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Thoughts: Papers on Mind, Meaning, and Modality
Thoughts is a collection of twelve essays by Stephen Yablo which together constitute a modern-day examination of Cartesian themes in the metaphysics of mind. Yablo offers penetrating discussions of such topics as the relation between the mental and the physical, mental causation, the possibility of disembodied existence, the relation between conceivability and possibility, varieties of necessity, and issues in the theory of content arising out of the foregoing. The collection represents almost all of Yablo's work on these topics, and features one previously unpublished piece.
336 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 27, 2008
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March 3, 2023
Perhaps "Physicalists vs Zombies" would have been a more catchy title for this first volume of the papers of Stephen Yablo, who in the 1990s was considered part of the hot new jet set of trailblazers in metaphysics, and is still one of our most notable living philosophers today. But I didn't need a catchy title to buy up what amounts to eleven of his seminal papers, one of which was previously unpublished, in one convenient volume. As with any work of philosophy, however, I am going to need to revisit this again at a later time.
As much as I enjoy reading philosophy of most schools, one of my ongoing issues with how philosophic papers and books are constructed is that they do not follow a clear structure. This makes little sense to me considering these are works that are attempting to use logic to analyze ideas. Perhaps I am spoiled by reading scientific abstracts--a hypothesis or goal is clearly stated, the techniques of analysis are discussed, and conclusions are recorded. But you can't always expect such cookie-cutter presentations from a field that thinks literally outside the box.
At least in the works of more contemporary philosophers, they attempt to state what they are trying to accomplish, and here, Yablo is no exception, but he buries his positive and negative goals somewhere in the course of his monographs, then when he starts off trying to show you his proofs, he meanders. Now, in some ways, I get it. Yablo starts down a path of analysis, but lo and behold, that doesn't quite work out. He still leaves his trail for you to find even if it is a dead end. Sometimes he seems rather timid to appear directly critical of others or to remain as neutral as possible, but this sometimes lent itself to difficulty understanding what exactly he is trying to say. So just when I thought I was following along with Yablo, he would then seem to say something completely antithetical to where I thought he was going, or then seems to be talking out of both sides of an argument. He does better with this in some essays than in others.
Yablo seems to anticipate confusion in readers like me, because he tries to explain at one point that he tries not to take sides on a particular argument, and that if he does meander into using language that does seem to take a particular view of a certain cohort of philosophers, it is because he is trying to "explore their system from the inside, in order to see what it is capable of, and whether it can be made to deliver the advertised kinds of results." I respect this.
But whether or not this is a challenging read, I have long been interested in his philosophy of mind, as well as the relationship between the mental and physical and the possibility of disembodied existence. If you have similar interests, this book should be promising to you.
Now, I must preface my last statement by saying that you first may want to make sure you are familiar with Descartes and the "Meditations," as well as Hume and Kripke, because Yablo picks up on their central epistemological arguments about what it means to "know something." Yablo also repeatedly refers back to the work of David Chalmers and others.
So considering that this book is entitled "Thoughts," and NOT "Physicalists vs. Zombies," what is this book about? Well, that's hard to summarize, because this work is as broad as the actual title suggests. But I can give some examples.
Yablo explores the value of what is conceivable and compares conceivability with possibility. If you can conceive of something, does that mean it is possible?
Conceivablility evidence is fallible. You might find something E conceivable but E-worlds cannot exist. There was a time when people thought dolphins were cold blooded because they didn't know they were mammals. These are modal errors, according to Yablo, because what seems possible is not. But it doesn't mean you are completely wrong or guilty of some lack of elementary logic. In your error, you registered the possibility of something, call it E*, which was misread as the possibility of E. All that follows from conceivability of a thing is that it is conceptually possible, not that it is "really" (metaphysically) possible. However, it seems he eventually concludes that "carefully handled" evidence from our intuitions of conceivability can be trusted.
I guess he figures we can rest easy because propositions proved impossible are not conceivable in the first place, despite appearances. Yablo seems to be ambivalent in his critique of the two-dimensionalist approach that if E is conceivable but impossible, then E* is possible. It seems he tries to support it, but then eventually concludes that deriving meaning from conceivability via our doomed intuitions is the best we got, even though we must prepare the way inevitably for new empirical evidence that will likely "overrule an incurably error-prone faculty, or to correct the input to a faculty that is in principle error-proof". We can never identify ahead of time all overruling arguments that may come up anyway.
Yablo uses this error theory to account for David Chalmers' use of the "zombie" argument to support dualism of mind and body. A philosophical zombie is a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have consciousness. This is a type of thought experiment used to deduce that mind is separate from body. Chalmers would argue that a world full of philosophical zombies is conceivable and therefore possible, which would refute physicalism and support the idea that conscious mind is distinct and irreducible.
Yablo says that maybe the intuition that zombies are possible is in error, and that he is "braced for the information that is going to make zombies inconceivable, even though I have no real idea what form the information is going to take." So once again, he does not question the logical validity of the argument. He simply reminds us that conceivability doesn't always mean possibility, even though it's the best we got.
One of the most scattered chapters was the epic length "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda," which starts off where Yablo is at his best playing with linguistics, but then moves on to a variety of other topics. He experiments by adjusting language from indicative (which ultimately fails to deliver fixation of meaning in all possible worlds) to the subjunctive conditional to protect any shift in meaning across worlds. And he is right to do this. We can't determine metaphysical necessity of a proposition S while messing around with the narrow content of S. For example, take A ≠ A, but tried to condition it in a world where "≠" meant "identity"?
He then starts asking questions about conceptual necessity. A statement is conceptually necessary if the narrow content is always true no matter which world is actual. Is conceptual necessity also a kind of apriority? Yablo thinks not.
Then, seemingly out of the blue, he starts talking about imaginative resistance. He accurately calls this section "Digression," because that was it seems to be. But it is quite interesting. Here he explores what makes us able to suspend our disbelief, willing thinking contrary to laws of logic, while at other times we can't. What makes us willingly buy into works such as "Star Wars," or for that matter zombie films, or anything with fantastic elements contrary to descriptive fact in our world, but then have trouble believing things like "female infants should be killed"? Is the latter a problem for us because we find it morally repugnant? Yablo says no--it is because such statements are contrary to "evaluative" fact rather than "descriptive" fact. Such statements trigger imaginative resistance because the concept it expresses is ‘grokking’ or response-enabled. He defines a grokking concept as “one that identifies its object in part by aspects of our experience of it that don’t purport to be representational.”
The whole point of books like this is to build upon past work on how the mind works. Can we reduce the mind all the way down to the neuronal level, or even further to microphysical properties? I tend to think that our conscience experience cannot be explained away by Physicalist reduction. As a psychiatrist, I know that the mind can certainly change the physical structure of the brain. Simply by practicing new behaviors and ways of thinking remaps the brain, and we can see this in decades of recent and amazing research in neuroscience. That's the whole purpose of psychiatry really. So how is it possible that the mind can alter the physical brain if the physical properties of the brain control all conscious experience? But if the mind and body are separate entities, they clearly must be connected to each other. What is that connection? Gassendi asked Descartes the same question: "How can there be effort directed against anything, or motion set up in it, unless there is mutual contact between what moves and what is moved?"
The debate is a very old one, and Yablo is trying to figure out where he stands. He has gone on record as affirming that he is a non-physicalist, but it is difficult to know exactly where he lies on the mind-body problem--or at least I can't completely tell from this book. In his chapter on "Mental Causation," he seems to say that contemporary philosophy has overall accepted that mind has no influence on the physical, but "...dualism is not dead, only evolved. Immaterial minds are gone, it is true, but mental phenomena (facts, properties, events) remain. And although the latter are admitted to be physically realized, and physically necessitated, their literal numerical identity with their physical bases is still roundly denied."
Maybe I find him confusing because he is in the same boat as me and the rest of us. He recognizes that we still don't know, and what we think we know may turn out wrong with new data in the future. But I still would have liked to have had a little more of a solid commitment from him. It might have been helpful if he had tied together all of these essays and the variety of topics for the publication of this book. At least give us some introduction or summary! But that isn't the case.
So overall, I can only say that this is a fairly interesting spin on a variety of interrelated subjects. If you already are familiar with Kripke, or books like "The Physicalists Theory of Mind," or philosophical zombies, then you'll want to see Yablo's take on things. But if you are just getting into the philosophy of mind, this is certainly not a great place to start.
As much as I enjoy reading philosophy of most schools, one of my ongoing issues with how philosophic papers and books are constructed is that they do not follow a clear structure. This makes little sense to me considering these are works that are attempting to use logic to analyze ideas. Perhaps I am spoiled by reading scientific abstracts--a hypothesis or goal is clearly stated, the techniques of analysis are discussed, and conclusions are recorded. But you can't always expect such cookie-cutter presentations from a field that thinks literally outside the box.
At least in the works of more contemporary philosophers, they attempt to state what they are trying to accomplish, and here, Yablo is no exception, but he buries his positive and negative goals somewhere in the course of his monographs, then when he starts off trying to show you his proofs, he meanders. Now, in some ways, I get it. Yablo starts down a path of analysis, but lo and behold, that doesn't quite work out. He still leaves his trail for you to find even if it is a dead end. Sometimes he seems rather timid to appear directly critical of others or to remain as neutral as possible, but this sometimes lent itself to difficulty understanding what exactly he is trying to say. So just when I thought I was following along with Yablo, he would then seem to say something completely antithetical to where I thought he was going, or then seems to be talking out of both sides of an argument. He does better with this in some essays than in others.
Yablo seems to anticipate confusion in readers like me, because he tries to explain at one point that he tries not to take sides on a particular argument, and that if he does meander into using language that does seem to take a particular view of a certain cohort of philosophers, it is because he is trying to "explore their system from the inside, in order to see what it is capable of, and whether it can be made to deliver the advertised kinds of results." I respect this.
But whether or not this is a challenging read, I have long been interested in his philosophy of mind, as well as the relationship between the mental and physical and the possibility of disembodied existence. If you have similar interests, this book should be promising to you.
Now, I must preface my last statement by saying that you first may want to make sure you are familiar with Descartes and the "Meditations," as well as Hume and Kripke, because Yablo picks up on their central epistemological arguments about what it means to "know something." Yablo also repeatedly refers back to the work of David Chalmers and others.
So considering that this book is entitled "Thoughts," and NOT "Physicalists vs. Zombies," what is this book about? Well, that's hard to summarize, because this work is as broad as the actual title suggests. But I can give some examples.
Yablo explores the value of what is conceivable and compares conceivability with possibility. If you can conceive of something, does that mean it is possible?
Conceivablility evidence is fallible. You might find something E conceivable but E-worlds cannot exist. There was a time when people thought dolphins were cold blooded because they didn't know they were mammals. These are modal errors, according to Yablo, because what seems possible is not. But it doesn't mean you are completely wrong or guilty of some lack of elementary logic. In your error, you registered the possibility of something, call it E*, which was misread as the possibility of E. All that follows from conceivability of a thing is that it is conceptually possible, not that it is "really" (metaphysically) possible. However, it seems he eventually concludes that "carefully handled" evidence from our intuitions of conceivability can be trusted.
I guess he figures we can rest easy because propositions proved impossible are not conceivable in the first place, despite appearances. Yablo seems to be ambivalent in his critique of the two-dimensionalist approach that if E is conceivable but impossible, then E* is possible. It seems he tries to support it, but then eventually concludes that deriving meaning from conceivability via our doomed intuitions is the best we got, even though we must prepare the way inevitably for new empirical evidence that will likely "overrule an incurably error-prone faculty, or to correct the input to a faculty that is in principle error-proof". We can never identify ahead of time all overruling arguments that may come up anyway.
Yablo uses this error theory to account for David Chalmers' use of the "zombie" argument to support dualism of mind and body. A philosophical zombie is a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have consciousness. This is a type of thought experiment used to deduce that mind is separate from body. Chalmers would argue that a world full of philosophical zombies is conceivable and therefore possible, which would refute physicalism and support the idea that conscious mind is distinct and irreducible.
Yablo says that maybe the intuition that zombies are possible is in error, and that he is "braced for the information that is going to make zombies inconceivable, even though I have no real idea what form the information is going to take." So once again, he does not question the logical validity of the argument. He simply reminds us that conceivability doesn't always mean possibility, even though it's the best we got.
One of the most scattered chapters was the epic length "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda," which starts off where Yablo is at his best playing with linguistics, but then moves on to a variety of other topics. He experiments by adjusting language from indicative (which ultimately fails to deliver fixation of meaning in all possible worlds) to the subjunctive conditional to protect any shift in meaning across worlds. And he is right to do this. We can't determine metaphysical necessity of a proposition S while messing around with the narrow content of S. For example, take A ≠ A, but tried to condition it in a world where "≠" meant "identity"?
He then starts asking questions about conceptual necessity. A statement is conceptually necessary if the narrow content is always true no matter which world is actual. Is conceptual necessity also a kind of apriority? Yablo thinks not.
Then, seemingly out of the blue, he starts talking about imaginative resistance. He accurately calls this section "Digression," because that was it seems to be. But it is quite interesting. Here he explores what makes us able to suspend our disbelief, willing thinking contrary to laws of logic, while at other times we can't. What makes us willingly buy into works such as "Star Wars," or for that matter zombie films, or anything with fantastic elements contrary to descriptive fact in our world, but then have trouble believing things like "female infants should be killed"? Is the latter a problem for us because we find it morally repugnant? Yablo says no--it is because such statements are contrary to "evaluative" fact rather than "descriptive" fact. Such statements trigger imaginative resistance because the concept it expresses is ‘grokking’ or response-enabled. He defines a grokking concept as “one that identifies its object in part by aspects of our experience of it that don’t purport to be representational.”
The whole point of books like this is to build upon past work on how the mind works. Can we reduce the mind all the way down to the neuronal level, or even further to microphysical properties? I tend to think that our conscience experience cannot be explained away by Physicalist reduction. As a psychiatrist, I know that the mind can certainly change the physical structure of the brain. Simply by practicing new behaviors and ways of thinking remaps the brain, and we can see this in decades of recent and amazing research in neuroscience. That's the whole purpose of psychiatry really. So how is it possible that the mind can alter the physical brain if the physical properties of the brain control all conscious experience? But if the mind and body are separate entities, they clearly must be connected to each other. What is that connection? Gassendi asked Descartes the same question: "How can there be effort directed against anything, or motion set up in it, unless there is mutual contact between what moves and what is moved?"
The debate is a very old one, and Yablo is trying to figure out where he stands. He has gone on record as affirming that he is a non-physicalist, but it is difficult to know exactly where he lies on the mind-body problem--or at least I can't completely tell from this book. In his chapter on "Mental Causation," he seems to say that contemporary philosophy has overall accepted that mind has no influence on the physical, but "...dualism is not dead, only evolved. Immaterial minds are gone, it is true, but mental phenomena (facts, properties, events) remain. And although the latter are admitted to be physically realized, and physically necessitated, their literal numerical identity with their physical bases is still roundly denied."
Maybe I find him confusing because he is in the same boat as me and the rest of us. He recognizes that we still don't know, and what we think we know may turn out wrong with new data in the future. But I still would have liked to have had a little more of a solid commitment from him. It might have been helpful if he had tied together all of these essays and the variety of topics for the publication of this book. At least give us some introduction or summary! But that isn't the case.
So overall, I can only say that this is a fairly interesting spin on a variety of interrelated subjects. If you already are familiar with Kripke, or books like "The Physicalists Theory of Mind," or philosophical zombies, then you'll want to see Yablo's take on things. But if you are just getting into the philosophy of mind, this is certainly not a great place to start.
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