Deely’s objection to physicalism/ naturalism

June 6, 2011 at 7:16 am (Uncategorized)

(Based on an argument in John Deely’s “Reference to the Non-Existent” in an edition of the Thomist that I’ve lost the citation for.)

John Deely raises the following objection to a physicalist account of signification. As a preamble,  physicalism is the doctrine that the real is what admits of scientific observation, and so is falsified if there is some knowable but unobservable reality.

No observable thing is such that it necessarily gives rise to the knowledge of something other than itself

Ideas or concepts are such that they necessarily give rise to the knowledge of something other than themselves.

No  idea or concept is an observable thing.

As a corollary, since we can observe brain states and neural firings, an idea cannot be nothing but a brain state or a neural firing, irrespective of what relation it might have to such things. (Perhaps such things are absolutely necessary to it, perhaps it can exist in some way without them, perhaps it can exist wholly without them, etc.)

The major premise is based on the fact that if there is some sign, there is no necessity forcing the one observing it to understand it as a sign, still less as a sign for this or that. Just because we agree that an amber light will be a sign for something doesn’t mean that some future archeologist must necessarily understand that we meant it as a sign when he observes it; and just because a certain rate of radioactive decay signifies that something is 9000 years old, or a certain lesion indicates a sickness doesn’t mean that everyone who observes the decay or the lesion must necessarily see the things they signify.

The minor premise is the definition of a formal sign, but it might be simpler for those who don’t read the Deely article to just call it an idea. Ideas make things known other than themselves by necessity. There might be some haggling over whether an idea of an imaginary thing does this (this is what Deely’s article was about), but for the purposes of this argument we can just bracket the discussion to those ideas that are about actual things – my idea of my wife, or of the lawn mower I’m looking at.

The argument is an interesting example of the attempt to articulate the dispute about intention between physicalists and dualists as a dispute about signs, that is, about things that make something other than themselves known. The middle term of the argument is what is most formal to the definition of a sign, though the same reality is what contemporary philosophers would want to call “intention”. But by approaching the problem through signs we can deal with it in terms of things we understand a little better than intentions or “aboutness”.

It is important to stress the point we made earlier that while this argument shows that something transcends the physical or empirical, this does not show us in what manner or to what degree it transcends the physical. For St. Thomas, the three examples that we gave above are descriptions of how the physical is transcended by animals, humans, and pure spirits respectively. Clearly, in the lowest degree of such transcendence, we are in no danger of assuming that there is something that can exist apart from a physical substrate. But though it is inseparable, it does not follow that “supervenience” is the best way to account for the relation of this transcendent part to the physical. It is closer to the truth to see the physical as infravenient to the transcendent, even in animals.