A Picture of Mind

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A Picture of Mind

 

 

How in the most general terms should we characterize the mind, animal or human? If the body has a respiratory system, a digestive system, and a reproductive system, what systems does the mind have? How does it divide up? What is its fundamental structure? I suggest the following tripartite picture: intelligence, desire, and will. These are the basic compartments of the mind: cognition, conation, and volition. Cognition includes the senses and what is traditionally called Reason; conation includes need, appetite, and wish; volition includes action, decision, and intention. I would say, further, that intelligence is manifested in the form of knowledge, desire is manifested in the form of emotion, and will is manifested in the form of action. What knowledge is to intelligence emotion is to desire and action is to will. We know, feel, and act, and these are expressions of our intelligence, desire, and will. We have desires and we act on them in the light of what we know. The mind is designed to produce action based on knowledge in the satisfaction of desire. No doubt evolution produced this three-component structure as the best solution to survival requirements. The components must of course be coordinated, so they interact in various ways; but they are separate regions of what we indiscriminately call the mind. Also, they have many sub-components: many types of knowledge, from linguistic to ethical, physical to psychological; many types of desire, from sexual to food-directed, ethical to prudential; and many types of action, from mental to bodily, reflexive to considered, novel to routine. So there are modules within modules, faculties within faculties; in fact, the basic compartments are more like repositories of faculties and modules than faculties and modules. If we picture each compartment as a tree, each faculty within it is a branch of the tree–the sum total of trunk and branch (and leaves) being the tree. The many modules of mind can be viewed as clustering into three large groups, which I am calling intelligence, desire, and will. There is much heterogeneity within each group, as well as across groups, but we can still recognize the larger grouping—a fundamental similarity of mental faculties (compare the components of the respiratory and digestive systems of the body). If I were to draw a diagram, it would contain three large boxes with arrows connecting them and many dots within each box.

This picture is not like certain traditional pictures that seek to impose uniformity on the mind. The behaviorist views the mind as a single block of dispositions to behavior, triggered by external stimuli, as in the standard S-R model; if there is a black box mediating stimulus and response, it is a matter of conditioned connections. The empiricist picture views the mind as an array of sensations (ideas, impressions, sense-data) corresponding to perception and “inner sense”, with desires also giving rise to internal impressions. The cognitive scientist is apt to view the mind as a uniform set of computations or mental programs with no fundamental distinction drawn between the cognitive and the affective. But the tripartite picture insists that we are dealing with three very different sorts of mental reality—knowing, feeling, and doing. None of these is a special case of the other; each must be treated separately. Nor are we saying that the mind is an unruly collection of various elements with no overarching general categories, a mere set of family resemblances, an irreducible plurality. There is a strict and principled distinction between the three compartments, despite their obvious interactions. Knowledge is not emotion and emotion is not action. We really do contain three distinct types of mental entity; in the Table of Elements for the mind there are three columns. When people say things like, “In the beginning was the deed” they risk overlooking distinctions—as do rampant empiricists or gushing sentimentalists (in the philosophical sense). Knowledge and perception are not paradigms, but neither are desire and emotion or will and action.  Nor is the mind a dualism of reason and emotion, or action and contemplation, or desire and reflective thought; it is a trinity of intelligence (knowledge), desire (emotion), and will (action). Any adequate psychology must begin from this recognition, as must any adequate philosophy of mind. That includes recognizing that will is not to be assimilated to desire: to desire or need something is not to will it or act so as to obtain it. The will is the servant of desire and need, but it is not a type of desire or need. The will must respect the promptings of intelligence as it goes about its practical business, since it must accept the reality of the objective world, whereas desire knows no such realism.[1]Traditional thinkers were quite right to distinguish volition from appetite and ponder the freedom of the will (desire is not subject to free choice any more than knowledge is). Psychology thus consists of three parts: cognitive psychology, affective psychology, and volitive psychology (to revive an old-fashioned term). Where psychologists speak of the “motor system” and seek to elucidate its workings, we do better to recognize the whole volitional system of which mere bodily movement is a part—practical reasoning, decision-making, intention, and action. This is far from the behaviorist’s preferred ontology.

Are there any features common to the three psychological domains? Indeed there are: it is clear that a combinatorial logic applies to each of them, and that the conscious and the unconscious play their part in each. Language is obviously combinatorial, but so is thought, which means that knowledge is too. The rules of combination need not be the same, but each faculty consists of a finite set of primitive elements and a finite list of rules for conjoining them—whether perceptual primitives, or linguistic, or conceptual. Intelligence in general relies upon the creativity permitted by quasi-grammatical combination—the formation of complex entities from simpler ones according to rules. But this basic property applies also to desire and action: desires have logical and constituent structure, which enables them to proliferate indefinitely (the desires of man have no end); and so do actions because of means-end reasoning and action-plan embedding (consider building a house). Our possible actions are endless, though finitely based, just as our desires are unlimited despite our finiteness. Thus we might say that creativity is a general property of mind, applicable in all its operations. Psychology will seek to articulate the creativity in question, attempting to identify primitives and the rules that apply to them. Affective psychology is no exception: emotions too are complex inner occurrences with constituent structure (think of a feeling of wistful ennui on a fine summer’s day). Similarly, each compartment of the mind divides into a conscious part and an unconscious part—the part we see and the part that eludes us. There is conscious knowledge and conscious emotion and conscious willing—none of these faculties is wholly unconscious—but side by side with consciousness we have the unconscious processes that underlie consciousness. I won’t defend this position here but merely point out that the same basic division exists across the mind’s principal components. So we have two psychological universals despite the deep differences in the psychological realities to which they apply: the presence of combinatorial structure, and the division into conscious and unconscious. Perhaps too we can add the presence of a self that has these aspects: I think and I feel and I act. Of course, the question of the nature of the self is much debated, especially its psychological robustness, but it seems true to say that the mind contains some sort of capacity to think I-thoughts with respect to each compartment that composes it. Not that this in any way compromises the heterogeneity of the components, any more than the previous two points do, but it does indicate a principle of integration or coordination that we should acknowledge. I am a knower, a feeler, and an actor—I subsume these three categories without being one rather than another. The I is not exclusively one of them but the totality of them (so it is not, for instance, the agent of Reason alone). This allows us to speak of unification with respect to the aspects of mind. Thus generative capacity, a conscious/unconscious divide, and selfhood all work to confer an overarching unity on the mind conceived as a collection of separate sui generis systems. The trinity is not absolute, nor unbridgeable; there are common features (the body is not dissimilar). If we think of the mind as made up of distinct buildings, the buildings are unique to themselves, but bricks and mortar are used to construct each of them. The process of evolution has employed generative mechanisms in the design of each of the mind’s compartments, as well as a conscious/unconscious division of labor and an overarching agency we call the self, while ensuring that the architecture varies from one compartment to another—rather as a church is one thing, a home another, and a prison a third. Function and form vary from one compartment to another, though some common principles are applicable universally.

The fundamental problem in designing an organism is that an organism exists in a real and possibly threatening world in which it must act to preserve itself. The way to solve this problem is to install a faculty for being informed about the world, a set of motivating inner states that reflect the organism’s needs, and a capacity to act effectively in the world. Thus it is that organisms come to possess intelligence, desire, and will—the basic prerequisites for survival. The large-scale composition of the mind results from the existential predicament of an evolved organism. The study of mind should reflect this threefold structure.[2]

 

Colin McGinn

 

[1] Recent philosophy of action has tended to downplay the distinctness of desire and will, as in belief-desire psychology, but really we need to make a firm distinction between desire and decision. The concept of intention is not the concept of a certain type of desire, as it might be the strongest desire of the agent at the time in question. The faculty of will is not to be assimilated to mere desire: it involves a distinctive type of reasoning and must respect the facts, as they are known to the agent. Intention is no more desire (or emotion) than thought is perception.

[2] I have said little here about the general nature of the three sorts of capacity I have identified, presuming some prior understanding, but if I were to sum up what distinguishes the capacities I would say this: knowledge is a truth-oriented state, desire is a well-being oriented state, and will is a survival-oriented state. Knowledge seeks to get the world right (to fit it), desire reflects the inner needs of the organism (mental and physical), and will strives to make reality serve the organism’s urge to live. These are different jobs and the capacities involved operate accordingly. For example, one can choose to act but not to know (or believe), and one can desire the impossible but not intend the impossible. Knowledge, desire, and intention have different “logics”.

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Externalism Re-Formulated

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Externalism Re-Formulated

 

 

There is quite a deal of debate about whether externalism is true but not much about what it means. We know the thought experiments (Twin Earth etc.) but how should we formulate their conclusion? Putnam puts it by saying that meanings are not “in the head”—and by extension mental content is not “in the head”. But that is too crude: what if the brain was not in the head and yet content supervenes on brain states? The brain is in your chest instead, but it fully fixes everything you think and mean. Is that externalism? Obviously not. So should we say that externalism is the view that mental content is not in the brain? But that would be agreed to by a dualist for non-externalist reasons; and besides do we really want to commit the externalist to holding that there is anything mental that is literally in the brain? That sounds like a materialist speaking not an externalist: it isn’t that the externalist holds that some of the mind is in the brain and some isn’t—he or she may reject such spatial talk as a category mistake. Similarly, we don’t want to say that externalism holds that the mind is spatially external to the body and brain—as it might be, over there. Nothing in the intuitions surrounding the usual thought experiments implies that mental content is distributed over the spatially remote, still less that the mind extends over space. Space doesn’t come into it. We can accept externalism for mathematical thought without supposing that numbers exist at some distance from the thinker’s body. Likewise we can defend an externalist position for psychological concepts without supposing that minds are located in space: other people’s mental states may be said to fix my concepts for those states without assuming that the states in question occupy space. For example, there may be two types of mental illness on earth and twin earth that can’t be distinguished by the people there and yet the term for these two types has different reference (say, schizophrenia and twitzophrenia). We can stipulate this kind of case without assuming that states of mind are spatially located.

We might try saying that externalism is the view that causal relations to the environment enter into content determination: but this presupposes that all externalist content is caused by what it is about (what about thoughts concerning numbers?), and what is to be meant by the “environment”? Are platonic forms in the environment? What about other people’s mental states? Doesn’t the physical environment start just where the skin stops, i.e. well short of things like water? A better approach would be to advert to introspection: externalism says that introspection doesn’t reveal the full nature of one’s mental contents. That applies to natural kind cases like H2O and XYZ, but it also applies to any mental state whose nature is not given to introspection, like abilities and traits of character. Just because my psychology is not fully known to me by introspection doesn’t imply that my mind is fixed by something “external”. Nor will the concept of the physical help us, as in “Mental content is fixed by the physical world”. That is clearly not sufficient since brain states are physical if anything is, but it is also not necessary. Suppose you are an idealist a la Berkeley: you hold that everything is an idea in the mind of God. Then twin earth is an idea just like earth, so that what fixes the meaning of “water” in the two places is something mental, viz. God’s ideas of H2O and XYZ. Thus you can be an externalist about “water” while accepting that nothing physical is involved: idealism and externalism are logically compatible.

I think the best we can do is the following: externalism is the doctrine that the phenomenology of a mental state does not wholly fix the content of that state but that something not identical to the state must be invoked. Thus our phenomenology of water (and “water”) does not fix the meaning of that word but something not identical to what has that phenomenology does, viz. water. Here we make no reference to location, space, externality, causation, the environment, or the physical—we merely speak of phenomenology and identity. Something not identical to anything in the state that has a phenomenology enters the individuation of the state. Numbers, natural kinds, individual objects, and other minds are not identical to anything in the state of mind that has a certain phenomenology, yet they fix at least part of the content of that state (“wide content”). The essence of the doctrine, then, is that the mind is not individuated purely phenomenologically, even when dealing with states that have a phenomenology (and have it essentially). It is a form of anti-subjectivism in one sense of “subjective”. This says nothing about supervenience on brain states, or the causal impact of the physical environment, or spatial separation; it is purely a point about phenomenology and what it doesn’t fix. To cover the full range of cases we use the abstract topic-neutral concept of identity not relations like spatial separation or causation or non-supervenience on brain states. That is the real logical thrust of the doctrine labeled “externalism”: we could say that it invokes something extrinsic to phenomenology—“external” in that non-spatial sense. Instead of saying “meaning isn’t in the head” we can say, “meaning isn’t in the phenomenology”, where the “in” here is not spatial. Intuitively, what confers content is not identical to the mental state on which content is conferred—it could be a number, a natural kind, a type of mental phenomenon, or an individual object. It stands outside (careful!) the representational state and yet it fixes that state’s content. In particular, it is not identical to the phenomenological character of the state. The thesis is really about the relation between phenomenology and meaning with all the other formulations more or less misleading. This is why we focus on how it seems to the speakers on earth and twin earth—for the question is whether the identity of seeming implies identity of meaning. Whether their brains are in the same state is beside the point, as is the question of what kind of thing earth and twin earth are (whether material objects or ideas in the mind of God). We do better to formulate the thought experiment by specifying that speakers on earth and twin earth are phenomenological twins and leave it at that.[1]

 

Col

[1] After all, nobody really thinks that brain states alone can distinguish the two meanings of “water” independently of their impact on phenomenological state. That is, no one is a non-psychological internalist, holding that purely physical brain states on earth and twin earth can force a distinction of meaning. It was always about whether subjective facts are the sole determinant of semantic facts, not internal facts more generally.

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Behaviorism Re-Refuted

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Behaviorism Re-Refuted

 

 

Behaviorism is a bit like a zombie: just when you think you’ve killed it the thing comes lumbering back into the room. So it may be worth reminding ourselves quite how bad the reasoning was that led to it. The doctrine may be defined thus: mental states are dispositions to observable behavior. There are three concepts at work here: disposition, observation, and behavior. None of these is redundant: each could be satisfied without the others being satisfied. Mental states could be dispositions to produce certain effects without those effects being observable or behavioral, since they could be entirely mental. They could be known by observation without being dispositional or behavioral, since they could be known by observing brain states or possibly by something like telepathy (assuming this to be logically possible). And they could be behavioral without being either dispositional or observable, since the behavior might be invisible—it might only occur at a microscopic level or possibly wear a cloak of invisibility (assuming this logically possible). Presumably no one would advocate behaviorism if the behavior was as unobservable as the mental state within, but this is not to be ruled out on logical grounds. The whole point of introducing behavior is to provide something that will function as observable evidence, so unobservable behavior is not going to cut it: hence the need to specify observable behavior (sometimes “gross behavior”).

The reasoning, then, goes from observation to behavior to disposition (the last introduced in order to allow for mental states on which the organism is not currently acting). We want something observable if psychology is to be a real science; behavior is observable; therefore mind is behavior. There is already a non sequitur here: it needs to be the case that only behavior is observable. That may seem de facto true, but it’s worth noting how contingent it is. What if brain waves detectable by an EEG machine were more accessible and revelatory than they actually are? Then scientists could read the mind off the recordings taken by such a machine without recourse to behavior.[1]Psychology could thus be a science based on electrical observations, not unlike parts of physics. It is merely a contingent fact that this is not the case. Or suppose there were super-scientists equipped with a special sense capable of detecting other people’s mental states directly—again no need to invoke behavior. Or suppose brain chemistry has reached such a point that chemical analysis can reveal what is going on mentally. None of these is practically possible as things stand, but they are not ruled out as a matter of principle. So the behaviorist is in effect saying that as a practical matter the only evidence we have is behavioral, not that no other evidence is logically conceivable. Consider how psychology might be conducted by blind psychologists: no one can see anyone’s behavior. Would the behaviorist approach seem so attractive then? What if EEG recordings delivered by Braille, though crude, actually outperformed attempts to hear or feel or smell other people’s behavior? Then the appeal of behaviorism as an evidence-based approach to psychology would presumably lapse. Behaviorism only seems appealing because we sighted people in fact generally judge other people’s mental condition by looking at what they do, but that is hardly a logical necessity. It amounts to the claim that as a matter of contingent fact we judge other people’s states of mind by visually observing their behavior, while allowing that there is nothing necessary about that.

But this gives the game away: for how could the mind be dispositions to behavior, simply because behavior is the only evidence we actually have, given our senses and the state of our technology, for ascribing mental states to others? Isn’t this a blatant case of trying to derive an ontological conclusion from an epistemological premise? It may be that the only evidence we practically have for knowing about distant stars is the light that reaches us from those stars, but that hardly implies that stars are patterns of light traveling across space. Evidence is one thing, fact another. A star is not a collection of dispositions to send light into our eyes, even though we have no evidence apart from this; and it is perfectly possible that other forms of evidence might emerge as technology develops—for example, we might travel to the stars and have an up-close look. So the reasoning in support of behaviorism commits a glaring non sequitur: it moves from a claim about the evidence actually available to us to a claim about the nature of the thing for which this is evidence. This is an attempt to move from a highly contingent fact about evidence to a constitutive truth about the nature of mind. If we made such a move in the possible scenarios I sketched, we would end up saying that mental states are dispositions to cause EEG recordings or chemical changes in the brain or even telepathic intuitions in a certain class of observers. None of these are what the mind is; they are merely possible sources of evidence regarding the mind. Behaviorism is no different: it is the elevation of one source of evidence, itself quite shaky, to the status of constitutive truth. There is nothing privileged about behavior in providing possible evidence about the mind, so converting it into a constitutive claim is bizarre and unwarranted. The mind cannot be what just happens to provide evidence for it to us now, given our senses and state of technology. Behavior is really just one effect of mental activity to be set beside others (electrical fields around the brain, chemical changes within it, remote stimulations of human senses at some distance from brains). Choosing another type of effect by which to define the mind would strike us as bizarre, but then why is behavior regarded as constitutive?[2] And add to this the point that gross observable behavior is actually a very unreliable and crude guide to what is going on in someone’s mind, being just a displacement of the body caused by an internal state. Your larynx moves thus and so when you vocally express your pain by groaning, but the pain itself may have a complex internal reality that exceeds this relatively coarse mode of expression. Also, behavior can be deceptive and misleading: it is hardly a certain guide to the other’s state of mind. EEG recordings would be much more reliable and attuned to what is really going on inwardly. Behaviorism is appealing to a rather impoverished source of evidence as well as committing a logical fallacy (trying to deduce an ontological conclusion from an epistemological premise). In ordinary life we have nothing better to go on most of the time, but as a basis for solid science behavior is far from ideal—so why try to convert it into a definition of the mental? That’s like taking unaided observations of the stars from planet earth as constituting the very nature of the astronomical world. Looked at like this, it is hard to see how anyone could have taken behaviorism seriously.[3]

 

Colin McGinn

[1] There are now many machines that allow for such brain scanning.

[2] A follower of Wittgenstein might insist that behavior supplies a criterion of the mental not merely a symptom; it is woven into the concept of mind. But why should the same thing not be true of EEG recordings if they formed part of our language game with mental words? What if children were brought up this way and took it for granted?

[3] There is also the familiar (and good) point that it is wrong to reduce a postulated theoretical entity to the evidence for it: but this concedes too much to the behaviorist in allowing that behavior is the unique and necessary form of evidence for mental attributions. What we need to appreciate is its thoroughly contingent status as evidence—whatever necessity it has is purely practical. Presumably if brain scanning were more realistic at the time behaviorism gained a foothold it would not have had the appeal it did have. The introspectionist school in psychology would be opposed by the brain scan school not by the behaviorist school. Maybe in the future behavioral evidence will be completely replaced by brain scan evidence; then someone will no doubt proclaim that the mind is a set of dispositions to produce images on scanning machines.

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Communication and Language

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Communication and Language

 

 

It is commonly supposed that the use of language in communication is its primary use. There is either nothing else that is language or anything else is an internalized version of outer speech. But in fact communication itself presupposes that language exists in another form and is not self-sustaining. First, communication is precisely the conveying of thought from one person to another, but this thought must exist in some symbolic medium, so it is required that sender and receiver share a language-like cognitive structure. Suppose I am thinking about a problem, talking to myself the while, and eventually I decide to communicate my conclusion to you: I say out loud “We had better take a left”. I have a thought and I attempt to transmit it to you, causing you to have the same thought; but this thought is in both cases a representational entity. Communication is the communication ofsomething, and that thing has to have properties that are encoded in communicative speech. It can’t be just unrelated to the speech act that conveys it; it must map onto the speech act, intelligibly so. Often, of course, it simply is an internal act of speech. The case is not like saying “I’m in pain” because that is not a case of communicating pain—I am not causing you to share my pain. But in communication I am causing you to share my thought, so my method must capture what is constitutively true of the thought; it must recapitulate the thought in some way. But what could this recapitulation be except a sharing of form? So a speech act of communication presupposes a prior instantiation of language in the mind of the speaker in the form of a thought. No communication without thought transmission, but also the transmitted thought must be alike in nature to the means of transmission; otherwise it is not communicated. If we regard language as primarily an instrument of thought, this is easy to understand: the internal language is simply translated into external language in acts of communication. But if we insist that outer speech is the only linguistic reality, we have trouble even explaining what communication is. For what precisely is it that gets communicated?

Second, speech acts require speech intentions. If I say, “It’s raining” I do so by forming an intention to say those words, just as if I raise my umbrella I form an intention to act in that way. So I have the intention to say, “It’s raining”. Acts of communication require intentions to make certain utterances.[1] But those intentions embed a reference to language: you intend to say the words “It’s raining”—this is the content of your intention. That implies that language exists in your mind prior to the act of external utterance, so it cannot be the product of your external speech. Speech acts require speech intentions, but speech intentions make reference to language, so the former cannot be the basis of the latter. In order to learn to communicate with language we have to learn to have linguistic intentions, but those intentions are already steeped in language, so communication cannot be prior to linguistic intentions. To put it differently, communication requires linguistic plans, but linguistic plans involve the ability to use language internally, so we can’t hope to base internal language use on external language use, let alone deny the existence of any language use other than overt communicative language use. Even if language were primarily used for communication, that would still require that language exists in another form—in this case as embedded in intentions. And since communication is precisely the communication of thought, the alleged primacy of communication would still require that language exists in the form of thought. Thus we cannot derive from the primacy of communication thesis the claim that language has no other form, or that whatever other forms of language exist they must depend on the outer form. The far more natural thesis is that language is not primarily a means of communication, still less is it identical to outer speech acts, but that it has an existence that is independent of such public expressions of language. That is, there are inner instantiations of language, in both thought and intention, and these get expressed, contingently so, in acts of outer speech. Outer speech is consequential not constitutive.[2]

 

C

[1] If you blanch at the word “intends” here, we can always replace it with something more neutral and sub-personal such as “directs” (cf. Chomsky’s “cognize”): the essential point is that the vocal system will include a preparatory phase of internal processing leading up to the actual utterance of the words determined on inwardly. Also, the usual strictures about implicature apply to using the familiar word “intends”, which I prefer: just because we don’t normally say that someone intends to say what they actually say doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.

[2] The idea that human language is identical to outer speech is well nigh universal in recent philosophy of language, though seldom explicitly stated, no doubt as a result of the prevalence of behaviorism. Yet it seems fairly easily refuted by the points made above. It is amazing what a stranglehold behaviorism has had despite its obvious weaknesses: it qualifies as an ideology and not merely a rational doctrine.

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Is Logic Arbitrary?

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Is Logic Arbitrary?

 

 

Propositional logic is the logic of truth functions: negation takes us from true to false and false to true; conjunction takes us from double true to true and otherwise to false; disjunction takes us from single true or double true to true and otherwise to false. But are these the only truth functions there are? No: what about the truth function that takes us from double true to false, or from single true to true but not from double true? That is, suppose we had a symbol for a truth function that is like conjunction except that it requires both conjuncts to be false for it to be true, or one that gives truth only if one of the disjuncts is true but not both. These might be written “nand” and “nor”, as in “p nand q” and “p nor q”. These truth functions exist and we can define them. We don’t seem to have any natural language words for them, but why should logic care about that? If we are interested in truth-functional logic as a general theory, we should make room for these non-standard truth functions and study their properties—they certainly generate well-defined entailments (for example, “not p” follows from “p nand q”). It would be arbitrary to exclude these truth functions from logical theory. And yet they are not mentioned in standard logic texts.

Predicate calculus introduces two quantifiers: “all” and “some”. It studies the entailments thereof. But in natural language there are many more quantifiers (and no doubt others could be defined): “most”, “many”, “a few”, “several”, “nearly all”, etc. They all serve to indicate quantity, and they all feature in valid inferences. For example, although “Most F are G” does not entail “This F is G”, it does entail “This F is probably G”; and we can infer from “Several F are G” that not just one F is G. Yet quantifier logic, as standardly presented, does not include these non-standard quantifiers, as they are called (though they are perfectly standard outside of standard logic textbooks). Surely a general theory of quantifiers should include the full range of quantifiers; it is arbitrary to exclude them. It leaves quantifier logic incomplete. It is true that such quantifiers are not found in arithmetic, with “all” and “some” ruling the roost, but they are common elsewhere and should be accorded the respect that is their due.[1] Just because predicate calculus historically arose from the desire to formalize arithmetic is no reason to ignore the logic of other quantifiers. There is thus an arbitrariness built into the logic that is customarily taught to students and thought to define the subject. Like propositional calculus, predicate calculus is too confined, too exclusive, too focused on one region of the logical landscape. We need a more inclusive logic open to the historically marginalized. Call this deviant logic if you like, but notice the pejorative connotations of that term.[2]

 

Colin

[1] No one seems interested in Goldbach’s sister’s conjecture that most numbers greater than 2 are the sum of two primes.

[2] We might see this as an essay in logical politics.

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The Certainty Principle

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The Certainty Principle

 

 

The Uncertainty Principle in physics comes as no surprise to a skeptic. We can’t know the position and velocity of a subatomic particle—so what? We can’t know a lot of things, including the position and velocity of an elephant. We think we can know that—or we think it when we are not thinking—but elementary reflection quickly convinces us that no such knowledge is possible for human beings. Newton’s physics is as uncertain as Heisenberg’s once we get critical about knowledge. Knowledge is basically an effect of the world, and the world does not affect us in such a way as to reveal its full nature. That should not surprise anyone according to the skeptic. Everything is subject the Uncertainty Principle—the truism that we can’t be certain of anything.

But wait: is that principle universally true? Can’t I know the intensity and quality of my present sensations? It is not that knowledge of the one automatically rules out knowledge of the other, or that there is some insuperable barrier to knowledge here. Indeed, I can be certain of the properties of my consciousness, so that skepticism gets no purchase: it is laid out before me, fully and transparently. True, the unconscious is subject to an uncertainty principle, like the body, but the conscious mind is subject to a Certainty Principle—the principle, namely, that I know with certainty the present state of my consciousness. I can’t know my brain in this way, but I can know the consciousness that depends on my brain. So consciousness possesses a remarkable epistemic property—it admits of certain knowledge. The physical world is subject to the Uncertainty Principle, both in physics and more generally, but the mental world is subject to a Certainty Principle. Amazing! How could anything in reality produce effects on us that guarantee knowledge of that thing? How does consciousness manage to convey its inner nature so perfectly? That seems contrary to the very nature of knowledge and yet it is apparently true. It even has an air of paradox about it—real yet fully known.

It doesn’t normally strike us that way because we are so familiar with consciousness, but a simple thought experiment makes us see how strange the situation really is. Suppose we were brought up knowing all about quantum theory: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is second nature to us, as familiar as elementary arithmetic. Moreover, our teachers have placed this principle in the context of general skepticism: we are thoroughly versed in skeptical thought and take it for granted in our daily lives. Epistemic limits are bread and butter to us. However, no one has ever said anything to us about consciousness—that subject has been off limits, possibly to discourage undue introspection. But this has not prevented a group of renegade thinkers from investigating the topic: they want to find out the truth about this aspect of nature. They have made some interesting discoveries about consciousness such as that it has intentionality and subjectivity and that it varies in certain ways with facts about the physical world. So far, though, no one has broached the question of the epistemology of consciousness, so ingrained is the acceptance of epistemic modesty. But one intrepid thinker takes the revolutionary step of questioning the general belief in Uncertainty and announces that there is something in the world that admits of complete Certainty. This is shocking, maybe even paradoxical, because the relation between reality and our epistemic faculties is generally believed not to admit of such a thing, and yet upon examination it turns out that consciousness is an exception to the general rule. Naturally the scientific world is in an uproar, but people have to admit that this brave thinker is onto something: the Certainty Principle gradually gains acceptance, despite some initial resistance. We have discovered that nature contains pockets that can be known with certainty—we can even know the intensity and quality of a sensation simultaneously! The Certainty Principle is added to the Uncertainty Principle as a pillar of science—though some people find it hard to accept the new paradigm, stubbornly insisting that it is simply not possible for any knowledge to escape the Uncertainty build into all human knowledge (so called). There must be some error in the reasoning that leads to that conclusion, or experiments are cited that purport to show that contrary to appearances error can creep into self-knowledge. Actually whenever someone takes himself to know both the intensity and quality of a sensation he is always a bit wrong about one of these properties. However, this is a minority position, with most people accepting the newly discovered Certainty Principle. A Nobel Prize eventually ensues.[1]

 

[1] Motto: what counts as a surprising discovery depends on background belief.

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