McEvoy was talking about the 'given', and then there's the 'myth of the
given', not to be confused with the 'myth of Grice', not to be confused with
the 'myth of Jones'.
Plato introduced the myth of the cave; Sellars introduced the Myth of
Jones. And then there's the myth of Grice -- and of course the myth of the
given.
This myth of Grice has two parts.
The first part is how we come to have the concept of inner episodes which
are thoughts.
The second is how we come to have the concept of inner episodes which are
sensations.
Common to both parts, however, is the telling of a story in which a group
of people begin without a concept of certain inner, mental episodes, but
gradually come to have both the concept and then direct awareness of the
respective episodes.
The myth, that is, takes seriously the view that all awareness presupposes
a language, and in the end, articulates the relationships between such
concepts as public, private, thought, sensation, and so on.
We begin the myth by having us imagine a group of beings who can talk and
act just like we do, but who lack any vocabulary of the inner.
They have no concepts or notions of thoughts, sensations, feelings, wants,
desires, though their language is otherwise rich and complete, even having
the resources for (proto)scientific theorizing.
We now introduce the hero of the story, Grice, who himself proposes a
theory.
Importantly, like many theories designed to explain, this one posits the
existence of a new class of entities. In this instance, Grice seeks to
explain some of the behavior of his peers, and relying on an analogy with the
method of postulation in physics (from our perspective), the entities Grice's
theory postulates of are, initially, unobservable.
To anticipate the end of the story, the entities Grice introduces, first
thoughts, then sensations, are not in principle unobservable.
His peers will eventually be able to direct, non-inferential knowledge of
many of them.
What behaviour, then, is Grice seeking to explain by the postulation of
something Grice calls, “thoughts” and “thinking”?
Namely that people sometimes engage in purposive, intelligent behavior when
silent.
Sometimes, that is, people engage in what we call, “thinking out loud,”
where they speak about the intelligent behaviour they are engaged in.
But sometimes the behaviour itself is present, with no accompanying verbal
commentary, as it were.
Imagine someone changing the faucet in their kitchen, with instructions
before them, sometimes reading aloud the instructions, sometimes declaring an
intention to do something next, followed by periods of silence.
What exactly, Grice wonders, is going on when people engage in such
intelligent behavioir when they are completely silent?
According to Grice's theory, during all these occasions of intelligent
behavior there is something going on “inside” people, in their heads if you
like, some of which gets verbalized, some of which doesn’t.
The way to explain such intelligent behavior is to see it as the
culmination of a silent, inner type of reasoning, an “inner speaking” going on
inside of people.
Grice reasons that this intelligent behavior involves the occurrence of
hidden episodes which are similar to the activity of talking.
Grice says, in essence, "Let’s call it "thinking," and though it is like
talking, it is silent, or covert inner speech.
"Thinking is what is going on in us, which lies behind and explains our
intelligent behavior and our intelligent talking."
Importantly, the episodes Grice postulates may turn out to be
neuro-physiological events, but Grice's theory is noncommittal on this point,
and doesn’
t require a specification of their intrinsic nature.
The salient point is that episodes of thinking are modeled on a public
language, and an understanding of these inner episodes will involve the use of
categories that are in the first instance applicable to a public language.
At the culmination of this first stage, Grice has only postulated the
existence of these inner episodes—“inner” in being under the skin.
In the second stage, Grices teaches his peer, Strawson, to use the theory
to explain people’s behaviour, in the absence of their "thinking out-loud."
Finally, and here is the crucial transition, Grice teaches other members
of his play group to apply the theory to themselves.
Having mastered the theory for third-person use, that is, people begin
making inferences about themselves.
"I just uttered such and such, so I must have been thinking such and such,
(though I was not aware of it)."
Eventually, by training and reinforcement from the Griceian community,
members of Grice's play group come to be able to actually report not just that
they are thinking, but also what they are thinking, in a direct,
non-inferential manner.
Just as people can be trained to make immediate, non-inferential judgments
about the nature of public objects, Grice's playmates come to be able to
issue non-inferential reports of their own thoughts, what is going on inside
them, in a way that others aren’t.
They can report directly about what is happening in their own minds, though
this has proceeded entirely within the constraints of Psychological
Nominalism.
Grice's playmates, including Strawson, developed awareness of their own
thoughts only after, or at least concurrently with, mastery of the public
concepts (i.e. words) of “thinking”, “believing”, “wishing”, and so on, that
comes with the learning of Grice's theory itself.
The thesis of Psychological Nominalism claims that to be aware of
something, x, one must have a concept for x.
But there is a flip side to this. If one has a concept of x, one can be
aware of x’s.
With the concept of x in hand, that is, you can notice all sorts of things
you didn’t notice before you had that concept.
For instance, a physicist looks at a puff of smoke in a cloud chamber and
sees an electron discharged.
She comes to have non-inferential knowledge of something we might not, as
she has certain concepts we don’t as laypeople, as well as an ability to
apply them directly to her experience.
In other words, perception is concept-laden, and depending on what concepts
you have, you can perceive different things.
As a result, once we acquire the concept of an inner episode (as we saw for
Grice’s playmates), we can come to experience those episodes directly,
though we were unaware of them before we had the concept.
Non-inferential knowledge of the private is now possible, and so provides
for a first person authority, as we sought.
We are simply in a better position to report on our own thoughts (and
sensations) than others.
We can report on our own thoughts, for instance, because we have the
concept of thinking.
But others have that concept too—it is a public concept after all—and as
such are in a position to also make judgments about our thinking.
We may be in a better position than others, but others aren’t precluded
from knowing our inner states.
The skepticism that gave rise to Behaviourism can be avoided.
Yet while we do have an authority about our own inner states, it doesn’t
follow that we are incorrigible about them.
All things being equal, you are in a better epistemic position to judge
your own states than others are.
There are times, however, when we aren’t the best judge of our inner
episodes, of what we are feeling, for instance, as is well documented by
psychotherapy.
Returning to the Myth of Grice, what Grice does for thoughts, Grice now
does for sensations.
Sensations are importantly different from mental episodes that are
thoughts.
Though both are private, sensations differ in that they have an intrinsic,
qualitative element in a way that thoughts and beliefs don’t.
Further, sensations aren’t intentional: they aren’t about anything.
Their postulation will have to be modeled, therefore, on something
different than what was used for thoughts.
The account of sensations, the final stage in the Myth of Grice, is
designed to capture another important element in an overall theory of mind,
namely that some of our private, mental episodes are a result of our sensory
encounters with the world.
By interacting with the world we are caused to have sensations, which vary
from pain and pleasure, to sensations of blue triangles and pink ice cubes.
As before, Grice offers a theory to explain public, observable behaviour of
his playmates, including Strawson.
In this case, Gric seeks to explain the fact that a person might utter
“Red triangle there!”
in cases both where there is one and in cases where there is not.
Grice seeks to explain both veridical and non-veridical perceptual
experiences, and how it is possible for people to have experiences that are
qualitatively alike even though one may be an accurate representation and one
not.
Grice theorizes that when a subject senses the physical world, something
internal is registered, and this internal state has a qualitative element to
it, one that can be caused by both genuine and illusory causes, to have
the same qualitative element (cfr. Grice, "The Causal Theory of Perception").
Sensations, in other words, are postulated entities too, and are held to be
the internal effects of outer, physical causes.
Subjects are effected by these sensations, leading them to judge that there
is, say a red triangle before them, both when there is one, but also,
perhaps, even if there is only a white one in red light, for instance.
As before, these inner episodes are modeled on something public and
observable—namely things like red triangles—and the inner episodes are said to
be similar to these public objects, to be replicas, if you like, though of
the sort that aren’t literally little triangles in minds.
In this way, the public language of color and other qualities is used to
characterize the nature of these episodes, and people learn to report,
non-inferentially, on their own subjective experiences.
As before, because individual reports of what is inner make use of a public
language, the concepts employed in such reports are gained only once one
has mastered that public language.
Considered in total, Grice's theory of mental episodes has allowed Grice
to maintain our commonsense belief that there is a realm of experience, the
inner, that is private and knowable by the subject of experience in a way
that others can’t know it.
At the same time, this has been done without reliance on a mysterious,
unexplained power to access the inner realm, and has also allowed us to avoid
the skepticism traditional accounts were faced with.
The resources for describing and reporting on these episodes are the same
resources available for describing public objects and events, and thus
learnable by all.
The Myth of Grice is an anthropological fiction, of course, but if
successful.
It demonstrates the conceptual relations between such terms "thinking,"
"language," "private," "public," and so on.
And it allows Griceto critique the traditional account of the nature of
these.
Importantly, Grice has inverted the Cartesian order of knowledge (cfr.
Grice, "Descartes on clear and distinct perception").
For Descartes, the inner is known first, and is the starting point for any
knowledge of the outer, the physical world.
Grice argues, in essence, that our ability to be aware of the inner in
fact requires an antecedent command of the language of public states of
affairs.
A subject must be able to speak of red objects before speaking of red
sensations; more generally, a subject must have command of the public language
before being able to report on her own inner events.
Crucially, though, we have given this account without sacrificing the
inner.
We can still talk meaningfully about how things are within us (our thoughts
and sensations) and we can still have the direct, unmediated knowledge
Descartes and others spoke of, but without violating any strictures on the
public character of concepts and knowledge.
To summarize all this into something tidy, we might say that Cartesians
hold the inner to be knowable better and prior to the outer, while Grice
claims just the reverse.
We can know and be aware of the inner only by first understanding and
knowing the outer.
Grice has flipped the Cartesian picture on its head.
-- Which of course infuriated Chomsky. He had dealt with Grice in his
"Reflections on language" (relying on just one essay by Grice, that reprinted
by
Searle in "The philosophy of language", Oxford readings in philosophy, ed.
G. J. Warnock. And now Chomsky could reminisce back on his "Cartesian
linguistics".
Cheers,
Speranza
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