Notes on Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man

Sections I, II (The Philosophical Quest; The Manifest Image):

1. The business of philosophydevelop the metaphor here: As I pointed out last time, there is a
sense in which we all come to philosophy with a perfectly good (perfectly serviceable grasp
of how we tal! about the world (and about ourselves, and even of how it all hangs together.
"e !now how to use words li!e #truth,$ without any deep philosophical reflection at all. At
this point, though, we are li!e %ellars& caterpillarand our first e'posure to philosophy is
li!ely to do to us (ust what thin!ing about how to move his legs does to the caterpillar (we&re
all familiar, I hope, with that sense of being swept up in a terrible tangle, of suddenly (ust not
!nowing what to say anymore, when a nasty philosophical pu))le ta!es hold.(1*+
,. "hen we spea! of two pictures of humans in the world, it&s a little easier if we don&t go
reflective right from the start. %o let&s tal! about the world first: The scientific image of the
world is still in the process of forming, but it has already, in many applications, far surpassed
(in practical terms, detailed predictive power, and coherent and economical conceptual
structure what the #manifest$ image can do. -ut the relation between them is pu))ling from
the start (this problem goes bac! to the early moderns, who were in on the ground floor of this
development, and saw immediately that the world as modern science describes iteven bac!
thenis very different from the familiar world of colours, te'tures, tastes, smells, etc.
.rimary and %econdary /ualities: develop this out of the #categori)ation stuff$ and then
e'pand on it as a perennial e'ample of the tension and philosophical scuffling around the
relations between the manifest image and the scientific. (%ee 0 on ob(ects 1 their properties
and relations
+. 2f course things get more difficult once we turn to thin!ing about ourselves and our place in
the imagedualism arises out of this, as we recogni)e that in many respects we are (ust
physical things li!e all the rest (falling at an acceleration of 0.3 m4s
,
near the earth&s surface,
etc., but in others we seem to be /uite different: capable of awareness, deliberation and
purposive action as opposed to mere #behaviour5$ sub(ect to social norms, and responsible for
our actions, with a concept of ourselves (and of others. 6ow better to ma!e sense of this
contrast between characteristics all of which we seem to have, than to suppose that we are
really two very different thingsone a #merely$ physical thing (that (ust behaves in accord
with its #nature$ and the other something different (something more: a mind or soul that
doubts, wonders, deliberates, and chooses.(11, 17
7. Images and ob(ectivity (17 1 f. A mere image can be ob(ective so long as there are social
norms that govern how it is described, i.e. so long as it is shared. -ut we cannot mista!e this
sharing for the mere factual possession of similar #images$ in various individual minds. The
sense in which it&s shared (or minimally, could be shared must include an acceptance of each
other&s accounts of the image as evidence, a commitment to a social norm according to which
we should agree about its features.
8. Ideali)ations (8. The manifest image is an ideali)ation in the sense that, while we may have
a reasonably good grasp of it, there remain substantial disagreements about it, and when we
spea! of a uni/ue, fully fleshed*out manifest image, we imagine a philosophical account of
ourselves in the world that is settled in an ideal way (so that, for instance, there would be in
such a correct account of the image a decision, one way or the other, about sub(ect dualism.
9. %elf*encounter (9: -ecause the manifest image is where we first encounter ourselves, it is
part of what we are in a fundamental way, since our self*awareness ma!es us what we are.
This odd, refle'ive status appears also in the case of conceptual thin!ing, where the status of
concepts is dependent on their relations to a conceptual system. 2utside the norms that lin!
concepts together into a system, there is nothing recogni)ably conceptual (:ant: concepts as
rules guiding the activity of thin!ing. ;emerov on the beginning of language#"e got
together one day and tal!ed it over amongst ourselves.$
<. =ause and =haracter: "e use the word #reason$ ambiguously. 2n one hand, reasons are part
of the picture of choice, of deliberate action: when I act for reasons, in this sense, the fully
fledged notion of a person (and not some truncated remnant of it is at wor!. -ut we also say,
the height of the flagpole (given the elevation of the sun is the reason why the shadow is '
meters long. 6ere there is no /uestion of choice, and truncation is definitely being applied.
There is no #choice$ (save in e'travagant metaphor here, on the shadow&s part.
3. (9*< The main point here is that the manifest image is fundamentally distinguished from the
scientific not by whether it&s sophisticated or even scientific in the sense of being a product of
deliberate investigation, but by whether or not postulated entities are invo!ed by the image.
(3*0 6ere %ellars identifies the manifest image as the sub(ect4focus4pole of a certain !ind of
philosophical investigationone that dedicates itself to e'plicating the manifest image, and
ta!es that image for reality itself. This is what %ellars calls the #perennial philosophy$.
%ellars& tal! of a stereoscopic view implies that this approach to philosophy gets things wrong
but it also points up a serious problem for such a view, since %ellars also says we are
essentially the being #which conceives of itself in terms of the image which the perennial
philosophy refines and endorses.$ The aim %ellars adopts here is of somehow fusing the two
images, without allowing either to dominate.
0. .ersons as the primary category: the idea seems to be that a person is the richest sort of
ob(ect in the manifest image&s classification of thingsa person is sub(ect to all the basic
properties and relations that apply to things in the manifest image. The original image is a
!ind of origin myth, but with a serious point. "e can get, by truncation and similarly
conservative maneuvers, all the categories of the manifest image out of the category of
person.
1>. (11 f %ellars spends a fair bit of time here without really e'plaining what he&s up to with this
stuff. ;atures, characters, habits? what&s this all about@ I thin! he&s developing some
fundamental points about the relations between actions that are e'pressions of character and
actions that, while predictable, have nothing to do with character, between habits and
deliberate actions, and the lin!s between these ideas and our ideas of causation and nature.
"hat&s in character here is what can be predicted (and only predicted in a certain way,
namely by evidence of what this person #has done in the past$ (1, 2ne&s nature is more
inclusive, since it covers all that&s predictable, whether that prediction depends on information
about that person&s past actions or not.
11. 2ne upshot here (aside from the truncation theory of the origin of other categories in the
manifest image is a caution about causationcauses involve #interventions$ of a !ind, that
lead someone or something to do what they otherwise would not have done. In the
metaphorical application of causes to non*persons4truncated persons, we preserve this by
regarding a change in path following a collision as #caused,$ while continuing in the same
path (though predictable is not something that needs a cause.
Sections III, IV (lassical Philosophy and the Manifest Image; the Scientific Image):
1,. Aetaining the conceptual as a part of the manifest imagecrude associationism (thin!, among
the early moderns, of the empiricists in psychology tries to cut the Bordian !not here. The
impact of nature on the individual can&t account for the development of conceptual thought in
the individual (though this was a standard view.lato, Aristotle. 6egel recogni)es the
essential role of the group here5 we need real norms here, and these cannot be in principle
restricted to a single individual.
1+. The manifest image hits a limit here: it can recogni)e, but it cannot account for, the role of
the world and the group together in producing, within an individual, the capacity for
conceptual thought. 6ere we need to draw on the scientific image, and evolution (of a social
species in order to get a handle on how this wor!s. (;ote how %ellars is pointing to the
scientific image here to resolve the pu))le that he earlier said was the last stand of special
creationism.
17. %o we have, in the manifest image, a dual notion of causation (13: The simple (mere causal
impact of the world on the nature of the individual, and the social4normative impact that
produces, in a developing human individual, the capacity for conceptual thought (and which is
essential in turn for #causation$ in a very different senseacting in character, and more
generally acting deliberately, doing things for reasons.
18. This duality of causation is reflected in the ambiguous use we ma!e of this !ind of tal! today.
"e use #reasons$ to refer both to causes, in the #predictable from something&s nature$ sense,
and to refer to reasons proper, the !ind that play a role in deliberation and acting in character.
It is fairly common, when being careful about the differences between these, to reserve the
words #cause$ for the first and #reason$ for the second. -ut their common origin in the
original image (and their subse/uent differentiation in the course of the #truncation$ of
specifically person*lin!ed features of many ob(ects should be !ept in mind here.
19. "hat remains of this picture of ourselves once it&s properly integrated into the scientific
image@ Cor %ellars, this can&t be separated from as!ing, what remains of ourselves@
1<. %ellars ma!es a more refined stab at characteri)ing the two images (p 10: a the correlational
and categorical refinement of the original image5 b the image derived from the fruits of
postulational theory construction.
13. 6e also articulates a view of how the many different scientific images are relatedthe
physical to the biochemical to the physiological to the behavioural? %ellars distinguishes
between an ontological reduction (that the entities of biochemistry (ust are comple' groups of
physical entities, for e'ample, a full reduction of one science to the other (re*ma!ing
biochemistry into physics (he re(ects this reduction as impossible, since each connects its
theoretical vocabulary to the world in independent and very distinct ways and conte'ts, and
the reduction of the laws4principles of one to the laws4principles of the other (here the !ey
/uestion is, is there a simple way to get the laws and principles of biochemistry out of the
laws4principles of physics. This may be the case sometimes, but it needn&t follow from a
successful ontological reduction, and in fact it&s pretty unusualcombinatorics ensures things
tend to get pretty complicated, and the range of conte'ts4conditions where the principles of
biochemistry apply is restricted (compared to the range where the principles of physics
apply.
10. -ehaviouristics is a special case. %ellars distinguishes common*sense behaviourism, which
simply treats behaviour as the evidence for psychological claims (here of course we also
include what people say about their psychological statesthe reasons we have for doing so
will come up later in the course, from a more fundamental behaviourism, which attempts to
replace ordinary psychological language with constructs defined in behavioural terms.
,>. In the case of animals, we have both e'perience and evolutionary thin!ing to than! for
considerable guidance on what sorts of stimuli and circumstances should play an important
role in our search for correlations between conditions and the behaviour of these organisms.
,1. The conditions in which earthworm behaviouristics will wor! successfully, i.e. really give
some predictive power for what earthworms do, must resemble (in ways that will need
e'ploration the conditions under which earthworms normally e'ist and behave.
(-iochemistry will do a lot to predict what happens to earthworms at high temperatures, for
e'ample, but earthworm behaviouristics will notD 2ther sciences come in, when we try to
define these limits.
,,. Iffy properties are related to counterfactuals (If I were to put this piece of meat on the floor,
my dog would eat it, and to postulations (the reason for this fact is that, as a dog with a good
appetite, she will reliably eat whatever I offer her in normal circumstances, and this in turn is
because the neuro*physiology of dogs has been tuned by evolution to ?. -ut the
postulations we ma!e about humans (and, but in a much looser and sloppier way, about
higher animals as well are guided by a very special class of postulationspostulations about
the presence, in the brains of the organisms, of states which are analogous to overt verbal
behaviour, and which in fact are often and naturally expressed by such behaviour. (,7
,+. -ut these postulations are not neatly tied into neurophysiologythey are an inheritance from
a much earlier stage of human thought. %o their role in our thin!ing about the scientific and
manifest images is a bit diceyon the one hand, they are postulations (so they should belong
to the scientific imagebut they don&t fit so easily with the ontological reductions we&ve
already considered vis a vis other sciences but on the other, they are very much a part of the
manifest image, as it has appeared in philosophical discussion.
,7. -ehavioural correlations of the !ind behaviouistics studies depend on circumstances, and
where we get outside such circumstances, other sciences must be brought in to account for
what&s going on. This points towards a telescoping of behaviouristics within
neurophysiology within physiology, biochemistry and physics in turn, despite the challenges
this poses. %o in the end, the scientific image of man turns out (ontologically to be as a
comple' system of physical ob(ects.
Section V (the clash of the images):
,8. Three views of the relation between the images: (,9
a. Identity theory: items in the manifest image are to be identified with suitably corresponding
items in the scientific image.
b. Eanifest privilege: The scientific image is a conceptual4intellectual convenience, helping us
to refine and e'tend the manifest image5 the manifest is real, and the scientific is a #tool$ for
helping us to represent it.
c. %cientific realism: Eanifest ob(ects are #appearances$ to human minds of a reality that is (in
the end best4correctly described in the terms provided by the scientific image.
,9. Cor a system to have properties none of its parts do, these properties must be facts about the
properties and relations of their parts. (A ladder is not made of ladders, but being a ladder is
(ust for its parts (rungs, etc. to have the properties and relations that they do. FGFAH
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,<. A pin! ice cube fails this test: It is pin! through and through. Its pin!ness does not appear, in
the manifest image, as a property that it has by virtue of the properties and relations of
uncoloured parts. There is no room in the scientific image for properties li!e #pin!ness$ even
when we allow properties of systems of ob(ects built up in this way.
,3. This gives us an argument for c (%ellars& + above. The manifest ice cube must be a mere
appearance, since its pin!ness is not a property of4relation between, the constituents of the
scientific ice cube.
,0. A little two step: Eoore&s common sense ob(ection to this view: It&s obvious from
observation that ice cubes are coloured through and through, so you surely can&t seriously
propose that we should re(ect this obvious fact. %ellars& response is to distinguish a challenge
within a framewor! (in the manifest image framewor! there is no /uestion about this from a
challenge to a framewor! (which is what the scientific realist is aiming at.
+>. The practical usefulness of the manifest image also fails as a defense of its truth (but it
imposes a constraint on a satisfactory scientific image: it must account for the usefulness of
the manifest image by correlating its image with the manifest image in certain ways.
+1. %imilarly, defenses against pu))les li!e Meno&s parado'es that appeal to the retail level
usefulness of concepts li!e space and time are unsuccessful. Aetail usefulness is compatible
with whole sale falsehood. 2rdinary use need not fail (ust because a parado' or contradiction
lur!s somewhere in the system.
+,. %ellars argues that there&s a problem with moving sensible properties li!e colour out of
ob(ects (in the scientific image and then going on to eliminate them from humans as well,
when we thin! of them as comple' systems of uncoloured physical ob(ectsas he puts it, it
seems incoherent, after this, that ob(ects could even appear to be coloured.
++. =onceptual thin!ing (despite J&s position on this is not really a problem%ellars thin!s
suitable neurophysiological states could be (in fact, are suitably similar to these states of
mind, so that we can (ust replace conceptual states (modeled analogically on overt language
use with these neurophysiological states.
+7. -ut the difficulties with perceptual states (the e'perience of colours, smells, etc., their
introspectability (which cannot (ust be a matter of how conceptual thoughts appear to us, since
instropective awarenesses themselves are thoughts, and the introspectability of conceptual
states, suggest that IC we can&t figure out how perceptual states can be satisfactorily #imaged$
in the scientific image, we shouldn&t settle for this picture of conceptual thin!ing either. This
would push us bac! in the direction of option b (%ellars& , above (predominance of the
manifest4 no real stereoscopic image.
Sections VI, VII (the p!imacy of the scientific image and putting man into the SI):
1. 6aving posed an argument that suggests we must retreat to the manifest image, and declare the
scientific image a !ind of tool or instrument used to e'tend our grasp of the manifest image, not a
truly independent, competing framewor!, %ellars comes bac! to reconsider the relation between
our grasp of our thoughts and our grasp of sensation. -oth, as he sees it, are cases of non*
inferential !nowledge. That is, we don&t have to infer claims about these things from other
sentences (evidence we accept in order to !now them. -ut they are very different, nevertheless.
,. %ellars proposes that thoughts are modeled, by analogy, on the sentences we use to report them.
The idea is that thoughts are related both to each other and to occasions and circumstances in the
world in ways that parallel the relations between corresponding sentences and the same occasions
in the world. This means that our understanding of thoughts does not re/uire them to have any
particular properties (or !inds of properties at all, so long as they participate in the right relations
between occasions and each other to properly parallel the relations that apply to sentences. 6ere
the metaphor of computer programs (which can run on very different systems by very different
physical operations and still be the same and a parallel with chess (which can be played on very
different boards with very different pieces so long as certain structures relating the #boards$, the
#pieces$ and the #moves$ are preserved come in.
+. %ensations are similar to thoughts in the sense that the characteristics we describe them in terms of
(being a sensation of white, or of something triangular, or of the smell of a rose are grounded in
an analogy. -ut the analogy in the case of sensations is between the properties we attribute to the
sensations and the properties (the sensible properties we attribute to ob(ects in the manifest
image. -y contrast, the analogy we use to ground the ways in which we describe thoughts (a
thought that it is cold outside, or the thought of a big lottery win is between the relations between
different thoughts (and circumstances in the world and the relations between different and
corresponding linguistic items (and circumstances in the world. The items related (and the
particular properties they have are not specified at all5 anything that participates in the right sort
of structure of relations will do. -ut in the case of sensations, the idea is that the properties these
things have are (somehow li!e the sensible properties of things in the manifest image.
7. -ut for properties to be ali!e is for them to share characteristics, i.e. to share second order
properties. All we mean by that hefty phrase is properties of properties: for e'ample, red is a
property that shares with other colours the property of being a sensible characteristic of visible
ob(ects in the manifest image. Aed also shares with other colours the second*order property
%ellars calls #ultimate homogeneity$. This is the property of holding uniformly of every point in a
continuous regionthat is, every sub*region of the region is also coloured (and if the region is
uniformly coloured, every sub*region is of e'actly the same colour.
8. "hat bothers %ellars about the property of being a #red$ sensation (i.e. a sensation of red, i.e. the
sort of sensation typically caused in normal (human sub(ects when presented with a red ob(ect in
standard visual conditions is that it inherits this character he calls ultimate homogeneity. A
sensation of red presents us with an ultimately homogenous, red #region$ of visual space. -ut this
means that, whatever property it is that ma!es a sensation #red$ it cannot be a property of some
discrete collection of neurons, or molecules, or even sub*atomic particles, since (in the scientific
image none of these is a continuous region that can be uniformly anything.
9. ;ow, while we can, easily enough, accept that red things only loo! (to perceivers li!e us to have
an ultimately homogeneous colour, and in fact are comple' systems of particles that have no
colour whatsoever, it is much harder to say that red sensations only look (to perceivers li!e us to
have an ultimately homogeneous character that is analogous to colour (i.e. resembles and differs
from other related properties in ways that parallel the patterns of resemblance and difference of
colours of ob(ects in the manifest image. After all, it is these sensations themselves that we
invo!e to explain how uncoloured ob(ects manage to loo! coloured to us: These /ualities of
sensations, by their analogy with the properties of manifest ob(ects, e'plain how manifest ob(ects
appear to have properties (li!e colour, taste, smell, i.e. secondary /ualities that the corresponding
real things (in the scientific image simply don&t have at all, by serving as intermediates between
our awareness (and the operation of our systems of concepts on that awareness and the ob(ects in
our environment that our senses are responding to. If the sensations themselves don&t have such
analogous /ualities after all, it seems impossible to understand how things could even appear to
be as they are in the manifest image. (Aecall here %ellars& remar!s about colours being #mere
appearance$ in a far more radical sense than the familiar primary4secondary /uality distinction
re/uires, in the sense, that is, that there is nothing like colours anywhere in the world at all.
<. %o it seems we&re really stuc!. If the physical world is best ta!en to be the world as science (in its
ideal form describes it, and that world includes nothing that is coloured (since the ob(ects in the
public world that we observe are not coloured and nothing that could even correspond to the
appearance, for us, of a world of colours (and smells and etc., since no property even structurally
analogous (possessing the same second*order properties to these occurs in the #real world$, then
it seems we&ll have to supplement the physical with another aspect of the world that does (the
#mental$. This other aspect will interact with the physical world, or at least some parts of it
within usafter all, if it doesn&t interact, it&s e'planatorily impotent even with regard to what we
say, and so can do no wor! for us at all. -ut we&re bac! to some sort of substantial dualism.
3. %ellars offers an escape, but it&s by means of a promissory note: As science develops, he suggests,
it may emerge that while much of what goes on in the natural world can be captured within a
discrete, particulate account of what there is and how it interacts, certain continuous regions of
space*time, within some organisms& central nervous systems, are occupied by continuous fields
whose presence and character affect the organism&s #particles$ in certain ways, and typically
result when certain stimuli impinge on the #sensory surfaces$ of the organism. Then the scientific
image itself would contain structures with characteristics analogous enough to colours (and other
secondary properties to explain why the world appears, to us, to contain coloured ob(ects, and
there would be no need, for descriptive and explanatory purposes (these are inseparable, for
%ellars for us to appeal to anything beyond the world of the scientific image.