Natural Light, Hypothetico-Deductivism, and Formal Logic

Natural Light, Hypothetico-Deductivism, and Formal Logic

In this essay, I will argue that the certainty and the reliability of natural light ground Descartes hypothetico-deductive method, and this in turn shapes Descartes’ rejection of formal logic.

When discussing causes in the third Meditation, Descartes argues that ‘it is obvious by the natural light that the total cause of something must contain at least as much reality as does the effect’. (Descartes 12) When considering empirical questions and others^[1], Descartes consults the natural light, or merely listens to what it says to him in a way similar to Socrates’ daemon^[2], and draws a ‘vivid and clear’ intuition straight from this source; ‘(t)hings that are revealed by the natural light—for example, that if I am doubting then I exist—are not open to any doubt’. (9) While I’ll go into what it is about the natural light that makes it reliable for Descartes later, it should be noted now that Descartes’ affinity for natural light is very much related to his critique of the senses; Descartes thought of the senses as providing ‘at best, “a spontaneous impulse” to believe something, an impulse we’re able to resist’. (SEP section 5.1) For Descartes, one can logically doubt their senses insofar as they cannot know they are not dreaming, and therefore there is  no absolute certainty to be derived from experience or granted to experience. On the other hand the natural light provides one with inherently indubitable truths;‘“(w)hatever is revealed to me by the natural light — for example that from the fact that I am doubting it follows that I exist, and so on — cannot in any way be open to doubt.”’ (Ibid.) Therefore, while experience can be logically subject to doubt, intuitions that are derived from natural light are indubitable. 

For the sake of clarity, The argument goes like this:

1. Any belief B, where B is any empirical belief, can be logically doubted.

2.  If a belief B can be logically doubted, then B cannot provide one with absolute certainty.

3. No belief B can provide one with absolute certainty. (2,1 MP)

This is connected to Descartes hypothetico-deductivism insofar as, as he states in the first Meditation, he wants to ground science on certain/incorrigible foundations; ‘"(b)y a method," wrote Descartes, "I mean certain and simple rules, such that, if a man observe them accurately, he shall never assume what is false as true, and will never spend his mental powers to no purpose."’(Passmore 546)

As stated above, one is said to have ‘(t)hings (...) revealed by the natural light’; namely intuitions. (SEP section 5.1) These intuitions are used to form hypotheses/propositions, which are then assessed via deduction. The method is grounded epistemically through this very natural light; there is no doubt for Descartes about this: if an intuition arises from natural light, it is given epistemic privilege. Thus, natural light goes hand in hand with Descartes’ goal to establish an absolute method for science, and shapes the way he crafts his hypothetico-deductive method.

While this shows how Descartes uses the natural light to ground his hypothetico-deductive method epistemically, it does not provide an account of just how this method is not merely epistemologically reliable but also ontologically reliable. How is this so? It is fair to say that there is nothing implicit about the theological underpinnings of Descartes’ natural light; these underpinnings are quite explicit, and I would argue they are what provides natural light with not only epistemic reliability, but also its metaphysical reliability. There’s a sense in which this is an intensely circular argument, but one can appreciate the reasoning a bit more if one considers the justification natural light provides to be epistemic insofar as it causes indubitably, and the justification Descartes’ concept of God provides to be metaphysical. What do I mean by this?

If one entertains a ‘vivid and clear’ intuition, then one is right to say that it is indubitable epistemically; one cannot help but doubt it, and must assume it to be knowledge. (Descartes 9) However, saying that one can’t help but to believe something only really states a psychological state or attitude one has in relation to a proposition; when in a dream, one can’t help but assume its truth, but this can be shown to be unsound if one wakes up and realises there was in fact no world there to have knowledge about. That is why Descartes must find something that cannot be doubted, but that is also ontologically independent of his mind; something he can latch onto, by virtue of reason alone, that can provide him with something more than mere belief. He finds his answer in the definition of God; God must exist because existence is a perfection and God, as the most perfect conceivable being, has all of the perfections. Descartes has knowledge of God by virtue of natural light, and can deduce something from the very concept GOD. Thus while Descartes himself comes to have knowledge of God from reason alone, he can be sure that his existence is not doubtable in the sense that experience would be because of dreams; the mind did not create God, it had an innate notion of him, and by virtue of intuitions drawn from about the concept, one can be sure that he exists independently of one’s ability to know him because of  his nature; one can be sure of the metaphysical reliability of natural light..

How does this ground all of the intuitions drawn from natural light? Now that Descartes has deduced the existence of God from reason alone, he can use this ‘vivid and clear’ intuition to show that all things that arrive from the natural light must be true; ‘this shows clearly that it is not possible for him to be a deceiver, since the natural light makes it clear that all fraud and deception depend on some defect.’ (Descartes 9) If concepts are ‘seeds planted by God in our heads’, then the above statement implies that they cannot lead to deception; it follows from the definition of God that he cannot deceive. Thus, there are two foundations to natural light: 1) indubitability of God’s existence, and b) the idea that God does not deceive.

How does this discussion relate to Descartes' criticism of formal logic? According to Passmore, Descartes’ criticism of formal logic was centered around the idea that it was a non-ampliative process; while the ‘art of thought’, the art of introspecting and deducing ‘vivid and clear’ ideas, was grounded in the natural light and therefore one could learn something new from it, formal logic was (at the time) an external apparatus that Lull and others used to classify what was already known. (Passmore 549) While natural light does provide one with new information that one can know to be certain, “‘the traditional formal logic (...) does not provide us with such a method’ insofar as it is ‘better in explaining to others things that one knows (...) than in learning what is new"’ (Ibid.) I would argue that what underlies their criticism is the notion that natural light is something that can provide one with novel information, and that an external apparatus like formal logic distances human beings from their natural source of knowledge. As Passmore quotes De Morgan: logic ‘bound(s) the human mind: for the human mind, he has been implicitly instructed, is rapid and vigorous in abstract science, if only it take care to follow no leader." (550)

The natural light should be seen as the individual and society's basis for a common and scientific rationality, and it has this form within Descartes’ hypothetico-deductivism. His use of the concept grounds his methodology, and also shapes his critique of logic insofar as logic is seen as drawing human beings away from the knowledge that God has provided them.  

Work Cited:

Brickhouse, Thomas C., and Nicholas D. Smith. The trial and execution of Socrates: sources and controversies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.

Descartes, Rene. Translated by: Bennett, Jonathan. Meditations on first philosophy. April 2007.

Newman, Lex, "Descartes' Epistemology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL=<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/descartes-epistemology/>.

Passmore, J.A. Descartes, The British Empiricists, and Formal Logic. Philosophical Review, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Oct., 1953), pp. 545-553

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[1] When arguing for God’s existence as well; ‘This shows clearly that it is not possible for him to be a deceiver, since the natural light makes it clear that all fraud and deception depend on some defect.’ (pg)

[2] “Socrates’ ‘divine sign’, that mysterious inner voice which from time to time warns him off something he is about to do’. (136 Brickhouse and Smith)

Moral Development, Ethical Perception, and Character: Nussbaum, Burnyeat, and Wagner

Moral Development, Ethical Perception, and Character:

Nussbaum, Burnyeat, and Wagner

        When reading the works of Nussbaum and Burnyeat, one gets the idea that the ‘intellectualist’^[1]  tools fashioned for understanding and navigating within ethical phenomena are ill-suited for their purpose; while algorithms and definitions provide a useful aid and description of scientific and mathematical thinking, they seem to be inherently limited when used in situations that are ethical in nature. In this essay, I will argue that this criticism of an ‘intellectualised’ approach to ethics is successful insofar as: a) perception, as it is meant in virtue theory, is absent in intellectual/abstract approaches to ethical phenomena, and is at the same time an essential feature of ethical phenomena that a theory of ethics has to take into account; and b) the importance of character and value is not accounted for in intellectualist theories of ethics, also needs to be accounted in describing and guiding ethical theory. I will first provide an analysis of both Nussbaum and Burnyeat’s arguments against intellectualism and the practical tools they develop as a reaction to its shortcomings; namely: moral development, ethical perception, and the importance of character. I will then argue that these are essential to understanding ethical phenomena by drawing examples from scene four of act two in Wagner’s Die Walküre.

        Burnyeat’s critique of ‘intellectualism’ in ethics revolves around his attempt to look at how one acquires virtue; while Socrates provides an abstract account of this process, wherein one must first know what virtue is to know how it is acquired, Aristotle signals towards a notion of development, wherein one must come to know what virtue is through practice and experience. Practice, for Aristotle, is a kind of habituation: while Socrates thought of virtue as a kind of knowledge of definitions, Aristotle, according to Burnyeat, emphasized the ‘importance of beginnings and the gradual development of good habits and feelings’. (Burnyeat 206) Claiming that virtue is knowledge does not account for, as Burnyeat points out, the akratic individual; someone who knows what the right thing to do is but cannot bring themselves to do it. This example is inherently contradictory from the Socratic perspective, but from Aristotle’s perspective, it is something expected: one cannot expect someone to read a definition of virtue and start being virtuous; being virtuous presupposes a life where one cultivates the ability to a) discern the ‘that’, b) have the appropriate internal response to the ‘that’, and c) to act appropriately given the ‘that’ that presents itself to the individual. Thus, Burnyeat’s criticism of intellectualism in ethical theory hails from the perspective of the importance of the development of moral character, and the inability of a purely rational picture of ethics to capture the problem of akrasia; a) intellectualised ethical theory does not give a coherent picture of how one acquires virtue, and b) intellectualised ethical theory leads to the problem of akratic individual.

        While Burnyeat’s criticism of intellectualism arises from concerns with the development of virtue, Nussbaum criticises intellectualism in ethical theory insofar as it gives too much weight to rationality and the logical form of decision-making, while ignoring so-called subjective elements like emotion and imagination that, according to Aristotle, are fundamental in ethical perception. According to Nussbaum, ‘contemporary writing in moral philosophy’ argues that ethical decision-making should mirror scientific or rational choice in fundamental ways. In a way similar to Plato, contemporary ethical theorists focus on the importance of a ‘science of measurement’; a way of keeping human beings away from ‘unendurable confusion in the face of (...) qualitative indefiniteness and (...) variegated plurality of apparent values’. (Nussbaum 56) This method entails a translation of ethical problems into a ‘single quantitative standard of value’ that is geared towards ‘maximisation’; the idea that ‘the point of rational choice is to produce the greatest amount of the single value at work in each case.’ (Ibid.) Attempts to define the ‘content of the end’, Nussbaum claims, were in her time, as well as Aristotle’s, focused with pleasure as this single unit of value; that which ethical decision-making is aimed at maximising in all cases. (Ibid.) Nussbaum responds to both the notion of a single value in ethical decision-making and the notion that ethical decision making should mirror scientific reasoning by: a) showing that pleasure or happiness fail as a single value, and b) showing that a fixation on the rational aspect of ethical decision-making has a fatal lacunae; it leaves both the theme of character and value, as well as the theme ofethical perception, out of ethical theory. I will first show why happiness is not the single value for Nussbaum, and then explain how perception is fundamental to ethics on her view; this will clearly indicate why the two intellectualist criterion stated above are ill-suited principles for understanding ethical phenomena.

        Nussbaum, drawing from Aristotle, argues that a single-valued metric is simply not the way ethical phenomena presents itself; she argues that Aristotle defends a view of choice as ‘a quality-based selection among goods that are plural and heterogeneous, each being chosen for its own distinctive value.’ (57) This is to be contrasted with a quantity based approach in which goods are valuable not on their own terms, but instead only have value insofar as they fall under an overarching universal value like ‘happiness’ or ‘pleasure’. Aristotle argues against this by showing that 1) pleasure is not a general term insofar as it is inseparable from the particulars it is a feature of, and 2) there are things people value, like ‘seeing, remembering, knowing, having the excellences’ for example, and which they would strive and choose these things even if they did not bring pleasure. (Ibid.)

In relation to the first point, Aristotle is arguing is that particulars of pleasure, like the pleasure derived from eating and the pleasure derived from physical activity, are not aptly generalised into a type called ‘pleasure’ insofar as these pleasures are virtually inseparable from the things within which they are instantiated; culinary pleasure and pleasure drawn from exercise are qualitatively distinct in more ways than they are qualitatively associated, and therefore it is senseless to generalise them into an abstract category of pleasure. Thus, the intellectualist, or more generally, the consequentialist perspective, is wrong in positing a unitary value according to Aristotle. In relation to the second point, Aristotle is saying that there are actions ‘we choose (...) for (their) own sake alone’; meaning that we do not do them for interests external to the action itself. (66) The idea of an action’s  intrinsic worth will come up in the following discussion, but for now, it is clear that Aristotle’s idea of an action’s intrinsic worth starkly contrasts with the the intellectualist view of ethics as instrumental: the perspective where ethics is never something valuable in-itself, but only valuable as a means to an end. Before I move on to Nussbaum and Aristotle’s idea of perception, I want to quickly say that, for Aristotle, the ‘intellectualist’ approach is hindered by a failed normative account as well a failed descriptive account; its senseless to ask human beings to seek a universal that does not exist (pleasure), and if human beings act in non-instrumental ways, if they do things for their own sake, that is, then intellectualism fails to describe the actual decision-making process carried out by human beings. This melds well with the criticism of  so-called ‘hyper-rational’ approaches to ethics, and even epistemology, that prescribe impossible tasks to human beings, like knowing the definition of ‘virtue’ or ‘justification’, in the spirit of ideals; these approaches, as is shown in Burnyeat and Nussbaum, fail to provide a proper prescriptive theory, and this is likely due to the failure of the descriptive element of their theory. I will now illustrate the notion of perception for Aristotle and Nussbaum.

When looking at the intellectual theories of ethics, one gets the idea that ethical decisions should be made purely abstractly and without appeal to the senses. By appealing to ‘general rules’ or ‘principles’, one must not even look at the particularity of a situation to know what the right/rational action is; one simply assumes certain impartial principles and ‘applies them to each new case’. (66) While this might seem like the right method if one considers all situations to be identical, Aristotle argues that no two ethical situations are identical, and therefore deductive approaches should be substituted by ‘concrete situational judgements of a more informal and intuitive kind (...)’(Ibid.) Why is it that, for Aristotle, one should adopt an informal approach instead of a pure abstraction to achieve proper discernment of ethical relevance? Aristotle views proper discernment as one that ‘grasp(s) particulars in all their richness and concreteness’; an activity that requires perception and not abstraction to be successful. (77) While one might be able to solve for the hypotenuse of a triangle without seeing it if one knows enough about it insofar as geometrical situations are identical, ethical situations are inherently particular and require an approach grounded in a certain kind of perception; a perception grounded inphantasia. While phantasia is a complex idea that I cannot completely explain in this essay, it is enough for now to say that it while phantasia is constituted by imagination, Nussbaum is clear to distinguish it from a faculty that is concerned with ‘free fantasy’, and indicates that its ‘job is more to focus on reality than to create unreality’. (77) Phantasia is then, in contrast to abstract reasoning, what one should use and what one does use when grasping the nature of ethical situations; it allows one to actually see what’s at stake; a concrete particular.

There is one thing I want to say before moving on to the final discussion. With his idea of ethical perception, Aristotle opens up the possibility of one learning something new about ethics from ethical phenomena itself, as opposed to the intellectualist who either claims that we already know what virtue is, or can only hope to attain it from pure reason. Insofar as the intellectual approach is grounded in supposed a priori knowledge, one already knows everything relevant about any moral circumstance that will ever happen, or can gain this knowledge through introspection, and thus there is no practical wisdom to be developed whatsoever; ethics is inherently conservative insofar as complete knowledge is assumed and one proceeds from there. Aristotle saves ethics from this conservative perspective by showing a way in which human beings can look at experience, by virtue of phantasia, and discern new knowledge of it. I find this point crucial because, if one argues that one cannot learn anything more about ethics than a utilitarian calculus for instance, then practical wisdom has no relevance in relation to ethical decision making, and one has then effectively thrown out the importance of character and value in all of ethics. It will be my task in the upcoming discussion to show that this cannot be true insofar as taking values, character and perception out of ethical situations makes them empty and meaningless; without perception and character there is no tension in life; without tension there is no deliberation; without deliberation there is no ethics.

Now that I’ve looked at Burnyeat and Nussbaum’s criticisms of the intellectual approach to ethics, I want to use their ideas to approach a scene in Richard Wagner’s Die Walkure and show that patently ethical situations lose all of their meaning if one assumes an intellectualist approach to ethics; understanding the salient features of this scene requires that one understands the importance of perception in developing practical wisdom and discerning the particular, as well as the fundamental role played by character in ethical situations. Thus, I will attempt to synthesize Burnyeat’s insight into the importance of moral development with Nussbaum’s view of the importance of character and perception, and use this synthesis as an interpretive tool to understand a crucial scene in this opera.While it will be impossible to give a complete context of the events that take place in act two given the length of this essay, I will do my best to raise the issues most relevant to understanding the scene from the perspective of the characters involved; this should help in elucidating the matters of moral salience later insofar as character is itself linked with the discernment of moral particulars.

The characters I want to call attention to are both ‘Siegmund’ and ‘Sieglinde’, as well as ‘Brunhilde’. Siegmund and Sieglinde are lovers and siblings, are the sole members of the ‘Walsung’ race, and are running away from certain death at the hands of those who seek them; Sieglinde’s true husband ‘Hunding’ and his fellow cronies. Because a) they are siblings and b) they consummated their marriage despite Sieglinde already being married, they have broken universal laws of marriage, which are enforced by Wotan’s (God) wife Fricka (the goddess of marriage)^[2], and must pay for this breach of universal law with death.

As the relevant scene begins, the twins are quickly resting before continuing their escape, and Brunhilde, a Valkyrie and Wotan’s daughter, arrives in an attempt to convince Siegmund to abandon Sieglinde and go with her to Valhalla; she has been reluctantly assigned to do this by Wotan himself.  If Siegmund goes to Valhalla he will a) be saved from certain death, b) be rejoined with his father, and c) have access to infinite pleasures ranging from the finest ales to the most beautiful women. However, when Siegmund learns that he would have to abandon his love Sieglinde in order to go to Valhalla, he exclaims: ‘(t)hen greet for me (Valhalla) , greet for me Wotan , greet for me (Volsa) , and all the heroes; greet all those fair and lovely maidens. To (Valhalla) I will not go!’ (Wagner 119)  At first, Brunhilde is extremely confused and angry about this; on the one hand Siegmund is disobeying a divine command, and on the other, he seems to be foolishly giving up infinite pleasure in the interest of certain death. Brunhilde asks: ‘So little do you value everlasting bliss? Is she everything to you, this poor woman who, tired and sorrowful, lies limp in your lap? Do you think nothing else glorious?’ (120) Siegmund responds by questioning Brunnhilde’s perspective; ‘So young and fair you seem to my eyes; but how cold and hard I know in my heart! You came to mock me; now leave me alone, you heartless, cold, cruel maid! (...) may my grief gladden your envious heart’(120-121).^[3] At this point, there is a complete shift in Brunhilde’s character; Brunhilde completely changes course, and, despite the fact that she is herself now breaking a divine command, vows to Sieglinde; ‘I see the distress and grief in your heart, I feel all your suffering, share in your pain! Siegmund, I’ll care for your wife; I’ll shield her safely from harm.’ (121)

This is all I think is necessary to say of this scene to discuss the moral phenomena at play. Why do I think this scene is relevant to the themes I stated earlier? In terms of moral development and ethical perception, Brunhilde’s complete shift in perspective is a function of her altering her perception of the situation, and this in fact enables her to a) discern the importance of the situation, and b) learn something new about ethics and love. While she was at first only looking at the situation abstractly, in the sense that ‘anybody in their right mind would choose infinite pleasure over death’, as well as from her perspective as a Valkyrie who should blindly follow orders, when she began to look at the situation as a particular, from Siegmund’s perspective by listening to him speak to him about the value of love, this general principle lost its raison d’etre; pleasure was not the salient feature despite its seeming universality, and following her heart was more important than following commands when it came to choosing the right action. What Brunhilde did, I would argue, is discern the particular of the situation through a kind of ethical perception, as opposed to the kind of blind rationality Aristotle warns against. While the moment cannot be put into words and must be seen while watching the opera, there is one single moment at which the music completely shifts in energy and one can see that Brunhilde has not only discerned the relevance of the situation, but she has also learned what love really is through understanding Siegmund’s perspective. Learning what love is, for Brunhilde, was nothing like learning a definition: it involved perceiving something, and not only that, it required a shift in character as opposed to a reinforcement of prior knowledge; a kind of moral development as opposed to blind application of a principle. This moment, along with Siegmund’s outright refusal to abandon Sieglinde, is a testament to the role of discernment and perception in ethical phenomena.

In terms of character, one can immediately see the futility, as well as seeming naivete, of applying abstract principles to this situation; thinking that everyone strives for pleasure is shown to have no ecological validity when one considers that people are willing to give up pleasure for things they value for their own sake. In this case, Siegmund’s character, being what it was, implied that giving up Sieglinde was inconceivable for him even if one attempted to substitute the role she played for him with something else of supposedly equal or greater value^[4]. This shows above all that values are relative to character, and that universal prescriptions of value are not made with the complexity of human nature and ethical phenomena in mind. What would we say of an individual who looked at this scene in disgust because of Siegmund’s failure to apply a utilitarian calculus? We would encourage them to look at the situation anew with greater empathy, emotion, and imagination, insofar as they have exhibited a failure to discern the salient elements of the scene. While the intellectual approach might say that we’ve entered too deeply into the realm of the subjective, the only response to this concern is that subjectivity is in fact well-suited and necessary for proper discernment. Even if an objective calculus was built, and the answer it provided to Siegmund was somehow ‘stay with Sieglinde’, I would argue that this result would be insignificant insofar as it was not, and should not be, the sole determinant of Siegmund’s action; Siegmund’s decision was made with the total-involvement of his character and without internal struggle, and that is why his decision was virtuous. There’s a subtle humour in Siegmund when he rejects Brunhilde’s terms, when his lines are heard within the context of the music, that I think indicates the absurdity and inconceivability of doing anything else but stay with Sieglinde for him; this is symptomatic of a human being with character.  

 In conclusion, I think I have shown that if one does not assume themes that lay at the core of virtue theory, namely those of moral development, ethical perception, and character, ethical phenomena in a sense loses its content. When attempting to use the intellectual tools criticised by Nussbaum and Burnyeat, as opposed to the tools these authors developed, to discern the ethical relevance in act two ofDie Walkure, one is committed to absurd conclusions that virtue theory does not condemn one to accept. On the other hand, if one assumes the themes of virtue theory stated above, the scene unfolds in a way that comports well with an intuitive ethical understanding.

Work Cited:
Burnyeat, Myles. Aristotle on learning to be good in Rorty, Amélie. Essays on Aristotle's ethics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Print

Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Love's knowledge: essays on philosophy and literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Print.

Wagner, Richard. Translated: Andrew Porter The ring of the Nibelung. United States: W.Norton. 1976.

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[1] I will be using ‘intellectualist’ within the spirit of ‘intellectualism’ as used by Burnyeat in Aristotle on Learning to Be Good; referring to a loose confederation of theses concerned with a achieving a logical  and universal account of  both normative and descriptive ethics; how we do reason, and how we ought to reason given ethical situations.

[2] It should be said that the drama between Fricka and Wotan, while it will not be mentioned in this essay, merits its own discussion at a later date.

[3] My italics; consider this phrase within the context of the tripartite view of the soul.

[4] This is relevant when considering Nussbaum’s discussion concerning friendship and substitution. (pg.60 Love’s Knowledge)

Upcoming stuff

Some topics that will be covered over the next few months:

-Rationalism: Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes

-Popper on demarcation

-Public concepts-Frege and Sense

-'Minimalist Program'

-cognitive linguistics 

Concepts Without Sense: How Fodor Uses New Tools to Solve Old Problems

Concepts Without Sense:
How Fodor Uses New Tools to Solve Old Problems

In this essay, I will explicate Fodor’s attempt to make RTM meet the requirements Frege set out for what a theory of concepts would have to be, without, as Frege does, positing Sense. I will first show why Frege thought positing Sense was necessary. I will then show how Fodor, in Concepts, responds to ‘Frege cases’ without needing to posit Sense as the Mode of Presentation (MOP). I will then illustrate how Fodor accepts the demand that concepts must be public, how Fodor criticizes the way Frege attempts to meet this demand, and show how Fodor argues a causal account of concepts could retain public concepts without needing to posit Sense. I will weigh these solutions against Fodor’s critique of  the “‘classical’ RTM LOT CTM”  account of the mind as found in LOT 2, and argue that Fodor’s solutions aren’t worth much if he’s right about the tripartite theory of the mind being in trouble. (Fodor 2008, 101)

The purpose of Sense

The best way to proceed would be to give the rationale for why someone would want to posit Sense; what made positing Sense necessary for Frege? Fodor’s interpretation of Frege’s motivation for positing Sense goes like this: Fodor takes ‘the typical Fregean position’ to be one in which ‘concepts are distinguished along two (...) parameters; viz. reference and (MOP).’ (Fodor 1998, 15) Fodor takes it that Frege ‘identif(ies) (MOP) with senses’. (Ibid.)  Frege’s reason for adopting Sense in his ontology of concepts is that he believes Sense is necessary for a) maintaining the public nature of concepts, and b) because ‘there is more than one way to think about a referent’. (19) How Sense and Reference secures these requirements is made clear by Fodor’s exposition of the Fregean account of MOP:

‘5.1 MOPs are senses; for an expression to mean what it does is for the expression to have the MOP that it does.

5.2 Since MOPs can distinguish concepts, they explain how it is possible to entertain one but not the other, of two coreferential concepts; eg. how it is possible to have the concepts WATER but not the concept H2O, hence how it is possible to have (de dicto) beliefs about water but no (de dicto) beliefs about H2O.

5.3 MOPs are abstract objects; hence they are non-mental.’ (17-18)

5.1 and 5.3 are both necessary for Frege because of the above-mentioned requirements he has on a theory of concepts: a) 5.3 is what Frege believes secures the public aspect of concepts; concepts can only be public if one aspect of them is abstract and not-psychological because Frege thinks that mere psychologisms could not retain the public nature of concepts; and b) 5.1 is necessary because co-referring concepts can mean different things. For clarities sake: Frege thought he had to posit sense to account for the fact that concepts are public, and because co-referring concepts could mean something different. Senses are abstract objects for Frege and therefore make public concepts possible, and Sense is also what makes two co-referring concepts like ‘morning star’ and ‘evening star’ have different content. The three questions I will now address are: 1) Is Fodor sympathetic with Frege’s demands of a theory of concepts?; 2) If so, how does Fodor retain co-reference without positing sense?; and 3) If so, how does Fodor retain the public nature of concepts without positing sense?. I will now show the answer to question #1 is ‘yes’, and show how Fodor uses RTM to approach questions #2 and #3.

Co-Reference without Sense

Frege cases arise in situations where one cannot substitute concepts in propositional attitude cases, that would be identical if reference exhausted concept identity, without leading to absurdity. In  LOT 2, Fodor provides the example of ‘Paderewski’. The thought experiment goes like this: John believes Paderewski was a pianist, but also believes there is a Paderewski who is a politician. Fodor argues that ‘If reference is content, then if John believes both that Paderewski was a pianist and that Paderewski was a politician, he ought to be prepared to infer that Paderewski was both a politician and a pianist. But he doesn’t. Indeed, he explicitly denies this inference. Our problem is to explain how, on referentialist assumptions, this could be true.’ (Fodor 2008,72-73) Frege’s solution was to posit Sense, and I will now show that Fodor’s solution is to show that, if one assumes RTM, Frege cases are shown to be ‘ill formed’. (73)  

How are these cases ill-formed? This has something to do with the kind of philosophical atmosphere both thinkers were immersed in; insofar as Frege was interested in everyday language, he looked at the surface of expressions and worked from there. Fodor on the other hand is working within an RTM framework; one that sees language as covering up the true nature of thought; Fodor's LOT hypothesis.^[1] Once this layer is removed, Sense dissipates, and fails to have a raison d’ètre in relation to co-reference. How does RTM come to the rescue in these cases? Fodor argues that ‘if RTM is among our background assumptions’ then there must be “two Mentalese names corresponding to the English word ‘Paderewski’”; 'PADEREWSKI1 and PADEREWSKI2’ would be the well-formed concepts at play. (72) Therefore, insofar as ‘(John) thinks in Mentalese, not English, (he) can’t think the thought that ‘Paderewski is tall’.’ (Ibid.) Fodor argues that ‘there is no such thought’ ‘Paderewski is tall’ if Paderweski has two tokens, there is effectively only the thoughts ‘Paderewski1 is tall’ and ‘Paderewski2 is tall’. (73). By extension, ‘John can’t think Paderewski is tall without choosing between PADEREWSKI1 and PADEREWSKI2; no more than he can think Marx was tall without choosing between Karl and Groucho(...)’. (Ibid.)

Looking underneath everyday language in order to solve Frege cases shows, among other things, how philosophical approaches that acknowledge the distinction between ordinary language and the language of thought are necessary given cognitive science, and it also gives credence to the idea that a new conceptual apparatus like RTM can be fruitful insofar as it extinguishes the seeming need for philosophical ontologies of decades past that relied on notions of everyday language rather than cognitive notions; one can see how Frege cases do not warrant the adoption of Sense if one adopts a more contemporary understanding of thought. If RTM, and by extension LOT, obtain, then Frege’s notion of sense can be done away with, and doing away with sense would be nice given how much philosophical ink has been spilled on the concept. But again, its not simply about spilled ink; many analytic philosophers find Frege’s positing of sense necessary^[2] given Frege cases, and thereby find it necessary to adjust their theory of concepts accordingly. I will now quickly go through some of Fodor’s points relating to this issue before moving onto public concepts.

There are a couple of questions to consider before moving on: A) how are there two mentalese tokens for Paderewski, and B) what is it about these concepts that makes them co-referential and all the while completely distinct in their causal powers i.e. why can you have one and not the other, even if they co-refer? Why is it, for instance, that PADEREWSKI1 and PADEREWSKI2 have the same referent but can’t be substituted for each other in cases with a propositional attitude?^[3]  Because Fodor, as I stated earlier, assumes CTM,  the notion that mental states are operations on syntax, this difference in 'causal powers' cannot be determined by something like the Sense of the concept. Fodor, by his own words, is 'motivated largely by a desire to comply with the chief demand that a computational account of mental processes imposes on the theory of mental representation'; he is committed to the idea that that if mental representations are not compatible in PA cases, then they must be 'formally distinct in ways that mental processes can distinguish'. (92)

‘From CTM’s perspective, the existence of Frege problems shows at most that reference isn’t sufficient for the individuation of concepts; something further is required. But Frege’s problem doesn’t show that the ‘something’ else is a parameter of content; for example, that it is something like a sense.’ (70)  

Fodor sees the problem as a by-product of  ‘working on the assumption that the content of a belief exhausts its contribution to the causal consequences of having it.’ (68) If one, on the other hand, assumes that ‘the causal consequences of having on kind of belief-with-content- F(Cicero)^[4] can differ from the causal consequence of having some other kind of belief-with-the content-F(Cicero)’, then, as Fodor puts it, ‘Frege cases cease to be problematic’. (Ibid.) When one assumes a framework in which operations are not sensitive of content, then ‘distinguishing the identity of beliefs from the identity of belief contents’ makes a CTM much more robust. (Ibid.) Frege cases then show that, for one, if they didn’t exist, ‘we would have to invent them’ to take into account that ‘the same belief can differ in causal powers’. (69) So in relation to question A, one can have distinct tokens of Paderewski because reference does not exhaust concept individuation, and in relation to question B, Fodor argues that ‘PADEREWSKI1 and PADEREWSKI2’ can have the same referent but different ‘causal powers’ insofar as ‘CTM distinguishes the causal powers of mental states whenever they are tokenings of type-distinct mental representations, even if the semantic contents of the representations tokened are the same’; if they have identical content, they can still play a different role causally because of 'possession conditions'. (70)

        One other implication of Fodor’s solution to Frege cases, is that, interestingly enough, English has no semantics. What has semantics is Mentalese. This demonstrates how Frege’s attempt to use everyday language to look at truth-conditions and propositions was doomed from the start; Fodor argues that ‘strictly speaking, English sentences don’t have a semantics; a fortiori English words don’t have referents and mutatis mutandis English sentences don’t express propositions or have truth-conditions’. (72) Thus one can see that Fodor manages to address Frege cases without appeal to sense, or even content; if the causal powers of a token are not determined by their content, and CTM provides a way to conceive of this, then Sense is not necessary. Of course, RTM has to be cashed in for any of this to work, and Fodor is quite aware of this. One has to also wonder what the implications of Fodor's arguments against CTM are on this argument; if CTM is trouble, as Fodor argues in LOT2 as well, then why is this solution worth anyone's. attention? I'll follow up on this point at the end of the paper. I will now approach Fodor’s attempt to meet Frege’s demand that concepts be public.

Public concepts without Sense 

For Frege and Fodor, the thought that concepts turn out to be public is indispensable. In respect to Fodor, his rejection of Quine’s IRS (inferential role semantics), a position which he himself supported in his early work^[5], is predicated on how IRS fails to account, or make room for, public concepts.^[6] Fodor argues that ‘since practically everybody has some eccentric beliefs about practically everything, holism has it that nobody shares any concepts with anybody else’. (Fodor 2004, 35) The idea is that concepts should prove not to be epistemically relative, and if they are, the notion that we could communicate with them would be implausible; if every concept is linked with another concept in a kind of  ‘web’, then what constitutes a concept are these very relations; having one concept C would require having every other concept C is related to. Frege himself feared positions that would fail to make concepts public, and in fact, Fodor argues that this fear is what guided Frege into making concepts have a Sense. I mentioned earlier that, according to Fodor, Frege saw concepts as distinguished by virtue of their reference and their MOP. Fodor argues that Sense is what Frege argues is a concept’s MOP, and furthermore, that ‘(Frege) thinks, quite wrongly, that if MOPs are mental then concepts won’t turn out to be public.’ (Fodor 1998, 20) I will now briefly discuss what public concepts should look like, explain why Sense will not work for Fodor, and then go over what Fodor hopes will retain public concepts; there doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut answer on how exactly RTM retains concepts as public, but the theory is interestingly build on the assumption that they have to be.  

How does Fodor retain public concepts without positing sense?  For one, it would be good to state what Fodor means by public: ‘Concepts are public; they’re the sorts of things that lots of people can, and do, share’. (28) What this means is that there is a type, like TRIANGLE for instance, that cognisors have a token of. With a concept like FOOD for instance, ‘it should turn out that people who live in very different cultures and/or at very different times (me and Aristotle, for example) have the same concept FOOD’. (29) To put this into context, other theories of mind like Theory-theory, which is influence by the Kuhnian notion of ‘Incommensurability’, would argue that insofar as people could have a different mental theory of TRIANGLE, that their concept of TRIANGLE would in fact not not be the same. (113) Fodor argues on the other hand, that it is perfectly reasonable to assume that he has the same concept of TRIANGLE as Einstein did, in the same way that it is perfectly reasonable to assume that Rousseau and Hume had the same concept of DOG. Fodor rejects what he calls 'variet(ies) of kinds of conceptual relativism; the idea that concepts are incommensurable:

‘If everybody else’s concept WATER is different from mine, then it is literally true that only I have ever wanted a drink of water, and that the intentional generalization ‘Thirsty people seek water’ applies only to me. (And, of course, only I can state that generalization; words express concepts, so if your WATER concept is different from mine, ‘Thirsty people seek water’ means something different when you say it and when I do.’ (29)

As stated earlier, Frege thought what made concepts public couldn’t be mental, and a fortiori, Sense had to be an abstract object. This is obviously not going to work for someone who is interested in mental states. So Fodor has to show how a) MOP could not be senses, and b) How one could conceive of public concepts within RTM. Fodor has already given a hint as to how concepts could be public within RTM; concepts are acquired by virtue of some sort of ‘latching’ on to properties in the world. Thus, WATER and REDNESS are by definition public because WATER is always caused by ‘water’, and REDNESS is always caused by something red. Because concepts are sub-doxastic, they do not depend on one’s thoughts about them, there isn’t really a problem with concepts being public; concepts simply have to be public in some sense insofar as they are all caused by tokenings of the properties they are concepts of. Therefore, what is left is to show why this is incompatible with MOPs as Sense. 

Fodor argues that ‘there are good reasons to believe that 5.2 excludes both 5.1 and 5.3’.^[7] (16) Why is it that MOPs cannot be abstract objects (5.3) or individuated by their Senses (5.1) if one wants to hold on to the thesis that insofar as ‘MOPs can distinguish concepts, they explain how it is possible to explain one and not the other, of two co-referential concepts(...)’? (Ibid.) In terms of 5.1, Fodor argues that ‘if MOPs are senses, and distinct but co-extensive concepts are distinguished (solely) by their MOPs, then synonymous concepts must be identical, and it must not be possible to think one without thinking the other’. (Ibid.) However, when looking at the logical syntax of concepts, Fodor argues that ‘(i)f ‘a’ and ‘b’ are different names, then the inference from ‘Fa’ to ‘Fb’ is never conceptually necessary’.^[8] (17) For instance, if someone told you that ‘Jackson was a painter’ and that ‘Pollock was a painter’, it would seem like ‘that fixes the sense of both names’. (16) However, Fodor claims that it would be perfectly reasonable for one to ‘wonder whether Jackson and Pollock were the same painter’. (Ibid) This leads Fodor to claim that Sense is a fortiori ‘patently’ not what MOPs are; ‘if concepts with the same sense can be different MOPs then (..) MOPs can’t be senses.’ (Ibid.) So in response to 5.1, Fodor is arguing that the content of a concept cannot be what makes it individuated in the way that an MOP would individuate concepts; concepts with the same content can have different MOPs, and therefore ‘Frege’s substitution test doesn’t identify senses’. (17) Fodor concludes that ‘individuating MOPs is more like individuating forms of words than it is like individuating meanings’. (Ibid.)

In terms of 5.3, why can’t Sense be an abstract object if one holds on to 5.2? As stated in an earlier section, Frege needs to invoke Sense as an MOP to individuate concepts because ‘different concepts can have the same referent.’ (19) However, Fodor argues that insofar as MOPs are what ‘Frege holds (...) can individuate concepts’, he cannot then ‘allow that a MOP can correspond to a concept in more than one way.’ (Ibid.) While Frege has no way to stop this beyond ‘sheer stipulation’, if this does manage to enter his theory of concepts, then ‘each way of entertaining the MOP would (presumably) correspond to a different way of thinking the referent, and hence (presumably) to a different concept of the referent’; MOPs however should stand in a bijective relationship to the concept it is a part of for Frege. As Fodor argues: ‘MOPs are supposed to correspond to concepts one-to-one.’ (Ibid) While 5.3 was supposed to retain concepts as public, Fodor argues that it leads to a fatal flaw in the Fregean architecture.This leads quite nicely into Fodor’s attempt to make sense of MOPs coherent in RTM.

 Insofar as Fodor is assuming RTM, the discussion of the ‘Fregean Architecture’ is in fact included in the description of what he takes to be the fifth thesis of RTM^[9], it is clear that MOPs are going to have to be naturalised in some sense. Not only are MOPs going to have to be naturalised, and I say this because I take it that Sense is non-physical for Frege, but they will also have to fit within RTM, and by extension CTM. In the previous section, I showed how distinctions among concepts must be defined purely syntactically within an RTM framework; in such a way that is negligent of theircontent. Concepts must be syntactically individuated; they will be different in their causal relations. This leads Fodor to simply state that ‘MOPs are mental representations’. (21) Frege’s notion of Sense is thus ill-suited within RTM because, again, Sense is concerned with the content of a representation, while RTM is only concerned with the syntax of representations. Furthermore, per thesis five of RTM, its unclear how MOPs could be causally defined if its a) non-physical, and b) not in the head.

‘If, as seems likely, the identity of a mental state turns on its causal role, then if MOPs are to individuate mental states they will have to be the sorts of things that the causal role of a mental state can turn on. But its a mystery how a MOP could be that sort of thing if MOPs aren’t in the head.’ (Ibid.)

If MOPs are non-mental, then it seems like they could not be the ‘proximal determinants of mental processes (as per thesis five)’. (Ibid) Thus, it looks like: a) Fregean architecture cannot hold if one assumes 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3; and b) 5.1 and 5.3 make it difficult to conceive how MOPs can have causal powers. Furthermore, concepts can retain their public nature because they are sub-doxastic and rely on outside properties to be instantiated; my concept RED is the same as your concept RED because they are both caused by ‘redness’. Again, this is all fine and good, but RTM has to be cashed in for any of this to be meaningful; do Fodor's own arguments against CTM make this solution, as well as the solution to Frege cases, worth mentioning?

What are the problems for CTM? Fodor sketches his general argument as such:

“(1) Computation, as our current cognitive science understands it, is an intrinsically local process; when a computation 'looks at' a representation in its domain, what it is able to 'see', or to operate upon, is the identity and arrangements of its constituents. Nothing else.

(2) But constituent is ipso facto local property of representations.

(3) So, according to CTM, mental processes are themselves ipso facto local, and their locality imposes substantial constraints on what models of the mind CTM can allow.

(4) But broadly empirical considerations suggest that these constraints can't be me.”(2008, 107)

While Fodor’s critique of CTM would need to be considered in detail, something that goes beyond the scope of this paper, it is fair to say at this juncture that, if there is a possibility that CTM as it stands isn't true, it is about the worst thing that's ever happened to cognitive science, as well as Fodor's solution to Frege cases, as well as his attempt to replace Sense. If Fodor is right in doubting that 'the 'classical' RTM LOT CTM model is anything like a general account of the mind', as he claims to have warned in LOT 1, then Fodor's solutions are in serious trouble. (101) Some have doubted that Fodor's arguments against CTM do not succeed, and he should hope they're right.

Fodor’s attempt to meet the requirements Frege set out for what a theory of concepts gets off the ground without positing Sense, as long as one assumes RTM. Fodor accepts the demand that concepts must be public, yet shows the tools Frege uses to meet this demand are ill-suited for the problem, and shows how a causal account of concepts that posits MOPs could retain concepts being public without needing to posit Sinn, or in other words, assuming that content is relevant to computations. However, as Fodor himself point out, in rather paradoxical fashion, there are good reasons to think that RTM, as it is currently, is in serious trouble. Fodor’s seeming rejection of RTM isn’t so surprising though, insofar as he seems to have only assumed RTM in the past because he felt every other option failed to account for something a theory of concepts would have to be. If RTM turns out to be untenable, and other views of concepts have to be assumed, then perhaps concepts won’t turn out to be public and have Senses.

“It’s really the basic idea of RTM that Turing’s story about the nature of mental processes provides the very candidates for MOP-hood that Frege’s story about the individuation of mental states independently requires.” (Fodor 1998, 22)

There’s a sense in which Fodor rejects the tools of the past, while assuming the problem is the same; concepts need to be public and have something to do with the external and the internal, while being rational. If Fodor is right about RTM in LOT 2, this prospect is also in serious trouble. Fodor seems to have a lot more on his plate than a mere debunking of Frege’s ontology; he has to make what might turn out to be a failed theory meet Frege’s ideals for what concepts must be. One should that hope Fodor thinks a theory of concepts is worth having even if these ideals can’t be met.

Work Cited:

Fodor, Jerry. Having Concepts: A Brief Refutation Of The Twentieth Century.Mind and Language 19.1 (2004): 29-47. Print.

Fodor, Jerry A., and Ernest LePore. Holism: a shopper's guide. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Print.

Fodor, Jerry A.. Concepts: where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Clarendon Press ;, 1998. Print.

Fodor, Jerry A.. LOT 2: the language of thought revisited. Oxford: Clarendon Press;, 2008. Print.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, David Pears, and Brian McGuinness. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Routledge, 2001. Print.

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[1] Wittgenstein hinted at the independence of thought from everyday language in §4.002 of the Tractatus.

[2] Fodor claims Frege’s conclusions are highly influenced by appeals to intuitions. While I will look at Fodor’s assessment of Frege’s work, taking the time to go back to Sinn und Bedeutung itself and seeing the philosophical phenomena at play there would definitely strengthen this paper. However, based on my understanding of Sinn und Bedeutung, Fodor’s analysis does justice to Frege’s work.  

[3] The most intuitive of examples I’ve read is: Lois Lane sees Clark Kent going to work. While Clarke Kent and Superman are the same referent, It’s clear that Lois doesn’t believe Superman is going to work. Thus, substituting ‘Lane thinks Kent is going to work’ with ‘Lane thinks Superman is going to work’ doesn’t work- Lane just does not believe that!

[4] Cicero has the property ‘fat’.

[5] http://www.iep.utm.edu/fodor/

[6] This is made explicit in Fodor and Lepore’s: Holism: A Shopper’s Guide (1992), as well as Fodor’s essay: Having Concepts: A Brief Refutation of the Twentieth Century (2004).

[7] The numbers stated here refer to the Fregean account of MOPs on page 15-16 of concepts, and listed on page one of this essay.

[8] My italics.

[9] ‘Whatever distinguishes coextensive concepts is ipso facto ‘in the head’; this means that it’s available to be a proximal cause (/effect) of mental processes.’ (15)