Articulating a Thought

170 Pages·2019·0.779 MB·English

by  Eli Alshanetsky

Articulating a Thought
We generally have no trouble expressing complex ideas that we have
never considered before, though not always. Articulating a thought can
also be extremely hard. Our difficulties in articulating thoughts pervade
many aspects of philosophical inquiry, as well as many ordinary situ-
ations. While we may overcome some of the challenges through educa-
tion and practice, we cannot do away with them altogether. And the
hardest thoughts to articulate often come to us unbidden: as we neither
assemble them from other thoughts nor get them from any source of
external information. They can come from us freely and spontaneously,
and frequently we articulate them in order to find out what they are. In
many cases, we would not bother articulating our thoughts if we already
had this knowledge—yet, when we find the right words, we can often
instantly tell that they express our thought. How do we manage to
recognize the formulations of our thoughts, in the absence of prior
knowledge of what we are thinking? And why is it that producing a pub-
lic language formulation contributes in any way to the deeply private
undertaking of coming to know our own thoughts? In Articulating a
Thought, Eli Alshanetsky considers how we make our thoughts clear to
ourselves in the process of putting them into words and examines the
paradox of those difficult cases where we do not already know what we
are struggling to articulate.

Articulating a
Thought
ELI ALSHANETSKY
1
1
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952618
ISBN 978–0–19–878588–0
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198785880.001.0001
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Acknowledgments
My interest in the subject of this book began when I was an undergraduate
at the University of California, Berkeley. In my philosophy classes, I would
often write papers in which I would summarize some philosopher’s view,
or rehash the arguments surrounding some thesis, while adding my own
twist here and there. This would result in clear papers, but they did not
feel very creative. On the other hand, outside of my philosophy classes,
I was having various insights about life, the world, morality, and other
topics that seemed broadly philosophical. Whenever I took the chance
to get clear on one of them in a paper, I could not predict how long the
paper would be, or whether it would make any sense. I would turn in
barely comprehensible papers, but still feel that I was getting somewhere
intellectually. It is as though I was split into two parts—one clear, the
other obscure. One part was well versed in language but oblivious to
many aspects of reality; the other part was linguistically clumsy but
interfaced more closely with experience. I wanted to understand the
reason for this split, and why it seemed so crucial to get the two parts
talking to each other. Thinking about this has naturally led me to the
subject of self-knowledge. Our knowledge of our own thoughts is as
immediate as can be. And yet, I did not feel that I had a good handle on
many of my thoughts, or knew whether my insights were really insights,
until I pinned them down using words others could easily understand.
This function of public language struck me as puzzling and as crying out
for investigation.
In graduate school at New York University, I was fortunate to have
open-minded mentors who encouraged me to pursue this interest further.
The first incarnation of this book was my dissertation, and I am grateful
to Paul Boghossian, who directed it, as well as to my advisors Ned Block,
Jim Pryor, and Crispin Wright for their trust and guidance. During the
long gestation of this project, I was helped immensely by many other
people at NYU, including, in particular, Yuval Avnur, Max Barkhausen,
David Chalmers, Mihailis Diamantis, Sinan Dogramaci, Cian Dorr,
viii Acknowledgments
Martin Ebeling, Matthew Evans, Kit Fine, Rob Hopkins, Beatrice
Longuenesse, Asya Passinsky, Kristin Primus, Christopher Prodoehl,
Katrina Przyjemski, John Richardson, Stephen Schiffer, Jonathan Simon,
and Peter Unger. New York has been a vibrant intellectual setting in
which to do philosophy, and the book grew out of the countless informal
conversations, animated debates, and thoughtful comments that I received
during my period there.
Much of the subsequent research on the book was done in relative
isolation in a foggy shed during my three years as an Andrew W. Mellon
fellow in the Humanities at Stanford. I am indebted to the Mellon
Fellowship program for enabling me to devote a significant amount of
time to research and writing. My warm thanks go to the fellows and staff
of the Stanford Humanities center for welcome breaks, in the form of
stimulating conversations that helped situate my work in a wider con-
text. I am especially grateful to R. Lanier Anderson for his enthusiasm
for the project and help during its final stages.
I am grateful to two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press
for carefully reviewing the typescript and giving insightful and con-
structive comments, and to Peter Momtchiloff for his patience and for
making the project into a reality. Thanks also to Alex Byrne and Ram
Neta for their valuable comments at the Chicago APA, which I did my
best to integrate into the book.
During the past several years, thinking and writing on this subject
have been an intense preoccupation, and my work on it is far from
complete. I thank my wife, Carrie, for her understanding, and for pro-
viding diversions and an anchor when my flights of philosophical fancy
were getting out of hand. Lastly, I thank my parents, Igor and Helena,
for humoring my precarious choice of vocation, and for their limitless
love and babysitting, which has freed precious time for writing. This
book is dedicated to them.
1
Introduction
Thought is only a flash in the midst of a long night. But it is
this flash which is everything.
—Poincaré
As philosophers and cognitive scientists have emphasized, articulating a
thought can be astoundingly easy. We generally have no trouble express-
ing complex ideas that we have never considered before.1 But not always:
a far less noted fact is that articulating a thought can be extremely hard.
Robert Solomon (The Big Questions, 2006: 5–6) goes so far as to identify
the activity of setting out a thought in clear, concise and readily under-
standable language with the main process of philosophy:
Philosophy is, first of all, reflection . . . Articulation—spelling out our
ideas in words and sentences—is the primary process of philosophy.
Sitting down to write out your ideas is an excellent way to articulate
them, but most people find that an even better way . . . is simply to dis-
cuss these ideas with other people . . . Articulating your opinions still
leaves open the question whether they are worth believing, whether
they are well thought out and can stand up to criticism.
1 On the philosophy side, our ability to articulate a boundless range of novel thoughts in a
quick and frictionless fashion has been a primary target of explanation of compositional theor-
ies of meaning of the kind developed by Donald Davidson (“Semantics for Natural Languages,”
2001), Michael Dummett (Frege: Philosophy of Language, 1973), and David Lewis (“General
Semantics,” 1970). On the side of cognitive science, the effortlessness of the articulation pro-
cess has been frequently emphasized by psycholinguists such as Willem J. M. Levelt, who
begins his influential book Speaking: From Intention to Articulation (1998: p. xiii) by observing
that “talking is one of our dearest occupations. We spend hours a day conversing, telling sto-
ries, teaching, quarreling, and, of course, speaking to ourselves. Speaking is, moreover, one of
our most complex cognitive, linguistic, and motor skills. Articulation flows automatically, at a
rate of about fifteen speech sounds per second, while we are attending only to the ideas we
want to get across to our interlocutors.”
Articulating a Thought. Eli Alshanetsky, Oxford University Press (2019). © Eli Alshanetsky.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198785880.001.0001
2 Introduction
Whether we take articulation to be the primary process of philosophy or
just one out of several important activities that make up philosophical
practice, our difficulties in articulating thoughts are certainly a familiar
part of the life of a philosopher. Such difficulties also pervade many
ordinary situations: we may face them in articulating an insight into a
movie or a sudden realization about a friend. We may overcome some of
the challenges through education and practice. But we cannot do away
with them altogether. The hardest thoughts to articulate often come to us
unbidden: we neither assemble them from other thoughts nor get them
from any source of external information. One characteristic that they
commonly share is that they freely and spontaneously come from us.
Articulating a thought is not merely a form of talking but also a form
of thinking in its own right. On those occasions when it is difficult, we
need to chisel away at imprecise formulations, in exploratory ways, until
we uncover a formulation that satisfyingly expresses what we originally
had in mind. When we encounter the wrong formulations, we doubt and
hesitate. But we are confident when we come upon the right one. We
cannot always break the hold of our thoughts over us by an act of will.
The thoughts that we struggle to articulate may keep inclining us to say
things, whether we like it or not. They may seem true or false, hopeful or
alarming, frivolous or serious, may lead us to find value in certain things,
worry about others, awake certain emotions or suspicions, and so on.
An important feature of these thoughts is that we often articulate
them in order to find out what they are. In many cases, we would not
bother articulating our thoughts if we already had this knowledge. Yet,
when we find the right words, we can often instantly tell that they
express our thought. So how do we manage to recognize the formula-
tions of our thoughts, in the absence of prior knowledge of what we are
thinking? And why is it that producing a public language formulation
(one that conforms to public standards of literalness, exactness, gram-
maticality, and so on) contributes in any way to the deeply private
undertaking of coming to know our own thoughts?
Of course, in evaluating words, our attention rarely goes to the for-
mulation itself. What we ultimately seem to evaluate are not sounds or
inscriptions but ways in which other competent users of our language
would understand or interpret them. We try out a formulation, and,
upon considering it, think: “That’s off!” A wrong shade of meaning here;
Self-knowledge: Reorientation 3
a potential misapprehension there. Each word or phrase that we think of
may seem laden with the risk of misrepresenting ourselves. But how can
we know this, given that the whole point of what we are doing is to get
clear on what we had in mind? And how do we bridge the gap to arrive
at words that would elicit precisely the needed interpretation? More
importantly, why does the other person enter into the picture at all?
Why do we need to know what some other person would think we
think, and realize that that is, in fact, what we think, to know what we
ourselves think? Why do we take the other person’s response into
account in trying to come to know our solitary thoughts?
Although these questions span several different areas of philosophy,
their most natural home is the subject of self-knowledge. In the next few
sections, I would like to sketch the territory of the subject from a dis-
tinctive perspective, and indicate the place of my project in it.
1. Self-knowledge: Reorientation
Self-knowledge is somewhat exceptional among contemporary philo-
sophical topics in that its study hardly needs justifying to those who
hear about it for the first time. Unlike other areas of philosophy that
may initially strike non-philosophers as too odd or esoteric to be worthy
of philosophers’ attention, self-knowledge often comes across as imme-
diately gripping to non-philosophers. As Quassim Cassam (Self-
Knowledge for Humans, 2014: p. vii) observes in his recent book on the
subject, it is “just the sort of subject which non-philosophers expect
philosophers to be interested in.” Unfortunately, however, as the
introductions to many books on self-knowledge are quick to warn, the
non-philosophers are in for a disappointment when they hear what
philosophers study under this label.
What philosophers mean by “self-knowledge” has little to do with the
rare kind of self-understanding that has traditionally been regarded as a
mark of wisdom and extolled by the Delphic injunction “know thyself.”
It has little to do with the journey of finding oneself, the hazard of losing
oneself out of ignorance of one’s true nature, or any of the other vicissi-
tudes of the self that have fascinated novelists, biographers, and psycho-
analysts. By “self-knowledge,” philosophers have in mind nothing more
4 Introduction
than our knowledge of our own mental states (for example, beliefs,
desires, sensations)—and not especially important or elusive ones at
that. Looking out of the window, you may come to believe that it is
windy. Not only do you believe it, you also know that you believe it.
Having finished eating at a restaurant, you may want to pay the bill. Not
only do you want it, you also know that you do. You may feel nauseous
and instantly know that you feel that way, without doing anything to
achieve this feat. In investigating self-knowledge, contemporary philo-
sophers focus almost exclusively on the kind of effortless knowledge
that we have in these cases.
Why care about self-knowledge of this seemingly trivial sort? A phil-
osopher of self-knowledge may point to several motivations. Some of
them come from epistemology. Many philosophers influenced by
Descartes have held our knowledge of our mental states to be at once
more immediate and better justified than our knowledge of others’ men-
tal states and our knowledge of our external surroundings. But it is not
obvious how to characterize our method of gaining self-knowledge. A
philosopher interested in the sources of knowledge would want to char-
acterize our way of knowing our mental states, and compare it with our
other methods of gaining knowledge. Furthermore, our typical beliefs
about our mental states seem to be bedrock or foundational beliefs, if
any beliefs are; our justification for believing that we have a headache or
that we want a drink does not seem to derive from our justification to
believe any other, supporting propositions. Understanding how such
beliefs could be justified, or amount to knowledge, could shed light on
our justification for other types of bedrock beliefs (for example, beliefs
about the basic principles of logic and mathematics) and the nature of
knowledge in general.
Other reasons to be interested in self-knowledge come from the phil-
osophy of mind. As many philosophers have noted, a crucial feature of
mental states is that they can be known from the inside, in a special way
available only to their subjects. This is not true in general of our non-
mental characteristics: to know what you are wearing or how much you
weigh, you must carry out the same kind of empirical investigation as
anyone else. A key mark of this first-personal way of knowing our men-
tal states is that it seems to rule out the possibility of misidentifying their
subjects—of mistaking our own mental states for those of others, and