The (In)Corrigibility of First-Person Statements: A Plausible Doctrine in Need of Defense

Philosophers have long considered first-person statements of beliefs, desires, and intents. Many thinkers have asserted, in some form, the doctrine that such statements are incorrigible.

Such statements can also be reports about emotions or internal experiences.

Such arguments are plausible, and perhaps sometimes even persuasive. How can I correct someone who makes statements like:

I’m in pain.
I’m happy.
I’m sad.
I think that John is in the office.
I believe that Susan is in the museum.
I hope to be in Pittsburgh tomorrow.
I’m driving to Detroit this afternoon.
I want to quit smoking cigarettes.
I desire to finish my graduate degree.
My left foot hurts.

Reports of pain or emotion seem to be such that they can indeed be false, but not corrigible. The man who says, “I want to quit smoking” or “I’m in pain” may be correct, or may be mistaken, or may be lying. But on what basis can the listener correct the man’s statement?

The doctrine of the incorrigibility of first-person reports can be defended differently, depending on underlying assumptions about the philosophy of mind.

For those “substance dualists” willing to embrace a rich metaphysical ontology, the mind is an object, such first-person reports are descriptions of that object. Such reports can be accurate or inaccurate as they correspond to that object.

If and when such statements are not correct, they can be corrected by comparing them to the object in question. But the only person with direct access to that object is the speaker.

Questions about first-person reports are questions about other minds.

Someone with fewer ontological commitments than a ‘substance dualist,’ i.e., someone not committed to asserting the existence of a ‘mental substance’ out of which the mind is constructed, or someone who conducts his philosophy mind without reference to the possibility of metaphysical entities, will look the doctrine of incorrigibility differently.

One might, e.g., reduce such first-person reports of mental states to truth conditions for those statements, and the experiences which confirm or deny situations or events which would fulfill such truth conditions might be accessible only to the speaker.

Although the incorrigibility of such statements is a widely-accepted doctrine, there are some examples which cause difficulty for it.

There are, in fact, concrete examples of situations in which one person will say or write a sentence of the form “I want …” or “I believe …” or “I feel …” and a second person will reply, “No, you don’t want …” or “No, you don’t believe …” or “No, you don’t feel …”

Imagine, e.g., a married person who’s recently had an argument with her or his spouse. She or he might exclaim to a friend, “I want a divorce.” The friend, knowing that the outburst is a reaction to a transient emotion, might reply, “No, you don’t.”

Although the view that first person reports of mental or emotional states or events is plausible, attractive, and widely-accepted, it is nonetheless susceptible to questioning, and will ultimately need to be defended.

Schopenhauer Demands Much from His Readers

To approach Schopenhauer simply, and at face value, is to encounter surprisingly steep stipulations. His central work is Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated variously as The World as Will and Representation, The World as Will and Idea, and The World as Will and Presentation.

He published it in 1818/1819.

The book is two volumes in its final form, totalling approximately 1430 pages, depending on the edition, font size, etc.

Schopenhauer expects the reader to digest a large amount of dense prose, including untranslated quotes from other authors in Greek, Latin, French, etc.

Even more, in the first few pages of the work, he places several other requirements on his audience. First, he asks that they read his book twice.

Second, he tells the reader that, before starting the book, he should read Über die Vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom Zureichenden Grunde (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason), a book he had written five years earlier.

Third, he imposes the requirement that the have also read Über das Sehen und die Farben (On Vision and Colors), a book he had written two years earlier.

Finally, he mentions in passing that the reader should have a good knowledge of Kant’s works.

This would mean that a person would have to read around 3120 pages of Schopenhauer’s writing, plus however many pages of Kant, in order to meet the demands.

Schopenhauer claims that only in this way does the reader have a chance to properly understand him.

His demands are staggering, and his claim, if true, would probably mean that very few people indeed have ever understood him.

As an author, Schopenhauer is free to make whichever demands and claims he pleases. As readers, people are free to comply or ignore as they choose.

But what about his claim that this is the only way to understand him? Certainly, generations of university students have contented themselves with reading summaries of, or excerpts from, his earlier two works.

Can it be said categorically that these students cannot have understood Schopenhauer?

His prose is often witty and enjoyable to read, but does he overestimate the power of his own text? Is it really necessary for the reader to read every page of this in order to understand Schopenhauer?

He certainly wouldn’t be the first author to be a bit too impressed with his own writing skills. Surely the reader could still understand his ideas, even if the reader skipped over the occasional anecdote or literary quotation.

Schopenhauer often restates his main points in a variety of ways. To be sure, this can lead to deeper understanding, but in this astonishing amount of text, there are, and there are bound to be, a number of redundancies.

In any case, it is clear that Schopenhauer has no qualms about placing significant burdens on his reader. He also hints, in those same early pages, that’s aware that many copies of his book will finally be little more than decorative objects.

If it’s true that those books can only be understood by meeting his demands, then he’s correct that the books will be merely ornamental trinkets.

On the Way, But Not Quite There Yet: Pre-Religion and Proto-Religion

A clear definition of the word ‘religion’ is necessary, because in concrete history, the reader will encounter phenomena, and want to call them ‘religion,’ and yet not be quite certain whether or not they are.

History seems to suggest that the earliest phases of all - a sweeping but justified generalization - human civilizations had, not religion, but something just short of religion: a system of myth and magic.

Here, ‘myth’ is understood to be narratives which are designed to explain; in this sense, a myth can be true or false, but in either case it’s still a myth. In addition, the creation of such myths, and their role in culture and society, are to be considered.

‘Magic’ is an attempt to manipulate or control nature: the weather, agricultural fertility, human fertility, disease, and health.

Hegel, in his lectures on the philosophy of religion, notes:

The first religion is this, that consciousness of the highest is consciousness of a human being as dominion, power, and lordship over nature. This first religion, if we can call it that, is the religion of magic.

The myths left to us by primitive civilizations seek to explain: the cycle of the four seasons, the patterns of visible stars and of other celestial bodies, the origin of the earth and of the universe, the features of natural geography, etc.

The magic of those early cultures included attempts to influence, primarily crops and harvests, but other events as well, by means of song, dance, chanting, incantations, the building of altars and temples, etc.

Sacrifice falls under the heading of ‘magic.’ Animals and edible plants were sacrificed to idols or effigies which were the personifications of natural forces like rain, sun, water, etc. The extreme case was common: human sacrifice has been documented in every known primitive civilization.

These early belief systems lacked elements which are found in religion: they focused almost exclusively on the attempt to explain or influence the course of nature. Even their hypotheses about the afterlife quickly returned, in one way or another, to the natural world.

Although these systems of myth and magic may seem very metaphysical, with their reliance on things unseen, they are, from another perspective, rather lacking in metaphysics, inasmuch as they are completely concerned only with the physical world. That which may seem metaphysical in these belief systems is merely an ad hoc explanation.

Hegel continues:

This earliest form of religion - although one may well refuse to call it religion - is that for which we have the name “magic.” To be precise, it is the claim that the spiritual aspect is the power over nature; but this spiritual aspect is not yet present as spirit, is not yet present in its universality. Instead the spiritual is at first just the singular and contingent human self-consciousness which, in spite of only sheer desire, self-consciously knews itself to be nobler than nature, and knows that self-consciousness is a power transcending nature.

To be sure, there are elements of myth and magic in modern culture, and even more in postmodern culture. In modern culture, however, these are less common than in early human civilization, and are often in the realm of politics and natural science, and less frequently in the realm of religion.

Further, myth and magic seem to be present, even in modern and postmodern contexts, in what one might call ‘folk religion’ or ‘disguised superstition.’ While religion itself in the current time has shed much of myth and magic, it is not difficult to find individual people, or individual events, in which both are significantly present.

Indeed, it is possible that one way to describe the emergence of postmodernism and the simultaneous recession of modernism is to depict it as reemergence of myth and magic. Postmodernism can be seen as more hospitable to both.

Another marker of the transition from pre-religion or proto-religion is the concept of relationship. In pre-religion and proto-religion, the deity, if present at all, is there to be cajoled and begged. The relationship to the deity, if it is a relationship at all, is one of manipulation. The deity is an object but not a subject, and although the deity may have power - to make it rain or to make the crops grow, etc. - the deity is not treaty as a fully knowing conscious agent with personhood, and no attempt is made to relate to the deity as a person.

By contrast, in the transition to religion, the deity is treated as a person, and the goal is not to manipulate the deity, but rather to know, and be known by, the deity. The goal of religion is relationship. Mature religion is not primarily focused on controlling nature or explaining it: hence the concepts of acceptance and surrender to what is.

Efficient Encryption

Data storage is measured by several variables: price, stability, speed of retrieval, and density, among other factors. ‘Density’ refers to the physical space needed, e.g., bytes per cubic centimeter.

Perhaps the most powerful encryption system on the planet, and one certainly exceeding any technical or mechanical invention of the last century, is DNA. In an object too small to be seen by the naked eye, gigabytes and terabytes of genetic information are chemically housed.

The data thus stored includes not only an exhaustive description of a complex biological structure, but much more: the developmental processes needed to create that structure, and plans for how that structure will respond to thousands of possible circumstances.

This amazingly efficient data encryption system is the envy of every hardware engineer. Ken Brown writes:

DNA, as well as the protein machines it codes for, possesses “complex specified information” (abbreviated, incidentally, CSI). This means it is both highly improbable (complex) and conforms to an independent pattern (specified).

A single drop of blood from a mouse contains data which is encrypted, stored, and retrievable in ways superior to the best current supercomputers.

The future of hardware may be found in the study of how data is stored in genetic material. This would open the door to a “memory explosion” of huge dimensions - memory wildly more efficient than any current hardware, and eventually perhaps at lower prices.

The question to be posed is whether it is possible, in fact or in principle, for humans to replicate the encryption used in chromosomes. Can this system of codification be synthesized?

Parsing the Will

The question about free will is one of the thornier topics in the philosophy of the mind, with its entanglements in psychology, ethics, and other areas of philosophy. A prima facie approach would pose the question of whether or not the will is free, and then move on to a raging debate.

But before such a question, and its ensuing discussion, can be posed, a number of significant preliminaries should be resolved. For example, what’s the difference between being free and having the experience of freedom?

Can one be free without knowing it? I.e., have freedom but not have the experience of freedom? Conversely, can one have the experience of freedom, without having freedom itself? In which case the experience would be misleading?

Some philosophers have moved the question about the free will up to a meta-level. If “willing” is wanting, does “having a free will” mean that I want to want what I want? Any will wants what it wants. Does a free will want to want what it wants?

There is an epistemological aspect: how do I know whether or not my will is free?

Freedom of the will might be relative to its object. This possibility uncovers the source of interest in the question about the will. Consider what we might call “mundane” decisions: I own several identical, or nearly identical, pairs of white socks. When I get dressed tomorrow morning, which pair will I choose?

Perhaps I will choose based on which pair is closest, which is at the top of the pile, which will take the least effort to grasp, or which will least disturb the orderliness of my wardrobe. Our discussion will then proceed along the usual lines: asking how I formed those preferences, how I analyze and calculate the situation, whether the choice is conscious or deliberate or not, etc.

But the choice about the socks is, in itself, uninteresting. The question about the free will becomes interesting when we discuss the will of, e.g., a murderer.

Many thinkers care about the question of the will because of its moral examples. But arguably many choices made by humans are ethically neutral.

Some scholars have estimated that each individual human being can make as many as several thousand decisions in one day: I reach into my drawer to grab a pencil; there is more than one pencil there; I choose one; in another drawer, there are several slips of paper; I choose one; I start writing my grocery shopping list; I choose whether to buy a quart or a pint of cream; I choose whether to buy red grapes or black grapes; I choose whether to buy grape jelly or strawberry jelly.

Marketing executives and advertising agencies will be interested in those decisions in the grocery store. Generally, philosophers will not.

The human will, then, makes some choices which appear to have no ethical significance, and other choices which do have ethical significance. It seems likely that moral decisions are responsible for much of the interest in the question of the will’s freedom.

Philosophers haven’t spent the last two millennia pondering the free will because they were wondering about choices between tea and coffee.

In addition to the ethically significant and the ethically insignificant, there may be a third category of decisions: a third set of objects for the will.

In theology, there are hints of a category of choices which we might call “spiritual.”

These are found, e.g., in the debate about whether one can ‘accept’ God’s grace, or whether one instead ‘receives’ it. Could this be a debate about the will?

A variety of theological views insist that the human will cannot ‘cooperate’ with, or ‘choose,’ God. They are implying that the human will is not free in those matters. But some views will simultaneously insist that humans are free in certain moral choices.

The result is the possibility that the human will could be, at the same time, free in some matters and bound in others.

Bluntly put, the businessman is interested in the will’s operation in selecting products in a grocery store; the ethicist is interested in the will’s operation in moral decisions; the theologian is interested in the will’s operation in relation to God.

Are these truly distinct categories? To be sure, there are some overlaps. A purchase decision can certainly be, simultaneously, an ethical decision.

Can we find examples of choice which are purely in one category or another?

Further: is it possible that the human will could be free in one category of decisions, and unfree in another category?

Discussions about the freedom of the will were already complex. If we establish a taxonomy of three difference types of choice (about mundane decisions, about ethical decisions, about spiritual decisions), then it’s even more complex.

Parsing WEIRD Morality: Its Constituent Parts

Among professional ethicists, the acronym WEIRD has arisen to refer to a demographic segment of “Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic” people. There is a general trend in the moral thinking of such individuals.

Each of the five factors named in the acronym has a general trend manifested in ethical thinking. To more specifically identify or express a factor’s ethical influence, however, the reader must first define each factor.

While the term “Western Civilization” is ubiquitous and has worked its way into the structure of both secondary and higher education, it retains at least some ambiguity. The word “western” is by itself merely a geographical designation; Sierra Leone is west of Paris; and Dakar, Senegal is west of London.

So what does “western” mean in the context of WEIRD morality? Other terms which are often given as nearly synonymous for ‘western’ included ‘European culture’ and the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition.’ These phrases, also, are ambiguous and problematic. “European culture” is now found around the world in the global embrace of some of its distinctive values (e.g., social and legal equality for women, the value and dignity of every human life, etc.). The “Judeo-Christian tradition,” the source of those values, has diffused itself as people from Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, and other traditions embrace those values.

So while there is some intuitive meaning to the word ‘western’ (e.g., Shakespeare, Luther, Michelangelo, Leibniz, John Locke, Edmund Burke, etc.), it is nonetheless fraught with vagueness. It carries this ambiguity with itself into the larger meta-concept of WEIRD morality.

The second component of WEIRD morality, education, likewise needs clarification. There are many types of education. Do all of them constitute constituent elements in WEIRD morality? When a madrasa (madrasah or medresa) educates its pupils in the Islamic trilogy of the Qur’an, the Sira, and the Hadith, how does that rote learning compare to a four-year degree in philosophy obtained from a Big Ten university in the United States? The use of the word ‘education’ within the WEIRD context leaves room for some additional specificity.

The ‘I’ in WEIRD represents ‘industrialized.’ Arguably, however, many exemplars of WEIRD morality are found in post-industrial societies. Certain aspects of industrialization might perhaps have an impact on ethical reasoning: concepts like interchangeability could encourage a greater degree of abstraction, and less emphasis on individuality, in moral reflection.

The notion of ‘rich’ is, like the other words above, to some extent relative. But if there is a more independent social understanding of ‘rich,’ it might relate to measurable, observable, and quantifiable aspects, like infant mortality, average lifespan, realistic anxiety about starvation, etc.

The final element in WEIRD morality is democracy. This word, too, is subject to a variety of meanings. One misunderstanding of ‘democracy’ fosters the habit in thought of overestimating the significance of majority or plurality opinion. Mixed with a hyper-Romanticist and postmodern privileging of passion over reason, of emotion over thought, this misunderstanding of ‘democracy’ grants legislative power to such opinion to establish morality. In extreme cases, such opinion is held to replace morality and ontological reality is denied to morality.

The examination of WEIRD morality, with its weaknesses and strengths, has been encouraged by Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Natural Language vs. Artificial Language: The Drive Toward Formalization

Philosophers have long considered the connection between problems and the linguistic expression of those problems. Could it be that some problems reside in language, and not in the states of affairs to which language refers?

Ordinary language contains imprecisions and ambiguities. The structures and mechanisms of natural language have caused confusions and disputes. One example centers on the nouns ‘space’ and ‘time.’

Consider these sentences:

Is there enough space in the suitcase for a pair of shoes?
He has space in his car for two more passengers.
How much space is in the storeroom?

Because we often take nouns as names for objects or substances, these sentences give the impression that ‘space’ names something which is found in suitcases, cars, and storerooms. This impression could give rise to the formation of sentences like these:

Can I take the space out of the suitcase and put it into the car?
Can an astronaut bring some space back to earth with him?
There’s a quart of space in the car, and a quart of space in the storeroom; can we exchange them?

This same type of confusion occurs with nouns like ‘time’ and ‘nothing’ and can be traced through the writings of many philosophers. Fridugis (also spelled Fredegis or Fredegisus) wrote an essay titled “On Nothing and Darkness” around 804 A.D.; Hegel and Sartre wrote extensively about nothing.

Likewise, the verb ‘to be’ causes confusion. Examples like the following lead the reader to infer that ‘be’ has the algebraic property of transitivity:

Fred is a teacher.
Fred is here.
A teacher is here.

But applying transitivity becomes problematic in examples like this:

My car is red.
My car is capable of going 75 MPH.
Red is capable of going 75 MPH.

These examples, and many others, have led some philosophers to seek a clearer and more precise mode of expression. It was thought that a more rigorous mode of expression would solve, or resolve, some of the questions and problems in philosophy.

This line of thought can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle (ca. 330 B.C.). His work on syllogisms, and his investigation of the verb “be” with its competing senses, manifest the hope that clarified language would lead to clarified thinking and understanding.

The next step is seen in the medieval Scholastics and their development of formal logic, including quantified and modal logics. William of Ockham (also spelled Occam) was among the most noted logicians of the early 1300s.

Gottlob Frege built on the work of John Venn, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and others. Frege developed symbolic logic in the 1870s, leaving behind the words and letters of natural language entirely. Symbolic logic raised hopes for higher levels of precision in the expression of propositions and of relations between propositions.

By the early twentieth century a clearly defined group of philosophers was working on language and logic as the keys for solving the major problems of philosophy. Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the works of logicians like Kurt Gödel and Georg Cantor exemplified this shared project.

Of course, not all philosophers were part of this movement, and among those who were part of the movement, there were substantial variations and disagreements. As Garth Hallett writes:

For Frege, Russell, and others, a perfectly precise and regular linguistic calculus was a desirable possibility or goal; for young Wittgenstein it was a fact and had only to be revealed through an appropriate notation.

An optimism and enthusiasm surrounded some philosophers in this movement. They figured that it was only a matter of time until most, or even all, of philosophy’s major questions would be finally and permanently answered by rigorous logical analysis. Logic would avoid the ambiguities of natural language, and it was those ambiguities, they thought, which had created the questions in the first place.

As the exploration of logic continued, however, questions about topics like completeness emerged. Slowly the analytical program unraveled. Logic might end up posing more riddles than it solved.

The movement’s initial hopefulness, and even naivety, withered under the discoveries of logicians. A new question emerged: Was the anticipated level of rigor and specificity possible?

Even more: was such an idealized formalism even desirable?

The early phase of Wittgenstein’s career was not, strictly speaking, “formalist,” in the sense that formalism is a view in the philosophy of mathematics which denies much meaning to mathematical expressions and treats them rather merely as exercises in symbol manipulation according to a set of arbitrarily stipulated rules.

While the early Wittgenstein was not a formalist, he relied to some extent on an analogy between mathematics and natural language, and relied even more on structures and forms to communicate meaning.

As is well known, an entire industry has arisen around the activity of comparing the earlier and later phases of Wittgenstein’s career. Garth Hallett argues that Wittgenstein’s later work

is directed against the supposed ideal which underlay both positions and against the pointless proposals and unrealistic analyses to which it gave rise. Ordinary language is no such calculus, nor need it be. In fact the ideal of absolute precision and regularity is ultimately unintelligible.

On Hallett’s view, then, Wittgenstein is rejecting both the view that “a perfectly precise and regular linguistic calculus was a desirable possibility or goal,” and the view that such a calculus was already latently present “and had only to be revealed.”

Among the competing views of the relationship between the early Wittgenstein and the late Wittgenstein, one central question is the extent to which the late views reject the early views, and the extent to which the late views see themselves as somehow continuing, or being founded on, the early views.

In any case, the late Wittgenstein in general, and much of later twentieth century philosophy with him, continued to see great importance in language, but sought to explore language less along the lines of an analogy between language and mathematical logic, and more along the lines of language as a social and anthropological phenomenon.