(Yet Another) Philosophical Illusion

Although I think philosophy would benefit from a decreased interest in rooting out the illusions that grip others, and an increased interest in merely rooting out falsity, I thought I would share a recent thought I've had about (what I take to be) a particularly clear instance of a philosophical illusion.

This past summer, while teaching a philosophy of mind class, I was discussing the putative possibility of an inverted spectrum and was trying to explain to the students what it means to say, as advocates of this possibility usually say, that someone for whom the color wheel is inverted would be “behavioristically indistinguishable” from someone for whom it is not inverted. (This is, of course, why the putative possibility of an inverted spectrum is supposed to be so devastating for accounts of mind that posit a necessary connection between mental experience and behavior.) As a means of working towards an understanding of what it would be for something to be a subjective mental difference that is behavioristically indistinguishable, I asked them to give me an example of a subjective mental difference that is behavioristically distinguishable. This query immediately derailed the intended trajectory of my discussion and led several of them to start talking about how we can (according to them) explain differences in people’s preferences (as expressed in their behavior) by positing differences in how things look, taste, smell, etc., for them.

The first thing to say about such comments is that our tendency to say such things is almost overwhelming. I think almost everyone is tempted to think that such subjective mental differences can explain differences in our overt behavior. And I don’t think there’s anything, as such, wrong with invoking such differences. For example, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with explaining why someone likes the taste of Coke, but despises Pepsi, by saying ‘Well, Coke tastes good to her but Pepsi doesn’t’.

But I do think that there’s enormous potential for illusion in such comments, and it’s this potential for illusion that I want to focus on. The illusion arises out of the tendency to think that by invoking differences in how things look, taste, smell, etc., we’ve somehow explained why some people are drawn to certain things, and others aren’t, without relying upon the notion of preference. The illusory thought is that by saying ‘Well, she likes Coke, and you don’t, because it tastes different to her’ we’re explaining why she is drawn to it—the illusion is that we’ve eliminated her role in her behavior, as it were, and found something that just anyone would be drawn to, if that’s how things looked, tasted, smelt, etc., to them. But if there is a question about why she prefers Coke, then I can’t, for the life of me, see why there shouldn’t equally well be a question about why she prefers that taste (i.e., the taste that is being posited as a taste that just anyone would be drawn to). The problem is that if there’s a question about why people prefer the external objective things they prefer, then there’s equally well a question about why people prefer the internal subjective things they prefer. And to think otherwise—i.e., to think that by positing subjective mental differences we’re leaving this question behind—is sheer illusion.

That, I think, is a clear case of a philosophical illusion. For an example of an illusion that is probably a little more interesting, check out the following link:

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/mot_mib/index.html

For a useful discussion of why the putative possibility of an inverted spectrum is an illusion, check out the following link:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/