Wittgenstein: belief, behaviour and beetles

The topic of today’s post is the meaning of mental-state terms, such as ‘belief’ and ‘desire.’ These terms are commonly used to refer, somewhat mysteriously, to strange things going on inside our heads. When a person says ‘I believe that it will rain tomorrow’, we take them to be referring to something intangible in the brain. Certainly, taking this view of beliefs and desires is useful in predicting human behaviour: philosophers call the use of such terms to predict and explain behaviour ‘folk psychology.’ This is all very well: but the interesting question is what these ‘folk-psychological’ terms actually mean. What is a belief? Is it a spooky new mental substance? Is it merely a combination of physical brain states in a particular combination at a particular moment? Or is it something else?

One really interesting answer to this question comes from Wittgenstein, who proposes a form of what has since been called ‘behaviourism.’ Wittgenstein’s philosophical behaviourism holds that ‘I believe X’ means ‘I am disposed to behave in a certain way given certain conditions’; and nothing more. All ‘a belief’ means is 'a tendency to do and say certain things given certain circumstances'. For example, if I believe that it is raining, all this means is that I display rain-like behaviour, such as putting up an umbrella, groaning about how I’m getting wet, etc. On this view, ‘belief’ is reduced radically to external, observable behaviour such as actions and sounds; ‘belief’ does not refer to anything going on inside my head, not even to a physical brain state or collection of brain processes. All it is to believe something (Wittgenstein and other behaviorists taught) is to be disposed to act in a certain way under certain conditions.

Why should we believe that this radical, externalist treatment of folk psychology is correct? Wittgenstein presented an interesting argument to show why: what has now been termed the ‘beetle in a box’ argument. In 'Philosophical Investigations', Wittgenstein imagines three people, each with a box in front of them that only they can look into (they can’t look into each others’ boxes). Each person looks into his/her box, and announces that inside their box, there is a ‘beetle.’ Wittgenstein points out that although the same word is being used to denote the contents of each box, there is no reason at all to think that each box contains the same object. The first person’s box could contain what we mean by beetle; the second person’s box could contain a fish; the third person’s box could contain nothing at all. We cannot know what is in each box, Wittgenstein points out, by merely listening to the word that each person uses to describe the contents of his/her box. Therefore, the word ‘beetle’ is meaningless when given meaning by a single person, and tells us nothing of what is within.

Wittgenstein’s main point is to show that all language is essentially public. There can be no such thing as a private language, because meaning is determined by public use, and in the beetle case, each person is employing his/her own unique use of ‘beetle.’ So too with words such as ‘belief’, ‘desire’, etc: using them to refer to private, intangible events going on inside peoples’ heads is meaningless, since the beliefs in your head are like a private language, only accessible to you, and nobody else. However, we know that ‘belief’ is a meaningful term; so, it must refer to something external and publicly verifiable: a behavioural disposition. (Whether Wittgenstein was a 'behaviourist' in a full sense is controversial, but we can take his reasoning here to provide a clear argument for behaviourism).

This conception of mental states such as belief is both very appealing and very counter-intuitive. It is appealing because it demystifies the mental; the mind can be given a much more plausible material explanation if beliefs and desires etc are no longer seen as intangible, ‘spooky’ occurrences inside our heads. However, the view is counter-intuitive because when we believe something, it seems obviously true that this is an inner mental event, something more interesting than a series of external behavioural patterns. Whether we accept Wittgenstein’s argument depends on how seriously we take what seems to go on in our stream of consciousness: how real is the internal nature of the mind? This question is absolutely central to the philosophy of mind, especially in questions about the phenomenon of consciousness, and the problems that arise from it.

Colin McGinn on the limits of explanation

McGinn: mean but fair

There has been a widespread assumption in philosophy, and other disciplines, that the problems of the world are there waiting to be solved, and that indeed they can and will be solved by human beings. The problem of consciousness, for example: though consciousness remains mysterious from a scientific perspective, philosophers have put forward a range of views and arguments for both physicalism and dualism (see, for example, Chalmers on zombies) which seek to explain consciousness, or at least provide the basis for thinking that we could explain it. 

However, Colin McGinn, a philosopher currently at the University of Miami, thinks otherwise. McGinn has formulated ‘Transcendental Naturalism’: the view that due to our biological and evolutionary background, we are inherently limited to some extent in our cognitive abilities, and thus there will be problems (both scientific and philosophical) that we will never be able to solve or explain in our current status as human beings. To many, this view will at first sight appear extremely pessimistic, but I think it holds a lot of plausibility. 

McGinn describes conscious beings as each having a ‘cognitive space.’ This is analogous to our perceptual space, or our physical space: areas within which we can ‘move’, so to speak. Our perceptual space is our visual and auditory field, outside which we cannot see or hear anything. Our physical space is the space within which we can move, and outside of which we cannot. So too with our ‘cognitive space’ - the intellectual area within which we can think, reason, and form concepts; and outside which, we cannot reason. 

We have cognitive limitations just as
we have perceptual and spatial limitations

If we accept that we are cognitively limited in this sense (and this seems likely, since as McGinn states, ‘we are not Gods, cognitively speaking’), then we should expect that some of the problems of philosophy we will be unable to solve. McGinn most famously treats the problem of consciousness as such a problem, not unsolvable in principle, but unsolvable to us, due to its solution falling outside our cognitive space. After 2000 years of thought and experiment, the basic nature of consciousness continues to remain mysterious: it is a Hard problem with a capital H, and raises a significant explanatory gap. The natural explanation for this mystery, McGinn argues, is not that consciousness itself is inherently mysterious, or is made up of new ‘mental, non-physical stuff’, as Descartes thought. Consciousness is probably as grounded in the physical world as tables or chairs. However, its nature lies outside our cognitive space: our biologically limited concept-forming abilities do not extend to grasping it. We can no more understand consciousness than a slug can understand mathematics. 

McGinn also applies his transcendental naturalist view to other problems, such as the problem of Free Will (a response also shared with Noam Chomsky). On reflection, these conclusions may be extremely disappointing: after all, if we agree with McGinn that these problems are in principle unsolvable to us, then we must admit that they could only in principle be solved by a higher intellectual race, 1000s of years of evolution in the future. This is not a nice conclusion to draw, certainly if one is a philosopher. 

However, as is often pointed out, the unpleasant-ness of a view is not a reason not to hold it, especially if one has good philosophical reasons to hold it. And I think we do: why assume that we are intellectually so superior as to solve profound philosophical problems such as the problem of consciousness? Our powers must stop somewhere; and there is good reason to think that consciousness does indeed lie outside our cognitive space. It’s not all so bleak though; McGinn’s view does allow the physicalist/materialist a good response to the arguments for dualism drawn from the explanatory gap between the mental and the physical. The explanatory gap exists not because there is a gap in the world, between physical and mental stuff; it exists because there is a gap in our cognitive abilities to grasp the physical world, and the conscious states that arise from it.

McGinn's more substantial defence of his position as applied to consciousness can be found here, in his classic paper.

Sources: Colin McGinn, 'Can We Solve The Mind-Body Problem?' and Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry

Mary and the black and white room

Is there 'something-it-is-like' to see red, over and above the
 physical facts about red? The Mary story suggests that there is.

Imagine a scientist named 'Mary.' She lives 200 years in the future, at a time when physics has finally explained everything it can about the physical universe. Mary is an expert in her field, and knows every truth there is to be known about the physical world.

Furthermore,  Mary has lived in a black and white room all her life, and has never seen anything coloured. In this room, she has gained all her scientific knowledge from birth, and conducted all the experiments and discoveries that have made her famous. She knows everything there is to know about the world through science; in particular, she knows all there is to know about the workings of the human brain, including how it forms beliefs, how humans perceive redness, and all the rest.

Mary steps out of her black and white room and immediately apprehends the world in all its colour; the first thing she sees is a red rose. Mary, despite having a grasp on every single piece of scientific knowledge in the world, has learned something new on stepping out of the room: she has learned what it is like to see the colour red.

What is this story supposed to prove? What does it actually prove? Philosophers have been debating this ever since Frank Jackson published a paper in which he introduced the example. Mary represents the perfect scientist, and the totality of the knowledge of all physical facts about the world. Yet as she apprehends colour for the first time, she learns a new fact about the world which she did not know before: what it is like to see the colour red. Before she left her room, Mary knew all scientific, physical facts about how a human being sees an red object, and how the light reflects off that object and into the eye of the human being, creating a red sensation. However, nothing she knew from this position of total expertise could have told her what it is actually like to see a red object from the first-person perspective; she had to leave the room and actually see a red object to grasp this.

The example attempts to show that once all the physical facts are in, some things are left unexplained. All the physical facts about colour do not entail the facts about what it is like to experience colour; and thus we cannot explain what it is like to see colour purely in terms of physical facts. The example is not specific to colour: Jackson generalises it to all conscious experience. Mary can be re-cast as knowing all the facts about rough objects, and how they are felt to be rough; but only when she leaves her perfectly smooth room can she know what it is like to feel a rough object. The example applies to what it is like to see colour, hear sound, touch objects, or taste. In a nutshell, the heart of human conscious experience; in philosophical terms, 'Qualia.'

If Mary really does learn a new fact about the world when she leaves her room, then it follows that what she knew before leaving the room (every physical fact about the world) was not enough to explain some other fact: it follows that there are non-physical facts, facts about conscious experience that are not entailed by physical facts. This suggestion has profound implications for how we think about conscious experience and its place in the physical world: physicalism / materialism is false.


David Chalmers lays out the argument in clear, simple terms:

1. Mary knows all the physical facts
2. Mary does not know all the facts
3. Therefore, the physical facts do not exhaust all the facts.

See also: Zombies, and the Explanatory Gap.

What philosophers think

A philosophical variant of Michaelangelo's 'The Creation of Adam.'

Philpapers.org conducted a survey a few years ago into the views of contemporary academic philosophers on a range of issues. The survey can be found here: http://philpapers.org/surveys/. In amongst the jargon, there are interesting findings to be had.

The survey shows that 72.8% of philosophers (faculty members, sample of nearly 1000) ‘accept or lean towards’ atheism, whilst only 14.6% ‘accept or lean towards‘ theism, the view that there exists a creator and sustainer of the universe. 12.5% were undecided.

What I find most interesting about the study is the correlative data - that is, taking views on a particular area and seeing how they correlate with views on a different area. You might expect, since ‘materialism’ these days is often used (misleadingly) as a synonym for ‘atheism’, that the vast majority of atheist philosophers are physicalists/materialists (see post - The Explanatory Gap). The survey shows this to be false. 67.9% of atheist philosophers call themselves physicalists, which leaves almost 20% who describe themselves as ‘non-physicalists.‘ (12% remained undecided on the issue, or refused to commit to either category).

Perhaps even more interestingly, 22.3% of theists call themselves physicalists, and thus commit themselves to the view that all that exists is physical matter. However, this is less contradictory than we might at first think - physicalism, construed as a view about human minds and the universe we inhabit, doesn’t rule out a God existing outside the universe, or a God not ‘existing' in the ordinary spatial sense. Nevertheless, the fact that 59.7% of theists are non-physicalists does indicate a predictable sympathy between the two views. Once you admit that there is mental stuff, I suppose you are less likely to find the notion of a non-physical being such as God suspicious for reductive reasons. (To say nothing of the role of the 'soul' in Christian religious thought).

Presenting ‘majority arguments’ as conclusively supporting a particular view (i.e ‘this view is true because the majority of people think it’) is a big mistake. We cannot conclude from the fact that 72.8% of philosophers are atheists that atheism is true - majorities can be seriously wrong in their views, as history has shown. Statistics should in any case be treated with caution. Nevertheless, the fact that a vast majority of philosophers are atheists is at least suggestive. Whether we draw any further conclusions here depends on how we view philosophers in general - are they skilled investigators into the fabric of reality, or just bearded men with weird views? Sadly, and most often unfairly, they are regularly seen by the public eye as falling into the latter category.

Zombies

Zombies are dead behind the eyes, and stagger around seeking sweet, sweet brains. In the context of philosophy, the staggering around is less important - what philosophers focus on is the notion of a being lacking in conscious experience.

A ‘philosophical zombie’ is a being that physically exactly resembles a normal, healthy human being, but inwardly does not experience the conscious experiences that human beings ordinarily experience. Zombies can think, talk and act, but they do not experience sensations of colour, taste, etc. When we see a blue sky, or a red apple, we get a direct impression of blue-ness or red-ness - there is ‘something it is like’ to see a blue sky. This ‘what it is like’ element is a vital part of conscious experience. Yet the zombie, though it might claim that it has rich experiences of blue, and rich tastes of sweet and sour, does not experience these experiences. It is brain-dead in the sense that there is nothing going on inside its head in terms of conscious experience. The main thing to note is that the zombie is identical to any other human being in terms of physical constitution - but lacks rich conscious experiences of things such as colour, sound and taste.

Daniel Dennett claims that consciousness
is largely an illusion. Perhaps this is
because he is a zombie. (Chalmers)

A thought experiment using zombies seeks to demonstrate the conclusion that there is more to 
the physical world than simply physical stuff - that consciousness indicates that there is also mental stuff. (See previous post: the Explanatory Gap). Though zombies probably do not exist in the actual world, the idea of a zombie seems possible - it seems like a possibility that zombies could exist in the real world, though if they did we would not know that they were zombies.

If it is possible that zombies exist, then physicalism/materialism, the view that everything that exists is composed of physical matter, is false. If zombies are possible, then a being physically identical to a healthy conscious human being, but which lacks conscious experience, is possible. If such a being is possible, then consciousness is not fully determined by the physical. And if consciousness is not fully determined by the physical, then whatever accounts for consciousness is non-physical. Hence, physicalism is false.


Whether we give any attention to such a thought experiment depends on our individual intuitions - in my opinion, it seems quite plausible that a physical copy of myself could lack the conscious experiences that I have. But you might not agree.

The Explanatory Gap

Does contemplation of the Explanatory Gap suggest a God-given soul?

What is a mind? Are minds physical, or are they made out of a separate mental substance, a ‘soul’? Perhaps the way we live and the way we use language assumes the second option - that we have souls inside our heads, and that somehow, ‘I’ is a special subject, distinct from ‘my brain.’ In fact the mere phrase ‘my brain’ seems to imply that there are two things here - a brain and an owner, the person ‘within’ the brain. Thinking like this seems to fit well with everyday experience, and how we take ourselves to interact with the world. At least on the every-day level, we are dualists. 

The idea, however, that souls (perhaps God-given, if we are religious) reside within our bodies seems a little archaic on reflection. Science has taught us that a mind, at least in the context of our world, must be ‘physically realized‘ - it must arise out of physical matter. The question then arises as to how this could possibly happen. The physicalist has a quick answer - a mind just is the physical state of a brain. On this view, there is nothing else to conscious experience other than particular combinations of physical brain states.  

Physicalism is popular, and has been thrust towards the spotlight particularly recently outside philosophy, in the work of Richard Dawkins, who seems to assume that physicalism is so obviously true that we needn’t even bother debate about it. But this is too hasty - there are real questions to be raised about the nature of minds that physicalism cannot seem to account for. How can a subject possibly be in some way identical to physical matter? No matter how complex we make a physical organism, a strong intuition remains that we will never reach subjectivity - that rich ‘first person-ness‘ of human experience that perhaps is unique only to humans.

The religious are able to exploit this intuition and use it as a basis for positing that there are God-given souls that reside within our bodies, and which explain our conscious, intellectual, moral and spiritual abilities. However, we don’t need to be religious to acknowledge that the so-called mind-body problem cannot be easily shelved just by asserting physicalism. Science seems to be a fundamentally objective, third-person pursuit, and perhaps third-person facts are all that it will ever be able to explain. If this is the case, then consciousness, that mysterious first-person entity with which we as persons are identical, remains unexplained. There is an 'explanatory gap' between mind and matter.

(see further - the so-called ‘Explanatory Gap.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap)