philosophical impairments

First a long quote (I have omitted all the in-prose references to increase readability):

In obvious reference to Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Wittgenstein pointed out, in conversation with Schlick and Waismann, that there is a third possibility, alongside the views of the formalists and Frege:

For Frege the alternative was this: either we deal with strokes of ink on the paper or these strokes of ink are signs of something and their meaning is what they go proxy for. The game of chess itself shows that these alternatives are wrongly conceived - although it is not the wooden chessmen we are dealing with, these figures don't go proxy for anything, they have no meaning in Frege's sense. There is still a third possibility, the signs can be used the way they are in a game.

The accusation is certainly unfair, since Frege was aware of the analogy with the game of chess; it was made by Thomae in a passage which Frege himself quotes and discusses at length. This passage is worth putting side by side with Wittgenstein's remark:

For the formalist, arithmetic is a game with signs, which are called empty. That means they have no other content (in the calculating game) than they are assigned by their behaviour with respect to certain rules of combination (rules of the game). The chess player makes similar use of his pieces; he assigns them certain properties determining their behaviour in the game, and the pieces are only external signs of this behaviour.

According to Thomae, signs in arithmetic derive their meaning from the rules of arithmetic. This sounds strikingly similar to Wittgenstein's position as states above, but there could not be an idea more alien to Frege than this. For Frege the situation ought to be exactly the reverse: rules are derived from meanings. As he construed the formalist position, rules are simply created, stipulated arbitrarily; they have no basis: "We do not derive these rules from the meaning of the signs, but lay them down on our own authority, retaining full freedom and acknowledging no necessity to justify the rules". Frege even accuses Thomae of pre-supposing meanings in his formal arithmetic:

Although numerical signs designate something, this can be ignored, according to Thomae, and we can regard them simply as pieces manipulated in accordance with rules. If their meaning were to be considered, this would supply the grounds for the rules; but this occurs behind the scenes, so to speak, for on the stage of formal arithmetic nothing of the sort can be seen.

Wittgenstein was not in any strict sense a formalist. For example, one aspect of the formalist doctrine which has no equivalent in his writings is the insistence on the tangibility of signs: "Is Mathematics about signs on paper? No more than chess is about wooden pieces". But it is no exaggeration to say that the whole of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of language goes against the Bedeutungskörper conception of meaning upon which Frege's "arithmetic with content" is based. His approach is antithetical to Frege's: "Rules do not follow from an act of comprehension". When speaking about comprehension, Frege's usual turn of phrase is that we "grasp" (Fassen, Erfassen) meanings, but he never explained what he meant by that. In Philosophical Grammar, Wittgenstein pointed out this lacuna:

In attacking the formalist conception of arithmetic, Frege says more or less this: these petty explanations of the signs are idle once we understand the signs. Understanding would be something like seeing a picture from which all the rules followed, or a picture that makes them all clear. But Frege does not seem to see that such a picture would itself be another sign, or a calculus to explain the written one to us.

Marion - Wittgenstein, Finitism, and the Foundations of Mathematics (Pages 177-179)

Clearly, Wittgenstein did not know how to take things easy. When Frege says he just grabs meanings, he probably did not lie. In fact, Frege was one of those few intellectuals who was brutally honest with himself. Here is an illustrative anecdote by Russell who discovered the paradox that undermined the foundations of Frege's arithmetic:

As I think about acts of integrity and grace, I realise there is nothing in my knowledge to compare with Frege's dedication to truth. His entire life's work was on the verge of completion, much of his work had been ignored to the benefit of men infinitely less capable, his second volume was about to be published, and upon finding that his fundamental assumption was in error, he responded with intellectual pleasure clearly submerging any feelings of personal disappointment. It was almost superhuman and a telling indication of that of which men are capable if their dedication is to creative work and knowledge instead of cruder efforts to dominate and be known.

Without any doubt, Wittgenstein had an immense power of mental imagery. Therefore understanding had a pictorial nature for him. On the other hand, Frege had a lesser imaging ability. Hence understanding had a mysterious quality for him.

...for Frege any complete account of how expressions can possess meaning at all would have to involve a complete account of how we can grasp and understand pure thoughts – and it does not appear that he thought this question could be sufficiently answered with recourse to language simply because for Frege language itself presupposes certain rational capacities in order to be capable of expressing thoughts. This seems to be precisely why Frege repeatedly takes refuge in various metaphors to indicate the existence of certain rational faculties that enable us to grasp a thought, like the mysterious “power of thinking” that he talks about in “Thought”. Indeed, in a draft dating from 1897 he explicitly describes the act of thinking as “perhaps the most mysterious of all”, and adds that he regards the question of how it is possible as “still far from being grasped in all its difficulty”. (Source)

David Berman has a wonderful paper that illustrates how some of the irreconcilable disagreements between philosophers may have been due to actual cognitive differences. Apparently the fact that imaging capability varies widely across the population was known in the scientific literature for more than 150 years... I had no idea about it! Here are some extracts from this paper for those who are too lazy to read it in its entirety. While reading these pieces, keep in mind that Berman has absolutely zero imaging ability.

(Note that I have omitted all the in-prose references.)

We can picture imaging ability (and images themselves) as on a scale of 0 to 10... Those with 10, the maximum, have photographic and eidetic imagery. Although most photographic imagers are also eidetic, the two kinds of images and imaging ability needn’t go together. What photographic imagery is should be reasonably clear. Briefly, an image is eidetic if it has more rather than less independence from the mind or will of the imager, enabling him to scan or move around his images. And while the images of most eidetics are of photographic or near photographic detail, they needn’t be. Probably the most famous case of someone with both photographic and eidetic ability was the subject of A. R. Luria’s classic study, the Mind of a Mnemonist, who could form images that were indiscernible from objects seen in the physical world, both in their detail and substantiality. Moving to the minimum extreme of the spectrum, to 0, there are those individuals who have no images.

In his own classic work, The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James writes:

Until very recent years it was supposed by all philosophers that there was a typical human mind which all individual minds were like, and that propositions of universal validity could be laid down about such faculties as ‘the Imagination’. Lately, however, a mass of revelations have poured in, which make us see how false a view this is. There are imaginations, not ‘the Imagination’, and they must be studied in detail.

And although it was Gustav Fechner who was the ‘first-breaker of ground in this direction’, it was the publication of Galton’s work, according to James, that ‘may be said to have made an era in descriptive Psychology’. James then quotes at length Galton’s description of how he came to make his crucial discoveries concerning imagery.

To make a long story short, Galton devised a two-page questionnaire which he distributed widely, not only in England but also in France, America and elsewhere. The aim of Galton’s questions was to determine the vividness, detail, location, etc. of mental images in the population. This is usually called his ‘breakfast-table questionnaire’, because that was what Galton suggested that his subjects try to imagine.

What Galton found, to his astonishment, was that the range in imaging ability was enormous and also that there were more forms of imagery than were generally known to exist.

So whereas it was formerly thought that human imagery was all of a piece, Galton found that a small percentage of people also had 0 or no images, another small percentage had 10 or eidetic/ photographic images, and many of those who had these also had other forms of imagery for which there were then no names. One of these Galton called number forms. Another only took its present name in the 20th century, namely synthesthetic images- for example colors that are heard- as did eidetic images.

...To appreciate the difference between the two extremes of 0 and 10 images, here are some responses which Galton received from those in the lowest and highest groups. I begin with lowest:

“Extremely dim. The impressions are in all respects so dim, vague, and transient, that I doubt whether they can reasonably be called images. They are incomparably less than those of dreams.”

“My powers are zero. To my consciousness there is almost no association of memory with objective visual impressions. I recollect the breakfast-table, but do not see it.”

As for the highest, we have the following:

“The image once seen is perfectly clear and bright.”

“ . . . I can see my breakfast-table or any equally familiar thing with my mind’s eye quite as well in all particulars as I can do if the reality is before me.”

...According to present-day psychologists, roughly about 2% or 3% of the population are non-imagers. In my own study of imagery, which stretches over the past ten years, I have come across only one person who had no images whatever in his waking life—either voluntary or involuntary—although even he has imagery in dreams. Perhaps the most interesting and influential case of someone without even dream imagery is to be found in Charcot’s Clinical Lectures. This was a merchant who originally had extremely strong imagery, but who lost all of it following a crisis in his life. In a letter to Charcot he described his condition in the following way:

I possessed at one time a grand faculty of picturing to myself persons who interested me, color and objects of every kind . . . I made use of this faculty extensively in my studies. I read anything I wanted to learn, and then shutting my eyes I saw again quite clearly the letters with their every detail . . . All of a sudden this internal vision absolutely disappeared. Now . . . I cannot picture to myself the features of my children or my wife, or any other object of my daily surroundings . . . I dream simply of speech . . . I am obliged to say things which I wish to retain in my memory, whereas formerly it was sufficient for me to photograph them in my eye.

Because I have little or no imaging I find certain kinds of problems, such as those which engineers or architects or interior decorators typically tackle, extremely difficult if not impossible, since I can’t form the requisite images, let alone manipulate them... As a schoolboy I found it very difficult to read the novels assigned in English class. At the time, I believed this was because I was either not very bright or didn’t like novels... In fact, I might as well come fully out of the closet and confess that I rarely read anything apart from comic books before I was seventeen, and that I had a vast collection of comic books. But it was only when I came to work on images that I found a way of understanding this. Most novels begin (and often continue) with long descriptive passages. But such passages are very heavy going for low or non-imagers and through no fault of their own. For a poor imager, these descriptive passages are essentially just words or dense forests of words, since the weak imager cannot see anything of the scene or people painted by the words. The comic book does that work for him by means of pictures.

So how did my imagery impairment affect my philosophical work? One clear way, I believe, is that it prevented me from properly understanding the philosophers that have been the focus of much of my work- the classic empiricists, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Of course, I knew that they put ideas at center-stage in their philosophies, and that ideas for them are very close if not identical to images. Thus Hume is clear that ideas are copies of impressions and impressions are what we experience. And since for Locke and (with qualification) Berkeley, but especially for Hume, a word is only meaningful if it stands for an idea, it follows that for them meaningful thinking consists in having an appropriate train of images. Of course, I knew all of this, but really I could never take it seriously. For how could anyone seriously believe that all their thinking was carried out in images? On the other hand, I was aware that they did seem to take that theory of meaning very seriously, particularly, in Berkeley’s case, to reject abstract general ideas and matter and, in Hume’s, to reject necessary causal connection, substantial minds and even personal identity. In short, I had a difficulty that I couldn’t really resolve. The best I could do was to suppose that either these philosophers were confused or when they spoke about images or ideas as copies of impressions or sensations, they really, in their hearts, meant meanings or concepts. Yet I now wonder how I could have been working on these philosophers for so many years, without seeing that my incredulity and difficulty stemmed from my imagery deficiency and from not being able to accept that their minds worked differently from my own. Curiously, however, I remember that when I first encountered Berkeley as an undergraduate, I became aware of the difficulty, but, after some initial perplexity, assumed that I must be wrong to be puzzled by it, since no one else seemed to be. Now, however, I am prepared to accept that the empiricists meant what they said, because they had unusually strong imagery.

If my experience is anything to go on, what mainly stands in the way of this acceptance is not only the rarity of such strong imagery, but also the natural tendency that each of us has to suppose that what is mentally normal for us is just normal or normal for all human beings. This tendency does not operate in the bodily realm because there the differences are apparent. Hence it comes with a sense of shock for either a very weak and very strong imager to realize that he is unusual. But this only emerges when a discussion can be moved from the general to particulars and concrete details.

Both Galton and James were aware that there were philosophical implications flowing from the findings of the breakfast table questionnaire—the most central of which was that philosophers had hitherto wrongly assumed that there was only one form of imaging... Very briefly, T.H. Huxley was the first to comment on the dispute, although his focus was on Berkeley’s position and Hume’s support for it, which Huxley disputed, at least for sensible or natural objects, on which he was clearly drawing on Galton’s findings both on imaging and photographic work on generic images. James, after quoting Huxley at length, then suggested that the dispute between Locke and Berkeley might be resolved if we looked at the differences in their imaging powers. A.C. Fraser took this one step further in 1891, suggesting it was Berkeley’s and Hume’s exceptionally strong imaging powers, connected with their relative youth at the time, that encouraged them to believe, as against Locke, that there were no general ideas. Put in another way, their imaging power were so strong and detailed that it psychologically prevented them from forming vaguer general images; whereas Locke, being older and hence a somewhat weaker imager, could form such images.

This brings me to the wider implications of Galton’s discoveries adverted to by James: that the variations in imagery powers show that there are basic differences in the way that human beings think, and hence that the idea of typical human thinking or typical human mind is a fiction. Following James, I have elsewhere described this as the Typical Mind Fallacy—or TMF for short. Put in another way there is no uniformity in our thinking and hence no uniform or typical human mind. As Galton put it in his Inquiries:

It will be seen how greatly metaphysicians and psychologists err, who assume their own mental operations, instincts, and axioms to be identical with those of the rest of mankind … The differences between men are profound, and we can only be saved from living in blind unconsciousness of our own mental peculiarities by the habit of informing ourselves as well as we can of those of others.

...Thus when a philosophical debate has reached a deadlock situation, or when philosophers find themselves repeating the same assertions and mounting the same arguments again and again, and to no apparent purpose, then something else should be tried. I would say it is time to bring in the Philosophical Counselors for these philosophers... In short, philosophers should go for Philosophical Counseling in the way that some husbands and wives eventually and reluctantly decide to go for marriage counseling—when they no longer seem to have any common ground, when using words and arguments no longer seems useful... Locke should not say to Berkeley: You are wrong about abstract general ideas. The reason why you disbelieve in general ideas is because your strong photographic imaging incapacites you from having general images. The idea is that going to a marriage counsellor or Philosophical Counselor is not for the purpose of deciding who is right or wrong, but easing the conflict and bringing out the hidden sources of conflict, which (we suspect) lie in the minds rather than the theories of the disputants. So here the Philosophical Counselor is not looking at the truth of theories. That is not his province. In the matter of rightness or truth, the philosopher per se should decide.

...This is the way I read Gilbert Ryle’s famous or infamous rejection of mental images in chap. VIII of The Concept of Mind. We can admire Ryle’s defence of his position as a tour de force of philosophical ingenuity. But, as we know, by positioning himself behind the barricade of linguistic analysis and argument, he was actually preventing himself from seeing the truth that some minds can form mental images. He was also adding another example to what is sometimes called the scandal of philosophy, the intractable disputes that, unlike science, populate our discipline. Not more argument, but a change in attitude or empathetic stretching assisted by Philosophical Counseling, is required.

In this respect the work of the Philosophical Counselor, as I understand him, is like that of the depth psychologist. Both are different from most other practitioners, such as dentists, who can treat their patients without ever having made their particular minds the object of a similar study. Here the Philosophical Counselor seems close to Socrates’s concern to know himself. For the Philosophical Counselor must be aware of his own cognitive capacities, if he is going to help others to understand theirs.