Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought

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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

428

being dialectical as in its being Materialist. Its dialectical side may be

epitomized in three laws: (1) that of the transformation of quality into

quantity, (2) that of the interpenetration of opposites, and (3) that of the

negation of the negation. Nondialectical philosophers find it hard, however, to

interpret these laws in a way that does not make them into either platitudes or

falsehoods.

Perhaps because of the historical determinism implicit in dialectical

Materialism, and perhaps because of memories of the mechanical Materialist

theories of the 18th and 19th centuries, when physics was deterministic, it is

popularly supposed that Materialism and determinism must go together. This

is not so. As indicated below, even some ancient Materialists were

indeterminists, and a modern physicalist Materialism must be indeterministic

because of the indeterminism that is built into modern physics. Modern

physics does imply, however, that macroscopic bodies behave in a way that is

effectively deterministic, and, because even a single neuron (nerve fibre) is a

macroscopic object by quantum mechanical standards, a physicalistic

Materialist may still regard the human brain as coming near to being a

mechanism that behaves in a deterministic way.

Types Distinguished by Their Account of Mind

A rather different way of classifying Materialist theories, which to some

extent cuts across the classifications already made, emerges when the theories

are divided according to the way in which a Materialist accounts for minds. A

central-state Materialist identifies mental processes with processes in the

brain. An analytical behaviorist, on the other hand, argues that, in talking

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about the mind, one is not talking about an actual entity, whether the brain or

an immaterial soul, but, rather, one is somehow talking about the way in

which people would behave in various circumstances. According to the

analytical behaviorist, there is no more of a problem for the Materialist in

having to identify mind with something material than there is in identifying

such an abstraction as the average plumber with some concrete entity.

Analytical behaviorism differs from psychological behaviorism, which is

merely a methodological program to base theories on behavioral evidence and

to eschew introspective reports. The analytical behaviorist usually has a not

too plausible theory of introspective reports according to which they are what

are sometimes called “avowals”: roughly, he contends that to say “I have a

pain” is to engage in a verbal surrogate for a wince. Epistemic Materialism is

a theory that can be developed either in the direction of central-state

Materialism or in that of analytical behaviorism and that rests on the

contention that the only statements that are intersubjectively testable are either

observation reports about macroscopic physical objects or statements that

imply such observation reports (or are otherwise logically related to them).

Before leaving this survey of the family of Materialistic theories, a quite

different sense of the word Materialism should be noted in which it denotes

not a metaphysical theory but an ethical attitude. A person is a Materialist in

this sense if he is interested mainly in sensuous pleasures and bodily comforts

and hence in the material possessions that bring these about. A man might be

a Materialist in this ethical and pejorative sense without being a metaphysical

Materialist, and conversely. An extreme physicalistic Materialist, for example,

might prefer a Beethoven record to a comfortable mattress for his bed; and a

person who believes in immaterial spirits might opt for the mattress.

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History of Materialism

Greek and Roman Materialism

Though Thales of Miletus (c. 580 BCE) and some of the other Pre-

Socratic philosophers have some claims to being regarded as Materialists, the

Materialist tradition in Western philosophy really begins with Leucippus and

Democritus, Greek philosophers who were born in the 5th century BCE.

Leucippus is known only through his influence on Democritus. According to

Democritus, the world consists of nothing but atoms (indivisible chunks of

matter) in empty space (which he seems to have thought of as an entity in its

own right). These atoms can be imperceptibly small, and they interact either

by impact or by hooking together, depending on their shapes. The great beauty

of atomism was its ability to explain the changes in things as due to changes

in the configurations of unchanging atoms. The view may be contrasted with

that of the earlier philosopher Anaxagoras (c. 480 BCE), who thought that

when, for example, the bread that a person eats is transformed into human

flesh, this must occur because bread itself already contains hidden within itself

the characteristics of flesh. Democritus thought that the soul consists of

smooth, round atoms and that perceptions consist of motions caused in the

soul atoms by the atoms in the perceived thing.

Because Epicurus’ philosophy was expounded in a lengthy poem by

Lucretius, a Roman philosopher of the 1st century BCE, Epicurus (died 270

BCE) was easily the most influential Greek Materialist. He differed from

Democritus in that he postulated an absolute up-down direction in space, so

that all atoms fall in roughly parallel paths. To explain their impacts with one

another, he then held that the atoms are subject to chance swerves – a doctrine

that was also used to explain free will. Epicurus’ Materialism therefore

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differed from that of Democritus in being an indeterministic one. Epicurus’

philosophy contained an important ethical part, which was a sort of

enlightened egoistic hedonism. His ethics, however, were not Materialistic in

the pejorative sense of the word.

Modern Materialism

Materialism languished throughout the medieval period, but the

Epicurean tradition was revived in the first half of the 17th century in the

atomistic Materialism of the French Catholic priest Pierre Gassendi. In putting

forward his system as a hypothesis to explain the facts of experience,

Gassendi showed that he understood the method characteristic of modern

science, and he may well have helped to pave the way for corpuscular

hypotheses in physics. Gassendi was not thoroughgoing in his Materialism

inasmuch as he accepted on faith the Christian doctrine that men have

immortal souls. His contemporary, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes,

also propounded an atomistic Materialism and was a pioneer in trying to work

out a mechanistic and physiological psychology. Holding that sensations are

corporeal motions in the brain, Hobbes skirted, rather than solved, the

philosophical problems about consciousness that had been raised by another

contemporary, the great French philosopher René Descartes. Descartes’s

philosophy was dualistic, making a complete split between mind and matter.

In his theory of the physical world, however, and especially in his doctrine

that animals are automata, Descartes’s own system had a mechanistic side to it

that was taken up by 18th-century Materialists, such as Julien de La Mettrie,

the French physician whose appropriately titled L’Homme machine (1747;

Man a Machine, 1750) applied Descartes’s view about animals to man

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himself. Denis Diderot, an 18th-century French Encyclopaedist, supported a

broadly Materialist outlook by considerations drawn from physiology,

embryology, and the study of heredity; and his friend Paul, baron d’Holbach,

published his Système de la nature (1770), which expounded a deterministic

type of Materialism in the light of evidence from contemporary science,

reducing everything to matter and to the energy inherent in matter. He also

propounded a hedonistic ethics as well as an uncompromising atheism, which

provoked a reply even from the Deist Voltaire.

The 18th-century French Materialists had been reacting against orthodox

Christianity. In the early part of the 19th century, however, certain writers in

Germany – usually with a biological or medical background – reacted against

a different orthodoxy, the Hegelian and Neo-Hegelian tradition in philosophy,

which had become entrenched in German universities. Among these were

Ludwig Büchner and Karl Vogt. The latter is notorious for his assertion that

the brain secretes thought just as the liver secretes bile. This metaphor of

secretion, previously used by P.-J.-G. Cabanis, a late 18th-century French

Materialist, is seldom taken seriously, because to most philosophers it does

not make sense to think of thought as a stuff. The Hobbesian view, also

espoused by Büchner, that thought is a motion in the brain is usually viewed

as a more promising one.

The synthesis of urea (the chief nitrogenous end product of protein

metabolism), discovered in 1828, broke down the discontinuity between the

organic and the inorganic in chemistry, which had been a mainstay of

nonmaterialistic biology. Materialist ways of thinking were later strengthened

enormously by the Darwinian theory of evolution, which not only showed the

continuity between man and other living things right back to the simplest

organisms but also showed how the apparent evidences of design in natural

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history could be explained on a purely causal basis. There still seemed to be a

gap, however, between the living and the nonliving, though E.H. Haeckel, a

19th-century German zoologist, thought that certain simple organisms could

have been generated from inorganic matter and, indeed, that a certain simple

sea creature may well be in process of generation in this way even now.

Though Haeckel was wrong, 20th-century biologists have proposed much

more sophisticated and more plausible theories of the evolution of life from

inorganic matter. Haeckel and his contemporary, the British zoologist T.H.

Huxley, did much to popularize philosophical accounts of the world that were

consonant with the scientific thought of their time, but neither could be

regarded as an extreme Materialist.

Contemporary Materialism

Perhaps because recent developments in biochemistry and in

physiological psychology have greatly increased the plausibility of

Materialism, there has lately been a resurgence of interest in the philosophical

defense of central-state Materialism. Central-state Materialists have proposed

their theories partly because of dissatisfaction with the analytical behaviorism

of the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle himself is reluctant to call

himself a Materialist, partly because of a dislike of all “isms” and partly

because he thinks that the notion of matter has meaning only by contrast with

that of mind, which he thinks to be an illegitimate sort of contrast.

Nevertheless, it would seem that analytical behaviorism could be used to

support a physicalist Materialism that would go on to explain human behavior

by means of neural mechanisms. (Ryle himself is suspicious of mechanistic

accounts of biology and psychology.) Analytical behaviorism has been felt to

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be unsatisfactory, however, chiefly because of its account of introspective

reports as avowals, which most philosophers have found to be unconvincing.

Philosophers have distinguished two forms of central-state Materialism,

namely, the translation form and the disappearance form. The translation form

is the view that mentalistic discourse can be translated into discourse that is

neutral between physicalism and dualism, so that the truth of a man’s

introspective reports is compatible with the objects of these reports being

physical processes. The disappearance form is the view that such a translation

cannot be done and that this fact, however, does not refute physicalism but

shows only that man’s ordinary introspective reports are contaminated by

false theories.

Translation Central-State Theories

Among the philosophers who have advocated the translation form is the

U.S. philosopher Herbert Feigl, earlier a member of the Vienna Circle, who,

in an influential monograph, did the most to get contemporary philosophers to

treat central-state Materialism as a serious philosophical theory. Against the

objection that, for example, “visual sensation” does not mean “process in the

visual cortex,” advocates of the translation form point out that “the morning

star” does not mean the same as “the evening star,” and yet the morning star

as a matter of fact is the evening star. The objection confuses meaning and

reference. Against the objection that a purely physical process (a dance of

electrons, protons, and so on) cannot have the sensory quality of greenness

that is observed in a visual experience of seeing grass, say, they reply that to

talk of the sensory experience of something looking green (or having a green

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mental image) is not to talk of anything that is literally green, but is simply to

report that some internal process is of the sort that normally goes with seeing

something, such as a lawn, which really is green. Though an immaterialist

might say that the sort of process in question is a spiritual process, the

Materialist can equally claim that it is a material process in the brain. The

analysis of the introspective report is neutral between these two contentions;

the Materialist, however, opts for his contention on various grounds. The

British Materialist U.T. Place does so on the ground of normal scientific

methodology; and the Australian Materialist J.J.C. Smart does so with a

metaphysical application of the principle (called “Ockham’s razor”) that

entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. A physicalistic Materialist

has, of course, an obligation to go on to give a suitable account of such

apparently nonphysicalist qualities as the greenness of grass. At one time

Smart analyzed colors in terms of the discriminatory behavior of human

beings. Another Australian Materialist, D.M. Armstrong, holds, on the other

hand, that colors are as a matter of fact properties of objects, such properties

being of the sort describable in the theoretical terms of physics. Feigl, in turn,

is to some extent (and rather reluctantly) a double-aspect theorist. He qualifies

the position taken by the other translation theorists, conceding that the

translations do leave something out, viz., the immediately introspectable

properties of “raw feels,” such as that of hearing the tone of middle C. He

holds, however, that such properties are irrelevant to causal explanations of

phenomena. The translation form of central-state Materialism thus has some

affinities with the earlier epistemic Materialism of the Positivist philosophers

Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, Germans who settled in the United

States. Thus Carnap has suggested that mental predicates be treated as

applying to material entities: for example, “Carnap sees green” could be taken

as meaning “the body Carnap is in the state of green-seeing,” the state of

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green-seeing being a purely physical state that explains the behavioral facts

that led one to ascribe the predicate “sees green” to Carnap in the first place.

David K. Lewis, a United States philosopher of science and language, has

developed a translation form of central-state Materialism on the basis of a

theory regarding the definition of theoretical terms in science. According to

this theory, entities such as electrons, protons, and neutrons are defined in

terms of the causal roles that they play in relation to observational phenomena

– e.g., phenomena in cloud chambers – but the method of definition is able to

do justice to the causal and other interrelations between the theoretical entities

themselves. Lewis applies this account to commonsense psychology. Since

mental entities, such as pains, are defined in commonsense psychology in

terms of their causal roles (in relation to observable behavior) and since there

is empirical reason to ascribe the same causal roles to brain processes, Lewis

identifies mental events, processes, and states with brain events, processes,

and states.

Disappearance Central-State Theories

The disappearance form of central-state Materialism is the sort of theory

held by P.K. Feyerabend, a U.S. philosopher, who denies that the Materialist

can give a neutral analysis of introspective reports. In Feyerabend’s view,

commonsense introspective reports are irreducibly immaterialist in content.

He argues, however, that this admission does not show the untenability of

Materialism. Ordinary mentalistic discourse, he holds, is comparable to the

medieval discourse about epileptics as being “possessed by the devil.” If one

now “identified” demon possession with a certain medical condition of the

brain, this would really be an assertion that there is no such thing as a demon-

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possessed state: the medieval way of looking at the matter is thus rejected. It

is in this sort of way that Feyerabend wants to “identify” the mind with the

brain: he simply rejects the ordinary mentalistic conceptual scheme and so

feels no obligation to show its compatibility with Materialism.

The influential American philosophers W.V. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars

also hold theories that could be regarded as disappearance forms of

physicalistic Materialism, though there is a Kantian twist to Sellars’

philosophy that makes it hard to classify. Sellars holds that mentalistic

concepts cannot be eliminated from man’s commonsense picture of the world,

which he calls “the manifest image.” In a way reminiscent of Kant he holds

that, although the manifest image is inescapable, it does not give metaphysical

truth about the world as it really is in itself. This truth is given, instead, by

“the scientific image” – i.e., by theoretical science, which is physicalist. In the

case of Quine, there is a certain Platonism in that he believes in the objective

reality of nonspatiotemporal entities, viz., those that are the subject matter of

pure mathematics. Because he holds that the reason for believing mathematics

is that it is needed as part of physical theory, his reasons for believing in

numbers and the like are not in principle different from those for believing in

electrons; thus Quine’s Platonism does not really compromise his physicalism.

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lived to the mid-

20th century and was professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, has

sometimes been interpreted as a behaviorist, though his insistence that an

inner process stands in need of outward criteria could possibly be interpreted

as a sort of epistemic and central-state Materialism. Nevertheless, to count

Wittgenstein as a Materialist would be to take considerable liberties with him;

for, while displaying at times a certain mystical attitude, he also held very

strongly that the business of a philosopher is not to put forward any