[This is the second section of the paper reproduced here in full. Unfortunately, the subsequent sections are too long for a blog-page. Hence, I will only post excerpts for those sections]
The sentient subject
The study of the thinking, sentient
human subject has always been a central concern in philosophy in any tradition.
However, only with the Cartesian rationalist tradition did the concern directly
relate to the concept of mind as a seperate substance, an additional joint of
nature. As the Cartesian tradition of substance dualism lost its appeal in
subsequent centuries due to serious challenges to the idea of a separate
substance by empiricists like David Hume and John Locke, the discussion of mind
itself, as a substantive concept, was progressively abandoned. In contemporary
times, the situation for the Cartesian tradition worsened even further after Gilbert
Ryle’s influential critique of the concept of mind as the ghost in the machine
(Ryle 1949).
Nonetheless,
the concern about the sentient thinking subject remained, especially after the
work of Immanuel Kant, because the subject was viewed as the center of the
complex network that related language, thought, and reality: the domain of
human knowledge. Thinking of human belief as a fact about humans, it is natural
to view human belief as the content of mental states, states that humans attain
when they have belief. Beliefs thus are viewed as contentful mental states par
excellence of a subject. The step from belief to knowledge is deemed natural
since knowledge is taken to be a species of belief: knowledge signals the
attainment of a restricted kind of belief-state, namely, a state of true belief
for which the subject has evidence.
It was then thought
that specific beliefs can be identified in terms of structured meaningful
propositions such as that the earth is round. The proposition, a
linguistic entity, represents the belief that the earth is round by a
systematic grammatical construction out of individual meanings of words such as
earth and round. These sounds are phenomena in the external world
to be accessed by perceptual systems, but the meanings of these words must
themselves be mental entities since they constitute the mental states of the
typically sentient subject: the content of the belief that the earth is round
is constituted of mental entities EARTH and ROUND; these entities endow the
sounds earth and round with meaning. We thus have a set of mentalistic concepts:
belief, knowledge, meaning, consciousness. The ‘Cartesian’ angle on these
concepts is hard to miss.
Since the concepts
of belief and knowledge in their ordinary usage are taken to denote mental
states, some notion of mind is at least indirectly implicated, although a
direct mention of it is forbidden due to Rylean strictures. In this indirect
sense, concepts of belief and knowledge define the contours of contemporary
philosophy of mind, and some of cognitive science, that takes the form of
(study of) folk psychology. I will discuss the concepts of belief and knowledge
more fully in the next two essays.
Similar
remarks apply to the concept of consciousness. It is a ubiquitous part of folk
psychology that we view human subjects as beings which routinely attain states
of consciousness. For example, John Searle (1992, xii) declares at the very
beginning of his study of the mind that we ‘all have
inner subjective qualitative states of consciousness, and we have intrinsically
intentional mental states such as beliefs and desires, intentions and
perceptions.’ Colin McGinn (1989) opens his influential paper on the mind-body
problem with the observation that philosophers have been trying for a
long time to solve the specific problem of consciousness which continues to be ‘the
hard nut of the mind-body problem.’ We need some explanation of why we have
these mentalistic concepts—belief, knowledge, meaning and consciousness—and
what they do for us. The study of these concepts then qualify as a study of the
mind, in the indirect sense outlined.
Cutting through
many-dimensional controversies covered in a vast literature, two broad perspectives
have emerged in the philosophical literature. These perspectives are in serious
conflict. The first perspective, often called folk psychology as noted,
says that the availability of these concepts in fact points towards an implicit
and largely correct theory of mind; the task is to make it explicit. In their
ordinary usage, these concepts are already laden with explanatory value; all we
need is to make proper scientific use of them. The neuroscientific perspective
says, on the other hand, that these concepts have a value at most as components
of a false theory; a genuine theory of cognition will dispense with these
concepts. Each of the ordinary concepts of belief (Stitch 1983) and
consciousness (Dennett 1991) are to be eliminated from a putative science of
the mind (Churchland and Sejnowsky 1992).
The debate has been
stultifying since, while folk psychology is untenable at various points (Mukherji
2006, this volume, Essay 8), neuroscience
has done nothing to replace it in the critical cases (Mukherji 1990; Bennett
and Hacker 2003). In particular, as we will see, fatal problems of explanation
seem to block any coherent neuroscientific account of consciousness, not to
mention beliefs and meanings. Although a careful review of the (astronomical) literature
is warranted at this point—a task that is beyond the scope of this essay—it is
not entirely unfair to surmise that neither folk psychology nor neuroscience
has much explanatory chance for the mental domain as commonly envisaged. Suppose
so. Nevertheless, these concepts are here to stay with us in ordinary
discourse. What do they do for us?
What I propose to
do is to move away from the folk psychology/neuroscience debate, and launch an
independent philosophical examination of these concepts to see if a general account
of their value can be extracted outside
the theory of mind. One option that seems particularly promising in the given
historical scenario is that these concepts are not designed to play (genuine)
explanatory roles in naturalistic theories at all; their value appears to be
located elsewhere. As noted, I will concentrate on the concept of consciousness
for the rest of this essay; concepts of belief and knowledge will be taken up
in the next two essays.
The
strategy adopted here is different from other attempts to set the problem of
consciousness aside. For example, in the paper cited earlier, McGinn (1989)
suggests that the problem of consciousness falls under what he calls the
principle of Cognitive Closure: ‘A
type of mind M is cognitively closed with respect to a property P (or
theory T) if and
only if the concept-forming procedures at T’s disposal cannot extend to
a grasp of P (or an understanding of T).’ McGinn thinks that consciousness is a property that we are
cognitively incapable of understanding; in that sense, consciousness is not a problem,
but a mystery.
Following Thomas Nagel and others, I
have myself suggested a more general version of the closure principle earlier
to raise the design problem: our grasp of the world is restricted to what kind
of creature we are (Mukherji 2010, Chapter One; also, this volume, Essay
One). However, I do not think that consciousness is a mystery that cannot be
understood by the human mind. As proposed, consciousness can well be understood
as a normative/ascriptive concept; to view consciousness as a real/naturalistic
property of human nature is probably not warranted. However, several
qualifications are needed to properly articulate the suggestion, as we will
see.
(To be continued)
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