Professor Simon Critchley vs. Professional Philosophy… and Analytic Philosophy

 

Professor Simon Critchley (1960-) once stated the following words about professional philosophy:

“Although philosophy, since its inception in Plato, has always been linked to the academy, to more or less formal schools of thought, the professionalisation of philosophy is a recent phenomenon. And I think it’s a lamentable phenomenon.”

This is bizarre. The person — Professor Simon Critchley — who referred to “the academy” and the “professionalisation of philosophy” had been a professional philosopher in the academy for 14 years when he wrote the words above. And, before that, he’d been a student for five or six years.

Did he lament those facts?

Professor Critchley has now been imbedded in the academy since he was 22 years old. That’s for around 40 years. Though, to be accurate, he wrote the words above when he was 42 years old. He’s now 61. That said, he was already a professional philosopher (a professor) when he stated these views.

More specifically, Critchley first became an academic when he became a university fellow at University College Cardiff in 1988 (when he was 28). He was a full professor by 1999. He has also had positions at the University of Essex, the College International de Philosophie, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität , the University of Nijmegen, the University of Sydney, the University of Notre Dame, the Cardozo Law School, the University of Oslo and the University of Texas. Critchley is also a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School. And, since 2004, Critchley has been professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York.

This seeming lack of self-awareness (though as an adept academic, Critchley could easily rationalise it) is also displayed by “populariser of philosophy” Nigel Warburton (1962-). He too is strongly critical of both analytic philosophy and “the professionalisation of philosophy” generally. Yet Warburton himself has a strong and long academic background.

In terms of detail.

At first Warburton was a pupil at the fee-paying Sevenoaks School; which is one of the United Kingdom’s most expensive schools. He then gained a BA from the University of Bristol and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Warburton was also a lecturer at the University of Nottingham and later joined the Department of Philosophy at the Open University.

So, like so many academics (such as Professor Simon Critchley) and ex-academics, Warburton isn’t afraid of having a go at academics — for being academics (i.e., not for other things). Indeed Warburton himself recognised this when he said that he was once in an

“awkward position as a lecturer because I didn’t feel completely committed to the academic world of philosophy”.

Warburton still spends much of his time interviewing, meeting and writing about academics — that is, professional philosophers. (Warburton’s Philosophy Bites has interviewed Barry C. Smith, Simon Blackburn, A. C. Grayling, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michael Dummett, Tzvetan Todorov, David Chalmers, C. A. J. Coady and many more. Almost — or literally — every one of these is a professional/academic philosopher. I have no problem with this. But I thought that Warburton did.)

So Warburton was a professional academic from before 1994 until 2013 and a student of philosophy before that. Indeed it’s highly likely that his publishers wouldn’t have been interested in Warburton’s popular philosophy if it weren’t for the fact that he’d previously gained a PhD from Cambridge University and also been an academic.

Of course it can be argued (in Critchley’s case at least) that someone can be a professional philosopher and also be critical of professional philosophy. Indeed some people may argue that Critchley is best placed to do so precisely because he “knows what he’s talking about”. But the argument isn’t that what Critchley says is automatically false because he’s a professional philosopher.(Some of what he says may be true.) The argument is that… well, he’s simply a hypocrite.

More relevantly and as will be seen in the following, Professor Critchley isn’t actually a critic of professionalised philosophy at all. He’s a critic of analytic philosophy, analytic philosophers and analytic philosophy departments. On the other hand, Critchley has been full of praise for the professional philosophy that’s been carried out at the places he has taught — and he waxes lyrically especially about the New School in New York. (This is where Critchley now teaches — see here.)

Professor Simon Critchley vs. Analytic Philosophy

Now take these statements from Professor Simon Critchley:

“To a certain extent, this professionalism insulates philosophers from other disciplines and encourages a certain lazy arrogance. What I dislike most about philosophers is the idea that they think because they are smart as philosophers they have nothing to learn from anybody else. You find this repeatedly.”

Which philosophers had Professor Critchley in mind?

He uses the word “philosophers”; yet it’s very clear that he meant analytic philosophers. That’s primarily because these words are embedded in a published interview in which the sins of analytic philosophy and analytic philosophers were the main subject. (Coincidentally, Nigel Warburton was also interviewed for that book and he said similar things — to Critchley — about both analytic philosophy and professional philosophy.)

Clearly Critchley only had his critical eyes on analytic philosophy. For example, he stated the following words:

“Just visit the Eastern Division annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association for an empirical confirmation of this thesis — it’s a meat market!”

The American Philosophical Association is an association of (almost exclusively) analytic philosophers.

So did Critchley honestly believe that there was no equivalent of the American Philosophical Association when it came to continental philosophers and academics like himself? Of course there was! Indeed considering Critchley’s 12 or more different academic positions, he’s been a perfect beneficiary of various continental-philosophy “meat markets”!

(The fact that Professor Critchley uses the gratuitous prefix “empirical” in the phrase “empirical confirmation” just shows how deeply embedded in the academy he was — even then.)

Critchley continues:

“To a certain extent, this professionalism insulates philosophers from other disciplines and encourages a certain lazy arrogance.”

All disciplines are isolated from other disciplines… to some degree. This is true of poststructuralism, literary theory, Critical Race Theory, history, anthropology and the other subjects taught at Professor Critchley’s New School in New York. It’s certainly true of physics, chemistry, etc. In fact it can be argued that that’s partly what makes a discipline a discipline — a degree of isolation from other disciplines.

That said, Critchley may well argue that philosophy should be different from these other subjects. Well, that depends…

Almost every analytic philosopher I know — both throughout the 20th century and today - did have a keen interest in physics, biology, ethics, neuroscience, mathematics, etc. And, more recently, in cognitive science. But Critchley seems to have been arguing (if implicitly) that analytic philosophers weren’t interested in the right things. That is, he stated that philosophers should learn “not just from cognitive scientists”. That hints at the fact that Critchley knew that analytic philosophers were interested in cognitive science — but that’s wasn’t enough for him. Indeed he went on to criticise what he calls “scientism”. This can be interpreted as meaning that the (bad) disciplines Critchley had in mind were the (hard?) sciences. Indeed he told us that

“one thread, and one thread, within contemporary philosophy is scientism”.

Here again it’s clear that Critchley meant analytic philosophy by “contemporary philosophy”. He also failed to realised that many analytic philosophers have been — and still are — strongly against scientism. (Philosophers such as G.E. Moore, Thomas Nagel, Alvin Plantinga, E.J. Lowe, etc.) That’s if the word “scientism” is anything more than a vague term of abuse.

So Critchley wants analytic philosophers to learn from (to use his own examples) “lawyers, historians, anthropologists”. Why these people? It must be because that’s what he and most continental philosophers are interested in. And, in parallel, on the whole they aren’t that interested in physics — or in cognitive science for that matter. This leads me to conclude that it’s not analytic philosophers not learning from other disciplines that irks Critchley: it’s their not learning from disciplines that Critchley himself has learned from. That is, those disciplines which have obvious political use value for (continental) philosophers and academics like Critchley.

Professor Critchley concludes:

“If philosophy isolates itself from other disciplines and from the culture at large it will die [].”

Analytic philosophy doesn’t “isolate[] itself from other disciplines”. Instead, perhaps it doesn’t have close enough relations to the disciplines which Critchley believes it should have relations to (e.g., Critchley’s examples of history, law, anthropology, politics, etc.).

And what does “culture at large” even mean?

All philosophy is part of culture — isn’t it? What else can it be part of? And are all other academic disciplines fully embedded in “the culture at large”? I don’t know what Critchley means by “culture at large”. But I do believe I have an idea what Critchley was getting at. My bet is that he meant that analytic philosophers aren’t (as the cliché has it) “politically committed” or as politically active as many continental philosophers and academics (such as Critchley) have been and still are. (Here is a video interview of Critchley in which he cites a long list of movements and examples of direct action which he claims to have been involved in — see 28 minutes and 57 seconds.) Alternatively, if analytic philosophers have been politically committed, then Critchley may well believe that they've been committed to the wrong political things!

Critchley For Continental Philosophy

Critchley categorically states that

“[a]nd philosophical questions have to be linked to non-philosophical discourses”.

Hasn’t that nearly always been the case for Western philosophy? And wasn’t it also true of analytic philosophy in the 20th century? After all, philosophy about philosophy is surely the Philosophy of Philosophy or metaphilosophy. (Traditionally, there has been more of this stuff on the continent that in the United Kingdom or the United States.) In addition, is the philosophy of science or the philosophy of mind really about philosophy itself? Many analytic philosophers in the 20th century also wrote about politics, aesthetics and ethics — wasn’t all that about what Critchley calls “non-philosophical discourses”?

Readers may also have noted the modal, absolutist and demanding “have to be” — as in “philosophical questions have to be [my italics] linked to non-philosophical discourses”. Do they? Who says so? And why do they say so? Of course demanding that all philosophical questions have to be linked to non-philosophical discourses is itself a philosophical — or, more accurately, a political — stance.

(Here’s a video of Critchley on the cusp of explicitly stating that any philosophy that’s not politically engaged — though engaged in in the correct kind of politics — is basically worthless . Critchley graphically expresses the clichéd and utterly conformist position found among very many continental philosophers — and, of course, among academics like Critchley. It dates back 170 years to Karl Marx himself. This very-self-conscious philosophical and political radicalism — at least as found in certain environments — is now the conservative position and indeed it has been since at least the 1960s — some 70 years ago. In other words, philosophical and political radicalism has been thoroughly entrenched in many institutions and environments for literally decades.)

Critchley then continued:

“It’s almost axiomatic in the continental tradition that philosophy will be linked to things outside itself, whether this is the aesthetic in early Schelling and German romantics, Christianity in Kierkegaard, political economy in Marx, psychoanalysis in Freud, and so on.”

This is odd because Critchley was arguing against 20th-century analytic philosophy when he stated these words. Yet he’s citing three or more pre-20th century examples. That is, there wasn’t really a “continental tradition” when Schelling, Kierkegaard and Marx were writing. Or, at the very least, there wasn’t a continental/analytic split. And it’s that split which Critchley was talking about.

Critchley’s examples are odd too.

Firstly, many analytic philosophers have indeed written on aesthetics. Sure; not as many as those who write about, say, science or consciousness. And analytic philosophers certainly haven’t written about aesthetics in the manner Schelling, etc. have done. Perhaps that was Critchley’s problem.

What about Karl Marx and “political economy”?

Well, firstly Marx didn’t see himself as a philosopher. In fact he explicitly argued against philosophy. As have many Marxists since the 19th century. (This is despite the early-late Marx division and the work of Althusser and others.)

And surely Marx took his words on political economy to be… well, political economy, not philosophy.

So what about Sigmund Freud?

He wasn’t a philosopher... or was he? Critchley may think that he was.

In any case, psychoanalysis wasn’t a “ thing[] outside” Freud’s philosophy — it was what Freud actually created and wrote about. This is like arguing that politics was outside Marx’s philosophy. (If it was philosophy at all — even some Marxists dispute this.) Something similar can be said about Kierkegaard's Christianity. It wasn’t outside his philosophy — it was at the very centre of it.

Conclusion

Just a final few words on the term “continental philosophy”.

Professor Simon Critchley tells us that

“[i]t’s almost axiomatic in the continental tradition that philosophy will be linked to things outside itself”.

Critchley uses the words “continental tradition” — not “continental philosophy” — in the above. Yet he’s used the term “continental philosophy” many times without putting scare quotes around it. Indeed take the single example of the book A Companion to Continental Philosophy, which Critchley edited and contributed to. (In that book he defends the term; although he does note problems with it — as I do and just about everyone does.)

Whenever any outsider criticises “continental philosophy”, continental philosophers and academics often say that “there’s no such thing as continental philosophy”. Then they add that the term “continental philosophy” is “an invention of analytic philosophers”. (Some cite Gilbert Ryle - who used the term in the 1940s — as the chief culprit.) Yet the term “continental philosophy” is also used by those who aren’t critical of continental philosophy. And, in these cases, it’s then deemed okay to use it.

Of course it’s possible that a fan of continental philosophy may criticise the term “continental philosophy” even when positive things are said about it. But, as yet, I’ve never come across this phenomenon.

To sum up. Professor Simon Critchley doesn’t like the fact that apples aren’t oranges. That is, he has a serious problem with professional analytic philosophers not having the same attitudes to philosophy and politics (as well as the same attitude on the relation of philosophy to politics) as professional continental philosophers — or the academics who champion them — do.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Professor Philip Goff’s (Panpsychist) Philosophy of Trees

 

“The mycorrhiza structures [between tree roots and fungi] allow for a complex system of egalitarian redistribution.” — Philip Goff (in Galileo’s Error)

i) Introduction

ii) Philip Goff’s Anthropomorphisms Galore

iii) Professor Gagliano’s Experiments on Pea Seedlings

iv) Professor’s Simard’s Research on Trees

v) Conclusion

Philip Goff

This essay is an account of Professor Philip Goff’s philosophical and political interpretations of the experiments and research on plants carried out by the ecologists Professor Monica Gagliano and Professor Suzanne Simard. This means that it won’t be focussing purely on the actual experiments and research — at least not as they’re presented by these scientists. Instead, the focus will be on what Goff philosophically and politically draws out from them.

So it may be the case that Gagliano and Simard have arguments which are more (or less) convincing than Goff’s own. In addition, their experiments may be scientifically kosher and their papers abound with mathematical equations and an infinity of footnotes/references. (Think here of those books by Creationists, Flat-Earthers, New Agers, Deepak Chopra, etc. which often run wild with mathematical equations and technical terms from science.) However, Goff’s interpretations of these experiments are the main theme of this piece.

That said, both of Monica Gagliano and Suzanne Simard do foist philosophical baggage onto their experiments. That philosophical baggage goes way beyond the science itself. Indeed this is a very good example of the common phenomenon of scientists — as well as philosophers and political activists — using scientific data or experiments as ammunition to advance their own political and/or religious/spiritual causes and goals.

To give an an example of that last claim.

In one interview with Monica Gagliano, the interviewer (a Dr Prudence Gibson, who’s clearly very sympathetic) keeps on using the word “radical” in a very positive manner (i.e., about Gagliano’s views). It’s as if she believes that being radical in itself is always and automatically a good thing. (Does being radical also mean being true or correct?) In addition, Gagliano classes (some of?) those who’re critical of her views as being “passive aggressive”. (Some of the people who adopt Gagliano’s views are often passive aggressive against those who reject them.) In addition, apparently Gagliano’s critics are suffering from the (to use the interviewer’s own word) “affliction” of plant blindness. That’s also the case according to those other academics who work in the field of Critical Plant Studies. (CPS seems to more of an idea or project than an actually-existing field of study.)

Philip Goff’s Anthropomorphisms Galore

The main theme in this piece is Goff’s clear anthropomorphism; which he uses to back up his prior panpsychism. The problem is that Goff doesn’t see the words and phrases he uses as examples of anthropomorphism.

For example, in the following Goff will be quoted using the words “associate”, “meaningless”, “preferential treatment”, “for their young”, “mother”, “kin”, “prejudice”, “reciprocal support”, “passing along” “egalitarian redistribution” and “dinnertime” (the last one, surely, is Goff’s joke) to refer to plants.

Perhaps the most extreme example of all is Goff’s use of the word “wisdom”. He uses that word when he says that “mother trees [] pass on their wisdom to the next generation”. Now this is an professional analytic philosopher using the word “wisdom” about trees without even hinting at it being a metaphor or a poeticism. Yet, as stated, that’s because he’s not using the word “wisdom” metaphorically or poetically.

Now it must be said that it’s of course the case that anthropomorphic words and phrases about plants or trees can be — and often are — used poetically and metaphorically, as well as to enable understanding. And, in that simple sense, such uses aren’t truly anthropomorphic at all. So this means that the least a philosopher or scientist can do is make it clear to his/her audience that he/she is using such words (or phrases) in a poetic or metaphorical way. That said, in Philip Goff’s case at least, it’s very clear that he’s not using these word and phrases metaphorically, poetically or to enable understanding: he’s using them literally.

So take this passage as an example of this:

“[W]e now know that plants communicate, learn and remember. I can see no reason other than anthropic prejudice not to ascribe to them a conscious life of their own.”

It’s ironic that Goff mentions “anthropic prejudice” when he himself is clearly indulging in gross forms of anthropomorphism. (Many people have a problem with anthropomorphism even when it comes to animals — never mind plants.)

Readers may now wonder why anthropomorphism is seen to be somehow better than what Goff calls “anthropic prejudice” (i.e., anthropocentrism). Yet don’t both positions share the same (as it were) ánthrōpos (i.e., “human being”) toward plants? And so aren’t both positions equally suspect?

Of course Goff doesn’t believe he’s being at all anthropomorphic.

Ironically enough, I once wrote a piece on the author and theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder and her (seemingly) naive position on panpsychism. (It’s called ‘Sabine Hossenfelder Doesn’t Think… About Panpsychism’.) I now believe that she might have been right to be highly suspicious of panpsychism (even if her arguments are poor) — at least when it comes to Philip Goff and panpsychists with similar views. (She didn’t actually have Philip Goff in mind; at least as far as I know.)

In that piece I stressed that most panpsychists don’t think in terms of electrons (Hossenfelder’s own example) “thinking”, let along “imagining” (see later quotes from Goff). Instead, some panpsychists talk in terms of the very basic phenomenal properties — or even protophenomenal properties — of electrons and other basic entities. Basically, such panpsychists believe that electrons don’t actually think at all; though they do instantiate phenomenal properties.

(Goff now includes spacetime itself in his panpsychism. For example, he writes: “Spacetime on its own is a simple and ubiquitous experience [].”)

So in the following we’ll see the monumental leap from those basic claims of panpsychists to claims about plants “thinking”, “imagining”, etc.

Professor Gagliano’s Experiments on Pea Seedlings

Professor Monica Gagliano

Philip Goff uses highly-selective scientific research on plants as a means to back up and advance his philosophical and political panpsychism.

Firstly, his cites an experiment by Professor Monica Gagliano. Goff writes:

“In order to set up a similar scenario with her pea seedlings, Gagliano put a pea plant at one end of a Y-shaped tube, so that it could grow in either of two directions, left or right. In one direction was the seedling’s ‘food,’ in the form of blue light. In normal circumstances, the pea seedlings will instinctively grow toward where the light was last present. However, Gagliano tested whether the seedlings could associate the sound of a computer fan with the presence of the blue light, by repeatedly placing the noise at the end of the tube where the blue light was located. Upon repeated trials, she found that just as Pavlov’s dogs had salivated at the sound of the bell, so the pea seedlings grew toward the noise of the computer fan. In both cases, a sound that was initially meaningless to the organisms had come to represent dinnertime.”

Firstly and to state the obvious. Plants don’t near to hear sounds or see light. Yet, despite that, they can still be causally affected by both sound and light.

More particularly, isn’t it the case that the seedlings in this experiment would have also been causally affected by the sound of a computer fan? That is, rather than the seedlings

“associat[ing] the sound of a computer fan with the presence of the blue light”

they might have simply been causally effected by the fan sound instead of the blue light.

So where does the supposition of association come from?

In more detail, light is a wave and sound is also a wave — both with very determinate physical natures. Thus the seedlings might have moved toward the computer fan’s sound waves because in many respects they were like the blue light waves. That is, the sound waves of the fan must have causally impacted on the seedlings; just as the light waves had done so previously.

Thus there’s no (immediate) need to talk of “meaning”, “association”, “value”, etc. — as both Goff and Gagliano do.

To repeat: might the sound waves (from the fan) have had a similar causal impact on the seedlings as the (blue) light waves had previously done?

(See the BBC’s ‘Light and sound — reflection and refraction’.)

Goff must also know that even non-biological objects display “movement” in response to their environments. Take the computers and other electronic devices. They change or move in (causal) response to that which is external to them. Yet, oddly enough, Goff himself doesn’t seem to believe that computers are — or even can be — conscious. Indeed he spends some time in Galileo’s Error saying so — if only implicitly. (At the very least, Goff seems to be sympathetic to John Searle’s well-known Chinese Room argument.)

Yet despite focussing on Goff’s panpsychist position on Gagliano’s experiment, it seems that Gagliano herself is a panpsychist… of sorts. (Perhaps that’s why Goff noted her experiments in the first place.) For example, she states (as quoted by Goff) the following:

“‘If the plant is imagining its dinnertime arriving, based on a simple fan that is associated to the light, then who is doing the imagining? Who is thinking here?’”

It’s clear (even if only from Goff’s own words in Galileo’s Error) that Gagliano already had reasons to believe - or hope — that she’d find the results she found. (See Fudge Factor and Experimenter-Expectancy Effect.) After all, she actually set up a (according to Goff) “similar scenario” to Ivan Pavlov’s well-known experiments on dogs in order to see if her pea seedlings would behave in the same — or in a similar — manner to dogs.

Professor’s Simard’s Research on Trees

Professor Suzanne Simard

Philip Goff also uses Suzanne Simard’s scientific research to back up his political and spiritual panpsychism.

Goff writes:

“[H]uman societies social harmony is possible only when they are united by strong ties of kinship. No such prejudice exists among trees. Even across species there exist networks of reciprocal support. In summer, the birch trees help out the fir trees by passing along carbon, especially to the fir trees that are shaded from the sun. In winter, there is reciprocation: when the birches are leafless, the firs provide much needed carbon support.”

It be argued that simply because entities have various causal (non-anthropomorphic) relations with one another, then that alone doesn’t mean that an entity within such a causal web must also display “reciprocal support” toward or “help out” the other entities within that same web.

Take a silicon chip in a computer or a piano string in a piano. Can we use the same kind of anthropomorphic words about these entities within the causal web that is a piano or a computer?

Of course Goff himself is referring to biological entities — trees and pea seedlings; but does that automatically change things in any relevant or fundamental way?

In addition, many animals (never mind trees) “help out” animals from other species for simple reasons of survival — not for reasons of “kinship” or “reciprocal support”. That is:

Animal x carries out action A, which also enables animal z (from another species) to survive, in order to bring about its own (or its species) survival.

And, if anything, the above will be even truer of trees. That is, birch trees “help out” (by “passing along carbon”) fir trees (which, in turn, “provide much needed carbon support” for birch trees) because birch trees gain from such a causal relation. This is the case even if both birch trees and fir trees turn out to be (anthropomorphic) “winners” when such mutual causal interactions occur.

Strangely enough, Goff himself cites evidence which may work against the political values which he extracts from this research. (This may be because Goff was either putting “both sides of the argument” or because he didn’t think through the implications of his own statements.)

The lack of (for want of a better word) altruism in the animal and tree world has just been mentioned. And Goff himself writes that “trees and the fungi enjoy a quid pro quo relationship”. Now would Goff like it if all human relationships were based on such quid pro quo arrangements? Of course no doubt Goff can interpret quid pro quo relationships in the world of trees in a way that squares with his own personal politics — and someone else could interpret it in a way which doesn’t.

That said, Goff then immediately shifts gear and says (of Simard’s research) that

“[t]he mycorrhiza structures allow for a complex system of egalitarian redistribution”.

Of course the words “egalitarian redistribution” are taken from the human political domain. Indeed Goff himself — coincidentally enough — is strongly in favour of egalitarian redistribution in the human world and has written about it in newspapers and in his blog. And here is Goff spotting egalitarian redistribution in the world of trees. (See Goff’s article ‘Our Glastonbury U2 protest was a call for an ethical tax’, written for the Guardian newspaper.)

Goff offers more on Simard’s research which may also be taken to go against his political interpretations of the plant world. He writes:

“[L]ike humans, trees do exhibit preferential treatment for their own young. Simard has shown that the ‘mother’ trees at the center of the network not only give greater amounts of carbon to their own kin, but also send them defense signals which can increase by a factor of four the young trees’ survival chances. This intergenerational transfer is particularly pronounced at the point when the mother trees die, as they pass on their wisdom to the next generation.”

Now since Goff himself mentions human “ties of kinship”, would he be happy with the idea that a specific human being only helps out other human beings because doing so actually helps that said human being? Indeed some theorists have argued that this is indeed always the case with all human beings. However, surely this interpretation wouldn’t please Goff or help his political panpsychism.

Take this other example.

You may think that the fact that “mother trees [] give greater amounts of carbon to their own kin” would work against Goff’s political and spiritual (as it were) holism. Isn’t this example a display of the (to use an anthropomorphic word) selfishness of trees vis-à-vis non-kin? (This all ties into very complex and long-running debates — often political in nature — about whether it’s a self-replicating molecule, gene, cell, organism, group or species that is subject to natural selection — see unit of selection.)

In any case, it can be argued that trees neither give preferential treatment nor don’t give preferential treatment to their “kin” (or, for that matter, to anything else). That’s because phrases like “preferential treatment” seem odd in these non-human (scientific) contexts.

Conclusion

All the above means that Goff uses anthropomorphic ways of speaking even when his examples can be made to work against his political and spiritual panpsychism.

And that highlights a problem here.

Exactly the same data, evidence or experiment about — or on — trees and other plants (as well as animals) can be used as ammunition to advance just about any political position. (See underdetermination of theory by data/evidence.) Indeed, historically, this has often been done. More specifically, talk of “quid pro quo relationship[s]” in the plant world could be used to advance political positions which are diametrically opposed to Goff’s own.

Finally, on the words “wisdom”, “egalitarian”, etc. again — as used by Philip Goff, Gagliano and Simard.

The simple argument here is that Goff, Gagliano and Simard are using these terms in ways that are massively at odds with how they’re used by laypersons when they refer to human individuals, institutions or societies. That is, they’re using them as highly-specific technical terms. What’s more, such technical terms pick out behaviours which are displayed by every member of a plant species — at least in a given environment.

Yet that simply isn’t the case with human beings.

The word “wisdom”, for example, is always used in a relative or contextual way — it’s never used to refer to every human being in all circumstances dating back tens of thousands of years. That is, person, institution or society x is (or was) wise in comparison with other persons, institutions or societies.

As for Goff’s word “egalitarian”: if every plant of a given species is egalitarian, then no plant of that species is egalitarian. Like wisdom, a tree can only be egalitarian if there’s the possibility that this tree (or the entire species) can choose not to be egalitarian. Again: the word “egalitarian” implies that an individual, institution or society chooses to be egalitarian. In other words, the word “egalitarian” has moral or normative content. That isn’t the case with the plant species Goff artfully selects. According to Goff (though he doesn’t explicitly state this), every plant of that species — and perhaps all plants! — are wise or egalitarian.

The same is true of Goff’s use of the words “prejudice” and “reciprocal support” when he refers to plants. Do these plants have the choice to actually embrace prejudice? Do such plants ever go against the reciprocal support Goff highlights? And say that there are indeed some exceptions (which is doubtful — unless for genetic and/or environmental anomalies, etc.) displayed by the plants of a given species — would they be morally flawed to display prejudice or reject reciprocal support?

So what’s the point of using these words at all? They have almost zero connection to how they’re used by laypersons — and probably even by Goff himself when he’s uses them in all other (non-plant-related) contexts.

In conclusion: perhaps it would be wise for Goff not to use the plant world as a weapon in his philosophical and political battles.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Eliminative Materialism: Paul and Patricia Churchlands’ Strong Neuronal Activations For Each Other

 

“One can’t help wondering whether the Churchlands’ early courtship involved poetry expressing the strength of their neuronal activations for each other.” — Professor Philip Goff (in his book Galileo’s Error)

i) Introduction: Philip Goff on the Churchlands

ii) The Future of Mind

iii) Those Damn Propositional Attitudes!

iv) Reductionism or Eliminativism?

v) Paul Churchland Believes That the Mind Exists

vi) Mental Contents and Their Expressions

vii) Problems With Eliminative Materialism

viii) Conclusion

Introduction: Philip Goff on the Churchlands

Professor Philip Goff (who’s a well known advocate of panpsychism) tells us a joke (though it’s possible that it wasn’t meant as a joke) about Paul and Patricia Churchland and their general materialist position on the mind. He writes:

“One can’t help wondering whether the Churchlands’ early courtship involved poetry expressing the strength of their neuronal activations for each other.”

Of course Paul and Patricia Churchland wouldn’t have used such neurobiological technical terms when they courted. And no one would use such a vocabulary today. That’s partly because it can be said that eliminative materialism (the position that Paul and Patricia Churchland advance) is a kind of philosophical (as it were) futurism in that it’s a position that predicts what form future scientific theories will take. That is, the Churchlands believe that the sciences will — or perhaps may — one day reveal that the mental states we refer to every day (i.e., when we use words like “love”, “believe”, “desire”) do not refer to anything real.

So what about the future?

This is how the Canadian philosopher Paul Churchland (1942- ) himself states his desire for a new language of mind:

“Neuroscience may appear to be defective in providing a purely ‘third-person account’ of mind, but only familiarity of idiom and spontaneity of conceptual response are required to make it a ‘first-person account’ as well. But it is entirely possible for a person or culture to learn and use some other framework in that role, the framework of cognitive neuroscience, perhaps.”

So is Philip Goff ruling out a change in vocabulary (as philosophers put it) a priori? And if he is, then why is he doing so?

After all, it’s a contingent fact that we use the terms we do to refer to our mental lives. Of course it can be argued that the words we use about our mental lives are somehow hardwired into our brains. But is that really the case? Are there natural-language cognates of all the contemporary terms of Western folk psychology which date back, say, 20,000 years? (The first human languages are thought to have begun between 50,000 and 150,000 years ago.) And have such terms (when translated into other languages) really been used by all other cultures too?

Despite those questions, even if such terms have been the norm throughout all histories and all cultures, then that surely still doesn’t — of necessity — stop us from acquiring a different way of speaking about the mind.

More specifically, surely Philip Goff can’t be arguing that all the expressions of (in his example) love can’t — by definition — be expressed in terms of what he calls “neuronal activations”. Indeed what’s so special about the words and concepts we currently use?

Yet, ironically enough, Goff himself unwittingly provides Paul Churchland with just the kind of argument he may well use himself. It just so happens that Goff (in this case) is talking about dualism, not love (or, for that matter, beliefs, desires, etc.). Goff writes:

“The psychologist Paul Bloom has argued that dualist thought is hardwired into use and that from an early age children categorize ‘mental things’ as distinct from ‘physical things.’”

More relevantly, Goff immediately continues with these words:

“Just because a view comes to us naturally or is hardwired, it doesn’t mean it’s true [].”

Goff’s joke is also almost like a version of the (as it were) self-refuting argument against eliminative materialism. This argument has it that because eliminative materialists use words like “belief” and “true” (or they simply believe that eliminative materialism is true), then this is evidently self-refuting. And that’s simply because, according to eliminative materialism, such things as truth and belief don’t exist. (This is covered later when Quine raises the question as to whether eliminative materialism expresses various mental states in neurobiological terms or whether it eliminates them tout court.)

Of course Paul and Patricia Churchland have offered ripostes against this argument. And Michael Devitt, for example, has offered a “deflationary” account of “x is true” that may help eliminative materialism.

Similarly (or at least fairly so), the serious part of Goff’s joke may be that in order for Paul and Patricia Churchland to be consistent about their belief in eliminative materialism, then when they courted, they should have used various words or terms from neurobiology to express their love for one another.

The Future of Mind

Paul Churchland goes into more detail on his own futurism in the following:

“Given a deep and practiced familiarity with the developing idioms of cognitive neurobiology, we might learn to discriminate by introspection the coding vectors in our internal axonal pathways, the activation patterns across salient neural populations, and myriad other things besides.”

Of course at present it would be virtually impossible (even for a neuroscientist) to describe our (to use Churchland’s own term) “first-person” thoughts, feelings and beliefs in terms of “coding vectors in our internal axonal pathways”, “activation patters across salient neural populations”, etc. It may even be hard to imagine such a state of affairs at present.

Yet Churchland wasn’t talking about the case as it is today. He explicitly stated that

“it is entirely possible for a person or culture to learn and use some other framework in that role”.

Clearly this is a statement about the future. In other words, this isn’t about a elite of neuroscientists imposing a new language on the populace today — or even next year. (Or such an elite banning all the words from folk psychology.) That said, if the “language” of folk psychology has been with us since human language itself began, then perhaps Churchland’s wishes for the future may be a little utopian. (Or, depending on one’s views, dystopian.) After all, there’s surely a difference between picking up new words or terms (which happens all the time) and picking up a new language to talk about ours minds. However, this clearly isn’t something that won’t — or can’t — happen in the future.

Those Damn Propositional Attitudes!

The following passage is a take on Paul Churchland’s general position on mind as expressed by Tadeusz Zawidzk:

“Churchland is famous for for championing the thesis that our everyday, common-sense, ‘folk’ psychology, which seeks to explain human behavior in terms of the beliefs and desires of agents, is actually a deeply flawed theory that must be eliminated in favor of a mature cognitive neuroscience.”

The main problem — so Churchland believes — with beliefs, desires, etc. is that they’re (deemed to be) propositional attitudes. And the main problem with propositional attitudes is that they (are seen to) have semantic and syntactic properties. Yet such semantic and syntactic properties can’t be translated into what goes on in the brain. Instead, what we really have are spiking frequencies, action potentials and other (neuroscientific) things. And these things, moreover, are distributed and continuous in nature, not precisely located in the brain or discrete.

Of course some philosophers have retorted that these mental states needn’t be seen as being linguistic in nature.

To take just one example. Many connectionist models of the brain do make use of what’s called representations (see here). Yet these (quasi?)representations are instantiated in the brain in a parallel and distributed manner (see here).

Reductionism or Eliminativism?

The important point now is to distinguish eliminative materialism from reductionism in the philosophy of mind.

Paul Churchland believes that “folk” concepts shouldn't be reduced to something neurobiological or scientifically kosher: he believes that they should be eliminated.

Why is that?

It’s because he believes that they don’t correspond to anything (to use a philosophical term) real or objective — that is, to anything in the brain.

Of course if beliefs, desires and the other propositional attitudes don’t exist in the first place, then it doesn’t really make sense to argue that they can be expressed in other ways. And, a few decades ago, the American philosopher W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000) made this point. He wrote:

“Is physicalism a repudiation of mental objects after all, or a theory of them? Does it repudiate the mental state of pain or anger in favor of its physical concomitant, or does it identify the mental state with a state of the physical organism (and so a state of the physical organism with the mental state)?”

So this can be expressed in the following way: either beliefs, desires, etc. exist and they’ll ultimately be explained in neurobiological terms — or they don’t exist at all and therefore they can’t be expressed in any way.

That said, Churchland would simply argue that it isn’t beliefs, desires, etc. that are being expressed with our Folk words or concepts — that’s if these things are seen as “sentences in the head”. And therefore it isn’t our beliefs, desires, etc. that are — or will be - expressed in neurobiological terms either.

So all this becomes a little circular.

Paul Churchland Believes That the Mind Exists

Despite all the above, one point that’s worth making is that Paul Churchland’s position isn’t as extreme as some people (not least Philip Goff) paint it.

Firstly, Churchland accepts that reality of the mind. Or, at the very least, he uses the word “mind”. (After all, Churchland may want to substitute or eliminate that word too.) More specifically, the mind itself (as such) isn’t denied. Instead Churchland's eliminativism is a position which states that that certain types of mental states (mainly propositional attitudes) do not exist.

Now can we even have a mind without such mental states?

That said, when it comes to consciousness (i.e., not the mind), Churchland (in his book The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul) did argue that consciousness may — in the future — be explained entirely in terms of neurobiology — i.e., physical events in the brain, biochemicals, parts of the brain, etc.

Yet here again (as with beliefs, desires, etc. earlier) the following can be asked:

Is it the case that consciousness does in fact exist but that it can be — or must be — described (or expressed) in terms of neurobiology?

Or alternatively:

Is it that consciousness simply doesn’t exist at all and all we need are neurobiological descriptions of people’s brains?

Churchland also accepts that there is such thing as a “first-person account” of (my own two words) inner processes. And he even uses the word “introspection”. It’s just that Churchland also believes that these processes should be described in the language of neuroscience or cognitive neurobiology, not in the language of folk psychology. In these cases at least, then, we don’t really seem to have any eliminations at all. Perhaps that’s mainly because Churchland has focussed primarily on the propositional attitudes when it comes to his eliminativism (though recall the earlier comments on his position on consciousness itself.)

(The words “inner processes” above are italicised because traditional behaviourists would never have been happy with any mention of them — and, arguably, Daniel Dennett still isn’t.)

Mental Content and its Expression

Paul Churchland also stated the following:

“What makes an account a ‘first-person account’ is not the content of that account, but the fact that one has learned to use it as the vehicle of spontaneous conceptualization in introspection and self-description.”

I don’t entirely understand Churchland's phraseology when he writes “is not the content of that account”. That said, his words may simply mean that we can make a distinction between (mental) “content” and the way we express that content. That is, there are things which occur in the mind regardless of the specific and contingent natural-language words we use to express them. (This is similar to the point philosophers have made — since Gottlob Frege here — about a single abstract proposition which can be expressed by many natural-language sentences.) In other words, we’ve acquired the words/terms of folk psychology to talk about (mental) content in our “first-person account[s]”. So we could, in the future, use the terms of neurobiology — instead — to express that very same content. (Or at least similar content as it’s “found” in the future.)

So the fact that we use words like “belief” and even “love” — and have the concepts belief and love — is a contingent fact about how we express such mental content. Indeed such words are now “spontaneous” simply because we happen to have been brought up in a particular culture at a particular time. Now these words might well have been used for centuries or even much longer. Yet even that fact (if it is a fact) wouldn’t stop such words from being highly contingent and variable entities.

For example, think here of how the words “troll”, “hi-fi”, “progressive”, “computer”, “transgender”, “race”, “electron”, etc. would have sounded (or seemed) to a 19th century person - let alone to a person from the 203 BC.

Yet despite all that, the words we use today may still seem entirely natural. Indeed they may even be entirely natural — what else can they be?

But so what?

Problems With Eliminative Materialism

There are problems with Churchland’s position. Take this passage:

“Given a deep and practiced familiarity with the developing idioms of cognitive neurobiology, we might learn to discriminate by introspection the coding vectors in our internal axonal pathways, the activation patterns across salient neural populations, and myriad other things besides.”

This is an odd.

Firstly, it seems to hint at the possibility that literally everyone in our community could — or even should — learn the “idioms of cognitive neurobiology”. Alternatively, does Churchland simply believe that these terms would — or could — be passed down from scientists to the whole population? Surely he can’t believe that they could be taught to — or even enforced upon — the populace! (The word “abolished” has indeed been used in the eliminative materialism literature and might even have been used by Paul Churchland himself — see here.)

The basic point here is that languages aren’t imposed or passed down — they grow organically and over time. Of course particular words or even ways of speaking can be taught, suggested or even imposed. (This is happening today — at least to some extent — in the political domain.) But is it likely that all speakers and thinkers would need to know anything — let alone much — about neurobiology? Again, perhaps the terms from neurobiology will — or may — simply filter down in the way that so many other words/terms from academia or science have filtered down over the years. (This is especially the case when it comes to political terms from academia.)

Conclusion

In purely personal terms, I can’t even imagine expressing anything in terms of my brain’s “coding vectors in internal axonal pathways”, “the activation patterns across salient neural populations”, etc. And that’s simply because I know very little about neurobiology. And most other people know very little about neurobiology too. But, again, Paul Churchland was talking about the future. In addition and as just stated, academic or scientific terms being passed (or filtered) down — if over time — to the populace is a commonplace fact. So perhaps that’s what Churchland had in mind.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]