Dainton on Unger on Phenomenal Truths

Since this blog is not supposed to presuppose any prior exposure to technical jargon or discipline-specific concepts, I shall first have a quick word on what phenomenal truths are. Roughly speaking, they are truths which are gathered from making phenomenal judgments. Now what are phenomenal judgments? They are judgments about the character and nature of our immediate conscious experiences. Although they are judgments of immediate experiences, they themselves need not be immediate. For example, I might reflect on the immediate sensory experiences I’d been having a moment ago (the cool air on my back, the queer smell of the room, etc.), and while this reflection and the accompanying judgments are not themselves immediate but are the products of a longer process, the experiences themselves are immediate.*

Peter Unger, in Identity, Consciousness and Value, suggests that we should be skeptical that our phenomenal experiences are as real as the less accessible “truths” that are discovered by natural science:

It cannot be nearly so easy as this to uncover deep truths about main aspects of reality. As with other psychological phenomena, an adequate understanding of conscious experience requires experiment, observation and theorizing that is both protracted and painstaking.

Barry Dainton, in Stream of Consciousness, rejects this argument. Firstly, he points out, truths need not be difficult to discover. We easily discover non-phenomenal truths all the time — water tends to flow downhill, pricking your skin with a needle draws blood, etc. But perhaps the crux lies in that ‘deep’ truths are difficult to discover? But even if we had any reason to think that, it still doesn’t stop us from accepting as reality the many ‘easy’ truths presented to us by phenomenal experience.

Secondly, it is not clear that all phenomenal truths must be ’shallow’. Is it not conceivable that further investigation into the nature of conscious experience will uncover deep phenomenal truths?

I pretty much agree with Dainton’s criticisms. All the same, I’m not ready to abandon all skepticism about phenomenal truths. If I were to make an argument against their reality, it would be something along the lines of how there is rather more intersubjective confirmation of truths in natural science than there is of phenomenal truths. I’m not sure that that’s true, but my instinct is that that’s a potentially weak point of phenomenal truths compared to scientific truths. I am rather less certain that the sensation of ‘blue’ I am experiencing now is really the same as the sensation of ‘blue’ everyone else experiences. Or that everyone else experiences that sensation (and others) in the same way that I do. Less certain compared to my certainty that, for example, the Big Bang theory of cosmology is broadly true. Now, I may be completely unjustified in these intuitive judgments, but as philosophers know, in grains of intuition lie the beginnings of a half-respectable argument.

*The difficult reader might then ask, am I not in that case reflecting on memories rather than immediate conscious experiences? I actually think that’s a question that should be taken seriously, but since Dainton doesn’t consider it, let’s leave it aside for now.

What is a Proposition?

One obvious answer could be something like the following:

A proposition is a statement of a state of affairs, which could be either true or false.

This seems to say exactly what we think a proposition is. It seems as though we could use these criteria (statement, possibility of being true/false) to determine if a given language form presented to us is a proposition. Not just that; it seems to us that the above definition tells us what a proposition is. That we can use our pre-existing ideas of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’, for example, to determine what entities out there are propositions, and what aren’t.

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein points out that it is wrong-headed to speak of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ as determining what a proposition is. For truth and falsehood themselves belong to the concept of a proposition. They are not, as it were, external criteria with which we use to judge possible propositions.

Wittgenstein compares the above ‘definition’ of a proposition with the following definition of what a king piece in chess is:

The piece that one can check.

In this case, would we say that we have in hand the concept ‘to check’, and the king is then whatever fits that concept — we go around ‘testing’ chess pieces for whether they indeed be ‘checked’, and when we find one that can, we conclude that it is the king? This seems ridiculous, for we all know that the the concept of ‘checking’ in chess is not independent of the concept of ‘king’; indeed, it is an intrinsic part of the concept ‘to check’ that one can check only the king and nothing else.

Wittgenstein means to suggest the same of the concept of a proposition. That is, we do not go around having independent notions of truth and falsehood that we then use to determine if certain linguistic entities are indeed propositions. Because we can understand truth and falsehood only if we also understand that these are concepts that apply to propositions.

This is often slightly disturbing to those with no prior exposure to Wittgenstein. If our apparently accurate definition of a proposition fails so fundamentally, then does there actually exist a definition of ‘proposition’ that is not, in some way, dependent on concepts that are internal to the concept of a proposition? No — it seems that ‘truth’ and ‘proposition’ must go together everywhere, as it were. Together, they form what Wittgenstein calls a language-game — a set of customs from which sprout many mutually defined objects. Chess is a game; a set of customary rules, and from these rules spring the concepts of ‘king’, ‘checking’, and so on, which are intertwined with one another and hence cannot be given a standalone definition in words alone (because to explain ‘king’ in words we have to explain ‘check’ in words, but to explain the latter in words we have to use the former as well, and so on). Similarly, Wittgenstein suggests that our ordinary linguistic and logical concepts, like that of a ‘proposition’, are really just part of language-games, meaning that we can’t hope to give all-determining definitions of them. Their meanings do not lie in abstract linguistic formulations, but in how they relate, very organically, to the other ‘pieces’ (concepts) in their respective language-games. But it would be a mistake to say that just because we cannot give them abstract linguistic definitions, that they are therefore ill-defined, or that we have a paradox. For it does not bother us that we cannot give an abstract definition of the ‘king’ in a chess game that is not implicitly dependent on a prior understanding of ‘king’. We accept that lack of definition as part of what it means to be a rule of a game. Similarly, Wittgenstein coaxes us to accept the lack of satisfactory definitions of many terms in ordinary language as simply part of the nature of those terms as pieces in language-games.