Proof of an External World

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Proof of an External World

Kant famously (and ruefully) remarked that it was a scandal of philosophy that it has been unable to come up with a proof of the external world. He was right: it is a matter of some embarrassment that philosophy should be unable to prove something so obvious, so commonsensical. What good is philosophy if it can’t even prove something that elementary? The proof need not be simple or obvious (that also would be to the detriment of philosophy as an interesting enterprise); it could be intricate and convoluted, with spots of uncertainty. I am going to offer such a proof: it has a Kantian ring, but is not to my knowledge to be found in Kant (or anywhere else). This should remove the scandal and prove the worth of the discipline of philosophy. It should also be personally satisfying (I myself feel a great sense of relief).

Let’s start with a simple thought, which will point us in the right direction. Suppose the skeptic says that our perceived world might be pure projection—a figment of the human imagination, corresponding to no further reality. After all, we already agree that much of it is projection—as with the perception of color and other secondary qualities. Why not all—why shouldn’t primary qualities also be subjective projections? We might think there is an obvious reply to this: projections need a screen onto which to project, which is not itself a projection. Thus, material objects in space provide the screen onto which colors (etc.) are projected; they are the equivalent of the movie screen that pre-exists the pattern of light thrown onto it. So, the perceived world can’t all be projected image; it must include a non-mental background. If so, we have a proof of the external world: it follows from the fact of subjective projection that something other than projection must exist, viz. material objects in space. But, of course, the skeptic will not be deterred by this simple-minded maneuver: he will suggest that the alleged non-mental screen is really just a virtual world, an imaginary world, a fictional world. So-called objects in space are non-existent objects, or may be for all we know. It only seems to us as if such objects exist; they might all be non-existent intentional objects, like objects in dreams or works of fiction or hallucinations. It is that hypothesis that needs to be disproved in order to prove that there is an external world. For example, there is an appearance of a square object in my visual field, but this could be a non-existent square object not one that really inhabits objective space. How can we rule this possibility out? I could be dreaming of a square object in front of me, this object being a mere figment of my imagination.

Here is the problem with this alternative skeptical hypothesis: we normally think there is a definite number of things that fall under a perceived (or conceived) attribute, but this will not be so if its extension consists only of non-existent objects. If lions and square things exist, then there is a definite number of them, known or unknown; but if they don’t exist, then there is no definite number of them. The point is familiar: there is no definite number of moles on Hamlet’s back or unicorns or angels or fairies. Such things are numerically indeterminate. But we normally think that ordinary objects of perception come in definite quantities, so they can’t just be non-existent entities. It follows from the fact of numerical determinacy that the objects of perception are not non-existent. Indeed, it is their existence in space that accounts for their numerical determinacy, since material objects are individuated by their location in space. Since non-existent objects do not exist in space, they can have no spatial principle of individuation that underpins their numerical determinacy. So, the skeptical hypothesis can be ruled out and our normal conception accepted. However, the skeptic is not beaten yet: why not say that there is no definite number of square things or lions since they are non-existent intentional objects? Why not bite the bullet and accept that consequence?

First, we should note that even if we do bite the bullet, we are still accepting that there are non-mental objects, because non-existent square things are not mental entities, any more than existent square things are (same for lions). We can quantify over them and they are not mental, so we have still proved that there are non-mental things (that don’t exist). But second, it is not so easy to give up on the numerical determinacy of attribute extensions: for attributes like these (sortal attributes) provide principles of counting, criteria of individuation, and these will generate assignments of cardinality. It is easy to miss this when an attribute applies to both existent and non-existent objects, but what sense does it make to suppose that an attribute that applies to pluralities of objects applies to no definite plurality of objects? If we claim that the attribute lioncorresponds to no definite number of lions, how can it be said to distinguish one lion from another? Not in virtue of position in space, to be sure, because non-existent lions don’t exist in (real) space. We lose the idea of a totality of individual lions standing in spatial relations to each other and adding up to a specific number of lions. That idea requires existence; it can’t survive in the realm of non-existence. The notion of non-existent lions is parasitic on that of existent lions, but then we are back with the external world as naively conceived. A fictionalist about minds (a mental eliminativist) has a problem about the individuation of minds—how many non-existent fictional minds are there?—and a fictionalist about bodies has the same problem about theirquantity. There really must be a definite number of minds and bodies for those concepts to have any intelligible content, but that idea goes out the window once we give up on existence altogether. Even the concepts of identity and difference begin to wobble when we enter the land of the non-existent (when are non-existent gods identical and when different?).

The attitude of sophisticated common sense is that we perceive a world of objects laid out in space, numerically distinct from each other, and forming totalities of specific cardinality. The skeptic tries to convince us that what we perceive are just non-existent intentional objects, but this involves abandoning the idea that we have concepts with definite cardinalities attached to them; and that is not a possible position, given the nature of our concepts (and associated attributes). Thus, an external world exists. The essential move in this proof is the observation that non-existence can provide no grounds for determining the number of things falling into the extension of a concept; only existence in space (in the case of material objects) can provide a basis for this determination. Things that don’t exist are not really countable in the way we normally (and rightly) take objects to be. Countability implies objectivity.[1]

[1] The proof here offered comes at the problem from a surprising direction. I think this is what we should expect, since no obviousmethod of proof has succeeded in removing the scandal. It would be surprising if the proof were not surprising.

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Subjective and Objective

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Subjective and Objective

The distinction between subjective and objective is often used in philosophy, but it is less often articulated, still less analyzed.[1] I will do that. The task is not particularly difficult, though there are glitches to be ironed out. The distinction is well-founded and its basic nature easily understood. We can begin with the dictionary (OED) definition: for “subjective” we have “based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinion; dependent on the mind for existence”; for “objective” we have “not dependent on the mind for existence; actual”. For philosophical purposes, the second definition is the appropriate one, not the definition in terms of personal feelings etc. Many things count as subjective without being based on feelings, tastes, or opinions (see below). The main limitations of the mind-dependence definition are (a) specifying what kind of dependence, (b) saying what is meant by “the mind”, (c) the lack of any positive characterization of the objective, and (d) the restriction to the mind as the sole source of subjectivity. We don’t want to say that logical inference produces subjectivity simply because the premises of an argument are beliefs (states of the mind) on which a conclusion depends. Also, the mind is a very various thing, so what specifically generates subjectivity? Is it anything mental or only some mental things? But more important are (c) and (d). First, let’s make it explicit that we are talking about mental representations and their content: we want to know what makes a representation subjective or objective—a perception, a thought, a sentence, an item of knowledge. Then question (c) is what a mental representation is dependent on when it is objective, granted that it is not dependent on the mind (whatever that is taken to include). Also, must the subjectivity-producing fact always be a mental fact? Can it ever be a physical fact?

The answer to the first question must surely be: the world, what exists outside the mind. For simplicity, let’s just speak of the physical world: then we can say that a representation of the physical world is objective if and only if it depends on the physical world. To be more precise, it must depend on the physical world beyond the subject’s body—ordinary objects surrounding the subject. These cause instances of the representation to occur; they explain the occurrence of the representation. In short, objective representations are dependent on external objects, while subjective representations are dependent on internal states of the subject. I say “internal states” because I want to lift the restriction to mental states, for several reasons. First, a mindless zombie could in principle have subjective representations, given that it allows its representations to be influenced by internal physical states just like those occurring in someone with genuine feelings etc. Second, an eliminative materialist can make use of the subjective-objective distinction while denying that minds exist at all, so long as internal states of the subject exercise control over the formation of representations instead of external facts. Third, illness or injury could induce the subject to form beliefs that are not appropriately sensitive to external facts but stem from internal physiological pathologies—these need not be mental. Representations can be subjective just by virtue of their internal causation, whether mental or otherwise; what matters is their detachment from external reality. We might even say that the dictionary has it the wrong way round: a belief about the external world is objective if and only if it is appropriately caused by that world, while a subjective belief is one not so caused (being caused by an internal state of the subject, mental or physical). What matters, intuitively, is what led up to the formation of the belief—external objects or internal states cut off from such objects. Is the belief object-generated or subject-generated? Is it held because of the facts it concerns or is it held because of certain internal perturbations? That is the crux of the distinction.

With these glitches taken care of we can now turn to classifying philosophical positions as subjectivist or objectivist: does our definition capture the intended notions? First, color (and other secondary qualities): perceptions of color are subjective in that the origin of such perceptions lies within the perceiver, and similarly for beliefs about color. The cause of color perceptions is internal to the perceiver (according to subjectivist views), so they come out as subjective by our criterion. Perception of primary qualities comes out as objective, since it is external features of objects that cause these perceptions; exogenous not endogenous causation. Colors come from the subject; shapes come from the object. Likewise, hallucinations stem from within, whereas veridical perceptions stem from without, so the former are subjective and the latter objective. In the case of perceptual constancies, objectivity arises when (for example) the retinal image is corrected in the direction of veridicality; the image is an aspect of the organism, and it can create subjective impressions of things that belie the objective facts.[2] Image and object are out of sync and objectivity requires correction of what the image suggests. Constancies are the result of amending the proximal retinal image to fit the distal objects, i.e., removing subjectivity from the visual output. Ethical subjectivism is precisely the doctrine that values originate from inside the subject: desires, inclinations, emotions. Ethical objectivism, by contrast, claims that moral judgment is responsive to facts external to the subject. So, this pair of doctrines tracks the definition I have proposed. The same goes for aesthetic values: if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then it is in the subject, not in the object: hence aesthetic subjectivism and objectivism. Questions of taste obviously follow this model: what you happen to like is a fact about you not about the object, and therefore subjective. According to Kant, space and time are in us not in mind-independent reality; hence, representations of space and time are deemed subjective (mere appearances). Indexical representations rely on the location of the subject in space and time, so they too will count as subjective, as opposed to non-indexical representations which reflect the condition of the object represented without reference to the subject. It is all a question of whether the representational content owes its allegiance to something within (or about) the subject, or to the nature of the object represented.

We should not confuse subjectivity and objectivity with subject and object as such. All representation (intentionality) involves subject and object: a thing representing and a thing represented. So, every act of representation is both subject-involving and object-involving. There is no such thing as a view from nowhere (a subject-less view), and there is no such as a view of nothing (an object-less view). Subject and object are locked inexorably together (that is the logic of intentionality). But it doesn’t follow that all such acts are both subjective and objective; it all depends on the generation and composition of the representing content. Does it owe its existence to the world or to the mind (strictly, the internal)? The picture we have is that the external world exerts some control over how we represent it but that our inner nature also shapes how we represent things. Thus, we speak of the “subjective” and the “objective”. On occasion, both coexist in the same representation, as when we see both color and shape. Sometimes the subjectivity is undesirable, if it leads the subject into error (e.g., misperceptions of size when size constancy breaks down); but sometimes it is beneficial to the subject (e.g., in food selection or color vision). Both traits can be defended; neither is exclusively correct or useful. The search for an “absolute conception” is motivated by the reasonable ambition of expunging ourselves from our maximally objective picture of reality, but it would be misguided zealotry to try to eliminate all subjectivity from our modes of representation. Subjectivity has its uses, its virtues. Subjective and objective both deserve a place in the sun.[3]

[1] For background, see Colin McGinn, The Subjective View (1983) and Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (1986).

[2] For a discussion of objectivity and perceptual constancy see Tyler Burge, Origins of Objectivity (2010).

[3] Setting aside technical issues of formulation, I take it that what I suggest here is not particularly controversial; indeed, it might be thought not terribly exciting. I agree, but sometimes it is nice just to have something obvious for a change. And clarity is never a bad thing.

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My Left Foot

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My Left Foot

An update on my left hand, and then a corollary on my left foot. I can now stick a knife from about 18 feet throwing with my left hand, no spin. This is substantial progress from a month ago. I also find that my two-handed backhand, which is governed by the left hand, is far more reliable and natural than it was a month ago. It feels as if my brain has accepted that it is expected to control the shot with the left hand, leaving the right hand along for the ride. So, my backhand has improved correspondingly. Meanwhile drumming and guitar playing have also improved, the left hand being a lot more dexterous than before (even though I have been playing the drums for 60 years).  This is all pretty surprising, but what also surprised me was this: my left foothas made a leap forward. I know this because the left foot is the hi-hat foot and my hi-hat playing has improved markedly. I’m having a left side renaissance! All this evidently stems from my ventures into knife throwing. Perhaps everybody should engage in left-side training from an early age (assuming they are right-handed); I am 74 and I am seeing these benefits. Bend Sinister, as Nabokov would say.

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Is Causation Necessary?

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Is Causation Necessary?

I don’t mean to be asking Hume’s question about the need for necessary connection in the causal relation; I mean to be asking whether causation (causal power) is a necessary feature of things. Granted that something has a causal power, does it necessarily have that power? Are its causal powers part of its essence? Kripke’s table is necessarily made of wood, given that it is actually made of wood, but does it necessarily have the causal powers it actually has? Are there possible worlds in which that table exists and lacks the causal powers it has in our world? Could it have the causal powers of a jellyfish instead, or a vacuum cleaner? Does it have no causal powers in some worlds? Some objects have zero causal powers (e.g., numbers), so could this table be like that in a possible world? Could the situation be reversed—numbers have causal powers in some worlds and tables don’t? Let’s agree that space and time as such have no causal powers as things actually are; could they nevertheless have causal powers in other possible worlds? Our physical universe has a wide range of causal powers, but could it (that universe) lack such powers? Is causality necessary or contingent to things? Is it like composition (necessary) or is it like spatial location (contingent)?

The first thing to be said about the answer to this question is that it is not clear. Our intuitions are not univocal on the matter. On the one hand, it seems imaginable that the very same object should exist and behave differently from the way it actually behaves, or not behave at all. The case is analogous to pain and C-fiber stimulation: we can apparently conceive of possible worlds in which C-fibers are correlated with another type of sensation, or with no sensation at all. C-fibers don’t dictate pain, don’t make it inevitable. Likewise, the shape and composition of an object seem contingently related to its causal profile—they don’t dictate what the object will do (as Hume famously argued). The one thing seems separable from the other. That very object could still exist even though it has had its causal powers stripped from it, as it could have its color and spatial location stripped from it. Causal powers are something superadded, conjoined, not something internal to its being the object it is. A type of causal dualism thus seems indicated: causal powers are something over and above other properties of the object like shape and composition (“distinct existences”, as Hume would say). But, on the other hand, such dualism offends our intuitive sense of unity in natural things: for how could the causal powers of an object transcend its actual properties—how could what it does float free of its actual make-up? So, our intuition of contingency (and hence causal dualism) must be mistaken; there must be a deep necessity at work here. Thus, the case resembles the mind-body problem in respect of modal questions: we are torn in opposite directions, subject to conflicting pressures. We are confronted by a deep metaphysical problem—the causation-body problem (where body here is understood as the totality of properties the object has sans its causal properties). We might even want to say that the causal is mysteriously connected to the non-causal; the connection is not pellucid, not even properly intelligible (by us). Maybe we don’t really know what causality is, or what ordinary properties are for that matter. We are intuiting in the dark, never a good place to intuit.

Let’s step back and try to get our bearings. How does causality fit into the grand scheme of things? Is it a necessary feature of the universe—this universe or any conceivable universe? Could God have created a causality-free universe—either one containing matter and mind or one made of very different materials? Certainly, some philosophers have been eliminative with respect to causality: it does not exist in the mind-independent world, nor in the mind itself. It is pure projection, sheer fantasy: the course of history is mere accidental sequence devoid of causal power (compare eliminative materialism). But even without such a radical anti-realist position, it seems conceivable that causation might someday disappear from the universe like a bad smell, rendering it static and unchanging. The connection between mass and gravity is notoriously lacking in perspicuity, so that the idea of massive objects with no gravitational causal powers appears perfectly intelligible. If we press the question, in virtue of what does matter have the causal powers we attribute to it, we come up empty handed; it seems brute, inexplicable. We are thus faced with the usual choice between three unpalatable alternatives: dualism, reductionism, or eliminationism. If causation is the “cement of the universe”, then it is an alarmingly elusive cement. We can’t even say whether Kripke’s table (which is nothing special) is necessarily combustible or stable or solid, though we know it actually has each of these attributes. We can’t say whether retaining these attributes is required for the table’s continued existence (or existence in a possible world). What looked like a local puzzle about tables and the like turns out to reflect a wider aporia about causation in general—about whether it is a real trait of the universe, or whether it is contingent to reality or necessary to it. The concept of reality, even concrete reality, does not logically imply causality—hence Platonism about numbers and epiphenomenalism about the mind.[1] Such anti-causal doctrines are not simply contradictory. But it is unclear whether material reality must be causally imbued: causality seems superadded to matter (extension, spatial occupancy), and yet it is hard to accept that just anything can be superadded—as if a table could act like a jellyfish! Could God have created the universe just as it is now and at the last minute decided not to add any causality to the mix? Could everything be just as it is except that it is all a causality-free zone? The causality-world problem is wide open and extremely confusing.[2]

[1] It would be useful to compile a list of all non-causal entities so as to see how they differ from causal entities, though the question is not without controversy. Thus: numbers, geometrical forms, space, time, colors, moral facts, qualia (?), spatial points, propositions (?), and infinities. Some would say that nothing has causal power save that injected by God’s will, counting themselves metaphysically sober; causation always comes from outside the object.

[2] What would we think if we came across a pebble on a beach that had none of the usual causal properties of pebbles despite its similarity to causally endowed pebbles? Would we put it in a museum and label it “The World’s Only Non-Causal Pebble”, as if it were just a natural curiosity?

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Is Speaking Acting?

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Is Speaking Acting?

We have grown accustomed to the phrase “speech act”, so much so that we regard it as a truism: of coursespeech is a type of action! It is an action we perform with our mouth and larynx as opposed to our hands or feet. Assertion is something we do—it is an intentional action. Nor is it an action merely in the very broad sense the word “action” allows: as when a physicist speaks of action at a distance or action and reaction, or a physiologist speaks of the action of the digestive system, or a psychologist speaks of reflexes as actions. No, the word is meant to imply intentional goal-directed intelligent conscious action, like preparing for a party or an exam. It doesn’t just mean uttering words, making sounds come out of your mouth, flapping your lips about. Speech is not action merely in that trivial sense. The idea of the speech act, as it is commonly understood, is supposed to be opposed to the idea simply of picturing a fact or expressing a proposition or stating a truth or pronouncing a word; a speech act is held to be an action that does something with words—gets something done, like making the hearer bring you a glass of water. Speaking is a practical activity, according to this conception, like farming or building a house. And since speaking is the primary form of language, language itself is to be conceived as action-oriented: knowing a language is a species of knowing-how, an ability to act in the world—intentionally, consciously, purposively. So we have been schooled to believe. I will argue that this is all wrong, from top to bottom; it is simply not true that speaking is acting in this full-blooded sense. It is not an action at all, save in a very attenuated and trivial sense (not the sense intended by its proponents). The “pragmatic turn” is an error.

I begin with an easy point. If assertion is an intentional action, it must be accompanied by an intention, namely the intention to assert. But people who assert do not in general have such an intention, because they don’t have the concept of assertion. They are not linguists or philosophers of language (certainly not speech act theorists). People don’t classify their utterances as assertions, even when they are (or interrogatives, imperatives, optatives, performatives, or exhortatives). They just say things a theorist may classify in this way; such classification is generally alien to them. So, it is not true that whenever someone makes an assertion, he or she does so under the aegis of an intention to assert. The speaker may have other intentions, like intending to inform or embarrass or contradict the hearer, but she doesn’t typically have an intention to make an assertion (a speech act theorist might have such an intention). Moreover, it is hard to see how she could have such an intention, since there is no agreement on what an assertion is: is it an attempt to communicate knowledge to the hearer, or just belief, or mere consideration, or a mental act of imagining? Are we to suppose that the ordinary speaker has a view about which of these theories of assertion is correct? No, she just comes out with a sentence that we characterize as an assertion; no such notion need enter her head. So, the category of assertions cannot be defined as those speech acts that are performed with the backing of an intention to assert—for there is no such intention in the normal case. All we have, at most, is a variety of intentions that might accompany assertions, e.g., the intention to inform the hearer of something (which might be accomplished in many ways, not all them via assertoric speech). And there might be no intention at all, just a kind of reflex or habit of speech, like rolling the tongue around the mouth or smacking the lips or swallowing one’s saliva (what are called “sub-intentional actions”). Isn’t a lot of idle chatter like that, or mumbling to oneself, or speech produced by rote? Sometimes words just pop out without any guiding intention, automatically, reflexively.

What if all speech were thus reflexive? Would that stop it being speech? Would no language be spoken in such circumstances? What if we came across a speech community (possibly not human) that produced words and sentences without any conscious deliberation, without guiding intentions, even without much in the way of intelligence? It is all pretty pointless, just a way to pass the time, with no ulterior aim in mind. Would we describe this strange activity as not speech at all? No: we would say it is a kind of degraded or purposeless speech, but still speech. The sounds uttered would have the structure and semantics of a language but lack its normal human pragmatic dimension. It might strike us as silly, gratuitous, surplus to requirements, but it would still be speech—the utterance of linguistic expressions. The same is true of a speech community that eschews all outer speech and sticks to inner speech, which completely lacks the pragmatic properties that our speech often exemplifies. This would still be speech but not be an action at all, in the sense intended by speech act theorists. The property of serving inter-personal purposes of familiar kinds is contingent to speech as such, i.e., the production of words and sentences in a language. Speaking itself is not essentially tied to achieving extra-linguistic aims. It consists only of acts in the trivial sense, i.e., things people or objects do, as opposed to what happens to them (e.g., blink as opposed to having a speck enter the eye). In principle, linguistic use could be stripped down to the basics and still be a case of speech; it might serve no purpose at all, or a purely individual purpose (say, as an aid to thought), or be just a hobby people share. It is not even clear that it requires consciousness or means-end reasoning or practical rationality.

Speech certainly requires an ability to utter words (externally or internally), but that is a far cry from what the speech act theorists had in mind. Maybe it also requires the capacity to utter words freely, voluntarily, spontaneously; but again, that is not what the idea of speech acts is intended to suggest. The idea is to contrast actual language and speech with conceptions that operate with such thin notions as expressing a proposition or stating a fact or saying something; speech, it is thought, does much more than that (though also that). The contention is that speech involves doing things with words in a sense that goes beyond merely uttering them in such “acts” as saying, expressing, stating, and the like. The underlying thought is that language is not merely symbolic representation but goal-directed action performed in a social context. But this conflates competence and performance, and interprets performance in a much too inflated way. Linguistic competence is a cognitive capacity not a sensorimotor skill; and linguistic performance is not essentially a matter of social coercion or education or whatever other goals it may on occasion possess. Speaking is not in its essential nature an act of interpersonal manipulation (good or bad): it isn’t a social instrument, a tool for getting ahead, a means of achieving one’s goals. Speaking is uttering words you understand to form sentences; what you go on to use these words or sentences for is another matter. Understanding a language is not act at all; it is a cognitive state. Thus, language is not speech and speech is not action (in the intended non-trivial sense of “action”). Competence is not performance and performance is not goal-directed intentional behavior (except in certain cases). Knowledge of language is not practical knowledge in the sense intended by the “pragmatic turn”; it is not a disposition or capacity to perform acts that achieve chosen ends (it isn’t knowing how to do these things). Semantics (and syntax) is not pragmatics. Knowing a language is not like knowing how to build a nest or catch a fly with your tongue. It is more like knowing-that than knowing-how, as in “I know that ‘snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white”. Speech act theory, as it has come down to us, is really an over-intellectualized form of behaviorism. Speech isn’t a deed. In speech sounds are produced, trivially so, which is an active faculty, but it is not constitutive of speech that it be a full-blooded intentional act in the style of speech act theorists.[1]

[1] The philosophers I have in mind as spearheading this movement are Wittgenstein and
Austin, though they had many followers. Obviously, I have Chomsky in mind as resisting this kind of neo-behaviorism.

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Attitudes to Memory

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Attitudes to Memory

Let me distinguish memories from our attitudes towards them. Memories, though changeable, are relatively static compared to our emotional response to them. The memory may fade or disappear with time (or it may not) but our feelings about it are quite plastic and can even reverse valence. A painful memory can become affectively neutral or even quite pleasurable in the light of later developments. What was once serious can become amusing. This is because we mature with time, gain perspective, see the bigger picture. It is attitude that determines trauma not memory content as such. Two people could have memories with the same content but vary in their emotional attitudes towards that content. Childhood events that were emotionally difficult at the time no longer seem so in retrospect. Proust was the master of this psychic domain: how we feel about what we remember not what we remember. The affective aura of a memory is separable from the memory itself. Memory affect is detachable from memory content. This means that a memory could be fixed and immutable while its affective charge is plastic and variable. We might not be able to rid ourselves of certain memories, but we may be able to alter their emotional force. In principle, we could change our emotional relation to memories at will while remaining completely powerless to change the memory itself. In practice, we could lessen the negative impact of a memory while leaving the memory intact. When people speak of “letting go” of the past or “moving on” from it, they mean lessening its emotional hold on them not lessening the presence of the memory itself. They mean something like remaining tranquil in the face of the memory not abolishing it altogether. The impossibility of the latter does not imply the impossibility of the former.

I mean this point to apply to the feasibility of rebirth therapy. Someone might object that simulated rebirth will leave memories intact, so not provide a way of freeing oneself from their malign influence. But this conflates memory retention with memory influence: you could retain the memory but not its affective charge. The affect could be reduced or neutralized without needing to get rid of the memory trace itself. A machine or drug could alter one’s attitude to a memory without altering the memory per se; similarly, the rebirth procedure could have the same kind of effect. So, it is no objection to the efficacy of the procedure that it leaves memories intact, because it doesn’t necessarily leave their affective charge intact. The question, then, is whether, empirically, such a change can be brought about by the procedure, given that it will do nothing to erase the memories as such. By finding, or creating, a new self within oneself, in the act of rebirth, it might well succeed in altering the emotional power of memories—as already happens with the normal passage of time and experience. If we can tap into the pre-trauma childhood self, we might be able to distance ourselves from the memories laid down by negative life experiences. Death abolishes all trauma, and birth begins with a pre-traumatic blank slate.[1]

[1] Rebirth therapy exploits a discontinuity in the removal of trauma: first, simulate death in order to abolish trauma; second, simulate birth so as to encourage the formation of a new untraumatized self. The time gap between these two phases allows the psyche to gather its forces after symbolically annihilating itself. There is something of existentialist psychology in this conception—the idea that we have the power to re-shape ourselves, to create a new facticity (as Sartre would say). I see also elements of Freud, Maslow, Goffman, Laing, and others.

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Foundations of Psychotherapy

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Foundations of Psychotherapy

Say what you like about Freud but at least he had a general theory of the nature, origins, and development of human personality. It centered on psychosexual dynamics, and repression figured prominently. It covered the emotions, neurosis, unhappiness, the family, dreams, jokes, art, morality, and other things. But we need not follow Freud into the intricacies of psychoanalysis; we can attempt our own theory of the human condition with similar ambitions in mind. We can adumbrate a general conception of personality that may be used in therapeutic contexts. We already have a wealth of information about this domain, because we have each lived human lives and been subjected to the travails thereof. We just need to assemble this information into a general framework of understanding and then recommend the appropriate course of treatment for what ails us. I actually don’t think this is difficult; the truth lies close to the surface. It is not, however, easily converted into ameliorative protocols; and my proposal may well seem drastic and potentially dangerous, certainly not reassuring.

We are not born miserable, damaged, neurotic, unstable, or a complete mess—though there are no doubt genetic predispositions at work. It is the world—experience–that does these things to us. We don’t need psychotherapy in the womb. We are born a blank slate psychopathology-wise; we should therefore be empiricists about psychological disease, unease, imbalance (whatever we want to call it—and that matters). This is an oft-told tale: the hapless neonate is hit immediately with hunger, discomfort, frustration, disappointment, isolation, its own incompetence, and (of course) maternal displacement or deprivation (she’s always going away). It’s a rough old world, a world of inconvenience and hostility, hurt and misfortune. And it is like this for everybody, before we even get to serious cases of neglect, abuse, danger, and injury. The infant’s psyche is assaulted on every side. Nor does it get much better: as time goes by there is rejection, bullying, parental failure, injustice, feelings of inferiority, self-doubt, fear, and all the rest. The years are marked by damaging stimuli, periods of misery, general ennui, and worse (betrayal, heartbreak, illness). None of it is easy to cope with. And on top of all that the human psyche, especially in early years, is stubbornly retentive: we remember all this bad stuff, not just in explicit memory but in the deeper recesses of the psyche. There is thus a cumulative build-up of wounds, traumas, and stresses, as well as trivial slights and disappointments (also some good things!). Other people become sources of pain, agents of harm. The suffering psyche must carry this burden. Thankfully, memory is not perfect: memories fade, leaving only a trace of their former sting (or stab). Time heals, as they say, but only partially; the scars remain. There is one balm for all this accumulated damage: sleep. Each day we awake to a new dawn with the residue of the previous day somewhat attenuated. If memory were perfect and sleep non-existent, we would surely be a lot more (what shall I say?) fucked up—done over, beaten down. But again, this provides only partial relief to the struggling psyche. That’s why psychotherapists exist, to take up the slack, to supplement forgetting and sleeping (feeble, really, against the slings and arrows of outrageous etc.). Bad experiences and retentive memory, with little relief, are the human lot in life. We all know this is true, though we may be reluctant to admit it.

What is the solution? What can put a stop to this inescapable build-up of trauma, large and small? What can reverse it? An obvious idea is to zap the memory banks: just erase all that bad stuff from the psyche, so that we can go back to those blissful days before the world had its way with us. Maybe a drug, maybe hypnosis, maybe electroconvulsive therapy—anything would do. But this is clearly impractical: such methods will wipe out too much, or not enough, or leave us like newborn babies mentally. Reincarnation looks like it might be a way out, but there is no such thing, and anyway the same shit will happen again. Here is where I reach for my drastic and possibly dangerous therapeutic proposal: Controlled Rebirth. First, we simulate death; then, we simulate birth. We thus distance ourselves from the life we have lived up to now; we put it in the past, bracket it, deactivate it. It is as if our past life is someone else’s, no longer at the core of what we are. Concretely, you lie down, therapist by your side, and you pretend to die, possibly thinking of the person or animal you hope to meet on the other side. You have to do this with full conviction. Next you lie still for a while, whatever length of time seems right; you then signal to the therapist that it is time for you to wake up. She proceeds to act as psychological midwife, coaxing you back to life, as if this is your first experience of reality—you act the part of newborn baby. You don’t talk. Your helper may then take you on a soothing walk in your new world, as if experiencing it for the first time. You gradually adjust to your new reality. This protocol may be gone through once or several times, depending on felt efficacy; and it is best undertaken after a period of preparation in which your wounds and scars are patiently excavated and curated, lovingly examined. It demands complete trust in the therapist, and she must treat the process with the utmost seriousness. The purpose of the treatment must be fully understood by the patient (and assented to, of course). It won’t cure you of all your psychic ills, obviously, but it may help to mitigate them, reduce their hold on you. The spirit of the procedure is to recognize the causation of the presenting symptoms and provide a form of treatment that directly attacks the basic problem. This is a medical approach in its general form. Instead of the release of repression as in Freud’s practice, this approach advocates rebirth of the psyche in simulated form. It is to be judged by its efficacy (as most medical procedures are—it is often not known how they work). I call this Simulated Rebirth Therapy, or just Rebirth Therapy. I venture to suggest that it is probably no worse than all the others, and more theoretically well-founded. It acknowledges the indisputable facts of human life, which can be more or less severe, and it attacks them in a literal and methodical manner. The only way out of human life is renewed human life.[1]

[1] The element of drama and ritual should not be underestimated: rebirth therapy is a dramatic enactment of the basic fact of birth, ritualistically realized. It exploits the power of the theatrical—the ability to make things so by acting as if they are so. It is like a performative utterance gone existential. Or again, it draws upon the power of fantasy (a theme of Freud’s). Coming-of-age rituals are similar, though virtual rebirth is a step beyond, a harder climb. In it we choose to be reborn.

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Philosophy of Skill

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Philosophy of Skill

There is no such thing as what the above title describes. We have philosophy of knowledge, perception, thought, emotions, imagination, and action—but not philosophy of skill (except for some scattered remarks). You can’t take a course in philosophy of skill in a typical philosophy department. So, let’s create the subject—let’s put it on the map. We will begin with some good old-fashioned ordinary language philosophy—what we would say when and why. The OED sets the stage: for “skill” we read “ability to do something well; expertise or dexterity”. This is admirably terse, but it needs some expansion. I can walk well, but would we say that walking is a skill? What about breathing or excreting or sitting down or picking one’s nose? The bit that’s missing from the dictionary definition is difficulty and value: a skilled action is one that overcomes or minimizes a difficulty—it isn’t something easy and automatic—and it should be something that is valuable or worthwhile or good. We don’t say that an action is skilled if it is easy and of no account, however well done it may be—say, chucking mud over the neighbor’s fence for the hell of it. We don’t see competitions devoted to such activities, or public esteem for their agents. Expertise and dexterity help, but what kind of expertise and dexterity—not in mere mudslinging (or nose picking). The paradigms of skillful action include piano playing, surgery, and tennis—where we recognize that these are worth doing and require much dedication and practice. I will therefore say that skill involves overcoming obstacles to the achievement of a goal, as well as merit in the goal achieved (we don’t say “Jones is a skilled bullshitter” or “Wendy is a skillful annoying guest”). Synonyms for “skillful” include “talented”, “accomplished”, “adept”, “adroit”, “competent”—all positive terms of evaluation. So, a skill should require for its mastery some degree of training and effort and be directed to something meritorious. A skilled surgeon is properly so described, or a skilled craftsman. We admire skill precisely because skill requires dedication to an esteemed outcome in the face of obstacles to success. Skills are learned, acquired, honed, refined—all in the service of something good. This is the difference between skilled labor and unskilled labor (or simply being a thief). The idea of a skilled torturer sticks in the throat because it lacks the latter while it might conceivably involve the former; and the idea of a skilled food purveyor lacks the element of expertise and training. We are now moving towards an analysis of skill in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions: Xis skilled in doing A if and only if X can do A despite obstacles to doing A and A is a worthwhile thing to do.[1]We might add to this barebones analysis the further condition that X has to learn to do A by training and practice, and that worthwhileness can take many forms (so we can include surgery, tennis, and piano playing under the proposed definition). I will leave it to the reader to think through such examples as “skilled lawyer”, “skilled politician”, “skilled policeman”, “skilled chess player”, “skilled detective”, “skilled weightlifter”, “skilled philosopher”, “skilled predator”, “skilled postman”, “skilled butter-spreader”, “skilled lover”, “skilled thinker”, “skilled perceiver”, “skilled salesman”, “skilled cashier”, “skilled alcoholic”, “skilled gossip”, “skilled TV watcher”, etc. Which of these locutions sounds right and which wrong, and why?

Is talking a skill? I mean ordinary chatting about this and that, not public speaking or thespian performance. I think not: because we can all do it easily and without practice and training—it’s like eating or walking or avoiding pointy objects or biting your fingernails. There is no skill involved; this why no one is paid to do these things and there are no sports involving them. Writing is a skill, even if done poorly, because it has to be acquired by effort and it has merit; but mere talking isn’t. Swimming is a skill, but floating isn’t, or jumping into the pool. Playing a musical instrument is a skill, but singing per se isn’t—unless you take voice training lessons. Dancing may or may not be a skill, or mountain climbing. Talking is indeed an ability, a type of competence, but it isn’t really a skill—though it is like a skill such as speaking in a foreign language. Dropping a ball isn’t a skill, though throwing one is. Talking is like dropping a ball—it comes naturally, effortlessly. Animals are not usually spoken of as possessing skills, except metaphorically by comparison with human skills, because animals don’t generally work at improving their motor capacities; where they do, the term is appropriate. It would be strange to say that birds are skilled flyers or sharks skilled swimmers—though they are both good at these activities. They don’t admire other members of their species for their (ordinary) flying and swimming skills (as we don’t admire other humans for their bipedal walking skills). No obstacles had to be overcome by these species; they were born this way. Animals are generally good at excreting (they had better be), but no one thinks to congratulate them for their skillful acts of excretion. Talking is like excreting in this respect (as in other respects). Nor are perceiving, remembering, and thinking skills, though they may be involved in the exercise of genuine skills. The concept of skill is quite specific and is not to be identified with the concepts of ability or capacity or competence. It would be quite wrong to say that a blind man lacks the skill of seeing, since seeing isn’t a skill, though seeing can be described as an ability. I don’t see the cup in front of me skillfully.

Are some kinds of skill paradigmatic while others are so described only by analogy? The OED tells us that “skill” is primarily used to ascribe “manual or physical” skills. This is exactly right: hands are the primary locus of skill, with feet coming second, and other body parts following along, the mental kind of skill being a distant runner-up. The pianist and the carpenter are the paradigms—they are “good with their hands”. The skilled agent has skilled hands above all (footballers may loudly protest, but they are an unusual case). Hand skill is not the same as hand strength or endurance or sheer flexibility; it is a matter of fine-tuned dexterity—a word that covers a multitude of talents. For dexterity comes in many forms that don’t transfer much from one to the other: you can have finger dexterity in one domain but not in others (e.g., throwing a ball with spin versus playing the violin). The brain, of course, is centrally involved, but the hand is the part of the body where the skill shows itself. It is our skill with our hands that sets us apart from other species, and which led to our species dominance.[2] The human hand is designed for skilled action, because of its powers of gripping and its team of adaptable digits. A skilled lawyer or politician can handle difficult situations, quickly, nimbly, effectively; he or she can mend fences, hold people together, keep a firm grip on things. Lawyers and politicians tend to use hand gestures a lot when they speak, as if exhibiting their strong (but gentle!) hands—so caressing, so reliable. They are not inept or clumsy; they have the world in the palm of their hands. They won’t let you slip. And they are always shaking people’s hands—they are skillful at that. The skilled laborer, for them, is the salt of the earth, the repository of all that is good and wholesome: the skilled hand is the good hand, the virtuous hand, the industrious hand. Manual skill is something to be admired and prized. The more a man approximates to that paradigm the better he is thought to be. Thus, skill comes to occupy a position of social and political centrality. A man who does not work with his hands is hardly working at all (he is an egghead, a brainiac, a pencil-pusher, an “intellectual”). In any case, the concept of skill is centered on the hands and derivatively elsewhere. Not “In the beginning was the deed” but “In the beginning was the skilled hand deed”.

The concept of skill has been neglected by philosophy (analytical philosophy anyway—too closely associated with the laboring classes), but it has not been neglected by other disciplines. I am referring to economics and psychology, in which skill has always had a central role. In the case of economics, the concept comes in via the focus on labor as the engine of production—skilled labor being of paramount importance to an economy. It is skill that primarily drives economies, where manual skill holds pride of place. When the economist speaks of the contribution of labor to productivity, he really means skilled labor—the greater the skill of the workforce the greater the economic progress. What is called the division of labor is really the division of skill, in which each worker specializes in a particular sub-skill (say, nail sharpening in Adam Smith’s famous example). The more that different skills are parceled out to different agents, the greater the productivity, and hence the greater the wealth of the society. The philosopher could contribute to this subject by employing her specific kind of intellectual talent (skill?) to clarify the concept of skill. In the case of psychology, the study of skill has been there from the start; not behavior as such but skilled behavior. How are skills acquired? What learning methods work best? Are there transfers of training between skills? But philosophy, which borders economics and psychology, has had little time for the concept of skill, preferring to focus on the cognitive and the phenomenological. Even cognitive science has shied away from skilled motor performance (perception and reason being the favored subjects). There is nothing objectionably behaviorist about studying skilled action, which has its roots in the brain after all. So, I suggest making the philosophy of skill part of the philosopher’s regular agenda. Enterprising graduate students could specialize in the philosophy of skill (not much literature to read).[3]

[1] This may remind us of Bernard Suits’ definition of a game in The Grasshopper (1978).

[2] See my Prehension (2015).

[3] Whole dissertations could be written on the different skills (piano playing, wood carving, knife throwing). Interdisciplinary work could be undertaken. Journals could be founded (Skill Studies, Hand, Quarterly Journal of the Society for the Study of Human Skilled Behavior). Bitter controversies would ensue.

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