Descartes’ “clear and distinct perception” argument

The “clear and distinct perception” argument is one of two arguments for mind-body dualism Descartes gives in the sixth of his famous Meditations on First Philosophy. It can be summarized as follows:

1. Whatever I have a clear and distinct idea of is capable of existing just as I understand it, at least in principle (e.g. if God creates it that way).

2. I have a clear and distinct idea of myself as simply a thinking, non-extended thing.

3. I have a clear and distinct idea of my body as simply an extended, non-thinking thing.

4. So I and my body are capable, at least in principle, of existing apart from each other.

5. So I am distinct from my body.

Does the argument work? Most contemporary philosophers would say No. I would say No and Yes and No.

Huh? Bear with me.

Here’s the first “No” part. For one thing, Descartes is, by all accounts, wrong to think of extension as the essence of matter, and thus as the essence of the human body. From an Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective (which is my perspective) there is obvious reason to reject this view, since A-T rejects the entire modern mechanistic conception of matter of which it is just a variation. But even those who accept this mechanistic conception – which includes almost all contemporary philosophers, even if (usually) only implicitly and unreflectively – would allow that “extension” (i.e. those properties of matter which can be defined geometrically, more or less) is too crimped a way of spelling out the mechanistic idea. They would allow all sorts of other mathematically quantifiable properties to feature in our characterization of matter as well. (What they share with Descartes is the insistence that, whatever matter is, formal causes and, especially, final causes will simply not be allowed to count as part of the material world.)

For another thing, A-T would also obviously reject Descartes’ implied assimilation of the self to the mind. Though the mind (specifically the intellect) is immaterial, “I” am nevertheless not distinct from my body from the A-T point of view, certainly not without serious qualification. In fairness to Descartes, he did not – contrary to the standard caricature (one now being vigorously combated by Descartes scholars) – actually hold that the body is non-essential to a human being, as if we were all really just ghosts trapped in machines (to allude to Ryle’s famous parody). He explicitly denies that “I” am in my body the way a pilot is in a ship, as if the body were an inessential excrescence. On the contrary, he believed that soul and body form a kind of organic unity, that a human being was an irreducible composite of the two, having attributes (namely appetites, emotions, and sensations) which cannot be predicated of either the soul alone or the body alone. The trouble is that, having abandoned the Aristotelian idea that the soul is the form of the body, and emphasizing as he does that it is the ego itself (and not just some part of the person) which is distinct from the body, he had a devil of a time explaining just how such an organic unity was possible. Hence it is no surprise that the “ghost in the machine” conception of human nature came to be seen as paradigmatically Cartesian, whatever Descartes’ own intentions. (Notoriously, what a thinker wants to conclude is not always what his premises actually imply.)

So, to the extent that Descartes’ argument depends on these assumptions, it is open to criticism. But it can fairly easily be fixed up to avoid these problems. For “myself” in step 2 and “I” in steps 4 and 5, just read “the mind” or (more exactly – and as we’ll see in a moment, as much in line with Descartes’ understanding of the mind as with the A-T view) “the intellect.” For “extension” just plug in either the Aristotelian view of matter or your favorite mechanistic conception. (It makes no difference for this specific argument.) Even if the resulting argument does not get us to precisely Descartes’ brand of dualism, it will definitely get us to some form of dualism, if it is otherwise unobjectionable.

Is it otherwise unobjectionable? Here we come to the “Yes” part of my initial reply. The main objection contemporary philosophers have to Descartes’ argument concerns its second premise, and it is an objection Hobbes raised in the Third Set of Objections to the Meditations. Even if it is conceded that Descartes has a clear and distinct idea of himself as a thinking thing, how can he be so sure that that which is doing the thinking is non-extended or, more generally, non-corporeal? The fact that he doesn’t conceive of corporeality when he conceives of thinking doesn’t show that thinking isn’t corporeal, any more than conceiving of triangularity without conceiving of trilaterality shows that something could be triangular without being trilateral.

So, Descartes needs some way of showing that thought can occur in the absence of anything corporeal or bodily. How about (after the fashion of some contemporary dualists) an appeal to metaphysical possibility, in particular to possible worlds? As in: “It is metaphysically possible for the mind to exist apart from the body” or “There is at least one possible world where mind exists apart from the body”? Nix that. From an A-T point of view, anyway, while these statements are perfectly true, they presuppose dualism and thus cannot be used to establish it. You cannot know what is possible for a thing, or what it might be like in various possible worlds, until you know its nature or essence. (Contemporary philosophers who try to define essence in terms of possible worlds thus have things backwards.) Hence, you cannot assert that there is a possible world in which mind exists apart from body, or that it is metaphysically possible for mind to exist apart from body, until you know the mind’s nature. And its nature is exactly what the Hobbesian objection calls into question.

A better way to show that thought can be incorporeal is just to show that it cannot be corporeal. This is a better way for two reasons. First, it establishes an even stronger claim than the one in question – always nice work if you can get it. Second, it is easy to do.

The reason is one we have examined in several earlier posts (such as this one). The objects of the intellect are abstract concepts, which are universal rather than particular, and determinate or exact rather than indeterminate or inexact. And the thoughts in which these concepts feature are (at least often) as universal, determinate, and exact as the concepts themselves. Yet nothing material has or can have these characteristics. Material objects and processes are inherently particular rather than universal, and also inherently indeterminate or inexact. Hence thoughts cannot possibly be identified with anything material. The point can be and has been developed at greater length (by writers like James Ross, and by me in The Last Superstition and Philosophy of Mind and in the earlier post just linked to) but the basic idea is fairly simple, is as old as Plato and Aristotle, and was endorsed and developed by various Scholastic writers.

The irony is that Descartes himself at least hints at this very argument when, earlier in the Sixth Meditation, he draws a rigid distinction between imagination on the one hand – which he apparently takes to be corporeal – and intellect on the other, which alone he identifies with the self he takes to be incorporeal. (The famous example of the chiliagon – which the intellect understands even though the imagination cannot form an image of it – is presented in this context.) This parallels the Aristotelian-Scholastic doctrine that intellect is immaterial while sensation and imagination are material. It is often supposed that Descartes assimilates sensation, imagination, and intellect into an amorphous something called “the mind,” but this is not the case. His view of their relationship is actually fairly close to that of his Scholastic predecessors. Here as elsewhere Descartes is, as contemporary Descartes scholars have made an industry of documenting, far more Scholastic than one would expect the Father of Modern Philosophy to be. (If only he had been consistently Scholastic, he would have really had something! – though he would not have had this claim to paternity. But we’d all have been better off, and Descartes could have spared himself a few millennia in purgatory.)

The thing is, once this Platonic-Aristotelian-Scholastic point has been developed in support of (our reformulated version of) premise 2, it more or less establishes dualism all by itself, so that the rest of the argument becomes otiose. Hence, Descartes’ argument works, but only if reformulated to such an extent that it amounts to little more than a restatement of an idea that had more or less already been around for millennia. The distinctively Cartesian bits – the stuff about “clear and distinct perception,” the assimilation of the self to the intellect, and the conception of matter as extension – are either wrong or irrelevant. So, as a Cartesian argument for dualism, the argument doesn’t really work after all. What is true in it isn’t new, and what is new isn’t true.

How typically modern!

Give me that old time atheism

Last night I was dipping into Roy Abraham Varghese’s Great Thinkers on Great Questions, an interesting collection of interviews with a number of prominent philosophers (including A. J. Ayer, G. E. M. Anscombe, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Ralph McInerny, Brian Leftow, Gerard Hughes, and many others) on topics mostly related in one way or another to religion. Some of Ayer’s remarks brought to mind how different earlier generations of agnostics and atheists had been, not merely culturally (as Roger Scruton has noted) but philosophically. Ayer, though a notorious lifelong foe of religion, was not a materialist. In his famous book Language, Truth, and Logic, he attempted (as he reminds us in the Varghese volume) to reduce physical objects to “sense-contents,” entities which were intended to be neutral between mind and matter but which were in fact (as Ayer admits) closer to the mental than to the physical side of the traditional mental/physical divide. Hence the resulting position was “much more nearly mentalistic than physicalistic.” And to the end of his life he apparently always rejected any attempt to reduce the mental to the physical.

The reason for this is that even agnostic and atheist philosophers of Ayer’s generation generally recognized that materialism is just prima facie implausible. As I have noted in some earlier posts (here and here), and as I discuss at length in The Last Superstition, dualism was by no means a deviation from the broadly mechanistic conception of matter contemporary philosophy has inherited from the 17th century, but rather a natural consequence of that conception, given its highly abstract and mathematical redefinition of the material world. If matter is what the mechanistic view says it is, then (it seems) there is simply nowhere else to locate color, odor, taste, sound, etc. (as common sense understands these qualities, anyway), and nowhere else to locate meaning (given the banishment of final causes from the material world), than in something immaterial. And until about the 1960s, most philosophers (the occasional exception like Hobbes notwithstanding) seemed to realize that, short of returning to an Aristotelian hylemorphic philosophy of nature, the only plausible alternatives to dualism were views that tended to put the accent on mind rather than on matter – such as idealism, phenomenalism, or neutral monism.

The last of these, as its name implies, was officially committed to the view that the basic stuff out of which the world is constructed is “neutral” between mind and matter, but notoriously it tends to collapse into either phenomenalism or idealism. In my atheist days, it was the version of neutral monism developed by Bertrand Russell (or rather a riff on that version developed by F. A. Hayek) that I took to be the most plausible approach to the mind-body problem. (In recent philosophy, Russell’s views have been developed, in a way that seeks to avoid any sort of idealism, by Michael Lockwood; and, in a way that to some extent or other concedes their idealistic implications, by Galen Strawson and David Chalmers. In my Russellian days I was more attracted to Lockwood’s approach.) After a brief flirtation with materialism while an undergrad, I was more or less inoculated against it by John Searle’s writings, and came to regard the Russellian approach as the most plausible way to defend a naturalistic (if non-materialistic) view of the world.

Most naturalistic philosophers are not at all attracted to this approach, however, precisely (I would suggest) because of its tendency to collapse into some sort of philosophical idealism. For to make mind out to be the ultimate reality is – as the history of 19th century idealism shows – to adopt a view which must surely strike most naturalists as “too close for comfort” to a religious view of the world. To be sure, Chalmers and Strawson do not take their position in anything like a religious direction, but so far few other naturalists have been willing to follow them.

But if they were wise, they would do so. Chalmers and Strawson are in fact among the most interesting philosophers of mind writing today, in part because of their attempt to defend a kind of naturalism while acknowledging the very deep philosophical difficulties inherent in materialism. (Strawson famously dismisses materialism as “moonshine.”) As I have been lamenting in recent posts, most contemporary philosophical naturalists (to say nothing of non-philosophers who are naturalists, such as the New Atheists) have only the most crude understanding of the theological views they dismiss so contemptuously. In the same way, they tend also to be absurdly overconfident about the prospects of a materialist or physicalist account of the mind.

Earlier generations of philosophical atheists or agnostics – Ayer, Russell, Popper, to name just three – knew how difficult it is to defend such an account, and thus avoided grounding their atheism or agnosticism in a specifically materialist metaphysics. Some of their contemporary successors – Lockwood, Chalmers, Strawson, Nagel, Searle, Fodor, McGinn, Levine, among others – have, to varying degrees, some awareness of the same problems. Consequently, at least some of these people realize that naturalism itself (which seems most plausible precisely when spelled out in materialist terms) is by no means obviously right; it is something that requires a very great deal of effort to defend, and cannot blithely dismiss its rivals. Unfortunately, the bulk of contemporary philosophical naturalists – Dennett and Rey being by no means idiosyncratic in this regard – seem forever lost in their dogmatic slumbers.

ADDENDUM: I should note that Strawson does sometimes call his version of Russell's position "real materialism," and that Lockwood has occasionally said similar things. By contrast, Grover Maxwell, another Russellian who influenced both Lockwood and Strawson, repudiates any kind of "materialist" label even though his views are more or less identical to theirs. And Chalmers sometimes characterizes his own variation on Russellianism as a kind of "dualism"! So, the terminology here can get confusing. The point is that all of these authors reject materialism in the standard (Smart, Armstrong, early Putnam, Davidson, Dennett, Churchland, et al.) sense.

The less Rey knows, the less he knows it

Apropos my post on straw man arguments in the philosophy of religion, reader Bobcat calls my attention to this article by philosopher of mind Georges Rey, which purports to show that theism, when held to by anyone with at least “a standard Anglo-European high school education,” necessarily involves self-deception. And for Rey, that includes – indeed, maybe especially includes – highly intelligent theists who happen to be philosophers. Rey starts out by acknowledging that he is “not a professional philosopher of religion and has no special knowledge of theology.” With that much, anyway, the reader can agree, for Rey’s article proves it conclusively. Why Rey thought himself nevertheless qualified to open his mouth on this subject is another question entirely, and the answer is by no means clear. I’ll leave it to those interested in plumbing the psychological depths of academic blowhards to consider whether self-deception might be a factor.

Now, my longtime readers know that I am loath ever to indulge in polemics, but I’m afraid in this one case the temptation is simply too great to bear. For Rey’s article is not merely mistaken on this or that point. It is not merely bad. As the kids would say, it totally sucks. Indeed, although it is of course better written than the average freshman term paper, it is even less well-informed. I apologize to those whose tender ears find it hard to bear such un-collegial harshness (not that Rey himself gives a hang about that vis-à-vis his theistic colleagues). All I can say in my defense is: Read the thing yourself and see.

Rey is not an unintelligent man. Indeed, he is a very intelligent man, and anyone who wants to understand the clever ways in which contemporary materialists attempt to surmount the many difficulties facing their position would do well to read his work in the philosophy of mind. It’s mostly wrong, of course, but still intelligent and worth reading. The article in question is another story. It is an object lesson in how ignorance coupled with arrogance can lead an intelligent man to make a fool of himself. (Not that another one is needed in this Age of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens.)

If any reader out there wants to evaluate Rey’s efforts at amateur psychoanalysis, knock yourself out. I’m more interested in the excuse Rey thinks he has for indulging in psychoanalysis in the first place. Why accuse even educated theists of being, not merely mistaken, but self-deceived? The reason, Rey repeats ad nauseam, is that the traditional arguments for God’s existence are obviously fallacious, are so bad that he simply can’t believe anyone takes them seriously, commit “blatant sophistries,” etc. Yet surprisingly, he says very little about exactly what the problems with them are supposed to be. As the impatient reader sifts through the trash talk and psychobabble in search of substance, he soon finds, first, that what Rey actually has to say about the arguments probably wouldn’t fill one side of an index card; and second, that it’s all wrong anyway.

One problem with Rey’s discussion of the arguments (such as it is) is the extremely crude, anthropomorphic conception of God he is working with. Like many atheists, he supposes that God is, like us, a “mental being” (as Rey awkwardly puts it) only “not subject to ordinary physical limitations.” Start with a human being, and abstract away the body parts. Then abstract away the limits on knowledge, and expand the range of sensory experience to include immediate perception of every corner of physical reality. Imagine that every experience of willing something is followed by the realization of that which is willed – for example, wanting the Red Sea to part is followed by the parting of the Red Sea, wanting a leper healed is followed by skin returning to normal, and so on. Throw in as well the tendency always to want to do what is right. Etc. The result is something like a super-duper Cartesian immaterial substance with a cosmic Boy Scout’s merit badge, far grander than any of the objects (material or immaterial) familiar from our experience, but differing from them in degree rather than kind.

It is no surprise that, with this “working model” of God, Rey and other atheists think Him comparable to Zeus, gremlins, ghosts, etc. To be sure, something like this conception – a conception Brian Davies has labeled “theistic personalism” and others have called “neo-theism” – has (unfortunately) featured, at least implicitly, in some recent work in philosophy of religion. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the God of classical theism – of Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, Leibniz, and countless others. It has absolutely nothing to do with the God of the great Christian creeds or the great Church Councils. That God is not “a being” among others, not even a really grand one, but Being Itself or Pure Act. Concepts like power, knowledge, goodness, intellect, will, etc. do apply to Him, but not (as in theistic personalism) in a univocal sense but rather in an analogous sense (where “analogy” is to be understood not on the model of Paley-style “arguments from analogy” – which in fact apply terms to God and to us in univocal senses – but rather in terms of Aquinas’s famous doctrine of analogy). And attributions of power, knowledge, will etc. to God are all necessarily informed by the doctrine of divine simplicity. Our philosophical conception of Him is not modeled on human beings or on any other created thing; rather, it is arrived at via reflection on what is entailed by something’s being that which accounts for the existence of anything at all.

Rey, it is evident, knows absolutely nothing of all this, nothing of the radical distinction between the classical theistic conception of God and every other conception. But this is not some mere family dispute between theists, something that can be ignored for purposes of making general claims about religion. If you don’t know how classical theism differs from everything else, and in particular from the anthropomorphic conceptions of God underlying tiresome pop atheist comparisons to Zeus and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, then you simply do not and cannot understand the arguments of Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al., and cannot understand the claims of Christianity as it has historically understood itself. It will not do to pretend that what your Uncle Bob or some TV evangelist has said about God can serve well enough as research for an argument against religion, any more than Uncle Bob’s or the evangelist’s conception of quantum mechanics would suffice as a “backgrounder” for an assault on modern physics.

So, Rey simply doesn’t know the first thing about what the people he dismisses as in thrall to self-deception even mean when they talk about God. That’s one problem. The other problem is that he evidently has no idea either of how the main traditional arguments for God’s existence are supposed to work. He is, for example, obviously beholden to the tiresome canard that defenders of the Cosmological Argument never explain why a First Cause would have to have the various divine attributes (unity, intellect, omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, etc.). This, I dare say, is an infallible sign of incompetence vis-à-vis the subject at hand; whenever you are reading an atheist writer who makes this common but preposterous claim, you can safely let out a contemptuous chuckle, close the book, and waste no further time with him, because you can be morally certain that he does not know what he is talking about.

As anyone who has actually cracked either the Summa Theologiae or Summa Contra Gentiles knows, Aquinas (to take just one example) actually devotes literally hundreds of pages of rigorous and painstaking argumentation to deriving the various divine attributes. (He does so in several other works as well.) Similarly detailed argumentation for the divine attributes can be found throughout the Scholastic tradition, in Leibniz and in Clarke, in more recent writers like Garrigou-Lagrange, and indeed throughout the 2,300-year old literature on the traditional theistic arguments beginning with Plato and Aristotle. The allegation that “Even if there’s a First Cause, no one’s ever shown why it would have to be all-powerful, all-knowing, etc.” is simply an urban legend. It persists only because hack atheists like Rey tend to read only other hack atheists, or read serious theistic writers only in tiny snippets ripped from context. (To judge Aquinas’s case for God’s existence by reading only the Five Ways – which were never meant to be anything more than an “executive summary” of arguments whose details are developed elsewhere – is like judging the arguments presented in Rey’s book Contemporary Philosophy of Mind by reading only the analytical table of contents.)

Rey confidently tells us that “the one argument” that tries to show that God “has a mind” – the correct way to put it would be to say that there is in God something analogous to intellect – is, “of course,” Paley’s design argument. But Aquinas’s Fifth Way is another – rather well-known – argument that takes the divine intellect as its focus. Like Richard Dawkins and most other atheists, Rey probably assumes that the Fifth Way is a mere riff on the basic design argument idea, but if so then he is once again just manifesting his ignorance, since the arguments could not be more different. Design arguments take for granted a mechanistic conception of nature, while the Fifth Way appeals to final causes; design arguments are probabilistic, while the Fifth Way is a strict demonstration; design arguments don’t claim to prove the existence of the God of classical theism, while the Fifth Way does just that; design arguments focus on complexity and especially the complexity manifest in living things, while the Fifth Way is not especially interested in either; design arguments have to deal somehow with objections based on evolutionary theory, while the truth or falsity of evolution is utterly irrelevant to the Fifth Way; and so forth. (See The Last Superstition and my forthcoming book Aquinas for the details.)

And then, as I have already indicated, the historically most important versions of the other main theistic arguments (e.g. Aquinas’s, Leibniz’s, or Clarke’s cosmological arguments, Anselm’s ontological argument), when fully worked out, all also claim to show that there cannot fail to be something analogous to intellect in God (alongside the other divine attributes). The thing is, you have to actually read them to know this. Pretty tough break for Uncurious Georges, I know, but believe it or not, philosophy of religion is a little like philosophy of mind in requiring actual research now and again.

As always with these things, it just gets worse the more ink is spilt. “Again, I’m not a scholar of theology,” Rey reminds us, before opining on theology; “however, I’m willing to wager that few of the details [theologians] discuss are of the evidential sort that we ordinarily expect of ordinary claims about the world.” And then – hold on to your hats – he actually gives “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” as an example.

[Cue Don Martin sound effect.]

One wonders whether Rey was the sort of high school geek who desperately tried to prove his athletic bona fides to his locker room tormenters by bragging about all the “touchdowns” he used to make in Little League.

Whatever the answer to that, the all-grown-up Rey can’t resist one more self-inflicted wedgie. On the heels of his learned allusion to medieval angelology, he earnestly considers the question of whether theologians might be guilty of “intellectual sloth.”

Self-awareness, thy name is not Georges Rey.

Well, I’ve wasted enough time on this, so let me close with the following thought. Suppose someone started out an article on why all materialists are necessarily engaged in self-deception by saying “I’m not a professional philosopher of mind and have no special knowledge of the materialist literature. But here goes anyway…” Now, how do you think Rey would…

Ah, never mind.

Quine as a conservative

For newer readers and others who might be interested, I will occasionally be reprinting some old posts from the now defunct Conservative Philosopher and Right Reason group blogs. Here is a piece that originally appeared in two parts on The Conservative Philosopher, on January 31, 2005 and February 9, 2005 respectively. (I have edited slightly to remove some now irrelevant references reflecting the time they were first posted. Not that anyone would notice.)

Part I:

W.V. Quine was unquestionably one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Almost the entirety of his body of work was in areas of philosophy far removed from ethics and politics: logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, epistemology and metaphysics. But he also happened to be politically conservative, and very occasionally he would express his conservatism in print. Two examples are the entries on “Freedom” and “Tolerance” in his book Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary. They are, like nearly everything Quine wrote, elegant in style and well worth reading.

Quine’s conservatism raises interesting questions about the relationship between a philosopher’s metaphysical commitments and his ethical and political commitments. It would be hard to deny that the sort of commonsense metaphysics associated with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas had a bearing on the conservative character of their moral and political views, or that the radicalism of Marx’s social theory was at least in part a consequence of his brand of materialism. Yet while Quine’s metaphysical position was among the most radically revisionist of any that philosophers have produced – physicalist, behaviorist, eliminativist – his political views were, again, conservative.

It is hard to think offhand of too many parallels in the history of philosophy. It is true, of course, that Hume’s far from commonsense epistemology and metaphysics also went hand in hand with a kind of conservatism, but then again Hume was also inclined to emphasize how irrelevant the results of abstruse philosophical speculation were to ordinary life, and inclined also halfway to give back to common sense with his right hand, via an appeal to the primacy of “custom and habit,” what his left hand had taken away via philosophical criticism. Quine, committed as he was to scientism, seemed less inclined then Hume to think that common sense would remain more or less intact regardless of the findings of scientists and philosophers.

There is a very widespread belief these days that ethics can be done more or less without paying attention to metaphysics. I think this is completely mistaken, and that most of the philosophers who hold this belief, being almost always metaphysical naturalists of one stripe or another and rarely having their naturalism challenged, have lost sight of how deeply they are themselves committed to what is really just one metaphysical position among others, and of how deeply it has in fact permeated their moral theorizing.

I also think that it is no accident that naturalistic philosophers tend toward unconservative positions in ethics and politics. Naturalists have a tendency to suppose that the methods of the natural sciences are the right models to apply to the study of the human world. Since the history of natural science has often been a history of proving common sense wrong where matters far removed from everyday human life are concerned, the expectation understandably forms that common sense is likely to be wrong where the human world is concerned as well. This is an attitude Michael Levin has called the “skim milk” fallacy – the fallacy of assuming that “things are never what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream” – and there are good Burkean and Hayekian reasons for thinking that it is indeed a fallacy. It is, Burkeans and Hayekians would argue, unlikely that deep errors about human nature would persist within common sense, given how crucial a right understanding of the human world is to the success of everyday human intercourse, and even to survival.

(I should qualify these remarks by saying that it is the scientistic brand of naturalism, which is the kind predominant in contemporary philosophy, that I claim has the implications I am speaking of here. The sort of naturalism associated with Wittgenstein, concerned as it is, in its way, to defend common sense, is very different, and for obvious reasons more conducive to a conservative position in ethics and politics.)

Whether or not I am right about all this, Quine would seem at least on the surface to be a counterexample to the claims I just made. But I think that in fact he is not, if only because his philosophical and political views seem to have had absolutely nothing to do with one another, even on a subconscious level. As far as I can tell, Quine’s philosophical and political thinking were conducted in two different and hermetically sealed off compartments of his mind. Even with Hume, one can detect a clear connection between his metaphysics and epistemology on the one hand and his politics on the other: the centrality of custom and habit in the former finds a parallel in the conservatism of the latter. There seems to be no similar systematic connection in Quine’s thinking.

Far more than other contemporary naturalists, Quine apparently never so much as entertained the possibility that conservative political views might sit uneasily with such a radical metaphysical position. Most naturalistic philosophers end up at least subtly re-conceiving the world of everyday human life along naturalistic metaphysical lines, and this influences they way they think about ethics, whether they realize it or not. Naturalism tells them we’re just clever animals, or “machines made of meat,” or whatever, and at some level the ethical theory reflects that. The average human being doesn’t think this way, of course, and indeed the average naturalistic philosopher doesn’t think this way either in day-to-day life. It is simply too inhuman a way to think about human beings to be possible to sustain for very long. Like the Humean skeptic, the naturalistic philosopher, once he exits his study, leaves the revisionist metaphysics behind and deals with other human beings as creatures having souls (whether you interpret “soul” in the traditional metaphysical sense or in a more figurative Wittgensteinian sense). Unfortunately, though, most naturalistic philosophers seem to write on ethics and politics while they’re still in the study. Quine did not. His conservatism was apparently not an intellectual one, but a matter of ingrained temperament. (That definitely does not mean it was an irrational one, as every conservative understands.)

That’s my armchair speculation anyway, for what it is worth. In any event, whatever one thinks of Quine’s metaphysical position – and for my part, I cannot think of a metaphysical position I am less sympathetic with – it is surely as powerfully developed and articulated as any in the history of philosophy, and deserving of close study. Some philosophers regard it as a brilliant drawing out of the surprising truths implicit in the physicalistic premises Quine starts with; others (like John Searle, and me) regard it as a reductio ad absurdum of those premises. Either way, Quine cannot be ignored.

Part II:

Here are some relevant quotes from Quine’s writings, which should give a sense of his political views.

From Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary:

“Freedom from the trammels of an age outworn can mean quandaries at every turn, for want of a rule, a precedent, a role model, even a vivid self-image” (p. 68)

“Freedom to remodel society, gained by revolution, can be a delicate affair. Society up to that point, if stable at all, was stable in consequence of the gradual combining and canceling of forces and counter-forces, some planned and some not. The new and untested plan shares all the fallibility of the planner, this young newcomer in a complex world. Maybe the new order bids fair to overprivilege a hitherto underprivileged group; maybe it will presently prove to underprivilege all. It is delicate, and delicacy is seldom the revolutionary’s forte. The constraint imposed by social tradition is the gyroscope that helps to keep the ship of state on an even keel.” (p. 69)

“Democratic regard for civil rights and due process affords a shelter for subversive efforts of enemy agents and for seditious activities of native sympathizers. An enemy despot can send his fifth column through democracy's open gates while keeping his own gates secured. Some restraints on democratic tolerance are thus vital to the survival of democracy. Excessive restraints, on the other hand, would be an abdication of democracy. Such, then, is the delicate balance of tolerance.” (pp. 206-7)

“Moral censorship down the years had monitored an ill-defined limit of legitimacy that was regularly pressed, tested, and moderately violated by the literary, artistic, and popular forces for prurience. Burlesque skits had made merry with sexual themes by double entendre and thinly veiled allusion that brought down the house. Press the bounds, however narrowly drawn, and titillation was assured. Withdrawing the bounds did away with the titillation. So far, perhaps, so good; but this was the least of the effects. Pornography burgeoned, ready with ever more extravagant lures lest custom stale. Also apart from such excesses the public prints, films, and broadcasts relaxed their restraints to a marked degree. General standards of taste in speech and behavior could then be counted on to evolve or dissolve apace, dictated as they are by the public prints, films, and broadcasts. It was a bewilderingly abrupt relaxation of the restraints of centuries, and no small achievement on the part of vocal students, liberal English teachers, and a few docile jurists. There were deeper social forces, also, that have yet to be understood. One conspicuous factor, superficial still, was the widespread spirit of rebellion induced by the Vietnam war, when sympathy with the enemy was open and defiant. Insofar, tolerance of the sort that we first considered played a role: tolerance of subversion.” (pp. 207-8)

From “Paradoxes of Plenty” in Theories and Things:

“It was in the increased admittance and financial support of students that the new prodigality [of the post-war university] came its most resounding cropper. Marginal students came on in force, many of them with an eye on the draft, and they soon were as bored with college as they had been with school. In their confusion and restlessness they were easy marks for demagogues, who soon contrived a modest but viable terror. A rather sketchy terror sufficed, in the event, to bring universities to their knees.” (p. 197)

From The Time of My Life: An Autobiography:

“[At the time of the student demonstrations at Harvard] feeling ran high in the faculty between a radical caucus at one edge, which backed the vocal students, and a conservative caucus at the other edge, in which Oscar Handlin played a leading role and I an ineffectual one. Attendance at faculty meetings exceeded all bounds; we had to move them from the faculty room in University Hall to the Loeb Theater. In previous years I had seldom attended, but now duty called. At one of these crowded faculty meetings, two shabby black undergraduates demanded to be admitted and heard. Henry Rosovsky had done a conscientious job of devising a program of Black Studies that might accommodate the new racism without serious abdication of scholarly standards; but the two black youths demanded more radical provisions, on pain, they hinted, of fire and destruction. The serried ranks of faculty, flecked with eminent scholars and Nobel laureates, were cowed – a bare majority of them – by the two frail, bumbling figures and voted as directed. What price scholarly standards, what price self-respect?” (pp. 352-3)

“At Syracuse in May 1981 I received an honorary degree, my twelfth, along with Alexander Haig, who gave the address. Radicals dressed in bloodied nuns’ garb protested our alleged aggression in Salvador and tried to silence him, but he coped admirably and I liked his thoughts on public policy.” (p. 452)

Computers, minds, and Aristotle

The recently published Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions, edited by Luciano Floridi, is a collection of quasi-interviews with prominent philosophers, cognitive scientists, and computer scientists. (The same five questions were sent to each of the contributors, who were asked to respond to them either question-by-question or in the form of an informal essay. Hence my label “quasi-interviews.”) Several of the contributions are particularly interesting from an Aristotelian point of view.

As readers of The Last Superstition know, I argue there that the “computationalist” view that the mind should be thought of as “software” run by the “hardware” of the brain is either incoherent or (if it is to be made coherent) implicitly committed to a broadly Aristotelian metaphysics. And in neither case can it vindicate a materialist conception of human nature. One reason for this is that the key concepts required to spell out this position – “software,” “program,” “information,” “algorithm,” and so forth (all of which are somehow to be understood as purely physical properties alongside mass, electric charge, and the like, if the materialist is going to make hay out of the view) – are suffused with intentionality, the “directedness” of a thing toward something beyond itself. Now on at least one common interpretation of the computationalist view, intentionality is among the features of the mind the view is supposed to explain – in which case it cannot coherently appeal to notions which presuppose the existence of intentionality. Even those versions of computationalism which do not claim to explain intentionality face the problem that nothing like intentionality is supposed to exist at the level of physics, at least given the mechanistic conception of nature materialists are implicitly committed to. As Jerry Fodor puts it in Psychosemantics:

“I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will perhaps appear on their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep.” (p. 97)

Hence the notions in question are simply not available to a consistent materialist. And if a materialist nevertheless digs in his heels and insists that “information,” “algorithms,” and the like really are somehow intrinsic to the physical world, then he will in effect have conceded that something like Aristotelian final causes exist after all, and thus abandoned materialism. For if purely physical processes embody genuine “information,” follow “algorithms,” etc., then that entails that of their nature (by virtue of their form, as Aristotelians would say) they point beyond themselves as toward a goal, after the manner of a final cause. (“Information” is information about something; an “algorithm” has an inherent end the rules it embodies are meant to lead to; and so on.) Materialists fail to see this because, like most modern philosophers, they have only the vaguest idea of what Aristotelian formal and final causes are, and labor under all sorts of crude misconceptions (e.g. that for a physical process to have a final cause is for it to seek a goal in something like a conscious way).

For the details, see The Last Superstition (especially pp. 235-47). It was interesting, though, to see that at least one contributor to Philosophy of Computing and Information seems to have come to something like the conclusion I defend in the book. Specifically, the neuroscientist Valentino Braitenberg says:

“The concept of information, properly understood, is fully sufficient to do away with popular dualistic schemes invoking spiritual substances distinct from anything in physics. This is Aristotle redivivus, the concept of matter and form united in every object of this world, body and soul, where the latter is nothing but the formal aspect of the former. The very term ‘information’ clearly demonstrates its Aristotelian origin in its linguistic root.” (Floridi, p. 16)

In other words, to describe some physical process as inherently embodying “information,” while it does rule out dualism of the Cartesian sort, nevertheless is not consistent with the crude materialist claim that “matter is all that exists”; for it is implicitly to accept something like Aristotle’s notion of formal cause (precisely, I would add, because it is implicitly to accept something like his notion of final cause). As I have put it in earlier posts, the neural processes underlying e.g. a given action are merely the material-cum-efficient causal side of an event of which the thoughts and intentions of the agent are the formal-cum-final causes, to allude to all of the famous Aristotelian four causes. (I develop the point a little bit in this review of the psychologist Jerome Kagan’s An Argument for Mind.)

To be sure, Braitenberg’s own claims are only suggestive, and I do not claim he would accept everything I say about this issue in my book (much less everything, or anything, else I say there!) But he clearly sees that the standard materialist assumptions are faulty, as do some other contributors to the Floridi volume. Brian Cantwell-Smith’s chapter, which is among the more lengthy and philosophically substantial contributions, is very good on the deep conceptual problems underlying much work done in this area. Key concepts are ill-defined, and unjustified slippage between or conflation of various possible senses of crucial theoretical terms (including “computation” itself) is rife. But the key problem, as he sees, is what he calls the “300-year rift between matter and mattering” that opened up with Descartes (p. 46) – that is to say, the early moderns’ conception of matter as inherently devoid of meaning or significance. Cantwell-Smith calls for a new metaphysics to “heal” this rift (being apparently unaware of, or at least not reconsidering as Braitenberg does, the old Aristotelian metaphysics the rejection of which was precisely what opened up the rift in the first place).

In his own chapter, Hubert Dreyfus, summarizing themes that have long characterized his work, also criticizes “Descartes’ understanding of the world as a set of meaningless facts to which the mind assigned what Descartes called values” (p. 80). Attempts to find some computational mechanism by means of which the brain assigns significance or meaning to the world always end up surreptitiously presupposing significance or meaning, and attempts to avoid this result tend to lead to a vicious regress. (This, as Dreyfus argues, is what ultimately underlies the well-known “frame problem” in Artificial Intelligence research and the “binding problem” in neuroscience.) As is well-known, Dreyfus makes good use of the work of writers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in criticizing AI, and in particular the notion that we can make sense of the idea of a world inherently devoid of significance for us. But this phenomenological point does not answer the metaphysical question of how and why the world, and ourselves as part of the world, have significance or meaning in the first place. For that – as I argue in The Last Superstition – we need to turn to the Aristotelian tradition, to the concepts of formal and final causation rejection of which set modern thought, and modern civilization, on its long intellectual and moral downward slide.

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.

The interaction problem

Aristotle and the Scholastic tradition influenced by him famously held that to understand a thing required knowing each of its four causes: its material cause, the stuff out of which it is made; its formal cause, the specific form or essence that stuff has taken on, and which makes it the kind of thing it is; its efficient cause, that which brought it into existence; and its final cause, the end or purpose toward which it is directed. Modern thought is largely defined by its rejection of two of Aristotle's four causes. For the moderns, there are no such things as substantial forms or fixed essences, and there are no ends or purposes in nature. There are just brute material elements related by purposeless, meaningless, mechanical chains of cause and effect.

As I have emphasized in my series of posts on dualism, this “mechanical” conception of nature, insofar as it stripped matter of anything smacking of either goal-directedness or sensible qualities as common sense understands them, and relocated these features into the mind, more or less automatically entailed a Cartesian form of dualism on which intentionality and qualia are immaterial as a matter of conceptual necessity. But it also automatically entailed that this form of dualism would suffer from the notorious “interaction problem.”

For the moderns, all causation gets reduced to what the Aristotelians called efficient causation; that is to say, for A to have a causal influence on B is for A either to bring B into being or at least in some way to bring into existence some modification of B. Final causality is ruled out; hence there is no place in modern thought for the idea that B might play an explanatory role relative to A insofar as generating B is the end or goal toward which A is directed. Formal causality is also ruled out; there is no question for the moderns of a material object’s being (partially) explained by reference to the substantial form it instantiates. We are supposed instead to make reference only to patterns of efficient causal relations holding between basic material elements (atoms, or corpuscles, or quarks, or whatever).

Thus, if the mind considered as immaterial is to have any explanatory role with respect to bodily behavior, this can only be by way of some pattern of efficient causal relations – to put it crudely, in terms of a Cartesian immaterial substance (or perhaps various immaterial properties) “banging” into the material substance (or material properties) of the brain like the proverbial billiard ball. How exactly this is supposed to work is notoriously difficult to explain. We’ve got two independently existing objects (or two independently existing sets of properties) somehow interacting the way physical particles or billiard balls do, or perhaps the way waves or fields of force do – except that one of these objects (or sets of properties) is utterly devoid of any of the material features that make it possible for something to count as a particle, billiard ball, wave, or field of force. Add to this considerations like the conservation of energy and interaction between the material and immaterial realms comes to seem ruled out in principle by our current understanding of the way the material world works.

But from an Aristotelian-Scholastic point of view, this whole picture of the mind-body relationship is hopelessly wrongheaded from start to finish. It is wrong to think of the soul (of which the intellect is for Aristotelians but a part, not the whole) and the body as independent objects in the first place. The soul is rather a form that informs the matter of the body and the body is the matter which is informed. As with the form and matter of a stone, tree, or earthworm, what we have here are not two substances interacting via efficient causation, but rather two metaphysical components of one substance related by formal causation. As the form of the stone is to the matter making up the stone, the form of the tree to the matter making up the tree, and the form of the earthworm to the matter that makes up the earthworm, so too is the human soul to the human body. There is in principle no such thing as the matter of a stone, tree, or earthworm apart from the form of a stone, tree, or earthworm respectively, and no such thing as the form of any of these things existing apart from their matter. The form and matter don’t “interact” as if they were two distinct objects; rather, the form constitutes the matter as the (one) kind of object it is in the first place.

Similarly, there is in principle no such thing as the matter of a living human body without a human soul and there is in principle no such thing as a human soul which is not the soul of some body. (This does not entail that the soul cannot survive the death of the body, only that it could not have existed in the first place unless it was united to some body; but this is a topic that can be bracketed off for present purposes.) The soul doesn’t “interact” with the body considered as an independently existing object, but rather constitutes the matter of the human body as a human body in the first place, as its formal (as opposed to efficient) cause.

As I move my fingers across the keyboard, then, what is occurring is not the transfer of energy (or whatever) from some Cartesian immaterial substance to a material one (my brain), which sets up a series of neural events that are from that point on “on their own” as it were, with no further action required of the soul. There is just one substance, namely me, though a substance the understanding of which requires taking note of each of its formal-, material-, final- and efficient-causal aspects. To be sure, my action counts as writing a blog post rather than (say) undergoing a muscular spasm in part because of the specific pattern of neural events, muscular contractions, and so forth underlying it. But only in part. Yet that does not mean that there is an entirely separate set of events occurring in a separate substance that somehow influences, from outside as it were, the goings on in the body. Rather, the neuromuscular processes are by themselves only the material-cum-efficient causal aspect of a single event of which my thoughts and intentions are the formal-cum-final causal aspect. There is simply no way fully and accurately to describe the one event in question without making reference to each of these aspects. Just as there is no such thing as the matter of a stone or tree apart from the form of a stone or tree, there is no such thing as the “physical” side of my action apart from the “mental” side. To make reference to the “physical” side alone would simply be to leave out half of the story, and indeed the most important half, just as describing the word “cat” in a way that makes reference to the shapes of the letters, the chemicals in the ink in which it is written, and so forth, while never saying anything about the meaning of the word, would leave out the most crucial part of that story.

As psychologist Jerome Kagan emphasizes in his recent book An Argument for Mind (my review of which can be found here) the trouble with trying to pick out some particular pattern of neural or other physiological events and identify some mental event with it (or in any other way attempt entirely to explain the mental in terms of the physiological) is that the same physiological pattern can underlie different mental events and the same mental event can be associated with different physiological patterns. This is a problem well-known to students of the history of the mind-brain identity theory (cf. Davidson’s anomalous monism), though it seems to me that many philosophers do not appreciate just how deep the problem goes, and how thoroughly devastating it is to materialism. As writers like James F. Ross have argued, at least some of our mental states are determinate in a way that no material process or set of processes can be even in principle, so that the hope of making mental states out to be identical with or supervenient upon physical states is an illusion. Without formal and final causes, it is inevitable that the project of assigning some specific, determinate mental content to this or that material substrate will come to grief. (Thus does the interaction problem arise in a new form even for materialists themselves, under the guise of the “mental causation problem.”)

Hence there can, on an Aristotelian-Scholastic view, be no question of some uniquely identifiable set of physiological events with which an independently identifiable set of mental events needs somehow to be correlated in efficient causal terms. There is just the one event of writing the blog post, of which the formal, material, efficient, and final causal components are irreducible aspects. The question of "interaction," in the relevant sense, simply cannot even get off the ground. As is so often the case with objections raised against modern defenses of traditional philosophical views (such as theism and natural law ethics), the interaction problem facing Cartesian forms of dualism arises precisely because these forms of dualism are modern, precisely because they take on board certain modern (especially mechanistic and/or nominalistic) assumptions which they (like theists and natural law theorists) ought instead to repudiate.

I have said much more about all of this in Philosophy of Mind and (especially) The Last Superstition, and I will say more about some of these issues in further posts to come in my series on brief arguments for dualism. The point for now is just to highlight that what we have here is yet another respect (among a great many others that I describe in detail in TLS) in which the early modern philosophers’ transition away from Aristotelianism to a mechanical understanding of nature constituted not an advance but a regression, a willful forgetting of crucial distinctions and categories the drawing and elucidation of which had been one of the great achievements of Scholasticism, and a conceptual impoverishment that inevitably created problems rather than solved them. The interaction problem was by no means the least, or last, of these problems.

Some brief arguments for dualism, Part III

In the previous post in this series, I argued that the “mechanistic” conception of the natural world adopted by the early modern philosophers more or less entails a kind of dualism insofar as its banishment of final causes from the material world effectively makes intentionality necessarily immaterial. Intentionality, of course, is one of two features of the mind to which contemporary philosophers of mind have paid special attention. The other is consciousness, and in particular the “qualia” that are said to make consciousness uniquely difficult to explain in material terms. There is a good reason for this difficulty – indeed, impossibility – and it is the same reason why intentionality is impossible to explain in materialistic terms. It lies in the mechanistic conception of matter itself.

The early modern philosophers and scientists were obsessed with quantification. There were several reasons for this, one of them being their desire to reorient intellectual efforts toward the improvement of life in this world and away from the otherworldliness of the ancients and medievals. This entailed a new emphasis on technology and more generally on the control and exploitation of the natural world in the interests of bettering man’s material condition. Since quantification would facilitate this, those aspects of nature that could be described in purely mathematical terms took on a special importance, and those which could not came to seem, from the point of view of this new, worldly approach to learning, irrelevant at best and a distraction at worst. Thus did final causes, hidden powers, substantial forms and the like go out the window. So too did the qualitative aspects of nature. Colors, odors, tastes, feels, sounds, and the like, at least as understood by common sense, vary from observer to observer – think of old philosophical chestnuts like the room temperature water that feels warm to one hand and cool to the other, colorblindness, and so forth – making them a poor fit for a science looking to make nature subject to human prediction and control. Out the window with them too, then. The physical world would be redefined as comprised of colorless, odorless, tasteless particles in motion; and color, temperature, and the like would be redefined entirely in terms of the quantifiable relations holding between these particles (e.g. heat and cold in terms of molecular motion). What about color, odor, taste, and so forth as common sense understands them? They in turn were redefined as entirely mind-dependent “secondary qualities” (or rather, ideas of secondary qualities), the ancestors of the contemporary philosopher’s concept of qualia. On the view in question, they do not exist in the physical world as it is in itself, but only in our perceptual representation of that world.

It should be obvious, then, how, as with intentionality, the notion that qualia are incapable of materialistic explanation is not some desperate attempt to avoid the implications of modern science, but is rather precisely a consequence of modern science. The mechanistic conception of matter that underlies science (or rather underlies what, since the 17th century, is allowed to count as science) itself entails that qualia (as we call them today) are immaterial or non-physical. Many early modern thinkers – Descartes, Cudworth, and Locke, for example – saw this, which is part of the reason they were dualists. Given the mechanistic conception of matter, these thinkers concluded that “secondary qualities,” “sensory qualities,” “qualia,” or whatever else you want to call them are necessarily immaterial, precisely because matter got (re)defined by the mechanical philosophy by contrast with these qualities.

Some contemporary naturalists – Joseph Levine, Thomas Nagel, and John Searle, for example – have more or less recognized this, acknowledging that there is nothing more to the contemporary materialist’s concept of matter (which derives from the 17th century “mechanical” conception) other than its contrast with the “qualitative” (and intentional) features of our experience of the world. Precisely for this reason, all three of these thinkers have (in their different ways) regarded modern materialism as deeply conceptually problematic, though they have also stopped short of embracing dualism. But other contemporary naturalists – Dennett and the Churchlands, for example, not to mention countless lesser lights of the sort who write crude atheist pamphlets and pop neuroscience books – cluelessly suggest that there is no good reason to think that the mind will fail to yield to the same sort of reductive explanation in terms of which everything else in nature has been accounted for.

In fact there is a very good reason why the mind should be uniquely resistant to such “explanation,” and it precisely because everything that doesn’t fit the mechanistic-cum-quantificational picture of the natural world has not been “explained” by science at all, but simply swept under the rug of the mind and treated as a mere “projection.” This is true in particular of anything in nature that seems to smack of final causality or to have an irreducible qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) character. It is conceptually impossible that the mind itself should be “explained” in the same way – that is to say, by further sweeping – which is why modern philosophy has a “mind-body problem” of a sort that did not exist before the mechanistic revolution, and why all materialist attempts to “explain” the mind are really disguised versions of eliminative materialism. The tiresome canard that “everything else has already been explained in materialistic terms” is thus a gigantic shell game, pure sleight of hand, a complete fraud from start to finish. (This is a theme I first explored in my book Philosophy of Mind and develop at length in The Last Superstition.)

In any case, we have now a third brief argument for dualism, which can be summarized as follows: Given the materialist’s own (mechanistic-cum-quantificational) conception of matter, colors, odors, tastes and the like as we experience them do not exist in the material world itself; but these qualities do exist in our perceptual representations of the material world; therefore, there exist features of the world – namely these sensory qualities or “qualia” that characterize our perceptual experiences – that are not material or physical features.

Obviously this argument raises questions about how these immaterial features relate to the material ones – Are they basic or emergent? How can they causally interact with the material ones? Do they inhere in a physical or a non-physical substance? – but the fact that it raises them has no bearing on the cogency of the argument itself. My own view is that the standard (Cartesian) dualist answers to such questions are problematic precisely because they buy into the same mechanistic conception of matter to which materialists are beholden. The right approach is to challenge that conception of matter, and return to the Aristotelian-Scholastic picture it replaced. But whether I am right about this or not is also irrelevant to the argument just given, which does not assume any Aristotelian-Scholastic premises, but simply draws out the consequences of the very conception of matter to which materialists themselves are committed. Whatever the deficiencies of Cartesian dualism, they do not approach the sheer incoherence and cluelessness of contemporary materialism.

Vallicella on intentionality and potentiality

Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella takes note of some important analogies between, on the one hand, the potentialities and dispositions we find in material world, and on the other hand, the intentionality that Brentano famously took to be the mark of the mental. I pretty much endorse everything he says; indeed, Bill’s observations dovetail nicely with some of what I say in the second of my recent posts on dualism.

Still, in reply to that post, Bill today comments:

“What is less clear to me is whether intentionality strictly speaking is to be found in the material world, as Ed suggests in the first paragraph, or whether it is only something analogous to intentionality, a sort of proto-intentionality, that is found in the material world. My recent defense of the Potentiality Argument against the moral acceptability of abortion commits me to holding that there are irreducible potentialities in nature below the level of conscious mind. And perhaps this should soften me up for hylomorphic dualism, which is Ed's preferred solution to the mind-body problem. But I find some difficulties with hylomorphic dualism.”

In response, I would say, first of all, that I suppose it depends on what one means by “intentionality.” The Brentano-inspired definition Bill makes use of in his original post makes reference only to “aboutness” or directedness toward an object. And if that is all that intentionality entails, then it seems to me that the position I endorse, but also the position Bill defends, does indeed imply that intentionality exists in the material world below the level of consciousness, wherever potentialities and dispositions (or “potencies” and “powers” as we Aristotelian Scholastics would say) are found. Interestingly, this is a view that is coming to be taken seriously by thinkers well outside the orbit of either the Aristotelian-Thomistic-Scholastic family of views to which I am partial, or the more general blend of traditional metaphysical views to which Bill is sympathetic. David Armstrong, for example, has suggested that dispositions manifest a kind of “proto-intentionality.” The late George Molnar argued that causal powers cannot be understood except as instances of what he called “physical intentionality,” to distinguish it from the sort of intentionality mental states exhibit. The biologist J. Scott Turner argues that we must attribute a kind of “intentionality” to certain biological processes if we are to make sense of the distinction between the normal development of an organism and aberrant growth patterns. These are just a few examples; and in my view they support the conclusion that the Aristotelian-Scholastic notions of potencies, powers, and final causes are not only defensible today, but are in fact surprisingly widely defended today, even if those doing the defending often do not realize (given differences in jargon and certain false assumptions about what the Scholastics believed) that that is what they are doing. (I discuss this issue at length in The Last Superstition.)

Of course, given its typical usage, the term “intentionality” does smack of mentality, so that the idea of “intentionality below the level of consciousness” might seem jarring. And the medievals from whom Brentano derived the term did indeed use “intentional” as a way of characterizing the objects of the intellect. (To describe the phenomena Bill, along with Armstrong, Molnar, Turner, et al. are interested in, the medievals would just have spoken of potencies, powers, final causes, and the like, not intentionality.) So it is certainly defensible to suggest that “intentionality” be reserved to describe the kind of directedness that is associated with grasping something with the intellect (as we do but physical objects manifesting potentialities, dispositions, etc. do not), and perhaps more generally to describe the sort of directedness that animals exhibit in their various states of conscious awareness (as even creatures without intellects can do). In short, it seems to me that if there is a difference between Bill and me over the existence of intentionality below the level of mind, it is probably a verbal one.

Regarding hylomorphic dualism (or “hylemorphic” dualism, as it is sometimes spelled), I suppose someone could in theory accept the existence of irreducible dispositions, final causes, and the like without going the whole hog for Aristotelian hylemorphism and the sort of dualism thinkers like Aquinas would build on it. So we can bracket that question off for now. Still, it does seem to me that once one concedes the existence of inherent potentialities, powers, etc., then since these potentialities, powers, and the like are the potentialities, powers, etc. of certain kinds of thing (such embryos and acorns, to use Bill’s examples), one is also well on the way to conceding something like Aristotelian essentialism, which brings the question of hylemorphism onto center stage. But, again, that is a matter for another time.

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.

Some brief arguments for dualism, Part I

It is unreasonable to expect even the best argument for a controversial philosophical position to be capable, in one fell swoop and all by itself, of convincing the most skeptical opponent – or, indeed, even to move him slightly in the direction of reconsidering his position. That is (usually, anyway) simply not how the human mind works. A dispute over some particular argument for the existence of God, mind-body dualism, or traditional sexual morality (to take just three examples) can reflect a tacit disagreement about fundamental metaphysical assumptions that is so deep and unconscious that the parties to the dispute (or at least one party, usually the skeptical or “naturalist” one) are barely aware that it exists at all, and often talk past each other as a result. What seems like an obvious objection to an argument can often constitute in reality a failure to see the point of the argument, and in particular a failure to see that what the argument does is precisely to call into question the intelligibility or rational justifiability of the objection itself. While the argument in question can in many cases be stated fairly simply and straightforwardly, pages and pages, indeed an entire book, might be required in order to set the stage so that its terms and basic assumptions are properly understood, and that countless point-missing objections might patiently be swept away like so much intellectual rubbish standing in the way of understanding.

Some common objections to dualism are like this. They falsely assume, for example, that any argument for dualism must be something analogous to a “God of the gaps” argument – a “soul of the gaps,” as it were – which seeks to exploit some current lacuna in our knowledge of the brain and to suggest that the “hypothesis” of an immaterial substance might explain what neuroscientists have so far been unable to. It is then objected that such an explanation would violate Ockham’s razor, that neuroscience has already “explained” x, y, and z and thus can be expected to explain everything else, etc. etc. I hear these objections frequently. They are often presented by people who mean well, and who are not entirely uninformed about some of the arguments presented by both materialists and anti-materialists in the philosophy of mind. But they nevertheless reflect a very shallow understanding of the debate. For the main arguments for dualism do not have this structure at all. They are not quasi-scientific “explanatory” “hypotheses” which “postulate” the existence of this or that as one way among others (albeit the most “probable”) of “accounting for” “the evidence.” They are intended rather as strict metaphysical demonstrations. They either prove conclusively that the mind is immaterial or they prove nothing. And if they work, there can be no question of the materialist looking for other possible ways to explain “the data.” For the existence of an immaterial mind, or an immaterial aspect to the mind, will, given such a proof, simply have itself to be taken as a piece of data for which any acceptable theory has to account.

Again, this doesn’t mean that one should judge such arguments based on one’s immediate reaction to a first reading; to prove something conclusively doesn’t mean to prove it instantly, to the immediate satisfaction of the most hostile and stubborn skeptic. Even properly understanding an argument, especially in metaphysics, can require a great deal of effort and sustained thought. Still, some dualist arguments are straightforward enough that at least their basic thrust can be put fairly succinctly, even if a complete treatment would require various further explanations of this or that premise or key concept. In this post and several succeeding ones I want to present some of these arguments, in as brief a form as possible. (Further elaboration can be found in my books Philosophy of Mind and The Last Superstition.)

One aspect of the mind that philosophers have traditionally considered particularly difficult to account for in materialist terms is intentionality, which is that feature of a mental state in virtue of which it means, is about, represents, points to, or is directed at something, usually something beyond itself. Your thought about your car, for example, is about your car – it means or represents your car, and thus “points to” or is “directed at” your car. In this way it is like the word “car,” which is about, or represents, cars in general. Notice, though, that considered merely as a set of ink marks or (if spoken) sound waves, “car” doesn’t represent or mean anything at all; it is, by itself anyway, nothing but a meaningless pattern of ink marks or sound waves, and acquires whatever meaning it has from language users like us, who, with our capacity for thought, are able to impart meaning to physical shapes, sounds, and the like.

Now the puzzle intentionality poses for materialism can be summarized this way: Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc. In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes.

You can, as I have implied, look at this as just a “puzzle” for materialism – one which might be solved by developing a complex functional analysis of mental states, or by framing materialism in terms of the concept of “supervenience” rather than identity or reduction, or whatever. Or you can see it as a very simple and straightforward statement of an objection that, while it can also be formulated in much more sophisticated and technical terms and in a way that takes account of and preempts the various objections materialists might try to raise against it, nevertheless goes to the core of the problem with materialism, and indeed shows why materialism cannot be true. This latter view is the one I endorse. I maintain that the problem for materialism just described is insuperable. It shows that a materialist explanation of the mind is impossible in principle, a conceptual impossibility. And the reason has in part to do with the concept of matter to which materialists themselves are at least implicitly committed. Some of the further posts in this series will develop this suggestion. Along the way we will see (among other things) that the common materialist claim that “everything else has been explained in materialist terms” is an urban legend, based on nothing more than conceptual sleight of hand coupled with historical ignorance. Stay tuned.