Tag: common sense

Introduction

In 2016 I completed a Master’s Degree in philosophy with the Open University, receiving a distinction. Wind the clock back a bit and this might seem a little, let’s say, incongruent. In school, I never really received good grades; they weren’t all that bad either, just sort of middling. It might suffice to say that focusing more on getting drunk on the school roof with your friends or playing computer games, rather than revising for exams, isn’t highly conducive to solid academic achievement. But there was another reason – a deeper form of aimlessness. Even during my undergraduate degree (in Media and Television Production) I never felt inspired to make an effort. I didn’t understand the idea of self-motivated study; I’d always felt like academic life was this structure arbitrarily imposed on us from above and this was something I should try to navigate without any serious commitments or even resist outright¹ . So, what changed? How did I find intellectual purpose? Over a series of blog posts I want to answer that question by talking about the merits of philosophy. This is not intended to be an exhaustive analysis of the concept of ‘philosophy’ – rather it is a perspective on what it has come to mean to me (at least, at the time of writing) and also, to an extent, a repudiation of the idea that philosophy is somehow defunct in the face of the successes of science.

First, a little more back-story to set the scene. In 2009 I had a period of reflection during which I consciously acknowledged that fact that I’d never really put any effort into anything intellectually. This was odd, in a way; I’d spent much of my life as an awkward outsider – I’ve never felt like I’ve really fit in and I had, therefore, spent a lot of time thinking about people’s motivations and ways of thinking, but this had not developed into a more serious project. Acknowledging these thoughts led to more general considerations about the nature of consciousness and metacognition. By some quirk of evolution (and the contingencies of ontogenesis – but that’s a different story) we’ve ended up with these unusual minds with their ostensibly singular capacity for self-reflection. It occurred to me that this shouldn’t be squandered and also that there are many levels of self-awareness. The most obvious case of human metacognition is, perhaps, the capacity to conjure up justifications for our behaviours, our beliefs and our desires. But, I realised, there is a deeper form of self-awareness; that is, there is a tutored self-awareness which looks beyond the explanatory tools typically employed during naïve introspection toward a less commonsense, a less folk-psychological, type of explanation. We can ask, for example, what forges our desires prior to any justifications? Why do we find the things that we find funny funny? What role are our emotions playing in shaping our behaviours? Behind the flux of ongoing thoughts and activities, what kind of beings are we? In what kind of ontological framework should this flux be situated, determining the meaning of its occurrent parts? These questions, I now think, take us beyond the metaphysics canonically assumed by liberalism – the metaphysics of the rational individual – to something much more complex and well hidden; perhaps the question emerges as ‘what governs us?’ rather than ‘what do we think?’. Awareness of the self, I believe, cannot just be a matter of introspection into an ‘inner’ mental realm, nor can the platitudes of folk-psychology suffice for any real understanding. Similarly, I have never found the explanatory lacuna at the heart of the concept of ‘free will’ – another platitude – very satisfying.

On the back of my thoughts in 2009, I set out to improve my knowledge in various domains, from physics and astronomy, to mathematics to biology, to psychology, politics, and so on. I’m not suggesting that I brought my knowledge in these areas up to a high standard; rather, I became interested in learning in a way which I never had before. This culminated in 2014 with the decision to begin a Master’s degree in philosophy. I hadn’t studied it at undergraduate level, so I was throwing myself in at the deep end, but I decided that, for the first time, I’d put some real effort into academic work. Below, then, I begin to outline the key things which I have taken from philosophy which now guide my thinking and which maintain my interest. Keeping in mind the above – my considerations about who or what we are – we can ask: why philosophy? This is a question I will answer in three parts, over three separate posts. In this first post I discuss the relationship between philosophy and common sense, explaining how philosophy serves to challenge our commonsense notions and helps us to develop new ideas. In the second post, I will discuss how philosophy teaches us a principle of charity, encouraging us to rigorously investigate even those positions which we may not agree with; I will also discuss how this alone is not enough and how we need something like philosophy of mind if we are to bring our metacognition to a new level, allowing us to find new ways of interrogating ourselves. Finally, in my third post, I will explore the relationship between philosophy and scientific discovery, arguing that philosophical thinking is a key part of scientific progress and that it is a mistake to position these things hierarchically, such that one has dominion over the other.

Because common sense is usually wrong

The story of Western philosophy is generally considered to start with Thales of Miletus, the first of the Presocratics. A theme in Presocratic thinking is the idea that the world is reducible to some more basic ‘stuff’. Thales, born in the early sixth century BCE held, in some sense, that water is the basic substance of reality. Aristotle relays in The Metaphysics:

of the first philosophers the majority thought that the causes in the form of matter were alone the principles of all things. For that from which all entities come, from which each thing primarily arises and into which it is at the end resolved, the substance remaining but changing as to affections, this they announced to be the element and principle of all entities […] But the number and form of such a principle they do not all proclaim to be the same. Thales, the introducer of this sort of philosophy said that it was water (that is why he declared the earth to be sitting on water), perhaps drawing this supposition from seeing that the nourishment of all creatures is moist and that warmth itself arises from this and that it is by this that all creatures live (and the assumption that that from which a thing comes is its principle in all cases). For this reason, indeed, taking this assumption and also because the seeds of all creatures have a moist nature and water is the natural principle for moist things (The Metaphysics, 1.983b).

This suggests the conjunction of some rudimentary observations about the world and metaphysical speculation about why the world appears to us in the way that it does. Similarly, the Presocratic Heraclitus gave primacy to fire: ‘Everything is compensation for fire and fire is a compensation for everything, as goods are for gold and gold for goods’ (Waterford, 2009: 42). One Presocratric school of thought even held the radical view that the world is made up of very small objects which can’t themselves be divided – ‘atoms’.

As Aristotle suggests (perhaps a little hastily) these types of positions might be called materialist; something like this was certainly a theme amongst the Presocratics (though not an exclusive one). Radically different was the Platonic school which grew out of the teachings of Socrates and built the foundations for classical metaphysics. For Plato the nature of reality cannot be grasped via the properties of material things in the world such as water, fire or speculative atoms, but rather by probing the nature of transcendental ideal objects or forms of which these things are merely a reflection. Such a notion of the ideal object grew out of the desire to explain universals; the reasoning being that if two objects share a property – say, roundness – that what unites these things in the world is their participating in or representing of a transcendental ideal of which the material world is merely a type of imitation. This leads to a hyper rationalistic epistemology which rejects observation in favour of arriving, by pure reason, at an understanding of a higher ‘intelligible’ realm. For example, in his Republic Plato rejects observational astronomy: ‘it’s only a field of study which is concerned with immaterial reality that I can regard as making the mind look upwards, and I wouldn’t describe the attempt to study perceptible things by gawping upwards or squinting downwards as learning…’ (529b). This represents a strong divergence from the dominant themes of the Presocratics, both in terms of metaphysics and epistemology; however, what the Presocratics and Platonic school share is a commitment to a cornerstone of philosophical thinking: the idea that how we perceive the world from the perspective of our everyday, commonsense assumptions is not enough – we must consider things more deeply if we are to comprehend the world’s deeper complexities. It might appear that the everyday world is made up of certain types of objects and processes, but when we consider its properties more deeply, we may need to revise our ontological commitments and the conceptual tools which we use to connect ourselves to it. Foregoing the metre here is an excerpt from the stunning first century BCE poem On the Nature of Things written by the Roman advocate of Epicurean atomism, Lucretius:

we sense various smells, although we never see the odour wafting towards our nostrils. We cannot see the scalding heat, or see the cold; likewise, we are not in the habit of noting voices with our eyes. But what acts on our senses is material, inasmuch as without body, nothing is tangible, nor can it touch. Moreover, clothing hung out by a breaker-beaten shore grows damp, but if you spread it in the sun, it dries once more. Yet how the moisture came and went, you cannot see at all – and so the water must evaporate in drops so small they escape detection by our eyes. Year after circling year the ring upon a finger thins from inside out to wear. The steady drip of water causes stone to hollow and yield. The curving iron of the plowshare fritters in the field by imperceptible degrees. The cobbles of the street we see are polished smooth by now from throngs of passing feet. And at the city gates, right hands of statues made of brass are worn away by touches of the greeting hands that pass. And thus we see things dwindle by their being rubbed away – but what is lost at any given moment, we can’t say, because our stingy sense of sight will never let us see. Lastly, whatever Days and Nature add on gradually to things, that makes them grow at a moderate pace, cannot be seen no matter how you stare and squint, your sight however keen. Neither are you able to perceive what disappears at any given time, when things grow old and waste with years or rocks are gnawed away with sea-brine. Thus these things are done by Nature using bodies that are visible to none (The Nature of Things, 1.299 – 328).

Clearly, and unlike Plato, the atomists had no dispute with observation but as Lucretius stresses here the classical atomists had not seen atoms – their ‘stingy senses’ would not allow it; rather they invented the concept of atoms in order to explain their everyday observations. This matter of the production of concepts, for me, is a key part of the entire project of philosophical work and is something we will return to in my final post where I will discuss the relationship between philosophy and scientific knowledge. Returning to the question of common sense: I’m not setting up a stall here suggesting that what we call ‘common sense’ isn’t useful. Rather, I think that studying philosophy shows us the limits of common sense; that is, common sense might be sufficient to get us through much our day to day lives, but when we stress common sense in conditions under which it is not normally exposed, it starts to break down. Just because a concept or belief might be useful, that doesn’t mean it provides an accurate description of the world, nor will it necessarily be adequate as we expand our empirical, theoretical, social or political horizons. Thus philosophy problematises our everyday concepts and makes us reflect on how we might change them or even abandon them. A paradigmatic example of this in the modern philosophical literature is the philosophy of personal identity – the subject which really took hold of me when I started my studies.

Something which is widely held as common sense is the idea² that the self is a sort of discrete essence – a singular thing with which we are identical. This idea underwrites the notion of the ‘soul’ and finds philosophical defence in the dualism of René Descartes who famously argued that minds are fundamentally immaterial things, which physical reality cannot exemplify or instantiate, and which themselves are indivisible. One way of problematising a commonsense idea is via the thought experiment. Such a thought experiment (admittedly one that for cultural reasons may have become cliché) involves the transporters from Star Trek. A transporter accident results in a duplication of an individual – one person goes in and two come out at the other side. Both are atom-for-atom copies of the original. Clearly, this raises questions of the continuity of the person – something conventionally deeply implicated in other questions relating to the survival of the self, moral responsibility, legal status, and so on. However, common sense tells us that if there is indeed a survivor of the accident at all, then one and only one of these individuals can be considered a true survivor – the real self. But which one? A key question here is what is it that we are trying to find the continuity of? In other words, we must delve deeper into the constitution of the self. The philosopher Derek Parfit (1971) argues that if we take that constitution as being of psychological states then there simply is no definite answer to which individual is the ‘real’ successor: individuals can have multiple successors, because the psychological states needed for survival normally being reducible to the continuity of singular individuals is merely a contingent fact, rather than a necessary one. In the aforementioned transporter accident both individuals can lay claim to the same psychological continuity, thus we cannot choose a ‘truer’ successor between them. Of course, a dualist may still suggest that despite this picture there still persists some more primitive individual thing which persists independently of psychological states, but the onus is on them to explain what this refers to and what necessitates it.

Positions such as Parfit’s operate within the legacy of an empiricist philosophical tradition which holds that there is no primitive ‘self’ prior to its realisation through a continuity of separate feelings, beliefs, and desires, etc. Hume, for example, states

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I call reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me (1739).

Here Hume problematises the notion of the self as commonsensically conceived. What is this ‘I’ supposedly threaded through time and space? Hume suggests that when we look closely at the notion of the self, this putatively discrete ‘I’, what we in fact find is a constellation of fleeting states. Of course, someone might object (and they have) that, while it is these states that we experience and not something more concrete, Hume here merely identifies an epistemological concern rather than a metaphysics of the self. Regardless of such an objection, such a formulation clearly upends any supposed certainty that one has immediate introspective access to some united inner ‘self’ and shows that more work has to be done if one is to be committed to a metaphysics involving something beyond what said introspection actually furnishes us with.

Note that I haven’t introduced the preceding discussion merely to shore up such an empiricist account of the self (although I do believe that something close to this is true, albeit alongside certain other ontological considerations); rather, it is to show how philosophical questioning can serve to destabilise our firmly held, but perhaps unexamined, beliefs. Unlike those Presocratics, however, who invented a new concept – the atom – to explain their observations, this line of reasoning, rather, deflates: what seemed like the solid, inner self – simple and continued – after rigorous reflection on our experiences, might begin to seem a little more nebulous. Our commonsense notion of the self is, thus, problematised. Consider too the following allegorical account of a visitor to a university, constructed by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle with the intention of exorcising the Cartesian ghost from the machinery of mind:

A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks ‘But where is the University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University.’ (1949: 17 – 18).

The mistake that is made here is obvious – the university is not an additional thing, alongside the libraries, playing fields, museums, etc, but is, rather, constituted by them. Ryle calls this type of error a category-mistake and suggests that viewing the mind, like Descartes did and as common sense often holds, as some discrete thing, behind or separate to the actual practice of intelligent behaviour in the world is an example of such a mistake. This short allegory of Ryle’s is one I find myself coming back to again and again; it serves a tool of thought to question our reifying ways of thinking.

If we relegate these issues to science fiction and transporter accidents then the philosophical interrogation of the commonsense notion of the self might be conveniently ignored. However, the notion of the self as some reified, perhaps pre-social ‘thing’ is one which is all pervasive in Western, neoliberal society and this is something with real consequences for how people organise themselves and live their lives. Take, for example, the question of gender. Something like the Rylean move is present in philosopher Judith Butler’s notion of ‘gender performativity’. Butler suggests that individuals don’t belong to gendered categories by virtue of some fixed inner being, but rather belong to them via gender performances which enact those categories.

Consider the case of Swedish model Arvida Byström. In 2017 she made the news after receiving rape threats as a consequence of starring in an Adidas advert while displaying her unshaved legs. What caused this backlash? Byström failed to perform her gender ‘correctly’. If gender were simply some natural fact of biology then Byström’s display of leg hair would simply have been an innocuous fact of gender. Women grow leg hair. However, the backlash that she received demonstrates how biology can, in fact, be a divergence from the gendered ideal.

Butler states:

gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self (1988: 519).

For Butler, then, gender consists in neither biological identities nor unitary ‘core’ psychological identities, but is constituted by practice. To ask what is behind such practice is, on this view, to once again enquire about the location of the university after already surveying its grounds and facilities. However, as the Byström case suggests, this practice is not freely chosen, but is socially constrained. Butler states ‘that culture so readily punishes or marginalizes those who fail to perform the illusion of gender essentialism should be sign enough that on some level there is social knowledge that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated’ (528).

If we take such a view of social identities, then we can consider how the imposition of such identities might be resisted, how they might change and how they may evolve. But if we reify them into discrete, unchangeable categories, then new trajectories are closed off and cannot be conceived of. The metaphysics which we attach to social Subjects – people in society – has real consequences. Those in India who believe that the categories of Hindu caste (Dalit, Shudras, Brahmins, etc) delimit natural-kinds do not merely commit to an abstract metaphysical claim, but aid in the legitimation and production of social hierarchies.

Similarly, consider the notion of ‘mind uploading’ and its supposed promise of digital immortality. Here the metaphysical questions relating to the self are far from incidental. What is it that we ought to be uploading? If that conceptual question isn’t first answered or if it’s answered incorrectly – perhaps naively conserving the ‘commonsense’ notion of the soul – then it’s hard to see how such a project can even get off the ground and into the, ex hypothesi, cloud.

All of this should, I hope, already be plenty enough to show how philosophy is important for questioning commonsense assumptions and the importance of doing so; however, we will visit one remaining locus of philosophical disruption for commonsense ideas before moving on. In my Master’s thesis ‘An outlook on the ontology of cognition: does conscious intelligence require symbol-like primitives?’ I approached the problem of what we can infer from consciousness for the structure of cognition. A key idea which I encountered while researching this subject is called ‘eliminative materialism’. Eliminative materialism is, perhaps, a case of rejecting common sense par excellence. In fact so much so that it might even be considered a metarejection of common sense in that it questions the very tools of sense making which we commonsensically attach to ‘common sense’.

Consider our everyday way of thinking about the mind and mental causation – the ‘folk-psychology’ (‘FP’, hereafter) mentioned in the opening. What conceptual tools does FP employ – what units of analysis – for understanding mentation? We use terms such as ‘thinking’, ‘belief’, ‘desire’ and so on. What do we mean by these terms? What type of ontology are they committed to – that is, what types of things do they hold actually exist in the world? One explanation for this is that the use of these terms forms a ‘propositional-attitude psychology’. On this view of FP if we say something like ‘x believes y’ or ‘x desires that y’ we hold that the subject x bears a relationship to some propositional mental content y, which can be individuated and is discretely causally active within their mental ecology. This view is not, however, solely associated with FP; something like this provided the ontological and methodological foundations for classical cognitivism and the classical approach to artificial intelligence – what is now often referred to as ‘GOFAI’ (Good Old-fashioned Artificial Intelligence). A key idea here is the ‘physical symbol systems hypothesis’ forwarded by computer scientists Allen Newell and Herbert Simon in the 1970’s. This hypothesis holds that intelligent systems just are systems of discrete symbols: ‘A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action’ (1976: 116).

For the eliminative materialists (‘EM’, hereafter) this view of the mind is simply a useful fiction. Closely associated with the neurophilosophers Patricia Churchland and her husband Paul, EM suggests that, in view of discoveries made in things such as neuroscience, connectionism (the theory of neural-networks), biology, situated-robotics and ecological psychology, we ought to abandon the language of folk-psychology completely, in favour an ontologically radical conceptual economy which does away with (eliminates) propositional content from our conceptual corpus or, even more radically, the need for inner representations entirely. Much like the Presocratics conjuring up the concept of the atomic particle in response to their observations, then, proponents of EM suggest that we need to reconfigure our conceptual economy in respect to the mind in response to the observations made in the sciences.

In his paper ‘Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes’ (1981) Paul Churchland suggests that our mutual understanding and even our introspection may ‘be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience’ (67). Churchland points to phenomena that FP has failed to explain and, perhaps, cannot:

consider the nature and dynamics of mental illness, the faculty of creative imagination, or the ground of intelligence differences between individuals. Consider our utter ignorance of the nature and psychological functions of sleep, that curious state in which a third of one’s life is spent. Reflect on the common ability to catch an outfield fly ball on the run, or hit a moving car with a snowball (73).

So, what might a ‘completed neuroscience’ furnish us with in FP’s stead? Churchland suggests that we might consider a scenario in which we view cognitive dynamics as operating at a much higher level of dimensionality than what is suggested by FP. Perhaps we can think of the inner kinematics of the brain, not in the discrete propositional terms attributed to FP, but in terms of higher dimensional dynamics between neurons. Language is thus ‘a one dimensional projection of a four or five-dimensional “solid” that is an element in [the] true kinematical state’ (85). He points to callosal agenesis, a neuro-developmental aberration in which individuals are born without the corpus callosum, and notes that despite the absence of this area of the brain which normally connects its two hemispheres, those born with callosal agenesis have little or no behavioural deficit. What Churchland is suggesting here is that if the two hemispheres of the brain can learn to communicate with each other ostensibly in the absence of the propositional characteristics of FP, then something like this might forward a paradigm for a post-FP way of formulating mutual understanding and introspection. In his Plato’s Camera (2012) he furnishes us with a more precise language for such neurodynamics, suggesting that we should think of the mind, not as a system of propositions, but as a sculpted state space, in which the units of cognition are not such discrete ‘thoughts’ but the vector-completions of patterns of activation between neurons. Thought works, on this account, as a sort of ampliative inference between semantic maps which are distributed over sub-symbolic nodes. Certainly, a step beyond the terms of FP.

Taking these ideas further, ask yourself, what constitutes an ‘appropriate’ amount of personal space? Navigating personal space is certainly an intelligent act, but when we reflect on this question we can see that (perhaps life during the Covid-19 pandemic not withstanding) this isn’t a form of intelligence obviously reducible to anything like propositional content. To be sure, we might say something like ‘I stayed a certain distance from that person because if I got any closer it could have provoked a negative reaction’ but clearly this is an explanatory gloss if it is committed to such a syntactical arrangement as a causal thesis of behaviour; this intelligent act is more feeling than calculation. If we consider this kind of interaction with the world as what is typical, then it looks like we must make major challenges to commonsense assumptions about the causes of our behaviour if we are to have that heightened sense of self-awareness which I spoke about in the introduction – if we are to understand ourselves beyond what can be achieved via naïve introspection.

However, as Paul Churchland points out, rejecting FP has an ‘aura of inconceivability’ (1981: 88). EM violates common sense, and it does so to such a degree that, at least when first exposed to it, it can be very difficult to even entertain as an idea (indeed, I’ve seen people become viscerally angry over it). It’s something that is easy to dismiss or caricature. How can we say that things like beliefs and desires don’t exist? What nonsense! And so on. If we succumb to such knee-jerk reactions in the face of new ideas, it becomes very difficult to shed existing ideas which are inadequate or plain wrong. How does philosophy help us get around this behaviour? This brings us to the principle of charity – something which I will introduce in part two.

Notes

[1]. I suspect that the culture of ‘oppositional masculinity’ present in my formative social environment played a role in my early unwillingness to engage in academic intellectual growth. As sociologist RW Connell notes in Masculinities (2005), the relationships which construct the specificity of masculinity are dialectical. A school authority, for example, can serve as a foil against which boys develop their sense of social identity. The (pernicious) consequences for learning are obvious.

[2]. Indeed, the idea that some form of dualism about the self, holding that the mind is a thing distinct from the body, is a widely held intuition, transcending various cultures, and finds empirical support in scientific literature. See for example Chudek et al. (2013).

Bibliography

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