3] He emphasizes the fact that consciousness essentially posits being: the for-itself aims itself at the in-itself. It is not an enclosed self-subsistent being. He doesn’t describe it as having a sensation-like character, but this claim is consistent with his analysis. What he does emphasize is what he calls the “nothingness” of consciousness—the idea that consciousness has no positive being over and above its posited objects. I won’t try to explicate this idea here, merely noting that it can be added to the account I am developing. In Sartre’s terms, consciousness harbors a negation: it is not the objects it posits. It transcends those objects, though not because it is another object, but rather because its being is to be pure other-directedness. It posits existence without being an existent thing like the things it posits—it has a kind of invisible vanishing existence: nothingness, in a word. So, following Sartre, we can say that consciousness is the feeling of being that distances itself from being: it posits being as not itself. It is the feeling of being while feeling itself not to be a being (an in-itself). Thus three notions come together in consciousness: feeling (sensation), being (existence), and negation (nothingness). These are fundamental features of our conceptual scheme, as well as of objective reality. We can therefore say, filling out our simple formula, that consciousness is the feeling of double existence that presents itself as removed from existence (transcending it) and as not itself an existent thing (except as a kind of nothingness).

There is another way to put the view I am proposing: we can speak of manifest being and non-manifest being (pure being). Inanimate objects have non-manifest or pure being: their being is not manifest to any conscious subject, save per accidens. They simply are without any necessary recognition of this fact. But in the case of conscious subjects being becomes manifest, as when we recognize our own existence in acts of consciousness. Consciousness makes our being (and other being) manifest, so it is the agent of being-manifestation. Instead of saying that consciousness is the feeling of being we can say that it is being become manifest, thus shifting the emphasis to the level of being. Consciousness is being become aware of itself. At one time being was manifest to no one, but then consciousness came about and being became manifest. Being caused being to become aware of being. Thus the feeling of being became part of being, with its characteristic structure (sensation plus being plus negation). Instead of saying that consciousness consists in a subject feeling an object we can equivalently say that consciousness consists in an object making itself manifest to a subject—the difference is one of emphasis.

An idealist would insist that there is no being without the feeling of being, possibly a feeling in God’s mind. So there is no pure being: all being derives from the feeling of being–all being is manifest being. This is another way of saying that everything is made of consciousness, so idealism can be formulated using this definition of consciousness. It is the doctrine that all being is felt being. Being consists in sensations of being, i.e. consciousness. An idea in the mind of God is a sensation of being, since God is a conscious being, though no doubt more capacious than human sensations of being. When God has the sensation that a table exists a table exists—that’s idealism under the present theory of consciousness.

How does this account relate to the idea that consciousness consists of states there is something it is like to have? This phrase is usually coupled with the idea of subjectivity, which in turn is analyzed in terms of epistemic access: a state is said to be subjective if and only if it can only be grasped by experiencing it oneself. Thus what it is like to be a bat is subjective in the sense that only beings with experiences like bats can know what kind of state is in question.[4] Clearly this is an epistemological point concerning knowledge of conscious states (or possibly unconscious ones if they are similarly restricted in their conditions of understanding, e.g. subliminal bat perceptions). As such it belongs to a different level from the kind of constitutive conditions I have been discussing: those are internal to conscious states, part of their structure, whereas subjectivity in the sense defined concerns relational facts about knowledge of conscious states. It says they are only knowable in a certain way, i.e. from a particular “point of view”, not from any point of view. There is nothing wrong with characterizing conscious states in this epistemological way, but it should be distinguished from the search for the constitutive nature of such states. There is no incompatibility between the two; they are aiming at different things. The feeling of being that defines a particular kind of conscious state, say a bat’s echolocation experiences, is something that can only be grasped by sharing that feeling, so that subjectivity (in the sense defined) can be added to existence, feeling, and negation that characterize the inner structure of a state of consciousness. Being can be felt (and simultaneously transcended) in different ways, and these ways correspond to differences in epistemic accessibility. There are different things it’s like for organisms and these consist in different ways that being can be felt.

But that doesn’t imply that consciousness itself is a variable commodity in the sense that the property of being conscious itself varies from organism to organism. If what I said earlier is correct, that property is uniform across types of conscious state—within an organism and across organisms. It is the same sensation in all cases—the sensation of consciousness as such. In this sense we do grasp the consciousness of bats, since their consciousness consists in the same thing as ours, viz. that feeling or sensation that makes a state a conscious state. The bat’s echolocation experience is not like anything we possess, but its being conscious is just like what we possess, since that property exists in our experience too—the property precisely of being conscious. If consciousness is a type of sensation, then bats and humans share a sensation (over and above other shared sensations), namely the sensation of being conscious. What we can’t grasp is the nature of the sensory experiences that bats enjoy, but we can grasp what consciousness is for bats, because it is the same for us. All sentient beings are united by a single mental property, i.e. the sensation of being conscious. The bat feels existence by exercising its echolocation sense, and that feeling is subjective (accessible only from one “point of view”); but in addition to that it has a sense of its own consciousness—a certain type of sensation that being conscious consists in. If consciousness consisted in possessing a higher-order thought, we would get the same result, since we know what higher-order thoughts are from our own case; but the same result follows from the sensational theory of consciousness. So there is a sense in which we don’t grasp the consciousness of bats but also a sense in which we do.

What would be a good label for the view I am describing? The label “phenomenological existentialism” suggests itself: it conveys the idea of feeling and the idea of existence, as well as their joining together. But those words carry a lot of baggage and are cumbersome—is there anything catchier and more specific? How about “felt being-ism”? True, it is grammatically awkward, and true it can claim no familiar antecedent; but at least it captures the view briefly and clearly. It’s either that or we appropriate some French or German phrase that resists translation into English, a task I leave to those more linguistically adept than I am.

 

Coli

[1] Of course there can be hallucinations, but the experience is still object-directed—it has an “intentional object”. It is as of an object.

[2] There might be other such constant sensations such as a sense of your own unity or of the presence of space and time. My suggestion is that a sensation of being conscious pervades all waking life: you constantly feel your own consciousness in the mode of sensation.

[3] See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943).

[4] See Thomas Nagel, “What is it Like to be a Bat?” (1972)

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Reducibility

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Reducibility

 

 

Some things are said to be reducible, others irreducible. I wish to consider two questions about such claims:  (a) what their modal status is and (b) what their explanation is. I won’t be interested in whether the claims are true or false but only in whether their truth is necessary or contingent and in why they are true when they are true. I will focus on the irreducibility of mind to body, assuming that this is a genuine case of irreducibility.

The first question, then, is whether the mind is necessarily irreducible or only contingently so. We are accepting that nothing about the brain as it actually exists affords an adequate reduction base for the mind—not neurons, axons and dendrites, chemical transmitters, etc. It doesn’t follow from this that no brain properties couldserve as an adequate reduction base: maybe there are possible worlds in which the mind is reducible to properties of the brain that don’t exist in our world. Maybe brains have a richer set of properties in some other world and these properties allow a successful reduction of the mind. For example, assume that panpsychism is false in our world, so that such properties cannot be appealed to as a possible reduction of the mind as we experience it—there just are no such properties of matter in the actual world, inside the brain or outside. That is consistent with accepting that in some other world the brain might be endowed with micro-mental properties and that these provide a successful reduction. Suppose that in that world we have ample evidence for the existence of these micro-mental properties and that physics has long since recognized their existence (they might even affect the behavior of elementary particles). It then turns out that a combinatorial scheme can generate macro-mental properties from these more basic micro properties—the case is structurally just like the atomic theory of matter. There is a mental chemistry that relates the mind reductively to its micro-constituents. Whether we choose to call those constituents “mental” or “physical” matters little; the important point is that there exists a set of facts that provides a satisfactory reduction. Or again, there might be some hitherto undreamt of set of properties that exists in a possible world that can provide a reduction, even though nothing in the actual world can perform this role. If so, though the mind is actually irreducible, it might not be necessarily irreducible (though we could still say that it is necessarily irreducible in the actual world).

Similarly, something may be reducible in the actual world but not in all possible worlds. Thermodynamics is reducible to statistical mechanics in the actual world, but is it so reducible in all worlds? What if a world contains heat phenomena but no molecular motion (the molecules stay still in this world)? Maybe heat is reducible to something else in this world, or maybe it is reducible to nothing. What if chemistry is not reducible to physics in a possible world because there are no negatively charged particles in that world? Just as the same things can have different explanations in different possible worlds, so natural phenomena can be differently reducible in different worlds. Does liquidity always have to reduce to sliding molecules in all worlds? Maybe it is a primitive property in some worlds, or maybe it reduces to perturbations in a continuous substance. Just because X is reducible to Y in our world doesn’t imply that the same reduction obtains in all possible worlds. Reduction is contingent.[1]

If these reflections are correct, Descartes could have been right about the mind as it exists in the actual world but not as it exists in all worlds. Maybe in some worlds matter is richer than Cartesian mechanism allows so that there is less of a gap between it and thought (the essence of mind). Maybe functionalism stands more chance of being true in a world that contains more subtle kinds of functional role than what obtains in the actual world (experiences of red may have a different functional role from experiences of green in this world, so that we don’t have inverted spectrum problems). None of this would imply that in our world functionalism is true, but some version of it might be true in another world (relative to the kinds of mind that exist there). Even something deserving the name “materialism” might be true in world in which the physical world is richer than our physical world. If this is so, we could say that it just happens that the mind is irreducible in our world—it might have been otherwise. Reduction is a metaphysical possibility.

But if it is merely contingent that the mind is irreducible in our world, why is it the case that it is so irreducible? If the mind is not intrinsically irreducible, then presumably something must explain why it is irreducible as things are—there must be something about our world that makes it so. There must be a reason for the irreducibility. There is a reason for reducibility when it obtains, which is not difficult to discover: roughly, things are generally combinations of simpler things. The universe starts with a range of basic ingredients and then these combine to form more complex structures, but nothing fundamentally new comes into the world—thus stars, planets, galaxies, rock formations, mountains, and continents. Molecules form from atoms, ever more complex. Primitive organisms form from molecules (we don’t yet know precisely how). Simpler organisms give rise to more complex ones. There is an unbroken chain, an intelligible and predictable sequence. It all hangs coherently together. Reduction, then, is only to be expected; it is certainly not something to be surprised about—no one says, “How amazing, mountains are reducible to rocks!” Nor are we stunned to find that water is H2O and heat is molecular motion. Things are composed of other things according to laws and intelligible modes of combination. It is irreducibility that is surprising from a cosmic perspective: how does the universe contrive to create novel types of entity? For example, granted that the mind is irreducible, why should that be so? Couldn’t it have been reducible? In some worlds it may be. What is the explanation of irreducibility in our world? Why does the universe indulge in it? This may seem like a strange question, but perhaps considering some possible answers will make it less strange.

Suppose the mind has some functional biological property P that cannot be conferred by the brain, as the brain is constituted in the actual world.  Then natural selection could lead to the propagation of P—even though the brain has no property that can reduce P. Here we have a biological explanation of the irreducibility of the mind: it has a property that brains can’t confer that is advantageous to survival. That is the reason an irreducible reality arose.  Irreducibility could arise when a chance mutation is selected that brings a new trait into circulation. That is, the explanation of mental irreducibility is that a chance factor combines with natural selection to favor a given trait that has no basis in anything else. In general, chance can lead to new forms, which may or may not persist. According to this explanation, irreducibility arises for intelligible reasons (in so far as chance is intelligible); it is not just a brute inexplicable fact. It might even arise from basic indeterminism at the quantum level. Alternatively, it might be said that the explanation of mental irreducibility is that God intervenes in nature to inject new ingredients into the world, expressly designing it to contain irreducible elements. He doesn’t leave nature to its own combinatory devices. Whether these are good explanations, is not to the point—which is that irreducibility requires an explanation. It is not a predictable necessary truth about how things are. In fact, it is a puzzle, an anomaly, compared to reducibility. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t a reality just that it is a surprising fact about nature. Given the way nature generally works, we would expect the mind to be reducible—as bodily organs are reducible (the brain is not irreducible). Something special must be invoked to explain its existence as an irreducible being. If we say that the mind is essentially subjective and hence irreducible, then the puzzle is why the evolutionary process gave rise to a subjective entity instead of making do with the objective entities already on the menu. What does subjectivity do for the organism? Why didn’t evolution install objective traits functionally like the subjective mind, thus allowing for reduction? The lack of reducibility calls for some kind of explanation, but it is not at all clear what this explanation might be. It hardly seems like a completely chance occurrence with no underlying rationale.

Compare fact and value: why is value irreducible to fact? We might reply: because values are normative and facts are not. That is some kind of explanation for irreducibility–and notice that it applies in any possible world. But the case of mind and body is not like that because the mental-physical divide is not comparable to the fact-value divide: the former exists within a natural evolutionary process while the latter reflects the very different purposes of factual and normative discourse.[2] It is not at all surprising that values differ from facts and are irreducible to them, but it is surprising that an irreducible type of reality arose during the course of evolution. This is why the latter irreducibility cries out for explanation while the former does not. We don’t know the reason why an irreducible mind arose—though (it may be supposed) we know that it did. In general, we don’t know why the universe contains irreducible things as well as reducible ones. It seems like an eccentric proclivity, a fondness for variety for its own sake. A thoroughly reducible universe would be a lot easier to comprehend.[3]

 

Colin McGinn

 

[1] The astute reader may observe that if reduction implies identity then we will have the same reduction all worlds, since if X is identical to Y it is so in all worlds. For example, heat will always be reducible to molecular motion in all worlds since heat is molecular motion. But we need not have such a simple view of the reduction relation: what matters for reduction is that everything about the reduced domain is explicable in terms of the reducing domain. And identity is certainly not sufficient for reduction or else “Hesperus is Phosphorous” would count as a reduction (and molecular motion would be reducible to heat). In this paper I shall try to avoid presupposing any specific theory of reduction, leaving the notion at an intuitive level.

[2] I am not here attempting to give any serious account of the fact-value distinction, or even defend its reality; my purpose is merely comparative.

[3] Another way to put the question of this paper is: Why does the universe contain (non-reductive) supervenience as a well as (reductive) identity?

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Mathematical Existence

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Mathematical Existence

 

 

The Platonist asks us to accept that mathematical entities exist independently of human thought in much the same way that material objects do. The central claim of both types of realism is that the entities in question pre-exist the existence of minds and would continue to exist even if minds did not. They do not derive their being from mental acts. Material objects are said to exist in space and time, while mathematical objects are said to exist outside of space and time; still both exist separately from minds, occupying their own region of reality. In both cases we are thought to have a conception of what this independent existence consists in—we understand what each type of realism is saying. In the case of material-object realism we can also envisage minds without external objects, as with brain-in-a-vat scenarios or dreams or hallucinations or simple illusions: the mind might be in the same state as it is now and yet no material objects answer to its representations. This possibility provides a clear sense in which material objects exist independently of minds: their existence is not entailed by the existence of corresponding mental states. So minds don’t entail a material world and a material world doesn’t entail minds. Material objects exist over and above minds. According to most views, matter and mind causally interact, which demonstrates their ontological independence—though it is possible that the two merely exist in parallel consistently with realism.

But here a disanalogy appears: for there is no analogue for mathematical objects of the brain-in-a-vat scenario. We can’t envisage a situation in which mathematical thoughts occur and yet correspond to no objects: the brain in a vat can’t be thinking mathematical thoughts and yet these thoughts are not about what they purport to be about. For example, you can’t be thinking that 2 + 2 = 4 and yet there are no such numbers as 2 and 4  (and no such things as addition and equality). We can’t subtract the objects from reality and leave the mathematical mind intact. You can’t hallucinate the number 3 as you can hallucinate a table, having merely an impression of that number. In the case of mathematics mind entails existence: there can be no mathematical mind without corresponding mathematical objects. Of course, this doesn’t yet tell us what the nature of those objects might be; what it does tell us is that the analogy with material objects breaks down at a crucial point. Mathematical existence is bound up with mathematical thought, while material-object existence is not bound up with material-object thought. Thus you can be a skeptic about the material world but not about the mathematical world: material objects might not exist, consistently with the existence of minds apparently about them, but mathematical objects must exist if there are minds that think about them.[1] To put it differently, mathematical intuition implies that there are suitable objects for it to be about (whatever their nature may be). You can’t think about numbers and yet there are no numbers for you to think about—but you can think about material objects and there not be any.[2]

This presents a challenge to Platonism. According to Platonism, numbers exist independently of minds, so it should be possible to separate them in thought from the minds that apprehend them; but that appears not to be possible on reflection. At the very least, the model of material-object existence breaks down. We can’t conceive of the mind as occupied about matters mathematical—performing a calculation, say—and yet no numbers are being apprehended and none exist; but we can conceive of a mind seeming to perceive material objects and yet failing to because there are none to be perceived. This is part of what realism about material objects asserts, plausibly so, but realism about mathematical objects cannot make a parallel assertion. It looks as if mathematical cognition entails mathematical existence, which is not what Platonism suggests: that is far more consonant with forms of mathematical mentalism. To be sure, it doesn’t entail that metaphysical position, but it does present a puzzle to the Platonist: why the failure of symmetry with the material object case if mathematical reality is as fully independent of the mind as Platonism suggests? The mathematical anti-realist will argue that mathematical objects without mathematical minds is a fantasy, and that the entailment from mathematical thought to mathematical existence shows that mathematics must be ultimately mental. How is the Platonist to explain the fact that there can be no mathematical thought without mathematical objects? Precluding skepticism in this way is a symptom of anti-realism, since it prevents us severing mathematical reality from mathematical cognition. We can’t say, “It might turn out that there are no numbers, despite my having mathematical thoughts concerning them”. And we can’t say, “Mathematical reality might be a complete hallucination” as we can say, “Material reality might be a complete hallucination”. But then we can’t articulate Platonism in mathematics in the way realism about material objects is typically articulated.[3]

 

[1] I put aside here fictional views of numbers; my point is just that we can’t get an analogue of a skeptical scenario for mathematics, i.e. the idea that our mathematical thoughts, which purport to be to be about real things, are actually about nothing. We couldn’t just be dreaming that numbers exist as we could be dreaming that a material world exists.

[2] Morality belongs with mathematics in this respect: no moral thoughts and feelings without moral values. We can’t envisage a world in which there are no moral values and yet people think of them. Again, this presents a challenge to moral realism, since one would expect the analogue of material-object realism to obtain: for it encourages the idea that moral values are mental constructions or projections not external realities not entailed by internal facts. The case of realism about other minds, on the other hand, mirrors realism about material objects, since we can envisage a situation in which we have the same thoughts about other minds and yet there are none (we are surrounded by zombies).

[3] Could we limit Platonism to the claim that mathematical objects can exist without being known? But it is difficult to see how that is consistent with the admission that mathematical thoughts entail the existence of mathematical objects—how could something whose nature is entirely non-mental be guaranteed to exist by mental acts?  Certainly we don’t think that is possible in the case of material objects.

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Connectives and Necessity

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Connectives and Necessity

 

 

In Naming and Necessity Kripke argues against the description theory of names and offers a theory-sketch to be put in its place, often labeled the causal theory. He then extends his critique to apply to common nouns (natural kind terms) contending that they too are not to be defined by means of descriptions but rather owe their reference to certain kinds of causal chain. What he doesn’t do is inquire into whether the critique can be extended yet further. Here I will do just that, focusing initially on logical connectives such as “and”, “or”, and “not”. The question, then, is whether these terms satisfy a description theory, and if not what kind of theory should be put in its place. Instead of employing the notion of reference, which may appear tendentious, we may prefer to formulate the issue in terms of the “semantic value” of such terms, so the question becomes whether (say) the term “and” has the semantic value of conjunction in virtue of the fact that speakers associate certain individuating descriptions with “and”. To fix ideas, we might cite a description like “the truth function that has such and such a truth table”, though a description like “Russell’s favorite truth function” is not to be ruled out on logical grounds. When a speaker uses “and” to refer to (express) conjunction does she do so by having a description in mind along these lines? Does she pick out conjunction with a description like “the truth function with such and such a truth table” and then abbreviate that with the monosyllable “and”? Does she have a little logician in her head that knows how to characterize conjunction uniquely? This would be the analogue of having a little historian in your head that enables you to refer to Winston Churchill using “Winston Churchill” by knowing various historical facts about that individual, such as that he was the prime minister of Great Britain during World War II.

It is easy to see that this kind of theory runs up against the same kinds of problems Kripke diagnosed for ordinary proper names. The main one is the problem of error: speakers may make mistakes about the properties of the things they refer to. In the Godel/Schmidt example, the obscure Schmidt is the inventor of the incompleteness theorem not Godel, yet people still refer to Godel with “Godel” and not Schmidt despite associating “the inventor of the incompleteness theorem” with the name “Godel”—their mistaken belief does not direct their reference towards Schmidt. Similarly, a logically inept speaker might wrongly suppose that a conjunction can be true if only one of its conjuncts is true (he would be a very logically inept speaker), but that wouldn’t mean that his use of “and” expresses disjunction not conjunction. The reason in both cases (according to Kripke) is that there is an historical and social dimension to the meaning of the relevant terms in a given speaker’s mouth—the speaker refers to what people in the past in general referred to with “Godel” or “and”. He just happens to have a false belief about what he is referring to (this would be even clearer if the description the speaker had in mind were “Russell’s favorite truth function” in the situation in which actually Russell liked disjunction more). Likewise, just as a speaker might refer to Feynman with “Feynman” even if all he knows about the physicist is that he is some famous physicist or other, a speaker might refer to conjunction with “and” even if all he can tell you is that conjunction is some kind of truth function or other. The community’s use of the word in question ensures its reference in an individual’s mouth; his ignorance of facts about the reference doesn’t undermine that. This applies as much to connectives as to proper names. It is in fact an instance of a perfectly general point, namely that what people believe about the things they talk about is not determinative of the reference of their words. You can have all sorts of false beliefs about things and still mean what other people mean by their words. Clearly, the point about “and” can be carried over to “or” and “not”, so our logical vocabulary is not subject to a description theory (assuming Kripke is right about proper names).[1]

Here is another instructive case: the word “necessary”. How does it refer? First, note that it can refer to two different things—metaphysical necessity and epistemic necessity (compare a single name with two referents). Suppose we take it to refer to metaphysical necessity: is this because speakers have true individuating beliefs about metaphysical necessity? Hardly: they might have quite wrong ideas about this kind of necessity. Suppose someone believes that such necessity is truth in all possible worlds whereas in fact there are no possible worlds and metaphysical necessity is a primitive modal property. Then they have a false belief about the reference of their words, but the words still have a determinate reference, viz. metaphysical necessity. Or suppose the speaker thinks the notion corresponds to some outdated and supernatural concept of the metaphysical whereas in fact it is definable in elementary modal logic. That doesn’t cause them to refer to nothing or to something supernatural with the word “necessary”; their personal beliefs are irrelevant to the semantic content of the communal words they use. Or again, they might just know that metaphysical necessity is some kind of necessity or other—they can’t personally distinguish it from epistemic necessity—and yet they still refer to metaphysical necessity not epistemic necessity. The same might be said of the word “causation”: does it refer to whatever satisfies the speaker’s descriptive beliefs? Clearly not, since the speaker might have quite erroneous beliefs about the nature of causation (she might think that causation is nothing but constant conjunction). Ditto for the words “identity” or “true” or “beauty” or “good” or “space” or “time” or any number of other words. The reference of these words will not follow the idiosyncratic false beliefs of individual users. We can’t find out what they refer to in a given speaker’s mouth by surveying the descriptive contents of his or her mind. Just consider all the erroneous beliefs that surround such words as “democracy”, “God”, “morality”, “death”, “consciousness”: none of this matters to the actual semantic content of the word as it is used in a given linguistic community. The point has nothing specifically to do with proper names; it is a general point about the relation between meaning and belief.[2]

Compare syntax and phonetics. No one thinks that the syntactic and phonetic properties of an utterance are determined by the speaker’s beliefs about them. They are a matter of the language itself not what the speaker believes about the language. People can have all sorts of false beliefs about syntax and phonetics—they are not made true by the fact that beliefs about language fix the nature of language, because there is no such fact. Why should semantics be different? What people believe about the reference of their words is not what fixes the actual reference of their words. Kripke claims that causal chains fix the reference of proper names, but the same kind of point applies to any meaningful word—the meaning-determining facts are not facts about individual belief. This is why false beliefs don’t alter meaning. We might put this by saying that the language faculty is independent of the belief faculty (compare the perceptual faculty). A pure causal theory of reference removes reference altogether from belief as a means of reference fixation, but the falsity of description theories already undermines such a theory. So the defects of the description theory of names reflect a much more general point about belief and meaning, as we can see by considering other types of word. It is certainly not true that each word in a sentence has its reference (semantic value) fixed by descriptive knowledge possessed by the speaker; and it is demonstrable that no word is semantically equivalent to a definite description (except a definite description).[3] The point I have been making is that Kripke’s critique of names is just part of a larger critique, and in the light of that larger critique is entirely predictable.[4]

 

[1] It wouldn’t be difficult to construct a similar case for quantifier words by imagining speakers with false beliefs about the properties of quantifiers.

[2] I haven’t discussed rigid designation in connection with the generalized description theory, but an analogue of it holds for connectives and the like (de jure rigid semantic value). The most effective argument Kripke deploys is the error argument, so I have focused on that.

[3] It is true that there can be “descriptive names”, i.e. names stipulated to be equivalent to descriptions (“Let ‘Stanley’ be synonymous with ‘the lizard in my living room’”). But that is not the situation with ordinary proper names.

[4] Another line of argument is that the description theory presupposes reference because the components of descriptions are themselves referential, as in “the father of that girl”. Kripke does not deploy this type of argument and I will leave it aside here.

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Particulars and Universals

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Particulars and Universals

 

 

It is a truism regarding particulars that they cannot be in two places at the same time. This is why alibis work in the law. Types of particulars can have multiple spatially separated instances, but not particulars themselves. Particulars are necessarily singly located things. Of course, they can have parts that are at different places simultaneously, but not the whole object. It is an essential property of any particular that it occupies a unique position in space at a given time. But the same is not true of universals: they can be manifest at different locations simultaneously. We can rightly say that they exist at different places at the same time: for example, the universal green exists wherever there is a green leaf. The same universal can be present at multiple locations simultaneously; and not just parts of it—the thing itself. Universals don’t even have parts; it is the whole universal that exists at a given location whenever a leaf is green. The single thing is spread out over space without detriment to its unity. We don’t think it must be a different green that is present in one place in contrast to another place; it is the same universal green that enjoys multiple locations.  The same particular must exist at one place only, but the same universal can exist at many places—sometimes billions of places. Particulars are spatially tied down, but universals can roam freely—except that there is no roaming, just multiple spatially separated instantiations. The universal is spatially distributed, but the particular is spatially localized. Herein lies an essential difference between the two—their different relation to space. Particulars are individuated by their location, while universals are not—they can be anywhere (sometimes nowhere).

This point should be obvious, but its metaphysical implications less so. Our world is made of two sorts of entities, one that is spatially monogamous and one that is spatially promiscuous. Both are essential to the formation of facts: for a particular to exemplify a certain property is for space to contain an entity necessarily at a single location that instantiates another entity that necessarily has many locations. Even if this second entity happens to have just one instance, it has potentially many instances—as in a world containing a single green leaf. Facts consist of the interplay of the spatially unique and the spatially common. Space offers itself in two ways, as the unique location of a particular and as the residence of a multiply located universal. We should take literally the idea that a universal exists in many places: it is here, there, and everywhere. Space cooperates with particulars and universals to produce facts, where these facts are a combination of the spatially confined and the spatially free-ranging. The world is the totality of combinations of the spatially singular and the spatially profligate—particulars and universals.

We should contrast this metaphysical picture with Plato’s picture (or at least how it has been represented). If we regard universals as existing in platonic heaven, conceived as a separate quasi-space housing the Forms, then they will have a single locus of existence. Within this quasi-space they have a unique location—perhaps all the color universals are clustered together in one corner of a vast hyperspace of universals. We will not then say that universals have their existence in the sublunary particulars that exemplify them; rather, the particulars are said to “participate” in the universals that exist in the otherworldly realm. According to this picture, universals are logically (ontologically) like particulars in that both enjoy a confined existence within their respective spaces—they have a unique location in the order of things. But if we insist on following ordinary language that is not the case: universals exist in, and at, the particulars that exemplify them. They are a totally different kind of being, not locally bounded at all, not sealed off from other being. For all his dedication to the special existence of universals, Plato modeled them too closely on particulars, taking them to be (quasi-) spatially compartmentalized–like so many celestial ducks in a row. But the essence of universals is to be spread out, borderless, scattered, nomadic. When I look out of my window I see greenness (that universal) at many different places: the single entity spreads itself across the landscape, seemingly without strain or limit. It does not (condescendingly) offer shards of itself to individual green objects but rather takes up full-blown residence in particulars, like a lodger. It divides its time between one place and another, but without having to do any traveling between them. Particulars can only get from A to B by taking a trip between them, but universals can effortlessly occupy many places simultaneously, with no travel required.  Thus they don’t descend from platonic heaven (a kind of journey) but rather find themselves spread hither and thither as a matter of course. Their original being is to be located multiply. For particulars, space is a challenge, a cage, and a trap; but for universals, space is no impediment, no constraint, just an arena of absolute freedom. Absolutely nothing prevents a universal instantiated here from also being instantiated (that universal) millions of light-years away. The particular cannot share its being with any remote object, while the universal spreads its being effortlessly. The particular cannot be in two places at once, but the universal is invariably in many places at once.

This has implications for epistemology. Russell talked about acquaintance with particulars and universals, picturing the latter as a kind of non-sensory intuition. Both are necessary for propositions to be grasped and known. But if universals are the distributed entities I have described, then that is too simple—the acquaintance must take a different form. I hesitate to enter this fraught territory, but we might suppose that at least part of acquaintance with universals involves direct perception of them by means of the senses. When you look at a leaf you literally see the universal green. That universal permeates the leaf in all its glory, and you see the leaf as green, so don’t you see the universal itself? Maybe some additional cognitive act is necessary in order to make real acquaintance with the universal in all its generality, but can’t we say that you are literally seeing it whenever you see a green leaf, despite its presence elsewhere? In any case, we need not slavishly model acquaintance with universals on acquaintance with particulars, as if each took a segregated entity as object—as if we can gaze at the individual shining inhabitants of Plato’s heaven. Rather, the universal has an essentially fragmented existence, i.e. it exists at each of its instantiations. The epistemology of universals should reflect this ontological character.

There have been two opposing tendencies in thinking about particulars and universals: one tendency takes particulars to be constructions out of universals, as with the “bundle theory” of particulars; the other takes universals to be constructions out of particulars, as with the idea that universals are collections of particulars (a kind of “bundle theory” of universals). The former theory has trouble accepting that particulars are spatially locked down—why couldn’t the same bundle of properties crop up at different locations? The latter theory has trouble with the fact that universals can exist independently of any specific collection of particulars—couldn’t the same universal exist in some other collection? The truth is that particulars and universals have very different kinds of being, as is clear from their different relations to space. A convincing alibi will always exculpate a particular, but misdeeds by universals can never be exculpated by reference to remote instantiations. Particulars can only be in one place at a time, but universals can be dispersed through space during a given time interval and generally are so dispersed. Any attempt to assimilate the two must face this fact.[1]

 

C

[1] This is one of those rare instances in which a robust dualism is indicated.

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Existence and Consciousness

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Existence and Consciousness

 

 

The idealist sees an essential connection between existence and consciousness: there is no existence where there is no consciousness. Can we make anything of this thought? Suppose an otherwise empty region of space contains an instance of consciousness, say an experience or thought; then we can rightly say that something exists in that region. Consciousness is the kind of thing that confers existence (this is the root of the Cogito). The thing that exists might be said to be the conscious state itself or its bearer (the subject of consciousness). Moreover, this thing is a concrete empirical existent not a merely abstract one. Consciousness is a paradigm of existence; it leaves no doubt of existence. Contrast consciousness with matter: suppose we stipulate that within a certain region of space there is extension, i.e. length, breadth, height, size, shape. Is it an immediate consequence of this that something exists in that space additional to the space itself? No, because space itself has extension, i.e. geometrical properties. It doesn’t follow from the instantiation of geometric properties that space contains an actual concrete empirical thing. Something needs to be added—something concrete. To put it another way, the concept of extension is a mathematical concept, so if matter is defined in terms of extension, we won’t be able to derive concrete existence from it. There is no analogue of the Cogito as follows: “X has extension, therefore X is a material existent”—not if matter is a concrete empirical thing. Thus consciousness brings existence with it while matter (defined as extension) doesn’t: we can’t get our ordinary concept of a material thing out of mere extension. It would be different if we could supplement extension with substance in the Scholastic sense, but that notion is not available owing to unintelligibility (certainly anathema to Descartes). Intuitively, we have no account of the distinction between empty space and what materially occupies it. We thus don’t know what the existence of matter consists in: the concept of extension (geometry) leaves it schematic, abstract, merely mathematical. To be sure, matter has extension, but what we don’t know is the nature of the thing that has it; whereas we do know the nature of consciousness, i.e. what it is that exists when consciousness exists. We have a real conception of mental existence, but we don’t have a real conception of physical existence. In practice we fill out the abstract notion of extension with the concepts derived from our perception of material things, e.g. color, but these have a mental origin, so they can’t be what the objective existence of matter consists in. The suspicion is that when we speak of the existence of material things we know not whereof we speak.[1]

This is where the idealist plants his flag: the only way to explicate the nature of material existence is to borrow from mental existence—material things are really mental in nature. Then we will understand how material things can have concrete existence, just like mental things—they are mental things. They might be sense impressions in human minds or ideas in the mind of God or a special kind of primitive consciousness found in so-called material reality (panpsychism and its ilk). According to each theory, material things turn out to have the kind of existence possessed by mental things. Existence is thus univocal and uniform: all of reality exists in the same way. It is not that minds exist in virtue of one kind of property and bodies exist in virtue of another kind—existence is always mental. To exist is to be conscious in some shape or form. The price of rejecting idealism is to render the existence of bodies problematic, not to say impossible. For what else could their existence consist in? You might try saying that bodies have properties other than extension such as mass, charge and solidity: where these properties are instantiated there must be existence. But these are merely dispositional properties, unlike extension, and so raise the question of what grounds them: what is the intrinsic nature of body? The existence of a thing cannot consist solely in its dispositional properties on pain of rendering it mere possibilia. Again, the contrast with consciousness is stark: in its case we do have a grasp of the intrinsic nature of the existent thing. The idealist insists on something analogous in the case of material bodies, and it is obscure what that might be if it is not more consciousness.

There is a possible view that can block the idealist’s argument, namely that matter possesses an unknown type of intrinsic property that plays the existence-conferring role of consciousness without being consciousness.[2]Call this property M: then we can say that bodies exist in virtue of instantiating M, where M is not identical with C(consciousness). This seems like a logically available position, but one can appreciate why the idealist will jib at it: why postulate such an unknown property when we have a well-known property that can demonstrably do the job of securing concrete existence? Isn’t the idealist position less hand waving, more parsimonious, more intellectually satisfying? Why go noumenal and mysterian when idealism offers such a nice uniform theory? Idealism tells us exactly what existence consists in, intelligibly and invariably, so why speculate about hypothetical unknown properties? Without it we are left with no positive account of what physical existence amounts to—a mere I-know-not-what.

Historically, idealism arose from Descartes and Newton’s mathematical conception of the material world: there was a distinct danger that the material universe might disappear in a puff off mathematical smoke.[3] Indeed, it wasn’t long before theorists began doubting the concrete existence of material things and regarding such talk in an instrumental fashion. If matter is really geometry, we might as well regard talk of it as so much applied mathematics. Physics seemed to take the substance out of the world—it took the body out of body. But idealism resisted this etiolating tendency: it allowed us to recover our sense of the concrete reality of body, albeit in mental form. Before mathematical physics arrived, Aristotle’s teleological physics allowed the concept of purpose to fill out the theory of motion; and purpose could plausibly be supposed to guarantee concrete existence—what has purpose must exist. But once this is banished and classical mechanism is allowed to fix the nature of matter (bloodless extension), a gap opens up in our conception of matter, a gap that threatens its very existence. The contrast between mind and matter becomes unsustainable and matter loses its grip on concrete reality. Thus Berkeley meets fertile ground for saving bodies from evaporating into abstract posits. At least with Berkeley we know what it is for bodies to exist! Idealism allows matter to have the kind of being we understand—the kind possessed by our own minds. Berkeley’s world is a world of complete intelligible existence, whereas Descartes’ world is a world of intelligible existence (the mind) alongside a world of unintelligible existence or faux existence (matter). The fundamental problem is that extension by itself is not sufficient to deliver concrete material being. Nor is it clear that anything in contemporary physics is sufficient either, which is why the physical world is apt to appear theoretically ethereal. In order to deliver concrete reality our conception of matter needs beefing up, and idealism offers itself as the only viable way to do that. For the idealist, existence without consciousness is no existence at all, because in the end consciousness is the only intelligible form of existence there is.[4]

 

[1] Here I am summarizing thoughts that have been around for centuries, from Descartes to Russell, Berkeley to Mach.

[2] This is the view that I myself am inclined to accept, mainly because I see objections to the idealist picture; here I am just trying to give idealism its best shot.

[3] Surely part of the reason we have trouble with Platonism in mathematics is that we can’t form a clear conception of what mathematical existence would be; we feel we are taking it on faith. Numbers are quite unlike episodes of consciousness, in which existence is carried on their face: hence the attraction of mentalist theories of numbers and nominalism generally.

[4] Let me emphasize the alternative—that there are other forms of existence that are unintelligible to us. This position is by no means absurd. The question then becomes whether idealism faces insurmountable problems (I won’t discuss this here).

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Illiteracy at the New York Times

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Today I read this sentence in the book review section of the New York Times: “An interesting , sciencey explanation of the Y chromosome in all it’s vagary and confusion, and the strange trip through the behaviors of the life span of the males of many species.” This is from Mark Morris in By the Book. It is semi-literate in several ways, including not being a complete sentence, but what caught my eye was the grammatical error of using “it’s” instead of “its”. I assume Mr. Morris initiated the error, but think of how many pairs of editorial eyes failed to detect and correct it! And this is the book review section of the New York Times! Is there really no hope for civilization? I would fire the people responsible. Are they trying to promote illiteracy? I felt more despair at this than the many other outrages I have seen recently in this country.

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