Paul Livingston Experience and Structure Philosophical History and the Problem of Consciousness

Investigation and analysis of the history of the concepts employed in contemporary philosophy of mind could significantly change the contemporary debate about the explainability of consciousness. Philosophical investigation of the history of the concept of qualia and the concept of scientific explanation most often presupposed in contemporary discussions of consciousness reveals the origin of both concepts in some of the most interesting philosophical debates of the twentieth century. In particular, a historical investigation of the inheritance of concepts of the elements of experience and the nature of scientific explanation from C. I. Lewis and Rudolf Carnap to contemporary theorists like David Chalmers shows the profound continuity of these concepts throughout the analytic tradition, despite important changes in the dimensions of philosophical relevance and significance that have characterized the emerging debate. I argue that, despite the significant methodological shift from the foundationalist epistemology of the 1920s to today’s functionalist explanations of the mind, the problem of explaining consciousness has remained the problem of analysing or describing the logical and relational structure of immediate, given experience. Appreciation of this historical continuity of form recommends a more explicit discussion of the philosophical reasons for the underlying distinction between structure and content, reasons that trace to Lewis and Carnap’s influential but seldom-discussed understanding of the relationship between subjectivity, conceived as the realm of private, ineffable contents, and objectivity, understood as public, linguistic expressibility. With this historical background in mind, the contemporary debate about the explanation of consciousness can be reinterpreted as a debate about the relationship between ineffable experience and structurally conceived meaning. The history of analytic philosophy, if viewed as more than a repository for superseded theory, could provide the basis for a transformation in the problem of consciousness with which philosophers of mind are currently grappling. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9, No. 3, 2002, pp. 15–33 Correspondence: Paul Livingston, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. Email: [email protected] Philosophers of mind seldom discuss or investigate, more than cursorily, the history of the interrelated concepts of mind, consciousness, experience, and the physical world that they rely upon in their theorizing. But these concepts in fact emerge from some of the most interesting and decisive philosophical struggles of the analytic tradition in the twentieth century. Historically, these struggles and their results set up the philosophical space in which contemporary discussion of consciousness moves, defining and delimiting the range of theoretical alternatives accessible to participants in the discussion of the relationship of consciousness to the physical world. Most contemporary philosophical discussions of consciousness address the question of its explainability in terms of objective, scientific description, or the question of its ontological reducibility to objective, scientifically describable phenomena. These questions are, furthermore, often raised against the backdrop of a conception according to which consciousness has certain properties or features that may make it especially resistant to scientific explanation and description. Paramount among the features of consciousness usually cited as problems for its explanation or reduction are its privacy, subjectivity, ineffability, phenomenality and irreducibly qualitative character. The debate about the reality and reducibility of these features, having developed over the 1980s and 1990s, shows no sign of being resolved, and indeed it is unclear what sort of consideration, empirical or philosophical, might decisively settle it (see, e.g., Price, 1996). But the debate can be re-invigorated, and brought to a greater richness and philosophical depth, if it is realized that each of the determinate notions used in these various types of arguments to characterize (or contest the characterization of) the specific properties of consciousness in fact originate in the context of particular bygone philosophical theories and concerns, often seemingly quite distant from those of philosophers who apply those notions today. 16 P. LIVINGSTON [1] Older discussions of consciousness often used Nagel’s memorable phrase ‘what it’s like’ to gesture at the problematic properties of consciousness; in particular, Nagel argued that knowing all objective facts about a bat would not help to establish ‘what it’s like’ to be a bat (Nagel, 1974). Except in the specialized context of Jackson’s ‘Knowledge Argument’ — where what is at issue is the cognitive or epistemological status of learning ‘what it’s like’ to see red (Jackson, 1982) — this language has largely ceded to talk of the ‘qualitative’ character of conscious states. Still, explanation of the meaning of ‘qualitative’ usually just repeats Nagel’s phrase (e.g. Chalmers, 1996, pp. 4–5). The idea that consciousness is ‘subjective’ expresses a different idea; perhaps the clearest formulation in the contemporary literature — Searle’s (1992, p. 95) — defines the subjectivity of a conscious state as its property of existing only for a single person or from a single point of view. (This language, though clearer than most contemporary descriptions of ‘subjectivity’, of course demands additional clarification of the phrase ‘point of view’.) The notions of states of consciousness as ‘ineffable’ and ‘private’ are, perhaps, more popular with those who affirm the explainability of conscious states than those who deny it; for instance, Dennett (1988, p. 639) characterizes the concept of qualia as the concept of the ‘ineffable, intrinsic, private, directly apprehensible properties of experience’ in order to show that there are no such properties. A third set of associations clusters around descriptions of conscious states in terms of their alleged epistemic properties, for instance their epistemic immediacy. For these descriptions, conscious states (or, more often, the qualitative component or aspect of them) are immediately recognizable or capable of being grasped in advance of other, more highly structured items of knowledge. For more illuminating discussion of some of these alleged properties of qualia and the arguments they issue in, see Lormand (1994) and Lycan (1990a). Broadly speaking, several of the main features of our contemporary philosophical concept of consciousness — in particular its alleged privacy, ineffability, and subjectivity — first arise historically from tensions present in the analytic attempt to describe the relationship of language and meaning to experience, in such a way as to make the structure of logic and language relevant to defining the structure of experience and characterizing its relationship to objective knowledge about the physical world. From around the turn of the twentieth century, a variety of prominent explanatory projects sought to elucidate the epistemology and ontology of our knowledge of the objective world on the basis of a description of our immediate, lived experience. One of the inaugural innovations of analytic philosophy was to tie this kind of explanatory project to a programme of linguistic and logical analysis, whereby the relationship between immediate experience and other items of knowledge or objectivity is specified by means of a clarification of the logical relationships between propositions describing immediate experience and other, more highly conceptual and less directly experiential, propositions. This configuration — in which consciousness is constantly understood as immediate content, and scientific explanation as structural or functional — has continued, despite changes in detail and focus, to characterize the problem of consciousness to the present. In this essay, I argue that the history of philosophy provides a genuine explanation for the resistance of consciousness to physicalist and functionalist accounts, and that this explanation, if properly understood, could help to bring the contemporary debate to a greater level of methodological richness and sophistication. In particular, with the historical account in mind, we can begin to reconceive the contemporary problem of explaining consciousness as one about the relationship of subjective experience, understood as private and ineffable, to structurally articulated objective meaning. I should be very clear at the outset about exactly what kind of explanation for the current problem it is that, I believe, the history of our concepts offers. Historical analysis of concepts is a species of conceptual analysis, and conceptual analysis explains in that it reveals the underlying conceptual determinants of patterns of use and description. This is especially so, in philosophical discussions, when current patterns of use and description arise and descend from older ones with somewhat different philosophical surroundings from those shown on the surface of the contemporary debate. By unearthing and evaluating the original arguments made for positions which have played a determinative role in structuring our contemporary concepts, historical investigation can remind contemporary philosophers of some of the original reasons for using various concepts of mind and explanation in the ways that we do today. Because of theoretical innovation or the intervening recognition of conceptual dead ends, some of these reasons may no longer be relevant to the contemporary discussion; but others may still bear a concealed richness of suggestion and implication for the contemporary debate. In particular, if it emerges that contemporary problems are in fact conceptual descendents of older problems and tensions still unresolved, then the historical investigation offers an enlightening explanation for the contemporary problems by identifying the reasons for the continuing insolubility of their EXPERIENCE AND STRUCTURE 17