Is Philosophy Useful?

An interview with Colin McGinn.

Raphael’s 16th-century masterpiece The School of Athens. (Image source here.)

Philosophy is a wonderful thing. For inspiration about the topic of philosophy, make sure to click on this image and zoom in on it and look at it carefully.

Colin McGinn is one of the finest philosophers in the world and his grasp of a huge range of philosophical topics is astounding. I urge readers to check out the following: 

• McGinn’s fascinating website where you can read 100s of philosophical pieces—on a huge range of topics—that McGinn has written

• McGinn’s 2021 piece “Puzzles of Color” that stimulates the imagination and causes you to reflect on the fact that colors actually exist that are outside of the range of colors that humans are able to see

• McGinn’s 2021 piece “Metamorphosis and the Self” that analogizes humans to butterflies in order to reflect on the nature of the self 

I was honored/thrilled to interview McGinn. See below my interview with McGinn that I edited for flow, organized by topic, and added hyperlinks to.

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General Questions

1) What are the most exciting projects that you’re currently working on?

My writing consists of writing short essays on a variety of subjects—I tend to move from one to the next with some rapidity, often not even dwelling for more than a week on one subject. I’ll write a few pages on one topic, and then move on to the next one. 

And I often don’t know what the next topic is—right now that’s the case. I just wait to see what comes into my mind. And maybe nothing will come into my mind, but that hasn’t happened to me for the last several years. 

So there’s no good answer to your question—I’m working on different things. I just put a series of pieces on my blog about color and idealism (“Mind in World”, “Color and Object”, “Secondary Qualities and Possible Worlds”, “Earth Mind”, “Object Mentalism and Philosophy”, and so on), so that’s the most recent thing I’ve done.

2) What are the most exciting projects that you know of that others are working on?

I’m not connected to other philosophers very much—hardly at all, in fact. The few people I do still know in philosophy always tell me the same thing: “There’s nothing interesting going on. You’re not missing anything.” And I say: “Okay.” 

So I don’t know of any interesting projects at the moment. 

But maybe there’s something perfectly worthy out there—probably there is.

3) How many topics does your blog cover and do you have any particular arguments on your blog that you would point to as particularly consequential? 

I can’t very easily pick anything out, but my blog has about 600 articles on everything in philosophy: ethics, linguistics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic, and so on. All of the articles are consequential and all of the articles develop new positions on things. 

My favorite thing is just whatever I’m working on at the time. 

4) Prior to your blog, what have been your big arguments? 

People know me for the mysterianism, but they profoundly misunderstand it. Mysterianism has nothing to do with mysticism and nothing to do with anything supernatural, and it has nothing to do with rejecting the idea that there are philosophical problems. Mysterianism is a solution to philosophical problems—I explained this with complete clarity in 1989 in the first paper that I ever wrote on mysterianism. 

Apart from that, I’ve written on many different subjects: metaphysics, philosophical logic, language, innate ideas, ethics, and so on. I couldn’t pick out particular arguments, though. 

The Joy of Philosophy

1) What do you love about philosophy? 

You could say it’s a love–hate relationship. It’s not really hate—maybe frustration. Philosophy is hard, and it’s mentally exhausting, and it’s frustrating when it’s not working out exactly the way you wanted it to. And it’s hard to persuade people—even when they should be persuaded—and get them to follow what you’re doing. 

I’m a writer, and I enjoy writing, so for me a lot of the pleasure of philosophy is to do with writing. And for whatever reason, I prefer writing philosophy to writing probably anything else—maybe because it’s more argumentative in structure than other things and I like to construct arguments. I also like the old-fashioned nature of philosophical prose. 

And philosophical problems are just intrinsically interesting and unavoidable, so I like to think about them, and it’s always exciting to come up with some new idea—I’m never that worried about whether I believe a new idea, but instead I ask whether the idea is new and whether the idea sheds extra light on a problem so that we can start to see the problem in a different way. There’s a playful aspect to coming up with new ideas. 

So there are a bunch of different things about philosophy that appeal to me. But if you ask me if I’ve most enjoyed teaching philosophy or talking to my colleagues about philosophy or working at home in my study, then it’s the last of those three—I’ve most enjoyed being alone in my study with philosophy. I’ll sometimes talk to people about philosophy, but I often regret it, and the institutional framework around teaching is so disagreeable because of grading and unprepared students and so on. 

2) But isn’t the most fun part when you publish something that you’ve been working on for a long time and you get to share it with the world? 

You’re heartily sick of it by the time it gets published. You’ve put so much work into it and read the proofs and answered the referees’ comments. So you’re happy to forget about it, and I basically forget—probably intentionally—the book that I’ve just published and move on to something else. In fact, I actually find it painful to read even a short paragraph of my books because I remember how painful the whole thing was.

So it’s very mixed when the book is published. But you do feel some relief: “Oh, it’s here. It’s concrete. I can put it away and forget it.” 

3) But my favorite part of writing is when I click the “Publish” button and then I get to put it on Twitter and send it to all my friends and celebrate. 

I like publishing on the internet because you don’t have to go through that long procedure anymore. When I publish on my blog, I don’t have to mess around with publishers or deal with referees or deal with journals—and you don’t have the long wait until the thing finally comes out. But I still forget these internet pieces once I put them up there because I’m bored with the topic and because the next topic has fully captured my mind. 

4) But even with print volumes, don’t you pour yourself a drink and throw a party when you publish? Isn’t it celebration time when you publish? 

There’s a sense of achievement, and it’s fine. When I published my very first book, I did get a thrill from seeing it in the window at the Oxford University Press bookshop in Oxford when it first came out. 

Philosophy’s Usefulness

1) To what extent is philosophy useful, and what can people read that defends philosophy’s utility? There’s a view that philosophy is a waste of time. I asked my friend to defend philosophy and he said: “I wouldn’t bother to defend philosophy, any more than I’d defend literature or art or history or other things. If people prefer ignorance and deeply impoverished lives, it’s their business.” 

I basically agree with that. If you ask that question, you’re already a philistine, and there’s not much point in talking to you. 

We’re naturally philosophical. Most people—almost all of us—have philosophical thoughts from an early age. Children, notoriously, have philosophical thoughts. So telling people not to bother with philosophy is like saying to people who want to run and jump: “Don’t run and jump.” People like philosophy, just like people like nature and art. 

I think it’s good that philosophy exists—people can read about it, enjoy the discussion, and have enjoyable thoughts about things. 

Philosophy makes the world more interesting. I’ve been worrying a lot about color recently, and I never cease feeling enriched looking at the green leaf—as I am now—on the branch of a tree. Where is that color? Is that color in the leaf? Is my mind projecting the color? What kind of thing is it? 

So there are perfectly good answers to that philistine who says: “Why should I ever do anything that isn’t useful?” And you can ask what the word “useful” is supposed to mean there. 

2) And if you’re going to say that everything has to be useful, then no more watching professional sports, because that’s sure as hell not useful. 

And what’s the point in playing any sports? It’s not useful. Why does anybody play chess? It’s not useful. Why fall in love? It’s not useful. 

What does “useful” mean? Usually people mean something economic, but then are we supposing that all value is economic value—really? 

3) I think maybe they want everyone to be like engineers or something and invent things that move the needle on human health and on the environment and so on. 

It just seems like complete tunnel vision—and total ignorance of everything about civilization. 

4) I wanted to ask you about criticisms of contemporary academic philosophy—of course, these criticisms have nothing to do with philistinism about philosophy itself. What do you think about this discussion about philosophy, especially the part about “Mario Bunge’s Ten Criticisms of contemporary academic philosophy, which has largely deviated from what philosophy was invented to be and could and should be”? Mario Bunge’s list of ten things is supposed to lay out the sins and maladies of contemporary academic philosophy. 

Some of the criticism is sensible, but I see most of the criticism as just tendentious propaganda for Mario Bunge’s own particular approach to philosophy—and I happen to know what that particular approach is, and I don’t think it’s a good way to do philosophy. 

Professionalization has a lot of defects—people have their career ambitions and they want to be promoted and be in a good department and so on—and that tends to dilute the purity of people’s motivation. 

The defects vary by place—American philosophy is contaminated with American culture, so it’s very competitive in a way that’s had a very dire influence. 

The real problem is just that philosophy is difficult and people are not always great at it even when they’re professionals. 

I’ve often thought that philosophy is too much oriented towards criticism and not enough towards creativity. There’s a role for destruction—and I’m as guilty of that as anybody—but there should be more emphasis on creativity. The problem is that new ideas are taxing because you don’t have a fixed position you can trot out, and so the common reaction is to ignore new ideas—or to focus on finding faults in new ideas without first taking the time to understand them. 

There’s too much political influence on professional philosophy in America. Gender, race, sexuality, and so forth are all reasonable topics that any rational, civilized person will need to think about, but it’s turned into something like a machine or an industry. There are political motivations for making sure that every philosophy department has a philosopher of race, and a philosopher of feminism, and a philosopher of gender, and a philosopher of sexuality—it’s become politically hot to have that so every department has to have it. I don’t think that the philosophical significance of those areas is sufficient to warrant that degree of interest, but that’s what’s fashionable right now. 

Popularizing Philosophy 

1) Is there a problem where philosophy popularization isn’t as good as science popularization? 

It’s difficult to do it well. People—including myself—have tried to popularize philosophy, with mixed success, and there are some professional popularizers of philosophy who do a reasonable job. Tom Nagel has a good book called What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy, and there are other good popular books too. 

It doesn’t help people with their tenure or with their promotion, so there’s not as much popularization as you’d like. So it would be nice if there was more, but I understand why there isn’t that much. 

There used to be more of it before the culture changed. In the 20th century in Great Britain there was quite a lot of good philosophy being produced for readers with a general education. For example, C. E. M. Joad used to popularize Bertrand Russell’s philosophy, and he was very good at it, and he wrote very well and very clearly. 

2) A physicist can get out a bedsheet and a bowling ball and say: “That’s what a black hole is.” But philosophers can’t make analogies like that, can they?

It’s intrinsically harder to explain it to people to get them interested, so that’s always a challenge.

My effort was to write my introductory book in the form of an autobiography and to make it less theoretical and give it a more human context. 

3) Could visualizations help? There are stunning mathematical visualizations on YouTube that have millions of views—beautiful, gorgeous, colorful illustrations work well for math, but I don’t know whether philosophy could do that as well for abstract things like metaphysics. 

It could help!

Philosophy of Science

1) What do you think about philosophy of science? Some people consider that the most exciting domain of philosophy right now. 

Do they now? Who are those “some people”? Are they philosophers of science by any chance? I would be interested to hear that philosophers of mind and ethicists were saying that philosophy of science was interesting, but I wouldn’t be interested to hear that philosophers of science were saying that philosophy of science was interesting. 

2) There’s a ton of literature in philosophy of science, though, right? 

Oh, yeah—there’s a ton of it. My own book Basic Structures of Reality (2011) is about the philosophy of physics. And I think that philosophy of biology is a very good field, and I’d actually like to collaborate with biologists about certain philosophical questions that I’m very interested in. 

3) I think that the point is that philosophy of science is exciting because it’s grounded in things that you can think about—as opposed to metaphysics or something. 

That’s true if you only know science and not metaphysics, but if you know metaphysics then it’s just like knowing science because you know all of the moves in metaphysics and you know what metaphysics is all about. 

4) Doesn’t philosophy of science make contact with something a little more tangible? 

It depends on your tastes and your preferences—some of us might like philosophy that does not make contact with the tangible. [Laughs.] We like the abstract questions, you see! 

I like very abstract questions—that’s my taste. What’s existence? What’s identity? What’s necessity? What’s truth? What’s meaning? These questions are incredibly abstract. 

I’ll do other things, but as soon as I start to discuss things like philosophy of literature then I start to think: “Well, this is getting a bit too concrete for me.” 

5) I think that philosophy of science fascinates people because once you find out that falsifiability hasn’t been relevant for decades in philosophy of science then you immediately wonder with great fascination: “Well, what is the actual foundation of science then, if not falsifiability?” 

That falls into the area of scientific method. But there are other questions in philosophy of science about understanding in science, knowledge in science, the content of various theories, how much theories relate to real unobservables (realism vs. anti-realism). So there are a lot of different things in philosophy of science that you can be interested in, and they’re all good, and they’re all worthwhile. Like I said, my 2011 book is about philosophy of science. 

6) People prize science as this jewel of our world and this treasure of our world, so does it make sense that people crave philosophy of science because philosophy of science gives you a firm foundation under science and a rigorous methodology behind science? 

These are all good questions. 

Free Will

1) What are the biggest philosophical arguments that you’ve put forward, and what can people read to get up to speed on these arguments?

I have a new take on the free will problem. I started thinking about this problem when I was probably 18 years old—I was a hard determinist and I thought that determinism ruled out free will. And I continued to think that for 30 years or whatever. But then recently I came to a conciliatory attitude towards the idea of freedom. 

There are two views about what free will is. The compatibilist view says that freedom is the ability to do what you want without coercion—the paradigm case is that somebody in a prison isn’t free because they don’t want to be in the prison and they wouldn’t be there if not for coercion. And that view is perfectly logically consistent with determinism because the issue isn’t whether your desires are determined or not but instead whether you’re acting on your desires without coercion. And that coercion could be internal as well, like a brain malfunction that causes involuntary muscle movements. 

The other notion of freedom that people have worked with is the ability to do otherwise, and this isn’t compatible with determinism. 

I argue that people have made a logical mistake because they’ve taken the word “free”—or “free will”—out of its normal context and tried to ask questions like “Are we free?” or “Is the will free?”. But these debates use the word “free” in two ways. The first way is in the context of being free to do X and the second way is in the context of being free from something. 

In the first sense, we are indeed free to do things—we’re not always being coerced into doing what we don’t want to do. I’m free now to stop this interview, to have lunch afterwards, and so on. Nothing external to me or internal to me is stopping me from doing these things, and I can act on my desires, so I’m free. 

But in the second sense, we’re not free. We’re never free from the facts about our brain or from the antecedent facts about the universe. 

There’s no inconsistency or tension between those two ideas—in order to act as I do, I’m completely dependent on my brain and on my desires, so I’m not free from my brain or from my desires, and yet I’m free to act on my desires. 

So the answer to the free will problem is simple. We’re free in the sense of “free to”, but we’re not free in another sense of “free from”—the compatibilists were correct about “free to”, and the incompatibilists were correct about “free from”. 

And my point is that there’s no other question. You can’t ask “Am I free?” unless you tell me which of these two senses you mean. You either mean one sense or you mean the other. You can get confused and fail to distinguish the two concepts, but you can’t come up with a notion beyond these two concepts. 

You might say that determinism isn’t true and that there’s a random element, but randomness isn’t free action and can’t somehow bring about free action. 

2) Chomsky says about free will that randomness and determinism might not be the only options and that maybe we can’t conceptualize the third option. 

There’s a mystery there—I think there’s room for mysterianism at this level. We don’t really have a good conceptual understanding of the nature of mental causation, the nature of decision, or the nature of will. 

My argument just tells you how to respond to the classic argument against free will. And then can add on to that the point that we don’t really understand what freedom to act on one’s desires is. I would agree with Chomsky that that freedom isn’t intelligible. That’s fine—it’s just one more thing about the mind that we don’t understand.

But Chomsky’s point doesn’t help you with the “free from” business, because there’s a very solid argument that you’re not free from the past. And my point is that the “free from” issue doesn’t entail that we don’t have free will if you mean by “free will” the freedom to act on our desires. And then there’s no further question. So Chomsky makes a perfectly valid point, but never raises that point in the context of this argument that I’m presenting here. 

Chomsky also often cites Descartes as saying that our desires can “incline” us to do various things but not “compel” us to do various things. That’s again a perfectly correct observation, but Chomsky never really spells out what we’re meant to take from this. 

I would say about Descartes’s observation that we can have second-order desires to not act on our first-order desires—maybe you want to lose weight, so you have a second-order desire to not act on your first-order desire to eat—but that it’s not possible for two people who are exactly alike in all of their first-order and second-order desires and values and beliefs to act differently from each other. 

3) The average person would probably define free will as the ability to do otherwise. 

I actually checked the dictionary and it doesn’t define it that way—it defines it as the ability to act on your desires without being coerced, and that’s the “freedom to” that I defined. 

And “ability to do otherwise” doesn’t entail that an agent could act differently in two identical physical universes—it might just mean that there’s no external or internal coercion. So we can accommodate “ability to do otherwise”.

And my argument shows that there’s no further question. 

It would be completely unintelligible if two people who were physically and mentally identical could act differently from each other. Their desires are identical—why would one eat an apple and one eat chocolate if they both had the desire to eat an apple? It makes no sense. 

Free action requires determinism because your actions would just be random and unfree if your desires—including all of your values—couldn’t determine your actions. 

4) Some people think that intuition aligns with libertarian free will. But I don’t I personally don’t feel like my intuitions bear on this question in either direction.

Intuition doesn’t bear on this question. 

And it’s a ridiculous intuition to say that two worlds could be exactly the same up to a certain point and yet in one case a person turns left and in the other case the person turns right. It’s like saying that you have an intuition that you could drop a glass on the floor now and it would break, but you could also drop it from exactly the same height in exactly the same place and it wouldn’t break—that’s ridiculous because the laws of nature would apply in the same way in each case. 

5) And again, what about Chomsky’s idea that the dichotomy of determinism and randomness might not be a true dichotomy because maybe there’s a third option that our cognitive limitations don’t allow us to conceptualize? 

Determinism is an incredibly general category that includes physical determinism and psychological determinism and other types of determinism. 

Some of these types of determinism might be completely mysterious. Supervenience might be true—most people believe that the state of your brain determines the state of your mind—but that doesn’t mean that we understand it. Nor do we know much about psychological determinism, which says that a person’s total psychological state—desires, beliefs, and so—uniquely fix that person’s decision.

But in contrast, we understand the determination where molecular structure determines solubility and we have theories of how the mass of an object determines the gravitational effect. 

But maybe even physical determinism is mysterious—Chomsky thinks that. 

6) Let’s say that you want to attack the seemingly inescapable dichotomy between randomness and determinism on the grounds that there might be a third option that human cognition doesn’t allow us to conceptualize. Would that be opening a Pandora’s Box, since then we literally have to put that same caveat next to every dichotomy in the history of philosophy?

This is a special case where we don’t have any good theories of action—any good theories of what Chomsky calls “performance”—so you could attack this particular dichotomy and still say that other dichotomies that don’t involve free action (true vs. false, necessary vs. contingent, a priori vs. a posteriori) are inescapable. 

It would be an uninteresting form of skepticism to literally say that maybe the true-vs.-false dichotomy is false, and maybe the law of noncontradiction is false, and maybe we’re all brains in vats. But we could have a conversation if you were to propose truth-value gaps as a third option apart from true and false, since I would know what you meant by that, although truth-value gaps don’t actually undermine the true-vs.-false dichotomy. 

7) Maybe the problem is that Chomsky has an intuition about libertarian free will, and he works forward from that intuition, but you and I don’t happen to share that intuition in the first place, and so you and I have no motivation to attack this dichotomy. 

And if I did have that intuition then I would question it because it’s contrary to the laws of nature. 

8) Chomsky once took off his watch and said that he knew that he could throw his watch across the room if he wanted to and that that intuition was very powerful to him. 

That doesn’t entail libertarian free will. Of course he has the power to throw the watch across the room, but it would be bizarre to say that in an identical world he wouldn’t make the same decision about throwing the watch—it’s as contrary to the laws of nature as the intuition that you could drop a glass on the floor and the glass could either break or not break even if all the forces acting on it were identical. 

9) I know somebody who took an undergraduate course in philosophy and they were upset and they said that compatibilism is a shell game—that “free will” means that physics doesn’t predetermine your actions and so any effort to obscure that definition is trickery. 

I think that some people have an emotional response to the discovery that a person’s actions are physically determined. But strangely enough, they’re not so just disturbed by the claim that their actions are psychologically determined.

10) I think that people are disturbed by the fact that their decisions are ultimately determined by chemistry in their brain.

But nobody worries about psychological determinism—your desires determine your intentions, and your intentions determine your decisions, and so on. 

Some people don’t like the idea that the brain determines the mind. And that’s a different worry that’s not particularly about free action. But you’ll become convinced—if you study the brain and understand the correlations between the brain and the mind—that nothing can happen in the mind without a corresponding state in the brain.

11) What do you think about this rhyme that Alan Watts said?

There was a young man who said “Damn,

For it certainly seems that I am,

A creature that moves

In determinate grooves,

I’m not even a bus—I’m a tram.”

It’s kind of true. Except it’s also importantly not true, because the difference between the tram and the human is that we have desires and we act on them—trams don’t. 

It’s generally accepted now that the mind depends on the brain, but that certainly doesn’t entail that the mind somehow makes no difference to your behavior. 

12) To what extent do philosophers talk about the very real threats to free will that you see in psychiatry? These threats seem much more concrete and much more immediate than the up-in-the-clouds discussions about determinism. For example, people whose brain chemistry or brain connections are a certain way might be less “in control” of their actions and less able to govern their actions and less able to hold their impulses in check. Everyone is on a bell curve in terms of self-regulation. Some people can read books from cover to cover and other people can’t. I know people who will barely react if you aggressively antagonize them because their self-regulation is so far above average.

Those come in under the heading of internal coercion—there’s something wrong with your brain that undermines the normal pathway that leads you to act like a normal human being. In a case like that, we’re inclined to say that the person doesn’t have the kind of freedom that we have.

13) But everyone’s on a bell curve when it comes to self-regulation. I know people who are average, and people who are way above average, and people who are way below average. 

I make the point in my paper that the concept of freedom isn’t all-or-nothing—one person can have more freedom than someone else.

14) Apparently they used to hold people morally responsible if they hit someone in the face during a seizure. But today we recognize that someone isn’t morally responsible for what they do during a seizure, so maybe as we move forward with psychiatry more and more things will fall under the “not your fault” domain and maybe pretty much everything we do will eventually fall under that domain. 

You’re now asking about morality, which is a separate question that people often confuse with the free will question. 

There’s a very powerful argument that says that a person’s character is pretty much just a function of their genes and their upbringing, and so a person doesn’t have any say in how their character was formed, and therefore a person isn’t to blame for their character. And since action follows from character, they’re not blameworthy for their actions.

I agree with this argument, but I also think that we have free will in the sense that I explained, so these are two separate questions. 

15) A jury in a courtroom will understand that a murderer isn’t blameworthy if you show the jury that the murderer had a tumor in his brain. But that just happens to be a striking instance where there’s an obvious physical explanation—doesn’t the same point apply to every physical aspect of the brain?

I think so—arguably people don’t have any moral responsibility when you get down to it. 

It’s a pretty repugnant notion because it means that all of our systems of punishment are unjust—it’s not at all a nice conclusion to come to. But as you say, the historical trend is toward recognizing more and more that people aren’t at fault for what their brains do, and that trend may well continue. 

Color

1) Which other big philosophical arguments have you put forward, and what can people read to get up to speed on these arguments?

I was rereading Berkeley, and he makes the very striking point that “ideas”—in the 17th century “ideas” meant immediately-perceived things like color—are mental entities, and therefore “ideas” can’t exist in external material objects because mental things must be perceived. So if color exists in something then that thing is a perceiver. 

You could suppose that color exists in the human mind or the animal mind and that these human and animal minds are the perceivers, but that doesn’t explain how things can be colored when no person or animal is looking at them. So why is something red when no person or animal is looking at it? 

And his answer is that color exists in the mind of God. But we don’t want to go with Berkeley that way, so I offered this argument that nobody’s offered before as far as I know: the color exists in the object (which is a material substance that has shape, and shape is not a mental thing); the perceiver isn’t the human mind or the mind of God but instead the object itself; and so the object has a mind because the object is red and red is mental and a mental thing needs a perceiver. So every object is a perceiver. 

2) Wouldn’t we say that color exists only in the mind? Light waves bounce off objects and strike the retina and then the color somehow mysteriously manifests in your mind, and the same light waves can produce a different manifestation of color for different people—for example, some people are colorblind, so they see as red what I see as green. 

There are different views about the nature of color—some views say that objects aren’t colored at all and that it’s an illusion, so it’s not true that anything is actually red.

There’s a view that color only exists in the mind and that only mental entities can be red.

Another view is that colors don’t exist in the mind, and instead exist in objects, but that there’s nothing more to them than physical reflectances. And the Mary thought experiment contradicts that theory. 

Yet another view is that colors are irreducible, non-physical, non-mental properties that objects have and that are determined by dispositions to appear in certain ways but aren’t identical with these dispositions.

So there are various views on this whole thing. But surprisingly, it follows from Berkeley’s premises—that objects are colored and that colors are mental—that objects have minds. 

3) But you and I would reject those premises, wouldn’t we? 

I happen to accept those premises myself because I think that all the alternatives are mistaken. For example, I think it’s a straight category mistake to say that mental entities are red—if they were red then they’d have to have a shape and they’d have to have volume, but they don’t, so I reject the idea that mental entities have secondary qualities. So we could have a long, long discussion about all of these different alternatives, but I happen to think that both of those premises are true. 

So I think there’s an argument to say that all objects have minds, and then you can ask about problems with that conclusion and arguments against that conclusion. 

In metaphysics, you’ve got a whole lot of things that you’re trying to hold together—every position has some problems and is evaluated relative to other positions. 

I think that this argument adds a new position—a position with some attractions, actually, when you think it through—and enables you to say things that you previously didn’t think you could say. 

This all has to do with whether we really have any conception of material substance, and I rather agree with Berkeley that we don’t have any conception of that. 

4) How can we grant that objects are colored if a colorblind person sees red when I see green? 

That doesn’t imply that the object isn’t colored. On classical theories, a color is a disposition to appear in certain ways to perceivers. And the object is red—for you. 

McGinn’s Books

1) Can you tell me about the main ideas in some of your books? 

Philosophical Provocations: 55 Short Essays (2017) ranges over all of philosophy—from ethics to epistemology to philosophy of mind. It’s a miscellany of many disparate things, so I can’t summarize the main arguments. 

Inborn Knowledge: The Mystery Within (2015) is about a very specific type of knowledge that includes knowledge of colors and shape and taste and that I call—following the 17th-century terminology—“knowledge of sensible qualities”. Most examples of inborn knowledge have to do with non-sensory, abstract issues like mathematics, logic, morality, and so on where there’s a good prima facie case that the knowledge is innate because there’s no way to derive that knowledge from sense perception. But Descartes in particular believed that we also have innate knowledge of the things that we directly perceive with our senses, so I wrote this book to defend that idea. 

Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity (2015) is about the role of the hand in human evolution. The book discusses the argument that the hand is the reason that our brains developed, that there was a sudden growth in our frontal cortex, and that we became the dominant species on Earth. It’s got some philosophy in it, but it’s mostly biology. 

Truth by Analysis: Games, Names, and Philosophy (2011) defends conceptual analysis as philosophy’s methodology. I myself was a skeptic about conceptual analysis until I read Bernard Suits’s very readable and very well-written 1978 book The Grasshopper that analyzes—in the classical sense of necessary and sufficient conditions—the concept of a game. I only read Suits’s book because I was teaching a seminar on the philosophy of sport, and at first I thought that Suits’s book had to be wrong, but then I studied it more carefully and I realized that he was right and that you can analyze the concept of a game. And if you can analyze the concept of a game, then you can analyze a lot more, and Truth by Analysis actually argues that all of philosophy consists of conceptual analysis and arrives at conceptual truths. 

Sport: A Philosopher’s Manual (2008) goes through my life as an athlete—starting when I was a budding five-year-old gymnast—and discusses the value of sport. The book tries to convey to people who don’t appreciate sport why people appreciate sport and what people get out of sport. 

Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (2006) focuses on six Shakespeare plays—all of them tragedies except The Tempest—and tries to extract major themes from those plays in order to give readers who find Shakespeare very difficult and very dense something to grab onto. I thought that people would find Shakespeare easier if they could see the themes in his work. It’s a popular book, so it’s not a contribution to Shakespeare scholarship. 

The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (2005) analyzes everything about the experience of seeing movies and makes an analogy between movies and dreams. So the book compares in detail the architecture of dreams and the experience of seeing movies, and argues that movies have this hold over us because movies resemble a dreaming state. 

2) Truth by Analysis sounds like a very provocative and very profound book. 

It’s profound, but it’s nowhere near as provocative as people have been led to believe. I’m talking about analysis of things, not analysis of concepts or language. So it’s not psychology—that’s a misconception. I’m talking about the world—but I’m talking about it philosophically, trying to find out what various things are, and in that context trying to resolve philosophical problems. 

For example, you can only answer whether free will is compatible with determinism if you know what free will is. So you have to do conceptual analysis, like we did previously in this interview, to find out what free will is and distinguish the two kinds of things that philosophers call free will. And once you distinguish them you can decide whether or not free will and determinism are compatible, and then you’ve solved a philosophical problem. 

It sounds very provocative—and perhaps even retrogressive—but I think you’ll find that it’s not if you look into it. It’s not difficult to understand, but the problem is that people haven’t really looked at conceptual analysis in the right way for a while. People have been taken in by various kinds of propaganda against the idea of analyzing knowledge—some people are even confused enough to think that I must be an ordinary language philosopher if I’m saying this, which is an extreme confusion. 

There’s no very radical thing that I’m saying here. 

3) How much traction were you able to get with that book? 

None. There were a couple of very pathetic reviews that were completely ideological and that didn’t even try to pay attention to the actual arguments that I gave. 

The arguments ought to have an impact, but there hasn’t been any impact to my knowledge. 

And Bernard Suits should have a much bigger impact—I only came across his book by sheer accident because I was doing that seminar on the philosophy of sport, and it’s incredible that that book was unknown to me because I’d been around in philosophy for a long time. But I’m not the only big fan of Bernard Suits—people have known about his work for a long time, and people came up to me after my book came out and said: “I’m so glad you discovered Bernard Suits, but nobody seemed to know about him.” 

The essence of his point about games is that games use inefficient means to achieve some end. The aim of golf is to put a ball into a hole, but you can’t just walk up to the hole and drop the ball in. And the aim of a race is to get to the finish line as fast as possible, but you can’t cut across the infield. 

4) What about a 100-meter sprint where you try to get to the line as fast as possible and you go in a straight line? 

But you can’t use a car to get there as fast as possible. Or consider chess, where the aim is to achieve checkmate, but you can’t just knock all of the other person’s pieces off the board and just put checkmate. There are always rules, and those rules specify inefficient means to achieve the aim. 

5) What do you think about the idea that Shakespeare’s plays pull people in and bring people back over and over because the plays pose philosophical questions without offering answers? Is it compelling to pose unresolved questions? 

Could be—I think they’d be more compelled if he actually answered the questions. He doesn’t answer them because like everyone else he doesn’t know the answers. He appreciates the questions, and he poses questions that most people can understand based on personal experience, and I think he’s aware that these questions are philosophical. 

6) When you uncover a theme in Shakespeare or in anything else, how do you address the issue of whether the author intended X/Y/Z? 

All you can do is look at whatever evidence you’ve got from the texts or from historical circumstances, and see what might be going on. 

I wrote a book called Ethics, Evil, and Fiction that was based on a class that I used to teach at Rutgers about philosophy and literature. In that course I taught Frankenstein, and you can see if you study that book very carefully that it’s a quite deep examination of the human condition and that Mary Shelley consciously discussed issues about human life—it’s not very plausible to suggest that these things were unintentional. 

Literary theorists write a lot of nonsense about the matter of intention. You can never prove anybody’s intentions or have Cartesian certainty about anybody’s intentions, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have reasonably good grounds to say that Shelley or someone has certain intentions. You can’t have Cartesian certainty about anything, so let’s not be skeptics. 

“Non-Philosophical” Pursuits

1) What “non-philosophical” things do you like to do, and what insights do you draw from those things? Philosophy intersects with everything, so I put “non-philosophical” in quotation marks.

I’m interested in athletics and motorcycling.

But I’ve always had musical interests. I started off as a drummer when I was 14—I was in a band. I was always interested in pop music, even when I was a little kid. At 60 I decided to try to learn guitar, so I took lessons and did systematic practice and bought a few electric guitars. I’m not a good guitarist, but I’m happy to have done it, and I enjoy it. 

And I always liked to sing, so I decided to take a couple singing lessons, so I’m not quite as bad at singing as I was before—a musicologist I sing with mapped my vocal range and found out that I’m a baritone, so that’s why I can’t reach high notes, and she gave me some exercises to do to improve my range. I gradually improved through these exercises, and this year it reached a point where I started to sing backup on some songs—Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, and so on. And then it reached a point where the musicologist and I started to sing together. She’s actually a good singer, but I was getting better all the time, and we started to sound better and better, so we formed a duo called The Fabulous Duetones and started to record things. And finally I improved enough that I could do videos of myself singing solo, and watch the videos and not think that it sounds too bad. 

So the general lesson for people is that you can decide any time to do anything you want. You’ve got nothing to lose, and it might bring you a lot of happiness and make your life a bit more interesting. I started guitar at the age of 60. And I started to sing at the age of 70 being a shitty singer, and now after a year and a half I can sing a lot better, and I get huge enjoyment, so I’m extremely glad that I did this. 

2) It sounds like you get profound enjoyment from picking up new skills and developing new skills. 

Yes—don’t ever think that you can’t take up new skills. I only got serious about swimming earlier this year because I couldn’t go to my gym and only the pool was open. 

3) If you lived in a small town in the 1800s, you might get a lot of self-esteem from being the second-best chess player in your town, but today you’re bombarded 24/7 with images of the most elite people in our world, so does that deter people? You might say: “I don’t want to swim because I’ll never be like those Olympic swimmers on TV.” Or you might say: “I don’t want to sing because I’ll never be like those pop stars on TV.” 

I think it does deter people. You’ll never be elite, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile to learn to sing—you could get some enjoyment out of it, so you do it, and you enjoy it. 

4) I think it’s neurologically healthy to acquire new skills.

I think it is too.

Including skills that you didn’t think you could do!

And these skills could be anything! 

5) What are your favorite sports to play? 

Right now tennis is my favorite—I’m extremely serious about tennis and I work very hard on it. 

I used to love pole vaulting and trampoline back when I did gymnastics. I used to like discus. I used to like pool and snooker quite a bit. I’ve been into a lot of sports: basketball, badminton, ten-pin bowling, darts, soccer. 

Surf kayaking is probably my favorite sport that I’ve ever done. 

I also love windsurfing. And I’m into kiteboarding at the moment, but for various reasons I haven’t reached the right level to be able to really enjoy it the most—there’s been no wind in Miami for about four months and that means no kitesurfing. 

I swim a lot now—I’ve been working on it and improving my technique. 

6) Is swimming an objectively superior sport? It might sound crazy to suggest that, but look at swimmers and look at their bodies and look at their muscles and look at their cardio. It seems like the ultimate full-body sport and the ultimate sport in terms of health. 

I would agree, but you’ve got to look at real swimmers who swim so that they’re actually out of breath—they’re the ones who actually build muscle and cardio. 

Of course, swimming is always healthy and there’s nothing wrong with leisurely swimming. 

7) What is the purpose of sport? If the purpose of sport is health and having a great body, then isn’t swimming quite hard to beat? Golf doesn’t involve much exercise. 

Golf is nothing—it’s like snooker. 

For most people, the purpose of sport isn’t health. My 2008 book emphasizes how pleasurable—and complicated—it is to acquire and exercise physical skill. 

8) Is there something strange about watching sports because you’re watching other people get the benefit of sport while you sit on the couch?

I don’t watch sports much—I tend to watch sports like tennis that I myself do in order to copy the professionals’ techniques.

9) What is your favorite literature? 

I'm very fond of literature—I’ve had much more time to read novels since I retired in 2013. 

I love Max Beerbohm—he’s so funny and such a good writer. I find Jane Austen very enjoyable—I really enjoyed Mansfield Park and Persuasion. I’m a big fan of Nabokov—Invitation to a Beheading is very good. Middlemarch and Vanity Fair are both extremely enjoyable. 

I’m reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time right now. It’s very daunting to read these long books—it takes a long time to read a long book carefully—but I’m very glad to be reading Proust because you want to know why people like Proust and when you read it you see what people like about it. His prose is amazing and his descriptions of human experience are like nobody else’s. 

10) What are your favorite films? 

I like films very much—I actually wrote a recent paper about films that goes beyond what I wrote in my 2005 book. 

I think The Wizard of Oz is a perfect movie. Brief Encounter is probably my all-time favorite film. And I like many types of films, including horror movies. 

Philosophy’s Progress

1) Philosophy has obviously been around since ancient times. Do you feel that there were exciting things in philosophy in the 20th century and that we’ve now reached a stagnant time in philosophy? 

We could speculate about why it’s not as exciting now—there are many possible reasons. 

I have a very strong impression that philosophy was very exciting in the mid-’70s—when I first went into the field—and for some time after that. There were lots of extremely creative people writing very good, very interesting things. 

But that gradually tailed off over the decades. I taught for about 40 years. And towards the end of it, it didn’t seem to me that much was going on. And it wasn’t just me—that was a general opinion. 

And why is that? I think it’s hard to say exactly what happened. It’s a sociological question. 

I think that it’s more interesting to ask about 20th-century philosophy in relation to previous philosophy. During the 20th century, people thought that huge advances were being made and that these innovations would sort out all sorts of confusions that had afflicted philosophy for 2000 years. 

I think that now everybody can see that that was a complete illusion—it wasn’t true at all—and that a lot of 20th-century philosophy’s departures from historical traditions were actually misguided and were actually errors. 

It’s not as if there was nothing good there—some useful things came up, especially to do with language, and there were some obviously great philosophers.

But consider the position of the positivists—and of Wittgenstein—that the problems of metaphysics were nonsensical, or somehow pseudo-problems, or something of that kind. I think that’s now been universally rejected—no sensible person today could believe positivism, and very few people do, even if some remnants of it echo around people’s minds.

I know a lot about 20th-century philosophy—I’ve specialized in philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, epistemology, and so on—but I think right now people are rediscovering the past. More and more, people are finding in the 17th and 18th centuries some great problems that have never really been adequately dealt with. Maybe with a more rigorous 20th-century philosophy we could actually make some progress on these problems. 

For example, all the great 17th-century philosophers—Descartes, Locke, Galileo, Hume, others—greatly discussed the topic of color that I mentioned a moment ago. But that kind of disappeared, and people didn’t talk about it until we discovered relatively recently that there’s a lot more to be said about that topic. I just reread Berkeley’s main works and found a lot of interesting arguments that 20th-century philosophy had neglected. 

So it’s a mixed bag in the 20th century—some good things, but also some occlusions of worthwhile subjects that might have been investigated better. 

Chomsky argues that we need to go back to 17th-century psychology and especially to Descartes, and I certainly agree with Chomsky that behaviorist psychology was an arid and pointless departure from traditions. But I think that much the same problem happened in philosophy—and in both psychology and philosophy, the problem had to do with positivism and verificationism.

So I think it’s a good idea to reconnect with the past and learn from the great philosophers of the past—including Berkeley, who people more or less dismiss these days. 

2) Apparently Chomsky tried to get people like Goodman to take Descartes (and other philosophers of the past) seriously, but apparently Chomsky’s effort failed badly due to strong aversion. 

People were extremely anti-Cartesian due to the influence of Wittgenstein and others. There’s an incredible caricature of Descartes, and it’s very unfashionable to say that you read Descartes. But Descartes has great things to say if you read him carefully—he’s one of the greatest philosophers of all time and you can’t dismiss him easily.

Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) had an impact at the time, but I think now most people just completely dismiss that book as anti-Cartesian prejudice. 

3) Chomsky does say that the post-WW2 American intellectual atmosphere was that everything of the past was bunk. 

Yeah, that’s right! [Laughs.] 

4) To what extent does philosophy progress? Physics has advanced since Newton, and we’d like to imagine that philosophy progresses too.

I think even in the area of physics things are not quite so straightforward. I agree that physics as an empirical science has made great advances since Newton. But in the 20th century logical positivism and verificationism influenced physics—Ernst Mach was a logical positivist; verificationism influenced Einstein and all of the other early quantum physicists—so the formulations of physics that come down from the 20th century are all outdated because they’re predicated on bad philosophy. 

So we need to go back to Newton’s time to recover a correct philosophy of science and then add the new empirical discoveries to that superior philosophy of science and then see what we get. 

Quantum theory has neglected various anti-verificationist approaches like David Bohm’s approach, so that’s a good example of the way that bad philosophy has affected physics. 

The empirical sciences make empirical discoveries through experiments—and through observations via telescopes and microscopes and other instruments. It’s true that philosophy doesn’t make advances in this sense, but philosophy isn’t an empirical science, so why should philosophy make advances in the way that the empirical sciences do? Morality and art and literature don’t make advances in the way that the empirical sciences do—does that mean that they somehow aren’t worthwhile? 

And a subject might make no advances at all—empirical or otherwise—for the simple reason that there are no advances to make because it’s made all of them. This doesn’t mean that the subject somehow isn’t worthwhile. For example, there are no advances in arithmetic—they discovered arithmetic and that was it. There are theorems and conjectures about arithmetic, but nobody’s discovered any new additions, but that doesn’t mean that arithmetic somehow isn’t worthwhile. 

5) You do have exciting developments in art, though. 

And indeed there are in philosophy—in fact, philosophy has a lot of them. 

What some people think is an exciting development in art others think is a catastrophe in art, and you see that same controversy about the developments in philosophy. 

Fashionable things eventually go out of fashion in philosophy, just like in art and just like with clothes and just like in so many things. 

The Greeks invented empirical science. There was a huge long interval in the medieval period where religion dominated and not much was going on. Science only took off in the 17th century—that’s only 400 years ago, so it’s a new subject, so of course it’s made good advances. 

Philosophy made very good advances during the first 400 years of philosophy. Plato came up with some great new things. Once you’ve mapped out the field and you’ve understood what the questions are and what the possible answers are, further progress will not be quite as spectacular. 

Philosophy is a truth-seeking enterprise, so there would be a problem if philosophy had no method and no rational procedure. But there is a method—I can tell you all about the method. 

So these alleged asymmetries between philosophy and empirical science don’t tell you very much.

6) People say that philosophy became more rigorous over the course of the 20th century. So it’s many of the same questions that they discussed in ancient Greece, but now with new distinctions and new nuances.

I think that’s a fair point. Logic, professionalization of the field, and openness to more peer evaluation have all improved rigor. 

But philosophers of the past were also rigorous. I just read Berkeley, and his work is extremely rigorous. He would be hard to beat in terms of conceptual acuity—he reminds me of 20th-century philosophers a bit in that respect. And Hume and Descartes and Locke were all perfectly rigorous. 

7) Maybe new philosophy papers can refine ancient problems even if new philosophy papers can’t solve ancient problems. 

Sometimes they refine them. They might sometimes solve them. 

You want to solve problems when you start out in philosophy, and after a while you realize that that’s a bit of a forlorn hope. 

You can always refine problems. That doesn’t just mean refining the question—you can refine the potential answers to it, find out what their strengths and weaknesses are, and gain a better perspective on the general field. 

I think there are advances all the time. Sometimes there are regressions—like logical positivism. And sometimes there are lulls where there just isn’t that much talent in the field—or it’s just a dead period—until something new comes along.

8) It’s one thing to say that art doesn’t progress. But I think we can say that art does have exciting periods. I don’t know if people would say that art is stagnant right now. 

You can indeed raise questions about whether visual art, literature, and music are stagnant right now. 

I think that most people would agree that literature is not in one of its most exciting periods at the moment. 

9) To what extent is philosophy stagnant right now? 

Right now it’s stagnant. 

How long it’s been stagnant for is an interesting question—some might say all of the 20th century. But that’s a bit much, even though we now completely neglect—and even almost despise—a lot of the philosophy that was taken seriously in the 20th century. 

10) But I don’t think it’s fair to tar the 20th century with logical positivism.

A lot of 20th-century philosophy was opposed to logical positivism, but logical positivism had an enormous impact and shaped philosophy in all sorts of ways. 

Wittgenstein had a huge impact on 20th-century philosophy, and his relation to positivism is very ambiguous. I basically think that Wittgenstein—though a genius—did not have a beneficial impact on philosophy. It wasn’t really his fault because I think people just didn’t read him the right way, didn’t really understand, and took oversimplified ideas from what he wrote and ran away with these oversimplified ideas. So the harmful interpretations weren’t really true to Wittgenstein at all.

But everybody who talks about Wittgenstein has a different interpretation of him. 

11) Chomsky has commented that there’s no private language argument in Wittgenstein, but instead there’s just exegesis where people try to interpret it to extract an argument from it.

Well, there is something like an argument in the case of the private language argument, whereas there isn’t in many of the other sections. 

It’s an invalid argument. [Laughs.] But at least it’s clear enough that you can see that it’s not valid. In my opinion, it’s a verificationist argument, though other scholars would disagree with that opinion. 

I have a very ambivalent relationship to Wittgenstein’s work. I’ve taught him a lot. I wrote a book about him. I’ve written things criticizing some of his most central doctrines. I think he’s a perfectly good person to study and learn about as long as you don’t get taken in by him too much. But that’s rare—people tend to be taken in too much by him, and they become Wittgensteinians, and that’s not good. 

12) But I don’t like it when you have to do exegesis just to try to interpret an argument. It should be clear.

It’s very tedious to do! I had to take a break from philosophy after I finished writing my book about Wittgenstein because it’s such a strain to try to understand it. 

13) How good were the developments in ethics during the 20th century? 

In the 19th century and before, the debate between deontology and utilitarianism had played out. 

I think ethics probably did rather well in the 20th century. The subject sort of livened up a bit in the 20th century—especially in metaethics, where you got emotivism and prescriptivism and moral realism and so on, which is all interesting stuff to know about. 

Anything to do with language and logic was quite good in the 20th century. Logic made big advances with Frege and Russell.

The picture of what’s flourishing changes again if you go up toward the 21st century. There’s been a lot of good philosophy of mind in the past 50 years. The discovery of the problem of consciousness was good. I myself think that recent work on imagination has been good—I myself wrote a book on imagination. 

14) Was John Rawls’s work progress? 

Yes, it was. He basically reinvented political philosophy and put it into a nice theoretical framework and had great ideas about it. So that was good, and so was the work that built on his work. 

15) Did Rawls’s work actually change anything in politics? 

It probably hasn’t changed politicians’ views. Some politicians have apparently read Rawls. Others have read Nozick. And then others have read Ayn Rand—that’s what most people do—which is dreadful rubbish. But it’s very doubtful whether it makes any difference to politicians’ views.

16) It’s not like anyone didn’t believe in welfare and then they read John Rawls and then they changed their mind about welfare. 

Exactly. But Rawls gives a theoretical articulation of what people on the left have always thought.

17) In terms of big advances in the 20th century, what about Kurt Gödel’s work? 

Yes. There were many great advances in logic, and Gödel is the most famous one. Logic had huge developments following Frege and Russell and all of the theorems from various Polish and German logicians. 

The invention of modal logic was good. 

I think that Tarski’s theory of truth was a great advance in logic—most people do. It had a big impact, and rightly so.

18) Are Gettier cases an example where an ancient problem was refined?

Gettier’s short paper “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” came out in 1963 and became instantly famous. You could say that it was refining a question, but it actually refuted the prevailing analysis of knowledge as true justified belief. 

And that had a broader impact because it made people think that perhaps philosophical analysis was misguided because an analysis that had stood the test of time had now been shown to be false. 

19) And that analysis had been around for how long?

Plato.

20) So that’s progress!

Yeah. This is an example of negative progress in philosophy because he didn’t produce a new definition of knowledge—he just refuted an old one. And that does happen, though rarely are the new ideas as crisp and neat as this one was. 

And often new distinctions are brought up—use vs. mention, type vs. token, psychology vs. logic—and people will say that people weren’t seeing those distinctions and therefore they were saying confused things. That’s all progress. 

21) Have Gettier cases and other new things from the 20th century enriched and refined lively philosophical debates about questions that go back to Plato? 

Yes. And the debates are often not just lively, but actually worthwhile, with good points being made. And fortunately, they’re independent of these broad meta-philosophical dogmas.

So these are good contributions, and I don’t want to damn 20th-century philosophy too much. The emphasis on logic and language definitely led to some clarifications and to some illuminating ways to approach questions. 

I’m a great advocate of conceptual analysis as the method of philosophy. Conceptual analysis was introduced really explicitly in the 20th century, and I think led to a lot of good philosophy, but became unfashionable in recent years for various not very good reasons. 

I think ordinary language philosophy led to a lot of good philosophy too. 

22) What do you make of the way that some people laugh at ordinary language philosophy, just like they laugh at logical positivism?

Sometimes that’s just the desire to be rebellious, have something new to say, somehow believe that your ancestors are not as smart as you, and so on. 

Ordinary language philosophy came in many varieties, but the basic thought behind it was that it might help your investigation of some concept or fact to look at the use that’s made of the relevant words in ordinary language. So if you’re interested in the nature of truth, then you might want to ask yourself how people use the word “truth”. And if you look into that, you find some interesting facts about it, and those facts lead you towards various theoretical avenues. 

So there’s nothing wrong with the basic idea that you should use this other way to look at things—this extra source of data—in conjunction with other things. 

As with other bad types of philosophy, the problem was that it was too exclusive—it said that we should exclude anything but ordinary language, and that meant excluding all previous philosophy because it didn’t do things that way. 

In philosophy of language, people had approached language through logic—they looked at formal systems. But then ordinary language philosophy helped people to study language more directly—what’s called “natural language”—and that study gave rise to speech-act theory and other good things. So that was all worthwhile, and meshed well with linguistics. 

23) What do you think about Derek Parfit’s work? 

It’s good—I’ve written some papers about the issues that he discusses, and I disagree with some major parts of his work, but his work is very creative and very interesting and very worthwhile. 

Referentialism 

1) It’s remarkable to look at some of the developments in 20th-century philosophy because Chomsky has huge disagreements with various things like referentialism—he just thinks that the whole thing is based on confusion. So if Chomsky is right about certain things, then philosophy made some major wrong turns!

The nature of reference is certainly a huge industry in philosophy. The concept of reference goes back to Frege’s distinction between sense and reference, and develops on from there, and it’s a staple of philosophy. 

I don’t find Chomsky’s comments about reference easy to understand—I don’t think I could tell you what his objection is to the concept of reference. 

But I can understand some ideas in the vicinity of what he says. For example, Strawson made a good point that it’s wrong to say that words intrinsically refer and that instead words only refer when speakers use them. And then there are complexities about what determines reference, especially in the case of indexicality where a word like “I” doesn’t refer to anything in itself and only refers in a context, so philosophy of language has developed the importance of context in determining reference. 

Is Chomsky raising these points in his own words? I don’t know. 

2) Is the issue simply that Chomsky is a semantic internalist?

Internalism versus externalism in philosophy of language is about the question of whether internal factors determine reference—that debate isn’t about whether there is reference.

Putnam said that “meaning isn’t in the head”, and he meant that context plays a role in determining reference. But Chomsky’s criticism seems to be more radical than that. Chomsky seems to think that the whole idea of reference is suspect. I just don’t understand Chomsky’s criticism. 

3) What about the idea that you can’t step into the same river twice?

Chomsky often mentions that, and I don’t know why that’s meant to be relevant.

4) Is it relevant because the word “river” doesn’t refer to an actual physical object? And Chomsky also says that he drives to work over a bridge under which there’s a river that sometimes doesn’t even have any water in it!

Intuitively, a river is an indentation through which water often—but not always—flows. It’s not that easy to define what a river is, and it’s interesting to ask about how you define a river. 

But why is this meant to show that reference doesn’t work? What if you just find examples of reference where you don’t have any issues like that? For example, if I say “gold”, am I not referring to gold? There are different theories about what gold is, but whatever it is, gold is referring to that. 

To me, Chomsky never says enough for me to figure out what his objection is. 

5) Doesn’t the Ship of Theseus show that we individuate objects based on some kind of psychic continuity? Even the concept of a person is a great example of this—someone remains the same person through time despite enormous physical differences.

These are good philosophical questions that have been gone over at great length. For things like rivers and the Ship of Theseus, there are theories about material object identity over time. And there are also theories about personal identity over time. 

But I don’t know why any of this shows that my name doesn’t refer to me. 

Consciousness

1) What are the main ideas in your piece “What is it like to be a Human?”? 

You’re asking me what it’s like to be a human? Bloody awful. 

2) [Laughs.] No, I’m talking about your piece “What is it like to be a Human?”.

It clarifies the logic of the argument that Nagel developed in his famous 1972 paper “What Is It Like to be a Bat?”.

3) What are the biggest questions/problems/mysteries about consciousness, and how might we move the needle on those questions/problems/mysteries?

I’m infamous as the person who thinks the needle cannot be moved on those because of our cognitive limitations—I’m a mysterian, so I think that the mind–body problem is insoluble for humans and that we shouldn’t expect to find out too much about the mind. 

But I think that there can be a science of consciousness and that we should try to develop a phenomenological mathematics—we don’t know what that mathematics would look like, and we might even need to invent new mathematics for this, so it’s a job for a mathematician to try to come up with some kind of mathematics that would help us. 

4) To what extent can we know whether insects, fish, and lobsters have consciousness? My personal intuition—strangely—is that all mammals have consciousness. But then I don’t know about insects and fish and lobsters. And I don’t know about reptiles.

There are different phyla. Now, you say “mammals”—birds are not mammals. And so you think that birds don’t have consciousness?

5) I’m unsure. But if you take the tiniest little shrew—the tiniest little mammal—then I somehow have an intuition that it’s conscious. And I don’t know why.

If we start comparing the most primitive mammal with the most sophisticated bird, I would find it very difficult to share that intuition. [Laughs.] It’s not limited to mammals. 

In the case of fish, sharks are fish, so why would we think that sharks don’t have consciousness but whales do? Whales are mammals. There are many types of whales, and some of them are like sharks. Physiologically it’s hard to see how you can make that distinction. 

I think the question is how far down the phylogenetic scale consciousness extends. And our concept of mind is formed and fashioned by our consciousness, so that’s why we have difficulty understanding what it’s like to be a bat. But that tells you nothing really about the reality of consciousness—that just tells you that we have a very parochial concept of mind that doesn’t necessarily apply to the animal world. So be careful not to think—as we move towards other animals that are more and more alien to us—that they’ve got a mind like ours! 

6) Do mosquitoes have consciousness? 

If they do, it’s in a form that is quite alien to us and that we would think of as very primitive. I tend to think that the presence of senses—like eyes—indicate some form of consciousness.

7) Mosquitoes have brain activity, but does brain activity entail consciousness? 

Brain activity is a very good sign of consciousness, and I wouldn’t dogmatically rule out consciousness as long as functioning neurons are connected to the senses.

8) What about a nematode? 

Probably not. And for bacteria, I’m inclined to say no, but there’s no nervous system in bacteria.

You could answer this question if you knew the answer to the problem of consciousness. But we don’t know what it is about a physical system that—by natural law—produces consciousness, and so we’re just speculating. 

9) The nematode has only 302 neurons.

I would definitely advocate being generous with the concept of mind. Descartes didn’t think that animals had minds at all—that’s crazy! 

10) Do you think that it’s unethical to catch a fish because you’re hurting the fish? 

Fish have moral status, but whether it’s unethical is another question. I think that fish feel pain.

11) Fish look so primitive, though, don’t they? 

You probably have some paradigms of fish in mind. But a shark is a fish, and there are some other fish that are quite complicated, and fish have brains and nervous systems. 

And everybody knows the octopus has a mind. An octopus is not even a fish—it’s lower down the scale than that! I think nobody nowadays would suppose that an octopus doesn’t have a mind—it does have a mind. Octopuses have complex brains, and they’ve got senses like vision and touch, so if they have a mind and they’re phylogenetically even lower than fish, then there’s no reason to think that fish don’t have minds. 

Pain is a useful adaptation, and it would be a strange thing for evolution to not use the adaptation of pain to enable fish to protect themselves. 

12) If I touch my stove, it’s a good thing that evolution has adapted my body to pull away from the stove, but why do I need to feel the pain? Why does it need to hurt? 

Now you’ve moved to another question—you’re asking why consciousness exists at all and why evolution favors consciousness. 

Consciousness did evolve, and consciousness is a biological adaptation, and consciousness does have a function. And we know what that function is: to collect information. 

There’s a bad argument that there’s no evolutionary justification for a trait if it’s logically possible that that trait’s function could be carried out by another trait. That makes no sense at all—there’s a biological function to moving around on two legs, and that’s no less true if there are other ways to move around. 

So we can imagine beings—automata—that act with our level of success survival-wise but have no consciousness: the proverbial zombies. That’s logically possible, but that logical possibility doesn’t entail that consciousness has no evolutionary function. 

13) Is there a difference between physically possible traits and evolutionarily possible traits?

Yes—there are good real-world reasons why bodies and minds are set up the way they are, and evolution only has a certain menu of options, and some physically possible things might not be on that menu. So evolution has to work with what it’s got, even if something else might be more efficient. There are only certain strategies available to evolution, and these strategies might not be the most efficient ones. 

14) But why aren’t we zombies? 

It’s like asking why we aren’t four-legged instead of two-legged—being four-legged has some advantages over being two-legged. 

It has to do with all sorts of detailed facts about evolution—it’s complicated to explain why organisms are the way they are, and there’s no simple answer.

15) Is it possible that reptiles (for example) have no conscious vision and that it’s all blindsight for reptiles? 

That could be the case! 

16) If a mosquito is conscious, can you imagine how primitive its consciousness must be?

It would be extremely, extremely primitive. [Laughs.] And not a consciousness that we should be ethically concerned about, really. 

17) Mosquitoes would lack self-awareness, even if they were conscious, correct? 

No self-awareness.

18) Does a dog have self-awareness? 

That’s another question that people have debated at length. You can mean different things by “self-awareness”. But I think dogs have self-awareness—that’s why they don’t bark when they see themselves in the mirror.

19) They sometimes do bark at themselves in the mirror, don’t they? [Laughs.] 

Sometimes they might, but normally they don’t.

My cat knows perfectly well that that’s him in the mirror. Maybe at first he didn’t know that, but he learned it, and now he has no interest in his reflection because he knows it’s not another cat—if another cat goes near him, he goes nuts. 

20) But I’ve seen dogs bark at themselves in the mirror! [Laughs.] 

The reason dogs bark is sometimes hard to understand. Sometimes they may bark at their reflections, but they quickly learn that it’s only them. 

21) But not many animals pass the mirror test, correct? 

People infer from that that only animals that pass that test have self-awareness, but that’s rubbish. That’s so obviously wrong. [Laughs.] That’s not a necessary condition for self-awareness. Clearly my cat recognizes itself in the mirror. 

22) But if you mark your cat and the cat sees its reflection in the mirror and then the cat doesn’t lick itself where you’ve marked it, then what does that mean about your cat’s knowledge?

I don’t know what it would mean. The whole problem is: What is meant by “self-awareness” in this and what are the empirical criteria for it? It’s not easy to find what these empirical criteria are. A cat sees its own body all the time and it recognizes its own body, so it definitely knows which body is its body. 

23) To what extent can we assume that another person’s consciousness is radically different from our own? I have some brain issues, and it’s just so obvious to me that other people’s consciousness is very different from my own when it comes to fabrics, dust, and many other things. 

There are no doubt differences, but mostly other people’s consciousness is very similar to our own. People all have thought and intention. People tend to all have visual consciousness, auditory consciousness, olfactory consciousness. Humans in general are extremely similar in their minds in comparison to rats or lizards.

Mind

1) Why do you refer to the “mind”? I have no idea what that is—it’s confusing to me. Why not just refer to the brain and to brain activity and to consciousness? Everyone agrees that the brain exists and that brain activity happens and that there’s consciousness. 

Everybody knows by introspection that they have a mind as well as the mental states—thinking this, seeing this, feeling this—of that mind. In contrast, most people don’t know about brains or about brain activity! 

2) But I don’t really know quite what the mind is, and it’s confusing to me. 

Nobody knows! [Laughs.] We know when we’re in certain states, and we’ve got words for those states, and we try to discover more about it. But we don’t know very much about the mind. 

3) I get confused when we debate what the “mind” is—or what “knowledge” is, or whatever—because these words like “mind” are completely nebulous natural-language words. Chomsky has pointed out that “water” (a natural-language word) is nebulous, whereas scientific terminology like “H2O” is a completely different category. 

Words are symbols we use to talk about the world. And the world contains the things that are in it—physical objects and minds and so on. I can use the word “pain” to refer to pain, but pain is an actual thing in the world, and it’s a mental thing. 

It’s true that words are ambiguous—the word “bank” can refer to a place where you get money or to the edge of a river—but that doesn’t mean that we can’t use words to talk about things that are actually in the world. 

It might be useful for you to read about the use–mention distinction because people confuse sign and object. I could mention the word “red”, as in the sentence: “The word ‘red’ has three letters.” Or I could use the word “red”, as in the sentence: “My car is red.” In that second sentence, I’m using the word “red” to talk about the world—I’m saying that my car has the color red and the word “red” expresses the property of being red.

The Limits of Human Cognition

1) We can look at rats and observe rats’ cognitive limitations, but we can’t look down on ourselves and observe our own cognitive limitations. So how can we possibly delineate the boundaries of where problems for humans end and where mysteries for humans begin? 

We’ll never have a view external to our own capacities, but we have relevant evidence. By analogy, we have empirical data that bear on the limits of how fast it’s possible for a human to run a mile—we can look at how fast people can run a mile right now and how fast people have run a mile in the past—and we know that it’ll never be possible for a human to run a mile in a second. And psychologists investigate the limits of human memory and the limits of the rapidity of human problem solving. 

When it comes to intellectual limits, we can see where problems have resisted our efforts for a long time and ask whether those problems have some special nature and try to articulate the difficulty that we face in those cases. You’ll never get anything here that’s straightforward, and you certainly won’t be able to look at the human intellect from the outside. 

Chomsky and I and others argue that every single evolved animal has observable intellectual limits and so it’s not remotely believable that our brain alone in the world—at this particular point in the ongoing process of evolution—somehow happens to be without limits. So we know on general grounds that we must have limits to our intellect, and then we look at certain areas where we’re having trouble with things, and then we can plausibly hypothesize: “Ah! This is one of those cases where our brain is showing its limits!” 

Most people agree that we will never know what it’s like to be a bat as long as our minds are as they are now. And not being able to know what it’s like to be a bat is an intellectual limit. 

2) But a Martian might understand free will perfectly well, and yet the Martian wouldn’t know what it’s like to be bat. 

Unless the Martian had echolocation. But if you lack a sense, then you can’t know what it’s like to have that sense. 

3) But there are certain things that you can imagine some super-alien knowing, whereas it’s inherent to being an organism that you can’t experience the consciousness of other organisms.

Nobody can experience somebody else’s mind. But I’ve written about how a brain transplant might allow two people to share the same mental events—the two people would be able to hook into the same piece of brain. 

4) Do you agree with Chomsky that Newton’s work rendered terms like “physical” and “material” honorific?

Yes.

5) What exactly is classical comprehension? Chomsky says that he learned about water electrolysis in a chemistry course, but that he doesn’t understand water electrolysis at the level of understanding that Galileo and Newton wanted. What deeper understanding of water electrolysis is Chomsky talking about? Galileo and Newton wanted some deeper understanding, but what is that deeper understanding? 

As Chomsky always says: mechanism. Galileo and Newton thought that intelligibility required you to conceive of the workings of the word basically in terms of collision—an object speeds towards another object, bangs into the other object, imparts to the other object a corresponding motion according to Newton’s laws, and that’s how one object causes another object to move. 

By contrast, gravity is not intelligible—according to the mechanism idea that it’s all to do with contact causation—because gravity allows objects to exert causal influences across vast tracts of space. 

As Chomsky says, this traces back to our common-sense idea of causation. How do you make things happen? You touch things and move things. But we don’t have a common-sense idea of gravity. 

6) I would analogize this to morality. We know something about human moral cognition, but that doesn’t tell us what we should consider to be ethical—it’s just a psychology thing. And it’s the same with this—we know that human psychology expects contact action, but that doesn’t mean that we should privilege mechanism above other explanations.

We now know from science that there is no contact causation—things don’t actually make contact at the microscopic level, and it’s instead electromagnetic forces. So even what seems like mechanism doesn’t actually meet the conditions of intelligibility that Galileo and Newton wanted. And in response to that fact you could say either that no motion is actually intelligible to humans or alternatively that the standards of intelligibility were set too high. 

There’s also a big question in metaphysics as to whether the world itself is intelligible. 

But intelligibility is always a psychological thing—it’s always “intelligible to X”, where X is a certain cognitive being. 

7) I’m just saying that it seems to deflate Chomsky’s whole point when you say: “Okay, so you’ve observed that the universe doesn’t follow our instincts. Big deal. So what?” 

It matters if you think science is trying to make the world intelligible and if you want to question mysterianism. 

8) It almost seems like Chomsky is just talking about a feeling. A Martian will look at a model of the solar system and say: “That aligns with my instincts.” A human will look at the exact same model and say: “That doesn’t align with my instincts because my instincts say that there should be contact action.” It’s the exact same model in each case, except the Martian has one feeling about it and the human has a different feeling about it.

When Newton announced his discoveries, all the scientists and physicists of the age said: “That’s impossible.” And they responded that way because they had a certain model in mind of how they thought that the world really worked. 

People nowadays are used to distance forces—especially with electromagnetism—and they say: “You should never have been trying to find that kind of intelligibility to start with. The world is not intelligible in that sense.” 

9) How do we know that deeper comprehension is always possible? You might imagine that a god with infinite cognitive capacities might still not be able to “go deeper” regarding X, since maybe there’s nothing deeper that can possibly be uncovered. For example, maybe there are no laws of sociology that a god could uncover.

It could be that we’ve reached the bottom layer—there’s nothing more to know than that we know. That’s a possibility, and the plausibility of that varies area by area. 

10) Isn’t it merely a form of harassment to ask for deeper comprehension of X without specifying what exact deeper comprehension you’re looking for? I could describe water electrolysis to you, and you could express a desire to have “deeper comprehension”, but that would be an empty/nebulous/meaningless comment, and so I would just respond: “Sure, we’d all love to have a deeper comprehension of literally everything ever described.”

Like I said, Chomsky is looking for mechanism. Mechanism replaced scholasticism, which was the whole business of forms and all that stuff. So if you could explain water electrolysis in terms of mechanism, then Chomsky would say that that’s intelligible. But it can’t be explained in terms of mechanism—electrolysis is an electromagnetic phenomenon. 

11) But “intelligible” here just means “aligns with the human instincts that expect mechanism”. 

Yeah, it can’t really mean anything else. 

12) It seems like Chomsky’s just making a banal psychological observation: “This is the way that humans expect things to be—a human baby will find magnets weird. And Martians might not expect things to be that way—a Martian baby might not find magnets weird.” But what’s the big deal? Who cares? 

This goes into the huge subject of intelligibility. What’s intelligible to somebody is a function of psychology, but you can’t infer from psychology anything about how intelligible different accounts of the world are. 

Let me give you a purely imaginary example of a very strange phenomenon in the world. Suppose that you observe that every time you cast a blue light on a certain part of my driveway then simultaneously—at the exact same time, with no time interval—a rhinoceros just springs into existence from nowhere in Africa. That would be an unintelligible phenomenon.

And various things come to mind if we try to analyze what’s unintelligible about this phenomenon, but one question is: How could something happening over here instantaneously influence something over there? And that’s the same problem as gravity, and that’s not just some prejudice about human psychology. 

But if you lived in a world where phenomena like this rhinoceros phenomenon happened a lot, maybe the inhabitants of that world would be so used to it that they wouldn’t question it. And maybe we would say that those inhabitants are—because they’re used to it—failing to notice that this phenomenon is indeed unintelligible. So intelligibility isn’t necessarily about psychological prejudice, and there can actually be something seriously wrong with a phenomenon. 

But in the end it comes down to metaphysical questions. Is there some notion of an ideally intelligible world that operates in a certain way? And is our world unintelligible if our world doesn’t operate that way? 

13) Is it possible that a Martian would think magnets are normal and find billiard balls to be really strange and mysterious? 

It’s logically possible. There might be a Martian who would say about my rhinoceros phenomenon: “Oh, that happens all the time. We’re very familiar with that.” And that Martian might say: “What do you think about this billiard ball hitting the other one and then the other one moves? I’ve never seen anything like that!” [Laughs.] And the Martian might say: “Guys, come and look at this billiard ball—it goes off when the other one hits it!” And another Martian might say: “That’s completely unintelligible!” 

The question is whether it’s just a psychological point or whether there’s something genuinely to it. You can’t just postulate anything and say it’s intelligible just because it’s familiar to the inhabitants—I can’t postulate a world with round squares because that would be a contradiction. 

14) Do you think that there’s something deeper here than just a banal psychological point? 

Yes, I do. But I would like to see Chomsky expand on this more and explain the point more fully. 

Asking Aliens Philosophical Questions

1) Which philosophical questions/problems/mysteries would you most like to know the answers to, and how might we move the needle on those questions/problems/mysteries?

No idea. I can’t answer that—too big. I don’t really have anything to say on that beyond all the things I’ve written recently.

2) If aliens landed on Earth and they could give you answers to three philosophical things, what would you ask them about?

Very hard to say. There isn’t anything that I think they could answer and that I haven’t thought about. 

If you’d asked me a few years ago, I would’ve said: “I’m still baffled by free will. I don’t know what to say about that.”

There are lots of good scientific questions that I’d like to know the answers to, but these really aren’t philosophical problems, even if they might sound a bit philosophical. I’d ask them: “Can you tell me what it is about the brain that generates consciousness?” And: “How did life evolve on Earth?” And: “What was before the Big Bang?”

I can’t imagine saying to them: “Is moral realism true?” That would be a very strange question to ask them—there’s no answer to that!

3) I would ask them if objects are colored.

[Laughs.] Again, I couldn’t ask them that question because there’s nothing I can imagine them saying that I don’t know about that! 

4) I’m stipulating that they know literally everything, so wouldn’t there be a lot to learn from them?

But in philosophy, maybe knowing everything won’t tell you the answers to these things—maybe there is no answer to these things and you can’t know it. Russell had a view that you can’t know the answer to philosophical problems and that you can instead ask philosophical questions in order to enlarge the mind, consider alternatives, and understand more about the problems’ nature.