The ‘brain-writing’ view obscures the important truth that the capacity of a language to store and transmit information (in books in libraries, in speeches and on signboards) is dependent upon the existence of non-linguistic means of storing and transmitting information. Information is not preserved in a sentence like a fossil in a rock; a sentence is a vehicle for information only in that it is part of a system that necessarily includes sub-systems that process, store and transmit information non-linguistically. Whether these sub-systems are whole men or whole nervous systems or certain of their parts is an empirical question, but there can be no doubt that there are such sub-systems. Within such sub-systems the association of verbal messages or contents with events and states can be given a rationale only by pointing out the effective contribution of these events and states to the direction of behaviour that is ultimately appropriate to the survival of the system as an organism in the world.
This fact puts the Intentionalist thesis of irreducibility in a new light. Initially the question of whether Intentional accounts of behaviour and ‘mental’ events could be reduced to or paraphrased into extensional accounts was seen as the question of whether events and states of the nervous system could be assigned meanings or ascribed contents, and assigning meanings was seen as associating events or states with verbal expressions. Verbal expressions, however, are not the ultimate vehicles of meaning, for they have meaning only in so far as they are the ploys of ultimately non-linguistic systems. The inability to find precisely worded messages for neural vehicles to carry is thus merely an inability to map the fundamental on to the derived, and as such should not upset us. Although this examination of the problem of the ascription of content has yielded the conclusion that no rigorous, predictive way of ascribing content is possible, a rationale for a looser but still explanatory assignment of meanings to events and states has been developed. This is enough to blunt the point of the Intentionalist thesis. If in a sense the thesis still stands, it no longer should have the effect of suggesting an unbridgeable gap between the mental and the physical – whether this is construed as a radical dualism of phenomena, or of sciences, or of modes of description or explanation. For although no neat synonymy or correlation between Intentional and non-Intentional sentences has been discovered or proposed, sense has been made of the lesser claim that certain types of physical entities are systems such that their operations are naturally to be described in the Intentional mode – and this, only in virtue ultimately of their physical organization. The force of ‘naturally’ here is this: although such systems are ultimately amenable to an extensional theory of their operations, their outward manifestations are such that they can be intelligibly described at this time, within our present conceptual scheme, only in the Intentional mode.
The Intentional mode, along with the extensional mode, is a given in our conceptual scheme, and as such it must serve as both a starting point and an at least pro tempore reference point for explanations that go deeper than our ordinary remarks about behaviour or minds. The role of the Intentional mode as a given can perhaps best be understood by looking back to earlier times when its scope as a given was wider, when our animistic ancestors spoke Intentionally about rivers, clouds, fires, mountains. From our present vantage point it is easy enough to say that talk of the river’s desire to reach the sea was a clear overextension of the mode, but the fact remains that there was a time when this was a phenomenon, Intentionally characterized, to be explained – or explained away. And until we stopped speaking seriously in this way about rivers, the Intentional characterization remained a reference point for explanations; what had to be explained was the river’s desire. From our present vantage point it would make no sense to say that the Intentional mode applied today to people, animals and occasionally to computers is similarly an overextension of the mode, for the ‘correct’ scope of the Intentional mode is determined at any time by the current conceptual scheme. Intentionally characterized phenomena are at this time reference points for explanations; people do have beliefs, intentions and so forth. If it is supposed that the present scope is on better ground than the earlier wide scope because the phenomena covered really are Intentional in virtue of being phenomena of goal-directed information processing systems, the reply is that our notion of a goal-directed information processing system is part and parcel of the Intentionality in our conceptual scheme. A computer is no more really an information processor than a river really had desires. What the purely extensional theory of behaviour would not say about beliefs and intentions the extensional theory of the hydraulics of river flow does not say about the river’s desire to reach the sea.
XI PERSONAL AND SUB-PERSONAL LEVELS OF EXPLANATION: PAIN
The aim of Part I has been to describe the relationship between the language of the mind and the language of the physical sciences. Chapter1 proposed a stance of ontological neutrality with regard to expressions in the language of the mind, and since then these expressions have been seen to play a certain role in Intentional interpretations of certain physical systems, but how the ontological stance is supposed to mesh with the later developments has been only dimly suggested. The time has come to consolidate the gains of Part I by illustrating them in application to a particular mental phenomenon: pain. Pain has been chosen because of its central role in a remarkably wide variety of philosophical and psychological theories. Pains are the identity theorists’ most plausible candidates for brain processes, but also in other theories the most compelling examples of ‘emergent’ qualities or ‘epiphenomena’. Pain, as we have seen, has a crucial function in stimulus-response behaviourism, but also figures centrally in the literature of the introspectionists and Phenomenologists.
The physiology of pain is relatively well understood. When a pain is felt, neural impulses travel from the area in which the pain is felt along an anatomically distinct neural network for the transmission of pain stimuli. In many instances there is a peripheral reflex arc that triggers withdrawal, but there are also other as yet unanalysed effects in the central areas of the brain. This, of course, is in harmony with the view of genetically transmitted links developed in Chapter 3. It is appropriate for an organism to heed the most pressing demands of survival, and the imminence of injury or death is as pressing as a demand can be, so it is altogether to be expected that a strongly entrenched pain network, essentially including appropriate responses of withdrawal, should be inherited. Moreover, as personal experience reveals, the behavioural reactions to pain are more difficult to overrule than any other behavioural tendencies. Genuine pain behaviour is compulsive, involuntary, and only with great ‘will power’ or special training can man or beast keep from reactions to pain. Whether or not such inherited afferent-efferent networks are a sufficient condition for the existence of the ‘phenomenon of pain’, it is safe to say they are a necessary condition. That is, it would be a very mysterious view that held that the bare phenomenon of pain could occur on the evolutionary scene before there were organisms that reacted appropriately to stimuli that were harbingers of injury. Pain could not appear until organisms began avoiding it. The question before us now is whether pain is something (some thing) in addition to the physical operations of the pain-network.
An analysis of our ordinary way of speaking about pains shows that no events or processes could be discovered in the brain that would exhibit the characteristics of the putative ‘mental phenomena’ of pain, because talk of pains is essentially non-mechanical, and the events and processes of the brain are essentially mechanical. When we ask a person why he pulled his hand away from the stove, and he replies that he did so because it hurt, or he felt pain in his hand, this looks like the beginning of an answer to a question of behavioural control, the question being how people know enough to remove their hands from things that can burn them. The natural ‘mental process’ answer is that the person has a ‘sensation’ which he identifies as pain, and which he is somehow able to ‘locate’ in his fingertips, and this ‘prompts’ him to re
move his hand. An elaboration of this answer, however, runs into culs-de-sac at every turning.
The first unanswered question is how a person distinguishes a painful sensation from one that is not painful. It is no answer to say that painful sensations are just those that hurt, for then the question becomes how a person distinguishes sensations that hurt from sensations that do not. If this question is seen as asking for a criterion for sensations that hurt, a criterion used by the person to distinguish these sensations, the question admits of no answer, for one does not distinguish the sensations that hurt or are painful by applying some criterion; one simply distinguishes them. Their only distinguishing characteristic is painfulness, an unanalysable quality that can only be defined circularly. Moreover, a person’s ability to distinguish this quality in sensations is ensured; one simply can tell when a sensation is painful (excluding cases where one’s doubt is over whether the word ‘pain’ is too strong for the occasion). When trying to explain the discrimination of pains, appeal to the quality of painfulness is no advance over the question; it tells us nothing we did not already know. When one is asked how one tells an x from a y and answers that x’s have an indefinable characteristic which one is simply able to recognize but not describe, all one is saying is: I can tell – that’s all.
The mechanical question, how is it done? is blocked. It is blocked not because the reply is that one is in the dark about how one distinguishes painful sensations from others, but because the reply is that no mechanical answer would be appropriate in this context. Pains or painful sensations are ‘things’ discriminated by people, not, for example, by brains (although brains might discriminate other things related to pains), and the question is: how do you (the person) distinguish pains from other sensations? The question admits of no answer because the person does not do anything in order to distinguish pains; he just distinguishes them. Distinguishing pains is not a personal actvity, and hence no answer of the form, first I do A and then I do B, makes any sense at all. But if this is so, the appeal to a quality of these discriminated sensations is gratuitous. A quality, to do any work in a theory, must be identified, but this means it must either be described or ostended. Description presupposes analysis, and in this instance analysis presupposes personal activity; where discrimination occurs without personal activity, no description of a discriminated quality is possible. Then, if the quality is to be identified at all, it must be ostended, but ostension of the quality in this instance cannot be separated from ostension of the discriminating. Where discriminating is an analysable personal activity, like discriminating good apples from bad by checking for colour and crispness, we can distinguish the qualities from the discriminating of them, but in the case of distinguishing sensations as painful, the act of discrimination itself is the only clue to the localization (in space and time) of the presumed quality. Insisting that, above and beyond our ability to distinguish sensations as painful, there is the quality of painfulness, is thus insisting on an unintelligible extra something.
The first cul-de-sac, then, is that a person’s power to discriminate painful sensations is a brute fact subject to no further questions and answers. The next question concerns the location of these pains, and meets the same fate. We do not locate our pains with the aid of any independently describable qualities or ‘local signs’ provided us by the sensations; we just can locate them. Whatever the brain may be ‘doing’ when one locates a pain, the person does not do anything in the process of locating his pains, for there is no such process that a person could engage in. One could engage in the process of locating another person’s pains, by asking him questions, poking around until he screams and so forth, but not in the process of locating one’s own pains.
The third question left unanswered has already been shown to have no answer. What is there about painfulness that prompts us to avoid it, withdraw our hand, attempt to eliminate it? The question is dead because there is nothing about painfulness at all; it is an unanalysable quality. We simply do abhor pain, but not in virtue of anything (but its painfulness). If, in our attempt to build an explanatory bridge between sensation and action here, we invoke the appreciation of an unanalysable quality of painfulness, we are forced to choose between two non-explanations. We can either take it as a contingent fact that painfulness is something we dislike, but a contingent fact that admits of no explanation since painfulness is unanalysable; or we can take painfulness as necessarily abhorrent – something which by definition we withdraw from or avoid – in which case there is no room for explanation since ‘we avoid pains’ is then analytic, and cannot take the ‘because’ of causal explanation after it.
When we have said that a person has a sensation of pain, locates it and is prompted to react in a certain way, we have said all there is to say within the scope of this vocabulary. We can demand further explanation of how a person happens to withdraw his hand from the hot stove, but we cannot demand further explanations of terms of ‘mental processes’. Since the introduction of unanalysable mental qualities leads to a premature end to explanation, we may decide that such introduction is wrong, and look for alternative modes of explanation. If we do this we must abandon the explanatory level of people and their sensations and activities and turn to the sub-personal level of brains and events in the nervous system. But when we abandon the personal level in a very real sense we abandon the subject matter of pains as well. When we abandon mental process talk for physical process talk we cannot say that the mental process analysis of pain is wrong, for our alternative analysis cannot be an analysis of pain at all, but rather of something else – the motions of human bodies or the organization of the nervous system. Indeed, the mental process analysis of pain is correct. Pains are feelings, felt by people, and they hurt. People can discriminate their pains and they do this not by applying any tests, or in virtue of any describable qualities in their sensations. Yet we do talk about the qualities of sensations and we act, react and make decisions in virtue of these qualities we find in our sensations.
Abandoning the personal level of explanation is just that: abandoning the pains and not bringing them along to identify with some physical event. The only sort of explanation in which ‘pain’ belongs is non-mechanistic; hence no identification of pains or painful sensations with brain processes makes sense, and the physical, mechanistic explanation can proceed with no worries about the absence in the explanation of any talk about the discrimination of unanalysable qualities. What is the physical explanation to be? Something like this. When a person or animal is said to experience a pain there is afferent input which produces efferent output resulting in certain characteristic modes of behaviour centring on avoidance or withdrawal, and genuine pain behaviour is distinguished from feigned pain behaviour in virtue of the strength of the afferent-efferent connections – their capacity to overrule or block out other brain processes which would produce other motions. That is, the compulsion of genuine pain behaviour is given a cerebral foundation. Now would this account of pain behaviour suffice as an account of real pain behaviour, or is there something more that must be going on when a person is really in pain? It might be supposed that one could be suddenly and overwhelmingly compelled to remove one’s finger from a hot stove without the additional ‘phenomenon’ of pain occurring. But although simple withdrawal may be the basic or central response to such stimulation, in man and higher animals it is not the only one. Could any sense be made of the supposition that a person might hit his thumb with a hammer and be suddenly and overwhelmingly compelled to drop the hammer, suck the thumb, dance about, shriek, moan, cry, etc., and yet still not be experiencing pain? That is, one would not be acting in this case, as on a stage; one would be compelled. One would be physically incapable of responding to polite applause with a smiling bow. Positing some horrible (but otherwise indescribable) quality or phenomenon to accompany such a compelled performance is entirely gratuitous.6
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