The History of Philosophy as Philosophy: (8). Philosophical Pay-Offs

In section 1 I alluded to various
philosophical pay-offs from ‘historical’ history of philosophy. Taking philosophy of mind as
my object, I will sketch examples
of two sorts of pay-off: understanding landmark positions and questioning embedded assumptions or platitudes. The examples involve
early modern and nineteenthcentury texts, which are often used to set ‘standard’ problems or positions in contemporary
philosophy. In such cases, historically sensitive readings are directly relevant to contemporary work.

In recent philosophy of mind,
terms such as ‘intentionality’, ‘introspection’,
and ‘naturalism’ are frequently employed. Often, such
terms are introduced and defined with a glance back at a historical figure. Thus, in discussing
introspection and self-knowledge, it is
common to speak of a ‘Cartesian model’ of the mind, and to invoke
the ‘introspective psychology’ of Wilhelm Wundt. This Cartesian
model maintains that the contents of the mind are ‘transparently’
and ‘incorrigibly’ known. Transparency
means that there can be nothing in the mind
that is hidden or unavailable to
direct inspection and cognitive apprehension. Incorrigibility means that we cannot make mistakes about
what is present in our own mind. The defeat of these
two theses is often linked with rejecting
a notion of phenomenal content as something more than the bare
representation of physical objects or bodily states. Allegedly, these epistemological theses were the
main support for the notion that
there is an ‘inner’ domain of phenomenal content. Here, Wundtian
introspection may be invoked as a last gasp of the Cartesian
model.

The historical attributions
to Descartes and Wundt are at best caricatures,
at worst grossly in error. Quotations can indeed be produced
from Descartes’s works that seem to affirm both positions. But in
fact Descartes admitted—or insisted—that people can be
mistaken about the content of their own minds: e.g. about whether
they are having a clear and distinct perception. He also allowed
that activities may occur in the mind that are so rapid or so dim as to go unnoticed. Similarly, Wundt
did not suppose that, when introspecting a sensory
state, a subject is aware of some inner state
that is unrelated to the perception of an external object. Rather,
he saw such introspection as a special attitude taken toward the perception of an external object. If
someone who is looking at an object is asked to
report its colour or match its colour to a set of
standard colours, Wundt took these acts to yield introspective reports of current experience. At the
same time, he acknowledged that the
perception of colour involves a special sensory quality
that depends on the perceiving subject. Physical objects are presented by means of subjectively
conditioned sensory experiences. The
introspective attitude focuses on the subjective character of
sensation, rather than seeking to abstract from it, as in physical observation.

This is not the place to
develop these interpretations of Descartes and
Wundt in detail, and I certainly do not mean to imply that there are no problems with the positions they
take. But if the alleged positions
of these figures are used in contemporary philosophy of mind as
objects to be criticized, or as examples of positions that have
been surpassed, then a difficulty arises if they did not hold the positions attributed to them. Of course,
one may be able to find someone else who held the
position targeted. But if Descartes or Wundt
held positions that are less implausible than the ones being shot down, then today’s philosophers
would be in danger of choosing the weaker
opponent—an ineffective procedure
at best. By offering an easily refuted
caricature, a contemporary philosopher claims a
comparative advantage. But the refutation of a straw
position leaves open the possibility that the ‘advantage’ is spurious. This outcome can derail the
study of live alternatives, by enshrining
the common ‘knowledge’ that a particular position has been
decisively set aside.

A similar situation arises
with the term ‘intentionality’, frequently invoked
in contemporary philosophy of mind but rarely discussed in
systematic fashion. The term is introduced, often with a reference to Brentano, and is said to denote a
relation of ‘aboutness’ or ‘representation’,
or a ‘directedness’ of the mind to its object. In recent
‘intentionalist’ theories of sensory qualities, intentionalism is alleged to do away with qualia or
intrinsic features of phenomenal states.
Brentano held no such doctrine, and found no incompatibility between his notion of the intentional
and the distinction, commonly held in the
nineteenth century, between primary and secondary
qualities. Here, historical work might well enrich contemporary
discussions of intentionality, and augment the surprisingly small amount of direct discussion of the
notion, even by those who label themselves
‘intentionalists’.

Finally, in contemporary
discussion, ‘naturalism’ about the mental is
frequently assumed to imply physicalism or materialism, so that offering a naturalistic account of the
intentional is considered as tantamount
to reducing that notion to non-intentional terms (usually,
to physical or material terms). Are mentalistic notions such as (unreduced) intentionality non-natural?
They have not always been regarded as such. Many
early modern authors, even dualists, saw mind
as a part of nature, as did major nineteenth-century physiologist-philosophers.
Some twentieth-century philosophers, including
John Dewey and Ernest Nagel, have distinguished naturalism about
the mental from materialism. Again, this is not the place to
argue for such a distinction, but historical investigation of the notion of the natural as it has been
applied (or not) to the mental (and to
the mind–brain relation) could help to sort out these matters philosophically.

Most philosophers grant that
past philosophical texts demand philosophical
skills from their interpreters. Many would allow that there is
plenty of work to be done in interpreting past philosophy and
comprehending its history. However, across the twentieth century,
philosophers disputed whether historically oriented interpretations have their own philosophical value. I
would urge that such interpretations are essential to
the health of ongoing philosophy. Philosophy
without history may not be completely blind, but it is
likely to be extremely near-sighted, bumbling about as it attempts
to orient itself in its own evolving problem space. It is not required, for philosophy to get its
bearings, that every philosopher become a
historian. But all of us may need to draw from the work of our
historically oriented colleagues. Which makes it all the more desirable for historians of philosophy
to take pains to render the interest
and the results of their work readily accessible to other philosophers.

Source : Sorell, Tom and
G. A. J. Rogers.(2005), Analytic Philosophy
and History of Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon
Press).