1. Culture of misery?
In his recent book-length study, Daniel Stoljar asks ‘Why does it seem a truism that philosophy makes no progress? Why the culture of misery?’Footnote 2 Indeed, Paul Horwich says ‘Our subject is notorious for its perennial controversies and lack of decisive progress – for its embarrassing failure, after two thousand years to settle any of its central questions’Footnote 3 and, although Galen Strawson ‘celebrates discovering that one has powerful allies’ in the past, a ‘moment of illumination, not defeat’, he candidly admits ‘almost everything worthwhile in philosophy has been thought of before’.Footnote 4 Nicholas Rescher characterizes progress as ‘a matter of achieving a rationally substantiated consensus on the basic issues of the field’Footnote 5 and on the same criterion, David Chalmers suggests ‘There has not been large collective convergence to the truth on the big questions of philosophy’.Footnote 6 Of course, except for social constructivists, collective convergence is not the same as progress. Despite the wide consensus in significant areas of philosophy, there remains room to doubt convergence to the truth. Indeed, Eric Dietrich has argued that there is no progress in philosophy at all.Footnote 7
To be sure, since KuhnFootnote 8 and LaudanFootnote 9 it has become clear that, even in the case of science, the notion of progress is problematic and requires subtle clarification. However, we may rely on the same commonsense criteria that Stoljar recommends to make reliable judgments across the diverse disciplines. He presents the case for a ‘reasonable optimism’ on the grounds that, once we clarify ‘whether the current disagreements in philosophy are over the same issues as disagreements in the past’, we can recognize that ‘there is progress on all or reasonably many of the big questions of philosophy’.Footnote 10 This is large and surprising claim in view of the widespread scepticism among professional philosophers.Footnote 11 Stoljar says Wittgenstein's famous Preface to his Tractatus is ‘very naturally read’ as ‘proposing a profoundly optimistic view about philosophy’. However, Wittgenstein claims to have exposed the fatal errors upon which the entire history of philosophy has been founded.Footnote 12 Of course, this may be counted progress in the same way that exposing corruption and criminality in government is progress. In this sense, the Tractatus might be seen as profoundly optimistic if one welcomes the end of philosophy, which was exactly the way it was greeted by SchlickFootnote 13 and the Logical Empiricists.
Nevertheless, against this current of doubt Stoljar does not offer ‘hitherto unknown sociological or historical information that shows that there has been progress when most people think there is none’.Footnote 14 Instead, he questions whether earlier problems are the same as later ones. Since historical and other evidence would be the most obvious, decisive way to combat pessimism, Stoljar's approach is ultimately unpersuasive, as I will argue. In part this is because, even granting Stoljar's case as far as it goes, his account omits consideration of central areas of contemporary philosophical debate that are essentially unchanged since at least the 17th Century and in some cases much earlier.Footnote 15 Stoljar's admitted avoidance of getting his ‘hands dirty’ with the historical cases means that his framework of caveats permits overlooking the source of persistent controversies. Stoljar aims ‘to defend reasonable optimism on the basis of a set of views about what philosophical problems are’.Footnote 16 However, appearing to concede the limitations of this approach, Stoljar suggests that, at worst, his claims about past philosophers are commonplace in philosophy departments.Footnote 17 Indeed, the historical evidence I will adduce constitutes an indictment of the widely shared view among professional analytic philosophers.
2. Residue, remnants
To the considerable extent that academic philosophy is still concerned with the traditional problems, these may be seen as the residue of progress as various issues become settled through the advance of science. Chalmers refers to such ‘disciplinary speciation’Footnote 18 and Stoljar labels this the ‘Womb of Disciplines’ view.Footnote 19 Stoljar dismisses this argument on the grounds that it ‘suggests that philosophy is by definition the subject that does not make progress’. However, this is to confuse the way the discipline may be defined with the empirical facts on which the definition is based. If certain obdurate problems persist as the proprietary business of philosophy, this is a sociological, historical fact, whatever may be one's judgement of the worth of those ‘remnant’ problems. Stoljar illustrates the conceptual difficulty of defining the discipline with the case of a dividing amoeba,Footnote 20 but this will be hardly grounds for optimism when we discover that we are rehearsing exactly the same debates as the Early Modern philosophers. Faced with the ‘culture of misery’, neglecting such tendencies at the heart of mainstream analytic philosophy is to follow Bing Crosby's advice to ‘accentuate the positive’ but it is to miss the evidence and very source of concern about the lack of progress. Furthermore, optimism can be maintained even in the most dire circumstances and, therefore, framing the issue in terms of such attitudes is unhelpful in assessing the objective state of the discipline.
For example, although not discussed by Stoljar, even the Gettier ProblemFootnote 21 and Newcomb's ProblemFootnote 22 deserve mention among the notorious puzzles showing no sign of progress after fifty years of inconclusive debate in an immense literature. Forty years ago David Armstrong already wrote of the ‘truly alarming and ever-increasing series of papers’ in which the philosophical literature on the Gettier problem reaches ‘the extremes of futile complexity’.Footnote 23 These are arguably symptoms of a malaise characteristic of philosophy.Footnote 24
3. Dialogue with the Dead: Pointless Exercise?
Curley asks ‘Why is the history of philosophy worth bothering with?’Footnote 25 Indeed, many contemporary philosophers share Quine's dismissive attitude to the history of philosophy on the grounds that determining what some historical figure thought and imparting it is less appealing than ‘determining the truth and imparting that’.Footnote 26 Scriven, like Quine, recommends the avoidance of ‘dialogue with the dead’ as not a fit subject for the education of those who aspire to make a contribution to philosophy. GaukrogerFootnote 27 disparagingly described efforts to show that Descartes was a precursor of modern cognitive science as a ‘pointless exercise, of no use in understanding anything’. However, on the contrary, as PasnauFootnote 28 has said regarding the Scholastics, ‘The point … is not to establish who said what first but to show that current ways of conceptualizing problems in these areas aren't just an accidental product of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’
StoljarFootnote 29 echoes Harman'sFootnote 30 claim ‘There are no perennial philosophical problems’. That is, Stoljar rejects the ‘endurance view’ that ‘the big philosophical problems discussed today [are] … literally identical to the problems discussed in the past’ (emphasis added). He acknowledges that, if warranted, the endurance view would make pessimism about philosophical progress ‘almost inevitable’. Of course, the key question of whether certain philosophical problems are literally identical depends crucially on how the problems are individuated. Stoljar acknowledges that certain broad ‘topics’ such as the relation of the mental to the physical may endure throughout history of philosophy,Footnote 31 but he argues that philosophers focus on different specific questions within the wider topic. Stoljar says ‘it is clear that the Cartesian mind-body problem – that is, the problem that operates with Descartes’ notion of a physical fact – fits our pattern [emphasis added]’. However, in this way Stoljar identifies the relevant problem or question narrowly in terms of specific conceptions at a particular time and place. Like attending to people's noses and freckles, this level of specificity misses the deep, persistent identities. Descartes is, after all, concerned with Levine's ‘explanatory gap’Footnote 32 – the puzzle of how to reconcile the mental, res cogitans, with the physical facts, even if the latter is understood as res extensa rather than our modern conception. Even Aristotle's question concerning the relation of body and soul in De Anima is recognizable as our own despite the fact that his conception of mind and matter were different from ours.
As Fodor put it,Footnote 33 the puzzle arises because, ‘details aside, Lucretius had things about right. What there really is is atoms-and-the-void, and there's really nothing else’. The fact that we no longer think of atoms in the way that Lucretius did, does not change the essential nature of the philosophical problem concerning the mind. Indeed, it is in exactly these terms that McGinn says ‘We don't really yet understand, scientifically or philosophically, by what means or mechanism bunches of particles contrived to generate something so apparently different from themselves.’Footnote 34 The idea of emergent consciousness is the question that ‘boggles the human mind’ by seeking an ‘imaginative grip on the supposed move from the non-experiential to the experiential’.Footnote 35 And Chalmers begins his celebrated book with a typical declaration, ‘Consciousness is the biggest mystery. It may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe.’Footnote 36 However we may distinguish topics from problems, we have clearly made no progress on this ‘biggest mystery’ since Lucretius.
4. A Bum Rap?
Of course, it is not unusual to lament the fact that Anglo-American analytic philosophy is ‘not only unhistorical but anti-historical, and hostile to textual commentary’.Footnote 37 Nevertheless, M. Wilson challenges the justice of such aspersions ‘as a fairly bum rap’Footnote 38 in the light of the significant historical scholarship by analytic philosophers. However, to take an important illustrative case, historians’ recent portraits of Descartes, the most cited, most taught and most famous Early Modern figure, are unrecognizable to Analytic philosophers trained on the canonical texts and vast secondary literature of their own discipline. The ‘real Descartes’, as Strawson notes, is ‘not the ‘Descartes’ of present-day non-historical philosophy’.Footnote 39 Nadler has remarked ‘Hopefully, the days when Anglo-American Cartesian scholarship could consist in numerous books on the Meditations alone and an endless stream of papers on the Cartesian circle or the cogito are over.’Footnote 40 Indeed, fellow historian Desmond Clarke has entirely ignored these topics in his book Descartes's Theory of Mind,Footnote 41 but this neglect will seem scandalous to any well-educated philosopher. There is little evidence that Nadler's hopes for reform have been realized and, for that very reason, the persistence of the narrow intellectual puzzles is interesting as much for what it reveals about philosophy today as for what it obscures about Descartes. For a notable example, despite the wide currency of Dennett's term,Footnote 42 Descartes was not guilty of the ‘Cartesian Theater’ fallacy and, indeed, in his Dioptrics explicitly argued against a conception of mental representation that would require the notorious homunculus. Descartes precisely anticipated Dennett's own position and Pylyshyn's critique of this error in pictorial theories of vision and imagery.Footnote 43 Progress?
5. Still living and sparkling
Of the canonical texts, Descartes’ Meditations is compulsory reading for every philosophy student. However, in the general neglect of his ‘scientific’ works, we see perhaps the most revealing illustration of disciplinary ‘speciation’, ‘fission’ and the ‘remnants’ of scientific progress in the ‘womb of disciplines’. Of his vast corpus of writing only a very few parts remain of ongoing interest to philosophers. Typically, students and scholars pay exclusive attention to the Meditations and Discourse and ignore his Dioptrics, Meteorology and Geometry to which the Discourse was a preface. Clarke's jarring, alternative portrait of Descartes is an indictment of contemporary philosophers’ practice:
I interpret the extant writings of Descartes as the output of a practising scientist who, somewhat unfortunately, wrote a few short and relatively unimportant philosophical essays.Footnote 44
Ouch! Clarke even asks the heretical question: Was Descartes a dualist?Footnote 45 Thus, for philosophers, it is astonishing, even scandalous, that, in his book Clarke makes no mention of ‘cogito’ or ‘doubt’. These omissions are incomprehensible to any student or teacher of academic philosophy. Clarke's book is evidence of a growing recognition that Cartesian scholarship in the Analytic tradition has misunderstood Descartes and failed to grasp the significance of his thought even in those canonical texts to which their attention has been exclusively devoted.
Nothing could more clearly illustrate this regressive character of Analytical Philosophy than the attitude of Alexandre KoyréFootnote 46 who captures the idea that the traditional issues in Descartes scholarship and curricula are the live issues today. Thus, in his introduction to the Anscombe and Geach translation of Descartes’ work, Koyré reflected on the centuries of progress that separate us from Descartes – ‘long enough to throw back into the dead past most of the subjects and some of the problems that stirred the minds of our forgotten ancestors’. Among subjects to be discarded as obsolete, Koyré suggests, are Descartes’ Meteors and large parts of his Optics. ‘And yet’ he adds by contrast, when reading the Meditations or Discourse, nobody ‘will feel that he is dealing with dead texts. On the contrary: they are still living and sparkling’. Koyré is characteristically appreciative, indeed reverential, towards philosophical questions that remain ‘permanently alive’ even after centuries, for they are ‘immensely difficult to grasp’ and, therefore, permanently important and ‘modern’.
6. Cogito
In particular, there is perhaps no problem in philosophy that is more studied by students and scholars than the one posed by Descartes’ Cogito dictum, and no text is better known than his Meditations. Judging by the unabated publications,Footnote 47 Woodruff Smith is certainly correct to observe ‘There is something dead right, and very much alive, about the cogito.’Footnote 48 Of course, what exactly is ‘dead right’ about it remains controversial after three centuries.
However, the greatest puzzle of the Cogito is why it should still be a puzzle. This problem has kept a philosophical industry busy for three hundred and fifty years. It is the puzzle of whether Cogito ergo sum is a logical inference, a pure intuition or something else, perhaps a ‘performance’.Footnote 49 Moreover, the ‘purely’ textual and ‘philosophical’ issues cannot be plausibly separated in such cases. The difficulty of Descartes’ texts is the difficulty of the mind-body problem itself. It is in this sense that the Meditations offer, in Frankfurt's words, ‘not so much a theory to be understood as an exercise to be practised’.Footnote 50 Three hundred and fifty years of inconclusive debate in the ‘massive and ever-growing corpus of secondary literature on Descartes’Footnote 51 suggests this staple ‘remnant’ of old-fashioned philosophy might constitute a case study of the ‘nonideality’ limitations on our thinking in Chalmers’ sense.Footnote 52 Indeed, despite its revered status, the manifest lack of an uncontroversial solution to the puzzle may be due to a seductive illusion – a peculiar kind of elusiveness rather than its intrinsic intellectual difficulty. The exegetical problem has not been widely seen in these terms but a less reverential attitude is expressed en passant by the logician Bar-Hillel who blames the intractability in this case on a specific kind of puzzlement concerning indexicality which he says is ‘a major cause of many philosophical pseudo-problems and pseudo-theses; and, in the confusion it creates when not fully understood, is partly responsible for the otherwise almost incomprehensible veneration in which the Cartesian Cogito is held.’Footnote 53 In this vein, I have argued that the Cogito is a variant of familiar paradoxical or ‘ungrounded’ statements like The Liar – a kind of Cantorean ‘Diagonal’ argument.Footnote 54 Such an account is textually faithful and has the virtue of revealing why the Cogito has been so elusive, as well as reconciling the deductive and intuitive interpretations of the insight. On this account, the Cogito turns out to be a member of a family of notorious paradoxes and, thereby, a kind of intellectual illusion, or pseudo-problem. In his last article, Hintikka acknowledged the merits of this analysis and his indebtedness to it in modifying his own view.Footnote 55 This account is perhaps disappointing in the way that a magic trick is disappointing when explained. Nevertheless, even if the sleight-of-hand seems obvious in retrospect, the puzzlement is real and tells us something important about the nature of some philosophical problems and their persistence.
7. Squiggle squiggle
It is easy to assume that contemporary puzzles arising from cognitive science and AI pose new problems for philosophers and that their debates reflect progress over old-fashioned preoccupations. However, we see a striking anticipation of Searle's notorious Chinese Room problem long before it spawned the recent decades of inconclusive debate in an immense literature.Footnote 56 Searle's Chinese Room is a metaphor for the computational conception of mind and was devised to demonstrate the impossibility of genuine meaning or intentional content in purely symbolic computers or ‘Strong AI’. However, to go back no further in history, Wittgenstein's oft-cited Investigations question was: What gives life to a sign that by itself seems dead? Of course, the question precisely anticipates Searle's puzzle arising from the meaningless ‘squiggle squiggle’ of symbolic AI. In fact, the same conundrum has a much longer history. Descartes’ account of visual perception involves the transmission of signals along the nerve filaments from the retina to the brain – essentially a correct account of the encoding of abstract, symbolic information or computation in the modern sense. In the Optics and Passions Descartes describes the causes by which objects produce perceptions as occurring ‘in the same way in which, when we pull one end of a cord, we make the other move’. In the same terms, Descartes compared sensory perception via nerves to the transmission of movements in a blind man's stick in the Optics. Footnote 57 Searle's incomprehension of the ‘meaningless’ symbols is uncannily evoked by Glanvill in 1661 who asks ‘But how is it, and by what Art doth the soul read that such an image or stroke in matter … signifies such an object? Did we learn such an Alphabet in our Embryo-state?’Footnote 58 Glanvill suggests that the ‘motions of the filaments of nerves’ must represent the quality of objects by analogy with the way in which a person learns to understand a language, for otherwise ‘the soul would be like an infant who hears sounds or sees lips move but has no understanding of what the sounds or movements signify, or like an illiterate person who sees letters but “knows not what they mean”.’ Glanvill's response to Descartes is just Searle's response to ‘Strong AI’.
8. The ocular metaphor
We see a striking lack of progress in the modern ‘Imagery Debate’Footnote 59 which revives and embraces the ocular metaphor characterized by Rorty as ‘the original sin of epistemology’.Footnote 60 The Debate was characterised as ‘one of the hottest topics’ in cognitive science by BlockFootnote 61 but it is perhaps the most remarkable modern duplication of seventeenth century controversies. Pylyshyn'sFootnote 62 criticism of the most ubiquitous and pernicious error today was exactly anticipated by Descartes and the one Arnauld charged against MalebrancheFootnote 63 – namely, the confusion of properties of objects with properties of their representations, that is, confusing properties in essendo with properties in repraesentando. Descartes explains that we must avoid the philosophers’ common assumption that ‘in order to have sensory perceptions the soul must contemplate certain images transmitted by objects to the brain’ or that ‘the mind must be stimulated, by little pictures formed in our head’.Footnote 64 Instead, ‘the problem is to know simply how they can enable the soul to have sensory perceptions of all the various qualities of the objects to which they correspond – not to know how they can resemble these objects’.
9. The endurance view: Jackson's ‘Knowledge Argument’
Stoljar acknowledges that contemporary problems often have historical precursors, but suggests that there is ‘no reason to suppose the very same big questions in philosophy have been discussed and debated for centuries’. Of course, this claim rests crucially on what is meant by ‘the very same’. Stoljar illustrates his point with the example of Descartes and JacksonFootnote 65 who ‘are asking distinct questions about that subject matter, owing to their differing understandings of mind, matter, and the possible relations between them’. However, as with Lucretius, by emphasizing such differences, we fail to notice the deep underlying commonality. Moreover, a further reason that Descartes is not asking exactly the same question as Jackson is that he is on the opposite side of the Knowledge Argument having spelled out the fallacy in his physiological texts ignored by philosophers. Descartes’ Optics criticizes ascribing qualitative features of phenomenal experience to the physical properties of the brain – essentially the criticism of the Knowledge Argument that Jackson himself later endorses.Footnote 66 It is not Descartes but Malebranche who appears to anticipate Jackson's Knowledge Argument. Malebranche wrote: ‘If a man had never eaten a melon, or seen red or blue, he would consult this alleged idea of his soul in vain.’ As Schmaltz notes,Footnote 67 Malebranche's position appears to evoke Jackson's original view of Mary's qualia, and he draws essentially Jackson's conclusion adding, ‘Heat, pain, and color cannot be modifications of extension, for extension can only have various figures and motion.’Footnote 68 Malebranche suggests that both the ‘learned and the ignorant’ ‘clearly understand that extension is incapable of pain, taste, odor or of any sensation … For there is no sensible quality contained in the idea that represents extension.’ Jackson's critique of his own earlier position as the ‘act-object’ theory of sense-data is essentially Arnauld's critique of Malebranche. It was precisely the recurrence of the idea of sense-data since Locke, that J.L. Austin lamented as ‘a curious and in some ways rather melancholy fact’.Footnote 69 Like Jackson, Locke challenged those who think phenomenal experience might be produced by words or in any way other than by the appropriate sensation. Locke says ‘He that thinks otherwise, let him try if any Words can give him the taste of a Pineapple, and make him have the true Idea of the Relish of that celebrated delicious Fruit.’Footnote 70 Stoljar's own example, supposed to illustrate progress in philosophy, appears to demonstrate precisely the opposite. Rorty has referred to the underlying problem as ‘the philosophical urge’ which is to model knowing on seeing – the ‘veil of ideas’ doctrine he credited to 17th century thinkers.Footnote 71 However, four centuries earlier, Aquinas was criticized for postulating inner representations ‘in which real objects are intellectively cognised as in a mirror’ and would therefore ‘veil the thing and impede its being attended to’. Pasnau remarks, ‘So much for veil-of-ideas epistemology as a modern invention.’Footnote 72
10. Qualia and the Heat Death of the Universe
As Stoljar recognizes, the Knowledge Argument is a defence of qualia. However, this issue gets only a passing mention in his book though it is the central, persistent source of the mind-body problem – the perennial puzzle about subjective, qualitative phenomenal states, the ‘raw feels’ of experience seen in the immense literature on zombies, inverted spectra and other esoterica. Levine's ‘explanatory gap’Footnote 73 merely re-invents Wittgenstein's ‘unbridgeable gulf’. Indeed, it is arguably the fundamenal puzzle that has plagued the mind-body problem throughout its history. Of course, this puzzlement is the reason for Nagel's remark, ‘Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.’Footnote 74 Searle,Footnote 75 like Levine, echoes Sherrington in 1942Footnote 76 almost verbatim suggesting that the physical causes of pain do not explain the subjective feeling. Significantly, DennettFootnote 77 reminds us that his own critical ‘illusionism’ about consciousness was anticipated by Place's classic manifesto for modern materialismFootnote 78 which cited Sherrington's ‘phenomenological fallacy’. The modern puzzle is captured evocatively by McGinn's question ‘How can technicolour phenomenology arise from soggy grey matter?’Footnote 79 In the 17th Century, Robert Boyle asked in the same terms how can ‘this seemingly rude lump of soft matter’ that appears like so much custard’ perform such ‘strange things’.Footnote 80 Lycan conveys the point dramatically in his wry observation ‘Someday there will be no more articles written about the “Knowledge Argument”’ for qualia. ‘That is beyond dispute. What is less certain is, how much sooner that day will come than the heat death of the universe.’Footnote 81
11. Intentionality: All the rage these days
If we turn to another major area of philosophical concern today, in something of an understatement, Georges Rey said recently ‘Mental representation is all the rage these days.’Footnote 82 In the same vein, Robert Cummins characterised the vexed problem of mental representation as ‘the topic in the philosophy of mind for some time now’.Footnote 83 They didn't mean four hundred years. It will come as a surprise to current philosophers that the Cartesians sought to explain the conformity between ideas and objectsFootnote 84 which is, of course, just the recalcitrant problem of intentionality regarding mental representations. Fodor suggests that in the period since Hume the theory of ideas ‘seems to have made some modest progress’Footnote 85 but Yolton has noted that the burning question among philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is that of ‘objects present to the mind’Footnote 86 – precisely the question of ‘concept possession’ central to Fodor's Hume Variations and his earlier Concepts. Footnote 87 Our ‘modern’ topic of representation was central to the entire philosophical tradition of ‘ideas’ since the late Middle Ages.Footnote 88
MoreauFootnote 89 suggests that the famous dispute between Malebranche and Arnauld rested on an ‘ambiguity’ in Descartes’ Third Meditation Footnote 90 in which he distinguishes between the réalité formelle and réalité objective of representational ideas, essentially the modern contrast between narrow, internal meaning and wide, external or referential semantic content. That is, the current internalism/externalism debate over the content of mental representations is a re-enactment of the most famous controversy of the 17th Century. Indeed, the view of Antoine Le Grand (1620–1699) is quite startling in its faithfulness to contemporary conceptions. Le Grand argues that ideas have a double aspect, precisely anticipating Ned Block's ‘two component’ view.Footnote 91 Block explains that there is ‘narrow’ or ‘conceptual role’ meaning entirely ‘in the head,’ and external, referential meaning relating internal representations with the world. Three hundred years earlier Le Grand wrote:
… in the Idea or notion of a Thing two things are to be consider'd: First, That it is a Modus inherent in the Mind, from whence it proceeds: The other, That it shews or represents something. The former of these proceeds from the Mind, as its effective Principle; the latter from the Object or thing apprehended, as from its Exemplary cause.Footnote 92
12. Tables and Chairs: Bumping into things
Celebrating progress with the emergence of a scientific orientation in analytic philosophy of mind, Fodor mockingly observed that philosophers have been notorious for absurd worries such as the ‘fear that there is something fundamentally unsound about tables and chairs’.Footnote 93 Fodor joked that, while such concerns are difficult to explain to one's spouse and colleagues, nevertheless, occasionally some merely philosophical worry turns out to be ‘real’ as in the case of the representational character of cognition. He explained that, unlike other proprietary concerns, this puzzle is no longer just a philosophers’ preoccupation because its solution has become a precondition of progress in several disciplines of cognitive science. However, there is an acute, unintended irony in light of the modern representational conception of the mind which evokes precisely the worry about tables and chairs.
Unwittingly echoing Berkeley's idealism, Fodor says ‘machines typically don't know (or care) what the programs they run are about’.Footnote 94 That is, as Searle has notoriously complained, the meaningless ‘squiggles’ of computational symbols don't seem to capture the contents of mental representations about the world.Footnote 95 Accordingly, Jackendoff facetiously asks ‘Why, if our understanding has no direct access to the real world, aren't we always bumping into things?’Footnote 96 But, of course, this is just the traditional worry about the reality of the external world.Footnote 97 Jackendoff's satire echoes Samuel Johnson's famous retort to Berkeley's ‘ingenious sophistry’. Kicking a stone, he said ‘I refute it thus.’ Jackendoff, too, appeals to bumping into things, suggesting the way in which classical and modern theories appear to entail a disconnection of the mind from the world via mediating representations. Despite Fodor's optimism, cognitive science seems to have simply rediscovered the traditional philosophers’ anxiety.
13. Too bad for you
Nothing could appear more remote from modern theories in philosophy today than Malebranche's 1674 doctrine of the Vision of All Things in the Mind of God – the theory that ideas are objects of our perception that exist in God's mind. However, despite the theological trappings, we can recognize the affinity of Malebranche's views with those at the very forefront of theorising today. Thus, when distilled from its theological elements, far from dying of itself as LockeFootnote 98 had predicted, Malebranche's Vision of All Things in the Mind of God (minus theology) is recommended by Fodor as the foundational conception of cognitive science – the Theory of Ideas conceived as objects or ‘mental particulars with causal powers and susceptible of semantic evaluation’.
NadlerFootnote 99 explains that Malebranche's theory conforms with a problematic tripartite schema – subject, representation, and the world – the triadic structure that Danto described as ‘the basic cognitive episode’ and the fundamental concepts ‘in terms of which most of philosophy may be understood’.Footnote 100 As Arnauld complained, Malebranche regards the intermediary representation ‘as being actually distinct from our mind as well as from the object’.Footnote 101 However, for Arnauld and Reid, representation may be conceived as dyadic rather than triadic, that is, in an ‘adverbial’ way, according to which ‘having a visual experience is a matter of sensing in a certain manner rather than sensing a peculiar immaterial object’.Footnote 102 Here, I follow Nadler in seeing Arnauld as Reid's ‘ally in his campaign against the theory of ideas’.Footnote 103 As van Cleve explains: ‘It is not, as in the sense-datum theory, a triadic fact involving the table, the perceiver, and a sense-datum as an intervening item.’Footnote 104
If there were any doubts about what Stoljar refers to as the ‘endurance view’Footnote 105 and the persistence of big problems throughout history, we may consider von Eckardt's discussion of Peirce's account of the irreducibly triadic sign relation between a sign,Footnote 106 an object and an interpretant. von Eckardt considers ‘the general outline, if not all the details, of what Peirce has to say about representation … is tacitly assumed by many cognitive scientists’.Footnote 107 Indeed, today Bechtel explains ‘There are … three interrelated components in a representational story: what is represented, the representation, and the user of the representation.’Footnote 108 It is telling that von Eckardt cites Kosslyn's work on mental imagery as a paradigmatic example of research in cognitive science.Footnote 109 This reference takes on a particular significance in light of Pylyshyn's critique of the pictorial theory as fatally flawed.Footnote 110 Arnauld made the same complaint about the 17th Century version of the tripartite conception of ideas. He said ‘You [Malebranche] are not happy with this distinction. Too bad for you.’Footnote 111 And too bad for much philosophy and cognitive science today.
14. Miracle Theory
It is no coincidence that Arnauld's 1683 treatise On True and False Ideas advocated a non-relational conception and was concerned to repudiate what he describes as ‘imaginary representations’, saying ‘I can, I believe, show the falsity of the hypothesis of representations’.Footnote 112 Today, proponents of ‘dynamic systems’Footnote 113 and ‘situated cognition’Footnote 114 argue that symbolic representations which intervene between the mind and the world are explanatorily redundant and must be dispensed with. These echo the debate between Arnauld and Malebranche, described by Nadler as a debate between the direct realism of an ‘act theory’ and an indirect or representationalist ‘object theory’, respectively.Footnote 115 He explains, ‘If ideas are representational mental acts [rather than entities], then they can put the mind in direct cognitive contact with the world – no intervening proxy, no tertium quid, gets in the way.’ To reject internal objects is not to reject mental representations altogether. In Arnauld's case, as in Reid's response to Hume, this is not the ‘miracle theory’ that repudiates intermediaries altogether as Fodor has uncharitably suggested.Footnote 116 As De RosaFootnote 117 recognizes, the term ‘idea’ did not refer to any third thing between thought and its object though this was not to repudiate representations as such. For Descartes and Arnauld, ideas are not distinct entities but just those very activities of the mind which are essentially representative per se. Our mind is capable of knowing bodies immediately, that is, ‘without any intermediary between our perceptions and the object’.Footnote 118
In view of the recurrence of these problems today, PutnamFootnote 119 returns to Reid's critique of ideas, rejecting representations as interface between mind and world. In response, Fodor says that this stratagem today flies in the face of the success of modern psychology because without mental representation ‘much of what the mind does would be miraculous’.Footnote 120 However, CopenhaverFootnote 121 argues that Reid does not hold such an absurd view because perception may be direct but still mediated. This is essentially Fodor's own position illustrated in his joke that long-distance telephone conversations with his wife are ‘direct’ though mediated in all sorts of ways. He says ‘still, it is my wife that I talk to’. Reid would have agreed,Footnote 122 like Descartes and Arnauld too. As if to answer Fodor, Copenhaver says, ‘The challenge, then, is to locate a version of direct realism that does not require perception to remain unmediated.’ Above all, in light of Fodor's mockery, it is important to appreciate that ‘causal mediation is not the sort to which Reid's direct realism is opposed’.Footnote 123 Apart from exegetical concerns, if Fodor is right about Hume's Treatise being the founding document of modern cognitive science,Footnote 124 a proper appreciation of Reid has dire implications for the contemporary field.
15. Fodor's guilty passion: Le plus séduisant cartésien
In their celebrated debate, Arnauld criticised Malebranche's ‘object’ theory for ascribing corporeal properties to mental ones. Significantly, Thomas Reid's made the same diagnosis of the fatal flaw in Hume's doctrine that Fodor has embraced. Fodor admits to having harboured something like a ‘guilty passion’ for Hume's Treatise but Hume's debt to Malebranche's Search After Truth was ‘so profound, in fact, that, if Hume were a modern academic, he would not escape the charge of plagiarism’.Footnote 125 Lennon points out ‘Hume's debt to Malebranche is, if anything, greater than that of his illustrious predecessor in British Empiricism’, namely, Berkeley.Footnote 126 Indeed, Hume recommends that in order to understand his own metaphysical views, ‘I desire of you, if you have Leizure, to read once over La Recherche de la Verité of Pere Malebranche’.Footnote 127 Just as Lennon remarks that Hume's theory of causation is Malebranche's ‘occasionalism’ minus God, we may say analogously that Hume's theory of ideas is Malebranche's Vision in God minus God. If the interest and relevance of Malebranche's theory today is surprising, this is because its theological trappings and overtones of mysticism have obscured the seventeenth century issues and their relevance from the view of modern philosophers.Footnote 128 Accordingly, focus on Malebranche clarifies the provenance of Humean ‘ideas’ and, thereby, the received orthodoxy in philosophy today.
Fodor says ‘How to understand the metaphysics of representation, is among the deepest and most hotly debated of current philosophical issues.’Footnote 129 Semantics poses ‘one of the Great Metaphysical Problems’, namely that of finding a place for meaning in the natural order.Footnote 130 The modern puzzle is how to reconcile internal causal processes with their external reference and to determine what is the ‘glue’ that holds them together. However, Yolton remarks ‘That startling distinction between causing and meaning, the two different interactive relations between perceivers and the world, is precisely the distinction I find in several of the writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’Footnote 131 Fodor explains, ‘cognitive processes are constituted by causal interactions among mental representations, that is, among semantically evaluable mental particulars’.Footnote 132 Translated, this means ideas are mental objects that can be true or false and the ‘essential problem’ is to explain how thoughts manage to preserve truth.Footnote 133 In the same way, Malebranche asks ‘if our ideas were only our perceptions, if our [internal] modes were representative, how would we know that things correspond to our ideas?’ Fodor says the semantic evaluability of mental states is ‘the most important fact we know about minds; no doubt it's why God bothered to give us any.’Footnote 134 The theological joke reveals a secular version of the Vision of all things in God. That is, for ‘God’ read ‘some sort of nomic connection between mental representations and things in the world’,Footnote 135 the modern guise of Empiricist concern with the ‘veridicality’ of ‘ideas’. Although neglected and underestimated by modern analytic philosophers, it is not without reason that Malebranche was characterised by a 17th-century author, as we might say of Fodor too, En un mot, c'est le plus séduisant cartésien que je connaisse – in a word, the most seductive Cartesian that I know.
16. Argument from illusion
The persistence of the traditional tripartite conception means we need not be surprised if familiar classical puzzles re-emerge in a new guise. Thus, it is noteworthy that the modern puzzle of misrepresentationFootnote 136 is a variant of the venerable ‘Argument from Illusion’ in support of Empiricists’ ‘ideas’ and ‘sense data’. The modern problem arises because causal or co-variation theories of content seem to be unable to capture the way a mismatch might arise between a representation and the world. If a mentalese token ‘mouse’ might be caused not only by mice but also by shrews, then the symbol must ipso facto mean ‘shrew’ and cannot be in error. That is, if ideas are caused directly by external objects, we can't have misrepresentations (i.e. illusions), whereas the classical Argument from Illusion concludes from the fact that we have illusions (i.e. misrepresentations), our ideas can't be directly caused by external objects (i.e. there must be mediating direct objects of perception). These are equivalent contrapositives. Schematically:
1. Cause/correlation → No illusion i.e. No misrepresentation (Fodor and Dretske)
2. Illusion → No cause/correlation (Malebranche and Locke)
Fodor asks how he could think about his Granny if he is in New York and she is in Ohio. Or, Fodor asks ‘How can I be in an unmediated relation to Ebbets Field (alas long since demolished); or to my erstwhile dentist, who passed away a year ago in August?’Footnote 137 This is, of course, just the notorious Argument from Illusion. Malebranche too, remarks ‘it often happens that we perceive things that do not exist, and that even have never existed – thus our mind often has real ideas of things that have never existed. When, for example, a man imagines a golden mountain, it is absolutely necessary that the idea of this mountain really be present to his mind.’Footnote 138 Of course, the classical conclusion endorsed by Fodor is that we must be in a direct relation with something else, namely, our image, idea, or representation – ironically, the very source of the persisting fear that there is something unsound about tables and chairs. In a famous passage Malebranche wrote: ‘it is not likely that the soul should leave the body to stroll about the heavens, as it were, in order to behold all these objects’Footnote 139 and in a parallel passage Fodor writes that thoughts ‘have to be, as it were, ‘out there’ so that things in the world can interact with them, but they also have to be, as it were, ‘in here’ so that they can proximally cause behavior… it's hard to see how anything could be both.Footnote 140 Curley asks the pertinent question:
Someone doing a really thorough study of an argument like the argument from illusion would have to look at it in an historical dimension, taking account of its various forms and the interpretive issues each author may raise, and giving some attention to the question: ‘Why, if this argument is fallacious, has it had such a strong appeal to so many people over such a long period of time?’Footnote 141 [emphasis added.]
17. Defining catastrophe.
Descartes shared the very ‘pragmatism’ and ‘direct realism’ of Arnauld and Reid that Fodor sees as ‘the defining catastrophe’ in recent philosophy of mind.Footnote 142 This is the idea that a person's abilities such as recognitional and classificatory capacities determine the nature of concepts. However, since Putnam and others such as CumminsFootnote 143 defend this catastrophic Arnauld–Reid view today, looking backwards at these neglected Early Modern philosophers might explain why there has been less progress since the 17th Century than Fodor or Stoljar suggest. Fodor's disparagement of Reid brings into relief the difficulties of Fodor's own position when it is seen that Reid does not hold the absurd version of ‘direct realism’ attributed to him.Footnote 144 Wolterstorff notes:
… central elements of the pattern of thought against which he [Reid] tirelessly polemicized – the Way of Ideas, he called it – have been so deeply etched into our minds that we find it difficult even to grasp alternatives, let alone find them plausible.Footnote 145
Remarkably, contrary to received opinion, it is Reid rather than Hume who is seen by Putnam and Lehrer as the true father of cognitive science.Footnote 146 Indeed Wolterstorff judges Reid to be second only to Kant among great philosophers of the eighteenth century although he has almost disappeared from the canon of Western philosophy because his ideas have been trivialized and misunderstood. The neglect of these Early Modern philosophers is a symptom of the dominance of views long regarded as fatally flawed. In the case of Reid, for example, Galen Strawson remarks ‘He is, in effect, forgotten – in spite of the fact that he appears, viewed from the present, as the natural and unacknowledged father, and astonishing anticipator, of the correctly moderate wing of the 20th-century ‘direct realist’ approach to the problem of perception’.Footnote 147 Although Reid (and Putnam) are relegated to uncharitable footnotes by Fodor, it is fair to say that the debate has made little progress over several centuries.
18. Conclusion
Colin McGinn observes the constancy of philosophical themes and remarks candidly ‘Philosophy has a remarkable talent for staying the same.’Footnote 148 Indeed, Aristotle's De Anima, if not Plato's work, reads like a modern text. The first pages ask how we might distinguish the soul from the body and his answer is recognizably the modern ‘functionalist’ solution. The mind is not the material substance but the form of the body. As we see clearly from Aristotle's analogies, he suggests that the ‘affections of soul are enmattered formulable essence’ – that is, as we would say today, embodied functional states. Rorty remarked that ‘Philosophy of mind is one of the few clear instances of intellectual progress which analytic philosophy has to its credit’,Footnote 149 but we have seen that this judgment must be tempered by the remarkable degree to which it has made no progress at all. Whether one adopts an optimistic or pessimistic attitude, Pasnau indicates the reasons that there has been such marked ‘endurance’ of philosophical problems:
It may be, as Rorty and many others have argued, that we are the victims of a badly misleading conceptual picture of the mind. But the conclusion I would draw is that this picture, right or wrong, is not just the product of a few idiosyncratic seventeenth-century thinkers. It's rather a picture that comes quite naturally to us when we think about the mind, and it's one that has been around much longer than is commonly thought.Footnote 150 [emphasis added.]
