This selection of D. H. Mellor’s papers demonstrates the wide-ranging originality of his work. It gathers together sixteen major papers on related topics written over the last seventeen years. Together they form a complete modern metaphysics. The first five papers are on aspects of the mind: on our ‘selves’, their supposed subjectivity and how we refer to them, on the nature of conscious belief and on computational and physicalist theories of the mind. The next five papers deal with dispositions, natural kinds, laws of nature and how they involve natural necessity, universals and objective chances, and the relation between properties and predicates. Then follow three papers about the relations between time, change and causation, the nature of individual causes and effects and of the causal relation between them, and how causation depends on chance. The last three papers discuss the relation between chance and degrees of belief, give a solution to the problem of induction, and argue for an objective interpretation of decision theory. Two of the papers included here have been especially written for this volume, another has been revised for it, and many have hitherto been relatively inaccessible. A substantial introduction summarises the papers and indicates the connections between them.Matters of MetaphysicsMatters of Metaphysics D. H. MELLOR Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge New York Port Chester Melbourne SydneyCAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo ‘Cambridge University Press ‘The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK, Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521411172 © Cambridge University Press 1991 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1991 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN-13 978-0-521-41117-2 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-41117-3 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2005For Tim Crane and Jamie WhyteContents Preface Introduction. Minds Analytic philosophy and the self I and now (1989) Consciousness and degrees of belief (1980) How much of the mind is a computer? (1988) (with Tim Crane) There is no question of physicalism (1990) Properties and laws In defence of dispositions (1974) Natural kinds (1977) Necessities and universals in natural laws (1980) Laws, chances and properties (1990) Properties and predicates Causation McTaggart, fixity and coming true (1981) The singularly affecting facts of causation (1987) On raising the chances of effects (1988) Prediction and decision Chance and degrees of belief (1982) The warrant of induction (1988) Objective decision making (1983) References page xi xv ld 30 61 82 104 123 136 154 170 183 201 225 235 254 269 288Preface Two of the papers in this volume, chapters 1 and 10, are published here for the first time. Chapter 1 is also due to appear in German as: “Analytische Philosophie und das Selbst’, Orientierung durch Philosophie, ed. P. Koslowski, 1991, Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Chapter 10, ‘Properties and predicates’, is also due to appear, with a reply by D. M. Armstrong, in: Ontology, Causality, and Mind, ed. K. Campbell et al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 9 has been significantly revised from its first publication as: ‘Laws, chances and properties’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 4 (1990), 159-70. Reprinted by permission of the Editors. The other chapters are reprinted here with no substantial changes. The details of their original publication are: Chapter 2: ‘I and now’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 89 (1989), 79-94. © The Aristotelian Society 1989. Reprinted by courtesy of the Editor. Chapter 3: ‘Consciousness and degrees of belief’, Prospects for Pragmatism, ed. D. H. Mellor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1980), 139- B. Chapter 4: ‘How much of the mind is a computer?”, Computers, Brains and Minds, ed. P. Slezak and W. R. Albury, Dordrecht: Kluwer (1988), 47- 69. © 1989 by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Reprinted by permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers.xii Preface Chapter 5 (with Tim Crane): ‘There is no question of physicalism’, Mind 99 (1990), 185-206. Reprinted by permission of Tim Crane and Oxford University Press. Chapter 6: ‘In defense of dispositions’, Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 157- 81. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Chapter 7: ‘Natural kinds’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 28 (1977), 299-312. Reprinted by permission of the Editor. Chapter 8: ‘Necessities and universals in natural laws’, Science, Belief and Behaviour, ed. D. H. Mellor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1980), 105-25. Chapter 11: ‘McTaggart, fixity and coming true’, Reduction, Time and Reality, ed. R. Healey, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1981), 79-91. Chapter 12: ‘The singularly affecting facts of causation’, Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in Honour of J. J. C. Smart, ed. P. Pettit et al., Oxford: Blackwell (1987), 111-36. Chapter 13: ‘On raising the chances of effects’, Probability and Causality, ed. J. H. Fetzer, Dordrecht: Reidel (1988), 229-39. © 1988 by D. Reidel Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chapter 14: ‘Chance and degrees of belief’, What? Where? When? Why?, ed. R. McLaughlin, Dordrecht: Reidel (1982), 49-68. Copyright © 1982 by D. Reidel Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chapter 15: The Warrant of Induction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1988). Chapter 16: ‘Objective decision making’, Social Theory and Practice 9 (1983), 289-309. I am grateful to those concerned for permission to republish this material in this book, and to Cambridge University Press for enabling me to do so. For the material itself | am beholden to many more people than I can mention here. I acknowledge specific debts in references to works listed at the end of the book; but since the bibliographies and acknowledgements of my previouslyPreface xiii published articles have not been reprinted, I must emphasise that I am indebted to far more of the literature than I refer to. But my deepest debts are to those with whom I have discussed these subjects for over twenty-five years. I owe much to many philosophers I have met elsewhere in Britain, Australasia (whose hard thinking and straight talking I find especially congenial), the United States, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Russia, Yugoslavia and Holland. But I owe most to my colleagues and students in Cambridge, who have taught more than I can say about philosophy and how to do it. Though I cannot name them all, I thank them all; and I hope they will let the name of my mentor, friend and philosophical exemplar, Richard Braithwaite, who died last year, stand for all I owe to Cambridge philosophy. Cambridge March 1991Introduction The papers that follow have been written over a period of twenty years and are those which I now think most worth preserving, both individually and collectively. They contain inevitable repetitions, but also important connections, and between them constitute a metaphysics which I hope will interest other philosophers and students of the subject. As they were written at different times and for different purposes, they naturally vary in depth, detail and style, variations which | have not tried to iron out. In particular, I have kept the style of the two chapters (1 and 15) originally written as lectures. The first of these, ‘Analytic philosophy and the self”, was given in Leibniz’ house in Hannover on 16 November 1989 in a series of public lectures on the réle of philosophy today. It starts with a statement of what I take to be the main uses and virtues of analytic philosophy, and that made it seem a good first chapter for this book. After this, however, readers will find nothing more about philosophy itself, since the philosophy of philosophy seems to me among its least enlightening branches. In the sense in which astronomers are interested not in astronomy but in the stars, I am interested not in philosophy but in the various philosophical topics dealt with in this book — topics on which I find discussions of what philosophy is and how to do it shed very little light. I think the proof of our methods lies rather in the results of applying them, and my case for my method, such as it is, rests on the contents of the ensuing chapters. Minds The first five chapters concern aspects of the mind. Chapters 1 and 2 contain work on the self motivated by scepticism about recent claims for its subjectivity. In chapter 1, I attack the myth of subjectivity by showing how a wholly objective world can incorporate all our apparently subjective first- person knowledge of ourselves and of the world as it appears from our own perspective. Chapter 2, ‘I and now’ (1989), supplements chapter 1 by showing how the causal mechanisms of our minds enable our subjective — first-person present tense — thought and speech to refer directly and infallibly to ourselves and to the present time. This remarkable ability turns out to need neither subjective facts or selves, internal representations of ourselves or of the xvxvi Introduction present, nor any problematic capacity for (or concepts of) infallible self- reference or self-knowledge. All it needs is causal contiguity: the fact that causes are contiguous to their immediate effects. That is all the mental machinery it takes to put us and the present time into the truth conditions of our subjective statements and beliefs. Subjective beliefs figure also in the theory of conscious belief developed in chapter 3, ‘Consciousness and degrees of belief’ (1980), written for a volume of essays to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of F. P. Ramsey. Our direct if fallible awareness of what we believe poses a problem for the functionalist accounts of beliefs pioneered by Ramsey, i.e. accounts which define beliefs by how our senses cause them, how they interact with each other and with desires and other states of mind, and how they combine with desires to cause actions. The problem is to say what conscious belief (which I call assent) is, how it arises, and how it relates to its unconscious counterpart. I argue that assenting is believing one believes, a ‘second order’ subjective belief caused by one’s ‘first order’ beliefs via an inner sense. I show how this accommodates degrees of both belief and assent — and justifies taking subjective probability to measure actual, rather than merely rational, degrees of belief. Finally I tackle the apparent and obviously false consequence (C) that assenting to any proposition entails assenting to every proposition which it entails and of which we're conscious. My treatment of this problem here is inconclusive, but I now think I could accommodate (C)’s falsity by taking account of limitations in the causal mechanisms of belief formation discussed in chapter 4. But that account remains to be given, as does an answer to recent apparent counter-examples to my equation of assent with second order belief — an equation which, however, failing any other account of assent, I still think I believe. Chapter 4, ‘How much of the mind is a computer?’ (1988), was written in response to some extravagant claims for computational psychology. In it I first consider what it might usefully mean to claim that mental processes are computations, i.e. causal transformations of information embodied in representations. | argue that this claim is vacuous unless computation is understood as part of a process of forming beliefs, but that this does not preclude non-trivial information-processing theories of perception and inference. However, I then argue that there can be no such theories of mental processes involving other mental states such as desire which, unlike beliefs, are not essentially truth-seeking. Most of the mind, I therefore conclude, is not a computer.Introduction xvii In chapter 5, ‘There is no question of physicalism’ (1990), Tim Crane and I attack the common but unclear assumption in much recent philosophy of mind that mental states and processes are all really physical. To avoid vacuity, this thesis needs a non-question-begging definition of ‘physical’ which will prevent the mental counting as physical in its own right; and we argue that no such definition exists. First we show why the physicalist cannot define the physical either as what reduces to physics, or as what has causes or effects. Then we show why he cannot define it as the non-intentional or as the law-governed: since all the problematic features of intentionality occur also in physics, and laws occur also in psychology. Finally we argue that the mental does not even supervene on the physical, and conclude that the whole question of physicalism is as trivial as the doctrine itself is false. Properties and laws Chapters 6 to 10 concern natural properties, kinds and laws. Getting the right account of these is important not only in itself, but for the light it sheds on other metaphysical matters, including the metaphysics of the mind. Thus the misconception that laws are necessary has led many to deny the psychological and psychophysical laws discussed in chapter 5. Conversely, many attempts to reduce mental states to behavioural dispositions have been motivated by the anti-realist view of dispositions which I attack in chapter 6. In this chapter, ‘In defence of dispositions’ (1974), I argue that dispositions, both physical and mental, are real properties of things and people: i.e. that changes in them have real causes and effects. I argue moreover that dispositions have these causal powers in their own right, needing no non- dispositional properties to give them a real basis, such as molecular structures are supposed to provide for solubility, or brain states for mental dispositions like beliefs and desires. For these properties too are only dispositions: like inertial masses, which are no less real for being nothing but dispositions which objects have to accelerate under applied forces. In chapter 7, ‘Natural kinds’ (1977), I turn from the supposed bases of dispositions to such supposedly essential properties of natural kinds as being H,0, which essentialists say that water not only is but must be. The paper was written to rebut two well-known semantic arguments for these essences, one based on an anti-Fregean account of the extension of terms like ‘water’, the other on the necessary truth of identity statements like ‘water is H,O’. Both arguments fail: the first by having premises which both fail to be true of real kind terms and fail to entail essentialism; the second by begging the question, since ‘water is H,O’ won’t even be true, never mind necessary, unless being H,0 is an essential property of water — which, I argue, it isn’t. And as forxviii Introduction H,0, so in general: apparently essential properties are either not even shared by every actual thing of the kind, or their importance as properties is evidently more a feature of our theories than of the world. Chapter 8, ‘Necessities and universals in natural laws’ (1980), was written for a festschrift for Richard Braithwaite, complementing a paper supporting Braithwaite’s Humean view of laws by attacking two non-Humean alternatives. One of these takes laws to be metaphysically necessary, the other takes them to be second order relations between the universals (properties and relations) involved. The implausible metaphysics of these views could be justified, I maintain, only by yielding better solutions than Humeans can provide to such problems as how an uninstantiated law (like Newton's first law of motion) can hold non-trivially - which, I argue, they fail to do. In chapter 9, ‘Laws, chances and properties’ (1990, revised), I supplement the previous chapter’s critique of rival views with a unified account of both deterministic and indeterministic laws, based on the probabilities which, I argue, all laws contain. As in my (1971) The Matter of Chance, | take these probabilities to be real single-case chances, an interpretation modified and further defended in chapter 14. I then identify the ‘natural necessity’ of deterministic laws with the chance of 1 which they give their corresponding regularities. Laws in general I take to be embodied in the actual properties and relations (including chances) they contain, where actual properties and relations are those that would be quantified over by the Ramsey sentence of the conjunction of all true law statements. Chapter 10, ‘Properties and predicates’, looks at how closely universals characterised non-semantically — as in chapter 9 — correspond to our general concepts, i.e. to the meanings of our predicates. I argue that they correspond hardly at all. I show how even if the effects on our senses of a single property fixed the extension of a predicate like ‘red’, the property would still not fix (though its laws would constrain) the predicate’s connotations. I argue moreover that in fact few if any predicates, except some of those used to state natural laws, even correspond to single universals, let alone have them as anything like their meanings. Causation In chapters 11 to 13 I turn from properties and laws to causation, and first to the link between causation and time. In chapter 11, ‘McTaggart, fixity and coming true’ (1981), I first give a tenseless account of change, using arguments which are taken further in my (1981) Real Time. | then use this to attack the idea that causation gets its temporal direction from the flow of time, which makes events necessary when they or their sufficient causes become