A Conversation on Liberal Education

Here is an interview with Daniel Clements, Political Science and Philosophy student at Loyola University Maryland. http://blip.tv/file/4402092
Topics are the Seven Liberal Arts; education vs. vocational training; Humanism and humanistic studies; the Jesuits' Ratio Studiorum as heir to the humanist ideals, including cura personalis and cultivation of individual talents; Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind; the connection between poor general education and openness to dictatorship and tyranny.

Michael Polanyi: Can the Mind Be Represented by a Machine?

Michael Polanyi: Can the Mind Be Represented by a Machine?

By Paul Richard Blum

Full version now available as 

Michael Polanyi: Can the Mind beRepresented by a Machine? Documents of the Discussion in 1949, in Polanyiana (Budapest) 19 (2010 [actually 2012]) 35-60.

On the 27th of October, 1949, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manchester organized a symposium "Mind and  Machine", as Michael Polanyi noted in his Personal Knowledge (1974, p. 261).  This event is known, especially among scholars of Alan Turing, but it is scarcely documented. Wolfe Mays (2000) reported about the debate, which he personally had attended, and paraphrased a mimeographed document that is preserved at the Manchester University archive. He forwarded a copy to Andrew Hodges and B. Jack Copeland, who in then published it on their respective websites.  The basis of this interpretation here is the copy preserved in the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago, Special Collections, Polanyi Collection (abbreviated RPC, box 22, folder 19).   The same collection holds the mimeographed statement that Polanyi prepared for this symposium: "Can the mind be represented by a machine?"  This text has not been studied by Polanyi scholars.

First a summary of the debate as it appears from the minutes; an interpretation of Polanyi's statement will follow.

From the minutes of the discussion, it is obvious that the question concerning the human mind and computing machines was addressed -- and should be addressed -- from a variety of scientific angles.  Dorothy Emmet, a scholar of Alfred North Whitehead, seems to have kept a low profile and yet she raised the typical philosophical question, whether consciousness is not what distinguishes human thought from machine operations.  It is interesting that Alan Turing, in devising his later so called Turing Test, related this objection not to a philosopher but rather to the neurologist Jefferson (Turing 1950, p. 446).  We have no evidence from the notes whether Jefferson had agreed with Emmet, but Turing's answer reveals that his approach to 'machine thought' focused on "sets of rules" ; he granted "conscious working" a status separate from routine operations that can be performed/emulated by a machine. Thus, looking for the philosopher's input first, we see immediately everyone concerned with the specter of materialism or of the "fourth continuity", i.e., the upcoming new shock (after Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud had evinced the continuity between humanity and the cosmos, animals, and mental illness) which consisted in creating a seamless transition between  mind and machine (Mazlish 1967).

It seems Emmet was the only professional philosopher present, if we except Polanyi who in 1948 had moved from chemistry to "social studies".   Mathematicians were present, namely Maxwell Herman Alexander "Max" Newman, Alan Turing, Maurice Bartlett, and Bernhard Neumann; furthermore the neurologists J. Z. Young and Jefferson, and then a person named Hewell (so far unidentified; note the question mark at the first appearance of his name) who also seems to be an expert in physiology of the brain.

Evidently, the discussion started with Newman responding to Polanyi's statement and his interpretation of Gödel's theorem.  It appears that the mathematician conceded the assumption that the operations of machines "cannot do anything radically new" and that the assessment of the difference between mind and machine is a matter of experimental research, rather than a priori speculation.  At this point, Turing intervenes by emphasizing that his idea of a "universal machine" entails some kind of self-referential operation, as one could translate the capability of "turning itself into any other machine".  Consequently, the three questions summarized by Emmet after a break: machine-brain analogy, physiology, limitations of the machine, are all answered by the mathematician Turing with an enigmatic reference to "trial and error" in combination with memory.  Turing seems to have no doubt that operating on 'past experience' and memory are not features that keep the machine and the brain apart.   The next time a mathematician joins in, namely Newman, the problem of the design of the calculator comes to the forefront.  He implicitly suggests using the design of a calculating machine, as the paradigm for investigating the mind. In doing so, he underlines the elementary problem raised by physiologist, Young, of internal versus external approach to operations.  For "in the case of the mechanical brain we start with something which has been made by us", as Young said, so that the implied solution could be a methodical approach to what takes place when a calculating machine is being programmed.  This would be a 'meta-programming' approach, in which the program and the design are not the same thing.

When the discussion circles around the problem of memory storage, Newman makes a further methodical suggestion that, broadly speaking, reflects the hypothetical-deductive method of science: "start like the atomists with a 'billiard ball' hypothesis”; that is to say, to hypothesize that the mind is a machine ("which is obviously wrong") in the hopes that experimental and theoretical research will falsify that, in due course. Not only the mathematician Neumann, with reference to consistency proofs, but also the neurologists agree. In spite of Polanyi's repeated objection that some achievements of the mind cannot be hypothesized with "crude models", the conversation goes on along the lines of models, analogies, and hypotheses and heads towards the notion of "incompatibles". If a system is observed from the outside, hypothetical paradigms help pointing out crucial changes that may or may not reveal alternatives or "choices" in the observed process.  At this point, Turing stresses that "random operation can be made to become regular after a certain prevailing tendency has shown itself".  The regularity is to be assumed first in the observation, that is, in the accommodation of the paradigm to the observed process, and then assumed to be indicative of the regularity of the process itself. So far it is a case of pure empirical research. Turing illustrates that with the operation in a machine, which on the input of incompatible data registers the contradiction and returns to the origin of the contradiction.  Just recently, John von Neumann had suggested that the rounding-error of a calculator, which is caused by the limited number of digits, can be compensated by having three machines doing the same calculation and stopping in case of conflicting results.  This is the moment when Turing explicitly sides with Polanyi in citing his insistence on the basic difference between "mechanically following rules" and consciously knowing rules. And yet there remained a dissent that needs to be clarified. Before that can be done, we need to take a look at the physiological/neurological view in the debate.

To summarize the mathematicians' contribution to the discussion: there is no doubt that machines are no minds, although Turing is seeking for the option to produce self referring machines, which opens the methodological discussion about design, method, and the meaning of rules.

Early in the debate Jefferson feels compelled to state that bodily functions may be interpreted in mechanical terms, "but not 'Mind'", to which Turing replies that even in engineering and operating a machine, there remains an element of playing and ignorance.  If that was actually the response of Turing to Jefferson, as it appears in the minutes, then the mathematician is consciously rejecting a mechanistic approach to physiology. His later definition of purpose as "use of previous combinations plus trial and error" suggests, in this perspective, that biologists should not abolish hypothetical purposes in living organisms, but rather redefine purposefulness in terms of programming.  In terms of programming, to "put a purpose into a machine" is not different from the operations of living organism.  Bartlett seems to have no problem assuming that the brain can be functioning with statistical errors. So Young joins in: first, he interprets Turing's remarks as an invitation to neurologists to collaborate with mathematicians.  Cybernetics would be the point in case. (Turing was involved in the birth of this new discipline: Wiener 1948/1961, p. 23.) Then Young mentions as a problem that the behavior of brain cells might be different from that of other cells in organisms.  But more importantly, he points out that the "collaboration" could reveal a fundamental difference between physiology that investigates a self-sustaining object, whereas engineering a brain provides an object, the rules of which have been established and implanted by the researcher.  He re-phrases the same difference by asking: "The physiologist can stimulate points and see what happens -- do the 'mechanicians' do the same?" The distinction between a mechanical and a physiological view on the mind could be that the brain as an organism is still good for surprises (it has to be studied empirically); whereas the mind as a machine would presuppose that its laws are known a priori (from its blueprint). Nothing unexpected should happen when poking a mind-machine. Histology and EEG are mentioned as recent techniques of physiological investigation and the specialists keep exchanging about its uncertainties until Young moves over to philosophical aspects.

In departing from empirical approaches, the physiologist seeks help from philosophy: first Young ponders the option that memory is not limited to a specific location in the brain, like memory cells, and then he endorses the term Gestalt of philosophical psychology and calls for logic to set up promising hypotheses. The promise lies in the pattern shift. Wholeness, paradigms, and logically supported hypotheses—that's what is needed in order to guide empirical research into the brain as the organ of thought.  Polanyi very much appreciated Gestalt psychology giving it an anthropological and cognitive meaning: "Gestalt psychology has assumed that perception of a physiognomy takes place through the spontaneous equilibration of its particulars impressed on the retina or on the brain. However, I am looking at Gestalt, on the contrary, as the outcome of an active shaping of experience performed in the pursuit of knowledge."  From this philosophical interest he can voice doubt whether "seeing stereoscopically" can play a role in the envisioned research program on the mind and, again, how would is possible to "derive from the model the conception of 'seeing in depth'"? The philosopher seems to be capitalizing on the inherent methodical limitations of mechanical physiology, which are both expressed in Jefferson's naïve dualism and in the antinomies of organisms that, as empirical objects, elude a singular method.

Eventually the physiologists joined the mathematicians in departing from the narrow confines of their disciplines.  Cybernetics, in this perspective, opens an understanding of machine operation that matches the anatomical findings and lack thereof.  Jefferson (1960, p. 43) lamented later that feelings miss "special abodes in the brain" and have been reduced to "fictitious … entities".  Since he was quite informed about the history of sciences, and in particular the debate about the location of the soul (Jefferson 1949, cf. 1960, pp. 94-209), it is also legitimate to mention that the study of the physiology of the brain, in connection with attempts at anatomy and localizing the human mind and its functions, had had a steady career in 18th through 19th century medicine and philosophy (Hagner 2008).  Mechanical optimism battled with philosophical skepticism.   There was always at stake the question: is there any relation between functions of the human mind (sense perception, memory, morality, etc.) and the empirical data?  Young's probing octopus brains and Jefferson's neurosurgery were just continuations of that century old debate. The aim remained the same, finding the interface between psychic and physical states.  The news at this discussion was that decentralized memory storage and generally non-localized and non-mechanical forms of operation became thinkable.  In that sense it marked the threshold to the computer age and cyber world. 

As soon as unpredictability, randomness (Turing), non-quantifiability, and holistic approaches are admitted, Turing is able to redirect the perspective away from mind-as-a-machine towards the functioning of machines.  Therefore, when he answers Jefferson's objection who doubted that human beings would be able to be perturbed by conflicting results of a thought process, Turing quips -- to the amusement of the people present -- that this is what mathematicians do. So we have the paradoxical situation that the physiologist gives less credit to the 'intelligence' of the mind than Turing gives to a well working machine.  When someone in the audience asks: "are mathematicians human beings?" it becomes obvious that the Turing project is to analyze human thought by way of programming a computer. Mathematics is what humans do and what machines can do.

Therefore it now also becomes clear what is at stake between Turing and Polanyi.  They agree that a mathematical interpretation of thought is not all there is.  Yet, Turing tries to find in thinking as much mathematical procedure as possible, while Polanyi aims at capturing with philosophical precision that what remains.  Jefferson's foggy "not the 'Mind'" and Young's apparently crestfallen swerving into philosophical methodology are to be remedied by Polanyi's insistence on formalization and specification.  This is what he had to tell his colleagues in his own statement.

In his statement on the question whether the mind can be represented by a machine Polanyi pronounced five theses. First he interpreted the development of mathematics from Hilbert to Gödel as establishing a realm that cannot be formalized and hence is prior to computation that a machine can do.  Second, he identifies this non-computing operation with reflection as the specific power of the mind. Third, the outcome of Gödel's and Tarski's discoveries do not disturb the understanding of human mind, they rather afford a philosophical tool to distinguish the primordial capability of reflection on rules which itself is not bound to those rules. His fourth point is the capability of belief that precedes empirical knowledge and is its foundation. Lastly Polanyi reasserts the denial of mechanical determinism.  In Roger Penrose's classification (1994, pp. 12-16) Polanyi would probably be a "C- believer", according to whom "the problem of conscious awareness is indeed a scientific one, even if the appropriate science may not yet be at hand" (p. 16), that is, Polanyi seems to believe that some mental activities can be emulated by computers, but not all of them.

 As is well known, Gödel had claimed that the system S contains propositions that cannot be proven and it contains undecidable problems (paraphrased from Gödel 1930, pp. 141-143). He had also added that his theorems "can be extended also to other formal systems" (p. 143); indeed, "[a]ny epistemological antinomy could be used for a similar proof of the existence of undecidable propositions" (Gödel 1931, p. 149 n 14). Now it is revealing how Polanyi phrased Gödel's "discoveries": To him this was originally about "arithmetic and advanced geometry". An unknown hand corrected his wording by saying that Gödel dealt with "number theory". This is factually correct, but it shows Polanyi's drive to extend the meaning of the theorem beyond number theory. A few lines down, when Polanyi concluded that there must be a "procedure for the discovery … which, by its very nature, is incapable of formalization", the same hand interjected that formalization is possible in meta-language. For Gödel 'formalization' was a term of art within mathematics, that is, to be "reduced to a few axioms and rules of inference", and his aim of 1930/1931 had been to show that it is not the case "that these axioms and rules of inference are sufficient to decide any mathematical question that can at all be formally expressed in these systems" (Gödel 1931, p. 145). This exchange makes it clear that Polanyi saw in Gödel's discoveries a point of departure from the need of formalization.  As a scientist he was, of course, well acquainted with axiomatic systems.  But as a philosopher, he was intrigued by the option of an infinite regress in formalization, a regress that is spurred by reflection, as he says, to the effect that reflection must necessarily stand outside of the mathematical/scientific procedure.  When his reader appealed to meta-language that could reenter the process of formalization, i.e. axiomatization, he was kicking at an open door, for Polanyi had already integrated meta-language on his escape route out of the word of formalization. Tarski and Gödel are both witnesses to an "indefinitely extending programme of innovation, which can be achieved only by informal methods and not by a machine" (end of section 2).

When Polanyi returns to the subject in his Personal Knowledge he states (1974, p.  258) that "a formal system of symbols and operations can be said to function as a deductive system only by virtue of unformalized supplements, to which the operator of the system accedes: symbols must be identifiable and their meaning known, axioms must be understood to assert something, proofs must be acknowledged to demonstrate something, and this identifying, knowing, understanding, acknowledging, are unformalized operations on which the working of the formal system depends." Thus he groups a wide range of mental acts together as those that precede formalization (symbols, axioms, rules), and this is what in the 1949 debate he called "semantic function".  "We call them the semantic functions of the formal system.  These are performed by a person with the aid of the format system, when the person relies on its use."  (Ibid.) He immediately adds that there is a "legitimate purpose of formalization", namely, an increasing reduction of "informal operations; but it is nonsensical to aim at the total elimination of our personal participation" (p. 259).  So he remains faithful to his understanding that mechanization, and specifically a mathematical interpretation of thought, is appropriate as long as one acknowledges the existence of what he later would call the personal coefficient.  Surprisingly he dismisses the Turing Test (Turing 1950) alleging that Turing had turned the question about thinking machines into "the experimental question, whether a computing machine could be constructed to deceive us to its own nature as successfully as a human being could deceive us in the same respect" (p. 263 n 1). If Polanyi did not reject Turing's project on the whole -- and he didn't -- he must have been alarmed by the playful implications of the mathematician's tongue-in-cheek approach to cognition. It is obvious that Turing's mental experiment successfully fooled a large audience into believing that thinking was a trickster game. 

Much of Polanyi's energy was invested in unmasking imposters and simplifiers. In the opening chapter of Personal Knowledge, he takes to task the myth of objectivity that makes believe there were no personal investment in discovering objective facts of nature (cf. Blum 2010b). In a paper of 1950 on "Scientific Beliefs" (that will become part of Personal Knowledge¸ chapter 12), he attacked standard positivism: "A genuine scientific theory must operate like a calculating machine, which, once the keys representing the dividend and the divisor have been depressed, determines the result automatically" (p. 27). It is this broader cultural context that interested Polanyi when he joined the debate about mind and machine.  The misunderstanding of the working of a machine is an expression of the mistaken anthropology. Positivists and mechanicists believe to "construct a machine which will produce universally valid results. But universal validity is a conception which does not apply outside the commitment situation." (p. 35). Polanyi dedicated an offprint of that paper "to A. M. Turing with best thanks".  In a later class on "Unspecifiable Elements of Knowledge" (his famous book was out since 1958) he boldly uses machines as a paradigm. When the design of a machine had been invoked to solve the problem of the mind-machine-riddle, then it was even more fitting to choose as the "leading example a class of comprehensive entities of which we can specify both the particulars and their coherence."  The surprising result is that the philosophy of machines is not much developed, and therefore it has been overlooked that machines "embody rules that are not laws of nature"; even more, the failures of machines ("bursting of boilers") are part of their essence, namely, as "imperfect embodiment of its ideal". In this lecture Polanyi fought submitting to the machine as the ideal or paradigm and recuperated it for the anthropological inquiry of knowledge.

Therefore, it is important to notice Polanyi informing his readership of Personal Knowledge that Turing's contribution to the Symposium "Mind and Machine" was "foreshadowed" by his paper on "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals". That paper "deserves to be read and understood far more than it has been." (Turing 1939, p. 71, introduction.) It addressed Gödel's incompleteness theorems, but towards the end, the author leaves technical mathematical language behind and reflects upon mathematical reasoning; and it was most likely this § 11 that caught Polanyi's attention. "Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of tool faculties, which we may call intuition and ingenuity." (Turing 1939, p. 214) In a footnote he clarifies that he is "leaving out of account that most important faculty which distinguishes topics of interest from others; in fact, we are regarding the function of the mathematician as simply to determine the truth or falsity of propositions." Again an example of Turing's sense of irony: the most important thing is left out.  But that leaves us with understanding that the reach of his number theory goes exactly as far as truth and falsity of propositions go.  This is no reductionism.  In describing the function of intuition and ingenuity, he emphasizes the role of intuitive judgment and the need for "suitable arrangements of propositions" and takes it for granted that "these two faculties differ of course from occasion to occasion, and from mathematician to mathematician."  Again, assuming that Turing is leaving technical mathematical language behind, his description can only be understood as the establishment of the competence that Polanyi would have understood to be 'personal'. It seems this is the passage Polanyi had in mind when he invoked Gödel for having proven that there is a non-formalized capability of the human mind. "In pre-Gödel times it was thought by some that it would probably be possible to carry this program to such a point that all the intuitive judgments of mathematics could be replaced by a finite number of these rules.  The necessity for intuition would then be entirely eliminated." (Turing 1939, p. 215) Reductionism in the sense of eliminating the personal component has been overcome by Gödel and, consequently, Turing. To eliminate the personal component is a methodical aim for the sake of mathematical theory.  Therefore during states: "We are always able to obtain from the rules of a formal logic a method of enumerating the propositions proved by its means.  We then imagine that all proofs take the form of a search through with this enumeration for the theorem for which a proof is desired.  In this way ingenuity is replaced by patience." He calls that "heuristic". (Ibid.)

Turing's paper on "Systems of logic based on ordinals" may have been extraordinary within his own production, but Polanyi found it more important than his famous 1950 paper.  It seems the mathematician was "steaming straight ahead with the analysis of the mind, by studying a question complementary to 'On Computable Numbers'," as Andrew Hodges put it.  "The Turing machine construction had showed how to make all formal proofs 'mechanical'; and in the present paper such mechanical operations were to be taken as trivial, instead putting under the microscope the non-mechanical steps which remained." (Hodges 1999, pp. 19-21) Therefore if the analysis of human thought is at the focus of attention, the distinction upon which Polanyi and Turing agreed, namely, that between rules and knowing rules turns out to be constitutive for any theory of thinking and computing.

As a young man, Turing had mused about the "Nature of Spirit" and described the same relationship as follows: "As regards the question of why we have bodies at all; why we do not or cannot live free as spirits and communicate as such, we probably could do so but there would be nothing whatever to do.  The body provides a something for the spirit to look after and use."  (Hodges 1983, p. 64) This is patently the traditional language of body-soul-dualism, and it will take some education to translate that into problems of logic and mathematics.  But looking back the structural identity is clear.  There is a relationship of independence and manifestation that cannot be 'reduced' or 'eliminated'.  Obviously pure non-formalized thought would be as 'boring' as an absolutely free spirit. On the other hand, science is after the laws of matter. Polanyi expressed that in the context of his recapitulation of the Manchester debate by assuming that a mechanical approach implies to determine that a particular object is seen to be a machine, a perspective that in and of itself leaves already simple mechanistic views behind. "A machine is an interpretation of an observed mind ... and not of an observing mind ..." (Polanyi 1952, p. 315) "For a machine is a machine only for someone who relies on it … for some purpose, that he believes to be attainable by what he considers to be the proper functioning of the machine: it is an instrument of a person who relies on it." (Polanyi 1974, p. 262)

Personalized Philosophizing A Sequel

As a sequel to my observations about personalized philosophical argument, here is a quotation from Robert Brandom:

Taking something to be subject to appraisals of its reasons, holding it rationally responsible, is treating it as someone: as one of us (rational beings). This normative attitude toward others is recognition, in the sense of Hegel's central notion of Anerkennung (…). Adopting that attitude is acknowledging a certain kind of community with the one recognized. It is the fellowship of those we acknowledge not only as sentient (a factual matter of biology), but also as sapient (a normative matter of responsibility and authority). It is attributing a kind of rational personhood, treating others as selves, in the sense of knowers and agents, ones who are responsible for their doings and attitudes. What they are principally responsible for is having reasons for those doings and attitudes.

If that were the meaning of those who make personalized arguments in the sense of referring to people rather than arguments (e.g., Platonists rather than Platonism), then philosophical argument would create a community of those who are able and willing to hold certain views on the basis of reasons. The catch is that it is hardly distinguishable whether a someone is not acknowledging a reason or is perhaps able to acknowledge it but not willing to do so. So, if everything goes well, one can be glad to share community with the great minds as well as with the unknown readers (as I am about to do with Robert Brandom and the unknown reader of this note). But what if things go wrong? What if Brandom would be appalled by my adopting his statement? That is, I might have misunderstood him. And what if my audience is unwilling to create some kind of community with me (with my reasoning, to be sure)? Skepticism is ruled out as soon as I shape my arguments in a way that the normativity of my argument (that's Brandom's context) appears to be intrusive. What if things go wrong because I am wrong? Would I commit my audience to err with me? No harm done as long as I appeal to reason alone rather than commitment. The first, second, third person talk in philosophy eludes objectivity through a false personal agreement on allegedly rational argument. In saying "us" Brandom wants to emphasize the structure of commitment that underlies rational argument. But although there is no understanding without commitment to what has been understood, as Michael Polanyi has pointed out, rationality has to be wise in avoiding by all means the appearance of a reversal between reasonability and responsibility: I as a speaker, claiming to have good reasons, do not take you as the reader hostage to my arguments.

[Robert B. Brandom: Reason in Philosophy. Animating Ideas. Cambridge, Massachusetts:Belknap Press, 2009, p. 3.]

Heidegger: Language is the home of the Being. In its housing man is at home

This essay is not available at
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17496977.2012.694176
as
Rhetoric is the Home of the Transcendent: Ernesto Grassi's Response to Heidegger's Attack on Humanism
Intellectual History Review Volume 22, Issue 2, 2012

What is a Strong Truth?

Listen to a discussion of some Loyola professors and students about truth:

http://loyola.edu/lcast
or download.

Das Wagnis, ein Mensch zu sein: Geschichte - Natur - Religion

Paul Richard Blum
Das Wagnis, ein Mensch zu sein:
Geschichte - Natur - Religion
Studien zur neuzeitlichen Philosophie
Reihe: Philosophie: Forschung und Wissenschaft
Bd. 31, 2010, 336 S., 39.90 EUR, br., ISBN 978-3-643-90032-6


"Die eigentliche Optik Paul Richard Blums sollte man akkurat als holistisch bezeichnen. Es handelt sich um ein verborgenes Streben nach Ganzheitlichkeit, das diesem Buch eine methodologische Einheit gibt. ... Ein Mensch zu sein nach dem Zeitalter der Renaissance und Moderne ... bedeutet die Aufgabe, sich in einer strukturellen und inhaltlichen Offenheit zu situieren, die die verschiedenen Antworten auf die Frage: Was heißt es, ein Mensch zu sein? in der paradoxen Einheit eines neuen Humanismus zusammenbringt. ... Genau wie die Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts ... das Fragen selbst ins Zentrum des Denkens stellte, so versucht Blum, Peter Wust folgend, das Prinzip insecuritas als Herzstück seiner Philosophie zu definieren." Balázs Mezei (Budapest)

1. Vorbemerkung
2. Die unendliche Aufgabe, ein Humanist zu sein, von Balázs Mezei
3. First, Second, Third Person Philosophy
4. Platonismus
5. Platonische Liebe: Eine wahre Geschichte
6. Zur Monadologie der Geistesgeschichte: Die Bedeutung Philipp Melanchthons für Wilhelm Dilthey
7. The Young Paul Oskar Kristeller as a Philosopher
8. Der Heros des Ursprünglichen: Ernesto Grassi über Giordano Bruno
9. Jacques Maritain Against Modern Pseudo-Humanism
10. Autorität und Demokratie: Yves René Simon
11. "Seinssehnsucht" – Peter Wust kritisiert Martin Heidegger
12. Das Wagnis ein Mensch zu sein: Überlegungen im Anschluß an Peter Wust
13. Expressionistische Lyrik als Existenzphilosophie
14. Acting versus Knowing
15. Die List der Vernunft: Lévinas, Thomas und die Ethik des Wissens
16. Natur als Person. Zur Geschichte des Naturbegriffs
17. Europa – ein Appellbegriff
18. "A pretty curious circumstance in the history of sciences": David Humes Naturalisierung der Religion
19. Satan and the Human Condition: John Milton Read in Terms of René Girard
20. Atonement before guilt: The end of history and the endings of mystery stories
21. The New Genesis: Voltaire's Quarrel with Maupertuis
22. The Immortality of the Intellect Revived: Michael Polanyi and His Debate with Alan M. Turing.
23. Gottes Plan: Von der Physikotheologie zur Theophysik
24. Warum ruhte Gott am Siebten Tag?

First, Second, Third Person Philosophy

First, Second, Third Person Philosophy
[now pp. 9-14 in Das Wagnis, ein Mensch zu sein: Geschichte - Natur - Religion]
During the US presidential campaign in 2008, a character was popular as "Joe the Plumber". He was to be the epitome of the working class that was coveted by the candidates. These elections being history now, it remains remarkable that American national economy was personified in this plumber from Ohio. Even if we leave aside the mechanisms of media democracy, it is strange that a single person was taken to represent the intentions of the candidates and/or of the electorate. Most likely those who 'used' Joe the Plumber were unwilling to discuss economic issues in theoretical, abstract terms, which prescind from individual people. One might think that an abstract idea was illustrated with the help of an individual. But the parties involved conveyed the image that personifying economy was the limit of their theoretical thinking. The proverbial plumber relieved politicians and commentators from conceptualizing. At least, they did not trust the audience to grasp the political problems conceptually, that is, objectively.
The same can be observed in philosophical debates. Frequently philosophers present their arguments by calling persons into action: the dualist, the monist, the Platonic, and others. It has the appearance of a Platonic dialogue that allows the opponents to voice their opinions. If that were the case it would be truly philosophical, because Plato had personified philosophical problems in Socrates and his interlocutors. Historic or fictional persons served to illustrate philosophical problems. In Plato, this was not just a literary ploy; he positively maintained that some philosophical problems can only be treated in the process of thinking as depicted in speaking, that is, those problems cannot be addressed in the form of propositions. Socrates is what you get when you philosophize, if you are Plato. Since no reader of this sentence is Plato, it easily translates into: Plato's philosophy created the character of Socrates. The difference between both statements is that the first seems to include the reader,[1] whereas the second is merely factual. The you-mode appeals to the reader who – depending on the context – may take it as an encouragement, critique, or any other psychological involvement that oversteps the limits of factual exchange. Oftentimes such overtones divert from the facts.
Modern scholarly parlance enjoys tying entire packages of arguments with one name: "Rawls says", "With Habermas", "As Thomas Nagel said". In those cases the argument is not abbreviated but labeled with a name without taking pains to actually think the argument. The reader, too, is not expected to recapitulate the argument. It is an extreme case of an argument from authority, for when referring to an authority it is rhetorically presupposed that the audience has familiarity with it or at least would be able, any time, to reproduce the doctrine of the authority. Therefore the question arises whether reference to philosophical plumbers allows returning to an objective treatment of the same problem. Does reference to some "monist" or "compatibilist" really invite to rethink the pattern of their thought without personifying? Probably not. For the sake of experiment, let us translate the third person into the second, and then into the first person: "The Dualist is my opponent; i.e., you, my opponent, hold this or that belief, which I am about to refute. Hence follows that I, first person, argue thus …" Here is an example from Imre Lakatos, speaking about the high frequency of simultaneous discoveries in sciences:

For this problem vulgar-Marxists have an easy solution: discovery is made by many people at the same time, once a social need for it arises. Now what constitutes a 'discovery', and especially a major discovery, depends on one's methodology. For the inductivist, the most important discoveries are factual, and, indeed, such discoveries are frequently made simultaneously. For the falsificationist a major discovery consists in the discovery of a theory rather than a fact. Once a theory is discovered (or rather invented), it becomes public property; and nothing is more obvious than that several people will test it simultaneously and make, simultaneously, (minor) factual discoveries.[2]

The objective problem of factually overlapping activities is addressed using labels. In each case, not the argument, only the result is presented. A scholarly book presupposes some familiarity with the theories in question. Nevertheless, no effort is made to explain how and why the various "–ists" came to their conclusions, although this is a book on methodology of science and within it a section on history. Since the argumentative framework of each proposition is reduced to a historic tab, the book should be shelved as scientific fiction. Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis could stand next to it, because Lakatos also advocates research programs. The only difference is that in the quoted passage he applies the program pattern retrospectively to the history of science. The key problem in this example is the fact that there is an asymmetry between premises and conclusion: The premise is personified, the conclusion factual. The personified premise ("-ists say") abbreviates the objective and theoretical reasoning to the extent that it is not recognizable and, therefore, the conclusion can only be judged on the basis of the reader's and the author's framework.
The third person rhetoric turns out to be a first person argument. Invoking a party, school, or any –ism reveals itself as directing the view to the speaker. This is where the philosopher's and the politician's strategies converge: both are mainly interested in themselves. Unless you are Plato, and unless you truly believe that thoughts are the only reality and cannot be reported otherwise than by ascribing them to an individual person, to argue with reference to people, rather than ideas, concepts, problems, things, or anything else objective, is nothing but egocentric conceit. Egotism is not necessarily a philosophical flaw, depending on the philosopher. But the contrast between thinking of persons and thinking about objective issues is worth exploring, especially if some arguments go simply wrong due to the misled style of thinking.
Incidentally, there are historic reasons for this fashion of personalizing a message. Humanist thinkers of the Renaissance drew the conclusion from the Scholastic style of philosophical and theological inquiry that no reality can have an impact on the human person that has not been personally processed in thought. Consequently, they also refrained from presenting insight in a systematic way and preferred writing poems, letters, invectives, etc. Later thinkers, well trained in Scholastic debates, adopted this turn of perspective and aimed at reassuring the audience that every single idea they were purporting had been thoroughly thought through. Ever since Giordano Bruno a philosopher would claim his own personality as first and ultimate witness for the truth of his teaching. With René Descartes the "I think" became a touchstone of philosophical quality. However, Bruno and Descartes, and certainty Kant and Hegel, not to speak of phenomenologists and existentialists, they all aimed at absolute trans-individual reality. (With the exception of the nihilist rejection of reality beyond human existence, as in Nietzsche.) They wrapped their insights in the first-person rhetoric, because to claim an objective reality was (in the wake of nominalism and voluntarism) suspect of begging the question. Therefore they would eclipse from their arguments that world, which they were to enquire. Subjectivity, the power of the personal mind, was the only accessible source of knowledge. Of course, they all had to presuppose the structural identity of everyone's mind and thus the communicability of first-person ideas. At this point it is inevitable to refer to persons and schools, because the object of this paragraph is the history of the structure of the first-person argument. To sum up, modern philosophy's battle cry is: Truth is what I think!
Again, if the process of reasoning is the topic of a thought it can be convenient to depict it with the help of a person. Objectified presentation can even go wrong if the question is, for instance, whether love is a person or a thing, and if the outcome is that it consists in the transition (as Plato taught). The thrust of the argument, here, is that reification is misleading, and therefore the argument itself should rather not be objectifying. First-person arguments occur frequently in psychological epistemology: problems of cognition, specifically those of sense perception, offer themselves to expressions in the first person. At the same time, there is no need to move over to a second person. Yet it might be useful to refer to third persons. In empirical psychology and pedagogy people are observed or act as test persons for the sake of exemplifying a theory. Unfortunately, this is not the case in many philosophical treatises, which either do not really illustrate any theory with the help of real or fictional people or conceal stratagems under the veil of personalized arguments.
An interesting example is Daniel C. Dennett's usage of persons. In his Consciousness explained he promises to "explain the various phenomena that compose what we call consciousness" and then continues: "it is very hard to imagine how your mind could be your brain … In order to imagine this, you really have to know quite a lot of what science has discovered about how brains work, but much more important, you have to learn new ways of thinking."[3] Of course the rhetoric is that of college teaching, suitable for an introduction. But Dennett also addresses directly the question of personal perspective. Since Descartes had used the first-person perspective that had fostered the notion of consciousness, experimental psychology preferred third-person perspective, in which "only facts garnered 'from the outside' count as data" (70). So, if the author is aware of the tricks of personalized presentation, why does he use the second person in describing the problem of understanding mind and brain? According to Dennett there is no consciousness. Mind is nothing but brain. Science is the objective authority ("quite a lot") concerning the workings of mind and brain. In spite of this reductionism, in the quotation there is imagination, there is learning, there is creativity, and – surprise! – there is thinking. How is such a performative contradiction possible? If "just rhetoric!" is the answer, then the author has put off at least one reader. Playful promises make the objectivity of the science dubitable. Obviously, the second-person appeal undoes the strong factual claim of a reductionist psychology. Perhaps, we should leave it at that.
A second example from philosophy of mind comes from John R. Searle. In his book Intentionality Searle confesses to despise "all this distinguished past", for, as he states bluntly, that his "only hope of resolving the worries which led me into this study … lay in the relentless pursuit of my own investigation."[4] First question: What makes John Searle believe that any reader cares about his worries? Why should readers be distracted from their own worries by worrying with and about Searle? After all, even to his contemporaries Searle was "distinguished past" once his book was out. This is a double attack of the philosopher: first he discards history; then he waves his own white flag for fear of being overlooked. On the other hand, second question: If philosophy is done by persons who successfully worry, why are those of the past to be discarded? Because they don't listen? But why not listen to them? Searle's worries are the heritage of European philosophy and should be treated according to its standards. The argumentative figure of 'the philosopher as the sole guarantor of his philosophy', as described above, is patent. In this sense the 20th century thinker is just mimicking Descartes on his retreat in Ulm. But is he also justified to do so? That is: does his argument gain by neglecting the past, given that this neglect has its history? Searle's rhetorical gesture is that of captatio benevolentiae. Such an opening is always risky, because it can go wrong, and as a rhetorical figure there is no second chance to repair it. So, the question is this: why does a philosopher have to covet the sympathy of the anonymous audience? To cover up the weakness of the argument? Or a hidden agenda? Again, the gesture is suspicious. But, perhaps the audience is not at all anonymous but a well defined group of colleagues and students. The implicit reader is to be an accomplice? All this has nothing to do with philosophy, it can happen in any corporation, business, association, etc. First-person philosophy can push beyond the fringes of philosophy.
Here I need to take up the cudgels on behalf of history. When dealing with philosophy of mind or with any other problem within the realm of anthropology, the philosopher is part of history and history is part of the problem. The very idea of relating to the world, which is at the core of intentionality and, generally, of philosophy of mind, this thought has evolved over a long way. The way 21st century thinkers worry about it started somewhere and sometime in the evolution of humanity and had significant leaps and detours and fallbacks and turns. Descartes is one of them. So far, present day philosophy of mind is just one station on a way. Each philosopher pushes it further, some try shortcuts, some explore dead end streets. But the question of mind, thinking about thinking, is genuinely human. Radical denial of the anthropological essence of thinking about thinking defeats itself; it is a performative contradiction as any skepticism. Everything human has a history (as far as anyone can look back). To think about the human mind, therefore, requires thinking about what others have thought. Right or wrong: what others have thought is thinking. If, as Descartes and Searle pretend, the past is distinguished as being superfluous, how was it possible that the past thinkers did not think as "I" (Descartes, Searle) think? What, if at all, did they think? Concepts like mind, consciousness, awareness, pain, reality, relation, organism, etc. have a meaning that cannot be makeshift wisdom. Such a thing does not exist. For philosophers, third-person psychology is thinking the past.
Philosophical plumbing hopes to encapsulate a problem in a person: I, we, you, he, they. Philosophical history liberates, at least, from the pressure to flirt with the audience or to expose one's own flaws (for no philosopher is right who does not take conceptual risks). Matters of science, as much as they belong to science, are definitely exempt of personal components (pace Michael Polanyi). Even if the philosopher is the only object truly known, the object remains objective, and true propositions cannot be thought of as true only in personal perspective. To say otherwise would make the personal perspective an objective truth. Therefore, to defend, for instance, the identity of mind and brain as a solipsistic insight or as a party game; to summarize in a falsifiable proposition the allegedly idiosyncratic take on science of some people; to rally for economic plans on the back of some chap from Ohio; all this is misleading. Philosophy starts with careful reading and goes a long way with it.

Notes:
[1] A peculiarity of the English language facilitates the transition from factual statements to second-person allocutions: the generic "you". For instance in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, IV 2: "Every true man's apparel fits your thief: if it be too little for your thief, your true man thinks it big enough … "
[2] Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, 115.
[3] Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown, 1991, 16.
[4] John R. Searle, Intentionality. An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. ix.