[Wittrs] Re: some helpful guidelines for reading Wittgenstein's philo...
- From: gprimero <gerardoprim@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:15:48 -0700 (PDT)
(Stuart) No, no, I wasn't proposing they were evidence Gerardo, only
that they indicated to me that I could do things without being aware
of what I was doing. This SUGGESTS to me at least the possibility that
the Freudian idea of the subconscious could also be true.
(Gerardo) That´s exactly what I meant by “evidence”: “this suggests
that”. But my point was that your evidence for “doing things without
being aware” is NOT evidence for any of the freudian hypotheses. It´s
like if you say “I´ve thought in Sue and then she called me, and that
suggests to me that I could have paranormal skills”. The premise may
be true, but it cannot be taken as evidence (not even remote) for the
conclusion, unless until more plausible explanations (e.g. that it´s
mere coincidence) are ruled out.
(Gerardo before) That´s exactly what I consider a pseudoexplanation:
if you try to explain an observable event by postulating an event that
you know even less of your explananda, then you have no explanation at
all: you have two events in need of explanation instead of one.
(Stuart) I think you are missing my point here, Gerardo.
(Gerardo) I think not. I´m pointing to the pragmatic relation between
means and ends.
(Stuart) This isn't about metaphysical realms. However it is
manifestly true that processes happen in our brains while we are
thinking, etc. It's strange to take no account of these in explaining
how it happens that brains are conscious in certain cases. Frankly I
go with Dennett here and think there is no reason to think that we
have privileged access to our own minds at all levels.
(Gerardo) It´s obvious that “we don´t have privileged access to our
brains” (we don´t know what´s doing our cingulate cortex right now),
but what does it mean “we don´t have privileged access to our minds”?
If you´re using “mind” for the cases of private experiences, we do
have necessarily “privileged access” in those cases (if there´s no
such privilege, there´s no point in calling them “private
experiences”).
(Stuart) After all, either the features we associate with
consciousness simply pop into being full-blown (which really IS a
dualist supposition) OR they are composites of more basic features
which are not themselves conscious.
(Gerardo) You seem to be treating a feature as a thing. People (of
whom we say they´re “conscious”, or not) are indeed “composed of more
basic parts” (e.g. organs, cells, molecules...). But that doesn´t
imply that “consciousness” (which is not a thing but a nominalization
of an adjective) must be either an holistic something “simply pop into
being full-blown”, or the accumulation of some kind of
“protoconscious” fragments. A dog can bark and run without the need of
an accumulation of parts that proto-bark or proto-run.
(Gerardo) You must clarify with Glen the usages of "mental" and
"behavioral". You have at least two senses of each term: mental as
privately experienced event, mental as non-experienced mentalist
construct (i.e. freudian unconscious, multilayered consciousness
systems), behavioral as overt muscular action, behavioral as
interactional S-R event (including private occurrences). You´ve
acknowledged that "perceptual response" might be considered "behavior"
in one sense of the term, and that there´re differences between
private experiences and non-experienced mentalist constructs.
(Stuart) Yes. But I have never suggested that what is mental is
somehow basic in any ontological sense. It is, on my view, just
another aspect of the physical. Merely noting that there is a mental
as well as a physical aspect to things is not dualist though some at
least want to claim it's "property dualism". Personally I think THAT
concept is rather a mixed metaphor and needs more explication. As
Searle explains it, property dualism is just confused substance
dualism while he, himself, denies being a dualist of any sort himself,
while often speaking of consciousness as if it were an ontological
basic in which case he would be a dualist himself, albeit without
admitting it. Dualism would certainly need to be explored if I were to
get into this with Glen but he's been a mite testy of late so I'm
reluctant to open up a new can of worms!
(Gerardo) OK, but I think that sometimes you mix this concept of
“mental” with other kinds of concepts, and that´s problematic. I
propose you to distinguish the following meanings of “mind”. M1 is
“mental as private event”, events that can be detected at least by one
person. M1 is the content of episodic mental concepts: perceiving X,
sensing X, feeling X, having imagery of X, dreaming X, and saying X to
oneself. M2 is “mental as disposition of overt or private
behavior” (see that this is not the logical behaviorist proposal of
overt dispositions, but a functionalist proposal of overt-plus-covert
dispositions), and includes concepts like being intelligent, knowing
about X, having a belief, or understanding a sign. M2 is still
“observable”, but in a less direct way than M1: people can detect many
criteria that support or refute the ascription of the disposition
(this usually happens very quickly and without the need of reasoning).
M3 is “mental as speculative constructs”, it includes all the imagery
and conceptualization that are not based on observation, direct or
indirect, but on the social reinforcement of some ideas: freudian
unconscious, religious souls, unconscious “mental
representations” (unlike the so-called “neural representations”, which
are observed physiological events that correlate with other
variables). Perhaps if we agree with this classification (or we make
some changes on it, until we get an agreement) we´ll be able to solve
some misunderstandings. What would you say until here?
(Gerardo before) I guess that "correlated events" would be a better
name, and much more discriminative. We can detect different kinds of
events, and then assess different kinds of relationships, without
obscuring them with the usage of unclear concepts.
(Stuart) I'm not sure that gets at what I have in mind. At some point
we have mental pictures which are represenations and it's not
unlikely, given what we know of brains, that there are various signal
transformations that underlie the mental representations we are aware
of. In that case, they may best be described as represenations, too,
albeit of a different order. "Events" strikes me as too general here,
though it may be the case that each such "representation" is also some
brain event.
(Gerardo) “Events” is a general term, but the “correlated events”
would be individuated by their features (e.g. the physiological event
of the kind X is correlated with the experiential event of the kind
Y). I´m saying that this kind of language is much more informative.
The polisemic meaning of “representation” makes people believe that
they´re saying more when they say less, and that they have an
explanation when they have only a speculation without evidence.
(Gerardo before) I´m not concluding that "it cannot" be used. We
obviously "can", but my thinking is pragmatic: we possibly have better
options if our purpose is empirical and technical research.
(Stuart) I think your aim, by your own description, is to study how
psychology (the state of minds) relates to behavior.
(Gerardo) My aim is to study how the environment and the organism
interact, including the role of private experiences as a very
important part of such interaction, but not as an initiating and
uncaused inner agency. I think that it´s too reductionistic to define
psychology as “the state of minds”: it reduces the person-in-context
to a passive and egocentric mind separated from the world.
(Stuart) I'm interested in something a bit different: to study how
brains produce the mental including all possible mental states. This
is not to say there aren't inputs involved but only to ask how do
those inputs become psychological phenomena (including actions and
dispositions to act)?
(Gerardo) I don´t think that “brains produce the mental”. The private
experiences are not “products”: they´re not things but events. And the
brain is not the “cause”: it´s a necessary but not sufficient
condition for the occurrence of those events. By the way, if you claim
that “the brain produces the mental”, it is a kind of dualism: you
have the brain and the mental as two separate things, and then you´ll
have to choose between epiphenomenism or interactionism. The
nondualist options are either the mind-brain identity thesis (e.g.
Place or Quine) or the ascription of mental terms to whole persons-in-
contexts (e.g. Kantor) where the brain is a necessary but not
sufficient condition as a participant of a wider set of conditions.
(Gerardo before) I´m not arguing that "mental images" are behaviors,
but that "imagery" is behavior (it´s an operant or respondent
occurrence of perceptual responses).
(Stuart) I find that a stretch of the term.
(Gerardo) It´s not a “stretch”, it´s an explanatory account of (at
least) some instances of imagery.
(Stuart) When I had that totally private image of my computer screen
(I had been thinking about it as I looked at it intently shortly
before I blacked out so it's not surprising that that was what I had
in my mind when I started coming to. That I was on the floor, my eyes
closed and then open after having collapsed and fallen there, is
certainly behavior. That I thought I was still looking at my computer
screen but could not somehow focus on it and read what was written
there and that it faded into oblivion the more I tried to read it,
hardly seems like behavior. It was like a dream of course since I was
lying on my back on the ground (which was indisputably behavior).
(Gerardo) Yes, I´d agree with you in all of this, I´m not trying to
“reduce” your description to something else. You had an event that
“was like a dream” or “like a visual perception”. But this is just a
description of the experiential event, and I was giving a plausible
explanation. I guess an explanatory account should include the
description of the target event, the actual environment, the
organismic conditions including its physiological processes, the
previous contingencies of learning of each stimulus and response, and
the ethological unconditioned responses and mechanisms.
(Stuart) I think that so broadens "behavior" as to render it
indistinguishable from what
others call mental events, in which case why bother?
(Stuart) Not all that others call “mental events”. See that, using the
classification of M1, M2 and M3, I would include M1-experiential
events as “behavior”, but would exclude M2-dispositions and M3-
fictions: they´re not behaviors, they´re words that might be part of
some linguistic behaviors.
(Gerardo before) Understanding a sign can be understood as a
physiological event that
changes many dispositions of overt and covert behaviors, which not
necessarily
are overtly or immediately shown.
(Stuart) It CAN but not in this case when the issue was not
physiological events but
mental images.
(Gerardo) You cannot claim that there were not physiological events in
your brain when you had such images. You´re not conscious of your
physiological events: they´re not stimuli with which you interact, they
´re necessary components of each of your responses. Physiological
events are a necessary condition of every experiential event, as far
as we know.
(Gerardo before) Having an image can be understood as a covert
simulation of a perceptual response.
(Stuart) I think it makes more sense to explain it as I did above,
i.e., that it was the last thing I had been focusing intensely on and
I had retained the general structure of what I was seeing in my head
(kind of an after-image) but, because our brains don't retain all the
details (as Hawkins posits) I was unable to plug them in from memory
and so, the more closely I thought I was looking at it, the less clear
it became -- precisely the opposite of what we would expect to happen
if I were really looking at it.
(Gerardo) I don´t see much difference in your description. You´re
saying that you had first a perceptual activity (“focusing intensely”
in the screen) and after the blackout there was a repetition of such
activity without the presence of the stimulus (a dreamlike event,
“kind of an after-image”). This activity could be accounted by the
simulation theory (the neural activity of the after-image is similar
to the activity of the actual perception). Then you had an operant
response of trying to focus your sight, and the actual perceptual
response replaced the dream-like event.
(Gerardo before) I´ve said that Moore (1980, 1995) divided two
categories: (a) interoceptive and propioceptive stimulation, (b)
covert behavior (imagery, dreaming, self-talk).
(Suart) My blackout "dream" involved no self-talk and no narrative,
just an image I was trying to see, an image that, of course, wasn't
there. How is the image alone "covert"? Not only is it not shared, it
cannot be (directly anyway).
(Gerardo) Your experience was a repetition of previous perceptual
responses. When a perceptual response is learned, many causes
different than the actual presence of the stimulus may trigger it.
Thinking of them as “images that are observed” is useful as a way of
talk, but it´s problematic if taken literally. Images are not like
observed objects. Observed objects remain when we don´t see them, but
“images” only remain while we are having the imagery. Observed objects
may be ostensively denoted, but “images” don´t. There´re no literally
“images” as internal copies of stimuli: there´s only the whole
organismic event of “visualizing X”.
(Gerardo before) Having an image can be understood as a covert
simulation of a perceptual response. Once you´ve learned the complex
behavior of "seeing a dog", the same activity can be triggered by
other causes that are not the presence of a dog. There´s no dog,
outside or inside: there´s only a covert activity that has some
similar effects (and other different effects).
(Suart) If you call the image an "activity" and mean anything else but
the brain events that underlay it, then I think you are stretching the
meaning of "activity" beyond where it can sensibly be stretched.
(Gerardo) I don´t understand our point here.
(Suart) Seeing is not the same as looking.
(Gerardo) Of course not.
(Suart) Yes but then it isn't "behaviorism" per se but some hybrid.
Frankly I share some of your preferences for behaviorist accounts. I
just think they don't cover everything and that the solution lies, not
in redefining "behavior" so they do but in broadening the picture of
mind so that we see that it's not all "behavior."
(Gerardo) Well, if it´s some hybrid, so what? Many good things came
from hybridization of previous proposals. I´ve been arguing that your
criticisms don´t apply to this proposal. I think this proposal covers
everything that must cover as explananda: publicly and privately
observed events. It includes M1, M2 and M3 as explananda, but only M1
can take part of the explanation, and never as uncaused agency. It
also includes physiological events as an important mereological
component of the explanation, but never as “the cause of mind and
behavior”.
(Stuart) Quine's approach as you've defined it strikes me as yet
another effort at redefinition. However, these terms (mental terms)
occupy an unusual place in our language game so it seems we are always
busy trying to get our hands around these particular greased pigs.
(Gerardo) There´s nothing wrong with redefinitions. The issue is how
useful results the redefinition for each speaker´s purposes.
(Stuart) Well as I've repeatedly said, I am not arguing against
behaviorism. I don't know enough about it. I am arguing against the
view you say no one actually ever held (and I've also expressed my
opinion, numerous times, that I'm inclined to agree that no
respectable thinker ever held such a view). My point is that
Wittgenstein certainly cannot be enlisted in the class of simplistic
behaviorists and even expressed his doubts about behaviorism as I
recall -- but I don't know if he thought of it in the simplistic way
we have both agreed is mistaken or not.
However, I do think that some of the moves you have made to render
behaviorism more sophisticated strikes me as a bit weak, i.e., why
redefine behavior to include things not typically understood as
behavior? Wouldn't it make more sense to simply broaden your theory to
include behaviors and other stuff (like mental images, having
realizations, etc.)
(Gerardo) Why should we take as a given that they are “other stuff”?
Couldn´t we propose a different conceptualization? Should we take
something for granted just because many people considered it to be
truth? I think that when you put aside the inertia of thinking they´re
other stuff because we´ve always thought they´re so, the rival
conceptualization is not weak at all: it explains much more, and it
avoids the many problems of the traditional “other stuff”
conceptualization.
(Stuart) My point is that the broader thesis you have been sketching
out here, and arguing for, is more stipulative than empirical since it
involves stipulating new meanings to terms.
(Gerardo) No, it´s not. Once you compare the two conceptualizations,
there´re differences in what we can and cannot do with each of them.
For example, when you weaken the dichotomy between public and private,
you can take the learning mechanisms that have been studied with
public behaviors and apply them to the explanation, prediction and
control of private events (which is a valuable purpose, both for
empirical and technical research). And when you strengthen the
distinction between M1 and M2/M3, you can avoid “Throwing the baby out
with the bath water” (like logical behaviorism did) and also you can
avoid “keeping the bath water for fear of trowing out the baby” (as
speculative cognitivists do).
(Stuart) While we can always redefine our terms, sometimes
redefinition can go too far. I genuinely see the effort to call mental
images behavior as just such a mistake, whether anyone ever held a
more restrictivist theory of behaviorism or not.
(Gerardo) I repeat: it´s not “mental images”, it´s the activity of
imagery what I´m considering as behavior (in the sense that it´s event-
like activity, and in the sense that it´s accounted with the same
principles that apply to other perceptual responses). The
nominalization of “mental images” may lead to mistake them with
observed objects, when the grammar of talking about imagery and
talking about observation has some important differences.
Regards,
Gerardo.
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