If the non-naturalist explanation is that intelligibility is somehow an essential feature of things, even a matter of essences that allow an "agent intellect" to grasp their meaning and significance, would that apply only to symbolic language enabled beings or would it apply to animals also — Janus

Yes, I think it might apply to animals. But we can't talk to them.

The argument pivots on whether physicalism can explain intelligibility. The reasoning for why it can’t is what I’m trying to drill into. See above.

Naturalism or physicalism?

Probably both. But a problem with "naturalism" is that it’s so vague that you can smuggle a lot into it. I think the explanatory gap for intentionality applies to both naturalism and physicalism, because both seem to share the central assumption that everything, including mental states can be explained in terms of physical processes or natural laws.

I’m not accusing you of sidestepping the problem, but you can see how people might call this avoidance. In other words, if I say the model is wrong, I don’t have to engage with it, I can just change the subject. — Tom Storm

Fair point.

I'll try to stay more focused. These were just my first thoughts.

Yes, and this is really the area I’m interested in: understanding the argument, not refuting it or trying to sidestep it. I want the best possible formulation of this argument. We often move so fast on this site that, for the most part, people are playing a kind of tennis with their own preconceptions: you hold this, I return your serve with mine.

Hart’s argument concerns an explanatory gap. Even if every mental state is correlated with a brain state, that only gives a correlation, it doesn’t explain why the brain state represents the world rather than merely being a physical pattern. The point, it seems is that naturalistic accounts struggle to bridge the gap from physical patterns to meaningful content. — Tom Storm

Cool. Sorry for starting out critically, then. It was my first instinct and reactive.

I wouldn't put naturalism in terms of mental states and brain states, though I can understand that rendition. I suppose part of me is thinking that it's easy enough to adapt naturalism in different ways such that there is no explanatory gap.

Which, yes, charitably that means I don't understand the argument.

We often end up in physicalist or naturalist circles claiming that our mysteries are explained by evolution or complexity and emergence, and that time will answer them definitively, or that we’ve described the problem incorrectly, so we simply restate it in a way that makes it disappear.

Which, yes, charitably that means I don't understand the argument. — Moliere

What I potentially like about the argument is its apparent simplicity (although, obviously, I don’t fully understand it). It isn’t talking about consciousness, mind, or any number of tedious philosophical problems; it is simply saying that a mere point of view can’t be explained by naturalistic processes.

Fair point.

I'll try to stay more focused. These were just my first thoughts. — Moliere

Coming back to this. I wasn’t being critical of you or your thinking; I apologize if it came across that way. We’re all just fumbling through this stuff. :up: :up:

Coming back to this. I wasn’t being critical of you or your thinking; I apologize if it came across that way. We’re all just fumbling through this stuff. :up: :up: — Tom Storm

Heh thanks. I didn't know and mostly was just worried that I went out into left field too much.

But a problem with "naturalism" is that it’s so vague that you can smuggle a lot into it. I think the explanatory gap for intentionality applies to both naturalism and physicalism, because both seem to share the central assumption that everything, including mental states can be explained in terms of physical processes or natural laws. — Tom Storm

The critique of naturalism emanating from phenomenology is, as has been mentioned, quite different from Hart’s objections to it. For instance, Merleau-Ponty argues that empirical accounts of perception succumb to the myth of the given. At the core of the myth of the given is not just the idea of “raw sense data,” but the deeper assumption that perception begins with something already fully determinate, such as neural signals, stimulus features and information, that is then processed or interpreted. Many neurological models describe perception as the transformation of incoming signals into representations: edges, contrasts, motion vectors, object files, predictive hypotheses, and so on.

The “input” to the system is treated as if it were already a perceptual unit, already individuated as visual information, when in lived experience there is no such pre-perceptual layer. What the neuroscientist calls “input” is itself a reconstruction abstracted from an already meaningful encounter with the world. The retina does not receive “edges” or “features”; it is we who later describe neural activity as if it were encoding them. The world is perceived in terms of what it affords, not as a neutral array of data awaiting interpretation. No amount of neural description can recover this level, because it presupposes it.

Nice. I don’t think the world in general has caught up to any of this. How long will it take?

But I wonder if it justifies the criticisms against naturalism on the basis of intelligibility. — Moliere

I think this is exactly the right question. And I agree: the point we’ve converged on (truth not collapsing into warrant) doesn’t automatically refute “naturalism” if by naturalism we mean something like methodological commitment to the sciences.

Where it arguably becomes a problem is for a stronger naturalism—one that treats reality as exhaustively describable in the idiom of efficient causation, and treats normativity/intentionality as reducible to that idiom. If what-is-the-case is not constituted by our justificatory norms, then truth is a genuine constraint that isn’t identical with any social practice. But it’s also not obviously the sort of thing that can be captured in purely causal vocabulary.

The reason that normativity purportedly can't be grounded in efficient causality is that causal explanation and normative status come apart. An efficient-causal story can tell us why a belief arose (neural mechanisms, evolutionary pressures, reinforcement histories, etc.), but none of that by itself tells us whether the belief is true, false, valid, invalid, justified, or unjustified. Two people could arrive at beliefs through the same kinds of causal pathways and yet one be right and the other wrong depending on how things actually are. So the causal story underdetermines the normative story. That’s why the worry isn’t that naturalism can’t describe cognition, but that it struggles to account for the binding “ought” of truth and correctness using only the “is” of causal sequence.

So the worry isn’t “science can’t work,” but that the intelligibility presupposed by science (truth, validity, correctness) can’t be ontologically grounded in a picture of the world as fundamentally non-normative. That’s where Hart thinks naturalism quietly leans on what it can’t fully account for.

In other words: the critique isn’t of naturalism as method, but of naturalism as a total metaphysics. The issue isn’t whether naturalism can describe how we reason, but whether it can make sense of why reason is answerable to truth at all.

↪Joshs Nice. I don’t think the world in general has caught up to any of this. How long will it take? — Tom Storm

There are promising signs that mainstream neuropsychological approaches are starting to nibble at the edges of phenomenology. The popular free-energy predictive processing branch of neuroscience used to ignore phenomenology-influenced embodied enactive approaches , but lately there has been a rapprochement between the two camps.

If intelligibility is not intrinsic to reality, then “success” can be explained causally, but it becomes unclear what licenses the further inference to correctness or truth. And that’s exactly where normativity enters. — Esse Quam Videri

I more or less agree with you. But I'm not sure that you can 'explain' anything without positing intelligibility. Rather, intelligibility seems to be the ground for any explanation.

Probably both. But a problem with "naturalism" is that it’s so vague that you can smuggle a lot into it. I think the explanatory gap for intentionality applies to both naturalism and physicalism, because both seem to share the central assumption that everything, including mental states can be explained in terms of physical processes or natural laws. — Tom Storm

I don't think that is a fair assessment of either physicalism or naturalism. It may apply to certain stripes, but beyond that, no. For example there are physicalssts such as Galen Strawson who propose a kind of panpsychism. Naturalism in the broadest sense, I would say, just rules out an intelligent designer, it doesn't rule out that matter might be, in some sense, intelligent at all levels.

We often end up in physicalist or naturalist circles claiming that our mysteries are explained by evolution or complexity and emergence, and that time will answer them definitively, or that we’ve described the problem incorrectly, so we simply restate it in a way that makes it disappear. — Tom Storm

Again I think this is not right. That there may be mysteries which might never be explained is not ruled out by either physicalism or naturalism. Supernaturalism posits an intelligent designer and an overarching plan, and the problem with those ideas is that they can never be demonstrated to be true, and they are, given the nature of the world we know, greatly implausible to boot.

Yes, and this is really the area I’m interested in: understanding the argument, not refuting it or trying to sidestep it. I want the best possible formulation of this argument. We often move so fast on this site that, for the most part, people are playing a kind of tennis with their own preconceptions: you hold this, I return your serve with mine.

Hart’s argument concerns an explanatory gap. Even if every mental state is correlated with a brain state, that only gives a correlation, it doesn’t explain why the brain state represents the world rather than merely being a physical pattern. The point, it seems is that naturalistic accounts struggle to bridge the gap from physical patterns to meaningful content. — Tom Storm

It seems to me the argument is one from incredulity coupled with accusing naturalism of not being able to deliver on what it does not necessarily claim to be able to deliver on. In other words, as you say the "explanatory gap" is counted as being fatal to physicalism/naturalism.

But really, what is the alternative? Positing a designer or even merely some kind of pan-psychism does not solve the "explanatory problem" because there seems to be no way of explaining how either of those alternatives could work. So it doesn't come down to a contest of explanatory power so much as a case of people simply having different intuitions in the matter.

The physicalist/naturalist can fairly say "why should we posit entities for which we have no evidence, and maybe even no possibility of evidence?".

Again I think this is not right. — Janus

I don't think that is a fair assessment of either physicalism or naturalism. — Janus

I’m not saying that other more circumspect views, like the ones you mentioned, aren’t also present. I’m just describing what I often hear and regarding physicalism and naturalism: the usual claims about eventually achieving a full understanding of consciousness in the future. In the meantime, trust in complexity and brain states. And yes, some naturalists agree that we may never have a complete account, leaving the door forever open to versions of God and esoterica.

A big issue for naturalism is whether we are talking about methodological or metaphysical naturalism, as people often shift the meaning of their claims.

If people claim that physics can explain everything, then they are obviously wrong. I haven't heard many, or even any, claims to that effect on this site.

Why should we not trust in complexity and neuroscience up to the point of what is known in those fleids? Like all science the trust should be provisional, and completely open to revision.

Also saying that we may never have a complete account does not necessarily leave the door open to God and esoterica, because those posits can never be scientific or satisfactorily explanatory. They can only be faith based notions. Science should not have problems with faith-based notions since they can never be part of science and hence pose no challenge to it. The obverse also holds, I think, since science can never be the "be-all and end-all" of human life, it can only ever play a mere part.

The “input” to the system is treated as if it were already a perceptual unit, already individuated as visual information, when in lived experience there is no such pre-perceptual layer. What the neuroscientist calls “input” is itself a reconstruction abstracted from an already meaningful encounter with the world. The retina does not receive “edges” or “features”; it is we who later describe neural activity as if it were encoding them. The world is perceived in terms of what it affords, not as a neutral array of data awaiting interpretation. No amount of neural description can recover this level, because it presupposes it. — Joshs

The problem applies equally to postulating that the input is historically determined cultural and social socially conditioning. In lived experience there is no such pre-perceptual layer. The degree to which what we perceive is "naturally given" as opposed to culturally constructed is impossible to determine and seems always to be open to black and white thinking on both sides of the argument.

Also saying that we may never have a complete account does not necessarily leave the door open to God and esoterica, because those posits can never be scientific or satisfactorily explanatory. — Janus

I think you misunderstood me. I should have said that we would leave the door open to superstitions, folk traditions, and supernatural ideas, God and esoterica. There is little doubt that wherever there is a gap, God will be inserted, as a kind of explanatory wall filler.

wherever there is a gap, God will be inserted, as a kind of explanatory wall filler. — Tom Storm

Reminds me of a nice Wittgenstein aphorism:

A crack begins to appear in the organic unity of the work of art, and so I stuff the crack with straw. But to quiet my conscience, I use only the best straw.

I think you misunderstood me. I should have said that we would leave the door open to superstitions, folk traditions, and supernatural ideas, God and esoterica. There is little doubt that wherever there is a gap, God will be inserted, as a kind of explanatory wall filler. — Tom Storm

Yes, I suppose that is true for some―for those who need certainty. My point is that God might provide a sense of certainty, but cannot provide any cogent explanation for anything. There is nothing more mysterious, more inconsistent, more ambiguous than God. Just read the Old Testament―particularly the Book of Job.

Reminds me of a nice Wittgenstein aphorism: — Srap Tasmaner

Ah, that's a nice quote of Witty's.

I’d like to better understand the argument that intelligibility cannot arise through purely naturalistic processes. Some naturalists will react to this idea, and I fear the discussion may end up in the somewhat tedious “how is consciousness related to a physical world?” type of threads. — Tom Storm

But your OP is about that -- how is consciousness related to the physical world, only that you stated it as if intelligibility could be extracted out of consciousness.

So, you've written a very good OP in terms of the naturalistic view, but you haven't really isolated anything from the hard problem of philosophy which is this: consciousness and the physical make up of the brain. If we could explain this, then we could explain intelligibility as it relates to the world.