Holistoids

a readable version

2008-07-10T15:00:00.000-03:00

Thought Holism meets World Holism
Hilan Bensusan & Manuel de Pinedo

1. Holisms

Thought Holism (TH) is the thesis according to which thoughts are interconnected by their semantic features. This interconnection extends to beliefs, meanings and mental contents generally. Intelligibility of thought, and its relation to the rest of the world, ties together different thoughts in a larger pool. According to TH, thoughts in isolation cannot be recognized as such – TH is the opposite of the Thought Atomism to be found, for example, in many versions of a representational account of the mind.

World Holism (WH), by contrast, is a thesis about the world. It claims that parts of the world are interconnected by their modal features. These parts can only be described by means of the dispositional properties that connect them together in a larger pool. WH is opposed to various forms of World Atomism that take the world to be composed of modally independent parts.

In this work we begin to explore the relations between TH and WH. We do that by means of a main contention: that WH is the best metaphysical companion for TH: TH is both best understood and best grounded if associated to WH. This contention has implications for the placement of thought within the world: we claim that in a WH scenario, thought could be fully integrated with the rest of the world. There could still be ways for TH to be accommodated in a more atomistic metaphysical outlook, but we will offer reasons to pair it with a full-blooded holistic conception of the world – and suggest that TH at the very least strongly encourages WH. (At least if we consider the versions of TH and WH that we favour.) If we are right, what emerges is a fully holistic conception of thought and world with interesting consequences both for the place of powers, intentionality and normativity in nature and for knowledge, truth and the contact between thought and the rest of the world.

2. Elaborating versions of TH and WH

We take the most satisfactory version of TH to be close to that recommended by Davidson (1974, 1986, 1991, 2001) for a number of reasons: (a) it is a thoroughly non-empiricist version of holism about mental content, (b) it is based on the rejection of the first two dogmas of empiricism denounced by Quine, together with the rejection of a third dogma that would make sure that no empiricism is left (1951), (c) Davidson’s holism is also committed to an externalist account of mental content: the world affects the pool of our (mostly true) beliefs and (d) central to his endeavour to flesh out and defend a TH, there was the effort to indicate how a collection of thoughts can respond to the world. We begin by contrasting his own holistic account of this contact with a standard view, akin to empiricism, that would take thought to be responding to the world through some privileged points of access.

The standard, atomistic ways to present how thought can respond to the world often assumes that thinking could be intelligible while being utterly indifferent to the world. The view calls, then, for some part of the world to be more readily available to thought – what we call a bottleneck, a channel through which the world affects thinking. Bottlenecks can appear as sense data, immediately perceptible objects, passively acquired (non-conceptual) contents and various other forms. Often, empirical contents are taken to act as bottlenecks. Singular non-modal items get in touch with thought through the bridge of the senses. Empirical contents, also, could be conceptually loaded and still act as bottlenecks.[1] The picture has therefore two conjoined components: the appeal to a passive, receptive element in our thought and an atomism about our responsiveness to the world.[2]

Davidson’s holistic view, on the other hand, postulates no bottlenecks. The idea is that internal properties of thoughts, chiefly their interpretability, ensure that the world is reachable. The manoeuvre, as envisaged by Davidson (1974, 1986, 1987, 1991), tied thought and the world through truth and intelligibility. Consider the following modal skeptical challenge:

MSC.

Premise: (It is intelligible that) each of my beliefs can be false

Conclusion: Therefore, (it is intelligible that) all of my beliefs can be false

One can accept the inference and attempt to show that the premise is false. Such a path leads quickly to the postulation of bottlenecks: through thoughts that cannot be wrong I make contact with the world.[3] Davidson’s holist take, in contrast, would be to show that MSC contains no valid inference.[4] If not every belief can stand or fall on its own, we can begin to see how each of my beliefs could be false and still intelligible while that could not happen to all of them. A crucial ingredient of the argument is that we cannot establish a separation between that which fixes meaning and other beliefs – that my beliefs are to be assigned a meaning (an interpretation) under the light of other beliefs. That there is no separate pool of meaning-fixing beliefs is a consequence of the Quinean rejection of the first dogma. The rejection of the second dogma entails that no verdict from the world can impinge on less than a collection of interconnected beliefs. Confrontation with the world requires always a background of true beliefs in order for the verdict to be intelligible. Davidson’s holism deals in critical masses of thought: within a critical mass there is intelligibility, truth and contact with the world. Little can be said about each belief constituting the critical mass. However, reassurance that thought is not indifferent to the world comes from the critical masses that make each belief understood.

We can try to formulate the argument that supports the claim that some (sufficiently large) critical masses of thought enjoy contact with the world in terms of semantically interdependent beliefs (sib for short): a collection of n beliefs so that there is an m (1 < m ≤ n) so that if m beliefs are false the collection is unintelligible. A sib is a critical mass of beliefs and, for our purposes now, we shall consider sibs such as that composed by all of someone’s beliefs (call them a-sibs). The argument, that we called Holistic Contact between Thought and World (HCTW), could be then presented as premises (1)-(5) leading to the conclusion (6):

HCTW.

(1) All beliefs are equally about the world: no belief is intelligible purely in terms of its contribution to the interpretation of other beliefs (From the rejection of the 1^st dogma)

(2) Conversely, each belief depends on other beliefs to be understood and to receive a verdict from the world – understanding and confrontation with the world apply to critical masses of beliefs, to sibs. (From the rejection of the 2^nd dogma)

(3) Empirical content comes in the form of beliefs. (From the rejection of the 3^rd dogma)

(4) If any sib contained too many falsities, it becomes unintelligible and cannot be confronted with the world. (Definition of sib)

(5) If an a-sib were unintelligible (if it contained too many falsities), its falsity would become unintelligible – and talk of truth (within the a-sib) would become itself unintelligible. (From 1-4)

(6) There should be some truths in an a-sib.

If the argument is sound, there should be some truths within any intelligible sib.[5] Certainly, we lack the means to locate the truths within a sib; in fact, from a holist point of view, the truth of a belief always depends on others as none is self-standing. Furthermore, if the premise of MSC is true, we seem to need a measure of indeterminacy as to where the truths are located in a sib.

The version of HT we favour is broadly Davidsonian in that it is committed to HCTW and to the link between intelligibility and truth. We take the features of our version of HT to be a consequence of this broadly Davidsonian position. The most salient are:

α. A thought cannot be understood or confronted with the world on its own, it needs an environment of thoughts.

β. A thought cannot be understood unless we consider the effect it could have over other thoughts (for instance, in terms of the inferences it entitles).

γ. We can highlight a particular connection between thoughts only by blocking the effect of surrounding thoughts; it is only by holding something fixed that we can pinpoint them.

In contrast, holism about the world (WH) appeals to modal connections between its parts – they are integrated through these connections as each part carries dispositions. The drive for holism comes from a rejection of the claim that all dispositional properties are grounded in categorical ones. It follows that there are at least some grounding powers in the world. Dispositions (and powers) are somehow directed towards another part of the world – their identities require something outside them, they enjoy what Molnar (2003) called physical intentionality. Our preferred version is one according to which there is no purely categorical properties – either all properties are dispositional (Shoemaker 1980) or properties are both categorical and dispositional (Martin & Heil XXXX). According to a power-based WH, the world is full of modal connections and we cannot understand any part of it without making reference to dispositional properties. Powers affect and are affected and no singular item can exist if it is not in some dispositional relation with others. We tend to view powers as singular, dispositional tropes: each disposition is unique in its potential relation to other items. Physical intentionality depicts singular elements even though we often use general terms to describe powers (such as fragility, solubility, edibility). Powers are therefore utterly relational and therefore holistic but, at the same time, singular. The singularity of powers entails nothing concerning quidditates: they are discernible one from another only by means of their potential effects. Finally, and contrary to a tradition in the metaphysics of dispositions (that revolves around the work of Armstrong) we prefer to consider powers as affordances and not as properties because to our ears affordances evoke capacities in a stronger manner. [6]

WH contrasts with a mosaic-like Humean ontology where parts are put together contingently. In a power-based WH, to individuate connections between two items of the world, we need to postulate that the surrounding powers are kept fixed. In order to, say, predict something based on a conditional such as “if this salt is put in water it will dissolve” we need to assume that other powers are not affecting the salt. Such assumptions enable nomological statements to be predictive – and explain their failures; we can individuate connections between parts of the world and without them, prediction is impossible as each item of the world is subject to an indefinite number of powers. Certainly, while a mosaic-like world would make knowledge impossible, in a world where nothing can be isolated from the rest and everything affects everything else knowledge is equally impossible: knowledge needs graspable connections. To some extent, a device to introduce ceteris paribus scenarios is the only way we can focus on particular connections. They introduce an element of modal inanimateness capable of separating a particular connection from the others. Without them, dispositional properties intertwine all parts of the world and everything can affect everything.

The features of our favourite version of WH are consequences of the power-based ontology above. The most salient are:

α. A part of the world cannot exist on its own, as it needs other things to affect and be affected by it.

β. A part of the world cannot be brought to focus unless we consider the effect it could have over other parts (for instance, in terms of what it causes).

γ. We can highlight a particular connection between parts of the world only by blocking the effect of surrounding parts of the world; it is only by holding something fixed that we can pinpoint them.

3. Some reasons to couple TH with WH

Having presented the features of our favourite versions of TH and WH we can now move on to present reasons in favour of the coupling of both doctrines. These reasons range from the advantages of a consistent rejection of atomism to considerations related to the integration of thought to the world. They are part of the picture of the thorough holism we are putting forward.

3.1. An atomist world is epistemologically and semantically implausible

A modally poor metaphysics entails various forms of scepticism, chiefly related to problems of induction. A modally poor world can only relate to thought by means of bottlenecks: a world of detached pieces is to be accessed by thought in a piecemeal way where whatever that is sensed works as the starting point. Thought finds no dispositional connections to exploit, the ties between affordances and what they physically intend becomes no more than a projection of our interests or habits and no longer part of the ontology – they are at most the product of our sovereignty. Humean accounts of modal connections encourage the idea that dispositional affordances cannot be part of the world and are exiled to a second creation, that responds to nothing but human convenience. An atomist and modal-poor ontology entails almost immediately a measure of scepticism: the world cannot be called to warrant any projection from what is received through the bottleneck towards what is still unobserved. Holism concerning thought rejects this projection legacy by showing that there is no part of thought where the world cannot be involved. TH has then exorcized the epistemological consequences of world atomism – and that strongly suggests that another metaphysics is in order.

We have said that in order to state a specific dispositional connection, we have to assume ceteris paribus scenarios. One can then say that this assumption introduces a measure of our sovereignty. In fact, a suspicion can arise that WH does no more than reverse the Humean image of a modally poor world associated with a second creation of dispositional connections – the world become a pool of powers where we select some assuming the rest is going to be kept fixed. It could be as if we need fixity and constancy in order to attain knowledge of the world and that cannot be provided by the world itself – as Hume held that modal affordances cannot be provided by the world itself. We will have more to say about this suspicion later but two related points of dissimilitude between the two images deserve attention now. First, what we do when we postulate a ceteris paribus scenario in order to act or think is to subtract something from the world and not to add anything. Our intervention would be just to establish a focus, to depict a part of the world disconnecting it (modally) from the rest. The raw material of modal connections is already there and is itself no product of our intervention. The contribution of thought is no more than selecting a part of the world to focus on.[7] Second, the postulation of a ceteris paribus scenario is the effect of a power – that thought, but not only thought, entertains. Knowledge in fact requires both modal connections and fixity, and the world is such that some interventions can produce greater fixity. Such a postulation is not something alien to an ontology of powers – it is not something added to it from outside. The manoeuvre is different from that of inserting modal connections in a world of distinct individuals in that the products of thinking while selecting powers could be accounted for in terms of what the world is made of – mind doesn’t present itself as alien and detached from the world it intends.

Humean ontology favours separate and modally inanimate items that establish only contingent connections between them. This is semantically implausible because we need stronger connections between items – normally necessary connections – in order to ensure connections between different predicates. Humeans hold that a is necessarily connected to b only if a is identical with b and therefore (in most cases at least) causation cannot be a necessary connection. So, there is a necessary connection between chordates and creatures with a heart (and a causal tie between chordates and creatures with a kidney). The Humean world is not modally inanimate, it is analytically animate. Necessary connections are reached through the trick of making some connections available to reason alone. If, according to (1) in HCTW above, there are no beliefs that are solely a device to understand other beliefs, then there could be no belief in a necessary connection that is provided by reason alone. In other words, Quine’s rejection of the first dogma can cut deep against Humean assumptions about analyticity that invokes it to provide the concealed necessities needed. Whenever we have observed occurrences of sentences where expressions like ‘chordate’ appear, we have also observed we were prone to accept sentences where ‘creatures with a heart’ appear – as we take both expressions to point to the same part of the world. Any further inductive step is unwarranted. Likewise, we have observed occurrences of sentences where expressions like ‘chordate’ appear, we have also observed we were prone to accept sentences where ‘creatures with a kidney’ appear – as we take both expressions to point to the same part of the world. Here again, any further inductive step is unwarranted. Humeans would like to say that a further inductive step is available in the first case – as it is a matter of reason that there should always be identity between some expressions, a matter of reason that relies solely on truths by virtue of the meaning of the expressions. Humeans hope to get necessity out of semantics – as a by-product of expressions having meanings. Quine’s rejection of the dogma suggests that there is no such shortcut: modal connections have to come from the world or will be no more than a projection from our habits. Once TH is adopted, there is no exception for analytical connections.

The reasons to move towards TH leave epistemological and semantic discomfort with an atomist, Humean image of the world. TH begins to appear more at home in an ontology of powers.

3.2 Holism, predictive truths and modality

A central element of the atomistic, mosaic-like view of the world is what Molnar (2003: 181) calls ‘Humean distinctness’. The idea is that (apart from the appeal often made by Humeans to analytical, de dicto necessary connections between items) items are only connected to each other contingently. Such a thesis, that there is no modal glue among items in the world, can be shown to be false by an extension of HCTW above. The extended argument purports to show that MSC above is an invalid reasoning because doubting cannot be done in an atomistic, cumulative manner. Specific doubts, the argument shows, require specific grounds for knowledge, like thought, cannot rest on atoms.

The extension of HCTW is done by considering other sibs. We can take some subsets of what we understood to be an a-sib – the critical mass formed by all of someone’s beliefs – to be sibs themselves. Consider the collection composed by all beliefs that make direct or indirect reference to what is not yet observed (not only ‘the sun will rise tomorrow’, ‘the clock will carry on ticking in the next minute’, ‘the rooster will sing in the morning’, ‘the water will boil in 10 minutes’ but also ‘the next emerald to be found will be green’ or ‘the next fossil to be found here will be of the same species’). The collection of beliefs about what is not yet observed – call it the collection of predictive beliefs, P – is a sib for if we take out enough beliefs from it (or show enough beliefs to be false), the remaining ones are going to be unintelligible. A predictive belief can only be false if a number of other predictive beliefs are true – otherwise falsehood about predictions ceases to make sense. We can call a sib a central sib (c-sib) for an a-sib if the following condition is met:

(7) If all beliefs in a c-sib are false, no other belief in the a-sib can be true.

We take that there are some c-sibs for any a-sib as there are some general features of beliefs and truth that require that some beliefs be present in any a-sib (even though no particular belief has to be present in any a-sib). Further, we claim that:

(8) There is at least one c-sib for any a-sib for P is a c-sib for any a-sib.

We take (8) to be a reasonable consequence of the centrality of prediction for belief. Some predictive beliefs have to be true in order for predictions to make sense and beliefs to extend beyond what has been observed. Beliefs are intelligible only against the background of other beliefs that link what has been observed and what is expected to be kept fixed – beliefs that establish a natural clock against which predictions about the future can be understood and put to test. Without those beliefs, there is no sense in using future observations to confront beliefs as ‘future’ can only be understood against the background of beliefs about natural clocks.

If we add (7) and (8) to HCTW, we have all the premises of the extended HCTW (EHCTW) that, from (1)-(8), would conclude that:

(9) There should be some truths in aP .

It follows that we can only question whether the sun will rise tomorrow against the background of accepted predictions concerning tomorrow – predictions that we tend to place in the very definition of ‘tomorrow’, such as that the rooster will sing or the clock will be indicating midnight.[8] Clearly, these predictions are as much part of P as the other predictions. Furthermore, some of the beliefs in the collection have to be true, otherwise it is impossible to recognize thought within it – and, therefore, it would be impossible to spot failures of prediction. Hume assumed that if the future resembles the past this would be a matter of fact and not a question that could be established by reason (alone or aided by experience). If all of our predictions were wrong, however, their falsity would disappear as they would cease to make sense. P, as a collection of inductions, is intelligible only in so far as some of its members are true – all of our inductions cannot be false. If the argument holds, the truth of some inductions is established.[9]

If some predictions are right, there are some modal connections between what has been observed and what has not – predictions exploit the modal ties and typically assume that in some cases, future observations will resemble past observations. That some of our beliefs about future observations are true show that our true beliefs cannot be concentrated on some observed items of the world while having no implications for the others. Notice that it is Humean distinctness and modal scepticism that are challenged by the argument and the appeal to future observations (and the future) is not central. In a four-dimensionalist ontology (XXXX) we can take predictions to be ties between different parts of space-time – the argument establishes that some modal tie has to be in place. EHCTW is an extension of HCTW, an argument that is part of our preferred version of TH. If we further hold (8), which is a reasonable feature of classes of beliefs forming a-sibs, we conclude that some modal ties between the items of the world have to be in place. TH leads us to some sort of modal anti-scepticism that further fuels WH.

3.3 Thought is part of the world

We can find support for WH if we manage to see the arguments for TH as a special case of a broader holism. Physical intentionality could be a starting point to consider thought as part of the world. Molnar (2003: 60-66) argues convincingly that the four features normally associated with Brentano’s account of intentionality can be only slightly modified to characterize an item with physical intentionality: i. it is directed to something beyond itself, ii. it could be directed towards something nonexistent, iii. it is disposed towards exemplars and prototypes rather than specific items and iv. it is sensitive to the way the intended item is presented. (We mean by physically intentional what satisfies this Brentano-Molnar characterization.[10]) Thoughts have a dimension of physical intentionality. Thought contents are directed towards other contents centrally because they are dispositional ingredients to produce other thought contents. Here it is interesting to consider the debate between inferentialists and representationalists – the latter being the ones who consider contents as categorical properties that carry a representation inside them quite independently of other surrounding thoughts and the former being those that consider contents in terms of their power to infer more contents. The debate is many-faced and the two positions have as many versions as they are intermediate proposals recommended (see, for example, Brandom 1994…). However, TH tends to side against the representationalist conception that a thought could be fully characterized in terms of a fixed states determined by what it is about. Inferences, to be sure, are not the only things that are in the powers of a thought: a thought can affect action, perception and several other abilities that require conceptual capacities (even though those capacities surely could be understood broadly in terms of inferences, see Brandom, 1994). The stress on inference, nevertheless, is enough to bring to light a feature of intentionality that is present in physical intentionality: the affordances of an item have to do with its capacity to affect other items – and we can think of inferentiability as a power. To think of a thought content in terms of its inferentiabilities contrasts with the image where it is first seen in terms of what it is about. Our insistence on inferentiabilities as powers doesn’t entail that a thought content has to be taken as a bundle of inferentiabilities (of powers) but what it is about cannot be brought to view without the bundle. Thoughts are in dispositional relation one to the other and truth is attained only within the scope of critical masses (sibs) where contents inter-animate each other. The elements in common with physical intentionality can be brought to view in the following (a)-(b) to (c) inference:

(a) Snow is white [a belief within an a-sib]

(b) There is snow in the landscape [acquired through perceptual capacities, or by testimony]

Here, i. we understand (a) in terms of its power (among others) to infer (c) on the presence of (b). ii. In the absence of (b), (a) would still be directed towards (c) – along with other powers it has – while not being part of the inference (actuality of unmanifested powers). iii. Surely, (b) is not more than a prototype – it can be presented as, for example:

(b’) Peter saw snow falling last night [by testimony]

(b’’) There is always snow in this area at this time [a belief]

(b’’’) I can see the snow in front of me [by perception]

Finally, iv. one has to recognize the snow in order to conclude, from (a), something like (c); which is not possible if snow is presented in a very different format (for example, filling pink pills).

This is not to say that there is nothing specific about the powers within thought. In fact, mental intentionality involves some special connection to rule following through which they are affected by, and acquire the powers to affect, the thoughts of other people. Full-fledged thoughts are interpretable and interpretation makes them recognizable as thought. We acquire new powers when we acquire the all-entwined capacities to use and recognize concepts – conceptual inculcation affects our affordances, our capacities to be active. Concepts make us respond to the world in ways that contrasts with our inclinations and provide an environment rendered fixed by assuming that some powers are not present. So, the concept of red is acquired together with the assumption that often the light conditions are going to remain the same – and no further power will intrude this artificially limited set-up. Concepts introduce lab-like limitations in our environment and this is part of our activity of focusing on parts of the integrated whole that compose the world: the contribution of our sovereignty is to fix some modal connections in the world by rendering some further powers sterile. The introduction of fixity – of ceteris paribus scenarios – is arguably not an exclusivity of conceptual activity (and of our sovereignty over our world-view). Many physical and biological powers depend on a fixed environment: the frog (physically) intends a fly and is not geared to an environment full of fly replicas; salt will not disolved under extreme temperatures, the bee goes for a flower-looking object and not towards a flower pill that might contain everything it needs, etc. Features iii. and iv. of the Brentano-Molnar characterization of physical intentionality suggest that other powers have the capacity to produce a ceteris paribus scenario around them: iii. the capacity to be directed towards exemplars and prototypes of an item and assume its specifics have irrelevant powers and iv. the capacity to be directed to something in a specific mode of presentation assuming that other powers could not affect the presentation of the directed item. We call these devices that act on the assumption that some powers are indifferent to others ceteris paribus devices (CPD for short). Thought – and arguably mental intentionality – is a CPD but we claim that they are not the only ones. CPDs are grounded on physical intentionality. Our capacity to project fixity in the world – in contrast with the capacity to project modality postulated by Humeans – is shared by other CPDs in the world. Our own projection can then be understood on the light of CPDs in general that, in its turn, can be understood in terms of physical intentionality.

TH can be viewed as a response to the failed attempts to establish a powerless (or inanimate, or nondispositional) realm within thought – like a bottleneck conceived as a blank slate to be impressed by the world. Such a slate will be a powerless effect of the perceived powers around us. Holism claims that there is no merely passive part of thought – powers are everywhere. We can select some powers and detach a part of the world but that is the work of a CPD acting locally – nothing is in itself powerless. If it is plausible that thought is part of the world, we should consider what counts in favour of TH as a special case of what counts for WH. As an exercise, we can attempt to expand on the three first premises of HCTW above (the rejection of the three dogmas) so that they are formulated as general claims about world holism:

(I) There is no atomic, fixed necessary connection that could be a truth-maker for our discourses on necessity. A modal connection is never unaffected by the other surrounding modal connections. There is no separate realm of necessary connections enjoying a special status that would make them effective comes what may – no separate realm of analytical connections, no separate realm of nomological connections. Therefore, no nomological necessity could be isolated from all the other powers affecting each other. There is no principled distinction between fixed nomological necessity on the one hand and ordinary powers – only as an approximation we can take laws as fixed connections (typically, through ceteris paribus clauses).

(II) As a consequence of (I), there is no picture of isolated parts of the world that could be taken as more than approximations. Our ontology should include all the intervening powers. Descriptions of thought and of the world should deal in critical masses.

(III) No item could be isolated from its powers (potentialities, capacities, conceptual schemes for thought). Therefore, there is no underlying substrata to objects and no underlying quidditas to affordances that can be detached from its powers. Thought content cannot be separated from its conceptual (for example, inferential) capacities and no part of the world could be separated from its powers.

The rejection of all kinds of fixed necessary connections (claim (I)) follows from the all intruding character of powers – they are holistically connected to whatever come their way and they are not limited to a fixed, easily detectable scope. This puts together the rejection of semantically necessary connections and eliminativism about natural laws as recommended by Mumford (2004): in both cases we assume no fixed necessary connections that are immune from other surrounding powers. The emerging picture is one where powers compose neither a mosaic nor a jigsaw with fixed positions but rather a set of moving magnets where attraction and repulsion comes from all parts and no connection is stable. Fixed necessary connections are not truth-makers, they are just part of our worldview, consequences of a CPD. We need some ceteris paribus clauses to provide fixity in order to focus on specific powers.

Claims (II) and (III) summarize the analysis of thought in terms of powers – there are no isolated parts of the world and there is no individual part that can be separated from its distinctive powers. They show further how TH can be seen as a special case of WH: conceptual capacities and physical dispositions seen as powers. Thought, as the rest of the world, is bounded by no fixed necessity and is not composed by individual parts that can be dissociated from its powers. Further, thought builds on dispositional affordances to produce a CPD that is, as any other, capable of introducing fixity and detachable parts in the world. If all these elements sketch a convincing image, it is an image of a thorough holism where the interdependence of thought contents is further illuminated by an ontology of interrelated powers.

3.4 Thought as a special part of the world

Last section presented the integration of thought and world through powers and physical intentionality as a reason to couple TH and WH. There are, nevertheless, strong intuitions that some features of thought – chiefly to do with its normativity, its rule-governing character and its connection to (reflective, conceptual) knowledge – make it special with respect to other parts of the world. These intuitions stress that there is a difference between mere physical intentional states and states that are about something else. In this section we will try to suggest that making room for these intuitions could provide more (and not less) reasons to embrace both TH and WH.

We have argued that powers could take us all the way from a TH to WH. In other words, once TH is embraced – at least in the version we favoured which is fairly Davidsonian and in any case committed to a degree of semantic externalism – holism seems to be hard to be keep away from ontology for the reasons above. There is nonetheless the temptation to tame some of the (world) holistic consequences of TH by embracing one form or another of partially atomistic metaphysics chiefly by softening claims I-III above in order to accommodate the supposed special character of thought. These temptations appear when TH is held together with a conception of nature where laws and determinate necessities underlie thought and make it look anomalous and, in some cases, unnatural. It could seem odd that a world of natural necessity would ground rule-based processes and that fixed necessary (nomological) connections were the elements available to account for our capacity to respond to reasons. An image of nature as a realm of interconnected laws can make it difficult to present normativity as part of it; a difficulty that stands out not only in naturalist projects to place thought in a natural scenario but also elsewhere in attempts to make place in nature for norm-governing behaviour.[11] The underlying image of nature – and the underlying ontology – refrain the holism about thought to spread to the world. It is this underlying image of nature that furthers the impression that thought, and mental states in general, are somehow different and anomalous.

Davidson appears sometimes to be prey of trying to put together TH with an atomistic take on natural necessity. He is at once the most profound champion of epistemological and semantic holism and a defender of the need for laws to make sense of causal connections. Thought ends up having to be anomalous and we can see a gulf emerging between the parts of the world capable to think and anything else. Further, the gulf is between mind and world as the former is thought of as revolving around contentful, normative states where the latter is made of categorical properties and laws. Davidson postulates that thoughts are causally connected to the world and embraces a Humean view of causality according to which there should be some description of thought where a law holds between thought and what causes it. This appeal to the need for laws under some description – that McDowell (1985) dubbed the fourth dogma of empiricism to be abandoned when the third is dismissed – introduces fixed necessity into the picture of thought. There is a way, then, at least in principle, to recognize thought without interpreting it – by exploiting the nomological connection. The appeal to fixed nomological necessities makes thought grounded on laws (and the categorical properties causally connected by them). Of course, at least in the best interpretations[12], thought content depends always on other contents and no ground can determine what a thought is about. Thought enjoys a degree of sovereignty but only to the extent that it becomes anomalous – detached from the rest of the world, subject to no (psychophysical) laws. Further, it is causally connected to the rest of the world through some grounding: Davidson’s so called weakly Humean account of causality can be read as a way to put forward the thesis that there should be a categorical property behind any thought that connect it to its content. By being coupled with WH, Davidson’s TH would be freed of the idea of anomaly of thought and thought could be conceived out of materials that are themselves dispositional affordances with physical intentionality. No categorical property would be postulated to ground thoughts – and no laws will be needed to assure a causal connection between a thought and its content. The connection would be just a matter of powers.

Powers are behind both physical dispositions and conceptual capacities. Surely, a crucial element for thought is related to its capacity to be sensitive to rules, to follow them and to respond to concepts: thought is not only (physically) intentional but it is normative. There is a gap to be breached between physical affordances and normativity but the latter might just start to look less unnatural if we take the former to be physically intentional. The Brentano-Molnar characterization of physical intentionality (especially related to iii and iv above) can help viewing the intentionality of thought in a continuum with physical powers (and thought in line with other CPD devices). So, for instance, a bee seeks a flower no matter its shape or colour – as we conceive of a man independently of his height. A bee is not happy with every presentation of a flower, a pill could contain all that it needs but it wouldn’t go for it. Assuming a bee has no thought contents, it follows a physical intentionality out of its inclinations. No matter how convinced we are by Millikan’s (XXXX) attempts to understand intentionality in terms of proper functions, we can draw the conclusion that inclinations are themselves intentional. In fact, if intentionality can be taken to be present already within inclinations – concept acquisition introduces normativity in a picture that is already intentional. The pupil of the famous example of Wittgenstein’s Investigations (PU, I, §185) can be said to have a particular intentional inclination at each stage of the process of learning how to follow the rule “+2”. The pupil’s behaviour can be seen as a product of a systematic error due to having seen the examples given as cases of something like “+4 when the sequence is greater than 1000”. This can be described as an intentional inclination of the pupil. Wittgenstein acknowledges that there could be fully articulated (mistaken) intentional items by saying that there is no way to distinguish a systematic from a non-systematic error in a pupil. Inclinations don’t have to be taken as randomly produced, they could be as intentional as the rule that in the expected end of the process the pupil will supposedly entertain. The important difference – between inclination-based and rule-governed action – is then not a question of intentionality, as both rules and inclinations satisfy the Brentano-Molnar conditions for physical intentionality. The difference is one of normativity – this is what is inculcated in the process of learning to follow a rule. (Physical) intentionality was there from the beginning.

Normativity is part of the specific intentionality of thought. Naturalizing normativity would be the name of the project to understand it in terms of physical intentionality – not necessarily to explain it away in terms of physical intentionality. Normativity has a special way of dealing with iii and iv: concepts deal with prototypes and exemplars and create opacity in language because they are relative to their mode of presentation (they introduce non-extensional contexts)[13]. A normative, conceptual CPD builds a conceptual interface with the world that carries within in some ceteris paribus assumptions. These assumptions are typically in the form of semantic connections (or so-called analyticity). This conceptual interface creates a scenario for intentional items where some powers are considered while others dismissed. Conceptual interfaces, like CPDs generally, are also powers, they are capable of interaction with other powers. Because of that, they can bring new things to the world. That their intervention always involves keeping some powers fixed, inanimating them, so to speak, should not be an obstacle for their creative nature. Forcing some powers into inertness is their way to bring to the fore other powers, to make them salient, to increase the possibility of interacting and combining with them into new powers. For instance, the move from being inclined to eat whatever it has a certain appearance to mastering the concept of food increases fixity and inanimation (by ignoring all sorts of other powers that could affect edibility) and at the same time affords you to eat a broader variety of things.

Inclinations, on the other hand, are powers but are not available as such to thought – they are directed towards some items without being about them, without having (non-conceptual) content. Leaving aside the epistemological and semantic details of such a view of inclinations, we would like just to point out that concepts bring up normativity through its special resources to create fixity. Those resources, we believe, can be fully understood in terms of powers. In this (perhaps restricted) sense, normativity can be naturalized.

We can also understand knowledge – and its ties with thought – better if we put together TH and WH. TH teaches us that true beliefs has to be present in any critical mass of thoughts. It is reasonable to take knowledge as having to be present always in thought.[14] In fact, we can think that knowledge is one of the powers of thought and it is easy to understand it in terms of dispositional affordances: we can afford to act and think things because of what we know. Surely, reflective, conceptual knowledge requires special abilities (powers) that are inculcated in us through our upbringing within language; the constituents of these abilities, however, can be understood, as we saw, in terms of powers. Knowledge, like any dispositional affordance, is holistic – it acts depending on its surroundings. Holistic knowledge is such that we cannot point at where exactly it lies – it’s elusive. It depends on a critical mass of thought and we cannot pinpoint where, within that mass, knowledge lies. TH gives us means to ensure ourselves that we know about the world – but we have no means to determine what exactly we know about it. The picture of WH is one of interconnectedness through modal ties. Reflective, conceptual knowledge exploits these ties and makes further powers available for thought and action. The search for knowledge lies in a framework of concepts and norms but it’s also akin to that of other CPDs with physical intentionality. Our knowledge, nevertheless, can be directed to things as far as our concepts can reach. Directedness is extended by conceptual means. The holism of thought introduces, therefore, a further holistic dimension to knowledge: our knowledge responds to everything our concepts can reach, it acts over a greater scenario than other CPDs. Knowledge (and concepts, rules, normativity) makes thought special – but only in the sense that it is a special power and, as such, a special part of the world.

4. Future work

This work is meant to be programmatic in nature. It starts considering the connections between TH and WH and arguing that there are reasons to embrace both. In this sense, it doesn’t intend to do more than begin to explore the connections and much work needs to be done to highlight the consequences of such a coupling and to further develop some of the ones discussed in this paper.

We would like to briefly mention a few. First, the application of an understanding of knowledge as power to bring new light to some traditional puzzles in epistemology, such as those related to the definibility of knowledge by means of the idea that knowing something involves powers absent in mere true belief. Second, the idea that a conception of thought as power, by stressing that thoughts involves acts of thinking no less than articulated sets of contents, could open new ways to think about the debate concerning non-conceptual content. Third, more work needs to be done to elucidate the role of CPDs in what distinguishes actuality from mere power, which also relates to the debates about categorical properties within an ontology of powers. Fourth, the relation between powers and truth seems to be fertile: thoughts are truth bearers while other powers are somehow truth-makers – is truth a relation between powers? Fifth, the role of thought within WT deserves some consideration: if thoughts are powers amongst powers, they are subject to interaction with other powers and, in that sense, equally constrained by them; any temptation to view thought as capable of embracing reality as a whole would then subside.

We believe there are interesting philosophical results in all of those avenues. Further, we trust to have provided some prima facie reasons to add to an ontology of powers to a thoroughly holistic account of thought.

References unfinished

Bensusan, H & M. Pinedo (2007)

Brandom, R. (1994), Making it Explicit, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Davidson, D. (1974), ‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984, pp. 183-98.

Davidson, D. (1986a), ‘A nice derangement of epitaphs’

Davidson, D. (1986), ‘A coherence theory of truth and knowledge’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 137-153.

Davidson, D. (1987), ‘Knowing one’s own mind’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 15-38.

Davidson, D. (1990), ‘Epistemology externalized’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 193-204.

Davidson, D. (1991), ‘Three varieties of knowledge’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 205-220.

Davidson, D. (2001) ‘Externalisms’, in Kotakto, P., Pagin, P & Segal, G. (eds.) Interpreting Davidson. Stanford: CSLI, pp. 1-16.

Ellis, B. (2002) The Philosophy of Nature: a Guide to New Essentialism, Chesham: Acumen.

Hawthorne

Martin, C. & J. Heil

Malpas, J. (2005), ‘On not giving up the world: Davidson and the grounds of belief’, in Smith, P. J. (ed.), Significado, Verdade, Interpretação: Davidson e a Filosofia, São Paulo: Loyola, pp. 1-17.

McDowell, J. (1985), ‘Functionalism and anomalous monism’ xxx

McDowell, J. (1994), Mind and World, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

McDowell, J. (1995), ‘Knowledge and the internal’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 55, 877-893.

Millikan, R. (xxxx)

Molnar, G. (2003) Powers: a Study in Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mumford, S. (2004) Laws in Nature, London: Routledge.

Nagel, T. (1999)

Pinedo, M. & H. Bensusan (2006)

Quine, W. v. O. (1951) ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’,

Rorty, R. (1986), ‘Pragmatism, Davidson, and truth’, in Lepore, E. (ed.) Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 333-355.

Shoemaker, S. (1980), ‘Properties, causation, and projectibility’, in Cohen, L.J. & Hesse, M. (eds.), Applications of Inductive Logic, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 291-312.

Williamson, T. (2000), Knowledge and its Limits, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (PU), Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell; trans. of Philosophische Untersuchungen by G.E.M. Anscombe, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, 1967.

Zinkernagel, H. (xxxx)

[1] McDowell’s minimal empiricism (1994) comes to mind. McDowell’s bottlenecks are not committed to modal skepticism: any kind of content can be acquired by passive exercises of conceptual capacities. See Bensusan & Pinedo (2007).

[2] The bottleneck image carries its (atomistic) metaphysical burden. It is required that there are singular and modally inanimate items to be channelled through the bottleneck. These items fall into the bottleneck view with a measure of what is often called a Humean metaphysics (Ellis 2002, Mumford 2004, Hawthorne 2006).

[3] Foundationalism concerning empirical knowledge comes to mind. The search for foundations for empirical knowledge can be pursued through the postulation of bottlenecks. Not every foundation, however, can be seen as a bottleneck (if you take as the foundation whatever explains best our empirical knowledge). Conversely, not all sort of bottleneck images postulate a foundation for empirical knowledge (consider, for example, Brandom 2004 as discussed in Pinedo & Bensusan 2006). Accordingly, friends of bottlenecks do not necessarily take the premise of MSC to be false.

[4] The validity of modal inferences from premises each-premises to conclusions with all-conclusions is not easily decided by an appeal to a logical form. Consider the two following examples: (i) Each child in the playground can break a leg therefore all children in the playground can break a leg; (ii) Each player in the lottery can win therefore all players in the lottery can win. It is clear that while (i) is valid, (ii) is not. The holistic argument is that MSC is closer to (ii) than to (i).

[5] Surely, a sib is not just a collection (or a body) of beliefs but rather a network. Beliefs are semantically structured in a particular way within the sib. The sphere Quine mentions in the end of Two Dogmas is an example of structure within a sib.

[6] Our version of WH involves a realist account of affordances that differs, for example, from Molnar’s selective realism about properties in general (2003: 25-28). Molnar starts out considering that there should be no isomorphism between predicates and properties. We tend rather to understand that we are close to an isomorphism between concept-applications and affordances. We take affordances to demand all sorts of conceptual abilities for their specification – including family-resemblance concepts and complex predicates. Of course, not all predicate imaginable is in isomorphism with singular affordances, but we should limit ourselves to concept-tokens, application of concepts within acts of thought. We see concept-tokens as capable to attempt to depict singular affordances. Concept-types, on the other hand, play no central role in our characterization of affordances. Here we are in line with the picture of interpretation of language by passing theories in Davidson (1986a).

[7] Molnar’s proposal regarding physical intentionality paves the way for the intentionality of thought to ocupy the same plane as physical powers and to partially simplify the problem of the naturalization of intentionality. We will come back to this in section 3.4.

[8] The line of argument that guides the extension of HCTW has been suggested by Zinkernagel (xxxx) and McDowell (1995).

[9] In a sense, it can be said that this is established through reason in a way that is unaided by experience (and by any appeal to habit or to any Kantian transcendental reasoning). The holistic image of reason that emerges, however, would not allow for a separation between matters of fact and matters of reason.

[10] The characterization is in fact only Brentano’s, but Molnar made it, contrary to Brentano’s original purpose, a characterization of physical intentionality.

[11] We have maily McDowell (1994) in mind. His second-nature naturalism tries to put normativity within a broader framework of what is natural. He recommends that we view the realm of laws as part of nature – embraced by a broader space of reasons. The gap between the realm of laws and the space of reasons, however, seems large enough to make his reformed image of nature sounds like too extreme a departure from the more widely accepted image of nature he is criticizing (the one that includes only the realm of laws). By contrast, viewing nature as capable of physical intentionality brings together what underlies both the realm of laws and the space of reasons; the gap is not bridged but is clearly shortened.

[12] Sometimes Davidson is read as implying that a brain in a vat could only thought of the eletric wires as it is caused by them (McDowell, 1994: xx, Rorty 1986). Even though Davidson is very close to this at times, we believe that he would have better things to say about a brain in a vat (see Malpas, 2005).

[13] The discussion of opaque contexts typically (but not justifiedly if we take the Brentano-Molnar characterization to be about physical intentionality) revolves around the non-extensionality of some conceptual constructions (for example, in much of the discussion of Frege).

[14] The alternative cogito Thomas Nagel (1999) attributed to Davidson is a good way to present the idea: je pense donc je sais (I think therefore I know). If justification is to be needed for knowledge, a TH-like argument can show that we need to have some justification to begin with in order to have any justification at all. We, however, tend to embrace some form of primitivism concerning knowledge where justification itself cannot be understood without resorting to knowledge (see Williamson, 2000).

The other current paper begining to get shape

2008-07-09T20:07:00.001-03:00

Living among small announcements

or, singularity in a connected world

1. Big headlines: Holistic powers

Powers – potentialities, potentia – can be found everywhere. An ontology of powers can be a perfect companion, if not a compulsory travel mate, for a conception of thoughts as abilities. It seems in fact that powers constitute a network of connections that run from thought - taken to be radically holistic and understood in an externalist way – to a pan-dispositionalist conception of the world as made of powers of different kinds. Thoughts are both interconnected and unseparable from reality and therefore should not be accounted for in terms of their contents, but rather in terms of what they afford us to do. The world itself is made of modally connected parts that should be accounted for dispositionally. Powers – encompassing both thought and the rest of the world – offer the elements for a network of modally connected elements where every item seem to be tie to all the others. However, we live among singularities. Singularities seem to invoke insulation, external relations, difference and what cannot be determined but only experienced. The danger is that an ontology of powers can machine gun singularities at birth. We want to claim, however, that powers can do better: they cannot be part of a totalizing structure bringing together thought and world. This is because powers are to be understood as both holistic and singular, both connected to the rest of the world and local, both directed towards what is outside and pinned to its own constraints. A world that is filled with possibilia is one where what is wide-open lives hands in hands with what is unique. This double-sided nature of powers can provide a way out of a distinctively 20^th century philosophical preoccupation: how to put together the singular and the all-embracing structure of thought and ontology.[1]

First, how we come to see thought and world as powers. It is not always obvious that a power-based metaphysics of thought should be accompanied by a general ontology of powers. Both an ontology of powers and an understanding of thought as powers (as well as the holism that goes with them) can be seen as developing a broadly Spinozist view. While one could characterize Humean metaphysics as fully devoid of modal commitments (being these no more than a projection of reason into nature), the ontology that we embrace takes the idea that possibilities and necessary connections are at the very core of nature. We believe that the influence of Humean metaphysics has been enormous in the history of philosophy and is still strongly felt. One of the main culprits of this lasting legacy is Kant’s attempted solution to Humean scepticism: by placing the focus on normativity rather than on modality and by insisting on the idea that necessity and possibility are properties of thought rather than of the world, Kant bites the Humean bullet. As far as conceptual thought is concerned, the world such as it is both unreachable and modally inanimate. In a sense, Kant hardens the problem: it is not only by limiting our access to the world to what we obtain through the senses that lose access to the multiplicity of connections between what there is.

Some manifestations of the quest for categorical and stable items in the world can be found in the domination of discussions about the nature of intentional content that forgets the idea of thought as intentional acts. This is the case for representationalist conceptions of the mind, but can be equally found in the debate between defenders of the conceptual character of empirical content and defender of its non-conceptual character. The idea that some contents are non-conceptual attempts to instil some fixity within thought: some contents are present independently of any other, just as a mere effect of a bare presence of an item in the world. So, for example, the bare presence of pain would be enough to make us a have a related content that bypasses the need for any concept. The immediate, or the given, is, in general, an appeal to ready-made contents that are indifferent to any disposition. Representationalist accounts of thought and knowledge take contents to be pure acts, unrelated to what else is present. Surely, we take contents to be representations much in the same way as we take properties to be categorical; however, pure actuality is a consequence of dispositions being directed to prototypes. In order to, say, predict something based on a conditional such as “if this salt is put in water it will dissolve” we need to assume that other powers are not affecting the salt. Such assumptions enable nomological statements to be predictive – and explain their failures; we can individuate connections between parts of the world and without them, prediction is impossible as each item of the world is subject to an indefinite number of powers. To some extent, a device to introduce ceteris paribus scenarios is the only way we can focus on particular connections. They introduce an element of modal inanimateness capable of separating a particular connection from the others. In a pan-dispositionalist ontology of powers, actuality, we submit, comes from such devices to create ceteris paribus scenarios and it is completely indexical. It is about what is maintained fixed for some power-related reason. We shall come back to this.

To counter such tendencies we will invite the reader to consider the idea that an ontology of powers, where the world is not constituted by representable objects and properties but rather by “affordances”, by possibilities offered to thought and to other powers in the world, may preclude any temptation to see the mind as an independent variable always short of full contact with the world. As a complement to the idea of a world constituted by affordances, powers in the same sense in which thoughts are powers, we will claim that the open-ended character of thought also demands “resistances”, it demands that there should be things that don’t fit any given conceptual repertoire, that forces the thinker to constantly revise and modify her approach to the world, to create and recombine her concepts and, by such to acquire new powers and discover new possibilities in the world. This brings a way to think of experience in a deeply non-Humean way, not as a foundation for knowledge, but as part of a biggest ontology of powers that extends far beyond any cognitive realm. [2]

We believe that a consequence of this move is that neither the idea of an “end of enquiry” nor versions of holism that countenance the possibility of absolute knowledge, of knowledge of the “whole”, can be given any sense. Against them we will recommend what could be called Spinozian humility (or, alternatively, Davidsonian humility or Deleuzian humility). We contrast such form of epistemic humility to what has been called Kantian Humility (Rae Langton xxxx). To our mind, Kantian humility, the recognition that we cannot warrant our knowledge of how things really are, invites the postulation of all-embracing abstractions such as absolute spirits, ends of enquiry or of history and ideal communities of communication with little room for singularities. From Spinoza we learn that being modest about our powers is a consequence of realizing the complexity of relations between what there is and also between what there can be, not of ignoring it and also a consequence of coming to terms with the idea that not everything is up to us, that even when we can be said to be acting the world has to collaborate. Davidson inherits this line of thought from Spinoza and also teaches us, explicitly, that in order to detect error and disagreement we must assume a large basis of truth and agreement and, implicitly, that it is a condition of possibility of thought that points of view may differ and that different angles on things may be compared and improve each other. Finally, Deleuze makes it clear that no conceptual exercise could achieve a complete organization of the world because forcing identities into reality is as much in the essence of thought as recognizing that something is always left out, that nature simultaneously offers us similarities and differences, allows us to intervene and resists our intervention.

A metaphysical holism without the whole could be used to characterize Spinoza as well as other outsiders to the stream that goes from Hume to Hegel via Kant (such as Davidson or Deleuze, but also Nietzsche). And the cognitive holism that opens a path between scepticism and epistemic dreams of grandeur could be put to a similar use.

A further consequence of pairing what, for short, could be called thought holism and world holism with an understanding of thought and the world in terms of singular, indefinitely interconnected powers is an image that avoids situating thought in a different plane from the rest of the world. Thought is a power amongst powers that can both affect them and be affected by them, that can take advantage of what they afford but also find resistance from them. Our strategy to place thought in the same level doesn’t merely follow from quasi-transcendental considerations regarding its externalist and holistic nature. It is also a consequence of the commitment to a modally animated view of the world, one where powers can be identified by their relations to other powers but where they are also elusive inasmuch as we always need to ignore some relations, some possibilities, some of the other powers which could potentially interfere, in order to achieve such identifications. Thought can now be seeing a device amongst many to make identifications possible, a device capable of incorporating possibilities only to the price of ignoring many others.

If we see the intentionality of thought as a necessary condition for its normativity, but not as a sufficient one, if we are prepared to recognize instances of intentionality where no conceptual, linguistic or cognitive capacities are in view, if we understand the realm of the intentional not as the realm of what is governed by rules or norms, but as the realm of interaction between possibilities, some mysteries that have dominated philosophy from Plato (and, with renewed force, from Descartes) may lose much of their centrality. Once again, Spinoza appears as a lonely and towering beacon. His approach makes the similarity between thought and other powers manifest: there is much that our bodies can do that escapes our knowledge, but there is also much that we know that escapes our consciousness. We are simultaneously full of powers that we ignore and full of knowledge of which we aren’t aware. The picture is both invigorating and humbling and could not be further from the Cartesian attempt to treat the mind as an (admittedly special) object that struggles to relate to the realm of the physical and that is characterized by its unfailing self-awareness, by its complete access to itself. A lot is ignored by the Spinozian mind and a lot is known without knowing that is known. It would be a hard task to find in contemporary theory of knowledge a stronger and better grounded form of epistemological externalism and of fallibilism.

First, the intentional character of our acts of thinking is a form of what has been called physical intentionality (Molnar 2003: 60-66). Physical intentionality could be a starting point to consider thought as part of the world. Molnar argues convincingly that the four features normally associated with Brentano’s account of intentionality can be only slightly modified to characterize an item with physical intentionality: i. it is directed to something beyond itself, ii. it could be directed towards something nonexistent, iii. it is disposed towards exemplars and prototypes rather than specific items and iv. it is sensitive to the way the intended item is presented. (We mean by physically intentional what satisfies this Brentano-Molnar characterization.[3]) Thoughts have a dimension of physical intentionality. Acts of thinking and contents of thoughts are directed to other thoughts centrally because of their power to produce new thoughts and evoke new contents. Thoughts introduce fixity while producing new powers. The introduction of fixity – of ceteris paribus scenarios – is arguably not an exclusivity of conceptual activity (and of our sovereignty over our world-view). Many physical and biological powers depend on a fixed environment: the frog (physically) intends a fly and is not geared to an environment full of fly replicas; salt will not dissolved under extreme temperatures, the bee goes for a flower-looking object and not towards a flower pill that might contain everything it needs, etc. Features iii. and iv. of the Brentano-Molnar characterization of physical intentionality suggest that other powers have the capacity to produce a ceteris paribus scenario around them: iii. the capacity to be directed towards exemplars and prototypes of an item and assume its specifics have irrelevant powers and iv. the capacity to be directed to something in a specific mode of presentation assuming that other powers could not affect the presentation of the directed item. We call these devices that act on the assumption that some powers are indifferent to others ceteris paribus devices (CPD for short). Thought – and arguably mental intentionality – is a CPD but we claim that they are not the only ones. CPDs are grounded on physical intentionality. Our capacity to project fixity in the world – in contrast with the capacity to project modality postulated by Humeans – is shared by other CPDs in the world. Our own projection can then be understood on the light of CPDs in general that, in its turn, can be understood in terms of physical intentionality.

That thought has correctness conditions is not central for its intentional nature. Thought can be seen as a power to take advantage of possibilities offered to it by the world, and in this it is not alone. These considerations do not amount to a solution for one of the hardest problems in contemporary philosophy, that of naturalizing normativity, but they certainly simplify the task (or, at the very least, clarify it): it is not the intentionality of the normative realm that needs naturalizing because intentionality can be found in areas of reality that are not subject to norms.

Establishing a separation between problems related to the nature of what is governed by norms and problems related to the nature of intentionality allows a fresh reading of Kripke’s take on Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations. Kripke (1982) finds in the Investigations a novel form of scepticism, more radical than any of its predecessors. Wittgenstein, according to Kripke, in highlighting that we cannot account for error or correctness either by appealing to self-standing, pre-existing, practice-independent rules or by interpreting general rules in a way that establishes the correctness or not of specific practices or (crucially) by spotting some grounding “fact” (say, a disposition to say or think something rather than something else, an inclination to answer one way or another), leaves us in a situation where we cannot even warrant the very idea of content or meaning. Traditional sceptical challenges question our entitlement to make claims of knowledge (about the world, about the meaning of our utterances). Wittgenstein’s pre-empts such challenges with a mightier one: we even lack the resources to identify contents capable of aiming at correctness. The detachment from reality is more than epistemological, it is transcendental. Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein has been interpreted either as hopelessly sceptical as well as unfaithful[4] or as an invitation to communitarism[5]. However, if intentionality is seen as a feature of capacities that cannot be characterized in terms of rules (and, hence, the nature of intentionality cannot be accounted for in terms of our preferred view on normativity), inclinations (and, more generally, dispositions) don’t need to be put into question as a consequence of the irreducibility of norms to facts. The pupil’s inclination to answer 1002 when asked to add 2 to 1000 cannot ground the correctness of the answer (for once, she could be equally inclined to answer 1004 and there seems to be no way to distinguish systematic errors from occasional ones), but it already constitutes an intentional act and, hence, is an intentional enabling condition for the normativity of language that remains immune to Kripke’s form of scepticism. Semantical and modal scepticisms could be more harmful than their epistemological relative, but they are also easier to preclude with a holistic ontology of powers.

The previous insight may also serve to separate Millikan’s from other projects of naturalizing meaning and intentionality. While most authors in the field (such as Fodor or Drestke) set themselves to fit intentionality within a nomological conception of the world (where necessity is canonically related to the existence of laws in nature and, in particular, to the allegedly exceptionless laws of physics), Millikan reconstructs the emergence of full-blown intentionality by focusing on biology rather than on physics, and by using the heavily intentional notion of Proper function. While physicalist attempts at naturalizing normativity toy dangerously with the naturalistic fallacy (and fall into the Cartesian trap of treating the mind as an object as much in need of prediction and control as other natural objects) by seeing norms in terms of laws, a biologically inspired naturalism is in a much better position to view mental intentionality side by side with other natural forms of intentionality.[6]

Furthermore, the idea that normativity introduces an ontological gulf with respect to the rest of nature can be neutralized by means of a line of thought inspired by a recent paper by Bjørn Ramberg. Ramberg answers to Rorty’s claim that Davidson should abandon any separation between a normative realm and a physical one (both Rorty and Ramberg talk about intentionality, but the point should be made in terms of normativity if the ideas of the previous paragraphs are taken into consideration) because the distinction between physical underdetermination and mental or linguistic indetermination only makes sense if we give pride of place to the explanations offered by the natural sciences (as Quine often does and Davidson refuses to do). If the physical is submitted to similar constrains than the mental, Rorty argues, no reason remains to keep them apart. As far as intentionality is concerned we fully agree with Rorty. However, Ramberg offers a reading of Davidson’s work that highlights a deeper motive in his philosophy not contemplated by Rorty. The title of the paper (“Rorty vs. Davidson: post-ontological philosophy of mind”) already offers a suggestion of this motive: Davidson’s rejection of the idea that the mental is amenable to the kinds of explanations canonically offered by the natural sciences is not a consequence of an ontological prejudice but it rather responds to the most subversive strand of his philosophy, a refusal to treat speakers and thinkers much as the objects of the natural science, i.e., as subject to prediction and control rather than to understanding, interpretation and charity.[7] The avoidance of the naturalistic fallacy becomes a minor issue in comparison with the rejection of the Cartesian category error of treating the mind as an object, by far a longer lasting heritage than immaterialism (as it was already noticed by Ryle; the ghost in the machine is a two-faced monster: both the ghost and the machine are problematic).

The idea of a post-ontological philosophy of mind does not enter in conflict with the kind of ‘ontological turn’ involved in arguing for the continuum between mental and physical intentionality. Rather the opposite: the philosophy of mind has much to win by realizing that traditional ontological issues such as the mind-body problem may not even arise if discussion about the place of minds in the world replaced by a focus on questions regarding the nature of thought.

One of the matters that has deserved more attention in recent debates is that of accounting for the constraints needed for thought to be objective. Even though it is not our purpose to enter into detailed exegesis of contemporary literature on this topic, we would like to make two related points about the main traps awaiting most conceptions of thought that fall short of a full acceptance of holism. A very illuminating way of setting up the problem is that offered by McDowell in his influential book Mind and World. According to McDowell, modern philosophy has witness an oscillation between two equally attractive but ultimately unsatisfactory explanations of the possibility of knowledge and objectivity. On the one hand, some philosophers have claimed that thought’s responsiveness to the world (openness to the world is another expression used by McDowell) cannot come but from empirical content, not yet conceptually articulated but still capable of giving justification to conceptual thought and of granting objectivity to it. This proposal manages to offer the friction supposedly needed by thought but only to a very high price, introducing elements that are externally given, and, as such, of a very different nature than the contents of judgments and other beliefs. Their immediacy is both their most attractive feature and the most dubious one. The question that motivates the move to the other side of the oscillation is how can they play any form of epistemic role if they themselves cannot be subject to justification. If they are not conceptual, they cannot be part of the kind of inferences that constitute the standard of epistemic justification. That appealing to them is bringing an unsustainable dogma into our conception of thought is a theme that can be found in authors such as Hegel, Wittgenstein, Sellars or Davidson, it is the myth of immediacy, of the given, of bare presences, or pre-conceptual empirical contents.

On the other hand, a common reaction to such forms of foundationalism has been to sit of objectivity within the network of thoughts. Only beliefs can justify other beliefs, justification can only come from conceptual items. Belonging to a coherent network of thoughts is the only way to be objective and to receive justification. The resource to anything given to thought from outside is avoided, and with it the idea that content could be non-conceptual but, McDowell concludes, thought ceases to be constraint epistemically by the world. The world can at most cause thoughts, but their justification cannot come from the world but only from inside, from other thoughts.

McDowell believes that both sides make the common mistake of ignoring the possibility that experiential content may be both conceptual and imposed by the world on the thinker, and argues that this is a version of the position defended by Kant regarding the role of sensibility. The faculty of experience, unlike those of judgement and understanding, is receptive and passive but can play a role in the epistemic economy of thought because it shares with them the very concepts that articulate judgements and beliefs.

We have developed at some length McDowell’s approach to the question because it relies heavily on two ideas that our proposal to compliment a view of thoughts as powers with a ontology of powers wants to avoid. First, McDowell thinks that objectivity and epistemic justification call for a sphere of thought characterized by its passivity: to him this is the only way for the world to have a saying. Once that we isolate a part of the mind and make it responsible for the acquisition of empirical content it is of little us to insist that the concepts that articulate such content must also be available for fully active thinking exercises. Making a judgement or holding a belief may only be understood within a holistic network of other judgements and beliefs, but when perception is the issue, the holistic network remains inert and waits for specific contents to be provided by experience. Experiential content is partially independent from the network of beliefs. Passivity brings with it an element of atomism but it also brings the possibility that areas of thought may be intelligible and yet untouched by the world (after all, McDowell starts out by giving plausibility to the idea that thought is in need of worldly constraint, as if the very idea of thought didn’t already imply being fully situated in the world). The postulation of a passive sphere of thought also invites a partially atomistic conception of the world. After all in experience we receive specific messages from the world, messages with a form that echoes the modally independent facts of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. An ontology of powers such as the one that we favour depicts an active, modally interconnected world. And our conception of thoughts as powers, as capacities to respond to the possibilities that the world affords while also limited by the world’s resistance, doesn’t make a separation between active and passive conceptual exercises, but rather recognizes that activity and passivity are present in every act of thinking.

While his commitment to cognitive states that are fully passive puts him at odds with Davidson (the philosopher that appears as the main representative of the “coherentist” approach within McDowell’s dialectics), the second assumption that we find suspect in the debate inaugurated by him finds Gareth Evans (who is the central player of the myth of the given team) as his opponent. The idea is that what is at stake in our understanding of thought is the nature of intentional content. Fifteen years after McDowell denounced some uses that have been made of the notion of non-conceptual content (introduced by Evans in the early eighties and popularized by authors such as Peacocke) as a contemporary version of the myth of the given, the confrontation between conceptualist and non-conceptualist doesn’t seem to have move very far. While defenders of non-conceptual content still insist on its need to explain the fine-grained character of perceptual content or to make room for non-linguistic or non-conceptual creatures having contentful states, conceptualists keep rehearsing variations of McDowell’s original accusations. It is hard to see how both sides could cease on their obstination as long as they concentrate on the issue of content. Non-conceptualist are surely right in their refusal to accept that any set of concepts can do justice to the richness with which the world presents itself to the subject of experience. But there is as much strength on the conceptualist point that such richness cannot play a role for thought if it cannot be accommodated by concepts, its defining tools.

However, our conception of thoughts as powers opens a new avenue by viewing thoughts not primarily as thought’s contents but instead as acts of thinking. The idea that thoughts are capacities, abilities, powers entails that thinking is already being situated on the world, being capable of acting on it by interacting with some of its powers. But every act of thinking also contains the seed of a failure, as we learn from Deleuzian humility. Every attempt at interacting with the world through concepts runs the risk of crashing against the unknown, of seeing something as what is not, of finding oneself powerless in the face of unpredictable possibilities, of bypassing the unfitting. Finding oneself without the concepts needed to deal with a novel situation is no less an act of thinking than smoothly coping with the most familiar scenario (only linguistic creatures can experience their lack of words to describe an event, only thinkers can feel that there are circumstances where their concepts are insufficient). A world of powers is a world where no power is limitless, where no power has itself as its ultimate grounding. Thoughts are powers because they carry some capabilities but also because they preclude some others.

There has to be room for thought to find resistance, for singularities to escape conceptual exercises, because the power of thought, like all powers, is not infinite. While thinking brings with it unique powers, opens up exclusive possibilities, it is on the very nature of thought that it reacts to stubborn circumstances, that it attempts to create new concepts and to modify existing ones in view of a world that constantly challenges it. It is not that some of our contents are non-conceptual, it is rather that some of our thoughts need to be rethought. The world constraints our thought not by providing contents, conceptual or not, but by eluding full incorporation into them.

To embrace an ontology of powers is to embrace an ontology of affordances, a notion that brings more active resonances than the notion of properties, better suited to describe an inert ontology that only receives life through the operation of laws. Thought’s engagement with the world always involves an active aspect, the actualization of a possibility, the activation of a power.

Experience is no different in this. We deal in powers all the time, a world of powers that makes contact with us by means of the affordances and resistances within thought. Those affordances and resistances can only be understood in a thoroughly holistic manner, but holism involves not only contents but acts of thinking, required for contents to be understood. Experience comes always with acts of thinking. This placing of experience, and of acts of thinking in general, against an ontological, rather than epistemological background, such as the one offered by the notions of affordance and resistance, as we have already highlighted, removes the need to concentrate on issues related to the nature of content (in contrast with both a representationalist conception of thought and a metaphysical outlook centered on properties) to see the subject of experience from the outset as actively interacting with other powers in the world. We have already argued that such an interaction should be not be seen as lacking any limits, given that the world’s powers not only afford the experiencer to do things but also keep escaping her best attempt at understanding. But the limitation is far from having a negative character: the world’s resistance to being fully embraced by thought and experience feeds acts of thinking into new directions and it is the foundation of its creative and powerful nature. Experience is creative because it is open-ended. Thought is powerful because it brings new possibilities into the world, but also because it is constantly pushed by the world into new directions. In this sense, experience, and acts of thinking, deals with singularities – what is not determined before the act of experiencing. Singularity may seem to be anathema to holism, but if we embrace an ontology of powers, we can see it as the other side of the same coin: what acts of thoughts and affordances in the world converge to.

2. Small announcements and the metaphysics of some

Deleuze and Guattari hold that singularities are best expressed by indefinite expressions, a structure of small announcements. They say:

Car si le plan de consistence n’a pour contenu que des heccéités, il a aussi toute une sémiotique particulère qui lui sert d’expression. [...] Cette sémiotique est surtout composée de noms propres, de verbes à l’infinitif et d’articles ou de pronons indéfinis. [...] Em troisième lieu, l’article et le pronon indéfinis ne sont pas des indetermines [...] ils ne manquent de rien lorsquíls introducent des heccéités, des evenement don’t l’individuation ne passe pas par une forme et ne se fait pas par un sujet. Alors l’indefini se conjugue avec le maximum de determination: il était une fois, on bat un enfant, un cheval tombe… […] C’est pourquoi nous nous étonnons devant les efforts de la psychanalyse qui veut a tout prix que, dernière les indéfinis, il y a un défini cache, un possessif, un personnel: quand l’enfant dit <>, <>, <>, <> […] <>. Petites announces, machines telegraphiques sur le plan de consistence.1980, p. 322-4

How can an indefinite description – rather than a definite one or, rather, a Russellian proper name[8] - be the best expression in language and thought of a singularity? Other expressions are considered to have the capacity to depict individual objects and bring them to the fore. Russellian proper names, for example, are expressions that allow de re thought about particular objects – where roughly defined borders are available, even when unbeknown to the thinker. The singularity depicted by a name (or definite description in referential use[9], or another expression rigidified[10]) is in some sense inanimate even though it could be animated by properties and relations. What the expression of singularity depicts is often a substratum that is fixed, inanimate and indifferent to its properties.

When singularities are not objects but rather powers or events, another kind of expression could be on demand. Singularities become what happen to things, instead of being bearers of properties and relations (and events) – singular is what happens, not what grounds many happenings. properties and powers are pin to. When we move from an ontology of singular objects to an ontology of singular transitions, we need a suitable change in our expression of singularities – they ought to express that feature of singular free-floating elements.

When discussing the transferability of power tropes, Molnar (2003: 43-44) considers a view he calls non-ownership trope-theory according to which tropes have no bearers – it is an ontology of properties with nothing but bundles of properties (and relations). Tropes would be floating in bundles with no substratum to rely on – no grounding object to be underneath whatever happens. Molnar sets this view aside by considering it a version of Platonism: “It allows the existence of properties without bearers just as Platonism allows universals not instantiated in any object.” Such a trope theory is not relevantly akin to Platonism as it postulates no universals and could not conceive of objects bearing them. Non-ownership trope theory is an ontology where singular items are floating powers: a metaphysics of indeterminacy. Indefinite propositions are therefore the basis for a metaphysics of the indefinite, borderless, vague and yet singular. We claim that an ontology of powers is the right setting for a conception of the world such that there is no definite determinations – like powers floating non-instantiated and not being further actualized in anything other than powers.

We claim thought is irremediably holistic – as is its capacity to respond to whatever is external to it. Surely, we can say that the world it is responding to is well-determined and atomistic (and even modally inanimate) but, in the process of contacting it, thought looses the determination as its contact with each part of the world is elusive. The picture would be that of us knowing something about the world but we cannot pinpoint at what we know. Indeterminacy as to what there is in the world is a product of our sovereignty. We don’t know which of our thoughts are true because we are limited in our access to the world. We are proposing to reject this picture in favour of an ontology of indetermination – a metaphysics of some. The world is such that some of the things we think are true, but nothing specific. The world is made of small announcements. The world is made of “a red thing passes by”, uninstantiated, “a child is beaten”, associated to a child different from the one we think, “there are some tables”, without any determination as to what are tables. Surely, the indeterminacies of the world don’t have to fit those of thought – thought approximates world’s indeterminacies by thinking further and increasing the critical mass of beliefs that are to contain truth. The metaphysics of some is a rejection of the picture according to which indeterminacy cannot be more than projection or ignorance. It is the rejection of the view that there are alls and eaches and as in the world – but there cannot be somes.

Powers vindicate a metaphysics of some. Physically intentional states are about prototypes: some water to dissolve the salt, some pollen, some food, some car passing by. The reach of our knowledge is the reach of what can affect us and affordances (or resistances) are always presented in the form of indefinite descriptions.

[1] The worry, in different ways, is arguably common to philosophers like Russell, Adorno, Lévinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Kaplan, Evans and Butler. Once thought and world is integrated (through some kind of Hegelian, or Heideggerian, or Davidsonian glue, the question emerges as to whether the singular, the unique, can still be reached through thought and find a place in our world-view.

[2] The notion of affordance (introduced by J. J. Gibson xxxx) has been put to a lot of use in the cognitive sciences in their attempt to overcome the idea that thought and, more generally, intelligent action demands representations (Wheeler xxxx, Brooks xxxx, etc.). We believe that linking powers to affordances is a neat way to highlight the externalistic commitments of the TH that we favour, as well as the active nature of thought. Conceptual exercises aim at taking advantage of the possibilities of the world, of the things that the world afford us to do. In parallel, the image is not one of thought’s holistic network projecting itself over the world and reorganizing it, but rather one where thinking is itself a power. A power to incorporate possibilities offered by the world as if they were a gift. Even though we will not rehearse in this paper considerations regarding the quasi-transcendental demand for singularity that lies at the bottom of many contemporary understandings of thought (from Russell to Levinas, from Deleuze to Kaplan or Evans), we would like to quickly mention that an ontology of affordances is also an ontology of “resistences”, of singular aspects of the world that do not easily let themselves be embraced by any established conceptual repertoire to the point of forcing thought towards conceptual change and creation. Most discussions of thought concentrate on content and its conceptual or nonconceptual nature. We believe that a change of focus from thoughts as contents to thoughts as acts of thinking could be a much liberating consequence of the WH that we are recommending. However, in section three we will explore other reasons to link WH to TH.

[3] The characterization is in fact only Brentano’s, but Molnar made it, contrary to Brentano’s original purpose, a characterization of physical intentionality.

[4] See, for instance, McDowell (1986) interesting suggestion that what Wittgenstein proposes is the idea that individual instances of following a practice are as normatively important as any general interpretation of the rule could ever be. Or, to put it differently, that no principled separation between instituting a rule and applying it is possible.

[5] Crispin Wright’s (xxxx) defence of the idea that the community within which the rule is learned has the last word on the correctness of its application comes to mind. MORE

[6] Still, there are strong reasons to question Millikan’s success in accounting for the specifically normative character of thought and language in biologically inspired terms, but it is her remarkable merit that she avoids a conflation of normative issues with intentional matters as a starting point.

[7] It is only fair to also mention that Rorty, in his answer to Ramberg, recognizes with outstanding modesty his failure to fully understand Davidson and quickly makes Ramberg’s point his own. It is also important for us to stress an aspect of Davidson’s philosophy that is not put into question either by Ramberg or by Rorty and that makes it compulsory for him to retain a strong separation between physical and intentional explanations: his commitment to the nomological character of causality. This strand of his thought may well be the most difficult to retain after accepting an ontology of powers. Reasons of a very different nature to abandon such a commitment can be found in McDowell 1985 and Hornsby xxxx.

[8] Cf. Evans (1982: xx)

[9] Cf. Donellan (1966)

[10] Cf. Kaplan (xxxx)

One of our current papers almost in readable version

2008-07-09T18:04:00.001-03:00

Thought Holism meets World Holism
Hilan Bensusan, Manuel de Pinedo

1. Holisms

2. Elaborating versions of TH and WH

MSC.

Premise: (It is intelligible that) each of my beliefs can be false

Conclusion: Therefore, (it is intelligible that) all of my beliefs can be false

HCTW.

(1) All beliefs are equally about the world: no belief is intelligible purely in terms of its contribution to the interpretation of other beliefs (From the rejection of the 1^st dogma)

(3) Empirical content comes in the form of beliefs. (From the rejection of the 3^rd dogma)

(4) If any sib contained too many falsities, it becomes unintelligible and cannot be confronted with the world. (Definition of sib)

(6) There should be some truths in an a-sib.

α. A thought cannot be understood or confronted with the world on its own, it needs an environment of thoughts.

β. A thought cannot be understood unless we consider the effect it could have over other thoughts (for instance, in terms of the inferences it entitles).

γ. We can highlight a particular connection between thoughts only by blocking the effect of surrounding thoughts; it is only by holding something fixed that we can pinpoint them.

In contrast, holism about the world (WH) appeals to modal connections between its parts – they are integrated through these connections as each part carries dispositions. The drive for holism comes from a rejection of the claim that all dispositional properties are grounded in categorical ones. It follows that there are at least some grounding powers in the world. Dispositions (and powers) are somehow directed towards another part of the world – their identities require something outside them, they enjoy what Molnar (2003) called physical intentionality. Our preferred version is one according to which there is no purely categorical properties – either all properties are dispositional (Shoemaker XXXX) or properties are both categorical and dispositional (Martin & Heil XXXX). According to a power-based WH, the world is full of modal connections and we cannot understand any part of it without making reference to dispositional properties. Powers affect and are affected and no singular item can exist if it is not in some dispositional relation with others. We tend to view powers as singular, dispositional tropes: each disposition is unique in its potential relation to other items. Physical intentionality depicts singular elements even though we often use general terms to describe powers (such as fragility, solubility, edibility). Powers are therefore utterly relational and therefore holistic but, at the same time, singular. The singularity of powers entails nothing concerning quidditates: they are discernible one from another only by means of their potential effects. Finally, and contrary to a tradition in the metaphysics of dispositions (that revolves around the work of Armstrong) we prefer to consider powers as affordances and not as properties because to our ears affordances evoke capacities in a stronger manner. [6]

The features of our favourite version of WH are consequences of the power-based ontology above. The most salient are:

α. A part of the world cannot exist on its own, as it needs other things to affect and be affected by it.

β. A part of the world cannot be brought to focus unless we consider the effect it could have over other parts (for instance, in terms of what it causes).

γ. We can highlight a particular connection between parts of the world only by blocking the effect of surrounding parts of the world; it is only by holding something fixed that we can pinpoint them.

3. Some reasons to couple TH with WH

3.1. An atomist world is epistemologically and semantically implausible

The reasons to move towards TH leave epistemological and semantic discomfort with an atomist, Humean image of the world. TH begins to appear more at home in an ontology of powers.

3.2 Holism, predictive truths and modality

(7) If all beliefs in a c-sib are false, no other belief in the a-sib can be true.

(8) There is at least one c-sib for any a-sib for P is a c-sib for any a-sib.

If we add (7) and (8) to HCTW, we have all the premises of the extended HCTW (EHCTW) that, from (1)-(8), would conclude that:

(9) There should be some truths in aP .

3.3 Thought is part of the world

(a) Snow is white [a belief within an a-sib]

(b) There is snow in the landscape [acquired through perceptual capacities, or by testimony]

(b’) Peter saw snow falling last night [by testimony]

(b’’) There is always snow in this area at this time [a belief]

(b’’’) I can see the snow in front of me [by perception]

This is not to say that there is nothing specific about the powers within thought. In fact, mental intentionality involves some special connection to rule following through which they are affected by, and acquire the powers to affect, the thoughts of other people. Full-fledged thoughts are interpretable and interpretation makes them recognizable as thought. We acquire new powers when we acquire the all-entwined capacities to use and recognize concepts – conceptual inculcation affects our affordances, our capacities to be active. Concepts make us respond to the world in ways that contrasts with our inclinations and provide an environment rendered fixed by assuming that some powers are not present. So, the concept of red is acquired together with the assumption that often the light conditions are going to remain the same – and no further power will intrude this artificially limited set-up. Concepts introduce lab-like limitations in our environment and this is part of our activity of focusing on parts of the integrated whole that compose the world: the contribution of our sovereignty is to fix some modal connections in the world by rendering some further powers sterile. The introduction of fixity – of ceteris paribus scenarios – is arguably not an exclusivity of conceptual activity (and of our sovereignty over our world-view). Many physical and biological powers depend on a fixed environment: the frog (physically) intends a fly and is not geared to an environment full of fly replicas; salt will not dissolved under extreme temperatures, the bee goes for a flower-looking object and not towards a flower pill that might contain everything it needs, etc. Features iii. and iv. of the Brentano-Molnar characterization of physical intentionality suggest that other powers have the capacity to produce a ceteris paribus scenario around them: iii. the capacity to be directed towards exemplars and prototypes of an item and assume its specifics have irrelevant powers and iv. the capacity to be directed to something in a specific mode of presentation assuming that other powers could not affect the presentation of the directed item. We call these devices that act on the assumption that some powers are indifferent to others ceteris paribus devices (CPD for short). Thought – and arguably mental intentionality – is a CPD but we claim that they are not the only ones. CPDs are grounded on physical intentionality. Our capacity to project fixity in the world – in contrast with the capacity to project modality postulated by Humeans – is shared by other CPDs in the world. Our own projection can then be understood on the light of CPDs in general that, in its turn, can be understood in terms of physical intentionality.

3.4 Thought as a special part of the world

Last section presented the integration of thought and world through powers and physical intentionality as a reason to couple TH and WH. There are, nevertheless, strong intuitions that some features of thought – chiefly to do with its normativity, its rule-governing character and its connection to (reflective, conceptual knowledge) – make it special with respect to other parts of the world. These intuitions stress that there is a difference between mere physical intentional states and states that are about something else. In this section we will try to suggest that making room for these intuitions could provide more (and not less) reasons to embrace both TH and WH.

We have argues that powers could take us all the way from a TH to WH. In other words, once TH is embraced – at least in the version we favoured which is fairly Davidsonian and in any case committed to a degree of semantic externalism – holism seems to be hard to be kept away from ontology for the reasons above. There is nonetheless the temptation to tame some of the (world) holistic consequences of TH by embracing one form or another of partially atomistic metaphysics chiefly by softening claims I-III above in order to accommodate the supposed special character of thought. These temptations appear when HT is held together with a conception of nature where laws and determinate necessities underlie thought and makes it look anomalous and, in some cases, unnatural. It could seem odd that a world of natural necessity would ground rule-based processes and that fixed necessary (nomological) connections were the elements available to account for our capacity to respond to reasons. An image of nature as a realm of interconnected laws can make it difficult to present normativity as part of it; a difficulty that stands out not only in naturalist projects to place thought in a natural scenario but also elsewhere in attempts to make place in nature for norm-governing behaviour.[11] The underlying image of nature – and the underlying ontology – refrain the holism about thought to spread to the world. It is this underlying image of nature that furthers the impression that thought, and mental states in general, are somehow different and anomalous.

Davidson appears sometimes to be prey of trying to put together TH with an atomistic take on natural necessity. He is at once the most profound champion of epistemological and semantic holism and a defender of the need for laws to make sense of causal connections. Thought ends up having to be anomalous and we can see a gulf emerging between the parts of the world capable to think and anything else. Further, the gulf is between mind and world as the former is thought of as revolving around contentful, normative states where the latter is made of categorical properties and laws. Davidson postulates that thoughts are causally connected to the world and embraces a Humean view of causality according to which there should be some description of thought where a law holds between thought and what causes it. This appeal to the need for laws under some description – that McDowell (1985) dubbed the fourth dogma of empiricism to be abandoned when the third is dismissed – introduces fixed necessity into the picture of thought. There is a way, then, at least in principle, to recognize thought without interpreting it – by exploiting the nomological connection. The appeal to fixed nomological necessities makes thought grounded on laws (and the categorical properties causally connected by them). Of course, at least in the best interpretations[12], thought content depends always on other contents and no ground can determine what a thought is about. Thought enjoys a degree of sovereignty but only to the extent that it becomes anomalous – detached from the rest of the world, subject to no (psychophysical) laws. Further, it is causally connected to the rest of the world through some grounding: Davidson´s so called weakly Humean account of causality can be read as a way to put forward the thesis that there should be a categorical property behind any thought that connect it to its content. By being coupled with WH, Davidson´s TH would be freed of the idea of anomaly of thought and thought to be conceived out of materials that are themselves dispositional affordances with physical intentionality. No categorical property would be postulated to ground thoughts – and no laws will be needed to assure a causal connection between a thought and its content. The connection would be just a matter of powers.

Normativity is part of the specific intentionality of thought. Naturalizing normativity would be the name of the project to understand it in terms of physical intentionality – not necessarily to explain it away in terms of physical intentionality. Normativity has a special way of dealing with iii and iv: concepts deal with prototypes and exemplars and create opacity in language because they are relative to their mode of presentation (they introduce non-extensional contexts)[13]. A normative, conceptual CPD builds a conceptual interface with the world that carries within in some ceteris paribus assumptions. These assumptions are typically in the form of semantic connections (or so-called analyticity). This conceptual interface creates a scenario for intentional items where some powers are considered while others dismissed. Such interface doesn’t add anything that is not present in the world, but makes powers available to thoughts. Inclinations, on the other hand, are powers but are not available as such to thought – they are directed towards some items without being about them, without having (non-conceptual) content. Leaving aside the epistemological and semantic details of such a view of inclinations, we would like just to point out that concepts bring up normativity through its special resources to create fixity. Those resources, we believe, can be fully understood in terms of powers. In this (perhaps restricted) sense, normativity can be naturalized.

We can also understand knowledge – and its ties with thought – better if we put together TH and WH. TH teaches us that true beliefs has to be present in any critical mass of thoughts. It is reasonable to take knowledge as having to be present always in thought.[14] In fact, we can think that knowledge is one of the powers of thought and it is easy to understand it in terms of dispositional affordances: we can afford to act and think things because of what we know. Surely, reflective, conceptual knowledge requires special abilities (powers) that are inculcated in us through our upbringing within language; the constituents of these abilities, however, can be understood, as we saw, in terms of powers. Knowledge, like any dispositional affordance, is holistic – it acts depending on its surroundings. Holistic knowledge is such that we cannot point at where exactly it lies – it’s elusive. It depends on a critical mass of thought and we cannot pinpoint where, within that mass, knowledge lies. HT gives is means to ensure ourselves that we know about the world – but we have no means to determine what exactly we know about it. The picture of WH is one of interconnectedness through modal ties. Reflective, conceptual knowledge exploit these ties and make further powers available for thought and action. The search for knowledge lies in a framework of concepts and norms but it’s also akin to that of other CPDs with physical intentionality. Our knowledge, nevertheless, can be directed to things as far as our concepts can reach. Directedness is extended by conceptual means. The holism of thought introduces, therefore, a further holistic dimension to knowledge: our knowledge responds to everything our concepts can reach, it acts over a greater scenario than other CPDs. Knowledge (and concepts, rules, normativity) make thought special – but only in the sense that it is a special power and, as such, a special part of the world.

4. Concluding remark

This work tried to start exploring the connections between TH and WH and arguing that there are reasons to embrace both. It didn’t intend to do more than begin to explore the connections and much work needs to be done to highlight the consequences of such a coupling. We believe, however, we provided some prima facie reasons to add to an ontology of powers to a thoroughly holistic account of thought.

References unfinished

Bensusan, H & M. Pinedo (2007)

Brandom, R. (1994), Making it Explicit, Harvard, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Davidson, D. (1974), ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984, pp. 183-98.

Davidson, D. (1984)

Davidson, D. (1986), ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 137-153

Davidson, D. (1987), ‘Knowing one’s own mind’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 15-38.

Davidson, D. (1990), ‘Epistemology Externalized’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 193-204.

Davidson, D. (1991), ‘Three Varieties of Knowledge’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 205-220

Davidson, D. (2000), ‘Truth Rehabilitated’, in R. Brandom (ed.) Rorty and his Critics, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 65-74

Davidson, D. (2001) ‘Externalisms’, in Kotakto, P., Pagin, P & Segal, G. (eds.) Interpreting Davidson. Stanford, CSLI, pp. 1-16.

Ellis, B. (2002) The Philosophy of Nature: a Guide to New Essentialism, Chesham: Acumen.

Hawthorne

Martin, C. & J. Heil

Malpas, J. (2005), ‘On Not Giving Up the World: Davidson and the Grounds of Belief’,in Smith, P. J. (ed.), Significado, Verdade, Interpretação: Davidson e a Filosofia, São Paulo, Loyola, pp. 1-17.

McDowell, J. (1977), ‘On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name’, in Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998, pp.171-98.

McDowell, J. (1979), ‘Virtue and Reason’, in Mind, Value, and Reality, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 50-73.

McDowell, J. (1982), ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’, in Meaning, Knowledge and Reality, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 369-94.

McDowell, J. (1984), ‘Wittgenstein on Following Rule’, in Mind, Value and Reality, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 221-62.

McDowell, J. (1994), Mind and World, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

McDowell, J. (1995), ‘Knowledge and the internal’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 55, 877-893.

McDowell, J. (1998), ‘Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality’, a revised version of the Woodbridge Lectures; Columbia University, April 15, 16 and 17, 1997, Journal of Philosophy 95, 431-91.

McDowell, J. (2000), ‘Scheme-content Dualism and Empiricism’, in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. by L.E. Hahn, Illinois, Open Court, pp. 87-104.

McDowell, J. (2002), ‘Responses’, in Nicholas H. Smith (ed.) Reading McDowell, London, Routledge, pp. 269-305.

Millikan

Molnar, G. (2003) Powers: a Study in Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mumford, S. (2004) Laws in Nature, Londres: Routledge.

Peirce, C. S. (1868) ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2, pp. 103-114.

Pinedo, M. (2006), ‘Anomalous Monism: Oscillating between Dogmas’, Synthese 148, 19-97.

Pinedo, M. & H. Bensusan (2006)

Quine, W. v. O. (1951) ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’,

Rorty, R. (1986), ‘Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth’, in Lepore, E. (ed.) Truth and Interpretation, Blackwell, pp 333-355.

Shoemaker

Williamson, T. (2000), Knowledge and its Limits, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (PU), Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell; trans. of Philosophische Untersuchungen by G.E.M. Anscombe, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and R.Rhees, 1967

[8] The line of argument that guides the extension of HCTW has been suggested by Zinkernagel (xxxx) and McDowell (1995).

[10] The characterization is in fact only Brentano’s, but Molnar made it, contrary to Brentano’s original purpose, a characterization of physical intentionality.

[11] We have maily McDowell (1994) in mind. His second-nature naturalism tries to put normativity within a broader framework of what is natural. He recommends that we view the realm of laws as part of nature – embraced by a broader space of reasons. The gap between the realm of laws and the space of reasons, however, seems large enough to make his reformed image of nature sound like too much of a departure from the more widely accepted image of nature he is criticizing (the one that includes only the realm of laws). By contrast, viewing nature as capable of physical intentionality brings together what underlies both the realm of laws and the space of reasons; the gap is not bridged but is clearly shortened.

[12] Sometimes Davidson is read as implying that a brain in a vat could only thought of the eletric wires as it is caused by it (McDowell, 1994: xx, Rorty XXX). Even though Davidson is very close to this at times, we believe that he would have better things to say about a brain in a vat (see Malpas, 2005).

[14] The alternative cogito Thomas Nagel (1999) attributed to Davidson is a good way to present the idea: je pense donc je sais (I think therefore I know). If justification to be needed for knowledge, a TH-like argument can show that we need to have some justification to begin with in order to have any justification at all. We, however, tend to embrace some form of primitivism concerning knowledge where justification itself cannot be understood without resorting to knowledge (see Williamson, 2000).

As of April 2nd (HK)

2008-04-02T12:45:00.000-03:00

Holistic Knowledge

Hilan Bensusan
University of Brasilia
Manuel de Pinedo
University of Granada

Donald Davidson inaugurated an extremely promising and fruitful way of conceiving the way thought responds to the world. The idea is to attempt to show that intelligibility and responsiveness to the world are closely tied. A critical mass of thoughts that is large enough to be semantically self-standing – does not require the contribution of any further thought to be understood – has to be in contact with the world. Davidson’s original insight contrasts with the more commonly held idea that there should be specific points where thought makes contact with the world. Often these specific points are singular items that are deemed immediately accessible (for example, by experience). The availability of specific points of contact is a central tenet of what we shall label ‘the bottleneck picture of how thought connects to the world’. In this paper we intend primarily both to debunk this picture and to draw some consequences of a thoroughly holistic picture of human knowledge.
We draw on Davidson’s holistic conception of contact with the world to develop an account of epistemology that enables greater room for research in ontology. The bottleneck picture has distorted our ontological imagination by forcing us into taking part of the world as more readily accessible. Further, a non-holistic epistemology encouraged ontology to make room for a distinction between matters of facts and what can be established without consulting the world. Such a distinction contrasts directly with the holistic picture we favor. Less constrained by these epistemological requirements, we sketch a combination of holism with an ontology of powers that understands causation, properties, dispositions and singularities in a way that contrasts with the bottleneck picture.

1. The Bottleneck Picture

The idea that we need a bridge between thought and world often springs from the assumption that thinking could be intelligible while utterly indifferent to the world. It follows from the assumption that thought cannot respond to the world unless there is a specific site within it dedicated to receive external constraints on what we think. Such a site is then understood as the part of our thinking that receives messages from the world: the bottleneck through which the world is inserted in thinking. Bottlenecks are often related to exercises of receptivity––as opposed to the mind’s spontaneity, in Kantian terminology (see KrV B75). As such, they are understood as a passive disposition in our mental life: where thought receives (specific) imprints coming from the world. Something outside thought leaves its mark on thought by affecting the bottleneck. Further thought can elaborate a worldview but the credentials for such spontaneous exercises would ultimately lie on what is directly received through the bottleneck.

Perceptual experiences are often seen as suitable to provide bottlenecks. Not anything in the world can be directly in contact with our thoughts––only that, for example, that is available to our perceptive capacities––and not any thought can be directly responding to the world––only, for example, the ones directly connected to our senses. In the general case, the picture holds that contact with the world ought to happen through a bottleneck; through a channel that is narrower than thought itself. Bottlenecks are required because without the specific messages provided by a dedicated contact channel (be it one made of sense detectors, or basic foundational beliefs or passive experiences) our thought would lack the link that makes it possible for it to be affected at all by the world. Botlenecks are bridges connecting (otherwise isolated) thought to the rest of the world. Bottlenecks are typically––yet not always, as we shall see––composed of intermediary objects between thought and world. Empiricism, for example, maintains that the bottleneck is made of sensations (or sense-data, or nonconceptual content, or pure qualia) which would be readily available to us independently of any conceptual exercise or inferential capacity––they were given.
The appeal to a bottleneck is nevertheless independent from any commitment to the dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content diagnosed and criticized by Davidson (1974). Perceptual content could be intertwined with conceptual capacities and thought could be informed about the world through a conceptually laden and yet passive sphere of our mental life, as in the understanding of experience that McDowell recommends; experience still can act as a bottleneck even though no intermediaries are postulated since any conceptual content could be a perceptual content. We can find the opposite position in Quine: empirical content can be separated from conceptual schemes but there is no bottleneck through which specific messages about the way the world is are carried––sensorial stimuli inform the whole of our thought. At this point we can formulate the bottleneck image of our responsivenes to the world:

Bottleneck Picture: our thought receives specific messages from the world through a dedicated passive channel.

The bottleneck constitutes the region of our thought where there is no activity but mere passive reception of specific messages. The picture has therefore two conjoined components: the appeal to a dedicated element of receptivity in our thought and an atomism about our responsiveness to the world.
Now, the bottleneck picture would seem compulsory if we find no alternative way to satisfy our cravings for rational contact with the world. We would then feel forced either to postulate a bottleneck through which messages from the world are received or to accept that thought is completely disconnected from how things are. Problems with the picture arise from the guiding assumption that thought can be intelligible while being devoid of any constraint from how things are if a bridge with the world is not somehow added. We are left with the option of a bottleneck or no contact whatsoever; if thought is fully intelligible with no appeal to how things are, either thought can be utterly indifferent to the rest of the world or there should be a specific connection between thought and world that needs to be included in the picture. This reasoning is what makes place for bottlenecks.
We find two serious drawbacks with the bottleneck picture. First, once the bottleneck is put into question—as the skeptic would find a way to do—thought would be disconnected from the world. The postulation of a bottleneck invites the idea that large parts of our thinking are self-standing without any constraint from the world: our world-views would be fully uninformed by how the world is if only the bottleneck is severed. Both the bottleneck picture and the skeptical attacks depend on the guiding idea that our mental life could be oblivious to how the world is: minds function as independent variables. This assumption makes it reasonable to think that (at least a sizeable amount of) our beliefs are formed and justified independently of any truth about the world. If we place the bottleneck in our perceptual judgments, we can conceive of our nonperceptual beliefs (the off-bottleneck ones) as confinable in themselves if only we replace the perception channel by a suitably crafted ersatz (for instance, a hallucination channel). The bottleneck picture encourages us to distinguish between the content of our thoughts and the influence of the world; thoughts and empirical (or world) contents are taken to be detachable: it is intelligible to have the former without the latter. Our diagnosis is that the picture springs from the same source that fuels the idea that a separable part of our knowledge could be labeled a priori and is intelligible with no reference to the world and independently from what is true. Accordingly, if we reject the idea that (part of) our conceptual exercises could be played without any constraint from the world, the craving for a bottleneck could begin to subside.
The second problem is that the picture invites the acceptance of the two dogmas denounced by Quine. If thought is in contact with the world through a bottleneck, the world provides specific verdicts regarding the truth of our beliefs through the bottleneck. This is possible if we take these received contents as fixed, atomistic and intelligible without any appeal to other beliefs we hold. This fixed structure of beliefs and meanings could be provided if we understand postulated connections between concepts as immune to the influence of the world––something like analytical judgments are often taken to be. By contrast, we take the crucial lesson from Quine’s rejection of the dogmas to be that any attempt at establishing a contrast between statements about the world and the world itself makes sense only against the background of other statements about the world. If this is so, the world cannot provide specific messages to our thinking without appeal to the resources available to the rest of our thinking: messages are intelligible only within a framework and, unless meanings can be provided from a separate sphere of analytical judgments, messages ought to be understood only in connection to other beliefs held. If the above lesson is drawn from Quine’s rejection of the dogmas, there is no space left for bottlenecks providing specific contents about how things are. The bottleneck picture depends more on a dualism of belief and meaning than on the dualism of scheme and content: it allows for the world to be conceived as a fixed structure that imposes itself as empirical content through specific messages in a bottleneck; this would require only that we have means to understand these messages no matter what else we believe about the world. In other words, if we take meaning to be independent from our framework of beliefs, we can undestand conceptual content coming from the world through the bottleneck as specific messages to inform our thinking about how things are. If there is no sphere of independent meanings––unrelated to beliefs––these messages would be relative to the beliefs held by the thinker. It therefore follows that a suitable rejection of a principled dualism of belief and meaning would make the bottleneck metaphor unavailable.[i] Of course we can hold some of our thoughts fixed in order for the world to produce a verdict about those thoughts that we place in the bottleneck. We can then either point at this bottleneck, built by fiat, and take it to quench our craving for a connection between thought and world or insist that any bottleneck would be equally acceptable. The former path would make the bottleneck arbitrary and therefore thwart our quest for a place where thought responds to the world: given the arbitrariness of the bottleneck, we might as well just decide that the world is reachable by thought. The latter path, by contrast, would just renounce the strategy of placing in the bottleneck the region where contact takes place: we ought to look for it someplace else.

2. Responsiveness to the world without bottlenecks

The bottleneck image is motivated by the idea that thought in itself can be intelligible while failing to respond to the world: any amount of thought contents could be completely devoid of empirical content. Thought can therefore run thoroughly uninformed concerning how things are. Intelligibility and responsiveness to the world appear as two independent variables that are (contingently) present when we have a piece of knowledge about the world. There is always the possibility that any amount of thought is immune to the world; this possibility opens the space where the skeptic moves. Because matters of intelligibility can be utterly alien to how things are we need a bottleneck to provide constraint from the world, otherwise our thought would run in complete indifference towards how things are.[ii] If we find a way to challenge the independence of intelligibility and responsiveness to the world, we can discard both the need for a bottleneck and the impression that the world would be lost without it.
We believe Davidson has at least sketched an account of intelligibility according to which it is a necessary condition for a sufficiently large class of thoughts to be intelligible that it responds to the world.[iii] We can begin to come to grip with this account by considering some skeptical challenges and some usual ways to overcome them. A frequent aim of skeptical argument is to sever the connection between our thoughts and the world: what seems to be a good path to attain truths, the skeptic suspects, lacks, in fact, proper credentials. Credentials are missing because each of our beliefs relies on other beliefs and the possibility is open that our beliefs could all (or most) be false. The skeptical challenge can be summarized in terms of an argument of illusion[iv] (AI) that can be presented as follows:

(P) (It is intelligible that) I can be wrong about each of my beliefs.

(C) Therefore, (it is intelligible that) I can be wrong about all of my beliefs.

One can accept the inference and attempt to show that premise P is false. That has been the effort of most epistemological endeavours and often this is done by arguing that not anything can be wrong––seeking foundations that cannot be wrong. Most (if not all) foundationalist projects rely on the bottleneck picture; even though bottlenecks are not always foundations. Once accepted the inference, the conditions are present for taking intelligibility and responsiveness to the world to be independent and all is set for the bottleneck picture to look compulsory. If we can understand our beliefs while considering that all of them can be false, we will feel compelled to either accept a skeptical conclusion or to look for a way to ensure us that, for some reason, not all of our beliefs can be false and therefore P is false.
However, we can also resist conclusion C by showing that the inference is not valid while accepting P. This would take one to a different way to understand intelligibility. If each of my beliefs can be wrong but not all of them, then not every belief can stand (or fall) on its own. (If one rejects the dogmas denounced by Quine, this is indeed what one expects.) At least some beliefs require other beliefs both to saddle them with content and to promote a contrast between them and the world. The line of argument to the effect that AI is invalid has to take beliefs as items that cannot be understood or individuated away from the critical mass of thoughts where they belong. We can try to present this line of argument (call it Anti-AI) in terms of a critical mass of semantically self-sufficient set of thought contents (an S4 for short). An S4 is a set of thought contents that can stand (or fall) on its own––it follows from what we have already said about this line of argument that at least most of our beliefs cannot be on its own in an S4. Surely, an S4 is not just a set but it should be organized in a network-like format; we shall nevertheless refer to this organized network of thought contents––the argument can also be presented in terms of beliefs––as a set since we shall not explore much the network-like features of the elements in the set. The Anti-AI line of argument goes as follows:

CMT-I: A thought content cannot be intelligible on its own. It requires other thought contents to saddle it with content (Critical Mass Thesis concerning Intelligibility)

CMT-V: A thought content cannot face alone a verdict from the world as it cannot be understood on its own. It requires other thought contents to make it possible to confront it with the world. (Critical Mass Thesis concerning Verdicts from the world, follows from CMT-I)

HT: There is no principled way to isolate the thought contents that are responsible for our understanding of an S4––there are no thought contents that can be taken to play a purely semantical role in the set. (Holist Thesis)

UMET: There could be no resources to confront all (or most of) the thought contents in the S4 one by one and consider that each of them lacks contact with the world. Confrontation between thought and world can only happen within an S4. The diagnosis that all (or most) thought contents in the S4 lack contact with the world is unintelligible––and therefore cannot be made. (Unintelligibility of Massive Error Thesis, follows from CMT-V and HT)

CONCLUSION: Each thought content in an S4 can fail to be in contact with the world––but all of them cannot. A (sufficiently large) part of the S4 has to be in contact with the world but we cannot specify which thought contents are those without isolating them from the others and that would amount to make their confrontation with the world unintelligible.
If the theses are acceptable and the inference is valid, this can provide an argument againt AI. CMT-V and UMET are motivated by the idea that confrontation of thought and world cannot take place when there are no sufficient beliefs making the contrast possible from the beginning. Now, if Anti-AI works, thought has to be understood as coming in collections and such collections––if intelligible at all––are in contact with the world even though we could not specify which thoughts are making this contact possible. For any S4, it will respond to the world if and only if it is intelligible. If Anti-AI can be substantiated and it can be shown that the whole set of thought contents of a given person at a particular moment is an S4, then we will have proven that thought cannot fully fail to respond to the world. Moreover, it shows that neither experiences nor the knowledge about the contents of one’s own mind can sustain independently the contact between thought and the world.[v] Contact with the world can be ascribed to the whole S4 but not to any item in it. As a consequence, the world appears not as external to thoughts but rather as part of what makes them intelligible.
If Anti-AI is sound and manages to engage both genuine thought and world in a way that imbrincates them, a fairly general argument against (at least) some forms of global skepticism can be presented: thought cannot be both intelligible and massively false. The scheme of argument is therefore addressed to (some forms of) global skepticism that would share with the bottleneck picture its motivating assumption concrening thought: responsiveness to the world and intelligibility are independent variables.
In order for the line of argument to be applied we need to specify first what counts as an S4. A first candidate, as mentioned above, is the set of all thoughts a person entertain in a certain moment of time.[vi] This S4 is the one that is used in the argument against global skepticism: one’s beliefs cannot be both massively false and intelligible at the same time. One could ask further whether more restricted sets such as the set of all of one’s beliefs about the future (or all my beliefs about myself, or all my thoughts about the external world) are suitable candidates. If they are, stardard forms of local skepticism (concerning the future, the external world) and challenges to my authority over my own mental life could be also straighforwardly rebutted by instances of the scheme.[vii]. These sets, nevertheless, can hardly be self-sufficient as it is arguable that beliefs about the external world depend for their meaning on beliefs about our language and our practices, beliefs about myself depend for their content on the world or beliefs about the future can only be understood under the light of other beliefs about time. We could make them semantically self-sufficient by adding some meaning postulates to each set of beliefs, but this would violate HT.
Anti-AI, however, can indirectly provide resources to deal with cases of skepticism of more restricted scope. We can see this if we consider two properties of an S4 that we can call properties of self-dependency. First, an S4 cannot be understood without the concourse of the beliefs inside it; it cannot be understood without (at least some of) its items being understood. Second, an S4 cannot be specified without the concourse of beliefs inside it; we can only specify it with the aid of its elements. Now, take the set of my beliefs about the future (F). These beliefs cannot be all false because if so the idea of future events would be meaningless and therefore skepticism about all inductive inferences concerning the future would be wrongheaded (see McDowell 1995). In order to determine what are the beliefs that belong to the set of beliefs about the future we need to make use of some of those beliefs––in order to doubt whether the sun will rise tomorrow we need to hold true that what we call “tomorrow” is determined by, say, a clock ringing at midnight. F cannot be fully understood from outside it––that is, making use only of the resources provided by beliefs that are not in the set. Even though F is not an S4, it enjoys the two properties of self-dependency above and cannot be understood (nor can it be specified) without the concourse of the beliefs within it. We can say it is a semantically self-dependent set of thought contents (SSDS for short).
Clearly, every S4 is also a SSDS. Also, once we remove all my beliefs about the future from the set of all my beliefs (T), we obtain a set T – F which could not be understood (or specified) without the concourse of the beliefs within it. T – F is an SSDS but not an S4: we need beliefs about the future to understand parts of our vocabulary related to the past and the present. Skepticism about all beliefs about the future (F) is not granted because F is close enough to an S4 (without being an S4) not to be understandable (and specifiable) without appeal to its own items; and this is so because it is an SSDS. We believe it is reasonable to extend this conclusion to all forms of skepticism that range over SSDSs C such that T - C is not an S4. In contrast, beliefs about my cousin’s car could be removed from T without the remaining set ceasing to be an S4. That makes this skepticism less challenging as T can be regenerated from the removal of all my beliefs about my cousin’s car: it doesn’t cease to be an S4. It can be argued that forms of local skepticism about a set of beliefs C, so that T – C is not an S4, are not granted as we cannot specify and understand either C or T - C without holding true some of C’s items. Therefore, Anti-AI can provide elements to counter any skepticism concerning sets of beliefs that can only be understood and specified using resources within the set.[viii]
Anti-AI can be applied clearly and directly (at least) to the case of all my beliefs at a given time. The line of argument encourages a kind of externalism according to which thought’s contact with the world is intrinsic rather than extrinsic: contact has to do with intelligibility. In “Externalisms” (2001), Davidson considers two forms of externalism––perceptual externalism and social externalism––and recomends a combination of both (through triangulation). In both cases the origin of thought is traced back to some external conditions: we need other people to inculcate in us concepts and criteria or we need causal connections with the world in order to have something perceived. These elements of the world (elements ouside what is available to the thinker) are, in an important sense, external to a first-person awareness of her own thinking: an argument can be made that awareness of one’s own thoughts requires no awareness of the elements of the world that enable those thoughts to take place. One’s thinking, as far as first-person awareness is concerned, could be completely oblivious to any (true) theory about what makes thought possible. These externalisms, in a sense, only add more to our third-person theory of the world––they make the link between thought and world external and therefore just add a further (postulated) element to the (assumed and perhaps true) furniture of the world.[ix]
Anti-AI, however, insinuates a way of making thought stand in contact with the world in an intrinsic manner; that is, in a way that is not oblivious to first-person awareness. It suggests an externalism where the connection between contact with the world and intelligibility makes access to the world a feature of thought; it is an intrinsic feature of thinking that the world is within its reach. It therefore adds no further theory about the origin or the nature of thoughts––no theory that expresses a third person, metaphysical or external dependence between thought and world. The externalist picture favoured is rather that thought depends on some access to the world: the world enters the picture as the object of one’s thought and not as something postulated from outside what is within the reach of the thinker. Accordingly, as thought responds to the world because of one of its intrinsic features there is no need to appeal to bottlenecks connecting thought contents with how things are.
Davidson has been sometimes charged with an accusation of simply postulating that there are thoughts. Peter Klein (1986), for one, has claimed that Davidson never argued that there are such things as coherent beliefs about the world––their existence was never more than merely taken for granted. Klein’s emphasis on beliefs about the world might seem misplaced as the world is gained in the argument through a firm connection between truth and intelligibility. The gist of the charge, however, is that if there are no thoughts, an argument like anti-AI cannot respond to the skeptical challenge that we have no knowledge. The suspicion is that Anti-AI does no more than postulate thought contents and explore their features. Surely, if there are no thought contents, there could be no responses to the world: there is nothing for the world to act upon. In that case, the skeptical case cannot be presented. The case against AI, then, can be no stronger than this conditional formulation: if there are thoughts, anti-AI holds. This, however, could be enough for most purposes––in particular to ensure a link between thinking and responding to the world. Davidson has often recommended the view that thought contents are products of interpretation––thought cannot be detected but within the borders of thought. Inversely, having thought consists on detecting thought on oneself and others. What Davidson takes for granted is that there are instances of such detection, which could not be understood if there were no thought contents. It is unclear how things would be if there were no thoughts: our constant endeavour to interpret each other could be enough to make sure that we can ascribe thought––and if so, we can ascribe knowledge.
The strategy to understand responsiveness to the world in terms of some features of thought could give the impression that we are settling for something somehow weaker than full-blown contact with the world. This worry attends to the echos of Kant’s transcendental distinction between things-for-us and things-in-themselves. The distinction has close resemblance with a persistent global skeptical challenge: anti-AI has not ruled out the possibility that the world is entirely different from whatever we can think about it. Of couse, we could not confront the world with our thoughts (because of CMT-V) but it cannot entirely escape our scrutiny. Surely nothing could be said as to how the world is. Anti-AI, suggesting that our thoughts could not be entirely off the mark, ensures us that even though any bit of the world can fail to be correctly thought, some bit of the world has to be grasped by thought. Anti-AI provides then with a two part argument against challenges like Klein’s: on the one hand it grants the existence of thought and thought contents, on the other guarantees that those contents are such that at least some of them must accommodate the way the world is.
Anti-AI was presented here in terms of intelligibility and contact with the world. When we claim that a large part of the set (of beliefs) is in contact with the world, we can take beliefs that contact the world, as Davidson often does, as true beliefs. Truth, then, would be an element that has to be present in an S4; even though we cannot isolate which elements in the set are true. We can take most of them to be true or rather claim that there is a presumption of truth in favour of any belief within an S4 (Davidson 1983). Truth of some beliefs is what is required to make an S4 understandable. Truth, as Davidson has often pointed out, has an intimate connection to understanding and interpretation. Intelligible beliefs are those that can be understood and considered against a background of true beliefs. Truth, however, is not the only way to understand contact with the world: we can also, for example[x], think that some beliefs in the set have to constitute knowledge. This makes sense especially if knowledge is taken to be the basis of justification (Williamson 2000) and a condition for any judgement concerning truth. A set of beliefs is intelligible only if there is enough knowledge about the world to make a confrontation between each belief and the world intelligible. We cannot, due to HT, isolate where there is knowledge––we can only safely assume, if Anti-AI works, that there is some knowledge disperse within the set. We shall come back to this idea in section 4.

3. Two (non-recommended) approaches to holistic constraints from the world

Our purpose in the remainder of this paper is not to directly assess Anti-AI but rather to examine some of its consequences. We shall distinguish three general images of the relationship between thought and the rest of the world that could be encouraged by Anti-AI and then proceed to elaborate and recommnend the third. The first is Davidson’s way of putting together the connection between truth and intelligibility on the one hand and his ideas about mental content and physical events on the other. The second is a variation of McDowell’s ideas that emphasize the thesis of the partial re-enchantement of nature and takes facts to be somehow constituted by thinkables or thinking contents. The third general image has elements of the first two while avoiding some problems with the second and some perceived drawbacks of the first. In this section we shall sketch the images and point at our discomfort with some of the features of the first two.
The first image is one that provides a holistic account of our mental life and therefore of sets of beliefs while still insisting that each individual mental event be describable in non-mental terms. This picture associates the line of argument in Anti-AI with a number of other theses by Davidson that revolve around anomalous monism and a causal individuation of events. Our beliefs are about a world that interacts with us and thus causes us to have the beliefs we have. Each of our thoughts can be causally in contact with the world and therefore the semantical contact provided by Anti-AI is not the only way by which our beliefs touch the world. The presumption of truth in favour of our beliefs comes together with the thesis that those beliefs are about what cause them. Now the causal connection between beliefs and what prompts them can be described in physical terms as any event can be described in physical terms. The nomological character of causality guarantees that if there is a causal connection between “p” and “belief that p” there is a law connecting them but this law does not have to be presented––and indeed cannot be presented––in terms of beliefs and other mental terms. In fact, Anti-AI, and in particular UMET, can motivate here at least a weak version of the doctrine of the anomaly of the mental: if there were atomistic psychophysical laws––laws that connect individual physical states to individual mental contents––there would be a way to specify which thought content is connected to which physical event and therefore it would be in principle possible to determine at least some thought contents independently of any other thought content. It would then be possible to connect “p” and “belief in p” independently of other beliefs: provided with an atomistic psychophysical law of this kind we would be able to trace an event of the world connected to each belief.[xi] At least this rejection of atomistic psychophysical laws is required to grant sovereignty to mental contents: our beliefs respond to other beliefs and make contact the world in blocks through a connection between truth and intelligibility. Davidson’s anomalous monism also provides an account of events whereby they can always be described in the vocabulary of physics; this allows for causal contact between events that can be described mentally and other events without compromising the nomological character of causality. This causal contact provides a further account of the contact between thought and the rest of the world that is added to the one concerning how truth is required for intelligibility.
Now, it can be useful to distinguish two strands of thought within the body of doctrines espoused by Davidson. On the one hand, in his work on radical interpretation, truth and meaning, he has argued that any exercise of understanding intentional behaviour, linguistic behaviour in particular, must start with a presumption of coincidence between the speaker’s and the interpreter’s systems of beliefs and of general truthfulness regarding those beliefs. Davidson calls this presumption the principle of charity and it appears under numerous guises: his rejection of the scheme-content dualism––and therefore of a principled separation between a thinker’s contribution and the world’s contribution to a system of beliefs––, his defence of triangulation as a precondition for thought––communication happens when speaker and interpreter compare their perspectives on a common world––, the interdependence of the three varieties of knowledge––about oneself, about others and about the world––and his truth-conditional account of meaning––meaning, belief and world are interdependent. Also his (often controversial) thorough rejection of a public language (1986) can be made to somehow fit into this strand of connecting intelligibility and access to the world through interpretation. This first strand can be seen as motivating and giving flesh to Anti-AI.
A second strand of thought, from which we take the first to be independent (and arguably incompatible), includes his defence of a monism (of an anomalous variety) and his causal account of the contact between beliefs and the world, together with his work on the individuation of events. Adding this second strand to the picture, mental events––normative and holistic as they are according to the first strand––must also be physical events in order to have causal powers. Our contact with the world through our beliefs can therefore be understood in physical terms––a physical description of how thoughts manage to be rationally constrainted by the world can be provided. Because the nomological character of causality is endorsed, there should be a law connecting physical description of our beliefs and their contents––our thoughts and the world. Such a law makes sure that beliefs are causally connected to the world and, as a consequence, the relation between our mental life and the rest of the world is always of a causal nature. We shall claim that this causal account of the relation between beliefs and their content adds unnecessary difficulties.
Guided by his causal acount of content, Davidson cannot fully preclude the possibiluty that we could determine the content of beliefs without engaging in an activity of interpretation; it would be enough to discover to what our beliefs are (appropriately) causally connected. As a consequence, once it is granted that this alternative way to determine the content of a belief is available, one can be inclined to try and determine the content of a belief without engaging in interpreting it and therefore without understanding it. In fact, according to Davidson, if anything is systematically causing a belief (or an utterance) that is what the belief is about (1990: 201).[xii] If this is so, not only interpretation can be (in principle) rendered dispensible but also there are two potentially conflicting authorities concerning the content of a belief––or, more generally, concerning one’s mental life. The swampman mental experiment proposed by Davidson (1987: 18-19) illustrates the predicament: Davidson concludes that the swampman (an indentically replica of Davidson produced by a cosmic accident simultaneously to the destruction of Davidson by a lightning) has no mental life even though people around him would ascribe to the replica most of Davidson’s beliefs and desires. It is just from the perspective of someone who knows that the accident had happened (and the replica has been brought about) that one could say that there is no mental life going on there because there is no causal link between any state of the replica and the contexts in which Davidson’s beliefs and desires where acquired. This swampman’s absence of a mental life can be appreciated only from a third-person perspective not available to the standard interpreter of the replica’s utterances that meets him after the accident and is not informed of what has happened. If we assign the ultimate authority to this perspective, we make our mental life ultimately dependent on causal relations around us. Surely our beliefs and desire are causally related to the world in different ways but we cannot intelligibly talk about these causal connections outside the perspective of an interpreter. If there is a shortcut that would take us items of one’s mental life without interpretation, we could have beliefs confronting the world without the aid of further beliefs and that would contrast with CMT-V.
Moreover, the idea that there are physical descriptions of beliefs suggests that such events could relate to each other in a one-to-one basis, contrary to HT and to the overall spirit of Anti-AI. Davidson’s account of monism depends also on how we individuate events so that we can establish that a belief and its content are the events mentioned in the corresponding nomological connection. The effort to individuate events took Davidson to present a causal account of sameness of events that run in its own difficulties (see Davidson, 1985). Physical descriptions of beliefs place them further within a causal structure where they can be individuated and treated separately.[xiii] Surely, that alone is not enough to commit Davidson to the bottleneck picture but it adds an unnecessary tension with CMT as it seems to fly in the face of the idea that only critical masses of beliefs can be in contact with the world.
Davidson adds a causal story to the one concerning beliefs being in contact with the world as a block – rational contact with the world through confrontation of critical masses of beliefs. The causal story, however, is not necessary as the first of the two strands above doesn’t require or depend on the second. The first strand, and Anti-AI in particular, can dispense with a causal account of the relation between beliefs and the rest of the world—and dispense with occasional sentences, criteria for individuation of events irrespective of their description, and causal determination of mental content. Surely, as we shall see, there could be causal relations between beliefs and other events but there is no need for a causal channel between individual beliefs and physical events to be postulated. We claim that the rational connection between critical masses of beliefs on the one hand and the world on the other is enough to assure us that we cannot be indifferent to how things are. Anti-AI can but need not be associated to anomalous monism and its commitment to the nomological character of causality and the causal character of the connection of beliefs and their content. The elements of what we have called the second strand in Davidson’s body of doctrines can be dispensed without prejudice to the structure of our account of how critical masses of beliefs respond to the world.
The second image that can fit with Anti-AI can be brought to view if we consider what happens when we retain from the bottleneck picture the idea of responsiveness to facts while letting go of a channel that receives these facts. An alternative is to consider that conceptual capacities are always required in order to detect facts of the world. Rational constraints then can come from the facts absorbed by any of comceptual capacity. This alternative bears similarities to the position recommended by McDowell (1994) but makes no attempt to rehabilitate a (privileged) tribunal of experience; thought is in contact with the world because the world reveals itself through conceptual capacities. In a sense, this alternative endorses McDowell’s partial re-enchantement of nature while rejecting any special role to experience.[xiv] Our thought is not constrained by a nonconceptual Given while it is not frictionless spinning in the void as conceptual constraints could also be legitimate worldy constraints. Thought is composed by contents that cannot stand or fall on their own and, as conceptually articulated items, can, for example, be identical with items of the world.[xv] Such alternative contrasts with the first one mainly in its conception of the world: the world is all that is the case, a totality of facts while being a fact, something that is the case, already involves being thinkable. Intelligible thinking reaches for facts of the world. Facts and thought contents are understood as having the same structure; that itself is what makes it unmysterious that our thinking could be legitimately respond to the world. The image therefore attempts to present a world of facts fully aprehensible through our conceptual capacities and therefore readily accessible to thinking without a bottleneck connecting our beliefs to how things are.
This image, however, has serious limitations.[xvi] Its central drawback is its failure to accommodate CMT. While we can make sense of the idea of particular causes affecting our thought without the causal relation needing to be subsumible by a general law, there is a tension between the thesis that thought is in nature holistic and the idea that the world is a collection of independently conceivable (conceptually aprehensible) facts. The most famous version of this picture (the one offered in Wittgensteins’ Tractatus) presents an atomistic conception of the world (the world divides into facts and each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same; 1.2-1.21) and thoughts (or the propositions that express them; 3.1) are independent of each other (2.0211) while describing reality completely (4.023). Basic states of affairs (facts that are the case) are taken as independent of each other and composing what Wittgenstein famously considered one of the prototipycal manifestations of the mystical: the feeling of the world as a limited whole, that is, as everything that is the case, as a collection of all the true facts. The picture where there is a structured world of (ready-made) facts contrast with a holistic picture of thought as it imposes on our thinking a structured collection of facts to which we respond––structured facts that are instances of correction or something akin to truth-makers[xvii] for our thoughts. The world is therefore impressing on us facts and our thinking responds to them––the tension between individual facts and a holistic conception of thought shows up again; this time without any appeal to a causal connection between beliefs and their content. It seems that this second alternative has to give away at least some holism as our thinking responds to specific atomistic facts that constitute the world. This commitment with the second dogma denounced by Quine could quickly encourage a separation between the contribution of the world to our thinking––that can be mapped into the facts that the world itself provides––and our own additions where our thinking would be up to us only. A distinction between meanings and beliefs seems to be therefore strongly encouraged––and both HT and UMET seem to be called into question.
A variation of this image can be suggested by a view according to which the Tractatus was not committed to a world of ready-made facts.[xviii] If this is so, the talk of atomistic facts could mean either that these facts are partly constituted by something structural to our thinking or that they respond to our process of thinking––and therefore are revisable on the light of the rest of our thinking. The former alternative would still be prey to the difficulties rehearsed above. If there are fixed ways in our thinking about the world (even if they don’t come from the world itself but from our interaction with it), then part of the holistic character of thinking has to be compromissed and we can feel invited to embrace a version of the distinction between belief and meaning. Whenever facts–– either conceived as part of a fix structure of our thinking or as ready-made in the world––are individuated independently of our process of thinking, there is room for a distinction between facts on the one hand and processes of thinking on the other. The latter alternative above––where facts are individuated not by the world or by some structural element in our thinking but by our thinking itself––would escape our criticisms but would offer no more than a faint suggestion as to how thought manages to respond to the world. Our third alternative will encompass something close to this last suggestion as it avoids individuating facts in any way independent from our sets of thought contents. By presenting this third alternative, we hope to take holism as a feature of mental content that has to be conciliated with our responsiveness to how things are, rather than sacrificed in order to obtain contact with the world.

4. A more satisfactory approach to holistic constraints from the world

A third––and, we shall claim, better––image can come to view as a consequence of the drawbacks we diagnosed in the first two. If contact with the world is a feature of an S4, there is no need to postulate a fixed or prestructured picture of the world; either in terms of causal connections or in terms of individual, atomistic facts. There is no need to have a fixed sketch of an account of how the world we are making contact with should be: our contact with the world is the sole source of knowledge about it. In fact, we shall focus on knowledge and take Anti-AI to entail arguments that our knowledge of the world is to be present in an S4. We could therefore endorse, in a different context, the slogan championed by Williamson (2000): knowledge first. This alternative will take knowledge as a condition for the intelligibility of a critical mass of beliefs: knowledge is what ought to be present in the S4 even though it cannot be separated from the rest of the set of thoughts. It is therefore a holistic conception of knowledge where knowledge is present within a network of beliefs but fails to be a piece of knowledge if taken in isolation—it cannot, in fact, intelligibly be taken in isolation. Further, while some knowledge has to be present in a critical mass of beliefs, there is no need or means to specify what in the critical mass amounts to knowledge.
Holistic knowledge––as we label this third alternative to stress our focus on the presence of knowledge in an S4––means that we cannot pinpoint what is known while we can infer from the intelligibility of a network of beliefs that there is some knowledge present. As knowledge is our point of departure to reach the world, we don’t need to postulate any definite structure for the world we are contacting. The world emerges in the effort to interpret—render intelligible—a network of thought contents. There is therefore no need to appeal to a fixed structure of known facts or known causal structures––what needs to be known is nothing specific, knowledge is the (potential) starting point for more knowledge.[xix] Knowledge is present and yet disperse within an S4. This third alternative takes knowledge to come before we have an overall picture of the world with which we are to make contact––contact, through knowledge, is present from the beginning and Anti-AI is enough to show that. There is no need to put any metaphysical chart in front of our knowledge horse: we do not have to feel forced to favour ontologies of facts, events, properties or objects, as any of these could be available to a conception of thinking grounded on knowledge—they could, in principle, be known.
We have seen that thoughts, beliefs or experiences are neither intelligible in isolation (CMT) nor can individually ground an S4 (HT). It follows that a knowledge claim cannot be understood as a claim about a specific content, connected to the world independently of other contentful states of the thinker. Knowledge claims are claims about a critical mass of thoughts in a network and can only stand within the critical mass. At the same time, thoughts have contents specifiable within the network as claims and those claims can be taken to be knowable contents[xx], something that can be known; and we shall say no more about the world except that it is constituted by knowable contents. Now, access to knowable contents is achieved, indistinctively, through perceiving, reflecting, feeling or acting, which invites detachment from any clear cut compartimentalization of modes of engagement with the world. No preference is given to any area, perceptual, inferential or practical, of our interaction with the world in coming to access knowable contents.The idea is that access to the world can only take place within our S4: holistic knowledge promotes access to the world through our network of beliefs. The world is made transparent by the capacities for correction of any belief that can be found within a set of beliefs. Even though we cannot detect where there is knowledge, we can detect (holistic) knowledge within an S4 and that knowledge is what entitles us to claim that we are in contact with the world.
The image is designed to add the least possible to what is already in Anti-AI and so to preserve a fully holistic account of mental content. There is an important feature of holism that the image can accommodate. If we take holism seriously, no individual belief is ever shared with anybody for contents are relative to other contents; however, we start interpretation through an application of the principle of charity: we make use of some of our beliefs in order to understand others. This third alternative claims that we do likewise with the world: we understand it from the perspective of our beliefs. Therefore, the world cannot on its own make individual beliefs true but it is part of the knowledge that is present in a network of beliefs; contact with the world requires a critical mass of beliefs. As a consequence, we cannot say that we know p but at most that p belongs to an S4 where there is knowledge. And, of course, we can argue for p with the resources available in the S4. In a sense, the world tells us something only in the context of interpretation––knowledge springs from a basis of intelligible thought. Beliefs, and knowledge, can only be understood collectively; our contact with the world has to be therefore present (and maybe massive) for us to start thinking. Thinking depends on a critical mass of beliefs but that, in itself, is what grants us contact with the world––that is, according to this alternative, what grants us knowledge. Knowledge is a claim about a critical mass of thoughts. What a knowledge claim is a claim about can only be established against the background of knowledge that entitles it to its content––we can specify, at best, knowable contents. Beliefs can surely be contrasted individually but that is done only against a background of intelligibility. If this third alternative is acceptable, as we believe it is, the very idea of intelligibility––and its connection to responsiveness to the world–– is all we need to ensure that our thinking involves holistic knowledge of the world.
One can wonder how a holistic conception of knowledge could cope with issues related to justification and the goal of inquiry. It can be claimed that, if any S4 has (holistic) knowledge and we cannot determine when an individual belief that we have adquired is in fact knowledge, inquiry needs to be explained in terms other than seeking knowledge. Now, within a network of beliefs there are justification relations and those can be assessed. We could then have networks of beliefs with different degrees of justification and can formulate the goal of inquiry in terms of justified beliefs (maximize justified beliefs, minimize unjustified beliefs, etc). Of course, we cannot define or understand knowledge in terms of justified beliefs; we have at least to make room for increases in justified beliefs that would not amount to more knowledge. Justification takes place in an environment that is already laden with beliefs and knowledge-rich.
The presence of knowledge is what instills contact with the world in an intelligible network of belief––justification is a way to exploit that contact with the goal of having a network of beliefs with greater rational responsiveness to the world. The pursuit of justified beliefs in this context fulfills the purpose of securing safer subnetworks of beliefs (theories, worldviews). There is no reason to think this is not an achievable and worth-pursuing purpose. But safer subnetworks of beliefs––where we can be sure to find a greater amount of knowledge––are only relative to our broader network of beliefs that itself has to host a measure of knowledge. Holistic knowledge, in contrast with justified beliefs, is elusive. Further (holistic) knowledge can only be diagnosed by arguments that consider the network of beliefs as a whole and draw conclusions from how justified the beliefs within it are. Justification is always justification with respect to a network of beliefs and therefore with respect to some holistic knowledge. Intelligibility is itself connected to justification: interpretation starts always from a network of beliefs where holistic knowledge is present. Beliefs themselves are connected to knowledge through inteligibility and interpretation. We seek justification because we want to ensure ourselves a less elusive contact with the world. Our attempts to proceed an inquiry starts out from a measure of knowledge while no specific piece of knowledge can be presented––there is no principled way to tell apart pieces of knowledge from other beliefs of the network. The best we can do is to seek justified beliefs that seem firmer than others while knowledge itself is not guaranteed but within the network as a whole.
Holistic knowledge is incorrigibly elusive. The emerging idea is that we can provide no resources to produce a set with nothing but knowledge. We prefer to talk about (holistic) knowledge to emphasize the elusive character of our contact with the world: we cannot pinpoint where we touch it without presenting a bottleneck. Holism can be conciliated with contact with the world only if we give up the idea that we should be able to indicate where this contact takes place. Holistic knowledge is elusive because it cannot be presented in isolation from a network of beliefs. We have means to ensure ourselves that we know about the world––we just have no means to determine what exactly we know about it.

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[i] We take Quine to hold that no specific message is received from the world; there is empirical content but that content provides no conceptual message as how things are on its own: it requires the intervention of our conceptual sovereignty.
[ii] The idea that thought could be intelligible while indifferent to the world has been challenged recently by the debates on (content) externalism inaugurated by Putnam (1975). If, however, externalism means only that the world needs to be consulted in order to individuate and identify thought contents, the thinker could still fail to believe that her thought can be in contact with the world: there is still room for a skeptical thinker. In order to curtail this possibility, externalism has to make sure that whatever contact with the world that is required for thought is somehow available to the thinker. More on content externalism and what is available to the thinker below.
[iii] The account can be found in many of his works but in more explicit form in 1982, 1983, 1991.
[iv] This line of thought that makes use of the argument of illusion to present some general features of the skeptical challenge is suggested by Davidson himself (for example 1988: 45) and, to some extent and in a different context, by McDowell 1995.
[v] The idea that contact with the world is a task for part and not the whole of our set of beliefs is present in different traditions of thought. Empiricists claim that the realm of experience would take the task whereas some rationalists would rather attribute it to the contents of one’s own mind that are seen as capable to sustain independently the contact between thought and world.
[vi] There is a number of ambiguities in this phrase, mostly to do with what counts as an individual thought and whether a person’s thought is closed for logical consequences (i.e., if the logical consequences of an item in an S4 has to be in the S4). We believe the line of argument can work for our purposes irrespectively of how one goes concerning those issues.
[vii] One can claim, for instance, that great part of my beliefs about my own mind have to be in contact with the world––that is, with how my mind really is––so that my authority over my own beliefs is (at least partially) guaranteed. An S4 of first-person beliefs would imply that “I believe there is a dagger in front of me” has its meaning no matter what “daggers can cut your skin” means; it probably depends only on the meaning of “I believe that daggers can cut your skin”. Now, this recoil to some sort of narrow (first-person) meaning or content is the classical first step towards asserting first person authority––it makes my authority over my own mental states oblivious to how the world is. First-person narrow contents are typical posits of a conception of thought and content where these are private. Richard Moran (2001), among others, presents arguments showing that first-person authority does not depend on first-person beliefs being in any sense private.
[viii] The idea behind an SDSS-based argument against restricted forms of skepticism can be presented in terms akin to those used by Brandom (2006) to suggest an analytic pragmatism that endeavours to elucidate relations between vocabularies and practices. Brandom introduces an apparatus of {sufficient} and necessary relations between different vocabularies and practices––where vocabularies, for example, specify, pressupose or express practices while those are enabling conditions for the usage of (other) vocabularies. Skeptical challenges can perhaps be understood in {terms} of a practice of challenging portions of a vocabulary. Our argument can be seen as showing that the challenge cannot work if the skeptical practice requires, in order to be specified, resources that can only be found in the portions of vocabulary that the challenge aims to put in question. Whenever this is the case, the portion of vocabulary being challenged constitutes an SDSS.
[ix] McKinsey (1991) argued that if the link between thought and world is merely a metaphysical link there would be no risk of one’s having to know about the world in order to know about oneself. The idea is that no a priori knowledge of contingents matters of fact about the world could be preserved. See also Burge (1988). As it will be clear later, we believe that the link cannot be a merely metaphysical link and, as a consequence, part of what we usually claim about a priori knowledge and contingent matters of fact about the world will have to be reexamined.
[x] Instead of truth one can also think of contact in terms of inference validity within the S4. Validity, here, would have to be construed more broadly than usually so that we can talk of valid material inferences. The idea, then, would be that most material inferences enabled by those beliefs are valid. We can claim that there is a presumption of validity in favour of any inference because without the background of shared inferences that we use to understand each other no interpretation could be possible. Inference validity, on the other hand, is what assures contact with the world as we cannot possibly make sense of a confrontation between our thinking and the world that would not take for granted the validity of (great part of) the inferences of which we make use. This inferentialist semantics differs from that recommended by Brandom (1994) as Brandom’s inferentialism requires reliable observational judgments to provide the contact between our inference moves on the one hand and the world on the other . Our alternative inferentialism has that most thoughts are products of valid inference. It seems that such inferentialism might have been suggested by Peirce in his 1868.
[xi] With holist psychophysical laws we would have a connection between a physical event and a global mental life. Even though this would still enable one to bypass the effort to interpret a set of beliefs in order to understand it, psychophysical laws like those don’t seem to be a challenge to UMET.
[xii] He then has to find a way to argue against the charge (aired by Rorty (1986) and McDowell (1994: 16-17) that a brain-in-a-vat would have wires as the content of its beliefs. Even if Davidson has resources to counter the charge (see Malpas 2005), he might be unncecessarily inviting the suspicion by adding a causal story (and what we take to be the second strand in his philosophy) to his account of mental content.
[xiii] Effects of this two separate accounts of content can be also found in Davidson’s account of occasional sentences (see 1983: 152). Davidson’s attempt to conciliate the two accounts can also be seen as in contrast with his rejection of the scheme-content dualism, see Pinedo 2006.
[xiv] McDowell feels encouraged to understand nature as something that is not entirely alien to our conceptual capacities. His route towards this thought starts out from an urge to vindicate the idea of a tribunal of experience after the rejection of the Given as a myth—experience cannot constrain thought without conceptual content. He argues that experience can be both conceptual and passive and further that, being so, it can capture facts of nature. Now, nature is then to be seen as made of facts; conceptually articulated units. We can however dispense with the route and consider only what can be achieved by a conception of nature such as the one McDowell is willing to recommend. McDowell’s position, but not this variation, has to be committed to the bottleneck image. When nature is so re-enchanted, we can passively receive—even if we don’t have experience as a separated place for receptivity—facts about the world. These are ready-made items that can be, at least in principle, taken in one by one. In this context, it is interesting to bring up a diagnosis Crispin Wright makes of McDowell’s position: “[his position] amounts not to a rejection of the Given as such, but a recasting of it. What is given in experience is essentially of the form: that P—that so-and-so is the case. “In experience one finds onelsef saddled with content” (MW, 10). In rejecting the Myth of the Given, McDowell intends to reject a mythology about what is Given, and how, but not the very idea that anything is.” (Wright 2002, p. 145). By re-enchanting nature—no matter whether experience is passive or epistemologically relevant—McDowell proposes a demythologized Given. Now, of course, Sellars didn’t argue, at least according to McDowell, against the very idea that something is received in a (sometimes conceptual) ready-made format by our mind from the world. Sellars’ complaint is against items that get into our mental life without being previously embedded in a theory. Surely then, McDowell’s Given, if it is fair to call it like this, doesn’t fly in the face of Sellars’ efforts to denounce the myth of the Given. However, it goes against the overall autonomy of our body of beliefs to determine the content of each belief—it goes against holism for it assumes that atomic ready-made messages are conceptual contents ready to be taken in by our endeavour to think. The world has to constrain us by telling specific messages (or it cannot constrain us). Quine, for one, can escape this urge to compromise holism by taking the Given to be nonconceptual while taking the tribunal of experience as capable to give no more than general verdicts. The problem lies in the idea that ready-made contents could be received by us independently of our acts of thinking. In fact, one could distinguish three different kinds of Given: 1) atomistic and nonconceptual, which is the variety endorsed by most non-Quinean version of classical empiricism, 2) atomistic and conceptual, which would be implicit in a re-enchanted nature and 3) nonatomistic and conceptual, as we could find in Quine. It seems that some passivity (or the idea of some receptivity) is crucially at odds with holism.
[xv] An identity theory of truth such as that defended by Hornsby (1997) could match finely with such an alternative: facts are the same as true thoughts.
[xvi] We present this second alternative mainly because we had believed for a while that it offered a promising way to conciliate holism and responsiveness to the world. We hope someone else could learn with our mistakes.
[xvii] The appeal to truth-makers in an account of truth is a move that often commits one to a conception of truth as an adequatio intellectus ad rem where there is an intelligible element of res that the intellectus has to respond to in order to reach truths. Confrontation between truth-makers and our beliefs as such, however, can hardly be rendered intelliugible (as Davidson 1983, 1990, 2001 has argued).
[xviii] McDowell (1994: II) argues that there is no priority between thinkables and thoughts––thinkables that are part of the world were not made prior to our thinking in any interesting way.
[xix] This can be developped in the direction of an account of a priori knowledge according to which nothing specific is to be known a priori but something has to be known a priori. Further, one could claim that some (synthetic) a priori judgments are necessary but we run into difficulties of different sorts if we try and specify what would be those judgments.
[xx] Knowable contents contrast with thinkable contents. We believe knowable contents, or even ‘knowables’, contrast positively with ‘thinkables’ (see Hornsby 1997, inspired by McDowell and Wittgenstein`s Tractatus) and ‘claimables’ (as in Brandom 1999). A knowable content has in itself an element of the world as it is a genuine object of knowledge.