C.I. Lewis on the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme

C.I. Lewis secured himself from any charge of ‘rationalism’ by arguing, in John Passmore's words, that

“the distinction between what is given to the mind and what the mind contributes has to be discovered in the world – it is not itself given”. [Passmore, 1957/1966]

Thus reason isn't its own guardian against error and untruth. It's far from autonomous in the rationalist sense. However, then Lewis makes a point that, although not rationalist, is very like Donald Davidson’s later position. He argues that the world

“we actually experience is one in which the mind has already been at work”.

In Davidson's terms, we don't apply a conceptual scheme to ‘the Given’ – the world is already "structured" though not "organised" [see Michael Luntley's 1999]. Lewis goes on to argue if that weren't so, “it would be wholly indescribable; nothing less than a pattern or an order can be named”. Moreover, “one can never say of anything that it is 'the given'”. Lewis adds:

“To know at all is to categorise; Russell’s 'knowledge by acquaintance' is impossible in principle.”

Like Davidson later, Lewis still accepted the given (without a capital 'G'); though he saw it differently to the epistemic foundationalists or sense-data theorists. He argued that

“there is a given – something which no activity of thought could alter – is beyond all question”.

He went on to say that “[n]o philosopher has ever succeeded in doing without the given”.

Like Davidson and, indeed, Kant, there is a given of sorts; though that too is structured (though not organised) by the mind (or, in Kant’s case, by the Transcendental Ego). The world is given to us in a structured form – structured by categories and concepts. However, we don't contingently apply conceptual schemes to this given in order to organise it – it's already organised.

Lewis argued that "critical realists" were wrong to conceptually tear apart the “unspeakable” sensory elements and the “categories through which it is categorised”. Lewis also accused the critical realists of asking an absurd question: “how do we know that experience will fit into our categorical types?” Lewis argued that this question is

“unanswerable – if it means, how do we know that what we experience is not quite different from what we take it to be?”

If we take the mind naturalistically, and deny any application of conceptual schemes, then this question makes even less sense because

i) we have no choice but to see the world as we do see it.

ii) If the mind is part of nature (not its pure spectator), then there's no prior reason to believe that there could be such a mismatch between mind and world.

As Davidson also argued, Lewis argued that

“experience must 'really' be the sort of thing which satisfies our categorical principles, because those principles are the only thing which can determine what is 'real' and what is not”.

Thus we can't escape from the conceptual scheme we're born with. Indeed if we're all born into this same conceptual scheme, then “the very idea of a conceptual scheme” [Davidson] is rendered suspect because of the implication that there's more than one conceptual scheme.

Lewis becomes Kantian in tone when he refers to the fact that our “categorical principles” determine the/our “conditions of experience” (to use Kant’s own way of putting it). Categorical principles

“describe the way in which we interpret our experience; nothing could happen, therefore, could overthrow them”.

Lewis acknowledges that they

“may alter if our interests, and with them our methods of interpretation, are modified; but they can never be refuted”.

Thus, after all, they aren't a priori in quite the same way as Kant thought. Though, like Carnap’s “linguistic systems”, they can't be deemed true or false: “they can never be refuted”. They must therefore be chosen on pragmatic grounds; even though we're still given a conceptual and categorial framework from which we can modify them. It's still the case that there's no experience devoid of “categorical principles” – no pure given. However, unlike Kant’s a priori categories and concepts, we can indeed modify or change our categories or categorial frameworks; though we'd still be unable to experience an uncategorised given.

This is quite an interesting middle way between Lewis's critical realists (metaphysical realists?), epistemic foundationalists, Kantian transcendental idealism and the conceptual relativists who came on the scene after Lewis. Indeed, because of Davidson’s debt to Kant (as well as his denial of conceptual schemes), this very synthesis was something Davidson tried to bring about later.

References

Davidson, Donald. (1973) 'The very ideas of a conceptual scheme'
Lewis, C.I. (1929) Mind and the World Order
Luntley, Michael. (1999) Contemporary Philosophy of Thought: Truth, World, Content (pages 118 to 121)
Passmore, John. (1957/1966) A Hundred Years of Philosophy (pages 294 to 297)

One Paradoxical Case of Material Implication?

In a material implication which includes p and q, if p is true, then q must be true. Statement p implies both q and q’s truth.

What happens, then, if p is false? If p is false, then q may be false. Does that mean that q is only true if p is also true? Can’t p be false and q true (even though if p were true, it would also imply q and its truth)? We can accept that if p were true, then it must be the case that q is true. Need it follow that if p were false, that q need also to be false? Or, alternatively, p may well be false and still imply q. In that case, q could be either true or false.

It's said that if p is false “it will imply the truth of any proposition we care to mention” [Passmore,1956].

What does that mean?

Does it simply mean that if p were false, then it wouldn’t matter what it entailed or implied? If p were false, perhaps it couldn't imply anything. Something that's false (or something that's not the case) surely can’t imply anything. What would be doing the implying if p is false (or if p isn’t the case)?

Of course we could use any statement as a possible implicative proposition (or placeholder); though it wouldn't thereby be a genuine case of implication. It would simply be a case of shoving one symbol or statement on the end of another. Where does the paradox come in?

Take this example from John Passmore.

The clause “If the Devil were elected in the United States” can't imply that the “spiritual welfare of the nation would be improved” because the consequent is about the future and the first clause is part of a conditional. How can conditionals imply anything when they're not in fact the case? We can of course say that a conditional statement would imply something if it were the case. Thus even if the Devil were elected, how would that imply the better welfare of the nation? That consequent is itself conditional. That means that if the nation’s spiritual well being were improved, then it must have been the case that the Devil had been elected.

Conditionals aren't conditionals if both their antecedent and consequent are conditionals. It may happen that if the Devil were elected then there would be improved spirituality; though the actual election wouldn't imply what c/would follow. There's no genuine implication here.

Implications must follow; even when based on conditional antecedents. Thus even if the Devil were elected, this wouldn't imply improved spirituality. It may indeed follow that such a thing would happen; though if such a thing did happen it wouldn't have an implication-relation to the Devil’s election. That may follow; though it wouldn't be implied. Such a consequence would or could happen simply because it won't be the case that the Devil is elected. And if that’s the case, then anything can follow a situation that doesn't or couldn't happen.

Reference

Passmore, John. (1957/1966) A Hundred Years of Philosophy (page 140).

Conditionals and Future Contingents

Conditionals must be, by their very nature, unsound. They're unsound because they are non-deductive. They express what could be the case, not what is the case. What could be the case isn't what is the case.

Sometimes conditionals are about what will be the case or what is necessarily the case. These conditionals can rely on a certain amount of sound and deductive reasoning. Though even what will be the case isn't the case now. And many sound and deductive systems wouldn't concern themselves with what will be the case in the future. That wouldn't be the domain of deductive logic; even if the future could, as it were, be deductively inferred.

Future Contingents

Many philosophers say that “future contingents” can't be either true or false. Thus this would create a problem for deductive logics.

What about conditionals which tell us what will necessarily be the case now or what is necessarily the case now? Even these cases would be about the future, strictly speaking.

That is, if I say,

“If I drop this stone it will necessarily fall to the ground.”

the falling stone (hitting the ground) is still in the future when the statement is actually made. Thus it's still a future contingent. The future it concerns itself with is just the very near future.

Conditionals don’t deal with what is the case now and what has already been the case. These kinds of necessities aren't the concern of conditionals. You can't, for example, say:

“It's necessarily the case now [i.e., 2006] that if in 1912 someone had dropped a stone it would have necessarily fallen to the ground.”

We can say that it was necessarily the case; though that wouldn’t be a conditional at all (not even on the surface).

Similarly if someone says the following:

“If someone had added 2 + 2 in 1912, then he would necessarily have got 4.”

That appears to be some kind of conditional in that it uses the argument-form “if…then...”. However, it's only an appearance. How could a particular past mathematical addition be verified? Perhaps certain adders were poor adders. Thus not every act of addition would have come out correctly. Of course we could add the qualification:

“If someone had added 2 + 2 correctly…”

Though that isn't an if-then scenario at all: it's a statement that 2 + 2 necessarily equals 4. The truth of the arithmetical addition doesn't depend on any conditions. And conditionals are, of course, about (possible/hypothetical) conditions.

Take this present-moment statement:

“When someone adds 2 + 2 correctly now, he will necessarily get 4.”

This too is about the near future; though still the future. In addition, not all additions can be verified. However, if we're again talking about the necessary truth that 2 + 2 = 4, then this has nothing to do with conditions, as such.

Acceptable Unsound Reasoning

 

Despite the problems with unsound reasoning, most of us (or everyone!) who use such reasoning will still require that our unsound inferences be reliable to some unspecified degree. There'd be no point otherwise.

Zero reliability would make unsound reasoning useless. Alternatively, 100% reliability is impossible. Thus the reliability ratio may be, at times, somewhere in the middle.

This reliability of unsound inferences is sometimes expressed in terms of the reliability of predictions; the explanatory power of its conclusions; whether or not it relies on false, true or unknown assumptions; and what the precise status of the observations utilised are. (E.g., are they good, bad, clear or unclear?)

What also matters with unsound reasonings is the power and utility of the conclusions derived from them. Do unsound inferences and conclusions help us in any way? Are they practical? And so on.

No prediction is foolproof. Who knows what the future may bring? Even predictions about future necessities are philosophically problematic to many philosophers.

Of course inductive reasoning must rely on observations; though that doesn’t stop the inductivist asking questions about the nature and status of his or other people’s observations. How were they experienced? Can we trust those who had them? Was the observational equipment working correctly at the time? Is the observer biased? What assumptions did the observer bring to his observations? What previous observations were required in order to make sense of the observations we're now commenting upon? Were they genuine observations at all? And so on.

There's another way of saying that certain correct/valid forms of reasoning don't lead us to truths. This doesn’t entirely matter because they're still valid/correct (if not sound).

If we observe ten white swans, it's largely correct to infer that swans are white. However, the statement “All swans are white” is still unsound. That is, it's possible that there may be black swans. In addition, the means used to come to that conclusion didn't depend on deductive inferences and the premises might included  past observations; not axiomatic truths or deductively-derived premises.

What other kinds of unsound reasoning are there?

The inductive form is simply one of generalisation. This is something that's of vital importance not just to science and philosophy, but to everyday life as well.

One observes a finite numbers of objects or events, and from that finite (or limited) amount one generalises about what will probably be the case with all other unobserved objects or events. Without such generalisations, we'd need to wait until we'd observed every example (or sample) of the thing in question. This would be impossible to do (in most cases) in a finite amount of time.

Of course mistakes are made when we generalise, as every scientist knows. However, it's still impossible to do without generalisations, both within philosophy and without. Even those philosophers who claim never to generalise do so. In fact that very claim is a generalisation and it's also false.

There are dangers which result from generalising, not just in philosophy.

For example, “All blacks are criminals”, “No blacks are criminals”, “Hegel is a generaliser” and so on. However, never generalising would also be very problematic. Or at least it would be if anyone actually completely abstained from generalising.

Some Newish Takes on Mind-Body Dualism

Quantum mechanics has been used to explain just about everything that's so far unexplainable. Consciousness doesn't escape that net (at least as cast by non-scientists).

For example, perhaps the nature of quantum phenomena can explain (or make sense of) good old-fashioned mind-body dualism:

“… loosen up our thinking and nudge us away from the simple billiard ball model of causation… When this is combined with a certain influential interpretation of quantum theory, dualism can start to seem, not merely, possible, but positively commonsensical!” [2004]

Presumably this is because in the “billiard-ball model of causation”, billiard balls were required to be next to each other (or ‘contiguous’, as David Hume put it) in order to affect one another. Theories of quantum mechanics deny that this is necessary. There's talk of “action at a distance”. However, it's not immediately clear what this has to do with consciousness or dualism in the philosophy of mind.

Is there an inference here from

 

             i) Action at a distance tells us that objects needn't be next to each other to be causally related.

                                               to                                                              

ii) The non-physical nature of mind doesn't need to be physical in order to causally affect the physical.

Isn’t quantum mechanical theory still about physical phenomena? (That is, no matter how far apart they are and no matter how loose the definition of ‘physical’.) If the mind is simply non-physical (or made of mind-substance), then it's not immediately obvious how quantum theory helps dualism. It's not distance that's the issue here: it's the fact that dualists believe that mind-substance can causally affect body-substance.

We need more arguments to accept the relevance of quantum theory for the mind-body debate. So here’s one argument:

“If minds were themselves parts of the material world, they would be, like the camera in Tibble’s box, merely parts of the whole system, hence themselves in a superposition of states.” [2004]

Again, it's not immediately obvious how quantum theory provides some kind of defence for dualism. Not even when we're given a parallel. The argument seems to be that the mind is a superposition of states - as in the Schrödinger’s cat thought-experiment. Would this automatically make minds non-physical?

The other possibility is that the minds are only parts of larger systems. Thus are we to conclude that minds emerge from these larger total systems because of, say, their very complexity?

E.J. Lowe on the Self

One of the major problems with Cartesian dualism is the clear fact that mind-substance is viewed as being completely different to body-substance. The major difference, according to Descartes, is that the mind is non-extended and that the body is extended. What if a contemporary philosopher accepted that account? E.J. Lowe does (partly) accept it. He says that it has relevance to our notion of the self. John Heil expressed Lowe's position thus:

“The self, he holds, is perfectly simple. What could be the parts of a self? You entertain different thoughts, your preferences evolve, and memories come and go. But these are not parts of you in the way arms, legs, hearts, and livers are parts of your body.” [2004]

The self, on this picture, is like a Leibnizian monad. It too has no parts. It follows that our thoughts, preferences and memories can’t be parts of the self because the self is a perfectly simple unity. Not only that: it's non-spatial or non-extended. How can something non-spatial have parts... even in principle?

Thus if we have mental items (of whatever sort), we can't see them as parts of our mind or self. So what are they? How do they all belong together? How, indeed, do they come and go? What do they belong to (if they belong to anything)? How does the unity and continuity of the self come about without physical (causal) connections?

The answer is that mind-substance holds it all together. However, even with mind-substance and non-extension we're still using spatial and physical metaphors like “to bind” and “to contain”. A dualist surely shouldn't be using such metaphors. Despite saying that, the problem is that if he didn't do so, he'd effectively be denying himself the possibility of saying anything. Metaphors and analogies are all he has. And they get him into trouble.

Heil offers us a simple thought experiment to help us determine whether or not dualism is in fact true (or even if it makes sense). He talks in terms of a status and the bronze out of which the statue is actually made. Heil writes:

“Now imagine that the mind or self is related to the body in something like the way the statue is related to the lump of bronze that is on the scene when the statue is one the scene. Selves and bodies have very different identity conditions, so there is no prospect of identifying the self with the body. Moreover, the self is simple (or so Lowe contends), altogether lacking in parts. Nevertheless the self and the body (like the statue and the lump) might share certain properties. If the body has a particular mass, so does the self; if the body is in Gundagai, so is the self. The body and the self do not share all their properties.” [2004]

We can intuitively say that the lump of bronze is the statue. Or, less strongly, that they're identical. Clearly we can't say the same about the body (or brain) and the self. They do indeed have different properties. Though does this mean that they aren't identical? Perhaps the self is X under one description and the body is X under a different description. This is pretty much what Donald Davidson believed in his position of ‘anomalous monism’. That is, the mental and the physical are indeed identical. However, the mental can't be satisfactorily reduced to the physical; nor do they have the same properties. That's because X is seen under two modes of description (just as a table can be described qua table or qua collection of moving molecules).

There's a hint of Leibniz’s law here as well. That is, if the self has different properties, and therefore things true of the body won't be true of the self (as well as vice versa), then the self and the body can't in fact be identical. However, that doesn't seem to work for the lump of bronze and the statue. As Heil says, both share the same mass and both exist in the same place at the same time. Despite that, the lump of bronze must have existed before it was made into a statue. Since that's the case, then the lump will have at least one property that the statue doesn't have: being older than the statue.

If the self is indeed simple, as Lowe contends, then it couldn't have the properties which a body has. This, again, can be accounted for in terms of two modes of description of the same thing. We have a mode of presentation of the self that simply precludes us from giving it any properties. Nevertheless, that's a result of a particular mode of presentation, not of X. If the self is truly simple, how could we really describe it at all, let alone say that it's the same as the body in which it is supposed to exist?

Perhaps the self and body can be identical; though not numerically identical. This doesn’t help because it raises the prospect of identity-at-a-distance (as it were). In any case, Leibniz would would have told that they can’t be identical because they don't share all their properties. In fact the self (whatever it is) shares no properties with the body or brain. How could it? We've already been told that the self is simple and non-extended. How could it share properties with something, the body, which is complex and extended?

The old question therefore arises:

If these radical differences and distinctions between body and self are real, then how can we account for the fact that they're connected in some - or in many - ways?

This isn't only a question of the improbability of causal connections between mind-stuff and body-stuff: it's also about the improbability of any substantive connections between substances which share no properties whatsoever. We must conclude (if we are dualists) that the analogy between self/body and lump/statue is far from being acceptable or precise. The two examples simply aren't parallel in any way.

The most palatable solution (in that it appears to be mid-way between dualism and materialism) is the following juxtaposition of ‘substance monism’ and ‘property dualism’ (as advanced by Davidson, amongst others). Heil writes:

“… 'property dualism', the view that mental and physical properties, though quite different, can be properties of one and the same substance.” [2004]

The problem with this position is that although it provides us with a middle way between hard-core materialism (or eliminativism) and dualism (as well as what seems like a satisfactory explanation), it in fact isn't really much of an explanation at all. How can one and the same substance be the ground or cause of two sets of completely unlike properties? How can a single substance be responsible for these anomalies between properties? It's an explanation; though not a solution to the mind-body problem. Indeed, as has just been said, it's not really an acceptable explanation at all!

Thus some philosophers may accept it (along with supervenience) simply because they don't - or can't - accept any of the alternatives.

References

Davidson, Donald. (1970) 'Mental events'

Heil, John. (2004) Philosophy of Mind: A Guide an Anthology (pages 815-817)
Lowe. E.J. (1996) Subjects of Experience (see chapter 2)