Are There Two Types of Necessity?

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Are There Two Types of Necessity?

It used to be thought there was only one type of necessity, analytic necessity. All necessity is de dictonecessity, stemming from, and about, language. There is no necessity in the extralinguistic world; to suppose otherwise is a fallacy of projection. Necessity is in the head, a product of words not things. But all this changed with Kripke’s Naming and Necessity: now we see (supposedly) that there is another kind of necessity—metaphysical necessity. This kind is de re, not always a priori, and independent of language and meaning; sentences reporting it can be and often are synthetic. Such necessities involve identity, composition, kind, and origin. They hold in virtue of an object’s nature not in our ways of describing the object. We thus live in a world that contains two radically different types of necessity—meaning-dependent and meaning-independent. As knowledge falls into two natural kinds, a priori and a posteriori, so necessity falls into two natural kinds, analytic and metaphysical. Both are types of necessity, but of quite different categories—prior to language and posterior to language, as we might say. But this mixed position leaves something to be desired: shouldn’t we be able to unify the two categories somehow? What do they have in common in virtue of which they are both called “necessary”? Please don’t say “family resemblance”; we need some account of the relevant similarities not just a blank declaration of heterogeneity. As it happens, I don’t think this is terribly difficult; in fact, so-called de dicto necessity is a special case of de re necessity. There is really only one kind of necessity, de renecessity; de dicto necessity is simply a type of de re necessity.

What are the bearers of de dicto necessity? We might say propositions, or sentences, or statements, depending on predilection. Let’s sidestep these niceties and focus on propositions (the others will naturally follow). Then consider our old friend the proposition that bachelors are unmarried males and compare this with our other old friend Kripke’s table. About the table, we have been schooled to accept that it offers necessity of identity, necessity of kind, necessity of composition, and necessity of origin (Kripke actually uses different examples to illustrate his category of metaphysical necessity, but it will be convenient to press the table into multiple modal service). The table is necessarily identical to itself; it is necessarily a table (not a worm, say); it is necessarily made of wood and of this particular piece of wood; and it necessarily has a certain origin in a specific tree (possibly also a specific carpenter). Let’s accept all that for purposes of comparison (personally, I do). Then we can ask analogous questions about our favorite analytic proposition: does it exhibit the same kind of modal profile? Well, it is clearly identical to itself, necessarily so; it is necessarily a proposition and a marital status one; it is necessarily composed of particular concepts or properties (married, male); and it necessarily has a specific origin. The last claim may seem stretched, or even a category mistake, but let us not be too literal. First, we must ask what the constituents of a proposition are and how propositions come into existence. They might be composed of senses or references: if these have origins, then the proposition has origins. The origins could just be the origins of the things the proposition is about (say, Queen Elizabeth II), or they could be origins of the concepts we apply to those objects. Putting aside Platonism about senses and concepts, the origin of these entities will involve the origin of psychological states of a certain sort, so that we will be asserting that such entities necessarily derive from the causal antecedents that actually gave rise to them (or their underlying brain states). We need not quibble about how exactly this goes, accepting that somesort of origin story must hold of them, and that this will mirror what holds of states in general (the state of being frozen, say, could not have derived from heating the substance involved). If we are very picky about this, we could always drop the necessity of origin for propositional constituents and stick to references of such constituents, or else allow that origin doesn’t apply to propositions (like numbers or Platonic forms). The point is that modal questions of the usual four kinds can be raised about propositions (sentences, statements): for these entities have essential natures too–involving identity, kind, composition, and origin (or the lack thereof). Thus, propositions are subjects of de re metaphysical necessity (and contingency). They also have a grammatical or logical form as a matter of metaphysical necessity: the proposition that all men are mortal is necessarily a universally quantified proposition (it couldn’t have been an existentially quantified proposition, i.e., that proposition). Propositions are things with properties, so they raise the same kinds of modal questions as other things, with the same kinds of answers.

One of the properties that the proposition that bachelors are unmarried males has is the property of being true. Evidently, it is true in virtue of being the proposition that it is (and not, say, the proposition that bachelors are miserable). So, we can say that an essential property of this proposition is that it is true—as it is an essential property of the table that it is made of wood. It has a number of essential properties, as just discussed, and this is one of them. Being necessarily true is like being necessarily made of wood—something that follows from the nature of what instantiates it. There is no departure from standard metaphysical necessity here: metaphysically, being necessarily true is like being necessarily made of wood—an object necessarily having a property (a thing necessarily having an attribute). The apparatus that has been developed to talk about de remetaphysical necessity (and contingency) carries over smoothly to so-called analytic necessity, with propositions taking the role of res. The right thing to say is that metaphysical necessities can concern physical objects, artifacts, organisms, mental states, numbers, geometrical figures, and propositions (sentences, statements). Analytic propositions are distinguished by the fact that they are always true (in all possible worlds) as a matter of meaning, but this is not a new type of necessity: it is simply the old type of metaphysical necessity applied to a different class of entities. It is the same with contingency: propositions are contingently true in virtue of their nature (necessarily so). And just as every entity has both necessary and contingent properties, so too do propositions: it may be contingently true of a given proposition that it was uttered five times on a single day, or that its utterance incited a riot. Language and meaning are things like other things and therefore have contingent and essential properties. They are part of “the world” and share its modal proclivities. So far from excluding necessity from the world and confining it within language, analytic necessity is simply part of the world. Once the world was created its necessities were created, and once language was created its necessities were created. These are all de re metaphysical necessities. Language did not create necessity in the world, as the world did not create necessity in language; but both are necessities of nature, part of the modal structure of reality.[1]

[1] If we ask what it is that makes the proposition that bachelors are unmarried males necessarily true, the answer is that the concept bachelor is composed of the concept unmarried and the concept male; similarly, if we ask what makes the proposition that water is H2O necessarily true, the answer is that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. The cases are exactly analogous. Modally, reality is homogeneous, not dualistic. It isn’t, say, that analytic necessity is a feature of the use of words while metaphysical necessity concerns facts—all necessity concerns facts (linguistic and non-linguistic).

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Contradiction and Synonymy

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Contradiction and Synonymy

This is to be an essay in the philosophy of logic. Regrettably, logic today is taught as mainly formula manipulation with little attention paid to philosophical questions. I will be engaged on foundational questions, not unlike the foundations of physics (crucial but ignored by the mainstream). No doubt this is all about aspiring to be a “science” etc. In any case, my question concerns the meaning of what is called the law of noncontradiction, specifically what this law is really about. Let’s start with an obvious and familiar point: the connection between contradiction and synonymy. A sentence only counts as contradictory if it contains synonyms, as in “This is both red and not red”. The sentence “This is both a bank and not a bank” can be true if we mean different things by each occurrence of “bank”. It is not always easy to tell when contradiction is avoided because of a lack of synonymy: “This is both identical to that and not identical to that” (qualitative and numerical identity); “It is both raining here and not raining here” (uttered when moving about); “This creature is both large and not large” (relative to different classes of animal, e.g., mice or mammals in general). The same words can be used to say different things. So, we must stipulate that contradictory-seeming statements are only contradictory if words are used synonymously in them. But then any difficulties that attach to synonymy carry over to contradiction; and isn’t that a frail reed when trying to formulate the basic laws of logic? What if you are a skeptic about synonymy (like Quine) but a true believer in logic? Is logic only as solid as the concept of “saying the same thing”? If there is no such thing as synonymy, is there no such thing as the law of noncontradiction? Is it possible to detach the two questions, avoiding reliance on the concept of synonymy? It might be thought that it is: why not say something like “This is both red and not that”, where the demonstrative refers anaphorically to the previous utterance of red? Then we can express the law of noncontradiction by saying that nothing of that sort can be true—intuitively, that the same thing cannot be both red and not what I just said. I thus avoid using the word “red” twice and having to answer the question of synonymy; I use it only once and then refer back to that use. Okay, that sounds feasible, but it is contrived and artificial, a mere trick. And I am still using the notion of identity as between things said: first I say something and then I refer to my saying it. The point here is not that such notions are taboo or indefinable; it’s that we shouldn’t have to employ them in order to state the logical law in question. Also, this is surely not what I am thinking when I accept the validity of the law of noncontradiction—I am not thinking about synonymy or what is said. That is not what the law is about, or a presupposition of accepting the law. Really, it might be thought, the law is not about language at all; so why should we get tangled up in questions about meaning? The law isn’t intrinsically meta-linguistic; it’s not about what kinds of statements can be true. The law may have consequences for what statements can be true but it isn’t a law of statements.

So, what is it about? Properties, you might reply: it says that an object cannot both instantiate a property and not instantiate it (at the same time). An object cannot have the property of being red and not have this property. That sounds a lot cleaner; it doesn’t make logic subject to the vagaries of language (saying, meaning, synonymy). As a bonus, we see that the law can apply to things not expressed in language—properties that have no name and may not even be known. The basic notion is simply that an object can’t both have a property and lack it. Doesn’t that sound intuitively correct? But there are two lines of resistance: first, we still have a problem of individuation; second, is the notion of a property broad enough to capture all that we want to capture? Criteria of identity for properties are hard to come by—do we really want to make logic dependent on the success of that search? Objects can clearly have different properties at the same time; it is only identical properties that cannot both be instantiated and not instantiated at the same time. There is, for example, no difficulty in the proposition that an animal can both be a creature with a heart and not a creature with a kidney, these being distinct properties that happen to have the same extension. And don’t we want to extend the law of noncontradiction to “good” and “exists” without supposing them to denote properties in good standing? We don’t seem to be employing an ontology of countable properties in acceding to the law of noncontradiction, and we do seem to be thinking more generally than this notion normally admits.[1] But now we are running out of ideas—we cannot capture what it is that we are thinking when we accept the law in question. The open-ended generality of the law outruns our vocabulary for stating it.

Let’s try a different tack: the idea of the paradigm and its extensions. What really happens in your mind when you are persuaded that the law of noncontradiction holds good? Perhaps something like the following: you gaze at a red object and think “Nothing could be both like that and not like that”. You focus on an example and try to think of the negation of that example existing along with the example. You try to combine perceptual opposites, failing dismally. Then you say to yourself, almost as an afterthought, “And similarly for everything else”, not worrying too much about the exact analysis of that statement. Notice that you don’t even attempt to articulate what kinds things cannot both obtain and not obtain—you don’t think about predicates or senses or properties; you just think demonstratively of what you are gazing at (“like that). You leave the thought in an unarticulated form, relying on ostension. This seems an accurate enough description of the phenomenology of elementary logical thinking, but it leaves much to be desired theoretically. We want to be able to formulate the law more explicitly and rigorously, casting the alleged paradigm aside and spelling out what the respect of similarity is supposed to be between the paradigm case and all conceivable cases. That kind of thinking isn’t very…logical. It isn’t impressive, masterful, exam-ready. But it’s the best we can come up with without falling into muddy waters and limp hand waving. This suggests a scary thought (notice how much I am relying on the vernacular): you don’t really know what you are saying! The law of noncontradiction is true, and you know that it is true, but you can’t say what precisely it is. It is the basis of our reasoning but we can’t formulate it, except obliquely and inadequately—we can only approximate it. We think things like “Nature cannot contradict itself” or “Reality must be consistent”, but we can’t get any further in saying what in nature or reality is incapable of contradiction. We know that something and its opposite cannot both be, but that “something” is left unspecified. Our conviction of the truth of this thought does not depend on our making philosophical sense of synonymy and properties; it is more basic and general than that. It seems anterior to language and ontology—pure logic, as it were. The form of any possible reality. The necessary structure of the world. The way things have to be. Let’s admit it: this is pretty mysterious stuff, mystical even. It transcends what we can properly understand (the “limits of language”). We only partially grasp the meaning of the law of noncontradiction. Not that it betokens the divine, or ushers in the supernatural; but it does indicate the limits of human understanding. We only glimpse the logical truth that we fail to formulate explicitly; we don’t mentally embrace the full import of our words (this too is a puzzling phenomenon). Thus, we feel that the law of noncontradiction expresses a sort of magical exclusion: reality excludes other reality. If one thing is so, then its opposite cannotbe so—reality is necessareily selective. It won’t allow everyone into the club. Once things are thus and so, nothing can contradict how they are. Reality has the power (almost godlike) of suppressing alternatives; it has made up its mind and nothing can change that. If this object is red, then it absolutely cannot (will not) be not red: that is simply out of the question. It is not surprising that some people balk at this putative power, denying that contradictions are absolutely impossible: for what kind of power is it—what kind of brute metaphysical exclusion? It seems like dictatorial annihilation (it crushes the opposition). The opposite could have been so, but for some reason once it isn’t so it cannot get a foot in the door. It cannot exist once reality has come to a decision about its contents. Contradictory statements can coexist—one person can disagree with another—but somehow reality prohibits such largesse. Reality never disagrees with itself. This can seem arbitrary, groundless, narrow-minded, not even clearly stateable, and yet we are told it must be so. But our conceptual and epistemological position makes the situation intelligible: we don’t fully grasp the import of the logical law in question. It is, in short, a mystery, or a partial mystery. It hints at the ineffable.

The language of logic is not in the best shape either. A trip to the dictionary is somewhat disconcerting. For “contradiction” the OED gives us “a combination of statements, ideas, or features that are opposed to one another”; for “contradictory” we have “mutually opposed or inconsistent; containing inconsistent elements”. The word “contradict” comes from the Latin contradicere, meaning “speak against” and dates from the sixteenth century. It is certainly possible to contradict someone else (speak against them) and the law of noncontradiction does not forbid such acts of speech; it says that contradictions cannot be true, or cannot occur in reality. It would be better (and brisker) to use the phrase “the law of consistency” to affirm that statements and states of affairs must be consistent; we don’t want a law prohibiting disagreement between people! And surely the law existed and was recognized long before the word “contradiction” came into use. But what I find most telling here is the disjunction in the definition, especially the “feature” disjunct. Evidently, the word cannot make up its mind as between a de dicto and a de re use: statements and ideas, on the one hand, and “features” on the other. The right thing to say is that statements and ideas should not be contradictory (inconsistent) because reality cannot be contradictory (inconsistent): the de re underlies the de dicto. There cannot be a contradictory combination of features, though clearly words (and ideas) can be contradictory. The world cannot contain contradictions but language can. Use-mention confusion runs through the dictionary definition. But further, the use of “feature” suggests the difficulty I have been alluding to, namely that it is hard to find a word of sufficient generality to cover the case. Is existence or goodness a feature of things, like the contours of a person’s face? Hardly. Yet these also are subject to the law of consistency (nothing can exist and not exist at the same time, or be good and not good at the same time). Must we accept a metaphysics of “features” in order to endorse the law of consistency? Do we have any clear idea of what this word means in the present context? Better to admit that the thought outruns our means of expressing it; and the thought can be true and known to be true without being fully articulated or analyzed. The thought (our thought) is elusive and programmatic, unlike (say) “The cat sat on the mat”. It is schematic not filled in. The OED is straining to catch its generality while conceding its lack of perspicuity. We should accordingly be semantic mysterians about the (so-called) law of noncontradiction.[2]

[1] Certainly, we don’t need to be Platonic realists about universals in order to assert the law of noncontradiction (or excluded middle for that matter), and there is a danger of that if we quantify over properties. Not that we must reject such a theory, but neither should it be a necessary presupposition of basic logic. Aristotle doesn’t need Plato.

[2] I note that the words “object” and “property” are used with incredible promiscuity in philosophy, with little explication; we don’t want our logical laws to participate in such promiscuity, whatever may be said of our metaphysics. Self-evident laws of logic should not depend on dubious metaphysics, or even sound metaphysics. They are pre-metaphysical (also pre-linguistic). We might almost describe them as visceral (instinctive, primordial). They belong in the belly part of our conceptual scheme. The logician speaks from his gut.

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Can the Body be in the Mind?

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Can the Body be in the Mind?

The classic mind-body problem can be stated as follows: How can attributes of the mind be attributes of the body? Attributes of the mind have been taken to include consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, rationality, privacy, incorrigibility, and unity. How can these attributes exist side by side with bodily or physical attributes? They seem like attributes of a radically different kind, incapable of joint instantiation. How can thought, for example, exist in an extended substance? Some have believed that they cannot—we must recognize a separate entity as the bearer of mental attributes (“mental substance”, “soul”). Others have supposed that the feat is possible because mental attributes are really physical attributes in disguise (good disguise!)—hence materialism. Yet others have thought to accept that two mutually irreducible properties can co-exist in the same thing (the self, perhaps, or particular events—as in token identity theory). Panpsychism has seduced more adventurous souls. Desperate men have declared deep mystery—we just can’t know how the mind and the brain manage to join hands. The range of options is now sadly familiar, if strangely comforting (all those delightful possibilities!). I won’t be discussing them today; my concern is with a different, though connected, question. That question is this: How can bodily attributes be attributes of the mind? How, in particular, can the brain be an aspect of the mind? The attributes that characterize the body and brain are: extension, mass, atomic structure, chemical reaction, motion, and location in space. How can these be instantiated alongside the usual mental attributes? Many organisms have both, but how is that possible? Some will say it is not possible: there has to be material substance in addition to the mental substance of mind or self in which the physical attributes reside. Thought itself cannot be extended, as Descartes would put it, but there is another dimension of reality that provides a natural place for the attributes we call “physical”. Dualism is thus the indicated position. A second view might take the problem to be not so readily solved and feel pressed to explain how so-called physical attributes contrive to come together with the mind—they are themselves covertly mental! That is, we adopt a mentalist metaphysics in which body and brain are minds in disguise (good disguise!), or something approximating to minds in the full sense. Extension, say, is really a species of thought, or proto-thought, or almost-thought. C-fiber stimulation is covertly pain-like, quasi-pain, pain-ready. Others have declared themselves unfazed by the alleged problem: there is no difficulty in the idea that a single state or event might have two irreducibly different attributes, so that C-fibers can happily fire alongside sensations of pain without being pain, or even be intelligibly linked to it. It is simply a brute fact that the same event can be both a pain and a C-fiber firing without the latter compromising its mind-indifferent physicality. Or else a form of panpsychism exercises its attractions: the only way that material properties can coexist with mental properties is that the former have traces of the mental already in them. The link is not then accidental. We also have to contend with those desperate characters who detect signs of deep mystery: we just don’t know (can’t know?) how physical attributes attach themselves to mental attributes—maybe they have a hidden nature that makes this possible. We can call this the body-mind problem in contrast to the mind-body problem. The latter problem is how to find a place for mind in body; the former problem is how to find a place for body in mind (hence my title).

Strangely enough, we have been much preoccupied with the mind-body problem but not with the body-mind problem. We think there is a big problem about locating the mind in the body, assuming that there must be some sort of intimate link, but we don’t worry about how the body can be bound up with the mind. We don’t try to construct clever theories of the body.   Perhaps this is because minds are always enmeshed in bodies but bodies are not always enmeshed in minds; indeed, physical attributes are frequently to be found quite apart from minds (e.g., mountains and minerals). But there is also the point that we don’t normally think of the mind as having physical attributes—as extended, massive, atomic, etc. And we are inclined to doubt that physical properties have a nature that suits them to be partnered with mental properties: extension per se seems to have nothing essentially to do with the mind. But closer examination suggests that the mind must have entanglements with the body and brain: it must have a physical nature in addition to a phenomenological nature, so that the question must arise as to how the mental can find room in itself for the physical. On the face of it, the mind is not extended or massive or chemical, but if it actually is all these things then this must be possible. It must be possible for the brain to host the mind, and it must also be possible for the mind to host the brain, i.e., allow the brain to form part of its nature. These are surely two sides of the same coin; they present a problem of integration. From the body’s point of view, it is a challenge to reach up to the mind, just as from the mind’s point of view it is a challenge to reach down to the body. How is the mind embodied, and how is the body “em-minded”? Could it be that there are two modes of extension, mind-indifferent and mind-directed? Is extension in the brain different from extension in mountains? Is it a complete mystery how matter inserts itself into mind? Or are we driven to conclude that the association is entirely contingent—that the mind just happensto have material correlates? The physical world starts to seem as mysterious and baffling as the mental world once we contemplate the body-mind nexus. How could the physical world come into such close contact with the mental world? How can attributes of the body be attributes of the mind? How can extension be partly constitutive of thought? What is extension such that it forms part of the nature of thought? Is it really a type of primitive thought—more thought-like than we suppose? The imagination reels. What account of the physical world can we give that enables it to form part of the mind? We are used to the idea that we have to reconfigure the mind in order to slot it into the physical world, but now we are seeing that we have to reconfigure the physical world to make it slot into the mind—or admit that no such slotting is possible. The body-mind problem is wide open and extremely confusing.[1] The body turns out to be as problematic as the mind.[2] The relation between the two is as opaque as ever, if not more so.[3]

[1] Here I paraphrase the last sentence of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1972).

[2] Simple mechanism brings out the problem most starkly: how can a mere machine form part of the essence of a mental state? But modern physics does not really bridge the gap to the mind either, despite some valiant efforts in this direction—quantum mechanics won’t help us. It is as hard to assimilate the body to the mind as it is to assimilate the mind to the body. Thus, we are faced with an irreconcilable duality grafted onto an evident unity.

[3] I would seem to have introduced a new problem about the relation between body and mind, but I wouldn’t deny that they are rumblings to this effect in the antecedent literature—panpsychism, for example, can be seen as a response to the body-mind problem. The idea that the physical world is really mental in nature suggests an answer to the problem, though one carrying heavy baggage. Idealism is the logical conclusion to this line of reasoning. I think myself that both mind and matter need to be reconceptualized in order to make progress with the problem, whether that be possible or not. I do not believe that what may be called naïve property dualism is a satisfactory solution. The mind-body problem is really astonishingly difficult; the word “hard” doesn’t do justice to it (calculus is hard, or Shakespeare’s language). Even the word “mystery” doesn’t cut it, since many so-called mysteries turn out to have prosaic solutions. Perhaps we should speak of “super-mysteries”.

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Dichotomous Knowledge

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Dichotomous Knowledge

There is a long tradition of recognizing two distinct categories of knowledge: knowledge of logic, meaning, and mathematics, on the one hand, and knowledge of geography, history, and chemistry, on the other (these lists are not exhaustive). We might name these “A-type knowledge” and “B-type Knowledge”, so as to be neutral about the nature of the distinction. It is not obvious what the difference actually consists in. Looking for something more descriptive, philosophers have hit on a pair of Latin terms that seem vaguely evocative and have stuck, namely “a priori” and “a posteriori” (usually italicized to mark their somewhat esoteric meaning). If we try to dig into them, we do not return with conceptual gold: they translate as “prior” and “posterior”, as in “before” and “after”. The OED gives us “existing or coming before in time, order, or importance” and “coming after in time or order; later”, respectively. Before or after what, we ask. Not breakfast or lunch, presumably; no, before or after something called experience. That notion is not pellucid or theory-independent; it is usually specialized to sense experience, i.e., the five human senses. Here things start to get controversial; also, the reference to temporal order is questionable—does A-type knowledge always precede B-type knowledge in time? The original distinction is not so much clarified as immersed in definitional murkiness. Does this form of definition really capture what we intuitively recognize in the examples cited? Isn’t it more of a place-holder than a theory? Not surprisingly, other concepts have been invoked in order to hit off the distinction: experiential vs. non-experiential, analytic vs. synthetic, intuitive vs. observational, innate vs. acquired, abstract vs. concrete, causal vs. non-causal, rational vs. sensory. These all have their merits and demerits, which have been amply discussed; I think they are all lacking in one crucial respect—they don’t tell us about the internal structure of the two types of knowledge. They focus on the means of acquiring the types not their constitutive anatomy. They don’t say anything much, if anything, about the inner cognitive architecture of knowledge of A-type truths or B-type truths. They tell us about etiology but not about form—causation not constitution. We are trying to articulate epistemic natural kinds and to do that we have to look at the internal structure of the two types of knowledge. How do they operate, and what kind of structure permits that operation? To answer these questions is going to take some fresh thinking.[1]

B-type knowledge proceeds as follows: first, observations of particular states of affairs take place; then, inferences to generalizations are made. General knowledge is inductively inferred from perceptual knowledge of instances of the putative generalization. Singular instances precede general truths. The particular is anterior to the general: the former justifies the latter, while being itself justified by experience. That is the basic structure of what we call a posteriori knowledge. Notice that the singular premises are separate and distinct—one observation does not entail another. We may think of these as the atoms of this kind of knowledge, its ultimate constituents or building-blocks. B-type knowledge is thus atomistic and inductive (or abductive). I know that the Sun will rise tomorrow because I have seen it rise many times in the past, each of these a separate act of knowing. If we were to draw a diagram of this kind of knowledge, it would have an array of points on one side, corresponding to the totality of singular observations, and a bunch of arrows pointing right to the general truth thereby justified. The cognitive structure has this kind of shape and it operates by the depicted procedure; we might call it the singular-to-general structure, or the “sing-gen” structure. Experience is the medium in which this occurs, its enabling format. But A-type knowledge is not like that; in fact, it inverts this order of reasoning. Logic is the paradigm: we don’t know that modus ponens or the law of non-contradiction is logically true by inductive inference from individual instances; instead, we know the general principle directly and then deduce its instances. The order of justification is reversed. If we were to draw a diagram, it would have a general principle on the left with arrows pointing to individual instances on the right: it would have a general-to-singular structure, or a “gen-sing” structure. What we call reason or intellect is the medium in which this occurs. First, we know the generalization by what we call “intuition”, then we move deductively to its logical consequences. It is the same with mathematical and semantic knowledge: we don’t infer that every number has a successor from individual instances by induction, or that bachelors are unmarried by observing that similar propositions have always been true in the past (e.g., the proposition that spinsters are unmarried). We grasp a general principle and know it to be true, and then we deduce its particular instances. This implies that such knowledge has a holistic character in that the consequences are united by a general principle and are not known separately from each other. You can’t know that 4 has a successor but not know that 6 does, or that sisters are female without knowing that brothers are male (given that you have the concept). You know a general property of numbers and of meanings (that semantic containment generates analytic truths). The general is epistemically prior to the singular, whereas with B-type knowledge the singular is prior to the general. In addition, B-type knowledge takes the form of a bundle while A-type knowledge takes the form of a unified whole. The form of what we designate as a priori knowledge is aptly captured by a system of general axioms and theorems; but the form of a posteriori knowledge consists of a collection of singular instances linked inductively to a general proposition. The fundamental unit of empirical knowledge is the singular proposition, but the fundamental unit of a priori knowledge is the universal proposition. A-type knowledge is principle-based and holistic, while B-type knowledge is particular-based and atomistic. So-called a prioriknowledge is systematic and organized (“logical”); so-called a posteriori knowledge is fragmentary and haphazard, dependent upon the knower’s location and sensory acuity (“accidental”). We could say that the latter type of knowledge pertains to a totality of particular facts, while the former concerns a body of general principles. The two types of knowledge move in different “spaces”, proceeding by different methods. The cognitive apparatus is different in the two cases, differently structured.

The two types of knowledge are therefore opposites of each other. The faculties involved have contrasting forms. The process of knowledge formation accordingly varies in the two cases. It isn’t just that they have different types of causation—one is caused by experience and one isn’t—they have a different inner structure. The rest is extrinsic. Moreover, all varieties of the two types are unified in their structure: all a priori knowledge fits the “gen-sing” form and all a posteriori knowledge fits the “sing-gen” form. Thus, we can include metaphysics (and philosophy in general) and ethics in the category to which logic, mathematics, and semantics belong; and we can include knowledge of mind in the category to which geography and chemistry belong. For example, knowing the nature of identity belongs to the A-type category and so does knowing that cruelty is wrong; and my knowledge that I am in pain or that people have an unconscious belongs in the B-type category. There really are two large and distinct types of knowledge—two basic epistemic natural kinds. This is a philosophical discovery of the first importance. Trying to discredit is a fool’s errand. And it is an interestingdiscovery: we have two very different modes of knowing co-existing (and interacting) in our head—it’s surprising we have a single word (and concept) for both of them. Knowledge is deeply dichotomous. Some knowledge is constructed from separate pieces picked up by the senses—it is compositional, aggregative; but some knowledge is based on general principles that are recognized by the intellect and imply many (infinitely many) individual truths. They are polar opposites, yet both qualify as types of knowledge. Memory of particular facts is the hallmark of one, but not of the other (we don’t remember that 4 is even or that every number has a successor). Memory is atomistic and selective; reason is holistic and inclusive. If anything, we have underestimated the differences between the two types of knowledge, as if they only differ in their origins and not in their intrinsic character—innate versus acquired, derived from experience or the result of intuition, based on the senses or the intellect. But actually, they differ in their fundamental modus operandi and internal logic (induction or deduction, derivational structure). It’s not a matter of what comes first but of the deep nature of what comes.[2]

[1] I published my first paper on this subject nearly fifty years ago: “A Priori and A Posteriori Knowledge” (1976). I am still thinking about it.

[2] This paper is quite programmatic; a more thorough treatment would require looking in detail at specific areas of knowledge and teasing out the role of the singular and general within them. The kinship between the senses and the singular, on the one hand, and that between the ratiocinative and the universal, on the other, is however quite intuitive and traditional (see Plato). Just consider the contrast between the propositions of pure geometry and ascriptions of shape to particular objects. Generality is at the heart of the a priori, while the a posteriori has trouble escaping the bonds of the particular (witness the problem of induction).

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The Survival of the Fittest?

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The Survival of the Fittest?

Herbert Spencer’s phrase “the survival of the fittest” has done a lot of mischief, not only in biology, but also in politics, economics, ethics, history, and education. The phrase is riddled with confusion, ambiguity, and tendentious error. I will indict the phrase, first its use in biology and then in other fields, particularly economics. We can start with some trenchant remarks from Keynes: “The philosophers and the economists told us [in the nineteenth century] that for sundry deep reasons unfettered private enterprise would promote the greatest good of the whole. What could suit the business man better?… Thus the ground was fertile for the doctrine that…state action should be narrowly confined and economic life left, unregulated so far as may be, to the skill and good sense of individual citizens actuated by the admirable motive of trying to get on in the world…  The economists were teaching that wealth, commerce, and machinery were the children of free competition—that free competition built London. But the Darwinians could go one better than that—free competition had built man. The human eye was no longer the demonstration of design, miraculously contriving all things for the best; it was the supreme achievement of chance, operating under conditions of free competition and laissez-faire. The principle of the survival of the fittest could be regarded as a vast generalization of the Ricardian economics.”[1] Accordingly, Darwinian biology could be touted as the foundation and rationale of individualistic capitalist economics, and hence anti-socialist politics (as well as egoistic ethics). The phrase “the survival of the fittest” was the expression of solid biological science—and hence of the general nature of life on earth. But the phrase was not much scrutinized, falling off the lips as it does—it sounds like common sense made rigorous. So, let’s ask what it means and whether it describes anything actually true in the biological world.

The phrase is evidently intended to express the idea that the “fittest” organisms live longer than the less fit ones: fitness produces longevity. An individual organism will survive longer than other individuals with which it is in competition if it has a higher degree of fitness. But what is fitness? The OED gives us the following for “fit”: “in good health, especially because of regular exercise”. This is the use of “fit” we employ when we say “You are looking very fit” or “Are you keeping fit?”. We may thus paraphrase Spencer’s phrase as “the survival of the healthiest, especially because of regular exercise”. Those animals survive best that are, and keep, fit—that are “in good shape”. So, now we know what the phrase means, pretty much, but is it true? And let us observe that it is intended to exclude other factors that might be thought to lead to survival—such as being designed by God, or well-connected, or of superior breeding, or notably virtuous. Survival depends solely on fitness—on physical good health. If you want to know whether a given organism will survive longer than its rivals, then you need check its physical fitness and nothing else. However, this test is neither necessary nor sufficient for survival, or even its relative probability. Not necessary because not all organisms are fit in the stipulated sense: are plants fit or bacteria or jellyfish? Do they exercise regularly? Do some have stronger muscles than others, or get out of breath less easily? Of course not, so their survival is not a matter of being more fit than other organisms in the customary sense. Here we might appeal to the definition in terms of “good health”—plants etc. can be more or less healthy. But what is the criterion for good health? It had better not be “conduces to survival” on pain of generating a tautology (“organisms survive best by having traits that conduce to survival”). To avoid this kind of trivialization we need to specify what kind of trait is “healthy”—such as muscular strength, or speed, or flexibility. But these are not universal traits of organisms subject to evolution by natural selection. Many organisms are not fit at all if we mean by “fit” what the dictionary says.  But what else could we mean? Isn’t that definition exactly what we have in mind when we hear the phrase “survival of the fittest”, not noticing that it applies only to a subclass of organisms (mainly humans). And what of rich well-connected humans who are sickly and bed-bound but supported into old age by wealth and privilege, while fit strapping youths die in battle at an early age? It all depends on your circumstances, your environment. Physical fitness is surely just one of many factors that contribute to longevity (in favorable circumstances)—what about intelligence, sociability, cunningness, good looks, an optimistic temperament? Individual physical differences are not the only things that affect survival; the mind does too. Mental qualities are not types of fitness yet they have an impact on survival. We need a more inclusive general notion than “fitness” if we are to capture the full range of survival-conducive traits—without falling back into the tautological “anything that contributes to survival”. The truth is that there is no such general notion, which is why “fitness” is so regularly (and uncritically) invoked.

The upshot is that there is no law of biology that specifies what trait an organism must possess in order to survive, or have the probability of its survival raised. The fitness formulation attempts to specify such a trait, but it fails to say anything true (even approximately). There is no law of the form “All organisms must have trait T in order to survive”. There are many traits that can lead to survival (or its opposite) with nothing significant in common, and many kinds of environmental context that affect the efficacy of those traits (being fit and strong won’t help you survive long in a gladiatorial culture, compared to your less pugilistic compatriots). There is no single trait that is correlated lawfully with survival—not fitness and nothing else. The world is too messy and complicated for that. Nor does Darwinian biology require the existence of such a law. Natural selection acts variously and contextually. So, there is no scientific law of biology that that can be invoked by other disciplines in order to confer respectability on their own predilections. Darwinian biology is not a prelude to laissez-faireeconomics and individualistic capitalism. In particular, there is no biological invisible hand that ensures that the laws governing survival necessarily produce the “fittest” future populations. Natural selection does not select for something called “fitness”, i.e., the state of being fit; it does not increase the level of bodily vigor in the organisms it operates on, or some such thing. Human nature, for instance, is not the result of a law that leads inexorably to an increase in something called “fitness”—we are not the fittest of all creatures (many of us are not fit at all). If being fit is thought to be a perfection, there is no law of biology that leads to a more perfect species. There is no “the survival of the X-ist”, where X is some general trait common to all organisms. There is no law of this form leading inevitably to improvement, progress, a more perfect world. So, there is no law of nature we can rely on to do what an intelligent designer is supposed to do. There is no substitute in nature for what God was supposed to ensure. Evolution could lead to a worse world, a less “fit” world. Natural selection just selects; it doesn’t select for some admirable trait like fitness. When the dinosaurs were wiped out it wasn’t because they weren’t fit—that they didn’t take regular exercise or mind their diet. In the biological world, shit happens; it isn’t all a steady accumulation of fitness, viewed as a type of perfection. It isn’t that evolution will inevitably lead to organisms comparable to Olympic athletes. It isn’t that in the end all animals will be incredibly fit (or incredibly smart or sexy or moral). That is all mythology supported by a rickety phrase invented by a chap named Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century.

Now we must talk about the appropriation of the offending phrase by economists and sundry others. The idea is that entrepreneurs and their products are subject to the same law that Darwin enunciated and Spencer christened: they survive according to their “fitness”. They compete with each other, subject to no outside authority, in the quest to make a better product, and the best man wins. In this they are just following the dictates of nature, engaged in a battle for survival. But that survival will inevitably bring with it a rise in the quality of the world, i.e., better goods and services. The fittest wins, survives into the future, outclassing the opposition. The business man is like a tiger in the wild, ruthless but bent on benefiting the world by being super-fit. Just as Darwinian laws benefit the species (allegedly), so economic laws benefit society as a whole. The trouble is that there is no such biological law, so that we will need to look elsewhere for a defense of laissez-faire economics. I won’t discuss all the problems of laissez-faire economics—I am not an economist and they have been amply discussed by experts[2]—I wish only to point out that biology provides no rationale for such an outlook. The same is true for politics, morality, history, and education. No respectability accrues from any supposed analogy to orthodox biology to certain doctrines in these areas, because the whole idea of the survival of the fittest is shot through with difficulties. There simply is no well-defined notion of fitness applicable to all organisms such that that trait is selected for in the battle for survival. There is just survival and its absence, aided by a large range of traits each suitable for the species that has them. We can certainly say that those organisms survive that are the fittest to survive, but that is a mere tautology and does not include the ordinary notion of fitness; here “fittest” means “cut out for” not “physically fit”. The phrase has survived as long as it has by dint of ambiguity, vagueness, and suggestiveness, not by denoting a well-founded piece of science. It should be retired from civilized discourse.[3]

[1] This is from Keynes’s 1926 essay “The End of Laissez-faire”.

[2] Keynes has a nice discussion in “The End of Laissez-faire”.

[3] It isn’t that markets don’t operate like species, though they don’t; it’s that species don’t operate like species, as conceived by the survival-of-the-fittest trope. This is really a meme not a scientific theory. Nor is survival the essence of the matter; reproduction is. It should be obvious that the contemporary biologist’s notion of fitness, defined in terms of quantity of offspring, has nothing to do with fitness in the vernacular sense invoked by Spencer’s phrase. There is a lot of confusion surrounding biological terminology here.

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Is Consciousness Shrinking?

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Is Consciousness Shrinking?

What is the ratio of the conscious mind to the unconscious mind? Is the human unconscious half the size of the conscious or twice the size? What percentage of mental activity is carried out unconsciously and what consciously? Does this proportion vary between species? Which species has the largest unconscious mind relative to its conscious mind? If you are a believer in the Freudian unconscious, do you think other animals also have a Freudian unconscious, and is it as extensive as the human unconscious? So far as I know, such questions have never been broached. There must be a capacious linguistic unconscious in humans, given the nature of our linguistic competence, but do animals that employ various kinds of signal system likewise have a large signaling unconscious? Does the unconscious expand over the course of a lifetime? There is reason to think that it does, because it is common for tasks that begin with conscious mental activity to gradually become taken over by the unconscious. This is because of considerations of economy: the conscious mind is easily overloaded and it is more economical to shift the burden to unconscious processes; the machinery gets moved to the basement. Consciousness is notoriously slow compared to the unconscious. Just think how slow and cumbersome speech would be if it had to be figured out consciously—or walking, driving, throwing. The involvement of conscious activity in these skills shrinks as the skill is acquired; that part of the conscious mind falls away to take up residence in the unconscious mind. To that extent and in that sense the conscious mind gets smaller—less full. The ideal is to be able to perform the skill while your conscious mind is a blank, so that you can daydream and let your mind wander. Conscious activity is not required to perform the task in question, so it has a tendency to disappear, handing the responsibility over to the unconscious. It is no longer actively involved.

Suppose there was a mind that began with a zero unconscious and a jampacked consciousness, but then over time the process of shifting responsibility to the unconscious proceeded apace. More and more of mental functioning is delegated to the unconscious, leaving the conscious mind free for more agreeable occupations—listening to music, fantasizing about movie stars, meditating as vacantly as possible. There would be consciousness shrinkage and corresponding unconsciousness expansion. This might reach the point that consciousness had hardly anything to do, and nothing vital to the well-being of the conscious subject. It might exist only as a light buzz, or not at all. Suppose that is the normal course of the lifetime of an organism constructed like this: a childhood of brimming and taxing consciousness, followed by a middle age of relative conscious relaxation, ending in an old age of virtual unconsciousness. The unconscious has taken over all the jobs that used to be done by the conscious. There don’t seem to be any actual species that develop like this, but there could be, logically speaking. Such a species has a shrinking consciousness; it undergoes consciousness atrophy or downsizing. It was once big and now it is little. It slowly becomes unnecessary. Then, assuming all this, my question is: Could this happen to consciousness as it exists in the biological world? Could it gradually fade away over evolutionary time? Is it destined to disappear as the unconscious takes over its functions? Might consciousness be only a temporary feature of evolutionary history on this planet? Could natural selection eventually phase it out in favor of more efficient unconscious processes and mechanisms? Might the unconscious mind take over completely? It is, of course, extremely difficult to obtain evidence as to whether consciousness has been expanding or contracting over evolutionary time, and ditto for the unconscious. How could we empirically determine whether the conscious mind has been ceding territory to the unconscious mind? But it doesn’t seem wildly implausible to suppose that the dinosaur mind, say, was heavily tilted in the consciousness direction: most of what went on in it was conscious, with only a minimal unconscious (nothing Freudian or Chomskyan going on). The mind that evolved early on was largely a conscious mind; only after eons did it grow a subsidiary unconscious, so as to avoid the burden of a crammed consciousness. The unconscious is a fancy adaptation, developed rather late in the game, designed to relieve consciousness of too much responsibility for organizing behavior. First the conscious, then the unconscious—as with skill acquisition. It strikes me as very likely that the human unconscious is by far the largest in the animal world, but that our consciousness is relatively confined. Certainly, our sensory consciousness is more limited than that of many animals—just consider our relative poverty with respect to sounds, smells, eyesight, and possibly taste (though we seem pretty discriminating in this respect). The elephant’s consciousness might well be larger than ours, but I doubt there is much going on in the elephant’s unconscious. There has been a trend towards smaller animals since the time of the dinosaurs, and maybe the same is true of the size of consciousness (with a corresponding increase in the dimensions of the unconscious). Might this trend continue until consciousness is replaced by purely unconscious mental processing, or by some negligible remnant of consciousness as it exists today? Might consciousness become extinct like so many biological adaptations? Has the hominid line been slowly shedding its earlier glorious consciousness in favor of a more streamlined and efficient unconscious? Are we less conscious than we used to be, more zombie-like? Is there less that it’s like to be us? The hypothesis does not seem beyond the bounds of possibility.

One future scenario is that human technological ingenuity might hasten this progression—I mean AI. What if devices are invented that can slot into the brain to take over many of the tasks now executed by the conscious mind? We might well welcome these as reducing the tedium that consciousness regularly courts (tax forms etc.). What if we could vastly improve our efficiency by inserting these devices, creating a kind of machine-based unconscious? Wouldn’t people want that kind of advantage? The end result could be a massively reduced consciousness, or no consciousness at all. We might retain some remnants of conscious pleasure for old time’s sake, but otherwise we hand things over to our man-made unconscious. AI becomes the form that the new unconscious takes. After all, consciousness was always slow and glitchy, prone to breakdown and depression, so we might be better off without it. On some remote planet this might already have happened: the inhabitants were once conscious and fleshy, but now they have gone fully unconscious and partly mechanical. Consciousness just wasn’t cutting it for them, so they phased that junk out. They de-conscioused. In their history, consciousness came–and then it went. Consequently, they don’t see themselves as raising a difficult mind-body problem, since there is no consciousness to be puzzled about. There is nothing it is like for these robotic beings. And is it even correct to describe them as robotic? Maybe the unconscious mind that pulses within them is a sensitive and sophisticated thing, morally sound and peace-loving; it may be soulful, creative, family-oriented, and kind to animals. Who knows what evolution can bring? Consciousness may not be all that it’s cracked up to be when it comes to intelligence and moral behavior. People still operating with the old conscious brain might be looked down on as primitive and hidebound—they need to get with the program. Eventually consciousness becomes a distant memory, darkly spoken of in ancient texts; the universe has gone completely unconscious, though still mentally rich (the unconscious being a type of mind). In the history of the cosmos, consciousness was born, grew, and flourished; then it began to shrink, giving way to superior forms of mentality, eventually disappearing entirely—a mere blip in the cosmic drama. To us it seems central, crucial, infinitely valuable, but maybe it will turn out to be just another discarded evolutionary gimmick destined to be superseded. Even now it may be on its way out. It may follow the fate of the dodo.[1]

[1] Another possibility is that some species retain consciousness in some form while others discard it. Reptiles may stay conscious in their modest way, but mammals abandon consciousness in favor of a supercharged unconscious. The most advanced animals move on to the new biological reality while the more pedestrian types stick with the consciousness game. The most successful species are thus the unconscious ones. Or plants become conscious and animals cease to be. Evolution is nothing if not creative.

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Reality and Appearance

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Reality and Appearance

Appearances are part of reality, even when they are illusions; they are real things, no less so when not representing reality correctly. But is reality part of appearance? Certainly, not all reality is presented in appearances, since some parts of reality have appeared to no one (unless we include God). But is reality everpart of appearance—does reality ever appear? I will argue that reality never appears as it is in itself. In its actual nature it never appears; it never appears as it is. No aspect of it ever appears as it really is. This means that we never experience reality as it is in itself in any respect. It would be widely agreed that some of its appearance is foreign to it as it is in itself (e.g., secondary qualities); I am suggesting that all of it is strictly outside the scope of appearance. For example, no one has ever seen an object as it is in reality, though it is a certain way in reality. The reason for this is simple, indeed truistic: appearances are always viewpoint-relative, but reality is not. The way the physical world is in itself is independent of any viewpoint; no viewpoint is built into it. But viewpoint is always built into appearance, necessarily. The easiest case is spatial perspective: we sense things from a position in space, but things in space don’t themselves have any spatial perspective. Perspective belongs to the appearances but not to the reality that appears. In other words, perspective is subjective (subject-relative) while reality is objective (not subject-relative). Appearance contains a point of view; reality does not. There is no point of view in reality, just brute existence—being in space is not a matter of being perceived to be in space. This is a fact about reality—a metaphysical fact—but it is a fact that cannot be represented in perceptual appearances. Thus, reality could never be perceived just as it is: the way it is for no one cannot be captured in an appearance to someone. Nor could it be captured by the universe itself, since the universe does not appear to itself. If it did, it would have a point of view, thus undermining its claim to complete objectivity. To put it differently, sense-data cannot represent objective states of affairs objectively. Sense-data may be caused by objective states of affairs (no doubt they are), and in that sense may be said to be de re objects of experience, but they cannot represent how the states of affairs are in themselves and only in themselves. That, indeed, is a conceptual truth.

At this point questions crowd in. Is this conclusion true only for perceptual experience but not for appearance in thought? What does it imply about human knowledge? What about Berkeley? Is it true for numbers and mental states? I will consider each question in turn. The first question is answered by observing that thought and perception are not unconnected: to the degree that our thoughts reflect our perceptions, they too are incapable of representing reality as it intrinsically is. Even a mild version of empiricism will generate this result. Certainly, we can’t imagine the real world without any tincture of our world of subjective appearance, because imagination tracks the senses. And isn’t it true that if we try to focus on our thoughts about the physical world, we find that we are forced back to a perspectival conception of reality? If I try to think of the world from noperspective, I find that I don’t know what I am thinking—my own self keeps intruding (hence the temptations of solipsism). Every conception of things is a type of view, but there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. We ask about someone’s views, tacitly conceding that they are locked into a certain perspective, even if it is just the human (or mammalian) perspective. Reality does not come to us neat but diluted by our own sensibility, sensory or intellectual. The phenomenal world is our world; we can’t grasp reality noumenally. So, thought cannot escape the tyranny of the appearances. At the limit we are subject to the tyranny of intelligence (reason, intellect) in that we see things from our cognitive vantage point—our concepts, our logical faculties. The subject cannot escape himself altogether. But reality is under no such constraint, simply possessing being itself, knowing subjects be damned. Thought, by contrast, cannot escape its status as thought: thought is always present to itself, intrusively so. Thought is not transparent. There is no such thing as a fact being embedded in thought just as it is, neither more nor less. Thought always adds and subtracts, because thought is a form of appearance (the intellectual form). A physical fact thought about is always thought about under a mode of presentation, but facts themselves have no mode of presentation—they are pure reference, so to speak. Being is not being for anyone. There is thus a fundamental mismatch at the heart of all mental representation. The mind never encompasses reality just as it is in itself. The idea is contradictory.

Does that mean that human knowledge of reality is impossible? No, because knowledge does not require complete objectivity; it requires, rather, a type of tracking. The knowing mind must correspond to reality, reliably, deeply, but it need not be reality—as if only the object itself can truly know its own nature. Knowledge does not require identity between subject and object, only correlation. Knowledge is true justified belief—a type of mapping—not the upload of world into mind. Scientific knowledge is not compromised by the admission that it cannot describe the world in completely unadulterated objective terms, as if the knowing subject has somehow disappeared. The knowing mind never collapses into the world; it parallels it. Maybe we have a fantastic ideal of knowledge in which the mind is invaded by the world as it objectively is, setting up camp in it as it were; but realistically, knowledge cannot aspire to such an encounter–it must be content to provide an atlas of reality, a guide. No one ever contended that x knows that p if and only if x’s mind apprehends reality as it objectively and intrinsically is: that is far too strong a requirement. Scientific realism does not require that reality should enter wholly and directly into the scientific mind, like a shoe in a box. It does not require an epistemology of containment.

What about Berkeley? It might be supposed that a Berkeleyan metaphysics could prevent reality from eluding the clutches of appearance. If reality is appearance (idealism), then it cannot lie outside of appearance; it must be a type of appearance, viewpoint and all. And surely, we can grasp appearances! But remember that reality for Berkeley is appearance in God’s mind not just any old mind (yours, your neighbor’s); and therefore, the kind of appearance that constitutes reality is not like ordinary human appearance. Do we really grasp what it would be for something to appear thus-and-so to God? Do we grasp the full reality of divine appearances, and not from our own limited perspective on them? Doubtful: so, we don’t have a conception of reality in Berkeley’s system that allows it to be captured by our human appearances—it transcends them. It probably transcends them even more than material substance—it is further from our natural modes of comprehension. At any rate, such a metaphysics doesn’t render reality one whit closer to what can enter into human representations; we are not acquainted with a reality so conceived, as we are not acquainted with ordinary objects under metaphysical materialism (i.e., the doctrine that physical objects are material not mental).

I just said that we know our own appearances—that they appear to us just as they are in themselves. But is that really true? This raises the broader question of whether any elements of reality appear to us just as they are, neither more nor less. Does pain, for example, appear just as it is intrinsically? That certainly seems like a more appealing proposition than it does for physical objects outside the mind, but on closer inspection it too comes to seem questionable. For it is arguable that pain also has dimensions that don’t show up in its appearance to us: it may have an underside that escapes our introspective awareness. What about its functional and cerebral properties? These don’t reveal themselves to our powers of introspection, so the first-person appearance of pain is not a mirror of the full nature of pain. And when we include these physical features by taking the brain and behavior into account we are back with elusive physical facts. Is it even clear that we have a complete picture of the phenomenology of pain just from our ordinary introspective awareness? Maybe there are details and similarities that are not immediately apparent to us: the reality of pain’s phenomenology might exceed the appearances it presents to us. After all, first-person introspection is just one perspective on pain, though doubtless a central one; pain itself might have a subjective reality that goes beyond such a perspective. It is a constituent of objective reality as well as a conspicuous presence in my subjective image of the world. It has being-in-itself as well as being-for-me.

Lastly, what should we say about mathematics? When I think about numbers do I grasp their objective reality? I know truths about them, to be sure, but do they offer their whole being to my cognitive faculties? I don’t view them from a particular spatial perspective, so it isn’t as if I falsify their inner nature in the way I do with concrete objects. But do I really perceive (intellectually) their actual intrinsic nature? Is there no more to their intrinsic nature than what appears to my mind? That seems hard to maintain: we don’t even know whether they are abstract, mental, or notational! We are ontologically myopic with respect to numbers. What if they exist in Platonic heaven right next to the Form of the Good—is that any part of our normal encounters with numbers? Scarcely. We may have a very partial and biased picture of mathematical objects; their reality may differ significantly from their appearance to us. Thus, I am inclined to believe that number appearance does not fully disclose number reality, though our knowledge of truths about numbers is one of our stronger areas of knowledge. It is hard, then, to escape the conclusion that reality never coincides with appearance. Appearances always omit aspects of reality as well as impose aspects alien to the thing itself. Our very concept of reality is too rarified for comfort, though indispensable.[1]

[1] Hume would say that we have no impression of subject-independent reality corresponding to our putative idea of it. The idea is thus under suspicion of emptiness. That is no doubt too strong, but it is true that the idea is unnervingly abstract and disturbingly noumenal.

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Emotional Logic

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Emotional Logic

The idea that emotions are exempt from logic is widely received. Emotion is supposed to be where logic breaks down, where the mind eludes logic’s inexorable grip. It is the domain of the unruly, the irrational, the unprincipled—a kind of mental anarchy. This is wrong on several levels. Of course, emotions are subject to logic: it is not logically possible to both love and not love the same thing at the same time. We can reason logically about the emotions, as we can about anything. The emotions do not constitute an extra-logical domain. Nor is it true that emotions lack a rational basis: they arise from solid biological roots (supplemented by learning) and serve a biological function; they enable their possessor to survive better. Emotions are not anti-prudential or somehow self-destructive (pace Mr. Spock).  They are useful adaptations just like intelligence or the ability to think logically. Sure, they can misfire and be disruptive on occasion, but they are not glitches or gremlins in our psychological economy. But is there anything logic-like in their internal geography—do they exhibit logical behavior? One point, frequently remarked, is that the range of emotions exhibits a certain kind of logical structure: emotions come in opposed pairs, rather like assertion and denial. Thus, love and hate, delight and disgust, attraction and repulsion, security and fear, calm and agitation, admiration and contempt, like and dislike, interest and boredom, happiness and misery. There are opposed poles of emotion, not unlike truth and falsity. Hence, we speak of positive and negative emotions. Emotions form a pattern, an intelligible structure, a kind of matrix. The mind (heart, soul) moves around this matrix in intelligible ways; it dances to the music of the emotions. We all understand this structure; we have a basic competence in its categories. We grasp its grammar. We speak its language. It isn’t just a haphazard assemblage of arbitrary urgings having neither sense nor logic. It isn’t just mental chaos.

But is there an emotional logic as there is a propositional logic or a quantifier logic or a modal logic or a tense logic or a deontic logic or an epistemic logic? That may seem like a bridge too far in the quest to redeem emotion from its reputation as logically inept (or sublimely transcendent). Surely, there cannot be a formal logic of emotion! Emotion words cannot function as logical operators, logical constants in a formal system of deduction. None such exists, and with good reason. What would a logic of love even look like? Could the concept of disgust play the same kind of role as the concept of necessity in modal logic? Could there be a logic text, littered with logical symbols, for happiness? Actually, I don’t see why not; in fact, it is surprising that such a logic does not already exist, since it follows the same pattern as those other types of logical system. Affect logic is a thing; it merely awaits codification. First, we need some logically true axioms expressed in conditional form. I will consider a system that employs two basic operators (there could be other such systems): L and F, where L is intuitively love and F is fear. Think of these as analogous to necessity and possibility. Then we have this axiom: if LLp, then Lp, i.e., if x loves to love y, then x loves y. I write the axiom with a propositional variable so that L and F can be seen as sentence operators like logical negation—x loves to love that p. The converse will not be an axiom, since someone might love another without loving to love this other. Love, like necessity, can be iterated indefinitely (if pointlessly): x loves to love loving y. We get a similar axiom for F: if FFp, then Fp, i.e., if you fear to fear something you also fear it (if only dispositionally). Again, the converse does not hold. We can make the same points about sadness, happiness, delight, etc. We have recursive operators that generate logical axioms. Accordingly, we have logical deductions employing these operators.

Are there any logical axioms containing both L and F? These would be analogous to modal axioms containing necessity and possibility. There ought to be such axioms because of an incompatibility between love and fear: we don’t love what we fear or fear what we love (in the normal course of things). We want to be close to the loved object but not the feared object. Thus, we have the axioms: if Lp, then not Fp; and if Fp, then not Lp.  Can we fear to love something? If so, we could add the axiom: if FLp, then Fp—if we fear to love something, then we fear that thing. Is that a logical truth? Why would we fear to love something unless we already feared it (heroin, say)? I won’t try to adjudicate the issue, merely remarking that it resembles similar questions about iterations of other operators (if it’s possible that p is necessary, is p thereby necessary?). In any case, we do have some plausible-sounding necessary truths in the axioms mentioned above, since love and fear are natural opposites. We approach what we love and we avoid what we fear, as the psychologists say; and these two kinds of behavior are not compatible. So, the logic of emotion might have some interesting complexity aside from the truisms already cited in the previous section. There is enough logical structure in the concepts to permit a logical treatment of emotions. As I noted, this is not terribly surprising in the light of the standard examples of non-classical logics; it isn’t hard to get a logic off the ground, since concepts tend to cluster in logically connected groups and iteration is a common feature of language (“not”, “know”, “necessary”, etc.). If you can love to love and fear to fear, then you have the foundations for a logic of these emotions. Emotions are naturally logical in their possible combinations: some imply others and some imply the absence of others.[1]

[1] Emotions are rather like colors in this regard: colors too exhibit logical relations of implication and exclusion. This logic cannot be reduced to a classical logic of truth functions (as Wittgenstein discovered). I can imagine the same hostility to emotional logic as greeted modal logic in its early days. I look forward to a formal semantics of emotional logic.

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