Richard Rorty’s position on the mind-body problem can be approached via two intermediate claims:
1. What is problematic about the relationship between mind and body is fully captured by the idea that we are incorrigible about our own mental states.
2. This incorrigibility is best understood as a kind of social-linguistic convention.
Together these claims yield the deflationary thesis that the mind-body problem is an artefact of social-linguistic practice. In this post I want to expand on the second of these claims by discussing an analogy of Rorty’s, though in order to get there I must begin by saying a few words about the first claim.
Recent attempts to pin down the mind-body problem have focused on the phenomenal or qualitative aspects of the mind, gathered under the general heading “consciousness”. These attempts usually take one of two forms. The first argues that to be in a phenomenal state is to be in a special kind of cognitive state. This strategy is exemplified by Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument [1], which aims to show that being conscious involves knowing a special kind of fact that is not included in or derivable from any amount of the corresponding bodily, i.e. physical, knowledge.
The second argues that phenomenal entities (like pains and visual impressions) are identified by properties sufficient to preclude their identity with physical entities. This strategy finds perhaps its best expression in Saul Kripke [2], though it is also deployed by John Searle when he describes phenomenal entities as having a “first-person ontology” [3], i.e. as existing only insofar as they’re experienced (in contrast with physical entities whose existence presumably does not depend on whether or not they are experienced).
In Rorty’s view both of these strategies stem from a deeper intuition about what makes the mind special: incorrigibility. Incorrigibility pertains to the authority we each have with regard to our own mental states—if it seems to me that I am in pain, then I am in pain. I can’t be wrong about that, though I can be quite wrong about whether someone else is in pain or not. Incorrigibility is thus a kind of infallibility with regard to beliefs or reports about one’s own mental states.
If Rorty is right, and incorrigibility represents our best intuition about the peculiarity of the mental, then the first strategy mentioned above (Jackson’s) makes a blunder by confusing a special epistemic relation to a normal fact—being incorrigible about whether I am in pain—with a normal epistemic relation to a special fact—knowing “what pain is like”.
The Kripke-Searle strategy fares slightly better, but gets pushed back a step. If incorrigibility encapsulates the mind-body problem, then it does so without appeal to exotic entities (qualia, raw feels, etc.) which ‘appear’ to a ‘subject’ (and all the imagery that comes with this obscure mechanism: inner space, the eye of the mind, etc), and so this whole framework is sustainable only when seen as being posited to explain the incorrigibilty of first-person reports. This framework may or may not succeed in explaining incorrigibility, but even if it does there may be a better way of explaining it. Rorty reckons he has a better explanation, and this I shall turn to now.
Consider a tennis game: it’s match point, and what is potentially the winning shot has just been struck. It dips over the net and lands close to the edge of the court, but is moving too fast for the crowd to see whether it lands in. They turn to the umpire to call it [4].
The event of the ball landing can be described in two ways: physically, or in terms internal to tennis. On the physical description the ball landed at some particular location, either outside the box described by the court lines or not. On the description couched in ‘tennistic’ terms, the ball landed either in or out. Here we have two descriptions, in two vocabularies, of the same event. But here’s the rub: while the umpire can be wrong about where the ball landed in the physical sense, the umpire cannot be wrong about whether it landed in or out. If the umpire calls it out, it’s out; if he calls it in, it’s in.
That the umpire is incorrigible about whether the shot was in or out is no mystery. It is a consequence of the special role assigned to the umpire in this social practice, that is, to act as an ultimate authority who can override any quarrelling that may result from trying to determine exactly where the ball landed in relation to the line (particularly relevant in the days before slow-motion replays). And of course, that the umpire is incorrigible about whether a ball lands in but not about where exactly it lands is not a good reason to maintain that the ball landing in cannot be the same event as the ball landing in some physical location.
Here is the lesson to extract from this: whether or not a person is incorrigible with respect to an event is relative to the vocabulary in which the event is described. The direct application of this to the mind-body problem is that the fact that people are incorrigible about whether they are in pain, but not about what’s going on in their brain, does not imply that pains cannot be, say, firings of certain neural clusters. Furthermore, it hints that the authority we each have with regard to our mental states might be something like the authority a tennis umpire has with regard to whether shots land in or out. On this account, first-person authority is “built into” mentalistic vocabulary, and to treat another being as having a mind is to welcome them as participants (or potential participants) in a social-linguistic practice. This is the thought behind Rorty’s idea that having a mind is a moral (rather than metaphysical) matter.
I’m not sure if that’s going to convince anyone, but I do think it’s provocative. If you have read this and do not find this line of thought compelling, why not? Is there something wrong with the tennis analogy, or is it simply that incorrigibility does not represent our best intuitions about what the mind-body problem is? If it’s the latter, does the tennis example perhaps help to show that incorrigibility cannot pin down the mind-body problem?
Notes:
1. See Frank Jackson – Epiphenomenal Qualia
2. See Saul Kripke – Naming and Necessity, Lecture III.
3. See, e.g., John Searle – Why I Am Not a Property Dualist
4. I tried to find the passage of Rorty’s I yoinked this example from, I really did, but it’s buried somewhere deep in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and the index—those bastards—did not contain an entry for ‘tennis’. Life is too short.
The Platopus 