The European Rationalist – In Reason We Trust

The present paper has two major goals, one of which is to argue that seeing is not always perceiving and the other of which is to argue that visual perception alone leads to knowledge of the world. Let me immediately try to make these two cryptic claims more transparent. Not all human vision has been designed to allow visual perception. Seeing can and often does make us visually aware of objects, properties and facts in the world. But it need not. Often enough, seeing allows us to act efficiently on objects of which we are dimly  aware, if at all. While moving at high speed, for example, experienced drivers are sometimes capable of avoiding an interfering obstacle of whose visual attributes they become fully aware afterwards. One may efficiently either catch or avoid being hit by a flying tennis ball without being aware of either its color or texture. This is the sense in which seeing is not always perceiving. If so, then the question arises as to the nature, function and cognitive role of non-perceptual vision. Here, I will make two joint claims. First of all, I will try to argue that the main job of human visual perception is to provide visual information for what functionalist philosophers have called  the “belief box”. In other words, visual percepts are inputs to further conceptual processing whose output can be stored in the belief box. Secondly, I will try to argue that the function of that part of the visual system that produces what I shall call “non-perceptual” or more often “visuomotor” representations is to provide visual guidance to the “intention box”. More specifically, I will argue that, unlike visual percepts, visuomotor representations – which, I shall claim, are genuine representations – present visual information to motor intentions and serve as inputs to “causally indexical” concepts. On the joint assumptions (that I accept) that in the relevant propositional sense, only facts can be known, and that one cannot know a fact unless one believes that this very fact (or state of affairs) holds, then it follows from my distinction between perceptual and visuomotor processing that only visual perception can give rise to “detached” knowledge of the mind-independent world.
 
 

I. Not all seeing is perceiving
I.1. The dualistic model of the human visual system
            In their (1982) paper “Two Cortical Visual Systems”, the cognitive neuroscientists Leslie Ungerleider and Mortimer Mishkin posited an anatomical distinction between the ventral pathway and the dorsal pathway in the primate visual system (see Figure 1). The former projects the primary visual cortex onto inferotemporal areas. The latter projects the primary visual cortex onto parietal areas, which serve as a relay between the primary visual cortex, the premotor and the motor cortex. Ungerleider and Mishkin based their anatomical distinction on neurophysiological and behavioral evidence gathered from the study of macaque monkeys. They performed intrusive lesions respectively in the ventral and in the dorsal pathway of the visual system of macaque monkeys and they found the following double dissociation. Animals with a lesion in the ventral pathway were impaired in the identification and recognition of the colors, textures and shapes of objects. But they were relatively unimpaired in tasks or spatial orientation. In tasks of spatial orientation, they were presented with two wells one of which contained food and the other of which was empty: the former was closer to a landmark than the latter (see Figure 2). Animals with a ventral lesion could accurately use the presence of the landmark in order to discriminate the well with food from the well without. By contrast, animals with a dorsal lesion were severely disoriented, but their capacity to identify and recognize the shapes, colors and textures of objects were well-preserved. On this basis, Ungerleider and Mishkin (1982) concluded that the ventral pathway of the primate visual system is the What system and the dorsal pathway of the primate visual system is the Where system.
 

            In their (1995) book, The Visual Brain in Action, the cognitive neuroscientists David Milner and Mel Goodale presented a number of arguments in favor of a new interpretation of the dualistic model of the human visual system. On their view, the ventral stream of the human visual system serves what they call “vision-for-perception” and the dorsal stream serves what they call “vision-for-action”. The important idea underlying Milner and Goodale’s dualistic model of human vision is that one and the same visual stimulus can be processed in two fundamentally different ways. Now, two caveats are important here. First of all, it is quite clear, I think, that, as Austin (1962) emphasized, humans can see a great variety of things: they can see e.g., tables, trees, rivers, substances, gases, vapors, mountains, flames, clouds, smoke, shadows, holes, pictures, movies, events and actions. Here, I will not examine the ontological status of all the various things that human beings can see and I shall restrict myself to seeing ordinary middle-sized objects that can also happen to be targets of human actions. Secondly, it is no objection to the dualistic model of the human visual system to acknowledge that, in the real life of normal human subjects, the two distinct modes of visual processing are constantly collaborating. Indeed, the very idea that they collaborate – if and when they do – presupposes that they are distinct. The trick of course is to find experimental conditions in which the two modes of visual processing can be dissociated. In the following, I will provide some examples drawn first from the psychophysical study of normal human subjects and then from the neuropsychological study of brain-lesioned human patients.
 
 

I.2. Psychophysical evidence
            Bridgeman et al. (1975) Goodale et al. (1986) found that normal subjects can point accurately to a target on the screen of a computer whose motion they could not consciously notice because it coincided with one of their saccadic eye movement (see Jeannerod, 1997: 82). Castiello et al. (1991) found that subjects are able to correct the trajectory of their hand movement directed towards a moving target some 300 milliseconds before they became conscious of the target’s change of location. Pisella et al. (2000) and Rossetti & Pisella (2000) performed experiments involving a pointing task in which subjects were presented with a green target towards which they were requested to point their index finger. Some of them were instructed to stop their pointing movement towards the target when and only when it changed location by jumping either to the left or to the right. Pisella et al. (2000) and Rossetti & Pisella (2000) found a significant percentage of very fast unwilled correction movements generated by what they called the “automatic pilot” for hand movement. In a second experiment, Pisella et al. (2000) presented subjects simultaneously with pairs of a green and a red target. They were instructed to point to the green target, but the color of the two targets could be interchanged unexpectedly at movement onset. Unlike a change of target location, a change of color did not elicit fast unwilled corrective movements by the “automatic pilot”. On this basis, Pisella et al. (2000) draw a contrast between the fast visuomotor processing of the location of a target in egocentric coordinates and  the slower visual processing of the color of an object.
 

            One psychophysical area of particular interest is the study of visual size-contrast illusions. One particularly well-known such illusion is the Titchener or Ebbinghaus illusion. The standard version of the illusion consists of the display of two circles of equal diameter, one surrounded by an annulus of circles greater than it, and the other surrounded by an annulus of circles smaller than it. Although they are equal, the former looks smaller than the latter (see Figure 3). One plausible account of the Titchener illusion is that the array of smaller circles is judged to be more distant than the array of larger circles. Visually based perceptual judgments of distance and size are typically relative judgments: in a perceptual task, one cannot but fail to see some things as smaller (or larger) and closer (or further away) than other neighboring things that are parts of a single visual array. In perceptual tasks, the output of obligatory comparisons of sizes, distances and positions of constituents of a visual array serves as input to perceptual constancy mechanisms. As a result, of two physically equal objects, if one is perceived as more distant from the observer than the other, the former will be perceived as larger than the latter. A non-standard version of the illusion consists in the display of two circles of unequal diameter: the larger of the two is surrounded by an annulus of circles larger than it, while the smaller of the two is surrounded by an annulus of circles smaller than it, so that the two unequal circles look equal.
 

            Aglioti et al. (1995) designed an experiment in which they replaced the two central circles by two graspable three-dimensional plastic disks, which they displayed within a horizontal plane. In a first row of experiments with pairs of unequal disks whose diameters ranged from 27 mm to 33 mm, they found that on average the disk in the annulus of larger circles had to be 2,5 mm wider than the disk in the annulus of smaller circles in order for both to look equal. These numbers provide a measure of the delicacy of the human visual system. Finally, Aglioti et al. (1995) alternated presentations of physically unequal disks, which looked equal, and presentations of physically equal disks, which looked unequal. Both kinds of trials were presented randomly and so were the left vs. right positions of either kind of stimuli. Subjects were instructed to pick up the disk on the left between the thumb and index finger of their right hand if they thought the two disks to be equal or to pick up the disk on the right if they judged them to be unequal.
 

            The sequence of subjects’ choices of the disk on the right or the disk on the left provided a measure of the magnitude of the illusion prompted by the perceptual comparison between two disks surrounded by two distinct annuli. In the visuomotor task, the measure of grip size was based on the unfolding of the natural grasping movement performed by subjects while their hand approached the object. During a prehension movement, fingers progressively stretch to a maximal aperture before they close down until contact with the object. It has been found that the maximum grip aperture (MGA) takes place at a relatively fixed point, i.e., at about 60% of the duration of the movement (cf. Jeannerod, 1984). In non-illusory contexts, MGA has been found to be reliably correlated with the object’s physical size. Although much larger, it is directly proportional to the actual physical size of the object. MGA cannot depend on a conscious visual comparison between the size of the object and subjects’ hand during the prehension movement since the correlation between MGA and object’s size is reliable even when subjects have no visual access to their own hand. Rather, MGA is assumed to result from an early anticipatory automatic visual process of calibration. Thus, Aglioti et al. (1995) measured MGA in flight using optoelectronic recording.
 

            What Aglioti et al. (1995) found was that, unlike comparative perceptual judgment expressed by the sequence of choices of either the disk on the left or the disk on the right, the grip was not significantly affected by the illusion. The influence of the illusion was significantly stronger on perceptual judgment than on the grasping task. This experiment, however, raises a number of methodological problems. The main issue, raised by Pavani et al. (1999) and Franz et al. (2000), is the asymmetry between the two tasks. In the perceptual task, subjects are asked to compare two distinct disks surrounded by two different annuli. But in the grasping task, subjects focus on a single disk surrounded by an annulus. So the question arises whether, from the observation that the comparative perceptual judgment is more affected by the illusion than the grasping task, one may conclude that perception and action are based on two distinct representational systems.
 

            Aware of this problem, Haffenden & Goodale (1998) performed the same experiment, but they designed one more task: in addition to instructing subjects to pick up the disk on the left if they judged the two disks to be equal in size or to pick up the disk on the right if they judged them to be unequal, they required subjects to manually estimate between the thumb and index finger of their right hand the size of the disk on the left if they judged the disks to be equal in size and to manually estimate the size of the disk on the right if they judged them to be unequal (see Figure 4). Haffenden & Goodale (1998) found that the effect of the illusion on the manual estimation of the size of a disk (after comparison) was intermediary between comparative judgment and grasping.
 

            Furthermore, Haffenden & Goodale (1998) found that the presence of an annulus had a selective effect on grasping. They contrasted the presentation of pairs of disks either against a blank background or surrounded by an annulus of circles of intermediate size, i.e., of size intermediary between the size of the smaller circles and the size of the larger circles involved in the contrasting pair of illusory annuli. The circles of intermediate size in the annulus were slightly larger than the disks of equal size. When a pair of physically different disks were presented against either a blank background or a pair of annuli made of intermediate size circles, both grip scaling and manual estimates reflected the physical difference in size between the disks. When physically equal disks were displayed against either a blank background or a pair of annuli made of circles of intermediate size, no significant difference was found between grasping and manual estimate. The following dissociation, however, turned up: when physically equal disks were presented with a middle-sized annulus, overall MGA was smaller than when physically equal disks were presented against a blank background. Thus, the presence of an annulus of middle-sized circles prompted a smaller MGA than a blank background. Conversely, overall manual estimate was larger when physically equal disks were presented against a background with a middle-sized  annulus than when they were presented against a blank background. The illusory effect of the middle-size annulus presumably arises from the fact that the circles in the annulus were slightly larger than the equal disks. Thus, whereas the presence of a middle-sized annulus contributes to increasing manual estimation, it contributes to decreasing grip scaling. This dissociation shows that the presence of an annulus may have conflicting effects on perceptual estimate and on grip aperture.
 

            Finally, Haffenden, Schiff & Goodale (2001) went one step further. They presented subjects with three distinct Titchener circle displays one at a time, two of which are the traditional Titchener central disk surrounded by an annulus of circles either smaller than it or larger than it. In the former case, the gap between the edge of the disk and the annulus is 3 mm. In the latter case, the gap between the edge of the disk and the annulus is 11 mm. In the third display, the annulus is made of small circles (of the same size as in the first display), but the gap between the edge of the disk and the annulus is 11 mm (like the gap in the second display with an annulus of larger circles) (see Figure 5). What Haffenden, Schiff and Goodale (2001) found was the following dissociation: in the perceptual task, subjects estimated the third display very much like the first display and unlike the second display. In the visuomotor task, subjects’ grasping in the third condition was much more similar to grasping in the second than in the first condition (see Figure 6). Thus, perceptual estimate was far more sensitive to the size of the circles in the annulus than to the distance between target and annulus. Conversely, grasping was far more sensitive to the distance between target and annulus than to the size of the circles in the annulus. The idea here is that the annulus is processed by the visuomotor processing as a potential obstacle for the position of the fingers on the target disk.
 

            From this selective review of evidence on size-contrast illusions, I would like to draw two temporary conclusions. First of all, visual perception and visually guided hand actions directed towards objects impose different computational requirements on the human visual system. As I said above, visually based perceptual judgments of distance and size are typically relative comparative judgments. By contrast, visually guided actions directed towards objects are typically based on the computation of the absolute size and the egocentric representation of the location of objects on which to act. In order to successfully grab a branch or a rung, one must presumably compute the distance and the metrical properties of the object to be grabbed quite independently of pictorial contextual features in the visual array.
 

            Second of all, what the above experiments suggest is not that, unlike perceptual judgments, the visuomotor control of grasping is immune to illusions. Rather, both perceptual judgment and the visuomotor control of action can be fooled by the environment. But if so, then they can be fooled by different features of the visual display. The effect of the Titchener size-contrast illusion on perceptual judgment arises mostly from the comparison between the diameter of the disk and the diameter of the circles in the surrounding annulus. The visuomotor processing, which delivers a visual representation of the absolute size of a target of prehension, is so sensitive to the distance between the edge of the target and its immediate environment that it can be led to process two-dimensional cues as if they were three-dimensional obstacles. I take this last point quite seriously because I claim that it is evidence that the output of the visuomotor processing of the target of an action can misrepresent features of the distal stimulus and is thus a genuine mental representation.
 
 

I.3. Neuropsychological evidence
            In the 1970’s, Weiskrantz and others discovered a neuropsychological condition called “blindsight” (see Weiskrantz, 1986, 1997). Since then, the phenomenon has been extensively studied and discussed by philosophers. Blindsight results from a lesion in the primary visual cortex anatomically located prior to the bifurcation between the ventral and the dorsal streams. The significance of the discovery of this phenomenon lies in the fact that although blindsight patients have no phenomenal subjective visual experience of the world in their blind field, nonetheless it was found out that they are capable of striking residual visuomotor capacities. In situations of forced choice, they can do such remarkable things as grap quandragular blocks and insert a hand-held card into an oriented slot. According to most neuropsychologists who have studied such cases, in blindsight patients, the visual information is processed by subcortical pathways that bypass the visual cortex and relay visual information to the motor cortex.
 

            In the early 1990’s, DF, a British woman suffered an extensive lesion in the ventral stream of her visual system as a result of poisoning by carbon monoxide. She thus became an apperceptive agnosic, i.e., a visual form agnosic patient (see Farah, 1990 for the distinction between apperceptive and associative agnosia). Following the discovery of blindsight, the main novelty of the neuropsychological description of patient DF’s condition – first examined by Goodale et al. (1991) and his colleagues – lies in the fact that DF’s examination did not focus exclusively on what she could not do as a result of her lesion. Rather, she was investigated in depth for what she was still able to do.
 

            Careful sensory testing of DF revealed subnormal performance for color perception and for visual acuity with high spatial frequencies, though detection of low spatial frequencies was impaired. Her motion perception was poor. DF’s perception of shape and patterns was very poor. She was unable to report the size of an object by matching it by the appropriate distance between the index finger and the thumb of her right hand. Her line orientation detection (reveald by either verbal report or by turning a hand-held card until it matched the orientation presented) was highly variable: although she was above chance for large angular orientation differences between two objects, she fell at chance level for smaller angles. DF was unable to recognize the shape of objects. Interestingly, however, her visual imagery was preserved. For example, although she could hardly draw copies of seen objects, she could draw copies of objects from memory – which she then could hardly later recognize.
 

            By contrast with her impairment in object recognition, DF was normally accurate when object orientation or size had to be processed, not in view of a perceptual judgment, but in the context of a goal-directed hand movement. During reaching and grasping between her index finger and thumb the very same objects that she could not recognize, she performed accurate prehension movements. Similarly, while transporting a hand-held car towards a slit as part of the process of inserting the former into the latter, she could normally orient her hand through the slit at different orientations (Goodale et al., 1991, Carey et al., 1996). When presented with a pair of rectangular blocks of either the same or different dimensions and asked whether they were the same or different, she failed. When she was asked to reach out and pick up a block, the measure of her (maximal) grip aperture between thumb and index finger revealed that her grip was calibrated to the physical size of the objects, like that of normal subjects. When shown a pair of objects selected from twelve objects of different shapes for same/different judgment, she failed. When asked to grasp them using a “precision grip” between thumb and index finger, she succeeded.
 

            Conversely, optic ataxia is a syndrome produced by lesions in the dorsal stream. An optic ataxic patient, AT, examined by Jeannerod et al. (1994) shows the reversed dissociation. While she can recognize and identify the shape of visually presented objects, she has serious visuomotor deficits: her reach is misdirected and her finger grip is improperly adjusted to the size and shape of the target of her movements.
 

            At bottom, DF turns out to be able to visually process size, orientation and shape required for grasping objects, i.e., in the context of a reaching and grasping action, but not in the context of a perceptual judgment. Other experimental results with DF, however, indicate that her visuomotor abilities are restricted in at least two respects. First, in the context of an action, she turns out to be able to visually process simple sizes, shapes and orientations. But she fails to visually process more complex shapes. For example, she can insert a hand-held card into a slot at different orientations. But when asked to insert a T-shaped object (as opposed to a rectangular card) into a T-shaped aperture (as opposed to a simple oriented slit), her performance deteriorated sharply. Inserting a T-shaped object into a T-shaped aperture requires the ability to combine the computations of the orientation of the stem with the orientation of the top of the object together with the computation of the corresponding parts of the aperture. There are good reasons to think that, unlike the quick visuomotor processing of simple shapes, sizes and orientations, the computations of complex contours, sizes and orientations require the contribution of visual perceptual processes performed by the ventral stream – which, we know, has been severely damaged in DF.
 

            Secondly, the contours of an object can and often are computed by a process of extraction from differences in colors and luminance cues. But normal humans can also extract the contours or boundaries of an object from other cues – such as differences in brightness, texture, shades and complex principles of Gestalt grouping and organization of similarity and good form. Now, when asked to insert a hand-held card into a slot defined by Gestalt principles of good form or by textural information, DF failed (see e.g., Goodale, 1995).
 

            Apperceptive agnosic patients like DF raise the question: What is it like to see with an intact dorsal system alone? I presently want to emphasize what I take to be a crucial characteristic of the content of visuomotor representations jointly from the examination of DF’s condition and from the visuomotor representations of normal subjects engaged in tasks of grasping illusory displays such as Titchener circles. As I said above, a visual percept yields a representation of the relative size and distance of various neighboring elements within a visual array. I take it that it is of the essence of a percept that the processing of such visual attributes of an object as its size, shape and position or distance must be available for comparative judgment. By contrast, a visuomotor representation of a target in a task of reaching and grasping provides information about the absolute size of the object to be grasped. Crucially, the spatial position of any object can be coded in at least two major coordinate systems or frames of reference: it may be coded in an egocentric frame of reference centered on the agent’s body or it may be coded in an allocentric frame of reference centered on some object present in the visual array. The former is required for allowing an agent to reach and grasp an object. The latter is required in order to locate an object relative to some other object in the visual display.
 

            Consider e.g., a visual percept of a glass to the left of a telephone. In the visual percept, the location of the glass relative to the location of the telephone is coded in allocentric coordinates. The visual percept has a pictorial content that, I shall argue momentarily, is both informationally richer and more fine-grained than the verbally expressible conceptual content of a different representation of the same fact or state of affairs. For example, unlike the sentence ‘The glass is to the left of the telephone’, the visual percept cannot depict the location of the glass relative to the telephone without depicting ipso facto the orientation, shape, texture, size and color of both the glass and the telephone. Conceptual processing of the pictorial content of the visual percept may yield a representation whose conceptual content can be expressed by the English sentence ‘The glass is to the left of the telephone’. Now the visuomotor representation of the glass as a target of a prehension action requires that information about the size and shape of the glass be contained within a representation of the position of the glass in egocentric coordinates. Unless the telephone interferes with the trajectory of the reaching part of the action of grasping the glass, when one intends to grasp the glass, one does not need to represent the spatial position of the glass relative to the telephone.
 

            We know that patient DF cannot match the orientation of her wrist to the orientation of a slot in the context of a perceptual task, i.e., when she is not involved in the action of inserting a hand-held card into the slot. She can, however, successfully insert a card into an oriented slot. She cannot perceptually represent the size, shape and orientation of an object. However, she can successfully grasp an object between her thumb and index finger. So the main relevant contrast revealed by the examination of DF is that while she can use an effector (e.g., the distance between her thumb and index finger or the rotation of her wrist) in order to grasp an object or to insert a card into a slot, i.e., in the context of an action, she cannot use the same effector to express a perceptual judgment. What is the main difference between the perceptual and the visuomotor tasks? Both tasks require that visual information about the size and shape of objects be provided. But in the visuomotor task, this information is contained in a representation of the spatial position of the target coded in an egocentric frame of reference. In the perceptual task, information about the size and shape of objects is contained in a representation of the spatial position of the object coded in an allocentric frame of reference. Normal subjects can easily switch from one spatial frame of reference to the other. Such fast transformations may be required when e.g., one switches from counting items lying on a table or from drawing a copy of items lying on a table to grasping one of them. However, DF’s visual system cannot make the very same visual information about the size, shape and orientation of an object available for perceptual comparisons. In DF, information about the size and the shape of an object is trapped within a visuomotor representation of its location coded in egocentric coordinates. It is not available for recoding in an allocentric frame of reference. Coding spatial relationships among different constituents of a visual scene is crucial to forming a visual percept. By contrast, locating a target in egocentric coordinates is crucial to forming a visuomotor representation on the basis of which to act on the target.
 
 

II. Visual knowledge of the world
 

            Although , if the above is on the right track, not all human vision has been designed to allow visual perception, nonetheless one crucial function of human vision is visual perception. Like many psychological words, ‘perception’ can be used at once to refer both to a process and to its product. There are two complementary sides to visual perception: there is an objective side and a subjective side. On the objective side, visual perception is a fundamental source of knowledge about the world. Visual perception is indeed a – if not “the” – paradigmatic process by means of which human beings gather knowledge about objects, events and facts in their environment. On the subjective side, visual perception yields a peculiar kind of awareness of the world, namely: sight. Sight has a special kind of phenomenal character (which is lacking in blindsight patients). The phenomenology of human visual experience is  unlike the phenomenology of human experience in sensory modalities other than vision, e.g., touch, olfaction or audition.
 

            On my representationalist view (close to Dretske, 1995 and Tye, 1995), much of the distinctive phenomenology of visual experience derives from the fact that the human visual system has been selected in the course of evolution to respond to a specific set of properties. Visual perception makes us aware of such fundamental properties of objects as their size, orientation, shape, color, texture, spatial position, distance and motion, all at once. One of the puzzles that arises from neuroscientific research into the visual system (and which I will not discuss here) is the question of how these various visual attributes are perceived as bound together, given the fact that neuroscience has discovered that they are processed in different areas of the human visual system (see Zeki, 1993). Unlike vision, audition makes us aware of sounds. Olfaction makes us aware of smells and odors. Touch makes us aware of pressure and temperature. Although shape can be both seen and felt, what it is like to see a shape is clearly different from what it is like to touch it. Part of of the reason for the difference lies in the fact that a normally sighted person cannot see e.g., the shape of a cube without seeing its color. But by feeling the shape of a cube, one does not thereby feel its color.
 

            I will presently argue that visual perception is a fundamental source of knowledge about the world: visual knowledge. I assume that propositional knowledge is knowledge of facts and that one cannot know a fact unless one believes that this fact obtains. I accept something like Dretske’s (1969) distinction between two levels of visual perception: nonepistemic perception (of objects) and epistemic perception (of facts). Importantly, on my view, the nonepistemic perception of objects gives rise to visual percepts and visual percepts are different from what I earlier called visuomotor representations of the targets of one’s action. What Dretske (1969) calls nonepistemic seeing is part of the perceptual processing of visual information. In the previous section, I gave empirical reasons why visual percepts differ from visuomotor representations. Unlike the visuomotor representation of a target, a visual percept makes visual information about colors, shapes, sizes, orientations of constituents of a visual display available for contrastive identification and recognition. This is why visual percepts can serve as input to a conceptual process that can lead to a peculiar kind of knowledge of the world – visual knowledge. Visual percepts serve as inputs to conceptual processes, but percepts are not concepts: perceptual contrasts are not conceptual contrasts. My present task then will be to show that the claim that visual perception can give rise to visual knowledge of the world is consistent with the claim that visual percepts are different from thoughts and beliefs. Visual percepts lead to thoughts and beliefs, but it would be a mistake to confuse the nonconceptual contents of visual percepts with the conceptual contents of beliefs and thoughts.
 
 

II. 1. Percepts and thoughts
 

         As many philosophers of mind and language have argued, what is characteristic of conceptual representations is that they are both productive and systematic. Like sentences of natural languages, thoughts are productive in the sense that they form an open ended infinite set. Although the lexicon of a natural language is made up of finitely many words, thanks to its syntactic rules, a language contains indefinitely many well formed sentences. Similarly, an individual may entertain indefinitely many conceptual thoughts. In particular, both sentences of public languages and conceptual thoughts contain such devices as negation, conjunction and disjunction. So one can form indefinitely many new thoughts by prefixing a thought by a negation operator, by forming a disjunctive or a conjunctive thought out of two simpler thoughts or one can generalize a singular thought by means of quantifiers. Sentences of natural languages are systematic in the sense that if a language contains a sentence S with a syntactic structure e.g., Rab, then it must contain a sentence expressing a syntactically related sentence, e.g., Rba. An individual’s conceptual thoughts are supposed to be systematic too: if a person has the ability to entertain the thought that e.g., John loves Mary, then she must have the ability to entertain the thought that Mary loves John. If a person can form the thought that Fa, then she can form both the thought that Fb and the thought that Ga (where “a” and “b” stand for individuals and “F” and “G” stand for properties). Both Fodor’s (1975, 1987) Language of Thought hypothesis and Evans’ (1982) Generality constraint are designed to account for the productivity and the systematicity of thoughts, i.e., conceptual representations. It is constitutive of thoughts that they are structured and that they involve conceptual constituents that can be combined and recombined to generate indefinitely many new structured thoughts. Thus, concepts are building blocks with inferential roles.
 

            Because they are productive and systematic, conceptual thoughts can rise above the limitations imposed to perceptual representations by the constraints inherent to perception. Unlike thought, visual perception requires some causal interaction between a source of information and some sensory organs. For example, by combining the concepts horse and horn, one may form the complex concept unicorn, even though no unicorn has or ever will be visually perceived (except in visual works of art). Although no unicorn has ever been perceived, within a fictional context, on the basis of the inferential role of its constituents, one can draw the inference that if something is a unicorn, then it has four legs, it eats grass and it is a mammal.
 

            Hence, possessing concepts is to master inferential relations: only a creature with conceptual abilities can draw consequences from her perceptual processing of a visual stimulus. Thought and visual perception are clearly different cognitive processes. One can think about numbers and one can form negative, disjunctive, conjunctive and general thoughts involving multiple quantifiers. Although one can visually perceive numerals, one cannot visually perceive numbers. Nor can one visually perceive negative, disjunctive, conjunctive or general facts (corresponding to e.g., universally quantified thoughts).
 

            As Crane (1992: 152) puts it, “there is no such thing as deductive inference between perceptions”. Upon seeing a brown dog, one can see at once that the animal one faces is a dog and that it is brown. If one perceives a brown animal and one is told that it is a dog, then one can certainly come to believe that the brown animal is a dog or that the dog is brown. But on this hybrid epistemic basis, one can think or believe, but one cannot see that the dog is brown. One came to know that the dog is brown by seeing it. But one did not come to know that what is brown is a dog by seeing it. Unlike the content of concepts, the content of visual percepts is not a matter of inferential role. As emphasized by Crane (ibid.), this is not to say that the content of visual percepts is amorphous or unstructured. One proposal for capturing the nonconceptual structure of visual percepts is Peacocke’s (1992) notion of a scenario content, i.e., a visual way of filling in space. As we shall see momentarily, one can think or believe of an animal that it is dog without thinking or believing that it has a particular color. But one cannot see a dog in good daylight conditions without seeing its particular color (or colors). I shall momentarily discuss this feature of the content of visual percepts, which is part of their distinctive informational richness, as an analog encoding of information.
 

            In section I.3, I considered the contrast between the pictorial content of a visual percept of a glass to the left of a telephone and the conceptual content expressible by means of the English sentence: ‘The glass is to the left of the telephone’. I noticed that, unlike the English sentence, the visual percept cannot represent the glass to the left of the telephone unless it depicts the shape, size, texture, color and orientation of both the glass and the telephone. I concluded that an utterance of this sentence conveys only part of the pictorial content of the visual percept since the utterance is mute about any visual attribute of the pair of objects other than their relative locations. But, further conceptual processing of the conceptual content conveyed by the utterance of the sentence may yield a more complex representation involving, not just a two-place relation, but a three-place relation also expressible by the English predicate ‘left of’. Thus, one may think that the glass is to the left of the telephone for someone standing in front of the window, not for someone sitting at the opposite side of the table. In other words, one can think that the glass is to the left of the telephone from one’s own egocentric perspective and that the same glass is to the right of the telephone from a different perspective. Although one can form the thought involving the ternary relation ‘left of’, one cannot see the glass as being to the left of the telephone from one’s own egocentric perspective because one cannot see one’s own egocentric perspective. Perspectives are not things that one can see. This is an example of a conceptual contrast that could not be drawn by visual perception. Thus, unlike a thought, a visual percept is, in one sense of the word, “informationally encapsulated”. Thought, not perception, can, as Perry (1993) puts it, increase the arity of a predicate. Notice that percepts can cause thoughts. This is one way thoughts arise. Thoughts can also cause other thoughts. But presumably, thoughts do not cause percepts.
 
 

II. 2. The finegrainedness and informational richness of visual percepts
 

            Unlike thought, visual perception has a spatial, perspectival, iconic and/or pictorial structure not shared by conceptual thought. The content of visual perception has a spatial perspectival structure that pure thoughts lack. In order to apply the concept of a dog, one does not have to occupy a particular spatial perspective relative to any dog. But one cannot see a dog unless one occupies some spatial standpoint or other relative to it: one cannot e.g., see a dog simultaneously from the top and from below, from the front and from the back. The concept of a dog applies indiscriminately to poodles, alsatians, dalmatians or bulldogs. One can think that all dogs bark. But one cannot see all dogs bark. Nor can on see a generic dog bark. One must see some particular dog: a poodle, an alsatian, a dalmatian or a bulldog, as it might be. Although one and the same concept – the concept of a dog – may apply to a poodle, an alsatian, a dalmatian or a bulldog, seeing one of them is a very different visual experience than seeing another. One can think that a dog barks without thinking of any other properties of the dog. One cannot, however, see a dog unless one sees its shape and the colors and texture of its hairs.
 

            Thus, the content of visual perceptual representations turns out to be both more finegrained and informationally richer than the conceptual contents of thoughts. There are three paradigmatic cases in which the need to distinguish between conceptual content and the nonconceptual content of visual perceptions may arise. First, a creature may be perceptually sensitive to objective differences for which she has no concepts. Secondly, two creatures may enjoy one and the same visual experience, which they may be inclined to conceptualize differently. Finally, two different persons may enjoy two distinct visual experiences in the presence of one and the same distal stimulus to which they may be inclined to apply one and the same concept.
 

            Peacocke (1992: 67-8) considers, for example, a person’s visual experience of a range of mountains. As he notices, one might want to conceptualize one’s visual experience with the help of concepts of shapes expressible in English with such predicates as ’round’ and ‘jagged’. But these concepts of shapes could apply to the nonconceptual contents of several different visual experiences prompted by the distinct shapes of several distinct mountains. Arguably, although a human being might not possess any concept of shape whose finegrainedness could match that of her visual experience of the shape of the mountain, her visual experience of the shape is nonetheless distinctive and it may differ from the visual experience of the distinct shape of a different mountain to which she would apply the very same concept. Similarly, human beings are perceptually sensitive to far more colors than they have color concepts and color names to apply. Although a human being might lack two distinct concepts for two distinct shades of color, she might well enjoy a visual experience of one shade that is distinct from her visual experience of the other shade. As Raffman (1995: 295) puts it, “discriminations along perceptual dimensions surpasses identification [...] our ability ro judge whether two or more stimuli are the same or different surpasses our ability to type-identify them”.
 

            Against this kind of argument in favor of the nonconceptual content of visual experiences, McDowell (1994, 1998) has argued that demonstrative concepts expressible by e.g., ‘that shade of color’ are perfectly suited to capture the finegrainedness of the visual percept of color. I am willing to concede to McDowell that such demonstrative concepts do exist. But I agree with Bermudez (1998: 55-7) and Dokic & Pacherie (2000) that such demonstrative concepts would seem to be too weak to perform one of the fundamental jobs that color concepts and shape concepts must be able to perform – namely recognition. Color concepts and shape concepts stored in a creature’s memory must allow recognition and reidentification of colors and shapes over long periods of time. Although pure demonstrative color concepts may allow comparison of simultaneously presented samples of color, it is unlikely that they can be used to reliably reidentify one and the same sample over time. Nor presumably could pairs of demonstrative color concepts be used to reliably discriminate pairs of color samples over time. Just as one can track the spatio-temporal evolution of a perceived object, one can store in a temporary object file information about its visual properties in a purely indexical or demonstrative format. If, however, information about an object’s visual properties is to be stored in episodic memory, for future reidentification, then it cannot be stored in a purely demonstrative or indexical format, which is linked to a particular perceptual context. Presumably, the demonstrative must be fleshed with some descriptive content. One can refer to a perceptible object as ‘that sofa’ or even as ‘that’ (followed.by no sortal). But presumably when one does not stand in a perceptual relation to the object, information about it cannot be stored in episodic memory in such a pure demonstrative format. Rather, it must be stored using a more descriptive symbol such as ‘the (or that) red sofa that used to face the fire-place’. This is presumably part of what Raffman (1995: 297) calls “the memory constrainst”. As Raffman (1995: 296) puts it:
 
 

the coarse grained character of perceptual memory explains why we can recognize ‘determinable’ colors like red and blue and even scarlet and indigo as such, but not ‘determinate’ shades of those determinables [...] Because we cannot recognize determinate shades as such, ostension is our only means of communicating our knowledge of them. If I want to convey to you the precise shade of an object I see, I must point to it, or perhaps paint you a picture of it [...] I must present you with an instance of that shade. You must have the experience yourself .
 
 

            Two persons might enjoy one and the same kind of visual experience prompted by one and the same shape or one and the same color, to which they would be inclined to apply pairs of distinct concepts, such as ‘red’ vs ‘crimson’ or ‘polygon’ vs ’square’. If so, it would be justified to distinguish the nonconceptual content of their common visual experience from the different concepts that each would be willing to apply. Conversely, as argued by Peacocke (1998), presented with one and the same geometrical object, two persons might be inclined to apply one and the same generic shape concept e.g., ‘that polygon’ and still enjoy different perceptual experiences or see the same object as having different shapes. For example, as Peacocke (1998: 381) points out, “one and the same shape may be perceived as square, or as diamond-shaped [...] the difference between these ways is a matter of which symmetries of the shape are perceived; though of course the subject himself does not need to know that this is the nature of the difference”. If one mentally partitions a square by bisecting its right angles, one sees it as a diamond. If one mentally partitions it by bisecting its sides, one sees it as a square. Presumably, one does not need to master the concept of an axis of symmetry to perform mentally these two bisections and enjoy two distinct visual experiences.
 

            The distinctive informational richness of the content of visual percepts has been discussed by Dretske (1981) in terms of what he calls the analogical coding of information.[1]  One and the same piece of information – one and the same fact – may be coded analogically or digitally. In Dretske’s sense, a signal carries the information that e.g., a is F in a digital form iff the signal carries no additional information about a that is not already nested in the fact that a is F. If the signal does carry additional information about a that is not nested in the fact that a is F, then the information that a is F is carried by the signal in an analogical (or analog) form. For example, the information that a designated cup contains coffee may be carried in a digital form by the utterance of the English sentence ‘There is some coffee in the cup’. The same information can also be carried in an analog form by a picture or by a photograph. Unlike the utterance of the sentence, the picture cannot carry the information that the cup contains coffee without carrying additional information about the shape, size, orientation of the cup and the color and the amount of coffee in it. As I pointed out above, unlike the concept of a dog, the visual percept of a dog carries information about which dog one sees, its spatial position, the color and texture of its hairs, etc. The contents of visual percepts are informationally rich in the sense of being analog. A thought involving several concepts in a hierarchically structured order might carry the same informational richness as a visual percept. But it does not have to. As the slogan goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Unlike a thought, a visual percept of a cup cannot convey the information that the cup contains coffee without conveying additional information about several visual attributes of the cup.
 

            The arguments by philosophers of mind and by perceptual psychologists in favor of the distinction between the conceptual content of thought and the nonconceptual content of visual percepts is based on the finegrainedness and the informational richness of visual percepts. Thus, it turns on the phenomenology of visual experience. In section I, I provided some evidence from psychophysical experiments performed on normal human subjects and from the neuropsychological examination of brain lesioned human patients that point to a different kind of nonconceptual content, which I labelled “visuomotor” content. Unlike the arguments in favor of the nonconceptual content of visual percepts, the arguments for the distinction between the nonconceptual content of visual percepts and the nonconceptual content of visuomotor representations do not rely on phenomenology at all. Rather, they rely on the need to postulate mental representations with visuomotor content in order to provide a causal explanation of visually guided actions towards objects. Thus, on the assumption that such behaviors as grasping objects can be actions (based on mental representations), I submit that the nonconceptual content of visual representation ought to be bifurcated into perceptual and visuomotor content as in Figure 7:
 
 

conceptual content                                                           nonconceptual content
 
 
 

                                                            perceptual content                            visuomotor content
 
 

Figure 7
 
 

II. 3. The interaction between visual and non-visual knowledge
 

            Traditional epistemology has focused on the problem of sorting out genuine instances of propositional knowledge from cases of mere opinion or guessing. Propositional factual knowledge is to be distinguished from both nonpropositional knowledge of individual objects (or what Russell called “knowledge by acquaintance”) and from tacit knowledge of the kind illustrated by a native speaker’s implicit knowledge of the grammatical rules of her language. According to epistemologists, in the relevant propositional sense, what one knows are facts. In the propositional sense, one cannot know a fact unless one believes that the corresponding proposition is true, one’s belief is indeed true, and the belief was not formed by mere fantasy. On the one hand, one cannot know that the cup contains coffee unless one believes it. One cannot have this belief unless one knows what a cup is and what coffee is. On the other hand, one cannot know what is not the case: one can falsely believe that e.g., the cup contains coffee. But one cannot know it, unless a designated cup does indeed contain some coffee. True belief, however, is not sufficient for knowledge. If a true belief happens to be a mere guess or whim, then it will not qualify as knowledge. What else must be added to true belief to turn it into knowledge?
 

            Broadly speaking, epistemologists divide into two groups. According to externalists, a true belief counts as knowledge if it results from a reliable process, i.e., a process that generates counterfactually supporting connexions between states of a believer and facts in her environment. According to internalists, for a true belief to count as knowledge, it must be justified and the believer must in addition justifiably believe that her first-order belief is justified.  Since I am willing to claim that, in appropriate conditions, the way a red triangle visually looks to a person having the relevant concepts and located at a suitable distance from it provides grounds for the person to know that the object in front of her is a red triangle, I am attracted to an externalist reliabilist view of perceptual knowledge.
 

            Although the issue is controversial and is by no means settled in the philosophical literature, externalist intuitions suit my purposes better than internalist intuitions. Arguably, one thing is to be justified or to have a reason for believing something. Another thing is to use a reason in order to offer a justification for one’s beliefs. Arguably, if a perceptual (e.g., visual) process is reliable, then the visual appearances of things may constitute a reason for forming a belief. However, one cannot use a reason unless one can explicitly engage in a reasoning process of justification, i..e., unless one can distinguish one’s premisses from one’s conclusion. Presumably, a creature with perceptual abilities and relevant conceptual resources can have reasons and form justified beliefs even if she lacks the concept of reason or justification. However, she could not use her reasons and provide justifications unless she had language and metarepresentational resources. Internalism derives most of its appeal from reflection on instances of mathematical and scientific knowledge that result from the conscious application of explicit principles of inquiry by teams of individuals in the context of special institutions. In such special settings, it can be safely assumed that the justification of a believer’s higher-order beliefs do indeed contribute to the formation and reliability of his or her first-order beliefs. Externalism fits perceptual knowledge better than internalism and, unlike internalism, it does not rule out the possibility of crediting non-human animals and human infants with knowledge of the world – a possibility made more and more vivid by the development of cognitive science.
 

            On my view, human visual perceptual abilities are at the service of thought and conceptualisation. At the most elementary level, by seeing an object (or a sequence of objects) one can see a fact involving that object (or sequence of objects). By seeing my neighbor’s car in her driveway, I can see the fact that my neighbor’s car is parked in her driveway. I thereby come to believe that my neighbor’s car is parked in her driveway and this belief, which is a conceptually loaded mental state, is arrived at by visual perception. Hence, my term “visual knowledge”. If one’s visual system is – as I claimed it is – reliable, then by seeing my neighbor’s car – an object – in her driveway, I thereby come to know that my neighbor’s car is parked in her driveway – a fact. Hence, I come to know a fact involving an object that I actually see. This is a fundamental epistemic situation, which Dretske (1969) labels “primary epistemic seeing”: one’s visual ability allows one to know a fact about an object one perceives.
 

            However, if my neighbor’s car happens to be parked in her driveway if and only if she is at home (and I know this), then I can come to know a different fact: I can come to know that my neighbor is at home. “Seeing” that my neighbor is at home by seeing that her car is parked in her driveway is something different from seeing my neighbor at home (e.g., seeing her in her living-room). Certainly, I can come to know that my neighbor is at home by seeing her car parked in her driveway, i.e., without seeing her. “Seeing” that my neighbor is at home by seeing that her car is parked in her driveway is precisely what Dretske (1969) calls “secondary epistemic seeing”. Secondary epistemic seeing lies at the interface between pure visual knowledge of facts involving a perceived object and non-visual knowledge that can be derived from it.
 

            This transition from seeing one fact to seeing another displays the hierarchical structure of visual knowledge. In primary epistemic seeing, one sees a fact involving a perceived object. But in moving from primary epistemic seeing to secondary epistemic seeing, one moves from a fact involving a perceived car to a fact involving one’s unperceived neighbor (who happens to own the perceived car). This epistemological hierarchical structure is expressed by the “by” relation: one sees that y is G by seeing that x is F where x ? y. Although it may be more or less natural to say that one “sees” a fact involving an unperceived object by seeing a different fact involving a perceived object, the hierarchical structure that gives rise to this possibility is ubiquitous in human knowledge.
 

            One can see that a horse has walked on the snow by seeing hoof prints in the snow. One sees the hoof prints, not the horse. But if hoof prints would not be visible in the snow at time t unless a horse had walked on that very snow at time t – 1, then one can see that a horse has walked on the snow just by seeing hoof prints in the snow. One can see that a tennis player has just hit an ace at Flushing Meadows by seeing images on a television screen located in Paris. Now, does one really see the tennis player hit an ace at Flushing Meadows while sitting in Paris and watching television? Does one see a person on a television screen? Or does one see an electronic image of a person relayed by a television? Whether one sees a tennis player or her image on a television screen, it is quite natural to say that one “sees that” a tennis player hit an ace by seeing her (or her image) do it on a television screen. Even though, strictly speaking, one perhaps did not see her do it – one merely saw pictures of her doing it -, nonetheless seeing the pictures comes quite close to seeing the real thing. By contrast, one can “see” that the gas-tank in one’s car is half-full by seeing, not the tank itself, but the dial of the gas-gauge on the dashboard of the car. If one is sitting by the steering wheel inside one’s car so that one can comfortably see the gas-gauge, then one cannot see the gas-tank. Nonetheless, if the gauge is reliable and properly connected to the gas-tank, then one can (perhaps in some loose sense) “see” what the condition of the gas-tank is by seeing the dial of the gauge.
 

            One could wonder whether secondary epistemic seeing is really seeing at all. Suppose that one learns that the New York Twin Towers collapsed by reading about it in a French newspaper in Paris. One could not see the New York Twin Towers – let alone their collapse – from Paris. What one sees when one reads a newspaper are letters printed in black ink on a white sheet of paper. But if the French newspaper would not report the collapse of the New York Twin Towers unless the New York Twin Towers had indeed collapsed, then one can come to know that the New York Twin Towers have collapsed by reading about it in a French newspaper. There is a significant difference between seeing that the New York Twin Towers have collapsed by seeing it happen on a television screen and by reading about it in a newspaper. Even if seeing an electronic picture of the New York Twin Towers is not seeing the Twin Towers themselves, still the visual experience of seeing an electronic picture of them and the visual experience of seeing them have a lot in common. The pictorial content of the experience of seeing an electronically produced color-picture of the Towers is very similar to the pictorial content of the experience of seeing them. Unlike a picture, however, a verbal description of an event has conceptual content, not pictorial content. The visual experience of reading an article reporting the collapse of the New York Twin Towers in a French newspaper is very different from the experience of seeing them collapse. This is the reason why it may be a little awkward to say that one “saw” that the New York Twin Towers collapsed if one read about it in a French newspaper in Paris as opposed to seeing it happen on a television screen.
 

            Certainly, ordinary usage of the English word ’see’ is not sacrosanct. We say that we “see” a number of things in circumstances in which what we do owes little – if anything – to our visual abilities. “I see what you mean”, “I see what the problem is” or “I finally saw the solution” report achievements quite independent of visual perception. Such uses of the verb ‘to see’ are loose uses. Such loose uses do not report epistemic accomplishments that depend significantly on one’s visual endowments. By contrast, cases of what Dretske (1969) calls secondary epistemic seeing are epistemic achievements that do depend on one’s visual endowments. True, in cases of secondary epistemic seeing, one comes to know a fact without seeing some of its constituent elements. True, one could not come to learn that one’s neighbor is at home by seeing her car parked in her driveway unless one knew that her car is indeed parked in her driveway when and only when she is at home. Nor could one see that the gas-tank in one’s car is half-full by seeing the dial of the gas-gauge unless one knew that the latter is reliably correlated with the former. So secondary epistemic seeing could not possibly arise in a creature that lacked knowedge of reliable correlations or that lacked the cognitive resources required to come to know them altogether.
 

            Nonetheless secondary epistemic seeing has indeed a crucial visual component in the sense that visual perception plays a critical role in the context of justifying such an epistemic claim. When one claims to be able to see that one’s neighbor is at home by seeing her car parked in her driveway or when one claims to be able to see that the gas-tank in one’s car is almost empty by seeing the gas-gauge, one relies on one’s visual powers in order to ground one’s state of knowledge. The fact that one claims to know is not seen. But the grounds upon which the knowledge is claimed to rest are visual grounds: the justification for knowing an unseen fact is seeing another fact correlated with the former. Of course, in explaining how one can come to know a fact about one thing by knowing a different fact about a different thing, one cannot hope to meet the philosophical challenge of scepticism. From the standpoint of scepticism, as Stroud (1989) points out, the explanation may seem to beg the question since it takes for granted one’s knowledge of one fact in order to explain one’s knowledge of another fact. But the important thing for present purposes is that – scepticism notwithstanding – one offers a perfectly good explanation of how one comes to know a fact about an object one does not perceive by knowing a different fact about an object one does perceive. The point is that much – if not all – of the burden of the explanation lies in visual perception: seeing one’s neighbor’s car is the crucial step in justifying one’s belief that one’s neighbor is at home. Seeing the gas-gauge is the crucial step in justifying one’s belief that one’s tank is almost empty. The reliability of visual perception is thus critically involved in the justification of one’s knowledge claim. In cases of primary epistemic seeing, the reliability of one’s visual system provides justifications for one’s visual knowledge in the sense that it provides one with reasons for believing that the fact involving an object one perceives obtains. In secondary epistemic seeing, one claims to know a fact that does not involve a perceived object. Still, the reliability of one’s visual system plays an indirect role in cases of secondary epistemic seeing in the sense that it provides grounds for one’s visual knowledge about a fact involving a perceived object, upon which one’s knowledge of a fact not involving a perceived object rests.
 

            Thus, secondary epistemic seeing lies at the interface between an individual’s visual knowledge (i.e., knowledge formed by visual means) and the rest of her knowledge. In moving from primary epistemic seeing to secondary epistemic seeing, an individual exploits her knowledge of regular connections. Although it is true that unless one knows the relevant correlation, one could not come to know the fact that the gas-tank in one’s car is empty by seeing the gas-gauge, nonetheless one does not consciously or explicitly reason from the perceptually accessible premiss that one’s neighbor’s car is parked in her driveway together with the premiss that one’s neighbor’s car is parked in her driveway when and only when one’s neighbor is at home to the conclusion that one’s neighbor is at home. Arguably, the process from primary to secondary epistemic seeing is inferential. But if it is, then the inference is unconscious and it takes place at the “sub-personal” level.
 

            What the above discussion of secondary epistemic seeing so far reveals is that the very description and understanding of the hierarchical structure of visual knowledge and its integration with non-visual knowledge requires an epistemological and/or psychological distinction between seeing of objects and seeing facts – a point much emphasized in Dretske’s writings on the subject – or between nonepistemic and epistemic seeing. The neurophysiology of human vision is such that some objects are simply not accessible to human vision. They may be too small or too remote in space and time for a normally sighted person to see them. For more mundane reasons, a human being may be temporarily so positioned as not to be able to see one object – be it her neighbor or the gas-tank in her car. Given the correlations between facts, by seeing a perceptible object, one can get crucial information about a different unseen object. Given the epistemic importance of visual perception in the hirarchical structure of human knowledge, it is important to understand how by seeing one object, one can provide decisive reasons for knowing facts about objects one does not see.
 

          
 

II. 4. The scope and limits of visual knowledge
 

            I now turn my attention again from what Dretske calls secondary epistemic seeing (i.e., visually based knowledge of facts about objects one does not perceive) back to what he calls primary epistemic seeing, i.e., visual knowledge of facts about objects one does perceive. When one purports to ground one’s claim to know that one’s neighbor is at home by mentioning the fact that one can see that her car is parked in her driveway, clearly one is claiming to be able to see a car, not one’s neighbor herself. Now, let us concentrate on the scope of knowledge claims in primary epistemic seeing, i.e., knowledge about facts involving a perceived object. Let us suppose that someone claims to be able to see that the apple on the table is green. Let us suppose that the person’s visual system is working properly, the table and what is lying on it are visible from where the person stands, and the lighting is suitable for the person to see them from where she stands. In other words, there is a distinctive way the green apple on the table looks to the person who sees it. Under those circumstances, when the person claims that she can see that the apple on the table is green, what are the scope and limits of her epistemic claims?
 

            Presumably, in so doing, she is claiming that she knows that there is an apple on the table in front of her and that she knows that this apple is green. If she knows both of this, then presumably  she also knows that there is a table under the apple in front of her, she knows that there is a fruit on the table. Hence, she knows what the fruit on the table is (or what is on the table), she knows where the apple is, she knows the color of the apple, and so on. Arguably, the person would then be in a position to make all such claims in response to the following various queries: is there anything on the table? What is on the table? What kind of fruit is on the table? Where is the green apple? What color is the apple on the table? If the person can see that the apple on the table is green, then presumably she is in a position to know all these facts.
 

            However, when she claims that she can see that the apple on the table is green, she is not thereby claiming that she can see that all of these facts obtain. What she is claiming is more restricted and specific than that: She is indeed claiming that she knows that there is an apple on the table and that the apple in question is green. Furthermore, she is claiming that she learnt the latter fact – the fact about the apple’s color – through visual perception: if someone claims that she can see that the apple on the table is green, then she is claiming that she has achieved her knowledge of the apple’s color by visual means, and not otherwise. But she is not thereby claiming that her knowledge of the location of the apple or her knowledge of what is on the table have been acquired by the very perceptual act (or the very perceptual process) that gave rise to her knowledge of the apple’s color. Of course, the person’s alleged epistemic achievement does not rule out the possibility that she came to know that what is on the table is an apple by seeing it earlier. But if she did, this is not part of the claim that she can see that the apple on the table is green. It is consistent with this claim that the person came to know that what is on the table is an apple by being told, by tasting it or by smelling it. All she is claiming and all we are entitled to conclude from her claim is that the way she learnt about the apple’s color is by visual perception.
 

            The investigation into the scope and limits of primary visual knowledge is important because it is relevant to the challenge of scepticism. As I already said, my discussion of visual knowledge does not purport to meet the full challenge of scepticism. In discussing secondary epistemic seeing, I noticed that in explaining how one comes to know a fact about an unperceived object by seeing a different fact involving a perceived object, one takes for granted the possibility of knowing the latter fact by perceiving one of its constituent objects. Presumably, in so doing, one cannot hope to meet the full challenge of scepticism that would question the very possibility of coming to know anything by perception. I briefly turn to the sceptical challenge to which claims of primary epistemic seeing are exposed. By scrutinizing the scope and limits of claims of primary visual knowledge, I want to examine briefly the extent to which such claims are indeed vulnerable to the sceptical challenge. Claims of primary visual knowledge are vulnerable to sceptical queries that can be directed backwards and forwards. They are directed backwards when they apply to background knowledge, i.e., knowledge presupposed by a claim of primary visual knowledge. They are directed forward when they apply to consequences of a claim of primary visual knowledge. I turn to the former first.
 

            Suppose a sceptic were to challenge a person’s commonsensical claim that she can see (and hence know by perception) that the apple on the table in front of her is green by questioning her grounds for knowing that what is on the table is an apple. The sceptic might point out that, given the limits of human visual acuity and given the distance of the apple, the person could not distinguish by visual means alone a genuine green apple – a green fruit – from a fake green apple (e.g., a wax copy of a green apple or a green toy). Perhaps, the person is hallucinating an apple when there is in fact nothing at all on the table. If one cannot visually discriminate a genuine apple from a fake apple, then, it seems, one is not entitled to claim that one can see that the apple on the table is green. Nor is one entitled to claim that one can see that the apple on the table is green if one cannot make sure by visual perception that one is not undergoing a hallucination. Thus, the sceptical challenge is the following: if visual perception itself cannot rule out a number of alternative possibilities to one’s epistemic claim, then the epistemic claim cannot be sustained.
 

            The proper response to the sceptical challenge here is precisely to appeal to the distinction between claims of visual knowledge and other knowledge claims. When the person claims that she can see that the apple on the table is green, she is claiming that she learnt something new by visual perception: she is claiming that she just gained new knowledge by visual means. This new perceptually-based knowledge is about the apple’s color. The perceiver’s new knowledge – her epistemic “increment”, as Dretske (1969) calls it – must be pitched against what he calls her “proto-knowledge”, i.e., what the person knew about the perceived object prior to her perceptual experience. The reason it is important to distinguish between a person’s prior knowledge and her knowledge gained by visual perception is that primary epistemic seeing (or primary visual knowledge) is a dynamic process. In order to determine the scope and limits of what has been achieved in a perceptual process, we ought to determine a person’s initial epistemic stage (the person’s prior knowledge about an object) and her final epistemic stage (what the person learnt by perception about the object). Thus, the question raised by the sceptical challenge (directed backwards) is a question in cognitive dynamics: How much new knowledge could a person’s visual resources yield, given her prior knowledge? How much has been learnt by visual perception, i.e., in an act of visual perception? What new information has been gained by visual perception?
 

            So when the person claims that she can see that the apple on the table is green, she no doubt reports that she knows both that there is an apple on the table and that it is green. She commits herself to a number of epistemic claims: she knows what is on the table, she knows that there is a fruit on the table, she knows where the apple is, and so on. But she merely reports one increment of knowledge: she merely claims that she just learnt by visual perception that the apple is green. She is not thereby reporting how she acquired the rest of her knowledge about the object, e.g., that it is an apple and that it is on the table. She claims that she can see of the apple that it is green, not that what is green is an apple, nor that what is on the table is an apple. The claim of primary visual knowledge bears on the object’s color, not on some of its other properties (it’s being e.g., an apple, a fruit or its location). All her epistemic claim entails is that, prior to her perceptual experience, she assumed (as part of her “proto-knowledge” in Dretske’s sense) that there was a apple on the table and then she discovered by visual perception that the apple was green.
 

            I now turn my attention to the sceptical challenge directed forward – towards the consequences of one’s claims of visual knowledge. The sceptic is right to point out that the person who claims to be able to see the color of an apple is not thereby in a position to see that the object whose color she is seeing is a genuine apple – a fruit – and not a wax apple. Nor is the person able to see that she is not hallucinating. However, since she is neither claiming that she is able to see of the green object that it is a genuine apple nor that she is not hallucinating an apple, it follows that the sceptical challenge cannot hope to defeat the person’s perceptual claim that she can see what she claims that she can see, namely that the apple is green. On the externalist picture of perceptual knowledge which I accept, a person knows a fact when and only when she is appropriately connected to the fact. Visual perception provides a paradigmatic case of such a connexion. Hence, visual knowledge arises from regular correlations between states of the visual system and environmental facts. Given the intricate relationship between a person’s visual knowledge and her higher cognitive functions, she will be able to draw many inferences from her visual knowledge. If a person knows that the apple in front of her is green, then she may infer that there is a colored fruit on the table in front of her. Given that fruits are plants and that plants are physical objects, she may further infer that there are at least some physical objects. Again, the sceptic may direct his challenge forward: the person claims to know by visual means that the apple in front of her is green. But what she claims she knows entails that there are physical objects. Now, the sceptic argues, a person cannot know that there are physical objects – at least, she cannot see that there are. According to the sceptic, failure to see that there are physical objects entails failure to see that the apple on the table is green.
 

            A person claims that she can know proposition p by visual perception. Logically, proposition p entails proposition q. There could not be a green apple on the table unless there exists at least one physical object. Hence, the proposition that the apple on the table is green could not be true unless there were physical objects. According to the sceptic, a person could not know the former without knowing the latter. Now the sceptic offers grounds for questioning the claim that the person knows proposition q at all – let alone by visual perception. Since it is dubious that she does know the latter, then, according to scepticism, she fails to know the former. Along with Dretske (1969) and Nozick (1981), I think that the sceptic relies on the questionable assumption that visual knowledge is deductively closed. From the fact that a person has perceptual grounds for knowing that p, it does not follow that she has the same grounds for knowing that q, even if q logically follows from p. If visual perception allows one to get connected in the right way to the fact corresponding to proposition p, it does not follow that visual perception ipso facto allows one to get connected in the same way to the fact corresponding to proposition q even if q follows logically from p.
 

            A person comes to know a fact by visual perception. What she learns by visual perception implies a number of propositions (such as there are physical objects). Although such propositions are logically implied by what the person learnt by visual perception, she does not come to know by visual perception all the consequences of what she learnt by visual perception. She does not know by visual perception that there are physical objects – if she knows it at all. Seeing a green apple in front of one has a distinctive visual phenomenology. Seeing that the apple in front of one is green too has a distinctive visual phenomenology. There is something distinctively visual about what it is like for one to see that the apple in front of one is green. If an apple is green, then it is colored. However, it is dubious whether there is a visual phenomenology to thinking of the apple in front of one that it is colored. A fortiori, it is dubious whether there is a visual phenomenology to thinking that there are physical objects. Hence, contrary to what the sceptic assumes, I want to claim, as Dretske (1969) and Nozick (1981) have, that visual knowledge is not deductively closed.
 
 

III. The role of visuomotor representations in the human cognitive architecture
 

            In the present section, I shall sketch my reasons for thinking that visuomotor representations do not lead to detached knowledge of the world. Rather, they serve as input to intentions in at least two respects: on the one hand, they provide visual guidance to what I shall call “motor intentions”. On the other hand, they provide visual information for “causally indexical” concepts. I will start by laying out the basic distinction between two different kinds of “direction of fit” that can be exemplified by mental representations.
 
 

III.1. Direction of fit
 

            Whereas visual percepts serve as inputs to the “belief box”, visuomotor representations, I now want to argue, serve is inputs to a different kind of mental representations, i.e., intentions. As emphasized by Anscombe (1957) and Searle (1983, 2001), perceptions, beliefs, desires and intentions each have a distinctive kind of intentionality. Beliefs and desires have what Searle calls “opposite direction of fit”. Beliefs have a mind-to-world direction of fit: they can be true or false. A belief is true if and only if the world is as the belief represents it to be. It is the function of beliefs to match facts or actual state of affairs. In forming a belief, it is up for the mind to meet the demands of the world. Unlike beliefs, desires have a world-to-mind direction of fit. Desires are neither true nor false: they are fulfilled or frustrated. The job of a desire is not to represent the world as it is, but rather as the agent would like it to be. Desires are representations of goals, i.e., possible nonactual states of affairs. In entertaining a desire, it is so to speak up for the world to meet the demands of the mind. The agent’s action is supposed to bridge the gap between the mind’s goal and the world.
 

            As Searle (1983, 2001) has noticed, perceptual experiences and intentions have opposite directions of fit. Perceptual experiences have the same mind-to-world direction of fit as beliefs. Intentions have the same world-to-mind direction of fit as desires. In addition, perceptual experiences and intentions have opposite directions of causation: whereas a perceptual experience represents the state of affairs that causes it, an intention causes the state of affairs that it represents.
 

            Although intentions and desires share the same world-to-mind direction of fit, intentions are different from desires in a number of important respects, which all flow from the peculiar commitment to action of intentions. Broadly speaking, desires are relevant to the process of deliberation that precedes one’s engagement into a course of action. Once an intention is formed, however, the process of deliberation comes to an end. To intend is to have made up one’s mind about whether to act. Once an intention is formed, one has taken the decision whether to act. I shall mention four main differences between desires and intentions.
 

             First, although desires may be about anything or anybody, intentions are always about the self. One can only intend oneself to do something. Second, unlike desires, intentions are tied to the present or the future: one cannot intend to do something in the past. Third, unlike the contents of desires, the contents of intentions must be about possible nonactual states of affairs. An agent cannot intend to achieve a state of affairs that she knows to be impossible at the time when she forms her intention. Finally, although one may entertain desires whose contents are inconsistent, one cannot have two intentions whose contents are inconsistent.
 

         Reaching and grasping objects are visually guided actions directed towards objects. I assume that all actions are caused by intentions. Intentions are psychological states with a distinctive intentionality. As I said earlier, intentions derive their peculiar commitment to action from the combination of their distinctive world-to-mind direction of fit and their distinctive mind-to-world direction of causation. I shall now argue that visuomotor representations have a dual function in the human cognitive architecture: they serve as inputs to “motor intentions” and they serve as input to a special class of indexical concepts, the “causally indexical” concepts.
 
 

III.2. Visuomotor representations serve as inputs to motor intentions
 

            Not all actions, I assume, are caused by what Searle (1983, 2001) calls prior intentions, but all actions are caused by what he calls intentions in action, which, following Jeannerod (1994), I will call motor intentions. Unlike prior intentions, motor intentions are directed towards immediately accessible goals. Hence, they play a crucial role, not so much in the planning of action as in the execution, the monitoring and the control of the ongoing action. Arguably, prior intentions may have conceptual content. Motor intentions do not. For example, one intends to climb a visually perceptible mountain. The content of this prior intention involves e.g., the action concept of climbing and a visual percept of the distance, shape and color of the mountain. In order to climb the mountain, however, one must intentionally perform an enormous variety of postural and limb movements in response to the slant, orientation and the shape of the surface of the slope. Human beings automatically assume the right postures and perform the required flexions and extensions of their feet and legs. Since they do not possess concepts matching each and every such movements, their non-deliberate intentional behavioral responses to the slant, orientation and shape of the surface of slope is monitored by the nonconceptual nonperceptual content of motor intentions.
 

            Not any sensory representation can match the peculiar commitment to action of motor intentions. Visuomotor representations can. Percepts are informationally richer and more fine-grained than either concepts or visuomotor representations. As I claimed above, visual percepts have the same mind-to-world direction of fit as beliefs. This is why visual percepts are suitable inputs to a process of selective elimination of information, whose ultimate conceptual output can be stored in the belief box.
 

            I shall presently argue that visuomotor representations have a different function: they provide the relevant visual information about the properties of a target to an agent’s motor intentions. Indeed, I want to think of the role of the visuomotor representation of a target for action as Gibson (1979) thought of an affordance. However, unlike Gibson (1979), who did not make a distinction between perceptual and visuomotor processing, I do not think of the visuomotor processing of a target as a “direct pick up of information”. I think that visuomotor representations are genuine representations. My main reason for thinking of the output of the visuomotor processing of a target as a genuine mental representation – and for thinking of grasping as a genuine action, not a behavioral reflex – is that Haddenden, Schiff & Goodale’s (2001) experiment suggests that the visuomotor processing of a target can be fooled by features of the visual display: it can be led to process two dimensional cues as if they were three dimensional obstacles. If the output of the visuomotor processing of a display can misrepresent it, then it represents it.
 

            Unlike visual percepts whose single role is to present visual information for further processing the output of which will be stored in the belief box, visuomotor representations are hybrid: as Millikan (1996), who calls them “pushmi-pullyu representations” has perceptively recognized, they have a dual role. I slightly depart from Millikan (1996), however, in that, unlike her, I assume that visuomotor representations, not motor intentions, have a double direction of fit. Visuomotor representations present states of affairs as both facts and goals for immediate action. On the one hand, they provide visual information for the benefit of motor intentions. On the other hand, their content can be conceptualized with the help of a special class of indexical concepts: causal indexicals. Whereas visual percepts must be stripped of much of their informational richness to be conceptualized, visuomotor representations can directly provide relevant visual information about the target of an action to motor intentions. To put it crudely, it follows from the work summarized in Jeannerod (1994, 1997) that the content of a motor intention has two sides: a subjective side and an objective side. On the subjective side, a motor intention represents the agent’s body in action. On the objective side, it represents the target of the action. Visuomotor representations contribute to the latter. Their ‘motoric’ informational encapsulation makes them suitable for this role. The nonconceptual nonperceptual content of a visuomotor representation matches that of a motor intention.
 

            Borrowing from the study of language processing, Jeannerod (1994, 1997) has drawn a distinction between the semantic and the pragmatic processing of visual stimuli. The view I want to put forward has been well expressed by Jeannerod (1997: 77): “at variance with the [...] semantic processing, the representation involved in sensorimotor transformation has a predominantly ‘pragmatic’ function, in that it relates to the object as a goal for action, not as a member of a perceptual category. The object attributes are represented therein to the extent that they trigger specific motor patterns for the hand to achieve the proper grasp”. Thus, the crucial feature of the pragmatic processing of visual information is that its output is a suitable input to the nonconceptual content of motor intentions.
 
 

III.3. Visuomotor representations serve as inputs to causal indexicals
 

            I have just argued that what underlies the contrast between the pragmatic and the semantic processing of visual information is that, whereas the output of the latter is designed to serve as input to further conceptual processing with a mind-to-world direction of fit, the output of the former is designed to match the nonconceptual content of motor intentions with a world-to-mind direction of fit and a mind-to-world direction of causation. The special features of the nonconceptual contents of visuomotor representations can be inferred from the behavioral responses which they underlie, as in patient DF. They can also be deduced from the structure and content of elementary action concepts with the help of which they can be categorized.
 

            I shall presently consider a subset of elementary action concepts, which, following Campbell (1994), I shall call “causally indexical” concepts. Indexical concepts are shallow but indispensable concepts, whose references change as the perceptual context changes and whose function is to encode temporary information. Indexical concepts respectively expressed by ‘I’, ‘today’ and ‘here’ are personal, temporal and spatial indexicals. Arguably, their highly contextual content cannot be replaced by pure definite descriptions without loss. Campbell (1994: 41-51) recognizes the existence of causally indexical concepts whose references may vary according to the causal powers of the agent who uses them. Such concepts are involved in judgments having, as Campbell (1994: 43) puts it, “immediate implications for [the agent's] action”. Concepts such as “too heavy”, “out of reach”, “within my reach”, “too large”, “fit for grasping between index and thumb” are causally indexical concepts in Campbell’s sense.
 

            Campbell’s idea of causal indexicality does capture a kind of judgment that is characteristically based upon the output of the pragmatic (or motor) processing of visual stimuli in Jeannerod’s (1994, 1997) sense. Unlike the content of the direct output of the pragmatic processing of visual stimuli or that of motor intentions, the contents of judgments involving causal indexicals is conceptual. Judgments involving causally indexical concepts have low conceptual content, but they have conceptual content nonetheless. For example, if something is categorized as “too heavy”, then it follows that it is not light enough. The nonconceptual contents of either visuomotor representations or motor intentions is better compared with that of an affordance in Gibson’s sense.
 

            Causally indexical concepts differ in one crucial respect from other indexical concepts, i.e., personal, temporal and spatial indexical concepts. Thoughts involving personal, temporal and spatial indexical concepts are “egocentric” thoughts in the sense that they they are perception-based thoughts. This is obvious enough for thoughts expressible with either the first-person pronouns ‘I’ or ‘you’. To refer to a location as ‘here’ or ‘there’ and to refer to a day as ‘today’, ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’ is to refer respectively to a spatial and a temporal region from within some egocentric perspective: a location can only be referred to as ‘here’ or ‘there’ from some particular spatial egocentric perspective. A temporal region can only be referred to by ‘today’, ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’ from some particular temporal egocentric perspective. In this sense, personal, temporal and spatial indexical concepts are egocentric concepts.[2] Arguably, egocentric indexicals lie at the interface between visual percepts and an individual’s conceptual repertoire about objects, times and locations.
 

            Many philosophers (see e.g., Kaplan, 1989 and Perry, 1993) have argued that personal, temporal and spatial indexical and/or demonstrative concepts play a special “essential” and ineliminable role in the explanation of action. And so they do. As Perry (1993: 33) insightfully writes: “I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch”. To believe that the shopper with a torn sack is making a mess is one thing. To believe that oneself is making a mess is something else. Only upon forming the thought expressible by ‘I am making a mess’ is it at all likely that one may take appropriate measures to change one’s course of action. It is one thing to believe that the meeting starts at 10:00 AM. It is another thing to believe that the meeting starts now, even if now is 10:00 AM. Not until one thinks that the meeting starts now will one get up and run. Consider someone standing still at an intersection, lost in a foreign city. One thing is for that person to intend to go to her hotel. Something else is to intend to go this way, not that way. Only after she has formed the latter intention with a demonstrative locational content, will she get up and walk.
 

            Thus, such egocentric concepts as personal, temporal and spatial indexicals and/or demonstratives derive their ineliminable role in the explanation of action from the fact that their recognitional role cannot be played by any purely descriptive concept. Recognition involves a contrast but it can be achieved without recourse to a uniquely specifying definite description. Indexicals and demonstratives are mental pointers that can be used to refer to objects, places and times. Personal indexicals are involved in the recognition of persons. Temporal indexicals are involved in the recognition of temporal regions or instants. Spatial indexicals are involved in the recognition of locations. To recognize oneself as the reference of ‘I’ is to make a contrast with the recognition of the person one addresses in verbal communication as ‘you’. To identify a day as ‘today’ is to contrast it with other days that might be identified as ‘yesterday’, ‘the day before yesterday’, ‘tomorrow’, etc. To identify a place as ‘here’ is to contrast it with other places referred to as ‘there’.
 

            Although indexicals and demonstratives are concepts, they have non-descriptive conceptual content. The conceptual system needs such indexical concepts because it lacks the resources to supply a purely descriptive symbol, i.e., a symbol that could uniquely identify a person, a time or a place. A purely descriptive concept would be a concept that a unique person, a unique time or a unique place would satisfy by uniquely exemplifying each and every of its constituent features. We cannot specify the references of our concepts all the way down by using uniquely identifying descriptions on pain of circularity. If, as Pylyshyn (2000: 129) points out, concepts need to be “grounded”, then on pain of circularity, “the grounding [must] begin at the point where something is picked out directly by a mechanism that works like a demonstrative” (or an indexical). If concepts are to be hooked to or locked onto objects, times and places, then on pain of circularity, definite descriptions will not supply the locking mechanism.
 

            Personal, temporal and spatial indexicals owe their special explanatory role to the fact that they cannot be replaced by purely descriptive concepts. Although they allow recognition by nondescriptive means, their direction of application is mind-to-world. Causally indexical concepts, however, play a different role altogether. Unlike personal, temporal and spatial indexical concepts, causally indexical concepts have a distinctive quasi-deontic or quasi-evaluative content. I want to say that, unlike that of other indexicals, the direction of fit of causal indexicals is hybrid: it is partly mind-to-world, partly world-to-mind. To categorize a target as “too heavy”, “within reach” or “fit for grasping between index and thumb” is to judge or evaluate the parameters of the target as conducive to a successful action upon the target. Unlike the contents of other indexicals, the content of a causally indexical concept results from the combination of an action predicate and an evaluative operator. What makes it indexical is that the result of the application of the latter onto the former is relative to the agent who makes the application. Thus, the job of causally indexical concepts is not just to match the world but to play an action guiding role. If it is, then presumably causal indexicals have at best a hybrid direction of fit, not a pure mind-to-world direction of fit.
 

            In the previous section, I have argued that, unlike visual percepts, visuomotor representations provide visual information to motor intentions, which have nonconceptual content, a world-to-mind direction of fit and a mind-to-world direction of causation. I am presently arguing that the visual information of visuomotor representations can also serve as input to causally indexical concepts, which are elementary contextually dependent action concepts. Judgments involving causally indexical concepts have at best a hybrid direction of fit. When an agent makes such a judgment, he is not merely stating a fact: he is not thereby coming to know a fact that holds independently of his causal powers. Rather, he is settling, accepting or making his mind on an action plan. The function of causally indexical concepts is precisely to allow an agent to make action plans. Whereas personal, temporal and spatial indexicals lie at the interface between visual percepts and an individual’s conceptual repertoire about objects, times and places, causally indexical concepts lie at the interface between visuomotor representations, motor intentions and what Searle calls prior intentions. Prior intentions have conceptual content: they involve action concepts. Thus, after conceptual processing via the channel of causally indexical concepts, the visual information contained in visuomotor representations can be stored in a conceptual format adapted to the content and the direction of fit of one’s intentions – if not one’s motor intentions, then perhaps one’s prior intentions. Hence, the output of the motor processing of visual inputs can serve as input to further conceptual processing whose output will be stored in the ‘intention box’.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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49. Ungerleider, L.G. & Mishkin, M. (1982) “Two cortical visual systems”, in Ingle, D.J., Goodale, M.A. & Mansfield, R.J.W. (eds.) Analysis of visual behavior, MIT Press.
     
     
50. Weiskrantz, L. (1986) Blindsight. A Case Study and Implications, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     
     
51. Weiskrantz, L. (1997) Consciousness Lost and Found, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     
     
52. Zeki, S. (1993) A Vision of the Brain, Oxford: Blackwell.
     
     

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[1]  For discussion, see Jacob (1997, ch. 2).
 

[2] The egocentricity of indexical concepts should not be confused with the egocentricity of an egocentric frame of reference in which the visual system codes e.g., the location of a target. The former is a property of concepts. The latter is a property of visual representations. One crucial difference between the egocentricity of indexical concepts and the ecogentricity of an egocetnric frame of reference for coding the spatial location of a target is that, unlike the latter, the former involves a contrast: if e.g., something is here, it is not there. 

 

Paper for the Summer School in Analytic Philosophy, on Knowledge and Cognition, July 1-7, 2002. Seeing, Perceiving and Knowing, Pierre Jacob, jacob@ehess.fr

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One of the striking, even amusing, spectacles to be enjoyed at the many workshops and conferences on consciousness these days is the breathtaking overconfidence with which laypeople hold forth about the nature of consciousness – their own in particular, but everybody’s by extrapolation. Everybody’s an expert on consciousness, it seems, and it doesn’t take any knowledge of experimental findings to secure the home truths these people enunciate with such conviction.

One of my goals over the years has been to shatter that complacency, and secure the scientific study of consciousness on a proper footing. There is no proposition about one’s own or anybody else’s conscious experience that is immune to error, unlikely as that error might be.  I have come to suspect that refusal to accept this really quite bland denial of what would be miraculous if true lies behind most if not all the elaboration of fantastical doctrines about consciousness recently defended. This refusal fuels the arguments about the conceivability of zombies, the importance of a first-person science of consciousness, intrinsic intentionality and various other hastily erected roadblocks to progress in the science of consciousness.

You can’t have infallibility about your own consciousness. Period. But you can get close – close enough to explain why it seems so powerfully as if you do. First of all, the intentional stance (Dennett, 1971, 1987) guarantees that any entity that is voluminously and reliably predictable as an intentional system will have a set of beliefs (including the most intimate beliefs about its personal experiences) that are mainly true.  So each of us can be confident that in general what we believe about our conscious experiences will have an interpretation according to which we are, in the main, right. How wrong could I be? Not that wrong. Not about most things. There has to be a way of nudging the interpretation of your manifold of beliefs about your experience so that it comes out largely innocent of error though this might not be an interpretation you yourself would be inclined to endorse.  This is not a metaphysical gift, a proof that we live in the best of all possible worlds. It is something that automatically falls out of the methodology: when adopting the intentional stance, one casts about for a maximally charitable (truth-rendering) interpretation, and there is bound to be one if the entity in question is hale and hearty in its way.

But it does not follow from this happy fact that there is a path or method we can follow to isolate some privileged set of guaranteed-true beliefs. No matter how certain you are that p, it may turn out that p is one of those relatively rare errors of yours, an illusion, even if not a grand illusion. But we can get closer, too.  Once you have an intentional system with a capacity for communicating in a natural language, it offers itself as a candidate for the rather special role of self-describer, not infallible but incorrigible in a limited way: it may be wrong, but there may be no way to correct it. There may be no truth-preserving interpretation of all of its expressed opinions (Dennett, 1978, 1991) about its mental life, but those expressed opinions may be the best source we could have about what it is like to be it. A version of this idea was made (in-)famous by Richard Rorty back in his earlier incarnation as an analytic philosopher, and has been defended by me more recently in The Case for Rorts (Dennett, 2000). There I argue that if, for instance, Cog, the humanoid robot being developed by Rodney Brooks and his colleagues at MIT, were ever to master English, its own declarations about its subjectivity would systematically tend to trump the third-person opinions of its makers, even though they would be armed, in the limit, with perfect information about the micro-mechanical implementation of that subjectivity. This, too, falls out of the methodology of the intentional stance, which is the only way (I claim) to attribute content to the states of anything.

The price we pay for this near-infallibility is that our heterophenomenological worlds may have to be immersed in a bath of metaphor in order to come out mainly true. That is, our sincere avowals may have to be rather drastically reconstrued in order to come out literally true. For instance, when we sincerely tell our interrogators about the mental images we’re manipulating,  we may not think we’re talking about convolutions of data-structures in our brain-we may well think we’re talking about immaterial ectoplasmic composites, or intrinsic qualia, or quantum-perturbations in our micro-tubules! but if the interrogators rudely override these ideological glosses and disclaimers of ours and forcibly re-interpret our propositions as actually being about such data-structure convolution, these propositions will turn out to be, in the main, almost all true, and moreover deeply informative about the ways we solve problems, think about the world, and fuel our subjective opinions in general. (In this regard, there is nothing special about the brain and its processes; if you tell the doctor that you have a certain sort of traveling pain in your gut, your doctor may well decide that you’re actually talking about your appendix whatever you may think you’re talking about and act accordingly.)

Since we are such reflective and reflexive creatures, we can participate in the adjustment of the attributions of our own beliefs, and a familiar philosophical move turns out to be just such reflective self-re-adjustment, but not a useful one. Suppose you say you know just what beer tastes like to you now, and you are quite sure you remember what beer tasted like to you the first time you tasted it, and you can compare, you say, the way it tastes now to the way it tasted then. Suppose you declare the taste to be the same. You are then asked: Does anything at all follow from this subjective similarity in the way of further, objectively detectable similarities? For instance, does this taste today have the same higher-order effects on you as it used to have? Does it make you as happy or as depressed, or does it enhance or diminish your capacity to discriminate colors, or retrieve synonyms or remember the names of your childhood friends or. . . . .? Or have your other, surrounding dispositions and habits changed so much in the interim that it is not to be expected that the very same taste (the same quale, one may venture to say, pretending to know what one is talking about) would have any of the same effects at this later date? You may very well express ignorance about all such implications. All you know, you declare, is that this beer now tastes just like that first beer did (at least in some ineffable, intrinsic regard) whether or not it has any of the same further effects or functions. But by explicitly jettisoning all such implications from your proposition, you manage to guarantee that it has been reduced to a vacuity.  You have jealously guarded your infallibility by seeing to it that you=ve adjusted the content of your claim all the way down to zero. You can’t be wrong, because there’s nothing left to be right or wrong about.

This move is always available, but it availeth nought. It makes no difference, by the way, whether you said the beer tastes the same or different; the same point goes through if you insist it tastes different now. Once your declaration is stripped of all powers of implication, it is an empty assertion, a mere demonstration that this is how you fancy talking at this moment. Another version of this self-vacating move can be seen, somewhat more starkly, in a reaction some folks opt for when they have it demonstrated to them that their color vision doesn’t extend to the far peripheries of their visual fields: They declare that on the contrary, their color vision in the sense of color experience does indeed extend to the outer limits of their phenomenal fields; they just disavow any implications about what this color experience they enjoy might enable them to do e.g., identify by name the colors of the objects there to be experienced! They are right, of course, that it does not follow from the proposition that one is having color experiences that one can identify the colors thus experienced, or do better than chance in answering same-different? questions, or use color differences to detect shapes (as in a color- blindness test) to take the most obvious further effects. But if nothing follows from the claim that their peripheral field is experienced as colored, their purported disagreement with the researchers= claim that their peripheral field lacks color altogether evaporates.

O’regan and Noë (2001) argue that my heterophenomenology makes the mistake of convicting naive subjects of succumbing to a grand illusion.   

But is it true that normal perceivers think of their visual fields this way [as in sharp detail and uniform focus from the center out to the periphery]? Do normal perceivers really make this error? We think not. . . . . normal perceivers do not have ideological commitments concerning the resolution of the visual field. Rather, they take the world to be sold, dense, detailed and present and they take themselves to be embedded in and thus to have access to the world. [pXXX]

 My response to this was:

Then why do normal perceivers express such surprise when their attention is drawn to facts about the low resolution (and loss of color vision, etc) of their visual peripheries?  Surprise is a wonderful dependent variable, and should be used more often in experiments; it is easy to measure and is a telling betrayal of the subject’s having expected something else. These expectations are, indeed, an overshooting of the proper expectations of a normally embedded perceiver-agent; people shouldn’t have these expectations, but they do. People are shocked, incredulous, dismayed; they often laugh and shriek when I demonstrate the effects to them for the first time.(Dennett, 2001, pXXXX)

O’regan and Noë (see also Noë, Pessoa, and Thompson, (2000) Noë (2001), and Noë and O’Regan, forthcoming) are right that it need not seem to people that they have a detailed picture of the world in their heads. But typically it does. It also need not seem to them that they are not zombies but typically it does.  People like to have ideological commitments. They are inveterate amateur theorizers about what is going on in their heads, and they can be mighty wrong when they set out on these paths.

For instance, quite a few theorizers are very, very sure that they have something that they sometimes call original intentionality. They are prepared to agree that interpretive adjustments can enhance the reliability of the so-called reports of the so-called content of the so-called mental states of a robot like Cog, because those internal states have only derived intentionality, but they are of the heartfelt opinion that we human beings, in contrast, have the real stuff: we are endowed with genuine mental states that have content quite independently of any such charitable scheme of interpretation.  That’s how it seems to them, but they are wrong.

How could they be wrong? They could be wrong about this because they could be wrong about anything because they are not gods. How wrong could they be?  Until we excuse them for their excesses and re-interpret their extravagant claims in the light of good third-person science, they can be utterly, bizarrely wrong. Once they relinquish their ill-considered grip on the myth of first-person authority and recognize that their limited incorrigibility depends on the liberal application of a principle of charity by third-person observers who know more than they do about what is going on in their own heads, they can become invaluable, irreplaceable informants in the investigation of human consciousness.

References:

• Dennett, 1971, Intentional Systems, J.Phil, 68, pp87?106
• Dennett, 1978, How to Change your Mind, in Brainstorms, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Dennett, 1987, The Intentional Stance,  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Dennett, 1991, Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown, and London: Allen Lane 1992.
• Dennett, 2000, The Case for Rorts, in Robert Brandom, ed., Rorty and his Critics, Oxford: Blackwells.
• Dennett, 2001, Surprise, surprise, commentary on O’Regan and  Noë, 2001, BBS, 24, 5, pp.xxxx.
• O’Regan and Noë, 2001. BBS, 24, 5, pp.xxxxx
• Noë, A., Pessoa, L., Thompson, E. (2000) Beyond the grand illusion: what change blindness
• really teaches us about vision. Visual Cognition.7, 2000: 93?106.
• Noë, A. (2001) Experience and the active mind. Synthese 129: 41?60.
• Noë, A. O’Regan, J. K. Perception, attention and the grand illusion.Psyche6 (15) URL:
• http://web.archive.org/web/20071103170804/http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v6/psyche?6?15?noe.html

Special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies on The Grand Illusion, January 13, 2002, How could I be wrong? How wrong could I be? Daniel C. Dennett, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155

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What is all this? What is all this stuff around me; this stream of experiences that I seem to be having all the time?

Throughout history there have been people who say it is all illusion. I think they may be right. But if they are right what could this mean? If you just say “It’s all an illusion” this gets you nowhere – except that a whole lot of other questions appear. Why should we all be victims of an illusion, instead of seeing things the way they really are? What sort of illusion is it anyway? Why is it like that and not some other way? Is it possible to see through the illusion? And if so what happens next.

These are difficult questions, but if the stream of consciousness is an illusion we should be trying to answer them, rather than more conventional questions about consciousness. I shall explore these questions, though I cannot claim that I will answer them. In doing so I shall rely on two methods. First there are the methods of science; based on theorising and hypothesis testing – on doing experiments to find out how the world works. Second there is disciplined observation – watching experience as it happens to find out how it really seems. This sounds odd. You might say that your own experience is infallible – that if you say it is like this for you then no one can prove you wrong. I only suggest you look a bit more carefully. Perhaps then it won’t seem quite the way you thought it did before. I suggest that both these methods are helpful for penetrating the illusion – if illusion it is.

We must be clear what is meant by the word ‘illusion’. An illusion is not something that does not exist, like a phantom or phlogiston. Rather, it is something that it is not what it appears to be, like a visual illusion or a mirage. When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.

What’s the problem?

For a drastic solution like ‘it’s all an illusion’ even to be worth considering, there has to be a serious problem. There is. Essentially it is the ancient mind-body problem, which recurs in different guises in different times. Victorian thinkers referred to the gulf between mind and brain as the ‘great chasm’ or the ‘fathomless abyss’. Advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence have changed the focus of the problem to what Chalmers (1995) calls the ‘hard problem’ – that is, to explain how subjective experience arises from the objective activity of brain cells.

Many people say that the hard problem does not exist, or that it is a pseudo-problem. I think they fall into two categories – those few who have seen the depths of the problem and come up with some insight into it, and those who just skate over the abyss. The latter group might heed Nagel’s advice when he says “Certain forms of perplexity-for example, about freedom, knowledge, and the meaning of life-seem to me to embody more insight than any of the supposed solutions to those problems.” (Nagel 1986 p 4).

This perplexity can easily be found. For example, pick up any object – a cup of tea or a pen will do – and just look, smell, and feel its texture. Do you believe there is a real objective cup there, with actual tea in it, made of atoms and molecules? Aren’t you also having a private subjective experience of the cup and the taste of the tea – the ‘what it is like’ for you? What is this experience made of? It seems to be something completely different from actual tea and molecules. When the objective world out there and our subjective experiences of it seem to be such different kinds of thing, how can one be caused by, or arise from, or even depend upon, the other?

The intractability and longevity of these problems suggests to me that we are making a fundamental mistake in the way we think about consciousness – perhaps right at the very beginning. So where is the beginning? For William James – whose 1890 Principles of Psychology is deservedly a classic – the beginning is our undeniable experience of the ’stream of consciousness’; that unbroken, ever-changing flow of ideas, perceptions, feelings, and emotions that make up our lives.

In a famous passage he says “Consciousness … does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. … it flows. A ‘river’ or a ’stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.” (James, 1890, i, 239). He referred to the stream of consciousness as “… the ultimate fact for psychology.” (James 1890, i, p 360).

James took introspection as his starting method, and the stream of consciousness as its object. “Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always. The word introspection need hardly be defined(it means, of course, the looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover. Every one agrees that we there discover states of consciousness. …  I regard this belief as the most fundamental of all the postulates of Psychology, and shall discard all curious inquiries about its certainty as too metaphysical for the scope of this book.” (1890, i,  p 185).

He quotes at length from Mr. Shadworth Hodgson, who says “What I find when I look at my consciousness at all is that what I cannot divest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have any consciousness at all, is a sequence of different feelings. I may shut my eyes and keep perfectly still, and try not to contribute anything of my own will; but whether I think or do not think, whether I perceive external things or not, I always have a succession of different feelings. … Not to have the succession of different feelings is not to be conscious at all.” (quoted in James 1890, i, p 230)

James adds “Such a description as this can awaken no possible protest from any one.” I am going to protest. I shall challenge two aspects of the traditional stream; first that it has rich and detailed contents, and second that there is one continuous sequence of contents.

But before we go any further it is worth considering how it seems to you. I say this because sometimes people propose novel solutions to difficult problems only to find that everyone else says – ‘Oh I knew that all along’. So it is helpful to decide what you do think first. Many people say that it feels something like this. I feel as though I am somewhere inside my head looking out. I can see and hear and feel and think. The impressions come along in an endless stream; pictures, sounds, feelings, mental images and thoughts appear in my consciousness and then disappear again. This is my ’stream of consciousness’ and I am the continuous conscious self who experiences it.

If this is how it seems to you then you probably also believe that at any given time there have to be contents of your conscious stream – some things that are ‘in’ your consciousness and others that are not. So, if you ask the question ‘what am I conscious of now?’ or ‘what was I conscious of at time t?’ then there has to be an answer. You might like to consider at this point whether you think there does have to be an answer.

For many years now I have been getting my students to ask themselves, as many times as possible every day “Am I conscious now?”. Typically they find the task unexpectedly hard to do; and hard to remember to do. But when they do it, it has some very odd effects. First they often report that they always seem to be conscious when they ask the question but become less and less sure about whether they were conscious a moment before. With more practice they say that asking the question itself makes them more conscious, and that they can extend this consciousness from a few seconds to perhaps a minute or two. What does this say about consciousness the rest of the time?

Just this starting exercise (we go on to various elaborations of it as the course progresses) begins to change many students’ assumptions about their own experience. In particular they become less sure that there are always contents in their stream of consciousness. How does it seem to you? It is worth deciding at the outset because this is what I am going to deny. I suggest that there is no stream of consciousness. And there is no definite answer to the question ‘What am I conscious of now?’. Being conscious is just not like that.

I shall try to explain why, using examples from two senses; vision and hearing.

The Stream of Vision

When we open our eyes and look around it seems as though we are experiencing a rich and ever-changing picture of the world; what I shall call our ’stream of vision’. Probably many of us go further and develop some sort of theory about what is going on – something like this perhaps.

“When we look around the world, unconscious processes in the brain build up a more and more detailed representation of what is out there. Each glance provides a bit more information to add to the picture. This rich mental representation is what we see at any time. As long as we are looking around there is a continuous stream of such pictures. This is our visual experience.”

There are at least two threads of theory here. The first is the idea that there is a unified stream of conscious visual impressions to be explained, what Damasio (1999) calls ‘the movie-in-the-brain’. The second is the idea that seeing means having internal mental pictures – that the world is represented in our heads. People have thought this way at least for several centuries, perhaps since Leonardo da Vinci first described the eye as a camera obscura and Kepler explained the optics of the eye (Lindberg 1976). Descartes’ famous sketches showed how images of the outside world appear in the non-material mind and James, like his Victorian contemporaries, simply assumed that seeing involves creating mental representations. Similarly, conventional cognitive psychology has treated vision as a process of constructing representations.

Perhaps these assumptions seem unremarkable, but they land us in difficulty as soon as we appreciate that much of vision is unconscious.  We seem forced to distinguish between conscious and unconscious processing; between representations that are ‘in’ the stream of consciousness and those that are ‘outside’ it. Processes seem to start out unconscious and then ‘enter consciousness’ or ‘become conscious’. But if all of them are representations built by the activity of neurons, what is the difference? What makes some into conscious representations and others not.

Almost every theory of consciousness we have confronts this problem and most try to solve it. For example, global workspace (GW) theories (e.g. Baars 1988) explicitly have a functional space, the workspace, which is a serial working memory in which the conscious processing occurs. According to Baars, information in the GW is made available (or displayed, or broadcast) to an unconscious audience in the rest of the brain. The ‘difference’ is that processing in the GW is conscious and that outside of it is not.

There are many varieties of GWT. In Dennett’s (2001) ‘fame in the brain’ metaphor, as in his previous multiple drafts theory (Dennett 1991 and see below), becoming conscious means contributing to some output or result (fame is the aftermath, not something additional to it). But in many versions of GWT being conscious is equated with being available, or on display, to the rest of the system (e.g. Baars 1988, Dehaene and Naccache 2001). The question remains; the experiences in the stream of consciousness are those that are available to the rest of the system. Why does this availability turn previously unconscious physical processes into subjective experiences?

As several authors have pointed out there seems to be a consensus emerging in favour of GWTs. I believe the consensus is wrong. GWTs are doomed because they try to explain something that does not exist – a stream of conscious experiences emerging from the unconscious processes in the brain.

The same problem pervades the whole enterprise of searching for the neural correlates of consciousness. For example Kanwisher (2001) suggests that the neural correlates of the contents of visual awareness are represented in the ventral pathway – assuming, as do many others, that visual awareness has contents and that those contents are representations. Crick asks “What is the “neural correlate” of visual awareness? Where are these “awareness neurons”¾are they in a few places or all over the brain¾and do they behave in any special way?” One might think that these are rhetorical questions but he goes on ” … this knowledge may help us to locate the awareness neurons we are looking for.” (Crick 1994, 204). Clearly he, like others, is searching for the neural correlates of that stream of conscious visual experiences. He admits that  “… so far we can locate no single region in which the neural activity corresponds exactly to the vivid picture of the world we see in front of our eyes.” (Crick 1994, 159). Nevertheless he obviously assumes that there is such a “vivid picture”. What if there is not? In this case he, and others, are hunting for something that can never be found.

I suggest that there is no stream of vivid pictures that appear in consciousness. There is no movie-in-the-brain. There is no stream of vision. And if we think there is we are victims of the grand illusion.

Change blindness is the most obvious evidence against the stream of vision. In 1991 Dennett reported unpublished experiments by Grimes who used a laser tracker to detect people’s eye movements and then change the picture they were looking at just when they moved their eyes. The changes were so large and obvious that under normal circumstances they could hardly be missed, but when they were made during saccades, the changes went unnoticed. It subsequently turned out that expensive eye trackers are not necessary.  I suggested moving the whole picture instead, and this produced the same effects (Blackmore, Brelstaff, Nelson & Troscianko 1995) . Other, even simpler, methods have since been developed, and change blindness has been observed with brief blank flashes between pictures, with image flicker, during cuts in movies or during blinks (Simons 2000).

That the findings are genuinely surprising is confirmed in experiments in which people were asked to predict whether they or others would notice the changes. A large metacognitive error was found – that is, people grossly overestimated their own and others’ ability to detect change (Levin, Momen & Drivdahl 2000). James long ago noted something similar; that we fail to notice that we overlook things. “It is true that we may sometimes be tempted to exclaim, when once a lot of hitherto unnoticed details of the object lie before us, “How could we ever have been ignorant of these things and yet have felt the object, or drawn the conclusion, as if it were a continuum, a plenum? There would have been gaps¾but we felt no gaps” (p 488).

Change blindness is not confined to artificial laboratory conditions. Simons and Levin (1998) produced a comparable effect in the real world with some clever choreography. In one study an experimenter approached a pedestrian on the campus of Cornell University to ask for directions. While they talked, two men rudely carried a door between them. The first experimenter grabbed the back of the door and the person who had been carrying it let go and took over the conversation. Only half of the pedestrians noticed the substitution. Again, when people are asked whether they think they would detect such a change they are convinced that they would – but they are wrong.

Change blindness could also have serious consequences in ordinary life. For example, O’Regan, Rensink and Clark (1999) showed that dangerous mistakes can be made by drivers or pilots when change blindness is induced by mudsplashes on the windscreen.

Further experiments have shown that attention is required to notice a change. For example there is the related phenomenon of ‘inattentional blindness’ (Mack & Rock 1998) in which people attending to one item of a display fail to detect the appearance of unexpected new items, even when these are clearly visible or in the centre of the visual field. However, though attention is necessary to detect change, it is not sufficient. Levin and Simons (1997) created short movies in which various objects were changed, some in arbitrary locations and others in the centre of attention. In one case the sole actor in the movie went to answer the phone. There was a cut in which the camera angle changed and a different person picked up the phone. Only a third of the observers detected the change.

What do these results mean? They certainly suggest that from one saccade to the next we do not store nearly as much information as was previously thought. If the information were stored we would surely notice the change. So the ’stream of vision’ theory I described at the start has to be false. The richness of our visual world is an illusion (Blackmore et al 1995).Yet obviously something is retained otherwise there could be no sense of continuity and we would not even notice if the entire scene changed. Theorists vary in how much, and what sort of, information they claim is retained.

Perhaps the simplest interpretation is given by Simons and Levin (1997). During each visual fixation we experience a rich and detailed visual world. This picture is only detailed in the centre, but it is nevertheless a rich visual experience. From that we extract the meaning or gist of the scene. Then when we move our eyes the detailed picture is thrown away and a new one substituted, but if the gist remains the same our perceptual system assumes the details are the same and so we do not notice changes. This, they argue, makes sense in the rapidly changing and complex world we live in. We get a phenomenal experience of continuity without too much confusion.

Slightly more radical is Rensink’s (2000) view. He suggests that observers never form a complete representation of the world around them – not even during fixations. Rather, perception involves ‘virtual representation’; representations of objects are formed one at a time as needed, and they do not accumulate. The impression of more is given because a new object can always be made ‘just in time’. In this way an illusion of richness and continuity is created.

Finally, O’Regan (1992) goes even further in demolishing the ordinary view of seeing. He suggests that there is no need for internal representations at all because the world can be used as an external memory, or as its own best model – we can always look again. This interpretation fits with moves towards embodied cognition (e.g. Varela, Thomson and Rosch, 1991) and towards animate vision in artificial intelligence (Clark 1999) in which mind, body and world work together, and sensing is intertwined with acting. It is also related to the sensorimotor theory of perception proposed by O’Regan and Noë (in press). On this view seeing is a way of acting; of exploring the environment. Conscious visual experiences are generated not by building representations but by mastering sensorimotor contingencies. What remains between saccades is not a picture of the world, but the information needed for further exploration. A study by Karn and Hayhoe (2000) confirms that spatial information required to control eye movements is retained across saccades. This kind of theory is dramatically different from existing theories of perception. It entails no representation of the world at all.

It is not yet clear which of these interpretations, if any, is correct but there is no doubt about the basic phenomenon and its main implication. Theories that try to explain the contents of the stream of vision are misguided. There is no stable, rich visual representation in our minds that could be the contents of the stream of consciousness.

Yet it seems there is doesn’t it? Well does it? We return here to the problem of the supposed infallibility of our own private experiences. Each of us can glibly say ‘Well I know what my experience is like and it is a stream of visual pictures of the world, and nothing you say can take away my experience’. What then do we make of the experiments that suggest that anyone who says this is simply wrong?

I suggest that we all need to look again – and look very hard, with persistence and practice. Experimental scientists tend to eschew personal practice of this kind. Yet I suggest we should encourage it for two reasons. First, we cannot avoid bringing implicit theories to bear on how we view our own experiences and what we say about them. So perhaps we should do this explicitly. As we study theories of consciousness, we can try out the proposals against the way it seems to us. As we do so our own experience changes – I would say deepens. As an example, take theories about change blindness. Many people find the evidence surprising because they are sure that they have rich visual pictures in their mind whenever they are looking at something. If you ask “What am I conscious of now?” again and again, this certainty begins to fall apart, and the change blindness evidence seems less surprising. This must surely help us to become better critics. At the very least it will help us to avoid dismissing theories of consciousness because of false assumptions we make about our own experiences.

The second reason is that this kind of practice can give rise to completely new hypotheses about consciousness. And this in turn can lead to testable predictions and new experiments. If these are derived from a deeper understanding of one’s own awareness then they are more likely to be productive than those based on the mistake of believing in the stream of conscious.

Note that what I am proposing here is first person practice – first person discipline – first person methods of inquiry. But the results of all this practice will be words and actions; saying things to oneself and others. This endeavour only becomes science when it is put to use in this way and it is then, of course, third person science.

How does one do it? There have been many methods developed for taking ‘the view from within’ (Varela and Shear 1999) but I am suggesting something quite simple here. Having learned about the results of the change blindness research we should look hard and persistently at our own visual experiences. Right now is there a rich picture here in my experience? If there seems to be, something must be wrong, so what is wrong? Look again, and again. After many years of doing this kind of practice, every day, it no longer seems to me that there is a stream of vision, as I described at the start. The research has changed not only my intellectual understanding of vision but the very experience of seeing itself.

The stream of sounds

Listening to what is going on it might seem as though there is a stream of sounds to match the stream of pictures. Suppose we are listening to a conversation, then turn our attention to the music in the background, and then to the conversation again. We may say that at first the conversation was in the conscious stream while the music remained unconscious, then they reversed and so on. If asked ‘what sounds were in your stream of consciousness at a particular time?’ you might be sure that there definitely was an answer, even if you can’t exactly remember what it was. This follows from the idea that there is a stream of consciousness, and sounds must either be in it or not.

Some simple everyday experiences cast doubt on this natural view. To take a much used favourite, imagine you are reading and just as you turn the page you become aware that the clock is striking. You hadn’t noticed it before but now you feel as though you were aware of it all along. You can even remember that it has struck four times already and you can now go on counting. What has happened here? Were the first three ‘dongs’ really outside the stream (unconscious) and have now been pulled out of memory and put in the stream? If so what was happening when the first one struck, while you were still reading? Was the sound out of the stream at the time, but after you turned the page it just felt as though it had been in there all along – with the contents of the previous page – even though it wasn’t really? Or have you gone back in time and changed the contents of the stream retrospectively? Or what? You might think up some other elaborations to make sense of it but I don’t think any will be very simple or convincing (in the same spirit Dennett (1991) contrasts Orwellian with Stalinesque revisions). The trouble all comes about because of the idea that there is a stream of consciousness and things are either in or out of it.

There are many other examples one could use to show the same thing. For example, in a noisy room full of people talking you may suddenly switch your attention because someone has said “Guess who I saw with Anya the other day – it was Bernard”. You prick up your ears – surely not – you think. At this point you seem to have been aware of the whole sentence as it was spoken. But were you really? The fact is that you would never have noticed it at all if she had concluded the sentence with a name that meant nothing to you.

Even simpler than this is the problem with all speech. You need to accumulate a lot of serial information before the meaning of a sentence becomes unambiguous. What was in the stream of consciousness while all this was happening? Was it just meaningless words? Gobbledegook? Did it switch from gobbledegook to words half way through? It doesn’t feel like that. It feels as though you listened and heard a meaningful sentence as it went along, but this is impossible.

Or take just one word, or listen to a blackbird trill its song. Only once the trill is complete, the word finished, can you know what it was that you heard. What was in the stream of consciousness before this point? Would it help to go even smaller? to try to break the stream down into its constituent bits? Perhaps there is a stream of raw feels, or indivisible bits of conscious stuff out of which the larger chunks are made. The introspectionists assumed this must be the case and tried – in vain – to find the units. James did a thorough job of disposing of such ideas in 1890, concluding “No one ever had a simple sensation by itself” (James 1890, i, 224) and there have been many objections since. There is no easy way to answer these questions about what really was in the stream of consciousness at a given time. Perhaps the idea of a stream of consciousness is itself the problem.

Of course we should have known all this. Dennett (1991) pointed out much the same using the colour phi phenomenon and the cutaneous rabbit. To produce colour phi a red light is flashed in one place and then a green light flashed a short distance away. Even on the first trial, observers do not see two distinct lights flashing, but one moving light that changes from red to green somewhere in the middle. But how could they have known what colour the light was going to turn into? If we think in terms of the stream of consciousness we are forced to wonder what was in the stream when the light seemed to be in the middle – before the second light came on.

There’s something backwards about all this. As though consciousness is somehow trailing along behind or making things up after the fact. Libet’s well-known experiments showed that about half a second of continuous cortical activity is required for consciousness, so consciousness cannot be instant. But we should not conclude that there is a stream of consciousness that runs along half a second behind the real world; this still wouldn’t solve the chiming clock problem. Instead I suggest that the problem lies with the whole idea of the stream.

Dennett (1991) formulated this in terms of the Cartesian Theatre – that non-existent place where consciousness happens – where everything comes together and I watch the private show (my stream of experiences) in my own theatre of the mind. He referred to those who believe in the existence of the Cartesian Theatre as Cartesian materialists. Most contemporary consciousness researchers deny being Cartesian materialists. Typically they say that they do not believe that ‘everything comes together’ at a point in the brain, or even a particular area in the brain. For example, in most GWTs the activity of the GW is widely distributed in the brain. In Edelman and Tononi’s (2000) theory the activity of groups of neurons in a widely distributed dynamic core underlies conscious experience.

However, many of these same theorists use phrases that imply a show in the non-existent theatre; such phrases as ‘the information in consciousness’, ‘items enter consciousness’, ‘representations become conscious’, or ‘the contents of consciousness’. But consciousness is not a container – whether distributed or not. And, if there is no answer to the question “what is in my consciousness now?” such phrases imply that people are assuming something that does not exist. Of course it is difficult to write clearly about consciousness and people may write this way when they do not really mean to imply a show in a Cartesian Theatre. Nevertheless, we should beware these phrases. If there is an answer to the question ‘what is in my consciousness now?’ then it makes sense to speak of things ‘entering consciousness’ and so on. If there is no answer it does not.

How can there not be an answer? How can there not be a stream of consciousness or a show in the theatre of the mind? Baars claims that “all of our unified models of mental functioning today are theater metaphors; it is essentially all we have.” (1997, 7) but it is not. It is possible to think about consciousness in other ways – I would say not just possible but necessary.

Dennett’s own suggestion is the theory of multiple drafts. Put simply it is this. At any time there are multiple constructions of various sorts going on in the brain – multiple parallel descriptions of what’s going on. None of these is ‘in’ consciousness while others are ‘out’ of it. Rather, whenever a probe is put in – for example a question asked or a behaviour precipitated – a narrative is created. The rest of the time there are lots of contenders in various stages of revision in different parts of the brain, and no final version. As he puts it “there are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes”.  “Just what we are conscious of within any particular time duration is not defined independently of the probes we use to precipitate a narrative about that period. Since these narratives are under continual revision, there is no single narrative that counts as the canonical version, … the events that happened in the stream of consciousness of the subject.” (Dennett 1991 p 136)

I would put it slightly differently. I want to replace our familiar idea of a stream of consciousness with that of illusory backwards streams. At any time in the brain a whole lot of different things are going on. None of these is either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of consciousness, so we don’t need to explain the ‘difference’ between conscious and unconscious processing. Every so often something happens to create what seems to have been a stream. For example, we ask “Am I conscious now?”. At this point a retrospective story is concocted about what was in the stream of consciousness a moment before, together with a self who was apparently experiencing it. Of course there was neither a conscious self nor a stream, but it now seems as though there was. This process goes on all the time with new stories being concocted whenever required. At any time that we bother to look, or ask ourselves about it, it seems as though there is a stream of consciousness going on. When we don’t bother to ask, or to look, it doesn’t, but then we don’t notice so it doesn’t matter. This way the grand illusion is concocted.

There are some odd implications of this view. First, as far as neuroscience is concerned we should not expect always to find one global workspace, or other unified correlate of the contents of consciousness. With particular sorts of probes there may, for a time, be such a global unification but at other times there may be several integrated patterns going on simultaneously, any of which might end up being retrospectively counted as contents of a stream of consciousness. Second, the backwards streams may overlap with impunity. Information from one ongoing process may end up in one stream, while information from another parallel process ends up in a different stream precipitated a bit later but referring to things that were going on simultaneously. There is no requirement for there really to be only one conscious stream at a time – even though it ends up seeming that way.

This is particularly helpful for thinking about the stream of sounds because sounds only make sense when information is integrated over appreciable lengths of time. As an example, imagine you are sitting in the garden and can hear a passing car, a bird singing, and some children shouting in the distance, and that you switch attention rapidly between them. If there were one stream of consciousness then each time attention switched you would have to wait while enough information came into the stream to identify the sound – to hear it as a passing car. In fact attention can switch much faster than this. A new backwards stream can be created very quickly and the information it uses may overlap with that used in another stream a moment later, and another, and so on. So at time t was the bird song really in your stream of consciousness or was it the children’s shouting? There is no answer.

Is it really this way? Do you want to protest that it doesn’t seem this way? As with vision it is possible to look harder into one’s own experience of sound and the results can be quite strange. Thinking about the chiming clocks, and listening as sounds come and go, the once-obvious linear stream begins to disappear.

Looking harder

I have suggested that we need to look hard into our own experience, but what does this mean? How can we look? If the models sketched above are correct then looking means putting in a probe and this precipitates a backwards stream. So we cannot catch ourselves not seeming to be having a stream of consciousness. As William James so aptly put it “The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.” (James, 1890, i, 244).

The modern equivalent is the metaphor of the fridge door. Is the light always on inside the fridge?  You may keep opening the door, as quickly as you can, but you can never catch it out – every time you open it, the light is on.

Things, however, are not quite that bad for the stream of consciousness. We do, after all, have those obvious examples such as the chiming clock and the meaningless half a word to go on. And we can build on this. But it takes practice.

What kind of practice? A good start is calming the mind. There are many meditation traditions whose aim is to see the mind for what it really is, and all of these begin with calming the mind. You might say that at first it is more like a raging torrent or even a stormy ocean than a stream. To see whether there even is a stream we need to slow everything down. This is not easy. Indeed it can take many years of diligent practice, though some people seem to be able to do it much more easily than others. Nevertheless, with a calm mind it is easier to concentrate, and to concentrate for longer.

Now we can ask “What am I hearing now?”. At first there seems always to be an answer. “I am hearing the traffic” or “I am hearing myself ask the question in my head”. But with practice the answer becomes less obvious. It is possible to pick up the threads of various sounds (the clock ticking, the traffic, ones own breathing, the people shouting across the road) and notice in each case that you seem to have been hearing it for some time. When you get good at this it seems obvious that you can give more than one answer to the question “what was I hearing at time t”. When you can do this there no longer seems to be a single stream of sounds.

My purpose here is not to say that this new way of hearing is right, or even better than the previous way. After all, I might be inventing some idiosyncratic delusion of my own. My intention is to show that there are other ways of experiencing the world, and finding them can help us throw off the false assumptions that are holding back our study of consciousness. If we can find a personal way out of always believing we are experiencing a stream of consciousness, then we are less likely to keep getting stuck in the Cartesian Theatre.

I asked at the outset ‘What is all this? What is all this stuff – all this experience that I seem to be having, all the time?’. I have now arrived at the answer that all this stuff is a grand illusion. This has not solved the problems of consciousness, but at least it tells us that there is no point trying to explain the difference between things that are in consciousness and those that are not because there is no such difference. And it is a waste of time trying to explain the contents of the stream of consciousness because the stream of consciousness does not exist. 

References

1. Baars, B.J. (1988) A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
2. Baars,B.J. (1997) In the Theatre of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind. New York, Oxford University Press
3. Blackmore,S.J., Brelstaff,G., Nelson,K. and Troscianko,T. 1995 Is the richness of our visual world an illusion? Transsaccadic memory for complex scenes. Perception, 24, 1075-1081
4. Chalmers, D.J. (1995) Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2, 200-219
5. Clark, A. (1997) Being There: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press
6. Crick,F. (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis. New York, Scribner’s
7. Damasio, A. (1999) The Feeling of What Happens: Body, emotion and the making of consciousness. London, Heinemann
8. Dehaene, S. and Naccache, L. (2001) Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: basic evidence and a workspace framework. Cognition, 79, 1-37
9. Dennett, D.C. (1991) Consciousness Explained. London, Little, Brown & Co.
10. Edelman,G.M. and Tononi, G. (2000) Consciousness: How matter becomes imagination. London, Penguin
11. James,W. (1890) The Principles of Psychology, London; MacMillan
12. Kanwisher, N. (2001). Neural Events and Perceptual Awareness. Cognition, 79, 89-113
13. Karn, K. and Hayhoe, M. (2000) Memory representations guide targeting eye movements in a natural task. Visual Cognition, 7, 673-703
14. Levin, D.T., Momen, N. and Drivdahl, S.B. (2000) Change blindness blindness: The metacognitive error of overestimating change-detection ability. Visual Cognition, 7, 397-412
15. Levin, D.T. and Simons, D.J. (1997) Failure to detect changes to attended objects in moton pictures. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 4, 501-506
16. Levine, J. (1983) Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64, 354-361
17. Lindberg, D.C. (1976) Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, University of Chicago Press
18. Mack, A. and Rock, I. (1998) Inattentional Blindness, Cambridge MA, MIT Press
19. Nagel,T. (1974) What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review 83, 435-450
20. Nagel,T. (1986) The View from Nowhere, New York; Oxford University Press
21. O’Regan, J.K. (1992) Solving the “real” mysteries of visual perception: The world as an outside memory. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 46, 461-488
22. O’Regan, J.K. and Noë, A. (in press) A sensorimotor theory of vision. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
23. O’Regan, J.K., Rensink, R.A. and Clark, J.J. (1999) Change-blindness as a result of “mudsplashes”. Nature, 398, 34
24. Rensink, R.A. (2000) The dynamic representation of scenes. Visual Cognition, 7, 17-42
25. Simons, D.J. (2000) Current approaches to change blindness. Visual Cognition, 7, 1-15
26. Simons, D.J. and Levin, D.T. (1998) Failure to detect changes to people during real-world interaction. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 5, 644-649
27. Varela, F.J. and Shear, J. (1999) The view from within: First person approaches to the study of consciousness, Thorverton, Devon, Imprint Academic
28. Varela,F.J., Thomson,E. and Rosch,E. (1991) The Embodied Mind. London, MIT Press
     

There is no stream of consciousnes - This paper is published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume9, number 5-6, which is devoted to the Grand Illusion.  See http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs/. This paper is based on a conference presentation by Dr Susan Blackmore at ‘Towards a Science of Consciousness 2001, in Skövde, Sweden, 7-11 August 2001.

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Subjectivity is a theme common to many of those philosophers eager to deflate the ambitions of cognitive science. The claim is that persons differ from all other things in that they cannot be exhaustively described in the third person. Any attempt to do so will fail to capture something about every human being that is essentiallysubjective. This expression covers many things, and the word sounds all the more impressive for the fact that the things it purportedly designates are lumped into a very mixed bag. When lumped together as if they constituted one hugely complex problem, they tend to induce a sense of hopelessness. Which is exactly what some of the champions of subjectivity count on to preserve its mystery and irreducibility.

Among the champions in question, some of the most famous are Taylor (1989), Nagel (1986), and Searle (1992, 1997)).

Here is sampling of some of their claims. First, Nagel:

“[T]he purely objective conception will leave something out [viz., the subjective content of "I am Thomas Nagel"] which is both true and remarkable” (Nagel 1986, 64).

Next, Charles Taylor:

There are certain things which are generally held true of objects of scientific study which don’t hold of the self:….
1. The object of study is to be taken “absolutely”, that is, not in its meaning for us or any other subject,… (”objectively”).
2. The object is what it is independent of any descriptions or interpretations offered by any subjects
3. The object can in principle be captured in explicit description;
4. The object can in principle be described without reference to its surroundings. (Taylor 1989, 33-34).

Next, Searle:

Conscious mental states and processes have a special feature not possessed by other natural phenomena, namely subjectivity…..[M]uch of the bankruptcy of most work in the philosophy of mind and a great deal of the sterility of academic psychoanalysis over the past fifty years,… have come from a persistent failure to recognize and come to terms with the fact that the ontology of the mental is an irreducibly first-person ontology. (Searle 1992, 93,95).Consider, for example, the statement ‘I now have a pain in my lower back.’ That statement is completely objective in the sense that it is made true by the existence of an objective fact…. However, the phenomenon itself, the actual pain, itself, has a subjective mode of existence. (Searle 1992, 94).

To these claims about the irreducibility of subjectivity, two forms of resistance are possible. One is to claim that the multifarious problems posed by consciousness and subjectivity actually all reduce to one. That one may or may not be currently soluble, but at least one has one problem and not many. That strategy is adverted to (though not adopted) in a recent book by Lycan, who defends “a weak version of Brentano’s doctrine that the mental and the intentional are one and the same…. It would follow that once representation itself is (eventually) understood, … I do not think there will be any ‘problem of consciousness’ left” (Lycan 1996, 11)[1]. A similar strategy may be implied in the recent books by (Tye 1995) and (Dretske 1995) defending a representationalist theory of consciousness.The line I propose to pursue here is the opposite. It starts from the consideration that big mysteries are sometimes made of a lot of little tricks, and so might yield to a divide-and-conquer strategy. I suspect this is true of the mysteries of consciousness: if the “problem of consciousness” is not one, but many, and if each one can be successfully dismissed or solved along naturalistic lines, then by this different route we shall reach the same goal, of bringing it about that there not be any ‘problem of consciousness’ left.

I do not aim to demonstrate this large claim here. I concentrate only on the term “subjectivity”, and propose merely to make a start on the first phase, consisting in drawing up a list of ostensibly different problems of subjectivity. If some should turn out to be reducible to others, so much the better. But if not, then each variety of subjectivity might be tackled singly, and this might indeed contribute to a “natural history” of the human mind, in such a way as to bring it all under the aegis of science.

In his perceptive comments on the version of the present paper as presented to the ISCC conference, Jean-Michel Roy urged that by concentrating on the diversity of claims using the word ’subjective’ made by philosophers, I risked missing the point which only a proper conceptual or phenomenological analysis could reveal. But the concept lives in what people use it to mean. No conceptual analysis, therefore, can avoid taking into account what those who use the concept have used it to do. Phenomenological analysis suffers from similar problems[2]. Still, one might ask what the root word ’subject’ itself suggests as to what the core of subjectivity might mean. Two sufficient conditions then suggest themselves: either that we are talking about items to which only the subject has epistemic access, or that we are talking about items that are ontologically distinct in somehow pertaining only to the subject, as claimed by Searle in the passage just cited. The former can happily be conceded by any materialist. The latter begs the essential question of whether it makes sense to speak of an ontological category which is essentially defined in terms of conditions on epistemic access to it. But these features do not exhaust the claims made for subjectivity and its consequences for our understanding of the mental. That is my justification for undertaking the sort of botanizing I propose in what follows.

To give the flavour of the strategy to which this botanizing is supposed to contribute, here is an example of how confusion between various senses of subjectivity can be misleading.

Berkeley argued against the distinction between primary and secondary qualities that are all equally “ideas existing only in the mind”: (Berkeley 1957, 27, 30). The subjectivity of secondary qualities, in the sense of their relativity to the observer’s mind, can be shown to attach equally to primary qualities. If we resist the idealist conclusion, we can re-interpret this remark as implying that the perception of all qualities depends on the interaction between the external world and state of the subject’s sense-organs. This assumes that if the appearances of things are relative to the sensory and conceptual apparatus of the perceiver, this entails that their attribution to the outside world is mere projection, with no objective correlates beyond themselves. The argument conflates phenomenology – the quality of experience – relativity to an observer, and projection – the attribution of a property to the outside world which is actually entirely resident in or manufactured by the observer. This conflation is plausible in the extreme case in which some quality attributed by an observer to a target depends totally on the perceiver and not at all on the target. For there is then nothing to the property in question except the observer’s experience of it, and relativity collapses into projection. But no lesser degree of relativity can effect this collapse. At most, Berkeley’s arguments show that the conflation of these different senses of subjectivity leads to idealism. This is not what the modern champions of subjectivity intend, but it may turn out to be the logical consequence of their strategy nevertheless. To some of us, this is reason enough for avoiding the conflation.

Phenomenology, relativity and projection are only three of the possibly distinct senses of subjectivity that have been adduced against materialism. In what follows I distinguish twelve basic varieties – senses, readings, interpretations, or aspects – of subjectivity or ‘the subjective’. Some, as we shall see, might easily be further divided. Moreover, I am not confident that they are exhaustive. But I remain unconvinced that any form of “irreducible subjectivity” presents an obstacle to physicalism, and I offer the hope that tackling each variety singly will may make it easier to pre-empt their use as a medieval mace to whack wicked reductionists over the head with. Here then, is my list.

1. Perspective.

An individual is somewhere in space-time, and not somewhere else. Except for God, of course, who was invented to instantiate all contradictions in blessed harmony. He’s everywhere and everywhen, though at the same time, as it were, not in time or space[3]. But the upshot of this is that every individual has a point of view, a perspective, and apprehends the world, so far as it can apprehend the world, from somewhere and not nowhere[4] (Nagel 1986). If taken in isolation, the feature of being somewhere in particular affects all kinds of individuals, not just humans. But only those individuals that can view something can presumably have a point of view. Thus Searle again:

Subjectivity has the further consequence that all of my conscious forms of intentionality that give me information about the world independent of myself are always from a special point of view. The world itself has no point of view, but my access to the world through my conscious states is always perspectival. (ibid. 95).[5]

In itself, however, that could be true of any other living thing. Nor is it a requirement to be alive: an artificial eye has a point of view. More generally, as shown in the excellent discussion of this subject in (Proust 1997), aspectuality can be seen as a consequence of mere differences of informational channels, and doesn’t therefore require any level of consciousness.

Perspective might itself be of two kinds. This can be seen by asking: Does a still camera have a genuine point of view? One reason to deny this is that for a still camera there is nothing that corresponds to the difference between locality in time, and locality in space. For a living individual, these pose slightly different problems. For there are different ways in which we might care about the effects of our actions in distant space, and in different times. Time is asymmetrical in this sense (among others): we care more, or quite differently, about what happens in the future than about what happened in the past. But although the things we care about may, of course, be unevenly distributed, space has no uniformly privileged direction. So temporal perspectivity appears seems to constitute a more serious species of subjectivity than the spatial kind.

Now perspectivity is sometimes equated with subjectivity in general, as suggested in the last quotation from Searle above. Yet subjectivity is also associated with the self, and the temporal form of perspectivity actually causes problems for the view that my self is my subjectivity. This is because changes in perspective, especially in temporal perspective, change the relative value of different prospects. For example, as (Ainslie 1992) has pointed out, we seem to discount the future at a hyperbolic rate, so that the closer prospect can surpass the more distant in apparent value, rather as a low building can loom higher than a tall one when one is up close to the former. Where such changes occur, which perspective is the right one, that is, truly mine? Are there as many individual selves as there are perspectives? In a recent article, Galen Strawson answers in the affirmative: each of us is many brief, material, successive selves, he says, strung like pearls on a string (Strawson 1997). Before him, Derek Parfit (1971, 1984), is famous for advocating a similar view.

Suppose I get my friends solemnly to promise to put me gently to death when I become gaga, because I would rather die than be gaga. What if, once I become gaga, my priorities change? Now I don’t want to die: I would rather live and be gaga. Do my friends still “owe” me euthanasia, against my present wishes? Actually, the answer is always No, but for a different reason. If I’m a different self from what I was when they made their promise, then you can’t be bound by him (i.e. me-then) to do anything to or for me (i.e. me-now). But if I’m the same person, then I can now relieve you of your obligation to me if I change my mind. The facts about perspective, then, appear to be neutral in practice between the Parfitean and a traditional concept of the self, but they seem to be significantly different in theory.[6]

Note, however, that in articulating the problem of the asymmetry of time we have to introduce an additional factor: what’s involved is not just being at a certain place and time, but envisaging what is seen from that point of view as affording possibilities for agency. Make that our second form or aspect of subjectivity.

2. Agency

Agency is presumably not an aspect of human individual subjectivity that we concede to inanimate individuals. As a human, one experiences oneself as having the power to choose and act. The fact of being an agent, as has been often stressed,[7] is a form of subjectivity in the precise sense that I, the subject, and I alone can decide what I will do, although – depending on your own particular stance on the tricky antinomies of free-will – all sorts of circumstances can determine what I in fact end up deciding. Whether I am free to decide to do or not to do A, compatibly with your ability to predict which I will do, is a conundrum that I won’t discuss. I’ll only assert the obvious, namely that whether or not you can predict what I will do does not change the fact that I do in fact experience myself as deciding.

Perhaps this apparent fact about the irreducibility of decision is really just an effect of perspective. From my own point of view as an agent, I can’t take my reason for action to causally-determine my action without failing to decide; but failing to decide is just another decision. (Compare: I never can directly see my own face: would I be right in concluding that my face is different from everyone else’s in some crucial way that makes it invisible?)

The first locus of the claim that agency is a form of subjectivity is probably Descartes[8], though he didn’t say it in so many words. But it takes just a little teasing out to get from the claim that the will is infinite to the present thesis. The infinitude of the will is unfortunately compatible with complete powerlessness. So the measure of the will’s freedom has nothing to do with its effectiveness in bringing about any change in the world. Furthermore, this infinite freedom says nothing about the origins of our desires. An admittedly simplistic argument suggests that the infinitude of the will’s freedom is also compatible with there being absolutely none of my desires that originates in myself. For whatever my desire, I cannot deny that it might have been different had I different genes or had I had a different life. In other words, my desire must have come from causes ultimately traceable to my genes and to my environment. But since I am not in any sense the author of either my genes or my environment, it seems to follow that I’m not the author of my own desires either. Whatever one may think of this somewhat fishy argument, it remains true that the “freedom of the will,” which I’m equating with the subjectivity of agency, cannot be denied: whenever I am made conscious of a set of possible choices, choosing is not so much something I can do, as something I cannot forbear to do, regardless of the origins of my grounds for making it or of whether my choice makes any difference to what results.

3. Titularity or ownness.

One of the specific ways in which my power of agency is “essentially subjective” is that my actions are mine in a peculiar sense of the word. Sergio Moravia (1995) has labeled “titularity” the fact that my mental attributes (including but not only including qualia) are my own in a unique sense of ownership. This sense of ownership is indeed peculiar. It is different from the sense in which I own my bicycle, different from the sense in which I own my hair; different from the sense in which, on some views, I own myself and no other person can logically own me; and different again from the sense in which I “own myself” and no one else can (ethically) own me. For if it is unethical for some person to own another, then it is not metaphysically impossible. But it would seem to be not merely unethical, but metaphysically (or logically) impossible for the slave-owner to own his slave’s experiences.[9] The point has been made by Tye (1995, 10-11,71ff), who distinguishes two problems raised for materialism by this feature. We might call these the two conditions of special ownership. One is that every mental state necessarily belongs to someone or other; and the second is that every mental state necessarily belongs to whoever it belongs to and not anyone else.

This is a particularly good example of the mystifying function of these declarations of subjectivity. For the special sense of ownership involved here is not, in fact, exclusive to mental states, but belongs to a large class of predicates. It was described long ago by Aristotle, in connection with what commentators have named “dependent particulars”. There are two senses in which we can talk about the whiteness of this paper: one refers to a specific shade of white, and in that sense the whiteness of this paper might also belong to, or characterize, some other surface. But in another sense it is logically impossible that the whiteness of this paper should belong to anything else. We can reidentify this paper, even if it has changed colour, but there is no way that we can reidentify its whiteness independently of it. The paper exists independently of its whiteness, but not vice versa[10] (Aristotle 1963, 1a25-27). Tye points out that non-mental actions, such as one person’s laughter, or her walk, also meet both the conditions of special ownership. Events, even those involving no agency at all, exhibit the same feature. My pen’s falling to the floor is not something that logically could pertain to nothing, nor is it something that could pertain to anything other than my pen.

Besides titularity, the legal notion of ownership involves two features that have figured prominently in characterizations of what it means for something to belong to me. One is that I have a special right to use it: I have, as the phrase goes, priviledged access to it. The other is that I have the right to exclude others from my property. You might call this the right of privacy, and where it concerns my beliefs about myself, it amounts to their incorrigibility by any one else. These two, then, constitute the next two forms of subjectivity. They are commonly confused, at least in the terms used to describe them. But if we keep in our minds the difference between access and exclusion, it seems plain that they are indeed separable doctrines. I might enforce my right of access to my property, while not excluding anybody else. The converse seems to make less psychological sense, but is not logically impossible.

4. Privileged access.

It was long a dogma of the philosophy of mind that one of the defining characteristics of mental states was their privacy, that is, their inaccessibility to other observers. Tye sees this as one of the aspects of ownership: “My pains, for example, are necessarily private to me. You could not feel any of my pains.” (Tye 1990, 71). But clearly privacy is distinct from that other feature of ownership, privileged access. This may well be one of the features that the champions of subjectivity have in mind, but nowadays the issue of access is not generally regarded as clear in either direction. This is partly due, no doubt, to the influence of Wittgenstein’s attack on private languages. On the one hand, we have gotten used to talking about mental states which are clearly enough my own, but to which I have no access either because they are repressed in the “Freudian Unconscious” or because they pertain to the “Helmholzian Unconscious” (Johnson-Laird 1988, 354). Conversely, in the light of some recent thought experiments, the impossibility of accessing another person’s mental states can no longer be asserted without begging just the sorts of question at issue in debates about materialism.[11]

5. The incorrigibility of appearance.

One of the political privileges of privacy, in sense in which we speak of a right to privacy, is the right to keep others out. Under the last rubric I have focused on the subject’s access (which turns out to be dubious). What then of the subject’s converse right to exclude others?

Objective reality is more than meets the eye. No one subject, it seems, is ever in a position to exclude others from all facets of Reality. “Mere” appearances, as we call them, on the other hand, are subjective. We inherit from Plato one of the reasons for drawing this contrast: appearances change, while reality supposedly stays the same. But this is quite wrong-headed. If you were aware of an “appearance” which never changed, it would be a pretty sure sign that you were having a hallucination. Part of the changes brought to appearances are due to perspective, which I’ve already talked about; and if you didn’t see something in perspective and from your own point of view that would prove that it was not objective. If I thought I saw a circle from the side and it appeared circular, then I’d have to conclude it wasn’t really a circle. The supposed subjectivity of appearance, then, lies in its incorrigibility. It is only I that am incorrigible about what appears to me; anyone else fails to have equal authority with mine. Conversely, what seems to be the case is the only thing on which (for example) Descartes allows that I am incorrigible (Descartes 1984-1985, 29). Incorrigibility thus emerges as a form of subjectivity independent of those already listed, because it is logically possible that propositions concerning perspective, agency, ownership, and even privacy (and also qualitative experience and seeing-as, which we shall get to in a moment) might all be corrigible on the basis of objective evidence. Incorrigibility has a low status these days: most philosophers agree that if any candidates presented itself it would turn out to be an illusion. (Gopnik 1993) An inverse relationship holds between the empirical content of a claim and the degree of its certainty. It is a plausible principle, even if we do not cling to strict verificationist or falsificationist dogmas, that there is a direct correlation between corrigibility and content. (Sellars 1963)

6. Proprioceptive sense.

Among the things I own in some peculiar sense, though not in the peculiar sense just discussed, is my own body. Herein lies one more trademark of subjectivity. In the most common case, the proprioceptive “sense” designates the awareness we have of the position of one’s limbs. Try this: close your eyes and touch your nose with your index finger. You may miss, but not by much. Ramachandran and Hirstein have described a delightful experiment in which I can actually find the tip of my nose to be displaced to where the tip of your nose actually is actually displaced:

[T]he subject sits in a chair blindfolded, with an accomplice sitting at his right side…. facing in the same direction. The experimenter then stands near the subject, and with his left hand takes hold of the subject’s left index finger and uses it to repeatedly and randomly tap and stroke the nose of the accomplice, while at the same time, using his right hand, he taps and strokes the subject’s nose in precisely the same manner, and in perfect synchrony. After a few seconds of this procedure, the subject develops the uncanny illusion that his nose has either been dislocated, or has been stretched out several feet…..” (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1997, 452).

What I find particularly intriguing about this illusion, is that in fact this “sense” which guided your hand is not a sense at all, insofar as it has no “organ”. What’s more, it is clearly a form of subjectivity, insofar as only the subject can make the relevant observation. We can’t have someone else’s phantom nose illusion. But it’s not just a quale or bundle of qualia.

Here again one might divide even more finely. For the special proprioceptive consciousness of one’s own face seems to form a distinct class by itself. It is not so easily explained as the nose-displacement illusion, and even more interesting, Jonathan Cole has described severe disturbances in self-concept and interaction with others in patients suffering from “Möbius syndrome”, which involves an inability to move any of the muscles of facial expression (Cole 1998). This inability is described as inhibiting the development of a sense of self, no doubt largely because it makes impossible facial imitation which, from the earliest days of a baby’s life, establishes one’s sense of one’s own emotions in some sort of concert with the emotions of others. Cole cites (Meltzoff and Gopnik 1993)’s observation of imitation in infants as suggesting “that in early experience babies learn something of emotion, and how it is experienced, by taking the facial expressions of others and, by imitation, feeling their own faces to be like others” (Cole 1997, 481). More of this under a later heading (see “The subjectivity of intersubjectivity” below). At this point I wish only to point out that no such mechanism could make sense unless there existed the sort of pseudo-sixth sense that is proprioceptive perception of one’s own face.

But is this a problem comforting to the mysterians? No. On the contrary, all these proprioceptive phenomena, both common and exotic, are highly suggestive about the physical, neurological origins that are likely to give rise to them.

7. Ipseity.

When I refer to myself, I am not just referring to the person who happens to be me. This is a point developed in a number of papers by H.-N. Castaneda (e.g. Castaneda 1988) and by John Perry (1979). The latter’s vivid example has him noticing a trail of sugar in the supermarket. He identifies its source as someone whose cart contains a leaking bag of sugar, who is unaware of it, and who has apparently been all over the supermarket. But for a long time fails to identify the person thus “identified” with himself.[12]

Is knowing that I (Ronnie) am I a real piece of knowledge? God couldn’t know it, though he could know that the writer of the previous sentence is Ronnie, or any number of other statements identifying me with myself under two different descriptions.

A similar point could be made about perspective: since God is everywhere, he necessarily lacks perspective. Is this a limitation on God’s supposed omniscience? Whatever the answer, it is tempting to think that ipseity is merely a side-effect of perspective. Tempting, but wrong: for the facts of perspective are entailed by the existence of spatio-temporal particulars in space-time; not so ipseity, since it would be theoretically possible for all information I have about myself to be devoid of perspective, and for all my desires to be formulated in entirely general terms. Sober and Wilson have suggested that ipseity is an adaptive trait which allows a self-interested individual to channel benefits to itself without having to burden itself with large amounts of discriminatory information. “This speculation,” they add, “entails a small irony. People use the concept of “I” to formulate the thought that they are unique. Yet, part of the reason that people have this concept is that they are not unique….” (Sober and Wilson 1998, 214, 350). Sober and Wilson also correctly point out that ipseity (which they call “self-recognition”) differs from “self-awareness” in that “self-recognition does not require that the individual be a psychologist”, i.e. think of themselves as having beliefs and desires. (Sober and Wilson 1998, 216).

8. Tone or colour.

What is it like to be you? It’s not obvious either that Descartes was right about the transparency of that consciousness, nor that there isn’t anything it’s like to be me, nor that it’s somehow reducible to all the others, or to some subset of qualia. An individual tone, or colour is thus subjective in what seems to be yet another irreducible sense. Nevertheless, the colour of my life may supervene on many physical properties, just as the colour of a surface supervenes on a number of properties of texture, light, and relational properties computed by our visual system in ways determined by complex ecological factors (Thompson 1995). What is distinct about this form of subjectivity is that it concerns not sensory experience in general, but one’s experience of oneself in particular. It is precisely not reducible to ipseity, however, if the contrast I just borrowed from Sober and Wilson between ipseity and uniqueness is a real one. My feeling-of-being-me may well be different from anyone else’s analogous feeling, and indeed is likely to be so insofar as it supervenes on a number of factors that determine different aspects of our experience of ourselves.

9. The subjectivity in intersubjectivity.

My identity is, in part, intersubjective. I mean by this that it is causally constituted by my being able to gauge the state of my own mind, and particularly my own emotions, in interaction with others. I note three aspects of this interaction. First, grown-ups tell children what they feel, more or less effectively, resulting in adults who know more or less what they feel. I am not sure quite how to analyse the capacity to be so trained to recognize one’s own emotions; obviously it presupposes that there must be something that one is being trained to recognize, but it doesn’t follow that there must already be full-fledged emotions awaiting recognition. For it may be, as Sue Campbell has stressed, that expressing emotions contributes crucially to the determination of the emotion, both in the sense of bringing the emotion into being and in the sense of making it to be just this emotion and not another (Campbell 1998). Again, there would be no such possibility were there not some subjective side to the interpersonal transaction which is an expression of emotion. One creates one’s subjective sense of one’s own emotions by comparing them to others. But this suggests something of a paradox, since subjectivity seems to be a precondition, or presupposition, of its own cause. For there surely can’t be inter-subjective engagement if there are no subjectivities between which the engagement takes place. The solution to this puzzle no doubt lies in a developmental and dynamic perspective, allowing us to see how the intersubjective and the subjective appreciation of one’s emotional self develop together. One piece of the puzzle may lie in this third observation: Meltzoff and Gopnik (1993) have shown that infants are able to imitate facial expressions in the very earliest days of their lives, at a stage when one would be disinclined to ascribe to them anything like a sense of self. Nevertheless it would be surprising if this capacity didn’t play a role in the acquisition of emotional expressions and through them of a sense of self. Jonathan Cole puts it this way:

Through imitation a face can be assimilated from visual experience, through proprioception, into felt experience: something can be taken from being “out there” in another, to being “in me” (Cole 1998, 110)

If so, then certain forms of interaction would lie at the base of the acquisition of subjectivity in some of the other senses I have sketched.

10. Projection.

Though most mentions of subjectivity are intended to prove our species superiority, it does sometimes happen that the connotation of subjectivity is negative. One such case is where what’s intended is projective illusion or “projection” in the Freudian sense. Now projection is actually a pathological condition, to the extent that it represents a mistake, an illusion based on a sort of confusion between a characteristic of oneself (which isn’t acknowledged) and which is ascribed to others though it isn’t actually there. But there are closely related phenomena that carry no such stigma. Indeed, some people have suggested that simulation (a sort of systematic but non-self-deceptive projection) plays a crucial role in our understanding of other people. (Gordon 1986, 1992; Goldman 1992; contra, see Stich and Nichols 1992).[13]

11. Seeing-as.

Among the subtleties of my perceptual point of view and of my experiences (to which I return in the next section), lies a facet of subjectivity which does not appear to be exhausted by the previous descriptions. This is the fact that what I perceive, I commonly perceive-as-something-or-other. When I see a duck-rabbit, how many qualia do I see? In the paper cited above, Ramachandran and Hirstein go so far as to propose the following unabashedly functional hypothesis: when I look at a duck-rabbit figure, I can “see-it-as” only one (at least one at a time), because that’s precisely among the functions of consciousness: to fix “irrevocably” what we see so as to make it possible for us to undertake unambiguous action. Though Hamlet says conscience makes cowards of us all, yet it is consciousness, on this hypothesis, that has the job of keeping us from the Hamlet syndrome.

To see something as a so-and-so, is to see it in a way that involves intentionality. Yet some sensations are sometimes held to be experienced non-intentionally: the typical example is pain.

Pains, however, are sensed as painful. Indeed, (Kripke 1980) used this fact to revive an old argument against the identity theory of sensations and brain states. That classical argument went as follows:

A painful sensation S is not just painful, but essentially painful. Any neural process N with which we might claim to identify it, however, could only be contingently painful. Therefore, by Leibniz’s law, N couldn’t be identical with S.

In order to appreciate the modifications that Kripke brought to this argument, recall that he loosened the bonds linking the analytic, the a priori, and the necessary, and their contraries, the synthetic, the a posteriori and the contingent. His analysis requires us to appreciate that some statements, such as the identity statement ‘Water is H2O’, or ‘heat is mean molecular momentum’, might be both necessary and a posteriori. The necessity involved is ontological, not epistemic: Kripke allows that there is nothing wrong with the statement that for all we knew there might have been some different physical process responsible for the feeling of heat. But as it happens, there isn’t and there couldn’t be compatibly with the laws of nature (Kripke 1980, 333).

Kripke’s doctrine actually constitutes a minor puzzle in the history of contemporary philosophy. For to have thus relaxed the link between what can be known a priori and what is necessary opens the door to an identity theory immune to the old arguments about what can be imagined to be identical. Yet no sooner did Kripke open this door than he tried to push it shut: nothing is more certain, he argued, than the fact that to be painful is a necessary property of any pain. So if N is really identical to S, then it must be the case that N is necessarily painful too. And that Kripke finds incredible, on the ground that while in the case of heat there is something, namely the process of molecular motion, between the sensation and the heat, there is no analogue to this “something in the middle” in the case of pain. For the essence of pain is nothing but quale felt by the sufferer. (339)

But what’s wrong with the other possibility? Why not say that the neural process N is indeed necessarily painful? Since Kripke has duly shown that some necessary truths can be known a posteriori, the burden of proof is now on him to show that this isn’t one such necessary truth. All that we need grant his argument is the analyticity of ‘pain is painful’, and the fact that any physiological state’s painfulness, by contrast, is synthetic. Given that, however, it remains perfectly possible that some physiological state really is necessarily painful just as water is necessarily H2O, regardless of the fact that neither, in advance of scientific knowledge, can be expected to seem analytic.

12. Phenomenal experience.

I have left till last the most hotly contested of subjectivity’s battlefields. Chalmers puts the centrality of qualia in these terms:

The problem of explaining these philosophical qualities is just the problem of consciousness. This is the really hard part of the mind-body problem (Chalmers 1996, 4).

But it seems to be characteristic of those who take this form of subjectivity as central that any attempt at explaining our talk about qualia in materialist term is taken as a refusal to take the hard problem seriously. Dennett, for example, has repeatedly been accused of denying that we are conscious: “Dennett thinks there are no such things as qualia, subjective experiences, first-person phenomena, or any of the rest of it.” ((Searle 1997, 99) Apart from being admirably unambiguous about the “charge” against Dennett, this is a nice example of how the vast and unspecified “rest of it” is thrown into the same bag as qualia. Dennett has repeatedly denied denying that we have conscious experience, but since he has indeed also “quined qualia” (Dennett 1990), it’s clear without assessing the argument that Searle’s mere assertion of the intuition that qualia just are the “data” doesn’t settle the matter. Dennett doesn’t deny that we are conscious, or that we have experiences, “and the rest of it.” He just claims that the philosophical mystery made about qualia can be dispelled once it is kept separate from other theoretical issues that surround it. He has also argued that once one focuses on the functions of qualia – which can perfectly well be discussed in the third person – there is nothing left for the ineffably private qualia to be.

The issue of qualia seems to me open to a vice-grip strategy, which consists in squeezing the irreducibility of qualia between two complementary poles, the materialist identity theory and functionalism. Both are reductive in the sense that they propose third-person accounts of the qualia in question.

(1) Materialism: Churchland has recently argued that the identity theory of qualia can be rehabilitated. His strategy is illustrated by showing how the colour solid is isomorphic to the solid generated by the 3 dimensional structure of the antagonistic receptors which receive input from the three types of cones. The essential strategy here consists in the challenge: “what more do you want than full formal coherence between the physiological mechanisms and the phenomenological structure of the colour solid (or mutatis mutandis)?” (Churchland and Churchland 1998). If it is then objected that correlations don’t establish identity, the objector owes an account of what more is required. The answer can only be that two objects, however perfectly correlated, might differ in their causes and effects. The argument is then ready to be turned over to the functionalist.

(2) Functionalism: This is also best summed up in a challenge, the zombie challenge: if you can imagine some being whose reactions to a given scene (sound, sight, stimulus, or whatever) are like yours in every possible way, including synesthetic, associative, recollections evoked, etc.) can you really also imagine that this being might not be like you merely in lacking qualitative experience? If you can, then subjective consciousness, as such, is strictly epiphenomenal in a sense so strong as to make it “a concept that has no utility whatsoever” (Dennett 1991 402.)

At this point, an objector might suggest that functional equivalence is not enough, since two functionally equivalent items might be substantially different. But this objector is one that can safely be left in the hands of the identity theorist, who can once again appeal to the structural correlations between qualia and their physiological underpinnings.

At the risk of dismissing this huge debate with cavalierly short shrift, this vice-grip strategy seems to me sufficiently promising to suggest that the subjectivity of qualia does not actually constitute an insolubly “hard problem”.

Conclusion

Some of these “senses” or “aspects” of subjectivity may be redundant. I certainly am not confident that none could, by means of some ingenious argument, be reduced or assimilated to others. But to establish conclusively that they are all distinct would involve 11! or 65 pairwise comparison: I leave this as a rich mine of thesis topics for future doctoral students to explore. All I will rest on now is the thought that there are plausible, non-mystifying avenues of research open on each of the twelve forms of subjectivity I have described, and that in such piece-meal solutions lies the hope of solving the so-called problem of subjective consciousness.

NOTES
Lycan’s own strategy, however, is much like the one I espouse, though he concentrates on anatomizing the term consciousness rather than the term subjectivity. See Lycan (1996, 2-7).
See “Contre la phénoménologie”, forthcoming, available at http://web.archive.org/web/20071103170804/http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/sousa/contrephen.html.
Christians solved this problem with the usual combination of ingenuity and absurdity: God, while eternal, becomes incarnate, just to show that it’s not logically impossible for Him to say things like “Thank Goodness it’s Friday.”
Nagel, in The View from Nowhere, conflates several types of subjectivity, though I haven’t ascertained that all twelve can be found there. Not surprisingly, subjectivity turns out to be something of a mystery, and an irreducible one at that.
Note how the language here supports the idea that we are dealing with a single and mysterious “ontological mode”: by speaking of a “consequence” of subjectivity, rather than a component, type, or sense of subjectivity, Searle suggests that we can have a prior knowledge of this “ontological mode” and that we are merely drawing out its implications.
The dilemma I have just articulated leaves out what may appear to be the most poignant case: namely where I am already too gaga to express any opinion. In those cases, however, we might justify giving a “living will” authority by default even in a Parfitean world, as a sort of legal fiction, just as we grant authority by default to nearest relatives for certain other decisions affecting the welfare of the incompetent.
By the existentialists, by Stuart Hampshire in his Thought and Action (Hampshire 1983) and by Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self (Taylor 1989) among others.
Descartes’s cogito can also be credited with stressing subjectivity in a sense I’m not sure how to classify. This emerges from the consideration that if we try to paraphrase his argument in Med. II as a syllogism with a universal major premise, “Whatever thinks, exists” the argument will collapse because the premise is false, since thinking is done admirably well by many a fictional character.
In the phenomenological literature, there is supposed to be a “second phenomenological reduction” that has to do with ownness; but since I have never understood what that is, I confine myself to the non-phenomenological sources literature.
Cf. Aristotle, Categories 2: “There is, lastly, a class of things which are neither present in a subject nor predicable of a subject, such as the individual man or the individual horse. But, to speak more generally, that which is individual and has the character of a unit is never predicable of a subject. Yet in some cases there is nothing to prevent such being present in a subject. Thus a certain point of grammatical knowledge is present in a subject.”
One set of thought experiments are attributed to Zuboff in (Tye 1995, 78 ff). (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1997) offer similar speculations, in which judicious rewiring of brain connections results in two people sharing or exchanging experiences. They infer that sensations are actually not in principle unobservable by others. The contrary appearance, they argue, is due simply to the fact that in ordinary situations I can only have access to the experiences of others through “translation”. But if my brain were wired in just the right way to yours I would have direct access to your mental states.
A novel the name of which I’ve forgotten tells the story of a detective who suffers from amnesia and gradually comes to the conclusion that the criminal he is tracking is he himself.
For further debate see (Davies and Stone 1995).
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What is it to “know your own mind”? In ordinary English, this phrase connotes clear headed decisiveness and a firm resolve but in the language of contemporary philosophy, the indecisive and the susceptible can know their own minds just as well as anybody else. In the philosopher’s usage, “knowing your own mind” is just a matter of being able to produce a knowledgeable description of your mental state, whether it be a state of indecision, susceptibility or even confusion. What exercises philosophers is the fact that people seem to produce these descriptions of their own mental lives without any pretence of considering evidence or reasons of any kind and yet these descriptions are treated by the rest of us as authoritative, at least in a wide range of cases. How can this be?

Most of the philosophers exercised by this problem would regard the English phrase “knows his own mind” and its connotations as a mere distraction, as the product of a theoretically unhelpful ambiguity. But to some, the English phrase suggests a fruitful approach to the philosophical problem of self-knowledge. In the twentieth century, Wittgenstein, Sartre and Austin all explored the idea that such mental phenomena as thinking, reasoning, deliberating are, in an important sense, activities which culminate in deeds, in the making of cognitive commitments. Moran sets out to refurbish this tradition, to revive the notion that self-knowledge is special because it is a matter of actively making up your own mind, rather than of passively apprehending it.  

Moran’s approach looks most promising when applied to the cognitive parts of our mental lives: our beliefs, judgements, the more intellectual of our desires and emotions. Yet the contemporary discussion of self-knowledge focuses at least as much on experiential states like pain and visual sensations. Moran says at the outset that he thinks these questions about experience require a quite different treatment (p. xxxiii) and focuses his attention on the cognitive. Some of his opponents might regard this as an admission of defeat but the range of phenomena Moran does cover is sufficiently impressive to make his view worthy of very serious consideration. In this article, I shan’t try to discuss Moran’s account of belief, desire and emotion. Instead I will concentrate on his view of our knowledge of our own intentions and of what are doing (or shall do) to execute them.

The Epistemology of Agency

People in a normal frame of mind usually know what they are doing and they know this without having to observe their own behaviour. In Anscombe’s example, which Moran adopts, someone pumping water may know that they are operating a pump without observation but not know that they are creating a clicking noise except by hearing the noise (pp. 124-7). In Anscombe’s view, this is because making a noise is no part of what they are trying to do. Anscombe acknowledges that one can be wrong in thinking that one is operating a pump (the pump one means to operate might be an hallucination); her point is that our knowledge of our own actions is groundless, not that it is infallible. We can (and often do) know what we are doing without the evidential backing needed for knowledge of someone else’s pumping.

As both Anscombe and Moran observe, this epistemic authority extends to our own future agency (p. 88). A person in a normal frame of mind can come to know that they will go to London tomorrow simply by deciding to go to London tomorrow. Again this way of knowing the future is hardly foolproof: an unexpected rail strike or weakness of will may intervene, and empirical evidence as to the reliability of the railways  etc. is needed before the decision can be taken. Anscombe’s point is that a normal person can know that they will go to London in this way without amassing inductive evidence of their own resoluteness, of their propensity to stick to and execute their own decisions, whereas if they were asked whether someone else who has decided to go to London will actually go, they would need evidence not only about the state of the railways but also about how resolute the person in question is. For Anscombe, the fact that we (directly) create this action gives us a special, evidence-independent way of knowing of it. We lack groundless knowledge of what other people are doing or will do precisely because we don’t (directly) create their actions, rather we apprehend them as objects in the empirical world.

In expounding these points, I confined my attention to “people in a normal frame of mind”. An example devised by David Velleman shows why this qualification is needed.[2] I have agreed to meet an old friend in order to patch up a quarrel. As the meeting unfolds, I start to become petulant, raise my voice, provoke my friend into saying some unconscionable things and we part in anger. I later infer that I must have decided, before the meeting, to end the friendship, an objective which I skilfully attained. But at no stage either prior to or during the meeting would I have announced such an intention and even afterwards I unearth it only in an effort to explain what happened. I may end up convinced that this was my intention but only qua observer of myself.

I take it Moran has this sort of case in mind when he says that:

Even within a psychoanalytic explanation, it will normally be the case that the contrary thoughts and attitudes which explain the subject’s blocked awareness of the intention will themselves be reasons for ambivalence in his overall intention; that is the intention itself will not be a wholehearted one. Ignorance in such a case will not be mere ignorance, not only because it will be irresistible to look for a motivation of sorts to explain it, but because the motivation we then impute to the person must qualify the ascription of the original intention (as conflicted or partial). (p. 57) 

Applying this to Velleman’s example, I don’t fully intend to end the friendship because I can’t, to use Moran’s favoured expression, avow this intention and I can’t avow this intention because I am aware of good reasons for not ending the friendship. In general, Moran thinks that a subject is an epistemic authority about the content of his intentions and intentional actions only where the subject’s intentions seem well grounded to the subject himself. To the extent that an intention seems to him misguided, the subject’s privileged epistemic access to it will be compromised, as will his sense of being in control of behaviour guided by this intention. To put it another way, he will start to wonder whether this intention is, in the full sense, his.[3]

Moran’s epistemology of agency takes off from the fact that we create our actions, we don’t just observe them. But why, someone may ask, does the mere fact that we create our actions make us an authority about them? I am unsure whether Moran offers to answer to this question. He might regard it as a brute fact that everyone is an authority about the character of their own creations (including their actions). Alternatively, he might be offering us an explanation for this fact, an explanation which goes as follows: when we act, we act for a reason and the character of our action is determined by the character of our reasons. Subjects (in a normal frame of mind) know the character of their reasons – they know what practical considerations they find convincing and persuasive – and so they know the character of their action. A subject is an authority about what they are doing just in so far as they are an authority about their reasons.

If Moran is telling us the latter story then he must be operating with a highly rationalistic notion of agency. A moderate rationalist would require that truly intentional action be motivated by a reason, by the agent’s awareness of some respect in which the outcome intended would be desirable, without requiring that the agent act on (what he would think of as) his strongest or most powerful reasons. But this moderate rationalism does not suggest a substantial epistemology of agency: we can hardly explain how an agent knows what they are doing by supposing that they know what reasons they are acting on. To avoid this difficulty we are pushed towards a more extreme rationalism which insists that truly intentional agency is agency determined by the strongest reasons which the agent knows they have. Since knowing what reasons you have is not synonymous with knowing what you are doing, there is a substantial epistemology of agency on offer here. Yet such hyper-rationalism runs up against the fact that people intentionally do things they know they have sufficient reason not to do.

A hyper-rationalist can acknowledge that various forms of behaviour approximate to fully intentional and responsible agency but, for him, agency occurs in its pure form only when it accurately reflects the subject’s reasons.  I am unsure whether Moran is invoking this rationalist notion of agency because I am unsure whether he means to offer us a substantial epistemology of agency. This uncertainty is connected with another interpretative issue: how should we understand Moran’s discussion of practical irrationality and, in particular, his notion of akrasia?

Practical Irrationality

On the usual understanding of these terms, akratic or incontinent action is action which is performed even though the agent judges that it would be better for him to be doing something else. Akrasia is a very familiar phenomenon. If I eat more biscuits than I know I’ll be able to digest comfortably or remain slumped in front of the TV when I realise I ought to be making lunch, my eating and my lounging are things I do, things which I do deliberately, freely and intentionally, things for which I am fully responsible. In these respects, akratic action is no different from fully continent agency: it is agency par excellence.

Understanding akrasia in this way, I find some of the things Moran says about it rather puzzling. For example

when I know that I am akratic with respect to the question before me, that compromises the extent to which I can think of my behaviour as intentional action … Nor does a person speak with first-person authority about such conditions. (pp. 127-8)

Moran also says that the akratic does not “identify” with their action and that his knowledge of it is empirical and not “ordinary self-knowledge” (p. 67).[4] The implication is that while the akratic may be able to predict that he is likely to behave akratically and then exercise a sort of self-control by putting obstacles in the way of akratic behaviour (e.g. placing a time-lock on the drinks cabinet), he will lack that first-person knowledge of and control over his behaviour which the continent possess.[5]

Moran’s description fits Velleman’s psychoanalytic example very well but as a commentary on everyday akrasia, it is a bit overstated. My partiality to lunch time TV hardly qualifies as an obsession or a compulsion even though it tempts me to do what I know I should not do. I am not overwhelmed by the desire to watch, I choose to indulge it. If I am honest, I won’t deny that it is me who decides to remain on the sofa. Furthermore, I know perfectly well why I take this decision: the lunchtime soap opera is genuinely entertaining and diverting (though, even in my own eyes, other considerations are more pressing). There is no failure of first-person access either to the motivation for my akratic behaviour or to what it gets me to do.

Reflection on such everyday cases of akrasia puts pressure on Moran’s notion of an avowal. Moran says that there are two elements to avowal: first, an authoritative awareness of the state of mind avowed and secondly an endorsement of it (pp. 91-2). Consider a Catholic woman, described by Jackson, who has become pregnant after rape.[6] She judges that she ought not to have an abortion but akratically decides to have an abortion nevertheless and makes plans to attend the abortion clinic next week. Can she avow this intention? She can do more than report this intention in the way she might report a third parties’ intention but she can’t go as far as to endorse this intention. What she can do is to affirm that she is set on having an abortion, that she has resolved to have an abortion, that she is committed to having an abortion. Moran’s notion of an avowal seems to include the idea of endorsement (p. 67) so perhaps he would maintain that the woman can’t avow her intention. But if that is how the notion of an avowal is to be understood, it looks as if what manifests a distinctive knowledge of (and control over) intention is not our ability to avow these intentions but rather our ability to affirm them.

Until now I have been assuming that Moran is using “akrasia” in its standard sense but this may be a misreading. In several places, he is at pains to draw a distinction between what might be called pure evaluation on the one hand and decision-making on the other (where the notion of “deliberation” applies only to the latter)

the mere appraisal of one’s attitudes, however normative, would apply equally well to past as well as to current attitudes, and indeed may have just the same application to another person as to oneself. In itself such an assessment is not an essentially first-personal affair. Rather “deliberative” reflection as intended here is of the same family of thought as practical reflection, which does not conclude with a normative judgement about what would be best to do but with the formation of an actual intention to do something. (p. 59)

The implication of this paragraph is that Moran is not really interested in the relationship between someone’s judgement of their reasons and their action;  such judgement interests him only in so far as it involves the formation of an intention so to act. What really concerns Moran is the relationship between intention and action. If that is right we should focus our discussion of practical irrationality not on akrasia but rather on what I shall call irresolution.

Philosophers sometimes apply the labels “weakness of will” and “incontinence” to both akrasia and irresolution but they are not the same thing.[7] Akrasia is a matter of failing to intend and act in accordance with your practical judgement, your judgements about what you should (i.e. have most reason) to do. Irresolution is a matter of not sticking to intentions once formed, of giving in to the very ‘inclinations’ which the intention was formed (however akratically) to resist. As Jackson develops his example, his Catholic woman is by turns akratic and irresolute. She is akratic when she forms the intention to attend the abortion clinic but later on her scruples get the better of her and she irresolutely refuses to leave the house on the day of her appointment. We need not take a stand on the issue of whether this woman’s akrasia or her irresolution are symptomatic of irrationality. The present point is simply that they are not the same thing.   

I suspect that Moran tends to equate akrasia with irresolution (p. 81) and that this goes some way to explaining his view of akrasia. Moran argues convincingly that a person who knows they are irresolute will, as a matter of conceptual necessity, find it very difficult to form intentions (pp. 77-83, pp. 94-8). If past experience of her own behaviour convinces Jackson’s woman that she won’t attend the abortion clinic even if she decides to do so, it is hard to see how she can even decide to attend the clinic.  Saying “I intend to have an abortion but predict that I won’t” is rather like saying “I believe that it will rain but it won’t”. Both sentences express a state of mind that is more than irrational, it is paradoxical.[8]

Of course, an analyst might convince someone that they had a belief which they wished to disavow and the subject might express this by saying “I believe that my brother drove my parents to an early grave even though he didn’t”. But here the subject seems entitled to enter a qualification: this is not his belief in the full sense, he knows about it only via the analyst and he cannot assume full responsibility for it. It is plausible to say the same of intentions that the agent believes they won’t execute. The analyst may convince me that I still intend to proposition my childhood sweetheart someday even if I know perfectly well that I’ll never bring myself to do it. But, I can plausibly insist, this intention is mine only in an qualified sense. Fully self-conscious irresolution is indeed paradoxical. None of this applies to everyday cases of akrasia. There is nothing paradoxical about the statement “I know I ought not to have an abortion but I shall”. And there is little pressure to say that such a statement evinces a division of the person, or a diminishment of the person’s control over or responsibility for the intention.

Reading Moran’s discussion of practical irrationality as concerned with irresolution, he maintains that a person is an authority about what they are doing because they are an authority about the intention with which they act and they are an authority about the intention with which they act because this is something they have created, something which is itself an expression of their agency. Here it is the subject’s ability to affirm their intention, rather than their ability to endorse it, which ensures that they have knowledge of (and control over) what they are doing. But, read in this way, Moran is not offering the substantial epistemology of agency I suggested he might. Rather he is assuming that an agent has direct knowledge of both of what he is doing and of what he intends to do simply because he is choosing to do it.

To sum up, Moran thinks that there is close tie between what he calls the standpoint of practical deliberation and the possession of first-person epistemic authority: one is an authority about what one is doing and why just in so far as one is occupying this standpoint (p. 127). To occupy this standpoint is, by definition, to both make judgements about what you have reason to do and to implement those judgements in decision and action (pp. 63-4, pp. 94-5, p. 131, pp. 145-6).[9] Now it is clear that these two things can come apart: one can make practical judgements which one does not implement and one can take decisions or perform actions which do not reflect one’s practical judgements. The question for Moran is this: when that happens, is first-person authority necessarily compromised? Is a subject who fails to do what he thinks he ought to do ipso facto less well placed to know what he is doing and why? My discussion suggests a negative answer.

Conclusion    

I have focused on what I take to be a central theme of Moran’s book but my treatment has been far from comprehensive. For example, I have had to ignore his interesting discussion of belief, desire and emotion and I have failed to mention his illuminating criticisms of superficially similar positions (like Shoemaker’s). Two other features of the book are particularly worthy of mention. First, Moran offers us an interpretation of the work the early Sartre which enabled the present writer to read parts of Being and Nothingness with great profit. Secondly, I strongly recommend the fascinating final chapter in which Moran explores some virgin territory: the moral psychology of the first person.

Reading a work of academic philosophy, one often finds oneself slogging through chapter after chapter of critical commentary on the work of others, to be rewarded with only the vaguest sketch of an alternative view. Yet (to paraphrase Feyerabend) no sensible person abandons a theory because of a counterexample, only for a better theory. Moran has taken Feyerabend’s maxim to heart. His prose is elegant and engaging. He lays out his view in enough detail to expose its weaknesses as well as its strengths. Occasionally, I would have wished to know more about why he thinks his position should be preferred to alternatives. Nevertheless Moran has said enough to encourage others to build up the theory’s defences and highlight its advantages over more familiar approaches to the problem of self-knowledge.

 

 [1] Richard Moran, Authority and Estrangement (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), xc + 201 pp. Page references are to this work.

[2] D. Velleman – The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) pp. 126-7.

[3] See also Moran discussing of emotions which one can’t avow on p. 93.

[4] On p. 131 Moran connects claims about alienation to claims about control and responsibility, saying that (certain forms of) the latter are compromised by such alienation (see also pp. 117-8).

[5] Moran says similar things about the desires which motivate action (pp. 116-20).

[6] This example occurs on p. 4. of F. Jackson – ‘Weakness of Will’ Mind (1984) 93, pp. 1-18

[7] R. Holton – ‘Intention and Weakness of Will’ Journal of Philosophy (1999) 96: pp. 241-62.

[8] This reading makes good sense of the parallels Moran draws between akrasia and self-deception (p. 67, p. 87)

[9] This may be too strong. Perhaps Moran intends only that the deliberative standpoint be one in which it is believed that one’s decision will reflect one’s practical judgement. I don’t think this will help. Someone who does not believe but merely hopes that they will take what they regard as the right decision in a difficult situation may still know, in the usual first-person way, what they end up doing (or deciding to do).

 

KNOWING YOUR OWN MIND[1], David Owens  University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

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A number of rationalists, including Alfred Ayer, Morton White, and Karl Popper, recognizing these difficulties with panrationalism, proceeded to develop what we can call (following Popper) Critical Rationalism. These critical rationalists, according to Bartley, hold three points in common. (1) They begin by acknowledging that rationality is limited in “that some matters, such as the principles and standards of rationality, cannot be justified.” [97] As Morton White puts it: “There is no rock which can serve as a fulcrum on which… claims… can be weighed in some absolutely decisive way. The notion that there is such a rock is one of the chimeras of western thought.”6 (2) They hold that this concession is insignificant, or too minor to give comfort to irrationalism. (3) ) “If challenged, they tend to ground or justify their rationalist position in personal or social commitment to standards which are beyond challenge.” [97]

Alfred Ayer started out as a panrationalist of sense experience (or what is usually referred to as a logical positivist) in his 1936 book, Language, Truth, and Logic, but developed a form of critical rationalism in The Problem of Knowledge (1956). Ayer states that it is “impossible to provide a rational justification for basic philosophical standards, principles, and procedures” or to give a proof “that what we regard as rational procedure really is so; that our conception of what constitutes good evidence really is right.”7 Ayer’s concession means he avoids claiming more than he logically can. Yet Ayer fails to demonstrate how his position, as a theory of rationality, can afford to leave his epistemic standards unjustified. Ayer’s explanation of why his standards need no justification holds that a standard “could be irrational only if there were a standard of rationality which it failed to meet; whereas in fact it goes to set the standard: arguments are judged to be rational or irrational by reference to it.” (Ayer, p.75) “Since there can be no proof that what we take to be good evidence really is so”, then “it is not sensible to demand one.” (Ayer, p.81)

Ayer’s move from panrationalism to critical rationalism results in a conservatism, in which “the business of the philosopher becomes to analyze, and state as principles, the patterns of accepted ways of thinking and speaking.” [101] This change of attitude can be described in theological terms: Ayer moves away from apologetics (the procedure that seeks rational justification for religious commitment) to kerygmatics (the exposition and description of the fundamental message). Bad as this is, even worse is the fatal flaw in this strategy for bolstering rationalism against irrationalism: The same move is open to irrationalists. If Ayer holds that the ultimate standards of rationality are unjustifiable because they themselves set the standard for justification, the irrationalist can contend that Ayer can have no objection to someone who is committed to a different ultimate standard (such as Biblical writing). Ayer has simply begged the question in favor of his standards; he has done nothing and has admitted that he can do nothing to show why one set of ultimate standards or commitments must be chosen over others. If Ayer’s standards are in fact correct, then all argument must proceed in terms of them. But the correctness of these standards is just what is at issue. We don’t even have to turn to irrationalists to find challenges to Ayer’s standards: Popper’s conception of scientific method rejects not only the legitimacy but the existence of inductive procedure. Ayer’s approach, then, turns out to be just one type of fideism rather than an antidote to it.

Popper’s critical rationalism also suffers from fideism, although he is at least open about it, as we can see in this passage from The Open Society and Its Enemies, where he proposes to adopt a “minimum concession to irrationalism.” [p.416-17] He writes:

whoever adopts the rationalist attitude does so because he has adopted, without reasoning, some proposal or decision,or belief, or habit, or behavior, which therefore in its turn must be called irrational. Whatever it may be, we can describe it as an irrational faith in reason…. the fundamental rationalist attitude is based upon an irrational decision, or upon faith in reason. Accordingly, our choice is open. We are free to choose some form of irrationalism, even some radical or comprehensive form. But we are also free to choose a critical form of rationalism,one which frankly admits its limitations, and its basis in an irrational decision (and so far, a certain priority for irrationalism).

Is there a way out of this irrationalist quagmire? Can we be rationalists with good conscience? Is rationalist integrity possible? Can we reject all forms of irrationalism and fideism without having to exempt our own standards of rationality from scrutiny and possible revision? I will argue that another form of rationalism pancritical rationalism is the answer, and furthermore clearly and powerfully helps to promote extropian goals, as expressed in the five Extropian Principles.

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…continued from yesterday 

Panrationalism is not a modern invention. Bartley tells us that panrationalism can be traced back at least as far as Epictetus who wrote in his Discourses: “To be a reasonable creature, that alone is insupportable which is unreasonable; but everything reasonable may be supported.” The panrationalist conception of what it means to be a rationalist holds two principles:

(1) Any position that can be justified or established by appeal to rational argument is to be accepted; and

(2) only positions that can be justified or established by appeal to rational argument are to be accepted.

Rationalists have long taken these principles as given, instead focusing on questions that arise only if the tenets are assumed to be correct, in particular the question: “What is the nature of the rational authority or standard according to which a rationalist can justify all his propositions?” Most theories of knowledge that have offered answers to to this question can be classified as Rationalist/Intellectualist or as Empiricist. (Although “rationalist” is the more common term for the first kind of position, I will use the term “intellectualist” to avoid confusion with the broader meaning of rationalist employed throughout this paper.) The intellectualist justifies her beliefs by appealing to a purported faculty of intellectual intuition, or pure Reason. The empiricist appeals instead to sensory experience. Despite the sustained attention of many sharp minds, all of these attempts have collapsed.

Rene Descartes, a paradigmatic intellectualist, sought an indubitable standard capable of terminating the regress of argument, without need for a dogmatic commitment. He thought he found such a standard in clear and distinct ideas presented to the intellect, their veracity guaranteed by God. All error came from the will, which decided that something was known before having been reduced to clear and distinct ideas. In the seventeenth century, skeptics like Gassendi weakened confidence in Descartes’ scheme, but it was crippled in the eighteenth century by John Locke, David Hume, and finally buried by Immanuel Kant’s “antinomies of pure reason”. Our intellectual intutions, it turned out, are too variable and unreliable. Furthermore, the rationalists realized, intellectualist versions of panrationalism were too wide, that is they allowed in mutually inconsistent beliefs, and they granted tenability to belief in such things as God, which rationalists thought should be excluded by a sensible rationalism.

Empiricist versions of panrationalism developed from the works of Bacon, Locke, and Hume, ending up in the twentieth century as logical positivism. Here the infinite regress of demands for justification were stopped not by intellectual intuitions but by sense data which it was held, were self-guaranteeing, incorrigible, unchallengeable. For empiricists, it was nature rather than God which did not deceive, and the irrationalist was the person whose ideas and theories could not be derived from sense observations or who clung to their beliefs with greater tenacity that sense experience sanctioned. As Bartley points out, “Whereas the main fault of intellectualism had been to include too much, to ascribe rationality to untenable views, the main fault of empiricism was to exclude too much, to exclude obviously tenable views as irrational.” [90] Thus empiricists beginning with Hume found themselves unable to justify induction, causality, the self, the existence of the external world or of other minds, or the rationality of scientific procedure.

When it became generally accepted that even Kant’s attempted fusion of intellectualism and rationalism into a new form of panrationalism had collapsed, many rationalists took refuge in pragmatism or instrumentalism. Their inability to justify some of their most basic and significant ideas and procedures was no problem, they now said, since beliefs in such things as scientific laws or in the existence of other minds were not, after all, descriptions of reality. Rather than describing the world, such ideas are instruments, tools, or symbols that help us find our way around. These beliefs are not justified on a factual basis grounded in sense experience, but only only on the basis of their utility in making predictions or in classifying the objects of experience.

Instrumentalism turned out to be a weapon easily adoptable by the irrationalists. They saw that instrumentalism allowed irrational commitments to persist without coming into conflict with science. The enemies of reason could plausibly declare belief in instruments or symbols such as God, angels, or the soul to be useful in organizing, interpreting, and handling experience especially if we include moral experience. Rationalists found their new weapon turned against them; they could no longer object to the irrationalists that their beliefs had no foundation in empirical reality. Also disturbingly, we can see that instrumentalism lends support to views that assert the reducibility (not the mere correlation) of beliefs to nonrational factors such as social class, nationality, race, gender, historical period, and so on. We see a clear case of this in Marxism, where ideology is generated by one’s economic class which itself results from the material relations of production.

A panrationalist may yet hope to discover a standard by which all irrational beliefs can be excluded and all rational beliefs justified. However, by returning to the two requirements for a panrationalist, we can see that panrationalism is impossible in principle. The two requirements were:

(1) Any position that can be justified or established by appeal to rational argument is to be accepted; and

(2) only positions that can be justified or established by appeal to rational argument are to be accepted.

We cannot simultaneously hold both principles for if we accept the second principle we must reject the first. The second principle enjoins us to accept only positions that can be justified by appeal to rational argument, yet it seems we cannot justify the first principle by appeal to sense experience or intellectual intuitions, or any othe rational authority.

If we are to reject one of the two criteria for rationalism, it should be the second because (a) we surely will not want to abandon the requirement that a rationalist accept any proposition that can be rationally justified; and (b) the second requirement is self-contradictory. The proposition that only positions that can be justified or established by appeal to rational argument are to be accepted cannot itself be justified by appeal to rational criteria. By its own imperative, if the second requirement is true, it must be rejected. The requirement thereby asserts its own untenability.

We should not accept the second principle because we should recognize that some statements, beliefs, and criteria at any time must be simply accepted without argument because they form the starting point for argument. As Popper puts it: “Since all argument must proceed from assumptions, it is plainly impossible to demand that all assumptions should be based on argument.” (The Open Society, 230) Of course, an assumption accepted without justification in order to start a particular line of argument might later, in the context of a different argument, become the object of justification. Significant results cannot be obtained from argument if we accede to the demand to start with no assumptions, or even to the weaker demand that we start with a very small set of assumptions such as the Kantian “categories” or Rand’s “axiomatic concepts”. Comprehensive rationalism or panrationalism falls down by being unable to justify itself. The rationalist attitude can be based neither upon argument nor experience, for a rationalist attitude must first be adopted if any argument or experience is to move a person. Only those who have already adopted this attitude will be convinced by arguments in its favour.

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The next few days covers some issues related to panrationalism and pancritical rationalism. The content is based on a paper delivered by Max More at Extropy’s Institute’s 1994 conference EXTRO-1 “Pancritical Rationalism: An Extropic Metacontext for Memetic Progress” .  Let us start off with Rationalism and Justificationism.  

Karl Popper suggests that we can understand rationalism in this way:

We could then say that rationalism is an attitude of readiness to listen to critical arguments and to learn from experience. It is fundamentally an attitude of admitting that “I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth”.

According to familiar versions of rationalism, everything is open to criticism, everything requires justification, except certain privileged propositions or procedures, whether these be sense data, logic, or induction. Bartley refers to this as the dilemma of ultimate commitment, or the problem of presuppositions [72]. Rationalists have held the view that any statement, to be justified (to be held rationally), must be supported by argument. Any argument involves both presuppositions and epistemic standards, which themselves require justification in turn. Argumentation thus leads to an infinite regress of justification, with each new supporting reason itself requiring justification. Unless we reach some indisputable, bedrock position, the original proposition remains unjustified. To justify the original contention, some unquestionable authority must be reached. Such standards, criteria, or ultimate presuppositions are simply accepted without further justification.

The situation is problematic whether different people have the same or diverse ultimate standards. What if people have different ultimate stopping points? How can we rationally arbitrate between them? Suppose René asserts that he has the correct means for deciding between differing ultimate standards or authorities. George will reply that no, he has the correct means and it shows that René’s method is faulty and, furthermore, so is his position. What if, on the other hand, everyone did accept the same ultimate standard? Still, there would be no way to prove that it led to objective truth about the world. An ultimate standard cannot be justified by appeal to another standard, for then it would not actually be the ultimate standard. But neither can it be justified by appeal to itself, for that would be to argue in a vicious circle. But if the standard of rationality is held immune from the need for rational justification, it can be said to be held irrationally or dogmatically. Many thinkers have therefore concluded that arguing about ultimate standards is pointless. It appears that reason is relativized to the differing ultimate standards, defining irreconcilable ideological communities.

The skeptic reacts to this situation by holding that since nothing can be supported rationally, we should (try to) suspend judgment about everything. Such a position is hard to live by: How, for example, can we go about our lives while refusing to accept the validity of inductive inferences? David Hume, the disturbing philosopher who first demonstrated the impossibility of justifying induction, found that when he left his philosophical study, he was unable to prevent himself from believing in the procedure that, in his reflective moments, he believed to be irrational. This conflict of practical action and theoretical belief has bothered generations of thinkers familiar with Hume’s skeptical writings.

While the rationalist skeptic frets over the problem, the fideist glories in it, proclaiming that an irrational, ungrounded ultimate commitment is necessary. Since no ultimate standards can be justified, the fideist gloats, why not accept as your standard the proclamations of the Pope, or the urgings of your feelings, or the will of the people, or the assertions of der Füehrer? The inability of the rationalist to justify ultimate epistemic standards opens the door to securing agreement by means of force or psychological manipulation.

A central epistemic procedure that philosophical thinkers have long sought to justify is that of induction. Inductive inference appears to be crucial to much of our daily reasoning as well as essential for scientific methodology. Whereas deductive reasoning involves logically valid inferences from a universal rule combined with an instance to a conclusion about a particular case (”All tax-collectors are extortionists, Sally is a tax-collector, therefore Sally is an extortionist”), inductive inference goes from some finite number of instances to a universal conclusion (”That human died, and that human died, and that human died, therefore all humans die”). If we want our beliefs to be justified, we must acquire them by a means that confers justification. So can we show inductive inference to be justified?

Clearly inductive inferences are not deductively valid. No matter how many instances we have seen of humans dying, we cannot logically deduce that the next human we observe will also die, since there is no contradiction in asserting the contrary. We can make the inference deductively valid by adding a premise:

Alice was human and she died.

Bob was human and he died.

Chris was human and he died.

[and so on...]

Observed past regularities will always continue into the future.

Therefore, the next human I observe will die.

Now we cannot deny the conclusion if we accept the truth of the premises. Unfortunately, to produce a deductively valid argument, we had to introduce a premise that itself embodies induction. So we have assumed induction in order to make the argument valid.

We will run into circularity even if we forget about trying to turn induction into deduction. When I have observed a constant conjunction between As and Bs (for instance between night being followed by day), I make the inductive inference that the next A will be followed by a B. For this belief to be justified I must be justified in believing in the procedure by which I came to the belief. I believe that a B will occur because I have observed past instances of As being followed by Bs, and I now observe an A. But my belief that this A will be followed by a B will be justified only if I am justified in believing that observed instances provide reason to believe a certain statement about unobserved instances. In other words, I need to be justified in believing in some kind of Uniformity Principle, such as “Instances of which we have have had no experience will resemble those of which we have had experience; th course of nature will continue uniformly the same”. But how am I to justify that belief? I must justify it on the basis of experience: I must justify the Uniformity Principle by means of a justified inference from what has been observed to the truth of the principle. But this is circular reasoning, since every inference from the observed to the unobserved is based on the Uniformity Principle. None of the justificationist attempts to solve this problem whether Strawson’s argument based on the meaning of “reasonable”, Russell’s argument that induction is a priori, or Reichenbach and Salmon’s practicalist or pragmatist approach, has withstood criticism. Pancritical Rationalism solves the problem by doing away with the need for induction, replacing it with the falsification of scientific laws in terms of observational statements.

Induction is not alone in its problematic status as an unjustifiable ultimate standard. I could have chosen instead to look at sensory input as a foundation for knowledge or justified belief. Whatever the particular privileged epistemic process, the problem of ultimate commitment applies to all foundationalist epistemologies (whether intuitionist or empiricist). Less clear is whether the problem equally to coherentist epistemologies, which reject the idea of epistemically basic beliefs. Unfortunately Bartley doesn’t discuss coherentist views like that of Keith Lehrer. Most coherentist views suffer from other fatal flaws however; linear coherence theories, for instance, allow justification to result from infinitely-long, non-terminating sequences of inferences from other beliefs, or from circular chains of reasoning. Possibly some form of negative, holistic5 coherence theory avoids the problem of ultimate commitment, though it would still be a justificationist approach. I shall not try to decide that question here. Whether foundationalist or coherence, standard epistemologies are all theories of epistemic justification. A typical foundationalist view seeks to justify beliefs in terms of some special class of epistemically basic beliefs. In past centuries such basic beliefs were taken to be things like intellectual intuition, the word of God, or clear and distinct ideas. Modern foundationalists have dethroned these and installed beliefs about appearances, or sense-data, as the specially privileged foundations of all justified belief.

It seems, then, that whatever particular epistemology she subscribes to, the rationalist faces the problem of ultimate commitments. As a result, rationalists haave been hard pressed to respond to fundamental anti-rationalist arguments. As Bartley says:

“The blame for continued failure by rationalists to answer sceptical and fideistic arguments about the limits of rationality should, in fact, be placed on the inadequacy and primitive character of our theories of rationality, or on our conception of rationalist identity, rather than on our rationality or reasoning capacity itself, where Pascal, Kant, and many others have put it.” [Bartley, p.85]

I will follow Bartley’s procedure in the middle part of this paper by emphasizing the difficulties inherent in two standard conceptions of rationalism panrationalism (or comprehensive rationalsim), and critical rationalism. Having seen the stages passed through by rationalism, we will be in a position to appreciate a third conception, pancritical rationalism (or comprehensively critical rationalism).

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Much of the conflict resolution literature presents an image of disputants as rational actors who are focused on pursuing their long-term interests, unaffected by their emotions. The “realist” approach suggests that all conflict involves material interests, while the rationalist approach suggests that conflict is the outcome of conscious intentions. [1] The idea seems to be that if parties rely solely on logic, both sides can advance their interests and come to a mutually acceptable compromise in the event that those interests conflict. Any emotional and relational factors should be set aside so that the political and economic interests that are central to the conflict can be addressed. Feelings of humiliation, shame, fear, and anxiety are viewed as obstacles to rational thinking and as a sign of vulnerability. [2]

Once parties have identified their deep-seated concerns and interests, they can make trade-offs and concessions and work together to devise creative solutions to their problems. Rationality helps them to explore their various interests and options, identify their zone of possible agreement, and find a way a way to compromise. According to the widely-accepted conception of means-ends rationality, a rational act is one that uses the most efficient means to achieve a given end. [3] Classical economic theory, for example, describes individuals as “hyper-rational.” [4] They make decisions by gathering and processing information and then acting in a manner that maximizes utility.

However, an approach to conflict that over-emphasizes rationality may obscure the fact that disputants in conflict are often influenced by unconscious motives and guided by the emotions of anger, fear, distrust, and shame. Protracted conflict, in particular, is often a result of parties’ lack of self-knowledge, disturbances in communication, and unacknowledged feelings about their relationship. [5] Insofar as strong emotions typically play either a positive or negative role in the way parties wage conflict and attempt to negotiate solutions, emotions have a profound influence on dispute management as well  Conflict and its resolution are driven not only by the pursuit of instrumental goals and rational interests, but also by desires for less tangible things such as love, recognition, and a sense of belonging.

Are Negotiations Guided by Rationality?

Most of the training literature for negotiation and mediation suggests that emotions should be ignored and that third party interveners should guide disputants toward rational behavior. [6] However, it is doubtful that the rational thought processes and decision-making that occurs during negotiation can function independently of the emotions. [7] Indeed, strong emotions are typically part of the negotiation process and may cause negotiations to break down if they are not dealt with properly. Feelings of fear, mistrust, and anger, for example, often interfere with effective negotiation by clouding parties’ judgment, narrowing their focus of attention, and distracting them from their substantive goals. [8]

For a settlement to be reached, it is not necessary that parties overcome all obstacles or address all of their concerns. There simply need to be enough incentives to motivate them to consent to the proposed agreement. Note that not all of these incentives are ones that figure into cost-benefit analysis or rational assessment. While it is true that disputants typically rely on rationality to assess the gains and losses associated with a proposed settlement, it seems clear that psychological rewards and disincentives likewise play a role. In addition to financial considerations and material interests, there are intangible considerations that may weigh in favor of settlement or against it. [9] For example, the emotional benefits and losses that may be anticipated as a result of settlement include recognition, revenge, honor, distrust, anger, and embarrassment. Other intangible considerations include the thoughts and feelings of the disputants about their relationship.

In many cases, disputants are not even reflectively aware of these emotional and relational factors. Unacknowledged threats to relational bonds result in shame can set the stage for insult, humiliation, and revenge. [10] These hidden emotional factors may make coming to a settlement seem unfavorable even, when such an agreement would best serve parties’ material interests. Indeed, if emotions are high, disputants are likely to be antagonistic in response to anything the other side proposes. Negative emotions thus may lead parties to neglect their instrumental goals.

Conflicts that are relatively intangible are those rooted in the dynamics of history, religion, culture, and values. Because these conflicts “arise from the depths of the human heart rather than the material world,” it is difficult to determine their parameters and boundaries. [11] When these conflicts continue for a long time, parties’ goals tend to extend beyond advancing their concrete interests to include upholding their dignity and prestige. Conflicts rooted in underlying value differences, identity issues, or unacknowledged emotions cannot be addressed in the same way as disputes over tangible resources. According to Jay Rothman (1997), trying to use common modes of bargaining to address conflicts that are poorly defined or intangible often proves to be inadequate.

Marc Gopin (2002) recommends that political negotiations to manage such conflicts be accompanied by efforts to address religion, culture, moral commitments, and the transformation of relationships. In his view, building peace requires more than political settlements and rational agreements. It requires groups’ ability to address the cultural and spiritual dimensions of conflict and deal with their feelings of humiliation, dishonor, and grief. Systems of mourning and coping with ultimate loss should be brought into the realm of peacemaking. Gopin believes that in addition to addressing the conflict’s substantive political issues, we should work to foster healing and reconciliation.

Understanding Conflict Escalation

In addition, an over-emphasis on rationality will limit our understanding of conflict escalation. Under certain circumstances, such as when one party has overwhelming power over its opponent, escalation is the rational thing to do. It makes sense to use one’s power to overcome the opponent’s resistance or to intentionally escalate the conflict in order to gain more leverage. [12] In these cases of tactical escalation, where parties make a rational choice to intensify conflict, they may actually be able to improve the conflict situation. However, escalation more commonly occurs without the parties having a full understanding of the situation or considering alternative courses of action. When conflict is driven by feelings of anger, fear, and perceived injustice, parties may overreact to the situation at hand and conflicts may spiral out of control. For example, sometimes individuals will perceive a grave threat, even though the situation is not actually as dangerous as they think it is. While there may be no real cause for anger or intense fear, these feelings may take over and lead to aggression. Actions that are seen as extreme or overly severe may then provoke outrage from the other side and cause conflict to become unnecessarily violent and destructive. [13] Overcome by hostility or a desire for revenge, the parties may develop grandiose positions that are unrealistic and unreasonable.

The intensification of conflict is typically accompanied by significant psychological changes among the parties involved. In addition to feelings of anger and fear, parties tend to develop stereotypes, negative attitudes, and mistaken perceptions of the other side. There is a tendency to misinterpret the behavior of one’s opponent or to assume that the intentions and basic dispositions of one’s enemy are always fundamentally “evil.” Even when an adversary makes some conciliatory actions or attempts to make some concessions, this conduct is likely to go unnoticed, or to be discounted as deceptive. [14] These mechanisms of attributional distortion and selective perception are not fully rational, and yet they influence much of the destructive behavior we see in value and identity conflicts. Indeed, parties may become so hostile and aggressive that they that may come to believe that the only way to resolve their conflict is to destroy the other side and make the other group just “go away” or “disappear.” It is these extreme attitudes that often result in genocide, war, and terrorism, many instances of which result in great harm to oneself or one’s group. Indeed, the injury that people sometimes undergo so that they can cause harm to their “enemies” suggests that people caught in conflict often act for reasons which defy rational calculations of self-interest. A failure to address these non-rational, social-psychological dimensions of conflict makes it difficult to account for why ordinary people engage in such destructive and violent acts.

Non-Rational Modes of Conflict Resolution Knowledge

Focusing solely on rationality may also cause us to overlook some of the important ways that people come to learn about ways to manage conflict. The conflict resolution field emphasizes research, training, and study as primary avenues for the development of knowledge. Through analysis and the application of various theories, practitioners can learn how to synthesize different approaches and apply resolution procedures to concrete conflict situations. Many people believe that knowledge gained through rational thinking and book learning should serve as the field’s focus. However, some theorists have begun to recognize that everyday, commonsense understandings of conflict play a central role in the process of learning how to manage conflict. Rather than being developed through scholarly study, folk knowledge is acquired through intuition and experience and embedded in cultural traditions. This awareness of how to manage conflict is a skill that people develop through everyday activity rather than through reflection and textual analysis. According to Paul Wehr (1998), this sort of knowledge evolves from generation to generation and emerges wherever human beings try to live together and get along in everyday life. [15] Children receive a great deal of this knowledge from their parents, elders, and social surroundings.

Stories, poetry, and rituals are likewise important sources of conflict resolution knowledge. Narratives allow people to gain insight into the perspectives and experiences of others and understand the motives and intentions behind their behavior. Similarly, poetry can help parties to identify their grievances, raise understanding about conflict dynamics, and move them toward reconciliation. In addition, participating in rituals often allows people to gain a deeper sense of what sorts of relationships they would like to build. Instead of emphasizing words or rational thought, ritual involves symbols, senses, and non-verbal communication. Through informal social activities as well as more formal cultural and religious ceremonies, parties tap into their emotions and learn how to wage conflict in more constructive ways. According to Lisa Schirch (2005), ritual offers parties an opportunity to interact in a space that is set apart from the conflict so that they can begin to develop a shared understanding of the challenges they face. Through art, ceremony, and symbolic activity, people who know little about the academic study of conflict resolution can gain knowledge about how to manage their conflict. In Schirch’s view, efforts to approach conflict in an exclusively rational, analytical, and linear mode are insufficient. [16] This is because much of our knowledge about conflict is rooted in our emotions, worldviews, and cultural understandings.

The imagination is yet another source of conflict knowledge that is not strictly rational. According to John Paul Lederach (2005), the capacity to recognize possibilities and envision constructive change does not emerge through the careful application of pre-established techniques. Instead, conflict transformation tends to come about through something that approximates an artistic process. [17] These “ah-ha” moments in which valuable insights surface are more like moments of aesthetic imagination than rational examination. Lederach thus views peacebuilding as an art form that requires creativity, constant innovation, and the ability to get to the heart and soul of conflict.
References
 
[1] Suzanne Retzinger and Thomas Scheff, “Emotion, Alienation, and Narratives: Resolving Intractable Conflict.” Mediation Quarterly 18(12)(2000-2001); available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20080120054541/http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff/16.html

[2] Daniel L. Shapiro, “Negotiating Emotions,” in Conflict Resolution Quarterly, (20:1, 2002), 68.

[3] Milton Rinehart, “Towards Better Concepts of Peace,” Working Paper 89-14, Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado; available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20080120054541/http://www.colorado.edu/conflict/full_text_search/AllCRCDocs/89-14.htm

[4] Edward E. Ergenzinger, “Conversations with Phineas Gage: A Neuroscientific Approach to Negotiation Strategies,” Mediate.com; available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20080120054541/http://www.mediate.com/articles/Ergenzinger.cfm

[5] T. J. Scheff, Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War,(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994) 3.

[6] Suzanne Retzinger and Thomas Scheff, “Emotion, Alienation, and Narratives: Resolving Intractable Conflict.” Mediation Quarterly 18(12)(2000-2001); available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20080120054541/http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff/16.html

[7] Ergenzinger, http://web.archive.org/web/20080120054541/http://www.mediate.com/articles/Ergenzinger.cfm

[8] Robert S. Adler, Benson Rosen, and Elliot M. Silverstein, “Emotions in Negotiation: How to Manage Fear and Anger,” in Negotiation Journal, (14:2, 1998). Summary available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20080120054541/http://www.colorado.edu/conflict/full_text_search/AllCRCDocs/adler.htm

[9] Shiri Milo-Locker,”The Decision to Settle – Balance, Setoffs and Tradeoffs Between Rational, Emotional and Psychological Forces,” Mediate.com, available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20080120054541/http://www.mediate.com/articles/lockerS1.cfm?nl=51

[10] Scheff, 1994, 3.

[11] Jay Rothman, Resolving Identity-Based Conflict in Nations, Organizations, and Communities, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997), 11.

[12] Otomar Bartos and Paul Wehr, Using Conflict Theory. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 99.

[13] Louis Kriesberg, Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution. (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, Inc., 1998), 169.

[14] ibid., 153.

[15] Paul Wehr, “The Development of Conflict Knowledge” http://web.archive.org/web/20080120054541/http://www.colorado.edu/conflict/peace/essay/wehr7492.htm

[16] Lisa Schirch, Ritual and Symbol in Peacebuilding, (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, Inc., 2005), 35.

[17] John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Arts and Soul of Building Peace, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

The above article is by Michelle Maiese from http://www.beyondintractability.org/  and the original can be found at http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/limits_of_rationality/?nid=6566

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This article on Theism, Atheism, and Rationality  is by Alvin Plantinga  

A theological objections to the belief that there is such a person as God come in many varieties. There are, for example, the familiar objections that theism is somehow incoherent, that it is inconsistent with the existence of evil, that it is a hypothesis ill-confirmed or maybe even disconfirmed by the evidence, that modern science has somehow cast doubt upon it, and the like. Another sort of objector claims, not that theism is incoherent or false or probably false (after all, there is precious little by way of cogent argument for that conclusion) but that it is in some way unreasonable or irrational to believe in God, even if that belief should happen to be true. Here we have, as a centerpiece, the evidentialist objection to theistic belief. The claim is that none of the theistic arguments-deductive, inductive, or abductive-is successful; hence there is at best insufficient evidence for the existence of God. But then the belief that there is such a person as God is in some way intellectually improper-somehow foolish or irrational. A person who believed without evidence that there are an even number of ducks would be believing foolishly or irrationally; the same goes for the person who believes in God without evidence. On this view, one who accepts belief in God but has no evidence for that belief is not, intellectually speaking, up to snuff. Among those who have offered this objection are Antony Flew, Brand Blanshard, and Michael Scriven. Perhaps more important is the enormous oral tradition: one finds this objection to theism bruited about on nearly any major university campus in the land.

The objection in question has also been endorsed by Bertrand Russell, who was once asked what he would say if, after dying, he were brought into the presence of God and asked whyhe had not been a believer. Russell’s reply: “I’d say, ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” I’m not sure just how that reply would be received; but my point is only that Russell, like many others, has endorsed this evidentialist objection to theistic belief. Now what, precisely, is the objector’s claim here? He holds that the theist without evidence is irrational or unreasonable; what is the property with which he is crediting such a theist when he thus describes him? What, exactly, or even approximately, does he mean when he says that the theist without evidence is irrational? Just what, as he sees it, is the problem with such a theist? The objection can be seen as taking at least two forms; and there are at least two corresponding senses or conceptions of rationality lurking in the nearby bushes. According to the first, a theist who has no evidence has violated an intellectual or cognitive duty of some sort. He has gone contrary to an obligation laid upon him-perhaps by society, or perhaps by his own nature as a creature capable of grasping propositions and holding beliefs. There is an obligation or something like an obligation to proportion one’s beliefs to the strength of the evidence. Thus according to John Locke, a mark of a rational person is “the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proof it is built upon will warrant,” and according to David Hume, “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” 

In the nineteenth century we have W.K. Clifford, that “delicious enfant terrible” as William James called him, insisting that it is monstrous, immoral, and perhaps even impolite to accept a belief for which you have insufficient evidence:
 

Whoso would deserve well of his fellow in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away.[1] He adds that if a belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure is a stolen one. Not only does it deceive ourselves by giving us a sense of power which we do not really possess, but it is sinful, stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence, which may shortly master our body and spread to the rest of the town. [2]
 
And finally: To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.[3] (It is not hard to detect, in these quotations, the “tone of robustious pathos” with which James credits Clifford.) On this view theists without evidence-my sainted grandmother, for example-are flouting their epistemic duties and deserve our disapprobation and disapproval. Mother Teresa, for example, if she has not arguments for her belief in God, then stands revealed as a sort of intellectual libertine-someone who has gone contrary to her intellectual obligations and is deserving of reproof and perhaps even disciplinary action. Now the idea that there are intellectual duties or obligations is difficult but not implausible, and I do not mean to question it here. It is less plausible, however, to suggest that I would or could be going contrary to my intellectual duties in believing, without evidence, that there is such a person as God. For first, my beliefs are not, for the most part, within my control. If, for example, you offer me $1,000,000 to cease believing that Mars is smaller than Venus, there is no way I can collect. But the same holds for my belief in God: even if I wanted to, I couldn’t-short of heroic measures like coma inducing drugs-just divest myself of it. (At any rate there is nothing I can do directly; perhaps there is a sort of regimen that if followed religiously would issue, in the long run, in my no longer accepting belief in God.) But secondly, there seems no reason to think that I have such an obligation. Clearly I am not under an obligation to have evidence for everything I believe; that would not be possible. But why, then, suppose that I have an obligation to accept belief in God only if I accept other propositions which serve as evidence for it? This is by no means self-evident or just obvious, and it is extremely hard to see how to find a cogent argument for it.

In any event, I think the evidentialist objector can take a more promising line. He can hold, not that the theist without evidence has violated some epistemic duty-after all, perhaps he can’t help himself- but that he is somehow intellectually flawed or disfigured. Consider someone who believes that Venus is smaller than Mercury-not because he has evidence, but because he read it in a comic book and always believes whatever he reads in comic books-or consider someone who holds that belief on the basis of an outrageously bad argument. Perhaps there is no obligation he has failed to meet; nevertheless his intellectual condition is defective in some way. He displays a sort of deficiency, a flaw, an intellectual dysfunction of some sort. Perhaps he is like someone who has an astigmatism, or is unduly clumsy, or suffers from arthritis. And perhaps the evidentialist objection is to be construed, not as the claim that the theist without evidence has violated some intellectual obligations, but that he suffers from a certain sort of intellectual deficiency. The theist without evidence, we might say, is an intellectual gimp. Alternatively but similarly, the idea might be that the theist without evidence is under a sort of illusion, a kind of pervasive illusion afflicting the great bulk of mankind over the great bulk of the time thus far allotted to it. Thus Freud saw religious belief as “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most insistent wishes of mankind.”[4 ]He sees theistic belief as a matter of wish-fulfillment. Men are paralyzed by and appalled at the spectacle of the overwhelming, impersonal forces that control our destiny, but mindlessly take no notice, no account of us and our needs and desires; they therefore invent a heavenly father of cosmic proportions, who exceeds our earthly fathers in goodness and love as much as in power. Religion, says Freud, is the “universal obsessional neurosis of humanity”, and it is destined to disappear when human beings learn to face reality as it is, resisting the tendency to edit it to suit our fancies. A similar sentiment is offered by Karl Marx: Religion . . . is the self-consciousness and the self-feeling of the man who has either not yet found himself, or else (having found himself) has lost himself once more. But man is not an abstract being . . . Man is the world of men, the State, society. This State, this society, produce religion, produce a perverted world consciousness, because they are a perverted world . . . Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The people cannot be really happy until it has been deprived of illusory happiness by the abolition of religion. The demand that the people should shake itself free of illusion as to its own condition is the demand that it should abandon a condition which needs illusion.[5] Note that Marx speaks here of a perverted world consciousness produced by a perverted world. This is a perversion from a correct, or right, or natural condition, brought about somehow by an unhealthy and perverted social order. From the Marx-Freud point of view, the theist is subject to a sort of cognitive dysfunction, a certain lack of cognitive and emotional health. We could put this as follows: the theist believes as he does only because of the power of this illusion, this perverted neurotic condition. He is insane, in the etymological sense of that term; he is unhealthy. His cognitive equipment, we might say, isn’t working properly; it isn’t functioning as it ought to. If his cognitive equipment were working properly, working the way it ought to work, he wouldn’t be under the spell of this illusion. He would instead face the world and our place in it with the clear-eyed apprehension that we are alone in it, and that any comfort and help we get will have to be our own devising. There is no Father in heaven to turn to, and no prospect of anything, after death, but dissolution. (”When we die, we rot,” says Michael Scriven, in one of his more memorable lines.) Now of course the theist is likely to display less than overwhelming enthusiasm about the idea that he is suffering from a cognitive deficiency, is under a sort of widespread illusion endemic to the human condition. It is at most a liberal theologian or two, intent on novelty and eager to concede as much as possible to contemporary secularity, who would embrace such an idea. The theist doesn’t see himself as suffering from cognitive deficiency. As a matter of fact, he may be inclined to see the shoe as on the other foot; he may be inclined to think of the atheist as the person who is suffering, in this way, from some illusion, from some noetic defect, from an unhappy, unfortunate, and unnatural condition with deplorable noetic consequences. He will see the atheist as somehow the victim of sin in the world- his own sin or the sin of others. According to the book of Romans, unbelief is a result of sin; it originates in an effort to “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” According to John Calvin, God has created us with a nisus or tendency to see His hand in the world around us; a “sense of deity,” he says, “is inscribed in the hearts of all.” He goes on: Indeed, the perversity of the impious, who though they struggle furiously are unable to extricate themselves from the fear of God, is abundant testimony that his conviction, namely, that there is some God, is naturally inborn in all, and is fixed deep within, as it were in the very marrow. . . . From this we conclude that it is not a doctrine that must first be learned in school, but one of which each of us is master from his mother’s womb and which nature itself permits no man to forget.[6]

Were it not for the existence of sin in the world, says Calvin, human beings would believe in God to the same degree and with the same natural spontaneity displayed in our belief in the existence of other persons, or an external world, or the past. This is the natural human condition; it is because of our presently unnatural sinful condition that many of us find belief in God difficult or absurd. The fact is, Calvin thinks, one who does not believe in God is in an epistemically defective position-rather like someone who does not believe that his wife exists, or thinks that she is a cleverly constructed robot that has no thoughts, feelings, or consciousness. Thus the believer reverses Freud and Marx, claiming that what they see as sickness is really health and what they see as health is really sickness. Obviously enough, the dispute here is ultimately ontological, or theological, or metaphysical; here we see the ontological and ultimately religious roots of epistemological discussions of rationality. What you take to be rational, at least in the sense in question, depends upon your metaphysical and religious stance. It depends upon your philosophical anthropology.

 Your view as to what sort of creature a human being is will determine, in whole or in part, your views as to what is rational or irrational for human beings to believe; this view will determine what you take to be natural, or normal, or healthy, with respect to belief. So the dispute as to who is rational and who is irrational here can’t be settled just by attending to epistemological considerations; it is fundamentally not an epistemological dispute, but an ontological or theological dispute. How can we tell what it is healthy for human beings to believe unless we know or have some idea about what sort of creature a human being is? If you think he is created by God in the image of God, and created with a natural tendency to see God’s hand in the world about us, a natural tendency to recognize that he has been created and is beholden to his creator, owing his worship and allegiance, then of course you will not think of belief in God as a manifestation of wishful thinking or as any kind of defect at all. It is then much more like sense perception or memory, though in some ways much more important. On the other hand, if you think of a human being as the product of blind evolutionary forces, if you think there is no God and that human beings are part of a godless universe, then you will be inclined to accept a view according to which belief in God is a sort of disease or dysfunction, due perhaps, to a sort of softening of the brain.

So the dispute as to who is healthy and who diseased has ontological or theological roots, and is finally to be settled, if at all at that level. And here I would like to present a consideration that, I think tells in favor of the theistic way of looking at the matter. As I have been representing that matter, theist and atheist alike speak of a sort of dysfunction, of cognitive faculties or cognitive equipment not working properly, of their not working as they ought to. But how are we to understand that? What is it for something to work properly? Isn’t there something deeply problematic about the idea of proper functioning? What is it for my cognitive faculties to be working properly? What is it for a natural organism-a tree, for example-to be in good working order, to be functioning properly? Isn’t working properly relative to our aims and interests? A cow is functioning properly when she gives milk; a garden patch is as it ought to be when it displays a luxuriant preponderance of the sorts of vegetation we propose to promote. But then it seems patent that what constitutes proper functioning depends upon our aims and interests. So far as nature herself goes, isn’t a fish decomposing in a hill of corn functioning just as properly, just as excellently, as one happily swimming about chasing minnows? But then what could be meant by speaking of “proper functioning” with respect to our cognitive faculties? A chunk of reality-an organism, a part of an organism, an ecosystem, a garden patch-”functions properly” only with respect to a sort of grid we impose on nature-a grid that incorporates our aims and desires. But from a theistic point of view, the idea of proper functioning, as applied to us and our cognitive equipment, is not more problematic than, say, that of a Boeing 747’s working properly. Something we have constructed-a heating system, a rope, a linear accelerator-is functioning properly when it is functioning in the way it was designed to function. My car works properly if it works the way it was designed to work. My refrigerator is working properly if it refrigerates, if it does what a refrigerator is designed to do.

This, I think, is the root idea of working properly. But according to theism, human beings, like ropes and linear accelerators, have been designed; they have been created and designed by God. Thus, he has an easy answer to the relevant set of questions: What is proper functioning? What is it for my cognitive faculties to be working properly? What is cognitive dysfunction? What is it to function naturally? My cognitive faculties are functioning naturally, when they are functioning in the way God designed them to function. On the other hand, if the atheological evidentialist objector claims that the theist without evidence is irrational, and if he goes on to construe irrationality in terms of defect or dysfunction, then he owes us an account of this notion. Why does he take it that the theist is somehow dysfunctional, at least in this area of his life?

More importantly, how does he conceive dysfunction? How does he see dysfunction and its opposite? How does he explain the idea of an organism’s working properly, or of some organic system or part of an organism’s thus working? What account does he give of it? Presumably he can’t see the proper functioning of my noetic equipment as its functioning in the way it was designed to function; so how can he put it? Two possibilities leap to mind. First, he may be thinking of proper functioning as functioning in a way that helps us attain our ends. In this way, he may say, we think of our bodies as functioning properly, as being healthy, when they function in the way we want them to, when they function in such a way as to enable us to do the sorts of things we want to do. But of course this will not be a promising line to take in the present context; for while perhaps the atheological objector would prefer to see our cognitive faculties function in such a way as not to produce belief in God in us, the same cannot be said, naturally enough, for the theist. Taken this way the atheological evidentialist’s objection comes to little more than the suggestion that the atheologician would prefer it if people did not believe in God without evidence. That would be an autobiographical remark on his part, having the interest such remarks usually have in philosophical contexts.  A second possibility: proper functioning and allied notions are to be explained in terms of aptness for promoting survival, either at an individual or species level.

There isn’t time to say much about this here; but it is at least and immediately evident that the atheological objector would then owe us an argument for the conclusion that belief in God is indeed less likely to contribute to our individual survival, or the survival of our species than is atheism or agnosticism. But how could such an argument go? Surely the prospects for a non-question begging argument of this sort are bleak indeed. For if theism-Christian theism, for example-is true, then it seems wholly implausible to think that widespread atheism, for example, would be more likely to contribute to the survival of our race than widespread theism.  By way of conclusion: a natural way to understand such notions as rationality and irrationality is in terms of the proper functioning of the relevant cognitive equipment. Seen from this perspective, the question whether it is rational to believe in God without the evidential support of other propositions is really a metaphysical or theological dispute. The theist has an easy time explaining the notion of our cognitive equipment’s functioning properly: our cognitive equipment functions properly when it functions in the way God designed it to function. The atheist evidential objector, however, owes us an account of this notion. What does he mean when he complains that the theist without evidence displays a cognitive defect of some sort? How does he understand the notion of cognitive malfunction?   

 

 

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NOTES   

[1]W.K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” in Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1879), p. 183.

[2]Ibid, p. 184.

[3]Ibid, p. 186.

[4]Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 30.

[5]K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3: Introduction to a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, by Karl Marx (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975). 

[6]John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.3 (p. 43- 44).

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