A Selective Retrospective on Ordinary Language Philosophy

 

The following is an essay on various good, bad and commonplace examples of ordinary language philosophy.

J.L. Austin (1911–1960)

In 2003, the American philosopher Hilary Putnam offered his own not-entirely-critical retrospective on the same subject. Indeed, he offered some examples of “traditional” philosophical locutions which ordinary language philosophers would have deemed to be suspect:

“The fact that we never speak of ‘directly perceiving’ and ‘not directly perceiving’ in everyday language in the way that traditional epistemologists do was a sign that something was really quite wrong with the traditional philosophy of perception, something already noticed in the eighteenth century by Thomas Reid, by the way. Reid sounds very Austinian when he fulminates against the strange ways philosophers talk about perception. I think that’s a corrective one should apply to one’s own thought.”

It’s no doubt true that the phrases “directly perceiving” and “not directly perceiving” are somewhat contrived (i.e., regardless of one’s philosophical position on this) — but so what!

The problem with Putnam’s position above is that it may not (or will not) allow philosophers any leeway to say anything new because that would be bound to go against the dictates of “everyday language”. Would we say the same kind of thing to poets when they use a strange metaphor — that they too are going against everyday language? (Herbert Marcuse’s and Jacques Derrida’s criticisms of ordinary language philosophy will be mentioned later.)

In addition, the very fact that philosophy is an academic discipline (that is, a specialism) surely means that it’s bound to say novel things in novel ways. Indeed the American philosopher Richard Rorty, for example, argued that it’s the duty of philosophers to say strange things in strange ways. [See here.]

Was J.L. Austin a Conservative Philosopher?

Jacques Derrida, and Herbert Marcus before him, categorised the ordinary language philosopher J.L. Austin as a “conservative philosopher”. In my own view too, he was. However, both Marcuse and Derrida meant it as a criticism which was somewhat equivalent to calling someone a paedophile. However, it needn’t be critical. It simply depends.

The following oft-quoted passage best sums up Austin’s conservatism:

“Thirdly, and more hopefully, our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetime of many generations: they surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you are I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon — the most favoured alternative method.”

Taken at face value, there are obvious problems with that passage. For one, how can it be known that

“our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetime of many generations”?

Say that Austin wrote this a hundred or a thousand years before he actually did write it. Would it have still been the case that “our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing”? Not all men have access to all distinctions and connections. Some men make distinctions and connections which are at odds with other men. And is it really the case that each generation of “ordinary men” reach the limit of all “sound” and worthwhile distinctions and connections?

In addition, the distinctions and connections made may be false, and yet they still (to use Austin’s word) “survive”. More precisely, Austin mentioned “the long test of the survival of the fittest” — yet many evolutionary theorists will tell you that truth is often not needed when it comes to survival. For example, many religious beliefs are obviously false, yet they may be conducive to survival in various circuitous ways. Moreover, false “commonsense” beliefs may also be conducive to survival, and the “fittest” may believe more falsehoods than the weakest.

Finally, it doesn’t seem out of the question that (at least sometimes) the connections and distinctions philosophers “think up in [their] arm-chairs of an afternoon” are truer, more correct, or even more useful than those thought up by what Austin calls “men”.

J.L. Austin is Boring

Many commentators have found Austin’s philosophy to be boring or almost pointless. Thus, it’s no surprise that the American philosopher Thomas Nagel said that “J.L. Austin was fascinated by many details of language for their own sake”. So here’s an example of that:

“‘It was a mistake,’ ‘It was an accident’ — how readily these can *appear* indifferent, and even be used together. Yet, a story or two, and everybody will not merely agree that they are completely different, but even discover for himself what the difference is and what each means.”

Perhaps it was the Austinian tradition that made that sad person complain about “split infinitives” when the newsreader announced the shooting of Pope John Paul II. In other words, Austin’s kind of analysis can lead to mere pedantry, rather than philosophical insight.

In any case, do many — or even any — people deem the phrases “It was a mistake” and “It was an accident” to be literal synonyms? I doubt it. Perhaps, then, Austin wasn’t claiming that people believe they are synonyms. However, they still go on to use them interchangeably. Moreover, can using these phrases interchangeably really lead to any serious consequences? It can be supposed that they could do in various contrived scenarios in which people really do believe that they’re literally synonymous phrases.

Austin is also well-known for bringing in the notion of a “speech-act”. He did so primarily because he claimed that philosophers (at least the ones he was concerned with) believed that sentences are only used to state facts or describe states of affairs… Philosophers, surely, couldn’t have believed that. After all, even analytic philosophers or German “system-builders” must have used phrases such as “Shut that door” or “Shut the fuck up”. Instead, didn’t such philosophers simply focus on fact-stating sentences for various philosophical and logical reasons?

Logical Form

It’s often said that the primary ordinary-language position was that “philosophical problems are largely a product of the misuse, or misconstrual, of language”. (This was basically Ludwig Wittgenstein’s position at one point in his career.) Of course, it’s hard to decipher what that could even mean without doing a lot of background reading.

Prima facie, any claim that language is “misuse[d]” or “misconstru[ed]” is surely suspect, and that applies just as much to ordinary-language philosophers as it did to the “early Wittgenstein” and Bertrand Russell. According to the ordinary philosophers, philosophical discourse is misused and misconstrued when it moves too far away from ordinary language. On the other hand, according to the tradition the ordinary philosophers reacted against, language is misused or misconstrued because ordinary folk don’t understand what it is they’re actually saying.

So why is “everyday usage” or, alternatively, “logical form” something that should be obeyed… in all circumstances? More strongly, language can only be misused or misconstrued according to a prior philosophy or ideology. In other words, only through the prism of that philosophy or ideology is language misused and/or misconstrued.

All that said, I believe that J.L. Austin was right about the early-20th-century concern with logical form.

Firstly, let Bertrand Russell speak for himself:

“Some kind of knowledge of logical forms, though with most people it is not explicit, is involved in all understanding of discourse. It is the business of philosophical logic to extract this knowledge from its concrete integuments, and to render it explicit and pure.”

The logical form was supposed to be there all along — underneath or behind everyday expressions. Thus, it was the philosophers job to dig deep and discover the logical forms of everyday and of (prior) philosophical expressions.

Now take this passage from Russell:

“The fact that you can discuss the proposition ‘God exists’ is a proof that ‘God’, as used in that proposition, is a description not a name. If ‘God’ were a name, no question as to existence could arise.”

W.V.O Quine (for one) had no problem at all with the naming of non-beings or non-existents. (Non-being and non-existence aren’t the same thing.) In his 1948 paper, ‘On What There Is’, he dismissed Russell’s position. (Quine, however, put Russell’s words in the mouth of McX and used the name “Pegasus” rather than the name “God”.) Quine wrote:

“He confused the alleged named object Pegasus with the meaning of the word ‘Pegasus’, therefore concluding that Pegasus must be in order that the word have meaning.”

So was Russell misled by grammar and metaphor, as the late Wittgenstein might well have argued? (Admittedly, Russell didn’t often use the words “underneath” and “behind”. However, he did use such words as “extract this knowledge”.)

Personally, I don’t have much time for Russell’s argument about the logical forms underneath or behind everyday expressions. It seems to have the character of a philosophical stipulation. (As with the logical positivists’ use of the word “meaningless”!) It’s primary purpose was logical and philosophical. (At that time, Russell was reacting to the, as Quine later put it, “ontological slums” of the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong.) However, this semantic philosophy (as stated) simply seems like a stipulated (or a normative) position designed to solve various perennial philosophical problems.

Are Insects and Plants Organic Machines?

 This essay asks the following question: Are insects and plants organic machines? It does so in the contexts of Robert Kirk’s semi-mechanistic position and Philip Goff’s panpsychism.

The British philosopher Robert Kirk (as found in his paper ‘How is Consciousness Possible?’) uses the term “pure stimulus-response system” to refer to the behaviour of a fruit fly. The panpsychist Philip Goff, on the other hand, doesn’t even see the behaviour of plants in such mechanistic terms. Indeed, his position on trees particularly seems to be obviously (at least to me) anthropomorphic.

The position of the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose (on the complex behaviour of paramecium) is also discussed. Whether Penrose’s position is another example of panpsychism is open to debate. (Penrose himself throws various spanners into the works.)

Weighing Machines and Plants

Robert Kirk argues that a weighing machine “can do nothing with the information” it receives from the inputs — i.e., things placed on the scale. However, the machine does react differentially to different weights. Thus, “it gives us information we can use”. Yet, more relevantly, this machine “cannot assess its situation, and it cannot initiate or control its behaviour”. It is, according to Kirk, a “pure stimulus-response system”.

Is a weighing machine pretty much like a plant in these respects?

The panpsychist philosopher Philip Goff thinks not.

Although a plant can be seen as a “pure stimulus-response system” (even if biological), Goff chooses to see things differently. He writes:

“[W]e now know that plants communicate, learn and remember. I can see no reason other than anthropic prejudice not to ascribe to them a conscious life of their own.”

It’s important to note here that Goff doesn’t use the words “communicate”, “learn” and “remember” metaphorically (or loosely). He really believes that plants have a “conscious life of their own”. Yet plants may be similar to weighing machines in at least the respects so far discussed.

In Kirk’s own terms: does a plant “asses its situation” or “initiate or control its behaviour”? A plant certainly behaves differentially to different external conditions — as does a weighing machine. But does it initiate or control its behaviour? Yes, but only in the strict and limited sense that every plant of the same species does so in the same way. And if every plant responds in the same way to the same external conditions (or stimuli), then is it correct to say that it initiates or controls its behaviour? Semantically, or in terms of stipulation, perhaps it is.

Similarly, does a plant “asses its situation”?

Again, yes, but only in the same way that every other plant of the same species does so. So, in identical conditions or with identical stimuli, all plants of a given species (to use scare quotes) “behave” or “respond” in the same way. However, if there are any slight differences, then that will be because there are slight differences in the environment which haven’t necessarily been noted.

Computers, garden sensors, piano strings, weighing machines, etc. respond to stimuli is specific ways. So too do plants.

So does biology make a difference here?

Next comes the possibility of interpreting the behaviour of plants in human-like terms. And that’s precisely what Philip Goff does. He writes:

“The mycorrhiza structures [between tree roots and fungi] allow for a complex system of egalitarian redistribution.”

We’ve already seen that Goff believes that plants “communicate, learn and remember”. And it can be concluded that all his interpretations must surely be based on the physical behaviour of plants, not on any access to their (to use Rudy Rucker’s terms) “inner lives”.

Monica Gagliano on Pea Plants

Philip Goff then cites an experiment by Professor Monica Gagliano. He writes:

“In order to set up a similar scenario with her pea seedlings, Gagliano put a pea plant at one end of a Y-shaped tube, so that it could grow in either of two directions, left or right. In one direction was the seedling’s ‘food,’ in the form of blue light. In normal circumstances, the pea seedlings will instinctively grow toward where the light was last present. However, Gagliano tested whether the seedlings could associate the sound of a computer fan with the presence of the blue light, by repeatedly placing the noise at the end of the tube where the blue light was located. Upon repeated trials, she found that just as Pavlov’s dogs had salivated at the sound of the bell, so the pea seedlings grew toward the noise of the computer fan. In both cases, a sound that was initially meaningless to the organisms had come to represent dinnertime.”

Plants don’t need to hear sounds or see light. Despite that, they can still be causally affected by both sound and light.

More particularly, isn’t it the case that the seedlings in this experiment would have also been causally affected by the sound of a computer fan? So rather than the seedlings “associat[ing] the sound of a computer fan with the presence of the blue light”, they might have simply been causally changed by the sound of the fan instead of the blue light.

So where does Goff’s supposition of association come from?

In more detail. Light is a wave and sound is also a wave — both with very determinate physical natures. Thus, the seedlings might have moved toward the sounds of the computer fan because — in many respects — they were like the waves of blue light. This means that the sound waves of the fan must have causally impacted on the seedlings, just as the light waves had done so previously.

So there’s no (immediate?) need to talk of “meaning”, “association”, “value”, etc. — as both Goff and Gagliano do.

To repeat: might the sound waves (from the fan) have had a similar causal impact on the seedlings as the waves of (blue) light had previously done?

[See the BBC’s ‘Light and sound — reflection and refraction’.]

Goff must also know that even non-biological (i.e., artificial) objects display “movement” in response to their environments.

Take computers and other electronic devices.

Such entities change or move in (causal) response to that which is external to them. Yet, oddly enough, Goff himself doesn’t believe that computers are — or even can be — conscious. Indeed, he spends some time in Galileo’s Error saying so — if only implicitly. (At the very least, Goff seems to be sympathetic to John Searle’s well-known Chinese Room argument.)

Despite focussing on Goff’s panpsychist position on Gagliano’s experiment, it seems that Gagliano herself is a panpsychist… of sorts. (Perhaps that’s why Goff noted her experiments in the first place.)

For example, Gagliano states (as quoted by Goff) the following:

“‘If the plant is imagining its dinnertime arriving, based on a simple fan that is associated to the light, then who is doing the imagining? Who is thinking here?’”

It’s clear (even if only from Goff’s own words in Galileo’s Error) that Gagliano already had reasons to believe — or hope — that she’d find the results she found. (See Fudge Factor and Experimenter-Expectancy Effect.) After all, according to Goff himself, she actually set up a “similar scenario” to Ivan Pavlov’s well-known experiments on dogs in order to see if her pea seedlings would behave in the same — or in a similar — manner to dogs.

Roger Penrose on Paramecium

In a similar (though far from identical) vein are the words of the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose. Of all animals, Penrose actually cites the case of the single-celled paramecium. He writes:

“For she [a paramecium] swims about her pod with her numerous tiny hairlike legs — the cilia — darting in the direction of bacterial food which she senses using a variety of mechanisms, or retreating at the prospect of danger, ready to swim off in another direction. She can also negotiate obstructions by swimming around them. Moreover, she can apparently even learn from her past experiences [].”

One can detect certain anthropomorphic words and phrases here too.

For example, “retreating at the prospect of danger”, “negotiate obstructions, and “learn from her past experiences”. That said, these words are probably (or possibly) used because it will have been very hard to think of any alternatives.

In any case, can’t the paramecium “darting in the direction of bacterial food”, “retreating at the prospect of danger”, “negotiat[ing] obstructions” and “learning from her past experiences” all be explained mechanistically? (Penrose himself uses the words “which [the paramecium] senses using a variety of mechanisms” about a paramecium.)

Penrose then discusses the paramecium in the specific context of panpsychism, as well as in the context of the possible lack of importance of neurons when it comes to consciousness. He writes:

“If we are to believe that neurons are the only things that control the sophisticated actions of animals, then the humble paramecium presents us with a profound problem.”

Finally, Penrose asks his readers a question:

“How is all this achieved by an animal without a single neuron or synapse? Indeed, being but a single cell, and not being a neuron herself, she has no place to accommodate such accessories.”

Penrose answers his own question by focussing on the relevance of cytoskeletons and microtubules. He writes:

“It is the cytoskeleton’s role as the cell’s ‘nervous system’ that will have the main importance for us here. For our own neurons are themselves single cells, and each neuron has its own cytoskeleton!”

More relevantly:

“Does this mean that there is a sense in which each individual neuron might itself have something akin to is own ‘personal nervous system’?”

Yet Penrose does indeed qualify his stance with the following words:

“[I]t must also be the case that the detailed neural organization of the brain is fundamentally involved in governing what form that consciousness must take. Moreover, if that organization were not important, then our livers would evoke as much consciousness as do our brains.”

Despite all the above, Penrose is at his most (well) panpsychist when he concludes:

“[S]uch (putative) non-computational processes [i.e., in the brain] would also have to be inherent in the action of inanimate matter, since living human brains are ultimately composed of the same material, satisfying the same physical laws, as are the inanimate objects of the universe.”

Robert Kirk on the Fruit Fly

Let’s now move up a few evolutionary levels and tackle the fruit fly.

Robert Kirk writes:

“Much of the behaviour of many insects seems to conform to that pure stimulus-response pattern.”

However, Kirk immediately qualifies (or questions) this position when he tells us that “since even the fruit-fly is able to find its way home, it is capable of learning”. Thus, to Kirk, a fruit fly “is not a pure stimulus-response system in my sense”.

Some readers may wondering if being “able to find its way home” stops a fruit fly from being a stimulus-response system. After all, even its reactions to new environments may still be “hard-wired”. In other words, different environments elicit differential responses which are also machine-like.

For example, roses “act” differentially in different environments. More specifically and obviously, a plant may flower more in one environment than a plant of the same age and species in a different environment.

Kirk also writes:

“[F]lies are hardwired so that if their feet break contact with a surface, their wings are automatically caused to buzz; and if their feet make contact with a surface, their wings are automatically caused to stop buzzing. Similarly, if their feet are in contact with a surface and that surface emits certain chemicals, the fly’s mouth-parts are caused to go into action. (With luck, the surface will be decaying meat.)”

It can be asked how the experts on flies actually know all this. More relevantly, how does Kirk himself know that the fruit fly’s responses are automatic? Even though there are — obviously — hardwired elements to both a fruit fly’s body and its responses, there still may be a remainder which takes it beyond responding automatically. That said, it can be strongly doubted that this is, in fact, the case.

Artificial Consciousness: Mental Acts and Conscious States

 

This essay is a response to, and a commentary upon, Dieter Birnbacher’s paper ‘Artificial Consciousness’, which can also be found in the book Conscious Experience (edited by Thomas Metzinger). In that paper Birnbacher make a useful distinction between what he calls “states of consciousness” and “mental acts”. The word “useful” has been used because I’m not entirely convinced by his position. Or, more accurately, I’m not entirely convinced by Birnbacher’s stipulative position on the words “mental acts” and “consciousness”.

Dieter Birnbacher offers his readers an analysis which shows that we can interpret a non-biological entity in entirely behavioural terms and still class it as displaying consciousness. However, that’s simply because he defines the word “consciousness” in two distinct ways: “states of consciousness” and “acts of consciousness”. (Birnbacher usually writes “mental acts”.)

In the following passage, Birnbacher makes this distinction:

“Whereas the statement N is in pain, feels comfortable or is depressed implies that N experiences certain states of consciousness, it is doubtful whether the statement N thinks, means, intends, calculates, perceives, concludes or understands implies in an analogous fashion that N performs a corresponding act of consciousness. In many cases, these concepts can be ascribed even if there are no corresponding acts of consciousness.”

The controversial part of the above is the following:

“[I]t is doubtful whether the statement N thinks, means, intends, calculates, perceives, concludes or understands implies in an analogous fashion that N performs a corresponding act of consciousness.”

Of course, Birnbacher’s examples of pain and feeling are often deemed to be subjective states, rather than mental acts.

Birnbacher’s distinction can now be applied to the subject of this essay: artificial consciousness. He writes:

“Unlike the concepts of sensory and affective states, the concepts of mental acts can be interpreted in a way in which they are applicable to entities which (apart from their external performance) are no proper objects for the ascription of states of consciousness.”

So computers (or artificial entities) can act as if they’re carrying out mental acts simply because they are, indeed, carrying out… acts. And acts are observable. Thus, these physical acts fall under the category of “external performance”. States of consciousness, on the other hand, are… states, and are not as easy to observe — at least not if they’re “internal”.

“Sensory and affective states” cannot be observed as such. However, they can still be behaviourally expressed. That said, it is these subjective states which are behaviourally expressed. So it’s not the case that the subjective states themselves actually are the behavioural expressions. In other words, behavioural expressions are acts, not states.

Despite all that, Birnbacher acknowledges that

“[c]oncepts of mental acts are ambiguous in a twofold way: they have, first, a ‘consciousness-sense’ in which they are applicable only to beings capable of consciousness”.

So mental acts too can be deemed to come along with consciousness. Birnbacher’s argument is that this needn’t be the case. In other words, many people believe that if an entity (to use two of Birnbacher’s own examples) calculates and concludes, then it must also be conscious. Birnbacher believes that such acts needn’t come along with consciousness. Indeed, computers do actually calculate and conclude. Yet Birnbacher also believes that computers, etc. “literally” think, calculate and understand. So, counterintuitively and in Birnbacher’s view, thinking, calculating and understanding needn’t come along with consciousness.

Birnbacher also expresses all the above in the following way:

“[Concepts of mental acts] have, secondly, an ‘achievement-sense’ in which they can be applied also to non-conscious entities such as computers and scanners, provided they show the relevant outward performance.”

Birnbacher then draws out a radical conclusion to his argument:

“In this latter sense, one can, in a completely unmetaphorical way, say of a computer that it *thinks, calculates or understands*, or of a scanner that it *perceives* certain things, without thereby suggesting that these entities are in any way conscious. Sentences such as ‘The chess computer means *this* pawn, not the pawn in front of your king.’ or ‘This scanner does not adequately see the diacritical signs,’ can be *literally* true.”

It’s easy to see why it’s the case that if thinking, calculating, understanding and perceiving are uncoupled from consciousness, then these words needn’t be taken to be metaphorical. Yet, arguably, this is simply a case of stipulation on Birnbacher’s part.

So what work do the words “literally true” do when thinking, understanding, calculating and perceiving are uncoupled from consciousness? This isn’t to argue that there can’t or shouldn't be such an uncoupling. It’s just that the these claims can only be “literally true” if one already accepts Birnbacher’s prior stipulations.

To get back to mental acts again.

In Birnbacher’s view, mental acts needn’t come along with consciousness. What’s more, they needn’t come along with subjectivity, and all the other characteristics many people usually associate with states of subjectivity. Birnbacher certainly makes this case in the following passage:

“What is irreducibly subjective, however, is the affective quality, the specific ‘colour’ of the emotion, including its hedonic tone and its felt intensity and depth. In virtue of this qualitative component emotions are more than the sum of cognition, excitement and appetition or aversion.”

Wittgenstein and Behaviourism

Dieter Birnbacher traces this behaviourist tradition (i.e., when stressing what he calls “mental acts”) to Ludwig Wittgenstein. In Birnbacher’s own words:

“Wittgenstein stresses the primacy of behavioural, especially expressive, criteria for inner states over against neurological indicators. Some of the effects of inner states — their expressions in behaviour — is given the status of criteria, whereas their neural causes are only assigned the status of symptoms.”

In the literature, sometimes it’s hard to fathom if Wittgenstein actually factored out “inner states” completely or simply stressed the point that behavioural expressions (qua “criteria”) are our only access to other people’s inner states. (In effect, inner states become beetles in boxes in Wittgenstein’s scheme.)

Wittgenstein’s behaviourism is also expressed by Birnbacher in the following way:

“[F]or Wittgenstein, certain behavioural criteria are necessary conditions, not of the occurrence of conscious states and acts in others, but of the *ascription* of such states and acts to others.”

This passage chimes in with my former point that it wasn’t that Wittgenstein denied that the “inner states” of other people existed, but that all we have access to is their verbal and physical behaviour. Indeed, Birnbacher also makes a Wittgensteinian point when he says that “the concept of pain is not only characterised by what pains are by themselves but also ‘by its particular function in our life’”.

The arguments against (pure) behaviourism (or inner-state eliminativism) are well-rehearsed. Birnbacher offers his own argument here:

“Bernard Rollin has drawn attention to the fact that the habit of cows who have been operated on to eat immediately after surgery must not be interpreted as proof that they feel no postoperative pain. There are rather good evolutionary reasons for the cow not to show typical pain behaviour though being in pain: The cow depends much more on regular feeding than humans (she would be considerably weakened by not eating), and she would be recognisable to predators by not grazing with the herd. If we want to know whether a cow hurts or not, an EEG is in any case the better criterion [ ].”

In this case at least, behaviourism is a bad position to uphold when it comes to animal rights. Indeed, it’s also a bad position to uphold when it comes to human rights in that any person who does not (or cannot) express his pain in behaviour is deemed not to be in pain. Thus, a person suffering from locked-in-syndrome is deemed not to be suffering from pain, as is a “tough guy” who never actually expresses his pain.

None of these conclusions go against Wittgenstein’s position if his only point was that behavioural expressions are our only means of accessing other people’s pain. (Although Birnbacher cites the case of an EEG.) However, it is an argument against old-style behaviourism.

Now let’s take the reverse situation: entities that display pain-behaviour but which don’t experience pain.

Birnbacher is explicit about his anti-behaviourist take on what is, and what isn’t, a conscious entity. For example, he says that

“i]t would be unreasonable to ascribe pain, say, to a machine, only because it shows pain behaviour in reaction to hurting stimuli”.

[The Turing Test can be rewritten in Birnbacher’s way: It would be unreasonable to ascribe understanding to a machine only because it shows understanding behaviour when it answers questions.]

Similarly, Birnbacher says that

“[a] machine uttering ‘I’ propositions is not thereby entitled to being treated as a self-conscious being”.

I’ve been using the term “behaviourist” to characterise the positions above. Birnbacher himself categorises them as verificationist. More accurately, he tells us that

“[t]he verification procedure proposed by Michael Scriven for consciousness in machine — the robot intelligently answering all sorts of question about its conscious life — is fundamentally mistaken”.

To bring Wittgenstein’s position up to date, we can say that a “verificationist” like Daniel Dennett rejected the “what pains are by themselves” part of this equation. He did so because he deemed that locution to be pointless (or without any content).

Philosophical Zombies

A (philosophical) zombie (or what Birnbacher calls an “imitation man”) displays all the behaviour of a conscious human being. Birnbacher admits that “a world of imitation men, of zombies without consciousness, is a logical possibility”. However, Birnbacher then qualifies his position by bringing in his distinction between mental acts and conscious states again. He writes:

“It is true, an *imitation man* would not be able to *feel* anything, but he could well be able to *mean* something, to have *thoughts* or *expectations* — exactly in the sense in which we can apply concepts of mental acts to purely material structures given that they exhibit the relevant complex behaviour. An *imitation man* could even be said to be able to think *itself*, without crediting it with self-consciousness in a sense which presupposes consciousness.”

Again, some — or even many — readers will be surprised that Birnbacher feels that he can uncouple thinking, expecting and meaning something from consciousness. However, and as already stated, that’s because he has stipulated that mental acts (i.e., qua certain behaviours) needn’t come along with consciousness. Yet, to repeat, using the term “mental” (as in “mental acts”) will still seem odd to some — or even many — readers.