A horrible philosophical problem
February 1, 2008
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.
February 2, 2008 at 2:08 pm
“One intuition supports the claim that the connection between mental states and behaviour is merely contingent, the other that it is necessary and analytic.”
Remember to keep clear on what kinds of mental states you are discussing when you focus on their relationship to behaviour. There are good reasons, for example, for thinking the connection between propositional attitudes and behaviour is of a very different sort to the connection between phenomenal states (such as pain) and behaviour.
“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.”
I’m not sure I quite agree with this. The writhing-behaviour is a criterion for our ascription of pain in the sense that it is evidence for the subject being in pain: it is not constitutive of the meaning of the concept. What is the pull towards the further step?
Also, some of the Wittgenstein quotes do not really support the further step. PI 303 just says that it is difficult to believe that people are not in pain when it appears as if they are: but our ability to doubt is to do with the epistemology of mental state ascriptions, not the semantics of them. The case is a bit more ambiguous with PI 281. Literally construed, it is false: I can, of course, say “a rock has sensations”. Wittgenstein must, I think, either mean that we cannot intelligibly say such a thing, or that we cannot truely say it. If the former, then this section does support your interpretation; if the latter, however, then not.
With PI 284 Wittgenstein seems more clearly to suggest that the issue is semantic. However, notice that he is on weak grounds here. He says that we “might as well” ascribe pain to a number as to a rock, but this directly begs the questions against the materialist. The materialist will say that pain is a configuration of matter, and so it makes sense to ascribe it to material things, but not to abstract notions like numbers.
Last thing:
“Perhaps that is a weak example – the person could be feigning pain, and then the application of the concept would be incorrect.”
This isn’t really a problem for behaviouristic philosophies of mind. The behaviourist asserts that mental states consist in *dispositions* to behaviour, and the person who is faking being hurt has different dispositions to someone who is really in pain (e.g. if you offer to give someone faking severe pain a fiver if they quit the pretense, they probably will, whereas someone who is really in severe pain won’t be able to).