I was reading Yablo’s “No Fool’s Cold: Notes on Illusions of Possibility” (That’s not a typo: “Cold”) that continues the theme of modal skepticism when I came up with a radical possibility. Of course, if someone thinks up something in the 21st century it likely has been thought a thousand times before, and this is no different. But let’s start at the beginning and check out whether there is anything new to be discerned.
I might initially think that the contents of my thoughts are the only thing I can truly be confident about since all the world of the senses could be an illusion. Given such a starting point it would be wise to try to understand the relationship between my thoughts and what is perceived by starting with the phenomenon of thought. I immediately become skeptical of my thinking, however, since I am unconscious nearly a third of the day, often accompanied by strange hallucinatory imagery in my dreams. More, I tend to agree with these zombie-intellects who inhabit this society-thing projected on my sensorium-thing and claim to study biases and perceptual trickery. Those perceptual-psychologist-patterns seem right, too, given the number of times I’ve been startled by faces coalescing out of twilight shadows or my overly generous past assessments of my own competency.
Thoughts seem unreliable.
But what is reliable? Some Platonic ideas, geometry, math in general, deductive proofs (uh oh, coarse premises as well as the indeterminacy of synonymy creep in here), and then scientific results (tentatively), perhaps. Let’s take the latter, though, and start with the notion that science contains a methodology that distills out many biases and misperceptions, arriving at a tentative model that is of higher truth value than simple guesses, traditions, and feelings. We can couple this with the realization that ideas are not really purely mental in character, but instead are contingent on indexicals in the perceived reality. They bind together in a matrix, sometimes with a degree of fixation, sometimes in a kind of evolving or dynamic interplay. This is called externalism. Putnam’s Twin World of twater and tice comes into play here.
Taking this perspective further, many of the pragmatic and semantic linguistic assumptions built into everyday language are flawed. Talking about “mental states,” for example, is using a placeholder phrase for something that we think we intuitively know but really can only be accurately described in a very different language. We might say “there appear to be neural correlations to what a person reports is some specific mental state, like when they are imagining a flying elephant baby while in an MRI,” and only then are we on the threshold of saying something truth-evocative about “mental states.”
Thoughts are unreliable and everyday-ish language is both imprecise and epistemologically flawed.
This “radical externalism” comports well with Yablo’s efforts to disentangle Kripke’s concerns about possibilities that become a backdrop for modal logic. In Yablo’s paper, the “fool’s cold” is part of a thought experiment concerning whether we can imagine people who interpret their sensations of low-molecular energy (LME) matter states as being “hot” rather than “cold.” In one interpretation of Kripke, doing so requires that a facsimile of LME could be perceived as “hot,” but Yablo argues that is impossible for heat and cold. Now, we could imagine people who are just dunces who use the words incorrectly (“dunce’s heat”). This is radically different from the possibility that this table I am typing at might be cleverly disguised ice; a passing facsimile is possible in the case of the ice table but not for “fool’s cold” because the sensation itself is not subject to a parallel facsimile sensory presentation. In either case, though, the intuitions of possibility dissolve under radical externalism. The only possibilities that we encounter are those that achieve some kind of scientific validity through verification, theory, falsifiability, peer review, and argument. Hmmm, has Bayesian reasoning been pushed into modal logic? Of course.
We are left with a kind of experimental philosophy that I often see in, say, Ned Block’s dissections of neuroscience that is looking at accessibility and its neural correlates. But I see now that I already covered this topic:
P.M.S Hacker and Maxwell Bennett in Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language emphasize [the problematic nature of language] through an analysis of the ways that neuroscientists discuss aspects of brain activities that they are uncovering through science. Hacker and Bennett think there are fairly uniform errors of language use. They don’t have much to say about the science itself, just about the language (Bennett is a scientist, but Hacker is an analytic philosopher who is the leading authority on Wittgenstein). Often these scientists use everyday language appropriated via metaphor to describe the way they think things happen in human brains:
We seem driven to say that such neurons [as respond in a highly specific manner to, e.g., line orientation] have knowledge. They have intelligence, for they are able to estimate the probability of outside events—events that are important to the animal in question. And the brain gains its knowledge by a process analogous to the inductive reasoning of the classical scientific method. Neurons present arguments to the brain based on the specific features that they detect, arguments on which the brain constructs its hypothesis of perception.
This quote illustrates a problem of language for Hacker and Bennett: the attribution of the notions of knowledge, arguments, and reasoning to neurons. It has nothing much to do with the science that Colin Blakemore has done on the observed behavior of neurons, it is the conceptual framework imbued with phrases that only apply to whole human beings that is problematical. People have knowledge. Libraries contain knowledge. Inductive reasoning is what people do. People present arguments. Brains do something else that is of a different character altogether.
Now, we seem very comfortable with these types of analogous and metaphorical applications of everyday terminology to the complexities of neuronal and brain activities. It’s how scientists communicate complex ideas. It’s how we all learn new concepts. For Hacker and Bennett, however, it can also lead us astray into complete nonsense and, critically:
…by speaking about the brain’s thinking and reasoning, about one hemisphere’s knowing something and not informing the other, about the brain’s making decisions without the person’s knowing, about rotating mental images in mental space, and so forth, neuroscientists are fostering a form of mystification and cultivating a neuro-mythology that are altogether deplorable. For, first, this does anything but engender the understanding on behalf of the lay public that is aimed at. Secondly, the lay public will look to neuroscience for answers to pseudo-questions that it should not ask and that neuroscience cannot answer. Once the public become disillusioned, they will ignore the important genuine questions neuroscience can both ask and answer. And this surely matters.
AI was used in image generation (Microsoft Bing) but not in writing.