I mentioned a few days ago that Davidson's division between the mental and the physical ends up being a linguistic one. That is Davidson argues that intrinsically our mental talk is in terms of normed folk terms like belief, intent, etc. which can't be treated as scientific law. Further to develop a scientific language of the mental is to "change the topic" (Davidson's words) and thus cease talking about the mental. To me this is pretty shady. Both because it's unclear why a more scientific language of the mental is changing the topic whereas a shift from folk talk of mechanics to scientific talk of mechanics isn't. (Or maybe it is, who knows?) The point being that Davidson's critique of the mental is ultimately about the words we use and not the nature of the phenomena. This is unfortunate since, as I've often said, I find anomalous monism extremely compelling.
To me the more interesting approach to what I see as fulfilling the three premises of anomalous monism is that of Peirce. There thought and thus the mental is seen purely in terms of information processing. That is a sign is something that determines an interpretant by an object. The interpretant by it ability to engage in sign-processes is a quasi-mind. Peirce uses the term "quasi-mind" to distinguish this from what we think of as mind. But clearly he thinks that a hive of bees to the degree they can be modeled as a sign process is mind-like. A human mind may be vastly more complex but it is still in this essential way the same. So to be the mental is merely to be able to be determined by a sign. As such the universe as a whole is suffused with signs.
"Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. Consistently adhere to that unwarrantable denial, and you will be driven to some form of idealistic nominalism akin to Fichte's. Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there. But as there cannot be a General without Instances embodying it, so there cannot be thought without Signs. We must here give "Sign" a very wide sense, no doubt, but not too wide a sense to come within our definition. Admitting that connected Signs must have a Quasi-mind, it may further be declared that there can be no isolated sign. Moreover, signs require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-interpreter; and although these two are at one (i.e., are one mind) in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct. In the Sign they are, so to say, welded. Accordingly, it is not merely a fact of human Psychology, but a necessity of Logic, that every logical evolution of thought should be dialogic. You may say that all this is loose talk; and I admit that, as it stands, it has a large infusion of arbitrariness. It might be filled out with argument so as to remove the greater part of this fault; but in the first place, such an expansion would require a volume - and an uninviting one; and in the second place, what I have been saying is only to be applied to a slight determination of our system of diagrammatization, which it will only slightly affect; so that, should it be incorrect, the utmost certain effect will be a danger that our system may not represent every variety of non-human thought." ('Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism', CP 4:551)
The difference from Davidson is that Davidson appears to really reduce the mental to the physical (even if he denies epiphenomenalism - it's general agree that his arguments to avoid the rejection are problematic). That is the difference between the physical and the mental is ultimately one of the kind of words we use and the rules for those words. Peirce on the other hand can be seen as reducing the physical to the mental in a certain way. That way is semiotics.
One might argue that this is once again a linguistic distinction. To the degree that our talk is wrapped up in semiotics then we are talking about the mental. So beliefs for Peirce are ultimately about signs: a habit or disposition to act in a certain way given certain potential interactions.
An other area Peirce and Davidson would disagree is over the nature of teleological descriptions. Physical talk famously allows no talk of ultimate goals or aims. Efficient causality is all there is. Mental talk, on the other hand, is completely wrapped up in talk of ends. However Davidson's famous swampman thought experiment attempts to undercut this. The swampman is an exact physical duplicate of a person created by chance. To Davidson the idea is that common teleological purposes can't be explained physically as one sees with the swampman.
I won't go into the details of the swampman which really is the issue about externalism and whether history is important to distinguish mental content. I think the nature of Peirce's signs as temporal processes and the interpretant being determined by the object entails the need of the history. Peirce's solution to the issue though - in terms of the separation of the physical and the mental - is to argue that there is a continuum with things being more mental-like and more matter-like. How? Basically by how lawlike they are.
Put an other way Peirce invokes chance, which obviously is the opposite of lawlike. Although obviously, as quantum mechanics shows, something can have lawlike boundary conditions while elements will be random within those boundary conditions. So the more determined (non-chance based) the more like matter it is whereas the more chance the more mind-like it is. Now that's entirely the whole story since you have a bit more going on. (Habits, for instance) But this gets at Davidson's issue of normative as justifying anomalous monism. What Peirce does is gives it an ontological rather than linguistical thrust.
whereas a shift from folk talk of mechanics to scientific talk of mechanics isn't. I would argue that it is. Much of the problems that students taking introductory physics have, in my opinion, is that the topic has shifted. Students used to using words like "force", "energy", "mass", "work", "heat" etc. still think in terms of the folk definitions of these terms. When a physicist talks about work, he/she is not talking about the same thing as when a layman says work.
On another topic, I finally read a little about Peirce from a philosophy textbook. I have to admit I was pretty underwhelmed, but I am willing to chalk it up to a bad textbook. I am looking for a relatively short (200-300 pages max) on Peirce, ideally a mixture of original Peirce plus commentary. Any book suggestions? (Though we rarely agree you did recommend a good Phenomenology book once to me). Also, I would prefer a book and not links, I still haven't figured out a good way to use my laptop on the toilet.
A brief note on AM and the threat of it devolving into epiphenomenalism:
Though it's a bit long (since it is a dissertation), I found Paul Raymont's "An Idle Threat: Epiphenomenalism Exposed" to be a fantastic read. (I lost an entire three-day weekend to this paper.) Link is at https://webspace.utexas.edu/deverj/personal/test/dissertations.html
On the topic of changing the topic and "folk mechanics", the discussion of rigidity (like in airplane wings) in "Three Varieties of Knowledge" is excellent. Short answer: We can shift from the "folk mechanical talk" to the "scientific mechanical talk" without changing the subject because the talk plays the same role in both cases. (Davidson does seem to concede to Dummett in that article that a field like geology can't be "strictly reduced" to physics, either, in quite the way Davidson had assumed the various sciences could in his earlier articles, but this doesn't affect his view of the anomalism of the mental.) But "folk psychological talk" (beliefs, reasons, etc.) can't be replaced by something law-like ("objective") without rendering it unable to serve the normative role we use it to serve.
I'm not sure how you're trying to draw a distinction between "the way we use words" and "the nature of the phenomena" of mind in Davidson, since Davidson denies that we can make any sense of the idea of thought without language (on pain of falling into the Myth of the Given). So "the way we use words" just is the way we are minded creatures; to treat of one is to treat of the other. I know that you've expressed skepticism about this aspect of Davidson before, but it hardly seems fair to complain that Davidson is not dealing with "the phenomena itself" when Davidson thinks that this is exactly what he's doing.
Oh, and I finally found that article I mentioned a while back, about McDowell and Merleau-Ponty. I'd just glanced at the title and mistaken it for a review of Hilary Putnam's "Mind, Body, and World: The Threefold Cord." It's Joseph Rouse's "Mind, Body and World: Todes and McDowell on Bodies and Language" (Inquiry volume 48, issue 1, february 2005). I know Duck's mentioned Dreyfus's silly dismissal of McDowell in Dreyfus's APA address before; Dreyfus expands on this in his introduction to Todes' book. Rouse then looks at why Dreyfus thinks McDowell is barking up the wrong tree, and says why he thinks Todes actually needs someone like McDowell's help to give an account of what he wants to account for. (Hopefully Duck sees this.)
Rereading the article, I seem to have run it together in my memory with "Is There A Problem About Nonconcepual Content?" (Jeff Speaks, Philosophical Review, vol 114, no 3, July 2005) and some of Sean Kelly's articles on Merleau Ponty and McDowell (he used to have a dozen or so good articles on his website, but it seems to be down while he's on leave; there were several devoted to Merleau-Ponty and the body, and at least one explicitly on nonconceptual content). -- Basically, I'd taken some of the excellent suggestions in the end section of Rouse's article about what McDowell needed to pay more attention to, and recalled Sean Kelly as paying that attention; and then Sean Kelly's criticisms of McDowell all fell away in the face of Rouse and Speaks' responses to him. Which is how I ended up remembering one super-article about McDowell and Merleau-Ponty. If that makes any sense.
(PDFs of all articles available upon request; DanielMLindquist at gmail.)
On the most private of libraries: I found that the only way to use a laptop on the toilet was to have a bathroom with a nice big counter. I never much cared for reading philosophy on the john, though; my legs fell asleep too often. Hackett's little "Presocratics Reader" made a pretty good addition to my stack of old magazines, though.
On Pierce: I have trouble believing that a crystal has a "mind" in anything like the way I or you do. I can't make sense of "quasi-mind" either; I can imagine a mind which functions poorly, but I can't imagine what a mind which functions normally though to a lesser degree would be. Is a crystal supposed to be like a man, but stupider -- much stupider? (If a crystal grows abnormally, I don't see how it would make sense to chastise it for "growing wrongly." I don't think this is due to the fact that my complain would be futile; I have no trouble complaining about events I hear about in the news, though I don't expect that my grousing will have any effect on such events.)
David, the best book introducing Peirce I've encountered is Kelly Parker's The Continuity of Peirce's Thought. I recommend it to everyone. I should note that Peirce's value is primarily in his logic. Many of his views I don't subscribe to myself. So if you find logic (of which I take semiotics to be a part) uninteresting you might just not enjoy Peirce. Many of his ideas are so ubiquitous in philosophy that we take them for granted. His metaphysical claims are more interesting but, unsurprisingly, considerably more controversial.
I ought do a post on what I find dubious or difficult in Peirce one of these days.
Regarding mechanics. While how we talk in physics is certainly different, I'm not at all convinced it's a change of topic. I understand where you are coming from and agree up to a point. But I think the phenomena is still the same just as I think that despite the concepts and words we use the phenomena of consciousness and mind is the same. (I tend to follow Peirce in distinguishing mind from consciousness)
Daniel, I plan on doing a post on the epiphenomenalism issue soon. I'd long worried about this threat in Davidson, primarily because in his later papers (even before getting his latest books a month or so ago) it seemed to me that he just didn't have good answers. Then I read a paper by Jaegwon Kim on Davidson, epiphenomenalism and anomalous monism and he argued quite tightly what I'd already thought. I'll check out that paper though when I have some time.
BTW - while Davidson is by far my favorite analytic philosopher even when I disagree with him, I have to put Kim as only slightly behind him. What a fantastic mind - even when I disagree with him.
Regarding the difference between mechanic talk and mental talk, I recognize Davidson says this. I completely disagree his argument works. I'll try and put something up on that paper tomorrow. Basically my argument would be that perhaps the folk talk and scientific talk can't serve exactly the same uses but that doesn't mean some uses - indeed the relevant uses for this conversation - don't overlap. So while one can critique normative issues I think this is somewhat arguing beside the point.
While phenomena and thought are obviously closely intertwined I think one can still draw more of a distinction than Davidson does. That is to disallow any division is to fall prey to Sapir-Whorf in my opinion. This is a place where I favor Heidegger over Davidson though. Despite their similarities I think Davidson blends the linguistic learning and the causality aspects of understanding too much together. While they are blended somewhat in Heidegger his distinction between authenticity (roughly causal knowing) and inauthenticity (roughly social linguistic knowing) allows a bit more flexibility with regards to the phenomena. I've been thinking about this a lot since reading several of Davidson's papers last month on this issue. (That I blogged about here a bit)
Regarding Peirce and his odd use of mind. (Indeed I think this a common difficulty folks have with him) I think it better to not think in terms of mind than to think in terms of sign-processes. What is radical is that Peirce thinks mind (not consciousness) reduces to sign-processing. Peirce then makes a distinction between consciousness and the mental. Most mental phenomena wouldn't be conscious phenomena. Of course this approach is common in the Continental tradition (albeit perhaps not quite as radical as Peirce has it). And of course in the analytic tradition reducing the mind to functions is common, albeit not quite in the way Peirce does it. However often (but not always obviously) in the analytic tradition the way one considers mind is still heir to the Cartesian tradition. That is talk of consciousness and talk of the mental are seen as the same.
I should add that how Peirce conceives of consciousness is one of his least persuasive moves. But I'll not get into that since it's among his least interesting hypothesis (IMO).
Oh, regarding reading in the bathroom. I'll occasionally put a book there I'm reading very slowing. (i.e. read a page and then reread it a few times) However I typically find philosophical encyclopedias - especially Blackwell's - are best to keep there. They are short but you can read about ideas or figures you'd not normally pick up on.
Thanks for the book suggestion, I just ordered it.
How exactly does one "fall prey" to Sapir-Whorf? Did their hypothesis become something firmly-established when I wasn't looking?
Davidson even mentions them at the beginning of "On The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme": "Whorf, wanting to demonstrate that Hopi incorporates a metaphysics so alien to ours that Hopi and English cannot, as he put it, 'be calibrated', uses English to convey the contents of sample Hopi sentences. Kuhn is brilliant at saying what things were like before the revolution using -- what else? -- our post-revolutionary idiom. Quine gives us a feel for the 'pre-individuative phase in the evolution of our conceptual scheme', while Bergson tells us where we can go to get a view of a mountain undistorted by one or another provincial perspective."
Ooh, synchronicity: I just got that book on Peirce at Labyrinth (sale hardcover - check their website, labyrinthbooks.com). It looks like I won't get to it for a while though. Heck, I haven't even been blogging lately.
Re: Davidson, obviously there is *some* distinction between "thought" and "phenomena" because that's the whole point of (his use of) the notion of belief: that our thoughts (i.e., in this context, our beliefs) may not reflect how things are. That epistemic platitude is quite different from the metaphysical gap between "appearance" and "reality." Davidson doesn't so much bridge that gap with language as show how the very idea (of such a gap) is nonsensical. I think you still haven't seen *how* the Davidsonian picture works (if that's what "pictures" do). The trick is to see how that epistemic platitude fits with his insistence that "belief is in its nature veridical." It has to do with how they get their content - with what makes them the beliefs they are - which necessarily puts us into an interpretive context (a triangle) rather than a flatly representative one (i.e. a dualistic one, with a gap to be bridged on pain of skepticism or idealism).
There really is no danger of linguistic idealism if you do it right; and every danger of a recoil into dualism (in the form, for example, of the Myth of the Given) if you don't. Of course as you know I don't think Davidson himself gets it right (and even McDowell is cagey on certain key points). Let's all read the papers Daniel has been kind enough to offer us.
I'm wondering whether some of Davidson's worries about anomalous monism, (through which he tries to ward off epiphenomenalism, even as you have counter-worries that he doesn't succeed), aren't tied to a residual attachment to a "covering law" conception of causality. That event A causes event B means that, given A, B "necessarily" follows. But though usually we consider that there are other events identifiable as of the same types as A and B, and generally we conceive of the universe as causally ordered, there is in principle nothing that prevents causal event A from being an absolutely unique and contingent event. (That we frame causal explanations such that the categories employed will yield a logical entailment of effects from causes is a fact about causal explanation and not a fact about causality, de dictu and not de re). It is not absolutely the generalizability, nor the repetition, nor the regularity of causal events that "makes" them causal. I want to take this idea of the (possible) contingency of causes in two directions. One is that "at bottom" the "laws of nature" are not grounded in anything but the statistical distibutions of regularities of events that we would happen to find obtain. The other is that, as one "rises" through the levels of physical structure and organization, it's not clear that further levels of structure and organization are not contingent, but somehow necessary; or, in other words, that necessity can be entirely distinguished and separated out from contingency in causality. An asteroid colliding with the earth might be an absolutely unique and contingent event, but still it can be accounted for in terms of a conjunction of lawful generalizations concerning mass, velocity, momentum, gravity and the like. But consider the case of the selection of a novel phenotype that generates a new species. There are some generalities there about genetic mutation, selection and amplification or distribution, but adaptive fitness is not itself a continuous function: in a significant subset of cases, the new phenotype itself contributes to the generation of the ecological niche to which adaptive fitness is acquired. (Just consider that there were once no terrestrial vertebrates). The upshot is that there is no universal generalization about causal laws, causal determinism, and the ways that causal events are or "must" be tied to the physical structures that they instantiate or even generate. So, it seems to me, by the same token, both that causal and mental talk need not be sharply demarcated to avoid any contamination of rationality about agency or truth, and that phenomenological and causal talk about the mental need not be regarded as utterly incommensurable or assigned to entirely different spheres.
That said, anomalous monism is a philosopher's synoptic conception. It's only been in the last 25 years or so that there has been a realistic program of empirical neurophysiological research that can begin to investigate the causal basis of mental phenomena and begin to address the sorts of questions that philosophers would deal with synoptically. Assuming, as I would, that mental phenomena are emergent properties and capacities of causally generated physical systems that evolved initially for purely physical and physiological "reasons", I'll offer two admittedly somewhat speculative points. One is that to causally explain a mental *capacity* is not to provide a reductively deterministic account of mental experience and behavior. At some point specifying the capacities of a physical system in terms of its conditions and constraints and demarcating mentally mediated behavior phenomenologically would converge as "functionally equivalent" explanations, and that is as far as scientific explanation can go. So such neurophysiological explanation needn't have the deterministic implications either feared or sought. The other still more speculative point is that the actual consensually acceptable causal explanation that I think can and will one day be arrived at wouldn't in fact have highly deterministic features. I think that brains are basically analog pattern recognition devices, not digital computational devices, (such that I rather wary of algorithmic computationalist models of "mind", as biologically begging the question), such that their processing is not only highly distributed, with neural connections and pulses in neuronal groups interacting with other similar such groups and their "results" mapping onto still other such groups,etc., but characterized by an equipotential multiplcity of possible pathways. The upshot is that a large population of discrete neuronal-causal events, say, 10,000,000 with 10,000,000! possible combinations would converge and boil down to a small number, 10 or 100, resultant states of brain or "mind". I wouldn't exactly argue this point, but I think it is at least a live possibility, and the only quasi-reason for it I will offer is the notion that emergent mental properties evolved in the brains of organisms that originally and otherwise evolved for purely physical and physiological reasons because of the advantages they offer in behaviorally responding with increased flexibility and scope to contingent novel events.
Which brings me back from the other end of the matter to that issue of contingency. I would be inclined to characterize the mental, in however loose or stretched a sense, as anything that can make selections between contingent possibilities with some real effect on behavior, result or output. That is, of course, virtually the opposite of the contingent as the sheerly arbitrary or random, but it is also a break with a sheerly deterministic universe. But it seems now that Peirce thought something similar over a century ago. And, though the order of reasons and reasonings is perhaps rather different, something of the same notion can be perhaps detected buried in Davidson. Davidson, I take it, wants to assure the existence of the mental as intentional content, which must be correlated with and interpreted through the semantic. But the semantic is itself interpreted through truth conditions, such that truth is primary or irreducible. The basic claim is that we can not even begin to make sense of our thinking or even that we think, of the existence of the mental at all, unless we grant the rational normativity of truth. But truth means the possibility that we could be right or wrong, which is to say, the necessity of deciding upon the truth, which is the very characteristic of the mental. But then the tight identification of the mental with the semantic/linguistic results from the straightforward recognition that the semantic/linguistic can not be interpreted by anything that is not equally language-like; that is, that there are not and can't be any self-present, inerrantly self-interpreting thought-meanings, such as Fregean senses or Husserl's intentional objects, any "transcendental signified", which would violate the requirement for contingent decisions about truth. So if there is something amiss about Davidson's tight identification of language and the mental grounded in his insistence on the strong rational normativity binding together for him the issues of truth, mentality, meaning and agency, again might it not lie in his conception of causality?
Well I'll entertain the faith that there is a way to do this without the problems I see. (I'll fully admit I'm still reading Davidson and trying to figure him out -- at this stage though I tend to value him more for the ideas he puts forth than the arguments)
I'll have some more comments later when I have enough time to turn to the texts for quotes. So maybe you guys can "fix" my misinterpretations.
John, I tend to agree with you that the digital view of mind is flawed. And for fairly similar reasons to what you note. I think that not only do we have the problem of analogue versus digital but the issue of chaotic systems (which I take the mind to be). And of course chaotic systems would magnify the difference between a digital simulation or system and an analogue one. Thus while I think the connectivists are closer to the truth than many approaches, I still find them falling short.
Your point about Davidson and truth seems right, as I understand it. While I think Davidson is right that truth is irreducible, I think we need some idea about truth. It's there that I think Peirce's normative notion of it being what an ideal community of investigators would agree upon is useful. However that raises interesting temporal issues that I don't see Davidson addressing. (Davidson's externalism, from what I can see, embraces the issue of the past - as the swampman among other things implies - but seems to neglect the openness of the future for meaning)
Whenever you talk about mind as a swarm of bees I think of Michael Chrichton's book, "Prey", since you've read everything, maybe you've read that. Michael also discusses cellular autonoma approach to AI (swarming) vs. algorithm based which seem less attractive than neural nets. And as long as computationalism is seen that way, sure, I agree, but I think most computationalists probably are aware that the brain works more like a neural net than a serial processor. But they would probably say that, once we approach higher level cognition, the serial processor runs virtually on the neural net. And that's to accomodate the modularity thesis. And they have some credibility as far as pointing to the limitations of native neural nets (which are great for pattern recognition/face) for language abilities and at this point a serial processor becomes a better model.
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