Knowledge and Human Nature

 

 

An alien observer of human cognitive development would be struck by a fact he might be tempted to describe as paradoxical. This is that in the first five years or so of life development is rapid and impressive while subsequent learning tends to be slow and laborious. The typical five-year-old already has excellent sensory awareness of the world, a mature language, and a fully functioning conceptual scheme—all without apparent effort. They may be small, but they are smart. The reason for this precocity, we conjecture, is that much of what they have achieved by that age is the unfolding of an innate program or set of programs: all this cognitive sophistication is written into the genes awaiting read-out.[1] It is not picked up by diligent inspection of the environment. It comes quickly because it was already present in substantial outline. Thereafter the child must learn things the hard way—by learningthem. Hence school, memorization, studying, instruction, concentration. Knowledge becomes willed, while before it was unwilled, spontaneous, given.[2] Cognitive development turns into work.

It could be otherwise for our alien observers: they are accustomed to school virtually from birth, because their children are born knowing practically nothing. They learn language by painstaking instruction, having no innate grammar; concepts are acquired by something called “deliberate abstraction”, which is arduous and time-consuming; even their senses need years to get honed into something usable. They don’t reach the cognitive level of a typical human five-year-old till the age of fifteen. Empiricism is true of them, and it takes time and effort. However, they have excellent memories and powers of concentration, as well as an aversion to play, so their later cognitive development is rapid and smooth: they are superior to human college-educated humans by the age of seventeen and they go on to spectacular intellectual achievements in later life, vastly outstripping human adults. They are slow at first, given the paucity of their innate endowments, but quick later, while humans are quick at first but slow later (our memory is weak and our powers of concentration lamentable). To the alien observers this seems strange, almost paradoxical: why start so promisingly and then lapse into mediocrity? They continue to gain in intellectual strength while we seem to lose that spark of genius that characterized the first few years of life. That’s just the way the two species are cognitively set up: an initial large genetic boost for us, and a virtual blank slate for them (but excellent capacities of attention, memory, and studiousness). Our five-year-olds outshine theirs, but their adults put ours to shame.

I tell this story to highlight an important point about the human capacity for knowledge—an existential point. The existentialists thought that freedom was the essence of human nature, conditioning many aspects of our lives, individual and social; but a case can be made that human knowledge plays a similar life-determining role. For we suffer under a fundamental ambivalence about knowledge, which is to say about our cognitive nature (which is not confined to non-affective parts of our lives). We are simultaneously very good at knowledge and quite poor at it. Some things come to us naturally and smoothly, especially in our earliest experience (pre-school); but other things tax us terribly, calling for intense effort and leading to inevitable frustration. Rote memory becomes the bane of our lives. Examinations loom over us. School is experienced as a kind of prison. Calculus is hard. History refuses to stick. Geography is boring. What happened to that earlier facility when everything came so easily? We were all equal then, but now we must compete with each other to achieve good test results, which determine later success in life. We seem to go from genius to dunce overnight. Imagine if you could remember your earlier successes and compare them with your current travails: it was all so easy and enjoyable then, as the innate program unfurled itself, but now the daily need to absorb new material has become trial and tribulation. Getting an education is no cakewalk. Wouldn’t it be nice if it could just be uploaded into your brain as you slept, as your genes uploaded all that innate information? It’s like a lost paradise, a heavenly pre-existence (shades of Plato), with school as the fall from blessedness. You are condemned to feel unintelligent, a disappointment, an intellectual hack. Maybe you will make your mark in society by dint of great effort and a bit of luck, but you are still a member of a species that has to struggle for knowledge, for which knowledge is elusive and hard-won. Suppose you had to live in a society in which those late-developing aliens also lived: they would make you look like a complete ignoramus, an utter nincompoop—despite their initial slow start.

A vice to which human beings are particularly prone is overestimating their claims to knowledge. It is as if they need to do this—it serves some psychic purpose. Reversion to childhood would be one hypothesis (“epistemic regression”). But the actual state of human knowledge renders it intelligible: within each of us there exists a substantial core of inherited solid knowledge combined with laboriously acquired knowledge, some of it shaky at best. Take our knowledge of language, including the conceptual scheme that goes with it: we are right to feel confident that we have this under control—the skeptic will not meet fertile ground here (I know how to speak grammatically!). Generalizing, we may come to the conclusion that our epistemic skills are well up to par: so far as knowledge is concerned, we are a credit to our species. But this is a bad induction: some of our knowledge is indeed rock solid, but a lot isn’t. Being good at language is not being good at politics or medicine or metaphysics or morals. We are extrapolating from an unrepresentative sample. As young children, our knowledge tends to be well founded, because restricted to certain areas; but as adults we venture into areas in which we have little inborn expertise, and here we are prone to error, sometimes fantastically so. We know what sentences are grammatical but not what political system is best. But we overestimate our cognitive powers because some of them are exemplary. It would be different if all our so-called knowledge were shaky from the start; then we might have the requisite humility. But our early-life knowledge gives us a false sense of security, which we tend to overgeneralize. We believe we are as clever about everything as we are about some things.

I recommend accepting that we have two sorts of knowledge—that we are split epistemic beings. On the one hand, we have the robust innately given type of knowledge; but on the other hand, we have a rather rickety set of aptitudes that we press into service in order to extend our innately given knowledge. Science and philosophy belong to the latter system. Thus they developed late in human evolution, are superfluous to survival, and are grafted on by main force not biological patrimony. There is no established name for this distinction between types of knowledge, though it seems real enough, and I can’t think of anything that really captures what we need; still, it is a distinction that corresponds to an important dimension of human life—an existential fact. We are caught between an image of ourselves as epistemic experts and a contrasting image of epistemic amateurishness. We are not cognitively unified. We have a dual nature. We are rich and poor, advantaged and disadvantaged. Other animals don’t suffer from this kind of divide: they don’t strive to extend their knowledge beyond what comes naturally to them. Many learn, but they don’t go to school to do it. They don’t get grades and flunk exams and read books. Reading is in some ways the quintessential human activity—an artificial way to cram your brain with information not given at birth or vouchsafed by personal experience. Reading is hard, unnatural, and an effort. It is an exercise in concentration management. We may come to find it enjoyable[3], but no one thinks it is a skill acquired without training and dedication (and reading came late in the human story). It is also fallible. And it hurts your eyes. This is your secondary epistemic system in operation (we could label the types of knowledge “primary knowledge” and “secondary knowledge” just to have handy names).

Animals are not divided beings in this way (lamenting their reading ability); nor do they apprehend themselves as so divided. But we are well aware of our dual nature, and we chafe at it (as the existentialists say that we chafe at the recognition of our freedom). We wish we could return to epistemic Eden, when knowledge came so readily; but we are condemned to conscious ignorance, with little inroads here and there—we are aware of our epistemic limits and foibles. We know how much we don’t know and how hard it would be to know it (think of remote parts of space). We know, that is, that we fall short of an ideal. We can’t even remember names and telephone numbers!  Yet our knowledge of convoluted grammatical constructions is effortless. If we are that good at knowledge, why are we so bad? Skepticism is just the extreme expression of what we all know in our hearts—that we leave a lot to be desired from an epistemic point of view.[4] We are both paragons and pariahs in the epistemic marketplace. In some moods we celebrate our epistemic achievements, in others we rue our epistemic failures. The reason is that we are genuinely split, cognitively schizoid. Perhaps in the prehistoric world the split was not so evident, in those halcyon hunter-gatherer days, before school, writing, and transmissible civilization; but modern humans, living in large organized groups, developing unnatural specialized skills, have the split before their eyes every day—the specter of the not-known. We thus experience epistemic insecurity, epistemic neurosis, and epistemic anxiety. Our self-worth is bound up with knowledge (“erudite” is not a pejorative). It is as if we contain an epistemic god (already manifest by age 5) existing side by side with an epistemic savage: the high and the low, the ideal and the flawed. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t value what we acquire with the secondary system, or that it isn’t really knowledge, just that it contrasts sharply with the primary system. The secondary system might never have existed, in which case no felt disparity would have existed; but with us as we are now we cannot avoid the pang of awareness that our efforts at knowledge are halting and frequently feeble. The young child does not suffer from epistemic angst, but the adult has epistemic angst as a permanent companion. School is the primary purveyor of that angst today. Education is thus a fraught venture, psychologically speaking, in which our dual nature uneasily plays itself out. The existentialists stressed the agony of decision, but there is also the agony of ignorance (Hamlet is all about this subject, as is Othello).[5]

Freud contended that the foundations of psychic life are laid down in the first few years of life (and sex not freedom or knowledge is the dominant theme), shaping everything that comes later. The stage was set and then the drama played out. I am suggesting something similar: the first few years of cognitive life lay down the foundations, and they are relatively trouble-free. Knowledge grows in the child quite naturally and spontaneously without any strenuous effort or difficulty. Only subsequently does the acquisition of knowledge become a labor, calling upon will power and explicit instruction. We might view this transition, psychoanalytically, as a kind of trauma: from ease to unease, from self-confidence to self-doubt. Whoever thought knowledge could be so hard! Compare acquiring a first language with learning a second language: so effortless the first time, so demanding the second. What happened? Now learning has become a chore and a trial. It is a type of fall from grace. The reason we don’t feel the trauma more is that it happens at such an early age (I assume there is no active repression)—though many a child remembers the misery of school. Knowledge becomes fraught, a site of potential distress. Cramming becomes a way of life, a series of tests and trials. But all the while the memory of a happier time haunts us, when knowledge came as easily as the dawn.[6] And then there is death, when all that knowledge comes to nothing—when all the epistemic effort is shown futile. Our divided nature as epistemic beings thus has its significance for how we live in and experience the world. It is not just a matter of bloodless ratiocination.

 

C

[1] I won’t rehearse all the evidence and arguments that have been convincingly given for this conjecture, save to mention the existence of critical periods for learning. Would that such periods could occur during high school mathematics training!

[2] Of course, we still pick up a lot of information without effort just by being in the world, but for many areas of knowledge something like school is required (this is true even for illiterate tribes).

[3] Logan Pearsall Smith: “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”

[4] Is it an accident that one of the prime distinguishing characteristics of God is his omniscience? He knows automatically what we can never hope to.

[5] The Internet, with its seemingly infinite resources, drives this point home. It also leads to varied and grotesque deformities in our cognitive lives.

[6] Here you see me lapsing into weak poetry, as all theorists of the meaning of life must inevitably do. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is one long dramatic poem: who can forget his puppet-like waiter, or the woman in bad faith whose hand remains limp as her would-be suitor grasps it, or Pierre’s vivid absence from the cafe? My illustrative vignette would feature a bleary-eyed student studying in a gloomy library while recollecting her carefree sunlit days of cheerful effortless knowing.

 

A Problem in Hume

 

 

 

Early in the TreatiseHume sets out to establish what he calls a “general proposition”, namely: “That all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent” (Book I, Section I, p.52).[1]What kind of proposition is this? It is evidently a causal proposition, to the effect that ideas are caused by impressions, and not vice versa: the word “deriv’d” indicates causality. So Hume’s general proposition concerns a type of mental causation linking impressions and ideas; accordingly, it states a psychological causal law. It is not like a mathematical generalization that expresses mere “relations of ideas”, so it is not known a priori. As if to confirm this interpretation of his meaning, Hume goes on to say:  “The constant conjunction of our resembling perceptions [impressions and ideas], is a convincing proof, that the one are the causes of the other; and this priority of the impressions is an equal proof, that our impressions are the causes of our ideas, not our ideas of our impressions” (p. 53). Thus we observe the constant conjunction of impressions and ideas, as well as the temporal priority of impressions over ideas, and we infer that the two are causally connected, with impressions doing the causing. In Hume’s terminology, we believe his general proposition on the basis of “experience”—our experience of constant conjunction.

But this means that Hume’s own critique of causal belief applies to his guiding principle. In brief: our causal beliefs are not based on insight into the real powers of cause and effect but on mere constant conjunctions that could easily have been otherwise, and which interact with our instincts to produce non-rational beliefs of an inductive nature. It is like our knowledge of the actions of colliding billiard balls: the real powers are hidden and our experience of objects is consistent with anything following anything; we are merely brought by custom and instinct to expect a particular type of effect when we experience a constant conjunction (and not otherwise). Thus induction is not an affair of reason but of our animal nature (animals too form expectations based on nothing more than constant conjunction). Skepticism regarding our inductive inferences is therefore indicated: induction has no rational foundation. For example, prior to our experience of constant conjunction ideas might be the cause of impressions, or ideas might have no cause, or the impression of red might cause the idea of blue, or impressions might cause heart palpitations. We observe no “necessary connexion” between cause and effect and associate the two only by experience of regularity—which might break down at any moment. Impressions have caused ideas so far but we have no reason to suppose that they will continue to do so—any more than we have reason to expect billiard balls to impart motion as they have hitherto. Hume’s general proposition is an inductive generalization and hence falls under his strictures regarding our causal knowledge (so called); in particular, it is believed on instinct not reason.

Why is this a problem for Hume? Because his own philosophy is based on a principle that he himself is committed to regarding as irrational—mere custom, animal instinct, blind acceptance. He accepts a principle—a crucial principle–that he has no reasonto accept. It might be that the idea of necessary connexion, say, is an exception to the generalization Hume has arrived at on the basis of his experience of constant conjunction between impressions and ideas—the equivalent of a black swan. Nothing in our experience can logically rule out such an exception, so we cannot exclude the idea based on anything we have observed. The missing shade of blue might also simply be an instance in which the generalization breaks down. There is no necessityin the general proposition Hume seeks to establish, by his own lights–at any rate, no necessity we can know about. Hume’s philosophy is therefore self-refuting. His fundamental empiricist principle—all ideas are derived from impressions—is unjustifiable given his skepticism about induction. Maybe we can’t helpaccepting his principle, but that is just a matter of our animal tendencies not a reflection of any foundation in reason. It is just that when we encounter an idea our mind suggests the existence of a corresponding impression because that is what we have experienced so far—we expectto find an impression. But that is not a rational expectation, merely the operation of brute instinct. Hume’s entire philosophy thus rests on a principle that he himself regards as embodying an invalid inference.

It is remarkable that Hume uses the word “proof” as he does in the passage quoted above: he says there that the constant conjunction of impressions and ideas gives us “convincing proof” that there is a causal relation that can be relied on in new cases. Where else would Hume say that constant conjunction gives us “convincing proof” of a causal generalization? His entire position is that constant conjunction gives us no such “proof” but only inclines us by instinct to have certain psychological expectations. And it is noteworthy that in the Enquiry, the more mature work, he drops all such talk of constant conjunction, causality, and proof in relation to his basic empiricist principle, speaking merely of ideas as “derived” from impressions. But we are still entitled to ask what manner of relation this derivation is, and it is hard to see how it could be anything but causality given Hume’s general outlook. Did he come to see the basic incoherence of his philosophy and seek to paper over the problem? He certainly never directly confronts the question of whether his principle is an inductive causal generalization, and hence is subject to Humean scruples about such generalizations.

It is clear from the way he writes that Hume does not regard his principle as a fallible inference from constant conjunctions with no force beyond what experience has so far provided. He seems to suppose that it is something like a conceptual or necessary truth: there couldnot be a simple idea that arose spontaneously without the help of an antecedent sensory impression—as (to use his own example) a blind man necessarily cannot have ideas of color. The trouble is that nothing in his official philosophy allows him to assert such a thing: there are only “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact”, with causal knowledge based on nothing but “experience”. His principle has to be a causal generalization, according to his own standards, and yet to admit that is to undermine its power to do the work Hume requires of it. Why shouldn’t the ideas of space, time, number, body, self, and necessity all be exceptions to a generalization based on a past constant conjunction of impressions and ideas? Sometimes ideas are copies of impressions but sometimes they may not be—there is no a priori necessity about the link. That is precisely what a rationalist like Descartes or Leibniz will insist: there are many simple ideas that don’t stem from impressions; it is simply a bad induction to suppose otherwise.

According to Hume’s general theory of causation, we import the idea of necessary connexion from somewhere “extraneous and foreign”[2]to the causal relation itself, i.e. from the mind’s instinctual tendency to project constant conjunctions. This point should apply as much to his general proposition about ideas and impressions as to any other causal statement: but then his philosophy rests upon the same fallacy–he has attributed to his principle a necessity that arises from within his own mind. He should regard the principle as recording nothing more than a constant conjunction that he has so far observed, so that his philosophy might collapse at any time. Maybe tomorrow ideas will notbe caused by impressions but arise in the mind ab initio. Nowhere does Hume ever confront such a possibility, but it is what his general position commits him to.

 

Co

[1]David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature(Penguin Books, 1969; originally published 1739).

[2]The phrase is from Section VII, [26], p. 56 of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding(Oxford University Press, 2007).

 

The Mind-World Nexus

 

 

According to a dominant tradition, appearances are not “in” objects: that is, how an object appears is not (completely) determined by its objective properties but depends on the mode of sensibility employed to perceive it.  The classic example is color: objects are not colored independently of how they seem but in virtue of the color sensations they elicit in perceivers. Thus we can conceive of variations of color without an intrinsic variation in the object but merely in virtue of being differently perceived (Martians may see as green what we see as red). Color is then relative to a type of perceiver—and not just perceived color but actual color. An object isred if and only if it seemsred to a suitable group of perceivers. We could put this point by saying that color is extrinsic to objects; it depends on what kind of perceiver exists in the object’s environment. If the environment contains one kind of perceiver (humans), then it is red; but if it contains contains another type of perceiver (Martians), then it is green. The color depends on context—on how the object is hooked up to experience. It would be wrong to think that color is internalto objects, as if objects could have determinate colors no matter how they are perceived. And much the same can be said of other sensible qualities associated with hearing, touch, smell and taste. Perhaps it is true that not all apparent qualities are thus subjective, such as shape and size, but many are. As is often said, such qualities are projected by the mind, generated from within, and spread on objects. They depend on the “psychological environment” of the object (no perceivers, no qualities).

I have put the point by using terms drawn from another debate, namely the debate between internalism and externalism about the mind. It is claimed that what kind of mental state a person has is dependent on his or her environment and is not a result of purely internal factors.[1]We can vary a person’s environment while keeping her internal states the same (Twin Earth cases), and when we do so we find that mental states track the environment. So mental states are extrinsically fixed (in part anyway) and environmentally sensitive. They are not “in” the subject—not locally supervenient, not a matter of internal facts. They depend on the physical context, on how the person is hooked up to his environment. So there is an abstract analogy between certain views of color and certain views of mental states: both are regarded as relational and context-dependent. In the slogan, mental states are not “in the head”, but neither are sensible qualities “in the object”. The mental world is not independent of the physical world, and the physical world is not independent of the mental world. The subjective embeds the objective, and the objective embeds the subjective. Thus mind and world are mixed together, each incorporating the other, each flowing into the other. It is not that the whole being of the mind is sealed off from the environment, but neither is the whole being of the external world sealed off from the mind. The world contains projected properties, and the mind contains introjected properties. The mind shapes the world (in part), and the world shapes the mind (also in part). So there is no fundamental dualism here: the world is partly formed by the mind, while the mind is partly formed by the world. When you are aware of external objects you are aware of your own mental contribution to their appearance, but equally when you are aware of your mental states you are aware of the world’s contribution to them. The mind absorbs and projects; the world also “absorbs” and “projects” (it “absorbs” color and “projects” mental content). Mind and world work together to produce a reality of colored objects and content-bearing mental states (though I don’t suppose there is any teleology coming from the world). In other terminology, the mind externalizescolor and internalizescontent—as we might say (metaphorically) that the world “internalizes” color and “externalizes” content. Mind and world are mirror images of each other, abstractly considered.

In fact, we shouldn’t really be speaking any longer of mind and world, as if there is an exclusive dichotomy, since each is woven into the other: there are traces of mind in the perceived world and there are traces of the world in the formations of the mind. What we have is a mind-world nexus: a joining, a merging, an overlapping. What we call “the world” is not purely objective in nature, and what we call “the mind” is not purely subjective in nature. The mind is (partly) constituted by the world, while the world is (partly) constituted by the mind: properties drawn from one side of this divide are found located on the other side. The world I perceive is partly internal to me (i.e. projected), and the mind I introspect is partly external to me (not “in my head”). From the point of view of objects (not that they have one), the colors (etc.) they wear are donated from the outside, while they provide their own service by constituting the mental content of subjects. Fancifully, we might view this arrangement as a quid pro quo: give me your colors and I will give you content in return. More soberly, the mind has two capacities: the capacity to absorb (internalize) and the capacity to project (externalize). It employs external properties to form its conceptual landscape, and it draws on its own resources to confer perceptible properties on things (it is useful to see objects as colored, etc.).

This is not to say that there is no mind-independent external world, or that there is no world-independent mental reality. On the contrary, I would strongly deny both assertions.[2]It is only to say that the livedworld is infused with both—both the world of external objects and the world of inner perception and thought. This is quite consistent with allowing that there is another level of description under which objects have purely internal properties (call it physics) and a level of description under which minds also have purely internal properties (call it narrow psychology). We don’t in physics describe objects in terms of mind-dependent qualities, and we don’t in narrow psychology advert to environmentally fixed psychological kinds. Color doesn’t affect the motion of bodies and they can exist without it; similarly, the operations of mind can be characterized without reliance on wide content and minds can exist without such content. For the purposes of science, we could accept that the two worlds don’t overlap; and it would certainly be quite wrong to conclude that either idealism or materialism is true given the considerations advanced so far (not everything about the world is contributed by the mind and not everything about the mind is contributed by the world). Rather, the phenomenalworld—both mental and external—the world we directly experience—thatworld is a mixture of mental and physical. The world I seeis partly made up of projected properties, and the mind with which I am directly acquaintedis up to its neck in externalities (e.g. my concept water). There are two levels of description here: one is inherently dualistic and the other is not. The one that is not concerns the world that we commonly occupy—the world that we sense, feel, talk about, and take for granted (which includes the mind). The other world is largely theoretical, which is not to say any less real. Think manifest image and scientific image.

I want to point out how remarkable the aforementioned capacities of mind actually are. When the mind internalizes an external property it converts that property from being a feature of external objects to being a vehicle of thought—and these are completely different roles. The property becomes bound up with a concept, and a concept has all sorts of distinctive properties–notably being a constituent of thoughts. This is a brand new career for the property and not one for which it had any prior training. Once it is a constituent of a proposition, it is required to participate in logical reasoning as well as mental representation of states of affairs. What has water (the H2O stuff) got to do with that, or being square or being arthritic? How does the mind perform this conversion operation—repurposing a property to start a new life as a concept? Externalists never answer this question—they just point to examples that (purport to) establish the doctrine. But it is really very puzzling: for how can a feature of the environment enter the mind in such a way as to shape its operations? What is this internalizationthat we speak of? How, for example, is the property of being square made to function as a constituent of perceptual experience and of thought? Not by making the mind square! It seems to undergo a metamorphosis, but the mechanism of this metamorphosis is obscure at best and impossible at worst. It might even make one to give up on externalism completely. Likewise, we speak blithely of projection, but how is thissupposed to work? It is not that the mind literally throws color at objects! Nor does it secrete color onto objects. No, the operation is purely mental—an operation of spreadingin Hume’s metaphor. This is both unhelpful and positively misleading. How does the mind externalize color, when it is not colored itself? How does it generate the qualities projected? How does the projected quality always manage to hit its target, painting the leaves green and the roses red with such precision? Somehow the brain produces an impression of a single object that has both color and shape, exactly coordinated, but it is not supposed that shape is projected; so how does it manage to project one quality and introject the other? Projecting color seems like a magic power—quite unlike what a film projector does (here there is actual transmission of light waves). All we have are vague metaphors but no theoretical understanding. This doesn’t mean that the mind doesn’t perform the action in question; it only means that we don’t understand how. In other words, the projective and introjective powers of mind are a mystery. Yet they are fundamental to our entire view of things.

Look at how perception must operate second by second. At a given moment a state of affairs presents itself to the senses—say, a red bird 10 feet in front of your eyes. Your visual sense must internalize this scene, its various properties and arrangements. The scene must so imprint itself that a suitable percept is formed that can then function as input to behavior: this is a highly complex conversion process whose workings are still poorly understood. But at the same time the brain must carry out a projection operation that bestows color on the seen objects, which is rapidly updated over time. It must take in but it must also give out. These operations have to be coordinated and unified. The stimulus for color projection just consists of impinging light rays in which no color is to be found; on reception of these rays the brain must issue an instruction to retrieve a certain color impression, which must then be combined with various shape impressions. The input is not colored but the output is. How the brain does this is a mystery. We know that the cones of the retina must be involved, but how the nervous system contrives to generate and project color is unknown except in gross outline. The result is that the perceiver sees a colored object, where the existence of the color depends on the existence of perceivers to project it. So there is a continuous interplay between internalizing and externalizing operations, tightly intertwined. It is not that perception is all internalization, as very naive naïve realism might suggest; but nor is it all projection, as idealism might maintain. The world is contributing to the mind and the mind is contributing to the world. In this two-way nexus we find the world as it is lived. We internalize the world (hence psychological externalism) and we externalize the mind (hence color subjectivism). Thus mind and world become intermingled.[3]

 

Colin M

[1]I won’t defend externalism here or even fuss over formulation; neither will I defend the subjectivist view of color. I am more concerned with their implications when conjoined. I defend externalism in Mental Content(1989) and subjectivism in The Subjective View(1983).

[2]I would count myself a staunch externalist andinternalist about the mind, and a staunch subjectivist andobjectivist about objects of perception. The key is to make distinctions between types of property or fact.

[3]Much the same can be said of language and meaning: semantic externalism brings the world into meaning and hence involves internalization, but the structure of language also shapes our view of reality, since our concepts are bound up with the structures of language (verbs and nouns, objects and properties). We need not accept the extreme view that our entire conception of reality is fixed by our language, which can vary from speaker to speaker, in order to recognize that language can function in a projective manner, imposing its internal architecture on our view of things. Language takes in but it also reaches out—it spreads itself onto perceived reality. Thus grammar can function like color perception. Then too, there is Freudian projection, in which traits of oneself are projected onto others, while the mind also introjects authority figures like parents. It seems that the mind is fond of the introjection-projection dialectic.