Sellars pointed out that “the ‘of-ness’ of sensation simply isn’t the ‘of-ness’ of even the most rudimentary thought. Sense grasps no facts, not even such simple ones as something’s being red and triangular” (quoted in Levine, “Sellars and Non-Conceptual Content”, 865). We may think of “the of-ness” of perceptions, with full-blown intentionality, as half way between non-intentional sensations and thoughts with derived intentionality.
18.
Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, 344. Sellars’s distinction of spaces is an acceptable form of the dualism that seems irresistible when we consider the evident truth that the suffering you feel is not in the same space as the beam and the head that banged against it, and a fortiori your intention to seek legal advice against the owner of the beam. This is not, of course, a dualism of stuffs.
19.
It is tempting here to quote G. K. Chesterton who said that “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything but his reason” (“The Maniac”, Chapter 2, Orthodoxy). I will however resist this temptation.
20.
Propositions do not exist unless they are proposed and, in order to be proposed, they have to be entertained, expressed, materialized in utterances or written expressions. Once, however, they have been expressed, it can seem as if they were already implicitly present in general propositional awareness. There is, however, two-way traffic. While propositions may grow out of propositional attitudes – as when I think my fear to myself – they are in turn fed by propositions – as when someone I think of gives me cause to fear.
21.
Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, 79. Even this is not entirely true. Much knowing-that is, and remains, implicit, lying beyond the reach of articulation, and know-how is even less amenable to being translated into propositions. Strawson’s account of the relationship of propositions to “what-is” is of course more subtle, complex, and hesitant than this. Consider, for example this suggestion in his Introduction to his edited volume Philosophical Logic: “Between sentence-meaning and utterance-force lies, sometimes, the proposition”, 10–11.
22.
Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, passim.
23.
See Tallis, The Knowing Animal.
24.
It may seem unnecessary to say this until it is recalled how influential logical atomism was in twentieth-century anglophone philosophy. Logical atomism was, of course, developed by Russell for whom all truths are developed from atomic facts. Truths become identified with the world in virtue of conflating facts with actual objects and their qualities standing in certain relations. Thus are “thatter” and “matter” merged. And thus, too, the opening of the Tractatus that we discussed earlier.
25.
There is a nice (but only apparent) intersection between thatter and matter in the question of what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. If the force is irresistible there can be no immovable object; and if the object is immovable, there can be no irresistible force. The idea that they might meet is self-contradictory and the contradiction is not in any actual world but only in a world of thatter that postulates possible worlds which are mutually exclusive in as straightforward a manner as “p” and “not-p”.
A variation of this invites us into more complex intersections between logic and actuality. If A is pushing against B and B is not moving then B must be pushing against A. This looks like a connection between folk physics, Newton’s third law of motion (“action and reaction are equal and opposite”), and a self-evident truth. Thus are the by-ways of “therefore”.
26.
The determination of the naturalizers of epistemology to wire us in to the material world is illustrated by this passage from Quine: “There is a short-sighted but stubborn notion that a mere string of marks on paper cannot be true, false, doubted, or believed. Of course it can, because of conventions relating it to speech habits and because of neural mechanisms linking speech habits causally to mental activity” (From Stimulus to Science, 94). Long live such short-sightedness because it may make it possible to see what is in front of our nose! Among those things that Quine overlooks are “conventions” and “mental activity” which are linked by (not identical with) neural mechanisms.
27.
Ladyman, “An Apology for Naturalized Metaphysics”, 144. Quine is much less apologetic: “To account for knowledge of an external thing or event … the naturalistic epistemologist looks rather to the external thing or event itself and the causal chain of stimulation from it to one’s brain” (Quine, “Naturalism; Or Living Within One’s Means”, 252).
28.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 476.
29.
See, for example, Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation, Chapter 12 “Time and Human Freedom”.
30.
Stroud, “The Significance of Naturalized Epistemology”, 456.
31.
The theory has many other advocates. The classic statement is Goldman, “A Causal Theory of Knowing”. Donald Davidson was an eloquent opponent of the theory but (unfortunately vide infra) on behalf of a coherence theory of truth. The notion that beliefs and pieces of knowledge are not stand alone, however, holds up and the point he makes about “neural intake” and knowledge most certainly does: “This causal relation [between sensations and belief] cannot be a relation of confirmation or disconfirmation, since the cause is not a proposition or a belief, but just an event in the world or in our sensory apparatus” (Davidson, “Empirical Content” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, 173).
32.
Jonathan Bennett aptly noted that true propositions are “categorially wrong for the role of a puller and shover and twister and bender” (Events and their Names, 22).
33.
Ramsey & Moore, “Facts and Propositions”, 155.
34.
Quine, Philosophy of Logic, quoted in Stolnar & Damnjanovic, “The Deflationary Theory of Truth” – to which I am indebted.
35.
See Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation, § 8.2.2.4 “Events and Truth-makers”.
36.
Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 26.
37.
I am tempted to point out that there was a reason why Václav Havel’s Living in Truth was not called Living in Disquotation. But that might be a rather cheap point.
CHAPTER 7
1.
Wilbur, Epistemology.
2.
Nagel, View from Nowhere, 127.
3.
There is no connection without explicit separation. At the root of this connection-and-separation is intentionality. There is thus a sense in which, certainly at the level of factual knowledge, the objects of consciousness are cognate to the perceiving subject. The contingency of this relationship, however, differentiates it from being internal in the idealist sense.
4.
This is captured in Strawson’s notion of real objects being “objects in the weighty sense”, sensed as having an existence independent of all experiences of them: they exist not merely independently of my awareness of them but in virtue of anyone’s awareness of them. They are not Berkeleian. Importantly, such objects form, or are deposited in, a unified spatiotemporal system and as such their identity is not constructed out of the happenstance of someone’s experience (The Bounds of Sense, 26).
5.
Quine, “Whither Physical Objects?”, quoted in Martin, “On the Need for Properties”, 221.
6.
Quoted in Dainton, Time and Space, 200.
7.
That is why Quine’s claim that “We can say of John’s body not only that it broke a leg but that it solved Fermat’s Last Theorem” (From Stimulus to Science, 85) seems profoundly wrong. Indeed, while being incarnate, and having flesh in some kind of working order, is a necessary condition of John’s solving the theorem, it is a mistake to t
hink of John’s body or part of it (even the organ inside his skull) as doing the solving; even less as doing it in the way that it, for example, heals a broken leg – or more precisely that such healing happens.
8.
I have explored this in several books. The reader might like to consult: The Kingdom of Infinite Space or I Am.
9.
This has negative implications for the popular idea among “transhumanists” of Substrate-Independent Minds “uploaded” on to computers, which we discussed in the Addendum to Chapter 5, “Subjects without Bodies”.
10.
See Tallis, “The Soup and the Scaffolding” in In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections.
11.
Quoted in Kołakowski, Positivist Philosophy from Hume to the Vienna Circle, 146–7.
12.
We are located by being dis-located. All persons are displaced persons.
13.
Quine, “Naturalism; Or, Living Within One’s Means”, 252.
14.
Ibid., 253.
15.
The curious might be interested in one version of this story – a rational reconstruction of the passage from apehood to personhood – set out in a trilogy of books by the present author: The Hand; I Am; and The Knowing Animal.
16.
Keskinen, “Quine on Objects”, 139.
17.
I am not of course concerned here with knowledge claims and the truth value of my thoughts. Self-evidently, whether or not the thought “It is raining” is true will depend on what is happening out there. My concern is with whether I can know what I am thinking about.
18.
Lau & Deutsch, “Externalism about Mental Contents” is an ideal introduction to the topic. Nagel has expressed the central idea of externalism very clearly: “The essence of what a term refers to depends on what the world is actually like and not just on what we have to know to use and understand the term” (View from Nowhere, 41).
We can of course generalize this to an acknowledgement of the limits of the privileged access we have to ourselves (lucidly and comprehensively discussed in Cassam, Self and World). In order to articulate ourselves, we need an objective knowledge of the correct use of the language in which we say what we are, and a capacity to choose the most illuminating way of gathering ourselves up into a stretch of prose. Moreover, the notion of the self-transparent self overlooks the degree to which “I” is constructed out of an internalized “we”. What is certainly true is that the Other – general or located in another individual – provides the necessary background to any act of making sense. The Other may even be in-house, given that an individual fact, for example, makes sense only against experiences, thoughts and memories whose acquisition has for the most part been forgotten.
Such thoughts would overlap with the fear that the most sophisticated, seemingly objective, and self-critical inquiry is compromised by external circumstances from which it arises and its own internal history. Michel Foucault spoke of “the unconscious of science” (The Order of Things, xi). A later passage is particularly relevant: “Order is one and the same time that which is given in things, as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for its moment of expression” (ibid., xx).
19.
McDowell, “Sellars and the Space of Reasons” discusses the notion of “epistemological externalism”: “[a]ccording to which it can suffice for a belief to count as knowledge if it results from a way of acquiring beliefs that can be relied on, in the circumstances, to issue in true beliefs, even if that fact about the belief’s provenance is beyond the believer’s ken” [I have this reference off the net and cannot find a formal reference for it]. In other words, I can know something and yet not know how good are the credentials for my counting it as knowledge. This is a reverse of the usual sceptical anxiety according to which we may not be aware of just how corrupt are the sources of our knowledge.
20.
There is the dream of a disembodied mind in the fantasies of the transhumanists discussed in Chapter 4. The point for the present is that the idea of a mind as a free-floating utterly transparent collection of information is of something so purified as to be subjectless and consequently – well, mindless.
21.
I have argued that pretty well everything else Lacan said was nonsense in “Lacan-can or the Dance of the Signifier” in Not Saussure.
22.
This would seem to be what remains indubitably true in Kant’s postulation of an unknowable realm underpinning the phenomenal world of experience: “[K]nowledge has to do only with appearances, and must leave the thing in itself as indeed real per se, but as not known by us” (Critique of Pure Reason, B, xx).
The noumenal realm must be thinkable, indeed must be postulated as the transcendental ground of the appearances, to avoid “the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears” (ibid., B, xxvi). While the noumenon shares with the residual opacity of the object of knowledge the characteristic of systematically eluding empirical access, its nature of being intelligible (as the intelligible ground of the sensible world), takes it beyond the complete cognitive resistance of the Lacanian Real.
23.
And this does not take into account the intrinsic dynamism of tokenized discourse that, as it were, “runs off”. Platonic thoughts are too static and the verbal tokens too mobile.
CHAPTER 8
1.
Quine, Word and Object, 22.
2.
For a critical discussion of some of the literature on the idea that physical science is gradually revealing metaphysical reality, see “Mathematics and Reality” in Tallis, Of Time and Lamentation.
3.
For a rough calculation of just how ill-read the most voracious reader will be at the end of his/her life – think mile-long beaches and individual grains of sand – see Tallis, “Criticism Terminable and Interminable”.
4.
Alkhateeb, “Science has outgrown the human mind and its limited capacities”, 2.
5.
See, for example, “‘I kid you not’: Knowingness and Other Shallows” in Tallis, In Defence of Wonder.
6.
Not all of us think in words and there are some whose lives are not accompanied by ceaseless inner chatter, as Charles Fernyhough points out in The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves. Leading primatologist Frans de Waal goes further and argues that, “though language assists human thinking by providing categories and concepts, it is not the stuff of thought” (De Waal, “The link between language and cognition is a red herring”). Neither of these facts takes away the force of the point I am making: that, even in the case of thinking to one’s self (something after all most of us do for much of our waking life), there is darkness at the heart of our thoughts. For me, linguistically articulated thoughts are a surface manifestation of something deeper, central to, and uniquely characteristic of, human consciousness. The unique human capacity for thought is rooted in something more fundamental than language – a relative parvenu in the history of hominins.
7.
Few imagine that animals have a semantic memory for facts – for reasons that hardly need spelling out. A recent paper, however, has claimed that dogs have episodic memories of experiences. Fugazza et al argue in “Recall of Others’ Action After Incidental Encoding Reveals Episodic-like Memory in Dogs” that dogs do have short duration episodic memory for particular commands. This, however, comes nowhere near the boundless, multi-dimensional network of past events located in their contexts, the seething recollection, that haunts our every moment.
8.
For an excellent discussion of “world-driven scepticism” see Sacks, Objectivity and
Insight.
9.
I believe this striking claim is in Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, but I have not been able to pin it down.
10.
Quite a few philosophers in the analytical tradition – most notably Quine – would take extreme exception to this.
11.
The key reference here is to Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et Les Choses [The Order of Things]. The standard definition of science as “a body of knowledge organized in a systematic manner” presupposes that its system to some degree reflects the order and “system” of the world. The position of Foucault, and of the structuralists from whom he distanced himself, is that Nature tends to be carved at joints defined by the curriculum of human thought, itself shaped by many happy and unhappy accidents of intellectual history.
12.
The idea of a “language of things” is beautifully mocked by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels where the ancient professors in the Academy of Lagado used things instead of words in their endeavour to avoid ambiguity. Some of the most learned, Swift pointed out, would be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of objects they had to carry on their backs in anticipation of their learned conversations. The opposite ambition is expressed in Francis Ponge’s ambition to speak for things, taking Le parti pris des choses – “the voice of things”. In fact, he does not succeed in ventriloquizing on behalf of things but instead engages in lovely reveries on the physical appearance and properties of things. Les choses are spoken for, not being allowed to speak.
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