Neutral Monism

By Gary Berg-Cross

My education was a bit deficient so I don’t remember running into the idea of neutral monism as part of my training in Psychology and the questions of world materialism and mind idealism.  A new book by Thomas Nagel is provocatively entitle:is provociisi “Mindand Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.” It features a skeptical take on materialism, but a naturalistic and not theistic alternative. Nagel is well known for an interesting and influential 1974 paper called "What is it like to be a bat?" He used the bat view of the world to argue that phenomenological facts about consciousness are not so obviously reducible to physical facts. In his new book he argues that lack of progress in materialistically explaining  suggests he is right in rejecting naïve materialist explanations.  Early on Nagel defines materialism succinctly as follows:
 

Materialism is the view that only the physical world is irreducibly real, and that a place must be found in it for mind, if there is such a thing.  This would continue the onward march of physical science, through molecular biology, to full closure by swallowing up the mind in the objective physical reality from which it was initially excluded. (p 37)

I’m not convinced by Nagel’s anti-materialist arguments about the irreducibility of mind rather than matter, although I doubt reductionist approaches that try to explain everything in reductionist concepts. I like evolutionary explanations for the emergence of cognition and the related concept of consciousness.  But I did find the discussion of neutral monism stimulating, if only because I had missed its presence in thinkers I had studied. I also appreciated Nagel's conversational style and in Mind and Cosmos and his frank admission that his aim "is not so much to argue against reductionism as to investigate the consequences of rejecting it". This blog is not so much about that as a some intro to neutral monism.

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Are you an author? Learn about Author CentralAs covered in the Wikipedia entry neutral monism is the philosophical/metaphysical view that:

 the mental and the physical are two ways of organizing or describing the same elements, which are themselves "neutral," that is, neither physical nor mental. This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things. Rather, neutral monism claims the universe consists of only one kind of stuff, in the form of neutral elements that are in themselves neither mental nor physical. These neutral elements might have the properties of color and shape, just as we experience those properties. But these shaped and colored elements do not exist in a mind (considered as a substantial entity, whether dualistically or physicalistically); they exist on their own.

It’s an exciting idea of continuity of reality rather than dichotomy and some faint versions of it were quietly posed in works by some of my favorite philosopher – James, Russell and Dewey as cited. 

OK, it wasn’t just my education. The ideas were probably too subtle for me to grasp when I dashed over their discussion of mind-body dualism. William James, for example, followed Peirce in developing Pragmatism as a way of getting beyond dualist debates on realistic materialism and idealism. 

According to an easy summary and readable source by David Pears (answers.com):

 the philosophy of mind adopted by Russell in his middle period was neutral monism, which denies that there is any irreducible difference between the mental and the physical and tries to construct both the mental world and the physical world out of components which are in themselves neither mental nor physical but neutral. He adopted this theory because he believed that there was no other way of solving the problems that beset his earlier dualism (see Russell's philosophy of mind: dualism). The book in which he developed the theory, The Analysis of Mind (1921), is an unusual one. The version of neutral monism defended in it is qualified in several ways and it is enriched with ideas drawn from his reading of contemporary works on behaviourism and depth psychology. The result is not entirely consistent, but it is interesting and vital especially where it is least consistent.

John Dewey followed James in seeing more continuity between mind and brain than a gulf. Like many my brief exposure to philosophy courses left me somewhere in the pragmatic camp with a healthy respect for reality-based materialism as the hull hypothesis. Dewey account of phenomena like intelligence does have a naturalistic basis that integrates biology & psychology as does Nagels’ new work.  But one is surprised to see have non-reductionist subjects of intentions and communication ala social psychology as front and center in Dewey’s new view. It is interesting to bump into some of these thinker’s metaphysical struggles to reconceptualize our view of nature to resolve the issues, even if one does not follow into a form of panpsychism with mind and consciousness everywhere and everytime in the universe. 

Images

 

Nagel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel

Mind-Body Dualism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dualism-vs-Monism.png

Something Monism: http://telicthoughts.com/category/philosophy/

A Matter of Semantics - Words, Concepts and Things

By Gary Berg-Cross

Modern society bombards us with words and no more than during a political season when candidates compete for our attention with punchy slogans and catchy phrases. It seems too close to the word manipulation of George Orwell’s 1984. 1984 isn’t yet the good old days, but people seem pretty confused by the flood of political language as we descend into a world of thin, distorted or made up meanings. Paid wordsmiths now hawk a language of fractional facts, non-sense, almost sense and truthiness that is captured in the Lewis Carroll quote:

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

In ordinary conversations, when people debate a point and the words they are using for discussion, they often backhand this disagreement with the phrase “It’s a matter of semantics.” Well perhaps, but that seems to trivialize meaning a bit. It’s more than a choice of words. Semantics is about the meaning of things, which seems more important than a making it something like “you say Po-tat-o and I say Po-ta-to.” 

In comparison to marketers and political writers most layman seem to understand little about semantics, but it is a deeply refined field over the last 120 years or so. Semantics is often contrasted with syntax in language. Syntax gets at the structure of language expressions, while semantics has a focus on the relations between a class of signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs, and symbols, and what they stand for or denote. The meaning of meaning is a lot to think about so one needs a bit of model to help.

A core of what is written above and what we should know about semantics, readily applied  at least simple, single word semantics, is represented by what is called a triangle of reference shown below. BTW. it is also known, as noted in Wikipedia, as the triangle of meaning, and the semantic triangle. A version of the triangle, shown below, was published in The Meaning of Meaning (1923) by Ogden and Richards^, but a more sophisticated version was penned earlier by the great American, pragmatic philosopher Charles Peirce, but also by French linguist Sassaure.

Ok, so what does this model assert? It’s a model of how linguistic symbols are related to the objects (or whatever) they represent. These are the 3 corners of the triangle and each relates to the other. I represent concept parts in sq. brackets [] and word parts in quotes ‘’ “ to make clear which vertex part is being discussed. 

Let’s start with the referent, which in my example is some thing we recognize as a [tree]. This is to say that we have a concept [] or category for the referent part of reality. A concept should be adequate and fit reality. That's part of a meaning, but only part. And we have a word for that concept “tree.” That's another part. If we say “tree” for that concept , we are correct. If we say “bush”, well close, but not correct. "Bush" shows we've used the wrong category.  That concept is not adequate for the isolated part of reality that makes up the referent - tree in reality.

A clearer example is when, say a child, has an initial concept for the category of thing that we see in the world –[bird]. If we categorize them by a flying attribute a child can quickly realize, or be told, that a flying thing I/we call a “plane” would then be classified as  [bird]. Not true, or at least we can do better and not be so confused as to not mean what we say. So the child should align the concept and referent part and not use the word "bird" for it.

And what about an ostrich? Not all birds fly. 
So I might make several types of mistakes in relation to a concept for a part of reality and its name. The correct, scientific alignment is that birds have feathers. That's a much better, consistent model for bird that aligns with we see when we test the world systematically with observations. Here we have the very important point that there should be a relation between our words and things.  The connection is through our thoughts but they are fallible. 

And even here the semantic game is difficult, since what we call "dinosaurs" seem to have had feathers. We have different names for things along an evolutionary path as our knowledge or reality advances.

So “it’s a matter of semantics" turns out to cover a pretty complicated, cognitive and scientific situation. Meaning is not in the referent of something like a tree. It’s isn’t just in the concept we have or in the words we use. When we are expressing ourselves with language the meaning is in the relation of 3 parts and is constructed.

There’s the rub. Or at least a starting part of a much deeper, but interesting story of semantics.

You can also see another challenge in the diagram in that the part of reality that I've tried to isolate and call "tree" is embedded in a larger context.  I could call it "tree in a yard" or "tree near a cemetery." What  I call it depends on the concepts evoked and this my meaning.  Or digging deeper into what Cognitive Science has revealed, the mental models we have that organize our understanding of the world. Another person hearing the phrase "tree in a yard" may have a similar concept and comprehend it in a similar way, but it is in this complicate conceptual processing that meaning comes about. Thinking fast with associative memory as discussed in my earlier blogs plays a big part in what meaning we come to.

When we are communicating we may share a common vocabulary, but differ on how we hook them up to our concepts. What do we mean by a term like “god”, “pro-life”, "legitimate rape" or “American”? Hooking "American" and "Exceptionalism" together is not just a syntactic affair and not something that has one, consistent meaning as discussed in earlier blogs. 

These are all pretty complex affairs and often used with different referents.  Using different words can evoke many different concepts in a cognitive agent.  The referents aren’t clear and the concepts are varied even in normal life let along in the wolf whistle world of current politics . Misunderstandings fly by and sometimes intentionally so as meanings get bent to a Humpty Dumpty purpose.  

Oh, and by the way, that is a third part of language - the pragmatics of what we say which is driven by what we are trying to communicate or not communicate.  We may just be trying to confuse someone's concepts and take over the usual meaning of words.  Over time words get weighed down by various associations. "Indian" used to mean something a bit evil, but the concept has evolved as we have gotten away from the Indian Wars.

This side of Socrates many don’t seem to make an effort to connect the parts and communicate. Next time you hear that it is “just a matter of semantics” you might have some concepts and new words to communicate back to the speaker.

                                          Image Credits

Semantic triangle: after http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ogden_semiotic_triangle.png

Tree: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/tree-in-grave-yard-danny-jones.html

God as a concept: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christianpiatt/2012/01/atheism-a-null-hypothesis-on-god/