Comment on Desmond Clarke, “Teleology and Mechanism

Desmond Clarke's remarks on “my” absurdity argument are puzzling. i) Although I do indeed still believe it to be a valid argument, I certainly would not claim credit for it. I believe that “Reducibility: Another Side Issue?” put the general problem of the reducibility of mind into a somewhat unorthodox context, but the particular claim Clarke is attacking forms only one very unoriginal step in the general argument of that essay. ii) Some points that Clarke makes I would certainly agree to, and believe I have agreed to in some of the texts he cites, while others are far from anything I meant to convey. Under Clarke's (a), 1) of course the “antinomies” of the paper above referred to trade on ambiguities. That's one of the points of the paper. 2) in both “Reducibility ... (Grene 1971)” and “To Have A Mind ...” (Grene 1976), I have tried to specify the sense in which “mechanism” was being used. That I do not take such terms as self-explanatory should be clear, for instance, from the remarks in the latter paper that immediately follow the passage Clarke criticizes. 3) I have no idea how physics is to develop in the future, nor did I wish to suggest that I did. With the rest of Clarke's (a) I entirely agree. As to his (b), I fail to see its relevance to my argument, unless it simply leads up to (c) and (d), with which, again, I wholeheartedly concur. Nancy Maull's paper, which Clarke refers to, for example, seems to me to shed great light on what used to be thought the problem of reduction; I don't see how her argument conflicts with “mine.” iii) Clarke's two “interpretations” of “my” argument are even more puzzling. The first paragraph is clear, as far as it goes. But the second is entirely murky. Perhaps I may try to reconstruct it. “The question for the scientist of a reductivist disposition in this context,” Clarke writes, “is: would it be possible to construct an alternative theory (which is not intentional, teleological, etc.) which adequately explains the same phenomena as the human sciences?” Fair enough. But apparently one is not allowed to reflect about an answer to this question. One has to wait and see if such a theory does develop. And meantime to notice that any theory by its very nature is intentional: this is to use some part of the human sciences to establish the explanatory power of all the human sciences. Is that what is meant? If so, I would reply: that the claim that theories are inherently intentional is not a thesis of any “human science” but a philosophical thesis about the nature of intelligible discourse. If a wholly non-intentional theory of human action were stated it would invalidate itself as theory. Thus, to respond to the major accusation of (ii), we would have an answer to Clarke's question such that the question could not have been asked. What we have, then, is not a petitio but a valid reductio ad absurdum.

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