Blackwell Publishers, 1999. Second Edition.
"Armstrong (David) - The Causal Theory of Mind"
Source: Rosenthal - The Nature of Mind
Paper Comment
Also in "Lycan (William) - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology"
"Bechtel (William) - The Case For Connectionism"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
Philosophers Index AbstractThis paper begins with a relatively introductory presentation of connectionist approaches to cognitive modeling and then offers an argument that one contribution of connectionism is to expand our conception of cognition. The bulk of the paper then explores strategies connectionists might pursue in answering one of the major objections to connectionism -- that it cannot account for the productivity and systematicity of thought -- and suggesting a way in which it might account for the intentionality of thought.
"Block (Ned) - Inverted Earth"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
"Block (Ned) - Troubles with Functionalism"
Source: Block - Readings in Philosophy of Psychology - Vol 1
Paper Comment
"Churchland (Patricia) & Sejnowski (Terrence) - Neural Representation and Neural Computation"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
"Churchland (Paul) - Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes"
Source: Rosenthal - The Nature of Mind
Paper Comment
"Churchland (Paul) & Churchland (Patricia) - Stalking the Wild Epistemic Engine"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
Philosophers Index AbstractThe paper develops two themes: (a) computational psychology should seek a wider conception of cognitive processes than is embodied in a sentential/rationalistic model, and (b) because computational psychology is methodologically solipsistic, it cannot provide a theory of how a representational system "hooks up to the world". To make good this deficit, we probe the possibilities for a naturalistic strategy, which we call "calibrational neuroscience".
"Davidson (Donald) - Knowing One's Own Mind"
Source: Davidson - Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Chapter 2
Philosophers Index AbstractA number of philosophers have argued that if the contents of thoughts are in part determined by social or other factors external, and perhaps unknown, to the thinker, then the intuition that we know what we think, special cases aside, must be false. This is a mistake; externalism neither shows that meanings ain't in the head' nor that we do not know what we think. The argument to this conclusion depends on the view that thinking does not require inner objects before the mind.
Is an attempt to resolve the following apparent difficulty: given that the contents of our minds are in part determined by external factors of which we are ignorant, how is it possible for us to know these contents without the need to appeal to evidence? Davidson resolves this difficulty by, among other things, giving up the idea of 'objects before the mind', for the attributes of such objects cannot be hidden from the agent.
Paper Comment
"Davidson (Donald) - Mental Events"
Source: Davidson - Essays on Actions and Events, Chapter 11
Paper Comment
"Davies (Martin) - The Mental Simulation Debate"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
Author’s Introduction (Extract)The present paper has four parts. First, I shall sketch the two opposed positions in the current form of the mental simulation debate: the theory theory and the simulation alternative. Second, I shall give a brief review of some of the empirical literature -though it has to be said at the outset that, in my view, the empirical strand of the debate is at a rather inconclusive stage. In the third section, I shall focus upon the particular development of the simulation theory that has been offered by Alvin Goldman (1989, 1992). I shall use this exposition both as a way of motivating a particular way of delineating the two opposed views, and as a way of introducing the idea that simulation cannot be employed to give a philosophically fundamental account of our use of mental concepts. In the final section, I shall raise the question whether Robert Gordon's (1986, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c, forthcoming) development of the simulation view presents a more promising prospect.
Paper Comment
See Link (Defunct).
"Dennett (Daniel) - Real Patterns"
Source: Dennett - Brainchildren - Essays on Designing Minds
Paper Comment
Also in "Lycan (William) - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology"
"Dennett (Daniel) - True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works"
Source: Dennett - The Intentional Stance, Chapter 2
See the Note1.
Paper Comment
Write-up3 (as at 20/10/2020 09:56:10): Dennett - True Believers
This is a detailed analysis of "Dennett (Daniel) - True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works", written while I was an undergraduate at Birkbeck, sometime around 2002.
- Introduction
- Dennett supplies an introductory quotation from W. Somerset Maugham, entitled Death Speaks. A merchant’s servant has met Death in Baghdad market and interprets his gesture as threatening, so “escapes” to Samarra. It turns out that the gesture wasn’t a threat, but one of surprise, since Death had not expected to see the person in Baghdad, because he had an appointment with him that evening in Samarra4.
- In the social sciences, there is lots of talk about belief, and talk about talk about belief. There is much controversy because belief is a curious, perplexing and multi-faceted phenomenon. Belief attribution is a complex business, especially for exotic, religious or superstitious beliefs. We court argument or scepticism when attributing beliefs to animals, infants, computers or robots. We’re uncomfortable attributing contradictory or wildly false beliefs to apparently healthy adult members of our own society5. Could someone really believe that rabbits are birds? It would take quite a story to persuade us to attribute such a belief to someone.
- Attribution of problematic beliefs is beset by issues of subjectivity, cultural relativism and “the indeterminacy of radical translation6”, whereas attribution in straightforward cases gives no trouble at all. When thinking of these straightforward cases, it almost seems possible in principle to confirm these simple, objective belief attributions by finding the beliefs themselves inside the believer’s head. You either believe X or you don’t believe X (taken to include no opinion), which is an objective fact about you that must come down to your brain being in a particular state. Hence, if we know enough physiological psychology, we could tell whether you believed there was milk in the fridge, whatever you said and however much you dissembled. On this view, physiological psychology could trump any “black box” method of the social sciences that divines beliefs by external criteria such as behavioural, cultural, social or historical.
- There are two extreme opposing views on the nature of belief and its attribution. While baldly stated, they are seen as mutually exclusive and exhaustive, so that the theorist can only be sympathetic to one of them.
- Realism – having a belief is like being infected with a virus; a perfectly objective internal matter of fact which can often be reliably guessed at by an observer.
- Interpretationism7 - the question of a person having a particular belief is analogous to whether the person is immoral or has style; it depends what you’re interested in, is relative and a matter of interpretation.
- Dennett thinks this dichotomy is a mistake. He is a realist in that he thinks beliefs are perfectly objective, but an interpretationist in that he thinks beliefs can only be discerned, and their existence confirmed, from the standpoint of a successful predictive strategy.
- This intentional strategy – adopting the intentional stance – approximates to treating the object whose behaviour you want to predict as a rational agent with beliefs and desires exhibiting intentionality. Dennett will argue that any system whose behaviour is well predicted by this strategy is a believer in the fullest sense of the world. To be an intentional system is just what it is to be a true believer. Dennett has hitherto gained few converts, but will here deal with many compelling objections.
- The Intentional Strategy and How it Works
- Dennett considers one of the “deplorably popular” methods of predicting behaviour – astrology – deplorable only because we have such good evidence that it doesn’t work, occasional success being due to luck or predictive vagueness. If it did work for some people, we could categorise them as astrological systems, whose behaviour was contingently predictable using the astrological strategy. If there were such people, we’d be interested in how the strategy worked – in its rules, principles and methods – and we could do that by asking astrologers, reading their books and watching them in action. But, we’d also be interested in why it worked, and we might find either no opinion on the part of the astrologers or pure hokum. So, having a good strategy and knowing why it works are two different things.
- Consider the physical stance, which allows behaviour prediction by determining a system’s physical constitution and the physical impingements on it and using the laws of physics, as in Laplace’s grand strategy for predicting the entire future of the universe. More modest versions work for predictions made by laboratory chemists and physicists, as well as cooks. While the strategy is not always practically available, that it will always work in principle, ignoring quantum indeterminacy, it is a dogma of the physical sciences.
- Sometimes it is more convenient to adopt the design stance, which ignores the messy physical details, and predicts that a system will behave as it is designed to do under the circumstances. Most computer users have no idea of the physical constitution of their machines, but can predict their behaviour, barring physical malfunction, based on what they are designed to do. Similarly one can predict the behaviour of alarm clocks based on a casual examination of their exteriors, or at a lower level, based on a description of the system of gears, without their material being specified.
- One can only predict the designed behaviour from the design stance – one would need to revert to the physical stance if one wanted to know what would happen if the clock were filled with liquid helium. Many biological objects – such as hearts or stamens – can be treated as designed as well as physical systems.
- Where even the design stance is practically inaccessible, one can retreat to the intentional stance. This works by
- treating the object whose behaviour is to be predicted as a rational agent,
- determining what beliefs the agent ought to have, given its purpose and place in the world,
- determining by the same principles what desires it ought to have and finally,
- predicting that the rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs.
In many cases, a little practical reasoning will give a decision about what the agent ought to do, and this is what we predict it will do.
- Dennett attempts to make the strategy clearer with a little elaboration. He asks how we populate one another’s heads with beliefs. He starts with truisms – sheltered people tend to be ignorant, but exposure leads to knowledge. In general we come to believe all the truths we’re exposed to in our corner of the world. Sensory confrontation with x for a suitable period of time is normally sufficient for us to know or have true beliefs about x. We are highly suspicious of the claims to ignorance of those in a position to know (eg. that the gun was loaded).
- In fact, we only come to “know all about” and believe relevant truths, though anything interesting is learnable provided it is within my threshold of discrimination and the integration and holding power of my memory. Hence, one rule for attributing beliefs in the intentional strategy is to attribute all the beliefs relevant to the system’s interests and desires that its experience has made available. This has a couple of defects, in that we are forgetful even of important things and entertain false beliefs. However, Dennett thinks that the attribution of any false belief arises in the main from true beliefs, the falsehood starting from hallucination, illusion, misperception, memory loss, or even fraud – but that false beliefs grow in a culture of true beliefs.
- Dennett thinks that even arcane beliefs arise by a process of mainly good reasoning from beliefs already attributed. An implication of the intentional strategy is that true believers mainly believe truths; Dennett hazards that more than 90% of a person’s beliefs are arrived at using the rule in the bullet above8.
- This rule is derived from a more fundamental one, namely to attribute to a system the beliefs it ought to have, and the same goes for desires. We attribute the usual list of basic beliefs to people (ie. survival, food, …) and citing such a desire terminates the “why?” game of reason-giving. Trivially, we have a rule to attribute desires to a system for things it thinks good for it, and, less trivially, attribute to it desires for things it thinks the best means to other ends it desires. Attribution of bizarre or detrimental desires, like false beliefs, requires special stories.
- Verbal behaviour complicates the relation between beliefs and desires as the latter are attributed on its basis. We would find it difficult to attribute a desire for a meal specified in detail in the absence of verbal expression. Dennett thinks that language not only enables us to express complex desires but also to have them. Expressed desires are more particular than what would satisfy you. Once expressed, since you are a truth-teller, you are committed to their detailed satisfaction.
- One might object to being asked how many baked beans one wanted, but we are socialised to accede to similar requests we hardly notice and certainly don’t find oppressive. There is a parallel with beliefs, on which verbalisation forces an often unwanted precision. Focusing on the results rather than the effects of this social force can easily mislead us into thinking that obviously beliefs and desires are like sentences stored in the head. Fully formed sentences that come true, or which we want to come true, may be unreliable models for the whole domain of belief and desire.
- With respect to the rationality of intentional systems, we start off charitably and revise downwards as circumstances dictate. We assume people are perfectly rational and believe all the implications of their beliefs and entertain no contradictions. The clutter of infinitely many implications isn’t a problem because we’re only interested in ensuring the system is rational enough to get to the implications relevant to its behavioural predicament of the moment. Dennett leaves aside, for this chapter, questions of irrationality and finitude, which he says raise particularly knotty problems of interpretation.
- Turning from description to use, Dennett claims people use the intentional strategy all the time, since it’s the only practical one we currently have, and that it works almost all the time. Dennett’s example is why we don’t think it a good idea for Oxford Colleges to dream up and award their own degrees whenever they feel like it. He doesn’t spell out the example but alludes to the sort of “what if” strategy we’d adopt in working out the probable consequences by thinking of how people would act. Because the intentional strategy is so habitual and effortless, we overlook the way it shapes our expectations of people – and of other mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and even shell-fish, for that matter. We devise traps to catch lesser creatures by reasoning about what they know, desire, avoid and so on. A chess-playing computer will not take your knight if it can see a reply that will let you win its rook. A modest thermostat will turn off the heater when it believes9 the room has reached the desired temperature.
- Some plants10 are cautious about concluding spring, which is when they want to blossom, has come early. Lightening always wants to find the quickest way to earth, but sometimes a clever electrician can fool it into choosing another path.
- True Believers as Intentional Systems
- Dennett comes clean and admits that the quality of the belief attributions in the previous section varies from the serious to the dubious to the pedagogically useful metaphors to outright fraud. The next task maybe ought to be to distinguish those systems that really have beliefs from those that only appear to do so, but Dennett thinks this would be either a labour of Sisyphus11 or would just be terminated by fiat. The important thing to note is that even where we know the strategy works for the wrong reasons, at least it still does work, at least to a degree, and it is this that distinguishes the class of intentional systems, ie. from the class for which the strategy never works. However, is the latter class empty? Does the Oxford lectern from which Dennett is lecturing believe, like some of his auditors, that it is at the centre of the civilised world? Does it want to stay there, and adopt the best strategy of staying put. Is it therefore an intentional system, given that I can attribute beliefs and desires to it and predict its course of action? If so anything is.
- Dennett thinks that the lectern is disqualified because we already knew it was going to do nothing, and tailored its beliefs and desires in an unprincipled manner to suit. This isn’t the case with people, animals and computers, where the intentional strategy is the only strategy that works for predicting behaviour.
- It might be objected that this doesn’t reflect a difference in the nature of the systems, but only reflects our incompetence as scientists. Had we Laplacean omniscience, we’d be able to predict the behaviour of a computer or a human body (assuming it to be governed by the laws of physics) without recourse to the sloppy design and intentional strategies. Engineers manage to avoid anthropomorphising thermostats; their failure with more complex systems and artefacts is just symptomatic of human epistemic frailty, and we wouldn’t want to count them with ourselves as true believes on such parochial grounds. Wouldn’t it be intolerable for a system to be classified as a believer by one observer but not by a cleverer one? This would be radical interpretationism, which Dennett doesn’t accept, his view being that, while we are free to adopt the intentional stance or not, if we do the results of its adoption are perfectly objective.
- The success of the stance tends to be obscured by a focus on cases where it yields dubious or unreliable results. In chess, the intentional strategy, even when it fails to pick out just the move to be made, drastically reduces the possibilities from the full list of legal but bad moves.
- While we can’t predict the buy and sell decisions by stockbrokers or the exact speech to be given by a politician, we can successfully predict some of the sorts of decisions they will make or themes they will raise today. This lack of precision can be useful in allowing us to chain predictions. If the Secretary of State were to admit to being a communist agent, even though this would be such a startling event, we could still make many successful predictions, including chains of predictions. While mostly not startling, these predictions describe an arc of causation in space-time that could not be predicted by any imaginable practical extension of physics or biology.
- The intentional strategy’s power is illustrated by an objection of Robert Nozick’s. Imagine some ultra-intelligent Martians to whom we are as thermostats are to clever engineers, so that they do not need the design or intentional stances to predict our behaviour as Laplacean super-physicists. While we might see brokers and bids on Wall Street, they see sub-atomic particles milling about and are such good physicists that they can predict days in advance the ink marks on the tape announcing the DJIA close. They can predict the behaviour of moving bodies without the need to treat them as intentional systems. Would we be right to conclude that from their perspective we aren’t intentional systems any more than thermostats? If so, our status as believers is not objective but is in the eye of a beholder sharing our intellectual limitations.
- Dennett’s response is that if the Martians didn’t see us as intentional systems, then, despite their Laplacean predictions, they would be missing the perfectly objective patterns of human behaviour that support generalisations and predictions and are only describable from the intentional stance. If they see a stockbroker deciding to place an order, and predict the exact movements of phone-dialling finger and vibrating vocal-cords as he places the order, yet do not see that indefinitely many motions, even from different individuals, would have had the same impact on the market, then they have missed a real pattern in the world. One hasn’t understood how internal combustion engines or stock-markets work unless one realises the intersubstitutivity of one spark-plug for another, or one similar order for another. There are societal pivot points where what matters concerning what people do is whether they believe that p or desire A, and other similarities or differences between individuals are irrelevant.
- Dennett imagines a prediction contest between the Martian and an Earthling predicting a person’s actions based on a telephone call to the wife (I will turn up for dinner with the boss in an hour armed with a bottle of wine). Both predict the arrival of the car, but the Earthling’s prediction – a reasonable guess – seems like a miracle to the Martian, given the amount of calculation required (from the physical stance) and the Earthling’s obvious inability to perform them. Dennett claims that the coming true of the Earthling’s predictions would appear to someone without the intentionalist strategy as marvellous and inexplicable as the fatalistic inevitability of the rendezvous in Samarra12. Dennett explains that fatalists (like astrologers) wrongly believe that the patterns in human affairs are inevitable and will transpire come what may, however much the victims scheme, second-guess and wriggle in their chains. They are almost right, in that there are patterns in human affairs – those we categorise in terms of the beliefs, desires and intentions of rational agents – which, while not quite inexorable, are capable of absorbing apparently random physical perturbations and variations.
- There is a cavil against this story, in that if the Martian is willing to enter into a contest with the Earthling, he must recognise the Earthling as an intentional system, and so, why not recognise all Earthlings as such, and the mystery would evaporate. Dennett imagines patching up the tale by stories of Earthling disguise, but thinks this would obscure the moral; namely, the unavoidability of the intentional stance with respect to oneself and one’s fellow intelligent beings. He admits that this is interest-relative, in that one can adopt the physical stance to intelligent beings, oneself included. However, one must also adopt the intentional stance to oneself, and also to one’s fellows, if one intends to learn what they know. Our Martians may fail to recognise us as intentional systems, but they must possess the relevant concepts because they view themselves as intentional systems if they observe, theorise, predict and communicate13. The patterns are there to be described, whether or not we care to see them.
- Dennett stresses two things about the intentional patterns discernible in the activities of intelligent creatures:
- Their reality, the objective fact that the intentional strategy works as well as it does.
- Since no-one is perfectly rational, unforgetful, observant or immune to fatigue, malfunction or design imperfection, the intentional stance does not work perfectly, since these problems lead to situations it cannot describe.
(b) is similar to the failure of the design stance to work with broken or malfunctioning artefacts. Even in the mild psychopathological14 cases of self-deception or the holding of contradictory beliefs, the intentional strategy fails to provide clear and stable verdicts on what desires and beliefs to attribute to such an one.
- A holder of a strong realist position on beliefs and desires would insist that the person in the above degenerate situation does have particular beliefs and desires, but that these are undiscoverable by the intentional strategy. Dennett, while not adopting a relativist, but rather a milder realist, position, thinks there is no fact of the matter in such cases, but that why and when this is the case is objective. He also allows the interest-relativity of belief attribution, and that one culture might attribute different beliefs to a particular individual than would another. We can have multiple objective patterns with their respective imperfections and with objective facts about how well the respective intentional strategies work in predicting behaviour and out-gun rivals.
- The bogey of radically different and equally warranted interpretations derived using the intentionalist strategy is metaphysically important, though not if we restrict our attention to human beings, the most complex intentional systems we know15.
- It’s now time to point out the obvious differences between ourselves and thermostats. What Dennett describes as the “perverse claim” is that all there is to being a true believer is being a system whose behaviour can be successfully predicted by the intentional strategy. In other words, that all there is to really and truly believing that p is being an intentional system for which p occurs as a belief in the most predictive interpretation. However, Dennett thinks that, in the context of interesting and versatile intentional systems, such an apparently shallow and instrumentalist criterion for belief puts severe constraints on the internal constitution of a true believer and consequently yields a robust version of belief.
- Considering the thermostat, at most we might attribute to it six beliefs – such as the room is too hot/cold, the boiler on/off, obtaining a warmer room requires it to turn the boiler on – and fewer desires. Suppose, given that it has no concept of heat and so on, that we de-interpret the thermostat’s beliefs and desires – believing that the A is too F, and so on, since by giving it different inputs and outputs it could regulate things other than temperature. As Dennett says, attachment to a heat-sensitive transducer and a boiler is too impoverishing a link to the world for us to grant any rich semantics16 to its belief-like states17.
- Say we enhance its sensory inputs with eyes and ears with which to see and hear shivering and complaining occupants, and give it rudimentary geography to know the likely temperature on being told where it is. Dennett imagines us giving it other functions to perform, such as purchasing fuel, and generally enriching its internal complexity and giving its belief-like states more to do by providing more and different occasions for their deduction from other states and occasions to act as premises for further reasoning. The end result is to enrich the semantics18 of its dummy predicates so that it becomes less able to act as a maintainer of anything other than room temperature. That is, the class of indistinguishable satisfactory models of the formal system embedded in its internal states gets smaller and smaller as we increase complexity, until we get to a virtually unique semantic interpretation. Then, we would say that this device – or animal or person – has beliefs about heat and about this room because we cannot imagine any other context in which it would work.
- Our thermostat had beliefs about a particular boiler because it was fastened to it, but it could easily be attached to something else so that its minimal causal link to the world and the rather impoverished meaning of its internal states changes. For more perceptually rich and behaviourally more versatile systems, it becomes more difficult to substitute its links to the world without changing its organisation – it will notice the change in its environment and its internal states will change to compensate. Dennett claims that complex systems with fixed states require very specific environments to operate properly, but that those with states that are not fixed will adapt to the environment perceived by their sensitive sensory attachments and be driven into a new operative state. The organism mirrors the environment, which is represented in the organisation of the system.
- Dennett stresses his views about the direction of belief attribution. When we find something for which the intentional strategy works, we try to interpret some of its internal states as internal representations. This is in contrast to attributing beliefs and desires only to things in which we find internal representations. What makes an internal feature of a thing into a representation has to be its role in regulating the behaviour of the intentional system.
- The reason Dennett has stressed our relation to the thermostat is his view that there is no magic moment as we move upwards from the thermostat to a system that really has an internal representation of its environment. He imagines a gradual transition from fancier thermostats to us via robots, each having a more demanding representation of the world than its predecessor. We are so intricately connected to the world that almost no substitution is possible except in thought experiment. Hilary Putnam imagines Twin Earth where everything appears to be an exact replica of earth, except below the threshold of our powers of discrimination – in this case what is called water on Twin Earth having a different chemical analysis to that on earth. Were you swapped with your Twin Earth replica you’d never be the wiser, just as was the simple thermostat with a much grosser change of inputs. For us, if Earth and Twin Earth aren’t virtual replicas, we will notice and change our states dramatically.
- Our beliefs are about our own boilers (rather than those on Twin Earth). Fixing the semantic referents of our beliefs requires facts about our actual embedding in the world. Dennett claims that the problems we have attributing belief to people are just the same as those we have attributing beliefs to thermostats. A final word of common sense – while the differences between thermostats and human beings are, says Dennett, only a matter of degree, they are of such a degree that understanding the internal organisation of the one gives one very little basis for understanding that of the other.
- Why Does the Intentional Strategy Work?
- There are two very different answers to the ambiguous question of why the intentional strategy works as well as it does. The true but uninformative answer for simple intentional systems like thermostats is that they are designed to be systems that are easily comprehended and manipulated from the intentional stance. However, we really want to know what it is about the design that explains its performance – that is, how the machinery works.
- The same ambiguity arises if the system is a person. The first answer is that evolution19 has designed human beings to be rational, to believe and want what they ought to. Our long and demanding evolutionary20 ancestry makes the use of the intentional strategy a safe bet. While true and brief, this answer is also uninformative because what we want to know is how the machinery provided by Nature works. Unfortunately, we just don’t know the answer to the hard question, despite knowing the answer to the easy question and the fact that the strategy works.
- There’s no denying there are plenty of doctrines about. A Skinnerian behaviourist would say the strategy works because its imputations of beliefs and desires are shorthand for complex descriptions of prior histories of response and reinforcement. Saying someone desires ice-cream just is to say that previous ingestion of ice-cream has been reinforced in him by the results, creating a propensity under further complex background conditions to engage in ice-cream- acquiring behaviour. Despite our lack of detailed knowledge of these historical facts we can still induct shrewd guesses, and these guesses are embodied in the claims of our intentional stance. Dennett thinks that, even were all this true, it would still tell us little about the way such propensities are regulated by the internal machinery.
- A more contemporary explanation is that the accounts of the workings of the strategy and mechanism will approximately coincide. For each predictively attributable belief there is a functionally relevant internal machine-state, decomposable into parts much as the sentence expressing the belief is into its words or terms. Inferences attributable to rational creatures are mirrored in physical, causal processes in the hardware, with logical form paralleled by the structural form of the corresponding states. This hypothesis is that there is a language of thought21 encoded in our brains, which will eventually be understood as symbol-manipulating machines analogous to computers. Dennett thinks this basic, bold claim of cognitive science will eventually prove correct.
- Dennett thinks that those who think it is obvious that such a theory will prove true are confusing two empirical claims.
- The description provided by the intentional stance yields an objective, real pattern in the world, one missed by our Martians – this empirical claim is confirmed beyond sceptical doubt.
- This real pattern is produced by another real and roughly isomorphic pattern within the brains of intelligent creatures – which can be doubted without doubting claim (1).
Dennett thinks that, while there are reasons for believing (2), they are not overwhelming.
- Dennett accounts for the reasons as follows. As we progress from thermostat via robot to human being we encounter combinatorial explosion in our attempts to design systems. A 10% increase in inputs, or more aspects of behaviour to control, results in an increase in complexity of orders of magnitude. Things rapidly get out of hand and programs swamp the most powerful computers. Somehow the brain has solved the problem of combinatorial explosion. While a gigantic network of billions of cells, it remains finite, reliable, compact & swift – capable of learning new behaviours, vocabularies and theories almost without limit. Some generative, indefinitely extendable principles of representation must be involved, of which we have only one model – a human language. So, what else could we have but a language of thought22? Our inability to think of alternatives warrants our pursuit of this strategy as far as we can, though we should remember that it is not guaranteed to be successful. One doesn’t well understand even a true empirical hypothesis if under the illusion that it is necessarily true.
In-Page Footnotes ("Dennett (Daniel) - True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works")
Footnote 3:
- This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (20/10/2020 09:56:10).
- Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 4:
- See "Somerset Maugham (W.) - The Appointment in Samarra".
- I’d thought the point of the quotation by Dennett to be the intentionality of the gesture. It has meaning, but its meaning is not clear. The merchant’s servant adopts the intentional stance towards Death, assuming the gesture has meaning, but misinterprets it.
- But, of course, the original story is about the inevitability of fate, or such-like.
- Dennett picks up on this point later, saying that clever Martians with the ability to calculate future events based on the physicalist stance would find the intentionalist strategy as marvelous and inexplicable as the fatalistic inevitability of the Rendezvous in Samarra. I find this obscure.
- So, I have to admit to not fully understanding the analogy or the point of the quotation.
Footnote 6:
- Of which Dennett appears scornful, noting that it requires phenomenological analysis, hermeneutics, empathy, verstehen, etc.
Footnote 7:
- Dennett dislikes having to give this view a name.
Footnote 8:
- Dennett includes a long footnote discussing the differences amongst philosophers on this issue – ie. between those who think it obvious that most of our beliefs are true (Quine, Davidson, ...) and those who think it obviously false. His diagnosis is that they are talking about different things. Dennett suggests distinguishing between beliefs and opinions – the latter approximating to betting on the truth of a particular sentence. He considers Democritus’s beliefs – even though his physics was totally wrong, his ordinary beliefs (about where he lived, where to buy a good pair of sandals, …) were most likely true. Dennett counters the response that since all beliefs are theory-laden, a view he accepts and thinks important, and since Democritus’s theory was wrong, so were his quotidian beliefs. He asks why we should assume that Democritus’s explicit theory (his opinions) is what infects his daily beliefs rather than the same benign theory that undergirds the beliefs of his less sophisticated contemporaries? Democritus’s observational beliefs would be left largely untouched by change of his theoretical opinions, since few of them would be touched by it.
Footnote 9:
- This, of course, cries out for a sceptical response (but wait for the next section) !
Footnote 11: Footnote 12:
- See the introductory quotation, and my Footnote above.
Footnote 13:
- Dennett thinks that beings lacking these modes of action would be “marvellous, nifty and invulnerable” entities, but that we’d not call them intelligent. Quite so, which is why people don’t call computers intelligent.
Footnote 15:
- In justification, Dennett points out an analogy with cryptography – the more information available, the less likely there are to be radically different interpretations consistent with the data.
Footnote 17:
- But, I would say, our reason for doubting it has beliefs is that it hasn’t anything to believe with.
"Devitt (Michael) - A Narrow Representational Theory of the Mind"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
"Fodor (Jerry) - A Theory of Content"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
Paper Comment
This is just pp. 180 - 206 of "Fodor (Jerry) - A Theory of Content, II: The Theory" (pp. 206 - 217 omitted)
"Fodor (Jerry) - The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanation"
Source: Fodor - Representations - Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science
Paper Comment
Also in "Lycan (William) - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology"
"Gordon (Robert M.) - Folk Psychology as Simulation"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
Paper Comment
Also in "Davies (Martin) & Stone (Tony) - Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate".
"Griffiths (Paul) - Modularity, and the Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
Philosophers Index AbstractIt is unreasonable to assume that our prescientific emotion vocabulary embodies all and only those distinctions required for a scientific psychology of emotion. The psychoevolutionary approach to emotion yields an alternative classification of certain emotion phenomena. The new categories are based on a set of evolved adaptive responses, or affect-programs, which are found in all cultures. The triggering of these responses involves a modular system of stimulus appraisal, whose evaluations may conflict with those of higher-level cognitive processes. Whilst the structure of the adaptive responses is innate, the contents of the system which triggers them are largely learnt. The circuits subserving the adaptive responses are probably located in the limbic system. This theory of emotion is directly applicable only to a small sub-domain of the traditional realm of emotion. It can be used, however, to explain the grouping of various other phenomena under the heading of emotion, and to explain various characteristic failings of the prescientific conception of emotion.
"Harman (Gilbert) - The Intrinsic Quality of Experience"
Source: Block, Flanagan & Guzeldere - The Nature of Consciousness
Paper Comment
Also in "Lycan (William) - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology"
"Heil (John) - Privileged Access"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
"Horgan (Terence) & Woodward (James) - Folk Psychology is Here to Stay"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
Philosophers Index AbstractPaul Churchland and Stephen Stich recently have given distinct but related arguments for saying that "folk psychology" is radically false, i.e., that humans do not have beliefs, desires, or other propositional attitudes. We examine their arguments critically, and find them wanting. In particular, we argue that they each impose implausibly strong constraints upon the way that folk psychology must be related to lower-level theories in cognitive science or neuroscience in order to be compatible with them.
"Jackson (Frank) - Epiphenomenal Qualia"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
Philosophers Index AbstractThis paper is a defense of qualia freakery. The author advances what he calls the knowledge argument to show that physicalism1 leaves qualia out of account. He then contrasts the knowledge argument with what he calls the modal2 argument and the 'what-is-it-like-to-be' argument. Finally he discusses whether qualia are causally efficacious, and argues that it is at least a possible view that they are not.
Paper Comment
For the full text, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File3.
Write-up4 (as at 10/04/2017 23:38:24): Jackson - Epiphenomenal Qualia
This note5 provides my detailed review of "Jackson (Frank) - Epiphenomenal Qualia".
Frank Jackson – Epiphenomenal Qualia: Summary & Aims
- The aim of Jackson’s paper is to overthrow the doctrine of physicalism6, and to show that the best argument against it is the knowledge argument rather than the modal or what it is like arguments.
- Worries about qualia having causal powers are allayed by espousing epiphenomenalism.
Text
- Introduction
- Much physical information of the physical, chemical and biological kinds is provided by the natural sciences. For example medical science may tell us much about the central nervous system and how processes going on in it relate to the happenings in the world around, past and future and to other organisms, leading to an understanding of the functional role of these processes.
- There are problems giving a precise definition of the notions of physical information, processes and property and therefore of the thesis of Physicalism7; that all correct information is physical information.
- Jackson is a qualia freak. He thinks that no amount of physical information can include certain features of bodily sensations and perceptual experiences. Whatever I know about the physical brain, its states and their functional roles and relations, is not enough to tell me anything about the itchiness of itches or the experience of smelling a rose, etc.
- Some qualia freaks say the rejection of physicalism8 is just an unargued intuition, but this is inadequate, for there are knock-down arguments available. Nothing of a physical sort captures the smell of a rose, so physicalism9 is false. The argument is perfectly good, though not logically valid, and the premise is intuitively obvious.
- However, such an argument is polemically weak because not everyone does find the premise intuitively obvious. We need to find an argument with premises obvious to as many as possible. Jackson thinks the Knowledge argument is the best bet, in contrast to the Modal and What is it like to be? arguments. The major objection to the existence of qualia is the supposed causal role they would have, but Jackson thinks that the view that qualia are epiphenomenal is adequate.
- The Knowledge Argument for Qualia
- Jackson starts with an example of exceptional colour discrimination – Fred can finely distinguish things of different colours, demonstrated by his objective ability to sort red tomatoes repeatedly and identically into two groups.
- He sees two colours, red1 and red2, where we see one. He cannot teach this discrimination, which he takes to be red1 / red2 colour-blindness in the rest of us. Physiological investigation shows that Fred’s optical system can distinguish two groups of wavelengths in the red spectrum as well as we can distinguish yellow and blue.
- We must admit that Fred can really see one more colour than the rest of us. To resist this view is to be like those in H G Wells’ The Country of the Blind where the faculty of sight on the part of those who could see was ridiculed and the advantages conferred by sightedness (not falling into ditches, for instance) being put down just to those special skills themselves.
- We do not know what kind of experience Fred has when he sees red1 and red2, and no amount of physical information about Fred’s brain or optical system can tell us. Information about cones tells us nothing about his colour experience. Because, despite knowing all the physical information, including knowledge of Fred’s body, behaviour, dispositions, physiology and history, we still don’t know everything about Fred, physicalism10 leaves something out.
- This point is emphasised by considering that, even were we able to make everyone (or by transplantation, one particular person) see like Fred, then this would only go to show that beforehand there was something about Fred we didn’t know (because we came to know it).
- Beforehand, we had all the physical information about Fred, but after the operation, there is more we know about Fred’s visual experience, so physicalism11 must be incomplete.
- Jackson gives another example – Mary, the brilliant scientist, has normal colour vision, but is forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television. She’s a specialist in the neurophysiology of vision, and knows what wavelengths of light cause us to use which colour-words, including all the mechanical workings that cause us actually to utter these words.
- However, when Mary is freed from her room, she will learn something more about the world and our experience of it. Prior thereto, despite all the physical evidence, she did not have all the knowledge, so physicalism12 is false.
- Similarly for other senses and for mental states with phenomenal features or qualia. So, qualia are left out. The polemical strength of the knowledge argument is that it is hard to deny the claim that we can have all the physical information without having all the information there is to be had.
- The Modal Argument
- This argument is that no amount of physical information logically entails that a person feels anything. So, there is a possible world in which they don’t, and no-one has any conscious mental life, though everything is physically the same. The difference cannot ex hypothesi be a physical one, so there is more to us than the merely physical and physicalism13 is false.
- While not preferring this argument, Jackson rejects one objection to it – that the physicalist14 only claims that physicalism15 is contingently true, in particular in our world. Be this as it may, if we in our world have additional features to physically identical replicas in other worlds, then we have non-physical features or qualia and the argument goes through.
- The problem with the modal argument is that it depends on a disputable, because disputed, modal intuition. We can dispute whether physically identical beings could lack consciousness.
- Our modal intuitions may arise from our rejection of physicalism16 on other grounds, eg. the Knowledge argument, so cannot form grounds for a conclusion that physicalism17 leaves something out. We might also draw a parallel with the argument that any two identical worlds would agree on aesthetic qualities, without aesthetic qualities being reducible to the natural.
- The “What is it like to be” Argument
- According to Thomas Nagel, no amount of physical information can tell us what it’s like to be a bat, because this can only be known from the bat’s perspective, which is not ours. Because something understandable in purely physical terms ought to be understandable from any perspective, the bat’s perspective cannot be captured in physical terms.
- Jackson points out an important difference between this argument and the Knowledge argument. The crux of the latter is not that we don’t know what it’s like to be Fred, but only that there’s something about his experience – a property of it – that we were ignorant of. Even were we to be able to distinguish between red1 and red2, we still wouldn’t know what it’s like to be Fred. We are not Fred, and no amount of knowledge, physical or otherwise, about Fred will help us to know Fred from the inside.
- When Fred sees red1 he knows two things; firstly, that he sees it as distinct from red2 ; secondly that he himself is seeing it. Physicalists18 no more than qualia freaks would suppose that knowledge of any sort that others have about Fred supplies knowledge of the second kind. Jackson’s argument is based on the first form of absent knowledge.
- According to Nagel, while we might be able to extrapolate for human beings from one shade of blue to another, the gulf between humans and bats is too great. However, Jackson sees no problem for physicalism19 here, which need make no claims about the imaginative powers of human beings.
- The reason the Knowledge argument goes through, according to Jackson, is that it makes no assumptions about our imaginative powers, which would be unnecessary if physicalism20 gave us all the knowledge we need.
- The Bogey of Epiphenomenalism
- Frank Jackson argues that there are no good reasons for rejecting the causal impotence of qualia. However, he does not address two other typical epiphenominalist views.
- That mental states have no causal effects. All he wants to argue is that some properties of some mental states make no difference to the physical world.
- That the mental is totally causally inefficacious. He thinks that qualia may affect other mental states even though they affect nothing physical, and that our awareness of qualia demands this.
- There are three standard reasons put forward for why qualia like the hurtfulness of a pain must sometimes make a difference to the physical brain or have other causal effects on the physical world.
- Obvious Consequences: It is taken as obvious that it is the hurtfulness of pain that is at least partly responsible for us avoiding it, or complaining that it hurts. Response: the constant conjunction of A and B may not be that A causes B, but that both A and B have a common cause. Certain happenings in the brain cause both behaviour and the feeling of hurt, just as the film director’s skilful use of film in a fight scene gives the illusion that a flying fist causes a head to shoot back, when it’s the case that his direction is the common cause of both.
- Evolutionary21 Origins: Qualia could only have evolved if they were useful for survival, which would not be the case if they have no impact on the physical world. Response: evolved characteristics have either to be conducive for survival or a by-product of such a quality. Polar bears evolved heavy coats that slow them down as a by-product of them evolving warm coats. Qualia are by-products of brain processes that are conducive to survival.
- Knowledge of Other Minds: how we know about other minds is controversial, but what is agreed on is that it depends at least in part on inference from behaviour. So, how can observation give reason to believe that other people have qualia unless, contra the epiphenominalist, their behaviour is thought of as the outcome of the qualia? How can I infer Man Friday’s existence from a footprint if I deny that footprints arise from feet? Response: similar to (i). Reading the result of a football match in paper A is good reason for me to expect to read about it in paper B, not because paper B gets its information from paper A, but because they both get their information directly by sending reporters to the match. So, A & B have a common cause, rather than A causing B. The epiphenominalist can similarly argue that qualia, though they have no physical effects, are caused by the same physical thing, namely brain workings, as behaviour. So he can argue back from others’ behaviour to others’ brain workings and out again to others’ qualia. While there may be problems with this analogy, things are no worse for epiphenominalism that for other theories of mind such as Interactionism. The problem of other minds is a major philosophical problem.
- There is a natural response to these responses that, while there is no knock-down response to epiphenominalism, it still leaves qualia as an excrescence that do and explain nothing and whose place in the worldview of science is a mystery.
- Jackson’s response to this view is that, while true, it rests on an over-optimistic expectation of the capacities of the human intellect. The understanding is formed by evolution22, and since qualia have no physical consequences they can have no survival value. Consequently, there has been no way for evolution23 to get a purchase on qualia and give a selective advantage to those who can understand them over those who can’t. Hence, minds capable of understanding qualia have not evolved.
- Evolution24 is a matter of chance constrained by preservation or increase of survival value. It is not surprising that there are some things outside our comprehension – maybe qualia being such. Rather, it is surprising that we can understand as much as we can.
- Jackson ends with an analogy. There might be supposed to be beings that have evolved in more restricted or more expansive environments than us, the former denying the existence of things known to us and the latter knowing more. The tough-minded “intelligent sea-slugs” may deny the existence of some things known to us (as tough-minded philosophers of mind deny qualia) on the grounds that no sea-slug can explain how these things fit into the successful sea-slug science. From our perspective, we can see what the sea-slugs can’t and we can suppose super-beings whose perspective may allow them to understand things we can’t.
In-Page Footnotes ("Jackson (Frank) - Epiphenomenal Qualia")
Footnote 4:
- This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (10/04/2017 23:38:24).
- Link to Latest Write-Up Note.
Footnote 5:
- Originally, this write-up was only available as a PDF, see File Note (PDF).
- It has now been converted to Note format.
- I’m not sure when I wrote the original version – here reproduced; presumably in 2002 or thereabouts.
"Kim (Jaegwon) - Mental Causation"
Source: Kim - Philosophy of Mind, 1998, Chapter 6
Contents
- Agency and Mental Causation1 – 126
- Mental Causation2, Mental Realism, Epiphenomenalism – 128
- Cartesian Interactionism – 130
- Psychophysical Laws and "Anomalous Monism" – 132
- Property Epiphenomenalism and the Causal Efficacy of Mental Properties – 138
- Can Counterfactuals Help? 139
- The Extrinsicness of Mental States – 144
- The Closure of the Physical Domain – 147
- Mind-Body Supervenience3 and Causal / Explanatory Exclusion – 148
- Further Readings – 152
- Notes – 153
Paper Comment
Also in "Lycan (William) - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology"
"Lewis (David) - What Experience Teaches"
Source: Lewis - Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology
Paper Comment
"Lycan (William) - Consciousness, 'Qualia' and Subjectivity - Introduction"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology, 1999
"Lycan (William) - Eliminitivism and Neurophilosophy - Introduction"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology, 1999
"Lycan (William) - Emotion - Introduction"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology, 1999
"Lycan (William) - Instrumentalism - Introduction"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology, 1999
"Lycan (William) - Ontology: The Identity Theory and Functionalism - Introduction"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology, 1999
"Lycan (William) - The 'Language of Thought' Hypothesis - Introduction"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology, 1999
"Lycan (William) - The Status of 'Folk Psychology' - Introduction"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology, 1999
"McLaughlin (Brian) - Type Epiphenomenalism, Type Dualism, and the Causal Priority of the Physical"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
"Millikan (Ruth Garrett) - Biosemantics"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
Philosophers Index AbstractBiosemantics presents a naturalist theory of the semantic content of mental representations that is neither a causal nor an informational theory, yet is roughly in the tradition of Dretske, Fodor and, most closely, Matthen. It constitutes a clarification and defense of Millikan's work on this issue in "language, thought, and other biological categories". Differences between very primitive and more sophisticated systems of inner representation are also discussed.
Paper Comment
"Nash (Ronald Alan) - Cognitive Theories of Emotion"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
"Place (U.T.) - Is Consciousness a Brain Process?"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
Abstract
- The thesis that consciousness is a process in the brain is put forward as a reasonable scientific hypothesis, not to be dismissed on logical grounds alone.
- The conditions under which two sets of observations are treated as observations of same process, rather than as observations of two independent correlated processes, are discussed.
- It is suggested that we can identify consciousness with a given pattern of brain activity, if we can explain subject's introspective observations by reference to brain processes with which they are correlated.
- It is argued that problem of providing a physiological explanation of introspective observations is made to seem more difficult than it really is by the ‘phenomenological fallacy’, the mistaken idea that descriptions of appearances of things are descriptions of actual state of affairs in a mysterious internal environment.
Paper Comment
For the full text, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File1.
"Putnam (Hilary) - The Nature of Mental States"
Source: Putnam - Philosophical Papers 2 - Mind, Language and Reality
Paper Comment
Also in:-
"Sober (Elliott) - Putting the Function Back into Functionalism"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
"Stich (Stephen) - Autonomous Psychology and the Belief-Desire Thesis"
Source: Rosenthal - The Nature of Mind
Philosophers Index AbstractThe "belief-desire thesis" is the claim that states invoked in an explanatory psychological theory will include beliefs and desires. The "principle of autonomous psychology" is the claim that states invoked in an explanatory psychological theory must supervene1 upon current, internal physical states. A more informal way of stating the autonomy principle is this: organisms which are physical replicas of each other will be indistinguishable from the point of view of explanatory psychology. The paper argues that there is an incompatibility between the belief-desire thesis and the principle of autonomous psychology.
Paper Comment
"Stich (Stephen) - Dennett on Intentional Systems"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
"Stich (Stephen) - Narrow Content Meets Fat Syntax"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
"Van Gelder (Timothy) - What Might Cognition Be, If Not Computation?"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
"Van Gulick (Robert) - Understanding the Phenomenal Mind: Are We All Just Armadillos? (Parts 1 & 2)"
Source: Block, Flanagan & Guzeldere - The Nature of Consciousness
Paper Comment
"Wilson (Robert) - An a priori Argument: The Argument For Causal Powers"
Source: Lycan - Mind and Cognition - An Anthology
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)