Desire and Understanding

 

In the course of a perceptive description of a cat James Joyce writes: “She understands all she wants to” (Ulysses, p.48). The cat doesn’t try to understand what she has no wish to understand, let alone what she cannot understand; she doesn’t try to acquire knowledge that doesn’t interest her. Her desire and her understanding are in perfect harmony. Nor does anyone try to force knowledge and understanding on her. She has what might be called desire-dependent understanding. Presumably other animals are the same way: they understand what they want to understand—what they need to understand to survive, what fits their natural life-style. We could even state a law of zoology: animals understand only what they desire to understand, neither more nor less. There is synchrony, a coordination of the mental faculties. They don’t know things they are not interested in knowing, and they do know what they want to know. That seems only right and proper.

            But humans are the exception to this rule: they understand a lot they have no desire to understand. I am not thinking so much of knowledge of unwelcome facts, though this is real enough; I am thinking of the process of formal education. We are a species that sends our kids to school for many years in order to learn things they are generally resistant to learning; no other species does this. We haven’t always done it: there was a time when human children were not forced to acquire knowledge they had no desire to acquire. But for centuries we have been forcing our children to learn what they desire not to learn—what they have no wish to learn. We have been filling them with desire-denying knowledge. Imagine if the same were true of (say) lions: instead of training their cubs in hunting skills in the usual way, they pack them off to boarding school to force them into endless lessons on correct predatory behavior, keeping them stuck indoors, giving them mountains of homework, forcing them to take stressful written examinations in how to bring down an antelope. We can suppose that the cubs don’t take kindly to this, suffering from maternal deprivation, jungle homesickness, performance anxiety, insomnia, and lifelong neurosis. We can even suppose that this education, so contrary to their natural inclinations, produces serious trauma with the inevitable PTSD. As it is, however, they are not subjected to this desire-denying regimen, but simply play with their mothers and siblings and gradually acquire the necessary skills. So far as I am aware there are no instances of lion cubs refusing to be taught hunting, feigning illness to avoid it, playing truant, and resenting the whole educational process. But human cubs experience the exact opposite: they really don’t like to do what they are coerced into doing on a daily basis for years on end. Their natural desires and their imposed educational program are completely out of sync. Their inclinations are violently flouted (sometimes literally).

            You would think this state of affairs might occasion serious reflection on the part of educators. Generally speaking, to thwart an organism’s natural psychological make-up is considered unwise: this degree of desire suppression might be thought to have some untoward psychological consequences. Isn’t school really a type of prison, psychologically speaking (it has often been experienced this way)? Isn’t it possible that education is inflicting massive trauma on its victims, causing neurosis, anxiety, low self-esteem, and general emotional sickness? And this is happening at a particularly vulnerable time in a human being’s life, when he or she has little in the way of emotional defenses. Could it be that deep-seated and widespread unhappiness results from this systematic violation of human desire? Isn’t it obvious that this is mental cruelty analogous to forcing cats to learn mazes all day? The standard response to this kind of concern is that they will thank us in the long run. There will be misery now, yes, but when they grow up they will feel the benefit. Granted no one would put children through this agony just for the sake of it—they are clearly not happy with the prevailing state of affairs—but the end justifies the means.    [1] We should always be wary of this type of argument (“spare the rod spoil the child” etc.) but there is this special consideration too: the reason for adopting this painful means to eventual happiness is the economic structure of the society that we now live in. So the defense of the oppressive nature of education is that it is necessary to survive in the economic world we have created—not that it is psychologically healthy for children and the adults they will become, or even tolerable. You might as well say, “Yes, I know it’s extremely damaging psychologically, but it’s the only way to prevent people from becoming destitute given the society we have created”. The fundamental point is that we are flouting a zoological law that ensures psychological harmony throughout the animal kingdom. Of course, people do like to learn things, even at school, some people more than others, but the form this has taken under relentless economic pressure is undeniably oppressive, going completely against the grain for almost everybody. (I am no exception: I recall the dread that ”Double Maths” used to instill in me, and I was pretty good at maths.) You would think the system might try to mitigate these deleterious effects, or at least openly acknowledge them; but it is has grown up with a naïve and outdated developmental psychology that pays little attention to the possibly traumatic effects of subjugation to a deeply disliked educational regime. James Joyce’s cat would not tolerate it for a moment–there would be all manner of biting, scratching, and screeching. Really, education should be against the law! And corporal punishment for failing at your lessons or “talking in class”—a class 1 felony.    [2]

            All this combines with a curious inconsistency: children are denied knowledge of what they want to know while being force-fed what they don’t want to know. I am speaking of sexual knowledge. True, things have improved somewhat, but even now there is a reluctance to teach sex with the rigor and determination with which (say) calculus is taught. And sex is a pretty important subject about which people have a lot of natural curiosity (I am here including love, family, friendship, human decency etc.). Shouldn’t children be given a full and deep education in such matters, possibly including examinations, advanced courses, and remedial classes? You can be sure it would be well received: it fits nicely with the human desire to know what it wants to know. And subjects that appeal less naturally to young people (for that is what they are) should be framed in such a way that their epistemic desires are properly respected. Otherwise we run the risk of producing a race of psychologically damaged, thwarted, depressed, warped, anxious victims. We can all now see how awful earlier pedagogical practice was, as we can see the same with respect to earlier child labor practices; but the fundamental problem hasn’t been solved, namely that education, as we have it today, is radically contrary to people’s natural desires. It is against human nature, to put it briefly. If children could learn mathematics in the way they learn their language—quickly, naturally, painlessly—things would be different, but sadly that is not the case given the way the human mind is structured. As things stand, we simply do not desire to learn things the way they are taught to us, or even at all in some cases. Does anyone believe it would be wise to teach every child Sanskrit or metallurgy or medieval manuscript writing on pain of serious punishment—for hours a day, year after year? Does anyone think that the fact that children would hate doing this is no reason not to impose it? We should always respect innate human psychology and not assume it can be violated with impunity. The element of coercion in current educational methods is a source of real concern (or should be), as are the psychological effects of the kind of education now taken for granted. The successful boy or girl is the one who survives this regime with the least psychological damage. I recall the day when I took my very last examination (I was 24) and the intense feeling of liberation I felt after the oppression of my earlier years. The system is frankly inhuman and despotic. It took me several years before the trauma began to wear off and I could live without the nightmare of a typical English education haunting me. And I don’t mean kids shouldn’t have to work so hard (I still work hard); I mean that their wishes in the matter of learning should not be routinely disregarded. They should be treated more like James Joyce’s cat, or as the lioness treats her cubs, or as the gorilla treats its aspiring little gorillas. It works for them; it should work for us (also primates). We should take a more biologically informed view of education. It’s a good idea in education to take a close look at the mind you are trying to educate and not suppose it is like a piece of putty you can mold at will, or as consisting just of a faculty of knowing that is independent of the rest of the human psyche. Children have desires about what they know and how they come to know it, which should be taken into account. So I advocate what might be called desire-sensitive education. 

    [1] Presumably we would all agree that other things being equal it would be preferable simply to download all this stuff into children’s brains so as to avoid the years of toil and heartache associated with traditional education. But of course this is not technically feasible, so we must resort to standard techniques of arduous instruction. Let it be noted that technological efforts to ease the process of education have long been sought, most recently in the form of the computer.

    [2] What would we think if the side effects of a formal education were even more severe than they are today? What if reading, writing and arithmetic caused actual physical pain and actual mental disorder? Would we still try to justify them by the instrumental value of a sound education in the 3 R’s? What if education made people go blind on a regular basis? I hope no one would argue that this would be good for children from a character-building point of view!

 

Meaning, Use, and Time

 

 

I propose to do a Kripke: I will describe an argument that was prompted by reading Wittgenstein—which I neither attribute to Wittgenstein nor endorse myself.  [1] I think it fits many of the things he says, and I also think it is interesting and compelling; but I don’t want to defend it as an interpretation by engaging in elaborate exegesis, and neither do I wish to give it a full defense as an independent argument. (In fact, just between us, I believe it isWittgenstein’s argument, and I also think it is basically sound, but it is not my intention here to establish these propositions; so let’s keep my real opinion hush-hush for the moment.)  The argument has to do with the relation between meaning and use, and centers on how both relate to time. Put very simply, it says that use is spread out over time while meaning exists at a time, so that meaning cannot be use; and yet meaning must be use, there being nothing else it could be. So we have a puzzle, a paradox: meaning must be what it cannot be; in its very nature it cannot be what it intrinsically is. This is a situation calling for philosophical treatment, possibly quite radical treatment; some major surgery is going to be required. I take it the paradoxical element is clear: it is paradoxical to claim that meaning is extended use over time and also that words mean what they do at particular times irrespective of what might be true earlier or later. That does not require elaborate argument; what is less obvious is the truth of the two propositions that lead to the paradox. I will venture to quote a section from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that expresses the paradox I am interested in (strictly the reader should interpret “expresses” weakly in this sentence given my official position): “But can’t the meaning of a word that I understand fit the sense of a sentence I understand? Or the meaning of one word fit the meaning of another?—Of course, if the meaning is the use we make of the word, it makes no sense to speak of such ‘fitting.’ But we understand the meaning of a word when we hear or say it; we grasp it in a flash, and what we grasp in this way is surely something different from the ‘use’ which is extended in time!” (138) Other sections that return to, and elaborate on, this initial formulation include 139, 141, 184, 187, 188, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, and 204. Here we see stated the apparent conflict between the use conception of meaning and the fact that we understand a word at a given time—entirely not just partially. We don’t have to wait to know the future use in order to know what the word means now as the meaning unfurls over time; yet the temporally extended use is the meaning. How can both of these things be true?

            It is very important to see that use is extended over time; this is not disputed by Wittgenstein but simply accepted as obvious by him. We find him being quite explicit about this in sections 198 and 199 (which I won’t quote in full): use is always extended use, repeated use, recurrent use. This is because rules cannot be followed just once: “a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom.” (198) In section 199 we read: “It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on.—To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order,  to play a game of chess, are customs(uses, institutions).” We should really speak of the extended use theory (conception, picture) of meaning; a single isolated use just won’t cut it, according to Wittgenstein. Of course this is quite correct empirically: linguistic use isspread out over time, often a very long time. Notice that Wittgenstein is not saying that meaning and rule-following consist in abilities to use or dispositions to use; he is saying that that meaning consists in repeated use itself (compare the locution “Is he still using?” asked of a drug addict). To understand a word is not to have an ability or disposition to use a word in a certain way over time—that might be possessed at or time or be manifested only once—it is actually to use it regularly over time. That is, meaning is matter of actions performed repeatedly over time: how many such actions must be performed is hard to specify, but a decent number is required. Meaning is something temporally distributed, like a habit or a fitness regimen or a custom. Some facts (things, properties) exist at a time in temporal isolation, while others are essentially spread out in time; meaning is of the latter type. As examples of the former type we might list: shape, size, color, mass, modal status, spatial occupancy, function, geometric relations (such as isomorphism), and picturing. The last item is of special significance because in the Tractatus Wittgenstein compared meaning to picturing, construed geometrically (lines of projection etc.); and picturing is an at-a-time type of fact. Most properties are like this: temporally isolated, punctate, of the moment. They don’t go on through time indefinitely; they can be instantiated just once, requiring no other times for their existence. But meaning, according to Wittgenstein, is different, belonging as it does to the more rare category of the temporally extended. It isn’t the only such property—we also have rule following in general as well as some non-rule-following facts (habits etc.)—but it is an instance of the rarer type.  [2]

            What else can we say of meaning if it consists of extended use? Well, what is a use? Wittgenstein gives us little guidance, but I think the following must be uncontroversial: uses are actions, and these actions are utterances. They are acts of speech, which are utterances (generally vocal but sometimes gestural). The acts occur in certain contexts and circumstances, and they have a history as well as future consequences: meaning consists in such situated utterances, according to Wittgenstein. We may then deduce that meanings are given by specific concrete acts of utterance—generally sounds made by mouths. To say that meaning is use is to say that meaning is, or includes, sound (or possibly hand movements in the case of deaf speakers). What else could linguistic use be? Intentional purposive sound, to be sure, situated-in-a-form-of-life sound, community sound if you like—but still sound. What is sound? We might construe it subjectively as auditory impressions, or we might construe it objectively as physical waves in the atmosphere—in either case meaning is being explained in terms of sounds (along with their “surroundings”). We might then reasonably wonder whether meaning itself has anything to do with sounds, as opposed to the expression of meaning: do meanings sound like anything, can they be measured by a speech spectrograph, what has meaning got to do with the sounds coming out of people’s mouths? But Wittgenstein does not raise such concerns; they suggest the possibility of a category mistake. What he does bring up is the question of at-a-time meaning: how can it be true that I understand a word when I hear or say it? The meaning seems to be right there then not to be in the process of unfolding itself over time: it seems to be present in the instant, hermetically cut off from anything past or future. Some theories of meaning acknowledge this fact: the image theory, Frege’s sense and reference theory, dispositional theories, Gricean intention-based theories, the picture theory, and others. But a use theory cannot acknowledge it in any straightforward way, or so it seems: it apparently has to deny an apparently obvious fact. Hence the paradox, since this fact is not seriously deniable. Something therefore has to go: either meaning is not use after all, or common sense is in error in supposing that meaning can exist whole and entire at a given time. Wittgenstein tries to remove the paradox having first presented it (shades of Kripke’s Wittgenstein): it is a kind of skeptical paradox and it receives a skeptical solution. What that solution is supposed to be I have not ventured to explain, and I think Wittgenstein’s remarks on the subject are obscure, as well as fleeting. The closest he comes to anything you can get your teeth into is section 187, which concludes with these enigmatic words: “When you said “I already knew at the time…..” that meant something like: “If I had then been asked what number should be written after 1000, I should have replied ‘1002’.” And that I don’t doubt. This assumption is rather of the same kind as: “If he had fallen into the water then, I should have jumped in after him”.—Now, what was wrong with your idea?” But I won’t attempt to penetrate this fog here; my concern is with the apparent paradox that leads up to it. For it certainly does seem as if we have a real puzzle before us: there is a definite clash between the use theory of meaning and the temporal facts of meaning. How can meaning exist ata time and yet only exist over time?  [3]

            It might be thought that there is a way out: simply claim that meaning determines use, and is determined by it, without being use. That is, something obtains at a given time that fixes future use but it isn’t identical with future use. We thus modify the original formulation of the use theory to read as follows: meaning consists in an at-a-time fact that determines future use. This seems like our commonsense view: there is something about me now that fixes, anticipates, entails how I will subsequently use my words—and this is what meaning is. The use is contained in the meaning, inherent in it, uncoiling as I make my linguistic journey through time. But famously this is what Wittgenstein contests (at least in the form in which we are tempted to think of it) and which Kripke’s exposition emphasizes: there is no current fact capable of this kind of determination. Or if there is it is not of the kind that philosophers have supposed and common sense seems to assume. Thus the paradox has no evident solution: the inescapably correct extended use theory is inconsistent with the obvious fact of at-a-time meaning. We are stuck with two apparent truths that are inconsistent with each other. This was Wittgenstein’s worry, what he struggled with in the relevant sections of the Investigations (at least this is the interpretation that might naturally occur to one upon reading these difficult pages). Not that there is no fact of meaning at all (as in Kripke’s interpretation) but that there is no present fact: extended use is a type of fact and it suffices to capture meaning (Wittgenstein assumes), but it won’t help us understand how meaning can exist during short intervals of time. It can’t be the fact of meaning if meaning can occur in its absence, i.e. ahead of all those repeated uses. Meaning can’t be extended andcompacted, spread out over time and yet squeezed into a moment. It can’t relate to time in both these ways. It seems to be both like shape or color or picturing and like a habit or a custom or a practice: but that is not possible. It must be one thing or the other. This is what makes meaning paradoxical and philosophically challenging. This is why we need a new meta-philosophy to handle the problem. This is why the Tractatus was barking up the wrong tree: it didn’t just propose a false theory of meaning; it failed to grasp the underlying problem.

            Compare the pragmatist theory of truth. Suppose we say that truth consists in usefulness. Then we add that usefulness is a matter of how things turn out in the future (“in the long run”). It will follow that truth is spread out over time. Truth is a matter of ongoing success not a matter of current correspondence or momentary coherence. Pragmatism is a future-looking doctrine, because it stresses human action, which is distributed in time. And it is not the doctrine that truth determines success, as if it is another property merely correlated with success; it issuccess—usefulness, desire-satisfaction. Truth looks ahead, and it depends on what happens in the future. The result is that nothing can be said to be true (or false) at a time before the proposition in question has had a chance to demonstrate its usefulness. There can’t be at-a-time truth. This looks like a problem for the pragmatist theory, though the bullet-biting pragmatist may opt to declare that the consequence is acceptable—truth can never really exist before usefulness has been exemplified. Given that the use theory of meaning is a type of pragmatist theory, we can see how such theories tend to produce these kinds of problems and puzzles: use and usefulness are cross-temporal facts, because actions are spread out in time. If I were to say that perception is a matter of actions, we would have the same result: nobody could ever perceive anything in a temporally isolated way. If to see something red now consists in what the perceiver goes on to do in the future, then obviously no one could see something red now unless such a future exists. This kind of theory seems obviously false given the facts of perception, but in the case of meaning things are not so clear, because meaning is not so phenomenologically striking. If a property holds in virtue of future facts, then clearly there have to be such facts for it to hold (this is obvious for the utilitarian view of the good, for example). We might try going dispositional in these cases, but that will raise problems of its own (explored by Kripke). The recent popularity (and obscurity) of this kind of approach is testament to the severity of the underlying problem.  We really do need to appeal to actual use, but then we are saddled with the time problem (we could call it the “time-meaning problem”). How is meaning related to use-in-time? Are they identical, or are they distinct and contingently correlated? Is there a determination relation between them (supervenience)? Is the link real but mysterious, or is meaning perhaps illusory? This is a characteristic philosophical problem with the usual range of options. In a way Wittgenstein is doing traditional philosophy in raising it, however unconventional his own response may be.

            Kripke compares Wittgenstein’s skeptical paradox to Hume’s treatment of causation. I see a similarity too, but a different one. If causation were a necessary relation, it could intelligibly hold at a specific time, since modal properties are at-a-time properties. But if we despair of finding such causal necessitation, plumping instead for constant conjunction, then again we get a problem with time. For constant conjunction occurs over time; and then we have to suppose that causation can’t be an at-a-time property. For one event to cause another at time t is for other similar events to cause similar events in the past and future: so there can’t be one-off causation and causation must be temporally dispersed. We try to find something observable for causation to be, but all we can find is future constant conjunctions; so causation turns out to be extraneous to what is happening at a given moment of causal interaction. Meaning, too, turns out to reside in uses that lie in the future relative to the present act of meaning, thus rendering problematic the very notion of meaning-at-time. Regular uses are like constant conjunctions—at some distance from the fact they are supposed to encompass (as judged by what is known at the time). There is obviously a general problem here with certain philosophical tendencies or theses, with meaning just one (striking) example.

            I actually think there are several distinct strands in Wittgenstein’s discussion of meaning in these sections of the Investigations, intertwined in complex ways; the theme I have extracted is just of them, though a central one. The problem doesn’t have to do with facts versus non-facts, or the individual versus the community, or the inner versus the outer; it has to do with the conflict between meaning-as-use and meaning-as-known. Linguistic use is spread out over time, but linguistic knowledge is of the moment: how can those two truths be reconciled? I have not tried to delve into Wittgenstein’s attempted resolution (a daunting task), being content to have articulated the problem he raised.

  [1] See Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1984)

  [2] It is noteworthy that Wittgenstein makes very little play with the notion of a disposition in these sections of the Investigations, not even considering it as a possible resolution of his puzzle (in this he contrasts sharply with Kripke’s interpretation of him). I think this is because he simply didn’t take it seriously as an account of what meaning and understanding might be. There are many reasons why he might have taken this view, but surely it sacrifices a great deal of what he finds attractive in the actual-extended-use theory. Also, it is just plain obscure: how can my knowledge of what I mean now consist in knowledge of what I am disposed to do in the future, even assuming there is such a thing? Why is what I do in the future determined by my current dispositions? We have become far too sanguine about the notion of a disposition in the period following Wittgenstein’s Investigations. The positivists would have regarded the notion as positively mystical, and certainly not usable as a basic philosophical tool. What (the hell) is a disposition?  

  [3] The puzzle would affect analyticity: how can a sentence be analytic at a certain time, given that its meaning is fixed by what happens later? Wouldn’t we have to wait to see how the words are used in the future? And nothing presently available can fix this. So analytic truth starts to look problematic—a central plank of positivist philosophy (and not only that). And how can analyticity consist in conventions if conventions are human practices that are spread out in time?

 

 

Personality Theory

 

Personal identity has an established place in the philosophical universe but personality is not so sedulously studied. People have personalities (some animals too) but not much is said about them by philosophers (by psychologists, yes, where personality theory is part of the curriculum). Why not? There are some good philosophical issues here, and the subject is certainly of considerable intrinsic interest (and not just to philosophers). There is first the question of the ontological status of personality traits: what are these exactly? A psychologist will tell you about the Big Five personality traits–openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—and you will have some idea of what she is talking about; but it is not so easy to say what having these traits consists in. The philosopher might lazily announce that such traits are dispositions to behavior without inquiring too closely into what precisely such a disposition might be, both with respect to its intrinsic nature and the range of behavior held to characterize the disposition. Is there any more reason to be a behaviorist about personality than any other psychological fact? The problem, evidently, is that personality traits are clearly not reducible to experiences or beliefs or speech or episodes of behavior, and yet they are perfectly real things. There may well be associated qualia and conduct, but these are not what such a trait is. The trait itself seems curiously elusive, being neither observable from the outside nor introspectable from the inside. It is perhaps the basis of a set of dispositions, which may be very various, but it is not simply identical to such a set—any more than molecular structure is identical with its associated dispositions. So there is first of all a fundamental question of ontology, with the usual threats of reduction, elimination, and mystery. We don’t have any clear idea of what a personality trait is.

            Other questions quickly crowd in. Is there something it’s like to have a certain personality trait, say extroversion, or is personality phenomenologically blank? Is personality a causal factor in the production of behavior, in addition to belief and desire and other recognized factors? Is it part of the explanation of intentional action? Does it cause action? How does personality relate to the brain? Could it be identical to a brain state? If not, why not (it has neither semantic content nor qualitative character)? Are traits of personality analyzable in any way: do they have compositionality or hidden structure? Are they definable? How are they related to desires? Certain desires seem characteristic of a given trait, but is there any necessary relation? Do extroverts always and necessarily desire to hang out with other people? What causes such traits to exist in an individual—genes, social interactions, education, reading habits? And what causes them to change and possibly disappear? How plastic are they? Can there be a complete alteration of personality? Traits don’t come and go like sensations or beliefs, but they do seem to be in a constant state of flux; they are not just passive elements of one’s psychological anatomy. They grow with age and can become atrophied. Are they supervenient on other parts of the psyche, particularly desires; or are desires supervenient on them? How exactly do personality traits interact with desires? Do they sometimes fix beliefs? These are all good questions, but we don’t find philosophers addressing them. It’s as if personality doesn’t exist so far as the philosophy of mind is concerned.    [1]

            Personalities notoriously vary, but are there any personality universals? Are there personality traits that all humans share? Is there a species personality? This question is like the corresponding question about languages; indeed, there is quite an exact parallel. Despite many local variations there is a substantial core of common traits—a human type. The same is true for other species, as any pet owner knows. Humans are apt to be acquisitive, competitive, social, family-oriented, hospitable, nervous, and afraid of death (among other things)—though there is much scope for variations of expression and different triggering conditions. No doubt this phenotypic coincidence has a genetic basis: we humans are born with a specific type of personality different from the personality of big cats and tortoises (say). Do humans always have a personality? There may be pathological cases, such as brain damage, and we have all heard the phrase “he has no personality”, but any normal human has one—though it may not be scintillating or agreeable. A personality is your birthright, for good or ill; you have no choice in the matter. You have one as surely as you have a body or brain. You might be able to have it removed, but then you will end up like the proverbial vegetable. You exist; therefore you have a personality. Indeed, you exist as a personality: that is what you essentially are. What makes me me is my personality more than anything else: take that from me and you rob me of my essence. You can take my memories, all of them, and leave me intact as long as my personality survives. If I have many personalities, you might be able to take some of them and leave me still on the premises; but if I am rendered a personality vacuum, I am effectively extinguished.

            How limiting is personality? Is it like having a limit to memory? Does your personality prevent you from achieving certain things? Is it possible to transcend one’s personality? We are certainly not free of our personalities (single or multiple), but is it possible to bracket them, to break free of them? The question is not easy: don’t we need another personality in order to break free of this one, or can we step into a personality void and proceed from there? Is there such a thing as personality-independent action? Some have thought that God can confer such an ability (think of Saul on the road to Damascus), but doesn’t there need to be some personality germ in there that makes such a thing possible? How can I just lever a brand new personality into being? Don’t I need a personality to do that, and mustn’t this personality somehow carry the new one within it? I can’t make myself be a patient person, say, simply by willing it (though I might be able to moderate my impatient actions). Aren’t we really imprisoned by our personalities? Don’t our personality traits form the bars of our existential cage? Don’t they sharply limit our freedom? At best you can use one trait to do battle with another (Agreeableness versus Impatience), but you can’t set yourself against your entire personality. Personality is fate. What personality is exactly is not so clear, but it is clear that it has a powerful grip on us. We do well to develop a sound philosophy of it.

    [1] I will refrain from cliched comment about the personalities of philosophers: is this why the subject is so neglected?

 

 

Knowledge, Memory, and Time

 

We have knowledge of the past, the present, and the future—or we think we do anyway. That makes three types of knowledge, classified according to time. But when you think about it you see that there is really only one type of knowledge: knowledge of the past.  [1] Knowledge of the future is based on knowledge of the past; it has no other source. We know what has happened so far and we project this knowledge into the future, relying on inductive inference. Knowledge of the future is simply knowledge of the past extrapolated forward: if there were no knowledge of the past, there would be no knowledge of the future. Knowledge of the present, so-called, is also really knowledge of the past: for it takes a finite time for a stimulus to cause a percept, and it takes a further finite time to form a belief based on a percept. By the time you have formed a belief about what is presently the case it may no longer be the case. This time lag is notoriously writ large in the case of distant astronomical objects: by the time you have perceived and formed a belief about such objects they may be long gone. Our knowledge is always of the past, though we may project it forward by making present-tense judgments, hoping that things haven’t changed too much in the interim. What we know is always strictly about what has been (this is true even for introspective knowledge, since it too takes time to formulate). In the most basic cases our knowledge is a trace of the past—an effect of a prior cause. In fact, there is always a complex sequence of events mediating the outside stimulus and the knowledge it eventually produces—events that are both computational and physiological, occurring in the nervous system. These function like memories of earlier events in that they involve holding information for later processing: the retinal image is a kind of memory of the light pattern that reaches the eye, and subsequent neural patterns are like memories of the retinal image. There is information storage over time, though the time might be measured in milliseconds.

Given that memory is the retention of information over time, we could say that all knowledge, including present-tense knowledge, is based on memory. Indeed, the light pattern that reaches the eye from a distant (and possibly extinct) galaxy might profitably be viewed as itself a type of memory of the galaxy in question: for the light preserves information about that galaxy over time, possibly for many years. The universe remembers! If we were to go externalist about memory, we could include this kind of information retention in the mechanisms of memory: the light preserves information about a remote object and then the nervous system of the observer preserves information contained in the light. In any case we have information preservation over time, the mark of memory. We can simplify matters theoretically by stipulating that the process of belief formation elicited by past events is a memory process: information retention is always a type of remembering. Even when an object is right in front of you now there is a complex memory process as information is gleaned, processed, and stored—eventually leading you to form a belief about the object (“This is red”). Subjectively it all seems to happen in an instant, but in fact there is always a time lag between the object having the property and the observer coming to know it has that property. If we were being very careful (the skeptic looking over our shoulder), we would more cautiously assert only that the object was red, albeit a fraction of a second ago. The sensory modules inside us, which have a much more fine-grained experience of time, might confine themselves to judgments along the lines of “I seem to recall that such and such an event happened in the recent past”. By the time the light stimulus makes itself felt in the visual cortex at the back of the head, after a long trip through the optic nerve and the brain, the retinal image might be a distant memory as far as our visual processors are concerned. The essential point is that information retention is the method whereby knowledge of the present is acquired—that is, knowledge of the past. In short, all knowledge is memory knowledge. When the positivists spoke of “observation statements” as forming the epistemic bedrock of science (and not just the positivists), they misspoke: it is memories of observation that form the basis of scientific knowledge. Observation itself is essentially a memory process, but in addition the observation must be retained over time, in memory and by means of external record (e.g. writing). The real basis of scientific knowledge is memory: no memory, no science. Everything we know about the world must be contained in what we remember about it. Our knowledge of the future and the present is really nothing but our knowledge of the past plus some inferential moves (more or less dubious according to the skeptic).

            The question must then arise as to how good memory is as a source of knowledge of the world. Does memory tell us how the world really is? Memory is, of course, notoriously unreliable, subject to distortion, fleeting and fallible. It needs some kind of external check if its deliverances are to be credited—and the checks too need somehow to be remembered. But that is not the point I want to emphasize: I want to focus on a deep structural feature of memory—what memory constitutively is. This feature is somewhat elusive to characterize, though we all recognize what it is; it tends to be described metaphorically or impressionistically. Hume spoke of memory images as “faint copies” of sensory impressions, which are vivid in comparison—as if memories are faded and worn, indistinct and blurry—and this description carries intuitive appeal. We might say that memories are impoverished or etiolated or drained of substance or sketchy or fragmentary or thin or insubstantial. Marcel Proust is the poet of memory as a feeble route to the past: it simply cannot recreate the psychological effect of past experience itself (this is why we are in search of lost time).  [2] Only the madeleine can bring back the past, enabling us to relive it, and even that cannot really recall the past experience in all its glory. Time past is time irrecoverable. Let me put the point this way: memory cannot provide us with a mode of apprehending the world that captures its full reality. Memories of the past are glancing, stripped down, and partial–ghostly remnants of what they purport to record. They are mere traces, like footprints in the sand: they don’t afford us the kind of full brimming knowledge of the past for which we yearn. They are not like seeing or touching or tasting something: remembering a taste is not like tasting a taste. It is true that some people reportedly experience the past in this quasi-perceptual way, and normal people can sometimes have remarkably vivid memories, but generally memory is a feeble conduit for knowledge of the past. It is normally pretty thin gruel. And once we appreciate the role of memory in perceptual knowledge we start to wonder how much is omitted even there: maybe a lot of information is lost between stimulus and response—even Humean impressions might be drastically etiolated compared to reality itself. If memory images are faint compared to sensory impressions, sensory impressions might be faint compared to the objective world; indeed they presumably are, given that enormous amounts of information don’t even get beyond the initial sensory receptors (the retina is by no means locally omniscient). We can conceive of creatures that have super vivid sense impressions, compared to which ours are pale and weak. In any case human memory is just not very saturated or all encompassing. And if memory is limited in this way, our knowledge must be too, proceeding as it does from such a bleached out basis. Our conception of reality is formed from our memories of it when you get right down to it, but memories are just not very rich or full or penetrating. Just think of your general conception of the past: it is shadowy, reduced, distant, full of blanks, and skeletal–even when operating at its most efficient. You really can’t think of the past as it is in itself (this was Proust’s lifelong lament). The past is gone, epistemically speaking; it is fundamentally irrecoverable, even when memory is accurate. The past is a shadow world (Plato should have used the parable of the cave to illustrate the feebleness of memory). But our conception of the world derives from memory and inherits its limitations. You might suppose that perceptual experience offers a way to something more vivid—more real—but don’t forget that experiences themselves become objects of remembering. Memories of experiences are themselves weak and faint, nothing like having the experience (and even that suffers from time lags and limited information retention). Fundamentally, our whole picture of the world is conditioned by our powers of memory, but memory is ineluctably Proustian—it can only offer us so much lost time.

Our epistemic relation to time is all out of whack: we can’t grasp time while it is happening, so to speak. Time is not obliging to human knowledge—not the past, not the present, not the future. We are always late to the party (or much too early in the case of the future), and poorly dressed and equipped. Time and human knowledge are just not cut out for each other. The result is that we view reality through a misty portal, a narrow and smoky window. This means that we never really grasp reality as it is, de re as it were; at best we form ideas that map its structure, or we feel its effects on our consciousness. God doesn’t remember the past, as if at a distance from it; he perceives the past—feels it in his marrow (or the divine equivalent). Think of an animal’s memory-mediated conception of reality, say a mongoose’s: that must be thin gruel indeed. Fortunately the animal is equipped with a bunch of instincts and doesn’t need to rely on abstract knowledge; we on the other hand fancy ourselves endowed with intellectual apprehension, while actually laboring under the constitutive limitations of memory. Memory is frustratingly flimsy, a perpetual source of existential angst, a Proustian nightmare. It all comes down to memory for us, but memory is very far from all there is. Reality itself has no truck with memory limitations and won’t agree to be represented by memory. Reality has all the talent and its agent memory is but a weak and impoverished echo of it. The past is always much more than memory can ever know.  [3]                             

 

  [1] I will put aside questions of innate knowledge; our concern here is with acquired empirical knowledge. A prioriknowledge is not temporally bound and is not founded in memory, but empirical knowledge of the world needs memory-assisted sense perception to get off the ground.

  [2] There is a good discussion of this philosophical theme in Proust (who was influenced by Bergson) in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature (1980). Nabokov writes: “To recreate the past something other than the operation of memory must happen: there must be a combination of a present sensation (especially taste, smell, touch, sound) with a recollection, a remembrance, of the sensuous past… In other words, a nosegay of the senses in the present and the vision of an event or sensation in the past, this is when sense and memory come together and lost time is found again.” (p.249) I would add that such recreation can never be complete. Memory alone cannot do the job, so we need to supplement it with the more vital and full-blooded force of perception; but this combination is still impotent to produce the impact of direct past experience. Thus we search in vain for lost time: the past comes to us only in hints and morsels, despite that magical madeleine. The only way truly to recover the past is to travel back to it—and then we are still stuck with the memory-like nature of perception.  

  [3] Here we might speak, not so much of cognitive closure, as of cognitive claustrophobia—the feeling of being squeezed into a space too confined, cognitively speaking. This is the prison of memory: the way knowledge is held in check by the very nature of the memory faculty. And it is not just a matter of what is remembered but of the wayremembering works—that faintness, that etiolation, that fatal thinness. The world for us is a remembered world, but remembering is subject to extremes of deletion and dilution. The veil of remembering (as opposed to the veil of perception) is an apt metaphor: the past hides coyly behind this veil, showing itself only sketchily and dimly. This must condition the way we think of reality.