Biological Philosophy of Language

Linguistics has grown accustomed to viewing human language as a biological phenomenon. This view stands opposed to two other views: supernaturalism and cultural determination. Ancient thought conceived of language as a gift from God, closely adjoined to the immaterial soul: this accounted for its origin, its seemingly miraculous nature, and its uniqueness to the human species (we are God’s chosen ones). Recent thought instead insisted that language is a cultural product, a human invention, an artifact: this too accounts for its origin, nature, and uniqueness to humans (only humans have this kind of creative power). Both views deny that language is a species-specific adaptation driven by natural selection and arising in the individual by a process of organic maturation—rather like other natural organs. The “biological turn” in linguistics maintains that language is not supernatural or cultural but genetically based, largely innate, founded in physiology, modular, a product of blind evolution, organically structured, developmentally involuntary, invariant across the human species, and part of our natural history. Biological naturalism is the right way to think about language.  [1] No one would doubt this in the case of the “languages” (systems of communication) of other species like bees, birds, whales, and dolphins; human language is also part of our biological heritage and our phenotype (as well as our genotype). But this perspective, though now standard in linguistics, is not shared by contemporary philosophy of language: we don’t see these questions framed as questions of biology. Not that existing philosophy of language overtly adopts a supernatural or cultural conception of the nature of language in preference to a biological conception; rather, it is studiously neutral on the issue.  The question I want to address is whether the received debates in philosophy of language can be recast as questions of biology, in line with the prevailing biological perspective in linguistics. And I shall suggest that they can, illuminatingly so. I thus propose that philosophy of language take a biological turn and recognize that it is dealing with questions of natural biology (if the pleonasm may be excused). This will require no excision of questions but merely a reformulation of them. Philosophy of language is already steeped in biology.

            Let’s start with something relatively innocuous: the productivity of language. Instead of seeing this as a reflection of God’s infinite nature or the creative power of human invention, we see it as a natural fact about the structure of a certain biological trait, analogous to the structure of the eye or the musculature. Finitely many lexical units combine to generate a potential infinity of possible sentences—that is just a genetically encoded fact about the human brain. It arose by some sort of mutation and it develops during the course of individual maturation according to a predetermined schedule. It is humanly universal and invariant just like human anatomy and physiology. It should not be viewed as a purely formal or mathematical structure but as an organic part of the human animal. So when the philosopher of language remarks on the ability of speakers to construct infinitely many sentences from a finite set of words by recursive procedures he or she is recording a biological fact about the human species—just like bipedal posture or locomotion or copulation or digestion. Nothing prevents us from saying that the human phenotype includes an organ capable of unbounded productivity—the language faculty. It isn’t supernatural and it isn’t cultural (whatever exactly this means). It is, we might say, animal.

But what about theories of meaning—are they also biological theories in disguise? The biological naturalist says yes: truth conditions, for example, are a biological trait of certain biological entities. The entities are sentences (strings of mental representations—“words”) and their having truth conditions is a biological fact about them. Truth conditions evolved in the not too distant past, they mature in the individual’s brain, and they perform a biological function. Truth conditions constitute meaning (according to theory), and having meaning is a trait of certain external actions and internal symbols. Meanings are as organic as eyeballs. So a theory of meaning is a theory of a certain biological phenomenon—a biological theory. It says that the trait of meaning is the trait of having truth conditions. Suppose we base the theory on Tarski’s theory of truth: then Tarski’s definition of truth for formalized languages is really a recursive theory of an organic structure. It is mathematical biology. Sentences are part of biology and their having truth-conditions is too; so a theory of truth is tacitly an exercise in biological description. No one would doubt this for a theory of bee language or whale language, because there is no resistance to the idea that these are biological traits—a theory of truth conditions here would naturally be interpreted a theory of a biological phenomenon. Bee dances don’t have their truth conditions in virtue of the bee god or bee culture, but in virtue of genetically based hardwired facts of bee physiology. It isn’t that bees collectively decide to award their dances with meanings—and neither do human infants decide such things either. Sentences have truth conditions in virtue of biological facts about their users, whether bee or human. Semantics is biology.

Consider Davidson’s project of translating sentences of natural language into sentences of predicate calculus and then applying Tarski’s theory to them. Suppose that, contrary to fact, there existed a species that spoke only a language with the structure of predicate calculus; and suppose too that we evolved from this species. It would then be plausible to suppose that our language faculty descended from theirs with certain enrichments and ornamentations. Then Davidson could claim that their language gives the logical form of our language and that it can in principle translate the entirety of our language. This would be a straightforward biological theory, claiming that one evolved trait is equivalent (more or less) to another evolved trait. The “deep structure” of one trait is manifest in another trait. Likewise, if we view a formalized language as really a fragment of our natural language, then a claim like Davidson’s is just the claim that one trait of ours is semantically equivalent to another trait—that is, its semantic character is exhausted by the formalized fragment, the rest being merely stylistic flourish. For example, the biological adaptation of adverbs is nothing more than the surface appearance of the underlying trait of predicates combining with quantification over events. Thus we convert the Davidsonian program into a biological enterprise—to describe one trait in terms of other traits. This is the analogue of claiming that the anatomy of the hand is really the anatomy of the foot, because hands evolved from feet—just as our language evolved from the more “primitive” language of our predicate-calculus-speaking ancestors in my imaginary example. Our language organ is both meaningful and combinatorial, and Davidson has a theory about what these traits consist in: he is a kind of anatomist of the language faculty.

Then what is Dummett up to? He is contending that the trait of meaning is not actually the trait of having truth conditions but rather the trait of having verification conditions.  [2] We don’t have the former trait because it has no functional utility so far as communication is concerned (it can’t be “manifested”). So Dummett is claiming that a better biological theory is provided by verification conditions. This is a bit like claiming that the function of the eye is not to register distal conditions but to respond to more proximate facts about the perceiver, these being of greater concern to the organism (cf. sense-datum theory and phenomenalism); or that the function of feathers is not flight but thermal regulation (as apparently it was for dinosaurs). Dummett is a kind of skeptic about orthodox descriptions of biological traits. He might be compared to someone who claims that there are no traits for aiding species or group survival but only traits for aiding individual or gene survival (“the selfish meaning”). Quine is in much the same camp: he claims that no traits have determinate meaning, whether truth conditions or verification conditions. The alleged trait of meaning is like the ill-starred entelechy—a piece of outdated mythology. A proper science of organisms will dispense with such airy-fairy nonsense and stick to physical inputs and outputs. For Quine, meaning is bad biology. Nor would Quine be very sanguine about the notion of biological function: for what is to stop us from saying that the function of the wolves’ jaws is to catch undetached rabbit parts? Our usual assignments of function are far too specific to be justified by the physical facts, so we should dispense with them altogether. We need desert landscape biology: no vital spirits, no meanings, and no functions, just bodies being stimulated and responding to stimulation—Pavlovian (Skinnerian) biology. Quine is really a biological eliminativist.

Where does Wittgenstein fit in? He emerges as a biological pluralist and expansionist. He denies that morphology is everything; he prefers to emphasize the biological deed. He forthrightly asserts that language is part of our “natural history” (not much discussion of genetics though).  [3] The Tractatus employed an austere biology of pictures and propositions, while the Investigations plumps for a great variety of sentences and words as making up human linguistic life. Wittgenstein is like a zoologist who once thought there were only mammals in the world and now discovers that there are many types of species very different from each other. He also decides it is better to describe them accurately than try to force them into predetermined forms. His landscape is profuse and open-ended, like a Brazilian jungle. He is resolutely naturalistic in the sense of rejecting all supernatural (“sublime”) conceptions of language. What he would have made of Chomsky I don’t know, but he would surely have applauded Chomsky’s focus on the natural facts and phases of a child’s use of language. His anti-intellectualism about meaning (and the mind generally) is certainly congenial to the biological point of view.

What about Frege? Frege is the D’Arcy Thompson of philosophical linguistics, seeking the mathematical laws of the anatomy of thought. He discerns very general structures of a binary nature (sense and reference, object and concept, function and argument) and finds them repeated everywhere, like the recurrent body-plans of the anatomical biologist. The human skeleton resembles the skeletons of other mammals and indeed of fish (from which all are derived), and Frege finds the same abstract structure in the most diverse of sentences (function and argument is everywhere, like the spinal column or cells). But these abstract structures are not antithetical to biology, just its most general features. When a laryngeal event occurs it carries with it a cargo of semantic apparatus that confers meaning on it, intricate and layered. The speech organs are impregnated with sense and reference as a matter of their very biology, not bestowed by God or human stipulation (the underlying thoughts are certainly not imbued with sense and reference as a matter of culture). Thus it is easy to transpose Frege’s logical system into a biological key—whether Frege himself would approve or not. Again, we should think of the developing infant acquiring a spoken language: his words have sense and reference as a matter of course not as a matter of cultural instigation—this is why language precedes culture for the child. Acquiring language is no more cultural than puberty is cultural (and I have never heard of an ancient theory to the effect that puberty is a gift from God). Meaning comes with the territory, and the territory is thoroughly biological.

Ordinary language philosophy? Why, it’s just ecologically realistic biological theorizing, instead of rigid attachment to over-simple paradigms. It’s rich linguistic ethology instead of desiccated linguistic anatomy.  It’s looking at how the human animal actually behaves in the wild instead of clinically dissecting it on the laboratory table. Austin, Grice, Strawson—all theorists of in situ linguistic behavior. Nothing in their work negates the idea of an innate language faculty expressed in acts of speech and subject to biological constraints. When Austin analyzes a speech act into its locutionary meaning and its illocutionary force he is dissecting an act with a biological substructure, because the language faculty that permit the act is structured in that way. Words are strung together according to biologically determined rules, and the same is true of different types of illocutionary force. Zoology took an ethological turn when scientists stopped examining rats and pigeons in the laboratory and turned their attention to animal behavior in its natural setting; ordinary language philosophy did much the same thing (at much the same time). This led to considerable theoretical enrichment in both cases as the biological perspective widened. One can imagine aliens visiting earth and making an ethological study of human linguistic behavior, combining it with organic studies of speech physiology. They would add this to their other investigations of bee and whale linguistic behavior. All of it would come under the heading of earth biology.

Of course, biologically based language activity interacts with cultural formations, as with speech acts performed within socially constructed institutions (e.g. the marriage ceremony). But the same thing is true of other biological organs—say, the hands: that doesn’t undermine the thesis that basic biological adaptations are in play. It is not being claimed that everything about language and its use is biologically based. But the traits of language of interest to philosophers of language tend to be of such generality that they are bound to be biological in nature. For example, the role of intention in creating speaker meaning, as described by Grice, introduces a clearly biological trait of the organism—purposive goal-directed action. We don’t have intentions as a result of divine intervention or cultural invention; intention is in the genes. Intention grows in the infant along with motor skills and doesn’t depend upon active teaching from adults. Intentions will play a role in cultural activities, but they are not themselves products of culture. The same is true of consciousness, perception, memory, and so on—all biological phenomena.

According to Chomsky, a grammar for a natural language simply is a description of the human biologically given language faculty. Following that model philosophical theories of meaning have the same status: they are attempted descriptions of a specific biological trait. Semantic properties are as much biological properties as respiration and reproduction. Philosophy of language is thus a branch of biology. The standard theories are easily construed this way. Semantics follows syntax and phonetics in making the biological turn. Fortunately, existing philosophy of language can incorporate this insight.  [4]

  [1] For an authoritative study see Eric Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language (1967) and the many works of Noam Chomsky. If we ask who is the Darwin of language studies, the consensus seems to be Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835).

  [2] The positivists may be construed as claiming that no sentence can have the trait of meaning without having the trait of verifiability. One trait is necessary for the other. This is like claiming that no organ can circulate the blood without being a pump or that no organ can be the organ of speech without expelling air. Thus a metaphysical sentence can’t be meaningful because it lacks the necessary trait of verifiability. No evolutionary process could produce a language faculty that included sentences that mean without being verifiable. Put that way, it looks like a pretty implausible doctrine—why couldn’t there be a mutation that produced meaningful sentences that exceed our powers of verification? Meaning is one thing, our powers of verification another.   

  [3] “Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.” Philosophical Investigations, section 25.

  [4] It would be different if existing philosophy of language tacitly presupposed some sort of divine dispensation theory, or a brand of extreme cultural determination; but as things stand we can preserve it by recasting its questions as biological in nature. There is nothing reductionist about this, simply taxonomically correct. 

                                                Being Queer

In section 196 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein writes: “In our failure to understand the use of a word we take it as the expression of a queer process. (As we think of time as a queer medium, of the mind as a queer kind of being.)” Earlier (section 93) he remarks: “One person might say ‘A proposition is the most ordinary thing in the world’ and another ‘A proposition—that’s something very queer!’… Why do we say a proposition is something remarkable? On the one hand, because of the enormous importance attaching to it. (And that is correct). On the other hand this, together with a misunderstanding of the logic of language, seduces us into thinking that something extraordinary, something unique, must be achieved by propositions.—A misunderstanding makes it look to us as if a proposition did something queer.” In Part II of the Investigations (p.215) he tells us of an experience of wrongly imagining a city to be on the right and comments: “’But what is this queer experience?’—Of course it is not queerer than any other; it simply differs in kind from those experiences which we regard as the most fundamental ones, our sense impressions for instance.” And there are other places in which he speaks of a “queer fact” (p.200) and a “queer reaction” (section 288) and says the following (section 428): “’This queer thing, thought’—but it does not strike us as queer when we are thinking. Thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking, but only when we say, as it were retrospectively: ‘How was that possible?’ How was it possible for thought to deal with the very object itself? We feel as if by means of it we had caught reality in our net.” From these scattered remarks we must glean what we can about how Wittgenstein understands the concept of queerness in philosophy. Two ingredients immediately stand out: (i) the queer is unusual and (ii) the queer is not something we should accept at face value. When we speak in this way something has gone wrong in our thought. Wittgenstein thus contrasts the queer with the ordinary; he regards it as unique and remarkable (as we conceive it); he thinks it goes with thinking of something as mysterious; and he takes it to be distinctly dubious and ultimately illusory.  [1] Still, we have more work to do in order to elucidate the concept of the queer fully.

            The OED provides a wonderfully succinct definition: “queer: strange; odd”, noting its old sense of “slightly ill” and adding a second meaning of “a homosexual man” described as derogatory. We can see ingredients (i) and (ii) at work in this definition: first, there is the statistical notion in which to be queer is to be infrequent or rare or contrary to the norm; second, there is the pejorative connotation of “strange” and “odd”, as in “oddball” or “strange brew” (though the negativity is not pronounced). Something is queer if it is uncommon and vaguely discreditable (though it can also be seen as remarkable or possibly supernatural). The term “queer” for a homosexual man certainly carries (or did carry) a negative evaluation, no doubt deriving from attitudes towards its designation. The word itself appears in the English language in the sixteenth century and began to be applied to homosexual men only in the nineteenth century, reaching its pejorative height in the twentieth century. Perhaps it was initially used to express rarity (statistical sense) and only later gained a pejorative tone. I suppose Wittgenstein was familiar with this use of the word, though whether its connotations featured in his philosophical use of it I hesitate to say (he was reputed to be an instance of the category himself). Other uses of the term, especially earlier, are not pejorative, but merely descriptive, as in Mr. Rochester’s comment to Jane Eyre: “I sometimes have a queer feeling in regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it’s as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame”. Here the queer feeling is not understood as disagreeable, perhaps the contrary—though rareness is implied (tenderness too). Then we have expressions like” A queer expression came across her face”, where the meaning appears close to “curious”. So the meaning is not irredeemably negative (this will be important in what follows). We must also not forget the old Yorkshire saying, “There’s nowt so queer as folk”, where the meaning is not that homosexuality is universal, but rather that people can be unpredictable and inscrutable (“a rum lot”).

            Returning to philosophy, we also have John Mackie’s use of the phrase “the argument from queerness” summed up as follows: “If there were objective moral values, then there would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.” Here we observe the use of “strange” as a synonym for “queer”, and also the claim that such objective values would be different from everything else—hence rare, out of the ordinary. I suppose Mackie got the word from Wittgenstein, though he doesn’t cite Wittgenstein in this connection, and his meaning is clearly close to Wittgenstein’s, especially in its pejorative overtones. I think it is fair to report that in this usage the word combines the following elements:  unusual, puzzling, queasy-making, mysterious, discreditable, and dubiously applicable to anything real. The queer is what gives us a queer feeling or sensation; it’s how something strikes us not how it is objectively.  [2] Wittgenstein lists time and mind along with meaning in 196—his point being that these two things elicit impressions of queerness from us, though there is nothing objectively queer about time and mind (or meaning). Let’s make a fuller list of the queer and not-queer as these categories are apt to occupy the philosophical intelligence: queer—mind, time, values, meaning, numbers, universals, necessity; not-queer—matter, space, facts, symbols, objects numbered, particulars, actuality. An enormous amount of philosophy has been generated around these contrasts, spurring many a reduction or rejection. The queer is generally frowned upon, maligned, and shown the door. Hence Mackie’s appeal to the concept in arguing against the objective reality of value—“Get away values, you’re queer!”

            Now I am not concerned to adjudicate these issues here; my concern is with the concepts involved and how they shape debate (this is meta-philosophy). The word “queer”, like the word “stupid”, is apt to invite the intensifier “fucking”, as in “That’s fucking queer!” It is built for strong disapprobation (consider that intensifier used in conjunction with “queer” for a homosexual man). But such terms often provoke a backlash, an attempt to reclaim them from the lowlands of insult and prejudice. Thus we have the use of “queer” to describe certain kinds of men by those very men—gay men proudly proclaiming themselves queer. We even have “queer studies” and “queer rights” and “queer eye for the straight guy”. And these uses are not etymologically wide of the mark, since “queer” does have a non-pejorative meaning, suggesting uniqueness, interestingness, nonconformity, specialness, exceptionality. Isn’t genius pretty queer? The word became pejorative because of prevailing attitudes, but it is not beyond redemption, so maybe it can be worn as a badge of honor (a bit like “cockney” or “scouser” or ethnic labels generally). Who wants to be commonplace, ordinary, easily understood, and humdrum? Better to be queer! This suggests a comparable move in philosophy: embrace the word “queer” if it describes a view you agree with. Thus one might say in response to Mackie: “Yes, objective values are queer (strange), but that is no objection to them—some things are very different from everything else!”  There is no need to tremble in shame as the dreaded label is thrown in your direction—own it, accept it, revel in it. The model here is the use of “mystery” and cognates as labels for certain philosophical positions: maybe the first use of “mysterian” was intended pejoratively, but semantically it is quite apt, so why not embrace it? Just as there is a problem-mystery distinction, so there is a commonplace-queer distinction—and some philosophers might wish to occupy that last niche.  If so, they can adopt the label and wear it proudly. Thus we can christen certain philosophers “queerians”, in some instances “new queerians”, while others can be called “anti-queerians” (compare realists and anti-realists). The general doctrine could be labeled “queerianism”, and it can come in different varieties (say, epistemological and metaphysical). Who in particular might be so labeled? Opinions may differ on this but Plato, Frege, and Meinong are good candidates for the label, being generally unconcerned about affronting common sense; I suppose some dualists might accept the label too (“Cartesian queerianism”). There are some things that give us a queer sensation when we contemplate them, but that is perfectly reasonable given their special nature (e.g., abstract unchanging universals, truth-values conceived as objects, non-existent but nevertheless real entities). Moral realists might welcome the label as a way to accentuate their position, better than the bloodless “non-natural” they have been saddled with. Is God queer? Why not—he is certainly not commonplace. Some may even point out, timorously, that matter has got pretty queer in the last three hundred years—queer physics! The word well expresses our feelings when we contemplate certain subject matters, and those feelings are real and appropriate. (Gravity is so queer.) Philosophy has been in flight from the queer given the fearful connotations of that word, but maybe it is time to resist this kind of name-calling by adopting it proudly (assuming it describes your actual position). At least the issues should be debated in these terms and not prejudiced by blatantly derogatory language. What other labels do we have, after all, except those formed by negation from the opposite term (“non-natural”, “nonsensical”, “unintelligible”)? Wittgenstein was onto a genuine and useful philosophical category, despite his disapproval of it; so we should keep it, suitably refurbished. It colorfully adds to our theoretical vocabulary. I would even say it forms a vital part of philosophical consciousness—how our minds work when they are engaged with philosophical problems. It captures the phenomenology.

            Once the concept of the queer has been properly absorbed we can ask questions employing it. Is all queerness epistemic or is some found in reality (metaphysical queerness)? Is the queer ever reducible to the non-queer? How are queerness and mystery related? What exactly is the phenomenology of feelings of queerness? Are there different types of queerness (e.g., fact queerness, value queerness)? Are some queer things queerer than other queer things? What is the queerist thing of all? Might everything turn out to be queer? Is non-queerness ultimately an illusion?  [3]

  [1] Thomas Nagel informs me that Wittgenstein used the German world “seltsam” (“strange”) which Anscombe translates as “queer”. This word is never used in German to refer to a male homosexual, so presumably he did not intend any such association. Nagel suggests that Anscombe chose “queer” to emphasize the disturbing element.

  [2] It might thus be taken as a secondary quality–as something conferred on the world by our sensibility not found in it already present. To be queer is to be disposed to produce queer feelings.

  [3] It would be queer indeed if everything we think we know about turned out to be queer. Empiricists took sense impressions to be clearly not queer, but now we recognize that they have a queerness of their own (they stand in a queer relation to the brain). Classical materialists of the mechanistic variety took matter be devoid of queerness, but physics has proved otherwise. Everything can come to seem queer if you think hard enough about it. What is a particular? Isn’t instantiation itself a queer relation (recall Plato’s view of it)? What about causal necessity? How queer is truth? Maybe that old Yorkshire saying needs to be generalized.

Beauty and Life

Judgments of beauty are always comparative and contrastive. One thing is deemed to be more beautiful than another or to contrast to something thought dowdy or ugly. There is no such thing as maximal or absolute beauty; the concept is essentially ordinal. If someone says that a certain bird is beautiful, she has in mind other less beautiful birds (or some other standard of beauty); you can’t judge something beautiful but be unprepared to compare its beauty to other things. The concept of beauty is like the concept of health: the primary notion is “x is healthier than y”. It is not like the concept of truth (or arguably the concept of good or right). We can conceive of an aesthetic judge as operating against a background of aesthetic judgments that form a standard of comparison, and this background can vary from judge to judge. Someone surrounded by a plethora of beautiful things will judge differently from someone surrounded by aesthetic dross, proceeding from a different aesthetic baseline. The example of clothes perhaps illustrates this best: a dress will be judged beautiful according to how it compares to other dresses with which the wearer is acquainted or can imagine.

            Is there some basic standard that applies universally? Is there some object that forms a baseline of comparison for everyone at all times and places? Do we judge the beauty of a given object by comparing it to thatobject? For example, do we judge beauty by comparison with the starry sky? Something is deemed beautiful or not according to whether it is more or less beautiful than the stars. That could be so for some conceivable species of being: the sky is available to everyone (more or less) and it is certainly an object of aesthetic evaluation, so it might form a universal standard of comparison. It is a better candidate than, say, a particular species of bird or a certain tradition of painting, which are only selectively available, as well as arbitrary. But it is hard to believe that the night sky could play such a pivotal and pervasive role in the case of ordinary human judgment. Do we ever refer our judgments of beauty to such a standard? Do we ever say: “Yes, this is a nice diamond ring, but not as beautiful as the starry sky”?

            Judgments of beauty by different people converge fairly closely, suggesting that there is a universal point of comparison—something with which everyone compares the things that come his way. There is something fixed that anchors aesthetic comparisons, but what is it? I suggest the following: human life. We judge the beauty or otherwise of our life as a human being and we compare other things to that life. And the point I want to make is that human life is not beautiful and is recognized to be so. That is why we judge beauty as we do—because we sense the contrast between ourselves and other things. Things in general tend to be more beautiful than we are and we know that to be the case. We are somewhat beautiful, or beautiful in certain respects, but mainly we are not. There are two main aspects to this: our organic nature and the shape of our lives. Birth and death are not beautiful, nor are diseases and injuries, and we live daily with the disgusting aspects of our biological nature. However outwardly beautiful, a human being is intimately acquainted with his or her less attractive aspects—and hence aware of the contrast between these and other objects (paintings, birds, etc). These objects represent an aesthetic ideal to which no human being can aspire, because of the lack of beauty manifest in human existence. But the second aspect is equally compelling: the narrative arc of human life is formless and chaotic, poorly plotted, incoherent, just not the product of an artist. We feel this keenly—the formlessness of life. Hence we tell ourselves consoling stories in which our life has some inner coherence or point or destiny, but we are well aware from our day to day existence that it is just one damn thing after another. It’s mainly a jumble, dependent on chance and exigency, on the accidents of our place and time, with no more aesthetic form than the life of any animal. A ballet it is not, nor an opera. So we cannot find in ourselves the kind of beauty we seek, except in certain pockets—we are far from aesthetically ideal. We are thus susceptible to art in which we are represented as more perfect than we are—as idealized beings. We also appreciate the perfectly formed and immortal: crystals and stars, symphonies and sculptures. Likewise, we sometimes make comparisons favorable to ourselves: the rat or worm is ugly compared to us, and scenes of devastation have even less form than our lives. In both cases we use ourselves as aesthetic yardstick.

            Two consequences of this account of aesthetic judgment may be noted. The first is that it presupposes a certain type of self-consciousness: we make such judgments against a background of awareness of our own aesthetic condition. We judge our own beauty first and other judgments are referred back to this. Animals don’t have this kind of self-consciousness; and this may have something to do with their lack of aesthetic experience. Our outer-directed aesthetic experience is conditioned by our self-directed aesthetic experience—by our sense of ourselves as aesthetic beings (very much a mixed bag). Judgments of beauty are not like judgments of color and shape, though we may speak of perception in both cases; they are far more conceptually sophisticated and dependent on our conception of ourselves. Animals and babies see color and shape, but they don’t see beauty, because that requires a structure of self-reflective thought that they lack. Judgments of beauty take place against a cognitive-affective background of comparison and contrast, with ourselves at the center, casting a jagged shadow.

The second consequence is that judgments of beauty depend upon the beauty of the judger: is the object more or less beautiful than myself with such-and-such a degree of beauty? Consider the gods: being beautiful themselves, they find little in art or nature to compare to them; their ascriptions of beauty are therefore restricted and qualified. They are not much impressed by Michelangelo’s David or Leonardo’s Mona Lisa: for they outshine such merely human products in their own divine nature. Works of art leave them cold, though they see why we imperfect beings might be impressed by them given our own dismal point of comparison. The gods live with beauty in themselves day in and day out; they need no relief from their own want of beauty. Who needs art if you are art? The sublime can be found without ever looking outwards, just by self-examination. The gods may be utter philistines when it comes to anything outside themselves.

            The human aesthetic sense is governed by an awareness of comparisons anchored in our assessment of our own aesthetic nature: it is, in one sense, anthropocentric. This baseline, common to all humans, determines the way we rank objects in our environment from an aesthetic point of view, and it shapes the way we produce art and respond to nature. To put it simply, when I say, “This object is beautiful” I am saying, “This object is more beautiful than I am”.  [1] A great many things count as beautiful by this criterion, anything with more aesthetic value than one’s own dull and dreary (and ugly) life. We don’t live beautiful lives, but the consolation is that we find beauty outside ourselves, thus beautifying our lives. Such beauty as we find in our lives springs from the lack of beauty ofour lives. Our urge to create and appreciate beautiful things stems from our awareness of the lack of beauty within us. We are aesthetic beings because we are unaesthetic beings.

Colin McGinn                  

  [1] This is a bit too simple, but it serves to get the point across: judgments of beauty are shaped by our aesthetic response to our own lives.

Analysis of Matter

What is the general nature of concepts of matter? How are such concepts to be analyzed? Is there a general nature or only a plurality of concept-types? Ryle wrote a book called The Concept of Mind (note the uniqueness implied by “the”), arguing that mental concepts are generally dispositional in form; what would a book called The Concept of Matter contain? I will begin to answer this question by considering the concept of motion (someone could write a book with this title too), a concept vital to physics. So I am concerned with the analysis of matter-in-motion: how do we conceive of matter-in-motion, and how should we conceive of it? What is the “logical structure” of this concept? This question is not to be distinguished from the question of what motion is—or what it is for a material object to move. What is the logical form (conceptual analysis) of, say, “The earth moves”?

            Immediately we are confronted by a difficulty, because there is controversy about the nature of motion. Some say it is absolute and some say it is relative (I say it is both, but we will get to that). We don’t need to settle the question for present purposes, since we can consider my question under either assumption. So suppose it is relative: motion only makes sense against the background of a plurality of objects, consisting in relative change of position. Then we can say that motion statements are relational in form: roughly, “the earth moves” means “the earth changes position relative to some object x”. The object in question may be indefinitely distant from the object said to move, so motion is not a local property of an object (the motion of the earth is usually referred to the sun). This is not apparent on the face of the statement we are analyzing, but that is not generally any objection to an analysis. We say, then, that the predicate “x moves” means “x moves relative to y”. I shall say that the concept of motion is an object-introducing concept, meaning that it refers us to an object not initially supposed essential: it is as if we can’t speak of x moving unless we are first introduced to another object y. We can’t speak of motion in isolation but only in the context of a system of objects. Motion is essentially relational. To put it differently: motion is not locally supervenient; it depends on what is going on in the environment of the object in question. It is not internal to the object that is said to move. It is not an individualistic property. We need to be externalists about motion, recognizing that motion only occurs in a certain context—it is object-dependent or object-involving. The moving object is only so in virtue of being embedded in world in which other objects exist that confer motion on it. The state of motion of one object incorporates the state of motion of other objects.

            I have put the point in these ways because I want to explore an analogy between motion and mental content. According to a dominant tradition, motion was conceived as an inherent property of an object, intrinsic and internal. An object could be in motion even though no other object existed. But a counter-movement arose that questioned this idea: motion is something that essentially involves other objects, even remote ones. Similarly, there was a tradition that located mental content within the subject, so that what you mean or think is independent of anything in your environment: it is a matter of your brain or your inner subjective state. But a counter-movement arose that questioned this idea: content is something that essentially involves other objects, even remote ones. Thus we are treated to twin earth cases and other ways of demonstrating the object-dependence of mental content. The environment fixes content—as it fixes motion. Externalism about meaning and motion became received wisdom. And these doctrines were intended to capture the actual character of our concepts, which had previously been misunderstood. As the slogan goes, “meanings are not in the head”; and neither is motion “in the object”—it’s in the relation between objects. In my terms, the concepts of meaning and motion are object-introducing concepts. That is their logical structure—what they logically imply. Thus all the characterizations that are applied to the mind can be carried over to matter-in-motion: externalism, anti-individualism, non-locality, non-supervenience, relationalism, environmental determination, object-dependence, etc. We thought that motion was internal to objects, part of their inner nature; but now we see that motion lies in the connection between one object and another, a matter of their external relations. The concept of motion is therefore a concept with an internal complexity that extends beyond its initial appearance—dyadic not monadic, two-factor not one-factor. Note, particularly, that it characterizes a fact that extends across space to possibly remote objects, and indeed brings in every object in the universe. It is not just a property of an isolated object doing its thing locally, sublimely unconcerned about everything else. It isn’t like shape or mass or atomic structure. It is more like size or length or being up or down: things have these attributes only relative to other things not intrinsically.

            One might think that the relational analysis only works if we accept relative motion not absolute motion. But that is not quite right, because so-called absolute motion is not really absolute: it is motion relative to space, conceived as eternally static and at rest. As Newton understood it, the motion of a body occurs against the background of an unmoving spatial manifold: space stays where it is while objects pass through it. So all motion is relative to something, though not to other material bodies. This something, however, is highly local, being either contiguous with the moving body or pervading its volume. So motion is relative but local on this conception: moving through an enveloping space. And what it is relative to is of a different nature from the moving body itself—space not being a kind of matter. So the concept of motion relates the moving object to a surrounding entity—viz. space—relative to which it moves; it is still a relational entity-introducing concept (I say “entity” not “object” because space is not a material object in the style of the relative theory of motion). Logically, then, the two views are not that far apart, despite the difference of ontology. A truly internalist view of motion would suppose that motion is entirely intrinsic to the object, not even relative to space. Thus this kind of absolutist would insist that even if the surrounding space did not move relative to the object the object might still be moving: for both the object and surrounding space might both be moving! Only if we suppose space to be necessarily at rest can this possibility be ruled out, but even then the following counterfactual might be true: “If space were to move along with an object, that object would still be moving”. That is, the concept of motion allows for the conceivability of motion without change of relative position with respect to space. This makes motion super-intrinsic—independent even of space (as presumably shape is: things are not triangular relative to their surrounding space).

            Here our analogy proves helpful. Consider a super-internalist who holds not merely that mental content is independent of the environment but also is independent of the subject’s brain and inner subjective state. This internalist holds that content is completely intrinsic to concepts themselves and is not dependent on anything outside of it—not the brain and not the subject’s subjective experiences. He might maintain that the mind is not the brain but an immaterial substance, and that we could vary a person’s subjective state and keep his concepts constant. For example, we could vary his senses and their phenomenology while not changing what he thinks and means: his concepts are not supervenient on his brain states or sensory states. They are supervenient on nothing but themselves (and possibly the immaterial substance). The usual kind of internalism supposes that the independence concerns only the external environment, but this extreme kind of internalism takes concepts to be independent even of states internal to the subject (not including concepts themselves). Thus we have externalism, internalism, and super-internalism (“intrinsicalism”); and similarly we have three views of motion—relativity to remote objects, relativity to space, and relativity to nothing save itself. That last view may not be plausible—it may not even be coherent—but it exists as an option that someone might adopt. After all, geometric properties are not defined relative to space: a circle is not circular only in relation to non-circular space, whatever that may mean. In any case, the two leading contenders for the nature of motion both regard it as fundamentally relational—much as mental content is regarded as fundamentally relational. Reflection in both cases has persuaded us that a superficially monadic concept is really a dyadic one. In the case of the relative theory of motion the extra object can be remote from the given object, while in the case of the absolute theory (so-called) it is as proximate as could be. The absolute theory should not be saddled with the idea of completely non-relative motion, which makes dubious sense; instead it is a question of which entity motion is relative to and where that entity is located. The absolutist might say, “Of course motion is relative, only not to remote objects but to surrounding space!”

            But which theory is true? I will not attempt to adjudicate that question; I will merely note that both could be. That there is such a thing as change of relative position there can be no doubt, and if we choose to call that motion (not unreasonably), then relative motion exists. But it doesn’t follow that no other kind of motion exists: maybe there is absolute motion as well. Objects could move relative to each other and relative to space. If I say to you, “Don’t move till I get back!” I don’t intend to blame you for your motion as the earth moves; I mean relative to the room you are in. But I can also talk about motion with respect to space and mean precisely that (rightly or wrongly—rightly in my view). Thus we have two concepts of motion that coexist in our conceptual scheme, and hence two types of conceptual analysis.  [1] They vary in their ontology but they are similar in logical form. Accordingly, we recognize two types of property when we use motion words, so we conceive of matter in two different ways: bits of matter change relative positions, but they also change their relation to space—they are capable of doing both. It follows that our concepts of motion have different analyses. This is analogous to the claim that we have two concepts of content, wide content and narrow content, which can coexist. Both are legitimate and useful, though they are differently defined and serve different purposes.

            Do all concepts of matter fit this pattern? I have already suggested that concepts of shape or configuration don’t: here there is no submerged relationality, whether remote or proximal–internalism rules. Geometric concepts are not covertly object-introducing; they are self-enclosed and just as they appear. I think the same thing is true of the concepts of mass and charge: these are not defined relative to some environmental variable—we would not be right to be externalists about these properties. They look like dispositional concepts, and as such refer to interactions with other things; but the same thing is true of all dispositional concepts, mental or physical. No one is surprised by this kind of relationality; by contrast, it comes as something of a revelation to discover that motion is relative (it is somewhat similar with size and length). Motion is a bit like color in this respect: we start off thinking color is intrinsic to objects and then are surprised to find that it depends on relations to perceivers. Whether a given object is red depends on whether other distant objects (i.e. perceivers) see it as red; color isn’t written into the object considered in itself. So it seems that we have three types of physical concept in our repertoire: intrinsic (shape), dispositional (mass and charge), and object-introducing (motion and size). There is not a single homogeneous type; physics is made up of three distinct concept-types with three different kinds of analysis. It would be pleasant to report that psychology is likewise made up of three such types, and arguably it is  [2]; in any case, conceptual heterogeneity holds in the case of the science of matter. This is a result in the conceptual science of science.

Colin McGinn

  [1] Imagine a possible world stipulated to contain both sorts of motion: it contains an absolute space with respect to which objects move, as well as the more humdrum kind of relative motion. Then inhabitants of that world would need two concepts to cover the facts. It seems to me that in our world we have two sorts of concern to which talk of motion answers—practical and theoretical, to put it briefly—so we naturally employ two concepts. The case is somewhat like the concepts of weight and mass. Put tendentiously, one kind of motion might be designated realand the other apparent.

  [2] There are mental states with content like beliefs and desires, which are object-introducing; there are mental traits like irascibility and generosity, which are dispositional; and there are occurrences like being in pain or feeling moody that are non-relational and non-dispositional.