Ted Sider’s Metaphysical Realism

The American philosopher Ted Sider believes that “the realist picture requires the ‘ready-made-world’” and that “there must be a structure that is mandatory for inquirers to discover”. Is he right about all this?

Theodore “Ted” Sider is an American philosopher who concentrates on metaphysics. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University.

Sider has also taught at the University of Rochester, Syracuse University, New York University and Cornell University. He has had three books published and written many papers.

Introduction

Ted Sider (sometimes deemed to be an “analytic metaphysician”) tells us what he takes metaphysics to be.

Alternatively put: Sider tells us what he believes metaphysics should be.

In his paper and chapter, ‘Ontological Realism’, Sider writes:

“The point of metaphysics is to discern the fundamental structure of the world.”

What’s more, “[t]hat requires choosing fundamental notions with which to describe the world”. Indeed Sider continues by saying that “no one other than a positivist can make all the hard questions evaporate”. Finally:

“There’s no detour around the entirety of fundamental metaphysics.”

Sider also makes it plain that metaphysics asks fundamental and important questions by asking his readers this question:

“Was Reichenbach wrong? — is there a genuine question of whether spacetime is flat or curved?”

The obvious response to that question is say it’s a scientific (i.e., not a metaphysical) question… That’s unless it’s the case that metaphysicians (such as Sider himself) can offer insights on this issue which physicists (at least qua physicists) are simply incapable of.

More technically, Sider cites W.V.O Quine’s work (as well as the quantification of metaphysical structure) as the means to answer the question above (as well as other similar questions).

Ted Sider on Objective Structure

What is realist in Sider’s “ontological realism” is what he calls “objective structure”. This does the work formerly done (i.e., in the history of metaphysics) by such things as objects, events, laws, essences, kinds, etc.

The main force behind all of Sider’s positions is his metaphysical realism. That classification isn’t such a big problem because that’s how Sider (if sometimes implicitly) classes himself. For example, he writes:

“A certain core realism is, as much as anything, the shared dogma of analytic philosophers, and rightly so.”

It’s certainly not the case that “core realism” has been a “shared dogma of analytic philosophers”. That’s simply a generalisation. There have been anti-realists, idealists, positivists, pragmatists, instrumentalists and all sorts of other philosophers (even a small number of panpsychists) within analytic philosophy.

Thus Sider may (or must) mean something more subtle by his claim above.

Perhaps he means this:

Deep down and when push comes to shove, “realism is a shared dogma of analytic philosophers”, as it is for almost everyone.

Does Sider really believe that almost everyone (including all/most analytic philosophers) believes that the “world is out there, waiting to be discovered”? That may well be the case. However, it may only be the case in a very vague way — a way which often doesn’t amount to much. Indeed even most anti-realists and idealists, for example, believe that something is out there (see note).

In other words, there’s a world (or an x) that exists regardless of minds…

So?

And it’s what Sider says next that problematises his position.

Sider argues that this world that’s “out there, waiting to be discovered” and also that it’s “not constituted by us”.

Those two claims depend on so much.

Minds, conceptual schemes, language, sensory systems, brains, etc. don’t literally make the world in the sense of creating its spacetime, matter, forces, etc. (That said, some idealists — such as Professor Donald Hoffman with his “conscious realism” — do believe that.) However, minds may well — even if in some subtle or limited sense — structure/shape/determine/colour (or whichever word is appropriate) the world. That is, anti-realists — and almost the majority of philosophers — believe that we never get the world “as it is” in its pristine condition. More importantly and as Karl Popper and, later, Richard Rorty once put it: “the world doesn’t tell us what to say about it”.

In that sense, then, Sider is simply wrong when he argues that

“[e]veryone agrees that this realist picture prohibits truth from being generally mind-dependent”.

The problematic word above is, of course, “truth” — and that usage may explain Sider’s ostensibly extreme philosophical position.

Ted Sider on Truth

Again, it’s simply not the case that “everyone agrees” that the world (or nature) is “generally mind-independent”. Sure, it may depend, for one, on how that phrase is taken. That is, people may well believe that truth is in some (or many) ways mind-independent. However, metaphysics itself is about the world and its “fundamental nature”.

Thus the truths Sider is talking about are about the world.

So do we ever have guaranteed truth in metaphysics?

We don’t in physics, cosmology and in all the other sciences. So perhaps we don’t in metaphysics either.

Yet, in once sense — a sense given by some metaphysicians and philosophers — truth is by definition mind-independent. However, Sider seems to be fusing that position with our metaphysical statements about the world.

So is it that we can argue that if such statements are true, then what makes them true is “mind-independent”? That doesn’t follow. At least it doesn’t automatically follow.

On the other hand, perhaps we simply don’t have metaphysical truths in the first place. Perhaps we only have metaphysical positions. And, as already stated, metaphysical positions involve mind, language, concepts, brains, psychologies, conceptual schemes, contingent sensory-systems, human intellectual and social history, etc. And all these things can be said to (rhetorically) pollute our metaphysical purity.

Thus perhaps we never have the Realist Truth Sider speaks of in metaphysics — analytic or otherwise.

Ted Sider on the Ready-Made World

Sider also states the following:

“The realist picture requires the ‘ready-made-world’ that Goodman (1978) ridiculed; there must be structure that is mandatory for inquirers to discover.”

There may well be a (to use a phrase also used by Hilary Putnam) “ready-made-world”. However, perhaps Nelson Goodman’s point was that we don’t have access to it except through our contingent minds, languages, conceptual schemes, brains, sensory-systems, etc. All those things make it the case that we must colour (or interpret) that ready-made-world. Thus, to us embodied human beings, it’s no longer a ready-made world: we make it (at least in a loose or vague sense).

What’s more, if all the above is the case, then grand claims about the independent nature of the world amount to very little.

The other point is that even if there is a mind-independent-ready-made-world, that doesn’t automatically mean that everyone — not even every realist philosopher — will says the same things about it. (The English philosopher Crispin Wright — in his book Truth and Objectivity — believes that we would say the same things if we all had what he calls “Cognitive Command”.) It doesn’t even guarantee that contradictory things won’t be said about this ready-made-world. Indeed contradictory things have been said about it — even by metaphysical realists!

So the world’s mind-independence doesn’t guarantee discovering Sider’s “mandatory structure” (just as it didn’t guarantee C.S. Pierce’s “future convergence”).

Yet Sider doesn’t accept any of this.

Instead, Sider believes that there are “predicates that carve nature at the joints, by virtue of referring to genuine ‘natural’ properties”. He continues:

“The world has a distinguished structure, a privileged description. [] There is an objectively correct way to ‘write the book of the world’.”

Well:

How does Sider know all that?

Does Sider know all that through metaphysical analysis and then referring to the “best science”?

Neither of these things can guarantee that we (not Sider’s words) “carve nature at the joints” or obtain metaphysical truths about the world. Again:

(1) How would we know when we have a “privileged description”?

(2) How do we know what that privileged description is?

What’s more, is there only one “objectively correct way to ‘write the book of the world”? Even if there is, then how does Sider know that?

Sider also gets to the heart of the matter (at least in the debate between metaphysical realism and what he calls “deflationism”) when he states the following:

“Everyone faces the question of what is ‘real’ and what is the mere projection of our conceptual apparatus, of which issues are substantive and which are ‘mere bookkeeping’.”

That’s certainly not true of “everyone”. It’s just true of many — not even all — philosophers. Sure, it’s true that many laypersons are concerned with what is real. However, they don’t also think in terms of the possibility that it’s our “conceptual apparatus” that hides — or may hide — the Real. Many laypersons believe that other things hide “what is real”: lies, propaganda, “the media”, politicians, religions, mind-altering drugs (or a lack of such drugs) and even science and philosophy.

Nonetheless, the philosophical issue of realism does indeed spread beyond philosophy. Take Sider’s comments on science.

Ted Sider on Science

Sider writes:

“This is true within science as well as philosophy: one must decide when competing scientific theories are mere notational variants. Does a metric-system physics genuinely disagree with a system phrased in terms of ontological realism feet and pounds? We all think not.”

Now take Donald Davidson’s less theoretical example of centigrade and Fahrenheit. According to Davidson, these are simply two modes of presentation of the same thing (see here).

However, Sider asks if the same can be said of “a metric-system physics” and a “ontological realism feet and pounds”.

Does Sider’s position have something to do with what’s called “empirical or observational equivalence” and theoretical underdetermination? If it does, then theories which are empirically equivalent needn’t also be theoretically (or philosophically) identical. Sider continues:

“Unless one is prepared to take the verificationist’s easy way out, and say that ‘theories are the same when empirically equivalent’, one must face difficult questions about where to draw the line between objective structure and conceptual projection.”

Sider also asks what he calls “deflationists” a couple of good questions.

Ted Sider on Metaphysical Deflationists

Firstly, Sider asks this question:

“Is your rejection of ontological realism based on the desire to make unanswerable questions go away, to avoid questions that resist direct empirical methods but are nevertheless not answerable by conceptual analysis?”

It’s hardly surprising — if we take the positions above (alongside the earlier reactions) — that Sider himself has heard “[w]hispers that something was wrong with the debate itself”. Despite that, according to Sider:

“Today’s ontologists are not conceptual analysts; few attend to ordinary usage of sentences like ‘chairs exist’.”

It’s tempting to say that ontologists should indulge in a bit of conceptual analysis!

That said, it’s not the case that conceptual analysis should be the beginning and the end of metaphysics; only that it may help things (just as a basic knowledge of science does).

Indirectly, Sider does comment on conceptual analysis; or at least on what he calls “ontological deflationism”. He writes:

“These critics — ‘ontological deflationists’, I’ll call them — have said instead something more like what the positivists said about nearly all of philosophy: that there is something wrong with ontological questions themselves. Other than questions of conceptual analysis, there are no sensible questions of (philosophical) ontology. Certainly there are no questions that are fit to debate in the manner of the ontologists.”

In terms of conceptual analysis and ontological deflationism being relevant to the composition and constitution of objects, Sider writes:

“[W]hen some particles are arranged tablewise, there is no ‘substantive’ question of whether there also exists a table composed of those particles, they say. There are simply different — and equally good — ways to talk.”

Sider also attacks what he calls “conventionalism”.

Ted Sider on Conventionalism

Sider argues that if we accept conventionalism, then we “demystify philosophy itself”.

In his book, Riddles of Existence: A Guided Tour of Metaphysics (co-written by Earl Conee), Sider puts his case more fully:

“If conventionalism is true, philosophy turns into nothing more than an inquiry into the definitions we humans give to words. By mystifying necessity, the conventionalist demystifies philosophy itself. Conventionalists are typically up front about this: they want to reduce the significance of philosophy.”

That is strong stuff!

Is conventionalism really that extreme?

Is Sider’s account of conventionalism even correct?

At first blast, Sider’s passage above sounds more like a description of 1930s and 1940s logical positivism!

In any case, do conventionalists (if they exist at all) really argue that philosophy is “nothing more than any inquiry into the definitions we humans give to words”? Or do conventionalists simply stress the importance of our words and our conventions when it comes to philosophy?

Moreover, surely the conventionalist doesn’t believe that it’s only a question of word-definitions: he also stresses our concepts. That is, how do our concepts determine how we see, conceive of, or interpret the world? Indeed if it were all just a question of word-definitions, then conventionalists would be little more than linguists or even lexicographers.

Perhaps conventionalists, on the other hand, don’t give up on the world at all. Perhaps they simply argue that our words, concepts, conventions, sciences and indeed our definitions are important when it comes to our classifications, descriptions, analyses, etc. of the world.

Is Ted Sider a Platonist?

When Sider argues that “[b]y demystifying necessity, the conventionalist demystifies philosophy itself”, he implies that philosophy is nothing more than the study of necessity! In that case, it’s no wonder that the conventionalist (real or otherwise) “wants to reduce the significance of philosophy” if that’s really the case.

Sider’s position seems to be a thoroughly Platonic (as well as perhaps partly Aristotelian) account of philosophy (i.e., with its obsession with necessity and essence).

Is that really all that philosophy is concerned with — essence and necessity? Indeed, if the conventionalists’ supposed exclusive focus on word-definitions is wrong, then perhaps obsessing about necessity and essence is too.

Arguably, this was largely true of Plato and indeed Aristotle. But what about 20th- and 21st-century philosophers? Indeed what about Hume and many other pre-20th century philosophers?

Now we can see more evidence of Sider’s Platonist notion of philosophy’s role when he answers the question, “What is philosophy?”

Sider answers that question five times, thus:

(1) Philosophy “investigates the essences of concepts”.

(2) Philosophy “seek[s] the essence of right and wrong”.

(3) Philosophy “seek[s] the essence of beauty”.

(4) Philosophy “seek[s] the essence of knowledge”.

(5) Philosophy “seek[s] the essences of personal identity, free will, time, and so on”.

According to Sider, conventionalists believe that “these investigations ultimately concern definitions”. Not only that, according to the conventionalist, “[i]t seems to follow that one could settle any philosophical dispute just by consulting a dictionary!”.

It would be nice to know if there is such a conventionalist animal who really believes all this. As stated earlier, Sider’s account of conventionalism really seems like an account of 1920s and 30s logical positivism — or perhaps an account of the later ordinary language philosophy of the 1950s. And surely no contemporary philosopher is such an old-fashioned animal.

Again, Sider’s take on conventionalism seems thoroughly old-fashioned in nature. What’s more, his Platonist account of philosophy (or its role) seems even more old-fashioned. This, of course, isn’t automatically to argue that Sider’s positions are false or incorrect simply because they’re old-fashioned. It’s only to say, again, that they’re old-fashioned. So perhaps all Sider’s philosophical positions are still correct or true.

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Notes:

(1) It’s interesting that Ted Sider stresses the importance of structure in both science and metaphysics considering the fact that analytic metaphysicians (ones just like Sider himself) are against, for example, ontic structural realists; whom also stress structure.

(2) An Objective Idealist (at least of a kind) can believe that, say, Universal Consciousness and “entangled conscious agents” are out there. And an anti-realist can believe that what’s responsible for “what we say” is out there; even though, when we say what we say, then that something we say is no longer about something that’s “mind-independent” — even if it is out there.

I Don’t Care If Your Position is Backed Up By “Peer-Reviewed Literature”!

Many people (often non-academics) mention “peer-reviewed literature” at the drop of a hat. The main reason they do so is to back up — or give kudos to — their own positions.

“I Would love to see how this topic is handled in credible peer-reviewed literature and not just scare tactic propaganda.”

— Theresa Gorenc (see screenshot at the end)

On social media (especially on political “discussion forums”) many people (often non-academics) mention “peer-reviewed literature” at the drop of a hat. The main reason they do so is to back up — or give kudos to — their own (non-peer-reviewed) positions. This is graphically shown by the fact that such people never cite any peer-reviewed literature that puts positions they disagree with or which directly contradicts their own carefully chosen peer-reviewed literature…

[See how often the words “peer-reviewed literature” are used here.]

As a result of all this, the adjective “peer-reviewed” has become an easy cliché for many people.

But now it’s worth stating that this isn’t an essay against peer reviews — despite the title. And neither does it state that everything about the peer-reviewing process is bad. Indeed there may well be a need for peer-reviewing processes. What’s more, without peer-reviewing processes it can be argued that all sorts of rubbish would end up being published…

True.

However, all sorts of utter rubbish is published as a result of various peer-reviewing processes too!

So there are three main positions advanced in the following:

(1) Not everything that is “peer-reviewed” offers the truth, is of good quality, is trustworthy, rigorous, etc. 
(2) No one should simply assume that everything that’s peer-reviewed is sacrosanct. 
(3) Citing peer-reviewed literature can often be a mindless and grandstanding way to back up positions that the citer holds anyway (i.e., what he or she believed long before finding any favourable peer-reviewed academic research).

What’s more, often the people I have in mind don’t usually cite specific papers or literature (peer-reviewed or otherwise) anyway. Such people simply like asking whether the positions (or arguments, evidence, data, etc.) they don’t like (or agree with) have been… peer-reviewed. Thus, in these cases, such people don’t even feel the need to cite any actual peer-reviewed stuff which contradicts positions (or views) they don’t like. To them, what’s important is that they can simply make the point that the positions they don’t like haven’t been…. peer-reviewed. And that’s usually enough for them.

But what does the term “peer-reviewed” actually mean (i.e., beyond its literal translation)?

In non-critical terms, a “scholarly peer review” is used to determine a paper’s suitability for publication.

Yet isn’t it the case that almost all — or even literally all — published academic papers have been… peer-reviewed? That is, isn’t it the case that in order for any paper to have been published in any academic journal, then it must have been peer-reviewed… by at least two or more academics?

Now there’s the problem that peer-reviewing may not amount to much anyway.

Problems With Peer Reviews

Various commentators have noted the fact that academics can easily produce their own journal on their very own specialised subject or area — no matter how arcane or specialised it is. And when such a journal is created, then this automatically generates an entire sequence of peer-reviewed papers. That is, these academics and their journals — and perhaps some academics from related journals — peer review each other in what amounts to an incestuous circle jerk or echo chamber.

One important point that outsiders or non-academics (if any outsiders even care about these things) may not be aware of it is that submitted papers are usually reviewed anonymously by “peers” who’re deemed to be “experts in the relevant field”.

The obvious question here is this: What on earth guarantees the impartiality of such anonymous reviews? For example, what if there simply aren’t enough experts to give a good review? Indeed what if there is only one or two experts in any given field? In this case, won’t the reviews merely reflect the views, tastes and biases of those all-too-human reviewers?

All this means the following two things. (1) That the reviewers don’t need to rationalise their decisions face-to-face. (2) That the academics or postgraduates who submit papers are said not to know who’ll review them. (It can be strongly doubted that this is always the case.)

As a response to all this, alternatives have been suggested and even put into practice. For example, there’s such a thing as an open peer review. In this case, the reviewers’ comments can be seen by the readers of these academic publications. What’s more, often the identities of the reviewers are disclosed.

As stated a moment ago, various academics themselves have written critical papers on the peer-reviewing situation.

Self-Reference

Such academics have noted that it’s (fairly) easy to create a journal. They’ve also noted that peer-reviewing may be problematic even in cases of established and respected (but respected by which people?) journals.

Of course this creates a self-referential problem.

The academics who discuss the problems with the peer-reviewing process may themselves have been peer-reviewed and therefore involved at least some of the same scenarios. Yet this possibility depends on how many of these critical academics also use the term “peer-reviewed literature” as an easy, empty and bombastic means to bolster their own work and/or positions.

In addition, some of these criticisms of the peer-review process are themselves a little incestuous in that they aren’t of much interest to anyone who isn’t focussed on the minutia of forging an academic career.

But let’s just cite one example of self-reference, as found in the paper ‘Arbitrariness in the peer review process’.

You can tell that this is written by academics because of the gratuitous and almost pointless introduction of the word homophily. Indeed this paper itself self-referentially cites peer-reviewed papers which are critical of the peer-reviewing process. So perhaps this can be taken to hint at peer-reviewing being a “self-correcting process”… except for the fact that the vast majority of academics will neither have read these critical papers or even care about their findings.

Anyway, take this typical passage of pure academese:

“Lately, many studies have emphasized the problems inherent to the process of peer review (for a summary, see Squazzoni et al. 2017). Moreover, Ragone et al. (2013) have shown that there is a low correlation between peer review outcome and the future impact measured by citations.Footnote1.”

Now for a few more words on these (as it were) papers on papers.

More Problems with Peer-Reviewing Processes

Many studies (we need to quiz that term too) have noted the many problems with academic peer-review processes.

For example, it’s been shown that just because some paper has been peer-reviewed, that doesn’t automatically mean that this paper will be relevant, important, unbiased, sufficiently rigorous, and/or honest. And, more relevantly to academics, it doesn’t mean that it will bring about more citations than other non-peer-reviewed publications.

This latter fact about citations is, of course, a purely internal affair which probably won’t concern anyone outside the Academy. That’s primarily because it seems to be more about academic careers than about quality, rigour, relevance, importance, bias… or, indeed, anything else.

Another thing to note here is how arbitrary the whole peer-review process is… or, at the least, how arbitrary it can be.

Take the example of a change of a single reviewer employed by an academic journal and the fact this change can have a large impact of the results of the journal’s overall peer-reviews. Thus, in crude terms, a simple change in reviewers (even the arrival of a single new reviewer) can result in a dramatic change to what’s deemed to be publishable by that journal.

On a related point, any heterogeneity among referees may — and often does — lead to the basic arbitrariness of the entire peer-review process.

More importantly, what about the outright fraud, “post-truth” politics (or “lying for Justice”) and/or “misinformation” that’s been discovered in many peer-reviewed papers?

Take just one case, as highlighted in ‘Researcher at the center of an epic fraud remains an enigma to those who exposed him’.

The following passage (from this article) shows how deeply incestuous and self-protecting academia can often be:

“Sato’s fraud was one of the biggest in scientific history. The impact of his fabricated reports — many of them on how to reduce the risk of bone fractures — rippled far and wide. Meta-analyses that included his trials came to the wrong conclusion; professional societies based medical guidelines on his papers.”

What’s more:

“The 12 trials Sato published in high-impact journals have been widely cited. Many were included in meta-analyses, sometimes changing the outcomes, or were translated into treatment guidelines. Other researchers used Sato’s fake data as part of the rationale for launching new clinical studies.”

Yet this is an example from medical science and scientific technology (or applied science) — where standards are usually far more rigorous than in other academic disciplines!

One can imagine that, for example, political, sociological and other journals in the humanities are bound to have involved cases which are far worse — and far more frequent — than the Sato story. The problem is, however, unlike details on bone factures, unhappy patients, etc., it’s hard to uncover academic deceit when it comes to such journals. One main reason for that is that hardly any outsiders (or critics) read this stuff. This means that — at least sometimes — we essentially have various extremely secure academic fiefdoms.

So it’s no surprise that we also have the studies featured in this article: ‘Secretive and Subjective, Peer Review Proves Resistant to Study’. These particular studies showed that that there is no “direct evidence” that peer reviews actually improves the quality of published papers…

Sure!

And no doubt there are other peer-reviewed studies or papers which show the exact opposite… Yet that, in a strong way, demonstrates the point.

Because if all these problems, what’s been called “invalid research” has occurred many times — at least according to the academics who’ve looked into these matters.

In terms of problems that people outside the Academy may be concerned with, academics have also noted that the peer-review process can — and often does — lead to political, philosophical, scientific, etc. stifling conformity and uniformity.

Conformity and Uniformity in Academia

In simple terms and depending on the journal, controversial papers are often rejected not for their lack of quality or rigour, or because of clear bias, etc., but because they don’t meet the journal’s often implicit — though sometimes explicit! — standards of political, philosophical or scientific uniformity and conformity. (Not that reviewers will openly and honestly see political, etc. conformity and uniformity as their goals.)

And one consequence of such academic uniformity and conformity is that many of the postgraduates and academics who submit papers to these journals pander to the political, philosophical or scientific biases and “interests” of their academic editors and reviewers…

Indeed that’s obviously the case!

It’s the case because academics and postgraduates wouldn’t have submitted their papers to these particular journals at all if they weren’t aware of such biases and interests.

All the above, then, involves the issue of just how conformist, uniform and/or even obsequious a submitter wants to be in order to get published and — in the future — gain academic tenure. This also means that those who offer controversial or “radical” views may not — or simply will not — get a fair hearing… Unless, that is, the journal is self-consciously radical and/or controversial in nature! But that may — or will — only mean that such a journal is controversial and radical in only very particular political, philosophical or scientific directions… and not in others. So it also needs to be noted that being (self-styled or supposedly) radical, controversial or iconoclastic can also effectively mean that one is uniform and conformist in a radical way — at least within the these limited domains.

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Note: In relation to the screenshot directly above. It’s worth stating that any “peer-reviewed literature” I could have cited would neither have helped nor hindered the arguments I had previously put. That’s because my points didn’t even involve any factual claims or data. Instead, I was simply offering some arguments and analysing various concepts and assumptions. Thus, asking for peer-reviewed back-up in this instance was like asking a pure mathematician to cite peer-reviewed papers on ontology or even on gardening.

Richard Rorty on Panpsychism’s Intrinsic Properties: Nothing Can Be Said About Them!

Way back in 1979, controversial philosopher Richard Rorty discussed panpsychism at a time when it was completely ignored by virtually all analytic philosophers.

Way back in 1979 (i.e., before the “rise of panpsychism”), the controversial American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931- 2007) discussed neutral monism and panpsychism at a time when these particular philosophical isms were completely ignored by virtually all analytic philosophers. (Rorty discussed neutral monism and panpsychism in his well-known book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.)

Perhaps that general ignoring of neutral monism and panpsychism may explain why Rorty himself spent so little time on them. Yet, despite that, Rorty did still get to the heart of the problem in the very few words he did offer us.

[See the 20th-century history of panpsychism here and my own ‘The Recent Rise of Analytic Panpsychism: 1996 to 2022’.]

Rorty gets to the heart of the problem with the intrinsic properties which panpsychists posit:

Nothing can be said about them.

Indeed even if such a (in the singular) intrinsic property is deemed to be consciousness (or experience/phenomenal properties), once consciousness is completely divorced from human and animal subjects and their material constitutions, behaviours, etc., and indeed from all specific entities or things, then (again) nothing (much) can be said about it.

More relevantly, Rorty asked about the lack of (to use his own words) “powers or properties” (which is a kind of epiphenomenalist point) of the intrinsic properties of panpsychists. Indeed this is precisely the main problem which physicists and other scientists point out when they spare the time to discuss panpsychism.

It must now be said that Richard Rorty primarily discussed neutral monism, not panpsychism.

Russell’s Neutral Monism and Panpsychism

Of course neutral monism and panpsychism are very closely linked. Indeed, in the case of at least some philosophers, they’re almost identical.

Take the the dispute between the philosophers Philip Goff and Sam Coleman.

The panpsychist Philip Goff is much beholden to neutral monism (as he has often freely admitted — see here and here). Yet, as ever with the shifting minutia of the technical terms of analytic philosophy, all this is complicated by the fact that Goff’s position can also be deemed to be a kind of Russellian monism. What’s more, Sam Coleman’s own position can be deemed to be a kind of panpsychism! (Coleman states that his position “needn’t constitute a wholesale abandonment of panpsychism”.)

This means that what will be deemed to be important and fundamental distinctions (by at least ten people) from deep inside this academic debate, won’t actually seem that way when looked at from the outside. As a consequence of this, it’s probably best to see Goff as being a (as it were) pure panpsychist and Coleman as being a Russellian monist — and that’s despite the many crossovers and grey areas between their positions. Indeed Goff is best seen as a panpsychist for the simple reason that his position squares very well with most accepted conceptions — if there even are such things! — of panpsychism. And that’s not to forget that Goff classes himself as a panpsychist.

[See Coleman’s ‘The Real Combination Problem : Panpsychism, Micro-Subjects, and Emergence’.]

In any case, one of the main points which unites contemporary panpsychists with Bertrand Russell isn’t only the latter’s commitment (at least at one point in his career) to a basic monistic stuff, but also his commitment to the “fundamentality” of experience — or, to use Russell’s own technical term, “percepts”.

To all these philosophers, nothing is more (as it were) Given than experience, consciousness or percepts. Thus these philosophers argue that experience is surely where we must start. (As David Chalmers put it: “Experience is a datum in its own right.”)

Of course the contemporary panpsychists who’ve been inspired by Russell’s neutral monism (or by Russellian monism) don’t argue that their own (in the plural) panpsychisms and neutral monism are identical in every detail.

Take Russell’s stress on “events” (i.e., rather than on consciousness, experience, etc.).

This stress on events puts Russell a little at odds with most contemporary panpsychists. For example, Russell said that his neutral monism is a monism

“in the sense that it regards the world as composed of only one kind of stuff, namely events”.

He then argued that “it is [a] pluralism in the sense that it admits the existence of a great multiplicity of events”.

And since the intrinsic-properties-cannot-be-described position is being discussed here, it’s now worth stating that Russell himself argued that we have no access — either observationally or otherwise — to the “intrinsic characteristics” of electrons, spacetime, rocks, etc. Instead, “[w]hat we know about them” is simply “their structure and their mathematical laws”.

In addition and on Russell’s reading, mathematical physics only deals with structures, behaviour and relations/interactions; not with intrinsic properties. Another way of putting that is to argue (as Russell himself argued) that whatever is stated in mathematical physics, none of it is about anything intrinsic (at least as the intrinsic is seen by panpsychist philosophers).

All that said, Russell did have a problem with the (mainly scientific) rejection of intrinsic properties.

In basic terms, Russell argued that it simply can’t be a question of (not his own words) “structures and relations all the way down”. Russell himself put it this way:

“There are many possible ways of turning some things hitherto regarded as ‘real’ into mere laws concerning the other things. Obviously there must be a limit to this process, or else all the things in the world will merely be each other’s washing.”

Despite the words above, Russell also expressed what can be called a Kantian stance on these issues when he stated that all we have is the “effects of a thing-in-itself”. Thus Russell came to the conclusion that if we only have access to effects (perhaps equivalent to Kant’s “phenomena”), then why not factor out the distinction between intrinsic properties and their effects (i.e., external properties) altogether? In other words, what’s left of intrinsic properties after all these qualifications?

Now let’s return to Richard Rorty.

Fundamentality?

Rorty began his discussion with the following words:

“[N]eutral monism, in which the mental and the physical are seen as two ‘aspects’ of some underlying reality which need not be described further.”

In both philosophy and physics, many different things have been described as being “fundamental”. (In logic too, modus ponens can be deemed to be fundamental — see here.) And precisely because of such fundamentality, any x which is deemed to be fundamental (to use Rorty’s words) “need not be described further”.

Take the Australian philosopher David Chalmers’ position on the fundamentality of consciousness. This is how Barbara McKenna tells Chalmers’ story:

“Over the millennia scientists have concluded that there are a handful of elemental, irreducible ingredients in the universe — space, time, and mass, among them. At a national conference in 1994, philosopher David Chalmers proposed that consciousness also belongs on the list.”

And, on behalf of the (as it were) ineffable nature of whichever x is taken to be fundamental at any given time in the history of philosophy, the philosopher John Heil (1943-) had this to say on fundamentality itself:

“Once you reach a basic level, however, explanation runs out: things behave as they do because they are as they are, and things with this nature just do behave in this way. Explanation works, not because all explanation is traceable to self-explaining explainers. Explanation works by reducing the complex to the less complex. At the basic level the behaviour of objects cannot be further explained.”

Indeed when physical explanations do come to an end, then we reach a point when

“things behave as they do because they are as they are, and things with this nature just do behave in this way”.

Depending on what any fundamental x is taken to be, philosophers will put these points in different ways. That is, they won’t be as open and explicit so as to say that x (to quote Rorty) “need not be described further”. That said, they often do state virtually the same thing as Rorty — just in different words.

Another important point is that all the things which have been taken to be fundamental (at many different times) are certainly not on a par. One obvious example of this is that the fundamental entities of physics are worlds apart from the fundamental entities of philosophy. Thus, to be even more specific, taking quarks or spacetime to be fundamental is very different to taking intrinsic properties (or, indeed, the World Soul, Love, monads, God, etc.) to be fundamental — and for many obvious reasons.

Different Reasons to Embrace Intrinsic Properties

Rorty continued:

“Sometimes we are told that this reality is intuited (Bergson) or is identical with the raw material of sensation (Russell, Ayer), but sometime it is simply postulated as the only means of avoiding epistemological skepticism (James, Dewey).”

The closest Rorty came to stating the position of contemporary panpsychists is when he expressed (again) Bertrand Russell’s position. In that position, the “raw material of sensation” constitutes the stuff of neutral monism.

The positions advanced by William James and John Dewey (at least as expressed by Rorty), on the other hand, immediately reminded me of Philip Goff’s and other contemporary panpsychists’ positions. Such philosophers also believe that intrinsic properties — and indeed panpsychism itself — are “postulated as the only means of avoiding epistemological skepticism” regarding consciousness and the relation between mind and matter. Thus panpsychism and its intrinsic properties are also deemed to be (as it’s often put) “elegant and parsimonious”. Another way of putting this is to say that panpsychism and its intrinsic properties are a neat and tidy possible solution to the problem of consciousness — particularly to the (with Germanic capitals) Hard Problem of Consciousness. Thus panpsychism and its intrinsic properties are a parsimonious and elegant way to avoid epistemological scepticism by virtue of their unification of matter and mind…

Yet all this is at a huge cost.

What’s more, it’s debatable whether or not anything is truly avoided by panpsychism.

Thomas Nagel on What It is Like

Richard Rorty doesn’t mention the American philosopher Thomas Nagel (1937-) explicitly when he uses the ironic phrase “we just know what it’s like”. However, elsewhere in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty did write the following words about the aforementioned (near) merging of panpsychism and neutral monism:

“A panpsychist view is also suggested by Thomas Nagel’s for an ‘objective phenomenology’ which would ‘permit questions about the physical basis of experience to assume a more intelligible form’ (‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’) [] However, in both Hartsthorne and Nagel, panpsychism tends to merge with neutral monism.”

In any case, Rorty got to the heart of the problem in this passage:

“In no case are we told anything about it [“this reality”] save that ‘we just know what it’s like’ or that reason (i.e., the need to avoid philosophical dilemmas) requires it.”

In addition:

“But in fact the ‘neutral stuff’ which is neither mental nor physical is not found to have powers or properties of its own, but simply postulated and then forgotten about (or, what comes to the same thing, assigned the role of ineffable datum).”

Here Rorty ties neutral monism — or panpsychism — to Nagel’s “what it is like to be a bat” thesis.

So we may well know what these intrinsic properties are like in the case of our own mental states. However, the intrinsic properties of panpsychists are supposed to be instantiated by rocks, cells, electrons, spacetime, etc. too! Thus if there is something it is like for them, then how could we know that? In other words, what about the ineffable data of all other beings and entities?