- [Announcer] This
program is a presentation
of UCTV for educational
and noncommercial use only.
(peppy techno music)
- Welcome to A Conversation With History.
I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute
of International Studies.
Our guest today is John Perry who is
the HW Stewart Professor of Philosophy
at Stanford University.
He is the 2009 Howitson, Howison Lecturer
in Philosophy at UC Berkeley.
- [John] Hi Harry.
- How are you?
Glad to be here.
- Where you born and raised?
- I was born in Lincoln Nebraska
and was raised in Nebraska.
Stayed in Nebraska through college.
Left in
1964.
- And looking back how do you think
your parents shaped your
thinking about the world?
- Well I think they had a
profound effect of course.
They were very much...
My father and his family
were very republican.
My grandfather had run
for congress in 1936
and was sadly defeated in
the Roosevelt landslide.
And I learned that Roosevelt
was evil and so forth.
My mother's family on the
other hand were democrats
and my grandfather had a picture
of Roosevelt in his bedroom.
So the biggest shape was probably
my maternal grandfather
who was a sign painter
but a very thoughtful
man, did a lot of reading.
And, I don't know, it's just you grow up
in Nebraska you think that's
a normal place to grow up.
You look back at it 60 years later
and you think, "Well, that
was, it was a rather..."
Nebraska in the 50s was
a rather unusual place.
Very suburban, very...
My grandfather and I used to go up to
the belfry in a local college
every Saturday morning
and watch for Russian
airplanes (laughter).
This is in Lincoln, Nebraska
in the ground observer core.
And (laughs) you know, of course we,
Like I suppose you're
old enough to remember
ducking and covering in
case of nuclear attacks.
So all that seemed
normal, now seems bizarre.
Seemed normal then,
seems quite bizarre now.
- And so as a result
of a line of democrats
and a line of republicans was there
a lot of political arguments
at the dinner table?
- No, no my grandfather and my mother's
side of the family learned that
they should just keep quiet.
(laughter)
Because the republican side of the family
was all lawyers and all
articulate and all...
One of my earliest memories
actually is the 1948 election.
My father and my uncle and a whole...
The families and a whole
bunch of republicans
had gathered around the big console radio
in the living room to celebrate
the end of democratic rule.
(laughter)
And you know as a five year old
I just remember the
emotions of that night.
They made a tremendous impact on me.
I think it's when you learn
your father is not omnipotent
and I certainly learned that they
were just so devastated
that Truman won, so.
- And what about in school in Nebraska,
before you went to college?
Any teachers who really influenced?
I'm curious as to when you
got the philosophy bug.
I guess it was much later?
- Well there was a couple
of really good teachers.
There was one guy named Glenn Fozott,
actually his son was
one of my best friends
and he was just a
homeroom teacher actually.
He must have taught something else,
but he had a big influence and he was...
He may have been the one
that told me to go read
Will Durant's Story of Philosophy,
that the first philosophy
book I ever read.
I was very mediocre student.
Tried to play football without success.
But I did a lot of reading,
it just didn't translate
into much academic prowess
until I got to college.
- And where did you go to college
and what did you major in?
- Well I went Doane college,
I'm sure you've heard of it,
it's the Harvard of
Selene county Nebraska.
I wanted to go away from home
and I wanted to play football
and it was 25 miles away and
with only about 300 students
I thought I should be able
to make the football team.
- And did that work out?
- No.
- (laughs) I see.
Did they have a football team?
- They had a very good football team
and I played my freshman year
or I sat on the bench my freshman year.
At the end of the year,
or at the end of the
the football season the coach put his arm
around me and said, "Perry,
you're small but you're slow."
(laughter)
"But I bet you'd make
a really good student."
(laughter)
So that was very inspiring
and I got into academics.
- But I believe I read somewhere that
you wanted to be an engineer?
- Well, yeah, as I said I didn't have
my eye on the ball as
a high school student.
Actually originally I
wanted to go to West Point
but my eyes weren't good enough
and probably wouldn't
have gotten in anyway.
So finally I went to Doane
and I had a vague feeling
I could be an engineer
but they didn't have
a school of engineering, I
had forgot to check that out.
That was about the way
things were going then.
Then I met my wife,
now my wife of 46 years Frenchie,
my freshman year and
she straightened me out.
- And so you majored in philosophy?
- Majored in philosophy and went to
philosophy graduate school
at Cornell University.
And philosophy's been
very very good to me.
You know I think philosophy
is this discipline
who's main function is
to provide a little place
for bizarre occupants
of the gene pool, right?
(laughter)
Until maybe centuries later their
particular skills mature right?
So I think if you go back 50 years
all the people that are now great
computer programmers
would've been philosophers
but then now they're, now they fit
into society in a more normal way.
- And so what does it
take to be a philosopher?
What are the skills involved?
Thinking alone or what?
- Well that's an interesting question.
Of course as somebody said,
philosophy has many mansions.
But the dominant philosophy
in America, during my career,
has been what's called
analytic philosophy.
It doesn't mean too much
but it means basically
you're supposed to be able to write
and think clearly and
not get into a lot of
pomposity in a way that
philosophers often do.
And you know I've been
happy in that movement.
But there are philosophers,
different kinds
of philosophers who love to read.
Love to read philosophy and love to
talk philosophy, don't
like to write philosophy.
And I think they're maybe
the best philosophers of all.
But they don't fit very well into
our current academic situation
where you're rewarded
for writing what we call
research scholarship and thinking
in the case of philosophy.
Other people like F.H. Bradley,
a great turn of the century philosopher,
he just didn't like to
interact with much of anybody.
Didn't like to give seminars,
didn't like to talk to people.
Just like to sit alone and read his books.
Bertrand Russell, just tremendous energy.
Loved to talk, loved to
argue, loved to lecture.
So it takes all sorts
but an appreciation for
thinking either slow careful thinking
and the process of
writing in your own study
or quick on the feet
thinking in the seminar room.
All great philosophers are good at
one kind or other of thinking.
- So does the fact that
you have to publish
as a philosopher bias the pool
because you might have
really great philosophers
who would be great undergraduate teachers?
- Well yes you might have not only
great undergraduate teachers
but huge contributors to their department.
In the old days you used
to get by with that.
There was a fella named Rogers Albritton
who was a professor at Harvard for
a long time then he went to UCLA.
Published very few things
but had this wide reputation
as a brilliant interlocuteur
and a great person for graduate students
to talk to and so forth and so on.
And I remember when the chairman at,
at UCLA a wonderful guy named Monty Firth
made the case that we should
hire Rogers Albritton.
And of course the comparisons
always with Socrates.
Socrates didn't publish anything
but everybody he was around benefited
by talking to him and that's the way
Rogers Albritton would be.
So Albritton got appointed but the Dean
sent a memo that said, "Don't try
"that Socrates argument on me ever again."
(laughter)
Now-a-days that kind of appointment
would be very very hard to make.
But those are often the most
useful people in the department.
People like me who aren't very good
at getting things read and like to write
may be much less useful
to their colleagues
'cause I depend on my
colleagues to find out about
the literature and on
my graduate students,
rather than being a resource for them.
So I mean I don't think I'm useless but.
- What sort of courses
are a useful preparation
for philosophy, other than
philosophy courses, math or?
- Well I think math is always
a good preparation for anything.
I think people should always...
My educational view is kids should take
some kind of math each year
as long as they possibly can.
Even if they're not really
making much progress.
Just to keep those brain cells working.
I'd wish I'd done that.
I quit taking math about
halfway through college
when I decided that wasn't
gonna be the area I went into.
But linguistics these days can be
very very useful because so much
philosophy connects with language.
And then coniginatve science in general.
Computer science, the
more theoretical parts
of computer science, AI,
those are very relevant.
Course if you're doing
the history of philosophy
it's good to know some history.
Political science, your field is
a very closely associated field.
Psychology is very important these days.
Philosophy has gotten a lot more
interdisciplinary over the
years I've been involved.
When I was a graduate student at Cornell
there wasn't much connection
with any other department.
The feeling was, "Well you know,
"philosophers doing our
analytic philosophy,
"we're just kind of our own thing
"and if other departments wanna come
"and have their conceptual mistakes
"straightened out that's fine."
Now it's much more interdisciplinary.
Philosophers
get ideas from experiments and cognitive
psychology and all sorts of things.
So for the areas of philosophy
I've been involved in
all the different so called cognitive
sciences are very relevant.
- And what about temperament?
What sort of a temperament
does a would be philosopher
should he have, should he or she have?
- Well you think maybe they should have
a philosopher temperament, right?
You know kind of take
a broad view of things.
Be able to see all sides
so forth and so on.
I can't say honestly that I see much
correlation between having a broad
philosophical temperament and being
a successful academic philosopher.
I mean, some do, maybe a little more
than the average run
of the mill population
but unfortunately, or fortunately
you get pre-Madonnas and you get a lot
of people who sit around
department meetings
and don't seem aware that the university
has any other mission
than promoting philosophy.
You get small minded people
and so forth and so on.
- So all types?
- All types, I'm afraid.
- But there must be a lot of the
loneliness of the long
distance runner in philosophy?
That is that you go off and do
a lot of thinking and so on?
- Well it's, compared
to a lot of other things
that happen at the university
a lot of philosophy is more like math.
Where basically the work is done
sitting alone trying to
unravel some problem.
And less done with a laboratory group.
I try to have group
meetings every so often
with the students who are working with me
but frankly it never works very well.
So it is much different than the
kind of team based scientific endeavors
that are fairly common in the university.
- Does that kind of setting require
a kind of courage, basically?
As you're grappling with problems
and especially if you're making
kind of a breakthrough in some area?
- Well I think chutzpah
might be a better word.
- Be a better word (laughter).
- Yeah, I mean you're sitting there
and you're, I mean like I'm gonna give
a talk this afternoon on free will.
Now people have been thinking about
free will for a long time
and very very smart people.
Go back to Lucretius, he was no dope
and he had his theory of free will.
Then we got the people I'm criticizing,
really brilliant guys like Carl
Ginet and Peter van Inwagen.
So for me to walk in to
a seminar at Berkeley,
the greatest university in the world,
with all these smart
people like John Searle,
God knows what he
believes about free will.
And say, "Hey I've
figured out the answer."
You know I'm defending Hume, so at least
I got one really smart guy on my side.
But I'm gonna tell you what Kant,
and van Inwagen, and Ginet
and all these guys have wrong.
It takes a certain amount of
chutzpah or stupidity,
but you know why not?
On the other hand it's a little bit
like Jimmy Carter you know?
He sat on his, when he
was Governor of Georgia,
he sat on his front porch and he met
all the candidates that
came through running
in the Georgia primary
or the Georgia caucus.
And he had this great revelation that
these guys weren't any
smarter than he was.
(laughter)
Actually you might say,
"Well he was wrong."
But I think he was a
pretty good president.
But anyway, so as you
go along in philosophy
you start of kind of awestruck.
I mean you're in this profession
that's the world's
second oldest profession
and you know all these
brilliant guys from Plato.
And then you meet some people
that you know you just say,
"Well no doubt about it that
guy's a lot brighter than me."
You meet a Bob Adams or a David Lewis,
the names might be familiar
to some of my colleagues.
Or John Searle and you
say, "Well, you know."
On the other hand you do a lot of reading
and you meet a lot of people with
good reputations and so forth
and you have a little bit
of the Jimmy Carter feeling.
"Well, gosh I mean my ideas
are as good as those."
I've come to have the
following view of philosophy
that's a little bit metaphorical.
I think there's a muse of philosophy.
And I think the muse of philosophy is like
the head person in the public
defenders office, right?
And they're assigning
philosophers to ideas.
And idea's to philosophers
and the philosophers
are supposed to defend the ideas.
And the brighter the philosopher
the stupider the idea.
(laughter)
So it's like you give your very best
defense lawyer the guy
who's most obviously
guilty and say, "defend him", right?
And then more mediocre talents like me
you give really plasuable
ideas that are easy to defend.
So that's my picture, right?
- I see, now in the case of the
person who has the worst idea.
- I won't tell you who I'm picking.
- No, just following up on the metaphor.
Does he then improve the idea or is it
like banging his head against the wall?
- No, no he becomes, he or she becomes
incredibly famous for working out
some elaborate scheme where the idea
seems within the scheme quite plausible.
Like Leibniz for example
would be a good example.
With these ideas of monads and
really isn't any causation
and so forth and so on.
Bizarre ideas but wonderfully defended.
- So give us a general sense
of what a philosopher does.
We've talked about the skills,
I mean are you bringing order,
a set of rules, to a domain of ideas?
Or is that a fair question,
is that a fair question?
- I suppose to a certain extent.
I mean a lot of people find it baffling.
"What do you do in philosophy?
"I mean science is research
but what do you do, you just?"
They kind of have the feeling,
"Well philosophy's a finished business.
"There's all the dead philosophers
"and philosophy must consist of teaching."
But actually no you get
involved in the same...
I had a teacher once named Okay Balsmunt,
at the University of Nebraska.
I went up and went to a seminar
that he put on when I was going to Doane.
And he said the first step in philosophy,
the basic philosophical talent is
the ability to quicken
the sense of the queer,
which in those days meant notice
what's odd about every day things.
Get puzzled about
personal identity, right?
Or about you know what
happens when I lift my hand?
That's the, not every, some
philosophers don't have that.
Some philosophers just pick up problems
from the past and they
can do a good job too.
But to me that's the fundamental
thing, is you get puzzled.
And it turns out that
there are these long,
there's problems that have been puzzling
to people from time in memorial.
And we can think about them now
just as they could think
about the very same
problems in Plato's time
or in Descartes's time.
Of course we have a lot more constraints.
We have a lot of science.
We have the criticisms that have been made
of earlier philosophers and we should
take all those things into account.
But when it comes right
down to it and you think,
"What is the relation
between the feel of a pain
"that I'm aware of in my consciousness
"and the brain state that is caused
"physiologically by the
thing that causes the pain?"
Are they the same thing?
It doesn't seem like a brain state
but what else could it be?
There's nothing in there but the brain.
When you get, you're
probably thinking thoughts
not all that different from the
ones that Descartes thought.
You're thinking about the same problem.
And I think it's a great thing about...
I mean (laughs) the philosopher
Gottlob Frege asked in 1892 he said,
"Well A is identical with A.
"A is identical with B.
"If they're both true they both
"say the same thing 'cause
they're just one thing."
But you can learn something from
"A is identical with B" that
you can't learn from "A
is identical with A".
How is that possible?
Well he thought about it,
Russel thought about it,
Quine thought about it,
we've gone through a whole...
The end of the 19th century,
all of the 20th century, and now we're
in the 21st century and we're
still thinking about it.
Now isn't that great?
I mean that's very ecological right?
We're not wasting problems.
Now in that time the theory of relativity,
quantum physics, the airplane,
the automobile, atomic energy,
global warming all this stuff has happened
and yet we're still thinking
about the same problem.
Now some people might think,
"What a dumb discipline.
"It never gets anything solved."
But I think, "Isn't that great.
"We have these problems
that last forever."
- And in finding the
complexity in the simple,
you're sort of clearing
the thought basically.
Especially your students basically
and helping them think about things
in their own existence in a way.
- Well I think, particularly
when you think of
undergraduates, that's your job.
Students come in and
their minds are full of structures
that they've gotten from their parents,
their teachers, their culture,
the particular place they live,
now the television and so forth and so on.
And then they often have very firm
convictions that they don't
really have any right to.
And so your job as an introductory
to philosophy teacher is to liberate them.
To say, "Look you shouldn't
really believe anything.
"Shouldn't really desire anything
until you yourself thought about it.
"You in some sense made
it your own desire,
"your own belief, not just something
"you believe 'cause your father did.
"Or what's just as bad,
'cause your father didn't."
So shake 'em up and teach 'em to think.
That's what you do with undergraduates.
And philosophy problems just turn out
to be a great way to get
that process started.
Because at least for some students
they find them very
gripping and they learn
what a good argument is,
what a bad argument is.
How something they believed all their life
can turn out to be not at all
obvious and that's very good.
And then when you get to the end
you get the graduate students,
that's very different.
They've got some big
project they're deeply into
and they know more about it than you do
and there's this huge literature
and your job is just to kind of
keep asking questions and
make 'em clarify things
and tell 'em that they're getting
too much into jargon
and so forth and so on.
- What does creativity
look like in philosophy?
Especially when you're rehashing
a lot of the old problems.
- Well creativity is looking
at an old problem in a new way.
Even if the new way is something that's
borrowed from a couple centuries before.
And all of a sudden some philosopher
makes it seem plasuable where
it seemed implausible before.
Say, take this problem I'm
talking about this afternoon.
When I was a graduate student
everybody thought that Hume was right
and free will and
determinism were compatible.
That is everybody feels, "Well gosh
"if the world was run according to laws,
"including human action,
are we really free?"
A very natural reaction
is to say, "No we're not."
Hume said, "Ah, yes you are.
"Being free is just doing what you want.
"And it's okay if your
wants in a law like way
determine what you do, your free."
Very plasuable view when in 1970
probably if you took a poll of
analytic philosophers
90% would be compatibles.
I went to a conference a few years ago
and discovered that while I
hadn't been paying attention
this whole field had been transformed
by people like Ginet and Peter van Inwagen
who revitalized these
arguments for incompatibilism.
The arguments that they say,
"No the common person's intuition
"that there's something screwy about
"being free if the world is run in a
"law like way including human actions
"can be given a good firm solid argument."
Well that was very original.
Produced a lot of good work,
a lot of good distinctions.
Even though in my humble
opinion they're wrong.
- Now let's go back to your education
because what do you do your dissertation
on at Cornell, identity was it?
- Identity yeah.
I went to Cornell primarily
because it was a hotbed
of Wittgenstein studies
at the time and I had become
very enthralled with Wittgenstein.
But after a couple years I got
less enthralled with Wittgenstein
and more enthralled with Gottlob Frege,
a great philosopher of language
and logician and mathematician
of the late 19th century
and modern people,
more modern people with the same interests
like Willard Van Orman
quine and Peter Geach.
And so my dissertation was rather
on a rather narrow topic, identity
and defending what Frege said
as opposed to what Geach said.
And a couple years
later when I was at UCLA
a fella named Artie Kauffman asked me
if I wanted to do an anthology
for a series he was putting together
on my dissertation topic.
And I said, "Sure that
sounds like a good idea."
And he says, "Well what's the topic?"
I said, "Identity."
He said, "Okay."
And a couple months later he brought
in a contract to do an
anthology on personal identity.
I think it never occurred to him
that anybody could be interested
in just identity (laughs).
So he interpreted it as personal identity.
So I was too embarrassed to (laughs)
to say anything so I did an anthology
on personal identity and that's been
a big part of my research ever since.
- And that was the subject of your
Howson lecture here.
- Yeah.
- Yesterday?
- Yeah, the nature of the self
and self knowledge, very related to
the problem of personal identity.
What is the difference between thinking,
"Well I am sitting here and
John Perry is sitting here."?
Well I believe I'm sitting here
and I believe John Perry is sitting here.
You believe John Perry is sitting here
but you believe you're sitting there.
So these "I" thoughts
are very interesting.
What's the difference between thinking
about yourself in the first person
and thinking about yourself
in the third person?
What's the difference between
the meaning of the word "I"
and say your proper name?
- And so here you are with a problem
that you've grappled with
throughout your whole career.
How has your thinking evolved?
I mean are you affected, for example,
by breakthroughs in
brain research between,
by fads in psychology and so on?
I know in the 60s identity
was quite a craze.
- Well not as much as
I probably should be.
(laughter)
Mostly indirectly by talking to people
who've conducted the research
or their students or my students
that have talked to their students.
But I must admit mostly it's
a very narrow set of topics.
If you go back to 19
76 say, I had my first sabbatical.
I'd come to Stanford, I was trying
to write a book on personal identity.
And I got to this problem
of self knowledge.
And I had this confidence that I had
this whole, whole bunch of concepts from
working in the philosophy of language.
And then this appreciation of the problem
of the self and personal
identity from my work there.
And I thought, "Well I'm kinda
"uniquely qualified to put those
"together and develop a theory."
And it turned out to be very difficult.
To work within what I thought a Frega,
Gottlieb Frega inspired framework,
I thought was pretty much correct
to explain the difference between just
these "I" thoughts and thoughts about
yourself under some other guise
or some other mode of
presentation as he would do it.
So it didn't avail me much to go,
I mean I did some reading
but the problem was there.
There was nothing to do but
think about it, you know?
And you know somebody could've told me,
"Ah, they've just discovered
that the brain isn't,
"is silicone based or that the brain
"really it's just oatmeal and it's
"your right shoulder that..."
Wouldn't have made any
difference about that problem.
So in that way it's a little bit
more like math or logic than
a lot of other parts of academia.
- In your lecture and in your book;
Identity, Personal Identity, and Self.
You use the example of
a story told by Mach, the
scientist philosopher.
What is it he saw, and let's play with
that a little here to give our
audience a sense of your lecture.
- So the Mach example
is Mach relates this,
early in the analysis of
sensations, and I don't know...
So his point isn't exactly the
one that intrigues me about it.
But he gets on a bus in Europe,
or a tram and it's one of these
things that has a mirror
at the opposite end.
So the conductor on a crowded day
can see people sneaking on and off.
And Mach just gets on the bus
looks up and just sees himself
in the mirror but doesn't
realize it's himself.
He just thinks he's seeing a
guy at the far end of the bus.
And he thinks, "What a
shabby pedagogue that man is.
"That man is a shabby pedagogue."
Now if you think about it
that man really refers to Mach himself.
'Cause he's referring to the fella
who's reflection is in the mirror
and he is the fella who's
reflection in the mirror.
So he saying about
himself, or he's noticed
about himself that he's
a shabby pedagogue.
But we wouldn't really ordinarily
call that self knowledge.
But after a while it suddenly hits him.
"My goodness that's me!"
So now he believes "I
am a shabby pedagogue."
And that's what we would
ordinarily call self knowledge.
The kind of thing you express
with the first person.
I suppose he used German
but we'll forget that.
And then you can imagine that he might,
if somebody asked him he'd say,
"Well I guess that means
Mach is a shabby pedagogue."
He could refer to himself
in the third person.
I mean de Gaulle used to do
that, Bob Dole used to do that,
I don't know about Mach
but if Mach had been in a
Bob Dole-ish or General de Gaulle-ish mood
he might have said, "Mach
is a shabby pedagogue."
So there's three different
ways of saying the same thing
and they really correspond
to three different ways of
thinking the same thing.
We say it's the same thing
because it's the same individual
and the same property,
being a shabby pedagogue.
But the thoughts are quite different.
They have different causes and
they have different effects.
When Mach realizes that
he's a shabby pedagogue
that is when he realizes
what he would express was,
"I am a shabby pedagogue."
Then he might wipe the lint off himself.
As long as he doesn't realize that
it's he that he's seeing he might,
if he's really upset by
the lint on the guys tie,
he might shout at him at
the other end of the bus.
"Get that lint off your tie!
"You're disgracing all
the pedagogue in Vienna."
So we have three different thoughts
with in a way the same truth conditions.
So a certain person has a certain
property, being a shabby pedagogue.
And yet they seem to have
different causes and effects
and the different cause and effects
seem to be related to different meanings
of the thoughts in the sentences
we use to express them.
Now you note about this you have
to be in a certain theoretical framework
to be bothered by it, right?
I mean if you're an analytical philosopher
and you're coming from the works of Frega
and Russell and you think that
there's a strong connection between
the meaning of a sentence
and it's truth conditions.
And you believe more or less in truth
then you might be bothered by it.
Somebody coming from
a much different angle
might just think it's a trivial thing
and not worth worrying about.
But to me, it was of
fundamental importance.
- And what would be significant
for somebody who's not a philosopher?
I mean, does this,
does this open up,
let's assume somebody
follows what you're saying,
does it open up your understanding
in a way about yourself
and the world around you?
As opposed to just the philosophical,
the debates within philosophy?
- Probably not (laughs) to be honest.
Because in a way what the philosopher,
what the philosopher meaning me here,
is having trouble with is understanding
distinctions that ordinary people
make every day with no problem, right?
It's like my friend Michael
Brartman worries about,
a lot about philosophy of action.
What's involved in scratching
your head intentionally.
Now when he gets this all figured out
it's not gonna help people
scratch their heads.
The main effect
is negative.
That is people, bad arguments
convince people of crazy things
that somehow have profound effects.
If you're convinced by, you know
in the immortality of the soul
or the immateriality of the mind
it may be that these views are connected
with misunderstanding the logic of
self knowledge at some point.
Or misunderstanding basic things
in the philosophy of action.
So I think philosophers do
have occasionally good effects.
Sometimes a bad effect, but
occasionally good effect
by undermining very complicated views
with sometimes broad social
and political implications
that ultimately are
based on confusions about
very complicated things under the surface
but very simple thing on the surface
like the way we talk and
think about ourselves.
Or what's involved in
scratching your head.
- In explicating these
ideas yesterday you used
the concept of a buffer and a file
which as a layman struck me as
clarifying things.
Explain that to our audience
'cause I think it's useful
and then it helps one
understand this recognition
that you were talking about earlier
which when Mach realizes
that the shabby person
that he has seen is himself.
- So this is basically a view I've come to
that in my view, demystifies
self knowledge to a certain extent.
And so let me give you this analogy.
Instead of a buffer let's talk
about an inbox or a notepad.
So you're a professor and
you have a certain number
of undergraduate advisees
you have to deal with
and at the beginning of the term
they come in and introduce themselves.
So you have this pad of paper
and you write down things about
about the person you're talking to.
Their name, what they look like.
What are you trying to do there?
Well you're trying to do two things.
You're trying to get information
to allow you to recognize them again.
And you're trying to get information
that will allow you, once you
recognize 'em, to say something
intelligent to them and to
help them with their problems.
So two really different
kinds of information.
And while you're in face to face
contact I call that accumulation
of information a buffer.
Then they leave, so now you're
information is no longer
attached to a perception.
So if it's gonna be of any use
to you it has to have enough stuff
there that you'll be able
to recognize them again.
Then what do you do with that?
Well if you're me you
toss it on your desk,
you lose it, and you have
to start all over next time.
But ideally you go pull
open your filing cabinet,
or I guess in these days
do something on a computer,
but let's say pull open
your filing cabinet
take out a manila folder,
put the kids name on the top
of it, put your notes in there.
Then pretty soon from
the registrars office
comes his grade sheets or so forth
and if you're good you stick
those in the same file.
And maybe get an email or
two and you print them out.
So you get a file that accumulates stuff.
The file is what I call detached.
It's not tied to any particular perception
or way of finding out about the person.
So we have this detached
and attached knowledge.
Attached knowledge you're actually
perceiving the person or
talking to them on the phone.
You've got some why of knowing about them.
Usually also provide some
way of interacting with them,
talking to them, startling them,
giving them a book to read.
And then detached, the kid goes off,
he could be in Burma or New York or Canada
or he could be in the office
next store, you don't know.
But you have this file
about the kid right?
And why is it useful?
Because he might come in again
and then you could talk to him,
recognize him, so forth and so on.
So in dealing with objects in the world,
most object in the world we have this
bifurcation between two
ways of dealing with them.
When we're actually adding
knowledge to the thing
because we're in some kind
of connection with them.
And then when we've just got the files.
And this translates into the head.
The buffer is a mental operation.
That's why I got my Harry buffer now.
I'm noticing things about you,
subtle gray tie, very distinguished dress,
thoughtful expression, good
haircut, so forth and so on.
And then tomorrow, the next day,
I'll still have this
file, Harry Kreisler file,
and I will be able to use
it to recognize information
about you and next time I meet you,
hopefully, although at my
age it's always touch and go,
they'll be enough in there
that I can recognize you
and recall our experiences together
and old times and the way we got
completely wasted last
night and were arrested.
I don't know if you want
you fans to know about that.
Now what's special about self knowledge,
on my theory, within
it's ordinary framework
is that you have a buffer for yourself
because you do have ways of
finding out about yourself
that aren't ways about finding
out about anybody else.
Just like looking
straight ahead is a way of
finding out about the
person in front of you,
introspecting is a way of
finding out about yourself.
If I wanna find out about
your hands I look that way.
If I wanna find out about
my hands I look this way.
If I wanted to brush lint off your tie
I would do something that I won't do
'cause it would probably embarrass you.
If I wanna brush lint off
my tie I go like that.
So we have a buffer for ourselves
and that's what I call a self notion.
That's associated with the word "I".
But we also have a
detached file of ourselves
because we do, that's
the thing about living
in this information rich environment
that language and plus
all technology gives us.
We have all sorts of ways of
finding out about ourselves
that are really the same ways
we find out about other people.
When I wanted to find out what time
we were gonna meet in the hotel
I looked down this sheet of paper
and it said, John Perry and Harry Kreisler
meet at a certain time.
So I find out by reading my name.
The same way anybody else
might find out when we meet.
So we've got these two,
we've got files on ourselves
and the files consist of
not just stuff that we get
in the ordinary way we
find out about ourselves,
the special ways of finding
out about ourselves,
but also all the stuff we
find out about ourselves
in the same way that we
find out about other people.
Now what's special is that
in the case of self knowledge
you never need to divide them.
There's gonna be a different kid
sitting in front of me
each hour of the day
till I work through all my advisees.
So I have to distinguish between
the information I'm getting
through my buffer and the file.
I have to detach.
With yourself your buffer is your file.
Unless maybe your parents
played a trick on you
and convinced you you were the
reincarnation of Woodrow Wilson
and then when you got to be 20
you had to kind of make a...
But mostly, mostly we get it right.
Mostly we know who we are.
So our self knowledge is
very special and unique
but it's not special and unique
because of some mysteriously cosmically
perplexing immaterial immortal self.
It's different because of ways that
once you have a proper theory of knowledge
you can see are just a special case
that comes with identity.
So that's how it's supposed to work.
- So back to Mach on the bus.
- Right.
- That moment of recognition.
Is he seeing the
the buffer and the file
simultaneously and saying "Ah!"?
- Well so his case is kind of special.
So he sees the guy at
the end and he gets his,
as I would say opens up a buffer.
As far as he knows he's
never seen that guy before.
And he says, "Huh, there's a guy."
And he watches him for a while,
I mean maybe just for a few seconds.
But he's accumulating information
about the person he sees.
About the person he's got
information about through vision.
And so for a while there
he's got his self notion.
He's picking up knowledge about himself.
If his stomach grumbles he knows that
in the way one knows ones
own stomach is rumbling.
I mean, if his glasses are dirty
he knows that in the way we know
our own glasses are dirty.
And at the same time he's got
another buffer for that guy
and then all of a sudden
he realizes, right?
That these are buffers of the same person.
They need to be merged.
Another example of the same thing
not involving the self, you're talking to
someone on the phone
and you're looking out
your window and seeing a
woman in a phone booth.
And it turns out the person you're seeing
and the person you're
talking to are the same.
But you might go quite a
while without realizing that.
You've got two buffers,
the person I'm talking to,
the person I'm seeing, then
you realize they're the same.
Same with Mach except one
of 'em is the self buffer.
The one where he keeps,
where he stores information
that he picks up in those ways
that we just know about ourselves.
- But is he realize, is this
a new piece of information
to go into his file, that he's
the rumple person that
he sees in the mirror?
- Yes, it is a new piece of information
and that's an interesting viewpoint
because that gets at...
One of the aspects of the problem is
that kind of information,
"A is the same as B",
is something that
traditional philosophical
theories of information
have a problem with.
This goes back to the
problem I mentioned earlier,
that Frega had about identity senses.
If we think of information as,
"Well what does the world have to
"be like for this sentence to be true?"
Or, "What does the world have to be like
"for this thought to be true?"
Then a natural way to do it is you say
"Well what objects are involved
"and what do they have to be like?"
So if I think, "Harry has a great tie."
What does that thought have to,
what does the world have to be like
for that thought to be try?
Well this individual right here
has to have a great tie.
So that's what you learn.
That's the information.
But how about the difference between,
Harry has a great tie and
that man has a great tie?
Well at that level of information
you can't get at the difference
'cause you are that man and you are Harry.
So you have to back up
and adopt a slightly
different way of looking
at the information
that I call a reflexive theory,
which readers can get my wonderful book
Reference and Reflexivity.
Makes a great Christmas gift,
you know, small, compact
and read all about.
In other words our
ordinary ways of thinking
it's suffices to just keep track
of when people are saying the same thing
and what people think and what they learn.
Just in terms of the object
they are learning about
and what they learned about 'em.
But in a lot of cases that
fascinate philosophers
and that you need to get straight to make
the whole theory work smooth,
that doesn't quite work and you have
to back off a little bit.
That was where Frega's problem came from
and the problem of self knowledge
is again an example of that.
Some of the puzzles about self knowledge
are really just special
cases of this puzzle
about how do you represent
when you learn "when A is B".
If A is B there's just one
thing you're learning about
but it seems like there's
two things involved.
And you have to kind of
give up the ordinary,
as I call it the subject matter level
of analyzing knowledge in order to
understand what's going on.
- For a number of years you've
actually had a radio program
modeled after Car Talk,
called Philosophy Talk.
- Yeah, now we don't like to say
it's modeled after Car Talk because--
- That was a joke I heard yesterday.
(laughter)
- No I mean it actually was
but we don't like to say it because
program directors say, "Oh
another imitator of Car Talk."
So now our official story is,
"No it's modeled after Money
Talk with Bob Brinker."
- I see, well that's a better
comparison in these times.
So what are you trying to do there?
Are you trying to with your partner--
- Ken Taylor.
- Ken Taylor
from the philosophy department
at Stanford, trying to
show the utility of philosophy
for everyday life, bring
philosophy to the masses?
What's your goal and how are you doing it?
- Well I would say the goal is two fold.
In the first place we think, I've thought,
Ken thinks for a long time that
a lot of people are naturally,
have natural philosophical interests
and they would enjoy philosophy
if they knew about it.
But in American culture
it's somewhat under,
it's low profile.
In other words you can
have a lot of people
that go through college
and learn that they
like literature and spend their lives
reading book reviews, reading books
and enjoying not being, not necessarily
academic professors of literature,
but they enjoy literature.
Same should be with philosophy.
Philosophy is a wonderful enterprise.
It's been going on forever and at least
a certain percentage of the population
is gonna be intrigued by
it and they outta have
this appetite sustained by public radio
in the same way that people that
like music and literature do.
So that's the first thing.
The second thing is that we think
that the standards of discussion
in philosophy where you
don't deal with sound bites
but we have a whole hour
to discuss a problem.
First we work out a couple of
concepts between ourselves.
Then we have an expert come
in and we have callers.
We don't try to be aggressive.
We don't try to score points.
We just try to understand what's going on.
We think it's a good model of
civilized communication
that's somewhat lacking
in the sphere of
communications these days.
Even something as good as PBS still...
Usually when people get
to an issue of principal
or a philosophical issue or
something that comes down
to some basic disagreement between
political philosophies they say,
"Well you know that just kind of depends
"on your basic political philosophy."
And move on as if once you get that far
you really can't discuss
it intelligently, right?
Abortion, well you know this gets
down to what you think the human soul is.
Yes, well now reporting from Moscow.
But you can discuss that.
That's open to discussion.
Where did these ideas
about the human soul,
the embryo, where do they come from?
What are the rights and wrongs?
Maybe we won't find the answer
maybe we won't convince anyone
but they can be rational discussions
like anything else.
- And what do you think
is the resistance to that
in terms of not being doing more broadly
for example, that is, "Okay
how should we think about
"thinking about the issues that
are really important to us?"
- Well I don't have a full diagnosis.
I know that we've had a lot of trouble
getting on stations
'cause program directors
just can't believe people
are interested in this.
On the other hand in the places
where we are on the radio we
get a huge amount of interest.
I mean Ken and I, we're
on Oregon public radio.
So Oregon is probably the state in which,
is most saturated with philosophy talk.
Cause they got about 16
different substations and so on.
We were in a cab in Portland once
talking to each other
in the back of the cab
and the cabbie turned around and he said,
"Hey you're the car", I mean,
"you're the philosophy talk guys."
(laughter)
Get that outta there.
"You're the philosophy talk guys."
So there is a public for it.
We get, people get our podcasts
and download our program
and listen to our program.
We always have plenty of callers
but there's a certain blindness
on the part of the program directors
and if you look at institutions like
the NEAH and so forth, philosophy just
tends to be, in America underrepresented.
You know, I have various theories.
A lot of it, higher education in America
originally was based on
the normal tools concept
of basically you're teaching,
you're teaching teachers.
You're training teachers.
And the humanities were
basically english and history.
Those were, philosophy came lately.
In Europe where universities
grew more out of
these ancient monetarists
and things like that
philosophy's always
been a bigger presence.
- You in your lecture and in some
of your writings evince a great wit
and I'm curious what you
think the roots of that are?
Is it that as a philosopher you sort of
think in terms of meta concepts
and that a humorists is
once removed from that
or is it just something that
comes outta your background?
- Well probably both, I mean my family
always liked humor and also, I don't know,
there's these various
psychoanalytic interpretations
of people that have to be funny.
You know comedians are
usually terribly unhappy
and looking for acceptance.
I suppose that's all part of the mix
but I do think you're on to something.
I think there is a kind of a connection
between philosophical thinking,
looking for unexpected connections and,
well take George Carlin,
be a great example
of somebody who steps back
and looks at an ordinary word
or ordinary usage and is
like, "That's really amazing.
"We do things like that."
And a lot of philosophy
consists of the same thing.
I have probably the thing I
wrote that has been most read
is not my incredibly profound analyses
of the human condition
and the nature of the self
but my article on procrastination.
I suppose what's unusual about that
is it's more or less a
defense of procrastination.
Maybe it would take a philosopher to
think of defending procrastination.
- And you do it quite well on a website
created, I believe I read
by your granddaughter.
- Right right,
structuredprocrastinaion.com
- And you're a progressive drawing on the
democratic line in your family history.
You're a progressive on procrastination.
- Yes (laughs).
- Why is that?
- Well I don't really
recommend procrastination
to those who don't have a
problem with procrastination.
What I really recommend
is if you procrastinate
and feel bad about yourself
maybe you're making a mistake.
Take a careful look at it
and see if you aren't really
a structured procrastinator.
That is if you aren't one of these people,
like I think I am, that get
an enormous amount done--
- While you're procrastinating?
- Yes.
- Yes.
- But as a way of not doing
something else, right?
Now that's not a perfect way to be.
That's not the way Aristotle would want
the perfectly rational animal to behave.
But for most of us it's
a pretty good compromise.
And then if you have, as I do,
good self deceptive skills.
(laughs)
Then you can convince yourself
that you've got this
really important project
that really isn't important
and then you're home free, right?
Because as a way of not doing something
that really isn't that important
you could do all sorts of things
that you will get a lot
of credit for doing.
- And in fact the great enemy here,
you say in your newest second essay
on procrastination, is perfectionism.
So it's really trying to live up to
a picture that you see of yourself
in the mirror when you got on the bus.
Is that?
- Exactly or you didn't see.
You think, "Ah what a shabby guy that is."
So of course procrastination,
psychologists
will tell you, has
various types and roots.
Some are very serious and you should
just go see a shrink
or something like that.
But I think an enormous number
of us procrastinate is
our closet perfectness.
By that I mean we don't every
really do anything perfectly.
I've never done anything perfectly
in my life, never come close.
So it's seems odd to
call me a perfectionists.
But I always plan on doing
things perfectly, right?
So I get an email from the Dean,
"Would you write a report on this case."
Or some student discipline
case or something.
Or I get a publisher asked me to write
a referee report on the book
and my immediate reaction is,
"Boy I'm gonna write the best
report that's ever been done."
I'm gonna you know...
And then of course I set the bar so high
that I procrastinate and don't do it.
So the perfectionism even though
it never results in doing anything perfect
results in procrastination
which is a way of
getting to a point where you can
give yourself permission to
do a less than perfect job.
Now the course, for most tasks
a less than perfect job is fine right?
If you're writing a publishers report,
referee report on a book,
there's no reason it
should read like Churchill.
There's no reason it should have
a scholarship of something that's going
to be in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
It should be an intelligent report.
And so if you're a
perfectionists you kind of
start out thinking you're
gonna do the perfect thing
and then by procrastinating
and suddenly realizing
you've only got two days to do it,
or it's two days overdue is more likely,
that's a way of giving yourself permission
to do what's probably a
completely adequate piece of work.
So that's something I
think the perfectionist
can get over with a
little self discipline.
But a little self
discipline may be too much.
- One final question
requiring a brief answer.
Students out there watching this program
whatever they've planned for their future,
how do you think philosophy,
they should integrate philosophy
into those plans?
Besides watching your program
or listening to your program?
- Yeah, besides watching to the program
or listening to the program.
Well if they're college students
they should take a intro
to philosophy course
because who knows, it might be something
that you really enjoy.
And by the time you get to college
you take an introductory to piano course
it's probably to late
to really get too much
into the piano, you might
enjoy it, but philosophy.
The nice thing about philosophy is that
you can get into these
problems fairly quickly.
You don't need to take preparatory courses
for years and years.
If you're going into a professional school
like a law or business or even medicine,
philosophy is a very good minor
or even a major because it helps
you do well on those tests
that you take to get in
and the skills of the lawyer
and the skills of the
philosopher are very similar.
Making the true appear the false
and the false appear the true.
If you really get stung
by the philosophy bug
and you wanna get a PHD
in philosophy and thereby
lessen your lifetime earning
prospects considerably.
(laughs)
There aren't that many jobs but I must say
if you manage to get one of 'em
it's a wonderful profession,
it couldn't be better.
If you're out there and
you're not a college student
or you were a college student there's just
a lot of good philosophy books to read.
When I was a kid I read Will
Durant's Story of Philosophy,
I think it's still a great book.
It's a little dated, it's a
long book, a little pretentious.
But very good, but the
thing is you can just
plunge right into the classics.
Read Plato's Republic or
Descartes Meditations.
Go to your local book store
and in the philosophy
section there will be
some good used paperbacks
by names you remember
and you'll find that even
if you read 'em in college
and hated 'em, with wisdom that
comes from being a little older
you may find them quite fascinating.
- And in the Bay area where
is your radio program heard?
- We come from KALW the
little station that could
in San Francisco, San
Francisco's oldest FM station
but not it's biggest by a long shot.
- And when are you on?
- We're on live 10 o'clock Sunday morning.
We're on repeat at noon Tuesday
and you can stream our program from
from the philosophytalk.org website
and if you wanna spend a little money
and get a podcast you can listen
to it while you jog or
whatever, you can do that to.
So there's no excuse for not
listening to Philosophy Talk.
- Well on that note of public education
professor Perry, thank you
very much for joining us today.
- Well thanks for having me Harry,
I enjoyed talking to you thoroughly.
- And thank you very much for joining us
for this Conversation With History.
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