Bernard Williams and Me

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Bernard Williams and Me

One day, over twenty years ago, I ran into Bernard Williams in the corridor at NYU. He remarked: “The thing about you, Colin, is that you think you’ve either solved the problems of philosophy or they can’t be solved at all”. I paused for less than a second and replied, “I believe you’re right”. I assume his point was that this is a rather self-confident attitude, perhaps not entirely justified by the facts. But I think, on mature reflection, that it was perfectly reasonable, and not for “narcissistic” reasons. In the case of the mind-body problem, I had at that time been thinking about it for over thirty years and was well-versed in all the standard theories, as would be any half-way competent philosopher; and I had no idea what such a solution would look like. I also knew personally all the top philosophers of the time, and they had no idea either (though some may have thought they did). It was phenomenally unlikely that I, or any of them, would come up with the correct theory any time soon, and there were principled reasons for urging pessimism. It is perfectly rational to believe that no one living will come up with the solution. Is it rational to believe that someone not now living will come with it? But what will they have that we don’t? On the other hand, there are philosophical insights that have been gained in recent times, and I have as much access to them as anyone else; so, what I believe about the relevant questions is likely to be correct, or at least eminently defensible. Bernard was wrong if he thought that I mistakenly believed myself to have come up with these insights—that is demonstrably false. But I share them, like numerous others. The essential point is that no one I know (including myself) is anywhere near solving the mind-body problem, so it is not absurd for me to hold that the problem is not within sight of a solution. It is not that there is anyone X such that X can be counted on to solve the problem. Even the great Saul Kripke, who might be thought a plausible value of “X”, declared the problem “wide open and extremely confusing”. So, Bernard was quite right about my attitude, but it wasn’t all that silly. It isn’t as if Saul qualified his remark by saying, “But I hear Colin McGinn is working on the problem, so perhaps we will get a solution in a week or two”. That would be ridiculous. In this we see the true nature of philosophical problems. It isn’t like Watson and Crick and DNA or the Higgs boson or Darwin’s theory of evolution.

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Games and Meaning

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Games and Meaning

Imagine a philosopher, call him LW for short, with a lifelong interest in games. In his youth he writes a book called The Logical Structure of Games. As the name suggests, the book gives an analysis of the formal structure of games—a theory of the a priori essence of games which purports to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a game. He also writes a book in middle age that largely repudiates his earlier book called The Activity of Playing Games. This book focuses not so much on logical structure as on practical function—playing the game as a human activity. These books may be summarized as follows.

In the first book the author announces that human life is the totality of human activities not human possessions—deeds not things. He then tells us that some of these activities mirror other activities; they resemble them. These we call “games”. In fact, he claims, games picture non-games—stand for them, are isomorphic with them. They represent non-games by sharing their structure. A game is then defined as a kind of picture (ludic picture) of a non-game, a surrogate or substitute or model. For example, many games represent military actions: one team pits itself against another, striving to win in vigorous intelligent maneuvers. The team aims for victory and exerts force against the other in order to achieve this aim, as in football and rugby. People get hurt, but are seldom killed. This kind of rough and tumble is good preparation for actual military confrontation (“war games”). LW focuses on the structure of games and their formal likeness to the activities they represent: the multiplicity of elements, the formal arrangement, the temporal sequencing. His theorizing is geometrical in character. Anything that looks like a game but doesn’t fit the theory is declared a pseudo game, for it resembles no non-game activity we can think of. Further examples include board games like chess and card games like poker. These are said to picture non-game strategic planning and economic activity; and indeed, money may be lost or gained in playing them. Then too we have mating and courtship games, which are taken to model actual mating and courtship; these are said to include athletic and dancing games. The athlete advertises his physical prowess; the dancer succeeds in getting into an embrace with his desired partner (dancing itself is alleged to be isomorphic with sexual intercourse). Then there is boxing and tennis, resembling hand to hand physical combat, actual fighting. Monopoly obviously stands for property transactions and the like. In this way LW hopes to persuade his reader that the essence of games is picturing; and if that is not evident on the surface, it can be revealed by in-depth logical analysis.

In his second book LW adopts a very different approach. No longer does he defend a logical picture view of games; indeed, he denies that games have any unifying essence. Instead, he declares that what we call games are united by nothing more than a loose family resemblance. The concept of a game is indefinable. Games are connected to our “form of life” and are held to be examples of rule-following. Rule-following in games is a practice, a custom, an institution. We cannot understand rule-following in games as an inner mental process or a brain state or even a disposition to behavior; it is a community activity. This is LW’s skeptical solution to a skeptical paradox to the effect that there is nothing (no fact) in game rule-following that this alleged activity could consist in; therefore, games do not exist. Here there is some doubt about the correct interpretation of LW’s words, but it is clearly the opposite of the earlier work. Interestingly, he compares playing a game to speaking a language; he tells us that playing a game has all the irreducible variety of speaking a language. There are many kinds of speech act with nothing in common; and the same is true of games, he suggests. He thinks it is relatively easy to see that language has no essence; this provides a nice parallel to his theory of games—they too lack an essence. The concept of a game is as much a family resemblance concept as the concept of a language, he insists. In fact, other analogies can be found in the concepts of a hobby, a job, a work of art, an economy, furniture, and many things. Games are no different from these: all are bereft of necessary and sufficient conditions and are knit together only by loose resemblance. The concept of a game is not the strict monolithic concept he used to think. His meta-philosophy is now that the search for definitions is futile in philosophy, and especially where games are concerned. He used to be fooled (“bewitched”) by language into thinking that the concept of a game is a concept unified by a single essence, but now he realizes that it is use that constitutes the meaning of “game”, and we use that word very differently from case to case. He now has a different theory of games in which essence is replaced by varieties of action: chess and football, say, are linked only by a series of loose similarities of behavior at best. Since games are the most important topic in philosophy, so far as he is concerned, LW takes himself to have overthrown the traditional way that philosophy is conducted. He doesn’t take meaning to be so central, because it is narrower than game playing: young children and animals play games but they don’t speak, and speaking is not as important to human culture as game playing. Humans were playing games long before they invented speech, and some scholars have argued that it was games that propelled language into existence (both are rule-governed activities). Language use is really a type of game playing (“language games” he calls it) and so has its roots in that activity. In any case, that has been the trajectory of his thinking on the topic of games over the course of his intellectual life.[1]         

[1] It should be added that LW was wrong about games during both of his periods; the correct analysis was supplied only later by Bernard Suits in his classic The Grasshopper (1978). But we can see why LW came to the views he did—they are not absurd and it wasn’t till Suits stepped in that the concept was defined. What LW made of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein remains unrecorded; there is talk that he thought that philosopher had his priorities wrong, though his methodology was sound.

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A Law of Subjectivity and Objectivity

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A Law of Subjectivity and Objectivity

Things can be subjective or objective, and so can conceptions of things. The former distinction pertains to types of objects and concerns their proximity to the mind: are they explicitly mental or at any rate mind-dependent? In this use, we say that color is subjective but shape is not. The latter distinction pertains to how we think of objects or otherwise mentally represent them: do we specify them conceptually in terms of their relation to us? Accordingly, objective things can have subjective modes of conception, and subjective things can have objective modes of conception. Here I will state a law that may seem paradoxical but is really truistic: the more subjective a conception is the more objective its object is apt to be, and the more objective a conception is the more subjective its object is apt to be. Objective things characteristically have subjective representations, and subjective things characteristically have objective representations. This sounds paradoxical because one would think the subjectivity or objectivity of an object would carry over to its mode of conception. But that is to confuse the two uses of “subjective” and “objective”, which have two meanings—objectual and conceptual. The reason the law is a truism is that the further an object is from the knowing mind the more we have to rely on its relations to our subjectivity (in the objectual sense) to get it in our sights; and the closer an object is to the knowing mind the less we have to rely on such indirect methods to get at the object conceptually.  For example, our thoughts about galaxies rely on our subjective modes of perceiving them, i.e., our visual experience; but our thoughts about our pains can skip all this and go straight to the pain, not relying on our senses. We know about pain directly, as it is in itself, but we know about galaxies indirectly, as they appear to us. The physical world is subjectively represented (initially at least, and maybe always), while the mental world is objectively represented in that we have immediate access to what it objectively and intrinsically is. Intuitively, we see the subjective appearance of galaxies from a certain position in space, but we see the real objective thing in the case of pain and other mental phenomena. We know galaxies from our particular point of view (from Earth, with our sense of sight), while we know pains from no point of view, but directly, and just as they are (by introspection). This is why the law I stated holds: the more out there an object is the more we rely on what is in here to conceive of it (the germ of truth in empiricism), but the more in here the object is the less we have to rely on anything indirect and peculiar to us, and can just go right to the object (hence infallibility doctrines of self-knowledge).

Granted that we have hold of a law here, we can ask how it applies elsewhere, in particular to mathematics and ethics. For if those subject matters are subjectively represented, then they must obey the law and be objective in themselves. But if they are conceived in a demonstrably objective manner, we can infer that they are subjective in the objectual sense: objective epistemology, therefore subjective ontology. If we have a murky humanly-relative conception of numbers, say, then numbers will be objective in the objectual sense—possibly Platonic. But if we conceive of numbers just as they are in themselves, with no subjective intrusion or mediation, then, according to the law, they should be closer to the mind, or even be mental entities. We can infer something like Platonism from conceptual subjectivity and something like intuitionism from conceptual objectivity. That is, we can do this unless the law breaks down in the case of mathematics. Similarly for ethics: if our ethical conceptions are subjective (subject-centered), we can infer objectivity in the objects; but if they have the marks of conceptual objectivity, then ethical subjectivism about the objects would appear to be indicated. If we think of the good relatively to our particular point of view, invoking our own psychology, then ethical truth is apt to be objectively determined; but if we think of it directly, and hence objectively, then ethical subjectivism would appear indicated. Suppose we think of the good as what produces the emotion of approval in us, but not so for all beings that think ethically; then we can argue that ethical fact must transcend our modes of mental representation. We must be thinking of the good in a subjective manner, perhaps peculiar to our species. The contingent mode of presentation of ethical facts that we employ must fall short of the reality in question. By contrast, if our mode of thinking is objectively true to the nature of the ethical facts, then those facts must be subjective in nature (in the objectual sense). If the good really is just what gives us pleasure, say, then we know its nature, because we know what pleasure is and what things produce it. But if the good is something epistemically remote from us, then it must transcend our subjective modes of apprehension (as Plato thought). Subjectivity in the conception implies objectivity in the object (assuming it has an object); and objectivity in the conception implies subjectivity in the object. So, it looks as if all we need to do to settle the question of the objectivity of ethics is to find out whether we think subjectively or objectively about it; and similarly for mathematics, mutatis mutandis. The law will do the rest.

So: do we think about moral value subjectively or objectively, and similarly for mathematics? Do we think about these things from our point of view or from the object’s point of view? The trouble is that it is hard to see how to answer this without having an independent grasp of the ontology in question, as we do in the case of physical objects (we call it “physics”). We can’t determine the epistemology without already knowing the ontology, i.e., whether the objects are subjective or objective in the objectual sense. We might find signs of subjectivity, such as variation in the manner of conception, but these can be interpreted as evidence of relativism; we can’t report that the conception comes apart from the facts, which are uniform. I myself believe that individual or cultural variation in ethical conceptions indicates that people have only a subjective grasp pf ethical values, which themselves exist universally and objectively; but it is hard to prove this (we don’t have an ethical analogue of physics). All we can say is that if ethical conceptions are subjective in the sense explained, and thus analogous to conceptions of the physical world, then ethics is objective on the objectual sense, i.e., not constituted by psychological facts. For if it were so constituted, there would not be this kind of variation; then we could affirm ethical subjectivism with regard to subject matter. (People don’t differ about what pain is because its nature is so evident.) Still, the law applies to the ethical case, though it is hard to use it to argue for one position or the other. If people rely on their own nature to anchor their moral thinking, perforce as it were, then moral values must be objective in the objectual sense, i.e., not “in the mind”. If people referred to the good as “the (non-mental) cause of these feelings”, then we would have reason to suppose that the good is more than the feelings thus referred to. But we don’t have any clear reason to suppose that they do. We must therefore rest content with the conditional claim. That is a non-trivial result.[1]

[1] Needless to say, these are very difficult and obscure matters, over which I have lightly skated.

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Reflexes

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This is from Bill Reagan:

I thoroughly enjoyed Colin McGinn’s post on Reflexes because it is a solid, concise work on the subject, with dabs of humour throughout. I am keeping it close-by as a reference for my own project on instincts, and guide to what the body is capable of doing to protect our best interests. Perhaps evolution is not as random as it has been portrayed? Even so, evolution is amazing, and Dr. McGinn’s work is a jewel of a description on this important work of nature. This is an eye opener, a thought stirrer, and a real treat for those wanting to better understand the origins and benefits of reflexes. They are so very important!

Virus-free.www.avg.com
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Accents

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Accents

Nowadays people recommend speaking in the same accent you were brought up to speak, whatever that may be, in the interests of linguistic diversity. I disagree. I myself first spoke in a Geordie accent, because I was born in Newcastle; my parents spoke Geordie their whole life. My family moved to Gillingham Kent when I was three and I spoke in that accent until I went to school at age five, and presumably for some time after. In due course I learned to speak in the Kent accent (the one Mick Jagger speaks). Should I have clung to Geordie even if no one could understand me and found me weird? Of course not. Then we moved again when I was twelve, this time to Blackpool in Lancashire. The kids called me a Cockney because of my southern accent. In time elements of the Lancashire accent crept in, though never very broad. I went to university at age eighteen and reverted to my Kentish accent because that was more common (and my then wife was from Kent). By the time I went to Oxford I was speaking in cleaned-up Kentish. There was nothing “inauthentic” about any of this; it was natural and necessary. What was my authentic accent—Geordie? I can’t even speak Geordie anymore, except for a smattering.

Living in Miami people often ask me where I am from and say they love my English accent. I tell them it is not my English accent they love, because many English accents are quite unlovable (Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester). What they love is my accent, but what accent is that? It has no name and no region. I invented it, several times. I consciously speak a certain way, like a trained actor. And it isn’t the sounds my mouth makes as I speak; it’s my clean vowels, intonation, clarity, and pauses. I speak so as to be understood and (yes) admired. I speak intelligently. I don’t speak harshly or carelessly or too rapidly. I choose my words and try to be amusing. I do this a lot with nurses. So, my point is this: do not speak as you were brought up to speak, but teach yourself to speak better—more clearly, intelligently, pleasantly. Speech is a performance, so perform it well. Let it convey who you uniquely are, not just what region you are from. Space out your words appropriately, so that the hearer has time to absorb what you just said. If you have a strong foreign accent, get rid of it, don’t feel proud of it (especially when talking on the phone). Vary your accent depending on who you are talking to. It would have been useless for me to speak in my first accent my whole life, as a philosophy professor, living in America. Work on your accent; if necessary, obliterate it. I don’t think it’s a good idea to retain your South African accent while living and working in America—you will not be understood. Moderate your Australian accent when you see your listener struggling, as he or she will. Your accent should be a work of art not just something you found lying about; so work on, refine it, perfect it. No one thinks you should preserve the manners of whatever surrounded you as a child, or the dress sense, or the subject matter of your speech; so, don’t stick to the accent you wore born into. You may get diversity that way, but you won’t get admiration and applause. Try to speak better than other people. Diversity is just another name for conformity and laziness. I recommend Alec Guinness or at least Peter Sellars as role model. It’s good to have a nice voice.

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Objective Truth

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Objective Truth

We can take subjective and objective views of the same facts: we can conceive of the object by reference to ourselves (“the object I am seeing now”) or by abstracting away from our specific characteristics and thinking from no particular point of view (“the planet next to planet Earth”).[1] This general point applies to the fact of truth: we can think of it in relation to ourselves or we can think of it as it is in itself irrespective of any relation to us—from the point of view of the world, as it were. I might think of truth as “the property I value most” or as “the property conferred on propositions by reality” (“Nothing is true but reality makes it so”, as Quine memorably remarked). How does this distinction apply to standard theories of truth? Which category do they fall into? Suppose we define truth as “the property rational enquirers converge on in the long run” or “the property a proposition has when it is known” or “the property of cohering with the rest of my beliefs” or “the property that serves me best in life”. These all make reference to the knowing subject, individual or collective. They are therefore subjective: we are thinking of truth from the human perspective, as it relates to us. We are not prescinding from ourselves and trying to define truth independently of ourselves: the general form of these definitions is “truth is what is R to me/us”. Logically, they are like “truth is what seems to me to be true”. Truth is conceived egocentrically, or anthropocentrically. Attributes of the self are introduced into the very nature of truth.

But that is not the only way truth has been defined; it has also been defined without reference to the self. So it is with the so-called correspondence theory of truth: truth is correspondence to the facts (reality, the world, being). There is a relation of correspondence (isomorphism, fitting) between propositions and worldly items, generally understood as combinations of objects and properties (“states of affairs”). If we think of propositions in Frege’s way, this relation holds for all time between mind-independent abstract entities and conditions of mind-independent reality (the universe). In no way does truth bring in human (or other) subjects; it exists apart from anything subjective or personal. It is completely objective. When we think of truth in this way, the human subject drops out; in its nature it has nothing to do with us. It’s like space, time, and matter. Thus, we have an “absolute conception” of truth to be set beside and contrasted with relative and subjective conceptions. This is held to constitute the essence of truth, its intrinsic constitution. From this perspective, the other definitions are deemed secondary at best and misleading at worst (or positively pernicious). They are to truth what the appearance of water is to water—not the real essence of what they purport to define and quite dispensable. The objective always takes precedence over the subjective (this term is used as a derogatory).

Now I want to make two points about these contrasting views of truth. The first is that the difference between them presages a battle: is truth inherently human and subjective, relative to us, or is it completely free of all subjective elements, absolute and objective. Is truth epistemic and practical, or is it metaphysical and divorced from all practice? This is a deep division and we may expect it to produce some ideological heat, not to be easily resolved. It will also affect such questions as the nature and status of moral truth and aesthetic truth. It bears on the prospects of a truth-conditional theory of meaning: can meaning be understood in terms of the objective conception of truth or must it be couched in terms of the subjective conception? This, I take it, is familiar territory. But the second point is not: is the objective conception even possible? The subjective conception is certainly possible, being framed in terms of humanly accessible facts—the only question being whether it is really a conception of truth, as opposed to such things as justification and utility. But there has always been a problem of understanding exactly what the objectivist correspondence theory actually says. What are these “facts” to which propositions correspond, and what is the relation of “correspondence”? Are facts complexes of objects and properties, and is correspondence a type of picturing? We don’t seem to know quite what we mean; it remains cloudy and obscure. Thus, anti-mystics repudiate it and opt for less heady doctrines (like the redundancy theory). The objective conception of truth is lacking in intelligibility. Maybe truth is objective in some way, but we can’t clearly say what that way is. The subjective views are intelligible enough but fall short, while the objective view seems on the right track but lacks in clarity or even intelligible content. Metaphysically, the objective view is a mess; spiritually, we rather like it. Subjective theories do nicely on the intelligibility front, but they fall under suspicion where material adequacy (Tarski’s term) is concerned. They strike us as neither necessary nor sufficient for genuine truth. Accordingly, Houston, we have a problem, a characteristically philosophical problem. One type of theory makes sense but is false, while the other doesn’t make much sense but impresses us as true. Ach! Compare philosophical theories of mathematics or ethics or the mind or necessity or the a priori or free will. In the case of truth, debates have raged over the various theories on offer, but the underlying dynamic has not been recognized, namely the conflict between subjective and objective conceptions of the target subject matter. The correct view would appear to be that truth is objective but we can’t make good on this conviction conceptually, whereas subjectivist theories make sense all right but are simply not plausible. I don’t know how else to put it: truth belongs to the class of natural mysteries (“mysteries of nature”, as Hume put it). We glimpse it perhaps in our limping formulations, but we can’t see limpidly into it. We may imagine the human institution of pictorial art and draw an analogy in the picture theory of propositions, but that idea is easily punctured. It may then seem that we must go deflationary or eliminative, but that is tough to stomach. In any case, we at least now see what is troubling us, what the deep structure of the debate turns upon. What is truth? Who the hell knows. I myself don’t doubt that truth is as the objectivist says, but I don’t have any real idea what this amounts to. Maybe I have a subjective conception of an objective conception that I don’t have: I picture the correspondence relation based on my own subjective perceptual experiences of correspondence relations of a geometrical nature, then I connect this to my vague mental image of a complex physical object; this forms my subjective conception of what a properly objective conception of the truth-making type of correspondence would be like. I certainly don’t have any direct perception of, or insight into, what the actual truth-making correspondence consists of. It’s just a word I throw around in philosophical discussions. Truth is an objective enigma.[2]

[1] See my papers, “Objective and Subjective Knowledge”, “A Paradox of Objectivity and Subjectivity”, “Philosophy of Objectivity and Subjectivity”, “A Program Delineated”, and “On Meaning, Mathematics, and Space”.

[2] An irenic individual might suggest carving truth into two pieces, each a legitimate type of truth. There is, on the one hand, subjective truth and, on the other, objective truth—the former pellucid, the latter obscure. But this is hard to accept: surely propositions don’t have two truth-values of truth and two of falsity. The proposition is either true or false, not true in one sense but not in another, and likewise for falsity. There is really no such thing as subjective truth (justification is another matter). The truth would appear to be that there is only one kind of truth but we can’t make much sense of it (our problem not its).

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2026

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2026

I may as well make my predictions for the coming year, for what they are worth (sixpence perhaps). I think collective insanity will continue to increase, particularly on the right but also on the left. The descent into savagery will continue (just look at Abby Phillip’s nightly show). I think Me Too will suffer a big backlash, some justified, some not. There will be no lasting resolution in Ukraine and Israel. Trump will keep naming things after himself. He will become more incoherent. Philosophy will continue its decline. Music and movies will be even more soulless. Tennis will be a bright spot, but a tenuous one. Comedy will have a bad year. Illiteracy will increase, especially among people at universities. SNL may run its course. I don’t see anything good happening.

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Locating Meaning

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Locating Meaning

Where is meaning? Where is it located? This is a good question, because not easy to answer; maybe answering it would give us some idea of the nature of meaning. Is it in the external world, or in the mind (conscious or unconscious), or in the soul (immaterial substance), or in the body (behaviorism), or in the brain, or in the community, or in the abstract Plato-Frege realm, or somewhere else entirely? Or is it in many places, or none? People talk about whether meaning is “in the head” (the skull, the brain, the inner ego?), but that doesn’t exhaust the location question; we should approach the question more broadly and comprehensively. To that end, I will consider an alternative intellectual history with some echoes of recent discussions; this should help us gain a better perspective on the issues.

Consider a group of Cartesians firmly convinced that the mind (the soul) is an immaterial substance having neither extension nor location. They accordingly believe that meaning resides in this substance along with anything mental. So long as the substance remains unaltered it will contain the same meanings, even posthumously. You can change the body, the brain, the environment, or anything external to the soul thus conceived and you won’t change meaning. It all depends on the internal make-up of the immaterial substance. They are savagely “internalist”. Now a renegade comes along, call him “Mantup”: this chap has come up with an ingenious thought experiment he wants to try out on his colleagues, involving a place called Twin Earth. You know the story from Mantup’s Earth counterpart (H. Putnam), so I won’t repeat it. Suffice to say that it shows that meaning is (partially) determined by the environment in such a way that “water” has a different meaning on Earth and Twin Earth. This goes against the prevailing immaterialist internalism. Mantup’s argument is found persuasive, but disturbing, for two reasons. First, it undermines the entrenched semantic internalism: “Meaning just ain’t in the soul!”, people exclaim. Meaning is in the world, the physical environment, a matter of causal interactions with physical things, at least partly. So, meaning seems to be an amalgam of the inner and immaterial and the outer and material—a metaphysical hybrid. But how can meaning be both material and immaterial, extended and not extended, located and not located? This goes against everything they believe—and yet it seems true. The resolution breathlessly proposed by some members of our imaginary group is that the soul cannot be immaterial! I know, crazy right? But they have an argument: it’s the only way to avoid metaphysical absurdity—because we can now say that meaning is uniformly material, extended, and located. That strange furrowed organ in the head (they have no name for it) actually plays a role in the formation of mind: it is the mind, or at least is vital to the mind’s powers. Who would have thought? They are now externalist materialists where once they were internalist immaterialists. Quite a volte face. If meaning has a location after all (a region of space next to a planet), then so must the mind have a location—right where the relevant part of space is. The correct theory of meaning has led to a revision in the metaphysics of mind. Meaning turns out to be physical and located in the brain. Syntax was already ensconced in the brain (no Twin Earth cases for syntax), and now semantics follows suit.

Now let’s go back to Earth and our own intellectual tradition. When we say that meaning is in the head, or deny this, what do we mean by “head”? I think there are three possibilities: the conscious, the unconscious, and the brain. Either meaning is in the conscious mind, or in the unconscious mind, or in the physical brain. What is the truth? I don’t think it is plausible that meaning is a creature of consciousness like sensation; it has a partly submerged nature. We don’t consciously assemble complex meanings from an array of simple meanings; our unconscious does that for us (compare seeing an object). A lot of linguistic processing goes on unconsciously—that is a truism. Yet meaning is not completely divorced from consciousness; consciousness comes in at some point—as when you consciously hear what someone says or carefully construct a line of poetry. This unconscious level is affected by external factors, as in Twin Earth: “water” differs in meaning in the unconscious minds of speakers on Earth and Twin Earth, as well as in their conscious minds. The physical environment forces a difference of reference in the two places, and this conjoins with the unconscious and conscious content of the speakers’ mind. In fact, I would say that the unconscious existence of meaning is aptly described as “physical”: not that it is reducible to physics but that it is “of the body”.[1] It operates at a subconscious cerebral level, like the subconscious processing of visual data. Moreover, the unconscious semantic level is larger and more important than the conscious level (as with phonetics and syntax). If so, meaning is mainly located in the unconscious physical world—the world of space, extension, and spatial location. The external component is clearly physical (water impinging on the senses) and so is the internal component in so far as it is unconscious (which it preponderately is). In short, meaning is (mainly) physical and located where matter is located. It is “bodily” in the way vision is. It is true that meaning can appear at the conscious level, and perhaps necessarily so, but it must also have an unconscious existence, as revealed in its combinatorial powers. As in all human skills, there is a vast reality of unconscious know-how lying behind any complex skill, from walking to talking. We only catch glimpses of it at the conscious level. How much of the child’s grasp of language is consciously represented? Not much. Does the child consciously know what he is doing when he speaks? Of course not. Meaning is located in the brain below conscious awareness (except when it reaches consciousness). Control of the larynx and other vocal organs is clearly unconscious and clearly body-directed, hence “physical”. Really, the whole contrast between “mental” and “physical” is out of date; the important point is that meaning is something that has a reality outside of what we can introspectively report. What we call “language mastery” is something wider than what crosses our conscious minds as we speak and understand. Indeed, I myself would happily say that meaning is not “in the mind”, though it is mainly “in the head”, because it is fundamentally “in the brain”, i.e., “physical” (it isn’t caused by non-physical supernatural agencies). Where is meaning? In the physical (biological) world, both internal to the organism (spatially) and also external to it. Thus, I am a kind of “physicalist” about meaning—not in the reductive sense but in the sense that meaning is a matter of actions of the brain. It is a sensorimotor skill. It isn’t like thought in this sense. That is why we don’t really introspect meaning: it isn’t a content of consciousness but a congeries of habits governed by the brain, though habits of a high cognitive order. It isn’t an attribute of an immaterial substance and it isn’t a bunch of qualia; it’s a body-involving sensorimotor skill of a specific kind. Thus, we may as well describe it as “physical” in the weak sense I have gestured at. It is not a divine disembodied attribute of something immaterial but a biological capacity rooted in the brain. Meaning is located in the head-world nexus.

Some theorists have contended, not without reason, that externalism extends beyond the semantic into the psychological. But this point can be overdone. Beliefs can be de re and so can meanings, but there are reasons why psychological externalism is less immediately appealing than semantic externalism: for language is clearly more tied to the body than mind is. We speak but we don’t do anything analogous with thought and belief—we don’t have bodily organs that are dedicated to these activities. We refer to things in speech publicly, but we don’t do the same with our thoughts. We don’t warm to “use” theories of thought, but we do for language. Languages vary from place to place, but thoughts don’t; thought is more universal. Words are more tied down to things than concepts are, more local. Language is public but thought is not. In other words, there are reasons to adopt an externalist conception of language that don’t apply to the mind. Language is more “outside the head” than thought is, though thought can be de re and hence environment-dependent. Calling thought “physical” is more of a conceptual strain than describing meaning this way. And remember that the language capacity is largely independent of other cognitive capacities like rational thought (or irrational thought). A behaviorist theory of language is marginally less repellent than a behaviorist theory of thought (though still repellent). Meaning is closer to behaving than thinking is (a statue called The Speaker would not portray him with his head in his hands completely silent and immobile). So, let’s not exaggerate the externalism of thought, ignoring the differences from language.[2]

[1] See my “Truly Physical”. Actually, we discovered in the nineteenth century that the mind was physical—as opposed to divinely (or devilishly) ordained and supervised. We discovered too that mental illness is not possession by evil spirits but an organic disorder. This is a type of “physicalism” in a perfectly good sense.

[2] There are ways of being an externalist about meaning but not about thought, such as being a causal theorist about words but a description theorist about concepts. Not that externalism about thought is a false doctrine; it is just not a simple deduction from externalism about meaning. Intuitively, meaning is embedded in the world in a way that thought isn’t (it is more inward). Language is all about hearing and speaking, but thought is more removed from the senses and the body.

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