D.M. Armstrong on What Philosophers Should Do

 Armstrong argued that philosophers should “give an account of the general nature of things and of man”… and also “analyse concepts”.

David Malet Armstrong (1926–2014) was an Australian philosopher who studied philosophy at the Universities of Sydney and Oxford. He did much work in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.

Like his fellow Australian, J.J.C. Smart (1920–2012), Armstrong influenced an entire generation of Australian philosophers. The Australian philosopher Keith Campbell, for example, said that Armstrong’s contributions to philosophy “helped to shape philosophy’s agenda and terms of debate”.

Armstrong’s philosophy is taken to be naturalistic. His overall position (i.e., naturalistic metaphysics) accepted (as stated in his Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics) “the assumption that all that exists is the space time world, the physical world as we say”. In addition, Armstrong believed that philosophers should make sure that their theories and ideas square with — or, at the very least, take on board — what the sciences tell them about the world.

Armstrong was influenced by David Lewis (an American philosopher who had strong ties to Australia), J. J. C. Smart (a fellow Australian), Ullin Place, Herbert Feigl, Gilbert Ryle and G. E. Moore.

In terms of prose style. Armstrong's writings are clear and direct — in the “Australian style”.

On Philosophy Itself

In his paper, ‘The Causal Theory of Mind’ (1968), D.M. Armstrong argued that

“philosophers in the ‘analytic tradition’ swung back from Wittgensteinian and even Rylian pessimism to a more traditional conception of the proper role and tasks of philosophy”.

And Armstrong believed that the “proper role and task of philosophy” was

“to give an account [] of the general nature of things and of man”.

All this was largely Armstrong’s reaction to the stress on what was called conceptual analysis (or, more broadly, philosophical analysis) found in analytic philosophy at the time (Armstrong wrote these words in 1968.). That said, Armstrong still saw conceptual analysis as being important in philosophy.

Following on from all that, while many (analytic) philosophers accept that such things as conceptual analysis, explanation, definition, etc. (see later) are fruitful tools of philosophy, they still don’t believe that these things are all that there is to philosophy.

So what did Armstrong have to say on what philosophers should do?

…. But firstly note the word “should” here.

This isn’t a claim that all philosophers actually do all the things which Armstrong will mention. Thus it can be assumed here that Armstrong simply believed that they should do these things. In other words, Armstrong was being both metaphilosophical and normative in his statements.

What Philosophers Should Do

I’ll quote an entire passage from D.M. Armstrong in which he states both his (aforementioned) metaphilosophical and normative position on philosophy.

Armstrong wrote the following words:

“The philosopher has certain special skills. These include the stating and assessing of the worth of arguments, including the bringing to light and making explicit suppressed premises of arguments, the detection of ambiguities and inconsistencies, and, perhaps especially, the analysis of concepts.”

What won’t be discussed in the following are the following questions:

(1) Do philosophers actually have “special skills”? 
(2) How would a layperson know that any given philosopher had special skills? 
(3) Which philosophers (or kinds of philosopher) was Armstrong actually referring to?

So let’s break down Armstrong’s own words.

On Philosophical Argument

Firstly, Armstrong begins in the following way:

“The philosopher has certain special skills. These include the stating and assessing of the worth of arguments [].”

It can easily be argued that argumentation is vital in philosophy. Indeed if a philosopher — or a layperson — doesn’t offer an argument for his position or viewpoint, then why on earth should anyone else accept it in the first place?

Of course there are indeed various — perhaps even many — reasons as to why people may accept a position or viewpoint without it being argumentatively advanced or defended.

These include the following:

(1) The reader or listener already agrees with much — or even all — of what’s being stated (i.e., not argued) by the speaker or writer. 
(2) The listener or reader finds the writer’s or speaker’s prose style (say, its rhetoric and poetry) emotionally appealing. (That said, it would probably only be emotionally appealing if, at least in part, the listener/reader already agreed with much — or even all — of what’s being stated.) 
(3) The reader or listener doesn’t really understand what’s being said; but he or she takes the speaker or writer to be some kind of expert or authority on the given subject. 
(4) The reader or listener feels emotionally, socially or politically obliged to agree with what’s stated by the speaker or writer. 
(5) The reader or listener simply doesn’t know of any arguments against — or even alternatives to — what’s being stated by the speaker or writer.

Suppressed Premises

More particularly, Armstrong believed that one of the “special skills” of philosophers “include[s] the stating and assessing of the worth of arguments”.

The obvious question to ask here is exactly how other people’s arguments are stated and assessed by philosophers with special skills.

Armstrong immediately goes on to answer that question when he says that the worth of arguments is stated and assessed (at least partly) by

“the bringing to light and making explicit [the] suppressed premises of arguments”.

The (possible) suppressing of premises (either deliberately or unknowingly) is of vital importance in nearly all debates or discussions — especially political ones. (See hidden/suppressed premises.)

To put this at its most basic.

In an argument, the suppressed premise (or suppressed premises) is simply assumed to be true from the very beginning. Indeed the argument wouldn’t even work at all if the suppressed premise wasn’t assumed (to be true) from the start. In other words, the entire position (or argument) depends on the reader or listener — as well as the speaker or writer himself — accepting the suppressed premise (either knowingly or unwittingly) as being true — or at least as simply existing (i.e., as being an assumed “fact”).

That said, often suppressed premises aren’t (strictly speaking) part of an argument at all. That is, such premises may simply be part of a stream of poetic or rhetorical statements expressed by, say, an activist, politician, scientist or even a philosopher.

The Detection of Ambiguities and Inconsistencies

Armstrong then mentions “the detection of ambiguities and inconsistencies”.

One would like to believe that literally everyone would have a problem with arguments (or simply positions) which contain “ambiguities and inconsistencies”. That said, the notion of ambiguity seems to be more… well, ambiguous than the notion of inconsistency. That said, not all inconsistencies are easy to spot either.

Thus, in a certain sense, an argument may be strong, valid and/or sound and still be expressed in an ambiguous manner. Or, less strongly, such an argument may simply contain ambiguous phrases or ambiguous individual words. In that case, then, the entire argument won’t necessarily fail simply because some phrases or words within it are ambiguous — or simply taken to be ambiguous.

All that doesn’t seem to also apply as clearly to an argument containing inconsistencies. That said, such inconsistencies may be a result of certain ambiguities and certain ambiguities may be the result of certain inconsistencies. This means that the notions of ambiguity and inconsistency need a lot of work in themselves.

The Analysis of Concepts: the Analysis of Things

D.M. Armstrong finishes off his account of the special skills of philosophers by mentioning what he called “the analysis of concepts”.

Despite the analysis of concepts being a worthwhile philosophical skill, Armstrong did offer some words of warning.

For example, Armstrong argued that

“[Gilbert] Ryle was wrong in taking the analysis of concepts to be the end of philosophy”.

Armstrong himself, on the other hand, believed that

“the analysis of concepts is a means by which the philosopher makes his contribution to great general questions, not about concepts, but about things”.

Oddly enough, Armstrong’s position seems to have been replicated by the British philosopher Colin McGinn (1950-) — at least according to Barry Dainton and Howard Robinson. The latter two philosophers write:

“Colin McGinn has recently defended the view that philosophy is (and should be) a matter of conceptual analysis — although McGinn does not think this is incompatible with analysis-revealing truths pertaining to reality itself.”

Yet Timothy Williamson (1955-), on the other hand (again, according to Dainton and Robinson),

“argues that it is a mistake to think that philosophy is (or should be) a matter of linguistic or conceptual analysis: it is an investigation into reality itself”.

So it’s not that conceptual analysis (sometimes simply called philosophical analysis), specifically, ever completely went away — as the position of Colin McGinn shows. That said and as Armstrong put it, conceptual analysis did come under severe criticism during and after the demise of “linguistic philosophy”.

So at that historical point there was much talk of “pedantry”, “irrelevance” and a “petty focus on minutia” (i.e., at the expense of focussing on meaty, deep and heavy stuff). Sure, not all these criticisms were only aimed at conceptual analysis — yet even this fundamental and basic part of analytic philosophy was deemed suspect by some (or even many) philosophers and laypersons at one point in philosophical history — and still is today. (This is especially the case when it comes to some of those academics who specialise in scare-quoted “continental philosophy”; as well as a number of scare-quoted “continental philosophers” themselves.)

In any case, let’s take it as true that Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) did believe that (as Armstrong put it)

“the analysis of concepts [is] the end of philosophy”.

Yet, if Ryle did believe such a thing, then that position hardly makes sense — at least at a prima facie level. After all, surely concepts, words or terms aren’t about (or they don’t refer to) other concepts, words or terms. How could Ryle have believed that? (Unless, that is, Ryle was some kind of “linguistic idealist”.)

So Armstrong clearly rejected the (as it were) “binary opposition” between the analysis of concepts and the analysis of things. Yet surely we can only get to Armstrong’s things (as it were) through our concepts. Of course that still doesn’t mean that the analysis of concepts is “the end of philosophy”.

The situation is that when we discus things, events, facts, theories, conditions, values, positions… or anything, we obviously use words, terms and/or concepts to do so. So it seems that it’s almost inevitable that philosophers should scrutinise the words, terms and concepts we use in such discussions and debates.

It can also be argued that much — perhaps very much — will flow from philosophers’ and laypersons’ own personal definitions (even if tacit or very vague) of the words (or terms) they use. In other words, it’s not as if there are determinate and fixed definitions of most of the words (or terms) used by philosophers and laypeople when discussing contentious issues and problems.

Of course a person may well claim that he defines a word in a particular way simply because he believes that his very own personal definition unequivocally follows from what the given x he’s defining actually is.

To repeat. Is all this about words (or technical terms) and how we define them?

No, not at all.

As D/M. Armstrong argued above: it’s also about things. So if definitions, conceptual analyses, etc. are very important, then once someone defines his word or term (say, “consciousness”, “existence”, “free will”, “fact”, “prove”, etc.), then we can move on from there. And that’s the case even if we’re using these words to talk about Armstrong’s things.

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Historical Pragmatism: Logic as Inquiry and Logic for Use

On the American and British pragmatists’ reaction against formal and mathematical logic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Left: John Dewey. Right: F.C.S. Schiller

The German-British philosopher F.C.S. Schiller (1864–1937) argued that logic is — or at least should be — a “theory of inquiry”. (This position is captured in Schiller’s book, Logic for Use.) In America and, to a lesser degree, in the United Kingdom, such a view was in the air from roughly the 1870s to the 1920s… and onward (see here). Indeed the American philosopher and pragmatist John Dewey (there’s more on Dewey in the final section) wrote a book called Logic — The Theory of Inquiry. (Dewey was influenced by Schiller; just as Schiller was, in turn, influenced by C.S. Peirce.)

So if logic is a theory of inquiry, then that means that it will be — primarily — an inquiry into human thought processes rather than into the formal relations which exist between logical symbols and statements. In addition, one prime pursuit of this kind of logic was to understand how people actually “fall into error”. Its concern, therefore, wasn’t such things as system-based validity, entailment, consistency, etc. And that was because — so these pragmatists believed — these things don’t depend on (as it were) empirical or observational truth — even if they do depend on soundness.

Schiller also argued that science simply isn’t as logical as many people assume. (Ironically, there was much that went under the description the logic of science written after Schiller died.) Moreover, logical techniques and logical methodologies, in Schiller’s eyes, aren’t fool-proof. Schiller also argued (perhaps obviously) that logic alone can’t solve all the problems that bedevil scientific experiment and research.

More specifically, Schiller argued that scientists simply can’t know (as the phrase has it) a priori about all the possible (what Schiller called) “unforeseen objections” (i.e., to their theories or experiments) which may appear on the scene in the future. In other words, there’s simply no way that these future possibilities can be known (or preempted) beforehand. And it’s not only these possible objections which are unforeseen; but also new physical conditions or experimental findings.

So scientists can’t logically (or fully) predict any future changes to science.

Now consider, for example, the impossibility of scientists predicting quantum phenomena in, say, the 18th century. And think also of all the other “revolutions” in 20th century science which could never have been predicted or preempted.

In terms of logic itself.

Consider the rise of many-valued logic. Consider the attacks — or at least questionings or revisions — of the Law of Excluded Middle. (The American philosopher W.V.O. Quine became a pragmatist about the Law of Excluded Middle — or at least its applicability - in response to the findings of quantum mechanics and the results of various scientific experiments — see here.)

Hardly any of these radical scientific and logical changes could have been prophesised in the (as mentioned) 18th century or even in the first half of the 19th century.

A traditional empiricist might also have argued that many of these scientific (if not logical) revolutions couldn’t have been predicted if such predictions, by their very nature, were simply — or at least partly — dependent on past and present experiences or observations. And because such things weren’t observed in the 18th century, then it follows that they couldn’t have been predicted either. This means that no matter how strong or speculative the prediction actually is, it should — or would — still at least partly depend on empirical data or observations. And if such things weren’t available to point in the direction of, say, quantum phenomena again, then such phenomena couldn’t even have been speculated about.

Of course it might have been the case that certain speculators’ predicted such scientific revolutions by (as it were) accident. Indeed in the philosophy of science much is made of scientists, philosophers and even lunatics getting things right — yet for the wrong reasons. So, in broad terms, some people have made wild leaps in the dark and still got things right. However, even if such speculators got things right, then few — if any — scientists (of their day) would have taken much — or any — notice of them. That primarily because such speculative theories (or ideas) would have been completely divested of any observational or experimental foundation or content.

Of course even the scientists who were strict sceptics would never have demanded complete and unequivocal justifications of the speculators’ predictions or hypotheses. Indeed scientists have always realised that speculations are vital in science. That said, such scientists would at least have expected the aforementioned speculations (or theories) to have had at least (as it were) one foot on the ground. In other words, such speculations should never entirely belong to another world.

A Little More on John Dewey

In John Dewey’s eyes, logic should be largely derived from the methods and practices which are used in science and by everyday people — even those people who aren’t experts. And because science is always on the move, then Dewey also believed (as expressed in his Essays on Experimental Logic) that logicians shouldn’t see logical principles as

“eternal truths which have been laid down once and for all as supplying a pattern of reasoning to which all inquiry must conform”.

More generally, Dewey expressed his naturalist position on logic (or at least on “thinking”) in this way:

“[T]hinking, or knowledge-getting, is far from being the armchair thing it is often supposed to be. The reason it is not an armchair thing is that it is not an event going on exclusively within the cortex or the cortex and vocal organs. It involves the explorations by which relevant data are procured and the physical analyses by which they are refined and made precise.”

So Dewey believed (like C.S. Peirce before him) that logic should be fallibilist in nature — just like science. Indeed his fellow American philosopher W.V.O. Quine (as already mentioned) was even a fallibilist when it came to both mathematics and logic.

Dewey also (if indirectly) argued that the arrow should point from the world to logic; as well as from science to logic. In that sense, then, logic seemed to take a back seat when it came to science.

Moreover, because science’s relation to the world is both more (as it were) direct than logic’s and philosophy’s, then the latter two (to use Quine’s words) “should defer to science”. Alternatively and to use a term used in the 20th century, logic and philosophy should be naturalised so that they don’t systematically conflict with science and its findings.

So Dewey clearly took a pragmatist line on logic.

Dewey noted the many successes (however defined) of science and everyday life. He therefore believed that whichever logical rules or principles scientists and everyday people use when they scored their particular successes, that logicians should also adopt them. In any case, scientists themselves have always taken on board new logical methods in their pursuits. And Dewey believed that logicians should do so too.

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Philip Goff on the “Brute” Identity Theory: Flogging a Dead Horse?

Philosopher Philip Goff tells us that “science is supposed to offer explanations [of the] subjective inner world of feeling and experience”. Does it?

The English philosopher and panpsychist Philip Goff offers us a broad dismissal of what he calls the “brute identity theory”. In Goff’s own words:

“The brute identity theory is very unsatisfying. Science is supposed to offer explanations I want to know how processes in the brain result in a subjective inner world of feeling and experience.”

It must be said here that Philip Goff is almost entirely beholden to the prior arguments and positions of the philosophers Saul Kripke (1940 — ) and David Chalmers (1966 — ). These two philosophers attacked identity theorists with the argument that they can’t — or couldn’t — identify (to use Goff’s own examples) feelings, experiences and pains with brain states (or, indeed, with anything physical). And that’s because human subjects are (as it’s often put) “directly aware” of the “qualitative” nature of their feelings, experiences and pains. That is, all these things have qualitative features (or properties) which no brain state ever has.

Explanations?

Firstly, science (if we can speak of science in the singular) does “offer explanations” of the “subjective inner world of feeling and experience”. It’s just that none of its explanations satisfy Philip Goff.

More relevantly, explanations as to how “processes in the brain result in a subjective inner world of feeling and experience” were even provided by the old-school identity theorists of the 1950s and 1960s. (Why is Goff going back so far? See the history here.) And neuroscientists and others today also provide explanations on this subject. It’s just — again — that Goff doesn’t like any of their explanations. That’s because Goff believes that all such explanations lack something — they lack a certain je ne sais quoi. And Goff’s je ne sais quoi is particularly philosophical.

What’s more, the (as it were) how-explanation which Goff demands may never be forthcoming. (David Chalmers asks “why”, not “how” — see here.) That may well be because it’s a demand which can never be met — not even in principle. (Remember Goff’s words “[s]cience is supposed to offer explanations” here.)

Think about this.

Would — or could — any physical how-explanation of what Goff calls the “subjective inner world” ever satisfy him? That is, would — or could — any move from the brain to the inner world of “feeling and experience” ever satisfy Goff? After all, if Goff believes — from the very start! — that feelings and experiences are both definitionally and metaphysically different to anything at the level of the brain, then literally all the how-explanations which lead from the brain to feelings and experiences will always be automatically ruled out. In other words, Goff demands an “explanation” which can never be given — at least not if given on his own impossible terms… And I use the word “impossible” because even a (careful) physicalist like the Korean-American philosopher Jaegwon Kim (1934–2019) had this to say on a closely- related matter:

“[I]f we think of certain properties as having their own intrinsic characterizations that are entirely independent of anther set of properties, there is no hope of reducing the former to the latter.”

In any case, Goff (at least partly) came to the conclusions stated above by analysing the claims and positions of the identity theorists of the 1950s and 1960s. (Goff doesn’t mention this historical detail.)

The Identity Theory

Let me quote Philip Goff in full:

“If we have sufficient empirical evidence that pain is identical with brain state X, which brute identity theorists claim we would have if pain were found to be systematically correlated with brain state X, then we can simply assert the identity and the case is closed. It is a philosophical confusion, according to the brute identity theory, to suppose that anything more is required.”

And, elsewhere, Goff puts the words “[f]eelings are no more real than the Loch Ness Monster” into the mouth of a Dr. Ivor Cutler; who’s a fictional neuroscientist — and presumably an Identity Theorist — at the factual California Institute of Technology.

Firstly, according to Goff’s take on identity theorists, there’s a too-smooth move from the fact that

pain Y is “systematically correlated with brain state X”

to the conclusion that

“we can [therefore] simply assert the identity and the case is closed”.

Yet it’s not that brain state X and pain state Y are systematically correlated which automatically leads to an identity. It’s that this systematic correlation gives the identity theorist a very strong reason to believe that there is — in fact — an identity. (The difference between type and token identity will be ignored here; as well as the fact that even if the identity theory were correct, a particular pain may still not — or even will not — be identical to a particular place in the brain.)

The following is how the American experimental psychologist Edwin Boring (as quoted by U.T. Place) put it in the 1930s:

“To the author a perfect correlation is identity. Two events that always occur together at the same time in the same place, without any temporal or spatial differentiation at all, are not two events but the same event. The mind-body correlations as formulated at present, do not admit of spatial correlation, so they reduce to matters of simple correlation in time. The need for identification is no less urgent in this case.”

And the following is how Valerie Gray Hardcastle went on to put it some 60 years after Boring:

“[I]f you find structural isomorphisms between our perceptions and twitches in the brain, then that is taken to be a good reason to think that the mind is nothing more than activity in the brain. (What other sort of evidence could you use?)”

Of course it’s the case that not all correlations entail — or even imply — identities. It’s just that in some cases they do.

So, clearly, smoking lots of cigarettes came to be strongly correlated with lung cancer. However, smoking lots of cigarettes is still not (to state the obvious) identical to lung cancer.

As already stated, Philip Goff essentially tackles the positions of the identity theorists of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet I doubt that any identity theorist — even at this stage in philosophical history — ever denied that there’s a first-person (or “inner”) angle to the physical-mental identities they posited.

The View From the Inside

Perhaps the seemingly(?) non-physical nature of Goff’s “feeling and experience” is largely — or even entirely — down to people’s subjective (or first-person) take on them. That is, to the (as it were) “owners” of feelings and experiences, such things do indeed seem to be non-physical. Yet do feelings and experiences seeming-to-be-non-physical mean that they are non-physical? Perhaps there’s a fundamental reason (purely phenomenological in nature) as to why the owner (or haver) of experience or feeling C takes it to be non-physical.

All this all ties in with broader takes on the privacy of feelings and experiences.

So why is fundamental privacy given so much credence in this philosophical debate?

Firstly, how do we move from that stress on the view-from-the-inside (in this particular case, the non-physical nature of feelings and experiences) to anything outside that inner domain? How do we move to anything specifically scientific — and indeed anything philosophical — from that which is deemed to be intrinsically private? In other words, what work is this innerness doing? Is it just a brute or fundamental fact — full stop?

The following argument is how the British-American philosopher Peter Carruthers (1952- ) expresses the relevance of privacy to this debate. He writes:

(1) Conscious states are private to the person who has them.

(2) Brain-states are not private: like any other physical state, they form part of the public realm.

(Conclusion) So (by Leibniz’s Law) conscious states are not in fact identical with brain-states.”

Not many people would doubt premise (1) above. What’s more, a behaviourist or eliminativist position isn’t being advanced here either. However, this question remains:

What can we conclude given that feelings and experiences are inner or private?

More clearly:

Is the claim that feelings and experiences are are non-physical itself largely (or even entirely) down to their being (as it were) viewed from the inside?

This means that it follows that because “[c]onscious states are private to the person who has them”, then the notion of the non-physicality of those states will be private to the person who has them too. Yet how can we draw out the actual non-physicality of (in Goff’s case) feelings and experiences from such personal “reports” on them?

Again, from a private (or phenomenological) viewpoint, feelings and experiences do seem to be non-physical. Yet that private seeming doesn’t mean that feelings and experiences are non-physical. Perhaps that seeming-to-be-non-physical is largely a product of personal psychology, learning, culture, history and sociology.

To repeat.

When a subject has a feeling or experience, it seems (to that subject) to be non-physical. Yet why should we accept that feeling or experience C is non-physical simply because its owner takes it to be that way? What relevance does that personal (or private) account of a feeling or experience have on its actual metaphysical status?

To take an extreme analogy.

To subject S, the cricket bat in the water seems to be bent. Yet that doesn’t mean that the cricket bat in the water is bent — it’s refracted. Similarly, subject S hallucinating a red goblin is “private to the person” who has that hallucination. Yet we wouldn’t conclude that the red goblin exists.

Now take another loosely analogical argument.

The reader’s experience (or observation) of a specific concrete building isn’t identical to that concrete building itself. And my own experience (or observation) of that concrete building isn’t identical to the reader’s experience (or observation) of that very same concrete building. In these simple cases, then, few people would claim an absolute identity between an experience (or observation) of a concrete building (or an experience/observation of anything else) and the building itself. That is, the experiences (or observations) of that building are never confused (or conflated) with the building itself (unless, that is, one is an out-and-out idealist).

Yet aren’t many people doing something similar to that when it comes to their own feelings and experiences?

Again, feelings and experiences seem to be non-physical. Therefore many people believe that feelings and experiences are non-physical. Yet that would be like seeing the concrete building as actually being black and white when wearing sunglasses (or even if one is suffering from a retinal problem of vision). Sure, the cases aren’t identical because feelings and experiences are private or inner; whereas the concrete building is far from being private. Yet that doesn’t mean that we can’t make mistakes about private conscious (or mental) states. Indeed there’s a large literature on this very subject which tells us that we often do (see here).

So perhaps we can conclude that the seemingly non-physical nature of feelings and experiences is purely a product of private states or describing things from the inside. As Carruthers (again) puts it:

“Even if descriptions of consciousness experiences are logically independent of all descriptions of physical states (as the cartesian conception implies) it may in fact be the case that those descriptions are descriptions of the very same things. This is just what the thesis of mind/brain identity affirms.”

Thus we shouldn’t also conclude that such feelings and experiences actually are non-physical from our descriptions.

In addition, does this mean that such people are taking their own positions — or descriptions — on the (metaphysical) nature of their own feelings and experiences to be gospel?

That last claim doesn’t mean that people make mistakes about the very (as it were) having of a feeling or experience or even about its phenomenology. The mistakes come only when people describe — or theorise about — their feelings and experiences. Mistakes also come about because of people’s assumptions about their own feelings and experiences. (The non-physical nature of feelings and experiences isn’t the only example of this.) Thus such descriptions, theories and assumptions may be highly mistaken or confused.

All that said, there’s no eliminativist or behaviourist denial of feelings and experiences here. What is being questioned is what people say or believe about their own feelings and experiences. And, in this case at least, many people believe (if only when pressed by philosophers and given a philosophical vocabulary) that all their feelings and experiences are non-physical.

Yet despite all the above, mental privacy can be — or at least it can become — scientifically kosher.

Paul Churchland on the Introspection of Neural States

So let’s finally consider the Canadian philosopher Paul Churchland (1942 — ) position on the introspection of mental states.

Despite what some (or even many) philosophers and laypeople believe, Churchland doesn’t deny that there’s such a thing as introspection. (For that matter, Churchland doesn’t deny that people have thoughts, pains or mental states generally.) That said, his position on introspection — and on much else — is truly radical.

For example, take Churchland’s detail as to why even introspection deals with scientifically-acceptable phenomena.

To begin with, Churchland states the following:

“For if mental states are indeed brain states, then it is really brain states we have been introspecting all along, though without fully appreciating what they are.”

So when we introspect we “may discriminate efficiently between a great variety of neural states”. However, we may not “being able to reveal on its own the detailed nature of the states being discriminated”.

The conclusion here is that although Churchland wants to eliminate propositional attitudes (see here) such as beliefs, desires, etc. (as basically seen as being “sentences in the brain”), he doesn’t actually want to eliminate mental states such as feelings and experiences (see here) in toto. Quite simply, that’s because this would be virtually impossible today or even in the future. Instead Churchland wants to re-envision what mental states are and how we should theorise (or philosophise) about them.

Conclusion

The last two sections directly above were partly counterpoised against Thomas Nagel’s very-well-known and much-discussed paper ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ (1974). Arguably, it can be said that the very essence of this paper isn’t the non-physicality or irreducibility of “qualia” or the impossibility of “knowing what it’s like to be a bat”: it is the prime importance of human subjectivity or the human first-person perspective. (Of course all these issues are strongly related to each other.)

As Nagel himself puts it in that paper:

“[E]very subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.”

Nagel also says that “one must take up the bat’s point of view” and that

“[i]t is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it”.

Yet in the above a position was advanced which was roughly similar to John Heil’s in that there was no denial of the inner there. In Heil’s own words:

“Attempts to accommodate subjectivity to the ‘third-person perspective’ are bound to fail. We must recognise ‘subjectivity as a rock-bottom element’ of reality and find a way of reconciling subjectivity with the ‘third-person perspective’ in a way that leaves subjectivity intact.’”

Finally: the (to quote Nagel again) “single point of view” isn’t denied: it’s what we make of it that matters.

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