Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

Here we have a subject term (the names ‘Bill’ and ‘Tony’, and the demonstrative ‘this’), and things are said of what they pick out: ‘is rich’, ‘grins’, or ‘is an orange’. These terms stand for conditions that things might meet. They are called ‘predicates’: the rich things satisfy the predicate ‘is rich’, and other things do not. This is the basic subject-predicate form of information.

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ Each person? Or the people as a collective, as in ‘The team can have a bus’? If the founding fathers had been able to think in terms of quantificational structure, a lot of blood might not have been spilt.

The way in which implicatures are generated is part of the study of language called pragmatics, whereas the structure of information is the business of semantics.

I have found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect, and I foresee, that other objects, which are, in appearance, similar, will be attended with similar effects. I shall allow, if you please, that the one proposition may justly be inferred from the other: I know in fact, that it always is inferred. But if you insist, that the inference is made by a chain of reasoning, I desire you to produce that reasoning.

Induction is irrational. It relies on itsefl

The inference from what is true of one limited region of space and time to a conclusion true of different parts of space and time is called inductive inference. What Hume is bothered about has become known as the problem of induction.

What Straightie would like is an argument in favour of the uniformity of nature. In other words, an argument saying that since God has started off with a blue sky, and stuck with it so far, probably he is going to go on sticking with it. But Kinkie can point out that God has started off with an as-per-Kinkie sky, and by equal reasoning urge that he is probably going to stick with that.

Straightie wants the argument that Hume says he cannot find. But, as I said, in our bones we all side with Straightie. What’s wrong with arguing that since nature has been uniform so far, it will probably go on being uniform?

It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance. Of course, Hume knows that we all learn from experience, and that we all rely upon the uniformity of nature. He thinks we share this natural propensity with animals. It is just that this is all it is: an exercise of nature. It is a custom or habit, but it has no special claim in reason. When we reason inductively there is a way in which our premises can be true and our conclusion false. Nature can change.

It seems that we engineer a bridge between past and future, but cannot argue that the bridge is reliable.

We could now revisit a number of areas: the Zombie possibility, the design argument, the likelihood of a good God creating or allowing evil, and especially the discussion of miracles, using Bayes’s theorem. It is a tool of immense importance. The fallacies it guards against—ignoring the base rate, ignoring the chance of false positives—are dangerous, and crop up everywhere that people try to think.

In short, it is not just the fact that a result is improbable that should prompt us to look for some special explanation. We need some additional reason to think that the improbable result is not just due to chance anyway. Chance is just as good at throwing up improbabilities as design.

Induction is the process of taking things within our experience to be representative of the world outside our experience. It is a process of projection or extrapolation. But it is only part of a wider process of trying to increase our understanding of things. In the final section of this chapter, I want to introduce some of the reasonings that this involves.

We fancy, that were we brought, on a sudden into this world, we could at first have inferred, that one Billiard-ball would communicate motion to another upon impulse; and that we needed not to have waited for the event, in order to pronounce with certainty concerning it. Such is the influence of custom, that, where it is strongest, it not only covers our natural ignorance, but even conceals itself, and seems not to take place, merely because it is found in the highest degree.

They wanted an insight into what gravitational attraction is, but Newton only told them what it does. Newton tells you how bodies accelerate towards each other, and that is all. Hume argues that the kind of thing Newton did was the only kind of thing science can ever do. He holds that anything else represents an incoherent ideal.

The famous philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) argued that indeed they can. ‘Normal’ science proceeds in the light of a set of paradigms, or implied views about what kind of explanations we should hope for. Periods of revolutionary science occur when the paradigms are themselves challenged. Science is to be seen as ‘a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions

We have distinguished processes of inductive reasoning, and seen how dependent we are on brute faith in the uniformity of nature.

Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would probably never arrive at qualities like these. Hence I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.

The secondary qualities are the immediate objects of the senses: colours, tastes, sounds, odors, feels.

So as well as opening up dualism of mind and body Descartes and his contemporaries open up a dualism between the world as it is for us (sometimes called the ‘manifest image’)—the coloured, warm, smelly, noisy, comfortable, familiar world—and the world as it is objectively or absolutely (the ‘scientific image’)—the world that contains nothing but physical particles and forces spread out across the boundless spaces of the cosmos.

Any argument aiming at something like the final conclusion needs to go via this. It is no good just pointing out that different creatures perceive the world differently, if that allows the interpretation that just one set of them has got the world right.

Sure, someone might say, the way in which a television set shows a picture in response to a signal may vary. If the television is the wrong kind for that signal, then it just shows snowstorms, for instance. But that just means that the television misses information that exists, that is objectively there, carried by the signal. It is no kind of argument that the information is not really there, independently of the receiver, in the first place. If the transmitter is beaming the inaugural speech, a television showing a snowstorm is doing worse than one showing the speech.

Creatures that cannot receive the kind of information they need to live their lives die out. So, unlike the televisions, O and O* maybe doing as well as each other, but living lives with different sensory experiences: seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, and feeling differently. It is this equality that suggests, as Russell later put it, that it would be ‘favouritism’ to say that the world is better represented in one of these ways than in any other.

Relatavism is wrong atop of a humanistic ethic

The upshot of the argument is called ‘secondary quality idealism’. It gives us Galileo’s result that the qualities that are the immediate objects of sensory experience are driven ‘back into the mind’.

In this picture there is the scientific world, of objects as they really are in Locke’s time, a world of little particles clinging together to form bigger bodies, each having the primary, scientific, properties. This is the scientific picture. There is also the manifest image: the coloured, smelly, tasty, noisy, warm, or cold world we think of ourselves as inhabiting. But the manifest image is either in or at least largely due to the mind. The scientific world is not.

Qualia

A number of writers in France had difficulties with Descartes’s world-view. In particular, if God was, after all, a kind of deceiver (although, of course, for our own good) with respect to secondary qualities, might he also be one with respect to primary qualities?

Colours are here a kind of Trojan horse working to reintroduce the general Evil Demon scepticism that Descartes thought he had beaten down.

There is no independent dice-tossing from time to time: rather it is as if God made the one decision, and stuck to it. There must be a metaphysical solution to the problem of induction, even if there is no purely probabilistic or mathematical solution.

Kant sees that when it comes to space and time, size, shape, and the objective order, to have a concept is not to have a mental picture. It is to have an organizing principle or rule; a way of handling the flux of data. Having the same organizing principles or rules could give us the same understanding of the world in spite of differences of subjective experience.

The intention is not to deny some element of scientific understanding, or indeed common sense, but to explain how those elements hang together in our thought. It is those thoughts that structure what he calls the ‘phenomenal world’: the world that is both described by science, and is manifested to us in sense experience.

The mind, for the idealist, creates the world we live in, the ‘Lebenswelt’ of our thoughts, imaginings, and perceptions. Kant, of course, is in this up to the elbows, since the entire framework within which we think, our ‘conceptual scheme’ of space, time, objects, causes, and selves, is due to organizing principles of the mind.

Here is one way of sympathizing with it. Suppose we think of Hylas as seeking to show that he can understand the realist notion of an object ‘independent’ of his actual modes of comprehension. He undertakes to ‘abstract’ away from contingencies of his own perceptual experience or contingencies of his own modes of thought, or his own conceptual choices. Then we can see Berkeley, in the person of Philonous, reminding him that this feat of abstraction is impossible. Whatever he succeeds in imagining or conceiving, he is doomed to bring his own perspective to it.

Moore undertook to refute the idea that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder—in other words he undertook to defend realism about beauty.

The idealist tradition in philosophy stresses the inescapable and vital place that the shape of our own minds plays in ‘constructing’ the world as we understand it.

REALISM (sometimes PLATONISM). These rules have a real, objective existence. They determine the proper application of concepts over past, present, future, and possible instances. We grasp them by some mysterious act of apprehension, which cannot easily be understood in natural terms.

CONCEPTUALISM. These rules are the creatures of the mind. They are conjured into existence by our shared responses arising from our shared human natures, or perhaps our educated and culturally shaped natures. In this way all concepts are ‘response dependent’: artefacts of our own dispositions to respond to things.

NOMINALISM. There aren’t really any rules at all. There are just human beings with their dispositions to apply words or withhold them. There is no real ‘correctness’ or ‘incorrectness’ in this, although as so often people whose applications diverge from those of the herd will find themes being called incorrect.

It is arguable that this is always the deepest, most profound, problem of philosophy. It structures Plato’s (realist) reaction to the sophists (nominalists). What is often called ‘postmodernism’ is really just nominalism, colourfully presented as the doctrine that there is nothing except texts.

This introduces another very dangerous mistake, which is that of thinking that whenever a person has a concern, what she ‘really’ desires is some state of herself, such as her own peace of mind. Psychologists, especially, have been apt to think of desire in terms of a kind of build-up of tension, and what the agent is driven to do is to release the tension. It is then easy to think that the release of tension was the real object of desire all along. This too can introduce hurtful words: ‘You weren’t really concerned about the starving children, you were just wanting to feel good.’ And all behaviour is diagnosed as fundamentally selfish, as though it is always your own state that concerns you, with other goals and aims a kind of mask.

This set of thoughts (sometimes called psychological egoism) is entirely wrong. Suppose you want food. Following the train of thought of the last paragraph, I interpret you as wanting relief from the tension of wanting food. So I punch you in the stomach, making you sick enough to stop wanting food. Did I get you what you wanted? Not at all (even forgetting that the punch may have been painful). You didn’t want any old relief from the tension. You wanted food. Similarly a normal person aroused by sexual passion does not want any old relief from the passion. A bromide might give him that, but he doesn’t want a bromide. He wants sex.

I said that one of our concerns is not to be deceived about whether our concerns are met. A parallel point is that often, but not always, one of our concerns is not just to lose our concerns.

When we have concerns, the aspects of things to which we are sensitive can be described as our reasons for choosing one thing or another, or feeling some attitude or emotion.

In a slightly wider sense our reasons may outrun what we call to mind as we deliberate. They can include aspects of situations that in fact affect us, even when we are unaware or only half-aware of what is happening. In this wider sense, Annie’s reason for leaving Bertie might be that he bores her, even when she does not admit this to herself.

When we speak normatively we should signal what we are doing by words like ‘ought’ and ‘good’. But sometimes, instead of saying ‘She had no good reason’ we say things like ‘She had no reason at all’, and that can be misinterpreted.