Like Hart, I have never "got" Daniel Dennett, and Hart's reasons are virtually identical to my own:
I have thought all his large books-especially one entitled Consciousness Explained-poorly reasoned and infuriatingly inadequate in their approaches to the questions they address. Too often he shows a preference for the cumulative argument over the cogent and for repetition over demonstration. The Bellman’s maxim, "What I tell you three times is true," is not alien to Dennett’s method. He seems to work on the supposition that an assertion made with sufficient force and frequency is soon transformed, by some subtle alchemy, into a settled principle. And there are rather too many instances when Dennett seems either clumsily to miss or willfully to ignore pertinent objections to his views and so races past them with a perfunctory wave in what he takes to be their general direction-though usually in another direction altogether. Consider, for example, this dialectical gem, plucked from his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: "Perhaps the most misguided criticism of gene centrism is the frequently heard claim that genes simply cannot have interests. This . . . is flatly mistaken. . . . If a body politic, or General Motors, can have interests, so can genes." At moments like this, one feels that something has been overlooked.
Gee, Hart didn't like the book very much, did he?
ReplyDeleteAs I think I said to you when we met in Philly recently, Frank, I've been disagreeing with Daniel Dennett for upwards of 20 years. But that's a compliment! Very few other contemporary philosophers have consistently held my interest in that way. A matter of taste, I suppose -- unlike Hart, I find Dennett's prose amusing and insightful, and he has (for me) an enviable gift for framing issues clearly and, even better, being clear about what's at stake if you take his position on them.
That being said, let me quote another favorite philosopher, Thomas Nagel, who's far more qualified than I to say this: "Dennett's view is essentially Gilbert Ryle crossed with 'Scientific American' -- an eternal optimism about the possibility of clearing up the mind/body problem by some sensible observations on the behavioral criteria for mental ascriptions, plus lots of empirical facts. I continue to think that this misses the real problem from the start. The disagreement between us will presumably end only in the grave, if then."
That says it well, I think. I can't agree with Hart that Dennett is all those unpleasant things, which taken together are meant to spell "unintelligent" (or is it "wicked"?). He's far from that -- it's just that he's never quite been willing to engage what, for Nagel and me and many others, is the real problem: How to provide a scientific/philosophical account of subjectivity as a given, not as something to be explained away or reduced to materialism. The prodigious effort expended in "Consciousness Explained" (or, as I prefer to think of it, "Consciousness Refuted") to paint a picture of how mind could be reduced to brain only makes sense if you're begging the whole question. For Dennett, there can't be any "mind," and consciousness is a "user illusion" -- so yes, some explanation is required. But for us non-materialists, what's wanted is a different, non-reductivist explanation of mind, of subjectivity. It's important to note that such an explanation can and should be as objective as you please. As Nagel points out, there's no reason why we can't look objectively at subjective facts/occurrences/data, whereas Dennett seems to think that subjectivity can only be approached subjectively, i.e., unscientifically. So a scientific viewpoint has to reduce subjectivity to something else. Why he thinks this I don't know -- this is the one area in which I do see him doing a lot of arm-waving and thrice-asserting.
Sorry for the wordy post but I consider Dennett to be the loyal opposition and I want to give him my own hat-tip for being so lucidly wrong for so long!
Hi John,
ReplyDeleteOnly time for the briefest comment, but I would say that what you quote from Nagel on Dennett is more devastating than what Hart says. I should also, in the interest of full disclosure, say that when I looked over Breaking the Spell in order to decide whether or not to assign it for review, it struck me as noticeably inferior to Dennett's earlier work. This also seems the case with his periodical writing as well. To put it almost cruelly, his recent writing exhibits, I think, signs of thought disorder. That said, I will duly honor him as a respected member of the opposition, though I am unclear as to what he is loyal to.