A Response to my Color Anti-realist Friend

In 1976, when I delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, I often spent time with Peter Strawson, and one day at lunch he made a remark I have never been able to forget. He said, "Surely half the pleasure of life is sardonic comment on the passing show".  This blog is devoted to comments, not all of them sardonic, on the passing philosophical show.

Hilary Putnam

My old friend JW writes:

“I am not clear if you are claiming the ‘greenness’ that I can successfully ascribe through repeated experience of my lawn as colour constancy to be itself a physical property of the object in a particular state (which position teasingly I refer to as ‘farbe an sich’), because elsewhere you recently said that there is no such thing as ‘being' green.  

“Or, are you saying that other physical properties of the object cause me (and most others with my kind of eyes) to see light of such and such a frequency in such and such a scatter under such and such an illumination as the same green (more or less) as my lawn was yesterday - given that it has rained on both days - which is good for the garden in this heat - even if the look of it is different from morning to evening, from day to day.  This would mean that green objects have the same or similar physical properties but not necessarily that these properties are in and of themselves green, just green inducing to my kind of eyes?”

I want to share my responses to my friend’s questions, so that he and the other readers of this blog will be clear on what I am saying and what I am not saying. One thing I did not say was that there is no such thing as being green.

Escher colors again

What I wrote, in my post of June 11 (“Escher Colors”) - after pointing out that even for normal viewers there is a slight (but noticeable if one attends to it) difference between the shade of color an object appears when viewed with the left eye closed and when viewed either either both eyes open or with the right eye closed - was:

“Yes, the question “is the wall (or the sand, in the beach case) really the shade of gray (or yellow, in the case of the sand) that it appears to be when I use my right eye or the shade it appears to be when I use both eyes, has no answer, “makes no sense”—there is no metaphysical fact to the matter to decide this “question”; but, in another way, it seems to make sense.  It takes reflection, however brief, to convince oneself that there is no such thing as the wall (or the sand) being colorwise as it looks to my left eye as opposed to its being as it looks to my right eye. It seems, at least for a moment, as it something may “really be” that color.  But there is no such thing as that color!   The color, or better the exact shade of gray or yellow or whatever,  that the wall seems to be when I use my right or left eye isn’t the sort of thing that a color on a paint chart is; the wall could really be, say, purple-gray₃₂, but there is no such thing as it’s really being “gray*”, where gray* is the “shade” that the wall “seemed to be” when I used my left eye to view the wall on that occasion.  Subjective colors are impossible colors.  Like an Escher building, they seem to be real and simultaneously to be impossible. As long I can remember how the “gray*” wall looked, I can say truly that “it looked gray*”, but “gray*” occurs intentionally, not referentially, in “looks gray*”; there is such a thing as “looking gray*” to a person at a time, but no such thing as really being gray*. Subjective colors aren’t colors; they are Escher colors.

Obviously, my friend misremembered the claim that there is “no such thing as really being gray*”, not only by forgetting that it was gray and not green, but my omitting the “*”. There is such a thing as being gray, but no such thing as being gray*.

But what is “gray*”? The short answer is that there is no such thing. The longer answer is that, in “looks gray*”- an expression I can use to describe a color experience as long as I remember what that look was[1] - “gray*” is, in scholastic terminology, syncategoramatic. It contributes to the meaningful denoting expression “looks gray*” – which denotes a subjective look – without denoting anything on its own. That’s  why there is no such thing as being (to shift the example) green* but absolutely there is such a thing as being green. Don’t lose the star!

The importance of distinguishing colors from color looks

It seems to me that a major reason that my friend gets me wrong is that, like Russell, in Problems of Philosophy, he conflates colors and color looks. Russell wrote:

“To make our difficulties plain, let us concentrate attention on the table. To the eye it is oblong, brown, and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives out a wooden sound…but as soon as we try to be more precise our troubles begin. Although I believe that the table is ‘really’ of the same color all over, the parts that reflect the light look much brighter than the other parts, and some parts look  white because of reflected light. I know that, if I move, the parts that reflect the light will be different, so that the apparent distribution of colors on the table will change. It follows that if several people are looking at the same table at the same moment, no two of them will see exactly the same different distribution of colors….” (p. 8, 1912 edition)

Here Russell moves immediately from a difference in “the apparent distribution of colors”, to “not the same distribution of colors”, that is, he takes a difference in apparent colors, or color looks, to be ipso facto a difference in actual colors. And two pages later Russell writes,

“When, in ordinary life, we speak of the color of the table, we only mean the sort of color it will seem to have to a normal spectator from an ordinary point of view under usual conditions of light. But the other colors which appear under other conditions have just as good a right to be considered real; and therefore, to avoid favoritism, we are compelled to deny that, in itself, the table has any one particular color.”

In my Bastille Day post (“The Manifest Image Is Not Wrong”), I wrote that this sort of view leads to a wholesale skepticism about the veridicality of what Sellars famously called “the manifest image. In Russell’s case this “leading to” is immediate. The very next sentence in Problems of Philosophy reads: “The shape of the table is no better. We are all in the habit of judging as to the ‘real’ shapes of things, and we do this so unreflectingly we come to think that we actually see the real shapes. But if our table is ‘really’ rectangular, it will look from almost all points of view as if it had two acute angles and two obtuse angles.” (He makes similar points about texture, solidity, etc.) And just as he concluded from the fact that the table has different color looks when viewed from different positions, that has “no one particular color”, so he now concludes that “the ‘real’ shape is not what we see” (page 11), and, further down the same page, “The real table, if there is one (sic), is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately know.”

 (Since none of the properties of the object can actually be seen or felt, the “object” becomes an inferred unobservable.)

The answer to the question in my friend’s first paragraph is that I am saying “the ‘greenness’ that I can successfully ascribe through repeated experience of my lawn as color constancy to be itself a physical property of the object in a particular state” and I am also saying (his second paragraph, but I have intentionally deleted the word “other”) “physical properties of the object cause me (and most others with my kind of eyes) to see light of such and such a frequency in such and such a scatter under such and such an illumination as the same green (more or less) as my lawn was yesterday - given that it has rained on both days - which is good for the garden in this heat - even if the look of it is different from morning to evening, from day to day.  This would mean that green objects have the same or similar physical properties” – BUT where he continues “but not necessarily that these properties are in and of themselves green, just green inducing to my kind of eyes” I would say that a particular distribution of those properties (technically, a reflectance profile) is identical with being (physically, really, green [in hue, neglecting here saturation and brightness]).  (That properties can be identical even though the concepts expressed by the corresponding predicates are quite different is something I first argued for and applied to the philosophy of mind in a paper published in 1967[2].) In sum, I believe that hues are identical with reflectance profiles, and that this identity is an empirical one, an identity we discover through theory building and confirmation.

But this would, of course, be absurd, if hues were identical with subjective looks like gray*. (Russell’s “apparent colors”, which he later says are in a “private space”).  But they are not. What looks are, and the distinction I draw between objective looks and subjective looks will be taken up next in this series of posts.

Epistemology

To close, I need to say a word about my difference with Russell over epistemology.

[I discuss these differences in more detail in “Naïve Realism and Qualia”, forthcoming in Adam Pautz and Daniel Stoljar (eds.) Themes from Block (MIT)]

Russell takes it that perception starts with sense data. That is why things in the environment can only be inferences.  I take it that we are essentially embodied creatures, and our knowledge starts with transactions between our bodies, including our brains and sense organs, and the external environment. Perception (as Tyler Burge has recently emphasized in his path-breaking book The Origins of Objectivity) involves representation of objects and features of the environment by perceptual systems; and our perceptual systems do not begin by examining the organism’s own qualia. And the properties our perceptual systems represent are not dispositions to produce qualia. I am a functionalist, but my functionalism today is a liberal functionalism[3]: the functional states involved in perception are not computational states, as I once thought, but object-involving states, states with “long arms”. If knowledge were something that begins in “private spaces”, as Russell held, there is no way it would ever get outside!

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[1] In a terminology Ned Block uses, I think in “Wittgenstein and Qualia”, “looks gray*” is  ineffable, meaning by that, not the in principle ineffability that philosophers rightly view with suspicion, but that there is at present no name for that look in public language, nor, since it is a purely  subjective look, any way of introducing such a name until we know more about the neural correlates of the various subjective looks.

[2] “Psychological Predicates.” Art, Mind and Religion, ed. W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), 37-48. Repr. as “The Nature of Mental States” in Mind, Language and Reality (1975), 429-440.

[3] For an explanation of the term “liberal functionalism” see chapter 3, “Corresponding with Reality”, of my Philosophy in the Age of Science

Quine's "Underdetermination Doctrine"

In 1976, when I delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, I often spent time with Peter Strawson, and one day at lunch he made a remark I have never been able to forget. He said, "Surely half the pleasure of life is sardonic comment on the passing show".  This blog is devoted to comments, not all of them sardonic, on the passing philosophical show.

Hilary Putnam

What follows this introductory paragraph are the opening paragraphs of chapter 16 [A Proof of the Underdetermination "Doctrine"]  of my Philosophy in the Age of Science. Because the confusion they address, between Quine’s “underdetermination doctrine” and “the Quine-Duhem Thesis” is still widespread, I have decided to post just those paragraphs. They point out that in  “On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World,”  a paper I heard him read at a symposium in Stuttgart a year or two before it was published, Quine admitted that the underdetermination doctrine admitted of a trivializing interpretation, and proposed a way to rule it out, but confessed that, when so modified, it was something he could not prove. In homage to his memory, I decided to look for a proof. The reader who is interested in these matters can find my proof (which uses heavy-duty mathematical logic)  in my chapter, and can find further information in the book by Yemima Ben-Menahem I cite below.

Prior to the publication of “On What There Is” in 1948, W.V.O. Quine was known to most philosophers (if they had heard of him at all) as a “logician.” But now it is universally acknowledged that the series of Quine’s philosophical papers and books that began with that famous essay are among the most important to have been published in (approximately) the second half of the twentieth century. One of the most famous theses in that series of works is “the doctrine that natural science is empirically underdetermined.”[i] Yet I have observed that Quine’s “doctrine” is widely misunderstood, and its logical status is, in fact, murkier than most readers imagine. The purpose of the present essay is to remove the murk and to prove the doctrine.

The principal misunderstanding I have observed is the idea that underdetermination follows immediately from “the Quine-Duhem thesis,” by which is meant the thesis that theoretical claims cannot be either conclusively falsified or conclusively confirmed by isolated experiences. If those experiences appear to falsify a theory, it is always possible to revise parts of the theory (including what the logical empiricists called the “coordinating definitions”), or, if worse comes to worse, to reject the observation sentences that we use to report those experiences. However this claim has literally nothing to do with the “underdetermination” doctrine. That doctrine, to which Quine gave considerable weight in his writings,[ii] says that even if we do not reject any observation sentences that we take to have been verified, and even if we do not allow any changes to the theory, still, if there is at least one theory that has a given set of observational consequences, then there will always be more than one.

Another misunderstanding that I have observed, even among those who do not confuse “the underdetermination doctrine” with “the Quine- Duhem thesis,” is that the underdetermination doctrine is, somehow, logically obvious. But it is not obvious, and in her brilliant book on conventionalism, Yemima Ben-Menahem reminds us that in a little-known lecture Quine surprisingly confessed that the doctrine risks being either trivial or, at best, unprovable! As Yemima Ben-Menahem has pointed out, in the original version of “On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World,” Quine suggested a way of stating the doctrine that would avoid triviality, but concluded that so restated, the truth of the doctrine “is an open question.”[iii] However, all of this rethinking was excised from “On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World” before that essay was collected in Pursuit of Truth![iv]

As Ben-Menahem explains the problem:

Underdetermination crumbles under a problem that seems utterly trivial at first. Quine invites us to consider two theories that are identical except for a permutation of terms, for example “electron” and “proton.” What is the relation between these theories? Taken at face value, they are clearly incompatible, for each affirms sentences the other denies, for instance, "The negative charge of the electron is..." It is likewise clear that these incompatible theories are empirically equivalent—they have exactly the same empirical import. The question is whether this would count as an example of underdetermination, that is, whether such a minor permutation of terms suffices to render the two theories empirically equivalent but incompatible alternatives. Rather than taking them at face value is it not more reasonable to regard them as slightly different, though perfectly compatible, formulations of the same theory?[v]

She goes on to explain that Quine endorsed the latter alternative. He wrote, “So I propose to individuate theories thus: two formulations express the same theory if they are empirically equivalent, and there is a construal of predicates that transforms one theory into a logical equivalent of the other.”[vi]

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[i] W.V. Quine, “On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World,” Erkenntnis, 9 (1975): 313-328; quotation from p. 313.

[ii] For example, in W.V. Quine, “On the Reasons for the Indeterminacy of Translation,” Journal of Philosophy, 67 (1970): 178-183, Quine gives the underdetermination of theory by data as one of the two principal reasons for his famous (and controversial) thesis of the indeterminacy of translation.            

[iii] W.V. Quine, “On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World,” Erkenntnis, 9 (1975): 313-328; quotation from p. p. 327.

[iv] W.V. Quine, Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990/2004).{ADDED TODAY: This was a mistake. Quine did not "collect" this paper in Pursuit of Truth; but he did write (p.96) "Effort and paper have been wasted, by me among others, over what to count as sameness of theory and what to count as mere equivalence. It is a question of words; we can stop speaking of theories and just speak of theory formulations. I shall still write simply 'theory', but you may understand it as 'theory formulation' if you will." He does not mention that this makes the underdetermination doctrine trivial.]

[v] Yemima Ben-Menahem, Conventionalism: From Poincaré to Quine (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2006), 246.

[vi] Quine, “On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World,” 320.

Wittgenstein and Scientific Realism (and the Atom Bomb)

In 2012 I gave a seminar on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy at Tel Aviv University. The following is the text of the second of two powerpoints I used as the basis for lectures in that seminar. For the other powerpoint, see the previous post. Each of these powerpoints covers material I dealt with in a number of meetings.

Scientific Realism: “Terms in a mature science typically refer and theories accepted in a mature science are typically approximately true” [I attribute this to Richard Boyd in my Meaning and the Moral Sciences (1978), 20ff]

Moreover, “ realism is the only philosophy  that doesn’t make the success of science a miracle.” [me, in Meaning and the Moral Sciences and more recently “On Not Writing Off Scientific Realism”; all references to my papers in the following are to articles now collected in Philosophy in an Age of Science]

I maintained [and still maintain in 2014!] an allegiance to scientific realism even during my internal realist period [See “From Quantum Mechanics to Ethics and Back Again”]

In chapter 4 of Reason, Truth and History, I even tried to reconcile a physicalist account of qualia like Ned Block’s with “internal realism” and with Wittgenstein by downgrading it to just one more language game.

In my Royce Lectures (Part II of The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World), I had given up “internal realism”, but I also gave up the idea of finding correlations between brainstates and qualia, claiming that there is no well-defined relation of identity between qualia (and hence talk of qualia is a confusion—a “Wittgensteinian” moment in my thinking. This is the publication in which the expression “not fully intelligible” made frequent occurrences. I now think both these developments were misguided - as explained in my “Wittgenstein: A Reappraisal” and “Naïve Realism and Qualia” (the latter is forthcoming in a Festschrift for Ned Block).

Where does this put me in relation to Wittgenstein?

Well, Wittgenstein’s views on the relation of science and philosophy are, to put it mildly, a mess. On the one hand, speaking as a thinker but not in his professional philosopher capacity, he had some very negative-sounding things to say about science. Here is an example:

“The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.” [emphasis added-HP]

And again:

“The hysterical fear over the atom bomb now being experienced, or at any rate expressed, by the public almost suggests that at last something really salutary has been invented. The fright at least gives the impression of a really effective bitter medicine. I can’t help thinking: if this didn’t have something good about it the philistines wouldn’t be making an outcry. But perhaps this too is a childish idea. Because really all I can mean is that the bomb offers a prospect of the end, the destruction, of an evil, our disgusting soapy water science.”

On the other hand, in the Tractatus period, he said both that “what can be said” (i.e. all that is cognitively meaningful) is “propositions of natural science”—what has “nothing to do with philosophy”­—and “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.” (Tractatus 6.52) Of course, even this limited privileging of science (even if it doesn’t “touch the problems of life”) disappears in the later philosophy,
In any case, I believe that we can be sure of two things:
First, that the idea that science can resolve or help to resolve any philosophical problem was anathema to Wittgenstein his whole life long.  Recall, for example, PI 109:

109.

It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones. It was not of any possible interest to us to find out empirically that, contrary to our preconceived ideas, it is possible to think such-and-such -- whatever that may mean. (The conception of thought as a gaseous medium.) And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems, they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Second, Wittgenstein would have detested the idea (which I defended at our last meeting) that psychology cum neuroscience can show that talk of qualia does make sense. I believe that the “manometer” passage has that idea as its target.
Here is the passage:

270.

Let us now imagine a use for the entry of the sign "S" in my diary. I discover that whenever I have a particular sensation a manometer shows that my blood -- pressure rises. So I shall be able to say that my blood -- pressure is rising without using any apparatus. This is a useful result. And now it seems quite indifferent whether I have recognized the sensation right or not. Let us suppose I regularly identify it wrong, it does not matter in the least. And that alone shows he turned a knob which looked as if it could be used to turn on some part of the machine; but it was a mere ornament, not connected with the mechanism at all.) And what is our reason for calling "S" the name of a sensation here? Perhaps the kind of way this sign is employed in this language-game. -- And why a "particular sensation," that is, the same one every time? Well, aren't we supposing that we write "S" every time?

I believe that what Wittgenstein would say about the suggestion that discovering the sort of brain processes (in the “work space”, etc., of the brain), and discovering whatever connections you please between those processes and our behavior, reports, etc., would show nothing about Block’s so-called “qualia”. [I assigned Ned Block, “Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh Between Psychology and Neuroscience,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, (2007), pp. 481-548 in the seminar.]

He would say that the subject  may decide to say that she is having “the same sensation” (in the “qualia sense”) whenever the neuroscientists tell her that a certain process is taking place in her brain, but this is like Wittgenstein’s privateer saying she is have the same sensation whenever the manometer rises. This is just a new (and philosophically irrelevant) language game. And the idea that brain processes may be constitutive of qualia, whereas we know that increases in blood pressure are not, would be dismissed by W. as “language on holiday”.  Of course Block and I don’t think language is on holiday here at all.
Sadly, I am led to conclude that one cannot buy into Wittgenstein’s picture of how philosophy should be done and into scientific realism at the same time. And  I find scientific realism much more persuasive, myself.