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.

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…