A True Story

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Here’s a birthday tale: who says philosophers don’t have adventures? Any parallels and life lessons I leave to my readers to draw.

 

 

 

A Great Escape

 

 

Last week I went to meet a friend of mine, Greg, for a nice evening boat ride. I drove over to Monty’s restaurant in Coconut Grove, parked, and went to join him on a nearby dock. He picked me up in his boat and we went for the planned boat ride, stopping off in a restaurant for dinner. It all went very smoothly and pleasantly, despite some initial logistical issues. At the end of the evening he took me back to the dock at Monty’s and then sped off. As I turned to regain solid ground (it was a floating dock) I observed that the gate through which I had entered earlier had been locked. It was 11.15 and there was no one around. I was trapped. It was dark. The gate was very high and there was no apparent way off the dock. I quickly realized that my only chance of getting back to dry land would be to get into the water and wade or swim to some rocks that led up to the road, and even then escape was not guaranteed, as the rocks were adjacent to a vertical face several feet below level land. I did not like the idea of getting into the water at all, fully clothed, and arriving drenched at valet parking in Monty’s (why was I so wet?). A pleasant evening had suddenly changed to a looming nightmare.

I noticed a small plastic boat moored to the dock and situated between the dock and some rocks. It was not long enough to span the stretch of water that needed to be traversed. If I could get into it I might be able to move it across a bit, within jumping distance of the rocks. It seemed like a long shot and quite perilous—it would be easy to fall in the water. I gripped the side of the dock with my hands and extended my leg in the direction of the narrow bow of the boat, placing it at the tip. It dipped alarmingly. It would be hard to get back now, so I swung my other foot over, placing both feet on the end of the boat, while trying to hold as much of my weight as possible with my hands. I managed to keep my balance and transferred my weight over to the tiny boat, which was clearly not designed for standing up in (I would have toppled over if it weren’t that I kept my grip on the dock). I edged up the boat crabwise and reached the stern, but it was still about five feet from the rocks, which looked slippery and inclined steeply down to the water. The question was whether the boat’s ropes would allow me to move it over a few feet. They did, but it was still a couple of feet between the boat and the rock.

Still gripping the side of the dock with my hands I aimed one foot at the rock, ready to brace for the slip. My foot stayed in place, so I brought the other one over, with most of my weight held by hands (I had to be thankful for them). I was now on the good side of the water, but still marooned on the rocks, in an even worse position than before. The trouble was that ground level was about five feet above me with nothing to pull myself up with. So the prospect of a night on the rocks was still with me. Then I saw a plant growing up from the rocks on the side of the dock—could I use that? It didn’t look very promising. I edged over to it, still being careful not to slip down the rocks into the water, causing both injury and saturation. One of the stalks had been cut: it was about an inch in diameter and very wet looking. My only hope was put my foot on it, push up while grabbing the dock, and try to pull myself onto land. It looked pretty risky: if my foot slipped as I pushed up, I would come down hard on the rock and tumble into the water. But I had little choice. Very gingerly I pushed up with the left foot, as squarely as possible, and it didn’t slip sideways. I was now balancing on one foot on a one-inch diameter stalk, the other foot lightly resting on the rest of the plant. Now I needed to hoist myself up by my arms and heave my body onto the flat land. I called upon all my earlier training as a gymnast and yanked myself up as hard as possible, scrambling to get my body over the rim of the dock. It worked: I was now lying face down on the ground, with legs dangling. I got to my feet (that was no trouble, comparatively).

I wandered over to valet parking, not wet at all, paid my fee to the valet guy, and drove silently home.

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Downton Abbey

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The great Downton ended its fifth season last week. I was struck till the very end by its preoccupation with matters moral: it’s not primarily about the British class system or the recent history of imperial England–it’s about right and wrong, good and evil. The good may be flawed (Lord Grantham) and the bad may be redeemable (Mr Barrow), but there is hardly a moment when some moral crux is not at full throttle. Mrs Hughes is the still moral centre of the show, closely followed by Mrs Crawley–with Anna Bates always tearfully and stoically in the right. But I greatly admired the actions taken by Mr Moseley (aided by Miss Baxter) in tirelessly identifying the pub where Mr Bates had his lunch on the day Mr Green was murdered: this was such a beautiful example of selfless virtue, quiet and determined, and ultimately successful. Mr Pratt, by contrast, is simply hilarious in his petty vanity.

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Galen Strawson on the Consciousness Myth

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That was a very enlightening article by Galen Strawson in the TLS about the history of the mind-body problem. He thoroughly debunks the idea that consciousness entered philosophy around 1995. Consciousness had long been regarded as especially problematic for materialism (I was banging on about it in my 1982 book The Character of Mind, following earlier thinkers). Even the phrase “what it’s like” dates back at least to a 1950 article by Brian Farrell (it was not invented by Thomas Nagel, as he himself has pointed out). It’s important that these things be got right.

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Intellectual Oscars

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It was nice to see the films about Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking doing so well at the Oscars, but I wonder if there would be anything like the same interest if the former had not been gay and the latter confined to a wheelchair. I yield to no one in my admiration of these two men, but it’s clear that the content of their minds was not the point. They are “human interest” stories, not stories about intellectuals. How many people, watching these two films, tried to find out about what these two geniuses actually thought? Perhaps they are the form in which people can accept intellectuals–they must be tormented or persecuted in some way. What about a film about an intellectual who did not have such problems? Or one that investigated the purely intellectual struggles of Turing and Hawking. Still, we should be grateful that these two great thinkers get the Hollywood treatment at all.

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Jessie J

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I had the good fortune to see Jessie J perform last night in concert at the Fillmore theater in South Beach. She sang with a four piece band to a dedicated and enthusiastic audience. I expected to be amazed by her voice (I listen to her albums all the time) but I was also much impressed with her stage presence and movement. It’s not dancing exactly but it is so integrated with the music, and so basically soulful, that it really made the performance. She gave it her all. She ended with Bang Bang, of course, and it brought the house down. She didn’t sing Big White Room, her great ballad, which really shows off her voice, but for a concert it is a little too serious and heavy. Anyway, I was not disappointed with the phenomenal Ms. Cornish. I think she is simply the best woman pop singer in the world today.

When I got home I watched the 40th year celebration of SNL, which was excellent, except for one thing: a truly horrendous performance by Paul McCartney of Maybe I’m Amazed. I don’t much care for the song, but Paul’s voice is shot–it was painful to listen to. I felt for him, because I am not all anti-Paul. Paul, meet Jessie.

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Ideology

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It is an odd thing about an ideology that it is never acknowledged by the person in the grip of it. He or she thinks it is the purest common sense or the soundest theory. No one ever thinks, “Yes, I am an ideologue and proud of it”. Religious ideologies, political ideologies, racial ideologies, gender ideologies, philosophical ideologies: no one in the grip of them ever realizes it. That is why it is so hard to dislodge ideologies, and why they seem to their believers to be completely rational. They always seem to involve an enemy that is demonized, and they consist of simple propositions that can be used to subsume anything that comes along. How do you tell if you are the dupe of an ideology, as opposed to a believer in a true theory? There is no litmus test, but anyone outside the ideology can see that it is operating. I think the clearest sign of it is a habit of generalizing about large classes of people in a derogatory way, without much regard for specific facts. I wonder how long ideologies have been around: did cave men and cave women have them? What about Neanderthals? Are any current apes ideologues? There is no doubt that they are a main curse of the human race, and surely everyone wants to avoid being an ideologue. Yet so many people are. Everyone should make every effort to ensure that they are not in the grip of an ideology, as a basic moral duty, being well aware that ideologies do not proclaim themselves as such. I am probably a victim of an ideology myself: I am thoroughly convinced of the ideology that ideologies are bad–I am an anti-ideology ideologue. And this ideology strikes me as the purest common sense.

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The Problems of Philosophers

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I have been a professional philosopher for forty years, teaching on both sides of the Atlantic, at University College London, Oxford, Rutgers, UCLA, USC, and elsewhere. People have been talking about the problems of “the profession” (as if that wasn’t about individual philosophers) and I thought it might be useful for me to give my take on the question. Before I became a philosopher I was a psychologist, and I have observed certain differences between these groups. I will simply give a list of the problems I have observed, in no particular order. Warning: there is much that I have not liked. Some of these problems have been more prevalent on one side of the Atlantic than the other. I have not noticed (with a couple of exceptions) much variation among the various groups that make up professional philosophers.

 

  1. Conformity

 

  1. Resistance to new ideas

 

  1. Clubbiness

 

  1. Fatuous self-importance

 

  1. Snobbery (especially institutional)

 

  1. Narrow mindedness

 

  1. Dishonesty, intellectual and moral

 

  1. Cowardice, intellectual and moral

 

  1. Prejudice

 

  1. Male insecurity

 

  1. Competitiveness

 

  1. Professionalism

 

  1. Complacency

 

  1. Moral obtuseness

 

  1. Herd mentality

 

  1. Malicious gossip

 

  1. Immaturity

 

  1. Boringness

 

  1. Fear of the alien

 

  1. Envy

 

  1. Petty ambition

 

  1. Insincerity

 

  1. Bullying (real and attempted)

 

  1. Social snubbing

 

  1. Lack of humanity

 

  1. Rule worship

 

  1. Snideness

 

  1. Hero worship

 

  1. Bad writing

 

  1. Rude questioning

 

  1. Status obsession

 

  1. Schadenfreude

 

  1. Favoritism

 

  1. Bad clothes and hair

 

  1. Literal-mindedness

 

  1. Sycophancy

 

  1. Factionalism

 

  1. Nastiness

 

  1. Absurdity

 

  1. Lack of judgment

 

I could go on. I have not seen any improvement in these faults over the years: if anything, they have worsened. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, but it seems to me that these faults are fairly pervasive. Overall there is a culture of enmity and backstabbing.

 

 

 

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Mysterianism Revisited

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True Mystery

 

 

The view now known as “mysterianism”, associated with Chomsky and me (though with many antecedents), has been called by other names. That label has (or once had) a rather pejorative connotation, as if the people who espoused the view so named were mystics enamored of spooky mysteries inaccessible to science and rationality. That was never the intention of Chomsky or me, as even the most cursory inspection of our writings would reveal. Still, it caught on. But it is worth reminding ourselves of alternative labels for the position. I called the view “transcendental naturalism” in Problems in Philosophy (which should have been titled by its subtitle The Limits of Enquiry, but I gave in to the marketing people at the publisher and made my original subtitle into the title). I also earlier introduced the phrase “cognitive closure”, though this does not easily admit of conversion into a suitable “ism”. Fodor had already spoken of “epistemic boundedness”, which also resists an “ism”. Various other terms suggest themselves: cognitive confinement, bounded cognition, epistemic blindness or blankness, explanatory gappiness, ignorancism, limitationism, epistemic modesty or humility, intellectual black-holism. None of these are very good, mainly for purely linguistic reasons—though they are accurate enough descriptively. I have toyed with neologisms, such as “anti-knowism”. Just as we are used to “realism” and “anti-realism”, so we might get used to “knowism” and “anti-knowism”. Knowism is the doctrine that everything about a certain subject matter can be known; anti-knowism is the view that not everything about a subject matter can be known. Thus we might speak of global and local knowists, and similarly for anti-knowists, depending on how broadly the thesis is taken. And we might also speak of partial and total versions of these doctrines—corresponding to the theses that something can be known about a given subject matter or everything can be known about it; or not known, as the case may be. This terminology has the virtue of linguistic adaptability and descriptive accuracy, as well as brevity and lack of misleading connotations. But it is rather arch and unnatural, and unlikely to catch on.

On balance I think the best approach is to retain “mysterianism”, keeping its defects in mind, but qualifying it so as to cancel its potential to mislead. Thus I favor “scientific mysterianism”—or “sci-my” if we want something pithier. Variants of this label would be: secular mysterianism, naturalistic mysterianism, tough-minded mysterianism, hard-nosed mysterianism, hard mysterianism, reductive mysterianism, or (my personal favorite) badass mysterianism. The idea is to flag the mysteries as “mysteries of nature”, not “mysteries of the supernatural”. So I propose using these new labels from now on, in the interests of clarity and philosophical ideology.

I shall now list the main tenets of scientific mysterianism (or for informal occasions, badass mysterianism). The aim is not to defend these propositions (they have been defended elsewhere) but merely to summarize the basic outlook in compact form.

 

  1. Unknowability does not imply non-existence.

 

  1. Degree of intelligibility is not degree of reality.

 

  1. Intelligibility is a matter of cognitive endowment.

 

  1. There is no such thing as “unintelligible reality” tout court.

 

  1. Mechanism provides the base standard for human intelligibility.

 

  1. Mind is as limited as body, and has an anatomy too.

 

  1. How-possible questions might have answers beyond our cognitive reach; philosophical problems can be solved by pointing this out.

 

  1. Knowledge is a matter of biological luck, not divine guarantee.

 

  1. Science is the name we give to what lies within our cognitive scope.

 

  1. We can speak of what we cannot know.

 

  1. The bounds of truth are not the bounds of human reason.

 

  1. It may be that nothing in nature is fully intelligible to us.

 

  1. It is remarkable that we understand anything about the deep principles of nature, not a matter of course.

 

  1. Mysteries of nature are facts of human psychology.

 

  1. The brain is an evolved organ, not a miracle worker.

 

  1. We can grow accustomed to mysteries, but they do not go away.

 

  1. Newton’s Principia is the ultimate text in mysterious Western science.

 

  1. Understanding a theory is not the same as understanding what that theory is about.

 

  1. Locke, Hume, and Kant all understood the limits of human knowledge.

 

  1. Positivism is a failed attempt to deny natural mysteries.

 

  1. Idealism is the only alternative to mysterious realism.

 

  1. Science is not the rejection of mystery but its studied recognition.

 

  1. Knowledge and mystery go together.

 

  1. Reality does not contain a mysterious part, though it is mysterious in part.

 

(The numbering is off for some reason, so correct accordingly.)

 

 

 

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