This profile is a complement to the profile with Mark Johnston published here.
How did you get interested in philosophy?
It all began in an underground cave in Melbourne, Australia. During my last two years of high school at St. Joseph’s, North Melbourne, I was spending most of my time a quick tram-ride away at Walter Lindrum’s Billiard Saloon—yes, that was the name of an august Melbourne educational institution established in 1923—on Flinders Lane. Earlier, I had skipped three years in school because my teachers, who were the Brigidine Sisters in grade school and the Christian Brothers in high school, used early promotion to the next grade as the cleanest way to get rid of smart-ass kids like me. So in sixth form I was fourteen going on fifteen. Instead of regularly attending school, I just read the books for the final exams, while headquartered at Lindrum’s.
School was slow, even oppressive, and anyway the plan at fourteen was to become world snooker champion. That ambition now seems quaint, indeed zany, even to me. But it was Melbourne in 1968, and the only thing that seriously counted for a boy was being really good at some game or sport. If you couldn’t be an Aussie Rules football player or a cricketer or a jockey or something like that, then at least there was snooker. In ’68 the hero at Lindrum’s was a hustler known as Scotty, a brilliant player, a natural, in some ways comparable to Hurricane Higgins or Alex Pagulayan, for those fortunates who know of them. Scotty taught me how to play.
Even as my snooker game significantly improved, the other regulars, who were all adults—mostly tough working-men along with a few dodgy bookmakers and some lazy journalists from the Herald newspaper—still treated me as a know-nothing kid. Which I was. Yet they were happy to gamble with me, typically offering to take on a handicap to lure me in. Invariably it turned out that it was I who should have given them a start. They put their losses down to bad luck, against a very lucky kid, and soon ponied up again for more punishment. Eventually, they stopped offering me a handicap, and I had to give them a start to get a gamble going. Even so they fumbled, except for Scotty.
Lindrum’s was a bracing introduction to the absurdities of adult pretension. Looking back, it was also a display of the power of what the theorist Rene Girard called mimesis: because we have no being in us, but only an open field of desiring subjectivity, we must learn what to want and value from the local others, who learnt it from still others, without anyone ever seriously considering whether what they learned to want by this history of habitual mimicry is actually worthwhile. Snooker definitely has its charms, but it is, after all, somewhat banal. You play it now because you once saw the adults playing it, and then they said you were getting good at it. How much of ordinary life is captured by that diagnosis?
In any case, to come back to philosophy, in 1969 there was a designated theme for the statewide English exam—Authority and the Individual. The reading list was a heady concoction, including as it did Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, Bertrand Russell’s Reith Lectures, and crucially for me, excerpts from the Platonic dialogs collected in the old Penguin edition, The Last Days of Socrates. Gosse was unreadable. Russell was clever but tedious. Plato was electric.
Especially so, since Lindrum’s was underground. You went from Flinders Lane down a steep flight of steps into a cavernous basement with twenty tables, lit only by shaded lights, one above each table. Shadows of the players were cast upon the walls, and the foolishness of adult male life, with its competitive preening, more than occasional violence, and constant self-deception, was openly displayed for those who had eyes to see. Everyone had opinions about everything, except the know-nothing kid, who somehow kept taking their money.
Inevitably, one day at Lindrum’s, between games, while reading The Last Days of Socrates, I came upon Plato’s myth of the cave, the myth of escaping from the moral and intellectual darkness of ordinary life. It wasn’t necessary to imagine the shadows on the wall that mesmerized the inhabitants of Plato’s cave. I could see them, right in front of me. And by then, thanks in large part to my education at Lindrum’s, I also knew that the real sun, the illuminating light which helps overcome mere opinion, mimesis and moral confusion, wasn’t to be found just by going upstairs onto sunny Flinders Lane, or even by pursuing a secure job in the warm suburbs of Melbourne.
Finishing high-school at the age of fifteen, I did not begin to learn a trade as my dad warned me I must, or become a professional snooker player as Scotty would have liked, or go to university as my mother urged. Instead, I went to Sydney to join the Columban Fathers, a Catholic missionary order that sent its priests to Japan, Korea, Peru, Chile and the Philippines.
Shock all around. Especially at Lindrum’s. “Wot! Johno is off to become a priest? Naahh.”
What led you to go to the seminary?
I seem to remember it had something to do with the light shining into the darkness and the darkness not overcoming it.
Did you do philosophy in the seminary?
Not in any real way. It was mostly scholastic summaries in bad textbooks, along with superficial rehearsals of Aristotelian syllogistic.
What really engaged me was the life of prayer and dedication to God. After just three months in the seminary my entering class began the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the so-called thirty-day retreat. The regimen was forbidding. There were four sequenced meditations every day, each lasting two hours. For the whole thirty days, you spoke to no one except your spiritual advisor. The aim of the subtly sequenced meditations of the Exercises was to begin the transformation from self-will to radical abandonment to the will of God. (I won’t say how far I got with that.)
Then there were the vivid Ignatian ideas of seeing God in all things, and of acting solely for God’s greater glory. Central also was setting aside the secular mimetic form of life, in favor of direct experience of the Good, or God’s will for you. Ignatius was a genius in both psychological and spiritual matters, and many people who take the full Exercises find it to be one of the most important events in their life, even if they cease to be conventionally religious.
That was how I found it.
Why did you leave the seminary?
A good Catholic doctor “saved” me. In 1972 there was a flu outbreak sweeping through Sydney. The local doctor kindly vaccinated the priests and the seminarians for free. As sometimes happened in those days, the good doctor heedlessly reused needles. I contracted a liver-attacking infection that a priest had brought back from the Columban mission in Mindanao. It was never properly diagnosed, and I was badly ill, bed-ridden in fact, for more than a year, and for a year after that I was neither here nor there.
So I wasn’t made for the missions.
So how did you end up as a philosopher?
After I left the seminary, I worked at a number of fill-in jobs. I was a groundskeeper in Albert Park for a while. Then I sold train tickets at the front office of Flinders Street Station, with hordes of commuters coming at me, morning and afternoon. After that, I was hired at the South Melbourne Council, in the property tax or rates department. It was a good office job, which I loathed. At least at Lindrum’s your standing was dependent on actual displayed talent, not on where you were in some random hierarchical structure. So, at last, I decided to go to university, intending to pursue experimental psychology.
Fatefully, I took an introductory philosophy course which began with Descartes’ Meditations. The Meditations was eerily familiar. Not the content or the arguments, but the framework of meditation and personal resolution, along with Descartes’ explicit attempt to reorganize his will around the central purifying maxim of not accepting anything of which he was not certain. Then there was Descartes’ version of the familiar Jesuit anxiety concerning discernment of spirits: how do I know that it is not an evil demon who is making me think or see this? So the whole atmosphere of the Meditations was, for me, redolent of Ignatius’s Exercises. The epistemological problem that Descartes himself invents is resolved by his trusting that God is no deceiver. Of course, from the Ignatian point of view, Descartes’ Meditations is an evasive displacement, onto the epistemic realm, of the deeper problem of the Exercises, namely how to trust in the choice of a fundamental practical orientation of one’s will, particularly if that chosen orientation valorizes the Good over one’s own good.
Years later, I discovered it was no accident that I had immediately resonated with the Meditations. When he was young, Descartes spent eight years at the Jesuit college of La Fleche, where it was customary for the students to take the truncated eight-day version of the Exercises every year during Holy Week, in order to help them in their final choice of a way of life. The texture, images and flavor of the Exercises must have remained with Descartes.
To josh my colleague Dan Garber, I sometimes say that you can’t fully understand the atmospherics of the Meditations, and hence what it is really about, unless you take the Exercises. Dan thinks it an exaggeration, but Zeno Vendler, the only other philosopher in the analytic tradition that I know to have taken the thirty-day retreat, makes a telling case for that “exaggeration” in his “Descartes Exercises” (Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 1989).
In any case, I was hooked on philosophy from that first course on. There were excellent philosophers at Melbourne University, most notably Barry Taylor, Len Goddard, Eric Darcy, Douglas Gasking, Mary McClosky, Vernon Rice and Tony Coady, whose classic work on testimony you must know. David Armstrong visited Melbourne in 1976, while I was an undergraduate, and gave seminars on what would become his two influential books on universals and laws of nature.
At the beginning of his seminar series, David set out his not-to-be-questioned reductive materialist starting points by saying “If you are like me, you will believe…” But with his slight Australian drawl it came across as an appeal to fondness for him: “If yer like me, you will believe…” It was not hard to like David.
Come to think of it, the unintentional appeal to personal fondness was at least as good as several of the arguments David originally gave, back in the early sixties, for the basic materialist outlook which he had championed, along with U.T. Place, Jack Smart and David Lewis. The crucial premise, that mental states were nothing more than the inner realizers of functional roles, was itself the product of an implicitly materialist outlook. Certainly it was not a neutral upshot of an analysis of mental state concepts, nor anything like a full account of the nature of mental states. It seemed purely ideological when compared to the subtle discussion by Franz Brentano as to what what was constitutive of mental states.
And that name “Australian Materialism” was unfortunate, given the burgeoning consumerism in Australia in the sixties and seventies. As philosophy students at Melbourne University in the seventies, we used to say that just as there is “American Pragmatism”, which could be either the name for the work of William James and John Dewey, or for the crude commercial attitude that only the bottom line really matters, there is also “Australian Materialism”, which is a name for both the view that the mind is the brain, and for the attitude that the price of the stereo system is more significant than the quality of the sound that comes out of it. In both cases, there is a question about the cultural source of the polysemy that connects the philosophical doctrine and the vulgar attitude.
The materialism and the universals aside, there is a lot to learn from David Armstrong’s work, across a wide variety of subjects. Among his best philosophy is one of his earliest books, hardly read today—Bodily Sensations, published by Rutledge in the early sixties. That is a gem. And his paper on relational and non-relational accounts of identity over time was the inspiration for the distinction between perdurance and endurance, which I introduced in my dissertation, and which David Lewis took up, to some effect.
Frank Jackson, now rightly known as one of the nicest men you could ever meet, was a young professor at Monash back then, and totally ruthless in argument. I remember him ripping into Jack Smart at a paper after Jack had just retailed a translucent account of Quine’s rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction in order to undermine Len Goddard’s attempt to solve the Ravens paradox within the framework of relevance logic. It wasn’t just Frank. The atmosphere was full-on delight in the pugna verborum, where the person with the best arguments, independent of age or rank, was likely to win the day. It was Lindrum’s, rather than the South Melbourne Council. What mattered was actual displayed talent.
Even throughout the seventies, philosophy in Australia was predominantly an oral activity. Publication was secondary, at best. Barry Taylor, himself an avid Davidsonian, told me that Donald Davidson was a talented philosopher with some important ideas, who lamentably had acquired a tendency to over-publish! The Australian philosopher who had the reputation of being the deepest thinker was Frank’s dad, Cameron “Camo” Jackson, an Australian Rogers Albritton figure, who like Rogers published next to nothing.
I got to know Rogers himself later on, and the long hours of philosophical conversation with him were reminiscent of the Australian philosophical milieu in which I grew up. True, that milieu would now be described as unprofessional. But in some ways it was much the better for that.
Why did you go to Princeton for graduate school rather than Oxford, where many of your teachers went?
Yes, no one from Australia had gone to Princeton for graduate school in philosophy before. Barry Taylor never really forgave me for not going to Oxford. The easy part of the answer to your question is that Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Tom Nagel, Gil Harman, Dick “Diamond Jim” Jeffrey, Bas van Fraassen, Paul Benacerraf, Margret Wilson and Dick Rorty were all at Princeton when I applied. They, along with Donald Davidson and Michael Dummett, were the people I was reading in my last years as an undergraduate.
There was also a personal connection. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, who twice visited from Rutgers while I was at Melbourne University, was indispensible in making the idea of going to Princeton an option that I could begin to fill out in my imagination. And Amelie’s seminars on the emotions at Melbourne seamlessly melded the modern history of Western reflection on the emotions with close analytic argument. It was eye opening. Australian philosophy had not yet acquired the respect for the history of philosophy that was already prevalent in the United States.
What great philosophers do you most admire?
I admire all the great philosophers. Philosophy is so hard and important that if someone is great at it then that person deserves admiration. But I have an affinity for Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard. My estimation of Kant has grown since I discovered that he used to hustle at billiards (the carom game) when he was a student at university. His university friend Heilsberg writes this:
Kant’s only recreation was playing billiards, a game in which Wlömer and I were his constant companions. We had nearly perfected our game, and rarely returned home without some winnings. As a consequence, persons refused to play with us, and we abandoned this source of income, and chose instead L’Hombre, which he played well.
One thing the philosophers on my list have in common is an understanding, each their own distinctive understanding, of philosophy as a response to our sense of homelessness, to the feeling that this is not our true home, even if—as Schopenhauer thought—there is no true home.
For example, there is the opening of Spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.
Crazed, but splendid. If you are like me, when you read that you knew that you were confronted with a person of real seriousness, a person who has just made a demand on you to think again about the structure of your own life. Here at least, Spinoza is closer to the Exercises than Descartes ever was. And Spinoza’s final resolution of his sense of homelessness ends with amor Dei intellectualis, something he shared with Aquinas.
Why Kierkegaard?
Kierkegaard was the one of the fathers of 20th Century philosophy. Consider that, when measured by impact and the devotion of their followers and commentators, the two most influential philosophers of the 20th Century were Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Both were brought up Catholic. Wittgenstein nominally so, even though he was buried in the Catholic rite, thanks to his request as he was dying for “a priest who is not a philosopher”. Though Heidegger and Wittgenstein rejected organized religion, they were in their very different ways, religious thinkers, or perhaps religious thinkers manqué.
I mean that both looked to philosophy as a source of a kind of austere salvation. For the early Heidegger, that came in part from the radical individuating experience of confrontation with just one of the Four Last Things of standard Christian theology; as Heidegger styled it: one’s ownmost death—the very thing that the smothering memetic crowd, the They, can never take away.
Wittgenstein calls his own version of austere salvation “the feeling of being absolutely safe”. Rush Rees reports him as saying “I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing everything from a religious point of view”. But that just is what it is to be a religious person.
The influence of the radical Lutheran Christianity of Kierkegaard on the early Heidegger is obvious and widely discussed. Less noticed is that Wittgenstein deeply admired Kierkegaard. He writes: “Kierkegaard is the greatest thinker of the 19th Century. He was a saint.” There is a reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as exhibiting something close to the outlook of Kierkegaard’s character Johannes Climachus, an outlook that find’s expression in the young Wittgenstein in the strange idiom that hypnotized him at the time, the idiom of logical atomism. The intent of the Tractatus is to draw the outer boundaries of objective thought, in order to show that objective thought fails to capture what is most important—the ethical and the salvific, understood as a profoundly accepting interior orientation towards everything that happens. That is the interpretation of the Tractatus which Wittgenstein himself offers to his friend, von Ficker:
The book's point is an ethical one. I once meant to include in the preface a sentence which is not in fact there now but which I will write out for you here, because it will perhaps be a key to the work for you. What I meant to write, then, was this: My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that many others today are just gassing. I have managed in my book to put everything firmly in place by being silent about it.
That also expresses the core of Climachus’s claim that truth is subjectivity, namely that the most important form of truthfulness is not a deliverance of objective investigation but an orientation of the will in the face of truth.
As to Kierkegaard’s broad influence, one thing that is even less well known is that Jerry Fodor once adored Kierkegaard. The present Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton recently discovered that when Jerry applied to Princeton for graduate school his stated intention was to work on Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Even later in his life, Jerry was reported as saying that Kierkegaard was “playing in a different league from the rest of us.” I think he meant a superior league.
*****
Turning to your work, how do you now think of your notion of response-dependent concepts?
Right, but this will be an abrupt change of key. I would distinguish de jure and de facto response-dependence. A concept is de jure response-dependent if its defining conditions of application turn on how we respond to the possible things that might satisfy the concept. So the concepts of being irritating and of being nauseating are de jure response-dependent. By contrast, de facto response-dependence is an extrinsic feature of a concept. There are concepts of features whose possession by objects is, as a matter of the nature of the feature the concept happens to pick out, response-dependent. That is, the feature is had by its possessors in virtue of certain patterns found in and among our responses. The concept of being red is like that, or so I would argue. The concept of being red is not the concept of habitually and by some standard light mechanism looking red to certain perceivers under certain conditions. However, it could still turn out upon reflection on all the relevant facts that the best account of something’s having the property of being red involves this: that thing, habitually and by some standard light mechanism, looks red to certain perceivers under certain conditions.
To take another case I find interesting, partly because of its connection with idolatry, consider the concept of an authoritative command. There is an old view that authoritative commands are authoritative just by virtue of their content, or by virtue of their content and the nature of the good, the right or the sacred. An example might be: Honour your father and your mother! Upon understanding it, and appreciating the good, the right or the sacred you just see that it has force. One pre-modern view is that all real authority is like that.
An opposing view, which highlights the potential “false necessity” or idol-making in this idea of authority, is that a command is authoritative only if and because there is a habit or disposition to show respect to it, if not to follow it. Both guilty lapsing and hypocrisy both might be understood as ways of showing respect to a command, while not following it. As taxes that vice pays to virtue they show, or at least feign, respect for the command.
On this opposing view, authority depends on, is grounded in, the inclinations of people to salute, or try to, or pretend to salute when the relevant flag goes up the flagpole. In more stilted terms, and simplifying a bit
It lies in the nature of authority and of a given command C, that C has authority if and only if and because the intended audience will have a habit or disposition to accept or at least respect the command. (A model for de facto response-dependence)
It should be clear that there are specifications of C for which the embedded biconditional is not a conceptual truth. For someone who takes the view that the authority of some authoritative command is intrinsic to its content and the nature of the good, etc. is not making a conceptual mistake. Indeed, we can come to realize, or discover, that the authority of some commands are de facto response-dependent, while others are not.
One way to discover this is to see that the authority of some commands have dissipated as the dispositions to respect them weakened. So the commands or demands of female sexual modesty prevalent in Victorian England have now lost their authority. It is not that they remain authoritative. It is not that teenage girls who guiltlessly wear bikinis on the beach are badly misbehaving.
How far can this debunking of the idea of inherent authority go? We are not going to debunk the inherent authority of all commands. “Value the truth!” and “Do not infer p from if p then q and q!” are examples. Disenchantment—the discovery that our responses are not demanded by some response-independent justifier—can only go so far. After all “Look to the facts!” is disenchantment’s own characteristic command.
Still, the authority of many commands, including most of those around which we are now organising our lives, is de facto response-dependent. What is the range of commands whose authority is not in this way dependent upon, or as people now put it, grounded in, our responses of acceptance, guilty lapsing and hypocrisy? To what extent are we victims of false necessity, of thinking of our collective practices as having response-independent justifiers?
One important empirical question for political theory is just how much false necessity is required for a particular social order to survive and provide security for its needy and less adventurous members. How far does an incredibly complex, yet to some extent cooperative, society like ours need to encourage the false idea that many of its demands are response-independent, that it’s central practices have independent justifiers, which not only underwrite but demand those practices?
For what it is worth, my own view is that complex social life is inevitably not life in the light of the sun but life in the cave, to borrow again Plato’s metaphor, and to take on board his pessimistic realism about the human condition. Life in the cave requires that there be a heavy helping of false necessity of one sort or another, i.e. persistent illusions to the effect that there are independent justifiers of our central social practices.
Only small groups can enter into the light of truth together. If political legitimacy requires at least counterfactual informed consent then the only loci of political legitimacy are smallish groups, like clans, where something like face-to-face accountability for a lack of truthful reflection has some chance of actually being implemented. Otherwise what holds us together is an idolatrous attitude to the social structure of command—an attitude supported not by informed consent, which would include answering the possibly disenchanting and destabilising question of response-dependence—but instead by what Noam Chomsky called manufactured consent; that is, by propaganda.
I also fear that the long supposed legitimation of immensely powerful national authority by mass democratic vote is now empirically proven to have been a chimera, and consequently that much of normal political philosophy in the analytic tradition has amounted to whistling in the dark. This fear is heightened by the cognitive science of biases and heuristics, including the unhappy empirical observation that we look for epistemic permission to persist in our cherished views, while requiring the demonstration of an epistemic obligation to give them up. We are not, on the whole, looking for relevant information on crucial practical matters. We are looking for confirmation of our biases. Whatever side we are on, we are hiding in the cave.
Sarah-Jane Leslie’s unnerving empirical work on both the psychological centrality and the “tonk”-like character of generic inference, intensifies this fear. When the evidence is just that some terrorists are Muslims, our default system of generalisation easily takes us to “Muslims are terrorists” and then, in effect, to “Characteristically, Muslims are terrorists.” That is the kind of thing we do habitually, and there is little empirical evidence that a university education makes it less prevalent, even though it may suppress certain instances of the inferential pattern.
So much for de facto response-dependence, what about de jure response-dependence?
When I began writing about colour and other manifest features in the mid-eighties, a common view, held for example by Christopher Peacocke, Colin McGinn and Michael Smith, was that biconditionals like
A surface is red if and only if it is disposed to appear red to standard perceivers under standard conditions
are a priori and necessary. There was an inclination to say that the source of this a priori necessity was the concept of being red and its “conceptual connection” with the concept of appearing a certain way. It wasn’t just that the concept of being red was a concept that de facto applied to a feature whose possession was grounded in, or metaphysically explained by, dispositions to appear. It was instead supposed to be a conceptual matter. The biconditional represented the sort of non-trivial conceptual truth that analytic philosophers since G. E. Moore had aimed for under the heading of “analysis”. In fullish dress, that would amount to something like this:
It follows from the natures of the concept of being red and of the other concepts employed in what follows that a surface is red if and only if it is disposed to appear red to standard perceivers under standard conditions
Partly under the influence of my teacher Saul Kripke, I was already deeply skeptical of this kind of idea. There are de jure response-dependent concepts where the relevant conceptual, because linguistically guaranteed, conditional holds. Here is the obvious example:
Something is nauseating if and only if it induces feelings of nausea.
But now if you now say that the ground or metaphysical explanation of being nauseating is being such as to induce nausea, you then fall foul of the missing explanation argument. Moreover, such de jure response-dependent concepts are, as I argued in “Objectivity Refigured”, few and far between.
In general, non-trivial analyses of concepts are few and far between. Back in the 1980’s, I had already argued against the adequacy of the analytic method of cases, the method of trying to arrive at a non-trivial conceptual analysis by considering our intuitions about real and imaginary cases and trying to summarise them in a bi-conditional. For example, when it comes to the concept of personal identity that method fails, in part because our criteria of application for the concept of being the same person are characteristic generics, which give us little or no guidance in the ingenious range of odd cases conjured up by the philosophical imagination. This skepticism deepened over time as I have learnt more how the psychology of concept use fails to underwrite many assumptions about concepts made by analytic philosophers. For more on concepts see the recent (2019) joint paper with Sarah-Jane Leslie “Cognitive Science and the Metaphysics of Meaning”.
How does what you called the “missing explanation” argument fit in?
The missing explanation argument was essentially the observation that de facto and de jure response-dependence are at odds with each other. Collaterally, it was an attempt to resist certain claims of conceptual equivalence.
People who endorsed de jure response-dependence about being red, often referred to that thesis as the dispositional view of colour concepts, to indicate that what was more conceptually basic were the dispositions, as if as a conceptual matter things get to count as coloured in virtue of their dispositions. But that cannot be so if the metaphysical explanation of something’s being red is the following
Something is red because it is disposed to look red to standard perceivers under standard conditions.
where the “because” in question is not the “because” of causal explanation, but the “because” of “in virtue of”, which points to the ground of being red. If the concept of being red is de jure response-dependent, that is if
It follows from the natures of the concept of being red and the other concepts employed in what follows that a surface is red if and only if it is disposed to appear red to standard perceivers under standard conditions
then our metaphysical explanation would be conceptually equivalent to
Something is red because it is red.
For there is no reason to suppose that metaphysical explanations should be strongly opaque, i.e. that substitutions of conceptually equivalent expressions do not preserve conceptual equivalence. But our dispositionalist metaphysical explanation is not conceptually equivalent to “something is red because it is red.” That claim is an explanatory solecism, while the metaphysical explanation is not.
Failure to distinguish de facto and de jure response-dependence yields explanatory solecisms. What looked like metaphysical explanations, including explanations of the ground of de facto response-dependence, go missing if we are really dealing with de jure response-dependent concepts. That is because a certain substitution principle, namely that conceptual equivalents can be substituted in explanatory concepts preserving conceptual content, is as plausible for metaphysical explanation as it is for causal explanation.
In his unpublished work on colour, Saul Kripke argued that being coloured is in the present terms, neither a de jure nor a de facto response-dependent matter. He held that in so far as something was disposed to appear red, this might have several different grounding explanations, only one of which is that it is red. Here Kripke’s core view was that red is a manifest feature, perhaps a purely manifest feature. Barry Stroud, John Campbell, and Colin McGinn have expressed similar views.
Those views are compelling in so far as they emphasise that colour is a purely manifest feature, which is something I agree with. But they mistakenly go on to take that to mean that being coloured in this or that way is a purely manifest feature.
Red is a kind, or better, a type. It is not the property of being red, just as the tiger is not the property of being a tiger. (Should we give up on the project of conserving the tiger, knowing as we do that the property of being a tiger will always be with us? No, the tiger is not the property.)
This “property mistake”—the identification of the kinds or types that are the colours with the corresponding properties of having them—is endemic in the philosophy of colour, and elsewhere. Almost every paper (including my own) in Readings on Color, Volume 1:The Philosophy of Color, a classic collection of papers on colours, makes some or other version of the property mistake.
What about response-dependent accounts of value?
A question I pursued in a symposium with David Lewis and Michael Smith at the Aristotelian Society in the late eighties was whether being valuable, worthwhile, etc. was de facto response-dependent, in the sense of being a matter of what we are disposed to find reason to value when we appropriately consider all the relevant facts. Do we here have de facto response-dependence? The relevant biconditional
Something is valuable if only if and because we are disposed to find reason to value it upon consideration of all the relevant facts.
is not a conceptual truth, but it may well be necessary. I would now say that it is only “a priori” in the weak sense of being supported by very abstract reflection; that is, reflection where the empirical input is very remote from the reflection itself. The resultant view was an early “reasons first” account of value.
A couple of years later, in “The Authority of Affect”, I argued that a restriction was necessary. There are certain base-level values, or at least default demands, which are disclosed to us by perceptual affectivity. That, I argued, is part of being an active animal in the environment in which one’s kind evolved. The upshot is a two-tiered account of value. We perceptually take in certain evaluative facts, and these are among the facts that we have to reason from and about to correctly settle questions of value. In so far as intellection is a process of search though a cognised domain with its own default pathways—“things you have to think”—the intellect too may disclose independent values to us.
Then there is the remaining question of the de facto response-independent authority of certain commands. Such commands also could provide reasons to value, or better, they could disclose response-independent values.
A question, seldom asked: “Are any such commands, commands with de facto response-independent authority, to be found in my tradition, or in any other?” That is a central question of ethical life. (It should be added that some lives can be exemplary, i.e. authoritatively commanding in respect of the virtues they exemplify.)
By what method does one tell whether a manifest feature like being coloured is or is not a de facto response-dependent matter?
A good place to begin is by clearly distinguishing the colours from the phenomenon of colouredness. Galileo believed that the external world was not coloured, but he did not dispute the existence of the colours. Achromatism, the view that things aren’t really coloured, is common among colour scientists, but none that I know are colour nihilists, claiming that the colours do not exist.
People nod at that remark, but I would go further in underlining the difference between the colours and the phenomenon of colouredness. We know that that red is more similar to orange than it is to green, and that canary yellow is not a shade of blue, i.e. is not as similar in hue to the blues as they are among themselves. But when it comes to the property of being red, the property—to put it neutrally—somehow “associated” with being disposed to look red, we do not know that it is more similar to the property of being orange than it is to the property of being green. That depends on shaky empirical conjectures about the similarity among the grounds of having the properties. Those conjectures may well turn out to be false, especially given the widespread phenomenon of metamerism, i.e. that there are a variety of quite different light reflectance profiles associated with the appearance of a determinate shade. And also quite different physical processes. The same shade can appear thanks to relatively straightforward light reflection, or to excitation, energy-loss and re-radiation of longer wavelengths of light, wavelengths which need not be predominant in the ambient illumination—as with the Jablonksi process, which is the causal basis of plastics exhibiting day-glo colours.
One idea is to frontload the similarity constraints on the colours, as I put in in “How to Speak of the Colors”. That is, we resolve to count some candidate surface physical or light-altering properties as deserving such names as “red”, “green” “orange” “blue” and “canary yellow” if and only if the properties stand in the relevant similarity relations. But then we may find that nothing physical, and nothing dispositional that is grounded wholly in the physical, stands in the right similarity relations. Yet that could not be the discovery that there is no such thing as red or blue or canary yellow. For we already know that is false, since we have seen cases of each of these colour kinds.
The way out of this problem, and others, is to distinguish red and being red, and so on for all the colours. Neither the concept of being red nor the concept red are de jure response-dependent, the concepts in question are nothing like the concepts of being exciting, or being impressive. Contrary to Kripke, although red is a purely manifest kind, and so is in the wrong category to be either de jure or de facto response dependent, being red turns out to be de facto response-dependent. Or so I argue in The Manifest.
In response to your question as to method, there is nothing special about the method. It is an inference to the overall best explanation of the phenomena of colour and colouredness.
In “Manifest Kinds” you claimed that many everyday substances like water are not pure natural kinds, but rather “partly manifest” kinds, kinds for which the manifest appearances or phenomenological features of their examples enter into their identity, so that they are not to be identified with their chemical composition. What is the significance of that?
The thesis, due to Saul Kripke, for which I found some difficulties was that there is a neat connection between the manifest and the scientific deliverances, as evidenced by the case of natural kind terms, i.e. kind terms for natural substances, or “stuff” like gold or water, and for natural phenomena like lightning. Water was intended by Kripke’s followers to be a paradigm for manifest kinds of stuff. They offered as an illustrative thesis—supposed to be derived from the semantics of natural kind terms and the empirical facts about water—that the kind water is numerically one and the same as the kind H2O.
If they are numerically one and the same then every quantity of water is a quantity consisting of hydrogen and oxygen in the proportion of two to one, and vice versa. Is that true, or are there further manifest conditions on being water?
Some stuff consisting of hydrogen and oxygen in the proportion of two to one, but which lacked all the phenomenologically available features of water—say the stuff looked and felt and tasted like treacle thanks to very strange environmental conditions—would not be a good candidate to be water. But we might go with the fact that the treaclish stuff satisfied the compositional formula H2O and insist it was indeed water. I wondered if this choice is forced on us by a combination of the chemical and manifest facts along with the semantics of the term “water”. One thing I noted was that generalising this choice would imply the identity of the kinds liquid water, solid ice and steam, despite their being manifestly different kinds of stuff. It is indisputable that these are three phases of H2O, but are they not also different kinds of stuff?
On the same point, suppose there is a single H2O molecule, just one and no more, left on the dried-out surface of Mars. Or, since H2O is simply a compositional chemical formula and not a structural one, suppose that on Mars there is just a single pair of OH- and H+ ions in close proximity. Would we report that as the fact that there is now water on Mars, though only a very, very small amount? If we resisted saying that, would we be changing our concept of water, or changing the semantics or meaning of “water”? Or are we simply registering an appearance-dependent constraint on something’s being water?
When it comes to manifest stuff like water or jade or treacle there is room for the view that chemistry aims to reveal the stuff’s constitutional structure, the structure that determines how it interacts with other substances, but not the whole of its nature, part of which is de facto appearance-dependent. You can have cases of the kind H2O that are not cases of the kind water. That is so, even though every case of water is constituted by hydrogen and oxygen.
The issue becomes more interesting if we get just a little more serious about the chemistry, and focus on the structural formulae associated with various forms of manifest stuff. We can then chemically distinguish soot from diamond, where the carbon atoms are arranged at the apexes of tetrahedrons. A leading expert on water is Pablo Debenedetti, the Dean of Research at Princeton. Focusing on chemical structure, the thing he says is that that liquid water has a complex dynamic constitution which involves short-term transitions between molecular arrangements or orderings.
So what then is the chemical essence of the dynamically changing structure that is water? Bad question. There are a range of defining essences of dynamic structures in the vicinity which philosophers might impose, essences differing in what they count as essential and what as merely invariable, but accidental. Our interests, both theoretical and practical, may make salient one or another of these strictly defined dynamic substances.
As well as pure natural kinds such as the kind gamma ray, there are partly manifest kinds like the kind red tide, (the natural phenomenon of reddish marine algae blooms), and purely manifest kinds like the utterly determinate shade Bordeaux red13. The latter can have its nature revealed or laid bare in a course of experience that closely attends to some case of that utterly determinate shade. This is the doctrine found in Russell’s Problems of Philosophy, which I once dubbed “Revelation”. Of course, that is not true of the property of being Bordeaux red13. Otherwise, there would be no room for the debate between physicalists and dispositionalists over the nature of the property of being Bordeaux red13. That is, by the way, another reason for distinguishing the shades and the colours from the corresponding properties.
If we identify kind terms syntactically and then distinguish natural kind terms as those kind terms pertaining to natural phenomena, then surely the formal semantics of a natural kind term should be neutral as to whether it is a term for a pure natural kind or a partly manifest kind.
Here is a new application of that idea, recently put to me by Ian Philips. Can there be unconscious perception? Is perception a purely natural or partly manifest kind of phenomenon, where the manifest element is the consciousness of what is perceived? I think that is not settled by the semantics of the term “perception”, with the consequence that the heated debate over whether there is unconscious perception is misguided. If perception is a purely natural kind then we should go with what neuropsychology tells us about it, and if we find significant neuropsychological similarities between the subserving neural bases of conscious perception and the subserving neural bases of states which are not conscious, then the right thing to say would be that there is unconscious perception. But if perception is a partly manifest kind then neuropsychology does not settle the matter. Is perception, understood as kind of natural phenomenon, purely natural or partly manifest? That might just be a semantically unsettled matter.
What about animal kinds, are they purely natural kinds?
No, animal and plant kinds are partly manifest kinds. If you look at our everyday terms for kinds of animals, you find that some denote species, others genera, others phyla, and so on. For example, the tigers comprise a species (Panthera tigris), the loons comprise a phylum (Gavia), the bears comprise a family (Ursidae), the flies comprise an order (Diptera) as do the frogs (Anura), the jellyfish comprise a class (the marine class of the phylum Cnidaria) as do the birds (Aves). And the forlorn ducks have no genuine taxon. So, short of pre-cognition about how biology would turn out, it cannot be that these terms, which have been around before any serious biology developed, nonetheless acquired their semantic value by ostension of paradigms, and the invocation of some principle of scientifically discoverable similarity between the paradigms and the other, thereby determined, members of the kind. Ostension plus stipulated similarity in occult features to be unearthed by subsequent science does not explain how our everyday terms for animals land all over the biological taxonomic map. Plants, well, plants—don’t get me started on that, since I am a gardener.
Manifest similarities at the level of phenotype (along with historical chains of generation) play some role in determining how much variation in genotype is legitimately included under the relevant kind term. The so-called Kripke-Putnam theory of natural kind terms needs significant modification in the light of that fact.
If animal kind terms function as terms for partly manifest kinds then we would expect that phenotypic similarities partly determine how much variation in genotype is compatible with being a member of a given animal kind.
More radically, science in general and biological taxonomy in particular is just not interested in essences, so that at the very least the philosophers known as scientific essentialists have been looking in the wrong place for a vindication of their essentialism. Indeed, there are viable scientific conceptions of species on which species membership is not essential to the members that actually make up the species. On such conceptions, we could have missed out on being, and now could cease to be, members of the species H. sapiens, as a result of events which involved no intrinsic change in us.
The collateral suspicion, encouraged by these thoughts about water and animal taxa, is that the Kripke-Putnam theory of natural kinds depended on relying upon an empirically outdated neo-Aristotelian picture of natural science and biology, a picture in which essences play a fundamental explanatory role within science. That is not how science goes. Science does not underwrite our innate, or early developing, psychological quintessentialism, as Sarah-Jane Leslie puts it.
What about Animalism, the view that we are essentially animals?
I take it that this is not the view that you and I could have had, or could take on, any animal form whatsoever. After all, ants and sponges are animals. If the thought is that you and I are essentially members of the species H. Sapiens then that is not a good thought, for reasons already mentioned. Suppose then we understand animalism as the view that we can’t exist without being constituted by a human body, where the human body is understood morphologically, abstracting from historical considerations and the details of biological taxonomy.
Then we should distinguish cell death, organ death and somatic death. A cell is dead when it has irreversibly lost all its characteristic functions. An organ is dead when so many of its cells have died that the organ has lost its capacity to subserve its characteristic functions. Somatic death, the death of a body arrives when crucial organs are no longer capable of cooperating to subserve the self-maintaining dispositions that are the life functions characteristic of the body. Some say the body continues to exist after non-obliterative death, though Aristotelians deny this. But we can skirt that issue by focusing on case in which the body is obliterated but for a remaining subserver of mentation, which is kept alive and functioning.
Consider then a gruesome possible situation in which a human body is obliterated but for its remaining cerebrum, which is kept alive and functioning. There is reason to think that even in such circumstances and for a short time, a functioning cerebrum could still subserve reflective mental life, so that there is a person, however diminished, wholly constituted by the functioning cerebrum. Obviously the cerebrum is not a human body, not even a badly mutilated human body, any more than a severed leg is. Neither was, or in the imagined case is, the locus of the self-maintaining dispositions characteristic of a human body. So animalism should say that in such cases the original person has ceased to exist.
But what about the remnant person, the person whose mental life is subserved by the functioning cerebrum? If the defender of animalism says that this person was there all along, then animalism has a version of the “too many thinkers” problem, the avoidance of which was supposed to be the main motivation for preferring animalism over psychological continuity theories of personal identity. The animal, or living human body or organism thinks, and the cerebrum thinks, and indeed it looks as though the animal thinks derivatively upon the cerebrum’s thinking. That is bad, for there does not seem to be any good sense in which this utterance “I am wholly constituted by a cerebrum” is now actually true, or even half-true.
The remaining option is to say that the gruesome destruction of the body brought the remnant person into existence. That is hard to credit. For the empirical drift of neuropsychology supports this principle:
Given that a person is a thinking reflective being, you do not bring a person into being by removing tissue unless that tissue is somehow suppressing an antecedent capacity for reflective mental life.
So, and this was my “remnant person problem”, animalism has no good way of dealing with remnant persons. (See "Animalism Undone: The Remnant Person Problem”.)
What is the larger significance of the issues surrounding constitution and identity, discussed in your “Constitution is not Identity”, “Constitution” and “Hylomorphism”?
I’ll mention just one application, which connects with the surrounding remarks.
Recently, while giving the Gifford Lectures, I came across the opening of Sir Arthur Eddigton’s published Gifford’s. It echoes the sort of thing I sometimes hear from practicing perceptual psychologists and physicists; more so now that I am Director of the Program in Cognitive Science at my home university.
Strange that the tune has not changed much since 1927. Here is Eddington:
I have settled down to the task of writing these lectures and have drawn up my chairs to my two tables. Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of everything around us. One of the tables has been familiar to me from earliest years. It is a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world. How shall I describe it? It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all it is substantial. Table No. 2 is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance and I do not feel so familiar with it. It does not belong to the world previously mentioned, that world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes. It is part of a world which in more devious ways has forced itself on my attention. My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself…There is nothing substantial about my second table. It is nearly all empty space - space pervaded, it is true, by fields of force, but these are assigned to the category of "influences", not of "things". I need not tell you that modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there.
That is, of course, nonsense. Indeed, it is pernicious nonsense, since it encourages the view that our experience of the world involves a mere projection of experiential features on to an occult world that does not have those features. Perception is then regarded as delivering a grand illusion. Odd then that it provides the starting point for all science.
There are not duplicates of everything around us. There were not two tables in Eddigton’s room. There was one table, whose manifest features had a ground for their possession, a ground which is response (appearance)-dependent.
Here is the importance of the notion of constitution in this context. All Eddington should have said was that physics, or better material science, has shown that his table has a very surprising, and hard to comprehend, relatively fundamental constitution. The truth misrepresented by Eddington’s remarks is that material science is far from boring. It is no indictment of the senses that they do not disclose the truths of material science to us.
Once we have that thought about constitution in place, there is then room for the following view. The senses disclose non-fundamental, though real, events, processes, and ordinary continuants, whose conditions of identity of over time—continuity conditions—are wholly grounded in such real processes. These real, though non-fundamental events, processes and continuants are the bearers of the features that sensing encourages perceptual judgment to assign to them. The characteristic veridicality of perceptual judgments is explained thus: the features those judgments assign to the non-fundamental items which sensing makes salient have (de facto) response-dependent grounds for their possession. That is, the having of such features is grounded in how their bearers, the events, processes and ordinary continuants, characteristically or habitually appear.
The senses are selective, and to that extent detective. They are not projective as they are depicted by the grand illusion theory of the senses, a theory that can be traced back to Galileo. The senses make salient real, though non-fundamental, items located in their respective objective fields. (E.g. the field of view, not the visual field.)
You have recently defended a variant on direct realism that allows for something like sense-data. Why isn’t that an inconsistent position?
The position was set out in some detail in The Manifest, my recent Townsend Lectures at Berkeley. Direct Realism, or better, “Disclosive Realism” I take to be the view that sensing is not the entertaining of a proposition merely representing how things seem to the subject, but a relation to environmental items—continuants, events, stuff, etc.—which present in certain sensory manners.
A visual episode, i.e. an item-presenting-in-a-certain-visual-manner-to-a-subject is not a propositional attitude, i.e. it does not yet involve the predication of the manner of the item. Instead, the episode introduces the item as “there”—as available for sensory attention, and demonstration—thus potentially enriching the topics of which we can go on to predicate this or that. Before even a simple or “atomic” proposition about a seen environmental item is grasped, its topic or subject must be made available by vision. It is this prior stage that I find most interesting. Propositions and propositional attitudes appear later in the day. A whole range of items can be presented in a visual episode, e.g. visible stuff, events, continuants, expanses and tropes. They in their turn can be topics or subjects of predication in perceptual judgments.
Unlike many people writing about perception, some of them my former students, I can’t see the need to postulate, at the experiential level, visually entertaining a proposition about the scene, a proposition which captures how things visually seem to the subject. All I can find are various sensory episodes, including those directed at sensible tropes, and the immediate perceptual judgments, which arise from the items presented and their manner of visual presentation. And to model sensing’s first deliverances as a state of things merely seeming to be thus and so undercuts the distinctive epistemic role of vision in particular and of sensing in general.
To capture the notion of sensory illusion, we need not treat sensing as a propositional attitude. What is misleadingly called veridical illusion aside, there is a sensory illusion if the item is presenting in a sensory manner which is at odds with its sensible nature. Since an items sensible nature is de facto appearance dependent, i.e. tied to how the item characteristically presents, the very notion of a grand, i.e. total illusion has little chance of getting a foothold. There would have to be radical instability is how items present, e.g. no characteristic ways in which their surfaces look.
What then are these sensory manners or modes of presentation? The best model of the relation between the target and its manner of presentation is not Fregean, at least as that is now construed. That is, it is not a model in which something gets to be the target or referent of a sensory episode because it satisfies the descriptive content of the manner of presentation or sense constitutive of that episode. For original demonstrative reference to an item can come by way of an illusory presentation of it. “What is that ‘spot’ on the side of the mountain?” The question has a determinate answer, even if the response is “It is my cabin, but because of the refractory effect of the haze, it is to the left of where you are seeing it now”. What this suggests is that the visual manner of presentation does not determine its referent by way of the referent’s matching the manner. The referent, or object presented, is internal to the manner of presentation. The manner of presentation is the-cabin-presented-in-a-certain-manner. Accordingly, sensory modes of predication are not to be individuated solely by their qualitative character, but also by what they present. Two sensory modes of presentation could share the same qualitative character yet present different items.
Moreover, visual manners of presentation are bi-directional. Surfaces, volumes and light sources are presented as pervaded by expanses of colour. Given a change of attention on the part of the subject, the expanses themselves are presented as pervading surfaces, volumes and light sources. The first direction is that of “the natural attitude”, the attitude that attends to objects, surfaces, volumes and light sources. The second direction is disclosed when we attend to the expanses themselves, as in the painting class. That is why the philosopher of perception H.H. Price, himself a painter, regarded those who denied the existence of expanses as either blind or lying.
As to your pertinent question about inconsistency, direct realism is the view that sensing discloses mind-independent environmental items. So understood, direct realism is wholly compatible with the claim that such items are disclosed via sensory manners of presentation. The manners of presentation do not get in the way, and are not the direct objects of sensing when we sense mind-independent environmental items. They are the means by which mind-independent items are directly sensed.
Attention to visual phenomenology reveals that expanses of colour figure in various ways in visual manners of presentation of seen items. Expanses exhibit different types of locational phenomenology. Sometimes they are presented as pervading surfaces, volumes and light sources, and sometimes they are presented merely as located in the field of view (as opposed to the visual field, which I do not believe in) without thereby being presented as pervading any surface, volume or light source.
The relevant attention to visual phenomenology that urges this distinction on us begins with a motley collection of seemingly marginal visual phenomena, including highlights, afterimages, film (or “aperture”) colour, the “brain grey” or negative ganzfield experience had when no photons are allowed to reach one’s eyes, the coruscating colours which make up the visual auras of migraine sufferers, the coloured shapes encountered in closed-eye pressurisation and visualisation, the illumination-disclosed coloured areas that are lighter than the uniform surface colour “beneath them”, along with the corresponding coloured areas, disclosed by shading, that are darker than the uniform surface colour “beneath them”.
When we attend to the visual manners of presentation involved in these visual phenomena, we notice expanses of colour, i.e. items wholly individuated by their colour shade and visual shape, and perhaps by their visible texture; items which appear to be located in spacetime, but are actually not anywhere.
The expanses differ from the sense-data of A.J. Ayer and the Frank Jackson of Perception: A Representative Theory in that (i) they do not form a veil between subjects and objects, (ii) we do not see objects by means of seeing them, (iii) there is no clear sense in which they are mental, as opposed to ultimate tokens of the expanse types that are the colours, and (iv) there are describable circumstances in which different subjects have numerically the same expanse figuring in their experience. Nor (v) are expanses properties instantiated in a visual field, or in anything else. (See “Why There Are No Visual Fields, Or Minds Understood As Interior Places, Either”) Expanses are apparently located, but they are not had by anything. The phenomenology of colour expanses is locational not “instantial” i.e. not of something having a property. It encourages, but does not underwrite, an epidermal theory of surface colour, the idea of colours as the stretched out and thinnest outer skins of surfaces. (For an account of the encouragement without the underwriting, see “Sense Data”, the second chapter of G.E. Moore’s Some Main Problems of Philosophy.)
Once we admit that there are expanses of colour, we recognise that that they appear ubiquitously in the field of vision. As well as the “detached” expanses encountered in the “marginal” cases of vision, there are expanses that apparently pervade physical surfaces, volumes and light sources.
So first we get a phenomenological grip on the detached expanses in the marginal cases, and then we are able to recognise that the much more common cases involve expanses of colour that do apparently pervade surfaces, light sources and translucent volumes.
Once we recognise the existence of expanses, a novel and intuitive account of what it is to be coloured becomes available: roughly, to be coloured in this way or that is to appear to be pervaded by an expanse of the relevant colour. To get more precise we must distinguish between episodic and standing appearances of pervasion; so to be coloured red is to be apparently pervaded in the relevant part by an expanse of red, where “apparently pervaded” is given its habitual rather than episodic reading. We might also require that the habitual appearance be secured by some standard process involving the deeds and vicissitudes of light. Then, the colours produced by rotating Benham discs may not be colours of the rotating disc.
That is what the property of being red comes to, but what is the colour red? It is an expanse-type whose ultimate tokens are expanses of determinate shades of red. Since we now have accounts of red and being red, we may engage in stipulative narrowing for the otherwise polysemous term “redness”: Redness is a type whose tokens are rednesses, i.e. particular apparent pervasions of surfaces, volumes, etc. by expanses of red. To a first approximation, what are known of as colour tropes are particular apparent pervasions of surfaces, volumes and light sources by expanses of colour. Since visual experience also involves certain attentive sensory episodes directed at such apparent pervasions, colour tropes are also presented in visual experience, in accord with the view developed in “On a Neglected Epistemic Virtue”.
The emphasis on expanses suggests a revision of the account presented in “The Obscure Object of Hallucination”. It is not structural qualitative universals, but mosaics of expanses, which are the common factors that explain both (i) how hallucination can provide original de re knowledge of colour and visual shape, and (ii) the possibility of subjectively seamless transitions from veridical to hallucinatory experiences. The explanation of the latter requires that there can be two modes of presentation that involve the same mosaic of expanses, one of which is a presentation of features in the scene, while the other is a presentation of nothing. A real possibility, given the way sensory modes of presentation are to be individuated in order to accommodate such facts as that our first reference to an item can be secured by an illusory presentation of it.
The different physical processes found in hallucination and veridical perception enable subjects to access distinct, though in special cases qualitatively indistinguishable, sensory manners of presentation. At a minimum, this suggests that the subserving or enabling basis for veridical perception goes all the way out to thing seen. Seeing is not the next event, caused by and occurring just after the visual system has completed its business. Rather, different subserving light and neural process enable subjects to access different visual modes of presentation.
There is the subserving, or material enabling, of the mental with its distinctive forms of intentionality, by the neural, which itself has no intentional structure, even though neural processes can be modelled in information-theoretic terms. But this subserving or material enabling of the mental by the neural is not the causal production of the mental by the neural. (There is counterfactual dependence, but no causal production.)
Understanding perception is a road that offers the promise of leading to a better model of the mind-body relation than any presently favoured. For many of those models—including not just Australian Materialism and Functionalism, but also token identity and the supposedly reductive supervenience of the mental on the physical, along with Emergentism—were developed before a deeper understanding of perception, and of personal identity over time, began to come into view.
Your two books, Saving God and Surviving Death, are projects developing a religious naturalism; in them, you are a staunch critic of the supernatural. But once religion has been fully naturalised, supposing that it can be, what does religious conviction turn on?
Genuine religious conviction is directed upon what religion is for. There are certain large-scale structural defects in human life that no amount of psychological adjustment or practical success can free us from. These include arbitrary suffering, aging (once it has reached the corrosive stage), our profound ignorance of our condition, the isolation of ordinary self-involvement, the insidious plague of low-level manipulative evil perpetrated by our collective everyday selfishness, the vulnerability of everything we cherish to time and chance and, finally, to untimely death. The religious or redeemed life is a form of life in which we are somehow reconciled to the large-scale defects of human life. Being reconciled to the facts entailed by human finitude and self-serving incurvature does not mean that the vicissitudes of life disappear. Instead, to be reconciled to these large-scale structural defects is to find a way to go on in the face of them, keeping faith in the importance of goodness, an openness to love, and a continual gratitude for life.
In those books, I do not so much reject the supernatural, as explore how far the large-scale defects of human life might be authentically met within a non-reductive naturalistic framework.
The thing I am against is idolatry, the occlusion of the Highest One, or the Good, by substituting some humanly-generated and very powerful idealised “Big Other”, a god supposedly effective in satisfying our unredeemed desires, including the spiritually materialistic desires of many who style themselves spiritual or religious.
The first part of the beautiful Shahada or “testimony” of Islam dramatically announces the rejection of idolatry, a rejection deeply embedded in that fine religion. “There is no god but God”. The only legitimate “god”—or conventional object of worship—is Allah, the Highest One. There is another anti-idolatrous conception to be found in Western neo-Platonism, and in certain forms of Jewish, Christian and Islamic mysticism: God is not a god! Meaning, as Aquinas would have put it, that God is not an ens, something which merely predicatively exists, a being among beings, who is very good and very powerful. God is not, to put it Australian, our Big Mate. The Highest One is beyond all that. The Highest One appears, if at all, only after all the gods who would pander to our worldly ambitions have faded away. This is a perennial religious attitude we find in a wide variety of contexts, for example in The Cloud of Unknowing and in Simone Weil’s cultivation of prayerful waiting.
The Hard God: How Did Evil Come Into the World?—a series of five Gifford Lectures delivered this last September at St Andrew’s—explores non-idolatrous religious supernaturalism or, better, transcendentalism, and argues that it can be made coherent and appealing when given a Neo-Platonic basis, important parts of which can be found in Aquinas’s discussion of the ground of predication.
How does all this fit with your “fellow-traveller” worries?
Yes, my turn towards taking transcendentalism seriously is in part prompted by the discovery that even non-reductive naturalism about personal identity over time implies that we are ontological trash. To explain just a little: you are ontological trash, if in your nearest spatio-temporal vicinity, there are a host of beings just like you, not ontologically dependent on you, having different conditions of persistence or continued existence from you. I argue that our not being ontological trash is a strong requirement, that it implies that our ultimate constitution cannot be exhausted by the events that take place within our spatiotemporal envelope. We have to see that as an expression of what we most fundamentally are. But of course that view has to be developed in such a way as to be consistent with the causal closure of the physical, and I take it, of the neural. For there is no evidence from neurochemistry for interactive dualism, i.e. there is no evidence for any “Checkpoint Charlie” in the brain, a locus where the mental makes a causal difference at the level of chemical matter-energy exchange.
If we think through the conditions of ethical life being viable we will see that we must understand our neural histories, and indeed all that takes place within our total spatio-temporal footprints, as expressions of what we most fundamentally are, not wholly exhaustive of what we most fundamentally are.
But what could make for non-causal expression? There’s a longish story there—for another time.
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