Fuster’s “Prólogo” to Hayek’s El Orden Sensorial

brain, cerebral cortex, connectionism, consciousness, El Orden Sensorial, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophical psychology, philosophy of mind, qualia, the sensory order

Here is a translation I commissioned by José Villavicencio of Joaquin Fuster’s “Prólogo” to F. Hayek El Orden Sensorial. Unión Editorial, S.A., Madrid, pp 11-23, 2004.

+++++++++++++++++++

Prologue

Salzburg, May 17, 1976

Dear Professor Fuster,

Thank you very much for your kind letter dated the 3rd of this month and that I have in my possession without having had the time to answer because I needed to make a visit to Vienna. It is always a great pleasure when, for long periods of time, I learn that someone is interested or remembers my Sensory Order. I have not seen any specific reaction to my way of thinking, even though it is a fact that it was recently republished for a second time indicating then that there is someone reading it…

Yours truly,

F.A. Hayek

In order to understand the intellectual roots of The Sensory Order, I am inviting the reader to visit Vienna, the Vienna of the last century’s 2nd decade, where and when the author wrote this work’s first draft. There is the beginning of the prestigious positivist school of philosophy, whose epistemology Hayek adopted in order to clarify the philosophical base of the mind. For positivist psychologists of the period, the mind is accessed through the senses, and thus, that’s what he begins to do, using empiricism, as it was the usage in vogue by the great physiologist-psychologist of the XIX century (e.g., Mach, Helmholtz, Wundt, James Müller). Just beyond the entrance to the senses is perception, the cognitive faculty that represents the world that surrounds us in the form of objects, animate and inanimate beings, and structures and physical occurrences, all with their respective dimensions of time and space. Perception, for the empiricists and the young Hayek, is the preferred way of the mind. According to them, if we understood the physiology of how we understand the world around us, we would understand the structure and the functions of the mind in the brain. The theoretical psychologists of the moment, and thus Hayek in the beginning build their theories of perception starting from basic elements of sensation, what Mach (1885) calls “the pure nucleus of sensation”. From here on, in apposition to primary sensations, the primary structures of perception begin to be formed, and these, in apposition too, form the more elaborate structure of the mind. The mental panorama of perception becomes a type of mirror or group of mirrors that reflect the exterior world. Thus, the mental world reflects the exterior world as a mosaic perception of itself. From this comes the so-called psychology of “mosaic”. It is a vision somewhat static of things that do not take into account the huge informative power of perceiving that resides in the almost limitless combination of the aforementioned basic elements of elemental sensation. Hayek quickly abandoned this static and restrictive vision of perception for a more dynamic vision of that function and more in line with the principles of interaction between perception and memory, fundamental with the principle—previously espoused by Helmholtz—that stipulated that perception sprouts from memory, and vice-versa, memory from perception. We not only remember that we perceive, but we perceive because we remember. Even more, for both, memory and perception, the “rule” is a rule of relations. Objects from both define themselves by a relation of spatial and temporal associations between elements of lesser rank to the former elements. It is in the power of the combination, to know, of the relation, where Hayek finds the key of perception, and thus, the sensory order. He does it forcing the psychology “of mosaic” to take a Copernican turn around. In the new psychology of perception he proposes, there are neither elemental sensations nor sensational nucleuses à la Mach. All perception, even the more elemental, are based on the relations or contiguousness or simultaneity between the stimuli or impulses to which the object has been subject in its own past or in the past of the species. It is here where Hayek finds the fulcrum for the Copernican turn: in the evolution of species and the individual, to know, in phylogeny and ontogeny. There is nothing new in the world of the senses. Everything we feel and perceive is of associative character, is the aggregate of relations that have been formed between stimuli that have occurred at the same time and at the same historical places of the species or the individual organism. At the lowest levels, the primary sensations are based on simple relationships that in the course of evolution have established relationships of contiguousness or spatial or temporal continuity. This is how the temporal sensors and the sensory receptors of the optical thalamus and the cerebral cortex are formed. These structures constitute, to put it this way, the memory of the species, the filetic memory or evolutionary, which was formed during the “night of time” in order to better adapt the species to the vicissitudes of the environment. Above those lowest levels of the sensory order, presumably in the so called cortex of association, the systems of relations are being formed between stimuli, let’s say it now, the networks of perceptive individual memory (in a psychological plane, Hayek calls them maps) that store in its structure the memory of the individual, plastic, dynamic and open to the future, subject to constant change until death. Each stimulus, each memory, according to Hayek, evokes its “retinue”, to know, a host of sensory traces that one day accompanied that stimulus or other similar ones (similarity, according to James Mill, is a special circumstance of cooccurrence) and that contribute to the map or network to which the stimulus belongs. When that stimuli and other similar ones reappear in the sensory environment, triggered by associative relationships of the original network, with which triggers the entire stimuli of perception, bringing about in unity the whole perception. With which, furthermore, the network opens to new accompanying stimuli that will amplify or bring “up to date”. Definitely, according to Hayek, to perceive is to classify the world in groups of relations among stimuli previously formed in the history of the organism or of its species. And the nervous system, or its part that is dedicated to perception, from sensory organs to the associative cortex, is essentially a classifying apparatus of relations among stimuli. Perception of an object is defined by the relations among the sensory components of the object. By itself, those components have no mental quality, but together they do. With it, theoretically, a problem that has perplexed psychologists since immemorial times is resolved: the problem of constant perception. How is it that the object continues to be the same in spite of its change of color, of its dimensions and of the space it occupies in the retina? How is it that the melody is the same even though the key, the scale or the instrument that emits it changes? The explanation is found, naturally, in the relation and order of the components. During the years that passed between the time this book’s draft was written and its publication in 1952, there appeared in Europe two important intellectual currents that Hayek used extensively to support and extend his psychological theory. The first was the Psychology of Form or Gestalt (Gestalt psychologie, Koffka, 1935); the second, Biology of the Systems (von Bertalanffy, 1942). The Gestalt psychologist reasoned that the object of perception was the figure, form or structure. They based their concepts, above all, in the field of vision, where an object and its perception are not formed simply by the apposition of elemental luminous impressions of the object on the retina, but by the configuration of those impressions, to know, as result of the order and relation among themselves. The concept of Gestalt, consequently, goes beyond the heralded saying, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”, which is undoubtedly true. Better to say, the whole is defined by order and the relationships among the parts. Hayek goes even farther. In the first place, he rids Gestalt of the nativism attributed by the founders, who postulated that “forms” have innate representation in the central nervous system, and this representation would manifest itself in the form of hypothetical “electrical fields”. Hayek rejects such concepts, that have no empirical foundation, but without refuting principal elements of Gestalt, and above all maintaining and emphasizing, among them, the relational or associative character of perception. At all levels, from the most elemental up to the most abstract, perception consists of a sensory order that has been formed in the nervous system by classifying acts of the surrounding, that is during the course of history of the species or of the individual. Gifted with the attributes, the relational and the evolutional, Gestalt becomes to Hayek the theoretical foundation of his conception of the sensory order and perception. It is important to add that, though the Gestalt psychologies built their theory almost exclusively in the visual environment, Hayek extended it and applied in all sensory environments. It remains to clarify the neurological base of these theoretical connections, of those relations among sensations that form the networks or “maps” of perception—and now that of the memory—that Hayek postulates. The second intellectual movement that decisively influenced Hayek is the socalled Biology of Systems. This current of thought had its origins in the work of the great philosophers and biologists of the end of the XIX and beginning of the XX centuries (e.g.; Bernard, Cannon, Uexküll). Among them, the one that most influenced Hayek was von Bertalanffy (1942). The fundamental concept of his theory is his theory of organization. The structural and functional properties of a biological system derive from the relations among its components and not from the individual properties of its components. In other words, the meaning of the structure and functions of a system reside exclusively in the organization of its parts and are inherent to it. The conceptual affinity between the systems theory and Hayek’s psychological theory is immediately understood. For him, all sensory order, all perception, are based in the relations among elements, more or less complex, and in their organization in the form of cognitive networks. What is important are the elements and, above all, the relations among themselves. To explain the formation of the contacts in his networks of perception and memory, Hayek uses an old concept of Ramon Cajal that was one of the first, if not the first, in proposing: the synaptic modulation by experience. In his Remembrances of My Life (1923, p. 288) he tells us, possibly paraphrasing him, what he told the participants to an international meeting in Rome with respect to the formation of habits and motor memories: “the functional perfection brought on by exercise (physical education, operations of speaking, writing, playing the piano, mastery in fencing, etc.) […it is due to] the creation of new cellular appendices […] susceptible of improving the adjustment and reach of the contacts, and even of organizing absolutely new relations between neurons primitively unconnected.“ All this Cajal said before Sherrington would invent the word “synapses” to describe those “contacts” between neurons. The fundamental idea is that the formation and consolidation of memory are due to the connection of synapses. Preceding Hebb (1949)—in the fact that this concept would be already mentioned in original version of The Sensory Order—Hayek proposes the beginning of the temporal coincidence of sensory impulses, and in the formation of memory, in order to facilitate the synapses between the neurons that received simultaneous impulses. This concept is completely backed today by data gathered by neurophysiological experiments on animals (summarized by Fuster, 1999). With relatively recent neurophysiological data, about which we cannot expand here, the basic fundamental physiological of association in memory, and subsequently, of the formation and recall of memories has been substantiated. Curiously, it was another Spaniard, Juan Luis Vives (1538), who already in the XVI century had enunciated the principle of simultaneity in the association of the perceptive mind, when he said: “Quae simul sunt a phantasia comprehensa si alterutrum occurrat, solet secum alterum representare” (Of two things simultaneously learned, if one happens it usually evokes the other.) Modern neuroscience gives that saying as its cerebral support. Just as it is done to support Hebb’s and Hayek’s principles of synaptic plasticity. Hayek, in his book, postulates that somewhere in the nervous system, probably in the cerebral cortex according to him, exists a structure and functional isomorphic organization with the organization of its sensory maps and networks. The isomorphism that he proposes is a topological isomorphism. With it he means to say that two hypothetical networks, one mental or perceptive and the other that represents in the cortex, coincide topologically, in such a way that order and relations between elements (nodes) in one are identical to order and relations between the other; I say order and relations, not physical distances between elements—which in a network are sensations and in the other are assemblies of neurons. Hayek makes us imagine two networks of knotted elastic networks, where the knots and the connecting pieces between the knots in one correspond to the knots and connecting pieces of the other. The two networks are topologically isomorphic, thus stretching and twisting any which way one of them, this one retains its topology and its isomorphism with the other. In the same manner, the sensory order would correspond to isomorphic order in the organization of the cortex. The organization of the cortex that Hayek insinuates in this book, like the role played by synaptic plasticity in learning and memory, would later find its neurobiological base in the cortical connectivity that was discovered much later after the book’s publication. It is truly astonishing that its author, in the middle of the ignorance that existed in the first half of the XX century about the anatomical and physiological organization of the cortex, would instinctively coincide with the evidence of the second half of the century. In cognitive neuroscience, as in other fields of human knowledge, the genius of Hayek is in having anticipated with perspicacity what would be verified many years later after it was stated at the theoretical level. During the three decades that passed during 1960 and 1990, new methods were designed to trace nerve connections in the primate’s cerebrum, which is in many ways homolog to the human. In several laboratories around the world, it was discovered with these methods a wealth of connections, unsuspected previously, among the different cortical areas. Each assembly of neurons, in any part of the cortex, seemed to be connected directly or indirectly with whichever other. Furthermore, the connectivity was reciprocal; an area that sent connections to the others, receive them in return, the major part of the connections were short, lacing connections or contiguous areas. Many of the connections, never the less, were long, lacing different areas among themselves, such as the frontal lobe areas, with the occipital, or the temporal ones. Little by little, never the less, in that huge mass of nerve fibers, a certain order was discovered. In first place was seen, that certain areas, to know, the sensory and primary motor areas, those we previously called the seat of the “filetic memory”, are the origins of nerve fibers that cross from area to area toward the more elevated zones of association or integration of the temporal, parietal and frontal lobes. It was also seen than each succession of areas in such discontinuous trajectories form a connective road and an information processing way that goes from an area primary sensorial or of determined motor modality (vision, tact, etc.) towards the cortex of association, supposedly processing and moving higher toward the superior information or motor areas of each modality. It was seen that at each step in the trajectory, the neurons from one area did not only transmit to fibers backwards to preceding area; but, more over, it transmitted collaterally to other sensory roads, as well as, other neurons at superior areas. Definitely, it appears to be that from each primary cortical zone, whether it be sensory or motor, departs an inverted conical weave of connective and neural processing that widens and distributes as it progresses, interconnecting itself with areas of association each time higher and more poli-modal. There is more, that progression toward the high cortical areas continues not only with gradient connections, but gradient in evolution and development, that is to say, filogenetic and ontogenetic. The lowest areas (“filetic memory”) are the ones that develop before, not only during the course of evolution; but, as well as, during the course of perinatal development. The higher areas, those of the superior associative cortex, are the ones that develop more and much later, in the evolution, as well as, during the development of the individual. The frontal cortex, for example, does not reach its maximum development up until the human cerebrum, and itself, until the third decade of life. It is along the length of these three gradients—connective, filogenetic and ontogenetic—how, from the beginning of the primary sensory and motor cortex, the networks of perception and memory are formed from the bottom up. Experiences that happen at the same time strengthen the synaptic contacts between the assemblies of neurons that receive what those impulses generate. New experiences, by association, reactivate old networks, expanding and reconfiguring the latter. The memory network each in its turn more complex and more abstract grow superimposing one above the other toward levels each time of higher cortical representations in the areas of superior associativity. All this constitutes a dynamic network formation process that retains memory in its connective tangle and at the same time serve to perceive, that is to say, to interpret and classify, the new experiences in the context of previous established memories. At the root of this dynamic network formation process, by which what is sensory— like that, which is motor—becomes mental, is the easiness of connectivity between neurons. It is because of this selective ease of synapses in this huge connective structure of the cortex how the memories of the individual are formed on the filetic memory base—sensory cortex and primary motor—that is common to all individuals of the species. The idiosyncrasy and specificity of the memory of the individual resides in the ability of each individual to combine the ten thousand million or so neurons that reside in the human cortex. As Hayek premised, the process of the formation of cognitive networks is a self-organizing connective process of the cortex under the influence of experiences. Under the use that experience imposes, the synapses between neurons simultaneous activated are facilitated, by which the network that unites them are formed or strengthen. It is, thus, with use how, the immense connective substrate that is in good part indefinite nerve roads, make their own roads that constitute the network and defines it. Things happen in somewhat the same way as the poet used to say: “Traveler there is no road, it is made as you walk” (Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla). That dynamic formation of cognitive networks, whose consolidation does not seem to stop during dreams, leads to the organization of the sensory order in the cortex similar to the one espoused by Hayek with much less knowledge, compare to what we know today, about the marvelous structure of the human brain. From our neuroscientific perspective of the XXI century (Fuster, 2003), the cognitive networks that he postulated, serve perception as well as memory, appear organized hierarchically, intertwine between themselves and sharing neuronal assemblies (the “knots” of the net) in very distinct levels of the hierarchy. The lowest networks of the hierarchy, those that represent more concrete memories, sensory as well as motor, reside in primary cortical areas and in foreign areas, the sensation entry points in the cortex and the exit points of the motor cortex to the kinetic apparatus. Above this network, in the associative sensory cortex, the more complex associative memories are found “declarative”, episodic and semantic; and associative motor cortex; one finds the memory that executes programs and sequential actions. Lastly, in the superior levels of the associative cortex of the parietal, temporal, and frontal (prefrontal cortex) lobes, reside the more abstract networks, representative of general concepts and action plans. All the levels of networks keep connected among themselves and the common nodes, by which and assembly of neurons, practically in any part of the cortex, can be part of many networks, and consequently of many memories. Thanks to modern neuroscientific methods, today we know that the function of the networks or neuronal “maps” of cortical representation that Hayek proposed to explain the sensory order in the human mind transcends perception and memory. Neuro-imaging and electro-physiology in man and primate permits us to affirm that to those two functions it is necessary to add attention, intelligence and language. It is to say, that the five cognitive functions are the result of selective and orderly activation, in time and cerebral space, of the cognitive networks that represent our internal and external worlds. Taking into account the little that was known in his time about the cerebral cortex, Hayek was not able to know the precise order that reigns in the structure and function of those networks, but he guessed with masterful precision the principles of that order or, to say it his way, “the explanation of the beginning”.

Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life

adam smith, Nicholas Phillipson, spontaneous order

Here are reviews of Nicholas Phillipson’s book:

New Statesman

The Guardian

The Economist

The Telegraph (reviewed by none other than Noel Malcolm who is contributing a chapter on Hobbes to our Oakeshott Companion).

Beneficence (I paste in an advance copy I’ve been very kindly sent by Lenore Ealy, Executive Director of The Philanthropic Entrerprise).

Who was Adam Smith?

James R. Otteson Joint Professor of Philosophy and Economics, Yeshiva University

A review of Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Adam Smith is one of the most beloved, most hated, most cited, and least read figures in the pantheon of great Western thinkers. His ideas have helped transform political and economic policy throughout much of the world, and they are credited by many for the unprecedented growth in wealth and prosperity the West has seen in the over two centuries since his death. They are also blamed by many for inequalities in wealth that have arisen since Smith’s time. But consider that since 1800 the world’s population has increased six-fold, and yet, despite this enormous increase, real income per person has increased approximately sixteen-fold.1 That is a truly amazing achievement. Yet that increased prosperity would seem due principally to the complex of institutions we now call “capitalism.” For the only thing that changed between 200 years ago and the previous hundred thousand years of human history was the introduction and embrace of “capitalist” institutions—political, economic, and cultural. And Adam Smith stands as one of the founders of these institutions. Smith is thus a vitally important figure in human history. So who, then, is this Adam Smith? What were his momentous ideas? How could a socially awkward eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher have wrought such tremendous effect on the world? Nicholas Phillipson’s Adam Smith is an excellent place to start in answering these questions. Indeed, Phillipson’s engaging, even compelling, story manages to do what some might have thought impossible: telling an interesting story about an economist. Yet Adam Smith was much more than what we today think of as an economist. He was a “moral philosopher” who spent his scholarly life trying to understand the principles that animate all human behavior, including both human morality in his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments and economic in his 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith came to articulate a conception of human social institutions that was grounded on observation and on a plausible picture of human psychology, and in so doing he also delineated a methodology for research about human society that would set the agenda for new and future disciplines of the “social sciences.” Phillipson reconstructs Smith’s achievement by locating the key principles of human behavior and social science that Smith discovered in all his extant writings, including of course his two great books, and also by explaining both what Smith takes and how he departs from other important figures like Francis Hutcheson and David Hume. Phillipson’s Smith emerges as an empirically-oriented social scientist, a brilliant mind trying to understand what the institutions are that lead to human happiness and prosperity, who yet also has the generosity of soul to be sincerely committed to using his discoveries to help remove obstacles to the wellbeing of the common man. Smith’s development of a spontaneous-order conception of human social institutions derived from a method of investigation that came to be known as the Scottish Historical School, which involved taking human beings as they are and the world as it is, not as they might be in a fictionalized state, and looking for observable patterns in their behavior. Once these patterns have been observed, the moral philosopher can make rational recommendations about how to enhance the possibilities of prosperous life. That is, or should be, the goal of social science, and we can see from Phillipson that Smith is one of its great founding fathers. Phillipson’s book is therefore quite welcome. Yet perhaps one might raise a handful of gentle criticisms. One relates to the thorny issue of the so-called is/ought problem. That problem concerns the logical fallacy of deriving normative (“ought”) statements from descriptive (“is”) statements. It was Smith’s friend David Hume who articulated this common fallacy in his Treatise of Human Nature, remarking that he noticed the frequency with which moralists would go from describing this or that state of affairs in the world to immediately concluding that this or that ought to be done about it. Hume pointed out that such a transition constitutes a logical fallacy because no set of factual statements (even if true) by itself implies any moral injunction. One can describe all the factual details of a murder, for example, without thereby determining any specific moral conclusions to draw from it. Smith seems to have a foot in both the normative and the descriptive camps in both of his books. For example, in Phillipson’s account, Smith offers in The Theory of Moral Sentiments the “impartial spectator” both as a heuristic device that people in fact employ to help them guide and regulate their behavior, and as a representative of true morality that people ought to follow. This raises a question of how we should understand Smith’s project in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Is he a moral psychologist describing his empirical findings about the phenomenon of human moral judgment making, or a moralist making recommendations about how people ought to behave? It seems he is arguably both: how, then, do the two go together? Similarly, in The Wealth of Nations, when Smith declares that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” that sounds like a descriptive statement (and, some have said, a rather cynical one at that)—to which one might retort, “Perhaps that is how we often do behave, but we should not!” One more example: Smith discovers and describes the mechanisms of a spontaneous-order model for understanding human social institutions, but he also seems to positively recommend the decentralized, spontaneously created orders as against centrally planned and designed orders. A discussion from Phillipson of how Smith got from the descriptive to the normative in cases like these would thus have been instructive. One might also wish Phillipson had given more than merely cursory attention to the question of how to reconcile Smith’s arguments for free trade—indeed, his, in Smith’s own words, “very violent attack” on “the whole commercial system of Great Britain” (247)— with Smith’s vigorous, exacting, and even punctilious fulfillment of his duties as the Commissioner of Customs for the last decade of his life. How can one square the fact that Smith argued for the abolition of tariffs, quotas, and other impediments to trade on the empirical grounds that doing so would increase human prosperity, with the fact that, when given the opportunity, he applied and exacted them with great enthusiasm? One also wonders how we should understand Smith’s endorsement of free trade and limited government, and indeed his, in Phillipson’s words, “pervasive” “doubts about the competence of modern governments” (232) in light of the rather long list of duties that Smith in various places suggested were the sovereign’s—including some public education and even entertaining “publick diversions” (234). In The Wealth of Nations Smith articulated three duties of government: protecting citizens from foreign invasion, protecting citizens from invasion from other citizens, and “certain publick works” (WN IV.9.51). These public works were those “which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expence to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society” (ibid.). How long a list is that, exactly? Smith suggests that it might include roads, canals, and the above-mentioned public grammar schools and “publick diversions,” but his criteria for selecting suitable public works might open the door far wider. If Phillipson is correct, however (as he surely is), that Smith has fundamental doubts about the competency of government, why would Smith allow even these few public works? Why would he not indeed have come to the opposite conclusion—that, because they are so important to the public, they must therefore not be left to the tender mercies of incompetent government? Phillipson rightly argues that Smith was not a utopian theorist, but was instead a realist who looked to history (even if sometimes “conjectural history”), to observation, and to what Smith somewhat fancifully called “experiment” to inform his positions. Phillipson claims that “Smith left utopian theorizing to the final pages” of The Wealth of Nations (235), where Smith described the problems associated with public debt, especially as Britain’s was increasing due to expenses associated with its attempt to maintain its empire in America. But what exactly is “utopian” about Smith’s concerns here? If anything, it would seem that, especially given the problems Western governments (American included) are facing with their huge and growing public debts right now, Smith’s discussion could not be more timely or germane to actual, on-the-ground reality. Let me close with an important and even enlightening lesson from Phillipson’s treatment. He writes near the end of his book that The Wealth of Nations “is the greatest and most enduring monument to the intellectual culture of the Scottish Enlightenment” (237). Phillipson shows that the story of the Scottish Enlightenment parallels and reflects the story of Smith himself; indeed, the story of the Scottish Enlightenment is, in a deep sense, the story of Smith. Given how profoundly our own world has, in turn, been shaped by ideas that came out of the Scottish Enlightenment, we can say that Smith’s story is also the story of us. Phillipson’s book provides a coherent picture of the complex life of Smith and his integration into the astonishing period of learning and advancement of human knowledge that marked the Scottish Enlightenment. But it is not only for the advancement of knowledge that we have to thank Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment. The tremendous increases in material well-being that Smithian institutions have enabled—and, one might add, the vast increase in philanthropic capacity and opportunity created by this increasing prosperity—has blessed millions of human beings with relief from the nasty, poor, brutish, and short status quo ante of human history. By reminding us of this important history and of Smith’s central place in it, Phillipson’s book not only provides us an illuminating and surprisingly timely window onto our own place in the world today but also an inspiration to protect and extend the fragile but precious Smithian institutions that have played no small role in the development of modern civilization.

It was the sound that tasted different

music, neurobiology, neurophilosophy, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, qualia, synesthesia, V.S. Ramachandran

Here’s an article from The Economist. More informative however is the work of V.S. Ramachandran and co. arguably the leading researcher in the field. See “The Phenomenology of Synaesthesia” and the recent “Survival of the Synesthesia Gene: Why Do People Hear Colors and Taste Words?“

Atheism and God: Review of de Botton and Scruton

atheism, religion

Here’s a review of Alain de Botton’s and Roger Scruton’s latest book, the most recent entries into what has become a thriving publishing niche. The reviewer is rather scathing of de Botton:

He is an aggregator of ideas rather than an original thinker, but his skill is to write simply about complex ideas and he gives his fans the sensation of reading something profound with little effort.

This has resonance with the entry for Scruton in  The Philosophical Lexicon:

scrutonize, v. “To conflate two disciplines at a superficial level so that dinner party conversations could continue in the spurious belief that matters of moment were being discussed while the port was passed.” – David Dunster, Architectural Design, December 1979, p. 327.

The latter is thoroughly unfair; the former (assuming it’s a fair assessment – I haven’t read de Botton) is hardly unique – there are many such “aggregators” around.

Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology

incommensurability, K. Brad Wray, paradigm, postmodern, relativism, sociology, sociology of science, Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Here’s a review of K. Brad Wray’s Kuhn’s Evolutionary Social Epistemology. (Wray, by the way, has been a strong contributor to EPISTEME). It’s also worth checking out Alexander Bird’s entry on Kuhn for Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Kuhn is one of those thinkers whose work has been tarnished by academics who need an off-the-peg philosophical outlook to paper over the lack of a critical philosophical culture.

Thomas Kuhn’s work occupies a strange place in the history of philosophy. With over one million copies sold, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is probably the most popular academic philosophy book of the twentieth century. Yet, despite its intuitive appeal Kuhn’s work has been received very critically by philosophers themselves. Almost fifty years later, Brad Wray wants to move past the popular negative reading of Kuhn and searches for positive insights in his work.

Hayek, Popper, and the Causal Theory of the Mind

causal theory, edward feser, hayek, mind body, neurophilosophy, philosophical psychology, philosophy of mind, Popper, Putnam, qualia, the sensory order

Here is the introduction to Ed Feser’s paper from Hayek in Mind.

In late 1952, F. A. Hayek sent his friend Karl Popper a copy of his recently published book The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology. In a letter dated December 2, 1952, Popper acknowledged receipt of the book and responded as follows to what he had read in it:

I am not sure whether one could describe your theory as a causal theory of the sensory order. I think, indeed, that one can. But then, it would be also the sketch of a causal theory of the mind. But I think I can show that a causal theory of the mind cannot be true (although I cannot show this of the sensory order; more precisely, I think I can show the impossibility of a causal theory of the human language (although I cannot show the impossibility of a causal theory of perception). I am writing a paper on the impossibility of a causal theory of the human language, and its bearing upon the body-mind problem, which must be finished in ten days. I shall send you a copy as soon as it is & typed.

In a later letter dated January 19, 1953, Popper added, As to my comments on your book, they are, as far as criticism is concerned, implicit in my paper. I think you have made a splendid effort towards a theory of the sub-linguistic (¼ sub-human ((¼descriptive)) language) level of mind; but I believe that no physiological approach (although most important) can be sufficient to explain the descriptive and argumentative functions of language. Or in other words, there can be no causal or physiological theory of reason. The paper Popper was referring to is his short article ‘‘Language and the body-mind problem.’’ Hayek began a draft of a paper entitled ‘‘Within systems and about systems: A statement of some problems of a theory of communication,’’ which, as Jack Birner has suggested, appears to have been intended at least in part as a response to Popper’s criticisms. But it was never completed, and Hayek never addressed Popper’s arguments in any of his published work. The Sensory Order has, however unjustly, largely been forgotten outside the circles of Hayek specialists. Popper’s brief paper is perhaps even less well known. Neither Popper’s letters to Hayek nor Hayek’s unfinished draft have yet been published. So, this episode might seem rather insignificant in the history of thought and indeed of little significance even to our understanding of either Hayek’s thought or Popper’s. But, as I hope to show in what follows, nothing could be further from the truth. With respect both to its general themes and to some of the specific philosophical moves made by each side, the brief, private dispute between Hayek and Popper foreshadowed a more prominent debate within twentieth-century analytic philosophy that began in the 1970s and continues to this day. Moreover, both the dispute between Hayek and Popper and the later debate reflect a deep tension that has lain at the heart of Western thought since the time of the scientific revolution. On the one hand, there is the ‘‘mechanical world picture’’5 according to which all natural phenomena can be explained entirely in terms of the mathematically describable behavior of matter in motion. On the other hand, there are rational human thought processes, including the philosophical and scientific theorizing that led to the mechanical world picture itself. It is far from obvious that the latter can be fitted comfortably into the former – that human rationality can be explained in terms of purely material processes – and from the time of Descartes until relatively recently, the dominant view was that it could not be. Hayek and Popper were writing at a time when this view began to give way to a new materialist orthodoxy. Hayek, though arguably more sensitive to the tension in question than most contemporary materialists, nevertheless thought it could be resolved in a way favorable to a broadly materialist or ‘‘naturalistic’’ understanding of the mind. Popper disagreed and believed the older, dualistic conception of the mind to be essentially correct, and as we will see, his reasons for doing so have in more recent years been regarded even by some non-dualist philosophers as posing a serious difficulty for materialism. In the next section, I will set the stage for the discussion of Hayek and Popper with a brief account of the nature and origins of the mind-body problem (or ‘‘body-mind problem,’’ as Popper preferred to call it). We will see that there are really at least three mind-body problems, and that while Hayek and most contemporary philosophers focus on the first of these, Popper was more concerned with the other two and believed that they pose a more serious difficulty for materialism than the former does. The third section will explain what a ‘‘causal theory of the mind’’ is and the respects in which Hayek’s account can be regarded as a causal theory. The fourth section will examine Popper’s main criticism of causal theories, which will be elucidated by comparison with the views of contemporary philosopher Hilary Putnam, who (apparently independently) developed a line of argument that parallels and extends the one presented by Popper. Finally, in the fifth section, I will consider the possible response to Popper suggested both by Hayek’s unpublished draft and by things Hayek had to say in some of his published work, relating it to the responses contemporary philosophers have given to arguments like those presented by Popper and Putnam. I will argue that none of these replies succeeds and that the Popperian critique remains a powerful and as yet unanswered challenge not only to dogmatic materialism but even to the more modest and critical form of materialism or naturalism defended by Hayek.

Hegel and the extended mind

Andy Clark, david chalmers, extended mind, externalism, hegel, parity principle, Shaun Gallagher, situated cognition, social cognition

Anthony Crisafi and Shaun Gallagher in AI & Society (Volume 25, Number 1, 123-129):

We examine the theory of the extended mind, and especially the concept of the ‘‘parity principle’’ (Clark and Chalmers in Analysis 58.1:7–19, 1998), in light of Hegel’s notion of objective spirit. This unusual combination of theories raises the question of how far one can extend the notion of extended mind and whether cognitive processing can supervene on the operations of social practices and institutions. We raise some questions about putting this research to critical use.

Experience and its Modes: A Reappraisal

epistemology, experience and its modes, metaphysics, oakeshott, philosophy of history

Here is a recent (2009) review of one of my favourite books. The review is infinitely warmer than the snippy Stebbing review I mentioned in a post some two years ago.

Culture wars revisited

culture wars, episteme, epistemology, James Robert Brown, social constructivism, social epistemology, sokal hoax, SUSAN HAACK

Michael Lynch and Alan Sokal enagage in a most civil dialogue: Defending Science: An Exchange. Readers might also be interested in Susan Haack’s Defending Science-Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism and James Robert Brown’s Who Rules in Science?: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars – two cracking reads – and both past contributors to EPISTEME.

Cosmos and Taxis

complex adaptive systems, complexity, constructivism, cosmos, hayek, rationalism, social connectionism, social epistemology, social ontology, spontaneous order, stigmergic, stigmergy, taxis

I chanced upon this painting entitled “Cosmos and Taxis“. The inspiration is, of course, as the artist states:

One effect of our habitually identifying order with a made order or taxis is indeed that we tend to ascribe to all order certain properties which deliberate arrangements regularly, and with respect to some of these properties necessarily, possess. Such orders are relatively simple or at least necessarily confined to such moderate degrees of complexity as the maker can still survey; they are usually concrete in the sense just mentioned that their existence can be intuitively perceived by inspection; and, finally, having been made deliberately, they invariably do (or at one time did) serve a purpose of the maker. None of these characteristics necessarily belong to a spontaneous order or cosmos. Its degree of complexity is not limited to what a human mind can master. Its existence need not manifest itself to our senses but may be based on purely abstract relations which we can only mentally reconstruct. And not having been made it cannot legitimately be said to have a particular purpose, although our awareness of its existence may be extremely important for of successful pursuit of a great variety of different purposes.