NDPR Christopher Peacocke, Truly Understood

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-06-01 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Christopher Peacocke, Truly Understood, Oxford University Press, 2008, 341pp., $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199239443.

Reviewed by D. Gene Witmer, University of Florida

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The theory of concepts is as contentious as any in philosophy, and it undoubtedly benefits from any sustained investigation of how a particular approach might, in detail, be worked out. Much of Christopher Peacocke's work over the last few decades can be seen in this light. His approach, as is well known, is Fregean in spirit, holding to the key idea that features of concepts must reflect rational relations between thoughts, and that a person's grasp of a concept must be grounded in her satisfying epistemic conditions -- such as that of finding certain inferences primitively compelling.

In his most recent book, Truly Understood, Peacocke's focus is on the role of truth and reference in the grasping of concepts. As he puts it, his "principal claim" is that reference and truth "have an explanatory role to play in the nature of understanding and concept-possession, an explanatory role that is deeper and more extensive than is commonly envisaged" (1). The book divides into two parts. In the first, "A Theory of Understanding", Peacocke focuses on this principal claim, motivating it and situating it in a more general framework continuous with the theory of concepts he has developed over the years. The book opens in a dialectical fashion, criticizing (in chapter 1) those theories of concepts that limit their explanatory resources to what the speaker understands by way of justification relations; the target here is mostly Dummett. The upshot is that a thinker's grasp must include something more substantial -- something that gives truth and reference a crucial explanatory role. The second chapter presents the main positive thesis about the explanatory role of reference, whereas the third looks to the first-person concept as an extensive case study to illustrate the thesis. The fourth chapter draws on older material to introduce the notion of "implicit conceptions" and makes plain how the current approach dovetails with the earlier motivation for insisting on such conceptions.

In the second part of the book, "Applications to Mental Concepts", Peacocke considers several mental concepts, leading systematically from the concept of a conscious state in general (chapter 5), to the concepts of perception, action (chapter 6), mental action in particular (chapter 7), and finally to those used to represent thoughts and concepts themselves (chapter 8). This two-part structure may seem rather arbitrary at first; why illustrate the main thesis by focusing only on applications to mental concepts? Those dubious about the prospects of investigating concepts in Peacocke's fashion may be especially keen to see how he would handle concepts not usually investigated by philosophers. However, the fact that the culminating chapter focuses on the concepts used in representing thoughts themselves suggests an underlying strategy behind this organization. After all, it seems that Peacocke owes us, ultimately, an account of how his general theory of concepts is to be linked to how ordinary thinkers conceive of concepts, and the material in that last chapter provide the tools for such an account. The result is a book deserving of very careful study.

A great deal of ground is covered in Truly Understood, and my review will need to be selective. My main focus will be on key claims made in the first part of the book, though I should stress that I found much of the discussion of mental concepts both illuminating and often rather persuasive. It is Peacocke's general approach to concepts that is most controversial and important, however, and I will be concerned to get clear on his thesis about the explanatory role of reference and how this relates to his other commitments regarding possession conditions for concepts and the role of "implicit conceptions." I will close with some briefer remarks on some of the specific claims about mental concepts made in the second part of the book.

So just what is the explanatory role of reference (and thereby truth) on which Peacocke focuses? In brief, the main idea is that each concept is individuated by a rule of reference, and this rule helps explain those rational norms that are distinctive of that concept. If for a concept C, the referent of C is determined by a rule R, then, if there is a distinctive norm regarding what one should conclude about when something does or does not fall under C, rule R may help explain why this norm governs that concept. Peacocke's claim is not that rule R will do all the work in explaining why those norms apply, as facts about the character of the world may play an indispensable role as well. The point is that the norms are rendered explicable in a way that is illuminated by what it takes for the thoughts involving C to be true.

As Peacocke points out, this claim is implied by two other views to which he was already committed:

The first, Fregean, view is that the essence of a concept is given by the fundamental condition for something to be its reference. The fundamental condition for something to be the reference of the concept is what makes the concept the concept it is. The second view is that there are reasons or norms distinctive of a given concept, where these reasons or norms depend upon the nature of the concept. If both these views are correct, it follows that for each concept, there is some condition that gives its reference, and which, since that condition gives the essence of the concept, must contribute to the explanation of anything derivative from the nature of the concept, including the norms or reasons distinctive of it. (54-5)

In what way, then, does Peacocke's project in this work differ from his previous work on concepts? While there are some substantive changes in his view, he sees his goal here as showing how this thesis could be true. "How can what is often a rich set of norms distinctive of a concept be explained by something as apparently austere as a rule of reference?" (55).

How serious this challenge is depends on the extent to which there really are such rich and distinctive norms; on some approaches to the theory of concepts, there are likely few such norms in need of explaining. For Peacocke, however, it seems that there are bound to be such norms. On his view, a concept is individuated not just by its rule of reference but also by its possession conditions. Those conditions must be rich enough to distinguish distinct concepts. It is hard to see how they could be thus discriminating without supposing there are such distinctive norms, norms that must be recognized in some fashion by thinkers in order to possess the concept. There is, then, a substantial task ahead for the theorist who adopts Peacocke's main thesis.

By way of meeting that task, Peacocke offers a sampling of styles of explanation (in chapter 2) and a prolonged examination of one particular case, the first-person concept expressed by 'I' (in chapter 3). In Part Two of the book, in applying his general approach to many mental concepts, we encounter a variety of further illustrations and defenses for particular cases, though much of what we find in that second part is independent of this particular explanatory task.

If the main thesis can be sustained, it is significant in a number of ways. Among those mentioned by Peacocke is one that I believe bears emphasis. He notes that if he is right, then

the contrast found in many writers, either explicitly or implicitly, between theories of meaning and concepts that are "use" theories on the one hand and theories of meaning that involve reference and truth on the other is, in certain basic respects, a spurious contrast. I do not mean that there are not genuinely competing theories of each of these two kinds . . . My point is rather that if "use" involves norms (as it has to if it is to be adequate in the explanation of meaning and concepts), then explaining why these norms exist will take us back to the level of reference. (73-74)

So-called use theories face any number of problems, but among the most important is a worry about arbitrariness, as it has not been clear just why certain uses should be constitutive. If norm-driven use is explained by appeal to grasp of a central, unifying rule of reference, the sense of arbitrariness can perhaps be dispelled.

The explanatory situation so far might be summed up as follows. On Peacocke's view a thinker S grasps a concept C only if S grasps the rule of reference that determines the semantic value of C. In specifying the possession conditions for concept C one should include the thinker's treating the concept as answerable fundamentally to a certain norm, where this norm is itself explained as the result of the rule of reference for C (in combination, perhaps, with other facts about the world). The norm itself -- that is, the fact that such and such conclusions and inferences are rational -- is explained (in part) by the fact that the concepts involved in those thoughts have those rules of reference.

What, however, of the fact that S possesses the concept C in the first place? On the well-known view developed in his A Study of Concepts (1992), Peacocke intended the possession conditions for a concept C to play this explanatory role: it is in virtue of a thinker's meeting those conditions that she grasps concept C. The conditions in question could be spelled out, it was hoped, in a way that did not presuppose an attribution of the concept to the thinker. If the conditions were thus spelled out, they fit what he called the "A(C) form" constraining the theory of concept possession. This is not a constraint he continues to impose, however, given the role of what he calls "implicit conceptions." As he now sees it, any adequate account of the way in which a person is guided by his understanding in assessing and making inferences of various sorts, including especially the ability to recognize newly formulated principles as valid, requires an account of that understanding according to which it is a kind of tacit knowledge. A statement of possession conditions will, then, include attributing to the thinker some knowledge the content of which essentially includes the very concept at issue. As a result, such statements violate the A(C) constraint.

As Peacocke points out, this scaling back of theoretical ambitions does not mean that the conditions one can spell out are trivial or theoretically uninteresting. He writes:

Violations of the A(C) form are unobjectionable in the explication of a concept F because one can use one's own mastery of the concept F to assess what someone with an implicit conception involving F could be expected to think or do in any given state of information. This is why a statement about what is involved in possession of a concept, and which does not respect the A(C) form, is not vacuous. It still makes an assessable claim. Each one of us, in evaluating the claim it makes, draws on his own mastery of the concept F in being explicated. One draws on that mastery, and engages in simulations to assess what one would be obliged, or rational, to think or do in any given state of information. (145)

While what Peacocke says here seems right, it understates the degree to which the project of providing possession conditions has now shifted ground, in that the goal is no longer, apparently, to explain what it is in virtue of which a thinker possesses a concept. If we no longer aspire to such an explanation, just what is the point of a statement of possession conditions?

Here's one way to press the worry. Suppose that grasping a concept C requires having tacit knowledge of a rule of reference. In that case, we can spell out a possession condition for C just by describing that bit of tacit knowledge. Having such knowledge requires that the thinker already grasp the concept C, so this condition is (trivially) sufficient for grasping C. Since this is a case of a necessary requirement on possessing the concept, the condition is necessary as well. In light of this, it's not clear what point there would be in discerning any other possession conditions; we've already specified one that is both necessary and sufficient.

The explanatory project that Peacocke seems now to be engaged in is not that of explaining what it is in virtue of which a thinker grasps a concept but, instead, taking such for granted, and explaining why it is a consequence of the need for that tacit knowledge that various other conditions are necessary for possessing the concept. If a condition is necessary for possessing concept C, then the fact that it is necessary should be explicable as the consequence of the fact that grasping C must involve tacit knowledge of its rule of reference -- just as facts about the norms distinctive of a concept should be explicable as a consequence of the fact that the concept has such and such a rule of reference.

This way of seeing his project reveals an important possibility. Earlier, I noted that on some views of concepts there will be very little by way of associated distinctive norms. Similarly, on some views, there will be little by way of interesting conditions necessary for possessing a given concept. Apart from such theories, further, one may wonder whether there are any interesting possession conditions to be explained in the first place -- even granting Peacocke's basic premises. Consider the following scenario: all concepts are indeed distinguishable from each other by their possession conditions, but those possession conditions distinguish them in a very simple fashion. For each C, what it takes to possess C is just tacit knowledge of the rule of reference for C, and nothing else in particular is needed for, or follows from, that possession. I don't mean this point as an objection to Peacocke's view; the point is just that it is surprising to see that his approach could accommodate this possibility.

Whether this is really possible may depend on what sorts of rules of reference are possible and what it might take to have tacit knowledge thereof. Peacocke does not offer us anything by way of a general principle constraining what these rules might look like, though they are illustrated through his examination of several particular cases. He does tell us, regarding the class of implicit conceptions that amount to tacit knowledge of the rule of reference, that

it is sufficient for an implicit conception to fall in this target subclass that it contribute to the specification of the reference of the concept in question. The content of the implication conception may or may not include such notions of reference and truth in providing this contribution to the specification of reference. (114)

This remark seems designed to ensure maximal flexibility in how such tacit knowledge is to be understood. One point we are apparently meant to take away from this is that such tacit knowledge need not be meta-conceptual in content; it need not be the case that what the person knows is something about concepts, truth, or reference per se. This would be an advantage, of course, since requiring such sophisticated tacit knowledge would prima facie hurt the plausibility of the theory.

Still, it is unclear whether this modesty can be retained. Peacocke describes the "fundamental rule of reference" for a concept as "the rule that specifies what makes something the reference of the concept" (56); but he also distinguishes this from "the intuitive notion of what it takes to be F" for some predicate 'F' (58). What the possessor of a concept expressed by F knows, then, is not what it takes to be F but what it takes to be the reference of that concept -- and that certainly threatens to be irreducibly meta-conceptual in content.

Whatever form such knowledge has, however, there remains the question of whether there is some explanation to be had of such knowledge, some account of what it is in virtue of which a person has that tacit knowledge. Whereas Peacocke argues against the possibility of what he calls a "purely personal-level conceptual-role" theory -- presumably, the sort of thing hoped for in A Study of Concepts -- he does offer some hope for an explanatory account when he suggests appealing to empirical psychology and the sub-personal level:

In the case of functionalism, we regularly distinguish, following Block, between analytical functionalism, and 'psychofunctionalism', which takes into account information from an empirical psychology in individuating functional roles. We should make a similar distinction between types of conceptual-role theory. A conceptual role theory may be a 'psycho-conceptual-role theory'. It may state that what is involved in possessing a particular concept includes the requirement that certain of the thinker's personal-level applications of that concept be explained by subpersonal representational states, ones which could be regarded as realizations of what I would say is an implicit conception. (137)

The remarks here are of course programmatic, but it's worth pointing out that the analogy with psychofunctionalism seems askew. For that analogy to be sustained, the position imagined would need to suppose that empirical psychology can specify conditions such that those conditions are necessary for, and explanatory of, possessing a concept, whereas the remarks here suggest that empirical psychology would only tell us which states could serve as realizations of implicit conceptions, not which conditions must be met in the first place to count as possessing the concept.

Be that as it may, it is not unreasonable to hope that some explanation of how one both possesses the concept and has the required tacit knowledge might be forthcoming; if it is compelling to suppose that there is such tacit knowledge, then there is nothing wrong with seeing what further theoretical results one can achieve while appealing freely to such tacit knowledge as an explanans. To this end, the several applications to particular concepts are indicative of real progress.

Let us turn, then, to some of those applications. The first (chapter 5) is to the concept of a conscious mental state. Peacocke advances an account that attributes to thinkers tacit knowledge the content of which makes crucial reference to an identity. The account builds on the discussion offered in the first chapter. Following the critique of "justificationist" theories of concepts, we are offered a realistic alternative account of the understanding thinkers have of many ordinary concepts. That alternative includes what Peacocke calls the "identity component" of tacit knowledge required for those concepts. For the concept oval, for instance, the thinker must know this:

For an arbitrary thing to be oval is for it to be of the same shape as things of this sort

where "this sort" expresses a recognitional capacity "exercised when the thinker is presented in perception with a thing as oval-shaped" (31). On this proposal, the thinker's grasp of same shape must play an explanatory role; it is not a mere epiphenomenon of already grasping oval in combination with certain truisms about sameness of properties. The account of our grasp of the concept of a conscious state likewise appeals to a thinker's grasp of identities. In brief, he proposes that the key bit of tacit knowledge involves two identities, as indicated by the following formulation:

For x, distinct from me, to be in pain, is both:

for x to be something of the same kind as me (a subject); and also

for x to be in the same state I'm in when I'm in pain. (175)

One advantage of this account is that it makes sense of the idea that we grasp the concept pain from our own case while allowing a straightforward treatment of applications of the concept to other minds (180). Another more general advantage -- one that will accrue to his accounts of other mental concepts -- is that it does not require that thinkers have any grasp of any functional role played by mental states (222).

An important question about this approach concerns the way in which the thinker's presumed grasp of "same state" and "same kind" is pressed into explanatory service. Peacocke defends this move, remarking at one point that "[i]dentity of state is a notion in good standing, and as such is graspable by a thinker capable of being in conscious states and with a conception of multiple subjects of experience, without any need for a reduction to something else" (179). This seems fair enough in light of the fact that we are no longer trying to provide an account of what it is in virtue of which a thinker grasps these concepts. Given this point, however, one may wonder why an account like that above is needed in the first place. After all, why not say that the notion of pain is a notion in good standing and say that there is nothing by way of interesting possession conditions for that concept? To press this a bit, note that Peacocke points out that "same state" in the above account really needs to mean "same conscious state" (180) -- so the kind of concept taken for granted here is more discriminating than it may have first seemed. If that can be taken for granted, why not the concept pain itself?

As I understand the logic of his project, Peacocke needs not only to advertise the virtues of the accounts he offers of particular concepts but, further, to offer a comparative evaluation. To revert to the main thesis, are there norms involving the use of the concept pain that are better explained by the above account than one that simply takes the concept for granted? (Taking it for granted, here, in effect means to offer nothing by way of possession conditions other than tacit knowledge of a rule of reference.) This is not, however, a project undertaken in Truly Understood.

The next chapter focuses on concepts of perception and action, developing an account of rational self-ascription of mental states and events that can be shown both to be explanatorily powerful on its own and to dovetail with the approach invoking identity relations at center stage in the previous chapter. Central to the account is what Peacocke calls the "Core Rule," which might be very roughly glossed as a rule leading from the event of seeing that p to the judgment that one sees that p, where if one follows this rule under the right circumstances one thereby gains knowledge that one sees that p. One especially useful aspect of this account is that it can be used to explain some empirical phenomena involving infants' attributions of mental states to others (229-237).

The Core Rule is generalized so as to apply to basic actions, and this provides a natural link to the next chapter in which it is argued that many mental events (not all) are best understood as actions. The upshot is that an account of self-knowledge is built up in a systematic fashion. The account has a great deal of attractive features, though the explanatory role of reference is not on much display throughout. It returns to a more prominent position in the final chapter, "Representing Thoughts."

Peacocke's account of the concept concept is introduced by considering a well-known debate about the semantics of iterated propositional attitude attributions, here transferred to the level of thought. If Amy believes that Basil believes that snow is white, should we suppose that the concept corresponding to "snow" in Amy's thought is a higher-order concept -- one that refers to a concept -- or that it is instead the concept that we normally express with the word "snow"? Peacocke's response is to opt for the first, higher-order account, but the interesting work here is provided by what he calls "the Leverage Account," according to which, for each concept, there is a canonical concept of that concept, one that can be formed in a systematic way given tacit knowledge necessary for possessing the first-order concept. The Leverage Account -- so-called, presumably, because given the first-order concept one has enough leverage to mount ascending orders of concepts -- is given as follows, where "can(F)" denotes the canonical concept for a concept expressed with "F":

For an arbitrary concept C to fall under can(F) is for the fundamental condition for something to fall under C to be the same as the fundamental condition for something to fall under the concept F. (291)

If a thinker, in possessing concept C, has tacit knowledge of the fundamental reference rule for C, then she can easily form the canonical concept of C by making use of the (tacit) knowledge displayed above. Given the systematic connection between first-order and higher-order concepts, the inferences one can draw from iterated propositional attitude attributes are readily explicable. This systematic connection is also used as a way of trying to resolve worries that an externalist account of content is incompatible with privileged self-knowledge. Higher-order judgments about one's thoughts inherit their contents directly from that of the first-order concepts at work; if you are making use of the canonical concept, then there is no issue about knowing which first-order concept you are using, since, as he puts it, given the Leverage Account, "you know as much about which concept is in question when you think of it as the concept F as there is to know" since "[a]ll the conditions that contribute to the individuation of the concept F itself contribute to the individuation of the canonical concept of F" (311).

I confess to finding the Leverage Account quite appealing, though I here register just two reservations. First, the account only works for concepts for which there is a fundamental condition for something to fall under it, and Peacocke explicitly allows that there are concepts for which there is no such rule of reference (59), yet presumably some accommodation must be made for thoughts about thoughts using those concepts as well. In general, he says very little about the concepts that lack such a rule of reference, and it is a bit frustrating that we aren't given more by way of explicit delimitation and discussion of them. Second, I expressed above some concern about the form of the tacit knowledge of the rule of reference, wondering whether it would have to take a meta-conceptual form. The Leverage Account would seem to forbid this option, as one's concept of the concept would have to be, itself, explained by one's logically prior grasp of the fundamental rule of reference. Knowledge of that rule of reference cannot in turn depend on a prior representation of the concept in question. It is all the more important, then, that we be given a clear account of just what form this tacit knowledge can take.

Despite these worries, I think it undeniable that the sort of general framework that Peacocke here develops has much to recommend it, though there is a need to face squarely two of the questions raised above: Just what form can these rules of reference take? And what are the prospects for explaining the grasp of a concept given the crucial role of tacit knowledge of such rules? However these questions are addressed, Truly Understood is an impressive exploration of the contours and promises of an important approach to thinking about concepts, one that deserves to have a lasting impact on philosophical thought.

NDPR Ray Jackendoff, Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-05-37 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Ray Jackendoff, Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure, MIT Press, 2007, 403pp., $19.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780262512534.

Reviewed by Steven Gross, Johns Hopkins University

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Introduction

According to a familiar research framework, we can explain various aspects of cognition and behavior by functionally characterizing the mind/brain in terms of computations over structures. Leading questions then include: what are these structures and computations (what are the primitives, and how are they combined and processed), how are they acquired (are any innate or innately constrained), how are they neurally realized, and what is their evolutionary history? Ray Jackendoff has been among the most creative and wide-ranging contributors to this enterprise. In particular, he has advocated applying the methods and insights of linguistics to less well-trodden cognitive domains, such as musical cognition and the interface of language and perception -- while demanding as well that linguists attend more to the constraints imposed on their own theorizing by results in neighboring fields.^[1] Jackendoff's most recent book continues these efforts, providing in particular his most sustained discussion of the mental structures implicated in social cognition.

Language, Consciousness, Culture is immensely stimulating. Jackendoff excels at weaving together lucid overviews, suggestive large-scale connections, and intriguing specific hypotheses and observations. Anyone working on its topics will benefit from studying the book.^[2] In what follows, I summarize its contents and then raise some questions concerning Jackendoff's views on consciousness and on theory of mind.

Summary

The first part of Language, Consciousness, Culture comprises Jackendoff's augmented 2003 Jean Nicod Lectures and provides a wide-lens view of various cognitive domains. Chapter 1 lays out the computational framework and argues that the mind is modular in that it utilizes a variety of distinct, incompatible structural formats. Jackendoffian modules -- individuated, but also prima facie isolated, by their proprietary structural formats -- interact in virtue of interfaces that establish cross-modular correlations among structures. Some details are developed in Chapter 2 (a précis of Jackendoff 2002) with respect to phonology, syntax, and semantics, modules implicated in linguistic competence. Their structures differ not just in their constituents, but also in their combinatorial principles (e.g., syllabic structure, unlike syntactic and conceptual (= semantic) structure, is hierarchical but not recursive). Indeed, a central claim of Chapter 2 is that, contrary to mainstream generative linguistics' assumption that syntax alone supplies generative principles, linguistic competence has a "parallel architecture." The modules interface via triples of cross-indexed phonological, syntactic, and conceptual structures stored in long-term memory. These include both specific lexical entries and more abstract schemata ("rules"), which differ, on Jackendoff's view, only in that the latter contain variables that the former have filled in. Jackendoff argues inter alia that the parallel architecture provides a better mesh with accounts of linguistic processing, a compelling account of idioms and "syntactic nuts," and consistency with an incremental evolutionary path to language.

Chapter 3 asks after the functional correlates of consciousness, specifically with respect to consciousness of language. (Cf. Jackendoff 1987, 1996.) On Jackendoff's view, the mental structures correlated with consciousness have two kinds of constituents: content features and valuation features. The content features of linguistic experience mostly mirror auditory images of phonological structure. In particular, we do not experience conceptual structure -- i.e., the meaning of what we say. Candidate valuation features include ±external (percepts vs. imaginings) and ±self-initiated (in the case of language, experienced as your own speech vs. as another's). Jackendoff's "Intermediate-Level Hypothesis" maintains that these structures correspond to where top-down processing first comes into play and attention is attracted and anchored. Because attention affects resource-allocation, consciousness of language enhances thought: the attention drawn to a phonological structure yields a greater allocation of resources to its associated conceptual structure as well, leading to greater inferential processing.

Chapter 4 speculates on the mental structures involved in complex actions, with special attention to shaking hands and making coffee. Jackendoff pursues analogies with linguistic competence, arguing, for instance, that these structures exhibit hierarchical complexity -- indeed, recursive structure, contrary to Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch's (2002) claim that language is unique among human cognitive capacities in this regard. He claims moreover that, as with language, the principles that constrain the construction of these structures operate over a vast lexicon of actions stored in long-term memory, as well as stored action-schemata whose variables can be fleshed out on-line as context requires (perhaps thus avoiding problems that bedeviled "frames" and "scripts" of old). But language is not just a species of action. It retains its uniqueness -- and its modularity -- in virtue of its proprietary structural formats and its particular functional role.

Chapter 5 advocates a mentalist approach to social cognition by drawing parallels with familiar considerations concerning language. The unlimited number of understandable social situations suggests a combinatorial rule system (only partly available to consciousness). That we acquire social competence from imperfect evidence and receive explicit instruction only about the consciously accessible rules suggests unlearned resources for social learning, innate and perhaps in part specific to social cognition. Jackendoff argues further that linguistics has a particular interest and role in the study of social cognition. First, a number of important linguistic issues involve social terms: the difference between a request and an order, for example, invokes social dominance. Second, linguistic evidence can provide insights into the conceptual structures involved in social cognition. After outlining how we conceptualize stable social relations (kinship, alliances, dominance hierarchies, and groups) as well as more evanescent relations, Jackendoff discusses rules and other normative principles, arguing inter alia that systems of norms in general offer a more promising object of study than moral principles in particular.

With Chapter 5 in place, the stage is set for the book's second part, which mostly provides detailed examinations of specific conceptual structures implicated in social cognition. Chapter 6 argues that the syntactic distribution of perception verbs requires a basic constituent in conceptual structure -- 'X EXP Y' (glossed as 'X experiences Y') -- that divides these verbs into those that imply a theory of mind ('sees') and those that do not ('looks at'). Theory of mind, on Jackendoff's view, does not constitute a distinct module but rather amounts to the possession of particular resources in the conceptual module. Chapter 7 analyzes how we use psychological and evaluative predicates to frame objective and subjective claims ('Problem P isn't interesting' vs. 'I'm not interested in problem P'). The objective case involves a conceptual constituent 'YA' for a generic person, introduced in the previous chapter's discussion of experience verbs without overt experiencers ('The stew tastes wonderful'). Chapter 8 takes up our conceptualization of intentional action and the linguistic expression of intention. It's argued that 'intend' belongs to a class of actional attitude verbs restricted to self-initiated, non-past-directed actions. Chapter 9 distinguishes eight kinds of conceptualized value and discusses which ontological categories they apply to, their objective and subjective linguistic expression, and their varying conceptual roles. The value system is characterized as an abstract, multi-dimensional calculating system that guides action -- albeit typically in a "quick and intuitive" fashion. Chapter 10 concerns how we conceptualize fairness, reciprocity, and exchange. Drawing upon Chapter 8's discussion of joint intentions, it distinguishes freely chosen reciprocity (including reciprocal altruism) and agreed-upon exchange. Chapter 11 turns to the conceptualization of rights, obligations, and the authority to impose obligations. Rights are analyzed as a relation between an Actor and an Action; obligations require as well someone to whom the Actor is obligated.^[3] Along the way, Jackendoff argues that the language used to characterize these domains (terms of possession for rights, of constraining force for obligations) does not support the hypothesis that these concepts arise from metaphorical extension; rather, the rough association between independently existing conceptual clusters motivates the linguistic collocations. Finally, Chapter 12 briefly speculates about which aspects of social cognition may be innate, which of those may be shared with other primates, and which may be specific to social cognition as opposed to part of a more general cognitive capacity.

Comments

Language, Consciousness, Culture, beyond up-dating Jackendoff's views on a variety of topics, adds a distinctive perspective to the study of social cognition. The comparison with linguistics delineates a framework for the field, and the examination of how social judgments are linguistically expressed supplies a new source of evidence. If at points Jackendoff raises more questions than he (sometimes speculatively) answers, he also sharpens those questions and indicates directions along which answers may be found. The book succeeds as well because it is so rich and thought-provoking: quite a few of its brief asides could themselves form the basis of an interesting research program. I'll try to indicate this richness by raising a few questions about just two of the many topics touched on: consciousness and theory of mind.

Consciousness

I'll remark on three aspects of Jackendoff's views on consciousness: the Intermediate-Level Hypothesis, the impossibility of conscious thought, and the valuation feature ±self-initiated.

Jackendoff, recall, holds that the functional correlates of consciousness are intermediate-level structures, where top-down processing first comes into play and attention is attracted and anchored (phonological structures in the case of linguistic experience). But Prinz (2007), following Bisiach (1992), argues that subliminal perception and neglect show that the occurrence of an intermediate-level structure is not sufficient for consciousness. He suggests that the structures must be attended to as well. Jackendoff, however, while accepting that consciousness and attention have a "close relation" and that consciousness is necessary for attention, does not claim that attention is necessary for consciousness. If I understand him aright, at least some of his cases of "fringe awareness" would exhibit consciousness without attention. (Cf. Jackendoff 1997, p. 197.) Unless he would dispute the putative counter-examples, Jackendoff must in some other way complete his account.

An alternative to Prinz's amendment would be to isolate those intermediate-level structures appropriately related to conceptual structures. This could take several forms. The functional correlates of consciousness might be those intermediate-level structures "poised" (adapting Tye 1997) to activate structures that conceptualize the intermediate-level structures' content features -- or the correlates might be those conceptual structures themselves. Alternatively, the correlates might be "higher-order" conceptual structures that incorporate the intermediate-level structures -- or the intermediate-level structures together with conceptual structures indexed to them.^[4] However developed, consciousness would thus indeed require an intermediate-level structure (so the data that motivate Jackendoff's account would be accommodated), but the occurrence of such a structure would not suffice for consciousness. With the possible exception of the "poised" proposal, Jackendoff rejects these and other "fashionable" views of consciousness (pp. 85-6). But to do so he must answer Prinz's worry in some other way.

I turn to my second remark on consciousness. Jackendoff maintains that we are not conscious of thoughts -- that is, conceptual structures. However, we can be conscious of our thoughts "indirectly" (p. 107):

We are aware of the content of our linguistically expressed thought only by virtue of experiencing phonological images associated with them, plus other images that are inferentially nonefficacious. (p. 83)

It is possible for us to be conscious of our thoughts in a way that is impossible for animals: not through awareness of the thoughts themselves, but through awareness of phonological structures associated with thoughts, which animals lack. (p. 84)

It is unclear, however, in what sense awareness of phonological structure enables consciousness of thought at all. To be sure, on Jackendoff's view, it is the association of phonological structures with conceptual structures that enables us to understand them. Perhaps it is more contentious to claim that we understand what we think via the experience of an associated phonological structure that in turn activates the very same conceptual structure that gave rise to the phonological structure. But, in any event, what is wanted is some connection between this understanding and indirect consciousness of thought. After all, phonological structures are just as much associated with syntactic structures. Should we also say that we are indirectly conscious of syntactic structures in virtue of their correlation with phonological structures?

Jackendoff wants to find within his account of phenomenal consciousness -- or, conscious experience -- some place for a notion of conscious thought, even if only an ersatz. (This is needed not only to accommodate common sense, but also to cash out his own theorizing: Jackendoff does not hesitate to distinguish thought that is and isn't accessible to consciousness -- cf. my summary of Chapter 5.) But perhaps conscious thought is just a different phenomenon. Suppose I am asked what I am thinking and answer, "I was wondering whether that linguistic claim has a counter-example." As I searched for a counter-example, my conscious experience may have included various phonological images. But among them need not have been a phonological image of, say, 'I wonder whether that linguistic claim has a counter-example' or of 'Does that claim have a counter-example?'. If my report of what I was thinking is accurate, then it seems I can consciously think that P without experiencing a phonological image correlated with the relevant conceptual structure.

Finally, some remarks about one of Jackendoff's candidate valuation features: ±self-initiated (in the case of language, experienced as your own speech vs. as another's). Among Jackendoff's marks for being a valuation feature are that it apply to multiple modalities and that it to some extent combine freely with other evaluation features. Accordingly, Jackendoff notes that ±self-initiated applies as well to proprioceptive experience, where it freely combines with ±external: consider voluntary bodily motions and involuntary motions, as well as voluntary and involuntary images of bodily motion. Jackendoff notes, however, that [+external, +self-initiated] visual experience seems impossible (though cf. p. 88, fn. 4). This would seem to hold for taste as well, but not for touch. Why is that? Here's a possible explanation, albeit one that would threaten ±self-initiated's status as an evaluation feature. We can speak and touch voluntarily. But while we can also choose to see in the sense of putting ourselves in a position to see (e.g., by opening our eyes -- and also choose to see something in particular by directing our gaze or otherwise moving), when our eyes are open and otherwise ripe for seeing, arguably the seeing is not something we voluntarily do. The suggestion, then, would be that seeing (likewise tasting) is not accompanied by a relevant doing; and, with those experiences that are accompanied by a relevant doing (hearing the product of one's speaking, visually imagining), it's the doing that supports the "feel" coded by +self-initiated. That is to say, we do not, for instance, experience a bit of language as +self-initiated; rather, in such cases the auditory experience is accompanied by a +self-initiated proprioceptive experience: we experience, as the case may be, speaking as +self-initiated. As Jackendoff (pp. 87-8) is careful to note, "valuations are not characteristics of one's experience as a whole [RJ's italics]. Rather, they are attached to particular percepts and/or images." But if +self-initiated is attached to proprioceptive experiences in these cases, then ±self-initiated does not seem to be multi-modal after all.

It might be replied that [-external, +self-initiated] visual experiences -- i.e., voluntary visual imagery -- and other voluntary imaginings suggest otherwise. After all, it's not clear that our experience of mentally acting is proprioceptive. But it doesn't matter whether it is; it would suffice that we experience mental doings as well as the image, whatever the sensory modality and however the senses are individuated.[5] Another reply might be that self-initiated visual, auditory, and gustatory experiences suffice for multi-modality. But, in the absence of +self-initiated cases, what justifies claiming that the functional correlates encode a lack of self-initiation as opposed to denying ±self-initiated's applicability to these modalities altogether? Finally, one might grant that the feature is not multi-modal but deny that this threatens its candidacy: multi-modal applicability may be a useful mark for a candidate valuation feature to have even if not all valuation features are in fact multi-modal. The discussion nonetheless illustrates a general methodological issue: it can sometimes be difficult, when two kinds of experience A and B as a rule co-occur, to distinguish introspectively which has some felt feature -- all the more so if they are experienced as pair-wise connected (cf. p. 97).

Theory of Mind

I conclude with two remarks on Jackendoff's views on theory of mind -- the ability to ascribe beliefs, desires, and intentions (p. 164), as well as experiences (pp. 206-7), to others. The first concerns its relation to social cognition and our dualistic tendencies; the second concerns Jackendoff's claims about 'looks at' and 'sees'.

Jackendoff emphatically distinguishes theory of mind and the capacity for social cognition. First, we attribute mental states to tigers but do not consider them individuals with whom we can have social relations. Second, some social statuses -- e.g., clan membership -- can obtain regardless of what mental states we attribute. Third, monkeys seem to possess social cognition but not theory of mind.

These considerations are open to debate. First, there are no cognitive blocks to my respecting or taking myself to be respected by a tiger, or to my taking myself to be dominant over or dominated by one. The social possibilities are attenuated, but so are the mental states I can ascribe.^[6] Second, though clan status might not depend on the particular mental states ascribed, it might depend on taking the individual to be a (potential) bearer of such states. As for monkeys, recent research on this contentious topic arguably suggests otherwise (see, e.g., Lyons and Santos 2006).

But suppose we grant Jackendoff's claim. I wish to raise a worry for his further claim that it is the nature of social cognition that accounts for dualist intuitions. Jackendoff (see also Jackendoff 1993, p. 77), like Boyer (2001), Bloom (2004) and others, holds that our dualistic tendencies -- e.g., "culturally ubiquitous belief in supernatural entities . . . that survive death", "no problem conceptualizing persons coming to inhabit different bodies" (p. 162) -- can be explained by a " 'natural joint' in our intuitive modes of thought" (p. 163). The joint is not carved between modules: on Jackendoff's view, physical cognition, social cognition, and theory of mind do not constitute modules, either in his "proprietary format" sense or in any other sense "remotely close to the way the term . . . is commonly used in the literature." (p. 207)^[7] Their development -- both phylogenetic and ontogenetic -- rather involves the availability (and appropriate processing) of the relevant kinds of conceptual structure. The physical, the psychological, and the social constitute different domains -- or, "planes" as he also puts it -- within our conceptual resources.

My question concerns the particular joint upon which his explanation rests. For Jackendoff, the explanation of our dualistic tendencies is not that we think of human beings as occupying both the physical and the psychological domains; it's that we think of them as occupying both the physical and the social domains. But it is unclear that this is so. These matters are difficult to sort out because, as Jackendoff notes, the domains as a matter of fact closely overlap even if they are not coextensive. But consider Jackendoff's example of non-overlap: do our dualistic tendencies fall short of tigers? In fact, it seems just as easy to conceptualize animals surviving their bodily death, metamorphosizing, body-switching, etc. as it is humans. (Cf. Bering and Bjorklund 2004.) It is not clear that this is only so if one anthropomorphizes them or treats them as honorary persons (as Jackendoff suggests we sometimes treat pets).

Finally, I turn to 'looks at' and 'sees.' As noted, on Jackendoff's view, possession of theory of mind involves possessing certain kinds of resources for building conceptual structures. He argues, in particular, via an analysis of the semantics of 'looks at' and 'sees,' that one crucial part of theory of mind is possession of a conceptual primitive 'X EXP Y' (glossed as 'X experiences Y'), possession of which enables the attribution of experiences to others. On Jackendoff's analysis, the conceptual structure associated with a sentence of the form 'X looks at Y' includes at least the following two tiers: [X SENSE_visual Y] and [X AFF], while that associated with 'X sees Y' includes at least: [X SENSE_visual Y] and [X EXP Y].^[8] The tier with 'AFF' (glossed as 'affects') marks what is encoded as Actor and Patient, standard tests for which are the acceptability of, respectively, sentences beginning 'What X/Y did was . . .' and 'What happened to X/Y was . . . .' (Actor and Patient need not align with thematic roles such as agent, theme, goal, etc.) Jackendoff argues that 'EXP' is needed as well to capture the fact that, while the subject of 'X looks at Y' is an Actor, the subject of 'X sees Y' is not -- nor typically can 'see' occur in the progressive.

Jackendoff suggests that the combination of 'SENSE' and 'EXP' "encode[s] the conceptualization of the 'feel' of one's relation to a percept, which has the feature combination [+external, -self-initiated]." (p. 206) But it also enables one to ascribe perception to others. On his analysis, then, the difference between the semantics of 'looks at' and 'sees' marks a major divide in the possession of theory of mind. Without 'EXP,' one may have experiences, but one cannot conceptualize them and thus cannot attribute them.

It's not clear, however, that one can attribute looking at without attributing visual experience or at least the capacity for it. A blind person might be able to direct her eyes towards something, but she cannot look at it. Jackendoff notes that one can look at something without seeing it. But what matters is whether one can look at something without seeing anything, or without having any visual experience. If one can't, it seems that the capacity to attribute looking at already involves the relevant part of theory of mind. Indeed, Jackendoff's analysis seems itself to acknowledge this. For what the conceptual structures associated with 'looks at' and 'sees' have in common is 'SENSE_visual'. Perhaps I am reading too much into 'SENSE_visual' (glossed as 'senses in the visual modality'): Jackendoff writes that "SENSE+AFF yields the verb look, which denotes an observable action," in contrast to 'see' which is "part of theory of mind." (p. 206, my italics) 'Looks at' does indeed denote an observable action, but what it denotes differs from what 'directs one's eyes towards' denotes. If 'SENSE' doesn't capture this difference, then arguably Jackendoff needs to add something else that does.^[9]

One might go further and suggest that ascriptions of looking at ascribe more aspects of theory of mind than do ascriptions of seeing. Mehler and Dupoux (1994, p. 139) claim that 'look' has an element of intentionality that 'see' lacks in that it involves an action, not a state. They presumably don't mean just that the subject of a 'looks' sentence passes the test for AFF or has the thematic role of agent, which is also the case with 'The wind made Bill sneeze,' but rather that looking is typically done intentionally or is conceptualized as subject to voluntary control.^[10]

References

Bering, J., and D. Bjorklund (2004) "The Natural Emergence of Reasoning about the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity," Developmental Psychology 40, pp. 217-33.

Bisiach, E. (1992) "Understanding Consciousness: Clues from Unilateral Neglect and Related Disorders," in A.D. Milner and M.D. Rugg (eds.), The Neuropsychology of Consciousness, Academic Press, pp. 113-38.

Bloom, P. (2004) Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human, Basic Books.

Boyer, P. (2001) Religion Explained, Basic Books.

Eilan, N. (2005) "Joint Attention, Communication, and Mind," in N. Eilan, C. Hoerl, T. McCormack, and J. Roessler (eds.), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds, Oxford University Press, pp. 1-33.

Gross, S. (2005) "The Nature of Semantics: On Jackendoff's Arguments," The Linguistic Review 22, pp. 249-270.

Gross, S. (2007) "Reply to Jackendoff," The Linguistic Review 24, pp. 423-9.

Hauser, M., N. Chomsky, W. T. Fitch (2002) "The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?" Science 298, pp. 1569-79.

Jackendoff, R. (1987) Consciousness and the Computational Mind, MIT Press.

Jackendoff, R. (1992) Languages of the Mind, MIT Press.

Jackendoff, R. (1994) Patterns in the Mind, Basic Books.

Jackendoff, R. (1996) "How Language Helps Us Think," Pragmatics and Cognition 4, pp. 1-34.

Jackendoff, R. (1997) The Architecture of the Language Faculty, MIT Press.

Jackendoff, R. (2002) Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution, Oxford University Press.

Jackendoff, R. (2007) "Linguistics in Cognitive Science: The State of the Art," The Linguistic Review 24, pp. 347-401.

Jackendoff, R., and F. Lerdahl (2006) "The Capacity for Music: What's Special about it?" Cognition 100, pp. 33-72.

Landau, B., and L. Gleitman (1985) Language and Experience: Evidence from the Blind Child, Harvard University Press.

Landau, B., and R. Jackendoff (1993) " 'What' and 'Where' in Spatial Language and Spatial Cognition," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, pp. 217-238.

Lerdahl, F., and R. Jackendoff (1982) A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, MIT Press.

Lyons, D., and L. Santos (2006) "Ecology, Domain Specificity, and the Origins of Theory of Mind: Is Competition the Catalyst?" Philosophy Compass 1, pp. 481-92.

Mehler, J., and E. Dupoux (1994) What Infants Know: The New Science of Early Cognitive Development, Blackwell.

Prinz, J. (2007) "The Intermediate-Level Theory of Consciousness," in S. Schneider and M. Velmans (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Blackwell, pp. 247-60.

Sperber, Dan (2005) "Modularity and Relevance: How Can a Massively Modular Mind Be Flexible and Context-Sensitive?" in P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press, pp. 53-68.

Sperber, D., and D. Wilson (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Blackwell.

Tye, M. (1997) Ten Problems of Consciousness, MIT Press.

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^[1] On musical cognition, see Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) and Jackendoff and Lerdahl (2006). On spatial language and spatial perception, see Landau and Jackendoff (1993). Jackendoff's previous discussions of social cognition include Jackendoff (1992, Chapter 4) and (1994, Chapter 15). Following Jackendoff, I speak of structures, not representations, because it is not part of Jackendoff's view that mental structures exhibit intentionality. In that sense, his is a purely syntactic approach to the mental -- or at least to those aspects of the mental about which he theorizes. Elsewhere, Jackendoff inclines towards a more general skepticism about intentionality. For discussion, see Gross (2005), as well as Jackendoff (2007, p. 353) and Gross (2007).

^[2] A warning to this venue's philosophical audience: Don't be put off by bits where the handling of philosophical matters is quick -- e.g., the unfortunate discussion of Rawls on p. 184. Such are the hazards of ambitious interdisciplinary work. Adapting a remark made by Jackendoff: Everyone's got to give a little.

^[3] It is unclear how Jackendoff might best accommodate Kantian imperfect duties -- such as the duty to help others. Imperfect duties are not obligations to anyone in particular, nor do they seem to be obligations to everyone or to a, or any, generic individual.

^[4] Perhaps the conceptual structures would contain Jackendoff's 'EXP,' mentioned above and discussed below -- crudely, [X EXP [the phonological structure]], or [X EXP [that]] with 'that' indexed to the phonological structure. On this suggestion, if there are creatures capable of conscious experience but not theory of mind, then the possession of 'EXP' could not mark possession of theory of mind -- contra Jackendoff's hypothesis. But he might consider this modification: that what marks possession of theory of mind is the ability to apply 'EXP' to subjects other than oneself. It might be objected that even 'EXP' restricted to the subject itself is too conceptually sophisticated for lower animals capable of conscious experience. But which animals are capable of conscious experience and what rudimentary conceptual resources they possess are empirical questions -- however amorphous and unamenable to current methods. (Alternatively, the conceptual structure could contain 'SENSE' -- see below -- but I am not sure that would free it from involvement in theory of mind.)

In mentioning these higher-order alternatives, I do not say that we are conscious of thoughts. The alternative is just that the functional correlate of conscious experience may be, or include, a thought in the sense of a conceptual structure. As we'll discuss presently, Jackendoff denies that we are conscious of conceptual structures. Indeed, to the extent possible, I am avoiding intentional constructions, given Jackendoff's official eschewal of them. For this reason, it's possible that the higher-order alternative mentioned here bears little resemblance to higher-order views in the literature. Still, these thoughts may be called higher-order -- perhaps even meta-representational -- because of the way they incorporate or are indexed to the intermediate-level structures.

^[5] That our experience of mentally acting does not present itself as bodily does not by itself show that the modality is not proprioceptive; for our experience might be in that respect illusory -- another way in which we are naturally prone to a mistaken dualism (see below). It would be relevant if the neural support for experience of bodily position and motion differs from that for the experience of mental action. But, again, my point does not require an answer to these questions.

^[6] Many hold that we have moral obligations to creatures capable of experiencing pain and that this amounts to a kind of social status they possess. Regardless of whether one agrees, the claim and its basis seem easy enough to understand.

^[7] The modules of Sperber's (2005) "teeming" modularity hypothesis -- on which each concept is itself a module -- would thus have to count as not even remotely close.

Note that, since Jackendoff denies that these joints involve informational encapsulation, he requires some alternative explanation of any apparent difficulties in crossing among them.

^[8] See pp. 192-206 for further explanation and motivation. Incidentally, the example illustrates another feature of Jackendoff's cognitive architecture: even within modules individuated by proprietary format, there are levels -- tiers -- of structure.

^[9] Three notes. First, what 'looks at' denotes differs as well from what 'gazes at' denotes at least in the pared-down, non-mentalistic sense sometimes used in developmental psychology and cognitive ethology. Perhaps 'looks at' is sometimes used this way too, but then the question would be whether the semantics of the term used in this technical context differs from its semantics as used more generally.

Second, for an argument that, at least with young children, the meaning of 'looks at' is not tied to vision, but rather should be glossed as roughly explores with the dominant modality for apprehending objects, see Landau and Gleitman (1985). Whether tied to vision or not, however, they construe looking as involving conscious experience.

Third, Jackendoff also claims that joint attention -- "observing that the other individual is looking where you're looking" (p. 174) -- does not require theory of mind. But some argue that the jointness does. Eilan (2005, p. 1), for example, claims that it requires that the attending be mutually manifest in Sperber and Wilson's (1986) sense, which requires the capacity to represent another's capacity to represent.

^[10] Thanks to Louise Antony, Peter Carruthers, and Barbara Landau for very helpful comments.

NDPR Roger M. White, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-05-38 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Roger M. White, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Continuum, 2006, 163pp., $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780826486189.

Reviewed by Fraser MacBride, Birkbeck, University of London

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Roger White's book on the Tractatus is an exemplary work. It succeeds in introducing the novice to the logical and metaphysical doctrines needed to navigate the archipelago of epigrams that constitute the Tractatus. It also succeeds in advancing our understanding of those doctrines. One is left with a profound impression of the Janus-faced features of the Tractatus, features that enabled Russell and Ramsey to make sense of the Tractatus as a work of discursive genius but eventually led Wittgenstein to recognise that what he had written was nonsense.

White's book (hereafter WTLP) appears in a series of Reader's Guides. Whilst it is written in such a way that it can be read independently of the Tractatus, WTLP admirably fulfils its role of providing a guide to the detail of the latter work that encourages the student to move back and forth between commentary and key passages in the text. WTLP invites favourable comparison with Anthony Kenny's astute and respected Wittgenstein (Penguin, 1973), although White and Kenny differ with regard to the interpretation of a number of important arguments in the Tractatus. However, because WTLP, in contrast to Kenny's book, concentrates solely on the Tractatus, it is able to furnish the reader with a far more thorough-going appreciation of the structure of that work, a vivid understanding of what the Tractatus in its succeeding sections is for. The penultimate section of WTLP also includes a judicious assessment of the recent controversy between those who favour a traditional interpretation of the Tractatus and the proponents of the 'new Wittgenstein'.

However, WTLP does not only exhibit these admirable pedagogical features. It also contains important new interpretations of Wittgenstein's argument(s) for logical atoms, the beguiling but bewildering arguments of 2.0201-2.0211 and 3.23-3.24, interpretations that significantly extend our understanding of the Tractatus. Before outlining White's interpretations of these particular Tractarian arguments it will be worthwhile to convey an impression of the structure of WTLP itself and the insights into the Tractatus it affords.

The overarching theme of WTLP is to make sense of the declared aim of the Tractatus "to set a limit to thought, or rather -- not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts" (Author's Preface, WTLP: 3).^[1] What does it mean to draw a "limit" and why would one want to draw one? It was common ground between Russell and Wittgenstein that Russell's paradox resulted from our transgressing the limits of what may legitimately be thought or said. Russell attempted to provide a resolution of the paradox by establishing a new, scientific way of talking, a perfect language governed by the theory of types, whose strictures on what could legitimately be said would exert a constraining rational influence upon us, preventing our transgressing those limits and straying into paradox and nonsense. But the difficulty with the theory of types is that any attempt to state it violates the theory's own type restrictions. So Russell's attempt to state the limits of language and thought is self-defeating because the theory of types he employs is, by its own lights, nonsense. Wittgenstein therefore proposed an alternative way of drawing a limit to what could legitimately be thought or said. His idea was if we understand the way our ordinary language already works, its implicit logical syntax, then Russell's paradox would already have been dealt with from within, from the resources already given to us. How so? Because, as White puts the point, "a complete account of the logical syntax would set the limits of language, not by stating what those limits were, but simply because the offending sentences would never be generated" (WTLP: 10, see also 24, 119).

To provide a complete account of logical syntax that enables us to appreciate the limits of thought and language Wittgenstein sets himself the extraordinary -- really jaw-dropping -- programme of establishing "the general form of the proposition", the form that captures what is common to every possible proposition. As White explains it, "the general form of a proposition would show the limits of language since it would establish a systematic way of generating every possible proposition, and what could not be so generated would be thereby shown to be nonsense" (WTLP: 11). White breaks this programme down into three stages: first to discover the nature of the proposition; second, to demonstrate that there is such a beast as the general form of a proposition; third, to carry out the technical task of specifying what that form is. The ensuing commentary of WTLP is designed to illuminate in detail the different ways in which the different sections of the Tractatus contribute to the execution of this programme.

White begins his commentary with an extended and careful examination of sections 1-4 of the Tractatus where Wittgenstein is primarily concerned with the first stage of this programme, endeavouring to establish the nature of propositions (WTLP: 22-83). White starts from the simplest of the principles that guide Wittgenstein's thinking about propositions, that a proposition is essentially what is true or false. What does it mean for a proposition to be true or false, the right or the wrong thing to say? It is for a proposition to be answerable to something that sets the standard for rightness and wrongness. So White's Wittgenstein introduces the world as the totality of facts because this is the sum total of what sets the standard of rightness and wrongness for the propositions of our language to meet. This makes the task of the initial sections of the Tractatus one of answering the question: "What is the nature of the relation of the propositions of our language to the world, so that they are true or false according to the way the world is?" (WTLP: 23). The answer, toward which White patiently guides us, is that a proposition is a picture, or a model, of reality. A proposition is itself a fact and therefore capable of sharing a form, a logical multiplicity, with another fact. It is because facts share logical forms that propositions may be intelligibly treated as pictures, or models, of other facts.

The second stage of Wittgenstein's programme is to demonstrate that there is such a thing as the general form of a proposition. Wittgenstein provides an explicit argument for this at the close of section 4 of the Tractatus. To prepare us for this argument, White lays especial emphasis upon the role of compositionality in Wittgenstein's development of the picture theory (WTLP: 70-1, 82-3). A language is compositional if the meaning of a proposition is a function of the words it contains and the way they are put together. Appreciating the compositional structure of language enables us not only to explain our ability to understand novel propositions, as Frege and Davidson have insisted. It also enables us to make sense of a proposition independently of its being true. It is because we understand the meanings of the individual expressions that make up a proposition and the way they have been arranged that we are able to construct a picture, or a model, of the situation that has to obtain for the proposition to be true, even if it isn't. This can only be possible if a proposition derives its significance from its position within a compositional language system. This supplies Wittgenstein with grounds for affirming that there is such a thing as 'the general form of a proposition'. It is the general form of a compositional system of language, a system whose existence is proved by our capacity to understand novel propositions, regardless of whether they are true or false.

Having proved to his own satisfaction that there is such a thing as a general propositional form, Wittgenstein proceeds in section 5 of the Tractatus to the third stage of the programme White has outlined, sketching out the basic structure of the single system in which every proposition would be generated. Proposition 5 of the Tractatus says, "A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions". White sketches Wittgenstein's argument for this claim as emerging from the materials already assembled in the preceding sections. The world has been explained as the totality of facts, where facts are conceived as consisting in the existence or non-existence of states of affairs (combinations of objects). 'Elementary propositions' are introduced as the propositions that directly represent those states of affairs in such a way that there is a 1-1 correspondence between elementary propositions and the states of affairs they represent. It follows that settling the truth-value of every elementary proposition will settle exactly which states of affairs exist and which do not. White continues,

But we would then know everything that is the case, and thus have at our disposal all the information to settle the truth value of any significant proposition whatever: any apparent proposition whose truth value of the elementary propositions could not be answerable to the way the world was. But saying that is tantamount to saying that every proposition is a truth function of elementary propositions. (WTLP: 85-6)

In a tour de force of exposition White then explains how, according to Wittgenstein, every non-elementary proposition can be perspicuously generated from elementary propositions by a finite number of applications of a single truth-operator (WTLP: 86-100).

Wittgenstein begins section 6 of the Tractatus with a statement of the general form of the proposition by giving a variable whose values would include every significant proposition. He thereby completes the programme of implicitly defining the limits of language. For any apparent proposition that fails to be included amongst these values will thereby be exposed as nonsense. The remainder of section 6 is devoted to dismissing, in one way or another, a range of what appear to be counter-examples to drawing the limits of sense where 6 says it is, where the successive application of truth-functional operations to elementary propositions gives out. Not least amongst this range -- that includes logical, mathematical, scientific and ethical claims -- are the statements of the Tractatus itself; they appear to be significant but it defies comprehension to conceive of such claims as merely truth-functional combinations of elementary propositions. White initially focuses on what Wittgenstein says in section 6 about logical truth and the consequences of endorsing his conception of the general form of the proposition for metaphysical enquiry more generally (WTLP: 101-114). But this is preparatory for the culminating discussion of White's book that finally, fully reveals to us the Tractatus' heart of darkness.

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein seeks to avoid paradox by drawing a limit to language. He does so by giving an account of the general form of the proposition according to which paradoxical sentences cannot even be constructed. But, as White lays out very clearly, Wittgenstein's own solution is "every bit as paradoxical as the original paradoxes: once we have realised that, by the same token, [his] solution cannot itself be stated". For Wittgenstein's own account of the general form of the proposition is not a truth-functional combination of elementary propositions. And, as White continues to reflect,

the paradox is clearly exacerbated by the fact that Wittgenstein seems to have been saying precisely what he is arguing cannot be said, and equally we seem to have been able to understand him, and argue for and against the positions he has apparently been putting forward. (WTLP: 119)

Wittgenstein himself draws the conclusion at the close of section 6 that anyone who understands him eventually recognises that what he has said is nonsense, so leading us to the sole statement of section 7 with which the Tractatus concludes, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence". White devotes the penultimate section of his book to canvassing some of the different options that have been put forward for interpreting these passages (WTLP: 118-34). His discussion is critical of the proponents of the 'new Wittgenstein', who favour the view that the Tractatus is just nonsense, the reading of it intended only by its author to perform a therapeutic role. Ultimately, White dismisses the view as a persuasive reconstruction of the Tractatus because he cannot see what therapeutic value to reading nonsense there can be: "After all, self-refuting metaphysical theories, even theories that turn out to be nonsense in their own terms, are hardly a rarity in the history of philosophy" (WTLP: 129). White favours instead a traditional interpretation of the Tractatus according to which Wittgenstein's text is intended to show us things that cannot be put into words, but are manifest in our use of language. What language does is state the facts. So whatever it is that is shown by the Tractatus, but not said, cannot be a fact. White suggests instead that it is a pattern within the facts, not an additional fact, that the Tractatus shows us. But, as White reflects, "the difficulty is thinking through what is meant by talking of such a pattern without making it an additional fact" (WTLP: 133-4).

Many of the interpretations that White develops will be familiar to Tractatus aficionados. But the point is not that these interpretations are new, but that they are done so well in an introductory guise. However White also offers novel interpretations of the Tractatus, key amongst these being his readings of Wittgenstein's arguments for the existence of logical atoms. There are two notorious passages in the Tractatus where Wittgenstein argues for such simples. In the first passage Wittgenstein assumes, for the sake of reductio, that there are no simples. But if there are no simples "then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true" (2.0211). But, Wittgenstein continues, this would be absurd; complexity all the way down would compromise our capacity to "sketch any picture of the world (true or false)" (2.022). Since we can sketch (represent) the world in truth-evaluable ways, it follows that there must be simples. In the second passage Wittgenstein argues from the "requirement that sense be determinate" (3.23) to the requirement for simple signs that pick out simple objects (3.24). Commentators have struggled to offer convincing interpretations of these passages, often interweaving them, often assuming a commitment on Wittgenstein's part to a strong form of bivalence and to a denial of worldly vagueness. White, however, offers a strong case for the claim that these passages offer quite different arguments for simples that have nothing to do with bivalence or vagueness, a case that is backed up by evidence that White gathers from the earlier Notebooks (WTLP: 38-44, 53-60).

White interprets the first passage (2.0201-2.0211) as an argument for simples that ultimately flows from an underlying assumption Wittgenstein makes about representation:

Wittgenstein is insisting on a conception of pictures according to which it is an intrinsic property of a picture that it is a picture, and what it is a picture of. It must be possible to tell that a picture is a picture, and what it is a picture of, from the picture itself without reference to anything outside. (WTLP: 43)

(White also discerns this commitment emerging elsewhere in the Tractatus; WTLP: 69, 108, 143). This assumption turns out to be incompatible with the possibility of the world consisting solely of complex things. It is a feature of complex things that they are capable of fragmenting into their simpler constituents. So if there were only complex things for our words to pick out then it would remain an open possibility that our words were empty because the complex configurations they purported to name failed to exist. In order to assure ourselves that our utterances weren't empty, that they were endowed with "sense", we would therefore be required to independently investigate whether the complexes in questions existed, whether the propositions that said these complexes existed were indeed "true". But this compromises the assumption that it is "an intrinsic property of a picture that it pictures what it does" (WTLP: 43); it makes it an extrinsic matter whether what we have said succeeds in picturing reality at all, requiring us to investigate independently whether something is so, whether a certain complex exists. Wittgenstein therefore concludes that what we say must be analysable into propositions whose names are guaranteed a priori to be non-empty because they refer to simple, necessarily existing things -- propositions that we simply need to grasp in order to understand what state of affairs they picture.

White interprets the second passage (3.23-3.24) as an argument for simples that ultimately flows from an ontological assumption. White draws a distinction between 'vague' and 'unspecific' propositions: "we shall call a proposition 'vague' if there is no clear answer to the question whether it is true or false; we shall call it 'unspecific' if there is a wide range of ways in which it could be true" (WTLP: 55). Thus, for example, "Some of Schubert's late works are typical of early romanticism" is vague because there are no clear-cut criteria for appropriately describing something as early romantic. But it is also 'unspecific' because it does not specify which of Schubert's works are in question. According to White, Wittgenstein's "basic idea is that lack of specificity is a feature of our language, not of the world. The propositions that we utter are all more or less specific, but it makes no sense to talk of the situations in the world that actually make them true or false as lacking specificity" (WTLP: 56). White strives to give us some feeling for Wittgenstein's ontological intuition that the world itself is specific by considering the claim that inflation rose last month. This claim is unspecific (indeterminate) in the sense that it does not specify which financial transactions are responsible for making it true (which shirt was bought at which shop etc.). Nevertheless, we do not think it barely true. If it is true it is because of the specific (determinate) financial transactions that actually take place (because that shirt was bought at that shop etc.). So, if we are to understand how such a claim is capable of being responsive to the way that the world is, it must be possible to analyse the claim that inflation rose last month in such a way that what it says answers to specific states of the world. Wittgenstein's suggestion is that we do so by spelling out the sense of the proposition in terms of a vast disjunction of possible sets of particular financial transactions that suffice for the claim to be true.

Now, according to White's interpretation, claims about complex things are invariably unspecific. For example, "the claims we make about a watch will typically be compatible with a wide variety of detailed ways in which the watch has been assembled" (WTLP: 59); for example, when I say that my watch has stopped, there are many particular ways in which this may have come about, concerning particular cogs and wheels, but I do not specify which. To be responsive to the way the world is, propositions about complex things, like my watch, must be therefore analysable into disjunctions of specific propositions. But since claims about complex things are invariably unspecific it follows that the specific propositions into which they are analysed must consist solely of names for simple things.

This is merely an outline of the different interpretations White uses to distinguish Wittgenstein's arguments for simples. And, of course, there are many questions to be raised about the case White presents. Nevertheless, it should already be evident that in seeking to disentangle these arguments White succeeds in opening up important questions about the underlying conceptions of representation and ontology that shape them. Moreover, White does so in a way that makes evident to the novice what is interesting about reading the Tractatus for its own sake.^[2]

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^[1] See L. Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuiness (Routledge: London, 1961).

^[2] Thanks to Nick Jones and Roger White.

NDPR Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-05-35 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory, Columbia University Press, 2008, 386pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780231144803.

Reviewed by Andrew Bowie, Royal Holloway, University of London

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The 'philosophy of music', especially in its analytical guise, has rarely faced up to the problem, already suggested by Schleiermacher, that establishing philosophical claims about works of art presumably entails already having an agreed system of philosophy upon which to base those claims. This would, though, 'mean deferring the matter to infinity', because such a system requires universal consensus.^[1] The agenda of the analytical philosophy of music has, of course, been notably restricted, to the point where it is arguable that it is not really about music at all, but is rather an exercise in ontology which seeks to define the essence of the object 'musical work'. Is the work, for instance, the score or the 'compliance class' of all performances of the score? Does the musical object express anything, mean anything? And so on. Significantly, musicians don't, in my experience, ever worry about this. Moreover, as Lydia Goehr pointed out in her first book, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, the notion of musical work that dominated the analytical philosophy of music until recently did not really exist until the eighteenth century anyway, so ontological claims are rather out of place, given the necessity for an adequate consideration of history in understanding music in philosophical terms.

By seeing music as best dealt with predominantly in terms of 'conceptual analysis' (which, since Quine, looks increasingly like no more than figuring out how one can best use words, rather than a method exclusive to philosophy), analytical philosophy of music seemed to feel justified in ignoring large parts of the history of philosophy (including recent and contemporary work in European philosophy) in which music was a significant issue. It presumably did so on the grounds that it could learn nothing from such approaches, because they were not up to speed on how to do philosophy properly. (The absence of, for example, Adorno is almost never discussed, so one has to guess why he is absent.) What was pretty well universally the case in the analytical philosophy of music was the sense that there was nothing which philosophy could learn from music, because the job of philosophy is to give a correct conceptual characterisation of whatever its object of analysis is supposed to be. That one of the progenitors of the analytical approach to philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, made the following remarks, seems incomprehensible, then, if considered in the terms of the analytical philosophy of music: 'It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?',^[2] and 'People today think that scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to give them pleasure. That the latter have something to teach them never occurs to them'.^[3] The future of the philosophy of music will, one hopes, be informed by this stance, rather than by the incipient arrogance of some analytical approaches.

The subtitle of Lydia Goehr's new book makes it clear that she does not adhere to the division of labour assumed in the analytical tradition: the essays are not just about music, they are in some sense 'musical'. This means, for example, that her concern with 'elective affinity' is not intended as a general argument about philosophy and music, but rather has to do with the kind of links between ideas, music, politics, etc., which are in some respects analogous to the links between thematic and other material in a piece of music. Goehr's book can be seen, then, as belonging to the 'philosophy of music' in both the subjective and the objective genitive (see Bowie 2007).^[4] Instead of music just learning from philosophy, philosophy can also learn from music: 'There is no such thing as the philosophy of music if by this we mean that philosophy is the clean and established method by which to capture the musical object. Philosophy and music stand instead in a mutually informing relationship' (p. 41). In chapters on such varied topics as, among others, the movement of music and the movement of philosophy, music and the end of art, 'the experimental', film and music, and opera in America, Goehr explores the entanglement of music and philosophy which is a feature of the modern period.

The theoretical spiritus rector for the book is Adorno, and this is a source of both the book's strengths and its weaknesses. The problem with Adorno with regard to the philosophy of music can be characterised in terms of the contrast between his ability to write philosophy which is musical in its suggestiveness and complexity, and his sometimes misplaced advocacy of what one can term 'philosophical music'. This is music which, for example, supposedly exemplifies the 'state of the material' (i.e. the most advanced techniques of a period) that composers have to live up to if their music is not to be part of the 'culture industry'. Such subordination of music to philosophy leads Adorno, for example, to the absurdities of his attacks on jazz (attacks which recently published material in the notes to his Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction suggests he began to question in later life), and his schematic rejection of Stravinsky in favour of Schoenberg in Philosophy of New Music (which he also questioned later in his career). One source of this subordination is Adorno's apocalyptic version of his judgement on the state of reason in a modernity epitomised by the Holocaust, that is summed up in the dictum that 'The whole is the untrue'. It is when Goehr's book adopts too much of Adorno's (admittedly in some respects historically understandable) apocalyptic vision that it seems at its weakest.

Goehr's book offers: 'a history of attraction and reaction (hence, the elective affinities) of music to philosophy, drama, birdsong, crime, film, and nationhood. As philosophical histories of thought and idea, they explore concepts such as movement, affinity, musicality, naturalism, experimentalism, displacement, actuality, and possibility' (p. ix). The apparent series of category clashes makes it clear that one cannot approach the book just at the level of argumentative assertion. This is as it should be: given the issues raised by the relationship between music and philosophy, one should not expect another philosophical run through the tired agenda of the philosophy of music. However, if we see the world as it appears in the following remark, it becomes hard to grasp the diversity of significances of music in modernity it suggests, because they will all, according to Goehr, be subject to the deceptions of the false whole: 'Adorno consequently preoccupies himself lifelong with the question of what contemporary form art and nature can appear in, given that the whole now is false' (p. 38). Art (leaving apart nature, which Adorno has some deeply interesting ways of rethinking, beyond the Kantian view of it as the system of necessary laws) can, however, appear in so many forms that the philosophical issue as suggested here is questionable.

Take an example of how art for Adorno and Goehr 'can appear':

Later in life, Adorno also mentioned Maurizio Kagel's score for the 1965 film Antithèse: Film for One Performer with Electronic and Everyday Sounds, a film in which Adorno found what he most often found in works he considered genuinely new: a space for repressed individuals to speak through silence in opposition to the articulated and compromised word. (p. 248)

Although what is meant here can play a valid role in some kinds of modernism in certain contexts, this view relies too much on a philosophical topos which only allows a certain kind of art to speak. It can, though, hardly be said that this specific work played any significant role in social or aesthetic developments, however admirable some of Kagel's work could be in challenging stuffy attitudes in music. Messages in bottles are all very well, but most of them do get lost.

Goehr is aware of the general problem I am suggesting, as the beginning of the following passage indicates:

if the world were really fully or finally administered, there would be no point going on with philosophy or thinking. Although Adorno writes as though making a final claim -- as, say, 'the whole is untrue' -- he intends through the dialectical movement of his argument to produce a rupture in the claim. He must produce a rupture in the claim because, in a genuinely immanent critique, the ongoing movement of the argument is the only way left to break through the world's contemporary deceit. One deceit is to claim that the world accommodates all differences while in fact it reduces everything to the always and everywhere the same. (p. 22)

The final sentence returns us, of course, to the original problem. If commodification is so total, claiming that this is the case results in the problem of how to articulate at all what is different. Goehr's universalising claim is presumably itself subject to the same reduction that she wishes to criticise with the claim. Indeed, the claim is rather too close to the kind of mimicking of Adorno present in his uncritical admirers, which she elsewhere avoids by the subtlety of her detailed explorations, and which is itself an example of the kind of commodification of thinking that Adorno's own best work seeks to avoid.

The Adornian stance present in the following: 'Only works, Adorno concludes, that appear as "politically dead," because they commit themselves to genuinely autonomous form, have a chance of being "uncompromisingly radical"' (p. 201) seems historically inappropriate to many kinds of art. Jazz history, for instance, suggests why. Some of the greatest modern jazz was radical both aesthetically and politically: its role in the Civil Rights movement, both at the time of the movement and in what led to the movement, should not be underestimated. Adorno was clearly wrong in this respect about the music he thought of as 'uncompromisingly radical', i.e. Second Viennese School, and this ought to make us suspicious of the methodology behind such claims. Goehr cites another example from his disastrous recently published work on the radio, which repeats the basic problem: 'The symphony that once promoted the illusion of pent-up time was now experienced as identical to the forty-minute slot granted in the day, between meals, advertising, and newsbreaks' (p. 242). This might well be the case for some people (need that be such a problem?), but symphonies on the radio were a source of revelation to me as a student, despite the technological limitations. I then went on to spend large parts of the time I studied in Berlin in the concert hall. The point is that when one looks at the empirical detail of such phenomena there is nearly always an aspect which resists the totalising philosophical claim.

The danger here is admittedly that, by citing the fairly obvious exceptions to Adorno's and Goehr's overly totalising claims, one may appear complacent about what lies behind the claims, namely the desire to be vigilant about culture, in the name of preventing a repetition of the nightmares of the past. The task for work on the relationship between philosophy and music is to find new ways of dealing with these issues -- which have been almost constitutively absent from the English-language philosophy of music -- that take more account of the specifics of our own historical situation. This situation may indeed share more than one would like with the situation as Adorno saw it, but this has to be established through detailed analysis of real cultural phenomena, rather than assumed on the basis of a questionable philosophical diagnosis of the state of the modern world. Goehr's book offers lots of material for the former, for instance in excellent passages on experimental art, or on Beethoven's Ninth, but it at times relies too much on the philosophical diagnosis for analysing that material.

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^[1] F.D.E Schleiermacher, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, (Berlin, Reimer, 1842), p. 48.

^[2] In ed. Rush Rhees, Ludwig Wittgenstein Porträts und Gespräche, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), p. 160.

^[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 36.

^[4] Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy and Modernity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).