A reader
asks me to comment on novelist Scott Bakker’s recent Scientia Salon article “Back to Square One: toward a post-intentional
future.” “Intentional” is a reference to intentionality, the philosopher’s
technical term for the meaningfulness or “aboutness” of our thoughts -- the way
they are “directed toward,” “point to,” or are about something. A “post-intentional” future is one in which
we’ve given up trying to explain intentionality in scientific terms and instead
abandon it altogether in favor of radically re-describing human nature exclusively
in terms drawn from neuroscience, physics, chemistry, and the like. In short, it is a future in which we embrace
the eliminative
materialist position associated with philosophers like Alex Rosenberg and
Paul and Patricia Churchland.
Bakker acknowledges that since giving up on intentionality entails giving up the mind, indeed the self, the consequences of eliminativism seem dire:
You could say the scientific
overthrow of our traditional theoretical understanding of ourselves amounts to
a kind of doomsday, the extinction of the humanity we
have historically taken ourselves to be. Billions of “selves,” if not people, would die
-- at least for the purposes of theoretical knowledge!
Here, as
Bakker notes, he is echoing Jerry Fodor, who in Psychosemantics wrote:
[I]f commonsense intentional
psychology really were to collapse, that would be, beyond comparison, the
greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species; if we’re that
wrong about the mind, then that’s the wrongest we’ve ever been about anything. The collapse of the supernatural, for example,
didn’t compare; theism never came close to being as intimately involved in our
thought and our practice -- especially our practice -- as belief/desire
explanation is… We’ll be in deep, deep
trouble if we have to give it up.
I’m dubious, in fact, that we can give it up; that our
intellects are so constituted that doing without it (I mean really doing
without it; not just philosophical loose talk) is a biologically viable option. But be of good cheer; everything is going to
be all right. (p. xii)
Fodor’s
certainly correct, both about the consequences of eliminativism, and about
everything’s nevertheless being all right.
Or at least, everything’s going to be all right for commonsense
intentional psychology; for scientism and materialism, not so much. For we cannot possibly be wrong about
commonsense intentional psychology. We
know that eliminativism must be false.
We needn’t worry about suffering post-intentional depression because
there’s no such thing as our ever being post-intentional. But scientism and materialism really do
entail eliminativism or post-intentionalism.
Hence they must be false too.
This is, of
course, ground I’ve covered in great detail in several places. There is, for example, the very thorough
critique I’ve given of Rosenberg’s book The
Atheist’s Guide to Reality and some of his other writings in a series
of posts. I there show that none of
the arguments for eliminativism is any good, and that eliminativism cannot
solve the incoherence problem -- the problem of finding a way to deny the existence
of intentionality without implicitly presupposing the existence of
intentionality.
Bakker tells
us that, though he once found the objections to eliminativism compelling, he
now takes the post-intentional “worst case scenario” to be a “live possibility”
worthy of exploration. It seems to me,
though, that he doesn’t really say anything new by way of making eliminativism
plausible, at least not in the present article.
Here I want to comment on three issues raised in his essay. The first is the reason he gives for thinking
that the incoherence problem facing eliminativism isn’t serious. The second is the question of why, as Bakker
puts it, we are “so convinced that we are the sole exception, the one domain that can be theoretically
cognized absent the prostheses of science.”
The third is the question of why more people haven’t considered “what… a
post-intentional future [would] look like,” a fact that
“amazes” Bakker.
Still incoherent after all these
years
Let’s take
these in order. In footnote 3 of his
article, Bakker writes:
Using intentional concepts does not
entail commitment to intentionalism, any more than using capital entails a
commitment to capitalism. Tu quoque arguments simply beg the question, assume the truth of the very
intentional assumptions under question to argue the incoherence of questioning
them. If you define your explanation into the phenomena we’re attempting
to explain, then alternative explanations will appear to beg your explanation
to the extent the phenomena play some functional role in the process of
explanation more generally. Despite the
obvious circularity of this tactic, it remains the weapon of choice for great
number of intentional philosophers.
End
quote. There are a couple of urban
legends about the incoherence objection that eliminativists like to peddle, and
Bakker essentially repeats them here.
The first urban legend is the claim that to raise the incoherence
objection is to accuse the eliminativist of an obvious self-contradiction, like
saying “I believe that there are no beliefs.”
The eliminativist then responds that the objection is as puerile as
accusing a heliocentrist of self-contradiction when he says “The sun rose today
at 6:59 AM.” Obviously the heliocentrist
is just speaking loosely. He isn’t
really saying that the sun moves relative to the earth. Similarly, when an eliminativist says at
lunchtime “I believe I’ll have a ham sandwich,” he isn’t really committing
himself to the existence of beliefs or the like.
But the
eliminativist is attacking a straw man. Proponents
of the incoherence objection are well aware that eliminativists can easily
avoid saying obviously self-contradictory things like “I believe that there are
no beliefs,” and can also go a long way in avoiding certain specific
intentional terms like “believe,” “think,” etc.
That is simply not what is at issue.
What is at issue is whether an across-the-board
eliminativism is coherent, whether the eliminativist can in principle avoid all intentional notions. The proponent of the incoherence objection says
that this is not possible, and that analogies with heliocentrism and the like
therefore fail.
After all,
the heliocentrist can easily state his position without making any explicit or
implicit reference to the sun moving relative to the earth. If he needs to, he can say what he wants to
say with sentences like “The sun rose today at 6:59 AM” in a more cumbersome
way that makes no reference to the sun rising.
Similarly (and to take Bakker’s own example) an anti-capitalist can
easily describe a society in which capital does not exist (e.g. a
hunter-gatherer society). But it is, to
say the least, by no means clear how the eliminativist can state his position
in a way that does not entail that at least some intentional notions track
reality. For the eliminativist claims
that commonsense intentional psychology is false
and illusory; he claims that
eliminativism is evidentially supported
by or even entailed by science; he
proposes alternative theories and models of human nature; and so forth. Even if the eliminativist can drop reference
to “beliefs” and “thoughts,” he still typically makes use of “truth,”
“falsehood,” “theory,” “model,” “implication,” “entailment,” “cognitive,”
“assertion,” “evidence,” “observation,” etc.
Every one of these notions is also intentional. Every one of them therefore has to be
abandoned by a consistent eliminativist.
(As Hilary
Putnam pointed out decades ago, a consistent eliminativist has to give up
“folk logic” as well as “folk psychology.”)
To compare
the eliminativist to the heliocentrist who talks about the sunrise or the
anti-capitalist who uses capital is, if left at that, mere hand waving. For whether
these analogies are good ones is precisely what is at issue. If Bakker or any other eliminativist wants to
give a serious reply to the incoherence objection, what he needs to do is to
put his money where his mouth is and show
us exactly how the eliminativist can do what the heliocentist or
anti-capitalist can do. He needs to show us exactly how the eliminativist
position can be stated in a way that makes no appeal to “truth,” “falsehood,”
“theory,” “entailment,” “observation,” or any
other intentional notion. The trouble is
that no eliminativist has ever done so. Even
eliminativists usually don’t claim that anyone has done it. They just issue promissory notes to the
effect that someday it will be done. But
since whether it can be done is
precisely what is at issue, this response just begs the question. (Readers who haven’t yet done so are
encouraged to read Rosenberg’s paper “Eliminativism without Tears”
and my three-part reply to it, here,
here,
and here. Rosenberg’s essay is the most serious and
thorough attempt I know of to grapple with the incoherence problem. As I show, it fails dismally.)
The second
urban legend Bakker perpetuates is the claim that the incoherence objection itself somehow begs the question. The way the Churchlands illustrate this
purported foible of the incoherence objection is to compare the objector to
someone who claims that modern biologists contradict themselves by denying the
existence of élan vital. The Churchlands imagine such a person saying
something like: “If élan vital didn’t
exist, you wouldn’t be alive and thus wouldn’t be around to deny its
existence! So you cannot coherently deny
it.” As the Churchlands rightly note,
this objection begs the question, since whether élan vital is required for life is precisely what is at issue. And the incoherence objection raised against
the eliminativist is, the Churchlands claim, similarly question-begging.
But the parallel is completely bogus.
The reason the imagined élan vital
objection fails is that the concept of being alive and the concept of élan vital are logically
independent. We can coherently describe
something being alive without bringing élan
vital into our description. Hence it
would require argumentation to show that élan
vital is necessary for life; this cannot simply be assumed. Things are very different in the case of the
dispute about eliminativism. Here, what
is at issue is precisely whether the relevant concepts are logically
independent. In particular, what is at
issue is whether the eliminativist can coherently speak of “truth,”
“falsehood,” “evidence,” “observation,” “entailment,” etc. while at the same
time denying that there is such a thing as intentionality. If he can give us a way of doing so, then he
will have shown that the analogy with the élan
vital example is a good one. But if
the eliminativist does not do so, then he
is the one begging the question. But,
as I have just noted, eliminativists in fact have not done so. So, once again it is really the
eliminativist, and not his critic, who is engaged in circular reasoning.
Another way
to see how hollow Bakker’s charge of circular reasoning is is to consider some
parallel cases. Take the verificationist
claim that a statement is meaningful only if it is verifiable. Notoriously, this principle seems to
undermine itself, since no one has been able to explain how it can be verified. Suppose a verificationist accused his critics
of begging the question in raising this objection. What could possibly be the basis for such an
accusation? If the verificationist had
given us some account of how his own principle could be verified, and the
critic simply ignored this account but still accused the principle of
verifiability of being self-undermining, then
the verificationist would have a basis for claiming that the objection begs the
question. But since the verificationist
has not given us such an account, any
claim that his critics beg the question against him would be groundless, and
their objection stands.
Similarly,
if eliminativists had given us some account of how they can coherently state
their position without making use of any intentional notions whatsoever, and if
their critics had nevertheless simply ignored this account and raised the
incoherence objection anyway, then
the charge that the critics beg the question would have some foundation. But this is not in fact what has
happened. Eliminativists have not given an account of how they can
state their position without using any intentional notions at all; typically
they just wave away the problem by saying that it will be solved when
neuroscience has made further advances. But
in the absence of such an account, the charge that those who raise the
incoherence objection beg the question is groundless. (Again, Rosenberg has
come closest to trying to answer the objection head on. I have not ignored this attempt but rather
answered it in detail, as the posts linked to above show.)
Another
parallel: “Analytical”
or “logical” behaviorism holds that talk about mental states can be
translated into talk about behavior or dispositions to behavior. To say that “Bob believes that it is raining”
is shorthand for saying something like “Bob will say that it is raining if he
is asked, is disposed to go to the closet and grab an umbrella before leaving
the house, etc.” One well-known problem
with this view is that no one has been able to show how talk about mental
states can be entirely replaced by
talk about behavior and dispositions to behavior. In the example just given, it will be true
that “Bob will say that it is raining if he is asked, is disposed to go to the
closet and grab an umbrella before leaving the house, etc.” only if it is also
true that Bob intends to tell us what
he really thinks, desires to stay
dry, etc. That is to say, if we analyze
the one mental state (the belief that it is raining) in terms of behavior, the
behavior itself has to be analyzed in terms of further mental states (such as
the intention to say what one is really thinking and the desire to stay dry),
and thus the problem is only pushed back a stage. And as it turns out, if we give a behavioral
analysis of the intention and desire in question, the problem just recurs
again. So it looks like no successful
thoroughgoing behaviorist analysis can be carried out.
Now suppose
the analytical behaviorist responds: “But this objection just begs the
question, since we analytical behaviorists say that such an analysis can be given!” Obviously this would be a silly
objection. The critic of analytical
behaviorism has given a reason to
think the analysis cannot be carried out, while the analytical behaviorist has failed to show that it can be carried
out. So, until the analytical behaviorist
succeeds in carrying out such an analysis, his charge that his critic begs the
question will be groundless.
Similarly,
critics of eliminativism have given reasons for concluding that the
eliminativist needs to make use of notions which presuppose intentionality, so
that no coherent statement of the eliminativist position can be carried
out. To rebut this charge, it will not
do for the eliminativist merely to accuse his critic of begging the question. The eliminativist has to provide the analysis his critic claims cannot be provided. Merely insisting, dogmatically, that it can be provided and someday will
be provided is not good enough to rebut the incoherence charge. The eliminativist has actually to show us how to do it.
Until he does, he is in the same boat as the verificationist and the
analytical behaviorist. (Not a good boat
to be in, since verificationism and analytical behaviorism are about as dead as
philosophical theories get.)
The “lump under the rug” fallacy
Bakker
wonders why we are “so convinced that we are the sole exception, the one domain that can be theoretically
cognized absent the prostheses of science.”
After all, other aspects of the natural world have been radically
re-conceived by science. So why do we
tend to suppose that human nature is not
subject to such radical re-conception -- for instance, to the kind of
re-conception proposed by eliminativism?
Bakker’s answer is that we take ourselves to have a privileged epistemic
access to ourselves that we don’t have to the rest of the world. He then suggests that we should not regard
this epistemic access as privileged, but merely different.
Now,
elsewhere I have noted the fallaciousness of arguments to the effect that
neuroscience has shown that our self-conception is radically mistaken. For instance, in one
of the posts on Rosenberg alluded to above, I respond to claims to the
effect that “blindsight” phenomena and Libet’s free will experiments cast doubt
on the reliability of introspection.
Here I want to focus on the presupposition
of Bakker’s question, and on another kind of fallacious reasoning I’ve called
attention to many times over the years.
The presupposition is that science really has falsified our commonsense understanding
of the rest of the world, and the fallacy behind this presupposition is what I
call the “lump under the rug” fallacy.
Suppose the wood
floors of your house are filthy and that the dirt is pretty evenly spread
throughout the house. Suppose also that there
is a rug in one of the hallways. You
thoroughly sweep out one of the bedrooms and form a nice little pile of dirt at
the doorway. It occurs to you that you
could effectively “get rid” of this pile by sweeping it under the nearby rug in
the hallway, so you do so. The lump
under the rug thereby formed is barely noticeable, so you are pleased. You proceed to sweep the rest of the
bedrooms, the bathroom, the kitchen, etc., and in each case you sweep the
resulting piles under the same rug. When
you’re done, however, the lump under the rug has become quite large and
something of an eyesore. Someone asks
you how you are going to get rid of it.
“Easy!” you answer. “The same way
I got rid of the dirt everywhere else!
After all, the ‘sweep it under the rug’ method has worked everywhere
else in the house. How could this little
rug in the hallway be the one place where it wouldn’t work? What are the odds of that?”
This answer,
of course, is completely absurd. Naturally,
the same method will not work in this case, and it is precisely because it worked everywhere else that it cannot work in
this case. You can get rid of dirt outside the rug by sweeping it under the
rug. You cannot get of the dirt under the rug by sweeping it under the
rug. You will only make a fool of
yourself if you try, especially if
you confidently insist that the method must work here because it has worked so
well elsewhere.
Now, the “Science
has explained everything else, so how could the human mind be the one
exception?” move is, of course, standard scientistic and materialist
shtick. But it is no less fallacious
than our imagined “lump under the rug” argument.
Here’s
why. Keep in mind that Descartes,
Newton, and the other founders of modern science essentially stipulated that nothing that would not
fit their exclusively quantitative or “mathematicized” conception of matter would be allowed to count as part of a
“scientific” explanation. Now to common
sense, the world is filled with irreducibly qualitative
features -- colors, sounds, odors, tastes, heat and cold -- and with purposes
and meanings. None of this can be
analyzed in quantitative terms. To be
sure, you can re-define color in
terms of a surface’s reflection of light of certain wavelengths, sound in terms
of compression waves, heat and cold in terms of molecular motion, etc. But that doesn’t capture what common sense means by color, sound, heat,
cold, etc. -- the way red looks, the way an explosion sounds, the way heat
feels, etc. So, Descartes and Co.
decided to treat these irreducibly qualitative features as projections of the mind. The
redness we see in a “Stop” sign, as common sense understands redness, does not
actually exist in the sign itself but only as the quale of our conscious visual experience of the sign; the heat we
attribute to the bathwater, as common sense understands heat, does not exist in
the water itself but only in the “raw feel” that the high mean molecular
kinetic energy of the water causes us to experience; meanings and purposes do
not exist in external material objects but only in our minds, and we project
these onto the world; and so forth. Objectively there are only colorless,
odorless, soundless, tasteless, meaningless particles in fields of force.
In short,
the scientific method “explains everything else” in the world in something like
the way the “sweep it under the rug” method gets rid of dirt -- by taking the
irreducibly qualitative and teleological features of the world, which don’t fit
the quantitative methods of science, and sweeping them under the rug of the
mind. And just as the literal “sweep it
under the rug” method generates under the rug a bigger and bigger pile of dirt
which cannot in principle be gotten rid of using the “sweep it under the rug”
method, so too does modern science’s method of treating irreducibly qualitative,
semantic, and teleological features as mere projections of the mind generate in
the mind a bigger and bigger “pile” of features which cannot be explained using
the same method.
This is the
reason the qualia problem, the problem of intentionality, and other
philosophical problems touching on human nature are so intractable. Indeed, it is one reason many post-Cartesian
philosophers have thought dualism unavoidable.
If you define “material” in
such a way that irreducibly qualitative, semantic, and teleological features
are excluded from matter, but also say that these features exist in the mind,
then you have thereby made of the mind something immaterial. Thus, Cartesian
dualism was not some desperate rearguard action against the advance of modern
science; on the contrary, it was the inevitable
consequence of modern science (or, more precisely, the inevitable consequence
of regarding modern science as giving us an exhaustive account of matter).
So, like the
floor sweeper who is stuck with a “dualism” of dirt-free floors and a lump of
dirt under the rug, those who suppose that the scientific picture of matter is
an exhaustive picture are stuck with
a dualism of, on the one hand, a material world entirely free of irreducibly qualitative, semantic, or teleological features,
and on the other hand a mental realm defined
by its possession of irreducibly qualitative, semantic, and teleological
features. The only way to avoid this
dualism would be to deny that the latter realm is real -- that is to say, to
take an eliminativist position. But as I
have said, there is no coherent way to take such a position. The eliminativist who insists that
intentionality is an illusion -- where illusion
is, of course, an intentional notion (and where no eliminativist has been able
to come up with a non-intentional substitute for it) -- is like the yutz
sweeping the dirt that is under the rug back
under the rug while insisting that he is thereby getting rid of the dirt under the rug.
That the
modern understanding of what a scientific explanation consists in itself generates the mind-body problem and thus
can hardly solve the mind-body
problem has been a theme of Thomas Nagel’s work from at least the time his
famous article “What is it like to be a bat?” was first published to his recent
book Mind
and Cosmos. As we saw in my
series of posts responding to the critics of Nagel’s book, those critics
mostly completely missed this fundamental point, cluelessly obsessing instead
over merely secondary issues about evolution.
Like Nagel,
I reject Cartesianism, and like Nagel, I think a reconsideration of
Aristotelianism is the right approach to the metaphysical problems raised by
modern science -- though where Nagel merely flirts with Aristotelianism, I
would go the whole hog. I would say
that although science gives us a correct
description of reality, it gives us nothing close to a complete description of reality, not
even of material reality. It merely
abstracts those features of concrete material reality that are susceptible of
investigation via its methods, especially those features susceptible of
quantitative analysis. Those features of
reality that are not susceptible of such investigation are going to be known by
us, if at all, only via metaphysical investigation
-- specifically, I would argue, via Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics.
Be all that
as it may, in the present context it cuts absolutely no ice merely to appeal to “what science has
shown” about the other, non-human aspects of reality, as a way of trying to
establish the plausibility of a radically eliminativist re-conception of human
nature. For the issues are metaphysical,
and science only ever “shows” anything of a metaphysical nature when it has
already been embedded in a larger metaphysical framework -- in the case of
eliminativism, in a naturalistic metaphysical framework. But to appeal to such a framework is, from
the point of view of Aristotelians and other non-naturalists, merely to beg the
question.
Hands-free onanism
Bakker asks:
“What would a post-intentional future look like? What could it look like?,” and he says
that it “regularly amazes” him that this question hasn’t been explored in
greater depth. But it really should not
amaze him. After all, nobody bothers
exploring in depth what a world in which round squares existed would be like. One reason for this is that there could, even
in principle, be no such thing as a world where round squares existed, since
the very notion is incoherent. We can’t
explore the idea in depth because we
can’t explore it at all.
Of course,
nobody takes the idea of a round square seriously, whereas some people take
eliminativism seriously. But the problem
is similar. You can’t explore the idea
of a post-intentional world in depth until you’ve first shown that the idea
even makes sense at all. That is to say,
you first have to solve the incoherence problem. And as I’ve said, nobody has done that. Of course, we can write stories in which
people say things like “There is no such thing as intentionality” and in which
people treat each other as if they
didn’t possess mental states. But that
is no more impressive than the fact that we can write stories in which people
say things like “Round squares exist” and in which they attribute both straight
and curved lines to the same geometrical figures. The former no more involves imagining a “post-intentional
future” than the latter involves imagining a world with round squares. In both cases, all we’re really imagining is
a world where people say odd things. But
that’s no different, really, from the actual
world, where all sorts of people say odd things (insane people, members of
strange religious sects, eliminativists, etc.).
So, though
its critics might be tempted to write off the project of imagining a
post-intentional future as just so much “mental masturbation,”
it really doesn’t even rise to that level.
After all, there’s no such thing as paralytic onanism -- onanism of the
literal sort, that is -- since paralysis rules out the anatomical preconditions
of onanism. Similarly, onanism of the
mental sort would require, as a precondition, the mental -- exactly what the eliminativist rules out. The closest he’ll ever get to imagining a
post-intentional future is not through active fantasy, but rather a dreamless
sleep.
Feser fanboy here checking in! I'm also a fan of those theists commenting on here as well. I learn so much from reading both Feser's work, and that of the posters substantiating their views in favor of the shared viewpoints!
ReplyDelete(If you can, put The Last Superstition in Bolinda guides audiobooks Feser, since I enjoyed the philosophy of mind and Aquinas one... (If it favors your happiness of course)...