Although The Act of Thinking is a rewrite of a Ph.D. thesis, for Massey
University of New Zealand, it is no academic cliché but the work of a mature,
sophisticated and profound thinker who may just have written the most original
and important book in philosophy of mind to have appeared in over a decade.

The title of Melser’s book
encapsulates its thesis, which is that thinking is not a process, either
biological or mental, but an action, which we have to learn from others how to
perform.  The text of the book consists
of an extended attempt to explain what this means and why the author believes
it.  Briefly, it means that thinking is
not a recondite process in a private inner theater, either physical or
spiritual, but an observable activity. 
The reasons to believe this are to be found in a study of how we acquire
the capacity to carry on this activity, which we learn from others.   

As Melser notes in the beginning,
he collects under thinking every
activity that Descartes called consciousness,
including attending, calculating, remembering, perceiving, musing, desiring,
emoting, minding, feeling, pondering, meditating, cogitating, etc.  Although Melser’s thesis is that these are
all actions, he makes no attempt either to define action or to say how thinking differs from other acts.  In his view, the concept of action is sui
generis–in other words, so basic it must count as indefinable, like the
primitive terms of a system of logic; and he regards belief that there is a
distinctive way in which thinking differs from other actions as a myth created
by taking metaphors literally. 

Readers conversant with twentieth
century philosophy of mind will hear echoes of the ordinary language
behaviorism championed in the first half of the twentieth century by Gilbert
Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein. They will also detect skepticism about the
cognitivist revolution that began in the last quarter of that same century and
still commands the allegiance of most philosophers and psychologists.  Melser’s document represents, however, no
futile attempt to revive a moribund orthodoxy or overthrow a regnant one.  Well aware of the limitations of earlier
versions of behaviorism, he knows that the best way to displace an
unsatisfactory philosophy is to offer a better one.  So, he attempts in the first 3/5 of his book to provide us with a
more fully developed version of the old line of thought while waiting to the last
2/5 to explain why he thinks its fashionable rival does not work.  This is not the usual order of exposition,
but it is a defensible one.

I cannot hope in a review to give
you an adequate account of Melser’s argument. 
You will have to read the book yourself if you want to get an idea of
its power.   I can, however, try to
describe and illustrate the general line of reasoning so you will know what to
expect.

Citing Ryle as predecessor and
inspiration, Melser begins by trying to make good on his introductory claim
that "there are two key ingredients in the act of thinking, both
themselves actional.  The first is our
ability to do things in concert, the second is our ability to–jointly with
others or alone–perform concerted activity in merely token form."  According to Melser, then, thinking is a
skill (or, rather, a diverse set of skills) that we start to acquire as infants
by learning to "concert" actions with our mothers (e.g., we smile
when she does) but that we eventually learn to do alone or in such subdued form
that the act may not be recognized as such by others in our company.  We make progress from infantile public
concerting to adult covert tokening by learning how to truncate, abbreviate, or
(in some cases) disguise the action. 

Thus, to take just two examples
(mine; not Melser’s), we learn as infants how to feel disgust towards our
bodily secretions, or how to recognize something as a toy, by imitating the
behavior displayed towards these things by our teachers, who must be able to
see what we are doing or saying in order to reinforce it.  Like Momma, we grimace and describe the
feces as dirty while trying to avoid it, or smile and call the stuffed toy a
doll while playing with it.  When first
learned, the disgust and recognition will be completely observable, because
manifest in our very overt behavior. 
After awhile, however, we learn when and how to suppress the grimace or
smile in order to make our emotion or recognition known with gestures or words
alone, sometimes in the absence of the objects named.  Eventually, we learn how to mouth the words and imagine the
gestures or recall the emotion silently, without overt display.  At this stage, the physical activities that
constitute our thinking have become so subtle and subdued that their occurrence,
or their meaning, may no longer be evident to others, especially when they know
nothing of our histories or circumstances. 

Such, Melser believes, is the
natural history of the way in which individual human beings–and he believes
only human beings, a doubtful proposition–learn to think and to display, then
hide or lie about, their thoughts.  As
he takes pains to show, his opinion is shared by numerous experts in child
development and supported by numerous studies of infant learning.  I shall not here name these experts or
review these studies; they constitute the detail for which you must read the
book.  Their interest lies in their
ability to help us see how thinking, an essentially observable activity when
first learned, can, by being gradually reduced to a mere shadow of itself, become
so subtle it is hard to recognize by anyone but the person doing it.  In other words, they help us understand
thinking and self-knowledge without postulating internal processing of
essentially recondite objects known only by esoteric means to the person in
whom they are supposedly taking place. 
"Cognitive psychology" is not thereby disproved, of course;
but Melser believes that it is made superfluous.  His attempt to discredit it comes later.

Before we move on to that attempt,
I want to note a few of the implications of the account just outlined. The
first and most obvious implication is that thinking is not a natural process
but a cultural product.  In Melser’s
view, we do not come equipped either with thoughts or with the capacity to
think, as Descartes and some who still follow him believe.  Second, since we have to be taught how to
think by others, thought never shakes free of its social origins; it remains an
inherently social activity.  Hence,
Melser says, it cannot become an object of study for a truly natural science.  Contrary to John Searle, consciousness is
not a biological process.  Third,
contrary to Cartesian belief, the reason consciousness, or thinking, will
resist being caught in the web of natural science is not that it is inherently unobservable and private.  As noted already, Melser believes that to be
taught us by others, thinking has to be essentially observable and public. 

So why can’t there be a natural
science of thinking?   Melser offers a
handful of arguments.  I shall say a little
about the main ones.

Melser’s main argument is that
thinking is not a process but an action, and actions, as Ryle and Wittgenstein
urged, do not have the right sort of "grammar" to become objects of
scientific study.  Actions being what
people do, they must–logically
must–be distinguished from natural (i.e., physical or biological) processes,
which people suffer or undergo.  Thus, eating is an action; but digesting is a process.  Exercising is an action but growing is a
process.  To treat eating and exercising
as processes is to deny the reality of 
agency; to treat digesting and growing as actions is to attribute agency
to nature.  Ryle would have talked of
category mistakes.

A related reason for thinking there
can be no science of action is that actions are goal directed while the
processes studied by science are mechanical. 
Melser acknowledges that biologists are fond of teleological metaphors,
but he regards these as merely heuristic. By contrast, he agrees with Ryle in
believing that action without purpose is a solecism and that, therefore, action
can be made intelligible only by referring to its end.  He does not consider the possibility, urged
by B. F. Skinner, that the teleology of human action has a mechanistic
explanation in the law of effect, which says that behavior is modified by its
consequences, an explanation that resembles evolutionary accounts of apparent
design in nature.

 
Another of Melser’s arguments is that there are no natural correlates
for actions.   He does not greatly
develop or illustrate this point, but I think he has in mind such truisms as
the following.  Any action–e.g., paying
your bills, showing respect for the dead, or courting your future wife–can be
done in a great variety of ways; if it nevertheless constitutes the same action
in each case, it is because all of these physically diverse acts comply with
the relevant social conventions.  But we
cannot expect a natural science, such as biology, to explain what is
essentially cultural.  As Susan Haack
once said when commenting on E.O. Wilson’s defense of scientific reductionism,
"It is all physical, but it is not all physics." 

A fourth argument is that thinking
cannot be equated with brain processes and made an object of neurophysiological
investigation because it is essentially externalist. Given that thinking is
readying oneself for coping with some item in the world, it is directed
outwards, not inwards.  Thus, the act of
imagining rabbits, or desiring dinner, is unintelligible without reference to
rabbits, or dinner; neither act has need of internal pictures.  "Methodological solipsism," which
attempts to understand thinking by treating it as a process in the brain wholly
detached from its objects, is a conceptually muddled enterprise. 

Finally, Melser argues that when we
learned to think by concerting our behavior with others, we also learned how to
empathize with them.  Once learned the capacity for empathy with
others remains central to understanding our own actions and theirs.  Thus, feeling Jones’s pain means imagining
yourself in his situation, and understanding Smith’s action means imagining
what you would do if you shared her beliefs and desires. In Melser’s view,
empathy is indispensable if we want to understand each other, but it is ruled
out of court by impersonal science. 

If there can be no science of
action, it follows that there can be no science of psychology, or sociology,
anthropology, or economics–all of which are concerned in one way or another
with human action.  That is the bad
news.  The good news is that these
become–or rather, remain–autonomous disciplines.  They may use the findings of science, but they cannot be reduced
to them.  Of course, in saying so, Melser
uses the word science very narrowly;
some people would say too narrowly.  If it
is not impersonal investigation of mechanical processes, he does not call it
science.  The verbal point is not worth
disputing.  The substantive issue is
reductionism. 

If attempts at reduction are
misguided, as Melser thinks, why are they so popular?  Where do we get our idea of the mind as a
ghost in the machine or a thinker in the brain? Why aren’t we content to
recognize with Ryle, Wittgenstein and Melser that "mind" is nothing
but a handy name for learned, because socially inculcated, abilities to recognize
and respond to things and persons in our common world?  Apart from the fact that it sounds
scientific, why are so many of us convinced that thinking is an inner
mechanical process, the secrets of which will be unlocked by a science of
neurophysiology? 

Melser’s answer, like that of Ryle
and Daniel Dennett, is that we are misled by our metaphors.  In an appendix, he provides a six page list
of the metaphors he has in mind, including the one I just used.  According to Melser, we use these metaphors
because, we are good at thinking but not at thinking about thinking–the usual
point being to do it, not to reflect on it. 
Unfortunately, having created a metaphor to highlight some feature of
thinking, we are prone to take it literally, a process that is helped along by
the use of abstract nouns, which encourage reification. Thus having talked of
the ideas one has, or the things one keeps in mind, one begins to think of
ideas as things possessed and minds as places where they are stored.  Memory becomes retrieving ideas from their
storage place, imagining becomes contemplating the ideas still there, and
communicating becomes transmitting ideas from one person’s storage house to
another’s. 

Despite the evident absurdity of
"mind" metaphors when they are taken literally, and their patent
incoherence when taken together, Melser says that we are led by them to ascribe
four properties to minds:  privacy,
agency, intentionality, and non-physicality. 
Thoughts and ideas become processes and events in a secret place
accessible only to its owner.  Those
thoughts and processes become the materials acted upon by an inner agent, who
lives in this secret place; a thinker within the thinker.  The thoughts and ideas this inner thinker
has seem to be directed at things that may not exist at all and certainly don’t
exist in the head.  But since they are
not objects in the larger physical world, these non-things come to be thought
of as non-physical objects, or as neurological shadows of physical
objects.   In Melser’s estimate, there
is no support for any of this in our actual observations; it is all a myth
created in a futile attempt to make sense of metaphors by forgetting that they
are metaphors.

Melser spends the last hundred
pages of his two hundred and fifty page book trying to make good on this
claim.  Included in these pages are
discussions of all the topics definitive of philosophy of mind.  Melser’s strategy in every case is to
collect the metaphors that have given rise to the myth, then try to dispel the
myth by translating these metaphors into literal language.   In the process, he manages not only to
ridicule the Cartesianism he condemns but also to tie all the various strands
of his book together.  In my opinion,
the resulting package is an illuminating work that provides exciting new
insights into some old philosophical puzzles. 

Of course, Melser’s book has
warts.  I see at least three. First, he
seems to me to be just wrong when he argues, from the correlativity of
perceiver with object, that things don’t exist independently of
perception.  One might as well argue
from the correlativity of husband and wife that men don’t exist apart from
women.  Fortunately, this reasoning
plays no essential role in the rest of Melser’s argument.  He would do well to drop it.  Second, Melser seems to me to overstate the
case against scientific study of the neurophysiological basis of thought. Grant
the obscurity of philosophical babble about supervenience.  Grant too the dubiousness of the idea that
the brain is a computer processing representations. Grant as well that brains,
and computers, don’t think, or even literally compute.  The fact remains:  If people do think, it is because they have brains capable of
operations in some ways comparable to those of a computer; they could hardly
think if they didn’t. Third, I believe that Melser reasons too hastily when he
argues that, since thinking is learned, it presupposes nothing innate.  As Quine and other behaviorists have
acknowledged, blank slate empiricism is not essential to behaviorism.

I don’t want to leave the wrong
impression.  Melser is not opposed to
science, just scientism and the kind of pseudo science that results when
mentalist metaphors and phenomenology 
(i.e., "conscious studies) are mistaken for contributions to brain
physiology.  Melser can be forgiven if
he sometimes overstates his case against these intellectual sins.  Overlook the occasional bit of rhetorical
overkill, however, and you are left with a book that contains much wisdom.  Never mind that it began as a doctoral
dissertation.  It is an impressive piece
of philosophy.

 

 

 

©
2005 Max Hocutt

 

 

Max Hocutt, Ph.D., Emeritus
Professor of Philosophy, the University of Alabama, author of Grounded Ethics:  The Empirical Bases of Normative Judgments (Transaction, 2000),
and former editor of Behavior and
Philosophy.

Categories: Philosophical