The Making of a Philosopher Colin McGinn

The Making of a Philosopher
Colin McGinn

HarperCollins Publishers, 2002

Themes:

1. Family, being like, growing different; dealing with parental expectations

2. Changing attitude toward religion over time

3. Taking a career path that seems “sensible” vs. a career path one loves (psychology vs. philosophy)

4. Favorite friends; mentors among his teachers; disappointments with friendships; having a teacher or two who saw something in him before he saw it himself

5. Excitement about ideas; following ideas through to conclusion; learning to be a philosopher; changing from a person who valued the physical to a person enthralled with thinking

6. Finding that a turn of events he thought awful turned out eventually to have been a good direction for him to take (not being hired by Oxford when it was on the wane after many decades of leading in philosophy; eventually going to the US, where philosophy was more dynamic and there is more opportunity)

7. Hard work produces results (10 years teaching stressful tutorial system in London, doing his own writing all during school vacations)

8. Giving something his best shot

Vocabulary:

cognoscenti
solipsism
unempirical
orthodoxy
invigilator
malleability
conflate
infer

Preface

Book concentrates on philosophy-related parts of his life, leaves out the personal.
He worked on analytical philosophy, which pursues truth rather than consolation.
Xii – The book “should be of interest to everyone who is concerned with fundamental questions about reality

Ch. 1 First Stirrings

8-12 – Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God proceeds from definition. If we agree that God is that being with all perfections, and we agree that existence is one perfection, we must agree that God does exist.
McGinn bought this for a while; later he thinks “existence” doesn’t belong in the category “perfection.”

12 – “Philosophy can lift you up and take you far away.”

13 – For centuries philosophy denied that sense perceptions were real and said they are emanations of the perceiver.
Illusions seem just as real as “real” perceptions.
How can we know the reality behind sense data, be sure that what I see is what you see, be sure that what I think I see is really there?
Examples – stick half in water looks bent; sun seems to move around the earth; hallucinations really scare me.
Solipsism – the theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.

17-18 – Idea of a brain in a vat, with an operator stimulating it so that it “thinks” it is experiencing things. What is experienced is not in “reality” but seems real to the brain.
Movie The Matrix used this idea. Immobilized humans provide nutrients; computers generate in the brain a simulation of the real world. Movie’s premise: If this were our predicament, we would not know it.

20 – Reason
- can prove logically that God exists
- leads to the idea that we cannot know that tables and chairs exist
Was gibt?

22 – Choice of major (psychology) because it sounded like it might lead to a job.
Philosophy would be hopelessly idealistic for a McGinn, first in the family to go to university.

23 – He did not do well in school but took a teacher’s advice on how to study on his own and passed some courses with honors. Advice: make notes, reread, rehearse what you have learned in your own words.

24-25 – Is a mailbox anything beyond its qualities? If I take away its red color and size and hardness, what is left of “mailbox”?
Though his earlier schooling was in institutions that did not aim at university admission, McGinn studied enough to be admitted.

Ch 2 From Psychology to Philosophy

27 – McGinn takes beginning Italian, thinking it is aimed at students who don’t know languages. He missed the information that those who just want to get the required language credits take French or Spanish. Neophyte, he doesn’t know which are the easy courses.

29 – “mastering Italian during that year was the most difficult intellectual task of my entire life.”
He can pronounce cognoscenti.

30-31 – He continued in psychology, though his heart was on philosophy. The psychology professors regarded philosophy as unempirical.

31 – A professor, John Cohen, believed in him, made him believe in himself.

32 – He became enamored of Bertrand Russell, a passionate intellectual

34 – He compares Russell and John Lennon: both “had eloquence, talent, courage, style.”

35 – He sees philosophy as “a life of creativity, commitment, and independence of spirit.”
He wonders how there can be free will, praise and blame, guilt if heredity and environment affect us so much.

36 – He shed his belief in God.

40-43 – He was influenced by Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
Sartre: Man is radically free.
This was confusing to McGinn because he had just concluded the opposite.

42 – Sartre: consciousness is “pure directedness” to objects and has no inner nature.
So, as centers of consciousness, we are “nothing” centers. Only in choice do we acquire nature. Character is chosen.
He hoped to go for a graduate degree BPhil at Oxford but was rejected twice. Later he was a BPhil examiner.
He stayed at Manchester for a graduate degree in psychology, studying a broader topic between psychology and philosophy: innate ideas.

46 – His next major influence was Noam Chomsky, who held for innate language structure and opposed behaviorist psychology, which studied externals and said that the mind itself could not be investigated.

48 – Chomsky linked psychology and linguistics to the 17^th century rationalist philosophers such as Leibnitz and Descartes. “He wanted a return to a properly scientific mentalism, in which the mind itself was the object of psychological study.”

49 – “Nowadays psychology has pretty much the way that Chomsky advocated, and it is hard to remember the time when behaviorism was the prevailing orthodoxy. I still think this provides a valuable lesson in questioning orthodoxies that go out of their way to deny obvious facts—as behaviorism in effect denied that we have minds. The sure mark of an ideology, in science and philosophy as in politics, is the denying of obvious facts. A healthy dose of common sense is always a useful antidote to ideological bias.”

54 – Having graduated, he had the unpleasant task of informing his parents that he wanted to be a philosopher.

Ch. 3 Logic and Language

67 – Kripke and his theory about proper names.
Older theory says that proper names call up descriptors of that named entity and are the equivalent of a description of the person named.
Kripke says that a proper name is a link in a social chain leading to the thing/person referred to. I may not be using the name accurately or know important facts about the person named, but I use it as it has been observed by me in a social context.

83 – He had to have an invigilator at the transcription of his illegible exam for the John Locke prize. He won the very prestigious prize.

Ch. 4 Mind and Reality

98 – Essential properties, those which are de re necessities.
McGinn argues that malleability, conductivity are as essential as molecular structure for gold to be gold.

98-99 – Necessity of origin: In order to be me I must be produced by my 2 parents and all that produced all the ancestors of my parents, to the lowest form of life or matter which eventually produced them and me.

99-101 – Concept of “possible worlds”: Some argue that all possible worlds are as real and concrete as the actual world, in which I really became the result of all the choices I made at all the forks in my road to now, just as distant space is as real as familiar space. McGinn is skeptical.

102-103 – Disappointed he didn’t get a job at Oxford but thinks all was for the best (USA later). Cronyism, preferences for a hire who agrees with the professors who are there, probably played a role.

104 – Idealism vs. realism: Whether the world depends on our minds in some way or is independent of our minds.

104-108 – Idealism vs. realism re: memories.
For an anti-realist, the past has no reality independent of the memories of it.
A realist says that the past transcends our memory of it and is not constituted by such memories.

107 – McGinn refutes the anti-realist position:

108 – “Drummett’s [the anti-realist] arguments had a number of obvious flaws. The main problem was that he assumed from the start that understanding a sentence is a matter of being able to verify it. But a realist will question this right away: Why not suppose that understanding a sentence is a matter of knowing what would make it true, whether or not we can ever find out whether it is true? We have two sorts of knowledge about any particular state of affairs: what the state of affairs itself consists of, and what would count as evidence for believing the state of affairs to have occurred. Thus I know what it would be for there to be a table in the next room, since I have a conception of physical objects in objective space, and I also know what kind of evidence would make me assert this, namely the experience of seeing such a table. Why conflate these two pieces of knowledge? Only, it seems, to insist that the former knowledge be reducible to the latter; but that is just to presuppose antirealism (or verificationism) from the start.

The general point here is that it is wrong to confuse reality itself with our ways of knowing about it. Reality is one thing; our knowledge of it is another. The past is not the / (109) same as our memories of it; physical objects are not the same as the sensory states we have when we perceive them; other people’s minds are not the same as the behavior we use to infer things about them; the future is not the same as the current indications of how it will turn out; elementary particles are not the same as the meter readings that signal their presence; and so on.”

109-110 – Color:
Martians may see a different thing when they see what we name “red.” Color is, in a sense, like flavor: I may like beetroot but you not; neither is more “correct.”

110 – “Color is in the eye of the beholder, basically. So we cannot properly dissociate the color of an object from the experiences the object produces in the mind; color is a mind-dependent aspect of reality.”

110 – But not all qualities of things are similarly mind-dependent. Shape and size are objective features. If I assert it is round and you say square, we cannot both be correct.
“Thus philosopher traditionally distinguish between the objective, mind-independent ‘primary qualities’ of things and the subjective, mind-dependent ‘secondary qualities’ of things.”

112 – We could not “see” a world that has no color.
Physicists describe the world objectively, mentioning only properties that things have whether or not they are perceived (wave lengths, photons).

112-114 – His 1982 book Subjective View

114 – The world in itself, independent of human minds, is not a world the human mind can apprehend other than theoretically. We can see things, but we cannot see them objectively. We can represent for ourselves an objective reality. Other animals don’t have this double vision, (we assume!).

117 – McGinn began to concentrate on 2 areas of interest:
1) How does a word mean what it means (language)?
The question of what thought is.
When I think that London is the capital of England, what gives my thought that content?

2) The mind-body problem.
How are an experience of a yellow bird in the garden and the neural processes of my brain at that experience connected?

120 – He becomes a book writer, previously having written only articles. He finds the longer work not so daunting as he had expected.

121 – He spent 20 years in London, with a grueling tutorial schedule during the academic terms, spending all his summers on his own writing. “I had no clear idea of what I might amount to as a philosopher, but I was going to give it my best shot.”

Ch 5 Belief, Desire, and Wittgenstein

127 -128 – UCLA was hot with the topic of belief and desire at the time McGinn taught there.

Belief and Desire are called “propositional attitudes” “because they involve taking an attitude toward a proposition. Take the proposition that it is sunny today: I can believe that this is true, desire that it be true, hope that it will be true, feel disappointed that it is not true, and so on. Propositions specify states of affairs, and beliefs and desires are attitudes concerned with states of affairs. The mind is very largely constituted by being the place where propositional attitudes do their thing: believing, reasoning, desiring, hoping, regretting—that is what mental activity is all about. You act as you do because of the beliefs and desires / (128) and other propositional attitudes you have.” [You desire something; you think you know where to get it; you go there.]

128-130 – There is more to the meaning of a word than simply what it refers to.
Marilyn Monroe, Norma Jean Baker; mousy girl in high school, comic film actress. Both refer to one person, but a speaker who doesn’t know they are the same would have a different “sense” for the word/name than another speaker.
If I use “Hesperus” and “Phosphorous” to refer to Venus in its morning star mode and its evening star mode, (128) “these names will differ in their sense, though coinciding in their reference. Reference does not determine sense.

“The distinction between sense and reference enables / (129) us to keep track of the difference between thought and reality. Reality is the reference, the thing in the world we are talking about, a person or a planet in our examples; thought corresponds to the sense we bring to our terms, the way in which we conceptualize the things we refer to. If we confuse sense and reference, we will be liable to think that objects are somehow mental or that concepts are somehow physical, but we always have to distinguish carefully between the external thing we are thinking about and the mental act of thinking about it in a certain way. Sense is rather like visual perspective: We may both see the same external object, but from different angles, so that it presents two different visual appearances to us; there is one object and two ways of apprehending it. There is reality, on the one hand, and then there are the many perspectives from which it may be viewed, on the other. This fundamental dichotomy manifests itself in the distinction between the sense and reference of our words. There is what we talk about (reference) and how we talk about it (sense).”

134 – McGinn favors the View “that the meaning is both the reference and its mode of presentation. . . . ‘dual component’ of meaning.”
The “I” in “I am hungry” when I say it and when you say it have something in common but have different references.

136 – Grice talked about “speaker meaning.” Intention is involved. I may say “We have no more cake” to mean that we have no more cake or to mean “Don’t offer Suzy any more cake or she’ll be sick tonight.”

I might also have an intention when I say something to you that I hope you don’t guess: “Betty was here this morning” to draw you off my scent, to get you to think that she ate the cookies and not I.

138 – If I mean you to read my clue, I have a second-order intention that my first-order intention be recognized. “In other words, my intentions should be transparent to you. That is the essence of meaning something to somebody by something.

“The importance of this analysis of speaker meaning, aside from its intrinsic interest, is that it offers the prospect of analyzing the whole phenomenon of linguistic meaning in terms of propositional attitudes.”

140 – Grice draws a distinction between two sorts of implication: what words convey and what people convey.

Asked whether I like you, I might reply that you’re a good cook. “You’re a good cook” doesn’t mean that I dislike you, but in the context you might draw that conclusion and I might mean that. Grice called this “conversational implicature” as distinguished from ordinary logical implication.

We can say what is “true in a conversational context and imply something quite false, and the latter does not contradict the former.” If I’m asked about your abilities in tennis and I reply that you can change a tire quickly, I say nothing false but I may imply something false (that you’re no good at tennis, when really you are).

141 – This device is used commonly in political speech:
What do you think of the allegation your opponent smoked pot?
[Knows the allegation is false] I think anyone who isn’t hard on drug crime has a dubious past.

142 – There are 2 ways to lie: tell a falsehood or say what is true while conversationally implying what you know to be false.

145 – Wittgenstein:
Gave away his large family inheritance, never owned a home, wintered in a shack in Norway, morally intense and fierce, writing oracular and almost poetic.

Question: What does it mean to use a + sign?
Not an infinite number of instances of its use; and someone may be using it to mean PLUS if it joins numbers under 2000 and ADD 7 if it joins numbers 2000 and over.
Some interpreted Wittgenstein to say that a symbol can only be used by a community, that man solo may not have rules or even concepts. (But then Robinson Crusoe couldn’t play solitaire.)

152-153 – “[U]nderstanding is a certain kind of ability or know-how, a capacity to use the symbol; and such capacities are not interpretations of the symbol but propensities to act in / 153 certain ways. Human beings have certain natural ways of acting, habits that get established by linguistic training, and these habits are the basis of meaning—not anything that ‘passes before one’s mind’ as one uses a symbol. Understanding is thus not a private conscious experience that the person knows by infallible introspection; it is a publicly observable capacity to use symbols in concrete situations. This is why you may think you understand something when you don’t—because you can be mistaken about the capacities you have (compare the capacity to swim). Wittgenstein is opposing the inner and the outer, the experiential and the practical; he is not opposing the individual and the community.”

Ch. 6 Consciousness and Cognition

Wrote a novel (unpublished) and more short stories (some published).
Was hired for prestigious Oxford position bridging psychology and philosophy after untimely death of an Oxford star.
Clarity of presentation of ideas won him the job, he thinks.
He had to drop fiction and again produce hard-core philosophy.
Oxford is insular; most accepted him; one unpleasant incident of public badgering by an old-timer.

166ff – What is the content of thinking?
Externalists such as Henry Putnam contend that meanings are not in the head.
Twin Earth thought experiment: another earth just like ours with people who are twins of us and English just like ours. But their word “water” refers to a liquid that looks and tastes just like our water but has a different composition, XYZ instead of H2O.

167 – “Despite the fact that we and they are exactly alike in what is going on inside our heads when we use our words “water,” we refer to different things on our two planets.

“Why is this? Because what we refer to is a matter of our contextual and causal relations to the environment around us, not just a matter of the internal subjective states that are present in our minds when we speak of that environment. . . .If I parade a pair of identical twins in front of you, one at a time, and ask you to refer to them with the demonstrative / (168) term ‘that person,’ then you will refer to whichever individual is actually standing there, whether or not you can keep track of who is who.

"This is a way of making the point that reference is not fixed by the descriptions you might offer to single out the object of reference, since there are cases in which you don’t know any descriptions that could single the object out—after all, the twins both look and sound exactly alike.”

Extending this line of thinking, we see that thoughts are similarly “not in the head.”

169 – “Thought is essentially a brain-environment interaction or interlocking; thoughts have the content they have because of the world in which you happen to be embedded, not merely by virtue of your internal states.”

But are all thoughts externally determined, or merely some classes of thoughts?

170 – Perceptual experiences seem to be in the head and not dependent on environmental difference. Twin Earthians and we would have the same perception of “water”/water as have we, though we have posited that the 2 ARE different substances.

McGinn argues that other mental states are like perception: pain, tickles, mathematical thoughts, thoughts about color and shape, ethical thoughts.

Even for all these, including perception, there is a “weak externalism,” for their content may be determined by things outside the thinker’s head (an object that seems square to me).

171ff – Noam Chomsky had posited that humans understand a language because they are hard-wired for language structure.

Vision seems to have the same sort of process and equipment: our eyes perceive a limited amount of information; “software” in our brain has developed, with experience, to interpret this information (and knows an edge from a shadow line); (173) “The third stage is asking what neural structures in the brain run these algorithmic programs, and how they succeed in implementing them.”

174 – Thinking seems to be a computational process such as that described for vision.

175 – Thinking seems to use language-like structures—but also image-like structures. (I can turn a red ball around in my head.) [Temple Grandin asserts that “video” imagery is the way she “think” and “remembers.” To solve a problem, she calls up mental videos of pertinent episodes she has seen, and says she has an enormous video library in her head.]

178-183 – Can we solve the mind-brain problem? Where do we think?
Perhaps thinking is something we cannot understand, just as having no experience in how bats perceive and navigate, we will never understand their experience.

(180) “whether reality had to be knowable by human beings, . . . reality being one thing and human knowledge another.”

(181) “Maybe the reason we are having so much trouble solving the mind-body problem is that reality contains an ingredient that we cannot know.” (Detective missing a clue)

(182) But with the case of the mind-body problem, I surmised, the clue is not going to come to light, which explains why we have been mystified by it for centuries. It might come to light, I thought, but it would have to be very different from anything considered so far; it would certainly not be some minor tinkering with one of the theories currently around.”

Dogs cannot think about thinking (we think). So perhaps understanding thinking is beyond the human brain capacity.

Neural brain processes seem to be something quite other than my experience when I think, so how can one be just like the other?

183 – McGinn wrote an article “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” It was rejected by the Journal of Philosophy. “Then I knew I was onto something. Originality and rejection go hand in hand when it comes to the rather staid academic journals.”

The article was published in Mind and is by far the most cited, reprinted, and translated paper he has ever written.

Ch 7 Metaphilosophy and Fiction

Moved to Rutgers, which was becoming a powerhouse in philosophy. Exit from Oxford was unpleasant, not made easy for him (no leave of absence granted). He had grown tired of the insularity and the antagonism to new methods/ideas at Oxford.

In the US, he wrote and was interviewed by popular organs, known as a “mysterian” for his contention that consciousness might not be knowable by human brains.

1991 – The Problem of Consciousness by McGinn. Daniel Dennett, an antagonist, wrote Consciousness Explained in answer.

1993 – Moral Literacy, or How to Do the Right Thing by McGinn, interested in ethics and dismayed that the US does not conduct ethical arguments with any philosophical underpinnings.

198 – turned to metaphilosophy, which inquires into the nature of philosophical problems, the possibility of philosophical knowledge, what methods to adopt in order to make philosophical progress.

Why is philosophy so hard? Why does the next generation of philosophers not build on the last? (200) “”Why do we still have no proof that there is an external world or that there are minds other than our own? Why is freedom of the will still so hotly debated? Why do we have so much trouble figuring out what kind of thing the self is? Why is the relation between consciousness and the brain so exasperatingly hard to pin down?”

208 – “The whole problem is that the conscious mind is not something that emerges from the brain as a whole emerges from its parts.”

McGinn has in previous pages presented his “CALM”conjecture: Combinatorial Atomism with Lawlike Mappings. He contends that that is how humans typically understand things such as language, anatomy, problems.

208 – That mental experience doesn’t follow this pattern makes dualists insist that mind is something quite separate from brain.

209 – In Problems in Philosophy he argues that the case is the same with the self, free will, meaning, knowledge. “There are yawning gaps between these phenomena and the more basic phenomena they proceed from. . . . The essence of a philosophical problem is the unexplained leap.”

So if philosophical problems cannot be solved, has he argued himself out of a job?

No. (212) “As Bertrand Russell pointed out in The Problems of Philosophy in 1914, the value of philosophy does not lie in the acquisition of what he called ‘positive knowledge’—as the value of science does—but rather in enlarging the imaginative scope of our minds and in appreciating that ignorance is part of the human condition.”

Ch. 8 Evil, Beauty, and Logic

Taught a new course, Philosophical Problems in Literature, choosing novels with themes centering on beauty and evil: Lolita, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Billy Budd, Frankenstein.

Course prompted a book Ethics, Evil and Fiction (1997).

Evil is one topic in the book: evil characters invert the normal; they feel pleasure in the suffering of others (sadism). This pure malevolence, such as James Claggart’s for Billy Budd, is beyond that of those who inflict evil merely ancillary to their pursuit of another goal (hurt while robbing).

Characters such as Dorian Gray and the monster in Frankenstein occasion the discussion of beauty and the inside/outside of ourselves; they also show a relationship between beauty (inner) and virtue.

We are born without our consent; our bodies are gross under our skin; our externals mark is in ways that others may dislike; our externals don’t show our true reality. The monster is mistreated because he is ugly; his good deeds are not rewarded; he is driven away. He begins, thereafter, to inflict evil. Dorian Gray bargains to keep his beautiful appearance at the price of his soul. McGinn asserts that (221) “beauty and virtue are not so separate after all.”

Lots of name-dropping: Oliver Sacks, Jennifer Anniston, Robin Williams.

Interest now in logic.

Existence: does it exist?
Orthodox view of existence is that it does not exist, is not a property of things. When I say that butterflies exist, I merely mean that butterflyhood has instances—not that individual butterflies exist.
McGinn says that existence is what it really appears to be: (236) “a genuine property of objects. True, it is universal to all objects that exist, but it is equally the case that blueness is a property of all blue objects. And there are objects that don’t exist, objects of thought like Sherlock Holmes—just as there are objects that are not blue. Existence is like self-identity, a logical property that is also very widespread. The trouble with saying that existence is really a matter of an attribute having instances is that the idea of having instances already contains the concept of existence.”

237 – “Among other things, this shows that the traditional response to the ontological argument for the existence of God (which I discussed in chapter 1), namely that it wrongly presupposes that existence is a property, is mistaken: Existence is a property of objects; the question is really whether this property can be argued to be entailed by the very concept of God—which I doubt.”