Colin McGinn: ‘The Making of a Philosopher’

I’ve just finished reading McGinn’s intellectual autobiography. I gutted it in a single evening. It’s a good read, although I must admit that I skipped a lot of the philosophy to get down to the gossip! McGinn seems to be very good at attracting controversy, whether its because (as he claims) he’s brutally honest, or because of ‘short man syndrome’ (he’s only five foot six). He’s certainly unforgiving of others. To give you an impression of McGinn’s style, here’s some choice epithets:

- Christopher Peacocke was a postgrad at Oxford with McGinn in the seventies. At that time they met regularly to discuss philosophy, but their friendship was terminated when McGinn came to the conclusion that “professional rivalry was more important to [Peacocke] than friendship”. Peacocke’s philosophical work is later described as being “almost preposterously unclear”.

- Later, when McGinn was Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy, he attended a discussion group of which Michael Dummett was also a member. During one meeting, in which McGinn presented a paper, Dummett attacked him “rudely and condescendingly” – “it was a nasty moment”, McGinn writes, “petty and ill-willed”. He pointedly concludes that “Trying to bully and intimidate junior colleagues is not tolerable”.

He certainly doesn’t pull his punches! Unfortunately, the book was published before his recent spat with Ted Honderich, so there’s no further information to be gleaned on that. Notably, after the incident with Dummett, McGinn left the discussion group because he no longer wished to have anything to do with his senior colleague. This seems to be fairly indicative of McGinn’s general approach to relationships – do one thing to piss him off, and that’s it. No doubt he’d call this ‘integrity’, but one wonders if he shouldn’t really be a little more understanding of others. Dummett, after all, was notorious for his temper, and he did subsequently apologise to McGinn, though admittedly only after being pressured into doing so by other members of the group (if McGinn is to be believed, of course).

On the philosophy side of things, what I have read so far is very clear and seems accurate (although I should emphasise that I haven’t read it carefully or completely). I would certainly recommend this book to someone thinking of doing a degree in philosophy, because it introduces many of the more obscure ‘analytic’ topics that you won’t otherwise come across before going to university – at least, not in as clear and colloquial a form. McGinn introduces Twin Earth, Grice’s analysis of meaning, Davidson’s theory of meaning, Kripke on Wittgenstein on meaning and rule following, Kripke on proper names, and (of course) a lot of his own work – mysterianism, the “dual component” theory of meaning, and so on. Importantly, he introduces these topics in away which explains their wider significance, so that they no longer seem as dry as old newspaper burned into the pavement. I think my degree has certainly suffered at times because lecturers fail to convey this wider significance: wondering how a name refers to a thing, when not placed in the wider context of the attempt to naturalise meaning and the social aspect of language, can seem dull beyond belief.

A brief note for those of you who read my earlier blog about McGinn and Miller’s discussion of theism. I was surprised that when asked about the infamous ontological argument, McGinn didn’t introduce the standard objection that existence is not a property. The reason for this becomes clear in the last chapter of McGinn’s book, when he writes about his current philosophical work in logic. One of his topics of interest is existence, concerning which he has reached the conclusion that existence really is “a genuine property of objects”, as the surface grammar of sentences suggests. I won’t go into McGinn’s reasons for this just now, because I have a philosophy of mind exam in five days that i haven’t started revising for yet, but I may do at some later date. Saying that, I’d better get on and do some proper work!

One last thing: reading the book has fired my enthusiasm for philosophy again, which is no mean feat considering I’ve thought about it constantly for three years and am in the midst of my finals. If you’re suffering from burn out, reading this book might just recharge your intellectual batteries…

Dawkins’s argument against the existence of God

Just wondered what people think of this argument from ‘The God Delusion’, which purports to show that the existence of God is extremely improbable. First, a definition: an entity is complex if and only if it consists of a number of parts combined in an intricate way, so as to produce extremely statistically improbable properties. (A human being is a complex entity: not every way you fling together the atoms constituting my body is going to produce thought, action, perception, kidneys, lungs, etc.) This definition isn’t watertight, but the general idea is intuitive. Anyway, on with the argument:

1) Complex entities can come into existence in three ways: either by design, evolution or chance.

2) God is a complex entity.

3) God cannot have been designed.

4) God cannot have evolved.

5) Therefore, God must have come into existence by chance.

6) The probability of a being spontaneously coming into existence with the remarkable properties of God (omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence) is extremely slight.

7) Therefore, God’s existence is extremely improbable.

I don’t actually agree with this argument, but I think it’s interesting. Any thoughts?

Lolita

It’s not a good idea to make bedroom furniture for young girls under the brandname ‘Lolita’, but this didn’t stop Woolworths from doing it. Check out the story on the Beeb. You can find a summary of Nabokov’s controversial novel on Wikipedia - for those who don’t know (like me until I looked it up on Wiki), it’s about a man who becomes sexually obsessed with a twelve year old girl, and commences an affair with her.

It reminds me of a story in the News of the World about a group of male school teachers who slept with their teenage pupils. I didn’t think the headline PAEDO MASTERS was appropriate, somehow.

A horrible philosophical problem

I’m writing my dissertation on the problem of other minds, and the focus of my research is the nature of our mental concepts. I call the problems raised by mental concepts ‘horrible’ because it seems to me that when we think about our mental concepts, we are struck by two very strong and conflicting intuitions. One intuition supports the claim that the connection between mental states and behaviour is merely contingent, the other that it is necessary and analytic. The first intuition is given full vent in the work of Tom Nagel:

“We can use the general concepts of experience and mind to speculate about forms of conscious life whose external signs we cannot confidently identify. There is probably a great deal of life in the universe, and we may be in a position to identify only some of its forms, because we would simply be unable to read as behaviour the manifestations of creatures sufficiently unlike us. It certainly means something to speculate that there are such creatures, and that they have minds.” (Nagel, T. The View From Nowhere: 24. Oxford: OUP, 1989)

And doesn’t this seem possible!? Think about the ‘what it’s like’ aspect of pain, its subjective feel. Couldn’t that be present in a being that displayed no recognisable behaviour, or, indeed, that didn’t behave at all? And it seems to me that the answer to this question is: yes, of course!

The opposing intuition is given powerful expression in Wittgenstein’s work:

“Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations.–One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number!–And now one looks at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it.” (PI 284)

“[O]nly of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.” (PI 281)

“Just try–in a real case–to doubt someone else’s fear or pain.” (PI 303)

It seems to me that in each of these remarks Wittgenstein is drawing our attention to the idea that our criteria for the application of mental concepts include behaviour of various kinds. When you see someone else writhing on the ground, it is impossible for you to doubt that they are in pain. This is not merely because of your kind, sympathetic nature, but because it is part of the meaning of our concept of pain to be correctly applied in such situations. Perhaps that is a weak example – the person could be feigning pain, and then the application of the concept would be incorrect. Think of an itch. Could you have an itch without a scratch? That is, is it intelligible that another bring could feel just that sensation and not respond to it by scratching? And here one wants to say: no, of course not. But then, that feeling of an itch on my head now; couldn’t that be present in a being that didn’t scratch?

I’m confused: I feel both intuitions very strongly.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

On one of my frequent late night trawls on the internet I dredged up this piece of ignorant, misleading and patronising creationist (or ‘intelligent design’) propaganda. The film is going to be released in the United States in early February, and features contributions from a number of eminent intellectuals, including Dawkins, Dennett, and Phillip Pettit. It seems that the makers duped all of them into appearing in the film by intentionally misrepresenting its content and stance. Another Darwinian contributor, “PZ” Myers, has published the invitation he received to appear in Expelled; you can find it here. Not only does the letter give a different title for the film (Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion), but the original blurb about it on the Rampant Films website includes the claim that “Darwin provided the answer” to the question of how we exist. If this isn’t intentional mispresentation of the film’s stance and content, I don’t know what is.

What’s even more sickening is that a concerted campaign is underway to get Expelled shown to schoolchildren across the States. If schools and colleges arrange trips to see the film they will receive generous ‘donations’ of up to $10 000, the exact amount depending on how many students watch it. This information, taken from the ‘Get Expelled Challenge’ web site, is published on Richard Dawkins’s web site, and you can see it for yourself by following this link. I love the fact that there is actually a specified ‘donation structure’, detailing precisely how much your college will receive if X amount of kids see Expelled.

 The sad fact is that creationists are not the underdogs in the United States. In a 2004 poll, 55% of Americans said that they believed that human beings were created directly by God; just 13% said that human beings evolved with no divine involvement whatsoever. Demonstrating the political aspect of the evolution vs. creationism debate, 67% of those who said that human beings were directly created by God voted for Bush in the last presidential election.

Expelled is made by rich and powerful ideologues prepared to lie and bribe in order to promote their right wing politics and their fundamentalist religious beliefs.

On a lighter note, I found this hilarious (and slightly disturbing) video on Youtube. Enjoy…

Colin McGinn on theism

If you’ve got half an hour to kill, you could do worse than watch Jonathan Miller and Colin McGinn discussing theism. You can link to the next two sections from the first one, which can be found here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=U51JT8dTHTs

I especially like the bit where McGinn trashes the argument which says that God must exist because if he didn’t human life would be meaningless. But he’s rubbish on the the ontological argument: surely the definition of God as ‘the most perfect being that can be conceived’ is inessential to the argument, because we can simply list God’s attributes as including existence, omnipotence, omniscience, and so on. Thus, questioning the meaningfulness of the description ‘the most perfect being that can be conceived’ does nothing to diffuse the argument. (And, by the way, Anselm wrote in the eleventh, not the fifthteenth, century! McGinn needs to do a bit of history of philosophy…) Anyone have any ideas why McGinn doesn’t just repeat the mantra, ‘existence is not a property’?

This should put you off philosophy forever!

The guy holding a glass of white wine is David Chalmers, one of the most eminent contemporary philosophers of mind. He looks disgusting…

 On a happier note, anyone interested in mental state externalism should get this book:

It’s about twenty quid (including p & p) on amazon, and it’s the perfect guide to a great topic.

An introduction to the issue of mental state externalism…

How do our beliefs about the world come to have the contents they do? What makes my belief that water is wet a belief about the wetness of water? These questions are deep and difficult, and I shall certainly not attempt to answer them fully here. However, we can fruitfully treat one aspect of the problem, the issue of mental content externalism. Hopefully, this will be the start of a series of blogs (and responses!) in which we discuss externalism, and reach some substantive philosophical conclusions. But first I need to clearly set out the issues at stake.

In the introduction I raised the issue through the example of belief. But it is not only our beliefs that have contents in the relevant sense; rather, the issue attaches to all of the so-called ‘propositional attitudes’. A propositional attitude is what it says on the tin: an attitude to a proposition. I believe that the Holy Spirit doesn’t exist, hope that I won’t go to Hell, desire that I will go to Heaven, and so on. In each example, the embedded sentence after the ‘that’ clause expresses a proposition, and the verb before the ‘that’ clause expresses an attitude towards that proposition – in my examples, the attitudes are belief, hope and desire. We call the embedded proposition the ‘content’ of the propositional attitude; what is at stake in the present debate is how this content is determined. At the present stage, we do not need to commit to a detailed answer to the question of what contents are. What we do need to acknowledge is the basic thesis that contents are comprised out of elements called notions or concepts, whose nature and arrangement determines the nature of the content as a whole. I trust that this will not be too controversial: after all, it seems, intuitively, that the contents ‘water is wet’, ‘water is potable’, and ‘Coca Cola is potable’ share certain things in common, and that what is shared is the occurrence of the same conceptual elements. Once again, we do not need to make any substantive metaphysical commitments about what concepts are. Finally, we should note the following criterion of individuation for mental states: if two mental states have different contents, then they are different mental states.

We’ve seen the distinction between attitude and content, and that contents are composed out of elements called concepts. To understand mental state externalism, we need to introduce one more philosophical concept: supervenience. This may be defined as follows: a set of properties A supervenes on a set of properties B if and only if any two individuals x and y which share all properties in B must also share all properties in A. The concept of supervenience was introduced into philosophy by G. E. Moore in the context of ethics and aesthetics. One supervenience claim is that the beauty of a painting supervenes on the arrangement of paint on the canvas: crudely, the beauty of the painting remains constant so long as you don’t muck about with the paint. A different supervenience claim is at stake between internalists and externalists. The internalist thinks that the contents of a subject’s propositional attitudes supervene on the subject’s internal states; the externalist denies this claim. What counts as a subject’s ‘internal states’? To keep things simple, assume that materialism is true: that is, that everything that exists is physical or material. My internal states are therefore wholly constituted, or determined by, the physical particles which make up my body. Thus, two subjects made up of the same particles in the same arrangement are in the same internal state. Now we can express the internalist’s thesis as follows: two physically identical subjects necessarily have mental states with the same contents. The externalist thinks that two internally identical subjects could be in different mental states, because their propositional attitudes could have different contents. Note that internalism and externalism are types of position, rather then concrete, particular positions: internalists can disagree about which internal states mental contents supervene on; externalists can disagree about which external factors play a role in determing the contents of a subject’s propositional attitudes.

In my next post, I’ll consider arguments for the the externalist’s thesis that two internally identical subjects could be in different mental states. This man looms large…