Email This Post Peter Hacker tells James Garvey that neuroscientists are talking nonsense
Peter Hacker
This has a much to do with his view of philosophy as a contribution to human understanding, not knowledge. One might think that philosophy has the same general aim as science – securing knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in – even if its subject matter is more abstract and its methods more armchair. What is philosophy if not an attempt to secure new knowledge about the mind or events or beauty or right conduct or what have you? According to Hacker, philosophy is not a cognitive discipline. It’s something else entirely.
“Philosophy does not contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in after the manner of any of the natural sciences. You can ask any scientist to show you the achievements of science over the past millennium, and they have much to show: libraries full of well-established facts and well-confirmed theories. If you ask a philosopher to produce a handbook of well-established and unchallengeable philosophical truths, there’s nothing to show. I think that is because philosophy is not a quest for knowledge about the world, but rather a quest for understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive of the knowledge we achieve about the world. One of the rewards of doing philosophy is a clearer understanding of the way we think about ourselves and about the world we live in, not fresh facts about reality.”
His account of the nature of philosophy is Wittgensteinian through and through. It’s a conception of philosophy which regards philosophical problems as confusions in language rather than deep mysteries encountered in the world. The job of the philosopher is to make these conceptual errors clear to us and in so doing help us out of our muddles. Philosophical questions aren’t solved; they’re dissolved. There is knowledge here, in a sense, but it’s not the sort of knowledge most philosophers think they are pursuing.
“By doing philosophy you come to realise things about the structure of our conceptual scheme that you would never have realised otherwise. Realization is indeed a dawning of knowledge. But the knowledge here is not knowledge of the world we live in. It is knowledge of the structure of our conceptual scheme. It very often looks like “metaphysical knowledge” of reality – as it were knowledge of the scaffolding of the world. But it’s no such thing. The world doesn’t have scaffolding. Rather, in doing philosophy, we come to realise the character of the grammatical and linguistic scaffolding from which we describe the world, not the scaffolding of the world.”
Because he thinks of philosophy is a quest for understanding, on Hacker’s view it can’t be transmitted from generation to generation as knowledge can. Each generation has to earn insight, has to face its own obstacles and work out an understanding for itself. This strikes a chord. I wonder about the present generation and what Hacker thinks might get in the way of our understanding.
“The main barrier is the scientism that pervades our mentality and our culture. We are prone to think that if there’s a serious problem, science will find the answer. If science cannot find the answer, then it cannot be a serious problem at all. That seems to me altogether wrong. It goes hand in hand with the thought that philosophy is in the same business as science, as either a handmaiden or as the vanguard of science. This prevailing scientism is manifest in the infatuation of the mass media with cognitive neuroscience. The associated misconceptions have started to filter down into the ordinary discourse of educated people. You just have to listen to the BBC to hear people nattering on about their brains and what their brains do or don’t do, what their brains make them do and tell them to do. I think this is pretty pernicious – anything but trivial.”
In the last decade Hacker has turned his attention from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind, dealing with what he sees as a whole raft of conceptual confusions in cognitive neuroscience. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, which he co-authored with the neurophysiologist M. R. Bennett, works through a number of tangles in detail. As we talk about some of them, I begin to see that there is a straight line from his Wittgensteinian thoughts about the nature of philosophy to his work on the mind.
“It has often struck me as ironical that Wittgenstein is criticised for being a quietist. It is true that he said philosophy leaves everything as it is. This has wrongly been interpreted as meaning that according to Wittgenstein philosophy is impotent – that it is powerless to affect anything at all. This is a gross misinterpretation of what he wrote. It also seems to me the exact opposite of the truth. What Wittgenstein says should be left alone is the grammar of our language. It’s not our business to devise better grammars. Our business is to tidy up linguistic or conceptual confusions rooted, among other places, in existing grammar. What we can do is clarify and disentangle conceptual confusions in the sciences. Of course, that’s what I tried to do with Max Bennett in the neuroscience book. I wish more people were engaged in this kind of enterprise. There are far too many philosophers who take their task to be to sing the Hallelujah Chorus to the sciences. It seems to me we should be serious, and one hopes helpful, conceptual critics of the sciences.”
One of his larger criticisms of contemporary neuroscience concerns the way it characterises the activities of the brain. Dualists about the mind and brain – those who hold that there are thinking substances like souls in the world as well as all the ordinary physical stuff – say that the mind sees and thinks and wants and calculates. Contemporary neuroscience dismisses this as crude, but Hacker argues that it just ends up swapping the mind with the brain, saying that the brain sees and thinks and wants and calculates. He says, “Merely replacing Cartesian ethereal stuff with glutinous grey matter and leaving everything else the same will not solve any problems. On the current neuroscientist’s view, it’s the brain that thinks and reasons and calculates and believes and fears and hopes. In fact, it’s human beings who do all these things, not their brains and not their minds. I don’t think it makes any sense to talk about the brain engaging in psychological or mental operations.”
But don’t we talk this way, harmlessly, all the time? When we say that our computer wants to install an update, that it does not recognise the printer, we’ve adopted what Daniel Dennett calls “the intentional stance”. We explain and predict what the computer might do as though it were a rational agent with desires and intentions. We can skip the unnecessary details of hardware and software, quickly work out that we need to install a driver, and get on with our lives. In speaking like this no one thinks a computer really, literally wants to do anything. Maybe neuroscientists don’t actually think that some region of the brain really remembers or thinks or fears. It’s just a useful fiction. It enables us to get on with the work. Where’s the harm in that?
“If that were all it was, it would be perfectly harmless, but I don’t think that is all the neuroscientists and cognitive scientists who say this are asserting. The fact is that if you look from one domain of cognitive neuroscience to another you will find that the operations of the brain thus conceived are being advanced as explanations for human behaviour, for our thinking, believing, seeing, hoping and fearing. That’s wrong, because it’s no explanation. If someone wants to know why poor old Snodgrass, as the result of some lesion, can’t do something that normal people can do, and you say that his brain can’t do it, you haven’t advanced any explanation at all. One cannot explain why someone cannot see by saying that his brain cannot see. One cannot explain why someone behaves in a certain way by suggesting that his brain tells him to. Cognitive defects can indeed sometimes be explained by reference to damage to the brain – but not by reference to cognitive deficiencies of the brain, since the brain has no cognitive powers at all. There is no such thing as a brain’s thinking, wanting, reasoning, believing or hypothesizing.”
The thought that philosophers of mind and cognitive neuroscientists are talking sheer nonsense recurs several times in Hacker’s treatment of their conception of consciousness. I want to pin him down on the expression “what it’s like”, because he might be on to something. The phrase appeared in Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper, “What is it Like to be a Bat?”, and the words are invoked almost everywhere in philosophy of mind, even by scientists with philosophical ambition. Nagel puts his point succinctly: “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism”. When many philosophers and neuroscientists try to say what consciousness is or capture what it is about consciousness that gives them trouble, they talk about how experiences feel, about what it’s like for the subject. Hacker thinks it’s all a muddle. In fact, he says, there’s nothing it’s like to be you. As I line up a question by paraphrasing his reasons for saying this, I leave too much out, and he corrects my omission generously with an image owed to Wittgenstein.
“Those are some of the reasons. Any decent philosophical problem is held in place not by one mistake or confusion but by a whole range. Wittgenstein has a wonderful metaphor: if you shine strong light on one side of a problem, it casts long shadows on the other. Every deep philosophical confusion is held in place by numerous struts, and one cannot demolish the confusion merely by knocking one strut away. One has to circle around the problem again and again to illuminate all the misconceptions that hold it in place.” We consider several of the struts in question, including the ones I missed out.
“You can ask any human being having an experience ‘What was it like for you to have that experience?’ Most commonly the answer is: ‘Nothing in particular.’ What was it like to see the lamp post? What was it like to see your shoes?’ – ‘The experience was quite indifferent!’ Sometimes the answer would be, ‘It was wonderful, marvellous, joyful, jolly good or revolting, disgusting, awful’–and so on. If you want to generalise over that, engage as Nagel does in second-level quantification, the result is not ‘There is something which it is like to experience such and such’, but ‘There is something which it is to experience such and such, namely wonderful, awful, exciting, boring’. Why? Because the answer to ‘What was it like for you to do it?’ isn’t ‘It was like wonderful’ – unless we’re in California – but rather ‘It was wonderful’. So it is a plain confusion to think that for any given experience of a conscious creature, there is something that it is like for the creature to have that experience. Sometimes there is something that it is to experience this-or-that – most of the time there isn’t. That’s one pair of mistakes.”
“Another kind of mistake is a systematic confusion between the qualities of an experience and the qualities of the objects of an experience. The question ‘What was it like for you to love Daisey?’ can be given an answer by specifying the hedonic character of the experience of being in love with her. It may have been wonderful, or heart-breaking. The question ‘What is it like to see something red?’ has no such answer. Seeing a red button, for example, is neither wonderful nor heart-breaking, neither exciting nor boring – it simply lacks any hedonic quality. But philosophers in the so-called consciousness studies community are prone to try to characterise the experience by reference to the qualities of the objects of the experience – as if the ‘redness of red’ were a quality of the experience of seeing a red thing.” He growls: “The redness of the red! That’s not what it’s like for you to see red. That’s what you see! What’s it like to see red? For the most part, nothing at all. Maybe seeing that wonderful red sparkle of that fantastic flower was intoxicating. Well then, it was intoxicating to see it. What you saw was the colour. It was the experience that was intoxicating. People confuse the object of experience with the positive or negative hedonic quality of the experience.”
The final confusion he identifies concerns the suggestion that what is unique to conscious beings is that there is something that it is like for them to be the beings that they are. Philosophers say, for example, that there is not anything that it is like for an ink-jet printer to be an ink-jet printer, nothing it is like for a brick to be a brick. However, there does seem to be something it is like for a bat to be a bat. There is something it is like for us to be humans. There is something it is like for you to be you, and for me to be me. There seems to be a meaningful distinction here between conscious things and everything else. For perhaps most philosophers of mind, this “what it is like” is the core of the mystery of consciousness.
Hacker argues that this is a muddle. He says that questions about what it’s like to be a something require contrast classes. “You can ask what it is like for an X to be a Y, but not what it is like for an X to be an X. If the question takes the form ‘What is it like for a human being to be a human being? – that amounts to no more than ‘What is it like to be a human being?’ This question has lost the ‘for someone’. It means no more than “What is human life like?” – and that has a pretty easy, if rather vague, answer. What’s it like for a bat to be a bat? Since bats can’t be anything other than bats, all that means is ‘What is the life of a bat like?’ Any decent zoologist can no doubt tell you in considerable detail what bats do, what they enjoy, and what frightens them. That’s what the life of a bat is like. There’s nothing mysterious here.”
“It looks mysterious because it’s modelled on ‘what’s it like for an X to be a Y?’”. He goes into character for a moment: “Daddy, what was it like for you to be a soldier in The Second World War? All sorts of stories follow. Daddy, what’s it like for you to be a human being? What on Earth is this question? The question is illegitimate. It’s stepped over the bounds of sense. The requirement is that there be a difference between the X and the Y. What’s it like for a woman to be a surgeon? Perfectly decent question. What’s it like for a woman to be a woman?”
He’s warmed to his subject, but now he trails off, his hands open, and he quietly leans back in his chair. I think he has chosen to pass over this enormous part of contemporary philosophy of mind in silence. I do take the point. If “what it’s like for an X” expressions need contrasts in order to make sense, and Nagel has left that bit unspecified, then Nagel’s version is nonsense. As a result we have an expression that looks sensible, but when we try to use it or answer questions based on it, we find that we can’t. The thought is that there is something it’s like for a bat to be a bat, but I can’t say what it is. There’s a bit of the world which has to exist – there must be something it’s like for a bat to be a bat – but I can’t describe it. Worse, I can’t describe it even if I have all the physical facts about a bat at my disposal. Is there something non-physical I don’t know? Is dualism true? The mystery closes in from every side.
Similarly, what is it like for a woman to be a woman…as opposed to what? A woman who isn’t a woman? I can see how that might look like a good question but turn out to be nonsense. I can see the same sort of thing happening with bats, even with me. What’s it like for me to be me? As opposed to what? To someone else’s being me? Perhaps there’s no sense in the thought that there’s something it’s like for me to be me.
But what’s the upshot? If we put “what it’s like” to one side, how could doing that get us past the so-called hard problem, the explanatory gap, the problem of consciousness? How does looking away from “what it’s like” help me understand how consciousness could arise from boring old matter?
“Slow down and start thinking of consciousness as we should, not in terms of ‘what it’s like’. Start with elementary sentience.” Hacker tells a story of a creature hundreds of millions of years ago, a creature with light sensitive cells, avoiding predators, reproducing, and all the while the mechanisms of evolution whir away. Light sensitive cells develop into eyes. Eyes give a creature the ability to see. Creatures that can see can be conscious of something moving in the underbrush over there, and so on.
He’s trying to take the mystery out of the equation. He bangs a fist on a table, “How could this stuff be conscious? – It couldn’t! How could consciousness arise from mere matter? – It can’t. Consciousness ‘arises’ from the evolution of living organisms.”
His point is that it is the way we put the problem of consciousness which creates a false mystery. The question should be about living organisms and how they became sentient, not about how the stuff that makes up tables might be conscious. “We might not have all the details,” he says, “but we surely do know the broad outline, and there’s nothing mysterious about it. It’s a bogus mystery. The hard problem isn’t a hard problem at all. The really hard problems are the problems the scientists are dealing with. When we have a cure for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, then we will have solved some hard problems. The philosophical problem, like all philosophical problems, is a confusion in the conceptual scheme. We’ve tied some knots, and the difficulty is finding the right threads to pull on in order to untie the knots.”
When he puts it this way, and if you allow yourself to think he might be right, then you have to wonder how much of the philosophy of mind is just confused nonsense. Hacker can be scathing when he talks about “the consciousness studies community”. He issues a challenge to them.
“The whole endeavour of the consciousness studies community is absurd – they are in pursuit of a chimera. They misunderstand the nature of consciousness. The conception of consciousness which they have is incoherent. The questions they are asking don’t make sense. They have to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.”
“I doubt whether this absurd misunderstanding is stoppable. It’s too entrenched now. But I think it is a kind of intellectual fraud. I’m not accusing paid-up members of the so-called consciousness studies community of bad faith – I’m sure they are just deluded – but the result of their confusion is that we’re bringing up a whole generation of people to think in a thoroughly muddled way, to have hopes and expectations which are totally absurd, and to concentrate on things which are just incoherent. It’s literally a total waste of time. But if anyone thinks that I am completely mistaken, I’d like them to explain to me why. If they cannot show that my arguments are wrong, they should admit the errors of their ways and withdraw from the field! That’s the challenge.”
Hacker is writing about consciousness again at the moment, attacking the popular view of consciousness as the mark of the mental. It’s part of a chapter in the second book he is preparing in a trilogy about human nature. The first book, Human Nature: The Categorial Framework, sets the stage for the other two. It takes up the general categories we use to make sense of ourselves and the world: such concepts as substance, causation, power, agency, teleology, rationality, mind, self, body, and person. The second book will focus on our cognitive and cogitative powers – consciousness, intentionality, the mastery of a language, knowledge, belief, perception, memory, thinking, imagination and so on. His task is conceptual clarification, showing why misconceptions are misconceptions and attempting to eradicate misunderstandings. I ask him about the history of the concept of consciousness. Can the history of a word shed light on how we might use or misuse it?
“With consciousness the story is curious. The Greeks and Romans didn’t have a term for consciousness, although they raised problems akin to some of the problems Descartes and his successors raised. Descartes introduced the word into his Latin writing in 1641 using ‘conscius’ in a sense different from the mediaeval use. For the mediaevals ‘conscius’ simply meant shared knowledge, being privy to information. When Descartes introduces the notion of consciousness, it’s the means whereby I know how things are with me mentally or inwardly or in my mind. The ordinary use of the word in English begins a little earlier – 1603 is the first recorded occurrence – and proceeds happily to develop into a pretty useful if specialised tool of our cognitive vocabulary. We use it as one of the group of cognitive verbs signifying cognitive receptivity – like ‘aware’, ‘realise’, and ‘notice’. Perceptual consciousness, for example, concerns having one’s attention caught and held by something one perceives. That is why one cannot voluntarily or intentionally become and then be conscious of something – for becoming conscious of something is not an act at all, let alone a voluntary act. That is why consciousness is not a form of second-order thinking, since thinking, unlike becoming conscious of something is, or can be, a voluntary act or activity.”
“The philosophical use has stumbled from one intellectual catastrophe to another. It’s never recovered since the days of Descartes, Locke and Kant. Tom Nagel, who introduced talk of ‘there being something it is like’ in order to illuminate the nature of consciousness, just pushed us into a new quagmire of confusion over the topic. The story about the philosophical use of the term ‘consciousness’ from Descartes onward is to be compared with the philosophical use of the term ‘idea’ from the seventeenth down to the nineteenth century – which we’ve jettisoned. Or the twentieth century’s use of the term ‘sense data’ which, again, we’ve jettisoned”. Although it sounds extraordinary to suggest that we just dump “consciousness”, philosophy does sometimes simply move on. No one solved any of the philosophical problems raised by the notion of idea. We just quietly stopped worrying about it. So too with “consciousness”?
“Although one may fondly think that certain fiendish philosophical illusions – such as those associated with ‘ideas’ or ‘sense-data’ – have been eradicated, crushed, destroyed, will never appear again … Damn it … thirty years later, there they are again in a different guise. When I was young we thought ‘sense data’ had been eradicated once and for all – and now ‘internal representations’ are alive and kicking. I suppose this just shows that the really deep temptations to conceptual, intellectual, confusion and distortion are permanently there. Each generation has to fight its way through them, through the jungle”.
I’m about to ask if he thinks of himself as carrying on where Wittgenstein left off, working through this new millennium’s particular philosophical jungle. He answers me before I have the chance.
“I can’t write without the Wittgensteinian influence being patent, but I’m doing things that he didn’t do and probably wouldn’t have done, a very often doing them in ways that I think he wouldn’t have liked. He would never have had the kind of patience for the kind of systematic nit-picking I sometimes engage in, or for trying to structure as much as can be structured. The danger, of course, is that you over do it. You overplay your hand – you make things clearer than they actually are. I constantly try to keep aware of, and beware of, that. I think it’s correct to compare our conceptual scheme to a scaffolding from which we describe things, but by George it’s a pretty messy scaffolding. If it starts looking too tidy and neat that’s a sure sign you’re misdescribing things.”
The final volume of his trilogy, on which he really won’t be drawn, concerns the affective and moral powers. He’ll only say that he wants to discuss emotions and attitudes, the place of value in human life, as well as sympathy and empathy.
“I’d like to say something tolerably sensible about the good, and the good of man. I’d like to say something about the role of value in human life before I toss in the towel. I should have started all this ten years earlier.”
The remark makes me think of the ambition behind this project. In a way it’s to be expected. After so many years working on the Analytical Commentary – admittedly not flat out on that single project, but still a long march, a huge endeavour – he could have shaken a final chapter, a summing up, right out of his sleeve on a summer afternoon and been done with it. Instead he rounded things off by getting to work on yet another book, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy.
His ambition is remarkable. I find this in the preface of The Categorial Framework: “As I reached the end of my academic career, I felt a powerful urge to paint a large, last fresco that would depict … themes which I had studied and reflected on for the last forty years”. The last thing most people do on reaching the end of an academic career is embark on very large projects. They don’t start writing more books. I ask him about his motivations. Why is he drawn to such enormous projects? How did he devote so much time to one vast endeavour? Why is he getting to this enormous project on human nature only now?
“I was a slow developer I think. My philosophical thought developed slowly. I didn’t hit a plateau quickly. I climbed very slowly, but it’s been up hill all the way – which has been nice. Some people hit a plateau, maybe a very high plateau, at thirty, and then they carry on the same. I don’t think that happened to me. When Gordon (Baker) and I started the Commentary on the Investigations, we thought the project would take five years, not nineteen. We thought it would take two volumes, not effectively five. Was it worth it? Yes, every bit. Of course it was. It was the most exciting intellectual adventure I can even dream of. Following Wittgenstein’s footsteps patiently …well, I went through landscapes I would never have dreamt of going through if not for his leading me there. It was wonderful.”
James Garvey is editor of tpm
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Fascinating interview - and saved to be re-read a number of times till the essence percolates through my elderly brain.
“The question should be about living organisms and how they became sentient, not about how the stuff that makes up tables might be conscious.”
AMEN!
I’ve argued this very point with psychologists and philosophers with little success. Scientists get it though. We need more refreshing, progressive work like Dr. Hacker’s in contemporary philosophy of mind.
As a layman, I have to raise my eyebrows at any idea that claims a well-established enterprise such as neuroscience - and by extension all of science - is somehow fundamentally flawed without suggesting a solution that the rest of us can understand: the only ones who seem to be privy to enlightenment are those who buy in the jargon.
I request to join the philosopher’s group, thanks
See my contribution here
http://johnivorjones.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html.
I don’t know what Hacker had to say about it but, as far as I know, my contribution to sense in the brain sciences has priority.
It’s also a little odd to think that someone could, in principle, spend longer studying and writing about someone’s thoughts than the person himself spent in creating them. The other way, of course, is to share a common, intuitive philosophical sense, hence obviating the need for relentless study.
[...] is an interview by James Garvey of the philosopher Peter Hacker posted on TMP magazine site (here) about his ideas on [...]
They say that starting a high-powered car is like being kicked in the back. This talk of ‘what it is like’ assumes an original experiece (being kicked in the back) which we know without reflection. This surely derives simply from my being this body. What is ‘up’ like merely points to a basic experience of an organism that lives in gravity. In space it makes no sense, not even the direction of my head, since I can lie down sideways.
[...] block rocking challenge to neuroscientists: make sense! There’s an expanded piece where he attacks more sacred cows over at The Philosopher’s [...]
I actually have to wonder if Hacker is reading actual neuroscience, or simply reports of neuroscience in popular media. I will definitely grant you that popular articles about neuroscience definitely treat neuroimaging results as an explanation. Right now I’m writing an article for a popular magazine, and my editor is pressuring me to put in brain data even though I don’t think such data explain anything.
This comes up on my blog a lot. And I hear cognitive neuroscientists making fun of newspapers for this kind of reasoning all the time.
I will say, though, that many neuroscientists simply don’t believe the results of behavioral experiments, to the extent that they refuse to even read the literature. If the results weren’t shown in a mouse during single-cell recordings, they don’t count. But that’s a very different problem than the one Hacker’s talking about.
Game
For god’s sake man, don’t be tempted in promoting false ideas about brain-imaging. You are right. Stay clear. A philosopher’s warning.
see my post http://johnivorjones.blogspot.com/2010/04/are-brain-sciences-trashing-human.html
Hacker is WRONG it IS possible to quantify the content of conscious experience, as is done here:
http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/epist/epist5.html
And that tells us something very concrete about how our brains represent reality!
Follow the implications here:
http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/cartoonepist/cartoonepist.html
[...] given that I have a rising interest in neuroeconomics I felt I should type something out about this quote (ht Andrew Sullivan): Dualists about the mind and brain – those who hold that there are thinking [...]
[...] interesting excerpt from an interview with Peter Hacker: There are far too many philosophers who take their task to be to sing the [...]
“since the brain has no cognitive powers at all. There is no such thing as a brain’s thinking, wanting, reasoning, believing or hypothesizing.”
This is the craziest thing ever said by someone who is supposed to be smart.
Does this guy really believe that ‘Wanting’ to drink, eat, or have sex isn’t the result of neural firings in specific regions the brain?
Does this guy really believe that storing items in working memory (i.e. “thinking”) doesn’t require the dorsolateral frontal correx?
Sure, cognitive neuroscience is oversold sometimes, but dismiss it as a waste of time is the height of foolishness. We know exactly how different wavelengths of light are perceived by different photoreceptors to produce the perception of color — so even if we can’t say much about the quality of the experience of ‘red’, to say that we know nothing of color perception is lunacy.
Interesting. Yet another tract on mind and philosophy that will be read by a handful of people and forgotten.
Dr. Hacker: show me a person or mind without a brain, please.
“One cannot explain why someone cannot see by saying that his brain cannot see.”
Why not? What does Hacker think seeing is?
[...] TPM: The Philosophers’ Magazine | Hacker’s challenge. (emphasis [...]
Steve writes: “Does this guy really believe that ‘Wanting’ to drink, eat, or have sex isn’t the result of neural firings in specific regions the brain?”
He wouldn’t disagree that various processes in the brain, among other things (processes in the rest of the body, things in the world, etc.) lead to the feeling that one describes as “wanting a drink,” etc.
No, Hacker’s argument is more “grammatical” than that. He would say something like — Just because certain groups of neurons often (or even always) fire whenever I find myself thirsty, that doesn’t mean that “my brain wants a drink.” Brains cannot drink any more than an esophagus can drink, and the latter is certainly necessary for drinking. Rather, a person — a being that HAS a brain, a hand, a mouth, an esophagus, etc. — can drink and can want a drink.
Similarly, hands are useful because they allow us to give and receive things. I use them when I want to pay for my lunch at a restaurant. But hands themselves do not pay for things and receive payment — rather, people (and corporations — “legal people”) do. If hands themselves could pay for things, then my left hand could pay my right hand, which would be nonsense. (Even in a puppet show, where we have my hands represent people, it would be more correct to say that the characters that they represent are paying one another, in the story, than it would be to say that my hands are paying one another.)
This grammatical argument isn’t mere pedantry — for say that we deny the argument: Say that we grant that, since my brain is so important to the whole enterprise of seeing, we really should say, “My brain sees my laptop computer in front of me.” Then we would like to know — what does my laptop look like, to my brain? (I already know what it looks like to me. But how it looks to my brain — that sounds like hidden knowledge.) Or in commenter Dr. Lehar’s words (http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/epist/epist5.html), what are the “properties of the visual representation in the brain”? This way of speaking frames an entire area of psychological study, which the above grammatical argument rejects.
The somewhat ill-conceived conception of philosophy that the quote bellow
expounds is surprisingly popular:
“Our business is to tidy up linguistic or conceptual confusions rooted,
among other places, in existing grammar. What we can do is clarify and
disentangle conceptual confusions in the sciences.”
Firstly it seems that this interpretation of Wittgensteins take on philosophy is either wrong. Or if not, then this conception of philosophy cannot be justified by any ‘philosophical theory’ (such as Wittgensteinian conception of language) without being blatantly self contradictory.
Wittgenstein can hardly be said to have followed this advice in any stage of his
philosophizing. The theory about meaning language and meaning that this kind of conception of philosophy rests on, is not merely an act of a entangling some form of conceptual confusion. It is positive theory about language and the world. (Wittgenstein himself and true believers might see his thoughts on language as fact on par with scientific theory, rather than philosophy, but to the rest of the world they constitute a philosophical theory.) It fails to practice what it preaches.
The notion that the greatest triumphs of philosophy lie in negative arguments,
that rather show our lack of understanding than furthering it, is anyhow hardly new.
Secondly one cannot disentangle a philosophical or ‘grammatical’ muddle if one has no positive theory or positive claims about the subject matter to disentangle. Of course one can
claim that one really is disentangling some everyday conceptions or other
scientific conceptions or grammatical misconceptions. But the distinctions between these and philosophical conceptions seem utterly unclear.
The fact is that what Hacker thinks are scientific notions, seem to be very
philosophical notions (at least that is what most of us would probably call them).
Is Hacker saying that there should be no attempts at formulating any positive
notions about what consciousness is? Only some form of disentangling of notions
The bottom line is that one cannot do philosophy, even in the disentangling
sense, without having some speculative ideas to examine. Even if these are
always to be discarded or made to disappear (as the metaphor goes?).
The Wittgensteinian metaphor of ‘disolving grammatical confusions’ is itself a muddle.
Thomas Metzinger seems to me the only one who gets it: “Certainly by far the best contributions to philosophy of mind in the last century
have come from analytical philosophers, philosophers in the tradition of Frege and
Wittgenstein. Because many such philosophers are superb at analyzing the deeper struc-
ture of language, they often fall into the trap of analyzing the conscious mind as if it were
4 Chapter 1
itself a linguistic entity, based not on dynamical self-organization in the human brain, but
on a disembodied system of rule-based information processing. At least they frequently
assume that there is a “content level” in the human mind that can be investigated without
knowing anything about “vehicle properties,” about properties of the actual physical car-
riers of conscious content. The vehicle-content distinction for mental representations cer-
tainly is a powerful tool in many theoretical contexts. But our best and empirically
plausible theories of representation, those now so successfully employed in connectionist and dynamicist models of cognitive functioning, show that any philosophical theory of
mind treating vehicle and content as anything more than two strongly interrelated aspects of one and the same phenomenon simply deprives itself of much of its explanatory power, if not of its realism and epistemological rationality.” (excerpt from “Being No One: The Self-model Theory of Subjectivity”)
“By doing philosophy you come to realise things about the structure of our conceptual scheme that you would never have realised otherwise. Realization is indeed a dawning of knowledge. But the knowledge here is not knowledge of the world we live in. It is knowledge of the structure of our conceptual scheme. It very often looks like “metaphysical knowledge” of reality – as it were knowledge of the scaffolding of the world. But it’s no such thing.”
ok.
“The world doesn’t have scaffolding.”
If the preceding statement is true, then how can you categorically make any claim about what “the world” does or does not have?
“Rather, in doing philosophy, we come to realise the character of the grammatical and linguistic scaffolding from which we describe the world, not the scaffolding of the world.”
A more philosophical perspective might argue that such a clean and neat separation of res and verba is one thing philosophy teaches us not to take for granted.
As an ex-Catholic undergraduate schooled first in Thomism followed by two years of Logical Positivism in graduate school under Mortimer Kadish ,I gave up on philosophy as a useful enterprise. This essay on Wittgenstein persuades me to take another look.Policing the grounds to keep philosophical morons from creating useless diversions or frustrating dead ends is a noble enterprise.Patrick D.Hazard,Weimar, Germany.
“As long as people read Wittgenstein”, eh? Already when I went to grad school in 1969, many good philosophers realized that at least the later Wittegenstein was engaging but pretentious dribble, substituting arm-waving for work. Read Chalmers for serious inquiries into consciousness before succumbing to these guru-utterances. Read Tarski or Kripke or Skyrms before huffing and puffing about philosophy.
Any sentence that contains the phrase “dynamical self-organization” as an explanation for any phenomenon can be safely ignored.
Hacker claims that philosophy is “a quest for understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive of the knowledge we achieve about the world”. But that conceptual scheme is, itself, part of the natural world, and understanding this fact is the key to understanding Quine’s naturalism, which entails that philosophy and science are along an epistemic continuum. It seems to me that denying that this conceptual scheme is part of the natural world would be the only move that could justify Wittgenstein’s approach. But this honest dualism is never embraced. BTW, I think that Quinean naturalism, not honest dualism, is the better bet.
“The main barrier is the scientism that pervades our mentality and our culture.”
Dr. Hacker reveals his prejudice.
I’m no philosopher, so I must ask a silly question. If a desire to drink something happens, what is doing or having the desire? And if the answer is “consciousness is doing or having the desire,” then what has been explained?
I Fully agree with Hacker people read the philosophy to understand to know thyself.Science may create tremendous knowledge but knowledge never satisfy our urge to know our self.science making life easy, safe, but science have no capacity to teach understanding. Philosophy give us satisfaction, joy,show the way for meaning of life.
“What is it like?…” is a request for metaphor. Likewise, the notion of “scaffolding” is metaphorical, and an apt metaphor for the process of metaphor in general. While it behooves us not to mistake our metaphors for the territory itself, we may be constrained to understand the territory (both outer and inner) through metaphor. Our brains evolved to process specific kinds of information, and while that limits us to what we can “handle,” it’s also the vehicle for transcending those limitations — using visual metaphors, for example, to structure and conceptualize that what can’t be “seen” — such as “mind”.
Hacker is right in a sense — philosophy has not been a cognitive discipline — but that does not mean that philosophy *can’t* be rooted in neuroscience. It just *hasn’t* been, yet, by and large.
~ jane ~
p.s. To ask what it’s like for a woman to be a woman, first, ask a woman. She can tell you about her personal experience, vis-a-vis the conceptions she has of women and the conceptions she understands others to have of women. The comparison is between an individual and a “category”, and she can use experiences available to everyone to illustrate “what it’s like.”
“What is it like . . ” is synonymous with “What is it similar to” and “What does it resemble”. No? Why not?
Or is like-ness different from likeness? Seems like analytical thinking is bumping up against ontological questions by the back door.
Why not, “How is it with you, o bat?”
Also, I don’t see how you get that by “What is it like to be a bat?” means “What is it like for a bat to be a bat?”
While I am sympathetic to many of Hacker’s ideas, it seems to me that his dismissal of Nagel’s question is too facile, for Nagel’s question can be rephrased so to be contrastive, as follows:
What is it like to be a conscious thing rather than a non-conscious thing?
[...] All Hail Science! (James Garvey, The Philosophers’ Magazine, 25/10/11) Maybe a nice counterpoint to the above article, this is a look at the work of the English philosopher, Peter Hacker, and his take on the perils and delusions of today’s Scientism. [...]
To say that knowledge isn’t understanding and that consciousness of that, generation after generation, is philosophy’s task is admirable. In his generation, Peter Hacker rises sensibily to it.
In an earlier one, Bernard Lonergan’s _Insight: A Study of Human Understanding_ did so, perhaps more intellectually.
” People dull their wits with gibberish,
and cannot use their ears and eyes “
What took you so long? Tibetan Buddhist commentary addresses this issue without religious fol-de-ral.
Intercept the hermeneutic circle on its next pass close to earth, then and only then will if become then.
[...] Its all cleared up here. [...]
[...] is not knowledge. His approach is Wittgensteinian derived, which, according to James Garvey* of The Philosophers’ Magazine, is “a conception of philosophy which regards philosophical problems as confusions in [...]
[...] für seine Studien zu Wittgenstein bekannte und in Oxford lehrende Philosoph Peter Hacker wird im Philospher’s Magazine porträtiert. Darin geht es um Hackers Kritik an philosophischen Einlassungen von Neurowissenschaftlern, die [...]
It seems to me that Peter Hacker begins with HIS definition of philosophy, from which his following points (may) follow. Since many philosophers, and their readers, consider philosophy as attempting quite different things, I fear Hacker, in claiming that ALL philosophy is and does such-and-such, may himself be suffering from a “confusion of language.”
What’s all the fuss? Didn’t Daniel Dennett explain consciousness way back in 1991, as in “Consciousness Explained”, and such a modest title it was. Then there was Patricia Churchland, and rafts of others. Is it possible we have been had? And by people making good livings with good sinecures, and with professional ethics to boot.
I have suspected for some time now that ‘analytical philosophy’ emerged from the minds of overly clever young men who served as cryptographers in the Second World War.
That event (WWII) over, these people–devious thinkers to the last man–flocked to universities, where it happily turned out they all spoke the same code.
I sincerely hope Hacker’s last major work will serve as the tombstone for this kind of philosophy.
I note with a sense of amusement bordering on exasperation Hacker’s assertion that “…philosophy is not a cognitive discipline”.
This cannot be true. It must therefore be nonsense.
Alfred N.Whitehead (now there’s a real philosopher) pointed out that “…philosophy is mystical”.
He goes on to explain that “mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken”.
However, he says, “…the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism”.
And there you have it–real philosophy, rather than linguistic nitpicking.
[...] Peter Hacker tells James Garvey that neuroscientists are talking nonsense [...]
“Philosophical questions aren’t solved; they’re dissolved”, Hacker believes.
Yes and no–and unambiguously so.
Philosophy is not a ‘convergent’ process at the far end of which you run into an application; it is ‘divergent’ in character–generating, not solutions, but more questions.
According to Whitehead (oh, him again), “The aim of philosophy is sheer disclosure”.
So, not dissolution, but disclosure. Makes sense to me. Why else engage in it?
Hacker seems to conflate cognition and science. But the vast bulk of our cognitive activities are not devoted to science at all.
Except perhaps when one is a linguistic confabulator, but that’s just a guess.
Consciousness is indeed interesting and curious.
But I don’t think “having one’s attention caught and held by something one perceives” covers the concept.
This type of ‘consciousness’ is passive–because reactive. It seems more a fysiological reflex than what I understand consciousness to be.
The philosophical concept of consciousness, the foundational form of it, must be autonomous, if one is trying to say anything sensible and/or worthwhile about it.
“…becoming conscious of something is not an act at all…”, says the writer, “let alone a voluntary act”.
Well, a reflex action is an act(ion), after a fashion; it quite often saves lives, even though it may not be voluntary.
But, you know, it’s better to be involuntarily alive, than voluntarily dead–is my view on it.
“…thinking, unlike becoming conscius (I like that word, it’s so much less like couscous)…is, or can be, a voluntary act or activity”, I read.
But if ‘thinking’ “is, or can be” something or other, that’s like having it both ways and trying to get away with it.
Thinking is voluntary or it isn’t voluntary–but perhaps not both just because it may suit you one day thisly and another day thatly.
It is dismaying to see after all these years we still fall short of sharing such a philosophical insight as to how we come to operate with pictures (representations) of language. That results in such confusions as expressed by our gestures of meaning, showing, pointing,intending, willing, giving an ostensive definition and so on of entities (”things”/”events”/”processes”) the identites and differences of which are actually learnt by operating and using pictures of language in internal connection with other signs. Therefore, Wittgenstein always reminds the “surroundings”, the signifying internal connections of manifest signifying phenomena of the pictures of historical language-games, as the trans-historical basis of historical language-games. Therefore the reminders assembled as “language-games” not only elucidate the signifying internal connections of the use of our pictures of language with the manifest signfications of phenomena, but also untie the knots that intertwine human imagination and memory reactions to images and associations of pictures, the form of expressions of which are expressed by gestures of meaning and giving an ostensive as if they are “entities” analysed and perceived to be meant and named. Wittgenstein by elucidating the signifying internal connections essential for a word to operate as a picture to represent an identity and difference to be used both as a means and ends of picturing, clarify by contrast the suppositions and presuppositions expressed by gestures of meaning, giving an ostensive definition of anything, that they signify nothing, like an idle wheel turning nothing with itself, except the fact of deep failure of awareness with its own consequences mamifesting from that failure of awareness — as the karma manifesting as its own consequence — as always reminded by the Buddhas and Zen masters. Thanks to efforts of those philosophers who are trying to contribute to the sharing of such a universal philosophical insight, despite to the main stream of intellectualism who always tend to theorize and argue by constructing external connections between pictures without really understanding how human intentionality and imagination reactions are conditioned by the images associated by their resemblances to pictures of historical language-games.
What is it like to be conscious? Here’s what I would ask Peter Hacker:
Peter, think about it. When you are awake doesn’t it feel like you are at the center of a surrounding space full of stuff and events and sensations? Isn’t this what consciousness is like for you? Think again. Aren’t your toes below your head? So isn’t your body a part of the space that you are in? If this is the case, where are you? The weight of empirical evidence points to a particular system of specialized neuronal mechanisms in your brain.
See: http://people.umass.edu/trehub/YCCOG828%20copy.pdf
What becomes clear is that ‘discovery’ itself is not a recipy for anything, and neither are rambling, muddled articles of this kind.
And I won’t go into ‘language’ as delivery of thought or the way in which this ‘confused’ messenger screws up a lot.
Again, this article represents proof in that sweet pudding.
Let’s just say that what we have here is a fight about the car, its design, how it grew, how it runs, how it moves, fuelled by what, having it go from A to B, by which likely road… and the freedom of indeterminate driving.
Yes, brains don’t think as such, just like cars don’t drive alone.
Why not simply differentiate between the mechanical levels 1 & 2, i.e. movement and simple hands-on reasoning (Move away from danger!) and conceptional levels 3 & 4, memory and the capacity to conjure up from simple pictures to sometimes disastrous complex abstractions. With 1 & 2 called ‘brain’, and 3 & 4 called ‘mind’,and with ‘philosophy’ needing to identify the potentially disastrous, then attempt finding a path around it.
No use getting carried away and ever so pompously, dear lads!
I think that the tone Hacker adopts probably contributes to a misunderstanding by the cognitive neuroscience folks. I don’t think he is opposed to scientific investigations of the brain at all in principle. The problem is that folk concepts that are learned and applied in social and behavioral contexts are then being retooled for this purpose, and that can lead to confusion (metaphors in one’s lexicon not being recognized as such like using “representation” a certain way, tacit homunculi being posited, etc.) The concern a Wittgensteinian displays about the potential for confusion here gets (ironically) misread as some sort of opposition to inquiry. It’s sort of like if someone who was studying a part of the brain which, when lesioned, prevented one from doing arithmetic, had asserted that they had discovered the physical location of the number four, and someone like Hacker had said “that’s a misunderstanding of mathematical concepts,” and they replied that he was a Luddite, a Mysterian, for *not* believing that the number four was a physical object, on the assumption that such a denial must entail that it is a nonphysical object. The expression “consciousness” is a linguistic token used in certain social contexts (”he’s lost consciousness!”) but that doesn’t mean that this term is adequate to any empirical inquiry into anything. Ironically, I think here Hacker and people like the Churchlands agree, whether they realize it or not.
No sensible person denies that the brain is causally necessary to certain socially defined behavioral performances; I think he’s just trying to caution us that socially defined behavioral performances and brain events aren’t the same kind of thing. I understand why the way he presents this is antagonizing, but I don’t think it should be, properly understood. Folk behavioral taxonomies are unlikely to map onto neuroscience taxonomies at all, but that doesn’t imply that they are in competition.
[...] Though it is my understanding philosophical proofs of pure negatives are problematic. Hacker’s challenge – Peter Hacker tells James Garvey that neuroscientists are talking nonsen… “Philosophy does not contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in after the manner of any [...]
It is not just Hacker’s tone that is the problem; it is his tactic. He builds a caricature of consciousness studies and then challenges us to defend his own caricature.
There is no doubt that consciousness is a tough nut to crack. But who would deny that consciousness is the linchpin of all human endeavor? This alone justifies a concerted effort to understand its nature. It seems to me that *consciousness studies* is an apt term to describe this effort, and that neuroscience is clearly an essential discipline in the exploration of consciousness.
Hacker declares:
“The whole endeavour of the consciousness studies community is absurd – they are in pursuit of a chimera. They misunderstand the nature of consciousness. The conception of consciousness which they have is incoherent. The questions they are asking don’t make sense. They have to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.”
Sadly, Hacker is behind the times when he suggests that there is a prevailing dogma in the field of consciousness studies. For a glimpse of the diversity of theoretical and empirical approaches to the problem of consciousness, see here:
http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/Online_Conf_FINAL.pdf
Hacker again:
“If they cannot show that my arguments are wrong, they should admit the errors of their ways and withdraw from the field! That’s the challenge.”
It seems to me that the evidence against Hacker’s arguments is out there for all to see. But those with blinkers are blind to the evidence.
What of tendency- minds, souls, spirit, location-of-awareness? What have you to see, sense. Tendendcy is a less than explored region of human nature. We tend toward, meaning our thoughts spray toward a location- the material is all that is, the emergence of mind cannot be explained. We tend toward mystery
What of tendency- a particular lean our souls, spirits, awareness, location-of-thought move toward? Tendency is an unexplored country (not the death one, another one). We tend toward the material (all things can be known) and the evanescent (mystery abides). What of the minds constant variegation of these two bastards? You can delve structures of mind or structures of mind, yes two things, (grammer, flesh). You can- but what of tendency? Why do I see spirit and you bone? Why do I see bone and you see spirit? Always Ask More! (options, anyone?)I will say this, metaphysics might be on holiday but not because it does not explain- thought does not explain, it opens. So yes, maybe I’m on Mr Harvey’s side- but that does not explain my tendency toward….Also, TENDENCY!
[...] via TPM [...]
While I agree with Hacker about the role of philosophy in general,the most substantive value I’ve gotten from this entire discussion was the pointer to Arnold Trehub’s article:
Space, Self and the Theater of Consciousness.
Trehub seems to me to be using a deft and powerful balance of metaphorical description and empirically based speculation to truly add to the conversation.
I have the impression one equates consciousness with rational reflection.
Seen this way, consciousness is pretty well limited to the only rational species on the planet–humans. But I believe other species are just as, or perhaps even more, conscious than humans.
The ability to reflect on things occurs ‘within’ consciousness, in a manner of speaking.
As I am sure Prof. Hacker knows, there is a great tendency to reify concepts and then endow them with independent existence. I believe that consciousness is best viewed as a process rather than an entity. The further complication is the general unwillingness to note that the (self)-observer, me, cannot be put in the place of another (self)-observer, you, since we are two different simultaneous processes.
[...] with Oxford (and Wittgensteinian) philosopher Peter Hacker in The Philosophers’ Magazine here (“Hacker’s Challenge”). Some people have been denigrating the interview at [...]
“But who would deny that consciousness is the linchpin of all human endeavor?”-Arnold Trehub.
Well, Hacker certainly seems to deny this. If consciousness is such a linchpin, how is it that Greek philosophy seems to have no word for “consciousness”? From this I would not infer that the word is useless, but I agree with Hacker that we shouldn’t just assume that there is such a topic, qua “linchpin.” Maybe a combination of Plato/Aristotle cognitive ascent (cf. Republic, De anima) with the notion of “interiority” that becomes explicit in Augustine and Descartes (and to which the “what it’s like” idiom directs our attention) would be helpful. Interiority can indeed become a sort of fetish (as in “sense data”). But it may nevertheless point toward something significant.
Bob Wallace wrote:
“If consciousness is such a linchpin, how is it that Greek philosophy seems to have no word for “consciousness”?
Language is always a problem. But we try. Hacker aside, would you claim that consciousness is *not* essential for all human endeavor?
Back to the problem of language, you might be interested in reading _The Pragmatics of Cognition_, pp. 300-301 here:
http://people.umass.edu/trehub/thecognitivebrain/chapter16.pdf
In particular, the last paragraph of this brief observation.
Quietism is a call to ending inquiry. The fact that others are not and still wondering about abstract philosophical problems that don’t amount to a hill of beans and we should criticize them until they do more productive work only gives philosophers a job for the time being. That is, to mitigate the unbridled curiosity of past/contemporary philosophers which is seeping into the sciences.
Once this happens, philosophers not willing to be self-indulgent and those who don’t think the problems need to be re-realized, will go into more productive fields - as they should.
Also, those of us unwilling to spend our lives making the projects of other intellectuals worthwhile, will go into another field, now.
[...] you? According to Hacker, philosophy is not a cognitive discipline. It’s something else entirely. More… « Humanities Journal, Volume 8, Number 6 now available Recently published in the [...]
[...] 4th, 2010 § Leave a Comment A few weeks ago I read an article by James Garvey about the philosopher Peter Hacker which discusses the difference between [...]
[...] second article is from The Philosopher’s Magazine: Hacker’s Challenge, in which Peter Hacker does a marvelous job of explaining why some of philosophy needs to be [...]
[...] You’d think that a definition of philosophy would be a fairly settled thing by now. But no, not necessarily, according to this piece in TPM: The Philosophers’ Magazine. [...]
[...] ne tako davnom intervjuu za TPM, Peter Hacker je spomenuo svoju kritiku slavnog Nagelovog „What is it like to be a bat?“ [...]
CVP says:
“Wittgenstein can hardly be said to have followed this advice in any stage of his
philosophizing. The theory about meaning language and meaning that this kind of conception of philosophy rests on, is not merely an act of a entangling some form of conceptual confusion. It is positive theory about language and the world. (Wittgenstein himself and true believers might see his thoughts on language as fact on par with scientific theory, rather than philosophy, but to the rest of the world they constitute a philosophical theory.) It fails to practice what it preaches.”
But there is no theory of language in Wittgenstein’s later work, and CVP offers no proof that he had one.
“Of course one can
claim that one really is disentangling some everyday conceptions or other
scientific conceptions or grammatical misconceptions. But the distinctions between these and philosophical conceptions seem utterly unclear.”
Not at all; it’s pretty clear in Wittgenstein’s work, in Hacker’s and in the work of many other Wittgensteinians
“Secondly one cannot disentangle a philosophical or ‘grammatical’ muddle if one has no positive theory or positive claims about the subject matter to disentangle.”
That’s like saying that you can’t cure a disease unless you have already got it!
“The fact is that what Hacker thinks are scientific notions, seem to be very
philosophical notions (at least that is what most of us would probably call them).”
He’d merely point out that these scientific notions have already been overlaid with philosophical (and quasi-Cartesian) connotations, and that is why they seem to CVP to be philosophical.
“The bottom line is that one cannot do philosophy, even in the disentangling
sense, without having some speculative ideas to examine. Even if these are
always to be discarded or made to disappear (as the metaphor goes?).”
In fact. Hacker and others begin with the speculations of traditional philosophy and unmask the latent non-sense they contain.
“The Wittgensteinian metaphor of ‘disolving grammatical confusions’ is itself a muddle.”
Well, I think we are going to need more than your say-so on this…
The more I read of ’scientist’s’ complaints, the more convinced I am that they are morons. It has become good fun to claim to be a Creationist just to watch the blood pressure rise high in the face of a ’scientist.’
If anyone is looking for evidence as to how deep this conceptual confusion really is, all one needs to do is to read some of the above replies.
Of all the comments above, there isn’t a single criticism of Hacker/LW which isn’t based on some sort of a gross misunderstanding of what is actually being said.
The only fault on Hacker’s part is that, perhaps after a lifetime of analysis of Wittgenstein’s work, he seems to underestimate the level of difficulty his philosophy presents to the average, or even above-average, philosopher, not to mention the random internet reader.
Is Hacker portraying too many neuroscientists in a bad light and thus deservedly incurring their wrath, or is Hacker correct and the flurry of the attacks on his position proof that the scientists cannot understand what he is saying?
I see Hacker’s understanding of the Nagel “What it’s like” to be completely off as many other comments here have stated. So although much of Hacker’s thoughts are indeed clearing up confusions, he does sometimes show his own “delusions.”
Hacker is spot on! Bravo! And it is no objection to philosophical argument, of any kind, that it can be difficult to parse, especially if one wades in without much preparation.
But one would not think it too difficult to understand, in fact one might even suppose it self-evident, as Hacker observes, that “[t]here are far too many philosophers who take their task to be to sing the Hallelujah Chorus to the sciences. It seems to me we should be serious, and one hopes helpful, conceptual critics of the sciences.”
Indeed.