Being and Being Known

Representation and Similarity

Opening issues

• Endorses Thomism: The senses in their way and the intellect in its way are informed by the natures of external objects and events.

• But the Thomist account of this isomorphism is over-simplified.

• This has major implications for other Thomist theses.

Contrasts

• Descartes• Contemporary Anglo-American ‘realism’• Both agree that intellectual acts differ not in their intrinsic

character as acts, but only in their relata (i.e. what they are related to).

• For D, the relatum is a thing ‘having being for mind’ (an ‘objective’ thing, as D puts it.)

• For contemporary realists there is no interposition of special things that have ‘being for mind’ here– instead it is things in the world that are the ‘objects’ of thought, i.e. the things thoughts are related to (in the content-determining way).

Meinongianism

• The realist turn requires objects for thoughts that are of non-existing things.

• Hence a distinction is drawn between existence (reserved for ‘real’ things) and subsistence– the kind of being possessed by the objects of thoughts of non-existent things.

• Meinong took this to its limits, allowing even for the subsistence of round squares– here every singular term has an object it refers to.

• Russell’s theory of descriptions eliminates such singular terms, avoiding at least some of these peculiar, non-existent objects.

Against Contents

• Existence-for-mind (objective being) seems very peculiar; more a metaphorical re-statement of the fact that one is thinking of something than an explanation of it.

• But does this force us to accept the realism above? No.

• If thoughts differ intrinsically in ways that determine what they are thoughts of, there’s no need to posit strange relata to specify (individuate) their contents!

The Mental Word

• The most promising approach to talking about these intrinsic differences between different thoughts is the model of the mental word.

• Sellars rejects the Thomistic version of this view, and defends one grounded in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

• This account requires some general view of the language of thought (mental questions, mental statements, mental nouns, etc.) and especially of the difference between mental words as acts and mental words as propensities or dispositions (as in the Thomist distinction between first and second act).

• Here the issue of when and how we come to have the mental vocabulary we have comes up.

Abstraction

• The abstraction account of the origins of our mental words holds that we begin with no such words in our mental ‘vocabulary’.

• Through our senses we acquire such words, as we have complex sensations and recognize/distinguish their components.

• Sellars rejects this as both wrong from the outset, and (more clearly) unable to deal with mental words (and sentences!) that aren’t about the sensible features of things and events in the world.

Odd claim & 3 questions

• Sellars says that the Thomists hold our grasp of the nature of mental words is independent of the details of the analogy to language.

• 3 questions: What is a mental word, how do we come by them, and how are they related to the world?

The Thomist Story

• Natures inform both thoughts and things.• For example, the nature triangular can inform a thing,

making it triangular.• It can also inform a thought, making it triangular in the

immaterial mode (i.e. making it represent triangularity…)• When such a nature can inform particular thoughts of

ours, then it informs our intellect (i.e. puts it in in first act with respect to this mental word).

• Types and tokens: Every mental act which is informed in this way is a token of the corresponding mental word type.

Acquiring mental words

• Here the idea is that the senses are a source of mental words, i.e. that we come to have many of our mental words by having the appropriate kind of sensory experiences: sensations of triangles furnish our minds with the mental word .triangle..

• Extrinsic (smoke of fire) vs. intrinsic (sensory/mental words) signs.

Example• White and triangular exist in an external, white

triangular thing. • Its action on (normal) senses (in normal

conditions) makes the natures white and triangular (in the immaterial mode) exist in the organ of sight.

• In these conditions the organ in act (i.e. by virtue of being in this state) is a sign of the white triangular thing.

• This is a case of the ‘sensitive’ as opposed to ‘intellectual’ word—we need to be careful here, since Sellars will distinguish these sharply.

Vocabulary of sense vs. intellect

• First, the vocabulary of sense is going to be reduced/cut down from that of the intellect.

• Focus here on sensible features of things.• Absence of words for logical connectives,

abstract singular terms (words for universals), words for forming judgements (not: This thing is white, but only: this white thing.)

Sellars on sense

• Sense is a cognitive faculty:• It’s essential to knowledge of the world.• But it ‘knows nothing’, & is not part of the intentional

order.• The senses do have pseudo-intentionality, though!• Grammatical parallel: A sensation of x // A thought of x.• The idea of being white in the immaterial mode applies

both to sensations and to thoughts– here it’s tempting to identify these two ‘immaterial’ modes of existence…

• But there’s a different way to tell how ‘white’ and ‘triangular’ can characterize sensations that doesn’t assimilate them to the ways in which these can characterize thoughts.

White sensations

• Are normally brought about by white things.

• Differ systematically from sensory states brought about by things of other colours.

• Are sometimes brought about by other sorts of things/conditions– hence can explain cases of illusion…

Order of things

• On this view, the ‘white’ of sensations is derivative from the ‘white’ of things.

• This fits with language learning.• It doesn’t fit with foundationalism, for

which our grasp of the features of sensations is prior to our grasp of anything about the external world.

• Analogy with healthy, as in ‘healthy food,’ and healthy, as in ‘healthy person’.

Self-knowledge

• For Sellars, direct self-knowledge (I’m having a sensation of…) can only be expressed using such analogical concepts. This is a pretty radical view!

• The place of derivative white and derivative triangular in the system of the species of sense acts is isomorphic in the structural sense with the place of basic white and basic triangular in the system of the perceptible qualities of material things (49).

Intellectual words

• Logical words.• Object (about the real order) vs. Meta (about the

logical order)– latter revealed by use of abstract singular terms (triangularity) and talk of implication, a logical relation between judgments.

• These words are so closely linked to sensory words, the separation required by Thomism seems impossible to maintain.

• So Sellars denies any of our mental words are there in sensation at all.

Holism

• Having any mental words requires having many.• We need a whole (if rudimentary) language here. • The need to see white things in order to have the

concept ‘white’ is not a matter of such seeings being a form of consciousness of something white as white.

• Instead, coming to have the mental word ‘white’ occurs when we perceive something as white– an act that includes a judgment that it is white, and involves both the senses and the intellect.

• In particular, complex linguistic training is essential for such perceptions to occur: it’s not just a matter of sensation.

Isomorphism

• The word 'isomorphism' applies when two complex structures can be mapped onto each other, in such a way that to each part of one structure there is a corresponding part in the other structure, where 'corresponding' means that the two parts play similar roles in their respective structures. (Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 49)

Two Isomorphisms

• When Sellars speaks of isomorphism between the intellect and the world, he has two different relations in mind:– A relation between the intellect as a real entity

in the world and other elements of the world, i.e. an isomorphism in the ‘real order’.

– The relation between the intellect and language, when the intellect is conceived in terms derived from its analogy with language, i.e. an isomorphism in the ‘logical order’.

Terminology

• The isomorphism in the real order, a parallel between correct descriptions of intellectual states and their relations with/ interactions with various features of the world is called picturing. This invokes the obvious fact that both pictures and the things they picture are part of the real order.

• The isomorphism between intellectual states and language, in which intellectual states are described in terms derived from the features and relations of overt linguistic episodes, is called signification. This invokes meaning and the normative roles that different expressions play in language, which parallel the roles that different intellectual states play in thought.

The spoken word

• Here Sellars will focus on the spoken word, focusing on the distinction between the two isomorphisms as it emerges in this case.

• From there, Sellars intends to apply the distinction to the mental word, following the analogy to language that, for Sellars, is the source of the concepts we apply to individuate and relate thoughts.

The Robot

• The distinction between the two isomorphisms is easy to lose track of.

• Sellars proposes to use an example that will make it easier to keep them distinct.

• It’s easier to separate the ‘merely mechanical’ workings of a sophisticated robot from the ‘translation’ we might be tempted to give of the ‘tape language’ it uses to record its observations of the world and itself.

The Robot Pictures

• The robot writes various symbols on its tape in response to the features of its environment that it can detect.

• It also writes symbols on its tape in response to regularities in what it finds written there (thus performing ‘inductive’ reasonings) and other features of what it finds there (thus maintaining a kind of autobiography of its observations).

• As it proceeds, it produces a kind of ‘map’ of its surroundings and its own states over time.

• Maps, of course, don’t record every detail– this is a map only in the sense that, given the robot’s construction and behaviour patterns, there is a rich structural relation between features of the tape and features/events in the robot’s environment.

Signifying• For Sellars, signification is a relation between languages, very

closely related to translation. • When we say: in German, ‘Mensch’ signifies man, we are indicating

a parallel between the role of ‘Mensch’ in German and the role of ‘man’ in our (or the audience’s) language.

• This is very different from the (much more metaphysical) view of language, according to which ‘man’ in our example is being used (not mentioned), but in a slightly non-standard way (since it’s not being used predicatively, i.e. to describe some item as a man).

• The non-standard use is a kind of meta-use, in which ‘man’ refers to ‘the absolute nature, man’ (something like a Platonic form), so that on this view, our statement of signification asserts a relation between the word ‘Mensch’ and a very special sort of thing (an entity that is part of the world, read broadly, and which in turn has some sort of real relation– instantiation, perhaps– to individual men).

The robot signifies

• The issue of signification arises when we ‘translate’ symbols on the robot’s tape into our own language (Sellars’ example is the translation of ‘::’ as lightning.

• Our decision to adopt such a translation assumes that there is a picturing relation between the instances of ‘::’ in the robot’s tape and occurrences of lighting– a picturing relation that parallels that between instances of ‘lightning’ in our talk about the world and instances of lightning.

• But adopting such a translation treats the picture as a language, bringing in normative categories (e.g. ‘this instance of ‘::’ is a mistake– there was a different sort of flash at the time, which the robot was unable to distinguish from lightning.”)

Back to the Mental Word

• Sellars recurs to his suggestion, ‘that the notion of mental words is an extension by analogy of the notion of the spoken word’ (57).

• Analogies always involve disanalogies: ‘Thoughts, after all, are not patterns of ‘inner sounds’ produced by the wagging of a hidden tongue.’ (Ibid)

• But they are linked to the ‘give and take’ between humans and their environment in ways (patterns) like those that link overt speech to these things.

Order of explanation vs. Order of conceptual priority

• In the order of explanation, thoughts come first, and overt language is their public expression.

• This does not conflict with the claim that we conceive thoughts in terms that we apply first to overt language.

• Similarly, we explain much of what ordinary things do in terms of unobservables like electrons, but we conceive those unobservables by analogy, using concepts that we first acquired in describing ordinary things.

The temptation of metaphysics

• In paragraph 56, Sellars gives an account of how confusing these two separate (but related) isomorphisms can lead us to endorse the Thomistic claim that the intellect is immaterial.

• The idea is that the link between ‘Mensch’ and the absolute nature man is a matter of the intellectual word ‘Mensch’ actually realizing this nature– but since it clearly is not (really) a material, physical man, we have to insist that it is instead a man in some other sense, i.e. a man in the immaterial mode.

• On this view, thoughts embody the same nature, viz. man, as the things those thoughts are about. We’re back to a puzzling and strange and unilluminating metaphor here– not the way to make progress!

Direct Knowledge

• We do have direct knowledge of facts such as ‘I’m now thinking of a white triangle’.

• For Descartes, this required that we have knowledge of what it really is to be such a thought, i.e. knowledge of this state ‘in propria persona’ as it is in itself.

• For Sellars, this is a mistake– we can have direct knowledge of such states of ourselves for reasons that do not require us to know just what it is to be in such a state– this direct knowledge is framed in concepts derived from analogies between language and thought and (in the case of sensations) between characters of sensations and the ‘perceptible qualities of physical things’ (59).

Keeping the two separate

• So we can now see how keeping the two isomorphisms separate in the case of thought keeps us away from metaphysical temptations.

• If the isomorphism of significance (at the level of translation) holds, it follows that there must also be a picturing isomorphism between the intellect and the real, paralleling the complex picturing ismorphism between language and the world.

• So what is thinking (the intellect) in the real world? • For Sellars, it is events occurring in the central nervous

system– events that we normally describe analogically, not in propria persona, even though we have direct knowledge of them.