[lit-ideas] "Promissory Materialism" [was: the first lines are the argument referred by]
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2011 11:24:59 +0000 (GMT)
>Below is a link to an article I came across a few days ago.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-hardest-problem-in-science/40845
Apparently not everyone would agree that it is demonstrated that a thought
isn't identical to a brain state.>
For reasons given in another post, this article falls short of arguing
for, or even perhaps unequivocally asserting, a mind-brain identity:
however, there are a number of philosophers who are 'identity theorists'
in this sense, some of whom are mentioned below in a discussion of the
'new promissory materialism' as Popper terms it - the tacit resort to a promise
being, in
effect, a recognition that in the present state of science there does
not exist an identity theory in a sufficiently telling empirical form [a form
that would
distinguish its predicted observations from those compatible with a
parallelist or dualist-interactionist view].
Almost thirty years after TSAIB, “Consciousness and its
Place in Nature” [Galen Strawson et
al., 2006] is a recent enough book that follows many others in the field in
failing to even once mention Popper’s work. Nevertheless David Papineau’s
contribution, “Comments on Galen Strawson” (more accurately on Strawson’s
initial essay), can be seen as defending what in TSAIB Popper termed
“promissory materialism” almost thirty years
earlier, but which Papineau calls “straightforward physicalism” or
“physicSalism” [sic] “(“‘S’ for straightforward, if you like”).
Unlike the article Phil urled, Papineau does try to present
arguments in favour of his position. He starts from the assumption that there
are “familiar causal-explanatory considerations” which favour the view that at
some point in the future science will establish that “for any specific
phenomenal kind M and any specific physical kind P, that M=P”; and
“[m]oreover,…when we have established such M=P identities, then we will
therewith have ‘fully captured the nature or essence of experience’ in physical
terms, in that the relevant physical term will refer to nothing other than the
phenomenal kind M.” This way of putting it is perhaps not fully clear, for the
physical term could refer to nothing other than M without necessarily
exhausting how M could be referred to.
But it becomes clear that Papineau is claiming that the physical term P will
exhaust M as a referent in the same way “that ‘the term sodium chloride fully
captures the nature and essence of table salt’”:
asking, “So why not similarly allow that the term C-fibres firing fully
captures the nature and essence of pain?” [C-fibres firing being a placeholder
for whatever P we need to capture M]. This might seem at first sight reasonable
in that we
do not suppose, from the scientific or physicalist POV, that sodium chloride
simply refers to the sodium and choride aspects of salt while leaving some
'psychic
residue' unaccounted for; but then, and here is a fundamental problem for
Papineau’s analogy
which is further discussed below, from the scientific or physicalist POV, salt
does not have any “phenomenal kind M” or any equivalent of C-fibres firing.
It is clear this is promissory materialism, as Papineau doesn’t suppose that
current science has yet
established any such identity; and while he can “see no reason to think that
such advances need to take us beyond physical theories of the same general sort
as we already have”, he does admit that “it is possible that our access to such
identities will require significant advances in brain science.” In other words,
we accept this materialism on the promise that it will deliver the necessary
advances, however "significant". [It is also only a promise to claim that these
advances will not need to take us beyond physical theories of the same general
sort as we already have] While Popper makes it clear he does not assert
that “it is impossible that things
may happen as the physicalist says here” [TSAIB p.98], nevertheless “all the
physicalist offers is, as it were, a cheque drawn
against his future prospects, and based on the hope that a theory will be
developed one day which solves his problems for him; the hope, in short, that
something will turn up.”
But the problems of promissory materialism go deeper than it
being “a peculiar theory…,essentially…a historical (or historicist) prophecy
about future results of brain research and of their impact” [TSAIB p.97]. Is
the analogy between
certain ‘C-fibres firing=pain’and‘sodium chloride=salt’, a good
analogy or a false and misleading analogy? In TSAIB Popper deals with a perhaps
analogous analogy: “Following a
suggestion by Armstrong, it has become fashionable to refer to the
identification of gene = DNA as an
analogue of the suggested identification of mental
state = brain state”; Popper then argues, “But the analogy is a bad one, because
the identification of genes with DNA molecules, while a most important
empirical discovery, did not add anything to the metaphysical (or ontological)
status of the gene or DNA…Genes themselves were, from the beginning,
introduced…as material structures; or more precisely as substructures of the
chromosomes. More than thirty years before the DNA theory of genes, detailed
maps of the genes were proposed that showed the relative positions of the
genes; maps whose principle was confirmed in detail by the recent results of
molecular biology. In other words, something like the identity gene = DNA was
expected, if not taken
for granted, from the beginning of the gene theory.” We might also say, to
Papineau’s analogy, that something like the identity salt = sodium chloride was
expected, if not taken for granted, when
we sought to explain compounds in terms of elements. Equally such an
identification does not “add anything to the metaphysical (or ontological)
status” of salt, as salt remains wholly in the physical domain and lacks any
equivalent of M or C-fibres firing.
“The identification of the mind with the brain would be
analogous to this only if it was assumed, to start with, that the mind is one
of the physical organs, and then found empirically that it was not (say) the
heart, or the liver, but rather the brain. While the dependence (or
interdependence) of thought, intelligence, subjective experiences, and brain
states was expected since Hippocrates’s On
the Sacred Disease, only materialists asserted an identity – in the face of
considerable factual and conceptual difficulties.
This analysis shows
that there is no analogy between the two identifications. The claim that they
are analogous is not only unwarranted, but misleading” [TSAIB p.95].
Popper goes on to make comments on Quinton’s version of an
identity theory that also would seem to apply to Papineau’s “physicSalism”:
“Like Feigl,
Smart, and Armstrong, [Quinton] regards the identification as empirical. So
far, so good. But he does not say how we proceed empirically to test
conjectural identifications. And like his predecessors, he does not suggest the
kind of test which could possibly be regarded as a test of the identity thesis
of mind and brain, as distinct from an interactionist thesis (especially from
one which does not operate with a mental substance)” [TSAIB p.96].
Popper has other important arguments that help demolish the
idea that views such as Papineau’s represent a properly scientific POV (though
clearly they are not important enough to be referenced by any of the eminent
contributors to the book). Instead
of being the proper scientific POV [as per Papineau and the author of the url'd
article] they might be better seen as pseudo-scientific, or indeed
anti-scientific:- for
the value of a properly scientific reduction is that it increases
falsifiability by way of a single, unifying theory (that will always be more
falsifiable than the disparate theories its replaces as its predictive range is
greater); but without a testable unifying
theory to hand, Papineau is offering not a testable, scientific reduction but
an untested, metaphysical one - and such a metaphysical reduction lessens
falsifiability by discounting the existence of a class of possible events
[irreducibly
mental events] which class otherwise constitutes a class of potential
falsifiers [for example of the theory that M=P]. It is a serious logical and
philosophical error to take
arguments that favour a scientific reduction, which increases falsifiability,
as arguments that favour its
logical contradictory – metaphysical or philosophical reductionism that
decreases falsifiability.
Donal
England
Other related posts:
