Positive Indeterminacy Revisited

(I meant to write this post a few months ago, when I was actually studying Merleau-Ponty. Since then, positive indeterminacy has popped up a few more times, in various guises. Hence "revisited".)

Merleau-Ponty introduces the term "positive indeterminacy" in The Phenomenology of Perception, where he uses it to describe visual illusions such as the Müller-Lyer...

 

Which line is longer?

 ...and the duck-rabbit. His point is that perception is often ambiguous, and he concludes that we must accept this ambiguity as a "positive phenomenonon". Indeterminacy, according to Merleau-Ponty, can sometimes be a feature of reality, rather than a puzzle to be explained.

Is it a duck? Is it a rabbit? Nobody knows!

Positive indeterminacy, then, is the identification of features of the world that are in some sense inherently indeterminate. Quine argues that any act of translation between languages is fundamentally indeterminate, as there will be always be a number of competing translations, each of which is equally compatible with the evidence. Of course in practice we are able to translate, at least well enough to get by, but we can never we be sure that a word actually means what we think it does. Thus Quine concludes that meaning itself is indeterminate, and that there is no fact of the matter about what a word means.

Quine: a dapper chap

Hilary Putnam comes to similar conclusions about the notion of truth. According to his doctrine of "internal realism", whether or not some statement is true can only be determined relative to a "conceptual scheme", or a frame of reference. Truth is also indeterminate, in that there is no objective fact of the matter about whether or not something is true. Putnam takes care to try and avoid what he sees as an incoherent form of relativism, and stresses that from within a conceptual scheme there is a determinate fact of the matter about truth. Nonetheless, this truth remains in an important sense subjective - it's just that Putnam thinks that this is the best we can hope for.

More recently Dennett has reiterated this kind of "Quinean indeterminacy", with specific reference to beliefs. According to his (in)famous intentional stance theory, what we believe is broadly determined by what an observer would attribute to us as rational agents. In some (perhaps most) situations, there will be no fact of the matter as to which beliefs it makes most sense to attribute. The same goes for other mental states, such as desires or emotions.

Dennett draws attention to Parfit's classic account of the self as another example of positive indeterminacy. There will be cases, such as dementia or other mental illness, where it is unclear what we should say about the continuity of the self. Rather than treating this as a puzzle that we should try and solve, Parfit argues that our concept of self is simply indeterminate, and that there is sometimes no "right" answer.

All of the above cases are much more complex than I have been able to go into here, but they give a taste of the importance of positive indeterminacy. I am most interested in how it can be applied to puzzles in the philosophy of mind, but it seems that it might well be a more fundamental part of how we should think about the world.

A spectre is haunting cognitive science...

...the spectre of Cartesian materialism. If there's been one consistent theme running through my studies over the last two and a half month, its this. But what is Cartesian materialism, and why is it haunting cognitive science?

A few obligatory words about the man himself before we go any further. René Descartes was a 17th century philosopher and mathematician, probably most famous for the now-infamous words "cogito, ergo sum" - "I think, therefore I am". He also invented the Cartesian coordinate system, which most of you will have been taught, even if you don't know it (it's the classic x-axis, y-axis thing). In modern analytic philosophy he enjoys a dubious status as both the inspiration and the target of many key arguments. It is a great irony that a tradition which owes so much to Descartes also routinely indoctrinates undergraduates against him.

He did most of his philosophising from the comfort of his bed.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. Many of Descartes' arguments are terrible, but the intuitions they appeal to remain strong, and his influence (the "spectre" of my title) can be felt throughout cognitive science and analytic philosophy of mind. Foremost amongst these is the intuition that 'mind' and 'body' must refer to two distinctly separate kinds of things. Descartes thought that this meant they must be composed of two separate substances, one physical and extended, the other insubstantial and non-extended. His cogito argument refers to this distinction - my mind, being a thinking thing, seems to exist independently of (and prior to) any physical world.

Empirical philosophy of mind (and thus cognitive science) tends to reject this dualism. Most philosophers of cognitive science (including myself) are physicalists, committed to there being only one kind of substance in the world. Thus the mind must be made out of the same kind of stuff as the body. Despite this commitment, there remains a tendency to conceive of the mind as something special, somehow autonomous from its physical instantiation. This attitude is sometimes called 'property dualism', 'non-reductive physicalism' , or, by its opponents, 'Cartesian materialism'.

Classical cognitive science, which dates back to around the middle of the last century, was (and still is) enamoured with the idea that the mind is essentially a computer program. As such it made sense to think of the mind as something distinct from the brain, a kind of "software" running on biological "hardware". This intuition is still strong today, particularly amongst those wanting to give an account of mental representation ("pictures" in the mind), or of the apparently inferential structure of cognition. Traditional functionalist accounts of cognition also tend towards a form of Cartesian materialism, as the multiple realisability requirement means that strict type identity between the mind and the brain is not possible. Whilst in many cases the mind (classically speaking) simply is the brain, it's conceivable that it might take some other form, and so the two are not strictly identical. 

However, recent (and some not-so-recent) work in embodied cognition argues that the physical body might be more important than classical cognitive science assumes. Examples include John Searle's suggestion that some quality of the neurobiological brain might be essential for consciousness (1980: 78), various enactive approaches to perception (championed by Alva Noë), and the dynamical systems approach that argues that cognition is a continuous process involving the brain, body, and environment. Whilst these approaches differ in many respects, they all agree that the mind cannot be conceived of as distinct or autonomous from the body.

Whilst Daniel Dennett takes an essentially computational and functionalist approach to cognition, he has also warned against the risks of Cartesian materialism - in fact, he invented the term. In Consciousness Explained (1991), he argues that many of our confusions about both consciousness and the self stem from Descartes, and that it is essential that we stop thinking about the mind as a single entity located at some discrete location within the brain. His mentor Gilbert Ryle made a similar point in The Concept of Mind, writing about the "dogma of the ghost in the machine" (1949: 17), the disembodied Cartesian mind that somehow controls the body.

A final Cartesian oddity that I have come across recently is found in the phenomenological work of Jean-Paul Sarte. Despite explicitly rejecting the Cartesian concept of the self, he emphasises a distinction between the "being-in-itself" and the "being-for-itself". The former is something like a physical body, and is all the "being" that a chair or a rock can possess, whilst the latter is what makes us special, the uniquely first-person point of view that we seem to enjoy. IN making this dichotomy he has been accused of resurrecting a kind of Cartesian dualism, in contrast with another famous phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty, who saw the self as inherently bound up in its relations the the world.

So there you have it, a whistle-stop tour of Cartesian materialism. I'm aware that I've skimmed over a lot of ideas very quickly here, but hopefully it's enough to illustrate the way in which Descartes is still very much exerting an influence, for better or for worse, on contemporary philosophy of mind.

• Boden, M. 1990. The Philosophy of Artifial Intelligence. Oxford: OUP.
• Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Company. 
• Searle, J. 1980. “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” Reprinted in Boden 1990: 67-88.

Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and philosophical mysticism

I study embodied cognition, an emerging field which has taken considerable inspiration from the phenomenological work of the likes of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Heidegger. As such, I've been attempting to get to grips with phenomenology, which given my analytic, Anglo-American philosophical education, is a somewhat odd experience. Phenomenology, broadly speaking, was a reaction against both empiricism and idealism, placing primary emphasis on "lived experience" and the act of perception. Merleau-Ponty in particular also focused on the interaction between the perceiver and the world, and it is this sense of "embodiment" that embodied cognition has most taken to heart.

Merleau-Ponty: grumpy

However there is another side to phenomenology, one which has the potential to be profoundly inimical to the whole project of cognitive science, embodied or not. There is evidence to suggest that Merleau-Ponty, at least, understood phenomenology to be far more than a modification of our psychological methodology. His most famous work, Phenomenology of Perception, is  littered with cryptic remarks that undermine any attempt to read it as a work of empirical psychology. He explicitly states that it is a work of transcendental philosophy, aimed at achieving "pre-objective perception". It is not at all clear what this might be, or even whether it can be expressed in words. Throughout the book (which I'll admit I haven't yet read), there is apparently a sense in which many things go unsaid, perhaps even things which will "only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts".

Wittgenstein: even grumpier

That sounds familiar. The above quote comes from the introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (which I have read, although I won't claim to have understood it). Both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty seem to be struggling to express the unexpressable, and both, perhaps, ought to be read as "anti-philosophers", whose mission is not to solve any great problems but to help us understand why there never were any problems in the first place. This is certainly the opinion of a psychology lecturer I know who, under the influence of both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, seemed shocked that us philosophers might still be trying to solve the "problem" of consciousness. Whilst I think this is somewhat arrogant (and ignorant), it is true that both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein regarded analytic philosophy as curiously misguided, tied up in knots of its own creation.

In light of which it may seem odd that half a century later analytic philosophy continues to venerate Wittgenstein, and that analytic philosophy of mind, or at least a certain strand of it, has recently adopted Merleau-Ponty as something of an idol. If both or either of them were right, surely we're completely missing the point? In fact I don't think this should worry us too much. Neither Merleau-Ponty nor Wittgenstein were perfect, and much of what they wrote may have been as confusing to them as it is to us. What is important is to pay attention to the issues that they do highlight, and to take to heart anything that does make sense to us. Daniel Dennett takes this approach with regard to Wittgenstein (in Consciousness Explained and elsewhere), and Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi seem to be doing something similar in The Phenomenological Mind, where they attempt to apply phenomenological insights to contemporary cognitive science. Regardless of whether or not either Mearlea-Ponty or Wittgenstein would have approved, I find this approach extremely useful, and phenomenologically speaking, perhaps this is all that should matter. It is, after all, my lived experience, not Merleau-Ponty's!

(Some credit should go to the phenomenology reading group at the University of Edinburgh, with whom I discussed much of the content of this post. Any errors or misunderstandings, however, are entirely my own.)

• Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown & Company.
• Gallagher, S. & Zahavi, P. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind. London: Routledge.
• Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945/1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.
• Wittgenstein, L. 1921/1991. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New York: Dover.