Does Externalism Beat Scepticism?

John Heil says that instead of talking about different causal interactions between minds and world, why not talk about 'different contexts’: He writes:

"The face, located in a depiction of merry party-goers is a happy face. The very same face located in a scene of devastation and suffering is evil. The face’s being happy or evil depends, not on intrinsic properties of the face (or at any rate not wholly on these), but on the context in which the face appears. If you vary the context, you change the face." (424)

Again, the intrinsic properties of the face don't change whether or not it's seen as happy or seen as evil. The only things that change are the contexts. The change of context determines how we interpret the face regardless of the fact that the face hasn't actually changed at all.


This is clearly an analogous with what happens with the mind.


In both cases the Cartesian or internalist mind may not change. However, if the contexts of the minds or mind change, then so too does its mental content. More to the point, the change in context will determine and fix the meaning of the mental content. Though, again, neither mind is required to know that the context has in fact changed. Nevertheless, if it has changed, then it will change the meanings of the words and sentences expressed by such a mind or by such minds.


So meaning-in-mind depends on the mind’s causal relations to things outside of mind. And if that's the case, we can't really talk about ‘meaning-in-mind’ because meanings are partly determined or fixed by things outside of the mind. Perhaps we can't even talk, then, about the ‘outside’ of the mind or about ‘external reality’ if the so-called ‘internal’ reality wouldn't even be the way it is without an ‘external reality’. Perhaps the internal/external dichotomy simply breaks down, at least when it comes to talk about the mind’s relation to the world.


This, if it's true, is a sharp rebuke to traditional (epistemological) scepticism.


Why is that? Because scepticism "presumes a sharp division between our thoughts and the world of which those thoughts are directed" (424). As I've said, perhaps there would be no thoughts about the world if it were not for the world in the first place. More strongly, perhaps there would be no thoughts about X, Y and Z in the world , if X, Y and Z hadn't already determined or fixed these thoughts about themselves.


The sceptic asks us:

"What gives us the right to believe that what we think is the case is the case?" (424)

The externalist will simply answer:

"If the contents of our thoughts depend on how things stand in the 'external world', there can be no question of our being dramatically deceived." (424)

Our thoughts are determined or fixed by how things stand in the world. We wouldn't have these thoughts about the world if the things the thoughts are about didn't exist and they didn't have a causal effect on the contents of our thoughts (about them).


Does it follow that we can't be deceived?


Perhaps we can say that the world, or things in the world, do indeed determine or fix the contents of our thoughts. Does it follow, however, that our thoughts, or representations, correctly represent the way the world actually is even if the world has determined and fixed the content of our thought and has even given us these very thoughts in the first place?


We can accept this causal determination of mental content or thought; though causation in and of itself won't guarantee the correctness of our thoughts or representations of the world. As Davidson said (in a slightly different context): causation doesn't come under a description. Causation fixes or determines our thoughts ; though it doesn't determine their shape, as it were. It's responsible for mental content; though not for the shape of that mental content. Causation itself is neither thought nor mental content; just as it's not itself either description or explanation.


Why does it follow that because of the fact that we wouldn't have thoughts about the world in the first place if it weren't for the world itself, that how we think about - or represent - the world will be true of the world? Causal interactions can't be enough to silence the sceptic. All that we can say, however, is that there must be a world because we causally interact with it and those causal interactions determine or fix the thoughts or mental content; though they don't in and of themselves determine their shape.


The world must exist; though our thought and representations of the world may be radically inaccurate. Causation alone doesn't guarantee otherwise. Thus the sceptic is partly beaten in that the existence of the world is established. However, the externalist hasn't established the actual shape of the world. Perhaps this is a pyrrhic victory on the externalist’s part. Perhaps it's also a pyrrhic victory on the sceptic’s part.


The problem with these conclusions is that many, or all, externalists reject representations, or at least the idea of mental representations precisely because of their externalist position. The question is:


Why do externalists, and other philosophers of mind, deny the existence of mental representations?

De Re & De Dicto Modalities & Counterparts

A vital distinction in modal logic is the one between de dicto modalities and de re modalities.


The former apply to dicta – that is, statements, sentences, propositions, and the like. That is, it is sentences, statements and propositions that are necessarily true or possibly true.


De re modalities apply directly to objects in the world. Even if we use statements, sentences or propositions to talk about objects in the world, when we say that things are necessarily or possibly true of these objects ,we're talking about the objects themselves, not about the statements we've made about them. When we say that ‘horses are animals’ is necessary, the modality involved is de dicto. The sentence ‘Horses are animals’ is necessarily true. Thus it is, perhaps, a conceptual truth: the concept [horse] and the concept [animal].


When we say that


"Socrates is necessarily a person but only contingently a husband."


we'e talking about Socrates himself, not the statement about Socrates. One can see that the modal terms ‘necessarily’ and ‘contingently’ both occur within the actual sentence itself – necessity isn't applied to the sentence. The alternative version would be:


"‘Socrates is a person’ is necessarily true."


not


‘Socrates is necessarily a person.’


I said earlier that it is necessarily true that a world without animals is a world without horses. Now I can say that it is necessarily true that a world without persons would be a world without Socrates. However, it's not necessarily true that Socrates at a world must be a bachelor. That Socrates is a bachelor at our world is only a contingent truth. He, or his ‘counterpart’, may be married at least one other possible world. (If worlds are infinite, he must be married at an infinite amount of worlds and a bachelor also at an infinite amount of worlds.)


Could Socrates, our Socrates, really exist at any other possible worlds, let alone an infinite amount of them? Not according to David Lewis. According to Lewis, "individuals can each inhabit only a single world" (133). Socrates, then, only exists at one world – ours! However, I used the term ‘counterpart’ earlier. Lewis believes that our Socrates can, or could have had, counterparts at other possible worlds. More precisely, "to say that Socrates is possibly rich is to say that there is a possible world in which Socrates’ counterpart is rich" (133). This counterpart can be almost exactly like our Socrates. However, I think that there are arguments to the effect that he can't be identical to our Socrates. Lewis only accepts numerical identity. This means that if Counterpart Socrates were identical, he would be our Socrates. That would mean that our Socrates would exist at other worlds. Thus he would be a ‘trans-world individual’.


Lewis believes that these other worlds exist. It follows, then, that our Socrates couldn’t exist at any other world other than our own. An identical Socrates at other possible worlds would be a ‘scattered object’ – bits of him would exist, as it were, at other worlds; just as universals are multiply scattered in different locations and at different times.


Would it help the trans-world theorist to argue that Socrates is the sum of his ‘temporal parts’? If he can have spatial parts, perhaps he could also have temporal parts. Are these theses the same? We can say that Socrates at another world is one of Socrates’ temporal parts. Socrates at our world was another of his temporal parts. Socrates at our world in the future would be another temporal part of Socrates. And Socrates in the future of another world would be a temporal part of Socrates.


However, possible worlds aren't only causally disconnected, they're also temporally disconnected. Indeed, if we have causal discontinuity, then we would also have temporal discontinuity. Thus it makes no sense to talk either of temporal or spatial parts of Socrates at other worlds.


However, perhaps we can talk about the temporal and spatial parts of Socrates in our world. That would only be when he actually existed. That is, Socrates at the age of four would have been a temporal part of Socrates. Similarly with Socrates at the age of thirty. The sum of all his ages, before he died, would be the complete Socrates. Thus we would only know of the complete Socrates after his death. Four years before he died he would have been, as it were, incomplete! A minute before he died he would have been incomplete! The spatial discontinuity of Socrates is harder to accept because that spatial discontinuity could occur at the same time. Evidently temporal discontinuity can't occur at one and the same time. Of course we can have spatial discontinuity over time in that when he was four he lived in Athens, but when he was twenty he lived in, say, Islington.

Searle on the Presupposition of the World’s Existence

There are many anti-sceptical arguments which claim that the sceptic - of whatever kind - must assume and take as true certain things before he can offer us his sceptical possibilities or conclusions. Wittgenstein talked about the ‘hinges’ on which all discourse must turn - even sceptical discourse. Hume and Strawson believed that we must accept the existence of objects, other minds and even the existence of the ‘external’ world. Similarly, the premises on which both sceptical and paradoxical conclusions are built must be taken as true or even certain by the sceptic or paradox merchant.


John Searle talks specifically about the "presupposition of an independently existing" (185). He calls this 'a background presupposition". He says:

"It’s not something that’s up for grabs in the way that whether or not the human genome project will have such and such an effect is... I point out that it plays a certain role in our background presupposition, because it’s what we take for granted when we engage in discourse." (186)

This must mean that Searle thinks that even the global sceptic will take the existence of the world "for granted when [he] engages in discourse" (186). It seems, according to Searle, that he wouldn't even be able to say anything, or, more strongly, claim anything, if he didn't presuppose, perhaps tacitly, that the world actually existed. Perhaps he doesn't even know that he's doing this when he's doing it.


The very structure of language itself may include certain presuppositions as to the existence of the ‘external’ world. However, as I said about the meaning and the propositional attitude sceptic, the external world sceptic can't help but use the only language which he has. He has no choice but to do so. Perhaps the existence of God and Superman (as philosophers have argued) is written into our ‘ordinary’ and even our philosophical grammar. That doesn't mean that we are automatically committed to the existence of either God or Superman. It's simply a fact about our language and how it's structured.


Searle gives us a rather mundane example of a case of the presupposition that the world really exists:

"You and I made an arrangement to meet at a certain place at a certain time. We couldn’t make that and we couldn’t have our normal understanding of that unless we assume there is a place in space and in time that is independent of us and we can meet at that particular place. That is external realism." (186)

I don’t see immediately how it follows that because you and I arrange to meet at a place and a time that they must be ‘independent of us’. After all, I may be - or both of us may be - brains in vats fed by the same simulations.


Alternatively, on an idealist reading of Searle’s scenario, we can say that what he says happens could still happen if what the idealists claim is true. This place and time may just be mental ideas in our minds. Alternatively, they may be false sensory simulations given to us by an evil demon or a malicious scientist. According to the sceptic, the sceptical version would be identical to the non-sceptical scenario as far as our actual experiences are concerned.


So there doesn't seem to be any direct or automatic ‘presupposition’ of a mind-independent world here. In any case, not many people talk of - or even think at all about - the world’s mind-independence or its mind-dependence – that isn't the way people look at or think about the world.


So there needn't be either epistemological or ontological presuppositions involved when you or I arrange to meet somewhere at a place and a time.


Alternatively, if we arrange to meet at a particular building and unknown to us that building is just a facade from a film set, we still wouldn't assume that it's not a facade or, indeed, that it is a facade. Though it could be a facade. That wouldn't affect our meeting and what we thought about the meeting. (The street could also be a facade as well as having artificial traffic and human-like robots walking up and down it.)


Similarly, we could meet at this building at 6 O’ clock even thought it's 7 O’ clock when we actually meet. However, the clock on the building says it is 6 O’ clock and we think it is 6 O’clock because it says so. Not even that: it may well be 6 O’ clock when the clock says 6’ clock; though unknown to us that clock stopped three months ago and it's just a happy coincidence that it stopped at that time.


Again, none of this means that we need to assume the existence of the world and none of this has any impact on its existence or our knowledge of its existence.

John Searle on Our Obsession With Scepticism

Many philosophers criticise both Quine and Rorty for not taking "scepticism seriously" (187). John Searle, an ‘external realist’, doesn't take scepticism seriously either. Some of the reasons Searle gives for not taking scepticism seriously are exactly the same as those given by Quine; and they're even more similar to those of Rorty.

At the heart of this critique - in the case of both Rorty and Searle (less so in the case of Quine) - is a criticism of Cartesian epistemology and the dominant role it has had in Western philosophy for about three hundred years – perhaps right up to late Wittgenstein and other philosophers:

"There’s deeper objection I have to this whole tradition and that is that I think our obsession with epistemology was a 300-year mistake. Descartes set us off on this and we just have to get out of the idea that the main aim of philosophy is to answer scepticism. There are all sorts of much more interesting questions. I don’t take scepticism seriously. I take it seriously in the way I take Zeno’s paradoxes seriously – they’re nice puzzles. But when I hear about Zeno’s paradoxes I don’t think, “Oh my God, maybe space and time don’t exist.” I think, “That’s an interesting paradox, let’s worked it out.” That’s how I feel about the sceptical paradoxes. I don’t feel that they show that the real world doesn’t exist or that we can never have knowledge of it. I’m quite stunned, in a way, that we’ve had three hundred years of taking scepticism seriously." [187]

What Searle says about epistemology’s ‘obsession’ with scepticism (or our obsession with epistemology itself) is more or less exactly what Rorty says. Indeed it's also more or less what the late Wittgenstein and even Heidegger said! They too not only said that scepticism was/is the prime issue of epistemology; but that epistemology itself (or at least epistemology as it was influenced by Descartes) created the problems of scepticism. That's why Rorty and Michael Williams don't only question scepticism itself, they also question the whole of epistemology which was partly (or fully) building on Cartesian-induced scepticism.

It's interesting to note, then, that Searle compares the sceptical ‘possibilities’ with Zeno’s paradoxes. He doesn’t "take [these] seriously" either. However, he does see them as "nice puzzles" (187). The philosophers who've been interested in paradoxes - Zeno’s or others - surely wouldn’t have seen them as simply ‘nice puzzles’ – or would they?

Bertrand Russell, for instance, did see the paradoxes as nice puzzles. They were useful because they challenge our cognitive abilities and challenge our ordinary ways of thinking about the world. However, perhaps that doesn't imply that we ever actually believe their conclusions or take them seriously. That is, like Searle, no one really thought that "maybe space and time don’t exist" (187) or that the hare could never have caught up with the tortoise. Similarly, no one, unless he were mad, ever thought "that the real world doesn’t exist or that we can’t have knowledge of it" (187). Or if they seemingly did, perhaps this was an example of the ‘false doubt’ that C.S. Peirce talked about when he castigated Cartesians.

We must conclude with a question:

Have we really been obsessed by epistemology - and therefore scepticism - in the last three hundred years? And was it really the case that scepticism was epistemology’s prime concern?

Come to think of it, it's quite easy to see that scepticism was epistemology’s prime concern because that's what epistemology is essentially about – whether we can have knowledge at all; and not just of the ‘external world'.

John Searle on Social Facts

John Searle argues that there are indeed normative facts and he applies this position to his ontology of social reality, which is set within a broadly Wittgensteinian framework. Thus:

"I say that’s the key element in understanding institutional reality: there’s a class of objectively existing facts in the world that are only the facts they are because we collectively recognise them as such, and that goes with prime ministers, governments, marriage, private property, universities, professorships, conferences and the English language. They’re all very important in our life but they are all cases of “status-functions” – where the fact can only perform the function in virtue of collective acceptance or recognition." (189)

This is a recognition of Wittgenstein’s positions on social practices, norms and rule-following. However, Searle adds a realist ontology to the basically constructivist position of Wittgenstein. Either that, or Wittgenstein himself was basically a realist when it came to these matters – only that there are ‘social facts’ as well as the facts recognised by physics and perhaps by other sciences.


Why shouldn’t there be social facts anyway?


People and institutions behave in certain ways, so why can’t these things be deemed to be factual simply because they aren't about natural laws, electrons and other things accepted by physics?


In addition, some of these social facts are themselves constituted by the facts of physics; though they are further up the line of physics, as it were. (Quine would make a similar point to this.) Our recognition and indeed construction of prime ministers, governments, marriage and the rest doesn’t seem to make them any less factual than natural laws and electrons. Why should they be any less factual than the arcane entities of physics?


Searle then goes into greater philosophical detail as to why there are such things as ‘institutional facts’:

"Now here’s the point: institutional facts do have an ontologically subjective component. They’re only the facts they are because we think they are. But that doesn’t prevent them from being epistemically objective. It’s just an objective fact, epistemically speaking, that this piece of paper in my hand is a five-pound note. That is, it isn’t just my opinion that it’s a five-pound note." (190)

Institutional facts "have an ontologically subjective component" (190) in the sense that we create certain institutional facts, like the fact that five-pound notes can buy 10 cigarettes, etc. More to the point, they’re "only the facts they are because we think they are" (190). Though that too is a fact – that we think that institutional facts are facts. That is, even if five-pound notes are ‘social constructions’ it is still a fact that they are social constructions and it is still a fact that we can buy 10 cigarettes with a five-pound note.


I’m not immediately sure why Searle calls such facts ‘epistemically objective’ rather than ‘ontologically objective’. Are they epistemically objectively because it's about what we know about these institutional facts and not about what they are regardless of our contingent knowledge or how they are ‘in themselves’?Only in the latter case would institutional facts be ontologically objective.


Again, it's an ‘objective fact’ - even if an epistemically objective fact - that a five-pound note is a five-pound note and that this five-pound note can buy 10 cigs, amongst other things. The institutional creation of five-pound notes, amongst indefinite other things, doesn’t at all change the factual status of any of these things.


Social reality is objective reality even if social reality is a ‘construction’ or indeed an invention of human beings and therefore, yes, ontologically subjective. The fact remains that this element of ontological subjectivity doesn't take away the epistemically objective status of all institutional facts. The two modes of ontology, according to Searle at least, can run alongside each other without contradiction.