What Kind of Creatures Are We

CONTENTS
foreword 
1 | what is language? 1
2 | what can we understand? 27
3 | what is the common good? 59
4 | the mysteries of nature
how deeply hidden? 81
notes 129
index 147

……………………………………

FOREWORD
Akeel Bilgrami

t h i s b o o k p r e s e n t s a lifetime of refl ection by a scientist
of language on the broader implications of his scientifi c work.
The title of this volume, What Kind of Creatures Are We? , conveys just how broad the implications are meant to be. They
cover an impressive range of fi elds: theoretical linguistics,
cognitive science, philosophy of science, history of science,
evolutionary biology, metaphysics, the theory of knowledge,
the philosophy of language and mind, moral and political philosophy, and, even briefl y, the ideal of human education.
Chapter 1 presents, with clarity and precision, Noam
Chomsky’ own basic ideas in theoretical linguistics and cognitive science (both fi elds in which he has played an absolutely
central founding role), recording the progress achieved over
the years but recording much more strenuously how tentatively those claims to progress must be made and how a very
large amount of work remains to be done even in the most
fundamental areas of study. Changes of mind over these years
are also recorded, some of the most striking of which occurred
only in the past decade or so.
The chapter begins by motivating the question its title announces, “What Is Language?” It behooves us to ask it because
FOREWORD viii
without being clear about what language is, not only will we
not get the right answers to other questions about various specifi c aspects of language (perhaps cannot even correctly frame
those specifi c questions), but we will not get close to investigating or even plausibly speculating about the biological basis
and evolutionary origins of language.
A tradition that goes back to Galileo and Descartes recognized the most fundamental feature of language, which then
got its most explicit articulation in Humboldt: “Language is
quite peculiarly confronted by an unending and truly boundless domain, the essence of all that can be thought. It must
therefore make infi nite employment of fi nite means, and is
able to do so, through the power which produces identity of
language and thought.” 1
Darwin, too, is cited as repeating
this in a more elementary form in the context of evolutionary concerns about language: “The lower animals diff er from
man solely in his almost infi nitely larger power of associating
together the most diversifi ed sounds and ideas.” It is worth
noting that there are three fundamental features observed
here by Humboldt and Darwin. First, the claim to an infi nite
power residing in a fi nite base; second, the link of ideas with
sound; and third, the link of language with thought. All of them
are gathered in what Chomsky declares at the outset as the
Basic Property of language: “[E]ach language provides an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions that
receive interpretations at two interfaces, sensorimotor for
externalization and conceptual-intentional for mental processes.” The hierarchical-structural element speaks to the
fi rst feature; the sensorimotor interface, to the second feature;
and the conceptual-intentional interface, to the third feature.
FOREWORD ix
What will account for this Basic Property is a computational procedure. The philosophical signifi cance of this is twofold: a theory of language is necessarily a generative grammar,
and the theory is necessarily about an object that individual
human beings possess, internal to the individual subject and
its mentality (i.e., intensional elements). It is not a theory
about externalized utterances, nor is it, therefore, about a
social phenomenon. The nomenclature to capture this latter
distinction between what is individual/internal/intensional
and what is externalized/social is I-language and E-language
respectively. It is I-languages that alone can be the object of
scientifi c study, not E-languages. 2
And although such study is
eventually to be redeemed in a biological account, until that
eventuality the science captures the phenomena at a level of
abstraction from the biology and speaks at the cognitive level
of the computational power that satisfi es the Basic Property. 3
A diff erent, more general, task is to discover the shared
underlying features of all I-languages, which is determined
again by the biological properties with which human beings
are endowed (a theme whose wider signifi cance for cognition
in general is discussed again in chapter 2). This more general
task is undertaken with a view to discovering the biological endowment that determines what generative systems can serve
as I-languages. In other words, what are the possible human
languages?
Chomsky then points out that as soon as the study of generative grammars addressing the Basic Property of language
was seriously undertaken, some surprising puzzles emerged,
with far-reaching implications. One is the “structure dependence” of linguistic operations: in all constructions, in all
FOREWORD x
languages, these operations invariably rely on structural distance rather than on the computationally far simpler notion
of linear distance. Language learners know this automatically,
without instruction. There is support for this from evidence
from experimental neuroscience and psychology. The result
follows from the assumption that the order is simply not available to the operations that generate the structured expressions that are interpreted at the conceptual-intentional interface, for thought and organization of action. That follows,
in turn, from the very natural assumption that I-languages are
generative systems based on the most elementary computational operation, which is order-free. These and numerous
other considerations provide substantial evidence that linear
order is ancillary to language, not involved in core syntax and
semantics. The same is true of the various external arrangements of sign language, which is now known to be remarkably
like spoken language in its structure, acquisition, use, and even
neural representation. Presumably, these external properties
refl ect conditions imposed by the sensorimotor system. The
option of using linear order does not even arise for the language learner. Linear order and other arrangements are relevant to what is heard—that is, externalized—not to what is
thought, which is interior.
He then points out that these conclusions accord well with
the little that is known about the origin of language. The sensorimotor system “appear[s] to have been in place long before
language emerged,” and there seems to be little specifi c adaptation for language. Cognitive properties of far deeper kinds
than those possessed by apes, or presumably nonhuman hominins, are intrinsic to language. Apes have gestural systems ad-
FOREWORD xi
equate for signing and auditory systems adequate for perception of speech; but unlike human infants, they interpret speech
as just noise, and even with extensive training cannot achieve
even rudiments of human sign language. Aristotle said that
language is “sound with meaning,” but these considerations
just outlined suggest to Chomsky that the priorities in the slogan may be reversed and language would be better understood
as “meaning with sound.” In case this comes off as Platonist
(something that was zealously propagated by Jerrold Katz), it
must be kept fi rmly in mind that for Chomsky, “meaning” here
is intended as a thoroughly psychological (eventually biological) category and thus not at all reifi ed in Platonist terms.
Such conclusions, in turn, fuel Chomsky’s long-standing
claim that language is not to be understood as it everywhere
is among philosophers, anthropologists, and others—as in
some defi ning way tied to communication. If externalization
of language is secondary, and the tie of language to thought is
primary, then communication cannot be central to any answer
to the question this chapter asks: What is language? Indeed, as
he says, there is reason to think that most of language/thought
is not externalized at all. If one fi rmly understands that language is not designed by human beings but is part of their biological endowment, then, taking language as an object of study,
whether scientifi c or philosophical, there might have to be
considerable shift in our methodological approaches.
The quotation from Darwin that Chomsky cites with approval has it that what is fundamental about language is a
“power of associating together the most diversifi ed sounds
and ideas.” Except for the fact that, as we have mentioned,
sound (along with other modes of externalization) has been
FOREWORD xii
demoted, Chomsky’s own theoretical account of the Basic
Property takes this point in Darwin for its word—though perhaps not the exact word, since “associating” is not exactly right
in describing the central operation that the account posits.
Associating happens, after all, even in classical conditioning
(bell, food), and Chomsky has famously repudiated behaviorist accounts of language. Moreover, associations between two
objects, as even nonbehaviorist psychologists understand association, may imply that the order of the objects is important
in a way that the far greater weight put on the forms suited for
semantic interpretation at the conceptual-intentional interface (rather than the sensorimotor interface) establishes it is
not. So moving away from Darwin’s misleading word “associating” for what Darwin himself wants to say, what Chomsky
has in mind is to make central that we are unique in possessing
the capacity to “put together” ideas and syntactic elements.
And this fundamental conception of language is echoed in
the theoretical account of the Basic Property, in which the
crucial operation is given the name Merge, which can operate externally on two distinct objects to create another, or can
operate internally from within one object to create another,
yielding automatically the ubiquitous property of “displacement” (phrases heard in one place but understood also in a
diff erent place) in the form appropriate for complex semantic
interpretation.
These are called External and Internal Merge, respectively,
and respect for simplicity in scientifi c method, applicable in
linguistics as anywhere else, dictates that we keep the basic operation down to this minimum and not proliferate operations
in accounting for the computational power that grounds the
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xiii
Basic Property. Working through some examples to present
how language design is at its optimal if we stick to this methodological injunction, Chomsky presents changes in his own
view, such as on the phenomenon of “displacement,” which he
once saw as an “imperfection,” but now, if one correctly keeps
to the simplest methodological assumptions as just mentioned, is something that is simply to be expected.
The chapter concludes with a bold attempt to exploit these
last methodological points to bring two seemingly disparate
questions together: What account shall we give of the Basic
Property? How and when did language emerge? This confl uence of simplicity of assumptions in accounting for the Basic
Property and the accompanying claim of the optimal design of
language may help to give substance to what is the most plausible hypothesis on the limited evidence we possess about the
origins of language: that language emerged not gradually, but
suddenly (and relatively recently). Such a sudden “great leap
forward,” it may now be speculated, was perhaps caused by a
“slight rewiring of the brain [that] yielded Merge, naturally in
its simplest form, providing the basis for unbounded and creative thought,” hitherto unpossessed.
Chapter 2, “What Can We Understand?,” consolidates
some of these conclusions by fi rst elaborating on another central theme in Chomsky’s work: the limits of human cognition.
There is a locution we have all used frequently: “the scope
and limits of . . .” Chomsky takes it very seriously and gives it a
crucial twist in elaborating his understanding of our cognitive
abilities. These abilities, which in their scope are wider and
deeper than those of any other creature we know, are so partly
because they are also subject to limits, limits owing to our
FOREWORD xiv
nature or, as the title of the book suggests, the kinds of creatures we are—in particular, the fact that our cognitive abilities
have a biological basis.
We implicitly came across this point in chapter 1, though
it is restricted there to the human ability for language, in particular. The theoretical account of language presented there
presupposed this notion of limits—that is, presupposed that
we are genetically endowed with innate structures that afford us our unique capacity for language, structures that at the
same time constrain what language is for us, what possible Ilanguages there are. It is for the characterization of these innate structures that the technical term “UG” is intended, and
it is within the framework of the scope and limits set by this
genetic endowment that language as a computational power is
explained in the generative account summarized earlier.
What is true of language is just a special case of a perfectly
general set of scopes and limits that come from the fact of being creatures with a biology. The idea seems to raise no controversy when it comes to physical ability: what makes us suited to
walk limits us, so that we are not suited to slither like snakes. 4
Chomsky thinks that it is a prejudice to deny that what is obvious in the case of such physical abilities is not obvious (as the
incessant controversies around innate ideas would suggest) in
the case of cognitive abilities. To possess some cognitive abilities necessarily means that other cognitive abilities may be
missing, cognitive abilities that other sorts of minded subjects
could conceivably possess. It is only if we ignore the fact of our
biology when we study human cognition that we would contrive to deny these limits. And chapter 2 proceeds to look at the
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xv
question of such limits on our cognitive abilities quite generally, beyond the specifi c domain of language, though returning
at various points to draw conclusions about language again.
It explores the methodological upshot of this idea of cognitive limits by fi rst recalling a distinction that Chomsky made
almost fi ve decades ago between “problems” and “mysteries.”
Invoking Peirce’s understanding of scientifi c method and scientifi c growth that appeals to the concept of abduction, which
puts limits on what count as “ admissible hypotheses,” he argues
that innate structures that are determined by our genetic endowment set limits to the questions that we can formulate.
The questions we can tractably formulate are called “problems,” but given the limits within which their formulation is
so much as possible, there will be things that escape our cognitive powers; to the extent that we can even think them, we
will, given our current conceptual frameworks and knowledge,
fi nd ourselves unable to formulate them in a way that a tractable form of scientifi c inquiry of them can be pursued. These
he calls “mysteries.” The title of this book, What Kind of Creatures Are We? , is directly addressed by this, since other sorts of
creatures, with a diff erent biological endowment from ours,
may be able to formulate problems that remain mysteries to
us. Thus for Chomsky, if not for Peirce (who, in speaking of admissible hypotheses, may have given less of a determining role
to the fact of our being biological creatures), 5
the distinction
between “problems” and “mysteries” is organism-relative.
It is a very important part of this methodological picture
that we should learn to relax with the fact of our cognitive
limits and the “mysteries” that they inevitably force us to
FOREWORD xvi
acknowledge. The fi nal chapter in this volume, “The Mysteries
of Nature,” traverses vital moments in the history of science to
draw this methodological lesson.
One crux moment is when Newton overturned the
contact-mechanical assumptions of the early modern science
that preceded him and posited a notion of gravity that undermined the earlier notions of matter, motion, and causality,
which were scientifi c consolidations of our commonsense understanding (presumably determined by the cognitive limits
of our biology) of the world of objects. Chomsky points out
that with Newton, a new framework emerged in which—by
the lights of those limits—something inconceivable was being proposed. Newton himself admitted to this inconceivability, even calling it an absurdity, and nobody since Newton has
done anything to redeem things on just this score. Rather, the
absurdity has simply been subsumed into our scientifi c picture of the world. Newton never let it deter him, constructing
explanatory laws and ignoring the lack of a deeper underlying
understanding that would, if we had it, make sense of what
were, by these admissions on his (and others’) part, described
as an “occult” force. It was suffi cient to construct intelligible
theories of the world. And to do so, it was not necessary to
fi nd the world intelligible in the deeper sense that our cognitive limits frustrate.
Subsequent thinkers (Priestley, in particular, comes
through as a most shrewd and comprehending commentator)
made explicit this methodological outlook and drew consequences for issues in the philosophy of mind that vex philosophers today, but that, were they to take in what Priestley had
to off er, might make them reconsider what they present as the
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xvii
mind-body problem, or “ the hard problem” of consciousness.
Philosophers have a tendency to stamp some issue as uniquely
“hard” and rest complacently in that frustrated register.
Chomsky appeals to precisely this history to show fi rst of all
that there is nothing unique about fi nding something “hard”
in just this way. Thus, for instance, what the introduction of
“gravity” did in physics was conceived to be just as hard in the
aftermath of Newton, including by Newton himself. 6
The signifi cance of this to the so-called mind-body problem is that it
puts into doubt whether it can any longer—since Newton—
even be formulated coherently. The initially anxiety-inducing
introduction of something “mysterious” like “gravity” eventually became essential to our understanding of material bodies
and their acting on each other without contact, and so it simply got incorporated into science—indeed, the new common
sense of science. From this, we should, if anything, conclude
philosophically that everything is immaterial, so nothing clear
can remain of a mind-body problem. In a memorably eloquent
reversal of Ryle’s slogan, Chomsky says that far from the ghost
having been sent to oblivion, the machine was discarded and
the ghost remained intact. As for consciousness, the philosopher’s tendency to require that much of our mentality be
conscious, a tendency explicit in philosophers as diff erent as
Quine and Searle, is brought into question by looking at the
operations of the rule-bound abilities of both language and
vision. Chomsky feels particularly strongly about this, since
even much of our conscious thought interacts with aspects of
mind that are hidden from consciousness, and so to restrict
oneself to what is conscious would hinder a scientifi c understanding of even the conscious mind.
FOREWORD
xviii
Given his concern with a scientifi c account, he is concerned too to show that some ways of thinking about language,
and thought more broadly, are not scientifi cally sound. There
is, in particular, an extended discussion of the atomic elements of computation. Invoking points established in chapter 1, he points out that these are misleadingly described as
“words” and as “lexical items” in the literature because—as
they feed into the conceptual-intentional interface, which has
been shown to be primary, in contrast with the sensorimotor interface—they are not constructed by the processes of
externalization. Even more startling for philosophers is the
claim that, except for some explicitly stipulative exceptions in
mathematics and the sciences, they do not have any referential
properties and are not to be thought of as bearing constitutive
relations to mind-independent objects in the external world.
I-language, which is the only scientifi cally accountable notion
of language, thus, is thoroughly internal. This point is explored
through a discussion of historical views, such as those of Aristotle and Hume, and by means of a discussion of examples
of such atoms, ranging from the relatively concrete such as
“house” and “Paris” to relatively abstract such as “person”
and “thing.” Reference or denotation is shown by these discussions to be too contextual to bear scientifi c study and should
be seen as relevant to the use to which language is put rather
than to a constitutive aspect of language itself. All this leads to
a diff erent taxonomy than is found among philosophers, relegating almost of all of what they have in mind by “semantics”
to pragmatics.
These conclusions are relevant to the question of the origin of language. Animals’ signals to one another are caused
FOREWORD
xix
by direct links that they have to objects in the external world.
There is no understanding them if one of these causal links is
left out, whereas the burden of the preceding discussion was to
show precisely that there are no such constitutive causal links
to a mind-independent reality for the atoms of human computation. This gives further reason to conclude that the kind of
creatures we are, possessed of the kind of powers for language
and thought we possess, should get an evolutionary account
of the sort presented in chapter 1 rather than what Chomsky,
citing Lewontin in chapter 2, describes as the “storytelling”
about gradual evolution from our creaturely ancestors, a mode
of explanation that one would indulge in only if one does not
pay enough prior and scientifi c attention to the nature of the
phenotype being explained. It is storytelling partly also, as
Lewontin is cited as saying, because of the “tough luck” of not
having access to any evidence on which these explanations
could be based. They are hidden from human cognitive access,
another form of our limitation.
Thus limits on our cognition are inevitable for a variety of
reasons, chief among which is the taking seriously of the sheer
fact that we are biological creatures. Unlike Locke, Priestley,
Hume, Russell, Peirce, and Lewontin, who are among the heroes of this chapter, Hilbert most explicitly (“There are absolutely no unsolvable problems”) and much of contemporary
philosophy more implicitly deny that there are mysteries,
thereby denying a truism based on this sheer fact. What is
fascinating is that Chomsky, having presented all this, takes
an interesting combination of attitudes toward it. On the one
hand, the very idea of cognitive limits that lands us human beings with “mysteries,” which other sorts of subjects may fi nd
FOREWORD xx
perfectly tractable, is a commitment to what philosophers
call a realist metaphysics. As he says, “Given mysterian truisms, what is inconceivable to me is no criterion for what can
exist.” But on the other hand, taking his cue from Newton, his
attitude, once this is acknowledged, is thoroughly pragmatist .
Just because what we study, the world, may not be ultimately
intelligible, does not mean that we should be inhibited from
striving to produce intelligible scientifi c theories of the world.
Even the concept of free human action, Chomsky says, which
may go beyond any of the concepts we possess (crucially, determinacy and randomness) may one day be scientifi cally tractable, though we are far from anything like that understanding
at present. This is quite diff erent from the attitude of Kant,
who declared freedom to be thinkable but never knowable.
Like Peirce and before him Newton, and unlike Kant, Chomsky
does not want his own mysterianism and his own insistence on
the limits of our cognitive powers to place, as Peirce once put
it, “roadblocks on the path to knowledge.”
Chapter 3, “What Is the Common Good?,” lifts the restriction on our natures, considered in terms of individual
capacities (for language and cognition), and considers us as
social creatures, seeking to explore what is the common good
and which political and economic arrangements promote or
thwart it.
The Enlightenment fi gures large in the pursuit of these
questions, though what Chomsky has in mind by the Enlightenment is capacious, including the familiar “liberal” fi gures of
Adam Smith 7
and Mill as well as those in a broadly Romantic
tradition, such as Humboldt and Marx. And its interpretation
is capacious, too, stressing not only the side of Smith that is
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xxi
often suppressed by most of his liberal and radical critics as
well as his conservative devotees, but also the principles that
allow the Enlightenment to be seen as a precursor of a later anarchist tradition in Europe as well as John Dewey in America.
The starting point of these inquiries is, in fact, individualist and has ties to the earlier chapters. Even within their
biologically determined limits, the creative capacities that
each individual possesses (and that were discussed in chapter 1 in the specifi c domain of language) are precisely the sort
of thing whose full development makes individuals fl ower as
subjects. The social question of the common good necessarily comes in when one asks what sorts of institutions hinder
such development within the individual. Social frameworks
such as capitalism that stress self-interest hinder rather than
encourage the development of individual capacities. Both
Smith’s vivid excoriations of what the division of labor does
to destroy our creative individuality and Dewey’s harsh words
on the shadow cast by corporate interests on just about every aspect of public and personal life are invoked to establish
this. The tradition of anarchism (from Bakunin to Rudolph
Rocker and the anarcho-syndicalism of the Spanish Civil War
period) combines socialist ideas with the liberal principles of
the classical Enlightenment to construct an ideal—of cooperative labor, workers’ control of the workplace and the means
of production, and a social life revolving around voluntary
associations—that, if implemented, would sweep away the
obstacles to the goal of human development that come from
both free-market capitalism and Bolshevik tendencies to a
“red bureaucracy.” Dewey’s ideas on education reveal how,
by contrast with much of the contemporary practice found in
FOREWORD xxii
educational institutions, the goal of human development can
best be pursued from an early age.
There are touching descriptions of how many of these ideals were central to the activism of a wide range of grassroots
movements—from the early radical parliamentary tradition
in seventeenth-century England to the “factory girls” and artisans that Norman Ware wrote of in his study of industrial
workers in the American tradition to the liberation theologians in the Catholic tradition of Central America. These
long-standing democratic labor traditions are contrasted in
some detail with a diff erent understanding of democracy, in
a tradition that begins in the United States with Madison’s
“aristocratic” strictures on who may govern and are updated
in the vision of Walter Lippmann’s ideas of democratic rule by
the “expert,” the American version of Leninist vanguardism,
ensuring—as Chomsky makes clear with a glance at the results
of polls on various important issues, such as health care—that
what the people want is almost never what gets on the agenda
of “democratic” politics. This latter understanding of democracy, of course, dominates the practice of societies and governments in much of the Western world, and Chomsky is keen to
point out that even at its worst, it never lets up on the claim to
be pursuing high-sounding ideals of the common good, showing how the common good is universal in a quite paradoxical
way: it is preached as applying to all, even as it is everywhere
violated by those who are said to be representing all but who
mostly pursue the interests of a few.
Given the fundamental starting point in human creativity and the importance of its unhindered fl owering, Chomsky’s leaning toward anarchism is not surprising, and his way
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xxiii
of putting the point has always been to declare, as he does in
this lecture again: any form of coercion that hinders it can
never be taken for granted. It needs a justifi cation. All arrangements that have coercive power, including centrally the state,
must always be justifi ed. The default position is that they are
not justifi ed—until and unless they are. And given the contingency of the “shoals of capitalism” (his phrase) in all corners
of the world, there is indeed a justifi cation of a notion of the
state that protects the vast numbers who are pushed to the
margins of society (echoing Smith himself, who thought that
only the state could alleviate the oppressive life that industrial
capital forces on labor), 8
very diff erent from the actual state
in most societies, which, as Dewey is cited as saying, largely
does the bidding of corporations and in doing so removes the
socialist element from anarchism and allows only the libertarian element—as a result of which democracy becomes “neodemocracy” (to match “neoliberalism”), in which if one suffers in poverty it is because, as Hobbes might have put it, one
has chosen to do so. Thus to turn one’s back on this and to justify the state as off ering protections for those who suff er under
capitalism, far from contradicting anarchism, is a consistent
application of its principles in historical contingencies, a point
that Chomsky presents with a marvelous metaphor that he
says he has borrowed from the Brazilian rural workers’ movement and extended—the metaphor of an “iron cage” whose
fl oors one tries to extend as one tries to reduce the coercive
power of the state, even as the cage protects one from the destructive forces outside the cage, forces that render us weak
and impoverished and alienated, to say nothing of rendering
our planet uninhabitable.
FOREWORD
xxiv
I have tried, as best I can, to summarize a book whose intellectual complexity and power and whose breadth of knowledge
and originality cannot possibly be captured in a summary—so,
an exercise and duty that may not, in the end, aid the reader at
all. But what I will say, without pause or condition, is that there
was such pleasure and instruction in the exercise that I could
do no better than ask the reader to study the book for herself—
not only for the qualities I have just mentioned, but for its utter seriousness of purpose regarding the deepest questions in
philosophy and science and, above all, its vast humanity.
WHAT KIND OF CREATURES ARE WE?

1 | WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
t h e g e n e r a l q u e s t i o n I would like to address in this
book is an ancient one: What kind of creatures are we? I am
not deluded enough to think I can provide a satisfactory answer, but it seems reasonable to believe that in some domains
at least, particularly with regard to our cognitive nature, there
are insights of some interest and signifi cance, some new, and
that it should be possible to clear away some of the obstacles
that hamper further inquiry, including some widely accepted
doctrines with foundations that are much less stable than often assumed.
I will consider three specifi c questions, increasingly obscure: What is language? What are the limits of human understanding (if any)? And what is the common good to which we
should strive? I will begin with the fi rst and will try to show
how what may seem at fi rst to be rather narrow and technical
questions can, if pursued carefully, lead to some far- reaching
conclusions that are signifi cant in themselves and diff er
sharply from what is generally believed—and often regarded
as fundamental—in the relevant disciplines: cognitive science
in a broad sense, including linguistics, and philosophy of language and mind.
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 2
Throughout, I will be discussing what seem to me virtual
truisms, but of an odd kind. They are generally rejected. That
poses a dilemma, for me at least. And perhaps you too will be
interested in resolving it.
Turning to language, it has been studied intensively and
productively for 2,500 years, but with no clear answer to the
question of what language is. I will mention later some of the
major proposals. We might ask just how important it is to fi ll
this gap. For the study of any aspect of language the answer
should be clear. Only to the extent that there is an answer to
this question, at least tacit, is it possible to proceed to investigate serious questions about language, among them acquisition and use, origin, language change, diversity and common
properties, language in society, the internal mechanisms that
implement the system, both the cognitive system itself and its
various uses, distinct though related tasks. No biologist would
propose an account of the development or evolution of the
eye, for example, without telling us something fairly defi nite
about what an eye is, and the same truisms hold of inquiries
into language. Or should. Interestingly, that is not how the
questions have generally been viewed, a matter to which I will
return.
But there are much more fundamental reasons to try to
determine clearly what language is, reasons that bear directly
on the question of what kind of creatures we are. Darwin was
not the fi rst to conclude that “the lower animals diff er from
man solely in his almost infi nitely larger power of associating
together the most diversifi ed sounds and ideas”; 1
“almost infi –
nite” is a traditional phrase to be interpreted today as actually
infi nite. But Darwin was the fi rst to have expressed this tradi-
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 3
tional concept within the framework of an incipient account of
human evolution.
A contemporary version is given by one of the leading scientists who studies human evolution, Ian Tattersall. In a recent review of the currently available scientifi c evidence, he
observes that it was once believed that the evolutionary record
would yield “early harbingers of our later selves. The reality,
however, is otherwise, for it is becoming increasingly clear that
the acquisition of the uniquely modern [human] sensibility
was instead an abrupt and recent event. . . . And the expression
of this new sensibility was almost certainly crucially abetted
by the invention of what is perhaps the single most remarkable thing about our modern selves: language.” 2
If so, then an
answer to the question “What is language?” matters greatly to
anyone concerned with understanding our modern selves.
Tattersall dates the abrupt and sudden event as probably
lying somewhere within the very narrow window of 50,000
to 100,000 years ago. The exact dates are unclear, and not relevant to our concerns here, but the abruptness of the emergence is. I will return to the vast and burgeoning literature of
speculation on the topic, which generally adopts a very diff erent stance.
If Tattersall’s account is basically accurate, as the very
limited empirical evidence indicates, then what emerged in
the narrow window was an infi nite power of “associating the
most diversifi ed sound and ideas,” in Darwin’s words. That
infi nite power evidently resides in a fi nite brain. The concept
of fi nite systems with infi nite power was well understood by
the mid-twentieth century. That made it possible to provide
a clear formulation of what I think we should recognize to be
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 4
the most basic property of language, which I will refer to just as
the Basic Property: each language provides an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions that receive interpretations at two interfaces, sensorimotor for externalization
and conceptual-intentional for mental processes. That allows
a substantive formulation of Darwin’s infi nite power or, going
back much farther, of Aristotle’s classic dictum that language
is sound with meaning—though work of recent years shows
that sound is too narrow, and there is good reason, to which I
will return, to think that the classic formulation is misleading
in important ways.
At the very least, then, each language incorporates a computational procedure satisfying the Basic Property. Therefore
a theory of the language is by defi nition a generative grammar, and each language is what is called in technical terms an
I- language—“I” standing for internal, individual, and intensional: we are interested in the discovering the actual computational procedure, not some set of objects it enumerates,
what it “strongly generates” in technical terms, loosely analogous to the proofs generated by an axiom system.
There is also a notion “weak generation”—the set of expressions generated, analogous to the set of theorems generated. There is also a notion “E-language,” standing for external
language, which many—not me—identify with a corpus of
data, or with some infi nite set that is weakly generated. 3
Philosophers, linguists, and cognitive and computer scientists
have often understood language to be what is weakly generated. It is not clear that the notion weak generation is even
defi nable for human language. At best it is derivative from the
more fundamental notion of I-language. These are matters ex-
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 5
tensively discussed in the 1950s, though not properly assimilated, I believe. 4
I will restrict attention here to I-language, a biological
property of humans, some subcomponent of (mostly) the
brain, an organ of the mind/brain in the loose sense in which
the term “organ” is used in biology. I take the mind here to be
the brain viewed at a certain level of abstraction. The approach
is sometimes called the biolinguistic framework. It is regarded
as controversial but without grounds, in my opinion.
In earlier years, the Basic Property resisted clear formulation. Taking some of the classics, for Ferdinand de Saussure,
language (in the relevant sense) is a storehouse of word images in the minds of members of a community, which “exists
only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of
a community.” For Leonard Bloomfi eld, language is an array
of habits to respond to situations with conventional speech
sounds and to respond to these sounds with actions. Elsewhere, Bloomfi eld defi ned language as “the totality of utterances made in a speech community”—something like William Dwight Whitney’s earlier conception of language as “the
body of uttered and audible signs by which in human society
thought is principally expressed,” thus “audible signs for
thought”—though this a somewhat diff erent conception in
ways to which I will return. Edward Sapir defi ned language as
“a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.” 5
With such conceptions it is not unnatural to follow what
Martin Joos called the Boasian tradition, holding that languages can diff er arbitrarily and that each new one must be
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 6
studied without preconceptions. 6
Accordingly, linguistic
theory consists of analytic procedures to reduce a corpus to
organized form, basically techniques of segmentation and
classifi cation. The most sophisticated development of this
conception was Zellig Harris’s Methods .
7
A contemporary version is that linguistic theory is a system of methods for processing expressions. 8
In earlier years, it was understandable that the question
“What is language?” received only such indefi nite answers as
the ones mentioned, ignoring the Basic Property. It is, however, surprising to fi nd that similar answers remain current
in contemporary cognitive science. Not untypical is a current
study on evolution of language, where the authors open by
writing that “we understand language as the full suite of abilities to map sound to meaning, including the infrastructure
that supports it,” 9
basically a reiteration of Aristotle’s dictum,
and too vague to ground further inquiry. Again, no biologist
would study evolution of the visual system assuming no more
about the phenotype than that it provides the full suite of
abilities to map stimuli to percepts along with whatever supports it.
Much earlier, at the origins of modern science, there were
hints at a picture somewhat similar to Darwin’s and Whitney’s.
Galileo wondered at the “sublimity of mind” of the person
who “dreamed of fi nding means to communicate his deepest
thoughts to any other person . . . by the diff erent arrangements
of twenty characters upon a page,” an achievement “surpassing all stupendous inventions,” even those of “a Michelangelo, a Raphael, or a Titian.” 10 The same recognition, and the
deeper concern for the creative character of the normal use
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 7
of language, was soon to become a core element of Cartesian
science-philosophy, in fact a primary criterion for the existence of mind as a separate substance. Quite reasonably, that
led to eff orts to devise tests to determine whether another
creature has a mind like ours, notably by Géraud de Cordemoy. 11 These were somewhat similar to the “Turing test,”
though quite diff erently conceived. De Cordemoy’s experiments were like a litmus test for acidity, an attempt to draw
conclusions about the real world. Turing’s imitation game, as
he made clear, had no such ambitions.
These important questions aside, there is no reason today
to doubt the fundamental Cartesian insight that use of language has a creative character: it is typically innovative without bounds, appropriate to circumstances but not caused by
them—a crucial distinction—and can engender thoughts in
others that they recognize they could have expressed themselves. We may be “incited or inclined” by circumstances and
internal conditions to speak in certain ways, not others, but
we are not “compelled” to do so, as Descartes’s successors put
it. We should also bear in mind that Wilhelm von Humboldt’s
now oft-quoted aphorism that language involves infi nite use
of fi nite means refers to use . More fully, he wrote that “language is quite peculiarly confronted by an unending and truly
boundless domain, the essence of all that can be thought. It
must therefore make infi nite employment of fi nite means, and
is able to do so, through the power which produces identity of
language and thought.” 12 He thus placed himself in the tradition of Galileo and others who associated language closely
with thought, though going well beyond, while formulating
one version of a traditional conception of language as “the
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 8
single most remarkable thing about our modern selves,” in
Tattersall’s recent phrase.
There has been great progress in understanding the fi nite
means that make possible infi nite use of language, but the
latter remains largely a mystery despite signifi cant progress
in understanding conventions that guide appropriate use, a
much narrower question. How deep a mystery is a good question, to which I will return in chapter 2.
A century ago, Otto Jespersen raised the question of how
the structures of language “come into existence in the mind of
a speaker” on the basis of fi nite experience, yielding a “notion
of structure” that is “defi nite enough to guide him in framing
sentences of his own,” crucially “free expressions” that are
typically new to speaker and hearer. 13 The task of the linguist,
then, is to discover these mechanisms and how they arise in
the mind, and to go beyond to unearth “the great principles
underlying the grammars of all languages,” and by unearthing them to gain “a deeper insight into the innermost nature
of human language and of human thought”—ideas that sound
much less strange today than they did during the structuralist/
behavioral science era that came to dominate much of the
fi eld, marginalizing Jespersen’s concerns and the tradition
from which they derived.
Reformulating Jespersen’s program, the primary task is to
investigate the true nature of the interfaces and the generative procedures that relate them in various I-languages, and
to determine how they arise in the mind and are used, the primary focus of concern naturally being “free expressions.” And
to go beyond to unearth the shared biological properties that
determine the nature of I-languages accessible to humans, the
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 9
topic of UG, universal grammar, in the contemporary version
of Jespersen’s “great principles underlying the grammars of all
languages,” now reframed as a question of the genetic endowment that yields the unique human language capacity and its
specifi c instantiations in I-languages.
The mid-twentieth-century shift of perspective to generative grammar within the biolinguistic framework opened the
way to much more far-reaching inquiry into language itself
and language-related topics. The range of empirical materials available from languages of the widest typological variety
has enormously expanded, and they are studied at a level of
depth that could not have been imagined sixty years ago. The
shift also greatly enriched the variety of evidence that bears
on the study of each individual language to include acquisition, neuroscience, dissociations, and much else, and also
what is learned from the study of other languages, on the wellconfi rmed assumption that the capacity for language relies on
shared biological endowment.
As soon as the earliest attempts were made to construct explicit generative grammars sixty years ago, many puzzling phenomena were discovered, which had not been noticed as long
as the Basic Property was not clearly formulated and addressed
and syntax was just considered “use of words” determined by
convention and analogy. This is somewhat reminiscent of the
early stages of modern science. For millennia, scientists had
been satisfi ed with simple explanations for familiar phenomena: rocks fall and steam rises because they are seeking their
natural place; objects interact because of sympathies and antipathies; we perceive a triangle because its shape fl its through
the air and implants itself in our brains, and so on. When
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 10
Galileo and others allowed themselves to be puzzled about
the phenomena of nature, modern science began—and it was
quickly discovered that many of our beliefs are senseless and
our intuitions often wrong. Willingness to be puzzled is a valuable trait to cultivate, from childhood to advanced inquiry.
One puzzle about language that came to light sixty years
ago, and remains alive and I think highly signifi cant in its import, has to do with a simple but curious fact. Consider the
sentence “instinctively, eagles that fl y swim.” The adverb “instinctively” is associated with a verb, but it is “swim,” not “fl y.”
There is no problem with the thought that eagles that instinctively fl y swim, but it cannot be expressed this way . Similarly
the question “Can eagles that fl y swim?” is about ability to
swim, not to fl y.
What is puzzling is that the association of the clauseinitial elements “instinctively” and “can” to the verb is remote
and based on structural properties, rather than proximal and
based solely on linear properties, a far simpler computational
operation, and one that would be optimal for processing language. Language makes use of a property of minimal structural
distance, never using the much simpler operation of minimal
linear distance; in this and numerous other cases, ease of processing is ignored in the design of language. In technical terms,
the rules are invariably structure-dependent , ignoring linear order. The puzzle is why this should be so—not just for English
but for every language, not just for these constructions but for
all others as well, over a wide range.
There is a simple and plausible explanation for the fact that
the child refl exively knows the right answer in such cases as
these, even though evidence is slight or nonexistent: linear or-
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 11
der is simply not available to the language learner confronted
with such examples, who is guided by a deep principle that
restricts search to minimal structural distance, barring the
far simpler operation of minimal linear distance. I know of no
other explanation. And this proposal of course at once calls for
further explanation: Why is this so? What is it about the genetically determined character of language—UG—that imposes
this particular condition?
The principle of minimal distance is extensively employed
in language design, presumably one case of a more general principle, call it Minimal Computation, which is in turn presumably an instance of a far more general property of the organic
world or even beyond. There must however be some special
property of language design that restricts Minimal Computation to structural rather than linear distance, despite the far
greater simplicity of the latter for computation and processing.
There is independent evidence from other sources, including the neurosciences, supporting the same conclusion. A
research group in Milan studied brain activity of subjects presented with two types of stimuli: invented languages satisfying
UG and others not conforming to UG; in the latter case, for
example, a rule for negation that places the negative element
after the third word, a far simpler computational operation
than the rules for negation in human language. They found
that in the case of conformity to UG, there is normal activation
in the language areas, though not when linear order is used. 14
In that case, the task is interpreted as a nonlinguistic puzzle, so
brain activity indicates. Work by Neil Smith and Ianthi- Maria
Tsimpli with a cognitively impaired but linguistically gifted
subject reached similar conclusions—but, interestingly, found
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 12
that normals as well were unable to deal with the violations of
UG using linear order. As Smith concludes: “the linguistic format of the experiment appeared to inhibit them from making
the appropriate structure-independent generalization, even
though they could work out comparable problems in a nonlinguistic environment with ease.” 15
There is a small industry in computational cognitive science attempting to show that these properties of language can
be learned by statistical analysis of Big Data. This is, in fact, one
of the very few signifi cant properties of language that has been
seriously addressed at all in these terms. Every attempt that is
clear enough to be investigated has been shown to fail, irremediably. 16 But more signifi cantly, the eff orts are beside the point
in the fi rst place. If they were to succeed, which is a virtual impossibility, they would leave untouched the original and only
serious question: Why does language invariably use the complex computational property of minimal structural distance
in the relevant cases, while always disregarding the far simpler
option of minimal linear distance? Failure to grasp this point
is an illustration of the lack of willingness to be puzzled that I
mentioned earlier, the fi rst step in serious scientifi c inquiry, as
recognized in the hard sciences at least since Galileo.
A broader thesis is that linear order is never available for
computation in the core parts of language involving syntaxsemantics. Linear order, then, is a peripheral part of language,
a refl ex of properties of the sensorimotor system, which requires it: we cannot speak in parallel, or produce structures,
but only strings of words. The sensorimotor system is not
specifi cally adapted to language in fundamental respects: the
parts essential for externalization and perception appear to
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 13
have been in place long before language emerged. There is
evidence that the auditory system of chimpanzees might be
fairly well adapted for human speech, 17 though apes cannot
even take the fi rst step in language acquisition, extracting
language-relevant data from the “blooming, buzzing confusion” surrounding them, as human infants do at once, refl exively, not a slight achievement. And though capacity to control
the vocal tract for speech appears to be human-specifi c, that
fact cannot bear too much weight given that production of human language is modality-independent, as recent work on sign
language has established, and there is little reason to doubt
that apes have adequate gestural capacities. Evidently much
deeper cognitive properties are involved in language acquisition and design.
Though the matter is not settled, there is considerable
evidence that the broader thesis may in fact be correct: fundamental language design ignores order and other external
arrangements. In particular, semantic interpretation in core
cases depends on hierarchy, not the order found in the externalized forms. If so, then the Basic Property is not exactly
as I formulated it before, and as it is formulated in recent
literature—papers of mine, too. Rather, the Basic Property is
generation of an unbounded array of hierarchically structured
expressions mapping to the conceptual-intentional interface,
providing a kind of “language of thought”—and quite possibly
the only such LOT, though interesting questions arise here.
Interesting and important questions also arise about the status and character of this mapping, which I will put aside.
If this line of reasoning is generally correct, then there is
good reason to return to a traditional conception of language
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 14
as “an instrument of thought,” and to revise Aristotle’s dictum
accordingly; language is not sound with meaning but meaning
with sound—more generally, with some form of externalization, typically sound though other modalities are readily available: work of the past generation on sign has shown remarkable similarities to spoken language in structure, acquisition,
and neural representation, though of course the mode of externalization is quite diff erent.
It is worth noting that externalization is rarely used. Most
use of language use by far is never externalized. It is a kind of
internal dialogue, and the limited research on the topic, going back to some observations of Lev Vygotsky’s, 18 conforms
to what introspection suggests—at least mine: what reaches
consciousness is scattered fragments. Sometimes, full-formed
expressions instantly appear internally, too quickly for articulators to be involved, or probably even instructions to them.
This is an interesting topic that has been barely explored, but
could be subjected to inquiry, and has many ramifi cations.
The latter issue aside, investigation of the design of language gives good reason to take seriously a traditional conception of language as essentially an instrument of thought. Externalization then would be an ancillary process, its properties
a refl ex of the largely or completely independent sensorimotor system. Further investigation supports this conclusion. It
follows that processing is a peripheral aspect of language, and
that particular uses of language that depend on externalization, among them communication, are even more peripheral,
contrary to virtual dogma that has no serious support. It would
also follow that the extensive speculation about language evo-
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 15
lution in recent years is on the wrong track, with its focus on
communication.
It is, indeed, virtual dogma that the function of language
is communication. A typical formulation of the idea is the following: “It is important that in a community of language users
that words be used with the same meaning. If this condition
is met it facilitates the chief end of language which is communication. If one fails to use words with the meaning that most
people attach to them, one will fail to communicate eff ectively with others. Thus one would defeat the main purpose of
language.” 19
It is, in the fi rst place, odd to think that language has a purpose. Languages are not tools that humans design but biological objects, like the visual or immune or digestive system. Such
organs are sometimes said to have functions, to be for some
purpose. But that notion too is far from clear. Take the spine. Is
its function to hold us up, to protect nerves, to produce blood
cells, to store calcium, or all of the above? Similar questions
arise when we ask about the function and design of language.
Here evolutionary considerations are commonly introduced,
but these are far from trivial; for the spine as well. For language, the various speculations about evolution typically turn
to the kinds of communication systems found throughout the
animal kingdom, but that is just again a refl ection of the modern dogma and is likely to be a blind alley, for reasons already
mentioned and to which I will return.
Furthermore, even insofar as language is used for communication, there is no need for meanings to be shared (or
sounds, or structures). Communication is not a yes-or-no but
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 16
rather a more-or-less aff air. If similarities are not suffi cient,
communication fails to some degree, as in normal life.
Even if the term “communication” is largely deprived of
substantive meaning and used as a cover term for social interaction of various kinds, it remains a minor part of actual language use, for whatever that observation is worth.
In brief, there is no basis for the standard dogma, and there
is by now quite signifi cant evidence that it is simply false.
Doubtless language is sometimes used for communication, as
is style of dress, facial expression and stance, and much else.
But fundamental properties of language design indicate that a
rich tradition is correct in regarding language as essentially an
instrument of thought, even if we do not go as far as Humboldt
in identifying the two.
The conclusion becomes even more solidly entrenched
if we consider the Basic Property more closely. Naturally we
seek the simplest account of the Basic Property, the theory
with fewest arbitrary stipulations—each of which is, furthermore, a barrier to some eventual account of origin of language.
And we ask how far this resort to standard scientifi c method
will carry us.
The simplest computational operation, embedded in some
manner in every relevant computational procedure, takes objects X and Y already constructed and forms a new object Z.
Call it Merge . The principle of Minimal Computation dictates
that neither X nor Y is modifi ed by Merge, and that they appear
in Z unordered. Hence Merge(X,Y) = {X,Y}. That does not of
course mean that the brain contains sets, as some current misinterpretations claim, but rather that whatever is going on in
the brain has properties that can properly be characterized in
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 17
these terms—just as we don’t expect to fi nd the Kekulé diagram for benzene in a test tube.
Note that if language really does conform to the principle of Minimal Computation in this respect, we have a farreaching answer to the puzzle of why linear order is only an
ancillary property of language, apparently not available for
core syntactic and semantic computations: language design is
perfect in this regard (and again we may ask why). Looking further, evidence mounts in support of this conclusion.
Suppose X and Y are merged, and neither is part of the
other, as in combining read and that book to form the syntactic
object corresponding to “read that book.” Call that case External Merge . Suppose that one is part of the other, as in combining Y = which book and X = John read which book to form which
book John read which book , which surfaces as “which book did
John read” by further operations to which I will return. That
is an example of the ubiquitous phenomenon of displacement
in natural language: phrases are heard in one place but interpreted both there and in another place, so that the sentence is
understood as “for which book x, John read the book x.” In this
case, the result of Merge of X and Y is again {X, Y}, but with two
copies of Y (= which book ), one the original one remaining in X,
the other the displaced copy merged with X. Call that Internal
Merge .
It is important to avoid a common misinterpretation,
found in the professional literature as well. There is no operation Copy or Remerge. Internal Merge happens to generate two
copies, but that is the outcome of Merge under the principle
of Minimal Computation, which keeps Merge in its simplest
form, not tampering with either of the elements Merged. New
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 18
notions of Copy or Remerge not only are superfl uous; they
also cause considerable diffi culties unless sharply constrained
to apply under the highly specifi c conditions of Internal
Merge, which are met automatically under the simplest notion
of Merge.
External and Internal Merge are the only two possible
cases of binary Merge. Both come free if we formulate Merge
in the optimal way, applying to any two syntactic objects that
have already been constructed, with no further conditions.
It would require stipulation to bar either of the two cases of
Merge, or to complicate either of them. That is an important
fact. For many years it was assumed—by me, too—that displacement is a kind of “imperfection” of language, a strange
property that has to be explained away by some more complex
devices and assumptions about UG. But that turns out to be
incorrect. Displacement is what we should expect on the simplest assumptions. It would be an imperfection if it were lacking. It is sometimes suggested that External Merge is somehow
simpler and should have priority in design or evolution. There
is no basis for that belief. If anything, one could argue that
Internal Merge is simpler since it involves vastly less search
of the workspace for computation—not that one should pay
much attention to that.
Another important fact is that Internal Merge in its simplest form—satisfying the overarching principle of Minimal
Computation—commonly yields the structure appropriate
for semantic interpretation, as just illustrated in the simple
case of “which book did John read.” However, these are the
wrong structures for the sensorimotor system: universally in
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 19
language, only the structurally most prominent copy is pronounced, as in this case: the lower copy is deleted. There is a
revealing class of exceptions that in fact support the general
thesis, but I will put that aside. 20
Deletion of copies follows from another uncontroversial
application of Minimal Computation: compute and articulate
as little as possible. The result is that the articulated sentences
have gaps. The hearer has to fi gure out where the missing element is. As well-known in the study of perception and parsing,
that yields diffi cult problems for language processing, socalled fi ller-gap problems. In this very broad class of cases too,
language design favors minimal computation, disregarding
the complications in the processing and use of language.
Notice that any linguistic theory that replaces Internal
Merge by other mechanisms has a double burden of proof to
meet: it is necessary to justify the stipulation barring Internal
Merge and also the new mechanisms intended to account for
displacement—in fact, displacement with copies, generally
the right forms for semantic interpretation.
The same conclusions hold in more complex cases. Consider, for example, the sentence “[which of his pictures] did
they persuade the museum that [[every painter] likes best]?”
It is derived by Internal Merge from the underlying structure
“[which of his pictures] did they persuade the museum that
[[every painter] likes [which of his pictures] best]?,” formed
directly by Internal Merge, with displacement and two copies.
The pronounced phrase “which of his pictures” is understood
to be the object of “likes,” in the position of the gap, analogous
to “one of his pictures” in “they persuaded the museum that
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 20
[[every painter] likes [one of his pictures] best].” And that is
just the interpretation that the underlying structure with the
two copies provides.
Furthermore, the quantifi er-variable relationship between
every and his carries over in “[which of his pictures] did they
persuade the museum that [[every painter] likes best]?” The
answer can be “his fi rst one”—diff erent for every painter, as
in one interpretation of “they persuaded the museum that
[[ every painter] likes [one of his pictures] best].” In contrast,
no such answer is possible for the structurally similar expression “[which of his pictures] persuaded the museum that
[[ every painter] likes fl owers]?,” in which case “his pictures”
does not fall within the scope of “every painter.” Evidently, it
is the unpronounced copy that provides the structure required
for quantifi er-variable binding as well as for the verb-object interpretation. The results once again follow straightforwardly
from Internal Merge and copy deletion under externalization.
There are many similar examples—along with interesting
problems as complexity mounts.
Just as in the simpler cases, like “instinctively, eagles that
fl y swim,” it is inconceivable that some form of data processing yields these outcomes. Relevant data are not available to
the language learner. The results must therefore derive “from
the original hand of nature,” in Hume’s phrase—in our terms,
from genetic endowment, specifi cally the architecture of language as determined by UG in interaction with such general
principles as Minimal Computation. In ways like these we can
derive quite far-reaching and fi rm conclusions about the nature of UG.
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 21
One commonly reads claims in the literature that UG has
been refuted, or does not exist. But this must be a misunderstanding. To deny the existence of UG—that is, of a biological
endowment underlying the capacity for language—would be
to hold that it is a miracle that humans have language but other
organisms do not. The reference in these claims is presumably
not to UG, however; rather, to descriptive generalizations—
Joseph Greenberg’s very important proposals on language
universals, for example. For example, in an introduction to
the new edition of Quine’s Word and Object ,
21 Patricia Churchland, with an irrelevant citation, writes that “linguistic universals, long the darlings of theorists, took a drubbing as one
by one they fell to the disconfi rming data of fi eld linguists.”
Presumably she takes this to be confi rmation of Quine’s view
that “timely refl ection on method and evidence should tend to
stifl e much of the talk of linguistic universals,” meaning generalizations about language. In reality, it is fi eld linguists who
have discovered and confi rmed not only the generally valid
and quite important generalizations but also the invariant
properties of UG. The term “fi eld linguists” means linguists
concerned with data, whether they are working in the Amazon
jungle, or in their offi ces in Belem, or in New York.
The fragment of truth in such observations is that generalizations are likely to have exceptions, which can be quite valuable as a stimulus to inquiry—for example, the exceptions to
deletion of copies, which I just mentioned. That is a common
experience in the sciences. The discovery of perturbations in
the orbit of Uranus did not lead to the abandonment of Newton’s principles and Kepler’s laws, or to the broader conclusion
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 22
that there are no physical laws, but to the postulation—later
discovery—of another planet, Neptune. Exceptions to largely
valid descriptive generalizations play a similar role quite generally in the sciences and have done so repeatedly in the study
of language.
There is, then, persuasive and quite far-reaching evidence
that if language is optimally designed, it will provide structures appropriate for semantic interpretation but that yield
diffi culties for perception and language processing (hence
communication). There are many other illustrations. Take,
say, passivization. It has been argued that passivization supports the belief that language is well designed for communication. Thus in the sentence “the boys took the books,” if we
wish to foreground “the books,” the passive operation allows
us to do so by saying “the books were taken by the boys.” In
fact, the conclusion is the opposite. The design of language,
following from Minimal Computation, regularly bars this option. Suppose in the sentence “the boys took the books from
the library” we wish to foreground “the library,” yielding “the
library was taken the books from by the boys.” That’s barred by
language design, yet another barrier to communication.
The interesting cases are those in which there is a direct
confl ict between computational and communicative effi –
ciency. In every known case, the former prevails; ease of communication is sacrifi ced. Many such cases are familiar, among
them structural ambiguities and “garden path sentences”
such as “the horse raced past the barn fell,” interpreted as ungrammatical on fi rst presentation. Another case of particular
interest is so-called islands —constructions in which extraction (Internal Merge) is barred—insofar as these can be given
WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
23
principled explanations invoking computational effi ciency.
An illustration is the questions associated with the expression “they asked if the mechanics fi xed the cars.” We can ask
“how many cars,” yielding “how many cars did they ask if the
mechanics fi xed?” Or we can ask “how many mechanics,”
yielding “how many mechanics did they ask if fi xed the cars?”
The two interrogatives diff er sharply in status: asking “how
many mechanics” is a fi ne thought, but it has to be expressed
by some circumlocution, again impeding communication;
technically an ECP violation. Here, too, there appear to be
counterexamples, in Italian for example. Recognition of these
led to discoveries about the nature of null subject languages
by Luigi Rizzi, 22 reinforcing the ECP principle, again illustrating the value of proposed generalizations and apparent
exceptions.
There are many similar cases. Insofar as they are understood, the structures result from free functioning of the simplest rules, yielding diffi culties for perception and language
processing. Again, where ease of processing and communicative effi ciency confl ict with computational effi ciency in language design, in every known case the former are sacrifi ced.
That lends further support to the view of language as an instrument of thought, in interesting respects perfectly designed, with externalization an ancillary process, hence a fortiori communication and other uses of externalized language.
As is often the case, what is actually observed gives quite a misleading picture of the principles that underlie it. The essential
art of science is reduction of “complex visibles to simple invisibles,” as Nobel laureate in chemistry Jean Baptiste Perrin put
the matter.
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 24
To bring out more clearly just what is at stake, let us reverse the argument outlined here, putting it in a more principled way. We begin with the Basic Property of language and
ask what the optimal computational system would be that
captures it, adopting normal scientifi c method. The answer
is Merge in its simplest form, with its two variants, External and Internal Merge, the latter yielding the “copy theory
of movement.” In a wide and important range of cases, that
yields forms appropriate for semantic interpretation at the
conceptual-intentional interface, forms which lack order
or other arrangements. An ancillary process of externalization then converts the internally generated objects to a form
adapted to the sensorimotor system, with arrangements that
vary depending on the sensory modality for externalization.
Externalization, too, is subject to Minimal Computation, so
that copies are erased, yielding diffi culties for language processing and use (including the special case of communication). A fallout of the optimal assumptions is that rules are invariably structure-dependent, resolving the puzzle discussed
at the outset and others like it.
A broader research project—in recent years called the minimalist program —is to begin with the optimal assumption—the
so-called strong minimalist thesis , SMT—and to ask how far it
can be sustained in the face of the observed complexities and
variety of the languages of the world. Where a gap is found,
the task will be to see whether the data can be reinterpreted,
or principles of optimal computation can be revised, so as to
solve the puzzles within the framework of SMT, thus producing some support, in an interesting and unexpected domain,
for Galileo’s precept that nature is simple, and it is the task of
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? 25
the scientist to prove it. The task is of course a challenging one.
It is fair to say, I think, that it seems a good deal more realistic
today than it did only a few years ago, though enormous problems of course remain.
All of this raises at once a further question: Why should
language be optimally designed, insofar as the SMT holds?
This question that leads us to consideration of the origin of
language. The SMT hypothesis fi ts well with the very limited
evidence we have about the emergence of language, apparently
quite recently and suddenly in the evolutionary time scale, as
Tattersall discussed. A fair guess today—and one that opens
rich avenues of research and inquiry—is that some slight rewiring of the brain yielded Merge, naturally in its simplest
form, providing the basis for unbounded and creative thought,
the “great leap forward” revealed in the archaeological record,
and the remarkable diff erences separating modern humans
from their predecessors and the rest of the animal kingdom.
Insofar as the surmise is sustainable, we would have an answer
to questions about apparent optimal design of language: that is
what would be expected under the postulated circumstances,
with no selectional or other pressures operating, so the emerging system should just follow laws of nature, in this case the
principles of Minimal Computation—rather the way a snowfl ake forms.
These remarks only scratch the surface. Perhaps they can
serve to illustrate why the answer to the question “What is
Language?” matters a lot, and also to illustrate how close attention to this fundamental question can yield conclusions
with many ramifi cations for the study of what kind of creature
humans are.

2 | WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
in chapter 1, I discussed the question “What is language?”
and considered what we can learn about the kind of creatures
we are from close inquiry into this distinctive human possession. Quite a lot, I believe and tried to suggest and illustrate.
In this chapter, I would like to move on to questions about our
cognitive capacities more generally, and specifi cally, how they
enter into the scope and limits of our understanding.
There is a concept called “the new mysterianism,” coined
by Owen Flanagan, who defi ned it as “a postmodern position designed to drive a railroad spike through the heart of
scientism” by holding that consciousness may never be completely explained. 1
The term has been extended to broader
questions about the scope and nature of explanations accessible to human intelligence. I will use the term in the broader
sense, which seems to me the more signifi cant one.
I am cited as one of the culprits responsible for this strange
postmodern heresy, though I would prefer a diff erent name:
truism. That is what I thought forty years ago in proposing
a distinction between problems , which fall within our cognitive capacities, and mysteries , which do not. 2
In terms I borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce’s account of abduction,
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 28
the human mind is a biological system that provides it with a
limited array of “admissible hypotheses” that are the foundations of human scientifi c inquiry—and by the same reasoning,
of cognitive attainments generally. As a matter of simple logic,
the system must exclude other hypotheses and ideas as inaccessible to us altogether, or too remote in some accessibility
hierarchy to be accessible in fact, though they might be so for
a diff erently structured mind—perhaps not Peirce’s view. UG
plays something of the same role for language, and the basic
observation carries over for all biological capacities.
Peirce’s concept of abduction is sometimes glossed as inference to the best explanation, but though undeveloped, the
concept goes well beyond that. Crucially, Peirce insisted on
limits of “admissible hypotheses,” which he took to be quite
narrow, a prerequisite for “imagining correct theories.” He
was concerned with growth of scientifi c knowledge, but the
same holds for acquisition of commonsense understanding, of
language acquisition in particular. 3
The same should be expected to be true even of the questions that we can formulate; innate structure provides a rich
variety of formulable questions, while barring others that
some diff erent mind might recognize to be the right ones to
ask. I also cited the somewhat similar ideas of Hume, who recognized that just as for “beasts,” so “the greater part of human
knowledge” depends on “a species of natural instincts,” which
“derive from the original hand of nature”—in our terms, genetic endowment. The same conclusions follow.
All of this does seem to me close to truism, if perhaps not
for reasons that have led many distinguished fi gures to somewhat similar conclusions. If we are biological organisms, not
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
29
angels, then our cognitive faculties are similar to those called
“physical capacities” and should be studied much as other systems of the body are.
Take, for example, the digestive system. Vertebrates have
“a second brain,” the “gut brain,” the enteric nervous system,
“an independent site of neural integration and processing.” Its
structure and component cells are “more akin to those of the
brain than to those of any other peripheral organ.” There are
more nerve cells in the bowel than in the spine, in fact more
“than in the entire remainder of our peripheral nervous system,” 100 million in the small intestine alone. The gut brain is
also a “vast chemical warehouse within which is represented
every one of the classes of neurotransmitter found in the
brain,” with internal communication that is “rich and brainlike in its complexity.” The gut is “the only organ that contains
an intrinsic nervous system that is able to mediate refl exes in
the complete absence of input from the brain or spinal cord.”
“The brain in the bowel has evolved in pace with the brain in
the head.” It has become “a vibrant, modern data-processing
center that enables us to accomplish some very important
and unpleasant tasks with no mental eff ort,” and when we are
lucky, to do so “effi ciently and outside our consciousness.” It
is possible that it “may also have its own psychoneuroses,” and
some researchers today report that it is susceptible to such
diseases of the brain as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and autism.
It has its own sensory transducers and regulatory apparatus,
which equip it to deal with specifi c tasks imposed by the organs with which it interacts, excluding others. 4
Uncontroversially, “the original hand of nature” determines what the gut brain can and cannot do—the “problems”
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 30
it can solve and the “mysteries” that are beyond its reach. Uncontroversially, scope and limits are related: the structural
properties that provide scope also set limits. In the case of the
gut brain, there are no debates about some obscure “innateness hypothesis”—which is often condemned in the case of
language but never defended, because there is no such hypothesis apart from various ideas about what the genetic component is. There are no complaints that after all these years the
genetic component of the gut brain is not fully understood—
just as in other domains. The study of the gut brain is internalist. There is no philosophical critique based on the fact that
what goes on in the digestive system crucially depends on matters external to it, elsewhere in the organism or outside the
skin. One studies the nature of the internal system, and its external interactions, with no philosophical quandaries.
Comparable concerns are considered to pose serious dilemmas for the study of the fi rst brain and its capacities, human language specifi cally. This seems to me one instance of a curious
tendency to treat mental aspects of the human organism diff erently from so-called physical aspects, a kind of methodological
dualism, which is more pernicious than Cartesian metaphysical dualism. The latter was a respectable scientifi c hypothesis,
proven wrong when Newton undermined the mechanical philosophy of early modern science by demonstrating that one of
the Cartesian substances—body—does not exist, thereby eliminating the mind-body problem, at least in its Cartesian form,
and leaving open the question what the “physical” or “material”
is supposed to be. 5
Methodological dualism in contrast seems to
have nothing to recommend it. If we abandon it, then it is hard
to see why the fi rst brain, in particular its cognitive aspects,
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 31
should be studied in some way that is fundamentally diff erent
from how one investigates the gut brain, or any other component of the body. If so, then mysterianism is just a variety of truism, along with internalism—contrary to views widely held.
For diff erent and varying reasons, many distinguished fi gures have been guilty of accepting the truism of mysterianism.
I suppose that one should include Bertrand Russell, ninety
years ago, when he adopted the Humean view that “the highest
grade [of certainty] belongs to my own percepts,” and we can
then think of the constructions of the mind as eff orts to make
sense of what we perceive, whether the refl exive constructions of commonsense understanding or the more considered
and disciplined eff orts of the sciences—which show us that
what is “given” in perception is a construct from external data
and mental structure, matters discussed interestingly by C. I.
Lewis shortly after. 6
As Hume put the matter, we must keep to the “Newtonian
philosophy,” with a “modest skepticism to a certain degree,
and a fair confession of ignorance in subjects, that exceed all
human capacity”—which for Hume includes virtually everything beyond appearances. We must “refrain from disquisitions concerning their real nature and operations.” It is the
imagination, “a kind of magical faculty in the soul, which . . . is
inexplicable by the utmost eff orts of human understanding,”
that leads us to believe that we experience external continuing objects, including a mind or self. 7
Contrary to Dr. Johnson,
G. E. Moore, and other estimable fi gures, his reasoning seems
to me to merit respect.
In a careful and informative study of Hume’s appendix
to the Treatise , Galen Strawson argues, convincingly I think,
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 32
that Hume fi nally came to realize that the diffi culties he faces
are far deeper. “It is evident,” Hume concluded, “that there is
a principle of connection between the diff erent thoughts or
ideas in the mind,” a real connection, not one feigned by the
imagination. But there is no place for such a really existing
entity in his philosophy/psychology, so at the end his “hopes
vanished.” His fundamental principles collapsed, irretrievably. One of the more poignant moments in the history of
philosophy. 8
For Russell, it followed that physics can only hope to discover “the causal skeleton of the world, [while studying] percepts only in their cognitive aspect; their other aspects lie outside its purview”—though we recognize their existence, at the
highest grade of certainty in fact, whether or not we can fi nd
satisfactory explanations in our scientifi c endeavors.
All of this seems to be thoroughgoing mysterianism, perhaps modifying it by taking consciousness to be at the highest
grade of certainty while everything else falls under problems,
in part perhaps even mysteries-for-humans. That would include the quandaries regarded as the “hard problems” in the
early days of modern science and philosophy, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most troublesome of the
hard problems in that era had to do with the nature of motion,
of attraction and repulsion. The “hard problems” were never
solved. Rather, they were abandoned, and regarded by the
more perceptive observers, like Locke and Hume, as permanent mysteries—at least mysteries-for-humans, we might add.
That was well understood at the time. Locke wrote that
while we remain in “incurable ignorance of what we desire to
know” about matter and its eff ects, and no “science of bodies
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 33
[that provides true explanations is] within our reach,” he was
“convinced by the judicious Mr. Newton’s incomparable book,
that it is too bold a presumption to limit God’s power, in this
point, by my narrow conceptions.” Though gravitation of matter to matter is “inconceivable to me,” nevertheless, as Newton demonstrated, we must recognize that it is within God’s
power “to put into bodies, powers and ways of operations,
above what can be derived from our idea of body, or can be explained by what we know of matter.” And thanks to Newton’s
work, we know that “he has done so.” 9
Given mysterian truisms, what is inconceivable to me is no
criterion for what can exist. Dropping the theology, we can reformulate Locke’s thoughts as holding that the natural world
has properties that are mysteries-for-humans.
Newton did not disagree. In his constant search for some
way to avoid the “absurd” conclusion that objects interact at
a distance, he speculated that God, who is everywhere, might
be the “immaterial agent” underlying gravitational interactions. But he could go no further, since he refused to “feign
hypotheses” beyond what can be experimentally established.
Newton agreed with his most eminent critic Leibniz that interaction without contact is “inconceivable,” though he did
not agree that it was an “unreasonable occult property,” in
Leibniz’s words. 10 Newton held that his principles were not
occult: “their causes only are occult.” These causes might, he
hoped, be accounted for in physical terms, meaning the terms
of the mechanical philosophy or something like them. In the
absence of that achievement, to derive general principles inductively from phenomena, Newton argued, and “to tell us
how the properties of actions of all corporeal things follow
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 34
from those manifest principles, would be a very great step in
philosophy, though the causes of these principles were not yet
discovered.”
In his penetrating study of Newton as a philosopher, Andrew Janiak argues that Newton had independent reasons for
rejecting interaction without contact. Newton’s “understanding of God’s place within the physical world,” Janiak observes,
“forms a metaphysical framework for his thinking in precisely
the sense that it is not subject to revision through refl ection on
experience or through the development of physical science.”
And “if divine distant action is possible,” yielding action at a
distance, “then God’s omnipotence need not be construed as
Newton always construes it, in terms of divine omnipresence.”
Later Newtonians rejected the metaphysics, hence accepting action at a distance within theoretical constructions while
disregarding the “inconceivability” of the conclusions about
the world that troubled Newton’s great contemporaries, and
also Newton himself.
Accordingly, the goals of scientifi c inquiry were implicitly
restricted: from the kind of conceivability that was a criterion
for true understanding in early modern science to something
much narrower: intelligibility of theories about the world.
This seems to me a step of considerable signifi cance in the history of human thought and inquiry, more so than is generally
recognized. It bears directly on the scope of mysterianism in
the broad sense.
Locke went on to conclude that just as God added to matter such inconceivable properties as gravitational attraction,
he might also have “superadded” to matter the capacity of
thought. Replacing “God” by “nature” opens the topic to in-
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 35
quiry, a path that was pursued extensively in the years that
followed, leading to the conclusion that thought is a property
of certain forms of organized matter. 11 As Darwin restated
the fairly common understanding, there is no need to regard
thought, “a secretion of the brain,” as “more wonderful than
gravity, a property of matter” 12 —inconceivable to us, but that
is a fact not about the external world but about our cognitive
limitations.
Some of the early modern understanding of these matters
has been rediscovered in recent years, sometimes with a sense
of wonderment, as when Frances Crick formulated his “astonishing hypothesis” that our mental and emotional states are
“in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve
cells and their associated molecules.” In the philosophical literature, this rediscovery has sometimes been regarded as a
radical new idea in the study of mind. As Paul Churchland puts
it, citing John Searle, the new idea is “the bold assertion that
mental phenomena are entirely natural and caused by the neurophysiological activities of the brain.” These proposals reiterate, in virtually the same words, formulations of centuries ago,
after the traditional mind-body problem became unformulable with Newton’s demolition of the only coherent notion of
body (or physical, material, etc.): for example, Joseph Priestley’s conclusion that properties “termed mental” reduce to
“the organical structure of the brain,” stated in diff erent words
by Locke, Darwin, and many others, and almost inescapable, it
would seem, after the collapse of the mechanical philosophy
that provided the foundations for early modern science. 13
The last decade of the twentieth century was designated
“the Decade of the Brain.” In introducing a collection of essays
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
36
reviewing its results, neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle formulated the guiding theme as the thesis of the new biology
that “things mental, indeed minds, are emergent properties
of brains, [though] these emergences are . . . produced by principles that . . . we do not yet understand”—again reiterating
eighteenth-century insights in virtually the same words. 14
The phrase “we do not yet understand,” however, should
strike a note of caution. We might recall Bertrand Russell’s
observation in 1927 that chemical laws “cannot at present be
reduced to physical laws,” a fact that led eminent scientists
to regard chemistry as no more than a mode of computation
that could predict experimental results but not real science.
As soon discovered, Russell’s observation, though correct, was
understated. Chemical laws were not in fact reducible to physical laws as physics was then understood, though after physics
underwent radical changes, with the quantum-theoretic revolution, it was unifi ed with a virtually unchanged chemistry.
There may well be lessons here for neuroscience and philosophy of mind. Contemporary neuroscience is hardly as well
established as physics was a century ago. In fact, there are what
seem to me to be cogent critiques of its foundational assumptions. 15 The common slogan that study of mind is neuroscience
at an abstract level might turn out to be just as misleading as
comparable statements about chemistry ninety years ago—if,
that is, we have in mind today’s neuroscience.
Note that questions that arise concerning this matter have
no bearing on taking the mind to be the brain viewed at a certain level of abstraction, as in the discussion here.
Thomas Nagel, in recent work that has been highly controversial, writes that “mind, I suspect, is not an inexplicable
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
37
accident or a divine and anomalous gift but a basic aspect of
nature that we will not understand until we transcend the
built-in limits of contemporary scientifi c orthodoxy.” 16 If that
turns out to be true, it would not be much of a departure from
the history of science, though his invocation of “incredulity”
and “common sense” should, I think, go the way of similar concerns that were abandoned from the late seventeenth century,
as the import of Newton’s discoveries was assimilated and
the goals of scientifi c inquiry implicitly and signifi cantly restricted, as discussed earlier.
In the light of these discoveries, and their implications,
Hume wrote that Newton’s greatest achievement was “to
draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature,” while also
having “restored [Nature’s] ultimate secrets to that obscurity,
in which they ever did and ever will remain.” 17 For humans at
least. All a form of dedicated mysterianism, for substantial
reasons.
As for consciousness, it entered modern philosophical discourse at about the same time. In his recent comprehensive
scholarly study of this range of topics, Udo Thiel fi nds that the
fi rst English philosopher to make extensive use of the noun
“consciousness,” with a philosophical meaning, was Ralph
Cudworth, in the 1670s, though it was not until fi fty years
later that consciousness became an object of inquiry in its
own right. 18 Subsequently consciousness was identifi ed with
thought, as it already had been by Descartes. And for some, like
von Humboldt, thought was further identifi ed with language,
which provides the language of thought, ideas that can partially be reconstructed in contemporary terms, as I discussed
in chapter 1.
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
38
In the modern period, identifi cation of thought with consciousness reappears in various way, for example, in Quine’s
thesis that rule-following reduces either to “fi tting,” as the
planets fi t Kepler’s laws, or to “guiding” by conscious thought.
Or in Searle’s “connection principle,” holding that operations
of the mind must be somehow accessible to conscious experience, an idea that is not easy to formulate coherently. Whether
taken to be empirical claims or terminological stipulations,
these doctrines rule out much of what has been discovered
about rule-following in language or perception, for example,
the rule of structure-dependence for language that I discussed
in chapter 1, and, more important, its basis, or what Donald
Hoff man in his study of visual intelligence calls “the rigidity rule,” the rule that image projections are interpreted “as
projections of rigid motions in three dimensions,” even with
highly impoverished stimuli. 19
There is reason to believe that what reaches consciousness, even potentially, may well be just a scattered refl ection
of inaccessible mental processes, which interact intimately
with the fragments that do sometimes reach consciousness.
The now famous Libet experiments on decision making provide some independent evidence about this matter—though
it is a mistake, I think, to regard them as having some bearing
on freedom of will. The same issues largely remain, including considerations of personal responsibility, if decisions are
made without conscious awareness or deliberation, including
issues of possible cognitive limitations, to which I will return.
If it is true that fragments of mental processes that reach
consciousness interact intimately with those that are inaccessible, as seems fairly clearly to be the case at least for use of
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
39
language, then restriction of focus to conscious awareness, or
accessibility to consciousness, may severely impede the development of a science of mind. These are topics of considerable
interest, but there is no time to pursue them here.
Instead, let us return to mysterianism in the broad sense,
not restricted to consciousness, taking it to be truism, as I
think we should. We can consider various kinds of mysteries.
Some are quite far-reaching, such as those I mentioned: perhaps permanent mysteries-for-humans. But before returning
to these, it is worth considering others that are narrower: cases
that might fall within our cognitive capacities and where there
might in principle be relevant empirical evidence, though we
cannot obtain it. Or cases where ethical considerations bar experiments that might answer questions we can sensibly pose.
Thus a lot is known about the neurology of the human visual
system thanks to invasive experiments on cats and monkeys,
but we cannot learn about language this way. There is nothing
homologous known in the animal world and relevant human
experiments are barred, though perhaps some barriers might
erode with new technology.
One example might be evolution of cognition—in particular, what is called “evolution of language,” meaning evolution
of the capacity for language, the language faculty; languages
change but do not evolve. Evolutionary biologist Richard
Lewontin argued extensively years ago that we will learn virtually nothing about these matters: “It might be interesting
to know how cognition (whatever that is) arose and spread
and changed,” he concluded, “but we cannot know. Tough
luck.” 20 Relevant evidence isn’t available to us. The editors of
the MIT Invitation to Cognitive Science in which he published
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 40
these conclusions found them persuasive, as I do, though his
analysis, largely ignored, has not impeded the growth of a huge
literature of what Lewontin calls “storytelling,” particularly in
the case of language.
The storytelling typically proceeds without even spelling
out the essential nature of the phenotype, a prerequisite to any
serious evolutionary inquiry. And it also typically constructs
stories about communication, a diff erent though perhaps
more appealing topic, because one can at least imagine continuities and small changes in accord with conceptions of evolution that are conventional though dubious at best. A recent
technical paper reviews what has been done since Lewontin’s
strictures, pretty much reaffi rming them—plausibly I think,
but then I am one of the authors. 21
With regard to language origins, we know of one fact with
considerable confi dence and have another plausible surmise.
The fact is that there has been no detectable evolution since
our ancestors left Africa, perhaps 50,000 to 80,000 years ago.
The same appears to be true of cognitive capacity more generally. The plausible surmise is Tattersall’s, which I quoted in
chapter 1: roughly 50,000 to 100,000 years before that, there is
little reason to suppose that language existed at all.
An account of the origin of human language will have to respect the fact and at least attend to the surmise. It will have to
provide some credible proposal as to the origin of what I called
the Basic Property. There is none, to my knowledge, apart
from what I mentioned in chapter 1, generally regarded as heretical, or worse.
There are also further tasks. One is to account for the variety of languages, for the range of options permitted by the
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
41
evolved language faculty. Particularly in the past thirty years,
that has become a rich and illuminating study of permissible
parameters of variation—which themselves pose evolutionary
problems.
A still more challenging problem is to account for the origins of the atoms of computation for the Basic Property. Here
too there is extensive literature, but of questionable value,
since it also rarely attends to the phenotype, the nature of
meaning in human language. Investigation I think undermines
some conventional doctrines and raises serious questions
about evolution and acquisition.
The atoms of computation—call them “atomic concepts”—
are word-like objects but not words. Words are constructed by
the ancillary process of externalization, which does not feed the
systems of thought, if the account I discussed in chapter 1 is correct. The atoms are sometimes called “lexical items,” but that is
not quite right either. The atoms of the syntactic computations
that reach the conceptual-intentional interface do not have
phonological properties, as lexical items do. These are assigned
as an early step of externalization and are arbitrary, in the familiar Saussurean sense. Furthermore, as is now known, sound is
only one possible modality for externalization.
More signifi cantly, the “atomic concepts” for human language and thought seem to be quite diff erent from anything
found in systems of animal communication. The latter, it appears, are linked directly to entities that are extramental and
can be identifi ed independently of any consideration of the
symbolic system itself. A vervet monkey, for example, has a
number of calls. One is associated with fl uttering of leaves,
taken as a sign that a predator may be coming. Another might
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 42
be associated with some hormonal change: “I’m hungry.” This
appears to be general and is quite diff erent from human language, where even the simplest elements lack this property,
contrary to a conventional referentialist doctrine holding that
there is a direct relation between words and extramental entities, as illustrated in the titles of such standard works as
Quine’s Word and Object and Roger Brown’s Words and Things ,
and an extensive literature.
Returning to Cartesian refl ections on mind, animal signaling appears to be caused by circumstances, internal and external, while for humans, appropriate production of words and
more complex expressions is at most incited or inclined.
Furthermore, the associations for animal symbol systems
are of a kind quite diff erent from anything in human language.
In this respect, Darwin’s characterization of the uniqueness of
human language, which I quoted in chapter 1, has to be modifi ed beyond what he could have anticipated. One of the leading
specialists on the topic, Laura-Ann Petitto, who was the primary investigator in the NIM project, writes that
chimps, unlike humans, use such labels in a way that seems
to rely heavily on some global notion of association. A
chimp will use the same label apple to refer to the action of
eating apples, the location where apples are kept, events
and locations of objects other than apples that happened
to be stored with an apple (the knife used to cut it), and so
on and so forth—all simultaneously, and without apparent recognition of the relevant diff erences or the advantages of being able to distinguish among them. Even the
fi rst words of the young human baby are used in a kind-
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
43
concept constrained way. . . . But the usage of chimps, even
after years of training and communication with humans,
never displays this sensitivity to diff erences among natural kinds. Surprisingly, then, chimps do not really have
“names for things” at all. They have only a hodge-podge of
loose associations. 22
Human language is radically diff erent, except in one respect: it also doesn’t have names for things, though for different reasons. The atomic concepts of human language do
not pick out entities of the extramental world. There is apparently no notion “reference” or “denotation” for human
language, though there are of course actions of referring and
denoting—an observation that has not been ignored in the
philosophical literature: Peter Strawson’s paper on reference
and referring sixty years ago is one well-known example, or
Julius Moravcsik’s aitiational semantics twenty years later, or
Akeel Bilgrami’s discussion of the “radically local or contextual” notion of content twenty years after that. 23 One can posit
a circumstance-dependent relation of reference deriving from
acts of referring; thus the name “Jones” refers to the person
Jones (far from an innocent notion, of course) insofar as we
refer to him by using the name in some way in some particular circumstances. But the act of referring is the fundamental
notion.
In this respect, atomic concepts are rather like the elements of phonetic representation. We can think of these as
instructions to articulators (and comparably, the perceptual
apparatus). The act of pronunciation yields a specifi c event in
the mind-independent world, but it would be idle to seek some
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 44
mind-independent entity or category to which the phonetic
unit corresponds even for a single individual, let alone a community of users. Acoustic and articulatory phonetics seek to
discover how internal symbols enter into the production and
interpretation of sounds, no simple task; after sixty years of intensive study with high-tech instrumentation, a great deal remains unknown. There is no reason to suspect that it would be
an easier task to discover how internal systems are used to talk
or think about aspects of the world. Quite the contrary, as becomes clear when we actually investigate the atomic concepts
of linguistic and cognitive computation, and the ways they are
used to refer.
That much was already clear to Aristotle. He concluded
that we can “defi ne a house as stones, bricks and timbers,”
in terms of material constitution, but also as “a receptacle to
shelter chattels and living beings,” in terms of function and
design; and we should combine both parts of the defi nition,
integrating matter and form, since the “essence of a house”
involves the “purpose and end” of the material constitution. 24
Hence a house is not a mind-independent object. That becomes still clearer when we investigate further and discover
that the concept house has much more intricate properties, an
observation that generalizes far beyond. Inquiry reveals that
even the simplest expressions have quite intricate meanings. 25
In other domains, the referentialist doctrine does have a
valuable role. In metamathematics, for example. And in the
sciences, where the doctrine is taken to be a guiding norm. In
devising technical notions like electron and phoneme , researchers hope to be identifying entities that exist in the world. But
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
45
none of this should be confused with human language. Further
confusions can arise if these diff erent systems are intermingled. Thus chemists freely use the term “water” in informal
discourse but not in the sense of the word of natural language,
which also violates the referentialist doctrine.
Note that Aristotle was defi ning the entity house , not the
word “house.” For him, it was a matter of metaphysics: the entity is a combination of matter and form. In the course of the
cognitive revolution of the seventeenth century, the general
point of view shifted toward seeking the “innate cognoscitive powers” that enter into our understanding of experience.
Summarizing many years of discussion of such topics, Hume
concluded that “the identity we ascribe” to minds, vegetables,
animal bodies, and other entities is “only a fi ctitious one” established by the imagination “upon like objects,” not a “peculiar nature belonging to this form.” 26
One illustration of the defi ciencies of the referentialist
doctrine is the concept person , intensively studied since the
classical era, particularly since the seventeenth century. Thus
when one says that the name “Jones” denotes its bearer, what
exactly is the bearer? It cannot simply be the material body.
As Locke observes, there is no absurdity in thinking that the
same person might have two diff erent bodies: if the same consciousness “can be transferred from one thinking substance to
another, it will be possible that two thinking substances may
make up one person.” And there are many other complications. Personal identity thus consists (at least) in some kind of
“identity of consciousness,” in psychic continuity. Locke adds
that the term “person” (or “self ” or “soul”) is, furthermore, “a
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
46
forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit; and so
belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness, and misery.” 27
There is no time here to discuss the rich and perceptive
inquiries on the topic, reviewed recently in the work by Udo
Thiel that I mentioned earlier. It may however be useful to add
a few reminders on the interesting legal history of personhood
as a “forensic” concept.
The Fifth Amendment to the American Constitution guarantees the rights of “persons”: crucially, that they shall not be
“deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of
law,” provisions that trace back to Magna Carta. But the concept person was sharply circumscribed. It plainly did not include Native Americans or slaves. Or women. Under British
common law, taken over by the colonies, women were basically property: of their father, handed over to their husbands.
The prevailing concept was expressed by Kant a few years
later: women have no “civil personality” because they depend
for their living “on the offi ces of others,” like apprentices and
servants, who also lack “civil personality.”
The Fourteenth Amendment extended personhood to
freed slaves, at least in principle. In reality, a few years later a
North–South compact permitted the slaveholding states to
reinstitute a form of slavery by eff ectively criminalizing black
life, providing a cheap and disciplined labor force for much of
the industrial revolution, a system that persisted until World
War II created the need for free labor. The ugly history is being
reenacted under the vicious “drug war” of the past generation,
since Ronald Reagan.
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
47
As for women, it was not until 1975 that the Supreme Court
recognized women to be “peers,” with the guaranteed right to
serve on federal juries—hence advancing to the category of
full personhood. Recent court decisions extend the right of
personhood that had already granted to corporations, while
excluding undocumented aliens from the category. 28 It would
be no great surprise if chimpanzees are granted the rights of
persons before undocumented immigrants are.
In brief, understanding “person” to be a forensic term has
many complex and troublesome human consequences.
Returning to language and atomic concepts, recent studies of acquisition, particularly by Lila Gleitman and her associates, have shown that meanings of even the most elementary
linguistic expressions are acquired from very restricted evidence, and very rapidly during the early years of life, even under severe sensory constraints. It is diffi cult to see how one can
avoid the conclusion that these intricate structures depend on
“innate cognoscitive powers” of the kinds explored in interesting ways in the “fi rst cognitive revolution” of the seventeenth
century. Intricacies mount rapidly when we proceed beyond
the simple elements used to refer, reinforcing the conclusion
that innate properties of the mind play a critical role in their
acquisition and use. Such considerations seem impossible to
reconcile with familiar views of language acquisition as based
on ostension, instruction, and habit formation; or with what
Dagfi nn Føllesdal, in his penetrating study of Quine’s theory
of meaning, calls the “MMM thesis: The meaning of a linguistic
expression is the joint product of all the evidence that helps learners and users of the language determine that meaning .” 29 In an
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
48
appreciative comment, Quine endorses Føllesdal’s interpretation but with a crucial modifi cation, stating that “what matters
is just that linguistic meaning is a function of observable behavior in observable circumstances.” The qualifi cation, however,
leaves a very weak thesis, one that would be true no matter how
rich the crucial innate endowment and how impoverished the
data, as long at least some stimuli are necessary, just as the mature visual system is a function of visual input.
If conclusions of the kind just mentioned do indeed generalize, as appears to be the case, then it would follow that
natural language has no referential semantics in the sense of
relations between symbols and mind-independent entities.
Rather, it has syntax (internal symbol manipulation) and pragmatics (modes of use of language). Formal semantics, including model-theoretic semantics, falls under syntax in this categorization. It is motivated by external world considerations,
just as phonology is, but relates to the world only in the context of theories of action, so it appears.
Considerations of this nature pose very serious problems
for any potential theory of the origin of language. As I mentioned, it appears to be the case that animal communication
systems are based on a one-to-one relation between mind/
brain processes and “an aspect of the environment to which
these processes adapt the animal’s behavior.” 30 If so, the gap
between human language and animal communication is as
dramatic in this domain as in the domains of language structure, acquisition, and use, and inquiry into origins will have to
look elsewhere.
Let’s turn briefl y to the objects to which a speaker refers.
We have to ask what qualifi es. Quine was concerned with this
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
49
topic. He observed that in some cases a noun phrase may not
be “a compelling candidate—on the surface, anyway—for
thinghood,” as Daniel Dennett put the matter recently in
discussing the issues Quine raised. We say “for Pete’s sake”
or “for the sake of ” but don’t expect to answer thing-related
questions about sakes or about Pete, for example, “how many
sakes are there?” or “how tall is Pete?” Similarly, Dennett observes, “Paris and London plainly exist, but do the miles that
separate them also exist?” Quine’s answer, Dennett writes, is
that a noun phrase of this kind is “ defective , and its putative reference need not be taken seriously from an ontological point
of view.” 31
Often there is direct linguistic evidence of defi ciency of
“thinghood.” Consider the nouns “fl aw” and “fl y.” In some
constructions, they function in similar ways: there is a fl y in
the bottle/ a fl aw in the argument ; there is believed to be a fl y in the
bottle/ a fl aw in the argument . In others not: there is a fl y believed
to be in the bottle /*a fl aw believed to be in the argument ; a fl y is
in the bottle /*a fl aw is in the argument (* indicating deviance).
Some constructions carry a kind of existential import that is
lacking in others, even those with explicit existential expressions, a matter that falls within an explanatory framework
with a variety of consequences, discussed elsewhere. 32
There do seem to be distinctions among “candidates for
thinghood,” but questions soon arise. Presumably at least
the word “thing” should be a compelling candidate for thinghood. But what are the identity conditions for things, and how
many are there? Suppose we see some branches strewn on
the ground. If they fell from a tree after a storm, they are not
a thing. But if they were carefully placed there by an artist as
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 50
a work of conceptual art, perhaps given a name, then the construction is a thing (and might win an award). A little thought
will show that many complex factors determine whether some
part of the world constitutes a thing, including human intention and design—Aristotelian form —which are not properties
that can be detected by study of the mind-independent world.
If thing does not qualify for thinghood independently of minddependent circumstances, then what does?
What about Dennett’s examples Paris and London? We
can refer to them, as if I were to say that that I visited London
the year before it was destroyed by a great fi re and then rebuilt
with entirely diff erent materials and design fi fty miles up the
Thames, where I intend to revisit it next year. Evidently, the
extramental world does not contain an entity with such properties, an entity that a physicist could in principle discover.
We can however refer to London, either by using the expression “London” or a pronoun linked to it, or by employing some
more complex phrase, say, “my favorite city.” In my I-language,
there is an internal entity London —not necessarily matching
yours exactly—constituted of elements that provide perspectives for referring to aspects of the world, much as the features
of the internal phonetic entity [ta] provide means for me to
pronounce and interpret certain events in the world. In these
terms, many classical paradoxes become diffi cult or impossible to formulate, from Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus to Kripke’s
puzzles, all stated in terms of referentialist assumptions.
As Norbert Hornstein suggests, we might reframe the observation, taking the problematic features of the paradoxes to
be another argument against the referentialist assumptions
that lead to them.
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 51
Early investigation of these topics was concerned primarily with individuation: What makes an individual distinct
from others? With the rise of corpuscular theories in the seventeenth century, the focus of investigation shifted from individuation to the prior question of identity: What makes an
individual the same through time despite partial changes? For
a corpuscularian, an individual just is what it is—a “distinct
portion of matter which a number of (corpuscles) . . . make up”
(Robert Boyle). Study of identity through time led to a cognitive treatment of the issue. As Thiel puts it, “as substantial
forms are denied and no ‘principle’ of identity could be discovered in the things themselves, it is recognized that their
identity must depend on what we regard as their essential
constituents”—“on what we regard,” that is, on our criteria
for judging, on our concepts of things. This “subjectivist revolution” was carried forward particularly by Locke, for whom
existence is preserved “under the same denomination,” in
terms of the abstract ideas under which we consider the world.
Hume interprets our tendency to assign identity through
time as a “natural propension,” a kind of instinct, which constructs experience to conform to our modes of cognition—
and in ways that seem sharply diff erent from anything in the
animal world. The “propension” to ascribe identity where
evidence shows diversity “is so great,” Hume writes, that
imagination creates concepts that bind a succession of related
objects together, leading us “to imagine something unknown
and mysterious, connecting the parts.” Hence ascription of
identity is a construction of the imagination, and the factors
that enter into constructing these fi ctions become a topic of
cognitive science, though Hume might have demurred if the
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 52
imagination is indeed, as he thought, “a kind of magical faculty . . . [that] . . . is inexplicable by the utmost eff orts of human
understanding,” 33 hence yet another mystery-for-humans.
In these terms, it should also be possible to reinterpret the
rich and illuminating record of thinking about the nature of
the soul, though now divorced of the theological conditions,
like resurrection, and from the metaphysical framework of
earlier years.
These are all matters that seem to me to deserve considerably more attention and concern than they have received. In
particular, they pose very serious problems for the study of
acquisition and origin of language, perhaps unsolvable ones in
the latter case, for Lewontin’s reasons.
These early modern refl ections on the origins of knowledge led to a much more fundamental form of mysterianism,
the kind I have been sampling briefl y. For Locke and Hume, it
follows from epistemological considerations that the limits
of our understanding are very narrow. Janiak observes that
Newton regarded such global skepticism as “irrelevant—he
takes the possibility of our knowledge of nature for granted.”
Hence “the primary epistemic questions confronting us are
raised by physical theory itself.” That would exclude the skeptical stance of Locke and Hume. They, however, took quite seriously the new science-based mysterianism that arose from
Newton’s demolition of the mechanical philosophy, which had
provided the very criterion of intelligibility for the scientifi c
revolution of the seventeenth century, based on the conception of the world as an elaborate machine. Galileo insisted that
theories are intelligible only under a very restrictive condition: only if we can “duplicate [their posits] by means of appro-
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 53
priate artifi cial devices,” a conception that was maintained by
Descartes, Leibniz, Huygens, Newton, and other great fi gures
of the scientifi c revolution.
Accordingly, Newton’s discoveries left the world unintelligible when his theological assumptions were dismissed.
The solution reached, as mentioned earlier, was to lower the
goals of science, abandoning the search for intelligibility of the
world in favor of something much weaker: theories that are intelligible to us whether or not what they posit is intelligible. It
was then quite natural for Bertrand Russell to dismiss the very
idea of an intelligible world as “absurd,” no longer a reasonable
goal for scientifi c inquiry.
There is no contradiction in supposing that we might be
able to probe the limits of human understanding and try to
sharpen the boundary between problems and mysteries (for
humans). 34 Experimental inquiry might be able to determine
the “limits on admissible hypotheses” that Peirce discussed,
both those that enter into commonsense understanding
and those that constitute what might be called our “scienceforming capacity,” Peirce’s specifi c interest, which might well
have diff erent properties (a matter that is contested in cognitive psychology). 35 One approach would be to take seriously
the concerns of the great fi gures of the early scientifi c revolution and the Enlightenment: what they found “inconceivable,”
and particularly their reasons. The “mechanical philosophy”
itself has a claim to be an approximation to commonsense
understanding of the world. Despite much sophisticated
commentary, it is also hard to escape the force of Descartes’s
conviction that free will is “the noblest thing” we have, that
“there is nothing we comprehend more evidently and more
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 54
perfectly,” and that “it would be absurd” to doubt something
that “we comprehend intimately, and experience within ourselves” merely because it is “by its nature incomprehensible
to us,” if indeed we do not “have intelligence enough” to understand the workings of mind, as he speculated. 36 Concepts
of determinacy and randomness fall within our intellectual
grasp, but if “free actions of men” that are “undetermined”
cannot be accommodated in these terms, that could turn out
to be a matter of cognitive limitations—which would not preclude an intelligible theory of such actions, far as this is from
today’s scientifi c understanding.
While the list of mysterians is long and distinguished, their
stance appears to contrast with the exuberant thesis that the
early scientifi c revolution and the Enlightenment provided
humans with limitless explanatory power, exhibited in the
rapid development of modern science. One outstanding fi gure
who espoused this view was David Hilbert. In his fi nal lecture
in 1930, not long before the Nazi plague destroyed the Hilbert
Circle in Göttingen, he recalled “the magnifi cent manner of
thinking and of the world-view that shines forth” in the words
of the great mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, who admonished Joseph Fourier for holding that the goal of mathematics was to explain natural phenomena. Rather, Hilbert
urged, “the sole aim of all science is the honor of the human
spirit,” and so “a problem of pure number theory is every bit
as valuable as a problem with practical applications.” Whoever
grasps this manner of thinking, Hilbert continued, will realize that “there is no ignorabimus ,” either in mathematics or
in natural science. “There are absolutely no unsolvable problems. Instead of the foolish ignorabimus our answer is on the
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 55
contrary: We must know, We shall know”—words that were
engraved on Hilbert’s tombstone. 37
The prediction did not fare too well in mathematics, as
Kurt Gödel soon demonstrated to the shock of the mathematical world. And despite the nobility of the thought, the argument has little force for the natural sciences.
Recently, physicist David Deutsch wrote that potential
progress is “unbounded,” as a result of the great achievement
of the Enlightenment and early modern science: directing
inquiry to the quest for good explanations, along Popperian
lines. As David Albert expounds his thesis, “with the introduction of that particular habit of concocting and evaluating new
hypotheses, there was a sense in which we could do anything.
The capacities of a community that has mastered that method
to survive, and to learn, and to remake the world according to
its inclinations, are (in the long run) literally, mathematically,
infi nite.” 38
The quest for better explanations may well indeed be infi –
nite, but infi nite is of course not the same as limitless. En glish
is infi nite but doesn’t include Greek. The integers are an infi nite set but do not include the reals. I cannot discern an argument that addresses the range of mysterian concerns and
conclusions.
The basic assumptions trace back at least to Peirce, who
did however off er an argument, one related to Albert’s observation about mastering the method to survive. Peirce proposed that the abductive instinct that establishes admissible
hypotheses and allows us to choose among them developed
through natural selection: variants that yielded truths about
the world provided a selectional advantage and were retained
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
56
during descent with modifi cation, while others fell away. That
belief, however, is completely unsustainable. On the contrary,
the theory of evolution places humans fi rmly within the natural world, taking humans to be biological organisms, much like
others, hence with capacities that have scope and limits, including the cognitive domain. Those who accept modern biology should therefore be mysterians. 39
Dropping the untenable recourse to natural selection, we
are left with a serious and challenging scientifi c inquiry: to determine the innate components of our cognitive nature in language, perception, concept formation, theory construction,
artistic creation, and all other domains of life. A further task
is to determine the scope and limits of human understanding, while recognizing that some diff erently structured intelligence might regard human mysteries as simple problems and
wonder that we cannot fi nd the answers, much as we can observe the inability of rats to run prime number mazes because
of the very design of their cognitive nature.
Far from bewailing the existence of mysteries-for-humans,
we should be extremely grateful for it. With no limits to abduction, our cognitive capacities would also have no scope, just as
if the genetic endowment imposed no constraints on growth
and development of an organism, it could become only a
shapeless amoeboid creature, refl ecting accidents of an unanalyzed environment. The conditions that prevent a human
embryo from becoming an insect play a critical role in determining that it can become a human, and the same holds in the
cognitive domain. Classical aesthetic theory recognized the
same relation between scope and limits. Without rules, there
WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
57
can be no genuinely creative activity, even when creative work
challenges and revises prevailing rules.
Honesty should lead us to concede, I think, that we understand little more about creativity than the Spanish physicianphilosopher Juan Huarte did in the sixteenth century, when he
distinguished the kind of intelligence humans shared with animals from the higher grade that humans alone possess and is
illustrated in the creative use of language, and proceeding beyond that, from the still higher grade illustrated in true artistic
and scientifi c creativity. 40 Nor do we even know whether these
are questions that fall within the scope of human understanding, or whether they are among what Hume took to be Nature’s
ultimate secrets, consigned to “that obscurity in which they
ever did and ever will remain.”

3 | WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
in chapters 1 and 2, I looked at the closely related topics
of language and thought. Close inquiry reveals, I think, that
they have many striking properties, for the most part hidden
from direct observation and in important respects not accessible to consciousness. Among these are the basic structure and design of the underlying computational system of
the “language of thought” provided by the internal language,
the I-language, that each person has mastered, with rich but
bounded scope determined by our essential nature. Furthermore, the atoms of computation, the atomic concepts of
language and thought, appear to be unique to humans in fundamental respects, raising diffi cult problems about their origins, problems that cannot be productively investigated unless the properties of the phenotype are carefully taken into
account. Inquiry reveals as well, I think, that the reach of human thought is itself bounded by the “limits on admissible hypotheses” that yield its richness and depth, leaving mysteries
that will resist the kind of understanding to which creators of
the early modern scientifi c revolution aspired, as was recognized in various ways by the great fi gures of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century thought; and also opening possibilities
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD? 60
for research into intriguing questions that have been too little
explored.
I have so far been keeping to certain cognitive aspects of
human nature, and thinking of people as individuals. But of
course humans are social beings, and the kind of creatures
we become depends crucially on the social, cultural, and institutional circumstances of our lives. We are therefore led
to inquire into the social arrangements that are conducive to
the rights and welfare of people, to fulfi lling their just aspirations—in brief, the common good.
I have also been keeping largely to what seem to me virtual truisms, though of an odd kind, since they are generally
rejected. I’d like to suggest some more of these here, with the
same odd features. And with the broader scope of the concerns
I will try to address, these alleged truisms relate to an interesting category of ethical principles: those that are not only universal, in that they are virtually always professed, but doubly
universal, in that at the same time they are almost universally
rejected in practice. These range from very general principles,
such as the truism that we should apply to ourselves the same
standards we do to others, if not harsher ones, to more specifi c
doctrines, such as dedication to promoting justice and human
rights, proclaimed almost universally, even by the worst monsters, though the actual record is grim, across the spectrum.
A good place to start is with Mill’s classic On Liberty . Its
epigraph formulates “the grand, leading principle, towards
which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges: the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.” The words are quoted from
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD? 61
Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the founders of classical liberalism among many other accomplishments. It follows that
institutions that constrain such human development are illegitimate, unless they can somehow justify themselves.
Humboldt was expressing views that were familiar during the Enlightenment. Another illustration is Adam Smith’s
sharp critique of division of labor, and particularly his reasons. 1
In his words, “The understandings of the greater part of
men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments,”
and that being so,
the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple
operations, of which the eff ects too are, perhaps, always
the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding . . . and generally becomes as stupid
and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be. . . .
But in every improved and civilized society this is the state
into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of
the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes
some pains to prevent it.
Concern for the common good should impel us to fi nd ways
to overcome the devilish impact of these disastrous policies,
from the educational system to the conditions of work, providing opportunities to exert the understanding and cultivate human development in its richest diversity.
Smith’s sharp critique of division of labor is not as well
known as his fulsome praise for its great benefi ts. In fact, in the
University of Chicago Press’s scholarly bicentennial edition, it
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD? 62
isn’t even listed in the index. But it is an instructive illustration
of Enlightenment ideals that are founding principles of classical liberalism.
Smith perhaps felt that it should not be too diffi cult to institute such humane policies as these. He opens his Moral Sentiments by observing that “however selfi sh soever man may be
supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature,
which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their
happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from
it, except the pleasure of seeing it.” Despite the power of the
“vile maxim of the masters of mankind”—“All for ourselves,
and nothing for other people”—the more benign “original passions of human nature” might compensate for that pathology. 2
Classical liberalism was wrecked on the shoals of capitalism, but its humanistic commitments and aspirations did not
die. In the modern period, similar ideas are reiterated, for example, by an important political thinker who described what
he called “a defi nite trend in the historic development of mankind,” which strives for “the free unhindered unfolding of all
the individual and social forces in life.” The author was Rudolf
Rocker, a leading twentieth-century anarchist thinker and activist. 3
He was outlining an anarchist tradition culminating in
his view in anarcho-syndicalism—in European terms, a variety
of “libertarian socialism.” These ideas, he held, do not depict
“a fi xed, self-enclosed social system” with a defi nite answer to
all the multifarious questions and problems of human life but
rather a trend in human development that strives to attain Enlightenment ideals.
The terms of political discourse are hardly models of precision. Considering the way the terms are used, it is next to
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
63
impossible to give meaningful answers to such questions as
“what is socialism?” Or capitalism, or free markets, or others
in common usage. That is even truer of the term “anarchism.”
It has been subject to widely varied use, and outright abuse
both by bitter enemies and those who hold its banner high, so
much so that it resists any straightforward characterization.
But I think Rocker’s formulation captures leading ideas that
animate at least some major currents of the rich and complex
and often contradictory traditions of anarchist thought and
action.
So understood, anarchism is the inheritor of the classical liberal ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment. It is
part of a broader range of libertarian socialist thought and
action that ranges from the left anti-Bolshevik Marxism of
Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, Paul Mattick, and others, to
the anarcho-syndicalism that crucially includes the practical
achievements of revolutionary Spain in 1936, reaching further to worker-owned enterprises spreading today in the Rust
Belt of the United States, in northern Mexico, in Egypt, and in
many other countries, most extensively in the Basque country
in Spain, also encompassing the many cooperative movements
around the world and a good part of feminist and civil and human rights initiatives.
This broad tendency in human development seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, authority, and domination that
constrain human development, and then to subject them to a
very reasonable challenge: justify yourself. Demonstrate that
you are legitimate, either in some special circumstances at a
particular stage of society or in principle. And if they cannot
meet that challenge, they should be dismantled. And not just
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
64
dismantled but also reconstructed, and for anarchists, “refashioned from below,” as Nathan Schneider observes in a recent commentary on anarchism. 4
In part this sounds like truism: Why should anyone defend
illegitimate structures and institutions? The perception is correct; the principle should be regarded as truism. But truisms
at least have the merit of being true, which distinguishes them
from a good deal of political discourse. And I think these truisms provide some useful stepping stones to fi nding the common good.
These particular truisms belong to the interesting category of moral principles that I mentioned earlier: those that
are doubly universal. Among these is the truism that we should
challenge coercive institutions and reject those that cannot
demonstrate their legitimacy, dismantling them and reconstructing them from below. It is hard to see how it can plausibly be rejected in principle, though as usual to act on the principle is not as easy as to enunciate it grandly.
Proceeding with the same thoughts, again quoting Rocker,
anarchism “seeks to free labor from economic exploitation”
and to free society from “ecclesiastical or political guardianship,” thereby opening the way to “an alliance of free groups
of men and women based on cooperative labor and a planned
administration of things in the interest of the community.” As
an anarchist activist , Rocker goes on to call on popular organizations to create “not only the ideas but also the facts of the
future itself ” within the present society, following Bakunin’s
injunction.
A traditional anarchist slogan is “Ni Dieu, ni Maître”—No
God, no Master—a phrase that Daniel Guerin took as the title
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
65
of his valuable collection of anarchist classics. I think it is fair
to understand the slogan “No God” in Rocker’s terms: opposition to ecclesiastical guardianship . Individual beliefs are a
diff erent matter. That leaves open the door to the lively and
impressive tradition of Christian anarchism—for example,
Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers Movement. And to many
achievements of the liberation theology that was initiated half
a century ago in Vatican II, igniting a vicious U.S. war against
the church to destroy the heresy of a return to the radical pacifi st message of the Gospels. The war was a success, according
to the School of the Americas (since renamed), which trains
Latin American killers and torturers and boasts triumphantly
that the U.S. Army helped defeat liberation theology. 5
So it did,
leaving a trail of religious martyrs, part of a hideous plague of
repression that consumed the hemisphere.
Most of this is out of conventional history, because of
the fallacy of wrong agency. We would know the details very
well if the crimes could be attributed to an offi cial enemy, another illustration of those interesting doubly universal ethical
principles.
Genuine scholarship, of course, is well aware that from
1960 until “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent
political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those
in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other
words, from 1960 to 1990, the Soviet Bloc as a whole was less
repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many
individual Latin American countries, . . . an unprecedented human catastrophe” in Central America alone, particularly during the Reagan years. 6
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD? 66
Among those executed were many religious martyrs, and
there were mass slaughters as well, consistently supported or
initiated by Washington. The reasons for the plague of repression had little to do with the Cold War, as we discover when we
look beyond the standard rhetorical framework; rather, it was
a reaction to the fact that subjects were daring to raise their
heads, inspired in part by the return of the church to the “preferential option of the poor” of the Gospels.
Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor comes at
once to mind.
The phrase “No Master” is diff erent: it refers not to individual belief, but to a social relation, a relation of subordination and dominance that anarchism seeks to dismantle and
rebuild from below, unless it can somehow meet the harsh
burden of establishing its legitimacy.
By now, we have departed from truism to ample controversy. In particular, at this point the American brand of libertarianism departs sharply from the libertarian tradition, accepting and indeed advocating the subordination of working
people to the masters of the economy, and the subjection of
everyone to the restrictive discipline and destructive features
of markets. These are topics worth pursuing, but I will put
them aside here, while noting that there may be ways to bring
together the energies of libertarian left and right—as is sometimes done, for example in the valuable theoretical and practical work of economist David Ellerman. 7
Anarchism is, famously, opposed to the state, while advocating “planned administration of things in the interest of
the community,” in Rocker’s words; and beyond that, wideranging federations of self-governing communities and work-
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
67
places. In the real world of today, anarchists dedicated to these
goals often support state power to protect people, society,
and the earth itself from the ravages of concentrated private
capital. Take, say, a venerable anarchist journal like Freedom ,
established as a journal of anarchist socialism by followers of
Kropotkin in 1886. Opening its pages, we fi nd that many are
devoted to defending these rights, often by invoking state
power, like regulation of safety and health and environmental
protection.
There is no contradiction here. People live and suff er and
endure in the real world of existing society, and any decent
person should favor employing what means are available to
safeguard and benefi t them, even if a long-term goal is to displace these devices and construct preferable alternatives.
In discussing such concerns, I have sometimes borrowed an
image used by the Brazilian rural workers movement. 8
They
speak of widening the fl oors of the cage, the cage of existing
coercive institutions that can be widened by popular struggle,
as has happened eff ectively over many years. And we can extend the image to think of the cage of coercive state institutions as a protection from savage beasts roaming outside, the
predatory state-supported capitalist institutions that are dedicated in principle to the vile maxim of the masters, to private
gain, power, and domination, with the interest of the community and its members at most a footnote, perhaps revered in
rhetoric but dismissed in practice as a matter of principle and
even law.
It is also worth remembering that the states that anarchists condemned were actually existing states, not visions
of unrealized democratic dreams, such as government of,
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD? 68
by, and for the people. They bitterly opposed the rule of what
Bakunin called “the red bureaucracy,” which he predicted, all
too accurately, would be among the most savage of human creations. And they also opposed parliamentary systems that are
instruments of class rule: the contemporary United States, for
example. Some of the most respected work in academic political science compares attitudes and policy, the latter evident,
the former accessible in careful polling that yields fairly consistent results. The most detailed current work reveals that
the majority of the population is eff ectively disenfranchised. 9
About 70 percent, at the lower end of the wealth/income scale,
have no infl uence on policy. As we move up the scale, infl uence
slowly increases, and at the very top we reach those who pretty
much determine policy, by means that are not obscure. The resulting system is not democracy but plutocracy.
Recognition of the fact is so deeply internalized that it
becomes virtually invisible, sometimes in remarkable ways.
Consider health care, which for years has ranked high among
concerns of Americans. And for good reasons. The health-care
system is a scandal. It has about twice the per capita costs of the
health-care systems of OECD countries, along with relatively
poor outcomes, and is a tremendous drain on the economy. It is
also the only system that is largely privatized and unregulated.
The facts are noted in instructive ways. A review of the
health-care fi asco in the New York Times observes that the
United States “is fundamentally handicapped in its quest for
cheaper health care: All other developed countries rely on a
large degree of direct government intervention, negotiation or
rate-setting to achieve lower-priced medical treatment for all
citizens. That is not politically acceptable here.” An expert is
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
69
quoted as tracing the complexity of the Aff ordable Care Act to
“the political need in the U.S. to rely on the private market to
provide health care access.” One consequence is “Kafkaesque”
bills because “even Medicare is not allowed to negotiate drug
prices for its tens of millions of benefi ciaries.”
The problem of “political impossibility” has been noted
before. Thus in the 2004 presidential campaign, the New York
Times reported, candidate John Kerry “took pains . . . to say
that his plan for expanding access to health insurance would
not create a new government program,” because “there is so
little political support for government intervention in the
health care market in the United States.” 10
Why is government intervention, even negotiation to set
drug prices, “not politically acceptable here”? Why does it
have “so little political support”? As polls have made clear for
years, that is not because of public opinion. Quite the contrary.
Thus 85 percent of the public favor “allowing the federal government to negotiate with drug companies to try to get lower
drug prices for seniors.” When President Obama abandoned
a public option, it had about 60 percent popular support. In
past years, there has been very high public support for a national health plan of the kind familiar in developed countries,
sometimes poorer ones as well. Support has been so high that
in the late Reagan years, more than 70 percent of the public
“thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,”
while 40 percent “thought it already was.” 11
The tacit understanding is that “political support” means
support by the pharmaceutical corporations and fi nancial institutions. They determine what is “politically acceptable.” In
short, plutocracy, rising to the level of virtual necessary truth.
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD? 70
Or perhaps, a little more kindly, it is what British legal
scholar Conor Gearty calls “neo-democracy,” a partner of
neoliberalism, a system in which liberty is enjoyed by the few
and security in its fullest sense is available only to the elite,
but within a system of more general formal rights. 12 It is a society that is free in the Hobbesian sense that a person “is not
hindered to do what he has a will to do,” and “if I choose not to
do something merely because I dread the consequences, this
does not mean that I am not free to do it; it merely means that
I do not want to, that is, I am still free,” so Hobbes explains. If
the choice is starvation or servitude, and nothing hinders the
choice, then we are free; it is merely that we do not choose
starvation, dreading the consequences.
In contrast, a truly democratic system would seek to
achieve the Humboldtian ideal. It might well have the character of “an alliance of free groups of men and women based on
cooperative labor and a planned administration of things in
the interest of the community,” quoting Rocker again. In fact,
that is not so remote from at least one version of the democratic ideal. One version. I will return to others.
Take, for example, John Dewey, whose major social and
political concerns were democracy and education. No one
took Dewey to be an anarchist. But consider his ideas. 13 In his
conception of democracy, illegitimate structures of coercion
must be dismantled. That includes, crucially, domination by
“business for private profi t through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press
agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” He recognized that “power today resides in control of the means of
production, exchange, publicity, transportation and commu-
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD? 71
nication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country,”
even if democratic forms remain. Until those institutions are
in the hands of the public, politics will remain “the shadow
cast on society by big business,” much as we see today.
But Dewey went well beyond calling for some form of public control. In a free and democratic society, he wrote, workers should be “the masters of their own industrial fate,” not
tools rented by employers, nor directed by state authorities.
That position traces back to leading ideas of classical liberalism articulated by Humboldt and Smith, among others, and
extended in the anarchist tradition.
Turning to education, Dewey held that it is “illiberal and
immoral” to train children to work “not freely and intelligently,
but for the sake of the work earned”—to achieve test scores for
example—in which case their activity is “not free because not
freely participated in.” To use imagery dating from the Enlightenment, education should not be a matter of pouring water into
a vessel—and a very leaky vessel as we have all experienced—
but rather, to borrow from von Humboldt again, it should be
conceived as laying out a string along which learners proceed in
their own ways, exercising and improving their creative capacities and imaginations, and experiencing the joy of discovery.
Under these conceptions, in Dewey’s words, industry must
be changed “from a feudalistic to a democratic social order,”
and educational practice should be designed to encourage creativity, exploration, independence, cooperative work—much
the opposite of what is happening today.
These ideas lead very naturally to a vision of society based
on workers’ control of productive institutions, as envisioned
by nineteenth-century thinkers, notably Marx but also—less
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD? 72
familiar—John Stuart Mill, who held that “the form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be
expected to predominate is . . . the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the
capital with which they carry on their operations, and working
under managers electable and removable by themselves.” 14
These should further be linked to community control within
a framework of free association and federal organization, in
the general style of a range of thought that includes, along with
many anarchists, G. D. H. Cole’s guild socialism and left antiBolshevik Marxism, and such current developments as the
participatory economics and politics of Michael Albert, Robin
Hahnel, Steven Shalom, and others, along with important
work in theory and practice by the late Seymour Melman and
his associates, and Gar Alperovitz’s valuable recent contributions on the growth of worker-owned enterprise and cooperatives in the U.S. Rust Belt and elsewhere.
Dewey was a fi gure of the American mainstream. And, in
fact, such ideas are deeply rooted in the American tradition.
Pursuing them, we enter into the terrain of inspiring and often bitter struggle since the dawn of the industrial revolution
in the mid-nineteenth century. The fi rst serious scholarly
study of the industrial worker in those years was by Norman
Ware more than ninety years ago, still very much worth reading. 15 He reviews the hideous working conditions imposed on
formerly independent craftsmen and farmers, as well as the
“factory girls,” young women from the farms working in the
textile mills around Boston. But he focuses attention primarily on “the degradation suff ered by the industrial worker,” the
loss “of status and independence,” which could not be can-
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
73
celed even when there was material improvement. And on the
radical capitalist “social revolution in which sovereignty in
economic aff airs passed from the community as a whole into
the keeping of a special class” of masters, often remote from
production, a group “alien to the producers.” Ware shows
that “for every protest against machine industry, there can be
found a hundred against the new power of capitalist production and its discipline.”
Workers were striking not just for bread but for roses, for
dignity and independence, for their rights as free men and
women. In their journals, they condemned “the blasting infl uence of monarchical principles on democratic soil,” which will
not be overcome until “they who work in the mills [will] own
them,” and sovereignty will return to free producers. Then
they will no longer be “menials or the humble subjects of a
foreign despot, [the absentee owners,] slaves in the strictest
sense of the word [who] toil . . . for their masters.” Rather, they
will regain their status as “free American citizens.”
The capitalist revolution instituted a crucial change from
price to wage. When the producer sold his product for a price,
Ware writes, “he retained his person. But when he came to sell
his labor, he sold himself ” and lost his dignity as a person as
he became a slave—a “wage slave,” the term commonly used.
Some 170 years ago, a group of skilled workers in New York repeated the common view that a daily wage is a form of slavery
and warned, perceptively, that a day might come when wage
slaves “will so far forget what is due to manhood as to glory in a
system forced on them by their necessity and in opposition to
their feelings of independence and self-respect”—a day they
hoped would be “far distant.”
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD? 74
Labor activists warned of the new “spirit of the age: gain
wealth, forgetting all but self.” In sharp reaction to this demeaning spirit, the rising movements of working people and
radical farmers, the most signifi cant democratic popular
movements in American history, were dedicated to solidarity
and mutual aid 16 —a battle that is far from over, despite setbacks, often violent repression.
Apologists for the radical revolution of wage slavery argue that the worker should indeed glory in a system of free
contracts, voluntarily undertaken. To them, Shelley had a response two centuries ago, in his great poem Masque of Anarchy ,
written after the Peterloo massacre, when British cavalry brutally attacked a peaceful gathering of tens of thousands calling
for parliamentary reform.
We know what slavery is, Shelley wrote:
’Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants’ use to dwell,
. . .
’Tis to be slave in soul
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.
The artisans and factory girls who struggled for dignity and
independence and freedom might well have known Shelley’s
words. Observers noted that they had good libraries and were
acquainted with standard works of English literature. Before
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
75
mechanization and the wage system undermined independence and culture, Ware writes, a workshop would be a lyceum . Journeymen would hire boys to read to them while they
worked. Their workplaces were “social businesses,” with many
opportunities for reading, discussion, and mutual improvement. Along with the factory girls, they bitterly complained
of the attack on their culture. The same was true in England, a
matter discussed in Jonathan Rose’s monumental study of the
reading habits of the working class of the day. 17 He contrasts
“the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidacts” with the “pervasive philistinism of the British aristocracy.” I am old enough to remember residues among working
people in New York, who were immersed in the high culture of
the day during the depths of the Great Depression.
I mentioned that Dewey and American workers held one
version of democracy, with strong libertarian elements. But
the dominant version has been a very diff erent one. Its most
instructive expression is at the progressive end of the mainstream intellectual spectrum, among good Wilson-FDRKennedy liberal intellectuals. Here are a few representative
quotes.
The public are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders [who]
must be put in their place.” Decisions must be in hands of the
“intelligent minority [of ] responsible men,” who must be protected “from the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd.”
The herd does have a function . Its task is to lend its weight every few years to a choice among the responsible men, but apart
from that its function is to be “spectators, not participants
in action.” All for their own good. We should not succumb to
“democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
76
their own interests.” They are not. We are: we, the responsible
men. Therefore attitudes and opinions must be shaped and
controlled. We must “regiment the minds of men the way an
army regiments their bodies.” In particular, we must introduce better discipline into the institutions responsible for
“the indoctrination of the young.” If that is achieved, then it
will be possible to avoid such dangerous periods as the 1960s,
“the time of troubles” in conventional elite discourse. We will
be able to achieve more “moderation in democracy” and return to better days as when “Truman had been able to govern
the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number
of Wall Street lawyers and bankers.”
These are quotes from icons of the liberal establishment:
Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, Harold Lasswell, Samuel
Huntington, and the Trilateral Commission, which largely
staff ed the Carter administration. 18
This shriveled conception of democracy has solid roots.
The founding fathers were much concerned about the hazards
of democracy. In the debates of the Constitutional Convention, the main framer, James Madison, warned of these hazards. Naturally taking England as his model, he observed that
“in England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of
people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure.
An agrarian law would soon take place,” undermining the right
to property. To ward off such injustice, “our government ought
to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation,” arranging voting patterns and checks and balances so
as “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” a prime task of decent government. 19
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
77
The threat of democracy took on still larger proportions
because of the likely increase in “the proportion of those who
will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for
a more equal distribution of its blessings,” as Madison anticipated. Perhaps infl uenced by Shays’s Rebellion, he warned
that “the equal laws of suff rage” might in time shift power into
their hands. “No agrarian attempts have yet been made in this
Country,” he continued, “but symptoms of a levelling spirit . . .
have suffi ciently appeared in a [ sic ] certain quarters to give
warning of the future danger.” For such reasons, Madison held
that the Senate, the main seat of power in the constitutional
system, “ought to come from and represent the wealth of the
nation,” the “more capable sett of men,” and that other constraints on democratic rule should be instituted.
Madison’s conundrum has continued to trouble government leaders. In 1958, for example, Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles pondered the diffi culties that the United States
was facing in Latin America. He expressed his anxiety over
the ability of domestic Communists “to get control of mass
movements,” which we “have no capacity to duplicate.” Their
advantage is that “the poor people are the ones they appeal to
and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.” 20 We somehow cannot rally them to the understanding that government
must “protect the minority of the opulent from the majority.”
That inability to get our message across regularly compels us
to resort to violence, contrary to our noblest principles and
much to our sincere regret.
To succeed in “framing a system which we wish to last
for ages,” Madison held, it would be necessary to ensure that
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
78
rulers will be drawn from the opulent minority. It would then
be possible “to secure the rights of property agst. the danger
from an equality of universality of suff rage, vesting compleate power over property in hands without a share in it.” The
phrase “rights of property” was regularly used to mean rights
to property—that is, the rights of property owners. Many
years later, in 1829, Madison refl ected that those “without
property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to
sympathize suffi ciently with its rights, to be safe depositories
of power over them.” The solution was to ensure that society
be fragmented, with limited public participation in the political arena, which is to be eff ectively in the hands of the wealthy
and their agents. Scholarship generally agrees that “the Constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed
to check the democratic tendencies of the period,” delivering
power to a “better sort” of people and excluding “those who
were not rich, well born, or prominent from exercising political power.” 21
In Madison’s defense, we should remember that he
“was—to depths that we today are barely able to imagine—
an eighteenth-century gentleman of honor.” 22 It was the “enlightened Statesman” and “benevolent philosopher” who,
he anticipated, would hold the reins of power. Ideally “pure
and noble,” these “men of intelligence, patriotism, property
and independent circumstances” would be a “chosen body of
citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interests
of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will
be least likely to sacrifi ce it to temporary or partial considerations.” They would thus “refi ne” and “enlarge” the “public
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
79
views,” guarding the public interest against the “mischiefs” of
democratic majorities.
Not exactly the way it turned out.
The problem with democracy that Madison perceived had
been recognized long before by Aristotle, in the fi rst major
work of political science: Politics . Reviewing a variety of political systems, he concluded that democracy was the best—
or perhaps the least bad—but he recognized a fl aw: the great
mass of the poor could use their voting power to take the property of the rich, which would be unfair. Madison and Aristotle
faced the same problem but selected opposite solutions: Aristotle advised reducing inequality, by what we would regard as
welfare state measures; Madison felt that the answer was to
reduce democracy.
The confl ict between these conceptions of democracy
goes back to the earliest modern democratic revolution, in
seventeenth-century England, when a war raged between supporters of the king and of Parliament. The gentry, the “men of
best quality” as they called themselves, were appalled by the
rabble who did not want to be ruled by king or Parliament, but
rather “by countrymen like ourselves, that know our wants.”
Their pamphlets explained that “it will never be a good world
while knights and gentlemen make us laws, that are chosen
for fear and do but oppress us, and do not know the people’s
sores.” 23
The essential nature of the confl ict, which has far from
ended, was captured simply by Thomas Jeff erson in his last
years, when he had serious concerns about the quality and
fate of the democratic experiment. He distinguished between
WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD? 80
“aristocrats and democrats.” The aristocrats are “those who
fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from
them into the hands of the higher classes.” The democrats, in
contrast, “identify with the people, have confi dence in them,
cherish and consider them as the honest & safe, altho’ not the
most wise depository of the public interest.” 24
The modern progressive intellectuals who seek to “put the
public in its place” and are free of “democratic dogmatisms”
about the capacity of the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” to enter the political arena are Jeff erson’s “aristocrats.”
Their basic views are widely held, though there are disputes
about who should play the guiding role: “the technocratic and
policy-oriented intellectuals” of the progressive “knowledge
society,” or bankers and corporate executives. Or in other
versions, the Central Committee, or the Guardian Council of
clerics. All are instances of the “political guardianship” that
the genuine libertarian tradition seeks to dismantle and reconstruct from below, while also changing industry “from a
feudalistic to a democratic social order” based on workers’
control, respecting the dignity of the producer as a genuine
person, not a tool in the hands of others, in accordance with a
libertarian tradition that has deep roots—and, like Marx’s old
mole, is always burrowing close to the surface, always ready to
peek through, sometimes in surprising and unexpected ways,
seeking to bring about what seems to me at least to be a reasonable approximation to the common good.
4 | THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE:
HOW DEEPLY HIDDEN?
t h e t i t l e f o r this chapter is drawn from Hume’s observations about the man he called “the greatest and rarest genius
that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species,” Isaac Newton. In Hume’s judgment, Newton’s greatest
achievement was that while he “seemed to draw the veil from
some of the mysteries of nature, he shewed at the same time
the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby
restored [Nature’s] ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which
they ever did and ever will remain.” On diff erent grounds, others reached similar conclusions. Locke, for example, had observed that motion has eff ects “which we can in no way conceive
motion able to produce”—as Newton had in fact demonstrated
shortly before. Since we remain in “incurable ignorance of
what we desire to know” about matter and its eff ects, Locke
concluded, no “science of bodies [is] within our reach,” and we
can only appeal to “the arbitrary determination of that All-wise
Agent who has made them to be, and to operate as they do, in a
way wholly above our weak understandings to conceive.” 1

I think it is worth attending to such conclusions, the reasons for them, their aftermath, and what that history suggests
about current concerns and inquiries in philosophy of mind.
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 82
The mechanical philosophy that Newton undermined is
based on our commonsense understanding of the nature and
interactions of objects, in large part genetically determined
and, it appears, refl exively yielding such perceived properties
as persistence of objects through time and space, and as a corollary their cohesion and continuity; 2
and causality through
contact, a fundamental feature of intuitive physics, “body,
as far as we can conceive, being able only to strike and aff ect
body, and motion, according to the utmost reach of our ideas,
being able to produce nothing but motion,” as Locke plausibly
characterized commonsense understanding of the world—the
limits of our “ideas,” in his sense. The theoretical counterpart
was the materialist conception of the world that animated the
seventeenth-century scientifi c revolution, the conception of
the world as a machine, simply a far grander version of the automata that stimulated the imagination of thinkers of the time
much in the way programmed computers do today: the remarkable clocks, the artifacts constructed by master artisans
like Jacques de Vaucanson that imitated animal behavior and
internal functions like digestion, the hydraulically activated
machines that played instruments and pronounced words
when triggered by visitors walking through the royal gardens.
The mechanical philosophy aimed to dispense with forms fl itting through the air, sympathies and antipathies, and other occult ideas, and to keep to what is fi rmly grounded in commonsense understanding and intelligible to it. As is well known,
Descartes claimed to have explained the phenomena of the
material world in mechanistic terms while also demonstrating
that the mechanical philosophy is not all-encompassing, not
reaching to the domain of mind—again pretty much in accord
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE
83
with the commonsense dualistic interpretation of oneself and
the world around us.
I. Bernard Cohen observes that “there is testimony aplenty
in Newton’s Principia and Opticks to his general adherence to
the Cartesian mechanical philosophy.” 3
The word “general” is
important. Newton was much infl uenced by the neo-Platonic
and alchemical traditions, and also by the disturbing consequences of his own inquiries. For such reasons, he sometimes
modifi ed the stricter Cartesian dichotomy of matter and
spirit, including in the latter category “the natural agencies
responsible for the ‘violent’ motions of chemical and electrical
action and even, perhaps, for accelerated motion in general,”
as Ernan McMullin shows in a careful analysis of the evolution
of Newton’s struggle with the paradoxes and conundrums he
sought to resolve. In Newton’s own words, “spirit” may be the
cause of all movement in nature, including the “power of moving our body by our thoughts” and “the same power in other
living creatures, [though] how this is done and by what laws we
do not know. We cannot say that all nature is not alive.” 4
Going a step beyond, Locke added that we cannot say
that nature does not think. In the formulation that has come
down through history as “Locke’s suggestion,” he writes that
“whether Matter may not be made by God to think is more
than man can know. For I see no contradiction in it, that the
fi rst Eternal thinking Being, or Omnipotent Spirit, should, if
he pleased, give to certain systems of created senseless matter,
put together as he thinks fi t, some degrees of sense, perception, and thought.” Furthermore, just as God had added inconceivable eff ects to motion, it is “not much more remote from
our comprehension to conceive that GOD can, if he pleases,
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE
84
superadd to matter a faculty of thinking, than that he should
superadd to it another substance with a faculty of thinking.”
There is no warrant, then, for postulating a second substance
whose essence is thought. And elsewhere, it “involves no
contradiction [that God should] give to some parcels of matter, disposed as he thinks fi t, a power of thinking and moving
[which] might properly be called spirits, in contradistinction
to unthinking matter,” a view that he fi nds “repugnant to the
idea of senseless matter” but that we cannot reject, given our
incurable ignorance and the limits of our ideas (cognitive capacities). Having no intelligible concept of “matter” (body,
etc.), we cannot dismiss the possibility of living or thinking
matter, particularly after Newton undermined commonsense
understanding. 5
Locke’s suggestion was taken up through the eighteenth
century, culminating in the important work of Joseph Priestley, to which we will return. Hume, in the Treatise , reached the
conclusion that “motion may be, and actually is, the cause of
thought and perception,” rejecting familiar arguments about
absolute diff erence in kind and divisibility on the general
grounds that “we are never sensible of any connexion betwixt
causes and eff ects, and that ’tis only by our experience of their
constant conjunction, we can arrive at any knowledge of this
relation.” In one or another form, it came to be recognized
that since “thought, which is produced in the brain, cannot
exist if this organ is wanting,” and there is no longer a reason
to question the thesis of thinking matter, “it is necessary to
consider the brain as a special organ designed especially to
produce [thought], as the stomach and the intestines are designed to operate the digestion, the liver to fi lter bile,” and so
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE
85
on through the bodily organs. Just as foods enter the stomach
and leave it with
new qualities, [so] impressions arrive at the brain,
through the nerves; they are then isolated and without
coherence. The organ enters into action; it acts on them,
and soon it sends them back changed into ideas, which
the language of physiognomy and gesture, or the signs
of speech and writing, manifest outwardly. We conclude
then, with the same certainty, that the brain digests, as it
were, the impressions, i.e., that organically it makes the
secretion of thought. 6
As Darwin put the matter succinctly, “Why is thought, being a
secretion of the brain, more wonderful than gravity, a property
of matter?” 7
Qualifi cations aside, Newton did generally adhere to the
mechanical philosophy but also showed its “imperfections,”
in fact demolished it, though to the end of his life he sought to
fi nd some way to account for the mystical principle of action at
a distance that he was compelled to invoke to account for the
most elementary phenomena of nature. Perhaps, he thought,
there might be “a most subtle spirit which pervades and lies
hid in all gross bodies,” which will somehow yield a physical account of attraction and cohesion and off er some hope of rescuing an intelligible picture of the world. 8
We should not lightly ignore the concerns of “the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and
instruction of the species,” or of Galileo and Descartes, or
Locke and Hume. Or of Newton’s most respected scientifi c
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 86
contemporaries, who “unequivocally blamed [Newton] for
leading science back into erroneous ways which it seemed to
have defi nitely abandoned,” E. J. Dijksterhuis writes in the
classic study of the mechanistic world picture and its collapse
as a substantive doctrine. Christiaan Huygens described Newton’s principle of attraction as an “absurdity.” Gottfried Leibniz argued that Newton was reintroducing occult ideas similar
to the sympathies and antipathies of the much-ridiculed scholastic science and was off ering no physical explanations for
phenomena of the material world. 9
Newton largely agreed with his scientifi c contemporaries.
He wrote that the notion of action at a distance is “inconceivable.” It is “so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who
has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking,
can ever fall into it.” 10 By invoking it, we concede that we do
not understand the phenomena of the material world. As McMullin observes, “By ‘understand’ Newton still meant what
his critics meant: ‘understand in mechanical terms of contact
action.’ ” 11
To take a contemporary analog, the absurd notion of action at a distance is as inconceivable as the idea that “mental
states are states of the brain,” a proposal “we do not really understand [because] we are still unable to form a conception
of how consciousness arises in matter, even if we are certain
that it does.” 12 Similarly, Newton was unable to form a conception of how the simplest phenomena of nature could arise
in matter—and they didn’t, given his conception of matter,
the natural theoretical version of commonsense understanding. Locke and others agreed, and Hume carried that failure of
conceivability a long step beyond by concluding that Newton
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87
had restored these ultimate secrets of nature “to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain”—a stand that
we may interpret, naturalistically, as a speculation about the
limits of human cognitive capacities. In the light of history,
there seems to be little reason to be concerned about the inconceivability of relating mind to brain, or about conceivability altogether, at least in inquiry into the nature of the world.
Nor is there any reason for qualms about an “explanatory
gap” between the physical and consciousness, beyond the unifi cation concerns that arise throughout eff orts to understand
the world. And unless the physical is given some new postNewtonian sense, there is even less reason for qualms about
an “explanatory gap” than in cases where there is some clear
sense to the assumed reduction base. The most extreme of
such concerns, and perhaps the most signifi cant for the subsequent development of the sciences, is the explanatory gap that
Newton unearthed and left unresolved, possibly a permanent
mystery for humans, as Hume conjectured. 13
Science of course did not end with the collapse of the notion of body (material, physical, etc.). Rather, it was reconstituted in a radically new way, with questions of conceivability
and intelligibility dismissed as demonstrating nothing except
about human cognitive capacities, though that conclusion has
taken a long time to become fi rmly established. Later stages
of science introduced more “absurdities.” The legitimacy of
the steps is determined by criteria of depth of explanation and
empirical support, not conceivability and intelligibility of the
world that is depicted.
Thomas Kuhn suggests that “it does not, I think, misrepresent Newton’s intentions as a scientist to maintain that he
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 88
wished to write a Principles of Philosophy like Descartes [that
is, true science] but that his inability to explain gravity forced
him to restrict his subject to the Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy , [which] did not even pretend to explain
why the universe runs as it does,” leaving the question in obscurity. For such reasons, “it was 40 years before Newtonian
physics fi rmly supplanted Cartesian physics, even in British
universities,” and some of the ablest physicists of the eighteenth century continued to seek a mechanical-corpuscular
explanation of gravity—that is, what they took to be a physical
explanation—as Newton did himself. In later years positivists
reproached all sides of the debates “for their foolishness in
clothing the mathematical formalism [of physical theory] with
the ‘gay garment’ of a physical interpretation,” a concept that
had lost substantive meaning. 14
Newton’s famous phrase “I frame no hypotheses” appears in this context: recognizing that he had been unable
to discover the physical cause of gravity, he left the question
open. He adds that “to us it is enough that gravity does really
exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained,
and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the
celestial bodies, and of our sea.” But while agreeing that his
proposals were so absurd that no serious scientist could accept them, he defended himself from the charge that he was
reverting to the mysticism of the Aristotelians. His principles,
he argued, were not occult: “their causes only are occult”; or,
he hoped, were yet to be discovered in physical terms, meaning mechanical terms. To derive general principles inductively from phenomena, he continued, “and afterwards to tell
us how the properties of actions of all corporeal things follow
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from those manifest principles, would be a very great step in
philosophy, though the causes of these principles were not yet
discovered.” 15
To paraphrase with regard to the contemporary analog
I mentioned, it “would be a very great step in science to account for mental aspects of the world in terms of manifest
principles even if the causes of these principles were not
yet discovered”—or to put the matter more appropriately,
even if unifi cation with other aspects of science had not been
achieved. To learn more about mental aspects of the world—
or chemical or electrical or other aspects—we should try to
discover “manifest principles” that partially explain them,
though their causes remain disconnected from what we take to
be more fundamental aspects of science. The gap might have
many reasons, among them, as has repeatedly been discovered, that the presumed reduction base was misconceived, including core physics.
Historians of science have recognized that Newton’s reluctant intellectual moves set forth a new view of science in
which the goal is not to seek ultimate explanations but to fi nd
the best theoretical account we can of the phenomena of experience and experiment. Newton’s more limited goals were not
entirely new. They have roots in an earlier scientifi c tradition
that had abandoned the search for the “fi rst springs of natural
motions” and other natural phenomena, keeping to the more
modest eff ort to develop the best theoretical account we can:
what Richard Popkin calls the “constructive skepticism . . .
formulated . . . in detail by [Marin] Mersenne and [Pierre] Gassendi,” later in Hume’s “mitigated skepticism.” In this conception, Popkin continues, science proceeds by “doubting our
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 90
abilities to fi nd grounds for our knowledge, while accepting
and increasing the knowledge itself ” and recognizing that “the
secrets of nature, of things-in-themselves, are forever hidden
from us”—the “science without metaphysics . . . which was to
have a great history in more recent times.” 16
As the impact of Newton’s discoveries was slowly absorbed, such lowering of the goals of scientifi c inquiry became
routine. Scientists abandoned the animating idea of the early
scientifi c revolution: that the world will be intelligible to us. It
is enough to construct intelligible explanatory theories, a radical diff erence. By the time we reach Bertrand Russell’s Analysis of Matter , he dismisses the very idea of an intelligible world
as “absurd” and repeatedly places the word “intelligible” in
quotes to highlight the absurdity of the quest. Qualms about
action at a distance were “little more than a prejudice,” he
writes. “If all the world consisted of billiard balls, it would be
what is called ‘intelligible’—i.e., it would never surprise us suffi ciently to make us realize that we do not understand it.” 17 But
even without external surprise, we should recognize how little
we understand the world and should also realize that it doesn’t
matter whether we can conceive of how the world works. In his
classic introduction to quantum mechanics a few years later,
Paul Dirac wrote that physical science no longer seeks to provide pictures of how the world works, that is, “a model functioning on essentially classical lines,” but only seeks to provide
a “way of looking at the fundamental laws which makes their
self-consistency obvious.” He was referring to the inconceivable conclusions of quantum physics but could just as readily
have said that even the classical Newtonian models had abandoned the hope of rendering natural phenomena intelligible,
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 91
the primary goal of the early modern scientifi c revolution,
with its roots in commonsense understanding. 18
It is useful to recognize how radical a shift it was to abandon the mechanical philosophy, and with it any scientifi c relevance of our commonsense beliefs and conceptions, except
as a starting point and spur for inquiry. Galileo scholar Peter
Machamer observes that by adopting the mechanical philosophy and initiating the modern scientifi c revolution, Galileo
had “forged a new model of intelligibility for human understanding, [with] new criteria for coherent explanations of
natural phenomena” based on the conception of the world as
an elaborate machine. For Galileo, and leading fi gures in the
early modern scientifi c revolution generally, true understanding requires a mechanical model, a device that an artisan could
construct, hence intelligible to us. Thus Galileo rejected traditional theories of tides because we cannot “duplicate [them]
by means of appropriate artifi cial devices.” 19
The model of intelligibility that reigned from Galileo
through Newton and beyond has a corollary: when mechanism fails, understanding fails. The apparent inadequacies of
mechanical explanation for cohesion, attraction, and other
phenomena led Galileo fi nally to reject “the vain presumption of understanding everything.” Worse yet, “there is not a
single eff ect in nature . . . such that the most ingenious theorist can arrive at a complete understanding of it.” 20 Galileo
was formulating a very strong version of what Daniel Stoljar
calls “the ignorance hypothesis” in his careful inquiry into
the contemporary study of philosophical problems relating to
consciousness, concluding that their origins are epistemic and
that they are eff ectively overcome by invoking the ignorance
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 92
hypothesis—which for Galileo, Newton, Locke, Hume, and
others was more than a hypothesis and extended far beyond
the problem of consciousness, encompassing the truths of nature quite generally. 21
Though much more optimistic than Galileo about the
prospects for mechanical explanation, Descartes, too, recognized the limits of our cognitive reach. Rule 8 of the Regulae
reads: “If in the series of subjects to be examined we come to a
subject of which our intellect cannot gain a good enough intuition, we must stop there; and we must not examine the other
matters that follow, but must refrain from futile toil.” Specifi –
cally, Descartes speculated that the workings of res cogitans
may lie beyond human understanding. He thought that we may
not “have intelligence enough” to understand the workings of
mind, in particular, the normal use of language, with its creative aspects, his core example: the capacity of every human,
but no beast-machine, to use language in ways appropriate to
situations but not caused by them, and to formulate and express coherent thoughts without bound, perhaps “incited or
inclined” to speak in certain ways by internal and external circumstances but not “compelled” to do so, as his followers put
the matter. 22
However, Descartes continued, even if the explanation
of normal use of language and other forms of free and coherent choice of action lies beyond our cognitive grasp, that is no
reason to question the authenticity of our experience. Quite
generally, “free will” is “the noblest thing” we have, Descartes
held: “there is nothing we comprehend more evidently and
more perfectly,” and “it would be absurd” to doubt something
that “we comprehend intimately, and experience within our-
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93
selves” (that “the free actions of men [are] undetermined”)
merely because it confl icts with something else “which we
know must be by its nature incomprehensible to us” (“divine
preordination”). 23
Such thoughts about cognitive limits do not comport well
with Descartes’s occasional observation that human reason
“is a universal instrument which can serve for all contingencies,” whereas the organs of an animal or machine “have need
of some special adaptation for any particular action.” But let’s
put that aside and keep to the more reasonable conclusions
about cognitive limits.
The creative use of language was a basis for what has been
called the “epistemological argument” for mind-body dualism and also for the scientifi c inquiries of the Cartesians into
the problem of “other minds”—much more sensible, I believe,
than contemporary analogs, often based on misinterpretation of a famous paper of Alan Turing’s, a topic that I will put
aside. 24
Desmond Clarke is accurate, I think, in concluding that
“Descartes identifi ed the use of language as the critical property that distinguishes human beings from other members of
the animal kingdom and [that] he developed this argument in
support of the real distinction of mind and matter.” I think he
is also persuasive in interpreting the general Cartesian project as primarily “natural philosophy” (science), an attempt to
press mechanical explanation to its limits; and in regarding the
Meditations “not as the authoritative expression of Descartes’s
philosophy, but as an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile his
theologically suspect natural philosophy with an orthodox expression of scholastic metaphysics.” 25 In pursuing his natural
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 94
science, Descartes tried to show that mechanical explanation
reached very far but came to an impassable barrier in the face
of such mental phenomena as the creative use of language.
He therefore, quite properly, adopted the standard scientifi c
procedure of seeking some new principles to account for such
mental phenomena—a quest that lost one primary motivation
when mechanical explanation was demonstrated to fail for
everything.
Clarke argues that “Descartes’s dualism was an expression of the extent of the theoretical gap between [Cartesian
physics] and the descriptions of mental life that we formulate
from the fi rst person perspective of our own thinking.” The
gap therefore results from Descartes’s “impoverished concept
of matter” and can be overcome by “including new theoretical entities in one’s concept of matter.” 26 Whether the latter
speculation is correct or not, it does not quite capture the defi –
ciencies of classical science from Galileo through Newton and
beyond. The underlying concept of matter and motion—based
on conceivability, intelligibility and commonsense understanding—had to be abandoned, and science had to proceed
on an entirely new course in investigating the simplest phenomena of motion, and all other aspects of the world, including mental life.
Despite the centrality of the creative use of language to
Cartesian science, it was only one illustration of the general
problem of will, and choice of appropriate action, which remains as mysterious to us as it was to seventeenth-century
scientists, so it seems to me, despite sophisticated arguments
to the contrary. The problems are hardly even on the scientifi c agenda. There has been very valuable work about how an
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95
organism executes a plan for integrated motor action—say,
how a person reaches for a cup on the table. But no one even
raises the question of why this plan is executed rather than
some other one, apart from the very simplest organisms and
special circumstances of motivation. Much the same is true
even for visual perception. Cognitive neuroscientists Nancy
Kanwisher and Paul Downing reviewed research on a problem posed in 1850 by Hermann von Helmholtz: “even without
moving our eyes, we can focus our attention on diff erent objects at will, resulting in very diff erent perceptual experiences
of the same visual fi eld.” The phrase “at will” points to an area
beyond serious empirical inquiry, still the mystery it was for
Newton at the end of his life when he continued to seek some
“subtle spirit” that lies hidden in all bodies and that might,
without “absurdity,” account for their properties of attraction and repulsion, along with the nature and eff ects of light,
sensation, and the way “members of animal bodies move at the
command of the will”—all comparable mysteries for Newton,
perhaps even beyond our understanding. 27
It has become standard practice in recent years to describe
the problem of consciousness as “the hard problem,” others
being within our grasp, now or down the road. I think there
are reasons for some skepticism, particularly when we recognize how sharply understanding declines beyond the simplest
systems of nature. To illustrate with a few examples, a review
article by Eric Kandel and Larry Squire on the current state
of eff orts aimed at “breaking down scientifi c barriers to the
study of brain and mind” concludes that “the neuroscience
of higher cognitive processes is only beginning.” 28 Charles
Gallistel points out that “we clearly do not understand how
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96
the nervous system computes,” or even “the foundations of
its ability to compute,” even for “the small set of arithmetic
and logical operations that are fundamental to any computation.” Reviewing the remarkable computational capacities of
insects, he concludes that it is a mistake to suppose that the
nervous system does not carry out complex symbolic computations on grounds of “our inability, as yet to understand how
the nervous system computes at the cellular and molecular
level. . . . We do not know what processes belong to the basic
instruction set of the nervous system—the modest number
of elementary operations built into the hardware of any computing device.” 29 Semir Zeki, who is optimistic about the prospects for bringing the brain sciences to bear even on creativity
in the visual arts, nevertheless reminds us that “how the brain
combines the responses of specialized cells to indicate a continuous vertical line is a mystery that neurology has not yet
solved,” or even how one line is diff erentiated from others or
from the visual surround. Basic traditional questions are not
even on the research agenda, and even simple ones that might
be within reach remain baffl ing. 30
It is common to assert that “the mental is the neurophysiological at a higher level.” To entertain the idea makes sense,
but for the present, only as a guide to inquiry, without much
confi dence about what “the neurophysiological” will prove
to be. Similarly, it is premature to hold that “it is empirically
evident that states of consciousness are the necessary consequence of neuronal activity.” Too little is understood about
the functioning of the brain. 31
History also suggests caution. In early modern science,
the nature of motion was the “hard problem.” “Springing or
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97
Elastic Motions” is the “hard rock in Philosophy,” Sir William Petty observed, proposing ideas resembling those soon
developed much more richly by Newton. The “hard problem”
was that bodies that seem to our senses to be at rest are in a
“violent” state, with “a strong endeavor to fl y off or recede
from one another,” in Robert Boyle’s words. The problem, he
felt, is as obscure as “the Cause and Nature” of gravity, thus
supporting his belief in “an intelligent Author or Disposer of
Things.” Even the skeptical Newtonian Voltaire argued that
the ability of humans to “produce a movement” where there
was none shows that “there is a God who gave movement” to
matter, and “so far are we from conceiving what matter is”
that we do not even know if there is any “solid matter in the
universe.” Locke relinquished to divine hands “the gravitation of matter towards matter, by ways, inconceivable to me.”
Kant rephrased the “hard problem,” arguing that to reach his
conclusions, Newton was compelled to tacitly “assume that
all matter exercises this motive force [of universal attraction]
simply as matter and by its essential nature”; by rejecting the
assumption, he was “at variance with himself,” caught in a
contradiction. Newton therefore did not, as he claimed, really
leave “the physicists full freedom to explain the possibility of
such attraction as they might fi nd good, without mixing up
his propositions with their play of hypotheses.” Rather, “the
concept of matter is reduced to nothing but moving forces. . . .
The attraction essential to all matter is an immediate action
of one matter on another across empty space,” a notion that
would have been anathema to the great fi gures of seventeenthcentury science, “such Masters, as the Great Huygenius, and
the incomparable Mr. Newton,” in Locke’s words. 32
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The “hard problems” of the day were not solved; rather
they were abandoned, as, over time, science turned to its more
modest post-Newtonian course. Friedrich Lange, in his classic nineteenth-century history of materialism, observed that
we have
so accustomed ourselves to the abstract notion of forces,
or rather to a notion hovering in a mystic obscurity between abstraction and concrete comprehension, that
we no longer fi nd any diffi culty in making one particle of
matter act upon another without immediate contact, . . .
through void space without any material link. From such
ideas the great mathematicians and physicists of the seventeenth century were far removed. They were all in so
far genuine Materialists in the sense of ancient Materialism that they made immediate contact a condition of
infl uence.
This transition over time is “one of the most important
turning-points in the whole history of Materialism,” depriving
the doctrine of much signifi cance, if any at all. Newton not only
joined the great scientists of his day in regarding “the now prevailing theory of actio in distans . . . simply as absurd, [but] also
felt himself obliged, in the year 1717, in the preface to the second edition of his ‘Optics,’ to protest expressly against [the]
view” of his followers who “went so far as to declare gravity to
be a fundamental force of matter,” requiring no “further mechanical explanation from the collision of imponderable particles.” Lange concludes that “the course of history has eliminated this unknown material cause [that so troubled Newton],
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and has placed the mathematical law itself in the rank of physical causes.” Hence “what Newton held to be so great an absurdity that no philosophic thinker could light upon it, is prized
by posterity as Newton’s great discovery of the harmony of the
universe!” 33 The conclusions are commonplace in the history
of science. Fifty years ago, Alexandre Koyré observed that despite his unwillingness to accept the conclusion, Newton had
demonstrated that “a purely materialistic pattern of nature
is utterly impossible (and a purely materialistic or mechanistic physics, such as that of Lucretius or of Descartes, is utterly
impossible, too)”; his mathematical physics required the “admission into the body of science of incomprehensible and inexplicable ‘facts’ imposed up on us by empiricism,” by what is
observed and our conclusions from these observations. 34
George Coyne describes it as “paradoxical that the rise of
materialism as a philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries is
attributed to the birth of modern science, when in reality matter as a workable concept had been eliminated from scientifi c
discourse” with the collapse of the mechanical philosophy. 35
Also paradoxical is the infl uence of Gilbert Ryle’s ridicule of
the “ghost in the machine,” quite apart from the accuracy of
his rendition of the Cartesian concepts. It was the machine
that Newton exorcised, leaving the ghost intact. The “hard
problem” of the materialists disappeared, and there has been
little noticeable progress in addressing other “hard problems”
that seemed no less mysterious to Descartes, Newton, Locke,
and other leading fi gures.
The third English edition of Lange’s much expanded history of materialism appeared in 1925 with an introduction
by Bertrand Russell, who shortly after published Analysis of
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Matter . Developing his neutral monism, Russell carried further seventeenth- and eighteenth-century skepticism about
matter, and recognition of the plausibility (or for some necessity) of thinking matter. Russell held that there are “three
grades of certainty. The highest grade belongs to my own percepts; the second grade to the percepts of other people; the
third to events which are not percepts of anybody,” constructions of the mind established in the course of eff orts to make
sense of what we perceive. “A piece of matter is a logical structure composed of [such] events,” he therefore concluded. We
know nothing of the “intrinsic character” of such mentally
constructed entities, so there is “no ground for the view that
percepts cannot be physical events.” For science to be informative, it cannot be restricted to structural knowledge of such
logical properties. Rather, “the world of physics [that we construct] must be, in some sense, continuous with the world of
our perceptions, since it is the latter which supplies the evidence for the laws of physics.” The percepts that are required
for this task—perhaps just meter-readings, Arthur Eddington
had argued shortly before—“are not known to have any intrinsic character which physical events cannot have, since we do
not know of any intrinsic character which could be incompatible with the logical properties that physics assigns to physical events.” Accordingly, “what are called ‘mental’ events . . .
are part of the material of the physical world.” Physics itself
seeks only to discover “the causal skeleton of the world, [while
studying] percepts only in their cognitive aspect; their other
aspects lie outside its purview”—though we recognize their
existence, at the highest grade of certainty in fact. 36
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101
The basic conundrum recalls a classical dialogue between
the intellect and the senses, in which the intellect says that
color, sweetness, and the like are only convention while in reality there are only atoms and the void, and the senses reply:
“Wretched mind, from us you are taking the evidence by which
you would overthrow us? Your victory is your own fall.” 37
To illustrate his conclusion, Russell asks us to consider a
blind physicist who knows the whole of physics but does not
have “the knowledge which [sighted] men have” about, say,
the quality of the color blue. In their review of related issues,
Daniel Stoljar and Yujin Nagasawa call this the “knowledge
intuition,” as distinct from the “knowledge argument,” presented in the resurrection of Russell’s example by Frank Jackson: in this case, the physicist (Mary) “learns everything there
is to know about the physical nature of the world” while confi ned to a black-and-white room but when released “will learn
what it is like to see something red.” 38
There is a substantial literature seeking to evade the argument. One popular though contested proposal is that what
Mary lacks is not the knowledge of the world that we have but
a range of abilities, a species of “knowing how.” That seems
unhelpful, in part because there is an irreducible cognitive
element in “knowing how,” which goes beyond abilities; but
also for the kinds of reasons that Hume discussed in connection with moral judgments. Since these, he observed, are unbounded in scope and applicable to new situations, they must
be based on a fi nite array of general principles (which are,
furthermore, part of our nature though they are beyond the
“original instincts” shared with animals). The knowledge that
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we have but Mary lacks is a body of knowledge that does not fall
within the knowing-how/knowing-that dichotomy: it is knowledge of —knowledge of rules and principles that yield unbounded capacities to act appropriately. All this is for the most
part unconscious and inaccessible to consciousness, as in the
case of knowledge of the rules of language, vision, and the like.
Such conclusions have been rejected as a matter of principle by
Willard Van Orman Quine, John Searle, and many others but
not convincingly or even coherently, I think. 39
Russell’s knowledge intuition led him to conclude that
physics has limits: experience in general lies “outside its purview” apart from cognitive aspects that provide empirical
evidence, though along with other mental events, experience
is “part of the material of the physical world,” a phrase that
seems to mean no more than “part of the world.” We must have
“an interpretation of physics which gives a due place to perceptions,” Russell held, or it has no empirical basis. Jackson’s
knowledge argument leads him to the conclusion that “physicalism is false.” Or in a later version, that to be valid “materialism [as] a metaphysical doctrine” must incorporate “the psychological story about our world”; the “story about our world
told purely in physical terms [must] enable one to deduce the
phenomenal nature of psychological states.” 40 But that is uninformative until some clear concept of physicalism/materialism is off ered. Classical interpretations having vanished, the
notions of body, material, physical are hardly more than honorifi c designations for what is more or less understood at some
particular moment in time, with fl exible boundaries and no
guarantee that there will not be radical revision ahead, even at
its core. If so, the knowledge argument only shows (with Rus-
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103
sell) that humanly constructed physics has limits, or that Mary
did not know all of physics (she had not drawn the right conclusions from Eddington’s meter readings).
To resurrect something that resembles a “mind-body
problem,” it would be necessary to characterize physicalism
( matter , etc.) in some post-Newtonian fashion, or to argue
that the problem arises even if the concepts are abandoned.
Both approaches have been pursued. I will return to current
examples. An alternative approach is to dismiss the mind-body
problem, and to approach the knowledge intuition/argument
as a problem of the natural sciences. Rephrasing Russell’s
thought experiment, we might say that, like all animals, we
have internal capacities that refl exively provide us with what
ethologists called an Umwelt , a world of experience, diff erent
for us and for bees—in fact, diff ering among humans, depending on what they understand. That’s why radiology is a medical
specialty. Galileo saw the moons of Jupiter through his primitive telescope, but those he sought to convince could see only
magnifi cation of terrestrial objects, and took his telescope to
be a conjuring trick (at least if Paul Feyerabend’s reconstruction of the history is correct). What I hear as noise is perceived
as music by my teenage grandchildren, at a fairly primitive
level of perceptual experience. And so on quite generally.
Being refl ective creatures, unlike others, we go on to seek
to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomena of experience. These exercises are called myth, or magic, or philosophy,
or science. They reveal not only that the world of experience
is itself highly intricate and variable, resulting from the interaction of many factors, but also that the modes of interpretation that intuitive common sense provides do not withstand
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 104
analysis, so that the goals of science must be lowered in the
manner recognized in post-Newtonian science. From this
point of view, there is no objective science from a third-person
perspective, just various fi rst-person perspectives, matching
closely enough among humans so that a large range of agreement can be reached, with diligence and cooperative inquiry.
Being inquisitive as well as refl ective creatures, if we can construct a degree of theoretical understanding in some domain,
we try to unify it with other branches of inquiry, reduction being one possibility but not the only one.
We can anticipate that our quest might fail, for one reason,
because our basically shared capacities of understanding and
explanation have limits—a truism that is sometimes thoughtlessly derided as “mysterianism,” though not by Descartes and
Hume, among others. It could be that these innate cognitive
capacities do not lead us beyond some understanding of Russell’s causal skeleton of the world (and enough about perception to incorporate evidence within this mental construction),
and it is an open question how much of that can be attained. In
principle, the limits could become topics of empirical inquiry
into the nature of what we might call “the science-forming
faculty,” another “mental organ.” These are interesting topics, but the issues are distinct from the traditional mind-body
problem, which evaporated after Newton, or from the question of how mental aspects of the world, including direct experience, relate to the brain, one of the many problems of unifi –
cation that arise in the sciences.
In brief, if we are biological organisms, not angels, much
of what we seek to understand might lie beyond our cognitive limits—maybe a true understanding of anything, as Gali-
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leo concluded, and Newton in a certain sense demonstrated.
That cognitive reach has limits is not only a truism but also a
fortunate one: if there were no limits to human intelligence,
it would lack internal structure and would therefore have no
scope: we could achieve nothing by inquiry. The basic points
were expressed clearly by Charles Sanders Peirce in his discussion of the need for innate endowment that “puts a limit
upon admissible hypotheses” if knowledge is to be acquired. 41
Similarly if a zygote had no further genetic instructions constraining its developmental path, it would at best grow into a
creature formed solely by physical law, like a snowfl ake, nothing viable.
We might think of the natural sciences as a kind of chance
convergence between our cognitive capacities and what is
more or less true of the natural world. There is no reason to believe that humans can solve every problem they pose or even
that they can formulate the right questions; they may simply
lack the conceptual tools, just as rats cannot deal with a prime
number maze.
Russell’s general conclusions seem to me on the right
track. The formulation can be improved, I think, by simply
dropping the words “matter” and “physical.” Since the Newtonian revolution, we speak of the “physical” world much as we
speak of the “real” truth: for emphasis, but adding nothing. We
can distinguish various aspects of the world—say chemical,
electrical, experiential and the rest—and we can then inquire
into their underlying principles and their relations with other
systems, problems of unifi cation.
Suppose we adopt the “mitigated skepticism” that was
warranted after Newton, if not before. For the theory of mind,
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that means following Gassendi’s advice in Objections . He argued that Descartes had at most shown “the perception of the
existence of mind, [but] fail[ed] to reveal its nature.” It is necessary to proceed as we would in seeking to discover “a conception of Wine superior to the vulgar,” by investigating how
it is constituted and the laws that determine its functioning.
Similarly, he urged Descartes, “it is incumbent on you, to examine yourself by a certain chemicallike labor, so that you can
determine and demonstrate to us your internal substance” 42 —
and that of others.
The theory of mind can be pursued in many ways, like
other branches of science, with an eye to eventual unifi cation,
whatever form it may take, if any. That is the task that Hume
undertook when he investigated what he called “the science of
human nature,” seeking “the secret springs and principles, by
which the human mind is actuated in its operations,” including
those “parts of [our] knowledge” that are derived from “the
original hand of nature,” an enterprise he compared to Newton’s; essentially what in contemporary literature is termed
“naturalization of philosophy” or “epistemology naturalized.”
Gassendi’s recommended course was in fact being pursued in
the “cognitive revolution” of the seventeenth century by British neoplatonists and continental philosophers of language
and mind and has been taken up with renewed vigor in recent
years, but I’ll put that matter aside. 43
Chemistry itself quite explicitly pursued this course. The
eighteenth-century chemist Joseph Black recommended that
“chemical affi nity be received as a fi rst principle, which we
cannot explain any more than Newton could explain gravitation, and let us defer accounting for the laws of affi nity, till we
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107
have established such a body of doctrine as he has established
concerning the laws of gravitation.” Being yet “very far from
the knowledge of fi rst principles,” chemical science should be
“analytical, like Newton’s Optics , in the form of a general law,
at the very end of our induction, as the reward of our labour.”
The course he outlined is the one that was actually followed, as
chemistry established a rich body of doctrine, its “triumphs . . .
built on no reductionist foundation but rather achieved in
isolation from the newly emerging science of physics,” historian of chemistry Arnold Thackray observes. Newton and his
followers did attempt to “pursue the thoroughly Newtonian
and reductionist task of uncovering the general mathematical laws which govern all chemical behavior” and to develop
a principled science of chemical mechanisms based on physics and its concepts of interactions among “the ultimate permanent particles of matter.” But the Newtonian program was
undercut by John Dalton’s “astonishingly successful weightquantifi cation of chemical units,” Thackray continues, shifting
“the whole area of philosophical debate among chemists from
that of chemical mechanisms (the why ? of reaction) to that of
chemical units (the what ? and how much ?),” a theory that “was
profoundly antiphysicalist and anti-Newtonian in its rejection
of the unity of matter, and its dismissal of short-range forces.”
“Dalton’s ideas were chemically successful. Hence they have
enjoyed the homage of history, unlike the philosophically
more coherent, if less successful, reductionist schemes of the
Newtonians.” 44
Adopting contemporary terminology, we might say that
Dalton disregarded the explanatory gap between chemistry and physics by ignoring the underlying physics, much as
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post-Newtonian physicists disregarded the explanatory gap
between Newtonian dynamics and the mechanical philosophy
by ignoring (and in this case rejecting) the latter, though it was
self-evident to commonsense understanding. That has often
been the course of science since, though not without controversy and sharp criticism, often later recognized to have been
seriously misguided.
Well into the twentieth century, prominent scientists interpreted the failure of reduction of chemistry to physics as
a critically important explanatory gap, showing that chemistry provides “merely classifi catory symbols that summarized
the observed course of a reaction,” to quote William Brock’s
standard history. August Kekulé, whose structural chemistry
was an important step toward eventual unifi cation of chemistry and physics, doubted that “absolute constitutions of organic molecules could ever be given”; his models and analysis
of valency were to have an instrumental interpretation only,
as calculating devices. Antoine Lavoisier before him believed
that “the number and nature of elements [is] an unsolvable
problem, capable of an infi nity of solutions none of which
probably accord with Nature”; “It seems extremely probable
that we know nothing at all about . . . [the] . . . indivisible atoms of which matter is composed,” and never will, he believed.
Kekulé seems to be saying that there isn’t a problem to be
solved; the structural formulas are useful or not, but there is
no truth of the matter. Large parts of physics were understood
the same way. Henri Poincaré went so far as to say that we
adopt the molecular theory of gases only because we are familiar with the game of billiards. Ludwig Boltzmann’s scientifi c
biographer speculates that he committed suicide because of
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his failure to convince the scientifi c community to regard his
theoretical account of these matters as more than a calculating system—ironically, shortly after Albert Einstein’s work on
Brownian motion and broader issues had convinced physicists
of the reality of the entities he postulated. Niels Bohr’s model
of the atom was also regarded as lacking “physical reality” by
eminent scientists. In the 1920s, America’s fi rst Nobel Prize–
winning chemist dismissed talk about the real nature of chemical bonds as metaphysical “twaddle”: they are nothing more
than “a very crude method of representing certain known facts
about chemical reactions, a mode of representation” only, because the concept could not be reduced to physics. The rejection of that skepticism by a few leading scientists, whose views
were condemned at the time as a conceptual absurdity, paved
the way for the eventual unifi cation of chemistry and physics,
with Linus Pauling’s quantum-theoretic account of the chemical bond seventy years ago. 45
In 1927, Russell observed that chemical laws “cannot at
present be reduced to physical laws,” 46 an observation that
was found to be misleading: the words “at present” turned
out to understate the matter. Chemical laws could not ever be
reduced to physical laws, because the conception of physical
laws was erroneous. The perceived explanatory gap was never
fi lled. It was necessary, once again, to dismiss as irrelevant the
notion of “conceivability” and “intelligibility of the world,” in
favor of the mitigated skepticism of methodological naturalism: seeking to increase our knowledge while keeping an open
mind about the possibility of reduction.
There are fairly clear parallels to contemporary discussion
of language and mind, and some lessons that can be drawn.
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The study of insect symbolic representation, organization of
motor behavior, mammalian vision, human language, moral
judgment, and other topics is in each case well advised to follow Joseph Black’s prescription. If these inquiries succeed in
developing a “body of doctrine” that accounts for elements
of insect navigation, or the rule that image motions are interpreted (if other rules permit) as rigid motions in three dimensions, or that displacement operations in language observe
locality principles, and so on, that should be regarded as normal science, even if unifi cation with neurophysiology has not
been achieved—and might not be for a variety of possible reasons, among them that the expected “reduction base” is misconceived and has to be modifi ed. Needless to say, the brain
sciences are not as fi rmly established as basic physics was a
century ago, or as the mechanical philosophy was in Newton’s
day. It is also pointless to insist on doctrines about accessibility to consciousness: even if they could be given a coherent formulation, they would have no bearing on the “physical reality”
of the rigidity principle or locality conditions. We should understand enough by now to dismiss the interpretation of theoretical accounts as no more than a way of “representing certain known facts about [behavior], a mode of representation”
only—a critique commonly leveled against theories of higher
mental faculties, though not insect computation, another illustration of the methodological dualism that is so prevalent
in critical discussion of inquiry into language and mind. 47
It is also instructive to observe the re-emergence of much
earlier insights, though divorced from their grounding in the
collapse of traditional physicalism. Thus we read today of the
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thesis of the new biology that “things mental, indeed minds,
are emergent properties of brains, [though] these emergences
are . . . produced by principles that . . . we do not yet understand,” according to neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle,
formulating the guiding theme of a collection of essays that
review the results of the Decade of the Brain, which ended
the twentieth century. The phrase “we do not yet understand”
might well suff er the same fate as Russell’s similar comment
about chemistry seventy years earlier. Many other prominent
scientists and philosophers have presented essentially the
same thesis as an “astonishing hypothesis” of the new biology,
a “radical” new idea in the philosophy of mind, “the bold assertion that mental phenomena are entirely natural and caused
by the neurophysiological activities of the brain,” opening the
door to novel and promising inquiries, a rejection of Cartesian
mind-body dualism, and so on. 48 In fact, all reiterate, in virtually the same words, formulations of centuries ago, after the
traditional mind-body problem became unformulable with the
disappearance of the only coherent notion of body (physical,
material, etc.)—for example, Joseph Priestley’s conclusion
that properties “termed mental” reduce somehow to “the organical structure of the brain,” 49 stated in diff erent words by
Hume, Darwin, and many others, and almost inescapable, it
would seem, after the collapse of the mechanical philosophy.
Priestley’s important work was the culmination of a century of refl ections on Locke’s speculation, and their most
elaborate development. 50 He made it clear that his conclusions
about thinking matter followed directly from the collapse of
any serious notion of body , or matter , or physical :
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The principles of the Newtonian philosophy were no
sooner known, than it was seen how few in comparison, of
the phenomena of Nature were owing to solid matter, and
how much to powers which were only supposed to accompany and surround the solid parts of matter. . . . Now when
solidity had apparently so very little to do in the system,
it is really a wonder that it did not occur to philosophers
sooner . . . that there might be no such thing in Nature.
There is, then, no longer any reason to suppose that “the principle of thought or sensation [is] incompatible with matter,”
Priestley concluded. Accordingly, “the whole argument for
an immaterial thinking principle in man, on this supposition,
falls to the ground; matter, destitute of what has hitherto been
called solidity, being no more incompatible with sensation and
thought than that substance which without knowing anything
farther about it, we have been used to call immaterial.” The
powers of sensation, perception, and thought reside in “a certain organized system of matter, [and] necessarily exist in, and
depend upon, such a system.” It is true that “we have a very imperfect idea of what the power of perception is,” and that we
may never attain a “clear idea,” but “this very ignorance ought
to make us cautious in asserting with what other properties it
may, or may not, exist.” Only a “precise and defi nite knowledge
of the nature of perception and thought can authorize any person to affi rm whether they may not belong to an extended substance which also has the properties of attraction and repulsion.” Our ignorance provides no warrant for supposing that
sensation and thought are incompatible with post-Newtonian
matter. “In fact, there is the same reason to conclude, that the
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powers of sensation and thought are the necessary result of a
particular organization, as that sound is the necessary result
of a particular concussion of the air.” And in a later discussion,
“In my opinion there is just the same reason to conclude that
the brain thinks , as that it is white , and soft .” 51
Priestley criticizes Locke for being hesitant in putting
forth his speculation about thinking matter, since the conclusion follows so directly from “the universally accepted rules
of philosophizing such as are laid down by Sir Isaac Newton.”
He urges that we abandon the methodological dualism that deters us from applying to thought and sensation the rules that
we follow “in our inquiries into the causes of particular appearances in nature” and expresses his hope “that when this
is plainly pointed out the inconsistency of our conduct cannot
fail to strike us and be the means of inducing” philosophers to
apply the same maxim to investigation of mental aspects of the
world that they do in other domains—a hope that has yet to be
realized, I think. 52
Priestley clearly “wished the disappearance of solid matter to signal an end to matter-spirit dualism,” Thackray writes.
And with it an end to any reason to question the thesis of
thinking matter. 53 In John Yolton’s words, Priestley’s conclusion was “not that all reduces to matter, but rather that
the kind of matter on which the two-substance view is based
does not exist,” and “with the altered concept of matter, the
more traditional ways of posing the question of the nature of
thought and of its relations to the brain do not fi t. We have to
think of a complex organized biological system with properties
the traditional doctrine would have called mental and physical.” 54 Priestley’s conclusions are essentially those reached by
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Eddington and Russell, and developed in recent years particularly by Galen Strawson and Daniel Stoljar, in ways to which we
return.
Reviewing the development of Locke’s suggestion in England through the eighteenth century, Yolton observes that
“Priestley’s fascinating suggestions were not taken up and extended; they were hardly even perceived as diff erent from earlier versions of materialism. The issues raised by Locke’s suggestion of thinking matter . . . played themselves out through
the century, but no one gave the emerging view of man as one
substance—foreshadowed by Priestley—a systematic articulation.” 55 This conclusion remains largely true, even for simple
organisms, if we interpret it as referring to the unifi cation
problem.
Having argued that the mind-body problem disappears
when we follow the “principles of the Newtonian philosophy,” Priestley turns to confronting eff orts to reconstitute
something that resembles the problem, even after one of its
terms—body (matter, etc.)—no longer has a clear sense. The
fi rst is “the diffi culty of conceiving how thought can arise from
matter, . . . an argument that derives all its force from our ignorance,” he writes, and has no force unless there is a demonstration that they are “absolutely incompatible with one another.”
Priestley was not troubled by qualms arising from ignorance,
rightly I think, any more than scientists should have been concerned about irreducibility of the mysterious properties of
matter and motion to the mechanical philosophy, or in more
modern times, about the inability to reduce chemistry to an
inadequate physics until the 1930s, to take two signifi cant moments from the history of science.
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115
A common objection today is that such ideas invoke an
unacceptable form of “radical emergence,” unlike the emergence of liquids from molecules, where the properties of the
liquid can in some reasonable sense be regarded as inhering
in the molecules. In Nagel’s phrase, “we can see how liquidity
is the logical result of the molecules ‘rolling around on each
other’ at the microscopic level,” though “nothing comparable
is to be expected in the case of neurons” and consciousness. 56
Also taking liquidity as a paradigm, Strawson argues extensively that the notion of emergence is intelligible only if we
interpret it as “total dependence”: if “some part or aspect of
Y [hails] from somewhere else,” then we cannot say that Y is
“emergent from X.” We can speak intelligibly about emergence of Y-phenomena from non-Y-phenomena only if the
non-Y- phenomena at the very least are “somehow intrinsically suited to constituting” the X-phenomena; there must be
“something about X’s nature in virtue of which” they are “so
suited.” “It is built into the notion of emergence that emergence cannot be brute in the sense of there being no reason in
the nature of things why the emerging thing is as it is.” This is
Strawson’s No-Radical Emergence Thesis , from which he draws
the panpsychic conclusion that “experiential reality cannot
possibly emerge from wholly and utterly non-experiential reality.” The basic claim, which he highlights, is that “if it really is
true that Y is emergent from X then it must be the case that Y
is in some sense wholly dependent on X and X alone, so that all
features of Y trace intelligibly back to X.” Here “intelligible” is
a metaphysical rather than an epistemic notion, meaning “intelligible to God”: there must be an explanation in the nature
of things, though we may not be able to attain it. 57
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Priestley, it seems, would reject Nagel’s qualms while accepting Strawson’s formulation, but without drawing the
panpsychic conclusion. It should be noted that the moleculeliquid example, commonly used, is not a very telling one. We
also cannot conceive of a liquid turning into two gases by electrolysis, and there is no intuitive sense in which the properties of water, bases, and acids inhere in hydrogen or oxygen or
other atoms. Furthermore, the whole matter of conceivability
seems to be irrelevant, whether it is brought up in connection with the eff ects of motion that Newton and Locke found
inconceivable, or the irreducible principles of chemistry, or
mind-brain relations. There is something about the nature of
hydrogen and oxygen “in virtue of which they are intrinsically
suited to constituting water,” so the sciences discovered after
long labors, providing reasons “in the nature of things why the
emerging thing is as it is.” What seemed “brute emergence”
was assimilated into science as ordinary emergence—not, to
be sure, of the liquidity variety, relying on conceivability. I see
no strong reason why matters should necessarily be diff erent
in the case of experiential and nonexperiential reality, particularly given our ignorance of the latter, stressed from Newton
and Locke to Priestley, developed by Russell, and arising again
in recent discussion.
Priestley then considers the claim that mind “cannot be
material because it is infl uenced by reasons.” To this he responds that since “reasons, whatever they may be, do ultimately move matter, there is certainly much less diffi culty in
conceiving that they may do this in consequence of their being the aff ection of some material substance, than upon the
hypothesis of their belonging to a substance that has no com-
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mon property with matter”—not the way it would be put today, but capturing essentially the point of contemporary discussion leading some to revive panpsychism. But contrary to
the contemporary revival, 58 Priestley rejects the conclusion
that consciousness “cannot be annexed to the whole brain as
a system, while the individual particles of which it consists are
separately unconscious.” That “a certain quantity of nervous
system is necessary to such complex ideas and aff ections as
belong to the human mind; and the idea of self, or the feeling
that corresponds to the pronoun I,” he argues, “is not essentially diff erent from other complex ideas, that of our country
for example.” Similarly, it should not perplex us more than
the fact that “life should be the property of an entirely animal
system, and not the separate parts of it,” or that sound cannot
“result from the motion of a single particle” of air. We should
recognize “that the term self denotes that substance which is
the seat of that particular set of sensations and ideas of which
those that are then recollected make a part, as distinct from
other substances which are the seat of similar sets of sensations and ideas”: and “it is high time to abandon these random
hypotheses, and to form our conclusions with respect to the
faculties of the mind, as well as the properties and powers of
matter, by an attentive observation of facts and cautious inferences from them,” adopting the Newtonian style of inquiry
while dismissing considerations of commonsense plausibility.
That seems to be a reasonable stance.
Priestley urges that we also dismiss arguments based on
“vulgar phraseology” and “vulgar apprehensions,” as in the
quest for an entity of the world picked out by the term me when
I speak of “my body,” with its hint of dualism. “According
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to this merely verbal argument,” Priestley observes, “there
ought to be something in man besides all the parts of which
he consists,” something beyond both soul and body, as when
“a man says I devote my soul and body,” the pronoun allegedly denoting something beyond body and spirit that “makes
the devotion.” In Rylean terms, phrases of common usage may
be “systematically misleading expressions,” a lively concern
at the time, based on a centuries-old tradition of inquiry into
the ways surface grammatical form disguise actual meaning.
Like Priestley, Thomas Reid argued that failure to attend “to
the distinction between the operations of the mind and the
objects of these operations” is a source of philosophical error,
as in interpreting the phrase “I have an idea” on the model of
“I have a diamond,” when we should understand it to mean
something like “I am thinking.” In an earlier discussion, the
Encyclopedist César Chesneau du Marsais, using the same
and many other examples, warned against the error of taking
nouns to be “names of real objects that exist independently
of our thought.” The language, then, gives no license for supposing that such words as “idea,” “concept,” or “image” stand
for “real objects,” let alone “perceptible objects.” 59 For similar
reasons, Priestley argues that “nothing surely can be inferred
from such phraseology as [‘my body’], which, after all, is only
derived from vulgar apprehensions.”
The need to resist arguments from “vulgar apprehensions”
holds more broadly: for such phrases as “my thoughts,” “my
dreams,” “my spirit,” even “my self,” which is diff erent from
myself (= me, even though in another sense, I may not be myself these days). When John thinks about himself, he is thinking about John, but not when he is thinking about his self; he
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119
can hurt himself but not his self (whatever role these curious
entities play in our mental world). There’s a diff erence between saying that his actions are betraying his true (authentic,
former) self and that he’s betraying himself, and “thine own
self ” indicates a more essential characteristic than “thyself.”
Inquiry into manifold questions like these, while entirely legitimate and perhaps enlightening, is concerned with the “operations of the mind,” our modes of cognition and thought, and
should not be misinterpreted as holding of the “real objects
that exist independently of our thought.” The latter is the concern of the natural sciences, and I take it also to be the prime
concern of the tradition reviewed here.
The operations of the mind doubtless accommodate the
thesis that “I am not identical to my body,” a core assumption of substance dualism, Stephen Yablo proposes. 60 He suggests further that “substance dualism . . . fallen strangely out
of view,” perhaps “because one no longer recognizes ‘minds’ as
entities in their own right, or ‘substances,’ ” though “ selves —
the things we refer to by use of ‘I’—are surely substances, and
it does little violence to the intention behind mind/body dualism to interpret it as a dualism of bodies and selves.” In the
tradition I am following here, it is matter that has lost its presumed status, and not “strangely.” It is also by no means clear,
as just noted, that by use of the fi rst-person pronoun (as in “I
pledge to devote my body and my soul”), or the name “John,”
we refer to selves . But truth or falsity aside, an argument would
be needed to show that in using such words we refer (or even
take ourselves to be referring) to real constituents of the
world that exist independently of our modes of thought. An
alternative, which seems to me more plausible, is that these
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topics belong not to natural science but rather to a branch of
ethnoscience, a study of how people think about the world, a
very diff erent domain. For natural science, it seems hard to improve on Priestley’s conclusion: that Locke’s suggestion was
fundamentally accurate and that properties “termed mental”
reduce to “the organical structure of the brain”—though in
ways that are not understood, no great surprise when we consider the history of even the core hard sciences, like chemistry.
As noted earlier, with the collapse of the traditional notion of body (etc.), there are basically two ways to reconstitute
some problem that resembles the traditional mind-body problem: defi ne physical , or set the problem up in other terms, such
as those that Priestley anticipated.
Galen Strawson develops the fi rst option in an important
series of publications. 61 Unlike many others, he does give a
defi nition of “physical,” so that it is possible to formulate
a physical-nonphysical problem. The physical is “any sort
of existent [that is] spatio-temporally (or at least temporally) located).” The physical includes “experiential events”
(more generally mental events) and permits formulation of
the question of how experiential phenomena can be physical
phenomena—a “mind-body problem,” in a post-Newtonian
version. Following Eddington and Russell, and earlier antecedents, notably Priestley, Strawson concludes that “physical stuff has, in itself, ‘a nature capable of manifesting itself as
mental activity,’ i.e., as experience or consciousness.”
That much seems uncontroversial, given the defi nitions
along with some straightforward facts. But Strawson intends
to establish the much stronger thesis of micropsychism (which
he identifi es here with panpsychism ): “at least some ultimates
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121
are intrinsically experience-involving.” The crucial premise for that further conclusion, as Strawson makes explicit, is
the No-Radical Emergence Thesis, already discussed, from
which it follows that “experiential reality cannot possibly
emerge from wholly and utterly non-experiential reality,” a
metaphysical issue, not an epistemic one. Strawson interprets
Eddington’s position to be micropsychism , citing his observation that it would be “rather silly to prefer to attach [thought]
to something of a so-called ‘concrete’ nature inconsistent with
thought, and then to wonder where the thought comes from,”
and that we have no knowledge “of the nature of atoms that
renders it all incongruous that they should constitute a thinking object.” This, however, appears to fall short of Strawson’s
micropsychism/panpsychism. Rather, Eddington seems to go
no farther than Priestley’s conception, writing that nothing in
physics leads us to reject the conclusion that an “assemblage
of atoms constituting a brain” can be “a thinking (conscious,
experiencing) object.” He does not, it seems, adopt the NoRadical Emergence Thesis that is required to carry the argument beyond to Strawson’s conclusion. Russell too stops short
of this critical step, and Priestley explicitly rejects it, regarding
radical emergence as normal science. Textual interpretation
aside, the issues seem fairly clearly drawn.
The second option is pursued by Daniel Stoljar, who has
done some of the most careful work on physicalism and variants of the “mind-body problem.” He does off er some answers to the question of what it means to say that something
is physical —a question that, he notes, has not received a great
deal of attention in the literature, though “without any understanding of what the physical is, we can have no serious
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understanding of what physicalism is.” 62 The answers he offers are not too convincing, I think he would agree, but he argues that it does not matter much: “we have many concepts
that we understand without knowing how to analyze,” and
“the concept of the physical is one of the central concepts of
human thought.” The latter comment is correct, but only with
regard to the commonsense concept of the mechanical philosophy, long ago undermined. The former is correct, too, but it
is not clear that we want to found a serious philosophical position on a concept that we think we understand intuitively but
cannot analyze, particularly when a long history reveals that
such commonsense understanding can often not withstand
serious inquiry. But Stoljar’s more fundamental reason for
not being too concerned with characterizing the “physical”
is diff erent: the issues, he argues, should be shifted to epistemological terms, not seeking reduction to the physical , but
taking physicalism to be only the “background metaphysical
assumption against which the problems of philosophy of mind
are posed and discussed.” Thus “when properly understood,
the problems that philosophers of mind are interested in are
not with the framework [itself ], and to that extent are not
metaphysical.”
Stoljar suggests that “the problem mainly at issue in contemporary philosophy is distinct both from the mind-body
problem as that problem is traditionally understood and from
the problem as it is, or might be, pursued in the sciences”; a
qualifi cation, I think, is that the traditional problem, at least
from Descartes through Priestley (taking the latter’s work
to be the culmination of the post-Newtonian reaction to the
traditional problem), can plausibly be construed as a prob-
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123
lem within the sciences. The traditional questions “we may
lump together under the heading ‘metaphysics of mind,’ ” but
contemporary philosophy Stoljar takes to be concerned with
“epistemic principles” and, crucially, “ the logical problem of
experience. ” It might be true that “the notion of the physical
fails to meet minimal standards of clarity,” he writes, but such
matters “play only an illustrative or inessential role in the logical problem,” which can be posed “even in the absence of . . . a
reasonably defi nite conception of the physical.” 63 The logical
problem arises from the assumption that (1) there are experiential truths, while it seems plausible to believe both that
(2) every such truth is entailed by (or supervenes on) some
nonexperiential truth and that (3) not every experiential truth
is entailed (or supervenes on) some nonexperiential truth.
Adopting (1) and (2) (with a qualifi cation to be considered),
the crucial question is (3). As already discussed, following a
tradition tracing back to Newton and Locke, Priestley sees no
reason to accept thesis (3): our “very ignorance” of the properties of post-Newtonian matter cautions us not to take this step.
In Russell’s words (which Stoljar cites), experiential truths
“are not known to have any intrinsic character which physical
events cannot have, since we do not know of any intrinsic character which could be incompatible with the logical properties
that physics assigns to physical events.” From these perspectives, then, the logical problem does not arise. 64
Stoljar’s solution to the logical problem, the new “mindbody problem,” is similar to the stance of Priestley and Russell,
even if put somewhat diff erently. It is based on his “ignorance
hypothesis, according to which we are ignorant of a type of experience-relevant nonexperiential truth,” so that the “ logical
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 124
problem of experience” unravels on epistemic grounds. 65 He
suggests elsewhere that “the radical view . . . that we are ignorant of the nature of the physical or non-experiential has the
potential to completely transform philosophy of mind.” 66 In
Strawson’s formulation, the (sensible) line of thought that was
well understood up to a half century ago “disappeared almost
completely from the philosophical mainstream [as] analytical philosophy acquired hyperdualist intuitions even as it proclaimed its monism. With a few honorable exceptions it outDescartesed Descartes (or ‘Descartes’ [that is, the constructed
version]) in its certainty that we know enough about the physical to know that the experiential cannot be physical.” 67
The qualifi cation with regard to (2) is that we cannot so
easily assume that there are nonexperiential truths; in fact the
assumption may be “silly,” as Eddington put it. Some physicists have reached such conclusions on quantum-theoretic
grounds. John Wheeler argued that the “ultimates” may be
just “bits of information,” responses to queries posed by the
investigator. According to H. P. Stapp, “The actual events of
quantum theory are experienced increments in knowledge.” 68
Russell’s three grades of certainty suggest other reasons for
skepticism. At least, some caution is necessary about the legitimacy even of the formulation of the “logical problem.”
Stoljar invokes the ignorance hypothesis in criticizing
C. D. Broad’s conclusions about irreducibility of chemistry
to physics, a close analog to the Knowledge Argument, he observes. He concludes that Broad was unaware “that chemical facts follow from physical facts,” namely, the quantumtheoretic facts. 69 But putting the matter that way is somewhat
misleading. What happened is that physics radically changed
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE
125
with the quantum-theoretic revolution, and with it the notion
of “physical facts.” A more appropriate formulation, I think, is
to recognize that post-Newton, the concept “physical facts”
means nothing more than what the best current scientifi c
theory postulates, hence should be seen as a rhetorical device
of clarifi cation, adding no substantive content. The issue of
physicalism cannot be so easily dispensed with. Like Marx’s
old mole, it keeps poking its nose out of the ground.
There are also lesser grades of mystery, worth keeping in
mind. One of particular interest to humans is the evolution of
their cognitive capacities. On this topic, evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin has argued forcefully that we can learn
very little, because evidence is inaccessible, at least in any
terms understood by contemporary science. 70 For language,
there are two fundamental questions in this regard: fi rst, the
evolution of the capacity to construct an infi nite range of hierarchically structured expressions interpretable by our cognitive and sensorimotor systems; and second, the evolution of
the atomic elements, roughly word-like, that enter into these
computations. In both cases, the capacities appear to be specifi c to humans, perhaps even specifi c to language, apart from
the natural laws they obey, which may have rather far-reaching
consequences, recent work suggests. I think something can
be said about the fi rst of these questions, the evolution of the
generative mechanisms. One conclusion that looks increasingly plausible is that externalization of language by means of
the sensorimotor system is an ancillary process and also the
locus of much of the variety and complexity of language. The
evolution of atoms of computation, however, seems mired in
mystery, whether we think of them as concepts or lexical items
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 126
of language. In symbolic systems of other animals, symbols
appear to be linked directly to mind-independent events. The
symbols of human language are sharply diff erent. Even in the
simplest cases, there is no word–object relation, where objects
are mind-independent entities. There is no reference relation, in the technical sense familiar from Frege and Peirce to
contemporary externalists. Rather, it appears that we should
adopt something like the approach of the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century cognitive revolution, and the conclusions
of Shaftesbury and Hume that the “peculiar nature belonging to” the linguistic elements used to refer is not something
external and mind-independent. Rather, their peculiar nature
is a complex of perspectives involving Gestalt properties,
cause-and-eff ect, “sympathy of parts” directed to a “common
end,” psychic continuity, and other such mental properties. In
Hume’s phrase, the “identity, which we ascribe” to vegetables,
animal bodies, artifacts, or “the mind of man”—the array of
individuating properties—is only a “fi ctitious one,” established by our “cognoscitive powers,” as they were termed by
his seventeenth-century predecessors. That is no impediment
to interaction, including the special case of communication,
given largely shared cognoscitive powers. Rather, the semantic
properties of words seem similar in this regard to their phonetic properties. No one is so deluded as to believe that there is
a mind-independent object corresponding to the internal syllable [ba], some construction from motion of molecules perhaps, which is selected when I say [ba] and when you hear it.
But interaction proceeds nevertheless, always a more-or-less
rather than a yes-or-no aff air. 71
THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE
127
There is a lot to say about these topics, but I will not pursue
them here, merely commenting that in this case too, there may
be merit to Strawson’s conclusion that “hyperdualist intuitions” should be abandoned along with the “certainty that we
know enough about the physical to know that the experiential
cannot be physical,” and Stoljar’s suggestion that “the radical
view” might transform philosophy of mind and language, if
taken seriously.
Returning fi nally to the core example of Cartesian science,
human language, Gassendi’s advice to seek a “chemical-like”
understanding of its internal nature has been pursued with
some success, but what concerned the Cartesians was something diff erent: the creative use of language, what Humboldt
later called “the infi nite use of fi nite means,” stressing use .
72
There is interesting work on precepts for language use
under particular conditions—notably intent to be informative, as in neo-Gricean pragmatics—but it is not at all clear
how far this extends to the normal use of language, and in any
event, it does not approach the Cartesian questions of creative
use, which remains as much of a mystery now as it did centuries ago, and may turn out to be one of those ultimate secrets
that ever will remain in obscurity, impenetrable to human
intelligence.

NOTES
foreword
1 . For all references, see the chapters from which the quotations are taken.
On the relation between language and thought, Chomsky, though he now
thinks it to be even closer than he once did, does not think it is necessary
to assert something as strong as “identity” between them, as Humboldt
does. Descartes and Darwin, who also fi gure in Chomsky’s discussion of
the relation, did not go that far.
2 . Although Chomsky mentions E-languages by way of contrast with
I- languages, he doubts the coherence of the very idea and therefore
whether they exist. In a number of his essays, he is critical of the most basic assumptions that philosophers make about their coherence, in giving
accounts of them.
3 . In making this point about study at a level of abstraction with a view to
an eventual account in terms of the brain, Chomsky points out how the
approach is no diff erent in the scientifi c study of language than it is, for instance, in insect navigation. In other work, Chomsky cites some progress
that might have been made in the inquiry into biological underpinnings,
but also cites how there may also be some fundamentally wrong assumptions being made by brain scientists about what the object of study is. On
this last point, see his reference to Charles Gallistel’s work in chapter 2.
4 . I owe this example to Carol Rovane. See Carol Rovane and Akeel Bilgrami,
“Mind, Language, and the Limits of Inquiry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky , ed. James McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 181–203.
130FOREWORD
5 . This should be qualifi ed by pointing out that Chomsky, at the end of this
chapter, actually discusses an argument in Peirce that appeals to biological considerations—in particular, evolutionary considerations based on
natural selection (which he fi nds completely fallacious). This would suggest that Peirce was himself somewhat ambivalent about whether or not
to see his overall methodological claim regarding admissible hypotheses
and limits on them as owing to our biology.
6 . And before Newton, motion was considered to be “the hard problem” by
William Petty and others.
7 . Chomsky was the fi rst to stress this side of Smith many decades ago, a side
of him that has been pursued in some detail much more recently in scholarship by Emma Rothschild and commentary by Amartya Sen.
8 . One might add that there are issues on which the state can be justifi ed
because it may protect not just the marginalized and impoverished but
everyone from their folly and doom, issues such as those of the environment, for instance, and more generally protect citizens from the cultural
detritus and psychological desolation (issues of “alienation,” in a word)
that affl ict capitalist societies.
1. what is language?
1 . Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London: Murray, 1871), chap. 3.
2 . Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), xi.
3 . The term is mine. See Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature,
Origin, and Use (New York: Praeger, 1986). But I defi ned it almost vacuously, as any concept of language other than I-language.
4 . A source of misunderstanding may be that in early work, “language” is
sometimes defi ned in introductory expository passages in terms of weak
generation, though the usage was quickly qualifi ed, for reasons explained.
5 . Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916; repr., New
York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 13–14; Leonard Bloomfi eld, “Philosophical Aspects of Language” (1942), in A Leonard Bloomfi eld Anthology ,
ed. Charles F. Hockett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970),
267–70; Bloomfi eld, A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language (In-
1. WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
131
dianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926); Bloomfi eld, “A Set of Postulates for the
Science of Language,” Language 2, no. 3 (1926): 153–64; William Dwight
Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science (London: King, 1875); Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the
Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), 8.
6 . Martin Joos, comments in Readings in Linguistics: The Development of Descriptive Linguistics in America Since 1925 , ed. Martin Joos (Washington,
D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1958).
7 . Zellig Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1951).
8 . A regression, I think, since it confuses the fundamentally diff erent notions competence and performance—roughly, what we know and what we
do—unlike Harris’s system, which does not.
9 . Dan Dediu and Stephen C. Levinson, “On the Antiquity of Language:
The Reinterpretation of Neandertal Linguistic Capacities and Its Consequences,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, no. 397 (2013): 1–17, doi:10.3389/
fpsyg.2013.00397.
10 . Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632),
end of “The First Day.”
11 . For references and discussion, see Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought , 3rd ed., ed., with introduction, James McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009).
12 . Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Infl uence on the Mental Development of the Human Species , trans. Peter Heath (1836; New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 91.
13 . Otto Jespersen, The Philosophy of Grammar (New York: Holt, 1924).
14 . Mariacristina Musso et al., “Broca’s Area and the Language Instinct,” Nature Neuroscience 4 (2003): 774–81, doi:10.1038/nn1077.
15 . Neil Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals , 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 136. See also Neil Smith and Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli, The Mind of a Savant: Language Learning and Modularity (Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1995).
1321. WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
16 . Robert C. Berwick, Paul Pietroski, Beracah Yankama, and Noam Chomsky, “Poverty of the Stimulus Revisited,” Cognitive Science 35, no. 7 (2011):
1207–42, doi:10.1111/j.1551–6709.2011.01189.x.
17 . W. Tecumseh Fitch, “Speech Perception: A Language-Trained Chimpanzee Weighs In,” Current Biology 21, no. 14 (2011): R543–46, doi:10.1016/j
.cub.2011.06.035.
18 . Charles Fernyhough, “The Voices Within: The Power of Talking to Yourself,” New Scientist , June 3, 2013, 32–35.
19 . William Uzgalis, “John Locke,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Fall 2012 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
fall2012/entries/locke/.
20 . Tue Trinh, “A Constraint on Copy Deletion,” Theoretical Linguistics 35,
nos. 2–3 (2009): 183–227. I also put aside here several topics that raise a variety of further questions, among them “covert operations” in which only
the fi rst-merged copy is externalized.
21 . Patricia S. Churchland, foreword to W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object
(1960; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), xiii.
22 . Luigi Rizzi, Issues in Italian Syntax (Dordrecht: Foris, 1982).
2. what can we understand?
1 . Owen Flanagan, The Science of the Mind , 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1991), 313. See also “New Mysterianism,” Wikipedia, http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mysterianism.
2 . Noam Chomsky, “Problems and Mysteries in the Study of Human Language,” in Language in Focus: Foundations, Methods and Systems: Essays
in Memory of Yehoshua Bar-Hillel , ed. Asa Kasher (Boston: Reidel, 1976),
281–358. An extended version is in Chomsky, Refl ections on Language
(New York: Pantheon, 1975), chap. 4.
3 . Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1968), 78–79.
4 . Michael D. Gershon, The Second Brain: The Scientifi c Basis of Gut Instinct
and a Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the
Stomach and Intestine (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).
5 . For more on this topic, and some of the other matters discussed later, see
chapter 4.
2. WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
133
6 . Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Matter (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1927), chap. 37; C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World-Order: Outline of a Theory
of Knowledge (New York: Scribner, 1929).
7 . Galen Strawson, The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 56.
8 . Ibid., part 3.
9 . John Locke, “Mr. Locke’s Reply to the Bishop of Worcester’s [Edward
Stillingfl eet] Answer to his Second Letter,” in The Works of John Locke in
Nine Volume
s , 12th ed. (London: Rivington, 1824), 3:191, http://oll.liberty
fund.org/titles/1724, discussed in Andrew Janiak, Newton as Philosopher
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 121.
10 . Janiak, Newton as Philosopher , 9–10, 39.
11 . On “Locke’s suggestion” and its development through the eighteenth
century, culminating in Priestley’s important work, see John W. Yolton,
Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); and some further elaboration in
chapter 4.
12 . Charles Darwin, Notebook C166, 1838, in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks,
1836–1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries , ed.
Paul H. Barrett et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 291,
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=image&itemID
=CUL-DAR122.-&keywords=brain+the+of+secretion&pageseq=148.
13 . Paul Churchland, “Betty Crocker’s Theory,” review of The Rediscovery of
the Mind , by John R. Searle, London Review of Books , May 12, 1994, 13–14.
Churchland associates Searle’s views with Descartes’s in ways that are
not entirely clear, in part because of a misinterpretation of the mechanical
philosophy and its fate. On Priestley and others, see Yolton, Thinking Matter ; and chapter 4.
14 . Vernon B. Mountcastle, “Brain Science at the Century’s Ebb,” in “The
Brain,” special issue, Dædalus 127, no. 2 (1998): 1.
15 . Charles R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience (Malden,
Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
16 . Thomas Nagel, “The Core of ‘Mind and Cosmos,’ ” New York Times , August 18, 2013; Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian
2. WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND? 134
Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
17 . David Hume, The History of England (1756), 6:chap. 71.
18 . Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal
Identity from Descartes to Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
19 . Donald D. Hoff man, Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (New
York: Norton, 1998), 159.
20 . Richard Lewontin, “The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will
Never Answer,” in An Invitation to Cognitive Science , vol. 4, Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues , ed. Don Scarborough and Saul Sternberg, 2nd
ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 108–32.
21 . Marc Hauser et al., “The Mystery of Language Evolution,” Frontiers in
Psychology 5, no. 401 (2014): 1–12, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00401.
22 . Laura-Ann Petitto, “How the Brain Begets Language,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Chomsky , ed. James McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 86.
23 . Peter Strawson, “On Referring,” Mind 59, no. 235 (1950): 320–44; Julius
Moravcsik, “ Aitia as Generative Factor in Aristotle’s Philosophy,” Dialogue 14, no. 4 (1975): 622–36; Akeel Bilgrami, Belief and Meaning: The Unity
and Locality of Mental Content (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
24 . Aristotle, Metaphysics , book 8:3; De Anima , book 1:1.
25 . Noam Chomsky, “Notes on Denotation and Denoting,” in From Grammar
to Meaning: The Spontaneous Logicality of Language , ed. Ivano Caponigro
and Carlo Cecchetto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),
38–45, and sources cited there.
26 . Cited in Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments (The
Hague: Nijhoff , 1974).
27 . John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), book 2,
chap. 27.
28 . On women, see Linda K. Kerber, “Why Diamonds Really Are a Girl’s Best
Friend: Another American Narrative,” Dædalus 141, no. 1 (2012): 89–100;
and Taylor v. Louisiana , 419 U.S. 522 (1975). On African Americans, see
Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black
Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday,
2008); and Michelle L. Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarcera-
2. WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
135
tion in the Age of Colorblindness , rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2012). On
aliens, see Rasul v. Myers , Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit,
January 2008, April 2009. On corporations, see sources in Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket, 2010), 30–31; and David
Ellerman, “Workplace Democracy and Human Development: The Example of the Postsocialist Transition Debate,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24, no. 4 (2010): 333–53.
29 . Dagfi nn Føllesdal, “Indeterminacy and Mental States,” in Perspectives
on Quine , ed. Robert Barrett and Roger Gibson (Cambridge: Blackwell,
1990), 98–109.
30 . Charles R. Gallistel, “Representations in Animal Cognition: An Introduction,” Cognition 37, nos. 1–2 (1990): 1–22.
31 . Daniel C. Dennett, “Sakes and Dints,” Times Literary Supplement , March 2,
2012.
32 . Noam Chomsky, “Derivation by Phase,” in Ken Hale: A Life in Language ,
ed. Michael J. Kenstowicz (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 1–52.
33 . Thiel, Early Modern Subject .
34 . An inquiry that Colin McGinn has undertaken in several books and papers, among them Basic Structures of Reality: Essays in Meta-Physics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
35 . Susan Carey, The Origin of Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011).
36 . For sources, see chapter 4.
37 . David Hilbert, “Logic and the Knowledge of Nature” (1930), in From Kant
to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics , ed. William
B. Ewald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2:1157–65. I am indebted to Richard Larson for this reference.
38 . David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infi nity: Explanations That Transform the
World (New York: Viking, 2011); David Albert, “Explaining It All: How We
Became the Center of the Universe,” New York Times , August 12, 2011.
39 . Chomsky, Language and Mind .
40 . Juan Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (The examination of men’s wits; 1575–1594). See Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought , 3rd ed., ed., with
introduction, James McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1362. WHAT CAN WE UNDERSTAND?
2009); and Javier Virués Ortega, “Juan Huarte de San Juan in Cartesian
and Modern Psycholinguistics: An Encounter with Noam Chomsky,”
Psicothema 17, no. 3 (2005): 436–40, http://www.psicothema.com/pdf/
3125.pdf.
3. what is the common good?
1 . Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ,
ed. Edwin Cannan (1776; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976),
book 5, chap. 1, part 3, art. 2 (ii, 302–3).
2 . Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; New York: Penguin,
2009); “vile maxim”: Smith, Wealth of Nations , book 3, chap. 4 (i, 437).
3 . Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1938).
4 . Nathan Schneider, “Introduction: Anarcho-Curious? Or, Anarchist
America,” in On Anarchism , by Noam Chomsky (New York: New Press,
2013), xi.
5 . United States Army, School of the Americas, May 1999, cited in Adam
Isacson and Joy Olson, Just the Facts: A Civilian ’ s Guide to U.S. Defense and
Security Assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean (Washington, D.C.:
Latin America Working Group, 1999).
6 . John H. Coatsworth, “The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991,” in
The Cambridge History of the Cold War , vol. 3, Endings , ed. Melvyn P. Leffl er and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 221.
7 . David Ellerman, Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992).
8 . Biorn Maybury-Lewis, The Politics of the Possible: The Brazilian Rural
Workers ’ Trade Union Movement, 1964 – 1985 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).
9 . Martin Gilens, Affl uence and Infl uence: Economic Inequality and Political
Power in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012);
Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New
Gilded Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).
3. WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
137
10 . Elizabeth Rosenthal, “Health Care’s Road to Ruin,” New York Times , December 21, 2013; Gardiner Harris, “In American Health Care, Drug Shortages Are Chronic,” New York Times , October 31, 2004.
11 . Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, April 2009. On polls, see Noam Chomsky,
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York:
Metropolitan Books / Holt, 2006), chap. 6. On constitutional right, see
Robert H. Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 239.
12 . Conor Gearty, Liberty and Security (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2013).
13 . Quotations from Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
14 . For more on Mill’s and related views, see David Ellerman, “Workplace
Democracy and Human Development: The Example of the Postsocialist Transition Debate,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24, no. 4 (2010):
333–53.
15 . Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840–1860: The Reaction of the
American Industrial Society to the Advance of the Industrial Revolution
(1924; repr., Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964).
16 . See, among others, Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short
History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978).
17 . Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002).
18 . Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public , in The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy , ed. Clinton Rossiter and James
Lare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 91–92; Edward
Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Liveright, 1928); Harold Lasswell, “Propaganda,” in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences , ed. Edwin Seligman (New
York: Macmillan, 1937); Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and
Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilaterial Commission (New York: New York University
Press, 1975).
19 . Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the
Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 1787 , http://oll.libertyfund.org/
1383. WHAT IS THE COMMON GOOD?
titles/1904. For further references to Madison and sources, see Noam
Chomsky, “Consent Without Consent: Refl ections on the Theory and
Practice of Democracy,” Cleveland State Law Review 44, no. 4 (1996):
415–37.
20 . John Foster Dulles, telephone call to Allen Dulles, June 19, 1958, “Minutes
of Telephone Conversations of John Foster Dulles and Christian Herter,”
Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum, and Boyhood Home, Abilene,
Kansas.
21 . Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding
of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 245,
citing Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969).
22 . Banning, Sacred Fire of Liberty , 333.
23 . Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the
English Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1975), 60.
24 . Quoted in Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America,
1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 269–70.
4. the mysteries of nature
1 . David Hume, The History of England (1756), 6:chap. 71; John Locke, An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), book 4, chap. 3. Locke’s
reasons, of course, were not Hume’s but relied on the boundaries of “the
simple ideas we receive from sensation and refl ection,” which prevent us
from comprehending the nature of body or mind (spirit).
2 . Renée Baillargeon, “Innate Ideas Revisited: For a Principle of Persistence
in Infants’ Physical Reasoning,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3
(2008): 2–13.
3 . I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 155.
4 . Ernan McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre
Dame University Press, 1978), 52ff . McMullin concludes that because of
Newton’s vacillation in use of the terms “mechanical,” “spirit,” and others, it is “misleading . . . to take Newton to be an exponent of the ‘mechanical philosophy’ ” (73).
4. THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE
139
5 . Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding ; and correspondence
with Edward Stillingfl eet, cited in Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, The Achilles of
Rationalist Arguments (The Hague: Nijhoff , 1974), 73. On the development
of “Locke’s suggestion” through the eighteenth century, culminating in
Joseph Priestley’s work (discussed later), see John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983).
6 . Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, On the Relations Between the Physical and
Moral Aspects of Man , vol. 1 (1802; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1981).
7 . Quoted in V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the
Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: Morrow, 1998),
227.
8 . Isaac Newton, Principia , General Scholium (1713).
9 . E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture: Pythagoras
to Newton , trans. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961; repr.,
Prince ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 479–80.
10 . Ibid., 488; Isaac Newton to Richard Bentley, 1693, in Newton: Philosophical Writings , ed. Andrew Janiak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 102–3.
11 . For more detailed analysis, see McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity ,
chap. 3.
12 . Thomas Nagel, “Searle: Why We Are Not Computers,” in Other Minds:
Critical Essays, 1969–1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),
106.
13 . For varying perspectives on the “explanatory gap,” see Galen Strawson
et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? , ed. Anthony Freeman (Charlottesville, Va.: Imprint Academic,
2006).
14 . Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the
Development of Western Thought (New York: Random House, 1957), 259;
Heinrich Hertz, quoted in McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity , 124.
15 . Dijksterhuis, Mechanization of the World Picture , 489.
16 . Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 139–40, 213.
4. THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 140
17 . Bertrand Russell, Analysis of Matter (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927;
repr., New York: Dover, 1954), 18–19, 162.
18 . Paul Dirac, Principles of Quantum Mechanics (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1930), 10. I am indebted to John Frampton for this reference.
19 . Peter Machamer, “Introduction” and “Galileo’s Machines, His Mathematics, and His Experiments,” in The Cambridge Companion to Galileo ,
ed. Peter Machamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
17, 69.
20 . Cited in Pietro Redondi, “From Galileo to Augustine,” in ibid., 175–210.
21 . Daniel Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination: The Epistemic Origin of the
Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Recall
that Newton hoped that there might be a scientifi c (that is, mechanical)
solution to the problems of matter and motion.
22 . On these topics, see Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in
the History of Rationalist Thought , 3rd ed., ed., with introduction, James
McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968),
chap. 1. Note that the concerns go far beyond indeterminacy of free action,
as is particularly evident in the experimental programs by Géraud de Cordemoy and others on “other minds” (see Cartesian Linguistics ).
23 . René Descartes to Queen Christina of Sweden, 1647, in Principia Philosophiæ , vol. 8 of Oeuvres de Descartes , ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery
(Paris: Cerf, 1905). For discussion, see Tad Schmaltz , Malebranche’s Theory of the Soul: A Cartesian Interpretation (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 204ff .
24 . Noam Chomsky, “Turing on the ‘Imitation Game,’ ” in The Turing Test:
Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence , ed. Stuart Schieber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 317–21.
25 . Desmond Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2003), 12. See also Rene Descartes to Marin Mersenne, 1641, on the goal of
the Meditations , cited in Margaret Wilson, Descartes (Boston: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1978), 2.
26 . Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of Mind , 258.
27 . Nancy Kanwisher and Paul Downing, “Separating the Wheat from the
Chaff ,” Science , October 2, 1998, 57–58; Newton, General Scholium.
4. THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE
141
28 . Eric R. Kandel and Larry R. Squire, “Neuroscience,” Science , November 10, 2000, 1113–20.
29 . Charles R. Gallistel, “Neurons and Memory,” in Conversations in the Cognitive Neurosciences , ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1997), 71–89; Gallistel, “Symbolic Processes in the Insect Brain,”
in An Invitation to Cognitive Science , vol. 4, Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues , ed. Don Scarborough and Saul Sternberg, 2nd ed. (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 1–51.
30 . Semir Zeki, “Art and the Brain,” Daedalus 127, no. 2 (1998): 71–104.
31 . Nagel, “Searle,” 106. For some cautionary notes on “sharp logical separation between the nervous system and the rest of the organism,” see
Charles Rockland, “The Nematode as a Model Complex System” (working paper [LIDS-WP-1865], Laboratory for Information and Decisions
Systems, MIT, April 14, 1989), 30.
32 . John Henry, “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory,” History of Science 24
(1986): 335–81; Alan Kors, “The Atheism of D’Holbach and Naigeon,” in
Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment , ed. Michael Hunger
and David Wootton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 273–300; Locke,
Essay Concerning Human Understanding ; Yolton, Thinking Matter , 199.
For Voltaire and Kant, see McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity , 113,
122–23 (from Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science [1786]);
Michael Friedman, “Kant and Newton: Why Gravity Is Essential to Matter,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science , ed. Phillip Bricker
and R. I. G. Hughes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 185–202; and
Howard Stein, “On Locke, ‘the Great Huygenius, and the Incomparable
Mr. Newton,’ ” in ibid., 17–48. Friedman argues that there is no contradiction between Newton and Kant because they do not mean the same
thing by “essential,” Kant having discarded Newton’s metaphysics and
making an epistemological point within his “Copernican revolution in
metaphysics.”
33 . Friedrich Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung
in der Gegenwart (1865), 3rd expanded ed. translated as The History of
Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner, 1925).
4. THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 142
34 . Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infi nite Universe (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958), 210.
35 . George V. Coyne, “The Scientifi c Venture and Materialism: False Premises,” in Space or Spaces as Paradigms of Mental Categories (Milan: Fondazione Carlo Erba, 2000), 7–19.
36 . Russell, Analysis of Matter , chap. 37. Russell did not work out how percepts
in their cognitive aspect were assimilated into the “causal skeleton of the
world,” leaving him open to a counterargument by mathematician Max
Newman (Russell to Newman, April 24, 1928, in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell , vol. 2, 1914–1944 [Boston: Little Brown, 1967]).
37 . Democritus, quoted in Erwin Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 89. I am indebted to Jean Bricmont for this reference.
38 . Daniel Stoljar and Yujin Nagasawa, “Introduction,” in There’s Something
About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s
Knowledge Argument , ed. Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa, and Daniel Stoljar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 1–36.
39 . On Hume, see John Mikhail, “Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy: A Study of the
‘Generative Grammar’ Model of Moral Theory Described by John Rawls
in A Theory of Justice ” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2000); Mikhail,
Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive
Science of Moral and Legal Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011); and Mikhail, “Universal Moral Grammar: Theory, Evidence,
and the Future,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 4 (2007): 143–52. On
the irrelevance (and as it is formulated, even incoherence) of the doctrine
of “accessibility to consciousness,” see Noam Chomsky, Refl ections on
Language (New York: Pantheon, 1975); Chomsky, Rules and Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); and Chomsky, New
Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000). On the rules of visual perception, inaccessible
to consciousness in the interesting cases, see Donald D. Hoff man, Visual
Intelligence: How We Create What We See (New York: Norton, 1998).
40 . Frank Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know” and “Postscript,” in There’s
Something About Mary , ed. Ludlow, Nagasawa, and Stoljar, xv–xix, 410–42.
4. THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE
143
41 . Charles S. Peirce, “The Logic of Abduction,” in Essays in the Philosophy of
Science , ed. V. Tomas (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957). For discussion
of Peirce’s proposals, and fallacies invoking natural selection that led him
to the ungrounded (and implausible) belief that our “guessing instinct”
leads us to true theories, see Chomsky, Language and Mind , 90ff .
42 . Quoted in Wilson, Descartes , 95.
43 . David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1772), vol. 2.1.
On dubious modern eff orts to formulate what had been a reasonably clear
project before the separation of philosophy from science, see Chomsky,
New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind , 79–80, 144–45, and generally chaps. 5 and 6 (reprinted from Mind 104 [1995]: 1–61).
44 . On Joseph Black, see Robert E. Schofi eld, Mechanism and Materialism:
British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 226; William Brock, The Norton History of
Chemistry (New York: Norton, 1993), 271; and Arnold Thackray, Atoms
and Powers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 37–38,
276–77.
45 . Brock, Norton History of Chemistry . For sources and further discussion,
see Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind ; Noam
Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origins, and Use (New
York: Praeger, 1986), 251–52; and David Lindley, Boltzmann’s Atom: The
Great Debate That Launched a Revolution in Physics (New York: Free Press,
2001). Some argue that even if quantum-theoretic unifi cation succeeds,
“in some sense the program of reduction of chemistry to [the new] physics fails,” in part because of “practical issues of intractability” (Maureen
Christie and John Christie, “ ‘Laws’ and ‘Theories’ in Chemistry Do Not
Obey the Rules,” in Of Minds and Molecules: New Philosophical Perspectives
on Chemistry , ed. Nalin Bhushan and Stuart Rosenfi eld [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000], 34–50).
46 . Russell, Analysis of Matter , 388.
47 . See note 39. Sometimes misunderstanding and distortion reach the level
of the surreal. For some startling examples, see Noam Chomsky, “Symposium on Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, Oxford, 2006,” Artifi cial Intelligence 171 (2007): 1094–1103. On “the
4. THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 144
rigidity rule and [Shimon] Ullman’s theorem,” see Hoff man, Visual Intelligence , 159. Needless to say, the rule is inaccessible to consciousness.
48 . Vernon B. Mountcastle, “Brain Science at the Century’s Ebb,” in “The
Brain,” special issue, Dædalus 127, no. 2 (1998): 1. For sources, see Chomsky, New Horizonsin the Study of Language and Mind , chap. 5.
49 . Joseph Priestley, “Materialism,” from Disquisitions Relating to Matter and
Spirit (1777), in Priestley’s Writings on Philosophy, Science, and Politics , ed.
John Passmore (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1965).
50 . Similar ideas appear pre-Newton, particularly in the Objections to the
Meditations , where critics ask how Descartes can know, “without divine
revelation . . . that God has not implanted in certain bodies a power or
property enabling them to doubt, think, etc.” (Catherine Wilson, “Commentary on Galen Strawson,” in Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its
Place in Na ture , 178).
51 . Priestley, “Materialism.” For later discussion, see Yolton, Thinking Matter , 113. Julien Off rey de La Mettrie had drawn similar conclusions a generation earlier but in a diff erent framework, and without addressing the
Cartesian arguments to which he was attempting to respond. The same is
true of Gilbert Ryle and other modern attempts. For some discussion, see
Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics .
52 . For discussion and illustrations, see Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study
of Language and Mind . For “hyperdualism,” see Galen Strawson, “Realistic
Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” in Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature , 3–31.
53 . Thackray, Atoms and Powers , 190. Priestley’s reasons for welcoming “this
extreme development of the Newtonian position” were primarily theological, Thackray concludes.
54 . Yolton, Thinking Matter , 114.
55 . Ibid., 125. For discussion, see chaps. 5 and 6. Yolton writes that “there was
no British La Mettrie,” but that exaggerates La Mettrie’s contribution, I
believe. See note 51.
56 . Nagel, “O’Shaughnessy: The Will,” in Other Minds , 94.
57 . Strawson, “Realistic Monism” and “Panpsychism? Reply to Commentators with a Celebration of Descartes,” in Strawson et al., Consciousness
4. THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE
145
and Its Place in Nature , 3–31, 184–280. Printers errors corrected (Strawson,
pers. comm.). For further discussion, see the essays in this volume.
58 . Strawson, “Realistic Monism,” “Panpsychism,” and commentary.
59 . Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1965), 199–200; for much more extensive discussion, see Chomsky,
Cartesian Linguistics . On the accuracy of interpretations of the empiricist
theory of ideas by Reid and others, see John Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984), chap. 5.
60 . Stephen Yablo, “The Real Distinction Between Mind and Body,” Canadian
Journal of Philosophy , suppl. 16 (1990): 149–201.
61 . Quotations from Strawson, “Realistic Monism” and “Panpsychism.”
62 . Quotations in this paragraph from Daniel Stoljar, “Physicalism,” in The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2001 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta,
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2001/entries/physicalism/.
63 . Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination , 56, 58.
64 . Ibid., 17ff , 56–57, 104. Stoljar understands the “traditional problem” to be
derived from the Meditations (45), hence not a problem of the sciences.
But though a conventional reading, it is questionable, for reasons already
discussed.
65 . Ibid., chap. 4.
66 . Daniel Stoljar, “Comments on Galen Strawson,” in Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature , 170–76.
67 . Strawson, “Realistic Monism,” 11n.21.
68 . John A. Wheeler, At Home in the Universe (New York: American Institute
of Physics, 1994); H. P. Stapp, “Commentary on Strawson’s Target Article,” in Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature , 163–69.
69 . Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination , 139.
70 . Richard C. Lewontin, “The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will
Never Answer,” in Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues , ed. Scarborough and Sternberg, 107–32.
71 . Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics , 94ff . On Cartesian and neo-Platonist
conceptions of the role of “cognoscitive powers,” see James McGilvray,
“Introduction to the Third Edition,” in Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics ,
4. THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE
146
1–52. For review and sources on referring, see Chomsky, New Horizons in
the Study of Language and Mind ; on Shaftesbury, Hume, and forerunners,
see Mijuskovic, Achilles of Rationalist Arguments .
72 . On misunderstandings about this matter, see Noam Chomsky, “A Note
on the Creative Aspect of Language Use,” Philosophical Review 41, no. 3
(1982): 423–34.
INDEX
abduction, Peirce on, xv, 27–28, 55–56
acquisition of language: and innate
cognoscitive powers, 47; MMM
Thesis of, 47–48; as mystery-forhumans, 52. See also origin of
language
action at a distance, apparent
absurdity of: ignoring of, by postNewtonian physicists, xvii, 34,
98–99, 108; Locke on, 33; Newton
on, xvi, 33–34, 83, 85, 86, 87–88, 98;
parallel of, with consciousness
arising from matter, 86–87; Russell on, 90
aesthetic theory, relation of scope
and limits in, 56–57
Aff ordable Care Act, complexity of,
as symptom of broken U.S. health
system, 68–69
African Americans, exclusion of
from U.S. personhood, 46
aitiational semantics, 43
Albert, David, 55
Albert, Michael, 72
Alperovitz, Gar, 72
American tradition, roots of anarchism in, 72–73
Analysis of Matter (Russell), 90,
99–100
anarchism: anarcho-syndicalism as
goal of, 62; balance of socialist
and libertarian elements in, xxiii;
federations of self-governing
communities under, 66–67,
72; and freedom from domination, 66–67; and freedom from
economic exploitation, 64; and
freedom from guardianship,
64–65, 80; as heir to principles
of classical liberalism, 62, 63, 71;
and human development, xxi;
on necessity of state power to
defend oppressed, 67; political
goals of, 62, 64, 70; principles
of, xxi; roots of, in American
tradition, 72–73; as term, 63; and
unjustified coercion, dismantling of, xxiii, 63–64, 66; workers’
INDEX
148
anarchism (continued)
ownership of means of production in, 71–72
anarcho-syndicalism: Rocker on, 62;
of Spanish Civil War, xxi, 63
animal signals: causative link of, to
external objects, xviii–xix, 41–42,
126; vs. human language, xviii–xix,
41–43, 48; as unlikely evolutionary source of human language,
xviii–xix, 48
apes: global nature of association in,
42–43; and language as computational procedure, x–xi, 13
Aristotle: on democracy, 79; on form,
50; on nature of language, xi,
xviii, 4, 6, 14; on words as minddependent concepts, 44, 45
atomic elements of computation:
complex nature of, 126; lack of
causative link of, to external
objects, xix, 42, 126; lack of referential properties in, xviii, 43–46,
126; necessity of accounting for,
in model of language origin, 41;
origin of, as mystery, 125–26; parallels of, with phonetic elements,
43; as prior to words or lexical
items, xviii, 41; questionable value
of literature on, 41; as unique to
humans, 59, 125
Bakunin, Mikhail, xxi, 64, 68
Basic Property of Language, viii, 4;
and computational procedure,
ix, 4; and early defi nitions of
language, 5–7; formulation of, 3–4;
issues exposed by clear formulation of, 9–12; Merge as optimal
computational procedure for, 24;
origin of, requirements for credible account of, 40; and principle
of simplicity, 16–17; reformulation
of, 13
Bernays, Edward, 76
Bilgrami, Akeel, 43
biolinguistic framework, 5; and
mid-twentieth-century turn to
generative grammar, 9
biological basis of I-language, ix, xiv,
5, 59; importance of investigating
vs. computed objects, 8–9; provisional abstraction from, ix, 129n3.
See also UG (universal grammar)
biological basis of mind. See mind:
as biological system; mind: as
emergent property of brain
Black, Joseph, 106, 109
Bloomfi eld, Leonard, 5
Boasian tradition, 5–6
Bohr, Niels, 109
Bolsheviks, and red bureaucracy,
xxi, 68
Boltzmann, Ludwig, 108–9
Boyle, Robert, 51, 97
Brazilian rural workers move –
ment, 67
British common law, personhood
under, 46
Broad, C. D., 124
INDEX
149
Brock, William, 108
Brown, Roger, 42
capitalism: and change from price to
wage, 73; Dewey on, 70–71; hindering of human development by, xxi;
history of U.S. activism against
ravages of, 72–75; necessity of
state as protector of oppressed
in, xxiii, 67; wrecking of classical
liberalism by, 62
Carter administration, and U.S.
plutocracy, 76
Cartesian dualism, 82–83; as common sense, 82–83; and creative
character of language, 6–7,
93–94, 127; delay in supplanting
of, by Newtonian physics, 88;
end of, Priestley on, 113–14; and
explanatory gap in explaining
mental phenomenon, 94; and
language as defi ning feature of
humans, 93–94; modern forms of,
30; Newton’s adherence to, xvi,
33–34, 83, 85, 86, 98–99; Newton’s
destruction of, xvi–xvii, 30, 33–34,
35, 52, 85, 111–12, 113–14. See also
mechanical philosophy; mindbody problem
Catholicism: and Christian anarchism, 64; and liberation theology,
65–66
Catholic Workers Movement, 64
causative link to external objects: in
animal signals, xviii–xix, 41–42,
126; lack of, in human language,
xix, 7, 42–43
chemistry, unifi cation of with physics: and abandonment of erroneous conception of physical laws,
36, 109, 124–25, 143n45; and ignorance hypothesis, 124; parallels of,
with research in science of mind,
36, 109–11, 114, 120; pragmatic
pursuit of, 106–9
Christian anarchism, 64
Churchland, Patricia, 21
Churchland, Paul, 35, 133n13
civil personality, of women and
servants, 46
civil rights activism, and libertarian
socialism, 63
Clarke, Desmond, 93–94
coercion, unjustifi ed, dismantling
of: as anarchist principle, xxiii, 61,
63–64, 66; Dewey on, 70–71
cognition: lack of accessible evidence on evolution of, xix, 39–40,
125; lack of evolution in, 40; scope
of, as product of cognitive limits,
56–57, 59, 105. See also limits on
human cognition
cognitive revolution, 126
cognitive science, tentative nature of
progress in, vii
Cohen, I. Bernard, 83
Cole, G. D. H., 72
common good: as concept universally supported and everywhere
violated, xxii, 60; defi nition of, 60;
INDEX 150
common good (continued)
Enlightenment conceptions of,
xx–xxi; and human development
as highest good, xxi; Smith on human impulse toward, 62
common sense: as basis of philosophical inquiry, 122; and Cartesian dualism, 82–83; as genetically
determined, 82; mechanical
philosophy’s basis in, xvi, 53, 82,
91, 94; and mind as emergent
property of brain, 117; Newton’s
disruption of, 84, 86, 90–91, 94,
108; and Peirce’s abduction, 28,
53; understandings of experience
from, as inadequate, 103–4. See
also intelligibility
communication: as cover term for
social interaction, 16; vs. facility
of semantic interpretation, in
optimally designed language,
18–19, 22–23; investigation of, as
surrogate for language, 40; and
Minimal Computation principle,
19, 24; as secondary to language/
thought, xi, xviii, 14–15, 16, 24, 125;
and shared meaning as moreor-less aff air, 15–16, 126. See also
sensorimotor interface
computational cognitive scientifi c
approaches to UG, 12
computational procedure: and Basic
Property of Language, ix, 4; as
basis of conceptual-intentional
interface, x; importance of investigating, vs. computed objects, 4,
8–9; mechanisms of, as mystery,
95–96; Merge as central operation
in, xii; order as unimportant in, x,
xii; reliance of, on structural rather
than linear distance, ix–x, 10–12,
13, 17; and scientifi c principle of
simplicity, xii–xiii, 16–20; as unique
human ability, xii. See also atomic
elements of computation; Merge;
Minimal Computation principle
conceptual-intentional interface
(mental processes): atomic elements of computation in, xviii, 41;
and Basic Property of Language,
viii, 4, 13; computational procedure as basis of, x; diffi culties
of studying, 44; and language of
thought, 13–16; reliance of, on
structural rather than linear distance, ix–x, 10–12, 13, 17; sensorimotor interface as secondary to,
xi, xviii, 14–15, 16, 24, 125
connection principle, Searle on, 38
consciousness: doctrines about
accessibility of, as pointless, 110;
early investigations of, 37; as
hard problem, limits on human
cognition and, xvi–xvii, 95–97;
identity of, 45–46; and knowledge
intuition, 101–2; and new mysterianism, 27, 32. See also entries
under mind
identification of , with thought ,
37–38; and conscious thought as
INDEX
151
fragment of subconscious activity, xvii, 14, 38–39, 59; and science
of mind, 39
consciousness arising from matter,
as issue. See mind: as emergent
property of brain
Constitution, U.S.: Fifth Amendment, 46; Fourteenth Amendment, 46; suppression of democracy in, 76–77, 78
cooperative movements, and libertarian socialism, 63
Copy, as nonexistent operation, 17–18
copy theory of movement, and Internal Merge, 24
Cordemoy, Géraud de, 7
corporate interests: control of state
by, xxiii, 71; as guardians of public
interest, 80; hindering of human
development by, xxi
corpuscular theories of identity, 51
Coyne, George, 99
craftsmen, and ravages of capitalism,
72–73, 74–75
creative use of language: and Cartesian argument for mind-body dualism, 6–7, 93–94, 127; as mystery, 127
creativity: limited understanding of,
57; and limits, 56–57, 59
Crick, Frances, 35
Cudworth, Ralph, 37
Dalton, John, 107
Darwin, Charles: on nature of language, viii, xi–xii, 4, 42; on origin
of language, 2–3; on thought as
physical process, 35, 85
Day, Dorothy, 64
Decade of the Brain, 35–36, 111
decision making, Libet experiments
on, 38
democracy: Aristotle on, 79; Dewey
on, 70–71, 75; and English Civil
War, 79; mainstream progressive views on, 75–76, 80; pure vs.
representative forms of, 79–80
in united states : eff orts to
circumvent, xxii, 76–78; founding
fathers’ fear of, 76–78; as neodemocracy, 70; as plutocracy, 68,
69, 76–77
Dennett, Daniel, 49, 50
Descartes, René: on authenticity of experience despite limits
of human cognition, 53–54,
92–93; and collapse of mechanical
philosophy, 85, 94; on consciousness, 37; and explanatory gap
for mental phenomenon, 94; on
free will, 53–54, 92–93; Gassendi
on, 106; on human reason, 93; on
language as defi ning feature of human beings, 93–94; and limits of
mechanical philosophy, 93–94; on
limits on human cognition, 53–54,
92–93; and material philosophy,
82; on nature of language, viii; on
origin of language as mystery-forhumans, 92. See also Cartesian
dualism
INDEX 152
Deutsch, David, 55
Dewey, John, xxi–xxii, xxiii, 70–71,
72, 75
digestive system, and gut brain,
29–30
Dijksterhuis, E. J., 85–86
Dirac, Paul, 90
displacement: as consequence of optimal simplicity of computation,
xiii, 17–20; and Merge operation,
xii, 17–20; as perceived imperfection, xiii, 18
division of labor, moral obligation to
remedy ill eff ects of, xxi, 61–62
domination, freedom from, as principle of anarchism, 66–67
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 66
Downing, Paul, 95
Dulles, John Foster, 77
ecclesiastical guardianship, freedom
from, as principle of anarchism,
64–65
economic exploitation, freedom
from, as principle of anarchism, 64
Eddington, Arthur, 100, 113–14, 120,
121, 124
education, Dewey on, 71
Einstein, Albert, 109
E-language: defi nition of, ix;
existence of, as issue, 129n2; inapplicability of scientifi c study to, ix;
as weakly generated infi nite set,
4, 130n4
Ellerman, David, 66
Empty Category Principle, 23
English Civil War, and concept of
democracy, 79
Enlightenment: conceptions of
common good in, xx–xxi, 61–62;
on limits of human cognition,
53–55, 59
ethical considerations, as limit on
scientifi c inquiry, 39
evolution of abductive instinct,
Peirce on, 56–57
evolution of cognition: lack of, 40;
lack of evidence on, xix, 39–40, 125
evolution of language. See origin of
language
exceptions to generalizations, value
of, 21–22, 23
experience: commonsense approach, as inadequate, 103–4; and
imagination, Hume on, 31, 45, 51;
and individual Umwelts , 104; and
limits to cognition, 104; necessity
of caution in framing terms of,
124; post-Newtonian theoretical
account of, 89; and “scienceforming faculty” as subject of
inquiry, 104; Stoljar on, 122–24;
supervenience on nonexperiential truth, as issue, 123–24
authenticity of : Descartes on,
53–54, 92–93; Russell on, 100–103
experts, rule by, xxii, 80
explanatory gap: between chemistry and physics, and pragmatic
approach to chemistry, 107–8;
INDEX
153
between Newtonian and mechanical physics, ignoring of by postNewtonian physicists, xvii, 34, 108
in explaining mental phenomen a : and Descartes, 94; as expected stage of process, 87, 89
externalized/social language,
as rarely used, 14. See also
E-language; sensorimotor
interface
factory girls, and ravages of capitalism, xxii, 72, 74–75
feminism, and libertarian socialism, 63
Feyerabend, Paul, 103
fi eld linguists, and UG, 21
fi ller-gap problems, 19
fi rst cognitive revolution (seventeenth century), 47
Flanagan, Owen, 27
Føllesdal, Dagfi nn, 47–48
founding fathers, fear of democracy
among, 76–78
Fourier, Joseph, 54
Freedom (periodical), 67
free will: Descartes on, 53–54,
92–93; and pragmatic approach
to inquiry, xx; and unconscious
foundations of thought, 38
Frege, Gottlob, 126
Friedman, Michael, 141n32
Galileo: and collapse of mechanical
philosophy, 85, 91; and ignorance
hypothesis, 91, 92; on limits of
cognition, 52–53, 104–5; and mechanical philosophy as common
sense, 91; on nature of language,
viii, 6; and origin of modern
science, 9–10; on simplicity of
nature, 24–25; and Umwelt -driven
perception, 103
Gassendi, Pierre, 89, 106, 127
Gearty, Conor, 70
generation: E-language as weaklygenerated infi nite set, 4, 130n4;
strong vs. weak, 4
generative grammar: mid-twentiethcentury turn to, 9; puzzling phenomena exposed by, 9–12; theory
of language as, ix, 4
Gleitman, Lila, 47
Gödel, Kurt, 55
government, and unjustifi ed coercion,
dismantling of, xxiii, 63–64, 66
gravity, discovery of, and destruction
of mechanistic philosophy, xvi–
xvii, 33–34, 52, 85, 111–12, 113–14.
See also action at a distance, apparent absurdity of
Greenberg, Joseph, 21
guardianship of the people, anarchism as freedom from, 64–65, 80
Guerin, Daniel, 64
gut brain, as biological system, 29–30
Hahnel, Robin, 72
hard problems: abandonment of,
in scientifi c inquiry, 98–99;
INDEX 154
hard problems (continued)
consciousness as, and limits on
human cognition, xvi–xvii, 95–97;
motion as, for early modern science, 32, 96–99
Harris, Zellig, 6
health care, universal: public support
for, xxii, 69; U.S. unwillingness to
adopt, xxii, 68–69
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 95
Hilbert, David, xix, 54–55
Hilbert Circle, 54
Hoff man, Donald, 38
Hornstein, Norbert, 50
Huarte, Juan, 56–57
human development: anarchism as
best means toward, xxi, 62–63;
Dewey on, xxi–xxii, 70–71; dismantling unnecessary constraints on,
as anarchist principle, 61, 63–64,
66; grassroots movements focused
on, xxii; as highest good, xxi, 60–61
human nature, Smith on, 62
human rights: as concept universally supported and everywhere
violated, 60; and libertarian
socialism, 63
humans, as social beings, 60
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, viii, xx, 7,
37, 60–61, 70–71, 127
Hume, David: on cause and eff ect, 84;
and collapse of mechanical philosophy, 85, 86–87, 89; on identity as
fi ctitious, 45; on limits on human
cognition, xix, 28, 31–32, 37, 52, 57,
87, 92; on link between signs and
objects, 126; on material basis of
thought, 84; on moral judgments,
101; on nature of language, xviii,
20; on Newton, 37, 81, 86–87; on
science of human nature, 106; and
subjectivist revolution, 51–52
Huntington, Samuel, 76
Huygens, Christiaan, 53, 86, 97
identity, as construction of imagination, 51–52
ignorance hypothesis, 91–92, 123–24,
127
I-language: as biological property
of humans, ix, xiv, 5, 59, 129n3;
as construct diff ering between
individuals, 50; defi nition of, ix,
4; importance of investigating
biological basis of, vs. computed
objects, 8–9; as inaccessible to
consciousness, 59; language as,
4; as object of scientifi c study, ix;
provisional abstraction of, from
biology, ix, 129n3; reliance of,
on structural rather than linear
distance, ix–x, 10–12, 13, 17; as
thoroughly internal, xviii. See
also computational procedure;
Minimal Computation principle;
UG (universal grammar)
imagination, identity as construct
of, 51–52
individual, internal, intentional
language. See I-language
INDEX
155
individuality, and thingness as issue,
51–52
innate cognoscitive powers, and
language acquisition, 47
insects, computational capacity
of, 96
intelligibility: necessity of suspending concerns about, in scientifi c
inquiry, 109, 116, 117; of Newtonian action at a distance, suspension of concerns about, xvii, 34,
98–99, 108; and radical emergence, as issue, 115, 116. See also
pragmatic approach to inquiry
Invitation to Cognitive Science, An ,
39–40
islands, 22–23
Jackson, Frank, 101, 102
Jacobi, Carl Gustav Jacob, 54–55
Janiak, Andrew, 34, 52
Jeff erson, Thomas, 79–80
Jespersen, Otto, 8, 9
Johnson, Samuel, 31
Joos, Martin, 5–6
justice, as concept universally
supported and everywhere
violated, 60
Kandel, Eric, 95
Kant, Immanuel, xx, 46, 97, 141n32
Kanwisher, Nancy, 95
Katz, Jerrold, xi
Kekulé, August, 108
Kerry, John, 69
knowledge argument: and ignorance
hypothesis, 124; vs. knowledge
intuition, 101–2
knowledge intuition, vs. knowledge
argument, 101–2
Korsch, Karl, 63
Koyré, Alexandre, 99
Kripke, Saul, 50
Kropotkin, Peter, 67
Kuhn, Thomas, 87–88
La Mettrie, Julien Off rey de, 144n51
Lange, Friedrich, 98–99
language: vs. animal signs, xviii–
xix, 41–43, 48, 126; behaviorist
accounts of, xii; as biological endowment, xi, xiv, 15, 20; common
usage, theory of mind and, 117–19;
communication as secondary to
thought in, xi, xviii, 14–15, 16, 24,
125; facility of semantic interpretation vs. communication,
18–19, 22–23; as I-language, 4; as
instrument of thought, 13–16, 23;
as internal to individual subject,
ix; lack of referential semantics
in, 48; as mystery, 8, 92; pragmatic
approach to study of, 109–11;
pragmatics in, 48; syntax in, 48;
and thought, relation between,
129n1; as unique to humans, xii,
59, 125; variety in, accounting for,
40–41, 125. See also acquisition
of language; atomic elements of
computation; communication;
INDEX
156
language (continued)
computational procedure; nature
of language; origin of language
language of thought (LOT): as biological inheritance, 59; Humboldt
on, 37; origin of, 13
Lasswell, Harold, 76
Latin America: liberation theology
in, xxii, 64, 65–66; U.S. fear of
Communist infl uence in, 77
Lavoisier, Antoine, 108
Leibniz, Gottfried, 33, 53, 86
Leninist vanguardism, xxii
Lewis, C. I., 31
Lewontin, Richard: on origin of
language, as mystery, xix, 39–40,
125; on “storytelling” about origin
of language, xix, 40
liberalism, classical: anarchism as
heir to principles of, 62, 63, 71;
wrecking of, by capitalism, 62
liberation theology, in Latin
America: and principals of anarchism, xxii, 64; U.S. suppression
of, 65–66
libertarianism: American vs. traditional forms of, 66; and freedom of
the people from guardianship, 80;
left and right, unifi cation of, 66
libertarian socialism: anarchism
as form of, 62, 63; range of
systems included under, 63;
U.S. experiments in, 63. See also
anarcho-syndicalism
Libet experiments, 38
limits on human cognition, xiii–xv;
acceptance of, by philosophers, 31–33; and acceptance
of mysteries-for-humans in
scientifi c inquiry, 32–34; cognitive
scope as product of, 56–57, 59, 105;
as defi ned in terms of biological
endowments, xv, 28, 56; denial of,
by philosophers, 54–56; Descartes
on, 53–54, 92–93; determination
of, as goal, 56; and Enlightenment,
53–55; Galileo on, 52–53, 104–5;
Hume on, xix, 28, 31–32, 37, 52, 57,
87, 92; and ignorance hypothesis,
91–92, 123–24, 127; and infi nite vs.
limitless sets, 55; Locke on, xix,
32–33, 34, 52, 92; and mind/brain
as biological system, xiv–xv, xix,
27–30; necessity of accepting,
xv–xvi; and new mysterianism, 27;
and Newton, xvi–xvii, xx, 33–34,
52, 53, 92, 104–5; Peirce on, xix, 28,
53, 105; and permanent vs. current
mysteries-for-humans, 39; and
philosophy of mind, xvi–xvii; and
problems vs. mysteries, xv, 27–29,
53; reasons for, xix; Russell on,
xix, 31, 32, 53, 104–5; and scientifi c
inquiry, limits on, 104–5; as truism, xix, 27–31, 39, 104–5. See also
mysteries
linear order, as peripheral part of
language, x, 12–13, 17
INDEX
157
linear vs. structural distance, in
language computation, ix–x,
10–12, 13, 17
Lippmann, Walter, xxii, 76
Locke, John: and collapse of
mechanical philosophy, 85; on
gravitation, as unintelligible, 97;
on limits on human cognition,
xix, 32–33, 34, 52, 92; on mechanical philosophy as commonsense view, 82; on mechanical
philosophy as unviable, 81, 86,
138n1; on personhood, 45–46;
and Priestley, 111, 113, 120; and
subjectivist revolution, 51; on
thinking matter, possibility of
(“Locke’s suggestion”), 34–35,
83–84, 113, 114; on thought as
physical process, 35
London, as concept, 50
Machamer, Peter, 91
Madison, James: on elite leaders,
characteristics of, 78–79; and
suppression of U.S. democracy,
xxii, 76–78
Magna Carta, and person as concept,
46
markets, and American libertarianism, 66
Marsais, César Chesneau de, 118
Marx, Karl, xx, 71–72, 80, 125
Marxism, anti-Bolshevik, 63, 72
Masque of Anarchy (Shelley), 73
materialist world view, and scientifi c
revolution, 82
Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy (Newton), 88
matter: as issue not easily dispensed with, 125; Priestley on
post-Newtonian dissolution of,
111–12; properties of, and radical
emergence, 115, 116. See also
Cartesian dualism; mechanical
philosophy
consciousness arising from . See
mind: as emergent property of
brain
definition of : and Descartes, 94;
lack of, 84, 102–3; and mindbody problem, 103, 120–23, 127;
redefi nition of, after Newton, xvi,
30, 81, 94, 97, 98–99, 105, 111–13,
125; redefi nition of, in quantum
physics, 107–9, 124–25
thinking : Locke on, 34–35, 83–84,
113, 114; Priestley on, 111–13
unknowability of intrinsic
character of : Locke on, 32, 81,
97; Priestley on, 123; Russell on,
100
Mattick, Paul, 63
McMullin, Ernan, 83, 86, 138n4
meaning: necessity of determining
nature of, 41; as psychological, xi
means of production, workers’ ownership of: Mill on, 72; as principle
of anarchism, xxi, 71–72, 80
INDEX
158
mechanical philosophy: basis of, in
commonsense understanding,
xvi, 53, 82, 91, 94; as genetically
determined, 82; and model
machines as test of validity, 82,
91; Newton’s adherence to, 83;
and world as machine, 82. See also
Cartesian dualism
collapse of : Locke on, 81; and
Newton’s gravity thesis, xvi, 30,
81, 94, 97, 98–99, 105, 111–13, 125;
and Priestley, 111–12; as radical
shift, 91; and science, restructuring of inquiry in, 87; scientifi c
community’s delay in accepting,
88; and struggle to account for
motion without contact, 83–86;
and survival of ghost without machine, xvii, 99. See also Cartesian
dualism
Meditations (Descartes), 93
Melman, Seymour, 72
mental phenomena. See conceptualintentional interface; thought;
entries under mind
Merge: binary, External and Internal
as only forms of, 18; defi nition of,
xii; emergence of, as evolutionary
leap, xiii, 25; as genetically determined part of UG, 20; as optimal
computational procedure for
Basic Property, 24; and Principle
of Minimum Computation, 16–17
e xternal , xii, 17; simplicity of, vs.
Internal merge, 18
i nternal , xii, 17–18; and copy
theory of movement, 24; and
displacement, 17–20; and islands,
22–23; simplicity of, vs. External
merge, 18; and structure for semantic interpretation, 18–19,
22–23
Mersenne, Marin, 89
metamathematics, referentialist
terminology in, 44
methodological dualism, in study of
mind vs. body, 30–31, 110
Methods (Harris), 6
micropsychism, and Strawson,
120–21
Mill, John Stuart, xx, 60–61, 72
mind: as biological system, xiv–xv,
27–30, 36–37, 56, 84–85, 115; as
brain viewed as certain level of
abstraction, 5, 36, 96; I-language
as property of, 5; innate properties of, and language acquisition,
47; operations of, vs. its products,
theory of mind and, 118, 119;
tendency to treat diff erently
from physical aspects, 30–31;
understanding of, limitations of
contemporary science and, 37. See
also limits on human cognition
as emergent property of brain :
Eddington on, 121; explanatory
gap, as expected, 87; and intelligibility, irrelevance of, 115–16;
Locke on, 34–35, 83–84, 113, 114;
and matter-spirit dualism, end
INDEX
159
of, 113–14; new biology on, 36,
110–11; parallel with apparent
absurdity of action at a distance,
86–87; Priestley on, 35, 113–17,
120, 121, 123; Russell on, 120, 121;
Stoljar on, 121–24; Strawson on,
120–21
pragmatic approach to study of ,
86, 87, 89, 109–11; and hope
of eventual unity with neuroscience, 36, 105–6, 109–11, 127;
parallels of, with early Newtonian investigations, 86–87,
89; and possibility of incorrect
reduction base, 89; Priestley on,
117
mind-body problem: epistemological argument for, 6–7, 93–94, 127;
evaporation of, after Newton,
104; and ignorance hypothesis,
91–92, 123–24, 127; and limits on
human cognition, xvi–xvii; Russell
on, 100–103. See also Cartesian
dualism
reconstitution of , 111–12; and
“physical,” redefi nition of, 103,
120–21; and Priestley, 114–15;
reinterpretation of, as bodyself dualism, 119–20; Stoljar on,
121–24; Strawson on, 120–21. See
also mind: as emergent property
of brain
Minimal Computation principle:
as basic principle of language, 11;
and communication, 19, 24;
displacement as consequence of,
xiii, 17–20; and islands, 22–23; and
Merge operation, 16–17; minimal
distance principle as subset
of, 11; neuroscientifi c evidence
for, 11–12; as part of UG, 20; and
passivization, 22; and strong
minimalist thesis, 24–25; as subset
of general property of organic
world, 11
minimal distance principle: in
mental computation, ix–x, 10–12,
13, 17; as subset of Minimal Computation principle, 11
minimalist program, 24–25
mitigated skepticism, as method,
89, 105, 109. See also pragmatic
approach to inquiry
MMM Thesis, 47–48
model-theoretic semantics, lack of
in natural language, 48
Moore, G. E., 31
Moral Sentiments (Smith), 62
Moravcsik, Julius, 43
motion, as hard problem of early
modern science, 32, 96–99. See
also action at a distance, apparent
absurdity of
Mountcastle, Vernon, 35–36, 111
mysterianism: acceptance of, by
philosophers, 31–33, 37, 52–53,
54; and acceptance of mysteriesfor-humans in scientifi c inquiry,
xx, 32–34, 53–54, 88–90, 104;
defi nition of, 27; denial of, by
INDEX 160
mysterianism (continued)
philosophers, 54–56; and human
mind as biological system, 56; and
permanent vs. current mysteriesfor-humans, 39; as truism, xix,
27–31, 39, 104–5
mysteries: acceptance of, in realist
metaphysics, xix–xx; as defi ned
in terms of specifi c biological
endowments, xv, 28, 56; denial of,
by contemporary philosophy, xix;
Enlightenment on, 53–54; Hilbert
on, xix; origin of language as, xix;
and pragmatic approach to inquiry, xx, 32–34, 53–54, 88–90; vs.
problems, xv, 27–29, 53; and scope
of cognitive capacities, 56–57,
59, 105. See also limits on human
cognition; mysterianism
Nagasawa, Yujin, 101
Nagel, Thomas, 36–37, 115, 116
Native Americans, exclusion of from
U.S. personhood, 46
natural sciences, as chance convergence of human cognitive capacity and natural world, 105
nature of language: Aristotle on, xi,
xviii, 4, 6, 14; Bloomfi eld on, 5;
Boasian tradition on, 5–6; Darwin
on, viii, xi–xii, 4, 42; Descartes on,
viii; Galileo on, viii, 6; Humboldt
on, viii, 7; Hume on, xviii, 20; importance of determining, vii–viii,
2–3, 25; Sapir on, 5; Saussure on,
5; as unresolved issue, 2; Whitney
on, 5
neodemocracy: and freedom
in Hobbesian sense, 70; and
necessity of state intervention,
xxiii
neuroscience: as infant science, 36,
95–96, 110; questionable foundational assumptions of, 36; and
research on language, x, 11; and
research on mind and language,
pragmatic approach to, 36, 105–6,
109–11
new biology, on mind as emergent
property of brain, 36, 110–11
new mysterianism. See mysterianism
Newton, Isaac: eff orts of, to unify
chemistry and physics, 107;
and evaporation of mind-body
problem, 104; Hume on, 37, 81,
86–87; Kant on, 97, 141n32; Kuhn
on, 87–88; and limits on human
cognition, xvi–xvii, xx, 33–34, 52,
53, 92, 104–5; and motion without
contact, struggle to conceptualize, xvi, 33–34, 83, 85, 86, 87–88,
98; and physical, redefi nition of,
125; and pragmatic approach to
science, xx, 53, 88–89, 99, 107; on
will, 95
and c artesian dualism : destruction of, xvi–xvii, 30, 33–34, 35,
52, 85, 111–12, 113–14; general
adherence to, xvi, 33–34, 83, 85, 86,
87–88, 98–99
INDEX
161
Newtonian physics, delay of in supplanting Cartesian physics, 88
New York Times , 68, 69
NIM project, 42–43
nonexperiential truths: existence
of, as issue, 124; supervenience
of experiential truth on, as issue,
123–24
No-Radical Emergence Thesis
(Strawson), 115–16, 121
noun phrases, and object status,
49, 118
null subject languages, 23
Obama, Barack, and Aff ordable Care
Act, 69
Objections (Gassendi), 106
Objections to the Meditations (Descartes), 144n50
objects: mind-independent, troubled
status of concept, 48–52; noun
phrases and object status, 49, 118.
See also referential properties
On Liberty (Mill), 60–61
Opticks (Newton), 83, 107
origin of language: animal signals as
unlikely source of, xviii–xix, 48;
and appearance of Merge, xiii; vs.
communication, 40; Darwin on,
2–3; focus on communication,
as misguided, 14–15, 40; gradual
evolution model, unlikelihood
of, xviii–xix, 48; Jespersen on, 8;
lack of detectable evidence on,
40; Lewontin on, xix, 39–40, 52; as
mystery-for-humans, xix, 39–40,
52, 59; origin of atomic elements,
as issue, 125–26; origin of infi nite
range of interpretable hierarchical expressions, as issue, 125; and
phenotype, necessity of defi ning,
xix, 6, 40, 41, 59; requirements for
credible account of, 40–41; and
SMT hypothesis, 25; as sudden, recent leap, xiii, 3, 25, 40; Tattersall
on, 3, 25
other minds, as issue, and creative
use of language, 93
Pannekoek, Anton, 63
panpsychism: Priestley’s rejection
of, 116, 117; and Strawson, 115–16,
120–21
parliamentary tradition: as
instrument of class rule, 68; in
seventeenth-century England, xxii
passivization, and communication
vs. semantic interpretation, 22
Pauling, Linus, 109
Peirce, Charles Sanders: on abduction, xv, 27–28, 55–56; on limits on
human cognition, xix, 28, 53, 105;
and mysteries as roadblocks to
inquiry, xx; on sign-object reference, 126
people, as guardians of public interest, 79–80
percepts as physical events, Russell
on, 100–101, 102
Perrin, Jean Baptise, 23
INDEX 162
person, as complex concept, 45–46
Peterloo massacre, 73
Petitto, Laura-Ann, 42–43
Petty, Sir William, 96–97
philosophy, contemporary: denial of
mysteries by, xix; Stoljar on central problem of, 122–23; Strawson
on hyperdualist intuitions of,
124, 127
philosophy, naturalization of in
Hume, 106
philosophy of mind: and limits on
human cognition, xvi–xvii; and
mind-body problem, reengagement with, 111–12; questionable
foundational assumptions of, 36;
Stoljar on epistemological terms
of, 122–23
phonetics, limited success of, 44
physicalism, Jackson on limitations
of, 102
physics: and human perception,
necessity of continuity between,
100, 102; Newtonian, delay of in
supplanting Cartesian physics, 88;
Russell on limits of, 100–103. See
also chemistry, unifi cation of with
physics
Plutarch, and Ship of Theseus
paradox, 50
Poincaré, Henri, 108
Politics (Aristotle), 79
Popkin, Richard, 89–90
positivists, on collapse of mechanical philosophy, 88
pragmatic approach to inquiry,
53–54; eventual adoption of, as
scientifi c routine, 90; and fundamental unintelligibility of world,
90–91; in language, and hope of
eventual unity with, 127; and mysterianism, xx, 32–34, 53–54, 88–90,
104; and Newton, xx, 53, 88–89,
99; and Priestley, 114; Russell on,
90; in study of mind and language,
36, 109–11; tradition of, before
Newton, 89–90
in chemistry : and abandonment
of erroneous conception of physical laws, 109; and eventual unity
with physics, 36, 106–9, 124–25,
143n45
for mental phenomen a , 86, 87,
89, 109–11; and hope of eventual
unity with neuroscience, 36,
105–6, 109–11, 127; parallels of,
with early Newtonian investigations, 86–87, 89; and possibility
of incorrect reduction base, 89;
Priestley on, 117
pragmatics, neo-Gricean, 127
Priestley, Joseph: and collapse of mechanical philosophy, 111–12; and
humans as one substance, 114; on
limits on human cognition, xvi–
xvii, xix; on Locke, 111, 113, 120;
and matter-spirit dualism, end of,
113–14; on mind, as conscious assembly of unconscious parts, 117;
on mind, as emergent property of
INDEX
163
brain, 35, 111–17, 120, 121, 123; and
mind-body problem, reconstitution of, 114–15; on operations of
mind vs. its products, 118, 119; and
pragmatic method, 114; on self,
as concept, 117; on study of mind,
117–19; on thought as physical
process, 35, 114–15
Principia (Newton), 83
private property, protection of:
Aristotle on, 79; as goal of U.S.
system, 76–78
problems, vs. mysteries, xv, 27–29;
eff ort to sharpen boundary between, 53
progressives, mainstream, on democracy, 75–76, 80
property. See private property,
protection of
quantum physics: and abandonment
of erroneous conceptions, unity
of chemistry and physics through,
36, 106–9, 124–25, 143n45; and
fundamental unintelligibility of
world, 90; and nonexperiential
truths, 124
Quine, W. V. O., xvii, 21, 38, 42,
47–49, 102
radical emergence, 115
Reagan, Ronald W., 46, 65
realist metaphysics, and acceptance
of mysteries, xix–xx
red bureaucracy, xxi, 68
referentialist doctrine, 42, 44–45, 50
referential properties: as contextual,
xviii, 43–44; lack of, in atomic
elements of computation, xviii,
43–46, 126; lack of, in natural
language, 48
Regulae ad directionem ingenii (Descartes), 92
Reid, Thomas, 118
Remerge, as nonexistent operation,
17–18
rigidity rule, Hoff man on, 38
Rizzi, Luigi, 23
Rocker, Rudolph, xxi, 62–63, 64,
66, 70
Rose, Jonathan, 75
rule-following, Quine on, 38
Russell, Bertrand: on certainty, three
grades of, 100, 124; on chemical laws vs. physical laws, 36; on
fundamental unintelligibility
of world, 90, 100; on limits on
human cognition, xix, 31, 32, 53,
104–5; on matter, unknowability
of intrinsic character of, 100;
on matter-spirit dualism, end
of, 113–14; on mind as emergent
property of brain, 120, 121, 123;
neutral monism of, 99–100; on
percepts as physical events,
100–101, 102, 142n36; on physics,
limits of, 100–103; on physics
and human perception, necessity
of continuity between, 100–
102; and pragmatic approach to
INDEX
164
Russell, Bertrand (continued)
inquiry, 90; on unifi cation of
physics and chemistry, 109
Ryle, Gilbert, 99, 118; slogan of, xvii
Sapir, Edward, 5
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 5
Schneider, Nathan, 64
School of the Americas, 65
science: and individual Umwelts ,
104; referentialist terminology
in, 44–45
science-forming faculty, limits to, as
subject of inquiry, 104
science of mind: limiting of, to phenomenon available to consciousness, 39; parallels of, with early
chemistry research, 36, 109–11,
114, 120
scientifi c inquiry: and acceptance of
mysteries-for-humans, xvi–xvii,
32–34; contemporary, limitations
of, 37; and hard problems, abandonment of, 98–99; and intelligibility, relegation to issue of human
cognitive capacity, 87; and limits
on human cognition, 95, 104–5; and
permanent vs. current mysteriesfor-humans, 39; progress in, and
ignoring of explanatory gaps,
107–9; and reduction of complex
visibles to simple invisibles, 23;
restructuring of inquiry after
collapse of mechanical philosophy,
87; and willingness to be puzzled,
12. See also mysteries; pragmatic
approach to inquiry
scientifi c revolution: on limits of
human cognition, 53–55, 59; and
materialist world view, 82; and
world as machine, 82
Searle, John, xvii, 35, 38, 102
self: independent existence of, as
issue, 119–20; Priestley on, 117
self-interest, hindering of human
development by, xxi
semantic interpretation, vs. communication in optimally designed
language, 18–19, 22–23
semantics: lack of, in natural
language, 48; relegation of, to
pragmatics, xviii
sensorimotor interface (externalization): and Basic Property of
Language, viii, 4; as basis of linearity in language, x, 12; as biologically prior to language, x, 12–13; as
origin of variety and complexity
of language, 125; as secondary to
conceptual-intentional interface,
xi, xviii, 14–15, 16, 24, 125. See also
communication
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of, 126
Shalom, Steven, 72
Shays’s Rebellion, 77
Shelley, Percy B., 73
Ship of Theseus paradox, 50
INDEX
165
sign language, structural similarity
of to spoken language, x, 13, 14
simplicity principle of scientifi c
method, and computational
procedure, xii–xiii, 16–17
slavery, and personhood, 46
Smith, Adam, xx–xxi, xxiii, 61–62, 71
Smith, Neil, 11–12
SMT. See strong minimalist thesis
socialism, as term, 62–63
soul, nature of, and identity as construct of imagination, 52
sound, link of language to: in early
views on nature of language, 5–6;
persistence of view, 6. See also
sensorimotor interface
Spanish Civil War, anarchosyndicalism of, xxi, 63
Squire, Larry, 95
standards, universally applied, as
concept universally supported
and everywhere violated, 60
Stapp, H. P., 124
state: control of, by corporate
interests, xxiii; as iron cage,
xxiii, 67; oppressive, anarchist
opposition to, 67–68; as protector
of oppressed against ravages of
capitalism, xxiii, 67
Stoljar, Daniel, 91, 101, 113–14, 121–24,
127
Strawson, Galen, 31–32, 113–16,
120–21, 124, 127
Strawson, Peter, 43
strong generation, defi nition of, 4
strong minimalist thesis (SMT),
24–25
subjectivist revolution, 51
Tattersall, Ian, 3, 7–8, 25, 40
Thackray, Arnold, 107, 113
theoretical linguistics, tentative
nature of progress in, vii
theory of language, as necessarily a
generative grammar, ix, 4
theory of mind, 105–6; pragmatic
approach to, 105–6, 117
Thiel, Udo, 37, 46, 51
thing, as term, identity conditions
for, 49–50
thinking matter: Locke on possibility
of, 34–35, 83–84, 113, 114; Priestley
on, 111–13
thought: language as instrument
of, 13–16, 23; link of language to,
7–8, 129n1; as most frequent use
of language, 14. See also computational procedure; conceptualintentional interface
conscious : danger of restricting
investigation to, xvii; as fragment
of inner language use, xvii, 14,
38–39, 59
identification of, with consciousness , 37–38; and conscious
thought as fragment of subconscious activity, xvii, 14, 38–39, 59;
and science of mind, 39
INDEX 166
thought (continued)
as physical process : early theorists on, 34–35; modern rediscovery of, 35–36; Priestley on, 35,
114–15; and radical emergence, as
issue, 115. See also mind: as emergent property of brain
Treatise of Human Nature, A (Hume),
31–32, 84
Trilateral Commission, 76
truisms: limits on human cognition
as, xix, 27–31, 39, 104–5; moral,
as universally supported and
everywhere violated, 60, 64;
necessity of dismantling unjustifi ed coercion as, 64; in study of
language, 2
Truman, Harry S., 76
Tsimpli, Ianthi-Maria, 11–12
Turing, Alan, 93
Turing test, 7
UG (universal grammar): as biological endowment, xiv, 11–12, 21, 28;
computational cognitive scientifi c approaches to, 12; and exceptions to generalizations, value of,
21–22, 23; and fi eld linguists, 21;
importance of investigating, vs.
computed objects, 8–9; Merge as
genetically determined part of,
20; necessity of existence of, 21;
reliance of, on structural rather
than linear distance, 10–12, 13, 17.
See also Minimal Computation
principle
Umwelt , individual diff erences in,
103
United States: disenfranchisement of majority in, 68; eff orts
to circumvent democracy in,
xxii, 76–78; libertarian socialist experiments in, 63, 72; as
neodemocracy, 70; personhood of
women and minorities in, 46–47;
as plutocracy, 68, 69, 76–77; and
universal health care, rejection of,
xxii, 68–69
Vatican II, 65
Vaucanson, Jacques de, 82
vervet monkey, signal calls of, 41–42
vision: and problem of will, 95; as
subconscious, rule-bound activity, xvii, 38
Voltaire, 97
Vygotsky, Lev, 14
wage slavery, and capitalism, 73,
74–75
Ware, Norman, xxii, 72–73, 74–75
war on drugs, as criminalization of
black life, 46
weak generation: defi nition of, 4;
E-language as weakly generated
infi nite set, 4, 130n4
Wheeler, John, 124
Whitney, William Dwight, 5
INDEX
167
will, as ongoing philosophical problem, 94–95
women, exclusion of from U.S.
personhood, 46, 47
Word and Object (Quine), 21, 42
Words and Things (Brown), 42
words or lexical items, atomic elements of computation as prior to,
xviii, 41
workers, subordination of: and
American libertarianism, 66;
history of U.S. activism against,
72–75
Yablo, Stephen, 119
Yolton, John, 113, 114
Zeki, Semir, 96