by Brian Glenney
Are philosophical thought experiments activating biases or intuitions? The very thing that makes a thought experiment powerful, how it attracts an actively reflective response, could just as well be attracting an unconscious unreflective bias. Consider two examples.
Nagel’s bat readily provokes my concept of an “other” consciousness. Why? Is it my ocular bias that sits in the wings, ready to fly at the idea? Or is it, as I think, a bat’s echo-locating, insect-eating, upside-down-sleeping, flying and screeching-ness? The question gets more concerning when I consider why it is readily adopted by those new to the concept of the subjectivity of consciousness, the thousands of undergraduates that I have discussed Nagel’s paper with. After all, bats are iconic for being blind—cue the cliché, “blind as a bat.” And if I am teaching students that bats are also exemplary of the “other,” I may be perpetuating, however unintentionally, the notion that blindness constitutes a basis for being “other” than human (Schillmeier, 2006). In fact, the provocation of Nagel’s bat could center on a “psychological error” based on internalized fears of blindness, as Pierre Villey (1930), a Montaigne scholar who was also a person with blindness, claimed: “The man who sees judges the blind, not by what they are, but by the fear with which blindness inspires him (15).”
Molyneux’s question, whether a person born blind might immediately identify tactually familiar shapes, stands accused of perpetuating a similar psychological error of ocular bias, and rightly so I think. As pointed out by Villey, the influential-in-his-day Ernst Platner (1793) reasoned “not,” because, “a man deprived of sight [has] absolutely no perception of an outer world. In fact, to those born blind, time serves instead of space. Vicinity and distance means in their mouths nothing more than the shorter or longer time (Hamilton, 174).” This view is so pernicious that Ruth Millikan dubbed it “The Classic View (1991);” it was taken seriously by early psychologists Lotze (1880) and Von Senden (1930), and even by the philosopher Gareth Evans (1985) who deftly discredited it.
Molyneux’s question does more than pump biases. It fundamentally privileges people with sight—it is meant to be asked of people with sight about people with blindness. Molyneux’s question is so intrinsically for visual culture, it cannot even be answered by a person with blindness—it is not that the newly sighted might or might not identify visual shapes known previously by touch—it is that only a person with ocular identity can give a meaningful answer to the question. It is not until a person with blindness acquires sight that they are asked to identify shapes.
This is no mere “in-house” philosophical dispute; Platner was a ‘public philosopher,’ whose reasoning was no doubt influenced by the even more popular Diderot, whose infamous Letter on the Blind for the use of those who can see (1749) about Saunderson, a ‘blind mathematician,’ claimed that people with blindness not only lacked spatiality but moral sensibilities. “What difference is there to a blind man between a man making water and one bleeding in silence (1916: 82)?” Diderot was even arrested for his denial of religious belief by Saunderson: “the great argument for the wonders of nature falls flat upon the blind (ibid.).” We can add to these examples Descartes’ crossed-sticks man, following Georgina Kleege (2005) who writes in her memoir on blindness that people with blindness are to philosophers but a, “patient subject… to highlight the importance of sight and to elicit a frisson of awe and pity which promotes gratitude among the sighted theorists for the vision they possess (Kleege: 180).”
It is an opportune time to consider if we need a moment of reclamation for people with disabilities in philosophical thought experiments, not only in their creation, our reasoning from them, but our promotion of them to those less aware of bias and the harm it brings to marginalized populations.
We can make our reclamations by doing what we are best at: critical assessment of thought experiments in teaching and research for potential ableist biases. We might, for instance, follow Ryan Nichols’ (2007) critical approach to the ‘hypothetical blind man:’ “Reid imagines an idealized agent who possesses all of Sauderson’s skills… I will use “Saunderson” to refer to Reid’s idealization of Saunderson (258).” We can do better at what we are worst at: including the very people that we are considering in the discussion. If our work consists of a thought experiment related to blindness, then a person with blindness needs to be part of this work: consult Villey, or his predecessor Thérèse-Adèle Husson (1825) as to how they would answer Molyneux’s question. Such answers are predicated on the marginalization of people with blindness and their own self-advocacy and identity. As Husson put it, “I prefer my touch to your eyes, because it allows me to appreciate things for what they really are, whereas it seems to me that your sight fools you now and then (Husson, 2001: 25).” And, as if in emphasis of Husson’s self-idenfication we find Villey inverting Molyneux’s question to his own: “Let us imagine a subject deprived from birth of the sense of touch and suddenly recovering it (1930, 196 my emphasis).”
While we cannot ask a bat about its consciousness, we can ask a person who practices non-traditional means of wayfinding, like echolocation through tongue clicks (Zhang 2017), about their intuitions to Nagel’s little thought experiment. It’s time to be inclusive in our thought experimenting and to reach out to actual people in the public—to be truly ‘public philosophers,’ particularly people that identify with the disabilities that we are consulting, as their intuitions will likely prove not only more reliable—less constrained by the biases that cloud our reflection—but insightful. I end with Kleege, “If the Hypothetical Blind Man once helped thinkers form ideas about human consciousness surely his day is done. He does too much damage hanging around. It is time to let him go. Rest in peace (Kleege: 188).”
Bibliography
Diderot, D., (1749/1916) “A Letter on Blindness for the Use of those who have their Sight” in Margaret Jourdain (trans./ed.) Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works London: Open Court.
Evans, Gareth, “Molyneux’s Question” in Collected Papers, edited by John McDowell, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 364-399.
Hamilton, William (1860) Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic Eds. H.L. Mansel and John Veitch (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood)
Husson, Thérèse-Adèle. (1825/2001) Reflections: The Life and Writing of a Young Blind Woman in Post-Revolutionary France. Catherine J. Kudlick and Zina Weygand (eds) New York and London: New York University Press.
Kleege, Georgina (2005) “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account” Journal of Visual Culture 4, 2: 179 – 190
Lotze, H. 1887. Metaphysic. (edited by Bernard Mosanquet.) Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Platner, Ernst (1793) Philosophische Aphorismen, ed. Schwickert. Vol. 1 (Leipzig: Schwickertscher Verlag, quoted in William Hamilton (1860) Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic Eds. H.L. Mansel and John Veitch (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood).
Schillmeier, Michael (2006) Othering blindness – on modern epistemological politics Disability & Society 21, 5, 2006: 471–484
Villey, Pierre, (1930) The world of the blind: (a psychological study) Trans. Alys Hallard, (Duckworth)
Von Senden, M. (1932/1960) Space and Sight, Trans. by Peter Heath, (Illinois: The Free Press)
Zhang, X. and Reich, G. and Antoniou, M. and Cherniakov, M. and Baker, C.J. and Thaler, L. and Kish, D. and Smith, G.E. (2017) ‘Human echolocation: waveform analysis of tongue clicks.’, Electronics letters., 53 (9). pp. 580-582.
Brian Glenney (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Program at Norwich University, USA. His work centers on sensory perception and early modern philosophy, with a recent interest in bridging philosophy of perception and disability studies. He is Co-Founder of the Accessible Icon Project—a design activism collective—and is Co-Editor of The Senses and the History of Philosophy (Routledge).
