One philosopher's explanatory posit is another's mere invention.
In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. XIX, 1994, pp. 1-21), Panayot Butchvarov rejects epistemic intermediaries as "philosophical inventions." Thus he rejects sense data, sensations, ways of being appeared to, sense experiences, mental representations, ideas, images, looks, seemings, appearances, and the like. (1) Curiously enough, however, Butchvarov goes on to posit nonexistent or unreal objects very much in the manner of Meinong! Actually, 'posit' is not a word he would use since Butchvarov claims that we are directly acquainted with unreal objects. (13) Either way, unreal objects such as the hallucinated pink rat are not, on Butchvarov's view, philosophical inventions.
But now consider the following passage from Anscombe and Geach's 1961 Three Philosophers, a passage that is as if directed against the Butchvarovian view:
But saying this has obvious difficulties. [Saying that all there is to a sensation or thought of X is its being of X.] It seems to make the whole being of a sensation or thought consist in a relation to something else: it is as if someone said he had a picture of a cat that was not painted on any background or in any medium, there being nothing to it except that it was a picture of a cat. This is hard enough: to make matters worse, the terminus of the supposed relation may not exist — a drunkard's 'seeing' snakes is not related to any real snake, nor my thought of a phoenix to any real phoenix. Philosophers have sought a way out of this difficulty by inventing chimerical entities like 'snakish sense-data' or 'real but nonexistent phoenixes' as termini of the cognitive relation. (95, emphasis added)
Butchvarov would not call a nonexistent phoenix or nonexistent pink rat real, but that it just a matter of terminology. What is striking here is that the items Geach considers chimerical inventions Butchvarov considers not only reasonably posited, but phenomenologically evident!
Ain't philosophy grand? One philosopher's chimerical invention is another's phenomenological given.
What is also striking about the above passage is that the position that Geach rejects via the 'picture of a cat' analogy is almost exactly the position that Butch maintains. Let's think about this a bit.
Surely Anscombe and Geach are right when it comes to pictures and other physical representations. There is a clear sense in which a picture (whether a painting, a photograph, etc.) of a cat is of a cat. The intentionality here cannot however be original; it must be derivative, derivative from the original intentionality of one who takes the picture to be of a cat. Surely no physical representation represents anything on its own, by its own power.And it is also quite clear that a picture of X is not exhausted by its being of X. There is more to a picture than its depicting something; the depicting function needs realization in some medium.
The question, however, is whether original intentionality also needs realization in some medium. It is not obvious that it does need such realization, whether in brain-stuff or in mind-stuff. Why can't consciousness of a cat be nothing more than consciousness of a cat? Why can't consciousness be exhausted by its revelation of objects? This is the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness that Butchvarov espouses. I don't advocate it myself, but I don't see that Geach has refuted it. That derivative intentionality requires a medium does not show that original intentionality does. No picture of a cat is exhausted by its depicting of a cat; there needs to be a physical thing, the picture itself, and it must have certain properties that found or ground the pictorial relation. But it might be otherwise for original intentionality.
Bewusstsein als bewusst-sein. Consciousness as being-conscioused. Get it? If memory serves, the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp has a theory along these lines, although the word I think he uses is Bewusstheit which, to coin an English expression, is the monadic property of consciousedness. Perhaps there is an anticipation of Sartre/Butchvarov in Natorp.
But this is not the place to examine Butchvarov's direct realist conception of consciousness, a conception he finds in Moore, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre, and contrasts with a mental-contents conception.
If matter (wholly material beings) could think, then matter would not be matter as currently understood.
Can abstracta think? Sets count as abstracta. Can a set think? Could the set of primes contemplate itself and think the thought, I am a set, and each of my members is a prime number? Given what we know sets to be from set theory, sets cannot think. It is the same with matter. Given what we know or believe matter to be from current physics, matter cannot think. To think is to think about something, and it is this intrinsic aboutness or original intentionality that proves embarrassing for materialism. I have expatiated on this over many, many posts and I can't repeat myself here. (Here is a characteristic post.)
But couldn't matter have occult powers, powers presently hidden from our best physics, including the power to think? Well, could sets have occult powers that a more penetrating set theory would lay bare? Should we pin our hopes on future set theory? Obviously not. Why not? Because it makes no sense to think of sets as subjects of intentional states. We know a priori that the set of primes cannot lust after the set of evens. It is impossible in a very strong sense: it is broadly logically impossible.
Of course, there is a big difference between sets and brains. We know enough about sets to know a priori that sets cannot think. But perhaps we don't yet know enough about the human brain. So I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers. Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think. But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand. And that is my point. You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations that ought to seem unseemly to hard-headed empiricistic and scientistic types.
Such types are known to complain about spook stuff and ghosts-in-machines. But to impute occult powers, powers beyond our ken, to brain matter does not seem to be much of an improvement. For that is a sort of dualism too. There are the physical properties and powers we know about, and the physical properties and powers we know nothing about but posit to avoid the absurdities of identity materialism and eliminativism. So instead of an ontological property dualism or an ontological substance dualism we have an epistemological property dualism, a dualism as between properties and powers we know about and properties and powers we have no idea about.
There is, second, the ontological dualism as between thinking and feeling matter and ordinary hunks of matter that do not think or feel. Even the materialist must admit that there is a huge difference between Einstein and a piece of chalk. How explain that some parcels of matter think and some do not?
It is worth noting that the reverent gushing of the neuro-scientistic types over the incredible complexity (pound the lectern!) of the brain does absolutely nothing to reduce the unintelligibility of the notion that it is brains or parts of brains that are the subjects of intentional and qualitative mental states. For it is unintelligible how ramping up complexity can trigger a metabasis eis allo genos, a shift into another genus. Are you telling me that meat that means is just meat that is more complex than ordinary meat? You might as well say that the leap from unmeaning meat to meaning meat is a miracle. Will you say that consciousness emerges from certain parcels of sufficiently complex matter? But then it is not matter any more, is it? It is an emergent from matter. Emergentism is a form of ontological dualism. What's more, the word 'emergence' merely papers over the difficulty, labeling the problem without solving it. Do you materialists believe in miracle meat or mystery meat? Do you believe in magic?
There is, third, a dualism within the brain as between those parts of it that are presumably thinking and feeling and those other parts that perform more mundane functions. Why are some brain states mental and others not?
The materialist operates with a conception of matter tied to current physics. On that conception of matter, it is simply unintelligible to to say that brains feel or think. I tend to hold that this unintelligibility is a very good reason to hold that it is not my brain or any part thereof that thinks when I think, and that it is not my brain or any part thereof that feels when I feel. (I am using 'think' in the broad Cartesian sense to cover all instances of intentionality, and 'feel' to cover all non-intentional conscious states and events.)
"But from the fact that such-and-such is unintelligible to us now it does not follow that it is not the case." True. Two possibilities. It might be the case that p even though we will never understand how it is possible that p, and it might be the case that p, even though we cannot understand at present how it is possible that p. The first is a mysterian position, the second is not mysterian but a pin-hopes-on-future-science position.
My thesis is that it is reasonable to hold that when I think and feel it is not my brain or any part of it that thinks or feels. But who knows? Maybe future science will prove me wrong. It is just that I wouldn't lay any money on being wrong.
(This is a repost from February 2013 slightly emended, except for an addendum added today. Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode just once do you?)
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A couple of days ago I had Nicholas Humphrey in my sights. Or, to revert to the metaphor of that post, I took a shovel to his bull. I am happy to see that Galen Strawson agrees that it is just nonsense to speak of consciousness as an illusion. Strawson's trenchant review of Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness is here. Unfortunately, I cannot see that Strawson has shed much light either, at least judging from the sketch of his position presented in the just-mentioned review:
There is no mystery of consciousness as standardly presented, although book after book tells us that there is, including, now, Nick Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. We know exactly what consciousness is; we know it in seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, in hunger, fever, nausea, joy, boredom, the shower, childbirth, walking down the road. If someone denies this or demands a definition of consciousness, there are two very good responses. The first is Louis Armstrong's, when he was asked what jazz is: "If you got to ask, you ain't never goin' to know." The second is gentler: "You know what it is from your own case." You know what consciousness is in general, you know the intrinsic nature of consciousness, just in being conscious at all.
"Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic, "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.
One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.
The main point of Strawson's first paragraph is surely correct: we know what consciousness is in the most direct and unmistakable way possible: we experience it, we live through it, we are it. We know it from our own case, immediately, and we know it better than we know anything else. If Dennett doesn't know what a sensory quale is, then perhaps the cure is to administer a sharp kick to his groin. Feel that, Dan? That's a quale. (I am assuming, of course, that Dennett is not a 'zombie' in the technical sense in which that term is used in philosophy of mind discussions. But I can't prove he isn't. Perhaps that is the problem. If he were a zombie, then maybe all his verbal behavior would be understandable.)
In the second paragraph Strawson rejects an assumption and he makes one himself. He rejects the assumption that we know enough about the intrinsic nature of matter to know that a material being cannot think. The assumption he makes is that we are wholly physical beings. So far I understand him. It could be that (it is epistemically possible that) this stuff inside my skull is the thinker of my thoughts. This is epistemically possible because matter could have hidden powers that we have yet to fathom. On our current understanding of matter it makes no bloody sense to maintain that matter thinks; but that may merely reflect our ignorance of the intrinsic nature of matter. So I cannot quickly dismiss the notion that matter thinks in the way I can quickly dismiss the preternaturally boneheaded notion that consciousness is an illusion.
I agree with Strawson's first paragraph; I understand the second; but I am flabbergasted by the third. For now our man waxes dogmatic and postures as if he KNOWS that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon. How does he know it? Obviously, he doesn't know it. It is a mere conjecture, an intelligible conjecture, and perhaps even a reasonable one. After all it might be (it is epistemically possible that) the matter of our brains has occult powers that physics has yet to lay bare, powers that enable it to think and feel. I cannot exclude this epistemic possibility, any more than Strawson can exclude the possibility that thinkers are spiritual substances. But to conjecture that things might be thus and so is not to KNOW that they are thus and so. All we can claim to KNOW is what Strawson asseverates in his first paragraph.
Here is Strawson's argument in a nutshell:
1. We know the intrinsic nature of consciousness from our own case.
2. We know that consciousness is a form of matter.
Ergo
3. There is nothing mysterious about consciousness or about how matter gives rise to consciousness; nor is there any question whether consciousness is wholly physical; the only mystery concerns the intrinsic nature of matter.
The problem with this argument is premise (2). It is pure bluster: a wholly gratuitous assumption, a mere dogma of naturalism. I can neutralize the argument with this counterargument:
4. If (1) & (2), then brain matter has occult powers.
5. We have no good reason to assume — it is wholly gratuitous to assume — that brain matter has occult powers.
Therefore
6. We have no good reason to assume that both (1) and (2) are true.
7. We know that (1) is true.
Therefore
8. We have good reason to believe that (2) is false.
Further Thoughts: Strawsonian Theology? (20 September 2015)
Strawson tells us that he is assuming that we are "wholly physical beings." Now a proposition cannot be true or false unless it is meaningful. But what does it even mean to say that we are wholly physical beings given that this entails that some wholly physical beings are conscious and self-conscious? What does 'physical' mean if beings as richly endowed with mentality as we are count as "wholly physical"? There is a semantic problem here, and it looks to be a failure of contrast. 'Physical' contrasts with 'mental' and has a specific meaning in virtue of this contrast. And vice versa. So if nothing is mental, then nothing is physical in the specific contrastive sense that lends 'bite' and interest to the thesis that we are wholly physical. To put it another way, if nothing is mental and everything is physical including us with our richly endowed inner lives, then the claim that we are wholly physical is not particularly interesting. It is nearly vacuous if not wholly vacuous. It has been evacuated of its meaning by a failure of contrast. If we are wholly physical in an umbrella sense that subsumes the contrastive senses of 'physical' and 'mental,' then Strawson has merely papered over the problem of how the mental and the physical are related when these terms are taken in their specific senses.
Suppose Einstein and his blackboard are both wholly physical. We still have to account for the fact that one of them is conscious and entertains thoughts while the other isn't and doesn't. That is a huge difference. What Strawson has to say is that in us thinking and feeling beings powers of matter are exercised that are not exercised in other, less distinguished clumps of matter. Hidden in the bosom of matter are powers that a future physics may lay bare and render intelligible.
But if Strawson widens his concept of matter to cover both thinking and nonthinking matter, does he have a principled way to prevent an even further widening?
If minds like ours are wholly physical, why can't God be wholly physical? God is a mind too. Presumably God cannot be wholly physical because God is not in space and is not subject to physical decomposition. But if we can be wholly physical despite the fact that we think and are conscious — if there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out thought and consciousness — then perhaps there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out material beings that have no spatial location and are not subject to physical decomposition.
If an advanced physics will reveal how meat heads like us can think, then perhaps there are other properties and possibilities of matter hitherto undreamt of. Consider Christ's Ascension, body and soul, into heaven. Christ's Ascension is not a dematerialization: he ascends bodily into a purely spiritual, nonphysical, 'dimension.' Without losing his (resurrected) body, Christ ascends to the Father so that, after the Ascension, the Second Person of the Trinity acquires Christ's resurrected body. On our ordinary way of thinking, this is utterly unintelligible. God is pure spirit, pure mind. How can Christ ascend bodily into heaven, and without divesting himself of his body, enter into the unity of the purely spiritual Trinity? It is unintelligible to us because it issues in a formal-logical contradiction: God is wholly nonphysical and also in part physical. A mysterian would say it is a mystery. It happened, so it's possible, and this regardless of its unintelligibility to us.
On Strawson's approach there needn't be any mystery here: some parcels of matter have amazing powers. For example, we are wholly material and yet we think and feel. It is truly amazing that we should be thinking meat! If so, God might be a parcel of matter that thinks, feels, and — without prejudice to his physicality — has no spatial location and is not subject to physical decomposition. If so, the Ascension is comprehensible: Christ ascends bodily to join the physical Trinity. It is just that he sheds his particular location and his physical mutability. He remains what he was on earth, an embodied soul.
The same could be said of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven. She too entered bodily into heaven. On a Strawsonian theology, this might be rendered intelligible without mysterianism.
To sum up. If matter actually thinks and feels in us, as Strawson holds, then he has widened the concept of matter to embrace both 'ordinary' matter and sentient, thinking, 'spiritual' matter. But then what principled way would Strawson have to prevent a further widening of the concept of matter so that it embraces God, disembodied souls, angels, and what not?
A character in a novel is an example of a purely fictional item provided that the character is wholly 'made up' by the novelist. Paul Morphy, for example, is a character in Francis Parkinson Keyes' historical novel, The Chess Players but he is also a real-life 19th century New Orleans chess prodigy. So Paul Morphy, while figuring in a piece of fiction, is not a purely fictional item like Captain Ahab or Sancho Panza or Frodo.
Earlier I said that it is a datum that Frodo, a purely fictional item, does not exist. Saying that it is a datum, I implied that it is not something that can be reasonably questioned, that it is a 'Moorean fact.' After all, most of us know that Frodo is a purely fictional character, and it is obvious — isn't it? — that what is purely fictional does not exist. Whatever is purely fictional does not exist looks to be an analytic proposition, one that merely unpacks the sense of 'purely fictional.'
The lesson I mean to convey by these examples is that the nonexistence of [Sherlock] Holmes is not an ontological datum; the ontological datum is that we can use the sentence 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist' to say something true.
I think this sentence would make more sense if van Inwagen had 'linguistic datum' for the second occurrence of 'ontological datum.' If the nonexistence of Holmes is a datum, then it is an ontological datum; but the fact that we can use the sentence in question to say something true is a linguistic datum.
In any case, PvI is saying the opposite of what I was saying earlier. I was saying something that implies that the nonexistence of Holmes is an ontological datum in virtue of his being a purely fictional entity whereas PvI is saying in effect that Holmes exists and that his existence is consistent with his being purely fictional. One man's datum is another man's (false) theory!
To sort this out, we need to understand PvI's approach to ficta.
Van Inwagen's Theory of Fictional Entities
We first note that van Inwagen holds to the univocity of 'exists' and 'is.' The ontological counterpart of this semantic thesis is that there are no modes of being/existence. He also has no truck with Meinongian Aussersein. Bear in mind that Aussersein is not a mode of being. And bear in mind that the doctrine of Aussersein is not the same as, and goes far beyond, the thesis that there is a weak mode of being had by the fictional Mrs. Gamp and her ilk. The thesis of Aussersein is that
M. Some items are such that they have no being whatsoever.
For van Inwagen, (M) is self-contradictory. He thinks that it entails that something is not identical with itself, which, if the entailment went through, would amount to a reductio ad absurdum of (M). (95) Now I have argued that van Inwagen is wrong to find (M) self-contradictory. But let's assume that he is right. Then it would follow, in conjunction with the univocity thesis, that everything exists and indeed in the same sense of 'exists.' And what sense is that? The sense supplied by the existential quantifier of standard modern predicate logic. Van Inwagen is thoroughly Quinean about existence. There is nothing more to existence than what existential quantification expresses. I call this a dogma of analysis. Fo an attempt at refutation, see my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75.
Now consider the sentence
1. Tom Sawyer is a character in a novel by Mark Twain.
By van Inwagen's lights, when (1) is translated into the quantifier-variable idiom it can be seen to imply that Tom Sawyer exists. I won't repeat van Inwagen's tedious rigmarole, but the idea is simple enough: (1) is plainly true; (1) cannot be supplied with an ontologically noncommittal paraphrase; and (1) ontologically commits us to the existence of the fictional character, Tom Sawyer. This is plausible and let's assume for present purposes that it is right: we accept (1) as true, and this acceptance commits us to the existence of a referent for 'Tom Sawyer.' Tom Sawyer exists! The same goes for all pure ficta. They all exist! They exist in the same sense that you and I do. Indeed, they actually exist: they are not mere possibilia. (What I just said is, strictly, pleonastic; but pleonasm is but a peccadillo when precision is at a premium.)
But now we have a problem, or at least van Inwagen does. While we are ontologically committed to the existence of purely fictional characters by our use and acceptance of true sentences such as (1), we must also somehow accommodate everyone's firm conviction that purely fictional characters do not exist. How?
When we say that Sherlock Holmes does not exist, we can be taken to express the proposition that "No one has all the properties the fictional character Sherlock Holmes holds . . . ." (105, emphasis added) There are properties that fictional characters HAVE and those that they HOLD. Among the properties that fictional characters HAVE are such logical properties as existence and self-identity, and such literary properties as being a character in a novel, being introduced in chapter 6, being modelled on Sancho Panza, etc. Among the properties fictional characters HOLD are properties like being human, being fat, having high blood pressure, being a resident of Hannibal, Missouri, and being a pipe-smoking detective.
What van Inwagen is doing is making a distinction between two modes of property-possession. A fictional item can possess a property by having it, i.e., exemplifying it, in which case the corresponding sentence expresses an actual predication. For example, a use of 'Tom Sawyer was created by Mark Twain' is an actual predication. A fictional item can also possess a property by holding it. For example, 'Tom Sawyer was a boy who grew up along the banks of Mississippi River in the 1840s' is not an actual predication but a sentence that expresses the relation of HOLDING that obtains between the fictional entity and the property expressed by 'was a boy who grew up, etc.'
With this distinction, van Inwagen can defang the apparent contradiction: Tom Sawyer exists & Tom Sawyer does not exist. The second limb can be taken to express the proposition that no one exemplifies or HAS the properties HELD by the existing item, Tom Sawyer.
To put it in my own way, what van Inwagen is maintaining is that there really is an entity named by 'Tom Sawyer' and that it possesses (my word) properties. It exemplifies some of these properties, the "high-category properties," but contains (my word) the others but is not qualified (my word) by them. Thus Mrs Gamp contains the property of being fat, but she does not exemplify this property. Analogy (mine): The set {fatness} is not fat: it holds the property but does not have (exemplify) it.
For van Inwagen, creatures of fiction exist and obey the laws of logic, including the Law of Excluded Middle. So they are not incomplete objects. On a Meinongian approach, Tom Sawyer is an incomplete nonexistent object. For van Inwagen, he is a complete existent object. Now although I am not aware of a passage where van Inwagen explicitly states that purely fictional entities are abstract objects, this seems clearly to be entailed by what he does say. For Tom Sawyer exists, and indeed actually exists — he is not a merely possible being — but he does not interact causally with anything else in the actual world. He does not exist here below in the land of concreta, but up yonder in Plato land. So if abstract entities are those that are causally inert, Tom Sawyer is an abstract object. That is consistent with what van Inwagen does explicity say, namely, that "creatures of fiction" are "theoretical entities of [literary] criticism." (Ontology, Identity, and Modality, p. 53.)
Some Questions about/Objections to van Inwagen's Theory
1. The theory implies that Sherlock Holmes exists, and exists as robustly as I do. That he exists follows from there being truths about him. That he exists as robustly as I do follows from the rejection of Meinongian nonentities and the rejection of modes of being/existence (and also of degrees of being/existence). But when I think about Sherlock I seem to myself to be thinking about something that does not exist. For I know that Sherlock is a purely fictional item, and I know that such items do not exist. If I am asked to describe the object of my thinking, I must describe it as nonexistent, for that is how it appears. So what should we say? Should we say that when I think of Sherlock, unbeknownst to myself, I am thinking of an existing abstract object? Or should we say that there are two objects, the one I am thinking of, which is nonexistent, and the existent abstract object?
Either way there is trouble. Surely I am the final authority as to what I am thinking of. It is part of the phenomenology of the situation that when I think about a detective that I know to be purely fictional I am thinking about an item that is given as nonexistent. But then the existing abstract object is not the same as the object I am thinking of. Van Inwagen's abstract surrogate exists; the object I am think of does not exist; ergo, they are not the same object.
On the other hand, if there are two objects, and it is van Inwagen's surrogate object that I am really thinking of when I think of Sherlock, then I am always in error when I think of pure ficta. I appear to myself to be thinking about nonexistent concreta when in reality I am thinking about existent abstracta.
2. When I think of Sherlock, I think of a man, and when I think of Mrs Gamp, I think of a woman. But no abstract object has sex organs. So either I am not thinking of what I appear to be thinking of, and a systematic error infects my thinking of pure ficta, or I am thinking of what I appear to be thinking of, namely, a man or a woman, in which case I am not thinking of an abstract existent.
3. When I think of Mrs Gamp as fat, I think of her as exemplifying the property of being fat, not as holding the property or containing it or encoding (Zalta) it. But then I cannot be thinking about an existent abstract object, for no such object is (predicatively) fat.
According to the Meinongian, when one think about Mrs Gamp, one thinks about a fat woman who does not exist. According to van Inwagen, when one thinks about Mrs Gamp, one thinks about an existing abstract object that is (predicatively) neither a woman not fat. Pick your poison!
I say neither theory is acceptable.
A Possible Objection to My Critique
"In the articles you cite, van Inwagen doesn't address our thinking about fictional items. He is not doing descriptive psychology or phenomenology; his approach is linguistic. He argues that fictional discourse — discourse about fictional items — commits us ontologically to fictional entities. He then tries to square this commitment with our acceptance of such sentences as 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist.' Your objections, however, are phenomenologically based. So it is not clear that your objections hit their target.
In response I would say that no adequate theory of fictional discourse or fictional objects can abstract away from the first-person point of view of one who thinks about fictional objects. Such linguistic reference as we find in a sentence such as (1) above is parasitic upon intentional or thinking reference. But this is a very large and a very hairy theme of its own. See The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic.
Let me attack yesterday's puzzle from a different angle. The puzzle in one sentence: we think about things that do not exist; but how is this possible given that they do not exist?
Here is the problem set forth as an aporetic hexad:
1. When I think about Frodo, as I am doing right now, I am thinking about, precisely, Frodo: not about some semantic or epistemic intermediary or surrogate or representative. I am thinking about a concrete, albeit nonexistent, item. I am not thinking about an idea in my mind, or a mental image, or any mental content; nor am I thinking about an abstract entity of any kind such as a property; nor am I thinking of a word or a phrase or anything linguistic.
2. Thinking about (thinking of) is a relation the relata of which are a subject who thinks and an object thought of. Thinking is triadic: ego-cogito-cogitatum.
3. Every relation is such that if it obtains, then all its relata exist/are.
4. There are no different modes of existence/being. This is the ontological counterpart of the semantic thesis of the univocity of 'exists' and 'is' and cognates.
5. To exist is to exist extramentally and extralinguistically, where the minds in question are finite.
6. Frodo, a purely fictional item, does not exist.
The limbs of the hexad are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. To solve the problem we must reject one of the limbs. But which one? (6) is a datum, and (5) is an unproblematic definition. So the the candidates for rejection are (1)-(4). I'll take these in reverse order.
Deny (4): There are two modes of being, esse reale and esse intentionale. When we say, with truth, that Frodo does not exist, we mean that he lacks esse reale. But we can still think about him in a manner to satisfy (1)-(3) since he has merely intentional being.
Deny (3): Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann Solution. There are items that have no being at all, and there are genuine relations that connect existents such as minds to beingless items in the realm of Aussersein.
Deny (2): Thinking-of is not relational, whether or not the obtaining of a relation requires that all its relata exist. This can be developed in different ways. Adverbial theories, Brentano's theory, Butchvarov's theory.
Deny (1): One way to deny (1) is via abstract artifactualism. A number of philosophers, including van Inwagen, have been putting forth some version of this view. The idea is that purely fictional items such as Frodo are created by the authors of works of fiction in which they figure. They are a peculiar species of abstract object since they come into being, unlike 'standard' abstract objects. They exist, but they are abstract. Meinong, by contrast, held that they are concrete but do not exist or have any being at all. Here is a paper that defends artifactualism against some objections by Sainsbury.
Now, gentlemen, pick your poison! Which limb will you deny? I claim, though this is but a promissory note, that no theory works and that the problem, though genuine, is insoluble.
Our Czech friend Lukas Novak sent me a paper in which, drawing upon John Duns Scotus, he rejects the following principle of reference:
(PR) It is impossible to refer to that which is not.
In this entry I will first pull some quotations from Novak's paper and then raise some questions about the view he seems to be endorsing.
I. Novak's Scotistic View
Novak writes,
Scotus’ position can be simply characterized as a consistent rejection of the PR . . . . According to Scotus, the objects of any intentional relations . . . simply are not required to have any ontological status whatsoever, or, as Scotus puts it, any esse verum. The “being” expressed by the predicates exploited by Francis, like “to be known” (esse cognitum), “to be intelligible” (esse intelligibile), “to be an image of a paradigm” (esse exemplatum), “to be represented” (esse repraesentatum) and the like, is not real or true in any way, irrespectively of whether the relation involved concerns God or man.
[. . .]
It is not necessary to assume any esse essentiae in objects of knowledge: instead, Scotus speaks of “esse deminutum” here, but he points out emphatically that this “diminished being” is being only “secundum quid”, i.e., in an improper, qualified sense – this is the point of Scotus’ famous criticism of Henry of Ghent laid out in the unique question of dist. 36 of the first book of his Ordinatio. If you look for some real being in the object of intellection that it should have precisely in virtue of being such an object, there is none to be found. The only real being to be found here is the real being of the intellection, to which the esse deminutum of the intellected object is reduced:
[. . .]
In other words: if we were to make something like an inventory of reality, we should not list any objects having mere esse deminutum. By speaking about objects in intelligible being we do not take on any ontological commitment (to use the Quinean language) over and above the commitment to the existence of the intellections directed to these objects.
[. . .]
And now the crucial point: it is precisely this intelligibility, imparted to the objects by the divine intellect, what [that] makes human conceiving of the same objects possible, irrespectively of whether they have any real being or not:
[. . .]
In other words: the most fundamental reason why the PR is false is, according to Scotus, the fact that a sufficient condition of the human capacity to refer to something is the intelligibility of that something. This intelligibility, however, is bestowed on things in virtue of their being conceived, prior to creation, by the absolute divine intellect. This divine conceiving, however, neither produces nor presupposes any genuine being in the objects; for it is a universal truth that cognition is an immanent operation, one whose effect remains wholly in its subject (and so does not really affect its object) – in this elementary point divine cognition is not different. Accordingly, objects need not have any being whatsoever in order to be capable of being referred to. (emphasis added)
II. Some Questions and Comments
As a matter of fact we do at least seem to refer to nonexistent objects and say things about them, true and false. Alexius von Meinong's celebrated goldner Berg, golden mountain, may serve as an example. The golden mountain is made of gold; it is a mountain; it does not exist; it is an object of my present thinking; it is indeterminate with respect to height; it is 'celebrated' as it were among connoisseurs of this arcana; it is Meinong's favorite example of a merely possible individual; it — the very same one I am talking about now — was discussed by Kasimir Twardowski, etc.
Now if this seeming to refer is an actual referring, if we do refer to the nonexistent in thought and overt speech, then it is possible that we do so. Esse ad posse valet illatio. But how the devil is it possible that we do so? (PR) is extremely plausible: it is difficult to understand how there could be reference to that which has no being, no esse, whatsoever.
If I understand Novak, he wants a theory that satisfies the following desiderata or criteria of adequacy
D1. Possibilism is to be avoided. We cannot maintain that the merely possible has any sort of being.
D2. Actualist ersatzism is to be avoided. We cannot maintain that there are actual items such as Plantingian haecceities that stand in for mere possibilia.
D3. The phenomenological fact that intentionality is relational or at least quasi-relational is to be respected and somehow accommodated. No adverbial theories!
D4. Eliminativism about intentionality/reference is to be avoided. Intentionality is real!
D5. Nominalist reductionism according to which reference is a merely intralinguistic phenomenon is to be avoided. When I refer to something, whether existent or nonexistent, I am getting outside of language!
Novak does not list these desiderata; I am imputing them to him. He can tell me if my imputation is unjust. In any case, I accept (D1)-(D5): an adequate theory must satisfy these demands. Now how does Novak's theory satisfy them?
Well, he brings God into the picture. Some will immediately cry deus ex machina! But I think Novak can plausibly rebut this charge. If God is brought on the stage in an ad hoc manner to get us out of a jam, then a deus ex machina objection has bite. But Novak and his master Scotus have independent reasons for positing God. See my substantial post on DEM objections in philosophy, here.
Suppose we have already proven, or at least given good reasons for, the existence of God. Then he can be put to work. Or, as my esteemed teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses."
So how does it work? It is sufficient for x to be an object of thought or reference by us that it be intelligible. This intelligibility derives from the divine intellect who, prior to creation, conceives of such items as the golden mountain. But this conceiving does not impart to them any real being. Nor does it presuppose that they have any real being. In themselves, they have no being at all. God's conceiving of nonexistent objects is a wholly immanent operation the effect of which remains wholly within the subject of the operation, namely, the divine mind. And yet the nonexistent objects acquire intelligibility. It is this intelligibility that makes it possible for us finite minds to think the nonexistent without it being the case that nonexistent objects have any being at all.
That is the theory, assuming I have understood it. And it does seem to satisfy the desiderata with the possible exception of (D3). But here is one concern. The theory implies that when I think about the golden mountain I am thinking about an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect. But that is not what I seem to be thinking about. What I seem to be thinking about has very few properties (being golden, being a mountain) and perhaps their analytic entailments, and no hidden properties such as the property of being identical to an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect. An intentional object has precisely, all and only, the properties it is intended as having.
Connected with this concern is the suspicion that on Novak's theory the act-object distinction is eliminated, a distinction that is otherwise essential to his approach. He wants to deny that merely intentional objects have any being of their own. So he identifies them with divine conceivings. But this falls afoul of a point insisted on by Twardowski. (See article below.)
My merely imagined table does not exist in reality, 'outside' my mind. But it also does not exist 'in' my mind as identical to the act of imagining it or as a proper part of the act of imagining it, or as any sort of mental content, as Twardowski clearly saw. Otherwise, (i) the merely imagined table would have the nature of an experience, which it does not have, and (ii) it would exist in reality, when it doesn't, and (iii) it would have properties that cannot be properties of mental acts or contents such as the property of being spatially extended.
My point could be put like this. The typical merely intentional, hence nonexistent, object such as the golden mountain does not have the nature of an experience or mental act; it is an object of such an act. But if merely intentional objects are divine conceivings, then they have the nature of an experience. Ergo, etc. Novak's theory appears to fall into psychologism.
What follows are some ideas from London Ed about a book he is writing. He solicits comments. Mine are in blue.
The logical form thing was entertaining but rather off-topic re the fictional names thing. On which, Peter requested some more.
Let’s step right back. I want to kick off the book with an observation about how illusion impedes the progress of science. It looks as though the sun is going round the earth, so early theories of the universe had the earth standing still. It seems as though objects are continuously solid, and so science rejected the atomists’ theory and adopted Aristotle’s theory for more than a millenium.
A final example from the psychology of perception: in 1638, Descartes takes a eye of a bull and shows how images are projected onto the retina. He finally disproves the ‘emissive theory of sight’. The emissive theory is the naturally occurring idea that eyesight is emitted from your eye and travels to and hits the distant object you are looking at. If you ask a young child why you can’t see when your eyes are shut, he replies (‘because the eyesight can’t get out’).
Scientific progress is [often] about rejecting theories based on what our cognitive and perceptual framework suggests to us, and adopting theories based on diligent observation and logic.
We reject ‘eyebeams’. We reject the natural idea that the mental or sensitive faculty can act at a distance. When we look at the moon, science rejects the idea that a little ethereal piece of us is travelling a quarter of a million miles into space. Yet – turning to the main subject of the book – some philosophers think that objects themselves somehow enter our thoughts. Russell writes to Frege, saying “I believe that in spite of all its snowfields Mont Blanc itself is a component part of what is actually asserted in the proposition ‘Mont Blanc is more than 4,000 metres high”. Kaplan mentions, with apparent approval, the idea that the proposition ‘John is tall’ has two components: the property expressed by the predicate ‘is tall’, and the individual John. “That’s right, John himself, right there, trapped in a proposition”. The dominant theory in modern philosophical logic is ‘direct reference’, or object-dependent theories of semantics: a proper name has no meaning except its bearer, and so the meaning of ‘John is tall’ has precisely the components that Kaplan describes.
BV: I too find the notion that there are Russellian (as opposed to Fregean) propositions very hard to swallow. If belief is a propositional attitude, and I believe that Peter is now doing his grades, it is surely not Peter himself, intestinal contents and all, who is a constituent of the proposition that is the accusative of my act of belief. The subject constituent of the proposition cannot be that infinitely propertied gnarly chunk of external reality, but must be a thinner sort of object, one manageable by a finite mind, something along the lines of a Fregean sense.
The purpose of the proposed book is to advance science by showing how such object-dependent theories are deeply mistaken, and also to explain why they are so compelling, because of their basis on a cognitive illusion as powerful as the illusions that underlie the geocentric theory, or the emissive theory of sight.
What is the illusion? The argument for object dependence is roughly as follows
(1) We can have so-called ‘singular thoughts’, such as when we think that John is tall, i.e. when we have thoughts expressable [expressible] by propositions [sentences, not propositions] whose subject term is a proper name or some other non-descriptive singular term.
(2) A singular term tells us which individual the proposition is about, without telling us anything about it. I.e. singular terms, proper names, demonstratives, etc. are non-descriptive. They are ‘bare individuators’.
BV: This is not quite right. Consider the the first-person singular pronoun, 'I.' This is an indexical expression. If BV says, 'I am hungry,' he refers to BV; if PL says 'I am hungry,' he refers to PL. Either way, something is conveyed about the nature of the referent, namely, that it is a person or a self. So what Ed said is false as it stands. A use of 'I' does tell us something about the individual the sentence containing 'I' is about.
Examples are easily multiplied. Apart from the innovations of the Pee Cee, 'she' tells us that the individual referred to is female. 'Here' tells us that the item denoted is a place, typically. 'Now' picks out times. And there are other examples.
There are no bare items. Hence there cannot be reference to bare items. All reference conveys some property of the thing referred to. But variables may be a counterexample. Consider 'For any x, x = x.' One could perhaps uses variables in such a way that there is no restriction on what they range over. But it might be best to stay away from this labyrinth.
One criticism, then, is that there are no bare individuators. A second is that it is not a singular term, but a use of a singular term that individuates. Thus 'I' individuates nothing. It is PL's use of 'I' that picks out PL.
(3) If a singular term is non-descriptive, its meaning is the individual it individuates. A singular term cannot tell us which individual the proposition is about, unless there exists such an individual.
The course of the book is then to show why we don’t have to be forced into assumption (3). There doesn’t have to be (or to exist) an individual that is individuated. The theory of non-descriptive singular terms is then developed in the way I suggested in my earlier posts. Consider the inference
Frodo is a hobbit Frodo has large feet ——- Some hobbit has large feet
I want to argue that the semantics of ‘Frodo’ is purely inferential. I.e. to understand the meaning of ‘Frodo’ in that argument, it is enough to understand the inference that it generates. That is all.
BV: 'Frodo' doesn't generate anything. What you want to say is that the meaning of 'Frodo' is exhausted by the inferential role this term plays in the (valid) argument depicted. Sorry to be such a linguistic prick.
What you are saying is that 'Frodo,' though empty, has a meaning, but this meaning is wholly reducible to the purely syntactical role it plays in the above argument. (So you are not an eliminativist about the meanings of empty names.) But if the role is purely syntactical, then the role of 'Frodo' is the same as the role of the arbitrary individual constant 'f' in the following valid schema:
Hf Lf ——- (Ex)(Hx & Lx).
But then what distinguishes the meaning of 'Frodo' from that of 'Gandalf'?
Meinongian nonentities are out. Fregean senses are out. There are no referents in the cases of empty names. And yet they have meaning. So the meaning is purely syntactical. Well, I don't see how you can squeeze meaning out of bare syntax. Again, what distinguishes the meaning of the empty names just cited? The obviously differ in meaning, despite lacking both Sinn and Bedeutung.
We don’t need an object-dependent semantics to explain such inferences, and hence we don’t need object-dependence to explain the semantics of proper names. If an inferential semantics is sufficient, then the Razor tells us it is necesssary: Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora.
BV: You should state explicitly that you intend your inferential semantics to hold both for empty and nonempty names.
And now we see the illusion. The proposition
John is thinking of Obama (or Frodo, or whomever)
has a relational form: “—is thinking of –”. But it does not express a relation. The illusion consists in the way that the relation of the language so strongly suggests a relation in reality. It is the illusion that causes us “to multiply the things principally signified by terms in accordance with the multiplication of the terms”.
That’s the main idea. Obviously a lot of middle terms have been left out. Have at it.
BV: So I suppose what you are saying is that belief in the intentionality of thought is as illusory as the belief in the emissive theory of sight. Just as the the eye does not emit an ethereal something that travels to the moon, e.g., the mind or the 'I' of the mind — all puns intended! — does not shoot out a ray of intentionality that gloms onto some Meinongian object, or some Thomistic merely intentional object, or some really existent object.
You face two main hurdles. The first I already mentioned. You have to explain how to squeeze semantics from mere syntax. The second is that there are theoretical alternatives to the view that intentionality is a relation other than yours. To mention just one: there are adverbial theories of intentionality that avoid an act-object analysis of mental reference.
Following Chisholm, et al. and as against Sellars, et al. I subscribe to the broadly logical primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.
But before we can discuss the primacy of the intentional, we must have some idea of (i) what intentionality is and (ii) what the problem of intentionality is. Very simply, (mental) intentionality is object-directedness, a feature of some (if not all) of our mental states. (The qualifier 'mental' leaves open the epistemic possibility of what George Molnar calls physical intentionality which transpires, if it does transpire, below the level of mind. I take no position on it at the moment.)
Suppose a neighbor asks me about Max Black, a stray cat of our mutual acquaintance, who we haven't seen in a few weeks. The asking occasions in me a thought of Max, with or without accompanying imagery. The problem of intentionality is to provide an adequate account of what it is for my thought of Max to be a thought of Max, and of nothing else. Simply put, what makes my thought of Max a thought of Max? How is object-directedness (intentionality, the objective reference of episodes of thinking) possible?
Why should there be a problem about this? Well, an episode of thinking is a datable event in my mental life. But a cat is not. No cat is a content of consciousness. Cats ain't in the head or in the mind. Obviously, no cat is spatially inside my mind, let alone my head, and it is only a little less obvious that no cat depends for its existence on my mind: it's nothing to Max, ontologically speaking, if me and my mind cease to exist. He needs my thinking of him to exist as little as my thinking needs to be about him. Cats are physical things out there in the physical world. And yet my thinking of Max 'reaches' beyond my mind and targets — not some cat or other, but a particular cat. How is this possible? What must the world be like for it to be possible?
To get the full flavor of the problem, please observe that my thinking of Max would be unaffected if Max were, unbeknownst to me, to pass out of existence while I was thinking of him. (He's out on the prowl and a hungry coyote kills him while I am thinking of him.) It would be the very same thought with the very same content and the very same directedness. But if Max were to cease to exist while a flea was biting him, then the relation of biting would cease to obtain. So if the obtaining of a relation requires the existence of all its relata, it follows that intentionality is not a relation between a thinker (or his thought) and an external object. But if intentionality is not a relation, then how are we to account for the fact that intentional states refer beyond themselves to objects that are (typically) transcendent of the mind?
Now it seems to me that any viable solution must respect the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. This thesis consists of the following subtheses:
1. Words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs and the like, considered in their physical being as marks on paper or sounds in the air or carvings in stone (etc.) are entirely lacking in any intrinsic referential, representative, semantic, or intentional character. There is nothing in the nature of the mark 'red' that makes it mean red. After all, it doesn't mean red to a speaker of German. It doesn't mean anything to a speaker of German qua speaker of German. In German 'rot' means red while in English the same sign is in use but has a different meaning. Clearly, then, marks on paper, pixels on a computer screen, etc. have no intrinsic sense or reference grounded in their very nature. It is a matter of convention that they mean what they mean. And that brings minds into the picture.
Mind is king. Mind is the source of meaning. No mind, no meaning.
2. So any sense or reference linguistic signs have must be derivative and relational as opposed to intrinsic: whatever intentionality they have they get from minds that are intrinsically intentional. Mind is the source of all intelligibility. Linguistic signs in and of themselves as mere marks and sounds (etc.) are unintelligible.
3. There can be mind without language, but no language without mind. Laird Addis puts it like this:
Conscious states can and do occur in beings with no language, and in us with no apparent connection to the fact that we are beings with language. Thus we may say that "mind explains language" in a logical or philosophical sense: that while it is perfectly intelligible to suppose the existence of beings who have no language but have much the same kinds of conscious states that we have, including introspections of other conscious states, it is unintelligible to suppose the existence of beings who are using language in all of its representative functions and who are also lacking in conscious states. The very notion of language as a representational system presupposes the notion of mind, but not vice versa. (Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple University Press, 1989, pp. 64-65)
Suppose I am conscious of an object in the mode of visual perception: I see a bobcat in the backyard. Does it make sense to try to analyze this perceptual situation by saying that 'in my mind' there is an image or picture that represents something 'outside my mind'?
In the Fifth of his Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl refutes this type of theory. One point he makes (Logical Investigations, vol. II, 593) is that there is a phenomenological difference between agenuine case of image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and ordinary perceptual awareness. Suppose I am looking at a picture of a mountain. The picture appears, but it refers beyond itself to that of which it is a picture, the mountain itself. In a case like this, it is clear that my awareness of the object depicted is mediated by a picture or image. Here it makes clear sense to speak of one thing (the picture) re-presenting another (the mountain). But when I look at the mountain itself, I find no evidence of any picture or image that mediates my perceptual awareness of the mountain. Phenomenologically, there is no evidence of any epistemic intermediary or epistemic deputy. So on phenomenological grounds alone, it would seem to be a mistake to assimilate perceptual consciousness to image-consciousness. The two are phenomenologically quite different.
A second consideration is that consciousness of a thing via a picture or image presupposes ordinary perceptual consciousness inasmuch as the picture or painting must itself be perceived as a precondition of its functioning as an image. How then can ordinary perceptual consciousness be explained as involving internal images or pictures?
Husserl also points out that, no matter how carefully I examine the picture, I will discover no intrinsic feature of it that is its "representative character." (593) That is, there is no intrinsic property of the picture that confers upon it its reference to something beyond itself. So Husserl asks:
What therefore allows us to go beyond the image which alone is present in consciousness, and to refer the latter as an image to a certain extraconscious object? To point to the resemblance between image and thing will not help. (593, Findlay trans. slightly emended.)
Why won't resemblance help? If picture and thing depicted both exist, then of course there will be resemblance. But it cannot be in virtue of X's resemblance to Y that X pictures or images Y. "Only a presenting ego's power to use a similar as an image-representative of a similar . . . makes the image be an image." (594) Husserl's point is subtle. I'll explain it in my own way. A picture considered by itselfis just a physical thing with physical properties. What makes it be an image? Its physical properties cannot account for its being an image. And the fact that it shares physical properties with some other thing cannot make it an image either. A painting of a mountain can be a painting of a mountain even if there is no mountain of which it is the painting. Pictures of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas are pictures ofsaid hotel even though it has been demolished. The intentionality of a photograph can survive the destruction of its 'subject.' A depiction of Cerberus is what it is despite the dog's nonexistence.
But even if there exists something that a picture resembles, that does not suffice to make the picture a picture of a thing it resembles. Suppose I have two qualitatively identical ball bearings. In an AndyWarholish mood, I take a picture of one of them, the one closer to my computer. Gazing fondly at the photo, I say, "This ball bearing is the one that is closer to my computer." Since the photo resembles theother ball bearing as well, but is not of that ball bearing, it cannot be resemblance that confers upon the photo its intentionality.
What Husserl is saying in effect is that pictures, paintings, movie images, and the like possess no intrinsic intentionality: what intentionality they have is derived from conscious beings who possess intrinsic intentionality. For Husserl, and for me, the project of trying to account for intrinsic intentionality in terms of internal pictures that resemble outer objects is a complete nonstarter. For onething, it leads to a vicious infinite regress: "Since the interpretation of anything as an image presupposes an object intentionally given to consciousness, we should plainly have a regressus in infinitum were we again to let this latter object be itself constituted through an image . . . ." (594)
There are both phenomenological and dialectical reasons for rejecting the image-theory (Bilder-theorie) of consciousness. Phenomenologically, there is no evidence that ordinary perception is mediated by internal images. In addition,
1. The image-theory interprets intentionality in terms of resemblance, but resemblance cannot explain the intentionality of pictures that (i) never had an object, or (ii) lost their object.
2. The image-theory interprets intentionality in terms of resemblance, but resemblance cannot account for a picture's being of the very object it is of as opposed to some other one that it merely resembles.
3. The image-theory is involved in a vicious infinite regress.
4. Since image-consciousness presupposes ordinary perceptual consiousness, it is impossible to explain the latter in terms of the former.
5. The image-theory tries to locate the intentionality of consciousness in the intentionality of a picture when it is clear that there is nothing intrinsic to any picture that could account for its intentionality.
One of the tasks of philosophy is to expose and debunk bad philosophy. And there is a lot of it out there, especially in the writings of journalists who report on scientific research. Scornful of philosophy, many of them peddle scientistic pseudo-understanding without realizing that what they sell is itself philosophy, very bad philosophy. A particularly abysmal specimen was sent my way by a reader. It bears the subtitle: "Without recognising it, Oxford scientists appear to have located the consience [sic]." In the body of the article we read:
This isn't some minor breakthrough of cognitive neuroscience. This is about good and bad, right and wrong. This is about the brain's connection to morality. This means that the Oxford scientists, without apparently realising what they've done, have located the conscience.
For centuries we thought that the conscience was just some faculty of moral insight in the human mind, an innate sense that one was behaving well or badly – although the great HL Mencken once defined it as, "the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking". It's been used by religions as a numinous something-or-other, kindly bestowed by God, to give humans a choice between sin and Paradise.
Now, thanks to neuroscience, we've found the actual, physical thing itself. It's a shame that it resembles a Brussels sprout: something so important and God-given should look more imposing, like a pineapple. But then it wouldn't fit in our heads.
Henceforth, when told to "examine our conscience", we won't need to sit for hours cudgelling our brains to decide whether we're feeling guilty about accessing YouPorn late at night; we can just book into a clinic and ask them for a conscience-scan, to let us know for sure.
Part of what is offensive about this rubbish is that a great and humanly very important topic is treated in a jocose manner. (I am assuming, charitably, that the author did not write his piece as a joke.) But that is not the worst of it. The worst of it is the incoherence of what is being proposed.
I'll begin with what ought to be an obvious point. Before we can locate conscience in the brain or anywhere else we ought to know, at least roughly, what it is we are talking about. What is conscience?
Conscience is the moral sense, the sense of right, wrong, and their difference. It is the sense whereby we discern, or attempt to discern, what is morally (not legally, not prudentially) permissible, impermissible, and obligatory. It typically results in moral judgements about one's thoughts, words and deeds which in turn eventuate in resolutions to amend or continue one's practices.
The deliverances of conscience may or may not be 'veridical' or revelatory of objective moral demands or or objective moral realities on particular occasions. Some people are 'scrupulous': their consciences bother them when they shouldn't. Others are morally insensitive: their consciences do not bother them when they should. If subject S senses, via conscience, that doing/refraining from X is morally impermissible, it does not follow that it is. Conscience is a modality of object-directed consciousness and so may be expected to be analogous to nonmoral consciousness: if I am thinking that a is F, it does not follow that a is F.
So just as we can speak of the intentionality of consciousness, we can speak of the intentionality of conscience. Pangs of conscience are not non-intentional states of consciousness like headache pains. Conscience purports to reveal something about the morally permissible, impermissible, and obligatory (and perhaps also about the supererogatory and suberogatory); whether it does so is a further question. Suppose nothing is objectively right or wrong. That would not alter the fact that there is the moral sense in some of us.
Can conscience be located in the brain and identified with the lateral frontal pole? If so, then a particular moral sensing, that one ought not to have done X or ought to have done Y, is a state of the brain. But this is impossible. A particular moral sensing is an intentional (object-directed) state. But no physical state is object-directed. So, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a moral sensing cannot be a brain state.
So that is one absurdity. A second is that it is absurd to suggest, as the author does, that one can examine one's conscience by examining a part of one's brain. Examination of conscience is a spiritual practice whereby, at the end of the day perhaps, one reviews and morally evaluates the day's thoughts, words, and deeds. What is being examined here? Obviously not some bit of brain matter. And if one were to examine that hunk of meat, one would learn nothing as to the thoughts, words, and deeds of the person whose hunk of brain meat it is.
If a person's feeling of guilt is correlated with an identifiable brain state, then one could perhaps determine that a person was feeling guilt by way of a brain scan. But that would provide no insight into (a) what the guilt is about, or (b) whether the guilt is morally appropriate. No brain scan can reveal the intentionality or the normativity of guilt feelings.
There is also a problem about who is doing the examining in an examination of conscience. A different hunk of meat, or the same hunk? Either way, absurdity. Examining is an intentional state. So, just as it is absurd to suppose that one's thoughts, words, and deed are to be found in the lateral frontal pole, it is also absurd to suppose that that same pole is doing the examining of those contents.
I have emphasized the intentionality of conscience, which fact alone sufficies to refute the scientistic nonsense. And I have so far bracketed the question whether conscience puts us in touch with objective moral norms. I say it does, even though how this is possible is not easy to explain. Well, suppose that torturing children to death for sexual pleasure is objectively wrong, and that we have moral knowledge of this moral fact via conscience.
Then two problems arise for the scientistic naturalist: how is is possible for a hunk of meat, no matter how wondrously complex, to glom onto these nonnatural moral facts? And second, if there are such facts to be accessed via conscience, how do they fit into the scientistic naturalist's scheme? Answers: It is not possible, and they don't.
Have I just wasted my time refuting rubbish beneath refutation? Maybe not. Scientism, with its pseudo-understanding poses a grave threat to the humanities and indeed to our very humanity. David Gelernter is good on this.
It is plain that 'sees' has many senses in English. Of these many senses, some are philosophically salient. Of the philosophical salient senses, two are paramount. Call the one 'existence-entailing.' (EE) Call the other 'existence-neutral.' (EN) On the one, 'sees' is a so-called verb of success. On the other, it isn't, which not to say that it is a 'verb of failure.' Now there is difference between seeing a tree (e.g.) and seeing that a tree is in bloom (e.g.), but this is a difference I will ignore in this entry, at some philosophical peril perhaps.
EE: Necessarily, if subject S sees x, then x exists.
EN: Possibly, subject S sees x, but it is not the case that x exists.
Now one question is whether both senses of 'see' can be found in ordinary English. The answer is yes. "I know that feral cat still exists; I just now saw him" illustrates the first. "You look like you've just seen a ghost" illustrates the second.
So far, I don't think I've said anything controversial.
We advance to a philosophical question, and embroil ourselves in controversy, when we ask whether, corresponding to the existence-neutral sense of 'sees,' there is a type of seeing, a type of seeing that does not entail the existence of the object seen. One might grant that there is a legitimate use of 'sees' (or a cognate thereof) in English according to which what is seen does not exist without granting that in reality there is a type of seeing that is the seeing of the nonexistent.
One might insist that all seeing is the seeing of what exists, and that one cannot literally see what does not exist. So, assuming that there are no ghosts, one cannot see a ghost.
But suppose a sincere, frightened person reports that she has seen a ghost of such-and-such a ghastly description. Because of the behavioral evidence, you cannot reasonably deny that the person has had an experience, and indeed an object-directed (intentional) experience. You cannot reasonably say, "Because there are no ghosts, your experience had no object." For it did have an object, indeed a material (albeit nonexistent) object having various ghastly properties. (Side question: Is 'ghastly' etymologically connected to 'ghostly'?)
This example suggests that we sometimes see what does not exist, and that seeing therefore does not entail the existence of that which is seen. If this is right, then the epistemologically primary sense of 'see' is given by (EN) supra.
Henessey's response: "I grant the reality of her experience, with the reservation that it was not an experience based in vision, but one with a basis in imagination, imagination as distinguished from vision." The point, I take it, is that what we have in my example of a person claiming to see a ghost is not a genuine case of seeing, of visual perception, but a case of imagining. The terrified person imagined a ghost; she did not see one.
I think Hennessey's response gets the phenomenology wrong. Imagination and perception are phenomenologically different. For one thing, what we imagine is up to us: we are free to imagine almost anything we want; what we perceive, however, is not up to us. When Ebeneezer Scrooge saw the ghost of Marley, he tried to dismiss the apparition as "a bit of bad beef, a blot of mustard, a fragment of an underdone potato," but he found he could not. Marley: "Do you believe in me or not?" Scrooge: "I do, I must!" This exchange brings out nicely what Peirce called the compulsive character of perception. Imagination is not like this at all. Whether or not Scrooge saw Marley, he did not imagine him for the reason that the object of his experience was not under the control of his will.
The fact that what one imagines does not exist is not a good reason to to assimilate perception of what may or may not exist to imagination.
Second, if a subject imagines x, then it follows that x does not exist. Everything imagined is nonexistent. But it is not the case that if a subject perceives x, then x does not exist. Perception either entails the existence of the object perceived, or is consistent with both the existence and the nonexistence of the object perceived.
Third, one knows the identity of an object of imagination simply by willing the object in question. The subject creates the identity so that there can be no question of re-identifying or re-cognizing an object of imagination. But perception is not like this at all. In perception there is re-identification and recognition. Scrooge did not imagine Marley's ghost for the reason that he was able to identify and re-identify the ghost as it changed positions in Scrooge's chamber. So even if you balk at admitting that Scrooge saw Marley's ghost, you ought to admit that he wasn't imaging him.
I conclude that Hennessey has not refuted my example. To see a ghost is not to imagine a ghost, even if there aren't any. Besides, one can imagine a ghost without having the experience that one reports when one sincerely states that one has seen a ghost. Whether or not this experience is perception, it surely is not imagination.
Have you read Nicholas Rescher's Nonexistents Then and Now? I read it recently and thought I'd bring it to your attention because it's relevant to your recent posts on fiction. If I understand the article, Rescher would agree with you that a fictional man is not a man, but he would say the same of a merely possible man (denying premise 6 in your post More on Ficta and Impossibilia): he argues that because nonexistents are necessarily incomplete, they are not individuals but schemata for individuals. In response to your post Imagining X as Real versus Imagining X as Unreal and a Puzzle of Actualization Rescher would probably say that the "table" before your mind is not an individual table but a schema for an individual table, a "schema to which many such individuals might answer" (p. 376). As your concluding apory implies, the argument against the possibility of actualizing Hamlet might apply to any nonexistent. Rescher seems to think it does. It would be interesting to read some of your thoughts on Rescher's essay, but I do see that you're now considering a different problem.
I was aware of this article, but hadn't studied it carefully until today. I thank the reader for reminding me of it. What he says about it is accurate. Herewith, some preliminary comments.
1. One objection I have is that Rescher tends to conflate the epistemological with the ontological. A careful reading of the following passage shows the conflation at work. I have added comments in red.
To begin, note that a merely possible world is never given. It is not something we can possibly encounter in experience. The only world that confronts us in the actual course of things is the real world, this actual world of ours — the only world to which we gain entry effortlessly, totally free of charge. [This is practically a tautology. All Rescher is saying is that the only world we can actually experience is the actual world, merely possible worlds being, by definition, not actual.] To move from it, we must always do something, namely, make a hypothesis — assumption, supposition, postulation, or the like. The route of hypotheses affords the only cognitive access to the realm of nonexistent possibility. [Rescher's wording suggests that there is a realm of nonexistent possibility and that we can gain cognitive access to it.] For unlike the real and actual world, possible worlds never come along of themselves and become accessible to us without our actually doing something, namely, making an assumption or supposition or such-like. Any possible world with which we can possibly deal will have to be an object of our contrivance — of our making by means of some supposition or assumption. [In this last sentence Rescher clearly slides from an epistemological claim, one about how we come to know the denizens of the realm of nonexistent possibility, to an ontological claim about what merely possible worlds and their denizens ARE, namely, objects of our contrivance.](364, emphasis added)
As my reader is aware, Rescher wants to say about the merely possible what he says about the purely fictional, namely, that pure ficta are objects of our contrivance. But this too, it seems to me, is an illicit conflation. The purely fictional is barred from actuality by its very status as purely fictional: Sherlock Holmes cannot be actualized. He is an impossible item. I am tempted to say that not even divine power could bring about his actualization, any more than it could restore a virgin. But the merely possible is precisely — possibly actual! The merely possible is intrinsically such as to be apt for existence, unlike the purely fictional which is intrinsically such as to be barred from actuality.
2. The conflation of the merely possible with the purely fictional is connected with another mistake Rescher makes. Describing the "medieval mainstream," (362) Rescher lumps mere possibillia and pure ficta together as entia rationis. For this mistake, Daniel Novotny takes him to task, explaining that "Suarez and most other Baroque scholastics considered merely possible beings to be real, and hence they were not classified as beings of reason." (Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel, Fordham UP, 2013, p. 27) Entia rationis, beings of reason, are necessarily mind-dependent impossible objects. Mere possibilia are not, therefore, entia rationis.
3. As I understand it, the problem of the merely possible is something like this. Merely possible individuals and states of affairs are not nothing, nor are they fictional. And of course their possibility is not merely epistemic, or parasitic upon our ignorance. Merely possible individuals and states of affairs have some sort of mind-independent reality. But how the devil can we make sense of this mind-independent reality given that the merely possible, by definition, is not actual? Suppose we cast the puzzle in the mold of an aporetic triad:
a. The merely possible is not actual.
b. The merely possible is real (independently of finite minds).
c. Whatever is real is actual.
Clearly, the members of this trio cannot all be true. Any two of them, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of the remaining one. For example, the conjunction of the last two propositions entails the negation of the first.
What are the possible solutions given that the triad is is genuinely logically inconsistent and given that the triad is soluble? I count exactly five possible solutions.
S1. Eliminativism. The limbs are individually undeniable but jointly inconsistent, which is to say: there are no mere possibilia. One could be an error theorist about mere possibilia.
S2. Conceptualism. Deny (b) while accepting the other two limbs. There are mere possibilia, but what they are are conceptual constructions by finite minds. This is essentially Rescher's view. See his A Theory of Possibility: A Constructivistic and Conceptualistic Theory of Possible Individuals and Possible Worlds (Basil Blackwell, 1975). He could be described as an artifactualist about possibilities: "A possible individual is an intellectual artifact: the product of a projective 'construction' . . . ." (p. 61)
S3. Actualism/Ersatzism. Deny (a) while accepting the other two limbs. One looks for substitute entities to go proxy for the mere possibles. Thus, on one approach, the merely possible state of affairs of there being a unicorn is identified with an actual abstract entity, the property of being a unicorn. For the possibility to be actual is for the the property to be instantiated.
S4. Extreme Modal Realism. Deny (c) while accepting the other two limbs. David Lewis. There is a plurality of possible worlds conceived of as maximal merelogical sums of concreta. The worlds and their inhabitants are all equally real. But no world is absolutely actual. Each is merely actual at itself.
S5. Theologism. Deny (c) while accepting the other two limbs. We bring God into the picture to secure the reality of the possibles instead of a plurality of equally real worlds. Consider the possibility of there being unicorns. This is a mere possibility since it is not actual. But the possibility is not nothing: it is a definite possibility, a real possibility that does not depend for its reality on finite minds. There aren't any unicorns, but there really could have been some, and the fact of this mere possibility has nothing to do with what we do or think or say. The content of the possibility subsists as an object of the divine intellect, and its actualizability is grounded in God's power.
4. Part of Rescher's support for his constructivism/conceptualism/artifactualism is his attack on the problem of transworld identity. For Rescher, "the issue of transworld identity actually poses no real problems — a resolution is automatically available." (371) Rescher's argument is hard to locate due to his bloated, meandering, verbose style of writing. Rescher rarely says anything in a direct and pithy way if he can pad it out with circumlocutions and high-falutin' phaseology. (I confess to sometimes being guilty of this myself.)
But basically such argument as I can discern seems to involve equivocation on such terms as 'individuation' and 'identity' as between epistemological and ontological senses. He gives essentially the following argument on p. 378. This is my reconstruction and is free of equivocation.
A. All genuine individuals are complete.
B. All merely possible individuals are complete only if completely describable by us.
C. No merely possible individuals are completely describable by us.
Therefore
D. No merely possible individuals are genuine individuals.
But why should we accept (B)? Why can't there be nonexistent individuals that are complete? Rescher just assumes that the properties of such individuals must be supplied by us. But that is to beg the question against those who believe in the reality of the merely possible. He just assumes the truth of artifactualism about the merely possible. Consider the following sentences
d. Bill Clinton is married to Hillary Rodham.
e. Bill Clinton remained single.
f. Bill Clinton married someone distinct from Hillary Rodham.
Only the first sentence is true, but, I want to say, the other two are possibly true: they pick out merely possible states of affairs. There are three possible worlds involved: the actual world and two merely possible worlds. Now does 'Bill Clinton' pick out the same individual in each of these three worlds? I am inclined to say yes, despite the fact that we cannot completely describe the world in which our boy remains single or the world in which he marries someone other than Hillary. But Rescher will have none of this because his conceptualism/constructivism/ artifactualism bars him from holding that actual individuals in merely possible worlds or merely possible individuals have properties other that those we hypothesize them as having. So, given the finitude of our hypothesizing, actual individuals in merely possible worlds, or merely possible individuals, can only be incomplete items, multiply realizable schemata, and thus not genuine individuals. But then the possible is assimilated to the fictional.
1. Tom believes that the man at the podium is the Pope
2. The Pope is an Argentinian
Therefore
3. Tom believes that the man at the podium is Argentinian.
The argument is plainly invalid. For Tom may not believe that the Pope is an Argentinian. Now consider this argument:
4. Tom sees the Pope
2. The Pope is an Argentinian
Therefore
5. Tom sees an Argentinian.
Valid or invalid? That depends. 'Sees' is often taken to be a so-called verb of success: if S sees x, then it follows that x exists. On this understanding of 'sees' one cannot see what doesn't exist. Call this the existentially loaded sense of 'sees' and contrast it with the existentially neutral sense according to which 'S sees x' does not entail 'X exists.'
If 'sees' is understood in the existentially loaded way, then the second argument is valid, whether or not Tom knows that the Pope is Argentinian. For if Tom sees the Pope, then the object seen exists. But nothing can exist without properties, properties most of which are had independently of our mental states. If the object has the property F-ness, then the perceiver sees an F-thing, even if he doesn't see it as an F-thing. So Tom sees an Argentinian despite not seeing him as an Argentinian.
Now seeing in the existentially loaded sense might seem to be a perfectly good example of an intentional or object-directed state since one cannot see without seeing something. One cannot just see. Seeing takes an object.
But whether existentially loaded seeing is an intentional state depends on what all enters into the definition of an intentional state. Now one mark of intentionality is aspectuality. What I am calling aspectuality is what John Searle calls "aspectual shape":
I have been using the term of art, "aspectual shape," to mark a universal feature of intentionality. It can be explained as follows: Whenever we perceive anything or think about anything, we always do so under some aspects and not others. These aspectual features are essential to the intentional state; they are part of what makes it the mental state that it is. (The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 156-157)
The phrase I bolded implies that no intentional state is such that every aspect of the object is before the mind of the person in the state. Suppose you see my car. You won't help being able to see it is as bright yellowish-green sport-utility vehicle. But you could easily see it without seeing it as a 2013 Jeep Wrangler. I take this to imply that the set of perceived aspects of any object of perception not only can be but must be incomplete. This should be obvious from the fact that, as Husserl liked to point out, outer perception is essentially perspectival. For example, all sides of the car are perceivable, but one cannot see the car from the front and from the rear simultaneously.
This aspectuality holds for intentional states generally. To coin an example, one can believe that a certain celestial body is the Evening Star without believing that it is the Morning Star. One can want to drink a Manhattan without wanting to drink a mixture of bourbon, sweet vermouth, and Angostura bitters. As Searle says, "Every belief and every desire, and indeed every intentional phenomenon, has an aspectual shape." (157)
Intentional states are therefore not only necessarily of something; they are necessarily of something as something. And given the finitude of the human mind, I want to underscore the fact that even if every F is a G, one can be aware of x as F without being aware of x as G. Indeed, this is so even if necessarily (whether metaphysically or nomologically) every F is a G. Thus I can be aware of a moving object as a cat, without being aware of it as spatially extended, as an animal, as a mammal, as an animal that cools itself by panting as opposed to sweating, as my cat, as the same cat I saw an hour ago, etc.
But now it seems we have a problem. If that which is (phenomenlogically, not spatially) before my mind is necessarily property-incomplete, then either seeing is not existentially loaded, or existentially loaded seeing is not an intentional state. To put the problem as an aporetic tetrad:
1. If S sees x, then x exists
2. Seeing is an intentional state
3. Every intentional state has an aspectual shape: its object is incomplete
4. Nothing that exists is incomplete.
The limbs of the tetrad are collectively logically inconsistent. Any three of them, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one. For example, the conjunction of the first three limbs entails the negation of the fourth.
But while the limbs are collectively inconsistent, they are individually very plausible. So we have a nice puzzle on our hands. At least one of the limbs is false, but which one? I don't think that (3) or (4) are good candidates for rejection. That leaves (1) or (2).
I incline toward the rejection of (1). Seeing is an intentional state but it is not existence-entailing. My seeng of x does not entail the existence of x. What one sees (logically) may or may not exist. There is nothing in or about the visual object that certifies that it exists apart from my seeing it. Existence is not an observable feature. The greenness of the tree is empirically accessible; its existence is not.
It is of course built into the intentionality of outer perception that what is intended is intended as existing whether or not the act or intentio exists. To put it paradoxically (and I owe this formulation to Wolfgang Cramer), the object intended is intended as non-object. That is, objects of outer perception are intended as existing independently of the mental acts that 'target' them, and thus not as merely intentional objects. But there is nothing like an 'ontological argument' in the vicinity. I cannot validly infer that the tree I see exists because it is intended as existing apart from my seeing. This is is an invalid 'ontological' inference:
A. X is intended as existing independently of any and all mental acts
ergo
B. X exists.
If the above is right, then seeing is an intentional state that shares the aspectuality common to all such states. A consequence of this is a rejection of 'externalism' about outer perception: the content of the mental state I am in when I see a tree does not depend on the existence of any tree. The object-directedness of the mental state is intrinsic to it and not dependent on any extrinsic relation to a mind-independent item. To turn Putnam on his head: the meaning is precisely 'in the head.'
Are there problems with this? We shall see. Externalism is a fascinating option. But I am highly annoyed that that typical analytic philosopher, Ted Honderich, who defends a version of externalism in his book On Consciousness, makes no mention of the externalist theories of Heidegger, Sartre or Butchvarov. How typical of the analytic ignoramus, not that all 'analysts' are ignorant of the history of philosophy.
Am I committed to an uneconomical multiplication of modes of existence? I said that the following set of propositions is logically consistent:
a. Tom is thinking of a unicorn b. Unicorns do not exist in reality c. Tom's mental state is object-directed; it is an intentional state. d. The object of Tom's mental state does not exist in reality. e. The merely intentional object is not nothing. f. The merely intentional object enjoys intentional existence, a distinct mode of existence different from existence in reality.
David Brightly in a comment constructs a similar set:
By analogy with your (a)–(f) can we not also consistently assert the following?
a. This tapestry, rather beautifully, depicts a unicorn. b. Unicorns do not exist in the (C1)-sense. c. The tapestry is object-directed; it is a depictional entity. d. The object of the tapestry does not (C1)-exist. e. The merely depicted object is not nothing. f. The merely depicted object enjoys depictional existence, a distinct mode of existence different from (C1)-existence.
Likewise,
Whereas my view is that when Tom thinks of a unicorn, he is thinking of something, an item that exists merely as the object of Tom's act of thinking, but does not exist mind-independently,
has the analogy,
When the tapestry depicts a unicorn, it is depicting something, an item that exists merely as the object of the tapestry's depicting, but does not exist tapestry-independently.
Three points.
First, the intentionality of Tom's thinking is original while the intentionality of the tapestry is derivative. The tapestry is not intrinsically intentional, but derives its intentionality from a mind's taking of the merely physical object as a picture or image of something else. By itself, the tapestry depicts nothing. It is just a piece of cloth.
Given the first point, my second is that there are not two kinds of intentionality or object-directedness, but only one, the intentionality of the viewer of the tapestry who takes it as representing something, a unicorn. 'Derivative' in 'derivative intentionality' is an alienans adjective.
Third, if there are not two kinds of intentionality, then there is no call to distinguish, in addition to (C1)-existence (real existence) and intentional existence, depictional existence.
In this way I think I can avoid multiplying modes of existence by the multiplicity of types of physical things (scribbles on paper, trail markers, grooves in vinyl, etc.) that can be taken to represent something.
