Academic Writing

When I was in academia I often didn't identify with what I wrote. I experienced my writings as modes of expression in which I was trapped, and within which I couldn't express my deeper feelings about academia. I see now this was because some of what I wanted to express back then were the kind of things I have been saying on this blog, and the essay writing I was learning to become a professional philosopher was not making possible the kind of sharing which this blog enabled for me. This doesn't mean I didn't really believe what I wrote in those academic essays. Only, until I could express myself about what I felt in academia, I couldn't embrace my own academic writing as speaking for me.

Recently I found the main essays I wrote as an academic. My dissertation and other essays. Things I didn't really try to publish or to present at conferences. This blog seems as good a place as any for to me put them. To remind myself that even with all the other stuff I have been talking about on this blog, I was also a normal academic, or one who was trying to learn and develop his views. These are essays I have written in the past decade, and so naturally I don't agree with everything in them. But they do capture the general framework of my beliefs, and it is helpful to realize that yes, this is roughly what I believe.

A few things I wrote as a graduate student:

* Action Without Inner Representations: An essay I presented at the dissertation workshop at Harvard, though this essay was not part of my thesis. At the time I was reading parts of Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God, and I tried to connect for myself that reading with my education.

* Toward a Direct Realism of Communication: This was an essay I co-authored with my brother Gautam Vallabha, who was at the time a post-doc in psychology at Carnegie Mellon. He was in psychology and I was in philosophy, and to our mutual surprise it turned out both of us were having similar views oriented towards, broadly speaking, embodied cognition. This essay was an attempt to bring together issues in speech perception, which was the focus of his work, with issues in ordinary language philosophy and phenomenology, which was the focus of my work. Working on this essay was one of the highlights of my time in academia, and one of the few times there was a kind of bridge between my school and my home life. We tried to publish the essay in a few places, but it didn't work out, and we got too busy with other things. Gautam left academia a few years before me and he currently works as a computer scientist, though his experience of the transition might be different from mine. There are of course many ways to leave academia, and many kinds of stories.

* Dewey's Neutral Monism: This was an essay I co-authored with my then friend, and now wife, Zoe. She was an undergraduate taking Peter Godfrey-Smith's class on Pragmatism, which I was auditing as a graduate student, and we got interested by something Godfrey-Smith said in class about Dewey, and the essay was our attempt to articulate what we found exciting. What we attribute in the essay to Godfrey-Smith might not capture what he believes, and to see what he thinks you should look at his work on Dewey. Zoe and I didn't think of this as something for publication, as much as something to get some of our ideas down on paper. Zoe decided not to pursue academic philosophy, though her experiences as a philosophy student, and her reasons for making this decision, might not be the same as mine. Again, there are many ways to leave academia, and many kinds of stories.

* On Dreyfus and Kelly on Dennett: This was an email I wrote to Sean Kelly about the essay he co-authored with Hubert Dreyfus on Dennett's view of heterophenomenology. Normally when I tried to engage with philosophers about their views I would become unnerved in some way about the fact of the interaction. I see now this was because unable to express my background concerns about the profession, I felt ungrounded while engaging in the ordinary business of philosophy. This letter is one of the times when I was free of such worries, and was able to engage just with the ideas.

My dissertation:

* Agency and the Mind-Body Problem: The thesis consisted of four essays. The first was on Chalmers' zombie argument for dualism, in which I argue against the conceivability of a zombie world. The second is on David Lewis' argument for functionalism, which I argue misdescribes folk psychology. The third and fourth essays argue against Kantian views of action as defended by John McDowell and Christine Korsgaard.

Some things I wrote while I was at Bryn Mawr:

* The Abilities Theory of Belief: I wrote this in the Fall of 2010, and sent it to a few journals as part of my reapplication process mid-way through my time till tenure review. In it I argue that beliefs are abilities, which are different from behavior or dispositions to behave.

* Reason, Faith and Self-Transformation: A grant proposal I wrote in Fall 2010, again as part of my reapplication process. It is the beginning of my connecting issues in the philosophy of mind to topics in the philosophy of religion, multiculturalism and broader issues of secularism.

* The Unity of Religions: An unfinished essay. In it I try to say what it means to say all religions have a essential unity, and why that is right.

* Truth and Power in Education: An essay for an group online blog and magazine at Bryn Mawr, Serendip, it is also part of The Breaking Project, a collection of essays edited by Alice Lesnick. I wrote the essay as I was trying to make sense of some of what I felt didn't work in my education, and what kind of a teacher I wanted to be.

* Rorty, Non-Foundationalism and Story-telling: A blog exchange I had with biologist Paul Grobstein on Rorty, relativism and academia. Paul, who passed away in 2011, was a great influence on me, and a wonderful inspiration for me, while I was at Bryn Mawr.

* The Work of Being a Person: This is not something I wrote, but it is a student's notes of a  guest discussion I led in Spring 2010 in a literature course on the James Family taught by Anne Dalke. The discussion was based on our reading of William James' essay "The Types of Philosophical Thinking". In part the discussion considers the issue of whether the kind of philosophy James espoused could be professionalized or taught in a classroom.

Building on Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein's philosophy can be divided into three parts: the Problem, the Cause and the Solution.

The problem is a view about what is wrong with much of contemporary philosophy, and which has its roots in the Early Modern period. The problem can be stated simply: It is the attempt to understand human life in terms of the categories of the natural sciences, i.e. the new sciences as discovered in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Here is an example of this problem: identifying mental states with brain states. The appeal of this view is the hope that by explaining mental facts in terms of the purportedly more basic physical facts - that of the brain - the mind can be understood in a objective way. The fundamental thrust of Wittgenstein's view is the idea that this kind of "explaining" is vacuous, as it has only the form of an explanation (with the mental phenomena being re-described in physical terms) but doesn't really provide an explanation. Saying we are conscious because we are in a certain brain state is like saying it rains because the rain-God is making it happen. In the rain case, one is taking a certain form of explanation ("Why is the grass wet?" - "Because John poured water there") which we are familiar with in certain situations, and applying it to a different situation and assuming it must be applicable ("Why is it raining?" - "Because God is pouring water"). Same in the consciousness case. We take a form of explanation from one proven area ("Why don't we float off into the air?" - "Because we are made up of atoms to which gravity applies") and apply it to a different situation ("Why do we have any consciousness?" - "Because our brain is made up of atoms which move in certain ways.").

The cause seeks to explain why the problem is so persistent. Why is it that we seek to understand human life through the categories of the natural sciences? Wittgenstein's answer is: it is because we are mislead by language by the surface similarities of how we describe the phenomenon and the types of explanations we are seeking. In effect, according to Wittgenstein, there is a kind of mistake we keep making because our minds and habits are just set up in the way to keep making such mistakes.

The solution seeks to explain how we can overcome the problem. Since according to Wittgenstein, the cause is our being mislead by language, the solution is not being mislead by language. We have to bring words back to their everyday use. We have to resist the bewitchment of language, etc.

Wittgenstein was profoundly right about the problem. But his view of the cause and the solution are completely vacuous. In fact, Wittgenstein's answers to the cause and to the solution are themselves perfect examples of answers which have the form of an explanation but which don't explain anything. "Why is it so tempting to understand the mind in terms of the brain? - Because it is a temptation intrinsic to our lives and language." "What can we do to avoid this temptation? - We have to avoid the cause which draws us into the temptation." Really, that's the best you got Wittgenstein? Thanks, but no thanks. That's not very helpful.

There are actually much simpler and clearer answers to the cause and the solution. Wittgenstein didn't think of these possibilities because of his generally a-historical and a-institutional approach to philosophy. But if we don't treat the problem as some profound battle of the soul to avoid bewitchment by philosophy, but treat it as just a normal sociological, historical and institutional problem, then very different answers for the cause and the solution present themselves.

The Mind-Body Problem

This article in the Guardian is a great example of a standard narrative about the mind-body problem. Beyond the bizarre glamorizing of the same half dozen or dozen thinkers (philosophers as rock n roll stars, drinking espressos, talking philosophy while on a yacht around Greenland, etc.), there is much here to think about. And not just because it is a article written for a non-academic audience. The central moves in the article are ones which are endemic to academic philosophy of mind.

A central theme can be found in these paragraphs:

By the time Chalmers delivered his speech in Tucson [in 1994], science had been vigorously attempting to ignore the problem of consciousness for a long time. The source of the animosity dates back to the 1600s, when René Descartes identified the dilemma that would tie scholars in knots for years to come....

The mind, Descartes concluded, must be made of some special, immaterial stuff that didn’t abide by the laws of nature; it had been bequeathed to us by God. This religious and rather hand-wavy position, known as Cartesian dualism, remained the governing assumption into the 18th century and the early days of modern brain study. But it was always bound to grow unacceptable to an increasingly secular scientific establishment that took physicalism – the position that only physical things exist – as its most basic principle. And yet, even as neuroscience gathered pace in the 20th century, no convincing alternative explanation was forthcoming. So little by little, the topic became taboo.

It was only in 1990 that Francis Crick, the joint discoverer of the double helix, used his position of eminence to break ranks. Neuroscience was far enough along by now, he declared in a slightly tetchy paper co-written with Christof Koch, that consciousness could no longer be ignored.

On this retelling, there is a connection between philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion. According to it, dualism used to be a religious view, having to do with souls, the limits of science, and the glory of God. Then with modern science secularism came on the scene, and all the nonsense about dualism, and with it the stuff about the need for God went out the window. But in the process science couldn't actually explain consciousness. And this was supposedly brought out by people like Crick, Koch, Nagel, Chalmers and McGinn. Against them are the hard core science people such as the Churchlands and Dennett who see the mysterians as losing nerve about the possibilities of science, and so unwittingly aiding the confused, religious people, and so aiding the opponents of secularism.