Category Mistakes, Concepts, and Explanation

We often talk about looking for things it makes little sense to think of finding: looking for ourselves, looking for America. looking for the ghost or spirit of some dead writer; and of failing to see things when we approach them: failing to see the forest for the trees. The situation with forests and trees is similar to the situation with Ryle's University: "A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, musuems, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks 'But where is the University?' . . . It has then to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized" (16).

The foreigner's confusion is not so strange, and could be specified in a way that renders it less absurd. Oxford is a particularly spread out university--especially to an American, who will expect a University not to have so many colleges in it, and to have an administrative center for the entire institution. This confusion is still less absurd given the way we accumulate ordinary knowledge about things; having a vague idea about what something is like, we decide we want to know more about the details. But the details may seem--because they are particular--inadequate to whatever idea we had of the thing before. The concept of something that arouses our curiosity invariably includes vagueness and mystery--or else it would not arouse our curiosity. This situation gives rise to the paradox of analysis, the sense that any "analysis" of a concept will fail to do justice to the meaning of the concept. The thing we want to learn about is like the horizon; it keeps moving away as we approach it.

The question in philosophy of mind as to whether a scientific account (e.g. in terms of neuroscience) could do justice to the way it feels to be this person in this body, having these perceptions, emotions, beliefs, etc. continues to cause ink to be spilled for just this reason. A scientific explanation of the causes of my perceptions, emotions and beliefs is not equivalent to my experience of my perceptions, emotions and beliefs, and never will be, no matter how precise. This does not mean a scientific explanation of my experience cannot be given; in principle it certainly can be; but it will never be my experience.

If philosophers of mind pursuing this problem want to know whether experience can be gotten out of laws explaining how the brain works, they are not asking the right sort of question. The move to answer the question in the affirmative through optimism about the possibility of artificial intelligence misses the point: perhaps we will someday have sufficient knowledge of the brain to fabricate a robot who has perceptions, emotions, etc. But this does not show that the knowledge we use to make the robot somehow contains experience within it. The trouble in philosophy of mind is that we have a concept (experience) whose full sense cannot be captured in the details we discover through scientific means, insofar as what it's like to live is not the sort of thing we find out about through science.

This is why looking for oneself sounds so odd. The self is an abstraction, and an abstraction that can only be learnt about in certain ways. First, what it's like to be you is not something you can sensibly do research into (unless you're Husserl). One's ability to find out about oneself is limited because it's something we can't try to learn about in the normal ways we go about learning things. Second, it's an abstract object. As an abstract object, it is in the position of Ryle's university. Universities and nations are also things you're not going to find if you look for them. There are specific things it might mean to look for a nation: find it on the globe, read the facts about it in the World Almanac, meet the people, see the architecture, taste the indigenous cuisine. But in any of these cases, the traveler is not going to be motivated unless she conceives of whichever of these things she's interested in as in some way mysterious, as a concept that particular experiences and facts will add dimension to but not exhaust.