 The "Folk Psychology" of Philosophers & the Social Networks of Gossip: Example-the Mind-Body Problem
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Jan. 9th, 2006 @ 10:45 am 
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The Strange Persistence of the "Mind/Body Problem" and the "Folk Psychology" of the Philosophers as an Example of the Social Networks of Gossip:
In one of these posts I made the mistake of ironically using the term 'folk psychology' to describe the persistence of the 'mind-body' problem among philosophers. The absurdity of that persistence I take as a given. What is taken as the "mind-body" problem – i.e. the inability to account for the 'qualia' of experience on a pre-determined physicalist basis or the impossibility of giving a physicalist account of "what it is like to be a bat," for example – is the same problem that is encountered in all areas of scientific inquiry, including the hard physical sciences.
Two quotes I am fond of will illustrate this thesis.
The question of what kind of a world [quantum mechanics] describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics. Minimally interpreted, the theory describes a set of facts about the way the microscopic world impinges on the macroscopic one, how it affects our measuring instruments, described in everyday language or the language of classical mechanics. Disagreement centers on the question of what a microscopic world, which affects our apparatuses in the prescribed manner, is, or even could be, like intrinsically; or how those apparatuses could themselves be built out of microscopic parts of the sort the theory describes. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm/
"It is not to be supposed, in any case that 'perceiving' an object involves knowing what it is like. That is quite another matter. We shall see later that certain inferences, of a highly abstract character, can be drawn for our perceptions to the objects perceived; but these inferences are at once difficult and not quite certain. The idea that perception, in itself, reveals the character of objects, is a fond delusion, and one, moreover, which it is very necessary to overcome if our philosophy is to be anything more than a pleasant fairy-tale."
Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy .
The first quote is from a standard account of the human problems encountered by common understanding when trying to explain the implications of quantum mechanics. The second quote is from Bertrand Russell's lead up to his philosophy of knowledge. These quotes should be taken together, but with the following addenda – perception-itself is also part of that intrinsic physical world that is intrinsically unknown – except that we do know what it is like to experience our own perception. On the other hand a scientific theory, even one that is primarily mathematical, is simply a "non-common sense" way of perceiving the world, or the relations of the world that we take for "objects." Further, all of these perceptions of the world can be conceived of as "appearances," but not as " mere appearances," i.e. it is not as if the appearance itself was somehow unreal or not a part of the world that we investigate, when we investigate the nature of what is real.
Galen Strawson put this best, in describing some ideas that he partially derived from Russell:
In having Experience in the way we do, we are directly acquainted with certain features of the ultimate nature of reality, as Russell and others have remarked – whether or not we just put what we known into words in any theoretically tractable way. And this is so whatever it is best to say about any non-Experiential ( e.g. dispositional) aspects of the mental that there may be. We may certainly hope to develop our understanding of the nature of the Experiential, but we can do this only by adding to what we already know of it by direct acquaintance.
…
[H]ow things appear or seem is how they really are, the reality that is at present in question just is the appearing of seeming. In the case of any experiential episode E, there may be something X of which it is true to say that in undergoing E, we only have access to an appearance of X, and not to how X is in itself. But serious materialists must hold that E itself, the event of being-appeared-to, with all the qualitative character that it has, is itself part of physical reality. They cannot say that it too is just an appearance, and not part of how things are, on the pain of infinite regress. They must grant that it is itself as reality, and a reality with which we must, in plausibility, be allowed to have some sort of direct acquaintance. As Russell says, we must 'treat "seeming" with respect". Real Materialism by Galen Stawson in Chomsky and His Critics, edited by Norbert Hornstein and Louis Anthony at p. 67, quoting B. Russell in An Outline of Philosophy , p. 101.
The basic mistake of those philosophers who persist in referring to the mind/body problem is an inability to break out of there own common sense notions of what science does and does not teach us. The same is true with the philosophers who refer to the problem of the "mental" or of "qualia." The problems they refer to are not unique to a naturalistic study of the world of the mental or of experience. It is rather an aspect of the limits of all theoretical study. These limits have been expressed in various ways since Newton's theoretical revolution in science. Empiricists, idealists and materialists alike have expressed them. What has not been recognized is the reason that they exist whenever we think the world through theoretical science. In effect, the special kind of thinking that is represented by a descriptive and explanatory theoretical model, a theory that is pragmatically testable, with tests that are repeatable, is very narrow in its representations of reality. In many ways these theories are simply other ways of "perceiving" the world. This means that the problems of perception and "seeming", the problems of making sure of reality, which we have in everyday life, do not disappear when we use a theoretical construct to refine our perceptions. The problems of appearance, of knowing what things are like, do not disappear in the physical sciences, as they don't disappear in the sciences that deal with the mental, they are only given sharp relief. They are made deeper.
I think it will be helpful here to quote the whole passage that Strawson refers to above. Russsell first points out that some of the problem that philosophers have is that they don't ask themselves 'what is meant by "seeming".'
If a dream or a table 'seems' to be one sort of thing, while it is 'really' another we shall have to admit that it really seems, and that what it seems to be has a reality of its own. Nay, more, we only arrive at what it 'really' is by an inference, valid or invalid, from what it seems to be. If we are wrong about the seeming, we must be doubly wrong about the reality, since the sole ground for asserting the table composed of electrons and protons is the table that we see, i.e. the 'seeming' table. We must therefore treat 'seeming' with some respect. Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy , p. 101.
For years Noam Chomsky has pointed out that the mind/body problem is not only wrong it is simply not even comprehensible. This is not because we know so little about "minds" or "perception" or "experience" but just the opposite; what we don't know about is what the physical really is. A "body", in the way that the Cartesians stated the mind/body problem, is a concept that has been shown to be unsustainable, since Newton elucidated his theories. Every fifty years or so physics comes along with another refinement of what the 'physical' really is. It turns out that just possibly the physical is just as well conceived of as little bits of information. Strawson points out that Russell once remarked "that the reason that physics is mathematical is not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little." (Strawson, op.cit. p.61) (Note, if Engels insisted upon calling his materialism "dialectical" it is because he had some intuition of the truth of how little we know about the physical. In other words "dialectical materialism" as originally propounded was a primitive insight into our lack of knowledge. The idea of the physical was meant to be a provisional and unstable concept, a constantly moving target. The fact that Engels had this insight, even though he was a very bad scientist only means that he was trying to understand the crisis of materialism after Newton and Darwin. There is no reason to bow down to an idea of philosophy that was meant to make up for our lack of knowledge of the physical, when we now have much greater insight into the reason why such concept as "materialism" or the "physical" don't stay pinned to the mat.)
The confusion comes with most philosophers because they think we know through science what the physical and is, and the real problem is to try to explain the mental or the qualia of experience. The opposite is true in a really interesting way. We know our own minds and experiences intimately. We experience the qualia of experience and thus this seems to us to be what needs to be explained or accounted for. Mental experience "seems" so florescent and effervescent to us, so unsettled. Non-mental objects on the other hand "seem" so solid and relatively easy to define, mainly because we are programmed to handle them, touch them, taste and smell them. They seem stable and there is reality in the "seeming", but what our theoretical evaluations show us is that we know so little about the physical. We simply don't know what it is. The "seeming" of our experience is what we really know. To quote Russell again:
"The essence of matter appears to be this: We can distinguish series of events in space-time which have a certain kind of close resemblance to each other, such that common sense regards them as manifestations of one 'thing'. But when we look closely at the question, it turns out that what physics offers is something more abstract than this. Take, e.g. the continued existence of a certain electron. This means to say that events in a certain neighborhood will be such as can be calculated on the assumption that there is an electric charge of a certain standard magnitude, in the middle of that neighborhood; and that the neighborhoods of which this is true form a tube in space-time.
So long as we stick to the standpoint of pure physics there is a certain air of taking in each other's washing about the whole business. Events in empty space are only known in regards their abstract mathematical characteristics; matter is only an abstract mathematical characteristic of events in empty space. This seems rather a cold world. But as a matter of fact we know some things are a little more concrete. We know, e.g. what it feels like when we see things. 116 (Emphasis mine.)
Yes, this is exactly the way it should be described. What we know is what it "feels like": to perceive. We know the perception of "things" from the "inside" of our own experienced reality. Since we know this experienced-reality intimately, the illusion arises with most philosophers, -- i.e. the philosophers who set goals for how explanations must be given if we are to explain the qualia of experience in a naturalistic way, -- that it is somehow these experiences that must be explained intrinsically, and "reduced" to the "physical", if mental experience is to be explained at all. But it is precisely our knowledge of the physical that cannot be apprehended through anything but a mathematical abstract except by way of the seeming of experience. The problem of intrinsic knowledge of the physical is as great, if not greater, than the problem of qualia.
Once again Russell says it much better than I can.
It used to be thought 'mysterious' that purely physical phenomena should end in something mental. That was because people thought that they knew a lot about physical phenomena, and were sure they differed in quality from mental phenomena. We now realise that we know nothing of the intrinsic quality of physical phenomena except when they happen to be sensations, and that therefore there is no reason to be surprised that some are sensations, or to suppose that the others are totally unlike sensations. The gap between mind and matter has been filled in, partly by new views on mind, but much more by the realisation that physics tells us nothing as to the intrinsic character of matter. 117 (emphasis mine).
My supplement to this is that the optimistic connotation of this paragraph ("It used to be thought… We now realise … no reason to be surprised… the realisation that…") has been undercut by subsequent history. And this is what I find curious. What was true then in 1927 about what physics told us that we don't know about the physical is even truer now after almost eighty years of further discoveries of the strangeness of the physical. Yet philosophers persist in not hearing the news.
How to explain this?
Well philosophers seem to have an explanation of the way they think only they apply this explanation to others in an inside-out fashion. What I am saying is that they project and externalize their notions into a theory that they call "folk psychology" and then attribute the workings of the theory onto the common people. Ian Ravenscroft at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/ explains one version of "folk psychology" in the following manner…
[F]olk psychology is a theory of mind implicit in our everyday talk about mental states. In the everyday traffic of our lives we make remarks linking sensory experiences to mental states; mental states to other mental states; and mental states to behavior. Thus we remark that the smell of freshly baked bread made Sally feel hungry; that Sally wanted to go on a diet because she thought that she was overweight; and that Sally went to the fridge because she desired a piece of chocolate cake. According to some philosophers, remarks such as these (or suitable generalisations of remarks such as these) function as a term-introducing theory which implicitly defines terms such as "believe", "want" and "desire".
Ravenscroft, then quotes David Lewis instructing us to do the following in order to build a model of a "folk psychology":
Collect all the platitudes … regarding the causal relations of mental states, sensory stimuli, and motor responses. … Add also all the platitudes to the effect that one mental state falls under another … Perhaps there are platitudes of other forms as well. Include only the platitudes which are common knowledge amongst us: everyone knows them, everyone knows that everyone else knows them, and so on. Lewis, D. (1972): "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications". Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50: 249-58.
My contention is that the only folk that such a model would be applicable to are members of the caste we call the intelligentsia, and that in particular such a model would be instructive only when constructed from the "platitudes which are common knowledge" among philosophers. In such a case, we would call the results of this model an "ideology". We know that the intellectual caste is more susceptible to ideology than most and we won't be surprised by what we see from the results of the collection of such platitudes.
The transmission of these platitudes we will call "gossip", because as should be clear all philosophy is basically transmitted through gossip and is often nothing more than gossip itself. When common people and "housewives" (sic) engage in gossip it is called by its true name. When intellectuals engage in gossip it is often called "philosophy."
In The Sociology of Philosophy: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Randall Collins states:
In the case of the ideas we are concerned with…, the ideas that matter historically, it is possible to demonstrate that the individuals who bring forward such ideas are located in typical social patterns: intellectual groups, networks, rivalries.
The history of philosophy is to a considerable extent the history of groups. Nothing abstract is meant here – nothing but groups of friends, discussion partners, close-knit circles that often have the characteristics of social movements.
Well how much such ideas "matter historically" is a matter of empirical demonstration. I do agree that these ideas are transmitted through "social networks" that "have the characteristics of social movements." But I do think that what really matters are actual social movements, like the one that ended slavery, or the movement that brought us the realization that women should be full and equal members of our society. What philosophers are engaged in is "gossip". This is not to devalue gossip. I believe that gossip is important to any culture, though when gossip becomes a mass media commodity it is greatly deformed. But I also think that we should call what most philosophers do when they transmit their ideas by its correct name, i.e. gossip.
Why insist on calling certain aspects of the transmission of philosophy a form of gossip? Isn't this abusive to philosophers? Yes, I am afraid that professionally trained philosophers will not even understand the basic point of my insistence that what they do is a form of gossip. I want to persist in a view that all human beings are philosophers and that philosophy must become a democratic and cooperative activity. Calling the transmission of philosophy a form of gossip illustrates the fact that doing philosophy is an activity of everyday life and it is not like science a technical specialty that needs long years of training. The same is true of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political analysis and participation, foreign policy, singing songs, telling stories, etc. Philosophy, as something 'technical' and separate from what the rest of us do is the product of a self-consciously anti-democratic movement, an aristocratic reaction to the threat of democratic decision making in Greek city-states. In other words, it was a semi-secular invention of a defensive intelligentsia. Such discussions that take place in philosophy and literary criticism, in the non-academic sense of these words, belongs to us all and can be understood by us all, or else they have failed in their main job, the shaping of open dialogue.
Now, as far as the conception of folk psychology is concerned, and its transmission through the hierarchical social network established through gossip, I think what it can be used for is explaining the persistence of the platitude called 'the mind/body problem.'
When I originally called the mind/body problem part of the 'folk psychology of philosophers' my correspondent did not understand the irony. He thought that both the mind/body problem and folk psychology were meant to be taken seriously as products of philosophy instead of as the transmission of gossip by other means, i.e. through the formation of an ideological world view appropriate to philosophers.
Let me say finally that folk psychology is a fine illustration of retail bullshit in its relation to gossip. The notion of folk psychology seems to me the academic homologue to the idea of the 'folk tale' among the nineteenth century philologists. It is also similar to the notion of 'folk music' among the Bohemians. Such notions arise when a social group that wishes to understand "the masses" posits a notion of a "primitive-authentic" and projects this authenticity upon others. The term "folk psychology" is a term of art which derives from the intellectual elitism of the academic (mis)conceptions of everybody else. The only people that the notions of 'folk psychology' actually describes are the philosophers who use it and who persist in such pre-Newtonian notions as 'the mind/body problem.' It is the equivalent of many other insular and parochial notions that are raised to pseudo-theory.
Intellectuals may exhibit a 'folk psychology'. Everybody else can make do with old fashion common sense – which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. As Bertolt Brecht said, in a much different context, people have no desire to become folk.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
9 January 2006
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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The first part of this reminds me of my flirtation with Rand, who held that having a grip on reality meant consistency among the senses ("if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc, it's a duck, whatever the damn collectivists have to say about it"), which made sense, though the rest of her epistemology seemed to be "of course reality is objective- look, this rock hurts when I throw it at you, doesn't it?"
Have you read Brecht's "A Man's A Man/The Elephant Calf"? There's a bit in it in which one of the characters tells the audience members who're having trouble following the play that if they want something they can understand, they ought to go the bathroom.
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