Paper read at the Seminar on Putnam, Pcs 2003

Ferenc Ruzsa:

Testing the vat: Talking about the Ding an sich

The Brains in a vat2 story was brought forward by Putnam to analyse some theories of

reference and contrast their consequences. But if his argument is valid, it also makes traditional talk about metaphysics meaningless in so far as the standard vocabulary of metaphysics would lack any reference. In this respect Putnam stands firmly in the positivist (and also in the British empiricist) tradition; and here it will be suggested that his attempt is as much open to serious doubt as previous efforts to the same effect. First let us recall the story. A human being has been subjected to an operation by an evil scientist. The persons brain has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc; but really all the person is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings. We could imagine that all sentient beings are brains in a vat. Perhaps there is no evil scientist, the universe just happens to consist of automatic machinery tending a vat full of brains and nervous systems. Could we, if we were brains in a vat in this way, say or think that we are? No, we couldnt. The brains in a vat are not thinking about real trees when they think there is a tree in front of me because there is nothing by virtue of which their thought tree represents actual trees. By the same argument, vat refers to vats in the image in vat -English, not to real vats, since the use of vat in vat-English has no causal connection to real vats.

My researches were supported by the OTKA (the Hungarian National Scientific Research Fund): project nos. T 034446 and T 043629. The first chapter in Putnam, Hilary: Reason, truth and history. Cambridge University Press 1981 (repr. 1992). All quotations are from this book.
2

If we are really the brains in a vat, then what we now mean by we are brains in a vat is that we are brains in a vat in the image. But part of the hypothesis is that we arent brains in a vat in the image (i.e. what we are hallucinating isnt that we are brains in a vat). So if we are brains in a vat, then the sentence We are brains in a vat says something false.3 It is clear that Putnams conclusion is fatal to any kind of metaphysics, where talk about objects beyond the range of human experience should be quite natural. We are no more in (the right kind of) causal connection with our Creator, disembodied souls, time without change, empty space or thing-in-itself then those brains with their vat. I find this suggestion (like so many interesting philosophical positions) somewhat offensive. Completely sane human beings, including myself, cannot imagine or express a fairly simple idea or situation? An atheist mistakenly believes that he has a meaningful position, but in fact he cannot deny God as it is impossible to refer to him? I feel that theories with similar outcome underestimate the power and possibilities of human thinking and language; and the way to this result is to overestimate the power of their theory of human cognition and/or communication. Normally philosophers with such strategy (Berkeley, Hume, Kant) do have something important to say about our faculties and their limitations, but they seem to think that they have fully exhausted all our capabilities. When spelled out clearly, the arrogance of such an undertaking is perhaps fairly transparent: one single person reflects on the abilities of every human being (reflection on our mental activities is not what our brains are best at) and then sets up the limits beyond which no one can go. I have a rather strong intuition about this kind of thesis. If a theory tells you that you cannot do what you in fact can do and what you do regularly, then chances are good that the theory needs some revision. And we do experience mind-independent material things, we think about our destiny, we speak about God, and we understand the proposition and can contemplate the possibility of our being brains in a vat. Again not quite unusually Putnams argument is self-refuting. It is self-refuting in a particular way: if his thesis is true then no one can understand it, at least among people who are in fact brains in a vat. Putnam says that the fact that those brains are within a vat is inexpressible in vat-English. But if a fact p is inexpressible in a language then also the fact that p is inexpressible is also inexpressible.4 To put it more simply: if I cannot think or say

3 4

Condensed from pp. 57, 1315. At least if the language contains an abstraction-operator () and a word for inexpressible.

that I am a brain in a vat, then I am also unable to understand that I am not one, and I will not understand Putnams paper.

By now it might be guessed that I think Putnams conclusion does not hold. But I also suggest that his argument is correct in the sense that the conclusion does follow from the premisses. And I also concur that his basic tenet is true: magical theories of reference are false, i.e. symbols do not necessarily refer: Thought words and mental pictures do not intrinsically represent what they are about.5 His programmatic slogan, meanings just arent in the head6 is well substantiated, and can hardly be doubted. Of course it should not be interpreted as saying, meanings are outside the head, but rather that meanings and references are fairly complex things, determined partly by the speakers mind, partly by social/linguistic conventions, partly by the structure of the world. In other words, meaning and reference are (or at least can be) context-sensitive in a very wide sense of context. Putnam on several occasions speaks of more than one premiss or assumption of his argument. One of these is the assumption that the mind has no access to external things or properties apart from that provided by the senses.7 I think it would be fruitful to investigate the plausibility of this position; a Chomskian innatism or an evolutionary approach to fundamental mental structures could be suggested as an alternative. But it would not have any effect on the brains in a vat-situation so I will not pursue it here. The other premiss is that one cannot refer to certain kinds of things, e.g. trees, if one has no causal interaction at all with them, or with things in terms of which they can be described.8 In a sense this is not another premiss it is just a more specific version of the meanings arent in the head doctrine. But it is worth seeing in exactly what ways it i s more specific. One aspect is that here the (vague) concept of causality is mentioned. The other is that here is a quantor (or operator) change of some to all (or possible to necessary): instead of external facts may modify meaning we have a causal connection is necessary to have reference at all. I think this is a problematic move: it seems very plausible to admit context-sensitivity as a frequent but not universal case. But in order to clarify this point we

5 6 7

p. 5. p. 19. p. 16.

would need far more technical precision than used by Putnam himself here, so I will return to the first point: the specific requirement of a causal connection. The theory in itself seems impossible to refute: all testable cases would belong to this world, and that is usually supposed to be causally interconnected. But for this very reason this would make the causal condition almost meaningless: any speaker is causally connected to anything in this world. Obviously something more specific is needed, although it would be difficult to spell out precisely what we want. The more immediately occurring suggestions (direct experience etc.) will clearly be too narrow. As Putnam remarks in the third chapter of the same book, already with a simple word like horse the extension includes many things we have not causally interacted with (e.g. future horses or horses that never interacted with any human being).9 Or, to bring up a more complicated example, The idea that causal connection is necessary is refuted by the fact that extraterrestrial certainly refers to extraterrestrials whether we have ever causally interacted with any extraterrestrials or not.10 The outline of a solution could be that we refer to some things by virtue of the fact that they are connected with us by causal chains of the appropriate kind, and to yet other things by virtue of the fact that they are of the same kind as things connected with us by causal chains of the appropriate kind, and to still other things by description . 11 But this solution might be used to refute the original conclusion: if the external vat is of the same kind as a vat within the illusion, then the brains in a vat may refer to it and describe their situation. Now can the two vats be considered to be of the same kind? The plausible answer is yes. Of the same kind seems to be a symmetric relation; and, viewed from outside, we can refer to the vat-in-the-illusion, because it is of the same kind as the real vat. This kind of referring to things in another world is quite common in human practice: we can think and speak of the things in a computer game or simulation, and even more traditionally about things and persons in literary works. The process can be iterated: we can easily refer to Gonzago, the king in the play performed in the 3rd act, 2nd scene of Hamlet. Products of human imagination can help us reconsider Putnams tenet in other ways as well. The authors of the film Matrix believed Putnam. (Matrix is the name given here to the

8 9

p. 16. p. 53. p. 52.

10 11

p. 53. Putnam is not really happy with this solution this whole complicated story is not so much false as otiose, because it presupposes that the world, and not thinkers, sort things into kinds. This issue, however, would lead on to his

illusion world within the vat.) Morpheus, who can move from the real word to the illusionworld and back, says to Neo in the vat: Unfortunately no one can be told what the Matrix is: you have to see it for yourself. Now in what follows Neo will get into the real world, and then sees and understands the situation; and we understand that the situation could have been described with any degree of accuracy, and Neo would have grasped the situation already within the vat. Putnam sees this difficulty and that is why he stipulates that all sentient beings in the Universe should be forever within the vat. But does it really matter? If somebody who could move in and out of the vat told us about the external world we would understand it. If somebody who could not, would say the same thing (he would be lying, but that we cannot know) we would understand it again: and when we would speak of the vat in the external world, we would be successfully referring to it. Reference does not presuppose an existing link: a possible connection is enough. If on a newly discovered faraway island, meeting the natives the captain says to his men, Let us go to their king, his meaning is clear, even if the natives have no chief at all; and if they do have something like a king, then the captain referred to him. To sum up, I suggest a slight modification to Putnams externalist model of reference: to be able to refer we need an imaginable (but not necessarily physically possible) information link to the referent. But with this modification the argument about the brains in a vat will not stand people within the vat can think of and discuss their situation, even if there is no-one who could (or would) tell them that their crazy hypothesis is actually true.

proposal of an internalist view as contrasted to the metaphysical realist or externalist position and that lies outside t he scope of this paper.