Do Words Ever Feel Like They're Literally on the Tip of Your Tongue?

In the course of writing my book with Russ Hurlburt, I started to notice what I took to be a pattern in our subject Melanie, and others, to over-literalize their metaphors into phenomenological reports -- that is, to regard themselves as having real conscious experiences that match the explicit or implicit metaphors they use to describe their mental lives, to think of themselves, for example, as literally seeing red when angry, being "blue" when depressed (Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel 2007, p. 72), or as experiencing their thoughts as sometimes literally in the back of their heads or minds (Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel 2007, p. 160). I'm generally suspicious of such claims.

So at the latest meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, when Jonathan Weinberg claimed to have a word on the tip of his tongue, I jumped in with the question of whether he really experienced a feeling like that of having a word near the tip of his tongue. Perhaps wisely, he denied it. Yet for all my skepticism, I feel some pull toward taking the "tip of the tongue" expression literally as an actual description of the phenomenology of having a word or name near to hand but not quite there.

In the case of seeing red when angry, I looked at cross-linguistic data: If people really do sometimes see red when angry, we might expect to see versions of that phrase across languages, or at least a cross-cultural association of red and anger; but we don't. For the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, however, there's much broader cultural agreement about the metaphor. Schwartz 1999 surveyed 51 Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages and found that 45 out of 51 used something like the "tip of the tongue" metaphor. Korean puts it particularly nicely with the phrase "sparkling at the end of the tongue".

So maybe there really is a widespread phenomenology here that this metaphor is latching onto?

How to Make a Rabbit’s Nose out of Electric Jello (by guest blogger Teed Rockwell)

We’ve all seen patterns created by causal forces “pushing” against each other (whether that description is literal or metaphorical depends on your metaphysics). Sometimes these patterns endure with a repeating persistence that makes them seem more like objects than events: waterfalls, tornados, rainbows. It seems a major accomplishment for these forces to coalesce into patterns that are solid enough to superficially resemble simple inanimate objects. But some argue that living organisms are more like interacting forces than they are like rocks. Unlike rocks, organisms do not passively endure. They must constantly interact with their environment, taking in matter, and transforming it from energy into motion, or they destabilize and settle into a more enduring equilibrium. In other words, they die.

Advocates of Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) argue that this might mean that we would do a better job of understanding minds if we saw them as more like events than objects. Instead of building computers out of hard silicon modules, perhaps we should “build” them out of events. These events would endure much longer than waterfalls and rainbows, but they would not be discrete objects like the modular circuits in computers. Furthermore, I believe that these events could interact with each to produce cognitively sophisticated behavior. Does this sound like a crazy speculation? That’s because it is. But thought-experiments, like science fiction, enable us to dream of things that never were, and say “why not?”. Neurobiologist Walter Freeman sees dynamic events as the primary cognitive factor in the olfactory brain of the Rabbit (colloquially referred to as “rabbit’s nose” in the title). Perhaps if we had the right sort of hardware, we could create dynamic patterns that had the cognitive sophistication of computer modules.

Imagine a large colloidal suspension surrounded by oscillators, which send electrical charges and/or acoustic vibrations into that colloid. Let’s call this colloid “Electric Jello”. Imagine a keyboard that controls the amplitudes and frequencies of those oscillators to create what Dewey called a “System of Tensions” - i.e. conflicting forces of various kinds which interact, then resolve into some kind of semi-equilibrium. A system of this sort would be neither stable nor unstable, but rather multi-stable. It could settle into different oscillating patterns, depending on the causal pressures it received from the oscillators. A system of this sort could in principle function like a decision tree in a computer program, and thus be arguably cognitive.

There are systems in nature, such as Freeman’s olfactory rabbit brain and the ambulatory system of horses, which perform the function of the decision trees mapped by computer languages like LISP. (For more on this, see my Minds and Machines paper “Attractor Spaces as Modules”. If DST is correct, hard-wired computer modules are only a brittle mechanical metaphor for these multi-stable systems. Until we come up with a new kind of hardware, however, these hard-wired computer systems will be the best that we can do. Electric Jello, however, might be a form of hardware that could duplicate both the cognitive complexity and the dynamic flexibility of real embodied cognitive systems. In a Jules Verne-like spirit, I confess that I see this machine with both typewriter keys and sliders, that enable the programmer to adjust the parameters of numerous input oscillators until representations of tornado-like repeating patterns begin to emerge on a video screen. These tornado-like patterns would be what DST theorists call attractor spaces, and eventually it would be possible to flip from one space to the other by manipulating the input oscillators. Somehow we would use the resulting changes in this system of tensions to manipulate outputs of some sort, and then we would have the functional equivalent of a computer control system. It would be, however, a system with unprecedented flexibility, because its “parts” would be events in multidimensional space, not hardwired modules.

Against Metaphysics, Especially the Metaphysics of Consciousness

I worry that metaphysics is a sham -- or at least, that it's a sham if it's thought of as an a priori discipline whereby one discovers a special class of truths while reflecting from an armchair. When you tilt back in your armchair and reflect, there's only one kind of thing you can discover, it seems to me: Facts about your own psychology. What gets called metaphysics, then, is really just a certain kind of self-study -- typically the study of the metaphysician's own concepts.

You can learn about the world by learning about your concepts, if your concepts contain in them important information about the world. Often they do contain such information: My concept of a bird as a type of biological organism, warm-blooded, bipedal, winged, feathered, egg-laying, etc. contains packed in it information about a certain cluster of traits that tend to travel together. Because of this, reflecting on my concept of "bird" can bring forward facts I may not have explicitly considered in the past.

How do my concepts come to contain information about the world? They must do so by contact with the world -- either my own contact (directly by empirical observation or indirectly by hearing the reports of others) or my ancestors' contact if the concepts are innate. I don't see, then, how studying my own concepts could yield a different kind of information than studying the world directly; nor do I see how our concepts could provide an independent source of information about the world orthogonal to empirical observation or immune to empirical refutation. (For a parody of the idea that the truths suggested by conceptual reflection are immune to empirical refutation, see here.)

The weird, science fiction cases that philosophers tend to dwell on in metaphysical discussions are exactly the kinds of cases where we should expect our concepts to be least in touch with the world, aren't they? Consider disputes in the metaphysics of consciousness: Would a silicon robot that behaves just like a human being be genuinely conscious, or would it have no more real consciousness than the computer on which I'm writing this post? Is it "metaphysically possible" (even if in practice unlikely) that my conscious experience is radically different from yours (e.g., red-green inverted or worse) despite all the similarities in our behavior?

If we construe these questions as questions about our concepts or pre-existing ideas, then it's not unreasonable to think we can make progress on them from the philosopher's armchair (though other methods for studying our concepts may be equally or more illuminating, in the spirit of recent "experimental philosophy"). Some people apparently find it impossible to conceive that a robot that behaved like a human being wouldn't be conscious; others apparently find it impossible to conceive that such a robot would have human consciousness. That shows something about their concepts or background assumptions. But how could it be (as Searle and Block and Putnam and Lewis and many others seem to think) that armchair reflection could reveal whether robots really would be conscious? Our concept of "bird" works well for near-home cases but tells us nothing about life on other planets; so also our concept of "consciousness" works well enough for distinguishing waking from dreamless sleep, mundane red experiences from mundane yellow experiences, but how could it cast useful light on robots or inverted spectra?

Metaphysicians often respond to such concerns by pointing to mathematics: In math, it seems, we discover substantive facts about the universe from the armchair, so why not also in philosophy? But is it clear that in studying math we do discover substantive facts about the universe? Not every philosophy of math grants this assumption. Maybe what we do, in studying math, is simply invent and apply rules for symbol manipulation. Maybe we discover facts about the structure of our concepts and invent new concepts. So irrefutable seems to me the view (empirically grounded!) that from the armchair we can discover nothing beyond the circuit of our own minds, that a conservative philosophy of math is mandatory. I find that considering alternative rules of logic (e.g., intuitionist logic or dialethism) and alternative rules of arithmetic (e.g. Boolean algebra) helps me feel the pull of the idea that mathematics is more an invention than a discovery of mind-independent facts.

What Is a Word, If a Baby Can Say It?

When my son Davy (who's now eight) was about ten months old he'd cruise around holding onto the couch saying "da da da da". He'd make the same "da da da" when he wanted to play with me. As an eager parent looking for milestones, I wondered if this was his first word but decided it didn't qualify. Soon he added "dis" to his reportoire: He'd point to something and say "dis", seemingly happy if I named what he was pointing at, but sometimes wanting more. What that a word? I asked an expert on infant language. Emphatically (almost tyrannically), she said no. Then more gently she added that developmental psychologists generally didn't take such seeming-words seriously until there were at least ten of them. Then they were words.

But ten of what? A hot trend recently in certain circles is teaching babies sign language: For example, if a baby makes a fist with one hand, that means "milk", if she brings her fingertips together, that means "more". Of course we don't want to be prejudiced against sign language: Words needn't be spoken aloud. The fist sign for milk is a word.

But now suppose that we have a psychologically identical case where instead of making a fist, the baby kicks her left foot in a distinctive way when she wants milk, and the parents learn to respond to that and reinforce it. Is that left-foot-kicking a word? Presumably we don't want to say that. To count such left-foot-kicking as linguistic seems to cheapen language too much. Ordinarily we think of language as something advanced, uniquely human or nearly so (except for maybe a few signing apes and Alex the parrot). The kicking doesn't seem to qualify, any more than we say a dog has language if he gets the leash when he wants a walk. In getting the leash, he communicates non-linguistically. So where to put on the brakes? Not every human communication is a word: A red stoplight is not a word, nor is a wink or a flag or a computer icon. (I think!) ;-)

Even very young babies will tighten their fists sometimes as a sign of hunger -- but surely that's not a word for a newborn. And babies seem quite naturally to point. Is pointing a word? My newly adopted sixteen-month-old daugher Kate will raise both hands over her head to communicate that she's "all done" eating. But just as the point might be a formalized reach, the hands up might be a formalized reaching up to be lifted out of her high chair. In fact, Kate has started raising her hands over her head in frustration when she has been trapped in her car seat too long and wants to be "all done" with that.

If a twelve-month old says "cup" for cup, we call it a word. If she says "mup" for cup, we find it cute and still call it a word. It seems to follow that if she makes regularly makes a sign language signal for cup, we should call that a word; and likewise it seems that if she makes her own unique sign for cup, we should call that a word too. But now the leash and left foot kicking seem to be back in.

So what is a word?

The Psychology of Philosophy

"Experimental philosophy", as a movement within philosophy, has so far been almost entirely focused on testing people's intuitions and judgments about philosophical puzzle cases. In this post on the Underblog, I argue for a broader vision of experimental philosophy, including the possibility of experiments on:

* introspective claims about the structure of concious experience (e.g., beeper studies to test claims about ordinary lived experience)

* the causes (including the psychological and cultural factors) influencing philosophers' preferences for particular sorts of philosophical theories (e.g., studies of the psychological correlates of a preference for Kantianism over consequentialism in ethics)

* the real-life consequences of adopting or teaching particular philosophical theories (e.g., does teaching students utilitarianism, or Nietzsche, have any positive (or negative) effects on their behavior?)

I'll be presenting these ideas orally at the Experimental Philosophy Workshop pre-conference at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting in Philadelphia next week. (The program shows my presentation title as "Introspection and Experiment", but I've broadened my topic and thus changed the title.)

Comments welcome!

Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote Less Often, Apparently, Than Other Philosophers

I assume that voting in public elections is a duty (a duty that admits of excuses and exceptions, of course) and that it's morally better to vote conscientiously than not to vote.

In previous research, I've found that:
(1.) ethics books are more likely to be missing from academic libraries than other philosophy books (full essay here),
(2.) philosophy students at Zurich do not give increasing amounts to student charities as their education proceeds, and
(3.) (with Joshua Rust) a majority of philosophers think ethicists behave, on average, no better than non-ethicists of similar social background (full essay here).

With Josh Rust's and my current findings on voting patterns, that's now four consecutive studies suggesting that ethicists behave no better than, or maybe even worse than, comparable non-ethicists.

Looking at voter history data from California, Florida, North Carolina, and Washington State, we found voting rates among professors registered to vote:

Ethicists: 0.97 votes/year (227 records total)
Political philosophers (a subgroup of ethicists): 0.95 votes/year (96 records)
Non-ethicist philosophers: 1.07 votes/year (279 records)
Political scientists: 1.11 votes/year (244 records)
Other professors: 0.93 votes/year

The differences over .07 votes/year are statistically significant. The results are stable controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, state of residence, institution type, and political party. Controlling for rank doesn't substantially change the results, except that it raises the voting rate of the comparison group of "other professors" to a rate between that of ethicists and non-ethicists, so that it can't be said that philosophers vote more often than non-philosophers.

Now I'd have thought political philosophers, like political scientists, would be more engaged than average with the political process. Instead -- depressingly (to me; maybe you'll rejoice?) -- it seems that they're less engaged, at least if voting is taken as the measure of engagement.

When I face moral decisions -- decisions like "should I go out and vote even though I'd rather look for Weird Al videos on YouTube?" -- I often reflect on what I should do. I think about it; I weigh the pros and cons; I consider duties and consequences and what people I admire or loathe would do. I am implicitly and deeply committed to the value of reflection in making moral decisions and prompting moral behavior. To suppose that moral reflection is valueless is pretty dark, or at least pretty radical.

Yet if moral reflection does us moral good, you'd think that ethics professors, who are presumably champions of moral reflection, would themselves behave well -- or at least not worse!

(Josh Rust and I will be presenting these results as a poster at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting next week. The full text of the poster will be available shortly on the Underblog.)

Update, June 26:
In the last couple days, Josh and I were able to do a first analysis of new data from Minnesota. In that state, the ethicists and political philosophers appear to be so conscientious in their voting that it knocked the p-value of our main effect from .03 to .06 -- in other words, the trend in Minnesota was so strong the other direction that we can now no longer feel sufficiently confident (employing the usual statisical standards) that the trend we see for ethicists to vote less is not due simply to chance. So we should probably amend our thesis from "ethicists vote less" to the weaker "ethicists vote no more often". However, the Minnesota data also seem to introduce some potential confounds (such as that Minnesota philosophers seem to have unusual job stability) that complicate the interpretation and that we may want to try to compensate for statistically. So the final analysis isn't in!

Political Scientists Vote More Often Than Other Professors

One theme of my recent research has been the moral behavior of ethics professors -- do they behave any better than others of similar social background? There's good reason to anticipate that they would: Presumably they care a lot and think a lot about morality, and one might hope (at least I would hope!) that would have a positive effect on their behavior.

However, some people don't think we should expect this. After all, doctors smoke, police commit crimes, economists invest badly. Whether they do so any less than anyone else is hard to assess. (However, the evidence I've seen so far suggests that doctors do smoke less and economists do invest better, contra the cynic. I don't know about police.)

Half a year ago I posted a couple of reflections on the lack of data regarding whether political scientists vote more often in public elections than other professors do (here and here). With perhaps more enthusiasm than wisdom, I decided to go out and get the data myself. Josh Rust and I (and some helpful RAs) gathered official voting histories of individuals in California, Florida, North Carolina, and Washington State (Minnesota pending) and matched those records with online information about professors in universities in those states. (The California data included only statewide elections; the other states include at least some local election data.) We looked at the years 2000-2007.

The data suggest that political scientists do vote more often, averaging 1.11 votes/year as opposed to 0.93 votes/year for a comparison group of professors drawn randomly from all other departments except philosophy.

We ruled out gender, political party, state of residence, age, ethnicity, and institution type (research-oriented vs. teaching-oriented) as explanatory factors. All of these factors either had no effect on vote rate (gender, party, institution type) or were balanced between the groups (state, age, ethnicity). The one factor that did have an effect and wasn't balanced between the groups was academic rank: Non-tenure-track faculty voted less often, and there were fewer tenure-track faculty in the comparison group than among the political scientists. However, even looking just at tenure-track faculty, political scientists still vote more: 1.12 votes/year for political scientists, 0.99 for comparison faculty. (Political science department affiliation also remains predictive of vote rate in multiple regression models including rank and other factors.)

These data support my ethicists project in two ways: First, they show at least some relationship between professorial career choice and real-world behavior; and second, since voting is widely (and I think rightly) seen as a duty, it's a measure of one piece of moral behavior. We can see if ethicists (and perhaps especially political philosophers) are more likely to perform this particular duty than are non-ethicists. Results on that soon!

Experimental Philosophy Survey

Thomas Nadelhoffer has posted a new online survey, and he wants philosophical respondents. Link here. I shouldn't reveal the contents, though lest I worsen the problems of self-selection bias! The survey took me about 15 minutes to complete, going pretty fast.

Political Affiliations of American Philosophers, Political Scientists, and Other Academics

As regular readers will know, I've been working hard over the last year thinking of ways to get data on the moral behavior of ethics professors. As part of this project, I have looked at the public voting records of professors in several states (California, Florida, North Carolina, Washington State, and soon Minnesota), on the assumption that voting is a civic duty. If so, we can compare the rates at which ethicists and non-ethicists perform this duty. Soon I'll start posting some of my preliminary analyses.

First, however, I thought you might enjoy some data on the political affiliation of professors in California, Florida, and North Carolina. (These states make party affiliation publicly available information.) Although U.S. academics are generally reputed to be liberal and Democratic, systematic data are sparser than one might expect. Here's what I found.

Among philosophers (375 records total):

Democrat: 87.2%
Republican: 7.7%
Green: 2.7%
Independent: 1.3%
Libertarian: 0.8%
Peace & Freedom: 0.3%

Among political scientists (225 records total:)

Democrat: 82.7%
Republican: 12.4%
Green: 4.0%
Independent: 0.4%
Peace & Freedom: 0.4%

Among a comparison group drawn randomly from all other departments (179 records total):

Democrat: 75.4%
Republican: 22.9%
Independent: 1.1%
Green: 0.6%

By comparison, in California (from which the bulk of the data are drawn), the registration rates (excluding decline to state [19.4%]) are:

Democrat: 54.3%
Republican: 40.3%
Other: 5.3% [source]

Perhaps this accounts for my sense that if there's one thing that's a safe dinner conversation topic at philosophy conferences, it's bashing Republican Presidents.

Now I'm not sure 87.2% of professional philosophers would agree that there's good evidence the sun will rise tomorrow (well, that's a slight exaggeration, but we are an ornery and disputatious lot!), so why the virtual consensus about political party?

Conspiracy theories are out: There is no point in the job interview process, for example, when you would discover the political leanings of an applicant who was not applying in political philosophy. We ask about research, teaching, and that's about it. Even interviewing a political philosopher (a small minority of philosophers) it will not always be evident if the interviewee is "liberal" or "conservative", since her research will often be highly abstract or historical.

Self-interest also seems an insufficient explanation: Many professors are at private institutions, and few philosophy professors earn government grants, so even if Democrats are more supportive of funding for universities and research, many philosophy professors will at best profit very indirectly from that. Furthermore, it's not clear to me -- though I'm open to evidence on this -- that Democrats do serve professors' financial interests better than Republicans. For example, social services for the poor and keeping tuition low seem to have a higher priority among liberal Democrats in California than the salaries of professors.

Democrats might be tempted to flatter themselves with this explanation: Professors are smart and informed, and smart and informed people are rarely Republican. That would be interesting if it were true, and it's empirically explorable; but I suspect that in fact a better explanation has to do with the kind of values that lead one to go into academia and that an academic career reinforces -- though I find myself struggling now to discern exactly what those values are (tolerance of difference? more willingness to believe that knowledgeable people can direct society for the better? less respect for the pursuit of wealth as a career goal?).

Self-Blindness?

If introspection is essentially a matter of perceiving one's own mind, as philosophers like John Locke and David Armstrong have suggested, then just as one might lose an organ of outer perception, rendering one blind to events in that modality, so also, presumably, could one lose an organ of inner perception, leaving one either totally introspectively blind or blind to some subclass of one's own mental states, such as one's beliefs or one's pains.

Is such self-blindness possible? There are, as far as I can tell, no clear clinical cases -- no cases of people who feel pain but consistently have no introspective awareness of those pains, no cases of people who can tell what they believe only by noticing how they behave. (I'm excluding cases where the being lacks the concept of pain or belief and so can't ascribe those states at all; and with apologies to Nichols and Stich on schizophrenia). Sydney Shoemaker suggests that the absence of such cases flows from a deep conceptual truth: There's a fundamental connection between believing and knowing what you believe, between feeling pain and knowing you're in pain, that there isn't between being facing a red thing and knowing you're facing a red thing -- and thus in this respect introspection differs importantly from sensory perception.

Since I'm generally a pessimist about the accuracy of introspective reports, my first inclination is to reject Shoemaker's view and allow the possibility of self-blindness. But then why do there seem to be no clear cases of self-blindness? I suspect that in this matter the cases of pain and belief are different.

Consider pain first. Possibility one: The imagined self-blind person has both the phenomenology of pain and typical pain behavior (such as avoidance of painful stimuli), maybe even saying "ow!" If so, on the basis of this behavior, she could determine (as well as anyone else could, from the outside) that she was sometimes in pain; but she would have no direct, introspective knowledge of that pain. Contra Shoemaker, this seems to me not inconceivable. However, it also seems very likely that a real, plastic neural system would detect regularities in the neural outputs generating pain behavior and respond by creating shortcuts to judgments of, or representations of, pain -- shortcuts not requiring sensory detection of actual outward behavior. For example, the neural system could notice the motor impulse to say "ow!" and base a pain-judgment on that impulse (perhaps even if the actual outward behavior is suppressed). This then, might start to look like (might even actually become?) "introspection" of the pain.

Alternatively, the self-blind person might show no pain behavior whatsoever. Then the person would behave identically to someone with total pain insensitivity (and cases of total pain insensitivity do exist). But now we're faced with the question: Do people normally classified as utterly incapable of feeling pain really feel no pain, or do they have painful phenomenology somewhere with no means to detect it and no way to act on it? The latter possibility seems extravagant to me but not conceptually impossible. And maybe even a fuller understanding of the neuropsychology of pain and pain insensitivity might help us decide whether there are some actual cases of the latter.

Regarding belief, I'm more in sympathy with Shoemaker. My own view is that to believe something is just a matter of being prone to act and react in ways appropriate to, or that we are apt to associate with, having the belief in question (taking other mental states and excusing conditions into account). Among the actions and reactions appropriate to belief is self-ascription of the belief in question, self-ascription that doesn't rely on the observation of one's own behavior. Someone who had the concept of belief but utterly lacked direct self-ascriptive capacity would be in some way defective not just as a perceiver of her beliefs but as a believer.

(Thanks to Amy Kind and Charles Siewert whose excellent articles criticizing Shoemaker on self-blindness prompted this post.)

More Philosophy Ph.D. Admissions Data from U.C. Riverside

[Due to objections by some members of the UCR department, this post has been removed.]

Will the Real Issue Please Stand Up? (by guest blogger Bryan Van Norden)

One of the classic debates in ethics is between realism and anti-realism. It's hard to precisely state what is at issue without being tendentious, but one way would be this. Are there moral facts (realism) or are there just individual human or social opinions or reactions (anti-realism)?

I'm not going to say anything in this post about the arguments for or against each side, and I'm intentionally not going to say which side I'm on personally. Instead, I want to just make a couple of sociological observations (with the caveat that my results are purely anecdotal).

(1) Most people feel strongly about this issue, whether or not they have a "philosophical" mind. This topic is a sure-fire discussion starter in any introductory philosophy class.

(2) Whichever side a person agrees with, she generally thinks that the other position is pretty obviously mistaken, and is a little bemused that anyone actually believes the other side.

(3) Realists worry that, if you actually took anti-realism seriously, it would encourage some sort of moral decay, while anti-realists worry that realism is really just a rationale for being dogmatic about morality.

(4) If pressed, most realists will assert that they "know" that anti-realism does NOT actually encourage moral decay, while anti-realists will assert that they "know" that realism is NOT actually just a rationale for being dogmatic about morality.

My sense is that (3) is what accounts for (1). In addition, no matter how often people assert what they do in (4), they still really believe (3) in their gut. This explains (2), because the arguments for one's position are really just rationalizations, while the arguments against one's position don't touch what really motivates one to accept it.

Maybe it would lead to a more productive debate if we talked less about moral realism and anti-realism, and more about how to find the mean between (A) taking one's ethical commitments seriously, and (B) dogmatically sticking to one's commitments? (David Wong has an interesting discussion of this in his recent book, Natural Moralities, pp. 179-272.)

(By the way, sorry for being so behind in replying to comments. I got a copy-edited manuscript this week, which I was rushing to revise for the publisher. But I sent it off, and I'll be back to my contrary self on Monday. *smile* )

The Unreliability of Naive Introspection...

... that is, my essay of that title, is now out in Philosophical Review. I confess to some pride: The essay is the culmination of years of thought and discussion, including a series of more narrowly focused essays on the same general theme; and Philosophical Review is the most selective and prestigious of all philosophy journals.

A certain very eminent philosopher (who will go unnamed) told me that he thought the essay was perhaps "the chattiest essay ever published in Phil Review". I'm not quite sure what to make of that remark....

Here are the first two paragraphs [footnotes excluded]:

Current conscious experience is generally the last refuge of the skeptic against uncertainty. Though we might doubt the existence of other minds, that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the earth existed five minutes ago, that there's any "external world" at all, even whether two and three make five, still we can know, it's said, the basic features of our ongoing stream of experience. Descartes espouses this view in his first two Meditations. So does Hume, in the first book of the Treatise, and -- as I read him -- Sextus Empiricus. Other radical skeptics like Zhuangzi and Montaigne, though they appear to aim at very general skeptical goals, don't grapple specifically and directly with the possibility of radical mistakes about current conscious experience. Is this an unmentioned exception to their skepticism? Unintentional oversight? Do they dodge the issue for fear that it is too poor a field on which to fight their battles? Where is the skeptic who says: We have no reliable means of learning about our own ongoing conscious experience, our current imagery, our inward sensations -- we are as in the dark about that as about anything else, perhaps even more in the dark?

Is introspection (if that's what's going on here) just that good? If so, that would be great news for the blossoming -- or should I say recently resurrected? -- field of consciousness studies. Or does contemporary discord about consciousness -- not just about the physical bases of consciousness but seemingly about the basic features of experience itself -- point to some deeper, maybe fundamental, elusiveness that somehow escaped the notice of the skeptics, that perhaps partly explains the first, ignoble death of consciousness studies a century ago?

[To continue, see the official Phil Review website, or the version on my own website.]

What Sorts of People Should There Be?

A fascinating question. A reflexive rejection of eugenics is too simplistic. There are so many ways now open (or opening) to shape ourselves and future generations, and the benefits and drawbacks are so diverse and complex, that you'll be glad to hear of

the new blog all about it!

Defining "Consciousness"

Scientists, students, ordinary folks, and even philosophers sometimes find the word "consciousness" baffling or suspicious. Understandably, they want a definition. To the embarrassment of us in "consciousness studies", it proves surprisingly difficult to give one. Why? The reason is this: The two most respectable avenues for scientific definition are both blocked in the case of consciousness.

Analytic definitions break a concept into more basic parts: A "bachelor" is a marriageable but unmarried man. A "triangle" is a closed, three-sided planar figure. In the case of consciousness, analytic definition is impossible because consciousness is already a basic concept. It's not a concept that can be analyzed in terms of something else. One can give synonyms ("stream of experience", "qualia", "phenomenology") but synonyms are not scientifically satisfying in the way analytic definitions are.

Functional definitions characterize terms by means of their causal role: A "heart" is the primary organ for pumping blood; "currency" is whatever serves as the medium of exchange. Someday maybe a functional definition of consciousness will be possible; but first we have to know what kind of causal role (if any) conscious plays; and we're a long way from knowing this. Various philosophers and psychologists have theories, of course, but to define consciousness in terms of one of these contentious theories begs the question.

So maybe the best we can do is definition by instance and counterinstance: "Furniture" includes these things (tables, desks, chairs, beds) and not these (doors, toys, clothes). "Square" refers to these shapes and not these. Hopefully with enough instances and counterinstances one begins to get the idea. So also with consciousness: Consciousness includes inner speech; visual imagery; felt emotions; dreams; hallucinations; vivid visual, auditory, and other sensations. It does not include: Immune system response, early visual processing, myelination of the axons; what goes on in dreamless sleep.

Unfortunately, definition by instance and counterinstance leaves unclear what to do about cases that don't obviously fit with either the given instances or counterinstances: If all the given instances and counterinstances of "square" are in Euclidean space, what does one do with non-Euclidean figures? Are paintings "furniture"?

Now of course some cases are just vague and rightly remain so. But one question that interests me turns on exactly the kinds of cases that definition of consciousness by instance and counterinstance leaves unclear: Whether unattended or peripheral stimuli (the hum of the refrigerator in the background when you're not thinking about it, the feeling of your feet in your shoes) are conscious. It would beg the question to include such cases in one's instances or counterinstances. But this class of potential instances is so large and important that to ignore it risks leaving unclear exactly what sort of phenomenon "consciousness" is.

Now maybe (this is my hope) there really is just one property -- what consciousness researchers call "consciousness" -- that stands out as the obvious referent of any term meant to fit the instances and counterinstances above, so that no human would accidentally glom on to another property, given the definition, just as no human would glom on to "undetached rabbit part" as the referent of the term "rabbit" used in the normal way. But this may not be true; and if it's also not acceptable (as I think it's not) simply to lump cases like the sound of the fridge and the feeling of one's shoes into the class of vague, in-between cases, then even definition by instance and counterinstance fails as a means of characterizing consciousness.

Are we left then with Ned Block's paraphrase of Louis Armstrong: "If you got to ask [what consciousness/jazz is], you ain't never gonna get to know"?

The Hermeneutic Alternative (by guest blogger Bryan Van Norden)

Philosophy begins in wonder. -- Aristotle

Aristotle was wrong. Philosophy begins when a community of people encounter a problem that outstrips their current methods for problem-solving. For example, in ancient Greece, the Sophists seemingly could argue persuasively for either side in a court case or public policy debate. Or in Eastern Zhou-dynasty China, the traditional Way of organizing society was no longer promoting prosperity and preserving social order. Plato addressed the former problem, and Confucius the latter. (Forgive me for greatly oversimplifying the views of these two subtle and multifaceted philosophers.)

Faced with a philosophy-inducing problem, members of the community continue to share (and hold true) most of their background beliefs. If they did not, they would be unable to communicate about the problem. But whatever the problem is, it will call into question some of their beliefs. (For example, "rational argumentation can arrive at objective truth" or "the Way of the ancients is relevant to contemporary society.") On the basis of their shared beliefs, the members of the community formulate solutions to the problem. (For example, "mathematics provides a paradigm for how rational argumentation can succeed" or "if we ethically cultivate individuals and put them into positions of authority, society can be returned to the ancient Way.")

Any solution must satisfy two criteria. (1) It must answer all plausible, substantive objections that are raised against it by other members of the community (including alternative solutions); and (2) it must fit our interactions with the world. In other words, philosophy always involves two types of dialogue partners: other people and the world. (Obiter dicta, I think Richard Rorty tended to forget or underemphasize the role of the latter dialogue partner.) To continue my earlier examples, Plato had to answer the objection that most people are not convinced by the type of argumentation he recommends (and he replied with the "Myth of the Cave") and Confucius had to answer the objection that brute force was the only plausible method for enforcing social order (and he replied with the concept of sagely "Virtue").

What is the payoff of this "hermeneutic account" of philosophy?

Contrast Descartes, who began with subjective "ideas," and then tried to make the jump from them to the world. The problem is that if you start with subjective ideas, and assume that there is a world independent of those ideas, you will be led to skepticism. Or if you start with subjective ideas, and abandon the notion of some unattainable world beyond them, you will be led to relativism. (I think the influence of the Cartesian picture is part of the reason undergraduates assume that relativism or skepticism is self-evident.) But Descartes' epistemological starting point is arbitrary and unwarranted. We begin as creatures in the world, communicating with other creatures in the world with whom we share many common beliefs about the world. Now, through a subtle process of abstraction we can temporarily adopt a Cartesian standpoint, but we do not start out there, and we are not obligated to go there.

The methodological implication of the hermeneutic approach is that, in order for our position to be justified, we need to (1) know the major objections that have been raised against our "solution," and (2) know the major alternative solutions to the problem we face, so that we can (3) answer the objections, and (4) explain why our solution is superior to the alternatives. Again, a contrast with Descartes is instructive, because his Meditations invites us to think of philosophy as an individual process conducted in isolation from previous beliefs. But, as I noted in an earlier post, one cannot even understand Descartes himself without seeing him as a participant in an ongoing dialogue. So the individualist methodology is self-undermining.