An Argument of Russell Against Mental Acts

Bertrand Russell's (1872-1970) The Analysis of Mind first appeared in 1921.  Lecture I contains a discussion of Brentano, Meinong, and mental acts.  He quotes the famous Brentano passage from the 1874 Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint, and then confesses that until very lately he believed "that mental phenomena have essential reference to objects . . .'" but that he no longer believes this. (p. 5)  One of Russell's arguments against acts is contained in the following passage:

. . . the act seems unnecessary and fictious. [. . .] Empirically, I cannot discover anything corresponding to the supposed act; and theoretically I cannot see that that it is indispensable.  We say: "I think so-and-so," and this word "I" suggests that thinking is the act of a person.  Meinong's "act" is the ghost of the subject, or what once was the full-blooded soul.  It is supposed that thoughts cannot just come and go, but need a person to think them. (p. 6)

Russell is making three claims.  The first is phenomenological: acts are not given to introspection.  The second is dialectical:  there are no arguments or considerations that make plausible the positing of acts.  The third is genetic:  the reason some believe that there are acts is because they have been bamboozled by the surface grammar of sentences like 'I want a unicorn' or 'I see at tree' into the view that when thinking takes place there is an agent who performs an act upon an object. 

The Phenomenology of the Situation

What is involved in the awareness of the lamp on my desk?  Phenomenologically, as it seems to me, there is awareness of (i) the lamp and of (ii) being aware of the lamp.  At a bare minimum, then,  we need to distinguish between the object of awareness and the awareness of the object.  Both items are phenomenologically accessible.  There is straightforward awareness of the lamp if it is seen or imagined or remembered, whereas the awareness of the lamp is given to introspection.  Of course, the awareness does not appear alongside the lamp as a separate object.  Being aware of the awareness of a lamp is not like being aware of a lamp being next to a clock.  And yet, phenomenologically, there is awareness of the lamp and awareness of the awareness of the lamp. Notice that I didn't smuggle in any ego or subject of awareness in my description.  So far, then, we are on solid phenomenological ground: there are objects of awareness, there is awareness of objects, and there is awareness that the two are different.  This is the phenomenological bare minimum.

But of course this does not show that there are mental acts.  For the bit of phenomenology that I have just done is consistent with the subjectlessness of awareness. If awareness is subjectless, as Sartre et al. have maintained against Husserl et al., then it cannot be articulated into individual acts of awareness  unless some individuating/differentiating factor can be specified.  But there seems to be no phenomenological evidence of such a factor. 

Well, let's see.  There is awareness of the lamp; there is awareness of the clock; there is awareness of the books piled up on the desk, etc.  But awareness appears 'diaphanous,' to borrow a word from G. E. Moore's 1903 "The Refutation of Idealism."  The diaphanousness of awareness is a phenomenological feature of it.  This being so, there is no phenomenological evidence of any act-articulation on the side of awareness.  All the articulation and differentiation appear on the side of the object.  But aren't there differences among seeing a lamp, imagining a lamp, and remembering a lamp?  No doubt, but why must they be act-differences?  It is consistent with the phenomenology of the situation that these differences too fall on the side of the object.  Instead of saying that there are acts of imagination and acts of memory, one could say that there are imaginal objects and memorative objects.

The point, then, is that phenomenology alone cannot justify the positing of mental acts. So Russell does have a point with respect to his first claim.   Phenomenology needs dialectical supplementation.

The Dialectics of the Situation

Being aware of a centaur and being aware of a mermaid are of course different.  This difference is phenomenologically evident.  But what differentiates them if there are no mental acts?  Not the objects, since they don't exist, and not the awarenesses since they are one and not two on the assumption that there are no mental acts.  And if there are no mental acts, then there are no subjects of mental acts.  And yet there must be something that accounts for the difference between awareness of a centaur and awareness of a unicorn.  The denier of acts seems at this point forced to embrace a Meinongian theory of beingless items.  He could say that the centaur-awareness and the mermaid-awareness are numerically different in virtue of the fact that a centaur and a mermaid are distinct denizens of Meinong's realm of Aussersein.

To this I respond that there are no beingless items.  The realm of Aussersein is empty.  (The arguments cannot be trotted out here.)  Hence there is no Meinongian way out.  I conclude that we are justified in positing mental acts to account for the difference.  I gave this argument already in more detail in my recent reconstruction  of an argument from Laird Addis for mental acts.

I conclude that Russell is wrong in his second claim.  If the argument I gave is sound, then acts are theoretically indispensable. 

Russell's Genetic Claim

This is fairly weak inasmuch as Russell seems not to appreciate the distinction between a mental act and a mental action.  An action is the action of an agent  who performs the action.  But a mental act is merely an occurrent episode of intentional awareness.  As such, it needn't be anchored in a substantial self.  One could reject substance ontologies as Bergmann does while admitting mental acts.  There is nothing in the notion of a mental act that requires that the subject of the act be a substance that exists self-same over time. 

What Do We Have to Teach the Muslim World? Reflections Occasioned by the Death of Maria Schneider

Alg_maria_schneider I was one of those who saw "Last Tango in Paris" when it was first released, in 1972.  I haven't seen it since and I don't remember anything specific about it except one scene, the scene you remember too, the 'butter scene,' in which the Marlon Brando character sodomizes the Maria Schneider character.  Maria Schneider died last week at 58 and indications are that her exploitation by Brando and Bertolucci scarred her for life.

Islamic culture is in many ways benighted and backward, fanatical and anti-Enlightenment, but our trash culture is not much better. Suppose you are a Muslim and you look to the West.  What do you see? Decadence.  And an opportunity to bury the West. 

If Muslims think that our decadent culture is what Western values are all about, and something we are trying to impose on them, then we are in trouble.  They do and we are.

Militant Islam's deadly hatred of us should not be discounted as the ravings of lunatics or psychologized away as a reflex of envy at our fabulous success. For there is a kernel of insight in it that we do well to heed. Sayyid Qutb , theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, who visited the USA at the end of the '40s, writes in Milestones (1965):

     Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance
     at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms,
     wine bars and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for
     naked flesh, provocative pictures, and sick, suggestive statements
     in literature, the arts, and mass media! And add to all this the
     system of usury which fuels man's voracity for money and engenders
     vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to
     fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law.

A wild exaggeration in 1965, the above statement is much less of an exaggeration today. But setting aside the hyperbole, we are in several  ways a sick and decadent society getting worse day by day. On this score, if on no other, we can learn something from our Islamist critics. The fact that a man wants to chop your head off does not mean that he has nothing to teach you.  We often learn more from our enemies than from our friends.  Our friends often will spare us hard truths.

Companion post: What Ever Happened to Linda Lovelace?

“Philosophy Bakes No Bread”

It helps to be armed with ready ripostes to what the thoughtless will throw at you in the course of life.  What do you say in response to "Philosophy bakes no bread"?

1.  Philosophy bakes no bread. It bakes bliss instead.

2. Though philosophy bakes no bread, it is the mill that separate the wheat from the chaff of human experience.

3. Man does not live by bread alone.

4.  While it is true that philosophy bakes no bread, it is the press that converts the grapes of experience into the wine of wisdom.  Better to be drunk with wisdom than stuffed with bread.

5.  Philosophy does indeed bake bread, it is just that the bread it bakes is panem supersubstantialis and not panem quotidianis.

Irreconcilable Differences

Accept that there are differences among people that are nonnegotiable and irreconcilable.  We are not all the same at bottom.  We do not all want the same things.  We are not equal physically or intellectually or morally or spiritually.  For example, bellicosity is as it were hard-wired into some.  They like fighting and marauding, raping and pillaging.  Don't make the mistake of projecting into others your attitudes and values.  That is a characteristic and lethal error of pacifists and others.

Do you value peace and reconciliation?  Do you aspire to live and let live?  Well, jihadis don't.  Are you kind and forgiving to the woman caught in adultery?  Well, a majority of Egyptians want the adulteress stoned to death.  Do you admire those who are reasonable and conciliatory?  Do you take such traits to be evidence of strength?  Well, a majority in the Middle East do not.  They takes such traits as evidence of weakness. 

An Argument for Mental Acts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

This just over the transom:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead

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

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

 

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

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

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

My Grunt Jobs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pseudo-Oxymorons

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

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

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