A Metaphysics for the Future by Robert Allinson

Author:Robert Allinson [Allinson, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General, Political Science, Social Science
ISBN: 9781351742030
Google: FFM8DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-11-01T02:18:05+00:00

Philosophical Debates

Intentionality Versus Behaviorism

Are there irresolvable philosophical debates? What of the position that the mind is a Cartesian theater, for example, as opposed to explaining or describing all that occurs from a behavioristic standpoint? From the standpoint of assuming the mind is a Cartesian theater or magic lantern show, one can, like the audience of a mental theater, become aware of a toothache as an item of prelinguistic knowledge. For behaviorism on the other hand, any description of a pain as a toothache is linguistic, and one cannot really experience a toothache as a toothache without making use of a language system. For the linguistic analyst or behaviorist, there can be no phenomenological reduction, as one is always operating within a world of signs and concepts. This conflict, it appears, cannot be resolved. It cannot be resolved because the entire debate is taking place within a linguistic and conceptual world. One possesses no access to a prelinguistic world.

It is only if one attempts to consider an abstract level of knowledge such as that which is represented by space and time, which is a phenomenologically reduced spectrum, that there is any hope of penetrating to the issues involved in understanding the difference between prelinguistic, linguistic and postlinguistic knowledge. In the reduction, or transcendental reflection, if one prefers this description, one employs language while one attempts to burrow beneath its surface.

In the example of pain, it seems that the behaviorist and the one who argues that there are intentional states, are at loggerheads. This is because one side is arguing about a description of a particular experience which in its view it possessed prior to its being expressed linguistically. From this side of the argument, the particular experience does not require the employment of language since the experience was prelinguistic. From the other side of the issue, to meaningfully possess this experience in the first place would already have required a linguistic act.

The example of pain is not a fruitful example for comparison. In order to approach the limits of language, one must take up examples that are at the beginning or the end of the limits of language that are examples of putative linguistic or prelinguistic data employed by subject knowers capable of utilizing language. Otherwise, the discussion can degenerate to a shouting match. One participant insists that pain (or the experience of red or blue) is an irreducible particular. The other argues that this irreducibility is a function of a network of conceptually understood relations and an understanding of a world system.4

The question of reducibility or irreducibility does not arise, strictly speaking, for the phenomenologist, since the phenomenologist is concerned with phenomenological data and not with the theoretical object of an irreducible particular or a reducible particular. However, with that qualification, it may be said that the view presented here finds a greater agreement with the position of Thomas Nagel, that there are irreducible particulars, rather than with Rorty’s view that experience who argue that language systems and world systems are required for experience by citing the examples of putative, irreducible particulars.

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