Reason, Bondage, Discipline
by rsbakker
We can understand all things by her; but what she is we cannot apprehend.
–Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1652
.
So I was rereading Ray Brassier’s account of Churchland and eliminativism in his watershed Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction the other day and I thought it worth a short post given the similarities between his argument and Ben’s. I’ve already considered his attempt to rescue subjectivity from the neurobiological dismantling of the self in “Brassier’s Divided Soul.” And in “The Eliminativistic Implicit II: Brandom in the Pool of Shiloam,” I dissected the central motivating argument for his brand of normativism (the claim that the inability of natural cognition to substitute for intentional cognition means that only intentional cognition can theoretically solve intentional cognition), showing how it turns on metacognitive neglect and thus can only generate underdetermined claims. Here I want to consider Brassier’s problematic attempt to domesticate the challenge posed by scientific reason, and to provision traditional philosophy with a more robust sop.
In Nihil Unbound, Brassier casts Churchland’s eliminativism as the high water mark of disenchantment, but reads his appeal to pragmatic theoretical virtues as a concession to the necessity of a deflationary normative metaphysics. He argues (a la Sellars) that even though scientific theories possess explanatory priority over manifest claims, manifest claims nevertheless possess conceptual parity. The manifest self is the repository of requisite ‘conceptual resources,’ what anchors the ‘rational infrastructure’ that makes us intelligible to one another as participants in the game of giving and asking for reasons—what allows, in other words, science to be a self-correcting exercise.
What makes this approach so attractive is the promise of providing transcendental constraint absent ontological tears. Norms, reasons, inferences, and so on, can be understood as pragmatic functions, things that humans do, as opposed to something belonging to the catalogue of nature. This has the happy consequence of delimiting a supra-natural domain of knowledge ideally suited to the kinds of skills philosophers already possess. Pragmatic functions are real insofar as we take them to be real, but exist nowhere else, and so cannot possibly be the object of scientific study. They are ‘appearances merely,’ albeit appearances that make systematic, and therefore cognizable, differences in the real world.
Churchland’s eliminativism, then, provides Brassier with an exemplar of scientific rationality and the threat it poses to our prescientific self-understanding that also exemplifies the systematic dependence of scientific rationality on pragmatic functions that cannot be disenchanted on pain of scuttling the intelligibility of science. What I want to show is how in the course of first defending and then critiquing Churchland, Brassier systematically misconstrues the challenge eliminativism poses to all philosophical accounts of meaning. Then I want to discuss how his ‘thin transcendentalism’ actually requires this misconstrual to get off the ground.
The fact that Brassier treats Churchland’s eliminativism as exemplifying scientific disenchantment means that he thinks the project is coherent as far as it goes, and therefore denies the typical tu quoque arguments used to dismiss eliminativism more generally. Intentionalists, he rightly points out, simply beg the question when accusing eliminativists of ‘using beliefs to deny the reality of beliefs.’
“But the intelligibility of [eliminative materialism] does not in fact depend upon the reality of ‘belief’ and ‘meaning’ thus construed. For it is precisely the claim that ‘beliefs’ provide the necessary form of cognitive content, and that propositional ‘meaning’ is thus the necessary medium for semantic content, that the eliminativist denies.” (15)
The question is, What are beliefs? The idea that the eliminativist must somehow ‘presuppose’ one of the countless, underdetermined intentionalist accounts of belief to be able to intelligibly engage in ‘belief talk’ amounts to claiming that eliminativism has to be wrong because intentionalism is right. The intentionalist, in other words, is simply begging the question.
The real problem that Churchland faces is the problem that all ‘scientistic eliminativism’ faces: theoretical mutism. Cognition is about getting things right, so any account of cognition lacking the resources to explain its manifest normative dimension is going to seem obviously incomplete. And indeed, this is the primary reason eliminative materialism remains a fringe position in psychology and philosophy of mind today: it quite simply cannot account for what, pretheoretically, seems to be the most salient feature of cognition.
The dilemma faced by eliminativism, then, is dialectical, not logical. Theory-mongering in cognitive science is generally abductive, a contest of ‘best explanations’ given the intuitions and scientific evidence available. So far as eliminativism has no account of things like the normativity of cognition, then it is doomed to remain marginal, simply because it has no horse in the race. As Kriegel says in Sources of Intentionality, eliminativism “does very poorly on the task of getting the pretheoretically desirable extension right” (199), fancy philosopher talk for ‘it throws the baby out with the bathwater.’
But this isn’t quite the conclusion Brassier comes to. The first big clue comes in the suggestion that Churchland avoids the tu quoque because “the dispute between [eliminative materialism] and [folk psychology] concerns the nature of representations, not their existence” (16). Now although it is the case that possessing an alternative theory makes it easier to recognize the question-begging nature of the tu quoque, the tu quoque is question-begging regardless. Churchland need only be skeptical to deny rather than affirm the myriad, underdetermined interpretations of belief one finds in intentional philosophy. He no more need specify any alternative theory to use the word ‘belief’ than my five-year old daughter does. He need only assert that the countless intentionalist interpretations are wrong, and that the true nature of belief will become clear once cognitive science matures. It just so happens that Churchland has a provisional neuroscientific account of representation.
As an eliminativist, having a theoretical horse in the race effectively blocks the intuition that you must be riding one of the myriad intentional horses on the track, but the intuition is faulty all the same. Having a theory of meaning is a dialectical advantage, not a logical necessity. And yet nowhere does Brassier frame the problem in these terms. At no point does he distinguish the logical and dialectical aspects of Churchland’s situation. On the contrary, he clearly thinks that Churchland’s neurocomputational alternative is the only thing rescuing his view. In other words, he conflates the dialectical advantage of possessing an alternate theory of meaning with logical necessity.
And as we quickly discover, this oversight is instrumental to his larger argument. Brassier, it turns out, is actually a fan of the tu quoque—and a rather big one at that. Rather than recognizing that Churchland’s problem is abductive, he frames it more abstrusely as a “latent tension between his commitment to scientific realism on the one hand, and his adherence to a metaphysical naturalism on the other” (18). As I mentioned above, Churchland finds himself in a genuine dialectical bind insofar as accounts of cognition that cannot explain ‘getting things right’ (or other apparent intentional properties of cognition) seems to get the ‘pretheoretically desirable extension’ wrong. This argumentative predicament is very real. Pretheoretically, at least, ‘getting things right’ seems to be the very essence of cognition, so the dialectical problem posed is about as serious as can be. So long as intentional phenomena as they appear remain part of the pretheoretically desirable extension of cognitive science, then Churchland is going to have difficulty convincing others of his view.
Brassier, however, needs the problem to be more than merely dialectical. He needs some way of transforming the dialectically deleterious inability to explain correctness into warrant for a certain theory of correctness—namely, some form of pragmatic functionalism. He needs, in other words, the tu quoque. He needs to show that Churchland, whether he knows it or not, requires the conceptual resources of the manifest image as a condition of understanding science as an intelligible enterprise. The way to show this requirement, Brassier thinks, is to show—you guessed it—the inability of Churchland’s neurocomputational account of representation to explain correctness. His inability to explain correctness, the assumption is, means he has no choice but to utilize the conceptual resources of the manifest image.
But as we’ve seen, the tu quoque begs the question against the eliminativist regardless of their ability to adduce alternative explanations for the phenomena at issue. Possessing an alternative simply makes the tu quoque easier to dismiss. Churchland is entirely within his rights to say, “Well, Ray, although I appreciate the exotic interpretation of theoretical virtue you’ve given, it makes no testable predictions, and it shares numerous family resemblance to countless other such, chronically underdetermined theories, so I think I’m better off waiting to see what the science has to say.”
It really is as easy as that. Only the normativist is appalled, because only they are impressed by their intuitions, the conviction that some kind of intentionalist account is the only game in town.
So ultimately, when Brassier argues that “[t]he trouble with Churchland’s naturalism is not so much that it is metaphysical, but that it is an impoverished metaphysics, inadequate to the task of grounding the relation between representation and reality” (25) he’s mistaking a dialectical issue with an inferential and ontological one, conflating a disadvantage in actual argumentative contexts (where any explanation is preferred to no explanation) with something much grander and far more controversial. He thinks that lacking a comprehensive theory of meaning automatically commits Churchland to something resembling his theory of meaning, a deflationary normative metaphysics, namely his own brand of pragmatic functionalism.
For the naturalist, lacking answers to certain questions can mean many different things. Perhaps the question is misguided. Perhaps we simply lack the information required. Perhaps we have the information, but lack the proper interpretation. Maybe the problem is metaphysical—who the hell knows? When listing these possibilities, ‘Perhaps the phenomena is supra-natural,’ is going to find itself somewhere near, ‘Maybe ghosts are real,’ or any other possibility that amounts to telling science to fuck off and go home! A priori claims on what science can and cannot cognize have a horrible track record, period. As Anthony Chemero wryly notes, “nearly everyone working in cognitive science is working on an approach that someone else has shown to be hopeless, usually by an argument that is more or less purely philosophical” (Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, 3).
Intentional cognition is heuristic cognition, a way to cognize systems without cognizing the operations of those systems. What Brassier calls ‘conceptual parity’ simply pertains to the fact that intentional cognition possesses its own adaptive ecologies. It’s a ‘get along’ system, not a ‘get it right’ system, which is why, as a rule, we resort to it in ‘get along’ situations. The sciences enjoy ‘explanatory priority’ because they cognize systems via cognizing the operations of those systems: they solve on the basis of information regarding what is going on. They constitute a ‘get it right’ system. The question that Brassier and other normativists need to answer is why, if intentional cognition is the product of a system that systematically ignores what’s going on, we should think it could provide reliable theoretical cognition regarding what’s going on. How can a get along system get itself right? The answer quite plainly seems to be that it can’t, that the conundrums and perpetual disputation that characterize all attempts to solve intentional cognition via intentional cognition are exactly what we should expect.
Maybe the millennial discord is just a coincidence. Maybe it isn’t a matter of jamming the stick to find gears that don’t exist. Either way, the weary traveller is entitled to know how many more centuries are required, and, if these issues will never find decisive resolution, why they should continue the journey. After all, science has just thrown down the walls of the soul. Billions are being spent to transform the tsunami of data into better instruments of control. Perhaps tilting yet one more time at problems that have defied formulation, let alone solution, for thousands of the years is what humanity needs…
Perhaps the time has come to consider worst case scenarios–for real.
Which brings us to the moral: You can’t concede that science monopolizes reliable theoretical cognition then swear up and down that some chronically underdetermined speculative account somehow makes that reliability possible, regardless of what the reliability says! The apparent conceptual parity between manifest and scientific images is something only the science can explain. This allows us to see just how conservative Brassier’s position is. Far from pursuing the “conceptual ramifications entailed by a metaphysical radicalization of eliminativism” (31), Brassier is actually arguing for the philosophical status quo. Far from following reason no matter where it leads, he is, like so many philosophers before him, playing another version of the ‘domain boundary game,’ marshalling what amounts to a last ditch effort to rescue intentional philosophy from the depredations of science. Or as he himself might put it, devising another sop.
As he writes,
“At this particular historical juncture, philosophy should resist the temptation to install itself within one of the rival images… Rather, it should exploit the mobility that is one of the rare advantages of abstraction in order to shuttle back and forth between images, establishing conditions of transposition, rather than synthesis, between the speculative anomalies thrown up within the order of phenomenal manifestation, and the metaphysical quandaries generated by the sciences’ challenge to the manifest order.” 231
Isn’t this just another old, flattering trope? Philosophy as fundamental broker, the medium that allows the dead to speak to the living, and the living to speak to the dead? As I’ve been arguing for quite sometime, the facts on the ground simply do not support anything so sunny. Science will determine the relation between the manifest and the scientific images, the fate of ‘conceptual parity,’ because science actually has explanatory priority. The dead decide, simply because nothing has ever been alive, at least not the way our ancestors dreamed.
Reblogged this on synthetic zero.
Cool. I’m off to Disney for a couple weeks. It would be nice to find a normativist critique of my critique when I get back. They tend to save their knockdown arguments for each other, where the value of straw is appreciated.
well sent this to Ray so maybe he will chime in, happy trails
Bakker in Disney World… that’s a pretty scary prospect.
For real, if you’re in or are coming to Orlando international airport (I work there), I will pay exuberant amounts of money for my books to be signed lol…
This discussion is hyper-charitable to the section in NU on Churchland. You make it sound way better than it is
One thing which is basically strange to me in the normative functionalism is that they require ‘real knowledge’ to be explicitated second order knowledge of knowledge. This is to glorify abstraction and formalism. He even spells out in Sophistry Suspicion Theory how logical inference is already embedded in basic perceptual activity. Dennett draws this out in his original paper on intentional stances. Any creature which could be said to be following an evolutionary process will adhere to some kind of logical structure of compatibility and incompatibility in the very structure of its perception and behavior, at least when it is not ‘damaged’. I watch my dog do complex spatial temporal inferences all the time. One wonders whether these guys ever owned any pets!
Disney World, you?! Aren’t we all in Disney World? Or perhaps you’re traveling ironically. Bon voyage.
No, it’s perfect! Disney is the exemplary of the primacy of the fetish production qua systematic interrelation of use valueless commodities united under ‘branding’ which become consumed as hyperreal lifestyles which you can literally buy into. This isnt cognitive captalism so much as metacognitive sufficiency capitalism.
Brandom’s view requires more naturalistic linkages than merely ‘normative attitudes’. As quine (and in my view derrida… never understood quines hostility to jackie d) points out, there “use” can not be an a priori notion because there is no a priori identification of “sameness of context of application”. So there is no normative bootstrapping. The sameness of context of application has to be given a neurological account of how class identities become operative in cognitive perceptual activity and how they arise out the dynamics of neural networks. In before but what counts as evidential support or explanation itself is irreducibly normative.
This is an excellent point. I’d love to take this up at some point. Have you read my piece on Brandom and Posthumanism? Might be of interest https://www.academia.edu/8056490/On_Reason_and_Spectral_Machines_an_anti-normativist_response_to_bounded_posthumanism
No, I remembered sharing it on social media last summer, but I only skimmed it. Will definitely check it out in full.
Not much time (because i’m in disney for real!) but i think this opens contentious ground. Everything really turns on the rule following argument for these guys. It literally doesn’t matter how many natural inputs are involved, so long as they can claim the unavoidability of some kind of ‘skeptical solution.’ This is the teetering foundation, i think, the assumption that only second order normative cognition can do the trick. The bootstrapping is entirely contingent: thats the genius. They begin with mere indispensibility, then keep talking until it feels like necessity. The ladder isnt so much kicked away as forgotten. This is one reason they arent going to worried about Derrida so much, or anyone who has no solution.
This is why i think bbt is a dialectical game changer. It blocks indispensibility by providing an alternate solution.
seems to me that machines aside rule-following is always more prescriptive than descriptive.
Well, my target in this essay is the a priori status of transcendental pragmatics, not its truth.
I only argue that normativism cannot account for the emergence of norm instituting behaviour from the pre-normative Eden without imputing ready-made sapience to agents in that state or (this being a really lame response) assuming that norms exist wherever something like us would impute them. Thus Brandom’s attributing intentionality collapses into yet more attributed intentionality.
The upshot, then, is not that transcendental pragmatics is false, but that we can infer no general claims about agency or mind from it. Basing a theory of agency on attributed intentionality without a theory of attribution gives us no handle on what the space of possible attributions (and thus agents) is. “[In] principle interpretability is ill defined unless we have some conception of what is doing the interpreting” (Posthuman Life: 128).
This argument bypasses the indispensability claim by rendering it vacuous.
I was actually replying to div’s Derrida comment. I agree with your paper entirely – and actually was hoping to discuss it in this piece (i’ve never got back to ‘eliminativistic implicit III’ because it’s argument was so similar (but sloppier!) to yours!) but i ran out of time. Speaking of which…
No, I remembered sharing it on social media last summer, but I only skimmed it. Will definitely check it out in full.
I think these pieces speak from a commitment to a (by physical testing) self disproving system, where as the targeted audience is commited to a disproval method which involves disproving the other guy (and not oneself). Ie, a commitment that if two people argue, one of them has to be right.
Can you really cross genres on this one? In the end you’d have to have a cult of Scott to get anywhere with a ‘disprove the other guy’ commitment audience.
Unless they are willing to humour a ‘attempt to disprove oneself with physical measures’ model for awhile (and from a laymans perspective, they don’t seem to do much humouring, only a hard ‘is truth/is false’ binary), where else can you go (apart from philosopher rock star)?
And a radical skeptic at disney world…that’d be like mixing water and potassium! That’s a mythbusters explosion I’d like to see! Or does it all appear an honest false?
Consider this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoousian
A great deal of ink and a great deal of blood has been spilled over this issue. For Christians the precise nature of the relationships among the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit matter. If you reject Christianity they don’t. For such people the differences between ‘of like substance’ and ‘of similar substance’ are less meaningful than the differences between techstep and dubstep.
I think that similarly, if you reject the premise that there are non-biological components of human cognition you can assume that because science is a cognitive activity it is a biological activity and can be explained using the methods science has used to explain other kinds of biological activity. If you accept the premise that there are non-biological components to human cognition I think you ought to offer some explanation of what those non-biological components are and how they came into existence before you start using them to explain biological activity. In general attempts to explain phenomena which can be easily observed and about whose existence there is widespread agreement using phenomena which can’t be observed and about whose existence there is no consensus is fraught with peril. If you don’t need to spend time constructing metaphysical entities to explain physical phenomena you can spend more time giving the history of electronic dance music the attention it deserves.
Scott, I think you put your finger on a problem with transcendentalism here, with your distinction between dialectical and logical issues. Of course, the eliminativist would need a non-intentional explanation of logic to draw this distinction, but even if she currently lacked one, she could say that cognitive science will eventually have mechanistic “explanations” or “theories” of both the practical aspect of debate and the logical relation between mental states.
I no longer see myself as relying on transcendental arguments, although I don’t think metaphysical naturalists must be eliminativists. Indeed, my way of responding now to BBT is to build on your concession that “Pragmatic functions are real insofar as we take them to be real, but exist nowhere else, and so cannot possibly be the object of scientific study. They are ‘appearances merely,’ albeit appearances that make systematic, and therefore cognizable, differences in the real world.”
This is how I see normativity, as an imaginary ideal that works as a blueprint, guiding our behaviour. An ideal’s like an Aristotelian final cause in that it shapes behaviour and thus opens up the Why question. But an ideal doesn’t require Aristotle’s crypto-theistic explanation. Instead, the ideal begins as an illusion but ends as a transformation of the world, as the supplanting of natural regularities by artificial ones, as the domestication of our species. We’re speaking of useful, impactful fictions (animistic projections, anthropomorphisms, etc), of delusions that act like self-fulfilling prophecies in that they bring anomalous, virtually supernatural phenomena into the world, like intentionality and ideality, which are made real in the worlds we build, beginning with the linguistic organization of the mind.
Once the inner and outer worlds have been so transformed through a kind of mesmerism or trance via the imagination, we can turn to the concepts of meaning, purpose, and value to explain the resulting regularities.
I should have qualified what I meant by ‘similarities’ – I think you have a far more credible approach to the dilemmas posed by the sciences. I just don’t think intentional idioms can do the trick because I see them as being irredeemably ‘low D’. I have my arguments, but when all is said and done, that’s just my bet: that post-intentionality is the only way thru. The kind of ‘quasi-intentionality’ you’re proposing is bound to appear more attractive for many reasons. My big worry is simply that short empirical recourse you’ll run aground underdetermination.
I might have been misreading Scott, but I did not read him as conceding:
“Pragmatic functions are real insofar as we take them to be real, but exist nowhere else, and so cannot possibly be the object of scientific study. They are ‘appearances merely,’ albeit appearances that make systematic, and therefore cognizable, differences in the real world.”
I read him as imputing that sort of argument to Ray Brassier. I don’t see what one might mean by:
“Norms, reasons, inferences, and so on, can be understood as pragmatic functions, things that humans do, as opposed to something belonging to the catalogue of nature.”
I read Scott as imputing that to Brassier as well. If ‘norms, reasons, inferences and so on’ are neurological processes they fall within the ‘problem ecology’ of biology. If one claims that ‘norms, reasons, inferences and so on’ are other than neurological or something in additional to neurological what is this other or additional thing if it is not supernatural? I don’t think there is a legitimate role for philosophy in a completely natural explanation of the human mind. That is not to say there are no legitimate roles for other kinds of philosophy but philosophy of mind appears to be going the way of all flesh.
the rejection to this view has been roundly made by many who are physicalists. the idea is that the brain is part of developmental trajectories involving systems outside the brain which account for what it can ultimately do in its environment (ritual magic vs quantum mechanics and engineering have nothing to do with the properties of neural networks. brassier just thinks those developmental processes require low dimensional formalism articulated by ‘dialectics’
Hmm, Michael, I think you’re right. More specifically, Scott’s imputing that pragmatism to Brassier’s reading of Churchland. Still, it’s consistent with Scott’s talk elsewhere of the illusory and thus subjective nature of intentional phenomena, and of the systematic efficacy of symbols.
Scott maintains that that efficacy is due solely to non-intentional mechanisms and especially to neural ones. But I think those mechanisms set themselves up for transcendence, as it were, by causing higher organisms to modify their environment so that their brains are rewired and they’re trained to have autonomous minds (personhood). Meaning and normativity come into being on the back of pure illusion and so they end up having nonreducible causal power through our tools, including linguistic symbols but also our other artifices (technologies, cityscapes) which embody our intentions and purposes (artificial functions).
“Pragmatic functions” a la normativism are metacognitive dupes in my view. Intentional idioms do an incredible amount of work in a wide variety of specialized contexts. Theoretically solving intentionality isn’t one of them… obviously, I think. ‘Taking as’ is something humans do all the time in myriad practical contexts, but not at all in any high D sense (in a manner analogous to the way ‘money talks’). Intentional idioms can be engineered to solve different problems, and this is the sense in which I think your project is plausible…
Wiped out. More later.
Bakker baiting:
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201504201000
John Searle on ‘Seeing Things As They Are
Seldom has a headline been so disappointing,
01 and 03 baiting
Moore’s Law is not a law but a sort of engineers call to arms @ around 20mins in:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/digitalp
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/283-consciousness-intelligent-software-kids-and-games-1.3046449/never-mind-the-robots-what-about-us-1.3047262