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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

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

928

The thesis that intentional phenomena are the essence of the mental thus

seems problematic. Its suggestion that the jet-searching missile has a mind or

partakes of the mental, as appeared in the discussion of the criterion of

purposeful behavior, would, to many scholars, appear to be quite implausible.

Nor does it seem that the trouble lies in the limited number of intentional

phenomena found in the missile. Even the lunar-exploration machines, with

all of their flexibility and multiplicity of functions, would not be said by most

analysts to have minds.

It might be possible to save intentionality as the criterion of the mental

by insisting on the presence of such highly sophisticated intentional

phenomena as emotions, daydreams, or amusement, but then one would have

to deny minds to those human beings who lack a sense of humour, never

daydream, or are cold-bloodedly unemotional, which does not seem correct

either. Some progress can be made here if the question is asked whether

intentionality is a necessary condition of all mental phenomena – whether

there are any phenomena that are mental but nonintentional. Examples of a

mental phenomenon that can most plausibly be said to be nonintentional are

sensations, such as feeling pain, which lack both of the aforementioned

characteristics of intentionality – inexistence and referential opacity. A man

cannot feel a pain that, unbeknownst to him, does not exist; if he feels pain,

there must be something he feels. Moreover, if a man feels pain, and the pain

is identified with the effect of a tumour, then he does feel the effect of the

tumour.

Sensations, which thus lack both of the characteristics of intentional

phenomena, are not just an odd counterexample; not only do sensations

comprise a large and central group of mental phenomena, but they also call

attention to an important aspect of many other mental phenomena, viz.,

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

929

subjective experience. The arrow in Figure 2 may point to the circle, but it

does not have the subjective experience of pointing, it does not feel itself

pointing; and the jet-searching missile does not experience how it feels to be

searching for jets. But when a person is in an intentional state, directed toward

an object, he – at least sometimes – experiences, feels, or is aware of that

directedness.

Clearly, this usage of “intentionality” differs somewhat from that found

in medieval philosophy; and there are other features of the concept, not

covered here, that are stressed by Phenomenologists and Existentialists.

Subjective Experience

It is often maintained that the essence of the mental consists of states of

consciousness taken as subjective experiences. When a person wakes up or

regains consciousness after a general anesthetic, a host of experiences of color

and light, sounds, feelings, thoughts, and memories flood in on him. As far as

his objective, observable behavior is concerned, he may be lying unmoved

and unmoving; but as far as his state of consciousness is concerned, he may be

undergoing a series of subjective experiences. To take an example, when a

person sees a scarlet patch, he experiences the homogeneous, spread-out,

distinctive scarletness present before him. A blind or color-blind person who

has never experienced scarlet would not have the awareness of scarlet that the

normally-sighted person has. He might have some vague idea, as did the hero

of the story told by John Locke, a 17th-century British Empiricist:

A studious blind man, who had mightily beat his head about visible

objects, and made use of the explication of his books and friends, to

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

930

understand those names of light and colors which often came in his way,

bragged one day, that he now understood what scarlet signified. Upon which

his friend demanding, what scarlet was? the blind man answered, It was like

the sound of a trumpet.

This reply is not totally wide of the mark; but any sighted person will

have a far more precise idea of scarlet than that. What he has and what the

blind person lacks is something that philosophers have called the “raw feel” of

scarlet, that peculiar and special way scarlet looks.

The subjective experience of scarlet is to be contrasted with the

discrimination of scarlet things. One could imagine a blind person who was

able to discriminate scarlet from other colors by the use of optical instruments

(e.g., spectroscopes with Braille printouts). But he would lack the subjective

experience of the color; he would not know the look of scarlet. Defenders of

this view would claim that there is a great variety of subjective experiences

and that the experience of colors is only one of them. Sensations (e.g., the

experiences of pain, tickles, throbbings, pangs, nausea, and tiredness) provide

another such example. Still other subjective experiences include: the

experiencing of images (afterimages, memory images, and others); feelings of

exultation, depression, pride, anger, fear, and love; and thoughts (imaginings,

surmisings, doubtings, and recollectings). All of these are episodes, occurring

at a particular time and place, in which the subject is in a state of awareness

that has a particular content.

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

931

Adequacy as a Criterion of the Mental

The question now arises of how adequate subjective experience is as a

criterion of the mental – whether, though it is obviously a sufficient condition

for something to be mental, it is a sufficient condition for something to have a

mind. The Scotsman David Hume, an 18th-century philosophical sceptic and

historian, once asked whether a creature that had but one state of

consciousness could be said to have a mind and concluded that it could not. In

his view, it takes, at the very least, a number of states of consciousness linked

by memory before one would say that the creature has a mind; and it may be

that there has to be a certain level of complexity in the nature and relation of

the conscious states for there to be a mind.

It is doubtful, however, whether consciousness is a necessary condition

for the mental. Before Sigmund Freud, it would have been widely agreed that

the notion of unconscious mental phenomena was logically impossible – a

contradiction in the very terms. That view had one important exception,

however: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a 17th-century Rationalist and

mathematician, held that there are petites perceptions of which the subject is

unconscious. They are so slight, so similar to others, so familiar, or in such a

crowd of other perceptions, that the subject is unaware of them at the time.

One of the examples that Leibniz cited is the person who is unaware of the

roar of the waterfall or the rumble of the mill if he has lived nearby for some

time. Leibniz seemed to have had in mind what modern psychologists call

“subliminal” perceptions, viz., those below the threshold of awareness but still

capable of leaving some effects on the mind. But Leibniz confined

unconscious states to perceptions; he would not have allowed unconscious

beliefs, desires, emotions, or judgments.

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

932

It was Freud’s great contribution to have discovered a range of

phenomena of which the patient was unconscious but which were very much

like typically mental phenomena, especially in their behavioral manifestations.

In the light of such similarities, it was plausible to extend the concept of the

mental to include these unconscious phenomena – especially since they were

such that the patient could become conscious of them through hypnosis or

psychotherapy. Freud postulated a mechanism that he called “repression” to

explain why the patient is unconscious of them.

In addition to the subliminal and the unconscious, there are more

familiar characteristically mental phenomena that do not consist of states of

consciousness. When a man falls into a dreamless sleep, he does not lose all

his beliefs or abandon all his goals, he does not cease wanting a better world

or being artistic or imaginative or lazy, nor does he forget how to do

arithmetic or speak French. A person is not jealous of someone only when

thinking of him, nor does a businessman have confidence in the dollar only

when concentrating on business. Obviously, these mentalistic characteristics

can apply in a dispositional way to people who are not at that moment

expressing or exhibiting the disposition.

Furthermore, as Gilbert Ryle has pointed out in great detail, a person

may use his mind on many occasions without the feeling of subjective

experiences. As he says,

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

933

When we describe people as exercising qualities of mind, we

are not referring to occult episodes of which their overt acts

and utterances are effects; we are referring to those overt acts

and utterances themselves.

(This and the following quotations

attributed to Ryle are from The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle. Copyright

1949 by Gilbert Ryle. Reprinted by permission of Barnes & Noble,

Publishers, New York, Hutchinson Publishing Group Ltd., London.)

To be responsive to one’s surroundings, to act intelligently, deliberately,

with wit or good grace, to utilize arithmetic or logic, to be sympathetic or

coldhearted, to drive alertly or absentmindedly – none of these requires the

occurrence of subjective experiences or inner states of consciousness, the

immediacy of feelings or sensations. In such activity, there may be nothing

going on except performances of a particular kind, and there may be nothing

more required except that under further circumstances other performances of a

particular kind will be forthcoming. It is, thus, reasonable to conclude that

subjective experience is not a necessary condition for the mental.

Those who have put the private events of subjective experience at the

center of the mental have committed what Ryle calls a “category-mistake...

represent[ing] the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or

category,... when they actually belong to another.” The mistake consists of

taking talk about a person’s mind as talk of events in a world parallel to the

ordinary world but occult and mysterious. The truth, according to Ryle, is that

to talk of a person’s mind... is to talk of the person’s abilities,

liabilities and inclinations to do and undergo certain sorts of

things, and of the doing and undergoing of these things in the

ordinary world.

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

934

It would be rash, however, to draw the further conclusion that subjective

experiences are in no way involved in whatever is mental. Returning to the

case of Leibniz’ petites perceptions that are not experienced, a person can be

conscious of them in various ways, either before getting used to them or when

they are alone or when their intensity or his own sensitivity is increased; and

Freud’s unconscious phenomena can become conscious phenomena under

favorable conditions. The beliefs that an individual is not aware of in sleep are

sometimes the objects of his consciousness, as are his moments of laziness

and imaginativeness, his knowledge of arithmetic, and his goals. It is dubious

that something that has no connection with states of consciousness could

qualify as mental.

Core Characteristics of Subjectivity

Philosophers deeply disagree on how to characterize what is peculiar to

subjective experiences. Some hold that the existence of subjective experience

indicates that there are peculiar events that do not occur in the public space-

time world that everyone shares and has equal access to but occur only in a

private world that each person has exclusively to himself, which he cannot

share with others, and to which no one else has access. Ryle has called this

view, with what he admits to be “deliberate abusiveness,” “the dogma of the

Ghost in the Machine.” He characterizes the dogma as follows:

Minds are not in space, nor are their operations subject to mechanical

laws. The workings of one mind are not witnessable by other observers; its

career is private. Only I can take direct cognisance of the states and processes

of my own mind. A person therefore lives through two collateral histories, one

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

935

consisting of what happens in and to his body, the other consisting of what

happens in and to his mind. The first is public, the second private. The events

in the first history are events in the physical world, those in the second are

events in the mental world.

Are there private events? Even so adamant a critic of privacy as Ryle

admits the existence of some private phenomena, chiefly dreams and

daydreams, sensations, thoughts, and imaginings. He insists, however, that the

sequence of your sensations and imaginings is not the sole field in which your

wits and character are shown; perhaps only for lunatics is it more than a small

corner of that field.

In Ryle’s view, private events occupy a small and inessential place in the

total range of mental phenomena; but they do occur. The notion of privacy is

really the conflation of two ideas: the metaphysical idea that mental events do

not occur in space and the epistemological idea that mental events are objects

of awareness solely to the person who is subject to them. Each of these may

be considered in turn.

The Rationalist René Descartes, the earliest major philosopher of

modern times, held that the essence of all that is nonmental consists in being

extended in space. Turning this around and broadening it, one could say that

the essence of the mental consists in the lack of spatiality; i.e., the lack of

shape, size, and, above all, location. If the philosopher confined himself to

events, he would say that necessarily a physical event occurs in some place or

other, but, necessarily, a mental event does not. It would be conceded that the

person who experiences the mental event does typically have a location, and

this leads to the question of why the event is not located where the person is

located.

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

936

A defender of the nonspatiality criterion would argue that such

ascriptions of location to mental events are very different from ascriptions of

location for physical events. For a physical event, it is always possible to ask

whether it occurred at some point, in some part, or throughout the location.

Thus, if the temperature of a body of water rises, one can ask precisely where

the rise occurred – at certain points, in certain parts, or throughout the volume.

But if a thought occurs, it is senseless to ask whether it occurred throughout

the area or only in some part of it. Furthermore, if the water undergoing the

rise in temperature is in a box, it is reasonable to say that a rise in temperature

occurred in the box; but if the person having a thought is in a box, it is

senseless to say that a thought occurred in the box. So the sort of ascription of

location is quite different for mental events, and the criterion can still be used

to mark off the mental from the physical.

The question remains whether the sort of nonspatiality that is allegedly

appropriate to the mental is peculiar to it. If such a physical event as

recovering from an illness or changing shape is considered, it would appear

also that it does not make sense to ask whether the event occurred throughout

the whole volume, in some part, or at some point. Thus, it would seem that

even this modified notion of spatiality does not uniquely distinguish the

mental.

Privileged Status of Subjectivity

Other philosophers would interpret subjective experiences not as private

events but as a special way of knowing certain events, specifically by

introspection. This is called the “privileged access” view. John Locke,

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

937

contrasting this way of knowing with sensation, called it “reflection,” defining

it as “that notice which the mind takes of its own operations and the manner of

them.” It is a way of being aware of one’s own present states without the

intervention or use of the senses. The emphasis here is on the way of knowing

rather than on the events known. Someone who holds the privacy view will

have to hold that there is some special way of knowing these special events,

but someone who holds the privileged access view is not necessarily

committed to holding that the events so known are in any way special. A

person could hold that one and the same event can be known both by sense

perception and in some other way. Being knowable by introspection would

then be the characteristic that defines events as mental. Such an account,

however, would not rule out that they may also be knowable by sense

perception or by inference.

Some contemporary philosophers deny that there is any such special

way of knowing. Ryle offers three objections: first, it would require that there

be simultaneously multiple attentions – in the mental event itself and in the

attending to that event; though it is not denied that such divisions of attention

are possible, he suggests that they are more unusual and difficult to achieve

than the proponent of introspection would have the reader believe; second,

because there is obviously some upper limit to the number of simultaneous

attendings that a person is capable of, there will have to be some mental acts

of which a person is unaware, and if it is admitted that some mental events

occur without being known in this special way, it is fair to ask whether one

must assume that any of them are known that way; finally, for many states of

mind – e.g., extreme panic or fury – the person is so involved that he is

incapable of taking note of them, yet such states are not, in consequence,

suspect – the person involved is as sure that they occur as he is of any so-