Jonah, over at the great new blog Bishop Berkeley, Bacon and Bird, has a few objections towards Williamson's externalism position. The first was from a few days ago and was a complaint about transparency.
The complaint is against Williamson's view of luminosity that I discussed a few days ago. Now in one way I think Jonah's position is a reasonable one. If you already are an internalist, you're not likely to be convinced by William's argument. At the same time though, I think William's approach to asking when a mental state ends is quite strong. The internalist can always say that as soon as you don't know you've left the state. But this, to my eyes at least, is the greatest weakness in the internalist position. Basically mental states are defined as conscious states. It is hard to see what differentiates them that isn't just a matter of definition. Others will disagree with me on that point, of course. I recognize it's very controversial. But I think what Williamson's argument gets at is that the internalist position isn't really brought about because of any phenomena but is more simply a matter of how we define our terms. The question is whether it is a useful definition. William's thought examples, especially those developed to criticism after the book, seem to provide compelling reasons to think it isn't. That's not to say it will convince the internalist, but it does force the internalist to turn to other issues in philosophy of language and mind for why they are internalists.
I should point out that most internalists I know are internalists for religious reasons. And that makes it far less likely that any appeal to phenomena will be convincing. But for the rest, I think there are a lot of issues here.
I'll confess that my own view of externalism arises precisely because of the confusion between conscious states and mental states. I think that what the internalist speaks about is simply consciosness of mental states. Further there is the old problem I've brought up several times about knowing other's mental states better than they do. David Rosenthal discusses this quite well.
We often know, without being told, what another person is thinking or feeling. And we sometimes know this even when that person actually is not aware, at least at first, of having those feelings or thoughts. There is nothing anomalous or puzzling about such cases. Even if it is only seldom that we know the mental states of others better than they do, when we do, the mental states in question are not degenerate or derivative examples of mentality. Moreover, conscious states are simply mental states we are conscious of being in. So when we are aware that somebody thinks or feels something that the person is initially unaware of thinking or feeling, those thoughts and feelings are at first mental states that are not also conscious states. These considerations suggest a way of looking at things on which we have no more reason to identify being a mental state with being a conscious state that we have to identify physical objects with physical objects that somebody sees. Consciousness is a feature of many mental states but, on this picture, it is not necessary or even central to a state's being a mental state. Consciousness seems central to mentality only because it is so basic to how we know our own mental states. But how we know about things is often an unreliable guide to their nature. (David Rosenthal, "Two Concepts of Consciousness.")
The problem is, as I see it, truly in philosophy of language and the issue of descriptions that are characteristically mental descriptions. Consider a mental state up for debate as being a mental state. Say being angry. Well, if we can truthfully describe someone as angry without them being conscious of being angry then we have a true statement about the mental that can't be explained by the internalist. Consider even pain. If we see someone flinching as they walk, we can reasonably infer that they are in pained. We might look to the pained expression on their face. But let's say that as they are walking that are deep in thought about the whole internalism/externalism issue. They aren't at that moment aware that they are in pain. So we are stuck with the odd situation of having truthful descriptions - descriptions the person in pain would even agree with - that somehow are simultaneously false.
The way out is to say that we ought distinguish between saying, "Jonah is in pain" from "Jonah is in the mental state of pain." But at this point it seems to me one starts doing violence to the language and our use of it. (Put more simply, it seems we assume we're talking about the mental but the internalist would deny it in a fashion that makes it difficult to know exactly what we're talking about)
The other approach is to say that Jonah, as he walks down the street apparently in pain, is momentarily aware of pain, but not continually aware of pain. But this gets us directly to Williamson's argument. When does Jonah's awareness of the pain end? Can Jonah say? Is Jonah aware of the end?
I don't deny that internalists have answers for these sorts of questions. In their more formal presentation they pop up in the various papers that are responses to Williamson's book. However one must really ask whether they are persuasive to someone without strong commitments to internalism. I don't think they are.
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