Can you TRY to forget that
you were there?
Wittgenstein wrote on logic which is about thought. Is
all philosophy only about thought? I had to think of it, when I read an article
by Kevin Lynch recently (see note). Lynch starts his article with the
observation that “according to a common assumption in the philosophical
literature about how self-deception gets accomplished, subjects deceive
themselves into believing something by the control of attention” (p. 63).
However, Lynch casts doubt on this assumption, which he particularizes as the
idea “whether people have the power to intentionally
deceive themselves using the ordinary sources of their own mind and body”(ibid. - italics mine). Or yet more
specific: The assumption states that it is possible to make “acquire oneself a
belief which, before trying to do this, one knew to be false or at least
unwarranted” (p. 64). This can be done, so many adherents of this idea (“attentionalists”)
suppose, by shifting attention intentionally from the belief to be suppressed
to an acceptable belief. So, attentionalists think that people can manage to successfully
deceive themselves intentionally. In their theories they explain how this can
be done. (cf pp. 63-64)
Then Lynch presents and discusses a few attentionalist
theories. The essence is: Attentionalists, like Perring, Davidson, Audi and
others, try to substantiate their idea by philosophical means, so by reasoning.
And, as Lynch stresses, “these philosophers make no special effort to insist
that these acts of shifting attention are carried out unconsciously” (p. 65; italics by Lynch). The acts are done
intentionally and knowingly. They can be done by simply directing one’s
attention away from the unwanted thought (pp. 65-69).
This is the theory and so it works according to the
attentionalists. But does it really work that way? In order to answer the
question Lynch takes an essential step: He turns away from philosophy and asks
what psychology says about it, so he appeals to an experimental approach. Keeping
it short: Psychological experiments have shown that one can’t suppress beliefs intentionally
and consciously. Therefore the attentionalist theory is false.
What does this mean for philosophy? Probably I have
said it more often, but there is thought and there is the real world (I don’t
want to say that thoughts do not belong to the real world, but here I make the
distinction for the sake of argument. I suppose that my readers understand what
I mean). Philosophy is about thought. It reasons and discusses about concepts
and their relations, about what is fundamental and cannot be shown and about
questions of life. Without a doubt you can add a few themes more.
In his Tractatus
logico-philosophicus Wittgenstein said: “We feel that even if all possible scientific
questions have been answered, our problems of life have still not been touched
at all” (6.52). This is also true the other way round: Even if all possible
questions of life and thought have been answered, we still know nothing about
the real world. It’s the latter what science is about. I tend to say that all
questions that can fundamentally be answered by science cannot be answered convincingly by philosophy. Even if
philosophers give an answer, always the question remains: You say it, but is it
true? You talk about facts, so look what the facts are and not how you think
they are. However, often it happens that philosophers ignore that what they
think and say can be tested against reality. Then they can say what they think,
but what they say fails to have the right foundation: facts (whatever this may
mean, but just that’s a philosophical question). The attentionalist question is
typically a question that can and so need to be answered by science (and so has
to be the subject of scientific research): Can you think away your unwanted
thoughts? Well, try it and see what happens. But apparently no attentionalist
philosopher has tried it, for it is impossible.
The upshot is: philosophy is for philosophers and the
rest is for ... (to be filled in, for instance by “scientists”; however there
is more in the real world than only science). Every man to his own trade (and
the same for women).
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