When I reflect on the debates that have recently unfolded surrounding epistemology, ethics, Kant, correlationism, and realism, I think they all spin on whether or not the philosopher begins from a naturalistic perspective. The Kantian and correlationist positions are basically descendants of Descartes’ philosophical methodology. Even though, for example, they don’t begin in the way Descartes did in the first two meditations, the implicit thesis is that we share an immediate and therefore apodictic or certain relationship to our consciousness, and therefore must begin with the analysis of consciousness prior to any claims about the world. Since our relationship to external objects consists of representations in the mind, and since hallucinations are always possible or we could be dreaming, we cannot begin by simply jumping haphazardly into claims about the nature of the world because we could be mistaken or merely making speculative claims.
The position of the linguistic correlationist is similar. Rather than treating consciousness as the immediate, the linguistic correlationist begins from the premise that since our relationship to ourselves, others, and the world around us is mediated by language, we must first begin with the analysis of language. Thus, for example, were Paul Churchland to point out to Lacan certain phenomenon pertaining to the brain with respect to schizophrenics (for example that they have much higher concentrations of dopamines), Lacan would respond by pointing out that in order for Churchland to investigate the brain he must frame his observations, experiments, etc., in signifiers. Again, the structure of the argument is the same. In both cases, the case of the correlationist that begins with consciousness and the case of the correlationist that begins with language, something is asserted as immediate and something else is posited as being mediated and therefore uncertain. Since the latter is categorized as uncertain by virtue of its status as mediated, it thereby is excluded from philosophical discourse such that it can no longer function as a ground.
read on!
The naturalist has a very different conception of where to begin. First, unlike the ant-realist, the naturalist does not begin from the premise that the ideal of knowledge is certainty, but rather probability. In other words, naturalist claims about knowledge are much weaker in terms of what they assert than are many anti-realist claims. In Husserl we find the word apodictic all over the place and the claim that we must disclose or discover the apodictic grounds of knowledge. For the naturalist this is fine for mathematics and deductive logic which is very likely composed of analytic truths, but it doesn’t fair very well with respect to knowledge claims about the world. I am reasoning well when I conclude that the peeked person I see sneezing, wiping their nose, etc., very likely has a cold, but I could subsequently discover they have allergies as new information becomes available.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the naturalist is skeptical about the accuracy of our introspective claims about our mental life and descriptions of our experience of the world. Familiar with a number of findings from cognitive science, the naturalist is aware that often our descriptions of our conscious states are wildly at odds with what is actually going on. For example, an experimental psychologist might place a number of identical red sweaters on a table in a store and then observe which sweaters people select. Much to his surprise, the buyers disproportionately choose sweaters from the right side of the table. When asked later why they chose the sweaters from the right side of the table, the people generally say that something about the sweaters on the right side of the table was better than the other sweaters, despite the fact that there was no difference between the sweaters. In other words, their first person reports of what they are doing often evoke reasons deeply at odds with what is cognitively going on.
Finally, third, the naturalist begins from the standpoint of naturalism not because it is apodictic or certain, but because so far it has been the most successful hypothesis in allowing us to understand our world and the nature of our being. Given the success of this hypothesis, the naturalist thus begins from the premise that we should work from the thesis that claims about our thought, ethical deliberation, etc., must at the very least be consistent with our biology, our current understanding of the physical world, etc. In other words, when the Kantian outlines the conditions for knowledge and the structure of the transcendental subject, the cautious naturalist says not so fast. Beginning from the premise that dualism is false– a thesis that has massive evidentiary support –the naturalist will point out that any claims that we make about the transcendental subject must be consistent with what we know about neurology for the most probable hypothesis is that mind and brain are identical. Evaluating Kant’s categories, his claims about pure intuition, his claims about reason, etc., will thus become an empirical claim requiring us to determine whether or not our neurology and cognitive experience actually works in the way described. The lion’s share of evidence strongly suggests that the answer to this question is no.
In treating such questions as empirical questions, the anti-realist will protest that the naturalist has missed the point and that he is merely outlining the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge to be possible. That is, Kant is outlining the normative conditions structuring knowledge. But again, this argument fails to hold up under scrutiny. As a friend once said to me, wishing does not make it so. You might not be able to see how knowledge is possible if this transcendental structure is not there, but if that transcendental structure is inconsistent with our best findings in neurology and cognitive science, then the most reasonable course of action is to abandon that model and go back to the drawing board. If our transcendental accounts is inconsistent with what our best neurology tells us about how moral reasoning takes place, then that transcendental account must be abandoned. I think, at the end of the day, the moral of the story is that there are no shortcuts. We cannot sit in an armchair engaging in a transcendental or phenomenological reduction with the assurance that we will be able to derive an accurate understanding of our minds and how we experience the world. No, we must do the hard empirical work (or at least be aware of findings in these fields) of determining how our neurology works. By all means, ask how ethics is possible, how mathematics is possible, how logic is possible, etc., but begin from the premise that these things have a biological base that cannot be ignored and that we do not have a priori knowledge of that base.
April 9, 2009 at 6:12 am
I’m with you on this one, for sure. I might add something to your points: the naturalist is a “results-based” thinker. If a hypothesis can’t get results in the world, or if an experiment’s results obliterate your hypothesis, there’s probably something wrong with your hypothesis. I have a whole ton of respect for a tradition or epistemology that split the atom and sent people into outerspace; not quite as much for one that’s still tethered to centuries-old abstractions and can’t produce any sort of verification or evidence for its most basic presuppositions.
Something that bothers me about correlationist thinking is that it seems blissfully unaware of its own irrelevancy in many respects. There’s always a place for abstract reasoning, even and especially within naturalism– but unlike the naturalist, the correlationist takes the strength of his own abstractions, to his own thinking and by his own standards, to be the best measure of their validity.
From what I can tell, the circularity of correlationist thinking is all but impenetrable to results-based criteria. When discussing topics with correlationists, I’ve found that my challenges to this kind of thinking and my appeals to the material-world results of naturalism are often met with accusations of “anti-intellectualism” or “theory hating”–you know, because philosophers and lit crit theorists have the “intellectual” market cornered. Scientists hate theories.
April 9, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Anodynelite: “Something that bothers me about correlationist thinking is that it seems blissfully unaware of its own irrelevancy in many respects. There’s always a place for abstract reasoning, even and especially within naturalism– but unlike the naturalist, the correlationist takes the strength of his own abstractions, to his own thinking and by his own standards, to be the best measure of their validity.”
Kvond: I think it is interesting to see that Descartes was primarily a Natural Science philosopher. If you look at the preponderance of his writings early on, they are focused on the study of the natural world, and theorization about it. It was not until rather frighteningly the well-connected Galleo was heavily censored, and Descartes realized that his mechanistic view had some potentially problematic theological consequences (the substance status of the eucharist, for one), that he went heavily into metaphysics as a means for justifying his theories in advance of any Catholic attack. This is very interesting because we largely think of Descartes in terms of what he did after the Galleo censor, instead of what he did before it. In a certain regard, the vast Cartesian metaphysical production was meant less to tell us about the world, than to qualify opinions about the world before the dominant ideology.
It seems that this parallel between natural world thinking (recognizing difference that make a difference in the world) and metaphysical abstraction (conducting ideological warfare) does not seem have have carried over. Instead, “theory” at times has disconnected from the world in which it is supposed to be engaged, in particular in the Idealist tradition which flowed from the post-Galleo Descartes. This is changing though it seems, as sociology has become more philosophical, and philosopher more sociological, each of them holding firm to the possibilities of science.
April 9, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Kvond,
Interesting observation. Some scholars have even speculated that Descartes himself did not believe his claims about the cogito and God, but formulated these claims so as to be able to continue his work in the physical sciences without suffering the fate of Galileo. The theory runs that the reason Descartes’ arguments revolving around the relation between mind and body and the existence of God are so bad despite Descartes himself being such a logical powerhouse was that he purposefully designed the arguments to be howlers so as to signal to his readers that the real issues of import were to be found in his naturalism. Under this reading, Spinoza would be someone who had heard and read Descartes well, articulating the implicate crypto-truth at work in his thought.
April 9, 2009 at 6:07 pm
How has this theory about Descartes again? It sound interesting, although from reading, for example, Descartes’ responses to objections to Meditations I find it hard to believe that he “faked” it all to appease some sort of authority as he sounds general sincere and frustrated when his arguments are misunderstood or misinterpreted – otherwise there’s a conspiracy here to fake a concern for the method, conspiracy that includes sending the earlier version of the Meditations around in order to get objections etc etc.
I do like this approach though, let’s call it “philosophical fear-mongering” – consider every significant philosophical thinker as writing out of fear of persecution, bullying and scorn to create a surface meaning aimed to quiet the authorities while creating a deeper meaning for the future generations to undercover. History of philosophy could be fun again.
April 9, 2009 at 7:39 pm
“First, unlike the ant-realist, the naturalist does not begin from the premise that the ideal of knowledge is certainty, but rather probability.”
The same goes for rhetoricians.
April 9, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Sorry, it has to be “who has this theory” of course
April 9, 2009 at 11:56 pm
LS,
I draw my reading that the metaphysical end of Descartes’ production was a response to Galileo’s fate comes from Gaukroger’s Intellectual Biography [http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Intellectual-Biography-Stephen-Gaukroger/dp/0198239947 ], and the related studies that wish to recast Descartes as a Natural Scientist, (and a semiotic realist at that). I have never heard the idea that he didn’t believe his metaphysical arguments, and given the lengths he went to defending it (not only did he send an early copy around as Mikhail says, but after publication a great number of letters poured in from his call for anyone to personally write to him with any questions or objections they had to his metaphysics), I personally find this unlikely.
In any case, I do believe that the motivations for his Natural Science and his Metaphysics were very different.
April 10, 2009 at 2:13 am
Kvond,
I came across this thesis in Patricia Churchland’s Brain-Wise, in reference, if I recall correctly, to the scholar you’re referencing here. I had a similar reaction to the idea that he was simply creating fictions to appease the church.
April 10, 2009 at 2:39 am
When I think of Meillassoux’s claim that a return to scientific materialism is necessary in light of this sort of historical or dialectical struggle between idealism and realism within philosophy (as it’s being discussed here), I find it pretty compelling.
Philosophy and science can only fortify each other–it seems strange and quite unfortunate that a schism formed between them…
April 10, 2009 at 4:38 am
LS,
Perhaps it is a game of telephone, that Churchland over emphasized Gaukroger’s point (I highly recommend this biography of Descartes for anyone who wants a fresh look at the ideas of this very icon). I don’t recall the idea that Gaukroger said anything close to Descartes faking his metaphysics, but as I said, he strongly suggests that Descartes never would have written his metaphysics if it were not for fear of persecution. Or perhaps Gaukroger makes this statement against Descartes’ metaphysics in other places than this biography.
By all accounts Descartes was a loyal Catholic, and the way that Gaukroger put it, if I recall, was that even though Descartes was safe from the Catholic Inquisition in the protestant Dutch Republic, as a Catholic it was no small thing to run afoul of the Church. It seems likely that Descartes’ metaphysics were true expressions of his philosophical belief, but he would not have constructed them exactly as he did if it were not for the problems of Galileo.
April 10, 2009 at 6:21 am
Kvond,
I read in Cangeux’s book, The Physiology of Truth that Descartes did indeed propose a materialist theory of mind in his early work book on man but then very quickly changed his tune when he heard about Galileo. Perhaps this provides some evidence for the claim.
April 10, 2009 at 1:51 pm
LS,
All the way through his Dioptrica there are very strong materialist themes. He compares mental stimulation to something like the vibration of threads in a web, in which events in the distances actually materially connect through physical contact, all the way to the nerves. But this vision always comes up against his thinking on Ideas. It seems to me that his thinking on Ideas, and the resultant metaphysical work that were forced upon him by the political situation were really an attempt to synthesize two branches of his thinking. Because Idealism and Empiricism took so much note of his treatment of Ideas, it has likely become lost that he had a much more naturally grounded view of the world. I know that John Yolton for one frames him, as I said, a Semiotic Realist.
I agree though that your point about Spinoza is well taken here.
For those interested, here are some of my rough sketch thoughts on the subject with some citations:
http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/slightly-re-evaluating-descartes/
April 10, 2009 at 5:28 pm
[…] 10, 2009 by Mikhail Emelianov While reading the latest output concerning the doomed conditions that, according to Larval Subjects, philosophy is […]
April 10, 2009 at 10:12 pm
hey LS,
You lay out three things that set apart the naturalist. I think the first is excellent and dead on. I find the second feels reductive. Even though in the first point you both talk about knowledge as probabilistic and about the naturalist as having weaker knowledge claims, your second point doesn’t just express skepticism about one sort of knowledge (individuals reports on their own ostensibly internal workings) but suggests another sort of knowledge over it, as in the case of people taking things from the right side of the table. In that case, fine and good I suppose, but “why did you buy that sweater?” is not a very interesting question with regard to people’s internal workings. “Why do you study philosophy” or “why did you commit yourself to armed struggle against the state” are more interesting questions. In those cases it’s totally fair to doubt people’s own self-presentation (in that sense almost all historians are naturalists) but it’s not at all clear there’s another register of knowledge. I’m not being clear. Trying again, I may be reading in too much but I get the sense your point two expresses interest in a sort of causal explanation and making probabilistic knowledge predictive. (I think this ties to your – laudable – interest in the hard sciences but I’m not sure.) Am I over-reading?
cheers,
Nate
April 11, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Hi Nate,
I agree that the point about the sweaters isn’t particularly interesting (though who knows what it might reveal about unconscious decision making processes?). I was simply trying to give an example where the evidences of self-consciousness are unreliable, thereby hoping to call into question some central premises of phenomenological approaches to knowledge and explanation. I don’t think I’m looking exclusively for causal explanations, though I’ll take them where I can get them. Rather, what I’m contesting is the Cartesian thesis that questions of knowledge should begin from the standpoint of the immediate self-evidencies of consciousness as the ground of knowledge. In other words, I think there is no “immediate” and unassailable beginning point that can be conducted from the armchair, but rather we must shuttle back and forth between careful descriptive analyses of how we experience the world and what we find through empirical investigation of our own minds, perpetually modifying and enriching our understanding of our own cognition. Hopefully that makes some sense.
April 11, 2009 at 8:08 pm
hi LS,
Thanks for clarifying. That makes more sense. (I should also say, sorry if I sounded cranky – I hurt my shoulder this week and I often get grumpy w/ folk for little reason when I’m not feeling well.) I think your point makes a good deal of sense to say that knowledge as such shouldn’t start from immediate consciousness. The impression I got from the post, though, which I now think was mistaken, was that you were suggesting a different sort of knowledge as well as saying there’s no role at all for reports on ostensibly internal states. (It was the last bit that really made me object, what I took or rather mistook to be an impulse to discount internal knowledge in all cases.) As you’ve clarified in your comment, we need a variety of knowledges to get by. I assume that means that for you there are some kinds of knowledge where internal reports are really important, but that these are not foundational to all knowledge. Does that get close?
take care,
Nate
April 11, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Nate,
Right. In fact, I don’t think a field like neurology can even get off the ground without descriptive accounts of how we experience consciousness. We can do all the fMRIs we want or look at all the neurons in the world under an atomic microscope, but if we don’t know how it correlates to conscious experiences it tells us nothing beyond the chemical and electrical interactions we observe. I guess my position would differ from the phenomenologists position in that I see these descriptions neither as foundational, nor as unassailable.
Sorry about your shoulder. I hope it heals quickly.
April 12, 2009 at 3:08 am
hey LS,
Thanks for the well wishes and the for clarification. All of this makes a good deal of sense to me, where do I get my membership card? ;)
Best wishes,
Nate
April 15, 2009 at 1:35 am
Hi Levi,
It seems to me that many of the naturalists you describe e.g. the Churchlands get themselves into very complicated philosophical loops by assuming that it is the neuroscience that should be leading the understanding the mind/brain when in fact they have to presuppose a phenomenology for their explanations to have any thrust. In other words, the main goal is to explain the way things feel with the underlying neurological apparatus, but the only way they can know what needs to be explained is through a rudimentary phenomenology. It’s possible that a better understanding of the phenomenology of experience made yield to better explanations in neuroscience.
A confusion: surely no phenomenologist would say that their descriptions were unassailable? Or if they would surely this would be obviously wrong? The history of phenomenology is a history of disagreements not of agreements (except obviously on certain issues).
I kind of want to understand your view of naturalism as a type of fallibilism. If this is correct than I think it is right in one sense and wrong in others. The sense in which it is right: many naturalists are pragmatists, and pragmatism is a philosophy that completely eschews apodicticity (see Dennett much of the time). The way in which it is wrong: most naturalists presume that it is science (in all it’s myriad forms) that gives us metaphysics. This strikes me not as fallibilist but as fundamentally unstable in that metaphysical naturalism basically says nothing about the way the world is because what science (though of course there are many different sciences)says constantly changes. It is only to trust in science to figure it out. Thus it is a kind of anti-metaphysics masquerading as metaphysics.
April 15, 2009 at 2:19 am
Hi Ninjaphilosopher,
Actually Patricia Churchland directly addresses this point right at the very beginning of Brain-Wise, arguing exactly as you do that we need a good descriptive account of experience in order for the findings of neurology too be informative at all. The neuroscientists refer to this phenomenology as “cognitive science” and are often themselves influenced by European phenomenology in their own work (for example, Lakoff). The difference would be that the neurologists are much more cautious about introspective description, instead coupling such description with careful experimental observation of behaviors. To give you an example, we can imagine a Husserlian phenomenological analysis of what we intend when we experience a person as being friendly or open. All sorts of things would be described in these accounts. Studies of conscious experiences of finding a person likable or open upon first meeting them, however, have shown that at the core of this phenomenon lies pupil dilation. The person with dilated pupils is experienced as being open and friendly, whereas the person with contracted pupils would not. I suspect that this wouldn’t show up in a million years in a phenomenological analysis, and that none of the participants in these experiments would report pupil dilation as a reason for them finding someone likable. Thus, while good descriptive analysis is of the highest importance, it also has to be coupled with more experimental approaches that can uncover these things that are just off the radar where our awareness is concerned.
Now, I think that phenomenology is tremendously important and have benefited from it deeply myself. However, I think phenomenology has tended to foster an attitude among its adherents that is dismissive of anything experimental in this sense, and that is even more dismissive of anything like neurological investigations. This has to do with the critique of the natural attitude at the heart of phenomenological analysis coupled with Heidegger’s critique of treating entities as “present-at-hand”. As a result, I think phenomenology has generated a sort of anti-intellectual attitude that equates anything like experimental science or neurology with “dogmatism” and frankly falsehood. As a result, these findings never even enter the picture or consideration for most phenomenologists (there are notable exceptions like Merleau-Ponty who took experimental psychology and the results of various forms of brain damage very seriously). Consequently, I think phenomenology needs to abandon its critique of the natural attitude (or understand that it is only a methodological moment, and abandon its pretension to being a foundational discourse for all other disciplines. This latter point, I think, is especially important as the findings of neurology indicate that many of our phenomenological self-conceptions aren’t indicative of anything real about the nature of our mind. For example, there is no centralized I or “self” that presides over will, decision making, etc. Phenomenology needs to be willing to surrender the “self-evidences” of consciousness.
I have a slightly different take on the “anti-metaphysical” stance of many naturalisms and pragmatic approaches than you do. The term “metaphysics” is, in my experience, a highly polysemous term in philosophy. When I hear Anglo-Americans denounce something as “metaphysics” (which for them is a pejorative), I take it they are referring to something like Platonic forms or Leibniz’s more audacious claims. That is, they are referring to anything that departs from observable and experimental confirmation. When looked at from another point of view, science and naturalism are the metaphysics of these philosophers. Thus, for example, Quine’s naturalism and endorsement of a physicalist conception of nature. Badiou, I think, partially has the right idea when he suggests that perhaps it’s time for philosopher’s to relinquish the idea that they are the ones who deal with questions of ontology or what being qua being is. I don’t agree with his particular account of ontology (as maths), but I think he’s on mark in separating philosophy from being a shepherd and steward of being.
April 15, 2009 at 3:15 am
I feel like there is a slippage here between your defense of Churchland, and your example of eye dilation. Eye dilation is a descriptive phenomena that should may need to be admitted in a phenomenological description of likability (is pupil dilation constitutive of likability? I don’t know). Obviously that no one has noticed it doesn’t mean it’s not there. This, as you have pointed out, is the brilliance of Merleau-Ponty: to bring to the fore the intersubjective and experimental aspect of phenomenology. As I understand the Churchlands’ project their goal is to reduce all phenomena to the neurological level (it’s not called eliminative materialsm for nothing). This would be a radically anti-phenomenological account in two ways: first it presupposes the first person experience is fundamentally wrong or inadequate, and second it presupposes that the lived world should be replaced by the physical/biological world. In this system the goal would be to eliminate the need for phenomenology, and frequently their arguments take this sort of form:
People report doing x
Their brain is doing y
Thus people are wrong about doing x
This does not seem to be obviously true. It’s not clear to me that the personal level can be reduced to the subpersonal level, though the sub personal clearly gives rise (in some sense) to the personal. I take this to be the goal of any decent naturalized phenomenology: to explain how these two levels interact.
I’m not sure that metaphysics is a pejorative term in analytic philosophy. If anything analytic (or anglophone, whatever) philosophers tend to make really wild and definite claims about the structure of the world. Physicalism, naturalism, anti-realism, idealism, pragmatism etc. are all major themes in contemporary analytic debates.
April 15, 2009 at 4:08 am
This is not an accurate picture of what Patricia Churchland actually claims. You’re saying something like “if love is neurological, than we will cease to love.” As Patricia Churchland herself points out explicitly, this simply isn’t the case at all. She compares neurological explanations to Copernicus’ discoveries about the movement of the Earth. We still say that the Sun rises and sets, and the Sun still appears to rise and set. Nonetheless, we now know that it is the Earth rotating that produces this. Likewise in the case of something like love. There is something more fundamental at work here as well. A theory is a relationship between an explandum and an explanans. That is, you require the thing to be explained in order to provide an explanation. We can’t just observe brain functioning under an electronic microscope or in an fMRI and know anything of significance. We have to see how these phenomena are correlated with conscious experience. Without that good descriptive account of experience the neurological events explain nothing.
I would say you are significantly mischaracterizing the thesis of eliminative materialism. Eliminative materialism rejects not phenomenology (though it does think some phenomenological descriptions are deeply mistaken), but folk-psychology. Now, by way of example, suppose you and I are sitting here in my living room and I observe you get up, go to the counter and grab a glass of wine. A folk-psychological theory or explanation of your action might be that you had a desire to have a glass of wine. A folk-psychology thus posits a causal agency called “desire” that functions as the explanation of your action. When the eliminative materialist rejects this folk-psychological explanation, what he is rejecting is not the phenomenological experience you undergo as you walk across the room, but rather the explanation for your actions. The eliminative materialists says that there are no “agencies” like “desires”, just as there are no things like caloric causing heat or phlogiston causing fire to burn, but rather that your actions is caused by a very complex, non-linear set of events among neurons, neurotransmitters, electrical pulses, etc.
The eliminative materialist does not propose that the “lived world should be replaced by the physical/biological world”. What would this even mean? Are you suggesting that a theory somehow would cause us to cease to experience? Rather, the eliminative materialist proposes 1) that that lived world is itself the result of physical and biological processes (and there are massive bodies of evidence for this), and 2) that we must revise our explanations for the phenomena of lived experience just as we revised our understanding of, say, movement and gravity based on Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. None of this, I repeat, eliminates the need of phenomenology, but it does resituate it as a particular moment in explanation and analysis.
Your syllogism also mischaracterizes what is going on for the physicalist. The eliminative materialist, will, of course, argue that people have wildly mistaken interpretations of why they do things. This has been an observation common sense Leibniz. To give you an example, women were asked to rate the attractiveness of pictures of men while walking down the street. On average, on a scale of 1 – 10, the rated the attractiveness of the men they were shown at 4 or below. However, much to our surprise, when questioning women who had just bungie jumped or ridden a roller coaster with the same pictures, they rated the attractiveness of the men about 7 or higher. Why this diffference? In asking the women why they found the men attractive or unattractive, they would cite facial features, clothing, etc. However, since the pictures were identical in both cases, this doesn’t explain the difference. The difference is explained when we consider that when engaging in thrill activities like jumping off a bridge neurotransmitters like dopamine and seratonin are released that are closely connected to pleasure and sexual arousal. The women found the men more attractive under these circumstances because of this increase in neurotransmitters. Moral of the story: if you want a love interest to find you more attractive go to the amusement park.
Now, where is the phenomenology in the above example? The phenomenology is not in the women’s explanation of why they find the men attractive or less than attractive, but in the lived experience of finding the man attractive or unattractive. None of that disappears under a neurological account. What does change is our account or understanding of why we currently experience the world in this way and under these conditions.
Returning to the pupil dilation example, I think you miss the point. Here I was pointing not to the neurological level, but with why the phenomenological level has to be supplemented with good experimental psychology to protect against the oversights and biases of the phenomenological analysis. The cognitive scientist agrees that we experience pupil dilation. What’s significance here is that the studies indicate that pupil dilation plays a key role in encountering another person as open and friendly, yet this would most likely never appear in any phenomenological analysis. A phenomenological analysis of our encounter of an “other” as open or friendly would thus be missing a central component of what is going on in our lived experience of the other. Merleau-Ponty is a hero here because he took these things seriously, but as I said before a number of phenomenologists suffer from an extreme provincialism and willful ignorance with respect to these sorts of findings, not even being aware that they exist and lacking all curiosity about them. As a result they, in fact, give us a distorted picture of lived experience.
At any rate, read Patricia Churchland’s Brain-Wise. I think you’ll be surprised as to what the neurophilosopher is really claiming.
April 15, 2009 at 5:50 am
I feel like you have somewhat mischaracterized what I said (or maybe I mischaracterized what I meant), though you may be right that I have misrepresented Patricia Churchland.
I did not say that we will cease to love in an eliminative materialist world, what I said (or meant to say) was that to love just is to be in a certain neuro-biological state. This seems to me exactly what the Churchlands argue. In this world we could eliminate all talk of love (or fear or pain) and replace it with neuro-biological accounts. So we could replace talk of the experiential talk with neurobiological talk, which the Churchlands have suggested.
In addition I’m confused with why you would disagree that the Churchlands don’t reject phenomenological accounts and instead say that they just those accounts they are deeply mistaken. This seems to amount to the same thing. Yes they are obviously against folk psychological explanations, however they also don’t think that the structures of experience can be understood phenomenologically. This seems to me the crucial point of disagreement. They argue that all experience can be explained in neurobiological terms to such an extent that the neurobiologcal terms could replace experiential terms. I would argue that this gets things, if not backwards, then mixed up.
I’m confused when you say that the phenomenology just is the experience of whatever. This seems like a slippage in terms: In analytic philosophy phenomenology just means the experience of whatever, but, as you well know, phenomenology in continental philosophy is the description of the constitutive features of experience.
And really, what could possibly be the philosophical basis for this insistence that experience can be explained in terms of neuroscience? It’s basically just a type of scientism in which the explananda are taken from neuroscience as opposed to folk psychology or phenomenology. But this relies on the assumption that they’re wrong. After all why else would you eliminate them if they weren’t wrong? However neuroscience is clearly not complete and why think that a completed eliminative materialist program wouldn’t end up with the same concepts that it had originally eliminated?
April 15, 2009 at 11:50 am
Ninja,
I guess I’m just perplexed by your claims here. It’ as if you’re claiming that heat is somehow less heat when we discover that it is the agitation of particles in motion or that a day is less a day when we discover that it results from the rotation of the earth relative to the sun. The neurological terms don’t “replace” the experiential terms but give the cause of the experiential terms. As for your suggestion that there is a slippage in terms here in the usage of “experience”, observe that phenomenology itself has functioned as a critique of folk-psychological accounts of experience. Thus, for example, one of the great philosophical services phenomenology did was to critique representational accounts of thought through an analysis of the intentional structure of lived experience. When I say that the intentional structure of love remains the same under a neurological account, all I’m saying is that the intentional lived experience remains the same. What changes is the nature of the account or ground of this experience. Thus, where under a prior account we would explain the experience in terms of a cause like “desire”, we now recognize that desires aren’t entities or causes, but that there’s a much more complex interplay of factors involved. What are you proposing as an alternative? A dualistic model of mind independent of the body?
April 15, 2009 at 11:50 am
Ninja,
I guess I’m just perplexed by your claims here. It’ as if you’re claiming that heat is somehow less heat when we discover that it is the agitation of particles in motion or that a day is less a day when we discover that it results from the rotation of the earth relative to the sun. The neurological terms don’t “replace” the experiential terms but give the cause of the experiential terms. As for your suggestion that there is a slippage in terms here in the usage of “experience”, observe that phenomenology itself has functioned as a critique of folk-psychological accounts of experience. Thus, for example, one of the great philosophical services phenomenology did was to critique representational accounts of thought through an analysis of the intentional structure of lived experience. When I say that the intentional structure of love remains the same under a neurological account, all I’m saying is that the intentional lived experience remains the same. What changes is the nature of the account or ground of this experience. Thus, where under a prior account we would explain the experience in terms of a cause like “desire”, we now recognize that desires aren’t entities or causes, but that there’s a much more complex interplay of factors involved. What are you proposing as an alternative? A dualistic model of mind independent of the body?