#81 Changing Minds, Metaphysics, and a Life in Analytic Philosophy with Janet Levin
HOW NOT TO BE A ZOMBIE: what is significant & how do we change our minds?
Love and Philosophy and Andrea Hiott
Mar 18, 2026
“There are two questions. One is: how do you change your mind? And a prior one, increasingly, is: how can you get yourself into a position where you are willing to change your mind? What do you have to give up, and what do you gain?”
“What does it mean to stumble into your life’s work? Do you think most of us stumble into our life’s work, or do we choose it? And what does that have to do with the connection between the way our bodies are moving through the world — all our experiences, everything everyone said to us, all the books we’ve read?”
“It’s easy to let the days go by without really thinking about things. When you asked me to do this, I found myself genuinely engaged, really interested, wanting to go back and think more. It made me realize that the questions I was interested in throughout my career are still interesting — and I’d like to think about them more.”
“Something can be staring you in the face, but you can purposely focus your attention straight ahead and not look. People are doing that more and more these days.”
Welcome to a new season of Love and Philosophy. We’re so glad you are here.
This episode is with philosopher Janet Levin.
Andrea Hiott hosts philosopher Janet Levin, newly retired after 40 years at the University of Southern California and the department’s first tenure-track woman hire, to discuss a life in analytic philosophy and debates about mind and consciousness. Levin recounts stumbling into philosophy at the University of Chicago with Ted Cohen and later studying at MIT amid figures like Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and advisor Ned Block, and writing the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on functionalism. They contrast dualism and physicalism, explain metaphysics as inquiry into what exists and what is possible, and examine thought experiments such as Descartes’ arguments, Jackson’s knowledge argument, and Chalmers’ zombie case. Levin holds that our feelings and experiences are nothing over and above physical processes in the body, primarily the brain and central nervous system. The conversation closes on teaching, women in philosophy, and how openness, identity, and social forces affect willingness to change one’s mind and pursue truth.
The Road Taken APA Talk 2020 Pacific Division Dewey Lecture: Listen here
Time Stamps:
00:00 Big Questions on Mind Change
01:47 Consciousness and Zombies
02:11 Welcome and Season Setup
03:22 Meet Janet Levin
07:31 Stumbling Into Philosophy
08:25 Why Minds Change Slowly
11:10 Synthetic Hippocampus and Extended Mind
12:57 Chicago Origins With Ted Cohen
18:02 MIT Era and Cognitive Revolution
22:01 From Behaviorism to Functionalism
26:17 Defining Physicalism and Supervenience
29:23 What Is the Mind Really
34:46 Cognitive Phenomenology Debate
37:31 What Metaphysics Studies
40:02 Classic Metaphysics Puzzles
43:15 Free Will and Determinism
46:34 Descartes and the Self
51:41 Conceivability and Zombie Arguments
58:40 Dualism’s Causation Problem
01:11:40 Type B Physicalism and Phenomenal Concepts
01:22:46 Water Lightning Mind
01:24:15 Identity Theory Pushback
01:27:51 Physicalism Explained Broadly
01:30:05 Phenomenal Concepts Introspection
01:32:17 Introspection As Skill
01:34:44 Defending Armchair Philosophy
01:37:22 Armchair Near Window
01:39:10 How Minds Change
01:43:55 Bias Identity And Windows
01:45:35 Women In Philosophy Shifts
01:50:28 Grad Training Mentorship
01:54:43 Teaching Confidence Bloomers
01:57:42 Love Retirement Future Questions
02:02:12 Host Outro Waymaking
Longer Show Notes and PDF of APA talk
Janet Levin
Janet is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, where she was a longtime faculty member in the School of Philosophy. Her research focuses on epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from MIT and her B.A. from the University of Chicago.
Much of her work engages with one of the hardest problems in philosophy: how to account for the subjective, felt quality of conscious experience within a broadly physicalist framework. She has also written the entry on functionalism for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — the view that what makes something a mental state depends not on its physical makeup, but on the functional role it plays in a larger system. Levin holds that our feelings and experiences are nothing over and above physical processes in the body, primarily the brain and central nervous system.
Much of her work engages with one of the hardest problems in philosophy: how to account for the subjective, felt quality of conscious experience within a broadly physicalist framework. She has also written the entry on functionalism for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — the view that what makes something a mental state depends not on its physical makeup, but on the functional role it plays in a larger system.
In her 2022 book The Metaphysics of Mind, published by Cambridge University Press, Levin surveys the major contemporary theories of mind — including dualism, type-identity theory, role functionalism, Russellian monism, and eliminativism — assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each rather than advocating for a single view.
Her other published work spans topics including phenomenal concepts, the epistemic gap between physical and mental descriptions, modal intuitions, the Molyneux problem, and the methodology of armchair philosophy.
A few of the themes discussed:
—the importance of thought experiments
—what matters in life as it progresses and how our questions still matter all the way through the shifts and changes
—how to understand why our experience of thinking feels so different from what we have traditionally called ‘physical’
—what it means to change our minds and how that happens
—the importance of mentorship and helping students early to feel free to experiment and find their voice without pressure
Levin shows us that thought experiments, offer a paradoxical blend of what Andrea calls rigorous ambiguity. They challenge us to consider possibilities beyond empirical testing, thus enriching our understanding of concepts that are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify, which Levin mentions here, like consciousness and free will. In classic cases, such as Chalmers' "zombie" scenario or Jackson's thought on "Mary the color scientist" these experiments push the boundaries of what we consider knowable.
While some critics argue that these mind games lack practical utility, Levin defends them as vital exercises in critical thinking. She and Andrea discuss how they nurture a form of intellectual navigation that helps us understand and engage with the world in more nuanced ways.
This conversation is pretty heavy in the philosophy, but it is also about what matters in a life and by the end, it comes to a place of real care, encapsulating an exploration of life's work through the lens of philosophy. Hiott starts with such questions: Do we stumble into our life's work, or is it a conscious choice? How do our experiences shape who we become, and how might our philosophical endeavors reflect and influence our life paths?
Levin's career journey and the talk here is living document and testament to the confluence of personal experience and philosophical inquiry. Starting from an accidental enrollment in a philosophy class to becoming the first woman hired on a tenure track in USC’s philosophy department, Levin embodies how personal and professional growth can be intertwined with intellectual curiosity and philosophical commitment. (Andrea also ‘accidentally’ got into philosophy after thinking she would get a degree in marine biology and then go to law school, though how that was going to be possible is its own thought experiment.)
All this relates to (and comes down to, in the end) questions about the ability to change one's mind, a process entwined with one's identity and experiential learning.
Levin emphasizes the importance of creating environments conducive to intellectual openness, allowing for mind change that moves us closer to truth—if indeed truth is discernible.
The conversation transitions into the significance of holding contradictions, or "holding the paradox," a skill crucial to philosophical thought and a necessary condition for progress. This echoes in broader societal shifts, such as evolving attitudes towards same-sex marriage and the way women have come into philosophy, demonstrating how openness to new perspectives can redefine normative thought.
Towards the end of the dialogue, Levin touches on the aspect of mentorship and teaching, pivotal in shaping future philosophers and thinkers. Teaching, she notes, is not merely about imparting knowledge but involves learning from students and creating a mutual path of discovery. Levin's reflection on philosophical inquiry post-retirement underscores philosophy's enduring value, both as a tool for intellectual engagement and personal growth.
Some of the heavier stuff in the middle includes debates on dualism versus physicalism and the nature of consciousness. In the end, what we understand is that thinking about our lives and how we come to know and change them matters. When we do philosophy, both individually and collectively, we partake in a timeless enterprise that not only seeks to solve intellectual puzzles but also to illuminate the pathways of human existence. Wherever we are and in whatever way feels right for us, the philosophical approach to thought experiments and life itself remains a journey worth embarking upon.
Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash
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TRANSCRIPT:
Metaphysics of Minds: Janet Levin and a Career in Philosophy
Janet Levin: So there are two questions. One is: how do you change your mind? And a prior one, these days it seems, is: how can you get yourself into a position where you are willing to change your mind? What goes into that? What do you have to give up, and what do you gain?
You need to have all that stuff going on in order for there to be conscious experience. So my view is that if that’s true, then whatever is supposed to be going on to have conscious experience can be explained by appeal to what’s going on in the brain, in the endocrine system, and maybe what’s going on in the world.
All of that stuff — physical — needs to be taken into account. But no matter how much information of that sort you have, no matter how closely these events may be correlated with these feelings — these feelings of what it’s like to be in pain, to be perceiving red, to be thinking that Paris is beautiful — that is not going to emerge from your knowledge of all the stuff that’s going on. It’s still going to seem separate. And this is where the phenomenal concept strategy comes in.
How do you get yourself to change your mind if it seems like you need to? And how does identity play into it? And how can forces that are there — and increasingly powerful — get in the way of real knowledge and changing your mind for the better? I mean, getting closer to the truth. People have said that the truth doesn’t matter. I think it does, but then you have to say more clearly why.
Couldn’t you imagine what Chalmers calls a zombie — a creature that is just like a human being, maybe just like you, neurophysiologically, but doesn’t have any conscious experience, that there’s nothing that it’s like to be that creature? Can you imagine that?
Andrea Hiott: Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott, and I’m so glad you’re here.
What does it mean to stumble into your life’s work? Do you think most of us stumble into our life’s work, or do we choose it? And what does that have to do with the connection between the way our bodies are moving through the world — all our experiences, everything everyone said to us, all the books we’ve read, where we are in the world? What does all that have to do with who we meet, who we become, and who we — perhaps after we retire — look back and think we were and what we’ve done?
Those are questions that I think are hiding in a lot of philosophy, even though they’re rarely examined or put exactly like that, because they’re questions that are human and that we’re all wondering about and trying to figure out as we go through this life. I just wanted to start with them, because they’re worth keeping in mind as we listen to this conversation, which will get quite analytical and deep into philosophy. We can remember that a lot of that was towards trying to figure out some of these bigger questions that matter on a very deep level.
Today my guest is Janet Levin. She has just retired from a 40-year career at the University of Southern California, which is one of the great schools of philosophy — and of neuroscience, actually. Janet was the first woman hired into the philosophy department there for a tenure-track position. That was just 40 years ago, and that was her.
There’s a lot of work going on at USC now relative to the body — like Damasio, who is at USC and working with the endocrine system. Janet is someone with a deep conviction that the world is physical. And I think those words — physical and mental — are starting not to mean the same thing they used to. I think we’re all starting to understand them a bit differently.
Because of that, even though Janet is definitely a physicalist and a materialist coming out of the analytic tradition, she now describes herself more as holding that feelings and experiences are nothing over and above physical processes in the body — primarily the brain and central nervous system. She’s coming from a really great analytic tradition that we haven’t spoken of a great deal on this podcast. We’ve had a few analytic philosophers on, but we haven’t really talked about the analytic tradition directly. So I wanted to start this season getting a little analytic — but also getting a little personal, talking about Janet’s life and philosophy, because those things — analytic philosophy in the US, at least, and her life story — are in a way intertwined.
So we’re going to talk about consciousness, physicalism, the zombie experiment, the nature of mind — we’ll walk through some of those thought experiments. And what’s wonderful is that we end up in a really human place, a place of care, and relative to what really matters. Also a little bit relative to those questions I started with. Listening back, I found it really touching, and I’m very thankful that we somehow got to that place.
I also think her life is one worth celebrating. I wanted to start with a kind of celebration of life, of her persistence and curiosity — and also what I like to think of as her ambiguous precision. I mean that as a compliment, and I said it to her too. She’s very good at what I think of as holding the paradox — holding a lot of things at once and not sticking herself in a box, even though she has certainly called herself a physicalist and all of that. She’s also very open and is really trying to figure things out. That is the best kind of philosopher. She opens paths and worlds for people.
She’s been part of a time in history that I just want to note: she trained at the University of Chicago, and then she was at MIT in the mid-1970s — a pretty electric time. There was a man named Jerry Fodor there who came up with something called the Language of Thought — LOT — and was developing a representational theory of mind. Very interesting stuff. Even though I hold a different view of representation, his work has genuinely informed my thinking. He was a really wonderful writer and philosopher, and Janet was there when he was creating all of this.
She was also there when Ned Block was starting his career. If you haven’t heard of him, most people know him because of his distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness. He was actually her PhD supervisor — she was probably one of his first PhD students. She went on to write the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on functionalism, which relates a great deal to all these people. Ned in particular, because he came up with the China Brain thought experiment, which distinguishes between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness.
Functionalism, briefly, is the theory that mental states are defined by their functional roles — their causal relationships to sensory inputs, other mental states, and behavior — rather than by the physical substrate. That might sound confusing, but we’re going to talk about all of that here.
Janet has come to her positions over time. She describes it the way Wittgenstein does, actually — he talks about it like light dawning gradually over the whole. She stumbled into philosophy through an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago, taught by a very charismatic professor named Ted Cohen, who was smoking his Lucky Strikes, telling stories of Harvard graduate school — it was that time. She really loved it. She took another course, and another, and it kept going.
I think quite a lot of us in philosophy have an experience like that, where we stumble upon philosophy and just can’t leave it. There’s a wonderful talk that Janet gave to the American Philosophical Association where she goes through many of these stories, which I will try to include as a PDF for those who want to read more — it’s a really beautiful and honest reflection on philosophy and on her life.
One question I asked her before we recorded was: how do you think minds actually change? We do get to that toward the end. It’s not really through knockdown arguments — it’s really through something slower, something seeping in, getting some different information, starting to understand things differently. It’s much more like the turn of a kaleidoscope, I think. She doesn’t describe it exactly like that, but I see it in the way she talks about it — this quiet turn that is also really stark, dramatic, clear.
We look at what really matters, and it tends to be the ideas and the change itself — finding new ways to sense and think, and having a community that’s partly helping you do that, or at least doing it alongside you. Thinking about your body, your life, the world outside — the world that is you, this extraordinary experience. I think we get into that feeling by the end, and it’s a very human place, and I like that a lot.
Relationships matter, I think — that’s what I want to say after having listened to our conversation. The paths we open for one another really matter. Teachers, you really matter. But students, you really matter too. You open paths for the people around you and for the people who are teaching you. The best thing about being a teacher is that you learn. Sometimes it’s more than content that matters. Sometimes all these theories in the end have taught us something that we didn’t actually think we were even talking about when we were making those theories.
It’s a bit of a strange thing for a philosopher to say, but I’ll leave it like that, because I think there’s a lot opening up right now in philosophy. We’re starting to see the past in a new light, and I think it’s really beautiful. I’m very grateful to Janet for being part of that time — especially in American philosophy, those years of creating analytic philosophy and teaching us how to think critically and how to notice the world around us. I’m also very thankful to her for spending some time with me. I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Welcome to the next season of Love and Philosophy. We’ll be posting a conversation at least on the 17th of every month — some months there will be two or three, but at least one every month. I’m writing as much as I can about these ideas on all the other outlets. If you want to hear more about the philosophy side of it all, thank you for being here. Good luck out there. I know some of you are working on your PhDs, and it’s coming time to turn them in for some people, so I just want to say: good job. You can do it. You’re almost there. All right. Be well, everybody.
Janet Levin: That is interesting. You know about this researcher at USC who has made something like a synthetic hippocampus?
Andrea Hiott: Oh!
Janet Levin: Yes. I think his name is Berger. I’ll check. Wow.
Andrea Hiott: Cool.
Janet Levin: And he found a way — for people who can’t lay down long-term memories, so that they just vanish, like in Memento or “The Lost Mariner” — he found a way to transfer them into some kind of device. This was a while ago, so I’m probably giving you imperfect information.
Andrea Hiott: Even so, that’s super interesting. I think I’m remembering something related, but I’ll definitely look that up again. I love the hippocampus — I should know everything about it.
Janet Levin: Can you remember it all?
Andrea Hiott: Ha, exactly — I use my hippocampus to remember my hippocampus.
Janet Levin: I suppose an iPhone can serve as one too.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. At the end of your book you talk a bit about the extended mind.
Janet Levin: Yes.
Andrea Hiott: That’s interesting — maybe we’ll get to that. But maybe we should start at the beginning. Hi, Janet! I’m just thrilled to meet you, as you know. Welcome to Love and Philosophy.
Janet Levin: Thank you very much. I’m very grateful that you’ve taken so much time with my work and raised some really interesting questions that I definitely need to think about more.
Andrea Hiott: I’m so glad to hear that. Where should we start — should we start in Chicago?
Janet Levin: Yes, I think so. There’s not a whole lot that went on before then. I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. They had a very heavy-duty core curriculum requirement in Western civilization. Some of it was a little outdated, but I happened into a three-quarter sequence in the humanities. One quarter — my very first quarter in college — was Ted Cohen’s class on philosophy. Modern philosophy, actually, though we were supposed to start with Plato.
Andrea Hiott: What we call modern philosophy — so, Descartes onward?
Janet Levin: Yes. We were actually supposed to begin with a history of philosophy starting from Plato, but we started in on Descartes, did a little of Hume, and were supposed to do Kant too — but we did about five minutes on Kant.
Andrea Hiott: Had you wanted to take that class, or was it by accident?
Janet Levin: Completely by accident. I really didn’t know anything about philosophy before I arrived. I often think that core curriculum requirements aren’t so great, but if you didn’t have them, nobody would end up majoring in philosophy — very few people encounter it otherwise.
Andrea Hiott: Absolutely. That’s exactly what happened to me. I thought I was going to law school, took a philosophy class through the core curriculum, and it changed everything.
Janet Levin: Really? Was your family okay with that?
Andrea Hiott: No, of course not — I was going to be a lawyer and I became a philosopher. Eventually they were okay with it. Was your family okay with it?
Janet Levin: Yes. They were — as long as you’re happy. I don’t think they expected too much either way, but they were happy to go with it.
Andrea Hiott: That’s good. So you took this class — what happened?
Janet Levin: I really loved it, though I wasn’t quite sure whether I liked the subject itself or the experience of the class. You focused on various passages and wrote short 500-word responses to questions — that was fun because it got me to be more precise and really look carefully at the texts. But there was also a lot of camaraderie. I remember the names of about half the students in that class, which is shocking — that hasn’t even happened in most of the classes I’ve taught. It was really extraordinary.
Ted Cohen in those days was just — I don’t know if you know him; he died a few years ago — he focused on aesthetics, but he’s probably best known for a book he wrote about jokes.
Andrea Hiott: Oh! I didn’t know that.
Janet Levin: He had a wonderful sense of humor. He was very charismatic — he would smoke his Lucky Strike (you could smoke in class in those days) and sort of go into a reverie, talking about what it was like to be a graduate student at Harvard, which he was, and all the things going on there. So I couldn’t quite determine whether it was philosophy itself that I liked so much, or this experience of being in a class where people were really engaged and the teacher was so charismatic.
Andrea Hiott: This is one of those classes everyone took — isn’t this the one your husband took too, and later your son?
Janet Levin: My son — yes.
Andrea Hiott: So it had a reputation.
Janet Levin: A mixed one. I went on into philosophy. That was the only philosophy class my husband ever took, and my son double-majored in philosophy and history but ended up going into history. So there you have it.
Andrea Hiott: So it did something to you specifically.
Janet Levin: That’s right. And I mean — there was one person who knitted the whole time but asked these really pointed questions. People went on to do various things; I’ve lost touch with most of them. But it was very interesting that I remembered it all — people really talked to one another, really engaged. And so I ended up taking other classes with less charismatic professors and still ended up liking it. I went on to graduate school and ended up at MIT. That wasn’t my first choice, but I’m glad I was there, because a lot of interesting things were going on.
Andrea Hiott: When was this exactly?
Janet Levin: I graduated from college in ‘72 and went the following fall.
Andrea Hiott: A lot of people would say philosophy was basically being created at that time at MIT and Harvard. You ended up at MIT, though you’d applied to Harvard first?
Janet Levin: Yes. But I got to know people there for various reasons — basically, they needed TAs at Harvard and MIT didn’t have enough spaces. So I was the first to go down there, and I was a teaching assistant for Quine’s logic class.
Andrea Hiott: Quine at Harvard — and you were also in the middle of the moment when philosophy of mind was joining forces with linguistics, in a sense. Jerry Fodor was there, Ned Block —
Janet Levin: Yes, and Chomsky, of course.
Andrea Hiott: Chomsky too! Goodness.
Janet Levin: And Morris Halle. It was really a group. At that time, philosophy had its own debate about its place — it was in the humanities section, and there was the worry, actually the threat, that philosophy would just be absorbed into the humanities and lose its autonomy. There were people who had joint appointments in philosophy and linguistics, and all sorts of twists and turns that I can’t fully remember.
Andrea Hiott: Do you think that merger with linguistics had a big influence on the philosophy that was happening — with Jerry Fodor, for example?
Janet Levin: Not directly. Fodor was interested in linguistics and psychology for a long time on his own terms. Descartes was a great 17th-century polymath — his mathematical contributions, Cartesian coordinates, are probably better known in some quarters than Cartesian dualism. Now there are a few people who know science very well and also do philosophy of science. But what seems easier and more relevant now is to be someone who does serious philosophy and serious linguistics and/or serious psychology altogether — making real contributions in all those fields. Fodor really was an example of that. His psychology, most of the time, did inform his philosophy and vice versa. It was very good to see.
Andrea Hiott: You were in his classes and around him, but why did you end up with Ned Block as your supervisor? That’s a more general functionalism rather than the specific representationalism Fodor was working on.
Janet Levin: That’s an interesting question. At that time I was more interested in getting the general hang of an alternative to behaviorism and to physicalism of the type-identity sort. I wanted to see what was going on. I was probably one of Ned’s first dissertation students — maybe the first, I can’t quite remember.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, you were one of his first PhDs?
Janet Levin: Yes. So he was learning, I suppose, how to be a dissertation advisor. He has supervised so many since — he really is a superstar. But I wasn’t quite ready either to be swept up in Fodor’s ongoing research program or to take a step in opposition to it. I felt I really wanted to master the more general questions first. I’m glad I did. I’ve read a lot of Fodor in between, talked to him — he’s wonderful. But I think I made the right decision.
I didn’t feel ready either to be swept into a research program or to stand in opposition to it. I was gradually becoming much more convinced that yes, there really are interesting processes going on in the mind — let’s see how you can give a general characterization of them that’s not too behaviorist and isn’t a JJC Smart-style identity theory. It was really good for me to read the burgeoning literature on that. Fodor did a lot of it, and he and Ned wrote some important papers together against behaviorism. So, in favor of something better.
Andrea Hiott: It’s funny — you said you were kind of a secret behaviorist at some point. Do I remember that correctly?
Janet Levin: Yes. It’s one of those embarrassing things I remember, though I try to shut it down.
Andrea Hiott: I don’t think it’s embarrassing — when you’re thinking about behaviorism in a scientific sense, or even Edward Tolman’s version, it’s not embarrassing at all.
Janet Levin: Well, nobody was a behaviorist, and at some point I wasn’t either. But I was attracted to the idea that you can explain a lot by talking about what people are disposed to do under certain environmental circumstances — and that you could get a lot farther with that than people had thought. Functionalism, at least philosophical functionalism, is like behaviorism in that mental states are defined in terms of what people will do if they have various combinations of states given certain environmental stimulation. So it’s a more realistic, less objectionable version of behaviorism, and it is compatible enough with physicalism, even though it’s not strictly speaking a physicalist view. It seemed a lot more promising and really worth pursuing. A lot of people are functionalists now.
Andrea Hiott: Indeed. For those who don’t quite understand what we’re talking about with all these terms — you mentioned that you always just thought physicalism was normal, or obvious, or something like that. And then of course when you have to justify it philosophically, that’s a whole other thing. For those who don’t really understand what physicalism means, how would you describe it?
Janet Levin: A fairly common and sufficiently broad way to put it: a physicalist holds that everything in the world — objects, properties, relations — is physical, or is nothing over and above the physical.
Now, what is it to be physical? Maybe this is begging the question somewhat, but many believe that being physical includes being one of the items theorized about in the physical sciences, including physics, chemistry, biology, and maybe psychology, or at least certain parts of it. And “nothing over and above” means that whatever else there is supervenes on the physical: no difference without a physical difference. If two things are allegedly distinct but there’s no physical difference between them, then they’re not really two — they’re one.
Was that understandable?
Andrea Hiott: Absolutely — wonderful. I’d just say, for context, that people often understand this in contrast to the “mental.” What are we really trying to understand when we try to understand the mind? Is it this experience we have that we call thinking? How would you describe what we’re trying to figure out?
Janet Levin: It seems that people are interested in the nature of mental states. That includes thinking — what goes on when we think; what goes on when we feel, that is, when we have bodily sensations like pain, nausea, itching; joy, ecstasy, love; and what goes on when we have perceptual experiences — when we look out into the world and see colors and shapes and other people. What goes on when we are in moods? All these things are supposed to involve or be located in the mind.
What goes on when we’re doing or undergoing all these things? How is it that our thoughts can be about items in the world? That’s the question about representationalism: how can what goes on in the mind reach out, connect with items in the world? Or can it? Maybe it can’t.
Andrea Hiott: And how do we know that it does?
Janet Levin: Exactly. And can you represent the world and have thoughts without language? That’s a really interesting question too. In any real-life situation, you’re doing a lot of things at once — you’re thinking, perceiving, your perceptions are sometimes distracted by your thoughts so you don’t notice certain things. If you’re sitting down, you’re feeling the seat beneath you. If you have a sore leg, you notice when you move around. All these things are going on when you’re just awake and paying attention.
Are all these cases to be characterized in the same way? Are there important differences between thoughts and sensations and perceptions?
It seems that thoughts are mental states that are, in most cases, about something — either in the world or in your own body. Whereas sensations and perceptions have, if you will, this qualitative character. This “what it’s like” — as Thomas Nagel put it, a phrase that has really become the term of choice to describe this. Some people think thoughts are essentially representational — you could have thoughts without there being any particular qualitative character. There might not be anything special that can be characterized as what it’s like to think that Paris is beautiful or that it’s sunny outside, beyond perhaps picturing those things.
So there’s a proposed separation: thoughts are necessarily representational, whereas sensations and perceptions necessarily have something it’s like to undergo them. But these days the lines of separation have been vanishing. Many people think that perceptions and even bodily sensations are also representational — that perceptions represent, truly or falsely, what’s out there in the world; that bodily sensations represent what’s going on in the body; that moods can represent certain general states of the world.
On the other hand, there’s an increasing number of people engaged in what they call cognitive phenomenology — who propose that thoughts not only have a general kind of content one can be aware of, but that each different type of thought has a special what-it’s-like character. So that what it’s like to think that world peace would be good is phenomenologically importantly different from what it’s like to think that universal charity is good — let alone more mundane thoughts like “I have to go to the grocery store after class” or “I hope my parking meter hasn’t run out.”
There’s a whole book by Angela Mendelovici about this, and many people hold this view. So it’s interesting that what seemed like a sharp line between what you can say about thoughts and what you can say about sensations seems to be, at best, ragged.
Andrea Hiott: Yes, absolutely. That’s happening in a lot of different fields — this simultaneous clarifying and blurring. But it’s interesting because I think a lot of the work that started in the seventies, which seemed so oppositional, helped us get to the point where we can handle that weird clarified blurriness. You wrote a book called Metaphysics of Mind — a short but very well-written overview of these theories as they’ve been developing. You talk about dualism, type identity theory, functionalism, eliminativism, illusionism — there are many we could cover. But maybe we could pick a few that show us what that oppositional nature was, and what we’re becoming more — or productively less — certain about. We should probably also talk about the word “metaphysics,” since your book is called Metaphysics of Mind. What do you really mean by that?
Janet Levin: Well, the term “metaphysical” is used in new age circles to mean something spiritual — and maybe that could be one kind of metaphysics. But metaphysical questions are usually taken to be questions about what there is: what is there in the world? Are there basically just mental entities? Are there physical entities? What are properties? What are the natures of things?
To determine the nature of something, you need a theory not just of what there actually is and what things actually do, and not just of what you can predict inductively from observation. Metaphysical questions mostly involve what’s possible — things that might not be scientifically possible. Is it metaphysically possible for a person to jump over the moon? Not only will it never happen, but science says it can’t. But is it possible in some other sense? Is it in the nature of human beings not to be able to do that?
Maybe better examples: what are the basic properties in the world? What about time — does the present, past, and future all exist at once? Is there a kind of spotlight present, so that only what exists now exists, and then you move on? Or is it more like a block universe, in which you move from one temporal period to another, but it all still exists?
Or think about a statue of Goliath, made of clay. Is the statue the same thing as the clay? They might come into existence together, but if you crush the statue, you still have the clay — just not the statue. Does that mean they’re not the same thing? What would have happened under counterfactual conditions? What gives you justification for saying one thing rather than another?
Then there are questions about the self — is the self just a bundle of changing states about what’s going on in your mind and body at a particular time, strung together? Or is there a substantial self we can access through introspection across time?
And then free will and determinism: are those compatible? Science isn’t going to tell you. Determinism means that, given some initial conditions — say, the Big Bang — and fixing the laws of nature, everything from that point on is determined. Is it possible to have free will even though there is no way to get out of that sequence? If I’m sitting here and decide to raise my hand, do I do it of my own free will, even though the laws of nature would have it that I raise my hand? Is it still possible that I could have done otherwise?
There are a lot of people working on that question. Those are the sorts of metaphysical questions.
Andrea Hiott: Wonderful — everything we’re interested in, really. You actually defend armchair philosophy in your work. And you also defend science. That holding-the-paradox quality that I love. But why have we had these competing theories — dualism, monism — about the mind? Why has it mattered?
Janet Levin: Well, I think it’s natural for at least some people to ask: what is it to be me? This is actually how Descartes starts in the First Meditation. He’s been doubting various things and wonders what he really is. He thinks he can arrive at a clear and distinct conception of what it is to be him.
Which is something I think we all feel at some point. And part of what Descartes asks is: what could I lack and still be me? What could I lack and still have thoughts? He works through it: if I lost an arm or a leg and still was living, would I still be me? He says yes. What if I were dreaming, and the world around me and even my body were completely different from how I think they are in waking life? He says yes, I’d still be me — because I’d still have my thoughts and at least my memories of perceptions.
And then — the big cannon — what if there were an evil genius who devoted all its powers to deceiving me, making me think there’s a world out there in all aspects, when nothing is really the way it seems? Not even mathematics or geometry, because the evil demon could interfere with each step from premise to conclusion. Even so, Descartes concludes, he can still exist — because it would still be him that the evil genius was deceiving. And what’s required for existence is just the capacity to think: to have thoughts, perceptions, doubts, certainty, mental states.
So what we need to exist, Descartes says, is a mind — an immaterial substance with the capacity to think in this broad sense. And by shaving away everything else — body, environment — he arrives at this foundation: we can have a clear and distinct conception of mind without body, and of body without mind, with no conceptual connection between them.
Andrea Hiott: And so that started to feel like something separate from the physical — what we’ve called “mental.” But then the question comes: maybe it’s just a kind of physical thing, like C-fibers firing. Could you talk about how that bifurcation felt like it needed to be resolved?
Janet Levin: Absolutely. So this is where things get picked up by Kripke, Chalmers, Jackson, and Thomas Nagel — the zombie argument, the knowledge argument, “what it’s like.”
They all use Descartes, because Descartes says: I can have an idea of my mind as something capable of thinking and perceiving, and I also have a conception of my body as this physical thing that takes up space and is capable of moving. I think very carefully about each of these, and I find nothing in one that connects it to the other. I have a clear and distinct conception of both — a complete enough thought of each — and can conceive of one existing without the other. Because of that, and because God is good and wouldn’t deceive us about these things, Descartes concludes that mind and body are genuinely distinct.
That lays the foundation for the argument that if you can conceive of two things as existing apart — in the right way — then they are distinct. That’s what resurfaces in the zombie argument, Jackson’s knowledge argument, Kripke’s argument from conceivability.
Andrea Hiott: Frank Jackson is the Mary one, for those who know the knowledge argument.
Janet Levin: Yes. By the way, he’s changed his view — in 1994 he became a representationalist, thinking that once we recognize these states represent the world, we can be physicalists.
Andrea Hiott: Oh — I knew that, but I thought you might mean he’d changed again. But that’s what I want to come to: the physicalist response. That’s really your work. We haven’t really brought that out yet in contrast to this dualistic picture. Could you say something about what a physicalist says here?
Janet Levin: Yes. What a physicalist says about Cartesian dualism — substance dualism, which holds that there are two distinct kinds of things in the world, minds and bodies — is, first, that there are obvious problems. How exactly are minds and bodies connected? What happens when something occurs in your body and produces a thought, or a pain? You stub your toe — on Descartes’s view, that’s a physical event, and it produces a mental state in an immaterial mind. How does that work? How do you get causation between the physical and the mental?
Descartes is actually quite good on the neurophysiology — until you get to the point where what’s going on in the body is supposed to produce something in the mind. Then it’s like that famous cartoon of mathematicians at a blackboard: the equation ends with “and then a miracle occurs.”
Andrea Hiott: Yes — and I think we all feel that, right? The physical seems so different from our experience of it. It’s very hard to understand how those things could be the same thing, even though we see how connected they are all the time. We go for a run and we’re in a different mental state — it’s very hard not to separate them, because it’s almost as if we’re having a conversation with our own self. And just as when I have a conversation with you, I feel like you’re different from me — there’s something in me that feels different from me too, and it doesn’t reduce easily to either side. This has been so hard to put into words.
Janet Levin: Yes. Sometimes when I would start an introductory philosophy of mind class, I’d ask students whether they thought the study of the brain is the only thing that can tell us about the mind. Many students, especially science majors, said: yes, of course. They thought that anything going on in the mind would, at least someday, be explained by looking at the brain.
Andrea Hiott: So they were already physicalists in a sense.
Janet Levin: In a naive version, maybe. Then I would give them some basic Descartes — can’t you imagine things going on in the mind without a physical correlate? And you get these thought experiments. Couldn’t you be perceiving something that doesn’t exist? But the real clincher that really grabs students is the zombie argument Chalmers puts forward.
Couldn’t you have all the information about a creature’s brain states, all the effects of the world on those brain states, all the effects of those brain states on bodily movement — and yet that creature has no conscious experience? The lights are on, or maybe they’re not, and nobody’s home. Couldn’t you imagine what Chalmers calls a zombie — a creature neurophysiologically just like you, but with nothing it’s like to be that creature?
Some people say no. But a lot of people say yes — even if I look very carefully at everything going on in their brain and body and the world around them, I can conceive of all that being there with no consciousness, no “what it’s like” in Nagel’s words.
Once you get people thinking that way, it’s very hard to get them back down the ladder to physicalism.
Andrea Hiott: I think it also resonates with our own experience of, say, driving while not really aware of what we’re doing — there’s a contrast there that makes the zombie idea feel almost familiar. But how do you counter that as a physicalist?
Janet Levin: There are a number of different ways, going back to critics of Descartes in the 17th century.
One is something Gassendi said: you think you’re conceiving of your mind without your body — that you have a clear and distinct idea of each and that they’re not connected. But maybe you don’t have such a clear idea of your mind. Maybe the mind is just a collection of very ethereal physical entities that are too small to recognize, and you’re wrong to think you have a complete enough thought of the mind and the body. A lot of people say this today too: you really aren’t conceiving of a mind without a body. Or, in the zombie case, you really don’t have the mental capacity to think about all the physical stuff at once — and if you did, you’d recognize that of course the creature is conscious. That’s not a very compelling argument, but some people try to make it.
Another critic of Descartes in the 17th century offered obvious counterexamples to the conceivability-to-distinctness inference. He pointed out that you can conceive of an isosceles triangle without conceiving of the Pythagorean theorem, but any isosceles triangle obeys it. Descartes’s response: you don’t have a complete enough idea of the triangle and the theorem. If you did, you’d see the connection. So the question becomes: what counts as a complete enough idea?
And then of course there’s the problem of causation — this view seems hard to reconcile with the conservation of energy. How can mental states cause physical events if they’re genuinely immaterial? We all believe that if you stub your toe, you feel pain, and that pain causes you to say “ouch” or reach for aspirin. How does that work without a physical substrate?
Andrea Hiott: Okay. What about the phenomenal concept strategy? I’m thinking about type-B physicalism — could you talk about that, and about how something like red or pain can’t be fully grasped through conceptual analysis beforehand, even though it’s happening as one physical thing?
Janet Levin: Yes. People say: I’m having a feeling, a sensation — I’m perceiving red, or I’m having an afterimage of yellow-orange, as JJC Smart used to say. So imagine you’re sitting somewhere with a brain scan running, and you can see on a screen what’s going on in your brain. You are seeing what’s going on, and you are feeling what you’re feeling, aware of your experience.
So, I’m seeing red. There are various things going on in my visual cortex — cone stimulation, and various processes that explain color perception. And yet there doesn’t seem to be any connection. If all that stuff had produced a sensation of green instead, you wouldn’t be able to tell just from feeling your experience and looking at the brain data that the sensation had to be what it was. You can explain this intuition very graphically: there’s no way to spell out what’s involved in feeling red or feeling pain that lets you derive it from the physical description, even a very detailed one.
But you can also say: okay, I can’t find a conceptual connection — but why do I need one in order for these concepts to be picking out the very same thing?
My view, and the view of many so-called type-B materialists, is this: a type-A materialist says that if we thought more carefully about what’s going on in our bodies, or about what’s going on when we feel pain, we’d see the connection. Think about pain: there’s this aversive quality to it, we want to be out of it, it gives rise to desires, we can compare it to other experiences. There really is a lot of information in our idea of what it’s like to be in pain that we’re glossing over. And if you go more general — take it up a step to the psychological significance of what’s going on in the brain, how certain beliefs and desires produce certain behaviors — you might see the connection after all.
That’s what Dennett says, and a number of others. I used to think that too: that if you get enough functional information, you’ll be able to see that they’re connected.
But I’ve changed my mind. I now think it’s unlikely there will be a conceptual connection between your experience of what’s going on in the mind and what’s going on in the brain, even at higher levels of generalization. But there is something special about this phenomenon of conceptual separation, and it’s this: mind-body identities are a special case. You get your idea of what’s going on in your mind through introspection. You are aware of a certain kind of event going on in you — you can pick it out, point to it, recognize it when it recurs. There’s no connection between your conception of what’s going on in your brain and the concept that picks out — that demonstrates, points to — what’s going on in your mind. But so what? Introspection is a special, subjective way of pointing to what’s going on in you. And given that there really isn’t anything to your conception of these mental states beyond picking them out, demonstrating them, and recognizing them again — there’s nothing that has to be conceptually connected, because it’s just a pointer. Introspection is the only way of getting substantive information about something that you access by pointing in this way.
Andrea Hiott: Is it just the same as what we do in a science experiment — noticing as much as we can about what we’ve set up, even though we can’t notice everything, and there are many different scales we could look at it on? When we do that with our own bodies it seems somehow different. But is it the same kind of thing — we’re also just noticing as much as we can, and we could look at different scales or with different technologies?
Janet Levin: So you’re saying that in lots of scientific experiments, you find out more by looking more deeply at the relevant domain — and that you have no problem saying, for example, “lightning is a stream of photons,” even though the common-sense concept of lightning seems so different. Or: water, the stuff that fills our lakes and streams, turns out to be H₂O. We have no problem saying, “Oh, okay, water — that’s H₂O, nothing but H₂O.”
Andrea Hiott: And we’re doing something similar with our own thinking — we’re trying to understand it better. I don’t think it takes away the mystery of what’s in the bucket, whatever it is. It’s still kind of amazing. I think our own experience is very similar. It’s pretty wild, and I understand why we want to think of it as something categorically different. But even if you think about what we’re looking at in the world, you can have that same awe about it.
Janet Levin: Yes. But there’s been pushback. Many people — including early identity theorists — said, look, saying that having an afterimage of orange is just having a certain brain process is the same kind of claim scientists make all the time: lightning is just a stream of photons, water is just H₂O. But Kripke, Chalmers, and Jackson push back and say: the reason we can make those claims about water and H₂O is that when we talk about water, we’re talking about the stuff that comes out of faucets, fills lakes and streams. What makes it seem possible that water couldn’t be H₂O is that we associate “water” with that stuff. There could be stuff coming out of our faucets that isn’t H₂O — gin, say, or something with the same functional role but different chemical composition. But that doesn’t mean water, that stuff in our lakes and streams, isn’t H₂O, given that experiments have shown it is H₂O.
Andrea Hiott: We’ve been going an hour and a half, so I won’t try to push back on all of that, because we could open up millions of threads. But just to bring it to a general level for people: we were thinking about mind as something not obviously knowable as physical things, and you think everything is physical. In the most general terms — would it just be that you think if we had enough sensory skill and technology, we could understand anything through the body, through the brain, through the central nervous system? That these aren’t separate realms that can’t make contact, but rather something continuous?
Janet Levin: Briefly: the idea is that all thoughts, perceptions, and bodily sensations are nothing but physical states. By physical, I include not just what’s going on in the brain but what’s going on in the rest of the body as well. Various people, including Antonio Damasio — whose neuroscience institute is now at USC — think it’s important for conscious experience that certain events occur in the endocrine system, of all things. I don’t know if that’s true, but there are a lot of things going on in the body that are required for consciousness besides certain brain states: certain regions associated with emotion have to be involved, and so on.
So you need to have all that stuff going on for there to be conscious experience. My view is that if that’s true, then whatever is supposed to be going on to have conscious experience can be explained by appeal to what’s going on in the brain, the endocrine system, and maybe what’s going on in the world.
All of that physical stuff needs to be taken into account. But no matter how much information of that sort you have, no matter how closely these events may be correlated with these feelings — the feelings of what it’s like to be in pain, to be perceiving red, to be thinking that Paris is beautiful — that is not going to emerge from your knowledge of all the stuff that’s going on. It’s still going to seem separate. And this is where the phenomenal concept strategy comes in.
The idea — called a “strategy” in a somewhat disparaging way, but I think it’s on the right track — is that there’s a special case where you don’t have to be able to see that all this physical information that determines your conscious experiences is conceptually connected to your experiences, to your knowledge of what it’s like. The reason is that you get a special set of concepts, a special way of picking out items in your brain, through introspection. You are a subject; you have experiences. Because you can focus your mind from the inside on these states, you can get a whole range of information about what’s going on in you, what it feels like to do things.
I don’t want to say it’s a special sense, because there isn’t some brain area that underlies introspection — but you can point to various things, and once you point to a bunch, you can compare and contrast them in terms of what it’s like to have them. Your own mental states are the only things you can pick out this way. You use your phenomenal concepts — the way of thinking about yourself, about what’s going on inside — that comes from introspection.
Andrea Hiott: Would you be willing to think of that as a skill that we develop?
Janet Levin: That’s really interesting. I think you can get better and better at identifying different things going on in you through practice. Think about what happens in a wine-tasting class: wines that seemed basically the same start to differentiate — this one is a little sour, this one sweet, this one gives a certain tingle. You can learn to notice differences and similarities you didn’t expect. There are people specifically trained in taste and smell distinctions for quality control, or people very attuned to differences in shade of color. So yes, there are ways in which you can get better and better at identifying how things seem to you — sensations, appearances, and so on.
Andrea Hiott: That’s wonderful. And it connects to the arguments you make in defense of armchair philosophy against the view that we should just do experimental philosophy and abandon thought experiments. If we take this noticing seriously — as a kind of physical skill, even — then critical thinking is doing something more powerful than we sometimes give it credit for. Is that part of what you mean in defending the armchair?
Janet Levin: What I think armchair philosophy can do is take certain counterexamples seriously — can knowledge be something other than justified true belief? The trolley problem? What I’m really arguing is that it’s an impoverished view of philosophy to say that philosophers have nothing to offer beyond what scientists give us. The cover of Chalmers’s book — well, the Churchland book actually, The Limits of Philosophy — shows someone in an armchair with their back against a wall. I think the author stops too soon. There are things philosophers can work out about possibility that are genuinely interesting, and sometimes thought experiments not only satisfy the itch of wondering what’s possible and what must be, but can also get people to reexamine empirical evidence, to notice distinctions they’d missed. So it can affect empirical research too.
The book I’ve been working on — through many incarnations — I’m tentatively calling The Armchair Near the Window.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, beautiful — I love that title.
Janet Levin: Rather than with its back against the wall.
Andrea Hiott: Yes. And I think there’s something to that. Can we try to bring it toward a close? Would you be willing to do the Mollie question another time, since we’ve already been at it nearly two hours?
Janet Levin: Sure. And if you want to do the whole thing over — I know there were deeper questions we didn’t get into — I’m happy to do that.
Andrea Hiott: I love this conversation as it is. I do have more things I want to talk to you about, and I think some part of the audience will too. So let’s just tie up a few threads, and then we can do a more focused follow-up in the spring — for the nerds. What do you think?
Janet Levin: Sounds good. Just one thing about the window: the idea being that if you pay attention to what’s going on in the sciences, what you take to be possibilities you might reconsider. And that gets into the question you began to ask about but we didn’t really get to: how do you change your mind? What does it take to effect a slight change, or a wholesale change?
A lot of what’s going on in thought experiments is that you are — or are not — willing to include certain cases in the category you’re thinking about: knowledge, free will, moral action, autonomy. Information about what’s going on in the world and in the sciences, and even information about how other people think, can have a direct impact or just somehow seep in and change your inclination to categorize things in certain ways.
I think that’s what happened with same-sex marriage. People were against it, and then they realized that people they know and love — who are in same-sex relationships — want to get married the way heterosexual people do, want to have families. Why think there’s something wrong with that? And so their category of what counts as a legitimate marriage expands. Something can be staring you in the face, but you can purposely focus your attention straight ahead and not look. People are doing that more and more these days.
So there are two questions. One is: how do you change your mind? And a prior one, increasingly, is: how can you get yourself into a position where you’re willing to change your mind? What do you have to give up and what do you gain?
Andrea Hiott: I think you have to be very strong. And that’s one reason I’d argue for critical thinking and for philosophy of the armchair-near-a-window variety — because it does teach you how to hold tensions, how to hold things that might not be resolvable. That openness gives you more windows, and lets you go outside them. Which can be very hard for people.
Janet Levin: Yes. And group identity really plays a big role. If you even look elsewhere, you’re seen as betraying your group — and that seems to be more and more the case.
Andrea Hiott: That’s a good point. There’s a lot of pressure not to look out the window. But just before we go — you were in this exciting moment in philosophy, and you were one of the first women in your position. Things have changed, I hope. I was also thinking of your friend Tamara Horowitz — I just want to mention her because I know she was at MIT with you, and also at Chicago?
Janet Levin: Yes, we were at Chicago together and continued to know each other after — she got a job at the University of Pittsburgh and became chair of the department. My mother lived in Pittsburgh, so whenever I visited, I’d visit her too.
Andrea Hiott: Pittsburgh is a major school for US philosophy, and she was the first female chair there. I just want to mention that — I want people to know that you were there and she was there, and it feels important to acknowledge. Is there anything you’d like to share about that, anything you feel should be part of the record?
Janet Levin: She was a very close friend, and she died of a brain tumor, much too young — before she was fifty. I just thought she was doing interesting things and would go on to do a lot more philosophically. But it wasn’t about philosophy — I just lost a friend who had become part of our family. My mother would visit her a lot in the hospital. When I gave that lecture, I wanted to acknowledge her, because she could have given one too, if she’d lived.
But in terms of changes more broadly: there are more women in philosophy now. They used to be steered — not formally assigned, but encouraged — toward so-called softer subjects: ethics, moral philosophy, value theory. But now there are lots of women in all fields, including core metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of science. And two: the so-called soft subjects like ethics and moral philosophy have become very technical — sometimes to their detriment, when technical results substitute for genuine philosophical interest. But also, fringe areas like work on women, gender, and race — which were once dismissed as too specific to have general philosophical consequences — are being taken much more seriously. Not only do they open up questions about intrinsic differences, the binary nature of gender, racial psychology, and so on; they make you reconsider more general questions about how things could be and how we characterize how they are.
And something else that’s changed, which I think is good for everyone: when I came to MIT, there really weren’t courses — just a pro-seminar you had to take. There was no instruction in teaching; I was thrown into an undergraduate class by myself. You had to pass general exams but could choose very narrow topics. Now, at USC and I think at other places, students have a fairly structured set of requirements at every stage. People are looking at your work and making suggestions. Students are assigned mentors for the first couple of years, then advisors for preliminary exams and dissertation. There are dissertation seminars, practice job talks. Students are not just assigned as TAs but given real teaching seminars where they learn how to teach.
Andrea Hiott: That is a very important difference — one I think we take for granted.
Janet Levin: And there are independent programs — philosophers teaching somewhere but getting together with funding to run mentoring seminars for women at certain stages. Louise Antony does a lot of this work, along with Jennifer Saul and Sally Haslanger — they get women in early positions, just hired as assistant professors, to share their work and help each other. They get feedback not just about their work but about what to expect at each stage, what the pitfalls are, what kinds of subtle dismissal they’re going to encounter. That’s really valuable.
And there are seminars for graduate students too. At USC, we always allow graduate students to ask questions first, before faculty, at colloquia. People are taught informally: you might be afraid to ask a question, but lots of people do — some questions don’t land, but some are wonderful, and those are the ones that get remembered. Here’s how to go about it. You don’t have to be aggressive; you don’t have to be first. You can still formulate something and be confident it will be interesting enough to engage with.
The idea that you’re innately good at this, or a complete failure, just isn’t right. You have to wait sometimes for confidence to build, and for what someone is good at to come out.
And the best way to think about it — what we are starting to do at USC — is to remember that you spent days and days choosing this entering class, this group of good students. So what you have to do is figure out how to get them to fulfill the potential you yourself noticed and chose them for. Think of it that way, and you’ll be more patient — and you’ll allow late bloomers to bloom. And they often do.
Andrea Hiott: That is wonderful. That makes all the difference. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve spoken to — famous or not, whatever that means — who say it was some teacher who noticed them and did exactly what you just described.
Janet Levin: And if it’s policy, then that’s even better.
Andrea Hiott: Yes. Just before we go — I always ask about love and care. Is there anything you want to say about those words relative to everything we’ve discussed, or just your career in general?
Janet Levin: One thing I want to thank you for, Andrea: I’m retired now, for the last couple of years, and it’s been somewhat hard to adjust to. I’ve had various health issues — nothing life-threatening, but still — and it’s easy to let the days go by without really thinking about things. When you asked me to do this, I found myself genuinely engaged, really interested, wanting to go back and think more about the questions you raised — especially the ones toward the end about how people change their minds, and how people can wall themselves off from even giving themselves the chance to think.
This made me feel much more energized about getting back to work. It made me realize that the questions I was interested in throughout my career are still interesting — and I’d like to think about them more. Maybe not so confident about the products, but very confident that these questions themselves are worth it.
How do you get people to change their minds? How do you get yourself to change your mind if it seems like you need to? How does identity play into it? How can forces that are increasingly powerful get in the way of real knowledge and changing your mind for the better — getting closer to the truth? People have said that truth doesn’t matter. I think it does, but you have to say more clearly why. Those are things I’d like to think about more. And there’s AI too, which we haven’t gotten to —
Andrea Hiott: We’ll leave that for another time. But I do love that question in the way you’ve been discussing it.
Janet Levin: And as I said in passing — I’ve been thinking more about what it would take to get me to change my own mind. And I think that’s a good first step.
Andrea Hiott: That is a really good first step. I really appreciate you and love this conversation. Thank you so much for spending this time with me, and for your career and your work. Thank you.
Janet Levin: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Andrea Hiott: Is there anything else you want to say, or are we good?
Janet Levin: I think we’re good — but I’d be happy to come back and talk about the Molyneux question.
Andrea Hiott: Okay, great. And maybe also how you change your mind.
Janet Levin: Yes. I’ll try to make up my mind about that.
Andrea Hiott: I’ll try to get you to change your mind about whether to talk about changing your mind.
Janet Levin: Ha — that’d be fun too.
Andrea Hiott: Thank you so much, Janet.
Janet Levin: Thank you. Bye-bye.
Andrea Hiott: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening all the way to the end.
Since you made it here, I’ll just offer a brief note on how this relates to way-making, or navigability — which is what I write about more broadly.
What I want to say is that I think what we understand as thinking is a form of communication with ourselves. When we think of it as communicative — drawing on Habermas and other traditions alongside phenomenology — then a lot of this makes more sense. This is something I write about in my thesis: we are often confusing the self with that communication. We can be social; we can learn how the world is from other perspectives through communication with ourselves, but with others too. Self and mind, in the way I’m presenting it, are communicative processes. That’s why it feels so mystical or mental — why we think it must be another kind of thing.
But in the same way that smell, or sight, or metabolism, or conversation — the fact that we’re communicating right now, whoever you are and wherever you are in the world — is both miraculous and, at the same time, just what happens. So there’s the paradox. It is bigger than a body, this communication. And I think it makes sense that we’ve thought of it in mystical terms — because it is, in a way, mystical. Both and either/or.
There’s more writing about that coming on the Substack, if you’re interested. It would be wonderful if you joined or, if you want to support us, you can visit the giving page — the link is in the show notes. Or come to the Substack. Whatever you wish.
I’m just glad you’re here. Thanks for listening. I’d love to know what you thought. My inbox is a little overwhelming at the moment, but please do write — I love hearing from you. Hope you have a good day, wherever you are. Bye, everyone.
More Links:
Substack (primary): https://lovephilosophy.substack.com/p/81-changing-minds-metaphysics-and
Major Platforms (show pages — episode should appear at the top)