materialism
J. J. C. Smart
Sensations and brain processes (1959)
In:
Heil, 116-27
I. Introduction (116)
A. Smart is a materialist
1. Can’t quite accept behaviorism
2. reports of after-images, pains
B. the object of this paper is to argue that there are no philosophical arguments to be a dualist (118)
C. The reasons he wants to resist dualism have to do with Occam's Razor (117)
1. Smart finds it unbelievable that everything in the world can be explained by the physical sciences except for sensations, pains, and other conscious states
2. It wouldn't help to say that things like sensations are "correlated" with brain processes, for that would suggest that sensations are somehow "over and above" what's going on at the physical level
3. sensations would then be "nomological danglers:"
a. that is, entities that could not be explained by the laws of other sciences
b. or, alternatively, the laws that govern sensations would not be explained by the laws of other sciences (117)
1.) he anticipates the objection that em has its own laws separate from gravitational mechanics
2.) but he believes that any new ultimate laws we discover will relate to simple, fundamental particles, not to complex configurations of billions of nerve cells
D. It is because he is opposed to dualism that he finds the philosophy of Wittgenstein, which he construes as a sort of behaviorism, so congenial (118)
1. on this philosophy, there are, in a sense, no sensations
a. a person is just a mass of physical particles
b. there are no sensations or states of consciousness over and above this
c. there are only behavioral facts about that person
2. for example, when he reports having a yellow-orange after-image
a. he is not really reporting anything
b. rather, he is merely expressing a temptation to say that there is a yellow-orange spot on the wall -- although he knows there isn't one
3. Similarly, when he says, "I am in pain" he is just making a sophisticated wince (116)
a. not making a genuine report
b. not reporting something irreducibly psychical (117)
4. In the same way, a person who says "I love you" is not making a report but engaging in a sort of behavior that is part of loving someone (118)
E. However, although he is sympathetic to behaviorism, he finds it inadequate
1. Smart thinks that there is something that one is reporting when one says one has an after-image
2. Also, when one says that one is in pain,
a. one is doing more than simply substituting a verbal expression for other sorts of pain behavior, such as crying (117, 118)
b. and this something more is not just saying that one is in distress, either
F. Yet he is not sure that to admit this is to admit that there are non-physical correlates to brain processes (118)
G. Hence, having found behaviorism inadequate and having rejected dualism, he adopts the view that sensations are just brain processes of a certain sort
1. does not mean to say that "after image" or "pain" means the same thing as "brain process -- that is, his materialism is not a semantic thesis (119)
2. only means to say that reports about sensations just happen to be reports about brain processes
3. hence, he does not think that statements about sensations can be translated into statements about brain processes or that they have the same logic
4. he explains this last point by making an analogy with nations
a. not that the nation-individual relationship is exactly the same as the sensation-brain-process relationship
b. however, they are similar in that they have a different logic and one cannot simply translate statements about nations into statements about their citizens
c. (e.g., to say that the nation A is rich and powerful is not to say that each individual citizen is rich and powerful)
II. Remarks on Identity
A. When he says that a sensation is a brain process or that lightning is electricity, he means "is" in the sense of strict identity
B. strict identity is the sense in which we say that, e.g., "7" is identical with the smallest prime number greater than 5
C. he does not mean identity in the sense of mere spatial or temporal continuity, that is, the sense in which you are the same person as the child who went to elementary school ten years ago
III. Objections and Replies (120)
A. Objection 1: A common person can talk about sensations without knowing anything about neurophysiology. Hence what we talk about when we talk about our sensations are not brain processes
Reply: this would be like arguing that someone who had never seen the morning star could not use the expression "the evening star" to refer to the same thing -- Venus
Objection: the morning star and the evening star are not strictly identical, but only spatio-temporally continuous
In reply, Smart instead makes an analogy with the sort of identity that exists between lightning and electrical discharge
1. there aren't two things here, the lightning and the electrical discharge
a. it’s not like the footprint and the burglar
b. rather, there are just two different ways of describing the same thing
2. he means the actual lightning here, not your sensation of it
3. in sum, there can be contingent statements of the form A is identical with B
a. and a person can know that something is an A without knowing that it is a B (120-21)
b. a common person can talk about his sensations without knowing that they are brain states in the same way that he can talk about lightning and not know it's electricity (121)
B. Objection 2: it is at best only a contingent fact that a sensation is a brain process
1. that is, it is possible that our present scientific theories about sensations are wrong
2. so when we report on our sensations we are not reporting brain processes (121)
Reply: this objection shows that when we report on a sensation we do not mean the same thing as a report on a brain process (q.v.)
1. but that does not show that in fact the sensation is not a brain process
2. the same goes for lightning and electricity or for the morning and evening star
3. that is, the meaning of an expression is not the same thing as what it names
a. the way "Fido" takes its meaning by naming Fido
b. if the meaning of an expression were what it named, then it would follow that "sensation" and "brain process" were different things
C. Objection 3: even if the first two objections do not prove that sensations are something other than brain processes, they show that the qualities of sensations are something other than the qualities of brain processes
1. we can avoid irreducible non-physical processes but not irreducible non-physical properties
2. for example, I may say that I see a yellow flash, but not that my brain processes are yellow
3. It might seem that this objection “succeeds at one jump”
a. colors seem to be something that physicalist terms cannot describe
b. in response, Smart defines colors as powers in things (121-22)
1.) to cause discriminatory responses in “normal” human beings (121, q.v.)
2.) (N.b. “Eskimos” and “Hottentots” not considered “normal” (122)
4. but that still leaves us with the objection that in saying that sensations are identical to brain processes, I'm picking out sensations in virtue of certain qualities that the other half of the identity doesn't have (122)
Reply:
1. suggests that we construe statements about seeing an orange after-image as saying something like "there is something going on which is like what is going on when I see an orange in good light" (q.v.)
2. construes true sensation reports in the same way
3. the "something . . ." (in italics, q.v.) is neutral between dualism and materialism
a. just as one can say that "someone" is in the room without knowing that that person is a doctor (122-23)
b. Smart's reply depends on a person being able to say that one thing is like another in some way without being able to say how it is alike (123)
D. Objection 4:
1. after-images are not in physical space
2. brain processes are in physical space
3. so an after-image is not a brain process
Reply:
1. the objection is an ignoratio elenchi: the fallacy of drawing an irrelevant ocnclusion
2. Smart is not arguing that after images are brain processes, but that his experience of an after-image is a brain process
3. The objection is similar to arguing that his after-image is yellow-orange but his brain process is not.
a. to which Smart would reply in the same way: it's his experience that is a brain process (123)
b. the experience itself is not yellow-orange
c. we describe the experience by saying it is like the experience of a yellow-orange patch on the wall, that is, in the language of material objects, for there is no such thing as a phenomenal language
E. Objection 5: brain processes may be swift, slow, etc., but experience of seeing yellow is not (123-24)
Reply:
1. again, our terms for brain processes and experiences may not mean the same thing or even have the same logic, although they refer to the same things
-- comparison with “somebody” and “doctor:” may refer to the same person but do not have the same logic
2. we could if we wanted adopt a convention that would allow us to talk about experiences in terms appropriate to physical things
F. Objection 6:
1. sensations are private while brain processes are public
2. one cannot be mistaken about sensations but one can be mistaken about brain processes
3. Also, two or more people can observe a brain process but not a sensation
Reply: this shows that experiences and brain processes have a different logic
G. Objection 7: I can imagine turning to stone and still having sensations
Reply:
1. I can also imagine that lightning is not electricity or that the evening star is not the morning star (124)
2. what this objection shows is that "experience" and "brain process" do not have the same meaning; it does not show that they are not in fact the same
3. compares this objection to arguing "What can be composed of nothing cannot be composed of anything." (q.v.) That is, if the identity between brain process and experience is only contingent, then it's at least possible that there is no brain process or any other sort of process there at all. There would just be the experience, nothing else. (124-25)
4. But for Smart, the person raising this objection must be assuming something like the hypothesis that experiences consist in "ghost stuff" (125)
a. So it is composed of something, and not nothing
b. the argument comes down to a choice between the ghost stuff hypothesis and the hypothesis that sensations are brain processes
5. the argument cannot eliminate the second hypothesis a priori
H. Objection 8: the beetle in the box objection: how could reports about experiences get a foothold in language? There must be public criteria for the correct application of terms
1. To argue against the suggestion that someone knows what “pain” mean from his own case, Wittgenstein makes an analogy: suppose everyone had a box with something in it called a "beetle," but nobody could look in anybody else's box (Philosophical Investigations, sec. 293)
a. everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his own beetle
b. everybody could have something different in the box, a person could even put something different in the box every day, or the box could even be empty
c. hence, if these people used the word "beetle" in their language, it could not be the name of a thing, and whatever was in the box could play no role in their language
2. this beetle in the box objection tells against dualism and in favor of some sort of behaviorism (126 n. 19)
Reply: (125)
1. First, Smart would have us make the shift from saying "this is so" to "this looks as though” or “this feels as though” (q.v.)
2. He’s describing his experiences, not what’s going on in the physical world
3. for example, "this looks green." He would interpret this as saying that one is having an experience that is like the experience that one has when one sees something green (125-26)
IV. Conclusion
A. there is both a sense in which the thesis that sensations are brain processes is an empirical claim and a sense in which it is not (126)
1. it is an empirical claim if by this one means that sensations are not liver, heart, or kidney processes
2. however, if the dispute is between some sort of materialism and epiphenomenalism, then it is not an empirical issue, at least, not one that could be decided by experiment
B. Makes an analogy with the difference between the way the creationist Gosse explains fossils and the way evolutionists do:
1. for Gosse, the earth was created with fossils already in it
2. no one fossil can decide between this and the evolutionary hypothesis (126-27)
3. the issue has to do with parsimony and simplicity -- Occam's razor again (127)
a. setting aside the theological issue about a god who would deceive us (127)
b. the hypothesis that the world just began the way it is in 4004 BC leaves too many facts unexplained
1.) e.g., why are pteranodon bones just the way that they are
2.) we would just have to accept millions of facts with no explanation
4. the issue between materialism and epiphenomenalism is similar
a. simplicity and parsimony decide in favor of materialism
b. dualism leaves us with too many "nomological danglers"