Refuting the Identity Theory

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Refuting the Identity Theory

Suppose someone were to make an outrageous identity claim—say, that Donald Trump is identical to Barack Obama. It would be easy to refute that by pointing out that the two men are to be found in different places, so cannot be the same man—following the principle (beloved of detectives) that one person can’t be in two places at the same time. It is not so easy to refute it by asserting that Obama and Trump look different, sound different, and have a different educational history, because that leaves it open for the identity claimer to say that one person can disguise himself and appear as if two people (Superman and Clark Kent, for example). One person can have two modes of presentation but not two locations. The same point applies to two events: if someone claims that the explosion was the same event as the fireworks display, you can refute this by pointing out that the events occurred two miles apart—though it isn’t so easy to argue that the appearances were of different events. Such identity claims are vulnerable to what we might call the “location argument” (as opposed to the “appearance argument”). They are thus falsifiable by recourse to location. However, in the case of the mind-brain identity theory this recourse is not available, because the mental event has no identifiable location: you can’t point to it in space and observe that its location differs from that of its correlate in the brain. If someone says C-fibers are identical to D-fibers, you can point to the D-fibers and observe that they are not where the C-fibers are, thus refuting the identity claim. But you can’t do that with pain: it has no identifiable location. So, the primary method for falsifying identity claims about empirical particulars is not available. You are left weakly protesting that pains don’t appear like states of the brain—to which the identity theorist will retort that one thing can have two appearances (though not two locations). This gives the identity theorist an unfair dialectical advantage: no matter how preposterous his claim is he cannot be refuted in the standard fashion. Even if the pain exists in a separate immaterial substance, you cannot demonstrate this by pointing to its different location. Not because it has the same location as the brain state but because it has no location, or none that can be pointed out. It is simply in the nature of the case that it lacks a distinct observable location, not because the identity theory is true. One suspects that identity theorists have got a good deal of mileage from that fact: they can complacently point out that no one has ever refuted their claim in the only way it can be, conclusively anyway. But this is nothing to their credit, since it follows equally from the dualist perspective: the pain could be as ontologically distinct from its neural correlate as you could wish and still not be capable of being located elsewhere. The location argument thus can’t be used against the identity theorist, but not because there is any truth in his position. Once this is recognized we can lean more heavily on such arguments as that pains and brain states seem very different, or that you can know all about the latter and not know about the former, or that in some possible worlds there are pains and no C-fibers. It shouldn’t worry you that you can’t falsify the identity claim in the canonical way.[1] It should worry the identity theorist that he can’t locate pains in space at all, independently of the truth of his identity claim. The case is not like a single mountain seen from different perspectives.

[1] If it turned out (per impossibile) that your pains exist in the back of your closet, you would have a cast-iron proof that they cannot be brain states (no sign of your brain in there); and then it would be perfectly clear why pains and brain states should have such different appearances—they are totally distinct entities. You might then wonder about the properties of your closet—does it have a peculiar aura of subjectivity about it?

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On Drumming

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On Drumming

My thesis is that all playing of musical instruments is drumming. Drumming is what they all have in common, what constitutes their underlying real essence. It might be thought that this cannot be right, because drums are a rhythm instrument and other instruments are used to produce melody. But actually, drums also produce melody in that they have different tones or pitches (drums proper as well as cymbals). Without these tonal differences a drum set would be a poor musical instrument (monotonous, boring). The pitches succeed each other musically and can be superimposed to produce chords. And clearly, we can envisage drum sets that are more tonally designed, with each drum tuned to a specific note and melodies played by striking these drums. There is nothing atonal about drums and drumming. A good drummer (especially a jazz drummer) will use pitch and timbre differences to accentuate and enliven his or her playing. But how can other instruments be forms of drumming? Consider first the xylophone: it is very similar to a set of drums and clearly the act of striking the plates is a type of drumming. The OED gives us the following for “drum” (verb): “beat or play (as) on a drum; make a continuous noise by rapidly repeated blows”. For “drum” (noun) we get: “a percussion instrument sounded by being struck with sticks or the hands”. These definitions fit the xylophone perfectly—and you just have to look at a xylophone player to see the similarity to paradigm drummers. A device (“stick”) is used to strike or tap or otherwise impact a surface that responds by making a particular sound the purpose of which is to produce music. There would be no essential difference if the plates were replaced by drums. True, we don’t call xylophone players drummers, but that is because such a description would be misleading for conversational implicature reasons; however, it is literally true that they employ drumming motions in playing their instrument. Now the piano: the hands are brought down on the keys which then produce notes by way of the instrument’s mechanism. The fingers work percussively (OED: “the action of playing a musical instrument by striking or shaking it”). The pianist is a species of drummer: he hits keys that produce sounds in response. You might say that he also touches or depresses keys, but remember that drummers sometimes use brushes not sticks—it’s not all vigorous banging. And some pianists are highly percussive (e.g., Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard). What about stringed instruments, which may be picked, plucked or bowed? Well, they too are operated by means of percussive actions, more or less vigorous (think of Pete Townsend’s slamming chords). Again, we have a striking action performed on a responsive medium—but a string not a membrane (the drum head or skin). It would be possible to stretch a string over a drum head and pluck it so as to make it strike the drum; that would still be a type of drumming.[1] So, playing guitar, say, qualifies as a form of drumming, as does violin playing. The interior of the instrument (resonance chamber) resembles the interior of a drum, and the action of playing it is like striking (or brushing) the skin of the drum (you can drum your fingers on a table, remember). There is no reason of principle why you couldn’t bow the head of a drum; to be a drummer it is not necessary to drum—you can also scrape, stroke, and palpate. You could be a drummer and never actually drum, or use a drum for that matter. So, logically, pianists and guitarists could be drummers without using drums or even drumming. Still, I prefer the strong and simple thesis that all instrumentalists are drummers, all instruments are drums, and all playing on instruments is drumming. Any oddity in these propositions arises from conversational implicature; logically, drumming is the rule, the universal. Drumming is the underlying essence of all these activities; it is the natural kind that subsumes them. But surely (you protest) wind instruments are not drums and playing them is not drumming—there is no use of hands or feet! By now my response to this will be predictable: first, the hands and fingers are used in depressing the pistons or blocking the holes; but second, air is forcibly expelled into the instrument causing it to vibrate and respond with a particular sound. Drums could be played this way too: a burst of air could be directed at the drum head and a sound elicited. We have a physical (mechanical) stimulus and a musical response—an impact producing a sound in the course of making music. What if the trumpet player were to produce a series of sharp bursts of air that impact the reed and produce rhythmic sounds—wouldn’t that be very like playing the drums? It might even be synchronized with the drummer; the trumpeter has joined the rhythm section. Bass players and rhythm guitarists are already there, striking strings. Finally, the voice: again, this is not difficult to slot into place—the singer drums (percusses) by propelling air into the vocal cords (really vocal membrane) and producing musical sounds. We are familiar with beat-box voicing—imitating the sound of drums with the mouth—so it is not much of a stretch to include ordinary singing in our natural kind. Singing is a variety of percussion—one thing hitting another to produce musical sounds. Tap dancing is also a type of drumming and may be used musically; singing is really not all that different—vocal tapping (using the larynx to produce music by physical impacts). So, all music-making is really drumming: this is its hidden architecture, its compositional make-up, its basic anatomy. There is a continuum from regular drums through xylophone, piano, violin and guitar, wind instruments, and voice—with no natural break or division. Probably drums are the oldest of these instruments, and most primordial, but other instruments build on the same basic idea.[2] That is why it is natural to pick drums out as paradigmatic, but really, we have a family of instruments all united by a common principle—by the mechanism of percussion. We hit things to make sounds and then we string these sounds together to create rhythm and melody. All music is drumming refined and extended. The drummer is the progenitor of all music. Ringo Starr was well-named: he made the Beatles possible.[3]

[1] The snare drum consists of a bunch of wires stretched tight over the reverse side of the drum, so the snare is stringed in much the same way a guitar is.

[2] I suspect that football (soccer) plays a similar role in the genesis of other sports: all other sports are variations on it or developments of it. Don’t say that football isn’t played with the hands, as many other sports are. First, football is partly played with the hands (throw-ins, goalkeeper); and second, the feet are always involved in hand-centered sports, because players have to run around. The basic form of sports consists of an object (often a ball) that is moved around in a competitive activity. Kicking a ball is one of the first sporting activities kids learn. But I won’t go into this further.

[3] Does it surprise you to learn that I was originally a drummer who moved onto guitar, harmonica, and voice? I always kept my love of drums, however. I believe that drumming is a basic human need. Drummers don’t get the respect they deserve. Drummers are close to the World Spirit (as I’m sure Charlie, Keith, and Ringo would agree, all singular figures). Drummers are cool.

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Identity and Synonymy

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Identity and Synonymy

It is commonly supposed that “water is H2O” is both known to be true and synthetic (hence a posteriori). I think this is not so. The reason is not difficult to see: if the sentence is known to be true, then speakers will associate the same descriptions with each term (following Leibniz’s law), so the sentence will be analytic for them.  Consider a group of scientists working in the same lab and knowing the identity of water and H2O: when they speak to each other they use the two terms interchangeably, knowing that the denoted things are identical. For them, the terms are synonymous and the sentence “water is H2O” is analytic. It is always possible to substitute these terms in belief contexts, given that everyone knows the truth of the identity statement (and knows that others also know it). Nobody thinks there is any more to one of the denoted things than the other: there is complete ontological parity, utter indiscernibility. They might even use “hydrox” as a more vernacular term than “H2O”, so producing the identity statement “water is hydrox”, which is also analytic (everyone assents to this sentence). Before the discovery of the identity people would suppose the two terms had distinct references, but afterwards the difference of meaning disappears. It is the same with Hesperus and Phosphorous: once the identity is discovered and generally accepted “Hesperus is Phosphorous” is analytic, since whatever is believed true of one is believed true of the other. This means that being synthetic is not compatible with being known to be true: no identity statement can be both. Of course, a false identity statement can be synthetic, given that the two terms have distinct references. All this seems clear enough, but matters turn murkier when we come to statements like “pain is C-fiber firing”. Here we are encouraged to believe that the statement is both true and synthetic—informative, a posteriori. It could have those attributes and be false, but it is said to be both true and synthetic; it is “empirically true”. This combination is supposed to be exemplified in such statements as “water is H2O”, thus providing a precedent for the claim of identity between pain and C-fiber firing. But I just argued that the former case is not an example of a synthetic identity statement. So, if the latter case is synthetic, as it seems to be, then this can be so only because it is not true (and known to be true). The explanation of its appearing not to be analytic is simply that it is not true—the two terms refer to distinct properties. If it were known to be true, then speakers would associate the same descriptions with each term, thus rendering the statement analytic. This doesn’t happen because speakers can see that the two terms have different denotations, so the statement can’t be analytic. The case is essentially like “creature with a heart” and “creature with a kidney”: the two predicates are coextensive (the properties denoted are correlated), but the properties are numerically distinct. Similarly, “pain” and “C-fiber firing” are coextensive (the properties are correlated), but the properties themselves are numerically distinct. This is the reason the statement is not analytic: there is more to pain than C-fiber firing, as any competent person can see. That is, the identity theory is false. And its characteristic formulation has no precedent in the sciences—no identity statement can be both known to be true and synthetic. Therefore, we cannot be lulled into accepting the truth of “pain is C-fiber firing” by alleged cases of known synthetic identity in the (respectable) sciences. If that sentence were an accepted identity sentence, then it would have to be analytic; but it isn’t, so it must be false. The explanation of its apparent non-analytic status must be that the properties are distinct, recognizably so. In other words, the identity could only be known to be true by being a priori—as in the case of “water is H2O”. Once that statement is known (or believed) to be true it becomes analytic, as it is for my group of savvy scientists; but this can’t happen with “pain is C-fiber firing” for the simple reason that the alleged identity claim is patently untrue. Ifpeople came to accept it as true, then it would be analytic for them; but it clearly isn’t analytic for anybody, so it cannot be true. There is no obstacle to water being recognized as identical to H2O, since there is demonstrably nothing more to water than H2O; but there is an obstacle to recognizing that pain is identical to C-fiber firing, namely that there clearly is more to pain than C-fiber firing. If that were not so, then the identity statement could be happily analytic—but that it can never be. The sentence is robustly synthetic, permanently informative, indelibly a posteriori: but this is incompatible with the truth of the identity statement. For, if the statement were true, it would have the status I attributed to “water is H2O”—an analytic truth. The fact is that there is no meaningful analogy between “water is H2O” and “pain is C-fiber firing”. Accordingly, the only way to make good on materialism is to provide an a priori analysis of the concept of pain—just the kind of thing attempted by the analytical behaviorists and functionalists. The idea of an empirically true central state materialism is a chimera born of a faulty analysis of so-called theoretical identifications in science. The mind-body problem requires an a priori analysis of the mental. No adequate solution can take the form of an a posteriori synthetic reduction of the mental to the physical. None of the standard alleged analogues have the properties required: “heat is molecular motion”, “light is a stream of photons”, “genes are strands of DNA”, etc. These all involve post-discovery synonymy, produced by the operation of Leibniz’s law. Once you discover that Hesperus is Phosphorous the names “Hesperus” and “Phosphorous” become synonyms for you, intersubstitutable everywhere salva veritate. There is no such thing as a known synthetic identity.[1]

[1] It might be said that this is too strong, because some identity statements contain definite descriptions that enable them to be both known and synthetic (“Benjamin Franklin was the inventor of bifocals”). But this is to overlook the point that such descriptions will typically contain terms that refer to distinct properties or objects. In cases in which this isn’t so we get full synonymy, as in “the bachelor at the back is identical to the unmarried man at the back”. It is really always reference that ultimately determines whether words are synonymous or not.

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Shark Attacks

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Shark Attacks

I recently read Francois Sarano’s excellent forthcoming book In the Name of Sharks (sent to me by the publishers because I wrote a review of a book about the octopus in the Wall Street Journal). It puts up a strong case for the preservation of shark populations in the face of dwindling numbers and impending extinction. The shark has a bad reputation in the human population, fed by prejudice and irrational fear (Steven Spielberg has a lot to answer for in spearheading the human desire to eliminate sharks from the face of the planet). It turns out that shark attacks (Sarano calls them “accidents”) are almost invariably caused by fear (on the part of the shark), territoriality, self-defense, and misunderstanding—not by wanton aggression or predatory behavior. Sharks are not innately violent or perpetually angry. They don’t attack for no reason. They are actually pretty nice, even lovable. This set me wondering about other vices in human and animal populations: do we find counterparts of human vices in other species? Is there wanton aggression, cruelty, torture, bullying, murder, hate crimes, sadism, emotional abuse, malicious gossip, defamation, nasty comments? Apparently not: such evils exist only in human populations. Animals can certainly be violent, but there is a point to it; it isn’t motivated by sheer malice. There are no Iago’s of the animal world. If we want a trait that sets us apart from animals, sheer nastiness would be a good candidate. Even sharks look upon us with disgust and horror.

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Am I Certain That I Exist?

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Am I Certain That I Think?

Descartes wanted to build human knowledge on a foundation of certainty. He thought the Cogito provided an instance of certainty, and many have agreed (Montaigne was there before him). Critics have argued that the conclusion of the Cogito doesn’t follow from the premise (the Lichtenberg objection). However, the premise itself is seldom questioned; it at least is certain, whether or not it entails the existence of a thinker. But is it certain? First, we need to ask what it means: when I say “I think” what proposition am I asserting? Does it mean the same as “I am a thinker”? And does that imply “I am a rational thinker”? Am I asserting that I think rational thoughts?  But there are two problems with this interpretation: (a) how can I be certain that my thoughts are rational and (b) how can I be certain that I have thoughts plural? What if there is a brain disease that renders my thought processes irrational while giving me the illusion that they are rational? I can’t rule this out with certainty. And how can I be certain that I have thoughts in the plural given that this will require a series of thoughts over time? I can’t be certain I have had thoughts in the past since memory is fallible, and the existence of future thoughts is even less certain. So, should “I think” be read as “I have a thought now, which may or may not be rational?” But is it possible to have only one thought and it be completely irrational? Would that even be a thought? Thoughts occur in series of linked thoughts (“temporal holism”), and their title to being thoughts surely depends on some degree of conformity to rationality, however minimal. But these requirements are not open to certainty. In addition, thoughts in the ordinary sense have intentionality, but is that open to certainty? Couldn’t I be having thoughts about nothing—how can I be certain that my thoughts are aboutthings? What thought is it that I am supposed to be certain I am having? Is it the thought that it is (say) raining in Miami now? But how can I be certain my thought is about Miami and rain—what if I am a brain in a vat and content externalism is true? Is it the thought that I think (“I think that I think, therefore I am”)? But then we are back with the problem about rationality and thought plurality. It looks as if we need to retreat inwards a step: “I seem to think, therefore I am”. We thus cancel the proposition that I really think and maintain more modestly that I appear to myself to think. This falls far short of the original Cogito in that it concedes that I cannot be certain that I think: that proposition cannot be the premise the Cogito works with. We can gloss “I seem to think” as “I may be thinking now but maybe I am not—it only seems to me that I am”. Is this strong enough to get the conclusion we want? It seems like a very flimsy foundation for erecting a tower of certain knowledge. And if we are to retreat to a “seems” version of the premise, why not say simply “I seem to exist, therefore I exist”? For, if we can’t appeal to an unqualified “I think” but must restrict ourselves to “it seems”, then we may as well do it straightforwardly and honestly—”I seem to myself to exist, therefore I must exist”. But that looks like a straight non-sequitur: how can my existence follow from the mere appearance that I exist? Don’t we need the existence of something real to get anywhere—as in the existence of real thoughts? How can seemingentail being? Certainly, this revised Cogito looks weird and fishy compared to the classic version—hardly self-evidently true. This impression is confirmed by raising another skeptical possibility, namely that we can’t get existence out of seeming existence—out of the mere impression of existence. Nor can we get it out of the mere impression of thoughts as opposed to real thoughts. Suppose you are Meinong and believe in different kinds of being, subsistence and existence: maybe you can derive self-existence from genuine thought-existence, but how can you derive it from mere appearances of existence? Surely subsistence could seem like existence, so it may be that the self you derive from “I seem to exist/think” is just a subsistent entity not an existing one (like a hallucinatory golden mountain that looks real). In order to rule this out you would need to refute Meinong by claiming that all subsisting objects are existing objects—or else the Meinongian will insist that the conclusion could only be that I have some sort of being. In other words, the seeming premise only licenses an inference to “The subject of this seeming has being of some sort”. To be more specific, how can I be certain I am not a fictional character? It can seem to a fictional character that he thinks and exists, but he is not thereby a thinking existing being like you and me (as we believe, at any rate).[1] Or if you hold that fictional characters really have existence, then the new Cogito has to conclude “Either I exist in the real world or I am a character in fiction”—not quite what Descartes was hoping for. The problem is that seeming is too weak to give (real) being, but we can’t justify the original premise that asserts certainty about the existence of thoughts (thinking). Can we assert the existence of real seemings? If so, we might be able to move to real subjects of seemings. But of course, there can be fictional seemings: it can seem to a fictional character that things are thus-and-so. I therefore need a way of showing that my seemings are real, but all I am entitled to is that they seem real. We are now at an argumentative stalemate, whereas the original Cogito at least purports to start from a premise about incontestable reality, viz. the known reality of thoughts and thinking. The idea was that we can know with certainty that thinking really exists and then move from this to the existence of the self. But it now turns out that only a “seems” premise is acceptable, which undercuts the move to an “is” conclusion (“I exist”). So, Descartes needs his version of the Cogito and not the weakened “seems” version: if the argument were equally good under the “seems” interpretation, he could have simply said “I seem to exist, therefore I exist”—which looks like a blatant non-sequitur.[2] But the original version is open to skeptical doubt about the premise itself, not merely about the validity of the inference. The lesson is that trying to base human knowledge on certainty is hopelessly quixotic and should not be attempted (unless we stick with the ordinary man’s use of “certain” and forget about philosophical skepticism). Or to put it differently, an epistemology of science should not be in the business of refuting skepticism. It will only take a sound beating if it chooses to take on the skeptic (like Don Quixote himself fighting foes far more powerful than him[3]). Descartes clearly had problems with his attempt to prove the external world (what with the ontological argument and God’s supposed non-deceptive nature), but in fact the problems begin much further back with his attempt to find at least one indubitable proposition. It is the whole Cartesian project that is at fault. Certainty is a false god.

[1] This is exactly the situation of two characters in Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder (1994): they think they are real but discover that they are characters in someone else’s work of fiction. Fictional characters cannot use the Cogito to prove they are real.

[2] There is also the problem that in order to know that it seems to me that I exist, or that I seem to have thoughts, my seeming must have intentional content; but how can I be certain that it does, given that this doesn’t depend solely on my inner state? The skeptic will argue that my seeming might not have the content I take it to have, if I am a brain in a vat or sufficiently mentally deranged or confused. Episodes of seeming can be as subject to skepticism as thoughts are with respect to their content. Things are not as simple as Descartes supposed.

[3] Don Quixote de la Mancha cuts quite a philosophical figure: even after a series of terrible drubbings he refuses to abandon his absurd delusions, despite the entreaties of Sancho Panza (the voice of common sense). He is the living embodiment of human error—of life inside Plato’s cave. Descartes is quixotic in the precise sense that he keeps fighting for his misguided ideals even when he is clearly outgunned by the evil demon; he is too entranced by the romance of complete certainty. There is a nobility to this, but it’s none too realistic.

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Seeming

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Seeming

Seeming is a pervasive feature of conscious life. We (and other animals) are constant subjects of seeming: things are forever seeming this way or that to us. It now seems to me that there is a red cup in front of me, that Sebastian is in a good mood today, and that seeming is a worthwhile topic for philosophical investigation. Consciousness could almost be defined by way of seeming: it is a center, a hub, of seeming. What it is like to be x is how things seem to x, and where there is seeming there must be consciousness. Sentience is seeming. Oddly, our vocabulary for it is quite limited: in addition to “seems” we have “appear” and how things “strike” us, but not much else. Synonyms are thin on the ground, despite the ubiquity of the phenomenon (is this a sign of poor comprehension?). What exactly is seeming? It might be thought to be a species of belief, perhaps the tentative kind: if it seems to you that p, then you (tentatively) believe that p. While there is certainly a correlation between seeming and believing, it would be wrong to define the former by the latter, since it is possible to disbelieve what seems to you to be the case (or to be neutral about it). If you have reason to believe you have been hallucinating recently, you may distrust your senses and reject the appearances they offer to your faculty of judgment. Seeming may be something like an invitation to belief, but you can decline the invitation. Nor is belief sufficient for seeming: I believe the Sun is 93 million miles away, but it doesn’t seem to me that way. Seeming looks like a sui generis state of mind, not to be assimilated to belief. It is also shared by different sense modalities and indeed by other modes of knowing: both sight and hearing (etc.) provide us with occasions of seeming, so the nature of seeming cannot be defined in terms of specific types of experience. What we can say is that all knowledge depends on episodes of seeming: we can’t know things without things seeming a certain way to us. Seeming plays a vital epistemological role. What we believe depends ultimately (sometimes directly) on how things seem to us. So it would be good to know what seeming is, how it is to be analyzed. When it seems to me that p what kind of mental state am I in?

            The answer might seem straightforward (note how frequently we use the word): I am in a subjective state that has representational content (intentionality, reference). In short, seeming is experience. But that can’t be right as stated, because mental images fit that specification: they are subjective states with representational content, but they are not states in which the world seems to be a certain way. Mental images are not hallucinations and do not present themselves as such. I am not tempted to believe what they represent; they don’t function as evidence for me. Here we might reach for the concept of the sense datum: a seeming is a sense datum, a constituent of perceptual consciousness. This suggestion encounters a problem with non-sensory seeming, unless we enlarge the concept of a sense; but there is a subtler problem, namely that the sense datum, as traditionally conceived, is too weak to add up to real seeming. The intuitive idea is that a sense datum is an intrinsic state of consciousness that transparently presents itself to the knowing subject—not very different from a pain or tickle (“My visual field is yellowish”). But why should that add up to a way the world seems? The sense datum is conceived as a floating element of consciousness—a quale in modern terminology—but where is the idea of how things seem in that conception?  Couldn’t such an entity be present in consciousness and not strike the subject as pointing to how things external to him actually are? The sense datum is too neutral, too isolated within itself, too uncommitted. It is too much like an image or idea or concept: it doesn’t carry within it the element of world-directed commitment. It just hangs there. You can see what I am driving at by consulting the dictionary: the OED gives an admirably concise and abstract definition of “seem”—“give the impression of being”. We could choose to build this into the notion of a sense datum, but the traditional notion is not so understood. There are two aspects to the definition: beingand impression. Seeming is the appearance of being—existence, reality, externality. It isn’t a neutral quality of consciousness: it points outwards; it has (purported) objectivity. This is more than mere intentionality, since that is compatible with the fictional or subjective status of the intentional object. But in the case of seeming we have apparent reality. When visual experience makes it seem to you that there is red cup in front of you it makes that state of affairs seem real—objectively real, really there. The concept of seeming is connected to the concepts of fact and truth; indeed, it is up to its neck in the idea of an objective, shared, external reality. All seeming is existential seeming (unless explicitly about fictional entities). The senses make the external world real to consciousness (whether or not it really is). If it seems to you that p, then it seems to you that it is true that p (factual, part of being). Seeming is ontologically committed. It isn’t ontologically neutral like traditional sense data or physical stimuli impinging on the sense organs. You need not believe what it purports to reveal, but it certainly has strong opinions (as it were). Seeming is a realist: it affirms the transcendent. The second element is the concept of impression: in seeming you have the impression of reality; you are affected that way. The seeming makes a certain impact on you. Not necessarily a belief, but some sort of mental effect (the word “impress” can mean “make a mark or design on (an object) using a stamp or seal”: OED). You have, as we say, the distinct impression that things out there are thus and so—really thus and so. You may be cut to the quick by this impression, or elated by it, or sublimely indifferent to it. How things seem concerns the self: it is the self that is impressed by the (apparent) encounter with being. But this fact—the fact of having the impression that p—fits none of the standard mental categories, being neither belief nor sensation. It is sui generis and rather puzzling, despite its familiarity. Seeming is neither assent nor feeling, but somehow something in between. It concerns reality and is clear in its commitments, but it isn’t a type of belief—though it functions as an invitation to belief. We might say it belongs to its own mental faculty, alongside the faculties of belief formation, imagination, emotion, etc. It provides input to other faculties but isn’t a special case of them.[1] It demonstrates the variety of the mental (and the dangers of that overarching concept). The seeming faculty is in the business of providing impressions of being (though it can fail in its mission), which we must evaluate in order to arrive at beliefs. These impressions are useful and sometimes impressive (waterfalls, mountains, whales) and no doubt serve a biological purpose. But they are rather mysterious, being neither fish nor fowl. It is hard even to talk about them: we are left with the bare claim that the mind is capable of entertaining impressions of reality that don’t ascend to the level of belief (but do go beyond mere subjective items).

            We can now define “seems”, notwithstanding its puzzling status. It seems to an organism that p if and only if the organism has an experience in which it has the impression that p. More briefly, seeming is having an experience-based impression of being. Here we leave “impression” as undefined (the dictionary is no help); it must be taken as primitive. All we can say is that it is not a case of belief (or disposition to belief). Such states, however, are the basis of all knowledge. Hamlet’s famous line “Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems’” encapsulates a good deal about seeming: its relation to being and its puzzling status. The traditional philosopher would put “is” after “I know not” (skepticism etc.), assuming that how things seem can be known; but Hamlet seems (!) to be saying that he doesn’t know anything about seeming. What is this strange seeming, this curious hybrid, this committed agnostic? I understand “To be or not to be”, but what are we to make of “To seem or not to seem”? I know not that, Horatio. Poor Hamlet, he doesn’t even know how things seem, let alone what really happened to his father or the nature of the afterlife! Our ordinary language also seems to be in some doubt on the matter: there are verb and adjective forms of “seem” (“seems” and “seeming”), but there is no noun form, as if English is reluctant to engage in the ontology of seeming. I have spoken in noun form of “a seeming” and “seemings”, as if there are such things, but that is not regular English. English, like Hamlet, knows not “seemings” or “a seeming”. Yet seeming seems real (I have the strong impression that seeming has being)—there are seemings of seemings. But they are puzzling conceptually; perhaps this is why they are seldom discussed, or assimilated to something else. We need a philosophy of seeming (not of physical sensory inputs or amorphous “sense data”); in particular, we need a better understanding of the notion of “impression”. Perhaps seemings are supervenient on other mental phenomena such as experiences of one kind or another, but we should be wary of any attempt to reduce them to such a basis. Do experiences cause seemings? Is it because of experiences that things seem a certain way, even though seemings strictly transcend experiences as such? Or are the things we call “experiences” really compounds of seeming and some more primitive sensory material? And how do experiences make an impression on the subject, whatever that effect is exactly? Hume spoke of impressions and ideas, recognizing that the senses do more than just parade ideas before our minds, but he said nothing to explain what an impression is, i.e. what it is an impression ofand what it is an impression to. We are constantly having impressions of this or that, but what this operation amounts to remains obscure. Metaphorically, it is something like an imprinting (a type of denting), but that tells us little of any theoretical use. All knowledge therefore rests on something we don’t understand.[2]

Colin McGinn

[1] Someone might try saying that seemings are the beliefs of the perceptual modules, potentially in competition with the beliefs of the central system, as in cases of visual illusion (see Jerry Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind). But that is an anthropomorphic picture of the perceptual systems: nothing in you believes that the lines of the Muller-Lyer illusion are unequal (assuming you know the illusion). The seemings of the senses are completely non-doxastic. It is merely as if your visual system believes what it delivers. Belief is really the icing on the cake not fundamental epistemological reality.

[2] If we say all knowledge rests on observation, we tacitly bring in the idea of seeming: an observation is a mental act in which something seems to be the case. That is, observations are precisely conscious states that embed an impression of being: the observer is affected by reality in a certain way and he seems to himself to be so affected. We can’t avoid admitting seeming into the epistemological picture in favor of something (seemingly) less obscure. Seeming is inescapable.

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A Philosophy of Seeming

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A Philosophy of Seeming

In “Seeming” I introduced seeming as a sui generis psychological natural kind. Here I will explore its uses in philosophical thought—the kind of impact it would have on philosophy were it to be taken seriously. I won’t repeat what I said in the earlier paper (this one should be read in conjunction with that) but the basic idea is clear enough: a seeming is an impression that something is the case—an impression of being. It is not to be assimilated to a belief, a sensation, an experience, a state of consciousness, a piece of knowledge, or a mental content. Roughly, it is an invitation to assent—a kind of intimation or suggestion (which may be rejected). It is not to be confined to the senses: although the senses do deliver events or episodes of seeming, they are not the only sources of seeming. There are also memory seemings, moral seemings, modal seemings, logical seemings, mathematical seemings, probabilistic seemings, introspective seemings, semantic seemings, other-minds seemings, existential seemings, negative seemings, and artistic seemings. Seeming is everywhere; it is hard to find a place where it isn’t. There don’t appear to be future seemings or unconscious seemings or self-reflexive seemings, but otherwise they are ubiquitous. They generally function epistemically: they provide reasons for beliefs or actions or emotions. They have intentionality. They interact with inference to produce knowledge. They can be episodic or dispositional. The concept of seeming is not a family resemblance concept (if such there could be); it is a genuine psychological natural kind with a real essence and a causal profile. Indeed, it is a biological natural kind, since psychology is really a branch of biology (the mind being a biological organ or system or faculty). There are many modalities of seeming, to be sure, but they are all united in a single psychological type, viz. impression of being. If it seems to you that something is so, you are under the impression that things are a certain way—the world strikes you as being thus-and-so (though you may reject this impression in the light of other impressions). Seemings are generally fallible, defeasible. Seemings are ontologically committed, but we can suspend these commitments in thought and speech. There are seemings of sense and seemings of reason; there are even mystical seemings and supernatural seemings. They have a distinctive phenomenology, a characteristic linguistic expression, and a logic of their own (referentially opaque, open to quantifying in). Presumably, animals have them too, and human infants; no doubt our species inherited them from earlier species (there were dinosaur seemings). They have a developmental psychology that might be empirically investigated. There is a neural basis for them. There must be a cognitive psychology underlying them (computational seeming algorithms, etc.). Some seemings will be alien to us because not shared by us (bats, sharks). And some will be intellectually beyond us, as ours are intellectually beyond simpler creatures (bats, sharks). Seeming science (“seemiology”) lies just over the horizon, I am convinced, poised to attract funds. However, let me now raise a few philosophical questions about this notion. First, what is the connection between seeming and concepts? Might it be true that all concepts require a basis in seeming? What about concepts belonging to the “absolute conception”, i.e., maximally objective concepts? Evidently, concepts of shape and color are tied to acts of seeming: to have these concepts is to be capable of its seeming to one that they are instantiated. But is this true of the concepts of mathematical physics or the concepts of morality or law or depth psychology? Has it ever seemed to anyone that General Relativity holds of space, or the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics? I think it is doubtful that these concepts have a basis in seeming, though the evidential warrant for the theories in which they occur may well involve acts of seeming. Do we have any idea of how curved space-time might seem? Our theoretical concepts can transcend our capacity to be subjects of seeming, even very abstract seeming. In other words, the View from Nowhere (the “absolute conception”) is not tied to seeming; so not all concepts are rooted in the capacity to host seemings. Perhaps many of our moral and legal concepts are (these are not particularly theoretical), so that they are linked to more primitive sorts of reactive psychological capacity; they don’t float free of our ability to be struck by the world. But concepts like infinity (of space, time, and number) are independent of our ability to entertain episodes of seeming—no one has ever had an impression of an infinite object or collection of objects. Second, acceptance of the psychological reality of seeming allows for a natural description of what is going on in cases of seeing-as. In the duck-rabbit drawing, for example, we can say that it both seems to the subject that the picture has changed and that it has not changed: both impressions exist simultaneously. The lines don’t seem to change their shape and orientation, but it comes to seem as if a different animal is depicted. So, we don’t have to limit ourselves to the concepts of sensation and belief; we can employ the richer terminology of seeming to capture the phenomenon. We now have a further resource, drawn from folk psychology, to work with. Third, we also have a new way to formulate epistemological issues: does all knowledge rest on a foundation of seeming? Is everything we know derivable by inference from premises about episodes of seeming (not sense data as traditionally conceived, or physical stimuli). This gives foundationalism a new freedom, liberating it from dogmas of the given or the universal reach of the human senses. Seemings have the power to justify, and they crop up in every domain of knowledge, perceptual and other. We can thus retain the attractions of foundationalism without its dubious baggage (the senses by themselves never justify, but neither is it true that only beliefs can justify). The knowing mind just has to be conceived more broadly, with seeming occupying a central epistemological place. Among other things, this will enable us to provide a uniform epistemology for ethics and physics: both rest on seeming—of value and physical fact, respectively. Reasons are all of essentially the same kind (the natural psychological kind seeming). Seeming thus provides a unifying epistemological framework. Fourth, we can supplement the old dispute between empiricism and rationalism with a new question—whether all knowledge rests on seeming or not. Empiricism and rationalism both base knowledge on seeming (sensory or ratiocinative), so they are not as far apart as we might have supposed; but now we have the further question of whether any knowledge is, or could be, based on nothing impression-like at all. Granted, in most cases knowledge is based on reasons deriving from events of seeming, but might there be cases in which not even this is true? These would be cases in which our reasons don’t advert to anything like a seeming but simply go directly to the heart of the thing in question—as it might be, direct insight into numbers. The numbers don’t seem a certain way to our intellect, but we nevertheless know their properties. We bypass seeming. I confess I don’t know what to say about this, but the issue is interesting and prima facie real. There is no natural name for the doctrine I am envisaging but it exists in logical space. We could call it “impressionism” but that has other connotations, and “seeming-ism” is too coy. Maybe some Latin term could be pressed into service. For now, I will just call it “S-epistemology” and stipulate that this is to mean “the doctrine that all knowledge, a prioriand a posteriori, is based on episodes of seeming, sensory or ratiocinative”. Then we can ask whether S-epistemology is true or not: this question is orthogonal to the old empiricism-rationalism debate, and arises out of the project of reconfiguring epistemology around the notion of seeming (construed as neutral between sense and reason). My guess is that S-epistemology is true across the board, but it is a substantive question whether this is so. No doubt there are further issues that can be raised under the new dispensation, but let that suffice for now.[1] Certainly, a lot of philosophy takes on a new aspect once the generalized concept of seeming is allowed to penetrate its precincts. This forces us to rethink our conception of the mind and that cannot but affect the way many philosophical issues are approached. The powers of the mind have been significantly expanded.[2]

[1] I will simply list a few issues that I have not discussed. Are Fregean senses (modes of presentation) explicable in terms of seeming? How does an epistemology of seeming bear on skepticism: does it make skepticism stronger or weaker or leave it the same? Are certainty and seeming compatible: if we are certain that p, can it also seem to us that p? Does intending involve seeming, or does the lack of future-seemings rule this out? Is seeming subjective or objective or both? Do we have impressions of nothingness? Could it seem that things are contradictory? Are Hume’s “impressions” the same as impressions as here characterized? Are seemings conceptual? Are there higher-order seemings? How are the concepts of seeming and evidence related? Could there be perception without seeming? Does pain involve seeming—if so, of what? Could knowledge be analyzed as seeming plus being? Do we have an impression of the self? Could we ever have an impression of our whole nature?

[2] I mean that we now have a general faculty of seeming, applicable across many domains, and capable of providing reasons in each domain. It has the generality of reason but it isn’t a kind of reason. It is a sui generis mental faculty not reducible to the traditional categories, lying somewhere between sensation and belief. Seeming is a vital and irreducible component of mental life.

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How to Do Philosophy

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How to do Philosophy

We are confronted by a world we don’t fully understand. We try by various methods to gain understanding of it, sometimes successfully. Philosophy is one such effort. Suppose we want to understand X: we talk about X, have thoughts about X, but we don’t know the nature of X, or the complete nature of X. We are in a state of ignorance about X, though we know enough about it to make it an object of contemplation. We then seek a method that will reveal the nature of X—a source of data, information, insight. Let’s suppose our interest is of the kind we call philosophical (as opposed to scientific, historical, or practical); it isn’t easy to say what this kind of interest consists in, but let’s leave that question aside. As an initial example, suppose X is pain: we refer to pain, feel pain, remember pain, expect and dread pain—but we don’t know what pain is. Is it a state of the nervous system, a functional state, a state of an immaterial substance, or something else entirely? That is, we are considering the mind-body problem. Presumably there was a time when the first human did this: he reflected philosophically on the nature of pain. He wasn’t thinking about the causes and effects of pain, possible cures for it, its prevalence in the population, or which pains were the worst; he was considering what we might describe as the very nature of pain. He was doing metaphysics. Evidently, his current knowledge of pain didn’t settle this question, so he needs to appeal to a further source of information. It is not obvious what this would be: he is ignorant of the answer, but nothing immediately suggest itself as the route to enlightenment. That is one of the first problems of philosophy—how is it to be done? We know there is something we don’t know, but we also don’t know how to remedy this lack. Should we just concentrate hard on the phenomenon and try to discern its nature? But that doesn’t seem to help—the real nature of pain is not given to us, not directly transparent. We therefore need to find an alternative source of data: introspection alone won’t cut it, so we need to look elsewhere—we need an indirect source of data. Then we can infer the nature of pain from the data. It is the same with many topics of philosophical interest—knowledge, meaning, causation, necessity, truth, time, goodness, etc.: we don’t get far by attempts at direct inspection, by looking and seeing. What would this even be in many cases—how would you look at and see truth, for example? The mind’s eye turns up nothing. I suggest that there are four possible ways of trying to get at the nature of the thing that puzzles us, all deployed at one time or another: language, consciousness, modal intuition, and knowledge. How is X represented in language? How is X presented to consciousness? What are the possibilities and necessities attaching to X? How do we know about X? All four are directed at elucidating the nature of X philosophically. As far as I can see, there are no other ways. I will call these the Four Ways, echoing Eastern modes of expression; and my first claim is that the Four Ways exhaust the ways. They don’t exhaust all the ways of knowing about the world available to us as human beings, but they do exhaust the ways of answering philosophical questions available to us (asking God’s opinion is not an available way). So, the way to do philosophy is to employ one or more of the Four Ways. We can do philosophy linguistically, phenomenologically, modally, or epistemologically. I don’t need to say much about each of these, as they are well known, but it will be useful to set them out in relation to each other. My general position is that all four are legitimate and potentially fruitful; I am not a philosophical sectarian.[1] Thus, the linguistic way involves us in questions of meaning, speech acts, logical form, grammar, and lexical analysis. The phenomenological way involves us in acts of consciousness, intentionality, introspective intuition, perceptual and intellectual apprehension. The modal way invites us to use our modal intuition to decide what is essential to the thing we are investigating and what is contingent: what is conceivably true of X and what is inconceivable (for example, false knowledge is inconceivable but knowledge in the womb is conceivable). This method enables us to separate what belongs to the very nature of X from what is extraneous to that nature, and hence provides useful information. It is where counterexamples to claims of analysis come in. The epistemological way asks how we know the thing in question—a priori or a posteriori, directly or by inference, with certainty or without, in virtue of knowing something else or primitively. One application of this method is the so-called knowledge argument: that is, whether it is possible to know the nature of X by knowing facts seemingly distinct from facts about X—as in knowing the nature of the mind by knowing the nature of the brain, or knowing the nature of the physical world by knowing facts about the phenomenal world. This enables us to determine whether some proposed analysis of a thing’s nature is really successful. In general, the idea is that the nature of X will be (partially?) revealed by examining how X is known, since the nature of a thing fixes the way in which it is known (e.g., mathematics). The picture is that X has a determinate nature N and N is revealed in the aspects of X that show up in its relations to language, consciousness, modality, and knowledge. The Four Ways tap into the nature of X, each in their different way, so that we can gain a fuller picture of this nature by seeing how they each reflect it. They each point to this nature, though they don’t exactly contain it (they are not identical to it); they provide us with evidence about the thing that interests us. In some cases, we can be confident that we have identified the correct nature by employing these methods, as with simple analytic truths: each method will certify that “Bachelors are unmarried males” states the essence of bachelorhood (I leave this as an exercise for the reader). In other cases, this won’t be obvious but can be ascertained by diligent conceptual analysis (e.g., Bernard Suits’s definition of a game). In yet other cases, we can provide a partial analysis but perhaps not a complete analysis (e.g., the analysis of knowledge as true justified belief). Perhaps in rare cases no account of X’s nature is forthcoming, possibly because of conceptual poverty. Convergence of the Four Ways will be taken as confirmatory. Is any primary? Probably not: each has its strengths and weaknesses. But it’s not a competition—we can use all four ways to conduct our philosophical investigations. Each of the Four Ways is fallible, of course, but that is just part of rational inquiry. At least we have a method, or several methods; we are not saddled with blank staring and unsullied ignorance. It is actually possible to do philosophy! The real nature of things can be accessed by the examination of related areas—language, consciousness, possibility, and knowledge. These all contain clues, indications, suggestions, even if they don’t provide transparent revelations of the nature of things. We shouldn’t really expect more; after all, philosophy only exists as a non-trivial subject because our minds don’t already contain knowledge of essences (philosophical knowledge is not present in the genes). In this regard, philosophy is very like empirical science, i.e., not possible by simple unaided intuition. In fact, I think philosophical methods are less naturally prone to error than scientific methods, because of the existence in the latter case of perceptual illusions, experimental mistakes, and the prevalence of induction (not to mention the necessity of sheer speculation). In philosophy, at least, what we are interested in is right under our noses, unlike the physical universe. Still, if it weren’t for the existence of language, consciousness, modal intuition, and knowledge, philosophy would be well-nigh impossible; we would remain in a state of utter ignorance about the nature of many things. We don’t possess a dedicated organ for obtaining philosophical insight, so we have to rely on these indirect sources of information, imperfect as they are.[2]

[1] It is a strange thing that many philosophers have shown a tendency to restrict their sources of data to one class of data–as it might be, language (often further restricted to communicative use). They then argue with each other about what method is best. One would think that philosophy is difficult enough without imposing such restrictions on its methods. Better to adopt a more pluralist approach.

[2] A common error here is to suppose that because we rely on these sources of information philosophy must be about them. But it is not, any more than physics is about meter readings; it is about the nature of things—reality itself. So-called linguistic philosophy (rightly understood) was about reality via language.

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