APA Freebook

R O U T L E D G E . TAYLOR & FRANCIS

Epistemology A Routledge Collection for APA Members

www.routledge.com/philosophy Contents

Epistemology: Current Controversies 2 Current Controversies in Epistemology ed. by Ram Neta

Introduction 10 Don't Be Fooled: A Philosophy of Common Sense by Jan Bransen

The Power of Power 27 Power and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelian ed. by John Greco and Ruth Groff

20% Discount Available Enjoy a 20% discount across our entire range of Philosophy books. Simply add the discount code APA17 at the checkout. Please note: This discount code cannot be combined with any other discount or offer and is only valid on print titles purchased directly from www.routledge.com. This discount is valid until 31/12/2017.

www.routledge.com/philosophy Epistemology Current Controversies RAM NETA

Introduction If you are reading this book, then it is very likely that you are either affi liated with an institution of tertiary education (a college or university), or that you have had some such affi liation in the past.1 Such institutions describe their missions in different ways, but one thing that their various descriptions have in common is a focus on the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge. To the extent, then, that we care (as many of us increasingly do) to understand and evaluate the mission of such institutions, we should be concerned to understand what knowledge is and why it is worth acquiring or disseminating. Epistemology is the attempt to answer such questions. And while epistemology is much older than any current institution of tertiary education, it arose in response to the systematic attempt to acquire and disseminate knowledge. Early work in Greek epistemology arose in refl ecting on Meno’s question whether virtue could be taught, or in refl ecting on Theaetetus’ dedication to acquire knowledge. But, as so often happens in philosophy, refl ection on these issues has led to controversy on several other, closely related issues. Four of these controversies have been especially important in the history of epistemology over the past three centuries at least: the nature and extent of a priori knowledge, the nature and extent of a posteriori justifi cation, the solution to the problem of the regress of justifi cation, and the question of whether skepticism can be refuted. The current state of these four controversies is repre- sented in each of the four parts of this volume.

3 • Ram Neta

You will notice that the term “justifi cation” occurs in the title of the fi rst three of these four parts of the volume, but the term “knowledge” does not. Why? For at least the past century, epistemology has proceeded under the assumption that the very same procedures or capacities or grounds that sometimes give us knowledge do on other occasions fail to give us knowledge, but fail in such a way as to leave us rationally permitted—perhaps even rationally obligated—to believe something that we (unbeknownst to ourselves) don’t know to be true. The evidence all strongly indicates that the patient will die within 6 months, and so we are rationally permitted, perhaps obligated, to believe that the patient will die within 6 months—but what if, nonetheless, the patient were to live longer? Then we would have been rationally permitted or obligated to believe something that turns out to be false, and so that we could not have known to be true. The controversies discussed in the fi rst three parts of this volume are controversies concerning the kind of permission or obligation that rationality can issue us with respect to a proposition, even when we fail to know that proposition to be true. This kind of permission or obligation is what I, following at least some common parlance in epistemology, call “justifi cation.” Though different epistemologists use the term “justifi cation” in different ways, and even when they use it the same way they often end up having very different theories of what constitutes possession of the relevant deontic status, the controversies discussed in the fi rst three parts of this volume tend to proceed on the assumption that we can fi x our attention in common on a single deontic status and engage in a fruitful dispute concerning the nature or extent of that status. Since it is that deontic status that is of distinctive concern to epistemologists—the deontic status that is involved in knowing, but can on occasion occur without it—the fi rst three parts of the volume are framed as controversies concerning justifi cation, rather than knowledge.

1. The A Priori: Can We Gain Justiﬁ cation Independently of Experience? Throughout much of its history, epistemology has been interested in understanding whether—and if so, then how—it is possible for us to know not merely what happens to be the case, but what must be the case. (Indeed, many philosophers interpret Plato as having Socrates advance the view, in the Republic, that knowledge is possible only with respect to what must be the case, and not with respect to what merely happens to be the case.) If we know what happens to be the case (e.g., that the clouds are now hiding the sun from view, or that the automobile behind us just honked its horn), then we know these things by means of what we currently see, or hear. Perception is thought to be the source of our knowledge of what happens to be the case (Part II of this volume is devoted to examining how this is possible, and Part IV to whether we can prove that it is possible). But can perception tell us about not

4 Epistemology: Current Controversies •

merely what happens to be the case, but rather what must be the case? Many philosophers2 have thought that it could not do so. But if perception cannot tell us what must be the case, then how, if at all, is it possible for us to know what must be the case? Descartes devotes much of his Meditations on First Philosophy3 to answer- ing this question. He attempts to identify the source of our knowledge of what must be the case by supposing that all of the information that we receive by means of sensory perception is false. On this supposition, what, if anything, is it still possible for us to know? Descartes argues that, even on this supposition, it is possible to know of one’s own existence as a thinking thing, it is possible to identify the source of this knowledge as a faculty of clear and distinct perception (or what Descartes sometimes calls “the natural light”), and it is possible to articulate the knowledge provided by this source as knowledge of the nature of extended substance, knowledge of the nature of thinking substance, and knowledge of the nature of perfect substance. All such knowledge, on Descartes’ view, is fully precise, even if very incomplete. Whatever exactly this faculty of clear and distinct perception amounts to, for Descartes, it must be distinct from sensory perception, because we gain knowledge by means of it even on the supposition that all of the information acquired by means of sensory perception is false. This sort of knowledge is what philosophers since Kant have called “a priori.” Notice that, as I just deﬁ ned a priori knowledge, it is knowledge of what must be the case, it is knowledge acquired by means of a faculty that is distinct from sensory perception, and it is, ﬁ nally, knowledge acquired by means of a faculty that could give us knowledge even on the supposition that sensory perception fails to do so. But it is a substantive commitment that there is some kind of knowledge that bears all of these properties. A number of Descartes’ successors may be understood as criticizing this commitment in different ways. David Hume, for instance, thinks that claims about what must be the case, to the extent that they are not confused, are claims that concern only relations of ideas, viz., relations among the various combinations of traces left on our minds by impressions. 4 The faculty by means of which we know such claims to be true is simply the faculty that preserves traces of our impressions and combines them in various ways. But this is the same faculty by which we gain knowledge of such contingent features of the world as that the clouds are now hiding the sun, and so the faculty that delivers knowledge for necessity is the same, for Hume, as that which delivers knowledge of contingency. Immanuel Kant thinks that our knowledge of what must be the case arises not from one but rather from two distinct sources: the form of our intuition, and the cat- egories of the understanding, and the ability of these sources to give us knowledge is not entirely independent of the ability of sensory perception to give us knowledge. 5 In particular, for Kant, we gain knowledge of the necessary by abstracting away from particular features of our knowledge of the contingent.

5 • Ram Neta

The question of whether there is a priori knowledge is the question of whether our knowledge of what must be the case—our knowledge of such necessary truths as those of mathematics and logic, for example—is knowledge that is furnished by means of a faculty that is distinct from sensory perception, or not. In Chapter 1, C.S.I. Jenkins defends the ﬁ rst option. In the Chapter 2 , Michael Devitt defends the second option.

2. The A Posteriori: How Does Perception Justify Belief? Clearly, there is some justifi catory relation between perception, on the one hand, and our beliefs about the way things happen to be, on the other. I wake up, look at the sky, and see that it is still dark. On the grounds provided by my visual experience of the dark sky, I am now justifi ed in believing what I now proceed to believe, namely, “it is not yet 7:00 a.m.,” and so I am now justifi ed in doing what I now proceed to do, namely, go back to sleep. In describing this situation, I’ve spoken glibly of the “grounds” provided by my visual experience of the dark sky. But precisely how does my visual experience provide me with such “grounds”? Does the mere occurrence of that visual experience make it the case that I am justifi ed in believing (whether or not I go on to believe) that it is not yet 7 a.m.? Or is it rather that the occurrence of that visual experience makes it the case that I am so justifi ed only in tandem with some further belief that I have (e.g., that the sun does not rise until after 7:00 a.m. this week)? Or is it rather that the occurrence of that visual experience makes it the case that I am so justifi ed only in tandem with some memories that I have (e.g., memories of seeing the sun rise around 7:00 a.m. on each of the past few days)? And if my justifi cation depends, not merely on my visual experience, but also on other beliefs or memories of mine, then does it depend in some different way upon these different factors? Does one of these factors constitute the justifi er and the other constitute a mere enabler of justifi cation? Or do the factors con- tribute to my justifi cation in the same kind of way? Furthermore, must these other beliefs and memories themselves be justifi ed in order to confer justifi cation? If so, how do they earn such justifi cation? This line of questioning can lead us to worry about the regress of justifi cation, discussed in section 3 below. Although I have framed the issue here as one of understanding precisely how it is that sensory perception contributes to justifying our beliefs about the way things happen to be, I should note that some philosophers—notably Don- ald Davidson 6 and Wilfrid Sellars 7 —have claimed that sensory experiences do not justify beliefs at all, but are merely the typical causes of beliefs (which themselves justify other beliefs). One reason why they held this view is that they believed nature of sensory experience left it mysterious how such experiences (so conceived) could stand in justifi catory relations to beliefs. With that view, one mental state can justify another only if the content of the fi rst stands in some relation of entailment or of probabilifi cation to the content

6 Epistemology: Current Controversies • of the second. But, if there is such a thing as “perceptual content” at all, how can it stand in a relation of entailment or of probabiliﬁ cation to the content of any belief? Neither Davidson nor Sellars thought it could. Whether or not they were right, what this bit of the history of epistemology illustrates is that questions about the kind of justiﬁ catory relations that obtain between sensory experiences and beliefs about the way things happen to be cannot be answered independently of considering the nature of sensory experiences themselves. As you read the chapters by Richard Fumerton and Nico Silins, ask yourself whether their contrasting views on the way in which sensory experiences can justify beliefs might tacitly depend upon contrasting presuppositions about the sorts of episodes that sensory experiences are.

3. The Regress of Justifi cation: Does Justifi cation Rest on a Foundation? You believe that the legislative elections will be held next week. Your justifi cation—or at least part of your justifi cation (see the discussion above)— for believing this is that you read it in the newspaper, and you believe what you read in the newspaper, barring some special reason not to believe it. But what justifi es you in believing what you read in the newspaper on this occasion? Well, this newspaper is widely recognized as a reliable newspaper, and there is no reason why the newspaper would risk its reputation for reliability by reporting a story that could be so easily found out to be false. But what justifi es you in believing that the newspaper is widely recognized as a reliable newspaper? Was it the Pulitzer prizes that the newspaper won last year, or its broad name recognition? But what justifi es you in believing that the newspaper really did win those Pulitzers last year, or that your memory isn’t generally misleading about such things? A persistent inquirer can continue this series of questions concerning justifi cation for quite a long time—in fact, for such a long time, that it is not clear how, if at all, this series can arrive at a rational conclusion. Can it rationally conclude by appeal to something that provides justifi cation but does not require it in turn? Can it rationally go on forever? In the fi rst chapter of Part III, Declan Smithies defends the fi rst option. In Chapter 6, Peter D. Klein defends the second option. Of course, their dispute is not about the conditions under which any actual procedure of the sort described above must, as a matter of practical necessity, come to an end: it is rather a question about whether, or how, such a procedure can be rationally complete. Could there be something that did not require justifi cation in order to confer justifi cation? The founda- tionalist says that there is, and in his chapter in this volume, Smithies defends foundationalism. Foundationalism, as it is usually understood, involves two commitments: fi rst, that there could be something that did not require justifi cation in order

7 • Ram Neta to confer justifi cation, and second, that all epistemic justifi cation bottoms out in such “foundational” justifi ers. In his response to Smithies, Klein attacks the second of these two commitments. As you read the Klein chapter, think about whether he attacks the fi rst commitment as well. Is there room for some rapprochement between the views that Klein and Smithies defend? This controversy concerning the possibility of rationally completing the regress of justifi cations is related to the controversy enacted in section 2 above, concerning how perception justifi es belief. If, as Silins argues in Chapter 4, perceptual experiences can themselves give us defeasible justifi cation for believing particular propositions about the world around us, and they can provide this justifi cation anterior to anything else’s providing us with justifi cation for believing any other propositions, then there must be such a thing as a “foundational” justifi er: there must be some kind of thing (viz., perceptual experiences, conceived of along the lines that Silins provides) that can confer justifi cation without requiring it in turn. And if that is correct then Klein is not right to suppose that the regress of justifi cations cannot be rationally complete. The controversies in Parts II and III are thereby closely related.

4. Skepticism: Can We Know That We Are Not Completely Deceived? It seems that you know yourself to have hands. It also seems that you are in a position to know anything that obviously follows from your having hands. But one thing that follows from your having hands is that you are not a handless brain, ﬂ oating in a vat of nutrient ﬂ uid, and being electrochemically stimulated to have the very series of experiences that you’ve had up until now. And, if you do know yourself to have hands, then you must also know yourself not to be some such brain in a vat (henceforth, BIV). But if you do know yourself not to be a BIV, then you must know this either on the basis of experience (that is, a posteriori) or else you must know it not on the basis of experience (that is, a priori). Could you know it on the basis of experience? That seems quite obviously impossible, since you would have precisely the same experience even if you were a BIV. Whatever appeal you make to your own experience in attempting to justify your belief that you are not a BIV, this is an appeal that the BIV could make just as well as you can, since the BIV has, by hypothesis, all the same experiences that you have. And if the BIV can issue this same appeal to experience, then your appeal to your experience cannot provide you with knowledge that you are not a BIV. Could you then know a priori that you’re not a BIV? How is that possible? Even on the supposition that you have a great deal of a priori knowledge of how things necessarily are, it is not clear that there is anything necessarily about you not being a BIV. Could you not possibly be a BIV? Some philosophers, e.g., Don- ald Davidson,8 Hilary Putnam,9 and John McDowell,10 have all argued that

8 Epistemology: Current Controversies • there is some feature of your mental life that a BIV cannot have, and so you can know, on the basis of mere refl ection upon your own states of mind, that you are not a BIV. In Chapter 7, Anthony Brueckner attacks various versions of this view, while, in Chapter 8 , Ernest Sosa defends a distinctive and original version of it. As you read the chapters in this part of the volume, and some of the readings mentioned in the “Suggestions for Further Readings” page, you will notice that the refutability of skepticism depends, to a large extent, on the correct account to the various other controversies canvassed in this volume. If we can identify foundational justifi ers, then this could allow us to refute the skeptic. If we can identify the presence of perceptual experiences that furnish us with a posteriori justifi cation, then this could allow us to refute the skeptic. Or, in any case, it could allow us to identify the mis-step in the skeptic’s argument, even if it does not enable us to prove her conclusion to be false.

Notes 1. Or you are one of my children, in which case: ﬁ nish your homework. 2. Though perhaps not all: see the widely inﬂ uential discussion of the “necessary a posteriori” in Kripke 1980. 3.Descartes 2006. 4.Hume 1993. 5.Kant 1996. 6.Davidson 1980. 7.Sellars 1997. 8.Davidson 1980. 9.Putnam 1981. 10. McDowell 1994.

References Davidson, Donald. 1980. “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford, 227–41. Descartes, René. 2006. Meditations on First Philosophy, edited by Roger Ariew and Donald Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett. Hume, David. 1993. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Eric Steinberg. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. The Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Werner Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard. McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Oxford: Oxford. Plato. 1990. Theaetetus, translated by Jane Levett and Miles Burnyeat. Indianapolis: Hackett. Plato. 2002. Five Dialogues, translated by G. M. A. Grube and John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett. Plato. 2004. Republic, translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett. Putnam, Hilary. 1981. Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1997. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom. Cambridge: Harvard.

9 Introduction How words liberate and captivate people

1. Autism

Teddy bear She is standing at the top of the stairs, aged two and a half, and raises her hand holding her teddy bear. ‘Teddy’, she says. Her father, half behind her, understands and takes the teddy bear. Satisﬁed, his daughter then grabs the handrail and carefully goes downstairs, step by step. She doesn’t need more than one single word to conjure up a complete scenario and to realise her goal. ‘Listen here, Daddy. I would like to go downstairs and I am now big enough to do so on my own if I hold on to the handrail. But look, I am still carrying my teddy bear, and that makes it impossible of course; not only am I already big, but I’m also still little. So if you can take my teddy bear, I can go downstairs by myself. And then you can give me back my teddy bear downstairs, because you are big enough to go downstairs with a teddy bear in your hand. Is that alright?’

Dasein Martin Heidegger, the famous German philosopher, is sitting at his old oak desk. He reads the passage he has just written and nods approvingly.

‘In contrast, for our Dasein, this — that we understand Being, if only in an indeﬁnite way — has the highest rank, insofar as in this, a power announces itself in which the very possibility of the essence of our Dasein is grounded. It is not one fact among others, but that which merits the highest worth according to its rank, provided that our Dasein, which is always a historical Dasein, does not remain a matter of indifference to us.

10 Introduction Yet even in order for Dasein to remain an indifferent being for us, we must understand Being. Without this understanding, we could not even say no to our Dasein.’ (Heidegger, 1953/2000, p. 116)

What you say is not always clearer if you have more words at your dis- posal. But the more words you have, and the greater the care with which you pick your words, the more independent the message will become from its context, its sender and its recipient. In the Teddy bear scenario, one word is enough, at least if your father is a good listener and you can hand him your bear. But what if, as in the Dasein scenario, you need to say something about an abstraction that you can’t point at and to a listener who doesn’t know you and may have a completely different way of thinking? What if you want to say something to a person unknown to you about the behaviour of someone who this person doesn’t understand? In such cases you need an extensive vocabulary, a vocabulary that is objective and that is rooted in reality rather than in your communicative skills, a language that belongs neither to you nor to the other person, a language spoken by the world in itself. Such an independent language with objective foundations is an old ideal – an emancipatory ideal from the Enlightenment. If words don’t belong to anybody in particular, this gives us the greatest chance that no subjec - tive distortions will surreptitiously sneak into our utterances. At least, this is one of the presuppositions that have come along with the idea that modern science has a liberating and democratic effect because it provides us with a wonderful human ability: critical thinking. In this book I investigate the plausibility of this presupposition and pose questions about the role of expertise and common sense in the development and use of a language necessary for people to understand both themselves and each other. I will start off this investigation with a third scenario, a scenario that was unthinkable 20 to 30 years ago; not only have I witnessed this myself in the past year, but I have also heard similar stories from other people. Slowly but surely scenarios like this are becoming the norm.

Michael We are sitting in a circle. Sixteen people who do not know each other, but who have all joined a bookbinding course, which we will be following together in the coming weeks. It is the ﬁrst night of the course. The teacher, who will turn out to be ﬁne, has not investigated the variety of modern approaches that are available to get to know each other a little bit in a

11 Introduction more or less surprising manner. Instead, he has opted for the traditional round of introductions, in which everybody shares information about themselves and their expectations regarding the course. Michael is number four. ‘Hi, my name is Michael. I am autistic. This is not something that people can easily see about me, and that’s why I’m telling you.’ Everybody is listening and nodding understandingly. This is the way things go nowadays. This is the way you introduce yourself.

2. Zoon logikon: talking animals The behavioural sciences, a relatively recent invention, have had an intri- guing effect on human existence. Of course, 150 years ago there were also people who would now be regarded from a neurological or behavioural point of view as people with an autistic disorder. But that was not what they were called then. Nor was it how this was experienced, either by the people themselves or by their environment. In those days, there was no way for people to diagnose themselves as autistic. And it was impossible to deal with relatives, friends and acquaintances in a way that could be characterised and summarised by the label ‘autistic’. Nowadays, however, this is a respectable way to find your place in society (Cf. Hacking, 2002). Michael is autistic. Clear. You know immediately who you are dealing with. At least, if you have enough information, if you know enough about behavioural disorders, and if Michael gives you some additional information about his specific subtype within the autism spectrum. People are talking animals. They use their voices when they introduce themselves. ‘My name is Michael.’ Their physical appearance is apparently not sufficient to know who they are. They say their name and add, if there is enough space and time and if it is expected, a label, a description or a story. For example, they can say what they do for a living, where they are from, what they like, or anything else that is characteristic of them. ‘I am autistic.’ If you get to talk to them in greater detail, you will notice that they draw much more on our common language. They can tell you complete stories about themselves and the most interesting aspect of these stories is that they are not superficial stories, similar to commercial posters or window dressing, but that they are stories that are fundamental to how a person experiences himself, understands himself, is himself. I am not saying that these stories are true or untrue; I am not nearly ready for such difficult issues. Nor is that my point. At the beginning of your bookbinding course you can easily say that you are fascinated by old craft, that you love books, reading, culture and tradition, and that you

12 Introduction adore the musty smell of old books that you always sniff attentively when you open a tome. You may even start believing this story yourself, even if you know that the real reason you are using such an introduction is that you have joined the course because you are looking for a relationship and that you believe that these supposed confessions will make you more attractive to women. When you introduce yourself you add verbal layers of the person you are, or think you are, to your bodily presence. This is no deception. But of course you can fool the other, or fool yourself. Of course you can pretend to be much more interesting than you really are and you can theatrically pick up an old volume and sniff the cover. And since you have begun to fantasise, you may well continue to imagine how the ladies at the bookbinding course start fidgeting, how they sigh quietly and decide to approach you during the break to confess they too adore that musty smell. If you’re inclined to fool yourself, I don’t mind fanning the flame. Nevertheless, people who introduce themselves are usually sincere. With a fancy word you could call these introductions personal identity management. (Bransen, 2008) This in no way means that you are pretending to be something you are not. You are presenting yourself, trying to make visible what is not immediately visible, in this case yourself. For this you need an increasing number of words, something you notice when you get older. You can use these words like you use a torch, to illuminate dark holes and corners. The words you use to introduce yourself have a similar effect to the torch in the dark: the ray of light not only illuminates the item it focuses on, but also deepens the darkness around it. What is outside the centre of attention becomes darker and less visible. Even though truth and truthfulness are important in this matter, in the case of self-presentation and self-interpretation it is not immediately clear what is true and truthful. If you introduce yourself, you do not give an objective account of what you know about yourself. It is not like reading a thermometer or giving directions. If you introduce yourself, you are creating something, putting something into words; it is expressive rather than a neutral exchange of information (Cf. Taylor, 1985). And exactly because it is expressive, because it is a matter of putting something into words, of finding the right words, I have elaborated on what would happen if Michael were to introduce himself by saying that he is autistic. People – talking animals, zoon logikon as the ancient Greeks put it – not only live in the world and are not only a physical body, but they also live in their stories and are also their voice. I am especially interested in the fact that these stories are built with and around the words that people have been given by their common language. This language

13 Introduction belongs to everybody in general and to nobody in particular. This language is alive, with us and among us. But even though this language belongs to everybody, that doesn’t mean that everybody has the same influence on the language. Some groups of speakers have more influence on the development of a language because they are seen as experts in their fields.1 My gardener taught me how to use the words ‘goutweed’ and ‘horsetail’. My GP told me what is meant by an irritable bowel and by Crohn’s disease. And the TV sports commentator explained the difference between ‘man- on-man coverage’ and ‘zone coverage’. If we want to examine human self-interpretation, what people say about themselves, the concepts they have learned to use to discuss their own behaviour, their motives, their attitudes, their outlook on life in general and their own life in particular – if we want to examine all that, Western culture has seen a long procession of experts. This procession is led by ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle, closely followed by physicians like Hippocrates and Galenus, church fathers like St Augustine and St Jerome, theologians like Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, humanists like Erasmus and Spinoza, physicists like Newton and Einstein, authors like Shakespeare and Goethe, political thinkers like Machiavelli and Montesquieu, and modern philosophers like Kant and Wittgenstein. However, since the advent of empirical science, since psychology disentangled itself from philosophy, and since healthcare started reorganising itself along lines of economic feasibility, a new type of expert has appeared: the behavioural scientist, who knows his way around the most up-to-date version of the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Since then, a new well-founded vocabulary has become available for if we want to (or have to) introduce ourselves. This new vocabulary holds a promise. In the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal explained the vulnerability of human existence as a lack of self- knowledge. He stated that even though mankind is capable of knowing all about nature around us, this will eventually lead us nowhere, as we do not understand our own human nature. However, with the advent of the modern behavioural sciences a vocabulary has become available with which we can accurately and truthfully tell the story about ourselves. ‘I am Michael. I am autistic.’ Here is the promise, analogous to the toddler standing at the top of the stairs, lucky enough to have a father who understands his daughter so that she needs to use only one word. It is the same with Michael: — Listen people. It is not so easy for me to understand the processes going on between and among you. All I know is that I have a different mental make-up than you. I like to be on my own and I don’t need to have so much contact with other people. I’d rather be home with my

14 Introduction stamp collection. I have all my stamps neatly pasted in my album, exactly in the correct place. I am never sure what other people expect of me. I have a doctor, or actually a psychologist. A therapist. She says that it is good for me to see other people. She gave me the ﬂyer for this course. She said that this may help me to have better interaction with my grannie, the neighbours and the people at my work. She said that it may help if I tell you what is the matter with me. Because you will understand that I am autistic. So. Okay?

3. Independent of context and audience

Cake I am standing at the counter, and I bend over a little, keeping my head up so that I can see better. — That one there. No, no, not that one, this one here. Yep, that one. — Ah, you mean the Triple Layer Nutty Cappuccino Cake. How many slices would you like? — Three, please.

Sometimes I overdo it and hold up three fingers. Quite easy, talking with your hands and feet. Of course you would learn the names of all the different cakes soon enough if you worked at a patisserie, as that would only be practical. After all, superficially it is all only a matter of using your brain economically, being slightly lazy. The next time I buy cake will be months from now, and by that time I will certainly have forgotten the name of that scrumptious little cake. — Yep, that one there. The one I had last time. The same thing happens at the fishmonger’s. Or at the garage. Or in your own garden, when you have finally decided to bring in a professional gardener, to whom you point out the weeds in your garden. ‘Goutweed, horsetail, shepherd’s purse, knotgrass, bellbind.’ Such silly names! They go in one ear and out the other. After all, they are only names, and they are only weeds. It’s actually rather pretty, bellbind. It is more serious at the GP’s. She also uses classifications. And she also looks for the right word, asks questions, presses on your stomach, uses the stethoscope to listen to your heart and lungs, uses a little light to look into your eyes – all that to reach the right diagnosis. But the GP doesn’t use just any old terms. They are all related to a certain therapy and it is sometimes a matter of life and death. But even for someone of a mildly hypochondriac disposition, ‘sometimes’ may be often enough, and scary enough. Life and death, that doesn’t bear thinking about. That’s why it is so fortunate that the GP is an expert. She doesn’t just name the

15 Introduction symptoms. She is a representative of medical science, who uses a universal language to reach an objective diagnosis, who studies the underlying mechanisms at micro- and nowadays even at nano-level, and who systematically evaluates her treatment, so that she can take pride in impressive successes and can make use of evidence-based interventions. Welcome to the twenty-first century! One crucial aspect of medical vocabulary and the medical profession is that the diagnosis, treatment and theory-building are independent of your own GP’s individual characteristics. At least, if you have a good GP. Medical science is objective, and its language is anchored in reality rather than in our ways of interacting. For example, herpes zoster is shingles, and it is the same the world over. If you have that particular disease, any doctor can make the diagnosis and prescribe treatment. Even if you are on the other side of the world and you are suddenly confronted with the symptoms of this disease, and you can only explain what you are feeling by using your hands and feet, the doctor who you visit there and who only speaks Vietnamese will be able to make the diagnosis. He will give you a prescription that you can probably not read, but fortunately the chemist that you will visit later is also an expert; he can easily read the illegible scrawl and will give you the correct antibiotics. It is a relief that even the final details can be communicated using your hands and feet. Three pills a day. Three? You hold up three fingers. He nods. Good. The existence of an objective vocabulary, a vocabulary in which a message can be formulated such that its meaning is completely independent of the context, the speaker and the recipient, is an invaluable cultural achievement. An objective vocabulary that is actually embedded in reality is an unparalleled ideal that has captured the imagination for over 2,500 years. It is uncertain whether modern science has been able to reach or even to approach this ideal. However, as a result of its tremendous technological and medical successes, at first sight science seems to have been proven right. Critical modesty should be part of this success. But our growing knowledge comes with all kinds of snags. And of course it is much more difficult to have a well-defined meaning, independent of context and recipient, for a concept such as AUTISM than for concepts such as THREE and HERPES ZOSTER. However, it is not impossible. At least, there doesn’t seem to be any fundamental reason why science would not be able to map human behaviour. Just take a look at the major advances made in mapping physical, biochemical and neurological reality. Especially because modern science knows the enormous challenges it faces, it can keep its ambitions high and offer mankind a methodological framework for the development of a vocabulary that can guarantee objective independence.2

16 Introduction This vocabulary needs gatekeepers, experts who guard the meaning of the terms used. Not everybody understands HERPES ZOSTER well enough to define this concept; physicians do. Not everybody understands GOUTWEED well enough to define this concept; biologists do. The following is also true: not everybody understands AUTISM well enough to define the concept, but scientists who know the DSM do. These gatekeepers, these experts, have provided mankind with an objective language, a language in which the terms mean what they mean, independent of context, sender and recipient. Even if you have insufficient expertise to define certain scientific concepts, you can still learn how to use them. This is satisfying and important, as it also gives non-experts the opportunity to find their way in a world that is continually becoming more complex. If you have had herpes zoster a number of times, you will have learned to recognise the symptoms and you will be able to have a discussion about this disease with your doctor. You know when you have shingles and also when it is definitely something else. Similarly, you can become an expert in weeds when you notice that goutweed keeps on raising its ugly head. After a while you recognise that irritating weed from miles away. The same goes for Michael and for us, his twenty-first-century fellow humans. By now we have learned to use the term ‘autism’. We have heard a great deal about it and come across it often. We have learned to recognise autism as one way of being a human being. To us autism is just a thing that some people have. It is beginning to become normal.

4. Missing information subroutine Suppose you are in a particular situation and you are not quite sure how to go on. For example, you are in town, looking for a shop, but you are not quite sure where this shop is and you are already late. Or you’re cooking dinner, trying out a new recipe, following the instructions but it doesn’t look as if it is going to turn out the way you expected. Or you’re reading a book, for example this one, and you are losing your feet, for example like now. Where is this all heading? You can’t really follow the reasoning anymore. What are you going to do? The sensible thing would be to give yourself a moment to think, to take a step back and observe the situation from a distance. How did you get to be in this situation? What is the logical structure of this scenario? And does that help you to determine with some clarity what the next logical step would be? So when we consider the book scenario, let’s brieﬂy look back together, from a little distance. In a nutshell, these are the steps that we’ve made so far (or at least the steps I have suggested):

17 Introduction • This book is about the role that expertise plays in our daily lives. • This role is much to do with language. • Experts are the developers and gatekeepers of different vocabularies with a presupposed objective validity. • At present, behavioural scientists are the experts who guard the vocabulary that we apparently need to use in order to understand ourselves. • Behavioural scientists strive for a language that is independent of context, sender and recipient, a language which is primarily anchored in reality rather than in communicative interaction. • Behavioural scientists have not only introduced new concepts such as AUTISM and OBESITY, but have also given a respectable scientiﬁc content to well-known concepts such as ADOLESCENCE and EDUCA - TION. • As a result of this language, our lives are increasingly controlled by experts.

Before elaborating on these thoughts, I will ﬁrst discuss a way of thinking that has become dominant: using the missing information subroutine as a starting point. The concept subroutine comes from ICT. My ICT knowledge stems from when I was a student of philosophy and I bought a Commodore 64, the ﬁrst computer for consumers, with which you could perform miracles. The number 64 referred to its working memory, which was its only memory. It had no hard disk, no disk drive and no monitor either. It did have a working memory of no less than 64 kilobytes. Quite, kilobytes! That was all. Anyway, I started programming away and soon became familiar with the concept of the subroutine. It works as follows. A computer goes through its program, which is a list of lines. Sometimes it can only go from one line to the other, for example from 13 to 14, if it knows the value of a certain variable. If it doesn’t know this value, line 13 starts a subroutine, a small program whose only aim is to discover the value of that variable. I’ll give you a simple example. I wrote a small program so that the computer could write an invitation to a party. The invitation started with ‘Dear’. The next thing was to insert a name, everything automatically, so this would be the next name on a list of friends. To know which name should be inserted, the program started a subroutine, an additional program that went through a saved list of friends and checked which name was the last to have been used. The next name was then the one to be inserted in the invitation. The subroutine then passed on this name to the program and the greeting to the invitation could be written: ‘Dear Elisabeth.’

18 Introduction In the same way, the missing information subroutine is a subroutine. You are in town, looking for a shop, but you are not quite sure where this shop is and you are already late. Walking around at random won’t be productive. Neither will panicking or being angry with yourself. Of course you could ask somebody the way, but that is not the way a man does things. He can find his own solution, just by thinking for a moment. Sometimes you have no choice, for example if you are the first in a certain scenario, or if you are a pioneer, which we all are at some point, especially if it is about the direction of our own life. If you’re stuck, if you don’t quite know what to do, the obvious next step is to interrupt the scenario, take a step back and think. Start your missing information subroutine. If you can’t find that shop in town, the subroutine will conjure up a mental map of the city centre. Calmly you picture the way the city centre is structured. You use this mental map to find the location of the shop, your own present location and the route from here to there. If this subroutine finds a result, like the route to the shop, it feeds it back to you, the actor in the original scenario, so that you can use this information to continue the rest of the program. Using the route you have just obtained, you can continue on your way, sensible, determined and informed. This is the way people do things. And they have been doing it like this for centuries. Throughout evolution, people have trained themselves to work with missing information subroutines. It must have started in prehistoric times. No food to be found? Think. It may be a good idea to move on and live a nomadic existence. Winters that are too cold? Think. How about living in a cave and wrapping yourself in a bearskin? Feeling ill? Think. You may be able to find out what the cause is and make it go away. You want to know how far that ship is from the shore? Think. Pythagoras’ theorem may come in handy. The ancient Greeks turned this into a systematic way of thinking. They gave us the idea of a theoretical perspective, a disinterested standpoint, a withdrawal from the urgency of everyday practical issues so that you can calmly think things over. They also gave us the seeds of a societal arrangement in which some people, the experts, are especially concerned with thinking and who provide the society at large with the knowledge necessary to avoid getting stuck in practical scenarios. Plato founded the Academy, a place where problems were studied and solved. His example has been emulated by our present-day universities, who have slowly become skilled in a modern variety of thinking: going through a missing information subroutine. Together, these two ideas have taken off in our modern knowledge society: first, the objective theoretical perspective, and second, the univer - sity as the societal arrangement that takes care of the missing information

19 Introduction subroutine. I hope you are aware that I am allowing myself an absolute simplification here, simply to provide you with a powerful image of a special type of labour division. On the one hand there are people, laypeople, who sometimes need information, and on the other hand there are experts, scientists, who work at universities and who are specialised in the missing information subroutine for a small area. The area of expertise for these scientists is becoming increasingly smaller, as science is becoming more and more specialised. To a great extent, every expert is also a layperson. That is why we are more and more interdependent, which could be seen as a positive development. A top economist knows as little about herpes zoster as I do, and similarly a medical specialist does not know more about refinancing budget deficits than me. And so on. The promise of an objective language finds its origin in the idea of the university as a collectively organised subroutine. For example, suppose that someone, a layperson, is not sure how to continue in a certain situation. These days, there is no need for such a person to ponder long about a solution. Most problems are too complicated anyway. As laypeople, we are unable to solve these problems simply by thinking. To find a solution we need a vocabulary that we may be able to use a little bit, but that we can’t really fathom sufficiently. We need to leave that to the experts, and we are fortunate enough that we can leave it to the experts. If we don’t know how to proceed, we can turn to the university. We can ask someone at the university, and in our advanced knowledge society there is a good chance that we will find a scientist who has just completed a thorough study of the scenario in which we got stuck. With a little luck we can soon continue our course in this tricky scenario, taken by the hand by the new knowledge provided by science. Michael has autism. This is not easy, but nowadays, as a result of the enormous developments in behavioural science, it is much easier for people with autism. And thanks to science it has become much easier for us, his fellow human beings, to deal with people like Michael. That is a positive development. At least that is what you might think once you realise how hard scientists have been trying to help us, to map a complex disorder such as autism even better, and to develop and test better treatment options. But this development is not only positive. We also lose something if the concepts we use to understand ourselves are becoming so complex and technical that we cannot understand these concepts ourselves. It is like we have to hand over parts of our own lives to other people. It is as if we really cannot answer some questions about ourselves, or to be more precise, as if we can’t even ask the right questions anymore. And that is a process that needs to be considered more closely.

20 Introduction 5. An investigative attitude When people think, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are in a missing information subroutine. Sometimes it is amazement that knocks us out of kilter, as the ancient Greeks put it. For a moment you just don’t know. Something affects you, requires a reaction, or even just a little bit of under - standing. In such situations people also tend to take a step back, have a close look at the situation, if only because they have no idea yet what the information is that they are missing. For example in the following three situations:

Out of kilter For no apparent reason, your 9-year-old son suddenly explodes, angry, sad, helpless, upset. He wants nothing to do with you, is angry especially with you, but then all of a sudden breaks down on your lap and is a small, vulnerable child again. After her ﬁnal exams, your girlfriend is going to backpack around the world for 9 months. You don’t like this at all and say that if she really goes, you will break up with her. You regret it the moment you say it. Your neighbour is 62 years old and looks after her mother, who is inﬁrm. Day in day out she is available for her mother, but now she’s sitting on your settee, with a blank look in her eyes and has no idea how to go on.

The ancient Greeks made no distinction between science and philosophy. In their work there is no clear and signiﬁcant difference between the demand for missing information and the demand for understanding. It is important to emphasise this. And it may be important to also emphasise the fact that the ancient Greeks had no computers and therefore could not see the computer as a metaphor for our mind. Their image of a thinking human being was not linked to the image of a system that processes information algorithmically. They did not know the idea of a subroutine, and they did not think that if you ask a question you are asking for missing information, for facts that you require in order to continue in a certain scenario. They continuously asked questions simply because they were wondering about all kinds of things. For them, amazement was a good occasion to take distance, to see things from an objective perspective, and to consider an issue theoretically. But for the ancient Greeks this did not necessarily mean that they needed missing information in order to continue. Let me be as clear as possible about what I mean. The missing information subroutine that I described in the previous section is a small

21 Introduction program, a strategically efficient way of gathering the missing information needed to carry out the main program. For example, you are writing invitations and you need the next name in your list of friends, you need milk and yoghurt, so before you can go to the checkout you need to find out where the dairy section is in this supermarket, or you are doing up your garden and you need to know which of the plants in your garden are weeds. The nature of these scenarios is always the same. You find yourself stuck because you lack certain relevant information, which is why you switch to the missing information subroutine, and in these cases this subroutine does not need to be more than a simple strategic program. It provides the missing information that gives you the opportunity to continue in your scenario. However, the scenarios regarding the upset child, the backpacking girlfriend and the neighbour with emotional exhaustion ask a different kind of question. In these situations there’s also something you do not know, but the similarity ends there, as it is not clear in these scenarios whether there is any missing information. That is certainly possible, but does not need to be the case. There is no completely obvious interpretation of your situation in these three scenarios that makes it clear to you that you’re missing information and what this missing information is. Something else is the matter in these situations: you first need to contemplate the aspect that causes you to get stuck, that confronts you with your inability to simply continue. What you need here is an investigative attitude. And if this investigative attitude helps you to understand that you are missing certain crucial information, and you know how to obtain this information, then starting the missing information subroutine is the best and most obvious next step. As I said earlier, the ancient Greeks made no distinction between philosophy and science, and as a result, for them amazement was always an occasion to adopt an investigative attitude. This investigative attitude can be seen as the anteroom from which a possible missing information subroutine can be started as soon as it is clear that there is indeed some information missing and we know where this information can be found. The anteroom is where the question is first analysed. If the question is mono-interpretable, you don’t have to stay in the anteroom with an investigative attitude. You can simply continue to the missing information subroutine. But if you are wondering what to think about yourself and your ridiculous threat to your girlfriend, you do need this investigative attitude, as in this case it is not at all clear if what you are dealing with is only a lack of information. In our modern knowledge society in which the missing information subroutine is taken care of by experts – empirical scientists at universities

22 Introduction and other specialists in collecting missing information – we have more or less lost sight of the anteroom with its investigative attitude. In a nutshell, my diagnosis of this issue is the following. First of all, if you get stuck in a certain situation nowadays, you may be lacking expertise and therefore you turn to an expert or to science. If you are wondering why you would say such a nasty thing to your girl - friend, you can go to a psychologist. It is probably something to do with jealousy, with stress, with hormones, with insufficient healthy attachment, and perhaps even with a temporary slump in your confidence as a result of the stage in which your adolescent brain finds itself. Nowadays you immediately turn to science because everything is so complex, which is why you do not need an investigative attitude anymore. Your anteroom has become science’s waiting room. When you get stuck, you immediately go into your missing information subroutine. Without thinking, you assume that this is a matter of missing information, in fact of missing scientific information. And without thinking you know where you can get the answers: from science. Second, experts at universities have also forgotten to adopt an investigative attitude. This may seem surprising, but isn’t really. In fact scientists have become skilled in the experimental method. They are excellent experts in the field of operationalised questions, and they can empirically test their hypothetical answers in their laboratories. Because they are so well-trained in the methods that they use, they have become especially good at reformulating questions in such a way that these questions can be used in experiments. It is not a sense of wonder that drives these scientists but the set-up of their labs. If I may exaggerate a little, they are not concerned with the question but with the answers that can be produced in their laboratories. Or, to use a metaphor, simply because they have a hammer, they tend to misinterpret a screw for a nail. This is why experts nowadays also automatically go into the missing information subroutine, thinking that every question is a request for missing information. Third, finding yourself is not a subject for experts. In a way this is correct. After all, you are the only expert regarding your own orientation. That is all right, as far as it goes. There are plenty of self-help books. But this is exactly where something extraordinary, interesting and even disquieting happens, something that leaves you empty-handed, notwith - standing our highly developed knowledge society. Because what is the language that you can use to discuss your own orientation? Of course, the language of the behavioural sciences, a language, however, of which you haven’t yet mastered the finer details. To understand yourself, you need the experts who have withdrawn from daily life because they need

23 Introduction distance, because only when they have distanced themselves from daily life can they take care of the collective missing information subroutine. To come back to the hammer metaphor: science likes to offer you its hammer, its expertise. It just doesn’t realise how much work is involved for the hand holding the hammer. Something to ponder on.

6. Philosophy’s anteroom These days, philosophy’s anteroom is rather deserted. True, there is a lot of interest in philosophy. Magazines on philosophy sell well and there have been Nights of Philosophy in Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam and New York. Philosophers are on the radio and on TV, they give TED talks, write blogs and post videos on YouTube that get over a million views. What more could you want? I would like a bit more. I would like to gather everybody together in that anteroom of philosophy. And then I would like to see that investigative attitude, in each and every one of us. Because I do not like shows that are not about thinking but about looking at thinkers who use complicated words to show off about the number of books they have read. I don’t like thinkers; I like thinking. Nor do I like this self-inflicted dependence. I would like us to stop auto - matically relying on experts. I would like us to stop automatically thinking that we are missing information. I would like us to start thinking for ourselves. I would like us to take a good look at the questions first, the questions that cause us to become stuck in our daily lives, the questions that deserve attention. These are the questions that do not have a quick or easy solution; they need attention and need to be understood – as questions. They require understanding rather than some missing information. In this book I take up arms against the advance of the experts and against the growing dominance in our daily lives of scientific expertise. I wish to emphasise that I am not pleading for an anti-intellectual or anti- scientific attitude. I deeply love thinking, using your brain; I like to do so systematically, critically, verifiably and methodically. I have nothing against our intellect, or against intellectuals. I have nothing against science, or against scientists. But I do have something against societal arrangements that systematically reward our lazy brain. I do have something against waiting in the wings as a matter of course, because we think the answer has to come from experts. I do have something against mindlessly moving into the missing information subroutine as soon as something puzzles us. I do have something against expertise, at least against expertise if it is related to our

24 Introduction daily lives and if it is based on the presupposition that there is not a gradual but a categorical difference between common sense and knowledge based on scientific research. I have something against the unnatural division between on the one hand daily practice in which people gain experience – in other words, knowhow – and on the other hand research laboratories in which experts obtain statistically significant results with which they justify their evidence-based interventions. I have something against neglecting and distrusting common sense, as it is precisely this common sense that you need as soon as you want to appeal to scientific knowledge. Moreover, it is exactly this common sense that you use as a scientist in all your activities in the laboratory, in discussions, in theoretical reflections and when giving advice. And it is also this common sense that you need if you want to be able to do anything at all with the various scientific results that are flooding our daily lives. I like the image of a scientist who does his best to fill our toolbox with the most fantastic attributes, instruments and tools. It is so much more positive than that rather ominous image of the scientist who thinks that he can do everything with just a hammer, and consequently mistakes a screw for a nail. But even in the image of the well-furnished toolbox, the most important element is missing: the hand. It is their hand, our hand, your own hand that is needed to do anything at all with all these wonderful tools. If something is wrong with your car, your toilet or your mobile phone, you are more than happy to have it repaired by somebody else, a skilled worker with the right toolbox. But if there is something wrong with your life, your attitude or your behaviour, you can’t leave that to somebody else. At this point a toolbox is a welcome help. But then you really need to know how to use the tools. You want to learn how to use your hand, the hand that you have always had, that has been given to you by nature, with which you have done everything up to now and with which you will be doing everything in the future. After all, if you can’t use your own hand, all the tools that the experts offer you will be useless. This hand symbolises your common sense. It also represents the common sense of all experts, of all specialists. Without their common sense they wouldn’t have got far, they wouldn’t have even started. And all the knowledge and expertise that they have gained are only extensions of that common sense.3 There doesn’t have to be a contradiction. There is no conflict between scientific expertise and common sense. However, there is a gap unfortunately. A wide gap. I don’t think anybody will be surprised at this point that this gap can only be bridged by common sense. You can have as many tools as you

25 Introduction like, but at the beginning of the chain there will always need to be a hand that operates the first machine, that knows what it has to do and knows why, for whom and to what end. It is this common sense, our common sense, that I will defend in this book. This book has two parts. In the first part I explain what I regard as common sense, by following a group of people on a fictitious island who cannot fall back on the advice of experts. They will have to solve their problems themselves, using common sense. The tone in this first part is constructive: It is a story about the different aspects of common sense. The second part has a totally different tone. In this part, I try to create turbulence, encouraging the reader to think. By exploring a number of presuppositions related to the scientific orientation that nowadays dominates our daily lives, I try to show how questionable these presuppositions are. Both parts serve the same goal. The first part shows you what common sense actually is, whereas the second part shows you what you can gain if you use your common sense.

Notes 1 The nature and the implications of this social fact have long played an important role in Foucault’s writings. See Foucault (1996/2002). 2 Bernard Williams’ study of Descartes’ philosophy brilliantly describes this modern ambition. See Williams (1978). 3 Quine is famous for emphatically supporting the growth of science. But in doing so he emphasised that disavowing the core of common sense is “a pompous confusion”: “Science is not a substitute for commonsense, but an extension of it.” Quine (1957), p. 2.

26 CHAPTER 1 The Power of Power STEPHEN MUMFORD

1. Philosophy In some ways it was a disadvantage while in others an advantage that I did not study mainstream analytic philosophy as an undergraduate. My degree was in history of ideas (major) and politics (minor) in a small provincial town that knew little of the mainstream of received orthodoxy. The philosophy I took was Marxism and Existentialism though with some of the great works of political philosophy thrown in. I thus studied a miscellany of deep and troubled thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, and knew Hobbes, Locke and Mill only as political philosophers. I read no Hume at all, nor Aristotle, and only Kant’s moral philosophy. The only logic we were taught was syllogistic. At times I am aware that I lack some of the training of my peers. I had to teach myself analytic philosophy on the hoof, often encouraged by the necessity of teaching it, but all the while conscious of huge gaps in my knowledge. At times I felt an imposter. But one thing I did bring from my undergraduate studies was a sense that philosophy was an important matter that should deal with the biggest questions. If you take Marx, Hobbes or Nietzsche as your model, you have a sense of the scope and ambitions of philosophy. It is about very serious tasks: building an all-encompassing system; explaining the human condition; showing what is to be done, facing unwelcome truths. I have never felt that my proper business was tinkering at the edges: for instance, developing minor amendments to other people’s theories that make little difference to the world. I had grand designs. If I

27 • Stephen Mumford was going to bother with philosophy at all, it would be so that I could offer a systematic view of the world. It should be radical, different: I should challenge rather than defend the paradigm. And any theory I developed should explain everything. To this day I worry whether this ambition is a preten- tious vanity. My initial work was piecemeal and I didn’t know how it would all hang together. But I have started to think of late that the hope of a single, all- encompassing theory might be realised. In this paper I outline for the first time how I think these ideas might form a systematic metaphysics and possibly realise the impetuous ambition of my youth.

2. Mind Temporarily casting aside my deep and troubling books, I landed by chance at the University of Leeds, commencing master’s studies in philosophy of mind. I lived almost on fresh air, having to take part-time work in a comic- book shop and then at the University library. On my entry, Leeds seemed a bastion of late-Wittgensteinianism. Advancing a positive thesis in the Department did not seem the done thing when there was instead the business of finding problems in what philosophers said. Some may have thought of me as the fly voluntarily entering the bottle. But change was coming. My arrival coincided with that of Robin LePoidevin, a PhD supervisee of Hugh Mellor’s, who taught that we should take metaphysics seriously. This was the start of a major transformation for Leeds and also for me. One of the first books I set to reading, before meeting Robin, was Gil- bert Ryle’s (1949) The Concept of Mind, as it was suggested reading on the course. It was between those covers that I first came across the notion of a disposition and it was an encounter that would have a profound effect on my intellectual development. Ryle argued against the myth of the ghost in the machine. There was no Cartesian inner theatre of thoughts and sense data, hidden from everyone else’s view. Instead, the mind could be understood as a complex bundle of dispositions. To believe that it is raining is just to be disposed to behave in a certain way: to be disposed to take in the washing, pick up an umbrella on one’s way out, or not go out at all, and so on. And Ryle says the same of emotions, desires and even sensations. To be in love is just to have a complex bundle of dispositions: to be disposed to buy flowers, write bad poetry and a host of other things. To be in pain is just to be disposed to behave in a certain way: to moan, to protect an injured body part, to seek medication. What interested me was not just the account of mind, which had the potential to be qualia-free (see Dennett’s 1991 development of the view), but what Ryle had to say about dispositions. Ryle didn’t quite go so far, but

28 The Power of Power • his is often the view thought of when we speak of the simple conditional analysis. He compared mental dispositions with ordinary, non-mental ones, such as solubility and fragility. When we say that a thing or substance is soluble we mean something more or less along the lines of: if it is in liq- uid, then it dissolves. The ascription of a disposition gives us an inference ticket. The disposition needn’t show itself all the time but I will nevertheless be able to infer that in certain circumstances it would. To say that someone speaks French, for instance, doesn’t mean that they are speaking French all the time, or now, but means that under certain circumstances—on holiday in Provence buying bread, for example—one can infer that they would be speaking French. I loved reading Ryle. But when I got to the end, I thought that something was lacking. Why were these conditionals true? What underwrote an inference ticket? What sustained them when they were not being put to the test? What kind of being did they have? And if there was nothing making them true, why should we accept these conditionals? Ryle resisted any tempta- tion to answer these questions, for if there were something that grounded these conditionals during the times when their antecedents were false, this thing could be precisely the sort of inner state that Ryle was denying. It could be exactly a thought or sensation in the Cartesian inner theatre. Such a worry prevented Ryle from taking disposition ascriptions at face value: as the ascriptions of properties.

3. Dispositions The problem I had discovered was already known. Indeed it is precisely the worry that supposedly led C. B. Martin to propose the truthmaker principle. (It is Armstrong 2004: 1–3 who attributes this principle to Martin.) In his case, the concern arose from Berkeley’s phenomenalism. According to Berkeley (1710), to claim that there is a chair in your room is to claim that if someone enters the room they will have chair-like sensations. But the chair is not an independently existing object that causes these sensations, so he says. We can see that the view and associated problem is entirely parallel to Ryle’s view of mind. Both material objects and then mind are analysed away in terms of the truth of a conditional. The conditional describes the possibility of a sensation or the possibility of behaviour, respectively. But Martin asked what the truthmaker was of such conditionals. They are contingent truths, not true merely analytically, for instance, but then it seems that if they are true, they have to be true for a reason. For a conditional to be true, there has to be some feature of the world that grounds the possibility of the consequent upon realisation of the antecedent. So what made it true that someone in love would write poetry when they had a spare moment?

29 • Stephen Mumford

There are a number of ways in which this question could be answered and they immediately take us into the area of what a disposition is. One view is that such a conditional’s truth just depends on the pattern of events. It may just be that within a certain period of time, a loving person does indeed write poetry for his beloved. The truth of the conditional may just supervene on this regularity. We may not be entirely sure what the regularity is, from our limited temporal perspective on it, and our belief in the truth of the conditional may be based only on inductive inference. (Quine 1960: 224 is a representative of this empiricist approach.) On the other hand, there are those who believe that there is a causal basis of the disposition. There is some persisting state, it is claimed, that is able to cause the manifestation when certain conditions are realised (Prior, Pargetter and Jackson 1982). It then becomes relatively easy to think of the having of a disposition as the having of such a causal basis that gives a certain kind of response or manifestation when it receives a certain kind of stimulus. And what is the nature of this causal basis of the disposition? Some have used the term categorical to describe it (Armstrong 1968: 85–9). There is an alleged categorical property that grounds the dispositional behaviour of the bearer. In the case of fragility, for instance, it is alleged that the disposition resides in the crystalline structure of the glass or pottery. But what is meant by the term categorical? The way it is typically used, it just means non- dispositional, but that tells us little positive. And while metaphysicians have put dispositions under intense scrutiny, the notion of a categorical property seemed to have slipped under the radar, evading our attention.

4. Dualism Setting aside the issue of what a disposition is, it was clear that a further question was now also raised. Are the dispositional and categorical two different types of property? There was often an assumption that dispositions were properties and they were set in opposition to categorical properties. This sets us a puzzle. Is the world populated by two entirely distinct types of property? Some have drawn this conclusion (Prior 1985), which is a view I called property dualism. But just as there is a problem of interaction for mind-body dualists, I worried about how two such distinct types of property would interrelate. Do all dispositional properties have a categorical basis, as some think? If so, does that mean that a disposition is a mere second-order property: the property of having a certain (categorical) property? If so, it would look as if it is the categorical properties that do all the real causal work: that are productive of their manifestations, for instance. As Prior, Pargetter and Jackson (1982) show, however, when the categorical properties do all the causal work, then the dispositional properties that

30 The Power of Power • they ground are rendered causally impotent. They were content to draw precisely that conclusion but it seemed to me wrong (Mumford 1994). This concern was foremost in my mind when I wrote my first book, Dis- positions (Mumford 1998). I wanted to make room for both the categorical and the dispositional without leaving either of them impotent and without requiring whole scale overdetermination of effects. The solution I offered was similar to the one articulated by Mellor (2000). I argued that there were just properties in the world, all of which were powerful. The dispositional/ categorical distinction was just a conceptual and epistemological one, not an ontological one (first ventured in Mumford 1995). Dispositions were properties functionally characterised, according to what they did. I was satisfied with the way in which I set up some of the problems in Dispositions, and some people still think it a good place to start on the topic. But in time I looked for something more radical. I became involved in George Molnar’s book Powers: A Study in Metaphysics (Molnar 2003), which he left incomplete at the time of his death. I edited a finished version from the material he left behind. There was a simple criticism of my view in that book that nevertheless struck home. One is hardly a realist about powers if what makes them powers is simply how we think about them, how we characterise them, or how we know them. I certainly wanted to be a realist about dispositions or powers (and I use the two terms synonymously) but there was something not thoroughgoing enough about the realism in Dispositions.

5. Properties Forced into a subtle but significant rethink, the connection between properties and powers seemed a crucial issue. What was a categorical property supposed to be? Nancy Cartwright once asked me this question on a Paris street, and she was genuinely mystified. I had to confess that I did not know. It seemed that all properties had to make some causal difference to the world, or at least had the possibility of making such a difference. Did we really want to allow any properties at all that were causally impotent or inert? I thought in response to the Prior, Pargetter and Jackson theory that we certainly did not want dispositions to be inert, but would the situation be any better if there were categorical properties that were causally impotent? I looked again at Sydney Shoemaker’s (1980) early theory of properties. He argued that properties were clusters of conditional causal powers: conditional in the sense that they could do things when suitably partnered with other powers. A certain shape, plus hardness, gives a knife the power to cut, for instance. Shoemaker was claiming that properties were constituted by

31 • Stephen Mumford causal powers. He subsequently withdrew this view, stating only that properties endow powers (Shoemaker 1998: 412), but I have stated elsewhere that I think there is no good reason to back away from the original theory (Mumford 2008a). It is interesting that Shoemaker used the example of a particular shape (being knife-shaped) as an example of a property constituted by a cluster of powers. While there are few theories of what it is for a property to be categorical we are sometimes offered examples, and shape is frequently cited. Shape is supposedly a good example of a property that is non-powerful (see Prior 1982 and Mellor’s 1982 reply). Consideration reveals this to be an implausible assertion. The way in which things behave is to a large and clear extent determined by their shape. The reason a knife can cut and an apple can’t, although both objects are hard, is the difference in shape. If we take the shape of being spherical, we can see that any object bearing the property would have a bundle of dispositions in virtue of it. It would be disposed to roll in a straight line down an inclined plane, for instance. A cube would not have this power, nor a pyramid. Some have offered counterexamples, in the hope of showing that there is a distinctness between powers and properties. Lowe, for instance, has said (in discussion) that a soap bubble is spherical but will not roll down an inclined plane, and Unger (2006: 269) says that a soft sphere will not roll because it will squash as soon as it is released. But neither of these are good counterexamples. When Unger’s sphere squashes flat, it is no longer spherical and thus no longer disposed to roll (Mumford 2007a). That’s no counterexample at all. Lowe’s case fails for another reason. The spherical soap bubble is indeed disposed to roll but it doesn’t do so because it also possesses a countervailing power of stickiness. The stickiness is stronger than the power to roll, we can assume, though it need not be for every object that is both sticky and spherical. Such considerations led me to a position of pandispositionalism: the view that all properties are powers or dispositions. I argued this line in Laws in Nature (2004). But it is worth noting that we also have a theory of properties. If we accept the reality of powers, then properties become just clusters of powers (Mumford 2004: 170–4). Of late, I have become more sceptical of a substance-attribute metaphysics. Armstrong has a detailed version of it in his immanent realism in which there are both properties and particulars (Armstrong 1978). But as I have described (Mumford 2007b, ch. 7), the issue of instantiation is a major problem for any such view. Instantiation cannot be a relation, on pain of Bradley’s regress, so we have to say something else about it. Armstrong has tried to improve his account of late (Armstrong 2004: 46–8), but I am not sure this works either. For that reason, I am now entertaining a trope ontology (see Maurin 2002, for instance), in which the tropes would of course be bundles of individual powers. And as some

32 The Power of Power • believe tropes reduce not only properties but also the traditional notion of substance, then particulars would be simple clusters of tropes and hence, ultimately, also large bundles of powers. We would thus have an account of properties and substances based on the powers ontology.

6. Laws One of the great attractions of the ontology of powers is the work that they can do (Molnar 2003: 186). Mind, properties and substances have thus far been discussed in terms of powers. I turned to the question of so-called natural laws in my Laws in Nature (2004). I had heard many people discuss the laws of nature and I had seen what some of them purported to be. But I confess to finding laws somewhat puzzling existents. There seemed to be two competing interpretations. One was that a law is nothing more than a pattern or regularity in nature that we might aspire to discover. But on this account, a law is not a thing or entity at all. The individual events or causal connections that fall into a pattern of regularity would be things. They would have some form of existence. But the pattern itself would have to be a resemblance between those events, or a higher-order fact that there is such a pattern, or a true proposition or some such. A resemblance can be real but it is not really a thing. This would give us a deflationary view of the laws. We would not need them as a separate irreducible category. Perhaps the regularity just supervenes upon the overall pattern of events. But then, of course, if laws are merely supervenient entities, they cannot govern or determine that upon which they supervene. Any explanatory role for laws would have been lost. We cannot explain by reference to the laws of nature, understood this way, why there are such-and-such regularities, because the law will be nothing more than the fact that there are such-and- such regularities. For these reasons and others, some have been attracted to stronger, more realist theories of laws of nature in which they really do play a governing role (for example, Armstrong 1983). Certainly the having of such a role would justify adding laws to our ontology. But what is the role and how are laws supposed to perform it? The view would seem to suggest that laws are distinct from the events and processes, but nevertheless capable of control- ling them. How would they do that? In Laws in Nature, I claimed that there was no plausible story of how laws would govern their instances. What is the alternative? The governing-laws model can be thought of as a proposed solution to what was not really a problem in the first place. There have been times when we have had a dead, passive and inanimate view of nature. Laws of nature have then been suggested as a way of ani- mating that lifeless world. Those of us who accept powers, however, partly

33 • Stephen Mumford do so because we think of them as active and as bringing animation to the world. If we embrace them, then we see that we never needed governing laws to begin with. Their inclusion in our ontology makes sense only if we think there is a job to do. But realism about powers shows us that there is not. The world will be full of causal activity in any case, just because it is a powerful world. Even some of those who have accepted a dispositional ontology have been somewhat prone to thinking of the world in passivist ways. Accept- ance of the stimulus–response model for the triggering of a power is, I sus- pect, to endorse something the true defender of powers shouldn’t. That powers stand in need of stimuli suggests that they are inherently passive, doing nothing on their own without a push from outside. But wouldn’t that indicate that the powers themselves are impotent: that they are power- less? The stimuli on the other hand are powerful. They provide the external push. Stimulation is clearly a causally laden notion. But then the stimuli look like the true powers. And if we apply again a stimulus–response model for how they are triggered then we have the possibility of a regress (see McKitrick, forthcoming). In place of this, I favour a mutual manifestation model for the exercise of a power, which comes from Martin (2008). A sperm and an egg have the power of producing an embryo but we cannot say which has the power and which has merely its stimulus. Such a distinction could only be plausi- bly maintained as an epistemic or pragmatically useful distinction, not as a serious ontological division. Martin’s model of mutual manifestation part- nerships, by contrast, depicts powers as equal partners, producing something together that they could not have produced alone. And once all the requisite partners are together, the powers exercise immediately. They do not need the addition of a further stimulus. The stimulus–response model, and the conditional analysis of dispositions with which it is associated, should therefore be rejected by the true friend of dispositions (Mumford and Anjum, forthcoming). There is one more issue on the subject of laws. A reason it may have been thought that laws were needed was that there are regularities in the world. How do singular causal powers produce regularities without some overall general principle that determines the same effect for the same cause: a principle that would look an awful lot like a law (Everitt 1991)? Any worry I had about this objection was dispelled by Ellis’s (2001) account of dispositional essentialism. We should not ask why every electron behaves in the same way, nor think what an amazing coincidence it is. The essentialist view is that the particulars of our world are what they are precisely because of their dispositions to behave. If you prefer a less robust form of essentialism, we could say that we classify things on the basis of their (dispositions to)

34 The Power of Power • behaviour rather than anything else (Mumford 2005). Hence, there is no mystery why all electrons or other kinds of things behave in a certain way. It is because they behave that way that things are members of that kind.

7. Causes I always planned a book on causation. I gave some papers on the topic, presenting an embryonic theory that developed the notion of natural necessity discussed in Laws in Nature and which I now think is a mistake. In 2006 I presented two talks at the University of Tromsø in Norway at the invitation of Svein Anders Noer Lie. In the audience was Rani Lill Anjum, who had completed a PhD on conditionals (Anjum 2004). This was a fortunate meeting. Anjum had claimed in her PhD thesis that there was always some context in which a conditional was false. We discussed the connection between our projects and realised that we had the answers to each other’s problems. Conditionals about the natural world would be context-sensitive precisely because dispositions were their truthmakers. And, in return, the context- sensitivity of such conditionals meant that those dispositional truthmakers never involved necessity. Even when the antecedent conditions were realised that in some situations could be productive of the manifestation, there could always be some circumstances in which the same kind of conditions failed to produce the manifestation. Anjum was writing a postdoctoral fellowship application at the time we met and, after the promise of this discussion, changed it at the last moment so that it involved time at the University of Nottingham. That came to pass, and we were able to develop an account in more detail. We first wrote a lengthy paper together called “Powers as Causal Truthmakers,” but after receiving the standard rejections we decided that we had enough ideas in the paper to write a book. The paper expanded and expanded until it became Getting Causes from Powers (Mumford and Anjum 2011) The aim of the book is to show what causation will be like if the world is a world of powers. I believe ours is such a world, of course, but we do not aim at the outset explicitly to convince the reader of that. We merely assume it, to begin with, though come eventually to an empirical argument in its favour. We think of the theory as a thoroughgoing dispositionalism to the extent that the key feature of the account is that causes only tend or dispose towards their effects, even on the occasions when they indeed succeed in producing them. In particular, they do not necessitate their effects. This goes against those views that depict dispositions as necessitating their manifestations (Bird 2007; Chakravartty 2007). There had been an assumption that if one were to be realist and thus anti-Humean about powers, one had to reject the contingentist picture of nature that Hume had provided. This

35 • Stephen Mumford indeed we should do. But the dispositional account should opt for powers disposing or tending towards their manifestation, which is enough of an anti-Humean connection, without going the whole hog towards necessary connections. In that respect, many of us had fallen into Hume’s trap. He had argued that those who believed in powers believed in necessity in the natural world. But there was no such necessity, he argued persuasively, for a cause could always fail to be followed by its typical effect, either actually or at the very least conceivably. And this showed that there were no necessary connections in nature, and hence, on Hume’s argument, no powers (Hume 1739: 161–2). But this argument works against powers only so conceived. If we argue that causes tend to produce their effects—where we have in mind a genuine notion of production that is much more than constant conjunction—then Hume’s argument is disarmed. Smoking tends to cause cancer and indeed does so in many cases each year. But it does not so do in every instance. Some smokers avoid the fatal disease. There is nevertheless a more than purely contingent connection between smoking and the causing of cancer. Why, though, would a cause such as smoking sometimes fail to produce its effect? The argument does not merely invoke indeterminism, as Ans- combe’s (1971) does. Rather, the argument against necessity is an antecedent strengthening argument. Sometimes smoking will be accompanied by another factor, such as a cancer-resistant gene, that interferes with the car- cinogen in tobacco. We have the addition of an interferer, which is effec- tively an antidote (Bird 1998). We can stop a causal process by removing one of the powers at work but we can also stop such a process by adding a power that disposes in the opposite direction. It is this latter kind of interferer that legislates against causal necessity, and this is just Hume’s original argument rehashed. Even this new collection of powers, involving the first power plus its interferer, will only tend towards its effect, whatever it is. For it too would be subject to additive interference. Philosophers know they have a genuine necessitation by one thing of another when the second always follows the first and when nothing could be added to the first that would prevent the second. If anything that is water is of necessity H2O, for instance, then if the water is in a cup it is still H2O, if it is water and today is Wednesday then it is still H2O, and so on for any additional factor. But clearly we do not have this in the case of causation. All natural causal processes of which we have good knowledge can be interfered with by the addition of some further causal power. We claim that we should be genuinely realist about the powers involved in causation. In particular, we accept that powers involve a primitive dispositional modality, which cannot be reduced to the two modalities with which philosophers are most comfortable: pure contingency and pure necessity.

36 The Power of Power •

When we understand powers this way, Hume’s direct argument against them holds no force. In the history of philosophy, it is perhaps Aquinas who was the greatest advocate of the dispositional modality. His philosophy of nature is one that invokes irreducible tendencies (see Geach 1961: 103). Much of the metaphysics of powers has historical antecedents in Aristotle’s Physics (see Mumford, forthcoming a).

8. Experience There is, however, another argument that Hume has, namely, his scepticism about our knowledge of powers. This scepticism is based on a general empiricist thesis that we can have no idea of something in our minds that did not derive from some original sense impression. Many anti-empiricists reject this doctrine but one of the other main claims of Getting Causes from Powers has a wider significance than just the theory of causation. We claim that powers can be directly experienced and thus we can answer the sceptical claims about powers even within Hume’s own terms (Mumford and Anjum 2011, ch. 9). We are not the first to have argued that causation can be directly per- ceived. Ducasse, for instance, claims that even when a bird lands on the branch of a tree and the branch bends we are seeing causation (Ducasse 1965). But a Humean is of course at liberty in such a case to produce a standard constant conjunction account of why we think the landing bird caused the bending branch. Others have already thought that a more prom- ising line was to consider human agency. We are after all causal agents (and patients) ourselves, and so we have some first-hand experience of powers at work, namely our own. Again, Hume has anticipated this line of argument and says that even in the case of our own agency we experience never more than a constant conjunction of willing and acting (Hume 1739: Appen- dix 632–3, Treatise, Bk I, p. 161, line 12). But Hume’s volitional account of agency is inaccurate and inadequate, and the thesis of the perceptibility of causes is further hampered by another Humean assumption about the nature of causation. Hume argued that a cause was temporally prior to its effect (Hume 1739: I, iii, 2, pp. 75–6). This immediately loads the dice against a powers account. For how could a power act on its effect unless both exist at the same time? If the cause ceases before the effect begins, then how can the cause work its power on the effect? Many examples of powers at work suggest instead the simultaneity of cause and effect. When the room’s heater is turned on, for instance, its heating of the room is simultaneous with its operation. Mar- tin’s notion of mutual manifestation is the best model for how a power is triggered. It tells us that powers begin to exercise when they are brought

37 • Stephen Mumford together with their mutual manifestation partners. Whenever sugar and water are together, nothing need be added for their mutual manifestation of dissolving to occur (though something could be added that prevented it). The mutual manifestation begins immediately, even if it takes time for the process of dissolution to run its course. But as long as there is some solid remaining, the dissolving will continue: or at least it will tend to do so (for the water might have reached saturation point). And even in Hume’s “perfect instance” of causation, when billiard balls clash (Hume 1740: 137), we can argue that the cue ball causes the object ball to move only at the time that they meet. While the cue ball is rolling towards the object ball, without yet reaching it, it of course cannot cause the second ball’s movement. And after the object ball has begun rolling and departed from the cue ball, the cue ball has already done its causal work. It would not matter to the object ball at this point if the cue ball ceased to exist. A reason why the simultaneity of cause and effect is important in the current context is that it precludes one of the ways in which a Humean might deny the perceptibility of causes. Cause and effect are split asunder by Hume’s temporal priority condition, but if one accepts simultaneity of cause and effect, there is the possibility that they be reunified. And, return- ing to the case of agency, cause and effect can be unified in our experience, as I will now argue. The key sense for the experience of causation, including its dispositional character, is not any of the traditional five senses but, rather, proprioception (see also Harré and Madden 1975, and originally Reid 1788: essay 4, ch. 2). This is the muscular sense of required effort: the aching that tells us when we are straining at our limit, when we need to exert more power, or less. When we lift a heavy suitcase, proprioception provides constant feed- back that enables us to use adequate force to overcome resistance, but not so much force that we would throw the suitcase over our shoulders. The sense also informs us where our body parts are in relation to each other. We do not have to watch our own body when swimming, riding a bicycle or driving a car because proprioception gives us the knowledge of where everything is and what it’s doing. The sense is vital in the case of causation because it is through it that we feel ourselves as causes. And we do not experience a willing that is separate from the action, causing it while being temporally prior to it, for instance. To willingly raise one’s arm, the willing is concurrent and inseparable from the raising. If a willing was prior to the raising, how would it ensure the raising was carried out at a later time? The fact that we can pull out of half-completed actions shows us that the will to perform an action must be maintained throughout it, for its withdrawal can lead to its end. Hume instead, arguing that our experience of causation is not direct, alleges only a constant conjunction between willing and act-

38 The Power of Power • ing. But they are not distinct existences in this way, if our reunification is correct. It is further argued that our experience of causation is an experience of something dispositional. What we experience are causal powers at work: our own causal powers. Our experience contains knowledge of the dispositional modality. Our power is towards the lifting of the suitcase. But it can be resisted by the weight of the contents. Sometimes the weight will be so great that it prevents our lifting the case. On other occasions we succeed. But we can still sense the effort proprioceptively, sensing our own limita- tions and that with a bit more resistance we might have failed. We feel how causal production is not the same as causal necessitation. The willing, the exercise of the power and resistance to it are all to be found in the same proprioceptive experience. This is the framework by which we could justify the direct bodily experience of causation at work, where it is not merely inferred from observed regularities. One instance of the a posteriori acquisition of the concept of power is all that we need to answer Hume’s sceptical challenge. We need not claim, as Ducasse does, that in vision we observe powers directly. We can allow that there is something indirect about that. Nevertheless, equipped with a theoretical background that our world is a world of powers, of which we have at least some immediate knowledge through our bodily actions, then visual and other sense impressions might be thought to give us a reliable and working knowledge of a powerful world. Using all our senses we can acquire such causal knowledge.

9. People The fact that we are empowered beings has a greater significance than just the fact that agency gives us an idea of the dispositional nature of causation. Only philosophers ever doubted that anyway. Our empowerment situ- ates us in a similarly powerful world, with which we interact, as embodied rational beings. It seems also that for the most part we find it pleasurable to exercise our causal powers. We want to do what we can, and often as much as we can. We have a number of pointless games and sports that seem to have little purpose other than for us to test the limits of our capacities. We want to run as fast as we can, jump as high as we can, and control a football to the best of our abilities. If we don’t do our best, or don’t give the game our maximum effort, we tend to feel empty and disappointed. Work is another area in which we want to display our mental and physical capabilities. Adults with children will often hear them ask “Can I help?” when some job is being done in the home, even when they have no idea of its purpose. We do indeed want to be helpful, which will mean exercising

39 • Stephen Mumford some power, being of some use, and making a contribution towards some desired goal. This suggests that we do not work just for money, unless the tasks of labour have been distributed in society in such a way that some jobs are considered humiliating, and accepted only because the alternative is to risk starvation. All who work recognise, however, that unemployment is one of the worst fates. Even those with inherited wealth can feel depressed and useless unless they have some way of being productive. If we see human flourishing as one of the principal aims of a society, then this suggests that useful employment should be regarded as a right (see Mumford 2008b). As well as taking pleasure in the exercise of a power, we often find it pleasurable to watch others exercise their powers. Many people watch sport, for example, and enjoy the feats of athleticism they see demonstrated, with a particular fascination reserved for the very best, such as the world-record holder (Mumford 2011). Sex is another such area. We tend to enjoy exercising our sexual powers and pushing ourselves to our sexual limits but some evidently also find it pleasurable watching others exercise their powers (see Mumford, forthcoming b). The simple thesis that it is pleasurable to exercise a causal power needs some refinement, however. Almost all of us have a capacity to murder another person, through strangulation, for instance. But almost all of us except the insane would not find it pleasurable to do so. Similarly, I could rob a pensioner of their wealth, but would feel terrible guilt if I did so. There are at least three ways we could respond to this complication and I have not yet chosen between them. We could say, first, that those who would find such acts truly repulsive in fact do not have the power to com- mit them. I feel, for instance, that I literally could not strangle someone, in any circumstances, because of the strength of my moral conscience. On the other hand, perhaps people really do have powers to do evil, and would indeed find them pleasurable to exercise, but morality teaches us to keep such powers in check. When the moral sense is lost, amoral murderers and maniacs do seem to enjoy killing and granting their unconstrained desires free reign. Third, we might say simply that some powers are not pleasurable to exercise, as a primitive matter of fact; only some of them are. We do, for instance, have the power to clean toilets all day, but we do not tend to find this pleasurable. And the reason we do not find it pleasurable doesn’t seem because of morality. If anything, to clean toilets seems a good thing rather than a bad thing. There are other options besides, and in future work I would like to explore how the powers ontology relates to social philosophy and philosophy of psychology. The theoretical use to which powers can be put in these areas does not yet seem fully exhausted.

40 The Power of Power •

10. Remainders Needless to say, I do not see this whistle-stop tour of the areas upon which powers impinge as by any means complete. There may, for instance, be a relation between powers and theories of persistence, my view being that a metaphysics of powers favours endurantism over perdurantism (Mumford 2009). And it almost goes without saying that the powers view will have something to say about the category of events and how they are produced. Events would be essentially changes rather than property exemplifications (contra Kim 1973), and they would be the manifestings of the powers in processes of change. Events could be causally powerful insofar as they involve properties and thus carry powers within them. Similarly, facts and substances bear powers and thus are able to participate in causal transac- tions. As always, however, it is the powers within that do the work.

Bibliography Anjum, R. L. (2004) Our Conditional World, Tromsø: University of Tromsø. Anscombe, G. E. M. (1971) “Causality and Determination,” Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981: 133–47. Aristotle, Metaphysics Book θ, S. Makin, trans. 2006, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Armstrong, D. M. (1968) A Materialist Theory of the Mind, rev. edn, 1993, London: Routledge. ——(1978) A Theory of Universals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1983) What Is a Law of Nature?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2004) Truth and Truthmakers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berkeley, G. (1710) A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970. Bird, A. (1998) “Dispositions and Antidotes,” Philosophical Quarterly, 48: 227–34. ——(2007) Nature’s Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chakravartty, A. (2007) A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press. Dennett, D. (1991) Consciousness Explained, London: Penguin. Ducasse, C. J. (1965) “Causation: Perceivable? Or Only Inferred?”, Philosophy and Phenom- enological Research, 26: 173–9. Ellis, B. (2001) Scientific Essentialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Everitt, N. (1991) “Strawson on Laws and Regularities,” Analysis 50: 206–8. Geach. P. T. (1961) “Aquinas,” in G. E. M. Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers, Oxford: Blackwell, 1961: pp. 65–125. Harré, R. and Madden E. H. (1975) Causal Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell. Hume, D. (1739) A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888. ——(1740) “Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature,” in P. Millican (ed.), An Enquiry Con- cerning Human Understanding, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007: 133–45. Kim, J. (1973) “Causation, Nomic Subsumption, and the Concept of Event,” Journal of Phi- losophy, 70: 217–36. Martin, C. B. (2008) The Mind in Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maurin, A. S. (2002) If Tropes, Dordrecht: Kluwer.

41 • Stephen Mumford

McKitrick, J. (forthcoming) “How to Activate a Power” in S. Mumford and M. Tugby (eds) Metaphysics and Science. Mellor, D. H. (1982) “Counting Corners Correctly,” Analysis 42: 96–7. —— (2000) “The Semantics and Ontology of Dispositions,” Mind 109: 757–80. Molnar, G. (2003) Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, S. Mumford (ed.), Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press. Mumford, S. (1994) “Dispositions, Concepts and Ontologies,” in Language and Related Mat- ters. H. Wallis (ed.), University of Leeds: 43–5. ——(1995) “Dispositions, Bases, Overdetermination and Identities,” Ratio n.s. 8: 42–62. —— (1998) Dispositions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——(2004) Laws in Nature, London: Routledge. ——(2005) “Kinds, Essences, Power,” Ratio, n.s. 18: 420–36. ——(2007a) Review of Unger’s All the Power in the World, Journal of Philosophy, 104: 424–31. —— (2007b) David Armstrong, Stocksfield: Acumen. —— (2008a) “Power, Dispositions, Properties: or A Causal Realist Manifesto,” in Revital- izing Causality: Realism about Causality in Philosophy and Social Science, R. Groff (ed.), London: Routledge, 2008: 139–51. —— (2008b) “Russell’s Defence of Idleness”, Russell: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives, n.s. 28: 5–19. —— (2009) “Powers and Persistence,” in L. Honnefelder, E. Runggaldier and B. Schick (eds), Unity and Time in Metaphysics, Berlin: Dr Gruyter, pp. 223–36. —— (2011) Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotions, London: Routledge. —— (forthcoming a) “Contemporary Themes: Aristotelian,” in T. Schmaltz (ed.) Efficient Causation: Oxford Philosophical Concepts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (forthcoming b) “A Pornographic Way of Seeing” in H. Maes (ed.) Pornographic Art and the Aesthetics of Pornography, London: Palgrave. Mumford, S. and Anjum, R. L. (2011) Getting Causes from Powers, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——(forthcoming) “Mutual Manifestation and Martin’s Two Triangles,” in J. Jacobs (ed.) Putting Powers to Work: Causal Powers in Contemporary Metaphysics. Prior, E. (1982) “The Dispositional/Categorical Distinction,” Analysis 42: 93–6. —— (1985) Dispositions, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Prior, E., Pargetter, R. and Jackson, F. (1982) “Three Theses About Dispositions,” American Philosophical Quarterly 19: 251–7. Quine, W. V. O. (1960) Word and Object, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Reid, T. (1788) “Essays on the Active Powers of Man,” in R. E. Beanblossom and K. Lehrer (eds), Inquiry and Essays, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983: 297–368. Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson. Shoemaker, S. (1980) “Causality and Properties,” Identity, Cause and Mind, expanded edi- tion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003: pp. 206–33. ——(1998) “Causal and Metaphysical Necessity,” Identity, Cause and Mind, expanded edi- tion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003: pp. 407–26. Unger, P. (2006) All the Power in the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.