Jan Faye

For many years, Arkady Plotnitsky has written extensively about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and his source of inspiration has undoubtedly been Niels Bohr’s philosophy to which he has returned time and again in order to make clear what Bohr said and meant. More than many other philosophers, Plotnitsky’s work shows a deep understanding of quantum mechanics and of Bohr’s thinking especially. In the present paper, he attempts to give a rational reconstruction of what he sees as Heisenberg’s Pythagorean revolution. This he explains as Heisenberg’s aim in his search for a theory. Heisenberg was looking for “a strictly predictive theory of quantum phenomena (only probabilistically predictive on the experimental grounds), without requiring this theory to represent the ultimate reality responsible for quantum phenomena. This is the form of Pythagorean view that this article advocates under the heading of the ‘reality-without-realism’ (RWR) Pythagorean view, also possible in mathematics”. Unfortunately, I think that Plotnitsky’s rational reconstruction misses some important historical facts just as I think the expression “ultimate reality” is unfortunate. Rejecting that our physical theories represent a world beyond the phenomena does not imply that there is something left to be represented in the future.

Bertrand Russell once pointed out that modern science doesn’t deal with causal laws and that assuming otherwise is not only wrong but such thinking is erroneously thought to do no harm. However, looking into the scientific practice of simulation or experimentation reveals a general causal comprehension of physical processes. In this paper I trace causal experiences to the existence of innate causal capacity by which we organize sensory information. This capacity, I argue, is something we have got in virtue of natural selection as can be seen from experiments with intelligent animals like crows and chimpanzees. So understanding the empirical world is impossible without the use of causal categories. The reason why Russell believed that modern science does not refer to causal laws is, I think, because he argued that the laws of mathematical physics give us a non-causal description of reality. In contrast to such a claim I hold that theoretical laws are prescriptive rules of description rather than descriptions themselves.

This paper argues that the fundamental problem of cognitive neuroscience arises from the neuronal description of the brain and the phenomenal description of the conscious mind. In general philosophers agree that no functional approach can explain phenomenal consciousness; some even think that science is forever unable to explain the qualitative character of our experiences. In order to overcome these challenges, I propose a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties of the brain according to which brain states are characterized by intrinsic properties, whereas the brain under the causal influence of an organism’s environment acquires extrinsic properties. These extrinsic properties may account for both phenomenal experiences as well as our thoughts about these experiences. At the end I discuss this proposal viability in relation to higher-order theories.

John Wheeler tells us that Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg met with the Danish philosopher Harald Høffding in the summer of 1927 to discuss the philosophy of quantum mechanics—following the disagreement between Bohr and Heisenberg about the uncertainty relations and right before Bohr’s introduction of his complementarity interpretation of quantum mechanics in Como, Italy, in September 1927. Is this evidence that Høffding had an even greater influence on the early development and interpretation of quantum mechanics than hitherto believed? We trace the historical sources of the story, which Wheeler first heard from Casimir, who apparently was present when the episode took place. We argue that the episode cannot have taken place earlier than 1929 and propose an event in November 1929 as its likely origin. What remains true is that Bohr, Casimir, and Høffding did meet, but the meeting is less remarkable than in Wheeler’s retelling. Nonetheless, Casimir’s role in the story adds new evidence for Høffding’s influence on Bohr. Heisenberg presence, though, is entirely of Wheeler’s invention. We use this rendering to illustrate how Wheeler operated as a storyteller of quantum mechanics from the 1980s to his death.

This chapter is dedicated to the evolution of thoughts and language based on sensory information of the environment. Animals living in socially organized groups have a strong need for communication to convey thoughts and knowledge to other members of the group. Certain primates have different alarm calls for different predators, and biologists have discovered that chimpanzees have at least one hundred behavioral signals with different meaning. These observations support the basic claim of the chapter that primates have thoughts about their experiences and that these thoughts are often image-based but sometimes belief-based and therefore conceptually formed. The same holds for humans whose thoughts are a mixture of image-based and belief-based thinking—for example, when we visualize our memories or mentally picture the streets to find our way around a city we already know. Indeed, the rise of language is possible only if an organism already has some conception of its own and others’ mind. In this perspective, language has evolved as a means of openly expressing animals’ thoughts such that they could share these thoughts with other congeners enabling those to react accordingly. The chapter closes with a naturalist characterization of the narrow and broad content of thoughts and specifies how this distinction relates to sensory and non-sensory beliefs.

The first three chapters deal with different modes of experiential knowledge as these appear in animals and, as I suggest, in humans too. Following up on this discussion, I discuss Wilfrid Sellars’s very influential discussion of sensory knowledge in humans. Sellars accused empiricist approaches of being based on what he called ‘the myth of the given’. He held that no sensation can be treated as being fundamental as we need concepts to identify the propositional content of any belief, and concepts are associated with language. No concept exists in isolation such that when a person states an observation report, that person already knows the meaning of such a report and its possible implications, which Sellars thought were necessary for the justification of the reported belief. The problem with Sellars’s view is that he associates sensory knowledge with the uniquely human ability to report one’s observational beliefs and to commit oneself to the implications of these reports. In other words, he claims that sense impression cannot provide us with sensory knowledge before we have learned a language in which we can report our observation. However, as an evolutionary naturalist, I argue that the capacity of acquiring belief-based knowledge evolved long before humans came into existence. Even after the hominins evolved, they had thoughts by which they were able to identify both individual as tokens or as types, presumably long before they had a developed language.

Explanations are in my view answers to explanatory questions. Such answers may deliver knowledge but also understanding which has a different epistemic status. The challenge to meet in this chapter is to explain how epistemic norms of understanding are rooted in natural cognitive schemas. I argue that understanding as a cognitive phenomenon is different from knowledge and therefore that the standards of understanding are different from the epistemic value of knowledge. A belief has to be true in order to count as knowledge, whereas understanding is not true, but depending on its use more or less adequate or correct. Thus, knowledge does not occur in degrees as understanding does. In an earlier work, I have argued that understanding consists of an organization of beliefs, images, and behaviors. For example, understanding is a coherent relationship among primarily sensory beliefs and bodily information, holding that we acquire new understanding whenever we can incorporate a new belief (image) into an already accepted body of beliefs (images). Understanding like knowledge is, I maintain, a natural phenomenon and as such ascribable to animals and not just to humans. However, I distinguish between three forms of understanding; two of them are forms we find among animals, whereas one form, namely theoretical understanding, is only found in humans. Theoretical understanding is the kind of understanding human gains by relating beliefs through conscious interpretation and explanation in terms of invisible or abstract entities. This form is usually expressed in terms of philosophical, religious, scientific, social, or cultural theories.

This chapter offers a discussion of scientific knowledge, what counts as theoretical knowledge in science, and how scientists may agree about the existence of invisible entities. The suggestion of their existence first appears as an interpretive hypothesis of experimental data, but later these data become evidence as part of the meaning of our knowledge claim that this or that invisible entity exists. Following the naturalist approach underlying the present work, I suggest that as long as theoretical claims result from various forms of induction based on experiments and observations, and scientists agree about the truth of these claims, those claims express the scientists’ knowledge. However, scientists introduce into their theories many abstract concepts, which I as an evolutionary naturalist deny correspond to any abstract entity about which we can have knowledge. It is impossible to see how humans’ adaptation by natural selection enables humans to know something that allegedly does not exist in space and time, and which is causally inert (as abstract objects are regarded to be). Therefore, I separate theories and models, arguing that scientific theories provide scientists with a vocabulary and rules for using this vocabulary by which scientists can describe those entities they consider relevant. In contrast, scientific models are mental or concrete constructions of the relevant objects such that these objects become describable in terms of a particular theory. The scientific model furnishes scientists with an idealized representation of certain objects and enables them to predict the phenomena what they expect to observe and to explain what they might observe.

I argue that the evolution of language had a huge influence on human knowledge and that much of our experiential knowledge evolved into empirical knowledge. This transformation happened because our resources of pre-linguistic concepts that structured our sensory beliefs were largely supplemented with linguistically defined concepts, which helped us to form non-sensory beliefs. Speaking a language is a form of practical knowledge by which humans can express their ideas and knowledge about their environment. However, where experiential knowledge is language-independent, empirical knowledge is language-dependent. To understand the evolution of language from the calls of animals to human speech acts, I draw upon Wayne Davis’s ‘expression theory of meaning’, which maintains that a speaker’s meaning determines word meaning. The theory is partly associated with Paul Grice and sometimes called intention-based semantics. In this context, I discuss how linguistic conventions nevertheless established among a group of language users drawing on works by Ruth Millikan. Based on these accounts of meaning, I describe how individual knowledge in the form of sensory and practical experiences constitutes the foundation of public knowledge we may express in observation reports by giving an empirical description of our individual experiences. I propose that the empirical description concerns entities we can see with the naked eye and that the description happens in terms of predicates whose extension we have defined to cover both visible and invisible qualities of the object.

This chapter investigates knowledge as a natural phenomenon that we find among almost all animals. It discusses Hilary Kornblith’s version of naturalistic epistemology in which he attributes beliefs to birds and mammals. It also considers the practice of modern biologists who describe animal behavior in terms of beliefs and knowledge. Although I agree that many animals have mental states such as beliefs and knowledge, I argue that we should distinguish between two modes of sensory knowledge. One kind is image-based and the other is concept-based. The first mode, image-based sensory knowledge, is what Russell might have had in mind with the term ‘knowledge by acquaintance’. It concerns the recognition of individuals. We find this mode of knowledge to be very common among lower and higher animals as well as human beings. The second mode, the concept-based knowledge, requires the ability to classify things in the environment such that these are experienced as of a certain type. Only in those cases do animals have sensory beliefs. Moreover, I argue that sensory knowledge counts as knowledge, not because it is justified by evidence, but because it is reliably acquired. It is reliably acquired if, and only if, the cognitive mechanisms by which this knowledge is gained deliver proper sense information about the environment according to how these mechanisms are adapted to work by natural selection.

Although experiential knowledge is reliable (because of the adaptation of the cognitive mechanisms by which we achieve such knowledge), this kind of reliability does not automatically transfer to empirical knowledge. Empirical knowledge is defined in relation to language, and the commitments we must be loyal to in order for us to claim that we have empirical knowledge are the same commitments as we must be loyal to as trustworthy speakers. I suggest that knowledge claims are perlocutionary speech acts whose purpose is to convince other people about what we assert such that these people are ready to ascribe knowledge to us. As long as nobody challenges the truth-value of our claims, and everybody agrees to what we state, it is rational to think that we possess the knowledge that we report. It is rational as long as others agree with the content of a report either because it is already common knowledge or because they trust the person making the report. However, a report of empirical knowledge goes beyond the speaker’s immediate experience, even if it is sincerely stated, someone may challenge the claimer and demand of her to be able to justify the claim of knowledge. Regardless of whether or not the claimer is personally able to justify the claim, because she may have forgotten how the information was acquired or had received the information from others whom she trusts, she may still know what she reports. This paves the way for a discussion of the validity of testimonies, which already Hume pointed to as a source of knowledge. In fact, most of our empirical knowledge stems from others’ reports as this knowledge is conveyed via intersubjective communication. The same holds even to a higher degree for people’s theoretical knowledge.

In this opening chapter, I discuss naturalized epistemology in contrast to traditional epistemology dating back to Descartes. What characterizes traditional epistemology is the a priori approach to knowledge according to which knowledge is identical to justified true beliefs. By virtue of such an a priori analysis of knowledge, the consequence is that beliefs must at least fulfill the norms of being true and personally justified. In contrast to traditional epistemology, Quine, in particular, maintained that epistemology should be naturalized. He argued that psychology is the proper area for studying knowledge. The problem with his form of naturalization is that psychology for him was still a question of a behavioristic input-output approach. Thus, naturalized epistemology focuses on physical stimulations and not conscious states, and on the causes of our beliefs and not on the causes of their justification. In my opinion, naturalized epistemology in the Quinian sense is too narrow. A naturalistic approach to knowledge should include evolutionary biology, linguistics, and social and cognitive science. The chapter ends with a presentation of terminology and how I use concepts like ‘cognition’, ‘information’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘understanding’ in relation to one another.

Here the focus is on sensory knowledge that we gain not from the external senses but from the internal senses such as the kinesthetic ones. Just as I distinguish between the two modes of knowledge we obtain from the external senses, I divide knowledge obtained from the internal senses into behavioral and actional mode of knowledge, respectively. The difference is that actional knowledge involves affordances, whereas behavioral knowledge does not. Together they constitute what I call embodied knowledge. In the remaining part of the chapter, I discuss knowledge in contrast to instincts, pointing out that knowledge refers to information acquired through learning, but instincts are congenital reactions to sensory information; they are reactions that are not learned in virtue of the senses. Hence, instincts are not a kind of embodied knowledge. Moreover, I discuss whether knowing-how is reducible to knowing-that, a claim Jason Stanley has recently defended, but which I reject. Embodied cognition and extended cognition are very much in vogue among cognitive scientists, but what insight they really think they gain by introducing these terms is not always clear. Finally, I discuss various suggestions of what extended cognition might mean and whether this notion adds anything to our understanding of embodied knowledge.

Scientists use a plurality of conceptual frameworks in order to explain the phenomena that really matters to them. This situation arises because some sciences study very complex systems. A non-reductive approach to complexity usually relies on notions like supervenience and emergence to characterize what its proponents see as novel and salient features of composite systems. It is those inherent properties that cannot be reduced to properties that belong to the constituents of the system. However, taking notions like supervenience and emergence seriously we introduce ontological levels of reality, which bring in certain problems of their own. In this paper I suggest a different non-reductive approach to complexity in which complex properties of a system are not inherent but occasioned by the system’s environment.

Physicalist theories are either reductive or non-reductive. I argue that two of the reductive theories, eliminativism and the identity theory, do not succeed. My point is that if we were to use a physical description of the brain to explain behavior, we must be able to individuate brain states in terms of mental states. Human actions are most often defined in terms of intentional states. The other reductive physicalist theory, the identity theory, seems to be supported by some recent experiments. However, the multiple-realization argument is considered as a devastating argument against any kind of identity between the mind and the brain. Nevertheless, I believe that this argument is flawed, but that the identity theory is nevertheless inadequate for other reasons. In the end, I present but dismiss a structural identity theory as an alternative to the classical identity theory.

In his seminal paper, entitled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), Thomas Nagel argued that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat because such an animal, due to its use of echolocation, has a very different sensory perspective on the world than a human being. Hence, his conclusion was that our experiences contain some essentially subjective feature that, in principle, is unexplainable by any objective scientific theory. Commonly, these subjective features are called “qualia.” However, it is argued that sensory qualities, considered as qualia or subjective feelings of our experiences, do not exist. In contrast, the suggestion is that sensory experiences present us with qualitative properties, but that such properties neither belong to the experiences themselves nor to the unexperienced object but instead to the experienced object.

This chapter takes issue with Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument (the blind Mary) and David Chalmer’s famous Zombi-argument. What is important in the case of the knowledge argument is that even though theoretically blind Mary knows all there is to know about color perception, she does not know how it is to be in states of experiencing color. The zombie-argument is a conceivable argument, but it presupposes modal realism and a two dimensional semantics. Consequently, if you do not accept these presuppositions, then you do not have to accept the force of the argument. An evolutionary naturalist may argue that Zombies may be “conceivable” in a purely conceptual sense, because the mental is not defined in terms of the physical, or vice versa. However, Zombies are “not conceivable,” if one accepts the naturalist view of the mental as a natural phenomenon resulting from specific laws of nature.

Mental states such as experiences are “presentations” of something outside or inside the body. Moreover, the mind is not like an operating system that monitors what is going on but is nothing but these presentations. Next, a distinction between the conceptual and non-conceptual content of these presentations is made, corresponding to my distinction in Chapter 10.1007/978-3-030-16138-5_2 between sentient beings and conscious beings. The claim is that sensory impressions in the form of experiencing qualitative properties are extrinsic properties of those brain states and that these extrinsic properties are the way in which the object that caused them is presented to consciousness. The elaboration of this idea discusses in detail how and why sensations provide us with the sensory experience of qualities. Moreover, the same extrinsic analysis applies to the conceptual content corresponding to our experience. In the end, the proposal is that self-awareness or self-consciousness can by understood in the terms of the same tokens.

This chapter outlines a naturalist view of the mind from simple sentient organisms to very complex self-reflective organisms like human beings. The existence of nerve cells are a biological precondition for having sensations. In general, the discussion distinguishes between sentient beings, conscious beings and self-reflective beings. The most primitive sentient beings respond generically to various sensory stimuli and behave according to some pre-established genetically inherited patterns. Later, through natural selection, more complex sentient beings evolved with the ability to present their environment in the form of “experiences.” Conscious beings are organisms that are able to form concepts and think about their own experience. Therefore, conscious beings can learn from their own experiences. Finally, self-reflective beings are those organisms that know that they know and can reflect about the consequences of their behavior with respect to themselves and other beings.

Reflecting on what a naturalist approach to an explanation of the mind should accomplish, this chapter takes issue with some of the objections against various attempts to provide an evolutionary account of the mind and its phenomenal properties. A focus is Thomas Nagel’s most recent attack on Darwinism as an impossible framework from which we cannot ever hope to understand consciousness. If his characterization of Darwinism as a reductive theory of organisms is correct, then one might naturally conclude that mental states are out of the reach of scientific explanation. However, this is a misunderstanding of the Darwinian framework. Darwinian explanation depends essentially on an organism’s environment as an explanatory factor. Instead, the chapter outlines what this means for an alternative non-reductive approach.

A horizontal perspective states the intrinsic properties of any physical system do not alone explain the behavior of the system. An environment surrounds all systems, and it is the causal interactions with their environment that provides systems with the extrinsic properties that determine their behavior. The illustration is how to understand the flock behavior of starlings. Extrinsic properties are distinct from relational properties. The suggestion is that mental properties, like sensory properties, are extrinsic properties of the nerve system being produced by environmental stimulations of sense organs. Apart from avoiding the problems with emergentism, such a view is in accord with Darwin’s thesis that the environment plays a determining role in biological evolution through natural selection. As an evolutionary naturalist, one would expect that natural selection determined not only the anatomy and physiology of animals, but also their cognitive and mental features as well.