Chomsky on today's materialism ...

Chomps

What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia UP, 2016) is Noam Chomsky's latest (and perhaps last-est) word on philosophy's big questions. The final chapter of the book is an exercise in what Aristotelians call philosophy of nature, an intermediary discipline between metaphysics and science. There Chomsky argues that the terms material, physical, natural (et al) are basically meaningless nowadays. (And what, then, is it to be a materialist, a physicalist, a naturalist? Cf. the  posts on Galen Strawson here, here, and here.) See, 'we speak of the "physical" world much as we speak of the "real" truth: for emphasis, but adding nothing' (What Kind of Creatures Are We?, p. 105).

'[T]he notions of body, material, physical are hardly more than honorific designations for what is more or less understood at some particular moment in time, with flexible boundaries and no guarantee that there will not be radical revision ahead, even at its core' (ibid., p. 102).

'[T]he concept "physical facts" means nothing more than what the best current scientific theory postulates, hence should be seen as a rhetorical device of clarification, adding no substantive content' (ibid., p. 125). 

Whatever happened to the 'substantive content'? As metaphysicians of matter, the early modern revolutionaries were mechanists.* What does that mean? Chomsky understands the mechanical as that which 'an artisan could construct' (ibid., p. 91). This is correct, inasmuch as all that's mechanical is (theoretically) constructible, but it doesn't get to the centre of the question. At the centre is this: the early modern understanding of matter (or of that which is material) was dysteleologico-nominal. What does that mean? It's helpful to look back to the later mediæval metaphysics, against which Kepler, Galileo, Descartes (and so on) positioned themselves. For Aristotelian metaphysicians, such as Aquinas and Scotus, the difference between an organism and an artefact is teleologico-essential. That is to say, an organism (an example of physis) has an intrinsic teleology and a substantial form, and is in this sense autotelic; whereas an artefact (a product of techne) has an extrinsic teleology and an accidental form, and is in this sense exotelic. The bisect that's made here isn't at all trivial. Its consequences are both intensive and extensive. (Take an example: the causation manifest in an organism is both immanent and transient—immanent in that it begins with the organism and terminates in the organism for the sake of the organism, to adapt David Oderberg—whereas that manifest in an artefact is transient simpliciter.) But here's the kicker, these teleologico-essential concepts (themselves the centuries-absent 'substantive content') are irreducibly qualitative, and the early moderns argued that the material world is to be understood in a reductively quantitative way. They therefore rejected these concepts as immaterial, nonphysical, supernatural, etc., necessitating substance dualism. The upshot is that, armed with mathematism, techne drove physis out of the cosmos altogether, and God was demoted from actus purus to artifex maximus, a supersmart artificer-demiurge. (Whence Pascal's criticisms of  Cartesianism qua proto-deism, a philosophy which would've liked to do without God, but 'couldn't help allowing him a flick of the finger to set the world in motion.' Cf. Kierkegaard: 'In scientific distraction people made God into a rather stupid God.') There are inferior man-made machines (e.g. levers and pulleys and cathode-ray tubes) and there are superior God-made machines (e.g. molecules and plants and animals)—that's all.†

[Off-piste addendum: 'History is written by the winners.' We're repeatedly told in the textbooks that scientists (qua scientists) discovered that the world was dysteleologico-nominal. But how could that be? No, that the world is thus-and-so was a conceptual decision, not (per absurdum) an empirical discovery.]

Note that we're still mechanists today, inasmuch as we're still dysteleologico-nominal. The atomistic (or corpuscular) push-pull causation, the Cartesian contact mechanics, and so on, gave place to the conclusions of the Newtonian and quantum-theoretic revolutions. But these are internal revolutions, internal to a subsisting mathematism.

What's frustrating is that the same philosophers who tell us that the terms 'material,' 'physical,' 'natural' are empty husks, e.g. Bertrand Russell, try to feed them to us as good eating nonetheless—an aporia. Chomsky picks up on this, noting that when Russell says 'experience is "part of the material of the physical world," ' this means 'no more than "part of the world" ' (ibid., p. 102). Thus Chomsky suggests 'simply dropping the words "matter" and "physical" ' (ibid., p. 105), and that's a start. What comes next?

In the end Chomps himself retires to a mysterianism, believing that there are probably 'ultimate secrets that will ever remain in obscurity, impenetrable to human intelligence' (ibid., p. 127). For 'if we are biological organisms, not angels, much of what we seek to understand might lie beyond our cognitive limits ... There is no reason to believe that humans can solve every problem they pose or even that they can formulate the right questions; they may simply lack the conceptual tools, just as rats cannot deal with a prime number maze' (ibid., pp.104-5). His position is not unlike Pascal's:

'Let us then realise our limitations. We are something and we are not everything ... Our intelligence occupies the same rank in the order of intellect as our body in the whole range of nature. Limited in every respect, we find this intermediate state between two extremes reflected on all our faculties. Our senses can perceive nothing extreme; too much noise deafens us, too much light dazzles; when we are too far or too close we cannot see properly; an argument is obscured by being too long or too short; too much truth bewilders us ... In a word, extremes are as if they did not exist for us nor we for them; they escape us or we escape them.' 

'Such is our true state. That is what makes us incapable of true knowledge or absolute ignorance. We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind; if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips away, and flees eternally before us. Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations. We burn with desire to find a firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity, but our whole foundation cracks, and the earth opens up into the depth of the abyss.' (Pensée 199)

* 'The label "mechanistic philosophy" or "mechanicism" should be handled with care, as it was not employed by the novatores themselves' (Cees Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, p. 6).

†A difference of degree, not kind; the definition of God-made machines is comparatively compounded (e.g. 'machinam hydraulico-pneumatico-pyriam'). Leibniz: 'An organism is formally nothing other than a mechanism, even if it is more exquisite and divine.' Herr Leibniz would later try to restore full godhead (to the all-too-human demigod of the moderni) by infinitizing the mechanical complexity of God's machines. See, for example, Guido Giglioni's Automata Compared.

Strawson's metaphysics ( || ) ...



Galen Strawson

OK. Let's try again. What is it for something to be physical? My handy-dandy Blackwell Dictionary of Philosophy says that physical things are those 'which possess physical characteristics'—that's a semicircular definition, Blackwell, but go on—for example: 'position, size, shape.' But where's quality, Blackwell? See, this is just physics-alism all over again. And physical isn't physics-al; we may be sure of that much. Still, all in all, it's not easy to say just what physicality is. I feel about it as St. Augustine felt about time: so long as nobody asks me, I know what it is; if anybody does ask me, I don't. Physical-nonphysical, material-immaterial, natural-supernatural, bodily-mental—there's so much adhockery to these contraries and contradictories. Noam Chomsky once said to John Searle that as soon as we come to understand anything, we call it 'physical' (quoted in Searle's Rediscovery of Mind, p. 25). And, to be sure, there's notable terminological elasticity here, though the terms won't stretch forever. At least substance dualists have a clear-cut definition of physicality-materiality (wrong, but clear-cut). Whereas the rest of us are left scratching our heads. And if we can't say what it is for something to be bodily (contra mental) then what is the mind-body problem? Chomsky puts it this way:

'The mind-body problem can be posed sensibly only insofar as we have a definite conception of body. If we have no such definite and fixed conception, we cannot ask whether some phenomena fall beyond its range ... There is no longer any definite conception of body. Rather, the material world is whatever we discover it to be ... The mind-body problem can therefore not even be formulated' (Language and the Problem of Knowledge, pp. 142, 144-5).  

Well, what Strawson wants to do is altogether collapse the mind-body dichotomy, thereby collapsing the mind-body problem. (There'll be no interactionist problems, for there'll be no interaction.) Here is Strawson's for-starters:

'The first thing one needs to do when addressing the question about the relation between the mental and the non-mental is to recover a proper sense of our ignorance of the non-mental. Many take the "mind-body problem" to be the problem of how mental or experiential phenomena can be material or physical phenomena given what we already know about the nature of the matter, or the physical. They've already gone hopelessly wrong, because we have no good reason to think we know anything about matter that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that mental or experiential phenomena are physical phenomena' (Selves, p. 285; Strawson's emphases).

Strawson refers often to the late astrophysicist Arthur Eddington (1882-1944). Eddington, (whom I've not read), woke Strawson from his half-dualist slumbers, sometime in the 1990s, by way of a book called The Nature of the Physical World. He quotes Eddington as follows:

' "What knowledge have we of the nature of atoms that renders it at all incongruous that they should constitute a thinking [experiencing] object?," asks Eddington, who took the existence of experiential phenomena — "qualia" — for granted: "science has nothing to say as to the intrinsic nature of the atom. The atom, so far as we know anything about it, is, like everything else in physics, a schedule of pointer readings [on instrument dials]. The schedule is, we agree, attached to some unknown background. Why not then attach it to something of a spiritual nature of which a prominent characteristic is thought. It seems rather silly to prefer to attach it to something of a so-called 'concrete' nature inconsistent with thought, and then to wonder where the thought comes from" ...' (Ibidem, p. 293). 

All of that, from Strawson and from Eddington, seems (more or less) correct to me. By 'experiential phenomena' Strawson means any sort of qualitative, what-it's-likeness phenomena—the 'what it's like' of any and all psychological goings-on. And what we're after, then, is a holistic metaphysic, 'not reductive but adductive' (ibid., p. 284, Strawson's emphasis). For it is, as Eddington says, rather silly for materialists to define matter in a literally thoughtless way and then to wonder where thoughts come from, why they can't find them materially, and so on. My personal favourite sciolism is when they say that consciousness is a mystery, but a mystery that scientists qua scientists will nevertheless solve someday. (O fides.) Well, 'mystery' is hardly the word. It's about as mysterious as giving a schoolboy white chalk and a blackboard so to colour a rainbow. He'll toil and moil for a thousand years — all the time being told 'Believe in calcareous progress!' and 'Look to the future!' and 'Here are government subsidies for more white chalk and a bigger blackboard!'—but he'll never colour a rainbow, for he hasn't the wherewithal. Meantime everybody will be talking about the mystery of prismatic colour, that maybe it doesn't really exist, or that maybe chromaticism 'emerges' from achromaticism ...

'Sod you lot!'

Now, there are some difficulties at the get-go. For example, Strawson's terminology is problematic, if not downright bothersome, as it runs crosswise of everyday speech. If today's man-on-the-street says 'physical,' he means physical contra nonphysical substance dualistically. Whereas by 'physical' Strawson means both physical and nonphysical blended together monistically. He calls his metaphysic a physicalism and a materialism, but he may just as well call it a nonphysicalism or an immaterialism (as did Eddington). All the terms are equally misleading. (Strawson has suggested more accurate titles, apathetically, like the cumbersome 'experiential-and-non-experiential-monism.') He uses the terms 'physical,' 'material,' and 'natural' to denote anything and everything that's concretely real. '[T]he physical is whatever general kind of thing we are considering when we consider things like tables and chairs and experiential phenomena' ('Realistic monism,' p. 5). 'Experiential phenomena are as real as rocks, hence wholly physical. They are part of reality [...] just like extension phenomena or electrical phenomena' (Selves, p. 288). Thus, if ghosts and ghostesses are real, they're Strawsonianly physical-material. (Of course, Strawson is an atheist who doesn't believe in boojums or faeries or homunculi.)

'I am ... a physical object — a wholly physical object ... I should admit, though, that I don't fully know the nature of the physical. No one does ... [T]he overall nature of the physical remains in many respects profoundly obscure to us — a point made vivid by the fact that although the experiential-qualitative or ‘what-it’s-likeness’ character of conscious experience is itself a wholly physical phenomenon, if materialism is true, our most general science of the physical, i.e. physics, provides no resources for its description, for the positive acknowledgement of its reality ... So even if I know — take for granted — that I’m a wholly physical thing, much remains unknown' (pp. 4-5).

Even though he forthrightly rejects dualism and half-dualist monism, he seems to want readers to hear the atheistic half-dualist overtones of words like 'physical' and 'material.' (Atheistic because on substance dualism God is made out of the mental stuff, and if you toss that away, keeping only the bodily stuff, you thereby toss away God.) He seems to hear the overtones himself too. But listen to how different he sounds if we standardise his terminology: 'The overall nature of the physical real remains in many respects profoundly obscure to us—a point made vivid by the fact that although the experiential-qualitative or ‘what-it’s-likeness’ character of conscious experience is itself a wholly physical real phenomenon, if materialism realness is true, our most general science of the physical real, i.e. physics, provides no resources for its description, for the positive acknowledgement of its reality.'

Furthermore, there's a sort of misrelation present, for Strawson is both agnostic and dogmatic at the same time and about the same thing. By his own admission, he can't set out a definition of physicality-materiality. (How then is he to argue his case, we may ask? Arguments are made of propositions, and propositions are made of definable terms.) For Strawson, the physical is something we know not what. And so physicalism is something we know not what. Why, then, call oneself a physicalist? (Isn't physicalist just another word for ignoramus?) He's so very sure he's 'a physical object—a wholly physical object.' But then he's so very unsure about what a physical object is. What marvellous surety!

Well, that's all as may be. The point for now is that Strawson is in the right where it matters: i.e. the qualitative stuff is just as real and as 'natural' as the quantitative stuff, and there's no good reason to suppose otherwise. Going back to Chomsky, 'matter' is whatever it turns out to be. And in that sense we're all to-be-determined-ists.

Still more to come.