7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
1/17
physicalDavid Papineau interviewed by Richard Marshall.
[Photo; Steve Pyke]
David Papineau is still roving in the deep philosophical waters even
though he knows that hell never know everything. He keeps writing hard
core books about his philosophical thoughts covering things such as
physicalism and how come everyone isnt a physicalist, substance and
property dualism and Kripkes worry that the mind brain identity is just
contingent. He wonders why philosophers think theres something wrong
with just knowing the facts. He thinks about the nature of colour
experiences, representation, and avoids mixing up methodological issues
with metaphysical ones. He thinks about the significance of Schrodingers
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
2/17
cat,about whether there are any special laws that are not reducible to
physics and about the usefulness of historical kinds. This is a deep water
big beast from the philosophical depths: bangin.
3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Has it been worth it?
David Papineau: My first degree was in mathematics. That was great, but
it didnt help with many of the things that puzzled me. I became a
philosopher because I wanted to understand everything, especially those
things that didnt make sense. And that has continued to be my
philosophical motivation. Thats one reason I have such a roving
philosophical eye once I have figured out a philosophical topic to my
satisfaction, I find myself moving on to new problems.
Has it been worth it? Absolutely. (I now realize that I wont have quite
enough time to understand everythingbut that hasnt stopped me
wanting to understand as much as I can.)
3:AM: You are an ontological naturalist. You think that modern science
makes some species of physicalism an irresistible position dont you?
Can you explain what your arguments are?
DP: Its simple enough. Nearly everybody nowadays accepts the causal
completeness of physicsevery physical event (or at least its probability)
has a full physical cause. This leaves no room for non-physical things to
make a causal difference to physical effects. But it would be absurd to
deny that thoughts and feelings (and population movements and
economic depressions . . .) cause physical effects. So they must be
physical things.
Note how this argument only bites for those things that do have physical
effects. If numbers say, or moral properties, have no physical effects, then
this argument gives us no immediate reason to say that they too must be
physical.
You might want to askif there is such a simple argument for physicalism,
how come everybody hasnt always been a physicalist? Thats a good
question, and there is a good answer. The causal completeness of
physics wasnt widely accepted until recently. A century ago mainstream
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
3/17
science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers
which had a downwards causal influence on the physical realm in a
straightforwardly interactionist way. It was only in the middle of the last
century that science finally concluded that there are no such non-physical
forces. At which point a whole pile of smart philosophers (Feigl, Smart,
Putnam, Davidson, Lewis) quickly pointed out that mental, biological and
social phenomena must themselves be physical, in order to produce the
physical effects that they do.
3:AM: This is not an eliminativist position regarding the mind but is
reductionist isnt it?
DP: Yesat least in the sense in which reductionist simply means
neither eliminativist nor dualism. Philosophers sometimes also use
reductionist more strictly, to mean type-identities between mental and
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
4/17
physical categories, and to exclude non-reductive physicalisms like
metaphysical functionalism. Im not so sure that I am a reductionist in the
strict type-identity sense. The issues here are messy. But I certainly a
reductionist in the more general sense which is opposed to eliminativism
and dualism.
3:AM: Substance dualism is a target of this approach isnt it?
DP: Yes. But so is property dualism.
3:AM:Tim Crane, for example, might happily concede the arguments
about substance dualism but not concede that this means no species of
dualism cant be sustained. How do you respond to that sort of challenge?
DP: Well, the causal argument I gave above doesnt just imply that there
cant be a non-physical mental substance, but also that there can t be
non-physical mental properties. (Tim is always a bit cagey about exactly
what he thinks at this particular point. Im having dinner with him on
Saturday and will press him about it.)
3:AM: Kripke has anti-materialist arguments at the end of his Naming
and Necessityand you think hes wondering how mind brain identity
seems false even to people like yourself doesnt he? How do you handle
his challenge?
DP: Kripke says that physicalists like me cant explain the apparent
contingency of mind-brain identities. He maintains that, if I really believed
that pains are C-fibres, then I ought no longer to have any room for the
thought that they might come apart. His argument is that, since pains
arent identified via some contingent description, but in terms of how they
feel, I have no good way of constructing a possible world, so to speak,
where C-fibres are present yet pains absent.
(For the experts, note that Im here reading Kripke quite differently from
the widespread two-dimensionalist reading which takes him to be saying
that the problem for physicalists is simply that mind-brain identities are a
posteriori. This seems to me an absurd misreading of Kripke.)
My response to Kripke is simply to point out that mind-brain identity claims
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
5/17
are very counter-intuitive. They continue to seem incredible even to
committed physicalists like myself. And that is why I go on half-thinking at
an intuitive level that there is a possible world with C-fibres and no pains. I
simply havent fully freed myself from the dualist intuition that even in the
actual world pains involve something more than from C-fibres. So of
course I intuitively think that they might come apart in other possible
worlds, even if they contingently co-occur in the actual world. (If pains are
extra dualist states generated by brain states, courtesy of the contingent
laws of nature operating in this world, then it immediately follows that
those brain states could occur without the conscious states, in a world
with different laws of nature.)
In truth, as Kripke points out, a clear-headed physicalist shouldn t be
thinking any of these dualist thoughts. If pains are one and the same as C-
fibres firing, then there really isnt any possibility of having one without
the other. Once you properly appreciates physicalism, this dissociation
should cease to appear possibleC-fibres with pains should strike you as
no more possible than squares without rectangles.
From my perspective, then, Kripkes intuition of contingency isnt a
thought that physicalists are somehow required to continue respecting
even after they have embraced their physicalism. Rather it is simply amanifestation of the psychological difficulty of fully embracing physicalism
in the first place.
This is a very straightforward response to Kripke, one that cuts through
the huge literature on the explanatory gap and two-dimensional
semantics. This whole literature is motivated by the idea that there is
something deficient about our current theoretical understanding of the
mind-brain relation, and that therefore we need some different anddeeper perspective that will somehow render mind-brain identities
transparently true. I say that there is nothing deficient about our current
theoretical grasp of mind-brain identities. The problem is only that they are
counter-intuitive. This doesnt show that there is anything wrong with our
theoretical understanding, any more than the intuition that the Earth is at
rest shows that there must be something theoretically wrong with
Copernicanism, or the intuition that time is moving shows that there is
something theoretically wrong with the block universe B series view of
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
6/17
change. (A hankering for transparent understanding, grasp of natures,
having things revealed as they are, and so on, seems to run through a lot
of current philosophical debate. I dont get it. Whats wrong with just
knowing the facts?)
Of course, there remains the question of why we should find mind-brain
identities so persistently counter-intuitive, if they are true. But this is a
simple psychological question, and there are a number of plausible
explanations. Indeed this is a topic that is quite extensively discussed
outside philosophy, by developmental psychologists and theorists of
religion among others, under the heading of intuitive dualism. It is rather
shocking that so few of the many philosophers working on the
explanatory gap are familiar with this empirical literature.
3:AM: While we are on conscious experience, you deny that we can
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
7/17
really see a million colours. This is territory that Pete Mandik is also
looking into isnt it? You offer an alternative to the orthodox view, and then
argue that phenomenological scrutiny isnt going to help decide which is
right. So first could you set out the two views?
DP: Colour experience is a new topic for me. Im not sure how closely itrelates to my previous work.
The orthodox view of colour experience assumes that, when we see a
colour difference between two surfaces viewed side-by-side, this is
because we have different responses to each of the two surfaces viewed
singly. Since we can detect colour differences between something like ten
million different surfaces, this implies that we are capable of ten million
colour responses to surfaces viewed singly.
I dont think that we are capable of anything like this many possible colour
responses. Instead I argue that the perception of colour differences
between two surfaces viewed side-by-side is a gestalt phenomenon.
There is a brain mechanism that works to identify colour differences
directly, without first identifying the absolute colour of each surface. So on
my view there is no reason to suppose anything like ten million colour
responses to surface viewed singly.
I think my view is rather more radical than Pete Mandiks. Both of us want
to show that colour perception doesnt transcend what can be
conceptualized, but I dont think he goes so far as to deny that it doesn t
involve different responses to all the discriminable surfaces.
On the methodological issue, I think that would be hopeless to try to
adjudicate between my view and orthodoxy by appeal tophenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain
mechanisms.
3:AM: So why does phenomenological scrutiny not help? Does this relate
your enthusiasm for phenomenal concepts? Youve written about
Wittgensteins Private Language Argument and argued that phenomenal
concepts are inconsistent with Wittgenstein. So who winsWittgensteins
argument or phenomenal concepts? Or both?
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
8/17
DP: The phenomenal concept issue is rather different, I think. Here the
question is whether there are concepts of experiences that are made
available to subjects solely in virtue of their having had those experiences
themselves. Is there a way of thinking about seeing something red, say,
that you get from having had those experiences, and so isn t available to a
blind person? Many contemporary philosophers would say yes, despite
the fact that such concepts seem to conflict with Wittgensteins private
language argument. I have written a paper arguing that phenomenal
concepts do indeed conflict with the private language argument, and that
this is bad for Wittgenstein.
Still, as I said, this issue about phenomenal concepts is different from your
previous question of whether we can decide the structure of colour
perception by phenomenological introspection. After all, in supporting
phenomenal concepts I am in a sense siding with introspection against the
more behaviourist Wittgensteinians. But even so I dont think that
introspection is powerful enough to resolve the specific issue about how
many colours you can see.
3:AM: So what approach do you recommend?
DP: As I said, I dont think that we can figure out what is going on inconscious colour perception just by phenomenological introspection. We
need to know about brain mechanisms as well. We need to figure out what
information is present in the mechanisms that constitute conscious colour
perception. If neuroscientific research shows that those mechanisms only
contain comparative information about colour differences, and have
thrown away more fine-grained information about the absolute colours of
single surfaces, then that would support my position, in a way that just
introspecting our colour experiences cant.
The use of neuroscientific data to help resolve phenomenological
questions is proving a common theme in much contemporary thinking
about the mind. How rich are the contents of visual perception? Does
vision only tell us about shapes and colours, or does it also represent
higher categories like lemon or umbrella? Again, when we view a scene
fleetingly, do we consciously see all the details even though we dont
retain them, or do we not see them in the first place? Neurological
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
9/17
information is crucial to deciding these questions. After all, they are so
interesting precisely because unaided introspection cannot resolve them.
Rather we need to know what is going on in the brain activities that
constitute visual awareness.
Of course, without any appeal to introspective phenomenology at all, we
couldnt get started on this kind of analysis in the first place, since the
initial identification of the brain activities that constitute visual awareness
must depend on correlating brain processes with phenomenological
reports. But we can engage in a kind of useful bootstrapping here. First
we use uncontroversial aspects of introspective phenomenology to figure
out which brain activities are in general responsible for visual
phenomenology and other features of consciousness. And then we use
the neuroscience to tell us what information is present in those brain
activities, and so to decide the trickier questions about the structure of
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
10/17
consciousness. We start and end with phenomenological data, but we
couldnt have completed our inferential journey without the detour through
brain science.
3:AM: Does this relate to your anti-conceptualism about psychological
representation? Dont you want to defend your views about psychologicalrepresentation as scientific reductions, rather than as results of conceptual
analysis?
DP: I think it helps to distinguish the local semantic question about the
specific representational contents of perceptionwhat things do
perceptual states represent?from the more general meta-semantic
question of the nature of representationwhat it is for psychological
states to have representational contents at all?
On the former question, I rather incline towards conceptualism, in line
with my view of colour perceptionI dont think that we can represent
objects and properties for which we have no concepts, not even in
perceptual experience. In this sense I differ from those who defend non-
conceptual content like Michael Tye and Chris Peacocke.
But this local semantic question isnt something that I have written about
much, apart from my recent interest in colour vision.
On the general meta-semantic question, by contrast, I have written a lot,
mostly under the heading of teleosemantics. And herethough this is an
entirely distinct issueI am very much inclined to be anti-conceptualist, in
the sense that I think that the philosophical task (as always) is to come up
with a synthetic theory that fits the empirical evidence, and not to analyse
our a priori concept of representation or anything like that.
3:AM: You also look forward to reducing causality to probabilities as part
of this same approach dont you? And an issue here is avoiding mixing
metaphysics with methodology. Can you explain this, and also why this is
not a methodology issue but a metaphysical one?
DP: A certain kind of methodologically-minded philosopher of science is
quick to read off metaphysical conclusions from features of scientific
practice. Chemists dont derive their laws from fundamental physics, so
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
11/17
reductive physicalism must be false. Biologists refer to natural numbers in
some of their explanations, so numbers must exist. I think that this kind of
thing makes for bad philosophy. The relevant features of scientific practice
often have mundane explanations which dont point to any deep
metaphysical moral. (Thus it would simply be messy and pointless for the
chemists to essay physical reductions, or for the biologists to offer
number-free explanations. Its a weird kind of science-worship that views
these practical considerations as clues to the nature of reality.)
Recent work on causation is a case in point. The metaphysical question is
whether causal relations can be reduced to non-causal general
regularities in some Humean style (though the modern Humean will work
with probabilistic generalizations rather than deterministic ones). Now,
methodological philosophers working on causal inference in practical
areas of science (epidemiology, economics, agriculture, . . .) have
observed that in practice causes are never inferred from probabilistic
patterns alone. When scientists do infer new causal conclusions from
probabilistic information, it is always against a rich background of prior
causal assumptions. (No causes in, no causes out.) And many
philosophers of science then move quickly from this practical
methodological observation to the metaphysical conclusion that causation
must somehow transcend any Humean pattern of probabilistic
generalizations. But this is not a good inference. Even if causation is at
bottom constituted by patterns of probabilistic generalizations, there are
obvious practical reasons for using prior causal knowledge to help identify
new causes, rather than trying to work everything out from first principles
every time.
The funny thing is that recent methodological work on causation itself
opens the way to a successful metaphysical reduction of causes to
probabilistic generalizations. I am thinking of Bayesian Nets. The
Bayesian Nets literature shows that, for any arrangement of causes, there
is a possible set of probabilistic relationships that entails that
arrangement. (No causes in, no causes out is a practical precept, not a
principled constraint.) Dan Hausman has written a terrific bookCausal
Asymmetrybuilding a reductive account of causation on this basis, and
I have written a couple of articles in the same strain. But as far as I knowwe are the only two people who read the Bayesian Nets stuff in this way.
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
12/17
The reason, I suspect, is that nearly everybody else who works on
Bayesian nets is a methodologist rather than a metaphysician, much more
interested in the way science proceeds than in the nature of reality. And so
they think that if scientific practice treats causes as irreducible, then thats
good enough for them. Still, as I said, it is a bad idea to run metaphysics
together with methodology in this way. Ive nothing against philosophers
who are interested in the practicalities of science per se. Its their
metaphysical aspirations that irk me.
3:AM: Why dont you want to get into the box with Schrodingers cat and
what is the significance of this thought experiment?
DP: Schrdingers cat has a 50% quantum chance of coming out of the
box alive and a 50% quantum chance of coming out dead. If you got in thebox with it, the same would apply to you. So you really don t want to do
that.
I favour an interpretation of quantum mechanics (the Everett
interpretation) according to which reality branches in any chancy quantum
situation. On this view, Schrdingers set-up will give rise to in two future
branches of reality, one with a live cat, and one with a dead catand the
talk of 50% chances just indicates that the two branches are both equallyreal futures of the cat that originally entered the box.
Now, some philosophers have tried to make trouble for this interpretation
by arguing that, if it were true, then you would have no reason not to get in
the box with the cat. For on the Everett interpretation you would be sure to
come out of the box alive. True thered also be a future in which you come
out dead. But whats so bad about that, given that you wont be there to
experience it, and that you survive happily in the only future that you willexperience?
This is a terrible argument (and not made any better by David Lewis
defending it at length in his last published papersee my David Lewis
and Schrdingers Cat.) There may be good objections to the Everett
interpretation, but this isnt one.
Everybody agrees that a future in which you are dead is a very bad thing,
and that it isnt made any better by your not being around to notice how
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
13/17
bad it is.
Everettians will simply agree with this, and observe that it follows that it s a
bad idea to get in the box with the cat. Doing so will cause the universe to
contain a future where you are dead, alongside the one where you are
alive, rather than leaving it as a universe where you are alive in all futures.Since a future where you are dead is a very bad thing, you really don t
want to do that.
3:AM: It seems to many people thinking about such matters that many of
our complex cognitive capacities are innate, but that raises the issue
about how they could be? How could we have evolved an innate capacity
to recognize doorknobs, say, given that presumably when we were
evolving our minds we didnt have doorknobs?
DP: I dont have much use for the concept of innateness. The everyday
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
14/17
concept incorporates a number of different notions that can come apart in
in many ways, and as a result encourages a range of dangerously
fallacious inferences.
Nor is it easy to tidy up the concept. I guess the best move is to try to
equate innate with not learned. But this really only works as a necessarycondition. It looks a bit dotty as a sufficient condition. (Is my newfound
ability to sing innate, just because it wasnt learned, but caused by that
bang on the head last week?)
Even if we go with the idea of innate as not learned, I doubt that anything
worth calling a cognitive capacity will come out as innate. This is because
it seems unlikely that evolution would ever bother to write the whole of any
cognitive capacity into the genes, so to speak, instead of allowinginformation from the environment to play at least some part in shaping it.
Of course our genes will make some capacities very much easier to learn
than others, and of course our genes themselves are not learned. But the
point remains that genes themselves are not cognitive capacities, and that
anything worth calling a cognitive capacity will depend to some degree on
learning and so not be innate.
Having said that, I do have quite a lot of sympathy for Fodors picture ofconcepts as information-free atomic entities which get locked onto their
referents causally, and to that extent they neednt involve anything much
in the way of learning. But even so it seems perverse to call them innate.
Here we see again the oddity of treating not learned as sufficient for
innate. Even if no learning to speak of was involved in locking my mental
term onto doorknobs, it is odd to say that therefore my possession of a
doorknob concept is innate, just as it is odd to say that my head-injury-
caused singing is innate.
3:AM: As a physicalist youll say that all laws are physical laws I guess.
But a non-physicalist will say that there are non-physical laws such as
laws in economics, or biology and psychology. Fodor writes about these
as special sciences. Do you think there can be special sciences?
DP: No, I think that there are non-physical laws all right: genuine (if not
strict) laws written in the language of biology, economics, and so on. But Idont regard that as a contentious issue. Even reductionists about
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
15/17
chemistry will think that there are special chemical laws whose formulation
makes essential use of chemical terminology.
The contentious issue is whether there are any special laws that aren t
reducible to physics. Fodor says yes, but I have always thought that there
are issues here. It has always puzzled me, along with Jaegwon Kim andNed Block, that there should be genuine lawlike patterns at the special
level, if physicalism is true (as Fodor agrees) yet the special laws are
variably realized by different physical processes in different cases (as
Fodor insists). Why should we always get the same results in the same
circumstances, if what is going on at the physical level is so different in
each case?
In a number of papers I have explored the idea that natural selectionmight fill the gap. Sometimes selection processes can ensure that there is
always some mechanism to produce such-and-such an effect in such-and-
such circumstances, even though that mechanism will be different in
different cases. All territorial birds have some way of discouraging
conspecific invaders, but the mechanisms vary (songs, displays,
odours, . . .). Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves
the requisite effect somehow, but it doesnt care, so to speak, how the trick
is done.
I still think that this story works in some cases, especially in the case of
people learning skills and other social behaviours (individual learning is a
kind of selection process). But more recently I have become interested in
another possible source of variably realized special science laws. The
idea is inspired by Ruth Millikans notion of a historical kind. Millikan
observes that some categorieschemical compounds, clouds, stars
enter into a range of generalizations because their instances have acommon physical essence. These are eternal kinds. But other categories
enter into a range of generalizations because they are all copied from a
common source. These are historical kinds. For example, all the many
copies of the Bible have the same first word, the same second word, and
so on. Each individual version of the Nuer belief system contains the
same tenet about twins, about ancestral spirits, and so on.
I now think that many generalizations of interest in the special sciences
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
16/17
7/27/2019 Physical David Papineau Interviewed by Richard Marshall
17/17
to concrete reality.
Let me finish with more two recent books that I learnt much from.
Peter Godfrey-Smith. Darwinian Populations. This book focuses on
concepts that are generally taken for granted in philosophic thinking aboutnatural selection, such as organism, heredity and reproduction. By
challenging these notions Godfrey-Smith brings out what is and isnt
essential to natural selection and opens up a fascinating range of new
issues in the philosophy of biology.
Richard Holton. Wanting Willing Waiting. Holton distinguishes two
notions of weakness of willacting against your better judgement, and
failing to stick to your resolutionsand shows that they are quite different.The book explores the latter idea, and uses a wide range of empirical
studies to cast new light on such topics as will-power, temptation,
addiction and free will.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.
Share on facebook
Share on gmail
Share on twitter
Share on email
More Sharing Services
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, April 8th, 2013.