Month: February 2011

An Argument for Mental Acts

An earlier post explains the distinction between mental acts and mental actions.  But a logically prior question is whether there are any mental acts in the first place.  Suppose I hear the characteristic rumble of a Harley-Davidson engine and then suddenly think of Peter.  One cannot move straightaway from such a commonplace observation recorded in ordinary English to talk of mental acts of perceiving and of remembering.  This is because 'mental act' is a terminus technicus embedded within a theory.  It is a term that drags behind it a load of theoretical baggage that one may not want to take on board.  Every mental act is a mental state, a state of a mind.  (A state is necessarily a state of something; a mental state is necessarily a state of a mental something.)  So talk of mental acts seems to commit one to talk of minds or mental subjects.  But their existence is denied by those (Sartre, Butchvarov, et al.) who maintain that consciousness is subjectless.  That theoretical denial, however, is consistent with the commonplace that we sometimes hear and remember.  On the other hand, talk of mental acts commits one to an act-object distinction, a distinction that adverbialists deny.  So although it is obvious that we sometimes hear and remember, it is not obvious that there are mental acts.  So we need an argument.  Here is one.  It is my reconstruction of what I think Laird Addis is saying on p. 71 et passim of Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality (Temple University Press, 1989).

1. Consider two states of affairs, S1 and S2.  In S1 I am imagining a unicorn (and nothing else) at time t, while in S2 I am imagining  a mermaid (and nothing else) at t.  S1 and S2 are individually possible, though not jointly compossible.

2. S1 and S2 are numerically different, and this difference requires a ground, a 'difference-maker.'

3. One cannot locate the difference-maker on the side of the object, because there are no unicorns and there are no mermaids.  (For an analogy, compare two mathematical sets, one whose sole member is a unicorn, the other whose sole member is a mermaid. These sets are the same  set, the null set, inasmuch as there is nothing that could ground their difference.)

4. Since both S1 and S2 involve the same type of mental directedness, namely, imagination, the difference between S1 and S2 cannot be ascribed to a difference in type of mental directedness.

5. Since one and the same subject is the imaginer in both cases, the difference between S1 and S2 is not on the side of the subject.  Therefore:

6. There must be something that grounds the difference between S1 and S2, and this all men call 'mental act.' 

Cuteness and quinque viae parody aside, there must be something that grounds the difference between S1 and S2 assuming the Difference-Maker Principle: No difference without a difference-maker.  This principle strikes me as well-nigh self-evident: how on Earth (or on Twin Earth for that matter) could two different complexes just differ?  S1 and S2 are complexes not simples: their numerical difference requires an ontological ground.  Suppose someone insisted that the unordered set {Bill, Peter} is just different — barely different — from the unordered set {Peter, Bill}.  You would show him the door, right?  I can swallow a bare difference of simples but not of complexes. 

The difference between S1 and S2, then, traces back to a difference between two mental acts.  If you ask me what makes these two mental acts different, my answer will be that they differ in their object-directedness: one has unicorn-directedness, the other mermaid-directedness.  Perhaps this could be explained further by saying that a mental act is a mental state, where a mental state is a mind's exemplification of an intentional property.  So in S1 my mind exemplifies the intentional property unicorn-directedness while in S2 my mind exemplifies the intentional property mermaid-directedness.  These property-exemplifications just are the mental acts.

This is pretty close to a Bergmann-Addis assay of the act.  If it could be made to work in all details, then we could avoid Meinongianism, Adverbialism, and Sartreanism (Sartvarovianism?).  But being an aporetician, I am not sanguine.

 

From the Mail: What is a Degree in Philosophy Worth?

This just over the transom:

My name is Bryce. I am a freshman uni student, studying philosophy. I have a question I believe you are well-suited to answer, considering your vast life experience and knowledge in philosophy; is it worth it to get a college degree in philosophy?

I am academically unaffiliated by choice, having resigned from a tenured position at a university.  So I am not an outsider to academic philosophy, but neither do I have a vested interest in recruiting philosophy majors.  So I am in a position to be objective.  But I advise you to solicit opinions from a variety of people both in and out of academic philosophy.  I have enabled Comments for this post in the off-chance that some readers will offer you some helpful suggestions.

If you are asking whether it is economically worthwhile to pursue an undergraduate degree in philosophy, then my answer is that it is probably not unless you have in mind to study law or journalism.  In that case the philosophy training could be very useful assuming that you are studying in a department that is analytically as opposed to Continentally oriented.  But studying philosophy as preparation for L-school or J-school  or some other professional school would not be a reason to study philosophy as opposed to economics or political science, say.  Of course, you might have an interest in the foundations of the law and so study philosophy of law as an undergraduate in preparation for law school. 

If you have an all-consuming passion for philosophy and are really good at it, then you might consider going into academe to make your living from philosophy. But this is a long shot.  Good tenure-track positions are hard to find, competition for them is ferocious, and the market can be expected to worsen.  And I presume that you would not want to end up an academic gypsy traipsing from one one-year position to the next or end up an adjunct  teaching 12 courses per year for slave wages at a community college in [insert name of least desirable locale]. 

So, from a purely economic point of view, you ought not major in philosophy — or in English or in Women's Studies, or . . . .  This is especially the case nowadays when the cost of a college education is vastly in excess of the value of what one gets for the money and many assume onerous debt to finance it.  By and large, the old adage holds: "Philosophy bakes no bread."  There is no money in it, nor, in my opinion, should there be: the lack of earning potential tends to keep out those with the wrong motivations.

The other side of the issue, of course, is that "Man does not live by bread alone," this New Testament verse being my stock response to those who say that "Philosophy bakes no bread."  Surely it is only the stunted mortal who views everything in economic terms. Philosophy is a magnificent and noble thing and the best have always pursued it for its own sake as part of a spiritual and intellectual quest for ultimate understanding, wisdom, and true happiness.  In my opinion, philosophy is the highest quest a human can embark upon.  The life of the philosopher is the highest life possible to a mortal.  But be aware that what I just wrote will be violently contested by many.  (Their contesting, however, is just more philosophy in the guise of anti-philosophy.)

And this leads me to a final suggestion.  If you agree with the spirit of the preceding paragraph and want to study philosophy for its own sake, then you might consider double-majoring in something 'practical' such as Information Technology so as to have a latter-day equivalent of lense-grinding by which to support yourself.  (The allusion is to Baruch Spinoza, patron saint of maverick philosophers, who was academically unaffiliated by choice and who supported himself by grinding optical lenses.)

Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead

Raising_Lazarus007 Etienne Gilson famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers."  That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat.  It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead.  Let that be my first law.  The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus.  Not so in philosophy.

None of the classical problems has ever been demonstrated to be a pseudoproblem pace Wittgenstein, Carnap and such epigoni as Morris Lazerowitz; none of the major theories proposed in solution of them has ever been  refuted once and for all; no school of thought has been finally discredited.

 

Thomism, to take an example, was once largely confined to the academic backwaters of Catholic colleges where sleepy Jesuits taught the ancient lore from dusty scholastic manuals to bored jocks.  (I am not being entirely fair, but fair enough for a blog post.)  But in the last twenty years an increasing number of sharp analytic heads have penetrated the scholastic arcana and have been serving up some fairly rigorous forward-looking stuff that engages with contemporary analytic work in a way that was simply beyond the abilities of (most) of the sleepy Jesuits and old-time scholastics.

Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected."  (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction.  Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is temporarily dead while Meinongianism thrives.  But Ryle too will be raised if my parallel law of philosophical experience — Philosophy always resurrects its dead — holds.

It may be worth noting that if philosophy resurrects its dead then it can be expected to raise the anti-philosophical (and therefore philosophical) positions of philosophy's would-be undertakers.  Philosophy, she's a wily bitch: you can't outflank her and she always ends up on top.

My Grunt Jobs

Furniture-mover in Santa Barbara; exterminator in West Los Angeles;  grave-digger in Culver City; factory worker in Venice, California;  letter carrier and mail handler in Los Angeles; logger in Forks, Washington; tree-planter in Oregon; taxi-driver in Boston; plus assorted day jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Boston. One thing's for sure: blogging beats logging any day of the week, though the pay is not as good.

Five reasons to avoid blue-collar work: (1) The working stiff gets no respect; (2) the pay is often bad; (3) the work is boring; (4) working-class types are often crude, ignorant, resentful, envious, and inimical to anyone who tries to improve himself; (5) the worker puts his body on the line, day in and day out, and often bears the marks: missing thumbs, hearing loss, etc.

Being from the working class, and having done my fair share of grunt work, I have been permanently inoculated against that fantasy of Marxist intellectuals, who tend not to be from the working class, the fantasy according to which workers, the poor, the 'downtrodden,' have some special virtue lacking in the rest of us.  That is buncombe pure and simple.  There is nothing to be expected from any class as a class: it is individuals and individuals alone who are the loci of value and the hope of humanity.

But individuation is a task, not a given.  Nicht gegeben sondern aufgegeben. 

There are no true individuals without self-individuation, something impossible to the mass man who identifies himself in terms of class, race, sex, and who is never anything more than a specimen of a species, a token of type, and no true individual.

And then these types have the chutzpah to demand to be treated as individuals.  To which I say: if you want me to treat you as an individual, don't identify yourself with a group or a class or a sex or a race.

Pseudo-Oxymorons

Some are puzzled by 'civil war.' How can a war be civil? A drummer of a band I was in stumbled over 'monopoly.' How can many be one? Exercise: find more examples of pseudo-oxymorons, and explain why they  only appear to be oxymorons. Don't confuse a pseudo-oxymoron with such  attempts at humor as 'postal service' and 'President Obama.'

Some consider 'jumbo shrimp' to be an oxymoron, but why? Can't there be big shrimp? I would classify 'jumbo shrimp' as a pseudo-oxymoron. Someone who considers this an oxymoron perhaps does not grasp that a big F can be a small G, just as a small H can be a big G. (A big shrimp is a small animal, while a small elephant is a big animal.)

Now if I were serious about this post, I would essay a definition of 'oxymoron.' But I think I'll take a nap instead.

Thinking and Thinking Of

I have claimed more than once that, necessarily, to think is to think of something.  But is that right?  Perhaps one can think something without thinking of something.  That would be a spanner in the works. 

Suppose I think that Tom is tired. The parsing could be done like this: I/think/that Tom is tired.  This suggests that one can think without thinking of or about anything.  One thinks something (e.g., that Tom is tired) without thinking of something.

It is clear that to think that Tom is tired is not to think of or about the proposition that Tom is tired, although of course one can think about that proposition, as when one thinks, of that proposition, that it is true or that it is a proposition.  But I cannot think that Tom is tired without thinking about Tom. Nor can I think that Peter is taller than Paul without thinking about both Peter and Paul. If I am thinking that nothing is in the drawer, or nobody is at home, then I am thinking about the drawer and the home, respectively.  If I am thinking that the null set is unique, then I am thinking about the null set. If I am thinking that wisdom is a virtue exemplified by few leftists, then I am thinking about wisdom and about leftists.

So it looks like I saw a ghost.  I was scared there for a minute.  Necessarily, to think is to think of something, if not directly, then indirectly as in the cases cited.

Is Smoking Irrational?

Bogarting To stymie the psychologizers, let me begin by saying that I do not smoke cigarettes. My enjoyment of the noble weed is restricted to the occasional cigar and load of pipe tobacco. What do I mean by  occasional? Well, so far this year I haven't touched even one of my twenty or so pipes, and I have smoked only two or three cigars.   In the interest of full disclosure I should say that I smoke the rascals right down to the 'roach' which I grip in a Bogart-like manner until such time as the finger tips protest. I swear that on only a half-dozen  occasions in my life have I rammed the stub into a smoking pipe and proceeded to convert the whole of the cigar into smoke and ash. I decided that this excess of frugality and vasoconstriction was contraindicated.

But I want to talk about cigarettes. Suppose you smoke one pack per day. Is that irrational? I hope all will agree that no one who is concerned to be optimally healthy as long as possible should smoke 20   cigarettes a day, let alone 80 like Rod Serling who died at age 50 on the operating table.  But long-term health is only one value among many.  Would Serling have been as productive without the weed?

Suppose one genuinely enjoys smoking and is willing to run the risk of  disease and perhaps shorten one's life by say five years in order to secure certain benefits in the present. There is nothing irrational about such a course of action. One acts rationally — in one sense of 'rational' — if one chooses means conducive to the ends one has in view. If your end in view is to live as long as possible, then don't smoke. If that is not your end, if you are willing to trade some highly uncertain future years of life for some certain pleasures here and now, and if you enjoy smoking, then smoke.

The epithet 'irrational' is attached with more justice to the fascists of the Left, the loon-brained tobacco wackos, who, in the grip of their misplaced moral enthusiasm, demonize the acolytes of the noble weed. The church of liberalism must have its demon, and his name is tobacco. I should also point out that smoking, like keeping and  bearing arms, is a liberty issue. Is liberty a value? I'd say it is. Yet another reason to oppose the liberty-bashing loons of the Left and the abomination of Obamacare.

Smoking and drinking can bring you to death's door betimes. Ask Bogie who died at 56 of the synergistic effects of weed and hooch.    Life's a gamble.  A crap shoot no matter how you slice it.   Hear the Hitch:

Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me. So I was knowingly taking a risk. I wouldn't recommend it to others.

Exactly right. 

So why don't I smoke and drink?  The main reason is that smoking and drinking are inconsistent with the sorts of activities which provide satisfactions of a much higher grade than smoking and drinking.  I mean: running, hiking, backpacking and the like.  When you wake up with a hangover, are you proud of the way you spent the night before?  Are you a better man in any sense?  Do you really feel better after a night of physical and spiritual dissipation?  Would you feel a higher degree of satisfaction if the day before you had completed a 26.2 mile foot race?

Health and fitness  in the moment is a short-term reason.  A long-term reason is that I want to live as long as possible so as to finish the projects I have in mind.  It is hard to write philosophy when you are sick or dead.  And here below is where the philosophy has to be written.  Where I hope to go there will be no need for philosophy.  When the meal is served, the menu is set aside.

 

Neuroscientistic Neurobabble

UCLA philosopher Tyler Burge scores some good clean hits against neuroscientistic  Unsinn in a December NYT piece. (HT: Feser).  For example, did you know that there is an area of the brain that wants to make love?  (Is it equipped for any such thing, with  a tiny penis or vagina?  And what would it make love to?  An area of the brain of another organism?  Or a different area of the same brain?  The possibilities of mockery are endless, but I will restrain myself.) But I can't resist reproducing this tidbit:

For example, a recent article reports a researcher’s “looking at love, quite literally, with the aid of an MRI machine.”

Quite literally!  You, sir, have your head in the proctologist's domain, quite literally!

 

Mental Acts Versus Mental Actions: Sellars and Bergmann

I have been assuming that there are mental acts and that there are mental actions and that they must not be confused.  It's high time for a bit of exfoliation.  Suppose I note that the front door of an elderly neighbor's house has been left ajar.  That noting is a mental act, but it is not an action.  I didn't do anything to bring about that mental state; I didn't decide to put myself in the state in question; I just happened to see that the door has been left ajar.  There is nothing active or spontaneous about the noting; it is by contrast passive and receptive.  But now suppose I deliberate about whether I should walk onto the man's property and either shut the door or inform him that it is ajar. Suppose he is a cranky old S.O.B.  with an equally irascible old dog.   I might decide that it's better to mind my own business and "let sleeping dogs lie."   The deliberating is a mental action.  So, assuming that there are mental acts and assuming that there are mental actions, it seems as clear as anything that they are different.

Why then are mental acts called acts if they are not actions?  It is because they are occurrent rather than dispositional.  Not everything mental is occurrent.  For example, you believe that every number has a successor even when you are dead drunk or dreamlessly asleep. This is not an occurrent believing.   Indeed, you have beliefs that have never occurred to you.  Surely you believe that no coyote has ever communicated with a bobcat by cellphone, although I will lay money on the proposition that you have never thought of this before.  You believe the proposition expressed by the italicized clause in that you are disposed to assent to it if the question comes up.  So in that sense you do believe that no coyote, etc. 

Mental acts are so-called, therefore, because they are actual or occurrent as opposed to potential or dispositional.  My noting that the old man's door has been left ajar is an occurrent perceptual taking that is not in the control of my will. As Wilfrid Sellars points out,

It is nonsense to speak of taking something to be the case 'on purpose.'  Taking is an act in the Aristotelian sense of 'actuality' rather than in the specialized practical sense which refers to conduct.  A taking may be, on occasion, an element of a scrutinizing — which latter is indeed an action in the practical sense.  To take another example, one may decide to do a certain action, but it is logical nonsense to speak of deciding to will to do it; yet volitions, of course, are mental acts.  (Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes, Humanities Press, 1968, p. 74.)

Another example Sellars cites is drawing a conclusion from premises.  That is a mental action, but there are mental acts involved in this will-driven thinking process.  One is the 'seeing' that the conclusion follows from the premises.  It cannot be said that I decide to accept a conclusion that I 'see' follows from certain other propositions.  The will is not involved.  The 'seeing' is a mental act, but not a mental action.

Gustav Bergmann says essentially the same thing. "An act is not an activity and an activity is not an act." (Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong, University of Wisconsin Press, 1967, p. 153.)  He says that this was crystal clear to Brentano and Meinong, but that in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition 'act' carries an implication of activity.  "In the Aristotlelian-Thomistic account . . . an act of perceiving is the 'abstracting' of a substantial form; and an 'abstracting' is an activity." (Ibid.) 

Very interesting.  It sounds right to me, though I wonder if all Thomists would agree. Not being a Thomist, I incline to the later view.  So as I use 'mental act' a mental act is not a mental action or activity.  This is of course consistent, as already indicated, with its being  the issue of certain mental actions.

A deeper and more important question is whether there are mental acts at all.  Their existence is not obvious — or is it?  Wittgenstein appears to have denied the existence of mental acts.  Bergmann believes he did, while Geach believes he did not.  There is also the related but distinct question whether mental acts require a subject distinct from the act which remains numerically the same over time.  But is even a momentary subject needed?  Why couldn't awareness be totally subjectless, a "wind blowing towards objects" in the Sartrean image?  Butchvarov takes a line similar to Sartre's. 

Clearly, there has to be some distinction between conscious intentionality and its objects.  That's a rock-bottom datum upon which "our spade is turned" to borrow a phrase from old Ludwig.  But why must consciousness be articulated into discrete acts?  Why believe in acts at all?  What are the phenomenological and dialectical considerations that speak in their favor?

Future posts will tackle all these questions as we plunge deeper into the aporetics of mind and bang into one impasse after another.  It should prove to be a humbling experience.

What Song Did the Sirens Sing and in What Key?

Ulysses and sirens Ulysses had himself bound to the mast and the ears of his sailors plugged with wax lest the ravishing strains of the sea-nymphs' song reach their ears and cause them to cast themselves into the sea and into their doom.  But what song did the Sirens sing, and in what key?  Were their tresses of golden hue? And how long were they?  Were the nymphs  equipped with special nautical brassieres to protect their tender nipples from rude contact with jelly fish and such?

One cannot sing a song without singing some definite song in some definite key commencing at some definite time and ending at some later definite time.  But you understand the story of Ulysses and the Sirens and you are now thinking about the song they sang.  But what sort of object is that?