Posted by
Nick Thompson on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-Missing-Manifesto-tp524085.html
THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN PRE-APOLOGIZED FOR.
Phil Henshaw wrote:
Sometimes I can't tell from careful efforts to be rigorous (like the common thread in Whitehead, Ryle and Wittgenstein you point out), whether it refers only to semantics and theories or also refers to physical things. A lack of clarity on whether a subject concerns the forms of mental constructs or the forms of things outside the mind to which we can only point is the most common of the misplaced referents I know of. To me it's highly relevant whether the subject is inside or outside our minds, as the former tend to be projections which can be associated with any other and are limitlessly pliable and extendable, and the latter are not. Does your understanding of category error' include that?
Ah, Phil,
THANKS for this comment. I feel we are on the verge of getting ANOTHER distinction nailed down. The answer to your question is in the LAST paragraph below. Like the Recovering Academic I am, I feel the need to lay some ground work, before I Get To The Point . But you can skip, if you like.
I am (until somebody convinces me otherwise) a REALIST MATERIALIST [MONIST] ANTI-REDUCTIONIST. (Actually, I might be an UP-REDUCTIONIST, but we will have to decide, after I lay the position out.)
As a REALIST, I believe that there really is stuff OUT there. More Faith, than reasoned belief. The alternatives to Realism that I know are Idealism or Solipsism. For me, the arguments against these are on heuristic grounds: believing in either is a stupid, mind-numbing, sophomoric waste of time. (I am told that Kant would disagree.) One CAN talk to Idealists; one just has to be prepared to make translations. Solipsists, on the other hand, are beyond the pale.
As a MATERIALIST, I believe that everything that is REAL consists of matter and its relations. To avoid letting idealism in the door here (and thus becoming a dualist) I HAVE to insist that mind things, such as idealists are fond of talking about, really consist of relations amongst matter or, more likely, relations amongst relations ............(etc.)......amongst relations amongst matter. In fact, I am perfectly happy conceding that all matter consists of relations amongst relations .... well, not quite all, obviously, but you see the point.
What does a REALIST MATERIALIST [MONIST] ANTI-REDUCTIONIST say about MIND things. Well mind things have to be relations amongst matter, just like everything else. But where are they "located"? In the head, obviously, right? BZZZZT! WRONG! That would make me a BRAIN-STATE REDUCTIONIST, which I refuse to be, even for a moment. NO, mind states are located in the relation between an organism?s surroundings, and an organism's actions. Thus they are not IN the organism, but they are OF it, in the sense that your automobile is not in you but OF you. You possess your mind in the roughly same sense that you possess your automobile It is your mind in the sense that it is indexed to you. Your mind is the relation between your acts and your circumstances, and it is via your body that your acts and your circumstances can be related. But your ownership of your mind is no more IN your body than your ownership of your car is IN the paper on which the title is written. (In Wittgenstein talk, the statement "the mind is in the head" does not warrant conversations about where in the head it can be found, because "the mind is in the head" is a different word game than "the computer is in the briefcase." Never point to your temple, when you say that I am crazy.
Whether I am an ANTI-REDUCTIONIST or an UP-REDUCTIONIST depends on how one understands reductionism. Here is a standard definition of reductionism, courtesy of
http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/r.htm#reduc
reductionism
Belief that statements or expressions of one sort can be replaced systematically by statements or expressions of a simpler or more certain kind. Thus, for example, some philosophers have held that arithmetic can be reduced to logic, that the mental can be reduced to the physical, or that the life sciences can be reduced to the physical sciences.
Note that the definition has two parts: the first part implies nothing about levels of organization. The second part consists of two examples of DOWN reduction. While I agree that most everyday examples of reduction that are instances of DOWN reduction, I think of a reductionism as a rhetorical move that has nothing essential to do with UP or DOWN in the scale of nature, but with the speakers sense of the ease or certainty of making a claim. Thus I think of myself as an UP-REDUCTIONIST with respect to the MIND because I think of the mind as "just" (simply, obviously, more certainly) a set of relations rather than (complexly, confusedly, and uneasily) a thing within the head.
Why am I so dead set against being a DOWN-REDUCTIONIST? For the same sorts of reasons that I against being an idealist! I think that identifying the mind with things going on in the brain leads to a lot of crazy, useless talk. For one thing, we know absolutely zippo about the brain, yet we know a tremendous amount about the mind. And since we know of minds from observations of the behavior of people in relation to their circumstances, we ought to speak of MINDS as if that is exactly what they are. One of the great advantage off this policy is that it leaves open the possibility of speaking of brain states as causes of mind states, which a brain state reductionist is logically forbidden from ever doing. Nothing can cause itself.
A long way to come to answer what I am sure seemed to you a straight forward question. I think my answer is "BOTH!", and that the confusion you fear may be deeply included in my way of thinking as a POLICY. But I think that with some care, error can be avoided. When I speak of events that you speak of as going on in somebody's head, I am speaking of an evident material relation between that person, his or her behavior, and his or her environment. And I would say that attributions to the HEAD constitute a category error. Moreover, I would that speaking of mental events as occurring in the instant is metonymy (a polite poetic word for "misplaced concreteness") in so far as one is claiming that a thought, feeling, desire, belief, lives in an instant, rather than in a haze of relations with which the current instant is compatible. So, if you say that you believe that there is coffee in the cup in front of you, I would identify that statement with a particular material relation between your behavior with respect to the cup and the position, temperature, weight of the cup and with a haze of material relations that in general characterize "belief". . I would be confirmed in that attribution if, for instance, the cup had no coffee, so that when you reached for it, the cup rose into the air in a unexpected way. If you assert only that there is coffee in the cup, I would take this as an entirely different material assertion, and look into the cup to see if there was a dark brown, savory liquid therein.
Does this make any damn sense at all? Though I am certain you reject it as a position, BUT DO YOU NOW UNDERSTAND IT? Because, if so, we could stop talking about it and just refer to it as Nick's #21, like that old joke about commuters and their jokes on the Long Island Railroad.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Research Associate, Redfish Group, Santa Fe, NM (nick at redfish.com)
Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthompson at clarku.edu)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20070619/86d2c7a9/attachment.html