Some brief arguments for dualism, Part V

The next argument in our series is inspired by Karl Popper, and in particular by some ideas he first presented in his short article “Language and the Body-Mind Problem” (available in his collection Conjectures and Refutations) and repeated in The Self and Its Brain. As Popper originally formulated it, its immediate aim was to demonstrate the impossibility of a causal theory of linguistic meaning, but it is evident from some remarks he once made about F. A. Hayek’s book The Sensory Order that he also regarded it as a refutation of any causal theory of the mind. (See my essay “Hayek the Cognitive Scientist and Philosopher of Mind” in The Cambridge Companion to Hayek.) Hilary Putnam would later present a similar line of argument in his book Renewing Philosophy, though he does not seem to be aware of Popper’s version.

The argument as I will state it is somewhat different from anything either Popper or Putnam has said, though it is in the same spirit. Before stating the argument, it is worthwhile recalling the “mechanistic” conception of the natural world which, as I have emphasized in earlier posts in this series, implicitly or explicitly informs materialism. On this conception, the world is devoid of what Aristotelians call formal and final causes: there are in nature no substantial forms or inherent powers of the sort affirmed by the medieval Scholastics, and there is no meaning, purpose, or goal-directedness either. The physical world is instead composed entirely of inherently purposeless elements (atoms, corpuscles, quarks, or whatever) governed by inherently meaningless patterns of cause and effect. All the complex phenomena of our experience, from grapes to galaxy clusters, from mudslides to minds, must somehow be explicable in terms of these elements and the causal regularities they exhibit.

But in fact there can be no such explanation of the mind, not even in principle. In particular, there can be no such explanation of intentionality, the mind’s capacity to represent the world beyond itself – as it does, say, when your thought that the cat is on the mat represents the cat’s being on the mat.

The reason is this. As already indicated, any materialistic explanation of intentionality is bound to be a causal explanation. That is to say, it is going to be an attempt to show that the intentionality of a mental state somehow derives from its causal relations. The causal relations in question might be internal to the brain (as they are according to “internalist” theories of meaning); they might extend beyond the brain to objects and events in a person’s environment (as they do according to “externalist” theories); they may even extend backwards in time millions of years to the environment in which our ancestors evolved (as they do according to “biosemantic” theories). An adequate description of the relevant causal relations may require any number of technical qualifications (such as an appeal to Fodor’s notion of “asymmetric dependence”). In every case, though, a materialist is bound to appeal to some pattern of causal relations or other as the key to explaining intentionality. He’s got nothing else to appeal to, after all; the basic elements out of which everything in the physical world is made are by his own admission devoid of any meaning (“intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep,” as Fodor insists in Psychosemantics) and anything other than these elements exists only insofar as causal interactions between the elements generates it.

Now, specifying the relevant causal relation entails specifying a relevant beginning point to the series and a relevant end point. We have to identify some physical phenomenon as that which does the representing, and some other physical phenomenon as that which is represented; or in other words, we have to pick out one thing as the thought, and another thing as that which is thought about. To take a simple example, if we imagine that a certain brain process is associated with the thought that the cat is on the mat because it is caused in such-and-such a way by the presence of cats on mats, then we will have to take the cat’s presence on the mat as the beginning of the relevant causal chain (call it A) and the occurrence of the brain process in question (call it B) as the end. (Of course, specifying exactly what the “such-and-such a way” involves can get pretty complicated, as anyone familiar with the contemporary literature knows, but the complications are irrelevant for our purposes here.)

But what objective reason is there to identify A and B as “the beginning” and “the end” of a causal sequence? Consider what happens in a situation like the one in question. Someone flips on a light switch, which causes electrical current to flow through the wires in the wall up to a ceiling lamp. Light from the lamp travels to a cat sitting on a mat below, is reflected off of the cat, and travels to the retinas of a nearby observer. This in turn causes signals to be sent up the optic nerves to the brain, which results in the firing of a certain cluster of neurons, which in turn results in the firing of another cluster, which in turn results in the firing of yet another cluster, and so on and so forth. All this neural activity ultimately results in a behavioral response, such as walking over to the refrigerator to get the milk bottle out so as to give the cat a snack. And this is followed, say, by an accidental dropping of the milk bottle, which results in broken glass, a cut to the ankle, a yelp of pain, and the kicking of the cat.

Now, again, what is it about this complex chain of events that justifies picking out A and B specifically and labeling them “the beginning” and “the end” respectively? Why is it the cat’s presence on the mat that counts as “the beginning” – rather than, say, the flipping of the light switch, or the flow of the current to the ceiling lamp, or the arrival of such-and-such a photon at exactly the midpoint between the surface of the cat and the observer’s left retina? Why is it brain process B exactly that counts as “the end” of the causal chain – rather than, say, the brain process immediately before B or immediately after B, or the walk over to the refrigerator, or the motion of such-and-such a shard of glass from the broken milk bottle as it skips across the floor? Of course, we have an interest in picking out and identifying cats and not in picking out and identifying individual photons, and an interest in brain processes and their associated mental states that we don’t have in shards of glass. But that is a fact about us, not a fact about the physical world itself. Objectively, as far as the physical world itself is concerned, there is just the ongoing and incredibly complex sequence of causes and effects, which extends indefinitely forward and backward in time well beyond the events we have described. Objectively, that is to say, there is no such thing as “the beginning” or “the end,” and nothing inherently significant about any one event as compared to another.

Popper’s point, and Putnam’s, is that what count as the “beginning” and “end” points of such a causal sequence, and thus what counts as “the causal sequence” itself considered in isolation from the rest of the overall causal situation, are interest relative. These particular aspects of the overall causal situation have no special significance apart from a mind which interprets them as having it. But in that case they cannot coherently be appealed to in order to explain the mind. It is no good saying that the representational character of our mental states derives from their causal relations when the causal relations themselves cannot be specified except in terms of how they are represented by certain mental states. A vicious circularity afflicts any such “theory” of intentionality.

Now it is important to emphasize that the point is not that causation per se is interest relative or mind-dependent; the argument is not an exercise in idealism or anti-realism. The overall complex ongoing sequence of causes and effects is entirely mind-independent. The claim, again, is just that something’s counting as a “beginning” or “end” point within the series is interest-relative and mind-dependent. Still, even this much might seem to be too close to idealism or anti-realism for comfort. It might seem to make causal explanations somehow subjective and arbitrary. (Indeed, Putnam attributes something like this sort of objection to Noam Chomsky.) But to fear that the Popper/Putnam argument we’ve been considering might entail that causal explanations are somehow subjective or arbitrary doesn’t show that the argument is wrong.

Is there any way to reconcile the argument with the objectivity and non-arbitrariness of causal explanations? Absolutely. The way to do it is to show that certain physical phenomena really can objectively count as the beginning or end points of a causal sequence after all – that they can indeed be picked out in a way that is not mind-dependent or interest-relative. But how can that be done? By showing that natural objects and processes are by their natures inherently directed towards the generation of certain other natural objects and processes as an “end” or “goal.” That is to say, by showing that natural objects and processes have what Aristotelians call substantial forms and final causes. In short, the way to explain how causal explanations can be objective and non-arbitrary as opposed to subjective and interest-relative is to acknowledge that the mechanistic conception of the world is mistaken, and that the Aristotelian-Scholastic conception that it replaced is correct after all.

So, the Popper/Putnam argument shows that the mechanistic conception of nature to which materialists are explicitly or implicitly committed entails that there can be no materialistic explanation of the mind. (As we have seen in earlier posts in this series, other arguments tend to show the same thing.) And the only way to sidestep the argument is to abandon the mechanistic conception of nature, which entails rejecting materialism anyway. Either way, materialism is refuted.

What positive view results? That depends. If one holds on to the mechanistic conception of nature, the result would seem to be some broadly Cartesian form of dualism – either substance dualism or property dualism. (Popper himself opted for the former. Putnam does not consider what consequences his view might have for the dualism/materialism debate.) If instead on opts to return to an Aristotelian conception of nature – the right choice, in my view – then one is on the path toward hylemorphic or Thomistic dualism. (I examine these options in my book Philosophy of Mind and defend the latter at length in The Last Superstition.)

Hence, one way or the other dualism is vindicated. And as with the arguments presented in earlier posts in this series, it will not to do object to this one that it somehow “violates Ockham’s razor,” that materialism is the “simpler explanation,” and so forth. Such objections can only have force against attempts to present dualism as a “probable” “hypothesis” “postulated” as the “best explanation” of the “data.” That is not the sort of argument I have given. As I have already said, the argument just presented is an attempt to show that materialism fails in principle; it purports to be a metaphysical demonstration of the falsity of materialism, not a piece of quasi-empirical theorizing. If it fails (and obviously I don’t think it does), it does not fail for the sorts of reasons empirical hypotheses do.

Searle, Aquinas, and property dualism

In an addendum to his article “Why I Am Not a Property Dualist,” John Searle suggests that property dualism really entails substance dualism. For it describes mental properties as “arising from” and existing “over and above” the brain, and “these metaphors suggest that… consciousness is something separate from the brain” given that “uncontroversial properties of the brain, like weight, shape, colour, solidity, etc.” are not said to exist in that way. For consciousness to exist “over and above” the brain requires that it be “a separate thing, object, or non-property type of entity.”

Searle’s claim here seems reminiscent in some ways of Aquinas’s argument for the subsistence of the human soul at Summa Theologiae I.75.2:

Therefore the intellectual principle which we call the mind or the intellect has an operation "per se" apart from the body. Now only that which subsists can have an operation "per se." For nothing can operate but what is actual: for which reason we do not say that heat imparts heat, but that what is hot gives heat. We must conclude, therefore, that the human soul, which is called the intellect or the mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent.

Aquinas has argued earlier for the first claim made in this passage, viz. that intellectual operations do not involve a bodily organ. What he saying here is that this claim entails that that which carries out these operations, the human soul, must “subsist” apart from the body; it isn’t a mere accident or attribute of the body. The reason is the Scholastic principle that agere sequitur esse, activity follows upon being. Heat, as a mere accident or attribute, cannot cause something to be hot; rather it is the substance which has the heat that causes something else to be hot. Similarly, an operation which is not carried out by any bodily organ but which – qua operation rather than substance – cannot exist apart from some substance or other, must inhere in something immaterial.

So, when Searle tells us that immaterial mental properties would have to inhere in something immaterial rather than in a material object like the brain, he is saying something which seems to dovetail with Aquinas’s argument.

Still, things are a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, unlike many contemporary property dualists, Aquinas does not regard consciousness (as contemporary philosophers tend to understand “consciousness”) as immaterial. Rather, it is intellectual activity (grasping abstract concepts, reasoning, etc.) that he takes to be immaterial. Second, Aquinas is not only not a property dualist, he is not (contrary to appearances) a substance dualist either, certainly not in the way that sort of view has been understood since Descartes. Rather, he is a hylemorphic dualist. From a Thomistic point of view, substance dualism, property dualism, materialism, idealism, neutral monism, and all other post-Cartesian theories of the mind presuppose a mistaken and muddleheaded conception of both mind and matter – a conception which (among other things) makes it very difficult for contemporary philosophers even to understand the Thomistic view. As when dealing with Aquinas’s position on other specific philosophical questions, the only way properly to understand what he says about the relationship between mind and body is to situate it within his general metaphysics, which presupposes an understanding of the notions of act and potency, form and matter, substance and accident, essence and existence, analogical predication, etc. I set all this out in Aquinas, with chapter 4 devoted to Aquinas’s psychology and how it differs radically from contemporary substance dualism, property dualism, etc.

Now, some further reading, while you wait for your copy of Aquinas to arrive: First, my essay “Why Searle Is a Property Dualist,” which explains why Searle’s own anti-materialist arguments in philosophy of mind do in fact entail property dualism, despite his attempt to avoid this result. Second, check out David Oderberg’s article “Hylemorphic Dualism” for an overview of the Thomistic position. Third, take a look at Alfred Freddoso’s article “Good News, Your Soul Hasn’t Died Quite Yet” for a discussion of some of the differences between the Thomistic view and the standard modern ones (and why Catholics, especially, should be wary of the latter, including modern versions of dualism).

Nagel and his critics, Part II

Whereas my First Things review of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos accentuated the positive, the first post in this series put forward some criticisms of the book.  Let’s turn now to the objections against Nagel raised by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg in their review in The Nation.  

First some stage setting is in order.  As I indicated in the previous post, Mind and Cosmos is mostly devoted to the positive task of spelling out what a non-materialist version of naturalism might look like.  The negative task of criticizing materialist forms of naturalism is carried out in only a relatively brief and sketchy way, and here Nagel is essentially relying on arguments he and others have developed at greater length elsewhere.  Especially relevant for present purposes is a line of argument Nagel put forward in what is perhaps his most famous piece of writing -- his widely reprinted 1974 article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” -- and developed further in later works like The View From Nowhere.

Davidson’s anomalous monism

Donald Davidson’s article “Mental Events” is widely considered a classic of twentieth-century philosophy of mind, and for good reason. It contains as clever an argument for materialism as anyone has ever given. And in the course of giving it, Davidson presents, albeit in a notoriously sketchy form, a profound and important argument against the possibility of a type-type mind-brain identity theory. To use such an argument as a key component in a case for materialism – now that’s the sort of ballsiness we pay philosophers the big money for!

Like all of Davidson’s work, the article has many nuances and cannot fully be understood apart from the context of his body of writings as a whole, which more or less consisted of a great many other articles (the most important of which have now been collected in The Essential Davidson). But the basic structure of the argument is fairly simple. It goes like this:

1. At least some mental events interact causally with physical events.

2. Events related by cause and effect fall under strict laws connecting events of the kinds to which the cause and effect belong.

3. There are no strict laws on the basis of which we can predict and explain mental phenomena.

4. If some mental event M causes a physical event P, there must be some description under which M and P are related by a strict law [From 2]

5. This law can only be a physical law, not one expressed in terms of mental concepts [From 3]

6. But if M falls under a physical law, then it has a physical description.

7. And if it has such a description, then it is a physical event.

8. So (at least some) mental events are physical events.

This summary is a bit loose, but let’s suppose that it can be tightened up so as to yield a valid argument. Should we accept the premises? Certainly they seem reasonable enough, at least given the assumptions operative in most contemporary philosophy of mind. There is no glaring falsehood here; the argument is a serious one, worthy of our consideration. So what happens when we probe more deeply?

Davidson calls step 1 the Principle of Causal Interaction, and it is the least controversial premise of the argument. There have, of course, been philosophers who have denied it, but most, whether their position is materialist or dualist, would not. And they are right not to do so – at least given a certain construal of “interaction.” Let’s concede this one for now and come back to it later.

Step 3 is Davidson’s famous Principle of the Anomalism of the Mental, and constitutes the argument’s most original contribution to the philosophy of mind. It is this principle that shows, in Davidson’s view, that no type-type identity theory is possible, because such a theory requires that we can at least in principle correlate mental event types and brain event types in a law-like way. As I have said, though, his argument for the principle is notoriously sketchy. How exactly is it supposed to go?

The answer, which requires adverting to broader themes in Davidson’s philosophy of mind and language, goes something like this: Consider a “radical interpretation” scenario like Quine’s famous “gavagai” example. You’re an anthropologist attempting to translate the language of a heretofore unknown tribe. The speakers tend to utter “gavagai” in the presence of rabbits. As Quine argues, it may turn out that, depending on what metaphysical assumptions you attribute to the speakers of this language, “gavagai” could be translated as “rabbit,” or “temporal stage of a rabbit,” or “undetached rabbit part”; and three complete manuals of translation might be prepared, each of which reflects one of these possible translations and adjusts the translations of other native utterances accordingly. Now, leave aside the various ontological and semantic theses Quine illustrated with this example (indeterminacy of translation, inscrutability of reference, etc.). What Davidson is interested in is the way in which we cannot even begin to make sense of the linguistic utterances of an alien speaker of this sort without attributing to him a vast network of beliefs, desires, intentions, and other mental states. We will conclude that he means “Lo, a rabbit!” only if we assume that he conceptualizes his experiences in terms of substances (say) rather than temporal stages. Furthermore, we will conclude that that’s what he means only if we assume too that he really believes that a rabbit is present and that he intends to express that belief via this particular utterance. We will make these further assumptions, in turn, only if we also assume that his mental states are at least for the most part rational and coherent, so that he would not (for example) infer from the fact that he is seeing a rabbit that a rabbit must not be present. Even that is not the end of the story, though. For further evidence – other things the speaker says in other contexts – may lead us to revise these various judgments, so that we revise also our understanding of what he meant when he said “gavagai.” And there may be several equally plausible interpretations, each associated with its own alternative attribution of beliefs, intentions, and the like.

Now while the example is an extreme one, Davidson’s view is that something like this set of circumstances confronts us, albeit to a much less radical extent, even in ordinary linguistic contexts. Our interpretation of anyone’s linguistic behavior always involves the attribution to him of one of several possible sets of beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like, and is always revisable in light of further evidence. But by the same token – and this is the key point – our attribution of mental states to him is also always subject to the same interpretive problems. Just as we might alter our judgments about what he means in light of our assumptions about what is going on in his mind, so too might we alter our judgments about what is going on in his mind in light of our assumptions about the meaning of his linguistic and other behavior. Mind, language, and behavior are so inextricably linked that none can be understood apart from the others, and our making sense of the whole in any particular case requires attributing to a subject at least minimal adherence to standards of rationality and coherence. Otherwise we simply could not meaningfully regard what is going on with him as language and thought at all.

Now in Davidson’s view, there is as he puts it “no echo” in physical science of any of this. In understanding a physical system qua physical, we do not and need not attribute to it beliefs, desires, or any other sort of intentionality, and we do not expect it to abide by norms of rationality. Such systems are governed instead (at least on the modern “mechanistic” conception of the natural world) by patterns of brute, purposeless efficient causation. This should already make us suspicious of the very idea of a one-to-one match-up between mental state types and physical state types. The notion seems to rest on a category mistake, a failure to understand that the network of rationally-cum-semantically interrelated mental states is no more susceptible of a smooth correlation with a particular network of causally interrelated physical states than the content of a book can be smoothly correlated with a certain kind of physical format (a modern printed book, say, as opposed to a scroll, wax tablet, or electronic book). As Wilfrid Sellars might put it, the “space of reasons” and the “space of causes” are simply incommensurable.

As Jaegwon Kim suggests in his introductory text Philosophy of Mind, Davidson might accordingly be understood as arguing that if there were a law-like correlation between mental events and physical events, this would entail that what is happening in a person’s mind could be determined in a way we already know on independent grounds to be in principle impossible. In particular, it would follow that we could at least in theory “read off” a person’s thoughts directly from an inspection of his brain, without making any reference to the various alternative ways those thoughts might cohere with other thoughts or with his linguistic and other behavior. Since this is (given what was said above) something we cannot in principle do, it follows that there is no such law-like correlation between the mental and the physical. All of this suggests the following argument in defense of Davidson’s step 3:

A. The meaningful attribution of mental states to someone is governed by norms of rationality which find “no echo” in physics.

B. But if there were strict laws connecting mental events with brain events, then the attribution of mental states could proceed without reference to such norms.

C. So there are no such laws.

(None of this is inconsistent with the fact that we can often draw reliable inferences about what someone is thinking from his speech and behavior, and even from what is going on in his brain. The claim is rather that it is impossible even in principle to have a complete and, more to the point, entirely determinate understanding of his thoughts based only on knowledge of his behavior and physiology. I have addressed this issue previously here.)

All of this seems to me to be essentially correct, and it is not a small point either. (As readers of Davidson know, he bases a number of interesting philosophical theses on his analysis of the interrelationship between mind and language, including a penetrating critique of conceptual relativism.) The “anomalous” half of anomalous monism is thus well-established. What about the “monism” half? Is the mental identical with the physical, despite there being no law-like correlation between them?

My answer, which will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog, is No, it is not. And the reason Davidson’s argument fails to show otherwise is that his conception of causation is (in my estimation) radically deficient. As I have argued elsewhere (e.g. here), the correct way to understand mental-physical “interaction” is on the model of what Aristotelians call formal causation rather than efficient causation. And one reason for thinking so is that conceiving of it on the model of efficient causation makes it hard – for materialists no less than for dualists – to avoid epiphenomenalism (as I noted here). To return, as promised, to Davison’s premise 1, then: If it is interpreted to mean (as Davidson himself did not mean it) that the mental and physical “interact” as formal and material cause, respectively, then this premise is certainly true (though in that case it cannot then be appealed to in an argument for materialism, since the Aristotelian conception of causation is incompatible with materialism). If instead it means (as Davidson intended) that they “interact” in the order of efficient causes, then though such a premise might be appealed to in support of materialism, it is false.

For the same reason, step 2 – what Davidson calls the Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality – is also in my view false. For it reflects a mechanistic view of nature, on which the material world is utterly devoid of any inherent goal-directedness or final causality and is governed instead entirely by (a stripped down version of) efficient causality. And as I have argued elsewhere (and at greatest length in The Last Superstition) this conception of nature is ultimately incoherent. By the same token, step 7 is false as well from an Aristotelian point of view. The fact that an object or event can be described in the quantitative terms typical of modern physical theory simply does not entail that such a description exhausts what is true of it. Rather, such a description is necessarily selective, abstracting away those features of the world which are irrelevant to the narrow purposes of predicting and controlling natural phenomena, but which must nevertheless be incorporated into any complete, metaphysical account of its nature.

It is only fair to note, however, that the premises in question are ones a Cartesian dualist must have a harder time dismissing, given that the Cartesian, like the materialist, is committed to a mechanistic and exclusively quantitative conception of the material world. It is no surprise, then, that Davidson should think the anomalism of the mental cold comfort to the dualist. Even here, though, the Davidsonian cannot be too smug, given that Davidson’s position only underlines the threat that epiphenomenalism poses to materialism as much as to Cartesian forms of dualism.

In any event, the fact remains that Davidson’s position, like all forms of materialism, ultimately derives whatever strength it has from the false supposition that, realistically, “there is no alternative” to materialism (or physicalism, or naturalism) if one rejects modern forms of dualism – a supposition that rests on a studied ignorance among contemporary philosophers of the true nature of the conceptual revolution by which the moderns displaced Aristotelianism (for an account of which see TLS).

Nagel and his critics, Part IV

Continuing our look at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos, we turn to philosopher Alva Noë’s very interesting remarks over at NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos & Culture blog.  Noë’s initial comments might seem broadly sympathetic to Nagel’s position.  He writes:

Science has produced no standard account of the origins of life.

We have a superb understanding of how we get biological variety from simple, living starting points. We can thank Darwin for that. And we know that life in its simplest forms is built up out of inorganic stuff. But we don't have any account of how life springs forth from the supposed primordial soup. This is an explanatory gap we have no idea how to bridge.

Science also lacks even a back-of-the-envelop [sic] concept explaining the emergence of consciousness from the behavior of mere matter. We have an elaborate understanding of the ways in which experience depends on neurobiology. But how consciousness arises out of the action of neurons, or how low-level chemical or atomic processes might explain why we are conscious — we haven't a clue.

We aren't even really sure what questions we should be asking.

These two explanatory gaps are strikingly similar… In both cases we have large-scale phenomena in view (life, consciousness) and an exquisitely detailed understanding of the low-level processes that sustain these phenomena (biochemistry, neuroscience, etc). But we lack any way of making sense of the idea that the higher-level phenomena just come down to, or consist of, what is going on at the lower level.

Scientism roundup

In several recent posts we have dealt at least indirectly with scientism, the view that the only real knowledge is scientific knowledge.  Scientism is an illusion, a bizarre fantasy that makes of science something it can never be.  Seemingly the paradigm of rationality, it is in fact incoherent, incapable in principle of being defended in a way consistent with its own epistemological scruples.  It should go without saying that this in no way entails any criticism of science itself.  For a man to acknowledge that there are many beautiful women in the world does not entail that he doesn’t think his own wife or girlfriend is beautiful.  Similarly, to say that there are entirely rational and objective sources of knowledge other than science does not commit one to denying that science is a source of knowledge.  Those who cannot see this are doubly deluded – like a vain and paranoid wife or girlfriend who thinks all women are far less attractive than she is and regards any suggestion to the contrary as a denial of her own beauty.  Worse, like an already beautiful woman whose vanity leads her to destroy her beauty in the attempt to enhance it through plastic surgery, scientism threatens to distort and corrupt science precisely by exaggerating its significance.

Post-intentional depression

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.

Nagel and his critics, Part IX

Returning to my series on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s look at the recent Commonweal magazine symposium on the book.  The contributors are philosopher Gary Gutting, biologist Kenneth Miller, and physicist Stephen Barr.  I’ll remark on each contribution in turn.

What’s the deal with sex? Part II

In a previous post I identified three aspects of sex which manifestly give it a special moral significance: It is the means by which new human beings are made; it is the means by which we are physiologically and psychologically completed qua men and women; and it is that area of human life in which the animal side of our nature most relentlessly fights against the rational side of our nature.  When natural law theorists and moral theologians talk about the procreative and unitive functions of sex, what they have in mind are the first two of these aspects.  The basic idea of traditional natural law theory where sex is concerned is that since the good for us is determined by the natural ends of our faculties, it cannot be good for us to use our sexual faculties in a way that positively frustrates its procreative and unitive ends.  The third morally significant aspect of sex, which is that the unique intensity of sexual pleasure can lead us to act irrationally, is perhaps less often discussed these days.  So let’s talk about that.

Vallicella on hylemorphic dualism, Part II

Bill Vallicella has kindly replied to my response to his recent post on hylemorphic dualism.  The reader will recall that Bill had suggested in his original post that, given the apparent tension between hylemorphism and dualism, Aquinas’s hylemorphic dualism seems ad hoc and motivated by Christian theological concerns rather than by philosophical considerations.  I argued that this charge cannot be sustained.  Whether or not one ultimately accepts hylemorphic dualism, if one agrees that there are serious arguments both for hylemorphism and for dualism, then -- especially when we add independent metaphysical considerations such as the Scholastic principle that the way a thing acts reflects the manner in which it exists -- one should at least acknowledge that hylemorphic dualism has a philosophical rationale independent of any Christian theological concerns.  It seems Bill still disagrees, but I do not see how his latest post gives any support to his original charge.

Some questions on the soul, Part II

In a recent post I responded to a reader’s question about the Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of the soul.  Another reader asks another question.  Let me set out some background before addressing it.  From the Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, strictly intellectual activity -- as opposed, say, to sensation or imagination -- is not corporeal.  This is the key to the soul’s immortality.  A human being is the sort of thing that carries out both non-corporeal and corporeal activities.  Though less than an angel, he is more than an ape, having a metaphysical foot, as it were, in both the immaterial and material camps.  That means that when his corporeal operations go, as they do upon death, it doesn’t follow that he goes.  He limps along, as it were, reduced to the non-corporeal side of his nature.  This reduction is drastic, for a great deal of what we do -- not only walking, talking, breathing, and eating, but seeing, hearing, smelling, and so forth -- depends on the body.

Liberty, equality, fraternity?

Pictured above are the ideals of the French Revolution, and of the modern world in general – liberty, equality, and fraternity.  Note carefully how they manifest their chief attributes.  Liberty freely indulges its desires.  Equality shares what it has.  Fraternity looks on with brotherly concern.  And they’re all idiots.

Reading Rosenberg, Part X

And now we reach, at long last, the end of our detailed critical look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.  In this final post I want to examine what Rosenberg has to say about a set of philosophical arguments he regards as “among the last serious challenges to scientism” (p. 228).  The arguments in question all entail that the realm of conscious experience -- what common sense says we know only “from inside” (p. 238), from a point of view “somewhere behind the eyes” (p. 222) -- cannot be accounted for in terms of neuroscience or physical science more generally.  In his treatment of these arguments, we get Rosenberg simultaneously at his best and at his worst.

Pop culture and the lure of Platonism

Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn't rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus... people so lofty they sound as if they shit marble!

Mozart (Tom Hulce) in Amadeus

I can remember spending many happy times observing the arrivals and departures of college boys with monocles, walking sticks, capes. They always livened up receptions and dinners, to say nothing of seminars and street demonstrations… I cannot actually report having spotted a young squire wearing a powdered wig, but doubtless there will come a day.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on the early days of the conservative movement, in The Conservative Crack-Up

The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.

G. K. Chesterton

Several readers of my recent post on Thelonious Monk, both here and at What’s Wrong with the World, expressed a dislike of jazz, a couple of them on conservative philosophical grounds. One of them cited Richard Weaver’s critique of jazz in Ideas Have Consequences, a classic of modern conservatism.

It’s no secret that I sympathize with the main theme of Weaver’s book, viz. that the nominalism of William of Ockham set the stage for the characteristic philosophical, moral, theological, and political errors of modernity. (This is also a major theme of The Last Superstition.) But, needless to say, I differ with Weaver at least in part on the matter of modern popular culture, and the issue is by no means as trivial as it might seem. Weaver and I agree that it was a catastrophe to abandon realism about universals, to deny that things – including, most importantly, human beings – have essences which define an objective standard of goodness for them. But realism comes in different forms, and the different forms have different moral, theological, cultural, and political implications.

For the Platonic realist, the essences of things are transcendent, existing in a “third realm” beyond both the material world and any mind. For the Aristotelian realist, essences are immanent, existing as constituents of the things themselves. For instance, the Form of Tree, for Plato, exists utterly apart from any particular tree, while for Aristotle a tree’s form (no caps needed, thank you very much) is a metaphysical component of the tree itself, not something external to it. Where they agree is in holding that the form or essence of the tree is something objective and repeatable, that this tree, that tree, and the other tree share the same nature, and that that nature determines what is good for trees as a matter of objective fact – such as that a tree that sinks its roots deep into the soil so as to give it stability and take in nutrients is to that extent a good tree, and that a tree which due to genetic defect or injury is unable to sink its roots very deep is to that extent bad and defective qua tree.

The differences between Platonism and Aristotelianism make a very real difference, though. Given the transcendence of the realm of the Forms, the Platonist is bound to regard the material world not only as second-rate but even as positively contemptible, and the body and its passions as a prison from which the soul needs to escape if it is to attain true wisdom and happiness. There is no such implication in Aristotelian realism. On the contrary, the Aristotelian regards the material world as good, and man as an essentially embodied being for whom the goods of the body, while less noble than those of the intellect, are nevertheless real goods worthy of pursuit in moderation.

I would not want to say that Weaver is a Platonist without qualification, but there is certainly more than a whiff of Platonism in his critique of jazz and of the popular culture of which it is a part. He tells us that jazz is a mark of modern civilization’s “barbarism,” “disintegration,” and “primitivism.” Why? His reasons seem to boil down to four: First, jazz evinces “a rage to divest itself of anything that suggests structure or confinement” and an eschewal of “form or ritual”; second, its celebration of the soloist’s virtuosity is a mark of “egotism” or “individualization”; third, its appeal lies in “titillation” and its themes are often “sexual or farcical,” appealing to the “lower” rather than “higher centers,” so that it fails to raise us to “our metaphysical dream”; fourth, it is “the music of equality.” Obviously, what he says about jazz applies also to other elements of modern pop culture.

Let’s consider Weaver’s concerns in order. First, it is, of course, by now a commonplace that to accuse jazz of formlessness or lack of structure is the height of superficiality. From swing to bop to modal jazz to fusion to acid jazz, it does not take much listening to discern the order underlying even the freest improvisation. Even free jazz has structure, though as I indicated in my previous post, it is so abstract that it can (in my view, anyway) only ever be of purely intellectual rather than aesthetic interest. It is hard not to see in Weaver’s criticism the Platonist’s impatience with the messiness and complexity of the real world, a desire for all form or order to be simple and evident enough to be accessible from the armchair. As the Aristotelian realizes, however (and has constantly to remind his critics, many of whom seem to think that all essentialists are armchair essentialists), to know the essences of things we actually have to get our hands dirty and investigate them empirically, in all their rich detail. If the structure of jazz is complex and unobvious, it is in that respect only mimicking the world of our experience.

Second, if like the Neo-Platonists one regards our very individuality as a kind of fallenness, remediable only by the dissolving of all duality in mystical union with The One, then I suppose the jazz fan’s admiration for virtuoso musicianship might seem to evince a morally objectionable “egotism.” But if, as the Aristotelian holds, our bodies are essential to us, then so too is the individuality that follows upon embodiment; and in that case, admiration of individual skill or achievement is not in any obvious way per se morally problematic.

Third, though I would deny that the pleasures of jazz lack any intellectual component, it cannot be denied that much of its appeal is bodily and sensual. But this too is per se objectionable only if one regards the body and the senses themselves as per se objectionable. For Plato, “each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body” (as the Phaedo famously puts it) which is deeply problematic if the aim is to free the soul from the body. But such harrowing metaphors at least require serious qualification if we are essentially embodied, as the Aristotelian says we are.

That the “nailing” metaphor might have some application even on an Aristotelian view is of course due to the fact that since intellect and will are the highest parts of our nature, the goods of the intellect and will are the highest goods we can attain, and we can lose sight of them if we are too focused on the goods of the body and the senses. But as I have said, the latter are still genuine goods; and since the intellectual and moral endowments of human beings are not equal, these lesser goods are bound to have greater significance in the life of the average man than they are in the lives of philosophers and saints.

Now a Platonist, aware of how few men are capable even in principle of living up to the severity of his otherworldly moral vision, might well object to the “sense of equality” Weaver perceives in jazz; that the appeal of such music is broad might seem to make it ipso facto corrupt. But the Aristotelian, while certainly an elitist of sorts, need not object to the idea of lower but still genuinely beautiful forms of art and music, any more than he objects to the idea that the goods of the body and the senses are, though lower goods, still genuine goods. Just as a mixed regime with monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements is for the Aristotelian preferable to the utopianism of Plato’s Republic, so too is a kind of mixed aesthetic polity bound to be the natural condition of human cultures.

Though anyone with conservative instincts is bound to recoil at the excesses of modern popular culture, then, it is possible to overreact. At the very least, it is arguable that a conservative could take a more nuanced and charitable approach to modern popular culture than Weaver does. And I would argue that such an approach is actually more conservative than Weaver’s is, because it is more realistic, more sensitive to the complexity and variety of the actual human world. As I have acknowledged before, Platonism is a noble doctrine and it can be a useful corrective to the shallow materialism and hedonism that dominate modern life. But it is also prone to unconservative excesses of its own – to utopianism and puritanism, and to either fanaticism or quietism as their sequel. It stands in need of correction itself.

Within Christianity, the Augustinian tradition partially accomplished this to the extent that it sought to reconcile Platonism with the earthiness of the Old Testament. But the Platonic-Augustinian tradition itself required correction, and this was accomplished only with the revival of Aristotelianism and the fusion, within Thomism, of the best of both worlds. In its cultural and moral implications no less than in its philosophical and theological achievements, the Aristotelico-Thomistic tradition synthesizes what is good in earlier systems and purges what is bad, and has also the resources to incorporate the best of the new.

There can in any event be no question that the mainstream Christian tradition acknowledges that the pleasures of the body and the senses have their place. For that tradition, asceticism is a nobler form of life not because the pleasures of food, drink, sex and the like are bad, but precisely because they are good. The ascetic sacrifices what is natural and good for the sake of a higher, supernatural good; and for the vast majority of human beings, even approximating such an ideal is possible only through grace, not via our natural moral capacities, precisely because it is what is naturally good for us that is being forsaken.

In light of all this, there is no reason to condemn some form of popular culture merely because it deals with this-worldly themes rather than raising us to “our metaphysical dream,” as Weaver puts it. This is not to deny for a moment that much of contemporary popular culture really is evil and corrupting. Nor is it to deny that even the best in popular culture is inferior to high culture, and that it ought never to intrude into sacred contexts. (As a lover of the Tridentine form of the Roman rite, I am stridently opposed to the use of jazz, rock, or folk music in the Mass. If I were somehow elected pope, this would be my first official act.) Nor is it to deny that even the best in popular culture can, like all the good things of this world, become a snare if we allow them to distract us from the higher and nobler things. Conservatives can definitely take too optimistic a view of pop culture – I think Brian Anderson does so in South Park Conservatives, to take one prominent example. But they can take too pessimistic a view as well, and see only bad where there is in fact much good. Weaver does so, as does Roger Scruton in some of his moods, though he seems to have mellowed a bit. (I say this as someone who admires Anderson, Weaver, and Scruton.)

As I have argued before, while conservatism should not be populist, neither should it be snobbish. The conservative or Christian who insists on Weaver’s Platonic hard line cannot fail to come across like one of the oddballs in Tyrrell’s anecdote quoted above, or the bores targeted by Mozart in the line from Amadeus – eccentric, cranky, nostalgic, uptight, unappealing, inhumane, ineffective, and irrelevant. More to the point, he is just wrong, refusing as he does to see man as he truly is, as nature made him, as God made him.

Against “neurobabble”

Every written token of the English word “soup” is made up of marks which look at least vaguely like “s,” “o,” “u,” and “p.”  Of course, it doesn’t follow that the word “soup” is identical to any collection of such marks, or that its properties supervene on the material properties of such marks, or that it can be explained entirely in terms of the material properties of such marks.  Everyone who considers the matter knows this.

To borrow an example from psychologist Jerome Kagan, “as a viewer slowly approaches Claude Monet's painting of the Seine at dawn there comes a moment when the scene dissolves into tiny patches of color.”  But it doesn’t follow that its status and qualities as a painting reduce to, supervene upon, or can be explained entirely in terms of the material properties of the color patches.  Everyone who considers the matter knows this too.

Somehow, though, when neuroscientists discover some neural correlate of this or that mental event or process, a certain kind of materialist concludes that the mind’s identity with, or supervenience upon, or reducibility to, or complete explanation in terms of neural processes is all but a done deal, and that the reservations of non-materialists are just so much intellectually dishonest bad faith.  In a recent online op-ed piece for The New York Times, and in an apt phrase, philosopher of mind Tyler Burge criticizes this tendency as “neurobabble,” which produces only “the illusion of understanding.”  For it is as fallacious as any parallel argument about words or paintings would be.

Immaterial thought and embodied cognition

In a combox remark on my recent post about James Ross’s argument for the immateriality of thought, reader Red raises an important set of issues:

Given embodied cognition, aren't these types of arguments from abstract concepts and Aristotelian metaphysics hugely undermined?  In their book Philosophy in the Flesh Lakoff and Johnson argue that abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

End quote.  In fact, none of this undermines Ross’s argument at all, but I imagine other readers have had similar thoughts, and it is worthwhile addressing how these considerations do relate to the picture of the mind defended by Ross and by Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers generally.

Philosophy of nature and philosophy of [fill in the blank]

A reader of my recent post on the philosophy of nature asks some excellent questions:

I wonder, where does the philosophy of physics and in general the philosophy of science fall in between the scheme of metaphysics and philosophy of nature?...

Also, where does the discussion on the topic of the laws of nature belong?  Is that also philosophy of nature? 

Let’s start with the question of how the philosophy of science is related to the philosophy of nature.  Recall from my recent post that as the middle ground field of the philosophy of nature gradually disappeared off the radar screen of modern philosophy, the disciplines on either side of it -- on the one hand, metaphysics and on the other, empirical science (in the modern rather than Aristotelian sense of “science”) -- came to seem the only possible avenues of investigation of reality.  Recall also that the methodology of metaphysics came to seem a matter of “conceptual analysis,” while any study with empirical content came to be identified as part of natural science.  The very notion that there could be a middle ground field of study with empirical foundations but arriving at necessary truths, thus transcending the contingent world described by physics, chemistry, etc. and pointing the way to metaphysics -- as Aristotelian philosophy of nature claims to do -- was largely forgotten.

Is self-ownership axiomatic?

In my recent post on Murray Rothbard, I addressed the question of whether the libertarian principle of self-ownership could be said to be axiomatic. Let’s pursue the question a little bit further. In particular, let’s pursue the question of whether it is even plausible to suggest that the principle is axiomatic in the strictest sense of “axiomatic.”

Notice that I am not asking whether the principle is true; nor am I asking whether there are any good reasons, of some sort or other, to believe it. Those are separate questions. I am asking whether, if it is true and justifiable, its truth and justification are plausibly of the sort that strict axioms enjoy. Again, what I am asking is whether the principle is plausibly axiomatic in the strictest sense.

What sense is that? One traditional way of thinking about it is this: A principle is axiomatic in the strictest sense if any proposition you could give as evidence for it would be less obviously true than the principle itself is. The law of non-contradiction is a standard example. Nothing you could say in defense of the law of non-contradiction is as obviously correct as the law of non-contradiction itself is. Call this special characteristic of strictly axiomatic propositions “self-evidence.”

So, is the libertarian principle of self-ownership axiomatic or self-evident in this sense? Before you answer, keep in mind that the principle says far more than merely that (say) your right hand belongs to you. When you look at your right hand and judge, spontaneously and quite correctly, “This is mine,” you might initially be inclined to think that the principle of self-ownership must be right. Indeed, maybe it is axiomatic!

Not so fast. Your right hand is indeed yours, as is your right foot, your right eye, and every other body part you can name. All well and good – and not terribly controversial. But what exactly does that entail? Does it entail that you are entitled to do absolutely anything you want with those body parts, provided you do not infringe the liberty of others? Does it entail that you can even do things that are immoral – on the grounds that since it’s your body, you have the absolute right to abuse it so long as you harm no one else? More to the point, is it strictly axiomatic or self-evident that you can do these things?

Let’s be more specific: Is it strictly axiomatic or self-evident that, so long as you harm no one else in doing so, you have an absolute right to do the following: Commit suicide; inject yourself with heroin, even repeatedly, to the point of addiction; have a major body part surgically removed for no reason other than that you just feel like doing so; deliberately engage in self-deception (it’s your mind, after all); and, in general, do to and with yourself things you believe it is immoral to do?

Consider further: Suppose your adult child or best friend informs you that he has decided to do one of these things. To take a clear and fairly simple example, suppose he has become a devout follower of Schopenhauer and has decided, on well-thought out philosophical grounds (rather than some fleeting whim, say), to commit suicide. And suppose you try to talk him out of it, but to no avail. Is it strictly axiomatic or self-evident that you must not use force to prevent him from killing himself – such as by stealing his glass of hemlock, locking him in a padded room, or whatever? Because that is what the libertarian principle of self-ownership entails.

Again, to avoid irrelevant objections, keep in mind that the question is not whether the libertarian principle of self-ownership, radical implications and all, is true or in some way defensible. The question is whether it is strictly axiomatic or self-evident, whether it is strictly axiomatic or self-evident that one has a right to do the things mentioned above, and an obligation to refrain from keeping others, even children and friends, from doing any of them.

When we keep in mind what the principle entails, I think it is quite obvious that the principle is not strictly axiomatic or self-evident. Indeed, this is, I submit, so obvious that it is remarkable that anyone would suggest that it is – as Rothbard may have (though, as I noted in my earlier post, it is not at all clear that Rothbard really meant to use the term “axiom” in anything other than a loose and popular sense). Unlike the law of non-contradiction, it is quite easy to doubt whether the libertarian principle of self-ownership is true; indeed (and again unlike the law of non-contradiction) probably most people on considering it would judge that it is not true. Of course, that doesn’t show that it isn’t true, but it is very strong grounds for doubting that it is self-evident or strictly axiomatic. More to the point, any argument one could appeal to in order to convince the doubters that the principle is true would obviously have to appeal to premises that are more evident than the principle itself is – in which case, it simply cannot be said to be strictly axiomatic.

Perhaps the rhetoric of property led Rothbard astray here. In some contexts, saying “It’s my property” does indeed crisply settle the question of whether one may carry out a certain course of action. But not in all contexts. In everyday life, we are all well aware that the fact that you own your back yard (say) does not entail that you have no obligation in justice to allow the fire brigade access to it in order to get to the burning building behind it, or to avoid using it to engage in dangerous scientific experiments. Conversely, we are well aware that the fact that you have these various obligations does not entail that you don’t “really” own your back yard after all. In everyday contexts, that is to say, we are well aware that to say “X is my property” simply does not entail “I can do absolutely anything I want with X provided doing so violates no one else’s property rights.”

It is only when, after the fashion of “rationalistic” approaches to moral and political thinking of the sort Burke and Hayek criticized, we abstract away from the complex details of human life that property rights can seem have such extreme implications. (It happens, as Wittgenstein might put it, when we “sublime the logic of our language [concerning property].”) Property rights are not all-or-nothing. For almost all theories of property historically – and certainly for classical natural law theory, which is in my view the correct approach to moral questions generally – private property rights, even when very strong, nevertheless come with various qualifications. (For those who are interested, I develop and defend such an approach in my essay “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation,” which is forthcoming in Social Philosophy and Policy. As I argue there, the correct approach to property rights rules out both the level of government and taxation that socialists and egalitarian liberals favor, but also the extreme laissez faire position of libertarianism. It is, in short, conservative.)

To suggest that you either go along with Rothbard or you are logically committed to going the whole hog for socialism is just too silly for words. Rothbardians seem to think their man (or maybe some precursor like Lysander Spooner) was the first thinker in history ever to think about property in a consistent way. In fact all he did was simply invent a grotesque caricature of the idea of private property.

(I recall once asking a radical libertarian what he thought he would be obliged to do if his own adult son informed him that he intended to commit suicide and he could not talk him out of it. Troubled, he thought for a moment and then replied that he hoped he would have the courage to do the right thing and allow his son to kill himself. “This,” I thought, “is a young man whose mind has been rotted out by theory.” But, being young and childless, it was merely theory, and we can have good hope that he will reconsider: Growing older and having children are pretty good cures for extreme libertarianism, though unfortunately not infallible ones.)

Anyway, if this judgment is mistaken, appealing to a purported “self-ownership axiom” is not going to show that it is.

Brentano on the mental

What distinguishes the mental from the non-mental?  Franz Brentano (1838-1917), in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, famously takes intentionality to be the key.  He developed this answer by way of criticism of (what he took to be) the traditional Cartesian criterion.  Descartes held that the essence of matter lies in extension and spatial location.  Whatever lacks these geometrical features is therefore non-material.  Accordingly, it must fall into the second class of substances recognized by Descartes, namely mental substance.  As Brentano reads the Cartesian tradition, then, it holds that the essence of the mental is to be unextended and non-spatial.

Some brief arguments for dualism, Part II

Following Aristotle, the Scholastic tradition famously held that final causes – goal-directedness, purposiveness, natural ends – permeate the natural world. Contrary to a popular misconception, this does not mean that they thought that everything in the world has a purpose or function in the sense that biological organs have purposes or functions. Hence it is no good to accuse them of thinking, absurdly, that piles of dirt, asteroids, mountain ranges, and the like simply must play some role within the universe as a whole that is somehow analogous to the role hearts and kidneys play in the body. Functions like the kind bodily organs play constitute only one, relatively rare, kind of final causality. Nor did they think that final causality is generally associated with anything like consciousness. For an Aristotelian to say that a plant by virtue of its nature “wants” to grow is just a figure of speech. Literally speaking the plant does not, of course, want anything at all, since it is totally unconscious. It is only in us, and in certain other animals, that final causes are associated with conscious awareness.

What the Scholastics did have in mind is summed up in Aquinas’s dictum that “every agent acts for an end,” otherwise known as the “principle of finality.” By an “agent” he means that which brings about or causes some effect. And what he is saying is that when a certain cause generates a certain effect or range of effects in a law-like way (as we would say today) that is only because it naturally “points to“ or is “directed towards” that effect or range of effects as its proper end. For example, a match when struck will, unless prevented (e.g. by being water damaged), generate flame and heat – and flame and heat specifically rather than frost and cold, or the smell of lilacs, or no effect at all. It has an inherent causal power to bring about that effect specifically. What Aquinas and the other Scholastics argued is that unless we acknowledge the existence of such inherent powers, unless we recognize that whenever a certain efficient cause A generates its effect B that is only because the generation of B is the final cause or natural end of A, then we have no way of making intelligible why it is exactly that A generates B specifically rather than some other effect or no effect at all. The existence of final causes is, in this sense, a necessary condition for the existence of efficient causes – of, that is to say, causation as modern philosophers tend to understand it. This is one reason Aquinas held the final cause to be “the cause of causes.”

Now modern philosophy, and in particular modern philosophy’s conception of science, is defined more than anything else by its rejection of final causes. Indeed, as philosophers like William Hasker and David Hull have pointed out, at this point in the history of science, what remains of the “mechanistic” picture of the natural world which we have inherited from the early moderns is really nothing but this rejection. As I argue in The Last Superstition, there has never really been any serious philosophical case for this rejection; it was, and still is, more ideologically than intellectually motivated. Moreover, there are in my view (and, again, as I argue in TLS) overwhelming reasons to think it was a mistake. One of them is that, as Hume’s famous puzzles illustrate, causation has indeed become seriously problematic in modern philosophy in exactly the way Aquinas’s analysis would lead us to expect it to, given the abandonment of final causes.

The abandonment of final causes has also crucially contributed to the creation of the “mind-body problem,” something that did not exist, certainly not in anything like the form familiar to contemporary philosophers, prior to the moderns’ rejection of the Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysical framework. For to insist that the material world is utterly devoid of final causes – devoid, that is to say, of anything that inherently “points to” or is “directed toward” anything beyond itself – is implicitly to deny that intentionality could possibly be material, for intentionality, of course, is just the mind’s capacity to point to or be directed towards something beyond itself, as it does in thought. (See my previous post in this series.) Hence to insist that the material world is devoid of any inherent final causes while at the same time acknowledging the existence of intentionality is implicitly to commit oneself to dualism. Indeed, this is surely one reason why Descartes, one of the fathers of the “mechanistic” revolution in science, was a dualist. Far from being a kind of pre-scientific holdover, dualism of the broadly Cartesian sort is a logical consequence of the turn to mechanism that defined the scientific revolution.

The only way to hold on to the mechanistic conception of nature while rejecting dualism is thus to deny the existence of intentionality. And that is why, as John Searle has argued, all extant forms of materialism do indeed implicitly deny its existence, and thus (I would say) amount to disguised forms of eliminative materialism. This is halfway admitted by Jerry Fodor when he writes, as he does in Psychosemantics, that “if aboutness [i.e. intentionality] is real, it must be really something else.” That is to say, intentionality per se simply cannot be real given the mechanistic conception of the material world that Fodor, like all materialists, has inherited from the early modern philosophers. Hence the most the materialist can do is try to substitute for it some physicalistically “respectable” ersatz. But this is simply eliminative materialism in “folk psychological” drag; and eliminative materialism, however you dress it up, is simply incoherent. (Yet again, see TLS, and in particular chapter 6, for the details.)

We have, then, another brief argument for dualism, which can be summarized as follows: If materialism is true, then (given that it is committed to a mechanistic conception of the material world), there are no final causes, and thus nothing that inherently “points to” or is “directed at” anything beyond itself; and in that case, there can be no such thing as intentionality; but there is such a thing as intentionality; therefore materialism is not true.

This is an argument for dualism, I should say, at least if one admits that the material world exists in the first place (which, of course, everyone other than a few adherents of idealism would admit), because it implies that there are features of the world other than its material features. The only way to avoid the dualistic consequences (other than opting for eliminativism or idealism) would be to acknowledge that the Aristotelians were right after all, and that final causes are a real feature of material reality. But that would, of course, be to abandon the entire modern mechanistic-cum-materialistic interpretation of science. Nor would it really stave off dualism for long, for it would simply open the door to the Thomistic or hylemorphic (as opposed to Cartesian) version of dualism. But that is a story for another time – a story which, like other details of the argument sketched here, can be found (if I might be forgiven one more shameless plug) in The Last Superstition.