Consciousness and Mental Representation

There is a language of thought, or so they say (and think).[1] When you think you are speaking inwardly (or perhaps hearing inwardly): there is a code with symbols, a syntax, a semantics. The words in this code combine like words in spoken languages. To think is to say in the head. Thought has its own language. If so, we are told, the Representational Theory of Mind is true: the mind is a device for representing things—that is its essence. Hence, the computational theory of mind. And thus, cognitive science has its paradigm, shiny and new. When the mind acts it manipulates mental representations, which we may as well label linguistic. To have a mind is to have a language faculty, but bigger and better than the language faculty we speak with. Even non-speaking animals have one of these—doggerel, as it were. Symbols in the noggin. It’s a nice theory, if you like that kind of thing: unifying, reductive, assimilative. Once we understand language, we have understood mind; and we have a pretty good understanding of language (it is believed). The mind is representational and its representations consist of words—that’s the whole deal. Now we can set to work discovering this language and mapping its operations. The sentence is the basic unit of the mind. Psychology is the science of the language of mind; it’s all psycholinguistics up in there.

But where is consciousness in all this? It seems irrelevant, since the mental language is deemed unconscious. It occasionally pops into consciousness in the form of conscious thoughts, but that is incidental to its existence. The mind, thus conceived, could be completely unconscious and still be the mind. There is nothing particularly conscious about the mind. Behaviorism ignored consciousness in favor of bodily behavior; representationalism ignores it too. The representations are internal, to be sure, but they have nothing intrinsically to do with consciousness. But doesn’t that sound wrong—crap, basically? Isn’t the mind that we all have a conscious mind (though we have an unconscious mind too)? You can’t subtract consciousness from the story and do justice to mind as it actually exists; thought itself frequently comes to us clothed in consciousness. Accordingly, RTM is a false theory; at most it is a partial theory of mind. Unless…unless consciousness itself is representational—unless there is a language of consciousness. Can we say that the operations of consciousness are linguistic operations, analogous to cognitive operations? Is all of consciousness made up of special symbols that define its identity? Call it LOC. Is there a LOC as well as a LOT? If there were, we could extend RTM to include LOC, sitting beside LOT. Conscious thought is then LOT plus LOC—one language combined with another. In conscious thinking, you “token” (verb) a sentence of LOC as well as one of LOT—a kind of double utterance. When you become conscious you acquire a LOC (it might be innate). There will be vocabulary for conscious pain and seeing red and feeling blue. For the brain to be conscious, or capable of producing consciousness, is for it to house the appropriate language—the language we employ in order to be sentient. This language constitutes what it is like to be a certain kind of conscious being. Bats deploy a language we don’t understand—the language of conscious echolocation. If we knew this language, we would effectively have solved the mind-body problem. Qualia are words in LOC, as concepts are words in LOT.

Isn’t all this pure fantasy? Whatever we might say about thought and language, it doesn’t carry over to consciousness and language. For what kind of language is LOC? Do we have even the faintest idea of what it would be? How could pain be a word? Is it anything like speaking or hearing the word “pain”? Does LOC have a grammar, a semantics, a pragmatics?[2] What would it sound like to say the pain word out loud—would it hurt to hear it? This is all nonsense. Consciousness is no more linguistic than blood is, or digestion, or bone marrow. It may not be a category mistake to describe consciousness as a language, but it is surely a capital mistake—criminal, cringeworthy, cretinous. It may well be that symbolic computations underlie and make possible conscious life, but they aren’t what consciousness is—if it is anything like what it seems to be. A conscious being is not a chatterbox or a poet or a vocalist (is being conscious anything like singing?). For one thing, it is far too primitive for that, being a biological basic (consider mouse consciousness). Even Jerry Fodor would recoil at the notion of a language of consciousness! We don’t know much about what consciousness is, but we sure as hell know it isn’t words. It could turn out that thinking involves mental words—the parallels between thinking and speaking are striking—but it couldn’t turn out that sensations are words (saying ouchinternally). The mind is not all linguistically constituted; language doesn’t get into everything mental. Consciousness is something separate and distinct from language, prior to it, irreducible to it. Experience isn’t utterance.

It might be replied that this can be conceded without damage to the RTM: thought is internal language but sensation is not—these being distinct faculties of mind. Well and good, but now we have abandoned a key tenet of RTM, namely that the mind is a device of representation. All we have is that representation is a bit of the mind along with other bits. And then the battle will be fought as to which bit constitutes the beating heart of mind: is the mind essentially consciousness or is it essentially computation? Is the mind symbolic in its essence or is it something else entirely, say “seembolic”? Is the mind a place of seeming or speaking? Or is it both with neither able to claim hegemony? Do we accept RTM or STM or RSTM? We have lost that unity we prized in general RTM and with it the hope of subduing the whole mind theoretically. No LOC, no RTM—sorry folks. Cognitive science is going to need a new paradigm (we might have to re-rehire Granny). One has the sneaking suspicion that the shine will be taken off LOT as the be-all and end-all. I myself would prefer to remove language from mental life except when it is manifestly present, i.e., in speech and in internal monologue. Or better: it is not clear that “language” is the right word to use for mental processes that are not evidently linguistic; otherwise, it risks collapse into metaphor. For example, a purely computational theory of vision is too linguistically oriented; consciousness needs to be recognized as a vital element. Come to that, even overt speech (let alone inner speech) is saturated by consciousness; it is not only symbolic. Speech acts are conscious acts of mind (excuse the redundancy) and this is not a contingent fact. There could conceivably be a consciousness theory of speech not a speech theory of consciousness. Perhaps the enthusiasm for LOT (partly) derives from its promise to do without the enigma of consciousness (the behaviorists were right to despair over this), while acknowledging the inner; but there is no escaping it, or containing it. CTM is here to stay.[3]

[1] The “they” are Peter Geach, Gilbert Harman, and Jerry Fodor (most famously).

[2] What kind of grammar does the language of consciousness have—phrase-structure, hierarchical, Markovian, transformational, logical? And what kind of semantics—truth-conditional, model-theoretic, Fregean, Gricean, denotational, etc.? What about the pragmatics—is it anything like conversational implicature or language games or conventions of use? These questions have no answers, except to say “Consciousness isn’t a type of linguistic exercise”. When I see a red bird flying past, I don’t say anything to myself along the lines of “There goes a red bird”, which does have a linguistic structure and a meaning. That is just bad phenomenology. Seeing is not talking (your lips don’t even slightly move). Being conscious is not saying “I am conscious”.

[3] We can imagine giving up the theory that thought is linguistic, but can we imagine giving up the belief that the mind (our mind) is conscious? Freud added an unconscious mind, but he never subtracted the conscious mind! It couldn’t turn out that we have no conscious mind. The only question is how central and formative it is. RTM might be false, but not CTM. I am certain that my mind is conscious.

Astronomical Perception

I don’t think anyone would seriously argue that we see stars just as they are. They look to us like small pinpoints of light not massive physical bodies, and they were conceived as such in earlier times. If there were a dome over the earth with apertures in it and a conflagration behind, the night sky would look the same as now. If we were closer to the stars, they would look quite different. Naïve realism about stellar appearances is evidently a false doctrine (though we may well still be seeing the objects themselves—just not as they actually are).[1] Certainly, we have very limited perception of the stars: we see very little of them—their shape, size, and composition. Some people maintain that we see only the cone of light that emanates from them, while they may have gone out of existence long ago. Their objective reality is hidden from our eyes. We can imagine having more powerful eyes that can surmount such large distances, revealing the stars’ affinity to the Sun (“telescopical eyes” as opposed to Locke’s “microscopical eyes”). As it is, we don’t see stars as we see apples and oranges, in all their multidimensional glory. Our perceptual faculties don’t disclose the true nature of extraterrestrial bodies in the way they disclose the true nature of terrestrial bodies.

But is that really true? Isn’t all vision au fond astronomical? What about the perception of the Sun and Moon—is it like the stars or is it like pieces of fruit? Do we really see them as they intrinsically are? For sure, our perception-based beliefs about them have been wildly erroneous as to distance, size, temperature, and composition. They appear very different up-close. The Moon isn’t intrinsically bright and the Sun is much larger than it looks. If they were closer to Earth, they would look quite different. The same is true of the planets: Venus looks like a bright shining star, but it isn’t. We don’t have a clear and accurate view of the heavens above, because our eyes are not acute enough for that. How well do we see the clouds? Not terribly well and they are quite close: they don’t look like volumes of water (nothing like lakes); they look fluffy and gaseous. Come to think of it, how well do we see high-flying aircraft? They can look like blinking stars at night and missiles or birds during the day. Our perceptual faculties are obviously limited. But isn’t the same thing true of up-close perception? And what is “up-close” anyway? Isn’t it all a matter of degree? Isn’t normal terrestrial perception just another variant of so-called astronomical perception? Aren’t we all astronomers of the world outside our heads (or even inside)? We have grown familiar with the idea that medium-size dry goods (or fruity ones) are actually not as they appear—not colored, warm or cold, solid, unchanging, inactive, heavy. The manifest image is not the scientific image. We are thus like astronomers with respect to ordinary perception. And why is terrestrial perception thought of as “ordinary” and different in kind from astronomical perception? Seeing the stars at night is quite “ordinary”, especially to nocturnal creatures; indeed, the stars are more visible at night than the fruity dry goods that litter planet Earth. Our customary ways of thinking are anthropocentric and relative.

The time has come to abandon the distinction between astronomical perceptual obscurity and terrestrial perceptual transparency. It is a pre-scientific holdover. Neither is a matter of clarity and perspicuity, revelation and veridicality. To put it bluntly, we are as bad at seeing apples and oranges as we are at seeing stars and galaxies; the two are on a continuum. Indeed, in some respects we are worse at seeing nearby things, because we are more misled by our perceptions: we are ignorant of stars perceptually but we are positively deceived about nearby objects—they appear in ways they are not. We are lousy astronomers of the local flora and fauna and bricks and mortar. Our senses purport to tell us the truth about these things, but they fail in this endeavor, whereas in the case of stars they are merely impoverished in informational content. Naïve realism is false for both. Perceptual appearances are as blind to things on Earth as they are when directed at the heavens, perhaps more so. Our natural naïve astronomy, whether sublunary or superlunary, is none too brilliant when gauged objectively. We gaze at those heavenly bodies standing right in front of us and gain a distorted and partial picture of the objects in question—correctable in the light of modern science. They are like stars in the firmament: objects we sense remotely and speculate about. Of course, our perception of them has its uses—biologically essential uses—but it isn’t terribly accurate from a scientific or philosophical point of view. The same is true of seeing the stars: navigationally useful but scientifically primitive. It is astronomy across the board. All scientists are really astronomers, as all earthbound humans are sky-wonderers. Eyeglasses and microscopes are telescopes. In fact, microphysics is a branch of astronomy (micro-astronomy). The atom used to be compared to the solar system; that analogy contains a kernel of truth—elementary particles are like the stars in heaven, perceptually. So, this is my philosophy of science: all science is astronomical science (including psychology).[2]

[1] See my “Not So Naïve Realism”.

[2] I am advocating an alteration of vision: seeing terrestrial seeing as astronomical seeing. I am dismantling a prejudice, rejecting an assumed dichotomy. Motion is the same on Earth as it is in the heavens, and the same is true of perception. Perception is always of the epistemically distant. Just as there is our-galaxy astronomy and whole-universe astronomy, so there is terrestrial astronomy and solar-system astronomy. Astronomy begins at home—at arm’s length. When we see a rock we are seeing a celestial body right here on Earth (sometimes they have actually fallen from the sky).

False Knowledge

Is it true that all knowledge is knowledge of truths? Does the concept of knowledge entail that the proposition known is a true proposition? Certainly, we have been schooled to think so; and the idea is far from preposterous. But is the propositional content of the knowledge literally, universally, and necessarily true? We have to concede that not all knowledge involves justified belief: sometimes a creature can know without believing (many animals), and sometimes knowers have no justification for their knowledge (they know directly or intuitively or subconsciously). These requirements are too strong if taken strictly. However, it has generally been held that truth is non-negotiable: you can’t know what is false. But maybe this holds only for some or most knowledge; maybe some cases of knowledge are not beholden to truth. Perhaps we have been misled into a rash generalization by (allegedly) paradigm cases. In our thirst for generality, we have neglected certain peripheral or statistically rare cases. So, let’s explore some of the hinterlands of our cognitive life; we might turn up some unusual specimens (like black butterflies or crimson swans).[1]

First, we should pay attention to the concept of truth, which is not exactly uncontested. Truth, we say, is correspondence to fact—reality, actuality, existence. Truth is denoting an actually existing state of affairs, a real fact. There is no truth but reality makes it so, as Quine once said. All truth is literal truth. There is no your truth and my truth, just the truth. All truth is objective truth. So-called approximate truth is not really truth; it is falsehood that is close to the truth. Metaphors are not true, though they may allude to truth. To be true a proposition must describe a state of affairs in which certain objects really do have certain properties. We must not be sloppy with the concept of truth; truth is a strict concept. If someone uses the word “true” loosely, we might introduce the concept of “strict truth”, which obeys the principles just laid down (like “strict laws”). Then we could ask whether all knowledge requires strict truth. In any case, we have a notion of truth that meets the conditions laid down: good old-fashioned no-nonsense truth—realist truth, we might say (not imaginary truth, whatever that may be).

Now we must test our intuitions. Do I know that the Sun rises in the east (not the west or south)? If you ask me where the Sun rises, will I hesitate to answer or say “In the south, I believe”, or will I promptly and confidently reply “In the east, of course”? Surely, we would say that I have knowledge of where the Sun rises. I have observed that fact innumerable times. But is it true that the Sun rises in the east? No, because the Sun doesn’t rise at all—the Earth rotates. It is not a real objective fact that the Sun rises in the east; this is a kind of illusion. Do I know the color of my coffee cup? Do I know that it is blue not red or some other color? We would surely say so. But is it true that my cup is blue? Not if it has no color at all—that is, if color does not belong to physical things. Do I know that Great Britain is triangular (not square or circular)? Yes, I do know that, if I know anything. And yet that land mass is not really and truly triangular; this is a false statement that only approximates to a true statement. Do I know that my car didn’t move all day? Yes, but of course it is not true that it didn’t move, because the Earth moves. Do I know that the eyes are the windows to the soul? Yes, I do know that—but it is not literally true that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Granted, this metaphor is related to a true proposition (“the eyes are sources of information about someone’s state of mind”), but it isn’t really true; yet I can be said to know it. Do I know that my friend is bald? Yeah, I know this, but it isn’t really true—he has some hair on his head, quite a lot in fact. Do I know that Smith is a damned fool? Yes, but it isn’t true that he is damned. Do I know that Hamlet was prince of Denmark? Sure, but it is not true that he was (look at the history books). Truth is stricter than knowledge, more demanding. In addition to this, not all knowledge is propositional; there is also knowledge of things (as Russell insisted). Knowledge of things by acquaintance is not knowledge of propositional truths; it is not propositional at all. Nor is knowing-how a bearer of truth. The concept of knowledge, in its full generality, is not necessarily tied to the concept of truth; that is the case only in certain cases not in all. To know that p is not necessarily to know that it is true that p, since in many cases p is not true. You can be said to know what is false, though it may have to be tied to something true; but that doesn’t make it true. The connection to truth is indirect, if it exists at all. If we wanted to retain the old style of definition, we would need to say something like, “X knows that p only if p is connected to some proposition q such that q is true”.

What is going on here? Why doesn’t knowledge precisely track truth? The answer lies in the function of both concepts. The concept of knowledge is used to assess someone’s epistemic credentials; the concept of truth is used to characterize the objective facts of reality. You can be said to know if you are a reliable indicator of reality, if only a rough indicator; a proposition is true if (but only if) it corresponds exactly to how things objectively are. Truth requires strict isomorphism (to borrow from Wittgenstein); knowledge requires a useful degree of fit. The latter is pragmatic, but the former is metaphysical (mathematical almost). Truth is formalizable; knowledge is humanistic. Truth is strict; knowledge is lenient. Knowledge is about passing the exam; truth is about how things really and genuinely are. You are not going to make any practical errors by believing the Sun rises in the east (even literally), but it is quite false to assert that the Sun rises in the east. Eyes aren’t truly windows, though talking this way shows you know how eyes function in human interactions. That is why we aren’t too pedantic in our attributions of knowledge, but we can become quite schoolmasterly if pressed about the truth. It really wouldn’t matter if all knowledge were of literal falsehoods, so long as the corresponding beliefs didn’t land us in too much trouble; but we would still insist that truth is truth and falsehood is falsehood. To take a classic example, you can know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 even if, strictly speaking, it began in 1065 on New Year’s Eve. True, we can’t get too lax about knowledge, but we are laxer than we are about truth, more forgiving.

This bears on the question of ethical knowledge. The possibility of ethical knowledge is not hostage to a thick notion of ethical truth. You can be said to know ethical propositions without those propositions being true. They might have no truth-value, being logically imperatival, and yet they could still be known: we can say “he knows that stealing is wrong” without being committed to the (literal) truth of “stealing is wrong”. For knowledge is not necessarily truth-entailing, though it may be reliability-entailing. You can make inferences about the epistemic credentials of the person in question, but there is no requirement to infer the truth of “stealing is wrong”. You can even hold an error theory about ethical statements while accepting that people have ethical knowledge. A person can know it’s wrong to steal even if “stealing is wrong” is false as a statement of fact or a pseudo-statement. Ethical knowledge does not imply ethical truth (though there may well be such a thing). If we put this together with other criticisms of the true-justified-belief account of knowledge, we can say that “X knows that p” is consistent with “it is false that p, X does not believe that p, and X has no justification for believing thatp”.  These conditions are all too strong, though they may apply in many or most cases. Broadly speaking, they are too intellectualist. Not all knowledge is like scientific knowledge; some knowledge is more rough and tumble than that. Often all that is required is acquaintance with a suitable fact, not grasp of a literally true proposition. Propositional truth is strictly irrelevant to knowledge, broadly understood, as is language. Birds and bees know nothing of truth and propositions, yet they know.[2]

[1] I know, reader, you are skeptical—have I gone mad? False knowledge! But bear with me; the Earth once seemed self-evidently stationary.

[2] They perceive facts, record them in memory, and act on them, which is the essence of knowledge. Believing true propositions is strictly separate. Thus, you can know without believing truths. Humans see the Sun appearing in the east and remember what they have seen, thereby knowing where the Sun appears in the morning. They express this knowledge in the sentence “the Sun rises in the east”, with its accompanying proposition. This proposition is false, but that doesn‘t undermine their status as knowers of the relevant fact. Knowing facts is one thing, believing true propositions is another: see my “Perceptual Knowledge” and “Non-Perceptual Knowledge”.

Descriptions and Names

The distinction between names and descriptions is not as sharp as we tend to suppose. We are prone to think that names are purely denotative (tags, labels) and descriptions are purely connotative (attributional, predicational), but actually the two overlap. If you favor a description theory of names, you are still up to your neck in names; and if you prefer to take names as primitive, you are still wallowing in descriptive content. There is no such thing as pure description or pure denotation. Pure description theories of descriptions are false, and pure denotation theories of names are false. Both are both. They are not mutually exclusive.

In the case of names, there are several kinds of descriptive content that they carry: a certain natural kind, male or female, family lineage, nationality, language spoken, social class, historical period, being called by the name in question, etc. A person named “Susan Smith” is thereby classified as a human being, female, of the Smith family, likely to be of British descent, a speaker of English, probably not upper class, born at a certain period of history, not nameless, and called “Susan Smith”. There are no names that are purely denotational (“logically proper names”), having no meaning apart from their bearer; that idea is a myth. And we all tend, as users of names, to know these descriptions, or someone in the linguistic community does. They also play a role in fixing the reference of the name—they tell you who or what is in question. They are not purely decorative; they have a semantic function. No one has ever spoken a language in which the names lack such descriptive content. We might even say that names necessarily have such content; it is essential to their being names. The whole institution of names, from baptism to burial, womb to tomb, is steeped in these connotations. Names have sense as well as reference; they contain information. It is not possible to analyze them by means of descriptions that don’t express this sense. Their meaning is not exhausted by their bearer. They are not semantically simple.

Why do I say that descriptions are always name-involving? Two reasons: one, they often contain proper names, and two, the predicates they contain are themselves name-like. Thus “the capital of France” and “the cat in the corner”.  They need to contain names because we don’t typically have purely general descriptions to hand (like “the first dog born at sea”), since we often lack that kind of individuating knowledge; and terms like “cat” are precisely names of natural zoological kinds. They are not, on their face, definite descriptions of the denoted natural kind. Also, adjectives and artifact terms are name-like: “square”, “blue”, “table”, “television”. These all stand for (denote) some attribute or kind of thing: they are classified as “common names”. Naming is not restricted to names of concrete individuals; we name qualities and kinds as well as particulars. So, descriptions don’t dispense with names; they depend on names. You don’t get rid of names by replacing them with descriptions, because the description will contain further names, particular or general. The idea of a purely descriptive name-free language is also a myth. Actually, all language depends on names; we can’t eliminate names and replace them with descriptions, because descriptions are made of names. If we can’t make sense of names, we can’t make sense of language. Language consists of names (“and” is the English name for logical conjunction).

Thus, names are inherently descriptive and descriptions are inherently nominative. The distinction is bogus. Every word of a natural language is both descriptive and nominative—a description and a name. Sense and reference, denotation and connotation, intension and extension. Meaning is inherently connotative and denotative simultaneously. There can’t be theories that are connotational but not denotational or vice versa. Language relies on both working together. The quest for a theory that is purely one or the other is quixotic. The words “Susan Smith” and “navy blue” work in much the same way—both are descriptive names of something (a person or a quality). The name-description distinction, as commonly understood, is an untenable dualism.