Metaphysics by van Inwagen Peter;

Author:van Inwagen, Peter; [Van Inwagen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westview Press

PART THREE

THE INHABITANTS OF THE WORLD

INTRODUCTION TO PART THREE

The final part of this book is about us, the inhabitants of the World. That is, it is about us human beings and any other beings there may be that are sufficiently similar to us that it would be reasonable to consider them our fellow inhabitants of the World. (While it may be reasonable to use the word ‘inhabitants’ in a sense in which apes and beavers and elephants—and perhaps even ants—are “our fellow inhabitants of the World,” I will use the word in the sense suggested by the adjective ‘inhabited’—as in the question “Is that island inhabited?”) The term traditionally used to describe us and beings “sufficiently similar” to us is ‘rational’. Human beings, however irrationally they may behave, and angels and Martians (if there are angels or Martians) are rational in the required sense. Apes and beavers and elephants are not rational in the required sense.1 Non-human terrestrial animals—especially apes—may, however, be very intelligent. For this reason, in Part Three, I avoid using the term ‘intelligent’ to do the work I now assign to the word ‘rational’. The use of ‘intelligent’ and ‘intelligence’ to refer to mental capacities not possessed by even the brightest apes is quite common, as may be seen from such familiar phrases as ‘the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence’. (I have myself used the word ‘intelligent’ in this strong sense at several points in this book. In Chapter 1, for example, I said that Kant’s diagnosis of the failure of human beings to produce a science of metaphysics would apply equally to “intelligent dolphins.”) In this phrase, ‘intelligence’ means exactly what I will mean by ‘rationality’: anyone who said there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe would be taken to mean there were somewhere beings who shared with us mental capacities that the most “intelligent” apes do not share with us.2

And what is rationality? Let us begin to try to answer this question by considering another question, a question asked by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “We say that a dog is afraid his master will beat him; but not, he is afraid his master will beat him to-morrow. Why not?” The beginning of the answer to this question is that the idea expressed by the word ‘tomorrow’ is wholly foreign to the mental world of the dog. If the dog can be said to have ideas at all, the ideas that constitute the content of its thought at any moment are ideas of things it is then aware of or of things that might well be immediate consequences of the operations of the things it is then aware of (such as an imminent beating). This point is often put by saying that dogs—and all other non-human terrestrial animals—are “incapable of abstract thought.” This idea (applied to a primitive species of our genus—a species more properly called Homo erectus erectus) is well expressed in a bit of verse by W. V. Quine:

The unrefined and sluggish mind

Of Homo javanensis

Could only treat of things concrete

And present to the senses.

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