โ Scribed by Richard Rorty
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Professor Dennett suggests that we can study consciousness empirically by keeping track of the linguistic behavior of organisms which are believed to be conscious. This proposal will strike some people as obvious, but there are some to whom it will seem evidently false. Some philosophers, like Gabriel Marcel and Thomas Nagel, cling to a sense of mystery which they believe distinguishes philosophy from science. They will say that Dennett has once again managed to miss the point about consciousness -namely, that it lies beyond the reach of language, and can only be known from the inside. To illuminate the disagreement between Dennett and this sort of opponent, I would like to point out some analogies between the problem of how to study consciousness empirically and that of how to study motion empirically.
It is widely believed, nowadays, that one can study motion empirically by plotting the positions, over a sequence of times, of those bodies which are believed to move. But there have been many philosophers who viewed this suggestion as simple-minded, as failing to realize that motion had an inside as well as an outside, a very mysterious inside. Aristotle, in defining motion as "the actualization of the potential qua potential", wished to link natural motion, the paradigm case of motion (standing to violent motion as zombies to humans) to the notion of substance. For him, natural motion (including growth, qualitative change and change of place) was to be understood by reference to the more fundamental fact of substantial change -the actualization of the potential tout court, rather than merely "qua potential." Descartes followed Galileo in mocking this Aristotelian definition, saying that it was unintelligible and that no definition was necessary, since "everyone knows what motion is." Leibniz, however, retreated to the Aristotelian view, arguing that motion required a metaphysical treatment, in terms of the ~lan vital, of monads as well as a mathematico-physical treatment. In our century this Leibnizian claim has been restated by Bergson, James, Whitehead, Weiss, and a host of others sympathetic to the idea of
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES