Tables, Touchdowns, and Technical Terms

There's all the things of the everyday world, colors and sounds and haircuts and pains and dollars and home runs. Those are all things. Then in the scientific world there's electrons and quarks and shields and molecules and how do we relate the things of our everyday sort of pre-scientific world to the things that science has discovered and what 100 years and more have shown is there's no simple answer. When I say 100 years I mean let's say since Einstein that's when the world really starts to look weird from the scientific point of view and you have people saying really it's all just atoms in the void and there's no such thing as solidity and there's no such things as colors. After all atoms aren't colored and the world's right about us. It's just atoms in empty space and we can go on from there. So at one extreme you have people who have insisted that the scientific image that's the gold standard that's what sets what's real. That's reality. That's reality. Everything else is illusion but as a cartoon I like puts it, the world we live in maybe an illusion but it's the only place you can get a good cup of coffee. Hi I'm Dr. Devon Sanchez Curry and you're listening to dialogues, meditations and analyses. A companion podcast for the problems of philosophy course I teach at West Virginia University. You just heard the philosopher Daniel Dennett, some of whose work we read last week talking to the physicist Sean Carroll about the apparent conflict between science and everyday experience. On today's episode we're going to discuss the work of Dennett's teacher Gilbert Ryle with a focus on Ryle's attempt to reconcile the many categories that we human beings use in order to think about our world. In the required chapters of this week's reading Gilbert Ryle is concerned to refute an argument that was very popular among scientists and some philosophers in the 20th century. The argument that Ryle wanted to refute was in short that because fundamental physics is after all fundamental and describes what everything in the universe fundamentally is. Therefore all of our other ways of talking about the world as containing people and places and touchdowns and justice are in the final accounting grasping at illusions. In other words as Ryle puts it, modern man is confronted with two worlds, the world of science and the everyday world. And according to the argument that's agitated Ryle, the world of science is real and the everyday world is just an illusion. Perhaps the most famous version of this argument was put forward by the physicist Arthur Eddington in 1928. It behoves me to mention straight away that Eddington himself was not as philosophically naive as Ryle suggested. Regardless, he once formulated our argument of interest in a strikingly memorable if misleadingly philosophically naive manner. So his words are worth quoting at some length. Here's what he wrote. I have settled down to the task of writing these lectures and have drawn up my chairs to my two tables. Two tables? Yes, there are duplicates of every object about me. Two tables? Two chairs? Two pens? This is not a very profound beginning to a course which ought to read transcendent levels of scientific philosophy. But we cannot touch bedrock immediately. We must scratch a bit at the surface of things first. And whenever I begin to scratch, the first thing I strike is my two tables. One of them has been familiar to me from earliest years. It is a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world. How shall I describe it? It has extension. It is comparatively permanent. It is colored. Above all, it is substantial. By substantial, I do not merely mean that it does not collapse when I lean upon it. I mean that it is constituted of substance. And by that word, I am trying to convey to you some conception of its intrinsic nature. It is a thing, not like space, which is a mere negation, nor like time, which is "heaven knows what." But that will not help you to my meaning because it is the distinctive characteristic of a thing to have this substantiality. And I do not think substantiality can be described better than by saying that it is an ordinary table. And so we go round in circles. After all, if you are a plain common sense man, not too much worried with science, you will be confident that you understand the nature of an ordinary table. Table number two is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance, and I do not feel so familiar with it. It does not belong to the world previously mentioned that world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes. It is part of a world which has forced itself on my attention. My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electrical charges rushing about with great speed. But their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself. Notwithstanding its strange construction, it turns out to be an entirely efficient table. It supports my writing paper as satisfactorily as table number one. For when I lay the paper on it, the little electrical particles with their headlong speed keep on hitting the underside, so that the paper is maintained in a ping pong-like fashion at a nearly steady level. If I lean upon this table, I shall not go through. Or to be strictly accurate, the chance of my elbow going through my scientific table is so excessively small that it can be neglected. Reviewing their properties one by one, there seems to be nothing to choose between the two tables for ordinary purposes. But when abnormal circumstances come about, then my scientific table shows itself superior. If the house catches fire, my scientific table will dissolve quite naturally into scientific smoke, whereas my familiar table undergoes a metamorphosis of substance which I can only regard as miraculous. There is nothing substantial about my second table. It is nearly all empty space, space pervaded, it is true, by fields of force. But these are assigned to the category of influences, not of things. Even in the minute part, which is not empty, we must not assume there is substance. In dissecting matter into electrical charges, we have traveled far from the picture which first gave rise to the conception of substance. The whole trend of modern scientific views is to break down the separate categories of things, influences, forms, etc. and to substitute a common background of all experience. Whether we are studying a material object, a magnetic field, a geometrical figure or a duration of time, our scientific information is summed up in measures. Neither the apparatus of measurement, nor the mode of using it, suggest that there is anything essentially different in these problems. The measures themselves afford no ground for a classification by categories. We feel it necessary to concede some background to the measures, an external world. But the attributes of this world, except in so far as they are reflected in the measures, our outside scientific scrutiny. Science has revolted against attaching the exact knowledge contained in these measurements, to a traditional picture gallery of conceptions, which convey no information and uptrude irrelevancies into the scheme of knowledge. I will not hear stress further the non-substantiality of electrons, since it is scarcely necessary to the present line of thought. Conceive them as you will. There is a vast difference between my scientific table, with its substance thinly scattered in specs in a region mostly empty, and the table of everyday life which we regard as solid reality. It makes all the difference in the world, whether the paper before me, is poised on a swarm of flies and sustained by a series of tiny blows from the swarm underneath, or whether it is supported because there is substance below it. All the difference in conception at least, but no difference to my practical task in the lectures. Modern physics has by delicate tests and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there, wherever there may be. On the other hand, I need not tell you that modern physics will never succeed in exercising that first table, strange compound of external nature, mental imagery and inherited prejudice, which lies visible to my eyes and tangible to my grasp. Eddington went on to complicate this two worlds picture in an interesting manner, but what we've just heard is what Ryle is concerned to refute. Ryle's argument against physicist's talk of two tables occupying two distinct worlds is straightforward. Fundamental physics does, in some sense, describe everything. When speaking in terms of fundamental physics, it is true to say that the chair I'm about to sit on is not solid, indeed that it's mostly empty space, indeed that there really is no chair there at all that can be captured by the language of fundamental physics. But it's simultaneously true to say that the chair I'm about to sit on is there, it's solid oak, in a different sense, when speaking in terms of whether or not I ought to sit on it, for instance. The chair with its solidity is not an illusion, it's just a phenomenon that exists relative to one way of speaking, even though it doesn't exist relative to another way of speaking. And there's no real conflict, according to Ryle, much less contradiction, between these two ways of speaking. So there's no conflict between the quote-unquote "world" of science and the quote-unquote "world" of everyday life. There's just one world, described in certain partially overlapping and partially distinct respects by the various sciences, and described in certain partially overlapping and partially distinct respects by people's various ways of talking in everyday life. Ryle motivates this argument by way of a series of analogies. To put a twist on Ryle's central analogy, consider the box score for a football game, say a football game in which WVU beat Texas 42 to 41. The box score, in some sense, describes everything that happened in the game. It even describes it in a rigorous, quantitative manner. In addition to the final score, every discreet tackle, every run, every pass completion, every time out and every touchdown, is captured in the box score. Precisely because all of these things, all of the events that make up the game are captured in the box score in a rigorous, quantitative manner. Some analytics nerds might be inclined to say that the box score is the most fundamental description of the game. But it would be absurd for these nerds to infer that the game, as described by the box score, is the only true game, in that any other descriptions of the game are just grasping at illusions. The spiral on the first pass of the game, the left tackles low stance, the inspirational halftime speech, the resounding thud of the biggest tackle, the way that each member of the crowd felt while singing country roads. Those are elements of the game that are not captured by any box score. But they're no less real for that. Board of the point, there's nothing in those elements of the game that conflict with, much less contradict, the game as described by the box score. There's simply two different ways of talking about the very same thing. So, Ryle says, goes the situation with science in everyday life. Fundamental physics doesn't give us a new world view to replace our old world view. It just gives us another way of describing the same old world. 20th century physics new way of describing the world was admittedly more rigorous in certain respects, just as football analytics allow for a more rigorous way of examining the game of football in certain respects. But the new way also misses out on some real important aspects of the world that the old way continues to capture just fine. And that's nothing to worry about since the two ways are not even in conflict, much less contradictory. Now, if Ryle's arguments are good, then we're mistaken in assuming that there's any obvious conflict between the world of science and the everyday world. There's just the one world, with a wide variety of scientific and everyday ways of describing and otherwise accounting for it. At first, this may seem like quite the relief. Fundamental physics doesn't call into question the solidity, much less existence of the cherim about to sit on after all. At least not in any sense that I need care about when deciding whether or not to sit. However, on reflection, Ryle's dissolution of the apparent conflict between world views summons more philosophical problems than it results. After all, if there were a true conflict, then figuring out the truth about the world would just involve figuring out which world view to hold and which to relinquish. We could be epistemically content to abandon the everyday world in favor of the world of science, for example. But given that they don't conflict, a trickier question immediately arises. Well then, what is the relationship between them exactly? Moreover, given that there's not just one world view presented by the sciences, nor just one world view presented by everyday life, but rather many distinct scientific modes of understanding the world, and many other distinct everyday modes of understanding the world. We're left not just with two, but with a great many world views to sort out the relationships between. As Danit pointed out at the beginning of this episode, sorting out these relationships is no simple task. To recognize that the everyday idea that you're sitting on a solid chair made out of oak does not conflict with the physicist's idea that your chair is fundamentally made up of atoms and void is not to explain how both things are true at the same time. According to Danit, Ryle, and Eddington for that matter, it's the philosophers task, as distinct from the physicist's task, to offer precisely this kind of explanation. Ryle discusses one of the many thorny philosophical problems of this kind in our optional reading for this week, his lecture on perception. The science of perception seems to indicate that we don't really see objects in the external world. Rather, we see our own internal representations. But this seems absurd, in a front to common sense, according to which I obviously see the microphone I'm currently speaking into, which is an object out there in the world, not a representation in my head. Ryle suggests that tackling this trenchant philosophical problem of perception requires getting clear in the nature of the relationship between our everyday notion that we see things, on the one hand, and the technical notions of optics, perceptual psychology, and the neurophysiology of vision, on the other hand. Ryle argues in examining that relationship, not only that seeing, in the everyday sense of the term, is not a bodily process like sweating, but that it isn't a psychological process, like associating the word triangle with the number three either. Nor is it somehow a jointly bodily and non-bodily process, like the one's day cart-posited with his notion of a mind-body union. Now as Ryle admits, this analysis doesn't tell us what seeing is, exactly, just tells us some things that seeing isn't. So it doesn't fully resolve the philosophical problem. But it does help sharpen our thinking about the problem, and sometimes, as Socrates discovered long ago, that's as much as a philosopher can hope for. Next week's podcast will analyze another, even more contentious set of philosophical problems, about which both everyday folks and scientists have plenty to say on Sundays, and about which what they have to say is, quite frankly, not always edifying. In particular, we'll both close our explicit discussion of the categories that people used to carve up the world, and open our discussion of ethics, by way of a conversation about race, racism, and solidarity. The category of race, like the category of perception, has long been a philosophical model, owing in no small part to confusions promulgated by the loose use of scientific and pseudo-scientific technical terms. And the category of racism is, if anything, even more of a model. We'll do our best to unmodel them. Next time on episode 12 of Dialogue's Meditations in [BLANK_AUDIO]