Reply to Paul Williams

·期刊原文
Reply to Paul Williams
By Mark Siderits
Philosophy East and West
Vol. 50, No. 3 (July 2000)
pp. 453-459
Copyright 2000 by University of Hawaii Press
Hawaii, USA

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p. 453 Reply to Paul Williams Philosophy East and West, Vol. 50, No. 3 (July 2000)

There is much in Paul Williams' response to my review of his book to which I might reply, but I fear the debate may already be too protracted. So I shall take this opportunity just to try to clarify some key claims of mine about which I think Williams might be confused, and then leave it to the reader to decide where the truth lies. Since Williams has made it fairly clear where he stands, perhaps I should begin by indicating my own (present) views concerning the larger context in which our dispute is located. I do not think the Reductionist project -- reducing persons to a wholly impersonal causal series of psychophysical elements -- can ultimately be made to work. At the same time, I believe that Reductionism has the resources to answer the objections that its many critics, such as Williams, raise. The Reductionist view of persons is also, I think, compatible with at least two different sorts of ontology: the mental/material (nāma/rūpa) dualism of early Buddhism and Abhidharma and the naturalistic physicalism of much of contemporary analytic philosophy. Reductionism is likewise compatible both with belief in rebirth and with its denial. The real difficulty I see for Reductionism lies in answering the far more fundamental challenge of the Mādhyāmikas. (Unlike Williams, I do not think the Madhyamaka claim that nothing bears its own essential nature is incoherent, or tantamount to metaphysical nihilism.) Yet I suspect that the key to understanding the bodhisattva's compassion may lie in seeing that the Madhyamaka critique does not undermine all the consequences of Reductionism. So I think it is worth investigating whether there is a plausible reading of Śāntideva's argument that makes more philosophical sense than Williams sees in it.

Rebirth and Identity
This is not the place to get into a lengthy battle over the meaning of "neither the same nor different" in the Indian Buddhist tradition, but let me say a few words about my own understanding of the expression as it occurs at Milindapañha 40. Like many other Buddhologists, Williams understands the expression to involve equivocation between numerical and qualitative identity. I claim instead that the expression is univocal, involving just numerical identity. (For a clear instance of this use,

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see Tattvasaṅgraha 338-342.) This means that in my reading, the expression involves a (usually implicit) sortal term: x and y are neither the same K nor distinct Ks. So when Nāgasena says that adult and infant are neither the same nor different, I take him to mean that they are not the same person and also not distinct persons. Of course, this bivalence failure seems so odd that we are immediately tempted to explain it away as involving equivocation. (Though we might not be so tempted if we recalled the case of the fire that had gone out, yet had not gone north or south or east or west.) Yet when Milinda claims that adult and infant are numerically distinct persons, Nāgasena gives various reasons why this claim should be rejected, and states instead that adult and infant are numerically identical persons. To explain all this he gives the analogy of the one light that shone all night. The flame of the first watch is numerically distinct from that of the second watch, and so forth, and it is the flame that does the illuminating at any moment, yet we would still say it is one light that shone all night. This is because 'light' (padīpa) is a convenient designation for a causal series of flames. The ultimate truth is that there is a series of such flames, each existing for a moment, then going out of existence, but giving rise to a successor. This situation may be described, at the level of conventional truth, as one light shining all night. But since the use of convenient designations is banned from the ultimate truth (because they lead to reification), we may not say either that ultimately the first flame and the last flame are (stages of) the same light or that they are distinct lights.

The bivalence failure is just a dramatic way of putting the point that ultimately an enduring light is a mere conceptual fiction and so not ultimately real. When applied to the case of persons, the lesson is that ultimately there is just the causal series of psychophysical elements, but that we have learned to use the convenient designation 'person' for such a series, so that conventionally the adult is the same person as the infant, though ultimately they are neither the same person not distinct persons -- once again, for the simple reason that the person is a mere conceptual fiction.

I take this account to be meant to apply to the case of rebirth as well, at least for early Buddhism and Abhidharma. So, ultimately, the psychophysical elements at rebirth are not the same person as those at the prior death, nor are they distinct persons, yet conventionally we may say that these are two stages in the existence of the same person. This is conventionally true because the causal link between the earlier and later psychophysical elements is of the same sort as that which typically obtains between the elements at one stage in a life and the elements at a later stage in that life. Now one reason I think this is the view of early Buddhism and Abhidharma is that when the Buddha teaches karma and rebirth to the laity (in the neyārtha texts), he seems to be appealing to his audience's self-concern. He appears to be saying that just as one ordinarily seeks to maximize the well-being of the later stages of oneself in this life, so the truth about rebirth shows that one should exercise equal prudential concern with regard to future lives as well, and the truth about karma shows how best to do so. Considerations of prudential concern would have no force here unless the audience were being led to believe that rebirth involves what would conventionally be called the same person.

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Like Williams, I find it hard to think of cockroaches as persons. Still, if I believed that my existence involves the continued existence of a witness self (like the sākṣin of Sāṃkhya and Advaita), and I had reason to believe that cockroaches are at least minimally conscious, then I might have to entertain the possibility that rebirth as a cockroach could occur. Philosophical arguments sometimes lead to counterintuitive results. For a Buddhist Reductionist, the continued existence of a person will, I think, require a far more complex mentality than it seems likely that a cockroach enjoys. A plausible account would, I believe, require that the reborn being have the capacity, at some stage of its life, to remember at least the more significant experiences of the prior life (though this capacity need not be exercised). The fact that a human embryo cannot be said to have this capacity proves nothing. While I am under total anesthesia I am incapable of remembering the experiences of the person who signed the patient-consent form, yet this does not render the surgeon guilty of operating on a non-consenting patient.

Coming to be a Construction
First, I think it crucially important to point out that I do not think 'person' is an "ultimately arbitrary convention." A convention, yes, but a convenient one -- that is, one that reflects certain interests, in this case an interest in minimizing overall suffering. I take the Buddhist Reductionist view to be that adopting this convention does tend to promote this end. Hence Nāgasena's references to punishing the criminal and rewarding the student, in his refutation of Milinda's view that adult and infant are distinct persons. For the Buddhist, the difficulty is just that our tendency to reify leads, when we employ this convention, to a belief in a person existing over and above the psychophysical elements, hence to clinging, hence to alienation and despair. Thus our adopting the convention in an unreflective way can diminish some kinds of suffering, but bring about other sorts. It also leads (and I take this to be the point of Śāntideva's argument) to our seeing a deep difference between suffering occurring in this causal series and suffering occurring in others. So our adopting the convention in an unreflective way causes us to miss many opportunities to alleviate the suffering around us.

As evidence for the claim that personhood is a construction, I pointed out that children must be taught to identify with past and future stages of the causal series. [1] As often happens at this point in the debate, Williams invokes biology in response. I don't think this will help. The naturalistically inclined Reductionist will agree that when spiders engage in behavior that promotes their long-term interest, it is reasonable to explain this by appealing to forces of natural selection that resulted in their having a certain sort of hardwiring. But humans are quite different. Because human infants are born premature by mammalian standards, their brains at birth are not hardwired for the more complex behavioral repertoires needed for survival. Instead, the neural structures that support cognition and affect are formed in interaction with the social environment during the first several years of life. Among the earliest bands of proto-hominids, some provided their young with social environments that fostered

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the development of habits of long-term prudential concern: the identification of the individual with their past and future stages, and dispositions to behave in ways that maximized well-being over the life span. Those that did this are our ancestors.

Finally, a Reductionist could agree that while children must typically be taught that three plus three equals six, this is not a socially constructed fact. A Reductionist can be a metaphysical realist about (ultimate) truth. Learning to think of oneself as a person is different, though, just as is learning to think of oneself as a certain sort of person. In a racist society, learning to think of oneself as belonging to a particular race can have significant consequences. Some facts only come into existence through certain social practices.

A Painful Subject?
First, a point of clarification about pains. The Reductionist does not deny that the occurrence of a pain sensation naturally causes behavior that aims at dispelling that pain; this does not require belief in personhood. What is distinctive about persons is their capacity to anticipate future pains and seek to prevent their occurrence, which is accomplished through the processes of identification and appropriation. Now the Reductionist will gladly concede that conventionally, pains have subjects. Coming to be a person means coming to think of some pains as occurring to the person who is me, others as occurring to other beings. The question at issue between Williams and the Reductionist is whether it is ultimately true that pains must have subjects. This the Reductionist must deny. Their argument for altruism depends on the claim that the conventional assignment of pains to persons is merely a useful way of trying to maximize impersonal welfare, and one that can be improved upon by taking the boundaries between persons less seriously. If it is ultimately true that pains must have subjects, this argument will fail.

I hope I was not being unfair to Williams when I attributed a functionalist view of pain to him. I did so because I was looking for some reason to support his claim that pains ultimately require subjects. Adverbial and event analyses of pain do not show this; the subject supplied in such analyses may well disappear under further analysis. And practitioners of vipaśyanā meditation will agree with Williams' characterization of pain's intrinsic nature, yet insist that there can be subjectless pains. Since Williams knows that one cannot simply rely on one's intuitions in these matters, I took those passages that suggested a functional analysis to constitute an implicit defense of his claim. Williams is right to want to distance himself from functionalism. It is true that the functionalist can be a reductionist and not an eliminativist about pain (what Williams calls a soft functionalist). But then the phenomenal properties of pain will (reductively) supervene on facts about the organism and its evolutionary history, and pain itself will lack independent causal and explanatory power. Pain will be only conventionally real, not ultimately real. So this won't fit with the claim that pain ultimately requires a subject.

I agree that it is not immediately obvious how to go about constructing sets of psychophysical elements that are maximally causally connected. Since I intend to

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deal with this more fully elsewhere, I appreciate Williams' critical comments. But if we are to be nāma-rūpa dualists, there is no difficulty individuating the mental elements based on their causal connections with the physical ones. The Buddha did, after all, hold that the nāma skandhas originate in dependence on sense-object-contact events, which are physical in nature. And, sadly, Williams' clever example of the miscreant who seeks to escape punishment by undergoing fission has been anticipated. [2] I agree, though, that fission raises difficult questions for the theory of karmic punishment. Buddhist ethics contains some elements suggestive of retributivism, and these are incompatible with Buddhist Reductionism.

Foggy Mountain Breakdown
I characterized the Buddhist Reductionist as holding that wholes are ultimately unreal, and that only impartite entities and their properties ultimately exist. (I did not say that the Mādhyamika believes both of these things; they would, of course, deny the second.) According to this view there is a true answer to the question of whether or not there were pines on Mount Fuji before there were persons to observe them. But the answer depends on what the ultimate facts are, and the ultimate facts consist entirely of facts about impartite entities and their properties. If some such entities were arranged in the way that we would classify as pines growing on Mount Fuji, then the answer is that the sentence 'Pines lived on Mount Fuji before Honshū was inhabited' is conventionally true.

Williams, with the Aristotelian, is willing to concede that the Reductionist view might be true of artifacts, but doubts it could be true of complex organisms like cows or trees. I think that the Reductionist side is supported by recent developments in biology, where, for instance, the reduction of embryology to biochemistry now appears feasible. [3] If all the facts concerning the formation of the embryo (such as differentiation of tissue types to form different organs) can be explained in terms of the biochemical properties of the gamete pair and the embryonic environment, then the organism as a whole lacks autonomous explanatory power and is causally inert. Everyone presumably agrees that the ultimate parts making up the organism are real. By the principle of lightness, then, we should eliminate the organism from our ultimate ontology, at the same time acknowledging its usefulness for our conceptual economy by granting it conventional reality. This is the sort of argument Buddhist Reductionists have in mind when they deny the ultimate existence of partite things.

I suggested that sorites difficulties might supply another such argument. Williams responds that even if we cannot say just where Mount Everest or a patch of fog begins, the mountain and the fog are real for all that, since they have real effects: when I become lost in the fog on the mountain, I may fall over a cliff. But the Reductionist does not deny the existence of a mass of contiguous suspended water droplets in the vicinity of that mass of earth atoms conveniently designated 'Mount Everest.' And these entities, with these spatial properties, are all that is needed to explain my fall. The question is whether we should additionally posit the wholes, the fog and the mountain. The challenge for the realist about wholes that is raised by

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indeterminacy is that there will be sentences of the form 'An entity of sort K exists here' that will be neither true nor false. Descending from Mount Everest step by step, there will come a point where it is no longer true to say that we are on Mount Everest, but it is also not false. Worse yet, there is no determinate point at which we can say that it begins to be no longer true that we are on Mount Everest. Multivalent logics do not seem to help here. Nor does fuzzy set theory. As Williams points out, we expect sortals like 'fog' to behave this way, and we might even come to expect it of 'mountain.' This does not dispel the difficulty for the realist about wholes, though; it merely repeats it. If these are the names of real things, their use should not generate logical contradictions of the sort "It is not the case that we are on Mount Everest, but it is also not the case that we are not on Mount Everest." Real things should not occasion bivalence failure. [4] For the Reductionist, on the other hand, indeterminacy is not a problem. Our use of the convenient designation 'mountain' will naturally occasion truth-value gaps, since this is merely a rough-and-ready way of referring to a certain sort of arrangement of earth particles, and the exigencies of human communication require that all the details of the arrangement not be specified in advance. [5]

There is obviously much more that could be said on both sides of this debate, but I should stop here. Let me close by saying that I very much like Williams' notion of "analytic meditation." I don't think it is enough by itself to bring about the sort of enlightenment that Buddhists seek (though the other sort of meditation is not sufficient either). But it is, I think, necessary. For one must know the truth to attain enlightenment, and our best shot at attaining the truth about these matters comes through philosophical dialogue with those holding opposing views. Though I still disagree with Williams, I have learned much -- about ways in which my own views may require elaboration or modification to be defensible -- from our exchange. To engage in analytic meditation, one needs worthy opponents, people capable of raising embarrassing questions for one's favored theory. In this and in my initial piece I have given several references to recent work that I think creates difficulties for those taking Williams' line. I should do the same for those who favor the Reductionist line. One source that immediately comes to mind is the recent collection Reading Parfit, [6] especially the pieces by Blackburn, McDowell, and Johnston. But also worth considering is the classical Nyāya attack on Buddhist Reductionism, as presented in the work of Arindam Chakrabarti. [7]

Notes
1. For an excellent phenomenological account of the resulting habit of appropriating certain non-present states see Raymond Martin, Self-Concern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially chapter 5.

2. David Wiggins, "Locke, Butler and the Stream of Consciousness," in The Identities of Persons, ed. Amelie O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 139-173 at p. 146.

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3. See Alex Rosenberg, "Reductionism Redux: Computing the Embryo," Biology and Philosophy 12: 445-470.

4. See Terrence Horgan, "Robust Vagueness and the Forced-March Sorites Paradox," Philosophical Perspectives, ed. James E. Tomberlin (Atascadero, California: Ridgeview) 8 (1994): 159-188. Also Peter Unger, "There are no Ordinary Things," Synthese 41 (1979): 117-154.

5. Crispin Wright has an interesting discussion of the pragmatics of vague terms (though he reaches somewhat different conclusions) in his "Language Mastery and the Sorites Paradox," in Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics, ed. Gareth Evans and John McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 223-247.

6. Reading Parfit, ed. Jonathan Dancy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

7. See especially, "I Touch What I Saw," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 103-116.