A short overview of aspects of the philosophy of content

A colleague at another university had agreed to offer a seminar on the nature of concepts to social science students and asked me for my thoughts. I realised that the word ‘concept’ has probably never appeared in any index of any of my books. It isn’t the way I have thought about philosophical issues, despite believing in Wittgenstein’s commitment to semantic ascent for doing philosophy.

§370. One ought to ask, not what images are or what goes on when one imagines something, but how the word “imagination” is used. But that does not mean that I want to talk only about words. For the question of what imagination essentially is, is as much about the word “imagination” as my question. And I am only saying that this question is not to be clarified a neither for the person who does the imagining, nor for anyone else a by pointing; nor yet by a description of some process. The first question also asks for the clarification of a word; but it makes us expect a wrong kind of answer.

§371. Essence is expressed in grammar. (Wittgenstein 2009)

Still, I found that I wanted to persuade my colleague of the necessity of starting out any account of concepts by thinking about their general home in the philosophy of thought and language. 

But also, post retirement, I found myself incapable of simply writing some serious notes. 

So here are 11 entries on the philosophy of thought and language hidden in a fictional world aimed at kids. Whether anyone is mature enough to get the philosophy of thought while still wanting to hear about it from a bad tempered hippo explaining it to a bolshie axolotl is anyone’s guess.

https://juggins-the-false.blogspot.com/2024/05/l11-lotties-first-lesson-on-concepts.html

Travis again

Dear Sir,

Many thanks. It is a pleasure a receive a letter from East Moseley especially about the philosophy of Charles Travis.

You write: 

I see what you mean about the Witttgensteinian approach - ie one looks to see how vocabulary is being used, rather than thinking that the use should be predicted from a general account of the meaning of the descriptive terms used. But then given that pragmatic move, Travis still wants to provide a theorisation of the semantic machinery involved: ie

What holds all the cases together is precisely and only this: in each of them it is not too stupid to suppose that the (candidate) name bears an understanding that allows us to make sense, for any general concept, of the idea that what fits that understanding does not fit that concept, and vice-versa. 

I’m not sure I understand what exactly Travis means by the terms in bold, but maybe that’s not important, and what he is trying to do is more therapeutic... ie it helps us become comfortable (no longer perplexed) with the language use, and we can throw away the ladder once we've achieved that. What holds all the cases together is precisely and only this: in each of them it is not too stupid to suppose that the (candidate) name bears an understanding that allows us to make sense, for any general concept, of the idea that what fits that understanding does not fit that concept, and vice-versa.

I think that Travis thinks he has spoken plainly. I don't think it’s supposed to be philosophy by pointing. In this case, I think he means that when we understand a name - ‘Scott’, say - to be a name - when we’re using it that way rather than as a shorthand for a description (cf Evans’ example of Julius as a conventional name for whoever invented the zip) - then for any Russell-style description - the author of the Waverley novels, say - we can understand the idea, or possibility, that Scott may not have written those novels. That possibility doesn't disbar ‘Scott’ from being a genuine name and, more radically, a name explained by using some general descriptions (unlike Kripke) which might have included, until the discovery, “You know the one, the author of the Waverley novels, not Captain Scott”. 

That’s not to say that there are no bits that I don't follow. As I may have said before, he seems to support an idea he ascribes to Frege that once one has articulated a bit of the conceptual realm in the form of a judgement, then its truth or falsity depends on nothing other than how the world is. That’s a condition on objectivity which I think he accepts. It fits all his anti-McDowell stuff about the conceptual reaching as far as the non-conceptual realm that instances it. If, by contrast, truth turns also on the thinker, too, then it isn’t an objective matter. It might be an expression of subjective preference. 

And yet, at the same time, following both Austin and his own ideas on occasion sensitivity, he also seems to think that there is some slippage. He quotes Austin: ‘Truth and falsity are . . . names for . . . a dimension of assessment—how the words stand in respect of satisfactoriness to the facts, events, situations, etc., to which they refer.’ Somehow, that idea of a ‘dimension of assessment’ doesn’t sound as unmediated as the Frege story. 

I’d like it to be the case that Travis thinks that occasion sensitivity operates on words (used with standard meanings) to arrive at a specification of a bit of the conceptual realm - after which Frege's view holds - given the basic idea that words, even with their English meanings, do not specify what is being said. They can bear different understandings until a context is provided to know the language game being played. (Is it true that the room is dark? Well it depends which game is being played. Too dark to find Zettel but not dark enough to remove film from a canister.) But he also seems to suggest that the conceptual just is words used with standard meanings. So the slippage occurs between the conceptual and what was actually said not between the words and what was actually said ie the conceptual. 

Having wrestled with this for about a month, I think I've now decided that I should say what I think he should say and accept that sometimes he's not consistent with that. 

There’s another tension in his discussion of knowledge. Here what I think he should say is that an assessment of what alternatives need to be ruled out in saying that someone knows there's a sheep behind the barn on the basis of the noise heard - so there’s no risk of that it could have been, though it wasn’t, a similar sounding goat really making the noise - is occasion sensitive. In a later paper, this seems to be all he says. I‘m happy with that. In effect he replaces precise statements of the range of possible worlds a knowledge producing mechanism has to be reliable in with a rougher notion of relevance assessed in context. ((The danger of even this is that it might collapse into an account of when it is reasonable to ascribe knowledge to S rather than an account of what S's knowing consists in, or what conditions have to be met for S to know.)) 

But in ‘A sense of occasion’, he compares ‘S knows’ with ‘is blue’ where the latter might speak of a bucket of water looking blue, as though dyed, or a lake reflecting the blue of the sky. This implies that he thinks ‘S knows’ might be used in different language games. In this case, however, he doesn't tell us what those different games might be (unlike for ‘is blue’). But also, he rejects philosophical accounts of 'S knows' in which S merely has very good evidence. Now I think he’s right to reject that idea - it’s a bad philosophical account of knowledge - but I'm not sure that he has the right given the suggestion that ‘S knows’ might be used in different language games. Why not in this one, too? 

Tim

Why should a Wittgensteinian read Travis?

My partner asked me why a Wittgensteinian ought to read Charles Travis. 

One answer would be that Travis wrote two books explicitly about aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy: The Uses of Sense (2001) and Thought’s Footing (2006). 

Another is that the sort of reader who flirts with a grand overview picture of the relation of thought and world and, paradoxically, also with the dissolution of such pictures, while also spurning vulgar reductionism, will find a kindred spirit in Travis. Travis both paints a big picture of the essentially general realm of the conceptual ‘reaching out’ to the essential particularity of the historical which ‘instances’ it and yet also stresses the role of our parochial sensibilities to make this possible (see his ‘Reason’ s reach’.) It is a picture consistent with Wittgenstein’s surprising claim that: 

429. The agreement, the harmony, between thought and reality consists in this: that if I say falsely that something is red, then allthe same, it is red that it isn’t. And in this: that if I want to explain the word “red” to someone, in the sentence “That is not red”, I do so by pointing to something that is red.” (Wittgenstein 2009)

A third is that Travis has really interesting things to say about some specific issues in Wittgenstein. For example, he has a line on seeing-as, seeing aspects and the duck-rabbit that starts from such a simple observation about what the duck-rabbit really is that it made me wonder how I could have missed it. He has an interesting idea to connect Wittgenstein’s central discussion of rule following to a distinction (from Russell and perhaps Frege) between singular and descriptive thought (well that is how it strikes me the idea works). I’m less convinced by his solution to the problem that then emerges. And he has a really good way to make the idea of language games very much more than a presentational eccentricity. 

I will sketch aspects of those ideas a little more, but there is also a better fourth reason for a Wittgensteinian to look to Travis which I will set out at the end. Travis’ mode of philosophy is breathtakingly Wittgensteinian (in something like Cora Diamond’s realistic spirit). I will give one example.

***

Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspect-dawning and the duck-rabbit in Part 2 section xi of Philosophical Investigations is sometimes taken to suggest that while particularly noticeable only in changes of aspect – of the duck-rabbit, the Necker cube etc – all seeing is seeing-as. N.R. Hanson’s 1970s book Patterns of Discovery on the philosophy of science runs such a line so as to advance claims about the theory dependence of observation in science via the idea that all perceptual experience is conceptually structured. That perceptual experience is conceptually structured is a claim famously advanced by the sometimes Wittgensteinian philosopher John McDowell in his book Mind and World. But it is an idea wholeheartedly rejected by Travis (in such papers as ‘The silence of the senses’ and ‘Reason’s reach’). 

Travis argues, instead, that perception involves no such content and is instead a relation between a subject and their environment that makes their environment available for judgements. Conceptual content first enters the picture in the judgements that the subject makes in response to a perceived environment. While seeing is perceptual and its objects have spatial locations – seeing the sun in the sky – ‘seeing that’ is a judgement and its object, such as that the sun has set, has no location. One might thus think that cases such as the duck-rabbit might be problematic for Travis. But, as he points out, the duck-rabbit is a picture in which there are two images to be seen: the duck and the rabbit. In fact, he suggests that attending to one image or the other is simply a case of seeing. ‘Seeing-as’ implies some further element of self-consciousness as to the nature of the experience. 

His account of rule following in Thoughts Footing and elsewhere, connects the issue to the difference between descriptive and singular thoughts. Here is a typical example: 

Sid tells Pia that her shoes are under the bed. Pia understands Sid’s words in a certain way. In particular, she takes him to speak on a certain understanding of shoes being under a bed. Now she enters the room. She encounters things being relevantly as they are (supposing how they are three floors down not to matter). She learns something, perhaps enough, of the conditions (circumstances) which then obtain. Three understandings of Sid’s words now become available. There is an understanding of them on which things being that way just is their being as Sid said. There is one on which it just is not. And there may be a third on which that much leaves the issue undecided. Other than the mentioned differences, these understandings may be very much alike. It may be that just one of them is the one that Pia’s understanding of Sid’s words requires. In that sense, just one of them is part of that understanding...

There is now a point about the availability of these three understandings...Some thoughts are only available to us given suitable acquaintance with our environment. And so it is with those understandings of Sid’s words I just mentioned. Pia’s shoes are positioned as they are with respect to the bed. There is then this understanding of Sid’s words: what they say is such that things being that way is things being as they said. Someone may thus understand them. One mayonly so understand them if one is suitably acquainted with things being as they then were. It is to things so being that one must be responding in having that understanding. An understanding thus unavailable to someone before a given time I will call novel (for that person at that time), and an understanding available anyway, even when that other one was not (or if it were not) prior relative to that novel one. (Travis 2006: 129-30)

The familiar problem explored in Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule following of the student who continues an arithmetic series in a divergent manner despite past agreement with common practice is mapped onto the distinction of a prior understanding that one might have of the meaning of some words and the novel understanding one is only in a position to have in a singular thought, or via acquaintance with some new situation, assessing whether those words apply to this case. The challenge for maintaining determinacy of meaning is showing how it is that prior understandings compel novel understandings. Travis thinks that Wittgenstein has done enough to undermine any account of how they do without relying on the reasonable judgement in the specific context of use of fellow subjects. (Sadly, Travis’ idea does not fit very well Wittgenstein’s famous arithmetic examples because it is unclear that one can take a singular thought towards a mathematical example. The best one could do is have a singular thought towards a specific typographic representation of a  mathematical example. But it is not clear that that is what matters. I am also unpersuaded that his positive account does enough to leave ‘everything as it is’. It looks to me that it is revisionary in the direction, at least, of Wright and Kripke by contrast with McDowell’s excellent non-revisionary account.) 

Travis adds his own particular signature dish to the possibility of divergent understandings: occasion sensitivity. And he illustrates the open possibilities for sensitivity to occasions through a connection to language games. In the example above, some of the options for understanding ‘shoes being under the bed’ include whether the shoes are wholly or only partly under the bed, nailed to the ceiling below or three floors below. But another example Travis offers may be more persuasive. It concerns whether a room is dark. Travis sketches two language games employing ‘is dark’. In one, one participant or ‘player’ announces that the room ‘is dark’ and the other then removes photographic film from its canister for developing. In the other game, that the room ‘is dark’ is deployed to explain – and thus justify – an inability to locate a specific book on shelves. The standards for ‘is dark’ differ in the two games. What meets the latter standard of correctness may not meet the former. Travis suggests that thinking of the different language games that can be played with the same English phrases, or sentences, with their standard meanings, shows how whether they can used to utter truths depends on the context. It depends on the game being played. Thus, contrary to much philosophical, including Fregean, orthodoxy, meaning alone is insufficient to fix the standard for truth. One needs to know the point of the game – eg. opening film canisters or finding books – to know the truth of the corresponding linguistic move. The idea of language games is not merely a presentational contingency but the heart of a claim that connects language to points, purposes and reasonable judgements. 

***

But the example that strikes me as most breathtakingly original is the discussion of names in Thoughts Footing. There are two dominant approaches to proper names in philosophy. One, starting with Russell and exemplified by Searle, claims that proper names stand for a definite description (Russell) or a cluster of descriptions (Searle). This assimilates the apparent singular character of proper name to a descriptive thought. The other, based on criticism of the descriptive account, takes the link from names to their objects to be mediate by causal relations back to an original baptism (Kripke). It faces problems concerning the specification of the causal mediation. Both approaches attempt to explain how a name can name its bearer. Travis, by contrasts offers the following picture:

Let us apply here an idea already sketched in Lecture 1 when we were considering how the notions of reason and responsibility might connect to truth. Imagine that we carry out an exercise. For its purposes we suppose that we do, on occasion, express singular thoughts, and do so with the aid of words which name individuals. We then ask: on that supposition is it clear enough where we should say a singular thought was expressed, and where not? Intuitively, yes. Descartes lived in Breda. That is a doubly singular thought. Rain makes streets wet. That is not one. If we were dividing things up in that way, following best intuition, what would we say of my ‘Russell walked’? The example is imaginary. But quite plausibly that it expressed a singular thought. Now, the idea I am applying here isjust this: if that is how the exercise comes out—if at least things divide up coherently on the working supposition—then that is how things are: we do sometimes express singular thoughts, and, nearly enough, where one would have thought we did. Ceteris paribus, then, that is what my ‘Russell walked’ did. 

To treat it as doing so will be to treat the understanding it bore in a particular way. For any general idea as to who my ‘Russell’ named—any general concept its bearer might be supposed to fit—the understanding my ‘Russell’ in fact bore must leave room for the discovery that my ‘Russell’’s bearer does not fit that concept, or that what fits it is not him. That understanding must leave room for those ideas to make sense. It must not be too stupid (unreasonable) to suppose my ‘Russell’ to bear an understanding that leaves such room. If it is too stupid to suppose this, then my ‘Russell’ was not a name. Conversely, though, by the operative idea here, if it is not too stupid to suppose this, nor too stupid to suppose that there is someone my understanding fits, then my ‘Russell’ was a name. (Family resemblance is an account of how an understanding might work as the understanding my ‘Russell’ bore would thus have to.) 

Let us now look at all the cases where, on the above line of thought, some word or other would count as having functioned as a name. We might look for something else, in common to all these cases, that would make them all count as that—some other feature of the understandings all those words bore by virtue of which it is not too stupid to regard them as leaving room for making the required kind of sense. For example, we might look for some particular sort of general idea involved in the relevant conceptions in every case. Or we might look for something like perceptual contact with the item named. But, on this first application of the idea of language on holiday, any such enterprise is a mistake. What holds all the cases together is precisely and only this: in each of them it is not too stupid to suppose that the (candidate) name bears an understanding that allows us to make sense, for any general concept, of the idea that what fits that understanding does not fit that concept, and vice-versa. The particulars that make this not too stupid to suppose may be too various here for that. If variety defeats here any candidate for further common feature to cases of names naming, that suggests no occult connection between name and bearer. It suggests no more than a very great deal of the mundane. (ibid: 63-4)

This seems to me to be a breathtakingly Wittgensteinian approach to the question of what makes a name a name and also how that is so much as possible. It takes very seriously the idea of not thinking but looking and placing weight on what we do when language is not on holiday. It refuses to do more than look to the details of actually using names. If this appeals, then Cora Diamond’s Realism and the realistic spirit is the next place to go.

See this and this for my later and initial thoughts on Travis on seeing aspects. See this for the discussion of rule following in Thought’s Footing. And see this and this and this for other interesting papers by Travis.

Travis' ‘Suffering intentionally?’

In ‘Suffering intentionally?’ Travis argues against Marie McGinn’s argument that some uses of ‘see’ are intentional in the sense that they can take an object that isn’t there. The paper ends with a discussion of various examples from Anscombe which seem to support this view and Travis’ contrary and more natural reading of them. But what is perhaps more interesting is his discussion of seeing aspects discussed in a way that fits the phenomenon to to his non-content-laden view of perception as a direct relation of subject and environment.

There are some initial clarificatory moves:

McGinn cites Anscombe as saying that “verbs” of sense perception “are intentional or essentially have an intentional aspect” (p. 38). If we like, we can stipulate that the verbs ‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘smell’, etc., are to be called verbs of sense perception. Perhaps they also have ‘intentional uses’, though it is not at all clear to me that they do. (46)

To return, then, to Anscombe. There are, at least, these different theses: the verb ‘see’ is intentional; perception is intentional, or has an intentional object. The verb ‘see’ might be intentional (if there is such a thing as intentionality) because it has uses on which it does not speak of perception (nor of perceptual experience, if such has a wider scope than perception proper), and on these uses it is intentional. (I do not assert that this is so.) Whether perception is intentional depends on what it is that it is possible to see, using ‘see’ here as a verb of perception. It is to this question that I thought, and continue to think, the answer is ‘No’. I am not perfectly clear as to what McGinn thinks the answer to this question is. But more on that later. I take it, though I might misunderstand, that Anscombe takes the answer to be ‘Yes’. I do not think Wittgenstein offers any such answer. (47)

The focus of Travis’ paper is whether seeing – the experience – is intentional. He argues that it never is.

‘See’, used to report a case of perceiving, is not an intentional verb, for one thing, because it is a success verb. You cannot see the (or even a) toad on the lotus leaf if there is no toad. (47)

This is set against a distinction from Frege that Travis often presses.

But, as Frege noted (1897: 149; 1918: 61), ‘see’ has non-perceptual uses. When we say, for example, ‘He sees that that flower has five petals’ (one of Frege’s examples), ‘see’ is not used to report perceptual awareness. One way to see this is to note that, while the petals are on the flower in the garden, and from thence form images on retinas – they are that sort of thing – that the flower has five petals is not in the garden. Nor is it on the kitchen table. It is not the sort of thing to be located, a fortiori, to form images on retinas. Rather, it is the sort of thing one recognises by exercising capacities of thought. In thought, one can represent the flower as falling under a certain generality; as being a certain way there is for a flower to be – five-petalled… Frege’s discussion of the construction ‘see that’ was meant to draw our attention to two different sorts of awareness, invoking two different sorts of capacity. There is perceptual (e.g., visual) awareness. In the first instance, at least, this is something one enjoys in perception proper: the sort of awareness I enjoy of the wine in my glass by seeing it, or, again, tasting it. Then there is what one might call cognitive awareness – realising that my companion’s glass is empty, for example. (46)

At this preliminary stage, Travis also notes that see-as might be used as a non-perceptual verb.

One might further note that non-perceptual uses of ‘see’ show up in other constructions besides ‘see that’. There is also at least ‘see as’. Perhaps this sometimes has perceptual uses. (I think it does.) But it also has uses like this: ‘I see social networking as a threat to civilisation’, or ‘I see wind energy as our hope for the future.’ (48)

It is striking that Travis highlights, later, Wittgenstein’s apparent view that seeing-as is not perceptual but rather, on the Fregean distinction, belongs to the realm of thought. But see-as does not have an obvious intentional reading, according to Travis’ intuitions.

As for ‘see as’, on its non-perceptual uses, I can certainly see something as something it is not – e.g., a threat. I cannot see nothing as anything. I cannot, e.g., see ‘Virgil the snark’ as a threat. As for perceptual uses of ‘see as’, it is unclear to me that one can see something as something it is not, though I do not want to fight the point. I am sure that one cannot see nothing as anything. (47)

Thus far in the first four pages, Travis has advanced everyday aspects of the apparently factivity of perception. But one might think that the suggestion of seeing-as connects to something that might not support these everyday features. Might seeing aspects in the duck-rabbit and other figures put pressure on this and suggest some intentionality-demonstrating aspects despite Travis’ doubts. Here Travis makes what still seems to me to be a striking observation.

The thing to remember is that the rabbit, the duck, the tiger or the yacht difficult to pick out among the mass of dots, are, first of all, images in pictures, and, second, things which are there to be seen. The picture is an image of a yacht, difficult as it may be to make this out. When one sees the image of the cube in orientation A, one sees an image that is there to be seen. The peculiar thing about ‘ambiguous’ pictures, like the Necker, the black cross–white cross, the convex–concave step, is that it is not possible to see all that is there to be seen at once. If I see the cube in orientation A, that is at the price of missing the cube in orientation B. I may know that it is there – that the lines are organised in that way too. But I cannot then see it. (48)

Travis thinks that the everyday aspects of seeing apply also to the seeing of aspects in carefully drawn ambiguous figures. The aspects are there to be seen in the figures, though the seeing of the cube in one orientation rules out seeing the simultaneous seeing of the other aspect.

What lesson do we learn so far? One might think of things like this. In normal perception one sees what is before his eyes. Or at least that is a sort of outer limit. (48)

Of course one does not always see everything that there is there to be seen.

One does not see of this what is not visible – what is obscured by something else, or in the dark, or too small, or faint, or large, for his perceptual capacities. (48)

But also:

There is also another way to fail to see what is before one’s eyes – or at least to fail, on some occasions, to count as seeing it. One may miss it, or be oblivious to it. Such contrasts give special reasons, sometimes operative, to deny that someone saw something. What is missing, where these are reasons, is suitable uptake on the seer’s part; some suitable form of registering what one sees (suitability liable to vary with the occasion for asking for it). (48)

This is the first mention of ‘uptake’ in this paper. It is mentioned 13 times in total. But it is not the mark of a concession to a content-laden view of perception such as McDowell’s. Uptake does not undermine Frege’s distinction between perception of what instances conceptual generalities and the expert subsuming of instances under generalities in judgement or thought. When I last read this paper, I found the connection more baffling than it seems now. Here is one suggestion of the link between uptake:

What uptake then might be is some responding attitude – a form of thought. E.g., one recognises what he sees as such-and-such, or at least takes it to be such-and-such. ‘Did you see my aunt’s pen on the table?’, ‘Yes, I did.’ Here, then, is a possible role for thought to play even in the most banal cases of perceptual experience: the awareness one enjoys is perceptual awareness (insofar as it is seeing that is in question); but one does not count as enjoying it at all unless he responds to this awareness with a thought of some kind. I do not assert that this is generally so. It is just one way things might go in an experience of seeing. (49)

Travis suggests that uptake plays a role in Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspect dawning as part of a rejection of inner ideas of the sort that Frege rejects in rejecting Vorstellungen. Frege’s rejection of Vorstellungen is discussed very many Travis papers so I will ignore it here. But Travis summarises the dialectic thus:

If Frege’s point holds good [ie the rejection of Vorstellungen] (and Wittgenstein certainly seemed to think so), then the problem for philosophy of mind is to see how to think of psychological phenomena without assigning Vorstellungen any essential role in them. Where the phenomena are, or appear to be, perceptual, one way for them to work would be for thought (responses to what is happening to you) [ie ‘uptake’] to take over some of the roles which, in the case of perception are played by, e.g., what is before your eyes. If I saw a bísaro, that is because that is what was there. If I ‘saw stars’, perhaps, that is because such is my response to what happened to me… In the late manuscripts, one of the main ways in which Wittgenstein develops this idea of responses taking over functions which belong, in perception, to what those responses are to is in opposing an idea of what he calls an ‘inner image’. (49-50)

Travis then sets out the attraction but failure of an idea that the experience of an aspect changing in a static external figure (of the cube or duck rabbit) concluding

The inner image offers no better candidate for what a shift in looks consists in than the Necker does itself. It makes no progress. (51)

Instead:

For what I see to change here would then be for there to be a change in uptake – in what, there anyway to be seen, impressed me, was registered – under those special conditions the Necker poses, in which taking in one thing precludes taking in another. (51)

The clearest account Travis then gives of the nature of aspect changing runs:

Two (related) things are distinctive about the Necker (and the duck–rabbit, the black/white cross, etc.). First, while it provides us two different things to see, it does this while occupying a given location, and providing us the same thing at that location to be seen (or missed) no matter which of the two options we take up. At that location is a pattern of lines. It remains the same where we see the A-cube and where we see the B-cube. And (unless we miss it, hence see neither cube) that occupant of the location is something we do see throughout. Second, in this case, seeing the one thing (the A-cube, say) excludes seeing the other. The exclusion lies in the seeing: what is there to be seen leaves either option open. So the question is how seeing can impose a choice between these two. Here, clearly, uptake is all. Our responses to what we are presented with visually must choose what kind of visual experience we have, or what it is of. Without varying what we are presented with, our responses, or uptake, might make what we see either of two things. As I read Wittgenstein, he is developing reasons for caution in how we appeal to responses here, or in just what in responses might do that selecting which, patently, is done… If uptake does the choosing, then I see the A-cube just where I am responsive in a given way to what I see. For me, things are, visually, just as they would be in seeing the A-cube. Such is an attitude on my part. But it is not the same as seeing that such-and-such, nor seeing the Necker as such-and-such, where ‘see-as’ does not speak of perceptual awareness. (52)

In that quote, I omitted a contrast with the idea of seeing-as. Going back a page we have:

If this view of the Necker is correct, then I may say, ‘I see the A-cube’, if that is what I am doing, using ‘see’ as a straightforward perceptual verb. I might also go on to say: ‘I see it as an A-cube.’ What would the ‘as’ add (if anything)? Or, less tendentiously, what would the difference be? Perhaps it is possible to hear the ‘as’ as adding nothing; as simply a way of saying how it looks: it looks to me as (an image of) an A-cube would. But I think the ‘as’ can also work to make the whole verb not purely perceptual, but rather one which works to report how I think of what I am seeing. Consider a different case: a puzzle painting. I stare at it for hours and see only a mass of dots. Finally, the yacht comes into focus for me. ‘I see the yacht!’, I might exclaim, excitedly. Suppose now that I go on to say: ‘I see it (the painting) as a painting of a yacht.’ Such would be taking an extra step. There is the yacht to be seen, alright. But now I also hold a certain view of the matter: if you want to depict a yacht, this is a way of doing that too. Here we have another example of the genre yacht portrayal. (51)

And in the middle of p52:

Where ‘see as’, read non-perceptually, adds something to what would be said here in the simple ‘see’, prima facie, at least, that something is not something appeal to which would do the needed selecting. So, for example, I may see how it could be a diagram of an A-cube, or see it to be, or see it as one (as Sid may see Vic as a rival). But that sort of uptake, if it belongs to what is added in seeing-as – an addition purely in thought, on a par with recognising what I see as the cube on the exam yesterday – cannot be what distinguishes seeing an A-cube from seeing a B-cube in looking at a Necker. (52)

This suggests a potential contrast with thinking that aspect dawning just is ‘seeing-as’ (as I confess I always have). If I follow, to see the duck aspect of the duck-rabbit is to see the duck-look drawn into the ambiguous figure with a degree of uptake. It is to notice the duck aspect. To ‘see’ the duck-rabbit ‘as’ a duck – to ‘see-as’ – is to add self-conscious thought or judgement to the initial noticing.

What makes this a bit more confusing, however, is another phenomenon Travis follows Wittgenstein in discussing.

It is thus, I think, that the Necker and its kin serve as a stepping stone to a range of further cases. Of some of these, at least, Wittgenstein makes the following remark: ‘Here one must guard against thinking in traditional psychological categories – say, decomposing experience into seeing and thought; or things of that sort.’ (LW I 542). (52)

Again if I follow, the suggestion seems to be that ambiguous figures (duck-rabbit, Necker) alone would not put the distinction between perception proper and judgement or thought under threat. It applies to some different examples.

To what sorts of cases is this advice meant to apply? Drawing from its surroundings, cases, it seems, like these: seeing a similarity between two faces (where someone might see the faces as well as you, but not see the similarity); seeing a row of evenly spaced dots as organised into pairs; seeing someone you have not seen for years and not recognising him, then recognising him. (53)

The first thing to note about these cases is: insofar as there is talk of seeing here (‘see’ used as a perceptual verb), there is no question of seeing anything other than what is there to be seen… The second thing to observe here is that in each of these cases there is a question one might puzzle over as to whether the difference between seeing and not seeing the thing in question is a difference in visual experience – that is, whether one visually experiences something in the case where he sees other than what he experiences where he does not see. Does it look different where you perceive the dots as a string of pairs? (54)

Travis approaches these examples through a discussion of how one would represent what is seen following a clue from Wittgenstein.

What is the criterion of the visual experience? The criterion? What do you suppose? The representation of ‘what is seen’. (LW I 563; PI II, 169)

To take just the case of seeing the line of equi-spaced dots as being positioned in pairs. One might draw equi-spaced dots or one might draw them grouped into pairs but either would need to carry a rider, an understanding. This illustrates the role of thought. The representation is a represent as that such and such.

But to show an organisation that was seen one needs to take a different step. One step would be, not to show, but to describe: ‘He saw the line as a line of pairs of dots’. Another would be to show it, to draw something. But then what one needed to draw would not be determined by what was there before the eyes. It would all depend on how one’s drawing was to be taken. What we need here is some ‘method of projection’. And practically anything might show the right thing under some such method. The interesting thing is that, for all this, what is being described might still be someone seeing such-and-such, undergoing a particular kind of perceptual experience. (55)

And so, Travis suggests, in such cases one sees a generality.

So now consider seeing the resemblance in the face – a resemblance, say, between a son’s face and his father’s. How would one represent what was seen? Again, that depends on the way a given representation would be taken, or how it is to be taken. But one would need to take account of the fact that, so far as what is reproducible is concerned – things, that is, like shapes and colours – there is no reason to suppose that anything different was seen by one who did see the resemblance than by one who did not. So we need some form of representation of what was seen which needs to be taken in the right way. Wittgenstein’s idea for doing this amounts to roughly the following. To see the resemblance is to bring what was seen under a given generality (represent it to oneself as so falling). And, as Frege insisted, doing that is a function of thought, not sight. Wittgenstein’s rough idea: To see the resemblance is to register, or note, seeing what would also be seen in such-and-such range of other cases. One is presented visually with what he is. What he sees is fixed not just by his registering, or being suitably sensitive to, things being (visibly) as they were, but also by his responding to what he sees by bringing it (now in thought) under given generalities. Here it is that that ‘thinking in traditional categories’ which Wittgenstein refers to lets us down. Now we seem to have cases with the following two features. First, they involve questions of what was seen – of what needs representing to represent this – where the objects of ‘see’ are (speak of) the sorts of things which might be objects of sight: not that such-and-such, but rather objects, events or episodes, visible features of those objects, such as, e.g., looking just like Elvis, or having an Elvis quiff. So they are cases where ‘see’ seems to function like a verb of perception. But, second, they are cases where seeing seems to involve noting, or being struck by, something; thus responding in a certain way to what one sees. And this seems to involve us with things which belong to thought, and not to perception. The above idea about representing gives us another way of putting the point. In these cases, representing what was seen seems to require producing what calls for understanding in the same ways that representing truly or falsely does. It requires representing something as something, rather than (if this is a contrast) simply producing the colour of something. Here, I suggest, is where Wittgenstein wants to abandon ‘traditional psychological categories such as seeing and thinking’. The representing involved here remains in a subject’s responses (in thought) to what he is presented with. But the upshot concerns what is seen. (55-6)

The discussion thus seems to highlight Travis’ endorsement of the distinction between seeing and thinking. That distinction even holds of cases of seeing aspects. See an aspect is just seeing something there present to be seen in a picture. By contrast, seeing-as – just as Wittgenstein says – is not in such cases perceptual. (Travis suggests that there can be distinct perceptual versions of seeing-as in the case of illusions that I’ve ignored here.) ‘See-as’ adds to seeing an aspect some more general awareness of the phenomenon – for example that there are two aspects to be seen – an aspect of thought or judgement. But in a small range of interesting cases, one can notice something that, while there to be seen, inheres in a generality, such as a relation between father and son. It’s object – a generality – thus belongs to thought but is nevertheless experienced visually.

In effect, by giving this account of exceptionality, Travis is defending his slimmed down view of perception as itself concept-free. But in its favour is the fact that such phenomena do genuinely seem somehow exceptional.

See this for my previous attempt on this paper, this entry on ‘A sense of occasion’, this on ‘Reason’s reach’, this on ‘The twilight of empiricism’, and this on the discussion of rule following in Thought’s Footing.

Travis, C. (2015) 'Suffering intentionally?' in Campbell, M. & O'Sullivan, M. (eds.) Wittgenstein and Perception, London: Routledge

A quick browse of Steve Peters: The Chimp Paradox

Richard

I’ve had an enjoyable hour looking at The Chimp Paradox. I hadn’t realised when you said his name that he is that Steve Peters.

Here are my quick thoughts.

My first question opening the book was why is there a ‘paradox’ and what was it? I think of a paradox as a conceptually baffling phenomenon. Perhaps some issue where we are drawn to two answers, for very strong reasons, but which cannot both be true. I’m not sure that there is any paradox in the book. And I’m not sure he uses the word ‘paradox’ more than twice (I’ve searched), which is odd. I think what he means is that there are two elements in human psychology that pull in different ways. That’s not quite as dramatic a notion. I think that anyone who balances, say, wanting a donut now and wanting to have that same donut later already knows that choice is a balancing of competing wishes. You couldn’t sell a book on that revelation.

There is then the ‘science bit’, as Jennifer Aniston put it in her shampoo adverts. The brain has divisions and brain imaging suggests some broad correlations between mental activity and localised brain activity, as measured by blood flow. Also there are deficit studies and Peters cites the celebrated Phileas Gage case. I think it fair to say that standard neurology is that the brain isn’t homogenous and there’s quite a bit of localisation. (Gage himself recovered from impulsivity despite his brain damage a couple of years after his accident, so it’s not hard and fast. But that doesn’t undermine the basic claim of localisation.)

Labelling the limbic system the ‘chimp brain’ suggests an evolutionary story. You and I mentioned the reptilian brain. But it’s interesting that in this book, Peters does not actually use the word ‘evolution’ once. The other irritating thing here is that he uses the word ‘brain’ to refer to parts of the human brain. He even calls part of the human brain the ‘human brain’. No it isn’t! It’s part of it. We could cash this out by saying that in evolutionary theory, this bit only emerged with the development of a characteristically human organism but I’d like some indication of that story. (Fossil records make this tricky, of course, but I’d cut him slack if he made the right gestures.)

This is further illustrated by his odd habit of saying that we the reader, the humans, comprise only part of our minds. The chimp thinks one thing; we another. This is odd because ‘we’ are the sum total of all of this. (Freud has better terminology for this.)

I bet others have said this, but it all bears more than a passing similarity to the distinction between id, ego and superego in Freud. Peter’s we/‘human’ flips between ego and super-ego depending on how puritanical Peters is being.

My professional scepticism enters at this point to ask: to what extent will the body of the book reflect any of these possible neurological or evolutionary theories? I’d say: not at all. For example: he credits the inner monkey with asking what if… questions. That’s not credible. Fight-flight isn’t a hypothetical: it’s an insurance policy. Hypotheticals are tricky things to grasp and thus surely belong to the human. But it serves his purposes to suggests that this is part of the chimp even if that falsifies the evolutionary story.

All the rest is Peter’s moral world-view. He’s rather a strict Victorian parent. So we must judge the book by whether it is a helpful self-help fairy tale. (That’s roughly how I’d assess Freud too and I like Freud so I’m not being mean.) It wouldn’t help me.

I don’t like his simple split between logic and emotion. I don’t think we can draw that line (except in a way which makes logic merely an abstract calculus taught in philosophy classes). If logic is the structure of reasoning, it cannot be separated from emotional contents.

I note that he thinks that future based happiness is part of the human mind. So, some emotion is allowed into the supposedly strictly logical human as long as, like a Victorian parent, we agree to defer it to later (heaven?). Again, that fits his coaching story but isn’t very convincing.

His attitude to emotional processing is also very C19. It seems as though he concedes: Well it has to go on so we better let our inner chimp grieve the death of our beloved partner, say. But we humans just let that happen in the next room of our minds. We’re not grieving! We, humans, are weirdly unemotional – except when we’re allowed to be in the future. This is terrible psychotherapy! (That’s not a professional judgement, I concede.)

His picture of conflicts of wishes seems naïve, too. If we have a wish but wish we didn’t have it, then he seems to think that the chimp is ‘in charge’ in so far as we have the ground level wish in the first place though I assume in some further sense we are in charge because we get to say no (or at least wish we didn’t have that wish). It’s not at all clear to me that all countermanding of ground level wishes is an expression of a better self. My inner teenager often stifles my adult good intentions by suggesting that I must have an ulterior motive for a good act. The devil on my shoulder isn’t always merely a chimp-like, Freudian-Id-like desire. It may be a deep insecurity.

This is a pity because I do think that there can be interesting crossovers between neurology, evolutionary theory and psychology. For example the dopamine theory of alcoholism is really interesting. It also makes some of Peter’s questions seem over simple. He keeps asking what we want. But there may be different species of wanting. Knowing that is helpful, it seems to me. See eg: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-55221825

Anyway, I’ve had a pleasurable hour looking at it, even if it isn’t for me.

T