part 1:
Introduction
part 2:
Putnam on The Threefold Cord
part 3:
Questions and Answers

Transcript of Friday Forum, February 11:
Questions and Answers

We have 15 minutes for questions, I am told:

Q: You use the word illusion there, in one section and that troubled me in that context.

HP: Well, but that’s a fair… It’s not my view, but it is a fair description, I think, of the standard view. That is, on the Sellars view, the cube I… the pink ice cube I see is a kind of illusion because you are prepared to say, "There really is no such thing." The physicists…

Q: How do you distinguish it from the rest of the things?

HP: Well, I don’t buy into the view. The answer is, "I reject the view". On such a view, the British philosopher Peter Strauss once said: "On this kind of story, which has been told all over and over again, I mean, it’s no accident that the founders of modern philosophy, at least two of the half-dozen founders in modern philosophy, take the usual list: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, on the rational side; Locke, Bartley, Hume on the empiricist side, that both Descartes and Leibniz were mathematical physicists. And that particular prejudice… in fact, the needs of philosophy were subordinated to what they saw as the needs for creating a new physics. Breaking with the Aristotilean physics was in fact mistaken -- that’s not where Aristotle was great -- and creating a new physics. And so from the very beginning, our view of the world… and I think this can be said of Kant, too. Kant, although few people realize this, was a great physicist, one of truly greatest ones. And… So the needs of philosophy have been very heavily subordinated to the needs of mathematical physics, and that’s not the way to view reality. Yeah… back there?

Q: You criticize the identity theory, and what I want to know is, is there a mind-body problem, and I want us to phrase it with, sort of, just with sensations. Clearly, with thoughts and other things it’s much more complicated which the world does include in very complicated ways. But, say, with pain, and brain state, it doesn’t have to be a reduction, but it can be sort of an interaction. Akin to Fodor in his first book, as opposed to his later works, where there is an adjustment in fit between the psychological state of pain and the physiological state. So it’s not a reduction, but it’s not…but there is a problem in understanding how these things connect together. It would be akin to, say, the gravity problem with Newton which is only, maybe, partially solved. So, my question is, is there a mind-body problem?

HP: What I try to show in the second book is that what is called the mind-body problem does not make sense. But let me say a little word… I’m glad you asked, I’d like to say a word about that. First of all, pain -- and here I agree with Dan Dennett -- pain is actually a bad example. People choose pain because they think it’s a simple case. In fact, as Dennett…I agree totally with Dennett, it’s an enormously complex case, but if you take the so-called visual sensation, I want to say that the way to approach -- and there are now psychologists who think this way. Of course, Gibson, you might say, was a pioneer, but there are now other neo-Gibsonians who are pushing this much further and using the new neurology. The…if you think of seeing as, in the first instance, a taking-in of the environment, or visual features of the environment, then how… the question how the brain enables us to do that, is I think, potentially attractable question, on which we’ve made a lot of progress, although we are constantly confused, because neurologists themselves tend to stop and say: this piece is the sense statum. On the other hand, if you proceed on the standard philosophical story, according to which, the reason I am fooled, let us say, God forbid, I had a hallucination -- because illusion themselves are of different types; there are illusions that fool the eye because they would also fool a camera, right, a photograph would be fooled in the same way, which is to say, you’re not really fooled about -- as Aristotle pointed out already -- you are not really fooled about the appearance property: that that’s seen from here appears this way is an objective property of the scene, it’s just you draw the wrong inference from the fact that the scene has that appearance property. But if you take the philosopher’s best case, where there is nothing there that looks like the Taj Mahal, but I have this dream that I see the Taj Mahal. The… Certainly, there are certain groups of neurons which fire. They could logically, possibly be the same group of neurons that would fire if I saw the Taj Mahal, although in the real world, in fact, it never happens. (Philosophers often like criteria of identity which are never realized in the real world.) But… Then we take… Then we make a move… it’s interesting, I found this at the very beginning of -- as taken as self-evident -- at the very beginning of Nelson Goodman’s The Structure of Appearance. We make the move, say: because we can use phrases like "the same appearance" or "the same experience," that the "same" is the "is" of identity. So that there is a well defined… By the "is" of identity I mean the logical "is", the "is" with these properties: that if "a" is identical with "b" and "b" is identical with "c," then "a" is identical with "c." Now, the "same" of ordinary language… if you say "it’s the same" very often, does not have this property. For example, the logician who used to teach at BU, Rohit Parikh, now teaches at Brooklyn College, once did this beautiful experiment: he took a hundred… what is it? 3 by 5 cards?… a can of white paint. He dipped the first one into white paint so it’s now glossy white, he put one drop of red paint in, stirred it, and used that to paint the next card, then one more drop of red paint, and so on. Now, there is… what he got was a pack of cards with the following property: if you take two cards which are close together, they’re next in the pack, or three apart in the pack or four apart, the appearance is the same. But if you take two which are, as it might be, 18 or 20 apart, the appearance is different. How can that be? This is the same appearance as this is the same as this as this is the same as this as this is the same as this…so this is the same as this. No, no! There is no well… appearances are not the sorts of things that have a well-defined identity. Moreover,… so that, what I want to say is the properties… I’m not ruling…banishing talk of appearances from the language, I am not doing a solarsian moon, say, we were mistaken in thinking there are appearances. What I am saying is, in fact, -- and this is something I try to develop in two parts of this book, in the third lecture -- they are called lectures rather than chapters in the first two parts of the book -- the third lecture in part two and the very last… in the last afterword in the book -- there are no scientific objects that have the properties of ordinary language appearances. So, if the mind-body problem is conceived of that way, then it’s a mistake. And of course there are many other… there is not one mind-body problem, there are a dozen. One of the main ones has come from the idea that correlation is a clear notion and these appearances are correlated with brain states, and then the question is: is an appearance identical with the brain state with which it is correlated? And this talk of correlation was already nonsense. To use one of Wittgenstein’s metaphors, the card trick was already performed before you thought. All the things you questioned, the magician wanted you to question. It’s that little move at the beginning that you didn’t notice. Once you have introduced this talk of: mental states are correlated to physical states, are they or are they not identical with the correlated physical states, you’ve already swallowed a myth… Yeah?

Q: Would you say that in your theory of natural realism, your emphasis on the mind interacting with the environment is perhaps more compatible or consistent with the evolutionary perspective of how the mind develops, or would you say your theory is neutral on that issue?

HP: Hm, well, it’s more compatible with the evolutionary account in this sense: that from an evolutionary point of view it is obvious that the senses evolved transactionally. That is, they evolved to enable us to have transactions with the environment, and that the illusion case… a dream is not an illusion, it is a defense mechanism of the body to protect… to protect sleep, but it’s parasitic on waking consciousness. It satisfies that part of the brain which would like to go on being conscious when something in your body says: no, you need rest. And, in fact, it activates the very mechanisms in the brain. It now… at least… the dominant theory now about neurology is when you have one of these non-veridical perceptions… even when you just imagine a color, in a sense, Hume’s faint image theory, which was proved to be conceptually incoherent by hundreds of ordinary language philosophers, had something right about it: you are re-activating, re-stimulating the very brain modules that would be stimulated by a veridical perception. So that what is fundamental there are the mechanisms of veridical perception and those are mechanisms for having certain kinds of transactions with an environment.

A second point, which I make emphatically, and in sympathy with John McDowell at Pittsburgh, is perception, the quality of perception is deeply changed by conceptualization. When I see the letters S T O P, I can’t help seeing STOP. I don’t see a sign design associated with STOP, I see STOP. When you… I hadn’t spoken French for decades. When I went back to France the first time as an adult, they were talking so fast. Every week they talked a little slower… [laughter] and finally it was meaningful language. So one of the things that I… I don’t think what can make the kind of separation, say, a philosopher like Chris Peacocke wants to make, between a certain unconceptualized given-in perception and how our concepts alter it, because even… because as James said, what we get in mature perception -- what he called recognition -- is sensation and conception fused. And concepts are for sure world-involving, so both from an evolutionary side, why these things evolved in the first place, and from the side of how they function in the life of a being employing concepts, they are constantly linked to the world. And it takes… you know, I mean… Husserl defended this as the basis of all philosophical methodology. That you have to do philosophy in this new way, the 20th century way, as it was, for Husserl, called phenomenology, you have to start by bracketing the question of the existence of the external world. We’ve all been taught… and not only these, we’ve been taught by philosopher after philosopher that the way to start doing philosophy is to treat all experience as if it were a dream. As if the problem, then, of distinguishing veridical perception from, say, dreams is a problem of distinguishing one kind of dream from another. And what I am trying to defend, and there are few allies, as I say, in the history of philosophy. They are an unlikely group including Austin, Wittgenstein and James, but… Purse also was an ally on this, so, for that matter, was Alfred North Whitehead, probably. But it is time to really…rather than performing these rather sophisticated games -- not that we should loose our sophistication -- rather than performing these very sophisticated games, that is looking at arguments which already presuppose two or three hundred steps before you get to them, which is what philosophers are good at, because that’s what you are trained to do in graduate school, it’s much harder to do what Wittgenstein asked us to do and say: what are we all taking for granted? And this will be the last question because I promised the store that there would be 15 minutes of questions and then you can sign books.

Q: How does this relate to [Donald] Davidson’s systems?

HP: I am… well, I have a…that plays a role, a big role in Part Two of this book. On the one hand, I defend Davidson against Kim’s arguments, Jaegwon Kim’s arguments. The second part of the book is directed against a former student of mine named Jaegwon Kim, who very kindly agreed to be my stalking horse, and I chose him because I respect him the most of the people with what I think is the wrong position. He was enormously gracious about that. I still have hopes of winning him over. So, on the one hand I defend Davidson against Kim’s arguments; on the other hand, I regard the notion, Davidson’s notion of identity of events, as hopeless. Once Davidson agreed that Quine’s criticism was right, I mean, I think Quine’s repair is as bad as abandoning the notion. Quine suggested, after pointing out to Davidson in a famous meeting in Rutgers, many years ago, that his criterion for identity of events was viciously circular, suggested: just call two events the same, if they have the same spatial-temporal boundaries. And that is both counter-intuitive and still doesn’t solve the problem. It’s counter-intuitive, because if say, a rotating metal ball is heated up to the point where it turns red and then white hot, so you get light, on this theory, the event of its heating up is the identical event as the event of its rotating. And that’s crazy, it’s event of its heating… especially if the events are the relata of the causal relation, as Davidson claims, and that’s an extension of a relation, as it claims, it would follow that the ball radiates light because it is rotating. No. Secondly, it doesn’t really solve the problem. Consider a typical… Suppose the kind of worry about event identity that philosophers like to play with is the… was the rationing an effect of World War II or was it part of World War II? The criterion about boundaries, spatial-temporal boundaries is not going help, I think. And in lots of other cases, it simply won’t help. So, I think, again, it’s another of those cases where the idea that this relation equals the equality of Euclid’s geometry. That’s where the so-called logical notion of identity came from. It was first axiomatized in geometry, by Euclid. The idea that that kind of identity is strictly defined for objects like events, or quasi-objects like events… Another thing I attack is this putting any weight on the question whether or not something is an object. I’ll close by reading one page, maybe, from the very beginning, on just that. I say:

" Traditional forms of realism are committed to the claim that it makes sense to speak of a fixed totality of all objects that our propositions can be about. We can speak about wars, but is the Second World War an object? According to Donald Davidson, events are objects, and so the answer is yes, but few traditional metaphysicians would have included events as objects. The criteria for identity for these objects are obscure indeed," and then… for the reasons I just gave, "We can speak about the color of the sky, but is the sky an object? We can speak about mirror images, but are mirror images objects? We can speak of objects of desire, such as the novel I wish I had written. Are such intentional objects really objects?" And the list goes on and on… Thank you.

[applause]

part 1:
Introduction
part 2:
Putnam on The Threefold Cord
part 3:
Questions and Answers

Copyright 2000 Harvard Book Store