Is Alva Noë His Brain?

 

“You are not your brain.” — Markus Gabriel

You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life — M.D. Jeffrey M. Schwartz and M.D. Rebecca Gladding

i) Introduction: You are Not Your Brain 

ii) In This World and Out of This World 

iii) Consciousness = An Achievement (Word)

iv) Consciousness is Largely a Matter of Definitions and Stipulations

Introduction: You are Not Your Brain

The American philosopher Alva Noë (1964-) believes that “you are not your brain”.

Did any materialist, neuroscientist, philosopher, etc. ever say that a person (or subject) literally is his or her brain? Or is Noë being somewhat rhetorical here? (I’m sure that if I researched this for long enough I could find at least one person — i.e., other than Francis Crick — who said it.) Indeed it’s difficult to fathom what the words “you are your brain” could even mean. And it will be seen later that Noë himself makes the same mistake with the “is of identity” when it comes to his own position on the nature of consciousness.

Despite all that, Alva Noë does in fact come clean about this. He cites the words of the molecular biologist, biophysicist and neuroscientist Francis Crick (1916–2004) as the inspiration for his own negation of Crick’s position.

Yet I don’t even believe that Francis Crick was being literal when he made his controversial statement. So let’s at least quote Crick’s well-known statement.

In his book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994), Crick wrote the following words:

“‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

It’s easy to believe that Crick was being wilfully provocative and rhetorical here. Crick was also well aware that when he began studying consciousness he was tackling a subject which, traditionally, had been the sole property of religion and philosophy. Hence the rhetoric. At the same time, Crick may also have been expressing various truths — if only to a degree.

Another point that can be made about Crick’s rhetoric and provocation is that he was simply attempting to get a point across. And the best and simplest way of doing that is to be poetic and rhetorical. After all, strongly-expressed views often attract a larger audience. (For example, take Markus Gabriel’s words “the world does not exist”.) Nonetheless, the extremity of a view doesn’t automatically mean that it’s false — at least not in every respect. Thus perhaps Crick enticed people in and then gave them a broader and more nuanced perspective on his extreme words. That said, it’s of course possible that all this is to give Crick far too much benefit of the doubt.

Despite the opening quote, Crick did get around to expressing the same idea in a slightly less provocative and more technical way. He also wrote:

“A person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them.”

Is that any better?

In any case, the very fact that Crick decided to study consciousness in the first place suggests that he couldn’t have been a reductionist in any strict sense. After all, in much psychology, neuroscience/neurobiology and sometimes even in philosophy, consciousness had been reduced to the brain, to behavior or simply ignored. Then again, most of The Astonishing Hypothesis is about neurobiology. Thus, even though the opening quotation is in essence a philosophical position, the philosophical defence and implications of that passage are rarely fully developed in the book itself.

To repeat: stating that “you are your brain” is actually (to quote Wolfgang Pauli’s oft-used phrase) “not even wrong”.

So is the following — put more succinctly and as an identity statement — what Noë protagonists are really meant to have argued? -

a human subject = that subject’s brain

First things first.

What is this “you” that does (or, for that matter, does not) equal the brain? The self? Consciousness? The mind? The mind, body, self and consciousness all together?

Thus, if all these things are believed to be realised by — or instantiated in — the brain, then the self, mind or consciousness (or all these things together) must literally be identical to the brain.

In This World and Out of This World

In the book Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, Alva Noë succinctly captures the entirety of his philosophical position in these two sentences:

“We are out of our heads. We are in the world and of it.”

This is almost a paraphrase of Hilary Putnam’s well-known statement: “meanings ain’t in the head”. That is, Noë has extended Putnam’s semantic externalism and applied it to consciousness (as a whole), the mind (as a whole) and the self.

Noë then continues:

“We are patterns of active engagement with fluid boundaries and changing components. We are distributed.”

Of course the passage above is expressed in a way that isn’t really Putnamesque. In addition, it probably doesn’t express what Putnam himself actually believed.

In any case, of course “we are in the world” — where else could we be? Do (or did) Cartesians — or anyone else — ever actually believe that we are literally out of this world? And does someone believing that the mind is a “non-extended substance” automatically mean that he/she also believes that we are (literally) out of this world?

Basically, even on the spectator theory of knowledge (which can easily be applied to consciousness or mind), isn’t the spectator still “in the world” or part of the world? For example, when you watch a football match, you aren’t part of the actual match but you’re still part of the whole environment which includes that match. Thus being a spectator of the match doesn’t put you in a (as it were) transcendent place outside the world.

So perhaps this football-fan example doesn’t work. (In that case, perhaps the word “spectator” — in the term “spectator theory” — doesn’t work either.) That is, in the Cartesian position, perhaps the subject’s mind is literally out of this world (i.e., unlike the football fan’s mind). That would mean that the Cartesian mind is literally out of this world at the very same time as being a spectator of that very same world. However, did many — or even any — Cartesians ever hold this position? (Perhaps no one is claiming that they did.)

Now let’s quote another passage passage from Noë on the same theme. He writes:

“we need to turn our backs on the orthodox assumption that consciousness is something that happens inside us, like digestion”.

Let’s put it this way. There are certainly many things which “happen[] inside us”. Yet the correctness (or incorrectness) of that statement entirely depends on what Noë means by “inside us”. Still, there are things which happen inside our brains. There are things which happen inside our… (?) minds which other people will never know about. So, on a loose reading, there is indeed an “inside us” which can indeed be distinguished from that which is outside us. Yet it still cannot be said that the mind is outside the world itself.

Noë may also be failing to distinguish the wide contents of consciousness (see here) — and the actions expressed by a (conscious) subject — from narrow contents. That is, the (as it were) sources of the contents of consciousness are the result of what is outside us (as on a wide and/or externalist reading). However, the content is still within us. In other words, content is — or at least can be — both narrow and wide. Of course it can now be argued that if any given content of consciousness/mind can be both wide and narrow, then that — kinda — makes the use of these terms either redundant or even self-contradictory.

In addition, our actions-in-an-environment can either be seen as expressions of consciousness (or mind) or as the actual instantiations (or realisations) of consciousness (or mind).

Consciousness = An Achievement (Word)

Gilbert Ryle

Noë claims that

“consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context”.

What is it, exactly, that is being achieved? And what if consciousness (as it were) accompanies the acts of achievement of a human subject? Of course one obvious answer to this question is to argue that such acts of achievement literally are (or constitute/realise) consciousness. Thus:

a subject’s consciousness = the subject’s achievement of x.

Now, of course, we need to know what the content of the symbol x could be. In other words, we’d need an example of what Noë means by the word “achievement”.

So say that a human subject successfully places a cup on a table. Thus this subject achieves the goal of placing a cup on the table. Do we now have the following identity statement? -

the consciousness of subject S at time t = subject S successfully placing a cup on the table at time t

If this identity statement is correct, then this must also mean that

a subject’s consciousness at time t = this subject’s arm/body, the environment (the table, cup and probably much more) and his brain.

As can be seen, Noë stresses action or behaviour — as Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) did seven decades ago in his book The Concept of Mind (see here). Noë writes:

“It is now clear, as it has not been before, that consciousness, like a work of improvisational music, is achieved in action, by us, thanks to our situation in and access to a world we know around us. We are in the world and of it.”

This may mean that the word “consciousness” is being taken as a verb — “a doing word” (see the qualifications here). We can even say that consciousness = what we do. Or, alternatively, consciousness is instantiated in — or realised by — what we do. Indeed Ryle himself even used the term “achievement word” when he wrote about intelligence (i.e., not about consciousness) in the 1940s. To Ryle, intelligence isn’t a thing (say, a part of the brain) or even an abstract entity. He believed that intelligence is (to use Noë’s own words) “achieved in action”. (Noë’s position also chimes in with much of Heidegger’s philosophy. See this paper.)

The second clause of the first sentence (i.e., “thanks to our situation in and access to a world we know around us”) expresses Noë’s commitment to our situatedness, the embeddedness and embodiment of the mind and the extended nature of the mind.

One obvious problem — or perhaps bonus! - of Noë’s position is that it leaves out qualia (or how experiences seem and feel). Noë sees almost everything about consciousness in terms of action, body and environment — so nothing is (as it were) private. In a sense, then, the “first-person perspective” is irrelevant to Noë’s account of consciousness. And, as stated, that may be viewed as either a problem or a bonus.

(It’s not clear what Noë means by “[i]t is now clear… that consciousness… is achieved in action”. Clear to whom, exactly?)

Consciousness is a Matter of Definitions and Stipulation

When Alva Noë states that

“we need to turn our backs on the orthodox assumption that consciousness is something that happens inside us, like digestion”.

one feels that he’s either arguing against straw targets or arguing against positions that haven’t been held by most philosophers for decades. (That said, the American philosopher John Searle (1932-) has compared consciousness to “digestion” — see here.)

Either that, or Noë is only aiming his words at laypersons!

So does it all depend on how Noe himself defines “consciousness”?

It can be argued that almost everything will flow from Noë’s own personal definition. In other words, it’s not as if there is a determinate and fixed definition of the word “consciousness” or even a determinate thing that is consciousness. And, as a result, Noë’s definition or thing means that “we” have got consciousness all wrong. (All this applies even if Noë doesn’t see consciousness as a thing but as, say, a process or an action in an environment.)

Now the following (as already quoted) is Noë’s own (personal) take on consciousness:

“[C]onsciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context.”

The question is:

Is the above simply Alva Noë’s own (personal) definition of the word “consciousness”?

Or is Noë stating that this is what consciousness actually is?

(Of course a person may define a word in a particular way because he believes that his own personal definition unequivocally follows from what that object actually is.)

Again, is all this mainly about words (or technical terms) and how we define them? If that’s the case, then once someone defines the word “consciousness” (or, for that matter, “you”, “self”, “mind”), then we can move on from there. Yet, of course, it has proved to be notoriously difficult to define this word.

This means that if a philosopher like Noë wants to define the word “consciousness” in a way which includes (or involves) the environment, the whole body and the brain, then so be it. He’s free to do so. This is especially the case because there is no consensus definition of “consciousness” in the first place — far from it. This makes it even more acceptable to take a (as it were) stipulational position on consciousness — or on the word “consciousness”. That said, if Noë believes that consciousness includes — or literally is — actions, the body, the brain and the environment, then he may not see it as a (simple) semantic issue of definitions. He may, instead, accept this (ontological) identity statement:

a subject’s consciousness = this subject’s body and brain and his actions within an environment

What does it mean (or what are we achieving) when we take the position (if bluntly put) that a subject’s consciousness = this subject’s actions, environment, body and brain? Indeed it may even follow that if we accept this position it will then be quite acceptable to jettison the word “consciousness” altogether. In other words, we can then stick with descriptions of human actions within an environment.

Yet in order to know that (some or many) neuroscientists, materialists, philosophers, etc. are wrong about consciousness, Noë needs to know what consciousness is. But how can he know that? This would assume that consciousness is a fixed and determinate thing that can be correctly known. This is even the case when Noë stresses processes, actions, the body and the environment. He nonetheless still sees consciousness as a… thing that is fixed and determinate otherwise he wouldn’t — or couldn’t — see other people as being (as he puts it) “profoundly wrong” about it.

Again, what if all this mainly boils down to how Noë and others define the word “consciousness”? That may be the case even if Noë refers to very concrete things like bodies, environments, brains, actions, etc. That is, these are simply the concrete entities Noë uses in his own personal definition of the word “consciousness”. The concreteness of these things doesn’t necessarily pass over to the abstraction that is consciousness itself.

So one can take a similar position on the word “consciousness” as the British philosopher Michael Williams (1947-) does on the words “knowledge” and “truth”.

A History of Stipulations

Michael Williams accepts that

“[w]e can have an account of the use and utility of [the word] ‘know’ without supposing that there is such a thing as human knowledge”.

So perhaps we shouldn’t “suppos[e] that there is such a thing as” consciousness. That said, Williams (again) happily concedes that

“[a] deflationary account of ‘know’ may show how the word is embedded in a teachable and useful linguistic practice”.

Is the same true of the word “consciousness”?

Take the position of the philosopher David Chalmers (1966-) too.

Chalmers often mentions what he calls “stipulation”. The basic point is that if we stipulate what we mean by a particular word or philosophical technical term, then the answers to the questions about facts, data, what something is, etc. must — at least partly — follow from such stipulations. Of course some (or even many) people will be horrified by the argument that acts of stipulation are decisive when it comes to what we take to be (as it were) matters of fact. But it’s not that simple.

Sure, there is also a problem with over-stressing the importance of stipulation; or even with simply emphasising its importance at all. Indeed Chalmers himself sums up this problem with a joke. He writes:

“One might as well define ‘world peace’ as ‘a ham sandwich.’ Achieving world peace becomes much easier, but it is a hollow achievement.”

(Ironically enough, Chalmers only applies his joke to a single case: consciousness.)

Clearly, even someone who argues that stipulation is important won’t also accept that we can define the words “world peace” as “a ham sandwich”. In turn, some philosophers and many laypersons will feel just as strongly about claiming that (to use Chalmers’ own examples) “a computer virus is alive” or that “bacteria learn”. The philosopher P.M.S. Hacker, for example, holds a very strong position on the philosophers and scientists who use such terms (or words) in ways that are radically at odds with everyday usage. (See Hacker’s ‘Languages, Minds and Brain’ in Mindwaves.) Many physicists, on the other hand, are very keen on using old words (or terms) in very different ways.

So it can be argued that Noë is using an old word (i.e., “consciousness”) in a new way. (That’s if we forget 20th century philosophers like Ryle, Heidegger, Dewey, etc.)

As already stated, philosophers and scientists often use old words in new ways. Indeed they often use old words in very peculiar and particular new ways. So think of how scientists use the words “string” (as in string theory), “time”, “particle”, “spin” (as in a particle’s spin), “information”, “wave” (as in wavefunction), “code” (as in the genetic code), “packet” (as in a wave packet), “vacuum”, “beauty”, “proof”, “chaos”, “memory” (as in a computer’s memory) and so on. Now also think of how philosophers (i.e., not laypersons) use the words “truth”, “world”, “existence”, “object”, “representation”, “meaning”, “realism”, “concrete”, “world” and, now… “consciousness”.

(Just yesterday, I came across yet another example of a strange use of an old word. The philosopher Thomas Nagel (1937-), in this case, used the word “facts” not only to refer to things which aren’t at present known or which have never been observed, but also to things which can — in principle — never be known or which can never be observed. See here.)

So if we return to the specific case of consciousness — or to the word “consciousness”.

There’ve been countless definitions of the word “consciousness”. (There have also been hundreds of often mutually-contradictory books on consciousness.) Discussing consciousness can often be pointless because the disputants are nearly always talking about different things when they talk about it. More relevantly, they define the word “consciousness” in very different ways. What’s more, many who talk (or write) about consciousness never actually get around to defining their word “consciousness” at all. True; they may have their own tacit (or unexpressed) pet definitions deep within their minds. However, they rarely explicate (or articulate) such definitions precisely or in any detail.

So perhaps it would be wise to adopt a deflationary view of the word “consciousness” — i.e., as Michael Williams has done with “knowledge” and “truth”. And that’s precisely what the English philosopher Kathleen Wilkes (1946–2003) did when she wrote that

“perhaps ‘consciousness’ is best seen as a sort of dummy-term like ‘thing’, useful for the flexibility that is assured by its lack of specific content”.

We can agree with Wilkes and see the word consciousness as a “dummy-term”. And it is so because it has so many meanings, definitions and connotations.

Conclusion

It follows that the philosophical positions on consciousness are so multifarious and vague precisely because of the non-scientific nature of the subject matter. So if consciousness were as intersubjective a phenomenon as a cat or a neuron, then we wouldn’t have so many multifarious and vague definitions.

Indeed perhaps there wouldn’t even be a thriving consciousness industry in the first place.

Finally, Noë may stress actions, environments, bodies, etc. because he’s attempting to make consciousness more scientific. Yet Noë is — if indirectly — critical of (what many call) “scientism” too. (This is certainly true of many of the people who’ve embraced his ideas.)

And Noë isn’t a fan of (reductive?) “materialism” either (see here).

So Alva Noë may be attempting to provide some kind of midway position between all these gruesome isms. In fact he’s come close to claiming precisely that.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Michael Williams: There are No Such Things as Knowledge and Truth

 

i) Introduction

ii) Heat and Knowledge/Truth)

iii) What is Epistemological Realism?

iv) Epistemology and Knowledge

v) Truth

vi) Conclusion: Michael Williams vs. Epistemological Realists

Despite the provocative title of this piece, the British philosopher Michael Williams (1947-) does accept that

“[w]e can have an account of the use and utility of [the word] ‘know’ without supposing that there is such a thing as human knowledge”.

Williams also makes similar claims about truth.

Yet the quote above still seems very radical or even extreme. That is, if we shouldn’t “suppos[e] that there is such a thing as human knowledge”, then that must mean that Williams believes that there is no such thing as human knowledge. That said, Williams (again) happily concedes that

“[a] deflationary account of ‘know’ may show how the word is embedded in a teachable and useful linguistic practice”.

So will that be enough for philosophers and laypersons? Well, as we shall see, it’s certainly not enough for what Williams calls the epistemological realist.

Heat and Knowledge/Truth

Michael Williams compares the philosophical study of truth/knowledge with the study of heat in physics. He writes:

“Naively, we might be inclined to suppose that just as in physics we study the nature of heat, so in philosophy we study the nature of truth. But once plausible deflationary views are on the table, the analogy between truth and things like heat can no longer be treated as unproblematic.”

It must follow that since (many) philosophers do believe that they’re attempting to “study the nature of truth” or the nature of knowledge, then that must mean that there is something to be discovered. What’s more, that something must be (or be seen to be) determinate and fixed. Like heat, then, that something must have a given nature.

Yet even if we do have an unquestioning position on truth and knowledge, then we still can’t see such things as being anything like heat… or water, trees, animals, etc. Thus, in that provisional sense at least, studying the nature of truth and knowledge is very unlike studying the nature of heat. And from that fact, many other things follow.

So why assume that truth and knowledge have determinate and fixed natures?

Surely for that to be the case, almost everyone would agree on what truth and knowledge are (as most people do on, say, what water is). But that’s never been the case — and not just when it comes to philosophers.

What is Epistemological Realism?

Michael Williams emphasises an important terminological distinction. He states that epistemological realism

“is not a position within epistemology…[it is a] realism about the objects of epistemological inquiry”.

In other words, this is realism about epistemology, not realism within epistemology.

This essentially means that although a philosopher may be, say, an anti-realist within epistemology, he may also be — or probably is — a realist towards (or about) epistemology itself. More precisely, he may be anti-realist in that he thinks that we can’t acquire knowledge of an objective, mind-independent reality. However, he may still believe that there are “underlying epistemological structure or principles” common to all epistemological methods.

Moreover, the epistemological realist

“thinks of knowledge in very much the way the scientific realist thinks of heat: beneath the surface diversity there is structural unity”.

This leads the realist to believe that not “everything we call knowledge need be knowledge properly so called”. This means that he also believes that his job is to generalise and extrapolate: i.e., to bring “together the genuine cases into a coherent theoretical kind”. Thus the right kind of, say, justification effectively becomes a natural kind. And so on. And when we bundle all these epistemic things together, then we knowledge as a whole becomes a natural kind.

So what if the world of knowledge and epistemology isn’t like that?

Michael Williams also refers to Thomas Nagel’s realist view of epistemology.

According to Williams, Nagel’s phrase “our knowledge of the world” contains various presuppositions. That’s because it assumes that there is a “genuine totality” to have knowledge of. Nagel’s phrase also assumes that

“there are invariant epistemological constraints underlying the shifting standards of everyday justification”.

Thus it can be said that Nagel sees the universal and general rather than the Wittgensteinian particular.

Williams cites the specific example (among many) of W.V.0. Quine’s own criticisms of the analytic-synthetic distinction.

Here again, many epistemologists have attempted to generalise and perhaps create two natural kinds — the analytic and the synthetic. Yet what if there isn’t a “fixed, objective division between a theory’s meaning postulates and its empirical assumptions”?

Epistemology and Knowledge

Michael Williams also makes a distinction between

1) theories of knowledge

and

2) theories of the concept of knowledge

This is a distinction he also (more or less) makes about truth.

So 2) above can be said to be about the word “knowledge” and how it is used. In addition, it’s also about the concept/s (or meaning/s) “behind” the word “knowledge”.

A theory of knowledge, on the other hand, is about the thing (or property) which is knowledge. This presupposes that there is something above and beyond our words, concepts, practices/usages, methods, etc.

Williams’s position is primarily aimed at what he calls “epistemological realism”.

The epistemological realist believes that there’s a single correct view of justification, a single kind of truth, a single correct method, and so on.

As stated at the beginning, Williams thinks that epistemological realism is very much like scientific realism.

Take the case of the analysis and classification of heat again.

When the physicist or chemist explores the nature of heat he looks for

“some underlying property, or structure of more elementary components, common to [all] hot things”.

Scientific realists (though not necessarily scientists themselves) therefore see heat as a natural kind. In other words, for the scientific realist,

“deep structural features of the elementary components of things determine the boundaries of natural, as opposed to merely nominal or conventional, kinds”.

The epistemological realist attempts to do the same kind of thing with knowledge and also with the methods and means he uses to acquire knowledge. Thus he believes that “there must be underlying epistemological structures or principles”.

Take the specific case of justified true belief.

For a long time many epistemologists argued that knowledge is justified true belief (even if they still had problems describing and/or explaining justification and belief when taken separately). Then along came Edmund Gettier’s demonstration that this analysis of knowledge (to use Williams's word) “fails to state a sufficient condition for knowledge”.

So is that partly — or even largely — because knowledge is not a thing (or property) that can even have a correct analysis in all situations? (This, as Williams argues, isn’t also to argue that there is no such the thing as knowledge.)

Again, Williams makes a connection with analysis in science. He writes:

“[W]e might be inclined to suppose that just as in physics we study the nature of heat, so in philosophy we study the nature of truth. But once plausible deflationary views are on the table, the analogy between truth [knowledge] and things like heat can no longer be treated as unproblematic.”

Essentially, then, epistemological realists — and many others — reify truth and knowledge. That is, they turn truth and knowledge into two — perhaps abstract— things or properties.

Now let’s concentrate on truth

Truth

Of course many people do agree on what they take to be true. However, they don’t necessarily also agree on why it is true or on what constitutes its truth.

This means that taking the claim, say, “Water is wet” or “Killing people for fun is wrong” as true is fairly unproblematic. What is problematic is why this statement is true or what constitutes its truth. So it’s not the taking of any given p as being true that’s being discussed here. Countless people take the statement “Cats are animals” or “Killing for fun is wrong” to be true. That isn’t disputed by most people.

Similar points holds for knowledge too.

More specifically in terms of Williams’s own position.

Just as Williams detects realist views about epistemology, so too he detects realist positions when it comes to truth.

Put at its simplest: the problem is that many people take truth to be a thing — even if an abstract thing. Yet Truth may not be a thing at all. And if that’s the case, then perhaps we can never discover its nature.

As a result of all this, Williams doesn’t believe that truth is a “theoretically significant property”. (Perhaps he doesn’t think it’s a property at all.) Thus he cites the case of the deflationary theory of truth.

Thus, to Williams, true sentences are “merely a nominal kind”. That is, all true statements don’t share the same something - viz., the same entity (or same property) truth.

Williams also argues that “there are endlessly many truths, [but] there is no such thing as truth”. (Perhaps we should write “Truth” here instead.)

Realists about truth, on the other hand, believe that truth is a single property — or even a single thing. Therefore, like heat or a cat, it can be analysed and correctly described. Such realists believe that truth is an “important property shared by all true sentences”. That said, the realist needn’t also be obliged to state exactly what truth is. He may offer any one of Williams’s following possibilities:

“[C]orrespondence to fact, incorporability in some ideally coherent system of judgements, or goodness in the way of belief.”

It must follow that if one of these accounts is the true way of describing truth, then all true statements will, say, be incorporable into an ideally coherent system, be correspondent with facts, etc.

So the truth realist wants something very substantial. He wants something shared by all true statements. This means, then, that he isn’t interested in the “use of a word” or the “point of the concept”. The realist, instead, believes that

“there is more to understanding truth than appreciating the utility of the truth-predicate”.

Conclusion: Michael Williams vs. Realism

Towards the end of his paper Williams lets an epistemological realist speak for himself. He quotes Thompson Clarke (1928–2012) thus:

“‘Each concept or the conceptual scheme must be divorceable intact from our practices, from whatever constitutes the essential character of the plain…[we] ascertain, when possible, whether items fulfil the conditions legislated by concepts.’”

The above is as strong a statement of metaphysical and epistemological realism as one can imagine. Williams would also no doubt argue that it’s an epistemologically realist position toward (i.e., not within) epistemology (which is of course the main tenor of Williams’s paper).

Williams, on the one hand, stresses the fact that concepts, conceptual schemes, epistemological methods, etc. are determined by the nature of our practices — they have no reality apart from them. Thompson Clarke, on the other hand, argues that the aforementioned can be “[divorced] intact from our practices”. Thus he must believe that there is a right and a wrong about all our concepts. That also means that correct concepts must match the world as it is in itself. Incorrect concepts, however, distort the world’s nature.

Yet Michael Williams himself still believes in the falsity or truth of our concepts. However, their truth or falsehood will be internally determined by our practices. Without practices, there is nothing.

Michael Williams also takes a very Wittgensteinian — as well as a deflationary — position on knowledge and truth.

He argues that a deflationary account of the word “know” may show “how the word is embedded in a teachable and useful linguistic practice”. (Surely this is a meaning-is-use definition of “know”.) In other words, Williams doesn’t suppose that being known to be true “denotes a property that groups propositions into a theoretically significant kind”. Williams nevertheless still accepts that the word “know” (as well as “truth”?) does have utility value. (Perhaps we can say that it works!)

Finally, in opposition to epistemological realism (at least of the kind Williams is talking about) we have Williams’s alternative of “various practices of assessment, perhaps sharing certain formal features”. And that’s all we’ve got. Williams writes:

“It doesn’t follow from this that the various items given a positive rating add up to anything like a natural kind.”

These various practices of assessment may not even be a “surveyable whole” or a “genuine totality rather than a more or less loose aggregate”.

Williams also argues that it’s the topics or subjects we study (with our epistemological hats on) that determine our epistemological methods and — perhaps — our goals too. So it largely depends on the subject we’re studying. That is, we can’t expect — or desire — that there’s “an order of reasons [that operate independently] of all circumstances and all collateral knowledge”. Moreover, every subject doesn’t have the same methodology which is applicable to it. And not even all the sciences use (to take just one example) the hypothetico-deductive method.

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Professor Christina Howells’s Tribal Criticisms of Analytic Philosophers

 

It’s of course the case that the title of this piece is somewhat provocative and rhetorical. It was — at least partly — motivated by some of the critical remarks of analytic philosophy and analytic philosophers I’ve read from continental philosophers and academic specialists on continental philosophy; as well as from those who simply don’t like analytic philosophy.

It must also now be said that some people argue that the continental-analytic philosophy distinction is a terrible “binary opposition” and that such entities don’t even exist in the first place. Yet Christina Howells herself must believe that continental philosophy exists. Take the following part of her academic curriculum vitae (CV) — as found on the University of Oxford’s website:

“Christina Howell’s research work centres on Continental philosophy, literary theory, and twentieth-century French literature.”

(There’s also the Oxford Companion to Continental Philosophy, which is hardly written by critics or outsiders. See note at the end.)

Oddly, some such “continentals” have graphically displayed their own tribalism in their very accounts of the supposed tribalism — and other sins — of analytic philosophy and analytic philosophers. (Professor Ansell-Pearson is a good example of this, as will shortly be shown.)

It must now also be admitted that, at times, some analytic philosophers have been tribal too— both in their accounts of continental philosophy itself (which, apparently, doesn’t exist) or when they’re just being (as it were) self-conscious about what it is they do. In addition, this piece must itself be somewhat tribal in that it only mentions the tribalism of continental philosophy and its fans.

Finally, the following mainly focuses on the words of a single academic and what she has to say about analytic philosophers and their relationship to continental philosophy.

That said, let’s begin with a few words on Professor Ansell-Pearson

Professor Ansell-Pearson

Professor Keith Ansell-Pearson points his very-judgemental finger at analytic philosophers.

He claims that all analytic philosophers believe that continental philosophers are “pretentious and portentous”. And Ansell-Pearson doesn’t like this attitude. He believes that such criticisms are “intellectually smug” and also “ethically deficient”. What’s more, this position of all analytic philosophers is an expression of “the ideology of the ruling class”. (Ansell-Pearson classes himself as a “Marxist” in the same interview from which these quotes are taken.)

So it can only be presumed that Professor Ansell-Pearson said all this because he also believes that all — or at least most — continental philosophers are politically and/or philosophically radical and not part of any ruling class. Indeed the professor says that continental philosophy “had a radicality about it that appealed to [him]”. He also stated that because he “readily identif[ied]” with “Marcuse, Adorno, Bataille, Deleuze, Foucault”, then that meant (to him at least) that he was part of a “terribly un-English education and absolutely outside of the analytic establishment”.

Ansell-Pearson’s words are clearly aggressive and very tribal.

And that’s partly why I used the words “all” above when mentioning his references to analytic philosophers. In other words, there’s nothing in Ansell-Pearson’s words to suggest that he believes that there are any analytic philosophers who’re exceptions to his categorical pronouncements. And he mustn’t believe that any subtle positions have ever come from analytic philosophers when they’ve discussed continental philosophy either.

That said, it’s Christina Howells I shall concentrate on in this piece.

Professor Christina Howells

Professor Christina Howells (of the University of Oxford) says that

“there is a risk of [analytic philosophers] transforming [continental] philosophers into something they’re not, and making them say something they weren’t saying”.

Why is that? Howells believes that it’s because

“we’d loose much of the specificity that way, and you could we be left with banality”.

Howells then goes on to say that

“when you extract from a long elaborated discussion a kernel which is then acceptable to analytic philosophy, whether it is about being with others, or about what Derrida might mean by différance, if he were prepared to express it quite differently, you’ve lost too much”.

Here Howells is primarily talking about how analytic philosophers have read (or “used” — see Howells’s later quote) the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida.

So what exactly is it to transform a philosopher into something he’s not? Does this mean that Howells knows exactly who Derrida/Sartre/etc. is? And what is it to know what Sartre/Derrida/etc. is? Yes — how comes Howells has the keys to this particular kingdom? Of course it’s not being said here that Howells believes she’s the only person with the keys — but she’ll certainly believe those outside her academic tribe of continental philosophy specialists don’t have the keys. (Unless, that is, they’re particularly compliant and agreeable students, followers, etc.)

In addition, how does Howells know that these analytic philosophers are “making [these philosophers] say something they weren’t saying”? Perhaps she’s making them say something they weren’t saying. Again, how does Howells know — exactly — what they were “saying”? What’s more, even if analytic philosophers — seemingly by definition — do make these philosophers say things they weren’t saying, why is that automatically a bad thing?

So what happened to The Death of the Author? And what about Jacques Derrida’s “interpretative play” and there being “no outside-text” (il n’y a pas de hors-texte)?

Aren’t free readings, for example, meant to be a good thing — at least if they’re interesting, informative or enlightened in some way (even if not in precisely the ways academics would like)? Probably not. That is, probably not if the readers are analytic philosophers. Or, alternatively, if such readers aren’t politically and/or philosophically “radical”. Indeed at one point various theorists championed free readings… that is, until they realised that such freedom resulted in at least some readings they politically disagreed with. (Derrida is a good example of this — see here.)

Of course since my words are written by someone who’s not in the Continental Philosophy Tribe, then they’ll probably be deemed to be misinterpretations — yes, misinterpretations — of ideas like the Death of the Author, etc. Either that, or Howells will believe that her very own Philosophical Other won’t know enough about these arcane issues. In fact and perhaps by definition, Academic Outsiders — especially those who are critical in any way — will fail and fail again when it comes to these sacred texts of wise continental men.

Let’s now focus specifically on Howells’s take on Derrida.

Professor Christina Howells on Derrida

Howells said that she’s not

“very keen on the idea of transforming Derrida into terms that analytic philosophy can cope with and use”.

Howell’s use of the words “cope with and use” are informative. They certainly seem very judgemental. These words make it seem that Howells herself doesn’t cope with and use Derrida’s works. So what is it that she does do with them?

Howells’s somewhat categorical and dogmatic stance must also mean that — for example — my own ‘Jacques Derrida’s Others’ must be flushed straight down the toilet. So isn’t it a little ironic that a follower (or admirer) of Derrida should explicitly state that at least some (or even many!) readings of him — i.e., those by analytic philosophers and perhaps others with the wrong politics — “loose too much” or are just plain wrong?

In any case, this isn’t really about translating Derrida’s writings and ideas into something analytic philosophers “can cope with and use”. It’s about translating Derrida’s writings and ideas into any other kind of prose.

So what is it to transform Derrida? Does Howells mean that she personally hasn’t transformed Derrida in any way whatsoever? And, again, why is the transformation of Derrida automatically a bad thing?

Howells also stresses how “technical language” (as it were) in itself is relevant when she says that Derrida claimed that he had created

“a specific type of philosophy, and it was technical, and there was no reason why anyone reading it should immediately understand it, anymore than they would any other specialised, technical language”.

Of course people don’t “immediately understand” Derrida’s writing style because it can be argued that the French philosopher went out of his way to make sure that people didn’t immediately understand it. And it can easily be argued that this wasn’t entirely down to Derrida’s prose being a “specialised, technical language” either.

Howells’s words above also seem to be an explicit endorsement of at least some kind of elitism — if only an academic kind of elitism (which clearly often spreads out beyond the Academy). Now I have no problem with academic specialisms — it’s just that I believed that many of the academics who champion continental philosophers do have a problem with… if not specialisms, then elitism. And how does such elitism square with their “radical philosophy”? Is Radical Philosophy only for an elite of academics who pass their own rarefied words down — if often in diluted form— to (fairly) uninitiated political activists below?

It’s also odd that one of the main criticisms of analytic philosophy — i.e., from fans of continental philosophy — is that it is too “technical” and therefore “dry, boring and irrelevant”. So it seems that the philosophers Howells appreciates are also technical - but presumably without also being dry, boring and irrelevant.

In any case, despite Professor Howell’s — and Professor Ansell-Pearson’s — personal problems with analytic philosophy, those problems are largely irrelevant to this issue. That’s the case because hardly anyone understands many of the continental philosophers they champion. And that fact also applies to the many highly-educated people (i.e., most of whom are completely unconnected to analytic philosophy) who’ve attempted to understand these philosophers.

Thus it can easily be argued that the prime appeal of these philosophers is solely their political and/or philosophical radicality. Indeed this kind of (as it were) philosophico-political hipsterism appeals especially to those between the ages of (roughly) 16 and 23. (Remember Professor Ansell-Pearson’s words earlier about how continental “radicality” strongly “appealed to him” as a young man who suffered from what he called “alienation”.) And this often means that such people (though not only the young) are prepared to overlook — or even deny — the esoteric (or simply pretentious) prose styles these philosophers engage in. In other words, being politically and/or philosophically hip (or radical) trumps everything.

Finally, what about Professor Howells on Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)?

Howells states that Sartre was never “deliberately difficult”.

How does she know that? Did she ever read his mind?

No. She says that Sartre has a “difficult” (though not “deliberately difficult”) writing style because

“he took drugs so that he could write more quickly and he didn’t self-correct”.

That almost sounds like a non sequitur.

What has taking drugs got to do with someone’s (possibly) pretentious writing style? Sartre might have taken drugs and written in a pretentious writing style. Indeed Sartre might have written pretentious prose precisely because he had taken drugs and didn’t “self-correct”. After all, many people under the influence of certain drugs become very pretentious and develop a heightened sense of their own greatness and importance.

Note:

No critic has even claimed that continental philosophy is a platonic universal — or a natural kind — with clearly defined and determinate “identity conditions” which everyone on the planet agrees upon. (This is also true of consciousness, truth, freedom, capitalism, socialism … and even certain kinds of animal.) Thus the following kind of popular question — aimed at critics of continental philosophy — becomes very silly: “Where would you place Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, etc. in your neat division of analytic-continental philosophy?”

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

David Chalmers: “Materialism is false.”

 

The following passage is the Australian philosopher David Chalmers (1966-) offering a four-part argument (in his book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory) against materialism:

“ 1. In our world, there are conscious experiences.
2. There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.
3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts.
4. So materialism is false.”

So let’s take each premise one at a time:

“1. In our world, there are conscious experiences.”

That is surely true. That said and as with many terms in philosophy, it may well depend on how the words “conscious experiences” are defined. In addition, there’s the old philosophical question as to how David Chalmers knows that “there are consciousness experiences”. Has he (simply) extrapolated from the single case of his own experiences? And if he has, then how, exactly, has he done so?…

But let’s simply take 1. as true because this premise isn’t central to this piece anyway.

2. “There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.”

How does David Chalmers know that there’s a “world [which is] physically identical to ours”? (Perhaps Chalmers believes that he doesn’t need to literally — or epistemically — know this.) Does Chalmers’ use of the modal qualifier “logically possible” make my question any less cogent? Is this claim an implicit — or even explicit — commitment to modal realism? After all, Chalmers uses the words “[t]here is”. He doesn’t state that there may be — or could be — such a world. So surely this is a realism (or concretism) about possible worlds.

Again, even if there is such a world, how does Chalmers know that there is? What’s more, how does he know that the “positive facts about consciousness about our word [] do not hold” in this world?

All this means that not only does Chalmers believe that this possible word is real (though not actual — if he accepts David Lewis’s position) — he also knows stuff about it. Now how can that possibly be the case?

The answer to that question is simple… or perhaps not so simple.

Chalmers knows (at least if we use this word loosely) all this stuff about this possible world because he can conceive of it. That’s literally all it takes. Thus it can be rhetorically said that Chalmers’ possible world springs into existence during the act (or his act) of conceiving of it. Or, more charitably, because Chalmers — and perhaps others — can conceive of this word, then that means that it must exist (or have some kind of being) somewhere (perhaps only in an abstract space).

David Chalmers also seems to assume that there’s a determinate and precise meaning of the words “conceiving of x” and “conceivably true”. Yet conceivability-to-possibility arguments may not get off the ground (at least in some cases) in the first place. And that’s because nothing at all is really conceived of in the first place. (Alternatively, that which is conceived is literally unbelievable; or, as Saul Kripke once put it, it is “misconceived”.)

So it can be argued that the least a philosopher can argue is that conceivability is a (rough) guide to possibility. This lesser claim would be an alternative to outrightly stating that because subject S has conceived of any given x, then that means that x is possible. Of course we’ll now need to know what the words “guide to possibility” mean and how, exactly, conceiving of x is a guide to x’s possibility. (Mountains of stuff in analytic philosophy has been written on this subject — but I’ll leave it there.)

"3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts."

On the basis of conceiving of a possible world, then, Chalmers has concluded that the “facts about consciousness are further facts about our world”. So we’d need to know what the phrase “over and above” (as in “over and above the physical facts”) means. After all, in a — perhaps loose — sense we can argue that the facts of chemistry are over and above the facts of physics. Similarly, the facts of biology are over and above the facts of chemistry. Indeed sociological and economic facts are over and above the facts of physics, chemistry and biology. Of course the over-and-aboveness of consciousness — at least in Chalmers’ scheme — is far stronger than any over-and-aboveness we will find in chemistry, biology, sociology or economics. And Chalmers is explicit that this is the case.

"4. So materialism is false.”

Shouldn’t Chalmers have written the following? -

When it comes to consciousness, materialism is false.

That said, if materialism is false when it comes to consciousness, then perhaps it is false — full stop. (Or, as the analytic philosophers who like Latin put it, materialism is false simpliciter.) That is, if consciousness doesn’t hold when it comes to consciousness, then it doesn’t hold at all. Yet perhaps that doesn’t actually follow. That is, could materialism hold in every domain except the domain that is consciousness? There doesn’t seem to be a contradiction here. Indeed this seems to be Chalmers’ own position of naturalistic dualism.

In Chalmers’ own words, the following explains why he takes his position to be naturalistic:

“I call it naturalistic dualism. It is naturalistic because it posits that everything is a consequence of a network of basic properties and laws, and because it is compatible with all the results of contemporary science. And as with naturalistic theories in other domains, this view allows that we can explain consciousness in terms of basic natural laws. There need ne nothing especially transcendental about consciousness; it is just another natural phenomenon. All that has happened is that our picture of nature has expanded.”

So why is Chalmers’ position also a type of dualism? (Some philosophers don’t see his position as a type of dualism… and one can see why.) Chalmers writes:

“[T]he fact that consciousness accompanies a given physical process is a further fact, not explainable simply by telling the story about the physical facts.”

What’s more,

“we also have new fundamental laws… psychophysical laws… they will be supervenience laws… the dependency of experience on the physical cannot be derived from physical laws…”

The problem with saying (as Chalmers does) that naturalistic dualism is “compatible with all the results of contemporary science” is that this is exactly what idealists have said (from Bishop Berkeley to Donald Hoffman) about idealism and panpsychists have said about panpsychism. Indeed theists and many others — and even some of those who make specific religious claims (which are clearly not naturalistic) say that their positions/claims don’t (to use another phrase) “contradict science”. (Of course not all these examples are in the same logical space.) Moreover, religious or spiritual people can say that their views are examples in which (to use Chalmers’ words) “our picture of nature has [simply been] expanded” — i.e., not contradicted. (Deepak Chopra makes these kinds of claim all the time— see here.)

Talk of the “further facts” of consciousness is open to debate too.

This isn’t because Chalmers is misusing the word “fact”, but simply because he’s using it in his own very specific way — which he’s free to do. (There’s a long history of philosophers saying that other philosophers — or laypersons - “misuse” terms. In addition, such philosophers themselves use old terms in their own very specific and new ways. And all this tends to have amounted to is that such philosophers didn’t accept a very specific stance on particular uses or they redefined an old word to mean something technical and very new. The logical positivists’ use of the word “meaningless” is a good example of this.)

It can also be argued that most scientists already accept various kinds of supervenience without also feeling the need to embrace some kind of dualism — naturalistic or otherwise. (This can’t be gone into here.)

Finally, it must be said that it seems a little grandiose to conclude that materialism can be declared false after only three premises and a conclusion (i.e., in a four-part argument). Of course it must also be said that Chalmers has indeed done all the hard (technical) work elsewhere.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]