‘Against Identity Theories’, “The Deep Problem’ and the ‘is’ of definition

I agree with the gist of both papers. However….

Aristotle distinguished ‘real’ from ‘nominal’ definition.  The latter is just a way of identifying what a name names.  So (to modify and build on an actual Aristotelian example)  “‘Lightening’ names the flashes in the sky often visible during a violent rainstorm”  is a nominal definition, ‘lightening is an electrical discharge from cloud to cloud or cloud to earth’ would be a real definition.  Similarly, ‘“Thunder’’ is the sound often heard during heavy rainstorms’ is nominal, ‘Thunder is an electrical…etc’ is ‘real’.  A real definition says of the thing defined ‘what it is’, its essence.  If thunder and lightening share an essence, they are identical. They are, so to speak, the same embodied form (or ‘act’ of an embodied form) that can be both seen and heard. ‘A thing and its real essence are one and the same’ is an Aristotelian principle that Locke appeals to in his argument that all our (incl. Aristotelian) definitions of substances are nominal.  We don’t (or didn’t when Locke wrote) know the underlying nature of any of them (and Aristotelians were further away from knowing it than atomists).

Is the natural inclination to reject the view that the essence of thought is a certain kind of  neurological process–that that is ‘what it is’–significantly different from the natural inclination to reject the view that thunder and lightening are the same thing?  We might try to distinguish the latter two by proposing that lightening is not an electrical discharge, but the stream of photons generated by one, and that thunder is the sound waves. ..etc., but that is unconvincing as compared with what seems a straightforward indication of different modes of presentation, by adding ‘as seen’ and ‘as heard’ respectively. We also experience, and think of, both lightening and thunder as distant or near, out there happening in the sky.  Perhaps without realising it, we are seeing and hearing the same event.

  So one might characterise sense experience and thought as a neurological process ‘from the inside’, or ‘as lived’, as opposed to ‘as observed and recorded by neurophysiologists’.  It isn’t even necessary to bring neurophysiology into it.  Long before any such understanding of the kind of physical process it is that goes on animals’ brains, it was judged that the brain is an organ with a function, and there was speculation as to what its function is (cooling the blood was an early candidate, if I remember right). So it was possible to achieve an untheoretical or minimally theoretical reference to the physical processes going on in a living brain, and speculate that they are the functioning of the organ of sensation, perception, memory and thought. 

Why, then, is it that  ‘We don’t normally say “H2O is water” or “molecular motion is heat” or… “brain processes are sensations” …[or] “C-fiber firing is pain”)’? Presumably  ‘normally’ here just means ‘generally’.   ‘Nominal definition’ will generally come before ‘real definition’.  We commonly have ways of identifying and picking out kinds of things, events and processes before we come to understand their nature.  Sometimes, on the other hand, theoretical explanations will promote principled re-conceptions of the everyday. In any case a student (or examiner) might ask ‘What is H20?’, or ‘What is C-fibre firing?’ (or, looking at an MRI scan, ‘What is that process?’), questions with ‘Water’ and ‘Pain’ as appropriate answers (although ‘It’s what happens in the brain when the subject is in pain’ might be a less crude response to the latter.)   

Consciousness is certainly a special case, since there’s something, as it seems intrinsically, mysterious about how evolution came up with that useful attribute, or how the physical universe originally contained the potentiality for it. That problem doesn’t seem to be enough to undermine the thought that, in asking someone whether they are in pain when observing their C-fibres firing (however that is done), we are dealing with one and the same process. It is, however, a problem merely ignored or brushed aside in the crude, reductively materialist thought that experience and thought are ‘nothing but’ brain processes.  

The main, surely correct point made in ‘Against Identity Theories’ and, more directly, in ‘The Deep Problem’, can perhaps be put in quasi-Aristotelian terms.  For Aristotle, the real definition of a kind of thing, one that gives its essence, explains its other ‘properties’ (ie attributes possessed by everything of that kind).  So one might say that the fact that water is H2O explains the properties of water, and the capacity of chemical theory to explain and predict the properties and interactions of more or less familiar stuffs (not to speak of the possibility of so far unobserved elements) is a measure of its adequacy.  Neurophysiology isn’t like that.  It is, and seems doomed to be, too much a matter of correlation to be in that way theoretical.  However well the process going on in the nervous system is understood in physical terms, and however closely it is correlated by empirical psychologists with the process of experience and thought, it’s not going to explain ‘what it is’ to be in pain.   The ‘identity thesis’ might tell us something about where mentality fits into the physical world, but it doesn’t offer an explanation of what it is.   

Non-Perceptual Knowledge

Perceptual knowledge is quite sharply limited, though clearly a type of knowledge. But we don’t customarily stop there; we generally extend the concept of knowledge beyond this restricted domain, well beyond it. Thus, we recognize several kinds of inferential knowledge—knowledge about things we don’t and can’t perceive. Are there any reasons to doubt this extension, stopping short of invoking extreme skepticism. Is the concept of knowledge inherently resistant to such epistemic promiscuity? Given that this “secondary knowledge” is not perceptual, we cannot locate its vehicle in sensory experience, so we will need some other psychological vehicle. This has various names: belief, judgment, opinion, surmise, conjecture, supposition, postulation, hypothesis, etc. Then we will be saying that some knowledge is grounded in this kind of state: for example, some knowledge is a type of belief (though many beliefs are not knowledge). In this way we take in knowledge of other minds, the past, the future, remote parts of the universe, the fine structure of matter, and so on. We don’t perceive these things but we do have beliefs about them. This has the consequence, obviously, that knowledge and belief are compatible states; as Plato would put it, some “opinions” (not all) count as instances of knowledge. The state of mind of knowing is compatible with the state of mind of having an opinion or surmising or conjecturing. But Plato would have none of that; for him, knowledge and belief (etc.) exclude each other. It is impossible to believe and know the same thing at the same time. And ordinary language would appear to back him up: no one in his right mind would say “I know that p and I am also of the opinion that p”, since the second conjunct contradicts the first. The well-educated analytical philosopher has his riposte ready—“That’s just a conversational implicature, my friend!” End of discussion. But is it just an implicature? Isn’t there something right in the idea that knowing is not compatible with believing? Don’t I need to do more than conjecture in order to know? I have to be convinced. Suppose I form a belief irrationally, based on my whims and wishes; but the belief happens to be true and I have gathered evidence sufficient to support my belief. However, I don’t hold the belief because of the evidence but because of my wishes: do I then have knowledge? Surely, I am in the wrong state of mind. The trouble is that beliefs and opinions can be held for irrational reasons, so they are unsuitable as the psychological basis of knowledge (the same is not true of sense experiences). Beliefs are often irrational, easily manipulated, and prone to error; so, we don’t want to involve them in the serious business of possessing knowledge. They also allow people to go out on a limb, get fooled by conspiracy theories, make mistakes of reasoning. Beliefs are just not a good way to run your cognitive life. You would be better off without them. They are an epistemic trap.

Many serious philosophers have advocated just that. Stick to what you really know, what you have seen with your own eyes, don’t believe other people with all their lies and bullshit. Remain agnostic about matters you really know nothing directly about. Don’t believe. Don’t form wacky opinions. You can behave as if you believe; you can provisionally entertain and act upon certain propositions; you can hold that a proposition has not yet been falsified; you can pretend the proposition is true: but for heaven’s sake don’t believe things of which you have no direct experience! That way error lies, if not madness. Don’t believe what you don’t directly know, and if you do directly know it you needn’t believe it. Abolish belief altogether! That would appear to be Plato’s view, and Popper’s too. Things will be much clearer and cleaner that way, once you have adopted the zero-belief lifestyle (“Just say no to belief!”). It might be replied that this is too sweeping: surely some beliefs are better than others, some opinions better informed than others. That is clearly correct, but it doesn’t blunt the force of the Plato-Popper position. We can register the necessary distinctions without employing the concept of knowledge so loosely and irresponsibly; we can simply talk of degrees of justification, warrant, cognitive virtue. Nor need we recommend any linguistic revision in our ordinary use of “know”; we just need to recognize that it is not literally true, a figure of speech, a useful convenience. We should stop thinking that we really know in these cases, whether in the primary sense or a secondary sense. We should stop assimilating these cases to the basic cases provided by perceptual knowledge—the only true knowledge. In fact, it is not clear that anyone is fooled by our common use of “know”: people are aware that this is so much loose talk—like talk of the sun rising. When I ask people about this, they generally say that of course we don’t really know other minds no matter what words we utter. Some propositions have higher epistemic credentials than others, that’s all; not much is really known. The language game involving “know” is just that—a game, not to be taken too seriously and literally.

It might be asked how this game came into being—why did we start using “know” so promiscuously? My theory is that it came from religion and then migrated into science. Clearly, it is not possible to perceive God, but religion encourages us to believe in him; so, it needs a notion of knowledge compatible with imperceptibility. Thus, belief (“faith”) was introduced as the route to knowledge of God. Religion needs a belief-based epistemology conducive to (non-perceptual) knowledge. Science, especially astronomy, needs a similar epistemological structure: belief as the vehicle of scientific knowledge. We need to stretch the concept of knowledge if we are to make room for scientific knowledge, thus conferring on it the honorific status of knowledge proper. However, there is really no pressing need to stretch the concept this far, to the breaking point as it were; we can settle for something short of knowledge, such as pragmatic acceptance. Then we avoid introducing an untenable dualism into our epistemology—between perceptual knowledge (the real deal) and something far removed from it (and not clearly knowledge at all). We don’t need to mess with the concept of knowledge, stipulating knowledge where it does not belong. There is simply a lot we don’t know (primary!), even when the relevant science is as good as it can be (pretty damn good). It is pointlessly provocative to insist that we know Darwin’s theory to be true, say, which invites the response “Have you seen it in action?” Epistemic merit is not the same as knowledge strictly so-called. The former is possible without the latter. Then we can say that only perceptual knowledge is really knowledge, bearing in mind that perception (“seeing”) is not just a matter of the physical senses. Unless we stick to this strict and sharp distinction, we end up completely confused about what counts as knowledge and what doesn’t. Opinions can differ in their epistemic credentials, but opinions are never knowledge, just as Plato maintained. Knowledge can be conceptualized as seeing in all cases, with no weakening contemplated. Belief therefore has nothing to do with knowledge proper: not perceptual knowledge and not some kind of dilution of that. Knowledge and belief are mutually exclusive. So far from knowledge implying belief, it implies non-belief. Knowledge is never true justified belief, or some improvement in that formula. All knowledge is acquaintance knowledge. The natural kind knowledgeis a single unified category not a congeries of different concepts. I would recommend the attitude of pragmatic acceptance for any truth claims that go beyond perception. There is no such thing as “inferential knowledge” or “testimony knowledge”. This is the way things should be carved up epistemologically, not into different types or degrees of knowledge.[1]

[1] How revisionary is this position? It is certainly revisionary of philosophical and scientific custom (not counting Popperians), but it is not clear that it contradicts the ordinary man’s tacit epistemology. From my informal surveys, people are quite ready to accept that nothing is really known beyond direct perception. It is deemed folly to suppose otherwise. This doesn’t prevent them from preferring some theories to others, quite rationally. People are surprisingly strict about the word “know”; they don’t like to see it bandied about. It is so in Barbados anyway (fine people).

Bajan Philosophy

The last three papers have been metaphysics Barbados-style, boldly black and white, bright as a beach. Now I will turn to Bajan epistemology, in which clear lines are drawn and compromise not tolerated. You either know or you don’t know. You either see it or you don’t. It is sturdy or it is ruined.

Ontology of Mind

What is the ontology of the physical world? What is its ontology and how do we conceive it? The best answer to this is that it is a substance ontology: the physical world consists of physical substances qualified by what are traditionally called accidents.[1] For example, animals, artifacts, and inanimate lumps—cats, tables, and chunks of gold. What are the marks of a substance in this sense? Substances are solid, cohesive, resistant, geometrical, extended, persistent, separate, self-subsistent, spatial, changeable, destructible, divisible, transmutable, located, causal, bearers of accidents, substrata of events and processes. You can see them, touch them, move around them, count them, and collect them. They are the routine objects of everyday life. The human body is a substance, as is the human brain. Basically, a physical substance is an extended thing in space instantiating a variety of properties. This is physical reality, and we conceive that reality by employing a conceptual scheme that recognizes substances and their attributes. It is familiar to the point of invisibility. It constitutes the ordinary non-mysterious world; we don’t look at a lump of coal, say, and think, “Wow, that is so mysterious!” It is, rather, the baseline from which we judge the mystery level of other things (numbers, values, universals, etc.). The physical world thus has a discrete segmented ontology and we view it in these terms: individual substances, kinds of substance, accidents of substance (attributes, properties), events occurring in substances, relations between substances. Our ontology of the physical is a substantialist ontology. It is intelligible and unmysterious (we are not amazed at the existence of physical substances). We are not inclined to infer the supernatural from the existence of substances. They are simply the form that matter takes—it clumps.

But what about the ontology of mind: is it a substance ontology? It doesn’t take much reflection to see that it is not. The mind is not on its face a physical substance; nor is it made of such substances; nor does it instantiate accidents in the manner of a substance. It presents substances in perception and thought, but it isn’t itself substantial; this ontological contrast is therefore evident within consciousness. Thus, the mind contrasts ontologically with matter; it isn’t the same old ontology located in certain organisms (it seems “queer”). Indeed, it appears radically opposed to such an ontology—it has a pronounced anti-substantialist character. Consciousness, in particular, is a substance-free zone. This, I think, is the key to its apparent mysteriousness: its ontology is obscure, elusive, and unique. We sense that it is not ontologically like other things, such as the body. Thus, it strikes us as mysterious—intrinsically, essentially. We might even want to say that it has no ontology, substantialist ontology being the only kind available. More cautiously, whatever its ontology is we have no conception of what it might be, since we are drilled in the ontology of substances and accidents. The only ontology we have, as theorists and ordinary folk, doesn’t apply to the mind, so we are bereft of an ontological framework for understanding the mind. We are ontologically blind with respect to consciousness. This leaves us in a state of bafflement about the nature of consciousness and the mind generally. We might try to force it into the substantialist framework, but this effort is doomed to failure (hence the many contortions and distortions of Western philosophy). We need to acknowledge that the mind draws an ontological blank; we can’t extend our basic ontological scheme to it. Substance ontology is all we have and it won’t cut it with respect to the mind. We are suffering from a bad case of ontological cognitive closure. Huge swathes of Western philosophy (and Eastern) have labored under this deficit (egos, homunculi, immortal souls, beetles in boxes, ghosts in machines, machines in machines, mental corpuscles, etc.).[2]

Symptoms of the disease have surfaced. Some have tried to preserve the framework by changing the subject matter—hence immaterial substance. But this has been half-hearted at best and faces well-worn objections. Such a putative substance is really nothing like its prototype in the physical realm; we just have a label for a limping analogy. Others have bitten the bullet and swallowed it whole: I am referring in particular to Sartre, Ryle, and Wittgenstein. Sartre views the conscious mind as ontologically nothing but pure nothingness. Ryle reduces it to hypotheticals about behavior. Wittgenstein goes public and expressivist. For them, there can be no real reality without substance, so they deny the reality of the mind (without saying as much). Still, they are responding to a genuine lacuna—we have no ontology of mind worthy of the name. Then there are the outright eliminativists about the anti-ontological mind. But the most popular move has been a quiet revamping of the substance ontology—eliminate such talk and replace it with talk of events and processes. True, there are no mental substances, material or immaterial, known or unknown, but there are still mental events—occurrences, happenings. So, we do have a viable ontology of mind—an event ontology. The trouble with this maneuver is that the event ontology we actually have relies on substances as vehicles of events: events occur insubstances, happen to them, presuppose them. Events without substances are not ontologically kosher; they are like accidents without substances to inhere in. We have no clear conception of substance-less events (how would they be individuated?). True, the mind undergoes changes, but to transfer event ontology from its original home in physical substances while leaving the substances behind is a hopeless project. There cannot be free-floating mental events. Nor can these be said to occur in the brain-as-substance, since we have no conception of how this is possible. We really possess no viable ontology of the mind when you get right down to the nuts and bolts. We just have words loosely used. Introspection does not disclose a mental substance in which mental events and processes occur; it is nothing like seeing a physical substance in space. All we have is a kind of stipulation about how we are going to use language to get a grip on mental ontology; but this has no epistemic foundation—it is just so much hopeful handwaving. We acquired our substance ontology from basic facts about biological evolution and perception, but it was never designed to accurately represent the ontological structure of the mind, so it signally fails to do so. The mind must have an ontology of some sort, since it clearly exists, but we are not privy to that ontology. This is not something that Western philosophy has ever come to grips with—hence the need for revision and re-invention. All the talk of souls, selves, immaterial spirits, and the like is a reflection of ontological ignorance, a vain attempt to keep our old substance ontology in place. Similarly for event ontology and process philosophy. And if we don’t even have an adequate ontological framework for the mind, we are unlikely to be able to resolve metaphysical questions about it. There really are no mental individuals or events or processes or states—or none that we can get our minds around. All this is just illegitimate employment of the substance ontology that applies so smoothly and naturally to the physical world. In fact, we have no workable idea of what the mind is, i.e., its ontological categories. The whole model of a unitary substance instantiating a plurality of properties breaks down and we have nothing to put in its place. We don’t know what kind of thing a sensation or thought or self is, except via rough and misleading analogies. The way we talk about the mind is thus strictly meaningless, because the ontological scheme that could make it meaningful does not carry over to the mind. Our language of the mind is a kind of inarticulate babble that we find useful for practical purposes. The sentence “I am in pain” is semantically really nothing like “This table has four legs”: substance ontology applies to the latter but not the former.[3]

[1] See Michael Ayers, Locke, for a careful exposition and defense of substance ontology. I will simply assume it in what follows.

[2] The ontology of “ideas” so prevalent in the history of philosophy might itself be a reflection of a presupposed substance ontology, this time at the corpuscular level. These are the smallest atoms of the mind, discrete persistent entities that combine to form larger wholes. But they are really nothing like physical atoms that bear the stamp of macro-substances: they are elusive, evanescent, not clearly discrete, and hard to pin down (where are they, how are they individuated, how do they cohere?). The mind as a receptacle of nuggets of mentality is hard to resist; the alternative is a kind of sea of indeterminate stuff (and even this image is too dependent on material paradigms). The ontology of mind is peculiarly ineffable. This is not surprising if our conceptual scheme is shaped from the bottom up by the substance ontology.

[3] I will say more about language and meaning in a later paper, given the anti-substantialist view of the mind. This will go along with a consideration of the self and “I”.