36.
Gardner, Kant and the Critique, 90.
37.
Kant, Critique, B 106.
38.
Most commentators seem to assume plurality in the noumenal realm. Consider Strawson: “The cooperation of sensibility and understanding is essential to experience, as is also the excitement of those faculties by things as they are in themselves” (The Bounds of Sense, 72).
39.
Kant, Critique, 125 (A92/B125).
40.
There is an excellent discussion of the impact of After Finitude on recent philosophical thought in Morgan, The Kantian Catastrophe?
41.
This argument has an interesting echo in Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances. If we believe that secondary qualities – colours, sounds, etc. – depend for their existence on conscious minds, then the world before minds emerged must be fundamentally different from the way we conceive of it. It would be a world without phenomena. Our world is a system of collective representations – representations (if they are not delusions) that are shared.
42.
This is helpfully discussed by Lucy Allais in “A Conversation with Lucy Allais” in Morgan, The Kantian Catastrophe?
43.
Russell, My Philosophical Development, quoted in Morgan, The Kantian Catastrophe?, 22.
44.
Ibid., 22.
45.
See Tallis, “Time, Reciprocal Containment, and the Ouroboros”, Philosophy Now Oct/Nov 2017, 54–5.
46.
Quoted in Morgan, The Kantian Catastrophe?, 13. Béatrice Han-Pile makes a similar point, glossing Foucault when she refers to the: “circle whereby Man is both the epistemic condition of the possibility of knowledge on the one hand, and a causally determined object within the epistemic field thus opened on the other. Without Man nothing can be known, but as soon as there is knowledge Man appears to itself as empirically pre-existing his very opening of the epistemic field in a sort of paradoxical pre-history” (ibid., 130).
CHAPTER 4
1.
I have discussed this in many places, for example “Biologising Consciousness” in The Explicit Animal.
2.
That is why a valid critique of the notion that consciousness awoke in the material world as a response to evolutionary pressures would not support arguments in support of “intelligent design”. Consciousness would seem to be a daft rather than an intelligent design feature – particularly in view of the huge metabolic cost of maintaining consciousness, that the naturalist viewpoint sees as a function of a complex nervous system.
3.
Daniel Dennett has consistently argued that consciousness has so little contribution to make to our human lives that the intuition or belief that it is central to what we are is an illusion (see, e.g., From Bacteria to Bach and Back). This is nonsense but his emphasis on “competence without comprehension” is relevant to our present discussion, not the least because he draws precisely the wrong conclusion from this. The fact he emphasises that many competencies do not require conscious deliberation should lead him to conclude not that deliberation is of marginal relevance to human life – it is manifestly central to our lives – but that his own evolutionary account of consciousness (and a fortiori of complex human self-consciousness) misses our nature by a country mile.
Dennett’s “competence without comprehension” – essentially mere mechanism – has a distant echo in Karl Friston’s assertion that “nature can drum up reasons without exactly having them for herself” (“The Mathematics of Mind-Time”, 2). It is, of course, we who drum them up for nature just as we can drum up reasons for the puddles on the road or the thunder following the lightning. The puddles have a “reason” or a “cause” but they are not brought about by a reason nor are they aware of their cause or the reason for their existence.
4.
Samuel Butler is often credited with this evocative phrase. I have not, however, been able to track it down. A Google search takes me to the Darwin scholar and literary critic Gillian Beer and the report – “The Soul Archaeology of Darwin” by Alex M. McLeese – of her lecture “Darwin and the Consciousness of Others”. She describes the idea that Darwin “was the man who banished mind from the universe” as a “popular idea”.
5.
Nagel, View from Nowhere, 78–9.
6.
The suggestion that possession of that piece of knowledge – and the capacity to learn and retain it – served the purpose of putting me ahead of others via the promotion of life chances through the passing of examinations and thus furthered the motives of my selfish genes by selecting the best and brightest (defined as those who are able to store and retain facts) for the kind of flourishing that will promote the well-being of mankind is as tendentious as it sounds. For the rule that “the geek shall inherit the earth” to become a pathway by which the human race should be increasingly precisely adapted to its environment, the environment in question shall long have ceased to be characterizable in biological terms.
7.
See, for example, Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype.
8.
Dawkins attempts (ibid., 109–10) to address this awkwardness by finding an analogy to the difference between the gene and its phenotypical expression in the difference between the unit of information in the brain – the replicator – and its consequences in the outside world – its “meme products” or phenotypical expression. That is simply to reduce the analogue of the contrast between replicator and vehicle (or gene and organism) to the contrast between brain and culture. It also overlooks the fact that even simple elements like tunes – never mind the more complex examples he cites (such as prejudices or styles of clothes) – are not confined to cells as individual genes are or even to discrete parts of the brain. What is more, a meme such as “a style of clothing” is required to be both a unit of intracerebral information – it replicates by propagating from brain to brain – and a unit of extra-cerebral (or cultural) information, and in each case defined by the words that specify it. This is just another way of demonstrating that the genotype/phenotype distinction cannot be mapped on to memes and their “expression”.
By a peculiar irony, Dawkins’ memetics is a fundamental betrayal of his gene-eyed evolutionary theory – to the extent of including something which could be construed as Lamarckian. Lamarck is welcomed back into the fold as the agent of cultural evolution, in which the experiences of the phenotype are passed on from one generation to the next – as, of course, they are. If we are going to insist that cultural development is “evolution” in a sense that retains something from biology, then it is clearly Lamarckian rather than Darwinian.
9.
See, for example, Dennett, The Intentional Stance.
10.
Macdonald & Papineau, “Introduction: Prospects and Problems for Teleosemantics”, 1. There is nothing especially novel about the naturalization of mental functions such as knowing, judging and sense-making. David Hume asserted that “Nature by an absolute and uncontrollable necessity has determined us to judge, as well as to breathe and feel” (Treatise on Human Understanding I, iv, 1, 183).
11.
A recent use of this metaphor by Ruth Millikan, a leading figure in teleosemantics, has an unintended irony: “Clearly our original conscious goals are not the same as whatever our genes aim for” (“Useless Content”, 104). Yes, our conscious goals are different from anything that genes may entertain, but the extent of the difference will not be appreciated so long as it is not acknowledged that it is entirely inappropriate to ascribe “aims” of any sort to genes which are, after all, just molecules.
12.
I am gliding over a vast literature replete with sophisticated arguments, including those that place coherence at the heart of the idea of truth. Some of the most developed coherence accounts of truth are committed in varying degrees to linguistic idealism. They acknowledge (correctly) that how we divide the world into truths is relative t
o the language or, more broadly, the sign systems in which truths are expressed. For this reason, there are no stand-alone or atomic truths: they come as a package. My assertion, for example, about economic trends may be true or false at the level of correspondence but the correspondence grows in a soil that has emerged from a mode of understanding that gathers up events and objects and patterns of behaviour into a unity named “economic trends”. In short, truths are true or false as part of systems of truth shaped by modes of understanding and of discourse. In the end, however, assertions still presuppose a distance between an expression and whatever it is that it asserts to be the case. The connection between the inhabitants of either end of that distance is inescapably one of correspondence.
The centrality of coherence even to naturalistic accounts of truth is reflected in Quine’s recognition that there are “bodies of knowledge” (such as are gathered up in theories) which stand or fall as a whole. Empirical claims “face the tribunal of experience corporately” (“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, 344). “The totality of our knowledge or beliefs … is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges” (Quine, quoted in a brief biographical note by O’Connor & Robertson).
13.
Millikan, “Useless Contents”, in MacDonald & Papineau, 100–14.
14.
Ibid., 101.
15.
Ibid., 105. There is an interesting analogy between the faith that functions designed to meet basic biological needs – using biological mechanisms widely spread through the animal kingdom – will spontaneously mutate into the kinds of intelligence we humans deploy and the much-publicized fear that robots designed to carry out practical tasks will spontaneously evolve into creatures that might out-perform our intelligence. Soon, so the story goes, robots will be so superior to us as to treat us like household pets, after they have stolen our jobs, en route to exterminating us. In the background, I suspect, is the notion of the “spandrel” – a feature that arises only as a necessary but incidental consequence of other features, a phenotypical trait that is not in itself adaptive but is the by-produce of evolution for other traits. It is not directly selected for but may have a happenstance use. This view, associated particularly with Steven Jay Gould has been bitterly attacked by many evolutionary theorists.
16.
A similar, even more impressive, story could be told about quantum theory. We are surrounded by its practical applications, many of which are key to our current safety and comfort. But quantum mechanics was developed for several decades (from Max Planck in 1900 to Paul Dirac in 1930) before any applications could be conceived of and several decades more before the first serious quantum-based technologies (transistors and the like) were manufactured.
17.
Macdonald & Papineau, “Introduction”, 4.
18.
Ibid., 19.
19.
Ibid., 4.
20.
Gray, Straw Dogs, 4.
21.
Ibid., 26.
22.
There is an analogous situation with meme theory (vide supra). Judging by its mode of spread, meme theory is itself a meme. It must therefore owe any success it has not to its truth but to its infectiousness. The self-refutation built into evolutionary “explanations” of knowledge and truth is noted by Nagel: “[If], per impossibile, we came to believe that our capacity for objective theory were the product of natural selection, that would warrant serious skepticism about its results beyond a very limited and familiar range” (View From Nowhere, 79).
23.
It is arguable that non-human animals do not even have a fully developed sense of causation. See Tallis, “The Cause-Seeking Animal” in The Knowing Animal. In what respect or to what degree non-human primates have a sense of objects existing permanently independent of their perceptions of them is contentious.
24.
Quine’s close affiliation with the forms of behaviourism already discussed is evident from the following passages: “Individuals whose similarity groupings [i.e. primitive classification] conduce largely to true expectations have a good chance of finding food and avoiding predators, and so a good chance of living to reproduce their kind” (“The Nature of Natural Knowledge”, 70); “The states of belief, where real, are … states of nerves” (“Reply to Hilary Putnam”, 429).
25.
In fact there is little that is scientific about Quine’s aspirational “scientific” reconstruction of our passage from stimulus to science. He relies on the traditional tools of philosophy: intuition, educated guesswork, and selective mobilization of facts deemed relevant.
26.
Quine, From Stimulus to Science, 16. Barry Stroud’s definition of naturalized epistemology is helpful: “… the scientific study of perception, learning, thought, language-acquisition, and the transmission and development of human knowledge – everything we can find out scientifically about how we come to know what we know” (“The Significance of Naturalized Epistemology”, 455). Quine is aware of the paradoxes of such an ambition. As he put it elsewhere, epistemology raises “scientific questions about a species of primates, and they are open to investigation by natural sciences, the very science whose investigation is being investigated” (emphasis added) (“The Nature of Natural Knowledge”, 68). Strangely, he seems to embrace as a virtue the vicious circularity of looking to advanced knowledge to cast light on how there is knowledge at all – providing a scientific account of how we can progress from sense experience or neural intake to scientific understanding – and, more than that, to validate knowledge sufficiently to head off the sceptical challenge.
27.
Quine, From Stimulus to Science, 17.
28.
Ibid., 21.
29.
Quine, “Naturalism; Or Living Within One’s Means”, 251.
30.
For a discussion of the case for, and the significance of, the distinctive holism of human belief in contrast to the behavioural dispositions of animals see “Does Rover Believe Anything?” in Tallis, Epimethean Imaginings, 25–53.
31.
This opens on to vast territory. Some of it is explored in Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation, §8.3.2.4, 388–92.
32.
Objects and the matter of which they are made have always been a problem for strict empiricists endeavouring to build up a world out of sense impressions, sense data, or irritation of nerve endings. Hume regarded material objects as fictions, and it was a standard position among analytical philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century, inspired by Bertrand Russell, to see such items as “logical constructions”. It remains a matter of controversy as to whether Quine himself was realist or anti-realist about “objects”. There is an excellent discussion in Keskinen, “Quine on Objects: Realism or Anti-Realism?”.
33.
Quine, From Stimulus to Science, 25.
34.
Ibid., 70.
35.
Ibid., 29.
36.
“Like the animal’s simple induction over innate similarities, [science] is still a biological device for anticipating experience” (Quine, “The Nature of Natural Knowledge”, 72).
37.
Lack, “The Behaviour of the Robin”.
38.
What is implicit in genuine tool use is discussed in Tallis, The Hand. The uniquely human hinterland is enormous. It is part of the yet more extensive hinterland that lies behind even the most commonplace voluntary activity. See, for example, Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation, Chapter 12 “Time and Human Freedom”.
39.
Quine, From Stimulus to Science, 40. It is interesting that Quine allows that classes and sets are real but properties are not. That he thinks colour red is less real than the set of all red things can only be ascribed to his partiality for mathematical logic which can handle sets but not properties such as red.
40.
The discussion that follows has been assisted by Robert Sinclair’
s excellent “Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology and the Third Dogma of Empiricism”. While I have found Sinclair’s article helpful, it will be evident I am not persuaded by his defence of Quine.
41.
Quine quoted in Sinclair, “Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology”, 461.
42.
Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical. This is quoted in Pojman, “Ernst Mach”. Some of what follows is indebted to this excellent article.
43.
Quoted in Blackmore, Ernst Mach: His Work, Life and Influence, 193–4.
44.
Mach, Knowledge and Error: Sketches on the Psychology of Enquiry, 171. There is the opposite view in philosophy that survival is enhanced by what Mark Sacks has described as “epistemic shortfall” – a world picture that is pre- or sub-scientific (Objectivity and Insight, 17). He cites Locke and Russell to the effect that if we could see everything – how things appear in the microscope, individual photons, the world as it is viewed in fundamental physics – we would see nothing. What we actually see is only that which it is useful for us to see. As Sacks puts it, “We have no need to be certain that our perception delivers the world as it is, only that it delivers the world-view that is appropriate for beings like ourselves” (18).
Logos Page 32