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by Massimo Pigliucci
I'm reading a fairly heavy (though fortunately not very long!) tome by French philosopher Jacque Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: the Myth of the Unconscious, which I picked up during a recent visit to Vienna (I was taking a few hours off and went to see Freud's home out of curiosity). I want to share some interesting notes, as Wittgenstein is always fascinating and yet baffling to me, and actually so is Freud!
Apparently, Witty often referred to himself as a "disciple" of Freud, and clearly admired the latter's intellect. However, beware of a compliment coming from Ludwig! Here are a few comments on psychoanalysis and its inventor, straight from the philosopher's pen:
* "Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. Now any ass has these pictures available to use in 'explaining' symptoms of illness."
* "Freud is constantly claiming to be scientific. But what he gives is speculation -- something prior even to the formation of a hypothesis."
* "Wisdom is something I never would expect from Freud. Cleverness, certainly; but not wisdom."
All of this makes Wittgenstein sound remarkably like his contemporary philosophical colleague, Karl Popper (also a Viennese, incidentally), who criticized psychoanalysis on the ground that it fails to meet Popper's criterion of "falsifiability," which allegedly differentiates science from pseudoscience (contemporary philosophers have moved beyond falsificationism, and admit that the boundary separating good science, bad science, and pseudoscience is somewhat fuzzy). Yet, Witty and Popper were actually often at odds, and they had a famous public dispute during a visit of Popper to Cambridge, where Wittgenstein was working.
Indeed, although I actually agree with the comments quoted above, their origin is to be found in Wittgenstein's (I think) excessive distrust of scientific explanations of human phenomena (such as the workings of the mind). Wittgenstein has made some blunders of his own, as in his criticism of Darwin's theory on grounds similar to his rejection of Freud:
"I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn't account for all this variety of species. It hasn't the necessary multiplicity."
By which he meant that the Darwinian principles of common descent and natural selection are insufficient to account for the variety of forms seen in the biological world. While this is in fact very likely true, it does not imply a rejection of Darwinism, but rather its expansion, building on Darwin's original insight (which is exactly what has happened over the past 150 years in biology).
While still (slowly) reading Bouveresse's book on Wittgenstein Reads Freuds, I got to an interesting bit where Witty is pitted against that compassionate curmudgeon, Arthur Schopenhauer. The battle is played around the difference (if there is any) between a cause and a reason for an action. This, as it happens, has profound consequences for the philosophy of mind, consciousness, and free will. So, read on!
Here is what Wittgenstein says: "The proposition that your action has such and such a cause is a hypothesis. The hypothesis is well-founded if one has had a number of experiences which ... agree in showing that your action is the regular sequel of certain conditions which we then call causes of the action. In order to know the reason which you had for making a certain statement ... no number of agreeing experiences is necessary, and the statement of your reason is not a hypothesis."
OK, Witty is always difficult to read, but it seems that what he is saying is that causes are hypotheses about how events are connected in the world. Reasons, on the other hand, are justifications that we give for certain actions or propositions. Perhaps an example will clarify: if I hit your knee with a small hammer, your leg will move because of a reflex. I.e., the hit, through a series of physical connections, caused the leg to move. However, if I ask you to raise your leg and you do it, your reason for doing so is that I asked you to perform the action. Wittgenstein is saying that reasons aren't causes, they are an altogether different kind of beast. This distinction does have great intuitive appeal, as we all realize that there seem indeed to be a big difference between the two cases concerning your knee just described.
Arthur (Schopenhauer), on the other hand, said about such matters: "Motivation [i.e., reason] is causality seen from within. ... Motivation [is only] causality passing through knowledge."
I'll be darn if this also doesn't make a lot of sense! The idea here is that in fact there is no real distinction between causes and reasons, because the latters are simply an awareness that we have of the causes of certain events or actions. So, for example, when I say that I got up and went to the refrigerator to get me a beer because I was thirsty, I am giving both a reason and a cause: indeed, my reason is a first-person description of the underlying cause (I was thirsty). (Incidentally, current neurobiological research seems to support Schopenhauer's contention.)
Wittgenstein seemed to prefer a distinction between causes and reasons for two, well, reasons! First, he was always distrustful of excessively scientifical or physical explanations of the human condition, especially of mental phenomena. Second, he felt that if one explains actions in terms of causes, then one is committed to an automatic form of determinism, and there goes free will out the window. Consciousness, then, is an after-the-fact illusion, a fiction that allows us to think that "we" make decisions, when in fact it's all a matter of physical causes.
The problem with Witty's position seems to me twofold: first, I don't see why causes have to be deterministic. We know (for example from quantum mechanics) that there is such a thing as probabilistic causality (though that still doesn't rescue free will, since we would at most have a random will). Second, Wittgenstein, like so many anti-physicalists, simply (conveniently) neglects to give an alternative explanation. If reasons are not a particular instance of causes, what are they, exactly? Inquiring minds want to know, and for good reasons.
(By the way, if you are wondering what all of this has to do with Freud, it is because Wittgenstein accused Freud and his disciples of confusing causes and reasons in setting up their psychoanalytical explanations.)
Witty's position seems to be akin to saying that trees are made of wood, but not of cells.
ReplyDeletewhy not of quarks or energy?
ReplyDeleteCauses are reasons but reasons are not causes.
ReplyDeletejeremybee
ReplyDelete>"Causes are reasons but reasons are not causes."
I'm guessing that reasons are both caused AND often are causal....they can have multiple effects.
Massimo,
ReplyDeleteI agree that LW's position as described it wrong. I have to wonder, however, what period of LW's work this thought is from, as there's a metaphysicalism in it that is very un-LW. In particular, for LW to hold that reasons-as-causes entails determinism requires thinking of causation as a language-independent phenomenon, such as a sparkling foam amidst the particles of the universe, which, again, is very un-LW.
Schopenhauer's notion of "causality flowing through knowledge" is a perfect example of this old-fashioned metaphysical conception of causation, and, ironically, an example of just the kind of thinking that early analytic philosophy, with LW on its avant guarde, wanted to dispel.
The old metaphysical conception of causation is still present, of course, though in the form of physicalist notions of causation--i.e., notions that takes physical causation to be a "fundamental" language-independent phenomenon--a view that leads to dubious forms of reductionism; it posits a phenomenon, physical causation, which is the true reality; hence to understand true reality in the fullest sense, we must reduce everything to physical causation. This is a 19th c.-metaphysics way of thinking.
The idea of causality as the phenomenon of particles flowing in the universe makes a nice picture, but it has nothing to do with the way we ordinarily use the word 'cause'. Use of the of the word 'cause' is inherently dialogical or contextual and tied essentially to logic rather than physical processes. When we ask the cause of an apple falling from a tree, we might say that the apple grew too heavy for the stem. If we ask what makes that the cause, we might answer that if the apple hadn't grown too heavy for the stem, the apple would not have fallen. Here we identify two states of affairs and assert a logical relation between them: causation. Generally whether it is correct to say that C is the cause of E depends on the context, and such contextuality is inherence to causal assertions, but I won't belabor that. We also say things say things like, 'Bill's affair caused Jill to leave Bill'. Why did Jill leave Bill? Because Bill had an affair. Of course, a close friend of Jill's might say that Bill's affair was not the cause--Jill was planning to leave Bill anyway--though it does explain why she left Bill at the moment she did. The cause was something else: Bill's snoring. My view is that causation has as much to do with cases like this as it does with physical processes. Causation is a certain logical idiom for talking about states of affairs generally, not physical processes especially. To think that causation has a special connection to physical processes is to be a modern day Schopenhauerian unwittingly driving western culture crazy with a reductionism implied by an antique metaphysics.
By way of illustration, I agree, Massimo--referring to your beer example--that reasons can be causes. I think we disagree in what this means, however. What you seem to mean is that something can be both a reason for doing something and a physical cause of what was done. Here we have the identification of cause with physical cause that causes reductionism. I on the other hand believe that any kind of state of affair can be a cause in the full sense of the word, and, as reasons are a kind of state of affair, reasons can be causes. To say that a belief, for example, caused something is simply to assert that if the belief was not held, the something would not have occurred. To think that physical processes or causes have anything to do with this assertion is to dust off Schopenhauer.
So, I believe it is thinking of causation metaphysically as opposed to logically or linguistically that leads to the (awful) reductionism of the present age. When we see that reasons can be causes without being physical causes--causation is just an idiom of logic, as opposed to something that sparkles in matter--the fly is out of the bottle.
Quantum mechanics is a good analogy for human behavior, if only for the purposes of a particular type of illustration: I gather that quantum mechanics includes the notion of the "probability cloud" that represents a neighborhood of some event that is only mathematically (but quite dependably) centered, on average, in some location.
ReplyDeleteIf we consider some (relatively) universal trait of mankind, such as the instinct for survival, then we might expect that the majority of humans would rate close to average on the basis of individual motivating factors, e.g., desire to avoid pain, instinct to procreate, desire for self-actualization, curiosity for the future, fear of death, etc. We could plot the instinct for survival on a linear scale, and most of us would fall near a central or average point, but that would be to subsume all of the various motivating factors to a single measurement.
Imagine, however, the instinct for survival displayed as an average central point in a (crudely) plotted probably cloud defined by the convergances of linear scales for all imaginable (possibly innumerable) motivating factors. Each individual's scores on the radiating scales would place him or her in appropriate proximity to the average center.
More importantly, such an illustration can serve when a profound divergence is found in human behavior, such as the general distinction between Eastern and Western religions as regards belief being based on ostensible fact. Imagine plots of relative importance, East versus West, on linear scales for reliance on emotion, unquestioning respect for ancestors, insistence on historicity, textual criticism, meditation versus analysis, etc.
A conceptual "probability cloud" to represent this phenomenon would suitably resemble a hazy ellipse with darker collections of events (persons) at the foci. Of course, this illustration has no practical application, since there would be no way to know how to arrange the individual linear scales in relation to each other. (Though this would be no more illogical than the general perception of Orthodox Judaism as "socially conservative"--a single linear measure--with the exceptions of abortion and divorce, which comprise some Christians' pillars of social conservatism.)
The "probability cloud" model, admittedly, has only cautionary value. However, linear conceptualization is often trapped in the snare of its implicit duality. It is all well and good to analyze Hindu versus Christian beliefs, for example, or to exhaustively study their "belief systems."
It is perhaps better, especially from an atheistic or agnostic viewpoint, to examine how the multiplicity of adherents of each religion, individually and in relation to their co-religionists (and other-religionists) go about the business of believing. Is it not important to study Hindu believing versus Christian believing?
Is not the "believing" part of "believing in God" as important to the atheist as the "in God" part? Cannot both parts be seen as social constructs as well as manifestations of evolutionary convenience? Must both parts be got rid of?
@Paul: I have not devoted much thought to causality, though I ought to. However, prima facie, Schopenhauer's position seems obviously right to me. Looking through your comment, I cannot find any argument against it other than that it leads to reductionism. Can you spell out why you think the Schopenhauer approach is wrong?
ReplyDeleteI agree that reasons can be causes, by the way, I just don't think they are a fundamentally different sort of cause from a simple physical one.
Ian,
ReplyDeleteThe way I argued against Schopenhauer's view was to suggest that it is just an imaginative picture that has no clear explanatory value for or relation to the way we actually talk about causality. Another way to argue against the view is to place the burden of explaining what it is supposed to mean for causality to exist language- and mind-independently. What intrinsic relations between particles, or basic stuff of choice, are supposed to amount to causality? If you say that causality is the relation between physical states of affairs such that if one occurs the other must occur, you're talking about a logical relation. Are such logical relations language- and mind-independent? Anyway, even if such relations could hold mind-independently, why take basic physical states of affairs to their primary domain? E.g., why should we hold that such relations between basic physical states of affairs are "more true or real" than when they hold among, say, beliefs and actions? My view is that if you start a study of causality with examination of language, a view like Schopenhauer's never needs to be considered.
You write: "I agree that reasons can be causes, by the way, I just don't think they are a fundamentally different sort of cause from a simple physical one."
What do you mean in saying that reasons and causes are not different kinds of cause? On my view, there is just one cause-relation with various sorts of states of affairs it can be applied to. If you're saying that there's no difference between a belief, say, and a configuration of particles, say, you'll have to explain what that is supposed to mean.
If what you mean is that the cause relation applies to one no more fundamentally than it applies to the other, then I agree. However, I think what you are trying to say is that reasons engage in physical causation. Again, this is something that needs to be explained. Schopenhauer should be useful in doing so ;)
There are no transitional organism between the sponge which has about 4 cell types and the Trilobite which has about 40 - 60 cell types. This transition occurred during the Cambrian and it happened in a time period below the resolution of the fossil record.
ReplyDelete@Paul: Let me see if I can summarize you. I think what you're saying is that causality is something like a logical relation among states of affairs A & B such that if A did not occur, then B could not occur either (caveats, caveats, fillips, fillips). So for example "the cue ball" counts as a cause (potentially), but so does "my decision to mow the lawn."
ReplyDeleteAnd you're furthermore saying that the first example is not more privileged or more basic than the second, because causality tracks a logical relation among states of affairs, not necessarily a physical one. So I think you would say that although "my decision to mow the lawn" is in principle reducible to basement-level physics, doing so would not make the causality any more "real" than it is at the level of human psychology.
I am less clear on why you think causation is mind-dependent. Do you mean this in the sense that exactly which states of affairs are chosen for scrutiny depends on an agent's particular interests? I doubt you mean that there is no objective fact of the matter about whether A caused B. It seems there is an objective right answer here, deducible from thinking about counterfactuals (e.g., "if I had not made the decision, would the lawn have been mowed?").
@paul
ReplyDeleteRegarding 'reason' in the discussion of "reason as possible cause"....do you see 'reason' as referring to something different than 'belief'?
Beliefs are causative....so it seems reasons would be also.
Ian,
ReplyDeleteThat's a pretty good description of my view, though I 'm not sure about the significance of the idea that your decision to the mow the lawn is in principle reducible to basement-level physics. What would this mean?--would it mean finding an equivalence for the phrase 'my decision to mow the lawn' in the form of some complicated description purely in the language of physics? The idea here, I suppose, is that there's an in-principle describable physical state of affairs such for it to exist is for a decision to mow the lawn to exist. Such a description may be logically possible, and this suggests that in principle talk of causation between conscious states could be stated in terms of causation between physical states, but this doesn't mean that talk of causation between conscious states *is* talk of causation between basic physical states.
Any English sentence can be translated into a sentence of French, but this doesn't mean that talk of equivalent sentences in English is talk of equivalent sentences in French. Similarly, talk of causation in phenomenal descriptive language is not abbreviated talk of causation in basic physics--not any more than English is abbreviated French. My point is that phenomenal language and basic physics are simply different descriptive languages, and the fact that the former can be translated into the latter does not mean that the phenomena described in the latter are "more real" than phenomena described in the former. The view to the contrary involves the strange pre-1900 metaphysical notion of graduated "realness" that underlies reductionism.
It might be said that what motivates reductionism is not a graduated view of realness but a desire fror explanatory unity: all reality is physics and all higher level description of reality is mere abbreviated physics. A neat picture indeed, however, within this, the view of graduated realness remains in the form of the notion of 'mere abbreviation'. If it is considered that higher-level descriptions describe reality just as truly as physics does, the logical possibility of descriptive reduction becomes a trivial abstraction. I.e., one needs the graduated reality view to find the picture compelling.
To your other point, my reason for bringing in the issue of mind-independence wasn't to argue that causality is subjective or relative in any sense. On my view, causal relations, being a kind of logical relation, have the same nature as logical relations in general. My point in bringing in mind-independence was to discount the notion of causation being a phenomenon like a fish that has a nature fully independent of our descriptions, as opposed to a phenomenon like entailment, which part of a metric that we place on reality, as opposed to something we discover. Anyway, in my view, problems of objectivity, etc., regarding causation are same as those pertaining to logic in general. On this score, I'm a nominalist (anti-platonist), though I haven't figured out yet how to make it all work.
DJD,
ReplyDelete"Reason" in the sense of "reason for something" is often used in a broad sense as a rough synonym for 'cause'. We might say that rain is the reason the boulder fell. In a narrower sense, in a sense of greater philosophical concern, a "reason" is what is referred to in explaining an action or intentional state. It is because the widely-held, old-fashioned notion of a cause as a physical process does not seem to apply--at least in a straight-forward way--to intentional states, such as beliefs, desires, and intents, that reasons as causes might be a point of dispute. My view is that this issue goes away when a logical view of causation is adopted, which is a better view than the physical process view in my view. On this view, all actual states of affairs are causative, so beliefs are causative by implication. If someone asks me why I am going to the train station, the true answer is the relevant state of affairs such that if it were not actual, I would not be going to the train station. That is the cause of my going in the context. A lot of complexity lies in my use of 'relevant'. What I give as the cause of my going to the train station may vary with who I'm talking to. This is because different people may know different things about my going to the train station and want to know different things via the question: why are you going? One person may simply wonder why I'm going there at all. Another may wonder why I'm going given their knowledge of, say, who I am going to meet there. Because causation is in a rough sense "informative ontological dependence", and because every actual state of affairs depends ontologically on an infinite number of others, assertions of causation are inherently contextual; their truth is context-dependent. There is no absolute cause of my going to the train station; just this cause or that depending on what enquirers know and want to know. Naturalistic explanation is just a special sort of context of causal discourse.
Paul
ReplyDeleteThanks...That discussion is philosophically stimulating. I can feel my "coherence module" working away, trying to plug this into my knowledge net.
What's the source text for W's remarks here? I'm not familiar with the passage. From the point of view of his later work, I find it hard to imagine that he as drawing rigid boudaries for the correct use of explanatory language....but a couple of points might help.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I suspect that "cause" here translates "Ursache," which more frequently denotes an objective, scientific event, and "reason" is probably "Grund," which typically denotes a reaosn or justification. None of this helps too much, because all of these terms shade into one another, (though Grund, like reason, is more laden with intentional baggage).
Even if we stipulate W's distinction as a matter of linguistic usage, it still strikes me as highly suspect. To make his point about "reasons" fly, he has to assume both that our psychological reasons are immediately introspectible and that such introspection is not open to error or revision. Both points strike me as straight-forwardly false, which is kind of interesting, especially in this context, since that is surely one of Freud's central themes.
...just some thoughts off the top.
Regarding Wittgenstein, a larger excerpt may clarify things a bit. Even more than most philosophers, it's often very difficult or impossible to tell what Wittgenstein meant from very brief excerpts (even the following is too brief, but my time is limited... as, apparently, is the amount of text allowed in a comment!). The general context is of examining rule-following behavior, and this is from pp. 14 and 15 of "The Blue and Brown Books".
ReplyDelete---
Giving a reason for something one did or said means showing a way which leads to this action. In some cases it means telling the way which one has gone oneself; in others it means describing a way which leads there and is in accordance with certain accepted rules.
[...]
At this point, however, another confusion sets in, that between reason and cause. One is led into this confusion by the ambiguous use of the word "why". Thus when the chain of reasons has come to an end and still the question "why?" is aksed, one is inclined to give a cause instead of a reason. If, e.g., to the question, "why did you paint just this colour when I told you to pain a red patch?" you give the answer: "I have been shown a sample of this colour and the word 'red' was pronounced to me at the same time; and therefore this colour now always comes to my mind when I hear the word 'red'", then you have given a cause for your action and not a reason.
The proposition that your action has such and such a cause, is a hypothesis. The hypothesis is well-founded if one has had a number of experiences which, roughly speaking, agree in showing that your action is the regular sequel of certain conditions which we then call causes of the action. In order to know the reason which you had for making a certain statement, for acting in a particular way, etc., no number of agreeing experiences is necessary, and the statement of your reason is not a hypothesis. The difference between the grammars of "reason" and "cause" is quite similar to that between the grammars of "motive" and "cause". Of the cause one can say that one can't know it but can only conjecture it. On the other hand, one often says: "Surely I must know why I did it" talking of the motive. When I say: "we can only conjecture the cause but we know the motive" this statement will be seen later on to be a grammatical one. The "can" refers to a logical possibility.
The double use of the word "why", asking for the cause and asking for the motive, together with the idea that we can know, and not only conjecture, our motives, gives rise to the confusion that a motive is a cause of which we are immediately aware, a cause 'seen from the inside', or a cause experienced.--Giving a reason is like giving a calculation by which you have arrived at a certain result.
---
The last sentence is perhaps the most relevant, and we can easily guess at its other half--Giving a cause is like explaining what mental processes occur when you make a certain calculation. In the context of modern understanding of biology, we might want to say instead that giving a cause would mean providing an account of the neurochemical events happening in your brain as you do a calculation, and we might object to Wittgenstein by saying that as our understanding of neurophysiology increases we are slowly creeping past the limits of mere conjecture.
In any case, the distinction is basically between explaining a behavior mechanistically (cause) rather than explaining a behavior as a result of the following of certain behavior, logical, and/or semantic rules (reason).
In reference to specific bits of the original post:
ReplyDelete"OK, Witty is always difficult to read, but it seems that what he is saying is that causes are hypotheses about how events are connected in the world. Reasons, on the other hand, are justifications that we give for certain actions or propositions. Perhaps an example will clarify: if I hit your knee with a small hammer, your leg will move because of a reflex. I.e., the hit, through a series of physical connections, caused the leg to move. However, if I ask you to raise your leg and you do it, your reason for doing so is that I asked you to perform the action. Wittgenstein is saying that reasons aren't causes, they are an altogether different kind of beast. This distinction does have great intuitive appeal, as we all realize that there seem indeed to be a big difference between the two cases concerning your knee just described."
If I ask you to raise your leg and you do it, what is the -cause-? In theory it should be possible to provide a causal explanation along the same lines as that for reflexive actions, just much, much more complicated.
In the first case, there apparently isn't a reason. In the second case, there is. That seems a big enough difference between the two cases.
Also, "Wittgenstein seemed to prefer a distinction between causes and reasons for two, well, reasons!"--[citation needed] for both of those.
aspidoscelis quotes the following paragraph from the original post:
ReplyDelete"OK, Witty is always difficult to read, but it seems that what he is saying is that causes are hypotheses about how events are connected in the world. Reasons, on the other hand, are justifications that we give for certain actions or propositions. Perhaps an example will clarify: if I hit your knee with a small hammer, your leg will move because of a reflex. I.e., the hit, through a series of physical connections, caused the leg to move. However, if I ask you to raise your leg and you do it, your reason for doing so is that I asked you to perform the action. Wittgenstein is saying that reasons aren't causes, they are an altogether different kind of beast. This distinction does have great intuitive appeal, as we all realize that there seems indeed to be a big difference between the two cases concerning your knee just described."
Both of aspidoscelis' comments seem perfectly sound: "In theory [as regards the second case] it should be possible to provide a causal explanation along the same lines as that for reflexive actions, just much, much more complicated", and: "In the first case, there apparently isn't a reason. In the second case, there is. That seems a big enough difference between the two cases."
But, with due respect to the Professor, what is our warrant for choosing two such disparate cases? Maybe the leg-raiser-at-command (like the first case person would normally be) is a poor soul sitting nervously in a cold exam room in a ridiculous excuse for a gown, ready to twitch any which way. Maybe the leg-raiser is a perennial orthopedic patient who has responded to "raise your leg" (or even just the familiar physician's voice on the first syllable) so many times that the response has become, well, reflexive.
I don't mean to be a quibbler, but I can't help thinking that examples posed to illustrate distinctions (as opposed to gradations) between named entities must be able to stand close scrutiny. I am rarely able to come up with such neat distinctions, which is why I am fascinated with the "probability cloud" illustration I offered earlier--human behaviors manifest in concrete phenomena due to the (statistically represented) person's approximate position on an unlimited number of converging linear scales.
However, is it not in fact the case that the substance of the post is not in "what is the difference between a cause and a reason?" but rather in "what is the difference between an act that a human or group of humans will ascribe to a cause impinging on the actor, and an act that they will ascribe to a reason on the part of the actor?"
Perhaps I am making too much of this, but is there really any party to this discussion, living or dead, who would say that a reason, as compared to a cause, is "an altogether different kind of beast?"