Uncategorized - Colin McGinn

Degrees of Grammaticalness

July 10, 2024/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Colin McGinn

Degrees of Grammaticalness

In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) Chomsky discusses what he calls “degrees of grammaticalness”. He concludes this discussion with these words: “More generally, it is clear that the intuitive notion of grammatical well-formedness is by no means a simple one and that an adequate explanation of it will involve theoretical constructs of a highly abstract nature, just as it is clear that various diverse factors determine how and whether a sentence can be interpreted” (151). Here we encounter such specimen sentences as “sincerity may virtue the boy”, “sincerity may elapse the boy”, “sincerity may admire the boy”, “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, “the book who you read was a best seller”, “a very walking person appeared”, “who you met is John”, “John found sad”, and many others. Chomsky makes some suggestions about what kind of rule is being violated in such cases, observing that some rule violations produce a greater degree of grammatical deviance than others. Surely, he is right to make these distinctions: there is not just a simple dichotomy of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences but a whole range of graded cases. I will be concerned with the philosophical implications of these linguistic observations.

The first implication is immediate: meaningfulness is also a matter of degree. We often speak as if there is a simple dichotomy of the meaningful and the meaningless, but this is an oversimplification; there are many intermediate cases. A random string of words is obviously more meaningless than the examples cited above. We can often find an interpretation for a sentence that violates syntactic rules, or deviant sentences can be likenon-deviant sentences (Chomsky gives “revolutionary new ideas appear infrequently” and “sincerity may frighten the boy”). Recognizing this point would allow the moderate logical positivist to say that metaphysics is less meaningful than science but still somewhat meaningful, and that the more verifiable a sentence is the more meaningful it is. And we do normally speak of sentences as being “pretty meaningless” or “perfectly meaningful” or “almost devoid of meaning”. Less obviously, what happens to the classical notion of a proposition? We will find ourselves saying that the proposition expressed can be more or less well-formed—there will be “degrees of propositional-ness”. There will be semi-propositions or quasi-propositions or borderline propositions or degenerate propositions. This is not what we have been taught to expect (consider Frege and the early Wittgenstein). If propositions are connected to meanings, and meanings can be more or less coherent, then propositions can be more or less coherent. Propositional-ness will be like grammatical-ness. It is true that there cannot be super-propositional propositions, as there cannot be super-grammatical grammatical sentences: once a sentence is certified as grammatical (“the cat sat on the mat”) there is no such thing as a sentence being more grammatical than it, just as a proposition in good standing cannot be outdone in point of propositionality by some superior form of proposition. There are no languages that contain sentences that outshine the sentences of English in point of grammaticalness, or propositions that make our ordinary propositions look like also-rans qua proposition (you don’t get more propositional than the proposition that snow is white or that Plato taught Aristotle). But deviance can come in degrees, so that some propositions are less than perfectly propositional. It is not a question of falsity: to be sure, deviant sentences will often express false propositions, but they will also suffer from an absence of full proposition-hood without entirely being devoid of propositional status. This is true of most of the sentences I cited from Chomsky: they express propositions of some sort (degree), and we can specify these propositions by prefixing the sentence with “the proposition that”, but the propositions in question are “deviant”—substandard, badly formed, not up to snuff. Frege’s realm of “Thoughts” is populated by some pretty shabby specimens, just like the possible sentences of the English language. Sentences, meanings, and propositions all come in degrees of coherence and well-formedness.

What becomes of logic in the sphere of the deviant proposition? Perhaps surprisingly, nothing much changes so far as I can see: the same rules of inference and logical laws hold. I won’t go through all of these, but we can see, for example, that if sincerity elapses the boy, then something elapses the boy, and that a conjunction of two deviant propositions implies its deviant conjuncts; also, that no colorless green ideas can sleep furiously and not sleep furiously simultaneously. Logic works as well for these cases as for the grammatical cases; the mere presence of nouns and verbs in the right order seems to be enough to give logic a foothold. So, logic does not require a domain of well-formed (“proper”) propositions, contrary to expectation. Nonsense can be logical. In this respect logic is like poetry (as in nonsense poetry). There is a logic of the less than fully meaningful. Correct syntax isn’t a precondition of logical inference.

Is it the same with facts? I don’t think so: there are no deviant facts. There are no ungrammatical facts corresponding to ungrammatical sentences; none of Chomsky’s deviant sentences represent deviant facts (none of them are true). Consequently, there are no deviant truths—truth admits of no lapse from syntactic well-formedness. Degrees of grammaticalness don’t line up with degrees of truthiness. Put differently, there are no deviant states of affairs analogous to deviant grammar; hence no deviant objects and properties. Reality doesn’t admit of degrees of coherence; only representations of it do. On the side of language things can be variously well-formed, but not so the side of the real world. Logic can tolerate nonsense (partial nonsense anyway), but reality can’t tolerate it. Propositions are inherently “squishier” than facts. There are no nonsense facts but plenty of nonsense sentences and propositions.

Could a language have only syntactically deviant sentences? Could it never have risen to the level of correct grammar? I don’t think so, because deviance is parasitic on correctness. It is the existence of good grammar that permits there to be bad grammar. Generally, less than exemplary sentences are degradations of perfectly correct sentences—they violate rules that govern other existing sentences. Speakers could not have a competence with ungrammatical sentences unless they already had a competence with grammatical ones—no nonsense without sense.[1] So, it could not be that natural languages arose by gradual evolution from pre-grammatical forms of language, as if people first began to speak in more or less meaningless sentences and slowly learned to construct meaningful ones. It isn’t like bad science preceding good science, or bad art good art, or bad morality good morality. When humans began to speak, they spoke in syntactically correct strings not in varieties of syntactic nonsense (“Not us this she cave”). Linguistic concatenation allows for meaningless strings, but syntactic rules were in place from the start (“This cave looks nice”). We did not learn to be grammatical by trial and error, or by the intervention of a grammatical genius putting us on the right track after centuries of syntactic chaos. Still, language has the potential to form more or less meaningless strings of words as well as meaningful strings. Thus, grammaticalness comes in degrees, as do meaningfulness and propositional-ness; or better, their lack does. These are not all-or-nothing properties.[2]

[1] Thus, we have a principle of charity with regard to grammaticalness: speakers can never be guilty of total grammatical incompetence.

[2] The same might be said of assertion and other types of speech act: there is not a simple dichotomy of assertion and non-assertion, but a graded range of assertoric force, from full confidence to tentative adherence (similarly for promising etc.).

Conscious Matter

July 5, 2024/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Colin McGinn

Conscious Matter

I will pose a question I don’t think has been posed before: Why can’t there be conscious matter, but only conscious mind? A mental state can be either conscious or unconscious, passing from one condition to the other, but an unconscious material state can only be unconscious. Consider a state of the brain that is not a mental state; it is unconscious and it cannot become conscious. A mental state of the brain, however, can become conscious, even if it is unconscious, temporarily or permanently. A merely physical state can never become conscious. Of course, it is possible for such a state to become an object of consciousness: you might pass from not seeing it to consciously seeing it. But that is not for it to become conscious, i.e., to be a conscious state. It is necessarily not a conscious state given that it is a non-mental state. This is compatible with it already being a mental state, as the identity theory contends: C-fiber firing might be identical to pain, and thus may be a conscious state (ditto desire and belief). But if a physical state is not a mental state at all, then it cannot become conscious—though it can clearly become an object of consciousness. The shape of the brain cannot become conscious, or its chemical composition, or its microanatomy—just as for other physical states of the world. A chair’s being made of wood cannot become a conscious state of the chair—unless it is first made into a mental state (don’t ask me how). In other words, it is a necessary condition of the possibility of being conscious that a state be a mental state: only mental states are candidates for consciousness. Not that mental states are always conscious—they are not—but rather their potential for consciousness is dependent on their being already mental. Consciousness is reserved for the mental; it cannot spread to the non-mental. A state has to qualify as mental before consciousness can admit it.

That sounds eminently reasonable, even indisputable, perhaps trivial; but actually, it raises a serious puzzle. For we may ask why it is so: what is it about being mental that makes a state eligible for consciousness? Consciousness is not inherent in the mind—much of the mind is quite unconscious—and yet being mental is indispensable to the possibility of consciousness. There must be something about the mental that explains this fact, that grounds the necessity. The problem is that no good answer comes to mind—hence the puzzle. Call this the “consciousness-mind puzzle”: what is it about being mental that allows non-conscious mental states to become conscious but not non-mental states? A simple higher-order thought theory runs up against this problem: one would have supposed that one could just add a thought to a non-mental state of the brain and it would thereby become conscious; but no, it stubbornly resists becoming a conscious state. It lacks a nature that permits it to make this transition. But why then does a mental state that is unconscious, perhaps permanently and necessarily, possess the secret ingredient? It may never be conscious, like a purely physical state, but it has what it takes to be conscious, unlike the physical state—it passes the consciousness test. It seems to possess a magic power, the power to metamorphose into a conscious state (assuming that it does or could). It must somehow possess the seeds of consciousness, even though the seeds may never actually sprout. So, what do these seeds consist in—from what does the power derive?

Several ideas suggest themselves. The first is that mental states, even unconscious ones, have a phenomenology, unlike purely physical states, and this provides the fertile soil in which consciousness may take root.[1] Granted, these states can be completely unconscious—the subject has no awareness of them—but (it may be said) they are blessed with phenomenological features and these make them at least conducive to consciousness. The trouble with this suggestion, striking though it is, is that the features in question will either constitute a type of consciousness or will be so attenuated that they fail to supply what is needed. We either build consciousness (“what-it’s-likeness”) into the mental state or we play with an idea that raises the same question again, viz. why should those features provide the necessary ground? The suggestion is either too strong or too weak. Also, is it true that all unconscious mental states have genuine phenomenology in some colorable sense—what about the syntactic tacit knowledge postulated by Chomsky-style psycholinguistics? Does it feel some way to perform a syntactic transformation unconsciously? Is there something it is like to have tacit knowledge of deep structure? A second suggestion fastens onto propositional content: what equips a mental state to rise to the level of consciousness is that it is a propositional state. The difficulty with this is apparent: why should propositional content qualify a state to become conscious? What has the one got to do with the other? It seems neither necessary nor sufficient: pains don’t have such content, though they clearly can be conscious; and sub-personal computational states arguably possess it, yet can’t become conscious (they are like non-mental brain states). Consciousness and propositional content are clearly not the same property, so why should the latter be a necessary condition of the former? It is the same with the property of intentionality: being about something is not necessarily linked to being conscious (not necessary and not sufficient), so why should it be the required basis? The puzzle is beginning to look deep, intractable. At this point desperation is apt to set in: perhaps the right thing to say is that there are no unconscious mental states—then there is nothing to explain. If all mental states are necessarily conscious, then it is trivially true that mental states are inherently equipped to be conscious. Physical states can’t be conscious because they are not already conscious, unlike mental states. Here the objection is that this is flying in the face of much science and common sense: there really are unconscious mental states, lots of them. Then there is this maneuver: the question is purely verbal—we simply decline to say, as a matter of convention, that anything non-mental can be conscious. We just stipulate that the word “conscious” shall apply only to things to which the word “mental” applies; there is nothing about the things referred to that underpins our linguistic practices (our “language game” with the words “mental” and “conscious”). About this I will simply say: haven’t we got over this kind of nonsense?

But perhaps we have not run out of wacky ideas. One idea would be that it is simply a mystery about mental states that they, and only they, can be conscious. Mental states possess an unknown property, call it C, that explains their availability to consciousness. But this seems unduly panic-stricken: surely it should be possible to detect something in mental states, and only mental states, that suits them to attaining consciousness, given that it is so plainly true that only the mental can be or become conscious. This isn’t the mind-body problem! So, let’s not declare defeat just yet; after all, the question I am trying to answer has only just been broached. It’s a brand-new question, a freshly minted puzzle, so we should give it a while to marinate (we can declare defeat in a couple of hundred years, if necessary). And there is a possibility we have not yet explored: what I will call psycho-functional role. I intend no commitment to traditional functionalism with its emphasis on physical behavior; I mean to be speaking of functional role within the mind (which can include action). Each type of mental state has a characteristic place in the overall functioning of the mind, which is complex and often obscure—its processes, procedures, laws, quirks. This includes folk psychology, scientific psychology, and whatever else about the mind that may lie hidden or alien to our existing conceptual scheme. I am talking about the sum-total of mental interactions and connections. Then the idea is that this psycho-functional role is the key factor in equipping mental states with the wherewithal to merit the appellation “conscious”. Indeed, it is largely this role that underlies our use of the word “mental” (or “psychological”): a state of the organism counts as mental just in so far as it plays this kind of role in the organism’s mental life. Now, a purely physical state has no such psycho-functional role; it is detached from the mind, wholly or partially. Therefore, it cannot enter the realm of the conscious, because to be a conscious state is also to play a certain psycho-functional role—not the same role but a connected one. The only things that can be conscious must have a role that suits them to be conscious, and only mental states have that role. We have role match-up. For example, to be a desire a given state must function in a certain way in the organism’s psychology; and to be a conscious desire the state must preserve this role and possess a further role, namely that appropriate to its being conscious. The unconscious mental state must have a role that fits its conscious expression; it can’t lack that role and yet expect to be capable of achieving conscious expression. Thus, non-mental states can’t become conscious states. To have a role in the conscious mind, an unconscious mental state such as desire must have a role in the mind as a whole—for instance, its mode of interaction with beliefs and intentions. These roles must be in the nature of the things that have them, thereby generating necessities. Accordingly, only mental states can become conscious, because only they have the kind of psycho-functional role that conscious states of their type possess. This explanation requires us to take on board a conception of mind and consciousness that recognizes the centrality of function in fixing the nature of the mental; it isn’t all introspective qualia and what it feels like from inside (though it is partly that). What a mental state, conscious or unconscious, does is key to its identity. We need a notion of phenomenological function as well as phenomenological quality (as well as sub-phenomenological function to accommodate the unconscious mind). It is true that much remains mysterious about this as an answer to our question, but it has the right form to constitute an answer. The notion of psycho-functional role is somewhat obscure, though not horribly so, and what consciousness does to modify the unconscious mental state is a matter of unbridled speculation almost alchemical in its logic. Still, we have the beginnings of an account of how the conscious and the unconscious manage to hook up; it begins to seem less puzzling why only the unconscious mental can penetrate the boundary that marks the extent of consciousness. Consciousness is actually quite demanding in what it will grant entrance to. It might even be that some precincts of what we think of as the mind are too cut off from the rest of the mind to slot into a place in the conscious mind, so that they are destined to remain always in an unconscious state. The conscious mind does not recognize them as mental in any sense it can understand (I am thinking of some aspects of pre-conscious visual processing). After all, the conscious mind is just one compartment of the mind among others, not all of which function in the same way. The borders of what we call the mind are likely to be indeterminate.[2]

[1] This is a view defended by that devotee of the Freudian unconscious, Richard Wollheim. I remember discussing it with him circa1980 in Katherine Backhouse’s office.

[2] There are many types of unconscious and many types of unconscious state, at least as various as the types of conscious and conscious state. It is hard to bring them all together into the natural kinds Conscious Mind and Unconscious Mind. Not surprisingly, then, some items will hover at the edges of these broad categorizations. What should we say about early-stage perceptual processing or the innate form of human universal grammar? What about the motivations of mollusks and ants? What about libidinal urges in monkeys and sharks? What about aliens?

Division and Diversity

July 2, 2024/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Colin McGinn

Division and Diversity

Professional pundits often say that the trouble with contemporary political culture is that we are too “divided”. The remedy is to “bring people together” by recognizing that “we have more in common than we think”. This is completely wrong: the problem isn’t division; it’s error. If people have contradictory opinions, one side has to be mistaken; these conflicting opinions can’t be “brought together”. That’s just logic. The errors are of three kinds: factual, practical, and moral. People can be wrong about what the facts are, about how best to rectify an undesirable situation, and about what is morally right and wrong. These errors arise largely from prejudice and propaganda (combined with credulity). The only solution to error is correction, but that can be hard to achieve, especially where stupidity reigns. At present we are facing an epidemic of error among a large section of the population. There is a lot of factual falsehood, impractical ideas, and moral blindness. For example, concerning crime: about who commits it, about the best way to handle it, and about what is the morally correct way to treat criminals. There is no particular problem with division as such: people can be divided about many things, sometime passionately, but it doesn’t lead to turmoil, violence, and misguided policies. They can be divided over the team they support, the music they like, the philosophical opinions they espouse: but this doesn’t have to spill over into hatred, violence, hostility, blacklisting, ostracizing, etc. The problem today is that political differences have become magnified and tribalized. People need to be less hysterical, more civilized, more tolerant of political differences (politics isn’t easy). The problem isn’t division as such but attitudes towards division, especially susceptibility to error through ignorance and dogmatism. People have to stop being hooligans and idiots. Division will then take care of itself.

It is also frequently maintained that the problem with universities and many other organizations is that they are not “diverse” enough. This too is wrong. There is nothing wrong with uniformity as such—sameness along certain dimensions. It all depends on what this uniformity stems from and produces. It is good if it produces progress, creativity, truth, goodness, and beauty; it is bad if it produces dullness, lack of progress, lack of creativity, falsehood, badness, and ugliness. Notice that all these terms are evaluative: diversity must be judged by evaluative criteria; we can’t determine our values according to diversity or its absence. There is no value-neutral way to assess an organization like a university. Diversity per se is not a value; it all depends on what it leads to. If it leads to what is good, then let’s by all means do it; but if it doesn’t, commit it to the flames. There is absolutely no value in difference as such: mere difference never adds up to quality. Variety may be the spice of life, but it isn’t a guarantee of merit. Intelligence, knowledge, diligence, hard work, creativity—these are the signs of a good university not its degree of diversity (whatever exactly this is supposed to mean). To be concrete, if it turns out that women make the best mathematicians, by all means let them run the mathematics departments; if men make the best athletic coaches, let them coach women’s basketball.

The problem with both the approaches I have criticized is that they try to substitute non-values (“facts”) for values. The fact of division is held to be inherently undesirable; the fact of diversity is held to be inherently desirable. These facts, however, are only evaluatively relevant if they conduce to other things deemed valuable in themselves, such as truth or moral rectitude; and they are at best only loosely correlated with such values. Agreement is only good if it is agreement in what is true and right; diversity is only good if it leads to creativity and progress. Fascists can easily agree with each other and be completely wrong; a diverse group of people can be a dull and incompetent lot. We should not be in the business of reducing difference of outlook or promoting diversity considered as ends in themselves.[1]

[1] Apologies for the obviousness of these remarks (it was tedious to write them down), but sometimes the obvious needs stating. Memes like “diversity” have to be subjected to critical scrutiny.

Knowledge of the Unconscious

July 2, 2024/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Colin McGinn

Knowledge of the Unconscious

We have two minds: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. These two minds differ in respect of the distinctive mark of consciousness (“what-it’s-likeness”) and in their accessibility to knowledge. The unconscious mind lacks the mark of consciousness and isn’t known in the way the conscious mind is. We know what is in our conscious mind but not (generally) what is in our unconscious mind. If we had equal knowledge of both, Freudian psychoanalysis and Chomskian linguistics would be a lot easier. We would know the contents of our dynamic emotional unconscious and the contents of our syntactic cognitive unconscious. But there is no direct route from the unconscious to the epistemic faculties; we have to resort to inference and postulation. Thus, we are naturally ignorant of what resides in the unconscious. It is the same for other species of unconscious—perceptual, creative, dream, memory-related.

But how deep does this ignorance go? We don’t know what is in the unconscious, but do we know what it is to be unconscious? Do we have an adequate conception of the state of unconsciousness? We do know what it is to be conscious of something, since our consciousness is hooked up to our faculty of knowledge, even if we don’t know much scientifically or philosophically about consciousness. But there is no such hook-up between the unconscious and knowledge, so it is a question whether we know what we are talking about when we use the words “unconscious mind”. Do we know what this peculiar condition consists in? We have neither introspection nor perception of the unconscious, so we have no natural mode of presentation of it. What kind of being does it have? It might be thought that this question poses no great puzzle: we simply subtract consciousness and are left with a purely physical or functional state—and we know what they are. I know what a brain state is—I’ve seen them and read about them—and an unconscious mental stare is just a brain state. But this is exactly wrong: an unconscious mental state is precisely a mental state—a desire, a belief, a piece of knowledge (“tacit knowledge”), a visual perception, a memory. We mustn’t confuse an unconscious mental state with a non-conscious physical state such as the state of being magnetized or having a mass. Similarly for functional states. No, we must remove consciousness but still be left with something distinctively and recognizably mental—but what is that exactly? Isn’t our whole positive conception of a mental state shaped and formed by our awareness of our conscious mental states. Surely, we cannot be thinking of our unconscious mental states as somehow implicitly conscious—as it might be, faintly conscious. So, unconscious mental states cannot be merely physical nor un-merely (as it were) conscious—but what else is there? Aren’t we just thinking by analogy to the conscious mind while disavowing the analogy? The unconscious mind is not there for the subject, as the conscious mind is, so what is its mode of existence? Isn’t the whole concept of the unconscious something cobbled together from unsuitable conceptual materials, a mishmash of the purely physical and the frankly conscious? If we had a way of directly knowing about it, we could use this to form a conception of what we are referring to, but that is precisely what we lack. We just have a word derived from negating the word “conscious” not a positive substantive conception of its reference. No wonder, then, that the unconscious was a relatively late discovery in human thought and perpetually in peril of denial (though evidently real)—it is actually a “mystery of nature” (in Hume’s phrase). It is something we need and can talk about, even formulate theories of, but not something of which we have any clear and distinct idea (rather, it is unclear and murky). Nor is the case like that of the unobservable constituents of matter: we dohave a clear idea of imperceptible constituents of matter, because we can model these on bits of matter we can see and touch—we don’t need to step outside the circle of physical concepts.[1] But the unconscious mind is a concept that radically extends our other concepts, being neither a physical concept nor a concept of consciousness. It can feel like a pseudo concept (compare the putative concept of immaterial substance).

The underlying question is whether we have a concept of the genuinely mental that leaves the concept of consciousness behind. The general concept of the physical will not do because it is too general; ditto for the concept of the functional. Nor will the concepts of the informational or dispositional or computational help us, since they are also too general and reductive. How can we form a concept of the mental that is non-reductive and properly specific that contains no hint of the conscious mind? The whole point of the notion of an unconscious mind is that the mind is not confined to its conscious compartment and is not dependent on it; it is a realm of mentality in its own right. How, then, can it require the concept of consciousness in order to be made sense of—except by beings (such as ourselves) that have no other conceptual resources to go on? When God looks into our minds, he sees the unconscious part for what it is, not as a kind of wan reflection of the conscious part; but that is not a perspective we can aspire to. We are epistemically cut off from the nature of the unconscious, even though we possess an unconscious and can refer to it in our theories. The unconscious is thus at its heart a necessary mystery. To be unconscious is to be naturally unknown (i.e., not a subject of acquaintance). The unconscious is, in fact, rather like the bat’s conscious experience as far as we are concerned. The bat’s experience differs from our experience in such a way as to be conceptually alien to us; but much the same is true of our own unconscious in that we can’t form an adequate conception of that either—such a conception is unavailable to us. It is as if we have an alien mind living in our head, one that eludes our modes of understanding (apprehension). It’s like having a bat mind existing side by side with our ordinary conscious mind, in regular contact with it but different in nature. The conscious mind is just one form that mind can take, though it dominates our thinking about the mind, and its unconscious partner is really very different from it, intrinsically, ontologically. Yet both fall equally under the concept Mind. Things are always stranger than we tend to suppose from our limited standpoint.[2]

[1] It might be thought that quantum physics provides an analogy to the case of the conscious and the unconscious, in that we also have to make a conceptual leap from the observable classical physical world to the non-classical quantum world. It is as if the quantum world is the macroscopic world’s unconscious—a world for which we require different concepts and different rules of operation. However, I don’t think the leap from classical to non-classical physics is as wide and abrupt as the leap from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind, since we are still dealing with a spatiotemporal world of extended objects subject to the same forces in the former case, while in the latter we are asked to jump from the conceivable conscious to the inconceivable unconscious. Also, it’s never wise to place much reliance on analogies to quantum physics!

[2] I think the case of the unconscious is one of those cases in which we are compelled on theoretical grounds to postulate things that lack clear roots in our given conceptual system (rather like Hume on causation or Newton on gravity). The resulting theory is not strictly intelligible (to humans) but it may be the best we can do and serves many of our purposes. So, I am in no way deriding the unconscious or our theories of it, just noting a conceptual lacuna or shortfall. The unconscious is inherently theoretical.

Free Choice

June 27, 2024/2 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Colin McGinn

Free Choice

A strange air of unreality surrounds the free will debate. Fanciful ideas abound. One feels that something is going seriously wrong somewhere, but it is hard to pinpoint where exactly. It is otherwise with the concept of liberty: here things are plain sailing. The OED defines “liberty” as follows: “the state of being free from oppression and imprisonment”, and “the power or scope to act as one pleases”. No one thinks that liberty is incompatible with determinism, to the detriment of one of them. No one sees fit to deny the reality of liberty or question its conceptual coherence, or to affirm that liberty requires randomness and lack of determination from prior states of the world. We are all compatibilists about liberty. It is true that we might discover that we have less liberty than we supposed—we might have a device implanted in our brain by aliens that makes us control our sexual behavior a lot more than we would really like. But no one thinks that liberty is an incoherent concept or that it requires supernatural phenomena (or quantum indeterminism). In the case of freedom of the will, however, all these possibilities are entertained; and there are rival factions each claiming to possess the precious truth of the matter. Strange! The reason is that determinism is thought to pose a threat to free will, so that we must deny either determinism or freedom. Some people think that we are not free of (or from) the past, including past states of the brain, and so not free at all; others think we are free of (or from) the antecedent conditions, so that human action is not determined. Thus, incompatibilism threatens either to deprive us of our freedom or to be committed to mysterious unintelligible incoherent supernatural goings-on. What should we say about this familiar dilemma?[1]

I won’t say much about the second horn of the dilemma, since it has been extensively covered, except to observe that the postulated theory involves us in the scarcely intelligible idea of uncaused physical occurrences at the macro level. Bodily movements are alleged to occur that have no causal explanation in terms of prior states of the universe; they just spring into being randomly. Yet it is evident that this is simply not so: internal states of the body cause the muscular contractions that constitute bodily motions. To avoid this, we might suggest that the initiating acts of will are completely incorporeal, but then their nature is left up in the air (they are like “bare particulars”). Clearly this is pure mythology. So, the preferred alternative is that free will is an illusion: nothing is free from the past, so nothing is truly free. Even if the past states are desires, they still constrain the action and hence rob it of any freedom it might be thought to possess. So, at any rate, it is widely believed. The point I want to make is that the destruction doesn’t stop there: if free will goes, a lot more goes with it. The determinist incompatibilist denies the existence of free will—no one ever acts freely—but the denial has to extend further into the mind as we normally conceive it. For the notion of choice is also put on the chopping block, along with allied notions: no one ever really chooses anything. We have the illusion of choice but not the reality. The OED defines “choose” as “pick out as being the best of two or more alternatives” and “decide a course of action”. But that is not possible if freedom does not exist, since then we have no alternatives, only the illusion of them. Why we should be under this illusion, or how the illusion is possible, is not made clear—since the concept of freedom has been denied intelligibility, or even conceptual coherence. But anyway, choice must be unreal if freedom is: it cannot be an existing feature of human psychology. We have no capacity to choose (we are just “machines”). We have no genuine alternatives to choose among. A single course of action is determined before any alleged choosing can take place. The concept of “unfree choice” is self-contradictory. If freedom goes, so does choice. But doesn’t this fly in the face of obvious facts—for example, that I can choose what I will have for dinner today? So, it must be that free choice (a pleonasm) is compatible with determinism (as it is for a compatibilist); at any rate, so it may be contended. Furthermore, if choice disappears along with freedom, so also does decision: we never really make decisions if freedom is ruled out, because decision and choice go together. And then deliberation goes the same way: deliberating is choosing or deciding among alternatives, but there is no such thing as choosing or deciding. This is all (unexplained) illusion. And it isn’t like a visual illusion in which the illusory scene is at least logically possible (even commonplace): no, the alleged illusion involves an incoherent concept, viz. the concept of free will (hence choice, decision, and deliberation). A lot of folk psychology collapses if freedom does, even some of its most evident propositions (e.g., that I chose chocolate over vanilla ice cream yesterday).

Does the destruction stop there? What about desire? Aren’t desires dispositions to choose? If I desire a chocolate ice cream, then I have a disposition to choose chocolate over other flavors, especially if I strongly desire chocolate; but if choice is illusory, then this would be a disposition to nothing. I never choose (I just behave), so I never choose based on my desires—they are not “choosy” things. Maybe some desires don’t presuppose choice, but a great many desires do, so these would go by the wayside along with decision and deliberation. Choice reaches down to desire, so to speak, so desires cannot survive the elimination of choice (needs can). The whole conative side of the mind, as we normally understand it, disappears if the will is not free; it can’t be detached by itself leaving the rest intact. If we want to save the conative mind, we need to find a defensible account of freedom; we can’t just abandon freedom and go on our merry way. The dialectical position, then, is that incompatibilism faces severe problems, whether pro- or anti- free will, so compatibilism seems like the better option. It doesn’t involve us in any fanciful ideas, or denials of the obvious, or weird science. It is conservative not revisionary, straightforward not convoluted. There is no air of unreality about it. Freedom is thus akin to liberty.[2]

[1] I have several papers on free will on this blog, approaching it from different angles. This paper doesn’t purport to go over this ground again but to add something new.

[2] It would be odd if the concept of liberty and the concept of freedom (“free will”) were unconnected, as incompatibilist positions take them to be. We would want our theory of the one to slot into our theory of the other, as compatibilism suggests. In a word: freedom is liberty generalized.

Names and Descriptions

June 25, 2024/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Colin McGinn

Names and Descriptions

It has been commonly supposed that names and definite descriptions have an affinity, a connection. Names of people and places, in particular, are associated with widely known attributes: for example, the name “Ringo Starr” is associated with the description “the drummer for the Beatles” and “London” is associated with “the capital of England”. This association has led to the Description Theory of Names—the theory that names meandescriptions, express them, are synonymous with them. And that has been welcomed as solving Frege’s problem of the informativeness of identity statements. We thus have a neat logical package: from the name-description link, to the sense of a name, and hence to the solution of a puzzle. What could be wrong with that? However, it has also been felt that a name is not equivalent to a description for a quiver of reasons: the statement “Ringo Starr was the drummer for the Beatles” is not analytic; speakers don’t always make the association; names are rigid designators but descriptions in general are not; it is not an a priori truth that Ringo drummed for the Beatles; names don’t accept scope distinctions but descriptions do. These objections are powerful—they seem to refute the “famous deeds” description theory and hence the proposed solution to Frege’s puzzle. Maybe names are actually just “directly referential” and have their meaning fixed by their bearer, in which case we will be faced by the informativeness problem again. This is pretty much where we stand today on the marriage between names and descriptions: they can’t live together but life apart is a problem. What is a good marriage counsellor to do? How can she engineer a rapprochement?

She might begin with an anodyne observation: just because we can’t analyze names by descriptions doesn’t mean they are not naturally connected; they may not be legally married but they are certainly intimately linked. It isn’t just that descriptions apply to things named as a matter of fact; names connote descriptions—descriptions are suggested by names, habitually tied to them. Not in the philosopher’s sense of “connote”, which requires synonymy, but in the vernacular sense, i.e., that there is a common and predictable association.[1] This may be individual or communal: the descriptive connotation may be peculiar to an individual speaker, depending on his knowledge of the name’s bearer, or it may be widely shared by speakers (as in “famous deeds”). The name reminds the hearer of something, sets up a mental link, taps into memory. It isn’t that the name means the connoted attribute; it merely evokes it in people’s minds. In particular, it doesn’t generate a priori analytic truths about the bearer of the name; the truths in question are a posteriori and synthetic. Still, they are commonly recognized, reliably correlated. This is quite compatible with accepting either of two theories of the strict meaning of names: the direct reference theory (the sense is the object named), or some other description theory of the name’s meaning (not famous deeds or generally known empirical facts). A leading contender for the latter type of theory is the metalinguistic theory: a name is self-referential, quoting itself, as in “The name ‘Ringo Starr’ means “the person named ‘Ringo Starr’”. For the sake of argument, I will endorse this theory here (it is actually a pretty decent theory): it tells us exactly what the name means in and of itself. In other terminology, it denotes the sense of the metalinguistic description. Accordingly, it is analytic and a priori that Ringo Starr is the person named “Ringo Starr”; and everyone who is familiar with the name is aware of this. Thus, we can say that the bearer of the name is the man Ringo Starr, the denotation (meaning, sense) of the name is given by “the person named ‘Ringo Starr’”, and the connotation of the name (for most people) is given by “the drummer for the Beatles”. That sounds like an attractive package, respecting the facts, not overstating things. We could call the connotation the “cultural meaning” of the name and not step on anyone’s toes, with the metalinguistic synonym as its “semantic meaning”. We could even call the bearer of the name its “referential meaning” and put it in the same box as cultural meaning, i.e., not part of strict and literal meaning but an aspect of the overall significance of the name. The name “connotes” that object as it connotes the property of being the Beatle’s drummer. Meanwhile the metalinguistic description tells us what the name means at its semantic heart.

What then of informativeness? We have two options: adopt the metalinguistic paraphrase for this purpose, or appeal to the descriptive connotations. The former strategy is familiar and I will not expatiate on it; the latter is fresher and more intriguing. The idea is that when we learn a true identity statement our knowledge is augmented by the connotations that come with the name: for example, “Hesperus” connotes “the evening star” and “Phosphorus” connotes “the morning star”, so that when we learn that Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus, we learn that the evening star and the morning star are one and the same planet. This is not the same proposition as that expressed by “Hesperus is Phosphorus” (that is given by the metalinguistic paraphrase), but is a substantive piece of knowledge associated with the identity statement. It isn’t a tautology but a real cognitive step forward.[2] It might easily be mistaken for the knowledge conveyed by the original statement, but actually it corresponds to a different statement—the one connoted. It is connotational (cultural) knowledge not denotational (semantic) knowledge. If you want to know what the conveyed denotational knowledge consists in, you will have to look at the denotations of the contained names, viz. the metalinguistic descriptions. That, too, is not tautological (it isn’t analytic that the same planet is called both “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus”). So, actually, two pieces of descriptive knowledge are obtained when the identity statement is discovered to be true—metalinguistic (denotational) and empirical (connotational). Lots of knowledge is conveyed in this composite picture, so we are not short of resources with which to answer Frege’s question. Nor does the resulting theory violate any of the principles employed in the standard objections to the description theory of names; we just have to be more careful about the formulation of that theory. We mustn’t be too simplistic and rigid about how the descriptions do their job: connotation can do it as well as denotation (strict intrinsic meaning). The marriage counsellor has advised a looser relationship as the solution to his clients’ problems, though not one without substantial commitments (live apart but always keep each other in mind).

Not all words have connotations, at least not in any marked manner; names stand out in this respect. Connectives and prepositions don’t do much connoting; nor do articles and pronouns. Verbs do some, but nouns do the most. This includes singular and common nouns (e.g., kind terms, natural and artificial). The reason for this is presumably that these are the things of most interest to us—in particular, people and places (just listen to the Beatles song “In My Life”). We have thoughts and feelings about the bearers of names, and these stick in our minds. Names are connotation-rich. It is not surprising that there are quasi-semantic associations here, interpenetrations. Frege and Russell were right to sense an affinity, though they overdid it to the point of asserting identity. The pragmatics of names is clearly description-directed. So, we should expect that descriptions will play a role in the functioning of names, though an auxiliary role. Names thus point towards descriptions without being equivalent to them. But the pointing goes in the other direction too: descriptions also connote names. If you hear the description “the drummer for the Beatles”, you naturally think of Ringo Starr, his face, his hair, his drumming style—the name strikes you in a certain way. This explains why we tend to regard definite descriptions as name-like, contrary to Russell’s theory. We expect descriptions to function like names because they irresistibly suggest names to us (it isn’t just that they occur in subject position); hence Russell’s theory comes as a surprise. The connotations of descriptions instill the idea that they are name-like—just as the connotations of names instill the idea that names are description-like. The mutual connotation encourages semantic assimilation. We mistake affinity for overlap, even identity. This is the psycholinguistics of names and descriptions, their depth psychology (the “semantic unconscious”). Russell’s theory of descriptions could be entirely correct, and known to be so, and yet descriptions persist in having name-involving connotations; just as Mill’s theory of names could be entirely correct and yet names persist in having descriptive connotations. And connotations count: they shape conceptions.[3]

Connotations need not be accurate; denotations have to be. You can get things wrong about the objects you refer to without detriment to your referential success, but you can’t be wrong in what you mean and expect to lock onto the right object. You might think Ringo was the drummer for the Stones but still refer to Ringo with “Ringo” not Charlie, but you can’t refer to Ringo with “Ringo” if you don’t grasp that Ringo is named “Ringo” and not “Charlie”. Denotation is infallible in this sense, but connotation is not: you can’t grasp the meaning of “tree” and not refer to trees with “tree”, but you can grasp the connotation of the word “tree” and this connotation not be an accurate representation of trees (for you “tree” might connote “plant that poisonous snakes hide in”—because you once saw a documentary about poisonous tree snakes in Africa). Connotations are certainly not entailed by denotations (meanings)—they are just stuff you associate with the word. But they can cooperate with denotations in the use and understanding of language—they come with words (hence con-notation: “con” as in “together with”). We should really pay more attention to the phenomenon of connotation in the philosophy of language.[4]

[1] See my “On Denoting and Connoting” for some background to this paper.

[2] One thing is perfectly clear: affirmations of self-identity can never be informative.

[3] Connotations are not the same as conversational implicatures, though they belong to the same general territory. Neither follows from strict literal meaning; both are broadly pragmatic (or penumbral). Connotations are more like psychological associations, cognitive and affective; implicatures have to do with conversational rules governing the purposes of communication. A comparative study of connotation and implicature would be worth undertaking.

[4] Words have reference, sense, force, tone, and connotation. Each does its job in accounting for language use. Consider all the connotations of “I went for a job interview in New Jersey yesterday”, let alone “The Second World War killed millions of people”. Language is heavy with connotation.

On Denoting and Connoting

June 22, 2024/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Colin McGinn

On Denoting and Connoting

There is something amiss with our standard terminology. And it covers actual confusion. I propose to straighten all this out.[1] The standard way of talking assigns a denotation and a connotation to definite descriptions (sometimes also to names and demonstratives): the denotation of a description is the object it refers to (if it refers), while the connotation consists of the properties expressed by the embedded predicates. In other terminology, the denotation is the extension and the connotation is the intension (the meaning, intuitively). This does not conform to the dictionary definition of these terms or their common usage. The OEDdefines “connotation” thus: “an idea or feeling which a word invokes in addition to its primary meaning”, following this with “Philosophy the abstract meaning of a term, determining which object or concept it applies to”. These two definitions are at odds with each other: the former speaks of contingent associations with thoughts and feelings that are not part of the “primary meaning” of the expression; the latter identifies connotation with primary meaning. This is very explicit in the definition for “connote”: “(of a word) imply or suggest (an idea or feeling) in addition to the primary or literal meaning”. This makes connotation extrinsic to meaning, while the philosophical definition makes it intrinsic to meaning. Clearly, the philosophical definition has deformed the vernacular meaning. What word does philosophy have for those suggested ideas and feelings that are merely associated with the term? The OED (concise edition) definition of “denote” gives us simply “be a sign of; indicate”; for “denotation” the Shorter OED gives us “the meaning or signification of a term, as distinct from its implications or connotations”. So, the denotation of a term can just be its conventional meaning not the object the term stands for or refers to. If we use “denotes” in this way, we can say that a definite description denotes the properties denoted by the predicates contained in it, i.e., what those predicates mean—not its ordinary reference. In other words, the connotation in the philosophical sense is the denotation in the vernacular sense. You see what I mean about the oddity of our standard philosophical use of these terms? It is really not true to say that meaning is constituted by connotation; what is true is that it is constituted by denotation. Since every word has a meaning, it has a denotation in the ordinary sense. The sense of a word, using Frege’s terminology, is its denotation; connotation doesn’t come into it, except as a kind of secondary meaning. That would seem to be the more accurate and natural way of speaking.

What is called by philosophers the denotation actually belongs with the connotation as normally understood, in that both belong to extrinsic contingent features of the term, more alluded to than actually expressed. I mean that the reference is not strictly part of what the term means, just like the connotation; both need not even exist in order for the term to have its usual meaning. You can vary the reference or the connotation and keep the meaning fixed. We might say that reference and connotation are alluded to or signified or intended by the use of the term (not by the term itself), but they are not aspects of its strict and literal meaning. They form the penumbra of the term’s meaning, piggybacking on it, not its core or nucleus. Both are indicated, even referred to, by the speaker—they are intended objects of speech. But they are not denoted by the term considered in itself; they might be removed without detriment to the term’s “primary meaning”. We could almost say that the reference in this sense is part of the term’s connotation: it connotes that object, suggests it, implies it, points towards it. If I know that Benjamin Franklin was the inventor of bifocals, then that description connotes the idea of Benjamin Franklin to me, even though that idea is not part of its strict meaning. Thus, rightly considered, connotation becomes denotation and denotation becomes connotation. A definite description denotes the properties that constitute its meaning, and it connotes an object that is not part of its meaning. According to Russell’s theory of descriptions, then, the denotation of a description is the property or set of properties denoted by its predicates, not the object indirectly alluded to by those predicates. It isn’t that the description has no denotation—for it has a meaning—but rather that its denotation is other than we tend to suppose. We thought (with Meinong and Frege) that its denotation was its intended object of reference, but in fact, as Russell’s analysis reveals, the only denoting going on is being performed by the predicates in relation to the properties they express. Meaning is always denotational, trivially so, but the denotation need not be a concrete object like a man or a mountain. The revealed logical form of the description tells us that its meaning consists in denoting properties not objects. That is the real lesson of the theory of descriptions once the terminology is straightened out. There is not denotational meaning and connotational meaning; there is just denotational meaning. Even if objects do sometimes constitute meaning (“logically proper names”), there is still just denotational meaning across the board—the entities may vary from expression to expression but not the meaning-constituting relation. Words always signify—denote–meanings, though it is possible for different kinds of things to be meanings. The contentious question has been what kinds of denotation words possess, not whether some words mean by denoting while others mean by connoting. That whole way of thinking and speaking is misconceived.

If we look at the extension of a predicate, we see clearly what is going on. The extension of a predicate is not its denotation; the property (or concept) it expresses is. The extension is extrinsic to the meaning and can vary ad libitum; it is more like connotation in the ordinary sense. The property determines the extension (in a world), but the two are quite distinct entities. Similarly, the property also at least partially determines the ideas and feelings connoted by the term in question (e.g., the property of being a snake). So, there is a definite relation between denotation, on the one hand, and extension and connotation, on the other. Still, it is denotation that is semantically primary, i.e., what the word strictly and literally means. In the case of whole sentences, we may say that their truth-value corresponds to the connotation side of things (what Frege would call their Bedeutung), while the proposition they express corresponds to the denotation side (alternatively, the states of affairs corresponding to them). Sentences thus denote (mean) propositions but merely allude to truth-values—intend them, point to them, contain them in their penumbra. The two don’t stand in the denotation relation but only in the “connotation” relation; we might say that they are “correlated”. But propositions are clearly integral to sentence meaning and hence are correctly said to be denoted by sentences. The extension of a sentence (its truth-value) is thus not its denotation; the intension of a sentence is. Sentences denote their intensions but not their extensions. Similarly, the truth-table of a connective is not its denotation but rather a part of its “connotation” in the extended sense; the denotation will be the function directly expressed by the connective (as it might be, the negation function). Denotations have penumbras or correlates or associations (ideas and feelings, references, extensions, truth-values, truth-tables), but they are always separate and autonomous. We should not confuse the two or mislabel them. The whole point of the denotation/connotation distinction is to separate what is internal to a word’s meaning from what is external to it; it does no good to force connotation into the heart of word meaning. We have inherited a misleading nomenclature and need to dispense with it.[2]

[1] Prepare yourself for a wild ride. We are going to break some bones, destroy some shibboleths, upset some apple carts. Expect dizziness.

[2] It is actually quite difficult to break the hold of the old nomenclature if one has been steeped in it for long enough, as I have been. We have to fight off the usual interpretation of “denotation” in classic philosophy of language. The word “denotes” has become an entrenched term of art in logic and philosophy of language, but it is a distortion and a source of wrongheadedness. It is to be noted that there is no vernacular term that means just what philosophers intend to mean by “denotes”; it is a neologism. Speakers refer not words; denotation is supposed to be something that words can do off their own bat. They can, but only if the term is taken in the vernacular sense as equivalent to “meaning”.

Hand-Based Psychotherapy

June 20, 2024/0 Comments/in Uncategorized/by Colin McGinn

Hand-Based Psychotherapy

The image we have of the therapeutic set-up derives from Freud’s clinical practice. It consists of a patient lying on a couch with the therapist sitting behind her unseen. There is no physical activity apart from talking. It is as if patient and therapist are focusing exclusively on the mind with the body bracketed for the duration. We would never picture this set-up if we were considering physical therapy—here the body is likely to be moving quite a bit. The division is remarkably Cartesian, and not in a good way: we all know that mind and body interact in all sorts of ways, especially when it comes to pathologies. We have psychosomatic illness as well as psychic disturbance occasioned by bodily injury or disease. Shouldn’t both kinds of therapy be psychophysical? Shouldn’t we be treating the WHOLE PERSON? With this ideology in mind, I wish to urge the benefits of a type of psychotherapy dedicated to the hands—hence hand-based psychotherapy.[1] The theoretical background to this method draws upon the central role of the hands in human life and evolution, the extensive neurophysiological basis assigned to the hands, and the consequences of hand dysfunction. There is nothing particularly esoteric about any of this: it is just part of our shared knowledge of the hand as mature human beings. I am not asking you to swallow anything mystical or New Age or weird-science. And my aim is thoroughly practical: therapeutic efficacy rules, there are no magic crystals, it’s all out in the open. So, let me be blunt in my language and my specific proposals. The heart of hand-based therapy is what we might call “hand activation”, i.e., a series of hand exercises or skills or disciplines. An initial list will include throwing, drumming, hitting, gripping, stroking, and strengthening. Both hands will be worked on, especially the non-dominant hand. Games and sports of various kinds are encouraged, as well as playing musical instruments; these may be decided by therapist and patient together. (I personally would favor knife throwing, drumming, and tennis, but that’s just me.) The aim is to train the hands systematically, bringing out their full potential, particularly the non-dominant hand. Hand awareness and hand connectedness are thereby enhanced.

I envisage this form of therapy for depression, anxiety, and PTSD, as well as ordinary discontent. I follow it myself. It is perhaps not wise to try to delve into its rationale and empirical basis too deeply, because that way lies mystification and pseudo-science. The general idea is that our hands are a central part of our human nature and should be developed to a high level in order to realize that nature. Just imagine life without your hands—it doesn’t bear thinking about. A considerable part of the brain is dedicated to the hands. They are capable of amazing feats. Capitalist labor has alienated workers from their hands by insisting on repetitive motions. Many jobs involve minimal hand activity and creativity. Hand neglect is like brain neglect, and indeed entails brain neglect. Infants follow a regular pattern of hand development beginning at just a few months old, indicating a carefully orchestrated set of innate instructions (like language development). Healthy hand development is necessary to a happy successful life. Some people are afflicted with hand phobia (chiro phobia) while others suffer from Clenched Fist Syndrome (CFS). Some gesticulate wildly while others let their hands droop uselessly. Most people never give their hands a second thought, so don’t do anything to unlock their potential. I would advocate hand therapy for criminals languishing in jail. I think the pinched personalities of many academics would benefit from compulsory hand exercises. Healthy hands make for healthy and happy minds. The old regime of forcing children to fold their arms and not “fidget” is the opposite of healthy, depriving them of the natural action of their hands (“hand repression”). There should be social clubs devoted to hand activities. Hand wellness should be a societal priority. The soul-hand nexus should be celebrated. But here I risk lapsing into hand mysticism, hand obscurantism. Let me just say that it is high time we recognized the importance of hand development to human wellbeing.

I am not suggesting that we replace all other forms of psychotherapy with hand-based therapy (“chiro therapy”). It can certainly be used in conjunction with other forms of therapy (including rebirth therapy[2]). But I think it could be a valuable addition to other therapeutic approaches. Obviously, it would be desirable to undertake empirical studies to evaluate its efficacy, but this is notoriously difficult to arrange (most psychotherapies are lacking in empirical support). Still, I am confident that it could have beneficial effects, simply because it goes to the heart of our human nature. We are born handy creatures.[3]

[1] I intend this short essay as an offshoot and application of my (criminally neglected!) book Prehension (2015).

[2] See my “Foundations of Psychotherapy” for an account of rebirth therapy.

[3] This essay is obviously highly programmatic; much more needs to be said. For example, should the education system make room for dedicated hand development classes? Is writing a sufficient use of the hands for a healthy psyche? (No!) What is the relative psychological importance of finger dexterity and propulsive manual power? Should different types of ball be used therapeutically? (Yes.) Are drummers happier than singers? (Probably.) How much emphasis should be placed on eye-hand coordination? Is there such a condition as stiff hand dystonia? Should we talk less and use our hands more? How should the feet be integrated with the hands? Is hand behavior diagnostic of psychopathology? Is obsessive-compulsive disorder hand-centered? Should children be tested on their hand skills? What constitutes hand beauty? Are there national differences in hand sophistication? Should the elderly pay special attention to their hand-mind health? Et cetera.