Neo-Dualism (ND): Pains are individuated/identified by the way they feel, so the causal role of neurons in the instantiation of pain is not essential to what pain is (we can have Martian pain and Ghost pain, ETC.?). What counts as a pain is any particular occurrence of a particular kind of phenomenal feel. Material constitution is nothing essential; so, pain cannot be identified with neural states.
Rorty's Counter-Consideration: ND's Hypostatization of Pain
Hypostatization: Taking a quality/property and transforming it into a subject of predication.
Pain Hypostatized: PAIN is taken from being considered a property of persons and conceived of as a particular, elligible for predication in its own right. But...
- ND PAIN is PAINFULNESS, the feeling of pain, or the universal or concept of what it's like to be in pain, abstracted from particular instances of pain.
- Confusion: ND PAIN is a universal construed as a particular. A particular pain state is just an acknowledged instance of a universal: PAINFULNESS.
- What appears to be an ontological distinction is merely a confused instance of the particular/universal distinction; paradoxically, mental particulars (pains) are like universals.
The upshot, according to Rorty, is that early Identity Theorists and Neo-Dualists are talking past each other:
- Smart/Place are talking about what is essential to someone's being in pain.
- Neo-Dualists are talking about what is essential to something's being a pain.
Rorty suggests that this sort of hypostatization is exactly the brand of error made historically by, for instance, Locke and Plato. The error is this: '...we simply lift off a single property from something...and then treat it as if it itself were a subject of predication.' Consider, following Rorty, the properties of being red or being good as the Platonic Forms REDNESS and GOODNESS or the Lockean ideas of RED and GOOD. ND PAIN, in other words, is like a Platonic form and a Lockean idea in that it is held to exist independently of its worldly instantiations, while maintaining causal intercourse with the world.
7 comments:
First off, thanks for the new vocab- hypostatize. cool word. my dictionary has it as "to think of (a concept, abstraction), as having real, objective existence." I think it makes a big difference whether we're talking about concepts or properties. Concepts, it's obviously a mistake to attribute real objective existence. Properties, I'm not so sure, but more on that later.
This is kind of unfair of me to respond to your post without having actually read the Rorty, but what the fuck:
(1) Maybe I'm missing something: If Kripke argues that what is essential to something's being a pain is a certain phenomenal feel, wouldn't he still disagree with a viewpoint (such as Smart/Place) that doesn't make the phenomenal feel essential to someone's being in pain? That is, don't you have to first say what it is for something to be a pain, and only then could you identify what is essential to someone's being in pain?
(2) I have to admit that I'm only a little familiar with Platonic forms and (even less so) Lockean ideas. Clearly Platonic forms are silly, but I'm not understanding the corresponding silliness of ND (well, aside from it being dualist...) For starters, I don't think it's silly to suggest that properties have real, objective existence, while at the same time not insisting that they exist independently of their worldly instantiations. Not that I'm claiming to have any expertise in properties, but I would want to hear more about how you (or Rorty) are thinking about properties. [I told you, metaphysics pops up all over the place]
(3) Come to think of it, maybe the "progress" made subsequent to the early identity theories can be seen as shifting the focus from someone's being in pain, to something's being a pain. The problem with the early identity theorists is that if we identify a certain human mental state with a certain human neural state, then we won't know how to answer questions like "what is common to both human pain and animal pain", and artificial intelligence would appear to be a hopeless enterprise.
Of course, people could insist that the phenomena that we label as mental states are necessarily human- animals and machines just can't have them. But that position is as mysterious to me as Platonic forms, and I don't think that position is what the early identity theorists had in mind. I think that what they had in mind is that certain neural states can empirically be identified as the body parts that implement certain phenomena- pain, consciousness, etc..., but actually this is only one part of the big picture. Whereas, when lightning was identified, or heat was identified, the identification wasn't just one part of the big picture (except, maybe, for weirdo philophers who worry about Martian heat and Martian lightning). The identification was the big picture.
Of course, I'm not claiming that, say, early functionalism is the correct philosophy of mind. But I'm trying to point out some of the advantages of shifting the focus from someone being in pain to something being in pain, even if (like myself) one is not convinced that Kripke's modal intuitions have any bearing on the issues at hand.
(4) A final methodological reflection. Well, not a reflection, but a paragraph quote from the beginning of Ruth Millikan's "Naturalist Reflections on Knowledge". Just substitute knowledge with pain, or any other mental state, or any other topic worthy of philosophical interest, and you wind up with the hope of some very solid first principles guiding the inquiry:
"In this chapter, I propose to describe knowledge in the same sort of spirit in which science has described, say, tuberculosis or acidity or genes. Whatever else it is, knowledge surely is a phenomenon in the world that we need to understand. Or perhaps it is several phenomena that have got mixed together under one term 'knowledge'- as there are two quite different kinds of acidity and several ways of counting genes, discovered by scientific inquiry, not just by a priori reflection. The setting within which I will explore the phenomenon of knowledge is that of evolutionary theory. Thus I make an immediate and obvious departure from conceptual analysis. Indeed, should the phenomena I discuss turn out to have no connection with the term 'knowledge', that would surprise but not unduly pain me. They would still be phenomena deserving of philosophical reflection, interesting in their own right."
Yes, ‘hypostatize’ is an awesome word. I’m surpised I haven’t come across it before, I might have used it in Declan’s class. I’ll try to respond to some of your comments here. I should point out that Rorty’s arguments in the section in question are wicked quick. They serve as introduction to the longer, more detailed arguments that follow. It looks like the whole book is more or less directly concerned with the issues we’ve been concerned with.
The suggestion, I take it, is not that (some) properties don’t have real, objective existence. I suppose where he wants to ultimately go is to say that ‘feelings’ don't have to real, objective existence. This is just a way of talking about bodily occurences.
Raw feels, construed as conscious thoughts, are residua from Descartes, who lumped thoughts, intentions, beliefs, and feelings together into the domain of non-extended substance, which is, according to Descartes, the domain of seemings, which we cannot be wrong about. Incorrigibility is a (the?) mark of the mental, since we can be wrong about what our thoughts representations represent, but we can't be wrong about what they seem to us to represent.
So far I think Rorty has a pretty standard view of properties; they inhere in substances. The problem he thinks he perceives is in this process:
(1) Take a property of persons: PAIN
(2) Abstract it from any of its instantiations: get the universal/concept PAINFULNESS
(3) Q: What counts as an instantiation of PAINFULNESS?
(4) A: What feels painful (duh).
(5) Now attribute ‘feels painful’ as the sole identifying property of PAINFULNESS.
(6) We’ve just transformed what was originally a property into substance with it’s own (essential) property.
Is this an OK thing to do? I don’t know; I think you’ve put your finger on something (now don’t wash it till you figure out what it is). But again, this is just the start of a long, historical/analytical argument. Rorty is very much a big-picture guy: philosophizing is nothing other than participating in a language-game with a technical vocabulary, much of which is inherited, some (much?) of which is stipulated. Descartes’ vocabulary was revolutionary, laying the groundwork for most philosophizing since. According to Rorty, the other dominant philosophical tradition (language), the Aristotelians, did not conceive of/talk about ‘feelings’ in the same way. The Greeks had no terminological analogue for consciousness, and the Thomists, a.k.a. Christianized Neo-Aristotelians, criticize Descartes for relegating sensory experience to the domain of immaterial substance. The dominant Greek traditions were dualistic, but only with regard to the soul, which was different from Descartes’ soul. The domain of the Greek soul (and the Platonic, Augustinian, and Thomistic) was the contemplation of the unchanging: mathematics, logic, god,god-proofs, etc. I’ve done a little work on Descartes’ view of phenomenal qualities, and he, himself, waivers and appears to be inconsistent.
I take it that functionalism was a response to just the question you mentioned: ‘What is common to both human and animal pain?’: it’s functional role, which includes both the display of behavior con-specifics can learn from and avoidance conditioning. The functional role strategy should marry well with a specifically psycho-evolutionary explanation too. But the assertion that 'feeling' is essential is dubious. We can't know if pain 'feels' like anything to mice. i suppose the question is whether we need 'feelings' included in an explanation of behavior. it's unclear. But appealing to the way pain feels, the Neo-dualist strategy, begs the question of conciousness. Rorty, for one, pushes a pretty hard behaviorist line. His strategy seems to be just to say that philosophical talk of ‘consciousness’, ‘feelings’, ‘qualia’, and ‘raw feels’ is a cultural/historical artifact (largely Descartes’ fault). What we take to be the incorrigible assumption that we have incorrigible raw feels is a philosophical artifact. (See the story of the Antipodeans in Chapter II; more Twin Earth business).
The point of the business about Lockean ideas and Platonic forms, think, is part of the point about hypostatization. The ideas and the forms are abstracted properties turned substances or substance-like entities. Both mediate perception. Rorty credits Locke with paving the way for Descartes’ epistemological turn; Lockean ideas are ‘what is before a man’s mind when he thinks’, occuring in something very like inner-space, the Cartesian theatre, etc. Presumably Rorty thinks this is an especially misleading way to talk about the mind. He charges Locke and Plato with '[treating adjectives as nouns]'.
I'm gonna post a couple of comments in installments here, because I was working on a long one and then deleted it by accident.
"The assertion that 'feeling' is essential is dubious." I agree, primarily because I don't know how to make any sense of metaphysical, rather than psychological, essentialism. In order to understand how to make sense of metaphysical essentialism, I need some principled methods (not just brute intuitions) for determining what is essential, and Kripke doesn't provide these methods.
Again, it's stupid of me to attack Rorty's argument without actually having read it, but I don't understand why he understands Kripke to be changing a property into a substance into its own property. Maybe because he was talking about essential properties of rigid designators? But the rigid designators simply refer to what is out there in the world, they aren't the substances themselves. In any case, to the extent that I understand what "essential" means, I think it makes sense to talk about what is essential to a property, without thereby elevating the property to the status of a "substance". Maybe it would be a property of a property? I don't know.
There's a difference between making the claim that the phenomenal qualities of mental states are essential to the mental states, and making the claim that the phenomenal qualities are just philosophical artificats. I don't know if Rorty is making the latter claim as well, but if he is I don't buy it. The phenomenal qualities are still phenomena that need to be adequately explained by materialists/physicalists.
Rorty's main argument is unfolding slowly, so i don't know exactly where it will end up.
like you, i'm a little confused about the possibility of a property of a property. if i am caucasian, can caucasion be modified by another property without making it substance-like? i could be part caucasian, but degrees aren't the kind of property we're concerned with, are they? i don't mean these to be rhetorical questions; i'm curious. it seems to me that, in large part, that isn't how the concepts/properties we express/attribute with linguistic predicates function. if i'm touching on a real issue here, then there might be a real problem with saying that the essential property of pain is painfulness; pain might be a property ineligible for property attribution.
I do think that Rorty wants to deny that phenomenal qualities need explaining in any robust way. His explanation is that phenomenal qualities are merely (an unfortunate) part of our linguistic/conceptual scheme. The reason physicalists have such a hard time doing away with phenomenal qualities is because they're confused notions to begin with.
recall Place's allusion to the Phenomenological Fallacy. Rorty is talking about something very much like that. With raw feels, it is just a mistake to think that there is an object of reference. Pain for instance (or painfulness) is taken for a property of some phenomenological field, inner-space, Cartesian theater, etc. in fact, there's nothing there to refer to, except the c-fibers in the neural tissue. much more to be said. i'm not trying to push any of these lines here, just trying to get it. intuitions (the bastards) pull in multiple directions. it's unnerving to entertain the thought that we could be AS enculturated as Rorty suggests.
So, I guess the bottom line is
(1) It'd be helpful to know more about the nature of properties.
(2) Phenomenal qualities are a bitch.
Also: I think the "feeling of pain just is the c-fibers firing" is the line that David Lewis takes in "mad pain, martian pain".
And: Valerie Hardcastle has an interesting looking book called "The Myth of Pain".
Post a Comment