The Formation of Reason

David Bakhurst

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444395594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

In The Formation of Reason, philosophy professor David Bakhurst utilizes ideas from philosopher John McDowell to develop and defend a socio-historical account of the human mind.

• Provides the first detailed examination of the relevance of John McDowell's work to the Philosophy of Education
• Draws on a wide-range of philosophical sources, including the work of 'analytic' philosophers Donald Davidson, Ian Hacking, Peter Strawson, David Wiggins, and Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Considers non-traditional ideas from Russian philosophy and psychology, represented by Ilyenkov and Vygotsky
• Discusses foundational philosophical ideas in a way that reveals their relevance to educational theory and practice
  

1

What Can Philosophy Tell Us About How History Made the Mind?

This chapter is concerned primarily with two questions. First: to what degree do we owe our distinctively human psychological powers to history, society and culture? Second: if our relatedness to others is a precondition of our mindedness, to what extent can this be demonstrated or illuminated by philosophical reflection?¹

My interest in these issues goes back to the early 1980s, when I began research on Russian philosophy. I spent the 1982–3 academic year in Moscow, trying to get inside the philosophical culture of the USSR. I was convinced that there had to be more to that culture than the tired doctrines of dialectical and historical materialism that were the official creed of the Soviet state. And I was right. I was fortunate to fall in with a group of talented philosophers, who took me under their wing. These thinkers were not dissidents; they were Marxists, but they were representatives of a very different form of Marxism from the kind peddled by the Soviet establishment. These were so-called ‘men of the ’sixties’, who had done their most creative work during the brief ‘thaw’ that succeeded the Stalin period. They were creative, critical and scholarly. They were steeped in German classical philosophy, especially Hegel. Their cast of mind was sceptical, playful and, as you might expect, dialectical. They were typically excellent orators.²

One prominent theme in their work was that the human mind is an essentially ‘socio-cultural’ or ‘socio-historical’ phenomenon. Now, I had been brought up to think that the idea that human beings are ‘socially constituted beings’ was a leitmotif of the incorrigibly feeble-minded: the sort of claim that no self-respecting philosopher would advance. So I was intrigued to find the idea flourishing among thinkers whose intelligence and ingenuity were hard to question. I therefore set about trying to establish what exactly these Russians were arguing and to explore similar ideas advanced by other thinkers. As it happens, since the early 1980s, the idea that the human mind cannot be understood without essential reference to culture has come to prominence in certain areas of Western philosophy and psychology: for example, communitarian political philosophy, feminist theory, certain readings of Wittgenstein, some forms of poststructuralism, and the various species of social-constructionist, discursive and cultural psychology.³ Even in cognitive science it is now common to hear reference to the importance of culture. Yet there remains little consensus about how exactly to understand the relation of mind to culture, or society, or history.

WHAT ROLE FOR PHILOSOPHY?

My Russians were convinced that the socio-historical character of mind is something that philosophy can illuminate. But there are grounds for scepticism here, for the influence of culture, or social interaction, or history, on the nature and development of mind must be an empirical matter, and as such one that lies outside the province of philosophy. If you muse about how great the influence of culture is on your own development, you might find yourself asking questions like: What would I have been like had I been born the child of a Roman centurion? And you might think that headway can be made by treating this as a thought experiment. But in so far as we can make sense of the question at all, surely the only interesting reading is this: How would someone with your genetic make-up have turned out had he or she been brought up as the child of a centurion? That looks like an empirical question about the respective contributions of nature and nurture, not a philosophical one. Questions about the manifestation of genetic traits in contrasting environments are the stuff of twin studies, not thought experiments.

It is interesting that my Russians strongly resisted the idea that they were making a speculative intervention in the nature–nurture debate. In fact, they explicitly argued that psychological development should not be seen in nature–nurture terms (see Mikhailov, 1995, pp. 76–7). First, they maintained that it is a mistake to suppose we can neatly distinguish two discrete causal factors, natural/biological, on the one hand, and cultural/environmental, on the other, and then sort influences on development into one kind or the other. Second, they complained that the nature–nurture debate portrays development exclusively in causal terms. It represents individual development as a product of either natural or environmental influences, or (more plausibly) of some combination of the two. But the position these philosophers were advancing was not one about the causal conditions of human development. Their argument was more transcendental in character: that initiation into culture, social interaction, having a history, and so on are not so much causes of psychological development as preconditions of the possibility of rational agency, and hence of mind, at least in its human form, since these Russian thinkers identified our mindedness with our status as rational agents. We can ask of a rational agent, say, whether she is naturally good at mathematics or prone to fits of anger, but we cannot portray rational agency as determined by nature, nurture, or anything else, for we represent an agent as rational in so far as we see her as autonomous and self-determining. The question for my Russians was the relation of history, culture and society to the possibility of self-determination, an issue that, they complained, was rendered invisible by the nature–nurture debate.

But even if we take a nuanced view of nature and nurture, human development is surely in the realm of the empirical, so what exactly is there for the philosopher to contribute? Well, the Lockean job of underlabourer for the sciences is available. But we can probably find more challenging employment even if we concede that the relation between culture and mind is to be explored by empirical investigation. One role might be to integrate material from different disciplines. Understanding the mind is an interdisciplinary project: we need insights not just from psychology, biology, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, etc., but from a number of historical disciplines, such as archaeology, ancient history, and so on. There are many reasons why practitioners in one field may be unable to see the significance of work in another, even if they are aware of its existence. So one task the philosopher can assume is to weave insights from different fields into a single synoptic vision. This is no easy job, not just because it is hard to establish a common universe of discourse, but because one has to reckon with all the entrenched reasons for thinking the project unnecessary or impossible.

I want, however, to consider whether there might not be a yet more ambitious role for the philosopher—that is, to argue that the human mind is essentially a socio-historical phenomenon. Might there not be distinctively philosophical arguments that would show what my Russians wanted to show—namely, that there is a more than merely empirical connection between possession of a mind and membership in society, culture or community?

Such a position seems to have been held by two of the greats of twentieth-century analytic philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson. I shall briefly sketch their respective positions.

WITTGENSTEIN AND DAVIDSON

In the passages in the Philosophical Investigations known as the ‘private language argument’ and the ‘rule-following considerations’, Wittgenstein argues—or appears to argue—that there could not be a language that is essentially private in character, from which it seems to follow that language is necessarily a public, or communal, phenomenon.

The argument is this: a language in which the meaning of the words was given by entities accessible only by the speaker (such as the speaker’s ideas or sensations) would lack standards of correctness. There would be no way to distinguish correct usage of the words of the language from usage that merely struck the speaker as correct. But a language with no standards of correctness is no language at all; therefore, a private language is impossible.

The ‘rule-following considerations’, which precede the private language argument in the Philosophical Investigations, seem to show that we can make sense of standards of correctness in a practice only by appeal to such notions as agreement and custom. There is no philosophical vantage point from which we can declare that one way of extending a mathematical series, or deploying a concept, is correct and another incorrect. Correctness and incorrectness are disclosed from within our practices—activities that cannot be underwritten by philosophy but must be accepted for what they are: namely, aspects of our natural history or ‘form of life’. Norman Malcolm concludes:

When Wittgenstein says that following a rule is a practice, I think he means that a person’s actions cannot be in accord with a rule unless they are in conformity with a common way of acting that is displayed in the behaviour of nearly everyone who has had the same training. This means the concept of following a rule implies the concept of a community of rule-followers. (1986, p. 156)

Given the intimate connection between language and thought, and between rule-following and rationality, it appears we have an argument that represents membership in a community as a precondition of mind and rational agency.⁴

What of Davidson? In several of his later essays, Davidson argues that interpersonal communication is a precondition of the possibility of thought. This is so in two respects. First, communication is ‘the source of the concept of objective truth’ (Davidson, 1991/2001, p. 209). Invoking Wittgenstein, Davidson argues that a person can be supposed to be engaged in a norm-governed practice—such as thinking, reasoning or speaking a language—only if a distinction can be drawn between her acting correctly or incorrectly; that is, we must be able to distinguish between what the thinker or speaker takes to be the case and what is the case. Davidson maintains that for a mind in isolation nothing can ground this distinction. He writes: ‘[W]e would not have the concept of getting things wrong or right if it were not for our interactions with other people.’ This is not because agreement determines truth, as relativists or social constructionists might argue; rather, consensus ‘creates the space’ in which the concept of truth has application (Davidson, 1997/2001, p. 129). Only a shared public language can have genuine standards of correctness.

Second, Davidson contends that the very possibility of what philosophers have come to call ‘mental content’ depends upon social interaction. He argues that our mental states owe their contents to their causes. My perceptual belief that there is a desk in front of me has the content it does in virtue of the causes that engender it. But the causal process in which the belief originates is complex and the number of contributing causal factors enormous. Why should we pick out the desk as the cause of the belief—and hence as the object the belief is about—rather than some other part of the causal chain, such as images on my retina or events in the visual centres of my brain? Davidson’s answer is that only when we introduce another person into the picture do we have reason to identify the causes of our mental states with the public objects about which we take ourselves to talk and think. Content is determined by a process of ‘triangulation’, in which two people’s responses to stimuli are traced back to a common object. Davidson concludes: ‘Without this sharing of reactions to common stimuli, thought and speech would have no particular content—that is, no content at all’ (1991/2001, p. 212).

Davidson (1991/2001) maintains that these insights resolve many of the traditional problems of epistemology. Knowledge of our own minds and knowledge of other minds are shown to be ‘mutually dependent’: triangulation presupposes that I cannot know what I think unless I can have knowledge of the minds of others, and that I cannot know what others think unless I am able to know my own mind. Both these varieties of knowledge rest in turn upon beliefs about the environment with which my interlocutor(s) and I interact. Davidson famously argues that these beliefs about the environment must be largely correct. For interpretation to be possible, interpreter and interpreted must share a significant number of true beliefs about the world. This is not just because the assumption that one’s interlocutor has largely true beliefs is a precondition of understanding her; triangulation ensures that speakers cannot be significantly in error about what they take their beliefs to be about. If knowledge of the external world, knowledge of other minds, and self-knowledge are all interdependent, and if many of our ordinary beliefs must be true, then the appearance that there is a gulf between mind and world, or between mind and mind, must be illusory. The traditional problems of philosophy are problems no more.

For present purposes, what is crucial is Davidson’s conclusion that ‘interaction among similar creatures is a necessary condition for speaking a language’ (1992/2001, p. 120) and for possessing thoughts:

Belief, intention, and the other propositional attitudes are all social in that they are states a creature cannot be in without having a concept of intersubjective truth, and this is a concept one cannot have without sharing, and knowing that one shares, a world, and a way of thinking about the world, with someone else. (1992/2001, p. 121)

If Davidson is right, minded beings are essentially social.

WITTGENSTEIN AND DAVIDSON CONTRASTED

I shall not undertake a detailed examination of the pros and cons of these much-discussed arguments, but restrict myself to a couple of observations.

It might appear as if Davidson’s and Wittgenstein’s positions are complementary—and hence that the weight of their considerable combined authority presses us to acknowledge the social character of mind.⁵ But things are not so simple. Even sympathetic interpreters of Wittgenstein are profoundly divided about just what his arguments show. Among the most persuasive interpretations is the one propounded by Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, and it is far less bold than Malcolm’s quoted above.

Baker and Hacker take Wittgenstein to have shown that a language must have public standards of correctness only in the sense that its rules must be such that another agent could understand and adhere to them. It does not follow that there must be other agents who actually do understand and adhere to them. What is crucial is that language practices exhibit regularity, but there is no reason why a contingently solitary person should not establish such practices so long as the practices could in principle be learnt by someone else. Wittgenstein treats language as a system of conventions, but a convention could be set up by a solitary individual if the convention were such that someone else—if there were someone else—could adhere to it. This shows that anything that is a language must be learnable by more than one person. It does not show that speakers must be members of communities if language is to be possible (see, for example, Baker and Hacker, 1984, pp. 71–80; 1990).⁶

On this reading, the significance of Wittgenstein’s remarks is primarily negative: they explode Cartesian and classical empiricist conceptions of mind and language. They fall short, however, of establishing a substantive doctrine of the socio-historical self. And this, one might think, is to be expected, since Wittgenstein was clear that the aspirations of his philosophy were to criticise and dissolve philosophical misconceptions rather than to advance positive philosophical theories. Moreover, if we look at what Wittgenstein says about persons and selves in his notorious argument that the first-person pronoun is not a referring expression, we see that advancing a vision of the person as socially constituted is pretty far from his mind.⁷

Davidson, in contrast, is committed to the stronger view that more than one subject must actually exist if language and thought are to be possible: ‘it takes two to triangulate’, as he puts it (1991/2001, p. 213). At the same time, Davidson is profoundly opposed to the idea that language is a system of conventions or that we can understand a language as a kind of social entity or institution over and above the interpretative activities of individual speakers trying to make sense of each other. To understand others, each speaker deploys Tarski-style theories of interpretation, short-term and long-term (‘passing’ and ‘prior’, in Davidson’s terminology), speaker-specific and more general in character, but none of these describes what philosophers and linguists are inclined to call a language. In fact, for Davidson, there is ‘no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what philosophers and linguists have supposed’ (1986/2005, p. 107; see also Davidson, 1994/2005). What there is is the coincidence of idiolects.⁸

So Wittgenstein gives credence to the notion of language as a set of shareable conventions, but does not require that a community exist to share them, while Davidson insists that more than one speaker must actually exist for thought and language to be possible, but he has no time for the notion of language as a social institution. There are deep differen...