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Here are a pair of very quick arguments I have cooked up in support of the thesis that, contrary to Descartes’ account, souls must be spatially located:
The argument from phenomenal experience (APE)
1) Phenomenal experiences tend to truthfully transmit information about the world.
2) It feels like I am in my office.
3) I am a soul.
4) Thus, a soul is in my office.
5) But if a soul is in my office, then souls must have spatial location.
6) Therefore [from 4 & 5] souls must have spatial location.
The argument from massive deception (AMD)
1) We frequently describe ourselves as being spatially located.
2) We are essentially immaterial souls.
3) Therefore we frequently describe immaterial souls as being spatially located.
4) It is either the case that immaterial souls are spatially located or they are not.
5) Assume that it is not the case that immaterial souls have spatial locations.
6) If immaterial souls do not have spatial locations and if (1) is true, then (if (2) is true) we are engaging in massive unintentional deception when we describe ourselves as spatially located.
7) Generally speaking, If believing in a metaphysical thesis necessitates believing that ordinary language users are engaged in massive unintentional deception, then we have grounds to reject that thesis.
8) Therefore [from 5, 6, 7] we should reject the thesis that immaterial souls lack spatial location.
9) Therefore [from 4 & 8] souls must have a spatial location.
I will try to get back to these later, and hang some flesh on the bones. But I welcome any comments in the interim.
Friday, August 8, 2008
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10 comments:
I'll try not to take up too much space this time...
Re: the phenomenological argument
First, premise (4) doesn't actually follow from (1)-(3). At best, you could get "(3.5) Thus, it feels like a soul is in my office" (from 2 & 3); and "(4*) Thus, there is some reason to believe a soul is in my office"(from 1 & 3.5). But even this might require a premise about having a phenomenal experience of your soul being in your office (maybe). Plus, setting aside the other concerns, moving from one soul having spatial location to all souls necessarily having spatial location is a bit of a hasty generalization (i.e., (5) is fallacious on its face). It probably goes without saying that I think (3) requires an argument of its own.
Re: massive deception (i think 'error' is more appropriate than 'deception'). So much to say... but I'll limit myself to this: what's the reasoning behind (7)? Given the overwhelming number of ordinary language users who self-identify as their body, your premise (7) would give us reason to reject your premise (2). But why should our metaphysics be slave to ordinary language? If that were so, we would still be metaphysically committed to the ancient gods of Olympus, the four humors of bodily fluids, caloric, the distinct existences of Hesperus and Phosphorus, and all sorts of widespread superstitions. But I take it that the very purpose of philosophy is to rid ourselves of such false beliefs.
**Adam, your comments are always as welcome as they are typically insightful and decisive. You said about APE:
First, premise (4) doesn't actually follow from (1)-(3).
At best, you could get "(3.5) Thus, it feels like a soul is in my office" (from 2 & 3); and "(4*) Thus, there is some reason to believe a soul is in my office"(from 1 & 3.5). But even this might require a premise about having a phenomenal experience of your soul being in your office (maybe).
**Agreed, I think I might have laid that out better than I did. I settled for premises that might have been a little more tightly hewn.
Plus, setting aside the other concerns, moving from one soul having spatial location to all souls necessarily having spatial location is a bit of a hasty generalization (i.e., (5) is fallacious on its face).
**This seems less troublesome to me. If there is some reason to think (as (1) through (4*) show) that there is a soul in my office, then it surely follows that either all souls are spatially located, or only my soul is spatially located. Do I really need to discharge the assumption that there is nothing so unique about my soul? It seems like I am guilty of nothing more here than most metaphysicians of mind, who assume, for instance, that other minds exist, or that by reflecting on the nature of their mental states they can find some general features of all mental states. Perhaps there are no other souls, in which case nobody else will have the sort of phenomenal experience of their own spatial location that I am appealing to, it is a risk I am willing to run.
It probably goes without saying that I think (3) requires an argument of its own.
**Agreed, however, since I offered APE in contrast to the Cartesian account of the human soul, I hardly think that my dialectical opponents will deny (3).
Re: massive deception (i think 'error' is more appropriate than 'deception'). So much to say... but I'll limit myself to this: what's the reasoning behind (7)?
**The thinking that (7) is trying to capture comes in the writing of metaphysicians (like David Lewis, John Schaffer, Charlie Martin, Peter Unger, and others) who see their primary task as conceptual analysis. These sorts of thinkers are taking folk usages, and folk conceptions, and trying to work up metaphysical theory to fit as much of these usages and conceptions as possible. It is seen weakness for a conceptual analysis to stray so far from ordinary usage that we end up engaged in widespread unintended error (or deception).
But why should our metaphysics be slave to ordinary language?
** There is a difference between being a slave to ordinary usage and being mindful of that usage. We should only be willing to tell everyone that they have been entirely, emphatically, wrong, when we have the strongest possible evidence to do so, the principle analytical modesty surely applies.
Given the overwhelming number of ordinary language users who self-identify as their body, your premise (7) would give us reason to reject your premise (2).
**Two points here:
1) I would like to see some X-Phi results on how people self identify. My guess would be that they would say that they are where there body is (which is the point of my argument), but I am willing to bet that they would not say that they ARE their bodies.
2) Premise (2) is not up for grabs, both the Cartesian dualist and I agree that it must be true.
You're right, those who do not think that souls are spatially located will have to explain why the folk say 'they are where their bodies are' while also explaining the fact that (at least 1/2 the folk) think that they are 'more then just their bodies'.
However, if xphi is going to be interesting here (and I'm not so sure it will be) it's because it's going to slice both ways. Maybe it even hurts AMD more than it helps it.
That is, those who think that souls are spatially located have to explain why the folk do not think that souls are spatially located! I don't have any data on this, but I'm pretty sure the folk think your entire thesis is preposterous. That's why I'm surprised to see you leaning on ordinary language here, since after all, it's just an unintuitive view you hold.
So let's assume that the folk find the idea of a spatially located soul in the office silly. I think it's a safe bet. Simultaneously, they also intuit like you say in AMD. How will you proceed? 1) Both you and your rivals can either give some kind of a pragmatic account reconciling the view with natural language, 2) Accept a new metaphysical view that respects the folk intuition, or 3) bite the bullet, argue that the folk are wrong about the certain metaphysical claims they hold.
I leave it up to you to decide the best course, but I bet that Descartes has the upper hand.
**Disclaimer for previous post: I should comment that the assumptions we've both made about folk intuitions in this area are just that, assumptions!
One part of experimental philosophy project argues along the following lines: intuitions are largely products of numerous irrelevant factors; among these factors is the influence cultural traditions, superstitions, and values have on our concepts; insofar as we are appealing to intuitions to support a universal hypothesis, we have to be sure that our intuition is not influenced by culture-specific variables. This is the sort of reasoning, I take it, that motivates papers like Machery, Mallon, Nichols, & Stich's "Semantics Cross-Cultural Style".
In this case, I don't see why we even need any experimental data to say that the ordinary language usage of spatially-located souls is culturally-specific. There are millions of people who do not self-identify as a soul: for example, a central tenet of Buddhism (one of the largest "religions", with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of worldwide practitioners) is the denial of any enduring 'self'; so, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who deny that there is a soul in the office. Add to these the millions and millions of atheists, and you've got a pretty significant number of ordinary language users who straight up doubt the existence of a soul (and, thus, the claim that the soul is spatially located in the office). This is why it's so difficult to run ordinary language arguments on topics that take as fundamental a controversial claim (i.e., "there are souls").
Re: the APE,
APT: "Do I really need to discharge the assumption that there is nothing so unique about my soul? It seems like I am guilty of nothing more here than most metaphysicians of mind, who assume, for instance, that other minds exist"
AA: Yes! Unlike the metaphysicians of mind, who provide arguments for thinking that others are also minded (e.g., Augustine/Mill's Argument from Analogy, Pargetter's Inference to the Best Explanation), you seem to be taking jumping straight to the assumption. Moreover, souls are unlike minds in that we seem to have first-person access to our ideas, thoughts, beliefs, desires, and other (presumably) mental events/entities; so it's not immediately clear (to me, at least) that running the same sort of arguments for souls as metaphysicians of mind run for minds is going to work.
I don't think that the motivation for the Machery et al paper is that 'intuitions are largely products of numerous irrelevant factors' or any such notion. The motivation (as i'm sure you know) is that philosophers shouldn't assume intuitions from the armchair to decide some philosophical argument...precisely for this reason that philosopher's intuitions about what the folk think (about a really famous theory of reference) seemingly vary to that of what everyone else thinks about language ussage, in this case cross-culturally.
So yeah, it's wrong for philosophers to assume intuitions (for sure!). But is that what's happening here? I think what's really happening here is that lots of potential xphi results in this area (muddled as it is) will end in a draw in this argument about whether a soul has spatial location or not. It's because both sides, spatialists and non-spatialists, suffer conflicting folk intuitions about various parts of their analysis...(whether the difference is cross-cultural or whatever):
Spatialists have to account for the fact that people often use spatial terms to locate while also claiming that they have a soul that is not spatially located (or something like this) and Non-spatialists have to explain why the folk seemingly reject some of the claims it makes about the soul's location (or something like that). Note: both sides think about souls, so both sides have to account for that big group of folk non-soul attributions you mention, so maybe a red herring in this particular debate between dualists.
So, we have these varying intuitions, for whatever reason, that conflict with both of these rival theories. So which theory can best square with this (hypothesized) data? I suggested 3 strategies in the former post. I won't suggest anything more, since this is really weird and deep dualist territory for me to be venturing.
I really agree that this is a tough place to run clear OL arguments, geeze! However, just at face value (and in the dualist context), it seems like spatialists and non-spatialists are neither straightforwardly the victor by appeal to OL
It may have been too strong to call such influences "irrelevant", but I think, Wes, that you and I aren't really disagreeing here. Yes, x-phi is partially about ensuring that the individual philosopher's intuition isn't purely idiosyncratic; but it's also concerned, analogously, with making sure that those intuitions that are common to the community aren't cultural eccentricities. Both programs aim at keeping the philosopher honest, so to speak.
I think we also agree that there's no need for x-phi here: you, because you think potential results will inevitably cut both ways; me, because i think the demographic data are already there for the taking.
Finally, I think we agree that the entire dialectic seems to reject Taylor's premise (7), and vice-versa. That is, presuming that souls exist and that the self is, essentially, the soul automatically presumes that millions atheists are mistaken; the whole debate about souls being spatially-located "necessitates believing that ordinary language users [namely, those who don't believe in souls] are engaged in massive unintentional deception." Thus, either (7) is an unacceptable premise, given the dialectic, or, according to (7), we have grounds for rejecting the entire dialectic.
Sound about right to you?
I want to say that 3. is a sleight of hand - we describe souls as being spatially located also in our dreams - "my soul was flying over the clouds like a bird". Thus the location of our soul is only relative to an interior, imaginative space, more or less mapped to objective exterior space.
The space of consciousness/soul is not physical. It is an abstract, higher dimensional space that contains various physical and imaginative spaces as optional.
If it were located in a physical space, then we would always be aware where our souls are, like we are aware where our heads are.
A sleight of hand HC? Seems to me like Adam's third premise is just a logical consequence of the argument sequence from 1-2.
The argument isn't just what we speak of in everyday conversations (or in dreams). The point is that
A) We all spatially locate. Crudely speaking, "HC is at BuffaloPhilosophy."
B) However, if HC is a dualist, than again crudely, "HC is a soul."
C) So given this metaphysical commitment about the things we attribute to the I or the res cogitans in (B), combined with our practices in (A), we get "HC's soul is at BuffaloPhilosophy"
So, I think many people agree with your intuition that pace Adam "the space of soul is...an abstract, higher dimensional space". But you should give arguments that support that view, perhaps by challenging one of the premises above.
Reading this entire thread I want someone to tell me what you all suppose a soul to be. What is a soul? Is it the thing we each call "I"?
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