I’ve hurt my back, so I aim to rant a little.
When I teach critical reasoning just about the first thing I teach is the principle of charity. It has many formulations:
This policy calls on us to fit our own propositions (or our own sentences) to the other person’s words and attitudes in such a way as to render their speech and other behavior intelligible. This necessarily requires us to see others as much like ourselves in point of overall coherence and correctness—that we see them as more or less rational creatures mentally inhabiting a world much like our own. [Donald Davidson]
In its simplest form, it holds that (other things being equal) one’s interpretation of another speaker’s words should minimize the ascription of false beliefs to that speaker. [The Oxford Companion to Philosophy]
This [P of C] says that if interpreting as reasoning a passage which is not obviously reasoning yields only bad arguments, assume it is not reasoning. (The rationale for this approach is that we are interested in finding out the truth about things rather than in scoring points off people.) [Alec Fisher]
There are many other quotations, for which I am indebted to Neil Thomason. However, the general point is that, when arguing with somebody, and they say something that seems on the face of it silly, try to reframe the statement so it makes the maximum amount of reasonable sense – that is, if the person’s statement can be reasonably interpreted in a coherent manner, do so.
We often interpret people as saying something that is truly silly in order to deprecate the arguments they make (this is called erecting a straw man, on the grounds that it is easy to knock a straw man down*). Consider what that implies about you: you do not use reason to find out try things, you use it to win arguments and reassure yourself. It isn’t knowledge that you seek but comfort and smugness.
Argument is supposed to give you a true conclusion if the premises are true and the argument is valid (technically, this is called a sound argument – but the term “sound” has, like so many other good terms, been hijacked by propagandists for rhetorical rather than rational purposes). This means that it is a way to work out what believing in true statements commits you to further believing, if you are a reasonable person. When you take the premises of observation that biological things vary more or less randomly in heritable ways, for example, it is a short but sound argument to the conclusion that, unless something intervenes to prevent it, all populations of living things are evolving. A rational person should believe that conclusion, because if the facts are true, the conclusion must be.
But if you try to leap onto missing premises or steps in the argument (an argument missing parts that are implied of assumed and which would be needed to make it truly sound or valid, is called an enthymeme, a term used by Aristotle, of course), just to score a point, you are not seeking truth, nor wanting to be rational.
What triggered this elementary introduction to reasoning is the way some (well meaning) commenters on this blog addressed my claim that there are no qualia. A quale, in philosophy of mind, is a feeling or experience, the “what it is to be like”, that cannot be reduced to a physical description. For example, Thomas Nagel’s famous paper “What it is like to be a bat” argues that we can know everything about the sensorium of bats, but not what it is like to be a bat with sonar. Likewise, Frank Jackson’s paper “Epiphenomenal Qualia” argues that a super scientist Mary in her room, which does not have any red light or colour, can know everything there is to know about light, vision and neurology associated with seeing red, and yet, when she is finally released and sees red for the first time, she experiences something she did not know.
This amounts to the claim that there is an ontological difference between the objective world, and the subjective world, a view that has deep roots, but is mostly associated with Kant and his heirs and successors. The term qualia (the plural of quale) indicates that we have experiential or phenomenological properties that are simply not reducible to factual statements (usually of physics, but you can take it in other ways, so long as the facts are objective).
For someone who thinks the world comprises one domain of being like me (I am an out and out physicalist), this presents a problem. David Chalmers dubbed this (inadvertently, I think) the Hard Problem (as opposed to the hard problems of building or simulating brains): how to account for consciousness in a physical universe. Qualia, phenomena, self-awareness, and so forth form a cluster of concepts that a monist/physicalist like me has to account for. They are assumed by many as truisms. Jackson and others give what I consider are question begging arguments for them, but at least they give arguments.
So, when I deny the existence of qualia and/or consciousness/the self, how should I be read? Assume I am not an idiot, just for argument’s sake. How might you read my claim? Well you might apply the Principle of Charity here and try to figure out what I am doing. You might ask “Where does Wilkins do a logical dance to get to this conclusion?” instead of saying “Wilkins is an idiot and a fool to deny what we all know to be true.” What we all know is in general terms a very good indicator to what is false.
You might think: “Wilkins must either have an argument that experience does not lead to the conclusion there are qualia or there is a self, or he must deny the premises that there are raw feels, or both”. And you would be right. I do both. On the one hand I assert that contrary to the widely held view, there is only a purely verbal existence of raw experience. In short, we have these words “feeling”, “experience” and “awareness”, and so we just sort of assume there are feelings, experiences and awareness in these special ways. Instead, I think that we can use the words without committing ourselves to the folk ontology† as we do things that “feel”, “experience” and “aware” refer to. These are, of course, objective processes, even if we can’t directly inspect them without killing the subject.
On the other hand I deny that having an experience is itself a reason to believe in qualia/consciousness. Instead I think we are all P-zombies anyway. Remember, a P-Zombie is just like you and me in every physical and behavioural respect, only without qualia or consciousness. You cannot tell, nor can they, that they lack these. They report pain and every other experience under the right circumstances.
So qualia are not objective, right enough. Now suppose that it happens that in this world, we are all P-zombies, but do not know it. Instead we all only think we have qualia (why? because language often leads us to think things that aren’t true, as Wittgenstein often said). We cannot tell that we do not. This is a thought experiment, but it has a sting: I am not merely giving it as a hypothetical, I am saying that we have no reason not to think it is the case.
Everybody has experiences, and because everybody is in a unique situation, both bodily, location wise, and circumstances, every experience is unique to the timeline of that individual. So I must assert that experiences are unique. There is only a “what it is like to be Wilkins” available to Wilkins, except in terms of general classes of experience (suffering pain from pulled lower backs comes immediate to mind right now), which are quite addressable as objective phenomena.
But this doesn’t license the ontological claim of the separate reality of the subjective. To be a subject in my view of the world is just to have a perspective, as I argued before. It is to be this thing, here, now. I’m not denying that you have these experiences, only that they mean there is a subjective world separate from and irreducible to the physical objective measurable world.
To return for a second to the Principle of Charity, one commentator exhibited a common response, often seen when scientists criticise philosophy: attacking the fact that there is a term of art in philosophy that means what the non-philosopher thinks is contrary to intuition or “common knowledge”. Qualia was defined as a term of philosophy to mean irreducible experience. By denying that experience is irreducible I must, perforce, deny that qualia exist. I could redefine it to mean “experience” but we already have a word for that: “experience”.
Philosophers often seem to the outside as if they are quibbling over meanings and splitting hairs. Meanings, of course, matter, and calling something “mere semantics” to a linguist will get you a well deserved rap on the knuckles, but philosophers do a fair bit more than that. They also reconstruct the arguments necessary to make usages of words rational, or try to show that the arguments fail to do this. We do it in the name of truth, even if a certain number just enjoy playing the game the way a tennis star plays tennis, by stretching the rules as far as they will go for competitive advantage.
And finally, here’s a thing: scientists, skeptics, religious believers, politicians, economists and every other group of people also do precisely this, although they usually do it poorly. Consider how bad reasoning led to the Iraq invasion. Imagine how much better the world would be, if the intelligence analysts to a person had used good reasoning skills. Deprecate philosophy at your peril, oh smug ones!
Okay, the pain killers have kicked in and my back is no longer driving my expression of bile and bitterness, so I will sign off for now. As Craig Ferguson says, I look forward to your letters.
* Straw men are not sexist, or if they are, it is insulting to my own gender, and so I am entitled to use it. I reject straw persons. There are no straw women.
† Another point that I made in comments is that I don’t think this is a folk ontology. Instead I think it is a cultural construct, and we find “instances” of it elsewhere because that’s how we read prior cultural history. I think the default ontology is monistic. For example, the pre-Hellenic Jews thought there was only bodily existence, and no soul. I would think that the notion there is “consciousness” in a self-standing fashion is a construct of late medieval and early modern philosophy that has found its way into broader culture. I don’t even think that this view exists in the Vedic tradition, although I am not expert enough to show this.
I like Chomsky’s critique of physicalism best: that it’s redundant, given that we already have naturalism, to add additional criteria to what is or isn’t investigable. If a phenomenon displays regularity that we can quantify, who cares whether or not it’s “physical”? (I think Rorty takes a similar tack.)
I think the argument people are asking you (John) to make here is the one that would justify equating ontologically real entities with res extensa. What is it about money, dactylic hexameter, Valentine’s Day, buyer’s remorse, justice, or the “self” that makes them uniquely “unreal?” It’s true that through analysis we can see they are made up of constituent phenomena, but so is a lobster, a lump of coal, or a radio wave. Isn’t the body every bit as much an “illusion” as the mind, given that it appears to us as a solid, stable, persistent thing, when in fact it is constantly exchanging matter and energy with its environment (while still alive anyway), and that at the atomic and subatomic level it is mostly empty space. In fact almost every commonsense statement we could make about a body is going to be found false if we analyze it deeply enough that its “middle world” properties vanish.
Why, then, privilege “physical” illusions over social or conceptual ones?
I don’t think money, dactylic hexameter, Valentine’s Day, buyer’s remorse, justice, or the “self” are not physical. In fact I think they all are if they are not mistakes. But a separate, self-subsistent, unitary self that is not physical (identical with the body and its behaviours and context) is unreal because it is a mistake of language. IMO.
I know what you mean here. (PoC.) Concepts like “justice” supervene on physical substrates (brain states, endocrine states). And that’s fine. (Though I would prefer you don’t go so far to say that justice itself is physical. It’s not, just as money is not.)
What I’m not clear on is why, if your benchmark for an illusion is that something be “dynamic, fractured, and transitory,” that you don’t apply the word equally to physical phenomena, such as neurons. It is one thing to say that social and conceptual entities (as well as qualia) arise from the “physical” world. It is another to say that they are thereby less “real.” Are there other grounds that distinguish the real and the illusory that haven’t yet entered the discussion?
Put another way, how do we properly deal with “misplaced concreteness,” when there is nothing which is not subject to analytic dissolution? (Unless the only “real” entities are quarks.)
p.s I have never heard of the laws of charity before but I do not see how you could engage in fieldwork without observing them. So I see a very strong Anthropological theme running through this aspect of philosophy. The language is odd but the thought certainly appears very clear.
It is a privilege to be allowed into peoples lives and observe them at such an intimate level. It demands considerable trust. particularly in matters relating to belief, to have people open up in such a way to an outsider and expose a deeply held part of what they are to a very different perspective. They are offering you a gift and you see the extent to which reciprocity is such a part of these very human concerns.
I think that human beings are social animals and that all our significations are therefore constructed socially, yes. One might call that anthropology, but I think honouring my asseverations with such a lofty term is doing me too much credit.
I always see potential in things and can run far away with them.
I spent a highly enjoyable few hours after reading this, ended thinking of a very rare thing from a very far away time and place.
“pleasant to me the sunshine for the way it glitters on these margins”
Change “mistake” to “product” and I’m basically with you. I say product, because I think there is a great deal of utility to the concept of self-subsistent unitary self. But, you’ll have to take my word for it.
I find the general arguments for physicialism convincing, but I must admit I’m at a loss when it comes to reconciling that with experience. To say qualia in the irreducible sense doesn’t exist, to me, just changes the framing of the question rather than dissolving the problem. Experience as reducible to brain activity leaves out just what that experience is. I’m happy to say I don’t know and leave it is a mystery to be worked on, but I do feel susceptible to arguments to dualism that focus on experience as their starting point. If I’m to apply the principle of charity to their arguments, as I try to do, is there merit in reductio ad absurdum between experience and physicialism?
I just want to be clear that I don’t think qualia “are” “real”. I think qualia “is” “real” for physicalism. The whole idea of qualia arose in the philosophy of mind under physical assumptions. It is essentially a “problem” or “excess” for physicalists. I do not reify that excess in order to deny it – (some) physicalists do that.
Qualia as “actual” like physicalism as “actual” is a symptom of a self-conceptualisation that believes in some totality of itself (the timeless aspect), being actual in the un-resolution of time (belief in the reality of the temporal signification). That is the basic confusion. It all comes back to language. Does language ever denote something timeless? I have no reason at all to expect that. Language is only a tool for a greater expansion of the overall mystery until it achieves the proper dimensionality for some type of culmination/collective resolution.
Now the problem of non-existence of “self” may be connected with the deep influence of English language upon the unconciousness and the thinking itself.
Consider “Cogito, ergo sum” – do you see there any explicit reference to self, or better Ego? Actually the subject is hidden (ego cogito/are). The same for other synthetical languages, like Slovakian: “Myslím, teda som”. Now we have analytical languages like German „Ich denke, also bin ich“ where the “Ich” seems to be central, as it stresses or focus our attention to the meaning of the sentence.
And now English : “I think, therefore I am.” Here “I” seems to have only syntactical meaning and actually doesn´t evoke any other ideas or “neben-vorstellungen”. Kantian philosopher Anton Marty put it clearly in his treatise on the sentences where subjects are missing – Ueber subjektlose satzes:
“Dadurch geschähe es, dass neben der Vorstellung des Zeichens sich eine Nebenvorstellung von der Position desselben im System bildete, und diese Vor stellung wurde oft die erste vermitteln. Aber es wäre dies nur
ein Schatten der inneren Sprachform, wie sie die Volkssprache
aufweist.”
What about Issac Asimov positronic thinking? Ages since I read any but I discovered another way of thinking here.
/Rant begin/
It’s as if I have hit a brick wall that is absurd.
That philosophers are very skilled and effective at being ‘objective’ is fine. It’s great. The advantages and desirable consequences derived though meticulous care at being objective has amply demonstrated itself. I gladly accept and defer to those who far more skilled and knowledgeable with regard to objectivity than myself.
In a similar manner, there shouldn’t be any shame disrespect of however one puts it in considering or suggesting that those who are very capable at objective reasoning aren’t automatically skillful, nor experienced, nor even especially interested in ‘subjective experience’.
It is probably OK to suppose that those who are very capable at objective experience might not be so good with ‘subjective experience’ or rather ‘cognitive science’
A lot of very intelligent experienced and skillful objective thinkers have made their way into ‘cognitive science’. That is a good thing! Objectivity is very desirable and effective in .. in let’s suppose every topic
Yet what seems to have been taking place in ‘psychology’ … (if it has indeed taken place …) is absurd and tragic.
Psychology seems to have moved strongly in the direction of insisting that it be extremely ‘objective’.
That means that there is overwhelming representation of the ‘objective’ viewpoint and experience. That means that there is an intense overbearing insistence that the study of ‘subjective experience’ must be performed and reported from a fastidiously ‘objective’ viewpoint.
‘Subjective experience’ has been disenfranchised of representation and stripped of all credibility.
‘Subjective experience’ is pure illusion
‘Subjective experience’ is certain and absolute fallacy.
The non-existential status of ‘Subjective experience’ has been made into dogma.
I am utterly flabbergasted at this decrepit state of science.
Of course, psychology might not be that way at all … I have become extremely poorly connected. Yet notwithstanding as much, the message that ‘subjectivity’ is worthless and the question has been settled … comes at me from multiple directions with increasing occurrence as time passes.
Ok Philosophers cannot handle ‘subjective experience’. They have done magnificently with objective concerns. I will accommodate their limitation.
Now that psychologists show the same absolute intransigence … and also show harder and more severe intolerance.
Well, maybe it’s time to call them stupid.
I feel very sorry, very dismayed and very sad and somewhat annoyed. People who make it their profession to study psychology ought to know better than they seem to be doing.
With caveats that I don’t know the first thing about psychology … I admit that … but if psychologists cannot accept a certain primacy to subjective experience .. then to heck with them. They are of no use to me.
/Rant finished/