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.

Van Fraassen on Peirce’s “Scholastic Realism”

Because I need the practice, this will be in the mould of those short summaries one writes about one’s course readings.

The arguments of the “scholastic realists” van Fraassen attacks in Laws and Symmetry can be broken into two parts: the first being that there exist laws of nature, the second being that we must believe there exist laws of nature (or else sink into an abyss of skepticism).

Van Fraassen quotes a lecture demonstration by C. S. Peirce:

Here is a stone. Now I place that stone where there will be no obstacle between it and the floor, and I will predict with confidence that as soon as I let go my hold upon the stone it will fall to the floor. I will prove that I can make a correct prediction by actual trial if you like. But I see by your faces that you all think it will be a very silly experiment.

This is supposed to demonstrate that there are some things that we know will happen without having to have that demonstrated before our eyes.

Peirce argues that the fact that we can believe that the stone will fall without doing the experiment is proof that the assumed ‘law’ that the stone will fall to the floor corresponds to reality. The idea is that either the fact that the stone will fall to the floor is a matter of chance — it could have failed to fall, but it just didn’t happen to have failed to fall that one time. Or, more plausibly, the fact that the stone will fall is dictated by a law of nature, which is what justifies us in believing that it will fall even before we see it do so. After all, if it were merely a matter of chance, we wouldn’t feel justified in believing it. Van Fraassen points out that this corresponds to the second part of the scholastic realists’ argument: that given our other beliefs, we must believe there exist laws of nature.

To recap Peirce’s argument: IF we are know that certain regularities in nature will occur without observing them to, THEN we must believe there exist laws of nature.

Van Fraassen argues that the dichotomy Peirce draws between events that happen due to ’sheer chance’ and events that happen due to a law of nature is a false one. What, he asks, does ‘by chance’ mean? In the most common interpretations of that phrase, it could mean ‘not due to any law’, or it could mean ‘no more probable than the other possibilities’.

If Peirce means to take the latter interpretation, then it is not true that we know that certain regularities in nature will occur. So the premise of Peirce’s argument is false already, and we can’t argue from that to the truth of its conclusion.

What if Peirce means to take the former interpretation, that ‘by chance’ means ‘not due to any law’? Van Fraassen simply says that that would be a strange use of the phrase ‘by chance’. (I’m not sure I agree with him on this.)

Van Fraassen then goes on to consider if Peirce had perhaps accepted the tacit premise that whatever happens either does so for a reason or else is no more likely to happen than its contraries. Van Fraassen rejects this premise because it would mean that if the universe contained no reasons for regularities, then it would have to be completely chaotic — there wouldn’t even be room for highly probable regularities. In fact, this premise is exactly the first part of the scholastic realist argument — not just that we must believe that laws of nature exist, but that there actually exist laws of nature. It is not clear, though, why we should accept the premise that events must either have a reason behind them or be instances of completely random outcomes.

Yet it is hard to deny the strong attraction of the Peircean intuition that laws of nature have a flavour of necessity to them that mere continuation of a regularity does not. As van Fraassen writes, “A law must be conceived as the reason which accounts for uniformity in nature, not the mere uniformity or regularity itself.” But how do we reconcile this intuitive notion of ‘law’ with our repeated inability (from Hume onwards) to prove that such reasons exist?

Frankly, I don’t have much of a problem with giving up the intuition that laws dictate necessity. It’s true that it’s really convenient, for scientists and even most ordinary people, to think of regularities like falling objects as due to natural laws. And when a mode of thinking becomes convenient enough, people start treating its objects as real existent things. In philosophical parlance, they start inventing an ontology to go with their mode of thinking, which may have started out as a metaphysically innocent heuristic. I tend to think, for example, that scientific realists have unwittingly bought into what started out as a heuristic. So I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that the regularities we know of now are just there, free of metaphysical baggage. It may please scientists to think of them as caused by laws of nature, but the burden of proof is on them to show that they have to accept the ontology of laws of nature. Seems to me the language of laws of nature is near-indispensable in much of modern day science, but I think it’s quite possible to shift to a more metaphysically conservative language (although I don’t see a point in doing so). In other words, bugger our intuitions. They are often products of extended cultural marination that need not push our intuitions any closer to the truth.