Do Babies have Concepts?

Or are they just a jumbled garble of sensations lacking any purported intentional or representational content? Or something in between?

I recently found myself in a discussion defending the thesis that cuddly babies and cute puppies and fuzzy gorillas do not have concepts. Denying that they have concepts of course a fortiori denies that they have beliefs, and thus anything like knowledge, and further, anything like a world-view. I'm not sure that I'm convinced by my own cobbled-together argument, but here is the core of it:

Let's admit that babies and doggies have perceptual capacities that allow them to discriminate among and, in some loose sense, to classify objects in their environment. A dog, I was told, being trained not to poop in the living room at home, will not poop in the living room of a neighbor's house. The lesson here is that the dog recognizes certain salient and genearl features common to living rooms. What could this 'recognition of general salient features' be other than something like recognition according to the concept 'living room'? Similarly, babies 'know' that it is mommy or daddy who is holding them, not someone else.

I don't deny any of this. I am more skeptical about the baby than about the dog (the baby, I can well imagine, is just reponding in some phylogenetically appropriate way to a range of feel-good mommy-and-daddy stimuli; it is not recognizing anything 'as' anything; it coos and caws and gurgles just like I would if you tickled my tummy). The question, however, is whether this discriminating, loosely classificatory capacity enjoyed by infants and monkeys and canines really amounts to something we should call a concept.

First off, to say this seems to commit one to the position that concepts make sense outside of propositional content and propositional attitudes. It is, in effect, to assume the buliding-block semantics Wittgenstein criticized in Philosophical Investigations. Thus, to accept that babies have concepts is to deny, in some important respect, holism. Of course many would like very much to do so, but it is at least problematic.

Secondly, as long as one does accept the Wittgensteinian position, and accepts therefore either a truth-conditional or verificationist semantics, the thesis seems wholly implausible. For in this case it is impossible to individuate and identify conceptual contents outside of the relevant propositional structures and attitudes in which they play a role. In other words, anything like a concept must be defined by some specficiable function it is to play in a propositional structure, and this in turn is something to which a truth predicate applies. Either purported baby-concepts are defined by a propositional role or not. If so, then one is ascribing more than concepts, but also propositions, and thus propositional attitudes and hence beliefs to babies. If not, then can one make sense of the idea of applying a truth-predicate to one of these 'concepts'? Can these concepts be false?

Thirdly, if one does not adopt the Wittgensteinian theory, then it seems that one has to adopt some version of mentalese, and this is problematic for all the reasons Quine and Davidson and Sellars, et. al., have been saying it is problematic for over fifty years.

In short, I guess I was arguing that one can admit that something has the capacity to discriminate, classify, and in some loose snese, recognize objects, without needing to say that such a capacity requires positing concepts. Concept capacity, I would say, should be reserved for those beings able to form true or justified beliefs about itself, its environment, or others. I'm sure what to call what it that babies and animals have or can do, but its probably not concepts or conceptual capacities.

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Externalism and Self-Knowledge

Several items I’ve been doting upon recently concern incompatibilism. Incompatibilism is the thesis that a priori self-knowledge and externalism are incompatible. A priori self-knowledge would be knowledge of the content of an occurrent mental state that I can obtain simply by reflecting upon that state, without the need to examine my cultural or natural environment. Externalism is the idea that the content of at least some of my mental states is a function of the environment I happen to be in, whether I know it or not; ie. English speakers have for centuries been referring to water, but only in the last century or so have we been in any position to say meaningfully just what it is that we are referring to when we refer to water. If externalism is true, then one could not have knowledge about the content of one’s occurrent mental state without consulting one’s environment. Thus a priori self-knowledge--the idea that one could have such knowledge without such consultation--is incompatible with externalism for at least some thoughts.

Let me first get rid of the ‘for at least some thoughts’ qualifier. If externalism is true about the meaning of ‘at least some thoughts,’ it probably needs to be true for all thoughts. In order for this not to be the case, one would have come up with criteria delimiting contents that could be known simply by reflecting upon them from those which could be known only through consultation with the environment. For reasons that I won’t get into now, I find this to be unlikely.

Back to the main argument: the problem with semantic externalism is that, if true, one cannot tell for sure what one is thinking without consulting the environment. Am I thinking about water or twater? Well, it depends on the world in which I happen to be. I may believe that I am thinking about water, only subsequently to discover that I’m actually on Twin Earth and therefore that I’m really thinking about twater. Such would be the case for all of my own beliefs about what I am thinking. Without some sort of empirical investigation into the world that I am thinking about, I might not know what I am thinking at all. That’s weird.

In my previous post I said that I would apply McDowell’s argument for the intrinsic intentionality of mental states to the issue of incompatibilism. Here goes. When it comes to knowing what I mean, there surely are more options than these:

(a) I know directly and apriori the meaning of my thought.
(b) I can discover the meaning of my thought only through empirical investigation, by discovering the relevant features of my environment that function as the meaning-relevant truth-conditions of that thought.

Much of the dispute between compatibilism and incompatibilism assumes that these are the two options. This is greatly restrictive.

Consider that I am thinking about the square root of two. A cursory familiarity with number theory let’s me know that I really have no firm understanding what I mean when I think the square root of two. That rules out (a). But for definitional reasons, there is no empirical field to be had where I could venture out to ‘discover’ what the world holds in regard to this thought. This rules out (b). I rather have to think through my thought. And this is not just the case with strange thoughts like the square root of two. For in fact, I would say that we very rarely are completely clear on just what it is that we are thinking or meaning. For further proof, just consider this question: are you happy?

This then is the problem with the dispute over incompatibilism: it is the assumption that ‘reflection’ or ‘introspection’ is a sort of looking inward in just the same way that seeing is a ‘looking outward.’ But this is a bad analogy. And this is McDowell’s point: if thoughts are intrinsically intentional, that means that they are intrinsically ‘deep.’ This is a metaphorical way of putting his insight that the ‘contents’ of our thoughts are not something that, once clear on, we have the further burden of comparing to the world; for the content of our thinking just is the world. I think that this is clear once we disabuse ourselves of our Cartesian prejudices.

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Are Mental States Intrinsically Intentional?

Discussing the problem of reference in his book on Husserl and Frege, Michael Dummett complains that for Husserl “the intentionality of mental acts was so axiomatic…that he perceived no necessity to demonstrate it in particular cases.” (Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Chapter 6, p55). Thus, whereas Frege developed a sophisticated if flawed theory of saturation in order to account for the meaningfulness of partial or incomplete expressions, Husserl--taking it for granted that any meaningful expression intrinsically enjoyed objective reference--failed even to problematize the issue. Since every thought, including partial thoughts, is intentional, and all intentional states have directness or reference (Bedeutung), there is no need to account for the specific reference of partial acts.

Dummett’s right. Husserl did take it for granted that mental acts are intrinsically and primitively intentional. I’m not going to argue here over whatever implications this might have for a Husserlian theory of reference (although Dummett is wrong that Husserl never saw this as a problem). I would like instead to consider the more fundamental gripe: can we assume that mental states are intrinsically intentional?

On the one hand, it seems obvious that we should. For what would it mean to speak about a belief, or perception, or desire that ignored what that belief, perception or desire were about. If we cannot think of what a belief, perception or desire would be like without it being about something—without it being intentional—then this is probably a good indication that mental states like beliefs, desires and perceptions are intrinsically (even ‘axiomatically’) intentional.

On the other hand, as Putnam points out, there’s a strong whiff of magical thinking somewhere in here. In that great Intro article of lore, “Brains in a Vat,” Putnam asks, suppose that the tracks of an ant happen to spell out WINSTON CHURCHILL, would this mark mean Winston Churchill? Certainly not by itself. But if marks and noises do not meaning anything ‘in themselves,’ what could it be, other than some magical mystery property, about thoughts (or brain states) such that they are intrinsically representational, ie intentional?

Putnam’s answer we know is that no mental state as such is intrinsically representational; there is no way to determine what a state represents simply from of features intrinsic to that state. The famous Twin Earth Gedankenexperiment is directed at precisely this point. What matters rather is how that state stands vis-à-vis its environment, and specifically, the causal lineage of that state in terms of its environment.

McDowell I think has an interesting response to this, one which, if plausible, lends support to Husserl. In “Putnam on Mind and Meaning,” McDowell argues that Putnam is led to deny an intrinsic intentionality to mental states because he sticks to a false dilemma regarding the following two claims: a) to know what a mental state means (represents) is wholly a matter of knowing about the subject’s mind; and b) that meaning determines extension. Since, as the Twin Earth Gedankenexperiment shows, two subject’s can be qualitatively indistinguishable by what we know from (a) but differ according to (b), Putnam thinks that we are forced to abandon (a) if we want to retain (b).

However, this is only because of Putnam’s unstated commitment to a psychologically “narrow” interpretation of (a), that is, the idea that a mental state...

“must in itself consist in the presence in the mind of an item with an intrinsic nature characterizable independently of considering what it represents.”

Now, as McDowell emphasizes, this surely is a phenomenologically inaccurate rendering of what it means to be in a particular mental state. For it simply is not the case that, when I reflect upon the contents of my mental states all I find are sense-data, images, soundings or sensations. When I reflect, for instance, on the sound of dripping water, it requires a quite radical phenomenological conversion to consider that state simply as a sound, and not as the representing of dripping water.

McDowell's riposte to Putnam's false dilemma is to point out that the latter unjustifiably analogizes the representational powers of symbols (etchings and soundings) with the representational powers of mental states. Surely symbols do obtain their representational powers via surrogation, which is why we can describe them without reference to what they are about. But we cannot similarly do so with mental states as such, because they do enjoy their representational powers not by surrogation but intrinsically.

I think that the lesson to draw from these comments is that for too long the burden of proof has been placed upon those who, like Husserl and McDowell, want us to assume from the start that mental states are intrinsically intentional. The burden must be the other way around. If we both find it difficult if not impossible to understand clearly what a mental state might be without reference to what that state represents, and if in order to do so we must adopt a position that is quite phenomenologically artificial and, to be frank, inaccurate, then surely the problem ought to be placed upon those who insist that this is the natural place to begin. In other words, while the idea that mental states are intrinsically intentional might seem just to be an assumption, it is one I think we are still pressed to maintain until a better reason is given for dropping it, and that better reason is still wanting.

In a following post I'll try to apply some brief lessons this insight have on the issue of the seeming incompatibility of externalism and self-knowledge.

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Morality and Death: Hobbesian Immoralism (I)

In an interesting move in his Leviathan, Hobbes does not simply derive the need for a commonwealth from his account of a state of nature; he imposes first an intermediary: natural law, or morality. What is especially odd is that, although the transition from the state of nature to the commonwealth requires only two laws of nature—to seek peace and to give away one’s right in order to make peace possible (though only under the appropriate circumstances)—Hobbes articulates a further host of them, concluding that the science of these laws “is the true and only moral philosophy.” He thus seems to be articulating—or clearly takes himself to be articulating—a moral system. I want to suggest instead that it is not a moral system at all. What Hobbes articulates is not a morality that differs from some other moral systems and yet finds its place among them but, quite simply, an anti-morality. He is, in other words, the arch immoralist.

To avoid confusion from the start, I am not saying that Hobbes is an immoralist because he grounds moral laws in something heteronomous or prudential, or because he approaches morality from an empiricist standpoint. Many others have done similarly—Hume, Mill, and Aristotle, just to name a few. But none of them are immoralists. What makes Hobbes an immoralist is not just his consequentialism, but the specific end of that consequentialism, an end that is not just contingently opposed to morality, but is opposed to its very essence: the preservation of one’s own life.

But let’s be charitable now. Hobbesian morality involves natural laws, which right reason discovers as a means to our ends. But he stresses in this connection that we do not all have the same ends. In fact, the diversity of goods and evils among humanity is an important part of his argument:

Good and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions, which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men are different (XV)

This, in fact, is why the state of nature is a state of war: we all want different things, and in the state of nature every individual has his or her own, individual good and evil. This is bound to lead to conflicts. Through some extra steps, which we need not go into, the diversity of individual goods and evils is precisely the reason why the state of nature is a state of war. And, in fact, following the passage just quoted, Hobbes does derive the need for peace directly from this diversity of goods and evils. We might thus question whether Hobbesian morality has one given end. Furthermore, his morality appears heteronomous, but not at all immoralistic. But this is of course not the whole story.

The extra step occurs to us when we ask not simply why the diversity of human goods leads to a state of war, but—as if the answer were not already clear—why the state of war itself is such a bad thing and should be overcome. Moral precepts, or natural laws, are the rules that reason discovers as means to escaping the state of nature, but the need to escape the state of nature, and the fact that this need is a need for all human beings, is grounded in the fact that, ultimately, all human beings really do have the same end, the same ultimate good and evil. Hobbes’s moral framework is, in other words, aimed to be universal. The diversity of individual goods does not mean that morality is reducible to particular individual appetites; rather, this diversity is the reason why moral laws must have a universality. So what is such a universal law?

A law of nature, lex naturalis, is a precept, or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same, and to omit that by which he thinketh it may be best preserved

[These laws] are but conclusions or theorems concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves

In other words, although human beings do have a diversity of ends, the problem with this diversity is precisely that that diversity leads to a consequence—war—which opposes another end that we all share: the preservation of our lives. It is clear that Hobbes defines morality as a system of principles dictated by right reason given the purpose of preserving one’s own life. This, of course, is Hobbes’s attempt to account for the universality of moral laws: If all human beings by nature want to preserve their own lives, then the prudential principles that best lead to such preservation are universal principles. As I will discuss in the next post, Hobbes focuses on the wrong aspect of morality: what is crucial is not simply its universality (which may, after all, be contingent), but the necessity of its universality, which is why morality must be not prudential but unconditioned. This is not in itself enough to show that Hobbes is an immoralist, but we can best show this by looking at what is entailed in the idea of an unconditioned morality.

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Philosophical Approaches and their Consistentcy with the History

I have occasionally seen philosophers make the claim that the analytic approach to philosophy is consistent with the way philosophy has historically been done. With this, I wholeheartedly agree. But I object to a further implication often drawn from this claim, i.e., that the analytic approach is more consistent with the history than continental approaches. That claim, I think, is simply false. My point, however, is not that some other approach, perhaps some continental approach, is instead more consistent. It is that both approaches are consistent with the way philosophy has been done historically, though perhaps not in the same way. Whether or not one thinks a particular approach is so consistent depends on the presuppositions with which one approaches the history of philosophy, presuppositions that are themselves the presuppositions inherent in one’s approach. Thus, any claim about the superiority of one or another approach to philosophy vis à vis the history of philosophy is likely to be simply circular.

A point central to hermeneutics: understanding requires presuppositions or “prejudices” (as Gadamer calls them). When I read a text, I already have some pre-formed ideas about what a text of this kind is supposed to be saying. I will thus interpret and evaluate the text in accordance with how well it does what I think it is supposed to do. If I am trained to think of philosophy as geared towards clear and precise arguments, I will likely find that the great figures in the history of philosophy have excelled at making clear and precise arguments (though I might be forced to assume that some historical elements—like Plato’s recourse to myth in the middle of an argument—are features extraneous to philosophy and rest on a confusion of that subject with another, such as religion). The presence of bias isn’t necessarily truth-distorting: the great figures really were interested in making clear arguments! But that may not be the only thing they were interested in doing.

Looking at some of the great philosophers in the history, we might note that they were in fact interested not only in making arguments, but specifically in making arguments for the correctness of a certain framework of thought, or way of seeing the world. Plato did not simply attack particular theses of Parmenides or Heracleitus: he argued that the world could not be properly grasped in its completeness either as a static unity or as a perpetual flux. Hume rejected all claims to non-experiential knowledge and suggested committing everything else to the flames. Kant, as is well-known, attempted to reconcile rationalism with empiricism, limiting the pretensions of each side to exhaustive and true knowledge of the world. These are, of course, not the only figures we find in the history of philosophy, and it is certainly false that the entire history contains nothing but attempts to articulate an overarching system or framework; to claim that would itself be an error induced by a certain set of pre-suppositions. My point is far more modest: the way philosophy has historically been done cannot be fully described by either perspective.

That articulating an overall framework of thought is a goal of many figures in the history of philosophy is implied by Peter Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, since both types of metaphysics aim at setting up a framework of thought or way of seeing the world, though they do this in different ways. John Rawls wrote that

one of the benefits of studying historical texts—and of trying to get a sense of the writer’s view as a whole—is that we come to see how philosophical questions can take on a different cast from, and are indeed shaped by, the scheme of thought from within which they are asked. (1)

But few simply made arguments from within a pre-given “cast of thought”—rather, philosophers have generally tried to argue for the superiority of a particular cast of thought over others—a claim with which, I take it, Rawls would be in agreement.

If we look at some of the 20th century thinkers who have not belonged to the analytic tradition, we find that this concern—the concern with addressing our cast of thought—frequently takes precedence over argument. This is not to say that Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, etc., do not have arguments or think arguments to be unimportant. That is far from true. But what defines their respective projects seems to me to be primarily the articulation of a particular scheme of thought. The arguments are usually made in this context and with this goal in mind, which is why—when taken out of context—they often do not even look like arguments at all. I do not want to imply, on the other hand, that analytic philosophers are conversely uninterested in our overall schema or cast of thought—many certainly are, and most seem to me to be concerned to articulate at least a segment of our cast of thought. But this strikes me as being a secondary concern—what is primary is the laying out of arguments for a specific regional problem, and the “big picture” often follows as a secondary concern arising from the combination of these regional solutions.

My point, as I’ve stressed, is not to insist on either the superiority of one approach over the other, nor is it to suggest that one is more consistent with the way philosophy has been carried out historically than the other, and it is certainly not to provide a new way to see the tired issue of the analytic/continental divide. It is only to point out that neither side can legitimately claim to be more consistent with the history of philosophy. Anyone who cares about maintaining such consistency, furthermore, would do well to look carefully both to the arguments and their framework.

(1) John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 17.

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Evil and Akrasia in the Context of Authenticity

Davidson claimed to have been the first to separate the problem of weakness of will, or akrasia, from the moral context in which the problem is traditionally taken up. He is right to make this separation, though it is a separation that needs to be carried out consistently. Davidson’s interest is in separating out akrasia as a distinctive problem for philosophy of action. But it seems equally important from the standpoint of moral philosophy to separate the problem of akrasia from that of evil. Akrasia is not equivalent to evil, and here I want to suggest a way of distinguishing the two in a vaguely Heideggerian language.

Heidegger characterizes our being as a being thrown into the world into the midst of pre-given possibilities. Some of these possibilities we will live through; others we will bypass entirely. Some we will take up as authentic, as genuinely our own. Others we will see as foreign to our selfhood. Akrasia seems to me to involve acting on possibilities that we are living inauthentically, but which are opposed to other, authentic possibilities. For example: Let us say that I am a student and see studying as the authentic possibility of my life. Occasionally, instead of studying, I go out clubbing and drink until 5 in the morning instead of getting any work done. Let us say (there is obviously no necessity in this) that I do not see this partying as authentically my own. In other words, I see a certain kind of behavior as defining of my self, as genuinely mine, and yet I am capable of taking up a behavior that I see as foreign to who I am, to my self, and to my will. How is this possible? This, I take it, is a way of characterizing the akrasia problem.

But the problem of evil involves something different: it involves the question of how I might choose to act contrary to a law that I see as the law supremely binding on me. This law—and I am here using the Kantian model of morality—is a law that is genuinely my own insofar as I am a person. Sometimes I may be tempted to break this law, and I do so. It is, of course, possible that what is involved in my breaking the moral law is nothing but a weakness of the will; in cases of that kind we have to look for an explanation along the lines mentioned in the previous paragraph. But the more interesting question of evil is that of an evil that is specifically chosen as evil; that is, I am both aware of my obligation according to the moral law and of the fact that the choice I am making explicitly violates that law. Yet at the same time I make this choice, and do so not through any weakness, but in a fully intentional way.

The way to characterize the second problem, I think, is by seeing it as a conflict not between an authentic and an inauthentic possibility, but as a conflict between two authentic possibilities. Both the moral law and the incentive to deviate from it belong to my self. This seems like a correct characterization of moral conflict: the difficulty is not simply that I am not strong enough to act on my judgment of what is morally right, but that I myself have made the other incentive powerful enough to oppose the moral law. I have done this by making the incentive into an authentic possibility for me. Kant does sometimes imply that moral conflict boils down to a case of akrasia, which is why he defines virtue as the strength to resist non-moral incentives. But it is also clear that, for Kant, we are responsible for having chosen those non-moral incentives as powerful enough to need resisting. That the incentives opposed to the moral law are, in fact, incentives we have made our own is the pre-condition for a theory of virtue as strength.

Obviously this rough account is not sufficient to explain moral conflict: we will need, among other things, an explanation of why morality should be seen by us as authentic at all. My goal here was only to suggest a framework within which akrasia and evil can, I think fruitfully, be distinguished. Only by seeing evil as involving a choice in favor of a certain view of one’s own self, rather than a simple fleeing from the self-conception implied by the moral law, can we start to understand the sort of responsibility involved in a violation of morality.

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Ought and Can: What Implies the Implication?

The foremost question posed by libertarians to compatibilists is how a thoroughgoing determinism can leave room for moral responsibility. Another significant question, however, is how it can leave room for moral obligation, and what sort of obligation would be implied. One way to approach this question is through Frankfurt's rejection of the principle of alternative possiblities (PAP) as an obstacle in the way of making responsibility compatible with determinism. As David Widerker notes (1), it remains an open question whether Frankfurt’s rejection of (PAP) requires “renouncing the Kantian thesis that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, i.e.

(K) An agent S has a moral obligation to perform (not to perform) an act A only if S has it within his power to perform (not to perform) A.”

Whatever the virtues of this debate, it is actually very clear that Frankfurt cannot accept the Kantian thesis (though he claims he can) for the simple reason that (K) is very obviously not a correct representation of that thesis. No understanding of the English (or German) language, however charitable the interpretation, is sufficient to yield (K) as an accurate restatement of the claim that “ought” implies “can.” Instead, as the wording of the implication clearly implies, the thesis is:

(K1) If an agent S has a moral obligation to perform (not to perform) an act A, then S has it within his power to perform (not to perform) A.

Of course the two are logically equivalent, so that (K1) entails (K): if we can establish on independent grounds that S cannot perform (not perform) A, then we cannot reasonably say that S has an obligation to perform (not perform) A. For example, if there were a species of beings that were rational but literally could not avoid constantly and intentionally killing each other (so, only a little different from human beings), then they could not have an obligation not to kill each other. So doesn’t this just mean that (K1) really boils down to (K)? I don’t think so. A Kantian might question the coherence of any such thought experiment, and do so on the following Kantian grounds: to be under an obligation is to be a rational being for which reason is practical. But if reason is practical, then it follows that we are able to act on it. (K) and (K1) differ precisely in their emphasis: Kant is not trying to derive obligation from ability (an “ought” from an “is”), but to show that obligation has implications for how we must see ourselves; more specifically, for what abilities we must attribute to ourselves regardless of lack of any possible other evidence for them. This, obviously, is a very different project. Logical equivalency does not guarantee identity of meaning.

(K1) is intimately tied to a project of giving what may be seen as a libertarian spin to freedom: it is determined entirely on the basis of our obligations, and established despite the truth of determinism (which also makes it completely different from any libertarian theories around today that I am aware of). Thus we come to Frankfurt, who happens to be a compatibilist. As a compatibilist, he can accept (K). There is nothing incoherent about accepting both that (1) our abilities place limits on our obligations and (2) the extent of our abilities can be fully ascertained within the scope of the natural sciences (whether deterministic or not). But (K1) meshes only with (1); it implies—strictly implies—that (2) is at least possibly false. It follows that Frankfurt would have to reject (K1). Would he have to do it on the basis of his rejection of (PAP)? I don't see how, except insofar as his rejection of (PAP) comes with other compatibilist assumptions.

(1) “Frankfurt on ‘Ought implies Can’ and Alternative Possibilities” in Analysis, Vol. 51, No. 4. (Oct., 1991), p. 223.

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Kant on Freedom and Evil

An argument still frequently raised against Kant’s theory of freedom goes as follows: Kant seems to have two conceptions of freedom, which may be termed, following Sidgwick, the rational and the neutral conception. According to the rational conception, freedom involves acting on the moral law. It is only when we act on the moral law, the idea goes, that we are actually free of the determination of our will by natural desires. Rational freedom, then, seems necessary in order to account for our ability to act morally. The neutral conception, on the other hand, involves our choosing between good and evil; that is, knowing the law, we choose to act on it or to willingly violate it. Without this conception of freedom it becomes impossible to blame agents for their immoral actions.

The standard criticism (formulated in some way or other by Reinhold, Sidgwick, and Prauss) is that these two conceptions clearly can’t work together: either we are only free when we follow the moral law, in which case we cannot freely choose to violate it and are never responsible for immoral actions, or we are always free, in which case there seems to be no internal connection between freedom and the moral law. Nelson Potter and, more recently, Henry Allison, among others, have pointed out in response that Kant actually defines freedom as the ability to follow the moral law, which means that one can be free without ever actually acting morally, so long as one is capable of acting morally. But the misunderstanding (and criticism) keep coming back, and to address them I want to look at a passage in the Metaphysics of Morals, where Kant deals explicitly with the problem (or at least as explicitly as he ever deals with the major problems) and suggest two important consequences of this passage.

The sentence in question reads:

die Freiheit nimmermehr darin gesetzt werden kann, daß das vernünftige Subjekt auch eine wider seine (gesetzgebende) Vernunft streitende Wahl treffen kann (6:226)

Roughly:

freedom can never be located in this, that the rational subject can also make a contentious choice against his (lawgiving) reason

If we keep in mind the context—Kant is talking about the definition of freedom—this isn’t a particularly strange claim. In fact, I want to insist that it is much closer to plain common sense than to the wacky metaphysics of which Kant is sometimes accused.

Here is the first point: Kant is talking about the rational subject acting against his reason. It makes sense that freedom—as an ability of the subject—cannot be defined in this way. Why? Consider an ordinary object, like a chair. We may roughly define a chair as an object for sitting on. The definition is perhaps incomplete, but it would be a very strange mistake to complete the definition by adding that it is also possible not to sit in a chair. It is of course true that there are chairs in the world in which no one is sitting at the moment, but that is not a good reason to define a chair as an object for sitting on or not sitting on. The first part belongs to the definition of a chair, while the second part belongs to a description of how chairs are sometimes actually used in practice and has nothing to do with the definition. By adding the second clause we do not simply confuse the definition of a chair, but we in fact ensure that we are not giving a definition of it at all. “An object for sitting on or not sitting on,” you see, would be a description that does not apply in any essential way to chairs: it would also cover tables, beds, floors, elephants, other people, etc. Similarly, it would be very odd to define the freedom of a rational subject as the subject’s ability to act in accord with or in opposition to its reason. To be rational means that one’s freedom lies in the exercise of that rationality, not its abandonment.

But now let’s look at the second point: In parenthesis, Kant puts the important word “lawgiving” before the word “reason.” Why is this important? Because it seems to refute the claim by some prominent analytic Kantians (see, for example, Korsgaard’s argument in “Skepticism About Practical Reason”) that immorality is just a species of irrationality. It is not. There is, of course, something irrational in violating one’s reason. But it is not as obvious that there is something similarly irrational in violating one’s lawgiving reason. Kant is, in other words, tipping his hat to Hume’s famous quip:

‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my little finger. (Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. 2, 3, iii)

There is nothing contrary to reason in this. There is, however, something contrary to lawgiving reason. But this sort of contradiction is not a logical one: it is a contradiction between the standards set by reason, on one hand, and evil on the other.

Kant never denies that we can freely choose to act contrary to the moral law, and he does not claim that it is irrational to do so. This is implied by his account: if evil were nothing more than a species of irrationality, then we would not be responsible for our evil actions any more than we are responsible for an innocent mistake in multiplication. This raises a new difficulty, of course: how can we understand the freedom of a rational being as allowing for action contrary to lawgiving reason? I will not address the problem here. My goal has, rather, been to deal with two common misreadings by pointing out, first, that Kant’s definition of freedom in terms of the moral law does not, in fact, rule out the possibility of freely acting contrary to the law and, second, that action contrary to the law is nevertheless freely chosen and not simply an error of reasoning. The problems that remain with the conception of freedom, I believe, must thus be addressed through the problem of evil.

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Is Phenomenology Moribund? (Part II)

Alright, I finally scrunched in some time between grading logic tests to continue my argument from the previous post.

It has been argued--no, not argued really, just asserted--that phenomenology is moribund. Or at least as moribund as logical positivism. Since I work on phenomenology, I am naturally chafed by this assertion. Take that for what it's worth. I admit that phenomenology suffers from some pretty serious deficiencies, especially in questions of method ("analytic philosophy," I might interject, is not immune to this either apparently). But I also think that there's a lot to be said for it, and that many of the charges lobbed at it don't stick.

In particular, I was in the middle of arguing that phenomenology ought to be ranked along with physicalism and computational functionalism as one of the three serious approaches to the philosophy of mind. Each of these approaches models itself off a more accepted, perhaps more respectable science. Physicalism is modeled off the natural sciences (especially biology), computational functionalism off of proof-logic, computer science, robotics and AI--and phenomenology off of mathematics.

I ended the previous post by claiming that the former two, while enjoying stricter and clearer methods, are not adequate to what the mind, most likely, is. Conversely, while phenomenology suffers from a vague and discombobulated method, it is more adequate to what the mind, most likely, is. So now to that case.

Why not physicalism? Physicalism is the thesis that mental states are just states of the central nervous system. In the most radical forms (Churchlands), it is the thesis that the predicates of folk psychology are archaic left-overs from the Iron Age that will slowly drop out as we learn to talk about the brain in more precise, scientific ways. But not all physicalisms need be so radical. What they all must share is the thesis that, ultimately, to be in some 'minded' state is to be in a specifiable physical state. No mental property of a world will differ from another without a corresponding physical difference. Or, for creatures with mental states, to be in the same physical state is simply to be the same.

It should be noted that physicalism so defined is compatible with most computational functionalisms, insofar as one can be both a computational functionalist and an intentional realist. Thus to further define the physicalist theory of mind in a way which precludes its compatibility with computational functionalism, we should add the following rider: a theory is physicalist iff, per minded creatures, to be in the same physical state is simply to be the same, and physical states are not consituent.

Let me explain what I mean by ‘constituent.’ Constituency is typified by propositional states. This means that the constituent states are complex, with ‘parts’ related and defined in systematic ways. Further, these parts are solely defined by these systematic roles. If physical states are constituent, then they are constituent in just the same way that propositions are constituent. This is what computational functionalists of the intentional realist variety argue. The problem is that it does not seem remotely plausible that any physical system, qua physical (this is the important clause), could instantiate the laws of constituency. Thus, as I will shortly argue, since thoughts (the contents of the mind) are necessarily constituent, this means that it is unlikely that brain science will ever be mind science. Hence, my argument: 1) thoughts are constituent; 2) the laws of constituency violate the laws of physics, and vice versa; 3) thus, a physicalism that denies constituency a fortiori denies thoughts; 4) but there are thoughts with constituent relations; 5) hence, physicalism is false.

This sort of argument is found in Sellars, in Quine and Davidson, also in Fodor. It is the problem that Frege, Husserl and Sellars have attacked under the various banners of classical empiricism, psychologism or associationism. The primary difficulty these latter suffer is logical. When modern day physicalism stopped talk about impressions and the stream of consciousness, reverting to neurons and dendrites and so on, it no doubt got rid of some rather metaphysically dubious entities, but doing so did not at all address the logical problem that was the real issue in the first place. That issue is this: the laws of logic do not conform to the laws of physics, and any system which obeys only physical laws will not be able to respect some of the more peculiar laws of logic. For instance, physical relations can only obtain between two actually existing entities or states of affairs, but not so in logic. Another question I’ve never found a good physicalist answer to: Let’s say that there is a physical instantiation in my brain of the belief: ‘Some Roses are red’. Where is the logically equivalent belief that ‘Some roses are not nonred’? Or ‘Some red things are roses’? Or ‘Some red things are not nonRoses’? Are these logical properties of that belief really there like its physical properties, such as mass, volume, density and charge? Similarly, what about the semantic relations this belief entails. If I believe that some roses are red, I also believe that some roses are colored, that something is red, that something is extended, that some plant is red, that something that my girlfriend finds endearing when given as an unsolicited gift is red, etc. Again, are these semantic features of the belief really there along with its physical features? And where is ‘there’? That ‘something is red’ cannot be a unique feature of this belief, because it would also be a feature of the belief that ‘Some stop signs are red.’ Are both of these specific beliefs related to the more general belief which is situated elsewhere, or is the more general belief merely there in both in the same way that two different objects can enjoy the same mass? All of this just strains my credulity. I don’t see how it can be right. Physicalists may have answers to these questions, and I would love to hear them, but I haven’t found them. Of course, most physicalists would argue that while the objects of propositional attitudes are constituently structured, the physical states themselves are not. But this just seems weird to me.

Why not computational functionalism? Computational functionalism to my mind sufficiently answers the logical problems that plague the physicalist. I consider it to be phenomenology’s real rival. My problems with computational functionalism are primarily of an epistemological and semantic sort, and these, it has to be admitted, are always less surely footed. Computational functionalism is, I take it, necessarily internalist and representationalist. And there are any number of reasons why neither of these epistemological and/or semantic positions is likely correct. Here are some reasons why: 1) Following Turing, computational functionalists must argue that mental states are discrete states; one is either in that state or one is not. So let’s take an example: there’s a loud bang, and I turn my head and both see and hear a car roar off. I come to the belief ‘That was a backfire.’ I haven’t the foggiest idea what a backfire is. I just know that it is a loud, gun-like bang some cars make and which emanates from tailpipes. My mechanic, on the other hand, can no doubt say quite a bit not only about what a backfire is, but about what caused it, how to prevent it, how different car models suffer from different likelihoods of backfire, etc. Consequently, when my mechanic comes to a belief, ‘That was a backfire,’ her belief is not the same as mine. Thus, according to computational functionalists like Fodor, we have in fact different beliefs. Fodor takes observations like this as evidence against holism. I take it as evidence against computational functionalism. It seems plausible to me that I and my mechanic have the same belief, only hers is more informed, and more variegated than mine. Husserl, who allows that fufillment and truth is a function of degrees and range, can allow and account for this; computational functionalists cannot. 2) According to computational functionalism, to be in a mental state is to be in a discrete internal state. The content of that state is internally determined. This is why computational functionalists have to be representationalists. This however restricts whatever can be said about the content of that state to whatever is actually there internally. Thus, mental representations (semantically contentful internal states) can only consist of entered data and the rules (ie ‘concepts’) for manipulating that data. But consider this (a sort of example found in Noë): you reach in to a black sack and feel something hard, smooth, with some variation in texture, shaped somewhat cylindrically. After a few moments, almost spontaneously, as it were, you realize that you are feeling a lighter. Husserlians want to argue that the content of that belief ‘Here’s a lighter,’ does not exist inside the skull, nor outside in the world; it is ideal; it does not exist at all. Not so computational functionalists. Presumably the moment of realization occurs when the restricted data that I am receiving tactilely is sufficiently processed up to the point where I (whatever that is!) realize that I should access the ‘lighter’ function and compute the relevant data accordingly. I don’t think this is wrong in its basics. The disagreement is whether we need this realization to be the running of the lighter function, or the actualization of an ideal content. The represtationalist answer runs into some pretty serious difficulties. What is the relation between the representation and the object? Does this representation obtain whether I realize it or not? Then how do I know what it does obtain? What is the relation between myself and this representation? The computational functionalist has to answer these questions. Husserl, on the other hand, does not, at least not anymore than the mathematician does. Finally, the computational functionalist qua representationalist has be committed, I believe, to the experiential plenum: all content is there all at once and in full to/as the mind. But this probably not correct. In the lighter example, phenomenologist qua content externalist can argue that the content of that experience is there through the particular real (reelle) parts of my experience (the smoothness, hardness, room-temperature-ness, etc) but only the latter are really experienced; the lighter as such, the lighter, which is the real content of my experience, is there as a whole, as it were, virtually. Husserl can make sense of this phenomenological fact; the computational functionalist cannot. Hence, the argument here boils down to the following: 1) externalist and reliabilist arguments about semantic, epistemological and experiential content are probably right; 2) computational functionalism, as internalist and representationalist, is incompatible with such externalism; 3) hence, computational functionalism is probably wrong.

Let me say that I can imagine how computational functionalists would respond to these objections, and they would be good responses--unlike the physicalists. So I in no sense pretend that this is knock-down. But I do not need a knock-down argument. I don’t necessarily want to argue that phenomenology is obviously better than these other two, only that it ought to be considered as a serious, if equal, rival.

So what is the phenomenologists’ answer? The contents of the mind are ideal, exhibiting ideal relations. The same is true of mathematics. The rules of the mind exist--if that word is appropriate at all--like the rules of chess exist. Husserl’s insight, I think, was to realize that the sorts of issues he was dealing with earlier in his career--namely, how is it that the rule-like manipulation of symbols, which no ‘intuitive’ understanding need accompany or underwrite, can nonetheless express true mathematical results?--applied to the range of mental states as such, and even further, to the range of ordinary, thoughtless ‘chit-chat’. This is the phenomenon that fascinated Husserl throughout his life; it is the one constant that perdures from the very beginning through the very end and through all the changes; it is, in a sense, the one question all of phenomenology is trying to answer. And it is, finally, simply a damn good question, one that ought to be more central in philosophy of mind, and one which, more than the others, phenomenology gives a good answer for.

In a final post, I will explain more fully what phenomenology is in its own terms, and also explain why some of the more indirect arguments for its moribund status are themselves, truth be told, moribund. Stay tuned.

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Davidson and the Causes of Action: A Problem of Permission

Philosophy of action has for decades focused on reasons; since Davidson, a good deal of debate has centered on the question of whether reasons are causes, whether those causes are occurrent or agential, and whether we can use reasons-explanations to replace causal explanations altogether in discussions of agency. My suspicion is that something is missing from the discussion. The focus on reasons comes from the conviction, first, that they provide us with the best way of explaining an action as something other than simply an event and, second, that it is by focusing on reasons (or, in a related branch of investigations, on endorsements of desires) that we bring out the role of the agent as deliberator. But is this dual approach sufficient to capture the notion of an agent? I suspect that it is not, and what is misleading in the standard account is that, by taking explanation and rational deliberation as its starting points, it fails to give adequate attention to the most basic aspect of action: it is often irrational and involves little or no deliberation.

Of course problems of irrationality—self-deception, akrasia, addiction—have taken a central place in analysis; but they are generally viewed as problematic in a secondary way: a theory of rational action is expected to account for them, but only against the backdrop of a pre-existing theory of rationality. The typical approach comes from the methodology of the sciences: first one formulates laws, then one goes on to explain away exceptions. Similarly, one first tries to come up with a generally rational explanation of action, then one attempts to explain away deviations from that rationality. But does this take matters in the order appropriate to a subject matter like action?

In his Dialectic of Duration, Gaston Bachelard takes on the orthodox view of Bergson, according to which time is fundamentally a continuity, which the intellect then breaks up artificially into a series of instants. Instead, Bachelard posits that in every field—action, psychology, science, poetry—it is the instant that is primary, with continuity being constructed in a secondary manner by the intellect. Thus, for example, memory involves particular moments that stand out—I remember waking up early, then a diploma being placed in my hand, meeting my roommate’s parents, and only then do I fill in the gaps between these events to evoke in memory a continuous commencement ceremony. Similarly in the domain of action: every action, for Bachelard, has at its central core the instant of permission. To act, I must give permission to do something. Whatever deliberation precedes the act, it is moot until I permit the performance of its dictates. Whatever consequences follow from my action—and whatever purposes are intended in it—are dependent ultimately on that instant. Thus, Bachelard opposes a phenomenology of the instant to that of duration, so that the continuity of action—its precursors and products—are dependent on the permission to act.

Davidson, I think, presents us with a similar scheme. In fact, it is the priority of the instant—or, in his case, the causal relation between reason and action—that allows explanation of action to be an explanation at all. But at the same time, Davidson conceals the cause by explaining the action as a bodily moment that is rationalized by a primary reason (a combination of a desire and a belief). The concealment is this: while the causation of an action by its corresponding reason explains the action, it explains it only because the action itself (along with its consequences) is explained by reference to its causal precursors. The emphasis on causality, so central to Davidson’s account, is only an explanatory feature that allows the past and future of the instant to be neatly brought together into a single whole. This creates a difficulty, and I think it is a difficulty that is internal to Davidson’s account: he cannot explain the very thing he is trying to explain.

To see this, let us take a look at Davidson’s view of freedom. His goal is not to reconcile freedom with determinism, but to show that freedom is a causal power. The central problem is that if the causal precursors of an action are themselves seen as actions—as something an agent does—then we are caught in an infinite regress because we must now account for the freedom of those prior actions. The way to resolve the problem is to posit precursors to the action that are not themselves something an agent does; they must be states or events that are not done in any sense, so that it makes no sense to even ask whether or not they are free. The solution, of course, is that an action is caused by reasons. The desires and beliefs that make up those reasons are states or events, but they are certainly not actions. Insofar as these reasons cause an agent to act, his action is intentional and free. And freedom, here, is a causal power because what makes the action free is precisely that it is caused by an agent’s reasons.

But I think Davidson cannot explain freedom as a causal power because he cannot explain the causality of reasons. He admits, essentially, that his account can only explain the causal precursors of an action provided that the action has already been carried out. Prior to this, there is no way to predict an action—that is, there is no way to derive the necessity of an action from its causal precursors (although statistical analysis can get us pretty close to this). Davidson’s major concern, then, is to show that something can be called a cause even in the absence of strict laws relating the cause to the effect. But what is lacking is any account of the agent’s role in this relation. If I act on my reasons, this involves an instant of permission—I do not just give myself a reason to act (as, say, Robert Kane’s analysis suggests), nor do I put an end to deliberation and let the final step in the deliberative process carry me to action (this is the overlooked Hobbesian account of action). Rather, I actively permit myself to act. It has seemed to many philosophers of action that if we start from this instantaneous act, we are stuck in an irrational and inexplicable kind of agent-causation. But I think that only holds so long as we emphasize the causality of the instant of “permission.” Instead, I am suggesting, the causal aspect does not underlie the instant of permission; rather, without the permission, we cannot explain causality at all.

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