The ‘hard’ problem of
consciousness is continually reproduced and made harder by all attempts to
solve it
Contents:
Introduction
1) What is ‘the hard problem of consciousness’?
2) ‘Information’ as a would-be solvent
of the mind-body problem
3) ‘Divisionism’ as a general strategy
for solving the mind-body problem
4) Philosophical approaches which
guarantee failure to connect mind and body
5) Sociological approaches which
guarantee failure to connect mind and body
6) An alternative approach
7) An exemplar of ‘the alternative
approach’: Wittgenstein
8) An apparent counter-example to ‘the
alternative approach’
9) Conclusion.
Coda
Introduction: The Cartesian legacy
Since René Descartes inaugurated Modern
Philosophy, even Modern Thought, many of the greatest intellects of the Western
world across many ‘disciplines’ (including, crucially also, Psychology and
Sociology) have struggled with perhaps the central problem he set: What is the
relation between mind and body? The problem has been so hard to progress with,
in part because Descartes’s key innovation was to
suggest that the body was to be thought of as
a machine, and the mind as what ‘animates’ it. Many have doubted Descartes’s story about the nature of this animation, but
most have left intact the body-as-machine. And have wondered, with Descartes;
How is it, how can it possibly be, that a machine
can have anything to do with experiences, with sensation, with intention, with
consciousness?
‘Cartesian
dualism’, the doctrine that mind and matter are two utterly different
‘substances’, has been a leading would-be answer to the mind-body problem ever
since Descartes himself suggested it. Dualism ‘substantialises’
or ‘objectivises’ mind as well as matter, but the key
reason why this has seemed unsatisfactory to so many is the whiff still of
something ‘supernatural’ about the ‘mind-substance’ (or ‘spirit’) that
Descartes appeared to hypothesize as the body’s animating ‘ghost’.
The
‘Cognitivist’ paradigm, now more-or-less dominant in
psychology, and influential in large swathes of philosophy (e.g. in Philosophy
of Mind) and sociology (e.g. in ‘Cognitive Sociology’, and (in practice) in
much ‘interpretivistic’ sociology), is a pared-down
scientifically-‘respectable’ latter-day heir to Cartesianism.
Cognitivism focusses on
‘mental processes’, ‘psychological states’, etc., but does not deny their
material instantiation -- their instantiation in the physical realm -- and thus
appears to avoid supernaturalism. It has generated various reactive responses:
for example, Behaviourism, which reduces mind to
(movements of the) body. More controversially, the very idea of a field of ‘the
sociology of the body’ (as opposed to
‘sociology of mind’), could be argued to be a reactive response to Cartesianism.
‘But
haven’t these debates moved on? Is anyone a Cartesian any more, or a Behaviourist? Is the mind-body problem as such not perhaps
over and done with, settled?’
I
have already intimated otherwise: the space set out by Cartesianism
is still very much being contested. Just because writers in sociology do not
cite Descartes very often, for example, does not mean that they have escaped a
more or less thoroughly Cartesian picture of mind (and thereby of society) --
or of a reactive ‘opposite’ to such a picture, an ‘opposing’ position to
dualism/cognitivism which does not really dispute the
Cartesian framework for the debate. Rather, I suspect that it is precisely a
certain lack of historical (i.e. of a serious ‘history of ideas’) awareness
among many ‘human scientists’ which renders them passive or unknowing prisoners
of the Cartesian framework.
There
are even new positions being carved out within the Cartesian co-ordinates. If
the liveness of the mind-body problem is revealed by
the liveliness of the debate over it, and by the
provision of new positions within that debate... then the mind-body problem is
alive and well and living in
But
in fact, of course, the mind-body problem is alive and well and living
-- in rather
more conventional guises, among philosophically-minded folks with higher hopes
of solving it themselves, even -- in loads of other places, too. John Searle
has his answer to it: he says that McGinn is right to
think that there must be a natural property of the brain which uniquely
generates consciousness, but wrong to think that it will remain a mystery to us
what it is.[2] The Churchlands have
their (very different) answer (or perhaps non-answer) to the problem -- severe
materialism (meaning here of course a reduction of the mental to the
material/physical, not ‘dialectical materialism’), perhaps to the point of
complete ‘Eliminativism’ (i.e. the elimination of the
category of ‘mind’ altogether). David Chalmers has a new kind of dualistic (or even panpsychistic [3]
) approach to the problem. Advocates of ‘Artifical
Intelligence’ (A.I.) simply bite on the bullet and say: Why not say that machines think? Some say
that Daniel Dennett’s ambitious explanation (or explanation away) of the
problem is neo-behaviouristic; and so on and so on.
A healthy debate?
Perhaps. But perhaps -- instead -- all of this is illusion.
Perhaps there is no (such thing as the) mind-body problem, actually.[4] The interminable analyses that are
made of it can perhaps be terminated -- though only if we are willing to
understand the misleadingness (or even vacuousness) of the metaphors upon which the problem is
largely based.
Let
me explain why I think this; and why exactly I think that all ‘human
scientists’, and not only philosophers, should care.
1) What
is ‘the hard problem of consciousness’?
The ‘hard’ problem is a ‘sub-problem’
of the broader mind-body problem. The ‘hard’ problem, as Chalmers has called
it, is that of ‘qualia’, the qualities of felt or sensed
experience. It is the problem of why, besides ‘intentional states’
(e.g. understanding
something about something in the world) and ‘informational processes’ (e.g. the
sub-personal processes which allegedly constitute perception), there should be
actual conscious events and feelings. No, not so much why there should be these things, but how there can be these things -- what it can be for there to be
such things, and, crucially, how, if at
all, their interconnection with ‘the physical’ -- with (the) body -- can be
understood. (Our
Now,
it has been argued by those dissatisfied with the Cognitivist
paradigm -- and quite rightly, I think, as intimated in the opening of this
essay -- that there is a very impoverished conception of the physical, and in
particular of the human body (when viewed as broadly mechanical), at play here;
that is, in Chalmers, but also in the behaviourists
and the eliminativists, and in McGinn
too; indeed, in virtually the entire Modern tradition of thought about mind and
body. Merleau-Ponty has probably shown this better
than anyone else.[6] It has also been repeatedly (and in my
view efficaciously) argued that there is something badly awry with the
conception of ‘mind’ and ‘body’ as (conceptually) separable in the first place:
this has been argued, for example, by Wittgenstein (Furthermore, what Hegel, Pragmatism, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgensteinians
and Philosophical Feminism have contributed to -- and what the Ethnomethodological sociologists have developed in the
greatest detail -- is the understanding of the social aspects of mind/body; but it would take us too far afield to
go into that question here. The interested reader is directed toward the
synthetic work for example of Meredith Williams -- and toward the writings of
several of the contributors to this TCS
special issue.[7]). One’s view on the mind-body problem
is surely deserving of real consideration only if it does not depend upon
wrong-headed conceptions of ‘mind’ and ‘body’. (Add to this, that arguably it
is only if one thoroughly re-thinks the philosophical tradition concerning mind
and body that one will be able to escape from the ‘dialectic’ between -- on the
one hand -- dualistic Cartesianism, and -- on the
other -- its reactive ‘opponents’ (e.g. neo-behaviourists
and eliminativists, who have not escaped from the space defined by Cartesianism).)
I
wish to develop a kind of synthesis of these related thoughts, of the genuinely and
therapeutically -- as opposed to merely reactively -- anti-Cartesian arguments
of Wittgenstein & co. . I think that the appeal of the mind-body problem as
an interminable enigma will not be depleted unless and until one has looked
carefully into the way in which the conception of mind and body as fully
conceptually separatable is first arrived at, and
then noticed the peculiar and impoverished conceptions of both mind [8] and body -- of people -- which tend to structure the separation, and thus the
debate. Specifically, in the contemporary context in which I have initially
framed my own discussion, in the context of philosophers like McGinn and Searle and Chalmers and the Churchlands,
I think it is essential to take a close look (for example) at the way in which
the computer ‘model’ of the mind has held virtually all of us captive, has metaphorically structured (deformed) the
discussion such that it is almost impossible to get a clear view of the very
peculiar nature of the question that is being asked, when ‘the hard problem’ of
consciousness is raised. But a clear view is what I am after: I think that, if
and when one attains such a view, the
mind-body problem really does evaporate completely.
Without
depending in my argument upon you
already trusting in Wittgenstein and the other critics of the Cartesian
tradition, and by a somewhat roundabout and sometimes even repetitious route --
it’s not at all straightforward convincingly
to motivate and carry off this evaporation -- I shall endeavour
to persuade you, the reader, of this.
2) ‘Information’
What do I have in mind? What I have in
mind can be conveniently focussed around the concept of information. This concept is absolutely crucial for ‘Cognitive
Science’, in part because it funds the computer ‘model(s)’ of mind which in one
way or another is shared by philosophers of mind as otherwise diverse as Fodor
and the Churchlands.
Now,
the concept of ‘information’ is a contested one within contemporary philosophy
of mind and cognitive science. There are debates, for example, between Fodorians (who are suspicious about the general usefulness
of the notion of ‘information’, but dead keen to treat the mind as entirely
computational in nature) and Dretskians (who think
that plants, non-human animals and human alike are all above all receivers of
and actors upon information). But such debates are very much debates within the broadly ‘Cognitivist’
paradigm in philosophy of mind -- a paradigm about which I am meaning to raise
deep doubts. Sometimes, more fundamental questions are raised about the use of
the term ‘information’ to refer to sub-personal processes. I think that these
latter questions are very pertinent,
and that there is an almost inexorable risk in the use of concepts such as
‘information’ beyond their original domain of application. The use of the
concept has been extended -- ‘bloated’, we might polemically say -- when it is
applied as Dretske et al apply it (They
therefore owe us an account of why it is wise to continue using the same term
-- ‘information’ -- at all, if what they are talking about is so loosely
connected with what the word normally, unmisleadingly,
means). The original context of the concept is in situations such as the
following.
One is at a railway station, and asks the station manager, “Please, I
need the following information: Could you tell me where I can find a decent
hotel?”
Or: One
is impressed by the knowledge of a fellow concert-goer,
and remarks to a friend, “That woman is a mine of information!”
Or even:
One defends one’s controversial choice of reading matter on aesthetic
grounds by saying, “I don’t read Martin Amis merely
to acquire information!”
Of
course, we can also acquire information (and indeed knowledge) from sources
other than other human beings. Examination of fossil remains yields information
concerning the nature of life on Earth hundreds of millions of years before
there were any human beings. But even here ‘information’ remains
paradigmatically a concept which operates on a personal and inter-personal
level, not on a sub-personal level. In other words: information is
paradigmatically something which human
beings have at their fingertips / lack / find out /communicate / ‘process’
/ dissect / question. That use -- that family of uses -- of the term we do, actually, clearly understand. It
may be ‘messy’ from some arbitrary and (purportedly) ‘scientific’ point of
view, but such alleged ‘messiness’ or ‘vagueness’ is not normally any
constraint whatsoever upon comprehensibility or utility.
For
the utility of such uses of the term ‘information’ and cognate concepts is
located at many and various points in the stream of daily life.[9] The ‘messiness’ of such uses is only
an issue for philosophers/theorists who are locked inside the ‘analytic’
attitude, rather than having any kind of ‘practical’ attitude toward their
subject-matter. Careful attention to the actual use of terms such as ‘information’
(and indeed ‘messy’ [10] ), to their actual contexts of
significant use, can enable one to see ordinary uses of the term as immensely
rich and sophisticated, rather than as flawed or merely sub-scientific. (The
founding impulse of Peter Winch’s Wittgensteinian
philosophy of social science was the same point, equally applicable to most
Social Theory today: that ‘social science’ versions of human practices tend to
provide impoverished or dangerously ironising
accounts of ordainary actors’ linguistic and
non-linguistic actions, unless they remain tethered at all points to those
actors’ own accounts and concepts. [11] )
Under
pressure from the scientific impulse, however, and from what John McDowell has
sometimes called ‘the drive toward objectivity’ in Modern thought,[12] it may appear as though this concept
of ‘information’ were hopelessly wishy-washy, and that some hard and pure and
clear replacement for it were required. The term gets used in extended ways, in
particular scientific or philosophical theoretical discourses, and these uses
are ‘not vague’, are clearly laid out and demarcated. (At least, that’s the
theory!) The theorists define their terms. So, for instance,
there is then talk of animals or even plants receiving information from their
environment, or of computers processing information. And such talk can seem
clearer, easier to put in a box, than the very uses of the term ‘information’
-- to do primarily with human beings interacting with one another -- from which
that talk was metaphorically derived.
It
then starts to appear as though we understand what information is better in the new extended use than in
the original context. We understand clearly, so it seems, what we mean when we
talk of ‘information’ in the context of ‘‘information’-processers’
-- computers -- and so then we can seemingly employ the new, clear use of the
term to retroflect upon how humans work. And
specifically, to start to figure out how ‘the mind’ works, how mind can be
embodied (e.g. as ‘software’).
Is
this how to make progress on the topic of the mind-body relation?
3) The
(flawed) strategy of ‘divisionism’
If one thinks that working with the
concept of ‘information’ can take one incrementally toward a solution to the
mind-body problem, one has what might be termed a ‘divisionist’
approach to the problem: one thinks that one can divide it into different bits,
and make progress on them one at a time. This -- ‘divisionism’ -- was in fact
the kind of programme that Descartes explicitly urged
upon us in his ‘rules of method’. Once again, he thereby laid the groundwork
for contemporary thinking on this matter: for the position that one can perhaps
the solve the relatively ‘easy’ problems (e.g. the
problem of how we get ‘information’ from the world, and then communicate it),
and leave the ‘hard’ problem (i.e. the problem of consciousness ‘itself’) til later.
But
this is actually what I meant when I said earlier that we need to learn to
understand how very deeply the computer model has deformed our grasp of what we
are after when we try to work at ‘the mind-body problem’.[13] We start to think that we can get
somewhere with the problem because we ‘know’, from talk of computers and of
what they can do via terms such as
‘information-processing’, how to approach at least some sub-component of the
problem. But if we do this, we have got
things back to front. We only make attributions to computers of the power
to process information on the basis of a (loose!) analogy with attributions we
make to conscious beings, i.e.
principally to other people (and to ourselves). The extended use of the term
‘information-processing’ to cover what computers do is no basis whatsoever upon
which to turn back around to us, and
suggest that now a tool is available for describing and explaining what is really
going on in humans: namely, ‘information-processing’!
There
is thus a very peculiar kind of ‘bootstrapping’ operation being envisaged, I
contend, whenever somebody aims to solve (part of) the mind-body problem
through the ‘divisionist’ strategy which is central
to the scientistic approaches arguably dominant in
philosophy and ‘cognitive science’. Concretely: It is fantasised
that we can divide the problem up and then make some headway on a sub-component
of the mind-body problem, for example with ‘the problem of information’ -- by
means of looking at a context where we supposedly have a ‘firm’ grip on what
information ‘is’ (viz. when working
with computers, etc.). Or similarly, it is fantasised
that we can make some headway with ‘the problem of perception’ -- by torturing
non-human animals and dissecting the brains -- because we supposedly have a
firm grip on how it is and what it is that they
see, which we can then extrapolate to us humans. In this instance, that things
are being gotten the wrong way around is perhaps particularly evident. For
while scientists may indeed by such means advance our understanding of brute
correlations between brain and external stimulus, and even of mechanisms of
conduit for (e.g.) sound waves to pass through the different parts of ears,
there will be no progress made on understanding what perception is, or how it is possible for mere matter to perceive. Any understanding that we
have of that is derived from our deep familiarity with -- and (largely
non-scientific) understanding of -- the perception of human beings (including
our own).
All
‘divisionist’ efforts are, I am suggesting, futile,
at least from a philosophical point of view. The rider is important: I have no
quarrel with ‘Information Theory’ considered, for example, purely as a mathematics of syntax. My quarrel is with the thought that
‘Information’ considered in that technical/mathematical sense can be of any
utility in solving (part of) the mind-body problem. And my quarrel thus is also
with the misleading title, ‘Information Theory’.
If the innovations of
We
only have a firm grip on what ‘information’ is in the first place through our
everyday variegated and mundane practices of exchanging ... information; we
only have a firm grip on what ‘perception’ is through our experiences and our
language (which is completely shot-through with ‘perceptuality’
and which has as a primary use the mutual communication and understanding of
what has been seen and heard, etc.); and so on. If we can’t satisfactorily deal
with ‘the mind-body problem’ through understanding the everyday, then we have
no hope of doing so by means of a scientifically-inclined division and
dissection of it. The ‘divisionist’ (or ‘divide and
rule’) approach to the mind-body problem (on the one hand) and (on the other
hand) ‘divisionistic’ approaches to the human being
(for starters, dividing the human being into mind and body) and (further) to
the mind itself (i.e. dividing it in turn -- as Chomsky and Fodor are
especially prone to do -- into sub-components, reducing it to things we
allegedly understand more clearly) are more or less just different sides of the
same coin -- and I am suggesting that we have grounds for thinking this to be
an unlucky and unhappy coin.
This
already suggests the moral I will draw more fully and explicitly shortly: That
efforts to solve the mind-body problem through ‘divisionism’, and through
‘bootstrapping’ up toward an understanding of the whole problem (including the
‘hard’ problem) on the basis of looking at scientifically-accessible fragments
of the problem where ‘progress’ can seemingly be made... that such efforts are
not only futile -- they in fact point in just the wrong direction.[14] For the narrowing of the problem at
hand, through the apparent stripping away from its hardcore of those portions
of it that can be effectively attacked, or progressed upon, itself
progressively draws our attention further and further away from what we do understand, from what we do have a clear view of: people, interacting with one another,
thinking and acting, seeing, responding to what they see, accomplishing things,
trading information, speaking about particular things, generalizing... in
short, all the hurly-burly of life, of the stream of life.
But
just who does ‘we’ refer to here? Is the reference to a
privileged elite of right-thinking philosophers or sociologists? Not really.
‘We’ here means simply: we members of a society, we competent language-users
and practitioners of numerous social arts. What Wittgenstein, Ryle, Winch and the Ethnomethodologists
from Garfinkel to Lynch and Watson and Sharrock add to the thinking and acting of ordinary actors
is really simply: reminders of it. I contend, after these authors, that all of us have ‘a clear view’ of
perception, information-exchange, thinking, and feeling ... within our grasp.
We only need to let ourselves see and know and realize this. Bad (i.e. most)
philosophy, bad psychology, bad sociology: all have a
way of getting in the way of this.
Earlier
philosophical sociologists -- e.g. Dewey, Mead, and the Symbolic Interactionists -- also got a sniff of the thoughts I am drawing
here from Wittgenstein, Garfinkel & co., but,
rather than be content with ‘reminders’, they tended at crucial points to fall
back into scientism/theory-ism, especially but not only of an Intellectualistic
or specifically Cognitivistic nature.[15]
Most notably
perhaps, those earlier thinkers tended to miss the methodological moral we
should arguably insist upon: that what is needed, to remind one of what one
already knows and to help one to not seek for more than such reminders, is not
sociological or psychological theory, but instead a diagnostic grasp and therapeutic dissolution of our endless tendency
to theorize (i.e. Wittgensteinian philosophy) and aggregated studies /ethnographies of
situated/embodied practices (i.e. sociology /anthropology pursued in a
genuinely post-analytic spirit). The bringing closer together of philosophy
and sociology in such a fashion, is
perhaps the key task for those who would avoid error vis-a-vis -- and facilitate
understanding of -- mind/body/society, in the twenty-first century.
I
have argued that we can see the problem with ‘the mind-body problem’ in
microcosm if we look at the strategy used by ‘divisionists’
to deal with the ‘sub-problem’ of ‘human information-processing’. This example
-- from the heart of ‘Cognitive Science’ -- suggests how the broader divisionist strategy may be flawed; how, in short, we
should strongly suspect there to be no incremental solution whatsoever to ‘the
mind-body problem’.
4) Strictly philosophical approaches
that guarantee failure to connect mind and body
The as-yet-insoluble mind-body problem
has seemingly been narrowed and narrowed with the passage of time, with the
development and intensification of the debate in recent and contemporary
philosophy of mind etc.; but with each narrowing, a solution of the real
hardcore, the ‘hard’ problem, seems to get further and further away. (This
again seems to me to explain the attractiveness,
the attraction, of the McGinn/Nagel view on the problem. For they, unlike nearly
all their predecessors, at least have
something to say -- albeit something that I myself think is very confused
-- about the deep elusiveness to us of a solution.[16] )
But what I am suggesting is that this greater and greater elusiveness of
a solution which will really satisfy us, which will let us end our
philosophizing, is in fact a structural
feature of the way the problem has been approached.[17]
There is in common
between virtually every single one of the protagonists to the debate the
assumption, covert and/or overt, that the way to make progress in and with the
problem of consciousness is to hive off from the problem more and more things
which purportedly ‘we can now explain’, via
neuro-science, or cognitive psychology, or A.I., or
composites of these, or social scientific spin-offs from them (most obviously,
some sociobiology / ‘evolutionary psychology’). More and more bits of the
problem get (supposedly) rendered answerable, as we ‘make progress’ with the
problems of intentionality, of information-receipt and information-communication,
of perception, and so on. We strip these things away from the ‘hardcore’, and
explain them in a manner which does not differ in kind from how we
scientifically explain all sorts of other natural phenomena. We are left with a
hardcore that more and more evades our scientific schemas. So we redouble our
efforts... and so it goes on.
Now
I am not denying that this ‘stripping away’ of bits of the mind-body problem
for the purposes of genuinely scientific investigation can ever be productive. For
example, neurophysiologists have of course learnt some interesting things. For
example, we now understand the etiology of epilectic
seizures, at least in brute causal/correlational
terms, better than we used to. But we don’t understand the causality (etiology)
of such things better because we know what ‘information’ really is, or because of anything remotely like that. We understand
them better because of new technologies and careful observation -- because of
real science and medicine, not because of philosophising.
The ‘divisionist’ and ‘stripping
away’ stratagem, I have suggested, is in the end philosophically disastrous. The problem of consciousness, as
opposed to the problem of which bits of the brain are correlated more and less
with what actions and events (which is a perfectly respectable
scientific/medical problem), will not
be illuminated by that strategem. In fact -- worse --
as indicated above, the strategem moves in precisely
the wrong direction. It keeps pushing
the hard problem forever beyond our ken.
In
a remarkable and almost faux-Hegelian fashion, then, we can see how cognitivist ‘optimists’ concerning the mind-body problem
and Nagelian ‘pessimists’ are made for each other.
The latter lead the former forever onward, and into greater and greater aping
of science -- precisely by means of denying that the problem is fully soluble.
‘Optimists’ redouble their efforts, on hearing how the mind of God (i.e. what
is at the heart of the human mind) is supposedly off-limits. What a great prize
it would be, against impossible odds, scientifically to uncover the mind of God
(i.e. the nature of the mindedness of ‘Man’)! (I return to this ‘dialectic’ in
the Conclusion (Section 9), below.)
If
the ‘optimists’ are ever to be weaned off their search, a different approach
will be needed. One which suggests not, as the ‘pessimists’ suggest, that
consciousness is a scientisable or theorisable object, only one that will forever be beyond
the grasp of our science. Rather, an approach that questions whether consciousness is that (or any) kind
of ‘object’ in the first place.
5) Sociological
approaches that guarantee failure to connect mind and body
An approach to ‘the mind-body problem’
such as I have argued is actually needed might be sought in sociology. Not being
an expert on sociology, I cannot be sure that this is an unwarranted hope. But
I have already intimated that I think one is liable and likely to be
disappointed, in this domain too. With certain very specific exceptions
(especially, much ethnomethodology), my own knowledge
/ experience and my informants alike tell me that ‘positions’ in sociology
tends to be structured around the very same stale debates -- voluntarism versus
constraint, structure versus agency, mind versus world -- which, albeit sometimes
under different names, make up the playing field, the ‘legitimate’ spectrum of
debate, in mainstream Philosophy.[18]
I
will just take one recent influential example, in order to sketch how this can
go. Colin Campbell’s The myth of social
action [19] is an attempt to rebut the ‘social situationalist’ doctrines he sees in the likes of Garfinkel, Goffman and Giddens alike. Campbell wishes to reinstate what he sees as
Weberian ‘action theory’, as the basis of
sociological explanation, rather than taking all action to be social action, as
he thinks those he criticises do. Campbell hopes to
understand action as springing from mind (as opposed to society); he hopes to
understand sociology as effectively underpinned by (or a branch of) psychology;
and he seems to think that psychology will have full-scale scientific
legitimacy and explanatory power, either on its own account or possibly by
virtue of being tied into more basic sciences.[20] In short, he thinks that the mind-body
problem can be solved by means of properly placing sociology in a
causal-interpretive physiological-psychological context.
“[S]trictly speaking, ‘meaning’ cannot be ‘located’ anywhere
except in minds.” (p.45)
“The
real problem which needs to be addressed is not so much whether actor and
observer attach similar or different meanings to a given action; it is whether
there are any grounds for believing that observers can ever know what constitutes the actions of individuals unless they
take the trouble to ask them.” (p.50; emphasis added)
“The
basic truth is that our understanding of the actions of others is grounded in
our own experiences of agency.” (p.78)
“[O]nly actors can possibly know what their action consists of.
But then that should not be surprising because all action is ultimately performed alone, undertaken by the
individual as the sole agent. ...This is because all true actions are the
outcome of an ‘act of will’, a covert and personal event which actors can
perform only for themselves. ...It is...essentially
personal, intra-subjectively created meanings which are the immediate and
direct ‘causes’ of actions.”
(p.162 -- the closing paragraph of the
book; emphases added)
I will not work through these
remarkable passages. The previous and following sections of this paper should
suffice to make clear my deep doubts and worries about them. A variant of the
views of those (many) philosophers which I have been wanting
to question in this paper can in fact be seen particularly baldly and starkly in
On
p.151 of his book, he suggests that according to the ‘social situationalist’ paradigm, “...human actors typically
possess neither mind nor body ... the individual human being, who as a living,
thinking actor was once at the very centre of the sociological stage, has been
completely dissolved away, stripped of both mind and body, now no more than a
ghost in the social machine.” Attributing this obviously absurd and nonsensical
position to his opponents is of course only forced upon
Before
leaving
(over-)intellectualisations of life.
Let
us delay no longer. What exactly is the alternative approach to consciousness,
to mind and body -- an approach alternative to that of Chomsky, Chalmers and
Campbell alike -- which I have in mind?
6) An
alternative approach
We can generalize now from what we
observed above in specific connection with the concept of ‘information’. If we
really want satisfaction, if we want to get anywhere in relation to the
philosophical problem that Descartes gave us, we should and will not strip away more and more of the human in
order to try to understand the human, to understand consciousness (We will not for example break off and ‘operationalize’ the problem of information). The hardcore
becomes more and more remote, the
more we de-humanize aspects of mind such as information and perception and
intentionality. The problem will only really be being faced if we face up to it
as a ‘problem’ that has to do with whole human beings, embodied, in a context
(inextricably natural and social), at a given time, etc. .
But
once we really manage to succeed in seeing the ‘problem’ in that way ... there is no longer a problem. When one watches
a graceful dancer, for example -- or when one dances more or less gracefully --
there is no mind-body problem. When one has an attitude toward another which
involves seeing them as (say) dancing mindfully, being in the dance
mind-and-body ... or when one hears someone (as) speaking mindfully -- when one
simply allows oneself to see a ‘body-self’ in action -- there is no
philosophical problem. If we give up the scientistic-mechanical
view of the body, and perhaps say along with Aristotle that the soul is the
form of the body, then the ‘problem’ vanishes.
And
so, to return to my main example: when one thinks of the way the word
“information” is actually used in its ‘home’, outside certain rarefied academic
contexts -- when, again, one thinks of requesting some information from a
librarian or from a ticket-seller, for example [23]
-- it becomes I think glaringly plain that there is no problem. Only
when one starts, say, to try to ‘theorize’ information across human and
non-human domains (supposedly using the non-human -- the animal (usually
thought of as mechanical) or the machine -- as one’s paradigm, and thus getting
things back to front) does there start to look as if there is a problem, as if
there is a residuum which, however good our ‘theory’ of information gets, will
not be accountable for by such a theory. This elusive residuum is the
‘hardcore’ which I am saying that the traditional and dominant approaches to
the problem -- all the mainstream
options, all the ‘isms’ (Cognitivism, Reductionism
(to the brain), Behaviourism, and so on) that one is
offered in a traditional undergraduate ‘philosophy of mind’ or ‘theoretical
psychology’ class -- push further and
further from our reach.[24]
One
gradually loses all sense of such a residuum, however, if one takes the
alternative track, a track toward a clear view, that I
am endeavouring to point up. Human beings,
body-and-soul, do not of themselves lend themselves to a mind vs. body split. Only, ironically, even
paradoxically, does the effort to explain human beings in apparently
well-founded scientific terms (e.g. in the terms of ‘information-processing’;
meanwhile ignoring that there is a non-problematic core set of uses of the
concept of ‘information’, attention to which actually would help us dissolve
the sense that there is a problem here!). The perhaps-uncomfortable but I think
desperately important general result of my diagnosis is now clear: The mind-body debate is the very disease of
which it takes itself to be the cure. The very debate, the very effort to
find the ‘solution’ to the various fragments of the problem, the very conceptualisation of the problem, is the very thing which
ensures that ‘the hard problem’ remains insoluble, and which perpetuates the
existence of the problem. Thus philosophers of mind are driven to
highly-desperate attempts at cure -- the McGinn/Nagel
approach at one extreme, supernaturalistic dualism at
another extreme, and Eliminativism, or Behaviourism, at yet others.
If
one looks to take the approach which I am recommending, by contrast, one
gradually loses a sense of there being what McGinn
calls a ‘mystery’, here. That doesn’t mean that suddenly all human life is flat
and dully obvious -- far from it. One can actually see human life, at least rather clearer than before, if anything.
One can see the beauty of the dancer and the dance, the beauty of that unity,
without perhaps being misled by reductionist
questions about the mind and/versus the matter of the dancer.[25] No, what one loses is the sense that
there is a philosophical problem here that demands or begs an explanatory
solution. As I have just suggested, one way of losing that sense is to notice
that, paradoxically, it is the very demand for a solution to the problem that guarantees that one will never rid
oneself of the sense that there is a problem here. The insistence that the
mind-body problem is a problem, however much that leads one toward ‘a partial
solution’, is the very act that ensures that one will never reach a
satisfactory full solution, and ensures that the ‘hard’ problem will keep on
receding out of reach.
7) An
examplar of the alternative approach: Wittgenstein
But some readers may as yet be
unconvinced by my claims. If so, how can I hope to convince them? Perhaps by engaging in dialogue with them, by working with what
they still want to say (differently from me) about these matters. I am
going to cheat slightly here; I am going to call upon Wittgenstein, in the Philosophical Investigations., to speak
for me -- or rather, to present just such a dialogue. And I am thinking now not
just of the debates Wittgenstein stages in the anti-private-language argument
‘proper’, though those are of course highly relevant, but in the subsequent
passages on the phenomenology of philosophical illusion; for example, in
para.412f., on consciousness:
"
The
feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciouness
and brain-process: how does it come about that this does not come into the
considerations of our ordinary life? This idea of a difference in kind is
accompanied by slight giddiness,--which occurs when we are performing a logical
sleight-of-hand...[26] When does this feeling occur in the present
case? It is when I, for example, turn my attention in a particular way on to my
own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be
produced by a process in the brain!--as it were clutching my forehead.--But
what can it mean to speak of "turning my attention on to my own
consciousness"? This is surely the queerest thing there could be! It was a
particular act of gazing that I called doing this. I stared fixedly in front of
me-- but not at any particular point
or object. My eyes were wide open, the brows not contracted (as they mostly are
when I am interested in a particular object. No such interest preceded this
gazing). My glance was ‘vacant’; or again like
that of someone admiring the illumination of the sky and drinking in the light.
Now
bear in mind that the proposition which I uttered as a paradox (THIS is
produced by a brain-process!) has nothing paradoxical about it. I could have
said it in the course of an experiment whose purpose was to show that an effect
of light which I see is produced by stimulation of a particular part of the
brain.--But I did not utter the sentence in the surroundings in which it would
have had an everyday and non-paradoxical sense. ” [27]
This passage seems to me to encapsulate
in a condensed form much of what I have argued above. Wittgenstein is trying to
get us to see that it is not consciousness that is weird, a weird ‘thing’, but
only our attitude towards ourselves that is (sometimes) weird, especially when
we are either psychologically disturbed or doing philosophy (either explicitly,
or in the implicit form of social or psychological theory). Then, we are
inclined to forget just how specific are the circumstances in which ideas of
consciousness are actually invoked or mentioned, in everyday life. And, just as
important, that consciousness itself is normally (arguably, always) itself intentional -- i.e. that consciousness is
consciousness of something. “He was
suddenly cognizant of the peril that he faced”, or “I am conscious of your
capabilities in this field, Ms. Greenford”, or “Right now, I am all too aware
of the depth of the wound, doctor”; these are perhaps typical occasions for
uses of the concept of ‘consciousness’. By contrast, philosophers frequently
envisage no context at all for their invocations of the concept. Wittgenstein
was very aware of the specificity, practicality and intentionality of
attributions of consciousness -- outside of the even more specific and often
downright peculiar or untethered context (or
non-context) of a philosophy discussion, as the following dialogue evinces:
“ "Human beings agree in
saying that they see, hear, feel and so on... So they are their own witnesses
that they have consciouness." --But how strange
this is! Whom do I really inform, if I say "I have consciouness"?
What is the purpose of saying this to myself, and how
can another person understand me? -- Now, expressions like "I see",
"I hear", "I am conscious" really
have their uses. I tell a doctor "Now I am hearing with this ear again”,
or I tell someone who believes I am in a faint "I am conscious
again", and so on...
But
can't I imagine that the people around me are automata, lack consciousness,
even though they behave in the same way as usual?...
[J]ust try to keep hold of this idea in the midst of
your ordinary intercourse with others, in the street, say! Say to yourself, for
example: "The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness
is mere automatism." And you will either find these words becoming quite
meaningless; or you will produce in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or
something of that sort. ” (PI paras. 417 & 420) [28]
Wittgenstein looks seriously at what
the conditions are which alone make the problem of consciousness, ‘the hard
problem’, compelling to one. He suggests that it is only the special situation
that philosophers put themselves in (or perhaps that some of the
mentally-troubled genuinely put or find themselves in) that makes them inclined
to see consciousness as a thing at
all, and that makes them wonder at 'it' being 'connected' to matter.[29] For from what perspective could it
seem -- does it (sometimes) seem -- as though there is something weird about
consciousness? From a perspective in
which one’s ‘interiority’ is foregrounded, and in
which the material world is seen as, if anything, then a brute ‘external’ Other to that interiority. (When, for example, one stares
into space while under the influence of a drug, or after a heavy bout of
reading Descartes.) But there is nothing
absolute or privileged about this ‘perspective’, about this peculiar state
of mind [30] which philosophers may be especially
prone to entertain. There is no such thing as a perspective from which it can
be absolutely asserted that some or other aspect of the way the Universe is
made up -- e.g. that we are conscious; or that we talk; or that there is matter
and energy, etc. etc. -- is odd.[31]
Suppose
it were said: ‘The perspective from which it genuinely is odd that there is
consciousness is the scientific -- or more broadly, the ‘objective’ --
perspective.’ I suspect that the perspective from which this is being said is not ‘the
scientific’ perspective -- some actual scientists, such as perhaps Raymond Tallis and Gerald Edelman, do not seem to find
consciousness aberrant; that is, do not find it crying out for scientific theorisation or replacement. I suspect that the perspective
in question is broadly that of the ‘unity of science’ movement and its
contemporary successors (that is, chiefly a philosophical and social scientific
tendency) imbued with broadly reductionist
prejudices. That is, only if one thinks that there must be a science of
anything that really exists, and that such sciences must in some sense be
unified or reducible to (a) fundamental science(s) (physics is the usual
candidate), will one find consciousness alarming. But even among mainstream
Anglo-American philosophers, reductionist and
unity-of-science views are far less respectable than they used to be. John Dupré has I think fairly decisively shown that such views
are untenable, in part for reasons that can be appreciated simply by looking
carefully at the actual practice of the natural sciences.[32]
No
good reason has ever been given for us to suppose that there must be a science
of something, if it is to be regarded as real. There is no good reason to think
that there should be a science of consciousness, or of the mind, or of society,
any more than there need be a science of numbers, or of universes, or of
capital cities, or of games, or of constellations, or of objects whose names
start with the letter ‘b’. If there is/are (a) science(s) of the mind, let us
please hear what its genuine puzzles are, what its exemplary puzzle-solutions
are, etc.[33]. I contend that none such are
available: that virtually all would-be scientific ‘human science’ is through
and through programmatic -- whereas scientists
(i.e. practitioners of one or another natural science) generally care barely a
jot for programmes or methods, but just get on with
it, with solving their puzzles and advancing their fields.
This
does not mean, heaven knows, that
there is nothing interesting to say about human beings beyond biology: there is
a wealth to say, using the approaches
of (non-scientistic) philosophy, history, literature,
ethnography, etc. What there is not to say, I am suggesting, is anything
analogous to the results of a science -- and any attempt to turn some area of
human studies into a science is likely to have exactly the kinds of
counter-productive effects that I have been giving instances of in this paper.
So:
there is no particular reason to trust one set of philosophical intuitions[34] (McGinn’s,
or Descartes’s, or Searle’s, or Campbell’s, or indeed
mine) over another, here. There is no particular reason to find consciousness
innately surprising, and thus in need of ‘scientific’ explanation. I claim
that, insofar as there is a problem or a ‘mystery’ which concerns consciousness,
it tends to dissipate, when we turn
our focus seriously to how people (ourselves included) actually talk, to what
we actually do, to what actually happens to us in our world, to our actual
existence. When we really meditate or look or listen, and stop idly thinking
and theorizing. For instance, I may get myself bewildered if I try to become
self-conscious of my consciousness,
and wonder how THIS could possibly be related to matter.
But do I have any such difficulties if I simply become aware of my own breathing
and thus of my mind-and-body (rather than trying to ‘capture’ or ‘explain’ my
own thoughts); or of course if I look at someone moaning pitifully, or writhing
in pain? (And let us not think of the concept of ‘pain’ purely in the abstract.
Picture instead (say) the scene of a terrible railway accident.)
Or,
let us even take an atypical case -- arguably a kind of case which could not be
the paradigm, but which is a variant special case of pain in public -- What if
one is alone, and is oneself suddenly afflicted by some kind of pain? I would
go so far as this: if one stops thinking of the consciousness-brain
‘connection’ obsessively, and instead has some pain inflicted on some region of
one’s body, one won't suffer from a sense of the 'mystery' of mind and body any
more. Even in an artificial situation, where it's hard not to be prejudiced by
all the philosophical theorizing we've learnt in a culture saturated with
dualistic and scientistic
ideology, this still may work. Try it now. Give yourself some kind of hard blow
or scratch. You feel it where you were scratched -- of course -- and that's not
surprising. You are not surprised, merely slightly pained... You are a whole
person, and it is you that thinks, or
feels pain, not one of your organs or a part of your body.[35] And now I think we can see more
clearly the location of a key mistake made by almost every mainstream thinker
in the field. We need to start with
the idea of ourselves as embodied persons, acting in the world, NOT with the
idea of ourselves as brains with minds ‘located’ in them, or ‘attached’ to them
-- whether materially, computationally, supernaturalistically,
or what have you.[36] If we don’t start with that idea, we will certainly never be able to reach it
through a process of theoretical reduction, of ‘division’, and so on! The
thought-style we need, we academic students of mind and society and culture
especially, is one we are especially resistant to: we
need a style of thinking that places centrally our embodiment and our
(inter-)action. That will be more productive than just thinking about and focussing on our intellectual problem-solving and our
contemplation.
Wittgenstein
gives us a good opportunity to overcome, by means of persuasion and redirection
of attention, our tendency -- especially we intellectuals -- to alienate
ourselves from our own ordinary embodiment, our seamless
mind-and-body-and-soul-ness.
8) An
apparent counterexample(s) to my approach
‘But how does your ‘alternative’
approach deal with fairly standard problems that face any account of the nature
and basis of consciousness? In particular, how are you any better placed than
‘the Cartesian tradition’ to deal with the extraordinary, with borderline
cases, cases where we do need to have
an answer to the question of whether there is consciousness present or not? How
can we get such an answer, absent a (scientifically respectable) theory of
consciousness?’
The
kinds of borderline cases that the objection has in mind could be non-human
animals, robots (‘Artificial Intelligence’), fetuses/infants, and paralysis/anaesthesia/coma. It would take too long to go into any
detail here on any of these interesting cases. But it is not necessary to do so
for my present purposes. For I have already hinted at my response to some of
these cases; and in any case, I believe that the core of the objection here
canvassed applies equally in each such case.
For
at the core of the objection, what appears to generate a counterexample to my
approach, is the notion that there could
be such a thing as discovering what consciousness really is, and then finding
out empirically in each of the cases under consideration whether it is present
or not. But this continues to get things
the wrong way around. Our paradigms of conscious beings are simply people
going about their business -- and, notably, consciousness is normally simply
not at issue in such everyday circumstances ... to such a very great extent
that even to state that ‘Ordinary people going about their business are
conscious’ is bizarre and decontextualized. As if it
might have turned out that they weren’t!
Even
if causal -- e.g. neural -- correlates for ‘consciousness itself’ can be found,
perhaps by retrospectively comparing brain scans of those who reported having
been awake while paralysed with brain scans of others
who reported no experiences while paralysed, how
could this really help us settle borderline cases? What would knowing the location of this bit of brain profit us? If
we find it deeply mysterious that matter can
yield consciousness at all, learning some neural geography can hardly help.
And say we subsequently encountered individuals who reported having
been conscious while paralysed even though their
brain scans revealed no activity in the ‘consciousness lobe’ of the brain.
Should we distrust them? Or distrust the original data which prompted the
postulation of the correlation? There is no way that science can help us
bootstrap into an ‘external’ / ‘objective’ account of what consciousness really
is and when it is really present. For it cannot help us when there is a
conflict of criteria, when our machines come into conflict with ourselves. For the machines are only calibrated by
means of our reports in the first place. There can be no such thing as
getting an external point of view -- as if ‘from sideways on’, to use another
of John McDowell’s handy phrases -- upon consciousness.
Now,
this is not to be heard as the conclusion that instead we have to adopt an
‘internal’ point of view. We do not need to conclude, with some post-modernistically and relativistically
inclined thinkers in sociology and in ‘Cognitive Science’ (e.g. Fodor), that we
are ‘restricted’ to a ‘merely’ internal description of the human form of life,
the human mind, or indeed of more locally-circumscribed forms of life. This is
because ‘the external point of view’ on consciousness vanishes as a chimera --
not as a still-hoped-for goal which ‘unfortunately’ ‘cannot’ be obtained -- if
one follows through the line of thought that I have urged. So we do not need to
recoil into a localistic or sceptical
account of what consciousness really is. Post-modernists and relativists tend
to leave the classic epistemological and metaphysical questions of the
tradition intact, and to give a negative answer to them. Instead, we really do
have the opportunity of laying the whole question(s) to rest. We really can
give up the chimerical search for an answer to ‘the problem of consciousness’
-- even an ‘internal’, ‘local’ answer.
The
apparent counterexample(s) to my approach to the ‘hard’ problem achieves
nothing, and is no counterexample. But that isn’t because the ‘pessimists’ (of
whatever stripe) are right, and the problem is insoluble. Rather, we need not
admit that a problem (to which any kind of theory could even conceivably be an
answer) has even been defined.
9) Conclusion
I have suggested in this essay that
there is only a pseudo-opposition between ‘optimists’ concerning ‘the hard
problem of consciousness’ -- apparently very diverse
figures such as the Churchlands, Dennett, Searle, and
some Cognitivists
-- and
‘pessimists’ -- Nagel, McGinn, Fodor, Chomsky. There
is only a pseudo-opposition, because all
of these philosophers and theorists agree on the one thing that shouldn’t be
granted: that there really is a mind-body problem (and that it would, in an
ideal world, be solved). How ‘the hard problem’ is built into the logic of the
broader mind-body problem, especially via
‘divisionism’, I have tried to show.
There
is a remarkable lack of self-consciousness concerning all this among the
philosophers/theorists I have named, who ‘lead’ their field, and similarly
among their fellow-travellers in the human sciences
more generally. And so ‘divisionism’ plunges blindly on, pushing the mystery
ever further away from resolution. Deludedly thinking
that consciousness is a thing, philosophers have recently started to divide
‘it’, pressing it to yield up its secrets, delineating its supposed varieties,
attempting to understand its ‘cognitive function(s)’ or ‘explanatory role(s)’.
Not surprisingly, then, it is being argued now that consciousness can be
effectively ‘cognitivised’, or at least effectively scientised through being divided -- but the ‘pessimists’’
response, predictably, is that not all
of consciousness can be explained thus... ‘Phenomenal’ consciousness -- the actual feel of consciousness -- remains
untouched, they say. I suppose that in a few years time, ‘phenomenal
consciousness’ in turn will be sub-divided; and so on, ad infinitum.[37]
The
‘pessimists’ concerning the mind-body problem, I have suggested, cloak
transcendentalism, ‘mysterianism’ and even a kind of
‘relativism’ (viz. the problem is soluble, only not by ‘us’) in scientistic clothing. ‘Optimists’, among whom are to be
numbered in practice also most ‘social and human scientists’, will I suspect
never manage to overcome the impulses that lead to ‘pessimism’ even among those
convinced that Scientism and Theoryism are the ways
to go, vis-a-vis the study of ‘the mind’. So if we do
not want a future in which philosophers and certain neurologists and
psychologists and cognitive sociologists (and so on) are endlessly claiming to
have solved this and that new bit of the mind-body problem, and endlessly
finding themselves (not to mention their students, and the wider culture)
frustrated that the ‘final’ solution to the ‘hard’ problem remains tantalisingly out of reach, and endlessly saying (to
pessimists, to their students, to each other, to funding councils), of the hard
problem, that ‘more research is needed’ ... then I say that we must take the
kind of approach that I have suggested here. We must, for example, regain a
sane grip on the concept of ‘information’, and learn to look again at our actual everyday practices of employing such words
and their derivatives and cognates. And we must mark off fairly firmly any
particular ‘technical’ use of such terms, so that there is no delusive
appearance of their being semantically or pragmatically closely-tied, in their
technical use, to their everyday use.[38] We must understand that it is
paradigmatically people who process
and communicate information, and that only confusion and endless impotent
scientism and theoreticism will be fostered by the
effort to ‘solve the mind-body problem’ via a technicalisation
of such concepts (as ‘information’).
For,
in truth: The mind-body problem is dead. In
Scientism
will forever foster supernaturalism: of the kind which we find clear hints of
now in Nagel (and possibly in Chalmers), let alone in the wider culture where
many people (e.g. many beginning undergraduate students, at least in my
experience) understandably express sheer incredulity at the supposed
‘scientifically naturalist’ ways of approaching consciousness. We should give
up the philosophical illusion that bits of the mind-body problem have really
been solved, and thus give up the
still more vain illusion that one day the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness
itself will be solved. The ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is, I have argued,
continually reproduced and made harder by all mainstream attempts to solve the mind-body problem, and thus
supposedly to home in, in a piecemeal fashion, on the hardcore of the supposed
problem.
For,
to say it again: The mind-body debate, the mind-body problem in all its
mainstream forms, is the disease of which it takes
itself to be the cure.[40]
Almost
everyone in philosophy nowadays wants to be some kind of ‘naturalist’. If this
only means avoiding supernaturalism, avoiding the literal postulation of
spirits etc., then I am all for it. If it means that ‘everything that there is’ should ideally be scientifically investigatable, then I have suggested that it is
unmotivated, and counterproductive. The only way to a real ‘naturalism’ -- i.e.
back to natural ways of thinking about us and our place in the world, ways
which are neither scientistic nor supernaturalistic
-- is the deflationary and wholistic alternative that
I have sketched here. ‘Deflationary’, not in the sense of ‘reductive’ -- there
is precisely no wish in my work to ‘reduce’ to something else the mental and
social phenomena actually under discussion -- but simply in the sense of
deflating the pretensions and ambitions of bad philosophy, whether it be practised by philosophers, psychologists, or sociologists.
If one insists on a label for my
‘view’, one might I suppose call it ‘anti-non-naturalism’, or ‘deflationary
naturalism’, or ‘cultural naturalism’ -- or how about ‘human naturalism’?
Coda:
The persistence of
consciousness-boggle and body-boggle
I know that some readers will still not be
satisfied. Some of you, be you sociologists or psychologists or philosophers or
what-have-you, be you even sympathetic to my general intellectual orientation,
will still find yourselves feeling things like, ‘But even after all this
argument, even if I find myself
intellectually convinced by Read’s paper, I still
sometimes want to say, while looking into the mirror: “How can I be this?” Or alternatively, if I really
reconcile myself to my physical existence, I still want to say, contrariwise,
“It is just so weird, that this physical thing can be conscious. How is consciousness possible?”’
As
long as these questions persist -- and though I myself feel their pull
relatively rarely, yet it would be quite untrue to deny that I ever feel it --
then the task of the Wittgensteinian therapist of
philosophy and of ‘social science’ and of culture is not over. Why do these questions persist?
Does
their persistence not indicate a weakness or gap in my line of discussion in
this paper? Does the mind boggling at consciousness not presage a truth at the
heart of the words of those who (like
I do not think so. What is indicated,
rather, is this: precisely that ‘the problem of consciousness’ is not in the end an intellectual problem,
at least if by ‘an intellectual problem’ we mean a problem accessible to full
resolution by the normal strategems of academic
debate in the human sciences/studies.
Thus
my cautious talk in sections 6 and 7 above of my alternative approach offering
an opportunity to return to the everyday; of an immersion in real life
(in dance, in meeting others, etc.)
as tending to foster a diminution or dissolution of ‘the problem of
consciousness’; of gradually losing one’s sense of a necessary boggle;
and above all, perhaps, of being convinced or persuaded of something by means
of a redirection of attention, not by means of a sequence of logical
arguments. In the sense of the word ‘argument’ common in Analytic philosophy
and in ‘scientific’ sociology, it would be reasonable to say: there are at the
crucial junctures no arguments at all in my paper. I have not proved anything
decisive about consciousness, or even about language. I have not refuted
dualism, or eliminativism, or even any kind of scepticism.
Because
the boggle at consciousness (a boggle manifested most powerfully in ‘physicalist scepticism’, in the eliminativist incredulity at their being anything more than
‘blank body’ in the world) and the symmetrical boggle at body (a boggle manifested
most powerfully in Cartesian scepticism), are not in
the end intellectual problems in the standard sense. They are not amenable to
solution by means of argument; or at least, not by means of anything like
argument, alone. They are historical problems; they are cultural problems; and
they are individual psychological problems. They are, as Wittgenstein
suggested, problems of practice, of attitude, of the will. In sum, they are, as
Heidegger and Stanley Cavell have suggested, problems
of ‘appreciation’ (of life), problems of mood.
Take
Cartesian scepticism. What Wittgenstein, and Cavell, and Heidegger have been after, and what has made
them so difficult to assimilate into ‘the academic world’, is that they do not
treat the Cartesian impulse as principally to be evaluated by means of
arguments for and against its philosophical position. They take such arguments
to be ultimately impotent, and indeed a distraction, a sublimation, an
avoidance of real (and scary and harmful, as well as in a way revelatory)
experience. The root of the Cartesian impulse -- the impulse
that eventually results in ‘Dualism’ as a theory in the human sciences -- is an
attitude, an anxiety, a mood, a mood
in which the world doesn’t feel real. All premises and conclusions are
impotent in the face of such a mood. This mood, this mood of
unreality, is (when felt) very real, and often very frightening. When I
myself have been subject to it, thankfully not all that often, I have felt the utter impotence of all
‘refutations of solipsism’ and ‘arguments against scepticism’
and ‘solutions [or even ‘dissolutions’] of the mind-body problem’. If there is
persuasion out of this mood, it is the kinds of persuasion I have used and
mentioned and gestured at in this paper -- for example, a persuasion of one
person talking with and being with (and dancing with?) another, not a
persuasion of one person forcing another to accept the rationality of a
conclusion.
Moods
such as ‘the Cartesian mood’ can be understood only by entering into what one
not in the grip of such a mood will find to be nonsense -- but that something
‘is’ nonsense doesn’t always stop one from feeling persistently as though it
isn’t. And moods can be altered only by processes which are largely orthogonal
to ‘the space of reasons’. Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Cavell
and Cora Diamond can help us to understand these moods by giving us entry
points into them ‘imaginatively’ -- not by literally making sense of them. By offering us strategems for
understanding their etiology -- not by supposedly reducing them to nothing, or
repressing them by rational argument. By offering us quasi-behavioural strategems for taking
our attention and our practice into places where these moods are less likely to
arise or persist -- not by denying that the phenomenon of boggle at body (or,
symmetrically, of boggle at consciousness) is a phenomenon which people
experience, suffer, and even use.
When
Chalmers insists on the tenability of Mind-Body Dualism, or when Campbell
insists that individual minds are the true locus of all meaning and intention,
the underlying motivation, I wish to suggest, is a persistent boggle at
body (And that includes, crucially, a
boggle at there actually being other people). This boggle is, I am suggesting,
above all a mood, not a logical conclusion. It is a way of seeing the world, a
(pathological) way of being-in-the-world, or even of not-being-in-the-world. I
say this not to mock it -- I would be mocking myself. I have been in this mood,
just as I have occasionally been in the ‘opposite’ mood of incredulity at
consciousness (i.e. even my own), and somewhat less occasionally in the rather
different, orthogonally-boggling mood of incredulity at there being anything at
all, anything whatsoever. Such moods requires ‘therapy’
-- whether it be Wittgensteinian
therapy, or psychotherapy, or the therapeutic comfort and reorientation offered
by dance, by love, by walking and talking in the park or in the hills, even by
repetitive work.
The
specifically Cartesian mood, the mood of boggle at body, is the scariest of
all, in my experience. I think that we would do ourselves and our philosophical
and cultural inheritance a great service if we were honest about this. If those
of us who have experienced such moods wrote honestly about our experience, and
wrote honestly about (I suspect) the irrelevance to that experience of all the
gassing about mind and body, structure and agency, self and other, and so on.
And if those of us, if there are any (and I strongly suspect that there are),
who have truly never experienced such moods confessed that they are engaging in
debate about mind and body from a position of mere abstract interest in
argument, in mental gymnastic, not
from a position of comprehending what it is like to be a participant in a lived
experience, an experience which motivates, as desperation motivates, a real
debate or discussion or confession or oration. (And the concern I have about
all of the standard ‘positions’ on mind, on consciousness, even that of Nagel et al, is then that it dresses up as an
intellectual conclusion what is actually the outworking or sublimation of a
perhaps inchoate but nevertheless lived mood.)
This is part of what I mean
by saying that the mind-body debate is a zombie. Unless we find ways of laying
it to rest, perhaps over and over, in our own lives -- in our culture(s), in
our societies -- and (not just) in our academic work, then it will ‘live’ on
... and we will risk zombiefication as a result. That is, we will risk either
immersion in distracting, substitutional, pointless
and intellectually bankrupt, empty theories, or (still worse?!) we will risk
possession by moods which empty us of our capacity for any kind of sane life.
‘Theory’ (as opposed to ‘therapy’) is
impotent to address the underlying malaises of our mental lives, of our
lives -- this is the final (and
actually, humanly, important) lesson that comes from reflecting upon ‘the
problem of consciousness’.[41]
[1] It should be noted that historically-speaking the strongest single influence on Fodor and McGinn towards ‘transcendental naturalism’ -- the idea that we humans may be ‘epistemically bounded’ from understanding the solution to (e.g.) the mind-body problem, even though in some (?) sense, a quite straightforward solution exists -- is actually another figure a little further up the East Coast: Noam Chomsky, and his thoughts on the ‘modularity’ of Mind, which is conceived of as consisting in more or less discrete organs (or ‘modules’). (To anticipate: both the scientific reductionist approach to the mind, highly-visible in the ‘modular’ view of mind, and the associated (broadly Cartesian) ‘divisionist’ approach to the mind-body problem (i.e. the thought that we can break down the problem into different bits which can be quasi-scientifically solved, or in some cases held to be insoluble by us) which we find in these philosophers, is in fact shared by Chomsky, McGinn et al even with apparent foes like the Churchlands. And it is what all of these thinkers share which I chiefly question, below. (What I have no space for below, but which should be discussed in a fuller presentation, is the interesting interpretive question of whether the tracing back of the roots of this whole problematic to Descartes is actually fair, or whether, as recent revisionist authors such as G.Baker have suggested, the tradition(s) I am discussing is only ‘Cartesian’, and little to do with Descartes’s own views.))
[2] A useful source for
comprehending the differences between Searle’s and McGinn’s
approaches is Colin McGinn’s “Can we ever understand
consciousness?”,
[3] For discussion of
whether Chalmers is committed to panpsychism -- the
view that everything in the universe is conscious -- see “Consciousnes
and the Philosophers: An Exchange [of letters between Chalmers and Searle]”,
[4] As will become
clear, I don’t mean this in quite the
way that (e.g.) recent Hilary Putnam does. “Putnam [wants] to show that the
mind/body problem is of
relatively recent vintage.” (James Conant, p.xvi of his “Introduction” to Putnam’s Words and Life
(
[5] See p.15 of Culture and Value (ed. von Wright, transl. Winch; Chicago: Univ. Chicago Pr., 1980; p.22 of the revised edition (1998)). Thus my thought, above, that ‘transcendental naturalism’ is neither a solution to the problem of a consciousness, nor a way of getting rid of the problem -- rather, it guarantees in a particularly powerful manner the keeping alive indefinitely of the problem.It offers the extraordinary psychological satisfaction of both a humble yet privileged ‘scientific’ statement of limits to the understanding, and the knowingness of being part of a privileged elite that, in stating those limits, can see beyond them. It fails to understand what Wittgenstein made clear in the Preface to the Tractatus (London: Routledge, 1981 (1922), p.27), that “The limit can...only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.” (See also n.40, below.)
[6] For useful discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s approach, see for instance Soori and Gill’s A Post-Modern Epistemology: Language, Truth and Body (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1989). (See however n.40, below, sounding a cautionary note.)
[7] See Meredith Williams’s Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning: Toward a social conception of mind (London: Routledge, 1999); Button, Sharrock et al, Computers, Minds and Conduct (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); Rod Watson’s “Ethnomethodology, Consciousness and Self” (Journal of Consciousness Studies 5:2 (1998), pp.202-223); much of Anne J. Jacobson’s work; and Simon Glendinning’s On being with others (London: Routledge, 1998; Glendinning is interesting also in his making a preliminary stab at something I largely ignore in the present paper: at comprehending our relatedness with and commonality with non-human animals, considered as beings, not just as ‘machines’). And it is worth noting that the mistake I am alleging in the bulk of the philosophical tradition, apart from these alternative and non-canonical thinkers, is not ubiquitous among reflective scientists. See for instance the writings of renowned gerontologist and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis; for example, his “A Critical Dictionary of Neuro-Mythology” and “The Poverty of NeuroPhilosophy” in his On the edge of certainty (London: MacMillan, 1999). Though, somewhat troublingly, Tallis seems not really to want to dissolve the mind-body problem at all (see e.g. p.73, p.89, p.101, p.123), and thus leaves the quasi-Dualistic impression that consciousness is a thing, he is I think dead right in his deep suspicions of the claim that blurring the boundary between human and machine is any way forward in our understanding of the mind. For a perhaps-less controversial example, take Gerald Edelman. As Jacqueline Rose writes: “For the neurobiologist Gerald Edelman, who has done more than anyone to ground our mental apparatus in biology, to put the mind ‘back into nature’ (there is no mind/body dichotomy...), it is at the point of our engagement with others -- our ‘social, effective and linguistic interactions’ -- that science has to withdraw. Once you are in language, ‘consciousness is not self-sufficient and beyond doubt . . . it is always in dialogue with some other.’ This, he argues in Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, is one of a number of reasons why ‘science fails for individual histories’: “There is no more mystery to our inability as scientists to give an explanation of an individual consciousness than there is to our [in-]ability to explain why there is something rather than nothing. There is a mystery, perhaps, but it is not a scientific one.”” (P.34 of “Go girl”, London Review of Books 30 Sept. 1999) Edelman shows a refreshing sense of the limits of what we (anyone) ought to try to say and explain hereabouts, limits significantly more modest even than those that McGinn et al recognize. Edelman seems at times to be onto the Wittgensteinian thought that one’s sense perhaps that there is a genuine (pseudo-)scientific problem of consciousness is likely actually to be fake and unnecessary -- see also n.31, below.
[8] To indicate a little more of what I mean here: Heidegger and Foucault are two of the philosophers who can help one to escape from a thing-like conception of mind, as of course can ‘Wittgensteinians’ such as Kenny and Ryle. For amplification of this thought, and of how it is crucial for sociology, see J. Coulter’s The Social Construction of Mind (London: MacMillan, 1979); especially p.1, p.34, and Chapter 2 of that work.
[9] This turn of phrase is intended to allude both to Cora Diamond’s magnificent discussion of the actual location of concepts (e.g. ‘rule’) which even ‘Wittgensteinian’ philosophers sometimes misuse, in “Rules: looking in the right place” (in Phillips and Winch (eds.), Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989)), and to the kind of approach to the actual use of terms often found in Conversation Analysis (CA) and Ethnomethodology. (It is worth noting, to forestall some possible understandings of my points about ‘technical’ concepts such as ‘Information’ in mind-body debates, that ‘Wittgensteinians’ such as Diamond, Cavell, Conant, Kuhn, Garfinkel and Lynch are clear in their work that for most purposes scientific and technical language as actually used should be considered to be perfectly everyday. The point is that sometimes terms ‘go on holiday’: When, that is, they are ‘employed’ metaphysically, as I am alleging they often are in philosophy/‘cognitive science’.)
[10] See Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (London: MacMillan, 1958 (1953), henceforth ‘PI’), para.s 65-80, for an extraordinarily penetrating dissection of our prejudices surrounding concepts such as ‘vague’ and ‘messy’. And see PI para. 356 for discussion of the actual use of the term ‘information’.
[11] See especially the ‘Preface’ and pp.83-90 of Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge, 1990 (1958)), and Winch’s ‘defence’ of the Azande against Evans-Pritchard’s claim that they are clearly committed to contradictory beliefs in Part I of his “Understanding a Primitive Society” (American Philosophical Quarterly I (1964), pp.307-324). See also n.40, below.
[12] An obsessional drive which, incidentally, McDowell thinks
afflicts many ‘anti-realists’ (e.g. Rorty, and
sociological relativists) just as much as it affects many ‘hard-nosed’
‘realists’. See especially his “Scheme-content dualism, experience and
subjectivity”, paper presented as part of ‘Two dualisms: scheme-content and
fact-value’, Conference on the Philosophy of the Human Studies, Greater
Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium,
[13] In this respect at least, my argument is consonant with Searle’s in his “Critique of Cognitive Reason”, in The rediscovery of the mind (Cambridge MA: MIT, 1992), especially on pp.222-5, where Searle points out that ‘information-processing’ in the Cog. Sci. sense is too abstract a concept to make scientific sense of what is actually going on in the brain of someone ‘processing information’, or engaged in intentional action. See also Coulter’s valuable (critical) discussion of “The Human Agent as Unconscious ‘Information-Processor’”, pp.69-80 of his Mind in Action (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
[14] See PI para. 108, for an alternative idea on what we could, more profitably, do: “One might say: The axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.”
[15] Some ethnomethodologists have arguably made the same mistake as most Symbolic Interactionists on this score -- see for instance the criticisms made of Aaron Cicourel’s post-1970 work by Coulter (p.7 and pp.61- of Coulter’s Rethinking Cognitive Theory (London: MacMillan, 1983)), and Bruce Waller’s “Mentalistic Problems in Cicourel’s Cognitive Sociology”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 12:2 (July 1982). (For further perspicuous discussion against ‘Theoryism’ in the philosophy and sociology of mind, see Coulter (ibid.), pp.28-42.)
[16] A useful way of
seeing the terrain hereabouts may therefore be this (my formulation here is
strongly influenced by work of James Conant’s):
Mainstream approaches to the mind-body problem are almost invariably scientistic, assuming that the answer to the problem will
one day be positively statable as some (e.g.)
physical or biological proposition, which philosophers are at this point only
able to sketch (and thus we get cognitivist sketches,
materialist sketches, behaviourist sketches, etc.).
Against such quasi-positivistic optimism, minority voices (e.g. some religious
thinkers) sometimes counsel an ‘ineffabilism’, to the
effect that we should not expect ever to be able to state the answer to the
problem, and that the human mind/soul will always retain an element of mystery. The McGinn & co. view is a novel attempt at synthesis of
these two apparently-conflicting positions: McGinn
says that the ‘scientistic’ view is wrong only in
thinking that we humans will be able
to succeed in stating the answer to the problem! Thus McGinn
wraps in secular ‘scientific naturalist’ robes the transcendentalism and ineffabilistic ‘mysterianism’ of those who have traditionally denied
that we will succeed in solving the mind-body problem. If McGinn
were living in a different age, he would cut to the chase and simply say quite
seriously: “God knows the answer to
the mind-body problem, but we never
shall.” (We can see how close he is -- except for some perhaps-superficial
features of his ‘clothing’ -- to Descartes’s late Medaeval / early Modern worldview, when we see how close he is to
saying, ‘We have a Clear Idea of Mind,
and we (scientists and philosophers) perhaps have a Clear Idea of Body, but no Clear Idea whatsoever is
available (to humans) of their Union. That
[17] There is a connection here between my point and that of Coulter and Watson in their writings referred to above. Just as methodological ironism and reductionism have been argued by them to be necessarily flawed methods -- methods guaranteeing an endless fruitless succession of theories -- in ‘cognitive’ or ‘social’ psychology, so I am suggesting that ‘divisionism’ and theory-driven philosophy of mind will have the same result. (See also n.18, below.)
[18] See p.670 of Wes Sharrock’s “Ethnomethodology” (The British Journal of Sociology 40:4; pp.657-677) for detail on this point vis-a-vis disciplinary sociology and ethnomethodology’s lack of ‘fit’ with it; see my “Beyond realism, relativism, monism, pluralism etc: reassessing Peter Winch (forthcoming in Philosophy of the Social Sciences) for a parallel account of disciplinary philosophy and Wittgensteinians’ lack of ‘fit’ within it.
[19]
[20] In Chapters 4 to 8
of his book especially,
But this will inevitably appear, to the Garfinkelian or Wittgensteinian, simply to be begging the question against their account -- which is not intended to be settling genuinely empirical questions but clarifying conceptual and grammatical ones.
[21] It is worth noting
that
[22] See p.49 and p.16.
[23] These are, notably, contexts in which there is a clear link -- normally, an interleaving -- between information and action. The divorce of ‘information’ from action, almost inevitable if one dwells on computers as paradigms of ‘information-processing’, is one of the implicit -- and disastrous -- moves typically made by those who like to think of themselves as helping to solve bits of the mind-body problem. On this, see the entry under ‘Information (Processing)’ in Tallis’s “Critical Dictionary” (op.cit.).
[24] Perhaps it is now
still clearer how being a behaviourist or a
materialist is not really being ‘anti-Cartesian’ at all. These supposedly
anti-dualist approaches have not reconceptualized
‘mind’ and ‘body’, and thus they retain the imprint of Cartesianism,
like prints made from a negative.
Because they have not given up (divisionistically etc.) theorizing. They have not returned to our everyday talk and life, in which there is a ‘hardcore’ (!) of inextricable unity of mind and body. Instead, they keep the concepts of ‘mind’ and ‘body’ intact, and merely reduce the former to the latter. This is an entirely ineffective way of responding to the Cognitivist paradigm (cf. here n.36 and n.40, below).
[25] One can see it, one can see the person, mind-and-body: for nothing is hidden. (See para.435 of PI; John Dupré’s “Against Reductionist Explanations of Human Behaviour I”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary volume 72 (1998), 153-171; and John Shotter’s “The dialogical nature of our inner lives” (Philosophical Explorations 1:3 (1998), 185-200).)
[26] In the ellipsis,
there occurs the following, in parentheses: “The same giddiness attacks us when
we think of certain theorems in set theory.” For the parallel case there, see
my “Logicism and Anti-Logicism
alike are both bankrupt and unnecessary” (forthcoming in Proceedings of the
2001 Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium (ed. Klaus Puchberg;
[27]I have emended the translation very slightly.
[28] For a fascinating and compelling account of what happens if one actually does attempt to take dis-belief in others minds etc. seriously, see Louis Sass’s The paradoxes of delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber and the schizophrenic mind (Ithaca: Cornell, 1994). Many schizophrenics, according to Sass, suffer from a real-life version of the typical philosopher’s complaint of (to use Cavell’s terms) being unable to acknowledge the world (and, especially, other people), and to insist rather on knowing it. In PI 420, this is what Wittgenstein is talking about -- the acknowledgement of others as others, as ‘souls’. (See also n.16, above.) For a fairly sympathetic exposition and critique of Sass, see my “On approaching schizophrenia through Wittgenstein” (Philosophical Psychology, 14:4, 2001, pp.449-473).
[29] This suggestion is also pivotal to the argument of Division I of Heidegger’s Being and Time; and to the work of Stephen Cade-Hetherington.
[30] See the quote from PI 412 above, again; and n.26, below.
[31] (See n.7 above, for Edelman’s similar point of view.) If anything is odd, ‘mysterious’, my own intuition runs somewhat differently. I rarely (though see ‘Coda’, below) find the fact of consciousness odd any more; the thing that I tend to find ‘odd’ is that there is any thing -- any such ‘thing’ as (and in) existence -- at all. Not how the world is, but that it is at all, sometimes surprises me -- as Wittgenstein: see his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44 - 652. (See again Sass (op.cit.; see n.27, above, and also Sass’s Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought (New York: Basic, 1992)), for detail on the phenomenology of philosophical delusion, in particular on the circumstances in which one is prone to philosophical illusion/delusion (and relevantly similar forms of psychopathological delusion).)
[32] See especially his “The Disunity of Science”, in Mind 92 (1983), 321-346. Also, his “Natural kinds and biological taxa”, Philosophical Review 90 (1981), 66-90; his The Disorder of Things: metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1993); and (p.108 and n.8 of) his “Metaphysical disorder and scientific disunity”, in Galison and Stump (eds), The Disunity of science (Stanford CA: Stanford, 1996). See also n.25, above. Dupré’s arguments undercut the notion that we should always worry if there are two enduring very different ‘levels of description’ of what seems to us in some sense to be the same phenomenon. Thus he undercuts even Nagel’s unusual stance: that consciousness simply cannot fit into human beings’ scientific schemata, but must be a real objective phenomenon all the same. For this need only worry one if one has a reductionist view of the task of science, and more broadly some ‘unified science’ point of view.
[33] I draw here on a
broadly Kuhnian framework for the understanding of
why it is that we tend to call something a science -- i.e. that it exhibits the
features of what Kuhn called ‘normal science’, that it is not simply riven by schisms between schools, by foundational
disagreements -- as the ‘human sciences’ are.
For detail, see my Kuhn: the philosopher of scientific revolution (joint
with Wes Sharrock;
[34] For an impressive general case to this effect, see J. Hintikka’s “The Emperor’s New Intuitions”, Journal of Philosophy XCVI:3 (March 1999), pp.127-147. Particularly relevant for our present purposes is Hintikka’s critique of the appeal to ‘intution’ of Chomsky and friends -- see pp.132-6.
[35] A more detailed version of much the same point is to be found in Hacker’s Analytical Commentaries on the Philosophical Investigations. For instance, Hacker reminds us that it is misleading to think along the following lines: ‘The brain is our organ for thinking and feeling, much as the intestines are our organ for digesting’. (See again also recent Putnam; for example, pp.xx-xxiii of his (op.cit. .))
[36] And to think of ourselves simply as brains, without any mind ‘attached’, as eliminativists do, is still to think within the same thought-style, within the same quasi-Cartesian space, as dualism, transcendental naturalism (see n.1, above, for explication), and the rest. I am suggesting a more radical break with that thought-style. As suggested above (e.g. in n.7), it may be that some scientists are actually succeeding in making that break already, and in really thinking in terms of whole body-selves, whole people. Such scientists will (not unreasonably) be anxious not to offend philosophers and tread on their toes by saying outright that there is no such thing as the mind-body problem or the problem of consciousness, that it is not even a McGinnian ‘mystery’ (a ‘genuine’ problem, but ‘beyond our powers of solution’). But eventually they will probably be bold and impolite enough to join Wittgensteinians in saying just this.
[37] For a salutary
warning on how this is already on the point of happening, consult the papers by
Chalmers, Church and Burge responding ‘critically’ to Ned Block’s influential divisionist paper, “On a confusion about a function of
consciousness”. All four papers are to be found on pp.375-434 of The Nature
of Consciousness: Philosophical debates (eds. Block, Flanagan & Güzeldere;
[38] A good example of
this, which I discuss in my “Chomsky against Chomsky” (in Language, Mind and Society: An ‘Alternative’ Raven, 2001,
pp.33-51), is Chomsky’s turn toward the word “cognize”, and away from the word
“know”. If applied and followed
through rigorously (unlike in most of Chomsky’s practice, unfortunately), this
use of a new term would lessen the impression which Chomskians
sometimes illegitimately give that their technical apparatus has anything
whatsoever to do with solving philosophical problems or with ‘vindicating’
philosophical Rationalism.
For recommendation of a similar strategy as a lesson linguists should learn from reading Wittgenstein, see Paul Henry’s “Wittgenstein and contemporary linguists” (in Henry and Utaker (eds.), Wittgenstein and contemporary theories of language (Working Papers from the University of Bergen no.5, 1992)).
[39] Again, this realization is not easy; for the difficulty here is not a mere difficulty of the intellect, but of the will, as Wittgenstein liked to put it (e.g. in Philosophical Grammar). See also the Coda, below.
[40] Or perhaps we can even risk generalizing this: As Karl Kraus, a key influence on Wittgenstein, once remarked of psychoanalysis in general, we may say of the Philosophy of Psychology (and similarly of Sociology of Mind, or indeed of Body) in general that it is the disease of which it takes itself to be the cure... . Its ‘problems’ require dissolution, not solution. Further, I do not believe -- though this would take a further paper to establish firmly -- that a new ‘theory’ of bodily action (of body and mind as a composite true whole) is needed to take the place of the positions in ‘the philosophy of consciousness’ that I hope to have discredited in this paper. If a positive new conception of the body were needed to move us beyond the mechanical body of philosophical biology, then Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’ (with perhaps some Heideggerian supplementation) would probably be the best candidate. However, my own view (see n.5 & n.14 above) is that post-McGinnian new conceptions of bodily action, drawing on these Continental thinkers and others, end up saying too much. They speak beyond the ‘limits’ of which Wittgenstein speaks. That is why I regard my approach here as building on the insights of Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Symbolic Interactionism etc. ... but as beyond these, in virtue of its greater austerity. I think, for instance, that most of what Heidegger wants to say about ‘being-in-the-world’ and ‘equipment’ is, from a Wittgensteinian point of view, ineffable. Nonsense. Following Diamond and Conant, I take a rigorously deflationary and ‘negative’ view of what philosophy can do for us. A new theory of bodily action -- similarly to the new ‘post-positivist’ theories of social action which Nigel Pleasants ably demonstrates the incapacity and otioseness of in his Wittgenstein and the idea of a critical social theory (London: Routledge, 1999) -- is in my opinion simply not required, once we practice thorough-going ‘negative’ Wittgensteinian therapy, and return ourselves to everyday action and language, disinfected from the many varieties of philosophical (whether or not undertaken by professional philosophers) speculation. So, is my approach in fact another theory? Is ‘Wholism’, or ‘human naturalism’ a new theory of mind-body interaction? No; for, like Button et al (op.cit., p.223), I “refuse to become embroiled in the spurious antinomies which permeate so much of philosophy, psychology and sociology, which polarise realism/constructivism, idealism/materialism, dualism/monism, realism/instrumentalism, behaviourism/mentalism. [I] favour none of the above.” (This point is further developed, with specific reference to mainstream sociology’s endless attempts to solve the problems whose existence it perpetually re-creates and re-invigorates, and ethnomethodology’s refusal to go along with this, on pp.667-670 of Sharrock’s “Ethnomethodology” (op.cit.). Sociologists may set aside ‘the hard problem’ (of consciousness, of agency, etc.), but it keeps coming back to haunt their work on problems they hope to ‘make progress’ on and with.)
[41] Thanks to Ken Westphal, Angus Ross, Emma Willmer, and Rod Watson (especially), and also to John Arthur, Richard Hamilton, Ayo Mansaray, Jerry Katz, Jim Morley, Bruce Wilshire, Ranjit Nair, Jonathan Smith, Louis Sass, Jeff Coulter, Wes Sharrock, David Smith, Mark Sacks, Espen Hammer and the Philosophy Senior Seminar at the University of Essex, for useful ideas and comments on earlier drafts of this paper.