Awareness Monism (8/11): A metaphilosophical point: AM as a “real metaphysical hypothesis”
[This blogpost is a part of the series Awareness Monism, originally my Master’s thesis. Go to the disambiguation page here.]
6. A metaphilosophical point: AM as a “real metaphysical hypothesis”
A distinction can be made between “factual” and “non-factual” questions, in this sense: answers to factual questions are either true or false, i.e. they work with pre-defined concepts and from agreed upon axioms, whereas answers to non-factual questions are proposals of meaning for the term(s) the question operates with, i.e. they are proposals for how to talk about reality, where to cut it, about what is valuable to notice and include in our concepts. The meanings of the terms in factual questions are settled, whereas the answers to non-factual questions are themselves offered as different ways to settle the concepts, i.e. different ways to draw boundaries into the world. Different answers to non-factual questions therefore yield definitional or conceptual disagreements, and deciding between them is a matter of considering their usefulness/pragmatic value, relative to some goal. That means they also normally reflect a difference in values, i.e. the fact that different people have different life-orientations—they notice and care about different things, and ascribe different interpretations and valuations to the same things.
Factual questions either concern empirical matters and so are settled empirically (for example: “how many toes does this frog have?”, where the criteria for what constitues a “toe” are already set), or they concern matters beyond our empirical capacity, and so cannot be settled empirically. I call the latter type of question “real metaphysical” (or “transcendental”, or “epistemically horizonal”) questions: factual questions the answers to which are in principle not determinable with the kind of certainty we can normally have about empirical matters, because they concern things beyond the horizon of intersubjective experience and thus empirical knowledge. For example, if we want to answer the question “does the cat sit on the mat?”, we simply check the empirical data about the matter; and intersubjective agreement is normally deemed sufficient for “certainty” about such questions. But we (as humans) cannot know how it feels to be a bat; whether our own experience of red feels the same as the experience of red of someone else; whether we actually live in a simulation; or whether there is an afterlife—these realities, be they one way or another, go beyond the horizon of our knowledge, and so are “transcendental”, and topics for “real metaphysics”.
It occurs to me that not all so-called philosophical disagreements that seem and are normally taken to constitute genuine disagreements about the nature of reality actually are such disagreements. Rather, some of them reflect a difference in conceptual frameworks, approaches to, or interpretations of some philosophical problem. These different, seemingly conflicting, views don’t describe different possible realities, but are different proposals for how to talk about reality, i.e. about which aspects of reality are the most salient. And what is salient, of course, depends on what we value. So, I propose, they are not mutually incompatible descriptions of what is going on, but different stories about what is going on.
Real disagreements have to operate from the same roots, on the same ground. Formulation of incompatible claims presupposes agreement in the basic framework of inquiry—it is possible only within the same axiomatic system. If a question is about this ground itself, the different replies cannot be in mutual disagreement. Unless there already is a sufficient shared understanding of what x is, different theories “about x” simply aren’t talking about the same thing, and so they cannot really disagree with one another, although they compete for the use of the same word (“x”).
So, corresponding to non-factual and transcendental questions, it seems there are broadly and generally two types of philosophizing (while the non-transcendental factual questions are covered by empirical sciences): the first consists in mapping the existing conceptual landscapes, elaborating on them, or constructing new ones, and understanding their potential utility for different purposes—“conceptual adventuring”, connected to conceptual ethics; the second aims at postulating different hypotheses about those parts of reality which are in principle inaccessible to empirical sciences, which however either are the case or not. Because the former is concerned with constructing and exploring different ways reality can be conceptualized (or cut), there is, again, no factual disagreement between different “isms” of this kind, because every ism is drawing different boundaries in reality, and thus talking about different objects.
If there is any disagreement, it is one of values, i.e. about which proposal for how we should think about the world should be preferred and put into practice. Examples of this type of question (viz. non-factual) are for example: “what is a human being?, “what is a person?” (“are chimpanzees persons?”), “do we have free will?” (in contexts where the conditions of having “free will” have not previously been specified), “what makes some person A at t1 the same person as some person B at t2?”[1], “what is art?”, “is matter fundamental?”, “do ethical sentences express propositions?”, etc.[2]
Different isms about the same topic (e.g. about “persons”, “art”) of this type use the same words differently, i.e. there is a verbal or conceptual disagreement between them, and there may be a “battle for dominance in salience” between them. For example, because the word “person” features prominently in our culture, in legal documents, and in our discourse about ethics, how people use the word, i.e. which concept is salient for them, has real-world consequences; the dominance of different conceptual systems yields different practical results. Another example is the different proposals for what is fundamental, i.e. that to which everything else must be reducible. A society which operates from a presupposition of everything being reducible to matter will approach reality differently compared to a society which starts from the axiom of “God” or “idea” being fundamental[3]. However, there is no disagreement between them about facts. Rather, each system defines its own axioms, from which it operates; they are different languages, different ways of approaching the world, or different moods or stories about reality.
As for the second type of philosophizing, i.e. that which offers hypotheses about transcendental questions, examples include aforementioned speculations about an afterlife, or whether other people are actually p-zombies, or whether there are parallel universes.[4]
The question of how many awarenesses there are is another such question. That is, whether AM or AP is true is a factual, real metaphysical, transcendental question. There is some number of awarenesses (in the defined sense), and AM and AP make incompatible claims about reality—they operate within the same conceptual system, they are using their terms in the same way, but they propose different hypotheses about the world. AM and AP as possible answers to the question “How many awarenesses are there?”, i.e. as hypotheses about reality, are in real conflict, because they describe different, mutually incompatible realities. If the answer is “one”, it cannot also be “more than one”. So between AM and AP there is not just a disagreement in concepts or values, but a factual one. And because the actual fact of the matter concerns something outside of the scope of empirical knowledge, it is not a question that can be resolved by empirical sciences. And yet, it concerns a matter of deeply existential importance, the most intimate matter there is for us, in one important sense—the scope of being for us, i.e. our existential limits.
The proposed distinction between different kinds of questions, of course, is not a novel one. Famously, Carnap[5] distinguished between internal questions asked about the existence of entities within a linguistic framework (which are resolved either by means of empirical observation or logical analysis), and external questions, which are about the linguistic framework itself, i.e. concerning the existence of the whole system of entities itself. Because each system sets its own rules for which entities exist or are real, these are not applicable to the systems themselves. So external questions can only be settled pragmatically. And according to Carnap, a lot of ink was spilled by philosophers trying to resolve the external questions concerning the systems as if they were internal questions, not recognizing this crucial distinction.
I have much sympathy for Carnap’s view. It seems to me that many of the perennial questions troubling philosophers, and also many of the more recent discussions in philosophy (e.g. concerning the nature of consciousness, or metaethics), are in essence confusions of this kind.[6] However, my suggestion here is that not all metaphysics is concerned with external questions, but that there are also internal metaphysical questions—in the sense that they are not proposals for different frameworks, but rather formulated within a framework, yet they cannot be settled empirically. So I disagree that all internal questions, asked within a framework, can be answered either empirically or by means of logical analysis. It seems to me there is another kind of internal question, that concerns matters beyond our empirical means, i.e. “transcendent(al)” matters, and which could thus never be settled by science or logic (the “real metaphysical” questions). AM and AP are two incompatible hypotheses about reality, asked about the same thing, within the same linguistic framework—the disagreement between AM and AP is thus “real”, and not an external question. AM and AP are not two different linguistic frameworks, yet it is impossible to decide between them by performing an empirical observation or logical analysis.
A more recent formulation of the same idea can be found in Plunkett & Sundell (2013), who propose to interpret at least some philosophical disagreements as cases of metalinguistic negotiation, i.e. pragmatic disagreements about which concepts to use (what meanings to assign to the terms we use). Metalinguistic negotiation is a dispute “that employs competing metalinguistic usages of an expression, and that reflects a disagreement about the proper deployment of linguistic representations”[7]—“that centers on normative issues about what a word should mean, or, similarly, about how it should be used, rather than the descriptive issue about what it does mean or about how it is used”[8]. The term metalinguistic usage refers to Chris Barker’s (2002) distinction between an expression being used and mentioned—an expression is used “to communicate information about the appropriate usage of that very expression in context”[9], so that “by putting forward competing claims of this type, speakers can, via metalinguistic uses of their terms, debate how it is those terms should be employed”[10].
Plunkett & Sundell give an example of two speakers arguing whether Secretariat, the champion racehorse, is an athlete or not: one speaker holds that “Secretariat is an athlete”—and the other disagrees, insisting that “Secretariat is not an athlete”. Both speakers have the same information about Secretariat’s achievements—but they disagree about whether it is appropriate to apply the term “athlete” to animals. Hence, the disagreement is not really about whether Secretariat is an “athlete”, but rather about which concept (one that includes animals, or one that excludes them) should we pair with the term “athlete”, i.e. how the term should be used.
On this view, some of the discussions e.g. in metaphysics, even though they are not between actually conflicting proposals, are taken seriously as disagreements. That is, they are not seen as purely verbal misunderstandings which could be resolved by simply making more disambiguations in our language. A dispute need not be canonical[11], i.e. concerning the factual matter of the subject under discussion, to be a real dispute. Plunkett & Sundell specifically mention philosophical disputes seemingly concerning the grounds, supervenience base, or identity of something—they hold that “the disagreement that is expressed is not actually about these things. Rather, it is about our ways of representing reality, and, more specifically, about which ways of representing reality we should adopt. In slightly more general terms, the normative question is often this: which concepts we should employ for the purposes at hand.”[12]
What linguistic frameworks we use matters—different conceptual schemas differ in their capacity to help us achieve different objectives. A purely verbal dispute can be resolved by simply clarifying the terms we use, but negotiating how we should use our language is negotiating norms of discourse, which have serious practical implications for how we lead our lives. Choosing one set of norms for how we operate (e.g. what we mean by the word “person”, or “real”, or “good”, or whether we see ourselves as “free” or not) yields different “forms of life”, different stories about what we are and what the world is, different values and behaviors—which are in real conflict.
To clarify one more time: my claim here is that the AM/AP disagreement is not a case of metalinguistic negotiation, but a real factual, canonical dispute—albeit the nature of the fact in question is such that it cannot be discovered or confirmed empirically. I do not offer two different frames to conceptualize the same reality, but rather two real hypotheses about a transcendent(al) fact, within a settled linguistic framework.
[1] Elaborating on what has already been discussed in the previous chapter: Much of disagreement about the problem of personal identity seems to come down to purely conceptual differences—some people find it more intuitive to draw boundaries of “person” via a bodily criterion, some via a psychological one; both criteria are imperfect in that they yield fuzzy cases in between where it’s simply not clear whether a person A and a person B are the same person or not. But this is not really a metaphysical mystery, but rather a matter of setting up convenient conceptual boundaries that serve our cultural-pragmatic-psychological needs. The concept of “person” serves a certain important social function, figures in our legal documents and in our ethical theories—so even though it matters a lot where we choose to draw the boundaries, the decision comes down to practical concerns. We are not trying to discover some “real” boundaries in reality and setting up our words to conform to them, but rather we’re drawing the boundaries of objects where we find it convenient on top of those existing distinctions in reality that we find practical to track. However, it also seems to me, in discussions of personal identity, what we often find is a disagreement between people who are discussing the superficial, purely conceptual problem of drawing the boundaries of human beings as objects in the world, and those who feel uncomfortable with the set criteria because what they are actually trying to do is to discover what the actual boundaries are “in nature” that yield or conform to boundaries of awareness. The difference between a copy and the original only matters if we move beyond, underneath the content. “Yes, my copy has the same memories and personality as me—but is it actually me?” Well, whatever could this “actually me” mean? It seems that people who ask the question are grasping the empty subject (not necessarily in bare form, because they could still be identifying themselves with awareness and some content), and they’re worried that, e.g. it is bound only to some particular, continuous cluster of matter—not to content per se, but to that which (they assume) under normal circumstances generates continuous content, i.e. some physical structure. So they assume that copying the content (memories, personality, etc.) to a different structure (replicating it in a different brain) does not yield experience that is theirs, and neither does a discontinuity of content (e.g. total amnesia) in the cluster of matter to which they assume they are connected bring about their demise. So my hypothesis is that people who feel uncomfortable with being copied (unless they’re already AMists) have a “deeper” (and “emptier”) self-identification, in the sense of conceiving of themselves as just contingently bound to the content that they are actually bound to—that is, that they are that which happens to be the person that they are, and this seems to simply be awareness itself. Even though they might also identify with a particular body (a particular brain), because they implicitly assume that their awareness is only bound to that particular body.
[2] However: note that the same question, depending on how it is interpreted/meant, can sometimes be either factual or non-factual. For example, we can also conceive of the question “what (kind of thing) is a human being?” in a biological-taxonomic terms, in which case it is a factual-empirical question: e.g. “human beings are primates/mammals/animals” (as opposed to, e.g. reptiles or plants).
[3] In stating that something is real or fundamental, philosophers are not making any factual claims that could be true or false in the sense that the proposition “cat sits on the mat” could be true or false. Rather, they are setting down their ontological axioms—choosing the elements of their reality. Real is that to which everything else is reducible. To say “matter is fundamental” is a statement of value, of an attitude, of a life-orientation that seeks to approach everything through the lens of the material, that notices and pays attention to material things, and explains everything by relating it to material things—that feels a sense of contentment, of resolution, once a phenomenon is transformed into matter, i.e. understood in the language of physics. A materialist considers something to be explained and grasped when it is described empirically, scientifically, physically. A non-materialist feels this is missing the point of the phenomenon in question—that that is not how its being can be revealed or understood.
[4] Of course these might also constitute purely conceptual disagreements if the different hypotheses are not formulated in the same framework.
[5] Carnap 1950
[6] However, that is not to say they are not interesting or even useful. The confusion lies in their being perceived as incompatible.
[7] Plunkett & Sundell 2013
[8] Plunkett 2015
[9] Plunkett & Sundell 2013
[10] ibid.
[11] Plunkett & Sundell’s term—meaning, focusing “on the truth or correctness of the content literally expressed by the speakers”. (ibid.)
[12] Plunkett 2015