On Being the Best

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On Being the Best

A few years ago, I came to the conclusion that I am the best philosopher who ever lived. It was hard to take in at first. But I had to accept it; I could no longer deny it. It was true. Facts are facts. I kept it to myself for a while and then decided to confess it. The response was mainly silence. But I have come to think that I was wrong. I have revised my opinion. I now believe that I am the best philosopher ever by far. Why do I say this? Compare the Beatles: it is generally agreed that they are not only the best band ever but the best band ever by far. They had it all; no one could compare. Four working-class blokes from Liverpool: the best ever by far. It is not seriously deniable after all this time. The Beatle mania was justified. Even they found it hard to believe. But you just have to look at their output—clearly the best by far. And they only existed for a few short years. I was forced to my own realization by my output of the last few years, written since I arrived (reluctantly) at my earlier judgment—it clearly makes me the best by far. Quantity, quality. No contest.

I hear the screams of protest: what an egotist, narcissist, deluded fool! But, my friends, you have got me wrong: because I am really not that good. Being the best at something doesn’t logically entail being good at it. Being the best is completely relative to a chosen group—e.g., being the best ant high-jumper. My potential rivals all have glaring weaknesses, recognized in hindsight. I won’t enumerate the various failures, limitations, and humiliations (e.g., the pineal gland). It is very easy to be wrong, short-sighted, and tunnel-visioned. Who now thinks that Plato and Aristotle got everything right? This is a familiar story. In fact, I think that the best philosophers were all too aware of their limitations—because philosophy is so hard. We are so confined by our time and place, not to mention our biology. Mistakes are easy to make. The very best philosophers don’t really think they are that good at the subject. I myself am acutely aware of this, though I admit I am actually pretty good. But I can see philosophy in the distance laughing at me—“What, you think you are good at this!” Humans are also quite bad at physics, though some are better than others. So, ok, I’m better by far than my fellow philosophical laborers, big fucking deal. If I am a narcissist (I don’t spurn the label), I am one in the land of the disfigured.

But let me return to “by far”, because that is the interesting question (the rest is obvious). What makes me by far the best? I think there are two main factors: my command of the English language and my refusal of orthodoxy. I really cannot bear to think as others do. And I am vain about my writing style. These are the motors, the mechanisms. (I also value creativity, but that is harder to pin down). I have always had abnormal powers of expression, and I never like to go with the crowd (in fact it makes me sick). When I survey my contemporary rivals, the problem is always a lack of style and a propensity to conformity. I might almost say it is a lack of (healthy) narcissism.

As I read this over, I think what rubbish it really is; but it is a lot better than other people’s rubbish. It is a better class of rubbish. And some of it is not rubbish at all. I am the least rubbishy philosopher ever, by far.[1]

[1] Let’s remember too that I have been doing philosophy continuously for over fifty years—no breaks, no wars. And my lifetime has corresponded with the best period that philosophy has ever had in terms of resources and opportunities, as well as fellow practitioners. I have had the benefit of all this. And someone has to be the best—if not me, then who? Would it be agreed that I am the best philosopher ever who started off as a psychologist? Am I clearly the broadest? Am I the best of my height? Etc.

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Knowing Other Minds

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Knowing Other Minds

We are only too familiar with the other minds problem: from liars to bats, the inverted spectrum to total zombies. But all is not dark—we do sometimes know what is on, or in, another mind. In fact, we have a great deal of knowledge of this type, generally taken for granted. But how do we have it, and how real is the knowledge? We have it by means of imagination: we imagine what it is like for the other to be in his current situation, say eating an apple. Suppose I imagine this and suppose his mental state is just as I imagine it—the taste and texture of the apple for him are perfectly represented by my imaginative act. Then it seems entirely appropriate to say that I know what he is experiencing—I literally know the other’s mind (his state of consciousness). My imaginative act is veridical and it provides a basis for a claim of knowledge. I know what it is like to eat an apple (I have eaten thousands) and I know that this person is having just such an experience—as it might be, a Fuji apple. I don’t know this fact by perceiving it—seeing it with my own eyes—but by imagining it. If I couldn’t imagine it, it is doubtful that I could know it—for what other handle do I have on the fact? Perhaps I could infer it, but I couldn’t know it as I do know—I would just have ersatz knowledge.[1]Consider a blind person with a lively imagination: such a person might be able to conjure up images to fit his physical environment, thereby coming to have knowledge about it—he knows just what is involved in two red cubes next to a yellow sphere, say. He doesn’t perceive this fact but he has a veridical image of it, possibly very vivid and detailed (it might even be caused by the fact in question). It would appear churlish to deny this person knowledge of the fact in question. That is essentially my position with respect to the apple eater. Should we then say that we have two different types of knowledge—knowledge by perception and knowledge by imagination? Does knowledge bifurcate in this way?

If it does, the term “know” is fundamentally ambiguous: do you mean it in the perception sense or the imagination sense? It also suggests that the perceptual model of knowledge is limited, since knowledge of other minds is non-perceptual. However, there is a way to unify the two types of knowledge, or rather not accept that we have two types to begin with, namely to regard the imagination as itself a type of seeing. All knowledge is seeing knowledge, and imagining is seeing—just not seeing with the eyes. It is seeing with the mind—what I have called “mindsight”.[2] Imagining is seeing with the mind’s eye, as we say. It is visual. Then we can say that I can see the other person’s state of mind—not by using my two physical eyes to scan his mind, but by using my mental faculty of imaginative seeing. We have here two species of seeing, not seeing versus imagining. I see with my mind what the other is experiencing by imagining it. We might even say that I am acquainted with it, apprehending it with sensory immediacy (I might even salivate in response to my imaginative act). I don’t just know “by description” what the other is experiencing; I have an immediate awareness of it—I know just what he feels like as he munches away. I don’t have second-rate knowledge, phony knowledge; I have excellent top-notch knowledge. I can say “I know exactly how you feel” or “I know that taste so well”, referring to his gustatory sensation. I don’t suppose that I am actually seeing his inner sensation with my two eyes, so that it would vanish if I closed them; I know perfectly well that my imagination is doing the work of knowledge production. I am seeing (mind) without seeing (eyes).

And there is a further point: there is such a thing as imaginative ocular seeing of other people’s mental states (also animals’). In Wittgenstein’s sense, we can see others as having certain states of mind: for example, we can see a person as suffering or as happy. He or she looks to be suffering or happy—that is, one’s eyes register this fact. Visual input is supplemented by the imagination to produce a specific type of visual state: seeing imaginatively. You can see the duck-rabbit drawing as a duck and you can see another person as happy; a fusion of perception and imagination takes place. On this basis it is possible to acquire knowledge—sense-based knowledge. Thus, we can maintain the perceptual model of knowledge across the board, even taking in knowledge of other minds: we literally experience the other’s mental state. This is the basis of empathy—putting oneself in the other person’s place. You sense the other’s suffering; you don’t just conjecture it or have an opinion about it. The seeing-imagining is a seeing which is a knowing. This is a primitive type of knowledge not like inductive or abductive knowledge (so-called). I think that animals have it too. Knowledge of other minds is not some kind of hugely theoretical effort or achievement. It is, in a sense, pre-rational, not a result of an exercise of Reason, as distinct from perception and imagination. It is nothing like scientific knowledge in the sense in which people mean this phrase (elaborately inferential, not yet falsified, highly fallible). It is primitive animalistic awareness of one’s environment, including the psychological environment. It is not a counterexample to the perceptual view of (genuine) knowledge. Of course, it can be conjectural and inferential, as when we are merely guessing what someone thinks or feels; but it need not be this way, and can therefore count as basic knowledge. There is a problem of other minds, but other minds are not normally epistemologically problematic; people have their secrets, but not everything is secret. The mind can be open to view or closed to view, visible or invisible. That is plain common sense; it isn’t always a philosophical problem (short of radical skepticism). Pain can be perfectly perceptible—though pains cannot be seen purely with the eyes (you need an injection of imagination). It is perceptible by means of the sympathetic imagination, perhaps coupled with perception of behavior: seeing your behavior, I imagine your pain and thereby come to be acquainted with your state of mind. What is invisible to the naked eye need not be invisible to the mind’s eye. The concept of the visible is capacious, elastic. It basically means being an object of a visual phenomenology, perceptual or imagistic. Some things are unimaginable, though possible, as some things are imperceptible, though thinkable. Other minds are imaginable—in some cases though not in all. Some of the bat’s mind I can imagine, but some I can’t. In the former case, I have knowledge; in the latter, I don’t. It is actually quite easy for me to imagine the states of millions of minds of many types, some quite different from mine; though many elude my imaginative powers. I have a lot of knowledge of minds other than my own, real honest-to-goodness knowledge.[3]

[1] See my papers “Perceptual Knowledge” and “Non-Perceptual Knowledge” for the background epistemology.

[2] See my Mindsight (2004).

[3] It is good to think of imagination as an extension of perception, a variation on it. There is what we perceive and there is what we can imagine given what we can perceive; the former constrains the latter and determines its character. We imagine by means of what we already perceptually know. We can imagine things that go beyond what we can directly perceive; and this can form the basis of knowledge, as when I imagine the future in order to plan the best course of action. Similarly, I imagine what your state of mind is in order to respond better to your actions—I may do this by imagining myself in your place. Our knowledge would be greatly limited if we lacked our imaginative capacities. Imagining is not opposed to knowing but a way of knowing.

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Material Selves

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Material Selves

The self and the mind: what are they? Are they material or immaterial? These questions are usually discussed separately: one under the heading “personal identity”, the other under the heading “the mind-body problem”. Thus, we discuss whether the self is the body and whether mental states are physical states. But these questions are surely connected—the nature of the self and the nature of the mind. The reference of “I” and the reference of “pain” must be connected questions. I will contend that they are connected to the point of identity, but this is not as obvious as you might think; it is a substantive philosophical thesis.

If the self is the body (the physical organism), are mental states necessarily physical states? And if mental states are physical states, must the self be identical to the body? Is there room for the idea that the physical self might have non-physical states? And if mental states are physical, could the self be non-physical, perhaps immaterial? To be concrete, if the human person is identical to the human physical organism, could his pains be other than C-fibers firing? And if his pains are his C-fibers firing, could he be something other than his physical body? Does materialism about the self entail materialism about the mind, and does materialism about the mind entail materialism about the self? Let’s take the second question first. Could an immaterial self have material attributes in the shape of mental states? It could clearly have immaterial non-physical attributes, but could it have material attributes? Wouldn’t this make it material? For such attributes would constitute it as material, would they not? You might think there is some wiggle room here, because the self has a body and itcould instantiate its mental physical attributes: wouldn’t the self then be immaterial but the mind be material? However, the reply to this is not hard to find: the self doesn’t have those physical attributes, the body does, these being distinct entities. The self is merely associated with a body that has physical attributes; it doesn’t have them (directly, intrinsically). If it had them, it would itself be material. So, the situation envisaged is not metaphysically possible: granted that the self has physical attributes, it must be physical—the body or brain. Materialism about the mind entails materialism about the self (the person, the subject, the “I”). You can’t be a Cartesian dualist about the self and a materialist about the self’s mind. The materiality of pain logically implies the materiality of the subject of pain: if my pains are material, so am I. I have to be my body or brain if my mental states are physical states. So, if I am not my body or brain, then my mental states cannot be physical states. The logical (metaphysical) connection between self and mind generates a possible refutation of materialism about the mind. If you don’t like materialism about the self, you can’t like materialism about the mind. You can’t have an identity theory of the mind and a non-identity theory of the self. You can’t be a physical reductionist about mental events and a non-reductionist about selves (given that such events occur inselves). This is a non-trivial result.

What about the other way round—can you be a reductive identity theorist about selves but a non-reductive duality theorist about minds? Could the self be a physical thing (the body or brain or the whole physical organism) and yet its mental states be irreducibly mental? Isn’t that combination of views actually held by some people? They don’t like immaterial egos lurking inside the body (as they would put it) but they are not freaked out by property dualism or some other non-materialist position. But again, this position is dubiously coherent: for how could immaterial properties inhere in a purely physical substance? Wouldn’t they stop it from being completely material? Of course they would, since they would constitute part of its nature and hence make it partly immaterial. You can’t be completely material and yet instantiate non-material properties. Here someone might invoke double aspect theories: the self has two aspects, one material, the other immaterial. Okay, fine, if you think this makes sense, but it doesn’t solve the problem, because the self is not then completely material—it has an immaterial aspect or nature or essence. And there is nothing yet to suggest that this is not basic to the ontology of selves—in which case they are not fundamentally physical. You can’t be a reductionist about selves and a dualist about minds, because selves have minds. Indeed, their minds are integral to their identity, at a time and through time. That’s how they are individuated. Thus, the choice is stark: either materialism about selves and minds or immaterialism about both. Persons and mental events must share their ontology. One can therefore argue against materialism about the mind by urging anti-materialism about the self and vice versa. It comes in a single package. (I am anti-materialist about both.) The two questions should not be debated separately.

What about identity through time? We are excessively familiar with all the thought experiments and empirical findings that adorn the study of personal identity, yet we don’t apply this apparatus to the mind: but are the questions really so distinct? Granted, mental events don’t persist through time (they occur over time), so we can’t ask what constitutes their identity through time; but can’t we ask the question about mental states? Do I have the same pain now that I had a minute ago? What constitutes this identity? States do persist through time, and presumably in virtue of something. A materialist will say that it consists in the persistence of an underlying physical state—the state of the nervous system has not changed (the C-fibers are still firing away). The pain, we might say, has survived, by dint of the continued existence of the brain state. But what if we consider a fission case? The C-fibers split apart, thus producing two nerve centers each realizing a pain. Has the original pain survived? There is some inclination to say yes: one pain has become two (just as in a split-brain personal identity case). But then, the survival of pains doesn’t require that the future pain be identical with the earlier pain—there can be pain survival without pain identity.[1] And we could mount the same argument about thoughts, emotions, etc. The personal identity literature could be redeployed in the area of the mind-body problem; and the diehard dualist will resist inferences drawn from brain physiology. He may even deny that pains can be divided, though C-fibers can be. The two subjects should not in any case be pursued separately (can minds survive without identity?). The subject of personal identity is just one subject in a class of similar subjects: we have the persistence of persons over time, the persistence of mental states over time, and the persistence of whole minds over time.[2]

Returning to the topic of materialism, I should say a few words about the eliminative view of selves or minds. Can we be eliminativists about one but not the other? It is not as easy as it sounds. Would it be possible to eliminate the mind but keep the self (“pain” doesn’t refer but “I” does)? Evidently not: what is a self without a mind to keep it company? There are no zombie selves. There can be organisms without minds but none of these qualifies as a self (still less a person). The I cannot exist as a psychologically bare physical particular; at a minimum it requires a primitive consciousness. But many people seem to think that they can get rid of the self and retain the mind in all its glory, as a kind of selfless heap of mentality. It is quite true that there is no need to go full Cartesian about the self, still less immortal-soulish, but how can mental states be thought to inhere in nothing, or in mere bodily tissue? Instead of saying “I believe in ghosts” should we say “There is nothing that believes in ghosts, but there are beliefs in ghosts in this vicinity” or “This bodily tissue believes in ghosts”? Really? Beliefs need believers, and believers are not (non-self) bits of tissue. Nor are they replaceable by brains: I don’t allude indirectly to my brain when I say “I”, even though my brain is necessary for saying anything. What the “I” is is a difficult question, but it isn’t dispensable in favor of my brain or some segment of it. The self emerges from the brain in some mysterious fashion, but it isn’t reducible to a chunk of brain, or nothing at all. No, if you want to hang onto the mind, you have to accept the self along with it; and if you want to preserve the self, you have to accept the mind. You can’t eliminate one but hold fast to the other. The mind and the self are too closely intertwined to be forced apart; nor is there any good reason to do so. There are no thinkers without thoughts or thoughts without thinkers—even if this is hard to understand.[3]

[1] There can be a pain Parfit as well as a person Parfit.

[2] We also have questions about the persistence of raindrops, plants, and statues over time: can there be survival without identity in these cases too? I leave these aside here, having discussed them elsewhere.

[3] Of course, this is the purest common sense, but it is amazing how ready people are to abandon it on the flimsiest of grounds. It is really quite obvious that materialism about the self and materialism about the mind are logically connected doctrines. Once again mysteries lead to ontological panic or mayhem. There is a mind-body problem about the self, as there is a mind-body problem about the mind (and about its contents). Is there something it’s like to be a self?

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Paleolithic Philosophy

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Paleolithic Philosophy

I wish to introduce a new academic discipline to be named “paleolithic philosophy” (aka “caveman philosophy”). This subject investigates the original causes of philosophically interesting concepts. The central tenet of paleolithic philosophy is what I will call “evolutionary empiricism”, the doctrine that our basic concepts derive from the primitive environment of our distant ancestors in (roughly) paleolithic times (when people got stoned a lot). So, cave men (also cave women—though this was contested at the time) hit upon certain concepts as a result of their interactions with their environment, before much real thinking had begun; and these interactions shaped the concepts acquired. There is no commitment here to classical empiricism with respect to innateness; no doubt the concepts in question partly arose by means of genetic selection in some way. What matters is which features of the environment did the prompting. We are to think of the minds of these people as barely above the animal level of their ape ancestors, but sophisticated enough to get real thinking off the ground (how we don’t know). They were no doubt naïve to a fault, but aspiring, curious, open-minded. I venture to suggest that there were four main things that would have impressed themselves on the childlike minds of these individuals: the sun, the sky, the earth, and the (other) animals. They noticed these things and distinguished them in their minds. The sun would have seemed mightily impressive, as it still does: its movement across the sky, its appearance and disappearance, its warmth or lack thereof, its ability to produce light thus creating day and night. As we know, it was man’s first god—the prototype of all gods. The idea of God grew from the sun—a supernatural agent of some sort. Religion sprang from the sun. No sun, no god, no religion. Simply put: the sun caused religion (along with other factors). The sky caused the idea of heaven—for the sun dwells in the sky. It may also have caused the idea of hell, what with lightning and thunderstorms. The sky ruled over the earth and the sun was its right-hand man (probably the boss, like the toughest cave man). The earth they took for granted—it was what you stand on, what you must not fall from a great height on. Caves were holes in it, so it couldn’t be that bad (pity about the damp). Other animals were everywhere and not always friendly, though occasionally helpful. That was it. That was life. It was all you had to think about, the basis of your theories and dreams.

The thesis, then, is that it all comes from this, fundamentally. From the sun we get the ideas of knowledge, the good, and the beautiful: what we know is what the sun throws light on; the good is the warmth of the sun; the beautiful is the sun in the morning and evening (you couldn’t look at it the rest of the time). Thus, the sun is ultimately responsible for science and human knowledge in general, for morality, and for aesthetics. The sun is bright, warm, and beautiful (not dark, cold, and non-descript). It brings knowledge, life, and delight. It instigates a huge swath of our early conceptual scheme. This is the solar theory of almost everything. The sky is the source of wonder, the unknown, the infinite. At night it turns black and twinkles with inscrutable points (and that pale-fire moon). It hardly bears thinking about. It eventually causes astronomy and man’s knowledge of his insignificance. What about the earth? Well, it gave our ancestors the idea of the earthy: the mundane, the daily toil, the coefficient of resistance. Eventually it would produce physics, but in those far-off days it mainly produced depression (the mud, the rocks, the sharp edges, the rigid laws). You had to live with the earth, like it or not. Ultimately it would lead to existentialism (the in-itself). It wasn’t very moral, but not all that immoral either, just indifferent. Facticity, as the existentialists would say. As to other animals: thereby hangs a tail. The animals were vexatious, enthralling, delicious to eat, dangerous. They caused so much conceptualization in our ancestors, as they patrolled the earth, tracked the sun, and monitored the sky. So many animals, of so many kinds, so much to digest. The cave men found animals too extensive and unpredictable to take in; they had only the vaguest idea what they were about. Nothing like the sun or the sky. They gave rise to ideas of generations, birth and death, fighting and surviving (our ancestors recognized their kinship with the animals). Ideas of taxonomy took hold, domestication, hunting methods—all leading to the science of biology and eventually Charles Darwin. The sight of an elephant in the daytime, a lion at night prowling. Then the flies, the rats, the snakes, the ants. All so overwhelming. They formed the scary part of our conceptual scheme, and so morally confusing (you loved them and you hated them). But, let me emphasize, the sun was preeminent in those simple-minded days: it was the focus of their attention, their constant preoccupation. The sun was the main cause of caveman philosophizing. When you left your cave in the morning the question was what the sun would be doing that day. Above all, the sun was the source of all knowledge: the knowable was the visible and the visible was what the sun cast its light on. The concept of knowledge was indissolubly linked to the sun’s powers. Epistemology centered on the sun (as the later empiricists implicitly recognized[1]). If there were no sun, there would be no epistemology worthy of the name: all would be ignorance, skepticism, the dark and gloomy cave (shades of Plato). Paleolithic philosophy is heliocentric, sun-obsessed. The sky is the sun’s home, the earth is what the sun sheds its light and warmth on, animals are the objects the sun enables you to track. The sun is everything. As we now know, this world-view is largely correct (the origin of the planets, the seasons, photosynthesis, etc.), at least so far as human beings are concerned. It got human thought off to a brisk start (according to evolutionary empiricism): it was the big bang of the human conceptual scheme. The earth orbits the sun, but human thought orbits it too. Astronomy begets psychology.[2]

[1] To say that all knowledge derives from the senses is to say that vision is the primary method of knowledge acquisition, but vision only provides knowledge with the aid of light, mainly sunlight. So, really, it is the sun that is the enabling condition of knowledge. The sun plays no role in implanting innate knowledge. Empiricism is, in effect, the doctrine that the sun is the source of (nearly) all knowledge. This is to physicalize the origins of human knowledge.

[2] Paleolithic philosophy is very interdisciplinary: it includes psychology, biology, geology, and astronomy. The human conceptual scheme is affected by all these things. Its origins reflect the basic facts of the universe, particularly our planet. And origins never really go away; they linger and permeate. This is cognitive science writ large. It takes in astronomical-psychological laws.

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Pinker Comment

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I couldn’t agree more, Colin (and thanks for the shout-out). As we know, academic fields have their own cultural mores, and the norm that real psychology = experiments (or occasionally computer simulations) is strong. I think it’s gotten worse: when I was an undergrad, every department had a course in history of psychology and a course in “mathematical psychology,” a fading subfield. These courses are rare today.

Hope all’s well,

Steve

From: Colin <cmg124@aol.com>
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2025 7:22 AM
To: Thomas Nagel <nagelhollander@cs.com>; Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>; Pinker, Steven <pinker@wjh.harvard.edu>; Richard Dawkins <richard.dawkins1@icloud.com>; Rebecca Goldstein <rebegolds@gmail.com>; Michael Ayers <michael.ayers35@gmail.com>; Simon Blackburn <swb24@cam.ac.uk>; Stephen Neale <sneale@gc.cuny.edu>; Ken Levy <klevy@lsu.edu>; Keith McGinn <keithmcginn@talktalk.net>; Robert Lawrence Kuhn <rlkuhn@icloud.com>; Peter Ludlow <peterjludlow@gmail.com>
Subject:

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Rhyme Song

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Rhyme Song

 

I was alone and writing

I was up midnighting

I wasn’t fighting

I wasn’t gaslighting

 

I called your name

I wanted fame

I fanned the flame

I staked my claim

 

Did you hear my voice?

Did I make the right choice?

Did I make you rejoice?

Or was it all just noise?

 

Sorry!

 

I laid in bed

Was it something I said?

Did I destroy my cred?

Will you leave me for dead?

 

Because I love you so

I can’t let go

I run to and fro

Till my heart would blow

 

Because it’s hard to rhyme

With you all the time

You think it’s a crime

When I can’t complete the line

 

The line, the line

When I can’t find the rhyme

The rhyme, the rhyme

The end of the line

 

To rhyme is sublime

To rhyme is sublime

The end of the line

The end of the line

 

There is no rhyme

At the end of the line

No rhyme, no rhyme

At the end of the line

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How To Be a Psychologist

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How To Be a Psychologist

In my years as a psychology student no one ever suggested I read William James’s The Principles of Psychology. No doubt this was because it was deemed old-fashioned and far too philosophical. In those days great emphasis was placed on doing experiments. You couldn’t be a serious psychologist unless you spent most of your time in the lab experimenting. You couldn’t be a “theoretical psychologist”. Chomsky was frowned upon because of his lack of experimental results (has he ever done an experiment?). I might have remained a psychologist but for this attitude. Don’t get me wrong: I liked doing experiments (as a philosopher I miss them), but I didn’t think purely theoretical work was out of the question. This is an odd attitude and I still don’t understand it. In physics you can be an experimental physicist or a theoretical physicist—there is a recognized division of labor. Some people are better at one than the other. In biology it is much the same: Richard Dawkins is more of a theoretical biologist than an experimental biologist (or even field biologist). It’s probably the same in chemistry. What I actually believe is that in psychology students should take a philosophy of psychology course as well, because the subject is deep in philosophical questions. But there is a marked hostility in psychology towards philosophy, no doubt through fear of not being recognized as a proper science. Steven Pinker has good philosophical awareness, but he is the exception. Some of the courses I took were dreadfully boring (psychological testing, industrial psychology); I would much rather have done some philosophy of mind or language. As it is, when I did my M.A. on innate ideas, I had to basically invent cognitive science, much to the consternation of my teachers; fortunately, the head of department, John Cohen, had a more enlightened attitude and let me do what I wanted. Otherwise, I would not have found a supervisor. Experiments are fine, but they are not the be-all and end-all. Somebody has to do the dirty work of making theoretical sense of empirical results.[1]

[1] It obviously still annoys me that the intellectual philistinism I encountered caused me to change subjects, though I admit I had a deeper interest in the full range of philosophical questions. Ideally, I would have done both (with a side-interest in marine biology). I did used to lecture to psychology students. Today I tend to describe myself as a philosopher-psychologist.

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On Naming

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On Naming

According to the classic description theory, names are synonymous with definite descriptions; they are said to abbreviate such descriptions, to be “short for” them. The two are therefore intersubstitutable. The description is said to “analyze” the name—spell out its meaning. Thus, there can’t be a language with names but no descriptions, and names work in the same way as descriptions. In principle, names are eliminable in favor of descriptions. But this synonymy claim raises an obvious question: if the two are synonymous, then aren’t descriptions synonymous with names—don’t they mean what names mean? Whenever the description occurs, we should be able to substitute the name and preserve meaning. In fact, couldn’t we construct a language in which all descriptions have associated names synonymous with them? Then we should be able to replace descriptions with names in all occurrences. The trouble is that synonymy is symmetrical, but the description theory is intended to provide an asymmetrical analysis in which descriptions are taken as primary and basic. We don’t want to end up saying that descriptions are analyzable by means of names—indeed, that they arenames. But what is to stop us saying that descriptions are just “long for” names? What if people spoke a language in which from childhood everything referred to is named but never definitely described (no expressions of the form “the F”), and then descriptions are added later? Wouldn’t these speakers naturally view the later descriptions as analyzable by means of names? For this is what goes through their minds when definite descriptions are used.

What is the right thing to say here? The first thing to say is that names and descriptions have a different function and play different linguistic roles. The name labels, the description characterizes—so the two are not semantically equivalent (strictly synonymous). The dictionary (OED) is helpful here: a name is defined as “a word or set of words by which someone or something is known, addressed, or referred to”; a description is defined as “a spoken or written account of a person, object, or event”. These are quite different concepts: descriptions are not words by which a thing is known or addressed, and names don’t provide accounts of things. The two types of expression do different jobs, answer to different needs. In fact, it is a misnomer to call definite descriptions “descriptions”—they don’t provide “accounts” of people and things. It would be better to call them singular predicative phrases; then the “description theory” would be claiming, implausibly, that words by which people and things are known or addressed are semantically indistinguishable from singular predicative phrases. A person known as “Socrates” would be defined as someone an account of whom would include the fact that he taught Plato. That sounds funny at best. The truth is that the naming relation and the describing relation are different relations; so, the corresponding phrases belong to different linguistic categories. One cannot be reduced to the other. They are not synonyms. Maybe they share sense and reference, but that doesn’t make them instances of the same linguistic type.

That objection may seem pedantic, philosophically, though it is suggestive. What about the issue of dependency—do names depend on descriptions (so-called) but not vice versa? Names certainly don’t depend on non-indexical descriptions; they can be introduced by means of suitable demonstratives. But more to the point descriptions typically work by employing names, either proper names or names of properties. We say “the capital of France” and we name the properties that things have (“red”, “capital”, “electricity”). So, descriptions depend on names not vice versa. We can’t find an asymmetry that way. What about the idea that descriptions are psychologically more basic, simpler, clearer? What if an avid Russellian went around speaking Russell-ese—using Russell’s analysis of descriptions everywhere other people use names and unanalyzed descriptions? Someone unfamiliar with this apparatus might not know what the hell he is talking about; a friend might interject saying, “He means Charles is a bit of a twerp”. Then why didn’t he just say that instead of all the rigmarole about “There is an x such that blah blah blah”? The description theory is not exactly good social psychology. Then what is it exactly? Why all the stuff about analysis, abbreviation, basicness? There is clearly a semantic relationship between names and descriptions, but that is a far cry from the rhetoric deployed in formulating the so-called description theory of names. Why not speak of the name theory of descriptions based on the same data? Indeed, descriptions are more name-like and name-involving than names are description-like and description-involving. Names don’t look and function like singular predicative phrases; if anything, these phrases are syntactically name-like (Frege’s actual theory). Among family members names are routinely employed in ignorance of the descriptions known by the general public; it would be very strange for Einstein’s relatives to think of little Alfred as “the inventor of relativity theory”. For them the name is far more salient than the description. In precisely what sense are names “less basic” than descriptions? The fundamental problem is that the description theory simply helps itself to an asymmetry claim while starting from a claim of symmetrical synonymy. That claim is dubious to begin with, but the further claim looks unwarranted. The two categories of expression are interrelated and share some semantic features, but the similarity doesn’t go much deeper than that. The idea that names are nothing but descriptions looks like an exaggeration, equally matched by the idea that descriptions are nothing but names. It is a case of over-assimilation in both directions.[1]

[1] The abbreviation claim is both implausible and necessary to the description theory. A genuine abbreviation literally shortens a word or phrase, as with “Tom” for “Thomas” and “Sue” for “Susan”, but names don’t abbreviate descriptions in that way, or in any way; they are quite different words. But the claim is necessary because without it the objection would be that names are nothing like the descriptions supposed to define them. An abbreviation of “the capital of France” would be something like “the cap of Fra”, but “Paris” is nothing like that. The description theory is really a highly revisionary analysis of names, implausible on its face. We have all the counterexamples that have been brought against it, but it is also methodologically flawed. You can’t infer semantic identity from semantic similarity. I suspect Russell, in particular, was moved to this inference by his anti-substance metaphysics and love of sense-data.

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