Being and Being Known
Representation and Similarity
Opening issues
• Endorses Thomism: The senses in their
way and the intellect in its way are
informed by the natures of external objects
and events.
• But the Thomist account of this
isomorphism is over-simplified.
• This has major implications for other
Thomist theses.
Contrasts
• Descartes
• Contemporary Anglo-American ‘realism’
• Both agree that intellectual acts differ not in their intrinsic
character as acts, but only in their relata (i.e. what they
are related to).
• For D, the relatum is a thing ‘having being for mind’ (an
‘objective’ thing, as D puts it.)
• For contemporary realists there is no interposition of
special things that have ‘being for mind’ here– instead it
is things in the world that are the ‘objects’ of thought, i.e.
the things thoughts are related to (in the contentdetermining way).
Meinongianism
• The realist turn requires objects for thoughts that
are of non-existing things.
• Hence a distinction is drawn between existence
(reserved for ‘real’ things) and subsistence– the
kind of being possessed by the objects of
thoughts of non-existent things.
• Meinong took this to its limits, allowing even for
the subsistence of round squares– here every
singular term has an object it refers to.
• Russell’s theory of descriptions eliminates such
singular terms, avoiding at least some of these
peculiar, non-existent objects.
Against Contents
• Existence-for-mind (objective being) seems very
peculiar; more a metaphorical re-statement of
the fact that one is thinking of something than an
explanation of it.
• But does this force us to accept the realism
above? No.
• If thoughts differ intrinsically in ways that
determine what they are thoughts of, there’s no
need to posit strange relata to specify
(individuate) their contents!
The Mental Word
• The most promising approach to talking about these
intrinsic differences between different thoughts is the
model of the mental word.
• Sellars rejects the Thomistic version of this view, and
defends one grounded in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
• This account requires some general view of the
language of thought (mental questions, mental
statements, mental nouns, etc.) and especially of the
difference between mental words as acts and mental
words as propensities or dispositions (as in the Thomist
distinction between first and second act).
• Here the issue of when and how we come to have the
mental vocabulary we have comes up.
Abstraction
• The abstraction account of the origins of our
mental words holds that we begin with no such
words in our mental ‘vocabulary’.
• Through our senses we acquire such words, as
we have complex sensations and
recognize/distinguish their components.
• Sellars rejects this as both wrong from the
outset, and (more clearly) unable to deal with
mental words (and sentences!) that aren’t about
the sensible features of things and events in the
world.
Odd claim & 3 questions
• Sellars says that the Thomists hold our
grasp of the nature of mental words is
independent of the details of the analogy
to language.
• 3 questions: What is a mental word, how
do we come by them, and how are they
related to the world?
The Thomist Story
• Natures inform both thoughts and things.
• For example, the nature triangular can inform a thing,
making it triangular.
• It can also inform a thought, making it triangular in the
immaterial mode (i.e. making it represent triangularity…)
• When such a nature can inform particular thoughts of
ours, then it informs our intellect (i.e. puts it in in first act
with respect to this mental word).
• Types and tokens: Every mental act which is informed in
this way is a token of the corresponding mental word
type.
Acquiring mental words
• Here the idea is that the senses are a
source of mental words, i.e. that we come
to have many of our mental words by
having the appropriate kind of sensory
experiences: sensations of triangles
furnish our minds with the mental word
.triangle..
• Extrinsic (smoke of fire) vs. intrinsic
(sensory/mental words) signs.
Example
• White and triangular exist in an external, white
triangular thing.
• Its action on (normal) senses (in normal
conditions) makes the natures white and
triangular (in the immaterial mode) exist in the
organ of sight.
• In these conditions the organ in act (i.e. by virtue
of being in this state) is a sign of the white
triangular thing.
• This is a case of the ‘sensitive’ as opposed to
‘intellectual’ word—we need to be careful here,
since Sellars will distinguish these sharply.
Vocabulary of sense vs. intellect
• First, the vocabulary of sense is going to
be reduced/cut down from that of the
intellect.
• Focus here on sensible features of things.
• Absence of words for logical connectives,
abstract singular terms (words for
universals), words for forming judgements
(not: This thing is white,
but only: this white thing.)
Sellars on sense
• Sense is a cognitive faculty:
• It’s essential to knowledge of the world.
• But it ‘knows nothing’, & is not part of the intentional
order.
• The senses do have pseudo-intentionality, though!
• Grammatical parallel: A sensation of x // A thought of x.
• The idea of being white in the immaterial mode applies
both to sensations and to thoughts– here it’s tempting to
identify these two ‘immaterial’ modes of existence…
• But there’s a different way to tell how ‘white’ and
‘triangular’ can characterize sensations that doesn’t
assimilate them to the ways in which these can
characterize thoughts.
White sensations
• Are normally brought about by white
things.
• Differ systematically from sensory states
brought about by things of other colours.
• Are sometimes brought about by other
sorts of things/conditions– hence can
explain cases of illusion…
Order of things
• On this view, the ‘white’ of sensations is
derivative from the ‘white’ of things.
• This fits with language learning.
• It doesn’t fit with foundationalism, for
which our grasp of the features of
sensations is prior to our grasp of anything
about the external world.
• Analogy with healthy, as in ‘healthy food,’
and healthy, as in ‘healthy person’.
Self-knowledge
• For Sellars, direct self-knowledge (I’m having a
sensation of…) can only be expressed using
such analogical concepts. This is a pretty
radical view!
• The place of derivative white and derivative
triangular in the system of the species of sense
acts is isomorphic in the structural sense with
the place of basic white and basic triangular in
the system of the perceptible qualities of
material things (49).
Intellectual words
• Logical words.
• Object (about the real order) vs. Meta (about the
logical order)– latter revealed by use of abstract
singular terms (triangularity) and talk of
implication, a logical relation between
judgments.
• These words are so closely linked to sensory
words, the separation required by Thomism
seems impossible to maintain.
• So Sellars denies any of our mental words are
there in sensation at all.
Holism
• Having any mental words requires having many.
• We need a whole (if rudimentary) language here.
• The need to see white things in order to have the
concept ‘white’ is not a matter of such seeings being a
form of consciousness of something white as white.
• Instead, coming to have the mental word ‘white’ occurs
when we perceive something as white– an act that
includes a judgment that it is white, and involves both the
senses and the intellect.
• In particular, complex linguistic training is essential for
such perceptions to occur: it’s not just a matter of
sensation.
Isomorphism
• The word 'isomorphism' applies when two
complex structures can be mapped onto
each other, in such a way that to each part
of one structure there is a corresponding
part in the other structure, where
'corresponding' means that the two parts
play similar roles in their respective
structures. (Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher,
Bach, p. 49)
Two Isomorphisms
• When Sellars speaks of isomorphism
between the intellect and the world, he has
two different relations in mind:
– A relation between the intellect as a real entity
in the world and other elements of the world,
i.e. an isomorphism in the ‘real order’.
– The relation between the intellect and
language, when the intellect is conceived in
terms derived from its analogy with language,
i.e. an isomorphism in the ‘logical order’.
Terminology
• The isomorphism in the real order, a parallel between
correct descriptions of intellectual states and their
relations with/ interactions with various features of the
world is called picturing. This invokes the obvious fact
that both pictures and the things they picture are part of
the real order.
• The isomorphism between intellectual states and
language, in which intellectual states are described in
terms derived from the features and relations of overt
linguistic episodes, is called signification. This invokes
meaning and the normative roles that different
expressions play in language, which parallel the roles
that different intellectual states play in thought.
The spoken word
• Here Sellars will focus on the spoken
word, focusing on the distinction between
the two isomorphisms as it emerges in this
case.
• From there, Sellars intends to apply the
distinction to the mental word, following
the analogy to language that, for Sellars, is
the source of the concepts we apply to
individuate and relate thoughts.
The Robot
• The distinction between the two isomorphisms is
easy to lose track of.
• Sellars proposes to use an example that will
make it easier to keep them distinct.
• It’s easier to separate the ‘merely mechanical’
workings of a sophisticated robot from the
‘translation’ we might be tempted to give of the
‘tape language’ it uses to record its observations
of the world and itself.
The Robot Pictures
• The robot writes various symbols on its tape in response
to the features of its environment that it can detect.
• It also writes symbols on its tape in response to
regularities in what it finds written there (thus performing
‘inductive’ reasonings) and other features of what it finds
there (thus maintaining a kind of autobiography of its
observations).
• As it proceeds, it produces a kind of ‘map’ of its
surroundings and its own states over time.
• Maps, of course, don’t record every detail– this is a map
only in the sense that, given the robot’s construction and
behaviour patterns, there is a rich structural relation
between features of the tape and features/events in the
robot’s environment.
Signifying
• For Sellars, signification is a relation between languages, very
closely related to translation.
• When we say: in German, ‘Mensch’ signifies man, we are indicating
a parallel between the role of ‘Mensch’ in German and the role of
‘man’ in our (or the audience’s) language.
• This is very different from the (much more metaphysical) view of
language, according to which ‘man’ in our example is being used
(not mentioned), but in a slightly non-standard way (since it’s not
being used predicatively, i.e. to describe some item as a man).
• The non-standard use is a kind of meta-use, in which ‘man’ refers to
‘the absolute nature, man’ (something like a Platonic form), so that
on this view, our statement of signification asserts a relation
between the word ‘Mensch’ and a very special sort of thing (an entity
that is part of the world, read broadly, and which in turn has some
sort of real relation– instantiation, perhaps– to individual men).
The robot signifies
• The issue of signification arises when we ‘translate’
symbols on the robot’s tape into our own language
(Sellars’ example is the translation of ‘::’ as lightning.
• Our decision to adopt such a translation assumes that
there is a picturing relation between the instances of ‘::’
in the robot’s tape and occurrences of lighting– a
picturing relation that parallels that between instances of
‘lightning’ in our talk about the world and instances of
lightning.
• But adopting such a translation treats the picture as a
language, bringing in normative categories (e.g. ‘this
instance of ‘::’ is a mistake– there was a different sort of
flash at the time, which the robot was unable to
distinguish from lightning.”)
Back to the Mental Word
• Sellars recurs to his suggestion, ‘that the notion
of mental words is an extension by analogy of
the notion of the spoken word’ (57).
• Analogies always involve disanalogies:
‘Thoughts, after all, are not patterns of ‘inner
sounds’ produced by the wagging of a hidden
tongue.’ (Ibid)
• But they are linked to the ‘give and take’
between humans and their environment in ways
(patterns) like those that link overt speech to
these things.
Order of explanation vs. Order of
conceptual priority
• In the order of explanation, thoughts come first,
and overt language is their public expression.
• This does not conflict with the claim that we
conceive thoughts in terms that we apply first to
overt language.
• Similarly, we explain much of what ordinary
things do in terms of unobservables like
electrons, but we conceive those unobservables
by analogy, using concepts that we first acquired
in describing ordinary things.
The temptation of metaphysics
• In paragraph 56, Sellars gives an account of how
confusing these two separate (but related) isomorphisms
can lead us to endorse the Thomistic claim that the
intellect is immaterial.
• The idea is that the link between ‘Mensch’ and the
absolute nature man is a matter of the intellectual word
‘Mensch’ actually realizing this nature– but since it
clearly is not (really) a material, physical man, we have
to insist that it is instead a man in some other sense, i.e.
a man in the immaterial mode.
• On this view, thoughts embody the same nature, viz.
man, as the things those thoughts are about. We’re
back to a puzzling and strange and unilluminating
metaphor here– not the way to make progress!
Direct Knowledge
• We do have direct knowledge of facts such as ‘I’m now
thinking of a white triangle’.
• For Descartes, this required that we have knowledge of
what it really is to be such a thought, i.e. knowledge of
this state ‘in propria persona’ as it is in itself.
• For Sellars, this is a mistake– we can have direct
knowledge of such states of ourselves for reasons that
do not require us to know just what it is to be in such a
state– this direct knowledge is framed in concepts
derived from analogies between language and thought
and (in the case of sensations) between characters of
sensations and the ‘perceptible qualities of physical
things’ (59).
Keeping the two separate
• So we can now see how keeping the two isomorphisms
separate in the case of thought keeps us away from
metaphysical temptations.
• If the isomorphism of significance (at the level of
translation) holds, it follows that there must also be a
picturing isomorphism between the intellect and the real,
paralleling the complex picturing ismorphism between
language and the world.
• So what is thinking (the intellect) in the real world?
• For Sellars, it is events occurring in the central nervous
system– events that we normally describe analogically,
not in propria persona, even though we have direct
knowledge of them.