Mikkel Gerken kindly called to my attention this interview with Fred Dretske that was conducted by the students, named below, for an undergraduate philosophy publication, Tanken, at the University of Copenhagen; the students kindly gave permission to publish the interview.
Interview with Fred Dretske
By Tanja Tofte Bøndergaard and Linda Fønss
Duke campus is beautiful and, to a newcomer, seems like a quiet place. Forbes has ranked this tranquil spot 7th on its list of “power factories”, but it is probably better known for its basketball team and its fierce rivalry with University of North Carolina. This is where Fred Dretske, internationally acclaimed philosopher, has his office and where we have set out to meet him. It wasn’t written in the stars that Fred Dretske would become a philosopher. In fact he was only a year away from completing a degree in electrical engineering when he decided that it was not the field of study meant for him.
“I was an engineer, when I decided I didn’t want to spend my life talking to engineers. I would go to the coffee shops and overhear conversations and say: “Oh, that sounds very interesting.” People talking about literature and sometimes philosophy. I didn’t know these people, but I thought it all sounded fascinating.“
It was a basic introduction to philosophy at college, which got Fred Dretske so hooked that he decided to scrap four years of college and start over with the uncertain prospects of becoming a philosopher.
“I was so excited about the problems that I knew I wanted to do that for the rest of my life.I think it is an advantage to keep your career options open as long as you can, because you’re going to spend 40-50 years doing this and you want to make sure you get it right. I never regretted the decision I made; I know it was the right decision, because I’ve had fun my whole life. But had I stayed in engineering, I think I would have been miserable. You have to make a career decision at some time, of course, but put it off as long as you can.”
When Dretske had finally made his decision and, after two years in the army, entered the academic world of philosophy, he was talked into writing his PhD. on the nature of space, time and substance. However, he quickly abandoned this field and instead fixed his attention on the subject of perception in relation to epistemology, a topic he was far more dedicated to.
“My first book, 'Seeing and Knowing', was about perception; what it takes to see something and how seeing is transformed into knowing. Well, once you start looking at all the ways we talk about seeing and the various ways we use perceptual verbs, there are enormous complications there that you have to sort through to make headway.My claim was that there was something called non-epistemic seeing, so that I can see the book on the table without knowing that it is a book, without even knowing what a book is: simple seeing. Then there is seeing what it is, seeing that it is a book, that’s epistemic seeing. This distinction, I think, is - once you understand it - pretty obvious.It doesn’t seem to me, though, that psychologists and neuroscientists are much interested in such distinctions. What they want to know is: “If you do something here, does it affect what’s there?”.It seems to me that philosophers have something to contribute here. Seeing what is on the table is ambiguous between “seeing what it is that is on the table” and “seeing that thing which is on the table”. That’s a big difference and a philosopher has to be sensitive to such verbal differences, or he’s going to get confused and not be of much help to anyone. Scientists aren’t particularly interested in these subtleties of language. They just get bored. Philosophers are fascinated by them ... I am anyway.”
We decided to follow up on this observation, by asking Dretske about his views on philosophy’s contributions to science. We asked him if he viewed philosophers as the people who have to add colours to the grey scale of empirical sciences, so to speak.
“You have got to understand the language, before you can understand the problems and understand what a possible answer to these problems is. Science isn’t going to answer that, not unless science thinks it already knows exactly what is being said. Scientists aren’t specialists on the language philosophical problems are expressed in. But philosophers better be, otherwise they will end up not answering the questions that people are asking.Ordinary language philosophy doesn’t have a very good reputation these days—not the kind of reputation it enjoyed in the era of Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin. It used to enjoy it, because of Wittgenstein; the language bewitched us and all our philosophical problems would evaporate if we could only understand the way we talk. I remain sympathetic to that style of philosophy. I think ordinary language is an essential tool in dealing with many philosophical problems, because many problems arise in the ordinary language. You don’t master a technical language and then express a philosophical problem. Not typically. You say “What is consciousness?”, “What is free will?” and “Can we ever do things freely?” Those are ordinary words expressed in everyday language. That is where the problems occur.”
As an outsider it might be difficult to see how the various topics Dretske has been engaged with could have anything in common, but on a closer look a pattern emerges; that of self-knowledge.
It therefore seems natural to ask some questions about the prerequisites of human behaviour, a topic Dretske wrote about in his paper 'Psychological vs. Biological Explanations of Behavior' from 2004, in which he talks about two different kinds of causes; structuring causes (which enable the triggering causes): for example how a switch is wired to a light to enable (and thus cause) the triggering cause, flipping the switch, to turn on the light:
“I make a big fuss about triggering and structural causes because that’s basically the difference between biological and psychological explanations of behavior. I’m not concerned about neurobiology, what I’m concerned about is basically the reasons you have for doing what you do.I think there is an overemphasis on neuroscience in philosophy today. Everyone wants to talk about neuroscience and show how much they know about it, especially in the philosophy of mind. I think it’s all right (in fact essential) to know all that stuff, but I don’t quite see how it answers what my questions are — how, for instance, reasons (what you want and believe) explain behavior.”
Here we felt it necessary to enquire about the exact nature of these unanswered questions. His reply led to a discussion of some of the more problematic concepts in philosophy of mind.
“Qualia, consciousness and such. I just finished reading a book on consciousness and it has an enormous amount of references to neuroscience; it must be 40 pages of references. But I didn’t think it helped. No matter how many studies, it takes a special talent to bring scientific information to bear on philosophical problems and you can’t expect neuroscience to do that job for you.”
Tanken: ”But you don’t see neuroscience helping, to some extent, by telling us empirical facts?”
“Yes. I depend on neuroscience to tell me what the facts are and what they must be, if what I say in philosophy is true. And so I have to keep my ear open all the time listening to them; are the facts on my side here? Because if they are not, all right, I have got to change my theory. But sometimes you can say: The facts have to be on my side. There has to be a neurological connection between here and there. How else could the brain control behaviour in any relevant way? So I do a little a priori science and then say, “all right, isn’t this right, scientists? I’m going to read your books and you are going to tell me, I hope, that this is the way it is.”
In some circles, the naturalization of epistemology has been proclaimed as the end of a priori science. We asked Dretske whether or not he supports this claim, a remark that caused laughter.
“No. No, I don’t. It just seems to me that if you are going to say, as I said in Knowledge and Flow of Information, that knowledge is information caused belief, then I can’t imagine a scientist saying: “No, that isn’t what knowledge is.” You can’t take a part of the brain and say: “We found knowledge here.” What you need is an argument or some kind of theory that says: “Look, when people talk about knowledge, this seems to be what they are talking about.” It’s understanding the concepts people deploy, when they talk about what they know, what they see, what they understand. That’s something a philosopher has to be especially sensitive to and it’s not science, it’s understanding what people are talking about.”
Dretske has a privileged insight in working with empirical science, due to his background as an electrical engineer and his works with biologists. Therefore we asked him how epistemology and empirical science can or should work together.
“I think they should be able to communicate. They don’t have the same problems though. Neurologists are not worried about skepticism. You know, they are willing to listen politely for an hour while some philosopher goes on about it, but then they’re going back to their labs and they don’t worry about that thing anymore and likewise with me; I hear them talk and I say “Well, that’s very interesting but that’s not my problem.” So I really do believe that philosophers have distinct problems that scientists don’t. But I do think that what scientists are doing is relevant for what philosophers are doing and one of the ways of knowing is being able to talk to them more easily, so smoothing the communication paths is an important project. That was why I spent ten years doing it. When philosophers talk about knowledge they usually talk about justification, reasons and so on. Scientists didn’t talk that way. For them, the psychologists I was reading, information is an important commodity. It is both psychology and biology. Why, I asked myself, aren’t philosophers using it? Why do we talk about justification in stead of information? I thought that if philosophers could formulate a theory of knowledge in terms of information we could come up with a much more useful account for knowledge in general. If you ask a philosopher: “What is justification?” you are not going to hear anything you want to listen to for very long. It’s going to be very fussy ... Whereas I can tell you exactly what information is. Information is something that is out there in the world that we, knowledge seekers, look for and try to exploit to further our purposes. We look at thermometer, or we look at the clouds, or we look at the footprints. Those footprints, those clouds carry information and we try to extract that information, and if we do, we know. That is what knowledge is: Coming to believe something because we have got the information. That’s the idea anyway and that seems to me a very plausible sounding story.”
This explanation led us to think of the work of another philosopher, Alvin Goldman, a social epistemologist who has also touched base with information and justification. Therefore, we asked Dretske whether he was familiar with Goldman.
“Oh yes, Al and I are good friends. When I first started talking about information, Al had this causal theory, which is a pretty good theory. Except one of the points that I made was that there is a difference between receiving information and being caused and that was crucial to understanding the differences between us.”
Tanken: “It seems to me like he has a more loose interpretation of information and how we can be justified in saying that we know something, and that your version is more theoretical and hardcore in justification?”
“Well, I’m happy to accept that way of describing it, because it makes it sound a little better for me that way.”
This account of the circumstances made us all laugh and in the ensuing break in the conversation, we informed him that extracts of his work Seeing and Knowing has been a part of the philosophical syllabus at University of Copenhagen for several years.
“Wow ... Well, thank you for telling me that. The latter chapters get pretty heavy-going.”
Tanken (in a joking manner): “Skip those?”
“Yes, who reads those?”
As a service particularly directed towards first year philosophy students at the University of Copenhagen (who will have to write a paper on this specific topic), we asked how Dretske’s beliefs about perception and knowledge differed from Sellars’, another famous philosopher, who was also Dretske’s professor.
“That’s a great question. I thought that they were pretty different, but apparently Sellars didn’t think so. Anyway, I was at one of the first conferences I went to as a young faculty member. I gave a paper on perception and Wilfred was in the audience. He and some other people came up to me later and were talking to me about it and someone said to him: “Did you enjoy Fred’s talk?” And he said: “Oh yes, Fred certainly got it straight about ... my views.”I couldn’t believe that, I thought: What does he mean, “His views.” Those were my views. I didn’t know those were his views. So he apparently thought that I was on board with his views and I didn’t know those were his views, I thought they were original with me. I still think they were. Anyway, we have a disagreement about whether Seeing and Knowing was kind of Sellarsian, whether it was Sellars’ kind of take on it or whether it wasn’t. I don’t know.”
Tanken: “Sellars was your teacher. Do you still believe that there is the same teacher-student relation in philosophy today as we’ve seen it with fx. Husserl and Heidegger or Heidegger and Arendt?”
“Yes I think so. Maybe not in such a kind of formal and ... (pauses) Germanic way.”
Everybody laughs at this remark.
“But obviously students are affected by their teachers and they often carry something away. Sometimes in a form they don’t even understand, like, maybe the way I took it away from Sellars and I didn’t even realize it. That’s possible. That would just mean I didn’t on a conscious level understand the view, but I picked it up somehow. So I think that still goes on, and it must go on if teacher-student relations are going to be as productive as we hope they are. But I don’t think they’re any longer ... you know ... my lecturing to the group and them writing it all down and then interpreting my views to the masses. That isn’t the way it goes down and I don’t think that’s the way it should go on. Just that some things the teacher says strike a bell. That kind of relationship I think is necessary and obviously continues to go on and will always - I hope - go on.”
Dretske himself experienced this as a young philosopher when he was writing his PhD. His adviser was a devotee of the Austrian philosopher (then teaching at Iowa) Gustav Bergmann:
“My teacher kind of wanted me to be the second generation disciple in this movement. I was to be a Bergmann student at one remove. But I didn’t go into philosophy so I could understand Gustav Bergmann and repeat what he said. So I rebelled against that. I resented that kind of heavy influence. I don’t think I wanted to do philosophy so that I could parrot the teachings of the master. I got interested in it so I could understand these things on my own and say what I thought, on my own. So ... Although I learned a lot from them. It’s just that I didn’t learn what they wanted me to learn.”
Philosophers have a reputation for being brutal in their discussions with one another, especially when we are compared to other fields. Therefore, we asked if this was something Dretske could recognize from his own academic life span.
“Oh ... Some of the articles that I’m best known for now were rejected repeatedly by journals with virtually no comment and others were criticized brutally. Philosophy just has this reputation, because everybody’s out to kind of establish their reputation by showing that everybody else is wrong. That just became part of the culture at graduate school. And it’s kind of vicious. I know female colleagues of mine at Wisconsin - where I taught - who just resented this. We were doing it viciously, us men. That’s how you do philosophy. Somebody gives a talk and you say: “Look, that’s wrong, for these reasons.” And the more you can show he’s wrong, the better off you feel. And she - I’m thinking of a particular woman, who was a good philosopher - she just felt that this was the wrong culture. That we should be trying to help the person put out a better product. And I kind of thought she was right, maybe.In those days a lot of philosophy of language was being influenced by linguistics and Chomsky and so we philosophers would go over to the linguistics departments to listen to their talks and we’d come in with our aggressive way, saying: “No, you’re wrong!”. And they would all look at us like “Who ... Who do you guys think you are?” And so there was a big cultural divide. We had to learn to behave ourselves. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten less that way. But when I was younger, I was as bad as the next person.”
Dretske already mentioned to us that Alvin Goldman is a good friend of his. We could not help wondering what other philosophers he had met in the course of his carrier and which encounters he was most excited about.
“Paul Grice and Hilary Putnam are two names that come quickly to mind. Paul Grice is mainly known for his maxims in language philosophy and his contributions to philosophy of mind. And Putnam is a brilliant philosopher of science. And philosophy of anything, really. In conversation they are impressive. You know you’re talking to someone whose intellect is extraordinary.I have often thought, though, that the people who were most influential on me were not people who - if you mentioned them at a dinner party - anybody would ever recognize. They would expect you to mention people like Descartes, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. But I think my heroes are mainly unknown outside of philosophy. Known by, perhaps, many philosophers, but outside of philosophy; not recognizable names.”
Now the time has come to leave our world for other possible worlds and we ask the following question: “Who would you like to have met, living or dead?”
“Well, I studied the usual kind of historical figures; Kant, Descartes, you know. Plato. But I never felt myself terribly influenced by these people. Kant, perhaps, more than anyone. But that’s because when I decided to do philosophy I said to myself: I’m going to be so far behind everyone else in graduate school that I better spend my two years in the army reading philosophy, trying to catch up. So I studied Kant’s “Critique of pure reason” and commentaries on Kant. I was virtually an expert on Kant (but no one else) by the time I got to graduate school. So I would say Kant was one of my big influences. But then there is the influence of people you’ve never heard of before. People whose books I read f.x. Richard Braithwaite, the English philosopher of science. I read his book Scientific Explanation and I was blown away by him, because he taught me so much. So it’s those kind of figures that I can pick out and say: “That person had a huge influence on me.” But they’re not the big icons in philosophy. They’re good philosophers and they’re well-known on a certain level, but they’re not generally well-known.”We open up for (another possible) world of fun and give Dretske the possibility to choose among all living or dead philosophers and name one or several he would like to meet.
“I wouldn’t like to meet someone, because I don’t think much would get accomplished for either one. I don’t think much progress is made in these one-on-one conversations. But I should think more about that question. I’ve never been asked that question before.”
Already on the subject of other possible worlds and counterfactual scenarios, we asked Dretske what he would have been, if not a philosopher.
“I thought about this quite a bit and I think I would have loved to be a psychologist or sociologist. I’m fascinated by the problem of the influences - the non-rational influences - of the formation of people’s beliefs and theories. When you come up with a theory you say: “Well, here are my arguments.” Now, we all know that most of the time people’s arguments don’t convince anyone.You know, you come to your views, not because somebody supplied you with a premise that implied the conclusion, but because of some other factor. And it’s those other factors that go into the formation of people’s belief systems. Maybe this is all studied so much already that I wouldn’t have a hope of making a contribution, but that’s what interests me.”
Our conversation is moving towards the end, and before leaving we ask if Dretske has a piece of good advice for people who consider doing philosophy as a career.
“When I told my teacher at Purdue - the only philosopher who was there in 1954 - that I wanted to do philosophy, he said: “You’re an electrical engineer. There are jobs in electrical engineering.” I said, “Doesn’t make any difference, I want to do philosophy!” … I was pretty dumb!So I went into philosophy against the best advice of my teachers and of course my family. My parents were appalled. I just told them that it was the only thing I wanted to do, the only thing I could do. So my advice would be: If you’re going to do philosophy make sure you have got that kind of motivation, in which you say, “I don’t care if there are any jobs, I have to do this for four more years and then I’ll worry about what I’m going to do and whether or not there are any jobs”.If you’re going to do philosophy, make sure it is a consuming ambition. One so overwhelming that you are willing to say to yourself; “I don’t care if there are any jobs, I have to do this”.”
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