Michael Devitt’s Question: What, Exactly, is the A Priori?

 

Like many defences of philosophical positions, the defences of the a priori are often purely negative in nature. Such defences are like the following:

Q) What is a proposition?

A) A proposition is not a sentence or a statement.

So we also often get:

Q) What is the nature of a priori knowledge?

A) A priori knowledge which isn’t derived from experience.

Yet this is a little like the following:

Q) What is a dog?

A) A dog isn’t a cat.

Of course the least that can be said is that experiential (or observational) knowledge and a priori knowledge are both examples of knowledge. So the cat and the dog example isn’t completely fair. Yet they too are both animals and mammals. So what about this? -

A) A dog isn’t a rock.

In addition, in a loose sense clairvoyant “knowledge”’ isn’t — at least directly — derived from experience either. Are clairvoyant “skills” a priori? And even if such skills exist, we still haven’t been told what the a priori is. So clairvoyance may simply be an example of the a priori.

This was also the problem which W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000) had with analyticity. Many philosophers had previously defined this notion in terms of examples of analyticity (or in terms of analytic statements). According to Quine, they never told us what analyticity actually is. (See here.)

So the Australian philosopher Michael Devitt (1938-) wants a “positive characterisation” of the a priori.

Michael Devitt on Systems and a Priori Links

What sort of characterisation of the a priori would that be? Devitt demands that

“[w]e need to describe a process for justifying a belief that is different from the empirical way and that we have some reason for thinking is actual”.

That process of a priori justification is very difficult to describe.

Indeed even apriorists (such as Laurence BonJour — who’ll be discussed later) admit that. This, of course, isn’t an absolute argument against the a priori. Many things in philosophy and science are difficult to describe and sometimes even classed as “primitive” or “unanalysable”. However, it’s not just the process of a priori justification that’s at issue here: it’s also whether or not it is (as Devitt puts it) “actual” .

What reason do we have for believing that the a priori (or a priori justification) actually exists or is (as it were) instantiated in minds?

Devitt tackles the positions of the American philosopher Laurence BonJour (1948-).

Firstly, not all BonJour’s defences of the a priori are really arguments.

For example, BonJour has written that

“the rejection of any sort of a priori justification leads inexorably to a severe scepticism and to the undermining of reasoning or argument in general”.

This is a warning about the repercussions of rejecting the a priori: it’s not an argument against those who reject the a priori or an argument in favour of it. (Perhaps we can call it an example of catastrophising; as some psychotherapists put it.)

So why does the rejection of the a priori lead to scepticism?

Why does it lead to the “undermining of reasoning or argument in general”?

Quine’s Web of Belief

On Devitt’s “Quinian alternative”, we have the following two-fold “web”:

1) Beliefs which are “close to experience” (or on the “periphery” of the Quinian web).

2) Beliefs that are in the interior of the web.

According to the Quinian picture, beliefs captured by 2) above are justified “via links with beliefs at the periphery”. So there are links between interior beliefs and peripheral beliefs which are “close to experience”. However, as some aprioristic logicians and philosophers have asked: What about those links themselves? That is, do these “justifications depend on the links themselves being justified”? Surely these links must be logical. And if they’re logical, then they must also be a priori in nature. This must also mean that even Quine’s web of belief has an a priori element. Or so the story goes…

More clearly, the interior beliefs can be justified by the exterior — or peripheral — beliefs if and only if the links between the exterior and the interior have themselves been justified. So surely these links are logical and must therefore be a priori justified. Again, this means that Quinian webs of belief are (as it were) polluted by the a priori. Or as BonJour puts it:

“[T]he justification of these links has to be a priori; it could not come from experience.”

The strange thing is that many would think that even empiricists (or naturalists) would happily accept that anything purely logical must be a priori in nature. So it must follow that these links between the exterior and interior beliefs must also be a priori justified. That said, Devitt’s paper is entitled, ‘There is no a Priori’. This means that he must believe that these logical (or evidential) links must not be a priori (or justified a priori).

BonJour has more to say about the links in Quinian webs of belief (or the links in any such system). He writes (as quoted in Devitt):

“[I]f there is no a priori insight… no prediction will follow any more than any other… any… sort of connection between the parts of the system will become essentially arbitrary.”

BonJour is simply arguing that if you don’t accept a priori justification (or rational “insight”) for the links in a Quinian web of belief (or in any other corresponding system), then the “connection between the parts of the system will become essentially arbitrary”. This means that if we don’t have a priori justification (or insight), then we effectively have nothing in such systems. And if we have nothing, then that’s bound to lead to the “arbitrary” nature of the “connections between the parts of the system”.

The question is, then:

Is the a priori way out the only way out?

If we accept BonJour’s prognosis of the rejection of the a priori vis-à-vis Quinian webs of belief (or any such parallel systems), then it’s no surprise that “the rejection of all a priori justification is tantamount to intellectual suicide”.

Again, the question is: Is the a priori the only game in town?

It was mentioned earlier that many people see logic and mathematics as being the only domains of the a priori. Devitt himself states that

“the objection is that logic must be seen as a priori because we need logic to get evidence for against anything”.

So perhaps BonJour is acknowledging the following:

Yes, fair enough, evidence is indeed of supreme importance in science and in just about every other disciple. However, without the framework of a priori logic to hold it all together, all this evidence would amount to nothing.

Indeed BonJour argues that it wouldn’t even be evidence “for or against anything” if it weren’t for such logical frameworks. Alternatively put, if it weren’t for the logical links between this belief and that belief (or between this bit of evidence and that bit of evidence), then there would be no evidence in the first place. A priori logic ties all these things together.

This is partly why “the logic of science” isn’t itself scientific (or a science). Science and even naturalism (or empiricism) require logic. Thus someone like BonJour would conclude that science and empiricism (or naturalism) also require the a priori (or a priori justification).

The American philosopher Hartry Field (1946-) is also quoted as arguing that the

“‘links that hold the web of belief together reflect a set of rules that are part of an evidential system’”.

The quote above implies that the links between beliefs in any given system (or whatever) provide a “set of rules” within what Field calls an “evidential system”. Thus there would be no system (or web) without those links. So, according to someone like BonJour, there would be no system (or web) at all without the a priori.

It can be said that (Quinian) webs of belief will be — explicitly and implicitly — full of examples of the rule modus ponens. And Devitt himself offers modus ponens as an example of a “link” or “rule”.

So what it modus ponens? This:

If p, then q

p

So q.

Is the above an example of the a priori (as it were) in action?

Surely it is.

Doesn’t the inference (or rule) above itself instantiate the a priori? And can’t it only be known a priori? Indeed how does Devitt argue otherwise? If modus ponens (which is one of the most common rules or inference patterns) is truly a priori (or known to be true a priori), then it will be at the very core of every web of belief.

Webs of Belief and Systems

Yet more is said about this relation between a system (which is made up primarily of empirical beliefs or bits of evidence — loosely described) and its (possibly) a priori “deductive parts”. Devitt puts his adversary’s position thus:

“But what about the specific deductive rules that we do have insight into, rules like modus ponens? Even if our overall confidence in S is empirical, our confidence in these deductive parts is a priori. We know MP a priori at least.”

That means that if the system (S) is largely empirical (or our “confidence in S is empirical”), then we still need to answer for the specific deductive rules within it. So it’s claimed by BonJour that we do have (rational) insight into them. We have both confidence in the empirical parts of the system and a priori confidence in the deductive parts. The gist of this argument — again! — is that we simply can’t escape from the a priori (at least in the case of systems like S).

Devitt also puts a slightly different slant on all this.

Firstly we have the relation between

1) empirical beliefs (within a system) and their relation to the world (or to experience).

and

2) the evidential or deductive links between the beliefs within that system.

Alternatively, we have the following:

3) External links involving certain direct causal relations to the world.

and

4) Beliefs which involve inferential relations among “thoughts”.

The Cartesian (or rationalist) stresses both 2) and 4) above. He may even entirely exclude 1) and 3). (Many externalists, perhaps, do the opposite.) Or, as Devitt puts it, the Cartesian takes only “one of those relations”. That is,

“[w]hy suppose that, simply in virtue of her [the Cartesian] having that relation [as in 2) and 4)], reflection must lead her to believe that it does?”.

This seems to set up the Cartesian as a (partial) straw target; at least at first glance. In any case, perhaps a philosopher of mind or a cognitive scientist (rather than an epistemologist or a logician) is best suited to comment on at least aspects of this issue.

References

BonJour, Laurence, ‘Is There a Priori Knowledge?’ (2005)

Devitt, Michael, ‘There is no a Priori’ (2005)

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Donald Davidson’s Anomalous Monism: Mental Events

 

This essay is almost entirely devoted to a single influential philosophical paper: Donald Davidson’s ‘Mental Events’ (1970).

Donald Davidson (1917–2003) was an American philosopher whose work - from the 1960s onward — has been very influential in many areas of analytic philosophy. He has also had a smaller impact on various Continental philosophers.

This following essay basically expresses Davidson’s position of anomalous monism. This is a philosophical thesis about the mind–body relation. The theory has it that mental events are identical with physical events (hence the monism in anomalous monism). Yet it also argues that the mental is anomalous in that under the descriptions of mental events, relationships between them are not describable by strict physical laws. This means that Davidson proposed an identity theory of mind without the bridge laws that strongly tie mental events to physical (or brain) events (as in the type-identity theory).

Mental Events

Many people accept that the mind interacts with the brain. Or, more technically and to use Donald Davidson’s own words, “some mental events interact causally with physical events”. Davidson gives a very concrete example of this:

i) Mental Events: perceivings, notings, calculations, judgements, decisions, intentional actions, changes of belief.

ii) Physical Event: the sinking of the Bismarck.

The mental events in i) brought about physical event ii).

So if there are causal events between the mind and the body, then, Davidson argued, these causal events must instantiate the kind of physical laws found in every other part of the universe. To use Davidson’s words:

“[E]vents related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws.”

Many people think that this is the case simply because it’s the case everywhere else in the universe.

The “third principle”, as Davidson calls it, is a position that’s not well-known outside the philosophy of mind. This is that

“there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained”.

That basically means that we can never really know, for certain, what a mind (or a person with a mind) will do next. If we kick a ball, we know what will happen: it will move in a particular direction. Though put a mind (or a person) in any given situation, then we can’t forecast precisely how he or she will act. (Of course we won’t know the exact trajectory of a kicked ball either.) We can, however, offer probabilistic forecasts of that mind’s behaviour; though this would be a forecast determined by past behaviours and verbal expressions rather than by the “inner” nature of the mind or the workings of the brain.

And because Davidson believed in what he called “the anomalism of the mental” (i.e., that there aren’t strict deterministic laws with which we can forecast, predict or explain mental events), then the Identity Theorist has a problem because he believes that the mental and the physical are identical. That means that there must be such laws for mental events.

Let’s be clear what the Identity Theorist believed. He believed that, for example, a particular pain is identical to a particular brain state. They’re literally numerically identical.

Anomalous monism (the position advanced by Davidson), on the other hand, is still physicalist; despite the special position it gives to mental events. The anomalous monist believes that all events are physical. Yet the anomalous monist also believes that “mental phenomena [can’t] be given purely physical explanations”.

So why aren’t mental events subsumable under scientific laws?

How does the monist account for this anomaly?

Firstly, although the mental and the physical aren’t identical, there is a very close relation between the two. Mental phenomena depend — or supervene — upon physical phenomena. And the supervenience thesis is both strong and, according to some, thoroughly physicalist.

Let’s explain this close relation between mental events and physical events.

If two events are alike in all physical respects, then they’ll be alike in all mental respects — despite the fact that they’re not identical! To put the same position somewhat differently. Two objects can’t alter in some mental respect without also altering in some physical respect.

Now a little will be said on the monist’s position on reductionism (which is very important in the philosophy of mind), vis-à-vis the relation between mind and matter.

Reductionism

As Davidson put it:

“Dependence or supervenience of this kind does not entail reducibility through law or definition.”

Anomalous monism isn’t a reductive physicalist position. This means that the mind can’t be reduced to the brain without remainder. Thus supervenience doesn’t entail psychophysical laws.

Again, Davidson went into the reasons why we can’t use physical predicates to describe or explain mental events. So, despite his physicalism, he argued that no physical predicate has the “same extension as a mental predicate”. To sum up: Davidson essentially argued that the physical and the mental are ontologically identical (again, hence the monism); though descriptively (or conceptually) non-identical.

Yet, at a prima facie level at least, this seems to be a hard position to defend. That is, can we make sense of ontological monism alongside conceptual dualism?

To defend his position Davidson discussed the long tradition of naturalist attempts to define the mental (or supposedly non-physical) in terms of the physical. (For example, behaviourists tried to define or describe the mind — or the mental — in terms of observable physical behaviour.) Davidson also argued that naturalism in ethics failed; as well as in instrumentalism and operationalism in the sciences; in the causal theory of meaning in semantics; and, finally, in phenomenalism in epistemology. According to Davidson, all these attempts at “definitional reductionism [were] conspicuously inadequate”. So it can now be said that Davidson was a realist about the mind or the mental (as well as about ethical terms/concepts and even properties). And, finally, Davidson believed that meaning is something that is not reducible to the physical.

Davidson then became slightly more technical and went into more detail about the anomalism of the mental.

The Technical Argument

Davidson cited the case of a mental event (m) and a physical event (p).

If m causes p, then “under some description m and p must instantiate a strict law”. However, this law must be physical because there are only physical laws. Yet “if m falls under a physical law, [then] it [must have] a physical description”. That is to say: m must be a physical event. This in turn means that in order for m to be subsumed under laws, it must be described in the language of p.

Davidson then argued something which , prima facie, seems contradictory. He wrote:

“So every mental event that is causally related to a physical event is a physical event.”

This appears to be saying that the mental is physical. Alternatively, that the mental is both mental and physical (hence the conceptual dualism). Yet hasn’t Davidson been arguing against the mental’s subsumption under the physical (hence the “anomalism of the mental”)?

To recap: In Baruch Spinoza’s fashion (in his own substance monism), Davidson claims that we can look at the mental qua mental and also the mental qua physical. m-descriptions can’t be reduced down to p-descriptions. And, therefore, p-descriptions can’t be lifted up to m-descriptions. However, if Davidson was a monist, m and p are the same substance. Therefore m = p. That said, it has already been stated that Davidson didn’t accept the Identity Theory. So one can now ask:

Can one be an ontological monist of mind and not be an identity theorist?

Human Freedom

It can be argued that there’s an idée fix running throughout all of Davidson’s paper.

It boils down to one thing: the necessity (or simple possibility) of human freedom.

The explanation — or perhaps the guaranteeing of — free will can be said to be one of Davidson’s primary aims in his paper. Yet despite the fact that earlier on Davidson had talked about “the efficacy of thought and purpose in the material world, and their freedom from law”, it’s strange that he was only explicit on this matter at the very end of his paper.

This is what Davidson wrote:

“The anomalism of the mental is thus a necessary condition for viewing action as autonomous.”

To put that another way:

The mind’s freedom from physical causation is necessary in order to secure us freedom (that is, secure us free will).

But which came first for Davidson?

Did the arguments about the anomalism of the mental lead to Davidson’s views about human freedom? Or did his pre-existing views about human freedom lead him to his arguments about the anomalism of the mental? Most analytic philosophers will say that whether or not this chicken or egg came first doesn’t matter at all. They’ll argue that if Davidson’s arguments work, then that’s all that matters.

In any case, the argument that Davidson’s faith in human freedom pre-dated his philosophical defences of human freedom becomes a little stronger when we bear in mind his references to Immanuel Kant — who, of course, undertook a similar enterprise.

In the last paragraph, Davidson paid homage to Kant by quoting — in full - a passage from Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals. This is the passage from Kant which Davidson quotes:

“[W]e think of man in a different sense and relation when we call him free, and when we regard him as subject to the laws of nature… It must therefore show that not only can both of these very well coexist, but that both must be thought as necessarily united in the same subject.”

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

One Challenge to Physicalism in the Philosophy of Mind

 

i) Introduction

ii) Jeffrey Poland’s Hierarchically-Structured System

iii) Abstract Objects, Properties and Relations

iv) Murray Gell-Mann’s Staircases Between the Sciences

v) Conclusion

Despite the title of this essay, the following piece offers a number of criticisms of that one challenge to physicalism (in the philosophy of mind). In other words, this essay doesn’t itself offer a challenge to physicalism. That said, it does understand and tackle that challenge. And there’s also various attempts to show why philosophers and laypeople may sympathise with it.

That challenge itself is the existence of non-physical or abstract (for want of a better word) phenomena within both physics and physicalist philosophy and how that fact relates to positions taken on the mind or consciousness.

Jeffrey Poland’s Hierarchically-Structured System

Put simply, there are non-physical objects, properties and relations which are quite acceptable to both contemporary physicists and to physicalist philosophers.

Take, as a single example, the following position.

Professor of Science and Technology (at Brown University) Jeffrey Poland puts his case in this way:

“It should be understood that the primacy of physics in ontological matters does not mean that everything is an element of a strictly physical ontology… [physicalism] allows for non-physical objects, properties, and relations… physicalism should not be equated with the identity theory in any of its forms… I prefer the idea of a hierarchically structured system of objects grounded in a physical basis by a relation of realization…”

All the above is quite acceptable on a physicalist picture of the world. That said, does any of the above help in the mind-body problem? Does it somehow justify attacks on physicalist positions on the mind or on consciousness?

In general, physicalists accept the existence of various concepts, properties, objects, etc. which are non-physical. Thus physicalism — generally perceived — can’t be seen as a position which denies the existence of such abstractions.

In addition, most physicists (i.e., rather than physicalists) believe that that certain phenomena supervene on the physical. (Admittedly, supervene — or supervenience — is a word from philosophy which physicists rarely use.) Moreover, because of this acceptance of supervenience, then few physicalists accept that all properties in the world are type identical to physical properties. (Consequently, this often brings about a commitment to what’s called multiple realizability.)

(Supervenience theorists argue that all social, biological and mental properties supervene on physical properties. This means that that two “worlds” can’t be physically identical yet differ in their social, biological or mental properties.)

Despite all the above, the following isn’t meant to be an essay on physicalism itself. However, it must be noted here that physicalism isn’t only a philosophical take on the nature of what is. It’s also often a philosophical position which commits itself to what science (mainly physics) tells us what is. This means that physicalism is strongly tied to naturalism — although they aren’t the same thing. Thus as the Australian philosopher Daniel Stoljar (1967-) puts it:

“[A] property is physical if and only if it either is the sort of property that physical theory [i.e., physics] tells us about or else is a property which metaphysically (or logically) supervenes on the sort of property that physical theory tells us about.”

But now let’s tackle abstract (i.e., non-physical) objects, properties and relations.

Abstract Objects, Properties and Relations

The first thing which should be said is that the non-physical nature of abstract objects, properties and relations aren’t of the same logical order as the ostensibly non-physical nature of mind or consciousness. (That’s if the mind or consciousness is non-physical in the first place.) So surely we can’t say that mind or consciousness is abstract in nature. Of course many accept that the mind is non-spatial. Yet does even the acceptance of that position make mind equivalent to abstract objects like propositions, universals, relations, etc.? Indeed even W.V.O Quine (an arch-naturalist and physicalist) accepted the existence of numbers and mathematics generally. And if anything is an abstract object, then surely a number is! (Of course that too has been disputed.)

This means that Poland’s quote — if used by an anti-physicalist — would actually set up a disanalogy between the abstract objects, properties and relations accepted in physicalist philosophy (as well as in physics) and the ostensibly non-physical nature of mind or consciousness.

In any case, the passage above finishes off with a statement of Poland’s statement that he prefers the

“idea of a hierarchically structured system of objects grounded in a physical basis by a relation of realization”.

This too is acceptable to most philosophers of the physicalist kind. Perhaps, more importantly, it’s also acceptable to scientists because they see meteorology, biology, anthropology, palaeontology, geology, anatomy, etc. as “higher-level sciences” — or at least sciences which study higher-level phenomena.

Or as the philosopher John Heil (1943-) writes:

“If you threw out ‘higher-level’ mental states or properties solely on the grounds that they depend in a mysterious way on lower-level material phenomena, you would have to toss out all the special sciences as well.”

So how does all this concern the scientific and philosophical question of consciousness or mind?

It can be accepted that the sciences mentioned above do grow out of physics. (Of course the phrase “grow out of” is both vague and metaphorical.) Thus chemistry — more directly — grows out of physics. And biology grows out of chemistry (at least to a large extent).

The important point here, however, is that even though chemistry and biology grow out of physics, this isn’t to deny the complexity of this issue and the problems with advancing any naive and simplistic kind of reductionism.

Gell-Mann’s Staircases Between the Sciences

The American physicist and Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) once stated the following:

“The laws of biology do depend on the laws of physics and chemistry, but they also depend on a vast amount of additional information about how those accidents turned out.”

Gell-Mann went into further detail:

“In very simple cases, an approximation to QED [quantum electrodynamics] is used to predict directly the results at the chemical level. In most cases, however, laws are developed at the upper level (chemistry) to explain and predict phenomena at that level, and attempts are then made to derive those laws, as much as possible, from the lower level (QED). Science is pursued at both levels and in addition efforts are made to construct staircases (or bridges) between them.”

Today the theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll (1966-) often stresses the autonomy of science’s higher-level descriptions. (The philosopher Jerry Fodor also focused on what he called the “strong autonomy” of the “special sciences”.) Indeed Carroll advances the “autonomy” of what he calls “emergent theories”. (This is a vital part of his overall “poetic naturalism”.)

Sean Carroll writes:

“The emergent theory is autonomous… it works by itself, without reference to other theories.”

Yet Gell-Mann himself (unlike Carroll who uses the phrases “without reference to other theories”) then went on to tell us why reduction is — despite all the above — a thoroughly scientific method in the following passage:

“I know of no serious scientist who believes that there are special chemical forces that do not arise from underlying physical forces. Although some chemists might not like to put it this way, the upshot is that chemistry is in principle derivable from elementary particle physics.”

In fact Gell-Mann did appear to offer us a middle-way between (strong) reductionism and the complete autonomy of the individual (special) sciences. He believed that it’s all about what he called the “staircases” between the sciences. As Gell-Mann put it (in the specific case of the staircases between psychology and biology):

“Many people believe, as I do that when staircases are constructed between psychology and biology; the best strategy is to work from the top down as well as from the bottom up.”

Interestingly enough, a man who’s often been accused of “reductionism” — the American biologist and naturalist E.O Wilson (1929-) - expressed a similar view in the following:

“Major science always deals with reduction and resynthesis of complex systems, across two or three levels of complexity at a step. For example, from quantum physics to the principles of atomic physics, thence reagent chemistry, macromolecular chemistry, molecular biology, and so on — comprising, in general, complexity and reduction, and reduction to resynthesis of complexity, in repeated sweeps.”

So instead of Gell-Mann’s simplicity and complexity, in this case we have the “reduction” and “resynthesis” of complex systems in “repeated sweeps”.

In addition, the philosopher Patricia Churchland (who classes herself as a “reductionist”) also advances a position which is similar to Gell-Mann’s. In her case, she confronts the neuroscience-versus-psychology binary opposition. And, in so doing, she mollifies people about that scareword “reductionism” by saying that the

“reductionist research strategy does not mean that there is something disreputable, unscientific or otherwise unsavoury about high-level descriptions or capacities per se”.

The words above can be summed up in the following way:

i) Simply because a scientist (or philosopher) says that x can be reduced to y (though not necessarily without remainder),

ii) then that certainly doesn’t also mean that this scientist (or philosopher) also believes that x is (to use Churchland’s words) “disreputable, unscientific or otherwise unsavoury”.

Patricia Churchland then goes on to say something that may surprise some philosophers. She argues that reductionism can exist side-by-side with what she calls “high-level descriptions or capacities”. This too perfectly expresses Gell-Mann’s own position as advanced above.

So how does all the above translate into the case of mind or consciousness?

Gell-Mann himself wrote:

“Where work does proceed on both biology and psychology and on building staircases from both ends, the emphasis at the biological end is on the brain (as well as the rest of the nervous system, the endocrine system, etc), while at the psychological end the emphasis is on the mind — that is, the phenomenological manifestations of what the brain and related organs are doing. Each staircase is a brain-mind bridge.”

So let’s simply rewrite Gell-Mann’s earlier words in this way:

There are no special mental properties which do not arise from underlying physical properties (or facts). Although some philosophers and laypeople may not like to put it this way, the upshot is that the study of mind is in principle derivable from neuroscience and the relevant cognitive sciences; which are themselves dependent on (more fundamental) biology, chemistry and, ultimately, physics.

The problem here is that the reduction of biology to chemistry and of chemistry to physics are of a different logical order to the reduction of mind (or consciousness) to the physical… Or are they?

To rewrite Gell-Mann again:

In very simple cases, an approximation to biology, the brain, etc. is used to predict directly the results at the level of mind or consciousness.

Well, the passage above is the case… in a vaguely analogous sense. That is, from (for want of a better word) happenings in the brain, one can indeed predict what’s going on in the mind (or in consciousness) — at least to some degree of approximation. Of course this is what’s often accused of being “mere correlation”. And because it is seen as being mere correlation, then moving from happenings in the brain to happenings in the mind (or consciousness) isn’t the same as — or even equivalent to — reducing what goes on in the mind (or consciousness) to what goes on in the brain.

Yet the words above almost entirely depend on how we take the word “reduction”. What goes on the the mind can be reduced to what goes on in the brain — but not without remainder. That is, what happens in the mind can be reduced to what happens in the brain in the sense that we can work from the former to the later. That is, the former (mind/consciousness) is — at least partly — explained in terms of the latter (the brain or happenings in the brain). However, the former cannot be said to be identical to the latter . So identity itself is the problem — or at least “identity” is the important word here.

Conclusion

So does the mind or consciousness really grow out of the physical in the same — or even in a similar — way to all these acceptable scientific examples? Are these higher-level states and properties of the special sciences emergent states and properties in the same way in which the states and properties of the mind (or consciousness) are often seen as being emergent?

Most anti-physicalists will argue that this parallel is far from exact.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Is There Thought Before Language?

 

“The original question, ‘Can machines think?’, I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.” — Alan Turing

In (vague) accordance with the words of Alan Turing above, in this essay there will be no attempt to tackle the word “thought” (or “thinking”) or define (or explain) what, exactly, it means. That said, the semantics of the issues covered in the following will — inevitably — still be hovering in the background.

The Prehistory of Thought

Some philosophers have argued that something (whatever it was) relatively complex must have predated language use in humans otherwise language wouldn’t have arisen in the first place. In other words, language couldn’t have come from nowhere — ex nihilo. So it can be assume that at least some kinds of conscious activity or even thought must have predated language use. The question is: Which kinds of conscious activity or thought?

I suspect that some people would question the use of the word “thought” primarily for two reasons:

(1) Language (of various forms) is used in most examples of thought.

(2) Only a language-user would have risen to the level of thought in the first place.

Yet there are many acts of the mind (or mental events) which, arguably, don’t involve language — even in adult human beings. Mental imagery is just one example.

You can imagine a round blue shape, for example, being stuck on the surface of a black square. You can even imagine adding an extra nose to someone you know. Despite that, some philosophers may argue that such mental activity (even if non-linguistic) could only be carried out by language users. They may argue that language even “infects” such (supposedly) language-innocent examples as mental imagery. After all, without the mastery of language, you may not even have a concept of a square and of a round shape. (This will depend on how we take the word “concept”.) The same goes for adding a nose to a face. The mental imagery itself doesn’t include the use of language; though perhaps only a language-user could think about such mental images and juxtapose them in the ways he, she or it does.

In any case, it’s not clear if philosophers (at least not on their own) can answer questions as to what humans thought about (or how they thought) before they were language users. (Weren’t homo sapiens always language users in some very basic sense?)

The evolutionary fact (or simple possibility) that something must have predated language (i.e., earlier than, say, 100,000 years ago) was mentioned earlier. Yet we don’t need to go that far back. Philosophers have also argued that right here and right now - and before humans say anything or even think something to themselves — something must come before the articulation (even if a sub-vocalisation) of any natural-language expression or vocalisation...

Or must it?

Many (analytic) philosophers, for example, have talked about an abstract proposition coming before its expression in a natural language. That may be the case. However, that doesn’t impinge on what goes on in an individual’s mind and brain before he expresses himself in a natural language. Even if abstract propositions do exist, then there’s still a different question to be asked about what predates natural-language expressions in the mind-brains of human language users — i.e., regardless of a realm of abstract propositions (if such things “exist” — or have being — at all).

One answer to some of this is the “language of thought” (LOT) theory first advanced by Jerry Fodor. Others provide a more naturalistic (or neuroscientific) account of what happens before we say or think something in a natural language.

Take the position of Paul Churchland.

Paul Churchland and Jerry Fodor

Patricia and Paul Churchland

The Canadian philosopher Paul Churchland (1942-) argued that

“how to formulate, manipulate, and store a rich fabric of propositional attitudes is itself something that is learned” .

And elsewhere in the same paper he wrote:

“[L]anguage use is something that is learned, by a brain already capable of vigorous cognitive activity…language use appears as an extremely peripheral activity, as a species-specific mode of social interaction which is mastered thanks to the versatility and power of a more basic mode of activity. Why accept, then, a theory of activity that models its elements on the elements of human language?”

It can be assumed that the first quote above would be given an immediate reply by a follower of Jerry Fodor (1935–2017). He may argue that the formulation, manipulation and storage of “a rich fabric of propositional attitudes” can be accounted for by something linguistic or at least something language-like: i.e., the language of thought. Thus we don’t escape from language here. Indeed, with relevance to the issue of animals, Fodor says that the cognitive activity of animals could also be “linguaformal”.

Although Churchland may accept that the LOT could account for our learning (i.e., in the first place) how to formulate, manipulate, and store a rich fabric of propositional attitudes, his own position is that our learning to do so is actually based on purely non-linguistic phenomena in the brain. To Churchland, it’s mainly a question of the following:

“[A] set or configuration on complex states…figurative ‘solids’ within a four- or five-dimensional phase space. The laws of the theory govern the interaction [“formulation”?], motion, and transformation [“manipulation”?] of these ‘solid’ states within that space.”

The point of bringing in Churchland here is — and we needn’t accept his whole philosophical scheme — that if he supplies us with some possibilities (or actualities) of non-linguistic “cognitive activity”, then clearly this can be co-opted to show the same for non-linguistic thought.

Yet Fodor muddied the water (as already stated) by claiming that, say, animal cognitive activity may also be “linguaformal”. The problem here is that Fodor’s use of the word lingua (in what inferentially appears to be his acceptance of an animal Language of Thought) may be a use of a word that’s so vague that it doesn’t satisfy any of the usual criteria for being a language.

Churchland offers us more on all this.

Take his reference to non-linguistic “representations” in the following:

“Any competent golfer has a detailed representation (perhaps in his cerebellum…) of a gold swing. It is a motor representation…The same golfer will also have a discursive representation of a gold swing (perhaps in his language cortex…).”

And later:

“A creature competent to make reliable colour discriminations has there developed a representation of the range of familiar colours, a representation that appears to consist in a specific configuration of weighted synaptic connections…This recognition depends upon the creature possessing a prior representation…This distributed representation is not remotely propositional or discursive…It…makes possible…discrimination, recognition, imagination…”

In a strong sense, what’s been argued in the passages above makes much sense — at least from an evolutionary perspective. At the level of species there must have been a continuum (at least of a kind) between animal and human thought. And, on the scale of individual human beings, there must also be a continuum between what can be called proto-thought and purely linguistic thought or verbal expression. (That’s if any mental activity at all can ever be purely linguistic.)

So, finally, what about the classic case of thinking about mathematics?

Roger Penrose’s Position on Mathematics

Roger Penrose and Plato

Do mathematical (for want of a better word) cognitions require words?

Would someone have ever reached any level of mathematical skill without being a user of language in the first place? Of course it must now be said that simply because language was (obviously) required to get a mathematician to where he/she is, that doesn’t also mean that language is used in all — or indeed any — of his/her mathematical (again, for want of a better word) reasonings.

More specifically, Roger Penrose (1931-) once stated the following words:

“[I] find words almost useless for mathematical thinking. Other kinds of thinking, perhaps such as philosophizing, seem to be much better suited to verbal expression. Perhaps this is why so many philosophers seem to be of the opinion that language is essential for intelligent or conscious thought!”

Like Plato before him, Penrose appears to glory in this escape from contingency. In this case, from the contingency of “words”. To be somewhat poetic/rhetorical again: both Plato and Penrose believe that the lack of precision when it comes to words (or all linguistic expressions) must be escaped from… Or at least that’s the case when it comes to mathematics.

Yet surely language is - (again) obviously - essential for Platonists too. That is, in order to become the Platonists that they are, language itself must have led their way when it comes to most — or even all — of their philosophical reasonings and then positions. Indeed (as just stated) that’s even the case when it comes to their mathematical cognitions.

So if we now take Penrose himself.

It can be argued that he would never have adopted and used these (supposedly) non-linguistic mathematical (as he puts it) “concepts” if they weren’t first described to him in “words”. And, as with the a priori in philosophy (or epistemology), we firstly need to learn what the a priori is in words — and also to learn the terms used in a priori statements — in order to have a priori “thoughts”. So this must mean that Penrose is talking about what happens after such words and linguistic concepts are acquired. And what happens after is (Penrose argues) something that’s completely non-verbal (or non-linguistic).

To sum up — what may be — Penrose’s position.

Of course one has to know — a posteriori — what the words and symbols in the equation, say, 2 + 2 = 4 mean. Yet after that, the non-linguistic status of this truth remains unchanged. Thus the Platonist will happily and obviously accept that we firstly need to learn the terms involved in mathematics and other areas of rationalist inquiry. However, once we’ve acquired such words and symbols, then we can (to quote Kant’s critical words on Plato’s position) “float free of the moorings” of language and rise into the Platonic realm.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]