The Problem of Psychology

Everyone knows that psychology is a difficult subject, especially psychologists. But why? Why isn’t it as advanced as physics and chemistry, or even biology? The mind has been around for a long time and so have our cognitive faculties (though less time), and it’s not as if we are not curious about it. Yet our psychological knowledge seems primitive in comparison, laughably superficial. What is the problem? It is commonly said that the reason is that psychology is a young science; we just haven’t been doing it as long as the other sciences. This is an unconvincing answer: why haven’t we been doing it as long? Is it really being claimed that if only we had started earlier psychology would be as advanced as the other sciences? It seems to be held in some quarters that philosophy was holding psychology back: it kept psychology to itself and wouldn’t allow it to employ scientific methods for some obscure reason. Tosh! Natural philosophy used to deal with physics and chemistry and yet that didn’t stop them from developing into the empirical sciences. Clearly, there must be a deeper reason why psychology is relatively immature; but you will not find a psychology textbook that explains why. After all, we have direct access to our own minds by introspection, and we interact with people with minds every day—and yet we don’t know much serious psychology. If we had that kind of access to the stars, we would have developed astronomy much earlier than we did! And it simply isn’t true that applying scientific methods in psychology has led to ground-breaking discoveries comparable to those of physics, chemistry, and biology; psychology is still relatively retarded.

Is it that minds are just incredibly complicated, much more so that lumps of matter, stars, and organisms? It might be true that minds are more complicated (whatever that means), but it is hard to believe that this is the reason for the lack of advancement. It isn’t as if we have looked into the mind and thought “Wow, that is socomplicated!” The mind isn’t even that big. The reason isn’t ontological—based on the nature of the mind itself. No, it is epistemological: we don’t have the right means to know it. It is the epistemic capacities of psychologists that cause the problem not the intrinsic nature of the mind. This is really quite obvious: we don’t have the ability to see directly into the mind, or to examine it under a microscope. The human senses are not geared to acquiring knowledge about minds. Psychology would be different if we could inspect the mind up close and simply see how it works. Nor is it introspectively accessible in its deep workings. We are cognitively cut off from direct knowledge of the mind and have to infer it from observable clues. A glaring example of this is child development: we just don’t remember much about our childhood. Thus, we can’t just ask people what was going on in their minds when they were babies, or ask babies themselves. Adults have no memories of these early psychological stages. We can’t settle the question of innate ideas by asking people whether they had this or that idea in the womb. A Freudian can’t ask a middle-aged man whether he desired sex with his mother as an infant and expect to get an answer. And the same is true of other areas of psychological interest: perception, intelligence, memory, attention, imagination, reasoning, motivation, emotion, personality, language, dreams, creativity, etc. We just don’t have access to these faculties by any direct means; we have to approach them from afar with whatever means we have at our disposal. Psychology is difficult because we are not cut out for it (we are hardly cut out for scientific knowledge in general, which is why it took so long to develop). Biology (the genes) didn’t make us natural psychologists (in the scientific sense). Why should it?

We can appreciate the true situation by imagining a species of alien psychologists with different epistemic capacities. Suppose these psychologists knew their stuff innately: they were born knowing the correct theories of the mind, their own and others. They know scientific psychology as we know our language—instinctively. For example, they know exactly how many kinds of memory there are, how memories are stored in the brain, what forgetting is, etc. Nothing about the mind is puzzling to them; and their predictive powers are phenomenal. They have all the psychological knowledge we will have in a thousand years and more. For them psychology is old hat, common knowledge, nothing to write home about. They know how the mind works (nothing to do with computation, it turns out). When these aliens come to Earth, they instantly figure out everything about human psychology (it’s a good bit simpler than their psychology). They are born equipped with all the psychological knowledge anyone could need (they also have advanced knowledge of physics). We know what we know of scientific psychology partly on the basis of our innate knowledge of folk psychology; they just know more than we do innately. We probably would know almost nothing of psychology without our innate endowment, but that innate knowledge doesn’t extend to the whole of the mind. It is contingent what we know innately, and we just don’t know that much psychology that way; we have to acquire such knowledge as we have painstakingly. Unfortunately, our scientific methods are not well designed for gaining deep psychological knowledge—we can’t even use the psychological equivalent of particle accelerators. We have yet to observe a psychological particle, if there are any. Psychology is difficult because we are not naturally much good at it, sorry to say. All our sciences are limited by our human science-forming capacity (to borrow Chomsky’s term); well, our psychology is very so limited. In some possible worlds we might be born expert psychologists, but not in the actual world. Do you think other animals could make much progress with establishing a scientific psychology? The problem is not that we came to the subject late in the day; it is that we came to it. The problem of psychology is our psychology as psychologists. The problem of cognitive science is the cognitive science of us.

The problem is acute in clinical psychology and psychiatry: we understand these subjects so poorly because we don’t have access to their causes and underlying processes. We can’t just look into the machinery and see what the pathology is and how to cure it. Freud used free association and the like, but this approach is limited at best. If only we could make the unconscious conscious, but no one has come up with the technology to do that. None of these problems will be solved merely by the passage of time and big grants, though we may be able to make some useful inferences. But don’t count on it; psychology might be in much the same state a thousand years from now, give or take a bit. Physical medicine might improve tremendously in the coming years, but mental medicine is a different proposition. Minds are just hard for us to know about, our own and others. How do we remember? No amount of remembering will tell you that. The problems of psychology are methodological, i.e., epistemological, and they are deep-seated. They are endemic not historical.[1]

[1] The methodological problems of other sciences were solved, partially at least, by fortuitous circumstances and technological innovation: microscopes, telescopes, fossils, light transmissions from space, prisms, X-rays, particle accelerators, etc. But no such luck has helped us in psychology: no instruments that reveal inner structure and hidden operations, no information-laden light coming from within the mind, no dissections, no atom smashers, no litmus tests, no staining techniques. We are on our own in psychology (the tachistoscope is a limited instrument). No wonder we know so little. Just think how retarded astronomy would be if we received no light from elsewhere in the universe and had never invented the telescope! We really need something like Mr. Spock’s mind-meld or a working mind-meter or souped-up telepathy. But we are stuck with training our eyes and ears on external behavior.

Do Events Exist?

We have become accustomed to the idea of an “ontology of events”, either as a total world ontology or as part of our ontology. Are events all there is (no objects or substances), or are they just a part of what there is? Events exist—we think. Donald Davidson was a great proponent of a robust ontology of events, making use of them in the philosophy of mind (“Mental Events”) and philosophy of language (adverbs as predicates of events). Philosophers talk unhesitatingly about physical events. We quantify over events, commit ourselves existentially to them, treat them as ontologically on a par with physical objects. We think vaguely of them as beads on a string, ripples in water, notes in a tune. But are they real existents? Are they genuine particulars or individuals? Do they exist alongside ordinary objects as separate but co-equal constituents of reality? I am going to argue that their ontological credentials have been greatly exaggerated—there are no such things as events as commonly construed by philosophers. Not that no events ever occur—they happen all the time (see below)—but they are not the robust ontological baubles philosophers have supposed. There exists no such metaphysical category. The way philosophers use the word “event” is a misuse of that term, standing for nothing. The set of events in this sense is the empty set. The term “event” as a philosophical term of art is a meaningless term.

How is the word “event” used by non-philosophical speakers? The OED gives us this: “a thing that takes place—a public or social occasion”; it then cites contests in sports (athletic events). We are familiar with the phrases “event planner” and “It will be a great event”. Events are things like weddings, christenings, graduations, and birthday parties. They are not just anything that happens no matter how trivial and unnoticed. A tap dripping is not an event. Generally speaking, an event in this vernacular sense is something of human significance—something that matters (to us). Events are part of the human world, not the mind-independent objective world. Nothing is an event in the “absolute conception”—the world as it is independently of us (or other intelligent beings). This should set off alarm bells: philosophers have lifted this word from ordinary speech and tried to imbue it with a wider metaphysical meaning. The ordinary speaker would be bemused by the way philosophers have come to use the word. This linguistic move borrows a meaning from ordinary language but then stretches it beyond what it can bear. The fact is that we have no term of ordinary language with the extension intended by philosophers. The plain truth is that an event, properly so called, is something that happens that has meaning for humans. So, there are plenty of events, but they are not what philosophers have in mind—those things are not events at all.

We must then ask what philosophers mean by the term (they don’t generally tell us). Here we get no univocal answer; the alleged ontology has no clear definition. This comes out in two ways. First, theories of the nature of events differ: are they simply the instantiation of a single property at a time by an object, or are they autonomous particulars instantiating a range of properties? That debate has raged (or trickled) for years and I won’t go into it. Is it true that being red at time t is an event? Hardly. Do events simultaneously instantiate the range of properties that objects do? Nope. Second, no criterion of identity for this alleged class of particulars has been proposed that does the job; identity of causes and effects is patently circular. So, the class of events in the philosopher’s technical sense is ontologically ill-defined and theoretically elusive. The indicated conclusion is that that ontology is spurious. It survives because of examples like explosions and wars, but these are events in the vernacular sense, since they are of human significance. Of course, stuff happens all the time, most of it of no human interest or account, but this doesn’t warrant application of the word “event”; it is just things coming to have properties or changing properties. It was an event for me when I graduated or got married, but not when I took a breath at noon yesterday or buttered a piece of toast this morning. The big bang was an event, as was the extinction of the dinosaurs, because these strike us as momentous; they are not events for the universe objectively considered. Then too, an object changing its properties at a time is nothing over and above the object, its properties, and a time; there is not some further entity, an “event”, on top of these. Being an event in the ordinary sense is a projected property, an anthropocentric property; there are no objective events. The universe was not eventful before humans (or other intelligent beings) came along; it was just shit happening, or less than shit (since shit can be an event—but I digress).

These reflections prompt a striking (even scintillating) thought: there are only mental events—there are no physical events. For physical events, considered objectively, are not events at all, since they have no significance for us (think of stuff happening in some remote unknown galaxy). But many mental events really are events, because our minds matter to us—weddings are events because the emotions that go with them matter to us (they are the true events of the day). We might even venture to say that what happens to us mentally is always an event, so focused are we on our own mental life. That pain yesterday was an event because it really got my attention. Thus, we might be persuaded that every mental change is an event, though these events may vary in their salience or “eventitude”. But there are no physical events, i.e., mind-independent events that matter to no one. Physical events don’t exist while mental events are only too existent. We can be ontologically committed to mental events, as events, and commit no linguistic or conceptual solecism; but we cannot do the same with physical events, there being none. Not even a massive explosion on an unknown star is an event (event for whom?). There is a well-defined ontology of events (weddings, graduations, etc.), but it isn’t what philosophers need for their theories, viz. uneventful events. Thus, there can be no identity theory of mental events and physical events (types or tokens), no general event ontology, no causal relations between events, no behavioral events, no metaphysical theory of events, no quantum events—not in any robust sense anyway. Stuff happens, but this doesn’t consist in things called events coming and going. The lion sleeps in the jungle, but there is no event of the lion sleeping there; that was really a non-event. There are jungles, lions, and sleep, but no additional entity of lion-sleeping. It always felt odd to speak of an event of buttering the toast in the bathroom (Davidson); now we see why. The alleged ontology of events reifies property instantiation under cover of ordinary language.[1]

[1] Suppose we have an ontology of sense-data and nothing else. We then assume that sense-data are significant events in someone’s life, as is not unreasonable. Then we will think that the world consists of events in something like the ordinary sense. It will then be easy to pick up on this use of “event” and transfer it, illegitimately, to the physical world. Hence, a world consisting of physical events. Things no doubt change, but there is no event of changing, as this is understood by philosophers. Events are not an ontological category which we have only recently recognized by reflecting on the logical form of action sentences. They carry a strong whiff of Meinong, or of possible worlds.

Causal Reality

Consider Michelangelo’s statue of David: heavy, large, made of marble, beautifully shaped. Aristotle would say that it consists of matter and form—its composition and shape. According to him, these are both causes of the statue—material cause and formal cause. Together, they make the statue what it is; they cause it to be what it is (making is causing). It is because of them that the statue exists. In general, Nature gives things a nature in virtue of matter and form.[1] Matter and form are ontologically basic. But what antecedent facts produced the statue? What is its efficient cause? Whatever that is it must cause the matter and the form of the statue, so what caused the matter and what caused the form? The cause of the matter is not immediately obvious and took some science to discover–geological science. It goes back to what caused the matter of the earth—the minerals, metals, etc. We can certainly report that matter was not caused by man; Michelangelo didn’t cause it. He found it ready-made. No one thinks that Michelangelo had the power to cause (create) the piece of marble that constitutes the statue. So, we can say that the matter of the statue was efficiently caused by nature, geologically understood. It is a product of nature not man. But what about its form, its shape? That was not caused by nature but by man, a specific man. The efficient cause of the form of the statue was the actions of Michelangelo.

In virtue of what was Michelangelo the cause of the form of the statue? What was it about him that made the statue have the shape it has? An old-fashioned answer would be his substantial body and soul; a modern answer would be the atoms of his body and the workings of his brain. That is, his physical and psychological characteristics. These fall under Aristotle’s scheme: matter and form (stuff and morphology). The efficient cause of the statue’s shape consists of a combination of the matter and form of an antecedent object, fact, or event—and nothing else. There isn’t some third attribute that figures in the causal story over and above the material and formal cause of the causing agency (a particular sculptor). An efficient cause has its causal powers in virtue of its matter and form; there is not some third causal factor exemplified by the so-called efficient cause. In other words, efficient causation reduces to the other two kinds of causation; they are what is basic to causal reality. They are the true causes not some indefinable “efficient” cause. There are no efficient causes, though there is a relation labelled “efficient”: all causes are constituted by matter and form. This is why we have that peculiar label “efficient”; there is no distinctive causal reality corresponding to it. We could equally call it antecedent causality, or sequential, or temporal. It isn’t a further type of causal factor, just one way in which the other factors operate—across time (as well as at a time). Aristotle was wrong to include it as a fourth type of cause on all fours with the other three. Causal reality consists of the material and the formal, and that’s it.

We can generalize from Michelangelo’s David; it exemplifies a general pattern. Whenever you have a causal sequence, the operative factors are material and formal. Births and deaths are the same: some antecedent combination of matter and form brings about an effect; there is nothing additional to these (something called efficiency). Atoms in certain configurations, as we would put it today—arrangements of stuff, basically. Because that is fundamentally what nature is. This applies also to mental causation, even when not construed in materialist terms: the “matter” might be an immaterial substance—this is still the “material cause” of the mind. Similarly, the form of the mind is not necessarily a geometric concept; it can be any mode of arrangement or structure (“architecture”). Cartesian substances act causally in the same way as material substances; their causal powers depend on their composing stuff and their structure. Causal efficacy is always a matter of matter and form. There are thus two factors operating in any causal interaction, both individually necessary and taken together sufficient, which we are calling by their Aristotelean names. Sometimes one predominates over the other in a causal interaction: sometimes it is only the matter that counts, sometimes form is the important factor. Mass matters in gravitational interactions, shape matters in house building. What I want to emphasize is that efficient causation is not itself a causal power, or the basis of one; this is just a way of talking about the other two. The cement of the universe consists of the actions of matter and shape (roughly); there is not also a third element, efficiency. It matters that there is a duality here—that causation divides into two components. It isn’t a unitary thing: we have matter and form, form and matter. Pure form can’t cause anything, and pure matter can’t either; each needs the other to power the universe. God had to install both in order to get the universe up and running, but he didn’t need to add something called “efficiency”. We might even say that necessarily causation exploits two and only two ingredients: for how could a third ingredient change the course of history, as dictated by matter and form? What else could nature consist of? How could causation be fixed by anything other than matter and form? Everything has to be made of something, and everything has to have some sort of form—and there can’t be anything else. Even God must fall under this metaphysical duality (divine substance and divine form)—he has a material cause and a formal cause that fix his causal powers. He engages in efficient causation, as in creating the universe, but he has no attribute corresponding to “efficiency”. A modern-day Aristotle would say there are two types of cause, material and formal, and leave it at that. What is called an “efficient cause” is really one manifestation of a material cause and a formal cause; these are the bedrock of the cement.[2]

[1] I won’t discuss Aristotle’s notion of final cause, which is really too antiquated to survive the passage of time. But his notions of matter and form are still relevant today, suitably updated. This is one dualism we can’t do without—which is not to say it doesn’t raise difficult questions. It might even be said to be deeply mysterious.

[2] Historically, at least since Hume, efficient causation has been the focus of attention, with material causes and formal causes relegated to Aristotelean antiquity. I am inverting that priority, seeing efficient causation as resting on the other two. It is material and formal causation in action, so to speak; it is nothing without them. The causal structure of the universe is determined by its material and formal nature, with efficient causation superimposed. We tend to take this basic structure for granted, our attention being grabbed by the passing show (one damned thing after another); but it is really the foundation of the whole causal set-up. Events in time are just substances (matter and form combinations) strutting their stuff (while keeping excellent form). Event metaphysics has ruined the philosophy of causation; and event metaphysics is the result of empiricist assumptions—so, we must reject those assumptions in order to get our causal house in order. Aristotle, happily, was not hampered by empiricism. In the beginning was the material-formal thing not the deed. Actions depend on actors.

Science and Philosophy

Many scientists have got it into their head that the purpose of philosophy is to help them with their science. They then complain that it isn’t much help, if any. The complaint would be reasonable if their assumption were correct. But it isn’t. Philosophy is a different subject entirely. Their attitude is like philosophers thinking that the aim of science is to help them with their philosophical problems. These scientists are like lawyers who think the job of philosophers is to help them with their legal cases, or farmers who think philosophers should be helping with the farming. The idea seems to be that philosophy used to be an adjunct of religion, but science took over from religion, so philosophers should switch their interests accordingly. Or else they just think science is the only thing worth knowing (who taught them that?). They appear to believe they are the gentlemen and philosophers their manservants (“handmaidens”). Jeeves to Wooster, as it were, but with a less spectacular Jeeves. The fact is that the philosophical Jeeves is off doing his own thing, far removed from Bertie’s scientific endeavors. The two subjects are miles apart. Of course, it is good to know a wide range of things—philosophers should know some science and scientists should know some philosophy, just to be well-educated. In my experience the educational lack is greater on the science side, since science is taught in schools and philosophy isn’t. I know many philosophers who are quite good scientists, but virtually no scientists who are even halfway decent philosophers. I myself was trained as a scientist (psychology) initially, and the scientists I knew were generally completely ignorant of philosophy and had no interest in it. If a philosopher chooses to do philosophy of science, he isn’t trying to do science in some amateurish fashion; he is doing philosophy. How philosophy could help one design experiments beats me, let alone analyze their results. Science is one thing, philosophy quite another. In my brain, psychology and philosophy occupy different compartments, rather as tennis and music do. The purpose of philosophy is not to help scientists think more clearly, or some such worthy (and dreary) aim; it is to solve philosophical problems—or at least understand them better. I am not today trying to explain what philosophical problems are, or how to set about solving them; I am simply asserting that philosophy is not the manservant of science. Nor has it ever been since the time of Plato. Philosophy is not concerned with finding out the center of the universe or how animals evolved or what matter is made of—or helping scientists find out those things (how?); it has its own subject-matter and methods. If a scientist wants to find out what these are, he or she could have a look at the curriculum of a typical philosophy degree—or even more onerous, take a philosophy course. It’s not that hard.