Logical Phenomenology

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Logical Phenomenology

What would a phenomenological study of logic look like? It would investigate the modes of consciousness proper to the various categories of logic: variables, quantifiers, individual constants, connectives, predicates, premise and conclusion, rules of inference. This could be directed to a formal language such as we find in a logic textbook or it could be directed towards a suitable fragment of natural language. It would presumably identify different types of intentionality, both as to intentional object and intentional act. Thus, it might invoke a sense of multiplicity for quantifiers, a sense of assembly or construction for connectives, and a sense of completion for whole sentences—these being constitutive of the corresponding mental acts. This is how the relevant symbols inhabit the consciousness of the logical mind. It wouldn’t be much use to describe the mental acts involved as “a feeling of negation”, “a feeling of conjunction”, “a feeling of quantification”, “a feeling of deduction”: these descriptions may be true enough but they are not informative; we need something that elucidates the mental acts not merely names them. Someone might object that there are no such mental acts: consciousness is a blank when thinking logically. But this is hard to believe, because logical thought is conscious thought and must engage consciousness at a fine-grained level. Something must be going on in consciousness when we reason logically (say, perform a mental act of conjunction elimination), so it should be possible to say what it is. No doubt the process is rapid and difficult to monitor—we don’t self-consciously notice what is going on in our consciousness when we reason—but it should be possible to articulate it by various techniques, as we can the processes of conscious perception (also very rapid and difficult to keep track of). At any rate, it’s worth a try. We will want to sift what is essential from what is accidental, what is constitutive from what is merely associative. What conjunction reminds you of may not be of much general interest (the way your grandmother used to emphasize the word “and” when agitated, for example); we seek the universal, the essential. Feelings of hesitancy when using “if” will likely not be of the essence but quite idiosyncratic, and it is doubtful that they always occur even in a specific individual. So, the task won’t be easy—a good deal harder than identifying the overt behavior that goes with the logical symbols (though that isn’t easy either). But not all worthwhile endeavors are easy; let’s see what our efforts can come up with. Here I will focus on three semantic categories that have excited a good deal of interest from analytic (non-phenomenological) philosophers: names, demonstratives, and descriptions. For it is easier to do effective phenomenology when we already have a plausible analysis to work from: when we know what these linguistic devices mean and how they work, we can attempt to answer the question of their representation in consciousness. We can decide what it is like to use them once we know what their correct semantic analysis is. So: what is the consciousness of a being that uses and understands names, demonstratives, and descriptions? Specifically, what kind of intentionality is involved? To answer this question, I am going to assume certain well-known theories of these expressions; the task will be to spell out the phenomenological implications of these theories. First, names: what is the distinctive phenomenological content of consciousness when using a proper name? Assume the name is logically proper, a label for some object, a directly referential term; there is no mediating descriptive or conceptual or perceptual or imagistic content. Then we can say that consciousness grasps the bearer of the name without any intervening representational medium: there is no sense or mode of presentation standing between the speaker’s consciousness and the object denoted. There is immediate apprehension, direct contact, bare acquaintance: the being of the person or thing named is brought within consciousness without any help from other types of representation. (Sartre would say that consciousness is pure nothingness at this point, just empty directedness toward a particular being.) The intentionality involved is of the disappearing kind, i.e., the singular proposition in question contains the object named and nothing else. Its existence is contained in the intentional act. There is no phenomenological distance or rift between subject and object. Consciousness does not stop short of the fact (to quote Wittgenstein). The act of naming is primitive, isolated, and basic—a kind of bare pointing. This is linguistic consciousness at its most fundamental level (most child-like, we could say). But that isn’t all: in the case of actual names of natural language, there is a social dimension. The speaker is aware of his dependence on other speakers to secure a reference; these other speakers form another intentional object for him (another noema, as Husserl would say). He is aware of the social context of use, and hence of himself as a social being. Names link him to other people and his consciousness registers that fact. Thus, his field of intentionality includes, in addition to the reference of the name, the existence of other people on whom he is linguistically dependent (and perhaps dependent in other ways): not family resemblance but family reliance. He is part of a family of name users. So, his consciousness is permeated not only by objective particulars as the referents of names but also other people as mediators of naming practices: his mind reaches out to both entities in the act of naming. In the case of demonstratives, we have a different structure of intentionality: the social element is gone but something else takes its place as referential aid, viz context. The mind grasps the object by exploiting the context of utterance: a use of “that dog” secures a unique reference by occurring in a particular spatiotemporal context with a certain unique dog identified. Content is a function of character and context, as Kaplan would put it. And the speaker is aware of this; she knows that context enables her reference to work. Thus, her consciousness is directed towards the world in which demonstrative reference occurs—the world surrounding the act of speech. She is aware of herself as existing in a world of space and time, along with dogs and other objects of reference. She has what may be called extended intentionality (like the social world bound up with names). That is, she is aware of context, and hence of her place in the world. The intentionality here need not be sophisticated; it could just be egocentric space and time based on perceptual awareness (she need not have an objective conception of space and time). Still, her consciousness is directed to the world that constitutes context—as well as the part of the world she is currently referring to. Presumably this will involve bodily awareness, so that she is conscious of her own body as located. This is not true of naming, which could occur without the body (semantically speaking). In demonstrative reference the body is part of the apparatus, and this is represented in consciousness. Evidently, the same is true of “here” and “now” (the case of “I” is complicated). What is important, phenomenologically, is that consciousness extends beyond the immediate object demonstratively referred to (this is a truth of the phenomenology of the logic of demonstratives). The case of descriptions is different again: here the referential apparatus is confined to the words occurring in the description. Indeed, it doesn’t even extend beyond the reference of the predicates contained in the description: there is no reference to the object that satisfies those predicates at all (I am assuming Russell’s theory of descriptions). What we have is reference to universals (and acquaintance with same if we follow Russell) from which a uniquely identifying description is constructed. Consciousness never reaches beyond these, save derivatively. There is no direct singular reference to particulars. Nor is context or the social world invoked in the intentionality involved. Here the speaker is on his own with only his words to go on. His world is pro tem a world of universals; there might not even be any particulars in it. And he is aware of the indirectness, the distance, the fallibility of his attempt at reference to a world of particulars. This produces what we may call “referential anxiety”: it isn’t easy to generate a description that succeeds in achieving singular reference. There could be many objects in the world that satisfy the descriptions assembled. Descriptive intentionality is fraught with referential insecurity, because of the difficulty of guaranteeing uniqueness of reference. In a sense, descriptions are more intellectually demanding than names or demonstratives, because with them it is necessary to find words that fit the world: we must formulate such convoluted locutions as “There exists a king of France, and only one king of France, and this king of France is bald”. The speaker must hope that his existential proposition is true, and his uniqueness proposition, but these are eminently fallible. His consciousness is taxed and troubled by such exertions; his intentional acts are burdened with insecurity. He can’t rely on context or other people to help him out. This is why he often resorts to inserting names or demonstratives into his descriptions; it’s the only way to guarantee unique reference. So, phenomenologically, descriptive reference is in a class of its own: demanding, intellectualist, fraught, indirect, and restricted to universals. Names bring the world right up close; demonstratives bring in the world as context; descriptions don’t bring in the world at all (except indirectly). Accordingly, intentionality takes different forms in the three cases, shaping the phenomenological landscape. This is what (part of) the phenomenology of logic will look like.[1] We can thus imagine what a more extensive phenomenology of logic might include: truth-functional intentionality for the classical connectives, modal intentionality for modal logic (thoughts of possible worlds, property modifiers, etc.), intimations of plurality for quantifiers, and so on. Wherever there is a logical concept there will be a movement of consciousness corresponding to it; typically, it will involve a more complex form of intentionality than that contained in the concept itself. Phenomenology is characteristically holistic (in one harmless sense).[2]

[1] As phenomenologists like to say, this is all part of the “lived experience” of doing logic—logic as we actually experience it.

[2] The phenomenology of the whole sentence is particularly important to this holism. Grammatically, a sentence is said to express a “complete thought”.  Frege stressed the primacy of the sentence (the context principle) and regarded sentences as complete expressions. So, we would expect sentences to be accompanied by a form of intentionality that corresponds to this idea of completeness. There has to be an act of consciousness that constitutes recognition of such completeness. Since words have their meaning in sentences, the phenomenology of word meaning must somehow connect with the phenomenology of sentence meaning, which means that the sense of completeness will be implicit in the grasp of word meaning. Here is a potent source of phenomenological holism. Even if word meaning is incomplete, it will be experienced as involving the noema of completeness. Consciousness of word meaning always involves consciousness of complete sentence meaning. Intentionality is not atomistic.

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Linguistic Phenomenology

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Linguistic Phenomenology

J.L. Austin described his method as “linguistic phenomenology”. It is highly likely that this is an allusion to Husserl’s phenomenology: Husserl’s work was well known in Oxford in Austin’s time and Gilbert Ryle had a special interest in Husserl (he was a colleague of Austin’s). A cheeky allusion, perhaps, but an allusion nonetheless. However, there is no evidence that I know of that Austin ever studied Husserl, and if he did it made no discernible impact on him. Is Austin’s linguistic phenomenology at all like Husserl’s phenomenology? Do any of Husserl’s concepts show up in Austin’s work? Is Austin’s linguistic phenomenology phenomenological? Husserl’s phenomenology emphasizes consciousness, the first-person perspective, intentionality, noesis and noema, the epoche, suspension of the natural standpoint, and other concepts of the phenomenological tradition (going back to Descartes, Hume, Brentano, and others).[1] No trace of this is to be found in Austin’s writings; he is not doing the phenomenology of language at all, i.e., the way language manifests itself in consciousness. The notion of consciousness does not appear in Austin’s work on language. Nor does the notion of intentionality. There is no suspending of the natural standpoint in order to focus on the contents of consciousness as such. What Austin appears to mean by “phenomenology” is simply careful description as opposed to premature theory and spurious explanation, which is not a natural or normal interpretation of that word. Austin is surveying the phenomena of language but not doing the phenomenology of language. One would think that he might, after appropriating Husserl’s use of the word, make a point of investigating what Husserl has to say, but apparently, he did not (or it didn’t have any impact). In point of fact, Husserl does a good deal of linguistic phenomenology in his sense, investigating meanings, predication, propositions, indexicality, and other linguistic phenomena. But none of this seems to have influenced Austin’s work. Pity: it would have been interesting if Austin had produced a comparative study of himself and Husserl; and it might have enriched his own efforts. Actually, there is really no phenomenology in the analytic tradition devoted to language: what we call philosophy of language includes no phenomenology of language in Husserl’s sense. Frege discusses thought, but his philosophy of language makes no reference to consciousness, or even intentionality. Russell talks a lot about sense-data, but he never tries to describe what it is like to speak or understand speech. Wittgenstein is all logic and no consciousness in the Tractatus; and the Investigations, though avowedly descriptive, never examines language from the first-person point of view, preferring to look at it from the outside. Nor do we find any phenomenology in Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Strawson, Kripke, Montague, Searle, Kaplan, and numerous others. You might think that for this tradition meaning and consciousness have nothing to do with each other.[2] It is noteworthy that Husserl studied with Wundt as well as Brentano: so, he was steeped in introspectionist methodology, as opposed to the behaviorism that influenced later thinkers. In any case, there is no such thing as linguistic phenomenology in the analytic tradition. And this despite the fact that Husserl intended to found a school of philosophy that could claim to be a rigorous science (he was also a mathematician and physicist)—as analytic philosophy in some of its forms also aspired to be. What Husserl called “transcendental phenomenology” is not that different methodologically from the school of thought known as “ordinary language philosophy”, in that both seek to study the human creature as abstracted from the world of natural science: that is, consciousness as it is in itself independently of the natural world and language as a system of communication divorced from the reality outside of it—consciousness as such and speech as such. Ordinary language philosophy also had its epoche. Even speech act theory, which stresses the psychological aspects of speech behavior (Grice in particular), avoided consciousness and its inherent structures; so, real phenomenology never found a place in analytic philosophy of language. It is also interesting that what we might call “linguistic existentialism” never took off (except perhaps subliminally): I mean the application of concepts drawn from existentialism to speech. Sartre’s views derive from Husserl and deliver a distinctive approach to human existence, which might be carried over to language. Thus, is there any room for the contrast between Being and Nothingness and the idea of radical freedom in the philosophy of language? Is meaning an example of the intentionality of consciousness with its negative essence? Certainly, a Sartrean view of intentionality is opposed to a Fregean theory of sense and reference, since the conscious mental act has no nature not conferred by its reference—its essence is nothingness (compare the idea of direct reference, which also dispenses with mediating senses). And the idea that speech acts are instances of free action comports well with certain strains of thought concerning the nature of human action in general (I am thinking of Chomsky’s views on linguistic performance). So, we can see parallels between ideas found in existentialism and ideas familiar from the (so-called) analytic tradition. Sartre’s conception of consciousness as nothingness is redolent of Mill’s view of names (also Russell and Kripke), and his view of action as radically unconstrained is like Chomsky’s view of performance (and other libertarian views familiar from the analytic tradition). Accordingly, we can envisage linguistic existentialism as we can envisage linguistic phenomenology; and both have their counterparts in strands of the intellectual tradition more familiar to most of us (the “analytic”).[3] Austin could easily have become a phenomenologist and existentialist! He just needed to open up about consciousness and read some Husserl and Sartre. I suspect it was a deep-seated hostility to Descartes in the English-speaking world that inhibited that delightful rapprochement. Might it be because Descartes was a Frenchman, est-ce possible?[4]

[1] In case readers are wondering, my first published paper was on Mach and Husserl (1972).

[2] In all the literature on proper names and definite descriptions is there anything on the phenomenology of using names and descriptions? Don’t different kinds of meaning inhabit consciousness differently?

[3] I don’t believe there is any serious intellectual distinction between what are called “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy. The difference is purely geographical and linguistic (i.e., what language the philosophy is written in).

[4] I’m joking, of course, but I do find the hostility to Descartes hard to understand. Ryle had it in spades, and Wittgenstein nourished it, and Quine embodied it.  There is a clear line leading from Descartes through Locke, Berkeley and Hume, up through Russell, Brentano, and Husserl; but the twentieth century saw a determined effort to expunge his legacy from the canon. It’s quite puzzling but should not be underestimated. I do wonder whether, if he were an Englishman, the hostility would be quite so marked. No Englishman wants to be labeled a Cartesian. Something similar is true of Sartre.

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Cancellation and Quotation

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Cancellation and Quotation

Today I happened by chance on an article in Scientific American on panpsychism by Dan Falk. The second paragraph contains the sentences: “As philosopher David Chalmers asked: ‘How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?’ He famously dubbed this quandary the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.” In the second paragraph of my 1989 paper “Can We solve the Mind-Body Problem?” I write: “The specific problem I want to discuss concerns consciousness, the hard nut of the mind-body problem” and go on to say: “Somehow, we feel, the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness, but we draw a total blank on the nature of this conversion”. Chalmers’ book The Conscious Mind was published in 1996 (I reviewed it). Whose mistake is this? Will anyone correct it? Is it the result of cancellation? I suspect it is, which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sickening. Has it reached the point where my words are quoted admiringly and then attributed to someone else? I suppose the next thing will be that my books are attributed to another author!

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Data in Philosophy

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Data in Philosophy

Every academic subject requires a source of data. Without data a subject cannot thrive, survive, or even exist. History requires written documents of the past. Archeology requires preserved artifacts. Microbiology requires data from microscopes. Anatomy requires dissections. Atomic physics requires data from supercolliders. Astronomy requires light readings from telescopes. Zoology requires observations from the field. Psychology requires behavioral data from experiments. Chemistry requires records of chemical reactions. Paleontology requires fossils. Certain sorts of data fit the subject in question and allow it to develop and grow. Practitioners have to learn how to collect and interpret data. Theories have to be tailored to data. Some potential subjects don’t exist because there is no data to support and nourish them—there is no celestial zoology or anthropology. Data is a sine qua non. But what kind of data is suitable for philosophy? It can’t be without data of any kind, because then it would not be at all. Here matters turn controversial: it is a contentious question. Some say that the data are human experiences introspectively apprehended (phenomenology). Some say the data are intuitions about concepts (intuitionism). Some say the data are the results of thought experiments (conceptual analysts). Some say the data are the results of the several sciences (scientism). Some say the data are surveys of people’s opinions (experimental philosophy). Some say the data derive from the study of ordinary language (the linguistic turn). Some have said (though rarely today) that religious revelation affords the data of philosophical reflection (fundamentalism). Some (especially today) have even insisted that the data of the brain are the appropriate data for philosophy (neuro-philosophy). There is no consensus on what kind of data are right for philosophy; indeed, there is vigorous opposition to some of these schools. Some people prefer a pluralist perspective (I include myself in this category), looking for data anywhere they can find it (though I draw the line at religion and brain science). Psychology is the closest analogue to philosophy: since its inception as a science debate has raged as to what the right source of data should be—introspective data, behavioral data, cerebral data, computer data. This is why psychology has never been able to free itself of the taint of philosophy (its progenitor and prototype). But the real problem in philosophy is not lack of consensus about what data are kosher; it is that no data (so called) really add up to data—a solid foundation with a clear connection to philosophical theories. The problem is data paucity, data inadequacy, data ineptitude. In the case of astronomy, we are lucky that light from the distant universe reaches planet Earth relatively unimpeded (but those pesky clouds!), because we have little else to go on, and light data is quite impoverished. Imagine if we had to rely on sounds from outer space, or the occasional visit from a meteor, or sensations of heat: astronomy would hardly be possible. It would exist in a primitive state, barely making any progress, sorely lacking in consensus—a bit like philosophy, in fact. We want to know the answers to philosophical questions—the problem of free will, the mind-body problem, the objectivity or otherwise of ethics—but our data base provides little guidance. We examine our language, our inner experience, the relevant sciences, the results of thought experiments—and we just don’t make much progress. The data underdetermine the theories; worse, they don’t seem to make proper contact with the theories. J.L. Austin thought that if he just assembled enough data from the use of ordinary language the proper theory would reveal itself, but that hope was forlorn—the correct theory remained elusive. Nor does knowing all the science help much. Et cetera. We are like astronomers reduced to listening and feeling. In short, the data of philosophy are a pretty sorry bunch when it comes to solving the problems that they are wheeled in to solve (they may be rich and fascinating in themselves). They can never be cited as settling an issue, as the data of the sciences often are. The putative data are hardly dataat all, only hints or clues or bits of decoration. I don’t mean to denigrate philosophy in saying this—the questions are real and we have to go on what we have to go on—but the relation between data and theory is depressingly tenuous. We are operating in an evidential void, in effect. Nothing in our data base can decideanything, except perhaps some elementary conceptual questions (e.g., whether knowledge is true justified belief). Sure, we have arguments, some of them very good, and objections, some quite devastating, but we don’t have anything analogous to the data of other academic subjects. If we had no data at all, things would be a lot worse; it would be like trying to do extra-terrestrial zoology or artifact-free archeology. We do have something to go on—in fact, quite a lot—but it just isn’t all that probative, all that datum-like. It’s a bit like trying to learn about the sun just by feeling the warmth of its rays. Or not like that, because at least the sun’s rays are systematically connected to its actual nature. It’s more that the data—say, ordinary language—is disconnected from the nature of the thing that puzzles us—free will, consciousness, moral rightness. Words will only tell us so much about the things they refer to (imagine an ordinary language chemistry!). The alleged data don’t make close enough contact with the thing that puzzles us. Our subject matter seems out of reach of the data we marshal to shed light on it. What we want to do is gaze directly at the facts and see what their nature is, but that isn’t feasible, so we resort to remote “data”. We can’t tell what numbers are simply by looking at them, so we resort to indirect support for our hunches deriving from loosely associated phenomena—numerals, mental acts of calculation, feelings in the belly (the number 2 feels real). We are data deprived; data bereft. Our supposed data is hardly worthy of the name. The OED defines “datum” as “a piece of information” and “an assumption or premise from which inferences may be drawn”: but the data of philosophy don’t inform us of the philosophical truth, nor do they constitute premises from which philosophical truths can be deduced (or even induced). At best, they may be suggestive or corroborative, things we can brandish in philosophical debate, but they can’t be put into a graph or entered in a ledger as statistical facts raising the probability of a philosophical hypothesis (there is no philosophical t-test). That is why there is so much disagreement about the nature of philosophical data: it’s because nothing we have at our disposal constitutes data in the normal sense (if it did, we would all welcome it with open arms). Philosophy is not a data-driven science (or even a data-driven humanity like history or Russian literature). So, we hover in a strange no-man’s land methodologically: we are not data-independent (whatever that might be) but we are also not data-driven—we are only data-stimulated, data-inspired. We find various facts philosophically suggestive, but these facts don’t convert into something solidly datum-like. Hence the permanent possibility of philosophical ignorance (like the plight of the would-be astronomers deprived of light as a source of information). No data, no knowledge.[1]

[1] Philosophers don’t proceed by first presenting their data and then drawing inferences from it. They start with a theory that appeals to them and then hunt around for some data that seems to support it—from language, from science, from introspection. The data is never viewed as definitive or even probability-raising (in the statistical sense). Nor do they accumulate more data over time like a typical scientist, hoping to edge a theory into the acceptance zone. The role of data in philosophy is quite different, more like a seduction than a deduction—designed to entice not overwhelm. The social psychology of the use of data in philosophy would be worth studying.

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Determinacy of Translation

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Determinacy of Translation

The following seems logically possible: a speaker’s use of the word “rabbit” is accompanied by rapid changes in its meaning and denotation—at one moment meaning rabbit and at another meaning undetached rabbit part. This will not be apparent to an observer, since assent behavior will remain constant in the presence of rabbits (and their undetached parts). Perhaps the speaker’s brain is being manipulated from moment to moment by a mad scientist. Should we take this hypothesis seriously as a possible interpretation of the speaker’s words, declaring it on a par with the usual assumption of semantic constancy? Or should we take seriously the hypothesis that a speaker’s use of “+” is accompanied by rapid alternations over time between addition and quaddition as its meaning? Clearly, that would be bizarre, though we have to admit that such a thing is logically possible. Why not? Because the world does not change like that over time. Granted, it could, if circumstances were conducive. But we have no evidence of that and can reasonably reject the idea (it’s just another piece of hyperbolic skepticism). We can reasonably assume a certain uniformity over time—stability, constancy. But if that is right, can’t we make the same assumption across speakers? It is logically possible that another speaker means by “rabbit” undetached rabbit part, but that would be a breach of uniformity that we have no reason to countenance; we have no evidence that the other speaker means something so different from us. He is a human being like us, with the needs and senses we have, living the same kind of life, so why should he differ so oddly from us in his linguistic nature? We can dismiss the alternative hypothesis as just so much skeptical exaggeration, not warranting dramatic claims such as that meaning is inherently indeterminate. Just as we can assume constancy of meaning across time, so we can assume constancy of meaning across individuals—assuming we have no evidence of any peculiarity in the present instance. That is just sound methodology, common sense. Even if the behavior of the speaker underdetermines the commonsense attribution, it is still acceptable to stick with it. We would need some startling new information to make us question our normal procedure (as that a mad scientist is manipulating the brain of the other). And questioning our background assumption of uniformity across time and across individuals of the same species (etc.) looks like an excessive response to the problem of induction. Nature is uniform and we are entitled to rely on this assumption in governing our descriptions of the things of nature.
But this short way with indeterminacy claims will not satisfy proponents of that position, so it would be desirable to undermine on general grounds their confidence that the problem is real. First, consider inverted spectrum cases: it seems logically possible that a person’s color perception might vary over time, switching from red to green (and conversely) from moment to moment. Yes, but it is hardly likely in the absence of any positive reason to believe it—short of some radical skeptical doubt. Why? Because human beings are similar in their perceptual capacities and responses, so we can reasonably assume no departure from the norm. Granted, we can’t observe other people’s minds, but reasonable principles of psychological attribution allow us to make uniform attributions. Or consider the possibility that the human language of thought varies over time and from person to person—having one sort of grammar at one time and another at a different time, or varying from person to person. Sure, that is a logical possibility—we can’t be certain it is not so—but it is an outlandish hypothesis with nothing to be said in its favor (unless we discover that it is actually so for some reason). In all these cases there is a certain kind of empirical underdetermination, which allows skepticism to get a foothold, but that is no reason seriously to entertain bizarre alternative hypotheses about what is going on. Phooey, we might say. Still, the defender of indeterminacy might insist that the mind is special; it alone allows for these kinds of underdetermination problems. Is that true? What if electrons were to switch their charge with protons over time, alternating from negative to positive, but with no change in the observable behavior of the elements (I’m not saying this is really physically possible, only that it is an intelligible hypothesis)? Should we take such a possibility seriously? No, because the world doesn’t work like that: it stays stable, uniform–it doesn’t just switch for no reason. Similarly, it would be bizarre to suggest that some atoms obey the usual charge distribution while others invert it (inverted charge cases)—even if the evidence couldn’t conclusively establish otherwise. It isn’t as if the two hypotheses are equally likely! Or again, it is logically possible that some parts of space are Newtonian and some parts Einsteinian, but we can confidently rule this out given that space must have a uniform nature across its entire extent. It is even logically possible that space switches from Newtonian to Einsteinian across time, being in the Einsteinian state whenever we apply empirical tests; our observations don’t logically exclude this possibility. But none of this warrants the idea that space might really vary in these ways, or that it is indeterminate between the two conceptions of space. Empirical underdetermination has no such drastic consequences; and uniformity assumptions rule out these outlandish possibilities. So, psychological indeterminacy is no more credible than physical indeterminacy (actually less so, given the availability of the first-person perspective). This is a position frequently urged (e.g., by Chomsky), but it is worth seeing how hyperbolic the Quinean line really is. It inflates mere logical possibility into serious science. Natives (i.e., fellow humans) are no more likely to mean undetached rabbit part by “rabbit” than newly observed electrons are likely to be positively charged. Maybe in some possible worlds these things are so, but in the actual world we can safely dismiss them. There is a fact of the matter about what people mean and we can generally tell what it is.[1]

[1] There is nothing especially inscrutable about meaning and reference, any more than there is about syntax and pragmatics. We can tell that an utterance has a certain grammatical form and a certain illocutionary force, and we can tell what it refers to equally. This is why we can actually translate foreign languages—which ought not to be possible under Quinean strictures. And isn’t it strange that other parts of language allow for translation but not the few cases discussed by Quine? Some meanings are held to be knowable and determinate, but some are not—why? Really the doctrine should be called “indeterminacy of some translation”. You can’t even derive the indeterminacy of color words from Quine’s considerations—or mathematical language, moral language, mass terms, and more.  Some meaning, then, is perfectly determinate.

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Does Truth Matter?

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Does Truth Matter?

Theories of truth are very various, as if people can’t decide what kind of thing truth is. Is it just another name for consistency (coherence), an inter-propositional relation? Is it nothing at all, mere repetition of the proposition said to be true? Is it some sort of abstract correspondence between proposition and world, a picture or isomorphism of the facts? Or is it a way of talking about utility, benefit, what pays? You would think that truth is the opaquest of things, given the variety of theories of it. But people don’t tend to ask why truth matters, i.e., why we should care about it: whatever it is, why is it important? The pragmatist theory brings out the urgency of that question most clearly, because it aims to answer the question of mattering: truth is utility, and utility matters. We want to know what is useful, what works, and truth does that, since truth simply is the attribute of being conducive to success or well-being. Beliefs that are true are precisely beliefs that are good for us—prudentially valuable—and that is why truth matters. The other theories leave us hanging, because they don’t offer an answer to why we should care about truth: why should we care that our beliefs form a coherent whole, or that they stand in a relation of correspondence to the world, or that the word “true” allows for the re-assertion of the proposition that is true? We think truth is valuable, a good thing, and pragmatism gives a clear answer to why—because to be true is to be useful. Falsity is useless, counter-productive, harmful—so we avoid it. The value of truth thus receives a solid grounding, an explanation; and it’s not clear that any other theory does this. The trouble is that pragmatism is a false theory: it is neither necessary nor sufficient for truth that a proposition be useful. This is an old story that I won’t repeat (useless true beliefs, useful false beliefs); the point for present purposes is that without pragmatism truth comes to seem pointless, expendable, of no account. It is true that truth and utility are correlated to some degree, which is why the pragmatist theory looks promising at first: generally speaking, what is true is useful and what is useful is true (and what is false is harmful and what is harmful is false). But we can’t identify the two properties; the connection is contingent not constitutive. This leaves us with the question of why we should care about truth—what has it done for us lately? Let me set out the question as starkly as possible. Suppose that truth is some kind of correspondence (the most popular conception of truth)—a mapping between proposition and fact. And suppose we consider an astronomical belief about a remote galaxy that happens to be true but is not useful in any way. The truth of this belief confers no benefit on its holder or on anyone else; it has zero utility. Then why should anyone care about it? Why should anyone strive to ensure that the belief is true or worry that it might not be? It is a fact about the belief in question that has no conceivable utility for anyone. Consider another type of correspondence relation that might obtain between the individual and the galaxy, say that it has as many stars as the individual has hairs on his head—there is a mapping, an isomorphism, between the two. Who cares? What difference does it make? It’s just a quirky fact, an adventitious correspondence with no relevance to anything someone might care about. It doesn’t matter. Likewise, the truth type of correspondence doesn’t matter, because it bears no relation to what does matter, prudentially or morally.[1] Of course, some true beliefs matter because they feed into action and action matters to well-being, but this is what matters not truth as such. As soon as the belief is detached from action, its truth ceases to matter; it is the property of being useful that matters, whether truth is implicated or not. Truth only matters because it is instrumental in providing utility—its mattering is entirely extrinsic to its nature. The truth relation itself has no intrinsic value; only the relation between the belief and the action matters. So, we are under the illusion that truth matters, because it is correlated with successful action; its not mattering becomes evident when we detach truth from useful action, as in the astronomical example. That is, a belief’s being true is not a property of the belief that has intrinsic value, because truth itself is utility-independent. If pragmatism were true, we could say that truth is inherently valuable because it is identical with utility; but it isn’t true, so truth is left hanging, a kind of pointless add-on. If all our beliefs were suddenly rendered false, while retaining their utility, we would not be a shade worse off, simply because correspondence with the world is not an inherently beneficial relation (consider the Matrix). To put it differently, truth doesn’t care if it matters to us; it cares only that it stands in the right correspondence relation with the universe, no matter how distant or irrelevant to our concerns. It is sometimes said that truth is the property of standing for an existing state of affairs: but why should this abstract metaphysical property be of any concern to us? What would change if it ceased to obtain? Everything would go on as before. As long as beliefs retain their functional role, they serve to advance our needs and desires; whether they stand in this fancy relation to states of affairs is beside the point. Does animal belief stand in such a relation to the world, or is it rather a state with a certain function in the animal’s life? Does the animal care? Our brains exist on a planet at such and such a distance from some remote galaxy, but this fact is of no value to us, being irrelevant to what matters to us; similarly, our brains stand in truth-making correspondence relations to the same galaxy (assuming we have beliefs about it), but this fact too is of no value to us, being irrelevant to what matters to us. There is no benefit attached simply to being true, so it is not clear why it should matter (except instrumentally). Truth as such doesn’t matter. It is not a value. It has no value. True, truth doesn’t actively harm us (like being at a certain distance from a particular galaxy), but it is strictly irrelevant to what matters to us. It’s a don’t-care, a matter of indifference. If it turns out that my belief about that distant galaxy is false, my response ought to be “How interesting, but really I don’t give a damn”. Mere falsity is not a defect that ought to keep me awake at night. This ought to change our attitude to lying: it is not vicious to lie if the lie merely produces a false belief that has no untoward consequences for the well-being of the person lied to. I could lie about that galaxy and inflict no harm on my interlocutor. False beliefs can indeed sometimes confer benefits, and the mere fact of falsity is not in itself a harm. The truth is generally a good thing instrumentally, but this is not a rigid rule and anyway is not a fact about truth as such, as opposed to its usual correlates. By all means seek the truth, you will likely be better off that way, and so will other people, but don’t think that this shows that truth has intrinsic value. How could it, given its nature as an abstract mind-world correspondence? The correspondence theory, as opposed to the pragmatist theory, is really a recipe for truth demotion, if not truth demolition. Why should we even continue to talk this way, in view of its irrelevance to what matters? Instead of responding to defamation by saying “That’s false” we could say “That has the property of unfairly maligning someone”, since that is really what is wrong with defamation. Making false statements about someone is not wrong if it imputes good qualities to the person! Talk of truth and falsity here is just shorthand for such periphrases; it is never the real point at issue. It simply doesn’t matter whether a belief stands for an existing state of affairs or not (much the same has been said of scientific theories by those impressed by the difficulty of obtaining truth and its irrelevance to the primary aims of science). My own view is that truth exists and is a type of correspondence, but it is not intrinsically valuable (unlike goodness and beauty). It has no more value than lines of projection in geometry. What matters is utility, but truth is not utility. Pragmatism is false but eminently right-headed.[2]

[1] There is a rough analogy between this position and Derek Parfit’s position on personal identity. We thought that identity through time is what matters to survival, but certain thought experiments undermine this view. What matters to survival is psychological continuity not identity, though the latter is generally correlated with the former. Similarly, what matters in belief is not truth but utility, which is generally correlated with truth. (I am not saying here that I agree with Parfit.)

[2] Let me report that the position advocated here came as a surprise to me. I had always assumed that truth has value, but I hadn’t reckoned with the implications of the failure of pragmatism as a theory of truth. The key move is to recognize that the value of truth is instrumental not intrinsic. Pragmatism is right about value; its mistake is to locate value in truth itself. The correct analysis of truth shows that it has no intrinsic value. You might suppose that truth has value for the intellectually curious—they care whether their beliefs are true. But what if you have no such curiosity, like animals and most of mankind? Then truth has no value for you: it doesn’t bear on your actual concerns. Surely, we don’t want to say that the value of truth resides in the eccentric interests of rare intellectuals with too much time on their hands. The pragmatist doesn’t claim that truth is utility for the intellectually curious but not for anyone else. Perhaps the reason most people don’t care about the truth is that there is nothing about truth to care about, not intrinsically anyway. (That was not an easy sentence to write.) Truth is good if and only if it leads to the good.

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Against World-Making

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Against World-Making

There is a view out there, made respectable by Nelson Goodman, that the world is made not found—or rather, worlds, plural.[1] Worlds are versions, verbiage, visions (to parody Goodman’s alliterative style). They are not discovered, or uncovered; they are constructed, built. Is there any truth to this trope (merit to this meme)? Note that the view is not that our representations of the world are made; it is the view that the world itself is made. The world of nature is a mental production. Reality is reflection reified. Let us first observe that vast tracts of reality pre-date our existence, or that of any animal. There was a universe before there were reflective reifying beings, world-makers. How then could the world be made by us? Not by backwards causation, presumably, or time-travel. That pre-cognitive world had a nature, a way of being; it wasn’t just a formless blob in the void. It consisted of natural kinds of some sort. Moreover, it made us: we are the products of natural history, of pre-existing natural kinds. Indeed, our world-making is the result of the world, not its cause. More specifically, our bodies and minds are the outcome of genetic selection and environmental shaping—like all evolved organisms. And the made cannot make the maker: what made us is not made by us. Perhaps it is true that we make our representations of the world; they have their origins in us. Our language and way of seeing and conceptual scheme are features of us not antecedent reality, not the world that we try to represent. So, Goodman is quite wrong to suppose that the world consists of nothing but versions, a projection of our symbolizing tendencies. On the contrary, there had to be a world prior to our powers of description and depiction, because we came from somewhere somehow. History exists. On Goodman’s way of looking at things, we came into existence miraculously and proceeded to construct the world. Our brains are the source of all being, including our brains. But, of course, our brains are natural objects with a natural history; they are made by the world, not its maker. We are in the world; it is not in us. This is not to say that we are right in all our conceptions and perceptions of things: maybe we are mistaken about the world as it pre-existed our existence. Nor is it to say that our concepts are guaranteed to capture the natural kinds that pre-date our thinking about them. It is only to say that some sort of world had to exist in order to give rise to beings like us, capable of forming versions and viewpoints. In fact, we have a pretty good idea of what this world was like, but the claim that there had to be a ready-made world is not committed to the idea that our epistemological capacities are infallible guides to it, or even on the right track. Metaphysics is not epistemology. The point is that we are not world-makers; the world is a mind-maker. This will not be disputed in the case of other animals; they don’t create the world they live in by constructing versions of it. But Goodman is strangely silent on their world-making powers; it is the human animal that gets to make the world as it is. You would never guess from Goodman’s text that we evolved from earlier types of organism. Does he think that at one point in the distant past the world was the upshot of dinosaur world-making? Or is it that the world had to wait for human construction in order to spring into being? That is a pleasingly anthropocentric view of things but hardly historically realistic. For Goodman, we stand outside of time and arbitrate what goes on in time. He forgets that we are effects as well as causes. But is he completely wrong about world-making? He is not: much of what he says is perfectly reasonable, though exaggerated. We do construct worlds, impose categories, initiate realities. All of the arts are instances of world-making: literature, poetry, painting, music, theater, architecture, dance. These are human productions, though based on naturally given objects and laws. It is literally true that in literature we create fictional worlds. Art is made not found. It is also true that we impose our minds on the natural world: in our systems of measurement of time and space, in our classifications of things as edible or not edible, in our perceptual categories (color is plausibly seen as imposed not detected). We also construct social reality: money, marriage, social class, political systems. Our classifications are often interest-dependent not objectively determined. Our concepts are mainly species-relative. Truth is not the only measure of symbolic rightness or representational worth (what about painting?). The constellations are human choices not astronomical givens. Musical styles are not beholden to acoustic science. In all this we can agree with Goodman: not all aspects of the world are independent of the human perspective; we are inveterate world-makers. But notice that even these acts of making have their own inner reality: they have a nature of their own not created by human hand or eye. Thus, language itself is a natural phenomenon with an objective nature; we can’t just decide what language is, though we can decide how to use it to create fictional worlds. Language is factual not fictive (to employ a Goodmanian opposition). So is painting, music, etc. All symbols (in the broad sense favored by Goodman) are symbols in themselves not by fiat or fabrication. A tailor’s sample (Goodman’s example) is an item in the world not a figment or fancy. Figments and fancies in themselves have a psychological nature that can be investigated. Versions and visions have a reality that calls for objective study. We don’t make our own psychology as if from nothing. The laws of the mind are as real as the laws of physics, if less strict. The science of psychology is not an exercise in world-making, like imaginative literature. So, yes, there is a whole lot of world-making going in, but not all thinking is world-making, and what is has its own non-negotiable reality. In some cases, there can be genuine dispute as to whether we have a case of world-making or world-discovering—mathematics and morality are prime examples—but in other cases we are clearly under the thumb of nature not its architect. It’s not versions everywhere and all the way down. It’s not irrealism and relativism wherever you look—though certainly there is some of that (e.g., fiction and food preferences). Nature made us (we didn’t make nature), and we proceeded to construct our own worlds (I don’t disdain the term), and it is not always easy to see what belongs to what; but the idea that the entire world (including our psychology) is made by us is preposterous and demonstrably false. Moreover, all this is obvious, platitudinous, and banal. Denying it has all the attractions of novelty for its own sake and the excitement of intellectual daring, but it is not at all plausible.[2]                    

[1] See Ways of WorldMaking (1978). The book is enjoyable to read, sometimes sharp and perceptive, but vague at crucial points, especially when it comes to distinguishing worlds from what is said about them. Goodman eschews merely possible worlds, on the grounds that he doesn’t believe in them, even though they are prime candidates for the thesis that worlds are made not found, fabricated not discerned, fabulous not factual. Goodman’s worlds are all actual, all parts of this world. I suspect his main motivation is to ensure a reputable place for art in the panoply of the respectable—to locate aesthetics in the space of metaphysics. It isn’t that art is disreputably merely imaginary while science is resolutely factual; rather, everything is really imaginary when you get right down to it. Everything is artifact, artifice, artistry. Truth is just one kind of creative achievement (his wife was an artist, he an art dealer). Art is not inferior to science or philosophy on account of its unreality, because these subjects too traffic in the unreal. Physics is not so different from cubism.    

[2] So why are people tempted by such views? I suspect it is simply because it is easy to conflate worlds with views of worlds: the phrase “our world” is ambiguous between these two things—does it mean ‘the world-as-we-conceive-it” or does it mean “the world-as-it-actually-is”? Of course, our conception of the world is in us, but it doesn’t follow that the world itself is in us. Language is in us, but not what language is used to talk about. We can’t conceive the world without conceiving it, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that the world is intrinsically constituted by our acts of conceiving. Does anyone believe that the world owes its existence to the conceptual resources of the armadillo (except a Goodman of the armadillo species)? A use-mention confusion lurks behind all such ideas and conceals their complete wackiness.     

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Geometrical Knowledge

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Geometrical Knowledge

How do we come to have geometrical knowledge? How do we acquire geometrical concepts? The question has been around since Plato and his theory is still probably the best—we have such knowledge innately. But this doesn’t answer the question of what triggers the innate knowledge (it isn’t there fully formed from the start): what in our experience enables the innate knowledge to enter our consciousness in explicit articulate form? It can’t be Socratic interrogation because someone has to have the knowledge without such interrogation, and obviously most people don’t learn what a triangle or circle is by explicit verbal instruction. Is it by seeing shapes, or touching them? But how do we see and touch shapes—how does our experience come to have this kind of geometrical content? You might suppose that triangles and circles are present in the stimulus as it reaches the sense organs, ready to picked off like apples from a tree, but this is not the case. The pattern of light that impinges on the retina is notoriously fragmented, fluctuating, and fleeting; yet the concepts of geometry are fixed immutable forms, as Plato emphasized. The proximal stimulus is remarkably impoverished compared to the representational powers that exist in the mind; no mere copying process could produce the latter from the former. You can’t make a Euclidian purse from a retinal sow’s ear. In fact, as we now appreciate, the visual system makes elaborate computations that lead from the mess on the retina to a stable, intelligible, three-dimensional sensory world—a world of shaped objects in space. We see an objective world of determinate forms based on a stimulus that is anything but, thanks to our sophisticated visual processing mechanisms. Vision science investigates these mechanisms and it has made impressive progress. Can we conjoin this with Plato’s innateness hypothesis to answer the question of the origin of geometrical knowledge? It sounds like a promising idea, but we need to be more specific about the eliciting stimulus that triggers the innate schematism: what is it exactly that causes geometrical understanding to form in the mind? There is an innate structure in the mind-brain of unknown character, and somehow the course of experience elicits it; but what is it about the perceptual system that makes it suitable for performing this role? What does it do that leads to the formation of geometrical understanding? I suggest the following: it works by means of perceptual constancies. As is well known, the visual system (and tactile) corrects for variations in the proximal stimulus that result from changes of distance, illumination, perspective, and so on. It extracts distal invariants from proximal variations, thus producing a world of objective forms from an array of idiosyncratic subjective impingements.[1] These forms—shapes, among other qualities—constitute the geometry of the human visual world. They are generated by a process of correction applied to the proximal stimulus. Thus, we perceive cubes and spheres and other forms that are not subject to the vagaries of the proximal stimulus. The visual system attributes these forms to distal objects. This is not to be understood as a process of conscious rational thought but as an automatic unconscious computational mechanism (unreasoning animals have it too). Perceptual constancies are primitive properties of visual systems, which can occur in creatures that lack rational thought. However, in the case of humans rational thought does coexist with perceptual constancy, and an innate potential for geometrical understanding comes with the genes; in humans, geometrical knowledge can flower. We have the conception of geometrical forms as fixed determinate shapes with specific properties by virtue of a combination of innate schematism, rational thought, and perceptual constancy—with the last of these doing the heavy lifting. This is the capacity that triggers the formation of geometrical understanding, given the right innate structure. For it deals in perceptual invariants, objective shapes, a repertoire of determinate geometric forms—not in flickering patterns of light striking the retina. There is no geometry worthy of the name in the patches of light that cause nerve endings to fire in the retina, but by the time the visual system has done its work a fully formed geometry has been attributed to the distal environment. It only remains for this visual geometry to interact with the system of representations we call “innate ideas” and we have the roots of geometrical understanding—concepts of triangles, circles, etc. Perceptual constancies are vital to this process of cognitive production. It isn’t that distal objects somehow emit shapes that end up on the retina and can be copied by the brain to yield shape concepts; the shapes have to be generated by the visual system from clues contained in the proximal stimulus. Perceptual representational content is endogenously generated from perceptual primitives and then attributed to the environment; geometrical knowledge, as we ordinarily conceive it, results from the interaction between this system and the innate endowment we bring with us into the world. It is as if the innate geometry lies dormant in us until stimulated by the operations of the perceptual systems as they impose constancies on the data of sense. This capacity arises early in all perceiving creatures, so human children are primed to output geometrical competence before the school years begin: they are then ready for formal geometrical instruction. They know what triangles and circles are well before they are taught their mathematical properties. They have been having experiences as of triangles and circles from an early age—forms subject to perceptual constancies—so they are acquainted with geometrical figures; they just need to attach these perceptual primitives to their innate system of “ideas”. The triggering is perceptual, but not in the way the old empiricists supposed, i.e., by a copying procedure; rather, perceptual constancies play the eliciting role. Not that any of this is easy to understand—the nature of the innate schematism, the act of triggering—but it is the general character of the formation of geometrical knowledge. In the case of language an innate schematism is triggered by verbal sensory input, and the child comes to understand what words and sentences are (a basic level of grammatical knowledge); in the case of geometry the same kind of thing happens, only here the innate schematism is triggered by a perceptual system that is built around constancy effects. When a ball, say, moves away from the perceiver, retaining its apparent size as the retinal image shrinks, this embodies the idea of a geometrical form that persists across space and time; it is an invariant in a world of variation. It is the primitive prototype of Plato’s eternal geometric forms existing in a flux of fleeting impressions. Constancies imply permanence amid change, and that is precisely what Platonic forms are supposed to be. Geometric objects are constancies idealized.[2]

[1] For a thorough discussion of perceptual constancy, see Tyler Burge, Origins of Objectivity (2010) and Perception: First Form of Mind(2022).

[2] Our knowledge of color is not dissimilar. There is also color constancy and this affects our conception of color: we don’t think of colors as varying with every change of illumination, etc. We think of colors as invariant under variation of proximal stimulus, and hence as possessing a certain sort of objectivity. We can then study colors as stable qualities with a fixed nature. If colors and shapes were conceived as varying with the proximal stimulus, we could hardly study them at all—they would be too fleeting and lacking in any fixed nature. They would not be colors and shapes as we know them (there would be no such thing, for us, as the color red or the shape square).

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