Richard Rorty on Panpsychism’s Intrinsic Properties: Nothing Can Be Said About Them!

Way back in 1979, controversial philosopher Richard Rorty discussed panpsychism at a time when it was completely ignored by virtually all analytic philosophers.

Way back in 1979 (i.e., before the “rise of panpsychism”), the controversial American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931- 2007) discussed neutral monism and panpsychism at a time when these particular philosophical isms were completely ignored by virtually all analytic philosophers. (Rorty discussed neutral monism and panpsychism in his well-known book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.)

Perhaps that general ignoring of neutral monism and panpsychism may explain why Rorty himself spent so little time on them. Yet, despite that, Rorty did still get to the heart of the problem in the very few words he did offer us.

[See the 20th-century history of panpsychism here and my own ‘The Recent Rise of Analytic Panpsychism: 1996 to 2022’.]

Rorty gets to the heart of the problem with the intrinsic properties which panpsychists posit:

Nothing can be said about them.

Indeed even if such a (in the singular) intrinsic property is deemed to be consciousness (or experience/phenomenal properties), once consciousness is completely divorced from human and animal subjects and their material constitutions, behaviours, etc., and indeed from all specific entities or things, then (again) nothing (much) can be said about it.

More relevantly, Rorty asked about the lack of (to use his own words) “powers or properties” (which is a kind of epiphenomenalist point) of the intrinsic properties of panpsychists. Indeed this is precisely the main problem which physicists and other scientists point out when they spare the time to discuss panpsychism.

It must now be said that Richard Rorty primarily discussed neutral monism, not panpsychism.

Russell’s Neutral Monism and Panpsychism

Of course neutral monism and panpsychism are very closely linked. Indeed, in the case of at least some philosophers, they’re almost identical.

Take the the dispute between the philosophers Philip Goff and Sam Coleman.

The panpsychist Philip Goff is much beholden to neutral monism (as he has often freely admitted — see here and here). Yet, as ever with the shifting minutia of the technical terms of analytic philosophy, all this is complicated by the fact that Goff’s position can also be deemed to be a kind of Russellian monism. What’s more, Sam Coleman’s own position can be deemed to be a kind of panpsychism! (Coleman states that his position “needn’t constitute a wholesale abandonment of panpsychism”.)

This means that what will be deemed to be important and fundamental distinctions (by at least ten people) from deep inside this academic debate, won’t actually seem that way when looked at from the outside. As a consequence of this, it’s probably best to see Goff as being a (as it were) pure panpsychist and Coleman as being a Russellian monist — and that’s despite the many crossovers and grey areas between their positions. Indeed Goff is best seen as a panpsychist for the simple reason that his position squares very well with most accepted conceptions — if there even are such things! — of panpsychism. And that’s not to forget that Goff classes himself as a panpsychist.

[See Coleman’s ‘The Real Combination Problem : Panpsychism, Micro-Subjects, and Emergence’.]

In any case, one of the main points which unites contemporary panpsychists with Bertrand Russell isn’t only the latter’s commitment (at least at one point in his career) to a basic monistic stuff, but also his commitment to the “fundamentality” of experience — or, to use Russell’s own technical term, “percepts”.

To all these philosophers, nothing is more (as it were) Given than experience, consciousness or percepts. Thus these philosophers argue that experience is surely where we must start. (As David Chalmers put it: “Experience is a datum in its own right.”)

Of course the contemporary panpsychists who’ve been inspired by Russell’s neutral monism (or by Russellian monism) don’t argue that their own (in the plural) panpsychisms and neutral monism are identical in every detail.

Take Russell’s stress on “events” (i.e., rather than on consciousness, experience, etc.).

This stress on events puts Russell a little at odds with most contemporary panpsychists. For example, Russell said that his neutral monism is a monism

“in the sense that it regards the world as composed of only one kind of stuff, namely events”.

He then argued that “it is [a] pluralism in the sense that it admits the existence of a great multiplicity of events”.

And since the intrinsic-properties-cannot-be-described position is being discussed here, it’s now worth stating that Russell himself argued that we have no access — either observationally or otherwise — to the “intrinsic characteristics” of electrons, spacetime, rocks, etc. Instead, “[w]hat we know about them” is simply “their structure and their mathematical laws”.

In addition and on Russell’s reading, mathematical physics only deals with structures, behaviour and relations/interactions; not with intrinsic properties. Another way of putting that is to argue (as Russell himself argued) that whatever is stated in mathematical physics, none of it is about anything intrinsic (at least as the intrinsic is seen by panpsychist philosophers).

All that said, Russell did have a problem with the (mainly scientific) rejection of intrinsic properties.

In basic terms, Russell argued that it simply can’t be a question of (not his own words) “structures and relations all the way down”. Russell himself put it this way:

“There are many possible ways of turning some things hitherto regarded as ‘real’ into mere laws concerning the other things. Obviously there must be a limit to this process, or else all the things in the world will merely be each other’s washing.”

Despite the words above, Russell also expressed what can be called a Kantian stance on these issues when he stated that all we have is the “effects of a thing-in-itself”. Thus Russell came to the conclusion that if we only have access to effects (perhaps equivalent to Kant’s “phenomena”), then why not factor out the distinction between intrinsic properties and their effects (i.e., external properties) altogether? In other words, what’s left of intrinsic properties after all these qualifications?

Now let’s return to Richard Rorty.

Fundamentality?

Rorty began his discussion with the following words:

“[N]eutral monism, in which the mental and the physical are seen as two ‘aspects’ of some underlying reality which need not be described further.”

In both philosophy and physics, many different things have been described as being “fundamental”. (In logic too, modus ponens can be deemed to be fundamental — see here.) And precisely because of such fundamentality, any x which is deemed to be fundamental (to use Rorty’s words) “need not be described further”.

Take the Australian philosopher David Chalmers’ position on the fundamentality of consciousness. This is how Barbara McKenna tells Chalmers’ story:

“Over the millennia scientists have concluded that there are a handful of elemental, irreducible ingredients in the universe — space, time, and mass, among them. At a national conference in 1994, philosopher David Chalmers proposed that consciousness also belongs on the list.”

And, on behalf of the (as it were) ineffable nature of whichever x is taken to be fundamental at any given time in the history of philosophy, the philosopher John Heil (1943-) had this to say on fundamentality itself:

“Once you reach a basic level, however, explanation runs out: things behave as they do because they are as they are, and things with this nature just do behave in this way. Explanation works, not because all explanation is traceable to self-explaining explainers. Explanation works by reducing the complex to the less complex. At the basic level the behaviour of objects cannot be further explained.”

Indeed when physical explanations do come to an end, then we reach a point when

“things behave as they do because they are as they are, and things with this nature just do behave in this way”.

Depending on what any fundamental x is taken to be, philosophers will put these points in different ways. That is, they won’t be as open and explicit so as to say that x (to quote Rorty) “need not be described further”. That said, they often do state virtually the same thing as Rorty — just in different words.

Another important point is that all the things which have been taken to be fundamental (at many different times) are certainly not on a par. One obvious example of this is that the fundamental entities of physics are worlds apart from the fundamental entities of philosophy. Thus, to be even more specific, taking quarks or spacetime to be fundamental is very different to taking intrinsic properties (or, indeed, the World Soul, Love, monads, God, etc.) to be fundamental — and for many obvious reasons.

Different Reasons to Embrace Intrinsic Properties

Rorty continued:

“Sometimes we are told that this reality is intuited (Bergson) or is identical with the raw material of sensation (Russell, Ayer), but sometime it is simply postulated as the only means of avoiding epistemological skepticism (James, Dewey).”

The closest Rorty came to stating the position of contemporary panpsychists is when he expressed (again) Bertrand Russell’s position. In that position, the “raw material of sensation” constitutes the stuff of neutral monism.

The positions advanced by William James and John Dewey (at least as expressed by Rorty), on the other hand, immediately reminded me of Philip Goff’s and other contemporary panpsychists’ positions. Such philosophers also believe that intrinsic properties — and indeed panpsychism itself — are “postulated as the only means of avoiding epistemological skepticism” regarding consciousness and the relation between mind and matter. Thus panpsychism and its intrinsic properties are also deemed to be (as it’s often put) “elegant and parsimonious”. Another way of putting this is to say that panpsychism and its intrinsic properties are a neat and tidy possible solution to the problem of consciousness — particularly to the (with Germanic capitals) Hard Problem of Consciousness. Thus panpsychism and its intrinsic properties are a parsimonious and elegant way to avoid epistemological scepticism by virtue of their unification of matter and mind…

Yet all this is at a huge cost.

What’s more, it’s debatable whether or not anything is truly avoided by panpsychism.

Thomas Nagel on What It is Like

Richard Rorty doesn’t mention the American philosopher Thomas Nagel (1937-) explicitly when he uses the ironic phrase “we just know what it’s like”. However, elsewhere in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty did write the following words about the aforementioned (near) merging of panpsychism and neutral monism:

“A panpsychist view is also suggested by Thomas Nagel’s for an ‘objective phenomenology’ which would ‘permit questions about the physical basis of experience to assume a more intelligible form’ (‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’) [] However, in both Hartsthorne and Nagel, panpsychism tends to merge with neutral monism.”

In any case, Rorty got to the heart of the problem in this passage:

“In no case are we told anything about it [“this reality”] save that ‘we just know what it’s like’ or that reason (i.e., the need to avoid philosophical dilemmas) requires it.”

In addition:

“But in fact the ‘neutral stuff’ which is neither mental nor physical is not found to have powers or properties of its own, but simply postulated and then forgotten about (or, what comes to the same thing, assigned the role of ineffable datum).”

Here Rorty ties neutral monism — or panpsychism — to Nagel’s “what it is like to be a bat” thesis.

So we may well know what these intrinsic properties are like in the case of our own mental states. However, the intrinsic properties of panpsychists are supposed to be instantiated by rocks, cells, electrons, spacetime, etc. too! Thus if there is something it is like for them, then how could we know that? In other words, what about the ineffable data of all other beings and entities?

Is the Binary A Priori/A Posteriori Opposition False or Misleading?

The following is a short and simple account of Peter Murphy’s paper ‘Rewriting the A Priori/A Posteriori Distinction’, which has a self-explanatory title.

Dual Epistemic Justification

Peter Murphy

The philosopher Peter Murphy’s argument is that what he calls “nonbasic beliefs” (i.e., beliefs that depend on other beliefs) can be justified by both experiential and nonexperiential justifiers; not just by either one or the other.

Murphy is concerned with the cases

“in which neither the nonexperiential justifier nor the experiential justifier would suffice on its own, in the absence of the other, to justify the non-basic belief”.

So what would happen if one of the justifiers were absent? Murphy continues:

“In the absence of either justifier, one of the basic beliefs would be unjustified and, as a consequence, so too would the non-basic belief. The two justifiers function as cocontributors.”

Despite that, Murphy’s prime purpose is to “rewrite” Immanuel Kant’s strict binary distinction between a priori and a posteriori beliefs (see here). He argues that in the case of the justification of a nonbasic belief which has both a nonexperiential and an experiential justifier, Kant classified the resultant belief a posteriori.

Murphy gets his point across by offering us an example which is taken from the philosopher Saul Kripke (1940-).

A Kripke Case

Take the following argument:

(i) (H = P) ⊃ □(H = P).

(ii) (H = P)

(iii) ∴ □(H = P)

[H can symbolise a mental state (or water) and P can symbolise a brain state (or H₂O). The modal symbol □ stands for “it is necessary that”. ]

Murphy says that Kripke takes (i) above to be known a priori. That is, if H and P are identical, then they must be necessarily identical. Yet the identity of H and P in some cases (such as water and H₂O), however, was still only known (or discovered) a posteriori.

So what about (iii) — the conclusion?

Is that known a priori or a posteriori?

More relevantly, is the entire argument above a priori or a posteriori?

Murphy argues that Kripke follows Kant on this.

Kripke takes (iii) to be justified (or known) a posteriori because the identity of H and P (in (ii) above) was only known experimentally (or through observation). Thus the whole argument, as well as the conclusion, is classified a posteriori, despite it dealing with a necessary identity.

Yet Murphy has a problem with Kripke’s classification.

Murphy’s basic argument is that although the necessary identity of H and P only came to be known a posteriori, the modal conditional — i.e., (H = P) ⊃ □(H = P) — can still be known to hold without (extra?) experience. That is, it’s known to be necessarily true a priori without also needing to know about the content of the symbols H and P.

So, in the Kripke case and in the case of other nonbasic beliefs, we have what Murphy calls epistemic co-contributors.

Murphy gives another example of the phenomenon of epistemic co-contribution.

Firstly, we have the a priori part:

1) A child’s belief that 4 + 3 = 7 might be partly a priori justified by her intellectual insight.

And then the a posteriori part:

2) The same belief is partly a posteriori justified by her recent experience counting and recounting groups of blocks.

Murphy also offers us a similar example.

Again, firstly we have the a priori part:

1) A new logic student might have a marginally reliable a priori insight into DeMorgan’s Rule.

However:

2) He might also base his belief in DeMorgan’s Rule on his marginally reliable roommate’s testimony that DeMorgan’s Rule is true.

Murphy then highlights the case of inference.

A Priori Inference and Dual Justification

The American philosopher Laurence BonJour (1943-) makes much of inference in his apriorist criticisms of W.V.O Quine (1908–2000) and his “web of belief” thesis. BonJour’s basic argument is that although the beliefs in any Quinian “web” may well be empirical, that isn’t also true of the inferential links between them.

According to Murphy, BonJour also “proposes that acts of inferring are a distinct kind of justifier”.

What Murphy (or BonJour) is interested in is the move (or link) from belief to belief. Indeed even if there is a move from nonbasic experiential beliefs to other nonbasic experiential beliefs, that link still requires an epistemic description and/or explanation. More relevantly, the inference from belief to belief (or from beliefs to beliefs) needs to be justified. And this will result in dual justification.

Murphy argues that

“there will be cases where the inference is justified one way and the relevant premise-beliefs are justified another way”.

This means that the “premise-beliefs” may well be justified a posteriori. However, these premise-beliefs will have links to - or inferences from - other beliefs and those links will be a priori in nature.

Again, Murphy makes the conclusion that if we

“[t]ake away either the a posteriori justified belief or the a priori justified inference [] the person’s conclusion-belief would be unjustified”.

In Kant’s book, according to Murphy, we can say that

“[s]ince the conclusion-belief is dependent on an experiential justifier for its justification, Kant has us put it in the a posteriori category”.

Thus Kant argued that the “conclusion-belief” is a posteriori in nature, despite the fact that it was derived from a process which is a priori (even in the case when the premise-beliefs were also a posteriori).

Murphy also detects an "asymmetry" in Kant’s account. Thus:

1) To be a posteriori justified, a belief only needs to partially depend on experiential justifiers.

However, an a priori justified belief doesn't get the same treatment from Kant. Thus:

2) “To be a priori justified, it is not enough that a belief partially depend on nonexperiential justifiers for its justification – it must exclusively depend on nonexperiential justifiers.”

Where does Murphy stand on the general empiricism/rationalism debate which underpins the issues just discussed?

Murphy’s Weak Rationalism

Murphy detects four positions.

Firstly, he detects two radical positions:

(1) Radical empiricism: this position denies that there are any non-experiential justifiers and insists that all justified beliefs are justified a posteriori.

And:

(2) Radical rationalism: this position denies that there are experiential justifiers and insists that all of our beliefs are justified a priori.

Now take the two moderate positions:

(3) Strong rationalism: this position argues that some of our justified beliefs are a priori justified.

And:

(4) Weak rationalism: this position argues that there are non-experiential justifiers, but restricts their justifying power to beliefs that are justified in a mixed manner.

To sum up. Clearly Peter Murphy opts for position 4) above.

Jonathan Rée on Truth, Relativism and Science (2)

Philosopher Jonathan Rée argues that relativists do believe in truth: they simply have their own take on it. Rée also has a problem with the notion of “objectivity” in science.

[The following short biographical introduction which has been copied-and-pasted from the first part of this essay on Jonathan Rée, which is called Jonathan Rée on the Words “Objective” and “Objective Truth.]

******************************

Jonathan Rée (1948-) is a British “freelance” philosopher and historian.

He has written for the London Review of Books, The Independent, New Humanist, Evening Standard, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Lingua Franca, Prospect and The Times Literary Supplement. In the1990s, Rée presented the Channel 4 TV series Talking Liberties, which featured conversations with the philosophers Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida and the historian Edward Said.

Rée was a joint founder of the journal, Radical Philosophy.

All the quotes from Rée in the following come from an interview with Jeremy Stangroom, which was published in the book What Philosophers Think. (A separate version of that interview can be found here.)

Jonathan Rée on Relativism and Truth

Jonathan Rée

The philosopher Jonathan Rée argued something that seems, prima facie, to be incredible vis-à-vis the debate on relativism and truth. He says:

“[I]t is simply an unfair debating point to suggest that to be a relativist is to be someone who does not believe there is such a thing as truth. It is just that a relativist is someone who tried to be explicit about the various standards by which truth is measured in different contexts.”

Is Rée arguing that relativists actually believe in truth after all — it’s just that truth must always relative to “various standards” and “different contexts”? That is, is it simply that relativists argue that one can’t have (or even imagine) a context-independent truth? (This, as it stands, is vague.) What would such a truth be like?

Of course an anti-relativist may say that truth isn’t dependent on any context or on anything else for that matter.

That said, surely truths are dependent on what the truths (or the true statements) are about. That, for a start, is a kind of context.

Again, an anti-relativist may argue that a truth is the truth that it is in all contexts and in spite of all contexts. He may also argue that this is part of what makes truths true — that very context-invariability. In other words, a statement can’t be true in one context and false in another. And it can’t be true at one time and false at another time.

Indeed the anti-relativist may add that even time-, place- and person-indexed truths (such as “It is raining today”) can be made explicit if the statement itself is reformulated to include a reference to the time and place of its expression. And that reformulation would capture the complete (to use Frege’s capitalised term) Thought (or, simply, proposition) which (as it were) hides behind the utterance — at least according to some philosophers.

Thus, if a truth is susceptible to variability and relativity, then it ain’t a truth at all.

Standards of Truth

Jonathan Rée also makes a distinction between the following:

(1) Relativism about “the various standards by which truth is measured in different contexts”.

and

(2) Relativism as applied to truth (or the concept of truth) itself.

The anti-relativist (or truth realist) probably will happily accept the relativity of our “various standards by which truth is measured in different contexts”. However, he’ll add that this relativity isn’t actually passed on to truth itself. The relativist, then, is really only talking about the relativity of standards or epistemic procedures.

In response, the relativist may argue that if one accepts the relativity of the standards by which we (as it were) come by truths, then that relativity must indeed be passed on to truth itself. That is, if our standards are context-relative or subject-relative, then truth itself must be context-relative or subject-relative too. Basically, we can’t have one without the other.

This is the point that was (kind of) made by the American philosophers Hilary Putnam (1926–2016) and Richard Rorty (1931–2007) when they discussed what they called warranted assertibility. They argued (in their own ways) that we can’t separate truth from our acts of warranted assertibility or justification.

The following passage is a take on warranted assertibility from Putnam (quoted by Rorty) which shows just how radically at odds with realism about truth this notion actually is:

“Like Dewey, for example, he [“the anti-realist”] can fall back on the notion of ‘warranted assertibility’ instead of truth. [] Then he can say that ‘X is gold’ was warrantedly assertible in Archimedes' time and is not warrantedly assertible today.”

Thus, if truth always (as it were) comes along with warranted assertibility, then perhaps there’s no truth at all without warranted assertibility (or our justifications of what it is we believe to be true). Thus this separation of truth from the variable standards by which we come to truth ceases to make sense. Alternatively, such (as it were) pure truths are simply unworkable.

Again, the anti-relativist may still argue that we must make a distinction between the relativity of the standards by which we arrive at truth and the relativity of truth itself.

But can the anti-relativist justify or legitimise such a distinction? And, if he can, then how does he do so?

Relative Truth in Science

Rée goes on to argue that what the relativist says about science is a little different to what scientific instrumentalists or anti-realists say about science. The following is Rée's position:

“Listen, everything that the ‘friends of science’ want to say about the extraordinary achievements and progress of the natural sciences, both in terms of knowledge and in terms of technique, all of these things can be said by someone who describes themselves as a ‘relativist’ [].”

Instrumentalists — and others - argue that we don’t need the notion of truth at all in science in order for us to accept the theories, achievements and techniques of science. Moreover, science can still have remarkable predictive and explanatory power without it saying that any of these things depend on truth. (The American philosopher Hartry Field says something similar about the notion of truth in mathematics — see ‘mathematical fictionalism’. He basically argues that all we have in mathematics is correctness: never truth.)

Of course scientific realists will argue that science has predictive and explanatory power precisely because scientific theories — or single scientific claims — are true (That’s basically Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s position as quoted in the opening image.)

Other philosophers argue that scientific theories — or single scientific claims — are true precisely because of their predictive/explanatory power, etc.

Yet other philosophers may argue that this is a “difference that doesn’t make a difference”!

On the last point. If science can only have predictive/explanatory power, etc. if its theories are true, then this addition of truth contributes nothing to the debate. After all, even the scientific realist must admit the possibility of something’s having explanatory (if not predictive) power even if it were not true. In addition, if a scientific theory can only have explanatory/predictive power, etc. if what that theory states is true, then can’t we just stick with that theory’s explanatory/ predictive power, etc. and leave it there? That is, why add truth to this equation?

In other words, if predictive/explanatory power = truth (or truth = predictive/explanatory power), then predictive/explanatory power = predictive/explanatory power. This truth can be eliminated from the equation entirely.

This is similar to arguing (as with Frank Ramsey — see here) that if

p

is the same as

p is true.

then we don’t even need the words “is true” at all. (To use Rée's words about the words “objectively true”, the words “is true” are a “rhetorical move” which have illocutionary force.)

So one can sympathise with Rée when he argues that the relativist can agree with

“everything that the ‘friends of science’ want to say about the extraordinary achievements and progress of the natural sciences, both in terms of knowledge and in terms of technique”.

Thus, on this reading, this relativity only applies to the standards by which science has achieved these great things, not to the results or even to the truths themselves. Moreover, even if the relativist does (if implicitly or on Rée's reading) believe in truth, then his relativism is still only be applied to scientific standards or “epistemic norms” — not to any truths discovered by the natural sciences.

Whether this is a coherent position or not is debatable.

Rée also — and again — stresses the superfluity of the idea of something’s being objective.

Science and Objectivity

According to Rée, claims of objectivity don’t add to anything and they don’t get “us” anywhere.

And, so Rée's argument seems to be, if there’ll always be one thing that scientific truth is relative to, then it’s “relative to human discourses”. Rée says:

“[S]cience improves the knowledge and control we have over things that matter to us. Of course, you can say ‘well, it does that because it tells us the truth about the objective structure of the world’ and that’s fine, you can say that, but it’s hardly an ontological big deal.”

So to make (empty?) claims about “the objective structure of the world” isn’t an “ontological big deal”. Indeed it may not be any kind of deal at all.

Again, this is a question of whether or not we can still say that “science improves the knowledge and control we have over things that matter to us” without bringing on board truth — never mind objective truth. Thus if science improves the knowledge and control we have over things that matter to us, then does it matter (or mean anything to say) that this is so because what science says is “objectively true” — or even true at all?

Perhaps the words “objective truth” or “objective reality” are (empty?) compliments we pay to scientific theories or individual scientific claims — compliments which are nevertheless not required.

So do we have a difference between the following? -

(1) What science claims is objectively true.

and

(2) What science says is true.

Indeed is there a difference between the following? -

(1) Science improves the knowledge and control we have over things that matter to us.

and

(2) Science improves the knowledge and control we have over things that matter to us because what science says is objectively true (or even just plain true).

Again, what’s the ontological difference between something’s being objectively true and it being just plain true? In addition, what’s the difference between science improving the knowledge and control we have over things and science doing such things because scientific theories and scientific claims are true?

Jonathan Rée on the Words “Objective” and “Objective Truth”

Are the words “objective” and “objective truth” only used as “rhetorical moves”? Do they create “mischief in the whole debate”?

Jonathan Rée (1948-) is a British “freelance” philosopher and historian.

He has written for the London Review of Books, The Independent, New Humanist, Evening Standard, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Lingua Franca, Prospect and The Times Literary Supplement. In the1990s, Rée presented the Channel 4 TV series Talking Liberties, which featured conversations with the philosophers Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida and the historian Edward Said.

Rée was a joint founder of the journal, Radical Philosophy.

All the quotes from Rée in the following come from an interview with Jeremy Stangroom, which was published in the book What Philosophers Think. (A separate version of that interview can be found here.)

Introduction

Jonathan Rée has a problem with the word “objective” — particularly when it’s used in the context of the often-used phrase “objective truth”.

Like Frank Ramsey (1903–1930) before him in the case of the words “is true” in the statement “p is true” (see Ramsey here and the more general ‘The Redundancy Theory of Truth’), Rée believes that the addition of the word “objective” doesn’t add anything to any statement which is deemed to be true.

As Rée himself puts it:

“I mean it’s ludicrous to think that adding the word ‘objective’ makes a truth any more true. There is a very important distinction between propositions that are true and propositions that are false. But I don’t know what further distinction is intended by adding the word ‘objective’. It is simply a rhetorical move that does mischief to the whole debate.”

So what does the word “objectively” in the statement “… is objectively true” add to that statement?

Is it about the impartiality of the statement itself or perhaps about the impartiality of the speaker who asserts it?

Is statement S objective because it’s about objects (or facts). Or is S objective simply because it’s not subjective (i.e., it’s not a “subjective truth”)? That is, isn’t a subjective truth about the speaker’s personal opinions, beliefs and emotions, rather than about hard matters of fact?

Now take these two metalanguage (or second-order) statements:

(1) The statement “Hitler died in 1945’” is true.

and

(2) The statement “Hitler died in 1945” is objectively true.

Is there a difference between (1) and (2)?

Perhaps the difference is that (1) and (2) are two different speech acts which each have a different illocutionary force. That said, perhaps (2) still doesn’t add anything factual or propositional to the embedded object statement “Hitler died in 1945” itself. However, it may still add something to the force of the speaker’s utterance.

Yet that illocutionary force, according to Rée, is simply a “rhetorical move”. And, if that’s the case, then perhaps it’s an attempt to stress that what the speaker is saying is true in an extra-special sense. That is, it’s more than true: it’s objectively true.

Rée also argues that the use of the word “objective” actually “does mischief to the whole debate”. Rée seems to believe that this is because the use of that word doesn’t actually get us anywhere or make the terms of the debate any clearer.

Despite all that, Rée does go on to make what seems to be a relativist point about truth when he states the following:

“What people need to understand is that the only truths that are available to us are those of specific historical contexts, but that they are no less true for that.”

Perhaps the operative words in the above are “available to us”. That is, this may be the epistemic point that we only have access to truths as they appear in “specific historical contexts”. Indeed the expressions of truth (if not truth itself) must appear in some context or other. In other words, truths don’t float free of the world and its specific historical or social contexts.

Could this be any other way?

After all, all truths are (as it were) given to us in the guise of particular contingent languages with their equally contingent words or concepts. And these languages — with their words or concepts — are bound to colour what it is that’s said in them. Thus no natural — or even artificial — language can break free of its many contexts and somehow describe the world (or its properties) in some kind of precise and perfect algorithmic manner.

Yet Rée also argues that even though truths are context-dependent (or context-relative), then it’s still the case that such truths are “no less true for that”. Indeed that’s the case because there’s no alternative but to recognise the social context (or context-sensitivity) of truth. In other words, if there are no (as it were) free-floating abstract truths, then such context-sensitivity can’t be avoided.

To repeat: Rée argues that just because truths are expressed in contingent languages (with their contingent words and concepts) and specific historical and social contexts, that doesn’t make them any less true.

Yet here’s a possible rejoinder to Rée.

Perhaps the various and many contingencies of natural — and even artificial — languages aren’t (as it were) passed on to the truths expressed in such languages. On the other hand, perhaps contingency is indeed transitive in these respects.

Rée then brings the American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007) into this debate

Rée on Objectivity and Intersubjectivity

Rée endorses Richard Rorty’s view that we should really talk about “intersubjectivity”, rather than “objectivity” (see Rorty here). After all, if the word “objective” is little more than a (to use Rée's words again) “rhetorical move” when used in philosophical and everyday debates, then someone can always trump another person’s claim with his use of this (as it were) self-complimentary word.

So perhaps we should leave the word “objective” well alone.

Rée says:

“I think this is why Rorty, who is quite wise about this matter, says that you should talk about intersubjectivity rather than objectivity. The question is not about different realities and how they connect up, but different conceptions, different vocabularies, and how they connect up. What you need to do is to experiment with trying to have conversations with people and to see whether you can negotiate some kind of linkage between the way that you’re talking about things and the way that they do.”

Firstly, we can say that if the word “intersubjectivity” is taken as being little more than a synonym of the word “objectivity”, then there’s little point in substituting the former for the latter. Alternatively, perhaps intersubjectivity is something other than objectivity. Either that, or objectivity isn’t really something to be more than — or to be different to — if what Rée argued earlier is correct. (To repeat: the words “objectively true” amount to little more than a “rhetorical move” and an “empty compliment” paid to the speaker’s utterance or claim.)

For a start, intersubjectivity is at least partly about communal agreement and the different kinds of rules (both implicit and explicit) which are used within debates, research, theorising, etc. Objectivity, on the other hand, seems to be something a person can have (or claim to have) all on his own despite communal practices — or, more mundanely, despite what other people think.

To follow a Wittgensteinian line. (See the ‘Private language argument’.)

If knowledge-in-splendid-isolation makes little sense, then perhaps we can say the same about private objectivity. After all, doesn’t one need knowledge in order to have (or to claim) objectivity for an utterance or statement?

It’s also interesting that Rée doesn’t go as far as, say, Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) and his talk of “world-versions”.

World-Versions?

Rée argues that this debate isn’t about “different realities and how they connect up”. Instead, it’s about “different conceptions, different vocabularies, and how they connect up”.

So, in Rée’s picture (as it can be seen), we all share the same world. We just happen to say different things about that same world…

And that’s hardly news.

Take this simple example.

There’s a wooden table in front of a small group of people. That table’s very existence — and even its nature — won’t guarantee that everyone in that group will say exactly the same things about it.

For example, one person in that group may say this:

“It’s a fine example of Chippendale furniture.”

Another person may say this:

“It’s a nice size for a family.”

It must be said that these different (to use Rée's word) “conceptions” of the same table don’t contradict each other. However, they do reflect how it these individuals look at — or think about — it. After all, one person in that group may not have a family and another may never have heard of Chippendale furniture.

In addition, it’s often been remarked that physicists say things about this table which are remarkably at odds with what everyone in that group says or thinks.

For example, a physicist may say (as the cliche has it) this:

“The table is made up mainly of empty space.”

Yet that statement too doesn’t contradict what the rest of the group has said (or thought) either.

Some philosophers would even say the following (at least according to Ted Sider’s take on mereological nihilism):

“A table is made up of mereological simples arranged table-wise.”

None of this really matters if we’re talking about the very same segment of reality or even the very same object. The physicist and metaphysician still eats off the table in front of them even though they look at it in very strange ways — at least they do so when they have their academic hats on.

So the physicist Niels Bohr’s notion of complementarity is useful here. (Bearing in mind that it may be a little suspect to shoehorn ideas and theories from physics into this debate.)

In his book Physics and Philosophy, the physicist Werner Heisenberg summed up Bohr’s complementarity in the following way:

“Bohr considered the two pictures — particle picture and wave picture — as two complementary descriptions of the same reality. Any of these descriptions can be only partially true [].”

Of course some philosophers do indeed believe that we literally inhabit what they call “different worlds”. In basic terms, such philosophers argue that if our conceptual schemes are different, then our worlds must be different too. That’s especially the case if conceptual schemes are taken to determine the worlds we experience and think about. Indeed, on this view, there’d be no world at all if there were no conceptual scheme (or schemes) through which we can experience or conceive of it.

Of course it’s the case that many other philosophers would argue that all this talk of “conceptual schemes” would still not give us literal different worlds.

That’s especially the case if all of us are still in causal contact with the same world and its objects no matter how we describe that world and its objects.

Yet the problem here (if it is a problem) is that, at least according to Donald Davidson (1917–2003), “causation does not come under a description”. And neither is causation in itself “explanatory” in nature.

That said, Davidson also denied that there are genuinely different conceptual schemes in the first place (see Davidson’s ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’). That’s primarily because we all causally interact with the same world — a world which includes the same (as J.L. Austin put it) “medium-sized dry goods” (such as cups, rocks, animals and even other persons). Once these fundamentals are in place, then it would be hard to believe that we literally inhabit different worlds — no matter how different our descriptive or explanatory practices and utterances are.

Thus this situation of plurality in itself doesn’t give us different worlds. It gives us the same world described, explained or conceived of in different ways.

But that’s no surprise to anyone — not even to the metaphysical realist who believes that there’s a determinate way the world is and a single set of truths to be known about it…

Yet none of these fine metaphysical details may matter that much anyway.

Ethics and Politics

Take Richard Rorty again.

Rorty’s prime concern was ethical and/or political in nature.

He was concerned with the importance of conversing (what Rorty called “the conversation”) with other people with different views in order to achieve at least a little consensus and therefore a little less conflict. This is an ethical and/or political aim; just as it was for Emanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.

Another way of putting this is to state that if we really believed that other communities (or cultures) literally spoke “nonsense” (or simply that they inhabited different worlds), then that very incommensurability (see here) would be bound to lead to political or social conflict of some kind.

So Rorty and the other philosophers mentioned above wanted to create the philosophical means to counteract such destructive possibilities. That’s why Heidegger’s metaphysics, for example, has been seen as an ethics — or, at the least, as a “ethico-ontology” (see also Emmanuel Levinas). Indeed it can be doubted that Heidegger — and Derrida for that matter - would have denied this. That’s primarily because they might have argued that this ethics-ontology dichotomy is false (or simply wrong). Similarly, Rorty wouldn’t have denied his ethical and/or political motivations for stressing intersubjectivity, rather than objectivity and truth. That’s because — as already stated — the stress on intersubjectivity was seen by Rorty as a means to keep the conversation going both within the West and between the West and the non-Western world.

Rée himself puts his own slant on this ethico-philosophy (or ethico-ontology) debate when he says the following:

“I mean the fact that it can always turn out that the things that we are convinced are unrevisably true might in fact be problematic in completely unexpected ways.”

That is obviously the case.

Of course what many people take to be “unrevisably true” may turn out to be mistaken in some way — or even to be absolutely false. That is the lesson of fallibilism taught by C.S. Peirce (1839–1914) and other philosophers and which also permeates the natural sciences. Indeed, if we move away from ethics and politics, this may even turn out to be the case with our cherished logical laws and mathematical truths — at least according to Quine (see here). Think also of what some have argued about quantum physics and the law of excluded middle (see here). In addition, dialetheic logicians even believe that the very same proposition (or statement) can be both true and false at one and the same time (see here)!

So perhaps modesty (if not humility) is a good strategy if we can’t even take an absolute position on the truths of logic and mathematics. Of course many other philosophers would question all these so-called “revisions” of the logical laws, etc. (see here and here). They’d also happily admit that even first-rate mathematicians can make mistakes in mathematics. Yet that obvious fact doesn’t in the least lead to any of the aforementioned radical conclusions.

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