Maverick Philosopher

Is the World Inconceivable Apart from Consciousness?

That depends. It depends on what 'world' means.

Steven Nemes quotes Dermot Moran on the former's Facebook page:

[1] In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. [2] Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. [3] For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. [4] The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. [5] Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. ( Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 144

This strikes me as confused. I will go through it line by line. I have added numbers in brackets for ease of reference.

Ad [1]. I basically agree. I'm an old Husserl man. But while conscious acts cannot be properly understood from within die natürliche  Einstellung, it doesn't follow that they cannot be understood "at all" from within the natural attitude or outlook. So I would strike the "at all." I will return to this issue at the end.

Ad [2].  Here the trouble begins. I grant that conscious acts cannot be properly understood in wholly materialistic or naturalistic terms. They cannot be understood merely as events in the natural world. For example, my thinking about Boston cannot be reduced to anything going in my brain or body when I am thinking about Boston. Intentionality resists naturalistic reduction. And I grant that there is a sense in which there would not be a world for us in the first place if there were no consciousness. 

But note the equivocation on 'world.' It is first used to refer to nature itself, and then used to refer to the openness or apparentness of nature, nature as it appears to us and has meaning for us.  Obviously, without consciousness, nature would not appear, but this is not to say that consciousness is the reason why there is a natural world in the first place.  To say that would be to embrace an intolerable form of idealism.

Ad [3] We are now told that this is not idealism. Very good!  But note that the world that is disclosed and made meaningful is not the world that is inconceivable without consciousness.  The equivocation on 'world' persists.  There is world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense as the 'space' within which things are disclosed and become manifest, and there is world as the things disclosed.  These are plainly different even if there is no epistemic access to the latter except via the former.

Ad [4] To be precise, the world as the 'space of disclosure' is inconceivable without consciousness. But this is not the same as the natural world, which is not inconceivable without consciousness.  If you say that it is, then you are adopting a form of idealism, which is what Husserl in the end does.

Ad [5] In the final sentence, 'world' clearly refers to the physical realm, nature. I agree that it would be a mistake to reify consciousness, to identify it with any physical thing or process. Consciousness plays a disclosive role. As OF the world -- genitivus objectivus -- consciousness is not IN the world.  But the world in this sense IS conceivable apart from consciousness. 

And so the confusion remains.  The world in the specifically pheomenological sense, the world as the 'space' within which things are disclosed -- compare Heidegger's Lichtung or clearing -- is inconceivable without consciousness. But the world as that which is disclosed, opened up, gelichtet, made manifest and meaningful, is NOT inconceivable apart from consciousness. If you maintain otherwise, then you are embracing a form of idealism.

So I'd say that Moran and plenty of others are doing the 'Continental Shuffle' as I call it: they are sliding back and forth between two senses  of 'world.'  Equivalently, they are conflating the ontic and the broadly epistemic.  I appreciate their brave attempt at undercutting the subject-object dichotomy and the idealism-realism problematic.  But the brave attempt does not succeed.  A mental act of outer perception, say, is intrinsically intentional or object-directed: by its very sense it purports to be of or about something that exists apart from any and all mental acts to which it appears.  To speak like a Continental, the purport is 'inscribed in the very essence of the act."  But there remains the question whether the intentional object really does exist independently of the act. There remains the question whether the intentional object really exists or is merely intentional.  Does it enjoy esse reale, or only esse intentionale?

I recommend to my friend Nemes that he read Roman Ingarden's critique of Husserl's idealism.  I also recommend that he read Husserl himself (in German if possible) rather than the secondary sources he has been citing, sources some of which are not only secondary, but second-rate.

To return to what I said at the outset: Conscious acts cannot be properly understood naturalistically.  But surely a full understanding of them must explain how they relate to the goings-on in the physical organisms in nature that support them.  A sartisfactory philosophy cannot ignore this. And so, to end on an autobiographical note, this was one of the motives that lead me beyond phenomenology.

 

London Ed on Reference to What is Not

Two weeks in Greece passed both quickly and slowly.  No access to internet or phone, much walking (on a lonely hillside I found a deserted monastery built on the ruins of a 6th century pagan temple) and much thinking.  In particular, thinking about the 'Meinongian' thesis that there are objects that do not exist, and that 'there are Fs' can be understood in a 'wide' or unrestricted sense, so that nonexistent entities are to be included [in the ] domain of quantification and discourse, but also in a 'narrow' sense, including only existing objects.

You implictly defend this view often, but explicitly here: "the crux of the matter is whether there are different ways of existing, or different modes of existence. I say there are ...".  Here is a brief critique of this view. Consider:

(1) Tom is thinking of Frodo

(2) There is no such thing as Frodo

I think we both agree that both of these propositions* are true.  If so, what are we to make of the following argument?

BV:  Yes.  We can call them data sentences.  They record Moorean facts.

(3) Proposition (1) is of the form 'aRb', where a = 'Tom', R = 'is thinking of' and b = 'Frodo'

BV: Permit me a quibble.  You don't want to say that a = 'Tom,'  you want to say that 'a' is a placeholder for 'Tom.'  Likewise for the other terms.  It seems to me that you are making two very minor mistakes.  One is use-mention confusion; the other is confusing a placeholder with an abbreviation.  Sorry to be such a pedant!

I would add that if we distinguish between grammatical and logical form, then proposition (1) is of the grammatical form, aRb.  It is at least conceivable that the deep logical form of (1) be something else.  Brentano, no slouch of a philosopher, would read (1) as nonrelational, as having the form of 'Tom is a Frodo-thinker.'  An adverbialist would take (1) as having the form of 'Tom is thinking Frodo-ly.'

(4) The truth of a proposition of the form 'aRb' always implies the truth of 'for some x, x = b and aRx', and hence the truth of 'for some x, x = b.'

BV: Agreed if you insert 'logical' right before 'form' in (4). 

(5) [Interpreting (4)] If Tom is thinking of Frodo then there is such a thing as Frodo.

(6) [from (5) and (1), modus ponens] There is such a thing as Frodo.

(7) [(6) and (2)] Contradiction.

BV: For this reductio ad absurdum to be formally valid, you need an auxiliary premise to the effect that 'For some x, x = b' asserts the existence of b.  In other words, you must read the particular quantifier 'For some x, ___ x ___' as an existential quantifier, where an existential quantifier expresses existence, where existence is real, i.e., mind-independent, existence.  It is at least a question whether existence can be reduced to someness!

We might attempt to resolve the contradiction as follows. We should read (6) as asserting existence in some wide or unrestricted quantification sense, as follows:

(6A) There is such a thing[w] as Frodo

where 'thing[w]' ranges over all kinds of things, existent and non-existent. Likewise, we should read (2) as asserting existence in some narrow or restricted quantification sense, as follows:

(2A) There is no such thing[n] as Frodo

where 'thing[n]' ranges only over real or existing things. Where there is ambiguity, there is no real contradiction. To assert that Frodo is a thing in the wide sense does not contradict the assertion that he is not a thing in the narrow sense.

BV:  I have been toying with a solution something like this, except that it is not strictly Meinongian. For Meinong, items like Frodo have no being whatsoever.  That is his famous doctrine of Aussersein.  I have been toying with the idea that they have being all right, but merely intentional being, esse intentionale as opposed to esse reale, where these are two different modes of being/existence.  Lukas Novak, who shares with me the idea that thinking is genuinely relational, denies that it is impossible to refer to what has no being.  See Lukas Novak on Reference to What is Not. It looks like I am fighting a war on two fronts, the London front and the Prague front.

My objection is as follows. 

BV: Your objection, I take it, is to a solution along the lines I sketched.

Consider:

(8) Tom thinks that there is such a thing as Frodo, but he is wrong

The conjunct 'but he is wrong' is a negation, and in order to be a negation, what it negates must have the same sense as what is asserted (inside the belief context). Having the same sense includes the terms having the same range, and so the range of the term 'thing' as it occurs in the assertion must be identical to the range of the same term as it occurs (although elided) in the negation.  I.e. (8) can be expanded into

(8A) Tom thinks that there is such a thing[x] as Frodo, but it is not the case that there is such a thing[x] as Frodo

where 'x' indicates sameness of range. I.e. if the range in the assertion is narrow, it is so in the negation, and likewise if it is wide. Thus the range of the term 'thing' is irrelevant.

BV:  Now you've lost me completely. There is clearly a difference between (1) -- Tom is thinking of Frodo -- and 'Tom thinks that there is such a thing as Frodo.'  I don't understand why you shifted to the latter sentence.  To think about x is not to think that there is such a thing as x, nor is it to think that there is not such a thing as x.  It is just to think about x.

At this point in the dialectic I don't know what you are up to.  From previous discussions, your aim was to pin a certain exportation fallacy on me, the fallacy of moving from

Tom is thinking of Frodo

to

There exists an x such that x = Frodo & Tom is thinking of x.

That is clearly a non sequitur; I recognize it as such, and I don't commit it.  If Tom is thinking of Frodo, then Tom is thinking of something; but it doesn't follow that this thing exists.  On Meinong's theory, Tom is thinking of a beingless item.  On my theory, he is thinking of an item that has esse intentionale but not esse reale.  On Meinong's theory, intentionality is a relation, but the object relatum has no being at all.  On my theory, is a relation, but the object relatum has merely intentional being.

Yet the form of 'Tom thinks that there is such a thing as Frodo' is also 'aRb', where a is 'Tom', b is 'Frodo', and R is 'thinks that there is such a thing as'.  If premiss (4) above were true, then from (8) we could derive 'there is such a thing such that Tom thinks that there is such a thing as it', which would mean Tom was right, rather than wrong.

My solution to the problem, as I have argued before, is to reject premiss (4).  'Tom is thinking of Frodo' has the grammatical form 'aRb', but that is not its logical form.  Clearly its logical form includes an internal quantifier, i.e. a quantifier that is included inside the belief operator, but cannot be legitimately  exported outside.

BV:  Now I think I see what you are up to.  You take

(1) Tom is thinking of Frodo

to have the logical form of

(9) Tom is thinking that Frodo exists.

And then your point is that (9) does not entail

(10) Frodo exists.

I agree that the inferential move from (9) to (10) is invalid. But I think it is a mistake that (1) can be replaced by (9).  Suppose I am thinking of something.  It might be London's Trafalgar Square or Boston's Scollay Square.  The former exists (last time I checked) but the latter no longer exists.  Clearly I can have either thought without the additional thought that the square in question exists or does not exist.  To think about something  is not eo ipso to think that the thing in question exists -- or to think that it does not exist.

Perhaps I have misunderstood you.

___________________
*Proposition: (def) a sentence capable of truth or falsity, and so not a question, a command or a prayer.

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Imagining X as Real versus Imagining X as Unreal and a Puzzle of Actualization

Peter and I discussed the following over Sunday breakfast.

Suppose I want a table, but there is no existing table that I want: I want a  table with special features that no existing table possesses.  So I decide to build a table with these features.  My planning involves imagining a table having certain properties.  It is rectangular, but not square, etc.  How does this differ from imagining a table that I describe  in a work of fiction?  Suppose the two tables have all the same properties.  We also assume that the properties form a logically consistent set.  What is the difference between imagining a table I intend to build and imagining a table that I do not intend to build but intend merely to describe as part of the fictional furniture in a short story?

In the first case I imagine the table as real; in the second as fictional. Note that to imagine a table as real is not the same as imagining a real table, though that too occurs.  Suppose I remember seeing Peter's nondescript writing  table.  To remember a table is not to imagine one; nonetheless I can imagine refurbishing Peter's table by stripping it, sanding it, and refinishing it.  The imagined result of those operations is not a purely imagined object, any more than a piece of fiction I write in which Peter's table makes an appearance features a purely fictional table.

The two tables I am concerned with, however are both nonexistent. In both cases there is a merely intentional object before my mind.  And in both cases the constitutive properties are the same.  Moreover, the two are categorially the same: both are physical objects, and more specifically artifacts. Obviously, when I imagine a table, I am not imagining a nonphysical object or a natural physical object like a tree.  So there is a clear sense in which  what I am imagining is in both cases a physical object, albeit a nonexistent/not-yet-existent physical object.

So what distinguishes the two objects?  Roman Ingarden maintains that they differ in "ontic character."  In the first case, the ontic character is intended as real.  In the second, intended as fictional.  (The Literary Work of Art, p. 119). 

Now I have already argued that purely fictional objects are impossible objects: they cannot be actualized, even if the constitutive properties form a logically consistent set.  We can now say that the broadly logical impossibility of purely fictional objects is grounded in their ontic character of being intended as fictional.   The table imagined as real, however, is possible due to its ontic character of being intended as real despite being otherwise indistinguishable from the table imagined as fictional.

Now here is the puzzle of actualization formulated as an aporetic triad

a. Every incomplete object is impossible.

b. The table imagined as real is an incomplete object. 

c. The table imagined as real is possible, i.e. actualizable.

The limbs are collectively inconsistent, but each is very plausible.  At any impasse again.

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More on Ficta and Impossibilia

More on Ficta and Impossibilia

As an ornery aporetician, I want ultimately to say that an equally strong case can be made both for and against the thesis that ficta are impossibilia.  But here I only make (part of) the case for thinking that ficta are impossibilia.

Preliminaries

Every human being is either right-handed or not right-handed.  (But if one is not right-handed, it doesn't follow that one is left-handed.  One could be ambidexterous or ambisinistrous.)  What about the fictional character Hamlet?  Is he right-handed or not right-handed?  I say he is neither: he is indeterminate with respect to the property of righthandedness.  That makes him an incomplete object, one that violates the law of Excluded Middle (LEM), or rather one to which LEM does not apply.

Hamlet (the character, not the play) is incomplete because he has all and only the properties ascribed to him by the author of the play, and the author left Hamlet's handedness unspecified.  It is worth noting that Hamlet the play is complete and this holds for each written token of the play, the type of which they are tokens, and each enactment of the play.  This is because the play and its enactments are actualia.

But don't we say that Hamlet the play is fictional?  We do, but what we mean is not that the play is an object of fiction, but that the people and events depicted therein are fictional.  The play is not fictional but entirely real. Of course, there could be a play that is a  mere object of fiction: a play within a play.  The same holds for novels.  My copies of Moby Dick are each of them complete and actual, hence full-fledged citizens of the real, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto; but Ishmael, Queequeg, and Ahab are not.  They are objects of fiction; those books are not.  And presumably the type of which they are tokens, though an abstract object, is also actual and complete.  A person's reading or 'enactment' of the novel is typically a long, interrupted process; but it too is complete and actual and resident in the real order.

Back to the character Hamlet: he is an incomplete object, having all and only the properties ascribed to him in the play (together with, perhaps, entailments of these properties).  London Ed balks at this:

I don't follow this at all. I don't agree with the second sentence "He has all and only ….". Of course Shakespeare said that there was a person called ‘Hamlet’ who had certain properties (e.g. he said that Hamlet was a prince of Denmark. It doesn’t follow that there is someone who has or had such a property. For example, legend says that there was a horse called ‘Pegasus’ that flew. It doesn’t follow that there are or were flying horses.

This objection shows misunderstanding.  I did not say or imply that there exists in actuality, outside the mind, a man named 'Hamlet.'  The point is rather that when I read the play there appears before my mind a merely intentional object, one that I know is fictional, and therefore, one that I know is merely intentional.  If Ed denies this, then he denies what is phenomenologically evident. And, as a matter of method, we must begin with the phenomenology of the situation.

Suppose I write a two-sentence novel:

It was a dark and rainy night. Shakey Jake, life-long insomniac, deciding he needed a nightcap, grabbed his flashlight and his raincoat and headed for the Glass Crutch bar and grill, a local watering hole a half a mile from his house.

Now I couldn't have written that, and you can't understand it, without  thinking about various intentional objects that do not exist.  Am I saying that there exist objects that do not exist?  No, that would be a contradiction.  Nor am I committed to saying  that there are objects that have mind-independent being but not existence.  Furthermore, I am not committed to Meinong's doctrine of Aussersein.

All I am doing is holding fast to a phenomenological datum: when I create a fictional character as  I just did when I created Shakey Jake the insomniac, I bring before my mind an intentional object.  (The act-object schema strikes me as having pretty good phenomenological credentials, unlike the adverbial schema.)  What can we say about this merely intentional object?  First, it is no part of the acts through which I think it.  My acts of thinking exist in reality, but Shakey Jake does not exist in reality.  (This point goes back to Twardowski.)   When I think about Hamlet or Don Quixote or Shakey Jake, I am not thinking about my own mind or any state of my mind.  I am not thinking about anything real.  But it doesn' t follow that I am not thinking of anything.

If Ed denies that there are merely intentional objects, then he is denying what is phenomenologically evident.  I take my stand on the terra firma of phenomenological givenness.  So for now, and to get on with it, I simply dismiss Ed's objection.  To pursue it further would involve us a in a metaphilosophical discussion of the role of phenomenological appeals in philosophical inquiry.

Ficta are Impossibilia

Let us confine ourselves to purely fictional objects and leave out of consideration real individuals who are partially fictionalized in fables, legends, apocryphal stories, so-called historical novels that blend fact and fiction, and the like.  One of my theses is that purely fictional objects cannot exist and thus are broadly logically impossible.  They are necessarily nonexistent, where the modality in question is broadly logical.  It does not follow, however, that pure ficta have no ontological status whatsoever.  They have a mode of being that could be called existential heteronomy.   On this point I agree with Roman Ingarden, a philosopher who deserves more attention in the Anglosphere than he receives here.

Earlier I gave an argument from incompleteness: the incomplete cannot exist and so are impossible.  But now I take a different tack.

Purely fictional objects are most plausibly viewed as made up, or constructed, by novelists, playwrights, et al.  It may be that they are constructed from elements that are not themselves constructed, elements such as properties or Castaneda's ontological guises.  Or perhaps fictional objects  are constructed ex nihilo.  Either way, they have no being at all prior to their creation or construction.  There was no Captain Ahab before Melville 'cooked him up.'  But if Ahab were a merely possible individual, then one could not temporally index his coming to be; he would not come to be, but be before, during, and after Melvlle's writing down his description.

The issue could be framed as follows.  Are novels, plays, etc.  which feature logically consistent pure ficta, something like telescopes that allow us to peer from the realm of the actual into the realm of the merely possible, both realms being realms of the real?  Or are novels, etc. more like mixing bowls or ovens in which ficta are 'cooked up'?  I say the latter.  If you want, you can say that Melville is describing something when he writes about Ahab, but what he is describing is something he has made up: a merely intentional object that cannot exist apart from the acts of mind trained upon it.   He is not describing something that has ontological status apart from his mind and the minds of his readers.   He is also not descrbing some real feature or part of himself as subject.  So we could say that in describing Ahab he is  describing an item that is objectively but not subjectvely mind-dependent.

 Here is an Argument from Origin:

1. Pure ficta are made up or constructed via the mental acts and actions of novelists, playwrights, et al.

2. Ahab is a pure fictum.

Therefore

3. Ahab came into being via the mental activity of a novelist or playwright.  (from 1,2)

4. No human being comes into being via the mental activity of novelists, et al., but via the uniting of human sperm and human egg.

5. Ahab is not a human being. (from 3, 4)

6. A merely possible human being is a human being, indeed a flesh-and-blood human being, though not an actual flesh-and-blood human being. 

Therefore

7. Ahab is not a merely possible human being, but a fictional human being where 'fictional' unlike 'merely possible' functions as an alienans adjective.

This argument does not settle the matter, however, since it is not compelling.  A Meinongian or quasi-Meinongian could, with no breach of logical propriety, run the argument in reverse, denying (7) and denying (1). One man's modus ponens, etc.

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