Vol. 24 No. 17 · 5 September 2002
pages 21-22 | 3256 words
Don’t bet the chicken coop
Jerry Fodor
- Thinking about Consciousness by David Papineau
Oxford, 280 pp, £25.00, April 2002, ISBN 0 19 924382 4
A note to Royall Tyler’s elegant new translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji explains that ‘Hahakigi (“;broom tree”) is a plant from which brooms were indeed made and that had the poetic reputation of being visible from afar and of disappearing as one approached.’* Well, philosophers live in a thicket of such things; it is often very trying.
Consider, as an example, current philosophical discussions of consciousness. Lots of us think that, details aside, Lucretius had things about right. What there really is is atoms-and-the-void, and there’s really nothing else. True, the story about atoms is more complicated than Lucretius supposed; so, too, is the story about the void. But the underlying materialist intuition continues to be plausible; everything is the same sort of stuff as familiar, ontologically untendentious objects like rivers, rocks and stars. The whole world is that sort of stuff in its myriad configurations. So construed, materialism is a sound bet on a research programme: sooner or later, science will figure out what it is that everything is made of. The results from our first couple of millennia pursuing this programme have been pretty good. It now seems probable, for example, that not just rocks, rivers and stars, but also many animate things are material through and through. That’s most encouraging.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 24 No. 19 · 3 October 2002
From Edmond Wright
Jerry Fodor (LRB, 5 September) objects to David Papineau's use of the distinction between water and H2O as an analogy for the mind/brain distinction. This cannot hold, he says, because we can see perfectly well that there is identity in the case of the former pair, while the mind/brain opposition remains stubbornly distinct. But he is in error about water and H2O. He happily identifies water's transparency, liquidity, and no doubt also the feel of it, its coolness and all the rest of our sensory acquaintance with H2O, as part of what water is. But this is to establish the pair water/H2O in such a way that it is an analogy for the mind/brain distinction – phenomenal properties are clearly on the left-hand side and the physical description on the right.
My own view is that we get confused about mind/brain 'identity' because we forget that in this case it is a part of our own being that is under investigation. Just as we cannot identify 'H2O' with the being of water, so, for example, whatever we propose about the neurons that give us the experience of colour could never be an identity statement – for any explanation, however successful in its description, is patently not what it explains. If there is an 'explanatory gap' between some future neurophysiological theory about sensory colour and the experience of colour, that gap is the harmless one between language and the real.
Edmond Wright
Cambridge
Vol. 24 No. 20 · 17 October 2002
From Graham Hamilton
Edmond Wright (Letters, 3 October) is surely mistaken about the water/H2O analogy for the mind/brain distinction. He seems to say that 'water' is associated with the properties of water, which we phenomenally experience, whereas 'H2O' is the physical description of water: 'we cannot identify H2O with the being of water.' But it is clear that water and H2O are co-referring expressions. You cannot make the true statement 'water is wet' into a falsehood by substituting the term 'H2O' for 'water'. Try a similar thing with 'mind' and 'brain' and it's obvious that the two terms do not co-refer: we don't speak of finding 'peace of brain'. The properties of water are all physical properties, and explained by the fact that water is made up of two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen. In the case of phenomenal experience, a physical object, the brain, is in some sense involved, but experience appears to have properties that just don't seem physical. As Jerry Fodor pointed out in his original article (LRB, 5 September), a pain is not the same sort of thing as a rock. Philosophy of mind has somehow to find a way to reconcile the existence of both in a material world.
Graham Hamilton
York
Vol. 24 No. 21 · 31 October 2002
From Edmond Wright
Perhaps because my letter on Fodor's review of David Papineau's Thinking about Consciousness was shortened, Graham Hamilton seems to have misunderstood my argument (Letters, 3 and 17 October). My point is that to assist our communication with each other we talk of 'water' and 'H2O' being 'identical', but neither will be identical with the being of water. Furthermore, reference remains a project, a game of hopeful mutual convergence upon the real that can never achieve the identity it seeks. Both our everyday use of 'water' and our scientific use of 'H2O' rely on that game of convergence in which we try to make our differing perceptions overlap perfectly. As the Norwegian psycholinguist Ragnar Rommetveit has insisted, we have to pretend that the overlap is perfect in order to get a partial overlap that works for the time being.
Edmond Wright
Cambridge
