I want to discuss the ontological theory that the only things that exist are material (physical) things. Call someone who holds this a 'materialist' and his doctrine 'materialism.' A materialist in this sense can be as anti-consumerist and 'idealistic' (in the popular sense) as you please.
The materialist, then, holds that everything is material: not just tables and rocks and black holes and their parts and microconstituents all the way down to the subatomic, but also human beings, their thoughts and feelings, and indeed anything that could be an existent object of their thinking.
If we think of all entities as divisible into three mutually irreducible disjoint categories, the material, the mental, and the abstract, then what the materialist is claiming is that the second two categories are empty. So the materialist is committed to denying the existence of God (as traditionally conceived), disembodied and unembodied minds/souls, unexemplified universals, and all 'Platonic' entities including Bolzano's Saetze an sich, Frege's Gedanken, and the like.
But what do we do with truth? Does it have a place in the materialist's world?
Of particular interest is the truth of the materialist thesis itself, the truth of the proposition expressed by 'Everything is material.' If everything is material, then the truth or falsehood of this thesis must also be material. But if we cannot make sense of this, then materialism will be inconsistent with the conditions of its own truth.
There is a difference between truth and a truth. Truth is what is common to particular truths. Perhaps it is a property, the property of being true. (Frege thought otherwise, but his theory is so bizarre that I hesitate to bring it up.) A particular truth, on the other hand, is a true proposition, or, to put it more generally, a true truth-bearer.
So let's inquire into truth-bearers. A truth-bearer (truth-vehicle) is whatever can be appropriately characterized as either true or false. Not everything can be so characterized. A banana cannot be a truth-bearer, since no banana is either true or false. (If you say that a banana that is not fake is true, then you are equivocating on 'true.') But Poindexter's belief, of a particular banana, that it is ripe, is appropriately characterizable as either true or false, whence it follows that beliefs are candidates for the office of truth-bearer.
Other candidates: sentences-tokens, sentence-types, utterance-events, judgments, Fregean propositions. Clearly, nothing can be either true or false unless it has a sentence-like structure. Thus the set {Socrates, wisdom} cannot have a truth-value. And the same goes for {Socrates, Exemplifies, Wisdom}.
Now if a you are a materialist, then your options narrow: you cannot admit as candidate truth-bearers anything irreducibly mental or irreducibly abstract. You have to say that truth-bearers are material objects, whether simple or complex.
Herein lies the rub. It is difficult to understand how any material item, or collection of material items, could be true or false. A belief can be true or false because of its intentionality: it is of or about something distinct from itself; it is a representation. As such, it can represent things as they are, or the opposite. But materialists cannot allow that beliefs (occurrent believings) are irreducibly mental items; the materialist must either go eliminativist and deny the very existence of beliefs, or (more plausibly) attempt to identify beliefs with states of the brain. But a brain state is just a physical state of a physical organ.
Such states can be assigned semantic properties ab extra, but it is difficult to see how they could intrinsically possess semantic properties. How could a physical state be intrinsically such as to represent Bush, say, as hopelessly inarticulate, or Ted Kennedy as irremediably confused?
A similar argument can be deployed for any material item that is advanced as a candidate truth-bearer. Here on this screen are dark characters against a light background. You see these characters with your eyes. But you interpret them as meaningful with your mind. Now the meaning of these meaningful marks is not intrinsic to them as physical scribbles. For this reason it makes no sense to say that a declarative sentence-token is true or false qua string of physical marks.
It seems that we have driven the materialist into a corner. Qua materialist, he cannot admit as existent anything other than material items. But we have just seen that no material item can be either true or false. So there is no room for truths in the materialist's world. There is no room for truth since there is no room for truth-bearers.
It follows that there is no room for the putative truth that everything is material. There is no room for the falsehood of this thesis either. So we ought to conclude that materialism is inconsistent with the conditions of its own truth or falsity. Materialism as defined above is a self-refuting thesis.
So it cannot be that the category of material items is the only nonempty category. If it is nonempty, at least one of the others has to be nonempty as well.
If representation and the sort of intentionality it presupposes can be adequately explicated in terms of functional relations, then there might be room for truth in the material world. Since teleo-semantics, based on the theory of selective processes, has made a plausible start toward delivering such an explication, the corner into which materialsts are backed might prove to be very defensible.
I've no disagreement with your central thesis here, though I would like to press you on a few of your supporting claims.
First, you propose that "all entities [are] divisible into three mutually irreducible disjoint categories, the material, the mental, and the abstract." Can you say something to justify this classification? For my part, I'm inclined to deny that the abstract is a metaphysically independent category. Like Aristotle or Aquinas, I would say that universals and such are either in concrete things or in minds, most fundamentally, God's mind.
Second, regarding truth-bearers, Kirkham in Theories of Truth argues that nearly anything, including bananas and teddy bears, can be a truth-bearer. All we need to do is devise a language in which such things are used to communicate. For example, we could have a linguistic convention such that whenever I want to compliment you on a chess game I give you a 5' inch, half-peeled banana.
Third, you say that "nothing can be either true or false unless it has a sentence-like structure." Stalnaker argues otherwise in Inquiry, and I am inclined to agree. It seems to me that our vehicles for expressing truths may need to have a sentence-like structure, but that truths themselves (i.e., true propositions) need not.
Finally, you say that "it is difficult to see how [brain states] could intrinsically possess semantic properties." I agree, though I was recently at a talk by Bill Ramsey of Notre Dame, and he argued that iconic representation could work. Basically, he suggests that what materialists need is a type of brain state that, like a map, structurally resembles what it represents and, viola, mental representation can be reduced to "mindless representation". (The reason why he thinks we have to reduce is because he thinks Dennett's right that otherwise we wind up with an infinite regress of homunculi.)
Thanks for the excellent comments. These are questions that must be addressed. By the way I've booked my room in LV for June 16-18. It would be great to meet you if you are available.
Ad (1). The tripartite scheme is provisional and prima facie. As you know, it can be found in different forms in Frege and in Karl Popper. Since there is a distinction between mental subjects and their contents, one can argue for a 4th category, minds themselves, especially if one were to hold that minds in themselves are unobjectifiable.
The 3-fold schema allows us to get the ball rolling, and allows the possibility of reducing one of the categories to the others later. My own view is that abstracta are accusatives of Absolute Mind. But that is not a view one can start with; it is a view one must slowly and patiently arrive at -- if one arrives at it.
The dialectical situation is that I am trying to persuade people like Malcolm P. who is a very intelligent educated layman with a background in science, but less background in philosophy. Since he is an atheist, it would be pointless to start with what he denies. I have to start with what he accepts and the see if I can tease out implications that he will also accept.
Ad (2). I read Kirkham some years back and wrote quite a lot about him in a early draft of my book -- mat'l that I later excised. Sure, we could rig up a banana language in which bananas of different lengths, ripenesses, etc convey different thoughts. But what does that show? Only that WE can assign meaning to a physical object that, in itself, lacks meaning. But that's not the issue. The issue concerns those entities which are intrinsically representative, intrisically such that they are either true or false. My point is that no physical object can be intrinsically representative.
Ad (3). Stalnaker's view is hopeless. For him a proposition is a function from possible worlds into truth-value. (Inquiry, p. 2) A function is a set. So a proposition is a set. That's absurd. End of discussion --for now.
Ad (4). I don't mean to be rude, but I'm a direct kind of guy who knows BS when he smells it. Suppose you found a tiny map inside Ramsey's brain. That's not going to happen, but just suppose. That map structurally resembles something outside his brain. But that's a mere contingent fact noted by US. No map is about its terrain intrisically. We set up the correlation, the mapping.
What is amazing here is that people like Dennett and so many others will adopt any sort of absurd theory just to avoid admitting the self-evident, namely, that mind exists, intentionality exists, qualia exist.
I can't argue it here, but any attempt to identify these with nonmind eliminates them. Reductive identification collapses into eliminativism. Why are contemporary philosphers so enamored of materialism? Is there a sociologist of knowledge in the house? The most absurd example of this are theists (of all people) who are materialists about the mind. I published an article in F &P on this some years back.
I hope latter-day teleosemanticists can do better than Millikan could.
Sure, they can argue that the brain has evolved to solve certain types of problems in a way that leads to survival, but how can a brain that has evolved to solve the problems of (1) finding food (2) avoiding predators and (3) getting laid be expected to have any success at solving philosophical problems? Surely it is a lot more plausible that such brains only think they can solve such problems.
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I would like to meet when you're in Vegas. May my wife join us as well? I'm sure she'd like to meet you too, and she's always interesting in a good philosophical discussion (that's why she married a philosopher!).
On the Stalnaker thing, I agree with you that propositions are not functions, but I one doesn't have to accept that implausible thesis to hold that propositions (as opposed to expressions of propositions) are not necessarily sentential in structure.
As for Kirkham's idea, I also agree with you that bananas and other material objects cannot be intrinsically representative. But even things that aren't intrinsically representative can still be truth-bearers derivatively, by virtue expressing a true proposition.
Then you wrote: Once again, right you are. It is difficult. In fact, so far, we don't have a satisfactory account.
Then comes:We have just "seen" that? Did I miss something? I mean the part where you demonstrated that our exhaustive understanding of what matter is and is not capable of rigorously and conclusively proves that there is no possible way in which matter, suitably organized, is able to become conscious?
Positing immaterial mindstuff is, to those whose intuitions pull in the opposite direction from yours, just as "absurd" as the idea that matter, in some way that we do not yet fathom, is able to spawn consciousness.
The fact is that neither of us really knows the truth of the matter.
Dave, your comment - that we have no justification to be entirely confident in our reason if it based solely on the mechanics of a physical system - is well-grounded, and is what C.S. Lewis called the "cardinal difficulty" of naturalism. But that doesn't refute materialism; if true, it would only mean that artifacts of human reason, including arguments in favor of materialism, cannot be relied on with certainty. For Lewis, such unreliability was a deal-breaker. But materialism could still be true, nevertheless.
Perhaps the evolutionarily recent redesign of the human brain into a more general problem-solver than that possessed by our more ancient ancestors (which we might suppose would have been adaptive because such a flexible and reconfigurable apparatus could do a qualitatively better and more productive job of finding food, getting laid, etc.) was enough to give us the ability to ask questions that we cannot answer.
And Bill, I'm NOT an atheist. I defend materialism in here, because I think it is underrepresented in these parts, but for all I know, it could go either way.
Why are contemporary philosophers so enamored of materialism? A fascinating question. I think there are many possible lines of inquiry there, but I will mention three that I have thought about.
First, I think the wars of religion have left a deep imprint on western culture, mainly in the form of stigmatizing medieval forms of inquiry such as dogmatic theology and mystical spirituality.
Second, those wars coincided with the rise of science and its spectacular successes. This has led to an exclusive focus on what might be called "spatiotemporalism" as the place to go for all substantive or positive knowledge. What is visible or detectable or mathematically describable has "cash value".
Third, the success of science has fostered what I think is the illusion that the balance between mystery and knowledge has shifted such that mystery is confined to ever smaller islands in a sea of expanding scientific explanation. But when I scrutinize scientific concepts I find at their base nothing but more mystery. For example, many philosophers have noted that the concepts of 'matter', 'energy', 'physical', and 'natural' are deeply problematic. Peter Unger has written on how we can't even conceptualize what a particle is. Thomas Nagel has questioned the very concept of 'objective reality'.
This is why I so much appreciated Bryan Magee's account in his Confessions, as he seems to have a more balanced perspective on how massive the mysteries really are.
One part of the story of the advance of experimental science is that practitioners found that they could make progress by starting "in the middle of things," i.e., they could "indefinitely postpone" some difficult foundational questions. This, unfortunately, also inspired some foolish anti-metaphysical doctrines from which the philosophy of science is still trying to extricate itself.
Since Henry mentions spatiotemporalism, I want to note that my remarks (in an earlier thread) about the inadequacy of a "pure" form of ST concerned what some have called the geometrization of nature. This represented a tremendous technical advance, but as students of Descartes know, he couldn't consistently treat matter as pure extension -- he also had to attribute to matter the dispositional property of impenetrability. Then along came Newton with his posit of occult forces (gravity is very strange...).
As things now stand, a lot of people calling themselves "materialists" unselfconsciously help themselves to a variety of concepts (Henry mentions several) that seem not to be reducible to geometry. I don't think there's anything wrong with treating these concepts as materialistic -- but then we need to recognize that matter is much more mysterious than a lot of people think. I'm willing to go so far as to treat seriously the suggestion that it might even be capable of consciousness.
I'm gratified to read your comments; as I've been saying, it is terribly premature for any of us to be signing off on what matter can and can't do. This has been my objection all along to arguments that assert the philosophical necessity of a dualistic account of mind, intentionality, etc. (which is not to say that I am insisting that dualism is wrong).
There is just SO much that we do not understand about the spatiotemporal world - quantum duality, nonlocal interactions, "dark matter", the quantum measurement problem, the apparent flow of time, how to reconcile QM and general relativity, and on and on. I think the extent of our ignorance means that philosophical certainty about many of the questions we've been discussing in here may be unattainable, for now at least.
I have the feeling that philosophers don't like to be told that, though!
Although I used 'dogmatic' in reference to ideas about the capacities of matter, I don't think that Bill is at all dogmatic about his conclusions -- quite the opposite. I think it takes some "getting used to" the manner of speech often employed by philosophers to express difficult ideas as clearly and succinctly as possible. Almost inevitably, qualifications and ammendations are on offer.
Suppose that materialism is indeed a bias or mistake; a mistaken notion that what is real is what is detectable. Then perhaps it is just the same mistake as looking for your lost keys under the streetlight. Or a figure-ground mistake, like noticing the objects in a room, but not the space of the room that contains the objects. The objects and the space are actually "co-dependently arising" as Buddhists would say. We have the example from physics of the hypothesized vacuum state energy - space seems empty, but the energy of the vacuum is much greater than carried by ordinary matter-energy.
I owe you some responses, and perhaps an apology for tagging you an atheist. Is 'agnostic' suitable? The responses will have to wait since today is running and chess day. Thanks for all the discussion. But let me ask you this: Is it possible that future science could establish that 7 is not prime?
First of all, I wish you sanguinary victory at the chessboard. May the tournament hall resound with the groans of your opponents, and the lamentations of their women.
Yes, "agnostic" will do perfectly well. That's what I am, unfortunately, for now at least. I don't like it much, because I hate to be in the dark about such a vital question, but every time I lean toward one camp or the other I start to feel that I'm kidding myself.
No, I do not suppose that science will establish that 7 is not prime, any more than I expect that science will demonstrate that the Easter bunny has scales. Our shared concept of the Easter bunny includes a furry integument, and just as your concept of 7 could not be prime, neither can mine, because we are both instantiating the same ideas of 7 and prime. It may even be that every sufficiently advanced sentient mind we will ever encounter will share this idea - all minds might always develop in this way, in the same way that clouds on Earth look just like clouds on Jupiter. The only claim I am objecting to is the idea that 7, and especially propositions about 7, have an independent existence as "abstract objects" that in turn can be leveraged for arguments about necessarily existing worlds to act as placeholders, as in this post, in which I assume you could just as easily have substituted 7 is prime as an example of something that must exist even in the putative "worlds in which S is false." I think that it is quite plausible that if there are no minds there is no 7 either. I realize this entails a lot of other assumptions that we have wrangled over also, such as whether intrinsic meaning can arise from the clay. I suspect that clay might be more remarkable stuff than we think.
I'm glad to read you unveiling these two notions:
"... the illusion that the balance between mystery and knowledge has shifted such that mystery is confined to ever smaller islands in a sea of expanding scientific explanation."
and
"Suppose that materialism is indeed ... a mistaken notion that what is real is what is detectable."
I completely agree, and for the time being these make me, just as Malcolm, pretty agnostic concerning the questions in this thread.
I don't see how a thorough-going materialist avoids allowing the possibility that seven (7) may not be a prime at some future point. For such a materialist the only Truth is the material in the present such that, borrowing from SK, what was true no longer is and what will be true is not yet so. Only what materially exists (in the present) constitutes the true. Since the true - that which exists now - is not contingent upon any Idea (Plato, Leibniz, Spinoza, Voltaire, et al. are ruled out by definition, yes?) but only upon itself (even if meta-things exist, they are not ordered by any Idea), hence how could seven as a non-prime at some future point be ruled out of order?
I think you are conflating two distinct doctrines, materialism and presentism (the present alone exists). Materialism does not entail presentism, though it is consistent with it.
Though I sympathize with what you are saying, I think the problem goes deeper. How could a thoroughgoing materialist even allow theat there is the proposition 7 is prime?
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