The Case for Conceptualism

Philosophy abounds in “isms,” theories of what is and of how what is can be what it is. One of these “ism” questions revolves around the real vs. fictivist debate or Realism vs. Anti-Realism. This dispute asks us how we know when something is real as opposed to when it’s just made up in some fashion or other, a concoction of our language, there to serve a purpose that is not based on denotation, as in pointing to something discernible in the world, but rather to express or stand in for some other, less concrete idea. When is an ascription of a thing a real ascription of something that actually exists and when is it just doing some linguistic duty in order to simplify how we speak with one another?

In the case of the Realism vs. Anti-Realism dispute we want to know when is the name of something really of something and when is it a case of pretend, however convenient for our interlocutory purposes. Is reality only to be found in what we can put our hands on, see with our own eyes, smell, taste or hear? Do our senses alone determine what's real and if something we speak of is not sensible in this way, is it then not really real? Or must we expand our universe of allowable ontological elements to things that are intangible, unobservable, as well, to things not subject to sensory-conditioned experience? Are abstract ideas real? Numbers? Thoughts? Beliefs? Attitudes? Hopes? Fears? Are there really minds or just dispositions to behave?

If all these named things can be reduced to no more than observed behaviors then why suppose they are anything more or that our use of terms to name them are anything more than some kind of useful shorthand mode of reference? Why should we take such usages to be saying that they exist in some specialized way, that they're not just the observable behaviors we recognize as indicators of their presence in the world? Why not just accept the implication that they are no more than useful verbal constructs of language speakers like us, creatures who think and speak about them in socially shared ways? Why not simply call them a kind of fiction, an illusion we create for ourselves?

What's really real is surely what can be seen, felt, and so forth, for who would want to deny that? But then everything else must just be constructed of these more basic phenomena, even if, for convenience’ sake, when communicating about them, we speak of such things as if they are as real as the hard stuff. But in the end, all that's really real, in any genuinely verifiable way, is surely only the stuff of our observable experience, right? Hence the Realist/anti-Realist dichotomy. But what does this dichotomy imply for us? It means that if we embrace the one view, then the stuff of our everyday world, the world we actually live in, which include beliefs and thoughts, intentions and understanding, must be thought of as lacking reality, as no more than convenient constructs in our heads.

Our heads, themselves, are real, of course, and so is the gray matter within them, of course, our brains and other tissues — but our minds? Well, where are they, when you actually look for them? Are they somewhere inside the brain in some part of that complex and still mysterious organ, or are they souls breathed into us from without, with a separate existence and able to get on without the brains and bodies within which they're temporarily lodged at some point? Or is there a parallel realm alongside the physical one in which sensory experience occurs where what we recognize as tangible occurs, a parallel realm which manages to peek through somehow, to lift the curtain between two separate and distinct domains, the physical and the mental in some part or parts of the brain?

The problem of trying to decide what is really real seems to throw us for a loop, especially when the issue is the mind, for all of us seem to recognize an essential subjectness that is mind, for what else is it to experience things? Rocks do not experience as far as we can tell and perhaps some animals don't. But clearly some do, likely we'd say nearly all creatures we deal with do, from the dogs and cats in our homes to the birds in the trees, the mice in the fields and on and on. But not all experience looks to be the same. We are unsure how the world is experienced by other creatures of a different type than ourselves though it seems quite reasonable to ascribe experience to them as to ourselves. But when it comes to describing what we have ascribed we hit a wall. We cannot even be sure others of our own kind experience their world as we experience it.

The thing with experience is that it is interior, internal to each experiencer. And that means, by definition, that it is forever beyond our reach as experiencers of our own experiences. We can share experiences in a public way to the extent we can tell one another that we are seeing the same thing they are seeing, feeling the same, smelling the same, tasting the same, hearing the same. But we can never be sure of the sameness in terms of how they are experiencing it. We can align our words with targeted physical phenomena but can't be sure what is targeted by our descriptions or references is experienced by each of us in the same way. And, indeed, we know that there are differences in experiences depending on our sensory equipment which is physical and subject to flaws or other differences from person to person. Being interior in this way means that no person's mode of experiencing what he or she is experiencing can ever be assumed to be the same in this deep way. The visual effect you call blue or red may be quite different from what I call by those terms and yet we might never know that because of the inherent interiority of experience, it's intrinsically subjective nature.

So how can we be sure that to be "real" is the same for each of us? Or that what is "real" is that in fact? Maybe every reality is itself a private fiction of its own experiencer? What then is it to be "real," in fact?

Is everything real? Or nothing? Is "real" merely a term we apply in order to differentiate some types of things from other things? Are horses real but unicorns are not? Is that all that "real" means, i.e., that which we can find to exist in the world given a sufficiently diligent and feasible search and enough time and effort to engage in it? Is reality just a term we use for what is empirically verifiable after sufficient observational effort? But what then of institutions and thoughts? What of the so-called mind we each ascribe to ourselves? And what of "self" itself? Is there even such a thing if we cannot see it, touch it, smell it, etc.?

Perhaps the problem is with the term itself. "Real" means different things in different contexts. A real person is someone we meet outside storybooks, on the street corner or in our homes. But within the story itself, there are also real persons and those made up by the storybook's characters as they tell their own stories to other storybook characters. Brains are real because we can see them (or some of us have and the rest of us could if in circumstances in which the brain of someone is visible). We don't see our own brains but we know they are there inside our skulls because we have knowledge of our own natures as creatures in the world. We have book knowledge, the accumulation of others' knowledge gleaned over many lifetimes by many others like us and set down in the books (or their equivalents) and made accessible to us. But minds? We never see them. We see only other creatures like ourselves, talking and acting in ways we recognize, ways that express intentions, a key aspect of what we mean by "minds." Well what are intentions? We cannot see them either, only their effects, i.e., the actions of others like ourselves doing things whose objective we recognize and can understand. How do we understand them? Because we recognize their congruity with our own thoughts when acting. If we are intentional, act with objectives in mind, and others appear to be doing the same, then aren't they intentional, too?

Well, can't we be fooled? Of course we can and sometimes are, taken in by actors on a stage or conmen on the street or by a cleverly engineered and constructed automaton. But if we can, isn't it because intentions have no visible reality but only visible effects which we take as indicators of their presence? So intentions aren't really real? but how can that be? do we live in a fictional world, a world in which it's all made up by us or by others? When is realism really real? And when is anti-realism the real story?

To embrace realism is, contrary to what we would expect, to grant reality to a great many things we encounter in our lives which lack the physical features that make them sensible to us as experiencing beings, that we tend to think of as real. To embrace anti-realism, on the other hand, is to suppose that only those things that have sensible form are really real whereas those other "things" we deal with every day in our lives as if they are real, really aren't. What then are they? Anti-realism proposes that they are constructs, imaginary "things" we concoct for our own convenience in getting around in the world.

So why is this a problem? Are institutions and beliefs, and the minds that can think about both (and all other such things) any less a part of our world for being constructs (if that's how we want to think about them) than if they could be wholly reduced to descriptions of phenomena based entirely in the language of the physicist? What makes a thing a thing is perhaps a better question than what makes a thing real. And for that it pays to look more closely at our practices when engaged in discursive activity, i.e., when we're doing the things we do with language: communicating by describing, asserting, inquiring, explaining, etc.

What does it mean to be "real"? And why do many of us have no problems recognizing the reality of brains but balk at using a term like "real" when it comes to the related term of "mind"? Well, of course, there is a history here, specifically the human history of trying to understand ourselves and our place in the world. In talking about ourselves and the experience of being what we are we think of the mind that we associate with not just being but being in an experiencing way. As noted above, rocks don't experience, nor do any other merely inanimate things as far as we know. Nor do many forms of organisms, especially as we move down the phylogenetic scale and approach microorganisms. Experience as we understand it is a function of complexity of the sort that produces nervous systems designed for specialized interaction with the environmental stimuli wherein it is immersed. Nervous systems and, at the "higher" levels (as in closer to ourselves), brains. So brains, and their constituents and extensions, are the platform for experience, the place where it happens. And the evidence we have for that is the behaviors of creatures with nervous systems vs. those without, and the differences in behavior between those with more developed nervous systems and those with less developed types.

So we know that when it comes to experience, we're not all created equal. You have to have a nervous system and it must include something like a brain. So far so good, but now we turn to talk of how to understand these behaviors as such, and here we see that we must talk of something going on within the brain (or equivalent platform) of the creature. And when the experience we mean is the kind we have, we presume the same sort of interior goings on as we find in ourselves even if we grant there may not be exact replication of interiority from entity to entity.

But there must be enough similarity to make the behavior meaningful to us when we see it. And here's the rub, for interiority is always interior to the entity in which it occurs. When we see what appears to us to be intentional behavior, are we merely making an educated guess that there's an interior “there,” or is making that claim just a way we speak, to make prediction of the entity's next move comprehensible to us and enable us to make more successful predictions?

The philosopher Daniel Dennett has proposed that everything is reducible to physical description if we could go deeply enough in our explanation. But, of course, not all physical description is equal or equally feasible. If we want to talk about intentions, one of those things we ascribe to minds, we can make no headway using physical descriptions, because of the incredible complexity of physical phenomena at the deeper levels of explanation, by attempting to recount all the gazillions of gazillions of interactions that enable brains to do what they do, let alone the universe to do what it does. So, we develop and learn to use other ways of describing what we encounter in the world.

Dennett explains it this way. We have developed, through eons of natural selection, three basic ways of relating to the stuff of our world: the physical stance (through which we look at, and relate to, a thing in terms of how it is affected by and how it affects other things which it bumps into in the world); the design stance (which looks at a thing as having a purpose to it, i.e., as having been put into the form it has to do something by a designer, whether some human or similar type agent or by nature itself, to accomplish some end); and the intentional stance (the way of looking at things that seem to us to be capable not just of being designed for a purpose but of having purposes and thus acting to achieve them, including combining inanimate objects into tools and machines).

But does this view from without, so to speak, which aims to identify a purposive entity behind certain kinds of actions, preclude recognition of whatever constitutes having real purposes in any other beings but ourselves?

If all we can see is the way a thing behaves in the world, whether inanimate or animate, haven't we ruled out the reality of the mental aspects, the interiority of the thing in question?

Given the ultimate inaccessibility of what is "inside," must we conclude nothing is necessarily there but various fictions we make up for explanatory purposes? Does the chess playing computer operate with purposes and, if so, are its purposes of the same sort we speak of when alluding to purposes that we may have?

Dennett's answer is not to deny interiority as such but to tell us that it's not what we think it is. If there are minds and selves, as there certainly seem to be, there’s no reason to disregard these “things” m or pretend they aren't there just because we can’t put our fingers on them. Or is there?

But what then is there? Well, we know we have experience because, well, we have it. And every other entity like ourselves, who can be asked and can provide an answer to our questions, would have to affirm it (if they are responding honestly, of course, and mean what we mean by these terms). So, experiencing, as in having perceptions, sensations, thoughts and all that these entail must be real, not constructs.

Even if some of us can't describe this phenomenon of having experience in the detail or with the refinement or sophistication as others of us (philosophers vs the ordinary person in the street), still we all have it and we know this because we can interact with others who appear to act as we do in familiar ways, sufficiently familiar, that is, to enable us to recognize the occurrence of intentions through what they do.

What's real then in the end is about recognizing the reality of subjectness, the state of being an aware being in contact with its world. But is this best explained via a realist or anti-realist account? Are minds and selves real and, if so, are they as real or less real (or more real for that matter) than rocks and bridges and rivers and skies? If we can't see them or touch them, hear, taste, or smell them, aren't they still no less real in our world than those other things named? Are rocks and such only real because they have tangibility while thoughts and intentions don’t?

Well, it depends on what we mean by "real." And here we want to consider what makes anything real at all. What is it that constitutes this world we find ourselves in? Well, certainly it includes sensations in the form of perceptions and proprioception (the feel of our own bodies). Indeed, we find ourselves awash in sensations, but is that enough for the real to be real?

Why should sensation's occurrence define reality as such? After all, many sensations can be misleading or, put another way, not really what they seem to the experiencing subject to be. But if something seems to be something, mustn't it be that something? To seem to be, in an important sense, just is to be, at least when we are talking about this sort of thing.

But that's not how we use the term "seems" all the time either. Sometimes things seem to imply other things and sometimes they seem different to us than, on careful examination, we discover they actually are. But at another level, certainly, to seem to be an experience must just be that experience because experiencing is a condition of seeming. And vice versa. For something to seem it must be some sort of experience.

If we adopt the view that a thing like a mind or an intention or a thought or a belief or a conclusion is just a fiction that we make up for ease of communication, then how is that different from supposing that the same applies to rocks and rivers and so forth? For creatures lacking the capacity to deploy concepts in their thoughts, there are only experiences in terms of the raw effects on them. They may be evolutionarily predisposed to behave in response to the stimuli that wash over them in different and sometimes fairly sophisticated ways. Birds build nests, beavers dams, dogs and cats recognize others like themselves and can relate to the people who may be around them, respond to the sounds and gestures we make . Creatures respond to their sensory inputs as they have been designed through millions of years of evolution to do. And the same is true of us.

But we have something that sets us apart from those others. We have the ability to think about our sensory inputs in ways that organize them into things, into a world rather than just the environment of stimuli within which we happen to find ourselves in each and every moment of our lives. We have concepts and, thus, think conceptually. We have language, the tool of conceptualization which enables us to sort and arrange our sensory inputs in a myriad of useful ways, ways that enable us to visualize a world, even the parts that lie beyond our immediate access. And to visualize the world in terms of its history and its future. We have the capacity to recognize what is here and what is there, what is now and what is then. All of this comes only with language as far as we can tell. And so we have a world of things and relationships, a world that is as much in our minds as in our space. Everything that is is conceptually contrived by us, not just individually but in concert with other language users. Sure the rock is there whether we see it as a rock or not. But for the non-concept using creature it is no more than a momentary obstacle or a place to lie down on or relieve itself (thus serving as a marker for itself and others of its kind.

In this very important sense everything in our world is a construct whether we think of it as real or fiction. The rock and brain are only those things because they are those things for us and they are only that because of what we think about them, what we can know of them. And in this sense they are no more real than the mind and its various aspects (thoughts, beliefs, feelings, etc.). So if the issue is realism vs. anti-realism why does it matter? To be a real thing is to be a construct, a fiction and in this sense the brains we have are no more real than the minds we associate with them. They are just observed and dealt with on a different level of operation. When dealing with brains we want to know how their parts work to enable their bearers to do what they do. When dealing with creatures like ourselves, we want to know what they are planning, how they will react to what we do and what they want to tell us if they have something to tell at all.

Are there minds? Yes.

Are they real? Of course.

How do we encounter them? Through behaviors, behaviors that find their best explanation via accounts that incorporate recognition, on the part of the behavers, of those same kinds of interior phenomena we experience in ourselves.

To be a mind is not to be less real than to be a brain. It's just to be a different kind of "real." Indeed, we cannot explain the behaviors of entities like ourselves without acknowledging their mindedness, although we rarely ever think about them in ways that suggest there could be any other way of explanation. Others aren’t automatons to us if they behave in the expected ways we behave. But sometimes, when we do make the leap that imagines that their minds are missing, we get ourselves all bollixed up in tangles, supposing that we mean something different by words like "real" than we do, or that there is a realer real that applies to some things in our world but not to others. What all this implies is not that some things are more real than other things but that reality comes in different flavors. And the reason for that is our mode of thinking because we live in a world of concepts and not raw sensory inputs. In one very important sense, the stuff that’s really real for us are the concepts we make use of when getting about in the world. Concepts, in fact, may well be the most real thing of all. After all, “real” represents a concept, too.

Comments

[Stuart W. Mirsky]

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