Review: [Untitled] Reviewed Work(s): The Metaphysics of Mind. by Michael Tye W. D. Hart The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 159. (Apr., 1990), pp. 255-257. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8094%28199004%2940%3A159%3C255%3ATMOM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8 The Philosophical Quarterly is currently published by The Philosophical Quarterly.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/philquar.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.
The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact
[email protected].
http://www.jstor.org Sun Sep 2 01:13:32 2007
The Phzlosophical Quarterly Vol. 40 IVO.159 ISSN 0031-8094 $2.00
BOOK REVIEWS
The Metaphysics of Mind. BY MICHAEL TYE.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. viii 215. Price E25.00.)
+
Michael Tye thinks that many psychological ascriptions are true. He argues (with Terence Horgan) that token mental events are not identical with token physical events in the central nervous system, and he argues on his own against both cartesian (or substance) dualism and event dualism, and against eliminative materialism. T o allow for the truth of psychological ascriptions, he generalizes a doctrine many of us were taught to associate with Roderick M. Chisholm. According to this doctrine, to say that Macbeth hallucinates a dagger is not to assert a relation between Macbeth and an object such as a sense datum, but is rather to assert that Macbeth hallucinates daggerishly. Tye generalizes this doctrine from perception to include bodily sensations, propositional attitudes and all psychology, folk and scientific. Rather than adverbial, he prefers to call his an operator theory. His metaphysical point is that his account allows him not only to agree that many psychological ascriptions are true, but also to avoid commitment to the existence of anything mental. His view is that genuine existential commitments are made by asserting (objectual) existential quantifications whose variables occupy positions for expressions that refer. Such expressions include people's names and singular terms for concreta such as, in his view, space-time regions. But while he allows quantification into predicate position, he expects this to be treated substi:.:rionally. He is aware of, and describes, a treatment on which the variables of such quantification have values, namely sets, and on which expressions in adverb positions denote functions from extensions of some expressions in predicate position to others. Such a treatment makes it seem parochial not to quantify objectually into the positions of those modifiers Tye favours for making true psychological ascriptions. So he prefers another treatment. Predicates (like 'senses' and 'believes') have sets (mostly of people) as extensions; he defers the avoidance of this much platonism to another occasion. But modifiers (like 'redly' and 'that-grass-is-green-ly') do not denote. Instead, the extension of a modified predicate depends on the extension of the predicate and what Tye follows Hartry Field in calling the conceptual role of the modifier; in Qume's terms, one might say that Tye replaces ontology with ideology. Tye is not very explicit about conceptual roles. He uses expressions like 'platitude', 'quasi-analytic', and 'a przorz necessary truths' in discussing conceptual roles. He thinks of conceptual roles of modifiers as constraints on assigning an extension to a modified predicate, and thinks with Dennett contra Putnam that these constraints
256
W. D. HART
probably suffice to make a unique such assignment right. That is how he expects to handle the indefinite, perhaps infinite, range of modifiers of verbs for propositional attitudes. Tye's dialectic is swift, dense and extended ;it is patent that he loves to argue. My very first impression of his text was of a tedious farrago of endless logic chopping all too often festooned with elaborations of quantificational notation, and larding over a doctrine too much a silly nonstarter to be worth refuting. I have packed this last sentence with rhetoric as a warning; first impressions do not deserve implicit trust, and mine was, if anything, anti-philosophical. What, if anything, would be a good objection to Tye's construction? He says that if there are logical connections among psychological ascriptions that his account gets wrong, then his theory is just wrong. While that saying has an admirable forthrightness, the licence he allows himself in inventing operators on modifiers, and in attributing conceptual roles to the results, make that approach to objecting look like a route into a bog of dialectic. But in his introduction, Tye mentions (only to dismiss perhaps all too quickly) another sort of objection. Why stop at adverbializing the mind ? Why not adverbialize everything save perhaps one ultimate subject like Spinoza's substance-orWhitehead's universe, or even take absolutely everything as a mode of a merely formal or dummy subject like the it that rains? Why not vindicate Parmenides? We might for some reason want to preserve some (logical) connections, and avoid others, within our discourse; but how do we know, if we do know, that ingenious invention of, and attribution of conceptual roles to, operators on modifiers will not suffice to entitle us to all of, and no more than, those connections within our discourse that we (or maybe even any old lunatic) might want ? Tye's only answer here seems (p. 7) to be to appeal to the semantic dimension of his theory. He seems to think of so-called folk psychology and, perhaps to some extent, cognitive science as repositories of the semantic roles that constrain his psychological modifiers. Very well ; why should we not think of common sense and, to some extent, science iiberhaupt as repositories of semantic roles sufficient to vindicate Parmenides, Spinoza or Whitehead? Maybe we have reached an absurdurn of Tye's approach; that is, perhaps these questions do not deserve to be taken so seriously as to try to answer them in their own terms. (If so, it might be enlightening to explain how we know that what we have reached is an absurdurn, that is for instance, that Parmenides' or Spinoza's monism is simply not on; but such an explanation is hardly a project to be taken on here.) Suppose we have reached questions not to be answered in their own terms. Can we then apportion blame? Semantic roles are never mentioned in Tye's elaborations of quantificational notation. A wish to be stingy with references for expressions is sometimes compensated by a profligate bestiary of their meanings, and meanings can somehow seem to attach to expressions enough more obliquely than references for ontology to be more spotlighted than ideology. Here one might be reminded of Quine versus Carnap, who wanted to consume his mathematical cake but not eat it. Carnap wanted to say that there are infinitely many prime numbers, but not that there are numbers out there independent of us by virtue ofiwhich that theorem is true. Quine blew a whistle or two, and Carnap came up with frameworks, a distinction between internal and external questions, and meaning postulates. But, to steal a line from Putnam, those were just magic labels under which Carnap tried to say there are
BOOK REVIEWS
257
numbers without saying that there are numbers. Tye's programme for consuming the mind without eating it is certainly nothing like so blatant as Carnap's for abstracta. Where Carnap continued to quantify over numbers, Tye nowhere quantifies over semantic roles in his displayed elaborations of quantificational notation. But at least to some extent that economy may shield his ideology of semantic roles from metaphysical and, perhaps even more importantly, epistemological scrutiny. It seems to me that there is in both Carnap and Tye an illusion of a semantic licence unfettered by anything empirical or physical, and that this licence dangles somewhat oddly beside what seems their tough-minded election of perceptible matter.
University College London
W. D. HART
Reality and the Physicist: Knowledge, Duration and the Quantum World. BY BERNARD D'ESPAGNAT. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. 280. Price E30.00 Hb., E10.95 Pb.) The main thesis of this book is that quantum physics has demonstrated that the existence of a mind-independent reality that can be veridically accessed by the methods of science is no longer tenable. This leaves us with two alternatives. Either science must be restricted to the investigation of regularities in sensible appearances, or we must admit an external reality, but one that is 'hidden' from science, or 'veiled' as D'Espagnat expresses it. D'Espagnat opts for the second alternative, mainly on the grounds that on a purely positivistic approach to science, 'it becomes impossible to understand why a theory enables us to predict experimental results accurately' (p. 68). This is the familiar 'miracle' argument against instrumentalist philosophies of science. The first part of the book, entitled 'Instrumentalism and Science', is a rather careful account of the arguments for and against instrumentalism, and the final conclusion, as we have seen, is against instrumentalism and in favour of physical realism. In the second part of the book, entitled 'Physical Realism and Contemporary Physics', the author explains how recent research on the foundations of quantum mechanics has demonstrated that local realism is no longer viable. D'Espagnat explains the idea behind local realism as follows (p. 83): 'Reality is composed of entities (particles or field strengths) which are localisable in distinct regions and whose influences on each other decrease as the distance between them increases.' It is a remarkable fact that this thesis, of so general and unspecific a nature, can be refuted by suitable experiments in atomic physics, more specifically the experimentally wellconfirmed violation of the famous Bell inequplity, linking certain correlation functions for pairs of observable magnitudes on widely separated microscopic systems. When one talks of refuting local realism the situation is never totally decisive. There always remain ad hoc and/or bizarre possibilities for explaining the
