Silliman's Papers

Linguistic Parallelism: A third way in the mind/brain problem
A proposal for a linguistic double aspect theory, and a draft for a longer project
By Daniel Silliman
December 3, 2003
For Dr. Jim Stephens, Contemporary Philosophy

The great mind/body debate hinges on a few minor questions that swing everything. For dualism, the question of over-causation, more than any other, serves as final judge for the theory. For materialism, the question of reduction is pivotal.

Dualism, of course, looks like this: MENTAL / PHYSICAL, and materialism wants to collapse the mental into the physical, saying that MENTAL --> PHYSICAL (or MENTAL / PHYSICAL) is the simple and more explainable picture. Altering these pictures a little, we see that both camps are dealing with a two-world theory of sorts. Dualism has a MENTAL WORLD / PHYSICAL WORLD division while materialism has a MENTAL WORLD --> PHYSICAL WORLD reduction. So our two problem issues, over-causation and reduction are right here, with dualism holding physical and mental causes for a single physical event and materialism holding the complete reduction of mental to physical. Normally answered separately, we should try to overcome both problems at once if we can.

Against the whole field of debate, I want to throw the crossbred child of Spinoza and Wittgenstein. From Spinoza, I want to take single aspect theory, with one world operating in different modes.
From Wittgenstein I want to take the charge that philosophical problems are linguistic confusions. Together, this will give us a way to dissolve the mind/body problem with a double aspect theory that works as a linguistic parallelism, shifting the over-causation to an under-description problem and simultaneously opposing a mind/body reduction.

Consider a Spinoza-style monism with Wittgenstein-style modes, looking like:
               —MENTAL LANGUAGE
WORLD
               —PHYSICAL LANGUAGE


This is to propose a parallelism where the physical and the mental run parallel but rather than being two types of worlds they are two ways of describing one world. This is a parallelism where the distinction between the mental and the physical is a linguistic one, where the world is larger than our ways of talking about it.

The claim here is that the mind/body problem results from confusions about language. We have two languages neither of which describes the world fully, so we go back and forth between the ways of speaking which causes us to think we have two causal explanations for one event, or to think we need to explain mental things in physical terms.

Let’s look at how this works. A man screws a screw into a wall to hang up a picture. A close description of the man screwing could go two ways: 1) what was it like, phenomenologically, to screw; 2) what was it like, mathematically, to carry the screw.

The first will describe how it feels to screw, detailing the strain in his arms and the twist of his wrist, the way the man manifests himself against the wall, against the screw, the intention of hanging a picture, the way the entire action recedes into the background as an action, the way he doesn’t think about the math of the action but it’s there. The second will describe the mathematical description of the screw’s planes, the torque, the weight and resistance, etc.

There is a phenomenological way to talk about screws and screwing, but it will never be a total description since it doesn’t talk about the math. I can talk here about the way I know, bodily, that I’ve screwed past the sheet rock and am twisting into the wood, but not about the way that works mathematically. There is a mathematical description of a screw that describes a screw but can’t be said to give a total description since it can never capture the way a man feels screwing into wood. I can express planes and torque, but not the bite of metal into wood. The two descriptions aren’t reducible to each other, but keep pace running parallel.

Einstein, apocryphally, was once asked if a concert could be explained mathematically. He responded
that it could, but not fully since no explanation of pressure variation would capture the emotional aspect of the event.

Having two ways of talking about the world is confused as talking about two worlds by dualists who then have to explain the interaction of the mathematical description of a screw and the qualia of screwing, and frustratingly battered against by materialists who want to say there’s only one world and the equation-description is the real, if complicated, description of the phenomenological one.

The confusion enters because a given question about a particular event may receive a mathematical answer, while the next question will receive a phenomenological one. One asks for physical explanations of a screw and receives them. One asks for non-physical reasons and receives them. Perhaps, rather than siding with the over-causation of two reasons to one action, or with the reduction of non-physical into physical, we should consider the simplicity of linguistic double aspect theory, a linguistic parallelism where there is only one screw but two incomplete ways of talking about it.

To crunch all this, my argument runs thus:
1 There is one world.
2 There are two ways of describing the world, a phenomenological and a physical way.
3 Both descriptions are incomplete, thus can never fully be reduced into.
4 Therefore, descriptions of world may vary between phenomenological and empirical, depending on the question.
5 Therefore, apparent problems of over-causation are really questions of under-description, that is to say: If something appears to suffer from over-causation, that is because it can be partially described by one language and partially described by another.
If this works, over-causation and reduction are linguistic confusions and the field of mind/brain problems can move a long way to being dismissed, the mind/brain dichotomy a long way towards being overcome.