Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

the philosopher studies the structure of thought. Understanding the structure involves seeing how parts function and how they interconnect. It means knowing what would happen for better or worse if changes were made.

Understanding thought better is to pave a better path for humanity

We might wonder whether what we say is ‘objectively’ true, or merely the outcome of our own perspective, or our own ‘take’ on a situation. Thinking about this we confront categories like knowledge, objectivity, truth, and we may want to think about them. At that point we are reflecting on concepts and procedures and beliefs that we normally just use.

how can thinking skills be acquired? The thinking in question involves attending to basic structures of thought.

The most famous philosophical character of the classical world, the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues, did not pride himself on how much he knew. On the contrary, he prided himself on being the only one who knew how little he knew (reflection, again).

To process thoughts well is a matter of being able to avoid confusion, detect ambiguities, keep things in mind one at a time, make reliable arguments, become aware of alternatives, and so on.

To sum up: our ideas and concepts can be compared with the lenses through which we see the world. In philosophy the lens is itself the topic of study. Success will be a matter not of how much you know at the end, but of what you can do when the going gets tough: when the seas of argument rise, and confusion breaks out. Success will mean taking seriously the implications of ideas.

Very much all of this

The time we take out, whether it is to do mathematics or music, or to read Plato or Jane Austen, is time to be cherished.

Reflection matters because it is continuous with practice. How you think about what you are doing affects how you do it, or whether you do it at all.

A system of thought is something we live in, just as much as a house, and if our intellectual house is cramped and confined, we need to know what better structures are possible.

Reflection opens the avenue to criticism, and the folkways may not like criticism. In this way, ideologies become closed circles, primed to feel outraged by the questioning mind.

It has identified critical self-reflection with freedom, the idea being that only when we can see ourselves properly can we obtain control over the direction in which we would wish to move.

Goya’s full motto for his etching is, ‘Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.

we start with Descartes because he was the first great philosopher to wrestle with the implications of the modern scientific world view.

Descartes recognizes that a conception of oneself as an embodied thing, living in an extended spatial world of physical objects, will come back almost irresistibly. And he realizes that the ‘I’ he is left with is pretty thin: ‘this puzzling I that cannot be pictured in the imagination’.

An argument is valid when there is no way—meaning no possible way—that the premises, or starting points, could be true without the conclusion being true

It is sound if it is valid and it has true premises, in which case its conclusion is true as well.

We might interpret him as having in mind something else, that he regrettably does not make explicit. This is called looking for a suppressed premise—something needed to buttress an argument, and that its author might have presupposed, but does not state. Alternatively we might reinterpret Descartes to be aiming at a weaker conclusion. Or perhaps we can do both.

So the second premise only seems true in the sense of ‘we cannot distinguish at a glance whether our senses are deceiving us’. Whereas to open the way to Descartes’s major doubts, it would seem that he needs ‘we cannot distinguish even over time and with care whether our senses are deceiving us’. And this last does not seem to be true.

‘Cogito, ergo sum’: I think, therefore I am. (A better translation is ‘I am thinking, therefore I am’. Descartes’s premise is not ‘I think’ in the sense of ‘I ski’, which can be true even if you are not at the moment skiing. It is supposed to be parallel to ‘I am skiing’.)

But if only we could see the rest of reality, mind, body, God, freedom, human life, with the same rush of clarity and understanding! Well, one philosophical ideal is that we can. This is the ideal of rationalism: the power of pure unaided reason. For the rationalist can see from her armchair that things must be one way and cannot be other ways, like the angle in the semicircle. Knowledge achieved by this kind of rational insight is known as ‘a priori’: it can be seen to be true immediately, without any experience of the way of the world.

He was undoubtedly more optimistic about the trademark argument than we can be because he inherited a number of ideas from previous philosophical traditions. One very important one is that genuine causation is a matter of the cause passing on something to an effect. Causation is like passing the baton in a relay race. So, for example, it takes heat to make something hot, or movement to induce motion. This is a principle that surfaces again and again in the history of philosophy, and we shall encounter it more than once. Here it disposed Descartes to think that the ‘perfection’ in his idea needed to be secreted into it, as it were, by a perfect cause.

The harmony between our minds and the world is due to the fact that the world is responsible for our minds. Their function is to represent it so that we can meet our needs; if they were built to represent it in any way other than the true way, we could not survive. This is not an argument designed to do away with the Evil Demon. It is an argument that appeals to things we take ourselves to know about the world.

It is good, then, to remember four options in epistemology (the theory of knowledge). There is rational foundationalism, as attempted by Descartes. There is natural foundationalism, as attempted in Hume. There is coherentism. And brooding over all of them, there is scepticism, or the view that there is no knowledge.

How then should we regard knowledge? Knowledge implies authority: the people who know are the people to whom we should listen. It implies reliability: the people who know are those who are reliable at registering the truth, like good instruments. To claim knowledge implies claiming a sense of our own reliability. And to accord authority to someone or some method involves seeing it as reliable.

One could hold that mental and physical properties are very different but that the one organized body has them both—after all, mass and velocity are two very different kinds of property, but projectiles have them both. People who hold that there are two kinds of property (mental and physical) but that they can belong to the one kind of stuff (whatever large animals are made of) are called property dualists.

The aim is not to wallow in scepticism, but to draw back from any philosophy that opens up the sceptical possibilities. We would say: according to Cartesian dualism the Zombie possibility and the Mutant possibility are both wide open. But that just shows there is something wrong about Cartesian dualism. The mental and the physical just aren’t as distinct as it is claiming.

for Leibniz the whole order of nature must eventually be transparent to reason. When things fall out one way or another it is not just that they happen to do so. There must be, if we could only see far enough, a reason why they do. Things have to make sense. When Leibniz says God does nothing in an arbitrary or unprincipled way he is not really expressing a piece of theological optimism, so much as insisting that we ought to be able to see why things are one way or another. This is his ‘principle of sufficient reason’.

From the Lockean point of view, all the scientist may have discovered is that when the brain is in some specific state, we get symptoms of consciousness. But that might just tell us what consciousness is annexed to, by happenstance. It does not make the combination intelligible.

Subjective colour experience becomes not just a queer addon, but the inevitable, rationally explicable, expression of the kinds of physical functioning of the creatures that we are. If the same can be done for all the elements of our consciousness, the problem is solved.

We might incorporate that into a revised revised compatibilist definition: The subject acted freely if she could have done otherwise in the right sense. This means that she would have done otherwise if she had chosen differently and, under the impact of other true and available thoughts or considerations, she would have chosen differently. True and available thoughts and considerations are those that represent her situation accurately, and are ones that she could reasonably be expected to have taken into account.

The conceptual engineering we are doing at this point is supposed to tease out or make explicit real elements in our thinking. We want to highlight and try to encapsulate things like this: we do make a distinction between changing the past (cannot do) and acting differently than we do (sometimes can do); we do have discriminating practices of blame; we do make a distinction between being ill and being bad; we do allow some excuses and disallow others. The philosophical analysis is supposed to give us intellectual control of all this. It is supposed to exhibit it all, not just as an irrational jumble of disconnected habits, but as the application of a reasonable and defensible set of concepts and principles. It is because it is hard to do this that the philosophy is hard.

The compatibilist is not intending to deny agency, but to give a particular account of it. The account is in terms of modular brain functions, in which data are taken in, and alternatives generated and ranked, until eventually an output comes ‘on line’ and initiates action. True, these events are all things that ‘just happen’ (passively, as it were) but, according to the compatibilist, they are the things that happen, and all that happens, when you, the person, do something. Describing you as doing something, and for a reason, is a description at the personal level of the upshot of these multiple micro-level happenings.

When you don’t know what will happen, and you think events will respond to your doings, you deliberate about what to do. We have seen that fatalism affords no argument for conducting that deliberation one way or another. And it affords no argument that the process itself is unreal, unless the process is construed in the outside way we have considered and rejected.

There is no reason for him to know that the future will be what it is whatever we do, any more than he knows that the tree will blow down whatever the wind does. From the timeless vantage-point, all that is seen is the wind, and the destruction.

But returning to fatalism, the truth, then, is that there is no general philosophical or rational justification for it. It corresponds to a mood, a state of mind in which we feel out of control, and feel that we are indeed just spectators of our own lives. This is not always unjustified. People are sometimes largely powerless, politically, or even psychologically (because we are not flexible, but are indeed brainwashed, or in the grip of strange obsessions that we cannot shake). When we are powerless, fatalism may be a natural frame of mind into which to relapse. If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma, are sometimes consoling.

And you cannot tell a priori how flexible human behaviour is. Our biology, let us say, gives us the modules. But then, how the modules turn out—how they are programmed if we like, differently in different environments—is another thing. By comparison, biology gives us the structures, whatever they may be, we need to learn language. We have them; no other animal has them to any remotely similar degree. But which language we then learn is not determined by biology, but by environment, as infants imitate the language of their mothers and their kin.

Locke can use this insight to explain why we identify the same human being through the normal changes of life. ‘Same man or woman is like ‘same tree’ or ‘same monkey’. It accommodates growth and change, so long as there is continuity of function, or of organized life. So far then, so good. Locke has got a good hold on what enables us to reidentify the same human being (thought of as a large mammal: what you see when you look in a mirror) or same plant through time. Why should anything change when we come to the self?

The minimal ingredients would seem to be these. It needs some way of telling whether it is itself moving. In particular it needs some ability to distinguish whether it is moving, and getting new views of stationary objects, or whether it is still, and the objects around it are moving. To do this, it needs a memory of what the scene was like, to compare to what it is now like. It needs to be able to represent the order of different appearances, and then it needs some way of integrating the past scenes and the present scene. In other words, to solve for the position of objects in space, it has to solve for its own point of view and for elapsed time during which it can log its own movements. What this suggests is that a minimal self-consciousness is a structural requirement on any kind of interpretation of experience. If the programmer can solve this problem for the robot, it cannot be by giving it just another ingredient on the screen (as if the camera always caught a glimpse of one of its wheels, down at the bottom of the screen). That would just be more ‘input’. It wouldn’t be part of the programming needed to turn input into a description of the room and of the robot’s place in it. In fact the robot need never catch any glimpse of itself. The camera can be rigidly pointed at the scene in front of it. This is why Hume would have been no nearer catching himself even if whenever he turned his eye inward he caught a continuing element of experience, like a background drone. W...

So thinking in terms of an ‘I’ now looks like a formal or structural requirement on interpreting experience in the way we do—as experience of a three-dimensional world of continuing objects, amongst which we move. The ‘I’ is the point of view from which interpretation starts. It is not something else given in experience, because nothing given in experience could solve the formal problem for which an ‘I’ is needed. But a point of view is always needed: to represent a scene to yourself is to represent yourself as experiencing it one way or another.

While admitting the emotional and social side, people have taken themselves to be making definite claims about the world—literally true claims, for which there is argument, and evidence. On this view, religious belief is like other belief: an attempt to depict what the world is like, what things it contains, and what explains the events in it.

The notable thing about this argument is that it is purely a priori. It purports to prove God’s existence simply from considering the concept or definition of God.

In my own view, the crucial problem lies in an ambiguity lurking in the comparison of ‘reality’ and ‘conception’. In the argument, things ‘in reality’ are compared with things ‘in conception’ (i.e. according to a definition, or in imagination or dreams), for such properties as greatness, or perfection.

Russell’s dismissal is a little glib. For the point of the argument, from the theological perspective, is that although everything material or physical has a distinct previous cause, this very fact drives us to postulate something else, that has none. In the theological jargon, this would be a thing that is ‘necessary’ or ‘causa sui’: a thing that is its own cause. And since this is not true of the ordinary things that surround us, we need to postulate something extraordinary, a Deity, as the bearer of this extraordinary self-sufficiency.

It is important to remember here that as far as everyday experience goes, minds are just as much in need of explanation, just as much dependent beings, as physical objects. Postulating a mind that is somehow immune from dependency on anything else whatsoever is jumping away from experience just as violently as postulating a physical thing that is so.

Argument by analogy requires certain conditions in order to be reliable. First, the bases for the analogy should be extremely similar. Second, we should have experience covering the likely explanations. That is, we should know as much as possible about the kind of cause that produces this kind of effect.

experience shows us how fragile, and dependent upon other things, the existence of intelligence is. In our experience minds require brains which are fragile, dependent, late, and unusual arrivals in nature. ‘Generation, that is, animal or vegetable growth from previous animal or vegetable life, is by contrast common, and as far as we ever observe, necessary for the existence of intelligence. So, arguing from experience, it is much less likely that there is a self-sustaining mind than some other physical cause responsible for the whole show.

Schopenhauer’s point (see Chapter 3): sometimes when we act we are not conscious of causation, but it does not follow, and is not true, that we are conscious of the absence of causation. This interaction between the design argument and the interventionist conception of free will has an interesting moral aspect. Arguably, the two images of God as supernatural, and of our ‘selves’ as equally outside nature, feed off each other. And each leads people to deny the sovereignty of nature. It leads people to see the world as something that ‘we’ have dominion over, just as God does. Whereas the truth is that the world is something of which we are a very, very small part.

The problem then becomes one of explaining how it should have any consequences whether we believe in an incomprehensible God. As Wittgenstein was to say later, in a different connection: a nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.

many commentators have puzzled at length over whether Hume was really a theist or an atheist. Many people think that the difference between being a theist, believing, and an atheist, unbelieving, is incredibly important. But if nothing does as well as something about which nothing can be said, it vanishes. If all we can reasonably believe is that the cause of the universe probably bears some remote inconceivable analogy to the other operations of nature, then we are given no usable comprehension, no real understanding, that we can bring back from these misty regions. We might say, following Wittgenstein’s remark, that Hume here ‘deconstructs’ the apparent difference between theism and atheism.

First, it seems to depend upon a conception of free will that seems to be incoherent: the interventionist conception according to which something that is not part of the natural order (the Real Me) occasionally interferes in the natural order. For without this, if free will is understood in a compatibilist way, my decision-making is done with a natural endowment which is ultimately, for the theist, due to God.