ANOMALOUS MONISM AND NATURALISM
“I acquiesce in what Davidson calls anomalous monism, also known as token physicalism: there is no mental substance, but there are irreducibly mental ways of grouping physical states and events…Still the mentalistic predicates, for all their vagueness, have long interacted with one another, engendering age-old strategies for predicting and explaining human action. They complement natural science in their incommensurable way, and are indispensible both to the social sciences and to our every day dealings. Read Dennett and Davidson” (Quine: Pursuit of Truth 1990 pp72-73)
“The notion of an exhaustive class of states each of which qualifies as thinking about Fermat’s Last Theorem, and each of which is specifiable in purely physiological terms, seems discouragingly unrealistic even if restricted to a single thinker. It is at this point that we must acquiesce in the psychophysical dualism of predicates, though clinging to our effortless monism of substance. It is what Davidson has called anomalous monism. Each occurrence of a mental state is still, we insist an occurrence of a physical state of a body, but the groupings of these occurrences under mentalistic predicates are largely untranslatable into physiological terms. There is token identity, to give it the jargon, but type diversity…The general predicate ‘thinking about Fermat’s Last Theorem’, then, is irreducibly mentalistic. It still denotes various physical objects in its intermittent way (usually mathematicians), and it has its place in our meaningful physicalistic language. The point of anomalous monism is just that mentalistic predicate imposes on bodily states and events a grouping that cannot be defined in the special vocabulary of physiologically describable, we presume, given all pertinent information. (Quine: From Stimulus to Science 1995 pp87-88)
Chapter 6 of Quine’s classic ‘Word and Object’ (1960) book contains a section called ‘The Double Standard’ where he discusses Brentano’s claim that propositional attitude ascriptions cannot be reduced to purely physical (extensional) science. Quine as a naturalist obviously chose the course of arguing that if propositional attitude ascriptions are not reducible to extensional physics we must reject them from our physics. However he recognised that descriptions of people’s behaviour in terms of intentional locutions were indispensible in ordinary life. Furthermore he recognised that despite the irreducibility of intentional locutions they had real explanatory value. Hence he grudgingly adopted what he called the double standard where we have to adopt intentional ascription language in ordinary life while eschewing it for scientific purposes. As can be seen from the above quote he even adopted a anomalous monism near the end of his philosophical career.
In the fifty five years since ‘Word and Object’ philosophers influenced by Quine have tried to deal with the propositional attitudes in various different ways. The Churchland’s adopted an approach which argued that future science would do away with propositional attitude ascriptions altogether and all human behaviour would be explained in the language of neuroscience. Fodor defended the reality of propositional attitude ascriptions. While Dennett argued that propositional attitude ascriptions were real patterns which picked out information which would be missed if we adopted a purely physical level explanation, but that at base intentions were not to be found at the ultimate physical level. Davidson’s solution was to adopt anomalous monism; Quine as we can see from the above quotes, believed that Davidson’s solution was the correct one. In this blog I will argue that if one is a naturalist like Quine then recent developments show that from a naturalistic perspective (and there is no other legitimate perspective) anomalous monism is false.
NATURALISM AND ANONOMALOUS MONISM
In their ‘Everything Must Go’ (2006) Ladyman et al criticise both Davidson (and Fodor) who wrote that physics discovers causal laws that take the form of exceptionless generalizations relating atomic events (ETMG p.35). Ladyman et al take exception to this claim as, according to them, if one looks at actual physical laws one will see that these laws have numerous counter examples and are the laws physicists produce are functionally interdependent not generalisations (ibid. p.35). They hold Davidson’s 1970 paper ‘Mental Events’ responsible for the fact that a substantial proportion of contemporary philosophers think that biological, mental, and economic properties supervene on physical properties (some of these people think of supervenience as part/whole physicalism which contradicts Primacy of Physics Constraint) (ibid p.55).
Both Davidson (1970) and Fodor (1974) were arguing against Type Reductionism. Ladyman et al note that the title of Fodor’s paper ‘Special Sciences or The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis’ indicates that he was attacking Putnam and Oppenheim’s (1958) paper ‘Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis’. Ladyman et al note that Fodor argues against bridge laws which played no role in Putnam and Oppenheim’s original paper. They also criticize Fodor for not dealing with the many examples which Putnam and Oppenheim use in their paper; they chastise Fodor for dealing with toy models of physics opposed to real physics. This approach has become more and more common over the last forty years to the detriment of metaphysics (ibid. p. 63).
Fodor’s two main arguments against the unity of science are that the generalisations in physics usually contribute nothing to generalisations in the special sciences. Ladyman et al argue that Fodor massively overstates his case here. Fodor’s second argument is his multiple realization argument. They agree that the multiple realisation argument is a good argument against type reductionism; but they do not think that it supports non-reductive physicalism. Ladyman et al. argue against supervenience as follows:
“Hence, unlike external relations, the non-supervenient relations into which several quantum particles may enter are not even supervenient on the relational properties which there relata possess independently of each other. They are much more independent of the properties of the individual particles than spatio-temporal relations between classic objects. This would seem to refute supervenience in so far as the doctrine is supposed to be inspired by science as Lewis claims…We have argued that entanglement as described by quantum mechanics teaches us that Humean supervenience is false, and that all the properties of fundamental physics seem to be extrinsic to individual objects” (ibid pp 163-164)
The above claim obviously has serious implications for Davidson’s Anomalous Monism. They argue as follows:
“For now the key point is that commitment to a world of levels strictly composed out of deep down little things has played an essential role in leading neo-scholastic metaphysicians to cast doubt on the ontological seriousness of all the special sciences. This is very far reaching anti-naturalism” (ibid p. 206)
Here we can see that if philosophers take contemporary physics seriously (as they must) then the idea that the mental supervenes on the physical cannot stand, as the supervenience relation itself is in question. In order to see how this claim effects Davidson’s Anomalous Monism I will outline his arguments for it and then show where those arguments fail.
ARGUMENTS FOR ANONALOUS MONISM
In his ‘Psychology as Philosophy’ when arguing that there can be no psychophysical laws Davidson argues as follows:
(1) He notes the holistic character of the cognitive field:
“Any effort at increasing the accuracy and power of a theory of behaviour forces us to bring more and more of the whole system of the agent’s beliefs and motives directly into account. But in inferring this system from the evidence, we necessarily impose conditions of coherence, rationality, and consistency. These conditions have no echo in physical theory, which is why we can look for no more than rough correlations between psychological and physical phenomena.” (Davidson: Psychology as Philosophy p. 25)
(2) He also notes the constraints of Rationality in explaining a person’s behaviour intentionally. He doubts that causal explanations of the type (supposedly) used in physics can capture the facts of rational decision like deciding between conflicting reasons and picking the best course of action.
(3) Davidson argues that we have no serious laws of the kind: Whenever a man has such and such beliefs and desires, and such-and-such further conditions are satisfied, he will act in such a way (ibid p.25). He argues that there are no serious laws of this kind, rather all we have are mere statistical generalisations. And he notes that the probabilistic laws in physics are nothing like the statistical generalisations in intentional explanation because physical laws give sharply fixed probabilities which, which spring from the nature of the theory. If we want to give an explanation of a person’s behaviour in terms of beliefs and desires what we want are, he argues, a quantitative calculus that brings all relevant beliefs and desires into the picture. He believes that such calculus is impossible. (It is worth noting that he tries to construct such a calculus in his ‘Unified Theory of Thought and Action’ with by his own admission mixed results)
(4) Davidson worked experimentally in the sixties on Decision Theory as developed by Frank Ramsey (Truth and Probability 1926) for several years. He notes that this form of Decision Theory (Basically Game Theory) is the best way to discover the nature of beliefs and desires in terms of actions:
“Ramsey’s theory suggests an experimental procedure for disengaging the roles of subjective probability (or degree of belief) and subjective value in choice of behaviour. Clearly, if it may be assumed that an agent judges probabilities in accord with frequencies or so-called objective probabilities, it is easy to compute from his choices amongst values what his choices are; and similarly one can compute his degree of belief in various propositions if one can assume that his values are, say linear money” (Ibid p. 26)
So Davidson assumes that to some degree we can construct a scientific account of the propositional attitudes in terms of Decision Theory. However he doesn’t think that this decision theory is on a par scientifically with physical theories. This is because he thinks that Ramsey’s theory has no predictive power unless it is assumed that people’s beliefs and values do not change over time. He noted that when studied experimentally it can be seen that the testing procedure effects the pattern we are trying to study. Merely making choices (without reward or feedback) alters future choices. The choices tend to become more and more consistent. This result, he claims, shows that Ramsey’s model will not be useful in making accurate predictions. All of this is connected to the fact that for Davidson: Attributing a belief a man cannot be done one at a time. We must attribute many beliefs to a man at the same time. And of course a man’s beliefs are connected to his desires, to his whole background theory of the world. When we are trying to interpret others we must assume that they hold a mostly true theory of the world and that their beliefs are connected to each other in ways that are largely consistent, and that theories are modified to accommodate the consistency criterion. So, for example, if a person becomes aware that he holds a contradictory set of beliefs he will modify his beliefs to avoid this problem.
In his 1991 book ‘Donald Davidson’ Simon Evnine noted a problem with construing this rationality constraint in terms of physics (in this case neuroscience):
“Let us look in detail at a case where the absence of an echo in physical theory of normative principles means that we cannot have a law linking some mental predicate with some physical predicate. If p is the proposition that there are at least ten apples in my bag, and q is the proposition that there are at least 5 apples in my bag, then, since p entails q, normative principles tell us that if someone believes that p, he should not believe that not q. Now suppose that there were psychophysical laws which connected the belief p with neural state m, and the belief that not-q with neural state n. These bridge laws ought to enable us to infer, from the fact that if someone believes that p, then he should not believe that not q, that if someone is in neural state m, he should not be in neural state n, But how are to make sense of this ‘should’ in the context of a physical law relating two distinct neural states?” (Evnine p. 19)
Evnine is surely correct that our brain states ALONE do not of them tell us that we should or should not avoid contradictions. However one can be pretty sure that evolution built our brains in such a way as to respect things like the law of non-contradiction respecting it would be vital to our survival . As Quine correctly noted creatures invariably wrong in their inductions have the pathetic but praiseworthy characteristic of dying before reproducing their own kind. Things are even worse for creatures who are incapable of reasoning deductively.
Davidson builds his argument for Anomalous Monism on three premises:
(1) Mental Events are causally related to Physical Events.
(2) Singular Causal relations are backed by Strict Laws.
(3) There are no strict psychophysical laws.
The above set of premises seem on the face of it to be inconsistent because if mental events are causally related to physical events, and singular causal relations are indeed backed by strict laws then it would seem that contra premise 3 we can indeed have strict psychophysical laws. Davidson argues that contrary to appearances the above premises are consistent and he tried to show why this is the case in his 1970 paper Mental Events. As an example of a mental event being causally related to a physical event he notes:
“If someone sunk the Bismarck, then various mental events such as perceivings, notings, calculations, judgements, decisions, intentional actions, and changes of belief played a causal role in the sinking of the Bismarck. I would urge that the fact that someone sank the Bismarck entails that he moved his body in ways that was caused by mental events of certain sorts, and his bodily movement in turn caused the Bismarck to sink ” (Davidson: Mental Events p. 208)
So we can see from the above that Davidson is talking about mental events he is referring to intentional actions as opposed to conscious states. So Davidson’s first premise amounts to the claim that intentional actions causally interact with non-intentional events. He holds that the causal interaction can go the other way. So, for example, a ship driving towards us can cause us to perceive a ship. In this sense Davidson argues that physical events can cause mental events and vice versa. Given this case one could be forgiven for wondering why he denies that there can be psychophysical laws?
Firstly he argues that mental events are identical to physical events: by an event, he means an unrepeatable, dated individual e.g. The event of the twin towers being bombed (see Stephen Pinker ‘The Stuff of Thought’ for difficulties in individuating events). His Anomalous Monism is the position that the mental supervenes on the physical; so mental events depend of physical events, it entails that two events cannot be alike in all physical respects but differ in mental respects, and that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect (ibid p. 214). However Davidson argues that despite the proceeding facts this does not mean that we can reduce the psychological to the physical anymore than we can reduce moral properties to descriptive properties. The obvious claim being that morality is prescriptive (normative) and we cannot derive an ought from an is, while intentional descriptions are also irreducibly normative. When we judge that a creature is an intentional system we are attributing a minimal level of rationality to them. We are saying that they can judge that something is the case.
There are real weak points to all of Davidson’s premises however I think that premise 3 is the weakest. He argued that there are no psychophysical laws. There is a degree of truth to the claim but this is because when Davidson talks about the psychological he is talking about our standard folk-psychology. Now our folk-psychology like our folk-physics and our folk-biology is the result of our idiosyncratic evolutionary history and our shared cultural heritage. This folk-psychology, folk-physics etc is pragmatically useful but it is also riddled with inconsistencies and is totally ill-equipped to be translated into the language of scientific laws. But as Chomsky correctly argues this doesn’t make the mental anomalous anymore than it makes the physical anomalous, rather it just shows the folly in trying to reduce idiosyncratic folk theories to scientific theories:
“The argument does not seem entirely compelling. For the same reason we should also not compare truisms about balls rolling down hills or a storm brewing in the West with the law of falling bodies, but we are not concerned with the lack of “physico-physical laws” connecting ordinary discourse about events in the world and explanatory theories of nature…In so far as scientific inquiry might undermine one’s conviction that the Sun is setting or that objects are impenetrable, it seems that it might in principle have similar effects on one’s convictions about the nature of beliefs…Folk Mechanics seems no more susceptible than folk psychology to the formulation of bridge laws.” (Chomsky ‘New Horizons in The Study of Language and Mind p. 89)
If Davidson wants us to take his third premise seriously he needs to present us with further arguments which shows why we should take a lack of psycho-physical laws any more seriously than a lack of physico-physical laws.
Another objection to Davidson’s premise 3 is that his version of a law relies heavily on a conception of causation that is seriously at odds with anything to be found in science. Davidson gives the following examples of one event causing another:
(1)The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. caused the destruction of Pompeii.
(2)His lighting the match caused the explosion.
(3)The next California earthquake will cause the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge.
(4)The hurricane is causing the rise in the water level.
Davidson argues that singular causal statements like the above ones indicate the existence of laws that cover the cases. He then goes on to claim that any justification for the claim that singular causal events are covered by laws will be a-priori. In his explication he notes that singular causal statements are extensional in that their truth value is to remain invariant independent of substitution of co-referring names. So, for example, if (5) ‘Batman caused the Joker to Cry’ is true then (6) ‘Bruce Wayne caused the Joker to Cry’ must be true as well because ‘Batman’ and ‘Bruce Wayne’ refer to the same person. While by a law he means a true universally quantified statement. Strict laws do not admit of ceteris paribus clauses; though less strict laws from the sciences like biology, psychology, etc will have these ceteris paribus clauses.
We have seen already that Davidson argues for his anomalous monism by claiming that intentional statements which are irreducibly normative cannot be reduced to physical statements which form a closed system. So he argues that while mental states supervene on physical states they cannot be reduced to them. (This seems to be connected to the fact that laws in physics are unexceptionable and support counterfactuals whereas laws in the special sciences employ ceteris paribus clauses).
Some people have criticised Davidson by arguing that his premise that true singular causal statements are covered by laws is shown to be false by contemporary quantum physics; in particular the fact that it is not deterministic. Davidson however denies this charge. He argues that the laws that he says exist are perfectly compatible with probabilistic laws. This is because such laws are universal and exceptionless (the probabilities they predict have no exceptions) (Davidson: Laws and Cause p. 205). Davidson makes the following point:
“Since it allows probabilistic laws, the cause-law thesis does not (in one fairly standard sense of that messy concept) imply determinism. Neither, then, does it imply complete predictability, even in principle, nor retrodictability.” (ibid p.205)
So we can see that Davidson at least does not see his Law-Cause thesis as being in conflict with quantum mechanics.
CAUSATION AND PHYSICS
As we saw above Ladyman et al. are very critical of Davidson’s views as expressed in his paper ‘Mental Events’ (1970) where Davidson argues for his Anomalous Monism. In order to understand their critique I will briefly describe the nature of their scientistic project. In their (2006) book ‘Everything Must Go’ they critiqued analytic metaphysics which relies heavily on our intuitions to construct our metaphysical theory of the world. A lot of their criticisms were directed to philosophers who claim to be naturalistic but who build their metaphysics upon toy models which while intuitively plausible do not correspond with the world revealed by quantum mechanics. This reliance on intuitions they think is a bad thing because our intuitions are not designed to handle really abstract thought about things like quantum mechanics:
“Furthermore, as science progresses we adjust our ontology in accordance with our concern for ontological parsimony. However, practical folk have no systematic reason to be interested in the constraint. Nor could natural selection attend to it when it designed the native anticipatory apparatus used by practical folk. In coping with problems of scarcity, tracking the trajectories through local space and time of bundles of rewards is almost everything. Attention to wider informational dynamics in which processes are embedded typically delivers few if any additional payoffs, and may get in the way of pay off maximization because of computational costs. Therefore modelling causal relations as sequences collisions of objects in time is a sensible heuristic.” (Ladyman and Ross ‘Everything Must Go’ p. 280)”
They are defending Ontic Structural Realism (OSR) which tries to make sense of two conflicting arguments which pull us in different directions about whether we should be realists or anti-realists about science.
(1)The Pessimistic Meta Induction: argues that since science goes through various different revolutions which disregard entities which previous theories were committed to the existence of (e.g. Ether) which supposedly shows that theoretical terms are not actually picking out anything. Arguing inductively people claim that since many revolutions have occurred in the past and unless we assume (implausibly) that our current physics is complete then more revolutions will take place in the future. This shows that we are not justified in believing that our theoretical entities refer to anything. We should rather treat science as an instrumental mode of making accurate predictions: Feynman “Shut Up and Calculate”.
(2) The No Miracles Argument: If our theoretical terms do not pick out mind independent entities then this makes the success of science a miracle. Since there are no miracles in nature then anti-realism must be false. Therefore one should become a realist.
These two arguments seem to pull in different directions so OSR tries to solve the problem by saying that it is structure that is preserved across revolutions. A lot of direct reference theories in semantics e.g. Putnam (1975) and Kripke were designed to show how theoretical terms could refer across revolutions. One of the advantages of the direct reference theories is that they could explain reference to theoretical entities within our scientific theories in ways which are more plausible than the descriptivist approach favoured by Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. Ross and Ladyman seem to think that their OSR can explain theory change in ways that don’t rely on our intuitions in the same way illicit way that Kripke etc do. In chapter 5 of ETMG ‘Causation in a Structural World’ Ladyman, Ross, and Spurret argue that at the level of fundamental physics we should be eliminativists about causation. This argument is accepted would have serious consequences for Davidson’s theory of Anomalous Monism in particular his first two premises which rely heavily on the notion of causation.
Ladyman et al. argue that one of the typical explanations of causation in philosophy is done in terms of micro banging of sub-atomic particles. However since fundamental physics does not justify us in postulating micro banging they claim that we are justified in rejecting explanations which use the unscientific notion of causation. By this they mean that in terms of our most basic ontology which is given to us by contemporary physics causation does not exist. However this fact doesn’t mean that causation cannot play a role in the explanations of the special sciences. They argue that causation in terms of the basic sciences should be thought of as follows:
“It is a concept that structures the notational worlds of observers who must book-keep real patterns from the perspectives that involve temporal and other asymmetries they cannot ignore on pain of discarding information” (ETMG p. 271)
So from the perspective of their scientism when it comes to the special sciences the concept of causation is pragmatically useful in helping us pick out real patterns in our environment. However at the most fundamental level of reality causation does not exist, rather it is what they call a representational real pattern.
They note that there are two main conceptions of causation one the folk psychological notion and two the scientific conception of causation (and possibly a third notion: causation as explicated by philosophers). We need to be careful when talking about causation to note which version of causation we are eliminating from our fundamental ontology (all versions) and which version we are preserving as a representational real pattern (the scientific conception). One of the primary conceptions of causation is the idea of it as a kind of cosmic glue that holds events together.
They follow Russell’s views on causation as expressed in his 1913 paper in the sense that they agree that causation finds no role in fundamental physics. However, Russell argued that because causation has no place in fundamental physics it should be eliminated from our ontology altogether. While as we saw above Ladyman et al argue that causation is a real pattern that helps us construct our theories in the special sciences even though it does not play any role in our fundamental physics. So they, unlike Russell, do not recommend out right elimination of causation.
As we noted above, we need to be careful when trying to analyse the notion of causation, and whether it is the folk psychological concept we are talking about, or the philosopher’s conception of causation. We know from studies in developmental psychology that as a matter of empirical fact during the normal course of development children do not pick out causal sequences in the same way as Hume believed. People do not need to for two events to be constantly conjoined to believe them to be causally connected. The work of Spelke shows that children from about 4 months have expectations about causation which include the singular causation. Ducasse has shown that students perceive causal patterns based on a single event. Obviously though our pre-theoretic intuitions of causation don’t necessarily tell us about the nature of mind independent reality rather they only tell us about how things seem to us. In fact our intuitions about causality vary depending on the culture we are born into (Cosmides 1989). This fact places serious doubt about whether our intuitions of causation are in any way accurate. From all of this they conclude that our human folk psychology of causation is not Humean, and it is too varied and idiosyncratic to be used as our scientific conception of causality in the special sciences. They follow Patrick Hayes in picking out three core features of folk knowledge (1) It construes causal relations as centred on some agent of change, (2) It postulates various transformative principles (often conceived of as forces) proceeding out from an agent to the recipient of causal influence. (3) It incorporates assumptions about time asymmetry: causal influences flow from the past into the future. (ETMG p. 282)
CAUSES IN SCIENCE
They begin by criticising Russell who argued that the notion of cause is never used by scientists. They did a corpus analysis of the journal SCIENCE over an 8 year period and found that the term ‘cause’ was used 90 times a month, while the term ‘effect’ was used even more. They argue that causation as used by scientists is not Humean causation of the simple regularities kind it is actually closer to the folk conception of causation. This they note leaves them with a problem:
“We have now argued our way into a tight corner. Getting out requires us to seek an account that (i) leaves scientists free to talk about causal processes without risk of embarrassment in the company of metaphysicians, but (ii) follows Russell in denying intuitions (folk or Humean) about causation any role in informing the metaphysical foundations of physics, or science more generally.” (ibid p.289)
Ultimately they reconcile the above seeming contradiction by arguing as follows:
“So causation, as it figures in science, is a notional-world construct. However, as we argued in 4.5, this notional world provides a useful heuristic for locating some real patterns. It is because special sciences are concerned with relatively isolatable regions of the universe which involve cross-classification from the perspective of less-than-fundamental but nevertheless limiting domains for them, that the causal relationships on which they variously focus will appeal to different aspects of their information-carrying potential”
“We think that Earman and Roberts are correct in their claim that fundamental physics discovers something of a kind that special sciences don’t; and we call this kind of something a universal real pattern. We argued in the preceding sections of this chapter for Russell’s and Redhead’s thesis that these real patterns are not causal. They are instead structural, in the sense articulated in Chapters 2 and 3.” (ibid p.290)
So given their argument and convincing demonstration that causation plays very little role in physics, one could argue, that they have cast doubt on Davidson’s first two premises in his argument for Anomalous Monism.
ANOMALOUS MONISM AND THE PRIMACY OF PHYSICS CONSTRAINT
(1)Mental Events are causally related to Physical Events.
(2)Singular Causal relations are backed by Strict Laws.
(3)There are no strict psychophysical laws.
It is important to go through Davidson’s argument in light of Ladyman et al. criticism of the scientific standing of Causation. When Davidson is talking about causal relations between events he is typically referring to macro level events as opposed to events at a microphysical level. Below are some examples of mental events he discusses in his paper ‘Mental Events’:
(1)The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. caused the destruction of Pompeii.
(2)His lighting the match caused the explosion.
(3)The next California earthquake will cause the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge.
(4)The hurricane is causing the rise in the water level.
As can be seen none of the examples are events at the level of fundamental physics. Likewise when he speaks of mental events being causally related to physical events and vice-versa he does not use examples from fundamental physics. So, for example, he talks of how mental events like perceiving, believing, planning can cause physical events like the sinking of a ship. None of these examples are anything that Ladyman et al would have a problem with. They would cash out Davidson’s examples of causation as pragmatic constructs which help us navigate the world but which do not obtain at the fundamental level. From the point of view of OSR there should be no problem with premise 1 and saying that mental events like perceiving, intending etc are causally related to physical events like a ship sinking. Premise 2 that singular causal relations are backed by strict laws. Premise 2 amounts to nothing more than a guess. As we have seen above Davidson argues that these causal laws will be extensional, he distinguishes between description of causal laws and the laws themselves. However he has not demonstrated the existence of these causal laws and we have good reasons to think that causation does not obtain at the level of fundamental physics. At the macro-level scientists do indeed appeal to causal laws. However they justify these appeals internal to a theory. As Dennett argues that the intentional stance is justified as follows:
“a pattern exists in some data-is real-if there is a description of the data that is more efficient than the bit map, whether or not anyone can concoct it’ (1991a, 34). Thus there are (presumably) real patterns in lifeless parts of the universe that no actual observer will ever reach, and further real patterns whose data points are before our eyes right now, but which no computer we can instantiate or design will ever marshal the energy to compact.” (Quote taken from Ladyman and Ross)
Now in the case of intentional stance ascription as used by cognitive scientists we have good reasons to think that this requirement is met but we have no real reason to think that it is met at the level of ordinary folk-psychology ascriptions. Davidson never really deals with scientific/computational theories of psychology, all of his descriptions are from folk psychology and there is no good evidence that the generalisations of ordinary folk psychology have strict causal laws. So Davidson gets his third premise for free, however it follows trivially from the fact that there is no science of folk-psychology anymore than there is a science of folk-physics (obviously ethno-scientists study the type of folk beliefs that people hold) but we don’t expect folk-physics to be compatible with scientific physics and the same is true of folk psychology. So Davidson’s argument for Anomalous Monism doesn’t really succeed in any meaningful way.

                      PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE

                                              INTRODUCTION

In the early days of my foray into Facebook philosophy groups ‘Philosophy, Science and Utube’ discussion group, which I set up to discuss scientific data and techniques and their relevance to philosophy, had about a hundred members. I had recently joined Analytic Philosophy which also had less than a hundred members, at this time my friend Bill Miessner who is an admin in both groups made a criticism of philosophy. His criticism was that in philosophy you have competing positions with no way of deciding between them, so you just end up arguing in circles. He gave the example of Davidson’s Anomalous Monism which he claimed had no more or less evidence to support it than positions like Identity Theory, or Eliminativism etc. His argument was that it was only really experimental evidence that could resolve these issues so philosophy was not really necessary. Since I think that philosophy and science are continuous I thought it was open to philosophers to use whatever conceptual and scientific resources are available to solve these problems.

            Recently Davidson’s views on Anomalous Monism came up again on Facebook. Eray Oxkural an artificial intelligence researcher claimed that both Davidson and Quine were creationists for arguing for Anomalous Monism. Unfortunately Eray was either unwilling or unable to present his arguments to support his views on Davidson. However, his claims did lead to some interesting discussions on Anomalous Monism. My friend Matt Bush (founder of Analytic Philosophy Facebook Group) argued that Davidson’s Anomalous Monism was false since one of its premises relied on the notion of causation in physics and causation plays no role in modern physics. This set me thinking that if Mat was correct then it would be a nice instance of scientific progress refuting a philosophical position and hence show the importance of using science to make progress in philosophy. It would also support Bill’s claims to some degree.

            However I am not an expert in physics so any conclusions I draw should be taken with a grain of salt, they are meant to draw out discussion and should not be taken to be remotely definitive. A variety of different philosophers have argued that since causation plays no role in our physics then we need to eject it from our fundamental ontology. Russell made this argument in his 1913 paper ‘On the Notion of Cause’ Tim Maudlin made a similar argument in his ‘The Metaphysics Within Physics’ more recently Ladyman and Ross in ‘Everything Must Go’ have made similar arguments. However prior to discussing these arguments I will first outline and discuss Davidson’s argument for Anomalous Monism.

Part 1: Davidson and Anomalous Monism

Davidson builds his argument for Anomalous Monism on three premises:

(1)   Mental Events are causally related to Physical Events.

(2)   Singular Causal relations are backed by Strict Laws.

(3)   There are no strict psychophysical laws.

The above set of premises seem on the face of it to be inconsistent because if mental events are causally related to physical events, and singular causal relations are indeed backed by strict laws then it would seem that contra premise 3 we can indeed have strict psychophysical laws. Davidson argues that contrary to appearances the above premises are consistent and he tried to show why this is the case in his 1970 paper Mental Events.

As an example of a mental event being causally related to a physical event he notes:

“If someone sunk the Bismarck, then various mental events such as perceivings, notings, calculations, judgements, decisions, intentional actions, and changes of belief played a causal role in the sinking of the Bismarck. I would urge that the fact that someone sank the Bismarck entails that he moved his body in ways that was caused by mental events of certain sorts, and his bodily movement in turn caused the Bismarck to sink ” (Davidson: Mental Events p. 208)

So we can see from the above that Davidson is talking about mental events he is referring to intentional actions as opposed to conscious states.  So Davidson’s first premise amounts to the claim that intentional actions causally interact with non-intentional events. He holds that the causal interaction can go the other way. So, for example, a ship driving towards us can cause us to perceive a ship. In this sense Davidson argues that physical events can cause mental events and vice versa.  Given this case one could be forgiven for wondering why he denies that there can be psychophysical laws?

            Firstly he argues that mental events are identical to physical events: by an event, he means an unrepeatable, dated individual e.g. The event of the twin towers being bombed (see Stephen Pinker ‘The Stuff of Thought’ for difficulties in individuating events).  His Anomalous Monism is the position that the mental supervenes on the physical; so mental events depend of physical events, it entails that two events cannot be alike in all physical respects but differ in mental respects, and that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect (ibid p. 214). However Davidson argues that despite the proceeding facts this does not mean that we can reduce the psychological to the physical anymore than we can reduce moral properties to descriptive properties. The obvious claim being that morality is prescriptive (normative) and we cannot derive an ought from an is, while intentional descriptions are also irreducibly normative. When we judge that a creature is an intentional system we are attributing a minimal level of rationality to them. We are saying that they can judge that something is the case.  

            There are real weak points to all of Davidson’s premises however I think that premise 3 is the weakest. He argued that there are no psychophysical laws. There is a degree of truth to the claim but this is because when Davidson talks about the psychological he is talking about our standard folk-psychology. Now our folk-psychology like our folk-physics and our folk-biology is the result of our idiosyncratic evolutionary history and our shared cultural heritage. This folk-psychology, folk-physics etc is pragmatically useful but it is also riddled with inconsistencies and is totally ill-equipped to be translated into the language of scientific laws. But as Chomsky correctly argues this doesn’t make the mental anomalous anymore than it makes the physical anomalous, rather it just shows the folly in trying to reduce idiosyncratic folk theories to scientific theories:

“The argument does not seem entirely compelling. For the same reason we should also not compare truisms about balls rolling down hills or a storm brewing in the West with the law of falling bodies, but we are not concerned with the lack of “physico-physical laws”  connecting ordinary discourse about events in the world and explanatory theories of nature…In so far as scientific inquiry might undermine one’s conviction that the Sun is setting or that objects are impenetrable, it seems that it might in principle have similar effects on one’s convictions about the nature of beliefs…Folk Mechanics seems no more susceptible than folk psychology to the formulation of bridge laws. (Chomsky ‘New Horizons in The Study of Language and Mind p. 89)

If Davidson wants us to take his third premise seriously he needs to present us with further arguments on which shows why we should take a lack of psycho-physical laws any more seriously than a lack of physico-physical laws.

            Another objection to Davidson’s premise 3 is that his version of a law relies heavily on a conception of causation that is seriously at odds with anything to be found in science. Davidson gives the following examples of one event causing another:

(1)The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. caused the destruction of Pompeii.

(2)His lighting the match caused the explosion.

(3)The next California earthquake will cause the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge.

(4)The hurricane is causing the rise in the water level.

Davidson argues that singular causal statements like the above ones indicate the existence of laws that cover the cases. He then goes on to claim that any justification for the claim that singular causal events are covered by laws will be a-priori. In his explication he notes that singular causal statements are extensional in that their truth value is to remain invariant independent of substitution of co-referring names. So, for example, if (5) ‘Batman caused the Joker to Cry’ is true then (6) ‘Bruce Wayne caused the Joker to Cry’ must be true as well because ‘Batman’ and ‘Bruce Wayne’ refer to the same person. While by a law he means a true universally quantified statement. Strict laws do not admit of ceteris paribus clauses; though less strict laws from the sciences like biology, psychology, etc will have these ceteris paribus clauses.

We have seen already that Davidson argues for his anomalous monism by claiming that intentional statements which are irreducibly normative cannot be reduced to physical statements which form a closed system. So he argues that while mental states supervene on physical states they cannot be reduced to them. (This seems to be connected to the fact that laws in physics are unexceptionable and support counterfactuals whereas laws in the special sciences employ ceteris paribus clauses).

Some people have criticised Davidson by arguing that his premise that true singular causal statements are covered by laws is shown to be false by contemporary quantum physics; in particular the fact that it is not deterministic. Davidson however denies this charge. He argues that laws that he says exist are perfectly compatible with probabilistic laws. This is because such laws are universal and exceptionless (the probabilities they predict have no exceptions) (Davidson: Laws and Cause p. 205). Davidson makes the following point:

“Since it allows probabilistic laws, the cause-law thesis does not (in one fairly standard sense of that messy concept) imply determinism. Neither, then, does it imply complete predictability, even in principle, nor retrodictability.” (ibid p.205)

So we can see that Davidson at least does not see his Law-Cause thesis as being in conflict with quantum mechanics.

                    EVERYTHING MUST GO AND THE NATURE OF CAUSATION

Ladyman and Ross in their (2006) book ‘Everything Must Go’ critiqued analytic metaphysics which relies heavily on our intuitions to construct our metaphysical theory of the world. A lot of their criticisms were directed to philosophers who claim to be naturalistic but who build their metaphysics upon toy models which while intuitively plausible do not correspond with the world revealed by quantum mechanics. This reliance on intuitions they think is a bad thing because our intuitions are not designed to handle really abstract thought about things like quantum mechanics:

“Furthermore, as science progresses we adjust our ontology in accordance with our concern for ontological parsimony. However, practical folk have no systematic reason to be interested in the constraint. Nor could natural selection attend to it when it designed the native anticipatory apparatus used by practical folk. In coping with problems of scarcity, tracking the trajectories through local space and time of bundles of rewards is almost everything. Attention to wider informational dynamics in which processes are embedded typically delivers few if any additional payoffs, and may get in the way of pay off maximization because of computational costs. Therefore modelling causal relations as sequences collisions of objects in time is a sensible heuristic.” (Ladyman and Ross ‘Everything Must Go’ p. 280)”

They are defending Ontic Structural Realism (OSR) which tries to make sense of two conflicting arguments which pull us in different directions about whether we should be realists or anti-realists about science.

(1)The Pessimistic Meta Induction: argues that since science goes through various different revolutions which disregard entities which previous theories were committed to the existence of (e.g. Ether) which supposedly shows that theoretical terms are not actually picking out anything. Arguing inductively people claim that since many revolutions have occurred in the past and unless we assume (implausibly) that our current physics is complete then more revolutions will take place in the future. This shows that we are not justified in believing that our theoretical entities refer to anything. We should rather treat science as an instrumental mode of making accurate predictions: Feynman “Shut Up and Calculate”.

(2) The No Miracles Argument: If our theoretical terms do not pick out mind independent entities then this makes the success of science a miracle. Since there are no miracles in nature then anti-realism must be false. Therefore become a realist fuck head.

These two arguments seem to pull in different directions so OSR tries to solve the problem by saying that it is structure that is preserved across revolutions. A lot of direct reference theories in semantics e.g. Putnam (1975) and Kripke were designed to show how theoretical terms could refer across revolutions. One of the advantages of the direct reference theories is that they could explain reference to theoretical entities within our scientific theories in ways which are more plausible than the descriptivist approach favoured by Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. Ross and Ladyman seem to think that their OSR can explain theory change in ways that don’t rely on our intuitions in the same way illicit way that Kripke etc do. In chapter 5 of ETMG ‘Causation in a Structural World’ Ladyman, Ross, and Spurret argue that at the level of fundamental physics we should be eliminativists about causation. This argument is accepted would have serious consequences for Davidson’s theory of Anomalous Monism in particular his first two premises which rely heavily on the notion of causation.  

Ladyman et al.  argue that one of the typical explanations of causation in philosophy is done in terms of micro banging of sub-atomic particles.  However since fundamental physics does not justify us in postulating micro banging they claim that we are justified in rejecting explanations which use the unscientific notion of causation. By this they mean that in terms of our most basic ontology which is given to us by contemporary physics causation does not exist. However this fact doesn’t mean that causation cannot play a role in the explanations of the special sciences. They argue that causation in terms of the basic sciences should be thought of as follows:

“It is a concept that structures the notational worlds of observers who must book-keep real patterns from the perspectives that involve temporal and other asymmetries they cannot ignore on pain of discarding information” (ETMG p. 271)

So from the perspective of their scientism when it comes to the special sciences the concept of causation is pragmatically useful in helping us pick out real patterns in our environment. However at the most fundamental level of reality causation does not exist, rather it is what they call a representational real pattern.

            They note that there are two main conceptions of causation one the folk psychological notion and two the scientific conception of causation (and possibly a third notion: causation as explicated by philosophers). We need to be careful when talking about causation to note which version of causation we are eliminating from our fundamental ontology (all versions) and which version we are preserving as a representational real pattern (the scientific conception). One of the primary conceptions of causation is the idea of it as a kind of cosmic glue that holds events together.

            They follow Russell’s views on causation as expressed in his 1913 paper in the sense that they agree that causation finds no role in fundamental physics. However, Russell argued that because causation has no place in fundamental physics it should be eliminated from our ontology altogether. While as we saw above Ladyman et al argue that causation is a real pattern that helps us construct our theories in the special sciences even though it does not play any role in our fundamental physics. So they unlike Russell do not recommend out right elimination of causation.

            As we noted above we need to be careful when trying to analyse the notion of causation and whether it is the folk psychological concept we are talking about or the philosopher’s conception of causation. We know from studies in developmental psychology that as a matter of empirical fact during the normal course of development children do not pick out causal sequences in the same way as Hume believed. People do not need to for two events to be constantly conjoined to believe them to be causally connected. The work of Spelke shows that children from about 4 months have expectations about causation which include the singular causation. Ducasse has shown that students perceive causal patterns based on a single event. Obviously though our pre-theoretic intuitions of causation don’t necessarily tell us about the nature of mind independent reality rather they only tell us about how things seem to us. In fact our intuitions about causality vary depending on the culture we are born into (Cosmides 1989). This fact places serious doubt about whether our intuitions of causation are in any way accurate. From all of this they conclude that our human folk psychology of causation is not Humean, and it is too varied and idiosyncratic to be used as our scientific conception of causality in the special sciences. They follow Patrick Hayes in picking out three core features of folk knowledge (1) It construes causal relations as centred on some agent of change, (2) It postulates various transformative principles (often conceived of as forces) proceeding out from an agent to the recipient of causal influence. (3) It incorporates assumptions about time asymmetry: causal influences flow from the past into the future. (ETMG p. 282)

CAUSES IN SCIENCE:

They begin by criticising Russell who argued that the notion of cause is never used by scientists. They did a corpus analysis of the journal SCIENCE over an 8 year period and found that the term ‘cause’ was used 90 times a month, while the term ‘effect’ was used even more.  They argue that causation as used by scientists is not Humean causation of the simple regularities kind it is actually closer to the folk conception of causation. This they note leaves them with a problem:

 “We have now argued our way into a tight corner. Getting out requires us to seek an account that (i) leaves scientists free to talk about causal processes without risk of embarrassment in the company of metaphysicians, but (ii) follows Russell in denying intuitions (folk or Humean) about causation any role in informing the metaphysical foundations of physics, or science more generally.” (ibid p.289)

Ultimately they reconcile the above seeming contradiction by arguing as follows:

 “So causation, as it figures in science, is a notional-world construct. However, as we argued in 4.5, this notional world provides a useful heuristic for locating some real patterns. It is because special sciences are concerned with relatively isolatable regions of the universe which involve cross-classification from the perspective of less-than-fundamental but nevertheless limiting domains for them, that the causal relationships on which they variously focus will appeal to different aspects of their information-carrying potential”

“We think that Earman and Roberts are correct in their claim that fundamental physics discovers something of a kind that special sciences don’t; and we call this kind of something a universal real pattern. We argued in the preceding sections of this chapter for Russell’s and Redhead’s thesis that these real patterns are not causal. They are instead structural, in the sense articulated in Chapters 2 and 3.” (ibid p.290)

So given their argument and convincing demonstration that causation plays very little role in physics they have cast doubt on Davidson’s first two premises in his argument for Anomalous Monism.

ANOMALOUS MONISM AND THE PRIMACY OF PHYSICS CONSTRAINT

(1)Mental Events are causally related to Physical Events.

(2)Singular Causal relations are backed by Strict Laws.

(3)There are no strict psychophysical laws.

It is important to go through Davidson’s argument in light of Ladyman et al. criticism of the scientific standing of Causation. When Davidson is talking about causal relations between events he is typically referring to macro level events as opposed to events at a microphysical level.  Below are some examples of mental events he discusses in his paper ‘Mental Events’:

(1)The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. caused the destruction of Pompeii.

(2)His lighting the match caused the explosion.

(3)The next California earthquake will cause the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge.

(4)The hurricane is causing the rise in the water level.

As can be seen none of the examples are events at the level of fundamental physics. Likewise when he speaks of mental events being causally related to physical events and vice-versa he does not use examples from fundamental physics. So, for example, he talks of mental events like perceiving, believing, planning can cause physical events like the sinking of a ship. None of these examples are anything that Ladyman et al would have a problem with. They would cash out Davidson’s examples of causation as pragmatic constructs which help us navigate the world but which do not obtain at the fundamental level. From the point of view of OSR there should be no problem with premise 1 and saying that mental events like perceiving, intending etc are causally related to physical events like a ship sinking. Premise 2 that singular causal relations are backed by strict laws. Premise 2 amounts to nothing more than a guess. As we have seen above Davidson argues that these causal laws will be extensional, he distinguishes between description of causal laws and the laws themselves. However he has not demonstrated the existence of these causal laws and we have good reasons to think that causation does not obtain at the level of fundamental physics. At the macro-level scientists do indeed appeal to causal laws. However they justify these appeals internal to a theory. As Dennett argues that the intentional stance is justified as follows:

“a pattern exists in some data-is real-if there is a description of the data that is more efficient than the bit map, whether or not anyone can concoct it’ (1991a, 34). Thus there are (presumably) real patterns in lifeless parts of the universe that no actual observer will ever reach, and further real patterns whose data points are before our eyes right now, but which no computer we can instantiate or design will ever marshal the energy to compact.” (Quote taken from Ladyman and Ross)

Now in the case of intentional stance ascription as used by cognitive scientists we have good reasons to think that this requirement is met but we have no real reason to think that it is met at the level of ordinary folk-psychology ascriptions. Davidson never really deals with scientific/computational theories of psychology, all of his descriptions are from folk psychology and there is no good evidence that the generalisations of ordinary folk psychology have strict causal laws. So Davidson gets his third premise for free however it follows trivially from the fact that there is no science of folk-psychology anymore than there is a science of folk-physics (obviously ethno-scientists study the type of folk beliefs that people hold) but we don’t expect folk-physics to be compatible with scientific physics and the same is true of folk psychology. So Davidson’s argument for Anomalous Monism doesn’t really succeed in any meaningful way.

LEIBNIZ LAW, HALLUCINATIONS, AND BRAINS IN A VAT

            Dennett’s theory of consciousness which he has developed over forty five years has had to try and explain away various different phenomena which seem to indicate that we have experiences which do not occur anywhere. The phenomena of dreams, after images, mental images, illusions and hallucinations seem to be experiences which exist nowhere; they can be correlated with brain states but they are not identical with brain states. The experiences are not located in the brain or in the world for these reasons they are considered problematic for a naturalistic theory of consciousness. In this blog I will consider the phenomena of hallucinations and their relation to Dennett’s Theory of Consciousness.

In chapter 6 of his ‘The Mind’s Eye’ Oliver Sack wrote up his diary entries of his experiences after he had been diagnosed with an ocular melanoma. Sacks had radiation treatment to try to kill the melanoma. After the treatment he had his damaged eye covered with a thick patch. He reported the following strange experience he noticed few days after his treatment:

“If I have been looking at something and then close my eyes, I continue to see it so clearly that I wonder whether I have actually closed my eyes. A startling example of this happened a few minutes ago when I was in the bathroom. I had washed my hands, was staring at the washbasin, and then, for some reason, closed my left eye. I still saw the wash basin, large as life. I went back into my room, thinking that the dressing over the right eye must be absolutely transparent! This was my first thought and, as I realised a moment later, an absurd one. The dressing was anything but transparent- it was a great wodge of plastic, metal, and gauze half an inch thick. And my eye, beneath it, still had one of its muscles detached and was in no position to see anything. For the fifteen seconds or so that I kept my good eye closed, I could not see anything at all. Yet I did see the washbasin- clear, bright, and as real as could be.” (The Mind’s Eye, p. 160)

Naturalist philosopher Tom Clark (Naturalism.org) used a hallucination of music produced by the same brain area that perception of music is produced in to illustrate what he thinks the hard problem of consciousness is. Tom’s conclusion on the topic is that the music hallucination shows that our experiences are internal in both: experiences of real world objects and in hallucinations of real world objects. He argues that this makes it very clear what the hard problem of consciousness is: how does the grey matter in our brains produce our whole worlds of experience?  So while we can explain what the neural correlates of an experience are we still haven’t explained how that experience arises. I think that Sack’s experience also makes clear the supposed internal nature of experience and hence what the hard problem of consciousness is.

Dennett famously discussed the nature of hallucinations in his ‘Consciousness Explained’ pp. 3-18. I think that it is worth considering what Dennett’s views on hallucinations are and how he would try to handle Tom’s evidence. Tom is of course a former PhD student of Dennett’s so he knows his work well, and he obviously isn’t impressed with Dennett’s arguments on the topic. So this brief blog is for my own clarification rather than a criticism of Tom.

Dennett of course does not deny that we can experience hallucinations of music; on p. 4 of ‘Consciousness Explained’ he makes the following point:

“Not wanting to horrify you, then, the scientists arrange to wake you up by piping stereo music (suitably encoded as nerve impulses) into your auditory nerves. They also arrange for the signals that would normally come from your vestibular system or inner ear to indicate that you are lying on your back, but otherwise, numb, blind. This much should be within the limits of technical virtuosity in the near future-perhaps possible even today.” (Consciousness Explained, p. 4)

Dennett is discussing the possibility of scientists being able to create virtual worlds that could fool us. He does not doubt that we could be fooled by musical hallucinations. So he would presumably have no problem with the article that Tom Clark shared, obviously though he wouldn’t draw the same conclusions as Tom did.

In his prelude to ‘Consciousness Explained’ Dennett discussed the nature of hallucinations along with the likelihood of the brain-in-the-vat scenario. Dennett notes that while it may be possible to stimulate a brain to think that it is hearing music and to feel that it is lying on a beach, it is far far beyond current and possibly all future technology to be able to manipulate a brain into thinking that it is a person walking around in the world, exploring it and making free choices about it. The reason Dennett thinks that such a brain-in-a-vat scenario is extremely unlikely is because there would be a combinatorial explosion involved in giving the brain in the vat exploratory powers in its virtual environment.

Given that the brain is a computational machine and that people report having very vivid hallucinations one could claim that Dennett’s arguments about the brain-in-the-vat scenario are contradicted by the existence of vivid hallucinations.  After all, since hallucinations do not exist in the external world but rather exist entirely within the brain then vivid hallucinations are a variant of the brain-in-the-vat scenario. So a critic of Dennett’s could argue that it is only a matter of time till we can develop technology which can construct brain-in-the-vat type scenarios using similar computational processes that the brain uses when constructing vivid hallucinations.

Dennett’s solution to an argument like the above one is to claim that that while some hallucinations are possible, strong hallucinations are impossible. By a strong hallucination he means:

“By a strong hallucination I mean a hallucination of an apparently concrete and persisting three-dimensional object in the real world- as contrasted to flashes, geometric distortions, auras, afterimages, fleeting phantom-limb experiences, and other anomalous sensations. A strong hallucination would be, say, a ghost that talked back, that permitted you to touch it, that resisted with a sense of solidity, that cast a shadow, that was visible from any angle so that you might walk around it and see what it looked like” (Consciousness Explained: p. 7)

Dennett argues that for hallucinations to support a brain-in-the-vat scenario the hallucinations would have to be a strong hallucination of the type he detailed above. However he argued that strong hallucinations do not in-fact ever occur so obviously they provide no support for a brain-in-the-vat type scenario. However while he does not think that strong hallucinations are possible he does think that multi-modal vivid hallucinations are possible. He argues that these hallucinations are made possible because of the fact that the minds epistemic curiosity is typically limited during hallucinations. He points out that people who have strong hallucinations typically note that they feel peculiarly passive when they experience hallucinations. They do not feel inclined to explore or engage with the things that they hallucinate. The mind in this scenario is forced to interpret along certain lines which means that the hallucination will not be properly tested. So on this view a hallucination is not a complex three dimensional mental object that can be inspected from various different angles. Rather it is an illusion which is maintained by restricting the exploratory paths that you will take. So a hallucination is to some degree like a card trick, it is not real magic, rather it is a trick that works because it focuses your attention in certain limited directions. The primary difference is that in the case of the card trick there is a person consciously tricking and manipulating us while in the case of hallucinating there is no trickster rather there is just a complex interaction competing areas of the brain trying to predict the phenomena of experience and competing with each other for control of the brain.

Now in the Sacks quote above he describes seeing a scene that is indistinguishable from reality. However notably he takes a passive attitude towards the scene he doesn’t move to see if it changes perspective, he doesn’t try to touch the scene etc. Sacks attitude is one that Dennett claimed was typical of people experiencing hallucinations:

“But that review also provides a clue leading to another theory of the mechanism of hallucination-production: one of the endemic features of hallucination reports is that the victim will comment on his or her unusual passivity in the face of the hallucination. Hallucinators usually just stand and marvel. Typically, they feel no desire to probe, challenge or query, and take no steps to interact with the apparitions.” (ibid, p. 9)

It is interesting that when Sacks had his hallucination, which he claimed lasted for 15 seconds he stood passively looking at the hallucination without moving about and probing it just as Dennett’s model predicts. Dennett argues that hallucinations rely on mechanisms of the brain “expecting” us to only interpret the data along certain lines. So Dennett would presumably think that the article posted by Tom Clark does not really effect his position at all. However Tom Clark would presumably reply that on contrary his example refutes Dennett’s position. The hallucinations while not strong in Dennett’s sense still are reported to occur by subjects and brain imaging supports some of these reports. Since on pain of breaking Leibniz’s law these experiences cannot be identical with particular brain states we do indeed seem to be faced with a hard problem (unless of course we are eliminativists about people’s experiences).

I will now consider some of the cases of Hallucinations that Sacks discusses in his book ‘Hallucinations’ and try to evaluate whether they support or contradict some of the central claims that Dennett makes about hallucinations. In chapter 1 of his book on Hallucinations Sacks discussed Charles Bonnet Syndrome a condition where patients who suffer from loss of sight sometimes experience visual hallucinations. The syndrome is estimated to affect 15 percent of patients (See: Teunisse, R. et al. ‘Visual hallucinations in Psychologically Normal People’). One patient of Sack’s who suffered from Charles Bonnet Syndrome was called Zelda, she had a series of hallucinations (caused by poor blood flow in the occipital and temporal lobes) which were extremely vivid and lasted a long time:

“As we drove away from the beauty parlour, I saw what looked like a teenage boy on the front hood of our car, leaning on his arms with his feet up in the air. He stayed there for about five minutes. Even when we turned he stayed on the hood of the car. As we pulled into the restaurant parking lot, he ascended into the air, up against the building, and stayed there until I got out of the car” (Hallucinations p. 17)

As we have seen above, Dennett makes the claim that typically people are passive when they experience hallucinations, and Zelda’s report above fits this pattern. However she later went on to mention that when she experienced hallucinations which she could not distinguish them from reality without testing, Sacks describes them as follows:

“Occasionally, looking in a mirror, she might see her own hair rising a foot above her head and have to check with her hand to make sure it was in its usual place (ibid p. 17)

So here we can see that Zelda’s report does not support Dennett’s conclusion that people who have hallucinations are unusually passive and can be counted on to only investigate in certain directions. Zelda had a hallucination which she doubted was real and she proceeded to test her experience by using another modality (touch). So there was nothing passive about her reaction to the hallucination. Nonetheless when she tested her hallucination she discovered that it was not real. So her hallucination was not what Dennett would call a strong hallucination. It would be better classed as a vivid hallucination restricted to a single modality.

Above I discussed a hallucination which Sacks had as a result of an ocular melanoma. In his book ‘Hallucinations’ Sacks described an even more dramatic hallucination which he experienced as a young man when taking twenty Artane pills (Artane pills are used to treat Parkinsons’ Disease). Sacks described the following dramatic experiences:

“So one Sunday morning, I counted out twenty pills, washed them down with a mouthful of water, and sat down to await the effect. Would the world be transformed, newborn, as Huxley had described it in ‘The Doors of Perception’, and as I myself had experienced with mescaline and LSD? Would there be waves of delicious, voluptuous feeling? Would there be anxiety, disorganisation, paranoia? I was prepared for all of these, but none of them occurred. I had dry mouth, large pupils, and found it difficult to read, but that was all. There were no psychic effects whatever-most disappointing I did not know exactly what I had expected, but I had expected something.

                   I was in the kitchen, putting on a kettle for tea, when I heard a knocking at my front door. It was my friends Jim and Kathy; they would often drop around on a Sunday morning. “Come in, door’s open,” I called out, and as they settled themselves in the living room, I asked “How do you like your eggs?”  Jim liked them sunny side up, he said. Kathy preferred them over easy. We chatted away while I sizzled their ham and eggs-there were low swinging doors between the kitchen and the living room, so we could hear each other easily. Then five minutes later I shouted “Everything’s ready” put their ham and eggs on a tray, walked into the living room- and found it completely empty. No Jim, no Kathy, no sign that they had ever been there. I was so staggered I almost dropped the tray.” (ibid: p. 107)

Sack’s report is interesting for a number of different reasons. Firstly his hallucination occurred in two modalities both visual and auditory and both modalities were perfectly synchronised. Secondly his hallucinations were indistinguishable from reality for him. It is true that he did not test the hallucinations to see if they were real but this is hardly surprising as he had no reason to think they were hallucinations they were presented to him as being as real as any aspect of reality.

However clearly Sack’s hallucinations are not strong enough to count as what Dennett calls a strong hallucination. Recall that Dennett defined strong hallucinations, ‘as a ghost that talked back, that permitted you to touch it, that resisted with a sense of solidity, that cast a shadow, that was visible from any angle so that you might walk around it and see what its back looked like’ (Consciousness Explained P. 7). Sack’s hallucination meets some of Dennett’s criterion the people he saw and talked to in his hallucination meet the criterion of a ghost who talks back to you. However the hallucination was in no way tactile and did not cast shadows. Unfortunately because Sacks did not realise he was hallucinating he did not test his hallucinations by touching them and inspecting them from a variety of different angles.

Later in his Hallucinations Sacks describes an even more vivid hallucination which a patient of his who suffered from a left hemianopia had.

“He has not recovered vision and retains a left hemianopia. He has, however, little awareness of his visual loss as his brain appears to fill in the missing parts. Interestingly, though, his visual hallucinations/filling in always seem to be context sensitive or consistent. In other words, if he is walking in a rural setting, he can be aware of bushes and trees or distant buildings in his left visual field, which when he turns to engage his right side, he discovers are not really there. The hallucinations do, however, seem to be filled in seamlessly with his ordinary vision. If he is at his kitchen bench, he “sees” the entire bench, even to the extent of perceiving a certain bowl or plate within the left side of his vision-but which on turning disappear, because they were never really there. Yet he definitely sees a whole bench, with no clear separation between parts composed of hallucination and true perception.” (ibid p.177)

In the above case the patients hallucination actively fills up aspects of experience that the patient is blind to. This hallucination while vivid is not a strong hallucination as it does not involve multiple modalities.

 Our brief look at some of the hallucinations which Sacks reported provided limited evidence that strong hallucinations occur. Though they do indicate hallucinatory experiences which are stronger than those predicted on Dennett’s model.  They do provide plenty of evidence for the existence vivid hallucinations which do not involve the subject taking a passive attitude to their experiences. So Sack’s descriptions of hallucinations do challenge some of Dennett’s central claims about hallucinations. However since Sacks was not directly addressing Dennett’s theory of hallucinations a lot of his descriptions do not directly connect with Dennett’s theory about hallucinations. To this end I constructed a short questionnaire designed to test whether people who experienced hallucinations of various different types did so in a way which conforms to Dennett’s theory.

It will take a couple of months till I get all of the data back from my questionnaire and can organise the data in a scientific manner. So I will discuss the questionnaire in detail in a later blog. However, since the first two people who answered my questionnaire have provided answers which contradict Dennett’s views on the nature of hallucinations I will discuss them here. It should be noted though that this discussion is entirely preliminary and I will provide much more detail in my later blog.

The questionnaire was structured as follows:

(1)Have you ever experienced a hallucination?

(2) Do you know what the cause of your hallucination was? E.g. Was it caused by the use of Drugs (either prescribed by a doctor or taken recreationally), or by epileptic seizures, or by nightmares, or blindness, mental illness etc? If there was some other cause of the hallucination beyond the ones I mentioned please state them? If you do not know the cause of the hallucination please state this.

(3) Did your hallucination occur in only one modality? E.g. was the hallucination primarily visual or did it also occur in other modalities? Did you hear your hallucination? Could you touch it? Or taste it? Or smell it? How many modalities did your hallucination manifest itself in?

(4) A strong hallucination is one “that talks back, that permits you to touch it, that resists with a sense of solidity, that casts a shadow, that is visible from any angle so that you might walk around it and see what its back looks like” (Dennett 1991 p. 7).  Would you describe your hallucination as a strong hallucination as defined above?

(5) When you experienced your hallucination did you experience either of the following attitudes (A) Did you feel the urge to stand passively and marvel at the hallucination? Or (B) did you feel like interacting with and inspecting and questioning the hallucination?

(6) When you experienced your hallucination did you (A) Passively marvel and stare at it? Or (B) Did you interact with it, and inspect and question the hallucination?

(7) How would you compare the vividness of your hallucination with the following experiences (A) Was the hallucination less vivid than a mental image? To test this call to mind the mental image of a friend’s face or a friend’s voice, was the image more or less vivid than your hallucination? (B) Was the hallucination less or more vivid than an after image? To test this look at a light bulb that is on for a few seconds when you look away from the bulb you should see an after image of the light in your field of vision. Compare the vividness of the after image with the vividness of your hallucination. (C) Was the Hallucination more or less vivid than Hypnagogic Images? (Hypnagogic Images are the imagery people sometimes experience when in-between being asleep and awake). If you cannot experience mental imagery, after images, or hypnagogic imagery you do not have to answer this section; though if you have experienced any of the above please try to answer the relevant questions.

(8) Describe your most vivid hallucination in as much detail as possible including the moments proceeding the hallucination and the moments immediately after the events.

The first two people to answer the questionnaire experienced hallucinations for different reasons. The first person who we will give the pseudonym Mary had hallucinations as a result of night terrors. In question 4 of my questionnaire I asked whether she had ever experienced strong hallucinations in the sense defined by Dennett. Here is her answer:

“Yes on several occasions – once I woke up from a nap on the couch and saw a huge black spider under the chair across the room. It was moving but staying under the chair. This happened while I was a don at University College in Toronto – I thought it might be a tropical spider come in with a load of bananas. I got up, upended the wastebasket so I could contain the spider and took a poke at it with a small wooden stick I took from under a plant pot on the table. As I was poking at the spider to prod it into the wastebasket, it dissolved into nothing. I went back to bed. I even thought it might be a dream until I noticed the waste basket and the stick were still there in the morning.”

Strictly speaking the above hallucination is not a strong hallucination in Dennett’s sense, however it multi-modal and it involves her interacting with her hallucination instead of merely passively staring at it. So it does to some degree contradict Dennett’s claims about the nature of hallucinations.

In response to question 6 Mary answered as follows:

“No, my first reaction is that it is real and often I am terrified – strange writhing geometric shapes descending on me while I lie in bed make me scream. Once I woke up (this was just a few years ago) and saw dark smoke billowing into the bedroom door – I assumed there was a fire downstairs and screamed and raced down the stairs to find the fire extinguisher… the smoke had completely vanished by the time I reached the dining room. This happened just about ten years ago. My husband was awakened too and following me down the stairs, poured us both a small brandy and we went back to bed. (B) I am usually either screaming or taking action. Once I saw a brilliant ball of light in the middle of the room, like a fire but white. I was paralyzed with fear and could not even scream… I was about 6 years old. I could see, vaguely, hands and a human form inside the light. I could see the light reflected on the tree branches waving outside my window. I had a puppy in the bed with me, and held him close to me. I was terrified. Then a voice said “believe” and I said “okay” and suddenly I went back to sleep. In the morning, when I woke up, I was still in the same position and the puppy was still asleep in my arms. I am an atheist, but because of this experience I can see why people believe in angels and burning bushes etc.”

Here we can see that Mary’s description of her hallucinations directly contradict Dennett’s claims about the nature of hallucinations. Mary does not merely passively stare at the hallucination but actively interacts with them.

The person who answered my questionnaire we will give the pseudonym John. John experienced his hallucinations after taking Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. He described one of his hallucinations as follows:

“I was sitting behind the desk at the door next to a nightclub venue I was a frequent visitor at (even though the night was one I hadn’t been to). The moments preceding I was looking around and people knew I was tripping hard; the venue was packed with people I knew well as a DJ and people kept coming over to check on me/marvel, mostly because it was my first trip and I was up and down a lot. I turned around and noticed that there were embossed raised patterns moving over the walls which matched the colour of the walls but had shadows and light qualities that made them look very solid and three dimensional; as above. I spent some time (I can’t remember how long) interacting with it, asking another friend who was tripping if they’d experienced anything like this and describing what I was seeing. Afterwards I got bored and turned back to the door and tried to talk to my friends, who were insisting that I didn’t sound like I was on acid but that it was very clear that I was. Their faces had a morphing quality and my vision was either panoramic or reminiscent of a fish-eyed camera. I experienced constant visual hallucinations and a few whole-experience hallucinations (having a strong sense of everything looking drawn in the style of Invader Zim, colours and stuff when I closed my eyes, time freezing to music, the experience of total innocence and an epiphany that I should stop experimenting with drugs on a weekly basis if I was going to get anywhere in life — I did, but probably because the intensity of the trip freaked me out). It was very difficult to choose one hallucination because each time I’ve dropped acid I’ve had extremely vivid experiences which I’ve been aware of because they’re so unlike reality. The first time I dropped I had the most full on experiences. I went with this hallucination rather than others because it was close enough to the real world to be able to describe confidently and in detail — I can actually relate it enough to the real world. Much of it was mental — the way I was thinking was completely different. In retrospect I’d say that it felt thoughts were moving as a Lorentz attractor.”

John’s experience was of patterns which appeared to cast shadows and he claimed that he interacted with the patterns so they have some of the qualities of a strong hallucination. John noted that he was able to touch the pattern that it cast a shadow and could be viewed from a variety of different angles. So John’s experiences were of a type that Dennett claims do not occur.

This brief discussion indicates that Dennett’s claim that people cannot experience strong hallucinations may be false. I will go into give a systematic analysis of the details of my questionnaire in my next blog. Here I merely want to note that Dennett’s claims that people cannot experience strong hallucinations and that they passively stare at hallucinations is not supported by the first two people who answered my questionnaire nor by the reports of some of Oliver Sacks patients. This raises difficulties for Dennett’s view on the nature of hallucinations as they seem to have a quality of reality for subjects that Dennett’s theory would predict.

One could argue that while hallucinations are correlated with brain states they are obviously not identical with them. If I have hallucination of a person who I am  talking to and inspect from different angles, this hallucination not being played out within an internal Cartesian Theatre, it is not identical with the grey matter in my brain, and it does not actually occur in the external world. So if such a hallucinations do indeed exist then, as people’s report indicate they do then we need a way of explaining where these hallucinations exist. Dennett’s solution is to argue that it only SEEMS to us that we are experiencing these hallucinations and mental Images; we are not actually experiencing them. He thinks that the only other solution is to assume that hallucinations are “Real Seeming” painted in Cartesian theatre by some kind of ghostly substance a position he obviously wants to argue against as i. I will briefly discuss Dennett’s take on the Colour Phi illusion to illustrate his notion of real seeming.

DENNETT ON REAL SEEMING[1]

In his Content and Consciousness Dennett talks about the fact that while it may seem to some people that they have mental imagery, closer examination reveals that what they call a mental image is really only a description. Twenty five years later in his Consciousness Explained when discussing Kosslyn’s experiments on mental imagery, Dennett noted that despite appearances mental imagery is really all tell and no show. One curious thing about Dennett’s view is the fact that he claims that despite the way things seem mental imagery is really a mental description. What is strange about this view is the fact that a description can seem like an image. This is a very odd way to understand the word ‘seem’. A paradigm example of an x seeming like it is a y is given by Descartes. He talks about how a stick which is in transparent water will seem to be bent because of light refraction, though in reality the stick is not bent. What Descartes means by the words ‘seems to be’is the same as ‘appears to be’; and this of course is the standard meaning of ‘seems to be’. However, even to a weak imager like me, it is patently obvious that mental images are nothing like mental descriptions. If something really seemed (as in appeared) to me like an image, then it follows that I would have an experience of something image-like, and a description is in no way image-like. This leads to the question of what Dennett could possibly mean when he admits that it at least seems to some people that they experience mental images?

In Consciousness Explained Dennett carefully explains what he means by the word ‘seems’; evaluating his views on this will help clarify his strange beliefs about the nature of images. In Chapter 5 Section 5 of Consciousness Explained Dennett discusses the colour phi experiment^[2]. In this discussion he makes explicit his strange views on the nature of ‘seeming’.  The colour phi phenomenon is apparent motion. We see examples of it on our television screen every day, where a series of still pictures are flashed one after the other at a certain speed to create the illusion of motion. Dennett discusses a simple example of colour phi where two spots separated by as much as 4 degrees of visual angle are flashed rapidly, creating the illusion of one spot moving back and forth rapidly (ibid, p.114). Kolers and Grunau (1976) did a phi experiment with two dots, one red and one green, flashing on and off. This gave the illusion of a red spot starting to move and changing colour to green mid-passage. Since the red dot is not moving and does not turn into a green dot we need to ask what is going on with this illusion. As the red dot moves we see it turn green as it moves towards its destination. The question is: how do we see the dot turn green before we actually see the green dot? One might think that the mind must first register the red dot and then the green dot and after that point the apparent motion must be played before the mind’s eye. To think this, way Dennett warns, is to demonstrate that one is still in the grip of the metaphor of the Cartesian Theatre (ibid p. 115).

To loosen the grip of this picture on our minds Dennett discusses two fictional processes which one could attribute to the brain. He calls them the Orwellian Process and the Stalinesque Process.  The Orwellian Process occurs when I misremember something because my brain tampers with what I remember so that I no longer remember accurately. The Stalinesque Process is where the brain projects a false picture of reality into the mind’s eye. Dennett notes that while a distinction between Orwellian and Stalinesque processes makes sense in the external world it is an illusion to assume that it makes sense as an explanation of what is going on at the level of the brain.

Let us think of both of these processes as they apply to the case of colour phi.  In the Orwellian case we did not see the apparent motion; our brain merely revised our memory and informed us that we did see the motion. In the Stalinesque case we unconsciously registered the two dots and afterwards our brain created a kind of mock event for us to watch. Dennett notes that once we give up the notion of Cartesian Materialism, we will see that there is no answer to the question of whether the Orwellian or Stalinesque process took place. He puts things as follows:

So here is the rub: We have two different models of what happens to the color phi phenomenon. One posits a Stalinesque “filling in” on the upward, pre-experiential path, and the other posits an Orwellian “memory revision” on the downward, post-experiential path, and both of them are consistent with whatever the subject says or thinks or remembers…Both models can deftly account for all the data-not just the data we already have, but the data we can imagine getting in the future (ibid, pp. 123-124)

So there is no fact of the matter which can decide between the two different stories. Dennett argues that the reason that we cannot decide between the two accounts is that there is really only a verbal difference between them. With Dennett’s rejection of Cartesian Materialism and his alternative multiple-drafts theory of consciousness we can no longer draw a non-arbitrary line to decide when an event becomes conscious.  There is therefore no fact of the matter as to whether an Orwellian or a Stalinesque process took place.

When Dennett claims that we cannot decide between the Stalinesque and Orwellian alternatives we are left with what seems like a mystery. In the external world a red object is not really moving and turning into a green object, yet Dennett is also denying that a Stalinesque show trial is played before the mind’s eye.  So the obvious question is: where does the movement of the ball occur? Dennett’s answer is that the ball does not move and turn green it only seems to. However, to say that a ball seems to move is to say that people have an experience of the ball moving. And this leads us back to our original question: what generates this experience, and how is it generated? Dennett thinks that this is a bad question because the brain does not need to create an experience of the ball moving; it merely has to form a judgment that such movement occurred:

The Multiple Drafts model agrees with Goodman that retrospectively the brain creates the content (the judgment) that there was intervening motion, and that this content is then available to govern activity and leave its mark on memory. But the Multiple Drafts model goes on to claim that the brain does not bother “filling in” the blanks. That would be a waste of time and (shall we say?) paint. The judgment is already in, so the brain can get on with other tasks. (ibid, p. 129)

This claim of Dennett’s is extremely strange. He is claiming that the brain judges that the motion occurred. However, as a matter of fact, we do not experiencethe motion; we only think we do.  The obvious reply to this is to categorically state that I do experience the movement and I judge that the movement occurred based on this experience. In other words, the experience is prior to the judgment. The experience is not of a fact in the external world (where no movement occurred); it is rather an experience of a person’s subjective qualia. When Dennett denies that it is the experience that leads to the judgment, he is leaving the phenomenal experience out and is focusing entirely on access consciousness.

The claim that Dennett is denying the existence of phenomenal consciousness is on the face of it an incredible claim. So before proceeding it is important that we show that this is indeed Dennett’s position. To demonstrate that this is indeed Dennett’s position I will now provide detailed quotes from him to make clear his position.  When discussing phenomenal space Dennett makes the following claim:

Now what is phenomenal space? Is it a physical space inside the brain? Is it the onstage space in the theatre of consciousness located in the brain? Not literally. But metaphorically? In the previous chapter we saw a way of making sense of such metaphorical spaces, in the example of the “mental images” that Shakey manipulated. In a strict but metaphorical sense, Shakey drew shapes in space, paid attention to particular points in that space. But the space was only a logical space. It was like the space of Sherlock Holmes’s London, a space of a fictional world, but a fictional world systematically anchored to actual physical events going on in the ordinary space of Shakey’s “brain”. If we took Shakey’s utterances as expressions of his “beliefs”, then we could say that it was a space Shakey believed in, but that did not make it real, any more than someone’s belief in Feenoman would make Feenoman real. Both are merely intentional objects. (Ibid, pp. 130-131)

The above passage is very instructive. It speaks to our topic of mental images and again shows that Dennett thinks of them as theorists’ fictions. Furthermore, his invoking of Shakey, who despite its verbal reports is not experiencing any items in phenomenal space, shows that Dennett thinks that we, like Shakey, despite our verbal reports are not experiencing anything in phenomenal space. Dennett is claiming that our brains may tell us that we have such and such experiences, and as a result of this brain report we form the judgment that we saw a red light move and turn into a green light. However, this judgment, despite appearances, is not grounded in a phenomenal experience.

It is worth noting that a lot of thinkers misinterpret Dennett’s claims on ‘seeming’ and colour-phi as indicating that he denies that we experience colours. This is not the case. Dennett’s arguments above only apply to colour hallucinations, Dennett tells a different story about how we perceive colour in the external world.

To understand Dennett’s views on colours it is helpful to think in terms of the primary quality distinction. One of the central motivations for claiming that the world is in your head is the existence of secondary qualities. When one looks at a beautiful garden one sees a variety of different colours: like the bright yellow sun-flower, the green-grass, the multi-coloured butterflies, the blue-sky and the bright-yellow-sun. Since the seventeenth century people like Galileo and Locke have been telling us that colours do not exist in the mind independent world. Colours are effects of light reflecting off objects and hitting our retinas in a variety of different ways. The majority of scientists since Galileo accept this dichotomy between primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are: Solidity, Extension, Motion, Number and Figure, while the Secondary qualities are: Colour, Taste, Smell, and heard Sounds. One consequence of accepting this picture is that the world is not as it reveals itself to us in our experience furthermore colours do not exist in a mind independent world. A further consequence is that we have a rich world which we experience consisting of taste, smells and colours but this world exists only within our minds. So on this view we have a subject, who is presented with certain experiences, and only some of those experiences correspond with a mind independent entity. The Cartesian materialist who accepts this world picture has a difficult job on his hands. Nowhere in the brain is the experience of a blue sky located or a yellow daffodil located. He may be able to provide neural correlates for these experiences but he will not be able to point to the spatio-temporal location where the experience is and the subject is located. So presumably the Cartesian materialist will have to argue for a strong emergence thesis.

Rather than going down this road Dennett interprets the dichotomy between primary and secondary qualities differently than most contemporary theorists. Dennett has discussed the status of colours throughout his philosophical development: in particular in his 1968 Content and Consciousness, 1991 Consciousness Explained and in his 2005 Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Objections to a Science of Consciousness. I will now try to give a synoptic view of Dennett’s views on the topic of colours. In his first major discussion of colours he noted that while most believed that colours are secondary qualities and do not exist in the external world there are reasons to doubt this conclusion.

He centres his criticism in terms of language and what we are referring to when we use colour words. If we view colours as secondary qualities we are committed to the view that when I refer to something red I am referring to something within my mind. Now if we accept this view then when two people claim that they are referring to something red then they we don’t know whether they are referring to the same thing, as their inner experience of red may be different and, we cannot decide because we would have nothing public to compare their experiences to. Now if we do not want to admit the possibility that a teacher can never know when his pupil has actually learned the meaning of the word ‘red’ we must admit that the reference of colour words is to public observable entities.

One difficulty is that if one accepts the solution to the sceptical problem of colour reference by arguing that words refer to publically observable entities is that it leaves us with a conundrum of where we say that colours exist. They don’t exist in the mind independent world, and they don’t exist in the mind, and there is nowhere else to exist. So one is lead to the silly conclusion that colours do not exist anywhere. This conclusion must be wrong; and Dennett correctly notes that colour words refer to publically observable entities that one can be right or wrong about (Content and Consciousness, p. 161). So they seem to exist and seem to exist in a publically observable sphere.

For Dennett since colours are publically observable entities which we can be right or wrong about then they must be a property of the external world. This leaves Dennett with the question: what property exactly are they? He notes that colours are not reflective properties of surfaces which can be cashed out at a sub-atomic level. This is because:

“Although the sub-atomic characteristics of surfaces that reflect light predominantly of one wavelength can now be described in some detail, those different types of surface do not correspond neatly to the colours we observe things to be.” (ibid, p. 161)

Also different wavelengths of reflected light can cause the same colour experience in a person. So the job of characterising what property colours actually are is more complex than one might assume. Dennett notes that when a person is referring to red we will need to cash-out what property they are referring to in terms like: The person is referring to the reflexive property of x or y or z…(and the disjunction associated with one colour might be very long).

Dennett asks us: if the disjunction of properties which can be associated with a person’s experience of colour have little in common with each other, are we driven to the conclusion that colours do not exist? To think through this possibility considers colour blind people who have poorer discriminative capacities than us and a hypothetical alien who has colour discriminative capacities which are greater than ours. He notes that we would say that the colour blind man who may say that ripe (red for us) apples and grass are the same colour is suffering from a cognitive illusion. On the other hand if an alien had greater discriminative capacities than us so that it would constantly see things as changing colour, we would also say that he was experiencing colour illusions. This is because the meaning of colour terms is defined in terms of OUR discriminative capacities; which means that WE judge certain things in the world to be red, green etc. So relative to our form-of-life these other people would be suffering from a form of cognitive illusion.

Dennett concludes with the following statement:

Colour is not a primary physical property like mass, nor is it a complex of primary properties, a structural feature of surfaces. Nor again is it a private ‘phenomenal’ quality or an ‘emergent’ quality of certain internal states. Colours are what might be called functional properties. A thing is red if and only if when it is viewed under normal conditions by normal human observers it looks red to them, which only means: they are demonstrably non-eccentric users of colour words and they say, sincerely, that the thing looks red. There saying this does not hinge on their perusal of an internal quality, but on their perception of the object, their becoming aware that the thing is red (ibid, p.163)

I am not really sure whether Dennett really manages to avoid the problem of where the experience of red is located. However it should be obvious that he is not denying that colours exist, rather he is claiming that they are not paraded in a Cartesian Theatre.

A problem for Dennett’s position is that while it is somewhat plausible to claim that people don’t actually experience mental imagery or brief illusions it is intuitively less plausible to argue that strong hallucinations are not real seemings. Multimodal hallucinations which we can inspect seem on the face of it to be less easily explained away as mere seemings. It is for this reason that Dennett finds it necessary to argue that strong hallucinations do not occur, and that when less vivid hallucinations do occur Dennett argues that they result in the passive attitude we take towards them. As we have just seen the verbal reports of the people I have questioned and of Sack’s patients do not support Dennett’s claims about the nature of hallucinations. In my next blog I will go into this in more detail. For now it is sufficient to note the discrepancy between people’s reports and Dennett’s claims. So since Dennett has not proven that hallucinations have the structure which he argues for in ‘Consciousness Explained’ all he really has left is his claim that hallucinations are mere seemings. Now his claim that hallucinations are mere seemings could indeed be true, however the only real evidence to support it is that it helps Dennett avoid breaking Leibniz’s law when explaining the nature of hallucinations, mental imagery etc.

My reaction to Dennett’s views on hallucinations and mental imagery are conflicted. On the one hand I find myself arguing that when I call a mental image to my mind’s eye I do damn well experience a mental image I don’t merely SEEM to experience it. On the other hand I find myself worrying that this reaction of mine is simply me giving my judgments about my subjective experiences papal infallibility, I simply judge that because it seems to me that x is presented before the mind’s eye then I cannot doubt that this is the case. In the case of perception of an object in the external world I can make judgements which can be intersubjectively tested and these tests can either weaken or strengthen my claim. Or even if there are no other people around who I can test my perceptions by seeing if what I am seeing is an illusion, by inspecting the conditions of viewing whether there is good light, I can walk up to the object, walk around it, touch it etc. In the case of hallucinations such intersubjective tests are not possible, though bimodal tests are. Likewise in the case of mental imagery I cannot test the lighting conditions or touch the images or walk around them etc. So it is extremely odd that I would accord myself papal infallibility in the case of hallucinations and mental imagery given that I cannot really test my judgements[3]. All I can really appeal to is the fact that I intuitively know I experience mental imagery, hallucinations, illusions etc[4]. However if the last three hundred years of science have taught us anything it is that we cannot uncritically be overly reliant our supposed certain intuitive judgements (nor should we ignore them). So I go back and forth on this issue and have never really solved it. Tom Clark feels certain that REAL SEEMINGS exist. Matt Bush argues that they don’t they are just a product of the manifest image. I have never really made up my mind on the matter but I lean towards Matt’s view.

 

[1]This section on Real Seeming is taken from my much longer and more detailed take on Dennett’s view on Consciousness and Mind ‘Dennett and The Typical Mind Fallacy’. A reader interested in understanding in more detail how I understand Dennett’s view and where my view differs from his should check out that paper. They will find the paper in my blog and in my Academia.edu page.

[2]See Kolers, P. A and Von Grunau (1985) “Shape and Color in Apparent Motion” Vision Research 16 pp329-335.

[3]I discuss the rotation tests and neuroscientific tests of Kosslyn et al. In my ‘Dennett and The Typical Mind Fallacy’ but those third person tests are not the reason people believe they have imagery, rather their purported experiences are the reasons.

[4][4]I should add that I personally have only ever experienced weak mental imagery, I have also experienced illusions like colour phi but I have never experienced any hallucinations myself even under the influence of LSD.

THE INDETERMINACY OF TRANSLATION AND INNATE CONCEPTS.

                                               INTRODUCTION

            Throughout their careers, both Chomsky and Quine have dealt with Underdetermination[1] in different ways. Whenever Chomsky encounters UD he seeks to overcome it by postulating innate constraints; in contrast, Quine treats UD as a fact of life which simply has to be lived with. In this paper I will discuss the Indeterminacy of Translation[2]. Chomsky argues that the IDT amounts to nothing more than UD. He argues that the UD in physics is overcome by our innate science-forming faculty, and that UD in language raises no more difficulties than UD in physics. In the case of language, the IDT is overcome by innate constraints imposed by the rules of our language faculty.

Chomsky’s interpretation of the IDT has been accepted by the vast majority of contemporary cognitive scientists and they have proceeded to flesh out his proposal that the IDT can be overcome by innate constraints. However, when cognitive scientists are concerned with the IDT, they are typically interested in only one area of it, the inscrutability of reference. They typically argue that the inscrutability of reference is a form of UD in concept acquisition and that this UD can be overcome by postulating innate concepts which we use to learn our first words.  In this paper I will consider the attempt by contemporary cognitive scientists to overcome the inscrutability of reference by postulating innate concepts. Furthermore, I will analyse what effect the supposed overcoming of the inscrutability of reference by postulating innate concepts has on the indeterminacy of translation argument.

PART1: INDETERMINACY OF TRANSLATION AND UNDERDETERMINATION
Most contemporary cognitive scientists follow Chomsky in arguing that the IDT amounts to nothing more than UD and that this UD can be solved by postulating innate concepts. In particular they are interested in problems of inscrutability of reference and argue that the fact that children do not fall foul of the inscrutability of reference can be explained by the fact that children are born with innate concepts.

In his book The Language Instinct, Stephen Pinker presents the inscrutability of reference as a form of UD:

A rabbit scurries by, and a native shouts, ‘Gavagai’ What does gavagai mean? Logically speaking, it needn’t be ‘Rabbit’. It could refer to that particular rabbit (Flopsy, for example). It could mean any furry thing, any mammal, or any member of that species of rabbit (say, Oryctolagus), or any other member of that variety of that species (say, chinchilla rabbit). It could mean scurrying rabbit, scurrying thing, rabbit plus the ground it scurries upon, or scurrying in general. It could mean footprint-maker, or habitat for rabbit fleas. It could mean the top half of a rabbit, or rabbit meat on the hoof, or possessor of at least one rabbit’s foot. It could mean anything that is either a rabbit or a Buick. It could mean collection of undetached rabbit parts, or ‘Lo Rabbit hood again, or ‘It rabbiteth’, analogous to ‘it raineth’. The problem is the same when the child is the linguist and the parents are the natives…Figuring out which word to attach to which concept is the Gavagai problem, and if infants start out with concepts corresponding to the kind of meanings that languages use, the problem is partly solved.(1994, 156)

 

Pinker then goes on to cite the research of the psychologist Ellen Markman to show that it is indeed the case that children are born with concepts which constrain the types of meanings that words can be given. It is Pinker’s view that Quine’s problem is a problem of UD which is solved by the fact that the concepts that children are born with will place innate constraints on the type of meanings that children can attach to words.

The child psychologist Paul Bloom draws a similar conclusion to Pinker:

These problems of reference and generalization are solved so easily by children and adults that it takes philosophers like Quine and Goodman to even notice that they exist. If we see someone point to a rabbit and say ‘gavagai’, it is entirely natural to assume that this is an act of naming and that the word refers to the rabbit and should be extended to other rabbits. It would be mad to think that the word refers to undetached rabbit parts or rabbits plus the Eiffel Tower. But the naturalness of the rabbit hypothesis and the madness of the alternatives is not a logical necessity; it is instead the result of how the human mind works. (2000, 5)[3].

 

The Harvard linguist Cedric Boeckx echoes the claims of the above thinkers:

Yet, if you think about it, the Gavagai situation is the one we all faced as children trying to acquire the meaning of words. How did we guess that elephant refers to that big grey animal with a long trunk? Because someone pointed to the animal and said elephant? But how did you know what exactly was being pointed at? Surely the finger couldn’t point at the whole elephant; it was your cognitive bias that interpreted the act of pointing in that way. (2010, 41)

 

So the above quotes clearly indicate that, within the realm of cognitive science, it is common-place to follow Chomsky and view the inscrutability of reference as a problem of UD, and indeed as a problem which can be solved by postulating innate concepts.  Pinker, Bloom and Boeckx are speaking only of the inscrutability of reference as it affects the child learning his first words. Chomsky goes further: he is arguing that the IDT is a form of UD which can be overcome by postulating innate concepts. He does not explicitly demonstrate how the IDT is overcome by innate concepts; rather, he merely points out that the situation in physics raises the same problems as the IDT problem. In the case of physics the problem is overcome by a science forming faculty, whereas in the case of the IDT the problem is overcome by our language faculty. His reasoning is that is that our innate concepts will ensure that when we are acquiring our first language, we will not think that a word like ‘gavagai’ refers to undetached rabbit part, etc. Rather, we will discover that the word merely labels our innately known concept of ‘rabbit’. The fact that our innate concepts will determine that our words have fixed meanings means that the IDT is incorrect in claiming that there are no facts about translation.

It could be argued that by postulating such innate concepts, these thinkers are merely begging the question against Quine by assuming the very determinacy of meaning which he is arguing against. However, Pinker et al. argue that they are not merely postulating innate concepts in order to overcome indeterminacy. Rather, they claim that there is independent evidence which supports their belief in innate concepts, and this evidence offers reasons to believe that UD will not be something that affects a young child who is learning his first language.

 PART 2: INDETERMINACY OF TRANSLATION AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH

SECTION 1: EVIDENCE FOR INNATE CONCEPTS OF BODY AND MIND

Empirical research in psychology indicates that children as young as four months already display conceptual knowledge. Jean Piaget’s experimental research led him to believe that young children at the age of five months do not have an adequate knowledge of objects and that they have to pass through a variety of developmental stages before they will acquire the full concept of an object. Piaget noted that children playing with a ball will not search for it if it runs out of their field of vision. He drew the conclusion that they do not have knowledge of object permanence at this age. As early as the seventies, psychologists such as Bower were questioning Piaget’s view by claiming that these babies do not search for the missing objects because of a problem of coordinating their movement.  And since the seventies, it has been common-place to try to test children’s concept of an object by using experiments that do not require coordinated sequences of actions. Bower’s studies have made surprising discoveries: (Here I am citing from Baillargeon, R., Spelke, E, and Wasserman’s paper ‘‘Object permanence in infants’’):

Bower’s studies have yielded four findings that seem to have provided evidence for object permanence in infants well below 9 months. First, 7 week old Infants were found to discriminate between disappearances that signalled the continued existence of an object (e.g. Gradual Occlusion), and disappearances that did not (e.g. gradual dissolution or sudden implosion). Second, 2 month old infants were found to anticipate the reappearance of an object that stopped behind the screen, ‘looking to that half of the movement path the object would have reached had it not stopped’ Third, five month old infants were found to show disruptions in their tracking when an object was altered while passing behind the screen: they tended to look back at the screen, as though in search of the original object. Finally, 5-month-old-infants were found to reach for an object that had been hidden by darkening the room. (1985, 195)

 

However, Bower’s experiments are not conclusive evidence that children are born with concepts of object permanence. Piaget himself claimed in a personal correspondence with Bower that he could interpret some of these experiments in a way which was consistent with his own theory (ibid., 97).  Because of the inconclusiveness of the debate between Bower and Piaget, Baillargeon et al. set up more rigorous tests to show that humans are born with concepts of object permanence. Quine, like Piaget, also argued that Bower’s experiments did not necessarily show that a 4-month-old child has a concept of an object:

True, an infant is observed to expect a steadily moving object to reappear after it passes behind a screen; but all this happens within the specious present, and reflects rather the expectation of continuity of a present feature than the reification of an intermittently absent object. (1969, 24)

 

Here Quine is interpreting Bower’s famous experiment to mean not that the young child has a concept of an object, but as indicating that the young child expects continuity in his experiences. Baillargeon et al.’s experiment aimed to test this view of Quine and Piaget’s.

They began by testing whether children have what they called The SolidityPrinciple, which was the principle that a solid object cannot pass through another solid object. An experiment was set up where an object was presented to the child and then occluded. Then another object was rolled towards the occluded object. If the child exhibited surprise that the object moved through the space which seemed to be occupied by first the object, then this would exhibit two things: first, that the child had grasped the Solidity Principle; second, that the child understood object permanence, because he knew the objects still existed when occluded. Baillargeon et al performed this experiment on four month old children. When completed the experiment showed that four-month-old infants do seem to reason according to the principle of solidity, and the principle of object permanence.

Quine explained Bower’s experimental results by saying that the child expected the object to return out the other side of the screen because of an expectation of continuity. The child saw the object-shaped thing move towards and behind a screen. So he expected this object-shaped thing to continue moving in the same direction as it started from; hence, the surprise when it did not move out the other side of the screen. For Quine this in no way indicates that our child has a sophisticated concept of an object. However, expectation of continuity does not explain what is going on in Baillargeon et al.’s experiment. The child is exhibiting two beliefs: first, the belief that object-shaped things do not disappear when occluded; second, that object-shaped things are solid, and hence cannot be moved through. Hence the surprise the child exhibits when the object appears on the other side of the screen as though it had passed through the original object.  Obviously, expectation of continuity does not explain what is going on in Baillargeon et al’s experiment. So, to account for both Bower and Baillargeon’s experimental results, Quine needs to postulate at a minimum that 4 month old children expect object-shaped things not to disappear when occluded, to move in undeviating paths unless stopped by another object-shaped blob, and to have solidity.  A child with knowledge of this sort seems to be clearly demonstrating a complex concept of an object, and a theory which, contrary to what Quine believes, precedes the learning of the syntax of quantification by about 2 years.

Quine argues that ‘Gavagai’ considered as an observation sentence has a clear stimulus meaning and can be correlated with non-verbal stimulation. The same situation occurs when the child says ‘Mama’; this is an observation sentence which has a clear stimulus meaning. According to Quine, the word is correlated with a scattered portion of what is going on in the child’s environment when he speaks. For Quine, the difficulty arises when we try to break down observation sentences into terms and predicates etc. When we tried to break down ‘Gavagai’, the observation sentence, into ‘gavagai’, the term, our problems begin. Our breaking down the observation sentence involves us using analytical hypotheses which go far beyond the empirical data. Quine notes that no behavioural evidence can decide whether ‘gavagai’ refers to ‘undetached rabbit part’, ‘particular instance of universal rabbithood’, ‘rabbit fusion’ etc. If we want to translate the words of the native we must unjustifiably impose our ontology onto the natives. The situation of the child is similar, though there are some notable differences. When the linguist is trying to translate terms like ‘gavagai’ he ends up imposing his own ontology onto the native; however, according to Quine, the child has no ontology. So when the child tries to move from using ‘Mama’ as an observation sentence to ‘mama’ as a term he will have little to go on. The child cannot impose his own ontology because he supposedly has none. As the child begins to gradually learn the apparatus of quantification and syntax, through induction, reinforcement etc, then he will gradually acquire the language of his peers. However, if Baillargeon et al.’s experiment is correct, then when children are learning to speak, their innate concept of object will determine that the UD facing the child learning his first language will be massively reduced.

There is also experimental evidence of children having theories of mind, as well as the theory of objects which Baillargeon et al discovered. These empirical discoveries indicate that prior to learning their first language, the child has an ontology consisting of objects, agents, and causality etc. which will partly determine how the child interprets the speech of the adults they engage with. So it is typically assumed that the child’s innate concepts of objects and agency will massively limit the UD facing the child as he learns his first language. However, while suggestive, this supposed evidence for innate concepts is derived from the study of pre-linguistic children so it does not directly deal with issues of the reference of words. In the next section I will discuss an experiment which was done on children who are in the early stages of learning their language. The experiment was designed to test whether Quine’s claim that children only develop an ontology after they have mastered the syntax of quantification is true.

SECTION 2: ONTOLOGY AND LANGUAGE LEARNING: AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST

The experimental research that I outlined above purported to demonstrate that children have innate concepts of object and agency. If the evidence is taken at face value, it implies that these innate concepts will ensure that the UD facing the child learning his first words will be decreased.  However, this argument runs contrary to Quine’s claim that we are only justified in attributing an ontology to children after they have mastered the syntax of quantification.  In this section, I will consider an experiment constructed by Soja, Carey, and Spelke which aims to test Quine’s claim.

In their 1990 paper ‘‘Ontological categories guide young children’s inductions of word meaning’’[4]  Soja, Carey, and Spelke tested whether the ontological distinction between objects and non-solid substances conditions the projection of word meanings prior to the child’s mastery of count/mass syntax. Quine denied that children make any ontological commitments prior to learning the syntax of quantification which helps them master the count/mass noun distinction. Here Quine is making an empirical claim that prior to grasping the count/mass distinction, an agent like Mother, a property like Red, and a non-solid substance like Water are on a par. According to Quine, it is only when a child has mastered the apparatus of divided reference through grasping the syntax of quantification that the child can distinguish these substances. Soja et al. set out to test these empirical claims of Quine’s. Before outlining their experiment I will outline Quine’s views on language acquisition.

                                             QUINE’S POSITION

 

Quine claims that when young children mouth words such as ‘Mama’, ‘Water’, or ‘Red’, we are in no position to state that they are using the words as terms which refer to the same things which we refer to by the sounds.

For though we may fully satisfy ourselves that the child has learned the trick of using the utterances ‘mama’, and ‘water’ strictly in the appropriate presences, or as a means of inducing the appropriate presences, we still have no right to construe these utterances in the child’s mouth as terms, at first, for things or substances. (1969, 7)

 

According to Quine, from our own mature perspective, we have come to view the child’s mother as a body which revisits the child from time to time, and water as a scattered object. However, from a behavioural perspective, we have little justification for imputing this ontology onto the child.  After making this negative point about our lack of justification for imputing our mature ontology onto the child, he then goes on to make a positive point about the nature of the child’s ontology.

But the mother, red, and water are for the infant all of a type: each is just a history of sporadic encounter, a scattered portion of what goes on. His first learning of the three words is uniformly a matter of learning how much what goes on about him counts as the mother, or as red, or as water. It is not for the child to say in the first case ‘Hello mama again’, in the second case ‘Hello another red thing’ and in the third place ‘Hello more water’. They are all on a par: Hello more mama, more red, and more water. (ibid., 7)

 

Here Quine is clearly claiming that young children who use words, such as ‘Mama’, ‘Red’ and ‘Water’ are not distinguishing them in terms of being respectively Objects, Properties, and Non-solid substances. His reason for arguing so is that we have no positive behavioural evidence to support the claim that children make such distinctions, and in the absence of such positive evidence, there is little reason to impute such a rich ontology to young children. Quine’s claim is that we should only attribute to children the ability to distinguish between Objects, Substances and Properties when we have behavioural evidence which supports us making this distinction.

Progressively, however, the child is seen to evolve a pattern of verbal behaviour that finally comes to copy ours too closely for there to be any sense in questioning the general sameness of conceptual scheme. For perspective on our own objectifying apparatus we may consider what steps of development make the difference between ‘mama’-babbling infant who cannot be said to be using terms for objects, and the older child who can. It is only when the child has got on to the full and proper use of individuative terms like ‘apple’ that he can properly be said to have taken to using terms, and speaking of objects. Words like ‘apple’ are not words like ‘mama’ or ‘water’ or ‘red’ are terms whose ontological involvement runs deep. To learn ‘apple’ it is not enough to have learned how much of what goes on around you counts as apple; we must learn how much counts as an apple, and how much as another. Such terms possess built in modes of individuation. (ibid., 8)

 

Now Quine acknowledges that the child may learn ‘apple’ in the same way that he learns ‘mama’ or ‘red’ but he goes on to say that the child will never master ‘apple’ in its individuative use until he gets on with the scheme of enduring physical objects. And in order to get on with the scheme of enduring physical objects, the child will need to master the apparatus of identity, difference etc.  Quine claims that to be able to tell if the child has got the trick of individuation down, we need the following:

How can we ever tell if the child has got the trick of individuation? Only by engaging him in sophisticated discourse of ‘that apple’, ‘not that apple’, ‘an apple’, ‘same apple’, ‘these apples’, ‘another apple’. It is only at this level that a palpable difference emerges between genuinely individuative use and the counterfeits lately imagined.(ibid., 9)

 

It is at this stage that Quine claims that we are justified in attributing an ontology to the child. Prior to that, attributing an ontology to the child is making an unsupported conjecture which is not justified by the facts.  For Quine, our child learns the adjectives ‘same’, ‘another’, ‘an’, ‘that’, ‘not that’ contextually. First the child gets used to various longer phrases which contain them, and he gradually develops appropriate habits in relation to the component words as common parts and residues of those longer forms. He further speculates that the contextual learning of all of these various different particles goes on simultaneously, so that we gradually adjust them to each other as a coherent pattern of usage is evolved (ibid., 10). So the story of child ontology as Quine tells it is that the child’s words just represent scattered portions of what goes on and do not distinguish between Objects, Properties and Substances.

So Quine’s picture of a child learning language and the ontology which is implicit in this language involves pared down assumptions according to which we attribute to the child no more than is necessary to explain his verbal behaviour. Quine treats the babbling which a child begins to emit at the age of 12 months as a form of operant behaviour which is omitted rather than elicited. He claims that the family of the child will reinforce the child’s verbal behaviour (such reinforcement made possible by the child’s pre-linguistic quality space) in such a manner that the child’s use of observation sentences such as ‘mama’ will reliably distinguish between ‘mama’ portions of the environment, and ‘non-mama’ portions. However, at this stage we cannot credit the child with having an ontology; from the point of view of external verbal behaviour we have no reason to attribute to the child a concept of ‘Mama’ as a name of a spatio-temporal object, as opposed to being a name of a mere mass term like ‘Water’.  It is only when we engage the child in discourse and he can answer the questions using terms such as ‘not that mama’, ‘same mama’, ‘another mama’ etc., that we are justified in attributing to the child a concept of ‘mama’ as an object as opposed to scattered portion of mama environment etc.

                                    TESTING QUINE’S CLAIMS

Soja et al. conducted their experiments to test Quine’s claim (1960, 1969) that young children only develop an ontology after they have grasped the syntax of quantification.  Contrary to Quine, they claimed that young children have a distinction between different ontological categories prior to grasping the syntax of quantification, and that in fact these ontological categories constrain the process of language learning. They distinguished their views from Quine’s in the following way:

According to Quine, then, when children hear a new word, the meaning they assign to it is determined by procedure 0:

Procedure 0: Conclude that the word refers to aspects of the world that share salient properties of the perceptual experience when the word is used. (1991, 182)

 

Soja et al. proposed a different view of the procedures children use when they learn a new word; their procedure assumed that the child had ontological categories prior to learning the syntax of quantification.

Procedure 1    Step 1: Test to see if the speaker could be talking about a solid object; if yes,

Step 2: Conclude the word refers to individual whole objects of the same type as the referent.

Procedure 2 Step 1: Test to see if the speaker could be talking about a non-solid substance; if yes,

Step 2: Conclude the word refers to portions of substance of the same type as the referent.  (ibid., 183)

 

Soja et al. proposed an experiment which would decide between these two different proposals about how children learn new words.

One way for Soja et al. to test whether Quine was correct, or whether they were correct, was to test how children generalised when they learned words for different objects. If children could generalize prior to a grasp of the count mass syntax this would be evidence that Quine was wrong. They ensured that the experiment was done on children who are below the age of 2 ½, the age at which children master the syntax of quantification.  They tested how children generalise words to non-solid substances as well as to objects. If Quine is right that children generalise names by using Procedure 0, then children will generalize names based on shape whether the name originally refers to an object or a non-solid substance.

THE EXPERIMENT

Twenty-four 2-year-olds from the Greater Boston area were recruited and randomly placed into two groups (informative syntax groups, and neutral syntax groups), with equal numbers of boys and girls in each group. Each testing session began with two familiar trials: one object trial and one substance trial. The stimuli in the familiar object trial were a blue plastic cup, a white Styrofoam cup and cup pieces. The stimuli in the familiar non-solid substance trial were peanut butter and Play-doh. These trials followed the same format as the unfamiliar trials described below.  The two familiar trials were followed by eight unfamiliar trials: four object trials and four substance trials which were intermingled. The subjects were tested on each trial on two separate occasions. Eight novel words were used: ‘blicket’, ‘stad’, ‘mell’, ‘Coodle’, ‘doff’, ‘tanninn’, ‘fitch’, and ‘tulver’ (ibid., 187)

TEST 1: AN UNFAMILIAR OBJECT TRIAL IN THE NEUTRAL SYNTAX CONDITION

The test involved presenting the child with an unfamiliar object, e.g. a plumbing T-shaped pipe, and giving the child a name for the object, e.g. blicket. In the neutral syntax condition the child is told ‘This is my blicket’. The experimenter then continued to talk about the object using ‘my’ ‘the’ and ‘this’ as determiners. She and the subject then manipulated the object. The object was then placed to the side and two other sets of objects were then presented to the subject.  One set consisted of objects of the same sort as the original but made of a different material, e.g. a plastic T shape; the other set consisted of objects of the same material but a different shape i.e. bits of metal.  The experimenter then said ‘Point to the blicket’

TEST 2: AN UNFAMILIAR SUBSTANCE TRIAL IN THE NEUTRAL SYNTAX CONDITION

The child was shown an unfamiliar substance, and told ‘This is my stad’. The experimenters referred to the substance using only the determiners ‘my’ ‘the’ and ‘this’. The experimenter and the subject talked about the substance and played with it.  In the presentation of test substances, the subject was shown two substances, the original and the new one, and told ‘Point to the stad’.  The original substance was in the alternative configuration, whereas the new substance was in the configuration used originally with the named substance.  There were four pairs of substances: (1) Dippity-do (a setting gel), and lumpy Nivea (a hand cream mixed with gravel), (2) Coffee (freeze dried) and Orzo (a rice shaped pasta), (3) Sawdust and leather (cut to tiny pieces), (4) Crazy foam and Clay. Of each pair one member was named and the other was used as the alternative to the original in the test presentation. Each member served in both roles across subjects.

TEST 3: OBJECT AND SUBSTANCE TRIALS IN THE INFORMATIVE SYNTAX CONDITION

This condition differed from the neutral syntax condition only in the determiners and quantifiers used when naming the original stimulus. The experimenter introduced an object trial in the informative syntax condition with ‘This is a blicket’ and used ‘A blicket’ and ‘Another blicket’ in subsequent discussions. Substance trials in the informative syntax condition were introduced with ‘This is stad’ and in subsequent discussion the experimenter continued to omit determiners or use ‘some’ or ‘some more’. This was the only difference between the different informative and uninformative trials. In the familiar word trial subjects differentiated the object and the substance trials as predicted.

                                   WORD LEARNING TRIALS

Subjects differentiated the two types of trials.  Responses were consistent with shape and number on the object trials, and were not consistent with shape and number in the substance trials.

                                     WHAT THE TEST SHOWS

If before the child has grasped the syntax of quantification the child differentiates in the above manner, this shows that the child is not generalizing the word-based perceptual similarity, but is doing so based on the type of object he is presented with. So, for example, if he was generalizing according to an innate perceptual similarity quality space which focuses on shape then why does this not work for substances? The answer is because the child recognises that objects and substances are distinct ontological categories. Soja et al. summed up their results as follows:

In sum, the children chose according to object type when the stimulus was an object and according to substance type when the stimulus was a non-solid substance. There was no effect of the syntactic context: performance was neither facilitated nor hindered by the additional syntactic information.

The data from Experiment 1 show that different inferences about the meaning of a newly heard word are drawn according to the ontological status of its referent. If the word refers to an object, the child’s projection respects shape and number, and ignores texture, color, and substance. If the word refers to a non-solid substance, the child’s projection ignores shape and number, respecting texture, color and substance. (ibid., 192)

 

From this experiment, Soja, et al. claim to have shown that Quine’s view of how children learn language is incorrect because the experiment shows that, contrary to what Quine claims; children do indeed have a distinction between different ontological categories prior to grasping count/mass syntax. It also shows that these innate ontological categories are what help a child learn a language and not the apparatus of quantification. Soja et al.’s experiment purports to have shown that children learn words according to ontological distinctions which they exhibit knowledge of prior to learning a language.  So their experiment, along with the experiment of Baillargeon et al., purports to show that Quine is wrong in his story about how children develop their concept of an object.

Again, the relevance of this experiment to the IDT should be apparent. While Soja et al. purport to have shown that children have an ontology prior to learning their first language, Baillargeon et al. purport to have shown that young children interpret the meaning of new words using this pre-linguistic ontology. Quine claims that linguists construct their analytical hypotheses by imposing their ontology onto natives. These two experiments try to demonstrate that a child interprets the sounds of his peers by imposing his own innate concepts. So according to this view, there are facts about meaning which are imposed by our universally shared concepts.

SECTION 3: THEORY OF MIND AND TRIANGULATION

Research by Baillargeon et al. which I discussed in Section 1 Part 3 indicates that four-month-old children seem to have implicit knowledge of the following five principles about objects:

(1) The principle of solidity.

(2) The principle that objects are three-dimensional.

(3) Objects tend to move on undeviating paths.

(4) Objects move continuously through space and time.

(5) Objects only move when contacted by another object. (Children make exceptions to this principle when they are viewing intentional objects)

 

This work of Baillargeon et al. indicates that children from a very young age have an intricate knowledge of objects; on the other side of the coin the work of people like Simon Baron-Cohen[5] indicates that prior to learning language, normal children view other people as intentional agents with beliefs, desires etc.  Furthermore, there is evidence that such children who lack this theory of mind suffer severe language learning difficulties. The evidence for a pre-linguistic theory of mind has been summed up succinctly by the psychologist Paul Bloom:

What understanding do prelinguistic children have about the minds of others? Consider first sensitivity to what other people are attending to. By around nine months, a baby will naturally follow its mother’s line of regard (Butterworth, 1991), and will also follow her pointing gestures (Murphy and Messer 1977), at about the same age, babies can monitor their parents’ emotional reactions to potentially dangerous situations and react accordingly. For instance when seeing a spider, a baby will be less likely to approach it, if its mother seems fearful than if she seems happy (Zarbatany and Lamb 1985) and when babies are uncertain or hesitant, they check what their mother is looking at and how she is reacting (Bretherton, 1992)… (2000, 67)

 

There is, then, some compelling evidence from both a logical and an empirical point of view which seems to indicate that children have pre-linguistic concepts which they use to help them learn their language. Furthermore, it is clear from the empirical studies that children exhibit knowledge of intentional agents and object constancy prior to their learning their first words at the age of 12months.

This evidence so far indicates the following: prior to the age of 12 months when young children begin to learn their first words, they exhibit a grasp of concepts of agency, object, substance etc. Young children also do not need to grasp the syntax of quantification to have ontological commitments; in fact there is evidence that young children (below the age of 2 ½) have an ontology which constrains the meanings that they can give to words. This evidence is typically used to argue that the inscrutability is overcome by our innate concepts.

                  SECTION 4: MARKMAN AND WORD LEARNING

Markman begins her book Categorisation and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction (1989) by discussing Quine’s IDT problem and claims that the young child is faced with the same problem as the adult linguist. Her empirical research is conducted to the end of seeing how the child does in fact overcome the problem. She begins by discussing the research of Piaget on young children, which indicates that young children categorise objects primarily in terms of thematic relations as opposed to taxonomic relations (e.g. a spider and a web are categorised together because they are both part of the same theme: the spider building a web).

The fact that children prefer to organise their experiences according to thematic relations poses a serious problem for theorists who claim that innate constraints on interpretations will limit the problem of IDT. Markman summed up the problem as follows:

Children seem to readily learn terms that refer to object categories. Their vocabulary is filled with words such as ‘ball’ and ‘dog’, simple concrete nouns referring to object categories. Yet children often notice and remember thematic relations between objects more readily than an objects category. How is it that children readily learn labels for categories of objects if they are attending to relations to objects instead? To take a concrete example, imagine a mother pointing to a baby and saying, ‘baby’. Based on the classification studies, we should assume that the child will be attending to the baby sucking on the bottle, or to the baby being diapered. Why, then, doesn’t the child infer that ‘baby’ means something like ‘baby and its bottle’ or ‘baby and its diaper’?(1989, 27)

 

Therefore, if we accept the results of the categorisation tests, and if we further accept that the IDT is overcome by pre-linguistic biases, then it seems to follow that children will think that words like ‘baby’ will pick out thematic events like ‘baby sucking on his bottle’, and this view runs counter to our intuition of what words typically mean.

Markman proposed a solution to this problem. She claimed that when children are interpreting new sounds, they will typically assume that the new sound refers to a whole object. Markman then constructed a series of experiments which were designed to test this proposal. Markman’s proposal is as follows:

Children may be biased to treat novel labels as referring to whole objects (the whole object assumption) and to treat them as referring to objects of the same type (the taxonomic assumption). (ibid p, 27)

 

Upon testing these assumptions the experimental evidence verified that these assumptions were indeed correct.

                                         EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE

Markman’s experiment was done on children between the age of two and three, and was designed to test whether children exhibit what she called the taxonomic and whole object assumption.  Her prediction was that children should interpret novel labels as labels for objects of the same type, as opposed to objects that are thematically related. And to test this prediction, she organised a test which compared the way children organised objects when they were given a novel object label and the way they organised objects when they were given no label. There were two conditions in the experiment: a no word condition, and a word condition. In the two conditions the children were shown a target picture; they were then shown two other pictures and asked to select one of them as being the same as the target (ibid., 27).

NO WORD CONDITION:

The children were introduced to a hand puppet and told to put the picture they choose into the puppets mouth. The child was then shown a picture such as a picture of a dog, and then told ‘Look carefully. See this? Find one that is the same as this.’

NOVEL WORD CONDITION:

This condition was identical to the no word condition with one exception. In this condition the child was told that the puppet could talk in puppet talk. They were told to listen very carefully to find the right picture. The puppet gave the target picture an unfamiliar name and used the same name in the instructions for picking a choice picture. For example, the puppet might say, ‘See this? It is a sud. Find another sud that is the same as this sud.’(ibid., 28)

The results of the experiments in the two different conditions are instructive. In the no word condition, the child who had to choose between another category member and a thematically related object, often chose the thematically related object. They selected other category members a mean of only 59% of the time, which is no better than chance. In the novel word condition, the children selected categorically the vast majority of the time. They chose the other category member a mean of 83% of the time, which is better than chance.

So these results supported Markman’s prediction that when young children are learning the meaning of a new word they switch to taxonomic understanding of the meaning of the word. In other words, the child will assume that ‘Gavagai’ refers to rabbit as opposed to rabbit running in the grass.

However, this experiment is not directly relevant to the claims which Quine is making in Word and Object. When Quine is talking about the inscrutability of reference he typically makes the following point:

Point to a rabbit and you have pointed to a stage of a rabbit, to an integral part of a rabbit, to the rabbit fusion and to where rabbit-hood is manifested. Point to an integral part of a rabbit and you have pointed again to the remaining four sorts of things; and so on around. Nothing not distinguished in stimulus meaning itself is to be distinguished by pointing unless the pointing is accompanied by questions of identity and diversity.(1960, 53)

 

Markman’s experiment indicates that children will make a whole object assumption in the new word condition 83% of the time. The relevance of this fact for Quine’s concerns is questionable. If a child interprets new words using the taxonomic assumption instead of the thematic assumption, then this is an interesting fact about child psychology but it does not refute Quine’s argument. If a child does make the taxonomic assumption for novel words he hears and continues to make this assumption when he uses the word, this will not overcome Quine’s concerns. The child may not use ‘Gavagai’ to refer to rabbit running in the grass, however nothing in the experiment can tell us whether the child uses the term to refer to an undetached rabbit part or a particular instance of universal rabbithood. The point of Quine’s thought experiment is that we can have no behavioural evidence which can indicate which of these interpretations is the correct one. We can try and find out if we engage the children or native in questioning, for example, are you speaking about a rabbit or an undetached rabbit part? However, in the case of the native we can only ask them when we have learned their language and hence have made assumptions about reference which will be hidden from experience.  While in the case of child, we will only be able to ask them after they have learned our language and hence have adopted our ontology. So Markman’s experiment does not really touch the issues which concern Quine. In Markman’s experiment, it can be decided whether the child is making a thematic choice or a taxonomic choice depending on what objects they pick. However, Quine’s example of ‘gavagai’ cannot be decided in such a manner because every time the child picks out rabbit he will also be picking out an undetached rabbit part etc.

PART 3: EVALUATING THE RELEVANCE OF THE EXPERIMENTS

We have seen that a number of contemporary linguists and psychologists view the IDT as a form of UD which faces the child when he is trying to learn his first words. These theorists argue that innate constraints overcome this problem of UD. Merely postulating innate constraints to overcome the problem is question-begging, so the theorists need independent evidence to support their postulation of innate concepts. I have reviewed some different experiments which are typically cited as evidence to support the view that the UD facing the child is overcome because of innate constraints.

The first experiment indicates that children at the age of four months have a concept of what it is to be an object which includes beliefs that it is solid, three-dimensional, tends to move in undeviating paths, moves continuously through space and time, and only moves when contacted by another object. This complex concept of an object exists prior to a child learning language and is clear evidence that the child has ontological commitments prior to learning language and the syntax of quantification. The second experiment showed that before the age of two and a half when they have mastered the syntax of quantification, children could, contrary to what Quine claimed, distinguish between mass terms and count nouns. The experiment proved that when learning new words for solid substances children generalised based on shape and number, and when learning new words for non-solid substances generalised based on texture and colour. This experiment showed that children can distinguish between these substances prior to learning count nouns and mass terms, and in fact this pre-linguistic ontology helps the child learn the distinction between mass and count nouns, not vice versa.

The third experiment showed that when children are learning a new word they are constrained to make a taxonomic assumption when deciding what the word refers to. This experiment is interesting in showing that when children are learning a new word they seem to be constrained in how they interpret the word. However, the experiment does not deal with the concerns of Quine, because even if the taxonomic assumption is in place, this still  leaves the question open of whether ‘gavagai’ refers to undetached rabbit part, particular instance of universal rabbit-hood etc.

We saw above that thinkers like Pinker, Bloom and Boeckx follow Chomsky in thinking of the IDT as a form of UD which can be overcome by innate concepts. They typically cite the experimental work of Baillargeon, Spelke, Soja and Markman as evidence that children are born with the innate concepts which will ensure that children will overcome the problems raised by the IDT.  However I argue now that these experiments are of limited significance when it comes to evaluating Quine’s philosophical position.

When Quine speaks of ontological commitment only being possible when we have mastered the syntax of quantification he is primarily talking about an explicit worked out ontology. A child having implicit beliefs about the behaviour of objects is of limited philosophical significance. It is only when a creature begins to speak about this and that object, and to make claims which are true or false about objects, that we can really evaluate their ontic commitments. My primary concern is whether any of the three experiments offer evidence that the IDT viewed as UD is overcome by innate constraints.

The three experiments offer no evidence that the UD is overcome for children learning their first language because of innate constraints. Markman’s experiment gives us no reason to believe that a child can decide between ‘gavagai’ in the sense of rabbit as opposed to undetached rabbit part, particular instance of universal rabbithood, or rabbit fusion etc. So her experiment is not relevant to the questions which Quine is raising when it comes to the Inscrutability of reference. It is typically believed that the evidence provided by people such as Baillargeon et al. etc. is evidence of innate concepts, and, indeed, the authors of these papers typically argue in this manner. However, the fact is that they only provide evidence for pre-linguistic concepts, not for innate concepts. It could be argued that if children have pre-linguistic concepts which determine that they will interpret ‘rabbit’ as referring to rabbit then by claiming that the concept RABBIT is innate we have solved the inscrutability of reference for a child learning his first words.  His innate concept of RABBIT willdetermine that ‘rabbit’ will mean rabbit. Furthermore if our innate concepts determine what the words mean, then this will mean that our analytic hypotheses’ are fixed from the start.  However, the empirical evidence indicates that this argument does not work.

First, the experimental evidence which I reviewed above merely shows that children have pre-linguistic concepts; they do not demonstrate that children have innate concepts. If we assume that a child has a pre-linguistic concept of GAVAGAI, the question arises of how the child learns this concept. If the concept of GAVAGAI is supposed to refer to Rabbit as opposed to undetached rabbit part, particular instance of universal rabbithood, or rabbit fusion, then one is faced with the question of what evidence the child used to decide amongst these different meanings of the concept? Quine’s point was that there was no behavioural evidence which can decide between the various possible meanings of GAVAGAI. So if there is no evidence which the child can use to decide between the various different meanings of GAVAGAI, then Chomskians are faced with an APS for concept acquisition. If they want to argue for determinacy about the meaning of the concepts, they need to overcome the APS. A possible way to overcome the APS is to argue that children are born with innate concepts. However, to argue in this manner is to merely beg the question against Quine by assuming the very determinacy of meaning which is in question here.

To be clear, the issue here is not innateness per se, but innate concepts. Human intuitive physics differs from those of apes in some respects, and other creatures in many respects. The differences between these creatures are obviously to do with their innate genetic endowment. However, nativists typically claim that certain intuitive theories of object behaviour, the behaviour of agents etc. is written into the genetic code of most if not all humans. And they claim that these theories will grow in the mind if children are situated in any normal environment. Non-nativists claim that humans differ from other animals because they are innately wired up to be able to recognise statistical regularities in their environment which will help them learn the structure of the world they are born into. The important point to note here is that the experiments of Soja et al. and of Baillargeon et al. do not tell us whether children learn their theory of object behaviour statistically or because they are born with innate concepts of objects etc.  Quine argues that we learn our concepts through observation and trial and error. However he notes that this mode of learning will not determine what the meaning of GAVAGAI is. The experimenters who I reviewed above all argue that such concepts are innate; however, as we have seen, the evidence does not support their claims on this point. Without such evidence in place, they can simply state that innateness overcomes the UD but it remains just that, a statement, a question begging-assertion rather than an empirical fact.

It is also important to note that the types of experiments which they constructed are in principle blind to Quine’s concerns. Quine is claiming that from a behavioural point of view there is no fact of the matter as to whether ‘gavagai’ refers to undetached rabbit part, particular instance of universal rabbithood, rabbit fusion etc. None of the experiments above can tell what ‘gavagai’ refers to, nor can any behavioural evidence in principle, because, as Quine says, every time we point to one of them we are pointing to the others as well. So the experiments do not really affect Quine’s IDT argument.

The situation is this: one of the premises of the IDT, the inscrutability of reference, says that there is no fact of the matter as to whether ‘gavagai’ refers to undetached rabbit part, particular instance of universal rabbithood, it rabbiteth, etc. One can avoid this conclusion by saying that we know intuitively that there is a distinction between the various potential references of the term, and we know this because we are innately constrained to interpret ‘gavagai’ as referring to rabbit. However, this move merely begs the question against Quine.  Likewise it could be argued that Quine is begging the question against Chomsky et al. by assuming that there is no determinacy of meaning.

We have seen that if concepts are learned statistically through incremental data processing, then there can be no evidence to distinguish between the various interpretations of ‘gavagai’. If, on the other hand, we assume that children are born with innate concepts which distinguish between the various different interpretations, then our problem is supposedly solved. However, given that behavioural evidence cannot decide between the various different interpretations, the postulation of innate concepts that solve the problem amounts to merely assuming without evidence that the problem does not exist.

PART 4: THE APTNESS OF THE ANALOGY

I have reviewed some empirical research on the nature of concepts which purports to show that Quine is incorrect about how children develop their ontology.  But nothing in this research tells us much about facts of translation; in fact it is only the strained analogy with the situation of the field linguist and the situation of the child that makes us think there is any connection at all. We have seen that thinkers such as Chomsky, Pinker, Markman, and Boeckx all write as though the two situations were identical. It is my contention, however, that this analogy should be dropped, that we should not compare the situation of the field linguist with the situation of the radical translator. Firstly, the field linguist differs from the child in that the field linguist has an explicit theory of the world which will affect how he interprets the sounds of the native, whereas the child supposedly operates using an implicit theory which will automatically map certain sounds onto certain interpretations.  The linguist will have a total network of beliefs about the world which he will bring to the translation situation. These beliefs will help him translate what the native is saying, but they will also ensure that we end up translating them according to our own lights. It could be argued that this situation is no different than the situation that the child finds himself in, and that the same solution is possible in terms of positing innate constraints on the interpretations the translator can make. Furthermore, it could be argued that these constraints are justified, given that the translator and the native are both members of the species homo-sapiens and so are subject to the same innate constraints. Such a move, I argue, is not justified by the best evidence that we have available to us at the moment. Firstly, as we have seen above, we do not as of yet have sufficient evidence that innate concepts exist, for all  that contemporary cognitive science has shown is that children have complex concepts from a very young age. Secondly, even if Homo-sapiens are, indeed, born with innate concepts, this would have limited significance for questions of translation.

Let us assume (wrongly) that contemporary cognitive science has proven that humans are born with innate concepts. So when our native begins to converse with the linguist, there will be a plethora of innate constraints which will in some ways determine how communication between the two takes place. These constraints have a lot in common with the types of constraints which Markman, Soja, etc talk about. Thus, one such constraint will be fact that the linguist will automatically track the eye movements of the native and try to triangulate with the natives on shared objects of experience. The linguist will use the language of the eyes to try out translations of the native’s utterances by mouthing ‘Gavagai’ while looking at the rabbit.  But obviously such innate constraints do not entirely determine what an adult is referring to when he uses the terms. An adult speaks about reality and communicates with others based on what he has learned about the world through his scientific education, religious education, social education, etc. When an ordinary adult speaks, he will speak in a language which reflects the ontological commitments of the community which he was socialised in. The discourse of any community will be shot through with assumptions which are justified in light of the total theory of the experts and the citizens of the community.  It is possible that a child may be born with a folk biology which determines that it sees a moving furry object with eyes as an agent.  And an adult may have the same innate bias wired in his brain; however, such a bias will not determine the speech of the adult. Imagine, for example, Putnam’s thought experiment that it has been discovered that rabbits are remote-controlled spies from Mars. In that situation, people may be innately biased to see rabbits as agents but would have scientific evidence that this bias was in fact false.  Various theories of the world which are learned through pain-staking trial and error will influence what people think they are referring to when they refer to certain entities.  When we are trying to understand the discourse of a native, we have no way of knowing what sort of ontological commitments they are adhering to. Do they have the same information about rabbits being remote-controlled spies as we do? The natives could be Platonists, or Nominalists, they could be Dualists or Monists. Without knowing their ontology prior to translation, we will have no choice but to assume that their ontology is the same as ours. This will mean, of course, that we are translating their language according to our own lights. The experiments of Markman, Soja and Spelke are not really relevant when it comes to facts about translation.  The native and the field linguist may both be members of the species Homo-sapiens and hence will presumably learn language subject to the same constraints as scientists like Markman, Soja et al. claim. Nevertheless, the fact that we develop sophisticated theories of the world which go far beyond the crude ontology of children means that understanding the constraints on language learning will give us little to go on in constructing a translation manual when we are trying to interpret our native.

Quine is quite explicit on this point: the IDT argument is separate from questions of how a child learns his first language. When Quine is speculating on how a child learns his first language, he is doing so because he believes that understanding how humans in fact develop their ability to refer will help us better understand the process of reference. And understanding our process of reference better will help us better grasp the process of ontic commitment.

We have seen in this paper, that despite the fact that most cognitive scientists believe that the IDT has been overcome by the postulation of a language faculty, the evidence indicates otherwise.  None of the experimental evidence demonstrates that children are born with innate concepts. So neither the Inscrutability of Reference nor the IDT is overcome by innate concepts. The fact is that, as of yet, we do not have enough evidence to indicate whether children are born with innate concepts. Furthermore, even if children are born with innate concepts, this fact would have no relevance for the IDT unless it could be shown that the innate concepts people are supposedly born with cannot be changed by experience.     

            

                                               BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baillargeon, R, Spelke, E and Wasserman, S. 1985 Object Permanence in Five Month Old Infants. Cognition 20 pg 191-208.

Baron Cohen, S., 1995 Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and The Theory of Mind. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Bloom, P. 2000 How Children Learn the Meaning of Words. Cambridge MA:  MIT Press

Boeckx, C. 2010 Language in Cognition. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Boeckx, C. 2010 Language in Cognition. London: Wiley-Blackwell

Chomsky, N. 1969. “Quine’s Empirical Assumptions” Synthese 21 pp 53-68

Chomsky, N. 1980b. On Cognitive Structures and Their Development. In M Piattelli-Palmarini ed Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. London:  Routledge and Kegan Paul, pg 35-52

Markman, E. 1989 Categorization and Naming in Children. Cambridge MA: MIT Press

Piaget, J. 1926 The Language and Thought of the Child. London: Routledge

Pinker, S. 1994 The Language Instinct. London: Penguin Books.

Quine, W.V 1960 Word and Object. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Quine, W.V 1975  ‘‘Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World’’. Erkenntnis 9 pg313-28

Quine, W.V 1970 ‘‘On the Reasons for the Indeterminacy of Translation’’.  The Journal of Philosophy 67. Pg178-183

Soja, N., Carey, S., and Spelke, E,. 1991 ‘‘Ontological categories guide young children’s inductions of word meaning: Object terms and substance terms.’’ Cognition, 38, pg179-211

 

[1]Henceforth Underdetermination will be known as UD.

[2]Henceforth the Indeterminacy of Translation will be referred to as IDT.

[3] While Pinker’s and Bloom’s arguments on this narrow point are similar, obviously this does not imply that they hold the exact same view on the nature of the mind.

 

[5]See Simon Baron Cohen:Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind.

HALLUCINATIONS AND THE HARD PROBLEM: TOM CLARK, DENNETT AND SACKS

In chapter 6 of his ‘The Mind’s Eye’ Oliver Sack wrote up his diary entries of his experiences after he had been diagnosed with an ocular melanoma. Sacks had radiation treatment to try to kill the melanoma. After the treatment he had his damaged eye covered with a thick patch. He reported the following strange experience he noticed few days after his treatment:

“If I have been looking at something and then close my eyes, I continue to see it so clearly that I wonder whether I have actually closed my eyes. A startling example of this happened a few minutes ago when I was in the bathroom. I had washed my hands, was staring at the washbasin, and then, for some reason, closed my left eye. I still saw the wash basin, large as life. I went back into my room, thinking that the dressing over the right eye must be absolutely transparent! This was my first thought and, as I realised a moment later, an absurd one. The dressing was anything but transparent- it was a great wodge of plastic, metal, and gauze half an inch thick. And my eye, beneath it, still had one of its muscles detached and was in no position to see anything. For the fifteen seconds or so that I kept my good eye closed, I could not see anything at all. Yet I did see the washbasin- clear, bright, and as real as could be.” (The Mind’s Eye, p. 160)

In the Analytic Philosophy Facebook page Tom Clark (Creator of the Facebook Naturalism page) used a hallucination of music produced by the same brain area as perception of music to illustrate what he thinks the hard problem of consciousness is. Tom’s conclusion on the topic is that the music hallucination shows that our experiences are internal in both: experiences of real world objects and of hallucinations of real world objects. He argues that this makes it very clear what the hard problem of consciousness is: how does the grey matter in our brains produce our whole worlds of experience?  So while we can explain what the neural correlates of an experience are we still haven’t explained how that experience arises. I think that Sack’s experience also makes clear the supposed internal nature of experience and hence what the hard problem of consciousness is.

Dennett famously discussed the nature of hallucinations in his ‘Consciousness Explained’ pp. 3-18. I think that it is worth considering what Dennett’s views on hallucinations are and how he would try to handle Tom’s evidence. Tom is of course a former PhD student of Dennett’s so he knows his work well, and he obviously isn’t impressed with Dennett’s arguments on the topic. So this brief blog is for my own clarification rather than a criticism of Tom. However I would welcome any feedback from Tom on the topic.

Dennett of course does not deny that we can experience hallucinations of music on p. 4 of ‘Consciousness Explained’ he makes the following point:

“Not wanting to horrify you, then, the scientists arrange to wake you up by piping stereo music (suitably encoded as nerve impulses) into your auditory nerves. They also arrange for the signals that would normally come from your vestibular system or inner ear to indicate that you are lying on your back, but otherwise, numb, blind. This much should be within the limits of technical virtuosity in the near future-perhaps possible even today.” (Consciousness Explained, p. 4)

Dennett is discussing the possibility of scientists being able to create virtual worlds that could fool us. He does not doubt that we could be fooled by musical hallucinations. So he would presumably have no problem with the article that Tom Clark shared, obviously though he wouldn’t draw the same conclusions though.

Dennett argues that it is pretty much computationally impossible to build a brain in a vat that could be fooled into thinking that it is a subject walking around the world experiencing this and that. He admits that there are some cases where we experience mild hallucinations like phantom limbs, after images etc. However he thinks that strong hallucinations of the brain in a vat kind are pretty much impossible. He defines a strong hallucination as “a ghost that talks back, that permitted you to touch it, that resisted with a sense of solidity, that cast a shadow, that was visible from any angle so that you might walk around it and see what its back looked like” (ibid p. 7)

Now in the Sacks quote above he describes seeing a scene that is indistinguishable from reality. However notably he takes a passive attitude towards the scene he doesn’t move to see if it changes perspective, he doesn’t try to touch the scene etc. Sacks attitude is one that Dennett claimed was typical of people experiencing hallucinations:

“But that review also provides a clue leading to another theory of the mechanism of hallucination-production: one of the endemic features of hallucination reports is that the victim will comment on his or her unusual passivity in the face of the hallucination. Hallucinators usually just stand and marvel. Typically, they feel no desire to probe, challenge or query, and take no steps to interact with the apparitions.” (ibid, p. 9)

It is interesting that when Sacks had his hallucination, which he claimed lasted for 15 seconds he stood passively looking at the hallucination without moving about and probing it just as Dennett’s model predicts. Dennett argues that hallucinations rely on mechanisms of the brain “expecting” us to only interpret the data along certain lines. So Dennett would presumably think that the article posted by Tom Clark does not really effect his position at all. However Tom Clark would presumably reply that on contrary his example refutes Dennett’s position. The hallucinations while not strong in Dennett’s sense still are reported to occur by subjects and brain imaging supports some of these reports. Since on pain of breaking Leibniz’s law these experiences cannot be identical with particular brain states we do indeed seem to be faced with a hard problem.

The problem is not unique to musical hallucinations. It is well known that two thirds of occipital lobe are lit up when people report experiencing mental imagery and Dennett has written about this (see his 2003 Reply to Pylyshyn). However he does not draw the same conclusion as Clark. The reason for this is that according to Dennett it only SEEMS to us that we are experiencing these hallucinations and mental Images; we are not actually experiencing them. Clark on the other hand argues that we manifestly are experiencing these hallucinations, it is not that merely that it seems to us we are. This is the crux of the debate between Clark and Dennett. Not whether people hallucinate, but whether hallucinations are “Real Seeming” painted in Cartesian theatre by some kind of ghostly substance. I will briefly discuss Dennett’s take on the Colour Phi illusion to illustrate his notion of real seeming.

DENNETT ON REAL SEEMING[1]

In his Content and Consciousness Dennett talks about the fact that while it may seem to some people that they have mental imagery, closer examination reveals that what they call a mental image is really only a description. Twenty five years later in his Consciousness Explained when discussing Kosslyn’s experiments on mental imagery, Dennett noted that despite appearances mental imagery is really all tell and no show. One curious thing about Dennett’s view is the fact that he claims that despite the way things seem mental imagery is really a mental description. What is strange about this view is the fact that a description can seem like an image. This is a very odd way to understand the word ‘seem’. A paradigm example of an x seeming like it is a y is given by Descartes. He talks about how a stick which is in transparent water will seem to be bent because of light refraction, though in reality the stick is not bent. What Descartes means by the words ‘seems to be’is the same as ‘appears to be’; and this of course is the standard meaning of ‘seems to be’. However, even to a weak imager like me, it is patently obvious that mental images are nothing like mental descriptions. If something really seemed (as in appeared) to me like an image, then it follows that I would have an experience of something image-like, and a description is in no way image-like. This leads to the question of what Dennett could possibly mean when he admits that it at least seems to some people that they experience mental images?

In Consciousness Explained Dennett carefully explains what he means by the word ‘seems’; evaluating his views on this will help clarify his strange beliefs about the nature of images. In Chapter 5 Section 5 of Consciousness Explained Dennett discusses the colour phi experiment^[2]. In this discussion he makes explicit his strange views on the nature of ‘seeming’.  The colour phi phenomenon is apparent motion. We see examples of it on our television screen every day, where a series of still pictures are flashed one after the other at a certain speed to create the illusion of motion. Dennett discusses a simple example of colour phi where two spots separated by as much as 4 degrees of visual angle are flashed rapidly, creating the illusion of one spot moving back and forth rapidly (ibid, p.114). Kolers and Grunau (1976) did a phi experiment with two dots, one red and one green, flashing on and off. This gave the illusion of a red spot starting to move and changing colour to green mid-passage. Since the red dot is not moving and does not turn into a green dot we need to ask what is going on with this illusion. As the red dot moves we see it turn green as it moves towards its destination. The question is: how do we see the dot turn green before we actually see the green dot? One might think that the mind must first register the red dot and then the green dot and after that point the apparent motion must be played before the mind’s eye. To think this, way Dennett warns, is to demonstrate that one is still in the grip of the metaphor of the Cartesian Theatre (ibid p. 115).

To loosen the grip of this picture on our minds Dennett discusses two fictional processes which one could attribute to the brain. He calls them the Orwellian Process and the Stalinesque Process.  The Orwellian Process occurs when I misremember something because my brain tampers with what I remember so that I no longer remember accurately. The Stalinesque Process is where the brain projects a false picture of reality into the mind’s eye. Dennett notes that while a distinction between Orwellian and Stalinesque processes makes sense in the external world it is an illusion to assume that it makes sense as an explanation of what is going on at the level of the brain.

Let us think of both of these processes as they apply to the case of colour phi.  In the Orwellian case we did not see the apparent motion; our brain merely revised our memory and informed us that we did see the motion. In the Stalinesque case we unconsciously registered the two dots and afterwards our brain created a kind of mock event for us to watch. Dennett notes that once we give up the notion of Cartesian Materialism, we will see that there is no answer to the question of whether the Orwellian or Stalinesque process took place. He puts things as follows:

So here is the rub: We have two different models of what happens to the color phi phenomenon. One posits a Stalinesque “filling in” on the upward, pre-experiential path, and the other posits an Orwellian “memory revision” on the downward, post-experiential path, and both of them are consistent with whatever the subject says or thinks or remembers…Both models can deftly account for all the data-not just the data we already have, but the data we can imagine getting in the future (ibid, pp. 123-124)

So there is no fact of the matter which can decide between the two different stories. Dennett argues that the reason that we cannot decide between the two accounts is that there is really only a verbal difference between them. With Dennett’s rejection of Cartesian Materialism and his alternative multiple-drafts theory of consciousness we can no longer draw a non-arbitrary line to decide when an event becomes conscious.  There is therefore no fact of the matter as to whether an Orwellian or a Stalinesque process took place.

When Dennett claims that we cannot decide between the Stalinesque and Orwellian alternatives we are left with what seems like a mystery. In the external world a red object is not really moving and turning into a green object, yet Dennett is also denying that a Stalinesque show trial is played before the mind’s eye.  So the obvious question is: where does the movement of the ball occur? Dennett’s answer is that the ball does not move and turn green it only seems to. However, to say that a ball seems to move is to say that people have an experience of the ball moving. And this leads us back to our original question: what generates this experience, and how is it generated? Dennett thinks that this is a bad question because the brain does not need to create an experience of the ball moving; it merely has to form a judgment that such movement occurred:

The Multiple Drafts model agrees with Goodman that retrospectively the brain creates the content (the judgment) that there was intervening motion, and that this content is then available to govern activity and leave its mark on memory. But the Multiple Drafts model goes on to claim that the brain does not bother “filling in” the blanks. That would be a waste of time and (shall we say?) paint. The judgment is already in, so the brain can get on with other tasks. (ibid, p. 129)

This claim of Dennett’s is extremely strange. He is claiming that the brain judges that the motion occurred. However, as a matter of fact, we do not experiencethe motion; we only think we do.  The obvious reply to this is to categorically state that I do experience the movement and I judge that the movement occurred based on this experience. In other words, the experience is prior to the judgment. The experience is not of a fact in the external world (where no movement occurred); it is rather an experience of a person’s subjective qualia. When Dennett denies that it is the experience that leads to the judgment, he is leaving the phenomenal experience out and is focusing entirely on access consciousness.

The claim that Dennett is denying the existence of phenomenal consciousness is on the face of it an incredible claim. So before proceeding it is important that we show that this is indeed Dennett’s position. To demonstrate that this is indeed Dennett’s position I will now provide detailed quotes from him to make clear his position.  When discussing phenomenal space Dennett makes the following claim:

Now what is phenomenal space? Is it a physical space inside the brain? Is it the onstage space in the theatre of consciousness located in the brain? Not literally. But metaphorically? In the previous chapter we saw a way of making sense of such metaphorical spaces, in the example of the “mental images” that Shakey manipulated. In a strict but metaphorical sense, Shakey drew shapes in space, paid attention to particular points in that space. But the space was only a logical space. It was like the space of Sherlock Holmes’s London, a space of a fictional world, but a fictional world systematically anchored to actual physical events going on in the ordinary space of Shakey’s “brain”. If we took Shakey’s utterances as expressions of his “beliefs”, then we could say that it was a space Shakey believed in, but that did not make it real, any more than someone’s belief in Feenoman would make Feenoman real. Both are merely intentional objects. (Ibid, pp. 130-131)

The above passage is very instructive. It speaks to our topic of mental images and again shows that Dennett thinks of them as theorists’ fictions. Furthermore, his invoking of Shakey, who despite its verbal reports is not experiencing any items in phenomenal space, shows that Dennett thinks that we, like Shakey, despite our verbal reports are not experiencing anything in phenomenal space. Dennett is claiming that our brains may tell us that we have such and such experiences, and as a result of this brain report we form the judgment that we saw a red light move and turn into a green light. However, this judgment, despite appearances, is not grounded in a phenomenal experience.

It is worth noting that a lot of thinkers misinterpret Dennett’s claims on ‘seeming’ and colour-phi as indicating that he denies that we experience colours. This is not the case. Dennett’s arguments above only apply to colour hallucinations, Dennett tells a different story about how we perceive colour in the external world.

To understand Dennett’s views on colours it is helpful to think in terms of the primary quality distinction. One of the central motivations for claiming that the world is in your head is the existence of secondary qualities. When one looks at a beautiful garden one sees a variety of different colours: like the bright yellow sun-flower, the green-grass, the multi-coloured butterflies, the blue-sky and the bright-yellow-sun. Since the seventeenth century people like Galileo and Locke have been telling us that colours do not exist in the mind independent world. Colours are effects of light reflecting off objects and hitting our retinas in a variety of different ways. The majority of scientists since Galileo accept this dichotomy between primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are: Solidity, Extension, Motion, Number and Figure, while the Secondary qualities are: Colour, Taste, Smell, and heard Sounds. One consequence of accepting this picture is that the world is not as it reveals itself to us in our experience furthermore colours do not exist in a mind independent world. A further consequence is that we have a rich world which we experience consisting of taste, smells and colours but this world exists only within our minds. So on this view we have a subject, who is presented with certain experiences, and only some of those experiences correspond with a mind independent entity. The Cartesian materialist who accepts this world picture has a difficult job on his hands. Nowhere in the brain is the experience of a blue sky located or a yellow daffodil located. He may be able to provide neural correlates for these experiences but he will not be able to point to the spatio-temporal location where the experience is and the subject is located. So presumably the Cartesian materialist will have to argue for a strong emergence thesis.

Rather than going down this road Dennett interprets the dichotomy between primary and secondary qualities differently than most contemporary theorists. Dennett has discussed the status of colours throughout his philosophical development: in particular in his 1968 Content and Consciousness, 1991 Consciousness Explained and in his 2005 Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Objections to a Science of Consciousness. I will now try to give a synoptic view of Dennett’s views on the topic of colours. In his first major discussion of colours he noted that while most believed that colours are secondary qualities and do not exist in the external world there are reasons to doubt this conclusion.

He centres his criticism in terms of language and what we are referring to when we use colour words. If we view colours as secondary qualities we are committed to the view that when I refer to something red I am referring to something within my mind. Now if we accept this view then when two people claim that they are referring to something red then they we don’t know whether they are referring to the same thing, as their inner experience of red may be different and, we cannot decide because we would have nothing public to compare their experiences to. Now if we do not want to admit the possibility that a teacher can never know when his pupil has actually learned the meaning of the word ‘red’ we must admit that the reference of colour words is to public observable entities.

One difficulty is that if one accepts the solution to the sceptical problem of colour reference by arguing that words refer to publically observable entities is that it leaves us with a conundrum of where we say that colours exist. They don’t exist in the mind independent world, and they don’t exist in the mind, and there is nowhere else to exist. So one is lead to the silly conclusion that colours do not exist anywhere. This conclusion must be wrong; and Dennett correctly notes that colour words refer to publically observable entities that one can be right or wrong about (Content and Consciousness, p. 161). So they seem to exist and seem to exist in a publically observable sphere.

For Dennett since colours are publically observable entities which we can be right or wrong about then they must be a property of the external world. This leaves Dennett with the question: what property exactly are they? He notes that colours are not reflective properties of surfaces which can be cashed out at a sub-atomic level. This is because:

“Although the sub-atomic characteristics of surfaces that reflect light predominantly of one wavelength can now be described in some detail, those different types of surface do not correspond neatly to the colours we observe things to be.” (ibid, p. 161)

Also different wavelengths of reflected light can cause the same colour experience in a person. So the job of characterising what property colours actually are is more complex than one might assume. Dennett notes that when a person is referring to red we will need to cash-out what property they are referring to in terms like: The person is referring to the reflexive property of x or y or z…(and the disjunction associated with one colour might be very long).

Dennett asks us: if the disjunction of properties which can be associated with a person’s experience of colour have little in common with each other, are we driven to the conclusion that colours do not exist? To think through this possibility considers colour blind people who have poorer discriminative capacities than us and a hypothetical alien who has colour discriminative capacities which are greater than ours. He notes that we would say that the colour blind man who may say that ripe (red for us) apples and grass are the same colour is suffering from a cognitive illusion. On the other hand if an alien had greater discriminative capacities than us so that it would constantly see things as changing colour, we would also say that he was experiencing colour illusions. This is because the meaning of colour terms is defined in terms of OUR discriminative capacities; which means that WE judge certain things in the world to be red, green etc. So relative to our form-of-life these other people would be suffering from a form of cognitive illusion.

Dennett concludes with the following statement:

Colour is not a primary physical property like mass, nor is it a complex of primary properties, a structural feature of surfaces. Nor again is it a private ‘phenomenal’ quality or an ‘emergent’ quality of certain internal states. Colours are what might be called functional properties. A thing is red if and only if when it is viewed under normal conditions by normal human observers it looks red to them, which only means: they are demonstrably non-eccentric users of colour words and they say, sincerely, that the thing looks red. There saying this does not hinge on their perusal of an internal quality, but on their perception of the object, their becoming aware that the thing is red (ibid, p.163)

I am not really sure whether Dennett really manages to avoid the problem of where the experience of red is located. However it should be obvious that he is not denying that colours exist, rather he is claiming that they are not paraded in a Cartesian Theatre.

My reaction to Dennett’s views on hallucinations and mental imagery are conflicted. On the one hand I find myself arguing that when I call a mental image to my mind’s eye I do damn well experience a mental image I don’t merely SEEM to experience it. On the other hand I find myself worrying that this reaction of mine is simply me giving my judgments about my subjective experiences papal infallibility, I simply judge that because it seems to me that x is presented before the mind’s eye then I cannot doubt that this is the case. In the case of perception of an object in the external world I can make judgements which can be intersubjectively tested and these tests can either weaken or strengthen my claim. Or even if there are no other people around who I can test my perceptions by seeing if what I am seeing is an illusion, by inspecting the conditions of viewing whether there is good light, I can walk up to the object, walk around it, touch it etc. In the case of hallucinations such intersubjective, bimodal tests are not possible. Likewise in the case of mental imagery I cannot test the lighting conditions or touch the images or walk around them etc. So it is extremely odd that I would accord myself papal infallibility in the case of hallucinations and mental imagery given that I cannot really test my judgements[3]. All I can really appeal to is the fact that I intuitively know I experience mental imagery. However if the last three hundred years of science have taught us anything it is that we cannot uncritically be overly reliant our supposed certain intuitive judgements (nor should we ignore them). So I go back and forth on this issue and have never really solved it. Tom Clark feels certain that REAL SEEMINGS exist. Matt Bush argues that they don’t they are just a product of the manifest image. I have never really made up my mind on the matter. Recently Matt has informed me he may have an argument for the existence of conscious experience that does not rely on the myth of the given. Perhaps this argument will solve a lot of these difficulties. However I think my next project is to try and discover if ‘The Given’ really is a myth.

 

[1]This section on Real Seeming is taken from my much longer and more detailed take on Dennett’s view on Consciousness and Mind ‘Dennett and The Typical Mind Fallacy’. A reader interested in understanding in more detail how I understand Dennett’s view and where my view differs from his should check out that paper. They will find the paper in my blog and in my Academia.edu page.

[2]See Kolers, P. A and Von Grunau (1985) “Shape and Color in Apparent Motion” Vision Research 16 pp329-335.

[3]I discuss the rotation tests and neuroscientific tests of Kosslyn et al. In my ‘Dennett and The Typical Mind Fallacy’ but those third person tests are not the reason people believe they have imagery, rather their purported experiences are the reasons.

     PSYCHOANALYTIC INTERPRETATION AND UNCONSCIOUS PHANTASIES

“In fact we are far from having to employ mere imagination or blind guess work, as even regards the first year of life. When all the observable facts of behaviour are considered in the light of analytic knowledge gained from adults and from children over two years, and are brought into relation with analytic principles, we arrive at many hypotheses carrying a high degree of probability.” (Susan Isaacs: The Nature and Function of Unconscious Phantasy, p. 2)

When one reads the work of Melanie Klein, one is struck by the bizarre phantasies that she attributes to the child. In her book ‘The Psychoanalysis of Children’ Klein interprets the behaviour of children in terms of the child unconsciously phantasizing about ‘ripping the mothers breast apart’, or of phantasizing about ‘burning and drowning his mother with his urine’ etc. When reading Klein’s views one is left with the impression that she is massively over interpreting the behaviour of the child. In Quine’s Radical Translation thought experiment he shows that when trying to translate the utterance from a native of a tribe who we have never had any previous contact with there are massive problems of indeterminacy[1] of the reference of observation sentence. Quine argues that if when a rabbit runs by and the native shouts ‘Gavagai’ we cannot automatically assume that ‘Gavagai’ means ‘Lo a Rabbit’. Furthermore if we try to interpret ‘gavagai’ as a term referring to rabbit our problems become worse because there from a behavioural perspective we have as much evidence that ‘gavagai’ refers to undetached rabbit part, particular instance of universal rabbit hood, or It rabbiteth (a feature placing term on a par with it rains) than we do that ‘gavagai’ refers to rabbit.  Some thinkers argue against Quine that interpreting  ‘gavagai’ as referring to Rabbit as opposed to the other options, has more intuitive psychological plausibility. Such thinkers argue that because of the innate structure of the human mind we will divide up the world similarly and hence we are justified in thinking the Underdetermination of the reference of ‘gavagai’ is overcome by our innate biases.  Now proceeding argument is not a proof that ‘gavagai’ refers to rabbit but it at least provides some kind of evidence that our interpretation of the reference of the native’s term is correct. However, Klein’s interpretation of the Childs unconscious phantasies is even more massively underdetermined by data of experience than Quine’s examples, and furthermore Klein’s interpretations are also wildly counter intuitive. The old saying goes that incredible claims require an incredible amount of evidence. So in this blog I will try to look at the type of evidence used by psychoanalysts to support their more elaborate claims about childhood phantasies and cognition.

One of the best expositors of the nature of Phantasy was Susan Isaacs. She made the following claims about the evidential procedure used by psychoanalysts when attributing to the child Phantasies:

“When we turn to children under two years, we bring certain proved instruments of understanding to the study of their responses to stimuli, their spontaneous activity, their signs of affect, their play with people and with material objects, and all the varied aspects of their behaviour. First, we have those principles of observation already outlined, the value of observing context, of noting precise details, and as regarding the data observed at any one moment as being a member of a series, which can be traced backward to their rudimentary beginnings and forward to their more mature forms. Secondly, we have the insight gained from direct analytic experience into the mental processes so clearly expressed in similar types of behaviour ( continuous with these earlier forms) in children of more than two years; above all, the evidence yielded by the repetition of situations, emotions, attitudes, and phantasies in the ‘transference’ during the analysis of older children and of adults.” (ibid, p. 8)

The evidence that Isaacs’s claims are relevant to interpreting the child is the primary tools of science, behavioural evidence and experimental evidence. However, she also appeals to evidence from analysis of older children and adults as a way of rationally reconstructing the childhood phantasies.

In his (1985) ‘The Interpersonal World of The Infant’ Daniel N Stern followed Isaacs’s method and expanded on it by combining insights from both developmental psychology and from the clinical experience of psychoanalysts. The psychodynamic approach is a technique which involves the analysand trying to rationally reconstruct his experiences with the analyst that he recounts them to.  Psychoanalysts from Freud through to Klein, and Bion have interpreted various different kinds of neuroses, and psychosis as resulting from experiences stemming from childhood which result in people getting stuck in some earlier developmental phrase.

So, for example, Freud’s model had his famous psychosexual stages of development at its core. He argued that through analysing patients it was clear that patients who were obsessional and controlling were stuck at the anal stage of development (which occurred between the ages of 18months and 30months). The anal stage of development occurs when the child is being toiled trained, if a child goes through harsh toilet training with their parents they may later develop an anal retentive personality. Stern correctly noted that one problem with Freud’s model is that it’s very specific predictions simply do not obtain. Another problem is that the contradictory models of Anna Freud, Klein etc all make different developmental predictions which also do not obtain. Stern argues that psychoanalytic models can be made more accurate by being merged with the empirical data which has been obtained by developmental psychology.

However he also thinks that developmental psychology can be enriched by the insights being gained daily in clinical practice. Developmental Psychology is great at constructing behavioural tests which can be used to show what the child’s preferences are. Habituation tests which indicates when a child is surprised by a change in their environment can be used to indicate the child’s expectations about the behaviour of the world and hence can be used to indicate the ontology that the child expects of the world.  We saw above that Susan Isaacs’ argues for a similar approach to Stern in her paper ‘The Nature and Function of Unconscious Phantasy’; she too argues that we need to merge behavioural/developmental data with psychoanalytic interpretation. She uses Freud’s 1922 discussion as a clear example of where psychoanalysts interpret the behaviour of a child psychoanalytically.

Freud spoke about a child who was very obedient and good at coping with being separated from his mother. He noted that when the mother was gone the child would gather all of his toys and hide them saying ohhhh (which Freud interpreted as meaning gone). For Freud the child was using the toys as a symbol of his mother. Later Freud noticed the child playing with a wooden reel with a piece of string wound round it. The child would throw the object away and say ohhhh (meaning gone) and then pull it back and say da which Freud interpreted as meaning back. Freud claimed that the child was using the game to cope with the loss of his mother. In the child’s Phantasy the wooden reel represented his mother and by being able to control the toy he was symbolically assuring himself that he has control of the mothers absence. Freud claimed that at a later stage he observed how the child dealt with a prolonged absence from the mother. When the mother returned from her absence the child was looking in the mirror and covering his eyes saying ohhhh (gone) and then uncovering his eyes and saying da (back). So by controlling his own disappearance and re-appearance the child in his Phantasy was giving himself control over an emotionally distressing situation.

Freud’s interpretation of the child’s behaviour has some plausibility to it. However, from a behavioural point of view there is little to recommend it over the assumption that the child is simply playing a game without any unconscious attempt to master emotional difficulties. Furthermore if one were to interpret the child as simply playing a game one would have a simpler explanatory theory than Freud’s more than elaborate reconstruction in terms of unconscious Phantasy.

One must therefore ask what is the evidence that Freud can bring to bear to support his more complex interpretation of the child’s behaviour? Freud can point to the fact that children are usually distressed when they are separated from his mother. He could further point to the fact that the child he is talking about has managed to deal with this stress in a successful manner (unlike a lot of other children), and the fact that the child games indicates a symbolic mastery over disappearance and re-appearance indicates a causal connection between the two behaviours. Furthermore various analysts could point to their own private practice with children which does indeed indicate that children play reveals their unconscious concerns and phantasies about reality.

However there is a serious difficulty with the above reply. Different theorists within the psychoanalytic community have different interpretations of the same behavioural patterns. So, for example, people using Klein or Lacan or Anna Freud’s theories will interpret the behaviour of children differently because their different theories result in them organising the data of experience differently. Typically analysts argue that their interpretation is proven to be correct because of the pragmatic success of their therapeutic interventions. However, the best empirical evidence we have so far does not indicate that any of the above theories outperform each other in terms of pragmatic success in analysis. Therefore we are presented with a situation where there are alternative interpretations of the childhood experiences which all cohere with observational data and which result in equally successful treatments. A possible way to decide between these alternative theories is to see which of them best coheres with current developmental data. This will give us some traction in the debate.

So in my next blog I will consider Lacan and Klein’s different theories of the childhood development between birth and 2 years old. I will consider their theories in light of current evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and most importantly in terms of contemporary developmental psychology. The theory which best coheres with our current scientific knowledge is more LIKELY to be the more accurate theory and to stand up to further experimental tests. In my final blog I will consider Klein and Lacan’s different clinical theories of hysteria.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND SCIENTISM: A DIALOGUE WITH MAREK SINASON

            In a recent blog “Symington on Psychoanalysis and Intellectual Disability” I criticised a hypotheses of Neville Symington on the cause of low IQ in people with intellectual disability. I argued that Symington’s hypothesis did not stand up to critical scrutiny and that he should take into account facts from developmental psychology and neuroscience to help him develop a superior account. Marek Sinason a neuroscientist disagreed with my criticism. Our debate got very heated and both of us felt that the other had inadvertently misrepresented the views of the other. At the end of our dialogue Marek suggested that I re-read his criticisms and this will demonstrate that I was misreading him. So I decided that in this blog I would try to revisit our discussion and to see whether we can clarify what our beliefs actually are and perhaps find some common ground.

To some degree our dispute is unusual. I am a philosopher who supports philosophical naturalism. So a large part of my time is spent defending attempts to naturalise epistemology and to naturalise metaphysics. Another area of research I am deeply involved in is attempting to explain: intentionality, consciousness, and language naturalistically. Marek on the other hand is a scientist who thinks that science has scopes and limits and it should not be extended beyond those limits. He argues that areas like folk psychology, psychotherapeutic dialogue, and literature have their own evidence and their practices are not diminished by not being reduced to physics and chemistry.

Marek’s position did not centre primarily on issues of scientism. His first criticism of my view was that the interdisciplinary research was not always beneficial. He gave some examples where interdisciplinary research would not necessarily be beneficial:

“ While many professions may benefit from learning of the fruits of others it is another thing to imply they are deficient without them. For example, geography teachers may benefit from learning about neuroscience, child development, programming, criminal law, Shakespeare…yet they may be very good teachers without the benefits of this additional expertise.

As a thought experiment, I find it useful to consider what are the realms of knowledge of other disciplines you would consider important for an adult mathematician to know about to not consider them deficient or worse, to consider the products of mathematics redundant?”

My reply was that I wasn’t arguing for interdisciplinary research in all areas and I agreed with his geography teacher example. I see no reason why a geography teacher necessarily needs to be an expert on any of the above topics. However in the case of psychoanalysis since they are making developmental claims and claims about the mind/brain they obviously have a duty to know the relevant neuroscience and developmental psychology. Our dispute on this issue went back and forth for a while. I continued claiming that as psychoanalysis is an empirical scientific discipline then its practitioners should know relevant facts that cast doubt on the truth of key claims they make. Here Marek disagreed with my characterisation of psychoanalysis as a science and pointed out that not all analysts agreed with this claim:

 “While there may be psychoanalysts who think the interdisciplinary work with neuroscience is worthy of a new discipline Neuropsychoanalysis. Others, such as Wilfred Bion, who served in a Tank Commander before studying medicine and then psychoanalysis did not consider those without this experience or interest were deficient.”

It was here that our dispute became interesting and a lot more heated. I argued that psychoanalysts are making claims about developmental issues and these issues are in fact scientific claims whether analysts acknowledge this or not. I further argued that such psychoanalysts are not doing their jobs if they do not modify their theories as we learn new scientific facts about the world.

Marek’s reply to me was that my argument presupposed that I knew what the objective truth on all these developmental psychology matters was. In other words that I was naively assuming that there was one true theory of child development and that Symington was ignoring this one true theory:

“Is Spelke’s wrong or right about intellectual differences between men and women? What is the empirical truth? What would you like ALL psychoanalysts and ALL psychologists to think on this matter?”

To this I replied that I did not have to be able to solve every question in contemporary psychology in order to judge that Symington had made a claim that was simply incorrect. I argued that Symington’s theory had absolutely no empirical evidence to support it and hence there was no reason to believe it was true. Marek’s claim about disputes within current developmental psychology struck me as beside the point. So, for example, there are current disputes within medicine on various subjects but nobody thinks that this means that we cannot know that current research has more to support it than the ideas of Galen. Or that because contemporary cosmologists disagree about the nature of string theory then we have no reason to think their theories are superior to Thales’s cosmology.

When looking back to our above debate I noted that Marek never answered my above question. So I repeat it here. I would like him to answer the following questions: (1) Does he think that there is a fact of the matter as to whether Symington’s claim about the causes of low IQ  being the result of a psychic turning away from reality is true? (2) If he thinks there is a fact of the matter what is the evidence that we could bring to bear on it? (3) If he thinks there is no fact of the matter does he think the same thing holds true of physics. Does he think that there is no fact of the matter as to whether say the cosmology proposed by Stephen Hawking is more correct that the cosmology proposed by Thales?

I think that part of our dispute may have arisen from me thinking that his argument that the fact that there are debates within contemporary developmental psychology means that we cannot judge the truth or falsity of Symington’s theory. It was for this reason that I called Marek a postmodernist. I think now I may have misinterpreted his views so if he answers my above three questions this will help me understand his point of view on the matter. If I misunderstood his position I apologise. Obviously I would have good reason to oppose the introduction of “anything goes” postmodernism into psychology, in the same way I would  oppose it being introduced into medicine,  because such an introduction would cause a lot of vulnerable people to be put in harm’s way. However given that I cannot say for certain that Marek supports postmodernist views I should not have argued so aggressively in our discussion. I should note that buying into the metaphysics of ‘facts of the matter’ and correspondence theories of truth are not the only way to deal avoid the terrors of post-modernism, personally I prefer Quinean holism (with the idea that Coherence leads to Correspondence) splashed with pragmatism. However perhaps a discussion of this point should wait till Marek answers my three questions above.

I don’t want to continue to go back and forth on the same points. I concede that Marek is not denying that evidence is important in judging psychoanalytic theory. He is merely trying to propose that interdisciplinary research is not necessary always a good thing. I agree with this to this to some degree but think that with psychoanalysis research from neuroscience and developmental psychology is relevant. This is not to dismiss the importance of intersubjective dialogue between the analyst and analysand. The majority of cases of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general involve emotional and existential crises. So, for example, a person may develop trust issues because of his early relationship with his primary care giver. These trust issues may result in the person being isolated and feeling depressed. Working through these issues with an analyst can probably be done without any medication and be facilitated by an emphatic analyst. However there are other cases where analysts will hold beliefs that medication is a bad thing and that all depression is the result of some childhood trauma. In this case a person who suffers from purely endogenous depression will present himself to the analyst be advised that medication is a bad thing and proceed to spend 150 a week on therapy looking for a cure that never comes. Surely this type of case can be avoided by analysts having some biological training.  Having this training doesn’t mean that the analyst is acting as a rival to the doctor offering alternative diagnoses, rather it is just a way of educating analysts so they can be aware of patients who they may not be able to help without medical intervention. Nurses, are for example trained in basic psychology, biology, etc not so they can offer alternative diagnosis to doctors but so they can manage their patients care as best as possible and contact specialists as needed. I see no reason why psychoanalysts shouldn’t have similar training.

I acknowledge Marek’s point that interdisciplinary research is often full of people making naive comments that seem silly from the point of view of people who are experts in the relevant fields. I am not proposing witch hunts on people who make naive mistakes. It is impossible to be an expert on everything so howlers are always going to happen. Within linguistics experts in syntax often make claims about phonology that experts in phonology would consider outdated or naive. My point about Symington was that his theory was false and that this could have consequences for patient care so I think he could do with modifying his theory. I still think that I am correct on this point. If Marek disagrees with me I would be interested in his reasons for thinking that Symington’s hypothesis is correct.

I mentioned that analysts who are ignorant of biology could end up causing harm to their patients. I think the history of Hysteria (now known as conversion disorder) bears this out. Hysteria is a case where people have some of the following symptoms: Feeling Unwell, Lipothymias, Vague diffuse states of fatigue, angry outbursts. (Spasms, and Paralysis are normally only found in women not men), but multiple conversion pains are common in men, as well as fear of heart disease, digestive disturbances, poorly defined neurodigestive disorders (Dor p, 97). In hysteria patients typically present symptoms which they think represent a particular disease however their symptoms actually only correspond to their own inexact idea of their body. So a patient may present with heart trouble and be complaining about they think their heart is as opposed to where the heart actually is. When they are informed about this fact their symptoms are moved to the appropriate bodily position. It is for this reason that it is assumed to be psychosomatic.

Throughout history psychoanalysts have treated people with supposed hysteria when in fact such patients were suffering from the early stages of a neurological disorder like MS. Now if a patient presents himself to an analyst with what seems to be hysteria then the analyst needs to be mindful that what seems to be hysteria could be real neurological disorder. Neurologists sometimes have difficulties diagnosing disorders like MS, MMD, or Parkinsons in their early stages. Some psychoanalytic schools have no close ties with biology so they may not be in any position to recognise when a person’s symptoms are indicating a biological as opposed to a psychological disorder. So a patient could spend a long time and a lot of money in analysis until such time as their actual disorder overwhelms them. I think that with hysteria an analyst has a responsibility (which should be legally enforced) to work with a multi-disciplinary team. In fairness most analysts are very honest and responsible people who will insist that the patient submit himself for vigorous medical tests while undergoing analysis. However I don’t think this should be left to the individual analyst but should be a matter of health board and government decision. I am not sure if this counts as scientism in Marek’s book but it seems to be just good sense to me.

Near the end of our discussion Marek made a point which I think needs to be discussed further:

“To the extent we have communicated at all, that was by virtue of the (incomplete) powers of dialogic exploration. This facility of human relations affords many things including the explorations and evaluations of ideas and formulas that may or may not have any value or applicability in this Universe at any time, or at least not right now. We did not have recourse to construct a testable hypothesis and collect statistical data to interpret before replying to each other. When speaking with individuals rather than standard deviations, there are things that can be explored that may or may not generalise beyond the confines of that dialogue…yet a dialogue may still be, powerful, moving, funny or a waste of time.
I do not feel the need to ridicule or undermine the power of dialogue or other forms of human relations in order to appreciate the value and limits of modern science. If you were to sit through a lecture on the science of humour you might agree.”

I agree with Marek on this point to some degree. When communicating with each other were not constructing testable hypothesises explicitly and statistical data to interpret each other; not at the personal level anyway. At the sub-personal level we were noticing statistical patterns in what was being said to us, we were also our background knowledge to help us construct our arguments and trying to form pictures of each other’s cognitive models, theoretical commitments etc. Most of this was of course done unconsciously. A scientist could of course try to rationally precisely what was going on, however if they ignored that we are intentional agents engaged in process of trying to communicate with each other they would miss a lot. If a scientist focused entirely on say the physics and bio-physics of the situation they would have real pattern in our environment i.e. our intentional communication. So I agree that at this stage of our development the best way to interpret each other’s behaviour is through adopting the intentional stance.  This is the intersubjective level of discourse you speak of and I agree it is very important. It may be the case that eventually some form of eliminative materialism is vindicated and we can predict and control our sociological environment by adopting design level or physical level explanations of human behaviour, however I don’t think that we are anywhere near that level of explanation. So for now our best explanation is intentional explanations in terms of propositional attitude ascription. So if my friend tells me he will meet me at the St Patricks day parade at 2 o clock I will be able to accurately predict his behaviour ceteris paribus. This will not be a scientific explanation just a bland use of folk psychology that is good enough for most purposes. Freud suggests enriching our folk-psychology by attributing to people propositional attitude level explanations which we are unconscious but which influence our behaviour. I think that this does give us some kind of useful predictive and explanatory power. And I agree with Marek that employing this approach in intersubjective communication between analyst and analysand has real explanatory power and it is not power that is best explained in-terms of physics level descriptions. Not at our present level of development anyway.

STEREO SUE A REAL LIFE PROBLEM OF MARY?

            In chapter 5 of his 2010 book ‘The Mind’s Eye’ neuroscientist Oliver Sacks discussed the case of Sue Barry, a lady who grew up cross eyed and whose eyes did not work in tandem, so she had to view things one eye at a time. As a result of her condition she was unable to view the world stereoscopically, so she lacked the ability to see the world in the same three dimensional manner normal people do. Sue was a neurobiologist who had read the works of Hubel, Wiesel and many other scientists on stereo vision. In 1996 at a shuttle launch party she met Oliver Sacks and discussed her lack of stereo vision with him. He asked her if she could imagine what it was she was missing as a result of lacking stereo vision. She said that yes she could because her knowledge of neurobiology helped her understand what the experience of stereo vision would be like. In 2004 Sue sent a letter to Sacks to inform her that she had treatment on her eyes and now had stereopsis. She noted the following about her experience of stereo vision:

“You asked me if I could imagine what the world would look like when viewed with two eyes. I told you that I thought I could… But I was wrong”

            Now clearly Sue’s case has a lot in common with Frank Jackson’s thought experiment ‘The Problem of Mary’. In Jackson’s thought experiment Mary is a neuroscientist who knows everything about the physics, and neurobiology of colour vision. However she has been brought up in a black and white room so has absolutely no experience of colour. One day she released from her black and white room and she experiences colour for the first time. A substantial proportion of philosophers have argued that after being released from her room, she will be in awe of her experience of colour which will go beyond anything she could have predicted on the basis of her complete knowledge of third person science. So they argue that there are experiential facts which are not captured by a complete scientific understanding.

In some ways one could argue that Stereo-Sue is a real life Mary who supports the conclusion that there are experiential phenomena e.g. qualia which cannot be captured by third person science. However there are obvious disanalogies between the two cases. The most important one being that in the case of Mary it is stipulated that she has ALL of the scientific knowledge of colour while Sue on the other hand is an extremely well educated neuroscientist who obviously doesn’t know everything about the neuroscience and physics of stereo-vision.

Dennett has critiqued ‘The Problem of Mary’ thought experiment as being a simple intuition pump where the conclusion is more or less stipulated. He argues that one could just as easily draw the opposite conclusion that upon leaving the room Mary is not surprised because given that she knows all of the science she will know what the experiential facts will be like. Dennett’s point is that one can stipulate how Mary will react all we want, however the truth is we do not know how we she will react. The thought experiment is merely designed to make it seem plausible that there will be experiential facts which third person science cannot capture. However the thought experiment proves no such thing.

Now in the case of Stereo-Sue because she is a real person she obviously doesn’t know everything. So we cannot draw any conclusions as to whether knowing all of the relevant scientific fact about stereo vision would have enabled her to predict what the experience of stereo vision would be like. In Sue’s case the amount of scientific knowledge she had wasn’t enough for her to predict what her experience would be like if she had Stereo Vision. However it tells us little about whether she would have been able to predict accurately what the experience of stereo vision would have been like if she knew more third person science or if a la Jackson she knew all of the third person science. So clearly Stereo-Sue’s story has little bearing on ‘The Problem of Mary’.

Nonetheless the case of Stereo-Sue has led Oliver Sacks drawing the following dramatic conclusion:

“She had discovered for herself that there is no substitute for experience, that there is an unbridgeable gulf between what Bertrand Russell called “knowledge by description” and “knowledge by acquaintance,” and no way of going from one to the other” (The Mind’s Eye, p. 131)

Sack’s view of the case of Stereo Sue is similar to that of people like Tom Nagel. Sacks thinks that her case demonstrates an unbridgeable gap between what we can know from third person science and what we can directly experience. However, there is no reason to draw the dramatic conclusion that Sacks does. Granted some of Sue’s descriptions are extremely interesting and extremely dramatic, she reports the following experience after a session with her developmental optometrist:

“I went back to my car and happened to glance at the steering wheel. It had “popped out” from the dash-board. I closed one eye, then the other, then I looked with both eyes again, and the steering wheel looked different. I decided that the light from the setting sun was playing tricks on me and drove home. But the next day I got up, did the exercises, and got into the car to drive to work. When I looked at the rear-view mirror, it had popped out from the windshield.” (ibid, p. 128)

“Today, I was walking by a complete horse skeleton in the basement of the building where I work, when I saw the horses’ skull sticking out so much, that I actually jumped back and cried out.” (ibid, p, 130)

Sue’s experiences are extremely interesting however they do not support Sack’s conclusion. If Sack’s wants to point to an unbridgeable chasm between experience and knowledge he will need a real life case of Mary. This will obviously never happen as it is extremely unlikely that humans will ever have a completed knowledge of the physical world.

Now Stereo-Sue could be used as a part of a kind of inductive argument. If we could discover a variety of different cases that of scientists who had similar impairments and who after an operation discovered experiences that they could not predict from their science. It could be argued that this is inductive evidence that in Mary’s case she is likely to be surprised as well. However such an argument would be extremely weak as there is no reason to think that a person with ALL scientific knowledge will have predictive powers even remotely analogous to those of contemporary scientists. Therefore the inductive argument fails.  So over all, it seems that despite what Sacks thinks there is no reason to think that Stereo-Sue case provides an unbridgeable chasm between experience and knowledge. It is unbridgeable for us today, but may not be for Mary.