The Folk Philosophy Fallacy (Part 1)

Twitter Tuesday #20

“One aspect of the meta-problem is the question: is the hard problem of consciousness universal? In its starkest form, one could put this as a question about judgment universality: does everyone (or at least every normal adult human) judge that there is a hard problem of consciousness? Does everyone make judgments along the lines of the intuitions above? The answer to this question is obviously no. Some theorists reject these judgments. Many people never consider them. In some cultures, the issue never seems to have been raised.” (Chalmers, 2020)

Ordinary people and folk conceptions of phenomenal consciousness

Once again we have a philosopher claiming to know what ordinary people mean when they employ certain terms or concepts. According to Dominik:

What ordinary people mean by consciousness ARE the phenomenal properties. So if you deny those, then you DO deny consciousness given ordinary English.

Dominik echoes a sentiment many professional philosophers have expressed. Wyrwa (2022) documents several examples:

• “phenomenal consciousness is the most folk psychologically obvious thing or feature that the positive examples [of conscious mental states] possess” (Schwitzgebel, 2016, p. 230, as quoted in Wyrwa, p. 47)

• “The great strength of this commonsense definition — consciousness is experience — is that it is completely obvious. What could be simpler?” (Koch, 2019, p. 3, as quoted in Wyrwa, p. 47)

• “even if we cannot say what it [consciousness] is, nonetheless each of us in the privacy of our own minds knows what it is” (Humphrey, 2006, p. 3, as quoted in Wyrwa, p. 47)

• “while ‘phenomenal consciousness’ is a technical term, the property it refers to is part of our common-sense picture of the world. Almost everyone believes that there is something that it’s like to be a hamster, but there is nothing that it’s like to be a rock or a planet” (Goff, 2017, p. 2, as quoted in Wyrwa, p. 47)

Unsystematic gathering of remarks hardly establishes the ubiquity of the presumption that nonphilosophers share the same concept of phenomenal consciousness as philosophers. However, it’s unlikely such presumptions are confined only to these examples, and even if they were, there’s nothing wrong with questioning assumptions that aren’t widely held, but still appear in the literature, especially when those remarks are made by leading figures in the field.

1.0 Who are ordinary people?

Philosophers often make claims about what “ordinary people” mean. If you aren’t familiar with the term, philosophers toss around a handful of loose labels for people who lack significant formal training in philosophy or have not engaged in a significant degree of philosophical reflection: “ordinary people,” “laypeople,” “the folk” or, as I prefer, “nonphilosophers.” 

These terms are intended to refer to “typical” people, and are used in contexts where the goal is to describe the way a “typical” person thinks, speaks, or acts. This does not mean philosophers aren’t aware that people differ, and that some “ordinary people” may be exceptional or unusual. While I have many critical things to say about philosophers, the notion of “ordinary people” is not necessarily objectionable, though I would note that the idea of a “typical person” may be a bit misleading: while we can meaningfully speak about a typical person in terms of various shared characteristics, e.g., typical physiological and behavioral characteristics, questions about psychological features may in many cases exhibit such considerable variation that while there may be something “typical” of people that is shared in common at a higher level of abstract, there may at a local level be very little in common. 

For example, it’s plausible that “typical” or “ordinary” people devise forms of entertainment for themselves, such as games or sports. So it would be reasonable to say that ordinary people often enjoy sports or games. But it would be extremely implausible to suppose that a typical person specifically enjoys chess or soccer. Chess and soccer are culturally contingent and highly parochial. Not all human societies have chess or soccer, and had history gone a bit differently, humanity could have been more or less the same, but without chess or soccer, and might instead play chmess and shmoccer (Dennett, 2006).

Whenever a philosopher speculates about what nonphilosophers think, they should consider the level of specificity: is the issue in question closer to “typical people like sports” or is it more like “typical people like soccer”? Such a question is difficult, because it’s not clear what level of specificity is appropriate without knowing more about human psychology. It cannot be known by a priori reasoning alone. No amount of reasoning or thinking about your concepts in your languages in your culture is going to necessarily yield insights into what  “ordinary people” are like. The only way to know how well our judgments generalize is by knowing more about human psychology. The problem is that psychology hasn’t answered these questions. At present, philosophers are left with little more than anecdotes and speculation and armchair theorizing that, at best, relies on educated guesses from a synthesis of the best available psychology. 

Another layer of difficulty is the lack of specification, especially in helpfully technical psychological terms, about what an ordinary person is. Philosophers may not have in mind some notion amenable to empirical investigation in the first place. An “ordinary person” may be some kind of hypothetical agent who meets some specified set of conditions that nobody in the real world ever actually meets, i.e., the philosophical equivalent of the spherical cow.  It would be helpful if philosophers who made claims about what “ordinary people” mean or think would be more precise. What I described above may not be exactly what Dominik has in mind, in which case Dominik is welcome to clarify.

Note the emphasis here on ordinary English. I often criticize analytic philosophy for its excessive focus on the meaning of English phrases in particular (and its comparative lack of concern for the 6000+ other languages). People occasionally object to drawing attention to this emphasis, which is weird, because analytic philosophy’s emphasis on English is hardly controversial. It would barely be misleading to call it “Anglophone philosophy.”

So here is an example you can add to the pile of similar instances in which there is an emphasis on English with little or no regard for how people may employ terms or concepts in other languages. Are all ordinary people English speakers? No. Can we generalize from how English speakers speak or think to how everyone else speaks or thinks? No, at least not without good evidence.

2.0 What do ordinary people mean by ‘consciousness’?

What do ordinary people mean by the term “consciousness” or the concept consciousness? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. How does Dominik know what ordinary people mean by “consciousness” or what they think about the concept consciousness? As I find myself repeating so often, this is an empirical question. Does the empirical literature support the claim that by “consciousness” ordinary people mean phenomenal properties?

No. It does not. There is a body of empirical research on the question of whether nonphilosophers share or employ the same notion of phenomenal properties as academic philosophers. However, this research has generally found little evidence to support such claims, with researchers generally concluding otherwise (see e.g., Sytsma & Machery, 2009; 2010; 2012; Sytsma & Ozdemer, 2019). In outlining the mainstream interpretation of the literature, Wyrwa (2022) observes that while a handful of early studies (e.g. Huebner, Bruno, & Sarkissian, 2010; Knobe & Prinz, 2008; Peressini, 2014) seemed to indicate that nonphilosophers have some notion of phenomenal consciousness, these studies suffered from methodological shortcomings and subsequent findings failed to corroborate these results.

2.1 Peressini (2014)

For instance, Wyrwa (2022) notes Peressini (2014) provided participants with instructions that told them “how to understand the ‘experiencer’ and ‘non-experiencer’ categories,” meaning that “the study measured how they used these new concepts rather than their folk view about consciousness” (pp. 47-48).  Wyrwa cites Sytsma (2014), who initially drew attention to this concern:

The setup of Peressini’s study, however, prompts the concern that his materials taught participants the new category of ‘experiencer’. Thus, it might be that participants’ ratings simply reflect their judgments about the similarity of the entities tested to the examples given—a living human being versus mechanical artifacts (thermostats, burglar alarms, and bread machines). Given these examples, it is perhaps not sur- prising that participants tended to classify artifacts as ‘non-experiencers’. (p. 644)

If the goal of a philosopher is to find out how nonphilosophers outside of philosophical or other academic contexts, one cannot achieve this goal by furnishing people with novel terms and concepts, then asking them to select from among them. Once you do this, there is no way to know whether whatever judgments they made reflect how they thought prior to participating in your study, or whether the study itself prompted them to develop new (if transient) philosophical views, a process I call philosophical induction, the process whereby participants are prompted to think, speak, or reflect in such a way that they mirror and effectively become junior philosophers (Bush, 2023). However, as Sytsma notes, Peressini findings wouldn’t exactly support the claim that ordinary people share the same concept of phenomenal consciousness as philosophers, even if we accepted them at face value:

Further, while Peressini raises doubts about the first study in Sytsma and Machery’s original article, he ultimately concludes that they were correct to deny that lay people tend to have the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness, at least as we have articulated it above. (p. 644)

This is clear from Peressini’s own remarks:

My findings (1) reveal limitations in experimental approaches using “artificial experiencers” like robots, (2) indicate that the standard philosophical conception of subjective experience in terms of qualia is distinct from that of the folk, and (3) show that folk intuitions do support a conception of qualia that departs from the philosophical conception in that it is physical rather than metaphysical. (Peressini, 2014, p. 862, emphasis mine)

However, Peressini later remarks that the results of the second study make it clear “That participants have a concept of some sense of qualia or ‘phenomenality’” (p. 833, as quoted in Sytsma, p. 644). Such findings would at best provide only partial vindication for claims that the folk have a notion of phenomenal consciousness: even if they have some notion, it would appear to differ from what philosophers have in mind. 

Next week, I turn to the second study purporting to show that nonphilosophers have a concept of phenomenal consciousness, Knobe and Prinz (2008).

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE TO PART 2

References

Bush, L. S. (2023). Schrödinger's Categories: The Indeterminacy of Folk Metaethics (Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University).

Chalmers, D. J. (2020). Is the hard problem of consciousness universal. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 27(5-6), 227-257.

Dennett, D. C. (2006). Higher-order truths about chmess. Topoi, 25, 39-41.

Goff, P. (2017). Consciousness and fundamental reality. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Huebner, B., Bruno, M., & Sarkissian, H. (2010). What does the nation of China think about phenomenal states?. Review of philosophy and psychology, 1, 225-243.

Humphrey, N. (2006). Seeing red: A study in consciousness. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Knobe, J., & Prinz, J. (2008). Intuitions about consciousness: Experimental studies. Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, 7, 67-83.

Koch, C. (2019). The feeling of life itself: why consciousness is widespread but can't be computed. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Peressini, A. (2014). Blurring two conceptions of subjective experience: Folk versus philosophical phenomenality. Philosophical Psychology, 27(6), 862-889.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2016). Phenomenal consciousness, defined and defended as innocently as I can manage. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11-12), 224-235.

Sytsma, J. (2016). Attributions of consciousness. A companion to experimental philosophy, 257-278.

Sytsma, J. M., & Machery, E. (2009). How to study folk intuitions about phenomenal consciousness. Philosophical psychology, 22(1), 21-35.

Sytsma, J., & Machery, E. (2010). Two conceptions of subjective experience. Philosophical studies, 151, 299-327.  

Sytsma, J., & Machery, E. (2012). On the relevance of folk intuitions: A commentary on Talbot. Consciousness and cognition, 21(2), 654-660.

Sytsma, J., & Ozdemir, E. (2019). No problem: Evidence that the concept of phenomenal consciousness is not widespread. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 26(9-10), 241-256.

Wyrwa, M. (2022). Does the Folk Concept of Phenomenal Consciousness Exist?. Diametros, 19(71), 46-66.