Identifying Reference - Part Three
Solipsistic and Non-Solipsistic Consciousness
Having discussed a number of conditions, limitations and potential objections, Strawson arrives at the following version of the question he wishes to ask:
"So I shall provisionally interpret the question, "Can the conditions of knowledge of objective particulars be ful-filled for a purely auditory experience?" as meaning: "Could a being whose experience was purely auditory, make use of the distinction between himself and his states on the one hand, and something not himself, or a state of himself, of which he had experience on the other?" This question, for the sake of a convenient phrase, I shall re-express as follows:
"Can the conditions of a non-solipsistic consciousness be fulfilled for a purely auditory experience?" That is to say, I shall mean by a non-solipsistic consciousness, the consciousness of a being who has a use for the distinction between himself and his states on the one hand, and something not himself or a state of himself, of which he has experience, on the other; and by a solipsistic consciousness, the consciousness of a being who has no use for this distinction.
"This question, however, is not the only one we have to answer. There is another which turns out to be closely connected with it, viz.: Can we, in purely auditory terms, find room for the concept of identifiable particulars at all? Would there, in the purely auditory world, be a distinction between qualitative and numerical identity?" (p.69)
The latter question is the type of problem with which Strawson actually began when first proposing his No-Space model. The former question concerning non-solipsistic consciousness seems to be some sort of variant of Strawson's initial characterizing of descriptive metaphysics as concerned with the "actual structure of our thought about the world".
Conscious beings who make a distinction between, on the one hand, their 'internal' states and their sense of identity rooted in such states, and, on the other hand, things considered to be independent of those internal states (and a concomitant sense of identity) would be beings who could distinguish between: a) the actual structure of their thought; and, b) the nature of the world. Therefore, they would be beings able to establish an epistemological bridge of determinate character from a) to b). In short, beings with non-solipsistic consciousness (and the distinctions Strawson believes such consciousness entails) would be beings capable of undertaking and completing the kind of metaphysical program which Strawson has designated as descriptive metaphysics.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a potential fly in the metaphysical ointment which, if not removed properly, will tend to undermine any heuristic properties Strawson's ointment might be thought to possess. More specifically, the fact a being has use for the distinction between self and non-self in no way necessitates that the uses to which that distinction is put will reflect, accurately, the metaphysical character of reality.
Conceivably, the distinction in question could be based on an untenable hermeneutic of experience such that, although differentiations are made between self and non-self, what one considers to be self and what one considers to be non-self are not accurately understood or delineated in .For example, depending on the way one characterizes the 'unconscious' or 'self', one may consider the unconscious dimension as part of self or as non-self. However, the way one characterizes these entities may not be accurately reflective of what role, if any, the unconscious may actually have with respect to self.
Alternatively, mystics might argue along the following lines. Although many individuals can make distinctions between self and non-self, these distinctions may be untenable inasmuch as the actual character of reality is believed to be such that no distinction should be made on the basis of self and other-than-self, and any such distinctions that are made are, in one way or another, erroneous.
Thus, the fact a being with non-solipsistic consciousness has use for the sort of distinctions Strawson outlines may say nothing about what the actual state of the world is, toward which the being's thinking is oriented, or about what the relationship of the individual and the world must be. In effect, what Strawson is describing when he talks of non-solipsistic consciousness is a being who has a certain belief system orientation concerning the metaphysical place of such a being in the world and the manner in which such a being epistemologically goes about describing the character of that being/world relationship. Whether, or not, that belief system orientation describes the actual structure of thought or the actual structure of the world or the actual structure of the interaction of thought and the world are all questions which could be addressed without one's having to make the solipsistic/non-solipsistic consciousness distinction which Strawson makes.
One could imagine that a being with solipsistic consciousness (i.e., a being who has no use for the distinction between self and 'other than self') could undertake a program of descriptive metaphysics which would focus on the 'actual structure of thought about the world' since "the world" would, in such a solipsistic context, be reduced to being a function, simple or complex, of the being's thought structure which was projected as, or onto, the world. On this view, anything experienced as non-self or other than self would be the result of some sort of illusion, self-deception or logical/empirical error.
Therefore, when Strawson asks: "Can the conditions of knowledge of objective particulars be fulfilled for a purely auditory experience?" or: "Could a being whose experience was purely auditory, make use of the distinction between himself and his states, on the one hand, and something not himself (or a state of himself) of which he had experience on the other?", Strawson is asking misleading, if not irrelevant, questions as far as descriptive metaphysics is concerned. The self/other-than-self distinction is not a necessary prerequisite to tackling the problem of the character of thought in relation to the world - a problem which, supposedly, is the task of descriptive metaphysics.
This is not to say the issue of solipsism will not be an important problem to investigate at some point in a program of descriptive metaphysics. Nonetheless, one could travel a fair conceptual distance in such a program without having to know whether the self/other-than-self distinction was an accurate reflection of one's relationship with existence or reality.
If the focus of descriptive metaphysics concerns the "actual structure of our thought about the world", what is of primary methodological importance is the attempt to determine the character of that structure in relation to what we take the character of the world to be on the basis of such thought. Whether the world about which we think is something separate and distinct from us as conscious beings who experience that 'separate' world in various ways, or whether the world about which we think is purely a projected function of such thinking, is initially of far less importance to a program of descriptive metaphysics than is an accurate determination of what constitutes the "actual structure of our thought about" whatever we experience as the object or focus of this thought.
If, for example, there exists consciousness of redness followed by consciousness of blueness, then, as long as the medium of such consciousness is able to identify, differentially, these particular features of consciousness, one doesn't initially need to ask, or know, whether the cause or locus of the object or focus of these experiences is other than the medium undergoing the experiences. The redness and blueness may, or may not, be a function, in part, of objective particulars that are other-than-self, but one doesn't have to know which is the case in order to be able to distinguish the two experiences or to identifyingly categorize them according to the differential character of the two experiences involved.
As far as descriptive metaphysics is concerned, determination of the ultimate source of the object or focus of thought and whether or not the world is distinct from our consciousness are questions which, to the extent they can be answered at all, follow upon, and are subsequent to, an accurate characterization of the nature or structure of thought concerning its various foci of experiential input, from sensation to reflection.
Re-identifiable Particulars
One of the reasons why Strawson introduces the material on solipsistic and non-solipsistic consciousness is because he is concerned about the problem which he believes the issue of re-identification of particularsposes for someone who did not adopt the distinctions made by a being withnon-solipsistic consciousness. Strawson phrases the question he believes is raised here in the following way:
"... does the entailment hold in the other direction too? That is, does the existence of the idea of a re-identifiable particular, and hence the idea of a particular which continues to exist while not being observed, entail the existence of the distinction between oneself and states of oneself on the one hand and what is not oneself or a state of oneself on the other?"(p.73)
There is a logical inference Strawson is making in the foregoing which does not necessarily hold. When, on the one hand, Strawson speaks of the notion of a "re-identifiable particular" but, on the other hand, states, in relation to this notion, "and hence the idea of a particular which continues to exist while not being observed", Strawson is making an inferential jump that might not be a tenable one.
He is equating "re-identifiable particulars" with particulars that continue to exist independently of their being experienced. Nevertheless, one could conceive of circumstances where given particulars could be re-identified without having to suppose re-identification entailed, or presupposed, the continued, autonomous existence of the particulars so re-identified. Consequently, the equivalency Strawson is setting up is potentially faulty.
For instance, suppose an individual underwent an experience in which he or she saw a face (This could be the function of a dream or an hallucination, or it could be a reflection of some 'actual' particular with autonomous, though not necessarily continuous, existence which manifests itself at regular or irregular intervals.) with the following features. There was long reddish-orange hair on top and down the sides of the face; the right eye was covered with a black circular patch of cloth, held on by a thin black string running to each side of the face and disappearing in the hair on each side of the face; the uncovered eye was green; the nose was somewhat flattened and crooked; the mouth was open and smiling, exposing two missing upper front teeth; the jaw was square and without a beard; the cheek-bones were high and the cheeks somewhat sunken; the complexion was ruddy; there was a small scar on his left cheek shaped like an inverted "v".
Irrespective of whether the individual has labels for these various facets of the description akin to those outlined above, all of the features described would be part of the individual's experience of the face. If the same features (structured in the same relationship to one another as were the features of the given face) were to be experientially encountered again by the same consciousness at a subsequent time - somewhat removed from the first instance of encounter - such that it was considered a distinct experience, then, not implausibly, the experiential particulars of the latter encounter might be re-identified as being similar to, if not identical with (This, of course, assumes that the consciousness in question is, in fact, in some undefined sense, the "same" on the later occasion as it was on the previous occasion), the various particulars of the previous, or initial, en-counter (Whether the individual recognized it as a 'face' doesn't matter for present purposes.).
All that is required for such a supposition to be justifiable is for there to be an accurate memory of the character of the first experience which is re-identified as being the same as, or similar to, what is being currently experienced. However, this supposition of re-identification does not necessarily mean the dream existed as a particular between the two occasions of the dream experience. It may only mean that on two separate occasions, circumstances were such as to result in the same dream being manifested.
Thus, for example, given our current ignorance of the mechanisms of dream production, there is little reason for assuming that dreams lie ready-made and waiting to be dreamt somewhere in the brain, much as a movie is in a cannister waiting to be put in a projector to be shown. Indeed, in view of our ignorance, one might suppose, just as easily, that dreams could be produced like a stage play is produced, by putting together bits and pieces of scenery, props, lighting, actors, etc. to create an end product that is called the dream which is then, run as a particular performance for the audience of the mind, using the stage of consciousness. However, unlike the movie which could be re-run intact on numerous occasions, the stage-production theory of dreams would hold that each time a dream runs, it would have to be recreated anew and re-staged, just as a stage play has to be put together again for each performance.
One might argue in a similar way in relation to hallucinations, mystical experiences, and even so-called "real" objects, since the latter might be a function of a process of alternating creations and extinctions on some subatomic or even on some, as yet unknown, sub-quantum level which renders the existence of these objects discontinuous. As a result, such objects might not exist in the interval between the individual's separate experiences of the given object.
Conceivably, like the aforementioned stage-production theory of dreams, one might have a stage-production theory of 'real' objects which are created anew from time to time for each new observational audience. Such a possibility raises questions: about what is meant by the notion of an "object"; about whether or not one could account for the means or mechanism or process by which an object could blink on and off ontologically; and about whether an object which existentially blinked on was identical to the object that blinked off.
If the idea of a discontinuous 'object' world that is constantly in flux and that is continuously appearing and disappearing should strike the reader as rather preposterous, then, I suggest that he or she consult with a few quantum physicists. Their view of reality is readily populated by such notions as "virtual particles" which both exist and do not exist at the same time, or "quantum states" whose character is determined by whether or not someone observes them. Moreover, right up to the instant of observation, these states could be any of several simultaneous possibilities, only one of which is fixed, somehow mysteriously, by the act of observation.
These sorts of issues notwithstanding, re-identification of particulars within a series of experiential settings is a function of the recognition of the requisite number of points of congruency between, or among, experiences involving a certain category of particular. What will constitute the "requisite number of points of congruency" will depend on what contingencies are at play in a given instance of re-identification.
Thus, suppose one experiences 'redness' on one occasion, and, then, later, has another experience of what one re-identifies as 'redness'. In these circumstances, if the sole purpose of the re-identification were to note that the focus of the second experience does not involve blue, yellow, green or black particulars (e.g., one might be asked: was that a red card you saw or a green one?), then, one does not need to assume the same precise red is involved in each case, consisting of the exact same hue, intensity, nuances and so on.
An artist, on the other hand, may notice subtle differences of color character between one experience and another, and although he or she may identify both instances as variations on, say, a redness-theme, he or she would not necessarily re-identify the latter experience as an exactly congruent expression of the former experience, despite their similarities. Yet, this kind of differentiation might be extremely important if the artist were, say, trying to determine if a given painting were a forgery or if the person who had contracted for a painting wanted a specific value of red to dominate the commissioned picture, and so on.
Naturally, in any given instance, one could be mistaken concerning a given re-identification. For example, the criteria of congruency on which such a re-identification is based may not have been sufficiently rigorous and exacting.
Thus, if one only said 'blue' was the criterion for determining congruency, the hearer might not be able to know if the speaker meant 'navy blue', 'sky blue' or 'swimming pool blue'. As a result, the hearer could make mistakes in re-identifying various kinds of particulars.
Consequently, one might not be able to screen out certain particulars which are, in some way, similar to, but, ultimately, substantially different from, the original experience that is to be re-identified in the present circumstances. At the same time, in cases where a re-identification tentatively has been established on the basis of the experiences in question having met certain conditions or criteria of congruency said to be sufficient for determining re-identification under the given circum-stances, then, if one wishes to bring such a re-identification into question, one would have to provide defensible arguments as to why one believed a mistake had been made in the issue of re-identification under consideration.
As the foregoing suggests, there may be degrees of re-identification of greater and lesser congruency among experiences. Whether greater congruency, rather than lesser congruency, must be established in order for re-identification to be determined in any given instance will depend on the circumstances surrounding such re-identifications. Different circumstances will have different criteria of exactitude which the congruency relationship between two or more experiences must attain before re-identification can be said to have occurred.
Irrespective of whatever controversies may arise with respect to whether the criteria for re-identification have been established in any given instance, at no point in these deliberations does one have to assume re-identification necessarily entails the idea that the particulars in question had to exist continuously while not being observed, in order for the re-identification of the particular to be possible. In fact, to make this sort of supposition is to invest particulars with a lot of ontological baggage that is somewhat premature as far as the methodological issues surrounding the re-identification of particulars within experience is concerned.
The question regarding re-identification which first needs to be asked is this: are the given particulars that are experienced at separate intervals "sufficiently" congruent to be considered as identifiable instances of one another? If so, then, from a methodological perspective those instances experienced as being subsequent to some initial encounter constitute re-identifications of the original experiential engagement with the particular of given character. Once this has been established, one could go on, if one liked, to explore whether or not the only way for such a re-identification to be possible would be if some particular had continuous existence between these two experiential encounters.
One must keep in mind that what initially is being particularized here is experience and not some independent real world. To be sure, the differential particularizations of experience may correspond, in some manner, with differential features of the world. In addition, these 'real-world' particulars may have continuous existence while not being observed.
However, such possibilities are not, presently, what is directly at issue. The question is whether the way we particularize experience into various conceptual categories (preferential or otherwise) represents an adequate 'oasis for accurately re-identifying prior particularized experience in terms of current particularized experience and whether or not any given speaker/hearer dyad could use this basis for entering into an intelligible discussion about the "actual structure of [their] thought about the world".
If I correctly understand - and, I may demonstrate the correctness of my understanding by answering to the speaker's satisfaction any number of questions about the character of the particular being referred to in the discussion about experience - what particular you are referring to within a discussion about experience, and if I agree this particular represents an instance of the sort (precisely or nearly so) previously experienced and referred to, then, in terms of the context of that discussion, the issue of re-identification has been settled independently of ever raising the question about the ontological status of the various particulars in the intervals between the experiences in which the particulars are involved. Seemingly, contrary to what Strawson maintains, the "idea of a re-identifiable particular" does not necessarily entail or mean the same thing as the "idea of a particular which continues to exist while not being observed".
To re-identify a particular, is to establish a congruency between experiences separated from one another temporally or by other experiences. This establishment of congruency neither presupposes anything about what the ontological status of such a particular is prior to, or in the intervals between, or subsequent to, these experiences. Furthermore, in the event a congruent link of re-identification may have been made between two separate experiential contexts on one or more given occasions, one need not be committed, ontologically, to anything with respect to what the character of the status of particulars independent of the context of experience must be.
In a sense, this issue of the ontological status of particulars in the intervals between experiential episodes is a second order metaphysical question. This is so because, methodologically, this issue is subsequent to the problems surrounding identification and re-identification.
As such, that issue cannot be properly addressed until these latter topics have been settled in some minimal fashion or until enough ground rules have been established (in relation to handling issues of identification and re-identification). The purpose of these ground rules would be to permit one to have an intelligible referential framework concerning individuated or particularized experiences through which to explore the problem of the ontological status of objects that have been so identified or re-identified.
Strawson's Argument for a Spatial System of Objects
Following his discussion of the problems surrounding the re-identification of particulars, Strawson asks, and, then, answers, a question concerning what he believes are some implications of the re-identification issue:
"... with what feature or complex of features of our familiar world is the idea of re-identifiable particulars, existing continuously while unobserved, most intimately, naturally and generally connected? I think the answer is simple and obvious.... Roughly speaking, the crucial idea for us is that of a spatial system of objects, through which oneself, another object, moves, 'out which extends beyond the limits of one's observation at any moment, or, more generally, is never fully revealed to the observation at any moment. This idea obviously supplies the necessary non-temporal dimension for, so to speak, the housing of the objects which are held to exist continuously, though unobserved; it supplies this dimension for objects which are not themselves intrinsically spatial, such as sounds, as well as for aspects that are."(pp. 73-74)
A number of problems arise in relations to the foregoing quote. This is especially the case in the context of the issue with which Strawson initially was dealing in the earlier stages of the chapter in which the previous quote appears - namely, whether one could develop a basis for determining identifiability-dependence relationships among particulars of different category-character that did not extend any sort of category-preference to the notion of material body particulars. However, as was previously indicated, while the idea of objects as continuously existing (i.e., independently of the experiences in which they were the subject of a re-identification process) might form an integral part of a spatial system which served as a means of housing such objects, this "truth" is irrelevant to the question of whether a non-material body particular based system of identification and re-identification is possible.
In the foregoing quotation, Strawson maintains that "objects" or "particulars" like sound (which, according to Strawson, "are not themselves intrinsically spatial") are dependent for their identification on an underlying set of category-preference primitives - i.e., material body particulars. Earlier in the present essay, Strawson was quoted as maintaining that sound has "no intrinsic spatial characteristics.
According to Strawson expressions such as: 'to the left of', 'spatially above', 'nearer', 'farther', have no intrinsically auditory significance." In one respect at least, Strawson is quite right in contending that expressions like "above", "below", "near", "in front of", and so on, when used in relation to discussions of sound, do not constitute intrinsic features of the character of sound when the latter is taken, in and of itself, as a particularized manifestation of some sort which is independent of a specified context of consciousness or experiential framework.
"Above", "below", "near", etc. are relational terms which link, in this case, sound and a being capable of not merely experiencing, to some extent, the particulars to which the word "sound" collectively refers, but a being also capable of localizing that sound-particular in relation to a given framework of conscious orientation to lived existence (i.e., experience).
On the other hand, sound itself (i.e., the category particular to which the term "sound" refers) seems to have, at least as far as Strawson is concerned, a somewhat nebulous spatial status; for, even though one can locate it in space (which is posited as that which is necessary to house continuously existing material body particulars), by determining its relationship to some given material body particular, one need not have exhausted the spatial characteristics of sound qua sound merely by limiting oneself to its relational properties (with respect to a given material body particular). In fact, quite apart from its relational characteristics, there seem to be spatial dimensions to sound which suggest it does not have to be dependent on material body particulars for its spatial status.
Yet, Strawson appears reluctant to explore these possibilities and determine whether or not sound could have spatial properties which are not, strictly speaking, entirely a function of positional relationships (i.e., "above", "below", "near", etc.) with respect to material body particulars. For example, current investigations in the physics of sound treat sound as a wave phenomenon which requires a medium of transmission in order to be carried over a distance.
The character of this wave phenomenon is said to be a function of a variety of 'input' factors that hold in a specifiable context. Thus, the type of medium (i.e., whether gaseous, liquid or solid substances) will affect the properties of a sound wave, as will the temperature of the medium in which sound is to be transmitted. In addition, the source of the sound wave (i.e., that which generates it) will have a major shaping effect upon the wave character emanating from that source, in terms of frequency, pitch and so on.
"Sound", understood in terms of such an interpretive theory of physics, does possess an intrinsic spatial dimension in the sense that in order, on this view, for sound to be possible, such an interpretation presupposes a notion of space in which wave phenomena can transpire. When considered from the foregoing perspective, space is not described in terms of "above", "below", "near" or "far, nor does this notion of physical space necessarily entail this sort of relational terminology.
"Space" becomes a matter of that which is necessary to house a medium capable of transmitting wave phenomena appropriate to the character of sound as understood by contemporary physicists. So, although one could say, as Strawson does, that sound, considered qua sound, has "no intrinsic spatial characteristics" in the sense of "above", "below" and so on (which clearly presuppose a relational framework of some kind), nevertheless sound does have intrinsic spatial characteristics in the context of certain theories of physics. Furthermore, if these theories turn out to be accurate representations of certain aspects of the character of reality, then, there is a determinate sense in which what Strawson is saying about sound (i.e., that it has "no intrinsic spatial characteristics") will have to be qualified in order not to be misleading.
Moreover, when Strawson says:
"... the most familiar and easily understood sense in which there exist sounds that I do not now hear is this: that there are places at which those sounds are audible, but these are places at which I am not now stationed." (p. 74)
one might postulate, equally well, that the idea of sounds existing independently of a particular referential framework of consciousness may not imply the existence of places other than the one at which the given locus of consciousness currently is stationed. Instead, one might maintain that the idea of sounds existing independently of a particular referential framework simply might suggest there was some sort of a limitation in the capacity of the given locus of consciousness to perceive, or sensibly intuit, a sound which exists at one and the "same place" (whatever this means) as the given locus of consciousness.
In other words, just because a being does not hear something, one cannot conclude, automatically, that what is not heard must be some place else. For, due to a faulty or limited hearing apparatus or due to inattention, sounds which are present may go unheard by the individual.
The foregoing considerations notwithstanding, the main issue seem to be as follows. If one could show that a being in the No-Space world could develop a basis for identification and differentiation of category-particulars encountered, then, one would have put forth a case which seriously would undermine Strawson's claims vis-a-vis material body particulars and asymmetric identifiability-dependence relationships.
Alternatively, given that Strawson already has defined the No-Space world as being without material body particulars because, allegedly, there is no spatial system in such a world which could house material particulars or objects. If so, then, Strawson needs to show that the beings who inhabit a No-Space world couldn't come up with any workable basis for a system of identification and re-identification that could be used as a step in generating a program of descriptive metaphysics. If he could not demonstrate this, then, his failure would leave open the issue of whether or not, in developing a program of descriptive metaphysics, one necessarily, at some point, had to root (as Strawson claims to be the case) this program in asymmetric identifiability-dependent relationships which were functions of material-body particulars.
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