Analysis 59.2, April 1999, pp. 79–85. © Jonathan Cohen

Holism, thought, and the fate of metaphysics: counter-reply to Heal

Jonathan Cohen

The History: (Fodor & Lepore 1992) argued that many prominent argu-ments for semantic holism fail. In (Heal 1994), Jane Heal proposed adifferent understanding of holism, and attempted to show that it evadesFodor’s and LePore’s attacks. In (Cohen 1999 – this issue) I claim thatHeal’s arguments for her own holism fail also. Heal responds in (Heal1999 – also this issue), holding that I misunderstood the arguments of(Heal 1994), and defending further her version of holism.

I owe Heal thanks for the clarifications. Regarding the charge that I’vemisunderstood her, I think my interpretations have more going for themthan Heal allows, but I propose not to quibble about exegesis here.Instead, I want to consider her latest defence of holism; once again, I shallconclude that Heal has not succeeded in defending any interesting versionof holism.

1. Metaphysical necessity and nomological necessity

The holism at issue is the conjunction of the following (Heal 1994:326):1

(1a) We cannot make sense of there being just one thought. If there isany thought then there must be quite a number of thoughtsattributable to the same thinker.

(1b) The presence in a set of thoughts of one with a given contentimposes some constraints on the contents of the rest of the set.

Much of the criticism in (Cohen 1999) consists of the suggestion thatneither (1a) nor (1b) (nor the claims invoked in their defence) can be meta-physically necessary, since there are quite obviously imaginatively possible

1 As remarked in (Cohen 1999), this version of holism is orthogonal to those underconsideration in (Fodor & Lepore 1992), even though Heal seems to direct herholism as a challenge to that work. For the holisms under scrutiny in (Fodor &Lepore 1992) concern the notion of intentional content: they are theses to the effectthat intentional content is the sort of thing which can only be had by multiple thingsif it is had by any. In contrast, Heal’s holism concerns thinkers: she maintains thatthinkers can only entertain multiple thoughts if they entertain any. Significantly,there’s no conflict between holding that intentional content is possibly atomistic andthat thinkers aren’t; one would only have to insist that the worlds in which contentis atomistic aren’t worlds where there are thinkers.

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cases where they fail. Thus, for example, I suggested that we could makesense of a thinker who thinks just one thought: the creature might developslowly just until it thinks its first thought and then be run over by a bus,tragically dying without ever managing to think a second thought.2

Similarly, the second stage of the argument for (1b), concluding that wethink of ourselves as subjects, depends crucially on the claim that we‘seek cognitive improvement in the form of more and better articulatedinformation about what concerns us’ ((Heal 1999: 75); again, even if thisconstraint happens to be satisfied by actual human thinkers, it seemsextremely easy to imagine cases of thinkers who violate it. Appealing tosuch examples, I argued in (Cohen 1999) that Heal’s constraints couldnot possibly reflect metaphysically necessary preconditions on thought(/subjecthood/thinking/etc.).

But (Heal 1999) makes it abundantly clear that (despite the metaphysical-/conceptual- sounding locution ‘we cannot make sense of’ in (1a)) she wasnever interested in obtaining metaphysically necessary preconditions. Shewas attempting only ‘to highlight what seemed to be particularly centraland important features of the agreed cases of thinking’ (78) which repre-sent ‘nomological necessities concerning thinking by complex livingcreatures in this world’ (77), even if their ‘denials … are not, either obvi-ously or less obviously, incoherent’ (78).

This is surprising insofar as Heal intends her work to be responsive tothe criticisms of holism in (Fodor & Lepore 1992) – for evidence that thisis what she intends, see (Heal 1994: 326–333, 336, 339, the title of thatarticle). For that book is devoted to evaluating accounts of the metaphysicsof intentional content – accounts on which holism turns out to be meta-physically necessary. Thus, even putting aside her emphasis on the holismof thinkers rather than the holism of content (see note 1), Heal’s insistencethat holism is nomologically necessary simply fails to engage the debateagainst which she sets her own contentions. For there’s no clash in holdingthat atomism is metaphysically possible but nomologically impossible: allthat is required is that the metaphysically possible worlds in which atom-ism is true include no nomologically possible worlds.

2 Notice that this is a claim about thought and not belief. Arguably, it is metaphysicallyimpossible for a creature to have just a single belief. But this is not in dispute, since,as noted in (Heal 1994: 330) and (Cohen 1999), the holism of belief is explicitlyconceded by Fodor and LePore in (Fodor & Lepore 1992: 118, 122). To avoid confu-sion, I adopted the technical term ‘entertain’ in (Cohen 1999), and claimed there thata metaphysically possible creature could entertain – not believe – just a singlethought. Because she speaks of ‘entertainings’ throughout (Heal 1999), Heal seemsto be in agreement that the holism of belief is not what’s at issue.

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2. The elimination of metaphysics?

If the foregoing is correct, then we might expect a happy reconciliationonce terminological confusions are set aside. However, this expectationwould go unfulfilled, for Heal has stronger things to say about the meta-physical project she avoids. Indeed, Heal seems not only to preferdiscerning nomologically necessary truths over metaphysically necessarytruths: rather, she thinks the latter goal is unattainable (at least in thepresent case).

First, she challenges those who would discern metaphysically necessarytruths to defend the coherence of their project:

The idea that there is such a thing as the ‘nature of thinking’ or ‘theessence of mind’ or ‘metaphysical necessities about thought’ seems tome to need some explanation and defence. The words ‘thought’,‘thinking’ and ‘mind’ do not have an agreed extension; … whetherthinking is going on … with animals or computers or in certain non-conscious human mental activity, or whether it really makes sense toimagine it going on in non-material beings such as angels, is contro-versial. Even more importantly, it seems very unlikely that the wordshave an agreed intension; on the contrary, reflection suggests that theyare used to express a variety of different ideas in different contexts. …[W]hat ties these various uses together is some relation back to theagreed or paradigm cases; the point of using the word ‘thought’ or‘thinking’ is to invoke some features of the central and agreed cases …(Heal 1999: 77).

But these considerations fail to establish the conclusion that there’s noessence of thinking. First, controversy over the status of borderline cases iscompatible with the existence of an essence. For example, there’s contro-versy over what causal relations hold in various complicated blocked andunblocked chains of counterfactual dependency, but it doesn’t follow thatthe metaphysician’s quest for an analysis of causation is doomed; all thatfollows is that the analysis produced must itself be vague – that the vague-ness in the analysans and the vagueness in the analysandum must ‘swaytogether rather than separately’ (Lewis 1986: 6).3 Second, if the words‘thought’, ‘thinking’, and ‘mind’ express different ideas in differentcontexts (as Heal’s reflection apparently reveals), presumably the thing todo is disambiguate; no reason has been given for supposing that any (much

3 Moreover, one wants to preserve some controversy over the extension of such terms,lest one cut off interesting disputes at the knees. For example, if we hold, with Heal,that the term ‘thinking’ only applies to creatures who grow slowly, it follows thatGod does not think (since, presumably, He did not grow slowly). I would havethought this too quick a refutation of theism.

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less all) of the distinct ideas so obtained will fail to capture a metaphysicalessence. Thus, from what has been said, it remains open that ‘the point ofusing the word “thought” or “thinking”’ may be to pick out some (contex-tually disambiguated) essence.

Still, Heal seems to worry that the hunt for metaphysically necessaryfeatures of thought (and so on) suffers from another drawback; shesuggests that the imaginative counterexamples on which this projectdepends will be excessively schematic:

The story which undermines (1a) needs to contain more than this:‘Once upon a time there was a complex creature which grew slowlyuntil it had its first thought. Then it died. The End.’ We want to be toldhow the creature grew, how it got its nourishment, whether it movedbefore it had its first thought, whether it had sense organs, what thecontent of its first thought was and why nothing that went on in itslife before that was a thought (Heal 1999: 78).

Here I must confess that I don’t see the trouble; why can’t we supply allthe details Heal wants if need be? For example:

Once there was a creature with sense organs which were never stimu-lated, which never moved, was nourished by a feeding tube suppliedby friendly scientists, and which grew slowly until its biological struc-ture was sufficiently articulated for it to think its first thought. Thisfirst thought involved only concepts which were innate in the creature;it had the content that’s a tree. Then it was run over by a bus and died.The End.

Obviously such stories are fanciful. But I don’t see any reason they can’t betold in whatever level of detail Heal desires. If Heal wishes to show theycan’t (i.e., that the stories are conceptually or metaphysically impossible,and not just unlikely), she needs to show that something about the descrip-tion of the creature conceptually or metaphysically precludes it fromqualifying as a thinker. Not only hasn’t she done this, but she can’t:precisely because she holds that there’s no metaphysical or conceptualessence of thinkers, there are no metaphysical or conceptual constraintswhich she can consistently require our stories to accommodate.4

I conclude, then, that nothing Heal has said impugns the project ofattempting to uncover the essence of thinking, subjects, minds, or anything

4 In requesting justification of the coherence of the metaphysical project in which shechooses not to engage, Heal says she is indulging in ‘the well known philosophicalsport of heaving the onus’ (77). As a way of heaving it right back, I’ll just note thatdisputes about essences which make use of cases which their authors take to violatelaws of our world are extremely common in almost all areas of philosophy. Thelist would be very long indeed, but we can at least mention the following salient

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else. She is, of course, free to refrain from engaging in this sort of project,but what she has said gives no reason for doubting its integrity.

3. Lingering Doubts

Heal’s holism, then, is compatible with the metaphysical possibility ofatomism, and her attempts at deflating the metaphysical questions fail. Thequestion remains, however, whether her arguments for the nomologicalnecessity of (1a) and (1b) are successful. In what follows, I want to raisesome reasons for worrying that they are not.

First, the success of Heal’s picture depends crucially on whether there arecertain kinds of laws. For her claims can only be nomologically necessaryif they are underwritten by natural laws.5 But this poses a real threat toHeal’s project, for it is (to put it mildly) no trivial matter to decide whetherthe regularities we observe in the world are law-governed or just coinciden-tal. That’s why doing science is harder than just listing facts. Perhaps wehave clear intuitions about some cases (e.g., that no natural law requiresthinkers to have proper names). But (speaking for myself), I have no ideawhether natural laws stand behind the regularities that thinkers seek cogni-tive improvement, that thinkers have multiple thoughts rather than justone, and so on. Significantly, if such regularities are not law-governed, thenHeal’s case for holism devolves into a mere list of features thinkers happento have, of no more particular significance than the de facto limitations on

5 Some might doubt that there can be such laws about thinkers (subjects, thoughts,ponderings, etc.), since it is possible to doubt that these terms pick out natural kinds.But Heal can answer such critics if she can show that there are laws subsumingnatural kind properties which thinkers (/subjects/thoughts/etc.) contingently satisfy;for this will show how laws can govern (actual) thinkers. Thus, for example, theconnection between thinkers and slow growth (a connection for which Heal arguesin the course of defending (1a)) might be unpacked as: (i) contingently, thinkingoccurs in entities composed of cells, and (ii) it’s nomologically necessary that entitiescomposed of cells grow slowly. If something like this is right, then Heal can defendher claims about thinkers as true, law-governed, counterfactual-supporting regulari-ties about (actual) central and agreed cases of thinkers.

instances: Descartes on the deceiver of supreme power and cunning in the secondMeditation, Aristotle concerning the essences of axes, eyes, and souls in De Anima(II.1, 412b10–15 and 412b18–24), Kripke’s work on the reference of natural kindterms, most disputes on metaphysical notions such causation, laws, or properties,most discussion of inverted spectra, all discussions of twin earth, almost all of norma-tive epistemology in the post-Gettier tradition, much of normative ethics, etc. If Healis concerned that consideration of law-violating and non-central cases is somehowflawed, then she has much bigger fish to fry than the present controversy – she shouldbe berating almost all of the philosophical community; surely, though, if she intendsto cast her net this widely, she owes us a powerful argument for the methodologicallimitation she suggests.

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their weight and number of noses. The upshot, then, is that the interest ofHeal’s approach presupposes without argument the existence of particularlaws, and that this presupposition is quite open to doubt.

Second, Heal’s claims are still open to possible empirical disconfirma-tion. Consider, for example, Heal’s claim (in support of (1b)) that a subjectwith a nearly full set of beliefs cannot suddenly arrive at a new thoughtwith radically disjoint content. On one natural reading, it seems that thisclaim is false. For, according to the going empirical accounts of humanmentation (i.e., the central and agreed cases of thinking), a subject thecontent of whose mind is given by an inventory of ‘perceptions, memories,beliefs, desires, fantasies and intentions, all of which are about items to beencountered in a small area of a tropical rainforest’ (73) will also entertainmany of what (Stich 1978) called subdoxastic states; these will concern(for example) the locations of edges and the spatial relationships betweensurfaces in the visual scene, what kinds of syntactic structures constitutegrammatical sentences of her language, and so on, rather than items in therainforest.6 Presumably, the content of such subdoxastic states differs radi-cally from the contents given in Heal’s inventory, and therefore combiningboth sorts of states in one head should be impossible, according to Heal’sinsistence that ‘concepts exercised in a subject’s entertainings cannot beradically disjoint from the concepts exercised in the subject’s otherthoughts’ (3).7 If anything remotely similar to our current understandingof human psychology is right, such combinations occur all the time, so therestriction Heal employs in arguing for (1b) is routinely violated bythinkers.

4. Conclusion

What, then, should we say about Heal’s holism?As Heal admits openly, it’s implausible that her theses are metaphysically

necessary. She suggests that this is unobjectionable, and that there’s some-thing wrong with the attempt to discern metaphysically necessarypreconditions in the first place; however, the reasons Heal adduces for thisconclusion are unconvincing. Moreover, I’ve raised reasons for doubtingwhether her holistic conclusions about thinkers can even be nomologicallynecessary. If they cannot, then (1a) and (1b) are (at best) nothing more than

6 For reasons discussed in note 2, I think I’m within my rights to count these subdox-astic states as among the thoughts putatively constrained by Heal’s holism.

7 This presumes that the non-overlap in the contents of such a pair of thoughts sufficesfor radical disjointness of the concepts exercised therein. I find this highly plausible;but, as Sara Bernal has pointed out to me, we are told sufficiently little about whatcounts as radical disjointness that there’s room for doubt on this score.

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individual members of an infinite list of features of central and agreed casesof thinkers, such as that all thinkers must weigh less than a million tonsand have proper names; presumably this would sap much of their philo-sophical interest. On the other hand, even if (1a) and (1b) are nomo-logically necessary, this may tell us about the sorts of things thinkershappen to be, but it tells us very little about intentional content.8

Rutgers UniversityNew Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA

joncohen@ruccs.rutgers.edu

References

Cohen, J. 1999. Holism: Some reasons for buyer’s remorse. Analysis 59: 63–71.Fodor, J. A. and E. LePore. 1992. Holism: A Shopper’s Guide. Oxford: Blackwell

Publishers.Heal, J. 1994. Semantic holism: still a good buy. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,

94: 325–339.Heal, J. 1999. Thoughts and holism: reply to Cohen. Analysis 59: 71–78.Lewis, D. 1986. Counterfactuals and comparitive possibility. In his Philosophical

Papers, Volume II : 3–31. New York: Oxford University Press.Stich, S. 1978. Belief and subdoxastic states. Philosophy of Science, 45: 499–518.

8 Thanks to Sara Bernal, Jerry Fodor, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich for helpfulsuggestions regarding this paper.