THE PHILOSOPHY OF DANIE~ DENNETT
Con tribu tors Lynne Rudder Baker • Ned Block • Fred Dretske • Ivan Fox Joseph Levine • Eric Lormand • Jeff McConnell Brian P. McLaughlin • John O'Leary-Hawthorne • Georges Rey Mark Richard • David M. Rosenthal • Carol Rovane Michael Slote • Joseph Thomas Tolliver • Robert Van Gulick Stephen Webb • Stephen L. White • Daniel Dennett
Volume 22
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Number 1 & 2
PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS FOUNDING EDITOR: Robert W. Shahan
EDITOR: Christopher S. Hill
Department of Philosophy University of Arkansas
Address correspondence not pertaining to subscriptions to:
PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS Department of Philosophy 318 Old Main University of Arkansas Fayetteville, AR 72701 t' Copyright 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Arkansas. Published by The University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Arkansas.
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Philosophical Topics VOLUME 22. NUMBER 1 & 2 SPRING AND FALL 1994
THE PHILOSOPHY OF DANIEL DENNETT
Copyright (c) 2007 ProQuest LLC Copyright (c) University of Arkansas Press
Contents
I. COlltent Meets Consciollsness Lynne Rudder Baker
,
23
What Is Dennett's Theory. a Theory. of? Ned Block
3. Differences that Make
No Difference
41
Fred Dretske
59
4. Our Knowledge of the Internal World
Ivan Fox
5. Out offill' Closet: A Qualophill' Joseph Le\ine
COl~frollts
QllaloJ71lObia
6. Qualia! (Nm\' Sho"'ing at (/ Theater near You)
107 127
Eric Lormand
7. III Defcnse (If the Knowledge AI;r.;II/1lent Jeff McConnell
157
8. Dellnett's Logical BchCll'iorism
189
Brian P. McLaughlin and John O·Leary-Hav.'thorne 9. Del/I/eft's UI/realistic P,\Tchology
259
Georges Rey 10. What 1.\'11 't (/ Beli(/,?
Mark Richard
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291
11. First-Person Operationalism and Mental Taxonomy David M. Rosenthal
319
12. The Personal Stance Carol Rovane
351
13. The Problem of Moral Luck Michael Slote
397
14. Interior Colors Joseph Thomas Tolliver
411
15. Dennett, Drafts. and Phenomenal Realism Robert Van Gulick
443
16. Witnessed Behm'ior and Dennett's IlltellfioJlal Stance Stephen Webb
457
17. Color and Notional Content Stephen L. White
471
18. Get Real Daniel Dennett
505
1. SCALE CP I;\" THE FOX ISLANDS THOROFARE
506
ReplY to Fox
II. DRETSKE'S BLIj\;D SPOT
511
ReplY to Dretske
III. TRl'TH-MAKERS. COW-SHARKS. AND LECTERNS
517
ReplY to McLaughlin and 0 "Learr-Hml'lhorne, Richard. Baker. and Vv'ebb
IV. SUPERFICIALIS:-.1 VERses HYSTERICAL REALISM ReplY
to
530
ReI'
V. OTTO AND THE ZOMBIES
537
Reply {o LeI'ine and Van Gulick
VI. HIGHER-ORDER THOUGHTS Al'.'D MENTAL BLOCKS
543
Repll' to Rosenthal and Block
VII, QUAL/A REFUSE TO GO Ql'IETLY
551
Rep/r to To/lil'er, White, McConnell, and Lormand
VIII. LUCK. REGRET. AND KINDS OF PERSONS Reply to Slote and Romne
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55H
PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL.
22
NO.
I
&
2,
SPRING
AND
FALL
1994
Content Meets Consciousness
Lynne Rudder Baker UJliI'crsity of Massachusctts, Amherst
In Consciousness E\pfailled, Daniel C. Dennett investigates consciousness from an empiricaL third-personal point of view. The facts of consciousness are to be validated, not by a subject's own introspective authority, but by neurophysiology. Citing neurophysiological research, Dennett discredits one model of the brain ("the Cartesian Theater") and replaces that model with a more empirically adequate model of the brain ("'the Multiple Drafts model"). Like most other investigators of consciousness, Dennett focuses on sensory phenomena that are putatively conscious. However. since much of what we report as conscious is intentional ("I just can't stop thinking about yoU"),1 and since Dennett's theory of intentionality makes no appeal to brain processes, the question arises: How can Dennett's neurophysiological method accommodate (putatively) conscious episodes with intentional content? How is Dennett's theory of consciousness, which identifies conscious states with particular hrain events, related to his theory of content. which does not identify "contentful" states with brain events'? Speaking of his overall project. Dennett says: My fundamental strategy has always been the same: first. to develop an account of content that is independent of and /l/ore .filllci(lI1ll'l1lulthan consciousness-an account that treats equally of all unconscious content-fixation (in brains. in computers. in
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evolutIOn's "recognitIOn" ot propertIes ot selected deslgns)and second, to build an account of consciousness on that foundation. First content, then consciousness.'
Since Dennett wants to erect his theory of consciousness on the foundation of his theory of content. it is of more than ad hominem interest to explore how these two halves of Dennett's project fit together. After setting out the two halves of Dennett's project-the theory of content and the theory of consciousness-I shall consider two points at which content meets consciousness: (i) reports of conscious belief, and (ii) putative events of content-fixation in the brain. I shall try to show that Dennett's theory of content does not have the features that could be a foundation for a physicalistic theory of consciousness. Then, I shall locate a fundamental tension between the two theories in the metaphor of "depth." Finally, I shall urge that. in the investigation of the mind, Dennett's intentional-stance theory is methodologically superior to his theory of conscIOusness.
DENNETT'S TWO HALVES Dennett's theory of content is his well-known intentional-stance theory. Intentional-stance theory was developed as a theory for interpreting behavior of rational agents. From the intentional stance. we discern patterns in our own and others' behavior: We spontaneously interpret a physical body with an appendage making jabbing motions in a container as an apartment dweller searching for her key in her purse. and we spontaneously predict and explain this behavior on the basis of the person's attitudes: She wants to get into the apartment and believes that the best way to enter is to unlock the door with the key which is in her purse. Intentional-stance theory frees intentional attributions from any assumptions about the internal states of the subject.; One's intentional states (her beliefs, desires. intentions, and so on) have their contents in virtue of patterns of the subject's gross observable behavior, not in virtue of particular events or processes in the brain. The very same internal physical states and physical motions of an individual in a different environment may exhibit different intentional patterns'-' All there is to being a "'true believer" is to behave in ways interpretable from the intentional stance: all there is to being a true believer i~ being a system whose behavior i~ reliably predictable via the intentional ~trategy. and hence all there is to really and truly believing that p (for any proposition p) i~ being an intentional system for which p occurs as a belief in the best (most predictive) interpretation.'
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Dennett goes on to comment that "this apparently shallow and instrumentalistic criterion of belief puts a severe constraint on the internal constitution of a genuine believer."" The severe constraint is that only systems with complex internal states turn out to satisfy the criterion, not that there is a one-to-one matchup between particular brain states and beliefs. Dennett thus disagrees with Fodor, whom Dennett characterizes as holding that "the pattern of belief must in the end be a pattern of structures in the brain, formulae written in the language of thought."7 As I see it, the difference between Dennett and Fodor is this: According to Fodor, whether a person believes that p is fixed by whether the person has a particular brain state that plays a particular causal role and that means that p; whereas, according to Dennett, whether a person believes that p is determined wholly by whether or not a belief that p is predictively attributable to the person. The fact that only systems with complex internal states turn out to have beliefs is an interesting fact. but what makes a belief attribution true. on Dennett's view, concerns only patterns of behavior, not any particular internal state. It is the absence of any attempt to identify particular behefs with particular internal states that distinguishes Dennett's intentional-stance theory from Fodor's "industrial-strength realism." So, according to Dennett's theory of content. if we want to understand the contents of a person's mental states. we see what the person does and says; we do not turn to neurophysiology.' The intentional stance, from the perspective of which a person has "contentful" states. is thus contrasted with the physical stance. From the physical stance. "if you want to predict the behavior of a system. determine its physical constitution (perhaps all the way down to the microphysical level) and the physical nature of the impingements upon it, and use your knowledge of the laws of physics to predict the outcome for any input."" Properties attributed from the physical stance are what I have called elsewhere 'stance independent.' III That is, from the physical stance, we attribute properties that are instantiated independently of (the possibility of) anyone's taking any particular stance toward them. On the other hand, from the intentional stance. we discern patterns that "are not out there entirely independent of us, since they are patterns composed partly of our own 'subjective' reactions to what is out there: they are the patterns made to order for our . • . ..II narclsslstIc concerns. As we have seen, according to intentional-stance theory, an entity has a "contentful" state only in virtue of someone 's predictive strategies. This is true not only of a person's having a belief. as we have just seen. but of any entity's having any "contentful" or intentional state. Since intentional-stance theory is Dennett's only account of content-one that applies equally to brains. to computers. and to Mother Nature herself-an entity's feature of having content is not a physical or stance-independent feature. Having
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content is not an intrinsic property (and hence is unlike, say, the property of being constituted by H 2 0): it is not a relational physical property (and hence is unlike, say, being a planet). Rather, having content is a stance-dependent feature-a feature that a system can have only in virtue of its (possibly) being the object of the intentional stance. I" Now tum to Dennett's theory of consciousness. Dennett aims to show how the various conscious phenomena "are all physical effects of the brain's activities."I' That is, he aims to give a physical-stance theory of consciousness. To this end, he uses neurophysiological research to impugn the model of consciousness as a "Cartesian Theater," where "a light-and-sound show is presented to a solitary but powerful audience, the Ego or Central Executive.','4 Brain research suggests a better model, the "Multiple Drafts" model of consciousness, according to which consciousness is not a single narrative, with an author of record, but rather the gappy product of many processes of interpretation in the brain. IS To investigate consciousness empirically, Dennett proposes an ingenious method. The theorist begins with a sound tape of a subject. perhaps accompanied by an electroencephalograph: the taped sounds provide the raw data of the investigation, from which a transcript is prepared. The transcriber distinguishes text from noise (e.g., a hiccough) and makes appropriate changes: If a phonetic transcription would read, say, 'from reft to light.' the transcriber would interpret the speaker to mean 'from left to right: Then the theorist interprets the transcript as a record of speech acts-"not mere pronunciations or recitations but assertions, questions, answers. promises. comments, requests for clarification. out-loud musings, self-admonitions.',J<, Both transitions-from tape to "direct-quotation" transcript (my term) and from "direct-quotation" transcript to interpreted text-require the theorist to adopt the intentional stance. as Dennett points out: "we must treat the noise-emitter as an agent. indeed a rational agent. who harbors beliefs and desires and other mental states that exhibit intentionality or 'aboutness: and whose actions can be explained (or predicted) on the basis of the content of these states." 17 The text thus interpreted is the subject's "heterophenomenological world." a third-personal description of the world as it seems to the subject. The subject's heterophenomenological world is "a stable. intersubjectively confirmable theoretical posit, having the same metaphysical status as. say. Sherlock Holmes's London or the world according to Garp.'·i< Initially remaining agnostic about the existence of the heterophenomenological items in the subject's world, the theorist attempts to "relate" the heterophenomenological items to states and processes of the subject\ brain. i'l Whether or not the subject's sincere reports about conscious experience are true is to be determined by the "'real goings-on in people's brains." As Dennett puts it:
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My suggestion, then, is that if we were to find real goings-on in people's brains that had enough of the 'defining' properties of the items that populate their heterophenomenological worlds, we could reasonably propose that we had discovered what they were really talking about-even if they initially resisted the identifications. And if we discovered that the real goings-on bore only a minor resemblance to the heterophenomenological items, we could reasonably declare that people were just mistaken in the beliefs they expressed, in spite of their sincerity.2 1 '
Dennett is not just noting that people have false beliefs (everyone knows that), nor is he just pointing out that people are sometimes mistaken about what they believe. (There is ample evidence that one may believe that she opened the window because it was hot; while in fact. she opened the window under hypnotic suggestion.) The point in this passage is that a self-attribution of conscious belief may be shown to be mistaken on the basis of what neuroscientists discover about the brain. To investigate con:-ciousness empirically. then. Dennett subjects heterophenomenological items to what I shall call the brain-mapping test: What a person says about her conscious life is to be tested. item by item. by what goes on in the brain. Neurophysiological discoveries confirm. disconfirm, or leave indeterminate the truth of the subject" s reports of her conscious experience. In this way. the theorist of consciousness seeks to discover "how heterophenomenological worlds map onto events in the brain.""
CONSCIOUS BELIEF What sorts of things are the heterophenomenological items in question'? The heterophenomenological items relevant to studying consciousness will include qualia. pains. and mental images. certainly-but also more. \Ve are also putatively conscious. at least sometimes. of our beliefs. There is one pretheoretical sense in which all heterophenomenological reports are reports of beliefs that the suhject is conscious of having (barring self-deception).': In this sense. "Winters are long in Vermont:' if contained in a heterophenomenological text. \vould report a belief of which the subject is conscious. merely in virtue of the fact that it was reported. However. this pretheoretical sense of 'consciousness' is clearly not Dennett's target. For any heterophcnomenological text is filled with reported beliefs: but Dennett wants to be agnostic about whether or not anything is conscious (until relevant heterophenomenological items pass the brain-mapping test). Moreover. if reporting a belief sufficed for a subject to he conscious of that belief. then the brain-mapping test would be otiose.
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If Dennett wanted to maintain ties with this pretheoretical sense of 'consciousness' without jeopardizing the brain-mapping test, he might regard a reported belief as putatively conscious, and thus to be subjected to the brain-mapping test. However, I do not think that this is what Dennett has in mind either. For a heterophenomenology yields a whole world from the subject's point of view. A heterophenomenology, like the text of The World According to Carp, contains much more than reports of introspective deliverances: it contains judgments about the world. not just reports of "inner life:' If each heterophenomenological item were subjected to the brainmapping test, then intentional-stance theory would be gratuitous. Thus, we should not suppose that a belief is putatively conscious (and hence susceptible to the brain-mapping test) simply because a subject reports it. Whether or not a heterophenomenological report such as "Winters are long in Vermont" is true is to be checked against the weather in Vermont. not the processes in the subject's brain: whether or not the subject believes that it is cold in Vermont is to be checked. from the intentional stance, against the subject's behavior. not against the subject's brain states. So. I think that Dennett's object of study is neither consciousness in the sense that if S reports that p. then she is conscious of a belief that p. nor is it consciousness in the sense that if S reports a belief. then she is putatively conscious of a belief that p. What. then, are the heterophenomenological items relevant to the study of consciousness in Dennett's sense? The answer. I think, is that the putative items of consciousness-the ones that are to undergo the brain-mapping test-are those reported in heterophenomenological texts of mental episodes of which the subject claims to be conscious at a particular time. So, heterophenomenological items relevant to studying consciousness will include reports of conscious episodes with intentional contents-e.g., "I suddenly realized that I left the oven on." Since work on consciousness, including Dennett's, tends to focus on qualia, pains, and the like. perhaps Dennett's theory is not supposed to apply to all putatively conscious phenomena but only to those phenomena that do not have intentional contents. However, much of what one takes to be one's conscious life consists of episodes with intentional content-she calls to mind her college graduation: she "relives" the events of the day; she weighs the pros and cons of moving. Hence. a theory whose domain excluded such reports as even putatively conscious would seem to me to fall seriously short of an adequate theory of consciousness. The heterophenomenological items relevant to the study of consciousness, and hence subject to the brain-mapping test, should include all those of which the subject reports that she is conscious at some time. So, I assume that the heterophenomenological items relevant for studying consciousness include reports of conscious belief, conscious thinking, conscious judgments. These are the items that raise the question of the relation between intentional-stance theory and the theory of consciousness, and on these I shall focus.
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Sometimes we report being conscious of our beliefs. So, a belief that the subject reports having been conscious of at a particular time is a putatively conscious belief, which should be subject to the brain-mapping test. In the case of such putatively conscious belief, the object of consciousness is a belief. But, according to Dennett, whether or not a person has that belief is determined by whether the belief is predictively attributable on the basis of her (intentionally described) behavior. So, in order to bring intentionalstance theory in line with the brain-mapping test, there must be a brain event onto which the putative object of consciousness (the belief) can plausibly be mapped. But if the existence of conscious beliefs depends on whether beliefs can be mapped onto brain states, then Dennett's theory begins to look like Fodor's. Given Dennett's two halves, the difference between a belief that is conscious and a belief with the same content that is not conscious is that the former can be mapped onto an event in the brain, whereas the latter may resist such mapping. But what wakes any particular brain event a candidate for such a mapping? Dennett says that "many of the brain eventii bear a striking resemblance to denizens of the heterophenomenological worlds of the subjects.":' But as far as I see, Dennett has no parameter of similarity between brain events and attributions of belief that could constrain any such mapping. An example of putatively conscious belief will further highlight the tension between the theory of content and the theory of consciousness. Suppose that Jane's heterophenomenological text contained this: "At that moment. I realized that I believed that Hal was trying to embarrass mealthough he later convinced me that I had been wrong." Suppose that at the moment at which it dawned on her (as Jane would put it on the tape that provided her heterophenomenological text) that she believed that Hal was trying to embarrass her. Jane's behavior changed. Until then. she had had the belief (the theorist noted that she had been avoiding Hal altogether) but had been unaware of it. But. since Jane gets aggressive when she thinks that someone is trying to embarrass her. she turned confrontational when she became conscious of the belief (as she put it). So, looked at from the intentional stance (the only stance from which beliefs are discernible in the first place), it is Jane's becoming aware of her belief. not just her having the belief. that accounts for her change of behavior. Now suppose that the theorist. seeking to confirm or disconfirm her report, looked for a brain state or process with which to identify the heterophenomenological item (reported by Jane as becoming conscious of her belief that Hal was trying to embarrass her). In the absence of any parameter of similarity between brain stales and attributions of belief. how would the theorist know whether she had found the "right" brain state'~ Suppose that we had a standard of similarity. but that the neuroscientist could find no brain state or process with which to identify the putatively conscious belief. In that case, I think that Dennett would have two alternatives: (i) stick with
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the real patterns discerned from the intentional stance and give up the neurophysiological approach to consciousness; or (ii) stick with the neurophysiological approach to consciousness and deny that Jane became conscious of her belief that Hal was trying to embarrass her-despite the "real patterns" discerned from the intentional stance. Either alternative would leave half of Dennett's project in the lurch.
CONTENT-FIXING IN THE BRAIN So far, in discussing how the theory of content and the theory of consciousness do (or do not) fit together. I have considered intentional-stance theory in the context in which Dennett developed it: One considers human beings as rational agents and attributes attitudes that are predictive of their behavior. But in the context of Dennett's study of consciousness, the theory of content must be put to another use as well. Suppose that Eve's heterophenomenological text contains this: "I was suddenly conscious of the fact that I was not alone in the house." In so saying, she reported an episode with the propositional content that she was not alone in the house. Indeed, the propositional content-that she was not alone in the house-was essential to the episode; a (putatively) conscious episode with any other propositional content. or with no propositional content. would not have been the same episode. The brain-mapping test would check to see whether or not the reported episode could plausibly be mapped onto a brain event or proce'Ss. If not. then, according to the theory of consciousness, it is false that she \\'as suddenly conscious of the fact that she was not alone. There are two possibilities: Either there are never any relevant brain events or processes onto which such heterophenomenological items can be mapped; or there are sometimes relevant brain events. If there are never any relevant brain events onto which such heterophenomenological items can be mapped. then, according to the theory of consciousness. no one is ever conscious of anything with propositional content; no one is ever conscious co of any state of affairs. In such an eventuality, one could either give up consciousness as a phenomenon or give up the theory that has the unfortunate consequence that no one is ever conscious of any state of affairs. [Although I would not hesitate to give up the theory before giving up the (putative) phenomenon. I shall not press that point here.] So. more optimistically from the point of view of Dennett's theory of consciousness, let us consider the possibility that there are brain events or processes onto which heterophenomenological items with propositional content can be mapped. Now onto what kind of brain process is Eve's consciousness that she was not alone to be mapped? Here is one suggestion: "a process that serves, over time. to insure a good fit between an entity's internal information-
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bearing events and the entity's capacity to express (some of) the information in those events in speech."~o On this suggestion, the heterophenomenological item-Eve's consciousness that she was not in the house alone-is to be mapped onto a brain process whose elements are information-bearing events. What sort of information do these brain events bear? Dennett sometimes speaks of a different kind of content in the brain. The brain may have an ""internal semantics-'referring' to memory addresses. internal operations. other states of the system. and so forth, not to things and events in the outer world."2!> How does this kind of content get tixed? Is it fixed from the intentional stance or is it fixed physically. apart from anyone's possible predictive strategies? At some points, Dennett sounds as if he is a staunch realist about this kind of content;'7 but if he is. he needs an additional theory of contentpresumably. a physical-stance theory of content for brain events. On the other hand, since intentional-stance theory is supposed to be a completely general theory of content that applies to brains as much as to persons. perhaps content is fixed from the intentional stance by discerning "real patterns" in the brain. In either case. questions arise: How would the internal semantics of brain states be related to ordinary propositional content (e.g .. that Eve was not alone in the house)? And how does this internal content get fixed in the brain? Dennett at least seems to be committed to there being brain processes onto which propositional content can be mapped. For he says: "What there is, really. is just various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain. These are nobody's speech acts. and hence they don't have to be in a language, but they are rather like speech acts: they have content. and they do have the effect of informing various processes with this content.,,2> Perhaps there is a clue to content-fixation in the brain in Dennett's discussion of the phi phenomenon-the phenomenon of subjects' reliably reporting seeing a moving dot that changes color when presented with two stationery dots. one red and one green. Dennett says that "retrospectively the brain creates the content (the judgment) that there was intervening motion. and this content is then available to govern activity and leave its mark on memory:"" (Sometimes Dennett contrasts what we judge to be the case with what we are conscious of. I am not concerned with such a contrast but with cases in which the subject is putatively conscious of her own judgment.) Dennett's remark again suggests that brain events and processes have propositional content (that there is a moving dot) and that this content has causal powers (the content can govern activity and leave its mark on memory). So, the content that Dennett attributes to the brain seems to be fullfledged propositional content. not just, say. reference to addresses of other brain states.'" 31 This at least suggests that the theorist should seek to map Eve's putatively conscious episode onto a brain process that has the content. "I am not alone in the house:' Dennett suggests that ""liJn some regards. you
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could say that my theory identifies conscious experiences with infonnationbearing events in the brain-since that's all that's going on, and many of the brain events bear a striking resemblance to denizens of the heterophenomenological worlds of the subjects."'c However, it is difficult to see how any brain events could bear a "striking resemblance" to Eve's consciousness of not being alone in the house. What neural properties could even count as bearing a striking resemblance to what Eve reported when she said, "I was suddenly conscious of the fact that I was not alone in the house"? The question, then, is this: How does content get fixed in the brain? Officially, Dennett's only basis for attributing content is his intentional-stance theory. For Dennett takes intentional-stance theory to be "an account of content that treats equally of all unconscious content-fixation (in brains, in computers, in evolution's 'recognition' of properties of selected designs )."" On intentional-stance theory, a brain process has content only in relation to someone's (possible) predictive strategies. Officially, having content is not a physical or stance-independent property of anything. So, if we understand content-fixing in the brain from the point of view of intentional-stance theory, then not even the neurophysiological side of Dennett's theory of consciousness has left the intentional stance behind; like the Cartesian he criticizes, Dennett himself has not avoided "the lazy extrapolation of the intentional stance all the way in."'~ Thus, he has not shown how heterophenomenological items even could map onto purely physical events in the brain; for the brain events onto which the heterophenomenological items map are themselves identifiable only from the intentional stance. On the one hand, if Dennett retains his unified account of content in terms of intentional-stance theory. then the relevant brain events are the content-fixing events that they are only relative to someone's (possible) predictive strategies. And if content-fixation is itself stance dependent. then either content-fixation is no part of neurophysiology or neurophysiology is itself an intentional-stance theory. Given the intentional-stance theory of content. events of content-fixation in the brain cannot be part of a wholly physicalistic theory. On the other hand, if content-fixation in the brain is stance independent then Dennett violates his intentional-stance theory of content; at the least. Dennett needs a separate account of content-fixation in the brain from his general theory of content. But even with a physicalistic theory of contentfixation in the brain, we would need to know how physically-fixed content is related to propositional content attributed from the intentional stance. We cannot tum to the would-be mapping for an answer; for the question is about the possibility of such a mapping in the first place: Which of the indefinitely many possible mappings onto brain states of heterophenomenological items with intentional content would be a correct mapping? In the absence of ansVvers to such questions, the brain-mapping test is not an adequate test for conscious events with intentional content.
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So, here is a dilemma: Either the neurophysiological theory of consciousness is itself a theory that essentially depends on the intentional-stance theory of content or it is not. If it is. then even "when we aspire to a science of the mind," we do not leave the intentional stance behind. If it is not. then we need a physicalistic account of content-fixation in the brain-an account l5 that would push Dennett toward Fodor. Why has this dilemma gone unnoticed? Let me hazard a guess: Dennett takes intentional-stance theory to give him all the content he ever wants-for free, so to speak. ", So. he is not worried about the propriety, from a physicalistic point of view, of speaking of events of content-fixation in the brain. However. I do not think that things are so easy. For if intentional talk about the brain is just a manner of speaking. then how can content "leave a mark on memory," if memory is understood neurophysiologically? And if content does any work in neurophysiology. then we need a physicalistic theory of content-on pain of making neurophysiological features themselves stance dependent. Let me conclude this section by pointing out another place where intentional-stance theory and the neurophysiological theory of consciousness tug in opposite directions. The Multiple Drafts model of the brainaccording to which there is just continual revising and editing in the brain with no sharp demarcation between what is conscious and what is notitself is formulable only from the intentional stance, not from the physical stance at all. Since editing and revising are intentional processes. it is only from the intentional stance that there is editing and revising in the brain. In responding to the charge that replacement of the Central Meaner (of the Cartesian Theater model) by a Pandemonium of Homunculi (of the Multiple Drafts model) is simply replacement of one set of metaphors by another. Dennett says that "metaphors are not 'just' metaphors: metaphors are the tools of thought:'" I agree. But the metaphors in question are intentionalstance metaphors.'s Can Dennett's preferred model of the brain be expressed except from the intentional stance?
THE METAPHOR OF "DEPTH" We have examined two places where the theory of content meets the theory of consciousness-putatively conscious belief and putative content-fixation in the brain-and have seen that Dennett's two halves do not sit comfortably on the same bench. In this section. I want to show that Dennett's physicalism, with its metaphor of "depth," precludes any rapprochement of the two theories. Like many physicalists. Dennett is committed to a metaphor of depth. According to the depth metaphor, there are distinct levels of reality. In an inversion of the idea of the Great Chain of Being. what is genuinely real resides at the bottom level. And the bottom level of reality is physical: its II
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properties are stance independent. The intentional stance is introduced in contrast to the physical stance, from which one predicts and explains an entity's behavior on the basis of "its physical constitution (perhaps all the way down to the microphysical level) and the physical nature of the impingements upon it."w Indeed, "if one wants to predict and explain the 'actual. empirical' behavior of believers. one must ... cease talking of belief. and descend to the design stance or physical stance for one's account."JO Physical-stance theories are thus deeper than intentional-stance theories. The intentional stance is only a resting place on the way to the 'lower: more mechanistic stances from which stance-independent of theories of genuine reality are formulated." I With this understanding of depth in mind. recall that Dennett's strategy is "first. to develop an account of content that is independent (~f and more .timdamenlal thall consciousness ... and second. to build an account of J2 consciousness on that foundation:· Content is more fundamental than consciousness in that it is much more widespread: Entities can have contentful states without having consciousness, but (presumably) no entities can have consciousness without also having contentful states. Moreover. in the passage just quoted. Dennett aims to build an account of consciousness on the foundation of the theory of content. Given the depth metaphor. how can content as Dennett understands it be a suitable foundation for a physicalistic account of consciousness'? What the theory of content appeals to-patterns discernible only from the intentional stance-are. from a physicalistic point of view, less fundamental than what the theory of consciousness appeals to-neurophysiological processes that are presumably stance independent. So. given the metaphor of depth. it is difficult to see how Dennett's theory of content could be a foundation for the theory of consciousness-at least if the theory of consciousness is to be a physicalistic theory-when the features countenanced by Dennett's theory of content are much less fundamental than those countenanced by the theory of consciousness. Let me try to be more explicit. Dennett may be committed to two different ways in which one theory may be more fundamental than another: (i)
Theory A is more fundamental than theory B if and only if theory B presupposes (in some sense) theory A and theory A does not presuppose theory B.
(ii)
Theory A is more fundamental than theory B if and only if the properties. states. and entities that theory A refers to are more fundamental (are closer to the physical ground-level of reality) than those that theory B refers to.
We have seen ways in which Dennett's theory of consciousness presupposes his theory of content. Content has a crucial role not only in the construction of heterophenomenologies but also in the identification of brain events as events of content-fixation. That is, even the "neurophysiological side" of his
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theory presupposes the theory of content. So, according to (i), the theory of content is more fundamental than the theory of consciousness, Also, Dennett says that his theory of content is more fundamental than his theory of consciousness, and in sense (i), it is. However, there is another sense in which physicalists take one theory to be more fundamental than another: Physics is more fundamental than chemistry because the entities countenanced by physics (subatomic particles) are more fundamental than the entities countenanced by chemistry (molecules).~' In this sense-sense (ii)Dennett's theory of consciousness is more fundamental than his theory of content: The properties, states, and entities countenanced by his theory of consciousness (brain states, etc.) are closer to the physical ground-level of reality than those countenanced by his theory of content (intentional patterns of behavior). That is, the two ways in which one theory may be more fundamental than another come apart for Dennett. The problem is not only that (i) and (ii) come apart in Dennett's two theories. The further problem is that the depth metaphor of physicalism commits Dennett to giving precedence to (ii), according to which the theory of consciousness is really the more fundamental theory. According to the depth metaphor, stance-dependent features are always less fundamental than stance-independent features. If the neurophysiological theory of consciousness is stance independent. then it should be explicated in a way that does not presuppose the stance-dependent features of intentional-stance theory. But if the neurophysiological theory of consciousness is /lot stance independent, then it is not a purely physicalistic theory. For a theory cannot legitimately claim to be physicalistic (and stance independent) if it appeals to stance-dependent features that are irreducible as far as we know. Dennett cashes out talk of Mother Nature's intentions in terms of the theory of natural selection, which does not presuppose unreduced intentional-stance features. Similarly, the theory of consciousness-if it is to be physicalistic-should provide a way to cash out talk of conscious states (including those with intentional content) without presupposing unreduced intentional-stance features. Dennett may respond that the beauty of intentional-stance theory is that it invokes no features that need to be reduced: it simply affords a convenient way to predict phenomena for which we have no strictly physical account. But in that case, a ground-level physicalistic theory must be formulable without appealing to features discernible only from the intentional stance. To the extent to which Dennett is less a realist about what is discerned from the intentional stance than about what is discerned from the physical stance, a genuinely physicalistic theory (of anything) cannot appeal to features discernible only from the intentional stance. To sum up the difficulty, as I see it: According to the depth metaphor, Dennett's theory of consciousness and theory of content have domains at different levels of reality. The theory of consciousness is more physicalistic
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and thus (by (ii) above) the more fundamental theory. Yet, the theory of consciousness presupposes the (less fundamental) theory of content. The depth metaphor precludes an easy reconciliation of the two theories. For what is "deeper" cannot presuppose what is "shallower." So, the problem is this: According to the depth metaphor, the theory of consciousness is more fundamental than the theory of content: but the theory of consciousness presupposes the theory of content. Therefore, according to the depth metaphor, the more fundamental theory presupposes the less fundamental theory. This prohlem would dry up if we dropped the physicalistic metaphor of depth. For there would be nothing untoward about a neurophysiological theory of consciousness that presupposes a theory of content-and hence is the more fundamental theory in sense (i)-if one did not also hold the neurophysiological theory to be "deeper" than the theory of content that it presupposes. So, the metaphor of depth precludes reconciliation of Dennett's theory of content with his theory of consciousness: The deeper theory cannot presuppose the shallower one. and Dennett's theory of content cannot be a foundation for a physicalistic account of consciousness. But if Dennett gave up the depth metaphor, he would lose the motivation for the hrain-mapping test to determine what a subject is conscious of.
REAL PATTERNS My proposal is that Dennett take the same approach to consciousness that he does to content.-l-l Test heterophenomenological items, not against brain states, but against their predictive attributability. That proposal rejects the dichotomy according to which the facts of consciousness are established either by introspective reports, taken to be authoritative, or by neurophysiology: yet. it retains the empiricaL third-personal approach to consciousness. In this section, I want to suggest that his physicalism alone does not commit Dennett to a neurophysiological approach to consciousness and that Dennett's discussion of "real patterns" gives him the resources to approach consciousness in the same way that he approaches content. In "Real Patterns." Dennett discusses, among other things, the relation hetween what is discerned from the intentional stance and what is discerned from the physical stance. As a physicalist, Dennett takes what is discerned from the physical stance to be what is "really there;" but Dennett also is a 'mild realist' about what is discerned from the intentional stance. Beliefs, says Dennett, are as real as centers of gravity. This "mild realism is the doctrine that makes the most sense when what we are talking about is real patterns, such as the real patterns discernible from the intentional stance."-" Since we lack the time and often the means to make predictions of behavior in term'> of fundamental physics (which Dennett takes to be the real locus of
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reality), we adopt the intentional stance as a basis for prediction. In the interest of efficiency we "trad[e] off reliability and accuracy of prediction against computational tractability."~6 We know that we have discerned a "real pattern" (and not just noise) when it is the basis for reliable predictions. And since beliefs and desires are reliable predictors of intentional action, we know that there are real intentional patterns. And. as I have emphasized, we know this quite apart from any neurophysiological investigation: Beliefs and desires would still be reliable predictors no matter how our brains turned out to be organized. This is a central message of intentional-stance theory. It is important to see that the "real patterns" of behavior discerned from the intentional stance need not mirror any detectable patterns of physical states.~' Suppose that there is a real pattern in Beth's behavior: She votes Republican in national elections~ she goes to school board meetings to protest increases in the budget; she sends money to a group whose goal is to privatize prisons and abolish welfare-all out of a belief that taxes are too high. This real pattern does not "correspond to" any pattern--either of bodily motions or of brain states-discernible from the physical stance. Indeed, according to "Evolution, Error, and Intentionality," transferring Beth to a different environment could change her intentional states without changing her physical states.~' But absence of correspondence between physical and intentional patterns does not impugn our claim to have found a real patternalbeit a real intentional pattern. In general. real patterns of a person's intentional behavior do not mirror 4 real physical patterns of the person's brain states or bodily motions. " What makes something the intentional action that it is, is often determined by context: The same bodily motion (produced by the same type of brain state) may be a vote in a faculty meeting, a request to be excused. or an attempt to distract the speaker. As intentional-stance theory suggests. there is no more reason to think that intentional behavioral patterns mirror neural patterns that cause the relevant bodily motions than to think that the patterns of play that win the U.S. Open in tennis mirror muscular motion in a player's anns and legs. This important point may be obscured by Dennett's emphasis on examples like "bar code" and Life World as examples of "real patterns." Looking at these examples. one may suppose that a believer or agent is to her internal physical states as "gliders" in the Life World are to arrays of pixels that constitute them.'(J Such an analogy would misfire: for the glider's behavioral patterns do mirror the physical (geometrical) patterns of the pixels that constitute the glider together with the pixels in adjoining cells. But Beth's intentional behavioral patterns (voting for Republicans. say) do not mirror physical patterns of her bodily movements (nor of her bodily movements together with the physical motions of nearby objects). Indeed. we know of no physical patterns whatever that are even candidates for mirroring patterns of one's voting behavior.
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A second way in wnicn / tninJ.' tnat the Lik JJ0ddi5' misleading if Ih81 it suggests that understanding a bit-map (and the Jaw that governs the "bits") gives a deeper understanding of the glider. But consider this: Bill Gates of Microsoft Corporation has bought up digital rights to many art works all over the world." Does a bit map afford deeper understanding of The Birth qfVellus'? Would we suppose that we can now understand the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile because we can reproduce it digitally? Suppose that we found no bit-map-level patterns that mirrored differences between smiles and leers; would we use the bit map to deny the reality of the smile or to say that there was no fact of the matter about whether a painting represented a smile or a leer?" No doubt neurophysiology can show us necessary conditions for consciousness: but it is a non sequitur to suppose that whatever "real patterns" there are in consciousness must be mirrored by "real patterns" in the brain-just as it would be a non sequitur to suppose that whatever "real patterns" there are in an artwork must be mirrored by "real patterns" in a bit map of it. In his "Appendix A (for Philosophers)." in COllsciousness Explained. Dennett responds to the charge that there is "a tension-if not an outright contradiction-between the two halves of [his] theory" by saying this: The shock-absorbers that deal with the tension are the strained identifications of heterophenomenological items (as conceived under the traditional perspective l from which we treat people as single-minded agents l) with events of content-fixation in the brain (as conceived under the new perspective [from which we break the single-minded agent down into miniagents and microagents with no single Boss 1)."
Far from being shock-absorbers. "the strained identifications of heterophenomenological items ... with events of content-fixation in the brain" seem to me to expose the tension that they are supposed to overcome. From the perspective of neurophysiology. there are no unified agents. However. from the intentional stance, of course there are ullified agents: intentional-stance theory was designed specifically to accommodate the "real patterns" discernible when we think of each other as unified agents. From the intentional stance. the question of whether there is a Boss neuron is simply irrelevant to whether a system is a unified agent. The fact that there are no unified agents discernible from the physical stance is wholly unsurprising: neither are beliefs. desires, or plans discernible from the physical stance. Why should the existence of unified agents any more depend on neurophysiological facts than the existence of beliefs? Yet, Dennett is a "mild realist" about beliefs.'4 I suggest that he assume the same position about agents. Indeed. from the intentional stance, agents and believers are treated in exactly the same way, as they should be.'; Here is my suggestion about consciousness: Look at consciousness from the intentional stance: as we have seen, intentionality infects Dennett's
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theory of consciousness anyway Suppose that Jack reports becoming conscious of a belief that has been induced by advertising. The transcript for his heterophenomenological text contains this: "I suddenly saw that I had believed that Wisk got clothes cleaner than Tide. When r realized how I had been taken in. I stopped buying Wisk and went back to Tide." Here is a report of a conscious belief. and one the consciousness of which changed Jack's behavior. The "real patterns" here are real intentional patterns. The stability of these patterns is independent of whether or not they map onto brain patterns. If such patterns are reliable bases for prediction. then they are real (mildly real?) regardless of the outcome of the brain-mapping test. Before publication of Consciousness Explained. Dennett's major insight (in my opinion) was that intentional patterns are "real patterns" and that real intentional patterns do not mirror patterns of brain processes.'" Why does he turn his back on his own insight when he considers consciousness? Perhaps Dennett would take the answer to be obvious: In the absence of immaterial souls. an account of consciousness must be in terms of brain processes. Early on. Dennett remarks that his hcterophenomenological approach "permits theorists to agree in detail about just what a subject's heterophenomenological world is. while offering entirely different accounts of how heterophenomenological worlds map onto events in the brain (or the soul. for that matter):'o' This at least suggests that Dennett sees only two possible loci for studying consciousness: brain or soul. But this dichotomy is a false one. Events of consciousness need not map onto events in the brain or soul. Now Dennett's particular brand of materialism may lead him to approach the study of consciousness via neurophysiology-even when such an approach conflicts with his own intentional-stance theory. But a neurophysiologicaJ approach to consciousness is not the only approach consonant with materialism. According to intentional-stance theory. an intentional attribution (as many attributions of conscious episodes are) is true if and only if it is predictive: and it is predictive if and only if the attributer has discerned a "real pattern." Now a perfectly respectable materialist may suppose that there are real intentional patterns in Dennett's sense. without supposing that these intentional patterns map onto any known or knowable physical patterns. For example. when investigators suspect someone of insider trading of stock in a company which is on the verge of announcing a take-over. they look for patterns of buying and selling the particular stock in the days before the announcement. Sometimes they find such patterns: sometimes juries are sufficiently convinced of the reality of the patterns that they are willing to send people to prison on the basis of them. I agree with juries that there are such patterns: Patterns of buying and selling a stock are real intentional patterns. and such patterns stand on their own whether we ever find any physical-pattern correlates for them or not. Indeed. it would be highly unlikely that the real patterns of trading the stock were mirrored in real
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patterns of bodily motions of the traders. Yet, physicalists need not withdraw their claim to have found a real intentional pattern for all that. In generaL there is simply no need to suppose that real intentional patterns must map onto "deeper" physical patterns. The patterns of consciousness are just a special case of real intentional patterns. So, 1 think that the following argument is unsound: (a) real patterns of consciousness map onto patterns in either brains or immaterial souls; (b) there are no immaterial souls. Therefore, (c) real patterns of consciousness map onto brains. It is important to see that my complaint about the argument is not based on affirmation of immaterial souls but on denial of the dichotomy: mapping onto brains or mapping onto souls. I am not denying the relevance of neurophysiology to the study of the mind. Rather, I am questioning the method that narrows its focus on consciousness to mapping heterophenomenological items onto brain events. One can reject the brainmapping test without rejecting the claim that consciousness has a biological basis. Once we take seriously the fact that intentional patterns need not mirror detectable physical patterns, we should be less tempted to try to map intentional heterophenomenological items onto brain events. We do not need such a mapping to ward off immaterialism. In some ways, conscious thinking is like making money. Making money doesn't take place in some immaterial space. Sometimes making money does have a definite location-e.g., at a certain poker table or at a certain race track." In other cases, specification of the location for making money is just silly: When Jack's Coca-Cola stock goes up. what is the location of his gain? In generaL I believe that it is a mistake to think that one must find spatial locations for intentional phenomena. including putatively conscious intentional phenomena. So, one need not believe in anything immaterial in order to question Dennett's neurophysiological approach to consciousness.
CONCLUSION Dennett's theory of consciousness is not. and cannot be, independent of his theory of content. Yet as we saw in examining his brain-mapping test for determining what we are and are not conscious of, the two halves of Dennett's project do not fit comfortably together. Moreover, I argued, the metaphor of depth precludes reconciliation of Dennett's theory of consciousness with his intentional-stance theory of content. Although I would be more of a realist than Dennett about what is discerned from the intentional stance, I suggested that intentional-stance theory offers a better way to study putatively conscious phenomena with intentional contents than does the brainmapping test.
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On the one hand, in the case of putatively conscious phenomena with intentional contents, we get a distinction between conscious belief and llonconscious belief from the intentional stance alone: From the intentional stance. the theorist confinns Jane's report that she was conscious of believing that Hal was trying to embarrass her at a particular time by noting the change in Jane's intentional behavior at that time. Brain mapping is irrelevant from the intentional stance. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how to go about applying the brain-mapping test to putatively conscious beliefs anyway. If the object of (putative) consciousness has intentional content. application of the brain-mapping test requires that we be able to assess the similarity between Jane's brain states and what is attributed to her by. for example. a belief that Hal is trying to embarrass her. What properties of brain states could be similar to what Jane attributed to herself when she said, "At that moment, I realized that I believed that Hal was trying to embarrass me"? What would count as similarity in this case'?'" So. it seems to me that Dennett neither needs nor has logical space for the brain-mapping test in the case of putatively conscious phenomena with intentional contents. Finally. a look at real intentional patterns. about which Dennett is a "mild realist" suggests that the brain-mapping test is not required for an empiricaL third-personal account of consciousness. A claim to have found an intentional pattern would not be impugned by our failure to find a physical pattern onto which to map the intentional pattern: this is plain in nonpsychological cases. (It is no defense against allegation of income-tax fraud to complain that the prosecutors have not come up with a physical pattern that the culpability-producing intentional pattern mirrors.) Dennett himself says that one can adopt the intentional stance to construct a heterophenomenological text "without giving up science."r,fI Since I am dubious that we will ever have a theory of consciousness. or of the mind generally, that is free of intentional presuppositions. I find it heartening that Dennett does not think that intentionality imperils science. But if we can adopt the intentional stance without giving up science. then we need not worry about mapping heterophenomenological items onto brain events. So. my suggestion for someone who wants an empiricaL third-personal account of consciousness is to take the science and leave Dennett's brand of physicalism with its metaphor of depth behind."!
NOTES I. I am not claiming that thoughts of a person are wholly intentional. always devoid of any sensory aspect. nor that sensory phenomena (reported as. e.g .. "r see a moving red dot'·) are wholly nonintentional. My point is that intentionality intrudes on any investigation of the full range of putatively conscious phenomena, 2. Daniel C. Dennetl. Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little. Brown & Co .. 1991). 457: emphasis his.
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3. The "intentional stance presupposes neither lower stance." where the lower stances are the design stance and the physical stance. Daniel C. Dennett. "Mechanism and Responsibility:' in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Montgomery. VI.: Bradford Books. 1978). 240. 4. Daniel C. Dennett. "Evolution. Error. and Intentionality," in The Intentional Stance (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press/Bradford Books. 1987). 287-321. 5. Daniel C. Dennett. "True Believers." in The intentional Stance, 29: emphases his. 6. Ibid. 7. Daniel C. Dennett. "Real Patterns:' The Juurnal of Philosophy 88 (1991): 30. 8. On this point. I think that Dennett is exactly right. See my Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind (Camhridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995). 9. "True Believers:' 16. 10. Sec my chapter eight of S{ll'ing Belief A Critique afPhnicalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1987): and my "Instrumental Intentionality:' Philosuphy of Science 56 (1989): 303-16. 11. Daniel C. Dennett. "Reflections: Real Panerns. Deeper Facts. and Empty Questions." in The Intentiollal Swnce . 39: emphasis his. 12. This aspect of Dennett's work is responsihle for his being taken to he an instrumentalist about belief. In "Real Patterns:' he resists the simple 'instrumentalist/realist' dichotomy. However. his discussion on pages 48f[' with continued endorsement of Quine's indeterminacy thesis. reaffirms the idea that to have an intentional feature is to he the object of a particular interpretive stance. Dennett allows that at least on occasion. "the choice of a pattern would indeed be up to the observer" (49). Here I am not concerned with the argument ahout realism but with the relatiom between the intentional stance and the physical stance. 13. Consciousness Explained. 16. 14. Ihid .. 227. 15. Ibid .. 9-1-. This summary comes from my review of Consciousness Explained in The Rel"ie\\' olMeraph\'sics -1-5 (1992): 398-399. 16. Consciousness t:1:plained. 76. In "How to Change Your Mind." in Brainstorms. Dennett distinguishes between beliefs that beings without language can have and what he called 'opinions: which are more language-infected states. In Consciousness Explained. Dennett comments on the distinction: "While I will not presuppose familiarity with that distinction here. I do intend my claims to apply to both categories" (7S). 17. COllSciousness Explained. 76: emphasis his. Since intentional-stance theory is independent of the theory of consciousness. I am not complaining ahout the theorist's exploitation of the resources of intentional-stance theory in investigating consciousness. 18. Ibid .. SI. 19. Ibid .. -1-07. 20. Ibid .. 85: emphasi, hi,. 21. Ibid, 81. 22. I am ,imply pointing out a way to isolate putatively conscious beliefs from all others~ including t<Jcit beliefs and heliefs that are subcom,cious in a p,ychoanalytic sense. 23. Consciousness Explained. -1-59. 24. I would take this result to be tantamount to saying that no one i, ever conscious of anything. Whatever consciousness would remain after removing consciousness of states of affairs (only pure sensations?) would seem to me negligible. For what it is worth. pure sensations seem at most to be a paltry part of one's conscious life. 25. Consciollsness Explained. 319. 26. Daniel C. Dennett. "Styles of Mental Representation." in The Intentional STance. 224. 27. Daniel C. Dennett. "Reflections: Instrumentalism Reconsidered." in The IntentiOlllll '5tance. 70-1. 28. Consciousness Explained. 365.
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29. Ibid., 128. 30. The mathematical idea of . information , in the Shannon-Weaver sense is a syntactic notion that does not suffice for propositional content. Syntax underdetermines propositional content. 31. Dennett emphasizes the indeterminacy of content in the brain and takes his opponent to claim that a thinker "begins with a determinate thought to be expressed" (CollSciouslless Explained. 241 ). I differ from both Dennett and his fictional opponent in that I hold that it is a mistake to try to locate propositional content in particular brain processes at all. 32. Consciousness Explained, 459. 33. Ibid., 457. 34. Ibid .. 458; emphasis his. 35. A physicalistic account of content-fixation \",ould not collapse Dennett into Fodor; for on Fodor's view, but not Dennett's, brain events have syntactic structure. 36. I have no objection to helping oneself to intentionality. but then I am not a physicalist. 37. Consciousness Explained, 455. 38, Indeed. it would seem that only from the intentional stance is anything a metaphor in the first place. 39. 'True Believers." 16. The intentional stance is also contrasted with the design stance, from which one predicts and explains an entity'~ behavior on the basis of its function or normal operation. 40. "Intentional Systems." in Brainstorms, 22. 41, Compare: "Of course. if some version of mechanistic physicalism is true (as I believe), we will never need absolutely to ascribe any intentions to anything" ("Conditions of Personhood." in Braimtorms. 273), 42. Consciousness Elplained. 4.57: emphasis his. 43. Although I agree that physics is more fundamental than chemistry. I reject the idea that all the sciences are neatly ordered according to depth. 44. Unlike Dennett. I would be as much a realist about features discerned from the inten" tional stance as about features discerned from the physical stance. But that major difference between Dennett and me is irrelevant to my proposal that Dennett treat consciousness as he treats content. 45. "Real Patterns:' 30-1. 46. Ibid .. 36. 47. A physicalist who holds that intentional patterns mirror undetectable physical patterns is in no position to use physical patterns as a constraint on intentional patterns. 48, See Dennett's "case of the wandering two-bitser" in Daniel C. Dennett. "Evolution. Error. and Intentionality," in The intenriollal Stance. 290-95. 49. If the thesis of global supervenience is true, then the intentional pattern may cOlTespond to some physical pattern, hut not one localized in space and time. Thus. it would be folly to try to find patterns of an agent's physical properties that correspond to the agent's intentional patterns. One does not have to be a dualist to see that brain states and bodily motions do nol match up with beliefs and actions. 50. For a description of the Life World. see "Real Patterns." 51. John Seabrook, ."E-mail from Bill." The New Yorker. 10 January 1994.48-61. 52. There may be cases of indeterminacy here: but there are many clear cases in which an intentional pattern is a smile and not a leer.
53. Consciousness Explained. 458. 54. "Real Patterns." 30-1. 55. I would treat agents and believers in the same way as well: but. giving up the metaphor of depth, I would be more than a "mild realist" about both. 56. See "Evolution, Error, and Intentionality." 57. COl1sciousness Explained. 81.
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But even so. is the location the physical facility that includes the track, the finish line with your horse crossing it first. or the window where you collect your winnings? Such questions are not serious spurs to inquiry; nor are similar questions about the location of the awareness that Jack has of his belief. 59. This is not a complaint [hat putatively conscious beliefs fail the brain-mapping test. Rather. the question is how the brain-mapping test could be applied: What would count as passing it? 60. Consciouslless Explained. 76. 61, I am extremely grateful to Derk Pereboom and to Louise Antony for helpful comments and criticisms. 58,
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 22 NO. I & 2. SPRING A!'lD
FALL
1994
What Is Dennett's Theory a Theory of?
Ned Block MIT
In Consciousness Explained and some papers written before and since, Dan Dennett expounds what he says is a theory of consciousness. But there is a real puzzle as to what the theory is about. There are a number of distinct phenomena that 'consciousness' is used by Dennett and others to denote. If the theory is about some of them, it is false: if it is about others, it is banal. A convenient locus of discussion is provided by Dennett's claim that consciousness is a cultural construction. He theorizes that "human consciousness (I) is too recent an innovation to be hard-wired into the innate machinery. (2) is largely the product of cultural evolution that gets imparted to brains in early training."I Often, Dennett puts the point in terms of memes. Memes are ideas such as the idea of the wheel or the calendar or the alphabet: but not all ideas are memes. Memes are cultural units. the smallest cultural units that replicate themselves reliably. In these terms then. Dennett's claim is that "Human consciousness is itse(f a huge complex of memes."" The claim is sometimes qualified (as in the "largely" above). I think the idea is that consciousness is the software that runs on genetically determined hardware. The software is the product of cultural evolution, but it would not run without the hardware that is the product of biological evolution. I claim that consciousness is a mongrel notion. one that picks out a conglomeration of very different sorts of mental properties. Dennett gives us little clue as to which one or ones, which of the "consciousnesses'" is
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supposed to be a cultural construction. Now this would be little more than a quibble if his claims about consciousness were plausible and novel proposals about one or more "consciousnesses," one or more "elements" of the mongrel. OK, so he doesn't tell us exactly which consciousness his claims are about, but we can figure it out for ourselves. As far as I can see. there is no kind of consciousness that is both plausibly and non trivially a cultural construction, a collection of memes. (But perhaps Dennett will prove me wrong in his reply.) For some kinds of consciousness. the idea that consciousness is a cultural construction is a nonstarter. For others, there is an empirical issue, but the cultural construction claim seems likely to be false, and Dennett does not defend it. For others, it is utterly banal-certainly not the exciting new thesis Dennett presents it as. So my challenge for Dennett will be to provide us with a notion of consciousness on which his claim is both true and interesting. Of course. I wouldn't be bothering with all this if I thought Dennett had an answer. What I really think is that Dennett is using the mongrel concept of "consciousness" the way Aristotle used the concept of "velocity." sometimes meaning instantaneous velocity, sometimes meaning average velocity, without seeing the distinction.' I think Dennett has confused himself and others by applying an unanalyzed notion of "consciousness," conflating theses that are exciting and false with others that are boring and true. I won't be arguing for this directly, but it is the upshot of what I will have to say. My procedure will be to go through the major elements of the mongrel briefly, with an eye to filling in and justifying the claim that what Dennett says is not both true and novel. I should say at the outset that I do not intend to be presupposing any controversial views about whether the inverted spectrum hypothesis makes sense, whether there can be "absent qualia" (that is, whether there can be creatures functionally identical to us, such that there is nothing it is like to be them) and the like. What I have to say here is supposed to be independent of such issues.
PHENOMENAL CONSCIOUSNESS Phenomenal consciousness is experience. Phenomenal conscious properties are the experiential properties of sensations, feelings, and perceptions; for example. what it is like to experience pain, what it is like to see. to hear, and to smell. Thoughts, desires, and emotions also have phenomenal characters, though these characters do not serve to individuate the thoughts, desires, and emotions. Phenomenal properties are often representational. For example. what it is like to see something as a refrigerator is different from what it is like to see the same thing from the same angle as a big white thing of unknown purpose and design. And there is a representational commonality
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to what it is like to hear a sound as coming from the right and what it is like to see something as coming from the right. I believe that there is a difference in these experiences that is not representationaL a difference that inheres in nonrepresentational features of the modalities; but I will not assume this in what follows. I also think that phenomenal consciousness is not characterizable in functional or intentional or cognitive terms, but again I will not assume this here. There was a time when Dennett was an out and out eliminativist about phenomenal content, but his views have changed. He now offers a theory of it, though he cautions us that his views of what phenomenal consciousness is are at variance with a picture of it that has a strong hold on our intuitions. I hope it is just obvious to virtually everyone that the fact that things look, sound, and smell more or less the way they do to us is a basic biological feature of people, not a cultural construction that our children have to learn as they grow up. To be sure. cultural constructions have a big impact on the way things look, sound. and smell to us. As I said, phenomenal consciousness is often representational, and the representational aspects and phenomenal aspects of phenomenal consciousness often interact. To use Dennett's wonderful example, suppose we discovered a lost Bach cantata whose first seven notes tum out by an ugly coincidence to be identical to the first seven notes of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer." We wouldn't be able to hear the cantata the way the Leipzigers of Bach's day would have heard it. So culture certainly has an impact on phenomenal consciousness. But we have to distinguish between the idea that culture has an impact on phenomenal consciousness and the idea that phenomenal consciousness as a whole is a cultural construction. Culture has a big impact on feet too. People who have spent their lives going barefoot in the Himalayas have feet that are different in a variety of ways from people who have worn narrow pointy high-heeled shoes for eight hours a day. every day. Though culture has an impact on feet. feet are not a cultural construction. So the impact of culture on phenomenal consciousness does not give us a reason to take seriously the hypothesis that phenomenal consciousness was i111'enfed in the course of the development of human culture or that children slowly develop the experience of seeing. hearing, and eating as they internalize the culture. Indeed. children acquire the culture by seeing and hearing (and using other senses) and not the other way around. We should not take seriously the question of whether Helen Keller had her first experience of eating or smelling or feeling at the age of seven when she started learning language. We should not take seriously the idea that each of us would have been a zombie if not for specific cultural injections when we were growir.g up. We should not take seriously such questions as whether there was a time in human history in which people biologically just like us used their eyes and ears, ate, drank, and had sex. but there was nothing it was like for them to do these things." And a view that says that such questions should be taken seriously should be rejected on that basis.
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Though almost everyone believes in phenomenal consciousness, some hold a deflationary or reductionist view of it, identifying it with a functional or intentional or cognitive notion. Mightn't such views of phenomenal consciousness make the thesis that phenomenal consciousness is a cultural construction more intelligible? The best way to answer this question, I think, is to examine the other consciousnesses, the other elements of the mongrel. They are the best candidates for a deflationist or a reductionist to identify with phenomenal consciousness.
ACCESS-CONSCIOUSNESS Let us say that a state is access-conscious if its content is poised for free use in controlling thought and action. More specifically, a state with a certain content is access-conscious if, in virtue of one's having the state, a representation which has that content is (1) poised to be used freely as a premise in reasoning, according to the capabilities of the reasoner, (2) poised to be used freely for control of action. In the case of language-using organisms such as ourselves, a major symptom of access-consciousness would be reportability. But reportability is not necessary. My intent in framing the notion is to make it applicable to lower animals in virtue of their ability to use perceptual contents in guiding their actions. In my view, this is the notion of consciousness that functionalists should want to identify with phenomenal consciousness. We needn't worry about whether access-consciousness is really distinct from phenomenal consciousness, since the question at hand is whether either of them could be a cultural construction. I am dealing with these questions separately, but I am giving the same answer to both. so if I am wrong about their distinctness it won't matter to my argument. Access-consciousness is a tricky notion which I have spelled out in some detail elsewhere.' I will briefly make two comments about it. First. the reader may wonder what the "in virtue of" is doing in the definition. It is there in part because there are syndromes such as blindsight in which the content of a perceptual state is available to the perceiver only when he is prompted and hears himself guess what he is seeing. In blindsight, there are "blind" areas in the visual field where the person claims not to see stimuli. but the patient's guesses about certain features of the stimuli are often highly accurate. But that doesn't count as access-consciousness because the blindsight patient is not in a position to reason about those contents simply in virtue of having them. A second issue has to do with the fact that the paradigm phenomenally conscious states are sensations, whereas the paradigm access-conscious states are thoughts, beliefs. and desires, states with representational content expressed by "that" clauses. There are a number of ways of seeing the access-consciousness of sensations such as
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pain. Pains are often (some have argued always) representationaL and so these representational contents are candidates for what is inferentially promiscuous, etc., when a pain is access-conscious. Alternatively, we could take the access-conscious content of pain to consist in the content that one has a pain or a state with a certain phenomenal content." Now to the point of this excursion into access-consciousness: Could access-consciousness be a cultural construction? Could there have been a time when humans who are biologically the same as us never had the contents of their perceptions and thoughts poised for free use in reasoning or in rational control of action? Could there be a human culture in which the people don't have access-consciousness? Would each of us have failed to be access-conscious but for specific cultural injections? Did Helen Keller become access-conscious at age seven? Once asked, the answers are obvious. Dogs have access-consciousness in virtue of their abilities to use perceptual contents in guiding their actions. Without access-consciousness, why would thought and perception ever have evolved in the first place? The discovery that access-consciousness is anything other than a ba~ic biological feature of people would be breathtakingly amazing, on a par with the discovery that housecats are space aliens. Anyone who claimed such a thing would have to marshal a kind of evidence that Dennett makes no attempt to provide. (Of course, to say that access-consciousness is a basic biological feature of people is not to say that it is literally present at birth. Teeth and pubic hair are biological, but not present at birth.) Access-consciousness is as close as we get to the official view of consciousness of CO/lSciouslless Explained, and also in Dennett's later writings. In a recent reply to critics, Dennett sums up his current formulation of the theory, saying "Consciousness is cerebral celebrity-nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and 'symptomatic' effectson memory, on the control of behavior. and so forth.'" The official theory of Consciousness Explained is the Multiple Drafts theory, the view that there are distinct parallel tracks of representation that vie for access to reasoning, verbalization, and behavior. This seems more a theory of access-consciousness than any of the other elements of the mongrel. But surely it is nothing other than a biological fact about people-not a cultural construction-that some brain representations persevere enough to affect memory, contml beho\'iO/; etc. Of course, our cOllcept of cerebral celebrity is a cultural construction, but cerebral celebrity itself is not. No one should confuse a concept with what it is a concept of. Now we have reached a conundrum of interpretation: The closest thing we have to an official cOllcept of consciousness in Dennett's recent work is not a concept of something that can be taken seriously as a cultural construction. In his reply, I hope Dennett tells us how, according to him, cerebral celebrity could be a cultural construction. In the meantime, I will search for another kind of consciousness that he could have in mind.
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I said that the concept of consciousness is a mongrel concept. Our use of a single word reflects our tendency to see the elements of the mongrel as wrapped together. In particular, we think of conscious qualities as given, as completely present with nothing hidden. To see phenomenal consciousness as completely present is to see it as entirely accessible. These are ideas about consciousness. but they are ideas that affect phenomenal consciousness itself. what it is like to be us, just as in Dennett's example; what it is like to hear the imaginary Bach cantata would be influenced by the idea we have of the Christmas ditty. Our theories of phenomenal consciousness do influence phenomenal consciousness itself to some extent. Our experience might be somewhat different in a culture in which a different view of phenomenal consciousness was prevalent. But we should not allow such interactions to make us lose sight of the main effect. True. culture modulates cerebral celebrity, but it does not create it. We must not conflate cultural influence with cultural creation. It should be noted that our theories, even wildly false theories. about many things. not just consciousness itself. can influence our experience. For example, we sometimes think of seeing as a process in which something emanates from the eyes. We talk of moving our gaze sometimes as if it were a beam of light. And we sometimes talk of seeing through a dirty window as if our gaze could to some extent penetrate it. These notions were parts of theories of vision in ancient times, and even now appear in childrens' theories." Perhaps these ideas affect our phenomenal consciousness-or perhaps it is the other way around.
MONITORING CONSCIOUSNESS The idea of consciousness as some sort of internal monitoring takes many forms. One form is one that Dennett discusses in COllsciousness Explained: higher-order thought. In Rosenthal's version," to say that a state is conscious in this sense is to say that the state is accompanied by a thought to the effect that one is in that state. Perhaps in another time or culture people were or are much less introspective than they are here and now, but would anyone claim that there was a time or place when people genetically like us (and who are not shell-shocked or starving to death) had children who had no capacity to think or say something on the order of "Carry me. my leg hurts"? To be able to think or say this involves being able to think that one's leg hurts. and that is to think a higher-order thought in the relevant sense. I won't say that it isn't possible that some wise child of our species discovered that she could get Mom to carry her by talking (and thinking) about her pain, but it would take weird and wonderful discoveries to convince me that this is a theoretical option to be taken seriously. Dennett does not give any hint of the kind
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of weird and wonderful discoveries that would be needed. So we have to doubt that this is what he means. (Though it should be noted that Dennett makes a number of very favorable remarks about this idea of consciousness in Consciousness Explained.)
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS There are a number of closely connected notions of self-consciousness clustered around the notion of the ability to think about oneself. Let us begin with a minimal notion of self-consciousness, one that requires thinking about oneself, but not in any particular way. Certainly this very minimal kind of self-consciousness is unlikely to be a cultural construction. Consider deception. Deception involves thinking about getting others to think that one believes something other than what one actually believes. This involves the minimal self-consciousness just mentioned. There is pretty good evidence that higher primates practice deception, so it seems unlikely that humans had to invent it. 10 Further. some higher primates. notably chimps. show other signs of self-consciousness in the minimal sense. Some primates show signs of exploring their bodies in mirrors. while other primates and humans below age one and a half do not. Gallup" and others have painted bright spots on the foreheads and ears of anesthetized primates. watching what happened. Chimps between the ages of seven and fifteen usually show surprise on looking at their mirror images. then touch the spot. attempting to wipe off the mark. This is known as the mark test. Nonprimates never do this. Human babies don't pass the mark test until the middle of their second year. This is now a well-established phenomenon replicated numerous times. though there are raging controversies. I' As far as I can see. the controversies have little to do with chimp self-consciousness in the minimal sense. One of the controversies is about whether chimps have a "theory of mind." but that is not required for minimal self-consciousness. Anyway. there is independent evidence from the literature on genetic defects that humans have an innate module dedicated to understanding the minds of other humans, a module which is therefore most unlikely to be a cultural construction. Autistic people appear to lack that module. even when they are otherwise cognitively normaL and there is another syndrome. a chromosomal abnormality. Williams Syndrome. in which the patients have the mind-module even when they are terribly subnormal in other cognitive respects. I , Carey. et aL mention a story that illustrates the lack of theoretical understanding characteristic of Williams Syndrome. A young adult woman with Williams Syndrome had read a number of vampire novels. When asked why vampires bite necks. she was very puzzled, and eventually answered that they must have "an inordinate fondness for necks." She had no idea that vampires are supposed to consume
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blood. This sort of evidence for genetic mental modules certainly puts a heavy burden of proof on anyone who claims that anything so basic as consciousness in any of the senses discussed so far is a cultural construction. Another controversy is over whether chimps really realize that they are seeing themselves in the mirror. Perhaps a chimp who is a subject of the experiment thinks she is seeing another chimp with a dot on his forehead. and that makes the subject chimp wonder whether she has a dot on her forehead too. Maybe so, but the ability to wonder whether I have a dot on my forehead presupposes that I have minimal self-consciousness. Another objection to these experiments is that perhaps they mainly test understanding of mirrors. But plausibly understanding mirrors involves having some idea that it is oneself that one is seeing in the mirror. The most fascinating result I've heard of in this area in recent years is unpublished work by Marc Hauser on the cotton-top tamarin, a small monkey which has a large white tuft on the top of its head. Monkeys had never been observed to pass orthodox versions of the mark test. Hauser thought that perhaps the inconsistent responses shown by chimps and other higher primates had to do with the lack of salience of the dots, so he died the cottontop tuft outrageous electric colors, flamingo pink, chartreuse, etc. The finding is that the cottontops passed the mark test. Normally, they don't look in the mirror much. and rarely longer than one to three seconds at a time. Hauser observed long stares on the part of the monkeys with died tufts of thirty to forty-five seconds, and a three-fold increase in touching their tufts. Further. it seems unlikely that the monkeys thought they were looking at other monkeys. since staring in this species is a threat, and these monkeys were staring peacefully, something they do not normally do. Hauser has run all sorts of controls. for example. painting the mirror instead of the monkey, checking what happens when a monkey sees another monkey with a died tuft, 14 checking the effect of the smell and the feel of the die, and the result stands. Another experiment (mentioned by Dennett) is that a chimp can learn to get bananas via a hole in its cage by watching its arm on a closed circuit TV whose camera is some distance away.15 Though there is strong evidence that chimps (and maybe monkeys) are self-conscious in the minimal sense, given the controversies in the field, I will draw a weaker conclusion, namely that it is up to anyone who claims that humans are not, as a biological matter, selfconscious in the minimal sense to debunk this evidence. In the absence of such debunking, we are entitled to suppose that it is false that selfconsciousness in the minimal sense is a cultural construction in humans. (I will ignore the possibility that self-consciousness is an independent creation of monkey, chimp, and human culture.) The idea that minimal self-consciousness is a cultural construction is certainly more of a genuine possibility than the options canvassed earlier, but it is nonetheless a poor empirical bet. But haven't I given up my case for confusion by admitting that this is an empirical question which could come out either way? No, Dennett will
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not get off the hook so easily. To be sure, he sees his theory of consciousness as empirical, but empirical in a diffuse way, not something that could be refuted by experiments on cottontop tamarins. Dennett is well aware of the work on the mark test and chooses not to mention it, at least not in anything I've seen. He clearly does not see his theory of consciousness as depending on these specific empirical results, since he mentions few of them; indeed, to the extent that he does mention this type of work, he appears to have something like the same view that I have expressed. He seems to discuss the Menzel experiment so as to support the idea that chimps are self-conscious in something like the way that we are. He describes the result as "a decidedly non-trivial bit of self-recognition."[" Where are we? I have argued that if Dennett's theory is about phenomenal consciousness or access-consciousness, it is obviously false and if it is about minimal self-consciousness, it is less obviously false but still false. There is a notion of self-consciousness that is a better candidate for what Dennett has in mind than minimal self-consciousness. He does have a chapter on the self in which he paints the self as a fiction, a fiction invented in human history. Now I should say right off that I have long been sympathetic to something like this idea, though I prefer a more conservative version; viz., that the self is much more fragmented than we like to think. This is an idea that has been around for many years, one that grows ever more prominent as the evidence mounts up. The first really impressive case for it by a philosopher was Thomas Nagel's famous paper on split brains and the unity of consciousness. Nagel argued that the fragmentation observed in split brain patients exists to some degree in normal people, and in the light of it our concept of the self crumbles. This sort of idea has been widened and elaborated for many years now by many psychologists and neuropsychologists, notably by Gazzaniga and his colleagues.[~ Gazzaniga tries to explain many ubiquitous cognitive phenomena in terms of the relations among "sub-selves," especially the efforts of some "sub-selves" to rationalize the behavior of other "sub-selves:'[') Now here is the relevance to Dennett. I have been talking about a rather minimal notion of self-consciousness, one that it seems tout chimps and human toddlers and maybe monkeys have. This is a very unintellectual notion of self-consciousness, because it is very relaxed about the notion of the self. In particular, this weak notion of self-consciousness does not require any conception of the self as being or as not being a federation of subselves. But we are free to frame a more intellectual notion of the self that does presuppose that we are not such a federation. I think it is the self in this sense, the nonfederal sense, that Dennett thinks is a fiction. And that sense of the self gives rise to a conception of self-consciousness, namely thinking about oneself in some way that is incompatible with being a federation. Let us call this sense of self-consciousness NONFEDERAL-SELF-consciousness. I spell it this way to remind the reader that the emendation attaches to the [7
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concept of the self; and only derivatively to the concept of consciousnessit is self-consciousness that involves thinking of the self in a certain sophisticated way, a way that Dennett thinks (and I agree) is probably wrong. Note that unity and nonfederation are distinct. since unity is compatible with both federation and nonfederation. The United States is a unity as well as a federation. One could think of oneself as a unity without having the conceptual equipment to think of oneself as either a federation or not a federation. I would guess (and it's just a guess) that members of our species have always thought of themselves as a unity, but only in recorded history have thought of themselves as NONFEDERAL, or, in the case of Dennett, Nagel, et aI. (including myself) as FEDERAL. So perhaps what Dennett means when he says that consciousness is a cultural construction is that NONFEDERAL-SELF-consciousness is a cultural construction because the nonfederal self is a cultural construction. But that would make the claim a total banality. It is no surprise at all that the ability to think of oneself in a very sophisticated way is a product of culture. You can't think of yourself as falling under a sophisticated concept without having the sophisticated concept. We could call thinking of oneself as chairman CHAIRMAN-SELF-consciousness. CHAIRMAN-SELFconsciousness involves thinking of oneself as the person who guides the department, the person who has the keys. etc. And all could agree that CHAIRMAN-SELF-consciousness is a cultural construction because the concept of a chairman is a cultural construction. But that is no news. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the idea that selves are not federations is a banality. On the contrary, J think it is an interestingly false thesis. What I am talking about is the claim that it requires culture to think of one's self as nonfederal (or as federal)-that's the banality. To put it slightly differently. Dennett's claim that we are federations, that we have federal selves. is a very interesting and profound idea that J agree with. What is banal is that it takes culture to think of oneself using such an interesting and intellectual concept (or its negation). The thesis about the self is interesting, the thesis about self-consciousness is banal. However, J find nothing in the texts to justify the idea that what Dennett means is that NONFEDERAL-SELF-consciousness is a cultural construcco tion. So I can't claim to have figured out what Dennett means yet. But there is an important piece of the puzzle that I haven't introduced yet. Before I get to that piece, I want to guard against one source of misunderstanding. I mentioned earlier that we think of phenomenal consciousness as wrapped together with access-consciousness in thinking of phenomenal consciousness as accessible. And this way of thinking-which may be a cultural product-influences phenomenal consciousness itself. We think of phenomenal consciousness as having nothing hidden about it, and experience might perhaps be somewhat different in a different culture in which phenomenal consciousness was not thought about in this way. I cautioned
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against the mistake of jumping to the conclusion that if this is right it shows that consciousness is a cultural construction. To confuse being influenced by culture with being created by culture would be a serious error, one that I am not attributing to Dennett. Consciousness and feet may both be influenced by culture, I concluded, but neither is created by it. What I am leading up to is that a similar point can be made about the relation between phenomenal consciousness and self-consciousness. There is a "me"-ness to phenomenal consciousness that may come in part from culture; this aspect comes out in part in the way we describe phenomenal consciousness as "before the mind." Whether or not the "me"-ness of phenomenal consciousness is in part cultural, the ideology of the unity of the self mentioned earlier gives us reason to think there is an influence of culture on the way many or most of 21 us experience the world. But once again. though there may be a cultural influence on phenomenal consciousness here. this is no reason to postulate that phenomenal consciousness is a cultural creation. Surely, in any culture that allows the material and psychological necessities of life, people genetically like us will have experiences much like ours: There will be something it is like for them to see and hear and smell things that is much like what it is like for us to do these things. I mentioned a new piece of the puzzle. Here it is: In the early part of Consciousness Explained,2' Dennett tells us that consciousness is like love and money. He thinks that you can't love without having the concept oflove, and (more plausibly) that there wouldn't be any money unless some people had the concept of money. (In another work, soon to be mentioned and quoted from, he includes right and wrong in the list of things that don't exist without their concepts.) According to Dennett. you can't have consciousness unless you have the concept of consciousness. This is certainly a wildsounding view (and he concedes this). Its incompatibility with common ideas is exemplified by the fact that we are inclined to think that animals are conscious (in at least the phenomenal. access and minimal-self senses) but don't have the concept of consciousness. I don't know what Dennett's argument for his claim is or what kind of consciousness he has in mind, but it does seem closely connected with the idea that consciousness is a cultural construction. Here is a line of reasoning that connects them. Suppose that Dennett is right that we can't be conscious without having the concept of consciousness. And suppose further that the concept is a cultural construction. Then consciousness itself requires a cultural construction and could for that reason be said to be a cultural construction. Since there is a close connection between the claim that consciousness requires its own concept and the claim that consciousness is a cultural construction, we should consider what kind of consciousness it is supposed to be that you can't have without having a concept of it. For whatever kind of consciousness it is that requires its own concept will no doubt be the Holy Grail, the kind of consciousness we have been seeking that is a cultural construction (and interestingly so).
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Dennett credits Julian Jaynes as one of the sources of the idea that conD sciousness is a cultural construction. Now we are in luck because Dennett has written a long review of Jaynes's book, Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown (~f the Bicameral Mind which links this view to the idea that consciousness requires its own concept, a view which Dennett also credits 24 to Jaynes. What kind of consciousness is it that Jaynes is supposed to think 25 requires its own concept? Dennett criticizes my review of Jaynes for misconstruing a revolutionary proposal as a simple blunder. In a review of Jaynes's book some years ago, Ned Block said the whole book made one great crashing mistake, what we sometimes call a "use mention" error: confusing a phenomenon with either the name of the phenomenon or the concept of the phenomenon. Block claimed that even if everything that Jaynes said about historical events were correct, all he would have shown was not that consciousness arrived in 1400 B.C., but that the concepf of consciousness arrived in 1400 B.C. People were conscious long before they had the concept of consciousness, Block declared, in the same way that there was gravity long before Newton ever hit upon the concept of gravity. , .. [A discussion of morality follows] Right and wrong, however, are parts of morality, a peculiar phenomenon that can 'f predate a certain set of concepts. including the concepts of right and wrong. The phenomenon is created in part by the arrival on the scene of a certain set of concepts .... Now I take Jaynes to be making a similarly exciting and striking move with regard to consciousness. To put it really somewhat paradoxically, you can't have consciousness until you have the concept of 2 consciousness. " [Note: Though Dennett calls this a paradoxical way of putting it, he says this repeatedly and does not put it any other way.]
Jaynes has a very concrete version of Dennett's hypothesis that consciousness is a cultural construction, namely that it was invented in Europe by the ancient Greeks around 1400 B.C. We don't need to get into the issue of what Jaynes actually meant by 'consciousness'. For my purposes, the issue is what Dennett takes Jaynes to mean, because Dennett himself endorses the idea that consciousness is a cultural construction in this sense. Here is what he says. Perhaps this is an autobiographical confession: I am rather fond of his way of using these terms; ["consciousness', 'mind', and other mental terms] I rather like his way of carving up consciousness. It is in fact very similar to the way that I independently decided to carve up consciousness some years ago. So what then is the project'? The project is, in one sense, very simple and very familiar. It is bridging what he calls the 'awesome chasm' between mere inert matter and the inwardness, as he puts it, of a conscious being. Consider the awesome chasm between a brick and a bricklayer. There isn't, in Thomas
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Nagel's famous phrase, anything that it is like to be a brick. But there is something that it is like to be a bricklayer, and we want to know what the conditions were under which there happened to come to be entities that it was like something to be in this rather special sense. That is the story. the developmental, evolutionary. historical story, that Jaynes sets out to tell."
So it looks like the kind of consciousness that requires its own concept and is a cultural construction is after all phenomenal consciousness. W. V. Quine tells me that he asked Jaynes what it was like to be a person before consciousness was invented. Jaynes replied, Quine says, that what it was like to be them was no different from what it is like to be a table or a chair. The passage just quoted suggests that Dennett would agree. So we are back to square one. I've been going through concepts of consciousness one by one looking for a concept of consciousness for which Dennett's thesis escapes both falsity and banality, and phenomenal consciousness is the first concept of consciousness I tried. If phenomenal consciousness is not reducible to one of the other consciousnesses, then the claim that phenomenal consciousness requires its own concept and is a cultural construction is obviously false for reasons I gave. But if Dennett does favor one of these reductions, we have every right to ask: "Which oneT And if the answer is one of the consciousnesses I have covered, the claim is false or banal. Perhaps Dennett will say that he will have no part of my distinctions, that they impose a grid on the phenomena that doesn't sit well with his way of thinking of things. But this is no defense. Consider randomness. The concept can be and is used in two very different ways. Sometimes we say a particular sequence is random if it is produced by a random process, even if the sequence itself consists of eighteen consecutive sevens. Other times what we mean is that it is of a type that one would expect to be produced by a random process, that is, it has no obvious pattern. Suppose someone makes a claim that is false on one concept of randomness and banal on the other. It would be of no use at all for the offender to defend himself by saying that he didn't find the distinction congenial. Given the fact that on one way of cutting things up, his thesis is trivial or banal. it is up to him to give some precise way of thinking about randomness that disarms the objection. He must show how his thesis can be neither false nor banal, and to do this he will have to make his notion of randomness precise in a way that allows us to see that the criticism is wrong. The application of the analogy to Dennett is straightforward. I have argued that on one grid that we can impose on the phenomena. his claim is either false or banal. He does not have the option of simply saying he doesn't like the distinctions. He will have to find a way of making more precise what he is talking about under the heading of "consciousness" in a way that rebuts the charge of falsity or banality. It is no good just refusing to make
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distinctions at all, since anyone can see that 'conscious' is highly ambiguous, and my argument puts the burden of proof on him. In another publication written about the same time as this paper, I have made a shorter version of some of these points about Dennett and Dennett 2K has replied. Here is what J see as his main point: Although Block discusses my theory of consciousness at some length, his discussion always leans on the presupposition that his putative distinction is in place. My theory of consciousness is stranded, he concludes, between being trivially false (if a theory of P-consciousness), non-trivially false (if a theory of "just" A-consciousness) and banal if a theory of "a highly sophisticated version of self-consciousness." But since I not only decline to draw any such distinction, but argue at length against any such distinction. Block's critique is simply questionbegging. I may be wrong to deny the distinction, but this could not be shown by proclaiming the distinction, ignoring the grounds I have given for denying it, and then showing what a hash can then be made of ideas I have expressed in other terms. with other presuppositions. If Block thinks his distinction is too obvious to need further defense, he has missed the whole point of my radical alternative. This is a fundamental weakness in the strategy Block employs. and it vitiates his discoveries of "fallacies" in the thinking of othertheorists as well. Those of us who are not impressed by his candidate distinction are free to run the implication in the other direction: since our reasoning is not fallacious after all. his distinction must be bogus. ,,,
First of all, though Dennett has some complaints against the phenomenal consciousness/access-consciousness distinction, he never mentions any problem about the notions of access-consciousness. monitoring consciousness or self-consciousness, nor does he impugn the distinctions among these things. Oversimplifying (see below), Dennett wishes to treat phenomenal consciousness as a type of access-consciousness. But the argument 1 gave can run on just monitoring consciousness. self-consciousness, and accessconsciousness of various sorts. Supposing that phenomenal consciousness just is a type of access-consciousness, what then is Dennett's theory about? If it is about access-consciousness, Dennett will run into the problem mentioned earlier, that it is obviously a biological fact about people and not a cultural construction that some brain representations persevere enough to affect memory. control behavior. and the like. Since this is Dennett's favored way of describing access. it is not easy to understand how seeing phenomenal consciousness as a type of access-consciousness is supposed to avoid the problem. If there is some novel form of access that his theory is about, it is surprising that he has not told us in any of his many publications on this topic, including his reply to a version of the criticism of this paper. Secondly, Dennett does not reject the phenomenal consciousness/ access-consciousness distinction. Far from it-he reconstructs it. His idea
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is that phenomenal-consciousness contents are richer in information and more accessible than the level required for access-consciousness. Thus, he says, I am "inflating differences in degree into imaginary differences in kind.")O I believe I can show that this reconstruction will not do. J I For present purposes, let's suppose Dennett is right: The difference is one of degree. Which degree, then, does his thesis apply to? Or does it apply to monitoring or self-consciousness? My criticism does not depend on taking the distinction to be one of kind rather than of degree. Thirdly, Dennett contrasts the informational paucity of the perceptual contents of the blindsight patient with the informational richness of normal vision. Some classic blindsight studies involve prompting the blindsight patient to guess between an 'X' and an '0' or between a horizontal and a vertical line. Normal perceptual contents are much richer. representing colors and shapes that are a small subset of a vast number of possibilities. In normal vision, we can "come to know, swiftly and effortlessly, that there was a bright orange Times Roman italic 'X' about two inches high, on a blue-green background, with a pale gray smudge on the upper right arm, almost touching the intersection? (That's a sample of the sort of richness of content normally to be gJeaned from the sighted field, after all.)" Supposing that Dennett is right that phenomenal-consciousness contents are just contents that are particularly rich in information and accessibility, is it phenomenally conscious contents that are cultural constructions and require their own concepts? It is hard to take seriously the idea that the human capacity to see and access rich displays of colors and shapes is a cultural construction that requires its own concept. Indeed, there is a great deal of evidence that culture does not even injfuence these perceptual contents. For example, in cultures which have only two or three color words, the people make all the same perceptual distinctions that we do. Further. they recognize the same colors as focal that we do even if their languages do not separate out those colors.': In a fascinating series of studies, Eleanor Rosch showed that the Dani. a New Guinea tribe that has only two color words, nonetheless remember and represent colors in many respects just as we do. For example, they learned words for focal colors much more easily than words for nonfocal colors (e.g., blue as opposed to greenish blue). When asked to learn words for oddball color categories covering focal colors plus adjacent nonfocal colors, some subjects wanted to quit the study." There is reason to think that many aspects of color and shape perception are genetically coded features of the visual system, and not a product of culture or something that requires any concept of • 3-+ conSCIOusness. So I leave the reader with a quandary, one that I hope Dennett will now resolve, since he gets the last word. Consciousness is a mongrel notion: There are a number of very different concepts of consciousness. On some of these, notably phenomenal consciousness, access-consciousness and monitoring consciousness, the idea that consciousness is a cultural construction
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is hard to take seriously. If it is minimal self-consciousness that is meant, it is an empirical issue where available evidence goes against the cultural construction idea. (But if that was what Dennett meant, you would think he would have commented negatively on that evidence; instead his limited comment is positive.) If it is a sophisticated self-consciousness that is meant (NONFEDERAL-SELF-consciousness), then the thesis is true but utterly banal, because it is no surprise that the ability to apply a sophisticated concept to oneself requires a cultural construction. I don't claim to have covered all the options. But I have covered enough options to make it fair to ask for an answer: What kind of consciousness is it that requires its own concept and is a cultural construction?"
NOTES I. Daniel Dennett.Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little. Brown & Co .. 1991). 219. 2. Ibid., 210. J. T. S. Kuhn. "A Function for Thought Experiments:' in Melanges Alexandre Korre, vol. I. (Hermann. 1964). 307-34. 4. This last point could be rebutted by the claim that throughout human evolution there was a culture that created phenomenal consciousness (apparently contrary to Julian Jaynes' view to be discussed later). If we allow ourselves to take the view that phenomenal consciousness is a cultural construction seriously we will have to take this issue seriously. My point, however, is that we should not take this question seriously. It is a poor question that will just mislead us. 5. Ned Block, "On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness." The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995): 227-47. See also my reply to my critics in the same volume. This paper is reprinted in The Nature ot' Consciousness: Philosophical Debates. ed. N. Block, O. Flanagan. and G. Guzeldere (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 6. One problem with the first of these suggestions is that perhaps the representational content of pain is nonco/lcepfuali;:.ed. and if so, it would be too primitive to playa role in inference. After all. dogs can have pains. and it is reasonable to doubt that dogs hm'e the relevant concepts. In response to an earlier version of this distinction, Davies and Humphreys have made a suggestion which I can adapt. (See the introduction to their Consciousnes.1 [Oxford: Blackwell. J 993].) A state with nonconceptualized content is access-conscious if. in virtue of one's having the state, its content ""ould he inferentially promiscuous and poised for rational control of action and speech if the subject were to have had the concepts required for that content to be a conceptualized content. 7. Daniel Dennett, "The Message Is: There Is No Medium:' Philosophr and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 929. 8. The,e theories are known as extramission theories. 9. D. Rosenthal, "Two Concepts of Consciousness," Philosophical Srudies 49 (1986): 329-59. 10. Merlin Donald's Origins (Jf the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cogniriol7 (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1991) is often thought to be rather critical about the evidence for the conceptual capacities of chimps compared to humans. It is interesting in this regard to tind Donald replying to six critics who criticize him for [his by admitting that there is impressive evidence for ape deception, See his reply to critics in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1993): 777. Merlin says he is espe-
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cially impressed with data on chimps' capacities, including some that indicate "sense of 'self'" in Alexander Marshak's "Correct Data Base: Wrong Model?" Behal'ioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1993): 767. Mitchell and Miles (in the same issue) provide further data supporting this conclusion. II. G. Gallup. "Self-Awareness and the Emergence of Mind in Primates." The American Journal oj Prima to logy 2 (1982): 237-48. The most complete and up-to-date survey on the mark test as of my writing this is D. Povinelli's "What Chimpanzees Know about the Mind," in Behavioral Diversity in Chimpan;:ees (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). See also R. W. Mitchell, "Mental Models of Mirror Self-Recognition: Two Theories," in New Ideas in Psychologv 11 (1993): 295-332 and "The Evolution of Primate Cognition: Simulation, Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of Other Minds:' in Hominid Culture in Primate Penpective, cd. D. Quiatt. and I.ltani (University Press of Colorado, 1993). 12. Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans. ed. S. T. Parker. et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also New Ideas in Psychology II (1993). R. W. Mitchell's paper, "Mental Models of Mirror Self-Recognition: Two Theories" draws fire from Gallup and Povinelli, De Lannoy. Anderson, and Byrne, and there is a reply by Mitchell. I think one gets a pretty good idea of what the controversies are like from this exchange. 13. S. Carey. S. Johnson. and K. Levine. "Two Separable Knowledge Acquisition Systems: Evidence from Williams Syndrome": H. Tager-Flusberg. K. Sullivan, and D. Zaitchik. "Social Cognitive Abilities in Young Children with Williams Syndrome" (papers presented at the Sixth International Professional Conference of the Williams Syndrome Association, July 1994). 14. M. Hauser. J. Kralik, C. Botto-Mahan, M. Garrett. and 1. Oser. "Self-recognition in Primates: Phylogeny and the Salience of Species-Typical Features" (forthcoming). 15. E. W. Menzel, E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, and 1. Lawson. "Chimpanzee (Pan Troglodwes) Spatial Problem Solving with the Use of Mirrors and Televised Equivalents of Mirrors:' The Journal oj Comparatil'e Psychology 99 (1985): 211-17. This experiment is mentioned by Dennett on 428 of Consciousness Explained. 16. Consciollsness Explained. 428. 17. Thomas Nagel. "Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness." Syntilese 22 (1971): 396-413. 18. M. Gazzaniga and 1. E. LeDoux, The Integrated Mind (New York: Plenum, 1978): M. Gazzaniga, The Social Brain (New York: Basic Books, 1(85). See also Marvin Minsky's The Society ()f Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985). 19. For a detailed account of the difference between phenomenal consciousness and selfconsciousness. and of why it is self-consciousness that matters to morality, see Stephen White, "What Is It Like to Be a Homunculus'?" The Pac(fic Philusophical QuarterlY 68 (1987): 148-74. 20. Further. if that was what Dennett meant, wouldn't he have advanced his theory of the self as a fiction in the course of presenting the theory of consciousness'? Instead, the theory of consciousness (including consciousness as a cultural construction) is presented in part II of the book (mainly chapters 7-9), and the theory of the self is given in part III at the end, in the next to the last chapter of the whole book, chapter 13. I am indebted to an unpublished paper on the self by Stephen White. Consciousness Explained, 24. Ibid .. 259. Daniel Dennett, "Julian Jaynes's Software Archeology," Canadian PHchology 27 (1986): 149-54. 25. Ned Block. review of Julian Jaynes's Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in Cognition and Brain Theory 4 ( 1981 ): 81-3. 26. "Julian Jaynes's Software Archeology:' 152.
21. 22. 23. 24.
27. Ibid .. 149.
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28. Block, "On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness." Dennett's reply is "The Path Not Taken,"The Behal'ioral and Brain Sciences 18 ( 1995): 252-3. 'P-consciousness' and 'A-consciousness' are the terms used in that paper for phenomenal and accessconsciousness. 29. Dennett. "The Path Not Taken:' 253. 30. Ibid. 31. Sec my reply in The BehUl'ioral and Bmill Sciences 18 (1995): 272-84. 32. B. Berlin and P. Kay. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Emllliion (University of California Press, 1969). 33. Eleanor Rosch. "On the Internal Structure of Perceptual and Semantic Categories," in CO,Rnitil'e Del'elopmelll and the Acquisition of Language. ed. T. E. Moore (Academic Pre~s. 1973). 111-44. 34. Ican't resist commenting on Dennett' s suggestion that phenomenal consciousness can be characterized in part in term~ of informational richness. (l won't comment on the accessibility part of the theory.) Wciskrantz notes that his patient DB had better acuity in some areas of the blind field (in some circumstances) than in his sighted field. And there is an obvious way to increase the superiority of the blind field-namely by decreasing the richness of the deliverances of the sighted field. Suppose a Mad Scientist kidnaps a blindsight patient and damages the sighted part of the visual system. Many blind people are unable to do much more than distinguish light and dark. so we can imagine the Mad Scientist injuring a blindsight patient by so damaging his sighted field. In the sighted field. he experiences the difference bctween light and dark. But don't we still have an informational superiority of the blind field? Dennett describes thc informational content of blindsight as "vanishingly" small. In his book. he emphasizes the cafoCS in which the blindsight patient is given a forced choice: e.g .. an 'X' or an '0'. But blindsight patients can exhibit contents that are far more informational than that. In PoppeL et a!.'s famous paper. the first human blindsight study. the patients wcre asked to move their eyes in the direction of the stimulus. \\'hich Ihe\' (,()lIld do. (E. P(jppe!. R. Held. and D. Frost."Residual Visual Function" after Brain Wounds Involving the Central Visual Pathways in Man:' Nafllre 243 [1973]: 2295-6.) So we could have a blindsight patient whose blind field discriminations involved distinguishing among a number of different direction~. and who could not make that many discriminations in his sigliu-d field. In the light of this point, no one should maintain that high informational content is the essence of or necessary for experience. Further. blind sight patients can catch a ball thrown in the blind field. and shape their hand to grasp an object presented in the blind field. These are cases of far more than binary information. and more. I would guess, than some cases of near total blindness of the sort described. Further. there are othef blind sight-like phenomena in which subjects have rich informational contents without phenomenal or access-consciousness of it. Prosopagnosia is a neurological impairment in which subjects cannot recognize faces. even the faces of their friends and family. Bauer ("Autonomic Recognition: A Neuropsychological Application of the Guilty Knowledge Test," Neurop.\·yc/wlogica 22 [1984J: 457-69) showed patients photographs of people they had seen many times. fOf example, John Wayne, and went through a number of names. noting a polygraph blip when the right name came up. Other experiments have shown that many prosopagnosics have information about the faces that they cannot consciously recognize in either the phenomenal or access senses. What's the informational value of seeing that it is John Wayne? Not vanishingly small. Compare the rich· ness of this content with that of say a salty taste (while holding your nose ~o there is no smell). It is not at all cledf that the experience of tasting without smelling has more informational value than the prosopagnosics nonexperiential appreciation that he is seeing John Wayne. 35. I am grateful to Susan Carey, Chris Hill. Paul Horwich. and Stephen White for comments on a previous draft.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 22 NO. I & 2. SPRING ,\ND
FALL
1994
Differences that Make No Difference]
Fred Dretske Stanford Ul1il'crsity
Never mind differences that make no difference. There are none. I want to talk, instead. about differences that do not make a difference to anyone, differences of which no one is aware. There are lots of these. According to Daniel Dennett, though, there are fewer than you might have thought. There are. to be sure. physical differences---even some that exist in you-of which you are not aware. There are also conscious events in me, and differences among them. that you don't know about. But there are no conscious events in you that escape your attention. If you do not believe yourself to be having conscious experience 0, then 0 is not a conscious experience at all. Dennett calls this view. a view that denies the possibility in principle of consciousness in the absence of a subject's belief in that consciousness. first-person operationalism.' Dennett is a first-person operationalist. For him there are no facts about one's own conscious lifeno. as it were, conscious facts-of which one is not conscious. Philosophers like to call each other names. I'm no exception. The preferred term of abuse these days. especially among materialists. seems to be "Cartesian." So I will use it. First-person operationalism sounds like warmed-over Cartesianism to me. For Descartes. the mind is an open book. Everything that happens there is known to be happening there by the person in whom it is happening. No mental secrets. For Dennett. too, there are no secrets. no facts about our conscious lives that are not available for external
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publication. Differences that make no difference to the publicity department, to what a person knows or believes and can thus exhibit in overt behavior, are not conscious differences. The mind is like everything else: There is more to it than we are aware. 1f making a difference to someone is understood, as Dennett understands it, as a matter of making a difference to what that person believes or judges, then conscious differences need make no difference to anyone-not even to the person in whom they occur.
1. HIDE THE THIMBLE From Content and Consciousness' to Consciousness Explained, a span of over twenty years, Dennett has been resolute in his conviction that awareness of something-an apple or a thimble-requires some kind of cognitive upshot. In the 1969 book (chapter six, "Awareness and Consciousness"), this is expressed as the idea that awareness of an apple on a table is awareness that there is an apple on a table. Awareness that there is an apple on a table, in tum, gets cashed out-l as a content-bearing internal state like a judgment or a belief that controls behavior and (for those who can speak) speech. In 1991, the same view is expressed by saying that Betsy, who is looking for a thimble in the children's game "Hide the Thimble," does not see the thimble until she "zero's in on" it and identifies it as a thimble. Only when an appropriate judgment is made-"Aha, the thimble"-will she see it. Only then will she become aware of it. Only then will the thimble be "in" Betsy's conscIous expenence. As a historical note, the same year Content and Consciousness appeared, I published Seeing and Knowing.' Although I was concerned primarily with epistemological issues, how seeing gives rise to knowing, I made a great fuss about what I called nonepistemic perception, perception that does not require (though in adult human beings it is normally accompanied by) belief or knowledge. In contrast to seeing facts (that they are apples and thimbles), seeing objects (apples and thimbles) is a case of nonepistemic perception. I made a fuss about nonepistemic perception because so many bad arguments in epistemology (and, at that time, in the philosophy of science) were pivoting on a confusion between the perception of objects and events (like oscilloscopes and eclipses), on the one hand, and the perception of facts (that they are oscilloscopes and eclipses) on the other. The perception of objects and events, I argued, could, and often did (especially in the case of children, animals, and theoretically untutored adults), occur in the absence of conceptual uptake-without such propositional attitudes as knowledge, identification, belief, and recognition. When it comes to objects and events, seeing is not knowing, and it isn't believing either.
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At the same time, therefore, that I was arguing that awareness of apples was quite distinct from awareness that they are apples or, indeed, awareness of any fact about the apples, Dennett was assuming that these were essentially the same thing, that awareness of things is awareness of facts about 6 those things. Although Dennett's book was, in many ways, an absolute eye-opener for me (awakening my interest in the philosophy of mind), we were obviously in disagreement about a fundamental point concerning perceptual consciousness and, therefore, the nature of perceptual experience. Since the perception of objects and events was, for me, a relation between a perceiver and a thing that could exist without the perceiver understanding what was being perceived-or even that something was being perceived-perception could not be understood in terms of judgment, belief. or knowledge. Cognitively speaking. seeing is like touching, a relationship between a person (or animal) and an object that can exist (though it normally does not exist) without identification or recognition. One does not need the concept of a thimble~oes not need to understand what a thimble is-to touch it. Neither does one need the concept of a thimble to see a thimble. This, by the way. is why the context "S sees ..." is referentially transparent.' If S sees X. and X = Y. then S sees Y. Compare: If S touches X, and X = Y. then S touches Y. Of course, many of the objects we see every day are objects we identify in some way or another. But this is also true of the objects we touch. I don't always, but I often know what I'm touching. I do not normally touch thimbles and apples without knowing what I'm touching. The same is true of perception. I do not always. but I often know what I'm seeing--especially so when I see familiar objects at close range in good light. But that isn't the point. The point is not what is usually true of the objects one sees and touches, but what must be true to see and touch them. what it is that constitutes the seeing and touching. Knowledge. belief. recognition, judgment. identification-none of this is necessary.' In view of Paul Grice's work on conversational implicatures. I hope it is not necessary to mention (I'll do it anyway) the irrelevance of what we would say (or deny) we saw or touched. I would not normally say I saw, touched, or stepped on a thimble unless I thought I saw, touched. or stepped on a thimble-unless I recognized or identified (as a thimble) what I saw. touched, or stepped on. None of this is relevant to what it takes to see. touch. or step on a thimble. And I would be quick to deny that I saw a thimble if I returned empty-handed from a search for a thimble through a cluttered drawer. The denial is conversationally appropriate and perfectly reasonable, not to mention informative to my impatient wife. even when it is false. I did see it; I just failed to recognize it-at least as a thimble. What I imply, and therefore, the information I succeed in communicating with this false statement is, of course, that I did not tind (identify, recognize) the thimble. As so Y
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often happens in communication, listeners are more interested in the implied truths than in the false statements that imply them. In a footnote in Consciousness Explained, 10 Dennett asks whether identification of a thimble comes after or before becoming conscious of it. He tells us that his Multiple Drafts model of consciousness "teaches us" not to ask this question. One can understand why he wouldn't want to ask this question and, therefore, why he would favor a theory that did not let one ask it. He doesn't want to hear the answer. Are we really being told that it makes no sense to ask whether one can see, thus be aware of, thus be conscious of, objects before being told what they are? Does it make no sense to ask. Macbeth style, "What is this I see before meT That it does make sense seemed obvious to me in 1969. It still does. Frankly, I thought when Dennett read my book it would seem obvious to him. Apparently it didn't. Maybe he didn't read the book. Whatever the explanation. he is still convinced that seeing is a form of knowing (or believing or taking-see below), that being conscious of a 0 is being conscious that it is a 0." I remain convinced that as long as these perceptual attitudes-seeing objects and seeing facts, being aware of apples and being aware that they are apples-are conflated. it is hard (to be honest, I think it is impossible) to give a plausible theory of consciousness. One has already suppressed one of the most distinctive elements of our conscious life-the difference between experience and belief.
2. ANIMALS AND INFANTS Cats and birds can see thimbles as well as (probably better than) little girls. They have better eyesight. The department in which little girls surpass birds and cats is in the conceptual department: They know, while cats and birds do not, what thimbles are. They know that, other things being equal. things that look like that are thimbles. When they see things that look like that. then they can judge them to be, identify them as, take them to be, thimbles. They can. as a result, not only see thimbles, but, when they are attentive and the thimbles are not too far away, see that they are thimbles-something quite beyond the capacity of birds and cats. This, though, is no reason to deny that animals can see thimbles. That would be to confuse ignorance with blindness. In replying to criticisms by Lockwood and Fellows and O'Hear, Dennett questions the "methodological assumption" that animals and infants are conscious.12 Whether or not infants and animals are conscious, he declares. has no clear pretheoretical meaning. What Dennett is doing here, of course, is recapitulating Descartes's answer to Arnauld. Holding that all conscious
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phenomena are thought-like in character. Descartes concluded that animals. lacking the power of thought. could not be perceptually conscious of anything. If sheep seem to see the wolves from whom they run. the appearances are deceptive. Such flight is an unconscious reflex to retinal stimulation. Dennett is no Cartesian. but he does. like Descartes. have a theory of consciousness to which conceptually impoverished animals (and infants) are an embarrassment.!' How can a bird who cannot take a thimble to be a thimble, cannot judge, believe. think (let alone say) that something is a thimble. see a thimble? How can sheep be aware of wolves if they cannot judge them to be wolves? Descartes's bold way out of this problem was to deny that animals were conscious of anything. Dennett's way out-not quite so bold-is to insist that it isn 'f clear that animals (not to mention infants) are conscious of anything. For dialectical purposes, though. the result is the same: Embarrassing counterexamples are neutralized. One cannot use the fact-obvious to most of us-that animals can see to argue that seeing is not believing. For the sake of joining issues, I am willing to defer to Dennett's judgments about what is. and what isn't, clear in this area, but I have my suspicions about what is shaping his convenient intuitions on this matter. It wasn't so long ago. after aIL that this, or something very like this, was clear to Dennett. In Consciousness E>. plained he said that "'birds and fish and reptiles and insects clearly [~] have color vision. rather like our 'trichromatic' (redgreen-blue) system."!4 If Dennett still believes this. one is left to conclude that he thinks color vision doesn't enable an animal to see colors. Either that or seeing colors is not a way of being aware of colors. Or. perhaps, that being aware of colors does not require consciousness. There is the further fact. as Dennett himself points out in Consciollsness Explained,!; that according to his own theory!" lower animals (including frogs) have beliefs and wants (he adds that there is no good reason for putting these words in quotes). Since perceptions are also part of the intentional stance, lower animals presumably have perceptions too. Is one to infer, then, that the intentional stance entitles one to attribute perceptual beliefs about X to animals but not perceptual awareness of X? Why? Why go skittish about this part of the intentional stance'? It isn't only pet owners (and new parents) that will strenuously disagree with Dennett's treatment of animals and infants. I think scientists who make it their business to study animals will too. Hom is typical: The evidence available. mainly from studies of the visual abilities of vertebrates. including macaques. rats. chickens and pigeons ... gives no support to the view that the visual capacities of these animals resemble those of humans \vith blindsight. and no reason. therefore, to infer that these animals are unaware of the stimuli to which they respond.:-
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3. COGNITIVISM Cognitivists (as I call them) are people who interpret perception, including the perception of thimbles and wolves, as some form of cognitive or conceptual achievement, as a species of identifying, knowing, judging, recognizing, taking, or believing. All awareness-of is awareness-that, all seeing is seeingas. Sensations are minithoughts. Hence. following Descartes, if one cannot think. one cannot feel or experience. The ignorant, the ones who cannot think the appropriate thoughts, are thereby rendered unconscious. Confronted with examples of perception that do not involve recognition. cognitivists typically give ground by diluting the cognitive requirements of perception. Quantifiers are shuffled. Though there is nothing in particular you must see something as in order to see it. you must. in order to see it, see it as something or other. Though you can see a thimble without seeing that it is a thimble. without taking it to be a thimble, you must, in order to see it, at least take it to be something in Granny's sewing basket or, maybe. just a shiny thing up there on the mantle. This maneuver has the welcome result of allowing people who are ignorant of thimbles to see them. but it still requires too much. It has the unwelcome result of making noticing-forming beliefs about-a thimble necessary for seeing a thimble. Even if one doesn't balk at this (some people, I know, don't), there is the fact that people can see objects without believing they are seeing anything. People have seen things when they thought they were hallucinating or imagining-when they took themselves to be seeing IK nothing at all. If some hallucinations are similar enough to veridical perception to convince the hallucinator that he is really seeing something. then. by parity of reasoning. they are similar enough to convince some perceivers that they are hallucinating. Hence, perceiving physical objects. induding thimbles, must be possible without believing one is perceiving any thingwhile. in fact, believing one is perceiving nothing. If seeing really is l believing. it is hard to see what the beliefs are supposed to be. This debate has a long and undistinguished history. I will not try to summarize it here. I merely intend to be locating Dennett within a certain tradition, a tradition that seeks to understand sensory phenomena in cognitive or conceptual terms. The motives for this assimilation in current philosophy of mind are usually functional (Consciousness Explained defends "a version of functionalism,,).211 Beliefs, as behavior-dedicated mental states, are, in principle, detectable in the behavior of the organism in which they occur. Given the game she is playing. Betsy'S belief that the object she sees is a thimble will result in her sitting down. From a functionalist's point of view, then, it would be convenient if Betsy's thimble-sightings were Betsy's thimblebeliefs. For then Betsy'S thimble-sightings would (together with her desires) have behavioral relevance. We could tell, from the outside, that she saw the thimble. If. on the other hand, there could be thimble-sightings without ,!
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thimble-beliefs, if Betsy could experience a thimble without realizing it, then-good grief!-how could we ever find out she saw a thimble? How could Betsy ever find out she saw a thimble?2! What possible functional role would thimble-sightings have? If the difference between seeing a thimble and not seeing a thimble is going to make a difference to anyone, the cognitivist concludes, it had better be identified with a difference between taking and not taking-between judging and not judging-an object to be a thimble. David Armstrong is a cognitivist who has long appreciated the problems inherent in telling this kind of story about sense experience. the problem of anal yzing how things seem in terms of belief and judgment. The problem. as he put it in his 1968 book," is that there is, quite simply. perception without either belief or the acquiring of belief. After citing some examples he concludes: All these cases seem to show that we ought to make a distinction between the beliefs that we acquire in perception. and the perceptual experience on which these beliefs are based."
Armstrong makes the distinction. but he prefers to do so by assimilating perceptual experience to perceptual belief. Experiences are inclinations to believe or what Armstrong calls potential beliefs-beliefs we would have if we did not have certain other beliefs. Adapting Armstrong's analysis to the thimble example, we get something like this: Betsy's seeing a thimble is Betsy's acquiring a potential belief. a physical event in her brain that would be a belief if certain other beliefs didn't interfere. This does not seem like much progress. Armstrong's potential beliefs are as elusive as are the experiences they are meant to replace. How does one tell that Betsy had a potential bel ief that some object was a thimble (or whatever potential belief an experience of the thimble is supposed to be)? How does Betsy tell she has one? In observing a crowd of people or a shelf full of books. does one have a potential belief for each (visible) person and book? The difference between having a potential belief and having no belief at all sounds like a difference that doesn't make a difference. Potential beliefs about thimbles seem to be "cognitions" one can have without knowing one has them. Why trade experiences one can have without knowing it for cognitions one can have without knowing it? George Pitcher is another cognitivist who understands the problems in accounting for sense experience. 2~ Realizing that X can look red to 5 without S's consciously believing that X is red. Pitcher identifies X's looking red with an unconscious belief state.'5 In order to account for the "richness" of perceptual consciousness-seeing a red ball among a cluster of other colored objects-the belief state with which the "look" of things is identified is said to be a large set of such unconscious beliefs.'o Finally. for the person who mistakenly thinks he is experiencing an illusion. a person who sees an oasis before him when he consciously believes that there is no oasis before him
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and that nothing there in the desert even looks like an oasis,'7 Pitcher resortsC~ to suppressed, or "partially" or "mostly" suppressed, inclinations to believe. According to this way of talking, Betsy's thimble-sightings tum out to be her thi mble-caused-suppressed-inclinations-to-believe. Once again, it is hard to see what is gained by these verbal maneuvers. The difference between a visual experience and a belief about what you experience seems reasonably clear pretheoretically. Why must the distinction be rendered in quasi-cognitive terms-especially when this results in the awkward identincation of conscious experience with unconscious beliefs and inclinations? After all the huffing and puffing. we are left with a difference that doesn't make a difference to anyone. So why bother? Dennett. working within this tradition, has his own philosophically "correct" way of talking about perceptual experiences. In 'Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain:,c9 Dennett and Kinsboume talk about microjudgments and microtakings. Microjudgments are "sort of like" judgments or decisions.'" They are contentful states or discriminations '1 that are the multiple drafts and narrative fragments of Consciousness Explained. These judgments. decisions, drafts, narrative fragments. contentful states. registrations, interpretations, and discriminations (all these terms are used) are "sort of like" judgments in much the same way that Armstrong's potential beliefs were "sort of like" real beliefs and Pitcher's suppressed inclinations were "sort of like" real inclinations. The persons in whom they occur need never know, need never be aware, that they are taking place. This, presumably. is why these contentful states. these decisions and discriminations, are labeled "micro"-a prefix that does exactly the work of "unconscious." There can be microjudgments in 5 that X is soand-so without 5 ever judging that X is so-and-so. There can be contentful discriminations in 5 of X from Y without 5 consciously discriminating X from Y. That. apparently. is why Dennett speaks of cells and circuits in people. not people themselves. as making microjudgments.'c The job of Dennett's micro "cognitions" and multiple "drafts" is to do precisely what potential or suppressed "beliefs" do for Armstrong and Pitcher: provide a cognitive rug under which to sweep conscious experience,'; Philosophers are free to use words as they please. As long as one is clear about what microjudgments are, there is, I suppose, no ham1 in describing Betsy's nervous system, when she sees a thimble, as swarming with microjudgments about all manner of topics. But, if we choose to talk this way, then. we must also be prepared to say that. in the same sense, automobile fuel gauges are making "contentful discriminations" when they distinguish an empty from a full tank of gasoline. Ringing doorbells are "deciding" that someone is at the door. And a thermometer is "interpreting" the increased agitation of the molecules as a room temperature of 78°. We can talk this way, yes,'-1 but one must be careful not to conclude from this way of talking
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that anything significant is being said about the nature of perceptual experience. One has certainly not shown that seeing an object, being perceptually aware of a thimble, consists in a judgment that it is a thimble (or anything else) in anything like the ordinary sense of the word "judgment." One is certainly not entitled to conclude that "there is no such phenomenon as really seeming over and above the phenomenon of judging that something is the case." Once the bloated terminology is eliminated, all one can really conclude is that perception is a complex causal process in which there are, in the nervous system. different responses to different stimuli. Causal theorists have been saying that sort of thing for years. No one took {hem to be propounding a theory of consciousness. Perhaps they could have improved their case by calling the products of such causal processes "narrative fragments" or "microtakings." It sounds so much more ... uh ... mental.
4. CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE Despite his reputation as an instrumentalist, Dennett is a rugged (not just a "sort of' )" realist about conscious experience: "Conscious experiences are real events occurring in the real time and space of the brain, and hence they are clockable and locatable within the appropriate limits of precision for real phenomena of their type:,36 He is. however, also a cognitivist: "There is no such phenomenon as reaBy seeming-over and ahove the phenomenon of judging in one way or another that something is the case:')' Perceptual awareness is real enough. yes. but it consists of judgments all the way down-or out (to the retina). I have no quarrel with Dennett's realism. I am taking issue only with his cognitivism. the idea that seeing or hearing X-being perceptually aware or conscious of X-is a species of judgment. I reject the idea that conception of ohjects is necessary to, let alone identical with, their perception. It is important to understand that the disagreement is not about the existence of qualia-at least not if qualia are conceived in the way Dennett conceives of them when he quines qualia." I'll return to the issue of qualia in the next section. Here I only mean to point out that the dispute about qualia-what they are and whether they exist-merely muddies these waters. What Dennett is rejecting in his well-known essay against qualia is the existence of mental particulars that are (1) inetIable. (2) intrinsic. (3) private, and (4) directly or immediately apprehensible. L too. have serious doubts about whether anything can have all these properties. Thus, I am happy, for the sake of argument. and because I agree with so much of what he says about qualia, to grant that our experience of the world has none of these qualities. That, though. is not the point. The point is not whether perceptual experience is ineffable. It isn't. It is not whether the properties
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external objects seem to have are intrinsic properties of our experience. I agree they are not. Neither is the quarrel about our direct apprehension of experience. The issue, rather, is whether our experience is constituted by thought-like entities, entities that, like beliefs and judgments, require some conceptual understanding on the part of the agent of that which the judgment is about. If perceptual experience of a 0 is not a judgment, a belief. a taking (macro, mini, or micro) of 0 to be a 0 (or whatever), what is it? I have elsewhere answered this question in terms of the way sensory information is coded.'" There is more information in our experience of the world than can normally be processed in a way appropriate to belief and judgment. The transition from an experience of X to a belief about X is a conversion of sensory information from analog to digital form. I have sometimes illustrated this process with examples involving our perception of complex scenes: crowds of people, shelves full of books, a sky full of stars, arrays of numbers, and so on. Since Dennett has used similar examples to reach an opposite conclusion, let me sharpen our points of disagreement by considering such an example. Consider a two-year-old child-I will call her Sarah-who knows what fingers are, but has not yet learned to count, does not yet know what it means to say there are five fingers on her hand, five cookies in the jar, etc. Sarah can, I claim, see all five fingers on her hand-not one at a time, but all five at 41l once. This is, I know, an empirical claim, but it is an empirical claim for which there is. for normal two-year-olds. an enormous amount of evidence. Whether or not Sarah sees all five fingers depends, of course, on Sarah, the lighting. the angle at which she sees the fingers, and so on. Let us suppose, though, that Sarah is a child of average eyesight (intelligence has nothing to do with it), that she is looking at the fingers in good light, and that each finger is in plain view. Part of what it means to say that Sarah sees all five fingers is that if you conceal one of the fingers, things will look different to Sarah. There will then be only four fingers she sees. There will not only be one less (visible) finger in the world, but one less finger in Sarah's experience of the world. This difference in the world makes a difference in Sarah's experience of the world, and it makes a difference even when Sarah is unable to judge what difference it makes or even that it makes a difference. I would like to say that the same is true of birds and cats, but, out of deference to Dennett's unstable intuitions. I promised not to mention animals again. I have heard cognitivists insist that one can see five objects, even without judging there to be five, by executing five judgments, one for each object seen. Although Sarah cannot count to five-thus cannot take there to be five objects-she can, simultaneously as it were, take there to be a finger five different times. Cognitivists are a stubborn bunch, but this strikes me as a fairly desperate move, not one that Dennett would happily make. Cognitivists want to define what is seen in terms of what one judges, the content
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of a judgment, not in tenns of properties of the judgment itself. An object is supposed to look blue, according to orthodox cognitivism, if and only if one takes it to be (or look?) blue, not if the taking is itself blue. Likewise, one would suppose, seeing five fingers is a matter of taking there to be five fingers, not of there being five finger-takings. I know this is tedious. Nonetheless, these facts. though painfully obvious, appear to need repetition. For it follows from these facts that there is a sense in which objects can look 0 to a person without that person judging or believing that anything is or looks 0. If Sarah had the concept FIVE and knew the difference between FIVE and FOUR, she would have a way of describing what she sees and a way of describing the way things look. But the fact that she is not able to describe the way things look does not mean that things do not look that way to her. Though she cannot describe the way five fingers look to her, we can. Dennett denies that the multiplicity. the richness, the tiveness. is in Sarah's experience of the world. A child who does not judge there to be five fingers is not conscious of five fingers: When we marvel. in those moments of heightened selfconsciousness, at the glorious richness of our conscious experience. the richness we marvel at is actually the richness of the world outside. in all its ravishing detail. It does not "enter" our conscious minds. but is simply available."
This is false. It is false. not on philosophical grounds. but (for anyone willing to admit that one object can "enter" a conscious mind) false on straightforward empirical grounds. The ravishing detail of the world does not cease to exist when we close our eyes. Our experience of this ravishing detail does cease to exist when we close our eyes. So the ravishing detail is not only "in" the world.": I take such situations to be critically important. and I harp about them at wearisome length in order to bring out the basic difference between perceptual experience and perceptual belief. A person's experience of the world can exhibit"" the property 0 even if the person in whom that experience occurs does not have the concept 0. does not understand what it means to be 0, is unable (therefore) to make judgments or have beliefs to the effect that something is 0. In terms of descriptive detail, Sarah's experience of five fingers exceeds her powers of judgment. She experiences more than she can know, more than she can believe or judge. This. indeed, is what the adjective "phenomenal" is meant to signify. Phenomenal properties are, in exactly this sense. independent of belief. Your experience can exhibit 0 even though you may not be able to judge that something is 0. It is in this sense that fiveness is a phenomenal property of Sarah's experience of her own hand."'"' Though the point is especially obvious with regard to numbers, the same holds true for color, shape, orientation. movement, and many other properties. Though they would not describe it that way, something can look blue
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and hexagonal to persons who have neither the concept blue nor the concept hexagonal-to anyone, therefore, who is unable to judge or describe it as looking this way. Dennett is rightfully sceptical of the more extravagant feats of "filling in" alleged for perceptual experience. Does one really see hundreds of Marilyn Monroe pictures spread across the wall? There may be a hundred "out there" on the wall, but how many are "in here:' in one's experience of the wall? I don't know. Given what we know about diminished acuity outside the fovea, probably not as many as it seems, certainly not as many as are actually out there. But, often enough, there are a lot more "in here" than I bother to discover by counting. Personally, I think it fairly easy to see, in a brief glance, dozens, sometimes hundreds, of objects. I do it all the time.~' But we needn't quarrel about big numbers. The argument for phenomenal experience is made as wen with five objects as it is with a hundred. If one can see five objects without judging or taking there to be five. and seeing five involves a different experience from seeing four, then experience of the world exhibits properties that are not exhibited in judgment.
5. QUALIA In "Quining Qualia" Dennett tells us that qualia are the way things look or appear.~(' As long as one understands the look to be what I just called the phenomenal appearances (= the way things look that is logically-though surely not causally-independent of what a person believes or judges). this is a workable definition. It captures what most philosophers mean to be arguing about when they argue about qualia. I'm willing to work with it. According to this definition. then, a person who sees a blue hexagon in normal circumstances will have an experience that exhibits the qualia blueness and hexagollality. These are among the person's visual qualia whether or not that person is able to judge or say that there is, or appears to be. a blue hexagon in front of her. Although I promised not to mention animals again. I cannot forbear saying that it will also be the qualia of normally sighted chimpanzees and a great variety of other mammals. If there are genuine doubts about this. the evidence lies in discrimination and matching tests plus a little neurophysiology."' I said earlier that I agreed with much that Dennett has said about qualia. II qua\\a are sU\:l\:l0seli to be 'mellab\e, lntnnslc, \:l'l\ll\egeli, anli so on, tnen, I agree. there are no qualia. But there is no reason to throw a clean baby out with dirty bath water. We can, as Flanagan argues, keep the qualia and renounce the philosophical accretions."' I do not believe in sense-data. but I don't renounce sense perception because philosophers have said confused things about it.
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Consider ineffability. If S's qualia are identified with the way things look to S, then, since something can look ~ to a person unable to judge that it is~, a person's qualia may be quite ineffable by that person at the time she has them. Sarah, at two years old, cannot express the fiveness that she experiences. But we can. I did. Those of us who know what properties objects have-and, thus, the ways that objects will appear in normal conditionscan describe our own and other people's qualia. I did this for Sarah and J can do it for chimps. If chimps and children can see blue hexagons, and if they are not colorblind, then, whether or not they know it, their visual qualia are hexagonality and blueness. In normal viewing conditions, that is the way blue hexagons look to normally sighted children and chimps. There is nothing ineffable about their qualia. In fact, according to Dennett's own characterization, it is difficult to see how qual1a could fail to be effable. If a phenomena\ property, a qua\e, is simply one of the ways things can appear to be, and we assume that things sometimes are the way they appear to be, then a catalog of qualia is, presumably, a list of the way things are: blue, hexagonal, bigger than a bread box. moving, loud, far away, bright, salty, circular, angry, upset, and so on. Qualia. in fact. are just our old, familiar properties. If qualia are the properties of phenomenal consciousness. there is nothing "sublimely inaccessible" about them.4" The problem is not with qualia but with the way experiences "exhibit" qualia. More of this in a moment. Also. if we remember that in the definition of qualia the sense of "looks" or "appears" is the phenomenal sense, the sense in which something can look ~ to a person unable to make ~-judgments, then qualia, quite clearly, do not enjoy privileged epistemological status. Most of a two-year-old's qualia are completely inaccessible to the two-year-old. This is not to say that the two-year-old doesn't have qualia. It is only to say that she does not know, perhaps cannot know, what qualia it is she has. Introspection isn't going to help Sarah figure out that there appear to be five fingers on her hand. Others. those who have the relevant concepts and are in a position to make informed judgments about how things look to Sarah, have better access (epistemologically speaking) to some of Sarah's qualia than she does. That is why we, or at least informed ethologists, know more about a chimp's qualia than the chimp does. Sarah and the chimp "enjoy"' the qualia, yes. They are, after alL their qualia. But we know better than they what it is they are enjoying. In that sense there is no privileged access. Up to this point I have been careful to say that experiences "exhibited" phenomenal properties (qualia). Sarah's experience of five fingers exhibits .fiveness. Her experience of blue hexagons exhibits blueness and hexagonality. J avoided saying that one's experiences had the properties they exhibited. I avoided saying it because. frankly. it sounds silly. This is an instance of the old Sense-Datum Fallacy-the fallacy of inferring that if an object. X.
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looks 0, then something (the look of X?, an X-ish sense-datum?) must be 0. An experience of five fingers is different than an experience of four, and different in a way that depends on the number of fingers being viewed, but the experience of five need not itself be five nor need it differ numerically from the experience of four. An experience of blue exhibits the property blue, but need not itself be blue nor need it be a different color (if it is colored at all) than the experience of red. Qualia, if these are the way things seem, are not to be understood as properties of the seeming. If this is what it means to deny that qualia are intrinsic properties of experiences, then, once again, I agree with Dennett that qualia are not intrinsic properties of experience. But if qualia are not intrinsic properties of experience, if my experience of blue need not itself be blue, what is the relation between an experience and the qualia it exhibits'? How can an experience exhibit the qualia blueness (during hallucination, for instance) if there is nothing either inside or outside the head that is blue? It is the search for an answer to this question, a question about the relationship between an experience of blue and the blue that is experienced, that drove many philosophers into sense-data wonderland. If something looks blue and there is no available object either inside or outside the head that is blue, then some object has to be invented, a sense-datum, to bear or have the property blue. Dennett rightly rejects this nonsense. Along with other cardcarrying cognitivists, he avoids the fallacy by replacing sense-data with their modem equivalent: minijudgments or microtakings. When an object looks blue. there need be nothing in the head that is blue. Why? Because looking blue is, you see, a form of judgment, a microjudgment, that something is blue, and just as a judgment that something is edible need not itself be edible, a judgment that something is blue need not itself be blue. Blue sense-data are thereby banished. Replacing them are, let us say, soggy grey judgments (microtakings, potential beliefs, suppressed cognitions) that something is blue-something one might actually hope to find in the brain if one knows what to look for. The trouble with this answer, as I have been at pains to argue, is that the microjudgments, the potential beliefs, the suppressed inclinations, have to occur in persons and animals incapable of making the corresponding judgments or having the relevant beliefs. Why, then, call them judgments or beliefs? If Sarah's visual system can "take" there to be five fingers on her hand without Sarah taking there to be five fingers on her hand, what sort of inventions are these microtakings, these narrative fragments, these partial drafts? Until we know, we won't know what conscious experience is.
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NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
7.
8.
9. 10. 11.
12. 13.
14. IS. 16.
I am grateful to Giiven Giizeldere for many helpful suggestions. D. Dennett. Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1991), 132. Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1969). Ibid., 118. F. Dretske, Seeing and Knowing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). Since I have just introduced the term "awareness" and will shortly be talking about consciousness, I should perhaps take this opportunity to register a point about usage. I take seeing, hearing, tasting, etc .. an object or event. X. to be ways of being (perceptually) aware of X. I assume the same with factive clauses: To see or smell that P-that the toast is burning, for example-is 10 be (perceptually) aware that P. I also follow what I take to be standard usage and take perceptual awareness of X (or that P) 10 be a form-in fact, a paradigmatic form--of consciousness (of either X or that Pl. This is what T. Natsoulas ("Consciousness," American Psychologist 33 [1978]: 906-14) calls "consciousness 3," and he describes this as our most basic concept of consciousness. It should also be evident that I use the verbs "aware" and "conscious" interchangeably. There are some subtle differences between these verbs (see A. R. White's Attention [Oxford: Basil BlackwelL 1964 j), but I don't think any of these nuances bear on the disagreement between Dennett and me. So I ignore them. In calling this a referentially transparent context, I mean to restrict the values of "X" and "Y" to noun phrases referring 10 specific objects and events (e.g., "the appie on the table," "the thimble on the mantle"). When interrogative nominals (what X is. who X is. where X is). factive clauses (that it is Xl, and abstract nouns (the difference, the pattern, the problem, the answer) follow the perceptual verb. the context is no longer transparent. As certain forms of agnosia testify: "Associative agnosia is also often taken to be a more specific syndrome, in which patients have a selective impairment in the recognition of visually presented objects. despite apparently adequate visual perception of them" (M. 1. Farah, Visual Agnosia [Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1990].57 J. P. Grice. "Logic and Conversation," in P. Cole and J. Morgan, eds., Syntax and Semal1tics (New York: Academic Press, 1975). Consciousness Explained, 335. Given his commitment to the view that all seeing is seeing-that. I do not understand Dennett's reaction to the work of Anne Treisman. In 'Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain" (The Behm'ioral and Brain Sciences 15 r 1992]: 335, n. 8). Dennett and (co-authOr) M. Kinsbourne say that Treisman has conducted important experiments to support her claim that seeing should be distinguished from identifying. I didn't think experiments were needed to establish this. Are experiments also needed to establish that touching X should be distinguished from identifying X? Aside from the issue of whether experiments are needed, though, I am puzzled as to why Dennett, who thinks seeing thimbles is identifying thimbles, believes Treisman's experiments support the view that seeing should be distinguished from identifying. Are we to conclude that he thinks Treisman's important experiments are a failure') Has he told her about this') Dennett, "Living on the Edge," InquirY 36 (1993): 144-45. Other theories of consciousness-in particular the so-called Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory according to which an experience is not conscious hnless one thinks (judges, knows) one is having it-also seem driven to deny con~ciousness to animals. See, e.g .. Carruthers. "Brute Experience:' The Journal (if Philosophy 86 (1989): 258-69. Consciousness Explained. 377. Ibid .. 194. At least the theory set forth in The Intentional Stance (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).
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17. G. Horn, "What Can the Bird Brain Tell Us about Thought without Language?" in L. Weiskrantz, ed., ThoU8ht without Lan8uage (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988). 18. A well-known experimental demonstration of this is C. W. Perky, "An Experimental Study of Imagination," in D. C. Beardslee and M. Wertheimer. eds" Readil18s in Perception (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1958). 19. One could insist that in order to see a thimble one must at least believe that it is some, thing or other, where that is meant to include figments of one's own imagination. Philosophers are capablc of defending almost anything, I know. but this doesn't sound like a move that Daniel Dennett would be happy to make. So I ignore it. 20. Conscioll.rness Explained, 31. 21. The answer to this question. an answer that cognitivists tend to overlook, is: Ask someone! Other people may be able to supply information which. together with what you already know, helps you to discover what (or who) you saw. The way I tell I saw Harold's cousin last night is to ask Harold whether his cousin was at the party I attended last night. What does he look like. where was he standing. when did he arrive? Was he in that crowd of people I was watching') If so. I must have seen him. 22. D. Armstrong. A Materialist TheorY of the Mind (New York: Humanities Press, 1968). 23. From dn excerpt in J. Dancy, ed" Perceptual K/1{}\\1ed8e (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1988). 134. 24. G. Pitcher, A Theory of Perceptio/1 (Princeton. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971). 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.
Ibid" 29. Ihid" 72. Ibid" 83. Ihid" 93. Dennett and Kinsbourne, op. cit.. 183-247. Ihid" 238. Ibid" 184, 185. We are told (ibid" 190) that even the ganglion cells in the rabbit's retina have the content "from left to right." Also see Consciousness Explained. 134-5. where the cortex is described as making discriminations, decisions. and judgments. 33. The resemblance between Dennett and Pitcher is really quite remarkable at times. To account for the richnes, of sense experience. Pitcher postulated m(1l1,l' unconscious beliefs. Dennett is more economical. He needs to posit only one microjudgment because he is much morc liberal with the content he is prepared to give that judgment: "There is 110 upper houlld on the 'amount of content' in a single proposition, so a single. swift, rich 'propositional episode' might (for all philosophical theory tells us) have so much content. in its brainish, non"sentential way, that an army of Prousts might fail to express it exhaustively in a library of volumes" ("Living on the Edge," 150).
34. I like to talk this way myself. but to avoid confusion I prefer to use the word "information"' for these (largely) causal relationships-see my KnowledRe and the Flo,,' of hlformation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1981). Information can be described in propositional terms, and in thi~ sense it (like judgment and helief) has propositional content. But lest we start ascribing judgments, decisions, and t(lkings to doorbells. fuel gauge" and thermometers, I think it useful to distinguish information from such conceptual phenomena as belief and judgment. Dennett did too in Content and Consciousness: see his distinction between intelligent and non intelligent storage of information (45ff.). 35. The reference to "sort of' realism comes from Dennett's own description of his position in "Postscript: Reflections: Instrumentalism Reconsidered," in Rosenthal. ed .. The Nature oj'Milld (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1991), 627. 36. Dennett and Kinsbourne, op. cit .. 235. 37. Consciollsness Explained, 364.
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38. Dennett. "Quining Qualia.'· in Marchel and Bisiach. cds .. COllSciollsness in COllfelll/)oran- Science (Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 1988). 39. See my "The Role of the Percept in Visual Cognition:' in Wade Savage. ed .. Mil1l1eso({/ Studies in the Phzlosophy of'Science: Perception Gnd Cognition. vol. 9 (Minneapoli;,. Minn.: University of Minnesota Pre,s. 1978) and Kllowledge und the FlOlI" or In{rmllafirm. 40. There is a sense in which one can see II objects without seeing any of the II objects. One might. for example. see a flock of eighty-four birds or a herd of thirty-;,ix cow, without seeing any individual bird or cow. The flock or herd. seen from a great distance. might look like a spot in the distance. This is not the sense in which I say Sarah sees five fingers. Sarah sees each of the five fingers. not (just) a heap (flock. herd. pile) of five fingers. 41. COl1sciolls Erplailled. 408.
42. M. J. Farah (op. cit., 18) points out that counting require, seeing more than one object at a time and. I would add (since otherwise why would you be counting'.'). seeing more than you know or judge yourself to be seeing. 43. I choose this word carefully. I explain why below. 44. This way of putting the case for phenomenal propenies is. I think. quite close to Ned Block's insightful suggestions about the need to distingui,h what he calb phenomenal consciousness from access-coD5ciousness. See Block's "Inverted Earth:' in Tomberlin. ed .. Philosophicaf Penpectil'es. 4: Acrion Theory Clnd Philosoph." or Mind (Atascadero. Calif.: Ridgeview Publishing Co .. 1990); "Consciousness and Accessibility." The Beh{l1'iowl and Bra ill ,,,'ciences 13 (1990): 596-8: "Evidence against Epiphenomenalism." The Behm'ioral and Brain Sciences. 14 ( 1991 ): 670--2: and his review of Dennetfs Consciousness Explained in The Journal of' Philosophy 90 ( 1993): 18/-92,
45. I argue this point in greater detail in "Conscious Experience." Mind 102 ( 1993): 263-83. 46. "Quining Qualia:' 42. 47. See. for example. S. Walker. Animol Thoughl (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 19831. ch. 7: D, R Griffin. Allinw/ Minds (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres',- 1992). 48. 0, Flanagan. Consciollsness Reconsidered (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. 1992). 49. Dennett and Kinsbourne. op. cit.. 240. I may appear to be skating rather ca\'alierly over the inverted-spectrum problem here. I admit the appearance~. but deny the reality. I do not. however. have the time to justify this claim. So the appearances will h,l\e to stand. SO. Dennett and Kinsbourne (op, cit.) do an excellent job of exposing this fallacious pattern of inference when it occurs in our thinking about representations----especially those having to do with temporal properties. The properties represented are not. or need not be. properties of the representation.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 22 No.1 & 2. SPRING AND
FALL J 994
Our Knowledge of the Internal World
1
Ivan Fox Princeton University
The world, the external world. is replete with things in themselves unthinkable-chairs. cups, and dogs. for example. Even my own body is unable literally to enter into thought. For this reason thought, if it is to be about these objects, must contain representatives of them. The representatives in thought might be either of two sorts. They might be like representatives in Congress. Since the political reality is that once elected, representatives are pretty much free agents, everything depends on the electoral system to yield representatives who resemble their constituencies. Insofar as I have a representative in the legislative halls just like me in politically relevant respects then this stand-in for me. through acting and being treated as a citizen in her own right, will pass legislation reflecting my positions, as well as, of course, the agenda of the administration. The mental representatives which allow us to think about the external world might be like that, they might be surrogates for external objects. Then again it might be that what represents me in Washington is only my social security number indexing my file of numbers in a huge system of cross-indexed computer files corresponding to everyone, everything, and every how of which the central government is cognizant. One suspects this. The success of this system would require reliable compilers, on the input side to pair persons with numbers headed for congressional computing and on the output side to translate numerically encoded legislation into action
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directed to the folks back home. Mental representatives of external objects might be like social security numbers. that is, mental states which succeed in representing external objects through an arbitrary but consistent inputoutput correspondence with them. Representatives of this type complementary to surrogates we may call representations. Both surrogate and representational systems of cognition would mediate action in the external world. but they would accomplish this end by very different functional architectures. The surrogate of a thing passes in cognition for that particular itself. that is. the surrogate is successfully subject to the same object attitudes of fear, desire, attention, memory. and planning as is the object for which it is a surrogate. with the system's legislative faculties so arranged that attitudes directed to a surrogate equivalently affect the 'ur-object' for which it goes proxy in thought. This is not true of representations. We do not attempt, much less with success. to pick up "the cup" from "the table" in the representation "the cup on the table". We do not attempt this even for a nonlinguistic analogue representation, i.e., an image of the cup on the table: if we did then by that token the image would cease, for cognition. to be an image. The behavior and success of surrogates in cognition is a consequence of their having literally or for all intents and purposes the properties of their ur-objects. By contrast perceptually induced beliefs or formulae in a language of thought are not themselves colored, moving. or weighty in any respect relevant to their representing colored, moving, or weighty things. Equivalently. while both surrogates and representations have meaning or content, the cognitively effective meaning of surrogates for intents and purposes is just the Gricean natural meaning they share with their ur-objects. By functional design an F representation, once interpreted. can be tokened in reflective thought independently of F things. This, indeed. is the peculiar advantage of representations over surrogates which makes it possible using representations to think and plan now about what is not now present. Insofar as an F representation can make an appearance in cognition apart from the occasioning causality of an F individuaL the import of an F representation is general. Such an F representation applies to no F individual in particular. Even an ordinary proper name denotes its referent at all times of the referent's existence independently of the time of the name's own tokening and is thus a term of temporally divided and general reference. But by design and function a surrogate is a stand-in for a particular, and that only in the here and now of the particular's perception. With surrogates we act on objects: with representations we act on information. Thus surrogates and representations are categorially distinct. Surrogates are of the same intentional type as the objects for which they go proxy. while representations are up a level in the semantic hierarchy from what they represent. Representations stand for, surrogates stand-in. The meaning of
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representations is symbolic. It is realized through the internal computational transactions between representations and the peripheral tethering of these symbols to their interpretations in the external world. But should there never have been an external interpretive source then there would be no information content to the symbols and hence their internal manipulations would be utterly without intentional significance. But even in such a dire strait. the surrogate objects, while they would not be surrogates. would serve, as in ordinary circumstances, as interpreting termini of the system's desires, fears, and plans. Human cognition-by which of these two world systems does it operate? Is it by surrogate or by representation of the external world? In the penultimate section (Cogito?) I will argue that the representational theory of mind is untenable. If internal states are not immediate objects for us, but rather representations themselves known through representation. then even as there can be Cartesian skepticism concerning the represented external domain so there can be Cartesian skepticism concerning the represented internal domain of our own thoughts. and so Cartesian skepticism concerning our existence as thinking things. Thus the representational theory of mind, I will argue, is incompatible with the actual certainty of the Cartesian cogito. In the long interim before that complaint I will apologize for the alternative view that our cognition functions at its interpretive base on a surrogate system. an internal world of objects-for-us with which we enjoy immediate and incomparably de re acquaintance.
THE INTERNAL WORLD THE TWO-WORLDS SYSTEM
That there are internal surrogates of external things which we do not distinguish in our practical intentions. actions. beliefs, desires. fears. and memories from the objects of perception. and that this systematic equivocation is the basis of our cognition's design and practical success. is a prospect so repugnant to contemporary philosophy of mind that we will do well to begin our consideration of the two-worlds system with a less controversial instance. As a novelty I offer a computer analogy to the mind. Consider the use of a Mac implementing Microsoft word processing. Here there are two text worlds. There is hard. or 'noumenal'. text which persists even when the monitor is sleeping (as it were). I know very little of this domain, but I am told it consists of invisible sequences of electric charges. In any case it is not colored. word shaped. or in motion except in a sense Locke would regard as secondary. Perhaps. for all I know. it exists spatiotemporally only in the same sense. Depending on hard text in some systematic. reliable, automatic. and hardwired way there is monitor, or 'phenomenaL
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text. I have even less conception of the mechanisms implementing this perceptual correspondence of noumenal and phenomenal text-worlds than I do of the ding an sich nature of hard text. No matter. The two-texts system has been cleverly designed so that even the recognition of there being two text domains is practically irrelevant. In practice 'the text' and how to deal with it is free of ambiguity.' When I want to delete a piece of 'text' I simply highlight 'it' and enter the delete command. Such is my naive practice. It is not that I think that monitor text is hard text or that phenomenal text is only the appearance of hard text. In practice J don't have any idea of there being two text-domains, a fortiori I don't have any view as to the status of the relation between the two worlds. For me there is simply 'the text'. The whole point of the system's design is to make this naive lack of discrimination a successful way of life. The system has been so engineered that when I 'highlight' 'the text' and enter the delete command 'the text' naively conceived is 'deleted' according to my naive intentions. Of course the sophisticated theory of the success of this naive practice must unpack the systematic, albeit unnoted, ambiguity of 'the text', 'highlight', 'delete', etc. According to sophisticated theory, the naive success is the fact that both the hard text and the coordinated monitor text are 'highlighted' and 'deleted' by my action in the respective domain-dependent senses which interpret these notions sub specie aeternitatis. But which textobject did I intend to delete and in which sense of 'highlight' did I demonstrate it? How did I discern the meaning of the 'delete' command? The fact of naive realism is that there is no fact of these matters. Or rather there are two facts of the matter. There is the naive-fact-on-its-own-terms that I intend to save, delete, produce, or amend 'the texf-period. And there is the fact that sub specie aeternitatis my naive intentions, desires, actions, and thoughts are systematically ambiguous. This is not to say that it is uncertain or indeterminate in which text domain I naively intend to operate, but that it is a determinate fact that there are two intentional termini of my naive intentions and actions. I have neither two intentions nor the intention to delete two objects. I have a single intention which has two interpretations. One interpretation systematically construes the objects and commands exclusively in terms of hard text, the other is equally single-minded in its monitor reading of text and intent. Under neither interpretation do I intend to delete two objects. Nonetheless, under ordinary operating conditions, my text-directed cognition admits and requires both interpretations, and the respective text domains, noumenal and phenomenal, are equally and by a single mental act the objects of my naive thoughts and actions. I naively perceive 'the text' and succeed in my naive intention to 'delete it' just in case the disambiguated text objects of the two sophisticated interpretations exist and the naive intention is satisfied when evaluated with respect to each of these domains.)
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So it is, I am claiming, with sentient cognition. It is a fundamental feature of perceptual cognition that by nature we do not distinguish the internal product of perception from the external cause of it. This is not to say that we are incapable of philosophic reflection which distinguishes an inner appearance and an outer reality. But such cogitation is an affectation which cannot reform the practical architecture of perceptual cognition, which is founded in undiscerning and unreflective naive realism. In the street no one is appeared to car-ly. With equal naivete, 'I feel the prick in my finger', look down and see the intruding 'thorn in the same place as I feel the pain'. Accordingly I 'remove the thorn', to my immediate relief. Is it the mental event or the physical insult to which I object? In what sense of 'same place' do Ijudge that 'pain' and 'thorn' are 'located'? In practice these questions no more arise than questions of which 'text' I wish to 'delete' or in what sense of 'beside' 'the word I wish to delete' is beside 'the one I want to save'. But once posed for theory these questions of intentional object have the same two answers just noted in the case of Mac engineering. There is the naive and unequivocal response of practical reasoning: I object to 'the pain in the finger' for which I blame 'the thorn in the finger' and so act in the way I know how to get rid of 'the former' by 'removing' 'the latter'-period; next case. This action takes place on its experientially unequivocal objects within the single, causally closed, world of naive objects. But then too there is the sophisticated fact that sub specie aeternitatis the content and objects and worlds of this naive cognition are systematically equivocal. How does this two-worlds account go? There are two story lines. On the phenomenal reading the naive intention to 'remove the thorn' from 'the finger' is an event internal to the phenomenal world analogous to the highlighting of monitor text. Practically speaking the intention gives the phenomenal world a particular charge, construed both as a particular causal disposition (as with electric charge) and teleologically as a mission. As a particle with negative charge attracts a positively charged particle so the phenomenal world with Pick out d-that! ('the thorn') charge evolves to bring 4 phenomenal hand to phenomenal thorn in the phenomenal finger. Thus the significance of the will for the phenomenal world is Kantian. The principle of practical reason is to act on maxims which through their willing become laws for phenomenal nature. My decision Pick out d-that! posits an end which through its willing becomes a temporary practical law for phenomenal nature naively construed. Given Pick out d-that! the phenomenal world will evolve to the posited end as if it were a constitutive law of phenomenal nature for the phenomenal hand to be drawn to the phenomenal thorn. But how does the phenomenal hand pick out the phenomenal thorn? By way of the external-world story line. The immediate effect of the phenomenal hand with Pick out d-thatt charge is to move the physical hand to d-that; the physical thorn in the physical finger. At the same time perception transduces this physical event as the phenomenal hand moving toward and
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removing the phenomenal thorn. This new state of the phenomenal world leads to a refined targeting of the phenomenal thorn by the phenomenal hand in accordance with the charge Pick out _! This updating of the phenomenal charge causes a refinement of the motion of the physical hand which by perceptual feedback leads to the thus effected refinement of phenomenal targeting. And so on until 'the hand' comes into 'contact' with 'the thorn' and 'picks it out' . That is how I remove the phenomenal thorn from the phenomenal flesh. But by the same token of intent and action it is how I remove the physical thorn from the all too solid flesh: A single naive intention succeeding through being simultaneously implemented in the phenomenal and noumenal domains. This example illustrates the reciprocal determination of the external and internal worlds which is constitutive of successful surrogacy. The phenomenal hand in moving toward the phenomenal thorn controls the physical hand according to the temporary teleological dynamics of the internal world. while the movement of the physical hand to the physical thorn controls the phenomenal hand according to the nomologically fixed dynamics of the external world. More explicitly. although 'picking out the thorn' is naively experienced as a single action, there are, sub specie aeternitatis. two series of events--one series in the phenomenal world consisting of the phenomenal hand with Pick-outcharge moving to and picking out the the phenomenal thorn: Pick out_!
= IT,m"o1l' ...• IT, ....• IT""JI =_
picked out.
and one series in the external world constituting the physical hand moving to and picking out d-thal, the physical thorn of which _ is the surrogate:
n ,m"JI' ...• n, ..... n"nal =d-that picked out. The two series mutually determine each other. Events of the phenomenal-world series directly determine events in external-world series by intentional action, [--7]. Events of the external world directly determine events of the phenomenal world by perception. [~]. To wit: In this composite series, each nonterminal event of either the IT or n series is both a cause and an effect of events in the other series. This is how the phenomenal hand controls the physical hand and how. in tum. it is moved by it. The action here is of worlds in collusion: there are no representations. While events of the phenomenal world directly determine events in the external world. they indirectly determine subsequent events in the phenomenal world: via --';> n,:::;' .... ]t,
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) ",
Fox, Ivan, Our Knowledge of the Internal World , Philosophical Topics, 22:1/2 (1994:Spring/Fall) p.59
This is how the phenomenal hand picks out the phenomenal thorn. Correspondingly, events of the 0 series indirectly cause the succeeding events of this series:
n
via:=:::}
n
11J --+
I
)
j
This is how I pick out the thorn. physically speaking. for it is in virtue of this indirectness of the dependence of bodily movements on preceding ones that the physical motion is my action and not merely a happening in nature. Ultimately, then, the naive intention, Pick out d-that!, brings about its phenomenal-world satisfaction, i.e., ]tlill"i = _ picked out, and its satisfaction in the external world, i.e., O'lnnl = d-that picked out. Under the semantics of the two-worlds system this naive intention with its two undiscerned termini is modeled as the joint satisfaction of two intentional actions. each with a single disambiguated endpoint state. Under the internal-world interpretation there is the intent Ac_! directed to _. and terminating with ]ttio"I' Under the external-world interpretation there is the corresponding intent directed to d-that which terminates with 0']11<.[' The complete action. Act_, from Ac_! to its phenomenal satisfaction, is the concurrent playing-out of these phenomenal and external actions as detailed in the composite series above. This two-worlds action is a circuit from an initial state of the phenomenal world. for example, Pick out_!. which is the cause. to a new state of the phenomenal world. which is the phenomenal effect. via a path of action and perception in the external world. Thus while the action from end to end is directed to a phenomenal object. it is comprised of events intentionally directed to and from the external world, viz .. an action (equal to the totality of ----j connected events of the composite series) directed to the ur-object. d-that for which _ is the surrogate. plus perception of this externally directed action (equal to the totality of ~ connected events of the composite serie s): Act~
= [Act d-tJwt EEl Perception of (Act d-rhatl].
This is the fundamental equation characterizing the dynamics of the twoworlds system. Experientially there are not two ways or intentional termini of acting on or attending to 'the object'. But. as the equation shows. this naive fact is at once the fact of there being both a phenomenal and an external focus of attention. Even the philosophically sophisticated cannot 'short circuit' the action of attending to the internal hand-before-the-face so as not to involve attending to the external hand before the face-or vice versa. The fundamental identity above holds even in cases where there is no feedback perception of the action being taken. as when I save 'the text' or form a memory of 'the pain'. In such cases the fundamental equmion reduces to a simple identity of the action directed to the phenomenal surrogate and the action directed to its external ur-object. For example, in the case of
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Rememberd-that! ('the pain') the action and result of forming a memory of the mental event _ is one and the same action and result as forming a memory of d-that, the bodily disturbance. The mind's two-worlds engineering will ensure that this single trace will make the appropriate contribution to future 'pain' behavior directed (naively) to the reoccurrence of the two objects, phenomenal and noumenal, of which it is at once the memory. Though there are phenomenal and noumenal readings of act and object, neither interpretation involves deception or pretense to the verities of the other. Hard text does not appear to have the properties of monitor text nor does monitor text seem to be hard text. The physical injury does not seem to have the nature of the phenomenal pain, nor does the pain seem located 5 in the physical hand. The surrogate of a red thing is not a representation of that object as phenomenally red--or as physically red, or even as 'red'. A surrogate is not a representation of the external object at all. The tomato of the phenomenal world has no more intentional content than the tomato of the external world. Each thing, inner and outer, is what it is and does not 'seem' at all. Moreover in each domain 1 do what I intend to do. literally and not merely apparently. I really do delete monitor text and I really do cut and paste hard text, though the conditions of intent and satisfaction for these deeds must be evaluated in the respective domain-relative senses, Similarly. I really do pick up the phenomenal cup and I directly remember the distressing physical injury. Because under usual circumstances, practical beliefs. desires, and actions are satisfied in both worlds. the unreflective life of naive realism succeeds and its undiscriminating judgments that there is 'a cup on the table' and 'a pain in the leg' are validated. These are the truths we and the rest of sentient life live by. Of course there are occasional glitches and nightly dreams. Suppose I naively believe that I have deleted 'the text' when due to a system error hard text has been unaffected. The deletion will be satisfied under monitor-text interpretation but not under hard-text interpretation. Since the undiscriminating beliefs of naive realism are true only when unequivocally true, my naive belief that I have deleted 'the text' is false. Granted. my belief is not unequivocally false. and this subtlety is exhibited in the proposed semantics. but my belief is not true in the naive way I hold it. Similarly. suppose that in a dream I am frightened by a tiger. It is true that I am frightened by the dream's phenomenal tiger as surely as I am distressed by the phenomenal pain. and a sophisticated belief to that effect would be univocally true. But in practice that is not what I do believe. What I believe is that d-that ('the tiger') exists. and that is not true. When I am naively right. it is because I am right under both sophisticated interpretations and when I am naively in error, it is because I am not. When I am naively right, I am right about 'the twig', 'the cup', 'the pain', and when I am naively in error, I am wrong about 'the twig', 'the cup', 'the pain'. But what are these objects of naive experience? The conditions of truth
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and reference for a naive cognition resolve its intentional object into the pair of objects of the sophisticated theory of perception. 'The twig' 1 'see'. 'the cup' I 'reach for', 'the pain' I 'feel' is not either of these sophisticated objects nor both of them. The noumenal object exists, and through the descriptions of theoretical discourse we can think of it as such. The phenomenal object exists and in moments of Cartesian reflection we can be acquainted with it as such. But the objects of naive experience are only for us; they are empirically real but transcendentally ideal. They are ideal because they have only an intentional existence from the perspective of naive realism which constitutes our Kantian experience of objects. So also with the properties of the objects of experience. We do no favor to common sense or to science by attempts to argue that what the untutored thought of man and beast means, recognizes, or intends as 'red' is either a certain spectral reflectance or its surrogate property in mind. Practical perceptual cognition operates naively in the limited domain where surrogate objects and their properties track external objects and their properties. But even in this range, though both the property of physics and its surrogate are literally red properties of their respective domains, they are neither severally nor jointly the "red' of naive cognition, which does not recognize the distinction between d-that and ~. It is naively true that 'the berries are red'. I know this; a bird knows this. That naive truth is enough for practically minded cognition. It is of no concern to naive common sense that its truths do not depend on a correspondence to its naive things and properties but on the joint truth of "the berries are red" under two other sophisticated interpretations. Since sentient cognition is naive by design, the transcendental ideality of 'the red berry' and 'the shooting pain' may seem like a deception. Too bad. Nature's interest in truth is limited to practical consequences, and the result of naive realism implemented by the two-worlds system is truth-in-practice. PHENOMENAPHOBIA
Discounting the attendant ideality of the objects of experience as insult without injury, there are, I believe, four sources of phenomenaphoiJia, the fear and hatred of phenomenal objects. In the first place, it has been feared that if we allow that we naively treat mental states as objects, the epistemology of the external world will suffer. The external world would be only indirectly perceived by inference from the "immediate perception' of our mental states. Not so. As naive realists we do not distinguish between internal and external objects much Jess infer from one to the other. Nor in the sophisticated theory of this naive realism do we perceive external objects by virtue of an awareness of internal objects. As the fundamental equation indicates, acquaintance with a surrogate object actually depends on the equivalent attentions being paid to the external object for which it goes proxy. Nor can the reflective epistemology of the external world be compromised by the fact that internal states enjoy the intentional status of objects.
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Whether an internal state is a phenomenal object-for-us or serves cognition in the role of a representation does not affect its relation to the extemal world and so cannot affect its evidential import. Secondly, it has been feared that if there is an internal phenomenal world there must be an observer of it, a Cartesian ego watching the Cartesian Theater. Not so. The supposition that perceptual states serve as surrogate objects no more requires a Cartesian observer than the view that perceptual states are beliefs requires a Cartesian believer or the view that perceptual states are formulae in a language of thought requires a Cartesian interpreter. The phenomenal world is the end of the line." In it desires, fears, and plans interact immediately with their phenomenal objects naively construed. These object attitudes are the analogues in the phenomenal world of the forces which attract, repel, and buffet objects in the external world. Just as the physical world gets on without representations of its objects or God's occasionalistic meddling. so the world of phenomenal objects subject to the indigenous strains of standing affects and passing plans constitutes my perceptual cognition without regress to representation or the interventions of an ego. There is a Cartesian Theater-but no one is watching. This is not. however. to deny subjectivity or my agency. It is sufficient for the personal point of view that it is 'my' fears, desires. and plans which animate the world. (Which world? 'The world'.) Thirdly, it has been feared that phenomenal objects must bring phenomenal properties, and with them, perversely, the threat of their absence. Indeed the view that phenomenology is a matter of the properties phenomenal states have is held by both friends and foes of the would-be qualia. I believe this conception of phenomenology is categorially mistaken. For the moment I will merely state the alternative position to be developed in the theory of acquaintance: Phenomenal consciousness is cognition of an object immediately pre sent to the thought about it. It is the fact of a this in thought unmediated by representation, demonstration. or appearance. Any _ which is thus the de re object of thought is. the very res itself, the subject-content of the thought, and that, I will argue, is the fact of phenomenology. Phenomenology so construed, phenomenology as thisness. is a matter of the intentional status of a particular. Precisely because in acquaintance the particular itself enters thought without any description or characterization no property is intimated by acquaintance with _. Thus on the view of acquaintance I will develop, there can be no knowledge by acquaintance. There are phenomenal objects and the de re cognition of these is the Kantian phenomenology which is the experience of objects, but there will be no phenomenal properties thus experienced. no qualia physical or nonphysical. Of course, any particular which constitutes the immediate content of a de re thought will have intrinsic properties, but it is not through possessing those properties that the instance is an object immediate to the consciousness of it and hence phenomenological. Phenomenology, I will argue, is a fact constituted by the intentional status
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of particulars of no particular kind. Phenomenology without phenomenal
properties. Finally, it has been fair and fertile ground for quining the existence of phenomenal objects that the would-be denizens of the internal world seem to be internally inconsistent and impossibly underdetermined. When phenomenal objects recede into the phenomenal distance do they actually become smaller or only appear to become smaller? Perhaps they remain the same size and only appear to recede! But how can there be a distinction of appearance and reality where esse est percipi? How many spots bespeckle the phenomenal hen? Can any real thing be at once getting smaller and staying the same size, or spotted with an indeterminate number of spots? CONSCIOUSNESS (OF IMPOSSIBLE OBJECTS) EXPLAINED
I believe we can accommodate at realistic face value the internal conflicts and indeterminacies of the phenomenal world by combining Dennett's' analysis of consciousness in terms of multiple drafts with Fodor's~ analysis of the modularity of perception. A phenomenal object, I posit is typically the compilation of several partial drafts each computed by a different perceptual module. One draft, the man(j'old of intuition. as it has been called, involves a comparative minimum of analysis of sensory input. Basically it is the surrogate transcription of properties readily accessible (computationally speaking) from the data of the sensory receptors: color-( or at least contrast}-at-a-point-in-the-visual field. pitch-at-a-moment. etc. This manifold is subjected to mUltiple, mutually independent characterizations of the more interpretive perceptual modules analyzing. for example. motion. spatial location. shape. and speech forms. The output of these interpretive modules is a gestalting of the manifold. Each gestalt. I propose. is the output of a single module. Gestalting ontologizes the manifold as a world of things with certain properties in certain relations. The gestalt is the perceptual cognition's imprimatur of objecthood. It is a peculiarity of this positing that while its presence or absence makes a phenomenological difference. this difference has no qualitative content. When the black-and-white pattern suddenly becomes articulated as foreground and background. no new color is added and no color-point shifts. A pain in the left thumb is phenomenologically distinct from a pain in the right thumb. but this phenomenological difference is not due to a difference in quality. viz .. 'left thumbness' versus 'right thumbness' . There are no such qualities. Rather. as with the distinct three dimensional orientations of the Necker cube. located sensation is a matter of positionally gestalted quality. The distinctness of gestalt from quality is manifest when the gestalting modules are run without sensory data determining a colored or pitched manifold of intuition. The result is phenomenal objects without quality but possessed nonetheless of individualized shape. motion. or phonemic form. Routinely there is phenomenology without quality in
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dreams, which are the visual experience of objects for which no color (not even 'black and white') need be specified, in verbal thought which consists in the mere ghost forms of audited speech, and in remembered melodies which (for me) have an intervalic structure but no pitch. In the physical world, structural facts of shape, motion, and form entail facts of intrinsic properties, but this is not the case with phenomenal objects. This is no problem for phenomenal objects, only evidence for the multiple modular drafts account of them. It is because the modular drafts gestalting a single manifold are independent posits that the resulting phenomenal objects can end up with dissonant properties. This phenomenon is well illustrated in the work of the Renaissance painter Gieuseppe Archimboldo. The Vegetable Gardener is a typical example (see figure opposite page). In one orientation the painting appears to be of a bowl of vegetables. but when the painting is inverted. presto, the bowl of vegetables becomes the vegetable gardener. This effect I believe, depends on one of the best documented and most studied perceptual modules. one devoted exclusively to the perceptual analysis of faces.~ The face module is quite imaginative as to what it takes to be a face so long as the face is in its normal orientation. In the initial orientation of the painting the face module finds nothing fit for its cognition. while the all purpose formmodules posit a vegiform ontology. When the painting is inverted the manifold immediately makes sense to the face module which now chimes in with its own gestalt posit, a face. Meanwhile the less specific form-modules continue with their vegetable inventory. That is what is charming in the painting. Nothing. intellect judges. can be both a face and a bowl of vegetables. but that is what one has in The Vegetable Gardener. This is not a cheek represented as an onion. nor an onion as a cheek. This is an onion and. moreover. a cheek. The two gestalts are simply superimposed. Conflict between the modular drafts constituting a single phenomenal object is the basis. I believe. of many perceptual illusions. In the unstable perception of the Necker cube there are. I suppose. successive incompatible drafts from a single module. The inconsistency, however, is simultaneous in the Miiller-Lyer illusion. On the introspectivist conception of the MiillerLyer illusion the perceptual system makes a pair of mental arrows which have determinately different lengths. Visual experience consists in the correct 'immediate perception' of them. The illusion is just the fact that the mental and the physical arrows are not homomorphic. A consideration of the myth of 'immediate perception' can be delayed, but it is important for the multipledrafts analysis of phenomenal objects to note that the introspectivist analysis is phenomenologically in error. It is not unequivocally true that the horizontal line segments of the Miiller-Lyer phenomenon are of unequal length. On one draft the retinal data is pretty faithfully transcribed as a pair of surrogate line segments of equal length, as is demonstrated by the fact that the end points of the parallel
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The Vegetable Gardener l),ed hy permission PI' the Marquand Lihrary of Art and Archaeology. Department of Rare Boob and SpeCIal Collection,
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segments are perfectly aligned. This transcription (I suppose) is provided by the system analyzing color. We know that this pathway does not analyze spatial relations, but in the course of determining point-by-point color it ends up yielding. without analysis, a pair of surrogate lines of equal length. At the same time. more or less, a module or system responsible for assessing length determines by its accounting of the arrowhead clues that one segment is longer than the other, and so gestalts. The positing of the unequal length of the two lines does not change any quality of the transcribed manifold, yet the manifold is transformed nonetheless. The result is a pair of surrogate lines of equal length gestalted as of unequal length. We are wont to overlook the manifest (but not gestalted) properties of the phenomenal manifold and so without intellectual intervention do not even note the internal conflict of the Miiller-Lyer phenomenal object. Unnoted conflict between the manifold and its characterization by modular drafts is so common in 'veridical' perception as to be constant. My hand moves toward my face. As it halves its original distance the retinal image grows to four times its original size. According to the introspectivist analysis, the perceptual system counteracts rather than construes the enlarging retinal image to produce an immediately perceived mental image of the hand which is actually of constant size. This is non sense. In phenomenal fact the transcribed manifold of intuition does track the enlarging size of the retinal image as is obvious from the phenomenal fact that the near-hand-ofconstant-size occludes four times the area of visual field it did at twice the distance. But the motion systems conclude on their own that the hand has remained size invariant and impose this posit on the expanding phenomenal hand-manifold. The result is very much like the Miiller-Lyer percept. but since in this case we hold that the gestalt is correct we do not account this impossible object as illusion! Indeed. as in the case of the Miiller-Lyer experience. we are uninclined even to note the literal features of the manifold. viz .. that the manifold of the posited constant object has expanded. 10 There is another feature. or rather lack of feature. which is typical of phenomenal objects: indeterminacy. A physical line that is IOl1ger than another line must be longer by some definite factor, and a speckled hen in the barnyard must have some particular number of spots. But this is not the case with gestalt posits. In the perception of the MiiIIer-Lyer figure the horizontal of one arrow is longer than that of the other. But if we seek to determine how much longer we will be frustrated. It is longer and that is the long and short of it. Dennett notes that experientially speaking there are many Marilyns on the periphery of one's vision of Warhol's Marilyn Monroe panoply; not any determinate number mind you. just many. I I Similarly. lance had a dream in which there was a table with several objects on it. 1 tried to count them but they were nondenumerable. There were several and that was the sum total of the numerical qualification of the table's visually given inventory.
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The modular-draft model of phenomenal objects allows us to account for such indeterminacies. The indeterminacy of phenomenal objects arises because the individual modular drafts comprising them are only partial drafts of what is the case-its color, or its motion, or its relative size. A given module may construe the manifold simply as a moving or longer or busy thing. In veridical perception a set of mutually consistent partial characterizations of a determinate manifold yields a fully determined internally consistent phenomenal object. But given the independent operation and limited scope of each gestalting module this ideal is not always achieved. Analysis in terms of modular drafts may illumine the colored phi experle iment carried out by Kolers and discussed by Dennett. In this experiment subjects are presented with a red point followed after a brief interval by a green point at a nearby location in the visual field. When the interval is not too long and the first (A) and second (8) locations are not too far apart the subjects report that the point moves continuously from A to B and suddenly changes from red to green in midpath. And so in phenomenal fact it may be. On the other hand we know color and motion are processed by separate parallel pathways in the visual cortex. so I suggest that what may happen is as follows: The color system determines. correctly. that there is first a red spot at A and shortly after a green spot at B. Evidently this sort of stimulus fact is subject to comparatively little analysis: the perceptual systems basically reproduce in surrogate form features of retinal stimulation. But there is also a more speculative analysis performed by the color-blind motion system to the effect that there is a continuous motion from A to B. This module posits this path not by generating the colorless trajectory of its analysis but by a gestalt characterization of the given manifold. i.e .. the pair of successive colored spots. as a continuous motion from A to B. The complete content of the experience constituted by the collated color and motion drafts is thus: A spot. red at A and green at B. moving continuously from A to B. Just that and no more. Of course this is not what the subjects report. If the perceived path is continuous and the color changes. then it had to change color at some perceil'ed place and time. (Right?) And so Kolers' queried subjects reportpointing to the place of color change (and v,,:here else than in the middle'?). And so in surrogate fact it may be. But I suspect Kolers' subjects simply lack a standard for comparison which would make salient the actual incompleteness of their experience. We sincerely avow that the approaching hand has maintained its original size. ·'It looks just the same."Yet a literally unchanging manifold would not be like the experience of a hand moving toward the face (where. in point of fact. the hand manifold expands). In practice we accept the gestalt draft of constancy (or, as it may be. of continuity) without noticing that it conflicts with the properties of the manifold gestalted. Let Kolers' subjects be given as a baseline a stimulus which does confon11 to their report
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of what they suppose they see in the case of the colored phi effect. They wjlJ notice, I suspect, that their phi experience is no! quite like that of an actually continuously moving point which changes color midcourse. On the version of the multiple drafts account of consciousness I am advocating, the individual drafts are determinate but partial and independent. The perceptual system does not. at least in the cases I am discussing, reconcile conflicting analyses either by rewriting or erasing. Evidently the conflicts arising from our response to 'impossible objects' are insufficiently frequent and of too little practical significance to drive the evolution of an Orwellian or Stalinesque editor. I' On the contrary, a Millian liberty is permitted-the multiple partial drafts are simply collated and published together. In the ideal case the compilation of the posit of moving but unshaped objects with the posit of cubical but colorless objects with the manifold which at each moment is only here white and there black will constitute a determinant and consistent surrogate of the perceived throw of the dice. But such ideal cases are just that. and even in these cases theory must recognize the existence of the partial drafts compiled. MEANING IN A (PHENOMENAL I WORLD OF CAuSES
The modular-draft analysis does not yet resolve the status of the deliverances of the perceptual modules. Are we to adopt a flat-footed realism with respect to the phenomenal world and claim that the perceptual modules construct impossible objects: Pairs of lines at once of different and the same length. faces that are bowls of vegetables. hands that get larger while remaining of constant size? Surely not. One can mean of something round that it is square. but nothing in the mind or out of it could possess conflicting properties. But is internal contradiction what is really at issue with 'impossible' phenomenal objects? Let us examine a specific though typical case of phenomenal interdraft conflict. Nothing can be literally round and elliptical. and yet it is a commonplace that a cup seen at an angle is. in some sense. experienced as both round and elliptical. How so? Does it look round? In a sense, but not literally. Literally it looks elliptical. At the same time. roundness is an experienced feature of the phenomenal cup, not a belief about the physical cup. To accommodate these facts we need to allow for two senses in which something may be round. A thing may be literally round, in which case it will behave by virtue of its roundness like a round thing. But a thing which is not literally round may be round practically speaking, be roundfor-all-intents-and-purposes; that is, it may possess, relative to intents and purposes directed to it. the causal properties of a round thing and so govern the implementation of those intents in round-relevant ways. What causal properties should being F-for-all-intents-and-purposes comprise? We can allow as included whatever properties ground the practical consequences of what in other conceptions of perceptual cognition are called perceptual
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beliefs. The round dispositions for intents and purposes which others have regarded as the perceptually generated belief that the elliptical appearing cup (i.e., the external cup) is round I am saying are inherent in the elliptical manifold which has been round-gestaIted. That J suggest. is what an F-gestaIt is-the possession by the manifold of intuition of the causal dispositions il1 respect oJ intents and purposes of an F thing. For example, the property of being round-for-all-intents-and-purposes is not the same property as being round. but it is the same for all intents and purposes. The aforementioned surrogate cup is round-for-all-intents-andpurposes. When there is some intent or purpose directed to the cup. for example. when its being picked up is desired, then by virtue of being roundfor-all-intents-and-purposes the literally elliptical phenomenal cup governs the implementation of this desire in round-relevant ways. My hand is extended and opened for grasping a round (not an elliptical) object. This is not an intellectual exercise. I am not acting on the basis of my belief that notwithstanding how the cup appears it is round and I should act accord· ingly. Life is too short, and there is too much ofroutine in action to make this a feasible or worthwhile cognitive architecture. The cup is round for all intents and pwposes. and the fact of its roundness for intents and purposes is immediately available for interaction as such with the intent to pick up the cup. Qualitatively the transcribed cup manifold is elliptical. but this elliptical manifold is roundly gestaJted by a module devoted to spatial analysis that gives to the manifold of cup-intuition those causal properties constitutive of being round-for-all-intents-and-purposes. The phenomenal cup is then both elliptical (literally) and round (for all intents and purposes). And both geometrical features are phellomenological: that is. both features are immediately present to thought about them: one qualitatively. the other by gestalt. There is no impossibility in this. On the contrary it constitutes quite a success for the surrogate cup which thereby simultaneously possesses the properties reflective of how the physical cup appears (viz.. elliptical) and how it is. practically speaking (viz .. round). A similar analysis is available for the indefiniteness of phenomenal states of affairs. Nothing. we may suppose. can be just many or just in front or just speckled without realizing some determinant number or separation or disposition of elements. On the other hand. in a foreground-background gestalt. a figure which. qualitatively. is in the plane of the slIn-ounding area is. for-all-intents-and-purposcs. merely in front of it without being. literally or practically, any determinate distance in front of it. Do I want to manually place an object on the background? Fine. The background-foreground gestalt is of such a nature, has such particular causal powers. as to mean in practical terms that the one figure is behind the other. In practice this means that the gestalted background beckons my hand to move 'beyond' the foreground figure until. if the surrogate system is working properly_ it reaches a point of
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'far enough'. Having such an intrinsic nature for practical ends is what it is for the one figure to be merely in front of the other. In consequence the gestalted manifold constitutes a single phenomenological state of affairs of figures at once in a plane and disposed as foreground and background. It is only meanings which can be contradictory or noncommittal. But the type of meaning phenomenal objects have, indefinite or conflicted as it may be. is the same kind that external objects have viz., natural meaning (meaning-n).'4 Those spots mean-ll measles and those clouds mean-l1 rain because these objects have the causal antecedents or causal consequences of measles or rain and because this fact serves to determine my measles diagnosis or rain prognostication. Similarly with the natural meaning of the phenomenal objects which stand-in for external objects. To serve as a surrogate for an F thing in this system, an internal object must have such causal properties as enable it to be the target of F-relevant object attitudes and to govern the ensuing action in F-relevant ways. Thus an F surrogate must have the causal powers/natural meaning of an F thingjor all intents and purposes. Now it may be that something which is F for all intents and purposes is so by virtue of being literally F. As it happens I have no problem with phenomenal objects being literally round or red or moving. and I suppose that much of what constitutes the phenomenal manifold is literally shaped. colored, and motile. and means-11 these features in the cognitive dynamics of the phenomenal world for that straightforward reason. I see no reason, for example, to suppose that the quantum-mechanical state constituting the dinner plate is more literally circular than what goes on mentally when I look at a dinner plate. On the contrary I am sufficiently Kantian as to suppose that my understanding of locus a/points equidistantfro171 a gi~'ell point in the very abstract sense required to find application in the quantum-mechanical domain is originally derived from the likes of dinner-plate intuition. Similarly, insofar as in usual perceptual circumstances objects of the internal world track the spectral reflectance of physical surfaces and the interrelations of these properties to others. then though surrogate and ur-object do not have the same property, each is literally a realization of redness. But as we have seen. what is F for all intents and purposes need not be literally F. The F meaning-n object may be F only for intents and purposes (i.e .. the object is literally F-for-all-intents-and-purposes) and so meanS-Tl F only in the ends-oriented dynamics of the phenomenal world." But that is all that is required of perceptual surrogates: that for all intents and purposes they possess the natural meaning of the objects for which they go proxy. So by way of realistically accommodating the inconsistencies and vagaries of phenomenal objects, we may grant that nothing in the world or mind can have inconsistent or indeterminate properties. Nonetheless a thing can be, and phenomenal objects frequently are, at once literally ellipsoidal and practically round, or I iterally in a plane and practically structured as foreground and background. or literally an unindividuated color or aural
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mosaics and practically this and such individual. Gestalting can effect the practical truth of a property even in the face of the conflicting inherent literal properties of the manifold or the practically incompatible positings of other gestalts. There is no logical or metaphysical inconsistency in the existence of such objects. There may arise, however, a pragmatic conflict when a single manifold is given the practical truth of conflicting attributes. Are we to eat or to greet the Archimboldean ontology? But conflicts between gestalts are rare and practical consequences of the routine conflicts between gestalt and manifold are minimal precisely because the gestalt is what the object is for all intents and purposes-a practical fact reflected in our often less than accurate reporting of what is going on phenomenally. That is what the perceptual modules accomplish; they give to the transcribed manifold of intuition the reality for all intents and purposes of the. therein perceived, external object. The resulting multiply drafted F surrogate will thus o.f irs OWllnature respond to the fears, desires, and plans which wrack the phenomenal worid in F-relevant ways. Which is to say. given the Mac-wiring of the two-worlds system. that the external object will be treated in F-relevant ways by those same fears. desires. and plans. It is for the sake of participating in this phenomenal psychokinesis that surrogate objects with the meaning-n of external objects have been evolutionarily crafted." This. then. is how I propose to think about the internal world: A Kantian world of objects for naive thought. computed a la Fodor. compiled a la Dennett, and recruited for surrogate service a la Dretske.
AN ACCOUNT OF ACQUAINTANCE Having provisioned ourselves with a world of internal objects we may proceed to a consideration of our acquaintance with them. This knowing. which is rhis-knowing or acquaintance. is intentionality directed to an immediately present object. Immediacy is what distinguishes acquaintance from perception. and intentionality is what distinguishes a thought directed to an object from the object to which it is directed. There is a recurring attempt in phenomenological theory to account for the immediacy and intentionality of the mind's self-knowledge by positing a u/lirary phenomenon of 'immediate aboutness' directed to the object by the object-viz.. 'self-intimation'. 'self-presentation', etc. The supposition of such reflexivity arises from the conviction that phenomenology subserves a special intentional role constitutive of phenomenal consciousnes~. the role of se(f-exhibition. This theoretical analysis rather than introspection is the origin of the doctrine of qualia. Qualia are how the mental states/eel. how they appear. Ewrything is what it is, but a quale is what it is like for me to be that quale. In each such apercu, a state of consciousness is glossed as an x in self-disclosure. Qualia
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are self-revealing properties. This unitary essence at once object and awareness explains, as it were, that 'immediate perception' of phenomenal states which for the qualophile is the central fact of phenomenal experience. I believe this conception of phenomenology and the coordinated view of the intentionality and immediacy of acquaintance is fundamentally mistaken. The special cognitive role of phenomenal states is not a mysterious self-illumination which allows them to be seen by the soul, but resides in the fact. for example. that a phenomenal chair, unlike the external chair, can literally enter into thoughts; thoughts which through the presence of this thinkable surrogate in them are directed to 'the chair' naively conceived. It is the thought to which the internal object is immediate which has intentionality while the phenomenal object itself has no more intentionality than an object external to thought. Phenomenology is not to be denied. but phenomenology, I will argue, is not an intentional special effect, but rather a special intentional status-de re intentional status-through which an object, the unrepresented res itself. becomes the content of thought in consequence of being of an immediate constituent of the thought about it. The object is immediate to the thought and the thought is about the object: but. in opposition to the posit of a unitary phenomenon of 'immediate aboutness', I will argue that the immediacy and the intentionality of acquaintance are two separately grounded phenomena. This is not an innocent or unproductive distinction. What will follow-the radical independence of the knowing of objects from the knowing of propositions. direct perception, demonstration without pointing, phenomenology without phenomenal properties. and the inadequacy of the representational theory of mind-will follow from this fundamental division of logical labor. THE IMMEDIACY OF ACQUAINTANCE
Immediacy requires that acquaintance involve the object of acquaintance itself. So the object of acquaintance must be a constituent of the thought about it. Not to prejudice the nature of thoughts with details. we may say simply that they are states of affairs. Thus it is a relative of the partwhole relation which the immediacy of acquaintance requires. viz., the relation between a state of affairs and a constituent of the state of affairs. The relation between a constituent and the state of affairs of which it is a constituent must not be confused with a relation between constituents. "The" is beside "cat" in "the cat is on the mat". but "the" is not beside the sentence of which it is a constituent. The arm of the chair is attached to the back and seat of the chair, but it is not attached to the chair. It is only attached to the rest of the chair. There is no physical, causal, or spatial content to the relation between the arm of the chair and the chair of which it is a part. The relation between a constituent and the state of affairs in which it occurs is a formal relation, like similarity or identity.
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I claim: II The immediacy of acquaintance is just the fact that the object of acquaintance is a constituent of the state which in its entirety constitutes acquaintance with it. Given the absence of an explication of the notions of state and constituent there is a limit to how informative this claim can be. Nonetheless it is substantive when viewed in terms of what it excludes. Because the object of acquaintance must be a constituent of the particular state of affairs which constitutes acquaintance with it, it follows, contrary to Rusellian doctrine. that. as here explicated, acquaintance is available only to particulars and not universals. Secondly. according to the Immediacy Claim the immediacy of acquaintance is not something which could contribute to phenomenology. It is likewise without physical. causal. or intentional content. As a purely formal relation it has none of the substantive properties of the state and constituent on which it supervenes. Just so. when the state of affairs is a thought about a constituent occurring in it then absolutely nothing comes between thought and object. That fact is all that the immediacy of acquaintance requires. THE INTENTIONALITY OF ACQFAI.'ITANCE
As an intentional phenomenon. acquaintance is frequently glossed as immediate perception. This is a contradiction in terms twice over. for what perception offers as function and intentionality is denied by immediacy. External chairs. tables. dogs. and Mount Fuji cannot themselves enter into thought. Perception serves to provide thinkable surrogates for objects of this sort. These representatives (do not say representations) because they are themselves thoughts (though they have the intentional status of objects) participate immediately in cognition in their constituencies' stead. Because these surrogates are already immediate to thought. perception of them is otiose. Immediacy also precludes the intentionality of perception. The 'of-ness' of perception depends on the reliable and lawfully grounded linkage between stimulus property and the resulting perceptual surrogate. It is by virtue of this intentional connection that perception is inevitably subject to a distinction of reality and appearance. Conversely. it is by avoiding the mediation of representation that acquaintance is not subject to an appearance/reality distinction. nor. therefore. to the skepticism which attends that divide. Because there is no representation of the object of acquaintance. there is no intentional connection./rYJI11 the object to the state of acquaintance with it. There are. however. other directions of intentionality. Perception is not an end in itself; it exists for the sake of action direCTed to the perceived objects. Even in the phenomenal world where perception is superfluous. objects must interact as feared or desired things. It is then the intentionalityas of action which merits our acquaintance. But lest we fall into the error of treating acquaintance as perception. we must be careful to distinguish the
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intentionality of looking from that of seeing. Sticklebacks see red objects in their environment by virtue of having an internal state which nomologically depends on the redness of external objects. Any other organism with a perceptual representative having the same lawfully based environmental dependence would perceive what sticklebacks perceive, viz., red things. However not all organisms act toward red things in the same way. As it happens male sticklebacks attempt to drive off the red objects they perceive, while female sticklebacks are inclined to mate with them." Sticklehacks perceive red objects as male cOllspec({ics. A predator of sticklebacks with the same perceptual mechanism possessed by sticklebacks perceives the same red things sticklebacks perceive but as dinner. Such perception-as consists in two forms of intentionality linked together. There is perception which moves from red object to red surrogate in fish thought, and there is action. or at least the disposition to action, which moves from the piscine cognitive state involving a red representative back to the red object. Of the two intentional links between object and representative. it is the action-fighting. fleeing, feeding, or mating-not the characterless correspondence of perception which treats the object as. Similarly. if a wayward Marlboro package is attacked by a male stickleback or otherwise abused by a female this mistake is perceptual error-as. But the miss goes on the 'as' intentionality not on the perception. There is an inappropriate characterization-as of what is perceived. but not misperceptioll. The action is mistaken in its content but nonetheless homes in on the red object. As Dennett") and Dretske'" have argued. learning and evolution serve to appropriately coordinate of and as intentionalities. But even when coordinated it is important to keep separate track of the intentionality of perception and of action. In action. as in perception. content follows the direction of causality. but the direction of causality in action is to the intentional object rather than from it. as is the case in perception. Perception is ohject-dril'ell intentionality: action is ()l~ject-directed intentionality. In perception the content of the representation is derived /1"0111 the object. What makes the representative a surrogate for F objects is that its appearance in thought is nomologically tethered to the F-ness of those. thereby perceived. instances of F. Thus one cannot perceive an object with the representation of a property that object does not have. But in action the intentional content derives from the nature of the action itself. To flee. fight. or remember something is in effect. that is, through effect. to characterize the object attended to as fleeworthy, fightworthy. or memorable. Practical success may demand that an object so characterized should deserve this treatment. but the content of object-directed intentionality is nonetheless logically independent of the properties of the object to which it is directed. The intentionality of perception is disinterested; ideally (as in ideal gases) it mirrors the properties it tracks without bias or affect. But action is not aesthetic contemplation; it is judgmental, goal-oriented. and purposive.
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I claim: The intentionality of acquaintance is the intentionality of action. The state of acquaintance is a cause whose effect relative to the object of acquaintance constitutes the fact and content of the state's being directed to that object. When we attend to mental objects as such, the range of actions taken on them is different than when we attend to a misbehaving child or the dinner dishes. But. according to the Intentionality Claim, the issues of content and reference are the same. Content-as is a matter of consequence, and when we attend, the object of our attentions is what bears their consequences. The phenomenal object of these attentions of acquaintance is an immediate constituent of the state of acquaintance itself. This immediacy applies only to the object of acquaintance. But the intentionality of acquaintance is equally and identically directed to the naively cognized external object for which the object of acquaintance is a sUlTogate. In perceptual circumstances the causal path which realizes this intentional connection between Ac_ and _ proceeds first to and then through the external object of which _ is the surrogate. For this reason we must say of action directed to a perceived object what is to be said of its perception: It is not immediate, but it is direct. The perception and the action is direct because neither involves any representation of or inference to its object. This experienced directness is the entitlement of cognition naively accomplished through sUlTogate olJjects. It is not available to a mind that perceives by way of representations and acts solely on information. There is an oversight concomitant with the received failure to distinguish the immediacy from the intentionality of acquaintance. This is the failure to recognize the content of acquaintance. The tradition conceives acquaintance aeSThetically. as disinterested contemplation, as a mere 'knowing' of the introspected object.~' Not knowing-as through action, as Eve knew Adam-that is, not knowledge by acquaintance in the received sense. Nor is acquaintance knowledge by subsumption under concepts, that is, knowledge by description. It is just 'awareness', just openness to whatit-is-like. This aesthetic awareness is cognition on a holiday. Even what passes for mere attention is action directed to its object since it disposes us to react to its changes or remember or search its features. Without the syndrome of these attention-caused effects we do not have the rather strenuous cognitive activity which is aesthetic contemplation. There is no neutral or characterless apprehension of what is immediately given. Acquaintance as disinterested contemplation is a myth: the myth, as we might say, of the 'intentional glance'. On the contrary, to bring an object immediately to mind is just to engage it in thought and thereby take cognizance of it through one of the modes of acquaintance, for example. as something to he remembered, interpreted. or given other preferential treatment.
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THE EMPEDOCLEAN MODES
In acquaintance there is aboutness and immediacy, but no immediate aboutness. The intentionality of acquaintance is mediated, but it affords acquaintance with an object immediately present to thought. We can schematically represent the combination of the separately grounded phenomena of the intentionality and immediacy of acquaintance as: Ac_. In this notation "Ac_" denotes a state of which _ is a constituent. In rejecting the inconsequential doctrine of the intentional glance we denied any all-purpose, contentless awareness. Thus "Ac" must not be thought of as signifying this imaginary acquaintance-pure-and-simple, but as going proxy for some particular imperative denoting one of the actions of acquaintance, for example, Remember_~ or Note_~ Each of these attitudes toward what is immediately going on is a different mode of intentional connection with it. The reference and content of any mode of acquaintance is assessed purely causally and functionally. It is solely on the functional and causal criteria that Ac_ has the significance of. say, attending to _. This intentionality has a circular topology insofar as it leads from the state of acquaintance. Ac_, to its constituent object. that is. back to _. Nonetheless the intentionalilY does not involve a causally closed path. In the first place. the intentionality and causality are not to be attributed to _ but only to Ac_. Secondly, the action brought about by Ac_ need not causally terminate on _ in order to be directed to it. Running away from _ is an action as much directed to _ as engaging it in combat. In cases such as Remember_~ the object of acquaintance does not even exist in the state of affairs effected by acquaintance with it. Still. the action of forming a memory of _ is intentionally directed to _. In all but philosophical moments the objects of acquaintance are nol regarded as states of mind. They are the naively construed friends, foes. furniture. and feelings with which unreflective life musl contend. So too the modes of acquaintance are typically practical: what by way of summary I will call Empedoc/ean modes. These are the cognitive forces of love and strife which stress the phenomenal world naively construed. The modes of acquaintance are not themselves objects of the phenomenal world, not themselves objects of acquaintance. In the adopted notation, only _ or the referenl of what is underlined is an object in the phenomenal world. Cognitive forces are manifest in the phenomenal world in the same way that the forces of electrostatic repulsion and gravitational attraction are manifest in the external world-by the characteristic syndrome of their effects. Thus Pick up_~ does not involve any self-conscious decision. Much of the action taken in 'the world' evolves from the interplay of standing desires. fears, plans. and routines. Life is too pressing to allow for reflection on every movement required to get through the day, or, indeed. on more than a very few of them.
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THE CARTESIAN MODES
Nonetheless, the reflective modes of acquaintance are derived from these unreflective modes. Or so I will argue. The basic structure of reflective awareness, I believe, is already extant, ripe for conceptualization. in the selfmonitoring processes of phenomenal/perceptual action. In the case of such EmpedocIean modes of acquaintance as Get_! or Pick up_! the resulting action is (via perceptual feedback) itself an event in the phenomenal world. Moreover, it is not that what we do is just there along with other events of the phenomenal world naively construed. We actively pay attention to our doing what we are doing-that is how it is done. To get things done one must know what one is doing. In the routine of action in the phenomenal world the events consequent on our attending to objects themselves become objects of modes of feedback acquaintance. This second-order acquaintance evaluates and modulates the compliance of actions with the sense of their initiating mode of acquaintance. The effect of this second-order acquaintance with the ongoing product of first-order acquaintance may be simply to allow the action to continue as is. But second-order attention can modify or halt the course of events if it does not fit the satisfaction conditions of picking up, chasing, or eating the red ones. The consequence of acquaintance with the consequence of acquaintance in tum becomes the object of continued monitoring until the project of the first-order acquaintance is accomplished or abandoned. This awareness of the result of acquaintance as something happening according to plan invokes what J will call monitoring concepts. A monitoring concept of F is the realization of a characteristic function for the property F: a Dennettian homunculus which when appropriately cathected to _ (where _ is the event resulting from F ___ ! ) reliably yields an F-positive output just in case _ is F-compliant. It is conceptualization of this sortal sort to which actions are routinely subjected. We do what we do (chase the squirrel. pick up the cup. or eat the red but not the green berries) through detemlining that what we are doing is an instance of chasing. picking up. or red-directed eating. Such second-order acquaintance is reflective. It is thought about thought-practical thought whose object is our practical thinking with objects. The application of monitoring concepts to particular events is judgment-practical judgment: and it should be accorded the status of knowledge of these events-working knowledge. To do is to know because knowing how to F ___ ! involves determining that the resulting act meets conditions of F-satisfaction. We need only give this practical reflective consciousness provided by monitoring concepts a representation and we will have the reflective modes of acquaintance. Suppose, for example, that I possess red know-how. This comes to the fact that in my phenomenal world the surrogates of red objects can induce red-relevant actions, for example. the eating of red but not green
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berries. Red-directed actions must be monitored to ensure compliance with the conditions of red-satisfaction, and the governing monitoring concept can certify this compliance or bring it about. Representation of this cognizance of red things requires the addition of a new consequence to the repertoire of red-monitoring, viz., the tokening of some object in the phenomenal world which will serve not as a surrogate of the red thing cognized but as a representation of its cognition as red. We have considered at the outset the distinction between surrogates and representations. Pretty much any affect-neutral phenomenal object producible at will, which meets the representation side of those distinctions, can be recruited for service as a representation with red-sense when functionally harnessed to the application of a red-monitoring 22 concept of practical acquaintance. The phonetic form "red" is an example. Now, to navigate my passage across the room to the Hershey bar on the horizon I need the phenomenal world of perceptual surrogates subject to the monitored interplay of the EmpedocIean modes, but I do not. so far as I can see, need to talk to myself. The evolutionary drive to develop representafirms of the practical modes of acquaintance and their naively cognized objects is. I would suppose. to make possible the planning and communication of action: 'Tomorrow. pick the red but not the green berries you over there!" It is representation. interpreted signals, which alone can intentionally connect the separate phenomenal worlds of different persons or times. But as a byproduct of the ability to engage in such other directed intention2 ality I acquire the ability to comment to myse(f on the prese!1l scene. ) lndeed. if I am a philosopher who has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge (of appearance and reality) and so has been driven from the Garden of Eden (of naive realism), I acquire the ability to knowingly comment on the current state of my own mind. Out of the Garden and into the briar patch! So we come to the Cartesian modes of acquaintance. These are explicitly represented judgments on the 'introspectable' (i.e .. acquaintance determined or measured) properties of objects of acquaintance as implemented by or grounded in monitoring concepts of the practical modes. We can mark their indicative mood with a period instead of the exclamation mark of the EmpedocIean modes. In the practical mode of living our lives we think about what we are doing. The fact of this practical thought is the evolution of the phenomenal world. naively construed, according the final causality provided by the cognitive forces of the EmpedocIean modes. But these imperatives of love and strife are themselves only immanently present in the phenomenal world through their effects. Pick up _! has the desired effect on its constituent phenomenal object, and this action proceeds by judging that 'the world' is indeed evolving in the pick-up way. However, neither the mode of acquaintance nor its monitored conceptualization is an object in the phenomenal world, which is to say neither is itself a subject of acquaintance. But through the Cartesian modes the practical cognition of objects is itself represented by an object in the phenomenal domain. When I pick up the cup I have
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a working knowledge of what I am doing. though this practical awareness of the action as picking up has no phenomenal representation. But insofar as I perform this monitoring cognition in a phenomenally explicit judgment "picked up" then I am thereby aware of the so judging. This cognition can in turn be explicitly represented, and so on up the reflective hierarchy without limit. This ability to iterate the Cartesian modes of acquaintance I will call the Cartesian Art because it corresponds to Descartes' conception of thinking about thinking. Contrary to widely held opinion, Descartes does not hold that thinking per se involves or requires awareness of thinking. In the Set'enth Set of Replies he writes: My critic says that to enable a substance to be superior to matter it is not sufficient for it to think; it is further required that it should think that it is thinking. by means of a reflexive act. or that it should have awareness of its own thought. This is as deluded as our brid.layer's saying that a person who is skilled in architecture must employ a reflexive act to ponder on the fact he has the skill before he can be an architect. ... He ['my critic') removes the true and most clearly intelligible feature which differentiates corporeal things from incorporeal ones. \·i;:. that the latter think. bUl not the former; and in its place he substitutes a feature which cannot in any way be regarded as essential, namely that incorporeal things reflect on their thinking. but that corporeal ones do not."
According to Descartes we have the ability, and hence option. to use the power of thought that enables us to think practically about bricks, to think about thinking about bricks, and so on. Thus as thinking things in the Cartesian sense we have the ability to generate the cognitive Cartesian Hierarchy: The initial thought by means of which we become aware of something does not differ [in kind) from the second thought by means of which we become aware that we are aware of it. any more than this second thought differs [in kind) from the third thought by means of which we become aware that we were 2.:' aware.
We can indicate that in a Cartesian mode of acquaintance the judgment that _ is red is itself an object in the phenomenal world by extending the blank notation indicating an object of acquaintance: Red. This is the event in the phenomenal world which is the Cartesian-mode judgment that _ is red. e.g .. by way of the thought "Red_." "Red" in Red_. functions as a representation. but it is not present to thought by representation. Rather in a Cartesian judgment the representation in application to its object is itself an object immediately present to thought. By the Cartesian Art we can in turn make this judging of the redness of _ an object of a further mode of Cartesian acquaintance, yielding, for example. an event in the phenomenal world which is the judgment that Red. is a thinking that _ is red. i.e., Thinking
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(Red .). Because at each level of the Cartesian Hierarchy the reflection of that level affords acquaintance with the predicate in application to its object, our thinking is itself immediately present to thought about it: Cogito (Cogito)., ergo sum. KNOWLEDGE THROUGH ACQUAINTANCE
Cartesian familiarity with our thoughts and our thinking is a limiting case. In general there is distance between thought and object, great or small, depending on the representative means by which the object is made available to thought. But in acquaintance the object itself, rather than any name, description, demonstrative, or surrogate, enters into the thought about it. This makes acquaintance de re in a manner categorially beyond the resources of other forms of intentionality. Only in acquaintance is the object known through thought because only in acquaintance is the object itself thought. This is what is definitive of acquaintance: not knowledge about objects but the knowing of objects. It is this immediacy of the object to the thought about it which makes demonstrative reference possible, for what makes for demonstration is not 'unmediated reference' but reference to an immediately present object. The reference of the thought Ac_ to its object is mediated by the functionally construed causality of Ac_, but the mediated reference is to an object immediately present to the thought: namely _. It is the whole state which has intentional content and reference, but it is by virtue of _ being a constituent of Ac_ that the reference detennining consequences of Ac_ intentionally tenninate on _. It is by virtue of_'s presence in Flee_~ that _ is fled: it is by virtue of the presence of .... in Remember.... ! that a memory of .... is made. Thus the relation of Ac_ to _ is demonstrative because it is through the occurrence of _ itself in the thought that the thought is directed to _. Because the reference of Ac_ to is demonstrative I will often refer to the object of acquaintance as this or as a this for thought. This usage should not be taken to suggest that acquaintance is accomplished through the mediation of a demonstrative referring device or act of mental ostention. The immediacy of the object of acquaintance to thought obviates and precludes any representation. In acquaintance it is the object itself and alone which enters into thought about it. All acquaintance, whatever its particular mode, involves demonstrative reference to its object. But there is in particular the mode of acquaintance with _ where the action naively directed to _ is the speech act, Dthat, of directing an audience's attention to d-that. Nothing could be more natural for us as unreflective naive realists than to point out to others what we have in mind and so get them to have 'it' in mind too. But we must not confuse the action which naively characterizes the object as 'what I have in mind' with the demonstrative reference to this object. The speech act of demonstration uses pointing or some fonn of description to indicate for the audience what
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(naively construed) the speaker is demonstrating in thought; what she literally has in mind. Pointing does not demonstrate: it merely describes or represents the demonstrated object. Of course the intersubjective object spatially demarcated, d-that. is not the one immediately present to naive thought,_. No matter. This unreftected divergence is beside the point. In the two-worlds system, action naively directed to d-that,-here Dthat-is equally directed to d-that as to _, and this so without inference to, or representation, or description of 'the demonstrated object' . Speech acts calling attention to dthat are therefore demonstrative in the received sense, providing that we do not confuse the demonstrative reference with the descriptive act of pointing used to communicate it. We do directly perceive and demonstrate external objects, yet it is only by virtue of acquaintance with the internal world, that is, by virtue of the identity of the act Dthat_ with {Dthat d-that <;B Perception (Dthat d-that)} that demonstration and direct perception of the external world take place. By virtue of its de re immediacy, acquaintance enjoys another signal distinction. Where epistemic access is mediated, whether by representation. or surrogate. it is possible to have the representative in thought without its constituency. But it is logically impossible to hallucinate objects of acquaintance since the object is a constituent of the very thought which constitutes acquaintance with it. One cannot be mistaken that _ exists for the simple reason that without _ there cannot be the thought or belief that _ exists. With respect to demonstration and existential incorrigibility, then. the present account of acquaintance confirms and explicates traditional views. But what properties can we know with certainty to be true of _ by virtue of acquaintance with it? The supposition of sense-data days was that since we have unmediated epistemic access to the object of acquaintance. a knowledge of its intrinsic features is automatic and infallible. Acquaintance. so conceived, interprets a predicate through acquaintance with the particular-as-instance. Acquaintance is thus conceived to yield knowledge that the object of acquaintance has this acquaintance-given or 'phenomenal' property. This, I believe, is a serious error of phenomenological fact and philosophical analysis. The object of acquaintance is a particular. We are acquainted with this individual, but the unmediated reality of _ is no intimation that it is F. for any F. We are acquainted with what is there. but while _ is there and is F. it does not 'occur-as' F. Because it is meaningless for a particular to 'occuras' or 'exist-as' an F thing. we cannot be acquainted with the F-ness of an F particular which is the being-there object of acquaintance. The point is not that acquaintance with universals is not possible on the present construal. which requires that the object of acquaintance itself occur in the thought. Acquaintance with universals, as allowed by Russell. would not provide knowledge by acquaintance. What we want is not the knowing of objects of higher type, but knowledge that _ is F. Extending the domain of objects of
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acquaintance to properties would give us de re access to F as well as to _, but not to as F. The formal relation between a property and an instance of it is not some thing that in principle one could be acquainted with. There is not even a state of affairs which exhibits a particular and a universal in the relation of predication as, we might say, the state of affairs of the cat in the hat can show the one thing in the other. It is only through the application of a representation of the property to _ that we can assert, believe, or know that _ has the represented property. Thus we must be more insistent in observing Russell's distinction between the knowing of objects and the knowledge of propositions than was Russell himself. When Russell spoke of knowledge by acquaintance he meant knowledge of propositions about the objects of acquaintance obtained by acquaintance with them. This is not possible. If we are acquainted with _ then we can think about _ without relying on an intervening appearance or mode of presentation of _. But what we think of _, the properties predicated, and the asserted participation of the subject in those properties cannot be given by the unmediated experience of the particular. Thus there can be no knowledge by acquaintance. There can be no knowledge by acquaintance because immediacy cannot provide any characterization of the immediate object. But this is not to say that acquaintance does not provide information about or characterization of its object. The effect of, for example, Note the shape of _~, Blue_?, or Eat_! serve as measurements or characterizations of some feature of . But these informative consequences and the corresponding explicit judgments of Cartesian acquaintance, for example, Square. or Blue ., have no epistemologically privileged status. The predicated or characterizing content of acquaintance depends on and is mediated by the causal-functional consequences of Ac_ for _. So acquaintance, while constitutionally immune to existential skepticism, is subject to the same possibility of content error that afflicts perception, This too is a consequence of what is fundamental; the separate grounding of the immediacy and the meaning of acquaintance. By Cartesian reflection we can exhibit our thinking to ourselves, for we are acquainted with a representation in thought-application to its object. The case of Cogito excepted, the representation may well be false of the object of acquaintance of which it is predicated. Nonetheless, when the characterization is true of _ there is knowledge. Moreover, with respect to its subject this is de re knowledge. One knows that _ is F not merely that there is an F thing. This is not simply knowledge by description because its subject is given by acquaintance. But neither is this de re success knowledge by acquaintance, for the interpretation of the predicate is de dicto. It is de dicto knowledge of an object given de reo Knowledge through acquaintance, we may say, since it is knowledge of the object of acquaintance through the truthful classification perfonned through some mode of acquaintance with it. I can know through a philosophically reflective acquaintance with the
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phenomenal cup that phenomenally speaking, it is on the table, white, and elliptical but round-for-all-intents-and-purposes. In short I can know of phenomenal objects through acquaintance with them what, with similar sophistication, I know by perception of the objects of sense. But of course! This is just to acknowledge that the two coordinated interpretations which apply without discernment to naive perceptual cognition become, after The FalL severally available to sophisticated thought as what is known of the internal world through acquaintance and what is known of the external world by perception.
BEING AND KNOWINGNESS We can now put this account of acquaintance to work. A good deal of the dissension concerning the adequacy of functionalism, the possibility of physicalism, the existence of qualia, and the standing of phenomenology has had its basis in conflicting claims about what we do or don't know about our own minds. Phenomenologists have insisted on what th(y knoB' and functionalists on I1mr they know. The result has been that the ends and means of self-knowledge have seemed to be in irreconcilable conflict. In the phenomenological camp it is held that no description of the causal or functional structure of the brain could entail or do justice to the experience of _. So an accounting of the ph.ysical and fimctionalfacts callnOf prot'ide a complete explanation of what }re know o.f experience. In the physicalist camp it is insisted that the facts of intentionality and knowledge are determined by the functional structure of causalia to which 'qualia' can make no contribution. So phenomenology. cOl/ceil'ed as all experielltial domain ~I'h()se content cannot be gil'{:'l1 b.y any de SCI'lJJtioll of thefllllctiOlzal and causalfacts, is al1 impossibility and its supposition a C01!fusioll. If the account of acquaintance developed here is correct in its basic bipolar logical structure, then this conflict is specious. The conflicting italicized conclusions follow from their respective true premises only by way of a category confusion of what we are and what we know, u confusion of being and knowingness. As phenomenologists aver. a recounting of the physical and functional facts cannot do justice to what we are, and the fact of phenomenology must be formally recognized. But from this it does not follow that there is anything more to be known or to be said than what physics and functionalism have to offer. As functionalists insist. facts of causal structure determine the fuct and content of self-knowledge. But from this it does not follow that what is not a matter of possible klUJH1edge, what cannot be said. viz .. _ itself. is nothing. Thus the reconciliation of what we are with what we know must proceed by insisting on the categorial distinction of the facts to be jointly acknowledged. With this insistence we may hope to prevent the
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slide from being to knowing, which would posit self-intimating qualia, and the slide from the absence of phenomenological knowing to the absence of phenomenology, which would deny the being of de re content. QUALIA REQUINED
The illusion that we have conceived phenomenal properties arises naturally. if not quite ineluctably. from the two components of Cartesian acquaintance. In the first place, there is the fact of phenomenal/de re experience. Secondly. there is the fact that we know this experience is 'red' or 'pain'. But there is a tendency to identify the fact that we know exactly what is going on, namely _, with the fact that we know that what is going on is red or is pain. This is the conflation of what we are with what we know. It creates the illusion that there is property content known by acquaintance with _. The phenomenology of _ is thereby mistaken for an immediate awareness of a phenomenological property which _ has. We must, as phenomenologists, work our way through and out of this illusion. But don't 1 know 'what it is like'? This phrase suggests that what is grasped of_ is which x's it is like. Do I know what other objects of immediate acquaintance are experientially like _? That depends. I am very good, or at least very confident, in my judgments of color likeness. I would be astounded if today's sky yielded the experience of yesterday's tomato. I am alarmed at even the slight greying of my hair. But when it comes to quality pitches instead of quality hues I have no such ability or confidence. How is that? If phenomenology was constituted by or sufficient for knowledge of 'phenomenal' properties, then I should know what c# is like from c# experience just as surely as I know what red is like through acquaintance with red particulars. But this is not the case. I am not deaf; it is just that I cannot remember. re-identify, or type-cast pitches. Is this the same tone I heard a minute ago; is it c#? I really don't know. I don't know what _ is like. All the same. _ is the phenomenology of the moment. Auditory experience provides a concrete and familiar illustration of the earlier reasoning that unmediated experience of a particular cannot provide acquaintance with its properties. A tone experience does not seem more or less typical or typeless than a hue experience. Indeed, who could tell from a blue experience that one will be able to re-identify its property type or from attentive acquaintance with a c# experience that one will not? The knowledge, then, of color type but not pitch type does not reflect any corresponding phenomenological difference. That we have or do not have type-casting abilities is something we must determine experimentally, not introspectively. We do not even know vdlether we know what _ is like by acquaintance with it. We must push further. In the case of color we know the type, and in the case of pitch most of us do not. But even when we can type-cast an object of acquaintance we cannot tell whether the property directly accessed is a property of the state thereby classified. Suppose that phenomenal color states
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are shadowed by other internal states having shape; for example. phenomenal red states are associated with neurological states that are literally square. Suppose further that when we attentively query the color type of _, the result is a highly reliable measurement of the shape of the internal state associated with _. There we are in medias res of a particular instance of color consciousness, absorbed in _ and certain that it is red. We know that _ is red without effort or, it seems, cognitive activity. We are wont to say we know it is red because it looks red. But while the mind's eye fixates on the red particular, the mind's hand reports its feeling of the associated square. This sleight of hand is intentionally directed to the red object of acquaintance, for (we may suppose) it is the functionally significant surrogate property intrinsic to the object of acquaintance which the square-monitoring concept has evolved to check indirectly.co The upshot is that we have the phenomenology of _ and, via Determine color of _!, the knowledge through acquaintance with it that it is red. Only in this route to Red " the property used to classify red _'s as red is not read off them or even among their intrinsic properties. This hypothetical scenario is perfectly consistent with actual color phenomenology and the actual content of color knowledge; and so provides another illustration of the central fact that phenomenology, the knowing of objects, is of particulars and as such can yield nothing in the way of phenomenological knowledge of properties. We must push further. In Russell's vision every nonlogical proposition was elementarily de re or could be constructed from de re propositions by application of the Russellian theories of types, names. descriptions, and acquaintance. Not so. At the lowest level of analysis it is not Russell's thoroughly de re propositions known by acquaintance into which the superstructure of de dicto propositions resolves. At the most elementary interpretive level there is only knowing hm\'. I exercise such ability as I have to will bodily movement or remember breakfast in ignorance of how I do it. So also with my judgments concerning the qualities of objects of acquaintance. I am able to type-cast particular hues and not tones, but I have no idea how this ability is realized. That is what we have at the interpretive basis of our knowledge of the internal world: Knowledge through acquaintance: the de re presence of particulars labeled by the unknown knowing of the Cartesian modes. ," It is thus only in a very restricted sense that I know what I am talking about when I exercise red know-how to judge that an object of acquaintance is 'red', The content of "red" so deployed is just the property (~r whatever it actually is, 'which I am able to label with "rea'. Uses of "red" so interpreted, that is, through acquaintance, are in what Carnap called the material mode: While the term occurs in the object language, the claim it is used to x make is effectively metalinguistic.: Nonetheless, this material-mode knowledge that _ is 'red' is knowledge and is not to be spumed. In the beginning we have nothing else in mind. Moreover, the Cartesian modes of acquain-
_.
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tance get terms on the table, and in the fullness of time and sophistication tenns naively introduced and interpreted merely by know-how are projected theoretically and so come to be intratheoretically glossed by descriptions. I can thus come to have knowledge by description of the properties ignorantly labeled through acquaintance by cognitive know-how. But such knowledge is not part of the fact or theory of acquaintance. We must push further. I have immediate experience of _ and I know that it is 'red'. But this-knowledge, knowledge through acquaintance, is not phenomenological knowledge. This is the difficult point I have been arguing. It prepares the way for the final emancipation of phenomenology from knowledge: I do not know that _ is red by experience but only of experience. What I know in knowing that _ is red I might know without the experience which is _. The fact and content of my knowledge depends on the application of cognitive know-how to a red particular, but it is no aspect or requirement of such knowledge that the particular be a this. an object of immediate acquaintance, my experience. The same subject might be brought to thought mediately without phenomenology by neurological description or by perception through an autocerebrascope. These modes of presenting the subject do not affect the null sense of the predicate "red" I know how to apply to _. Suppose I know that what is in the box is 'red', that I can make such knowhow judgments of what is in the box with ease and consistency. I would know nothing more of what is in the box were I to literally become the boxed thing. Becoming what is in the box would make a difference in my experience, but c9 not in the content of my knowledge. It is just that whereas I knew before is 'red'. Ifwe can see and that what is in the box is 'red', I now know that accept this we will be able as phenomenologists to accept the lesson implicit in the case of the squarely known red experience considered above: that my knowledge that _ is red, or pain, etc., is without phenomenological content. By the same insight we will disabuse ourselves of those deceptive thought experiments in which what is in fact the absence of content is mistaken for the conception and imaginative manipulation of independent content, viz., of a phenomenal property known by acquaintance. I can suppose without contradiction or cognitive conflict that Martians with a different physiology might have the same kind of experience I know as 'red' or that such experience might obtain without any body at all. But then too, I can suppose without cognitive opposition that what liable as 'red' could exist without any nonphysical property existing. The possibility of these suppositions does not show that the red property known of _ is not physical and also not nonphysical. It shows that I don't know what I am talking about. In these cases the consistency of my suppositions is degenerate, for it arises only from the fact that there is no 'red' content to conflict with. I conceive only what is possiblef()f all J knoM', and since I know nothing but truth-in-labeling, nothing will be excluded from this modality as possible of red.
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Nor will it avail to switch the focus of ontological speculation from the predicate to the subject of acquaintance. It is true that the supposition that this could exist without brainstate <\> does not meet with any resistance from _. However, this fact must not be mistaken for a conceiving of the possibility that _ could exist apart from brainstate <\>. In acquaintance we have in thought the thing itself, which is just to say that we literally have no idea of what we are thereby thinking about. Now epistemologically, a thing is no substitute for an idea of it. Facts exclude contrary facts and ideas conflict with contrary ideas, but. alas, fact~ do not repel false ideas. If my epistemic access to _ does not involve any conception of it as F, then the mere fact of its F-ness will present no resistance to my ignorant supposition that it is or could be not-F. Thus, since acquaintance delivers _ to thought completely free of any conceptualization of it, any property can be thought of without resistance. Illusion sets in when this automatic absence of resistance between characterizing idea and uncharacterized thing is mistaken for a conception of the compatibility of ideas of subject and predicate, and hence for the conceptio11 of the possible truth of the predication. The supposition that _ could exist apart from brainstate <\> is fully, even rigidly, interpreted and therefore necessarily true or false, as the case may be. However, whereas truly or falsely supposing requires only success in applying a concept to an object. cOllcei\'ing the possible truth of the predication supposed or denied requires recognition of a concord of subject and predicate contents. Since in the case of an object of acquaintance there is no conception of the subject. no supposition as to that object's properties qualifies as conceiving or imaginatively constructing a state of affairs involving it. Thus the fact that a supposition concerning the nature of this meets with no resistance shows nothing as to what is possible. These considerations show that experience of objects is phenomenological without providing us any experience or knowledge of properties. This being so, it can be seen that the attempt to construe phenomenology as constituted by the possession of special phenomenal properties is a category mistake. Although this particular instance of 'red' or 'pain' or c# is phenomenologicaL it is not so by virtue of instancing these properties, but by virtue of its-the particular independent of its party affiliation-being an immediate constituent of the thought directed to it. Phenomenology is a matter of the intentional status of particulars. Thus there is no phenomenal content introspectively interpreting the terms "red", "pain", or "c#" even when the particulars to which they are correctly applied constitute, by virtue of their immediacy to thought, phenomenal experience. In other circumstances some or all the instances of these same property kinds would fail to be phenomena! states for failing to be this's. Conversely, if states of kidney kind Q were to enter immediately into thoughts about them, then they would become a this for those thoughts, thoughts for which their own particular Q-beings would provide the phenomenological/de re content. Phenomenology, then,
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is a contingent fact constituted by the intentional status of particulars of no particular sort. Of course, the objects of acquaintance have properties, and sensation tenns label them, but this is not to the point of phenomenal properties. Phenomenal properties or qualia as they have been understood in philosophical disputes are not simply properties that phenomenal states have, but properties by virtue of which they are phenomenological. It is phenomenal properties in this. the philosophically operative sense that, with Dennett, I am claiming do not exist. DE RE FUNCTIONALISM
There are no phenomenal properties and there is no knowledge by acquaintance. Whose ox is gored? Far from arguing against phenomenology I have argued that it is because phenomenology is of particulars given de re that there are no phenomenological properties and no knowing of propositions by acquaintance. What constitutes the specialness of phenomenal objects is that the particular res is itself immediately present to the thought about it. Anything which is a this in this strong sense is a datum of immediate consciousness. I submit that is what the fact of phenomenology comes to. It is tlzisness, not quality, which is the common denominator between this (pain), this (thought), this (gestalt). It is thisness which distinguishes these objects immediate to acquaintance from objects cognized through perceptual surrogates or representations. It is thisness which by putting the res in content gives being to thought and so accommodates the traditional ineffability of 'what it is like': an ineffability not of properties of unutterable peculiarity but as the category of being (de re content) versus knowing (de dicto content). This categorial ineffability is a consequence of the analysis of phenomenology as thisness, not an unexplicated premise. Similarly, as we will shortly consider, two other hallmarks of phenomenal experience-the independence of phenomenal content from functional fonn (consistent with the fact that the presence or absence of phenomenology is fixed by functional/intentional structure), and the truth of Nagel's axiom that phenomenal content can be apprehended only from a subjective point of view-are immediate corollaries to the construal of phenomenology in tenns of the de re intentional status of particulars. Most importantly, while the supposition of qualia is ever falling into epiphenomenalism, the analysis of phenomenology as the fact of a this for thought, together with the analysis of perceptual thought in tenns of the naive cognition of this-objects in the two-worlds system, makes clear the practical point of phenomenal experience. In short, it is qualia not phenomenology which has been quined. Nonetheless, because no special properties and only functionally construed intentionality have been invoked, it is likely to be felt that the view that phenomenology is constituted simply by the intentional status of being a this for thought is open to trivialization. I have no problem with the
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possible triviality of phenomenology. It is required for any account which would allow for that evolution of consciousness in which. by insensible phylogenetic degrees. the phenomenal world emerges at the turning point of the reflex arc. The phenomenal psychokinesis of the two-worlds system is such a natural form that we must expect that it was soon caught onto. Consequently I do not doubt that there is something which it is to be a bat or a bee. But between us and the simplest insentient organisms there are certain to be places where there is no fact of the matter whether a certain constituent of an internal state is the immediate intentional object of that state and so its de re content; no fact as to whether there is anything which it is to be that organism. Infactuality must afflict the evolutionary origins of any intentional phenomenon. be it perception, belief, intelligence, or thisness. At the other extreme, we should not mistake the complexity of our own phenomenal world for a condition of phenomenology per se. The dim witted orgasm of an earthworm is as truly phenomenology as our own multimedia experience. What is marvelous about human phenomenology is not that it is phenomenology but that it is marvelous phenomenology-nature's threebillion-year solution to the problem of achieving in one state the surrogate of the perceived world; a world within a world conceived by nature in its own image. No doubt this engineering feat requires very special properties. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. and the phenomenal world is silk-purse phenomenology. At the same time it is true (on the position I advocate) that phenomenology per se requires no special properties-in one mind or another anything might do. But we must be careful to distinguish this broad-mindedness from the indifference to the material of mind professed by functionalism. On an account of de re psychological states it matters absolutely what the object of acquaintance is in each case; the broad-mindedness is only that of chacun a son gout. On a functionalist analysis. the material instantiating the functional form has no psychological standing ill any case. Psychological states are construed only through their causal-functional relation to each other and the external world. and so all realizations of a given functional structure are psychologically equivalent. This is emphatically false on the theory of de re acquaintance argued here. What is true is that since there is no knowledge by acquaintance, the theory of acquaintance is in complete accord with Shoemaker's Theorem that functionally equivalent systems are epistemologically equivalent with respect to their own mental states.'" This is not to say that the reference and intension of the dictum "pain" used phenomenally in my thought and that of a functionally isomorphic Martian is the same. I suppose that what the Martian determines in determining that he is in "pain" is a different property of phenomenal objects than what I determine in making the functionally equivalent representation; and I follow Kripke and Putnam in holding that these different properties are the respective rigidly designated
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referents of "pain" in my and Martian usage. But what the Martian and I understand about these different properties by virtue of our "pain"-labeling abilities is exactly the same. I and the Martian introspectively know the same thing about our respective pains; for our respective recognitions that an object of acquaintance is 'pain' have exactly the same minimal materialmode know-how sense. There is no difference in the content of the introspective knowledge we each have of our respective experiences. But we must not infer from this that there is no experiential difference in being what, respectively, we are. Knowing is not the be all and end all of our existence. It is not the he any. I and my Martian doppelganger are de dicto equivalent but we are de re distinct. This makes all the difference in the world; the phenomenal world. On our respective painful occasions we are acquainted with instances of different properties. The absolute identity of these essentially different esse's makes a psychological difference because it is the this which as object of acquaintance becomes the de re content of thought. These particulars themselves are what we feel. Thus our experience differs even though there is no difference in our understanding of it. So the existence of phenomenological/de re content is at odds with the functionalist party platform that psychological states are fully characterized by their causal-functional relation to inputs, outputs, and other psychological states. We can layout the street plan of cognition functionally. but what is met at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine is what it is and is not its location. To deny or overlook this distinction is to suppose that what cannot be propositional knowledge is nothing at all. Not so. The de re content of experience cannot be knowledge or be said, but this is because it is de reo not propositional or de dicto. content. It is provided by the res itself. not our concept of it. Nonetheless it is not clear that phenomenologists will appreciate the defence of phenomenology as thisness. The position just maintained against functionalism also allows for the possibility of experientially distinct but introspectively undetectable intrasubjective spectrum inversion or substitution. Such a change might befall Jackson's Mary. ': We may suppose that through the usual mischievous machinations. her phenomenal states. along with their qualitative monitoring concepts, are transmuted without temporal discontinuity to those of a functionally isomorphic Martian. If what has been argued here is correct. she will not notice the qualitative change of her immediate, de re conscious experience. On the contrary. she may be expected initially to deny that there has been any change. But given her worldrenowned expertise in neurology, a glance through an autocerebrascope would change her mind about her change of mind. The possibility of experientially distinct. introspectively undetectable spectrum substitution vividly contrasts being and knowing, and is likely to offend both phenomenological and functionalist camps. This alliance of opposition supports what I have been arguing-that phenomenologists and
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functionalists share the same underlying conflation of being with knowing. The one camp applies this conflation with the fact of phenomenology to infer, modus ponens, properties known by experience (qualia); while the other camp invokes the conflation and the absence of phenomenological knowledge to deny, modus tollens, the fact of being. I believe that what has united phenomenologists and functionalists, the supposed unity of being and knowing, is an illusion: while what the one side would deny to the other-being or knowing, respectively-is real. For phenomenology de re is de rigueur. And de re content cannot be given by any functional description. But as our own reflections example, the account of phenomenology as thisness is neutral with respect to what the 'this' is. Thus the theory of phenomenology is functional even if the experience so circumscribed is not something that can be said. The conflict between functionalism and phenomenology has arisen from the conflation of being and knowing, positively and contrapositively. When we are careful to distinguish being and knowing, both can be accommodated. As phenomenologists we must give up any pretense to know what we are. As functionalists we must admit what we are, as distinct from what we know. Functionalism can effect this-admission by introducing de re variables (which is what the adopted fill-in-the-blank notation comes to) for states which on a functionally characterized assessment of demonstrative intentionality are objects of acquaintance. To be is to be the value of a de re variable. Functionalism cannot articulate the experiential content constituted by the valuation of a de re variable: but this is a limitation of functionalism or the proof of ineffable phenomenal properties only internal to the category conflation of being (a particular) and knowing (a proposition or propositional function). There is no conflict between phenomenology and the de re functionalism I am advocating. On the contrary, it is because the functionally characterized cognitive architecture of a system determines which states, if any, of the system are de re that there can be an 'objective phenomenology' as envisioned by Nagel.;' COGITO'J
There is, however. a brand of functionalism which is inimical to the phenomenal world, our acquaintance with it and any form of de re thought: a concept of mind which while insisting on realism with respect to mental states is logically incompatible with the phenomenology of thisness: The representational theory of mind. It is not to be questioned that internal states serve in one capacity or another to mediate our response to the external world. This much is granted by behaviorism or Dennett's intentional stance. But it is an additional question within the fold of realism with respect to mental states whether these internal states subserve this role by functioning as representations or as objects. The representational theory of mind holds that internal states have the intentional standing and the corresponding cognitive architecture of representations. From this posit derives the hypothesis
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of a language of thought and the view that what is central to the understanding of cognition is propositional attitudes, construed psychologically as so many distinct computational treatments of representation ally interpreted 'syntactic' forms. I believe this is a mistaken conception of the core of human cognition which is perceptual cognition. At least it is at odds with the intentionality I have ascribed to the naively cognized two-worlds system. Here there are no perceptual beliefs. The phenomenal cup is on the phenomenal table-zu handen. The practical perceptual cognition by which we naively live our lives does not involve propositional attitudes but object attitudescognitive forces. Attraction is not a computational attitude applied to a sentence. The body of the Other warps the structure of phenomenal spacetime and draws mine to it along the geodesic of desire. These differences, and others, separate cognition via representation and via the intentional physics of the phenomenal world. But it is only epistemic and phenomenological conflicts with the representational theory of mind which obtrude on a consideration of our knowledge of the internal world. De dicto minds, minds for which the representational theory of mind is true. realize the obverse of the Cartesian worst case. There is an external world but no internal world~ The skeptical consequence of this circumstance bears reflection. On the representational theory of mind, skepticism concerning the external world is possible because what we have in mind is at best a representation of the external world. I can doubt that the external world exists because I can doubt that what are representations in syntactic form are representations in semantic fact. If there is no external world, then the syntactic forms are not interpreted at all. In that case I do not even succeed in thinking falsely that the external world exists, because even false thought requires an interpretation which. by hypothesis. is lacking. I do not think at all. I merely pass through a series of uninterpreted states that would have been thoughts if they had occurred by virtue of being tethered to an interpreting domain. Thus. on the representational theory of mind, Cartesian skepticism, the doubting that there is an external world, is possible only if this doubt. as the condition of its possibility, is false. But this only pushes skepticism back to a question of whether one is doubting.)) Can one doubt that one is doubting and so bring Cartesian skepticism to the world of thought? Descartes could not. Under ordinary operating conditions in the twoworlds system there are two interpretations of my 'reaching for the cup' under both of which it will be true that there is a cup for which I reach. Even if circumstances are temporarily nonstandard, because at the moment I am dreaming, there remain two interpretations of the intentionality of my reaching for the cup, though only on the phenomenal-world interpretation will an object of my short-circuited action exist. If, however, in accordance with the generating supposition of Cartesian skepticism, I have always been 'dreaming', then there is no surrogate intentionality or interpretation. But by default of external objects my thought does not become un-thought. Even
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in the worst-case scenario my states of mind are not devoid of intentionality and interpretation, as would be the case on the representational theory of mind. I still reach for the cup, only in the imagined circumstances this action is categorical; it is interpreted by and directed to the phenomenal cup alone. Thus for Descartes and those of us capable of the Cartesian Art. a doubt that one is thinking is insupportable. We are acquainted with objects, for example, the phenomenal cup == ..•. ; and through Cartesian modes of acquaintance with thoughts about objects of acquaintance. for example. with I think that .... is a cup.; with thoughts about thoughts, for example, with (I think that .... is a cup) is a thought about .......:.; and so on up the Cartesian Hierarchy. These thoughts are immune to existential skepticism concerning their object thoughts because they cannot occur without those demonstrated particulars. Thus I cannot doubt that I fail to think for the failure of there being the requisite objects (thoughts) to interpret I am thinking (I am thinking), therefore I exist. Indeed, it is only because even in the Cartesian worst-case scenario there is one interpretation relative to which J am acquainted with unrepresented objects of thought. desire. and fear that I can know that I am thinking. Otherwise I should be able to doubt that my 'thoughts' had any intentionality, i.e .. that they were thoughts. We must distinguish the question of Cartesian doubt, which is existential and concerns whether there is a thought-making subject of thought. from 'predicate' doubt concerning the properties of this subject. Doubt concerning whether the tower seen in the distance is round or square is predicate doubt. At the extreme of predicate doubt there is the insanity defense of skepticism: 'Perhaps I am mad'. This is predicate doubt about thoughts, viz .. whether the thoughts of one's acquaintance meet the norms of rational deliberation. Cartesians are not immune to madness and reasonable suspicions thereof. However. this is not the doubt that one has a mental life but the doubt that one's mental life is rationally ordered. De dicto intellects. however. may be in reasonable doubt of their minds as well as of their sanity. On the representational theory of mind there is no internal world of unmediated acquaintance. My epistemic access to my thoughts and feelings does not differ in kind from my epistemic access to the external world. Access to the external world, if any. rests on representations of it. and access to those representations rests on representations of some kind of them, for example, sentences in the language of thought or 'introspective beliefs'. It is representations all the way up the representational hierarchy. Thus for the representational mind there arises the reasonable possibility of extending Cartesian skepticism to the mental domain. To put it another way. the epistemic relation of a representational mind to its own cognition does not differ in principle from its relation to the cognition of other minds. So for the representational mind the problem of 'other' minds begins at home: Am I in pain? Am I having visual experience? Any experience at all? Perhaps not. Perhaps I have never been in pain, nor in any other qualitative state. Perhaps I have
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never even believed falsely that I was in pain. Perhaps there is now and always has been only the syntactic form of what would have been qualitative state representations ( qualitative beliefs ), if, as may be doubted, these states had been caused by, and so interpreted by, 'pains' or other 'qualitative states' . Perhaps, by the same token, the state I am in is not even a thought of thinking! I really can't be sure. Is such reflection self-refuting? I think not. The doubt is insupportable if at any point the representational regress is closed off with a Cartesian mode of acquaintance with thought. But for a representational mind this is analytically impossible. Of course, even in an interpreted de dicto mind the thought I do not exist would necessarily be false whenever it was conceived. But even in the case of an actual de dicto thinking of ego existo? the necessary falsity of one's doubt could never be experienced or known beyond doubt, because it could not be exhibited that the interpretational condition of being a doubting, of being a thought because a thought of something, had been met. The representational mind can think of its thoughts only through representations of them, and the reference of representations can always be questioned. At no level of representational assent will there be any more warrant for the representational mind to suppose that its thought-symbols are interpreted by thoughts than at ground zero there is any necessity to suppose that its cup-symbols are interpreted by cups. Thus if there were a de dicto mind capable of and disposed to entertaining Cartesian skepticism with respect to the external world, it would find it equally reasonable to entertain Cartesian skepticism with respect to current perceptions, beliefs, feelings, and thoughts. Should we pity the representational mind for being trapped in inescapable existential angst? Not at all. Our reflections show that for a representational mind lhere can be no angst. Insofar as a cognitive system is only a manipulator of representations, it thinks (providing its syntactic states are interpreted), but it has no experience. Experience, in the Kantian sense, is (~f objects and no representation can bring an object, a this, to mind. The cognition of given objects is possible only through the de re vehicle of acquaintance with them. Thus for the de dicto mind there can be only thought without sentience. The representational theory of mind may be true for some cognitive systems, perhaps current computers, but it is radically false in application to the human mind-mine at least.'~ Will it be said that I might suffer from an illusion of de re thought? An illusion of x consists in being in the same experiential state one would be in if x were the case without its being the case. It is not possible to have an illusion of being acquainted with _, for if one is in the experiential state one would be in if there were an objecl of acquaintance then ipso facto there is such an object of de re experience. Will it be said that a de dicto mind might nonetheless believe that it had acquaintance with its 'conscious' states? To have a belief that P a system
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must have a state with P-content. No de dicto mind could ever provide the interpretation of a representation that it was acquainted with _. Thus no belief a representational mind has concerning its own states could ever have the content that it is acquainted with _ for any _. One cannot mistakenly believe that one has phenomenology. Will it be said that in principle de dicto and de re minds might be Turing-test indistinguishable and that therefore there is no intersubjective empirical content to a difference between de dicto and de re minds? If in principle we cannot determine hehaviorally the difference between being and knowing and knowing without being, this shows the limitation ofbehaviorism. However, on the view I have defended the classification of minds as de re or de dicto is as objectively determinahle as any fact of cognitive architecture. But I do not require an autocerebrascope: Here is one hand and here is another. This-thought does not prove the existence of an external world. hut it is sufficient to demonstrate its phenomenal counterpart, and so refute the representational theory of mind in my own case. PHENOMENOLOGY AS THfSNESS
What then am I? The ohject of acquaintance is a mere existence. Yet as object of acquaintance it is an ohject-for-me: its very existence my conscious experience. Such Kantian experience is not only of objects, it is knowledge of objects. What we know through acquaintance is that _ is 'red' or that_ is 'pain'. Though devoid of reflective intellectual content. these know-how judgments. Empedoc1ean or Cartesian, synthesize the manifold through the application of concepts and so render _ an empirically known/experienced entity. Yet by experience construed through the ignorant deployment of the monitoring concepts of cognitive know-how we understand nothing of the nature of experience. Knowledge through acquaintance is neutral to the point of vacuity: The res is what it is and the dictum labels what it labels. Thus the fact that there are no phenomenal properties is consistent with the truth of Cartesian dualism. Perhaps _ is nonphysical with only nonphysical properties, But acquaintance with _ cannot give me grounds for positing this or any other partisan ontology. Descartes himself never claimed he could determine hy introspection that his mind was unextended. On the contrary he maintained that hy acquaintance with his thinking he could not tell whether his thinking nature was extended.'> Descartes' only reason for believing that mind and body were distinct substances was that his ideas of thinking and extension were severally complete and mutually independent. If we are inclined to disagree with his dualistic conclusion it is not hecause we disagree with Descartes' logic or conception of mind, hut because we dissent from the Cartesian conception of matter. I dare say we would all be Cartesian dualists if we believed with Descartes that the physical was only intrinsically inert geometry!
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In the centuries since Descartes, our concept of mind has barely changed while we have revolutionized our concept of matter. The fundamental forces of physical nature have become the world's only movers and shakers. Substance has withered away and we are now left with little more than the formal structures of physical causality. But these primordial forms, we have come to understand, have been manipulated by nature, first into the arc of stimulus and response, and then, by repeated knotting, into the labyrinth of memory and reflection. Thus it is matter which has taken on the form of mind; mind which has shown itself to be a final cause for matter. And yet Dasein has seemed beyond the legitimate aspirations of matter. On this presumption the consensus encompasses eliminative doctrines which deny being to achieve materialism, the gamut of dualisms and the mystery mongering of intentional special effects. I believe we have underestimated matter and overestimated phenomenology. Have we tried being a brain and found it wanting? It is only the illusion or fear of an apperception of properties independent of our physical constitution that has led us to deny either our being or our physicality. Once we realize that phenomenal experience cannot intimate any properties, physical or nonphysical, we can accept our phenomenological and physical fate with equanimity. Indeed. Chris Hill has so persuasively argued the merits and cogency of a phenomenologically realistic type materialism that it remains here only to comment on its logical form.-'" Not an identity. Objects of the internal world are of various types just as objects of the external world are of various naturaL functionaL and artifactual kinds. There are qualities which sensations possess literally, for example. the internal realizations of red and round. Then there is the literal nature of being F-for-all-intents-and-purposes. This property, like fragility. is an intrinsic dispositional property of the phenomenal object's construction. Functional properties are also essentiaL This (wooden) lectern could not have been made of ice. but neither would this wood without this artifactual form be this lectern. So also with the furniture of the mind. for example. this memory, pain, or phenomenal cup. Thus there are many neurophysicaJ. functional, and surrogate types under which phenomenal objects are to be lawfully subsumed. But there are no phenomenal types; no properties by virtue of which objects having them are phenomenological. Phenomenology and hence the subject of the mind-body problem is constituted by the particular qua being a this for thought, not by the properties of the object having this intentional status. But this's are not a kind of thing. Thus there can no more be a type identity for this's as such than for d-that's as such. Nonetheless it is knowledge of what properties _ has, the predicates of the mind-body problem, which an answer to the identity of consciousness must provide. for that is what we do not know by being _. Might we then accept a type identity, say, of pain sensations with instances of brainstate <\>, understood as asserting in the material mode that pain monitoring concepts
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and "pain" in know-how application have brainstate cjJ-ness as their intension? This is not a bad idea. It makes clear that the issue is not with what physical property a phenomenologically grasped property of 'phenomenal pain' is identical, but with the identification of an unknown; viz., the unknown natural property kind of the states pain-monitored or "pain"labeled. Thus the logical form of an answer to the mind-body problem must be that of a type identification rather than an identity of types. However, an identification of sensation properties does not per se address the mind-body problem. By itself it would avoid not only phenomenological properties but phenomenology. It is a mind-body solution fit for unreconstructed functionalism or the representational theory of mind. On the account of phenomenology as thisness, "pain" can report exactly the same know-how determined intension in de re and de dicto minds. the one with and the other without pain phenomenology. This possibility must be distinguished from the oft alleged possibility of absent qualia. There cannot be cases of 'absent phenomenology'. Any system functionally. and so intentionally. isomorphic to one with de re states must also have de re states; and consequently will also enjoy the phenomenology of thisness. But while I cannot have a zombie isomorph, I might have a ·dedictomorph·. Dedictomorphs, as I am introducing this notion. though they may conform to the outward behavior of persons with de re states. have only representational access, practical and reflective. to their mental domains, including sensational and perceptual states. Nonetheless this difference is consistent with the fact that the sensation and perceptual states of my dedictomorph would be exact copies of mine. So when my dedictomorph reports that he is in 'pain' or when he cognizes in purely practical ways the color similarity of two perceived objects, he is reporting or acting on infonnation provided by states type identical with my pain and color e.xperiences. Far from being a case of absent qualia. the intrinsic properties of my dedictomorph's qualitative states are the same as mine. Yet given the representational nature of his mind. these states are no more experienced than ones he knows of only by reading that he is undergoing them. Dedictomorphs are zombies with qualia present and accounted for! This reflection shows that the identification of the pain such does not by itself invoke a pain this without which no property instance is phenomena!, and thus that such-identification is inadequate to formulate an answer to the being-body problem. The formulation of the relation between what we are and what by description we know ourselves to be must incorporate the two facts determinative of the logical structure of phenomenology-de re intentionality and particularity-as well as the predicate true of this. We want to know what we are. Since the subject of this-knowledge counts as what we are only by virtue of its intentional status, the identification of what being _ comes to must itself instance a state of acquaintance with _. In consequence. the answer to the being-body question is not reducible to a saying but must
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involve the being whereof it speaks. As such the answer cannot be cognized by a de dicto mind. Nor can the being-body propositions humans know be translated for de re Martians. Even amongst us, each person must interpret with her own experience the de re propositions concerning what human being is. All aspects considered, we might take as an example of the form of our knowledge of the internal world: _ is my being-in-pain: the valuation of de re functional state fJ. by this instance of physical property F. Dasein, cognitive role. and natural essence. Something for everyone.
NOTES 1. Research on this paper was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities in conjunction with an NEH seminar. at the Center for Ideas and Society. University of California Riverside. Bernd Magnus. director. 2. I will use single quotes to indicate an object of naive perception. 3. The formal semantics I am proposing for the naively cognized two-worlds system is an adaptation of Hartry Field's semantics of partial denotation presented in "Quine and the Correspondence Theory." Philosophical ReJ'ieJ\, 83 (1974): 200-28. 4. In the notation of this paper "_" stands in place of the internal surrogate object (the object of acquaintance) while "d-Ihal" indicates the corresponding directly perceived external object. i.e .. what. a la Kaplan. would be dthat l_l were we 10 (mis )treat the surrogate _ as a perceptual singuar term denoting the object for which it stand,-in. The composite expression "d-tlwt" will serve to signify. from the sophisticated two-worlds perspective. the undifferentiated object of naive cognition. S. The idea that the perceived ohjects of physics appear to have or seem to have phenomenal properties is not a piece of naive phenomenology but a confusion of theory which arises from being taken in by our naive realism. rather than giving an account of it. 6. This is true even of the results of deliberation. The phenomenal world occupies a place in cognition between the reflex arc and the representational level of ,ymbolic thought. In it. behavioral outcomes are neither hardwired nor deliberated but result from the complex perceptually monitored and modulated interaction of fears, desires, and plans operating on immediate phenomenal objects. In the course of evolution there has been added to this arena of practical thought an antechamber of representational thought in which the future l:an be contemplated and planned. Nonetheless. however abstru;,ely I deliberate what is to be done. implementation must take me back to the naively cognized world of ph en omenal objel:b-J must 'pick up the phone' and 'make the call'. At this point of implementation it i, the dynamics of the phenomenal world and the force of routine which take over. 7. Daniel C. Dennett. COllsciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co .. 1991 ). ~. Jerry Fodor, The Modularity olMind (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press/Bradford Books. 1983). 9. See R. K. Yin. "Face Perception-A Review of Experiment;, with Infants, Normal Adults, and Brain-Injured Pen,ons," in E. C. Carterette and M. P. Friedman, eds .. Handbook of" Perceptioll. voL 8 {New York: Springer Verlag. 197~ J. 10. I believe many example;, of conflict between drafts can be found in the perception of language. As with the literal properties of the visual manifold, it is hard to hear the sound of speech for the pigeonholing of its linguistic form. In the right Iinguistil: l:ontext J will experience an expected phone mil: form even though the manifold presents a 'dil:k', and
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in this context it is the 'click' which is made to bear this alien form. If one listens to a tape loop of a single utterance of "cogitate", the transcription modules keep up a constant output, but the linguistic modules are quickly fatigued by the repealed computation of the phonetic form "cogitate". Very soon one begins to 'hear' instead a quite amazing series of words and phrases other than 'cogitate". But what one hears m, this for-all-intents-andpurposes varied ontology of linguistic gestalts is always the same unchanging manifold of aural intuition. II. Dennett, Consciousness Explained. 354. 12. Ibid., 120-25. 13. Higher-level processes are able to override the practical consequences of the ontology of the phenomenal world but not reform the ontology itself. The point. less it::. phenomenological gloss, is made by Fodor (op. cit.) who also cites Zeno Pylyshyn. "Computation and Cognition: Issues in the Foundations of Cognitive Science:' Belw\'iowl and Brain Sciences 3 (1980): 111-32. 14. H. P. Grice, "Meaning," Philosophical Rn'ieu 66 (! 957): :; 77-88. 15. Given the brain's procliYity to homomorphic mappings of stimuli. we should expect a systematic covariance between external properties (e.g .. distance, size, or motion) and the perceptually induced properties of surrogates. even for those surrogate properties which are not literal internal realizations of the external properties but only realization~ of them 'for all intents and purposes'. 16. On the evolutionary selection of internal states as a function of their meaning. sec Dennett's COil/em (lnd Consciousl1ess (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1969) and Fred Dretske's Erpluining Behm'ior: Reasons ill a V,/orld of Callses (Cambridge. Mas~.: MIT Press/Bradford Books. 1988). Neither Dennett nor Dretske present an analysis of the evolutionary selection of cognitive states by virtue of their content in terms of the natural meaning of surrogate objects, But their fundamental ideas do not depend on the intentional status of the internal states so recruited. j 7. Along with Chris Hill. Hill argues that it i, this fact which distinguishes introspecti\'e awareness of mental states from perception. See his SellsariollJ: A Defense of TYpe Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1991). 118. 18. The natural history is from N. Tinbergen. "The Curious Beha\'ior of the Stickleback." Sciel1tific American 167 ( 1(52): 22-6. via Dretske. op. cit. 19. Dennett. COl/rem and Consciouslless, chs. :; and 4. 20. Dretske. E.tplail1il1g Belw\'ior. ch. ::1. 21. Chris Hil]", treatment of acquaintance (op. cit.. ch. 5) is a noteworthy exception. 22. A, a practical matter red things cannot he represented by the taste of chocolate. This phenomenal object is too reacli\c. too interesting. Contrary to the functional-intentional structure required of representation. thoughts ahout red objects would end up being eaten I It is no accident. then. that linguistic representations of Cartesian thought ha\'c been drained of all distracting quality. This allows them to play their role as representing ohjects-for-u, in the phenomenal world without being caught up in the cognitive forces affecting surrogates. 23. In normal practice the Cartesian modes are used to introduce or acquire the naively interpreted representations of a public language. But I sec no objection to a private language of sensation terms interpreted :.olely by monitoring concepts in Cartesian use. 2..L Seventh Set (){Replicol. in TIle Pllilosophical Writings (I( Descorles. \"01. 2. trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff. and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge Cnjversity Press, 1984). 382. 25. Ibid. 26. By the same token. the checking of the internal square is also intentionally directed to determining the pln'sical color of the external ohject for which the naively cognized red phenomenal ohject goes proxy.
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27. The distinction between knowing how and knowing that-is due to Ryle in The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson. 1949). It is not, however, in application to sensations that Ryle deploys it. Effectively, though not in Ryle's terms. this application is made by Smart in "Sensations and Brain Processes," in David M. Rosenthal, ed .. Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. 1971), 53--66. Though Smart is not thinking about acquaintance or de rc states. the idea that sensations are classified by exercise of a capacity which does not provide a characterization of the intrinsic and (in Smart's original conception) nonfunctionally construed property is essentially the claim about knowledge through acquaintance that I make. More recently, claims that our 'introspective' knowledge is a matter of know-how have been advanced by Nemirow (review of Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions. Philosophical Rel'ie\l' 89 [19801: 473-77 J. Nemirow's approach is endorsed by Lewis in the postscript to "Mad Pain. Martian Pain:' Philosophical Papers. vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 28.
Rudolf Carnap, Philosophy and Logical Smtax, (London: Kegan PauL 1935). I do not deny. of course. that in the case of red experiences we can do more than just deploy the label "red". I can make reliable comparative judgments of quality. identity, and similarity. for example. that I cannot make in the case of tones. But this is the same kind of materialmude knowledge. In effect this is Smart's point in arguing that such judgments are 'topic neutral' and the basis for absent qualia objections to a functionalist analysis of our introspective knowledge of qualitative states.
29. The experiential difference is not to be accounted as due to a difference between mudes of presentation. In knowledge through acquaintance with _ that _ is 'red'. there is no mode of presentation of the subject. there is just the red particular. The experiential difference is between knowing "red" applies to x, where x is made available to thought by some mode of presentation (which is not experience at all) and being the thing known to be 'red' (which is experience).
30. See Sydney Shoemaker. "Absent Qualia Are Impossible-A Reply to Block." Philosophical Rel'ie,,' 90 (1981): 581-99. 31. Frank Jackson. "Epiphenomenal Qualia." Philosophical Quarterlr 32 (1982): 127-36. 32. Thomas Nagel. The VieH'from NOIl'here (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1988). 33. This is not Descartes' reading of Cartesian skepticism. Descartes never douhted that his ideas had content-his 'ohjective reality'-and that this content arose from a source of which it wa~ at least eminently true. Given the phenomenal world as an interpretative suurce aV<Jilable even in absence uf an external interpretatiun. this axiom is arguably true. But I am not here describing Cartesian skepticism as Descartes understood it. only how it must be rendered on the representational theory of mind. Anthony L. Brueckner in "Brains in a Vat," Journal of Philosoph\' 83 (1986): 148-67. considers a related. though less virulent, form of skeptical regress concerning the interpretation of thought. 34. Not that I have an ubjection to computer phenomenology in principle. I huld that phenomenology is only a question of whether the cognitive format is notional, that is. representational. or phenomenal. that is. de reo The cumputer must be given states which not only direct thought (as do representations) but to which thought is directed. In short the computer needs to be given intuition which it will regard as objects.
35. Second Meditation. in The Philosophical Writings (d'Descartes. 18. 36. Hill. Sensations: A Defense oj Type MaTerialism. In addition to presenting a comprehensive and compelling defense of type materialism, Hill advances central elements of the theory of acquaintance developed here (see note 17).
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 22 NO. 1 & 2, SPRING MiD
FALL
1994
Out Of the Closet: A Qualophile Confronts Qualophobia
Joseph Levine North Carolina State University
I will begin with a confession: I am a qualophile. By "qualophile" I mean someone who finds that the phenomenon of conscious. qualitative experience-there being something it's like to see colors, taste tastes. feel emotions, and even entertain thoughts-poses a challenge to a materialist account of the mind. There are various ways of characterizing the nature of this challenge, as well as various ways for materialists to respond. Let's distinguish two sorts of qualophile: modest and bold. The bold qualophile argues that we can tell, through a priori reflection on the nature of our own conscious experience, that no materialist account of it could be true. We can just see that conscious experience has certain features which make it incompatible with any description couched in tem1S of the natural sciences. Conscious experience is just not, in this sense, a natural phenomenon. The modest qualophile makes no strong, positive claims of this SOli. Far from claiming to see so clearly into the nature of conscious experience that its nonmaterial character is evident. the modest qualophile finds the nature of conscious experience a source of deep puzzlement. Who can tell whether its ultimate ontological status is material or immaterial merely by means of having it? Rather, the challenge conscious experience is believed to pose has a more negative characterization. The modest qualophile finds that no materialist theory seems to really explain our experience. to make intelligible how a system satisfying the materialist's description could be a subject of
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conscious experience. In confessing to qualophilia,-1et me make clear that it is only the modest version in which 1 indulge (or, at least, that's as far out of the closet as I wish to emerge at this time). Let's distinguish two basic kinds of materialist response as well: reductivist and eliminativist. The reductivist argues that conscious experience is indeed a natural, material phenomenon, and in fact can be adequately characterized by her favorite psychological or neuroscientific theory (or some combination of the two). The eliminativist, on the other hand, agrees with the qualophile that no such theory provides an account of conscious experience, but that's not because of some lack in the theory. Rather, the problem is that conscious experience doesn't really exist. Of course we talk and act as if it does, but such talk is just that, "talk." Instead of the fairly unified phenomenon we think we have in mind when referring to "conscious experience," there is a multifarious collage of psychological and neurological phenomena, none of which answers to our simple conception of there being something it's like to see color and feel pain. In response to the bold qualophile, any materialist must be an eliminativist. After aIL the bold qualophile claims that qualia-the phenomenaL qualitative characters of conscious experiences-are immaterial, outside the natural, physical order. The materialist claims there are no such phenomena; hence she is an eliminativist with respect to the posits of the bold qualophile. So if there is a difference between the two materialist responses. it must be in addressing the modest qualophile that it manifests itself. The modest qualophile claims that something is left out of the materialist's theory. The reductivist responds that. no. there isn't. The eliminativist says that. yes, there is, but it's not a real something after all; it's a kind of cognitive illusion. I think it's terribly difficult to get clear about just what is being affirmed or denied in this debate. The general characterization I've given so far leaves unanswered questions, in particular, the following two: What precisely is essential to the bold qualophile's conception of conscious experience, and how far does the modest qualophile's conception diverge from it? What is the nature, if there is one, of the cognitive illusion from which the modest qualophile allegedly suffers? In what follows I will attempt to shed some light on these questions. In the course of the discussion I will try to show that. once we distinguish the two forms of qualophilia properly, the eliminativist response-I will call it "qualophobia"-is unjustified. On the contrary, I will argue that we have no good reason to doubt that conscious experience is real, and that it is deeply puzzling. For the purposes of my argument, I will take Daniel Dennett's position, as presented in his recent book, Consciousness Explained I to be my prime example of qualophobia. However, I don't intend this to be simply a discussion of Dennett's view, but rather an exploration of the general confrontation between qualophiles and qualophobes. Let's tum first to the question of what precisely divides bold from
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modest qualophilia. Both fOnTIS of the condition find their home in the firstperson point of view. I think this is undeniable. and it is the source of the great difficulty both in eliminating qualophilia and in defending it. At any rate. it seems clear that were we not to have access to our own experienceor were God to guarantee that we were the only ones who had conscious experience-we wouldn't find any explanatory gap in the account of others' behavior (or not from this quarter anyway). But we do have experience. and it seems that merely by having it and reflecting on it we can generate questions that seem very difficult to answer: How could neurons transferring signals amount to this? Why should selectively responding to such and such surface reflectance properties look like that? Both bold and modest qualophiles take the deliverances of first-person experience seriously. Where they differ is how rich and how determinate they take those deliverances to be. The bold qualophile believes that certain metaphysical claims can be established on the basis of what is presented in experience. For instance. it is often claimed that qualia couldn't be physical properties. or that they are simple unstructured properties. The idea is that when it comes to the contents of our own minds we can attain a level of Cartesian clarity and distinctness sufficient to reveal their essences. Descartes claimed to demonstrate that extension was no part of the essence of a thinking thing, and that the mind was indivisible by nature. These are bold, metaphysical claims, and l. as a modest qualophile, do not feel they are warranted by what is presented in experience. Let me elaborate on how I think the bold qualophile oversteps her limits. There is both a metaphysical and an epistemological side to my objections. On the epistemological side, it seems to me that if we've learned anything of late. it's that metaphysics is independent of epistemology. How the world is, which includes how it could possibly be. and what the ultimate natures or essences of its inhabitants are, is not transparent to the mind. Therefore. no matter how conceivable it is that mind could exist without matter. or any other. more contemporary variation on this theme you might endorse. it doesn't.f(JlloH" that it really is possible.' On the metaphysical side, I think we have strong reasons for thinking that all mental states, including conscious experiences. are in fact physical in nature. To explain why. let me first say something about what I mean by calling a state or property "physical." There are certain basic physical properties-presumably the ones that figure in physics-in virtue of which all causal transactions in nature (leaving aside for the moment whether the mind is a part of nature) occur. These basic physical properties are. of course. physical. For any other property to count as physical. it must be possible for it to be realized in a physical property. (So this is a recursive description.) I do not have a general definition for the realization relation. but it is the sort of relation that obtains between programs and hardware. formal descriptions of systems and concrete instances. etc.
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Now, as a qualophile myself, it seems to me that there is no point in having qualia if they are causally inert. Here I definitely differ from Frank Jackson, who endorses epiphenomenalism. J If I'm not judging that my experience is of such and such a character because it is. then what makes me think it is? These judgments in tum cause bodily movements (and of course are themselves realized in bodily states. though this would be begging the question against the dualist). so in the end qualia have to maintain causal relations with physical properties. Once we abandon epiphenomenalism, it seems to me that we are forced to accept the view that qualia are physical properties. The basic idea is that in order for a property to have causal power. it must ultimately. be realizable in basic physical properties. since it is only by way of the latter that any causal transaction occurs in nature. Of course if this principle is itself falseif there are mental properties that are themselves basic causal agents-then all bets are off. But I for one find this move far too desperate-too disruptive of the rest of natural science-to want to entertain it quite yet. Furthermore. if it were to be entertained. it would have to be on grounds that were available from physical theory itself, not just from psychology. So. unless we want to go down that route. we ought to accept the metaphysical thesis that conscious experiences, qualia. are instances of physical states or properties. If modest qualophilia leaves open what (at the very least) the ultimate metaphysical status of qualia is. in what way does it consider the nature of conscious experience to pose a challenge to materialism? The problem lies not in metaphysics. but in epistemology. As I've argued elsewhere." it seems to me that the problem qualia pose for materialism is that there is an "explanatory gap" between a characterization of the functional and neurophysiological structure of the brain and a characterization of the contents of conscious experience. It is not enough. I contend. that we be confident that qualia are in fact physical states. We also want a theory of the mind to tell us hmr our experience could be a matter of the functional and neurophysiological properties of the brain. Bold and modest qualophilia can be summed up this way. Both claim that there is an aspect of mental life, conscious experience. which is '"left out" of the standard materialist theory of the mind. The bold qualophile maintains that it is left out in the sense that it constitutes a domain of phenomena outside the natural. physical order. The modest qualophile maintains, on the contrary. that it must be located within that order. but the problem is that materialist theories don't explain how that is so. Both. of course, agree on the metaphysical reality of conscious experience, and that it is a phenomenon with which we have a kind of special. first-person epistemic access. But, again, whereas the bold qualophile draws the conclusion that this access provides insight into the essential nature of conscious experience, and does so in an incorrigible manner. the modest qualophile only maintains that the nature of this access is as puzzling as that to which it
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provides access. We can draw no positive metaphysical conclusions. and it is always possible that what is presented within first-person experience embodies errors of all sorts. Still, we have this experience. we have firstperson access to it, and this requires explanation. It is interesting to note the complicated web of relations that hold among the modest qualophile, the reductivist. and the eliminativist. Although along one dimension the reductivist is clearly more friendly to the qualophile than is the eliminativist, along another, perhaps more significant dimension. it is the qualophile and the eliminativist who are closer in spirit. To defend the first part of the claim is easy. Reductivists say that of course conscious experience exists; there is something it is like to see, feel. etc.-no doubt about it. But in fact materialist theories, whether of the computational sort or the neurophysiological sort. do a pretty good job of explaining it. What hasn'1 been explained is waiting on completion of the various theories of perception. cognition. and emotion that are currently under development. The problem with qualophiles is that they don't know enough science: they can't see that what they're after is in fact visible on the horizon. The very phenomenon the qualophile is pointing at when she goes "But how do you explain this?" is just what the materialist theory has an account of. So. it looks as if the reductivist at least agrees with the modest qualophile about the ontological question. On the other hand. the eliminativist accuses the qualophile of having a cognitive illusion: of positing states and properties which literally do not exist. Where the reductivist sees ignorance. the eliminativist sees hallucinations. Perhaps it's unclear which is a greater cognitive vice, but it might appear that the reductivist is the friendlier, for at least she allows that the qualophile is talking about "a something" and not "a nothing." Still. on another dimension. I think it is the eliminativist who best understands the qualophile's challenge, and. for that very reason. takes such an uncompromising ontological stand. As an example of what I have in mind. let me just note a recent debate between Bill Lycan' and Georges Rey." the former a reductivist and the latter an eliminativist. To oversimplify greatly. it comes down to this. Rey argues that consciousness couldn't be a matter of certain computational mechanisms, for those are easily realized on your favorite laptop. Lycan disagrees. arguing that your favorite laptop. when suitably programmed. just has consciousness. Rey maintains that nothing which is so easily realized on a laptop could provide an explanation of what we have in mind by conscious experience. and so in that sense is more friendly to the qualophile than Lycan. or course, he also maintains that there isn't anything in fact going on in us that couldn't easily be realized on a laptop, so the qualophile is guilty of an illusion. What Rey gives with one hand. he takes away with the other. This brings us quite naturally to a discussion of Dennett's response to the qualophile, since what he claims to do. in the very title of his book,
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Consciousness Explained, is precisely what the modest qualophile is requesting, and therefore he might seem to be a reductivist. Despite the title, though, Dennett's response to the qualophile is not so much to explain qualia as to eliminate them as candidates for explanation. The actual explanatory work is reserved for our belief in qualia: our temptation to ascribe these quite mysterious properties to our experience. Dennett puts it this way: "I am denying that there are any such properties. But ... I agree wholeheartedly that there seem to be qualia.,,7 In fact, I think the sort of affinity with the qualophile attributed above to Rey is manifested also by Dennett in his rejection of what he calls "Cartesian materialism." That doctrine claims that conscious states are straightforwardly identical to certain brain states (or realized in certain brain states; it doesn't matter for these purposes). There's a place in the brain where it "all comes together." Some states count as conscious. others not. Dennett's arguments to the effect that there couldn't be such a brain center of consciousness, while not exhausted by this consideration, do largely rest on the insight that there is nothing in the brain-center story that really explains the difference between the conscious brain states and the unconscious ones. What after aIL could there be that so fundamentally distinguishes those bits of information processing that are subconscious from those that are conscious: Given this lack of explanatory connection, the best materialist strategy is to show that there is nothing here to be explained in the first place: that it is all a chimera. In this way the explanatory burden is lifted from the materialist's shoulders. There are interesting and important reductivist responses to the modest qualophile. but I'm not going to consider them here.' I want to focus for the remainder of this paper instead on eliminativism about conscious experience. or qualophobia. On the face of it. of course, the qualophobe's denial of conscious experience seems ludicrous. After alL what could be more obvious than the fact that we have conscious. sensory experiences: How could you deny that there is something it's like to see red. smell a rose. or feel pain: What possible illusion could we be suffering from in thinking these are all genuine properties of our experience? There are moments when I'm tempted to just stop there. "What are you talking about'?" I would say to the qualophobe. "I literally don't understand what it means to deny this" (pointing somewhere vaguely in the direction of my head). But I'm going to attempt to do better. As I see it. qualophobic strategies basically break down into five types: ( I) assimilating modest and bold qualophilia; (2) accusations of theoretical irrelevance; (3) displacing \.\\.~ C\\\~~\.\C)\\ \"(C)ill ~~'Y~"(\~\\\:'~ \.C) 'N\\.'6.\. 'N~ S'6.~ ~\\Q.. )\\Q..'b~ '<\\)C)\\\ ~~\'l~~\'~\\<':~'.
(4) skeptical arguments; and finally, (5) denigrating the first-person perspective. Though I've characterized these as five different strategies, to me it's more useful to see them as stages in a single dialectic. Even calling them "stages" is misleading because as the dialectic develops various stages are
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constantly revisited. So, in what follows I will try to map a path through the various stages through which the qualophile-qualophobe confrontation plays itself out. hoping at the end to emerge with the qualophile, if perhaps a bit bruised. at least still intact. As emphasized above, the bold qualophile makes claims about the nature of qualia that are very difficult to substantiate merely from the deliverances of first-person experience. A common response to qualophilia then is to point out the problems with these positive, bold claims. If there are nonphysical properties of the sort the bold qualophile posits, how do they cause behavior or causally result from physical stimuli? There are all sorts of phenomena which seem to shake our conviction that the contents of our experience are always knowable without possibility of error. yet incorrigibility is usually part of the bold qualophile's conception of experience. So. the qualophobe argues. there really couldn't be any phenomena answering to this description, and it must all be an illusion. Now, given that the modest qualophile makes no such bold claims about the contents of conscious experience. such arguments have no force. 1. as a modest qualophile. claim that. for all I know. qualia are perfectly respectable physical properties. and I don't claim that it is logically impossible that one be mistaken about the content of one's experience. Still. perhaps the qualophobe might argue that r m the one who is cheating here. For if I look closely at what it is that I claim is left unexplained by current materialist theories. it will tum out. the qualophobe argues. that it is precisely those properties in which I claim not to believe. To see what I mean, let's take the case of visual experience of color. r m looking at my red diskette case. and there is a certain quality to the experience. and I wonder what it is about information processing. or its physical realization. that could explain it. When pushed to describe just what it is that is so hard to explain. I might easily slide into talk about the uniformity. the simplicity, the ineffability of the visual field. I might say that it seems as if my inner. phenomenal space is painted with what Dennett calls "figment."" and if s the nature of figment that cries out for explanation here. Of course if I do talk this way. I am guilty of practicing bold qualophilia. It is then appropriate for the qualophobe to point out that there can'r be such a thing as figment, that the properties that seem to me so simple. homogenous, and the like are really quite complex and heterogenous. This is one way of understanding the lesson of Dennett's Jell-O box ex.ample." It is an example of a very simple representation of a complex state. Once we see how our visual experiences can carry quite complex information in a form that hides i.ts complexity from us, we should not tind the apparent simplicity of our color experience so puzzling. There literally isn'r anything in us that answers to the description we use when characterizing our purported explanandum. I have to admit that providing a helpful characterization of the explanandum at issue here is quite difficult. So far. all I know how to do is 1
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point at the phenomenon, using hand-wavy tenns like "what it's like to see the red diskette case." But that I can't provide a satisfactory description doesn't mean either that I must accept the one provided for me by the qualophobe. or that there is nothing I'm pointing at in my hand-wavy sort of way. Adhering as I do to a fairly strict separation between matters metaphysical and matters epistemological, I don't claim to have privileged knowledge concerning the actual simplicity or complexity, homogeneity or heterogeneity. or any other aspect of the ontological nature of my visual experience. Thus. that there isn't anything fitting such descriptions doesn't automatically eliminate the object of my concern. I. as a modest qualophile. merely maintain that I am a subject of such experience, and that I am, and what it's like. is not explained by any materialist account I know of. But now. the qualophobe argues, moving on to st~ategy (2). if you really mean it that you aren't prejUdging the metaphysical issue in an aprioristic way, then the question comes down to which theory-the qualophile's or the qualophobe's-better meets our general epistemological nonns for theories. Qualia. she continues. like all mental states, are posited as part of a theory-"folk psychology." Like all theoretical entities. we have reason to believe in them only to the extent that they do explanatory work. If we can find a more elegant. parsimonious way to do the explanatory work qualia do. but without the problems they cause. then of course we should eliminate qualia from our ontology. In fact, psychological explanations can get along very well without adverting to qualia. Functional and neurophysiological processes can take us from stimuli, through the various levels of cognitive processing. all the way to behavior. What theoretical function then do qualia perform? Without sufficient reason to believe in qualia, the rational default is to eliminate them. If qualia, or the qualitative characters of conscious experiences. entered the game only as theoretical posits, then of course they would be more trouble than they're worth. When people speak of mental states as theoretical entities, as part of the explanatory machinery of folk psychology, they have in mind a pretheoretical delineation of the data relative to which these theoretical entities are expected to do their explanatory work. The data are usually presumed to be behavioral responses to stimuli. We want to know why English speakers sort wave forms of various sorts into two categoriesgrammatical and ungrammatical-and posit an internal representation of the grammar of English to explain this. The "posit" here is the internal representation. not the sorting behavior itself. My response to the second strategy, then, is to challenge the status of theoretical posit to which conscious experience is relegated, instead treating it as a basic datum that itself requires explanation. No one ever proposes to doubt that human beings behave in various ways that require explanation, though of course there are quarrels within psychology over the validity of particular bits of behavioral data. Any theory that denied human linguistic
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behavior to start with wouldn't be worthy of even superficial consideration. Sure, you can deny that the behavior is sufficiently systematic to warrant positing internally represented rules, but you can't deny that people talk to and understand each other. This isn't a logical truth, and of course Descartes's demon could be invoked to doubt it, but it's still the datum you have to begin with and which you can't reasonably deny. I I It's precisely this question of what the data are that Dennett attempts to address with his "heterophenomenological method," and with this we slide gracefully into strategy (3). He claims that the theory of consciousness ought to be constrained by everything we are tempted to say about our experience. The constraint isn't that there must tum out to be a phenomenon that satisfies our intuitive descriptions, but rather that our theory of the mind. taking what we say about our experience as data, must be capable of accounting for why we say what we say. If we are compelled to describe our experience as consisting of an internal. mental field of figment, then the correct theory ought to explain this compulsion. As mentioned above. this is the point of examples like the Jell-O box: to demonstrate how something could be one way though we are tempted to think of it quite another way. Though I don't think it is obvious that even if we adopt the heterophenomenological method. Dennett's account succeeds. I do think he has won the better part of the battle if we accept this move from the outset. As he describes it, heterophenomenology is "a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences. while never abandoning the methodological scruples of science:' As for the latter ··scruples." they include. essentially. "insistence on the third-person point of view:'12 Now. you might well wonder how a phenomenon like subjective experience, with its apparent privacy and ineffability, to which we seem to have access primarily from the first-person point of vie,"'. is going to be done justice from the third-person point of view. The answer is that it is the pronouncements we make about conscious subjective experience that are to be done justice, and these of course are readily available to the third-person point of view. It is our statements, our verbalized and verbalizable judgments. that constitute the data concerning experience which are to constrain the construction of theory. Of course if these are your data. then conscious experiences themselves-qualia-become legitimate only as explanatory posits. Once we see how to account for the data without qualia, their legitimacy is undermined. I maintain, however. that conscious experiences themselves. not merely our verbal judgments about them, are the primary data to which a theory must answer. Of course this means taking the first-person point of view seriously; not, as the Cartesian perspective of the bold qualophile demands. by treating it as a source of theoretical hypotheses itself, but still as a legitimate source of data. I maintain. that is, that I don't just say or think (in the sense
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of verbalized judgment) that I am having an experience of a certain sort right now, but that I am having such an experience. Anticipating just such a response, Dennett presents the following instructive dialogue between himself and the qualophile Otto: OTTO: Look. I don't just say that there seems to be a pinkish glowing ring; there really does seem to be a pinkish glowing ring! [He's here talking about the color-spread phenomenon depicted on the back of Dennett's book.] DENNETT: I hasten to agree .... You really mean it when you say there seems to be a pinkish glowing ring. OTTO: Look. I don't just mean it. I don' t just think there seems to be a pinkish glowing ring; there really seems to be a pinkish glowing ring! DENNETT: Now you've done it. You've fallen in a trap. along with a lot of others. You seem to think there's a difference between thinking (judging, deciding, being of the heartfelt opinion that) something seems pink to you and something reallY seeming pink to you. But there is no difference. There is no such phenomenon as really seeming--over and above the phenomenon of judging in one way or another that something is the case. I'
Of course, if Dennett is right that there is no difference of the sort that Otto is worried about, then there really is nothing left about which to argue. But Dennett, at least in this passage, isn't really arguing for the claim of no difference as much as he's asserting it. He's basically saying that there are these judgments concerning what's going on around us. and though we are tempted to endow some of them with the title "conscious," there is no principled difference marked by the term. WelL that is the qualophobic position. But what is supposed to show that Otto is making a mistake, or has "fallen into a trap," as Dennett puts it? I think what's doing part of the work here is the unclarity over the relation between a state's qualitative phenomenal character and its representational content. Take the case of the pink glowing ring. I am having a visual experience. and its content is of a pink glowing ring. What sort of "content" is this? In one sense the phrase "of a pink glowing ring" describes the state of affairs represented by the experience. Visual experiences are certainly a species of mental representation, and they represent what's happening in the space around us. In our case, the representation is an illusion, so the state of affairs represented doesn't really obtain. But that doesn't mean the representation doesn't obtain. and this is what Dennett means by admitting that of course it seems to Otto that there is a pink glowing ring on the book jacket. That is just as real as the sentence, 'There is a pink glowing ring on the book jacket". But the phrase "of a pink glowing ring" is doing double duty here. It not only describes the representational content of the experience, in the sense just presented, but, when embedded in contexts like "what it's like to
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see ... ," it also describes the phenomenal character of the experience itself. It is this second use of the phrase that Otto is getting at when he complains, "But I really do seem to see ...." Of course, given the precise terms in which Dennett allows Otto to express himself here, he is easily deflected. since he seems still to be only talking about the experience's representational content. 14 No doubt there is an intimate link between the phenomenal character and its representational content; qualia are most naturally thought of as ways of presenting the world to us. But acknowledging this intimate link-as well as the fact that it is very dimly understood-does not automatically lead to acknowledging that all there is to qualitative experience is its representational content. My complaint against Dennett in this passage comes down to this. 1 claim we have access to data in our own experience that demands explanation from a theory of the mind. Dennett claims that all we have access to is our propensity to make judgments. He illustrates his point with Otto by showing how Otto's attempt to characterize what he has access to commits him to a distinction between degrees of seeming. But drawing the distinction between conscious experiences and unconscious representational states in terms of their representational status-'"really seeming" versus "mere seeming"-is already to ignore the very phenomenon with which Otto. "along with a lot of others," is concerned. But how do I know I really have this experience to which I claim access? This is the standard qualophobic retort. and now we slide into strategy (4). Just how tangled is the epistemological web here can be seen by reflecting on the fact that the very same thought experiment-the so-called "zombie" thought experiment-is employed by both qualophile and qualophobe. A "zombie" is supposed to be a creature that is a functional duplicate of me but lacks conscious experience altogether. It is the creature envisioned in the absent qualia hypothesis. The bold qualophile claims that such a creature is possible. and therefore conscious experience is not a matter of functional organization. The modest qualophile claims that such a creature is conceivable-where this is not taken to entail metaphysical possibility-so therefore functional organization does not explain conscious experience. In either case. the epistemological possibility of a zombie carries a large part of the qualophile's argumentative burden. But then the qualophobic response is to tum the tables. using the possibility of zombiehood against the qualophile. After all, a zombie would say everything you say, think (in the nonquestion-begging sense of occupying states with informational content) everything you think. so how do you know you're not a zombie yourself? To which I respond: because I have these experiences. that's how I know. But. the qualophobe presses again: You say that. and I see how sincerely and emphatically you insist on it. but so wOllld your ;.omhie twin. Your own position commits you to the conceivability of
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such a convincing zombie facsimile, so, again, how do you know you're not one yourself? If the question is, literally, how I know 1'm a genuine subject of experience and not a zombie, there's a two-part, quite unilluminating answer: The fact that I am a genuine subject of experience is undoubtedly responsible for my knowing that I am, but just how this is accomplished, just what the epistemic mechanisms are, I haven't the faintest idea. Of course the challenge "How do you know?" is meant to elicit justification, and not an account of epistemic mechanisms, but then the two are fairly closely connected anyway. Let's try to sort some of this out. I am faced with two hypotheses: (I) I am a subject of genuine conscious experience; (2) I am a zombie. The qualophobe demands justification for belief in (I) and rejection of (2). Why should I even begin to take (2) seriously? It might be said: because it's conceivable, at least on the qualophile's view, and therefore I need a reason for ruling it out. Of course it can't be that it's the mere conceivability of (2), the fact that (2) is not logically false, that poses the challenge. Lots of statements I know to be false are not logically false. The challenge to justify believing a statement, and ruling out its negation based on the conceivability that it's false only has bite if we have specified in advance a relevant data base. So then the claim of conceivability is not mere conceivability on its own, mere self-consistency, but rather the much more substantial conceivability you get from consistency with all the available, relevant data. But if this is the challenge in this case, there are two straightforward replies. First, even when faced with two alternative hypotheses both consistent with all the relevant data, we don't standardly reject claims to knowledge. Some doubts are merely skeptical doubts. Skepticism always has its foot in the door when you allege that some characterization of a state of affairs is strictly consistent with the data, even if you would normally consider it crazy to believe it actually to obtain. So of course if the qualophile argues that there is no contradiction involved in a description that includes both my functional organization and a lack of conscious experience, she immediately opens the door to a skeptical "How do you know there aren't such creatures? How do you know you're not one yourself?" But how does this differ from the hypothesis that the world was created by God five minutes ago? The second reply addresses the challenge at an even earlier point. Who says it's really conceivable that I'm a zombie? The fact that it is logically consistent with any data I could obtain that there could be a zombie doesn't show that it is similarly consistent with any data I could obtain that I am a zombie. After all, why doesn't my conscious experience itself count as part of my data base? (And here we see stage (2) emerge again as the focus.) Of course, you can argue that appeal to this evidence is illegitimate, because it's the very hypothesis at issue. But then you could mount the same chal-
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lenge with regard to any data, including what I'm inclined to say, or even what I have said. The point is that we have already admitted a logical epistemic gap between the data derivable from an account of functional organization and the data of experience itself. This should only be an embarrassment to the qualophile's claim to know (l) jf there is some reason to screen off conscious first-person experience itself as a source of data. But why do that? Let me put this another way. How do certain skeptical possibilities begin to get a grip on our epistemic imaginations? It isn't their mere conceivability, but rather our becoming convinced that things could seem just as they do, down to the very last detail, and yet we could be radically wrong about some fundamental belief. My "'notional" world could be just as it is, yet I could be a brain in a vat. Now, with respect to such epistemic possibilities, there is my first reply~that it's just skepticism, and there seem to be only two choices when faced with skepticism: give up realism or stop worrying. But still, we do see what's worrying the person who refuses to stop. I submit that the rhetorical, intuitive power ofthe qualophobe's skeptical challenge derives from conjuring up a picture of how it is with me now and claiming that it could be just like this even without conscious experience. But in what sense could things be just as they are with me now, epistemically, notionally, and yet I not have genuine conscious experience? Only if I excise the conscious experience itself from this conception of how it is with me now. But then what's left isn't a very convincing picture of what my epistemic position really is, and I don't see any reason to worry that such a creature, one just like me but without the qualia, would have a genuine skeptical problem. Such a creature, after all, isn't really very much like me at all. I' Of course, as has become apparent from the way the dialectic has developed, the question of justifying belief in (1) has come down to the question it was invoked to settle: whether first-person conscious experience constitutes pretheoretic data for a theory of the mind. or is a highly theoretical. and thus epistemically vulnerable posit. Dennett's comparison at one point between belief in qualia and belief in undetectable gremlins reinforces the point. 16 We would have to posit such gremlins as explanatory mechanisms in order to justify belief in them, and I grant you can't do that with qualia. But I contend the situation is much closer to the one we'd be in if we saw and touched the gremlins, but still couldn't explain their presence. Well, what if someone swore they really did see and touch the little devils? What then, huh? People say they immediately experience all kinds of things, and we usually discredit these reports when they don't comport with our overall theory of the world. What's more, there's a whole body of psychological data demonstrating how untrustworthy first-person reports can be, giving the lie to the Cartesian perspective of incorrigible access to our own minds. In other words, aren't qualophiles guilty of an unscientific methodology by taking the first-person perspective seriously at all?
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This, more than the skeptical doubts, is wherethe issue is really joined, J believe, and it brings us to strategy (5). In a sense, this is where we started. Qualophilia is a first-person phenomenon-some no doubt think of it as a disorder-and its legitimacy depends on the legitimacy of that perspective. The considerations just adduced on behalf of the qualophobe certainl y seem to bring the legitimacy of the first-person perspective into doubt. These considerations break down into the following three types: (i) an objection to incorrigibility, (ii) a concern for the objective character of scientific evidence, and (iii) an indictment of the qualophile's inability to provide a theory of the epistemic mechanisms of first-person access. It can easily seem as if the qualophile's claims concerning conscious experience involve appeal to the incorrigibility of first-person access. For one thing, this has been a traditional claim of dualists, and for another, it has a certain intuitive plausibility, so why shouldn't the qualophile avail herself of the claim, since she's relying on intuitions anyway? Also, appeals to the incorrigibility of first-person access have played an important role in foundationalist epistemological theories, so it is plausible again that anyone appealing to the data revealed within this perspective does so in this traditionaL foundational manner. Once this identification with the traditional, foundational notion is made, then of course any attack on traditional foundationalist epistemological theories is easily seen as an attack on the legitimacy of any data at all emanating from the first-person perspective. Once the "myth of the given" is given up, what's left? While appeals to incorrigibility, which provide a secure foundation for all claims to knowledge, may be part of the bold qualophile's agenda, they are no part of the modest qualophile's. I agree that "the given"' is a myth if by this phrase one intends a source of knowledge with no possibility of error built in. I see no reason to doubt any of the vast body of data showing just how wrong we can be about what's going on in our own minds: in fact I argued above that when it comes to essences or natures we have no special epistemic access even in the case of our own mental states. But does this acknowledgment of the possibility of error impugn our first-person knowledge of our own experience? Why should it? Unless one thought that one can never claim knowledge when even a possibility of error remained, the rejection of incorrigibility, and the foundational role of the "given" in experience, doesn't entail that we must totally discount what seems to be the case from within the first-person perspective. Of course in some sense I could be wrong that I'm now having a certain visual experience (though in normal cases I find it quite difficult to know what this would amount to-but let's admit it anyway). I'm also convinced that there are all sorts of cases where I am wrong about first-person judgments I make. But what follows from this is not that I should doubt, in a substantive and not just skeptical way, that I really don't have the data of experience I believe I have.
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Let's turn now to the qualophobe's concern for scientific objectivity. As we all know, in the "bad old days" psychology was hobbled by an assumption that its domain was the phenomena available to introspection. Of course no systematicity in the data is possible if each theorist must look into her own souL and nowhere else, for the data upon which to build a theory. Furthermore. some people claim to know all sorts of things in an immediate. first-person sort of way. Science demands some check on this sort of claim; a recourse to third-person, public verification. Thus psychology really has no business taking data available only from the first-person perspective seriously. Far from an explanatory burden, it should be relegated to the dust bin of mythology. While of course I endorse the general goal of scientific objectivity, I don't think such a concern entails totally neglecting a source of data that is, as it were, "right in front of your face." It does mean, however, that we must proceed with extreme caution and not jump to insupportable conclusions. This is one reason I endorse modest and not bold qualophilia. To claim to know what the nature of experience is just by having it. or to base a theory on data that are publicly inaccessible, would be to run afoul of sound scientific practice. Yet the modest qualophile is not pushing a theory. but pointing to an area of inadequacy in one. All data, no matter how garnered, are fair game for that purpose. Now this concern for objectivity does connect rather directly with the issue of skepticism, not of the first-person sort but of the third-person sort. We have reason to take the qualophile's concerns seriously to the extent that we share the data. J myself am not going to find fault with a theory that fails to explain something to which only you seem to have access: especially not if I have a perfectly good explanation of your claiming to have access to such data even when you don't. However, to the extent that we all find ourselves in a similar predicament, [0 the extem that we all find something puzzling about experience that seems inadequately explained by informationprocessing or neurophysiological models, there is nothing unscientific about taking this epistemic state seriously. It's true that so long as we don't understand clearly what's going on we can't stop there. we have to keep digging into what the problem is. how [0 better articulate it. But seeing that you don't understand a phenomenon is not sufficient reason for ignoring or eliminating it. Well. leaving aside how I know I have conscious experience, if it's conceivable that someone functionally identical to me could lack experience. how do I know that my first-person data really does reflect a more general phenomenon? Maybe I'm the only one. In other words. the qualophobe turns again to strategy (4). skepticism. Fine. I have two ansv.'ers to this. First, I repeat the first answer to the skepticism argument presented above. Second. I say that it doesn't really matter.
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Again, we don't normally accept the principle that we must abstain from claims to knowledge whenever there's a logical possibility that we're wrong. Yes, it is conceivable that someone could talk and act just like you and yet not be conscious, even if I open their head and they have a brain and everything. [7 I also claim to know that you are conscious. I don't accept the argument that my knowledge claim must be justifiable in a way that closes the logical gap between the data and the claim, and that therefore the claim itself must be either analyzable in terms of the data or count as some sort of nonsense. I'll be convinced of an analysis when it actually does the job of analyzing what I have in mind, not when it can only be justified indirectly by relieving skeptical pressure. But suppose you really did convince me that I can't claim to know you are conscious. So then I might conclude that materialist theories explain all there is to explain about you, at least as far as I know. StilL what about me? Perhaps you have no good reason to take my protestations seriously. but I still do. I believe each one of us is in that position. but if I'm wrong that doesn't automatically undermine my own puzzle about my own conscious expenence. The problem for the qualophile here is supposed to be this. I have conscious experience, and by way of that experience I have a conception of that experience. I point to my experience when characterizing that conception. Now. that very thing I'm pointing to. that very experience of which this is my conception. I attribute to you on the basis of your behavior and your general physical similarity to me. The data-your behavior and general physical similarity to me--does not literally entail the truth of the attribution of conscious experience to you. The possibilities are these: (a) I know you have conscious experience because it's reasonable to believe this even though no data I have literally entail it; (b) I don't really know you have conscious experience after all; (c) my conception of conscious experienceto which I point in my own case-is actually analyzable in terms of some idealized set of third-person accessible data; or (d) this conception of conscious experience to which I point in my own case is just incoherent and does not correspond to any phenomenon at all. The qualophobe chooses (d); the reductivist (c). But both argue that (0) and (b) can't be maintained. In particular, it's supposed to be obvious that either (c) or (d) is more plausible than (b). The idea is that I can't seriously entertain the possibility that what I have in mind by conscious experiencewhat I, the qualophile care about-is lacking in you. Therefore. what I have in mind must really be about your behavior, or functional organization. or nothing at all. But what sort of inference is this anyway? I maintain that (b) is unsustainable as well, but for me that's a strong argument for (a). If you tell me that no, (0) is also insupportable, then I'll choose (b) over either (c) or (d). WelL you say, but (b) is crazy. I agree, but then I think that shows that
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the epistemological principles at work in undermining (a) must be suspect. After all, it gives you (b), or, even worse, (c) or (d). But look, responds the qualophobe, c1early exasperated at this point. your position is worse than the normal case of maintaining knowledge in the face of skepticism. If your only reason for rejecting (a) were adherence to absurdly strong epistemic scruples, then it wouldn't show (a) to be any worse off than many other, quite mundane, knowledge claims. A logical space into which doubt can creep is not sufficient to defeat c1aims to knowledge in general. But in this case there is an added defect. Not only is there the logical space for error, but we have no theory of what's transpiring given even that there is no error. This is the third consideration mentioned above-the qualophile's inability to provide an account of the mechanisms of firstperson epistemic access. To see the force of the objection, compare the case of my knowledge of your conscious experience with my knowledge that there's a chair right in front of me. Of course I want to c1aim that I know the latter and also, it seems to me, that there's always logical room for doubt. I could be a brain in a vat, after all. StilL on the assumption that I'm not a brain in a vat. I can tell a story about a mechanism that starts with the hypothesized chair and ends with my occupying a state with the informational content that it's in front of me. But I c1early can't give anything like such a story that begins with your experience and ends with my occupying a state with the informational content that you're having genuine conscious experience. This argument constitutes a general indictment of the first-person perspective, and hence applies even to knowledge claims about my own experience. Or better: It's not really a matter of knowledge, or skeptical doubt, but just a general suspicion of a source of data about the workings of which there is no theory. Now to this charge the qualophile has to admit guilt. If information-processing models cannot explain conscious experience, they can't explain our knowledge of conscious experience. But. the qualophobe presses, to a rough approximation, information-processing models are the only models of epistemic access we have. Hence. we don't have a model of first-person epistemic access. Of course we clearly have epistemic access to our own minds. Hence, it must not be a phenomenon that matches the qualophile's conception of experience to which we have access, so, the qualophobe concludes with a flourish, there just isn't any phenomenon corresponding to the qualophile's conception of experience, and there's nothing therefore to explain beyond what information-processing models explain! Why does it follow that if information-processing models can't explain conscious experience then they can't explain our access to conscious experience'? This isn't obvious, actually. Couldn't there be a kind of phenomenon to which our epistemic access is explicable in information-processing terms
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even though the phenomenon itself isn't? Of course this is possible, since we can explain our access to lots of noncognitive phenomena. So the problem isn't located in the information-processing aspect per se. but rather in the fact that information flow is itself explicable only in tenns of causal transactions, and it's between the conceptual framework of physical causation and the conceptual framework of conscious experience that the explanatory gap is located. Let me spell this out a bit. An account of epistemic access will involve explaining how a subject's cognitive state, A, carries infonnation about some other state, B. To the extent we are providing a naturalistic account of this relation. it seems that it must involve some sort of causal dependency of A on B. So, in the standard case, my belief that there's a chair in front of me carries infonnation about the chair because the chair's being in front of me is causally responsible for the belief. Infonnation flow, the basic notion of information-processing models, is explained in tenns of-indeed reduced to-a causal relation realized ultimately by the basic causal mechanisms of the physical world. So suppose B is a state of conscious experience. I want to understand how a cognitive state. A. carries the infonnation that B. It seems that in order for me to understand that relation, I must first understand how B is realized in those very physical mechanisms by which the information that B is to be carried to A. But. by the qualophile's own hypothesis. this understanding is not currently available. That is. I don't understand how B is itself realized in physical mechanisms. So, it follows that I also don't understand how information concerning B can flow to A. Hence, I don't have an account of firstperson epistemic access. Now, having admitted that we do lack an account of the mechanisms of first-person epistemic access (indeed, I would go further and say it is part of the very same puzzle about conscious experience that drives the qualophile's position), must I then admit that there is no such access? Of course not! I think the crucial slide in the qualophobe's argument came in the passage above, which I repeat here: Of course we clearly have epistemic access to our own minds. Hence, it must not be a phenomenon that matches the qualophile's conception of experience to which we have access ....
Whence the "'hence"? Of course we do have epistemic access, so there must exist a story about how it works, but that doesn't mean that the story must be available to us. The qualophile's whole point is that we don't understand this phenomenon. To accuse her of not having a real phenomenon in mind because she can't explain one of the very features she insists can't be explained is to rule her position out of court from the outset. But why should she agree to play by rules that are clearly weighted against her in this way'?
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(If you're tempted to reply that these rules insure a proper respect for objectivity, and that's why she should play by them, then return to our discussion above.) Finally, it might also be that the argument from "we don't have an account of first-person epistemic access to conscious experience" to "there isn't anything here to which we have access" is really aimed at the bold qualophile. If so, as I myself argued above, I am sympathetic (though it's not clear to me, given what else the bold qualophile is willing to buy, that this increases the cost all that muchj, If qualia just aren't physically realized, then there couldn't be a physical mechanism underlying the infonnation flow from qualitative state to the relevant cognitive state. But remember that the modest qualophile is willing to grant that qualia are in fact physically realized, so she need not accept the consequence that no such mechanism of information flow exists. Once we understand how brain states realize qualia, we'Il also presumably understand how we have knowledge of them. It's time to sum up. The qualophile, the qualophobe, and the reductivist maintain a complex, triangular relationship. The qualophile points to her experience and wonders, how could thor be a matter of neurons pushing each other around? The reductivist says, well. that's just what it is. The qualophobe understands that what bothers the qualophile can't be relieved by reference to serotonin or opponent-process theory, but diagnoses the problem as obsession with a picture, a fixation on a Cartesian fantasy-theater to which literally nothing corresponds. I have tried to show that nothing in the qualophobe's bag of tricks really ought to convince the qualophile that she is guilty of such a conceptual disorder. So long as the qualophile maintains a modest demeanor. none of the five strategies surveyed in this paper. either alone or in combination. reveal the qualophile's sense of puzzlement to be illegitimate, to be merely the result of a philosophically infantile obsession. I will end on a polemical note of my own. Qualophobia, like other phobias. stems from a dread of the combination of mystery and temptation represented hy its target. If we don't stamp it out, label it a confusion, quaJophilia may recruit impressionable young minds and lead to a disrespect for the authority and objectivity of science. But modest qualophiles practice their puzzlement in a spirit of profound respect for science and in a search for mutual understanding among mature, consenting philosophers. In fact. it is precisely this respect for science and for the progress of philosophical understanding that fuels the tenacity with which qualophiles refuse to accept what seems obviously unacceptable. Perhaps the point comes down to this. In their rush to solve the mind-body problem, qualophobes must deny the undeniable. Better, I say, to work harder at this stage to understand the mindbody problem than attempt to solve it. But it's been two thousand years, you say? So, what will another fifty hurt'll'
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NOTES I. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little. Brown & Co., 1991). 2. For considerations to the contrary see Stephen Yabl0, "Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility')" PhilosophY and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 1-42. and David Chalmers. Toward A Theory ojConsciousnes5 (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1993). In the end. Yablo's position is not clearly inconsistent with mine, though he would undoubtedly quarrel with the way I distinguish conceivability and possibility here. 3. Frank Jackson. "Epiphenomenal Qualia," Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982): 127-36. 4. Joseph Levine, "Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1983): 354-6 L and "On Leaving Out What It's Like," in M. Davies and G. W. Humphreys. eds .. ConsciOllsne55: P5ychological and Philosophical ESJGn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 121-36. 5. William G. Lycan, "Consciousness as Internal Monitoring, I." Philo50phical Per5pectil'es (forthcoming). 6. Georges Rey, "A Reason for Doubting the Existence of Consciousness," in R. Davidson. G. E. Schwartz. and D. Shapiro, eds., Consciousness and Se1f-Regulation, vol. 3 (New York: Plenum Press, 1983). 7. Dennett, op. cit.. 372: emphasis in original. 8. Austen Clark. Sensory Qualities (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993): C. L. Hardin, Color for Philosophers: Unweal'ing the Rainbow (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988); W, G. Lycan, Consciousness (Cambridge. Mass.: Bradford BooksfThe MIT Press, 1987). 9. Dennett, op. cit., 346. 10. Ibid .. 376. II. For other arguments along these lines see Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford Book,(fhe MIT Press. 1992). and David Chalmers, op. cit. 12. Dennett, op. cit., 72. 13. Ibid .. 363-4. 14. In his review of Consciousness Etplained (Journal of" PhilosophY 90 [1993J: 181-93). Ned Block distinguishes between "access" consciousness and "phenomenal" consciousness, and then accuses Dennett of ignoring the latter in his account of consciousness. My complaint here is certainly similar to Block's. though it is not precisely the same. IS. This way of looking at the skeptical argument was first put to me by Bob Hambourger in conversation years ago. 16. Dennett, op. cit.. 403. Actually at that point Dennett is responding to epiphenomenalism, which is not at issue here. Still. my bet is that he would not object to citing the comparison in this context as well. 17. I want to enter two caveats at thi, point. First. it's important to emphasize that I mean conceivability or epistemological possibility here, and not metaphysical possibility. If our conscious experience is in fact realized in our brain, then it isn't possible to have such a brain (in good working order, of course) without conscious experience. Second. even the epistemic possibility of someone physically like me being a zombie may be questionable, The point is that once I establish that I am conscious, that I have a brain, and that, on philosophical grounds like those adduced above, supervenience is true, then sufficient physical similarity to myself might rule out the conceivability of zombiehood in someone else. Of course, what would count as sufficient physical similarity, in the absence of an explanatory theory that determined the degree of similarity necessary? AI any rate, I choose not to rely on this move to remove the skeptical doubt, since I don't think it addresses the crucial point at issue. 18. I want to thank Louise Antony, David Auerbach, Randy Carter. and the members of the University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill Philosophy Department, where an earlier version of this paper was read. for helpful comments and criticism.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL.
22
No.1 &
2,
SPRING AND FALL
1994
Qualia! (Now Showing at a Theater near You)
Eric Lormand University of Michigan
The characters arefalltastic! -Quilling QuarterlY This shOll' hrings the house down! -Cannes E.tplained
Despite such widespread acclaim, there are some influential theater critics who have panned Qualia.'-most recently and vehemently, Dan Dennett. In his review, "Quining Qualia:'1 he laments several characters of Qualia.' as unrealistic and even kitschy. This literary criticism begets social criticism in Dennett's Consciousness Explained,' where he puts the blame for Qualia.' and similar productions on any "cartoons ian" theater that promotes them. and ultimately on the rather imperceptive ""audience" itself. My aim here is to respond to these charges. I first summarize the issues at stake, with brief excerpts from Quafia."s playbill.
PLAYBILL Qualia! is a bold drama about qualia. On more cautious stories, to say that a mental state has '"qualia'" is to say that there is something it's like to be in that mental state. If there are any states with qualia. any states it's like
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something to be in, the clearest examples are conscious "experiences," namely: conscious perceptual representations, such as tastings and visual experiences; conscious bodily sensations, such as pains, tickles, and itches; conscious imaginings, such as those of one's own actions or perceptions: and conscious streams (or trains) of thought, as in thinking "in words" or "in images." We sometimes try to describe the particular qualia of these experiences, for example, by saying that a given pain is "sharp" or "throbbing" to some degree, or that a given visual image is "blurry" or "moving." Qualia.' is bold in its portrayal of qualia properties as having several secondorder properties (or characters) that seem to resist familiar kinds of scientific explanation. CAST OF CHARACTERS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
Intrinsiclless (also appearing as: nOl1relationality. Ilondispositiollality. reaction-independence)
To say that a quale Q is "intrinsic" to a conscious experience is to say that only things that are part of the experience help constitute what the experience is like as regards Q. Other things, such as the stimuli that may cause the experience or the behavior and the further mental states that the experience may cause, do not seem even partially to constitute its having the quale. Directness (also appearing as: noninferentiality)
immediac.\~
intimacy. acquaintallce.
To say that one has "direct" access to a quale Q is to say that one can acquire evidence about the Q-ness of one's experiences without the kinds of inference one needs about the mental states of other people. One does not appear always to use such inferences in one's own case-most clearly. in detecting what it's like to have one's current conscious experiences. Reliability (also appearing as: privilege, intimacy) Understudies: infatlibilit\; incorrigibility
To say that one has "reliable" access to a quale Q is to say that one has a source of evidence about the Q-ness of one"s experiences that is more reliable than one's access to other empirical facts, or perhaps that is even infallible. Unanalrzability (also appearing as: atomicity, simplicity, homogeneity. f,;rainlessness)
To say that a quale Q is "unanalyzable" is at least to say that what an experience is like as regards Q is not wholly constituted by what it or any other experience is like in other regards. Perhaps few think that all qualia are unanalyzable; for example, what we might be tempted to call a "round, red quale" may be analyzable into "roundness qualia" and "redness qualia." But many would say that some qualia-perhaps "points" of color qualia-
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are unanalyzable into simpler qualia. What it's like (normally) to see red does not seem to reduce, perhaps not even partially, to what it's like to see anything else. Ineffahility (also appearing as: inexpressibility, incommunicability)
To say that a quale Q is "ineffable" is at least to say that only subjects who have had Q-experiences understand what it is for an experience to have Q. It seems impossible for one to understand what it's like without having undergone what it's like, and impossible for a subject to specify what it's like verbally or otherwise.-' Privacy (also appearing as: subjectil'ity)
To say that a quale Q is "private" is to say that it is impossible for one to confirm adequate!;.' the hypothesis that someone else's experience has quale Q, even when one is in a position to form the hypothesis (i.e., even neglecting or overcoming the alleged ineffability of Q). This notion of "adequate" confirmation must be specified carefully. For example, on views according to which qualia supervene on a precise total brain state (or machine state. or even soul state). one might in fanciful cases know that two subjects are having the same qualia by knowing that they are in precisely the same total brain (machine. soul) state. On other views according to which qualia supervene on limited aspects of a brain (machine. soul) state, one might know such comparative facts in less fanciful cases. But this would merely give one knowledge that the subjects have two sets of qualia that are the same or different. H'halel'er they turn out to be specifically. In other words. it would not give one llol1comparatil'e knowledge of another's qualia. We might then cast the alleged privacy of qualia as the impossibility of noncomparative tests of another's specific qualia." FRIENDS OF THE THEATER
Friends of the Theater recognize with their contributions that Qualia.' and offerings with similar themes (such as Consciousness.') would not exist without the theater and a faithful audience. In facL qualia and consciousness are popular themes because they serve as reminders of the importance of the audience. Every Friend recognizes. to take an analogy from experience. that a mental state can only have qualia. or be conscious. if it is (or is disposed without much effort to be) ilse(fthe object of some sort of mental representation. This representation of the mental state is akin to an audience in a theater. The theater and audience are necessary conditions for the show to go on. If you would like to become a Friend of the Theater. we invite your support in response to these needs. We are pleased to reward exemplary contributions (at various levels listed below) with reserved seats (at a variety of distances from the stage).
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Participating Friends ($JO,OOO and above)
Participating Friends hold reserved seats on the stage itself, and therefore become parts of performances such as Qualia! and Consciousness! In the analogy from experience, Participants would claim that a mental state has qualia, or is conscious, only if it is somehow self-representational or "reflexive" (perhaps in addition to representing other things). The Theater gratefully acknowledges Franz Brentano for his outstanding past fundraising efforts at the Participant level: "The presentation which accompanies a mental act and refers to it is part of the object on which it is directed."~ Perceiving Friends ($J ,000 and above)
Perceiving Friends hold reserved seats a bit removed from the stage, but still within excellent viewing distance. In the analogy from experience, Perceivers would claim that a mental state has qualia, or is conscious, only if it is (disposed to be) the object of an inner-perceptual representation, a representation distinctively analogous to the products of ordinary "outer" perception of nonmental objects. The theater wishes to acknowledge David Annstrong for his valuable recent fund-raising efforts at the Perceiver level." Believing Friends ($/00 and above)
Believing Friends hold reserved obstructed-view seats farthest from the stage, but may receive descriptions of the action from the ushers upon request. In the analogy from experience, Believers would claim that a mental state has quaJia, or is conscious. only if it is (disposed to be) the object of a certain kind of belief. The Theater acknowledges David Rosenthal for his current contribution at the Believer level. Rosenthal claims that a mental state is conscious only if one has a "higher-order" occurrent belief that one is in the state." Similarly. he tries to explain the qualia of a mental statewhat it's like to have it-partially in terms of higher-order beliefs about it.'
RESPONSE TO THE LITERARY CRITIC: ARE THE CHARACTERS FANTASTIC? In '"Quining Qualia" Dennett argues that "conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special";" the characters of Qualia.' are utterly untrue to reality. He concludes, "tactically," that "there simply are no qualia at all."I" As he mentions, there is some temptation to retreat to a more cautious conception of qualia on which qualia need not have the offensive cast of characters. In this part, I want to argue that the bolder conception of qualia-according to which they do have these characters-survives his arguments. This is merely a negative point; although J mean to assert thatj(Jr all Dennef! argues qualia have these characters, I do not mean to assert that qualia have them. 130
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INTRINSICNESS
Dennett denies that an experience has qualia "independent[ly] of how [the subject is] subsequently disposed to behave or believe."" He argues that intrinsicness is untrue to the intuitive facts about experience. His several examples concern changes in liking or disliking reactions to tastes: professional coffee-tasters who gradually come to dislike a certain kind of coffee, experienced beer drinkers who gradually acquire a liking for a certain kind of beer, and cauliflower-haters who take a pill that instantly cures their dislike. Although we might be tempted to describe such cases as changes in reactions to the same taste, Dennett argues that this is a mistake, or is at best groundless. Changes in likes and dislikes seem to change taste experiences. Dennett concludes: [1]f it is admitted that one's attitudes towards, or reactions to. experiences are in any way and in any degree constitutive of their experiential qualities, so that a change in reactivity amounts to or guarantees a change in the property, then those properties. those 'qualitative or phenomenal features', cease to be 'intrinsic' properties and in fact become paradigmatically extrinsic, relational properties .... When [someone] thinks of 'that taste' he thinks equivocally or vaguely. He ... need not try-or be ableto settle whether he is including any or all of his reactions or excluding them from what he intends by 'that taste' .... Of course I recognize that the taste [of the cauliflower afterthe pill J is (sort of) the same-the pill has not made cauliflower taste like chocolate cake. after all-but at the same time my experience is so different now that I resist saying the cauliflower tastes the way it used to taste. There is in any event no reason to be cowed into supposing that my cauliflower experiences have some intrinsic [and mental?-E. L.] properties behind. or in addition to. their various dispositional. reaction-provoking properties. ':
Before directly assessing this argument. I want to consider where it leaves matters if it is successful. If qualia are not intrinsic. but are reactiondependent in Dennett's sense. a theory of qualia should also say which reactions determine qualia. and why. In Consciousness Explained. Dennett claims that "there is no [mental ?-E. L.] reality of conscious experience independent of the effects ... on subsequent action (and hence, of course. on memory)." I , He is reasonably clear about which effects are relevant to qualia. He seems to favor a kind of holism about qualia. that is: identifriflR "the way it is with me" in perceptual experience with the sum total of all the idiosyncratic reactive dispositions inherent in my nervous system as a result of my being confronted by a certain pattern of stimulation. '"
Taken strictly. this holism is very implausible. Consider. for example. unexercised dispositions of an experience. Suppose a person is very poor, and therefore (unbeknownst to her) the taste of coffee disposes her. if paid one 131
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dollar to say "Shazam" when she tastes coffee, to say "Shazam." Does this "idiosyncratic reactive disposition" help to determine what it's like for her to taste coffee? Presumably not. Suppose she is slowly drinking a cup of coffee while watching the stock market reports, according to which her wealth is oscillating considerably, which in turn (unbeknownst to her) oscillates her disposition to say "Shazam" if paid. Desperately trying to console herself, she moans, "Even if I can rely on nothing else in this world, at least I can rely on the taste of this coffee." We have no reason to doubt the constancy of her taste-qualia, simply because of the change in her unexercised dispositions to say "Shazam." Similarly, qualia seem unaffected by an experience's exercised dispositions to produce wholly and clearly unconscious reactions-suppose one retains a conscious liking for coffee over a period of time, but during this time for the usual sordid reasons one develops a deeply subconscious Freudian dislike for coffee (say. it comes unconsciously to symbolize Father). Would coffee taste-qualia be altered simply by this wholly unconscious change? Would a fickle Freudian subconscious continually change them? We can keep a principled line against Dennett's quaJia holism as follows. Dennett's best cases of reaction-dependence involve only consciously exercised dispositions to liking or disliking reactions. For all he has argued, then, dispositions which are unexercised or which are exercised l wholly unconsciously may not be constitutive of qualia. ) But once we ask H'hy they are not constitutive of qualia, we can preserve the claim that qualia are intrinsic, even given his kind of reaction-dependence! As I will now try to illustrate, the key is that the consciously exercised liking and disliking dispositions may trigger desires which have their mvn qualia (or which cause thoughts and images with their own qualia). The relevant qualia in a case of disliking a taste may be produced in the following way, compatible with Dennett's arguments: (i)
Tasting a certain food causes a purely gustatory experience g with intrinsic qualia T (i.e., the experience and its qualia are intrinsically neutral with regards to liking or disliking reactions).
(ii) g (iii)
activates disliking.
The disliking in turn causes (or perhaps partly consists of) further experiences e with their own intrinsic qualia Q distinct from T, such as imagined muscular tension, inner "yuck ". speech. visual or gustatory images of refuse, etc.
When one comes to like the food, (i) may remain the same even though (ii) and (iii) change. The food may still cause g with qualia T, but the further states may be as follows: (ii') g
activates liking.
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(iii) The liking in turn causes (or perhaps partly consists of) further experiences e' with their own intrinsic qualia Q' distinct from T, such as imagined muscular relaxation, inner "yum!" speech, visual or gustatory images of other enjoyable foods, etc.
In this way, when one's likes and dislikes change, one's total set of qualia produced by a food may be different, even though these sets are of the same type in respect of T. These claims are not ad hoc, since they would explain how we can detect taste similarities through changes in liking reactionse.g., why the cauliflower taste "is (sort of) the same." as Dennett argues. They would also explain why thoughts of "that taste" are equivocal and vague-in the examples such thoughts can refer to T or instead to the whole complex containing T and Q or Q ~ But the main point of the example is to block Dennett's argument against intrinsicness and to avoid his path to qualia holism-T can be intrinsic to g, while Q and Q/ are intrinsic to e and e~ and while the whole set of qualia in each case is intrinsic to the whole set of experiences in that case. DIRECTNESS
Dennett denies that qualia are properties "essentially directly accessible to the consciousness of their experiencer:' properties "with which one is intimately or directly acquainted:' or "immediate phenomenological qualities:']" He argues against direct access on the grounds that we can be wrong about qualia: [Flar from being directly or immediately apprehensible properties of our experience. [quaIia. if they exist.1 are properties whose changes or constancies are either entirely beyond our ken. or inferrable (at best) from 'third-person' examinations .... [People aren 'tj introspectors capable of a privileged view of these properties, but ... theorists whose convictions ... are based not only on their 'immediate' or current experiential convictions ... but also on ... events they remember from the recent past.
This argument seems to confuse issues about direct access with issues about reliable access. These can come apart. One might have direct (noninferential) evidence about one's qualia that is less reliable than others' indirect (inferential) evidence. or one might have reliable evidence that is no less indirect than others' unreliable evidence. So direct access doesn't require infallibility. incorrigibility, or any weaker kind of reliable access, and Dennett's argument therefore does not count against direct access, even if it counts against reliable access (but see the next section). Direct access could be threatened if the mistakes one makes about one's qualia are systematically explainable as the result of faulty inference. To take
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an analogy, we make regular mistakes in identifying some of our propositional attitudes--e.g., some beliefs, desires, and emotions~and these mistakes follow a pattern: They reflect our expectations about the attitudes we rationally should have in our circumstances. IX Presumably we make the same kind of mistakes about other mental states, such as our moods, erring systematically in the direction of the moods that we think appropriate in our circumstances. Most of our access to our attitudes and moods, then, seems to be based on self-directed inferences, analogues of the indirect access others have to our mental states, namely, inference via common-sense rational explanation. The illusion of direct access may be fostered by the rapidity or unconsciousness of these inferences. Could such a "hidden-inference" model work for all access to qualia? It would have difficulty explaining how we access features of our conscious experiences that are irrelevant to common-sense rational explanation, and so involve no standards of rationality or appropriateness for us to use in thinking "too highly" of ourselves. For example, no folk-theoretic principles of rationality suggest that one should feel a stinging pain rather than a throbbing pain when a limb has restricted blood flow, yet untutored subjects offer consistent (and apparently reliable) reports of stinging-pain 'feelings'. What premises could we use, consciously or unconsciously. to draw inferences about how these experiences feel? A hidden-inference account seems less suited to (all) qualia than to what we might call "rationalia," properties appropriately related to common-sense rational explanation. such as the force and content of some attitudes and the identity of moods. (l forego here such questions as whether some qualia are ration alia. whether conscious attitudes and conscious moods~like conscious "experiences"~have qualia in addition to rationalia, etc. I merely take properties such as the stingingness of pains to suggest that some qualia are not rationalia. and properties such as the contents of unconscious beliefs to suggest that some rationalia are not quaJia.) Friends of the Theater have several options for explaining the apparent directness of access to qualia. Believing Friends. for example, may at their discretion deny that access is direct. and attempt to explain it as a hidden inference. A second view (natural to Believing Friends and Participating Friends) is that there is direct access to qualia. but this access is an analogue of our psychologically primitive abilities to undergo transitions from one mental state to another. Just as the transition from believing that p and q to believing That p presumably takes place without intermediate inference. so might the transition from (say) believing thaT p to believing that I believe that p. or the transition from having quale Q to believing that I have Q. While there presumably isn't such primitive access to (all) ration alia, it might be thought that there is such access to (some) qualia. But this would leave a mystery about wh:..,. there isn't primitive access to (all) rationalia. If direct access requires such simple mechanisms as primitive state transitions, why would it be generally unavailable for rationaIia? A third view would be more
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natural for Perceiving Friends: Direct access is some inner-directed analogue of our perceptual (and in some sense noninferential) access to outer objects. By postulating a distinctive, nonprimitive but also nonrationaL means of access, this view promises to explain why (some) rationalia seem less reliably accessible than (some) qualia. RELIABILITY
Perhaps it is unfair to take Dennett to be confusing directness with reliability; perhaps he simply uses "direct" and "immediate" to mean "especially reliable" rather than "noninferential." But does his argument count against reliable access? The argument as presented works only against the view that one has infallible or especially reliable memory access to past qualia, not against the view that one has infallible or especially reliable access to present qualia. Dennett argues that one can easily be wrong about "what qualia one had"l" or wrong about their "changes and constancies" over time. But in principle one can have separate, reliable access to nOllcomparative (e.g .. intrinsic) properties of two experiences (:'1 and e~ without having such access to comparative relations between e l and e" namely, their "changes or constancies." This is because comparisons require comparing mechanisms in addition to accessing mechanisms, and these extra mechanisms can lack or interfere with such access. In comparing a current e l with a past e,. one's memory for e, can be unreliable or fallible (or indirect. for that matter) even if current access to e l is reliable or infallible (or direct), and even if past access to e~ was reliable or infallible (or direct). Dennett's style of argument against reliability would face a similar problem even if he appealed to unreliable comparisons between two current experiences. For to perform such comparisons. one may have to divide attention between the two experiences. perhaps reducing the reliability (or even directness) of one's undivided access to each. Dennett rejects attempts like mine to find a residue of special knowledge. He criticizes the claim that "I know how it is with me right now" by asking, "if absolutely nothing follows from this presumed knowledge ... what is the point of asserting that one has it?"'o But substantive things do follow from this knowledge. frone's memory (or divided attention) is reliable, or ~r one has evidence to that effect, one may have evidence about the relations between current and past experiences (or between mUltiple current experiences). And for all Dennett has argued, one can have independent evidence about the general reliability of one's memory (or one's divided attention). On behalf of Dennett. one might object that pure introspection could not provide independent evidence of memory reliability. But this would be irrelevant to the issue. Dennett's opponents claim that one has reliable introspective access to one's current qualia. not to the reliability of one's memory (or one's divided attention). Once again, Friends of the Theater have many options for explaining
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the apparent reliahility of access to qualia. Consider the views about access presented in the previous section. On the hidden-inference view, it would be natural to suppose that access is no more reliable than other kinds of empirical folk-theoretic inference. An inner-perception view of access might suggest that access is fairly reliable, at least to whatever extent outer perception is normally more reliable than folk theory. But even on this view, presumably, the alleged mechanisms of inner perception can break down or be tricked, so that one can suffer qualia illusions just as one can suffer ordinary perceptual illusions. On the primitive-transition view, access to qualia might be considered even more reliable, since there is less of an accessing mechanism to break down. Such views could provide for reliability, perhaps enough reliability for knowledge of current qualia. even if they do not provide for infallibility about current qualia. (l will discuss Dennett's further arguments that inner theaters undermine reliability in the final section of the paper.) INfALLIBILITY
How might a Friend of the Theater provide for infallibility, if so inclined? Dennett argues that only one move is available: The infallibilist line on qualia treats them as properties of one's experience one cannot in principle misdiscover. and this is a mysterious doctrine (at least as mysterious as papal infallibility) unless we ... treat qualia as logical constructs out of subjects' qualia judgements: a subject's experience has the quale F if and only if the subject judges his experience to have quale F.: 1
Dennett raises a warning flag about this maneuver. Before considering it. I would like to motivate a modified version of the maneuver. Infallibilist Friends of the Theater (or. as we may call them, Friends of the Papal Audience) need not "construct" qualia out ofjudgmenrs. While this would be natural for Believing Friends, Perceiving Friends would more naturally appeal to the contents of inner-perceptual representations. and Participating Friends would more naturally appeal to the (reflexive) contents of o.periew·e.\". These latter options seem more plausible from the start, since beliefs (or judgments) about what current experiences are like can easily go wrong. One can even believe falsely that one is in a state it is like something or other to be in! If one can have beliefs at all while completely unconscious and lacking qualia--e.g .. during dreamless sleep-there would seem to be no reason why one can't mistakenly believe, while in such a state, that one is conscious or has qualia. Perhaps this explains certain behaviors of hypnotics, sleepwalkers, and sleeptalkers: e.g., those of us who answer the phone while apparently still in a deep sleep and who respond affirmatively when our skeptical caller asks whether we're awake. Or, if one can have and apply a concept despite being radically confused about its proper application,:: perhaps a blind person can radically misapply a genuine concept of con-
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scious visual experiences, or of qualia. and mistakenly believe he is having visual experiences with particular qualia. It's wise for infallibilist Friends to focus on reflexive or inner-perceptual access, since e\'en if these are infallible, self-belief'! can be fallible through inattention. breakdown. or other incapacities, Infallibility seems implausible because whatever the relevant representation r of an experience e, presumably there is in general no guarantee that (I) implies (2): (1)
r represents e as having (property) F.
(:2) e has (property) F.
But. strictly speaking, the infallibilist about qualia would at most have to derive from (1): (3)
ehasqualeF.
This can be done by treJting (3) as an idiom. and so breaking the apparent entailment from (3) to (2). There is nothing ad hoc about this, since talk of qualia is introduced by stipulation in terms of "what it's like." and this is probably itself an idiom." On this view. F needn't be had by e in order for the two to stand in the "is a quale of' relation. just as a property needn't be had by an object in order for the two to stand in the "'exists at the same time as" or "is as interesting as" relations. If an experience has quale F without having property F. this forces changes in the interpretations of some of the characters of qualia, First. we would need to modify the claim that qualia are properties of experience. Qualia may be real properties, with real relations to experiences. without literally being properties (~fexperiences, Nevertheless, the property of hal'ing quale F may literally be a property of experiences. namely. the property of being represented in certain ways as F. (Similarly. hal'ing quale F may be an intrinsic property of an experience, if the experience is represented by itselfas F. as Participants hold.) Such consequences are the price of nonmysterious. motivated infallibility about current qualia. Friends of the Theaterand perhaps only Friends of the Theater--can at their discretion hold that qualia are correctly represented (or "accessed") forfree in inner perception or reflexive experience. since the content of inner perceptions or reflexive experiences constitute which qualia are had. Now, finally, to the worry Dennett raises about the infallibilist maneuvers: Logical constructs out of judgements lor, presumably. inner perceptions or experiences-E. L.] must be viewed as akin to theorists' fictions, and the friends of qualia want the existence of a particular quale in any particular case to be an empirical fact in good standing. not a theorist's useful interpretive fiction. else it will not loom as a challenge to functionalism or materialism or third-person objective science."
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The dialectic is a bit tricky at this point. The friends of qualia may well consider qualia to be a challenge to theoretical explanation, without building into the notion of qualia that this challenge cannot be met. This can be so even if intrinsicness, directness, infallibility, unanalyzability, ineffability, and privacy are built into the notion of qualia, and even if these characters exist and "loom" as challenges. And, anyway, even if the quale F (as a theorists' fiction) doesn't itself generate insuperable difficulties for theoretical explanation, perhaps hm'ing quale F (as the nonfictional property of being fictionalized in certain ways to be F) does! Perhaps the content of the relevant fiction is something that cannot be explained by functionalism or materialism or third-person objective science. This might hold if certain claims about unanalyzability, ineffability, and privacy are true. Let's turn to Dennett's discussion of these characters. UNANALYZABILJTY
Dennett denies that any qualia are "somehow atomic and unanalyzable l ... 'simple' or 'homogeneous.",c He argues for this by considering the effects of prolonged experience: Consider the results of 'educating' the palate of a wine-taster, or 'ear training' for musicians. What had been 'atomic' or 'unanalyzable' becomes noticeably compound and describable; pairs that had been indistinguishable become distinguishable. and when this happens we say the experience changes.'"
Such changes can occur quickly, as Dennett illustrates: Pluck the bass ... string [of a guitar] open .... Does it have describable parts or is it one and whole and ineffably guitarish? Many will opt for the latter way of talking. Now pluck the open string again and ... lightly [touch] the octave fret to create a high 'harmonic'. Some people ... will describe the experience by saying 'the bottom fell out of the note' -leaving just the top. But then on a third open plucking one can hear. with surprising distinctness, the harmonic overtone that was isolated in the second plucking .... The difference in experience is striking, but the complexity apprehended in the third plucking was there all along (being responded to or discriminated). After all, it was by the complex pattern of overtones that you were able to recognize the sound as that of a guitar rather than of a lute or harpsichord.'-
Dennett concludes that "the homogeneity and ineffability of the first experience is gone, replaced by a duality as 'directly apprehensible' and clearly describable as that of any chord.',2H The trouble with this argument is that, as Dennett admits, "the difference in experience is striking" between the first and third pluckings. Given this, even if we can analyze what the third experience is like, this is no evidence that we can analyze what the first experience is like, since what the
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two are like is d(fferent. Perhaps only the qualia of the third experience are analyzable. Similarly, although Dennett admits and even emphasi:::es that "'the" experience changes in a case of prolonged training with wine or music, he does not seem to realize that this undermines his argument against unanalyzability. He cannot argue that the pretraining qualia are analyzable (or effable) simply on the grounds that the different, posttraining qualia are analyzable (or effable). (And it is no news that some qualia are analyzable, since few would claim that no qualia are analyzable into further qualiarecall the "'round, red qualia" mentioned in the Cast of Characters.) Even if Dennett's argument fails, we would like an account of what constitutes such changes in experience: In what way do the experiences (or the qualia) in Dennett's cases get more complex? And how do these changes result from training? Although training may build more complex outerperceptual discriminatory abilities, this does not seem to account for all such changes. In the guitar example, the "complexity" of the sound is discriminated "all along," so that the change in qualia does not seem to be due to a change in outer perceptions. Friends of the Theater have alternative explanations in hand. It would be natural for a Believing Friend to locate the change in the relevant higher-order beliefs, and in particular in the concepts of mental states that these beliefs involve. Training can build more complex concepts of mental states. However, such concepts do not seem sufficient for changing experience, since one can acquire complex theoretical concepts about wine-experiences and music-experiences by reading books, for example. without the associated changes in one's experiences. On the other hand, if it is suggested that some such concepts can be acquired only by tasting wine or listening to music, why shouldn't we think the tasting or listening changes experiences directly, rather than by detouring through concepts? It seems especially implausible to suppose that the listener in Dennett's guitar example needs to acquire a new concept. rather than some kind of temporary perceptual modification. But what kind of modification? A Perceiving Friend might locate the modification in one's innerperceptual representations of experience. Increasing attention to a nonmental object can increase the detail or intensi ty of one's outer-perceptual representations of the object. Similarly. perhaps increasing attention to an experience can increase the detail or intensity of one's inner-perceptual representations. On this view, the changes in qualia in the guitar case are due to such changes in inner perceptions. The inner perceptions on the first plucking may represent the (complex) outer perceptions simply, while the inner perceptions on the third plucking represent these same outer perceptions complexly. So the qualia on the first plucking (accessed by the simple inner perceptions) are not shown to be analyzable by the fact that the different qualia on the third plucking (accessed by the complex inner perceptions) are analyzable into simpler qualia (perhaps accessed by components of the complex inner perceptions). Perhaps training in wine-tasting or
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music-listening changes experiences in the same way, not merely by developing one's theoretical concepts, and not necessarily by changing one's outer-perceptual discriminatory abilities, but by changing one's innerperceptual sensitivities to one's outer perceptions. (A similar suggestion is available to Participants.) INEFf-ABILITY
Dennett denies that "one cannot say to another ... exactly what way one is currently seeing. tasting. smelling, and so forth."'~ He argues against genuine ineffability by attempting to undermine the following enticing example of allegedly ineffable qualitative knowledge: Suppose ... that I have never heard the cry of an osprey.... Then one day.... I identify an osprey visually. and then hear its cry. "So that's what it sounds like". I say to myself, ostendingit seems-a particular mental complex of intrinsic. ineffable quaJia. I dub the complex 'S' (pace Wittgenstein) . . . . My perceptual experience has pin-pointed for me the location of the osprey cry in the logical space of possibilities in a way verbal description could not. 'II
Against this. he first downplays the knowledge claims in the example. and then stresses the possibilities for expressibility. His first point downplaying one's knowledge of one's qualia. is that from a single experience of this sort I do not-cannot--know how to generalize to other osprey calls ... [and] I do not and cannot know ... which physical variations and constancies in stimuli would produce an indistinguishable experience in me. Nor can I know whether I would react the same (have the same experience) if I were presented with what was, by all physical measures, a re-stimulation identical to the first. I cannot know the modulating effect. if any. of variations in my body (or psyche). 'I
Here Dennett seems to confuse specifying a particular qualia complex caused by a specific osprey call with (a) specifying what is common to the sounds of all osprey calls. and (b) specifying the external property that causes the particular qualia complex. To "dub" the specific qualia complex. I need not know whether it is similar to other osprey-caused qualia complexes. or even whether it is caused by an osprey. I can dub a specific osprey egg "E" without knowing about any other osprey eggs, or even knowing whether it is an osprey egg. Why should J need similar information to dub a qualia complex? Dennett seems to trade on an ambiguity in the phrase "the osprey cry"-it can mean "this specific osprey cry (as it strikes me now)" or it can mean "the standard osprey cry:' Even if the perceptual experience has not "pin-pointed for me the location of [the standard] osprey cry in the logical space of possibilities." it still may have "pin-pointed for me the location of (this specific] osprey cry [as it strikes me now] in the logical space
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of possibilities," and it is only the latter knowledge that a friend of ineffability should claim in Dennett's example. The second part of Dennett's strategy is to stress the expressibiIity of one's knowledge of one's qualia. The most he concedes to ineffability is that "the only readily available way" of specifying the osprey call is by a description like "the property I detected in that event."': He suggests that there are ways to specify qualia in principle. even if it is practically difficult. Expressing the knowledge is supposed to be difficult for the following reason: My experience of the osprey cry has given me a new way of thinking about osprey cries ... which is practically ineffable ... because it is ... such a highly informative way of thinking: a deliverance of an information ally very sensitive portion of my nervous system. "
But the richness of the information represented does not seem relevant as an explanation of alleged ineffability. High information sensitivity is not sufficient even for apparent ineffability. My retinal and other very early visual representations are as rich as or richer than the osprey experience in difficultto-express information. yet I can say exactly what ifs like to have them: nothing.' And high sensitivity seems unnecessary for ineffability. because si mplifying the information does not alleviate the appearance of ineffability. !f completely blind people have trouble understanding what visual experiences are like for someone with normal vision. they would appear to have the same sort of trouble understanding what visual experiences are like for someone capable only of detecting a few points of light without information about color. shape. motion, or depth. So Dennett succeeds neither in identifying the source of the difficulty of expressing qualitative knowledge. nor in alleviating it. PRIVACY
Dennett resists the claim that "any objective. physiological. or 'merely behavioral' test[s] ... of [qualia] are ... systematically impossible."" To argue for this he relies on the same kinds of cases that he uses against directness and reliability. namely. cases in which. using introspection and memory alone. one may not be able reliably to compare current qualia with past qualia. In such cases. he argues. one may need to appeal to "outside" help-an "objective. physiological, or 'merely behavioral' test .. Does the availability of outside tests threaten privacy? Not clearly. since as mentioned in the Cast of Characters a defender of privacy need not deny that all external tests are possible. but only that nOl1compararil'e external tests are possible. And. in fact, all of Dennett's cases of external tests are comparative in just the way that makes them irrelevant. At best the outside procedures directly test the comparative claims that the subject's current qualia are the same or not the same as his past qualia. without "caring" how the qualia are or were
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specifically. lIthe subject has any noncomparative knowledge of his current qualia, then coupled with this knowledge the external comparative tests can give him noncomparative knowledge of his past qualia. What the defender of privacy denies is that there are any purely external tests of noncomparative claims. And such privacy withstands Dennett's arguments. Dennett attempts to provide a substitute for the privacy that he denies. If his memory-comparison argument against privacy fails. then the substitute may be unnecessary. But perhaps Dennett thinks the substitute has some intuitive plausibility of its own. and so perhaps he intends it as an auxiliary argument against privacy. [W]hen we seem to ostend. with the mental finger of inner intention. a quale or qualia complex in our experience ... [w Je refer to a property-a public property of uncharted boundaries-via reference to our personal and idiosyncratic capacity to respond to it. That idiosyncracy is the extent of our privacy. If I wonder whether your blue is my blue. your middle C is my middle C. I can coherently be wondering whether our discrimination profiles over a wide variation in conditions will be approximately the same. And they may not be; people experience the world quite differently. But that is empirically discoverable by all the usual objective testing procedures."
I find Dennett's substitute for privacy difficult to grasp. He seems to begin by denying that we can refer to our experiences by their qualia; when we try to refer to them. instead we refer to external properties. But in the next breath he says that we refer to the external properties by referring to our experiences--our personal and idiosyncratic capacities to respond. How then does Dennett think we refer to these internal capacities? He cannot say that we refer to them by referring to the public properties. since he thinks we refer to the public properties by referring to our capacities. And he denies that we can refer to our capacities by their associated qualia. So how does he think tbe reference to our capacities gets off the ground? I also tind the substitute implausible in a wider range of cases than Dennett considers. What happens if I wonder whether your blue is my middle C (or. as We might be tempted to put it. whether what it's like for you La see the sky is what it's like for me to hear a piano note)? I am certainly not wondering whether or not you can discriminate piano sounds from purple and turquoise. given this or that light source or background noise. I assume you can make such discriminations as well as I can. Presumably, what I am wondering about is whether, when we each refer to our "personal and idiosyncratic capacity" to respond to public properties such as the color of the sky. you pick out your capacity via the same (qualitative) property that I use to pick out mine. And when I cease to wonder this, and wonder less fancifully whether your blue is my yellow or your blue is my blue, I seem to be doing more of the same kind of wondering. I agree that Dennett describes a coherent way of wondering, and I agree that it is subject to
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objective test, but this does nothing to support the view that there isn't also a coherent way of wondering about private qualia. not subject to objective (and noncomparative) test. While Friends of the Theater can accommodate the claim that qualia are ineffable and private, in a sense that may preclude theoretical explanation. I think Friends are in a unique position to mitigate ineffability and privacy worries. If qualia are genuinely ineffable and private. they must not be identical to physical or functional properties. or else they would he specifiable, expressible. and discoverable in any number of objective ways. There are arguments against objective (e.g .. physicalist) theories on the basis of an (alleged) impossibility of knowing what it's like for another to have certain experiences-'6-and the prohlems boil down to an (alleged) impossibility of belhfabout what it's like (i.e., ineffability) and an (alleged) impossibility of adequate justification of this belief (i.e., privacy). If such arguments were convincing. they would weigh against any reductive theory of qualia. But they should not be convincing. A poweIi'ul hut not dismissive response turns on distinguishing qualiaproperties from ways qfrepresenting them. Even if a creature has a special way of representing phenomenal properties that is unavailable to us, we can in principle objectively specify. express. or test for these phenomenal properties in other ways. If a reductive theory of phenomenal consciousness is to avail itself of this alleged alternative to ineffability and privacy, it should explain the special ways of representing gualia that are allegedly available only to "owners'" of the qualia. An attractive proposal compares idiosyncratic ways of representing qualia with simple demonstratives." When you see a banana and think of it demonstratively-as "this'"-your thought cannot literally be expressed using complex public-language expressions such as "the thing I am seeing" or "the banana in front of my face.'" This is because you can have the simple perceptual-demonstrative thought without using. or even without 'w~·ing. a concept of seeing. of bananas. or of your face. Likewise. someone who does not perceive the banana is constrained to think of it in a different way than you do-not simply as ""this" (while staring at something else). By analogy, perhaps your representations of your qualia involve. at least in part. simple inner-perceptual or reflexive demonstratives of them. This would explain why these representations cannot strictly be expressed using complex public-language expressions. and cannot strictly be shared by someone who does not "perceive" the same qualia. Even if qualia properties aren't ineffable and private, wouldn't someone's ways qf representing them be ineffable and private. and therefore objectively inexplicable? Here we must be careful to distinguish between specifying (or testing for. explaining. etc.) something and having it. The distinction is nonnally obvious, but confusion is tempting when the subject matter is representation itself. Nevertheless, in general one can specify representations without having them. Trivially, one can specify a certain thought
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by its contingent properties-say, as "Napoleon's last thought"----even if one happens not to have had it or is incapable of having it. The nontrivial task is to specify objectively the particular ways of representing involved in unavailable thoughts, by reference to their essential properties. But this is possible, without cheating. We cannot have a thought with the same ("fine-grained"') content as Napoleon's thought that he was the emperor of France. If we try using "Napoleon." we miss his precise 'T' (or "je") thought. which he could have had even if he forgot his name; and if we try using "1." we refer to ourselves rather than to him. But so long as we can isolate the dimensions along which ways of referring to things vary. we can ()/~iecth'elr specify Napoleon's way of referring to himself----e.g., as using the "simple first-person singular demonstrative concept that refers to Napoleon" rather than a concept that is complex. third-person, plural, descriptive, about Josephine, etc. Even though we don't have such a concept of Napoleon, we 've fully "specified" it if there can be only one such concept. If so (give or take some tinkering). we can specify Napoleon's thought objectively: It was a thought by Napoleon predicating French-emperorhood of Napoleon using Napa/eon 'sfirst-persoll concept. What we need is a comparable objective way of specifying the dimensicms along which the contents of inner perceptions or reflexive experiences can vary. But this is a general problem in the theory of meaning. not a specific problem about consciousness and qualia. and it is a problem we can hope to solve. Given a general theory of reference such as a causal or correlational theory, the trick would be to discover which properties of experiences (in our case, perhaps neural or functional ones) cause or correlate in the relevant way with inner perceptions or reflexive representations. And given a general theory of sense~perhaps in terms of a representation's relations to other representations or to its representational parts-perhaps we can discover which such relations characterize inner perceptions and reflexive experiences. If so. we could objectively specify and test for someone else's (even a bat's) particular way of representing a quale. narrowing to one the possible ways of experiencing, without even being capable of sharing this experience. In this way, unshared ways of experiencing qualia would not be private.
RESPONSE TO THE SOCIAL CRITIC: MUST WE BRING THE HOUSE DOWN? The central tenet of the Friends of the Theater is this: A necessary condition for a mental state to be conscious or to have qualia is that it be represented by an "audience" of inwardly-directed representation (or that it be "presented" in a "theater" that disposes it easily to be so represented). In
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Consciousness Explained. Dennett argues strenuously against this view. Here is a typical formulation of his claims against Theater theories of a state's being conscious: [T]here is no reason to believe that the brain itself has ... any inner sanctum. arrival at which is the necessary or sufficient condition for conscious experience. In short. there is no observer in the brain.)'
In another fonnulation. against Theater theories of consciousness (~f mental states. he denies that there is a crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain. marking a place where the order of arrival equals the order of "presentation" in experience because what happens there is what you are conscious of."
And against Theater theories of qualia. he argues that there is no '"functional place of some sort where the items of phenomenology are ... projected .. ··" In this part I want to argue that the Theater survives his main arguments. As before. this is merely a negative point: I do not intend here to provide direct positive arguments for Friendship. IS THE SCREEN OUT OF FOCuS')
Dennett directs his criticisms plimarily at what he calls the "Cartesian Theater" of consciousness. An inner theater is Cartesian, apparently. if it provides for a suitably precise distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states: "a crucial finish line:' "a highest point. a turning point. a paim such that all tamperings on one side of it are pre-experiential. and all tamperings on the other side are post-experiential."·i He rejects such a precise distinction in favor of a smeared (or extensionally vague) distinction. Before considering his argument to such imprecision. I want to consider his arguments from imprecision: What damage does he think imprecision would do to Theater theories? Imprecision would certainly spell doom for Friends of the £'xtremely Cartesian Theater. who suppose that the conscious/unconscious distinction is absofutely precise. so that consciousness begins with this minute quantummechanical event and ends with that one. But such a view would have no intuitive appeal from the start, and Dennett would not need a sophisticated argument against it. No psychological (or biological. etc.) distinction is so precise. whether or not it concerns consciousness. So consider Friends of the Moderately Cartesian Theater. who hold that the conscious/unconscious distinction is ps:vchologically precise, in the sense that it is as least as precise as any other psychological distinction. On this view. any psychological event is either conscious or unconscious (but some underlying biological or quantum-mechanical events may be determinately neither "in" nor "ouC of a conscious state). This has some intuitive appeal, though the appeal can
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easily be undermined without much argument. There seem to be fuzzy boundaries at the edges of one's visual field, for example, and intuitively it is hard to tell when a peripherally moving object becomes consciously represented rather than subliminally represented. Similarly, when one's attention is drawn to various faint pressure sensations or itches around one's body, it can be hard to answer whether they were conscious a moment earlier. It isn't clear that reflective common sense is committed even to psychological precision. But, at any rate, Dennett argues for psychological imprecision, and by stipulation this conclusion would undermine either the extreme or the moderate Cartesian Theater. What matters is whether the demise of Cartesian Theaters amounts to the demise of any Theaters at all. This depends entirely on whether there can be a vague Theater. Friends of the Theater do hold that inner-directed representation is a necessary condition for consciousness. But even if Friends also hold that it is a sufficient condition for consciousness, none of this would commit them to holding that it induces a psychologically precise conscious/ unconscious distinction. We can give necessary and sufficient conditions for vague categories: bald grandfathers are bald fathers (~f parents (and probably also fathers, with l'irtually no hair on their heads. ofparents). If consciousness is vague in some way, then a Friend of the Theater should hold that the relevant kind of inner representation is vague in the same way. And, in fact. this is independently plausible. Consider first that the distinction between mere reflexh'e reactions to outer stimuli and (even unconscious) representations of outer stimuli may be vague; there may be stimuli that are neither (clearly) represented nor (clearly) reacted to merely reflexively. Similarly, perhaps the distinction between (Theatrical) representations of mental states and mere reflexive reactions to mental states is vague. Another potential source of Theatrical vagueness is that a Friend of the Theater may only require a suitable kind of disposition to be innerly represented. If the specification of "suitable disposition" admits of vagueness, then the resulting conscious/unconscious distinction will be vague. Given the apparent vagueness of consciousness and qualia in the visual field periphery and in bodily sensation, for intuitive plausibility a Friend of the Theater is likely to favor, from the start, psychologically vague inner-directed representation. At any rate, Dennett cannot simply move (if that is his intention) from the claim that there is no Cartesian Theater to the claim that there is no Theater and audience at all of reflexive experience or inner perception or higher-order belief. Does his argument work against the (moderate) Cartesian Theater, however'? This depends on whether his considerations support the claim that the conscious/unconscious distinction is psychologically vague, or, in other words, that there are psychological events that are neither conscious nor unconscious. He considers a representation (call it "b") that exists very
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briefly and is promptly revised and unremembered. How could two opposed theorists test whether or not b was (briefly) conscious? Dennett argues first that after b vanishes, the subject has no possible retrospective evidence that favors either claim. Then he argues that there is no possible evidence available to others either: Your retrospective verbal reports must be neutral with regard to two presumed possibilities, but might not the scientists find other data they could use'? They could if there was a good reason to claim that some nonverbal behavior (overt or internal) was a good sign of consciousness. But this is just where the reasons run out. ... Both models can deftly account for all the datanot just the data we already have. but the data we can imagine getting in the future .... Moreover. we can suppose. both theorists have exactly the same theory of what happens in your brain . . . . So in spite of first appearances. there is really only a verbal difference between the two theories .... ':
Must the reasons run out? Suppose we seek to test the hypothesis that consciousness is some psychologically precise, objectively specifiable property C. Even if we can't use subjectively unclear cases like b as evidence that consciousness is C. we can in principle use subjectively clear cases. and then apply the conclusions to initially unclear cases. We might. for example. discover that in clear cases of consciousness. there is a certain precise kind of inner-directed representation. and in clear cases of unconsciousness. there is not. Then we could conclude that b was (however briefly) conscious if and only if it was (however briefly) represented in the required way. Dennett anticipates such an objection to his argument: Whatever could it mean to say I was, however briefly and ineffectually. conscious of [hI') If there were a privileged Cartesian Theater somewhere. at least it could mean that the film was jolly well shown there even if no one remembers seeing it. (So there!)"
He responds that this is metaphysically dubious. because it creates the bizarre category of the objectively subjective-the way things actually. objectively seem to you even if they don't seem to seem that way to you! ... Some thinkers have their faces set so hard against "verificationism" and "operationalism" that they want to deny it even in the one arena where it makes manifest good sense: the realm of subjectivity .... We might classify [my 1 model, then, as first-person operationalism. for it brusquely denies the possibility in principle of consciousness of a stimulus in the absence of the subject's belief in that consciousness."
I agree that we can't reject Dennett's argument simply by rejecting verificationism in general. But nothing in the defense of the Cartesian Theater
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depends on commitment to the "objectively subjective" in Dennett's sense. Friends of the Cartesian Theater need only say, quite plausibly, that things can objectively have seemed some way even if they don't now seem to have seemed that way. They needn't say that things can now seem some way they don't now seem to seem, or that things can have seemed some way they didn't then seem to seem. So Dennett's objection that the Cartesian Theater commits us to such a metaphysically dubious category of facts fails. Even if the Cartesian Theater were committed to the objectively subjective, it is hard to see what is wrong with this. Plausibly, for something to seem F one needs La have and deploy a concept of F (or a percept, or some similar mental representation). If so. for things to seem to seem some way. one needs a concept of seeming. If, as Dennett suggests, things can only seem F if they seem to seem F. then things can only seem some way if one has and deploys a concept of seeming. But this is a sophisticated mental concept. probably lacked by some creatures (babies, lower mammals. higher nonmammals) for whom things may nevertheless seem some way. In other words. arguably, things seem some way to babies and animals. even though things don't seem (LO them) to seem some way to them. Why should this not also happen for normal human adults? The point is clearer against Dennett's brusque requirement, for consciousness, of a "belief in that consciousness." Is it supposed to be ob\'ious that creatures cannot have (say) conscious pains unless they have concepts of consciousness? Is it even supposed to be obvious that we who have such concepts must use them continuously at every conscious moment? I conclude that Dennett's imprecision argument against the Cartesian Theater is dubious. and that even if repaired, it weighs not at all against imprecise inner theaters and audiences. ARE THE TICKETS TOO EXPENSIVE">
When we seek to address questions about the distribution and nature of some alleged psychological phenomenon P, in the absence of more direct evidence we can sometimes make headway by appealing to "engineering" considerations. Would there be a psychological point to P's existing in this or that creature. or to P's having this or that feature? It is easy La give plausible examples of mental phenomena with theoretically illuminating functions: Intentions are good for the stable and reliable guidance of action. beliefs and desires for the rational formation of intentions, perceptions for the stable and reliable formation of beliefs, attention and moods for the activation of coherent sets of attitudes, etc. But these states need not be conscious to fulfill these roles. When they are conscious, does this endow them with any greater capacity to fulfill these roles, or with any new roles? Even if we could settle the question of what consciousness is good for, we might be left with the question of what having qualia is good for. What is the point of having states it's like something to be in? Just as creatures that do not
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overcome threats to the stability or reliability of their actions are at best unlike/.v candidates for intentions and the rest. it may be that Dennett can argue against the existence of qualia and inner theaters by arguing that they are pointless or worse. Consider a few challenges to the value of qualia and inner theaters. One extreme possibility is that qualia endow a state with no extra capacities at all, whether good, bad. or neutral. A theory that accepted this would have to explain how we could have reason to believe we have qualia, since our beliefs, by hypothesis. could not be influenced by the facts about qualia. Perhaps. then. qualia endow a state with the capacity to cause beliefs about qualia, but endow it with no other (independent) capacities. Dennett says that "qualia are supposed to affect our action or behaviour only via the intermediary of our judgements about them.""'; though he doesn't say who started this rumor. and he doesn't provide any argument for the view. At any rate. the view would also undercut beliefs in qualia: If we don't suppose that qualia do anything except via beliefs about qualia. why should we suppose there are qualia in addition to (false) beliefs about them? A third possibility is that qualia endow a state with capacities besides beliefs about qualia, but that these all have practically neutral or even harmful effects. Dennett argues that having qualia would waste precious cognitive resources, if it involved anything distinct from mere judgments about experienced events, such as inner "seemings" or presentations in an inner theater. For example. he considers the "phi phenomenon" of vision, in which a flash of light is followed very rapidly by a second. nearby, flash. and one seems to see. not two separate points of light. but a single light moving from the first spot to the second. On any view. one's visual or cognitive system must somehow (consciously or unconsciously) register the second point of light. and only then jump to the mistaken conclusion that there was light at the intervening points (without the registration of the second flash. we would have no good explanation of the direction of the concluded motion). A natural idea (at least for Participating or Perceiving Friends) is that one doesn't merely conclude that there was motion. because. in addition, representations of the intervening spots are "filled in" so that the entire path appears lit. Dennett objects as follows: [T Jhe brain doesn't actually have to go to the trouble of "filling in" anything with "construction"-for no one is looking .... [O]nce a discrimination has been made once. it does not have to be made again . . . . [Rletrospectively the brain creates the content (the judgement) that there was intervening motion. and this content is then available to govern activity and leave its mark on memory. BUl . . . the brain does not bother "constructing" any representations that go to the trouble of "filling in" the blanks. That would be a waste of time and (shall we say?) paint. The judgement is already in. so the brain can get on with other tasks !"(,
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There are three resources that Dennett says would be wasted by presentations in an inner theater: discriminatory effort. time, and representational media (a Friend of the Theater need not posit mental "paine-neurons will do nicely. so long as they realize states that are innerly represented). Friends of the Theater have ready responses to all of these charges. Once one discriminates (or checks) that p. it might indeed be wasteful to rediscriminate (or recheck) that p. But Friends don't require rechecking or even re-representing that p; instead, they require newly representing features of a representation that p. Inner perception is not repeated, redundant. outer perception. As to the other resources, it might indeed be a waste to reach a detailed judgment (e.g .. of motion) and then use "paint" to put on a seems-like-this show. But Friends can hold that the judgment itself is reali:.ed in the innerly represented medium or caused by activity in it, and so Friends can agree that there is no need to use more paint or more time after the judgment is "already in." Is it plausible that the judgment that the light moved is especially related to an innerly represented medium. when many other judgments may not be? I think it is somewhat plausible. For starters, merely judging that the light moved is compatible with merely being told this. but what it's like consciously to judge-by-seeing that the light moved is different from what it's like consciously to judge-by-hearing that the light moved. This difference could be explained by the presentation of a seeming in addition to the judging. The difference is not plausibly due to a simple further judgment that I see it move. First, arguably, a creature may judgeby-seeing. and undergo what it's like to do so, without having or deploying a concept of seeing. Second. we can distinguish how we saw-the precise trajectory, the speeds. the blurriness, the presence or absence of doublevision, etc.-and this information might be most efficiently encoded in a seems-like-this medium, such as an innerly represented "bitmap." These considerations indicate that the light's seeming to move need not happen, wastefully, after one's judging that it moved. Dennett objects to a similar claim as follows: Some people presume that this intuition is supported by phenomenology. They are under the impression that they actually observe themselves judging things to be such as a result of those things seeming to them to be such. No one has ever observed any such thing "in their phenomenology" because such a fact about causation would be unobservable (as Hume noted long ago):'
This Humean point is not quite relevant to the overall argument. Even if the seeming (or the inner representation) doesn't cause the judging, it may coincide with it. and so not waste time or paint after the judgment is already in. And even if Dennett is right that one cannot innerly observe the causal relations that seemings bear (to judgings), one may innerly perceive the seemings (which Friends may accept to be the judgings-it doesn't matter so long
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as they are innerly represented). Dennett seems to care "which came first"the innerly represented seeming or the judging-but what is at issue is whether there are innerly represented seemings at all. It is no solace to Dennett if such seemings exist but are caused by or are identical to judgings. since he means to argue against the existence of seems-like-this presentations. It would be no good in an "engineering" argument against a trait to allow that the trait exists and lament its pointlessness! Furthermore, once one accepts that there are seemings, one can argue (even if one cannot observe) that they are not caused by judgments. For example, someone familiar with the phi phenomenon might resist judging that the light moved, even though it seems to move. Of course. this may be due to having initial perceptual "judgments" without considered judgments. It would still be open to Friends to identify innerly represented seemings with innerly represented initial perceptual judgments. At any rate, if we are prepared to distinguish two kinds of judging-attitudes, we should be prepared to distinguish them even when they agree. that is, even when they are attitudes to the same content. But this would also undercut Dennett's engineering argument against presentations. If there is some point to reaching initial perceptual judgments. and then reaching further considered judgments to the same effect. why wouldn't this show that Dennett is wrong to think redundancy of content is wasteful? And if there is no point to reaching initial perceptual judgments, why wouldn't their existence give us reason to resist the inference from alleged wastefulness to nonexistence in the closely related case of seemings? ARE THERE TOO MANY OBSTRUCTED-VIEW SEATS')
Dennett argues that "the Cartesian Theater is incoherent in its own terms".(~ because it asserts that we know what our experiences are like, but
at the same time it undermines this knowledge by inserting implausibly too many places for error to creep into our self-reports and self-beliefs. Since nothing in this argument turns on precision. it may be directed at any Theater. Cartesian or not. While a Friend could avoid incoherence by denying reliable (or infallible) access to qualia, Dennett's argument is interesting for its claim that Theaters jeopardize reliability. Dennett suggests that inner-perception and higher-order-belief theories yield implausible models of how one reports one's conscious mental states: 1n order to report a mental state or event. you have to have a
higher-order thought which you express. This gives us a picture of first observing (with some inner sense organ) the mental state or event, thereby producing a state of belief, whose onset is marked by a thought, which is then expressed:" This is supposed to be implausible because it yields too many potential sources of reporting error:
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Suppose I have my subjective experience (that's one thing) and it provides the grounds in me for my belief that I'm having it (that's a second thing) which in turn spawns the associated thought (a third thing) which next incites in me a communicative intention to express it (a fourth thing), which yields, finally, an actual expression (a fifth thing). Isn't there room for error to creep into the transition between each thing? Might it not be that I believe one proposition but, due to a faulty transition between stales, come to think a different proposition'? (If you can "misspeak," can't you also "misthink"'?) Wouldn't it be possible to frame the intention to express a rather different proposition from the one you are thinking? And mightn't a defective memory in the communicative intention subsystem lead you to set out with one preverbal message to be expressed and end up with a different preverbal message serving as the standard against which errors were to be corrected'?'"
To assess this objection we have to consider each transition, ask whether it is an implausible source of error, and, if so, ask whether Friends must posit it. I look at the steps in reverse order. The last step goes from a communicative intention to an utterance (perhaps via communicative subintentions). Errors in this step are commonplace on plausible views of speech, since there are slips of the tongue, mispronunciations, distractions, etc. '"Friends don't let friends drive drunk," the public-service announcement says, but Friends do let Friends speak drunk. The next-to-last step is from a thought about the target state to a communicative intention. Here it seems possible for a Friend to reduce the potential error. This could be done in at least two ways. First. the thought about the state may cause the utterance without first causing a communicative intention, as in a case of "blurting out." And second, even if there is an intention, it can be framed parasitically on the thought--e.g .. the intention subsystem can have a fixed pointer to whatever is in the current thoughtabout-myself subsystem. Now consider the step from a belief about the target state to a thought. Why does Dennett think there is any step here at all? He focuses on Rosenthal's theory of higher-order "thoughts," but he doesn't show that Rosenthal does or should treat thoughts as anything but beliefs.'1 This brings us to the first step Dennett considers, from the target mental state to one' s belief about it. A Friend of the Theater need not hold that selfbe1ief~ are necessary for self-reports, since (the Perceiving Friend's) selfperceptions or (the Participating Friend's) reflexive experiences may suffice. Furthermore. even though Friends treat self-representations as necessary for consciousness. they may deny that self-reports need to be generated via the self-representations. But set these possibilities aside for the moment. As I suggested in the discussion of reliability, errors in the step from a state to a self-belief about it are commonplace due to delusions of rationality, at least if the self-belief is about (nonqualitative) rationalia rather than qualia. And in the case of qualia. a Friend may either find some way to insure that this
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step is fairly reliable (though possibly erroneous). or else a Believing Friend may employ the infallibilist maneuver and hold that the appropriate selfbeliefs constitute qualia. (Similarly. a Perceiving or Participating Friend can hold either that their favored representations constitute qualia. or else merely find some way to insure that they are fairly reliable.) Dennett considers the infallibilist line (in the fonn a Believing Friend might put it) and objects that you (the subject) still "wiII not thereby be able to rule out the possibility that [you have] a misjudgement about how it seemed to you a moment ago."" But this objection is beside the point. The Believing Friend can claim that a state is conscious if it coexists with an appropriate higher-order belief. and can if so inclined claim that there is no room for error between a conscious state and this simultaneous belief. Of course. reports based on such a belief may take longer to generate than the conscious state lasts (or longer than its associated higher-order belief lasts). and so reports may always be a bit retrospective. But the infallibilist about certain self-beliefs may happily admit that self-reports admit of error. since some of the steps from the belief to the report admit of error. Dennett suggests an instructive alternative model of self-reports and self-beliefs: It is not that first one goes into a higher-order state of selfobservation. creating a higher-order thought. so that one can then report the lower-order thought by expressing the higherorder thought. It i<, rather that the second-order state ... comes to be created by the very process of framing the report. We don't first apprehend our experience in the Cartesian Theater and then, on the basis of that acquired knowledge. have the ability to frame reports to expres<,: our being able to say what it is like is the basis for our "higher-order beliefs." ... The higher-order state literally depends on--causally depends on-the expression of the speech act. But not necessarily on the public expression of an overt speech act. ... We must break the habit of positing ever-mare-central observers. As a transitional crutch, we can reconceive of the process as not knowledge-by-observation but on the model of hearsay. I believe that jJ because I have been told by a reliable source that p. By whom: By myself. ... "
I think this model is very plausible. but compatible with a Theater theory of consciousness. In fact, it fits rather naturally with one. Dennett distinguishes outer speech acts from inner speech acts. Presumably an outer self-report does not cause a self-belief unless one perceives what one says out loudpresumably hypnotics or s]eeptalkers who do not hear themselves do not learn from what they say. So we should ask: How does an inller self-report cause a self-belief, if not by inner perception of the inner self-report? Why wouldn't inner saying without inner hearing be like inner hypnotic talking or sleeptalking? If Dennett doesn't want to posi t an inner hearing or selfbelief about the inner saying. does he mean to substitute for it a second inner
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self-report about the inner saying, and a third about the second, and so on? Even if it is implausible to suppose that we innerly perceive the rationalia of attitudes and moods, it may be plausible to suppose that we innerly perceive the qualia of our conscious inner speech and other conscious experiences. In fact, for all Dennett's opposition to inner audiences. his criticism is not quite relentless. At some crucial points, particularly where he comes closest to convincing the reader of the relevance of his positive theory to consciousness, he flirts with a particularly strong idea of inner perception. He seeks to explain a large part of human consciousness as the result of a "]oycean machine" that innerly talks and listens to itself, and so has workings that are 'just as 'visible' and 'audible' to it as any of the things in the external world" since "they have much of the same perceptual machinery focused on them."'~ Such a machine, Dennett suggests, can also draw pictures to itself, which "do indeed amount to re-presentations ... not to an inner eye, but to an inner pattern-recognition mechanism that can also accept input from a regular ('outer'?) eye.")) These assertions-for they are not merely possibilities Dennett considers only to reject-are at odds with a sustained argument against metaphorical inner audiences. Maybe we can all be Friends ?I"
NOTES I.
2. 3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Daniel Dennett. "Quining Qualia." in COllsciollSllCSS in Contemporary Science. ed. A. 1. Marcel and E. Bisiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992: first published 1988 J. Dennett. Consciousness E\plained (Boston: Little. Brown & Co .. 1991 J. While ineffability is often treated as an inability of a speaker to "express" or "communicate" something. the heart of the matter seems to be an inability of a hearer to grasp it. Speakers may be able to expres:, (or even. in a sense, communicate) things that hearers can't understand. If one knows one's own relevant brain (machine. soul) states and those of another. and if one has some sort of noncomparative knowledge of one's own qualia, then one can derive noncomparativc conclusions about another's qualia. But this still counts as using a comparative tesT. Franz Brentano, Psychology/rom an Empirical Standpoinl, trans. A. C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell. and L. L. McAlister (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1973: originally published IS74). 128. See Armstrong's A Materialist Theon o/the Mind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1965). In "Phenomenal Illusions (under review). I argue that a certain combination of the Participant and Perceiver theories of qualia has substantial explanatory virtues. beyond those I will descrihe in the present paper. and in "Inner Sense until Proven Guilty" (in preparation), I respond to common arguments against inner perception based on the 'diaphanousness' of perception and the need to avoid phenomenal sense data. See Rosenthal's "A Theory of Consciousness," ZIP Report 40 (Bielefeld: Center for Interdisciplinary Research, 1990). I substitute "occurrent beliefs" for Rosenthal's "thoughts" to emphasize (with Rosenthal) that the higher-order states need not he conscious. (By an "occurrent" belief I mean a belief that is datable, active. and, for emphasis, more than a mere dispm,ition to believe.) Colloquially at least, thoughts are occurrent state~ that cOllsciously "occur" to one, as in the "stream of thought" when one makes assertions "to
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oneself:' I argue in "Nonphenomena1 Consciousness" (under review) that we get a better higher-order-thought theory of consciousness by construing "thought" more along the lines of (innerly perceived) inner speech than along the lines of occurrent beliefs. 8. Since in my terminology a state can only have qualia if it\ like something to have the state, qualia should not be confused with what Rosenthal calls "sensory qualities:' which he does not take to presuppose consciousness or higher-order beliefs or something-it'slike (see "The Independence ofCons<.:iousness and Sensory Quality:' Philosophical Issues 1 [1990]: 15-36). 9. "Quining Qualia," 43. 10. Ibid., 44. 11. Ibid" 45. 12. Ibid., 61-3.
13. Consciousness E-rplained, 132. 14.
Ibid.,3~7.
IS. Dennett's qualia holism may stem from his denial that there is a suitable distinction between conscious and unconscious states. Friends of the Theater draw this distinction in terms of the presence or absence of suitable (dispositions to) innerly directed representations. I will take up Dennett's objections to such views in the tinal part of the paper. 16. "Quining Qualia:' 46-7. 17. Ibid .. 59, 18. See Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson, "Telling More Than We Can Know:' PsychoIORical Rel'iew 84 (1977): 231-59. 19. "Quining Qualia:' 60; emphasis added. 20. Ibid.,54-5. 2!. Ibid .. 55. 22. See Tyler Burge, "Individualism and the Mental." Midl1'est Studies ill Philosoph\' 4 (1979): 73-121. 23. Here is a suggestion about how the idiom works. By stipulation, (3) is equivalent to: (4)
It is like F to have e.
The occupant of the "it" role is plausibly specified by (5)
We might try reading (6)
"to
have e," yielding. simply:
eislikeF. (5)
literally, as:
e is similar to something that is F.
However, since e may be similar to something in nonqualitative respects-if F is, say, the property of heinK 500 miles/rom Medford-(6) can be true while (3 )-(5) are not true. We cannot avoid this problem by treating (5) in eirher of the following ways: (7)
e is similar in qua/ilatil'e respects to something that is F.
(8)
e is in qua/iratil'" respects as if it were F.
Suppose Q is a legitimate quale, and that where F is Q, (3)-(5). (7), and (~) are all true. Even in that case, where F is the property of being 500 miles from Medf{Jrd (llld Q, (7) and (8) can be true while (3)-(5) are false. Such proposals as (7) and (~) would also lead to circularity, since "qualitative" is to be specified in terms of "what it's like." Compare (5) with an idiomatic but nonphenomenal use of "is like": "the car is like new." This doesn't literally mean "the car is similar to something new:' since e1'en'liling is similar to something new in some or other respect. It seems to be idiomatic for something like "the car appears new"-which is why we don't accept "the car is like 500 miles from Medford and new." A telltale sign of this idiomatic use of "x is like F" is (understood) accompaniment by reference to beings for which x is like F-beings to which .r appears F. We can easily add "for those who see it" to the idiomatic "the car is like new" but not to the literal "the car is like everything else in some or other respects." Since "what it's like to have e" is clearly elliptical for "what it's like/or e's hearer to have e" it may just mean "howe appears to e's bearer:' So (5) becomes: (9)
e appears F to e's bearer.
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On a perceptual or experiential construal of "appears" .(as in the "new car" case) this bring" u" full circle: It makes (3 )-( 5) equivalent to ( 1 ), where r is an inner perception of e, or e itself, rather than a belief or judgment. And (3) does not entail (2), since (9) clearly does not entail (2). 24. "Quining Qualia," 55. 25. Ibid., 46.
26. Ibid .. 73. 27. Ibid., 73-4. 28. Ibid., n. 29. 30. 31. 32.
Ibid" 46. Ibid" 69. Ibid. Ibid .. 71 and 70.
33. 34. 35. 36.
Ibid" 70. Ibid .. 46. Ibid .. 71. See Thoma, Nagel. "What Is It Like to Be a Bat'!" in Mortal Question.\' (Cambridge: Camhridge University Press. 1979), 165-80. and Frank Jackson. "Epiphenomenal Qualia." Philosophical Quarrerl" 32 (1982): 127-36. For a ,imilar suggestion. from a Perceiving Friend, see William Lycan. "What Is the Subjectivity of the MentaP" Philosophical Perspectil'es 4 (1990): 109-30. COIIScJOll.l'Iles.1 Explained. 106. Ibid .. 107. Ibid .. 1:.'7: ellipsis and emphasis in the original. Ibid., lO8; emphasis on "point" and "line" added. Ibid .. 124-5. Ibid .. 131. Ibid. "Quining Qualia:' 56. COllsciouslless Lrplailled. 127-H. Ibid .. 133. Ibid .. 303. Ibid .. 314. Ibid .. 317. Sce note 7. Ibid .. 319. Ibid .. 315-6. Ibid .. 225-6. Ibid .. 293. Which reminds me: Thanks to Monique Roelofs for helpful suggestions on a draft of this paper. and thanks to colleagues and students at the Universities of Michigan and Maryland for discussions of my related work.
37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.
47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL.
22
NO.
I & 2,
SPRING AND FALL
199-1-
In Defense of the Knowledge Argumenf
Jeff McConnell Tufts University
According to the Knowledge Argument. there are certain things which you can know everything physical and functional about but not know everything about. and which. because of that make physicalism and functionalism false. The Knowledge Argument says that your having this extra knowledge-the knowledge about these things which you could have over and above your knowledge of everything physical and functional about them-depends on the existence of special nonphysical properties. These properties. called qualia. are supposed to be properties of your experiences: it is supposed to be in virtue of them that you can say of your experiences that they feel a certain way or look a certain way to you. The Knowledge Argument purports to show that qualia exist. Moreover. it purports to show that qualia are nonphysical and nonfunctional and that. because of this. physicalism and functionalism are false. The position which it purports to establish I shall call property dualism. This position-that qualia exist and are distinct from physical and functional properties-is inconsistent with the materialist world view assumed by most contemporary philosophers of mind. That much is clear. "Are qualia functionally definable?" Dan Dennett. for example. asks at one point in his book Consciousness Explained. "No. because there are no such properties as qualia .... Or. yes. because if you really understood everything about the
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functioning of the nervous system, you'd understand everything about the properties people are actually talking about when they claim to be talking about their qualia,',2 Not all philosophers of mind would agree with these two statements. But most of those who don't will still want to find other reasons to reject the Knowledge Argument. I agree with Dennett and other critics of the argument that the conclusions which follow from it are unattractive; it is hard to know how to fit extra nonphysical properties into the world picture we get from physics and biology. Nevertheless, my aim in this essay is to show that, despite rumors of its demise and despite the best efforts so far advanced against it by its critics, the Knowledge Argument remains alive and well. I shall focus in the first part of the essay on the specific version of the argument advanced by Frank Jackson. There I argue that previous criticisms of Jackson's version are either unsuccessful or don't go far enough, for his version and the argumentative strategy underlying it can ultimately be rejected. The assumption on which Jackson relies~that simply your knowing everything physical but not knowing everything is enough to contradict physicalism-is false. I shall then develop a different. stronger version of the Knowledge Argument which escapes this and other outstanding objections. According to it, the knowledge you have of some of your mental states could not be about those states unless you picked them out in virtue of properties of them that are distinct from any physical or functional properties. If this is right, qualia provide routes to your mental states distinct from those provided by any physical or functional properties, contradicting physicalism and functionalism. Thus, I claim that the Knowledge Argument is and continues to be a substantial obstacle for any defender of the standard materialist solutions to the mind-body problem.
1. JACKSON'S ARGUMENT Frank Jackson's argument has probably been the most discussed version of the Know ledge Argument and the most discussed recent defense of property dualism. In two papers, he invites us to consider the unusual experiences of supemeuroscientist Mary. I quote his account of Mary's situation in full. Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like "red," "blue," and
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so on. She discovers, for example, just which wave-length combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue.'"
Let's imagine that Mary's knowledge becomes even more extensive on the basis of her black-and-white books and television lectures, as Jackson does in a subsequent account. In this way she learns everything there is to know about the physical nature of the world. She knows all the physical facts about us and our environment, in a wide sense of "physical" which includes everything in completed physics, chemistry, and neurophysiology, and all there is to know about the causal and relational facts consequent upon all this. including of course functional roles."
On the basis of Mary's case, Jackson argues against the truth of physicalism, which he describes as the view that "all information is physical information." What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information.
Thus, Jackson reasons, there is more to have than what Mary had, and physicalism is false.' Jackson represents this argument as follows. Jackson's Argument. (I) Mary (before her release) knows everything physi-
cal there is to know about other people.
Ergo.
(2) Mary (before her release) does not know everything there is to know about other people (because she learns something about them on her release). (3) there are truths about other people (and herself) which escape the physicalist story."
Although J do not accept Jackson's argument myself. I believe that the arguments that have so far been advanced against him have for the most part missed their marks. Before setting out my own objections in section IV and my alternative defense of the Knowledge Argument in sections V and VI, I will review some of these counterarguments in sections II and III and show why they fail. 7
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II. WHAT MARY CAN IMAGINE Dennett's much-discussed' counterargument against Jackson depends upon speculation about Mary's powers of imagination. Like Paul Churchland whom he cites approvingly, Dennett argues that Jackson underestimates the extent of Mary's knowledge and the cognitive powers it gives her. The counterargument seems to be as follows. If Mary knows everything physical and functional there is to know about other people, then she can at least figure out or imagine what it is like to see chromatic color. But if she can figure out or imagine what it is like to see chromatic color, she knows what it is like to do so. And since, by hypothesis, she knows everything physical and functional there is to know about other people, she knows what it is like to see red. Thus, Jackson's premises conflict. Endorsing the first requires giving up the second. Dennett and Churchland have not had many followers. But at least some of the reluctance to join them in this position has grown out of a mistaken view of what their reductionist position requires. Many critics of the Knowledge Argument would argue that Churchland and Dennett have taken on an unnecessary burden and that the physicalist can settle for much less. In this, the critics exploit a very natural first reaction to the argument. The idea is this. The physicalist is committed to the view that my having experience is just another physical fact which can be described in paradigmatically physical terms. However, the physicalist. it may seem, is not committed to the view that just my knowing all the physical facts about a certain kind of experience will give me experience of that kind. After all, things do not often come into existence simply in virtue of my knowing the principles underlying them. According to Joseph Levine, the physicalist should thus not reject, as Churchland and Dennett do, but embrace the idea that Mary cannot imagine or figure out what it is like to see red. "After all," writes Levine, "in order to know what it's like to occupy a state one has actually to occupy it!" From this general principle it is supposed to follow that Mary "can know which physical (or functional) description a mental state satisfies without knowing what it's like to occupy that state."" Levine's argument is that "all Mary's new knowledge amounts to is her new experience," and that it is thus open to the physicalist to hold that this is just a different way of knowing the same thing. But Levine appears to equivocate. It is almost tautological that in order to know what it's like to occupy a token state one has actually to occupy it. Every token state will have its own peculiarities, and one will not fully know what occupying any given one is like until one has done SO.IO But Mary's knowing what it is like to have the specific token experience she has on her release does not exhaust her red-related knowledge of what it is like, since
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she also comes to have general knowledge of what it is like to see red. knowledge of what it's like to occupy states of a type. When applied to knowledge of types rather than tokens. Levine's principle is not tautological but false. It would follow. for instance. that since nobody has ever occupied the state of seeing a unicorn or a golden mountain nobody knows what it is like to occupy that state. Not even the most extreme of classical empiricists held that view. According to Hume, we can create complex ideas out of simple ones and can visualize unicorns and golden mountains even though we have never seen such things. And by some other means. we even know what it is like to see shades of blue we have never been exposed to. I Perhaps Levine means to restrict the scope of the principle to this: that in order to know what it's like to occupy states of a simple qualitative type one actually has to occupy one. This is not tautological either, but while it may be true, it is not obviously so, and it would beg the question simply to assume it to be true. It would be just what Churchland and Dennett deny. How could they deny this? It may be helpful to consider a possible analogy. What is it like to ride a roller coaster? One perhaps need not have actually ridden one to know. For there may be experiences enough like each of the various aspects of riding a roller coaster that someone with enough experience could piece together what it is like without actually having done it. Although this would leave out knowledge of what any specific rides were like. one might still fully know what it is like in a general way. It is such general knowledge of what it is like as this that Dennett believes Mary to be able to figure out in virtue of her complete knowledge of the physicalfunctional aspects of human beings. He might agree with Levine's physicalist that she learns nothing on her release. but he would differ in holding there to be an aspect of her knowledge of what it's like that is beyond her unique knowledge of the experience: her ability to conceptualize it, to place it in a type. She learns nothing because she can figure out ahead of her release what it's like in this general way, just as she might figure out what it's like to ride the roller coaster. Now let me single out two of the premises of the Dennett-Churchland counterargument for closer scrutiny. J
(Neuro-onmiscience to lmaginabilitr.) If Mary knows everything physical there is to know about other people. then she can at least figure out or imagine what it is like to see chromatic color. (Imaginability to Knowledge.) If she can figure out or imagine what it is like to see chromatic color. she knows what it is like to do so.
Both these premises are crucial to Dennett's counterargument. and at least one is false. Let me look at each in tum.
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The "Neuro-omniscience to lmaginability" Premise. Dennett argues that Jackson has given no reason for thinking that, even if Mary indeed has all the neurophysiological knowledge Jackson gives her, she will be surprised when shown a blue object. From this he concludes that Jackson has not shown Mary to have learned anything. Already there is an error here. A lack of surprise does not entail a lack of learning. In learning what it's like to see red or blue, Mary learns something about which she had no expectations and thus could not be surprised. I~ More significant is Dennett's reasoning about how Mary could gain knowledge of what it's like. He assumes that Mary knows what it is like to see black and white (and presumably gray) objects; the differences between an object's color and properties like its glossiness and luminance; and "precisely which effects-described in neurophysiological terms-each particular color will have on her nervous system." Thus, he writes, the only remaining task for her is to "figure out" how to identify "those neurophysiological effects 'from the inside.'" He suggests this to be possible by her "figuring out tricky ways in which she would be able to tell that some color. whatever it is. is not yellow, or not red" by means of "noting some salient and specific reaction that her brain would have only for yellow or only for red." In this way. she could gain '"a little entry into her color space," and from there "leverage her way to complete advance knowledge."" Dennett, however, fails to make it plausible that Mary knows the entirety of what it is like to see chromatic color. Given her wide knowledge, Mary will know most of the effects on somebody of seeing a normal banana. The knowledge of some of these effects will manifest itself in thoughts and beliefs of hers that I will label "nonchromatic." By that I mean all her thoughts and beliefs except those by which she attributes to herself and others. by acquaintance with them, ways of visually experiencing chromatic color. Extending her expertise to bananas. Mary will know all the nonqualitative effects of seeing a normal banana. She may know enough of them "from the inside," to use Dennett's phrase-for instance, through the nonchromatic thoughts she has about the banana-for her to be able to tell that she is seeing something aberrant when she is shown a blue banana. Let me for the moment accept several of Dennett's suppositions about Mary's knowledge. She knows in advance that there is a way things appear, whatever it is, which people label "blue." She knows in advance the thoughts she would have on seeing something appear this way. She knows on seeing the banana that she is having those thoughts and that those thoughts are sufficient for her to know that the banana is blue. On the basis of such knowledge, let us say that she recognizes the banana as blue. I will even concede to Dennett that having the recognitional ability to do all this would be sufficient for Mary to know what it is like to see blue. '4 Still, it would not follow that Mary knows everything. For even if she might have the recognitional knowledge of what it is like in advance of seeing red, she still might lack what we could
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call imaginative knowledge of what it is like. Having this requires the ability, in advance of seeing and recognizing red, to anticipate seeing it by calling to mind something which seems to resemble seeing it. Dennett does not explicitly discuss imagination, but Churchland, whom Dennett cites favorably, does. Supporting his second premise by Mary's color ignorance commits Jackson, Churchland argues, to "the claim that Mary could not even imagine what the relevant experience would be like." Like Dennett, he contends that Jackson has not "adequately considered how much one might know if, as premise (1) asserts, one knew everything there is to know about the physical brain and the nervous system." In particular, suppose that Mary has learned to conceptualize her inner life, even in introspection, in terms of the completed neuroscience we are to imagine. So she does not identify her visual sensations crudely as "a sensation-of-black," "a sensation-of-gray," or "a sensation-of-white"; rather she identifies them more revealingly as various spiking frequencies in the nth layer of the occipital cortex (or whatever). If Mary has the relevant neuroscientific concepts for the sensational states at issue (viz., sensations-of-red), but has never yet been in those states, she may well be able to imagine being in the relevant cortical state, and imagine it with substantial success, even in advance of receiving external stimuli that would actually produce it.';
But despite all that Churchland supposes about Mary in this sciencefiction future, he has not yet given any reason for thinking Mary might have something in her imagination that seems to her to resemble red. What Churchland appears to invent is a possible world in which reference to phenomenal properties has dropped out of the language and has been replaced with reference to objective, public, paradigmatically neurophysiological properties. I will grant that we can imagine such a world. If you were asked in such a world to imagine being in a state characterized physically, one which correlates with sensing red. you could perhaps do so without much effort, if you were the neurophysiologist Mary is and accustomed to characterizing your own occurrent qualitative states in physical terms. But it is a further task to imagine being in a state conceived of not physically but phenomenally. Imagine feeling the way one normally does while being in a rapidly dropping roller-coaster car. Can somebody imagine this without having been through the experience of rapidly dropping while riding a roller coaster? In a sense, yes-one need only imagine that one is in a roller-coaster car, rapidly dropping, and feeling the way one normally does in such circumstances.'o Let me call this a case of descriptive imagining-a case of imagining that one satisfies a certain description, "being in a rapidly dropping roller-coaster car and feeling the nonnal way." But there is a further kind of imagining that seems in order here-which I will call direct imagining-in which one calls to mind something which seems to resemble the feeling of
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rapidly dropping. Even if one were to do the first kind of imagining, there would still be the task of doing the second kind. Similarly, we still have reason to think that there is a way in which Mary before her release would be unable to imagine what it is like to see red even if she could also do so in Churchland's way. Labeling it "crude," as Churchland does, does not contradict Jackson's assumption that the normal way is a different way. Only if Churchland can make it plausible that this difference in ways of imagining does not entail a difference in what is known does his argument succeed. This is perhaps what Churchland intends to do when he suggests that sensations of color might be analogous to musical chords. He suggests that both are "structured sets of elements" and that Mary might be able to imagine red just as musicians gain access to musical chords they have never heard before by constructing them "in auditory imagination.,,]7 If that were right, then by descriptive imagining alone Mary could literally gain access to something that seems to resemble red and thus could fully know what it is like to see it without actually seeing it. However. there is an obvious dissimilarity which Churchland must contend with. The musician has heard the elements out of which musical chords are structured, or she at least has a way of generating the elements out of what she has heard. Even if Churchland is correct that there is "excellent empirical evidence to suggest that our sensarions (~f color are indeed structured sets of elements" (his emphasis), still common sense tells us that Mary, raised since birth away from color. has not experienced enough such "elements" to generate any structures of color-sensation. The "/maginabilit.y to Knm'l'ledge" Premise. But there is a deeper problem with the argument. Suppose, contrary to common sense, that Mary does have access to "elements" out of which she can imaginatively construct color-sensations. Then consider the case of another superneurophysiologist. Marilyn, who does not have access to these "elements." Suppose that Marilyn is blind. although she later learns what it is like to see red when she acquires vision. Why believe that the blind Marilyn, who knows everything physical, has access to elements out of which she could construct what it is like to see red in visual imagination?]X For any putatively structured sensation, it would always seem possible, hypothetically, to come up with someone who (I) has mastered all the facts of neurophysiology but also (2) lacks enough raw elements of experience to generate the sensation structures which Churchland supposes to exist. Such a someone might even be Mary herself-say. in some possible world in which she is congenitally blind. This insight defeats Dennett's counterargument as well. One might fail to notice that it does by equivocating between the two premises which I have been examining. The equivocation is on the phrase "can imagine." Construe it to mean "can have the ability to imagine," and the "Neuro-omniscience
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to Imaginability" premise might well be judged true by considerations like Churchland's. But then the "Imaginability to Knowledge" premise is surely false. By the argument above, merely having the ability to imagine red in some possible world does not entail having any particular knowledge of red in the actual world. Mary can hypothetically have the ability to imagine red in some world, one in which her mental powers are intact, without having knowledge of what it is like in the actual world, let us suppose. because of the congenital blindness. On the other hand, construe the phrase to mean "would have the ability to imagine:' and the second premise is true: If Mary would actually have the ability to imagine red, then she would know what it is like. But then the first premise is surely false (or at least unsupported by anything Dennett or Churchland argue): Neuroscientific omniscience does not alone entail that one tWJUld have the ability to imagine red. For people's powers of imagination vary: rank the powers of imaginatively bringing to mind the sight of red. consider the worst case of such powers in an otherwise normal human being. and select the possible world in which such worst-case powers happen to be Mary's. It is surely plausible that there are worst cases of these powers that are consistent with Jackson's assumption that Mary does not know before her release. and therefore was 14 factually unable to have imagined. what it is like to see red. A related point can be made about Dennett's "'figuring out." Dennett may seem to have improved on Churchland's argument by eliminating the flaw just noted. Mary's vast neuroscientific knowledge may seem to guarantee that she would be able to figure out everything that can be figured out. even if (as I just argued) it does not guarantee that she would be able to imagine everything that can be imagined. Any improvement, however. is illusory. As I claimed before. if figuring out what it is like to see red in Mary's situation does not require imagining it. then figuring out will not be sufficient to gain her complete knowledge of what it is like. Some form of acquaintance with the appearance of red is required, and perception of red objects is unavailable to her. If. on the other hand, figuring out does require imagining. then Dennett confronts the same problems I argued to face Churchland. Clearly Dennett needs more than just that Mary call figure out or imagine. Even if Mary could figure out what it was like from Dennett's reasoning, still she has to figure it out. That means that her knowledge of what it is like to see red is something over and above her neurophysiological knowledge of the factors Jackson and Dennett cite. That is all Jackson needs to reach his conclusion. Dennett's conclusion that she learns nothing new requires that Mary must know what it is like given her physical knowledge: in fact, it requires that her physical knowledge constitutes her knowing what it is like. But then, there is no longer any need for her to figure anything out. Dennett's position ought to be that the neurophysiological omniscience Jackson assumes of Mary requires that she has already figured out what it
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is like to see red. But what she must already have figured out includes not just recognitional but also imaginative knowledge, and it is this that makes Dennett's view untenable. Suppose that Mary were able to imagine what it is like to see red due to her neurological knowledge. More is needed. Just as Dennett's argument requires that she must have figured it out, it also requires that she must have been able to imagine it.'o Only this, on the kind of story Dennett chooses to tell. would complete Mary's knowledge. Even Churchland, however, does not argue that she must have been able to imagine it, only that she can have been, and it is hard to see how he could make the stronger claim plausible. Once again, it does not seem inconsistent to suppose that there could be Marys and Marilyns who are poor at imaginatively calling to mind the ways things appear and at the same time good, in fact omniscient, at gaining explicitly physical knowledge of things.,1
III. KNOWING HOW, KNOWING THAT, AND KNOWING ABOUT I have devoted as much detail to the Dennett-Churchland position as I have because I believe it to be an extremely important one. My counterargument shows that unless there is a defect in the mechanics of the Knowledge Argument or a deep flaw in our common sense about what Mary knows, then the standard positions about the nature of the mind are untenable. This is true not only of physicalism but of functionalism as well. For common sense tells us that Mary cannot know what it is like to see red just on the basis of knowing physical or functional properties of herself. It might seem that the analytic functionalist has a way out, for the analytic functionalist asserts an a priori connection between mental terms or properties and functional characterizations. But against that view, it would seem that Mary might know any functional characterization that is true of her without knowing what it is like to see red. Functionalists have developed ingenious strategies against the standard anti functionalist arguments. They have argued, for example, that the argument against functionalism from the possibility of spectrum inversion fails because certain dispositions are intrinsic to our color experiences, and spectrum inversion is therefore impossible." But even if this were right. what Mary knows shows that functionalism remains prima facie untenable--common sense tells us that she might know every causal aspect whatever of these dispositions and still lack imaginative knowledge of what it is like to see red. Thus, physicalists and functionalists like Dennett and Churchland should adopt a different strategy against the Knowledge Argument. They ought instead to be looking for flaws in the mechanics of the argument. In the remainder of this section I will review and criticize in some detail two
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well-known accounts of the sort that attack the argument in this way. My purpose in doing so is not only to point out difficulties in the accounts but also to draw attention by way of them to features of Mary's knowledge that will playa role in the argument against Jackson in the next section. Consider this complaint: Jackson's argument goes wrong by assuming in the second premise that Mary before release is ignorant of possible objects of knowledge, of information. Sometimes called the Ability Hypothesis, this view has it that Mary before her release is not ignorant of information but rather lacking in ability-that Mary lacks know-how that she could not get just by obtaining information. On this view, Jackson's premise (2) is unsupported. The Ability Hypothesis plays on the intuition that some of our knowledge-such as Roger Clemens's knowledge of how to throw a 95-mileper-hour fastball wherever he wants it to go--is not knowledge of some body of information, or "knowledge that . .. ," but rather is ability, or "knowledge how to . .. ." This is to say not that Clemens is inarticulate about his throwing of the fastball-in fact, he has plenty to say about it-but rather that his accurate throwing of the fastball is not causally dependent, at least not entirely, on the kind of prior information he might report when speaking about his fastball." Although I share Jackson's view that the Ability Hypothesis is an incorrect assessment of Mary's situation, Jackson's own counterargument to the Ability Hypothesis is unsatisfactory. He contends that since Mary not only gains knowledge of what it is like to see redIor herse(fbut comes to know more about the experiences of others as well, it follows that she gains more than abilities. since if she were a skeptic about other minds and doubted that she had gained knowledge of others. she would not be doubting abilities. which "were a known constant throughout:'c~ But why can it not be said that. in such a case, what Mary doubts is just another ability-her ability to identify what it is like for others to see red or her ability to see in the way others see? It seems rather straightforward. contra Jackson. to identify the knowledge of others Mary gains when she comes to experience red also as an ability. The real problem with the Ability Hypothesis is the intuition underlying it that draws a firm line between "knowing that" and "knowing Izmr to." Sometimes the two forms of knowledge are much closer than the intuition allows. Generally, if Roger Clemens knows 110vv to throw his accurate fastball, then he will have "knowledge that' which he can present using sentences like, "I know that my accurate fastball is thrown like this." as he exhibits both the way it is properly thrown and his ability to throw it that way with an accurate throw. Such performatory uses of demonstratives. which produce demon strata for display instead of ostending them. are little discussed but cornman. If I know how to play golf. then generally I have knowledge I can perform using forms of words like. "1 know that golf is played like this." The main kind of exception to the general claim that
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"knowledge how to" entails "knowledge that" is the kind of case in which I fail to realize that this ability is the ability to play go(f or in which Roger Clemens, suffering amnesia, forgets what his pitching ability isfor. In such a case the exception is shown by the fact that 1 can say of Clemens, for example, that he still knows how to throw a fastball for a strike over the inside comer of the plate, but no longer knows that that ability can be described this or any other way. But even this exception is not readily available in cases of knowing what it is like to experience chromatic color. It would normally make no sense to say of someone that she knows how to recognize a particular shade of color but has forgotten that recognizing the shade of color is like that. Normally, knowing how to identify a particular shade partly consists in knowing how it appears, and, to adapt a point made by Brian Loar, knowing this is just knowing that it appears a certain way.C\ The claim that Mary before her release lacks information-that is. lacks "knowledge that"-and subsequently gains it thus remains untouched, since the Ability Hypothesis does not offer a genuine alternative to it. Mary gains both a recognitional ability and a piece of knowledge reportable with a thatclause. Now consider an argument along a different line. Churchland asserts that Jackson's argument is "3 prima facie case of an argument invalid by reason of equivocation on a critical term." The tenn he questions is "knows about." (I) Mary (before her release) knows everything physical there is to know about other people. (2) Mary (before her release) does not know everything there is to know about other people (because she learns something about them on her release). EIXo.
(3) there are tmths about other people (and herself)
which escape the physicalist story.
Premise (1). he writes. is "plausibly true:' given Jackson's story about Mary. "only on the interpretation of 'knows about' that casts the object of knowledge as something propositional, as something adequately expressible in an English sentence"; premise (2) is true only on the interpretation casting it "as something nonpropositional, as something inarticulable, as something that is non-truth-valuable."'c Bul are there two such separate interpretations of "knows about"? Churchland gives us no reason to think there are, besides pointing out two kinds of knowledge. But that is no more reason for thinking "knows about" is equivocal than the existence of paperbacks and hardbacks is reason for thinking "book" equivocal. Even if I were to grant that if premise (1) is true, then it is tme in virtue of Mary's having mastered something propositional and articulable, and that if premise (2) is true, it is true in virtue of Mary's missing something nonpropositional or inarticulable, Churchland's point would not follow. Why aren't these just cases, on the one
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hand, of Mary's hQ1'ing some "knowledge:' understood univocally, and on the other hand, of Mary's lacking certain features (~f experience. features required for having some other "knowledge:' understood the same univocal way? Why should we believe "Mary" is the subject of a different \'erb in premise (1) and premise (2)? How could the knowledge Churchland calls nonpropositional even be about anybody if it were nonpropositional? It is. after all, perfectly intelligible to claim that Mary comes to know about other people by coming to know both every physical characterization true of them and what it is like for them to experience chromatic color. Following Loar's suggestion. we can regiment this claim to read that. for all other people, Mary knows two sorts of one-place open sentences to be true of them: that such and such a physical characterization is true of them, and that experiencing such and such a chromatic color is for them like that (where the demonstratum is a paradigm experience of the such and such chromatic color at issue). Churchland challenges Jackson to provide a univocal interpretation of "knows about" that makes the premises plausibly true at the same time. Churchland constructs his own nonequivocal argument. replacing Jackson's premises with (1') and (2') and Jackson's conclusion with (3'). Church/and's "NOI1f'Qllil'oca/" Argument. ( 1') For any knowable x and for any form f of knowl-
edge. if x is about humans and x is physical in character. then Mary knows by f about x. (2') There is a knowable x and a form of knowledge f such that x is about humans and Mary does not know by f about x.
Ergo. (3') there is a knowable x such that x is about humans and x is not physical in character.
The "nonequivocal" argument is unsound, Churchland tells us, because "there is something about persons (their color sensations. or identically. their coding vectors in their visual pathways). and there is some form of knowledge (an antecedently partitioned prelinguistic taxonomy). such that Mary lacks that form of knowledge of that [physical] aspect of persons." This is supposed to be what it is for her to be unacquainted with what it is like to see red. Of course, she purportedly has another form of knowledge. knowledge by description. of this same physical aspect of persons. Thus, premise (2') is said to be true and premise (1') false. Initially. Churchland's supposition that Mary has knowledge by dcquaintance and lacks knowledge by description of one and the same thing may not seem troubling. After all, consider a characterization of the following sort. (5) To notice that a tomato is red has that prope11y. "
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At least initially, one can make sense of the claim that Mary knows (5) to be true by description although not by acquaintance: To specify the referent of the demonstrative, one goes on to give a detailed physio-anatomical description. And one might think that Mary could know one and the same thing by acquaintance (instead of by description) by specifying the referent of the demonstrative through production of a paradigmatic experience of seeing red. If the first demonstration could pick out the same state as the second demonstration, then it would be possible to say that the same object of knowledge was picked out by different forms of knowledge in virtue of the two demonstrations. But it is not enough for Churchland to produce only a single case like this. Churchland's account of why the "nonequivocar' argument is unsound requires that el'ervthing knowable by acquaintance be knowable, in principle. by description. What. then. is it like to know (6) by description? (6) To be in that state (demonstrated by giving a physioanatomical description) is to be in that state (demonstrated by exhibiting a paradigm experience of some sort).
As a malerialist. Churchland must hold that on her release Mary will know (6) to be true. But for Mary to know (6) to be true is not for her to know by a new form of knowledge something she already knew by physio-anatomical description. She must know something new, and not just by a new form of knowledge. The point is a familiar one since Frege. Let "R" be a referring expression the reference of which I fix with a physio-anatomical description. Let "S" be a referring expression the reference of which I fix by ostending. so to speak. a phenomenal experience as a paradigm. The following two statements have different cognitive significance. (7) R = R. (7') R =
S.
There has been dispute over why (7) and (7') differ in cognitive significance, but there is no dispute that to know (7) is true is to know somelhing in some sense empty. while to know (7') is true is to know something substantive. In any case. to know (7) is true and (7') is true is to know two different things and not to know the same thing b.l· d(fferentforms of knmt'ledge. Thus, premise ( I ') of Churchland's "nonequivocal" argument is false, as Churchland claims. but for a different reason. It is false that Mary before her release knows every knowable item of relevant information by every form of knowledge because there is an item she does not know by acquaintancewhat it is like to see red. Still, while Churchland is correct that his argument is unsound. he overlooks a different "nonequivocar' argument which derives the same conclu-
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sion (3') from two true premises. Before her release, Mary knows every item of information characterized physically by at least one form, description or acquaintance. But there is an item of information she does not know by any form of knowledge. Thus, (1") and (2") are both true, and (3') follows. A Sound "Nonequivocal" Argument. (l") For any knowable x there is a formfof knowledge
such that if x is about humans and x is physical in character, then Mary knows by f about x. (2") There is a knowable x such that for every form of knowledge.f, if x is about humans then it is false that Mary knows byfabout x. Ergo, (3') there is a knowable x such that x is about humans and x is not physical in character.
IV. THE PROBLEM WITH JACKSON'S CONCLUSION The real problems with Jackson's argument concern not Jackson's premises but his antiphysicalist conclusion. Some of these are problems first identified by Terence Horgan, and I will build here on his original presentation. If we take Jackson's premises. contrary to Churchland. to be about the presence and absence in Mary of knowledge of different things, we can take these different things to be different ilems (~fillf()rmation. In that case, we have an argument for a dualism of i1~formation into paradigmatically physical information and the introspective information Mary comes by on her release. But. as Horgan argues, a dualism of information does not guarantee a dualism of properties, since distinct items of information can be about the same property. Thus. he argues. we have no reason to conclude that physicalism is false because of an excess of properties. Horgan illustrates his case by considering two statements: "Superman can fly" and "Clark Kent can fly." These statements express different information even though they predicate the same property of the same individual. Horgan argues that it is similarly open to the physicalist to assert that. even if it is true that statements made in language paradigmatically mental (and. thus. in language not paradigmatic ally physical) express different information from statements that explicitly predicate physical properties and relations of wholly physical entities, still the mental-language statements predicate the same physical properties and relations of the same wholly physical entities as do the explicit statements. Horgan illustrates his point with the following statement which, following him. I label (4). (4) Seeing ripe tomatoes has this property.
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Assume that Mary, in using (4) to express new knowledge acquired after her release, uses the demonstrative "this property" to designate a color-quale, a phenomenal property, instantiated in experience contemporaneous with her statement. According to Horgan, it is not merely open to the physicalist to assert that the entities referred to and the properties and relations expressed by (4) are physical, it is true that they are physical. Sentence (4) expresses new information because Mary has a new perspective on phenomenal redness: viz., the first-person ostensive perspective. Her new information is about the phenomenal color-property as experienced. Thus she could not have had this information prior to undergoing relevant experience herself. But these facts are compatible with Physicalism; there is no need to suppose that when she acquires experiential awareness of phenomenal redness, she thereby comes into contact with a property distinct from those already countenanced in her prior physical account of human perception."
There may be a question, however, given that Mary has all relevant physical information, about how a physicalist can make sense oftilrther information expressed in language which (a) is not paradigmatically physical but (b) predicates physical properties and relations of physical entities. From where would the further information come? Both statements about Superman, if they express different information, express physical information after all. constructed of language paradigmatically physical. Horgan can make his point uncontroversially with this pair of statements because both are constructed from language that is paradigmatically physical-both are of the same modality of information. Doesn't it just beg the question, one might ask. simply to assert. without argument. that the same point can be made across modalities of information-to assert that information so seemingly different as that contained in statements expressing mental information and physical information can also predicate the same properties and relations of the same entities? This is to misunderstand Horgan. His argument is a burden-of-proof argument. Its point is not to refute Jackson but to shift the burden of proof back to Jackson. requiring Jackson to provide evidence that Mary's new knowledge can't be accounted for in Horgan's way.2'1 But I think that it is possible to go further than Horgan does. It is possible to refute Jackson by a direct counterexample. one that once again enlists Roger Clemens. Imagine that Clemens has a brother. Ronald. who is a brilliant scientist but has never touched a baseball. Imagine that. like Mary. Ronald Clemens obtains a vast collection of physical information-this time. about the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of throwing a baseball. Imagine that. like Mary in her own sphere, Ronald also acquires all explicitly physical information about throwing a baseball. He cannot do what his rich Red Sox brother can do-throw the 95-plus mile-per-hour fastball over the inside
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comer of the plate consistently for strikes. But suppose that with all his other knowledge about baseball. curiosity about what it is like to throw the fastball overcomes him and, after an intense period of training. he learns how to throw it. Although Ronald Clemens might know everything physical about other people-or at least about their baseball skills-he doesn't initially know everything. Initially, he does not know-but he comes to know-something he can report by words like, "The accurate fastball is thrown like fhis:' as he presents the way it is properly thrown. But all this seems compatible with physicalism. The way of properly throwing the fastball that he presents demonstratively-a property of Ronald. Roger. and other people who employ this sty Ie of throwing the fastball-is presumably just a type of physical process. It seems to me that Jackson has no reply to this counterargument. In fact, I do not see any possible reply within the argumentative strategy behind Jackson's version of the Knowledge Argument. Where exactly do the formal versions of Jackson's argument which I have discussed-one with (1) and (2) as premises. the other fuller representation with (1") and (2") as premises. both with Jackson's (3) as the conclusion-go wrong? As I have argued already. not in the premises.'" Thus. the problem must lie in the inference to the conclusion, It should be obvious that both versions are enthymematic. Let me focus on the fuller version from ( I ") and (2") to (3). (I If) For any knowable x there is a form/of knowledge such that if x is about humans and x is physical in character. then Mary knows by f about x. (2") There i~ a knowable x such that for every form of knowledge f. if x is about humans then it is false that Mary knows by f about x.
Ergo,
(3) there are truths about other people (and herself) which escape the physicalist story.
The terms "truths about other people" and "the physicalist story" appear only in the conclusion. not in the premises. Thus. if a conclusion is to be derived from (I") and (2") using only principles of logic. either (a) it must be a different conclusion from (3), or (b) one or more further premises must be added to the argument. First, consider option (a), that of altering the conclusion. The strongest conclusion that can be derived from (Iff) and (2") on the basis of principles of logic alone is Churchland's (3'). (3')
There is a knowable x such that x is about humans and x is not physical in character.
But (3') is not strong enough to accomplish Jackson's antiphysicalist aims. It is open to a critic such as Horgan to insist that although phenomenal
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knowledge is not characterized physically-that is, is not explicitly or paradigmatic ally physical-it does not provide contact with any nonphysical property. Horgan's (4) is not characterized physically; it begs the question to assume that its existence contradicts physicalism. Jackson must give a funher argument to show that there is no gulf between what follows from logic alone. (3'). and the antiphysicalist conclusion (3). Thus. Jackson is left with option (h). In fact, Jackson means the argument to have a further premise. something like (P). (p)
If physicalism is true. then if you know everything about such and such expressed or expressible in explicitly physical language. you know everything about such and such. 'I
Jackson's fullest argument for something like (P) goes as follows. Physicalism is not the noncontroversial thesis that the actual world is largely physical, but the challenging thesis thaI it is entirely physical. This is why physicalists must hold that complete physical knowledge is complete knowledge simpliciter. For suppose it is not complete: then our world must differ from a world, W(P), for which it is complete, and the difference must be in nonphysical facts: for our world and W(P) agree in all matters physical. Hence. physicalism would be false at our world [though contingently so. for it would be true at W(P)]."
Jackson's error should now be apparent. The reductio does not succeed. Jackson asks us to suppose, contrary to (P). that physicalism is true but that. as I have already argued, complete physical knowledge is /lot complete knowledge simpliciter. Contrary to what Jackson writes, it is not then true that our world must differ from a world W(P) which agrees in all matters physical with our world and in which complete physical knowledge is complete knowledge. There is no world, W(P), even moderately similar to ours physically in which complete physical knowledge is complete knowledge. For in any world similar enough to contain knowledge how to not characterized physically, complete physical knowledge comes up well short of complete knowledge. This is the lesson of the Clemenses. In an)' possibJe world physically identical to their world. there are things to know beyond those things known by way of explicitly physical characterizations. In any such world, Ronald Clemens will still lack knowledge of how to throw the accurate fastball. Thus. he still might need to acquire the "knowledge that." which he would report with the words. "The accurate fastball is thrown like this." even when he has all the knowledge a scientist could have through explicitly physical characterizations. "
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V. THE KNOWLEDGE ARGUMENT
AND THE PROPERTY DUALISM ARGUMENT Even though Jackson's argument is inadequate. a version of the Knowledge Argument can be constructed that succeeds against the physicalist where Jackson's fails. It is. however, an argument somewhat different in form and inspiration. This section will be taken up with constructing and defending this alternative version. I have suggested that some knowledge provides routes to objects of knowledge distinct from every route provided by knowledge by description and that at least some of these cases are entirely compatible with physicalism. These are the cases of knowledge by demonstrative reference that I have just discussed in connection with Jackson. I shall presently focus on some cases of knowledge by demonstrative reference which. by contrast with those just discussed. are prima facie not compatible with physicalism at all. The point that I shall make is a familiar one. It goes back at least to Smart's 1959 essay "Sensations and Brain Processes." and Smart contends there that it originated with Max Black. The point is this. If singular terms are to pick out referents. they must do so in virtue of properties of the referents. If two singular terms cannot be known a priori to co-refer (whether it is because they do not co-refer or because they co-refer a posteriori). then the singular terms must pick out their referents in virtue of different properties. Singular terms referring to things paradigmatically mental cannot be known a priori to co-refer with singular terms referring to things paradigmatic ally physical. It follows, according to this argument. that they refer in virtue of different properties-it follows. that is. that mental properties are not physical properties and that physicalism is thus false. I will call this the Property Dualism Argument. q By illustration. consider first a nonmental case. The definite descriptions "the forty-first president of the United States" and "the former governor of Arkansas" refer to the same person, Bill Clinton. Each description refers to Clinton in virtue of properties of him: He satisfies the first description in virtue of being the forty-first president of the United States and he satisfies the second description in virtue of being the former governor of Arkansas. Since the concepts expressed by these descriptions cannot be known a priori to co-refer (they are known to co-refer. of course. but only a posteriori). they refer in virtue of different properties of Clinton. Thus. I will say that they follow different routes to the referent. In this way they differ from the descriptions "the forty-first president of the United States" and "the president following the fortieth president of the United States." for the concepts expressed by these two descriptions can be known a priori to co-refer and pick out Clinton in virtue of the same properties of him.
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Nothing so far requires us to abandon physicalism about persons, governors, or presidents. It is consistent with what I have written so far that every one of the properties in virtue of which these three descriptions refer is a physical property and that each of these descriptions follows one of two different physical routes to the referent. Contrast this case with the case of a mental description. Assume that both "Clinton's headache at time t" and "Clinton's C-fiber stimulation at t" uniquely refer and that, moreover. they refer to the same thing. Since the two descriptions cannot be known a priori to co-refer, they refer in virtue of different properties. But because the first cannot be known a priori to refer to the same thing as any description referring to things paradigmatic ally physical (and in this way differs from the concept expressed by "the forty-first president of the United States"). it follows prima facie that the properties in virtue of which the mental description refers are distinct from any properties in virtue of which any paradigmatically physical description refers. Unless the mental description has a topic-neutral translation. the properties in virtue of which "Clinton's headache at t" refers are not physical at all but irreducibly mental. And prima facie, the topic-neutral option is unavailable: Not only does it seem not to be a priori that mental descriptions co-refer with topic-neutral translations, but it also seems, on the basis of other qualia-based counterarguments to functionalism, to be false." The analysis so far holds whether the referring expressions refer by way of Fregean senses or on Kripke's model of rigid designation by referencefixing descriptions. Consider the latter. Even if mental- and physicallanguage expressions picked out the same property as Horgan claims. no reference-fixer for the mental-language expression would be linked to any reference-fixer for a physical-language expression a priori. thus prima facie requiring irreducibly mental properties. Suppose that an objector were to point out paradigmatic property identities from the physical sciences-such as the identity of heat and mean kinetic energy-as models of how mental properties might just be physical properties. The reply is that the problem remains. To suppose a mental property to be some physical property, we require two separate kinds of routes to this property via further properties, one irreducibly mental. Thus, even if "pain" and "C-fiber stimulation" were coreferential on the model of "heat'" and "mean kinetic energy," we would still expect what Loar calls "higher order reference-fixers" to provide separate routes to their common referent by way of separate properties.';' There is. however. an inadequacy in the account so far. The referential potential of descriptions like "Clinton's headache at (' actually depends on the referential potential of expressions that refer directly-that is, noninferentially, without the mediation of individual concepts or Fregean senses or satisfaction conditions or any other mediating sort of thing. Thus, if the description "Clinton's headache at t" is to pick out a headache. then there must be some linguistic device for picking out such things (although not
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necessarily Clinton's headache at (-Clinton might be struck dumb at t) directly, as Clinton himself does in focussing on the feeling running from his left temple to his right and thinking to himself. 'This hurts." Now, a natural objection to the kind of argument for irreducibly mental properties just advanced is one that parallels Horgan's reply to the Knowledge Argument-that the two descriptions, mental and physical. differ not in the categories of properties they refer in virtue of but in the two routes their referring takes, both of which can be wholly physical. It is natural to think that some phase of the routes singular terms take in referring to qualitative mental states is a direct reference of the kind that we do not find in the routes theoretical singular terms of, say, neurophysiology take in referring to physical states. The objector asserts that it begs the question to suppose that these routes cannot be wholly physical. Thus. the objector explains that we can be misled to believe that two mutually exclusive sorts of properties exist by the existence of the two very different sorts of routes to the referent. But while it may be true that demonstrative reference to qualitative states does not depend upon Fregean senses or intervening concepts or any other mediating entities. it does not follow that we can understand it without appeal to phenomenal properties at all. The success of demonstrative reference depends upon the demon stratum .s being picked out for demonstrator and audience by a mode or manner of presentation-by something that individuates the cognitive significance of referring expressions. ,; Following a standard account of how this happens for demonstrative reference. I suggest that the presentation must have at least three aspects: a cOl1text of which the demonstratum is a part. a directing intention on the demonstrator's part for what is to be demonstrated in the context. and an externali::.arioll of this directing intention for conveying it. such as a pointing or a perforn1ing. Cases where arguably no mode or manner of presentation is needed to fix reference, such as standard uses of the pure indexicals "I." "now:' and "here." are not cases of '"true demonstratives." to use Kaplan's words: such cases would seem to be irrelevant anyhow to questions concerning demonstrative refer· ence to qualitative states. In those cases in which demonstrative reference picks out a demonstratum by a manner of presentation. it is possible for it to do so only in virtue of properties of the demonstratum which the demonstrator indicates to an audience." Demonstrative reference to a public audience would not be successful-or would at least be faulty-unless the demon stratum were (I) part of a context, (2) the object of a directing intention. and (3) the target of an externalization. None of these three conditions could be satisfied except in virtue of properties of the demonstratum. In the case of direct demonstrative reference to a qualitative state,'4 where demonstrator and audience are identical, the properties of the state in virtue of which the demonstration individuates that state must be mental properties. since only mental properties are available to do this. It is in virtue of the
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state's mental properties that the state is part of an inner context and is singled out in that context by a directing intention. That these properties are irreducibly mental is shown by an argument like the one employed above with respect to descriptions. It follows prima facie from the fact that modes of presentation associated with direct demonstrative reference to qualitative states cannot be shown a priori to pick out the same things as referring expressions using explicitly physical or topic-neutral means. In the latter case, I observe again that this appears not only not a priori but, given the qualia-based arguments against functionalism. false. A prima facie case for the Knowledge Argument now goes like this. We are able to know our qualitative mental states by acquaintance, picking them out by direct reference as states "like this," so to speak, producing examples in imagination or ostending to ourselves occurrent states. If physicalism is true, then all routes to the referents of our singular terms run via physical properties or topic-neutral properties. properties neither physical nor mental. Thus, if physicalism is true. then all routes from the knowledge we have of our qualitative mental states to the states themselves that are the objects of that knowledge run via physical or topic-neutral properties of those states. That is. if physicalism is true, then all routes from such states of knowledge to the objects of such states of knowledge are of one kind-let me call it a physical~functional kind. But there are two kinds. Besides routes of a physical-functional kind. there are also routes that run via irreducibly mental properties. Thus. while Horgan is correct that the intensionality of Mary's knowledge is consistent with the possibility that the physical knowledge she has before her release has the same objects as the phenomenal knowledge she comes to have after release, he is wrong that this is compatible with physicalism. if the Property Dualism Argument is sound. On this argument, Mary could only come to possess the "first-person ostensive perspective" on her qualitative states-the new perspective in virtue of which she makes the discovery of what it is like to see red and can refer to it directly-if she could pick those states out in virtue of irreducibly mental properties of them. The physicalist cannot at this time say how it is that Mary comes to have, if she does, a second kind of knowledge via a second referential route to her phenomenal states-that is, why it is that there is a "first-person ostensive perspective" at all-and it is hard to see how the physicalist could ever say how. It is not because there is a form of knowledge beyond the paradigmatic forms of scientific and everyday knowledge we have of physical things that the physicalist story is incomplete-there are forms of such knowledge fully compatible with physicalism. Nor will it do to claim, as Geoffrey Madell does, that the physicalist cannot distinguish the knowledge by description we have of physical things from the knowledge by acquaintance we have of
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our phenomenal states-these differ at least in their forms of representation. Rather, physicalism runs aground for different reasons. If Mary has phenomenal knowledge that picks out its objects in virtue of properties different from any in virtue of which her physical knowledge picks out its objects, then physicalism is false. The fact that Mary discOl'crs what it is like to see red after knowing everything physical about seeing red assures that Mary's phenomenal knowledge picks out its objects in virtue of different properties-irreducibly different ones. Thus, physicalism is false. This is the correct version of the Knowledge Argument. It requires as a premise not the claim that Mary. despite her neuroscientific omniscience, lacks some knowledge or other but that she lacks the very specific knowledge of what it is like to see red. The further premise that is required, then, is (P'). (P')
If physicalism is true. then if you know everything expressed or expressible in explicitly physical language about what it is like to see red. then you know everything about what it is like to see red.
And (P') is true. prima facie. because of the Property Dualism Argument. It is prima facie true because physicalism would require that knowing everything expressed or expressible in explicitly physical language about what it is like to see red would be knowing by every route there could be-that is, the only route there would be-about what it is like to see red. But. of course. there is another route, as Mary discovers on her release. This answers critics who would take my response to Madel! and argue that whatever difference that there is between knowledge by description of matters physical and knowledge by acquaintance of matters mental that leads some to infer a difference in types of facts and properties is /Iothing more than a difference in styles of representation. It is true. as such critics suggest. that somewhere along the reference chain there is a divergence in styles of representation. matters physical being represented in virtue of definite descriptions. matters of a mental nature in virtue of direct reference. But these forms of representation would not succeed in picking out their referents, the objects of knowledge, unless there were a further difference. The form of representation picking out qualitative mental states does so in virtue of properties distinct from the paradigmatical!y physical properties in virtue of which neurophysiological descriptions refer. This also answers someone who would argue that we can use the example of the Clemenses also to refute the Property Dualism Argument. Just as the Clemenses present something purely physical when they employ their throwing abilities and use the words "like this," the objector claims, so Mary does as well when she employs her recognitional and 'imaginative abilities and uses the words "like this." But the objector ignores the lesson of the Property Dualism Argument. Even if Mary did refer to something physical by her use of "this," she would do so by a separate referential route that
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prima facie would require the introduction of separate nonphysical properties, since any such identification of this-referred to by way of her performing her recognitional or imaginative abilities-with something to which reference is fixed wholly functionally, as in the case of the Clemenses. would be known a posteriori, as the counterargument to Dennett and Churchland shows.
VI. LOAR'S OBJECTION TO THE PROPERTY DUALISM ARGUMENT I have argued that in its strongest form the Knowledge Argument is a version of the Property Dualism Argument and is sound if the latter is sound. Several kinds of objections have been made against the Property Dualism Argument. Consider a recent one by Brian Loar. who responds to this objection to physicalism by attempting to explain away the pressure to posit mental properties along the mental-language route. He argues that there are fewer properties along that route than the Property Dualism Argument requires. He asserts that we can be led through the first-person ostensive perspective of what he calls "recognitional/imaginative concepts" to the very same physical properties of our brains that we are led to by way of the third-person perspective of the theoretical concepts of neuroscience. Given a normal background of cognitive capacities. certain recognitional or discriminative dispositions suffice for having specific recognitional concepts. which is just to say. suffice for the capacity to make judgments that depend specifically on those recognitional dispositions. Simple such judgments have the form: the object (event, situation) a is olle ()f that kind. where the cognitive backing for the predicate is just a recognitional disposition. i.e. a disposition to classify objects (events. situations) together. that often but not inevitably is linked with a specific imaginative capacity.
If a recognitional/imaginative concept is linked to the ability to class together things with the same objective property, Loar says that the property "triggers" applications of the concept. In that case, Loar writes. "the property that triggers the concept is the semantic value or reference of the concept: the cOllcept directly refers to the proper(\', ullmediated by a higher order reference~fixer" (my emphasis). And nothing, he argues, prevents the property picked out by some theoretical concept of neuroscience from also triggering some recognitionallimaginative concept, "so the two concepts can converge in their reference despite their cognitive independence.".j[) They would do this without introducing separate properties, since there would be no higher-order reference-fixer on the phenomenal-concept side at all to
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introduce new, further properties. This, if Loar is right, would refute the Property Dualism Argument. We can think up cases for which Loar's point is well-taken, but these are cases very different from those that generate the mind-body problem. Imagine someone, for example, who can, without physical evidence, report and categorize many of her own brain states, even states that lack qualitative character. Call her Marcy. For Marcy, there will be states lacking qualitative character, toward which she has what Horgan calls "the first-person ostensive perspective" and which she may refer to, both to herself and to others, using demonstratives. She reports her own brain states, but she does not do so in virtue of physiological or phenomenal evidence. Marcy has access to her states through separate routes that could create the illusion of dualism. Connections between states lacking qualitative character but demonstrated from the "first-person ostensive perspective" and states picked out through explicitly physical properties of the person could only be known a posterIori. Here it would not follow from someone's having two distinct forms of knowledge, forms not linked a priori but following distinct routes to the object of knowledge, that each route of knowledge would pick out its object in virtue of entirely distinct properties of or facts about the object. In this case, the direct reference would not pick out the object of reference, the brain state in question, in virtue of any properties of the referent of which the subject is aware. Instead, Marcy would "just know" she was having the brain state and would not make reference to it in virtue of evidence about it. To use Loar's terminology, Marcy has a recognitionall imaginative concept that is triggered by. and thus has as a semantic value, the very same property referred to by some theoretical concept of neurophysiology. The two concepts are linked a posteriori. But it would be wrong to conclude that they introduce distinct properties. Clearly they do not. In this example. however, Marcy is very much unlike us, and the example is thus beside the point when it comes to understanding creatures like us. The kind of case where Loar's argument most obviously works. such as the case of Marcy, is the kind with "just known" routes, in which predicates are applied in virtue of no properties of the referents. In those cases, we do not have "higher-order reference-fixers" or any other modes of presentation. But the normal case of demonstrative self-reference to one's own phenomenal states or to the phenomenal properties of them would seem to require modes of presentation. Unlike Marcy's states, our phenomenal states are normally present to us. and we type-identify them by virtue of the ways they are present. And given that such modes of presentation are distinct from any of the modes of presentation associated with the theoretical concepts of neuroscience, we can infer. at least prima facie, the existence of irreducibly phenomenal properties. distinct from any other properties. in virtue of which we normally pick out our own states.~1
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VII. NO COMMON-SENSEWAY OUT I see only three possible kinds of common-sense options open to the physicalist against this stronger version of the Knowledge Argument which incorporates the Property Dualism Argument. None of them seem adequate. Smart's strategy was proto-functionalist: that the psychological route to the referent runs by way of functional properties, not irreducibly phenomenal ones."" But this position, as I have indicated, has the same difficulty as Dennett's. The link between phenomenal and functional properties is a posteriori; Mary may need to learn what red is like even if she knows every4 thing functiona1. ' The second option is to continue the search for flaws in the mechanics of the Knowledge Argument. I argued that there is such a flaw in Jackson's version. I have tried to construct a version in which there are no such problems. Against this version, the physicalist might pursue Loar's strategy of showing that phenomenal-concept terms pick out referents without higherorder reference-fixers. I have not discussed all the ways someone might follow this strategy, but none seem very promising to me. A suggestion I have not considered, for example. is that these terms behave more like pure indexicals. contributing to truth-values solely in virtue of the circumstances of use. This option, however, runs up against the fact. noted in the literature, 4~ that pure indexicals are very different from demonstratives and descriptions. A last-ditch option for the physicalist. the last one I can see, is one that Colin McGinn has argued against Kripke."" McGinn never discusses Jackson. but it is clear how this form of argument might go. On this view, there exists a naturalistic theory fully explaining the dependence of consciousness on brain states, but this theory is beyond our limited human conceptual capacities to grasp. Psychophysical reductions are thus said to be "cognitively closed" to us, and the best the antireductionist could do is to show that phenomenal properties are physical but noumenal, beyond any humanly possible psychophysical reduction. But so far as I can see, not even such an extreme view as McGinn's helps. We do not accept the Property Dualism Argument and the stronger version of the Knowledge Argument based on it on grounds which an argument from "cognitive closure" would require. There is no place in the argument where we jump to property dualism merely from an inability to come up with an alternative. Rather, both arguments proceed from very general considerations about knowledge and reference that have wide application. Nothing seems to be "cognitively closed." Property dualism is not an attractive view. It is hard to see how to fit the Knowledge Argument and the Property Dualism Argument into the world view we get from biology and physics. My aim here has not been to argue for the Knowledge Argument but to show that a strong version of it can be constructed that withstands the best attacks made so far by critics. The 182
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Knowledge Argument thus remains a substantial obstacle for any defender of the standard materialist solutions to the mind-body problem, and if it is to be defeated, this will happen only with arguments more subtle, and probably more counterintuitive, than any previously made.
NOTES I. I am grateful to Ned Block, Brian Crabb, Dan Denncll. Robert Stalnaker, and Stephen White for discussions of earlier drafts of this paper. Parts of it were read under the title "The Knowledge Argument and the Property Dualism Argument" at the Pacitlc Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. San Francisco, March 31. 1995. 2. Daniel Dennett. Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little. Brown & Co., 1991 ), 459-60. 3. Frank Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia," Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982): 130. 4. Frank Jackson, "What Mary Didn't Know." Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 291. 5. Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia." 6. Jackson, "What Mary Didn't Know," 293. Besides this version and that of Thomas Nagel (see note 10), see also the version by Howard Robinson in his Matter and Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1982). 4-5, and his "Introduction" and "The Anti-Materialist Strategy and the 'Knowledge Argument.'" in Howard Robinson. ed .. Ohjections to Physicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993). 17-18 and 159. respectively. See also the version by John Foster in his The Immaterial Se(f (London: Routledge. 1991), 64. 7. By contrast. see Robert Van Gulick. "Understanding the Phenomenal Mind: Are We All Just Armadillos:" in Martin Davies and Glyn Humphreys. eds .. Consciousness: PSYchological and Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwell. 1993). 138---42. Van Gulick reviews many of these counterarguments against Jackson and endorses most of those he reviews. 8. See Howard Robinson. "Dennett on the Knowledge Argument." Anah'sis 53 (1993): 174-7; Brian Crabb, "Dennett, Robinson and the Knowledge Argument:' (ms., University of Liverpool); Dale Jacquette, PhilosophY of Mind (Englewood. N.J.: Prentice-Hall. 1994),56-7: Andrew Pessin, "Is the Blue Banana a Red Herring?" (paper read at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. December 29. 1993). 9. Joseph Levine. "On Leaving Out Whallt's Like," in Davies and Humphreys, op. cir., 125. 10. Thomas Nagel claims that it is "beyond our ability to conceive" the "specific subjective character" of the echolocating experiences of bats. See his "What Is It Like to Be a BatT' in his Morral Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1979), 170. In criticism of Nagel in his Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1992). 103. Owen Flanagan remarks that this is a general other-minds problem: "11' conceiving of the specific subjective character of the experiences of another means having the experiences exactly as the experiencer has them. then this never happens." But. of course. this is not just a problem about understanding other minds-the experiencer does not herself have the experiences as she has them ullIil she has them. 11. Hume's Enquin Concerning Human Understanding. ch. 2. 12. Dennett. op. cit., 400. But Robinson. in "Dennett on the Knowledge Argument." is also wrong to argue against Dennett that Mary would he surprised. On this point. see Crabh, op. cit. 13. Dennett, op. cit., 399. 14. In his "What Experience Teaches," in William G. Lycan. ed .. Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1990). 516. David Lewis claims that according to his Ability Hypothesis "knowing what an experience is like just is the possession of these abilities to remember. imagine and recognize." In his Metap/J.nics of' Consciollsness (London: Routledge, 1991), 157-8, William Seager argues that one can know what an
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15. 16. 17. I R.
19.
20.
21.
22.
experiencc is like without any of these abilities. In his rcview of Seager. Canadian loumal of Philosophy 24 ( 1994): 159-60. Christopher Hill argucs that a recognitional ahility is requircd. I will assume here. contrary to Hill's view, that any of the three abilities-to rememher. to imagine. or to recognize-is sufficient. Consider. for example. someone who. never having seen anything red. is nevcrtheless wired neurally to imagine seeing red. although she cannot ever hope to recognize anything as·red (let us suppose because of visual difficulties J. Paul Churchland. "'Reduction, Qualia. and the Direct Introspection of Brain States." lournal Philosophy 82 ( 1985): 25-6. I am indehted to Rohert Stalnaker for this point. Churchland. op. cit.. 26-7. Suppose that Humc's copy theory of ideas. even if untrue of the rest of us, were true of her: then by stipulation the blind Marilyn could not generate red in her imagination. But this seems consistent with also supposing her to know everything knowable in the language of the physical sciences. Owen Flanagan (op. cit.. 1(4) offers this possibility about how Mary might grasp what it is like to see red without actually having seen it: "Suppose that she discovers a novel way to tweak the red channel She discovers that staring at a black dot for a minute and then quickly downing a shot of brandy produces red hallucinations." In his C%rfor Philosophers (Indianapolis: Hackett. 1988).91-2. C. L. Hardin offers other ways in which one might do this. Bul. again. all this is beside the point. A friend of the Knowledge Argument can acknowledge the possibility that in creatures like us the neuroscientific expertise Mary has would enable hcr to grasp phenomenal red. even without seeing it exemplified in objects. Thc critic of the Knowledge Argument. however. must take the position that Mary \ neuroscientific expertise would not just enable her to do this but would constitute the grasping of phenomenal red. and this is implausible. For it seems easy to imagine a person in Maris shoes. someone perhaps unlike Mary biologically. who doesn't have the powers of hallucination Flanagan supposes but about whom we would say the things Jackson says of Mary. On the other hand. it does not seem to be required that Mary IIllist imagine or must hare imagined it. no more than she must imagine what it's like to see a golden mountain or. never having done it, ride a rollcr coaster in order to know what it's like to do so. Here the parallel between imagining and figuring out may break down. Someone's knowing what it's like to ride a roller CO
or
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23. See Lawrence Nemirow', review of Thomas Nagel's MOrIal Questio/ls. Philo.lOphicul Rel'ieH' 89 (1980): 475-6: and Lewis. op. cit.. esp. 514-18. 24. Jackson. "What Mary Didn't Know:' 293. 25. Brian Loar. "Phenomenal States." Philosophical Perspectil'es -+ (1990): 85, I take it that Loar must have something like this in mind when he links knowing hm\' with knowinf, thai. These are relevant to the Ability Hypothesis only if they can be linked to knowing hoH' to. On the relation between knowing hOI\' and knowing that. see also Stephen L White. The Ullity of the Seif(Cambridge. Mass.: MlT Press. 1991). 116. 26. Paul ChurchIand. A Neurocomputatimwl Perspectil'e (Cambridge. Mass.: MlT Press. 1989).68. 27. As Michael Tye does in his "The Subjective Qualities of Experience:' Milld 98 (1986): 12-13. n, 19. Tye' s example is closely related. and his account of it. which is a response to Horgan (see below). is much like the one that I entertain here, 28. Terence Horgan. "Jackson on Physical Information and Qualia." Philosophical Quarterly 34 (] 984): 150-1. Similar points are made by Flanagan. op. cit.. 98-9, The account Horgan provides of his assertion that Mary could not have had the information she expresses by (4) until being released from the room has a flaw. but one that is correctable, Horgan's explanation that one cannot have information about a phenomenal property "as experienced" before experiencing it is false, since before experiencing it. Mary can. at least by being told, know of the phenomenal property of seeing ripe tomatoes-the "phenomenal property as experienced"-that it is like the phenomenal property of seeing bright sunsets. What Horgan should have written is that Mary cannot have knowledge b\' acquaillfance before having the relevant experience-knowledge. that is, by what he calls the "first-person ostensh'e perspective." Mary can know that the phenomenal property as experienced has certain properties, but she cannot know. if Horgan is right. what it is like to be acquainted with the phenomenal property as experienced before experiencing it: or. to put it differently. Mary cannot. before experiencing it. have the first-person knowledge of the phenomenal property she expresses by directl) referring to the property-if Horgan', account is correct. 29. Related forms of criticism have been directed at the Knowledge Argument. Christopher Hill notes. rightly, that two items of knowledge might have different cliarac/{:'r (in Kaplan'., sense). as the items of knowledge Mary has and lacks do. but have the samc ('ol1telll. See his review of Seager. op. cit. Christopher Pcacocke notes. rightly. that index· ical knowledge can differ from nonindexical knowledge but have the same propositional content; see his "Ko Resting Place: A Critical Notice of The \/ieH'from NOIt'here. by Thomas NageL" Philosophical Redell' 98 (1989): 70-1. Like Horgan's argument. these are also attempts to shift the hurden of proof hack to Jackson. to require that he show why Mary', new knowledge cannot be accounted for in these ways, Related, but less relevant to Jackson's version of the argument. is John Perry's amnesiac, Lingens. who. lost in the Stanford library. might know any objective facts about the world you choose but still not know everything. since he might not knmv who he is or where he is. By contrast with Lingens_ Mary is missing knowledge ahout other people. not just herself: moreover. the anti physicalist might accept this description of Lingens but deny its compatibility with physicalism. See Perry's "Frege on Demonstratives," Philosophicol Ret'ie\) 86 (1977): 492.
30. Flanagan. op, cit., 99, makes a mistake about this. He insists that the error lies in premise (J). but elsewhere he accedes to Jackson's assumption that Mary knows the truth of ever) relevant statement that is explicitly physical. which is all Jackson says ("What Mary Didn't Know") he means by (1). 3 I. Jackson, "What Mary Didn't Know:' 291. Actually. Jackson endorses only this specific case of (P): If physicalism is true, then if you know everything expressed or expressible in explicitly physical language, you know everything. However. this is not enough: the argument needs (Pl. or at least the special case of it that replaces "such and such" with "other people." 32. Ihid.
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33. A recent defense of Jackson's argument might be thought to overcome this difficulty, but actually it stumbles in a similar way. Geoffrey Madell argues that criticisms of Jackson which rely on a distinction between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance, as do the writings of the Churchlands and others, are self-defeating. since "it must be clear this is not a distinction which is open to the physicalist to make." This distinction. he argues. "amounts to the claim that knowledge must be grounded in something which eludes description." Whatever such a thing is. Madell writes, the physicalist must hold that "it i~ some configuration of physical elements. and as such it must be describable. The physicalist cannot therefore accept that even the most complete physical description one could give would nevertheless fail to capture an aspect of what is described." Nor, therefore, if this were right. could the physicalist even distinguish a form of knowledge by acquaintance. This criticism, if sound, is general in its impact. defeating Horgan and Lewis as well. But it is not sound. The Churchlands, et aL accept that states of knowledge by acquaintance are configurations of physical elements and thus "describable." to use MadeIrs term. The contrast with knowledge by description is made not on the basis of differences in the physical describability of the havings of the two forms of knowledge-having knowledge by description and having knowledge by acquaintance, according to physicalists like the Churchlands. are both physically describable-but on the basis of differences in the ways in which the two forms of knowledge represent their objects. Roughly, we can say that knowledge by description represents objects of knowledge in virtue of definite descriptions. whereas representations employed in knowledge by acquaintance refer directly and express singular propositions. Or, to use the Churchlands' different formulation. knowledge by description is mastery of a "set of descriptive propositions." knowledge by acquaintance is "prelinguistic representation." In asserting that knowledge by acquaintance must be "describable." Madell fails to distinguish between the assertion that the state itself must be representable in virtue of defmite descriptions. with which the Churchlands would agree. and the assertion that the state's style ql'representation must be that of definite descriptions. which is false. Because it is false. Madel! has failed to show that this distinction is unavailable to the physicalist. See Geoffrey Madel!. "Neurophilosophy: A Principled Sceptic's Response." Inquiry 29 (1986): ISS. See also his Mind and Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 1988).80-3. 34. For convenience. I will construe mass terms as singular terms. The clearest and fullest statement of the objection is that of Stephen White. "Curse of the Qualia:' S.mlhe.le 68 (1986): 351-3. Labeling it with the name "the Property Dualism Argument" is due to White. It was first reported by J. J. C. Smart and linked to Black in Smart's "Sensation, and Brain Processe<' in V. C. Chappell. ed., The Philosophy of Mind (Englewood Cliffs. N.J.: Prentice-Hall. 1962), 166--7. 35. See. among others. the references cited in note 42. 36. Loar. op. cit.. 83-4. In his Sensations (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1991 l. 100-1. Christopher Hill argues that this is inadequate for motivating property dualism. His reasoning is that the references of physical-language expression, are fixed by (a) properties which are the mode, of presentation of the referents of such expressions. and that while it follows from what I have argued in the text that these properties will be distinct from (h) any properties that are modes of presentation of the referents of mental-language expressions. still (h) may not be distinct from (e) certain properties which are themselves referents of physical-language expressions. since (a) will be disjoint from (e). This counterargument seems to rest on making the distinction between (a) and (e) something like a distinction between observable and theoretical properties. If there is such a distinction. however. it is contingent where the line between the two sorts of properties will fall. (On this point at least, I am in agreement with Churchland, op. cit., 13-14.) Hill's counterargument must be successful wherever the line falls. but no reason is given to think it would be. 37. This idea. of course. comes from Frege. 38. The term "mode of pre,entation" appears in the discussion by White. op. cit" of the argument against physicalism being defended here. The term "manner of presentation" and
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39.
40. 41.
4~.
43.
44.
45.
most of the rest of the terminology that appears in this paragraph comes from David Kaplan, "Demonstratives"' and 'Afterthoughts."' in Joseph Almog. John PelT). and Howard Wettstein. eds .. Themes from Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Pres,. 1989). -+89-91. 514-15, 5~6-7, and 58~-3. My one addition is my usc of the term "context"' in place of Kaplan's use of the term "picture." His term conceals. I think. the f
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 22 KO. I & 2. SPRI:-JG AND
FALL
1994
Dennett's Logical Behaviorism
Brian P. McLaughlin Rutgers University
John O'Leary-Hawthorne Australial1 National University
I. A SUPERVENIENCE THESIS In a recent symposium on Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained. I Frank Jackson aptly notes: The truth-maker question for materialists is to specify what it is about a person's material nature (widely understood so as not to exclude. for instance. material environment) which necessitates their psychological nature.'
''The problem" in understanding Dennett's materialism, he goes on to say. "is that Dennett leaves it unclear where he stands on the truth-maker question.'" "Behaviorism," Jackson reminds us. "says that what makes it true that people have mental states are certain facts about their behavioral dispositions"; and this answer to the truth-maker question. he notes. implies the following psycllOphysical supen'ellience thesis: "[N]ecessarily. if two organisms are behaviorally exactly alike. they are psychologically exactly alike."" Jackson further observes that (in Consciousness Erplained) Dennett sometimes seems to at least implicitly endorse this supervenience thesis. Where. then. he asks. does Dennett stand on "the truth-maker question"?
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Dennett is forthright in his response: Jackson is absolutely right in claiming that L as a materialist, must answer the truth-maker question.-'
And he answers the question as follows: Let me confirm Jackson's surmise that I am his behaviorist; I unhesitatingly endorse the claim that necessarily, if two organisms are behaviorally exactly alike, they are psychologically exactly alike."
It would thus appear that Dennett has now come out and made it clear what his answer to the truth-maker question is. His materialism is a brand of behaviorism: It implies that behaviorally indiscernible organisms (behavioral "twins") cannot fail to be psychologically indiscernible (psychological "twins")-i.e., psychological nature supervenes on behavior. (Hereafter, we will call this simply 'the supervenience thesis'.) The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, to see how the supervenience thesis squares with views Dennett has expressed elsewhere, and, second, to argue that the thesis (even qualified in ways suggested below) is false. The first of these aims might be thought to be in need of defense. Since we want to argue that the thesis is false and since Dennett says he "unhesitatingly endorses" it, why are we going to discuss how it fits in with views he has expressed elsewhere? While the general themes of Dennett's theory of mind are well known, there has been considerable controversy over what. exactly, the details of the theory are, even over whether the theory is a kind of behaviorism. We think that certain of Dennett's long-standing views commit him to the supervenience thesis, and thus to a brand of behaviorism. For these reasons. and because this issue of Philosophical Topics is devoted to Dennett's work. we thought our first aim appropriate. In carrying it out. we will look very closely at Dennett's texts. We should note at the outset, however, that we will restrict our attention to Dennett's discussions of intentionality, remaining silent about his views concerning consciousness that are expressed in Consciousness Explained. In section II, we will say how we think the supervenience thesis should be understood-in particular. how 'behaviorally exactly alike' and 'psychologically exactly alike' should be understood. In section III, we will make a case that Dennett has long held views about intentionality that entail the thesis; he is a sort of behaviorist as far as ordinary "propositional attitudes" are concerned. In section IV, we will further explicate our interpretation of Dennett's views by defending them against some objections. Finally, in section V. we will argue that the supervenience thesis is false, and thus that Dennett's behaviorism should be rejected.
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II. HOW THE SUPERVENIENCE THESIS SHOULD BE UNDERSTOOD To begin, the supervenience thesis conflicts with Dennett's avowed externalism about content. 7 According to his externalism, Dennett and his TwinEarth doppelganger, Twin-Dennett, will differ in some of their beliefs and desires, and thus differ psychologically.H But, it might be argued, Dennett and Twin-Dennett will be exactly alike behaviorally. If they will be, then the supervenience thesis is false. In response, it might be countered that they will not be exactly alike behaviorally. There is a familiar distinction between wide and narrow behavior. Wide behavior is narrow behavior within an environmental circumstance. Narrow behavior is intrinsic behavior of an organism such as, for example, kicking. Wide behavior. in contrast, can include such things as kicking a chair. Wide behavior and wide behavioral dispositions are partly environmentally characterized. Dennett and Twin-Dennett have the same narrow behavior but different wide behavior. Dennett often drinks water; Twin-Dennett never does. Moreover, it may be argued that Dennett and Twin-Dennett have different di5positiolls to wide behavior. Dennett is disposed to drink water in certain circumstances, while Twin-Dennett is, instead, disposed to drink rn,'ater (XYZ). This last claim, however, can be challenged. Dispositions to wide behavior are just dispositions to narrow behavior relative to an environmental context. Dennett and Twin-Dennett. it might be claimed, have exactly the same dispositions to wide behavior and not just the same dispositions to narrow behavior." Dennett and Twin-Dennett are arguably disposed to drink water (and arguably disposed to drink twater) in exactly the same environmental contexts. And the one will be disposed to kick a chair in a certain environmental context (one in which a chair is suitably situated) if and only if the other is. In any case, even if two organisms are exactly alike behaviorally both narrowly and widely, Dennett's externalism may allow that they can differ psychologically. He sometimes appears to hold that the contents of psychological states depend, in part, on historical environmental context. where that context can include the selectional history of the species to which the organism belongs .1<) 1f he endorses such a historical constraint on psychological profile. then his externalism allows that Dennett and Twin-Dennett can differ in their psychological profiles despite the fact that they are exactly alike behaviorally both narrowly and widely. Dennett does not address any of these issues in his response to Jackson. We will assume that Dennett was simply ignoring such complications in order to avoid prolixity and obscuring qualification. He elsewhere explicitly distinguishes what he calls 'the organismic contribution' to an organism's
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11
psychological nature from the environmental cDntribution. These factors jointly necessitate an organism's psychological nature, but neither does so alone. We will assume that Dennett's position is that "the organismic contribution" to the truth-maker question consists of narrow behavioral facts. But we will also assume that by 'behaviorally exactly alike' in the supervenience thesis, he means exactly alike with respect to both narrow and wide behavior, and dispositions to such. (If we have, thereby, included more in the behavioral supervenience bases for psychological respects than he intends, that would only make the supervenience thesis weaker and thus more difficult to falsify. ) The environmental contribution to an organism's psychological nature will not be a central topic in this paper. The supervenience thesis implies this weaker thesis: Necessarily, if two organisms are narrowly and widely behaviorally exactly alike and environmentally exactly alike. then they are psychologically exactly alike. We think that it is really only this weaker l thesis that Dennett unhesitatingly endorses. : Our primary concern will be the organismic contribution to psychological nature, in particular, whether it consists only of narrow behavioral facts-facts about actual narrow behavior and about dispositions to narrow behavior. But nothing in what follows will tum on the distinction between narrow and broad behavior. In section V. we will argue that the supervenience thesis is false on grounds that make no appeal to externalism about content. To anticipate. the problem with the thesis is, rather, that behavior and dispositions to behave do not exhaust the organismic contribution to psychological nature. and indeed are not even an essential part of that contribution. The point to underscore for now, however, is that Dennett appears to be endorsing a sort aflogical behaviorism in his response to Jackson: The truthmakers for psychological profiles are (wide and narrow) behavioral facts (in conjunction with environmental ones). However, it may well be thought that there are many passages in Dennett's work that are in tension with this sort of behaviorism. Consider: Am I a behaviorisfl Tom Nagel and John Searle have always wanted to insist on it, and now [Patricia] Churchland concurs, and so does Dahlbom, who very accurately describes my position but imposes a label I abhor [viz .. 'logical behaviorist"]. I agree that there is historical justification for the label, spelled out by Dahlbom, but most people don't appreciate the subtleties of that justification, and hence are drastically misled by the term's connotations. I.'
Moreover, it appears that it is not just the label that Dennett abhors, for he emphatically insists that The standard arguments against both Skinnerian and Rylean behaviorism do not touch my view; indeed, I am the author of
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some of those arguments ("Skinner Skinned," "A Cure for the Common Code'"). My anti-behaviorist credentials are impecI cable. '
Consider also, and in particular, the following passage: The tricky word 'behavior' can be understood to mean something like 'peripheral: 'external', 'readily observable' behavior. I am not now and have never been that kind of behaviorist. I am the kind of behaviorist that every biologist and physicist is."
Logical behaviorism is concerned only with "peripheral" or "external" or "readily observable" behavior and dispositions to such-roughly. an organism's moving or posturing its body in "overt" ways (e.g .. its standing up, or its moving its arm or paw, or its remaining still). and its doing things that involve its moving or posturing its body in overt ways (e.g .. its running across the street, or its catching a ball. or its drinking water), and its dispositions to do such. Such narrow and wide behavior involves "peripheral" movements or postures of the body. It, The passage last quoted should give one pause before taking Dennett to be "unhesitatingly endorsing" any sort of logical behaviorism in his response to Jackson. Indeed, it may well seem that unless Dennett is expressing a new view in that response. it would be a mistake to take him to be endorsing any sort of logical behaviorism. For. unless he has changed his mind. this earlier passage certainly strongly suggests, to put it mildly. that he would deny that he holds a kind of behaviorism that, like logical behaviorism, concerns itself only with peripheral behavior and dispositions to such. He is, rather, he tells us, just "the kind of behaviorist that every biologist and physicist is." But what kind of behaviorist is that? Dennett elaborates: The biologist says that once the behm'ior of the pancreas or the chromosome or the immune system is completely accounted for. everything important is completely accounted for. The physicist says the same about the behavior of the electron. I'
It is uncertain what is meant by 'behavior' here. But. whatever is meant. suppose. just for the sake of argument. that once the behavior of a psychological subject is accounted for, everything important for a psychologist (qua psychologist) is accounted for. If the supervenience thesis were true. then it would be puzzling how psychological states and processes could account for behavior. How does the supervenient explain the subvenient? If the supervenience thesis were true and there were an explanatory connection. one would expect it to go in the other direction. To add to the perplexity. in the very same year as his response to Jackson, Dennett made the following remarks: But people like a memorable label for a view, or at least a slogan, so since I reject the label ['behaviorism'], I'll provide a
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~Iogan: "once you've explained everything that happens, you've 1 explained everything." Now is that behaviorism? No. >
Indeed, it is not. I" Here Dennett appears to be dissociating himself from any sort of behaviorism. The passage seems to conflict with his response to Jackson only months later. The use of 'his' in "let me confirm Jackson's surmise that I am his behaviorist" does not help to remove the perplexity. For unless "behaviorally exactly alike" or "psychologically exactly alike" is being used in some unusual way. Dennett's endorsement of the supervenience thesis makes him everyone's behaviorist. What is it to be a behaviorist if not to endorse the thesis that necessarily, if two organisms are behaviorally exactly alike, they are psychologically exactly alike? However, the passage in question ("But people like a memorable label. ...") is, to our knowledge, the only one in which he eschews the label 'behaviorism' altogether. He has long used the label in qualified ways to characterize his views. Let us look at some passages that might be thought to provide clues as to the sort of behaviorism he might be endorsing in 'his response to Jackson, if he is indeed not endorsing any sort of logical behaviorism. Dennett says in one place that Searle is mistaken "about my behaviorism, when he insists that my third-person point of view compels me to 'Iook only at external behavior', but remember that everything the neuroscientist can look at is also external behavior by this criterion.,,2o Dennett would, then, it appears, allow that there are other sorts of behavioral differences than peripheral behavioral differences that can make for psychological differences, that the kinds of internal-to-the-brain behavioral ditferences neuroscientists investigate, differences in the behavior of neurons and complex chemicals, can make for psychological differences. If there is a brand of behaviorism here, it is certainly not Rylean or Skinnerian behaviorism. Indeed, Dennett says elsewhere in response to Searle that his (Dennett's) behaviorism is the bland "behaviorism" of the physical sciences in general, not any narrow Skinnerian or Watsonian (or Rylean) dogma. Behavior in this bland sense, includes all intersubjectively observable internal processes and events (such as the behavior of your gut or your RNA)."
It may appear, then, that not just peripheral behavior, and not just that and everything the neuroscientist can look at, but "all intersubjectively observable internal processes and events" of organisms count as their behavior in Dennett's intended sense. This is an unusual use of 'behavior', but let us follow it and see where it leads. The distinction that emerges from Dennett's texts between peripheral behaviorism and a sort of behaviorism that includes under the heading of 'behavior' "everything the neuroscientist can look at," indeed "all intersub-
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jectively observable internal processes and events," bears a close resemblance to a distinction C. D. Broad drew explicitly some seventy years ago. In the context of discussing the wave of behaviorism that was then sweeping from the United States to England, Broad distinguished "molar" behaviorism from "molecular" behaviorism. Molar behaviorism is close to what Dennett calls 'peripheral behaviorism'; it is, roughly, the view that the truth-makers for mental attributions are facts about disposition to "gross overt actions. like shrieking and kicking."" In contrast, molecular behaviorism includes under the heading of 'behavior' all this and any molecular behavior occurring in the body and brain. 2) One might wonder, then, whether Dennett's brand of behaviorism is just molecular behaviorism. Perhaps, in his response to Jackson, he does not intend to be endorsing molar or peripheral behaviorism but only molecular behaviorism. However, if so, his response to Jackson remains puzzling. For it is quite clear from Jackson's texts that by 'behaviorally exactly alike' in the statement of the supervenience thesis, he means exactly alike with respect to peripheral behavior. Indeed, he offers Ned Block's example of a giant look-up table (what has come to be called a 'Blockhead') with the same behavioral dispositions as a normal human being as raising "a serious problem" for the supervenience thesis.'''' But. of course, a Blockhead will be exactly like a human being only, at best. with respect to dispositions to peripheral behavior; the behavior of the innards of a Blockhead will be quite different from those of any human being. If behavior includes "everything the neuroscientist can look at." then, as we are sure Jackson would readily agree, Blockheads pose no problem at all for the supervenience thesis, not even an apparent problem. For no Blockhead is a molecular behavioral twin of any human being. If. then, in his response to Jackson, Dennett does not mean by 'behaviorally exactly alike' exactly alike with respect to peripheral behavior but means instead exactly alike with respect to all behavior, "including any behavior the neuroscientist can look at," then he is not really agreeing with Jackson. The supervenience thesis Dennett endorses is not the one Jackson proposes. Dennett simply misunderstands Jackson's surmise when he says: "I am his behaviorist," He is not Jackson's behaviorist. Jackson has him pegged for a molar or peripheral behaviorist. But he isn't: he is, rather. simply a molecular behaviorist. Jackson complained that "the problem," in understanding Dennett's materialism, "is that Dennett leaves it unclear where he stands on the truthmaker question." Dennett tried to clear that up, but, as we have just seen, a problem remains. The problem now is to understand what Dennett means by 'behaviorally exactly alike' in the supervenience thesis he endorses in response to Jackson. If Dennett is not a peripheral behaviorist but only a molecular behaviorist, then an observation Broad made about molecular behaviorism is well
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worth repeating here. Molecular behaviorism, he observed, "is just old fashioned materialism which has crossed the Atlantic under an alias."c, If 'behaviorally exactly alike' is understood in the sense of molecular behaviorism, then the supervenience thesis Dennett endorses is implied hyoId fashioned cn materialism. If Dennett is not a molar or peripheral behaviorist but only a molecular hehaviorist, then there truly has been much ado about nothing. Molecular behaviorism is a brand of hehaviorism that, we think. Searle, for one. would join Dennett in unhesitatingly endorsing.'7 Newfangled materialists, persuaded by Twin-Earth thought experiments. will insist that material environment must be included in the supervenience base for intentional states, capacities, and dispositions. (Dennett is himself, you will recall, a newfangled materialist.) But no materialist would quarrel with the thesis that necessarily. if two organisms are molecular behavioral twins and material environmental twins, then they will be psychological twins.'~ If Dennett has been using 'behavior' in the molecular behaviorist's sense, then, had that fact heen appreciated, an awful lot of fuss in print could have been avoided. No materialists will disagree with him about the organismic contribution to our psychological nature. However, we don't think that Dennett intends to be just endorsing molecular behaviorism in his recent response to Jackson.'" By 'behaviorally exactly alike' Dennett means exactly alike with respect to peripheral behavior and dispositions to such. He is, we believe. endorsing peripheral behaviorism (as concerns the organismic contribution). One reason for thinking this-in addition to wanting to read him charitably as not having blatantly misunderstood Jackson-is that Dennett does not respond to Jackson's claim that Blockheads pose a serious problem for the supervenience thesis by pointing out that a Blockhead could not be a molecular behavioral twin of any human being. But that would have been the obvious response if being behaviorally exactly alike includes being exactly alike with respect to everything the neuroscientist can look at. Another reason is that Dennett appears to say in response to Jackson that the ahility to pass the Turing Test suffices for having mentality. ", And the Turing Test, as Dennett himself notes in his response to Jackson. is a "simple 'external' behavioral test,,'1 for mentality. (Whether it is indeed a test for mentality depends. of course, on whether the presence of the patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior it could be used to test for suffice for mentality.) If an individual can pass the Turing Test, then so can any peripheral behavioral twin of it. Thus, if a Blockhead is a peripheral hehavioral twin of an individual who can pass the Turing Test, then that Blockhead can pass the Turing Test too. But if Dennett is endorsing peripheral behaviorism in his response to Jackson, has he changed his mind and decided that he is. after all, a peripheral behaviorist: The short answer is "no," for he has not changed his mind.
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He has been a peripheral behaviorist all along. We proceed now to give the long answer. To begin, what do we make of his apparent denials of peripheral behaviorism? Consider, once again, the following passage: The standard arguments against both Skinnerian and Rylean behaviorism do not touch my view: indeed, I am the author of some of those arguments (",Skinner Skinned," "A Cure for the Common Code"). My anti-behaviorist credentials are impeccable.':
Dennett's views about intentionality indeed differ in striking ways from those of Skinner and Ryle. He emphatically rejects Skinnerian psychology." And unlike Skinner and Ryle, he does not deny the possibility of a scientific intentional psychology. 1~ On the contrary. Dennett has long championed cognitive psychology. which, as he himself has often pointed out, is full of intentional hypotheses. He holds that there may well be inner mental processes in which mental representations participate. Some years ago he remarked that one probably ought to be able to construct a compelling argument to the effect that the brain couldn't function in such a way that intentional explanations work to the extent that they do unless there were in fact perspicuous functional divisions, with the functions of larger divisions being functions of smaller or subsidiary brain parts. such that we could consider these functional parts as representations in some sense. 50
In more recent years. he has at times expressed considerable sympathy with the view that there is a full-blown Fodorian "language of thought."'" For example, he says: Now somehow the brain has solved the problem of combinatorial explosion. It is a gigantic network of billions of cells, but still finite. compact. reliable, and swift. and capable of learning new behaviors, vocabularies. theories, almost without limit. Some elegant, gelleratil'e, indefinitely extendable principles of representation must be responsible. We have only one model of such a representation system: a human language. So the argument for a language of thought comes down to this: what else could it be"? We have so far been unable to imagine any plausible alternative in any detail. That is a good enough reason, I think, for recommending as a matter of scientific tactics that we pursue the hypothesis as far as we can. ,-
Since the new wave of connectionism, Dennett's enthusiasm for the language of thought hypothesis has waned. but he remains open to the possibility that we (human beings) possess a language of thought." And the following may still be his considered position: Ryle said. aprioristically, that we cOltldn 'f be mentalrepresentation-manipulators; Fodor and others have said.
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aprioristically, that we must be. Some of the details of the computer metaphor suggest what we might be, and in so doing may eventually shed light on what we are. W
However, perhaps he would now underscore the word 'may' too. But given that by 'behaviorally exactly alike' he means exactly alike with respect to peripheral behavior, how does this willing embrace of cognitive psychology square with his endorsement of the supervenience thesis? The intentional factors postulated by cognitive psychology do not supervene on behavior. We are led to this question: What does he mean by 'psychologically exactly alike' in the supervenience thesis? We contend that Dennett does not mean to include all of the psychological respects cognitive psychology deals with under the heading of 'psychologically exactly alike'. The context of Dennett's reply to Jackson indicates that he is tacitly restricting the psychological to beliefs, desires, intentions, hopes, fears, and the like, to the so-called "ordinary propositional attitudes." That is to say, by 'psychologically exactly alike' he means exactly alike with respect to beliefs, desires, and their kin and does not mean to include all the intentional phenomena covered by cognitive psychology. Similarly, when Dennett acknowledges that the truth-makers for psychological attributions consist of facts about dispositions to peripheral behavior (together with environmental facts). his acknowledgment concerns only the truth-makers for attributions of belief. desire, and the like. not all attributions of cognitive states. Recall that Dennett admits that there is "historical justification" for labeling him, as Dahlbom does, a 'logical behaviorist' .-10 His well-known intentional system theory (to be described in detail below), a theory he first proposed in 1971-11 and has been developing and refining since, above all provides the warrant for that label. The Intentional Stance. a book largely devoted to intentional system theory and its relationships to other doctrines about intentionality. introduces the term 'behavior' as a term for the "observable macro-activity,,-1C of whole systems. Moreover, Dennett himself labels intentional system theory "a sort of holistic logical behaviorism"·' and tells us that it explicates "folk psychology ... as a sort of logical behaviorism."4-J Indeed. as we will see shortly, the term 'logical behaviorism' occurs frequently in his characterizations of the theory. The subject matter of the theory is precisely belief. desire, intention, and the like. And, like logical behaviorism, intentional system theory concerns itself with peripheral behavior only, not with "everything the neuroscientist can look at," not with "all intersubjectively observable inner states and processes." Intentional system theory "treats the individual realizations of ... [intentional] systems as black boxes,'·-1' Dennett notes that it is the fact that "intentional system theory is almost literally a black box theory, which makes it behavioristic to philosophers like Searle and Nagel:,-l6 Indeed it is, and not just to Searle and Nagel.
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But how do we square our interpretation of intentional system theory with the remarks: "The tricky word 'behavior' can be understood to mean something like 'peripheral', 'external', 'readily observable' behavior. I am not now and have never been that kind of behaviorist,,?"7 We could easily square these remarks with our interpretation were they made only in the context of discussing cognitive psychology. But unfortunately, they were not; propositional attitudes were also on the table for discussion. We think, however, that Dennett was simply remiss in not making it clear that the remarks concerned only his view of the domain of cognitive psychology. How, then, do we square our view that Dennett is a sort of logical behaviorist with these remarks quoted earlier: "People like a memorable label for a view, or at least a slogan, so since I reject the label ['behaviorism']' I'll provide a slogan: 'once you've explained everything that happens, you've explained everything: Now is that behaviorism? No"?"' These remarks immediately follow Dennett's "My anti-behaviorist credentials are impeccable" declaration. To be frank, we are simply unable to square the remarks either with the earlier texts in which Dennett presents and defends intentional system theory or with his nearly contemporaneous response to Jackson. However, we have a speculation about Dennett's frame of mind when he dissociated himself from behaviorism in the passage in question ("But people like a memorable label ..."). We feel justified in our speCUlation because he reveals his frame of mind in the relevant surrounding text. Shortly before the remarks in question, he says: If I held a view that could be seen. in a certain light, to be a sort of dualism. I'd be extremely reluctant to "admit it." since the debates that ensued would so boringly gravitate towards defending my view against all the old arguments."';
We can all relate to the worry that if we identify ourselves with an "ism," someone will lay a simple-minded interpretation on our view and trot out "the old arguments," whether they are applicable or not. And Dennett shares with us a quite unpleasant experience of this sort: I once made the mistake of acquiescing. in a cooperative spirit. when Ned Block suggested that I should let myself be called an instrumentalist. Never again. In
(Yes, this counts as putting the blame on someone else. But let us listen while he shares his experience, rather than jumping to criticize.) Dennett goes on: When I let myself be counted as an instrumentalist. I then found I had to work very hard to undo the damage. People quite naturally reasoned that if I was a self-professed instrumentalist. and if some dime-store argument refuted instrumentalism. the same must refute me.' I
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Dennett is quite understanding about this sort of thing. He doesn't claim to be above it himself. We all go in for this sort of reasoning. If I learn that somebody is an idealist, or a dualist, my initial working assumption is going to be that this person holds a forlorn view. since the "refutations" of idealism and dualism are well known."
It is. we believe, this unpleasant experience with the term 'instrumentalism' that accounts for the remarks in question. It was fear of "isms" that drove him to make them. The fear is. of course, not only understandable, but justifiable. Use of the labels 'behaviorism' and 'logical behaviorism' might well lead someone who took only a quick look to mistake him for some Ray Bolger caricature. BUL of course. we all risk being uncharitably understood when we say what we helieve. Still. we must say what we believe. Ism labels are useful: though, of course, they should be used with caution. If one uses an 'ism' and that leads critics to trot out the old arguments, that is not necessarily a bad thing. If an old argument is obviously inapplicable. it is nothing to worry about. One can trust that folks will realize that. If it fails for subtle reasons. there may be something to be learned from its failure. And, of course, there is always the chance that one or another of the old arguments runs deeper than one realized. One might think one's account escapes the argument when, in fact, it doesn't. And if so, that is important to find out. Anyway, to his credit. only months after making the remarks in question. Dennett forthrightly tells us: Let me confirm Jackson's surmise that I am his behaviorist; I unhesitatingly endorse the claim that necessarily, if two organisms are behaviorally exactly alike. they are psychologically exactl y alike."
We understand him to be endorsing the following thesis: Necessarily. if two organisms are exactly alike with respect to their actual (narrow and wide) peripheral behavior and dispositions to such (as well as exactly alike environmentally), then they are exactly alike with respect to their beliefs, desires. and the like. Of course, we may be wrong: Perhaps we too have misunderstood Dennett. If we have. we invite him to try. once again, to clarify his position on the truth-maker question by answering the following: What, exactly, is meant by 'behaviorally exactly alike' and by 'psychologically exactly alike' in the supervenience thesis? However, in section III. we will make a textual case that intentional system theory implies the supervenience thesis as we construe it. The theory is /lot an instrumentalist theory, though it is a sort of logical behaviorism.'4 It does not imply that beliefs and desires are theoretical fictions that never-
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theless have predictive utility, but rather (roughly) that exhaustive beliefdesire profiles describe global patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior within an environmental context." We will present intentional system theory in section III without pausing for criticism. Then, to further clarify the theory, we will, in section IV, pose and respond to some objections to it. Finally, in section V, we will argue that the organismic contribution to beliefdesire profiles does not consist only in facts about dispositions to peripheral behavior and that the supervenience thesis is thus false. Since it is, and since intentional system theory implies it. the theory should be rejected.
III. INTENTIONAL SYSTEM THEORY IMPLIES THE SUPERVENIENCE THESIS Intentional system theory, Dennett tells us, is "a self-consciously abstract idealization of folk psychology:,ob "Folk psychology." he notes, "is the perspective that invokes the family of 'mentalistic' concepts, such as belief. desire, knowledge, fear. pain. expectation. intention. understanding. dreaming. imagination. self-consciousness. and so on."'" Gilbert Ryle's The COllcept (~lMind'x could. he says, serve as a good introductory textbook of folk psychology."! It meticulously studies folk psychology "'in the field." Intentional system theorists begin with folk psychology. However. Dennett tells us, intentional system theorists do not attempt to capture "what folk psychology in the field truly is. but [rather] what it is at its best. what deserves to be taken seriously and incorporated into science:,oll Intentional system theorists are engaged in a proto-scientific quest ... an attempt to prepare folk [psychology1 for subsequent incorporation into, or reduction to. the rest of • fol sCIence.
Given this quest. such theorists should be critical and should eliminate all that is false or ill founded. however well entrenched in popular doctrine,'"
rather than simply meticulously record folk-psychological platitudes. Intentional system theory attempts. moreover. to systematize. idealize. and precisionize (this last is not Dennett's term) folk-psychological notions of belief, desire. intention, and their kin. Dennett's favorite analogy is the relationship the notion of Turing-computability bears to the intuitive. informal notion of computability.'" He tells us that According to Church's Thesis, every "effective" procedure in mathematics is recursive, that is, Turing-computable. Church's Thesis is not provable. since it hinges on the intuitive and informal notion of an effective procedure. but it is generally accepted, and it provides a very useful reduction of a fuzzy-but-
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useful mathematical notion to a crisply defined notion of apparently equal scope and greater power. Analogously, the claim that every mental phenomenon alluded to in folk psychology is intentional-svstem-characteri:able would, if true, provide a reduction of the mental as ordinarily understood-a domain whose boundaries are at best fixed by mutual acknowledgment and shared intuition-to a clearly defined domain of entities whose principles of organization are familiar, relatively formal and systematic, and entirely generaL'';
As we will see, Dennett has already presented the broad outlines of intentional system theory, arguing that belief, desire, and their kin are intentionalsystem-characterizable. The main work left to be done by intentional system theorists, as he appears to see it, consists of showing how various other folkpsychological notions are intentional-system-characterizable."< It should be emphasized at the outset that it is a mistake to view intentional system theory as offering entirely stipulative notions of belief. desire, and their kin that are in no way beholden to the folk-psychological notions. The theory purports, as Dennett says, to be a reduction of the intentional "'as ordinarily understood."'6 Indeed, he tells us that "A prospect worth exploring is that folk psychology (more precisely, the part of it worth caring about) reduces-conceptually-to intentional system theory."b" Of this idea of conceptual reduction, more shortly. Dennett tells us that: Folk psychology is abstract in that the beliefs and desires it attributes are not-or need not be-presumed to be intervening distinguishable states of an internal behavior-causing system."
Rather than opficatin[!, folk psychology as a proto-scientific theory of intervening (between stimulation conditions and behavioral response) distinguishable states of an internal behavior-causing system, intentional system theory explicates it as a kind of logical behaviorism. Dennett tells us: I am claiming. then. that folk psychology can best be viewed as a sort of logical behaviorism: what it means to say that someone believes that p. is that that person is disposed to behave in certain ways under certain conditions.(··'
However. unlike Rylean logical behaviorism,70 intentional system theory is a sort of holistic logical behaviorism because it deals with the prediction and explanation from belief-desire profiles of the actions of whole systems (either alone in environments or in interactions with other intentional systems), but it treats the individual realizations of the systems as black boxes .... and individual beliefs and desires are not attributable in isolation, independently of other belief and desire attributions. The latter point distinguishes intentional system theory most clearly from RyJe's logical behaviorism, which took on the impossible burden of characterizing individual beliefs (and other mental
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states) as particular individual dispositions to outward behavi or. . i
There is much to discuss in this compressed passage. To begin. like Rylean logical behaviorism. intentional system theory. in answering the truth-maker question, cites facts about dispositions to "outward" (i.e., peripheral) behavior. However. unlike Rylean logical behaviorism. intentional system theory eschews "the impossible burden of characterizing individual beliefs (and other mental states) as particular individual 2 dispositions to outward behavior.,,7 As is well known. the realization of the impossibility of this burden is one of the primary factors that led to the demise of logical behaviorism. William Alston nicely summarizes the problem: Analytical [i.e .. logical] behaviorism sought to construe a belief or a desire as a disposition to behave in a certain way. given certain conditions. Thus a belief that it is raining might be thought of as a set of dispositions that includes. e.g .. the dispo· sition to carry an umbrella if one goes out. Behaviorism failed because it was committed to the thesis that each indil'iduaf psychological state determines a set of dispositions to behavior. Human beings just are not wired that simply. Whether I will carry an umbrella if I go out is determined not just by whether I believe that it is raining. but rather by that in conjunction with my desire to keep dry. my preferences with respect to alternate ways of keeping dry. my beliefs about the other consequences of carrying an umbrella. and so on. Even if I believe that it is raining I might not carry an umbrella, if I am wearing a raincoat and hat and I believe that is sufficient. or if I do not object to getting Viet. or if I believe that I will project an unwanted image by carrying an umbrella. What I do is not just a function of a single psychological state but rather of the total psychological "field" at the moment.~;
Eschewing the impossible burden, intentional system theory is a holistic logical behaviorism. It characteri::,es exhaustive belief-desire patterns as highl:,; determinable global patterns of di!>positions to peripheral behavior.~-l Like Rylean logical behaviorism, intentional system theory treats "the individual realizations of the [intentional] systems as black boxes:'"' Dennett tells us: Intentional system theory deals just with the performance specifications of believers while remaining silent on how the systems are to be implemented."
However. while intentional system theory treats the realizations of (intentional) systems as black boxes, it nevertheless makes some minimal assumptions about what is inside. It is thus not literally a black box theory. Rylean behaviorism employed the phenomenalistic notion of a disposition. the simple counterfactual notion, according to which an object possesses a
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disposition iff some appropriate counterfactual is true of it.;; But that would be an accidental feature of intentional system theory were Dennett to adopt it. It is unfortunate that, with all of his talk of dispositions, Dennett has not (to our knowledge, at least) discussed what dispositions themselves are. We will assume. however, that his holistic logical behaviorism eschews simple counterfactual analyses of dispositions. Dennett holds that dispositions must be "realized" in the system. We will take it that a system's possessing a disposition is not reducible to certain counterfactuals being true of it. Unlike Rylean logical behaviorism, intentional system theory, as we will understand 7 it. requires that dispositions have bases within the system. < Moreover. unlike Rylean behaviorism, the theory finds a place for scientific psychology. Dennett says: [The J microtheoretical science of the actual realizations of ... intentional systems [is 1 what I will call sub-personal cognitive psychology.,q
Subpersonal cognitive psychology looks into the black boxes. We take it that subpersonal cognitive psychology investigates the bases for the global patterns of dispositions. However. what cognitive psychology finds in a system has no bearing whatsoever on whether the system is an intentional system. provided there is a basis for an appropriate pattern of dispositions to peripheral behavior in the system. But of the relationship between cognitive psychology and intentional system theory. more shortly. Which patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior are appropriate? To answer this. we must first consider Dennett's notion of the intentional stance. To take the intentional stance toward a system is to employ the intentiollal strategy to predict the system's behavior. Dennett tells us: To a first approximation. the intentional strategy consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rational agent with beliefs and desires and other mental stages [sic] exhibiting what Brentano and others call illtellfiollality.'"
The intentional strategy is. Dennett tells us. a "predictive strategy.'·~1 It is first and foremost a strategy for predicting behavior on the basis of beliefs and desires. where: A svstem's behavior will consist of those acts that it \l"Ould he rati;mal for an agent with those beliefs and desires to perform.':
What. exactly. is the rationality assumption involved in the intentional strategy? Dennett says: One starts with the ideal of perfect rationality and revises downward as circumstances dictate. That is, one starts with the assumption that people believe all the implications of their beliefs and believe no contradictory pairs of beliefs."
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Moreover, one employs decision theory in calculating how they will behave on the basis of their beliefs and desires."~ It should be stressed, however. that the intentional strategy is used not just to predict behavior but also to predict beliefs, desires, and other mental states. But the prediction of behavior is primary in that behavioral predictions are tested "directly by looking to see what the agent does: [while] belief and desire predictions are tested indirectly by employing the predicted attributions in further predictions of eventual action.""; The intentional strategy is also used to predict mental acts that do not themselves include peripheral behavior. For example, we might give a belief-desire explanation of why an individual is performing a certain mathematical calculation, even when the calculation is performed "in her head." "silently to herself." rather than out loud or on paper or computer. But attributions of mental acts are. like attributions of belief and desire. tested only indirectly by employing them in further predictions of actions involving peripheral behavior. Attributions of mental acts are thus ulrimately tested against the predictions they help yield about actions involving peripheral behavior.'" Let us ask again what patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior are appropriate for being a believer and desirer. Dennett claims that: Any object-or as I shall say, any system-whose behavior is well predicted by this strategy [i.e .. the intentional strategy 1 is in the fullest sense of the word a heliever. What iT is to he a true believer is to be an intentional sYstem. a system whose behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy.'-
A system has an appropriate pattern of dispositions to peripheral behavior to be a true (i.e., genuine) believer iff it possesses a dispositional pattern that renders its behavior reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy. So long as a system possesses such a behavioral dispositional pattern. it is a genuine believer, whatever its innards are like. Dennett is emphatic on that point: Any object-whatevt'r its innards-that is reliably and voluminously predictable from the [intentional] stance is in the fullest sense of the word a believer. What if is to be a true believer. to have beliefs and desires. is to be an intentional system."
The notion of being reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy is, of course, vague. How reliable must the predictions be? How voluminous must be the reliable predictions? These are vague matters. Still. there are clear-cut cases of intentional systems and clear-cut cases of nonintentional systems. A lectern is not an intentional system since its behavior is not \'Uluminously predictable via the intentional strategy."" Humans are clear-cut intentional systems; and so are higher nonverbal
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· Is. 'ill P l 'me cases. "I S uc h vagueness poses no anima er h aps 'msects are b order problem so long as our conception of a believer and desirer is correspondingly vague. Dennett holds that it is, or at least that an explication of the conception that preserves what is best in it. what in it deserves to be retained and incorporated into science, is correspondingly vague. There is a certain not unnatural reading of Dennett's statement of what it is to be a genuine believer that we want to reject as incorrect. A recent expositor of Dennett says: Dennett ... provides an exceptionally lucid. concise. and challenging statement of a doctrine which we can call pure ascripTit'ism concerning mental states. The pure ascriptivist holds thaI being a genuine believer is. in a certain sense. essentially a matter of how others might find it profitable to treat you. It is not. as the mental realist believes. a matter of how you are in yourself. regardless of the ways in which any other being might find it useful to consider you. On this Dennett is absolutely forthright. Whatever is 'voluminously predictable' by the technique of treating it as if it had beliefs and desires does have beliefs and desires. When we treat something as having beliefs and desires. we are said to be looking at it from the viewpoint provided by an imenTiollai stance."e
But Dennett is 1101 espousing "pure ascriptivism." If whether a system is an intentional system is not a matter of how it is in itself but rather is a matter of how an individual or group might find it useful to treat it. then a system can be an intentional system for one individual or group but not for another. given differences in what individuals and groups can find useful. Moreover. no system would have the property of being an intentional system independently of how any individuals or groups might find it useful to treat it. The property of being money is arguably like that (of this. more shortly). But it is not Dennett's view that the property of being a genuine believer is like that. appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Dennett says: Would it not be intolerable to hold that some artifact or creature or person was a believer from the point of view of one observer, but not a believer at all from the point of view of another. cleverer observer? That would be a particularly radical version of interpretationalism. and some have thought I espoused it in urging that belief be viewed in terms of the success of the intentional strategy. I must confess that my presentation of the view has sometimes invited that reading. but I now want to discourage it. The decision to adopt the intentional stance is free, but the facts about the success or failure of the stance, were one to adopt it. are perfectly objective."'
And consider what Dennett says in response to an example of Robert Nozick:
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Suppose. he suggested. some beings of vastly superior intelligence-from Mars. let us say-were to descend upon us. and suppose that we were to them as simple thermostats are to clever engineers. Suppose. that is. that they did not need the intentional stance ... to predict our behavior in all its detail. They can be supposed to be Laplacean super-physicists. capable of comprehending the activity on Wall Street. for instance. at the microphysical level. Where we see brokers and buildings and sell orders and bids. they see vast congeries of subatomic particles milling about-and they are such good physicists that they can predict days in advance what ink marks will appear each day on the paper tape labeled "Closing Dow Jones Industrial Average." They can predict the individual behaviors of all the various moving bodies they observe without ever treating any of them as intentional systems. Would we be right then to say that from their point of view we really were not believers at all (any more than a simple thermostat is)? If so. then our status as believers is nothing objective. but rather something in the eye of the beholder-provided the beholder shares our intellectual limita• '1-1 Hons.
In answer to the question he raises in the penultimate sentence of this passage. he says: Our imagined Martians might be able to predict the future of the human race by Laplacean methods. but if they did not also see us as intentional systems. they would be missing something perfectly objective: the patfems in ~uman !:~~il~iQ~hat...are describable from the inJ~mi.QI1(t!2~Ilt;:.e~-
Our status as believers is objective. not something in the eye of the beholder. We are believers. whether or not Martians would find it useful to so treat us. We do not fail to be believersfbr Martians. Being a believer is not a matter of being a believer for some individual or group. Moreover. thennostats are not believers. even if. for limited purposes. janitors find it useful to so treat them. There are. Dennett holds. actual objective patterns of behavior possessed by systems that make their behavior voluminously and reliably predictable via the intentional strategy. whether or not anyone or any group ever takes the intentional stance towards them or would find it useful to take the intentional stance towards them. As he tells us: Where there are intelligent beings. the patterns must be there to be described. whether or not we care to see them.'"
Whether a system has an appropriate pattern of dispositions to (narrow) peripheral behavior is. as much as anything ever is. something about how it is in itself. It is not a matter of how an individual or group might find it useful to treat it. Similarly. whether a system is a genuine believer is. as much as anything ever is. something about how it is i9it~elf. for ifjt l1<:l.sanappro1~6~-haxior.~9n~ in virtue ot which priate g,!g~_f!1.-9f
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its behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable via~the intentional strategy-that will suffice for its being a genuine believer (and desirer). Intentional system theory is. as Dennett tells us, a sort of holistic logical behaviorism; it is not "pure ascriptivism." And that it is not a pure ascriptivism is all to the good given that Dennett maintains that intentional system theory offers a materialist answer to the truth-maker question. If pure ascriptivism were true. then unless there were a materialist account of what it is for an individual or group to find taking the intentional stance toward something useful, we would lack a materialist answer to the truth-maker question. But if there were a materialist account of what it is for an individual or group to find taking the intentional stance toward something useful. that account would itself yield an account of belief and desire. Consider a property for which pure ascriptivism holds. namely the property of being money.'" Subtleties aside. a kind of thing is money within a community if it can play the various money-roles within that community: if it can function as a medium of exchange for goods and services, as a repository of value, and so on. But a kind of thing can play these money-roles iff it is accepted by the community in these roles. (Only kinds of things that have a certain sort of historical ancestry are accepted by the international monetary community as being United States paper currency.) A materialist answer to the truth-maker question about money will be available only if a materialist answer to what it is for a community to accept something in the roles in question is available. To underscore this last point, consider a different analogy. A secondary-quality theory of color might imply. for example. that something is red for species 5 iff it would look red to a normal member of 5 under normal conditions of illumination. Given such a theory, a materialist answer to the truth-maker question for color attributions will be available only if a materialist answer to what it is for something to look red to a normal member of 5 under normal conditions is available."' Consider. again, Dennett's claim that "What it is to be a true believer is to be an intentional system. a system whose behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy.""" Notice that necessarily. if two systems are exactly alike with respect to their dispositions to peripheral behavior, then the peripheral behavior of the one is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy iff the peripheral behavior of the other is. Notice further that since what gets primarily predicted via the intentional strategy is peripheral behavior. given Dennett's statement of what it is to be a genuine believer. it follows that necessarily. if two systems are exactly alike with respect to their dispositions to peripheral behavior, then the one is a genuine believer iff the other is. Thus, b~ing a genuine believer supervenes, on Dennett's view, on dispositions\:oPeripheral beh~vlor.S·t~mce-takers are not part of the supervenlencebase. The description 'the actual patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior such that possession of them renders the behavior of systems reliably and volumi-
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nously predictable via the intentional strategy' is a rigid~fying plural description: It picks out the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior in "every possible world."II" P~ession of a..DL.?"ych ~~~io~~ern necessitates being a believer and desirer. '-uefinett tells us in one-place that: All there is to really and truly believing that p (for any proposition p) is being an intentional system for which p occurs as a belief in the best (most predictive) interpretation. Ifll
The most predictive interpretation would be the one that best predicts the peripheral behavior of the system. But what get interpreted? And what must an interpretation take into account'? Let us consider the questions in tum, What get interpreted. according to intentional system theory. are "the patterns in human behavior that are describable from the intentional stance.,,]()2 patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior. These patterns are "characterize[d] in terms of the beliefs, desires. and intentions of rational IIF agents:· Dennett says the patterns are describable "only from the [intentional] stance."I,q However. there is a distinction that Dennett fails to draw explicitly. First. there are the patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior that get interpreted from the intentional stance. Second. there are the beliefdesire patterns that patterns of dispositions get interpreted as being. It may be that types of belief-desire patterns are expressible only in an intentional vocabulary. However. each of the types of patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior that get interpreted as belief-desire patterns can, in principle. be expressed in a nonintentional vocabulary. It should be noted that the fact. if it is one. that types of belief-desire patterns cannot be expressed in the vocabulary of physical theory does not itself pose a problem for Dennett's materialism. For, as Vann McGee has pointed out. if we require for materialism that all applicable predicates be expressible in the vocabulary of physical theory. then 'is true in the language of physics' would have to be so expressible. But if it were, physical theory would be inconsistent. 105 Any brand of materialism that requires every applicable predicate to be translatable into the language of physics is too strong. (We recur to materialism below.) Interpretations of patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior must take into account environmental context. according to Dennett. He is, you will recall, an externalist about content: The contents of a system's beliefs and desires depend, in part, on environmental factors. Indeed. he sometimes appears to embrace an el'olutionary account of content. II". But. in any case, whether or not he actually embraces an evolutionary account, this sort of historical-extemalist theory is not dictated by his intentional system theory. A proponent of intentional system theory could argue in favor of some nonevolutionary account of the environmental contribution. In any event, as we keep saying, the environmental contribution to belief-desire profiles will not be a central topic of concern in this paper. 209
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Dennett misspoke when he said: "All there is to really and truly believing that p (for any proposition p) is being an intentional system for which p occurs as a belief in the best (most predictive) interpretation.,,107 For his considered view is that, strictly speaking, tht:re is !l_~~':!..,=h thing as the best jnterpretation of a system. Indeed, that is why he speaks of "interpretation." Dennett holds that it is always possible in principle for rival intentional stance interpretations of those patterns [patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior] to tie for first place, so that no further fact could settle what the intentional system in question really believed. 1",
There will invariably be. in principle, at least two distinct total belief-desire profiles such that they do equally well overall in predicting the behavior of a system and no other total profile does better. The profiles may differ on some predictions, but, on balance. there will be no choosing between them on the basis of their predictions; nor will there be any choosing between them on the basis of any environmental factors. The problem is not that we lack epistemic access to facts that would decide the matter. There is. rather. no fact of the matter to be known. There is indeterminacy. Dennett reminds us that This idea is not new. It is a quite direct extension of Quine's ... thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation, applied to the "translation" of ... the patterns in subjects' dispositions to engage in external behavior. "" 111I
Indeed. Quine himself would endorse such an extension. Now the vagueness of belief-desire attributions alone will no doubt make for some indeterminacy of belief-desire profiles. Considerations of vagueness would lead us to suspect that just as there is sometimes no fact of the matter whether an individual is bald, so sometimes there is no fact of the matter whether. say, an individual wants a rabbit. If we are too precise about the candidate would-be exhaustive belief-desire profiles for an individual. there may indeed be no fact of the matter whether the individual has one of the hyper-precise profiles rather than another of them. 111 However, the indeterminacy Dennett envisions, following Quine. goes well beyond what we would expect from ordinary vagueness. On the radical indeterminacy Dennett envisions. there is, for example, never a fact of the matter whether an individual wants a rabbit rather than wanting an undetached rabbit part. I Ie One of the optimal exhaustive profiles might imply that the system wants an undetached rabbit part and the other that the system does not. Contradiction is avoided by maintaining that a system wants that p (and believes that p) only relative to an interpretation. While. there is no fact of the matter whether a system believes that p simpliciter. there is a fact of the matt~r w~liEeIT~v~that p reratTve-'io';~- i~terpretation. H~~e~ei:-muYilpie optimal interpretations are lll always possible, with no fact of the matter to decide among them.
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Given Dennett's commitment to indetenninacy, rather than writing "'all there is to really and truly believing that p (for any proposition p) is being an intentional system for which p occurs as a belief in the best (most predictive) interpretation:,II-l he should have written: ~.ll_there is to really and truly be~ing that p (for any proposition p) is being ani.ntentional ~!~~ for whicl1-.£....2.ccurs as i:!J~~lle.f in ol:2e.(if the..he.st (most predicti v e4nterpretati,ons.. Still, it is necessarily the case that if two systems are exactly alike with respect to their dispositions to peripheral behavior (and environmentally), then an interpretative belief-desire profile is optimal for one iff it is optimal for the other. Moreover, it is necessarily the case that if two systems are exactly alike with respect to their dispositions to peripheral behavior (and environmentally), then the one meets a belief-desire profile relative to an interpretation iff the other does. Given that a system meets a belief-desire profile only relative to an interpretation, it is necessarily the case that if two systems are exactly alike with respect to their dispositions to peripheral behavior (and environmentally), then the two meet all and only the same belief-desire profiles. Thus, it is necessarily the case that if two systems are exactly alike with respect to their dispositions to peripheral behavior (and environmentally), then they are exactly alike with respect to their beliefs, desires, and the like. We see, then, that intentional system theory implies the _e.·_ s~rvenience thesis. In what remains of this section, we will first discuss further the relationship between folk psychology, intentional system theory, and cognitive psychology and then briefly say more about how intentional system theory permits a materialist answer to the truth-maker question. Dennett draws a distinction between two sorts of questions, a distinction which has received no attention in previous expositions of his views but that is crucial to his overall view of intentionality (and consciousness). He notes that the question, "What do all chemical elements with the same valence have in common [that makes them have the same valence]?"II< admits of two sorts of answers: ,_~-.-
First answer: they are disposed to combine with other elements in the same integral ratios. Second answer: they all have suchand-such a microphysical property (a property which explains their capacity so to combine). The theory of valences in chemistry was well in hand before its microphysical explanation was known. In one sense chemists knew what valences were before physicists told them .... There is a ... view of Ryle's (or perhaps at best a view he ought to have held) that deserves rehabilitation. Ryle's "logical behaviorism" is composed of his steadfastly conceptual answers to the Socratic questions about matters mental [e.g., such questions as 'What do all believer's-that-P have in common that makes them believer's-that-PTJ. If Ryle thought these answers ruled out psychology, ruled out ... reductive ... answers to the Socratic questions, he was wrong, but if he thought only that the cc/Oceptual answers to the questions
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were not to be given by a microreductive psychology, he was on finner ground .... Ryle's logical behaviorism was in fact tainted by a groundless anti-scientific bias, but it need not have been. Note that the introduction of the concept of valence in chemistry was a bit of logical chemical behaviorism: to have valence /J was "by definition" to be disposed to behave in such-and-such ways under such-and-such conditions, however that disposition to behave might someday be explained by physics. In this particular instance the relation between the chemical theory and the physical theory is now well charted and understood ... and the explanation of those dispositional combinatorial properties by physics is a prime example of the sort of success in science that inspires reductionist doctrines .... Such progress invites the prospect of a parallel development in psychology. First we will answer the question "What do all believers-that-p have in common'?" the first way, the "conceptual"' way, and then see if we can go on to "reduce" the theory that emerges in our first answer to something else-neurophysiology most likely.... Since the terms "belief' and "desire" and their kin are parts of ordinary language ... we must first look to "folk psychology" to see what kind of things we are being asked to explain. III,
While Dennett does not say how exactly to draw the distinction between "conceptual" questions and "reductive" questions. some such distinction can, we believe, be drawn. I I: Valence theory itself yields answers to such conceptual questions as 'What makes it the case that an element has valence II +37' where 'makes' is used in a sort of "logical" or "conceptual" sense. ' Quantum mechanics was required, however. to yield answers to the reductive question 'What makes an element have valence +37' where 'makes' is used to express something like constitution. Quantum mechanics told us what an element's possessing valence +3 consists in. It answered the reductive question by postulating architectures for the chemical elements and by describing structure-sellsiti~'e processes that explain the forming and breaking of chemical bonds. The reduction of chemistry to quantum mechanics is our leading paradigm of reduction. It is. as Dennett rightly notes, the hope of cognitive psychology that the same sort of microreductive strategy will work for some systematic explication of folk psychology, Recall that Dennett tells us that "A prospect worth exploring ... is that folk psychology (more precisely, the part of folk psychology worth caring about) reduces--conceptually-to intentional system theory."IIY Intentional system theory purports to answer the conceptual questions about belief, desire. and their kin. The task of cognitive science is to answer the reductive questions. On the evidence. our peripheral behavioral dispositions and those of other animals have neural bases. However, many of us, Dennett included. also look to subpersonal cognitive psychology, a branch of cognitive science, for answers to intermediary reductive questions; we expect the dispositions to have cognitive bases, which themselves in tum have neural bases. Cognitive psychology postulates a subpersonal-Ievel cognitive architecture to
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explain, among other things. what possession of personal-level intentional capacities and dispositions in fact consists in, how these capacities and dispositions are exercised or activated, and so on, thereby attempting to answer reductive questions about which intentional system theory is silent. Quantum mechanics engages in chemica-tectonics: cognitive psychology attempts to engage in psycho-tectonics. Th~_Q~Jails .of the haSe.sJQLthe_dj.§120s,ition.alpaJte_ms .described by llltentio~~!E..!~~2!L'!.~~) llClliLeyer, .inelevanJ tQ.tb.e truth of belief a!1d desire attributions. They will be no part of the answer to the conceptual questions. From-ih~-pe~spective of intentional system theory. the bases are black boxes. To steal a metaphor, the boxes may contain hidden intentional beetles, but whether they do has no bearing on the truth of belief and desire attributions. It is consistfllLW!!D_ int~-D.1iQ!lgLS'ystern.J.hkQr.xJll~t,-f2r)nsl~!l<':~J,t.h.t;Ee is a 19p9lla.ge of thought. But that a system have a language of thought is not conceptually required for it to be true that the system has beliefs. I"Ii What (conceptually) makes it true that the .system has a. belief-d.esire profile .will be the facLthaL !]1e system has a suitable global pattem of dispositions to peripheral b.~b.
_--
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b~!la~io:.~I.d~spositions
is entirely physical. To repeat; The_disPQsition bases are treate~ asbla~k 1J~l!es by the th~ory. Ins.()far as the organismic contribution to belief-desire patterns is concerned, all that is needed is an appropriate pattern of dispositions to narrow peripheral behavior. Intentional sy:il.fm t~~or'y thus does not 10gicallyr~q_u}[~Jhe.Lf!:lth of.m~terialism. That is not a problem. For the theory purports to answer conceptual questions about belief. desire, and their kin, and materialism is not a conceptual truth. Dennett can, nevertheless, appeal to the theory in giving a materialist answer to the truth-maker question. To be sure, in telling us what it is for a system to be a believer that P, the theory invokes intentional notions (the intentional strategy is spelled out in intentional terms). Indeed, it invokes the very notion of a believer that P. However, given the intentional system characterization of what it is to be a believer that P, we see that being a believer that P supervenes on global patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior (together with material environmental factors). Intentional system theory implies that possession of a belief-desire pattern is conceptually equivalent to possession of a certain highly determinable physical-and-topic-neutral conditionviz .. possession of a certain type of pattern of dispositions to peripheral behavior within a certain environment. (The condition is topic-neutral because it is topic-neutral, for example, about the disposition bases.) And that physical-and-topic-neutral condition is one that it is nomologically possible for a wholly material system to meet. Dennett plausibly maintains, on the evidence. that a wholly material system can possess a global pattern of behavioral dispositions in virtue of which its behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy. Moreover, he plausibly holds that the bases for the relevant dispositions are, as a matter of nomological necessity. physical. If intentional system theory yields correct answers to the conceptual questions about belief, desire, and their kin, we can appeal to the theory to explain how a wholly material system could have a belief-desire profile. Folk psychology, or "more precisely. the part of it worth caring about",2< can be incorporated into science. Let us sum up. According to intentional system theory, an exhaustive belief-desire profile for a system is an interpretative description of the global pattern (~f dispositions to peripheral behavior of the system within an environmental context. Moreover, according to the theory. the organismic contribution to belief-desire patterns is exhausted by the system's dispositions to narmVl" peripheral behavior. The theory is a kind of logical behaviorism concerning belief, desire, and their kin that is holistic, externalist about content. interpretational, and that requires bases for dispositions. In these ways, in addition to the other ways noted above, intentional system theory differs from Rylean logical behaviorism. It should be clear now how to move from Rylean logical behaviorism to Dennettian logical behaviorism. First, reject Rylean arguments against the possibility of a scientific psychology as non sequiturs. Dispositions have
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bases, and the job of cognitive psychology is investigating the bases of the appropriate patterns of behavioral dispositions. Second. eschew ordinary language analysis of folk psychology and, instead, attempt to explicate what folk psychology is at its best, what deserves to be preserved and incorporated into science. Third, acknowledge the holism of belief and desire: Eschew the impossible burden of pairing individual mental states with individual dispositions to behave. Fourth, acknowledge that the contents of beliefs and desires do not supervene on the organismic contribution alone: There is an environmental contribution to content. Finally. acknowledge Quinean indeterminacy: The organismic contribution and environmental contribution do not jointly determine a unique belief-desire profile. All this is compatible with maintaining a brand of logical behaviorism, Dennett's brand. that takes exhaustive belief-desire profiles to be interpretative descriptions of global patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior within an environmental context.
IV. SOME OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES In this section, we will pose and respond to three objections. Our reasons for pursuing this objection-response strategy are two: first, to explicate further intentional system theory. and, second. to make a case that it is not the weak reed some think it is. Ohjection One. The objection derives from Christopher Peacocke's 12r well-known Martian marionette example. , It is often cited as raising an insuperable problem for intentional system theory. m Peacocke imagines a marionette that is remotely controlled by a Martian in such a way that the marionette moves in ways that are voluminously and reliably predictable via the intentional strategy. Surely. the complaint goes, we are not to count the marionette as having beJiefs and desires. Rep!.>,. We agree that the marionette would lack beliefs and desires. However. intentional system theory would not count it as a genuine believer and desirer. Recall that while the theory treats the bases for appropriate patterns of behavioral dispositions as black boxes. it requires that an intentional system possess the boxes: The system must have bases for the dispositions. Wbile...-what is in the black boxes does not matter, it matters that the blackhQ~s are p;~i.-;;f~ ~y~tem The marionette fu'iTSto count-;-;~-;;inten- tional system because it fails to possess bases for the behavioral dispositions in the pattern of behavioral dispositions that it appears to have. and thus it lacks that dispositional pattern. Its peripheral movements are not manifestations of its dispositions but are, rather. mainly due to external forces."> We see, then, that intentional system theory can avail itself of a distinction between mere as-if intentionality and genuine intentionality.12Y Given
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the movements of the marionette's body (and the noises coming from it), there is the appearance that it possesses a global pattern of behavioral dispositions sufficient to make it a genuine believer. But while it appears to have the dispositional pattern in question. it in fact lacks it. Its peripheral movements match the peripheral movements of a system with the pattern of dispositions in question. but the marionette's movements are not manifestations of dispositions it possesses. The movements are. as we just noted, due to external forces, not to the activation of dispositions. ~~l~t~m ~il}J1_~ mere a~-ifJIIl~fl_tiQnality just in cCl~~J!.?_.p~Tlp~~~~~_~_~~_ments match those that would. be manifestations of an. ~pprop~i.'l!~JJ.~.!t~.rrLQf q!~, butjts peripheral movements are not manifestations of~!:!"c~_ap(lttern. . -Objection Two. Recall thailf1ie~iioii"afsystem theory "deals with the ... actions of whole systems:,I") And recall that: A system's behavior will consist of those acts that it would he rational for an agent with those beliefs and desires [ones
attributable via the intentional strategy 1to perform. I ,I
It would appear, then, that given Dennett's answer to the truth-maker ques-
tion, he takes the truth-makers for belief-desire profiles to include facts about dispositions to such actions. Types of actions in the relevant sense will count as types of peripheral behavior because they will involve peripheral movements of the body. However. the action types themselves are not types of peripheral movements of the body. They will include peripheral behavioral 11 acts like arm-raising.I' but not peripheral movements like rising anns. : Given that, it might be thought that Dennett's answer to the truth-maker question is unavailable to materialists since the relevant notion of behavior or action is itself within the intentional circle. The point is not that all actions are intentional; of course they are not all intentional. Someone might spill ink without doing so intentionally, or deliberately, or on purpose. However, it has been argued that every action is intentional under some description. If every action is so. then for a type of occurrence to be a type of action it must be a type whose tokens are invariably intentional under at least some description (alternatively. a type whose tokens must fall under some intentional type). It is thus~argllable that Dennett's peripheral behavioral dispositions presuppose ifl"tentional factors~ If that is rlght:ihen inappeai}!!g-io !I:!.em, Dennett is not breaking "out 'of the intentional circle. lie"fails, thereby, to provide a materialist answer to the truth-maker question. The supervenience bases for belief-desire profiles include dispositions to actions, and actions (even unintentional ones) are within the intentional circle. Reply. The short reply is that the types of behavioral acts that Dennett needs to appeal to are not such that their tokens are invariably intentional under some description (or such that their tokens must fall under some intentional type). The behavioral act types are not within the intentional circle.
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More generally, the factors intentional system theory counts as supervenience bases for belief-desire profiles are not themselves within the intentional circle. To begin the long reply, it is useful to consider some remarks by the leading proponent of the view that every action is intentional under some description. Davidson says: We must distinguish three situations in which it is correct to say I spiJled the coffee: in the first. I do it intentionally: in the second I do not do it intentionally but it is my action (I thought it was tea); in the third it is not my action at all (you jiggle my hand).'"
Both the first and second case, he points out. are different from the third in this way: In the first two cases, but not the third, he is intentionally doing something. He goes on to make the following proposal: "A person is the agent of an event if and only if there is a description of what he did that makes true a sentence that says he did it intentionally.""~ Every action, he tells us, is intentional "under some description." He acknowledges the third reading of "Davidson spilled the coffee." However, he tel1s us that in this third case, he does not figure as an agent, thus there is no action. But is there no sense in which he is an agent? Consider claims like: "The rock broke the window," and "The plane flew from New York to California," Is there no sense in which the plane and the rock are agents? Some have 1 claimed that there is not.1. 0 But we need not pause to consider what is required to be an agent. A rock falls on someone's head. thereby killing the person. It would be true to say "The rock fell and killed him." But the rock does not. of course, do anything intentionally. If in such cases the rock is not an agent. so be it. Davidson's notion of agency strikes us as stipulative. Dennett can give him the word 'agency' and the word ·action'. There is a sort of behavior that need not be intentional under any description. yet is not mere movement and i~ not the sort of behavior that a rock engages in when it falls on someone and kills him, nor the sort that a plane engages in when it flies from New York to California. Fred Dretske has called our attention to a notion of behavior that can be engaged in by a system that is incapable of intentional action. a kind not covered by Davidson's three ways. '36 Dretske distinguishes movements and behavior. He counts Tom's arm's rising as a mm'emenl but Tom's raising his arm as behavior. Dretske characterizes movements as motions. Behavior. he tells us, involves peripheral movements that are (at least partly) internally caused. The movements are manifestations of dispositions, and thus caused by the bases for the dispositions. The marionette's arm rises, but it never raises its arm. Its peripheral movements are not manifestations of appropriate dispositions to peripheral behavior. A frog's flicking out its tongue is behavior on the frog's part; the frog's tongue's flicking is not; nor is the frog's falling over as a result of a gust of wind."!
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Davidson holds that animals lack beliefs and desires, and are thus incapable of intentional action. 11K However, he does not deny that animals run, climb, fly, swim, eat, mate, and so on. But these are all behavior in Dretske's sense. And if animals are not agents in these cases, then call them 'behavers'. Davidson's claim that animals lack beliefs and desires is, we believe, implausible; moreover, Dennett himself would reject it. However, the issue of whether animals have beliefs and desires certainly does not tum on whether they really run, climb, swim, fly, eat, and mate. That they engage in such behavior does not imply that they have beliefs and desires. Moreover, "The flower opened its petals" and "The tree shed its leaves" purport to characterize behavior in the sense in question. Such descriptions do not presuppose any intentional notions. Flowers and trees are incapable of intentional action. Finally, note that in conceding to artificial-intelligence researchers that they have succeeded in constructing a toy robot that can move around or climb over small obstacles in its path, we are not thereby conceding that they have reached their goal of constructing genuinely artificial (i.e., nonbiological) intelligence. They have not reached that goal. But they have developed toy robots that can behave in the ways in question. We can distinguish what the toy robots do (e.g., climb over small obstacles) from what merely happens to them (e.g., their being knocked over). We will take Dennett's behavior to be (roughly) behavior in Dretske's sense. 1<9 Behavior consists in a peripheral movement's manifesting a disposition of the system. Facts about such behavior and patterns of dispositions to such behavior are perfectly appropriate truth-makers for a materialist to cite. This notion of behavior does not presuppose intentionality. Objection Three. Recall that intentional system theory is a sort of holistic logical behaviorism because it deals with the prediction and f.'planation from belief-desire profiles of the actions of whole systems. I."
So far we have focused only on prediction. However. rationalizing beliefdesire pairs causally explain behavior. But how could they, if belief-desire attributions are partial characterizations of global patterns of dispositions to behave? Must not, as Rylean behaviorists would insist. reasons for actions (rationalizing belief-desire pairs) fail to be causes of them? RepZy. We will address the general issue of whether beliefs and desires are distinguishable internal states and the relationship of this to their role in causal explanations in section V. (As we will see there, there are dragons here for Dennett.) However, in what remains of section IV, we will see what Dennett might say as at least a first-pass response to the claim that his holistic logical behaviorism commits him to denying that intentional explanations of actions are causal. Dennett tells us:
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Intentional explanations . .. cite thoughts. desires. beliefs. intentions ... in explaining the occun-enee of human motions.'"
His intentional system theory does not prevent him from maintaining this. Human motions are. we take it. movements of the body. Beliefs, desires. and the like can causally explain movements. First of all. dispositions are states. and dispositional states can be causes, even if, as has been argued. they are causes only in a derivative way. in virtue of their bases being causes. I.: Second. a causal explanation can cite a disposition, even when what is being explained is a manifestation of the disposition. Explaining an occurrence that is a manifestation of an activated disposition by citing that disposition is causally explaining it. "The sugar dissolvedQ.ecall.~~j!_is -,~ateJ;.....~le" causally exphlins t.he.-£ugaL~_di~SQlying. The ~xplanation•.JQJ;J~_s.w:e..i£not highly infor.mCiti\i~:...-~ut jJJll1.es. 9ut oth~r_~xplanati.oJls. ..of. why .the.sugar dissolved. Moreover, intentional explanatiQns are. in any_ case, not highly informative about the causal ancestry of what they explain. As Dennett notes: "Intentio~al explanations a'ie . .-. not causal explanations simpliciter," 143 They explain in part "by gil'ing a rationale for the explicandum."I~ Atull-blown intentional explanation of an action (one that cites a desire and an instrumental belief) will reveaTa purpos;;-for the acti~n. a poil.ZLfor the aQ!.~uY.ill reve:Jl...J:!lLat.tize...age.lll...u:.aS.a11eJJ1J).li?lg to do. It does that by citing a desire for a certain end and a belief to the effect that the action in question is a way of achieving the end. Dennett's holistic logical behaviorism faces no difficulty in accommodating this rationale-providing aspect of intentional explanations. The belief and desire provide the rationale in virtue of their contents. But how can the theory accommodate the causal aspect, where behavior. as opposed to motion or movement, is concerned? It seems that movements are caused by beliefs and desires. but behavior is what gets rationalized by them. Dennett could maintain, however, that behaviors are movements which are manifestations of dispositions to peripheral behavior. Given that. it might be claimed that beliefs and desires cause behaviors, since they cause movements that are manifestations of behavioral dispositions. and such movements are behaviors. Dennett can maintain that causation is extensional: If one thing causes an.()tll.ex, the first causes the second. b.Q~Lthe...two are characterized. Now. to b~-sure, beliefs and desires do not rationally explain motions or movements as such. We give intentional explanations of armraisings but not of rising arms. H~ver, Dennett can maintain that explanation, unlike c(iusation, roo .-'i~__ r.'1rensional~b~titu..liY.i4Loiid.enti~i!1~faIls in explanation contexts . .)n Dennett can hold that the belief-desire pair provides a rationale for the behavior under its behavioral description. even though not under its movement description. The belief-desire pair provides a rationale for the occurrence qua behavior but not qua movement, so to speak.
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While intentional system theory purports to avoid treating folk psychology as a proto-theory of intervening, distinguishable states of an internal behavior-causing system, it implies that patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior must have bases. Those bases are internal states that cause movements that are manifestations of dispositions, and thus that cause behavior. So. isn't intentional system theory after all a belief-desire theory of intervening, distinguishable states of an internal behavior-causing system? In a word, "no." Intentional system theory indeed implies that intentional systems have internal behavior-causing states, namely, the bases for appropriate global patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior: These internal states indeed cause movements which are behaviors. However, the theory. you will recall. eschews the impossible burden of pairing subpatterns of global belief-desire patterns either with individual dispositions to behave or even with subpatterns of global patterns of dispositions to behave. To repeat: Intentional system theory is a holistic logical behaviorism. The basis for an individual disposition or subpattern of dispositions will be a state that is part of a complex state that is a basis for a global pattern of behavioral dispositions interpretable as a certain total belief-desire pattern. However. given holism, no state that is a basis just for some individual disposition in the global pattern or for some subpattern of the global pattern is itself interpretable as any belief or desire, or as any subpattem of a total belief-desire pattern. The only internal behavior-causing states that are paired with beliefdesire patterns are states that are bases for global patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior. It is important to note that given holism. Dennett must maintain that total belief-desire patterns cause movements that are behaviors. if any beliefdesire patterns cause such movements. Here is why. If some subpattem of a total belief-desire pattern caused a movement but some other subpattern did not then there would have to be an internal state that is a cause of the movement and that is a basis for the former belief-desire subpattem but not for the latter. That. however. conflicts with holism. If that were possible. we could pair up subpatterns of behavioral dispositions with subpatterns of belief and desire. Given that Dennett must maintain that total belief-desire patterns cause movements that are behaviors. he might maintain that a state that is a basis for the relevant global pattern will count as a cause of a movement that is a manifestation of an individual disposition in the pattern. in a derivative way. by virtue of containing a component state that is a basis for that disposition. (Keep in mind that given the holism, that component state will not itself be the basis for a behavioral dispositional pattern that is interpretable as a belief-desire pattern.) On this view. a belief-desire explanation of an action would provide the information that there is an internal state that causes the movement and that the internal state is part of a complex state that is interpretable as a belief-desire pattern that includes the belief and desire in question. Or, alternatively. Dennett might maintain that the move-
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ment is a manifestation of the entire global pattern. a complex behavioral disposition that is interpretable as a belief-desire pattern that includes the belief and desire in question. and that the basis for the entire global pattern is a cause of the movement. On this view, a belief-desire explanation would provide the information that an internal state caused the movement and that the internal state is a basis for a belief-desire pattern that includes the subpattern of belief and desire in question. Since Dennett has not to our knowledge. addressed this issue. we will not speculate about which alternative. if either, he would choose. But either way. intentional system theory would be obviously and importantly different in its account of belief-desire explanations of actions from the sort of theory of distinguishable states of an internal behavior-causing system that Dennett rejects. A closely related issue arises. How is it. one might well wonder. that some belief-desire pairs causally explain an action and others do not. if all are equally causes of the behavior? Part of the answer is that only certain pairs will rationalize the action. But of course. two belief-desire pairs might both provide a rationale for an action, and yet the one but not the other might give the agent's reasons for performing the action. How is this accommodated? It cannot be accommodated within the framework of intentional system theory by appeal to the different causal roles of the belief-desire pairs. It must be accommodated in some other way. We won't speculate on how Dennett might try to accommodate it. But we will close by noting that from the fact that some belief-desire pairs causally explain an action and others do not it does notfoflow that beliefs and desires are distinguishable internal states or that they are dispositions which have distinguishable internal hases. One can causally explain an occurrence by citing one disposition rather than another. even when the dispositions have the same bases; the dispositions need not have discernible bases. This is nicely illustrated by an example of Jackson and Pettit's.IO" The electrical conductivity of metal and its thermal conductivity may have the same bases (free movements of electrons), but the dispositions figure in different causal explanations.
V. WHY THE SUPERVENIENCE THESIS IS FALSE As we hope is by now evident. we think that Dennett's intentional system theory recombines several of the central ideas of the last forty-five years of the philosophy of mind in a truly novel and ingenious way. The theory recombines the ideas to serve up a theory that many. it seems. find attractive. Given the attractions of the theory (e.g., its sparse ontological commitments), no one interested in intentionality should ignore it. Moreover. as may not be evident we share a lot of common ground with Dennett. Like him, we look to science for reductive answers to questions
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about belief, desire, and their kin. Like him, we think that "since the terms 'belief' and 'desire' and their kin are parts of ordinary language ... we must first look to 'folk psychology' to see what kind of things we are being asked to explain."j.J' Moreover, we applaud his goal of explicating folk psychology in such a way as to retain "what it is at its best, what deserves to be taken seriously and incorporated into science."j.JY As in any folk theory. there may well be generalizations, even platitudinous ones, that are false, and postulated entities which deserve elimination. ISO We share with him the view that there are both conceptual questions and reductive questions. We share the view that the business of scientific psychology is to answer the reductive questions by engaging in psycho-tectonics. And, finally, we share with him the view that what it is to be a believer and desirer is to possess patterns of dispositions and capacities. However, where Dennett primarily goes wrong, we believe, is in holding that these dispositions and capacities are dispositions to and capacities for peripheral behavior. His peripheralism about belief-desire profiles should be rejected. We will argue that intentional system theory, in its peripheralism, falls far short of its aim of capturing all that folk psychology is at its best, all that deserves to be preserved and incorporated into science. One might argue this by arguing that there are states and processes cited in folk psychology that are not intentional-system-characterizable: e.g., pains, visual experiences. dreams, and so on. 1'1 However, we will not pursue this line. We want to argue more directly against the theory. We want to argue that even belief and desire are not intentional-system-characterizable. We cannot attempt here, however, to present a better explication of these folk-psychological notions. We will attempt instead to carry out the far more modest aim of making a case that there must be a better one. We think that Blockheads-who, you will recall, are creatures with all the dispositions to peripheral behavior of a normal human being but who. unlike human beings, operate thanks to a gigantic look-up table-pose an insuperable difficulty for intentional system theory. 152 They show the supervenience thesis is false. And since that thesis is implied by intentional system theory, they show intentional system theory is false. Dennett is, of course, well aware that Blockheads are thought by some to pose an insuperable difficulty for his view, and he has attempted to address the difficulty. We find in Dennett three sorts of responses to Blockhead examples, which we will consider in turn. After that, we will consider a fourth response Dennett might give, and we will respond to it. Then, we will raise two general issues: (I) whether features of cognitive architecture that do not supervene on dispositions to behave can constrain belief-desire profiles, and (2) whether features of folk psychology that should be retained impose constraints on belief-desire profiles not imposed by dispositions to behavior. A proper and thorough discussion of (I) and (2) is beyond the scope of this paper. But we want to flag certain key considerations. Next, we will draw
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attention to a certain ordinary kind of case that shows the supervenience thesis is false and that intentional system theory is wrong in certain crucial respects. Dispositions to peripheral behavior are not, we claim, essential to the organismic contribution to belief-desire profiles. Having a belief-desire profile does not require having any dispositions to peripheral behavior. Finally, we will challenge an assumption that is fairly widespread, namely, the assumption that it is necessarily the case that normally embodied organisms with belief-desire profiles have the capacity to exert intelligent control over their peripheral behavior. Dennett's first response to Blockheads is that they are nomologically impossible.'" He is surely right about that.I'-l This nomological-impossibility response would be adequate if intentional system theory were only purporting to state a nomologically necessary and sufficient condition for having a belief-desire profile. For, then, since Blockheads are nomologically impossible, the theory would not be committed to counting them as intentional systems. However, the theory purports to answer conceptual questions about belief. desire, and their kin: questions such as: What makes-what logically or conceptually makes-a system a believer that P? A desirer that Q? And so on. It attempts to provide a materialist answer to the truth-maker question: to tell us what it is about our material natures (widely understood so as to include material environment) that necessitates our belief-desire profiles. The necessity here, and in the supervenience thesis, is. you will recall, metaphysical necessity, not nomological necessity. I'; Intentional system theory purports to state metaphysically necessary and sufficient conditions for being a believer and desirer. The theory does not purport simply to provide a contingent test for something's being a believer or desirer. It quite explicitly purports to tell us what it is to be a genuine believer and desirer. Given that the theory purports to state a metaphysically sufficient condition for being an intentional system. and that Blockheads satisfy the would-be metaphysically sufficient condition, the theory is committed to Blockheads being intentional systems. It makes no difference at all that Blockheads are nomologically impossible. If Blockheads are metaphysically possible and fail to count as true believers, then intentional system theory is false. Blockheads are metaphysically possible. And they fail to count as believers. We conclude that intentional system theory is false. (It should be noted that ifthere were no better than nomologically sufficient physical-and-topic-neutral conditions for intentional facts, then there would be psychophysical "nomological danglers." It would have to have been the case that when Mother Nature dictated the fundamental laws of our world and set up the initial conditions, she had to dictate the laws pairing physical-and-topic-neutral conditions with belief-desire profiles. She could not have counted on them being true, given the fundamental physical laws she dictated and the initial physical conditions she set up. The psychophysical laws would be among the fundamental laws without doing any of the
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work the other fundamental laws (laws of mechanics, for instance) do. There would be a small group of systematically well-integrated physical laws. with a vast swarm of psychophysical laws dangling from it. Emergentism. not materialism, would be true. For the nomological danglers would be emergent IOh laws. Mental emergentism is avoided if there are physical-and-topicneutral factors from which. with the help of physical laws and physical initial conditions, all mental facts can be derived.'.'? That is what intentional system theory purports to provide, at least in the case of facts about beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like. That is why it counts as offering a wouldbe materialistically respectable answer to the truth-maker question. The presence of a certain global pattern of dispositions to peripheral behavior is a physical-and-topic-neutral condition that (together with material environmental factors) metaphysically necessitates a belief-desire profile (even if not a unique one). Physical laws and initial physical conditions, together with the fact that this physical-and-topic-neutral condition obtains, imply that the belief-desire profile is present. If there were no physical-and-topicneutral condition that metaphysically necessitates a belief-desire profile. and yet it were nomologically possible for a system to have a belief-desire profile, then emergentism, not materialism. would be true.)'" Dennett's second response to Blockheads involves an appeal to generality. He says in response to Block: "My view embraces the broadest liberalism, gladly paying the price of a few recalcitrant intuitions for the generality gained."!)" We will continue to assume that while it contains elements of stipulation and is highly idealized. intentional system theory is intended to capture what folk psychology is at its best. what deserves to be preserved and incorporated into science. We will continue to assume that its aim is to incorporate into science "the mental as ordinarily understood."Ih(' We will continue to assume that it seeks "a conceptual reduction" of the mental. Ihl We will continue to assume that these are the theoretical interests it is meant to serve. The issue here, then, is whether this "appeal to generality" preserves all that is best and worth preserving about folk psychology; or whether, instead. it moves so far from "the mental as ordinarily understood" that it simply changes the subject. If intentional system theory fails to preserve certain valuable distinctions of folk psychology, then we should hope to find a better explication. (We could adopt a liberal explication of "duck" counting anything that looks like a duck and walks like a duck as a duck. But the generality afforded by this explication would not preserve everything that is worth preserving in our conception of a duck.) It should go without saying that while generality is a desirable feature of a theory, it must be weighed against other desirable features. We shall grant Dennett that whether Blockheads are believers can't be settled simply by consulting intuitions. Reasons must be given. But if reasons can be given for thinking that the relevant "recalcitrant intuitions"
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may well draw lines that are theoretically important there is reason to look for a better explication of belief and desire than Dennett·s. Dennett's third sort of response to Blockheads is. we believe. his most compelling. He invites us to imagine discovering that a significant part of our own community satisfies a Blockhead description. His examples are emotionally charged: What if all left-handers turned out to be Blockheads?!!': Would we then say that they do not believe or desire anything? While we certainly feel the rhetorical force of Dennett's questions. we think that the discovery that left-handers are Blockheads would provide a serious reason for doubting that they have beliefs and desires. despite the fact that they have patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior that are the same on the surface. so to speak (the same. ignoring facts about their bases. that is). as ours. As we have noted. intentional system theory requires only that an intentional system possess a basis for an appropriate pattern of dispositions-one in vinue of which its behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy. But richness in behavioral dispositions suffices for intentionality, we believe. only if there is a sufficient degree of organization among the bases for the dispositions in the pattern. And the requisite organization-whatever exactly that might be is an issue we will leave open here-is surely absent in the case of Blockheads. That there is an appropriate organization does not follow solely from the fact that there is a pattern of dispositions to peripheral behavior that renders a system's behavior reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional stance. That is what Blockhead cases show. And that is why no pattern of dispositions to peripheral behavior by itself, independently of what the bases for the relevant dispositions are like. suffices for the presence of a belief-desire profile. Consider a string-searcher Blockhead.!"' With the exception of the string-searcher itself, there is a discrete mechanism that mediates each input and output (a specific string).!M The basis for any behavioral response is almost entirely distinct from the basis for any other: again. only the stringsearcher is common. The mediation of input and output by the look-up table lacks systematicity.I(" Internally, Blockheads mediate each input and output by virtually entirely independent causal means. They have a sUljace pattern of dispositions to peripheral behavior but no appropriate under!."ring pattern. that is. no appropriate pattern in the bases for the dispositions. Since we are prepared to allow that left-handers might fail to be believers and desirers should they prove to be Blockheads. Dennett might try an even more compelling rhetorical ploy: What if it turned out that you yourself were a Blockhead?! In response to this fourth and final response. if we (the authors) were presented with compelling evidence that we were Blockheads. then we would conclude that at least some Blockheads have beliefs and desires. We are not committed to the view that it is logically impossible for
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a Blockhead to have beliefs and desires. We are committed to the view that if a Blockhead has a belief-desire profile, it would not be in virtue of its possessing a pattern of dispositions to peripheral behavior that it has the profile. There would have to be some other explanation of why it has the profile. We do not count ourselves as believers and desirers in virtue of our possession of a pattern of dispositions to peripheral behavior. We could share such patterns with Blockheads who were not believers and desirers. Moreover. if we discovered that we were Blockheads. and we knew the rest of our innards were pretty much as we now think they are, we would (or at least ought to) conclude that there may very well be nothing about our material nature that reductively explains our mentality, and thus that materialism may very well be false. Should we conclude instead that we lack beliefs and desires? In a word, "no:' (Of course, if we lacked beliefs, we could not conclude anything.) Our knowledge that we are believers and desirers is not evidentially dependent on assumptions about the bases for our dispositions to peripheral behavior. There is no a priori guarantee that materialism is true. It is conceptually possible that nothing about our material nature could fully account for our mentality. We have faith in materialism because we think, on the evidence, that there may very well be something about our material nature that reductively explains our mentality. We know that there are no facts about anything in our toes or in our breasts which could explain it. We think, however. that there are facts about something in our skulls which could explain it. We believe that, because we believe that we have brains and that facts about their complex functioning can do the explanatory job. However, if we discovered that we were Blockheads, we would (or at least ought to) cease to believe that. Our mentality cannot be explained by a look-up table of the sort described by Block, by, for example. a string-searcher Blockhead. If we discovered that we were Blockheads, we would be stunned to learn that our peripheral behavioral movements. while usually matching our intentions. are not under our intelligent control. We would have to seek some explanation of this extraordinary coincidence. (Might some sort of occasionalism or preestablished harmony be true?) But our faith in materialism (and let's face it, at this stage of inquiry, it is a matter of faith. which is not to deny that it is quite reasonable) is based, at least in part, on our belief that we have brains and on general empirical assumptions about how brains work. 1M If we were presented with compelling evidence that we are Blockheads. our faith in materialism would be very badly shaken indeed. The moral of this fourth response to Blockheads is that there is no conceptual guarantee that facts about our material nature will explain our mentality. So much, then, for Dennett's responses to the possibility of Blockheads. Now, as we said, there is overwhelming reason to think Blockheads are nomologically impossible. If our current empirical science can be trusted
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(and, so, for instance, we can trust that Blockheads are nomologically impossible), then if a system has a pattern of behavioral dispositions that renders its behavior reliably and trul.y voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy, it is a good bet that it is a believer and desirer. But that is not a conceptual matter. And having such a pattern of dispositions is by no means what it is to be a believer and desirer. We should not confuse what is e1'idence that a system is a believer and desirer with what is constitutive of a system's being a believer and desirer. But that is what intentional system theory does. For all that we know, passing the Turing Test, for instance, may be a nomologically sufficient condition for the presence of belief and desire. (Keep in mind that Blockheads are nomologically impossible.) Perhaps. given nomological constraints, something could pass the Turing Test only if the bases for its dispositions to peripheral behavior have an appropriate underlying structure. That is an empirical issue that remains to be determined. But if passing the Turing Test is a nomologically sufficient condition for having beliefs and desires, that, by itself. would by no means vindicate materialism. A Cartesian dualist (even if not Descartes himself) could concede that passing the Turing Test is such a nomologically sufficient condition. The relevant point is that passing the Turing Test is not a conceptually or metaphysically sufficient condition for having beliefs and desires. Blockheads show that. They would pass the Turing Test. but they lack beliefs and desires. Dennett sometimes seems to acknowledge that the Turing Test is only a nomologically sufficient condition for being a believer and desirer. But if a system's behavior's being reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy conceptually necessitates its being a believer and desirer. then one wonders why a system's passing the Turing Test wouldn't. (Is it that passing the test doesn't guarantee that the system's behavior is sufficiently reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy?) Moreover. our Blockhead duplicates are not just able to pass the Turing Test. Our behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy iff our Blockhead duplicate's behavior is. For our Blockhead duplicates are behavioral twins of us. We want now to press further problems that Blockheads pose for intentional system theory. We each have possible Blockhead behavioral duplicates. Let us set aside for awhile the issue of whether they are believers and desirers and pursue a different issue. Since there is an environmental contribution to belief-desire profiles, Dennett could maintain that a Blockhead behavioral duplicate of us could differ from us in its belief-desire profile due to environmental differences. However, suppose that Dennett allows that for any two behavioral twins. it is metaphysically possible for them to be sufficiently alike environmentally to have the same belief-desire profile. Call, then, our Blockhead duplicates which are sufficiently like us environmentally, our 'Blockhead counterparts'. 107 We are concerned, then, with certain Blockhead duplicates of us, duplicates such that there is no environmental
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factor in virtue of which they differ from us in their belief-desire profiles (if any). If dispositions to peripheral behavior exhaust the organismic contribution to belief-desire patterns, then a necessary condition for your having a certain belief or desire is that any Blockhead counterpart of you would have that belief or desire too. A vivid example will be helpful to illustrate how implausible this is. Suppose that right now you firmly believed that you were having an excruciating headache and firmly believed that you were engaging in a silent reasoning process concerning the relative advantages of ibuprofen and paracetemol. If the supervenience thesis is right, then we will be forced to conclude that your Blockhead counterpart firmly believes that it has an excruciating headache and firmly believes that it is engaging in a silent reasoning process. Given that conclusion, we will have to say one of two things: that (i) your Blockhead counterpart, like you, is engaging in a silent reasoning process and has an excruciating headache or that (ii) the Blockhead is under the illusion that it is engaging in a silent reasoning process and that it has an excruciating headache.lf>~ Given that Blockheads work by a gigantic look-up table, (i) seems wildly implausible, to say the least. 16" And (ii) seems paradoxical. But, in any case, if (ii) were true. then your counterpart would differ from you mentally in ways acknowledged by folk psychology. We said we wouldn't discuss pain and conscious episodes. But the point to note is that we have beliefs that purport to be about pains and conscious episodes, and desires that purport to be toward them (e.g., you want the headache to cease). Intentional system theory thus seems stuck with a choice between (i) and (ii). A far more plausible option is to reject the supervenience thesis. The internal architecture of a Blockhead is radically different from the internal architecture of a human being. Could nothillg about the internal architecture of a human being make for an\' difference in the belief-desire profile of that human and the belief-desire profile (if any) of her Blockhead counterpart? Dennett's endorsement of the supervenience thesis and his statement of what it is to be a believer that P commit him to saying "no" in answer to this question. But. we wonder. what possible justification could he give for maintaining that. Blockheads show just how little constraint patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior place, by themselves, on internal architecture. Cognitive architecture. we believe, places "bottom-up" constraints on belief-desire profiles. This is not to say that it can eliminate indeterminacy. The supervenience thesis commits Dennett to saying that it plays no role at all in constraining belief-desire profiles. beyond containing bases for dispositions to peripheral behavior in an appropriate pattern of such dispositions. But there is no reason whatsoever to believe that this is the only relevance of cognitive architecture to determining belief-desire profiles, and there is good reason to deny it.
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We said in section II that Dennett does not maintain that the intentional factors cited by cognitive psychology supervene on dispositions to peripheral behavior. He is. as he insists. not a behaviorist about scientific psychology. Conceptual questions arise about the intentional factors cited in cognitive psychology. These questions include: What makes a state a mental representation? What makes a mental representation a representation that P? Intentional system theory does not purport to answer these conceptual questions. But. then. to what extent does Dennett think dispositions to peripheral behavior constrain answers to such questions? We are uncertain what Dennett's considered position is here. However. given what we have said thus far. it should at least come as no surprise when Dennett says of functionalism. in response to Jackson's truth-maker question: As forfunctio/la!islIl. in its defensible version. it is not really an alternative to behaviorism. but simply a reflection of the tight constraint behavioral capacities (as described from the intentional stance) place on internal states. So let me confirm Jackson's surmise that I am his behaviorist: I unhesitatingly endorse the claim that "necessarily. jf two organisms are behaviorally exactly alike. they are psychologically exactly alike."""
Our question is: Just how "tight" are the constraints that behavioral capacities (as described from the intentional stance) place on internal cognitive states? It appears that Dennett takes the behavioral constraints to be fairly tight. He says, for example. that while there may very well be inner representations: It is not that u'e atfrihute (or should attribure) I~elief~ und desires onlY to things ill which H'e find internal representations, bllt rather that when \I'e di,\'cO\'er some o/~ject for )\'hich the illtentiollal strategy l\'Orks, H'e endeo\'or to interpret some (d'its internal stales or processes as internal representations. What makes some internal feature ot' a thing a representation could ol1ly be its role in regulating the behm'ior of (In intentional system (enlire emphasis Dennett's).'-'
What makes a state of the brain a representation could only be its role in regulating the behavior-the peripheral behavior-of an intentional system. There are representation-constituting roles. roles such that an internal state is a representation iff it plays them. Let us ask. then: Do differences in these roles supervene on differences in dispositions to peripheral behavior? If the answer is "yes." then the behavioral constraints on what count as representations are as tight as they are on belief-desire profiles. We have internal representations iff our Blockhead duplicates have them. Given that result. we assume that it is not Dennett's position that the representationconstituting roles supervene on dispositions to peripheral behavior.
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What about the conceptual question of what makes a representation have a certain content? Speaking of the explicit "syntactical elements"m of an internal system of representation, Dennett says: If these internal state components are cunningly interanimated. the states achievable by them can bear delicate informational relations to events and things in the outer world. but then, insofar as the states of such systems can be interpreted as having external semantic properties, they obtain their semantic properties in just the same way-for just the same reasons-as the merely tacitly representing states. It is only the globally defined role of such a state (the role that is characterized in terms of the rule~ of operation the whole system "follows" when it goes into that state) that fixes its informational or external semantic properties. 1-'
Consider "the states achievable" by "the interanimation of syntactical elements." Must differences in the interanimation of syntactical elements that make for differences in the "external semantics" of such states supervene on dispositions to peripheral behavior? If such differences so supervene. then the behavioral constraints on the relevant interanimations are as tight as the behavioral constraints on belief-desire profiles. We assume that Dennett does not hold that differences in the relevant interanimations of syntactical elements supervene on dispositions to peripheral behavior. Dennett would not, we assume, hold that the possibility of Blockheads excludes the possibility that we can be in states that involve the interanimation of syntactical elements. And that is all to the good. since the empirical search for types of syntactical elements in the brain and their modes of interanimation is not constrained by a requirement that these factors supervene on dispositions to behave. Of course, such research often relies, in part, on reaction-time experiments. and so on. But such reactions are evidence about cognitive architecture because they causally result from such architecture; they are not COllstitutive of it. Moreover, such research often relies on behavioral evidence from brain-damaged individuals; from such individuals we can learn about the functional organization of our cognitive architectures. It is not relevant that the pertinent functional differences are not manifestable in our behavior. But could not differences in "the interanimation of syntactical elements" that make for differences in "the external semantics of states achievable" by such interanimation, make for differences in the belief-desire profiles of systems? It would seem so. Factors such as the interanimation of syntactical elements can make a difference to belief-desire profiles, even when such factors fail to supervene on dispositions to peripheral behavior. We think here of the role of conceptual role in the semantics of belief and desire. m If differences in conceptual roles that do not supervene on dispositions to peripheral behavior can make a difference to the contents of beliefs and desires, then belief-desire profiles won't supervene on dispositions to peripheral
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behavior (and environment). To retain the supervenience thesis, Dennett must deny that the interanimation of syntactical elements (or conceptual roles) can make a difference to belief-desire profiles when such interanimation fails to supervene on dispositions to peripheral behavior. But we see no justification for this denial. The supervenience thesis is a behaviorist dogma that should be rejected. Speaking of a theory of cognitive architecture that postulates structured internal representations, Dennett says: Those who think that it is obvious, or inevitable. that such a theory will prove true (and there are many who do). are confusing two different empirical claims. The first is that intentional stance description yields an objective. real pattern in the worldthe pattern our imaginary Martians missed. This is an empirical claim. but one that is confirmed beyond skepticism. The second is that this real pattern is produced hy another real pattern roughly isomorphic to it within the brains of intelligent creatures. Doubting the existence of the second real pattern is not doubting the existence of the first. There are reasons for believing in the second pattern, but they are not overwhelming.'"'
Whether there actually is the second pattern, and whether the reasons for thinking there is one are overwhelming or not. if there were the second pattern, surely its presence could make for differences in the belief-desire profiles of the possessors of those profiles and those (if any) of their possible behavioral duplicates who lack the pattern. But if so, then the supervenience thesis is false. For it is possible for the second pattern to be present and to make for differences in the first pattern. differences that do not supervene on dispositions to peripheral behavior (and environment). Dennett sometimes seems to acknowledge that features of cognitive architecture could make a difference to belief-desire profiles. In one place, he says: Progress in sub-personal cognitive psychology will blur the boundaries between it and intentional system theory. knitting them together much as chemistry and physics have been knit together. 170
But, then, given that subpersonal cognitive psychology is not constrained by the supervenience thesis in what factors it can postulate, why insist on the supervenience thesis? Speaking of indeterminacy in another place. he writes that "going inside leaves things only marginally better" as far as belief-desire attributions are concerned. In "Enough better." he goes on, "to quell the intuitions of outrage that rise up when faced with Quine's claim [i.e .. Quine's indeterminacy claim], but not all the way better:,,7' We do not see how anything sufficient to quell the intuitions of outrage that rise up in response to Quine's indeterminacy claim would at the same time make only a "marginal" difference to the belief-desire profiles attributable to an organism. But in any case, if internal organization can make even a "marginal difference," 231
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the supervenience thesis is false. The falsity of the thesis does not require that "Iooking inside" will make things "all the way better." Someone who rejects peripheralism is not thereby committed to denying there is any indeterminacy of belief-desire profile or even that there is any radical indeterminacy of belief-desire profile. The supervenience thesis implies that we and our Blockhead counterparts will necessarily have exactly the same beliefs, desires. and the like. despite the radical differences in what goes on in our heads. If Dennett wishes to retain the supervenience thesis. then he cannot allow that "looking inside" can help at all in distinguishing our belief-desire profiles from those. if any, of our Blockhead counterparts. For if it can make any such difference at alL the supervenience thesis is false. We think. moreover, that in addition to "bottom-up" constraints on belief-desire profiles imposed by cognitive architecture. there are "topdown" constraints that are imposed by folk psychology which go beyond peripheral behavioral constraints. It is these top-down constraints that. we believe. helped to motivate the historical shift from logical behaviorism to analytical fUl1ctionalism. a different descendent of logical behaviorism from intentional system theory.17Y We tum now to these top-down constraints. There is a distinction between behavior that is under intelligent control and behavior that is not. But behavior that is not under intelligent control can be caused by beliefs and desires. Consider one of Dennett's examples: The thought of the narrow escape from the rattler made him shake uncontrollably. 1<" This case is different from the following: The thought of the presence of a rattler outside made him decide to stay in the car. In both cases. intentional system theory would treat the behavior as a manifestation of the subject's belief-desire profile. But how can intentional system theory capture the distinction between behavior that is under intelligent control and behavior that is not? If intentional system theory is to explicate folk I psychology. it must be able to capture the notion of intelligent contro1. '1 Notice that the distinction between activities that are subject to intelligent control and those that are not has no corresponding reality in Blockheads. All of their responses to stimuli are mediated by the one giant look-up table. Actions which we count as reflex responses in humans are in their Blockhead duplicates produced in the same sort of way-namely. by mediation of the giant look-up table. All of the behavior of a Blockhead will be quite straightforwardly tropistic. mediated by a simple mechanism. The first point to note. then. is that two individuals can be behavioral twins and yet differ dramatically in what behavior is under their intelligent contro1. Davidson has remarked that "Any serious theory for predicting actions on the basis of reason must find a way of evaluating the relative force of various desires and beliefs in the matrix of decision."lx2 Notice that Blockheads only appear on the surface (on the periphery) to be decision-making systems: in fact they are not. However. even though our Blockhead duplicates are not decision makers, we ma:..· ve,)' well he. And if we are. this would
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be a difference in our belief-desire profiles and theirs (({they have any). Dennett accepts that intentional system theory will employ decision matrices. However. he contends that this only ""creates the illusion that the theory contains naturalistic descriptions of internal processing in the systems the theory is about. when in fact the processing is all in the manipulation of the theory and consists in updating the intentional characterization of the whole system according to the rules of attribution."I,' The idea is that decision-theoretic principles are among "the rules of attribution." they are part of the intentional strategy. Now that would be fair enough if intentional system theory were an instrumentalist theory of belief and desire. I'" However, Dennett has denounced instrumentalism. There are real beliefdesire patterns. Won't the elements of belief-desire patterns interact in internal processing? This leads to a broader top-down consideration. We discussed in section IV how intentional system theory might try to accommodate the fact that certain belief-desire pairs causally explain an action. while others do not. However. beliefs and desires do not figure only in the causal explanation of actions. They often figure in the causal explanation of other beliefs and desires. You want a loan because it is a means to obtaining something else that you want (a car). You recall that your anniversary is next week after noting that the calendar reads ""June," These explanations are causal. Consider also inferential processes in which beliefs figure. processes of reasoning, Beliefs and/or desires causally interact with other beliefs and/or desires. Intentional system theory cannot accommodate such causal interactions. For in order for a subpattern of a total belief-desire pattern to interact causally with another subpattern. the subpatterns must have distinct bases. The reason is straightforward: Causation is irreftexive. But given intentional system theory's commitment to holism. subpatterns of total belief-desire patterns cannot have distinct bases. Intentional system theory thus implies that a beliefor a desire canl10t cause anothCJ: and so cannat causally oplain anathel; since all beliefs alld desires hal'e exactly the same internal bases. Intentional system theory thus camlOi allow, for instance, that reasoning processes are causal processes in which heliefstates participate. Dennett tells us that: I expect that the actual internal states that cause behavior will not be functionally individuated. even to an approximation. the way belief/desire psychology carves things up. I;;
We take it that by 'belief-desire psychology' Dennett means an explication of folk psychology that implies that there are internal states that are beliefs and internal slates that are desires. Perhaps his expectation that ""the actual internal states that cause behavior will not be functionally individuated. even to an approximation. the way belief!desire psychology carves things up" will be borne out. But the issue seems to us an empirical one. It is an empirical
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question whether the way "belief-desire psychology" carves things up passably well approximates the functional organization of intentional systems. A passable approximation of functional organization would not require a distinguishable internal state for every belief and desire. We can allow that there are implicit beliefs and implicit desires. Consider the language of ,xb thought view of cognitive architecture. On that view, beliefs are dispositions to compute in certain ways with mental sentences, and desires are dispositions to compute in certain other ways with mental sentences. The mental sentences would not. it should be noted, have to be tokened when a belief or desire was not figuring in actual reasoning processes. The sentences need not be "stored" anywhere. All that is required is a mechanism for generating them and a disposition to generate them under appropriate circumstances. When the belief or desire figures in an actual reasoning process, then the mental sentences will be tokened and will figure in actual computational processes. That is. however, the only sort of occasion when the sentences would have to be tokened. If there are causal processes in which states that are beliefs and states that are desires participate, then we would of course like answers to the questions 'What makes a state a belief that P?' and 'What makes a state a desire that QT Could an intentional system theorist allow that the conceptual answer to the question 'What makes a state a belief that P?' is that it is a state of being disposed to compute in a certain way with a mental sentence that means that p?I~7 No. While intentional system theory is compatible with the existence of a language of thought, it is incompatible with this answer to the conceptual question being considered. For being in a state that is a belief that P suffices for being a believer that P. and thus if the latter requires an appropriate global pattern of behavioral dispositions. the former must too. But being a disposition to compute in certain ways with a mental sentence that means that P does not conceptually suffice for having an appropriate global pattern of behavioral dispositions. And thus. being such a disposition to so compute does not conceptually suffice for being a belief that P. The language of thought hypothesis aside, given the sort of holistic logical behaviorism intentional system theory is, can it even allow that there are any types of internal states which are themselves beliefs that P? A basis for an appropriate global pattern of dispositions to peripheral behavior is an internal state of the system. It is open to an intentional system theorist to argue that a type of state that is a basis for appropriate global patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior that is interpretable in part as a belief-that-P pattern counts as a belief-that-P state. However. that same state-type must, then, also count as a belief-that-Q state, a desire-that-R state, an intention-that-S state, and so on for each of the intentional states that are part of the interpretation. For intentional system theory, given its holism, will not allow that distinct types of internal states pair up with types of beliefs or types of desires. Any theory of belief and desire should treat it as an empirical question
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whether the actual internal states that cause behavior are functionally individuated, to an approximation. the way belief-desire psychology carves things up. However, so far as we can see, intentional system theory does not. It treats it as a conceptual impossibility, at least on one natural reading of 'actual internal states that cause behavior are functionally individuated. to an approximation. the way belief-desire psychology carves things up'. We take that to imply that at least certain different subpatterns of global belief-desire patterns are identical with different internal functional states. Given that, intentional system theory cannot allow that there is the conceptual possibility in question. For suppose that two different subpatterns of an exhaustive belief-desire pattern of a system could be identified with two different internal functional states of the system. Then. the holism of intentional system theory would be false. The top-down considerations we have been raising contributed. we believe, to the historical shift from logical behaviorism to analytical functionalism. But analytical functionalism. unlike intentional system theory. treats folk psychology as a proto-theory of intervening. distinguishable (distinguishable up to an approximation. and allowing that, at any time. virtually all beliefs are implicit) states of an internal behavior-causing system. Intentional system theory is intended as an alternative to this view. But it is inadequate. We invite Dennett to offer (I) an account of the distinction between behavior that is and behavior that is not under intelligent control. (2) a noninstrumentalist account of decision theory. (3) an account of causal explanatory relationships between beliefs and/or desires and other beliefs and/or desires, and (4) an account of reasoning processes. without postulating distinguishable internal states that are beliefs. desires. and the like. We do not see how a theory could yield (I )-(4) without appeal to somewhat distinguishable internal states of a behavior-causing system. As we saw earlier, Dennett sometimes acknowledges that features of internal organization which fail to supervene on behavior can make a difference to belief-desire profiles. We noted that in one place. he holds that as cognitive science progresses. the distinction between it and intentional system theory will blur. 'KK And we noled that he allows in one place that looking in the head can help (enough to quell the intuitions of outrage about Quine's indeterminacy claim).'Ko He also writes that "if one gets confirnlation of a much too simple mechanical explanation ... this really does disconO firm the fancy intentional level account:" " But surely. the extremely simple mechanical explanation of the behavior of Blockheads would disconfirm the hypothesis that they are believers and desirers. To add to the perplexity. in the same article from which we have just quoted. Dennett tells us: Any object-whatever its innards-that is reliably and voluminously predictable from the [intentional] stance is in the fullest sense of the word a believer. What it is to be a true believer. to have beliefs and desires. is to be an intentional system. I'"
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Clark has commented on the discrepancy, noting that the claims are "straightforwardly incompatible.,,'92 Since the claims are incompatible, Dennett should give up one or both. We recommend that he reject the claim that "Any object-whatever its innards-that is reliably and voluminously predictable from the (intentional} stance is in the fullest sense of the word a bellever." Surely, Blockheads show that is false. But enough about Blockheads. Let us return to the supervenience thesis implied by intentional system theory. Are there no ordinary ex.amples that make trouble for it? In fact, there are actual cases that refute it, cases which no doubt occurred to alert readers as soon as we tirst stated the supervenience thesis in section 1. There are actual peripheral behavioral twins who differ psychologically. Consider complete paralytics. Two such paralytics can differ psychologically, differ in their belief-desire profiles, despite the fact that they are exactly alike with respect to dispositions to peripheral behavior. The paralytic has no dispositions to peripheral behavior. Given the supervenience thesis, either the paralytic has no belief-desire profile at all or all complete paralytics share the same belief-desire profile. Intentional system theory implies that they have no belief-desire profile since their behavior is not voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy. They are thus not intentional systems. Intentional system theory excludes complete paralytics from the community of genuine believers. So much the worse for intentional system theory. Pretty much any belief-desire profile that could be had by a human being could be had by a paralytic human being. For consider human beings that become paralyzed in their sleep. Prior to realizing that he or she is paralyzed, it seems that pretty much any profile that a normal human being can enjoy in his or her sleep is one that such a paralytic can enjoy. While claiming the widest liberalism, Dennett's account is thus too restrictive, since it excludes the paralytic. Dennett has to address the case of complete paralytics. Surely, he has views about such cases. since they are so familiar. To our knowledge (we have not read everything he has written), he has not discussed paralytics. Perhaps he holds that they do not provide counterexamples to the supervenience thesis. Re1ecting a simQle counterl'actual analJ'sis of disQositions, he might mai.ntain that even though the relevant counterfactuals about how the paralytic will peripherally respond under various stimulus conditions are all false, the paralytic nevertheless has dispositions to peripheral behavior. Dennett might claim that the reason the counterfactuals are false is that standing conditions required for the manifestation of the dispositions under activating conditions are not present. The standing conditions in question are the normal neural connections. We ourselves reject the simple counterfactual analysis of dispositions. And we concede that failure of standing conditions can indeed prevent a disposition from being manifested: You might be disposed to raise your arm over your head in certain circumstances, but you won't succeed if your arm is tied to your waist. However, the neural connections we have that paralytics lack are not standing conditions for our
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dispositions to peripheral behavior. They are, rather, part of the bases for the dispositions themselves. Complete paralytics lack bases for dispositions to peripheral behavior. They have all and only the same dispositions to peripheral behavior; they have none. '"' Perhaps Dennett takes paralytic cases to be counterexamples to intentional system theory as stated. but holds that the modifications of the theory required to render it immune from such cases are too trivial or too obvious to pause to make. All that is required is a bell or a whistle. He might claim that intentional system theory as it stands will get the right results for individuals who are normally embodied, even if it fails to get the right results for paralytics. Moreover, he might claim that it can be easily modified to handle such cases. Restrict its initial scope to nonnally embodied subjects, and then add a further (bells-and-whistles) story about the truth-makers of beliefdesire profiles for other subjects which is parasitic on the story given for normally embodied individuals. One possible suggestion is that an abnormally embodied individual has the belief-desire profile he or she would have were he or she normally embodied. But that obviously won't do for several reasons. An abnormally embodied individual might lack any belief-desire profile, and this proposal might mistakenly attribute one. Moreover, an abnormally embodied individual might actually have a belief-desire profile that is different from the one he or she would haw in the counterfactual scenario. Were the paralytic or the blind or the deaf normally emLodied. that might change their belief-desire profiles. Moreover, an abnormally embodied individual could have enhanced behavioral capacities relative to normal members of his or her species rather than diminished capacities. The intentional strategy might yield a belief-desire profile for the individual in his or her abnormal condition that is quite different from the one it would yield in the counterfactual scenario. It is clear that the proposal in question is a nonstarter. We doubt. however. that any mere bells-and-whistles revision will save intentional system theory. We lack the space to consider other proposals here. But it should be noted that the challenge would be to handle the difficulties in question without simply collapsing intentional system theory into analytical functionalism. In any case, we will consider shortly two other supervenience theses. and what we say about them will be directly relevant to any would-be bells-and-whistles fix-up of intentional system theory. We will now note several closely related points that foliolt'. on trivial assumptions. from the case of complete paralytics and which make plain the ways in which intentional system theory goes badly wrong. First, of course. the supervenience thesis is false as stated (even modified to include external factors in the supervenience bases and however. exactly. 'psychologically exactly alike' is to be understood). Second. the organismic contribution to the truth-makers for belief-desire profiles need /lot include facts about dispositions to narrow peripheral behavior. Third. dispositions to narrow peripheral behavior do not exhaust the organismic
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contribution to belief-desire profiles. even in normally embodied individuals. Fourth, the paralytic case vividly illustrates that patterns of beliefs and desires are not patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior. This point is worthy of note because Dennett seems to hold that belief-desire patterns are highly determinable patterns of such dispositions. Recall that Dennett speaks of interpreting patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as belief-desire patterns. And recall that in his response to Jackson. he speaks of "behavioral capacities (as described from the intentional stance)."IY.) Belief-desire profiles were supposed to be interpretative descriptions of patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior. The paralytic case shows that they are not. Fifth, consideration of the paralytic makes manifest the following important point. Even if. from a total belief-desire profile. we could. in principle. work out the most reasonable or appropriate action for an organism, the profile. by itself. will fail to imply virtually anything whatsoever about the organism's peripheral behavior. (Think of the paralytic who does not yet realize he or she is paralyzed.) What this shows is that in order to predict behavior from a belief-desire profile we will require supplementary premises: We must assume counterfactual dependencies between belief-desire patterns and patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior. But such counterfactual dependencies will be. for the most part. contingent. Of course. this last point can be easily seen without appeal to the case of paralytics. Consider a principle Davidson proposes: If an agent wants to do x more than he wants to do y. and believes himself to be free to do either. then he will intentionally do x. if he does either x or y intentionally. I'"
Davidson tells us that he regards the principle as "self-evident."I"" The principle predicts intentional action. But given that. it also predicts behavior. For if it predicts that the agent will intentionally do x. if he does either x or y intentionally. then it predicts that the agent will do x. if he does either x or y intentionally. Consider. then. the weaker principle: If an agent wants to do x more than he wants to do y and believes himself to be free to do either. then he will do x, if he does either x or y intentionally. It is false. and thus the stronger principle is too. For if an agent is able to do y but not able to do x. then it may well be that he will do y if he does either x or y intentionally. To illustrate. if Tom wants to fly home by his own power more than he wants to fly home by plane. and he mistakenly believes he is free to do either, if he in fact cannot fly by his own power. then he will fly home by plane, if he either flies home by plane intentionally or flies home by his own power intentionally. It thus matters whether Tom has the capacity to fly. And that will not be determined even by an exhaustive belief-desire profile for Tom. Consider, next, a principle Alston endorses: If S wants that p and believes that doing A will bring about p, then S has a tendenc\' to do A.
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Having a tendency to do A is a state that will lead to doing A. given ability and opportunity. provided it is not opposed by stronger tendencies.'"'
But the connection between belief-desire pairs and tendencies is looser than this. and the connection between tendencies and abilities is tighter. If 5 lacks the capacity to do A, then 5 will not have a tendency to do A when 5 has the want and belief in question. Beefing up the antecedent of the principle with a fuller description of 5's belief-desire profile. indeed with an exhaustive description of it, will not help. The principle will still be false if 5 lacks the capacity to do A. And where A involves peripheral behavior, nothing about 5's belief-desire profile will guarantee that 5 has the capacity in question. Given the want and belief cited in the principle. S might, of course. have a tendency to try to do A. But some tryings (e.g .. trying to run for president of the United States) depend on complex factors (including peripheral behavior) that go well beyond what can be predicted from a belief-desire profile alone. Moreover. basic tryings-things we try but not by trying anything else-are mental acts. not acts that involve peripheral behavior. Predicting peripheral behavior on the basis of belief-desire profiles requires making assumptions about contingent counterfactual dependencies between belief-desire profiles and dispositions to. and capacities to. behave peripherally. Of course. since Dennett does not maintain that dispositions to peripheral behavior supervene on belief-desire profiles, he is not committed to the claim that we can predict peripheral behavior solely on the bases of beliefdesire profiles. Belief-desire profiles, he might claim. have multiple supervenience bases of dispositions to peripheral behavior. However. if belief-desire profiles are patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior (even if very highly determinable patterns). one would expect to be able to predict peripheral behavior from them (and environmental circumstances), if only very highly determinable peripheral behavior. But it seems that we cannot do even that. At best, we can predict basic tryings. And they can occur without peripheral behavior. even when they are attempts at bodily movement. Consider the following thesis: Necessarily. if two individuals are nonnally embodied members of the same species and are exactly alike with respect to their dispositions to peripheral behavior (and exactly alike environmentally). then they will have exactly the same belief-desire profiles.
This thesis, even if it were true. would not support intentional system theory. However, the thesis is, in any case. false. The connection between beliefdesire profiles and dispositions to peripheral behavior is not even this tight. It is possible for the internal conceptual roles of inner representations in a normally embodied individual to affect that individual's belief-desire profile
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without the difference heing reflected in her dispositions to peripheral hehavior. It is possihle for two nonnally embodied individuals to have the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior (and to be the same environmentally), but for them to have somewhat different belief-desire profiles due to internal differences that affect the conceptual roles of their internal representations in ways unreflected in their dispositions to peripheral hehavior. We want now to present another sort of counterexample to the above supervenience thesis, which, while fantastical, will serve to illustrate vividly an important general point: namely, that a 110rmally embodied creature can fail to he able to exert intelligent control over its peripheral hehavior. Imagine an alien creature that looks like a large praying mantis and has the same dispositions to peripheral behavior as does a praying mantis. Let us call the creature "'Manthra.",c'K Manthra engages in the four Fs (feeding, fleeing. lighting, and making love) and so on. in essentially the same way praying mantises do. Moreover. his engagement in the four Fs is controlled by a simple organ very much like the brain of a praying mantis. Not only are the creature's peripheral behavioral dispositions just like that of a praying mantis. the bases for the dispositions are too. However, in addition to this simple brain. Manthra also has a large hrain into which rich visual and auditory input from the environment is fed. Manthra has ears that channel input only into his large brain and has eyes that are more complex than those of a praying mantis. The eyes involve two channels. One channel sends input only to the small praying-mantis-like brain. where the input is essentially like that the eyes of a praying mantis send to its hrain. The other channel sends much richer visual information into the large brain. The large brain very much resemhles the brain of a human being. However, there are some striking and important differences. The large brain has nothing that functions as a 1110tor strip."'" The large hrain exerts no causal control over the peripheral movements of the body. They are entirely controlled by the praying-mantis-like small brain. The creature thus exerts no intelligent control over its hehavior. The small brain and large hrain are. we may suppose. connected to each other in various ways. And separating them surgically would certainly kill Manthra. Manthra is a normal member of his species. The large brain confers no selectional advantage on memhers of the species. It is an accidental accompaniment of other traits that confer selective advantage. The large brain. nevertheless. endows memhers of the species with a formidable intelligence; they can live rich mental lives. While Manthra engages in no peripheral hehavioral acts beyond the sort a praying mantis would engage in, Manthra engages in elaborate mental acts. coo There could he a fellow memher of Manthra's species who is likewise normally embodied and who is exactly like Manthra in his dispositions to peripheral behavior but who has a different belief-desire profile. Since this case is conceptually and metaphysically possible. the above supervenience thesis is false.
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Let us consider Manthra further. Suppose that we use our cerebroscopes and observe Manthra's complex brain activity to try to make sense of it. If we had something we do not now have, namely, a detailed cognitive theory that explains the cognitive activities in our brains, that theory, given the similarity between our brains and the large brain of Manthra, might enable us to determine that he has a rich mental life. And it may even enable us to get a considerable distance in understanding his mental life. There may well be indeterminacy of interpretation. But nevertheless, the brain of Manthra is sufficiently like our own brains that our cognitive theory enables us to narrow down a manageable range of interpretations. The conjectures yielded by the theory offer a coherent and useful portrait of the creature's intellectual life. Our portrait represents him as having a Zen-like detachment concerning his peripheral behavior-his engagement in the four Fs-as realizing he lacks control over such behavior. Manthra, being male, realizes that he will die while mating and that he lacks control over when he will mate. But Manthra does not fret. He spends his time engaging in intellectual pursuits. He often engages in visual geometry. Manthra would pose no problem at all for intentional system theory jf he were just as we said but with this exception: He is capable of public linguistic behavior. (We are now imagining that Manthra's large brain is not entirely devoid of a motor strip.) He still exerts no causal control over his engagement in the four Fs (with the exception of verbal fighting). However. Manthra can talk. In that case. we could play the role of Quine's radical Ii translator and use the query-assent method.: ' We take it that Dennett would have no difficulty allowing that such a creature would be an intentional system. But suppose further that Manthra does not talk out loud but only subvocally. Manthra. like other normal members of his species. lacks the wind power to make his subvocalizations audible. Still. there would be no problem for intentional system theory. Perhaps. for instance. an amplifying device could somehow be attached to his vocal cords to make his subvocalizations audible. But now imagine that Manthra engages in internal dialogue. He has nothing like vocal cords (and we are again imagining that his large brain lacks a motor strip). Suppose. however, that he is highly interested in us and has succeeded in learning our language by watching and listening to us. He wishes to communicate with us but is unable to do so given his lack of intelligent control over his peripheral behavior. But suppose further that we hook up electrodes to Manthra's brain and teach him how to control symbols on a screen using mental effort (think of people who practice biofeedback). Suppose further that this is a great success. that Manthra learns our written language and begins to converse with us over the screen. Perhaps this would count as his peripheral behavior, the screen counting as part of Manthra's periphery. Intentional system theory would. then. have no difficulty in counting Manthra as a believer and desirer. But notice that we have given
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Manthra a prosthetic device that alters his dispositions to peripheral 202 behavior, one which endows him with behavioral capacities he lacked. However, prior to the acquisition of this prosthetic device and the subsequent control over certain of his peripheral behavior, he was a genuine believer and desirer. Let us consider yet another scenario. Suppose that Manthra talks out loud, but that he, like all members of his species, is constitutionally unable to engage in verbal communication. Manthra talks, but whenever he does so, all he is doing is reasoning out 10ud.2f)1 He never engages in conversation, being constitutionally unable to. Presumably, this would not be a problem for intentional system theory. He won't intentionally answer our questions. However, if he ever reasons about the scene before his eyes or the like, we should be able to get him to answer our questions indirectly, if we are sufficiently patient and ingenious. And we could come to predict his verbal behavior via the intentional strategy. But now suppose that Manthra lacks anything like vocal cords (and lacks a motor strip), yet that Manthra, like other normal members of his species, reasons silently to himself. Given that Manthra is constitutionally unable to communicate, we could not use a technique like the feedback one described earlier. However, we could hit upon a way of interpreting Manthra's relevant neurophysiological processes, given their similarity to neurophysiological processes we already understand (those in our own brains). Indeed. it is even conceivable that we could monitor Manthra's brain with some device that feeds information into a supercomputer with a program that interprets those neurophysiological processes within the context of their causal role in Manthra's brain. The computer screen might print out Manthra's patterns of reasoning. And we might be able to predict what Manthra will conclude in various circumstances. what Manthra will reason about. and so on, via the intentional strategy. We might thus employ the intentional strategy to predict his mental acts and often find our predictions confirmed. That counts as predicting his behavior. if 'behavior' is used to include internal activities. But the behavior is not peripheral behavior. The acts are mental acts, not acts that involve peripheral behavior. We should make it clear that we are not denying that it is partly constitutive of belief and desire that they playa role in the explanation and prediction of actions. But, as we have stressed, the actions can be mental actions that in no way involve peripheral behavior. Moreover. beliefs and desires also figure in the causal explanation of other beliefs and desires. And we imagine that this too would have to be part of our story. In predicting Manthra's reasoning processes, we are predicting which beliefs he will form in certain circumstances and which beliefs those will lead to, and so on. Manthra's internal behavior is interpretable. Recall that we have no quarrel with molecular behaviorism, only with peripheral behaviorism. Our point is that Manthra's peripheral behavior is no more reliably or voluminously
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predictable via the intentional strategy than is the peripheral behavior of a praying mantis. Manthra can be employed, we believe. to show that a certain bells-andwhistles revision of behaviorism proposed by Frank Jackson won't succeed. While in his commentary on Dennet!"')'; Jackson pointed out that Blockheads pose a serious problem for Dennett. he has recently argued elsewhere that modest modifications to behaviorism can suffice to handle Blockheads.~I)' They do not, he thinks, raise "a substantive point ... against natural behaviourist analyses of intelligence."C()h We will pass by how he thinks the modifications handle Blockheads and. instead. simply present his neobehaviorist proposal. He says: If S is a normally embodied. intelligent creature free to move about his or her environment then any duplicate of S. with regard (a) to the totality of actual and possible behaviour in circumstances at times sustained by its internal nature and (b) to the way the totality of behavioural dispositions at one time causally depends on what sustains the totality of behavioural dispositions at earlier times is also intelligent. ~117
It is clear from the context of the article that the behavioral dispositions in question are dispositions to peripheral behavior.c()S Jackson holds that this supervenience thesis is one "that an upholder of a generally behaviouristic approach to intelligence should espouse."21>,! Given that praying mantises are not intelligent and that Manthra (lacking a motor strip) is possible. Jackson's supervenience thesis is false. For Manthra is normally embodied, intelligent. free to move about his environment and a praying mantis could be a duplicate of Manthra in ways (0) and (b). All the dispositions to peripheral behavior of Manthra are just like those of a praying mantis. and. we have imagined, so are the bases for those behavioral dispositions. Thus. the way the totality of the praying mantis's behavioral dispositions at one time causally depends on what sustains the totality of his behavioral dispositions at earlier times is the same as in Manthra. However, unlike Manthra. the praying mantis is not intelligent. We see no conceptual connection between the intelligence of a normally embodied creature and that creature's having the capacity to exert intelligent motor control. As we said, Manthra is conceptually possible, indeed. metaphysically possible. Perhaps Manthra is nomologically impossible, but if he is, we would be very curious to know why. In any case, the point to note for present purposes is that Jackson's mistake is to assume that a normally embodied intelligent creature must have the capacity to exert intelligent motor control. There is no "must" about it; no conceptual "must;" no metaphysical "must;" and, we think, it remains to be seen even whether there is any nomological "must" about it. There is a fish found off the coast of Sydney, Australia, that is called 'the ball fish' because it is shaped like a ball. While not very large, the fish,
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it turns out, has a hrain about lVv'o-thirds the size of a human brain and v.'ith fully three-times the density o{ neural connections. So far as we know, no intelligence test has been performed on it. It could be that the fish is not very intelligent. On the other hand, it could be that the fish is highly intelligent. ]t could be that it is intelligent enough to have a belief-desire profile. We do not yet know enough one way or the other. It would be difficult to design an intelligence test for it since its ball-shaped fish body makes its peripheral behavior limited and very different from the sorts of behavior we know how to evaluate for intelligence. There are, however, various ways we might try to test its intelligence. We could try to see whether it is educable."() We might see if we can teach it to swim through very complex mazes. We might even see if we can teach it to hit buttons with its fish body by bumping into them in such a way as to print symbols on a screen. (Think of the well-known work with chimps along these genera] lines; chimps use their hands of course.) However. such attempts to educate might prove unsuccessful. There could be many explanations of this that are consistent with the assumption that the ball fish is highly intelligent. Perhaps ball fish are terrified of humans, are frozen with fear around them, and are unable to get over their fear. Or perhaps they are uncooperative, unlike dolphins and "killer" whales. These would. of course. not impose insuperable difficulties for testing their intelligence. We could keep our presence unknown and try to trick them in various ways into doing things that would test their intelligence. Suppose, however, such tests fail simply because the ball fish is too easily fatigued. Or. finally. suppose that, as in the far more extreme case of Manthra. the ball fish won't pass a behavioral intelligence test simply because it lacks sufficient intelligent control over its peripheral behavior. The dense neural connections might have very little to do with its control over its peripheral behavior. There may be only a small range of speeds it can take when it swims; it may be limited in how it moves its eyes; it may be able to make only limited sorts of simple turns: and so on. We can imagine. however. that while we cannot get it to pass a behavioral test for high intelligence. we someday learn enough about brain functioning to understand what those dense neural connections-three-times more dense than they are in us-are doing. And we can imagine that we come to learn by studying the ball fish's brain that it has a fairly rich mental life. rich enough for a belief-desire profile. Discovering this would be perfectly compatible with there being a kind of fish that is indistinguishable from the ball fish with respect to its dispositions to peripheral behavior and with respect to the bases for the dispositions, but which is no more intelligent than, say. a cod fish.211 Unlike the ball fish, such a fish might have a simple fish brain. Notice that if we found a fish with a simple fish brain but that was behaviorally exactly like the ball fish, there would still be reason to wonder whether the ball fish has far greater intelligence. And discovering that the bases for the ball fish's dispositions to peripheral behavior are simple
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and typically fish-like, not involving very much of the ball fish's complex brain, would hardly settle the issue. For it may be that much of its complex brain engages in other work, work that supports the ball fish's intelligence. The moral is that dispositions to narrow peripheral behavior neither exhaust nor are (in general) essential to the organismic contribution to psychological natures. ,I,
NOTES 1. Dennett, COIlSciollslless Explained (Boston: Little. Brown & Co .. 1991). 2. Jackson, "Appendix A (for Philosophers)," Philosopln und Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 901.
3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 902. A supervenience thesis is a thesis to the effect that there cannot be a ditlerence of one sort without a difference of another sort. The kind of supervenience thesis in question here is essentially a strong supervenience thesis in Jaegwon Kim's sense. (See his "Concepts of Supervenience." PhilosophY and Phenomenological Research 44 11984J: 153-76.) Moreover. the mode of necessity in question is metaphysical necessity. (Something is metaphysically necessary iff it is true in "every possible world.") This is quite clear from the context of Jackson's discussion and was confirmed by him in conversation. S. Dennett. "The Message Is: There Is No Medium." PhilosophY and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 922. 6. Ibid .. 923. 7. See. e.g .. "Beyond Belief." in The !melltional Stallce (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT PresslBradford Books, 1987 J. 117-202, and ·'Evolution. Error. and Intentionality," in The !nlelllional Stallce. 2R7-322. 8. For the seminal discussion of Twin-Earth. see Hilary Putnam's "The Meaning of 'Meaning'." in Putnam, cd .. Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers. vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975),215-71. 9. It is important to keep in mind that we are speaking here only of narrow and wide beha\'ioral dispositions l1ollillfelltiOlw/lr characteri7ed. Dennett and Twin-Dennett will not he disposed to engage in the same intentional actions. Dennett may be disposed to intentionally drink water: Twin-Dennett will not. He lacks the concept of water. 10. Sce, e.g .. Dennett. "Evolution, Error. and Intentionality." But see also note 106 below. We are uncertain what Dennett's considered opinion is as to whether the environmental contribution to content i, evolutionary. or even historical. 11. "Beyond Belief." 134. 12. Students of Dennett's work may wonder whether the stronger thesi, is intended. with psychological respects restricted to what he calls 'notional attitudes' (sec '"True Believers." in The Intentiollal Stallce. 15: "Beyond Belief." 151-73: and "Reflections: Ahout Aboutness." in The Inrellfiol1al SWIlC/,. 209-10). Subtleiies aside. notional attitudes are. hy stipulation. psychological states typed by their "narrow content." supervenient on the organismic contribution only, and thus not dependent on environment. Iran organism's dispositions to narrow behavior exhaust its contribution to its psychological nature, then. by stipulation. it is necessarily the case that if two organisms are narrowly behaviorally exactly alike. then they are exactly alike with respect to their notional attitudes. The question about notional attitudes. however. is whether there are any: it is quite controversial whether anything answers to Dennett's stipulated notion. We think that there may be something answering to it. However. we don't think that Dennett means hy 'psychologically exactly alike' exactly alike with respect to notional attitudes. For he recognizes that it is controversial whether there are any: and there is not even a hint of a
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suggestion in his response to Jackson that he intends 'psychologically exactly alike' to be understood in the stipulative sensc in question. We will say in due course in this section what we think he means by 'psychologically exactly alike'. BUI even if he means by 'psychologically exactly alike' exactly alike with respect to notional attitudes, that won't affect our point that the organismic contribution to psychological nature is not exhausted by thc organism's dispositions to behave. Notional attitudes, if there are any. won't supervene on behavior. 13. Dennett, "Back from the Drawing Board: Replies to My Critics," in B. Dahlbom, ed .. Dennett and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993),210.
14. Ibid. 15. Dennett, "The Intentional Stance: Author's Response," Behm'ioral and Brain Sciences II (1988): 543: emphasis Dennett's. 16. Narrow behavioral dispositions, when activated, are manifested by "peripheral" movements or postures of the body: and wide behavioral dispositions are, when activated, manifested by peripheral movements or postures of the body within an environmental context. The wide dispositions are thus manifested by the manifestation of narrow behavioral dispositions within an environmental context. Logical behaviorists were concerned oilly with actual narrow and wide peripheral behavior and dispositions to such. A few terminological points: Hereafter, unless we explicitly say otherwise, we will use 'peripheral behavior' to mean both wide and narrow behavior that involves peripheral movements or postures of the body. We will write simply of movements rather than of movements or postures. And we will use 'environment' in such a way as to allow that it may include natural historical environment, such as the evolutionary history of a species. 17. "The Intentional Stance: Author's Response," 543. 18. "Back from the Drawing Board: Replies to My Critics." 210. 19. It is also. we think, false, if by 'everything that happens' Dennett means everything that actually happens. For there are nonactivated dispositions and unexercised capacities that also require explanation. 20. "The Intentional Stance: Author's Response," 543. Dennett is right that a third-person approach to intentionality does not compel one to "look only at external [i.e .. peripheral] behavior." Moreover. he is right that if the criterion for being external behavior is being intersubjectively observable behavior. then everytbing the neuroscientist looks at is external behavior: external behavior is not restricted to peripheral behavior. However. Searle's claim is that Dennett's particular brand of third-person approach looks only at peripheral behavior. Dennett appears to be emphatically denying that too, however. 2\. Dennett, "Fast Thinking," in The lllTentional Stance, 334. y) Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Kegan PauL 1923),616. 23. Ibid .. 617. 2-1-. See Jackson's "Appendix A (for Philosophers)," 902. Block presents Blockhead in "Psychologism and Behaviorism," Philosophical Review 90 (1981): 5-43. Block's lookup table was designed to pass the Turing Test (introduced by A. M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 59 [1950]: 433-66). Block asks us to Imagine the set of sensible strings recorded on tape and deployed by a very simple machine as follows. The interrogator types in sentence A. The machine searches its list of sensible strings, picking out those that begin with A. It then picks one of these A-initial strings at random, and types out its second sentence, call it "B". The interrogator types in sentence C. The machine searches its list, isolating the strings that start with A followed by B followed by C. It picks one of these ABC-initial strings and types out its fourth sentence, and so on. The reader may be helped by seeing a variant of this machine in which the notion of a sensible string is replaced by the notion of a sensible branch of a tree structure. Suppose the interrogator goes first, typing in one of A" .. A,. The programmers produce one sensible response to each of these sentences B, ... Bo' For each of B, ... B" the interrogator can make various replies, so many branches will sprout below each of B, ... Bo' Again, for each of these replies, the programmers produce
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one sensible response. and so on. In this version of the machine. all the X-initial strings can be replaced by a single tree with a single token of X as the head node; all the XYZ-initial strings can be replaced by a branch of the tree with Y and Z as the next nodes. and so forth. This machine is a tree-,earcher instead of a stringsearcher ("Psychologism and Behaviorism." 20). As Block, Dennett. and Jackson are aware. we can extrapolate to a look-up table that mediates the transition from all sorts of stimulus input to all sorts of motor output in such a way as to match the overt or peripheral responses of a human being. Jackson has in mind that sort of Blockhead: so will we when we speak of Blockhead(s). It is IORic£111\' possible for any pattern of dispositions to peripheral behavior (that is, in principle. non intentionally characterized) to be possessed by a Blockhead. It is logically possible for the basis for the pattern of dispositions to be a look-up table. Some years ago. D. M. Mackay pointed out that any peripheral behavioral test for a mental attribution could in principle be passed by an automaton (see his "Mentality and Machines." Aristolelial1 Society Supplement 26 [1952]: 61-81), This is true even for a subclass of automata. namely the class of Blockheads. automata that work by look-up tables (whether of the tree-searching kind or the string-searching kind), We will have more to say in section V about Blockheads and Dennett's responses to their possibility.
25. The Mind and Its Place il1 Nature, 617. 26. Broad took what is nowadays called 'the knowledge argument' (see Frank Jackson's "Epiphenomenal Qualia." Philosophical Quarterly 32 [19821: 127-36) 10 pose an insuperable difficulty for molecular behaviorism (see The Mind and It.1 Place in Nature. 71). Here is what he had to say about lIlolar behaviorism in particular: It seems to me that ... strict [i.e .. molar] Behaviorism ... may be rejected .... [It i, an] instance of the numerous class of theories which are so preposterously silly it i, important to that only very learned men could have thought of them. remember that a theory which is in fact absurd may be accepted by the simpleminded because it is put forward in highly technical terms by learned persons who are themselves too confused to know exactly what they mean. When this happens, as it has happened with [molar] Behaviorism, the philosopher i, not altogether wasting time by analyzing the theory and pointing out its Implications (ibid .. 623-4) Broad related that in his experience. as the consequences of molar behaviorism are pointed out. molar behaviorists tend to retreat closer and closer to molecular behaviorism. He tells us: What happens is that a man starts as a Molar Behaviorist and is then pushed back by criticism into Molecular Behaviorism. at which stage his theory has lost most of its interest [as a "new form of Reductive Materialism"] (ibid .. (17). 27. It is true that Searle rejects Dennett's thoroughgoing third-person approach to intentionality. Searle holds that mental states are "subjective states," states that can be fully understood only by taking up a certain experiential point of view (see his The Redisc(wery of Mind [Cambridge, Mass,: MIT Press, 1987]), However. Searle also holds that these subjective states arc nevertheless physical states of the brain. He denies that all physical states are "objective states." Dennett would insist that all physical states are objective states. understandable. in principle, from the third-person point of view (see. e.g .. "Setting Off on the Right Foot," in The Intentional SWnce, 5-7). But despite this important difference in their views. Dennett and Searle can agree about the supervenience thesis implied by molecular behaviorism. As we read Searle. he allows that two individuals who are intrinsic objective physical twins will be subjective (physical) twins. While he emphatically rejects molar (peripheral) behaviorism. he would. we think, have no quarrel with the thesis that molecular behavioral twins (i.e .. behavioral twins right down to the behavior of the molecules that make them up) cannot fail to be psychological twins. A molecular behavioral duplicate of the brain of a conscious being will. on his view. also be the brain of a conscious being. and the brains will token all and only tile same types of subjective states. 28. Well. almost no materialist would quarrel with it. David Lewis would claim that the term 'necessary' must be understood by universal quantihcation over (mh nonalien \\orlds,
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29.
30. 31. 32. 33. 34.
35. 36. 37. 38.
39.
40. 4!. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.
47, 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.
otherwise the supervenience thesis will be stronger than any reasonable materialist should endorse. See his "New Work for a Theory of Universals:' Australasian Journal of Philosopl1l" 61 ( 1(83): 343-77. We think that some such qualification is required for the reasons Lewis enumerates. but we will ignore these complications for present purposes. Of coursc. molecular behavioral twins will he peripheral narrow behavioral twins: and in the same environmental setting (where that includes the same laws). molecular behavioral twins will be peripheral wide behavioral twins too. Proponents of peripheral behaviorism are committed to molecular behaviorism, but not conversely. See. for example. 'The Message Is: There Is No Medium," 923. Ibid. Dennett. "Back from the Drawing Board," 210. See his "Skinner Skinned," in Brainstorms (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. 1978). 53-70: and see also, "Why the Law of Effect Will Not Go Away," in Brainstorms. 71-89. See, for example. Dennett's "A Cure for the Common Code':''' in Brainstorms, 90--108. Sec also Dennett's respectful disagreements with Ryle about cognitive science in "Styles of Mental Representation:' in The inrentioll(i/ Stance, 213-25. Dennett, "Comment on Wilfrid Sellars," Syl11iJese 27 (1974): 444. Sec Jerry Fodor's The Language of Thought (Scranton, Pa.: Harvester Press: Hassocks. Sussex: Crowell. 1975). "True Believers," 35: emphasis Dennett's. Sec Dennett's "Mother Nature versus the Walking Encyclopedia:' in W. Ramsey, S. Stich. and D. E. Rumelhart. eds .. Philosophy and Connectionist Theon (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlhaum, 199 I): see also "Reflections: The Language of Thought Reconsidered," in The Intentional Stance, 227-36. "Styles of Mental Representation:' 225. While it won't matter at all for what follows, we wish to note. for the record, that Fodor does not hold that it is a priori true that we are mental-representation-manipulators. Dahlhom, "Editor's Introduction." Dennell and His Critics, 5. In "Intentional Systems," Journal of PhilosophY R (1971): 87-106. "Setting Off on the Right Foot:' 7. "Three Kind, of Intentional Psychology," in The Intentional Stance. 58. Of the holism. more in section III. Ibid .. 50. Ibid .. 58. "Reflections: Instrumentalism Reconsidered:' in The Intentional Stallce, 74: emphasis his. In "Witnessed Behavior and Dennett's Intentional Stance:' this issue, Stephen Webb claims that Dennett is committed to logical behaviorism. "The Intentional Stance: Author's Response." 543. "Back from the Drawing Board." 210. Ibid.: emphasis his. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. "The Message Is: There Is No Medium." 923. There are many passages in which intentional system theory appears to be an instrumentalist theory, and not jusl because the word 'instrumentalism' occurs in them. In its original formulation in "Intentional Systems." it clearly appeared to be instrumentalist. However. we view intentional system theory, as we believe it should now he viewed, in the light of "True Believers." 13-36: "Reflections: Real Patterns, Deeper Facts, and Empty Questions:' in The intentional Stallce, 37--42; "Three Kind~ of Intentional Psychology," 43-68: "Reflections: Instrumentalism Reconsidered." 69-82: and in the light of Dennett's more recent "Real Patterns." Juurnal of PhilosophY 88 (1991): 27-51. For a powerful
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critique of intentional system theory construed as an illstntl11t'nw/is/ theory of nelief and desire, see Lynn Rudder Baker's Sm'ing Beli!:',f (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), ch. 8. 55. We are using "exhaustive nelief-desire profile" in a quasi-technical sense: We mean to include not only a total profile of neliefs and desires hut a total profile of these and of intentions, hopes, fears, and the like. It is an interesting question how these otht:[ anitudes relate to helief and desire. Dennett takes helief and desire to he the fundamental members of the family of psychological attitudcs in question, (For an interesting discussion of this issue see Searle's Intt'ntiollality [Camnridge: Camhridge University Press, 1980], 29-36,) We use 'exhaustive nelief-desire profile' (and sometimes 'total heliefdesire profile') rather than 'exhaustive intentional profile' to avert misunderstanding. For recall that Dennett is not a logical behaviorist about the intentional factors postulated hy cognitive psychology, 56. "Reflections: The Language of Thought Reconsidered:' 235. 57. "Setting Off on the Right FOOL" 7. 58. Ryle, The Concept (~f Mind (London: Hutchinson, 19.+9). 59. See "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," 46. For anyone who docs not know. Dennett had the honor of having Gilhert Ryle as his thesis advisor. 60. Ihid .. 54. 61. Ibid .. 47. 62. Ihid. 63. See "Introduction:' in Brainstorms, XYllL See also "Thrce Kinds of Intentional Psychology," 67-8. 64. 'Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," 68.
65. He has, moreover. attempted to do that himself in many cases. Hc discusses dreams in "Arc Dreams Experiences?" in Brainstorms, 129-48. and pain in "Why You Can't Make a Computer that Feels Pain." in Bminstorms, 190-232. And. of course. he offers a theory of consciousness in COllsciollsness Explained. 66. "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology." 68. 67. Ibid .. 66. 68. Ihid .. 52: emphasis his. 69. Ibid .. 50. 70. As Dennett is well aware. the lahel 'logical behaviorist' is not fully appropriate for Ryle since Ryle analyzes certain sorts of mental states ny appealing to inner episodes. See Rylc's The COllcept ofMmd where. for example. in his analysis of vanit}. he appeals to dispositions to "indulge in roseate daydreams ahout [one's] own successcs" (86: quoted in Dennett's "A Cure for the Common Codc',''' 96). Suffice it to note that Ryle may well not have been a Rylean. 71. "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology." 58. 72. Ibid. 73. Alston. "Functionalism and Theological Language:' in Dil';ne .!Vature (fnd Humall Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1989).68. 74. See note 55. 75. 'Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology." 58. 76. Ibid .. 59. 77. See McLaughlin's "Dispositions:' in E. Sosa and 1. Kim. ed, .. A Companion to Meta· physics (Oxford: Basil BlackwelL 1994).70-3. On the phenomenalistic view of dispositions. something is. for instance, water soluble iff it would dissolve if immersed ill water. For a criticism of the phenomenalist view of dispositions. see C. B. Martin's "Dispositions and Conditionals:' Philosophical Quanerly 20 ( 199.+): 256-3. 78. We appeal to this feature of intentional system theory in our responsc to objection one in section IV
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79. 80. 81. 82. K3. 84.
"Three Kind,., of Intentional Psychology." 57. "True Believers:' 15. Ibid .. 2S. "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," 49. "True Believers:' 21. It has been countered that a more workable strategy is a perspectiva/ist one: Start with the assumption that the subject i, psychologically just like yourself and adjust that assumption only insofar as you have to for successful prediction of behavior. See Stephen Stich's "Dennett on Intentional Systems," PhifosoplziC!lf Topics 12 (1981): 38-62. Stich offers a powerful critique of the ideal-rationality strategy. Dennett replies to Stich in "Making Sense of Ourselves:' in The Intentional Stance, 83-102. Dennett appears to hold that the difference between the ideal-rationality strategy and the perspectivalist strategy is not deep but rather more a difference in emphasis. The strategies strike us, however. as importantly different. (How can a perspectivalist strategy be considered an entirely third-person strategy") But this is not a matter we will pursue since so doing would take us far afield of our central concern,. We will simply leave open the details of the rationality assumption. KS. "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology." 52n. 86. While we speak of actions and of peripheral behavior, we do not mean to suggest that they are different. We address this issue in section IV: see the reply to objection two. 87. "True Believers," 15; emphases his. Notice that this holistic logical behaviorist version of intentional system theory differs from the early instrumentalist version. In "Intentional Systems." he say,: The definition of intentional systems I have given doe, not say that intentional "ystems really have heliefs and desires, but that one can explain and predict their behavior hy ascrihing beliefs and deSires to them (7). To repeat: We will not discuss the early instrumentalist version. 88. "The Intentional Stance: Author's Response:' 542-3. 89. See "True Believer<' 23-5, In "Intentional Systems," employing the instrumentalist version of the theory, Dennen counts a chess playing computer as an intentional system. However. he docs not do that on the more mature holistic logical behaviorist version which purports to tell us what it is to be a genuine believer. The behavior of a chess playing computer is /lot reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy. Only its chess moves are so predictable. And the predictions would fail terribly if, for instance, a single rule of chess were changed. 90. For Dennett's views concerning nonverbal animals, see "Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethnology: The Panglossian Paradigm Defended," in The IlIlentiol1af Stan('e, 237-68: see also "Reflections: Interpreting Monkeys, Theorists, and Genes," in The TIl/ell/;ollai Stance, 266-86. Dennett draws a distinction between beliefs and opinions (see "How to Change Your Mind:' in Bmin.llorms, 300-9 J. Higher nonverbal animals have beliefs, but they lack opinions. According to Dennett. only language w,ers have opinions. 91. See. for example, Dennett's discussion of the sphinx wasp in "Mechanism and Responsibility." in Bminsrorms, 24+-6. 92. Andy Clark, Ass(lciatil'e Engines (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 214-15: emphases Clark's. 93. 94. 95. 96,
"True Believers:' 23-4. Ibid .. 25: emphases his. Ibid.: emphasis his, Ibid .. 2g.
97. cr. Searle's "Meaning and the Social Construction of Reality:' forthcoming. 98. We are not of course here endorsing a secondary-quality theory of color. 99. "True Believers," 15.
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100. Subtleties aside, the description 'the liquid actually in our lakes. rivers. streams ..... is a rigidifying description of water. It picks out the same kind of stuff in every possible world. namely RO. The notion of a rigidifying description is employed b) M. Davie,; and L. Humberstone in their "Two Notions of Necessity," Philosophical Studies 38 (198()): 1-30. The notion is. of course. derivative from Saul Kripke ' .., notion of a rigid designator. See his Naming alld Necessity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1980). (We should note in this connection that Philip Pettit ["Realism and Response-Dependence." Mind 4 (199\ ): 587-626] has pointed out important ways of combining the notion of a rigidifying description and the notion of a "responsc-dependent property" [the term is Mark Johnston's: see his "Dispositional Theories of Value." Proceedings «[the Aris{{Jtelian Society. Supplementar; Volume 63 (1989): 139-74]. Suffice it to note that what he says is consistent with the points we have been making about pure ascriptivism. There is no disagreement here.) 101. "True Believers," 29: emphasis his. 102. Ibid .. 25; emphasis his. 103. Ibid .. 27. 104. Ibid., 25. 105. Sec Vann McGee. TrUlh, Vagueness. and Paradox (Indianapolis: Hackett. J988), 77. 106. See the reference in notc 10. We hesitate to say that Dennett actually holds an evolutionary account of inte~tionality. He wants, for instance, to allow for artificial intelligence. To be sure, he sometimes seems. however. to hold that selectional history, albeit not natur
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109. Ibid. (The locus classicus for Quine's indeterminacy thesis is, of course. Word and Ohject [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pre", 1960[, ch. 2.) Dennett is emphatic that indeterminacy extend, as well to "patterns in di~positions to 'behave' internally" (,'Reflections: Real Patterns, Deeper Facts. and Empty Questions." 40). He goes on to tell us: My argument in "Brain Writing and Mind Reading" [in Brainstorms. 39~521 enlarged on this theme. exposing the error of those who had hoped tofind somerhill~ ill [he head to settle the cases Quine's peripheralism left indeterminate: exactly the same considerations applied to the translation of any 'Ianguage of thought' one might discover once one abandoned behaviorism for cognitive science (ibid.). On a language of thought view. there will be dispositions to compute with mental sentences. Belief states will be dispositions to compute in certain ways with mental sentences, while desire states will be dispositions to compute in certain other ways with mental sentences. Dennett maintains that such dispositions to internal behavior would likewise be subject to interpretation. I 10. Quinc says: The metaphor of the black box, often so useful. can be misleading here. The problem i,., nol one of hiddcn facts, such as might be uncovered by learnmg more about the brain phy;,iology of thought processes. To expect a distinctive physical mechanism behind every genuinely distinct mental state is one thing: to expect a di,tinctive mechanism for every purported distinction that can be phrased in traditional mentali,tic language is another. The question whether ... the foreigner really believes A or believes rather B, is a question whose very significance I would put in doubt. This i;, what I Jm getting at in arguing the indeterminacy of translation ("On the Reasons for the Imleterminacy of Translation:' 10111'1101 (~f'Plzi/{]s(Jph.\' 67 [19701: 180-1). III. For a discussion of vagueness and the absence of facts of the matter. see Vann McGee and Brian P. McLaughlin's "Distinctions without a Difference." Suwhl'l'Il juul'Iluf oj' Pilifo,lOpily. Spindel IsslIe 011 Vagueness 33 ( 1994): 203~51. 112. Intuitively, one can want a rabbit without wanting an undetached rabbit part and conversely. This is true even when the subject realizes you cannot have one without the other.
In. It is, of course, an important question what it means to say that a system believes that p relative to an optimal interpretation. It for instanc<:. that jus/ means that some optimal belief-desire profile implies that the system believe, that p. then there is a problem. For if one optimal belief-desire profile implies that a sy,tem believes that p and another (purporting as it does to be exhaustive J implies that the system does not helieve that p, then one of the helief-desire profiles is mistaken about whether the system believes that p. However. that is not the way that rclativization to an interpretation is understood hy indeterminists. There is no receiv<:d view ahout how it should b<: understood, but one proposal. due to Davidson is thi,: An organism believes that p only relative to an interpretation scizeme. where such ,chemes use sentences to index intentional states. (See Davidson's "Belief and the Basis of Meaning." Sm/hese 27 r 19741: 309-23. and see. especially "What Is Present to Mind:' in Brondel and Gambocz. eds., The Mind alDOl/aid Dal'idso/l [Amsterdam: Rodopi. 1989J.) Davidson draws an analogy with different scale:, of measurement for temperature (e.g .. Fahrenheit and Celsius). There is no fact of the matter whether one thing is twice as hot as another that is independent of any scale of measurement. nor any fact of the matter whether something is 30 degrees that is independent of such a scalc. There are. however. such facts of the matter relative to a scale. Interpretation schemes use seIllences to index intentional states. just as temperature scales use number, to index temperature states. And just as different numbers can be used in different measurement scales to index the same temperature states, so different sentences from the same language can he used in different interpretation schemes to index the same iIllentional states. The different optimal belief-desire profiles do not conflict. even though, as in the temperature scale case, one can coherently U',e only one interpretation at a time. so to speak. Gi\'en this account of relati\'ization to an interpretation, all oj'the optimal
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belief-desire profilesfor a SI'stem are true of Ihe sl'slem. although one can sensihly employ at most one of the profiles at a time. Thcy are. as Davidson says. just "alternative ways of stating the [same J facts" ("Belief and the Basis of Meaning:' 322). Given this vicw of relativization and Dennett's account. all the optimal belief-desire profiles. while intuitively different. would be stating thc same facts: facts ahout dispositions to behave within an environmental context. Dennett cites Davidson ( in "Reflections: Real Patterns. Deeper Facts. and Empty Questions:' 41 J. but hc does not commit himself to this account of belief-desire relativization to an interpretation. nor to any other account. However. in "Beyond Belief," 123-6. he expresses sympathy with Paul Churchland's usc. in Sciel1li/ic Realism alld the Plasticity of Mind (Camhridge: Cambridge University Press. 1979). of the idea that sentences index intentional states. Suffice it to note here that unless Dennett offers some way in which belief-desire profiles can he relativized to interpretatiom so that an optimal helief-desire profile will he true of a system. even though it is only one among many other optimal he lief-desire profiles all of which are also true of the system. his endorsement of indeterminacy will appear at odds with his answer to Jackson's truthmaker question alld his allowance that we actually have belief-desire profiles. For how could any facts make true a helief-desire profile. if any belief-desire profile is invariahly either false of a system or thcre is no fact of the matter whether it is true of the system') The point of the relativization strategy is that all of the optimal profiles are true of the system. They arc alternative ways of stating the same fac«,.
We will not speculate about what sort of relati\'ization account Dcnnett might proyide. Nor will we address the highly controversial issue of whether there even is a radical indeterminacy of belief-desire profiles (though we think there is some indeterminacy due to vagueness). While we will hriefly recur at ,cvcral points to the issue of indeterminacy. this controvcrsial issue will not he a major topic of concern in what follows. 114. "True Believers," 29. lIS. "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology." 43. 116. Ibid .. 44-6: emphases Dennett·s. 117. The two sorts of questions will remind readers of Fodor', two version~ of the question. "What makes Wheaties thc breakfast of champions"" in chapter one of The Lanf;uage of" Thoughl. In the text surrounding thc passage just quoted. Dennett cites Fodor's distinction with approval. The distinction is also. of course. reminiscent of Aristotle's distinction betweenforl11al and lila/erial causes. 118. How does it yield such answers') Dennett nowhere says. A possible suggestion is that such answers can he derived from valence theory using the Lewis-Ramsey method for defining theoretical terms. See Lewis's "Ho'W to Define Theoretical Terms." joul7la/ of Philosoph\" 67 ( 1970): 427-46. I 19. "Three Kinds ofIntentional Psychology." 66. 120. Fodor would agree. He does not maintain that haYing a language of thought is a COIIC('/JwulIY necessary condition for having beliefs. 121. You. dear reader. are no douht a believer that electricity is not a liquid. But. while you wcre such a heliever prior to reading the last sentencc. you may never have been in a state that is a helief that electricity is not a liquid until you read the last sentence. 122. "Three Kinds ofIntentional Psychology:' 58. 123. Indeed. he scems to hold that this may actually be the case. eyen where we (humans) are concerned. He says: If you were to sit down and write out a list of a thousand or so of your paradigmatic beliefs. all of them could tum out to be virtual. ani) implicitly stored or represented. and what was explicitly stored would he information (e .g .. about memory addresses. procedures for problem-soh·ing. or recognition. etc.) that was elllircl~ unfamiliar (ibid .. 56). We will retum to this point in section V. 124. See. for example. "Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast:' in The l11telllional SWllce. esp. 342-9: and "Real Patterns:' Dennett typically uses the following analog) to
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help get acros~ what he means by saying that beliefs are abstracta: Beliefs are like centers of gravity. But this analogy is not only unhelpful, it is misleading. See Jackson's "Appendix A (for Philosophers)," 900. It is better to spell out what it is for beliefs to be abstracta without the use of analogies. 125. "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," 66. 126. In his Sense and Content: Experience. Thought. and Their Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 127. See, for example, Andy Clark's Associative Engines. 216. 128. What, then, about the system consisting of the Martian and the marionette? If there is such a system, then bases for the dispositions will be in the Martian, and thus in the system. However. it would not be counterintuitive to attribute a belief-desire profile to such a system, if there is such a system. For if there is such a system, the marionette would count as a prosthetic body of the Martian, one that it possesses in addition to its natural body. (While the cases are not strictly analogous, readers of Dennett will be reminded here of his discussion of the brain-in-the-vat in Houston with a body in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that it remotely controls; see "Where Am IT' Brainstorms, 311-23.) We must note that in one place. Dennett says something that strongly suggests he would count the marionette itself as an intentional system. Citing a series of examples that might be thought to show that his theory is too liberal in what it counts as an intentional system. including an example of "human puppets," he remarks: "My view embraces the broadest liberalism, gladly paying the price of a few recalcitrant intuitions for the generality gained" ("Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology;' 6\1,n). But that puppets can have belief-desire profiles is simply absurd. If Dennett eschews a phenomenalistic account of dispositions and requires that dispositions must have bases, then intentional system theory need not count either human or Martian puppets as intentional systems. Since dispositions must have bases, we think the intentional-system-theory response to the marionette case is straightforward. 129. Dennett has himself maintained that intentional system theory allows for the possibility of mere as-if intentionality, as opposed to genuine intentionality. See "Evolution, Error, and Intentionality," 314. 130. "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," 58. 131. Ibid., 49. 132. Of course. if we can predict that someone will raise her arm, then we can predict that her arm will rise: for that she will raise her arm implies that her arm will rise. However, beliefdesire profiles can show arm-raisings to be rational but not arm-risings to be such, 133. Davidson. "Agency." in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980),45. Davidson is careful to note that his three-fold distinction is not Austin's famous three-fold distinction concerning ways of spilling ink. 134. Ibid .. 46. 135. Not everyone would concede that the statements in question can be literally true. See, for example, the discussion in Keith Gunderson's Mentality and Machines (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 214, of Virgil Aldrich's contention that while we can fly airplanes, airplanes cannot fly, Can we, then, fly airplanes that cannot fly? Presumably. Aldrich thinks airplanes can be flown but cannot themselves fly. What one cannot do is fly an airplane that cannot be flown. But if airplanes indeed cannot fly, cannot some unmanned spacecrafts'7 136. See Dretske. Explaining Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT PresslBradford Books. 1988), ch. I. 137. This frog example is taken from Colin McGinn's The Character of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 85. 138. See Davidson, 'Thought and Talk," in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 155-70. J39. We say "roughly" in Dretske's sense because we won't assume that Dennett is committed to Dretske's component analysis of behavior (Explaining Behavior, ch. 1J. According to that analysis, behavior is a process consisting of an internal state's causing a peripheral
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140. 141. 142.
143. 144. 145.
movement. (The internal state is the basis for the disposition of which the peripheral movement is a manifestation.) Dennett could hold instead (a more Davidsonian view) that behaviors are peripheral movements caused by the activation of dispositions. Dennett has, however, nowhere addressed this issue. "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," 58; emphasis ours. "Mechanism and Responsibility," 235; emphasis his. See Elizabeth Prior's Dispositions (Aberdeen, Scotland: 1986): see also Lewis's "Causal Explanation," in his Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). We should mention here that in "Back from the Drawing Board:' 216. Dennett claims beliefs and desires are causally efficacious, despite being abstracta. We see no problem with the idea that the state of being a believer that P can be causally efficacious, even if the believer is not in a state that is a belief that P. It is worthwhile noting that he regards the so-called 'logical connection argument' as the notorious howler that it is. See Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), where he reminds proponents of the argument that the sun causes sunburn. "Mechanism and Responsibility," 235. Ibid., 236. See Davidson's "Causal Relations," in Essays on Actions and Events, 149-62.
146. 147. 148. 149. 150.
See ibid., 162. "Functionalism and Broad Content," Mind 97 (1988): 381-400. "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology:' 46. Ibid., 54. Suppose that it is a platitude of folk psychology that when you see a red after-image, then there is a red after-image such that you see it. If so. this would have to be rejected if materialism is to be defended. The leading physicalist strategy is to hold that while we sometimes have red after-images. when we do, there is nothing that is red and an afterimage, and such that we have it. Having a red after-image is a state but not one that consists in one's bearing a relation to something that is red and an after-image. 151. (See, for example, Stephen Stich's "Headaches." Philomphical Books 21 [1980]: 65-76.) Dennett would argue that these mental states and events are intentional-systemcharacterizable. As we noted carlier, he discusses dreams in "Are Dreams Experiences?" and pain in "Why You Can't Make a Computer that Feels Pain." And he offers a theory of consciousness in Consciousness Explained. But as we said at the outset. we will not discuss this issue here. It is all we can do to discuss properly intentional system theory.
152. See note 24 for a description of Blockheads. 153. See "The Message Is: There Is No Medium," 923. 154. Cf. Block: "My argument requires only that the machine be logically possible, not that it be feasible or even nomologically possible" ("Psychologism and Behaviorism." 30). 155. Conceptually necessary truths are metaphysically necessary. 156. For further discussion. see McLaughlin's "The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism." in A. Beckermann, H. Flohr. and 1. Kim. eds., Emergence or Reduction? (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), 49-93. 157. Here we ignore again, for simplicity of exposition. the important qualification that Lewis points out is needed in "New Work for a Theory of Universals." 158. See note 157. 159. "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," 68n. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164.
Ibid .. 68. Ibid .. 66. See 'The Message Is: There Is No Medium," 924. See note 24 for a description of a string-searcher Blockhead. Of course, which strings are selected in a given conversation by the string-searcher will causally depend on which strings had been selected earlier in the conversation. But we are concerned with the mechanisms that would mediate input and output at a time.
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165. To avert possible misunderstanding, we should note that we are not using 'systematicity' in Fodor and Pylyshyn's sense in "Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis," Cognition 28 ( I 988): 3-7 I . Rather. we are using it in Martin Davies' weaker sense of a systematic mechanism. one that deals with different inputs and outputs by systematic means rather than by independent means. See Davies. "Concepts, Connectionism. and the Language of Thought," in W. Ramsey, S. Stich, and D. E. Rumelhart, eds., Philosophy and Connectionist Theon, 229-58. Systematic relationships among cognitive capacities are not metaphysically required for mentality, but that input and output be mediated by systematic mechanisms (in Davies' sense) is arguably so required. (Fodor and Pylyshyn, by the way. would whole-heartedly agree that systematic relationships among cognitive capacities are not metaphysically required for mentality. They maintain only that various cognitive capacities of humans and higher animals are systematically related and that a cognitive theory must thus explain such systematic relationships. It is worthwhile mentioning here that Dennett has claimed that while humans may have systematically related capacities for beliefs, vervet monkeys do not. (See his "Mother Nature versus the Walking Encyclopedia," in Philosophy and Connectionist Theory, 27.) He refers the reader to Cheney and Seyfarth's How Monkeys See the World [Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1990] for evidence for this claim. Dennett did not give a page reference. so one of the authors of the present paper, McLaughlin, perused the book for evidence for the claim. He could find none.) 166. Of course. dualists don't share our faith. They don't think facts aboU[ the brain can explain our mentality. We think they underestimate the brain. 167. One will have more than one Blockhead counterpart. since one's Blockhead counterparts can differ internally. But we will occasionally write as if we had unique Blockhead counterparts. 168. Of course there is conceptual space for the response that goes one way on the headache and the other way on the silent reasoning, but we need not explicitly attend to that here. The following remarks will apply mutatis mutandis to that option also. 169. In any case, it would not be that a Blockhead engages in such reasoning processes and has pain in virtue of the workings of its look-up table. 170. 'The Message Is: There Is No Medium," 923. 171. "True Believers:' 32. 172. "Styles of Mental Representation," 224. 173. Ibid .. 224. 174. See Block's "Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology." Midwest Studies in Philosophy JO (1986): 615-78. See also McLaughlin's "On Punctate Content and on Conceptual Role," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 653-60. 175. "True Believers." 34. 176. "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," 64. 177. "The Intentional Stance: Author's Response," 537. 178. Ibid. 179. For a presentation of a version of analytical functionalism, see, e.g., David Lewis's "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications," AUSTralasian Journal of PhilosophY 50 (1972): 249-58. 180. The example is from Dennett's "Mechanism and Responsibility," 235. 181. We were unable to find any account of the distinction between behavior that is subject to intelligent control and behavior that is not in Dennett's Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Wimh Wanting (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT PresslBradford Books. 1984). 182. Davidson. "Actions. Reasons, and Causes," in Essays on Actions and Events, 16. 183. "True Believers," 33. 184. For a powerful critique of intentional system theory construed as an instrumentalist theory, we refer the reader again to Baker's Saving Belief, ch. 8. 185. "Reflections: Instrumentalism Reconsidered," 71.
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186. This is of course an empirical theory of cognitive architecture. It attempts to answer reductive questions about belief and desire, not conceptual questions. 187. We are not here considering Fodor's view: He is not attempting to answer the conceptual question but only the reductive question. 188. See "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," 64. 189. See "The Intentional Stance: Author's Response." 537. 190. Ibid., 542-3. 191. Ibid., 496. 192. Associative Engines, 215. 193. WelI, they might have some if we are liberal in what we count as a disposition to peripheral behavior. Broad (The Mind and Its Place in Nature. 617) noted that as molar (peripheral) behaviorists, pressured by criticism, start to move in the direction of molecular behaviorism, they appeal to behavior such as blood pressure and pulse rates. Complete paralytics can of course have different blood pressures and different pulse rates in different situations, and these can be due to their belief-desire profiles. But it should be obvious that two complete paralytics might be the same in these respects lOo, yet have different belief-desire profiles. 194. "The Message Is: There Is No Medium," 923. 195. "How Is Weakness of Will Possible?" in Essays on Acriolls and l:.\'ents, 23. 196. Ibid, 197. "Functionalism and Theological Language." 74. 198. Manthra is so named in honor of "Mothra:' a giant moth that was the star of a 1950s Japanese monster movie by the same name. 199. 'Motor strip' is the term for that strip of the cerebral cortex by means of which motor control is exerted. Manthra's small brain has one but not his large brain. 200. We engage in mental acts of trying to move our bodies in various peripheral ways (e.g .. we try to move our legs). Such acts are not themselves peripheral behavior. Perhaps, however. the functional role that events must play in normally embodied individuals to count as such tryings will involve peripheral behavior. But no matter. Manthra cannot engage in such mental acts. 20 I. See Word and Ohject. ch. 2. 202. The same would be true of the paralytic if we supplied him or her with such a device. 203. Note that the reasoning out loud need not involve communication. The expression 'public language' is often used ambiguously as between "use of language that is publicly observable" and "language of communication." A creature that reasoned out loud may be constitutionally unable to communicate with others. Wilfred Sellars, the hero of "Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast," was emphatic on the point that language as a vehicle of thought is not parasitic on language as a vehicle of communication. See Sellars' "Language as Thought and as Communication," in Essays in PhilosophY and Its Histon' (Dordrecht: Reidel. 1974). 204. "Appendix A (for Philosophers)." 205. Jackson, "Block's Challenge." in J. Bacon, K. Cambell. L. Reinhardt. eds .. Ontology, Causalitl' and Mind: Essays in Honour of D. M. Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 235--45. 206. Ibid .. 245. 207. Ibid. 208. This was also confirmed in personal communication. 209. "Blocks Challenge," 245. 210. The term is Jonathan Bennett's (see his Linguistic Behal'ior [Indianapolis: Hackett. 1990)). While Bennett's work is behavioristic in flavor. and Dennett cites him as an ally in "Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast," Bennett's stated aim is merely to find "sufficient conditions in non-linguistic behavior for the attribution of intention (or
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purpose) and belief." He says that "they need not be weak enough to be necessary" and further that the sufficient conditions are not intended to be logically sufficient for belief and intention, being rather "ones which are sufficient by normal, reasonable, everyday standards" (32). 211. We are supposing that the bases for the ball fish's peripheral behavioral dispositions involve very little of its brain. Of course, that supposition could be factually wrong. But that does not affect the point. 212. We wish to thank Kathleen Akins, Jose Benardete. Jonathan Bennett, David Chalmers, Georges Rey, and Stephen Stich for helpful discussions of Dennett's views, and to thank Carl Gillett, Alan Hajek, Chris Hill, Karen Neander, Daniel Nolan. and especially Stephen Webb for their comments on a draft of this paper. Finally, we wish to thank audiences at the University of Edmonton and at the University of Calgary where earlier drafts of this paper were presented.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 22 NO. 1 & 2, SPRING AND FALL 1994
Dennett's Unrealistic Psychology
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Georges Rey University of Maryland, College Park
1. INTRODUCTION Throughout his career, Dan Dennett has sought to wed the tradition of conceptual analysis to the recently emerging cognitive and neurosciences. The articles collected in Brainstormi-I think particularly of the rich piece "Why a Computer Can't Feel Pain" but also of the more intimate "How to Change Your Mind" and the witty "Where Am IT-have been wonderful episodes in the romance and, to my mind, bode well for the maniage. I worry, though, that Dennett doesn't take the relationship sufficiently seriously. It seems to me bound to end up on the rocks so long as neither party is committed to the reality of their common interest-the mind. This lack of commitment Dennett explicitly advocates throughout his writings. Early on, for example, in "Intentional Systems," he wrote: [T]he definition of intentional systems I have given does not say that intentional systems reall)' have beliefs and desires, but that one can explain and predict their behavior by ascribing beliefs and desires to them .... The decision to adopt the [intentional] strategy is pragmatic and not intrinsically right or wrong.'
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And reiterating a little later: 'There is no objecrively satisfiable sufficient condition for an entity's really having beliefs."" Indeed, in the introduction to the collection of these early papers, he even provides an answer to the Socratic question[:] What do two people have in common when they both believe that snow is white? I propose this: (x)(x believes snow is white iff x can be predictively attributed the belief that snow is white).'
This view persists into later writings: [T]here are no uninterpreted interpreters. no privileged representers .... We are both the creators and the creatures of such interpretation, are nothing beyond the reach of that activity."
All this seems to have the startling consequence that the mental states of one thing would seem to depend upon the predictive strategies of another. Leave aside the puzzling regress-not to mention the vicious circularity-this 7 seems to invite. as well as the simultaneous chauvinism and excessive liberalism it risks (physicist geniuses with high standards of prediction might predictively attribute beliefs to nothing; simple-minded children to evel)'thing):" The question I want to ask is why on earth should psychology be burdened with such instrumentalism? Dennett addresses the question of his mental instrumentalism in his later coJlection. The Intentional Stance: Some instrumentalists have endorsedjictionalism. the view that certain theoretic statements are usejitl falsehoods. and others have maintained that the theoretical claims in question were neither true 110r false. but mere instruments of calculation. I defend neither of these variants of instrumentalism; as I said when I first used the term above: "people really do have beliefs and desires ... just as they have centers of gravity,""
More positively, he claims that the intentional stance provides a vantage point for discerning ... useful patterns. These patterns are objective-they are there to detected-but from our point of view they are not ow there entirely independently of us, since they are patterns composed partly of our own "subjective" reactions to what is out there. I"
To give his "ism" a name and distinguish it as he wishes from standard instrumentalism, call it "Patternalism": It relegates what many take to be an objectively explanatory idiom to the status of merely drawing patterns whose significance is observer dependent, like colors or the constellations in the stars. Strictly speaking, he allows that mental states do exist but only in the way abstracta such as numbers do, as merely a means employed to describe the pattern; they are not part of the spatiotemporal causal order themselves. II Many might dismiss such a discussion as being of only philosophical
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interest, leaving empirical issues in psychology untouched. Dennett, himself. in his latest book, Consciousness Explained, is inclined to dismiss the clarification of his instrumentalism as "slogan-honing."" And elsewhere, he suggests that ontological questions about the status of mental entities are. like similar questions about holes and haircuts, merely "interesting playthings to come back to in one's spare time."I' However. what's a plaything in a sandbox can be a weapon on the street. Ontological questions about holes and haircuts may not be of much moment outside philosophy. but the same questions about the mental notoriously are. Many of the major battles about the course of actual psychological inquiry have turned on the reality of mental states: Witness the devastating consequences on research of Skinner's scruples about needless "mental way stations." Dennett's Patternalism is no exception. Its aim is to rule out certain questions as scientifically illegitimate. At its most extreme. it invites a practically Skinnerian dismissal of the whole of cognitive psychology: Intentional explanation is \'QCUOUS as psychology because it presupposes and does not explain rationality or intelligence. 1-1
Less wildly. it plays a crucial role in his recent treatment of consciousness in Consciousness Explained, serving as a basis for his rejection of what he calls "Cartesian Materialism" ("CM") and the related distinctions that view invites among qualitative experiences. In what follows. I want to show how reasonable understandings of cognitive psychology, CM. and many of those distinctions are immune to the objections Dennett raises against them. so long as one thinks of them realistically. as involving real causal relations in space and time. Seeing all this, however. will require sifting out a number of distracting issues in his discussion. In section II of what follows I shall do that sifting. I shall then turn in section III to the Pattemalism that underlies Dennett's rejection of CM. which, I shall argue, is in turn based upon a number of errors that arise in his thought: "constructivist" confusions between epistemology and metaphysics (§III.a): a confusion between descriptive and normative idealization (§III.b): and a disregard of the explanatory and causal role of mental states (§III.c). a disregard that is actually at odds with some of the positive proposals he wants to make about consciousness (§III.d). But underlying all these errors is a particularly superficial (he calls it an "urbane") form of verificationism that he inherited from the philosophers who inspired him. whereby the meaning of mental claims is taken to be exhausted by introspection and dispositions to overt behavior (§IV). I shall argue that there is no more reason to be superficial and Patternalistic about psychology than about any other science. Moreover. allowing for some genuinely explanatory mental states puts us in a far better position to avoid the extravagant mentalisms-"epiphenomenalism. zombies, ... conscious teddy bears. self-conscious spiders""-that seem in the end to be what really
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worry Dennett. Indeed, if one is effectively to "quine qualia,,,16 as I happen to agree with Dennett that one ultimately ought to do, it is important not to quine too much else besides.
II. ON BEHALF OF CARTESIAN MATERIALISM In Consciousness Explained, but also in an earlier article with Marcel Kinsbourne. "Time and the Observer" and in their "Authors' Response" to commentators on that article,17 Dennett presents what he claims to be a "radical rethinking of the familiar idea of the stream of consciousness."18 The discussions display an impressive mixture of the grand and the detailed: He hopes to show that the Cartesian Materialist (CM) model of the mind, according to which "the brain has an inner sanctum, arrival at which is the necessary and sufficient condition of conscious experience,"I~ is defective and should be replaced by an alternative-his "Multiple Drafts" conception, according to which there is no such sanctum and consequently "no single narrative that counts as the canonical version ... in which are laid down, for all time. the events that happened in the stream of consciousness of the subject:,2o To this end he marshals a breathtaking wealth of experimental results. But the two don't line up: The experimental results he cites don't corne close to establishing the grand philosophical claims he wants to make. r shall defend CM here, not so much because I earnestly believe it but simply because I don't think Dennett has provided any good reason for thinking it is wrong: A natural version of it is compatible with all the experimental data and philosophical distinctions that he cites. An illusion to the contrary is sustained in the end only by his reliance on his Patternalism and his Urbane Verificationism, neither of which do we have any reason to accept. Dennett attaches a number of further features to CM's "inner sanctum," which for reasons that will emerge, I'll divide into two groups: A. (1) it is an "inner theater" where more local perceptions are
"re-represented" and "gaps are filled in,,;,1 (2) its contents determine "what it's like";" (3) its contents are determinate even in cases where they
appear introspectively fuzzy;" (4) its contents form a "single narrative";'· B. (5) as "a point of view of a particular conscious subject, [it's] just that: a point moving through space-time";" (6) it is a place where all psychological events come together for executive decision making;'" (7) the time of reception of a content in consciousness
=
the time of the conscious experience of that content;'?
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(8) At every possible instant, it is determinate whether or not a phenomenon is conscious."~
Dennett vacillates between two criticisms of CM, a weak one that its truth is not dictated by any data (e.g., "the clarity of the peripheries gives us no guarantee that the same distinctions will continue to apply all the way in,,)29 and a strong one that it's falsehood is dictated by the data (e.g., "we will be forced to abandon [CM],,).30 It is only this latter, stronger claim that I am concerned to refute. CM needn't be true; but it needn't be false either. It is easy to imagine a naturalistic model of mental processes that permits an "inner sanctum" with all the features of list A and is compatible with all the data that Dennett cites. The features of list B are indeed problematic, but obviously so, for quite general reasons that are entirely independent of the CM conception that Dennett wants to reject. Partly because it seems to me so natural, but partly to bring out Dennett's reliance on Patternalism, I shall take as a point of departure an entirely realistic account of mental states; in particular, the "computational/representational theory of thought" ("CRTT") that has been developed by a number of writers, notably by Fodor." I shall assume that there is a language of thought and that attitude states consist in agents standing in particular computational relations to tokens of that language that are encoded in their brains and have specific meanings by virtue of certain covariant relations with worldly phenomena and/or inferential relations among themselves.I.' I shall argue that CM is entirely defensible within CRTT and that, consequently, Dennett's objections to CM must devolve upon objections to a realistic theory like CRTT. There are a multitude of different relations the language of thought theorist can postulate to capture ordinary folk-psychological distinctions: Belief is distinguishable from judgment, for example, in being a disposition to the latter;" and judgment is distinguishable from occurrent preference by the different roles they play in relation to evidential reasoning and decision making. These differences can be captured (although they needn't be) by imagining a "boxology" in which the LOT sentences expressive of the contents of different attitudes occupy different "boxes," or addresses, in an elaborate cognitive architecture: Thus, there might be "judgment" and "desire" addresses, whose contents are accessed in the production of a straightforward intentional action. Along these lines, it is thus open to a language of thought theorist to suppose that items are conscious iff an agent stands in a specific computational relation to them-e.g., they are contents of some specific set of addresses, "c-addresses," that are normally (but not necessarily) accessible to certain "introspective" processes, most familiarly, verbal self-report and expression. Call this "Cartesian Computationalism about Consciousness" or "CCC."N
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Let's consider CCC in the light of the A and'B list, item by item. No doubt some Cartesians have been taken in by ordinary talk, but the metaphors of an "inner theater," a point of view, and of a special space in which "gaps are filled in" obviously cannot be taken literally. Rejecting ludicrous interpretations of them, we are left with the theater being the set of caddresses, which mayor may not re-represent contents from elsewhere (is there a problem about redundancy in the brain?). The process of "filling in gaps" can be taken merely to be the inferring into those addresses predications about space-time points that weren't provided by the input. For example. predications concerning a red spot changing to green seem to be inferentially inserted into c-addresses in such a way that creates an illusion of a continuously moving spot. So ( 1) is not a problem. Nor are (2) or (3): The contents as a whole comprise "what it's like" for an agent" and may well be sometimes more determinate than memory or introspection can reveal (of course, they needn't be; see the discussion of (8) below). Information retrieval systems can fail or be influenced by many factors other than merely the contents of the addresses they normally access. Certainly the combined limits of attention, memory, and the formation of verbal reports could result in complex limitations of access to fleeting contents of c-addresses-which, for all that, could still be determinate contents of those addresses. (Dennett's insistence to the contrary will be the topic of section IV below.) The question of a "single" narrative, (4), raises an issue of just what is being counted: The collection of sentences that tell a story or the story or stories those sentences telL One collection of sentences (e.g .. DOll Quixote) can, after all, tell many different stories (the different adventures); and in recent collections (e.g., The French Lieutenant's Woman) the same collection can even tell incompatible stories. CCC is committed to there being a determinate collection of sentences that pass through the c-addresses and so in that sense is committed to a "single narrative." But I see no reason to think it is for a moment committed to the stories those sentences tell being on the whole particularly unified or coherent; in that sense it effortlessly allows Dennett's "multiple drafts." In the moving dot experiment, it might well be that at one time there's the claim that there's not a red spot at the intermediate position, and then 200 milliseconds later there is the claim that there was a red spot there. "Do I contradict myself? I contain multitudes," the Cartesian Materialist is free to allow subjects to protest. Of course, even if there are contradictory stories at different times, it doesn't follow that one of them isn't correct, that at least some of the (particularly second-order intentional) sentences don't "represent the actual stream of consciousness""'-i.e., the contents of c-addresses. The denial of there being any fact of the matter here is the most extraordinary claim that Dennett makes, and it's hard to see why he insists upon it-or even really believes
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it, given that he agrees, e.g., that the sight of fireworks precedes the sound.'7 (Dennett's insistence in this regard will be the topic of section III below.) Perhaps there couldn't be overt contradictions at one and the same time in "the same" set of c-addresses. Here the issues are delicate: It is none too easy to say exactly what we can't do with overt contradictions. Can we not think them? But don't we think them quite easily when, reflecting, we realize they couldn't be true or when at the penultimate step of a reductio ad absurdum proof we prepare for the ultimate modus tollens? Without settling this difficult issue here, we can allow that there are certain processes of cognitive integration-of which avoidance of committed contradiction is at least good evidence-that might be individuative of c-addresses. Where such integration fails to obtain, there would be genuine "multiple drafts," i.e .. functionally disparate sets of c-addresses.!8 The clearest cases of such lack of integration-besides among different human beings-begin to arise in the case of split brains. where there is substantial reason to posit functionally autonomous cognitive systems (after all. the plausible means of integration has been physically severed!). Whether the many other anomalies-e.g .. multiple personality, hysterical amnesia. blindsight---Dught to be understood in this way is a question that would depend upon a much more detailed psychophysiology than we yet possess (or than Dennett provides). If similar cognitive autonomy were also to be found in the normal cases as well, we would then certainly have evidence against CM. But. unless I am missing something (which, given Dennett's voluminous discussion. is not impossible). I don't see any of Dennett's evidence addressing this issue." Certainly neither the Kohlers nor Libet experiments come close to establishing any such conclusion. Indeed. Dennett's Patternalism. eschewing litera! accounts of functional organization over and above "different narratives:' positively discourages determining just which processes. much less which c-addresses. are genuinely integratable. It's not enough that one could compose one or many coherent narratives out of various materials: That one can do on any rainy saturday. What one needs is some account of precisely how the various materials interact. In sum. so far as anything Dennett has said, there seems to be no problem with there normally being an "inner sanctum" of consciousnessthe contents of c-addresses-with the features of list A. What about list B? Can CCC handle them as well? There is no need to. They are extraneous confusions, inessential to the above story. For example. as Dennett well knows (and Block. Van Gulick. and Velmans remind him).~() it is a truism of modern functionalist proposals that pinpointing the location of a mental state may be as idle as pinpointing the location of "the State Department" or "the University without Walls." So long as they function in the right way. "c-addresses" could be distributed throughout the brain (or the "whole cortex"t without disrupting their determinate identity in the above model in the least. So (5) is a red herring.
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As is (6): There is no need whatever to suppose-that the c-addresses are where everything mental comes together, much less that there is a need to do so for "the perusal of a Central Meaner.,,42 Your modem cognitivist presumes that nonconscious mental states are the breath of mental life and so is quite prepared to think that the contents of c-addresses may not exhaust all mentally active contents.-I} Indeed, as Libel's work suggests:4 they sometimes may not be "in the loop" for producing specific intentional actions. But insofar as many traditional Cartesians have been in fact "epiphenomenalists:' it should certainly be open to the Cartesian Materialist to be a restricted epiphenomenalist of this sort. In any case, it would seem a result entirely compatible with CCc. As regards (7), Dennett is quite right to call attention to an enticing confusion between, as it were, the time of consciousness and the consciousness of time, or "when in the brain an experience happens" with "when it seems to happen" or "the time of the conscious experience of that content.""' In CCC, it is easily sorted out as really a three-fold distinction between (i) the actual time a sentence enters a c-address, (ii) the time that might be indicated in that sentence-"Itch at noon!"-and (iii) the time that it is recorded as having entered that address-"'Itch at noon' noticed at 12:01 :01." (Which of the latter two counts as the "seeming" would depend upon whether one was thinking a first-order timed thought or a second-order thought about such a first-order thought.) CCC makes the distinctions merely instances of the use-mention distinction, between the times themselves and the times that are represented, a distinction we know from many other cases is notoriously hard to bear in mind in thinking about thought. Now, in generaL there is no reason for the three times to coincide: One's thoughts about past thoughts tend to occur afterwards and are fallible: I can mistakenly think now that a minute ago I just thought about last year-it was actually two minutes ago that I was thinking about the year before. The only place where one might expect to find some coincidence is when somehow it matters, viz., in those cases in which there is pressure for the system to know as fast as possible when certain represented events are occurring. If fine synchronization among other events (other perceptions, motor processes) is vital, then indicated time and received lime had better not get too discrepant, lest the agent suffer the fate of the British Empire that Dennett nicely recounts.-l b But there are no doubt limits to how well this synchronization can be brought off, and the examples and experiments Dennett cites suggest what some of those limits might be. The inferred predication about the moving spot changing color must have been inserted into a c-address at a time other than the time indicated in that predication (there was, of course, "backwards referral," just as there can be reference to most anything anywhere in space-time); and the second-order belief about that time reflects the indicated and not the actual time of that insertion.
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However, I can't see that neglecting these distinctions is in any way peculiar to or required by CM or CCC, that a "paradox arises ... when one interprets the events through ... the Cartesian Theater."n To the contrary, appeals to sentences in c-addresses afford a particularly straightforward way of keeping the use-mention issues clear. Nor can I see why there couldn't be a basis in CCC for choosing between "Stalinesque" and "Orwellian" accounts of the events in c-addresses, i.e., between supposing that the descriptions of the dots enter c-addresses preedited or that revised descriptions are introduced later. I haven't a clue which of these stories is correct, but I see no reason in that to leap to the conclusion that "there is no fact of the matter" between them. ~8 Such states of an address would seem to be every bit as factual as any states postulated by CCc. Merely that they might be subtle and hard to ascertain is no reason to give up on them entirely (we will return to this issue in section IV). Of course, there is probably some limit to subtlety, here as elsewhere. What might be called the "determinacy" issue, (8), the last of the features Dennett attaches to CM, is, I fear, the one that he seems to present as most crucial; but it is also the reddest of the herrings. Why in the world should anyone think anything is determinate at every point of space and time? Vagueness is ubiquitous, not merely epistemically, but metaphysical!.v (arguably, it's not merely epistemic limitations that make it indeterminate whether certain men are bald). Why shouldn't the most literal minded of Cartesians, positing even a full-dress theater in the mind, allow that that theater has borders that are just as vague as any real one on Broadway? If "the fundamental implication of the Multiple Drafts model" is that "if one wants to settle on some moment of processing in the brain as the moment of consciousness, this has to be arbitrary,"'" then this is hardly news. Indeed, it would be astonishing if there weren't various borderline features of processing about which it was arbitrary whether or not they were conscious: Try the moment when an address is only n% full; or cases of dreaming, when the contents of c-addresses seem to be available to some but not all of the usual processing; or merely the issues, familiar from phenomenological discussions, of the vague "horizon" of consciousness that surrounds everyday attention (marking perhaps a further distinction within c-addresses between attended and unattended ones). Deciding just where folk concepts apply is-as many of us folk know on(r too well-inevitably arbitrary in many cases, just as it is in many of the increasingly complex cases of determining a manuscript's "publication.";" But this hardly implies for a moment that all or even most applications are arbitrary, in either the case of publications or of the mind.
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III. DENNETT'S PATTERNALISM A standard way people are tempted to move from tiny to grand indeterminacies is to slide down the inviting "slippery slope" that seems to link them. It is hard to resist the impression that it is such a slope that tempts Dennett. I hesitate to think so: He recognizes "the startling dissociation of the sound and appearance of distant fireworks,"S! as well as the "undeniable fact that for everyday, macroscopic time intervals, we can indeed order events into ... 'not yet observed' and 'already observed.",s2 But there's all this talk of consciousness as "narrative(s)"--even "text(s)"-"no one ... of which can be singled out as canonicaL"s' all of which sounds perilously "constructivist" or, to return to the phrase I've reserved for Dennett's version of that doctrine, Patternalistic. Indeed: No subsequent introspective report can claim to be a veridical account of "what happened in consciousness."" The MUltiple Drafts model makes "writing it down" in memory criterial for consciousness ... [it] brusquely denies the possibility in principle of consciousness of a stimulus in the absence of the subject's belief in that consciousness."
One might think this is plausibly restricted to consciousness and belief at a time: It is arguable (although by no means unproblematic) that consciousness 56 at t requires a disposition at t to think one is conscious. But Dennett doesn't so restrict his claim. A page after the latter passage just quoted he expands his claim to include the past as well: "Just because you can't tell. by your preferred ways, whether or not you were conscious of x, doesn't mean you ~i'erell 'to Maybe you \1'ere conscious of it but just can't find any evidence for it '" Does anyone, on reflection, really want to say that?'"
I would have thought we all would. It certainly seems as if most conscious experiences-rather like most pens and umbrellas-vanish without a trace! However. without any qualification as to time, Dennett goes on to claim that "just what we are conscious of within an:..' time duration is not defined independently of the probes we use to precipitate a narrative about that period."'" And in a passage still more sweeping, he compares claims about phenomenology to fiction: But what about actual phenomenology') There is no such thing. Recall our discussion of the interpretation of fiction .... It seems to be about various fictional characters. places and events, but these events never happened; it really isn't about anything'"
Indeed. "if 11 'v a pas de hors texle," he in the end approvingly quotes Lodge quoting Derrida. He hastens to add: "I wouldn't say there is nothing outside the text. There are, for instance, all the bookcases, buildings, bodies, bacteria .. :,H.I-but, conspicuously, no mention of any mental states.
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Dennett's Pattemalism has many sources, and it is not easy to say which is operating on him in any particular passage. There is the slippery slope from tiny to grand indeterminacies. Then there is the verificationism-so close to the surface in the above-that we will discuss in section IV. There are two other sources that I want to examine in the remainder of this section: one, a confusion, by no means confined to Dennett, between epistemology and metaphysics, and the second, a confusion between normative and descriptive idealizations. lILa: EPISTEMOLOGY VERSUS METAPHYSICS
At least since Kant, and especially in recent years, many people have been struck with the epistemic insight that much of our knowledge of the world is not due to some kind of "direct" perception of it but is "constructed," the result of "top-down processing," whereby our preexisting theories are imposed upon an often inchoate perceptual experience. Putting to one side the degree of truth of such claims, what is alarming about them is how often they lead people uncritically to the astonishing metaphysical claim that the world itself is "constructed.""/ Sometimes this is in tum related to the aforementioned use-mention confusion-the confusion between properties of our representations of the world with properties of the world itself.'" That this latter confusion may be at play in Dennett is brought out by his repeated endorsements'" of Julian Jaynes's similar confusion between the emergence of consciousness and the emergence of stories about consciousness.'" On the face of it, there would seem to be all the difference in the world between a narratil'e about one's conscious states and the conscious states themselves. Someone, after all. could falsely believe a narrative that she was unconscious yesterday: But surely that alone wouldn't have made it true that she was unconscious then~ In his defense of Jaynes against this charge, Dennett compares Jaynes's (and his own) view to Hobbes's view of the origins of morality in a social contract: It's only once you get into a certain conceptual environment that the phenomenon of right and wrong. the phenomenon of morality exists at all. Now I take Jayne" to be making a similarly exciting and striking move with regard to consciousness. To put it really somewhat paradoxically. you can't have consciousness until you have the concept of consciousness.'"
He, in tum, places both morality and consciousness in the category of straightforward social constructions, like baseball: These aren't the only two phenomena. morality and consciousness, that work in this way .... Other phenomena are obvious: you can't have baseball before you have the concept of baseball. you can't have money before you have the concept of money. ".
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Now certainly with regard to money and baseball, constructivism does seem plausible enough, sustainable by relatively trivial conceptual analysis: Baseball is constituted by social agreement; if everyone agrees that a certain activity isn't baseball, then it isn't."7 But surely conceptual analysis supports no such claim about consciousness: It's part of my and most of my friends' concept that it's at least possible for someone to be conscious even if neither she nor anyone else ever thought she was. We certainly wouldn't regard the DennettIJaynes view, by itself, as a genuine anaesthetic: Convince yourself-and everyone else--{)ftheir story, et voila!, you're unconscious?!M It's one thing to be an eliminativist about mental entities, quite another to think the issue depends upon what one thinks on the matter. 6Y If not conceptual analysis, then what else supports constructivism about consciousness? IILh NORMATIVE VERSUS DESCRIPTIVE IDEALIZATIONS
Another source of Dennett's Patternalism is his often repeated claim that mental concepts are "normative": A system's beliefs are those it ought to have given its perceptual capacities, its epistemic needs, and its biography, ... [its] desires are those it ought to have given its biological needs and the most practicable means of satisfying them .... twhere] "ought to have" means "would have if it were ideally ensconced 7 in its environmental niche. (\
At one point Dennett seems to regard the "ought" and normativity as explicitly moral: The concept of a person is ... inescapably normative. The moral notion of a person and the metaphysical notion of a person are not separate and distinct concepts. but just two different and unstable resting points on the same continuum. This relativity infects the satisfaction of conditions of personhood at every level. There is no objectively satisfiable condition for an entity's 71 reallv having beliefs.
Moreover, different people might idealize differently and there be no objective basis for choice: "The choice of a[n intentional] pattern would indeed be up to an observer, a matter to be decided on pragmatic grounds."n Indeed, he even goes so far as to make the astounding claim I quoted at the beginmng: Intentional theory is vacuous as psychology because it presupposes and does not explain rationality or intelligence."
Fortunately for cognitive psychology, there are a number of problems with the argument here. To begin with. "idealization" suffers from a crucial ambiguity: There are genuinely normative ideals, such as one finds in ethics and aesthetics, ideals of goodness and beauty which, though perhaps forever uninstantiated in this dismal world, are the standards by which we judge
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things. These are to be distinguished from descriptive, explanatory idealizations. which seem to arise essentially throughout the sciences, mostly in the macro ones but quite arguably even in the "academic physical ones": There are, after all, Boyle's and Kepler's laws, Bernoulli's Principle, and even (short ofthe utopian grand-unified "Theory of Everything") the fundamental laws of electromagnetism and gravitation, which must idealize away from interactions among themselves.7-I On this latter, descriptive reading, idealizations to rationality need make no more claim to how people ought to speak. think, or act, than do Boyle's idealizations about gases need make some sort of moral claim about how gases morally ought to behave or Kepler's laws need to about how planets morally ought to move. Such idealizations are not justified on any normative grounds other than the standard epistemic norms of good theory and explanation. One idealization, like Boyle's or Bernoulli's or Kepler's, is selected over another presumably because of its greater explanatory power: Do the bookkeeping this way, claiming this to be a law and the rest to be noise or interference, and you'll get a better explanation-objectively better, "carving nature closer to her joints"-than if you do it otherwise: Think of the planets as moving in ellipses, with deviations due to interactions and interlerences, and you'll get a more correct theory than if you think of them as moving in circles. In any event. however one thinks of the ultimate status of idealizations in science. Dennett has provided no reason to think that idealization in psychology is any worse off than the idealizations involved in the rest of science. Notice one immense difference between normative and descriptive idealization: Ethical and aesthetical ideals are not. per se, invoked in a causal explanation of anything.~5 (Of course, a belief in or desire for the ideal may be: But, as powerful as the belief might be, the ideal itself may be forever uninstantiated and so causally impotent.) The factors postulated in descriptive idealizations, however, typically are causal: It was because the pressure increased and, because ideally (or ceteris paribus), increases in pressure with constant volume cause increases in temperature that the temperature increased; presumably it is something about the motion and proximity of planets to the sun (something finally isolated by Newton) that causes them to move elliptically. This is not to say that every referring term in a descriptive idealization must refer to something that is causally efficacious. Dennett rightly points to cases such as "state spaces" which are arguably merely a piece of the representational system and not "part of the furniture of the physical world." But one needs to consider the terms case by case, law by law. Thus, to take the competence models of Chomsky and David Marr with which Dennett compares the intentional stance, it is hard to see how those models would be explanatory without the structural descriptions (~fsentellces and of 2-J/2D sketches being causally implicated in language processing and vision. and,
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arguably, without at least some of the rules for these domains being encoded in the brain from birth. But it's hard to tell from a distance. What one wants is details.
m.e
EXPLANATORY ADEQUACY AND CAUSAL EFFICACY
Setting aside, then, the spurious role of "normativity" in intentional explanation, we ought to examine (i) the explanatory adequacy of Dennett's idealization and (ii) the extent to which its explanatory adequacy requires the causal efficacy of the constituent intentional states. With regard to (i), however, it would seem wildly premature to decide upon the appropriate idealizations for psychology-think of the difficulties of picking the right idealizations in merely linguistics. not to mention the enormous difficulties in even framing genuinely normative criteria of inductive or practical rationality. I see no particular reason to accept just at their face value the particular idealizations Dennett recommends: that, e.g .. even ideally, people believe what they ought-under deductive closure !7 '_or desire what they need. Off hand. these particular idealizations seem about as likely as that the planets move in circles. But, fine, appearances can be deceptive and science can explain them away. I just don't see Dennett defending his idealization along any empirically compelling lines. addressing in detail the experimental literature that raises problems for such claims." Indeed. confronted with familiar experimental problems for his modeL Dennett simply writes: f
I would insist. however. that all this empiricalJ y obtained lore is laid over a fundamental generative a~d normative framework that has the features I have described.
After aiL "No other view of folk psychology ... can explain the fact that we do so well predicting each other's behavior."'" This last claim. however, is a quite substantive one for which he hasn't provided any serious empirical evidence, much less convincing philosophical argument. Surely we make sense of one another all the time without assuming anything remotely like deductive closure or a correspondence between wants and needs-to the contrary. we'd be positively myst{fied were either of these actually to be observed in someone (e.g .. someone who immediately saw any consequence of Peano's axioms and was never so much as tempted by anything she didn't need!). Indeed, an important point that Dennett oddly overlooks is that many patterns ofirratiOlzality demand el'el-:V bit as much intentionality as patterns (~f rationality. Consider, not merely Kahneman and Tversky's "deliberately [induced] situations that provoke irrational responses,"KO but just any of the fallacies enumerated in any elementary logic text. One might wonder why they are there, as opposed to some neurophysiological manual (they are certainly not part of logic). The reason is clear: These are errors that often
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appear to be logical. As such, they are intentionally comprehensible, usually by virtue of their content. The fallacy of composition involves uncritically inferring properties of the whole from properties of the parts; the gambler fallacy involves supposing that what's true of an infinite set is true of its large finite subsets; the genetic fallacy involves confusing mere causes of a claim with its reasons.XI These are no mere mechanical breakdowns, comprehensible only from some nonintentional stance; to the contrary, they are specific patterns in contentful thought that people find persistently compelling.~c Pace Dennett, they do not "defy description in ordinary terms of belief and desire:,R) The intentional stance, far from being undem1ined by such cases, would seem to be required by them. Along similar lines, Fodor pointed out that in playing chess, for example, part and parcel of one's intentional stance may be the hypothesis that one's opponent is "a sucker for a knight fork:'K~ Dennett attempts to account for such metareasoning by claiming that Being approximately rational. Black is not likely to notice threats that would take a great deal of time and effort to discover .... If Black is, as Fodor supposes, rather unlikely to notice the threat, it must be because the threat is somewhat distant in the search tree. K<
But-apart from providing no empirical evidence that that is the right diagnosis (why shouldn't the fork be "right in front of his nose," and one just knows he's bad at noticing patterns of that sort?)-Dennett here is already conceding that the intentional stance doesn't require anything like deductive closure or any other optimal rationality. Indeed, when we now tum to issue (ii)-the extent to which explanatory adequacy requires causal efficacy-it's hard to understand the folk strategy without supposing it involves quite specific causal presumptions. Reasonings, whether logical or fallacious, seem representation-bound: The agent needs to spend "a great deal of time and effort" doing what? Evidently searching a free or, anyway, inspecting some sort of internal "image" or "model" whose inspection would have the consequences in time and effort that Dennett postulates. We-the folk-obviously know this and a multitude of other details about idiosyncracies in people's processing. They certainly seem to be inseparable from our use of the intentional stance to explain behavior. Moreover. as Dennett elsewhere admits, we need to know how it is that beliefs can cause not only actions they rationalize but also "blushes, verbal slips, heart attacks, and the like."" How could they possibly do this unless they are genuine internal states whose content is somehow causally efficacious? Indeed, as Davidson rightly asked, how are we to distinguish the real from merely a rationali:::ed reason for an act--or a blush-unless we regard the real reason as being the genuine he lief that caused it,?x7 Thus, on the face
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of it, folk-psychological explanation would seem to be up to its ears in commitment to mental states that have a causally efficacious representational structure. Dennett does try finally to hedge the issue of causal efficacy. Insisting on his idealization, he proposes "a divorce" between notions of attitudes that are "strictly abstract, idealizing, holistic, instrumentalistic" and those that are part of "a concrete, micro-theoretical science of the actual realization of those intentional systems-what I will call sub-personal cognitive psychology."~H But once the above confusions about idealization are cleared away, it is hard 89 to see the reason for it. Why not just take the semantics of both the folk and the working cognitivist's idiom at face value and allow that it is sometimes referring to occurrent mental states that cause both voluntary and involuntary behavior in virtue of their content and form? m.d THE CAUSAL ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
One certainly would have thought such common-sense realism to be true in the case of consciousness itself, lost at last sighting in Dennett's indeterminacies among "multiple drafts." However one counts "drafts," whether consciousness involves one narrative or many, surely it can't be merely a narrative. After all, if "when a portion of the world comes ... to compose a skein of narratives, that portion of the world is an observer,"YO then there had better exist somewhere that skein of narratives; and if they are to be psychologically real, in a way that Dennett seems to be presuming at least some of them to be, they had better be entokened somewhere relevant to a person's mind, perhaps, for example, "'writ[ten] down' in memory."YI Where else for a human being than in her brain? But that won't be enough: They had better not just be written there; they had better do something. And it's difficult to see what else they could do besides cause some change in the agent, for example, to behave in a certain way. But that won't be enough either, since some even causally efficacious narratives might be unconscious. at least in the sense that, despite their causal inft uence on other states and behavior, the agent may be h'holly unable to report on them. For a familiar psychotherapeutic example, someone may have been thinking ("telling herself a narrative") about herself as a martyr, and this may explain her self-destructive behavior, even though she might not ever have had a conscious clue. So the unconscious narratives had better be entokened in only certain causally efficacious addresses, the conscious ones in others. But now we seem to have precisely the simple CCC model that I have urged and have taken to be a natural way of realizing the CM that Dennett means to deny. Indeed, it is extremely difficult to see how Dennett can in the end really avoid the CCC model, given its abstractness: Insofar as some information typically issues in verbal reports and some only in behavior, why isn't the first regarded as the content of c-addresses? Note that, at stray times when Dennett momentarily reneges on his Patternalism, many of the concrete
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suggestions he makes could easily serve as straightforward implementations of a CCC model. He and Kinsboume, for example, speculate: As "realists" about consciousness, we [Dennett and Kinsboume] believe that there has to be something-some property K-that distinguishes conscious events from non-conscious events. Consider the following candidate for property K: an event becomes conscious if and when it he comes part of a dominant acri\'ity ill the cerebral cortex. This is deliberately general and it lacks any suggestion of a threshold.,!2
In Consciousness Explained, Dennett claims that among the many "multiple drafts" some get promoted to further functional roles in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain .... The seriality of this machine (its "von Neumannesque" character) is ... the upshot of coalitions of these specialists. Anyone or anything that has such a [von Neumannesque] virtual machine as its control system is conscious in the fullest sense. and is conscious hecause it has such a virtual machine.'!;
And most recently, he claims: Consciousness is cerebral celebrity-nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere. that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and "symptomatic" effecls--on memory. on the control of behavior and so forth.')·
Putting aside the red herrings about locality and sharp boundaries discussed earlier, all of these suggestions could easily tum out to be implementations of CCC: Y5 The c-addresses could be just those that "get promoted to further functional roles:" perhaps as the "dominant activity of the cerebral cortex:' with "lots of hooks into the on-going operations of the brain" (well. at least into some of them). It is hard to see how any of this bears upon any issue YO except the particular realization of c-addresses in a particular brain. So what is the issue?
IV. DENNETT'S VERIFICATIONISM There is this suggestion: There is no reality of conscious experience independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence. of course. on memory):"
which immediately precedes the earlier quoted passage denying the possibility of conscious experiences vanishing without a trace. Here we are close to what I take to be the crux of Dennett's view, a particularly strong form of
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verificationism, what I call "superficial ism," about the meanings of mental terms: They are exhausted by introspection and/or dispositions to overt behavior. Such a view is not entirely novel with Dennett. Its roots reach far back in empiricism, and it surfaces in the writings of Russell and the Positivists, and particularly in the various forms of behaviorism of Wittgenstein and Quine."1 Dennett's chief contribution is his generous combination of both introspection and behavior: Earlier writers tended to opt for one or the other. But the superficial ism remains. And, certainly, if it were a sound account of mental meanings, Pattemalism would afford a natural accompanying metaphysics. Dennett is not unaware of the scepticism that standardly greets verificationism and tries to meet it head on. He takes himself to be not a "village" but an "urbane" verificationist, who is merely trying to avoid "epiphenomenalism, zombies, ... conscious teddy bears, self-conscious spiders."'''' But, of course, these are precisely the sorts of things that all verificationists have been trying to avoid. Why does Dennett think he will succeed where so many others have failed? I suspect that Dennett doesn't notice that he (like many others) actually vacillates between two very different forms of verificationism. There is a quite general form that many might find innocuous enough: [The Multiple Drafts model] leaves out the possibility that there just are brute facts of the matter unreachable by science.'''' Putative facts about consciousness that swim out of reach of both "outside'" and "inside" observers are strange facts indeed. ""
This claim might be regarded as merely a general demand on publicity that there is no need to dispute here (although note the difficulty in formulating a nontrivial version of the claim that doesn't exclude too many of those lost pens, umbrellas, and events preceding the Big Bang). But this general form doesn't for a moment entail the much more specific. superficialisl form that Dennett frequently deploys against eM, for example, in the quote that began this section. as well as in such passages as: There is no further functional or neurophysiological property ... over and above the properties that account for the various [synchronization] "bindings" and effects on memory, speech, and other behavior, and those properties cannot distinguish between Orwellian and Stalinesque models. ""
This second form seems specifically to limit the "reach of science" on certain mental matters to only certain sorts of evidence, viz., behavior and introspection. But why accept such superficial limitations? On the face of it, this would seem like limiting distinctions among elementary particles to what could be detected by a Geiger counter. Dennett doesn't offer much of an explicit argument for the limitations. At most he merely claims that:
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about some concepts (not all, but some) we can be sure we know enough to know that whatever came along in the way of new science, it wouldn't open up this sort of possibility [of distinguishing between the Stalinesque and Orwellian stories]. III,
Now, he may well be right that there is such knowledge to be had about some concepts (But which ones? Why especially mental and not also all physical and biological ones?): The tradition of "conceptual analysis" that is the background of Dennett's work struggled for years to capture some of it. It seems to be a lot harder to set out than people expected and than Dennett's quick remarks suggest. One enonnous problem it has perennially faced is the very error Dennett at another point notices among his colleagues, of "mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity."").1 Consider the classic kind of verificationist appeal Dennett makes: Suppose something happened in my presence. but left its trace on me for only "a millionth of a second." ... Whatever could it mean to say that I was. however briefly and ineffectually, conscious of it?'o,
What's important here is not the question whether there actually is a conscious event of a millionth of a second but whether Dennett's reflection here establishes that it's absurd to think so. The last rhetorical question should be compared to a similar question that has been raised about the statement that 'All processes in the universe have stopped for one hour': Dennett"'" might wonder whatever it could mean to say this. and perhaps he would be right in thinking that there might not be any direct way of verifying such a claim. But, as Sydney Shoemaker nicely pointed out some decades ago. claims that may fail of direct verification can sometimes be verified indirectly: Shoemaker imagines with regard to the universally stalled processes. for example. that the universe consisted of three regions in each of which all processes periodically "freeze" for a year at intervals of. respectively. three, four, and five years."17 Since the periods don't coincide, it would be possible for scientists in each quadrant to learn about the periodicities in the others. But then they could also conclude that processes in all regions stopped for a year every year that was the product of those intervals. i.e .. every sixty years: Thus, there could be good evidence to conclude every sixty years that all of the processes in the universe stopped for one hour. With a little bit of theoretic imagination we can see past what seemed initially to be an insight into necessity.'(1~ I think it would be a mistake to think that this error is simply an oversight, a case of rash generalization. I suspect that what's at work here is an implicit assumption on Dennett's part of an empiricist account of concept learning that was an unfortunate accompaniment to the "analytic" tradition. It is explicit in the work of Russell. the Positivists, Quine, and seems everywhere presupposed in the later work ofWittgenstein. which apparently was
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the source of much of Dennett's inspiration. All concepts, the story goes, are derived from experience. Since we seem to learn mental concepts by introspection and exposure to behavior, it's out of such phenomena that the concepts must one way or another (via "analytic reductions" or "criteria") be constructed. "An inner process," Dennett might expand on Wittgenstein, "stands in need of outward-behavioral or introspective--criteria."I09 This empiricist demand on meaning goes hand in hand with an instrumentalist view of scientific theories. Just as concepts are constructions from experience, theories are tools for predicting experience, a view that surfaces explicitly in Dennett's claim "that our power to interpret the actions of others depends on our power ... to predict them.,,11O Rather than as essentially a means of explaining behavior, it is sufficient that the intentional stance suggests patterns that are predictive of it, whether or not it adverts to causally explanatory states. This is not the place to discuss these empiricist assumptions in detail or to present what seems to many people today to be the overwhelming arguments against them. II I Suffice it for present purposes to notice that the burden is presently on those who believe them. Theories are as much for the purpose of understanding and explanation as they are for prediction; and most people's theoretical and conceptual competence demonstrably involves the ability to transcend the evidential material by which they come to deploy the theory or concept. 112 It is the empiricists' disregard of this ability to transcend ordinary evidence that would seem to be the source of the otherwise peculiar failure of imagination that Shoemaker's example of stalled time reveals. In any case, it would seem to be precisely the mistake Dennett is making. In wondering about what would verify a conscious experience of a millionth of a second, or about what would distinguish the Orwellian from the Stalinesque stories, he seems to be demanding direct verification in terms of the usual ways we have learnt to provide evidence of a mental state, i.e .. in terms of behavior or introspection. But then the reply is precisely as Shoemaker's example suggests: Just because we might not be able to direct!:", verify a Stalinesque versus an Orwellian interpretation doesn't rule out some indirect verification through some interesting theoretic inference about real processes underlying our usual evidence.1I' Indeed, suppose there was ample independent evidence for thinking CCC was generally correct and, in particular, that c-addresses were in general the very addresses accessed in conscious reports. Why shouldn't we then look to the contents of those addresses for precisely the basis we might want for distinguishing the Orwellian from the Stalinesque stories in difficult cases like that of Kohlers' moving dot, just as we might look to general regularities in the case of the periodic universe? All that is required is not the abandonment of verificationism tout court-we still might insist that a meaningful claim be subject to some test-but simply a commitment to a
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deeper realism about the regularities in the world or the structures of the mind than a superficial verificationism tends to permit. The same point emerges perhaps more vividly with regard to the problem about the taste of beer that Dennett discusses both in "Quining Qualia" and in Consciousness Explained: We wonder whether in coming to like it since childhood, it's our experiences or our preferences that have changed. The wonder seems perfectly intelligible, yet it can certainly seem obscure what further considerations should settle the matter. Let us suppose with Dennett that all of the behavioral and introspective data are compatible with either hypothesis./I'; Dennett concludes: So if a beer drinker ... says that what he is referring to is "the way the beer tastes to me right now," he is definitely kidding himself if he thinks he can thereb.v refer to a quale of his acquaintance, a subjective state that is independent of his changing reactive attitudes.'"
Indeed, more generally: There is no line that can be drawn across the causal "chain" from eyeball through consciousness to subsequent behavior such that all reactions to x happen after it and consciousness of x does not happen before it. ... There is no coherent way to tell the necessary story. There is no way to isolate the properties presented in consciousness from the brain's multiple reactions to its discrim• • 116 matlOns.
Why give up so easily? Why suppose for a moment that all such lines can "deftly account for all the data-not just the data we already have, but the data we can imagine getting in the future,,?117 It's one thing for Einstein to claim in the extraordinarily well-developed physics of 1905 that specification of a coordinate system was independent of the laws; quite another for Dennett to presume we're in anything like an analogous position in psychology. We have only the sketchiest views about the actual processes responsible for our mental life, which we surely access only quite crudely at the level of introspection and overt behavior. Now, Dennett might protest that this last remark in the case of consciousness invites the bizarre category of the objectively subjective-the way things actually objectively seem to you even if they don't seem to seem to you that way! ... Some thinkers have their faces set so hard against "verificationism" ... that they want to deny it in the one arena in which it makes manifest good sense: the realm of subjectivity.'1X
But, as the beer drinker's dilemma shows, there's nothing the least bizarre about such a category: The beer drinker himself wonders whether the taste actually does seem the same as earlier or only seems to seem so because his preferences have changed. Moreover, with regard to this question. a
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"boxological" theory like CCC could supply a potentially perfectly good way to settle the question: It could quite reasonably posit subsystems of the mind that are dedicated to specific processing, e.g., one for (gustatory) perception, another for memory, another for the ordering of preferences, still others for the abilities to attend and compare. The question about the taste of beer would then be a question about just which of these (or other computationally defined) subsystems is responsible for the net change in attitude towards beer. For example, suppose it turns out that children have more taste buds than adults. One might have independent evidence that both children and adults have the same preferences for bitter titillation but that consequently children reach a painful threshold sooner with the same quantity of a bitter substance. It tastes differently, since, e.g., more sensory predications (and/or ones with different intensity settings) are released by the gustatory module. Why couldn't the beer drinker's references to his taste sensations be vindicatory in just this way? Why shouldn't we take him to be referring to the output of his gustation module?m However, in such a case he would be doing so in a way that transcends mere introspective and behavioral evidence: He would have to make essential appeal to evidence that would be relevant only on a fully realistic conception of internal mental states. Here, then, is a perfectly ordinary example of how clarifying Dennett's Patternalism is not merely a matter of philosophical "slogan-honing." Why, the beer industry could expand its markets accordingly! Ironically enough. once we allow ourselves to "go inside" the full computational structure of the brain, we actually begin to have a firmer foundation for the very eliminativism about qualia that Dennett is keen to defend. Once we have learned all there is to learn about the computational architecture of the beer drinker-all about his gustation module, memories, associations, preference orderings, the contents of c-addresses, and so forth--once we have learned all that, further worries about qualia differences, reversals, or absences do seem gratuitous. At this point, it does seem plausible to claim that there is no more to consciousness than a narrative-i.e., the contents of c-addresses. There is no further world of images, qualia, or consciousness beyond the distinctions afforded by the cognitive architecture described by a cognitive model like CCc.J2() One could say that all there is, is "the narrative," but only so long as one understood by that a token of that narrative pla.ving the role tokens in c-addresses characteristically play. That is, it's essential to recognize the need of that architecture as a basis for denying the further metaphysics. Quine everything in this domain and the plausible basis for quining quaJia alone is lost. By all means quine those things whose only purchase on reality is to serve as the apparent referents of our phenomenological talk. Insofar as "what it's like" has anything to do with how things seem, the comparisons
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we make, what we think and love and hate, or any other (nontendentiously described) phenomena that qualia are supposed to explain. qualia do seem entirely otiose. They serve no serious explanatory role and merely produce pointless conundrums.I]1 Indeed, they would be not unlike the epiphenomenal gremlins in combustion engines that Dennett is anxious to avoid. But avoiding such entities doesn't require verificationism, superficial or otherwise. All that the avoidance of gremlins, self-conscious spiders, conscious teddy bears, or cognitively transcendent qualia requires is a robust sense of the reality of causally efficacious states and the need of good evidence for the explanatory work they are posited to do. In this paper I have tried to defend a straightforwardly realist account of intentional states, showing how it would permit a version of Cartesian Materialism and distinctions among qualitative states that would be immune to the objections Dennett raises against them. I have argued that his rejection of such a proposal depends upon his particular version of instrumentalism about the mentaL Patternalism. which, once we sort out confusions about constructivism, idealization, and verification, we have no reason to embrace. Let me emphasize in conclusion, however. that I am not particularly wedded to a Cartesian model. For all I or anyone knows. there may well be (for reasons discussed in section II) autonomous sets of c-addresses. constitutive of autonomous "streams of consciousness." I have only been concerned to establish that. for all Dennett has said. there might not be. Psychology may no longer be in its infancy: but it's still pretty adolescent. and, especially in view of the enormous difficulties in working out its career, any marriage to a particular model-or, to return to the metaphor with which I began, between conceptual and empirical issues-is premature. Indeed, this is perhaps my main objection to Dennett: He is supposing we know the serious option.'> in this area. I submit we're all still on our first date.
NOTES
J. Versions of this paper were read at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. June 1993, in Vancouver. British Columbia, and at LaTrobe University. Melbourne. and Flinders University, Adelaide, in Australia. I am grateful to Joseph Levine. Karen Neander. and Paul Pietroski for useful comments; and to Dan Dennetr for a lengthy conversation in Vancouver and some important clarifications over e-mail. N.B.: Italicized note numbers in the text indicate substantial critical or explanatory comments. 1. Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT PresslBradford Books. 1978). 3. Ibid .. 7. 4. Ibid., 185. 5. Ibid .. xvii.
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6. Daniel Dennett, "Comments on Rorty," Synthese 53 (1982): 355. 7. Dennett (in correspondence) has claimed in reply to this worry that mental properties should be understood dispositional/y, like colors, as "lovely" but not "suspect" properties. (See Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained [Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown & Co., 1991], 379-80; and his "Lovely and Suspect Properties," in E. Villanueva, ed., Consciousness [Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview Press, 19911.) However, just as "there wouldn't be colors at all if there weren't observers with color vision," so then would there be no intentional systems without (other) intentional systems? (Perhaps Dennett intends to retreat to possible interpreters: But which ones? Racists? Speciesists? Or panpsychic children'l) In any case, how are we even to specify the relational predicate "x believes p relative to intentional system y relative to intentional system;: relative to ... ," on the model of 'x looks green relative to observer)' in condition ;:'? Indeed, it would appear that, unlike reasonable "lovely" analyses of color, such analyses of intentionality would run the risk of presupposing in the analysis the very intentionality being analyzed. But I won't pursue these points here. 8. This last consequence, at least, doesn't seem to bother Dennett, who insouciantly declares, "My view embraces the broadest liberalism. gladly paying the price of a few recalcitrant intuitions for the generality gained" (The Intentional Stance [Cambridge, Mass,: MIT PresslBradford Books, 1987], 68n), It's hard to see virtual panpsychism as a modest price: but perhaps it isn't so serious for Dennett, given that what is being bought is not genuine generality but mere instrumentalism. 9, The intentional Stance, 72. 10. Ibid., 39. 11, Actually, the above and other of Dennett's passages on this topic present a number of exegetical difficulties. The last quotation from The Intentional Stance probably overstates the case even for him. The patterns themselves are supposed to be "objective" but are "composed partly of our own 'subjective' reactions." As with similar treatments of secondary properties (see note 7 above), the latter claim would usually lead someone to think they are not entirely "objective." Indeed, Dennett elsewhere (see, e.g., Consciousness Explained, 367) describes "souls" and "mathematical abstractions" as "exquisitely useful fictions"; they are "not ... real things in the universe in addition to the atoms" (Daniel Dennett, "Why Everyone Is a Novelist" Times Literary Supplement [19881: 16). On the other hand, in "Comments on Rorty," 355, he writes, "Our vision of ourselves as knowers and carers is no worse off. epistemically, than our vision of water as H,O:' and he and Marcel Kinsbourne in their "Authors' Reponse." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1992): 235, express coy dismay at their commentator~' charging them with "antirealism," claiming to be "unproblematically 'realist'" (if there's no problem. why the quotation marks'll. Evidently Dennett has a recipe for having a cake and eating it. Until he provides it. I shall take his position to be that mental states are causally impotent abstracta used by interpreters to describe patterns in behavior that, like colors and constellations, depend upon their having a certain affect upon us. 12. CO/lSciousness Explained, 460. 13. Daniel Dennett, "Back from the Drawing Board: Replies to My Critics." in B. Dahlborn, ed., Dennett and his Critics: Demrstif'.·ing Mind (Oxford: BlackwelL 1992), II. 14. BrainstomlS, 15: italics mine. 15. Consciousness Explained, 461. 16. Since many readers may search the OED in vain for this verb, I should note it is one of Dennett's important contributions to the philosopher's lexicon: "To quine: to deny the existence and importance of things real and significant"--{)r, anyway, things thought to be. See Daniel Dennett. The Philosophical Lexicon (distributed by the American Philosophical Association). 17. Daniel Dennett and Marcel Kinsbourne, "Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain." and "Authors' Response," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1992): 183-201 and 234--48, respectively. 18. Consciousness Explained, 17.
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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36. 37. 38.
39.
Ibid., 106. Ibid., 136. Ibid .. 113; see also "Time and the Observer," §§ 1.1. 1.2. "Time and the Observer," 183. See ibid., §2.2, 30-3; cf. 28-31. Ibid .. 185. Ibid., 183. See Consciousness Explained, 101-2. See "Time and the Observer," 106-7. See Consciousness Explained, 144 and "Authors' Response," 239. Consciousness Explained, 110-1. Ibid., 108: italics mine. Jerry A. Fodor, The LanguaRe o.fThought (Scranton, Penn.: Crowell. 1975): and Pn-chosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosoph." o.f Mind (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). This of course compresses an industry of work. both on computationalism and especially on semantics, the distinctions within which are largely irrelevant to the issues of the present discussion. For recent versions of the work, see Jerry A. Fodor, A Theon' o.f Content (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991): and for a survey of the main approaches within it, see Barry Loewer and G. Rey, "Introduction," Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics (Oxford: Basil BlackwelL 1992). Thus naturally capturing the distinction between "core" and "implicit" beliefs that exercises Dennett in a number of places (e.g .. Brainstorms, 104 and The Intentional Stance, 54). Versions of this view are to be found in many places, most conspicuously perhaps in Dennett's own Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge. 1969) and >'Towards a Cognitive Theory of Consciousness," in Brainstorms. (! defend a version of it as a notion of "weak" consciousness-a consciousness we could share with even simple machinesin G. Rey, "Towards a Computational Theory of Akrasia and Self-Deception." in B. McLaughlin and A. Rorty, eds .. Perspectil'es 0/) Self-Deception [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989].) Given his earlier advocacy. it is genuinely puzzling that he doesn't explicitly consider it in Consciousness Explained. The closest he comes is in two footnotes (270 n. 2. 358 n. 16). where he expresses disdain for any such "boxology" in general-but the worst he says is that it might "tend to blind the functionalist to alternative decompositions of function. and particularly to the prospect uf multiple superimposed functions."lt is hard to see here a principled objection. So we will have to infer his objections to CCC frum his complaints about CM generally. Give or take specific problems about sensory qualitative experience (e.g .. "privacy," "ineffability") that are not at issue here but. arguably, could be accommudated by further restrictions on sensury predications entering these c-addresses. Fur proposals of this sort. see G. Rey. "Sensational Sentences." in Martin Davies. ed., Consciousness (London: Blackwell. 1993); William G. Lycan, "What Is the 'Subjectivity of the Menta)'?" in J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectil'es. Vol. 4: Action Theon and the Philosoph\" of Mind (Atascadero. Calif.: Ridgeview Press, 1990): and Stephen Leeds. "Qualia. Awareness, and Sellars," Nous Hi (1992): 302-30. "Time and the Observer:' 185. See Consciousness b.plained. 183-4, Notice that this understanding of "multiple drafts" doesn't imply any illdelerminacr about the stream of consciousness but simply muiIiple detenninacies--of. according to CCc. the contents of different sets of c-addresses. In his commentary on Dennett and Kinsbourne's "Time and the Observer." Max Velmans rightly stresses this issue of integration. (See Max Velmans, "Is Consciousness Integrated')" Behm'ioral and Bmin Sciences 15 r1992J: 229-30.) In their reply, Dennett and
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40.
41. 42. 43.
44.
45.
46. 47. 48.
49.
50. 51.
Kinsbourne actually claim to "a/?ree with him that there are distributed processes that tend, normally, in the fullness of time, to achieve a relatively integrated version of the world-the stream of consciousness that emerges in subjects' ... protocols: we just insist that there is no bridge across the stream!" ("'Authors' Response," 239), But if issues of integration~or "paths of information flow"-aren't what establish the existence or nonexistence of such bridges. what does 7 And if nothing else does, then why not rely on that it la CCC? See Ned Block. "Begging the Question against Phenomenal Consciousness": Robert Van Gulick. "Time for More Alternatives": and Max Velmans, "Is Consciousness Integrated,)" in commentary on Dennett and Kinsbourne's "Time and the Observer," Behal'iorar and Brain Sciences 15 (! 992): 206,229. 230, respectively. See Consciousness Erprained, 271. Ibid .. 253. But perhaps Dennett here means only to reply to John Searle (The RediscOI'er\' of the Mind [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1987]), who, unusually among contemporary philosophers of mind, seems to insist upon mental state~ being conscious-in which case, more power to Dennett' Note that Searle is most emphatically rejecting any version of CCc. But by no means shoH's. It is remarkable how little discussion there has been of a crucial ambiguity in Libet's protocols, which don't distinguish between deciding (or ll'ifling) and wanting. (See B. Libel. "Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action," Behm'ioral and Brain Sciences 8 [19851: 529-66.) Unconscious desires are one thing and very much a contemporary commonplacc: unconscious decisions preempting conscious ones would seem to be another and rather more surprising thing. (Dennett, himself. expresses doubts about Libet's experiment in COllsciousl1ess Explained. 156. which, he notes. remains unreplicated.) Consciousness Explained. 131 and "Time and the Ohserver," 107. Indicative of the difficulties in this area, this last phrase j, of course ambiguous between the time that the consciousness oc(;urred and the time that it appeared to occur. On pain of trivializing (7). I assume it's the latter reading that Dennett intends. See Consciollsness Explailled. 146-7. Dennett and Kinsbourne. "Authors' Response." 241. I should add, though. that I quite agree with Dennett thm such a microdeterminacy doesn'J follOl\' from the clarity of macro one~ (see Consciollsness Explained. 107-11. 119). But that needn't be the argument for CM or CCc. In any case. I'm not arguingfor CM at all but only defending it against Dennett's criticisms. Consciousness Explained, 126 and "Time and the Observer." 194. This is no momentary exaggeration. Dennett returns to the issue about determinacy of boundaries-given the triviality of the point-at an astonishing number of places: E.g .. "Time and the Observer:' 192-4. 200: "Authors' Response:' 236. 239: COllsciousness Explained. 107. I 19. 126, 275: and in his most recent account of his view in "The Message Is: There Is No Medium:' PhilosophY and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 928tT Despite at least two commentators-Michael Antony and Ned Block-remarking on the triviality, he nowhere replies to this charge. (See M. Antony. "The Where and When of What?" and N. Block, "Bcgging the Question against Phenomenal Consciousness," both commentaries on "Time and the Observer:' Behm'ioral and Brain Sciences 15 r 19921: 201-6.) At most. Dennett and Kinsboume lament ("Author;.' Response ," 235) that their commentators don't agree that this possible lack of resolution doesn't "follow" from the use-mention distinction and the lack of physical locality (which, of course, it doesn't). See "Time and the Observer." 194 and Consciousness Explained. 125-6. "Time and the Observer," 183.
52. Consciousness Explailled, 107. 53. "Time and the Observer," 185. 54. "Authors' Response." 242.
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55. Consciousness Explained, 132. 56. See David Rosenthal. "Two Concepts of Consciousness," in D. Rosenthal, ed., The Nature of Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 57. Consciousness Explained, 133; italics mine. 58. Ibid., 136; italics mine.
59. Ibid., 365. I will return in section IV to the grain of insight that is lost in the excess here and that can be saved only on an otherwise realistic model such as CCC. 60. Ibid., 41 I. 61. Thus, it is interesting to note the more modest, merely epistemic version of the Multiple Drafts model that appears at the end of "Time and the Observer": The representation of sequences in the stream of consciousness is a prodllct of the brain's interpretative processes, not a direct ref/ectioll of the seqllence of e)'ellls makinR up those f'mce.~ses (200; my italics). But this doesn't entail constructivism about consciousness, any more than similar observations about knowledge of the external world-familiar discussions to the contrary notwithstanding--entail constructivism about it. 62. For useful discussion of constructivism generally. see M. Devitt and K. Sterelny, Language and Reality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 63. See Daniel Dennett. "Julian Jaynes' Software Archaeology," Journal of Canadian Psychology 27 (1986): 14-9-54: Consciollsness Explained. 259: and "Multiple Drafts and Facts of the Matter," ms. 64. Julian Jaynes (The Origins (~f Consciousness ill the Breakdown ()f the Bicameral Mind [Boston, Mass.: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977J) claims that people weren't conscious before 800 B.C. because none of the narratives about themselves said they were. See Ned Block's review of the book in Cognition and Braill Psychology 4 (19): 81-3. for discussion. 65. Dennett, "Julian Jaynes' Software Archaeology:' 152. 66. Ibid. 67. J leave aside (as Dennett does) more "realist" views (that baseball is an activity playable in the absence of explicit intention), I also leave aside (as Dennett should) the far more controversial case of morality, which seems to me rather more complex than Dennett', account of Hobbes's account can settle (see, e.g .. Rousseau, Kant. Hegel. Rawls. SayreMcCord for discussion). Just how quickly Dennett is prepared to leap to constructivism is indicated by a third such claim he and Jaynes are prepared to make: Is there a histon of lions and antelopcs? Just as many years have passed for them a, for us, and things have happened to them, but it is very different. Their passage of time has not been conditioned by their recognition of the transition. it has not been conditioned and tuned and modulated by any reflective consideration of that very proccs,. 50 history itself. our hm'il1R histories, is in part a function of our recognizing that fact (ibid .. 152: italics on 'So' mine). One hopes thaL whatever the merits of social contract theories, they don't res[ on such gratuitous 'so·s. Constructivists should stick to money and baseball. 68. I had thought that confronted with thi, consequence Dennett would retreat or show me where I had misread. All contmire. in conversation in Vancouver. in which he agreed to be quoted, he cheerfully embraced it. reminding me that he had warned his readers that reading his book might change their mental lives! More recelllly (in conespondencel. he has retreated or, anyway, insisted that his "claim is, and has always been, that since consciousness is very much a concept-dependent phenomenon (like love and money), if you change your concepts sufficiently, you change the sort of consciousness you might be capahle of. That is not the same as saying that you can render yourself anesthetized by helieving me." Well. if consciousness really is "concept dependelll" in the way that baseball or money are. then why shouldn't you') Presumably we're not pla\'ing an." sort of hasehall or exchanging (111." rea/money if we don't take ourselves to be doing so' But. in any case, if it's only a "sort" of consciousness that's SO dependent. where', the "exciting and striking move"') Anwillf can agree that the sort of consciousness you have deploying
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69.
70. 71. 72. 73. 74.
75.
76.
77.
78. 79.
one concept is different from the sort you have deploying another; that, in particular, the sort of consciousness of pre-Homeric Greeks is probably very different from our own. It would all depend upon how you count sorts, and who's counting? Thus, I hasten to assure the reader who may think my own published views commit me to similar claims that (a) my denials of consciousness are across the board: I argue (in, e.g .. G. Rey. "A Question about Consciousness," in H. Otto, ed., Perspectives on Mind [Dordrecht: Reidel, 1989) and "Sensational Sentences Switched," Philosophical Studies 68 [1992]: 289-319) that the notion appears to be as illusory as the notions of free will and personal identity which, for all their robustness in our lives, simply may fail to apply to anything (indeed, I'm convinced they're incoherent). Nothing in what I have argued commits me in the slightest to claiming such concepts do apply only if someone merely thinks they do! And (b) my account explicitly recognizes the existence of not only genuine mental states but of even perceptual and qualitative ones, some of which we may dislike exactly as much as the qualiaphile dislikes having functionally transcendent pain qualia. I simply deny that the qualiaphile has the correct understanding of the nature of those states. There are no such things as quaJia or consciousness in what I call the "strong sense," whereby people but not an equivalently programmed, existing desktop computer could enjoy them (l discuss my own view further at the end of section IV below). The Intentional Stance, 49. See also Brainstonns,18-19, 21-2, 106,281-2. Brainstonns, 285. Dennett, "Lovely and Suspect Properties," 49. Brainstonns, 15; italics mine. See Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1983) and Nature's Capacities and Their Measurement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), for lively discussion of idealization in even fundamental physics. Cartwright does think that these idealizations show that "physics lies," and sometimes it would appear that this is what Dennett would like to say about the intentional stance. But it's not what he does say, which is not that that stance is merely false but that there is no fact of the matter! But, of course, the mere fact that few, if any. objects may satisfy the conditions in an idealization is no reason whatever to think that it is indetenninate whether they do. The fact that Boyle's laws may apply only to "ideal gases" that might be well-nigh impossible does not for a moment imply that there is no fact of the matter about whether there are ideal gases: only that there is a good chance that in fact there are none. At worst, if this interpretation of idealizations were correct (and Dennett's particular idealizations were the right ones), then it would turn out that there were no intentional systems: Nothing whatsoever would have intentional states. But there are other, less draconian interpretations of idealizations (see Paul Pietroski and Georges Rey, "When Other Things Aren't Equal: Saving Ceteris Paribus Laws from Vacuity," British lournalfor the Philosophy of Science, [forthcoming], for one such interpretation and a reply to Cartwright). I leave aside Kantian and other prescriptivist views, according to which even moral laws might be descriptive laws to the effect, e.g., that, ceteris paribus, a rational agent acts on the moral law, since, a fortiori, this can't be Dennett's view. See. for example, Brainstorms, 10--11. Dennett does seem to retract this extreme view on page 94 of The Intentional Stance, claiming he really intends a "flexible line" between folk practice and overtly normative theory. But a page later he hedges it, claiming that "in the course of making [a] case for what we might call implication-insulated cognitive states, ... we must talk about what our agent 'pseudo-believes' and 'pseudo-knows: [or1 ... 'sub-doxastic states'" (95). I, who see no such need, am therefore inclined to hold Dennett to the closure condition, as a condition on at least full belief. Stephen Stich provides a useful discussion of much of this material in relation to Dennett, in Stich, "Relativism, Rationality and the Limits ofIntentional Description," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 65 (1984): 211-35. The Intentional Stance, 54. Ibid., 51.
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80. Ibid., 52. 81. These are, of course, rough diagnoses. I only want to bring out their probable semantic content; the details are surely much subtler than anyone presently knows. 82. Philip 10hnson-Laird's Mental Models: Towards a Cognitit'e Theory of Language. Inference and Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1983) is an example of an effort within intentional psychology to explain oddities in people's deductive reasoning. Notice, incidentally, pace Stich, the difficulty of capturing the generalizations about these fallacies without a semantic level (even though, pace Johnson-Laird, they still may need to be implemented at an entirely syntactic level as well). Note, too, that, pace Stich, the errors we can understand in others need not be ones to which we are prey ourselves: I need not be prey to the "gambler" fallacy for a moment to recognize the (nevertheless fully semantic) pattern in others. 83. The Intentional Stance, 87. 84. Jerry A. Fodor, Representations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pres sIB radford Books, 1981), 108. 85. The Intentional Stance, 80. 86. Ibid., 57. 87. Donald Davidson, "Actions. Reasons. and Causes," in Davidson's Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 88. The Intentional Stance, 57. 89. Apart from his Pattemalism, Dennett does make other occasional criticisms of CRTT, replies to all of which there is simply no space to provide here. I assume that his charge of a "looming regress" in such a theory (Consciousness Explained, 234) is only fleeting, met by his own excellent reply to it in Brainstorms. 80-1. One of his main worries (in his early review of Fodor's Language of Thought), distinguishing between implicit and explicit beliefs, we have already addressed in note 7 above. In the only passage in Consciousness Explained in which he addresses Fodor's "dubious" language of thought hypothesis, he points out correctly that Fodor is "not talking about the level at which human languages do their constraining work" (302-3), concluding that "the media used by the brain are only weakly analogous to the representational media of public life" (303). Perhaps one shouldn't quarrel with claims about strengths of analogies, It's enough for the purposes at hand (and for any of Fodor's) that there are semantically evaluable mental states whose constituents are causally efficacious. 90. Consciousness Explained, 137. 91. Ibid., 132. 92. "Authors' Response," 236. 93. Consciousness EJ.piained, 254 and 281. respectively. 94. Daniel Dennett, "The Message Is: There Is No Medium," 929. 95. Perhaps there is some feature of "such a virtual machine" that would resist such implementation. It's difficult to tell, given the rather diffuse and metaphorical presentation of the details of the machine he has in mind in Consciousness Explained. 228, 253-4 and of his and Churchland's claims about "underlying processes being projected through linguistic behavior" (Dennett, "Lovely and Suspect Properties." 45: see also The Intentional Stance, 110--6). 96. Perhaps Dennett supposes ifCCC is only "virtual" then it can't be causal. But he needs to argue this: On the face of it. virtual-machine states seem as causally efficacious as any macro states of the world. My computer runs the virtual machine. WordPerfect. whose states-such as "block on "-seem to cause other states--e.g .. material to be stored in one buffer rather than another. They certainly seem to be spatiotemporal states that are lawfully (andior counterfactually) related to subsequent ones as well as any such macroscientific states might be. But much might depend here on a subtler discussion of macrocausation than either Dennett provides or is possible here. 97. Consciousness Explained, 132.
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98. I discuss this issue at length in a criticism of Quine's s'imilarly superficialist attacks on meaning and the a priori in G. Rey, "Semantics as Idealized Conceptual Roles," Philosuphr and Phenomenolugical Research (1993) and "The Unavailability of What We Mean: A Reply to Fodor. LePore, and Quine," Gra~er Philosophica 46 (1993): 61-101. 99. Consciousness Explained, 461. 100. Ibid., 126. 10 I. Ibid .. 133. 102. Dennett and Kinsbourne, "Authors' Response," 236. 103. Consciuusness Explained, 462. 104. Ibid .. 401. 105. Ibid., 132. 106. Along with Aristotle, Hume, and McTaggart, among others. See Sydney Shoemaker. "Time without Change," in Identity, Cause. and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969/1984), 49. for citations and discussion. 107. Ibid .. 55-6. 108. In this connection, one wonders how to take Dennett's claim about the impossibility of discovering the universe is "upside down" (Consciousness Explained, 462). Certainly from my armchair, I share Dennett's suspicion that this is an empty conjecture. But, unlike Dennett, ignoramus that I am about physics, I see no reason to think there might not emerge theoretically interesting reasons for regarding the universe in this way. It surely is the most extravagant of philosophical mistakes of Dennett. as of the Positivists before him. to think that unless we take a firm stand on such questions, we will have nothing to say against, e.g., Hegel. Bradley, self-conscious spiders. or epiphenomenal qualia. 109. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan. 1953), §580. 110. Dennett. "Lovely and Suspect Properties," 29. 111. Chomsky led the attack on the view. See his "Review ofB. F. Skinner's Verbal Behm'ior." in J. A. Fodor and J. Katz, eds., The Structure of Language (Englewood Cliffs. Calif.: Prentice Hall, 1964) and his Aspects of the Theory of Srntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1965). Hilary Putnam in "Dreaming and Depth Grammar," in Mind, Language. and Reality: Philosophical Papers of Hilan Putnam. vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 196211975), deployed some of Chomsky's arguments and then some classic arguments of his own against Malcolm's Wittgensteinian/verificationist account of dreaming. which Dennett's views more than occasionally resemble (see note 69). See Norman Malcolm. Dreaming (London: Routledge Kegan Paul. 1959 J. For more recent discussion. see Fodor. The LanFiuage of Though! and Charles Gallistel. The Organi::.ation of Learning (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). In my "Concepts and Stereotypes," Cognition 15 (1983): 237-62 and "Concepts and Conceptions," Cognition 19 (1985): 297-303, I consider verificationism's role in currently popular "prototype" theories of concepts that were inspired by Wittgenstein 's discussion of "family resemblances" in his Philosophical Investigations. §§66-7. 112. See W. V. O. Quine. 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point ofViev.' and Other Essays (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961) on the problems facing phenomenalistic reduction, and Roderick Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Ithaca, N. Y: Cornell University Press, 1957) on the difficulties of both it and behavioral reduction. I 13. Which is not say that any old fact about the brain would ipso facto be relevant. I agree with Dennett in his reply to both Block and Van Gulick that examining mere correlates of phenomenal experience ("as if we could tell by looking at the neurological evidence that some of the neural events glowed in the dark" [Consciousness Explained, 240)) wouldn't be of much help. 114. At least for the sake of argument. Actually, I think it's no easier to imagine the resources here than in the more general case of any possible evidence, 115. Cunsciousness Explained, 396.
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Ibid .• 392-3. Dennett and Kinsbourne, "Time and the Observer," 193. Consciousness Explained, 132. See Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pres sIB radford Books. 1983), 76-7, for particularly subtle empirical evidence for hypotheses of this very sort with regard to perception of phonemes. In Rey, "Sensational Sentences Switched," and "Sensational Sentences," I discuss how sensations could be specifically handled by such hypotheses. Dennett does momentarily allow that to settle the heer case "we would have to look ... to the actual happenings in the head to see whether there is a truth preserving (if 'strained') interpretation of the beer drinkers' claims" (Consciousness Explained. 396). He doesn't consider any specific suggestions, much less measure how great the "strain" would be, but merely concludes without argument that "we would have to 'destroy' qualia in order to 'save' them" (Ibid., 396). Cf. Malcolm's (Dreaming, 81) similar claims ahout dreaming; that it's impossible to use REM data to establish the existence of forgotten dreams (without the memories. he argues, the data would perforce be about a different phenomenon). Superficialism dies hard. 120. This is the "strong consciousness" whose existence I agree with Dennett in denying. 121. It would take more space than I have here to argue this adequate Iy. I make a longer effort in "Sensational Sentellces Switched." In G. Rey. "Why Wittgenstein Ought to Have Been a Computationalist (and What a Computationalist Can Learn from Wittgenstein)," in D. Gottlieh and J. Odell. eds .. Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science (Ithaca. N.Y.: Cornell University Press. forthcoming), I make much the same argument in relation to Wittgenstein's discussion of sensations (in Philosophical /1lI'Cstigatiolls. §§243-308) that was apparently Dennett's original inspiration (see Consciousness Explained. 462-3). 116. 117. 118. 119.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 22 NO. 1 & 2, SPRING AND
FALL
1994
What Isn't a Belief?
Mark Richard Tufts University
According to Dennett, to be a subject of intentional states-to have beliefs, desires, and so on-is to be an intentional system. I Such a system is one "whose behavior can be-at least sometimes--explained and predicted by relying on ascriptions to the system of beliefs and desires" and other inten2 tional states. Whether something is an intentional system has very little to do with "what it is like inside," or with how its physiological, "interior" properties wax and wane with changes in the environment. As Dennett puts it, The concept of an intentional system is a relatively uncluttered and unmetaphysical notion, abstracted as it is from questions of the composition, constitution, consciousness, mortality, or divinity of the entities falling under it.'
And what an intentional system believes is not fixed-not absolutely, anyway-by what goes on inside and outside of it. Radically different, even incompatible, ascriptions of beliefs and desires may do an equally (and maximally) good job of rationalizing something's behavior. This, at least, is Dennett's view; he takes it to follow from translational indeterminacy. An upshot is that speaking strictly, an intentional ascription's truth is relative to one or another (maximally) successful implementation of the strategy of rationalizing behavior by ascribing beliefs, desires, and the like.
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Many think Dennett is committed to a pretty pernicious instrumentalism about belief. After all, we can predict the behavior of plants and trees by aSGribing them beliefs and desires about growth and reproduction. We can, to use Dennett's own example, explain the behavior of a lectern in an Oxford lecture hall intentionally: It seems the lectern ... can be construed as an intentional system
... believing that it is currently located at the center of the civilized world ... and desiring above all else to remain at that center. What should such a rational agent so equipped with belief and desire do? Stay put, clearly, which is just what the lectern does."
If having beliefs is merel)' being something whose behavior is well predicted by the expedient of ascribing it beliefs and other intentional states, it follows (absurdly) that trees and lecterns have beliefs. For Dennett to solve what I will call the lectern problem, he needs to provide a principled reason for denying that lecterns, trees, and other such things have intentional states, while remaining within the spirit of the suggestion that to be a believer is to be an intentional system. It is only the tip of a larger problem, that of giving a principled account of the distinction between (having) propositional attitudes as against (having) psychological states which, though they produce and regulate behavior and can be assigned informational content, are not propositional attitudes. There presumably is a significant difference between beliefs and desires, as opposed to mere conditioned responses or the panoply of "subdoxastic" states involved in sensory and linguistic processing. But (what control) conditioned responses, as well as subdoxastic states, are (quite often) states to which informational content may be nonarbitrarily assigned, and which are tied to behavior and stimulation in a way which makes it possible to explain and predict an organism's behavior by treating them as if they were beliefs. On a view like Dennett's, this makes them beliefs. What follows is some discussion of whether Dennett can solve the lectern or the larger problem; its conclusions are negative. Section I presents and criticizes Dennett's attempt to solve the lectern problem in "True Believers." Sections II and III critically discuss attempts to distinguish beliefs from other information bearing, behavior controlling states, attempts which Dennett might co-opt while remaining true to the idea that intentional systems are believers. Section II discusses attempts to distinguish beliefs in terms of "inferential integration"; section III by appeal to Gareth Evans' Generality Constraint.
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I One "solution"-not Dennett's-to the lectern problem is this. (a) X is an intentional system only if X's behavior can be explained and predicted by applying the canons of common-sense psychology. (b) But common-sense psychology incorporates a minimal theory of the nature of belief, according to which beliefs and other intentional states are "internal states" of an organism, with causal powers functionally characterized by the "laws" of common-sense psychology. Common-sense psychology applies only to things of which the minimal theory is true. (c) But lecterns don't have any such internal states. Though it is quite clear that he rejects such solutions, Dennett's attitude towards them is subtle. He sometimes writes as if he rejects (b): "Folk psychology is abstract in that the beliefs and desires it attributes are notor need not be-presumed to be intervening distinguishable states of an internal behavior-causing system.") But he sometimes seems close to conceding it: "The ordinary notion of belief no doubt does place beliefs somewhere midway between being illata [theoretical posits with a causal role] and being abstracta ["calculation bound entities or logical constructs"]."" In fact, Dennett's attitude seems to be that our folk notion of belief roughly delimits the notion of an intentional system, and that this notion is of genuine scientific interest. 7 Sadly, the folk notion is overlaid with an empirical excrescence, of dubious interest to science. which must be scrapped away to get to the good stuff. Dennett's concern is with the notions of belief and desire as they might find employment in present or future cognitive science. He presumably holds that whether the excrescence is "really part" of the everyday notion is a question which has no determinate answer, and whose answer. if it had such, would be of no interest anyway. Dennett's response to the current "solution" would thus be something like this: My account of belief is an account of a notion obtained by purging the folk notion of certain empirical overlays. This yields a notion closely allied to, though perhaps a bit different in extension from, the ordinary one. If 'common-sense psychology' in (a) means the purged theory, (a) of course is true. But what gets purged is exactly those elements of the folk theory which make (b) true, if it is indeed true (something which I am in fact inclined to deny). In any case. in applying the notion of an intentional system we treat the system as a "black box";~ thus I eschew the "appeal to the inside" involved in this response. One might wonder why Dennett should be perturbed by the lectern problem, if his notion of belief isn't common-sense's. After all, if Dennett is determining the sense of 'believes' as he uses it, who are we to complain
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if lecterns have beliefs? But the fact that Dennett's use of 'believes' may involve some departure from ordinary usage (though he insists it is minimal) doesn't mean that the lectern problem isn't really a problem. On the contrary: The departure from ordinary usage resides in increasing the "abstractness" of the notion of belief by making the question of whether something has a belief a matter of predictive or explanatory efficacy. The lectern problem is the worry that if the notion of belief were this abstract, it could be of no theoretical utility whatsoever: "Explaining" all behavior, belief ascription would explain nothing. How does Dennett deal with the lectern problem? In essence, by modifying the claim, To be a subject of intentional states is to be a thing whose behavior can be predicted and explained by ascribing such states,
thus: To be a subject of intentional states is to be a thing whose behavior can usefully be predicted and explained by ascribing such states.
Thus, for example, he writes: "What should disqualify the lectern? For one thing, the strategy does not recommend itself in this case, for we get no predictive power we did not antecedently have."~ If this response is to avoid making the truth of X has beliefs observerrelative. it must identify usefulness with some observer-independent property.1O Dennett identifies the usefulness of intentional prediction (in cases where it works) with its allowing the predictor to discern objective behavioral patterns which would otherwise be indiscernible. Thus, in "True Believers," we find it claimed that: (0) It's an objective fact whether some implementation of the strategy of using intentional prediction will be successful when applied to a given individual. (b) Laplacean Martians using only knowledge of physics and biology, if they didn't adopt the strategy, "would be missing something perfectly objective: The patterns in human behavior that are describable from the intentional stance, and only from that stance, and that support generalizations and predictions."]] The response to the lectern problem, then, seems to be something like this. (1) Being a true believer is being a system whose behavior exhibits patterns which are describable only in a vocabulary which employs intentional idioms, and whose behavior is explicable and predictable by reference to such regularities. (II) But the lectern does not exhibit this sort of behavior. So, the lectern is not truly a believer. To make this response work, one needs to convincingly show that (for example) human behavior exhibits irreducible (i.e., not physically describable) intentional patterns while (for example) lectern behavior does not. One
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tempting argument to this conclusion is this: (1) Obviously, we don't need the intentional strategy for lecterns. For we can appeal simply to physical considerations to predict that (unless someone picks the lectern up, or there's an earthquake or the like) the lectern will sit there. (2) But we do need the intentional strategy for anticipating human behavior. So, (3), the intentional strategy reveals patterns in the behavior of humans but not lecterns. Now, (4), the patterns the intentional strategy uncovers are genuine and irreducible. So, (5), there is a genuine, irreducible pattern in the behavior of humans uncovered by the intentional strategy, but no such pattern in the behavior of lecterns. Dennett does not give this argument (at least so far as I can see), and it is a good thing he does not. There are two ways in which we can understand 'we need the intentional strategy for anticipating y's behavior'. We might take this as a claim about "what's practically predictable," given limitations of time, knowledge, etc., or as a claim about what is predictable "in principle," abstracting from such limitations. We can allow that (l) is true on either construal. But (2) is true only on the "practical" construal, at least if we assume physical determinism-which Dennett, if only for argument's l sake, seems willing to concede. ! What follows from (1) and (2). interpreted so they are true, is (3'), some pieces of human behavior, but no pieces of lectern behavior, are, as a practical matter. predictable only intentionally. But this is not (3), and (1) and (2) do not imply (3), for they do not imply that the intentional strategy fails to uncover "real patterns" in lectern behavior. Superphysicists unencumbered by computational limitations can truly say that no pieces of human behavior are predictable only intentionally. That no single event is unpredictable from the Laplacean perspective does not imply that every behavioral pattern is perceptible from the perspective. Any given event will participate in numerous patterns (thought of as principles for grouping events together). Some set of principles may allow us to anticipate every event without thereby allowing us to describe every pattern. A perfectly analogous point holds for the lectern. From the fact that we don't need the intentional stance to predict any of the lectern's behavior, it simply does not follow that the stance does not deliver objective, "nonphysical" patterns in lectern behavior in exactly the sense in tvhich it delivers them for our own behavior. To successfully solve the lectern problem, Dennett must provide a characterization of behavioral pattern on which every such pattern displayed by a nonbeliever and describable in the intentional idiom is also describable nonintentionally, while some patterns in the behavior of believers are only intentionally describable. Whether he can depends, in part, on the operative notion of pattern. We can get some insight into the notion by looking at Dennett's example in "True Believers" of Martian superphysicists who accurately predict the motion of stockbrokers' bodies, as well as all the other bodily movements associated with the stock market. They
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observe a stockbroker deciding to place an order for 500 shares of General Motors. They predict ... [hisl exact motions [as he does this]. ... But if the Martians do not see that indefinitely many d(fferellt patterns [of movement] ... could have been substituted for the actual particulars without perturbing the subsequent operations of the market, then they have failed to see a real pattern in the world .... [T]here are indefinitely many ways of ordering 500 shares of General Motors, and there are societal sockets in which one of these ways will produce just about the same effect as any other." I think it fair to assume that one pattern Dennett has in mind is one associated with or determined by the claim,
(Ceteris paribus) if y orders 500 shares of General Motors for someone x. then somewhat after this a piece of paper with the letters 'General Motors' will be sent to x. This pattern is a pattern of one piece of behavior (stockbrokers ordering GM stock) being followed by another (notification being mailed). It's the (more or less) law-like pattern of property instantiation given by C: Ceteris paribus, instantiation of the relation R: orders 500 shares of GM for by
will be followed by instantiation of the property P: is sent a piece o.f paper with 'General Motors' Oil it by h.
The pattern can thus be thought of as a rule which (at each time "at each possible world") picks out the pairs such that instantiates R and (a bit thereafter) b has P.'< To describe the pattern in a given vocabulary is then to write down a sentence A(x. y) in the vocabulary which is true of (at time t in world w) just in case (in w at t) stands in R, and (shortly after t) b has P. For the pattern to be a pattern in the behavior of a is for there to be an individual b such that instantiates R, with such instantiation followed by b's having P, and for there to be no h such that instantiates R without p's being sh0l1ly thereafter instantiated by b. Why isn't this regularity describable using just, say, the vocabulary of physics? Dennett's discussion suggests that without the aid ofthe intentional idiom, the Martians can't be expected to see the pattern because there are "indefinitely many ways" in which one might order stock. This in tum suggests that the regularity is physically describable only if there is physical vocabulary to construct a predicate which would be true of just those actual and counterfactual events which would be orders of General Motors' stock in situations in which the regularity holds. But because of the "indefinitely many ways" in which one might order stock, there isn't such vocabulary. One might challenge the claim about reduction of intentional idioms; I propose to let it pass. How does this help with the lectern problem? Having admitted that 'x orders stock' is not reducible to physical vocabulary, we have (in effect)
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admitted that patterns like that associated with C can't be described in a nonintentional idiom. And we all agree that the behavior of stockbrokers exhibits the sort of regularity described by C. So, given (I') Being a true believer is being a system whose behavior exhibits patterns or regularities which are describable only in a vocabulary which employs intentional idioms, and whose behavior is explicable and predictable by reference to such regularities
of the response, we can conclude that stockbrokers have beliefs. But why shouldn't we, given (I '), also conclude that the lectern has beliefs? The lectern problem is a problem because it seems that a perfectly good predictive strategy for the lectern is to subsume its behavior under L: Ceteris paribus, a thing which believes that it is at the center of the civilized world and wants to stay at the center of the civilized world will refrain from moving.
Nothing in the foregoing shows, or was intended by Dennett to show, that this is an incon"ect or bad strategy, or that appeal to L fails to provide an explanation. The burden of the foregoing was merely that intentional patterns are real and not describable in physical vocabulary. At no time have we been given a reason to think that claims like If the lectern believes that it is at the center of the civilized world and wants to stay there, then it will refrain from moving
are falsified by the lectern's behavior or fail to be predictive. That the lectern's behavior is subsumed under intentional laws does not make intentional vocabulary reducible to physical vocabulary: The predicate 'believes Oxford is the center of civilization' is univocal across 'The lectern believes Oxford is the center of civilization' and 'The lecturer believes Oxford is the center of civilization'. If the predicate is irreducible when applied to the lecturer, it remains so when applied to the lectern. So there are regularities in the behavior of the lectern which are describable using intentional vocabulary. Such regularities are. ex hypothesi. not describable in a nonintentional idiom. The lectern's behavior can be predicted (and explained) in intentional terms. So, by (1'), the lectern has beliefs. We have identified the usefulness of intentional prediction with its enabling one to discern otherwise indiscernible behavioral patterns. We identified behavioral patterns with the (nonvacuous) instantiation of a ceteris paribus law of property instantiation by an individual. And, as Dennett seems to, we took it to follow from the claim-that a law describing a pattern makes essential use of the intentional idiom-that the pattern is not physically describable. 15 Because L makes essential use of the intentional idiom and determines a pattern in the lectern's behavior, we have become committed to the lectern's having beliefs.
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Dennett might resist the inference from Law L describes a pattern in x's behavior and makes essential use of the intentional idiom
to Some pattern in x's behavior is not describable in physical vocabulary.
One way to resist the inference is as follows. Consider an intentionally describable regularity, say that determined by L. If intentional ascriptions are irreducible, no sentence using only physical vocabulary describes the regUlarity. But this is consistent with some restrictions of the regularity being describable in physical vocabulary. By restrictions of the regularity, I mean the claims made by replacing L's universal quantifier with a noun phrase or name with less than universal range. Examples are LI: Ceteris paribus, if Martin thinks he is at the center of the civilized world and wishes to stay there, he will remain stationary,
L2: Ceteris paribus, if this lectern thinks it is at the center of the civilized world and wishes to stay there, it will remain stationary.
One might say that a law L describes a pattern of x's behavior provided its restriction to x is true, and take the describability of the pattern in physical idiom to be a matter of such a restriction being suitably equivalent (at a minimum, necessarily equivalent) to a claim in the physical idiom. This way of thinking of matters blocks the inference displayed above. If, in addition, L I is not while L2 is, equivalent to a physical claim, Dennett's response to the lecturn problem is vindicated. Now, it's not altogether clear how Dennett can avoid holding that LI is, in fact, necessarily equivalent to a physical claim. This seems to be a consequence of the view that to be a believer is to be an intentional system. After all: At each world w, either Martin has beliefs or he doesn't. If he has beliefs, then since believers are intentional systems, and so principles like L are therefore true of them, LI will be true at l-1'. And if Martin doesn't have beliefs, Ll is vacuously true. So Ll looks to be a necessary truth, and so equivalent to a physical claim (i.e., one formulatable in physical vocabulary). But there is a way in which we might try to argue that L2 is, but LI is not, reducible to a physical claim. LI straightforwardly determines a rule which, given a world, returns those times t such that, in the world at t, Martin thinks he is at the center of the civilized world, wishes to stay there, and remains stationary. Given the inexpressibility of 'Martin believes he's at civilization's center' in the physical idiom, this rule is presumably not expressible therein. Let us henceforth call rules so determined by the likes of L 1 and L2
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regularities. We might construe Dennett's response to the lectern problem as turning on the idea that L2's regularity is physically expressible, though L I 's isn't. So construed, Dennett's response is this: lfwe suppose that the lectern has beliefs, we suppose that there's a true, nonvacuous restriction of an intentional regularity to the lectern. But the regularity associated with such a restriction is a physical regularity-that is, it is a rule which can be expressed in the physical idiom. For example, take any implementation of the intentional strategy which ascribes the beliefs and desires mentioned in L to the lectern. Consider, in the context of this implementation of the strategy, the restriction of L to the lectern. Consider, that is, the regularity in the lectern's behavior constituted by its remaining where it is when it thinks itself at civilization's center and wants to stay there. This regularity is physically describable. Indeed, it is a remarkably boring "regularity," since the strategy we will use to "intentionally explain" the lectern's behavior is simply to ascribe standing beliefs and desires and consequent inaction to the lectern. Of course, the restriction of L to a true believer will not yield a physically describable regularity.16 Thus we distinguish the lectern from the true believer. So runs the response to the lectern problem. Now, we can agree that on the assumptions that the lectern alwa.vs believes that it is in the center of civilization, always wants to stay there, and always acts according to its beliefs and desires, the regularity associated with L's restriction to the lectern is just the rule which, for each possible world, returns the times the lectern exists. If the lectern is describable in physical vocabulary, so is this. The problem with the response is that it presupposes that the only way to rationalize the lectern's behavior is to ascribe it standing beliefs and desires which result in inaction. But there are many possible rationalizations of the lectern's behavior. We might just as well explain it as follows: Sometimes, the lectern thinks itself at civilization's center (and wants to stay there): other times, though it doesn't think this, it does think that Martin will hurt it if it moves (and it wants to avoid being hurt).17 For the sake of definiteness, let us suppose that we have hit upon the following hypothesis: The lectern believes that it is at civilization's center (and wants to stay there), when and only when some stockbroker is ordering stock; otherwise the lectern, rather than believing it's at civilization's center, believes that Martin will hit it if it moves (and wants to avoid being hit). This predictive strategy--call it S--does as good a job of allowing us to anticipate the lectern's behavior as does any other implementation of the intentional strategy. Under S, there is a pattern in the behavior of the lectern given by Law L. So why doesn't the lectern, given (1'), have beliefs? Because, supposedly, the pattern associated with the restriction of L to the lectern (under S, our implementation of the intentional strategy) is expressible in physical vocabulary.
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But this is not true. The restriction of L to the lectern, under 5, is the rule which maps each possible world to the set of times at which the lectern believes itself at civilization's center, wants to remain there, and does not move. 5 is the hypothesis that the lectern has the belief (and desire) in question exactly when someone is ordering stock. So if the regularity associated with L's restriction under 5 is physicalistically describable, so is the rule that maps a world to the set of times at which the lectern exists. is stationary, and someone is ordering stock. If this rule is so describable, we can surely translate "the lectern exists, is stationary, and someone is ordering stock" into the physical idiom. And if this can be said in the physical idiom, so can "someone is ordering stock." But the solution to the lectern problem requires that there be no physicalistic translation of this sentence." In order to salvage his response to the lectern problem, Dennett would have to find a way to rule out implementations of the intentional strategy like 5 as illegitimate, or provide us with a so far unmentioned notion of behavioral pattern on which lectern behavior turns out, after all, not to exhibit physically indescribable patterns. It is not immediately clear how he could rule out 5 as an implementation of the intentional stance. After all, 5 does a good job predicting the lectern's behavior. True, if we open up the lectern. we probably won't find anything inside it which corresponds to the states (or transition of states) ascribed by 5. But this is irrelevant to 5's legitimacy. So is the fact that 5 involves a somewhat kinky way of ascribing beliefs and desires, when compared to our usual strategies. Would identifying patterns with something other than the regularities cum rules just discussed help matters? I'll end this section by considering whether Dennett's "Real Patterns" provides a notion of pattern which would be helpful in this regard. In this essay. Dennett suggests that we identify the existence of a pattern in behavior with the existence of an "efficient description" of that behavior. Here is the idea explained with reference to data sets called frames. each composed of dots either black or white: We can understand a frame to be a finite subset of data. a window on an indefinitely larger world of further data .... Consider the task of transmitting information about one of the frames .... How many bits of information will it take? . , , The least efficient method is simply to send the "bit map", which identifies each dot seriatim ("dot one is black. dot two is white, dot three is white. ' , ,"), , ' , A series (of dots or numbers or whatever) is random if and only if the information required to describe (transmit) the series accurately is incompressihle: Nothing shorter than the verbatim bit map will preserve the series, Then a series is not random-has a pattern-if and only if there is some more efficient way of describing it.'"
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One might wonder how it could be, on this conception, that any of us display any pattern given by an intentional description. For displaying a pattern is being describable efficiently with a projectible description-such, I take it, is the point of the first sentence of the above citation. But none of us is perfectly rational. And in fact there doesn't seem to be any efficient. projectible way to describe the situations in which rationality breaks down. And this seems to imply that to "preserve the series" in our behavior-i.e., to accurately recount how we do and would behave-nothing less than a moment by moment description (for each possible world!) will do. A qualification Dennett makes a few pages later seems responsive to this worry: Compression algorithms, as general-purpose pattern describers, are efficient ways of transmitting exact copies of frames ... but our interests often favor a somewhat different goal: transmitting inexact copies that nevertheless preserve "the" pattern that is important to us. For some purposes, we need ... only transmit the information that the pattern is [such ,and such a pattern] with no/c noise.'"
This suggests that x's behavior is patterned if (a) there is a description d which would capture a pattern. in the sense of the first citation above. of any history of behavior of which it was true, and (b) the claim x '.'1' behm'ior is d with n% noise (where 11 is not 50) is true and projectible. It is difficult to see how this account of patterns will be of very much help in explaining why the lectern's behavior does not display an irreducible intentional pattern. given that our own does. On the current account. patterned behavior is efficiently describable behavior. Suppose that to say that a pattern in behavior is not physically describable is to say that no sentence which asserts that the pattern exists is (necessarily) equivalent to a sentence in the physical idiom. It then seems that if we are able to differentiate between the lectern and a true believer like Martin. it will be because a sentence of the form With no/, noise. the lectern obeys law L
has a physical equivalent. while With no/r noise, Martin obeys law L
does not. But it seems unlikely that this could be generally true. The argument above shows that where 11 = 0 (and so the claims are simply that the lectern and Martin obey L). the irreducibility of the claim about Martin implies the irreducibility of the claim about the lectern. Furthermore. variations of the argument above seem to show that even when n is not zero. the claim about the lectern won't have a physical equivalent. if claims about humans do not.
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I take it that a claim of the fonn (N) a obeys the law all As are Bs with n% noise
is true at a world w provided that, at w, (100 - n)% of the cases in which a satisfies Ax are cases in which a satisfies Bx. More generally, a claim of the fonn The members of set S obey the law all As are Bs with n% noise
is true at a world w provided that, at w, (100 - n)% of the cases in which a member of S satisfies Ax are cases in which the member satisfies Bx. Now, one strategy for ascribing beliefs and desires to the lectern is the following: Assume that it believes that it is at civilization's center (and wants to stay there) just in case there is some human who believes the lectern is at civilization's center and who intends to make the lectern remain where it is. On this strategy, the lectern obeys the law L3: He who thinks himself at civilization's center, and wants to stay there, will
with exactly as much noise (at a world w) as there is in the obedience (at w) of the set of humans to the law L4: He who believes that this lectern is at civilization's center,
and intends that it remain where it is, will make it stay where it IS.
So if the claim (el)
With
l1o/e
noise, the lectern obeys L3
has a physical equivalent (for nonzero n), so does (e2) The lectern exists, and with 11% noise, the class of humans obeys L4.
But surely if the latter has a physical equivalent, so do claims like (e3) With no/c noise, the class of humans obeys L4.
One can vary the definition of pattern p is physically describable given above. But variations on the arguments of this section seem always to apply. For instance, suppose one says that the pattern described by (N) is physically describable if there are predicates A' and B' which are, respectively, necessarily coextensive with A and B. Then one can't say that (CI) characterizes a physically describable pattern without undennining the claim that the intentional idiom resists reduction to the physical. Alternatively, one might suggest that (N)'s reducibility to the physical idiom is a matter of there being physical predicates A' and B' such that a is A' is necessarily equivalent to a is A, and a is B' is necessarily equivalent to a is B. But then one can argue as before that if (CI) is reducible in this sense, then so is the claim
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C5: With n% noise, Martin obeys the law: He who is such that the lectern exists, believes that this lectern is at civilization's center, and intends that it remain where it is, will make it stay where it is.
But surely, if CS is physically reducible, then so is the claim that, with 11% noise, Martin obeys L2.
II The lectern problem is the tip of a broader problem-distinguishing beliefs from what Stich has called subdoxastic (SO) states, certain behavior regulating, representational states which are not beliefs; putative examples are many of the states involved (on computational accounts) in visual processing, and many of the states involved in language production and comprehension. Stich suggested that beliefs and other doxastic (D) states can be distinguished from SD states in terms of the "inferential promiscuity" of the cl former: Beliefs are inferentially promiscuous. Provided with a suitable set of supplementary beliefs, almost any belief can playa role in the inference to any other. Thus. for example, if a subject believes p and comes to believe that if p then q. he may well come to believe that q-and do so as the result of an inferential process .... [S]ubdoxastic states. as contrasted with beliefs, are largely inferentially isulatedfrom the large body afinferentially integrated beliefs to which a subject has access. This is not to say that subdoxastic states do not play any role in inference to and from accessible beliefs, but merely that they are inferentially impoverished, with a comparatively limited range of potential inferential patterns via which they can give rise to beliefs, and a comparatively limited range of potential inferential patterns via which beliefs can give rise to them,"
If the distinction between SD and D states can be drawn along these lines, then, one might think, Dennett can accommodate the distinction whether or not he can solve the lectern problem, For Dennett holds that beliefs are closed under logical consequence, at least under ideal conditions. c' If SO states aren't promiscuous with beliefs, adding an SO state to the set of beliefs yields a set which isn't so closed. The balance of this section attempts to flesh out the idea in the passage from Stich. Its conclusion is negative: Whatever the difference between D and SO states, it is not characterized in terms of inferential integration or promiscuity.
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What is inferential promiscuity? One definitian ascribes it to a system or set B of mental state types. B is promiscuous provided that for each b in B there is a content p. where (I) b's content determines h's truth conditions;'" (2) contents determine logical relations among members of B such as entailment and incompatibility; (3) if conditions are right, someone in each of a set of states from B the contents of which logically entail a content p will come to be in a state from B with p as content.
This delimits a sense in which beliefs might be said to be inferentially promiscuous: They have contents which determine truth conditions and entailment relations, and are loosely closed ("when conditions are right") under logical entailment.'< Note that ( I) and (2) come to different things. Suppose, for illustration's sake. I "think in English." Then the truth conditions of the belief realized by "Twain writes" are the same as those of the belief realized by "Clemens writes." But the logical consequences of the beliefs are different. Only the latter, combined with the belief that Melville writes if Clemens does, logically implies the belief that Melville writes.'n In the above sense of 'content', the heliefs have different contents. Why should we suppose that SD states are not promiscuous. on the current understanding of promiscuity, with beliefs? Well, the argument might go thus: Having a belief with the content p implies q, and an SO whose content is p. doesn't usually give rise to a belief with the content q. Suppose, for example, T abbreviates a theory which gives the correct account of anaphor for my language. correct because I subdoxastize the rules T spells out and "use" them in production and processing. I might well consciously know that T was proposed by Lasnik, and so believe something I express with a sentence of the form {f T. then Lasnik is right about the binding theory. But I need not believe that Lasnik is right about the binding theory. The upshot is that, assuming that the set of beliefs is promiscuous, their 2 promiscuity allows us to distinguish them from other content bearing states. ' Call this the argument from content. The first point I want to make is that the argument from content is a bad argument. Let's just grant, for argument's sake, that beliefs are promiscuous in the above sense. Now the argument from content observes that when I have a conditional belief C and a subdoaxastic state A which, shall we say, corresponds to the belief's antecedent, then C and A do not typically lead to a new belief. By itself, this does not tend to show that A is not a belief, or that A plus my other beliefs is not a promiscuous set. After all, Jane's belief A', that Clemens sleeps, corresponds in one clear sense to the antecedent of her belief B', that if Twain sleeps, then there is trouble. That Jane (who is innocent of the relevant identity) does not believe that there is trouble does
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not show that A' isn't a belief. It doesn't show this because while A' has the truth conditions of the antecedent of B', it does not have its content: 'there is trouble' isn't a logical consequence of 'Clemens sleeps' and 'if Twain sleeps, then there is trouble', To show that state X is not a belief. using an argument like the argument from content, you have to show that though X has a content suitably related to those of some beliefs, it doesn't combine inferentially with them. So the argument from content can't be applied unless beliefs and SD states share contents. In fact, it seems to require us to assume that when the truth conditions of a belief h, SD state s, and belief b' are given respectively by sentences of the forms ff p then q, p. and q, then the content of b' is a logical consequence of that of band s. But logical consequence (and. thus, identity of content) is a syntactic relation; sentences or states with the same truth conditions needn't have the same logical consequences. If we keep this in mind, it is obvious that the argument from content is a bad argument. After alL why should we suppose that someone might subdoxasticize the theory T, believe the state of affairs L conditional on T to obtain, but not believe the state of affairs L to obtain? Part of the answer, presumably, is that the way the information is represented varies between the SD and D states. This suggests that the representational systems employed by SD and D states differ enough so that beliefs with the truth conditions given by sentences p and q, ifp will typically lack the contents of SD states with those truth conditions. For content is a matter (in part) of logical relations. and logical relations, being syntactic, are bound up with styles of representation. When styles of representation differ. logical interaction is (typically) blocked. And this means that the contents of the styles of representation are different. The argument from content gets purchase only on the assumption that pairs of SD and D states which truth conditionally imply a state of affairs q have contents which logically imply a content which determines q. But for the reasons just reviewed, there is every reason to insist that this is false. A belief in T will differ from a "subdoxasticization" of T in somewhat the way the belief that Clemens is here differs from the belief that Twain is here: The latter two beliefs agree in truth conditions, but have different logical properties, and thus different contents. Exactly the same thing is true of the SD state and the belief. The upshot is that. given the present characterization of promiscuity, the argument from content is an abject failure. It won't do to respond that we ought to think of contents as being truth conditions and nothing more. True. if we do this, we can rescue the claim that, together, beliefs and subdoxastic states aren't closed under entailment. and thus that beliefs and subdoxastic states aren't jointly promiscuous on the current definition. But it is wildly implausible to think that beliefs are closed, even under idealization, under (mere) truth conditional entailment.
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It just is not plausible to think (for example) that someone who believes what she says with 'Twain's here' and what she says with 'If Clemens is here, then Melville is here' must have a belief in what she says with 'Melville is here'. But the first two beliefs truth conditionally entail the last. Now, one might think that even though the argument from content fails to show that beliefs and SD states are jointly promiscuous under the current definition, still it's plausible to think that they aren't jointly promiscuous, when promiscuity is so defined. But this is not so. Recall that on the current characterization, a set of states is promiscuous if the states have contents which determine truth conditions and entailment relations, and are loosely closed ("when conditions are right") under logical entailment. Recall that content is determined not simply by truth conditions but by broadly syntactic properties of states. And finally, recall that we have seen that it's plausible that, because ofthe difference ofrepresentational styles between beliefs and SD states, the two sorts of states will have contents which have relatively little inferential mesh. All this seems to imply that, typically, a belief and an SD state don't really have much in the way of logical consequences. (More carefully: For the most part, if content c is a logical consequence of the contents of a belief and an SO state, then c is a consequence of the content of the belief or of the SO state.) This is because beliefs and SD states, having by and large unrelated contents, have little logical mesh. For two states to have a third state as a logical consequence, they have to have suitably related contents. (Compare: For two sentences to have a third sentence as a logical consequence, they have to have suitably related syntax.) Since beliefs and SD states don't share contents, they don't have (much in the way of significant) logical consequences. (Compare: Because 'Twain sleeps' and 'if Clemens sleeps, there will be trouble' aren't suitably related in content, they don't have much in the way of interesting logical consequences.) So, that there is relatively impoverished inferential interaction between beliefs and SD states does not show on the current characteri:::.ation of promiscuity that beliefs and SDs aren't jointly promiscuous. Since they don't share contents, they don't need to interact inferentially, on the current definition, in order to be jointly promiscuous, since a set of states is promiscuous when its members which have inferentially related contents combine to produce new states. Obviously, we need to modify our definition of promiscuity. Now, other characterizations of promiscuity can be extracted from Stich's article. Let us use 'BRR' as an abbreviation for 'behavior regulating, representational state'. Suppose we identify inference patterns with "causal mechanisms" which map BRR types to BRR types. Speaking loosely, to say that a mechanism maps a collection C of BRRs to a BRR b is to say that, ceteris paribus, if one is in each state in C, the mechanism is "activated," and it is "applied" to the realizations of C, then one's being in each of C is causally sufficient
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for going into h. When I is an inference pattern. C a collection of BRRs, and h a BRR to which I maps C, we write C f-, h. Stich might be interpreted as follows. (1) Every state (type) which is a belief is promiscuous with the collection of (actual and potential) beliefs. where h is promiscuous with the collection of state types S provided
there is, for many of the members b' of S, some "suitable" subset X of S and an inference pattern 1 such that X,b 'r,b'.
But, (2), SD states are not promiscuous with beliefs in this sense. and neither are they promiscuous with the collection of beliefs and SD states taken together. 2~ The problem with this proposal, as I see it, is that (2) is implausible on plausible fleshings out of the notion of inference pattern. We can get a feeling for why this is so by considering Smith, who is bilingual. reasoning (and thus thinking) in two languages. Smith's linguistic abilities are not well integrated: If she draws a conclusion in one language, she is typically not disposed to assent to sentences which translate the conclusion into the other language. Only if she consciously and quite laboriously is forced to translate from one language to the other can she generally be made to see that a conclusion drawn in one language commits her to the truth of a sentence in the other. The belief states she vents with sentences of one of her languages are apparently promiscuous with those vented by the other. For there seems to be a "causal mechanism"-that which is "activated" by the instructions translate this sentence into the other language-which can be coupled with other causal mechanisms to get Smith from a belief in one language to most any belief in the other language, given the presence of suitable auxiliary beliefs. So long as the coupling of two inferential processes is itself an inferential process-something one would. at least initially. think to be the caseSmith's beliefs are interlinguistically promiscuous. But subdoxastic states are often enough linked to doxastic states in much the same way that Smith's linguistic states are linked to one another. An SD state 5 can lead inferentially to a doxastic state D, which, in the pres24 ence of suitable auxiliaries. can lead to most any other doxastic state. But then it is possible, by joining inferential processes together to forn1 complex processes, to find inference processes which will take D, in the presence of suitable other premises, to most any doxastic state. Is there some way to interpret Stich so that promiscuity will draw the distinction he wants to draw? Perhaps Stich's "inferential patterns" are not supposed to be closed under "product," so that (for example) from the fact that pattern P applies to S, mapping it to D, and pattern P' applies to D. mapping it to D', we cannot infer that there is some inferential pattern which applies to 5, mapping it to D'.
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It is difficult to see what justification there could be for so restricting what counts as an inference pattern. If an inference pattern is a mechanism which, when "activated," reliably (if ceteris paribus) takes one sort of information bearing state to another, then-so long as activating mechanism A reliably (if ceteris paribus) results in the activation of mechanism B which applies to A's output-the product of A and B would seem to be an inference pattern. Another interpretation is possible. Stich claims that the inference patterns which apply to SDs are in some sense "special purpose": They apply only to a limited range of SDs and do not apply to most actual or possible beliefs. The inference patterns which apply to beliefs, on the other hand, are supposedly "general purpose," applying to the overwhelming majority of beliefs. Let us say that Inference pattern I is general for a set 5 of BRRs provided that for most pairs h, h' drawn from 5, there is some (not too large) subset X of 5 such that X, b rib'.
We might suppose that modus ponens is general for the set of belief states, since for any such states p and q, there will be a conditional belief state r, whose content is the conditionalization of that of q on p. such that being in p. r leads. under modus ponens. to being in q. Suppose we characterize promiscuity so: b is promiscuous with the collection of state types 5 provided there is. for many of the members hi of 5. some "suitable" subset X of 5 and an inference pattern I thaT is general for 5 such that X. hrill'.
Perhaps any doxastic state is promiscuous, in this sense, with the set of all doxastic states (witness the range of modus ponens), but no SD state is promiscuous with the doxastic states. It is hard to know what to make of this proposal. because it is hard to know how to individuate inference patterns. I think that on most plausible individuations, the proposal will fail because inference patterns will either not be general enough to cover enough beliefs or will include the class of SD states. An illustration may help make the point. Suppose that a certain SD state s of Smith's has properties which make it appropriate to assign it the truth conditions that a sentence with certain syntactic analysis S has been uttered. Let us suppose further that Smith is presently so constituted that whenever she is in s, this causes her (reliably, if ceteris paribus) to be in a belief state d with the truth conditions that Canada is being invaded by Finland. Suppose, now, that Smith comes to be in s-say, because someone produces a sentence with analysis 5 in her presence-which in turn causes her to be in d-i.e .. to believe that Canada is being invaded by Finland.
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It seems eminently plausible to think the existence of the requisite connections between (the potential tokening of) sand d will in this sort of situation themselves constitute the tokening in Smith of a representational state with truth conditions of the claim if a sentence with analysis 5 is uttered, then Canada is being invaded by Finland. Call the state in question sId. And there seems to be an inference pattern which leads Smith, when she is in sId and s, to be in d. It seems, in fact. that the inference pattern has a name: modus ponens. But if this is right, an inference pattern which is general with respect to the set of beliefs applies to s. And since any belief could presumably in principle be "conditionalized" on s, we would seem again to have lost the distinction between SD and doxastic states, since we seem to be committed to saying that s is inferentially promiscuous with the set of beliefs.)O One could deny that there is a BRR constituted by sand d whose truth conditions are given by the requisite conditional. This strikes me as quite implausible. An initially more plausible response is to deny that modus ponens is involved. That is, deny that the inference pattern here is the same as that involved when beliefs which have truth conditions given by a conditional and its antecedent lead Smith to a belief with the truth conditions of the conditional's consequent. What makes the inference pattern different? There isn't a semantic (i.e., truth conditional) difference. It won't do simply to observe that the causal pathway involved in Smith's s, sid, so d inference will be quite unlike that involved in "more normal" instances of modus ponens. For there are surely significant causal differences between exercises of modus ponens when it is applied to different sets of beliefs. If we were to suppose that all appl ications of modus ponens to beliefs involved something like a "transcription" of the premises in an "inference center" or on a "belief blackboard," we would have reason to think that there was some significant property which they all enjoyed which the s, sid, d inference didn't have. But not even the most rabid advocate of the language of thought need be committed to this. It is difficult to see why there should be something that all (and only) applications of modus ponens to beliefs share, which Smith's s, sid, d inference lacks. The only thing which all applications of modus ponens to beliefs seem to have in common is that they are applications of an inference pattern which reliably, if ceteris paribus, takes (certain) states whose content is that of a conditional and its antecedent to a state whose content is that of the conditional's consequent. But this is true of the s, sid, d inference pattern, too.'] The attempt to distinguish doxastic and subdoxastic states using a notion of inferential integration is not promising. Let us consider one other attempt to draw the distinction.
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III Gareth Evans once suggested that propositional attitudes conform to what he called the Generality Constraint: If a subject can be credited with the thought that a is F, then he must have the conceptual resources for entertaining the thought that a is G, for every property of being G of which he has a conception. ,~
The constraint is widely seen as true and important. Christopher Peacocke, for example. claims that the sort of recombinability represented by the constraint "is about as general a phenomenon as one can hope to find in the realm of conceptual content."" Recently, Martin Davies has suggested that we can appeal to the conceptual fecundity represented by the constraint to distinguish attitudes from subdoxastic states: To have a propositional attitude that a is F "is ipso facto to exercise mastery of the concept of being F; and that piece of concept mastery can be exercised by the thinker in thoughts about other objects.,,)-I While satisfying the Generality Constraint is essential to any attitude. it is not, Davies suggests, essential to any subdoxastic state-indeed, that is the difference between the two. What does it mean to say that someone "has the conceptual resources for entertaining" a thought? It must be more than merely having the constituent concepts and the ability to entertain some thought with p's structure; otherwise the constraint is trivial and unable to do the theoretical work Davies expects it to do. Peacocke suggests that to have the conceptual resources to entertain p is roughly, to have the ability, abstracting away from "inhibitory mechanisms," to grasp or entertain p. Were these inhibitions absent, the individual would have a straightforward ability to entertain the thought in question. Thus, using conceptual capacity, where Evans speaks of conceptual resources, Peacocke writes By speaking of a "conceptual capacity" for attitudes with the content Fh, ... I [do not] mean that the thinker will easily entertain the thought Fh. For certain contents, such mechanisms as self-deception, repression, and the like may prevent the thought from being so much as entertained. There may also be preventing factors at the level of hardware .... [I]t might be that attempts to concatenate ... Mentalese symbols for the concepts F and h produce strange chemical reactions that prevent [one] from entertaining the thought Fh. What I do mean ... is rather this: The thinker is in a position to know what it is for the thought Fh to be true. That is, if there is some block to the thinker's attaining states with the content Fh, what is missing is not any knowledge about concepts, nor any conceptual capacity. "
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Dennett is not committed to the Generality Constraint. But it would be natural for him to endorse it, given his view that belief is (ideally) closed under consequence. Given such closure, it seems plausible that if a subject can be credited with the thought that a is F, and can be credited with the thought that b is G, then she has the conceptual resources to entertain the thought that a is C. For given deductive closure, the antecedent implies that the subject (ideally) has the belief that if a is b, then a is C. And it is quite plausible that whoever (ideally) has this belief has the conceptual capacity to entertain the thought that a is G. A slightly more complicated argument makes the constraint itself plausibly a consequence of Dennett's overall • VIews. So Davies' attempt to draw the distinction, if successful, could be coopted by Dennett. But Davies' attempt is not successful, for the Generality Constraint is simply not a truth about belief. Even if our thought is not invariably realized in a linguistic medium, the existence of something whose thought was invariably so realized and in whom we would identify the possession of concepts with lexical mastery, isn't impossible. Now such an individual's thoughts needn't be realized in a single linguistic medium. Suppose we have such an individual, Jan, who thinks in Dutch and in Hausa. He might be able to think of lions using a Hausa word, of zoos using a Dutch word. Both languages provide him with the ability to conjoin and existentially quantify. The Generality Constraint (in full generality) apparently implies that Jan is able to think that some lions are in zoos. But must this be so? Let's call Jan's Dutch and Hausa states (without prejudice to the discussion's outcome) 'thoughts'. Suppose Jan's psychological makeup involves a number of "processors" or "modules:' and that for each one of his token BRRs t and each processor or module p, we can answer the question, Does p have access to t? Why shouldn't Jan's Dutch and Hausa thoughts be "modularly isolated" from each other, in the sense that for any processor or module p, if p has access to any Dutch thought of Jan's, it has access to none of his Hausa thoughts? If this were so, he would not be able to think that some lions are in zoos, if he lacks the Hausa word for zoos and the Dutch word for lions. One might respond: In this case, at least one system of Jan's "thoughts" is excluded from Jan's "central processor" (supposing that he has one). That system will fail to constitute a system of propositional attitudes. This response seems committed to a somewhat arbitrary view of what counts as a belief. Suppose we integrate two systems (say computers), each of which is plausibly said to have beliefs. Under the integration, each of the original systems is preserved more or less intact, each receives information which results from the other's processing, while neither has any interesting sort of "direct access" to the other's information bearing states. The current response seems committed to saying that when we integrate the machines. ~6
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some of the states which were in isolation prop-ositional attitudes are no longer such. This seems gratuitous. And if each subsystem has access to the (output of the) other, the response requires either an arbitrary identification of one subsystem as the locus of attitudes, or the absurdity of denying that an.v of the integrated systems' states are attitudes. But let us concede for argument's sake that if either Jan's D(utch) thoughts or H(ausa) thoughts are not in principle accessible to his "central processor," we have no threat to the Generality Constraint. Let us suppose that some processor p has access to both D and H states. In fact, let us assume that Jan is more or less human, and that he often has conscious access to the states in question. Must he satisfy the Generality Constraint? If we take seriously the idea that all of something's thought could be linguistically realized, it seems that the answer is still no. Even if we identify the concepts with some "underlying" state which might be "manifested" in several languages, Hausa might manifest a concept I which Dutch does not, and Dutch some concept z which Hausa does not. Taking the idea that thoughts are linguistically manifested seriously, we will limit the possibilities of Jan's thoughts to the possibilities offered by tokenings of Dutch and Hausa sentences. And so we conclude that Jan might not be able to think (so to speak) that some Is are z, though he has all the constituent concepts at his command. One might respond that the case does not constitute an argument against the Generality Constraint. We can assume that one of Jan's languagesHausa, say--equips him to think thoughts of the form some Fs are Gs. So all he would need to think the thought in question would be to realize in this language the two concepts I and z. Now, the concept I is realized in Hausa. Let P name the Dutch word which expresses concept z. All that Jan needs to do is to say to himself-in Hausa-"The concept I express in Dutch with P I shall so express in Hausa: Z," and he will thereby increase the expressive power of Hausa and enable himself to think the thought in question. But this is trivial, something a thinker could always arrange if need be. So Jan should be said to already have the conceptual resources to think the thought. Call this the concept hopping argument. It presupposes (a) a concept must in some sense be linguistically neutral, so that at most a relabelling is necessary to "move it" from one language to another. It further assumes (b) someone who has conscious access to a concept can invariably perform the necessary relabelling. Interesting versions of (a), ones strong enough to support the present argument, are almost certainly false. Certainly words are not linguistically neutral, in the sense that a word can always be translated from one language to another. In order for W to be translatable from L to L', the argument structure L assigns to W must be assignable in L'. For example, if one of the argument places of a predicate is characterized INSTRUMENT (as is the indicated argument in John opened the door with the key) in the home language, that must be possible in L'. But even confining our attention to
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humanly speakable languages, this does not seem true: After all, L' might lack some of the resources which L has for assigning argument structures.'" And (b) is far too strong. Things which are not as sophisticated as we are can (presumably) have thoughts and conscious access to those thoughts. Imagine, for example, an ape which has been taught to sign and to "write" with plastic words. Presumably, such training may give it access to thoughts to which it had no access beforehand. It may be able to simultaneously and consciously "think" or process signed and plastic communication. But the ape's vocabulary can be imagined to be too impoverished to allow it to overtly perform conceptual transfer from one language to another. We can even imagine scenarios which would lead us to say that the ape was not able to directly transfer concepts from one language to another. For example, we might find that introducing a concept c and a sign word 11' therefore did not reduce the amount of time required to introduce a word for c in the other language, even when cueing with sign sentences involving w. Someone might respond that at least we can still hold that the Generality Constraint applies to us, since we are not as cognitively impoverished as our simian cousins.'~ This is an odd response: It grants that concepts and beliefs can fail to exhibit the integration required by the Generality Constraint, and thus makes it puzzling, as to the nature of the argument for denying that (say) the constituents of the states which realize our lexical competence or our ability to parse our native tongue are not on a cognitive plane with the constituents of our consciously accessible beliefs about language. Another response to the above is that it depends upon a bad model of belief: All it shows is that ~lall belief is realized sententially, the Generality Constraint fails; but, the response concludes, the antecedent is simply false. But this misconstrues the point of examples like Jan. What Jan provides us with is an example of a believer for whom the Generality Constraint fails. What I have been trying to show is that there is no reason whatsoever to suppose (as Davies must, if he is to distinguish beliefs from subdoxastic states as he tries to) that if something has beliefs, it satisfies the constraint. To show this in the way I have been trying to, I must assume that a believer who conforms to sententialist models is possible; I don't have to assume, for these purposes, that all our beliefs are sentential. Why have people thought that the Generality Constraint is true? Here is an argument due to Davies: To believe that a is F ... a thinker must have the concept of heing F. If a thinker has that concept. then the thinker knows what it is for an arbitrary object to be F. So, if a thinker believes that a is F and is able to think about the object b, then the thinker is able to entertain the thought that b is F. ... Thus. one consequence of the conceptualization of the contents of propositional attitude states is that the domain of thought contents available to a thinker exhibits a kind of closure property [namely, the Generality Constraint]. ,q
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This argument is not valid. One way (a way sufficient but hardly necessary) to know what it is for an arbitrary object to be F is to know-true a sentence of the form (x)( x
is F iff __x__ ),
where the quantifier ranges over all objects and where the ellipsis is replaced by a suitable (noncircular) account of necessary and sufficient conditions for being an F. Suppose that Jan believes in Dutch that a is F. Then by the argument's first premise, he has the concept of being F. By the second premise, he knows what it is for an arbitrary object to be F. Suppose he does this by knowing-true a Dutch version of a sentence of the just displayed form. Suppose that Jan can think about a certain object b by using a name in Hausa. For reasons given above, it does not follow that he must be able to frame in either Dutch or Hausa any thought that is true if and only if b is F. So the conclusion of the argument does not follow from the premises. A somewhat different argument for the Generality Constraint is due to Peacocke. Peacocke begins with an account, reviewed above, of what it is to have the conceptual resources (he speaks of the conceptual capacity) to have a particular thought Fb, an account which, it will be recalled, climaxes thus: The thinker is in a position to know what it is for the thought Fh to be true. That is, if there is some block to the thinker's attaining states with the content Fh, what is missing is not any knowledge about concepts, nor any conceptual capacity.
Why must someone with the concept being F and the concept b be in this position? Peacocke claims that a thinker is in a position to know what it is for a given thought to be true just in case these two conditions are met: for each constituent of the thought, he knows what it is for something to be its semantic value. and he grasps the semantic significance of the mode of combination of the constituents of the thought.-liJ
Given that a central tenet of Peacocke's position is that possessing a concept is knowing what it is for something to be its reference (i.e., semantic value), 41 it is not too difficult to see how the argument gets completed. Even if we accept this identification of concept possession and knowledge of reference, there is a serious problem with this argument. Unless we begin by assuming that the Generality Constraint is true, we have no reason to think that the two conditions mentioned in the last citation are sufficient for being in a position to know what it is for a thought to be true. For knowing what it is for a thought to be true is having the ability (abstracting from inhibitory mechanisms, like repression, and from "hardware problems") to entertain the thought. But as we just saw, in considering Davies' argument for the constraint, unless we begin by assuming that the Generality Constraint is correct, there is no reason to suppose that the knowledge of
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what it is for something to be F, the knowledge of what it is for something to be b, and the ability to entertain a thought of the form x is Q, must be integrated in such a way as to allow one to be able to entertain the thought Fb. And surely the knowledge of what it is to be F and the knowledge of what it is for something to be the semantic value of the concept F are related in such a way that if the possession of the former pieces of knowledge do not suffice to yield an ability to have the thought Fb, possession of the latter sort doesn't suffice either. So Peacocke's argument for the constraint is apparently a failure too.
IV I have argued that Dennett cannot solve the lectern problem, and that accounts of the distinction, between beliefs and subdoxastic states, which are friendly to Dennett's overall views of belief fail to adequately draw that distinction. All this seems to show that Dennett can't adequately answer the question, What isn't a belief? But then he can't adequately answer the quesc tion, What is a belief?, either'-
NOTES 1. He writes, for example: Any object ... whose behavior is well predicted by this strategy is in the fullest sense of the word a believer. What it is to be a true believer is to be an intentional system. a system whose behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy ("'True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works." in The Intentional Stance [Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1987], 15). The strategy referred to here is this: First you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have. on the same consideration, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs (ibid .. 17). The observant reader will notice an addition ("voluminously'") to the definition of 'intentional system'. I have chosen to ignore the addition for simplicity. Assuming that one measure of volume is the number of times (or worlds at a time) for which predictions are made, the omission doesn't effect any of the arguments in section I. 2. Dennett, "Intentional Systems," in his Brainstonns (Montgomery, Vt.: Bradford Books, 1979),3. 3. Ibid., 16. 4. "True Believers," 23. 5. 'Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," in The Intentional Stance, 52. Compare his response to the claim that "folk psychology is in fact committed to beliefs and desires as distinguishable, causally interacting [theoretical posits]": "I do not concede it. for it seems to me that the evidence is quite strong that our ordinary notion of belief has next to nothing of the concrete in it" (ibid., 54).
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6. Ibid., 55. 7. Only by abstracting away from questions about realization and internal structure, as docs the notion of an intentional system, do we achieve the "level of generality ... essential if we want a theory to have anything meaningful and defensible to say about such topics as intelligence in general (as opposed, say, to just human or even terrestrial intelligence) or such grand topics as meaning or reference or representation" (ibid .. 60). 8. Sec, for example, "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," 58-60. 9. 'True Believers," 23. 10. Dennett can, of course, agree that X has beliefs i~ "absolutely" true or false while insisting that the truth-values of claims of the form X beliel'cs that p are had only relatively. II. "True Believers:- 24-5. 12. This is clear from the discussion of the Laplacean Martians, cited three paragraphs hence. 13. "True Believers," 26. I assume that it is not essential to the point that the regularity in the example is interpersonal. Nothing in the subsequent argument turns on the choice of an interpersonal. instead of intrapersonal. regularity. 14. I pretty much ignore the ceteris paribus quality of C and other folk-psychological laws in what follows. So far as I call see, working this into our account of patterns (say. in terms of notions of noise or static) would only complicate the ensuing argument, not effect its outcome. 15. L makes essential use of the intentional idiom provided it makes use of the idiom and isn't logically equivalent to a claim formulatable without it. (if one goes to the 1IJ01'ies, either one wants 10 go or one doesn't is a "law" whose use of the intentional idiom is not essential.) 16. This argument goes through only if we consider "transworld" regularities. If we consider only actual regularities-thai is, functions with only actual events in their field-we presumably consider only sets of finite size, all of whose members are pairings of physical events. All such sets are physically describable. 17. To allow this is to allow that the "interior" physical states of the lectern have a certain "intentional plasticity": Essentially the same physical constitution can "realize" quite different beliefs and desires. But to say this is simply to liken the lectern to ourselves, for our interior states have this sort of plasticity as well, since variation in the situation "outside" of me can result in a shift of what beliefs T should be said to have. On Dennett's view. one can hardly object to a strategy of explaining lectern behavior on the basis of changing beliefs, because it requires assuming such plasticity in the "interior" state~ of the lectern. For Dennett's is a view on which the ascription of beliefs is supposed to be independent of assumptions about the nature of the interior states of the object and their relation to its beliefs. 18. It might seem that some sort of illegitimate hocus pocus enters the argument with the invocation of possible worlds and talk of truth at various worlds. So let's make sure we understand the role of this sort of talk. Dennett's response to the lectern problem, as I understand it. relies crucially on the claim that some explanations can, and some explanations cannot. be recasl or reslaled in the physical idiom. What is at issue is whether we can take the claim that Martin or the lectern believes thus and so and can rewrite it in physical language wilhout disturbing the conditions ullder which what we're saying is or H'ould be true. The appeal to possible worlds in the above is (I hope) a harmless reification of the notion of truth conditions. In the course of the argument. I spoke of the truth conditions of a claim about the lectern's beliefs relatil'e to a certain implementation of the intentional strategy, S. This translates out. in possible worlds jargon, to a belief ascription being true at a world relative to the implementation. It's important to remember that, as far as Dennett is concerned, such talk is not only permissible, it's mandatory. For Dennett's view is that the truth of a belief ascription is always relative to one or another implementation of the intentional stance. So it can only be relative to a policy for implementing it that a belief ascription has truth conditions or determines a collection of possible worlds.
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19. Dennett, "Real Patterns," Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991): 31-33. 20. Ibid., 34; emphasis in original. 21. Stich actually gives two criteria for a state's being subdoxastic. Besides the promiscuity criterion, he suggests (speaking roughly) that beliefs are in principle conscious while SDs are not. I ignore this, partially because it is implausible that all beliefs are consciously accessible. even in principle. In any case. we are looking for a way for Dennett to distinguish Ds and SDs, and Dennett agrees with this assessment. 22. Steven Stich, "Beliefs and Subdoxastic States." Philosophy of Science 45 (1978): 499-518. The extract appears on 506-7; emphasis in original. 23. See "Intentional Systems." passim. 24. Such determination is best seen as relative to a context, for familiar reasons, I will ignore this. 25. The present characterization is not Stich's, but a simpler one, Versions of Stich's characterization are discussed below. 26. Some philosophers of language have held that the logical properties of sentences which differ only in the use of co-referring proper names (like 'Twain' and 'Clemens') are identical. The example I am using, to illustrate the difference between identity of truth conditions and identity of content. presupposes that these philosophers are wrong about this. If you are one of these philosophers, you can change the example to some other pair of sentences which determine the same state of affairs but aren't logICally equivalent. 27. Stich gives an argument which strongly suggests the argument from content. (See Stich. op. cit., 510-12.) 28. Of course this is lamentably vague. Some restrictions on what is 'suitable' are obvious (e.g .. X shouldn't include b itself). The quoted 'activated' and 'applied' as well as the definition are mine, not Stich ·s. 29. Stich himself insists that there are inferential relations between doxastic and subdoxastic states. 30. A complete argument showing that the current proposal doesn't distinguish D and SD states would need to show that there is an inference pattern that will lead from most any belief to Smith's being in s. But the discussion in the next two paragraphs should make clear why it can plausibly be maintained that transitions from beliefs to 5 are aptly seen as instances of modus ponens. Given this. it seems that we can construct a parallel argument to the conclusion that. in principle. any belief of Smith's can lead, via modus ponens, to her being in s. 31. A moral here might be that if 'inference pattern' is defined as in the text. then modus ponens is not an inference pattern but a type of inference pattern. 32. Evans otTers this constraint in "Semantic Theory and Tacit Knowledge." in A. Phillips. ed .. ColleCTed Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). as well as in chapter 4- of The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, j 982). Actually, the constraint is a generalization of what's given in the text, one which entails inter alia that someone who can think that aRh and cSI can think that aSc. 33. Peacocke. A Study of COl1cepts (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. 1992), 41. 34. Davies, "Tacit Knowledge and Subdoxastic States," in A. George. ed., Reflectiolls 011 ChomSky' (Oxford: Blackwell. 1989). 148. 35. Peacocke, op. cit., 42-3. 36. The argument needs, among others. the premises if one has the concept C, there's some individual concept a such that one has the conceptual capacity to entertain the thought that {/ is G and if beliefs are ideally closed under conseyuence. then so is the collection of belief~ and thoughts one has the conceptual capacity to entertain.
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37. I take (a) as aclaim about sets ofruIes and procedures, cognition of which would be sufficient for mastery of a human (or humanly possible) language. Consider rule systems which might be results of a human's attempt to learn a language. Such systems are (typically) open ended. in that they allow addition of new primitive vocabulary to the language they determine so long as the new vocabulary is assigned whatever sorts of syntactic, semantic. phonetic, and other properties the rule system as a whole demands of vocabulary. Let us suppose that when someone understands a (humanly) possible language, she thereby assigns a concept to each of its predicates. A set of rules r is compatible with a concept c provided it is possible that someone might. making proper use of r, come to assign c to one of the predicates of a language that r determines. We might phrase (a) as the claim that whenever rand r' are rule sets for humanly possible languages, if a concept c is compatible with r, then it's compatible with r'. The concept hopping argument needs to appeal to a principle about linguistic neutrality which is at least as strong as this. We don't know precisely what sorts of information must be contained in such rule sets. The argument in the text can be understood as the argument that if the rule sets are ones which assign relatively abstract semantic properties to predicates, like the theta-roles of contemporary linguistic theory. then (a) is false. Theta-roles can be identified with properties of argument places of relations or with relations between objects and the event, state, or process a complex expression picks out. It is not implausible to suppose that information about theta-roles helps individuate concepts. For example. it is plausible that part of what it is to have the concept to open is to cognize it as a three place relation between an AGENT. a THEME, and an INSTRUMENT. If rule systems assign theta-roles to predicates, and concepts are individuated in part by theta-roles. then the rules exercise some constraint on what concepts the predicates of a language can express. For example, if a rule system is missing a theta-role, the languages it generates may be conceptually impoverished, in the sense of being unable to express some concepts which other systems can express. Surely a rule system missing the role FACTIVE (the role labelling. for example. the second argument in 'believes') is a possible outcome of a human attempt to learn language. But a relatively impoverished rule system needn't fail to determine a language whose sentences make claims and express thoughts. Humans may suffer from deficits which. while not depriving them of an ability, render their exercise of the ability limited in ways in which the ability in normal humans is not. In fact, there is evidence that an actual deficit (autism) involves an inability to possess concepts like belief. desire. and not really being the case that. See Uta Frith. "Autism," Scientific American 268 (1993). 38. See for example, Evans, The Varieties of Reference, 104, n. 22. 39. Davies. op. cit.. 147. 40. Peacocke, op. cit.. 430. 41. See Peacocke, op. cit., sec. 1.3. 42. Thanks to Sarah Patterson and Stephen White for reading and commenting on various drafts of various sections of this paper; to Chris Hill for helpful queries and worries (and for his patience): and to Dan Dennett for his ever stimulating work.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 22 NO. 1 & 2, SPRING AND
FALL
1994
First-Person Operationalism and Mental Taxonomy
David M, Rosenthal City University of New York, Graduate School
I. MULTIPLE DRAFTS AND FIRST-PERSON OPERATIONALISM Any acceptable theory of consciousness must plainly satisfy two main constraints. It must, first of all, do reasonable justice to our common-sense, folk-psychological intuitions about consciousness and mentality. Some of these intuitions will be helpful in identifying just what phenomena the theory seeks to explain. Others the theory will predict, using its explanatory machinery. Still others the theory may be neutral about, avoiding any conflict between theory and intuition. Also, a theory may jettison certain intuitions, ruling in effect that they do not reflect the nature of conscious phenomena; but the theory must then explain why those intuitions, despite being mistaken, still strike us as compelling. A theory of consciousness must also square with what scientific research tells us about the brain and about the conscious functioning of people and other animals. The theory must, in particular, help make it intelligible how brain mechanisms operate in producing conscious experiences, and it must take account of experimental and clinical findings. Theories often seem to do a lot better with one of these tasks than the other. Many theorists, for example, would take Thomas Nagel's account of
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consciousness in terms of subjective points of view as setting a standard for successfully capturing our folk-psychological intuitions.' And this may well lead to the kind of skepticism Nagel himself holds about whether those common-sense intuitions can be made to fit with a scientific account of these things. Similarly, whatever the merits of neurobiological explanation, such as the suggestion by Francis Crick and Cristof Koch that consciousness arises from neuronal oscillations close to forty hertz," it isn't easy to see how such explanations could do justice to our folk-psychological intuitions about consciousness. Indeed some, such as Patricia Smith Churchland, have argued that a scientific theory of consciousness will require that many of these intuitions be rejected.) Against this background, the theory of consciousness developed in Daniel Dennett's impressive and important book, Consciousness Explained," occupies a useful middle ground. One of Dennett's main concerns is to describe a model for explaining consciousness which takes account of relevant results in experimental cognitive psychology and the neurosciences. Consciousness, he argues, results from a number of interacting brain processes, which are constantly changing due to new stimuli and feedback from other brain processes. Because the interactions among the relevant processes are continually being updated, the way consciousness represents our mental lives is not fixed from moment to moment. At any particular moment therefore, there may be many competing interactions among the brain processes, each capable of giving rise to consciousness. And the interactions competing at anyone time may represent the contents of consciousness in different ways. Which interactions lead to conscious results, moreover. may often be a matter of chance factors, factors, that is, extrinsic to the interacting processes. Some external stimulus, or "probe:' may push things in one direction or another. And often there will be a succession of interactions that yield conscious results, producing successive versions-or "drafts"-of the conscious goings-on within the person. Dennett calls this model for explaining consciousness the Multiple Drafts model (MDM). He contrasts it with what he calls the Cartesian Theater model, on which a mental state's being conscious is a matter of its being observed, somehow, in a "theater of consciousness."> On the MDM, consciousness is a function of processes occurring in a distributed way throughout much of the brain, whereas the Cartesian Theater model holds that states are conscious just in case they occur at a single privileged location. Dennett argues forcefully against the Cartesian Theater model, which, he plausibly maintains. tacitly underlies the explanatory strategies used by many theorists. Dennett is concerned not merely to make intelligible how consciousness arises in the brain, but at the same time to do justice to our folkpsychological intuitions about consciousness. But he departs from many
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theorists in how he gets at these intuitions. People seem to have direct access to their own introspective data; so it's tempting to claim that such data are decisive about mental reality. But introspective data differ notoriously from person to person, and even for single subjects their reliability is questionable. Dennett therefore takes the principal evidence about conscious mental phenomena to be the verbal reports people make about their mental lives. These "heterophenomenological" reports" provide the common-sense information about our mental lives to which a theory must do justice. Because introspectible events aren't directly accessible to others, heterophenomenological reports provide a measure of objectivity that direct reliance on intro• 7 spectlOn cannot. Discounting occasional insincerity, heterophenomenological reports are authoritative about how people's mental lives seem to them. Dennett emphasizes that this doesn't mean that these reports are also authoritative about the states and processes that underlie those appearances. Even the mental events to which a subject's heterophenomenological reports ostensibly refer may not always exist. We should take heterophenomenological reports to refer to actual events only if those reports are corroborated by what we know independently, say, about brain events. Dennett's methodological reliance on heterophenomenological reports is therefore neutral about whether such reports truly describe mental events that go into a subject's first-person viewpoint, or whether they simply express beliefs about the subject's mental events, events which may be entirely notional. It's a special strength of Dennett's approach that this neutrality enables the heterophenomenological method to bridge the traditional gulf between first- and third-person accounts of mind and consciousness. We need not, accordingly, have a theory based just on first- or third-person considerations. This approach therefore allows Dennett to weave together heterophenomenological data with the findings of neuroscience and cognitive psychology in a way that does reasonable justice to both. Heterophenomenological reports may well provide the best evidence about how people's conscious mental lives appear to them, though these reports may not always tell us about the states and processes that underlie those appearances. But Dennett goes further and insists that, whatever the case with underlying processes, there is nothing more to people's conscious experiences than how those experiences appear. When it comes to people's conscious mental lives, there is no distinction to be drawn between the reality of conscious experiences and how those experiences appear to those who have them. Consciousness consists in things' appearing in certain ways; so appearance is all there is to the reality of consciousness. Dennett calls this view first-person operationalism (FPO). It's a form of operationalism because appearance determines reality; but it's operationalism restricted to the first-person case, that is, to "the realm of subjectivity."K
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9
Dennett regards his MDM as a form of FPO. But it's possible to separate Dennett's denial of the distinction between the appearance and reality of conscious experience from other aspects of his model that are independent of this denial. In what follows, I'll refer to Dennett's denial of that distinction as FPO, and I'll apply the label 'MDM' more restrictively to those aspects of his model that are independent of FPO. I'll argue that, although Dennett's MDM narrowly understood in this way is as promising a model as we now have for explaining consciousness, we need not also adopt his thesis of FPO. I'll do this by defending a model of consciousness very similar to the MDM, narrowly construed, and by arguing against the addition of FPO.
II. TEMPORAL ANOMALIES AND FACTS OF THE MATTER Perhaps the most important of the empirical findings against which Dennett tests his model has to do with the remarkable temporal anomalies he describes in chapters five and six of Consciousness Explained and in his earlier article with Marcel Kinsbourne. 'o The ability to deal satisfactorily with these anomalies is one of the greatest strengths of Dennett's MDM. So in trying to assess whether FPO is a necessary aspect of Dennett's view, it's useful to begin with these curious results. Two anomalies will suffice to give the flavor. In color phi, a subject is presented with alternating red and green flashes on the left and right, respectively, but seems to see a single spot that moves and changes color. In the socalled cutaneous rabbit, three successive bunches of physical taps are administered, at the wrist, elbow, and upper arm, but the subject feels a sequence of single taps along the arm, evenly separated by small distances. Subjects presented only with the initial red flash on the left, or only the bunched taps at the wrist, consciously sense these things in just that way. Why is it that when these initial stimuli are followed by the others, subjects do not consciously perceive the initial red flash nor the bunched wrist taps? Dennett believes the MDM has the answer. On that model, conscious mental states are due to the interaction of many brain processes. These interactions are of course not instantaneous, but take some time to occur. So an interaction that would ordinarily lead to some particular conscious experience can, in effect, be derailed by a suitably timed stimulus. If presented with only a red flash on the left, the subject consciously experiences it. But the subsequent stimulus of a green flash on the right interferes with the interaction that would have led to a conscious experience of a red flash, replacing it with the conscious experience of a moving spot that changes color. Similarly with the cutaneous rabbit.
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Among the intervening stimuli that may alter the course of the interactions leading to a conscious experience is the eliciting of some reaction from a subject. And a small change in timing can of course be crucial. At successive moments we may well "precipitat[e] different narratives ... : [different] versions of a portion of 'the stream of consciousness."'[[ Because of this, there is no privileged moment at which eliciting a report would reveal the true nature of the subject's conscious experience. Any event that serves as a probe for a subject's heterophenomenological report may affect the contemporaneous interactions leading to specific conscious results. Even in the temporal anomalies, when an event following the initial stimulus derails things, it might still have been possible to elicit a report of the initial stimulus if we timed our probe sufficiently precisely. In color phi, the probe would presumably have to occur after the stationary red flash affected the visual cortex, but before the first green flash interrupted the normal resulting processes. Such a probe might block the processes leading to the conscious experience of a moving spot that changes color, allowing the subject to consciously experience the initial stationary flash. But if no such probe intervenes, there will be no conscious experience of the initial stimulus. Dennett compares the situation to the revising of texts. When a text changes through successive drafts, some features typically persist through many drafts; others may be so transitory as to altogether escape one's notice. Similarly with consciousness. Successive interactions among brain processes lead to different ways in which consciousness represents our mental lives, that is, to different versions of contents of consciousness. It may seem that reports of our experiences must be the last word on this matter, much as publishing a text fixes what words do and don't occur in it. This idea is especially inviting if we take heterophenomenological reports to be the best evidence about people's mental lives. But even publication fixes a text only relative to a social context, and only for a while; post-publication revision can and does occur. Similarly with reports of conscious experiences. We sometimes withdraw earlier remarks about our experiences, replacing them with claims we take to be more accurate. It seems clear that temporal anomalies such as color phi demand some explanation along these lines. The initial stimulus sets processes in motion that, if uninterrupted, give rise to a conscious sensation of a stationary red flash. But if certain stimuli follow after a suitable temporal interval, those processes are side tracked, and lead instead to the conscious experience of a moving spot that changes color. When color phi occurs, there is, from a first-person viewpoint, no conscious experience of a stationary red flash. Plainly this is in some way due to the subsequent stimulus. But it seems that we can imagine two distinct types of mechanism by means of which the subsequent stimulus could have
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that effect. Perhaps the subsequent stimulus derails the process leading to a conscious sensation of a stationary red flash, so that no such conscious sensation ever occurs. But there's another sequence of events that would make it seem from a first-person point of view that no such conscious sensation had occurred. Perhaps the initial stimulus does reach consciousness, so that a conscious sensation of the initial flash does occur, but that conscious sensation does not last long enough to have any noticeable mental effects; it commands no attention, and when it ceases any traces in memory are immediately expunged. The first mechanism, in which the stimulus is edited out before any conscious sensation occurs, Dennett calls Stalinesque; the second sequence, in which the stimulus reaches consciousness but is immediately edited out of memory, he calls Orwellian. It's here that FPO leads to radical results. According to FPO, there is no distinction between the reality of a conscious experience and how that experience appears. The reality of conscious states consists simply in how they seem, from a first-person point of view. Accordingly, Dennett, makes 'writing it down' in memory criterial for consciousness .... There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory). 12
If it seems from a first-person point of view that there has been no conscious sensation of a stationary red flash, then one has not occurred. But if the reality of conscious experiences consists in how they appear from a first-person point of view, there can be no difference between Stalinesque and Orwellian mechanisms. In color phi, the second stimulus prevents the content of a stationary red flash from occurring within the subject's first-person viewpoint. That stimulus is, at some point or other, edited out. But if "'writing it down' in memory [is] criterial for consciousness," editing a stimulus out of memory will, on criterial grounds. be indistinguishable from editing it out before it reaches consciousness. There will simply be no difference between the two. Accordingly Dennett denies that there's any difference between the Stalinesque and the Orwellian models. The difference can only be verbal, a difference between two equivalent ways of describing the same thing. When no early reaction is elicited from the subject, there is simply no fact of the matter about whether the initial stimulus ever becomes conscious. So "there are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes."]) The temporal anomalies by themselves, however, do not imply these conclusions. Explaining the anomalies does not require us to deny that there's a real difference between Stalinesque and Orwellian mechanisms nor, more generally, to adopt FPO. We can do justice to the phenomena by a more modest explanation along the lines of the MDM sketched above, on which subsequent stimuli interrupt the processes normally initiated by the original
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stimulus. Moreover, this interruption can be Stalinesque. preventing the occurrence of any conscious sensation corresponding to the initial stimulus. or Orwellian, in which case it will cut short the conscious sensation that occurs and remove any trace of it from memory. In the end, the two mechanisms yield the same subjective appearances. But this doesn't mean that we cannot determine which is operative. since the order of events they posit is different. Either the stimulus is edited out before a corresponding conscious experience occurs or it isn·t. And on the MDM, construed narrowly without FPO, there is an objective temporal order in which the various events occur. So the MDM thus narrowly construed suggests not only that the initial stimulus is edited out but also that there are two distinguishable ways in which that might happen, either before or after the stimulus leads to the corresponding conscious sensation. According to FPO, however, there are no facts of the matter about consciousness beyond those which make up one's first-person. subjective point of view. If a subject cannot distinguish two situations introspectively. then with respect to consciousness there's no difference between them. And it may seem that the constraints of FPO are not unreasonable. By hypothesis. Stalinesque and Orwellian mechanisms do not differ in their introspectible results. Moreover. which mechanism is operative makes no difference in subjects' verbal behavior, including their heterophenomenological reports. Nor can nonverbal behavior help distinguish the two. As Dennett notes. when mental representations result in nonverbal behavior, the very same behavior may occur whether the representation occurs consciously or not. ,0 So. for example. neither verbal nor nonverbal behavior can determine whether or not the mental representation of a stationary red flash in color phi is conscious. It is arguable that common-sense folk psychology distinguishes conscious mental phenomena only by way of their introspectible differences. and by the verbal and nonverbal behavior they result in. But even if that is so. theories often considerably expand our ability to discriminate among phenomena that are indistinguishable independent of theory. Suppose that a particular theory about consciousness always draws the right distinctions in problematic cases about whether particular mental states are conscious or not conscious. The theory agrees, that is. with our folk-psychological convictions. We could then apply this theory to the problematic temporal anomalies to determine. regardless of how it seems to the subject. whether a particular stimulus does or does not make it to consciousness. We can be more specific about how a theory of consciousness can help in this way. Intuitively. it's a distinguishing mark of conscious states that whenever a mental state is conscious. we are in some way conscious (4that state. J5 To avoid confusion. I'll refer to our being conscious of something. whether a mental state or anything else. as transitive consciousness. And I'll
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call the property mental states have of being consCious state consciousness. A state's being conscious does not, of course, require that we're attentively or introspectively conscious of it. We don't introspect or pay attention to most of our conscious states. Indeed, we forget the overwhelming majority of those states moments after they occur. Still, if one is in no way transitively conscious of a particular mental state, that state is not a conscious state. I" Any theory of what it is for mental states to be conscious must explain in what way we are transitively conscious of our conscious states. There must be some event that constitutes one's being transitively conscious of any conscious mental state, and a theory of consciousness must tell us what event that is. Such a theory would therefore be able to tell us, when a particular temporal anomaly occurs, whether the mechanism responsible for it is Stalinesque or Orwellian, since Orwellian mechanisms involve an event of transitive consciousness that on the Stalinesque model simply doesn't occur. In advance of a reasonably well-confirmed theory of this sort, we have of course no way of telling which model explains color phi or the other temporal anomalies. Perhaps some anomalies are Orwellian and others Stalinesque; perhaps some have both Stalinesque and Orwellian instances. Because we cannot distinguish Stalinesque from Orwellian cases by appeal to introspection, speech. and nonverbal behavior, and we now have no suitable general theory, current experimental paradigms reflect a provisional methodological acceptance of FPO. We operate as though FPO were the case. But this methodological operationalism would be unnecessarily restrictive once we had such a theory. We would then be able to frame more finegrained experiments based on knowing which mechanism is operative in each kind of case. On the Orwellian model, the initial stimulus in color phi reaches consciousness but leaves no further mental traces; a conscious sensation occurs but makes no mental difference to the subject. This may seem to conflict with the common-sense observation that no mental state is conscious unless one is transitively conscious of it, even if in the most casual and inattentive way. The Orwellian model claims that sensations become conscious even though it never seems to the subject as though those sensations occur. And if the sensation doesn't, from a first-person point of view, seem to occur, how can the subject be transitively conscious of it? It seems that such a sensation could be conscious in name only, that is, in some technical sense 17 that fails to make contact with our intuitive conception of consciousness. The Orwellian model may therefore seem to be an artificial contrivance, somewhat like Descartes's unflinching insistence that "we do not have any thoughts in sleep without being conscious of them at the moment they occur; though commonly we forget them immediately."I~ Could either claim be more than a mere verbal conceit? It doesn't help here simply to note that theories often go beyond common sense. What could we mean by a mental
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state's being conscious if it could be conscious without one's being in any way whatever transitively conscious of it? But the Orwellian model does not, in fact. conflict with our commonsense conceptions. Consider the fleeting auditory and visual sensations that occupy the periphery of our consciousness. These sensations are seldom if ever introspectively conscious. But they also do not occur outside our conscious field of vision. They are conscious sensations. though we take note neither of them nor of our being conscious of them. These sensations are so transitory, moreover, that we ordinarily have no memory at all of what conscious contents occupied the peripheries of our perceptual fields. even a moment earlier. Neither the sensations nor our transitive consciousness of them typically leave any trace in memory. This account of things accords with common sense, which countenances a wide if somewhat indeterminate area for our conscious visual field. Because we have a strong conviction about roughly how far the field extends, and that it's visual through and through, I'! we feel convinced that many sensations near the periphery of that field are conscious. That is so despite our inability to say what sensations occur near the periphery of that field. The Orwellian model posits states with roughly this status. The model maintains that stimuli reach consciousness but remain there so briefly that, from a first-person point of view, it doesn't seem that any such conscious sensations occur. All that's necessary for this to happen is a momentary event of being transitively conscious of the sensation, albeit too briefly to register as part of the subject's first-person point of view. Presumably this happens all the time with fleeting peripheral sensations. Because they leave no trace in memory, it can be argued that we have no reason, from a first-person point of view, to think such conscious sensations exist at all. Of course, when we shift our attention to them, we are subjectively certain that they exist; but those are the cases that do leave traces in memory. Here, again, the appeal to theory is irrelevant, since what's at issue is our common-sense, folk-psychological view of these things. Is it possible for a state to occur consciously even though to the subject it doesn't seem to occur? There is compelling reason to think so. We're often aware of things that don't make it into our first-person point of view. We are conscious in daily life of endless details of which we don't seem to ourselves to be conscious. The same is true with mental states. Like any other mental construct, our first-person view of ourselves leaves out much detaiL enabling us to concentrate on the big picture. So there's no reason to think that every mental state we're conscious of occurs as part of our subjective view of ourselves. Stil], when we're conscious of states that don't figure in that firstperson picture of ourselves, those states are conscious states. The denial that the reality of conscious sensations can differ from their appearance, though central to FPO, is not part of our folk-psychological picture.
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III. TRANSITIVE CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE TWO MODELS Because a theory of consciousness must explain what events occur when we are transitively conscious of our conscious states, such a theory will help distinguish Stalinesque from Orwellian mechanisms. So explaining the temporal anomalies does not require that we adopt FPO. Nor must we deny that for each occurrence of a temporal anomaly there'sa fact of the matter about whether a Stalinesque or an Orwellian mechanism is operative. Dennett draws the contrast between Stalinesque and Orwellian mechanisms in terms of the temporal order of events: Does the editing out come before the initial stimulus reaches consciousness or after? I've argued in the previous section that there's no reason to doubt that a suitable theory can answer that question. Even so, the contrast between Stalinesque and Orwellian cases turns out to be somewhat more complicated than that. In this section, I'll argue that there's a possible mechanism for the temporal anomalies that resists ready classification either as Stalinesque or as Orwellian. What's crucial is recognizing the difference between our sensations and our transitive consciousness of those sensations. Once that distinction is clearly in place, we'll see that a firm distinction between Stalinesque and Orwellian models cannot. in generaL be sustained. This will, in effect, vindicate Dennett's rejection of that distinction, though not quite for the reasons he put forth. There is compelling reason to hold that our transitive consciousness of sensations is something distinct from the sensations themselves, even when the sensations are conscious sensations. For one thing, not all sensations are conscious. In peripheral vision and subliminal perception, and in some dissociative phenomena such as blindsight,"" sensations occur without our being in any way transitively conscious of them. The sensations that occur in these processes are not conscious. 'I It's natural to conclude that sensations are distinct from our transitive consciousness of them, which occurs only when our sensations are conscious. Considered apart from our transitive consciousness of them, the sensations by themselves are not conscious states; only the two together-sensation plus one's transitive consciousness of it-constitute a conscious state. The heterophenomenological method may make it seem as though all mental states are conscious. Whatever may be so when mental states go unreported, the states we do report are always conscious states."2 Since heterophenomenological reports provide the best evidence about those states, it may be tempting to conclude that no mental states could fail to be conscious. No evidence other than heterophenomenological evidence is, one may think, nearly strong enough to justify the existence of mental states that aren't conscIOUS.
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But this is too quick. Although heterophenomenological reports are our best evidence about mental states, they are not our only evidence. Nor does heterophenomenological evidence always trump other considerations. For example, other evidence can override a person '5 heterophenomenological denials that that person is in a particular mental state. The mental states thus established would not be conscious states; heterophenomenological denials show that the person is in no way transitively conscious of those states. And, since mental states needn't be conscious, we have reason in the conscious cases to distinguish the states from our transitive consciousness of them. There are, in addition, theoretical reasons to distinguish sensations from our transitive consciousness of them. We distinguish sensations by reference to their sensory content. A sensation may, for example, be a sensation of a stationary red flash, whereas another is a sensation of a moving spot that changes color. Each such sensation may be conscious or not conscious. When a sensation of a stationary red flash is conscious. one is transitively conscious of that sensation. But even when one is conscious of the sensation in the way required for it to be conscious, one's consciousness of the sensation can be more or less detailed and can represent the sensation in different ways. The way one's transitive consciousness of the sensation represents it, moreover, determines how it appears to one from a first-person point of view; it determines, that is, what it is like to have the sensation. Consider, for example, the game Dennett describes of "hide the thimble,,,c'in which people may look straight at the thimble they're trying to find and yet fail to register it consciously. Dennett uses this phenomenon to illustrate that it is not always clear, even from a first-person point of view. whether one is conscious of some particular thing.'~ Cases of this kind plainly occur, but they seem to cause difficulties. Whatever is true about the periphery of one's visual field, the sensory states central to that field are normally conscious. So if one is looking straight at the hidden thimble. how can one fail to see it consciously? The difficulty we have in describing this kind of case from a first-person point of view seems to lend plausibility to Dennett's claim that. independent of particular probes. there isn't any fact of the matter about what conscious experiences we have. Distinguishing our sensations from our transitive consciousness of them helps explain this kind of case. Mental states often have more detailed content than we're transitively conscious of. This is true even of the visual sensations that occur at the center of our visual field: we're seldom if ever aware of all the sensory content such sensations contain. as casual shifts of focus reveal. This should come as no surprise. In generaL being transitively conscious of something doesn't mean being transitively conscious of every aspect of the thing. We would need some special reason to make an exception of mental states and count consciousness as transparently revealing every aspect of their nature.
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When I look straight at the thimble, I may well be conscious of the sensations at the center of my visual field, even though I'm not conscious of seeing a thimble. How can we explain this? It's a mistake to suppose that the sensory content of these central sensations includes no representation of the thimble. It can happen that, even though one doesn't consciously see an object, one later recalls just where it was and what it looked like. This is strong evidence that the content of our earlier visual sensations contained a representation of the object. That aspect of our sensations wasn't conscious, but the content was nonetheless there. But if one is conscious of sensations whose content includes a representation of the thimble, why doesn't one consciously see the thimble? The only explanation is that, although one is conscious of those sensations, one is not conscious of their content as representing a thimble. One is transitively conscious of the sensations in a way that leaves out that aspect of their content. This sort of thing happens in many other cases as well. Consider the process by which we acquire the ability to recognize different wines or to pick out the various instruments playing in an orchestra. Normally, the two kinds of sensation are conscious even before one can tell consciously the difference between them-that is, even before they're distinguishable from a first-person point of view. It's just that the two types of sensation don't yet differ consciously. How can a sensation of an oboe and another of a clarinet both be conscious without differing consciously? Even before one acquires these discriminative abilities, one's sensory contents must reflect the qualitative differences one is trying to learn; otherwise, one could never learn those differences. So even before one can distinguish an oboe from a clarinet. one's auditory sensations of the two instruments must differ. There will be some aspect of the sensory content of the two types of sensation that differs, even though that aspect doesn't register consciously. The two kinds of sensation are typically conscious sensations before one can consciously tell the difference between themthat is, before they're distinguishable from a first-person point of view. Even before one learns to discriminate the two sensations, one is conscious of them, though not in respect of the relevant qualitative differences. Only afterwards does one become conscious of them in respect of those differences. Again, we have reason to hold that sensations can be conscious even when one isn't transitively conscious of every aspect of their content. Since we can be transitively conscious of our conscious sensations in different ways, there are two levels at which we must distinguish content. The sensations of which we're transitively conscious have sensory content of one sort or another, depending largely on the nature of the relevant stimuli. But even holding the sensory content of a sensation constant, we must distinguish the different contents that our transitive consciousness of those
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sensations can have. In the situation just considered, our transitive consciousness may represent a particular auditory sensation either as an indiscriminate woodwind sensation or in a more refined way, say, as a sensation of an oboe. In these two cases, the content of our transitive consciousness of the sensation will differ accordingly, even though the sensory content of the sensation remains unchanged. Moreover, one's first-person point of view is a function of the way one is conscious of one's sensations and other mental states. So it is the content of one's transitive consciousness of the sensation that determines how things are from a first-person point of view. These considerations suggest a mechanism for the temporal anomalies that Dennett doesn't consider. Suppose, in color phi, that the initial stationary red flash produces in the subject a sensation of that flash. The sensory content of that sensation is of a stationary red flash. But the subject need not be transitively conscious of the sensation in that way. When distinct stimuli follow rapidly one upon another. one often isn't conscious of much detail in the resulting sensations. Suppose, now, that the subject in color phi is transitively conscious of the initial sensation only as a sensation of a flash and not as something stationary nor even red. After the green stimulus causes a second sensation, then the subject becomes conscious of both sensations, but still not as sensations of stationary flashes. Rather, the subject becomes transitively conscious of the two sensations together, as though fused into a single sensation of a moving spot that changes color. The content of the subject's transitive consciousness of the two sensations is that there's a single moving sensation that changes color. Strictly speaking, there is no editing here, since there's no revising of the content of the sensory states nor of the content of the subject's transitive consciousness of those states. Rather, the subjective appearance results simply from the way one comes to be transitively conscious of those states. This mechanism resists easy classification as StaJinesque or Orwellian. On the Stalinesque model, the initial stimulus of a stationary red flash never makes it to consciousness. That's what happens in this case, since the subject never becomes transitively conscious of the initial sensation by itself. nor in respect of its sensory contents of color or motion. On the Stalinesque model, editing occurs prior to consciousness. And though strictly speaking there's no editing-that is, no revising-something like editing does occur before the initial sensation makes it to consciousness. For when the subject's transitive consciousness of that initial sensation does occur, it misrepresents the sensory content of that sensation. The transitive consciousness edits the sensations in the attenuated sense that it misrepresents them. But this mechanism counts equally well as Orwellian. The Orwellian model stipulates that the subject becomes conscious of the sensation that results from the initial stimulus before any editing occurs. That's what
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happens in this case; the subject begins by being eonscious of the sensation as a flash, albeit one that's indetenninate with respect to color and motion. When the second stimulus is received, the subject becomes transitively conscious of both sensations in a way that more fully reflects the sensory contents of color and motion, as a sensation of a moving spot that changes color. But on the Orwellian model, editing does occur after the first stimulus reaches consciousness. And in the mechanism under consideration, there's editing of a sort after the initial consciousness of the first sensation. since the subject's transitive consciousness changes from that of a flash with no color or motion represented to that of the spot that changes color and position. When Dennett describes the Stalinesque and Orwellian models, he sometimes seems to allow for sensory contents' being distinct from one's transitive consciousness of those contents." But Dennett holds that we need not regard the sensory contents we 're transitively conscious of as distinct existences. They can, instead, be merely notional objects of the relevant transitive consciousness. What matters for consciousness is how one is transitively conscious of sensory contents, not whether distinct sensory contents exist. And if it could be that no sensory contents exist distinct from our transitive consciousness of them, we must avoid the idea that our transitive consciousness of sensory content can vary independently of the sensory content itself. For this reason, the mechanism under consideration doesn't fit comfortably with Dennett's discussion. But if. as I've argued, sensory states can occur without being conscious states, and hence independently of one's being transitively conscious of them, the third mechanism is at least a theoretical possibility. And. because that mechanism conforms to some extent to both the Stalinesque and Orwellian models, and to neither better than the other, it is arbitrary to describe this mechanism as exemplifying either model more than the other. So the third mechanism blurs the contrast between Stalinesque and Orwellian models. Even if we suppose the objective temporal order of events fixed, it's wholly arbitrary whether to regard this mechanism as Stalinesque or Orwellian. This gives us reason, albeit different from Dennett's, to reject a finn distinction between Stalinesque and Orwellian models.'"
IV. TRANSITIVE CONSCIOUSNESS AND FIRST-PERSON OPERATIONALISM The foregoing argument shows that there are mechanisms it is arbitrary to count as Stalinesque or Orwellian, even when the order of events is known. But the argument does not appeal to any indetenninacy about the order of
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events; rather, it relies solely on the different ways we may be transitively conscious of our sensations. So the argument gives us no reason to conclude that there's no fact of the matter about the temporal order of those events. And if the argument of section I is sound, we can expect suitable theoretical developments to pin down any lack of clarity about the order of events. So even though the argument undermines a firm distinction between Stalinesque and Orwellian models, it does not support FPO. Suppose I have a sensation of red and I'm transitively conscious of that sensation. Th· ..:ontent of the sensation determines the sensation's character. whereas my transitive consciousness of it is responsible for there being something it's like from a first-person point of view to have that sensation. The distinction between a sensation and one's being transitively conscious of that sensation warrants a distinction between how conscious sensations appear and the way they really are. Dennett rejects this conclusion. Seeing things this way, he urges, "creates the bizarre category of the objectively subjective-the way things actually. objectively seem to you even if they don't seem to seem that way to you.":: Indeed, the main appeal of FPO is. he urges. that it blocks that "bizarre" consequence. Conscious experiences are a matter of things' appearing in certain ways. And according to FPO, there is no more to the reality of consciousness than the appearances our experiences present from a first-person point of view. Dennett holds, moreover. that distinguishing between the appearance of states with content and their reality is of a piece with the Cartesian Theater model. On that model. when "vehicles of content ... 'arrive at' the theater of consciousness .... rthey] 'become' conscious.":x A mental state's being conscious consists in its being observed in the theater of consciousness. The Cartesian Theater model must therefore distinguish between the reality of a mental state and how it appears. Its appearance is a function of how it's observed. whereas its reality consists in its nature independently of any such observation. Perhaps adopting the Cartesian Theater model does commit one to distinguishing between the appearance and reality of mental states; but the converse does not hold. For one thing, the Cartesian Theater essentially involves the idea that a state's being conscious is a matter of its being located at that single place in the brain. But there can be a difference between the appearance of conscious states and their reality even if no unique location in the brain is involved. Such unique location to one side. Dennett stigmatizes the picture he rejects as involving the notion of something's seeming to seem a certain way. But whatever initial air of oddity there is to this idea. there is good reason to sustain the distinction between how things seem and how they seem to seem. The content of one's sensory states defines how things seem to one. even when
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the sensory states aren't conscious. Even when they aren't conscious, sensory states have various connections with other aspects of one's mental life, both conscious and not. We sometimes see things without being conscious that we do, and our seeing things in these cases often affects us mentally. For example, seeing a truck by peripheral vision may cause one to feel startled and swerve one's car, even when one is in no way transitively conscious of seeing the truck. Such things contribute to the way things seem to one, even when one is in no way transitively conscious of their seeming that way. When one is not at all transitively conscious of being in some sensory state, however, it will not. from a first-person point of view, seem that one is in it. That's where the second level of seeming comes in. The unconscious seeing of the truck is the first level of seeming; if one saw it consciously. that would be a second level of seeming. So, when the seeing isn't conscious, it's natural to say that things seem to us a certain way, but without seeming to seem that way. Saying this is just a way of describing the distinction between how mental states really are and how those states seem, from a firstperson point of view. These considerations allow also for a distinction between the appearance and reality of mental states that are conscious. Suppose I see the truck consciously and then, reflecting on my close call, I attend to my conscious experience of seeing the truck. I am now introspectively conscious of seeing the truck; that is. I am conscious of my sensation and conscious also that J am conscious of that sensation. This higher-order transitive consciousness defines how my conscious sensation appears to me. Dennett might deny that this sort of thing establishes a full-fledged distinction between the appearance and reality of mental states. Rather, it shows only that the way things seem to us is sometimes conscious and sometimes not. To distinguish between the reality of mental states and their appearance, we need cases in which their appearance and reality diverge. As long as the content of my sensation determines how J am transitively conscious of it. the reality of the sensation determines its appearance. And if that always happens, it's arguably idle to distinguish two levels of seeming. But that does not always happen. Consider again the woodwind and thimble examples. The best explanation of those cases is that the sensory content a sensation has does not fully determine how one is transitively conscious of that content. There are, for example, two ways one might be transitively conscious of one's sensation of an oboe. One might be conscious of it indiscriminately, as a sensation of some woodwind or other. Or one might be conscious of it specifically as a sensation of an oboe. The sensory content of the sensation does not fix how one is conscious of that content, and so the two can diverge. There is sometimes a difference between a sensation's sensory content and the way one is conscious of that contentbetween how the oboe seems and how it seems to seem.
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These cases show that our transitive consciousness of a sensory content may fail to capture everything about that content. Can we also be transitively conscious of a sensory content in a way that actually misrepresents the content? Can we in effect be mistaken about what mental states we're in? The woodwind case does not clearly involve such misrepresentation. Being conscious of an oboe sensation as a sensation of an indiscriminate woodwind is not an error in that case, especially since it only happens before one has learned to discriminate the various woodwinds. Nor does outright error occur in the thimble case; rather, the way we are transitively conscious of the sensations central to our visual field simply leaves out an important detail of their content. A clear case of error would have to involve our transitive consciousness representing the sensations as having some content they don't have, and this doesn't happen in the woodwind and thimble examples. Dennett seems tempted to adopt the traditional view that we cannot be wrong about our mental states. If we don't, he thinks, "we lose the subjective intimacy or incorrigibility that is supposedly the hallmark of consciousness.,,2" Such incorrigibility seems also to be connected with Dennett's use of his heterophenomenological method. The only neutral method for studying consciousness scientifically relies on heterophenomenological reports. And if such reports were definitive about the mental data of investigation, perhaps scientific results could never show such reports to be mistaken. Perhaps, as Richard Rorty has argued. any reason for thinking that some such report is untrue would equally be a reason to think we had misconstrued the reporter's words.'" But adopting the heterophenomenological method does not commit us to rejecting the possibility of real error about one's mental states. We might well have sufficient success in pinning down the use of the words used generally in somebody's heterophenomenological reports that we could simply rule out certain misuses of language. We could then conclude that particular reports were untrue because they expressed mistaken judgments. It's natural in any case to assume that error about our mental states does occur, and indeed that it is not all that rare. The thimble and woodwind cases show that when mental states are conscious, there can be features of those states that we could be conscious of but aren't, and it's plausible that this occurs frequently. And if that happens reasonably often, why shouldn't the way we're conscious of mental states sometimes represent them as having features they do not actually have? One might object that distinguishing the appearance of a sensation from its reality commits us to a hierarchy of such distinctions. The reality of a sensation is independent of its being conscious, whereas its appearance is due to the way we're transitively conscious of it. And we can even be transitively conscious of our being transitively conscious of the sensation, as we are when we introspect. Here we distinguish the true nature of the
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appearance of the sensation from how that appearance seems to us to be. But why would things stop here? If we take these first steps, won't we risk an endless hierarchy of appearance-reality distinctions? One might raise this worry in connection with the higher-order-thought hypothesis about consciousness that I've developed elsewhere." On that hypothesis, our being transitively conscious of our conscious mental states consists in our having occurrent thoughts to the effect that we are in those mental states. So a mental state is conscious just in case it is the intentional object of a roughly contemporaneous thought-what I call "a higher-order thought:' This higher-order thought must, I argue, have an assertoric mental attitude, and it may not be the result of any inference of which we are transitively conscious. This last requirement, that higher-order thoughts be independent of any conscious inference, is meant to ensure that our transitive consciousness of the mental states the higher-order thoughts are about will, from a first-person point of view, seem immediate.'c This concern need not, of course, be tied to the higher-order-thought hypothesis, but can be raised independently of the way any particular theory accounts for our transitive consciousness of our conscious states. The only way to avoid an endless hierarchy of distinctions between appearance and reality, on this worry, is to collapse the initial distinction between mental states and our transitive consciousness of them. As already noted, introspective consciousness involves two levels of being transitively conscious of our mental states. We're transitively of the state, and also transitively conscious that we are transitively conscious of it. For a distinction between appearance and reality to apply at this second leveL error must again be possible at that level. And indeed introspection is often unreliable. The failure of introspectionist psychology was due less to theoretical objections than to the conflicting resuhs that continually issued from introspectionist experiments." It's also plain from everyday experience that expectations and preconceptions distort our introspective awareness of our mental states, sometimes to the point of error. Does our ability to distinguish between mental states and being transitively conscious of them at these two levels imply an endless proliferation of levels at which we might draw that distinction? In principle yes, but not in practice. We can of course conceive of higher applications. But it's pretty clear that there's no empirical warrant for drawing that distinction at higher levels, at least in the mental life of our species. After all, it is relatively seldom that being introspectively conscious of one's mental states plays any useful role; it's far less likely that an even higher level of transitive consciousness would play any role distinct from that of introspective consciousness itself. So it's natural to suppose that such higher levels seldom if ever occur.
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V. FACTS OF THE MATTER AND MENTAL TAXONOMY'~ The argument for distinguishing mental states from our transitive consciousness of them relies mainly on noting that mental states are not always conscious, and that no state of which we are not at all transitively conscious will count as a conscious state. Since mental states occur both when we're transitively conscious of them and when we aren't, events of transitive consciousness are distinct from the mental states we're transitively conscious of. We can reinforce the idea that mental states are distinct from the events of transitive consciousness in virtue of which those states are conscious by appealing to the content of these states. Every mental state has some distinguishing content. But the content of one's being transitively conscious of a state perforce differs from the content of that state. Suppose I think it's raining: the content of that thought is simply that iCs raining. If my thought is conscious, I am transitively conscious of iC so the content of that transitive consciousness will be that I have the thought that iCs raining. Similarly for other cases. It is occasionally argued that we should not individuate mental states by way of their content. After all. the thought that it's raining and the thought that I think it's raining seem to amount to much the same thing. That is because they are the same in respect of the mental analogue of conditions of assertibility. Any conditions in which it's appropriate to have the thought that it's raining are also conditions in which it's appropriate to think that I have that thought. And if we individuate thoughts not with respect to their content but by way of the mental analogue of their conditions of assertibility. one's conscious thought that it's raining will not be distinct from one's transitive consciousness of the thought. On this picture, such transitive consciousness turns out to be internal. somehow. to the thought.'; Dennett, also. resists individuating mental states the way folk psychology does, by way of content. but for different reasons. Individuating mental states that way. he notes. results in our distinguishing mental states from our transitive consciousness of them. and hence in a potential hierarchy of levels of such transitive consciousness of mental states. "[W]e end up having to postulate differences that are systematically undiscoverable by any means, from the inside or the outside." distinctions that are "systematically indiscernible in nature."'" Dennett emphatically does not however. propose to individuate mental states by the mental analogue of their performance conditions. Rather. he urges that [w]e replace the division into discrete contentful states-beliefs. meta-beliefs, and so forth-with a process that serves, over time. to ensure a good fit between an entity's internal information-
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bearing events and the entity's capacity to express (some of) the information in those events in speech.'7
Describing things in terms of such processes is doubtless the right way to capture what happens at a subpersonallevel of analysis. The subpersonal brain events that sub serve our conscious mental lives probably are not organized in any way we could predict by relying on our folk-psychological taxonomy of ordinary mental states, whether conscious or not. Still, even if that is right at the subpersonallevel, it does not follow that there is no level of description at which we should taxonomize things in terms of the folkpsychological notion of mental content. Dennett himself occasionally seems to be committed to describing things in terms of such content. He describes the Stalinesque and Orwellian models, for example, in terms of when a stimulus reaches consciousness. And the idea of a stimulus's reaching consciousness presumably means that it is the content the stimulus produces that becomes conscious. This appeal to content is hardly decisive, however, since Dennett rejects the Stalinesque and Orwellian models; so his descriptions of them may well invoke notions . he a Iso rejects. There is a somewhat stronger reason, however, to think Dennett is committed to some notion of mental content. and thus to a distinction between mental states and our transitive consciousness of them. Throughout Consciousness Explained, Dennett speaks of a content's being present in the brain even when it isn't conscious, that is, even when we're not conscious of it. Typically he does not use our ordinary folk-psychological terminology for these purposes. Rather, he talks of such things as "events of content-fixation," "information-bearing events," "content-discriminations," and "vehicles of content."'Y These phrases, moreover, evidently refer to the occurrence of content of which we need not be transitively conscious. The "onsets [of content-fixations in the brain] do not mark the onset of consciousness of their content,"-!o These events of content fixation must, according to Dennett, differ in various respects from mental states as conceived of by folk psychology. For one thing, "content-fixations ... are [each] precisely locatable in both space and time,,;-l' by contrast, Dennett argues that we cannot locate conscious mental phenomena precisely in time. But conscious states are states conceived of in folk-psychological terms. So Dennett must hold that events of content fixation are not the sorts of event that could be conscious. Events of content fixation are the brain events responsible for conscious mental phenomena; they are subpersonal events that subserve mental 4c phenomena as folk psychology taxonomizes them. Nonetheless, they carry content in some way or other. Can we say anything more about exactly what kind of events they are and how they relate to mental phenomena, folkpsychologically taxonomized? ,~
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Here is one hypothesis. In the early stages of visual processing, the properties of color, form, orientation, and motion are represented in the brain independently of one another."' There is no special problem, moreover. about precisely locating such representations, either spatially or temporally. These independent representations of color. shape, and so forth do not occur consciously. Except perhaps for pathological cases, we never are visually aware of color or motion without shape, shape or orientation without color, and so forth. There is reason to think things are similar with other sensory modalities. It is therefore inviting to suppose that Dennett's events of content fixation may be something like these early representations. How, then, would such events of content fixation lead to consciousness? In the early stages of vision-so-called early vision-the properties of color. motion, orientation, and shape occur independently of one another. In conscious visual states, however, taxonomized folk psychologically, these properties are combined. So it is tempting to suppose that consciousness may arise somehow in the course of subsequent integrative processes that represent those properties as unified. This picture fits wel1. in a number of respects, with Dennett's MDM."""' Dennett holds that no individual states occur that literally exhibit the contents of distinct events of content fixation, such as those in early vision.~5 Consider any group of events of content fixation that represent independent visual properties in early vision. At anyone time, there may well be several processes that might integrate the members of that group. Each process would yield a kind of draft of the contents of consciousness. As with the revising of a text. the relevant integrative processes would perform an editorial or interpretive role in bringing together the fragmentary representations of properties in early vision. Those editorial processes would serve "to ensure a good fit between an entity's internal information-bearing events and the entity's capacity to express (some of) the information in those events in .,46 speec h. According to Dennett, probes at different moments may "precipitatteJ different narratives ... : [different] versions of a portion of 'the stream of consciousness.",47 That would occur on the present model. When distinct integrative processes coexist, each may involve a disposition to produce a different narrative about one's mental life. Editorial processes that exist concurrently might even dispose one toward conflicting narratives. Only when some particular probe intervenes will one integrative process drive out the others, thereby settling, for that moment. the facts of consciousness. Heterophenomenological reports give us our best evidence about how people's conscious mental lives appear to them. But things aren't always as they seem. So Dennett's methodological appeal to these reports is neutral about whether sincere reports truly describe the conscious events that go into a subject's first-person viewpoint or simply express the subject's beliefs about those mental events. events which may be entirely notional.
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If there are any states that do conform t6 the descriptions that occur in these heterophenomenological reports, they are mental states, folkpsychologically conceived. And it is reasonable to follow Dennett in holding that these reports refer to actual events only if such reports are independently corroborated by what we know by objective, third-person means, for example, by what we know about such things as brain events. Dennett apparently believes that the situation is at best mixed. Brain events exist that can be reasonably regarded as bearing content, but their content will be dramatically unlike the integrated content that folk psychology ascribes to conscious states. Certainly that is so if we understand events of content fixation on the model of the independently occurring properties of early vision, and it seems equally so however we construe events of content fixation. So perhaps what exists is simply the precisely locatable events of content fixation-the representations of early vision and the likeand the editorial processes that integrate those early representations. There is nothing. then, corresponding to the folk-psychologically taxonomized mental states to which our heterophenomenological reports refer. On the present hypothesis. editorial processes do not integrate content by producing actual states with unified content. Rather. they integrate by referring to each of the relevant component events of content fixation. These events can be located precisely in time: and presumably the same holds of the processes that appear to integrate those disparate events. Folk psychology assumes that conscious states, individuated by way of their unified content, can also be located precisely in time. If so, we could locate a particular state by reference to the color, shape, location. and motion it represents. But no such unified states occur, on the present modeL Indeed. the distinct events of content fixation that represent color, shape. location. and motion may well occur at distinct times. And in any case, we can assume that these independent events of content fixation will all occur earlier than the editorial process that appears to unify them.-1~ So there is no unique. privileged moment at which content occurs that represents all these visual properties together. If this model is correct, our folk-psychological taxonomy of mental states is inaccurate in certain important ways. Folk psychology posits mental states that represent in a unified way the various visual properties that are represented separately in early vision. And folk psychology supposes that these states can be located relatively precisely in time. But on this hypothesis, no such states exist. Representational events occur that we can locate precisely in time, but relative to our folk-psychological taxonomy, those representations are fragmentary. There are, in addition, processes that appear from a firstperson point of view to integrate those fragmentary representations. But these processes do not result in the unified states of folk psychology. This picture is not eliminativist with respect to mental states, taxono-
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mized folk psychologically. To be sure, no single state or process corresponds to any conscious mental state, as folk psychology describes things. But between the subpersonal events of content fixation and the processes that appear to integrate them, we can save the subjective appearances that folk psychology describes. Events of content fixation are well-defined and precisely locatable, and the subsequent editorial processes provide the apparent folk-psychological integration of representational content. These editorial processes will, as Dennett suggests, "replace the division into discrete contentful states."·Y It is just that no single state or process satisfies both functions at once. This integrative model does not deny that conscious mental phenomena exist. But, as with Dennett's view, the model sees as artificial the way we ordinarily carve consciousness and mind into discrete mental states.
VI. INTEGRATIVE PROCESSES AND CONSCIOUSNESS Events of content fixation do not occur consciously. So consciousness must result from the editorial processes that appear to integrate those events. On the integrative model under consideration, there is nothing else that could give rise to consciousness. But why should integrative processes produce consciousness? Given that events of content fixation are not conscious to begin with, why should integrating them yield conscious results? This problem is particularly pressing, since integrative processes often fail to produce consciousness. Cognitive theories posit many processes that integrate various representational contents, but such unification typically does not result in states that are conscious. Nor is it intuitively obvious why integration should yield consciousness. Integrative processes can explain why shape and color, for example, are represented together, but not why the resulting unified representation should be conscious. By itself. integration seems unable to explain why, from a first-person viewpoint. we seem to be in conscious states with those combined properties. A related difficulty affects Dennett's discussion. Dennett maintains that ''It]here is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course. on memory).,,50 Perhaps it is correct that all conscious mental phenomena leave suitable traces on action and elsewhere in our mental lives. particularly in memory. But Dennett seems to hold that leaving such traces is not just necessary for states to be conscious, but sufficient as well. Thus he writes: Consciousness is cerebral celebrity .... Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and "symptomatic" effectson memory. on the control of behavior and so forth."
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The difficulty is that mental states have many effects that are independent of whether those states are conscious or not. As noted earlier, Dennett observes that the very same nonverbal behavior may be caused either by a state that's conscious or a state that is not. 52 Since conscious and nonconscious mental states can have the same effects on nonverbal behavior, having such effects will not make a state conscious. Similarly, most of the mental traces left by conscious states could equally well have been left by mental states that are not conscious. In the processes posited by cognitive theories, representational states typically have very wide ranging mental effects even when those states are wholly nonconscious. But the general point is independent of theoretical posits. We often seem to solve difficult problems without consciously thinking about them; in these cases, many nonconscious mental states must have substantial mental effects, which in tum remain nonconscious, before the solution occurs to us consciously. The same holds for the effects mental states have on memory, effects which Dennett counts as criterial for consciousness. Occasionally we recall having seen something, and may even have a visual image of it, though at the earlier time we were not in any way conscious of seeing it. In such cases, perceiving that wasn't conscious has a significant, lasting effect on memory. So, just as the integration of fragmentary content can occur without resulting in conscious states, so can cerebral celebrity and states' leaving traces in memory. Still, the integrative model seems to have promise. Ordinary conscious states, taxonomized folk psychologically, do represent shape, color, orientation, location, and movement as unified. If no individual brain events represent those distinct properties together, consciousness and unification somehow go hand in hand. Why should this be? On the integrative model, properties represented separately in early vision in some way come to be represented together as a result of various editorial processes. These processes need not result in unified states with the representational properties of the relevant components; rather, they may simply refer back to each of those components. Integration may be achieved by referring to all the early representations in a unified way. If integration occurs in this second way, the connection with consciousness is clear. Conscious mental phenomena are mental phenomena of which we're transitively conscious, in a way that from a first-person point of view seems to be immediate. By referring in a unified way to the separate representations of early vision and other such events of content fixation, integrative processes not only unify those representations, but also make us transitively conscious of them. And because these processes refer to events of content fixation as suitably integrated, they make us transitively conscious of them in just that way. To integrate events of content fixation, these editorial processes must involve some unifying intentional reference to the events. And referring to something mentally is having some sort of thought about
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it. So, in making us transitively conscious of events of content fixation, the editorial processes in effect involve higher-order thoughts. S)
VII. CONSCIOUSNESS AND SPEECH Dennett rejects the folk-psychological taxonomy of "discrete contentful states," in favor of "a process that serves, over time, to ensure a good fit between an entity's internal information-bearing events and the entity's capacity to express (some of) the information in those events in speech."'" What sort of fit is this? Putting aside Dennett's reasons for rejecting the taxonomy of folk psychology, just what connection does obtain between speech and our "internal information-bearing events"? On the standard picture, speech acts express intentional states, the content of which matches that of the speech acts. This has important implications when we turn to heterophenomenological reports. Since these reports are about the mental states we take ourselves to be in, they express our transitive consciousness of those mental states. So the content of our heterophenomenological reports is the same as the content of the corresponding events of transitive consciousness. Dennett rejects this standard picture. Speech acts, he argues, typically do not express intentional content that is already in place; rather, our choice of words often influences the content of our thoughts." On this Pandemonium Model of speech production, as he calls it, the content of our speech acts does not generally match that of some previously existing intentional states. Accordingly, the content of our heterophenomenological reports seldom reflects prior events of being transitively conscious of our mental states. Instead, these reports often, perhaps always, determine the content of whatever events of transitive consciousness may occur. 56 Dennett's principle argument against the standard picture of the relation between thought and speech is that we often discover what we think 57 only as we say it. But it is likely that when we discover what we think only as we say it, that is not because the thoughts do not exist until we speak, but because often our thoughts are not conscious until we express them verbally. Doubtless, the words we use do sometimes affect the content of our thoughts, perhaps often. But even when that happens, this does not show that our heterophenomenological reports do not express prior events of transitive consciousness, but only that those reports diverge to some extent in content from those prior events of transitive consciousness. It is likely that we often assign content to our thoughts on the basis of what we say; in effect, we read back onto our thoughts the refined distinctions of content drawn so readily in speech. But whenever one speaks, there must have been some inner state-or more likely, as Dennett urges,
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interactions among inner states-that are responsible for one's using the words one does. And it is reasonable to identify the thoughts one's words express with whatever states or interactions among states end up producing those words. As Dennett usefully emphasizes, we often learn what thoughts we have not by introspection but by seeing what we say. But that does not mean that there is no thought, folk-psychologically conceived. Dennett urges that "the second-order state (the better-informed state) comes to be created by the very process of framing the report."5~ It is unlikely that this is always so. Second-order states plainly occur without being verbally expressed, even if their content is sometimes less elaborate than that of verbally expressed second-order thoughts. In any case, heterophenomenological reports do indicate the occurrence of events of transitive consciousness with the same content as the reports. whether or not those events occur prior to the reports. Since a state's being conscious implies that one is conscious of it, it must be these events of transitive consciousness which are responsible for the consciousness of the mental states they are about. On the model I have been considering, no individual states occur that literally combine such contents as shape and color; there are only non conscious, fragmentary events of content fixation and integrative processes that refer to those events. Nonetheless, these processes, and the higher-order thoughts they involve, enable us to explain why we seem to be in mental states as folk psychology taxonomizes them. Those mental states are the intentional objects of our editorial processes or higher-order thoughts. They are the states we represent ourselves as being in, even if it turns out that they are simply notional. Conscious mental states do exist on this model, but they are not the kinds of states folk psychology takes them to be. They are not conscious cases of states with integrated sensible properties, but arrays of events of content fixation of which we are transitively conscious, though we represent those arrays as though they were single states. Dennett would have limited sympathy with these conclusions. As noted earlier, his heterophenomenological method is neutral about whether the mental events referred to by subjects' reports really exist. Still, if those reports are sincere, he maintains, they are constitutive of what it's like for the 5Y subject at that time, and hence constitutive of that subject's consciousness. The Pandemonium Model of speech production seems to support this idea. What it's like for one hinges on how one is transitively conscious of one's mental life. So, if sincere heterophenomenological reports fix the content of whatever events of transitive consciousness occur, perhaps those reports are somehow constitutive of what it's like for the subject. As already noted, consciousness occurs even in the absence of sincere heterophenomenological reports. So in these cases Dennett might urge that what is constitutive of consciousness is the disposition to report sincerely,
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rather than the reports themselves. But whenever we can describe things dispositionally, there is some occurrent state or property that is responsible 60 for the relevant dispositional behavior. Since the disposition here is to make sincere a heterophenomenological report. we can assume that the relevant underlying state is simply the higher-order thought that this report would express, a thought whose content is reasonably close to that of the report. As we saw in the thimble and woodwind cases, events of being transitively conscious of our mental states can be more or less detailed. Moreover, what determines in these cases how the subject is conscious of the mental state in question is the event of transitive consciousness. not the state or states that event of transitive consciousness is about. So, even when an event of transitive consciousness is erroneous, we can assume that that event fixes what the relevant conscious state is like for the subject. If I have a sensation of an oboe but my transitive consciousness of the sensation represents it as a sensation of a clarinet. it will be just as though J have a conscious sensation of a clarinet. Suppose, now, that the sensation is absent altogether. but that an event of transitive consciousness still occurs, representing me as having a sensation of a clarinet. Since that event suffices for it to seem to me that I have such a sensation when my sensation is actually of a different sort. that event should yield the same result even if I have no relevantly similar sensation at all. Even when the sensations events of transitive consciousness are about do not exist. those events will determine what it's like for one. This lends plausibility to Dennett's claim that a subject's sincere heterophenomenological reports are somehow constitutive of what it's like for that subject. Events of transitive consciousness fix what it is like for the subject. So it is representing oneself as being in various particular mental states that is constitutive of one's consciousness. Heterophenomenological reports do just that. The same considerations also lend support to the integrative model. On . that modeL when it seems to me that I have a conscious sensation, there is no unified sensation as folk psychology conceives of these things. Rather. there are various events of content fixation, together with my being transitively conscious of those events as suitably unified. Once again. it is the event of transitive consciousness, not the states that event pertains to. that determines what it's like for me. What consequences does all this have for FPO? Folk psychology assumes we can assign a precise temporal location to conscious states with relatively unified representational contents, for example, visual perceptions that represent color, shape. and motion together. But that presupposes that such unified states actually exist. If what exists. instead. are various events of content fixation, we can expect that in any particular case the relevant representations of shape and color will occur at slightly different moments. and that the integrating process will occur at still another moment.
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What corresponds to the conscious states posited by folk psychology, then, is an array of events and processes. So it may seem that to assign any temporal location to a conscious state, folk-psychologically conceived, would require an arbitrary choice among the moments at which the relevant component events and processes occur. And the present picture would vindicate FPO; there would be no fact of the matter about the temporal location of those notional folk-psychological states. But assigning such temporal location to the conscious states of folk psychology is not, in fact. arbitrary. Each integrating process involves being transitively conscious of the relevant component events of content fixation as a unified whole. This points toward a nonarbitrary way to locate conscious folk-psychological states in time. Since it is the event of transitive consciousness which is responsible for a state's being conscious and determines what it's like for the subject, that event is all that matters for temporal location. Events of content fixation will occur earlier than the event of transitive consciousness. But at those earlier moments there is nothing it's like for the subject, since at those times there are only the various nonconscious mental precursors of the conscious state. So the relevant events of transitive consciousness provide determinate, non arbitrary facts about the timing of conscious states. Since the foregoing integrative model closely resembles Dennett's MDM, narrowly construed, and we have reason to reject FPO, it seems possible that we can explain consciousness by a view along the lines of the MDM but which avoids appeal to FPO. 51
NOTES I. Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat')" The Philosophical Rn'ietl' 83 ( 1974): 435-50; "Panpsychism," in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979),181-95; and The View From Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), chs. 1--4. 2, Francis Crick and Cristof Koch, 'Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness:' Seminars ill the Neurosciences 2 (1990): 263-75. 3. Patricia Smith Churchland, "Consciousness: The Transmutation of a Concept," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1983): 80-95. 4. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1991). 5. Ibid .. 144. 6. Ibid .. 71fL 7. Reliance on such reports is of course standard in experimental cognitive psychology. 8. Consciousness Explained, 132. 9. Ibid. 10. Daniel C. Dennett and Marcel Kinsbourne, "Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1992): 183-201. See also the open peer commentary, 201-234, and Dennett and Kinsbourne's authors' response, "Escape from the Cartesian Theater," 234--47.
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II. 12. 13. 14. 15.
Consciousness Explained, l35. Ibid., l32. Ibid., 138; cf. 275. Ibid .. 124. Fred Dretske has contested this, arguing that we often are not transitively conscious of our conscious states ("Conscious Experience," Mind 102 11993 J: 263-83, esp. 272-5, and "Are Experiences Conscious')" ch. 4 of Naturalizing the Mind [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT PresslBradford Books, forthcoming]). Instead of a mental state's being conscious if one is transitively conscious of it in some suitable way, Dretske proposes that a state's being conscious is simply a matter of its being a case of transitive consciousness ("Conscious Experience," 280-1). But all mental states are cases of transitive consciousness. So Dretske's alternative in effect defines all mental states as conscious states, which is implausible. Dretske's argument that we aren't always transitively conscious of our conscious states also fails to take account of the fact that we can be conscious of an experience in one respect while not being conscious of it in another. See David M. Rosenthal. '"Explaining Consciousness," ms. John R. Searle denies that it's even possible to be conscious of our conscious mental states, though his reasons are different. "[W]here conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed" (The RediscOl'en' of the Mind [Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1992]. 97). The context makes clear that Searle is denying not just that we can observe our conscious states,but that we are transitively conscious of them at all in the way we 're conscious of other things: '"We cannot get at the reality of consciousness in the way that. using consciousness, we can get at the reality of other phenomena" (ibid .. 96-7). Searle argues for this by appeal to the idea that we can describe consciousness only in terms of what it's consciousness of (ibid .. 96). But even if that's so. it doesn't follow that there can't be states in virtue of which we're conscious of our conscious states. Searle also urges that. when we mentally represent things, the things we represent must be something ontologically objective. Since conscious states, according to Searle. are ontologically subjective, we cannot mentally represent them and so cannot be transitively conscious of them (ibid .. 99: cf. 87-100, 137f.. and 144f.). Because it's difficult to make clear sense of Searle's distinction between the ontologically subjective and objective and, indeed. just what ontological subjectivity amounts to, it's unclear how to evaluate this argument.
16. For more on this. see David M. Rosenthal. "State Consciousness and Transitive Consciousness:' Col1sciousness and CORl1ition 2 (1993): 355-63. 17. Cf. Dennett, "The Message Is: There Is No Medium:' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 929-31. 18. Letter to Arnauld. 29 July 1648. Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3., trans. John Cottingham. Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1991). 357. Descartes's insistence that "[b]eing conscious of our thoughts at the time when we are thinking is not the same as remembering them afterwards" stands in useful opposition to Dennett's view that "'writing it down' in memory [is) criterial for consciousness." 19. Contrast this with the situation in which one senses that another person is looking at one. Though it's plain on reflection that we get this information visually. it doesn't intuitively seem to be visual information. 20. See. e.g .. Lawrence Weiskrantz. Blil1dsight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986): "Outlooks for Blindsight: Explicit Methodologies for Implicit Processes," The Ferrier Lecture, 1989, ProceedinRs of the RamI Society 239 (1990): 247-78; "Remembering Dissociations," in Varieties of'Memory and Consciousness: Essays in Honour of Endel Tu/l'ing, ed. Henry L. Roediger III and F. I. M. Craik (Hillsdale. N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989), 10 1-20; and "Introduction: Dissociated Issues:' in The NeuropHcholo!:y of Consciousness, ed. A. D. Milner and Michael D. Rugg (New York: Academic Press, 1992).
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21. For more extended argument on this, see David M. Rosenthal. "The Independence of Consciousness and Sensory Quality," in Consciousness: Philosophical Issues, vol. 1, ed. Enrique Villanueva (Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1991), 15-36. 22. See David M. Rosenthal. "Moore's Paradox and Consciousness," Philosophical Perspectil '1'.\' 9 (1995), forthcoming, and "Why Are Verbally Expressed Thoughts Conscious?" Report 32/1990, Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiFJ, University of Bielefeld. 23. Consciouslless Explained. 336. 24. Recall the challenge to the Orwellian model considered at the end of the previous section. 25. E.g., Consciousness Explained. 124. 26. It was this way of partially undermining the contrast between Stalinesque and Orwellian models that I had in mind in "Time and Consciousness" (The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 r1992]: 220-21 ). though that discussion wasn't as clear as I would like. 27. CO/lSeiouslless Explained, 132. 28. Ibid., 144. 29. Ibid .. 319. 30. According to Rorty, when there is reason to believe somebody's report of a mental state is not true, we cannot even in principle distinguish between the person's having just misused words and having actually made a factual error about what kind of state it is. ("Mind-Body Identity. Privacy, and Categories," The Review of Metaphrsics 19 [1965]: 45-6.) This recalls W. V. Quine's well-known argument that any translation of a language which represents people as asserting bald contradictions is overwhelming evidence that the translation is wrong. ("Carnap and Logical Truth," in The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, rev. and enl. ed.[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1976J. 109.) 31. See, e.g .. David M. Rosenthal. "A Theory of Consciousness." in The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, ed. Ned Block, Owen Flanagan. and Guven Glizeldere (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. forthcoming): "Thinking that One Thinks," in Consciousness: A Mind and LanguaRe Rellder. ed. Martin Davies and Glyn W. Humphreys (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1993), 197-223; and "Two Concept, of Consciousness." Philosophical Studies 49 (1986): 329-59. Dennett has informed me (personal communication) that he is not in fact concerned about an endless hierarchy. but rather about taking the first step in distinguishing the appearance from the reality of mental states. 32. Dennett raises a distinct worry specifically about the higher-order-thought hypothesi,. He assumes that this theory must posit not only a higher-order thought about each conscious mental state but. in addition. a distinct higher-order belief about the state (see COllsciousness Explained, 307 and 317). As Dennett notes, beliefs are dispositional state~ that underlie our thoughts: in effect. they are dispositions to have certain thoughb. But being disposed to have a thought about something doesn't make one conscious of that thing. So higher-order beliefs will not figure in explaining how we are transitively conscious of our conscious mental states nor, therefore, in explaining what it is for mental states to be conscious. 33. For a detailed survey of thi~ failure. see William Lyons. The Di.wppeamnce oj' Introspection (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT PressfBradford Books. 1986). ch. 1. 34. Much of this section and the next derives from David M. Rosenthal. "Multiple Drafts and Facts of the Matter," forthcoming in a collection edited by Thomas Metzinger. 35. See Franz Brentano. P.nchology /1-0111 all Empirical Swndpoint, trans\. Antos C. Rancurello. D. B. Terrell. and Linda L. McAlister (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1973). J 27. for a traditional example of this argument. 36. Consciousness Explained, 3 I 9. 37. Ibid.; emphasis Dennett·s. See also "The Message Is: There Is No Medium," 930-31. 38. Similarly. though Dennett notcs thaI the editing posited by the Orwellian model allows for a certain kind of error about what mental states we're in (Consciousness Erp/uined, 318-19). hi, rejection of Orwellian explanation leaves it open to him to deny the possibility of such error.
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39. 40. 4!. 42,
43.
44.
45. 46. 47. 48.
49. 50. 51. 52. 53.
54. 55. 56.
57. 58, 59. 60.
61,
Consciousness Explained, 365, 459, 113, 114, respectively. Ibid .. 113: emphasis Dennett's. Ibid, On Dennett's views about subpersonal and folk-psychological levels of description, see "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," in Dennett's The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT PresslBradford Books, 1987). The evidence for the independent representations of these properties in early visual processing is inferential, mainly from experiments in which subjects report seeing illusory conjunctions of the colors and shapes of distinct. simultaneous stimuli. Subjects do not report seeing either shape or color independently of the other. See Anne Treisman. "Perceptual Grouping and Attention in Visual Search for Features and for Objects," lournal of Experimental Ps\'chology 8 (1982): 194-214: "Features and Objects: The Fourteenth Bartlett Memorial Lecture," Quarterly loumal of Eyperimental P,nelwlog.'" 40A (1988): 201-37: and Anne Treisman and Stephen Gormican, "Feature Analysis in Early Vision: Evidence from Search Asymmetries," Psyehologiral ReI'iell' 95 (1988): 15-48. Though for other reasons. partly indicated in section VII helow, Dennett would not accept this picture. Consciousness Erp{ail1ed, 257-8. Ibid., 3 I 9. Ibid., 135. This is suggestive in connection with the temporal anomalies. Thus, the explanation of our seeming to see a moving spot that changes color when the red and green flashes occur suitably separated in space and time might have to do with the timing in the brain of the events of content fixation that independently represent color, motion, and location. C onsciollsness t\plained, 3 19. Ibid .. 132. "The Message Is: There Is No Medium:' 929. See COI1SCiOIlSness Explained, 124. To the extent that the integrative model under consideration resembles Dennett';, MDM, this conclusion fits with my argument elsewhere that the higher-order-thought hypothesis ha;, all the advantages of the MDM without being committed to FPO. (See David M. RosenthaL "'Multiple Drafts and Higher-Order Thoughts." PhilosophY and Phenomenological Research 53 [1993]: 911-18.) Consciollsness £.\p/ained, 319: emphasis Dennett's. Ibid .. 247. Ibid., 315. Dennett considers in this context the higher-order-thought hypothesis, on which these events of transitive consciousness are higher-order thoughts about our mental states. It is arguahle that the higher-order-thought hypothesis in effect follows from what I am calling the standard picture of the connection between speech acts and intentional states. See Rosenthal. "'Thinking that One Thinks," passim. See Consciollsnl'ss Explained, 2'+5. Ibid., 315: emphasis Dennett's, Also: "The emergence of the [\erbal] expression IS precisely what creates or fixes the content of higher-order thought expressed" (ibid.). I am grateful to Dennett for emphasizing this (personal communication). Compare W. V. Quine's yiew that dispositional descriptions can, for theoretical purpose,. be replaced hy descriptions that mention enduring structural traits (Word (lila ObjeCT [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960).46). Special thanks to Dan Dennett for exceptionally useful reactions on an earlier draft.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL.
22 No.1
&
2,
SPRING AND FALL
1994
The Personal Stance
Carol Rovane Yale University
Dennett has a preference for broad-stroke sketches and rough cuts. There is wisdom underlying his preference. If the larger lines of his vision are not harmonious-if they do not hang together-then the long labor of rendering those lines in full, finished detail will be wasted. Of course, this preference has the effect of making it hard to follow the standard procedure in philosophical criticism, viz., close (verging on myopic) scrutiny of detail. Since Dennett is not yet concerned with the finishing touches, there is no alternative but to tum critical attention away from matters of detail to other, larger issues. However, as soon as attention is turned away from details to the larger issues raised by Dennett's work, two related difficulties immediately arise. The philosophical critic will generally prefer to carry out a close inspection of the goods on offer rather than engage in a freer (e.g .. more speculative) style of response. The trouble is that such close inspection is not very feasible when the goods are very large ideas about very large issues. Perhaps it is not absolutely impossible to meet this first difficulty, i.e., to go in for a close inspection of large things. However, Dennett's vision not only comprehends large things; it also comprehends many things. And this comprehensiveness of Dennett's vision poses the second difficulty. For a proper response to such a comprehensive vision ought likewise to be comprehensive. But the sort of close inspection that philosophical criticism favors is not likely to afford such a comprehensive response.
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Clearly, the best thing would be to attempt a-philosophical response to the whole of Dennett's work. If one is daunted by that prospect-which anyone would be-the next best thing would be to focus on some point of intersection where several interesting lines converge. While this approach would not do full justice to the comprehensive and systematic nature of the work. it would at least have the merit of not ignoring it altogether. And it may also have the additional merit of being able to enter into the speculative spirit that characterizes much of the work, even though it does not confront the whole of the speculative vision that informs the work. The point of convergence in Dennett's work on which I shall focus is the concept of a person. Although some of the lines that converge there run the whole length of the composition, there are a few lines that belong just to the little group that Dennett treats as 'conditions of personhood.' This group deserves-and rewards-careful study in its own right. Dennett's most concentrated study of the group is to be found in a remarkable essay entitled, simply, "Conditions of Personhood:' I Interesting developments of it can also C be found in Elbo"" , Room: The Varieties (~r Free Will Worth Wanting and in scattered remarks and chapters about the self in his writings in philosophy of mind.) I will argue that Dennett's view of the person should lead him to embrace the possibility of what I call "multiple persons" and "group persons"i.e., persons who exist along with a multiplicity of others within a single human being. and persons who are comprised of groups of human beings (or to be more precise, persons who are comprised of groups of parts of diverse human beings). These possibilities are to some extent approximated by the actual phenomena of multiple personality disorder and group agency. However, my argument is not an empirical argument about these phenomena. What I want to defend is the conceptual or the metaphysical (as opposed to merely logical) possibility of multiple and group persons. And I want to defend this possibility both as a consequence of Dennett's position, and as something with independent plausibility. (With respect to this second, stronger thesis, I want to stress that I aim to demonstrate plausibility and not to offer conclusive proof. For I cannot, within a single article, clear the ground of the many objections that are likely to arise, nor can I rule out the possibility of good arguments in favor of alternative and incompatible theses. In fact, I believe that such alternatives are bound to arise. because our common-sense notion of a person is a multifaceted and contradictory notion.) The feature of Dennett's view that puts him on the road to admitting the possibility of multiple and group persons is his idea that the concept of a person is inescapably normative. I will be defending his normative approach to the philosophical study of the person, and pushing it even harder than he has done, and pushing it in directions that he has not gone. Dennett identifies two different but related normative aspects of the concept of a person.
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The first normative aspect concerns a moral, or as I shall sayan ethical, dimension of personhood. I will clarify just what I mean by "ethical" as opposed to "moral" in section 1. For now, suffice it to say that ethics in my sense is neutral among the main positions and controversies of moral theory. whereas Dennett explicitly commits himself to a broadly Kantian position ..! Nevertheless, ethics in my sense has this much in common with Dennett's Kantian morality: both positions concern values that arise from and for interpersonal relations. According to Dennett, nothing can have the metaphysical status of being a person without also having a certain moral status that is distinctive to, and partly definitive of, persons, where this moral status is defined in terms of Kantian and Rawlsian moral norms. I will defend a corresponding ethical claim which is weaker: Nothing can count as a metaphysical person without also having a certain ethical significance that attaches to persons alone, by virtue of the fact that persons alone can (and I mean they merely can, as opposed to the Kantian must) treat one another as persons. Anything which is a moral person in Dennett's sense has the distinctive ethical significance that I claim for persons, but not vice versa. The second normative aspect of the concept of a person concerns rationality. According to Dennett, nothing can qualify as having the metaphysical status of being a person unless it is a rational agent. In consequence. a person must both be subject to, and also in some degree satisfy. certain rational norms. Here I will defend a somewhat stronger claim than Dennett's-but it is virtually entailed by his own account of the sort of rationality that persons manifest. I will argue that a person must not only be subject to certain rational norms, and even satisfy them to some degree, but also, a person must be committed to living up to such norms. There is one norm in particular of which this is true. It is the normative requirement to achieve overall rational unity within one's rational point of view, by arriving at and acting upon all-things-considered judgments. Although Dennett expresses some reservations about this conception of rational agency. he has no good reason to reject it. (I will address this matter at the end of section 2.) The two normative aspects (moral and rational) of the concept of a person that Dennett identifies lead him to endorse a version of Locke's distinction between the concept of a person and the concept of a human being. For although he thinks that it is in some sense "normal" for mature human beings to exhibit the normative properties that define personhood. he does not think it is necessary that they should. Nor does he think that everything that has those normative properties must be a human being, or even an animal. Indeed, it seems that he would bear no prejudice against artificial or robotic persons, so long as they exhibited the right normative propertiesthough he does tend to describe persons as belonging to the biological order. Of course Locke went further than to distinguish the concept of a person from the concept of a human being. In fact he was primarily concerned to show that the condition of personal identity is distinct from the condition of
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human identity. But Dennett's explicit agreement with him does not extend to his views about personal identity. This is partly because Dennett is simply not interested in the traditional problem of personal identity. Nevertheless, his overall position does have implications for that problem. At any rate, I will argue that the natural and proper corollary to Dennett's normative concept of a person is a normative analysis of personal identity. The general shape of the normative analysis is as follows: Wherever there exists a commitment to satisfying the normative ideal of overall rational unity within a rational point of view, there too exists an individual person. Although this normative analysis differs substantially from Locke's own analysis of personal identity, it does support his claim that personal identity is not the same as human (or any other animal) identity. For the normative analysis says that wherever a commitment to the ideal of overall rational unity is held and acted upon, there lies an individual person--even if this normative commitment is held and acted upon by something less than an individual human being, as in the case of multiple persons, or something more than an individual human being, as in the case of group persons. Much of this article will be devoted to showing just how the two normative aspects of the concept of a person that Dennett identifies-once suitably qualified in the ways I have indicated-lead to the normative analysis of personal identity, and hence can be exploited in an argument that supports the possibility of multiple and group persons. As I said, to mount a complete and conclusive argument in favor of that possibility would require much more than one article. But as it happens, the most controversial steps in the forthcoming argument are not ones that run counter to Dennett's particular philosophical commitments-on the contrary. In consequence, he really cannot avoid its conclusion in favor of the possibility of multiple and group persons. The rest of the paper will be divided into three sections. The first is devoted to the normative aspect of the concept of a person that concerns morals and ethics. The second is devoted to the normative aspect of the concept of a person that concerns rationality. The third is devoted to an account of how these two different but related normative aspects of the concept of a person point to the normative analysis of personal identity, with its implications about multiple and group persons. In each section I will carry out two tasks. First, I will examine how Dennett treats the issues raised in that section, and then I will proceed to exploit the same issues so as to advance the argument for the possibility of multiple and group persons. Along the way, I will offer some mild criticisms and minor qualifications of some specific claims that Dennett makes in his treatment of the conditions of personhood. The two most important qualifications have already been anticipated: A retreat from Dennett's strong Kantian moral assumptions about personhood to a less controversial ethical assumption, and a stronger assumption than his about the rational requirements on
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metaphysical personhood. I will also, in section 2, challenge Dennett's account of the relations that obtain among the conditions of metaphysical personhood. He aims to show that most of the conditions of personhood, indeed all but one, may be satisfied by nonpersons, and that the difference between persons and nonpersons is therefore one of degree. I will argue that this leads him to overlook the ways in which the distinctive rational and social capacities of persons are interdependent. But overall, there is much more similarity than difference between Dennett's account of the concept of a person and the one that I will offer. And I am curious to learn whether he thinks that my proposals amount to unwelcome departures from his view that he must reject, or welcome developments that he can embrace. There is room for either conclusion.
1. MORAL AND ETHICAL DIMENSIONS OF PERSONHOOD The issue to be treated in this section has to do with the sense in which the concept of a person is an ethical concept. Dennett calls it a moral concept, and before going any further, I must explain this terminological difference. I will follow Bernard Williams in using the term "ethics" to refer to a very large and amorphous domain that comprehends just about everything that occasions reflection about what is the best manner of living.s The specific topic of ethical reflection is usually contextual-a particular time and place. a personal circumstance, a social situation. And yet, such reflection may also aspire to transcend context by arriving at universal principles. In the latter case, ethical reflection culminates in moral theorizing, the mark of which is precisely to identify and establish moral principles that are universally binding. Thus "ethics" in my sense is prior to moral theory. It is also morally neutral: It provides an occasion for moral reflection, without actually entailing or precluding any particular moral theory." With the terminology clarified, I can now anticipate the main points of this section. Dennett holds that the concept of a person is a moral concept, because he construes it as involving the ambitions of Kantian moral theory. where that includes Rawls's theory of justice. Dennett also holds that there must be some connection between this moral concept of a person as something that is subject to Kantian and Rawlsian moral norms and the metaphysical concept of a person as a rational being. Although Dennett offers an account of the connection between these two concepts of a person which is internally coherent, I will argue that he can achieve a better overall account of the concept of a person if he retreats from his strong moral assumptions about persons to a weaker, merely ethical assumption. According to this weaker assumption, a person is something that can be treated as a person in the following sense: It can be influenced through the engagement of its
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rational capacities, i.e., through reason-giving 'and argument. This conception of the person is merely ethical, as opposed to moral, because it carries no moral-theoretic consequences; it can be accepted without taking a stand on any of the major positions or controversies of moral philosophy among Kantians, consequentialists, egoists, etc. Nevertheless it captures an extremely important ethical dimension of personhood. Indeed its ethical importance is such that it ought to be embraced as a criterion of personhood. I will argue that Dennett ought to embrace this ethical criterion of personhood, and moreover, he should do this even though he may remain absolutely convinced of the correctness of his stronger moral assumptions. l.a. DENNETT'S MORAL CONCEPT OF A PERSON
For reasons that will soon be evident (though the full weight of these reasons will not be felt until section 2), Dennett is not really in the business of offering a strict criterion of personhood-moral, ethicaL or otherwise. Nevertheless, as I have already indicated, he does hold that the concept of a person is as much a moral concept as a metaphysical concept. He frames "Conditions of Personhood" with a question about the relation between these two concepts of a person: Does the metaphysical notion [of a person]-roughly, the notion of an intelligent, conscious, feeling agent-coincide with the moral notion-roughly, the notion of an agent who is accountable, who has both rights and responsibilities'? Or is it merely that being a person in the metaphysical sense is a necessary but not sufficient condition of being a person in the moral sense? Is being an entity to which states of consciousness or selfconsciousness are ascribed the same as being an end-in-oneself, or is it merely one precondition? In Rawls's theory of justice, should the derivation from the original position be viewed as a demonstration of how metaphysical persons call become moral persons, or should it be viewed as a demonstration of why metaphysical persons must he moral persons?'
At first sight, this seems to be a version of the familiar question about whether Kantian-style moral principles admit of a rationalistic derivationwhether, that is, such moral principles can be derived from the conditions of rational agency in such a way as to be universally and unconditionally binding. But Dennett's eventual answer makes clear that his is not quite the traditional question about the possibility of rationalistic proof in moral theory. Between his posing of his question and his eventual answer, Dennett lays down six necessary metaphysical conditions of personhood. They are: I) persons are rational beings; 2) persons are beings to which conscious and intentional states are attributed; 3) to be a person is to be an object of a certain attitude or stance; 4) any object of this personal stance must be capable of reciprocating the stance, or at least some crucial aspect(s) of it; 5) persons
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must be capable of verbal communication; 6) persons have a distinctive sort of consciousness, generally referred to as "self-consciousness." Dennett ends by denying that this set of metaphysical conditions could possibly be taken as sufficient for moral personhood. This is mainly because he construes moral personhood in terms of the highly demanding moral ideals of Kant and Rawls. He rightly believes that something can meet all six of his metaphysical conditions of personhood without realizing. or even getting very close to realizing. the Kantian and Rawlsian moral ideals. However. this does not deter Dennett from regarding those moral ideals as a defining reference point for metaphysical personhood. According to him. even though persons never fully realize those ideals. their metaphysical status as persons would be in jeopardy if they were to fall too far short of them. Hence Dennett's answer to his question: The moral notion of a person and the metaphysical notion of a person are not separate and distinct concepts but just two different and unstable resting points on the same continuum.'
As far as Dennett is concerned this is just a special instance of a perfectly general feature of all normative concepts. All norms are unattainable ideals. On the one hand, they are never fully satisfied. but only approached to varying degrees." Yet on the other hand. nothing can be subject to norms without also satisfying them to some degree. This latter point. about norms having application only where they are to some degree satisfied. entails that the concept of something that is subject to norms is also the concept of something that is defined in part by reference to norms. And that is the sense in which. according to Dennett. the metaphysical concept of a person is defined in part by reference to the moral concept. Of course. Dennett's account of the moral concept of a person precludes anything like a moral criterion of metaphysical personhood. For since nothing ever fully satisfies the moral ideals of Kant and Rawls that he regards as a defining reference point for metaphysical personhood. to take them as criteria would be to deny the existence of persons altogether. Dennett himself says as much. He proceeds as if this fact-i.e .. the poor performance of persons with respect to living up to the ideals of Kantian morality and Rawlsian justice-were the only serious obstacle to taking those moral ideals as a defining reference point for metaphysical personhood. And we have just seen how he proposes to overcome this obstacle. by offering an account of how normative concepts always incorporate Ideals of which their actual instances always fall short. However. although this is a perfectly good account of how nonns work. it does not serve to remove all of the obstacles that face Dennett's moral concept of a person. There is another. much more imposing obstacle. viz .. that some persons fall short of the Kantian and Rawlsian ideals because they choose to do so. and moreover. they choose to do so on moral grounds. i.e.,
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because they actually reject these ideals in favor of others, such as those embodied in consequentialism or egoism or some other altemativeincluding. for example, Williams's rejection of all moral theorizing. Dennett is certainly in no position to deny this. He might be, if he claimed to have a proof of his chosen Kantian and Rawlsian moral ideals. But he conspicuously docs not commit himself on that score. And so long as he does not, he must allow for divergence of moral opinion. My aim in insisting on such divergence is not to advocate pessimism about the possibility of resolving moral disagreement. Nor is it to ensure the possibility of truly evil persons who are entirely beyond the moral pale (though I do not want to rule that out either). My aim is rather to register that there is at present a variety of responsible moral positions available to persons, and that this variety should not be papered over in a philosophical account of how the metaphysical and the moral sides of the concept of a person fit together. Dennett might suppose that in his account the fit is loose enough to accommodate the actual variety of moral opinion. After all, he does allow that an agent may count as a metaphysical person even though it falls substantially short of the Kantian and Rawlsian ideals. But to this I would answer that when a person explicitly rejects a moral ideal, it is simply not appropriate to make that person's metaphysical status as a person depend on how it measures up to that rejected ideal-even if one is prepared to allow the person to fall substantially short of it. l.h. AN ETHICAL CRITERION OF PERSONHOOD
In granting that persons may adopt a wide variety of moral positions without jeopardizing their status as persons, one need not abandon Dennett's idea that the metaphysical concept of a person is no mere metaphysical concept. That is, one may continue to agree with him that the concept of a person is a normative concept, one whose normative content goes well beyond the fact that persons are rational beings. For as rational, and also social beings, persons do have a certain distinctive ethical-as opposed to moral-significance. This ethical significance has to do with the fact that persons, and persons alone, can treat one another as persons. There are of course many ways in which persons may be said to treat one another as persons. Many of these ways, e.g., various forms of address, courtship, familial ties, legal recognition, etc., rest on specific and local social conventions and traditions. But I mean to invoke something that is constant across social settings, namely, the ability of persons to influence one another by reasoning with one another. I shall take it as obvious that this ability of persons to treat one another as persons is distinctive to persons. For the ability makes possible distinctively interpersonal relations that rest on mutual recognition of one another as rational and social beings. It is perhaps less obvious-except perhaps to Kantians-that this ability confers on persons a distinctive ethical signifi-
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cance. But if this is not obvious, it is only because the ethical significance in question-which, to repeat, is not the moral significance that Kant claims for persons-is so basic and uncontroversial that it might escape notice as a specifically ethical matter at all. Here is why the fact that persons can treat one another as persons does have distinctive ethical significance: The fact presents persons with an ethical choice, one that they alone occasion and they alone face, viz., the choice whether and when to treat one another as persons. Because persons alone are the objects and the agents of this ethical choice. they hold a distinctive ethical significance for one another. And this remains true no matter what choice they make, whether it be in accord with the requirements of Kantian morality, or consequentialism, or egoism. or any other moral alternative, including Williams-style abdication of moral theory altogether. Thus the distinctive ethical significance that I claim for persons is both prior to moral theory and morally neutral-and that is precisely why it counts as ethical (in my sense) rather than moral. On the one hand, granting this ethical significance to persons does not require that one follow Kant in placing a preeminent moral value on it, for granting it does not preclude embracing a moral theory that attaches no special moral worth to it. But on the other hand, no moral theory can, by a low assessment of its moral worth, actually obliterate this distinctive ethical significance of persons. For no moral position is such that it affords persons a way to escape the ethical choice that they alone occasion and they alone face, the choice whether and when to treat one another as persons. So. for example. if I were to embrace the principle of utility. I might believe that I should physically remove an unwilling person from a burning wreck, and that I should do so in the same sense and spirit that I should salvage everything else of value that might otherwise go up in flames. In such a case, my moral attitude towards the person might place the person on a par with nonpersons. That is, I might believe that I should save the person without making any attempt at discussion or argument or any other form of specifically interpersonal interaction-in short. without treating the person as a person at all. Yet even though the principle of utility might thus dictate that I should on occasion treat a person as a mere thing, that cannot erase the difference that there clearly is between treating a person as a mere thing and treating a mere thing as a mere thing,lO For in the former case there is an ethically relevant alternative: I can treat the person as a person, even if I do not. This alternative does not evaporate simply because my moral theory assigns it a low 'utility.' Similar remarks apply to any other moral position that ever dictates treating a person as a mere thing: If one should embrace such a position, and if one should thereby be led to treat a person as a mere thing, one would have made an ethical choice. one whose ethical significance arises precisely because a person can also be treated as a person. So far I have stressed that the distinctive ethical significance of persons
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attaches to them a/one, by virtue of their distinctive rational and social capacities-i.e., by virtue of the fact that they alone can treat one another as persons. But I now want to propose that this distinctive ethical significance should be adopted as a criterion of personhood, indeed as the necessary and sufficient condition for being a person. This proposal is unashamedly revisionist, in the same way that all Lockean and neo-Lockean proposalsincluding Dennett's-are revisionist: They all propose to revise the common-sense tendency to equate persons and human beings. In this case, the argument for revision rests on ethical grounds that are themselves recognized by common sense. So the revisionist character of the proposal is not the result of ignoring common sense altogether; rather it is the result of selecting and pressing some strands of common-sense thinking about persons and suppressing other strands. For common sense does recognize that there is a distinctive ethical significance that attaches to those things that can treat one another as persons. And common sense also recognizes that not all human beings can so treat one another, for some human beings lack the requisite rational and social capacities. This means that common sense does recognize the existence of an ethically significant class-viz .. the class of things that can treat one another as persons-which is distinct from the class of human beings. We have a perfectly good term for the second class: "human beings." What we need is a term to cover the first class. For this class I suggest the term "person." However. this is not just a terminological suggestion. There are strong ethical. even verging on moraL grounds for accepting it. For it would be an act of gross prejudice to allow that something can be treated as a person (not as if it were a person, but really as a person), and then go on to deny that it is a person. And yet there is no similar prejudice in saying that something is not a person because it cannot be II treate d as a person. So to sum up my revisionist proposal. I propose an ethical criterion of personhood, according to which something is a person if and only if it can be treated as a person and can treat others as persons as well. It follows from this proposal that the class of persons is the ethically significant class of things such that: The members of this class all hold, and all recognize that they all hold, a distinctive ethical significance for one another; the members of this class would be guilty of prejudice if they denied membership in the class to anything that shared this distinctive ethical significance; but the members of this class would be guilty of no prejUdice in also declaring their ethical distinction from all things outside the class. This ethical conception of the person does not suffer from the disadvantages noted above, of Dennett's moral conception of the person. The latter is unduly dismissive of moral diversity among persons. And because it measures persons against specific moral ideals (of Kant and Rawls) which they may reject, it threatens to be unduly restrictive in what it is prepared to count as a person, as well as unduly dismissive of actual moral attitudes of
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persons. It is difficult-indeed it is impossible-to say exactly how restrictive Dennett's moral conception of the person is, since meeting the moral ideals of Kant and Rawls is according to him a matter of degree. But it is clear that he intends his moral conception to be more restrictive than the ethical conception that I have proposed. For he clearly states that his six conditions of metaphysical personhood are not jointly sufficient for moral personhood in his sense. But those metaphysical conditions do suffice for having the distinctive ethical status that the ethical criterion accords to persons. For those conditions provide for the very rational and social capacities by virtue of which persons can treat one another as persons, and thereby satisfy the ethical criterion. What those six conditions provide for, remember. is 1) that something be rationaL 2) that it be a subject of intentional states, 3) that it be an object of a stance from which it can be viewed as such a rational subject of intentional states, 4) that it be able to reciprocate that stance, 5) that it be able to communicate, and 6) that it be capable of selfconscious reflection. All of these conditions jointly suffice to make something just the sort of thing that can be reasoned with, and thus treated as a person. In fact, the class that is picked out by the ethical criterion of personhood coincides exactly with the class of things that satisfy Dennett's six necessary conditions of metaphysical personhood. By his own admission. his class of moral persons is more restrictive than this class, and in my view, his class is unduly restrictive. This equivalence of the ethical criterion of personhood and Dennett's six conditions of metaphysical personhood constitutes one of the main positive advantages of my proposal to adopt the ethical criterion. For adopting it would serve to bring the ethical and the metaphysical dimensions of personhood into line with one another. However. there is a danger of misunderstanding here. Once the ethical and metaphysical sides of the person are brought into line, that seems to provide an opportunity to revert from Dennett's normative approach to the philosophical study of the person. to a more familiar approach that privileges metaphysics over ethics and morals. On this more familiar approach, one must first study the actual nature of persons in a value-neutral way-i.e .. without any special attention to ethical and moral questions-and then one may. if one likes. go on to derive ethical and moral consequences from a prior metaphysical account of the person. Now it might be thought that the real advantage of my ethical criterion of personhood over Dennett's moral concept is precisely that it does seem to leave the door open to this more familiar, strictly metaphysical approach. For given the equivalence of the ethical criterion with Dennett's metaphysical concept, the former is. in a sense. derivable from the latter, whereas his moral concept is not so derivable (at least not according to him. though it would be derivable according to strict Kantians). But I want to be very clear: I do not propose to derive the ethical criterion of personhood from an independent metaphysical concept of a person. For I do not grant that the metaphysical
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concept is really an independent concept at alL Consider the fact that the central instance of personhood is the normal adult human being. There are a great many metaphysical facts about such human beings that have little or nothing to do with their personhood. How does one decide which of those metaphysical facts bear on the question of whether something is a person? My answer is: Those facts that give rise to the distinctive ethical significance that persons alone possess. Thus I propose to argue from the ethical criterion of personhood to Dennett's list of conditions of metaphysical personhood, thereby preserving his uncompromisingly normative approach. Dennett too could argue in this order, from his moral concept of a person to its metaphysical consequences or presuppositions. The difference is that in my argument, the metaphysical conclusion-i.e., his six conditions of metaphysical personhood-suffices to explain fully the distinctive ethical significance that I claim for persons. Whereas in his argument, there would be a moral leftover that was not fully explained by the conditions of metaphysical personhood. For he does not think that metaphysical personhood in his sense suffices for moral personhood. So one of the positive advantages that I am claiming for my proposed ethical criterion is that it affords a more integrated, and explanatorily complete, conception of the person, in which the ethical and metaphysical dimensions of personhood are in perfect accord. Dennett might complain that touting this advantage of the ethical criterion just serves to show that I have missed the point of his claim that the concept of a person is inescapably normative. But I have not missed his point: I wish merely to situate it differently with respect to the concept of a person. As Dennett sees it. the important point is that instances of normative concepts generally fall short of the normative ideals to which they are subject. And he wants to illustrate this with his claim that a candidate for metaphysical personhood can be disqualified if it falls too far short of certain moral ideals. Now this particular illustration of his general point about normative concepts will no longer be available if he retreats from his moral concept of a person to my proposed ethical criterion of personhood. For the ethical criterion ensures a perfect correspondence between the metaphysical concept of a person and the ethical concept. But it does not follow that adopting the ethical criterion of personhood would require rejecting the general point about how normative concepts incorporate ideals of which their instances fall short. All it means is losing a particular illustration of that point. And the loss ought to be measured against the counterbalancing gain. The gain is three-fold. First. by retreating from morals to ethics, Dennett would no longer be unduly dismissive of the diverse moral attitudes that persons actually hold, or unduly restrictive in what he is willing to count as a person. Second, the ethical criterion has an ethical rationale that is highly compelling and yet completely uncontroversial, for no one can deny that the class of things that can treat one another as persons is a class of ethical distinction and importance. Third, by adopting the ethical criterion, it is
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possible to arrive at a highly integrated conception of the person that brings its ethical and metaphysical dimensions into line with one another. Dennett has no reason to deprive himself of all of these gains that come with adopting the ethical criterion of personhood--even though his general picture of how norms work might serve to obscure its comparative advantages over his moral concept of a person.
2. RATIONAL REQUIREMENTS ON PERSONHOOD Dennett's account of metaphysical personhood is just as uncompromisingly normative as his account of moral personhood. For all of his conditions of metaphysical personhood involve rationality, and in consequence they all involve rational norms. Dennett takes the normative dimension of rationality very far indeed. It governs his account of what he takes to be the distinguishing condition of personhood, viz., self-consciousness. And it also informs his larger metaphysical vision, which situates persons in relation to the rest of the natural order. In this section I will primarily be concerned to gain a proper understanding of the form and significance of the particular sort of rationality that persons possess, viz., reflective rationality. Dennett sees reflective rationality as part of his sixth condition of personhood, self-consciousness. Minimally. self-consciousness involves reflexive self-awareness: i.e .. it involves a recognition, in the first-person mode. of an identity between the subject and the object of a thought and onese(f But according to Dennett. the sort of selfconsciousness that distinguishes persons involves more than this; it also involves the essentially normative activity of reflective self-et'aluation. He more or less equates freedom of the will with this sort of reflective rationality, and in doing so he draws heavily both on Frankfurt's and on Strawson's work.l' In his conception, reflective self-evaluation involves higher-order attitudes that function very much like Frankfurt's "second-order desires," Such higher-order attitudes provide for the possibility of selfchange at the level of lower-order attitudes. In so doing they provide for a significant kind and degree of freedom within determinism. Yet Dennett goes along with Strawson in holding that the doctrine of determinism ultimately has no bearing on the issue of freedom~and this is due to a connection between freedom and a certain normative perspective that is afforded by reflective rationality. According to Strawson. we caJI those things free that we are prepared to hold responsible. And his important lesson is that there is no nonevaluative. which is to say no nonnormative. way to characterize the distinction between the things we hold responsible and regard as free and the things we do not. For all it takes to be free and responsible is to be an appropriate object of certain evaluative attitudes which he calls "reactive"
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attitudes. These reactive attitudes presuppose, indeed they explicitly engage, the very sort of reflective. or self-evaluative, rationality in which Dennett locates personal freedom. This account of freedom is compelling. Nevertheless, I will argue that Dennett fails to describe fulJy and adequately the sort of reflective rationality that persons possess. and which he claims constitutes their freedom. For he fails to acknowledge the most central normative requirement on such reflective rationality, viz., the requirement to arrive at and act upon all-thingsconsidered judgments. Although Dennett frequently observes that persons cannot in fact consider all things, I will argue that he has no good reason to deny that they are subject to a normative requirement to do so--indeed I will argue that he has good reason to affirm it. Moreover, r will argue that persons are not only subject to this normative requirement. they must actually be committed to meeting it. For this is essential to their being the sorts of things that can reason with one another. and hence can treat one another as persons in the fullest sense, and hence satisfy the ethical criterion of personhood. The main thesis of this section, then. is that Dennett's sixth condition of metaphysical personhood, self-consciousness. should be strengthened. Just as he construes self-consciousness as incorporating the sort of reflective rationality that constitutes freedom, I will argue further that such reflective rationality should be construed as incorporating a commitment to meeting the specific normative requirement of arriving at and acting upon all-thingsconsidered judgments. However, although this is my main thesis. the arguments on behalf of it will come only at the very end of the section. and will occupy only a small portion of it. The issue that will occupy most of my attention in this section is the issue that occupies most of Dennett's attention in "Conditions of Personhood." And that is the relation between his sixth condition of personhood and the other five. Dennett claims that his first five conditions are necessary but not sufficient for the sixth and that nonpersons may satisfy all but the sixth. As I have just articulated these two claims, they are compatible with a vision of persons to which Dennett is utterly opposed and which he calls the "absolutist" conception. On this conception there is a sharp divide between persons and the rest of nature. i.e., between those things that do, and those things that do not, possess self-consciousness and reflective rationality. Dennett aims to overcome the absolutist tendency to suppose that persons create a sort of breach in the natural order. In the service of this aim. he attempts to portray reflective rationality as emerging out of less sophisticated forms of rationality, in such a way that the difference between persons and nonpersons is merely a difference of degree. And his account of the relations among the six conditions of metaphysical personhood-what he calls their order of dependence-is meant to provide this portrait of continuity between persons and the rest of nature. This leads Dennett to argue that two specific social capacities, for recip-
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rocating the intentional stance and for verbal communication (his conditions 4) and 5», are possible in the absence of self-consciousness and reflective rationality (his condition 6»). I will challenge this claim by arguing that reciprocating the intentional stance and verbal communication are both distinctively interpersonal relations. For both presuppose an ability to grasp and use the normative principles that figure in, and indeed constitute, the sort of reflective rationality that distinguishes persons. The upshot is a greater unity among conditions 4), 5), and 6) of personhood than Dennett grants. For reasons that will emerge later, my argument concerning the interdependence of conditions 4) and 6) may not convince Dennett. But fortunately. convincing him does not matter to the overall dialectic of this paper. Why, then, make the argument? First, because it concerns a very central feature of Dennett's treatment of the conditions of personhood. and it would be highly inappropriate to attempt a philosophical response that did not take account of it. But second, making the argument will put me in a position to further clarify my main positive thesis of this section, which is that Dennett's sixth condition of personhood requires a stronger interpretation than he gives of it. in terms of a normative commitment to all-things-considered judgments. 2.a. DEl\'NETT'S NATURALIST AGENDA
Although I will be challenging some of the detail s in Dennett' s account of the conditions of metaphysical personhood. I do not propose to depart from his uncompromisingly normative approach to the philosophical study of the person. There is a broader agenda that lies behind his normative approach which I have not yet fully divulged. and it is largely responsible for those details in his account that I wish to challenge. This is Dennett's naturalist agenda. It is important to have this agenda in view as my argument proceeds. Whenever Dennett runs up against a phenomenon that threatens to resist naturalist treatment-the most notable examples being consciousness, rationality, and freedom-his strategy is to show that the phenomenon in question lies at one end of a spectrum and is really continuous with the rest of nature. Thus he subverts the common naturalist strategy of trying to provide naturalist reductions of psychological and normative concepts to strict biological or physical terms. Instead. he reads into nature the very psychological and normative properties that seem to resist such reduction. And so it is with his account of the concept of a person. There is no sharp break between persons and the rest of nature: Their distinctive rational and social capacities lie on a spectrum and are continuous with less sophisticated kinds of rationality and sociality that arc exhibited by other things lower down in the natural order. Dennett's conception of norms as ideals serves his naturalist agenda very well, for it allows him to apply rational norms to things that fall very far short of satisfying them. In fact, he is willing to apply such norms to
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anything whose behavior can be made sense of and predicted on the basis of rationalizing explanations, where 'anything' includes such things as subpersonal parts of the mind (homunculi), lower life forms, and forces of nature. To give such rationalizing explanations is to adopt the intentional stance. And the intentional stance is of course a familiar line that, if it does not run the whole of Dennett's work, certainly dominates the largest and most colorful part of it. 13 In his view, anything which is an appropriate object of the intentional stance is an intentional system, and any intentional system is to some degree rational. It follows that persons are not the only rational beings. Rather, there is a spectrum of such beings. At one end are ideally rational beings (though no such being actually exists). and at the other end are things that manifest no rationality whatsoever. In between are the various intentional systems-nonpersons and persons-that satisfy the normative ideals of rationality to varying degrees. Dennett's naturalist project goes hand in hand with the larger metaphysical thesis of "'gradualism." Gradualism stands against all forms of philosophical absolutism. All differences, both particular and general. are gradual. There are no sharp boundaries or dividing lines but only continua and spectra. Gradualism is a line that truly does run the entire length-and breadth and midst-of Dennett's work. It informs his approach to the study of consciousness. his view of biological species, his understanding of the conditions of organismic identity, and indeed of all issues concerning identity. It also drives his account of the concept of a person, most especially, his view of the order of dependence that holds among his six conditions of metaphysical personhood. At the most general level, the main dividing issue between gradualists and absolutists is essentialism. The very same considerations that lead some philosophers to embrace essentialism lead gradualists to reject it. For what essentialists hanker after are the very sorts of fixed natures and sharp boundaries that gradualists either cannot make sense of at all. or simply cannot find in the world. Even philosophers who are not much attracted by essentialism. and who on general principle prefer gradualism to absolutism, may be tempted to le embrace an absolutist conception of the person. For it is tempting to suppose that the distinguishing features of personhood, especially the rational and communicative abilities of persons, cannot be matters of degree: Either something is fully and self-consciously rational, or it is not rational at all; either something is fully capable of linguistic communication or it does not really communicate verbally at all. One of Dennett's primary goals is to squelch this temptation to absolutism with respect to the concept of a person. He insists that rationality and sociality do come in degrees, and can be possessed to significant degrees by nonpersons. And this makes him determined to show that all of the conditions of metaphysical personhood can be ordered on a spectrum, that most of them can be satisfied by nonpersons, and that the difference that is made by the one distinguishing condi-
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tion of personhood, the sixth condition of self-consciousness and reflective rationality, is not very great. Here, in brief, is his spectral ordering of the conditions of metaphysical personhood. The first three conditions are 1) a person is a rational being, 2) a person is a subject of intentional states, and 3) a person is an object of a certain stance. According to Dennett, these three conditions go hand in hand. for they are all part of what it is to be an intentional system. In other words, to be a rational being just is to be a subject of conscious and intentional states, which in tum just is to be the object of a certain stance, namely, the intentional stance. But he holds that many things-e.g., frogs and thermostats-are objects of the intentional stance and yet fail to satisfy condition 4), of being able to reciprocate the stance. He also holds that some things-e.g., certain birds and dogs-seem able to reciprocate the intentional stance without satisfying condition 5), of being able to communicate verbally. And finally, he holds that a creature might be capable of verbal communication, in the sense of producing utterances whose meanings exhibit the complex structure of Gricean communication intentions, and yet not meet condition 6). For he finds it conceivable that a Gricean communicator might fail to be self-conscious in the fullest sense that involves reflective self-evaluation. As I have already indicated, I will argue that condi tions 4) and 5) presuppose condition 6). But in so doing, I will not challenge Dennett's general thesis of gradualism. nor his application of it to the case of persons. Nonpersons may indeed exhibit a significant degree of rationality and sociality, and the difference between persons and nonpersons may, for all I know, be a difference of degree. If I were to challenge this general aspect of Dennett's account of the concept of a person, I would be calling into question the liberal and pragmatic spirit in which he is prepared to apply the intentional stance. He is willing to apply the stance wherever it workswherever. that is. it affords explanatory insight and/or predictive success. To challenge this aspect of his position would merely be to repeat the charges of instrumentalism that are so often levied against him. But 1 will let his standard replies to the standard instrumentalist objections stand. This is not because I think that he has demonstrated to the satisfaction of realists that he is not an instrumentalist. but because the charge of instrumentalism does not I really touch what is interesting and powerful about his overall vision. ' So to reiterate: I do not wish to challenge Dennett's naturalist agenda or the sort of gradualist metaphysics that underlies it. My point is rather that certain specific social relations-those that involve reciprocating the intentional stance and Gricean communication-presuppose reflective rationality. and so are distinctively interpersonal relations. My primary motive for insisting on this point is akin to my motive in section 1. There my aim was to construe the concept of a person in such a way as to provide an integrated account of how its ethical and its metaphysical sides fit together. And here
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my aim is to provide an integrated account of how the distinctive rational and social capacities of persons fit together. Often this aim is associated with just the sort of absolutist tendency that Dennett is struggling against. the tendency to regard rationality and sociality as being necessarily all or nothing. But one may share Dennett's general orientation on this score, i.e., one may prefer a gradualist to an absolutist metaphysics (even in philosophy of mind), and yet also keep an open mind about whether, and why, the conditions of personhood might sometimes go together. 2.h. THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF CONDITIONS 4). 5). AND 6)
Before presenting my argument for a significant form of interdependence among Dennett's conditions 4).5). and 6), let me first say a bit more about the rationale for his own account of the order of dependence that obtains among all six conditions. I will try to present this rationale in a sympathetic light. the light which is provided by his naturalist agenda. As we have seen. this agenda directs Dennett to look for ways in which different rational and social capacities can be ordered according to their degree of rational sophistication. One natural ordering of rational capacities is according to the level of higher-order thought that they involve. This is the main axis along which Dennett proposes to rank the conditions of personhood. Anything that satisfies his first three conditions of personhood is an object of the intentional stance. and so must have first-order thoughts. His fourth condition. the ability to reciprocate the intentional stance, involves the ability to adopt the intentional stance towards others. This takes us one step higher on the rational spectrum. for adopting the intentional stance towards others requires secondorder thought. When Dennett turns to his fifth condition of personhood. the ability to communicate verbally, he invokes Grice's analysis of nonnatural meaning in terms of communication intentions. Since Gricean communication intentions are third-order intentions. this takes us yet another step higher on the rational spectrum. There is a way of conceiving the self-consciousness of persons so that it continues this progression. On this conception (a conception to which rationalists and platonists would be particularly drawn), the self-consciousness of persons involves not a specific level of higher-order thought but the general capacity to iterate thoughts indefinitely, and thereby form thoughts of ever higher orders. This, however. is not why Dennett ranks self-consciousness higher than the capacities for reciprocation and communication. He chooses to emphasize instead that the self-consciousness of persons includes a capacity for reflective self-evaluation. And he cannot show that this capacity should be ranked higher than the other five conditions of personhood by placing it on the same axis, in accordance with the level of higher-order thought that it requires. For the fifth condition (Gricean communication) puts us at level three on that axis, whereas reflective self-evaluation need not take us any
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higher than level two-the second order is a high enough order of thought to provide for the possibility of criticism and revision of lower (i.e., first-) order thoughts. Dennett nevertheless aims to portray this sixth condition of personhood as the endpoint of a progression of increasing rational complexity. In this progression, communicators first become "Anscombian reason-givers" who can critically evaluate others, and then these communicators come to be self-evaluators as well. Thus on Dennett's account, reciprocators of the intentional stance can fail to be communicators, and communicators can fail to be Anscombian reason-givers, and so fail to be capable of reflective self-evaluation. This ordering of the conditions of metaphysical personhood undoubtedly has a rationale, and even some elegance. But I think it is telling that Dennett needs to appeal to more than one standard of measurement in the course of trying to assess relative degrees of rational sophistication. On the one hand, he measures rational sophistication according to levels of higherorder thought. But on the other hand. he measures it according to whether something engages in explicitly evaluative activities or not. The first standard clearly provides for just the sort of spectral ordering that he likes to find: first-, second-, nth-order thinking. But I do not see that the second standard likewise provides for a spectrum: Either something can engage in explicitly evaluative activities or it cannot. And this is where I begin to have a doubt about Dennett's account of the order of dependence among the conditions of personhood--especialJy his understanding of the relations among conditions 4).5). and 6). My doubt does not concern Dennett's claim that the capacity for critical evaluation is a complex and sophisticated rational capacity. For critical evaluation involves assessing intentional phenomena in light of rational norms. and this involves at least three sorts of rational activity: first-order thought. second-order thought, and the application of rational norms. Dennett holds that these three activities employ three quite distinct capacities. Indeed. from his point of view. to deny their distinctness would be to fall into the trap of absolutism. And it might well be said that to raise my doubt is to put one foot into that trap. But only one foot. My other foot remains firmly planted on Dennett's ground. For] embrace his view that unselfconscious things can think, which means that the capacity for first-order thought is separable from capacities involving higher orders of thought. What I doubt is whether any rational capacity that involves higher-order thought is separable from the capacity for critical evaluation, and reflective rationality generally. Here is the source of my doubt. It is not enough for higher-order thought that a creature has the formal ability to iterate symbols. For such formal iteration can be found in a wide variety of rational activities. including especially the formation of numerals. Clearly. something much more specific is required, besides the general formal ability to iterate symbols. in order to engage in higher-order thought. For true higher-order thought is thinking
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about thoughts. And that involves apprehending "certain phenomena as intentional, which involves wielding the explanatory apparatus of the intentional stance, which in turn involves seeing phenomena as instantiating certain norms of rationality. But in that case, the capacity for higher-order thought presupposes both a grasp of rational norms and the ability to apply them. I simply do not see what more would be required in order to have the capacity for critical evaluation. And so I do not see how the capacity for higher-order thought (which is part of Dennett's fourth condition of personhood) is really separable from reflective rationality (his sixth condition). Given that Gricean communication (the fifth condition) also involves higher-order thought, I do not see how it is separable from reflective rationality either. And this leads me to have a very general doubt about Dennett's account of the relations among his conditions 4),5), and 6) of metaphysical personhood. (I also have a more specific objection to his account of condition 5), which is less tentative.) Let me now try to articulate my general doubt in greater detaiL and try harder to see why Dennett does not share it. Dennett holds that some unselfconscious things can reciprocate the intentional stance, which means that they are capable of higher-order thought in the absence of reflective rationality. He sees the capacity to reciprocate the intentional stance as going hand in hand with a capacity for nonverbal deception. of which he gives the following example. A dog wants to lie in the chair which is occupied by its master, and it proceeds to behave as if it wanted to go outside. This leads the master to get up. at which point the dog leaps victoriously into the vacated armchair. According to Dennett. it would be natural and legitimate to interpret the dog as having an intention to deceive its master. where this intention amounts to a second-order intenticn to induce in the master the first-order belief (which is false by the dog's lights) that it (the dog) wants to go outside. And of course the dog cannot have such an intention unless it can wield the intentional stance. This interpretation implicitly credits the dog with a grasp of the normative principles that figure in rationalizing explanations, and also, a grasp of the concepts of truth and falsehood. I, like many others. find that it strains credulity to suppose that these principles and concepts are really within a dog's cognitive reach. But Dennett is unperturbed by this difficulty. To him it is no greater than the difficulty of supposing that thermostats want to control the temperature, even though they lack the conceptual wherewithal to think very much about anything at all. In both cases, the interpretation is legitimate, so long as it works. This is the pragmatic aspect of Dennett's whole approach to the intentional that so bothers realists. But I find myself in the odd position of sharing a pragmatic attitude and yet doubting whether that attitude should really lead us to suppose that unselfconscious creatures can wield the intentional stance. The force of my doubt begins to emerge in connection with an important
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concession that Dennett makes, viz., that a more modest interpretation of the dog's behavior is available. The more modest interpretation does not attribute to the dog a higher-order intention to deceive its master, but merely a first-order intention to get its master to vacate the coveted annchair. This concession leads Dennett to make a perfectly general point that holds for all purported cases of nonverbal deception. Whenever it seems that a nonverbal agent aims to deceive another creature, one can always interpret the agent as a behaviorist who merely aims to influence the other creature's behavior, rather than suppose that the agent actually adopts the intentional stance and aims to influence the other creature's intentional attitudes. The striking thing about the behaviorist interpretation of the dog is not that it makes the dog out to be a behaviorist, but that it makes the dog out to be a Humean. The dog does not engage in rationalizing explanations at all, but merely finds observable regularities in the world and exploits them to its advantage. And I believe that this is also true, at least implicitly, in the purported intentionalist interpretation of the dog: It too makes the dog out to be a Humean. In fact, I believe that any interpretation of a creature that fails to credit it with reflective rationality implicitly makes the creature out to be a Humean. In order to drive this point home, I want to reconsider Dennett's originaL purportedly intentionalist interpretation of the dog. According to this interpretation the dog intends to deceive its master, and in so doing adopts the intentional stance towards its master. This means that the dog's understanding goes beyond a grasp of behavioral regularities; it also has a conception of the inner springs of the master's behavior. Now insofar as the dog really does adopt the intentional stance towards its master, it must engage in rationalizing explanation. This means that it must find rational connections between the master's inner states and the master's behavior, where these connections are defined by certain normatil'e principles of rationality. Yet the only use that the dog makes of these rational connections is predictil'e use. And in that case, the supposed rational connections might just as well be-and I would say they collapse with-mere causal regularities. My point is not just that the dog sees the master's intentional attitudes as causes ofthe master's behavior-the dog must do that if it is to engage in intentional or rationalizing explanation. My point is rather this: There is no difference. for a dog, betv.'een a rationali;:.ing explanation and a causal explanation. Thus even if a dog were able to make out inner causes of its master's behavior, it would not have made out the reasons on which the master intentionally acts: the dog would still be just a Humean rather than a reciprocator of the intentional stance. As far as I can see, the only cases where this is not so-i.e., the only cases where a creature ought not to be interpreted as a thoroughgoing Humean-are cases where a creature makes another kind of use of its knowledge of rational connections, besides a predictive use. I shall call this
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other use "normative" and the perspective from-which it is made a "normative perspective." The clearest example of a normative use of knowledge of rational connections is explicit critical evaluation. But that is not the only example of such a use. Any rational activity that incorporates a conception of the principles of rationality as normative ideals-as opposed to causal generalizations-involves a normative use of knowledge of rational connections. And what makes such a use normative-as opposed to predictive-is that it is aimed at trying to satisfy, or live up to, normative ideals. The normative perspective affords a kind of social relation which is very unlike the sorts of interactions that are afforded by a merely Humean perspective. For creatures who adopt a normative perspective can influence one another by rational means, whereas all that the Humean perspective affords is manipulation. Of course, any creature that can engage in rational influence satisfies the ethical criterion of personhood, for to engage in rational influence is precisely to treat another as a person. I now want to suggest that the only condition in which it makes sense to suppose that a creature actually reciprocates the intentional stance is that it can engage in the distinctively interpersonal relations that involve rational influence and not just manipulation. For that is the only condition in which it makes sense to suppose that a creature can grasp the specifically normative dimension of the principles of rationality, and hence can give rationalizing explanations that are not reducible to Humean causal explanations. Let me elucidate this suggestion, first by trying to give a general characterization of the difference between rational influence and manipulation. and then by example. The following sorts of social interactions among persons all count as forms of rational influence: praise, blame. and expressions of other Strawsonian reactive attitudes: argument and other forms of rational persuasion: deliberate and voluntary cooperation. In all of these social interactions, the participants proceed from a shared normative perspective, and they attempt to influence one another by appealing to one another's normative commitments. In the simplest case, one participant tries to get another to do something by demonstrating that it follows from the other participant's own normative commitments. So if the effort is successful, the other participant does what it believes it ought to do, and the result is therefore a free and voluntary act. It is the mark of rational influence that that is precisely what is intended-voluntary compliance. In contrast, the sort of manipulative influence that is afforded by a Humean perspective does not aim at voluntary compliance. Manipulation simply aims at control on the basis of predictive knowledge of how the thing to be controlled works. In The difference between these two forms of influence can be illustrated by contrasting the dog's nonverbal deception, which I claim is manipulative influence, with the following example of rational influence. At the theater someone says, "You're mistaken, that's my seat." Like Dennett's dog, your
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challenger intends that you leave your seat. But in this case, the aim is to get the intended result by appealing to your own sense of what you ought to do. That is, it is presumed that you have a normative commitment to doing the right thing in such situations, and the aim is to show you that it follows from your commitment that you ought to relinquish the seat. Thus the intended result is that you relinquish the seat of your own free will. This is not so in the case of the dog's nonverbal deception. Of course the master's response to the dog's trick is in some sense a voluntary act. But that is not what the dog intends. The dog simply intends to control its master's behavior by exploiting its knowledge of relevant causal regularities (again, it does not matter whether the dog's knowledge is confined to behavioral regularities or whether the dog's knowledge extends to 'inner' causes). So by the lights of my suggestion, Dennett's deceiving dog does not reciprocate the intentional stance at all. For the dog displays no capacity for rational influence, and hence displays no grasp of the normative dimension of the normative principles that figure in intentional explanation. In consequence, its nonverbal deception is best construed as an attempt at the sort of manipulative influence that is afforded by the Humean perspective. My suggestion does not actually refute Dennett's claim that it is possible for unselfconscious creatures to adopt the intentional stance. What it shows, though, is that there is no compelling reason to suppose that this is possible. Dennett's main line of defense against this suggestion is straightforward and clear. He can simply point out that it VI'orks to interpret some unselfconscious creatures as things that adopt the intentional stance. the case in point being. of course. a dog that apparently intends to deceive its master. To this pragmatic line I have nothing to say except what I already said: There is no evidence that unselfconscious things can grasp the normative dimension of rationalizing explanations, and they are best interpreted as thoroughgoing Humeans who do not really reciprocate the intentional stance. Thus to my way of seeing things. Dennett's conditions 4) and 6) of personhood are best construed as going together. Though I admit that his view to the contrary is not absolutely untenable. Ii Before turning to Dennett's fifth condition of personhood. I want to consider and dismiss a subtler line of defense with respect to his view that the fourth condition is independent of the sixth. This other line of defense rests on a mistake. I have no particular reason to think that Dennett would make this mistake. But it is an interesting mistake nevertheless. and it is important to see why it is a mistake. This mistaken defense would proceed by trying to extend my suggestion in such a way that it threatens to culminate in a form of skepticism. and possibly even nihilism. I have argued that the availability of a Humean interpretation of the dog is a ground for saying that it does not adopt the intentional stance towards its master. That would seem to commit me to a more general thesis, viz., whenever a Humean interpretation is available. that is a
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ground for saying that the creature does not -reciprocate the intentional stance. And Dennett might protest that a Humean interpretation is always available----even for purported cases of rational influence. Consider my own example of rational influence, where someone says, "You've made a mistake, that's my seat." I have offered an interpretation according to which the person aims to get you to relinquish your seat by appealing to your own normative commitments-by appealing to your sense that you ought to relinquish your seat. Thus on my interpretation, the person counts as a reciprocator of the intentional stance because the person makes normative use of the principles of rationality. But it is certainly possible to give a Humean interpretation instead, which does not portray the person as exploiting the normative dimension of rational connections at all. On this interpretation, the person simply aims to manipulate you on the basis of its predictive knowledge concerning the regular causes of your behavior. For example, the person might be interpreted as believing that there is a strong correlation between uttering the sentence "You've made a mistake, that's my seat" and getting people to move out of seats. On the face of it, every purported case of rational influence is subject to such a Humean interpretation. And so it would seem that, by the lights of my suggestion at least, there is always a ground for saying that a creature does not reciprocate the intentional stance. Indeed, there seems to be a ground for saying that nothing (except possibly one's own self) ever adopts the intentional stance. Hence the threatened skeptical, and potentially nihilistic, consequences of my suggestion. The first thing to notice about this offensive defense is that the threatened skepticism and/or nihilism does not carryover to the entire domain of intentional phenomena. It is presumed that dogs and persons think. What is not presumed, indeed what is called into doubt, is whether there are any selfconscious creatures who truly adopt and reciprocate the intentional stanceand to call this into doubt is of course to call into doubt whether there are any persons. Since we are working within Dennett's framework, the first presumption is backed by the appropriateness and utility of adopting the intentional stance towards various creatures (including both dogs and persons). I see no reason to shun this pragmatic attitude. But ifit is adopted, then it should be taken all the way, i.e., from attitude to actual practice. Such a thoroughly pragmatic attitude instructs us to verify not only whether it works to regard something as a thing that thinks, but also, whether it works to treat it as a thing that thinks. So for example, if something has first-order intentional attitudes, then it ought to be possible to influence its behavior by manipulating its intentional states. Similarly, if something has reflective rationality, then it ought to be possible to influence its behavior by explicitly rational means, such as critical evaluation, argument, and cooperative proposals. There is every reason to believe that this second test suffices to distinguish persons, but not dogs, as reflective beings. For it works to argue back with someone in the theater who challenges your right to your seat, but
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it will not work to argue back with your dog once it has maneuvered you out of your annchair. (This is not to say that you will win the argument at the theater; but you cannot even lose an argument to your dog.) My suggestion is that a creature ought not to be interpreted as a reciprocator of the intentional stance unless it passes this pragmatic test for reflective rationality. The present issue is not whether this suggestion is correct, but whether it carries skeptical or nihilistic consequences. And it should be clear that if the pragmatic orientation of the suggestion is accepted, then it will not carry any skeptical or nihilistic consequences. After all, many things really do pass the pragmatic test for reflective rationality, and so really do count as things that can reciprocate the intentional stance. Thus the charges of skepticism and nihilism can be pressed only by challenging the pragmatic attitude that underlies my suggestion. But since Dennett's whole approach to the intentional domain is governed by precisely such a pragmatic attitude, he is hardly in a position to press those charges in that way.l~ The second thing to notice about this unsuccessful line of defense is that it really misses the point of my original suggestion. ( suggested that the only condition in which it is reasonable to suppose that something reciprocates the intentional stance is that it can engage in forms of rational influence. The point of this suggestion was that any creature that fails to satisfy this condition can be interpreted as a thoroughgoing Humean in the following sense: For such a creature there is no distinction between Humean causal explanations and rational explanations. It is important to see that this is a conceptual point and not a skeptical point. Thus when I claimed that Dennett's deceiving dog is a thoroughgoing Humean, I was not raising a skeptical worry about whether we can ever know that the dog really engages in rationalizing explanations. Such a skeptical worry would be appropriate only if the dog at least appeared to have a grasp of the normative dimension of the rational principles that figure in such explanations. But that would be true only insofar as the dog appeared to engage in social interactions that involve a normative use of rational principles, such as criticism, argument. etc. For only in that case would the dog appear to have the rational capacities by virtue of which there would be a distinction, for it, between rationalizing explanations and Humean explanations. Of course if a dog did display all of these appearances of reflective rationality. then a skeptical possibility might be raised about whether those appearances were correct. But I was not raising that skeptical possibility when I suggested that Dennett's deceiving dog-which displays no appearance of reflective rationality-is a thoroughgoing Humean. Dennett's pragmatic attitude properly insulates him from the sort of skeptical possibility that I just alluded to. And while my own suggestion avails itself of the same pragmatic attitude, we have seen that this pragmatism is also Dennett's main line of defense against my suggestion. Nevertheless, I believe that my suggestion makes a plausible connection
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between reciprocating the intentional stance, grasping the normative dimension of rationalizing explanations, and the capacity for reflective rationality. And in doing so, it makes a plausible connection between Dennett's fourth and sixth conditions of personhood----even though he is within his pragmatic rights to deny it. My objection to Dennett's treatment of his fifth condition of personhood, verbal communication, is less conciliatory. For he endorses Grice's account of communication. And if I am right, Grice's account makes communication out to be a form of rational, as opposed to manipUlative, influence that necessarily presupposes the normative perspective of reflective rationality. So even by Dennett's own lights it is not possible to satisfy his fifth condition of personhood without also satisfying the sixth. Grice identified in verbal communication among persons a particular kind of meaning, which he called "nonnatural meaning." This is the sort of meaning that we have in mind when we say that someone meant something by saying (or doing) something. He distinguished this sort of nonnatural meaning from a sort of meaning that does not require a speaker at all. This latter sort of natural meaning can be found anywhere there are causal relations and regularities: Smoke means fire, clouds mean rain. In drawing this distinction between natural and nonnatural meaning, Grice did not propose that nonnatural meaning is somehow outside the natural order. He merely wanted to draw attention to the difference between a certain sort of verbal communication, and sundry other intentional acts and unintended natural meanings that we might find in the world. Dennett rightly regards Grice's analysis of nonnatural meaning as being at one and the same time both implausible and illuminating. To mean something in Grice's nonnatural sense is to intend to induce a response in an audience by means of a recognition of that very intention. This analysis is implausible, simply because speakers very rarely. if ever, explicitly form such complicated communication intentions. Dennett asks why, then, no one has ever pressed this as an important objection to the analysis.l~ His answer is that Grice was too clearly onto something important. and it has to do with a dimension of normativity that arises only in communication, viz., sincerity. Grice never really addressed, and to my knowledge he never even mentioned, the fact that his analysis of nonnatural meaning affords an illuminating explanation of just how and why sincerity and insincerity are possible. And although Dennett sees that Grice's analysis does afford such an explanation, he does not actually provide that explanation in complete detail. If he had done so, he would have seen that the capacity for Gricean communication goes together with his condition 6) of personhood, selfconsciousness, and reflective rationality. The matter can best be approached by first seeing how Gricean communication fits the characteristic pattern of rational influence. To intend to have a rational influence is to intend a result through another person's voluntary
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compliance, where this is achieved by appealing to the person's own normative commitments. The cases we have so far considered involve reasoning with a person. In such cases, the wielder of influence sets about showing, in a fairly direct and explicit way, that the intended result follows from the person's specific normative commitments. This last feature is missing from Gricean communication, and its absence is what affords the possibility of sincerity and insincerity. But that does not compromise the status of Gricean communication as a form of rational influence. For in Gricean communication the speaker does intend voluntary compliance, and success does depend on a successful appeal to the audience's normative commitments. It will soon emerge that Gricean communication makes a rather more complicated sort of appeal to normative commitments than occurs in ordinary reasoning and argument. This complexity is hinted at in the complexity of the intentions that figure in Grice's analysis of nonnatural meaning. Here is the formulation of the analysis that Dennett provides: "U meant something by uttering x" is true if. for some audience A. U uttered x intending (I) A
to produce a particular response r
(2) A to think (recognize) that U intends (I) (3) A
to fulfill (I) on the basis of his fulfillment of (2).'"
Although it is not made explicit by this formulation, this complex of intentions is a species of reason-giving. For in intending that A respond on the basis {~f its recognition of V's intention that it do so, V intends that A's recognition of U's intention be A's reason for doing it. Of course. to offer a reason is to function within the normative perspective. But where. exactly. is the appeal to A's own normative commitments? The simple answer is as follows: V must recognize that A has reason to comply only if A regards that as a way of satisfying. or living up to. A's own normative commitments. However. this simple answer does not reveal exactly how U manages to exploit this insight so as to achieve the intended result via an appeal to A's commitments. As I said. it will emerge that this appeal is rather complicated. In order to understand this appeal better, it is necessary to examine more carefully the particular sort of reason that a Gricean communicator offers to an audience. This reason is peCUliar. For no substantive justification or demonstration is provided that would show why the thing is worth doing. The mere intention that the thing be done is all the reason that is offered. This is the crucial element that distinguishes instances of nonnatural meaning from communicative interactions that exploit natural meanings. Grice illustrates the distinction by contrasting photographs and drawings. If I were to present you with a photograph with the intention that you come to believe something, I would intend that you believe it on the basis of the photographic evidence rather than on the basis of your recognition of my intention that you should. Whereas if I were to draw you a picture in order
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to induce the same belief in you, your recognition of my intention to induce that belief would really be all the reason that you would have been given. Only the second case involves nonnatural meaning, and so counts as a genuine case of saying something, as opposed to showing you something by exploiting natural meanings. (Grice hereby gives us a distinction between saying and showing that is quite different from Wittgenstein's.) Thus the reason that is provided with a Gricean communication intention is thin-it is not substantive. But the question remains, exactly how does such an intention appeal to the audience's own normative commitments? The answer to this question can be found by seeing exactly how the framer of such an intention can expect to achieve the audience's voluntary compliance. It is not hard to see that, in general, an audience ought not to comply with a Gricean communication intention unless it has reason to believe that there is some further justification for doing the thing intended, over and above the fact that the speaker intends it. And this is something that speakers are bound to know when they frame such intentions. That is, a framer of a Gricean communication intention is bound to know that its intention ought not to succeed unless its audience has reason to believe that the response intended has some warrant, over and above the fact that it is intended by the speaker; it must be worth doing in some more substantial sense. Moreover, an audience is bound to know that a speaker knows this. Because this is so, a Gricean communication intention really amounts to a sort of declaration that there is good reason--Dver and above the fact of the intention itself and the audience's recognition of it-for the audience to comply with it. And this of course means good reasonfrmn the audience's point of Fiew. For if this were not so, i.e., if a Gricean intention did not declare the reasonableness of the intended response from the audience's own point of view, then the framer of such an intention could have no reasonable expectation of fulfilling it, i.e., could have no reasonable expectation that the audience would comply with it. This appeal to the audience's own point of view is of course an appeal to the audience's own normative commitments. Yet it is a complicated sort of appeal, because no attempt is made to show, or demonstrate, exactly why the response intended will serve the audience's commitments. That puts the audience in the position of having to trust the speaker. The audience must take it on faith-one might say that the audience must take the speaker's 'word' for it-that the response intended really is worth doing, that it really is mandated by its own normative commitments. Typically, an audience arrives at this conclusion by reasoning that the speaker is reliable in two ways: First, the speaker would not intend the response unless it believed that the response would serve the audience's own normative commitments, and second, the speaker would not believe this unless it were true. Now, finally, we can see the complicated nature of the appeal that a speaker makes to the audience's normative commitments. The speaker must represent itself to the
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audience as reliable in both of these ways, for only in that case would the speaker have given the audience adequate reason to believe that the intended response will serve its own normative commitments. There is, of course, no guarantee that the speaker is reliable in either of these ways. And it is the absence of a guarantee for the first sort of reliability that affords the possibility of sincerity and insincerity. A sincere Gricean intention intends a response that the speaker actually does believe it would be reasonable for the audience to undertake. Whereas an insincere Gricean intention intends a response which the speaker believes it would not be reasonable for the audience to undertake. The form of insincerity that is most often discussed is insincere assertion-i.e., lying. This involves an intention to deceive an audience into believing something that is false by the speaker's 21 lights. But that is not the only form of insincerity. There can be insincere orders as well as insincere assertions. Just as an insincere assertion intends a belief that (by the speaker's lights) it would be unreasonable for the audience to hold, likewise, an insincere order intends an action that (by the speaker's lights) it would be unreasonable for the audience to perform. (Childish pranks often take the form of an insincere order: "Go ahead and taste this, you'll really like it," offering up some delicious looking but disgusting concoction.) So much for a basic review of Grice's analysis of nonnatural meaning and how it explains the possibility of sincerity and insincerity. In light of this review. it is hard to credit Dennett's claim that Gricean communication (his condition 5) of personhood) is possible among creatures that lack selfconsciousness and reflective rationality (his condition 6»). The only conceivable response that is available to Dennett is the following argument: The sort of reflective rationality that figures in Gricean communication falls short of the capacity for reflective self-evaluation, and this latter capacity is what condition 6) requires, for that is the rational capacity that constitutes personal freedom and truly distinguishes persons from nonpersons. However, this response will work only insofar as it is possible to specify the extra degree of rational sophistication that the capacity for reflective self-evaluation requires, beyond what is required for the sorts of reasoning that Gricean communicators must engage in. And I deny that there is any such extra degree of rational sophistication. For Dennett reflective self-evaluation is distinguished by the fact that it can lead to self-change in light of critical reflection on one's intentional attitudes and actions. One must first notice that one's attitudes or actions somehow violate or contradict one's normative commitments, and then respond by revising one's attitudes and actions accordingly, so as to conform better to one's commitments. However, self-criticism is not the only form that reflective self-evaluation can take, for it is not the only way in which one's commitments to normative ideals can be a catalyst for self-change. Two other forms come immediately to mind. One can come to accept certain
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consequences of one's attitudes that hitherto had escaped one's notice. And one can come to accept new truths insofar as adequate evidence should present itself (there is no reason why such new truths should not concern matters of value as well as fact). Both of these sorts of self-change are efforts to achieve a kind of completeness in one's overall rational outlook, and each presupposes a commitment to a specific rational ideal, the first to closure, and the second to what might be called inclusion (but not in the strict logical sense). It follows that these efforts at self-change, which are aimed at greater completeness, are just as evaluative as self-criticism. For all of these forms of self-change-revising one's attitudes in light of criticism, embracing the consequences of one's attitudes in light of reflection, adopting new attitudes in light of evidence-are really just attempts to better meet the requirements 22 of the normative ideals to which one is committed. This is what I have meant all along by the normative perspecti~'e, in contradistinction to the predictive perspective. The former is essentially evaluative, because it affords rational activities that are responsive to the ideals which are embodied in one's normative commitments. In my view. Gricean communicators function within this normative perspective. Believing or doing something because someone told you to in Gricean fashion is an essentially evaluative activityit makes no sense except as an attempt to live up to your normative commitments. And my point is that if you can participate in this communicative enterprise, then you must have full reflective rationality, which includes the capacity for reflective self-evaluation. In other words, you really cannot satisfy Dennett's fifth condition of personhood unless you satisfy the sixth. Throughout my discussion of the relations among conditions 4), 5). and 6). I have been emphasizing that a grasp of the normative principles involved in the intentional stance affords the possibility of rational influence, a form of influence that exploits the normative perspective of evaluation. But my larger point is that even in its explanatory mode the intentional stance must invoke this same normative perspective. For the distinction between mere predictive explanation and rationalizing explanation lies in the fact that the latter appeals to norms. Now Dennett himself insists that norms are ideals. And I think that is enough to ensure a connection between conditions 4) and 6). For nothing can give intentional explanations without invoking rational norms, and nothing can grasp rational norms without recognizing their force, and to recognize their force is already to embrace them as normative ideals. and to embrace them is to have reason to engage in the essentially evaluative activities of the normative perspective-and that constitutes full reflective rationality. What. then, becomes of Dennett's gradualism and his idea that the rational and social capacities that constitute the conditions of personhood are matters of degree? He is certainly right to say that satisfying the ideals of rationality is a matter of degree. and that nothing ever fully satisfies them.
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It also seems clear that the possession of such ideals can be a matter of degree-at least in the sense that one can have more or fewer of them. Perhaps it is even true that having the capacity to grasp and embrace normative ideals is a matter of degree. But it is not entirely clear what this means. What does seem clear is that Dennett's account of what it means is not convincing. For it does not really work to portray this capacity, which is really the capacity for full reflective rationality, as the endpoint of a progression which is defined by his six conditions of personhood. In fact, that list of conditions does not capture a spectrum of rational sophistication at all. Rather. it divides naturally into two sets of interrelated rational capacities. As Dennett himself notes, the first three conditions go together in one set that defines what it is to be an object of the intentional stance. And I have been arguing that the last three conditions go together as well, and that they all define aspects of what it is to be a subject who can adopt the normative perspective of the intentional stance. Thus in my view. there is a real divide between those things that lack, and those things that have, full reflective rationality. This divide falls not between Dennett's conditions 5) and 6) but between conditions 3) and 4). On the second side of this divide lie persons. Their basic grasp ofthe normative perspective confers on them-and them alone-a bundle of interrelated rational and social capacities. They alone can adopt and reciprocate the intentional stance: they alone can engage in various forms of rational influence. including Gricean communication; they alone can hold one another responsible-and more generally. they alone can treat one another as persons. 2.c. THE
~ORMATIVE
IDEAL OF OVERALL RATIONAL UNITY
I said at the beginning of this section that it does not really matter to the overall dialectic of this paper whether my specific arguments against Dennett's account of the order of dependence among his six conditions of personhood succeed. If those arguments were to fail. it would follow that neither reciprocating the intentional stance nor Gricean communication presupposes reflective rationality, and so neither is a distinctively interpersonal relation. But that would not rule out the main positive point on which my overall dialectic depends. The dialectic began in section I by defending an ethical criterion of personhood. This criterion is based on the idea that persons have a distinctive ethical significance which arises from the fact that they can treat one another as persons. The second stage (which is the work of this section) is to argue that persons can stand in such distinctively interpersonal relations only because they have a distinctive rational capacity. viz.. the capacity for self-consciousness and reflective rationality. Thus the positive point on which the dialectic depends is that there are some such distinctively interpersonal relations which are necessary and sufficient for satisfying the ethical criterion and which depend on reflective rationality. Now Dennett
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can be brought along in this dialectic, so long as he recognizes some such relation. And in point of fact, he does recognize the most basic and important such interpersonal relation, namely, reason-giving-not of the opaque Gricean sort, but the more straightforward reason-giving of direct argument and persuasion. It suffices for my purpose that he regards this as a distinctively interpersonal activity, even though he does not view reciprocating the intentional stance and Gricean communication that way. As with all forms of rational influence, direct reason-giving aims at results by appealing to a person's normative commitments. In the case of argument, this amounts to providing internal criticisms that take account of, and speak to, a person's particular rational point of view. Of course such internal criticism would not be possible unless a person's rational point of view were governed by some very basic rational ideals, the most obvious and least contentious of which is the ideal of consistency. Another ideal which is often appealed to in argument, and which I mentioned briefly in connection with self-evaluation. is closure, i.e .. believing the consequences of one's beliefs. Frankly, I do not know which, or how many, other such rational ideals must be in place. But there is one ideal that Dennett fails to embrace and which I believe is absolutely crucial. That is the ideal of arriving at and acting upon 'all-things-considered judgments: If I am right, this ideal really helps to define what it is to reason from a point of view, and hence also, what it is to reason with a person. Recognizing this ideal will be absolutely crucial to the third and final stage of the dialectic, for it will play a central role in the argument for the normative analysis of personal identity, and indeed it will figure centrally in the analysis itself. But for now. I just want to consider the more immediate significance of the ideal of arriving at all-things-considered judgments, without regard for its implications about personal identity. Here, in quick and rough terms, is an account of that ideal. It is reaIly the ideal of achieving overall rational unity within a rational point of view. The ground is prepared for such unity through the following sorts of rational activities: resolving contradictions and other conflicts among one's intentional attitudes, accepting their consequences, ranking one's preferences, assessing opportunities for action, assessing the consequences of possible courses of action, assessing means to ends. All of these activities trace various relations of support and exclusion that obtain among the intentional episodes that figure in one's psychological life and economy. These intentional episodes constitute, as it were, one's rational point of view-even when it falls woefully short of meeting the requirements of rationality. For these episodes are what one must consider when one reasons about what 10 do and think. Some of them may be irrelevant to the issue at hand, and there may be more of them than one would have patience or inclination to review, even if they were relevant. Nevertheless, they are there to be considered. And
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one has a sense of what it would mean to find later, after one has deliberated, that one should have considered something but did not. Here I do not mean to raise an issue about the things that would have been relevant if only you had a clue about them, but you never even heard of them. That is, I am not invoking the idea that some people seem to have. according to which, for example, ancient Greek astronomers should have adopted the heliocentric theory of planetary motion, even though they had not even hit upon the possibility of such a thing as heliocentrism. What I mean to invoke is really a very familiar phenomenon, viz., the sense one sometimes has that one did know better, and that one would have realized this, if only one had thought a bit harder about what was already, at the very moment of deliberation, part of one's overall rational perspective. Anyone who has ever had this sense has an implicit commitment to arriving at and acting upon all-things-considered judgments. It is the sense that if one reasons from a particular rational point of view, then one ought to take that point of view into account. Indeed that is what it is to reason from a point of view-to take it into account by l:onsidering all things within it. Even if one should fail to do so, one certainly has a commitment to doing so. And to realize this commitment would be to achieve a unified point of view, for in that case one's deliberative conclusions would reflect everything within it. This is what I meant when I said above that the ideal of arriving at and acting on all-things-considered judgments is the ideal of achieving overall rational unity within one's rational point of view. I believe that this ideal is always appealed to in the course of attempts at rational influence. Consider, for example, internal criticism. Characterized in the broadest terms, such criticism exploits some element in a person's point of view and attempts to show that the person ought to accept something else-in light of their own normative commitments. I have already named two commitments that are often appealed to in this way, namely, commitments to the ideals of consistency and closure. There is no reason why many other ideals should not also be invoked, such as obeying certain standards of evidence or achieving transitivity in one's preference rankings. But the one ideal that is always invoked is the ideal of rational unity, which is manifested in a commitment to arriving at and acting on all-thingsconsidered judgments. Why? Because it is always fair game in the course of criticism and argument to exploit anything in a person's rational point of view. Of course a person is always free to argue that some of its beliefs, values, and other attitudes are irrelevant to the particular issue at hand. But what a person cannot do is simply declare that its attitudes are irrelevant tout court. To declare that would really be to give those attitudes up-it would be to cast them out altogether from one's rational point of view. In other words, to hold attitudes at all is to allow that any rational appeal to one's point of view-be it in the course of interpersonal argument or in the course
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of reflective self-evaluation---can in principle appeal to them. And the legitimacy of that appeal is underwritten precisely by the ideal of arriving at allthings-considered judgments. Despite all of this. Dennett has resisted embracing this ideal of rationality. He often points out that one simply cannot consider all things. And he is generally struck by the fact that actual deliberation proceeds on a rather different and more haphazard basis. For example, he offers the following observations in Elbow Room: "However much one considers and evaluates and reflects, there is always logical room for more. Since we are thus inevitably confronted with the need for a limited and incomplete survey of considerations, it becomes important to us that the 'right' considerations occur to us early in the deliberative process. But we cannot directly control this ordering; we cannot play parade marshal for the queue of considerations-tobe-reviewed, putting each in its proper place in line."" A page earlier he notes that "the weighing lof considerations] can invoke an indefinitely large and unstructured set of further considerations. One must limit one's reflections and take a few relatively blind leaps-or else postpone resolution forever." As descriptions of our actual deliberative limitations. these observations cannot be faulted. The question is. what do they show about the rational ideal of considering all things? If one takes Kant's dictum to heart, that 'ought' implies 'can: then a hard look at our limitations might lead us to conclude that we are not really subject to that ideal. That is. we might conclude that it canl10t be the case that we ought to consider all things, because it is not the case that we can. But this conclusion would be completely at odds with Dennett's general picture of normative ideals. For in general, he takes it to be in the nature of normative ideals that the things that are subject to them inevitably fall short of satisfying them. And he makes no exception in the case of specifically rational ideals. It is easy to see why. After all, no living person can actually meet the relatively uncontroversial ideals of consistency and closure. No one has time or opportunity to identify and resolve all conflicts within their point of view. nor to follow out all of the consequences of their beliefs and attitudes. But that does not make them any the less ideals to which persons are generally committed. This can be seen from the fact that if you point out a contradiction or an unacknowledged consequence. a person will normally act accordingly, so as to better meet the ideals of consistency and closure. Likewise for the ideal of arriving at and acting on all-things-considered judgments. We cannot meet that ideal, but we do embrace it. The sign that we do is that we can see and regret our failures to meet it, and that this can lead us to alter our attitudes and actions so as to accord better with its requirements. If this were not so, we could not treat one another as persons by engaging in rational influence, and we would fail to satisfy the ethical criterion of personhood.
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3. THE NORMATIVE ANALYSIS OF PERSONAL IDENTITY Having defended an ethical criterion of personhood and the metaphysical corollary that a person is something with a commitment to meeting the normative ideal of overall rational unity. what follows about the condition of personal identity? The ethical criterion of personhood points to a connection between personal identity and the ideal of overall rational unity. For the criterion implies a one to one correspondence between the individual things that satisfy it, i.e., between the things that can treat one another as persons. and those things that are committed to achieving overall rational unity within their rational points of view. There is also a more direct conceptual tie between personal identity and the ideal of overall rational unity. For that ideal more or less defines what it is for an individual person to be fully rational. It will soon emerge that these two connections. viz., the one to one correspondence between the things that can be treated as persons and the things that have a commitment to rational unity. and the conceptual tie between such unity and individual rationality, make it possible to analyze personal identity in strictly normative terms. But before presenting and defending that normative analysis, the latter conceptual connection needs to be further developed. The conceptual tie between the ideal of overall rational unity and personal identity can be seen from the fact that this ideal does not apply to groups of persons as it does to individuals. This is because the scope of a person's all-things-considered judgments is determined by the scope of its own rational point of view. In other words. such judgments should take into account all that belongs to the person's own point of view, and they may disregard what anyone else might want or think. Thus I ought to resolve all contradictions and conflicts within my own point of view. but I need not resolve all of my disagreements with you. I ought to rank my preferences and set priorities among my commitments. but this ordering need not reflect your preferences and commitments. When I arrive at all-things-considered judgments about what would be best to do, these judgments must take into account all of my beliefs and motives. but not yours. This restriction of the ideal of overall rational unity to my own rational point of view might seem implausible. After alL I often learn from others, and I also often care about what others want and think. How could I learn from. or care about. others' points of view unless my all-things-considered judgments took them into account as well as my own? The answer is familiar from internalist conceptions of reasoning and justification. If I am already committed to the idea that I might learn from you. or that I ought to help satisfy your motives. then I have grounds, within my own rational point of view. to take your beliefs and motives into account in my all-things-considered judgments. But I need
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not have such grounds. I might think you a fool from whom I can learn nothing, and I might believe that there is no reason why I should help to satisfy your motives. In such cases, I am not required to take your beliefs and motives into account in my all-things-considered judgments. These are of course claims about the requirements of rationality and not morality. It might be a moral failing on my part not to take your motives into account in my judgments about what would be best to do. But unless I already had, within my own rational point of view, some ground for taking your motives into account, it would not be a failure of rationality on my part to disregard them in my deliberations. The normative analysis of the condition of personal identity takes advantage of these conceptual ties between personal identity, a single rational point of view, and the ideal of overall rational unity. However, the mere existence of these conceptual ties does not immediately entail any particular analysis of personal identity. Rather, they merely provide an indirect means by which to establish such an analysis. Insofar as the ties hold, the condition of personal identity is the condition in which there is a single rational point of view that is subject to the normative ideal of overall rational unity. And insofar as the ethical criterion of personhood is allowed to stand, that is also the condition in which something actually has a commitment to this ideal. For without that commitment persons would not be susceptible of rational influence, and hence would not be treatable as persons in the ethically significant sense which is specified by the ethical criterion. In light of this, I propose the following indirect approach: First identify the condition that gives rise to, and supports, the commitment to the normative ideal of overall rational unity, and then take that as a basis for an analysis of personal identity. It might be thought that this indirect approach to the question of personal identity via normative considerations will not get us very far at all. Indeed it might seem hopeless. For it might seem that the normative ideal of rational unity makes no sense except insofar as the identity of a person is already given-and in that case, it is simply not available as an independent consideration by which to try and establish the condition of personal identity. Consider, for example, two analyses that represent two main camps in the dispute about personal identity. The first is a physical analysis, according to which the condition of personal identity is the condition of identity for some physically definable thing, such as a body (e.g., the human body), an organism (e.g., the human animal), or an organ (e.g., the human brain). The second is a phenomenological analysis, according to which the condition of personal identity is the condition of identity for a persisting subject of conscious states, where the ground of such persistence is some sort of phenomenological unity and continuity. An advocate of either sort of analysis might reason as follows: So long as my proposed condition of personal identity obtains, the normative ideal of rational unity is in place. In the case
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of a physical analysis, this means that whenever intentional episodes are associated with the same physical thing (body, organism, organ), they belong to the same rational point of view and are together subject to the normative ideal of overall rational unity. In the case of a phenomenological analysis, this means that whenever intentional episodes belong to the same unified consciousness, they belong to the same rational point of view and are together subject to the normative ideal of overall rational unity. These illustrative arguments might seem to indicate that my indirect approach gets things in the wrong order. For they seem to indicate that the condition of personal identity must be established on the basis of purely metaphysicalwhich is to say nonnormative-considerations, and only then, once it is established, consequences may follow for the proper application of the normative ideal of overall rational unity. However, this effort to make normative considerations posterior to the issue of personal identity has overlooked the all-important consequence of the ethical criterion of personhood, which is that individual persons are not only subject to the normative ideal of rational unity, they must also be committed to it-for otherwise, they could not be subject to rational influence, and would not be things that can be treated as persons, and would not satisfy the ethical criterion. This gives rise to the following hard questions for advocates of both sorts of analysis that I just considered. Does their preferred analysis describe a condition that guarantees the existence of something that has this normative commitment? And can their analysis account for this commitment? I think not. The quickest way of seeing why not is to look at some features of multiple personality disorder and group agency. At the beginning, I said that I would not be defending the actual existence of any multiple or group persons. I am not going back on that by appealing at this juncture to the actual phenomena of multiple personality disorder and group agency. For my present point is merely a negative one against the physical and phenomenological analyses of personal identity. The case of Sybif4 strongly suggests that neither a physical analysis nor a phenomenological analysis specifies a condition of personal identity that would suffice to explain and support a person's commitment to the normative ideal of overall rational unity. Leaving aside the question whether Sybil's alter personalities were distinct persons, their presence-whatever they were--constitutes evidence of pockets of rational unity within the human being Sybil, each with a distinct commitment to th~ ideal of rational unity within it. As a result of these distinct normative commitments, it was possible for Sybil's therapist to engage in forms of rational influence that were directed at Sybil's alter personalities rather than at the 'total' Sybil. In fact it was not possible for the therapist to direct such efforts at rational influence towards the 'total' Sybil precisely because that human being failed to have the requisite commitment to achieving overall rational unity within her. This shows that the suggested physical conditions of personal identity-the
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human body, organism, or brain-do not suffice to support a normative commitment to overall rational unity. The case of Sybil also shows that the phenomenological condition of personal identity likewise fails to support that commitment. For some of Sybil's alter personalities had direct phenomenological access to one another's thoughts and yet failed to have a normative commitment to achieving overall unity together. It might seem inappropriate to use what is generally regarded as a disorder in order to show that certain analyses of personal identity do not guarantee the existence of a normative commitment to overall rational unity. Many will be tempted to say that Sybil's disorder lies precisely in the fact that she lacks the right normative commitment to go with the condition of her identity. But if that is right, then we ought to be able to say ·what it is about the condition of her identity-be it physical or phenomenologicalthat should have produced that commitment to overall unity. Moreover, since Sybil's alter personalities possessed significant rational and critical powers, it should have been possible to explain to them why they ought to embrace the normative ideal of Sybil's overall rational unity.'> The interesting thing is that once the idea of integration was up for discussion, Sybil's alter personalities mostly did not approve of the idea. And they certainly did not regard the fact that they shared a body. or had phenomenological access to one another's thoughts. as a reason to try and achieve overall rational unity among themselves-i.e., in Sybil. Since Sybil's alter personalities did have significant rational and critical powers. it is worth considering what sort of justification they might have produced for rejecting the ideal of Sybil's overall rational unity and for preferring instead to retain distinct commitments to their separate pockets of rational unity. For that may bring to light what sort of justification might have sufficed to convince them that they ought. after alL to embrace the broader ideal of Sybil's unity. And that in turn might point the way to an analysis of personal identity that, unlike the physical and phenomenological analyses so far considered. would suffice to account, in a general way, for a person's normative commitment to the ideal of overall rational unity. Before trying to see how Sybil's alter personalities might have tried to justify their distinct normative commitments to unity within their own rational points of view. it is necessary to see what the separateness of their points of view could possibly consist in. And here, I am moving from a quasi-empirical account of the actual Sybil, to a rational reconstruction of what would have to obtain if her alter personalities were to maintain separate rational points of view. Perhaps they did not in fact do so. But that does not matter. for my concern is whether they could. In order to maintain separate rational points of view, each of Sybil's alter personalities would have to be able to distinguish some, but not aiL of the intentional episodes associated with Sybil's life as belonging to it, where a recognition of such ownership entailed a willingness and commitment to take those, and only those,
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episodes into account in deliberation and argument. But what is the principle of organization by which Sybil's intentional episodes could get parceled out in this way to different alter personalities? This question is not a causal question about the origins of Sybil's multiple personalities. It is rather a normative question concerning what determines the scope of a rational point of view. Thus the question is really this: On what principle could Sybil's alter personalities suppose that they ought to take some but not all of the intentional episodes associated with Sybil's life into account in the course of their deliberations? The principle obviously cannot be physical. for the intentional episodes were all associated with the same human body, organism, and brain. Nor can the principle be phenomenological in any straightforward sense. For it is possible, and indeed it seems to have been true in the case of some of Sybil's alter personalities, to have phenomenological access to an intentional episode even though it does not belong to one's rational point of view. The principle cannot be epistemic either. for it is certainly possible that distinct rational points of view should have a great deal of common knowledge, including mutual knowledge of one anotherand again. this was true of many of Sybil's alter personalities. If anything. the principle of organization would seem to be conative. And in fact. Sybil's alter personalities clearly displayed quite distinct. and indeed irreconcilable. fundamental desires. values. and projects. Whatever might have been the original causes of this fact about SybiL once the fact obtained there was no possibility of rational unity for Sybil without massive psychological change. These irreconcilable differences about what is most desirable. most valuable. and most worth doing made it impossible to reason in any orderly way about what. all things considered. it would be best for Sybil to think and do. On the other hand. it was not impossible that her alter personalities should find a way to deliberate from the standpoint of consistent subsets of these irreconcilable fundamental ends (l am using the term "ends" in a broad way to refer to any of the desires. values. projects. etc .. that provide motives to act). The result would be a kind of division of rational labor: For the sake of each set of fundamental ends. some. but not alL of Sybil's conflicts would have to be resolved. some preferences ranked. some practical opportunities assessed. and some coordination of practical effort achieved. Without this division of rational labor. there could be no exercise of rational agency at all. But with it there must come a division of rational point of view: Each separate set of fundamental ends underwrites a separate commitment to achieving the degree of rational unity that would be necessary in order to act for the sake of just those ends. This division of rational labor is of course a principle of organization by which Sybil's alter personalities could regard some, but not all. of the intentional episodes associated with Sybil as belonging to their own separate rational points of view. At the same time. it is also the most naturaL and the most powerfuL justification that Sybil"s alter personalities could possibly provide for their preference of retaining their
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distinct nonnative commitments to their separate pockets of rational unity that, on this account, would define and govern their separate rational points of view. After all, to forego their nonnative commitments to their separate pockets of unity would mean forsaking their fundamental ends. I said earlier that if it were possible to establish a ground on which Sybil's alter personalities could claim to be justified in preferring their own rational unity to the ideal of Sybil's overalI rational unity, that might bring to light what sort of consideration could, and maybe should, move them to change that preference and to embrace the latter ideal instead. We have seen that the ground on which they could claim to be justified in preferring their own rational unity is the distinctness, and also the incompatibility, of their fundamental ends. This suggests that if the alter personalities had the same fundamental ends, that might give them a reason to achieve overall rational unity together. And in the following conditions this would indeed be so: a) they regarded their shared fundamental ends as important enough to override the other irreconcilable ends that they did not have in common, and b) acting for the sake of their shared fundamental ends would require coordinated action on their part. In such conditions. the alter personalities would have reason to resolve their conflicts. rank their preferences together, pool all their information. and jointly assess their opportunities for coordinated action in the service of their shared fundamental ends. In other words, they would have reason to deliberate from the common perspective that was provided by their shared fundamental ends in such a way as to arrive at all-thingsconsidered judgments that took their various attitudes into account. In yet other words. they would have a reason to embrace the ideal of achieving overall rational unity among them, where to achieve progress with respect to that ideal would mean integrating into one person with a more or less unified rational point of view. What the last paragraph has shown is that there is a single condition such that it can account for a nonnative commitment to overall rational unity within a single rational point of view, irrespective of how that point of view falls with respect to physical and phenomenological boundaries. For the condition holds both when multiple personalities within a single human being have distinct nonnative commitments to their own rational unity, and when there is just one integrated person within a single human being. This condition that gives rise to a nonnative commitment to rational unity is really nothing else but a certain rational structure. and it is impossible to describe it except in the most general and abstract tenns. Here is a crude first attempt at an abstract fonnulation of the condition: It obtains whenever there is a set of intentional episodes such that]) those intentional episodes stand in suitable psychological relations so as to afford the possibility of coordinated action, 2) the set includes commitments to certain fundamental ends that are overriding, 3) those fundamental ends require sustained and coordinated action, and 4) those fundamental ends therefore provide a basis on which to
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consider and order whatever else belongs to the set-i.e., they provide a reason to achieve overall rational unity within the set.~o I do not have sufficient space remaining to further elucidate this condition, except for a brief statement of why I believe that it can in principle be realized by groups of human beings. Explaining why I believe this may help to clarify just what the condition amounts to. lf a group of human beings have a great deal in common by way of common beliefs, common values, and mutual knowledge of one another's attitudes, actions, and abilities, then 1) is satisfied. That is, their intentional episodes are suitably related so that there is, for that group of human beings. the possibility of coordinated group action. If there are. among those intentional episodes associated with the group, commitments to certain overriding fundamental ends, then 2) is satisfied. lf those overriding fundamental ends can be satisfied only by sustained and coordinated action involving the group. then 3) is satisfied. And if these fundamental ends therefore provide a single perspective from which to consider and order all of the possibilities for thought and action belonging to the group as a whole. then 4) is satisfied. If a group of human beings should satisfy this four-part condition, then it (the group) has reason to achieve overall rational unity. Thus with this four-part condition. I am in a position now to claim that a rational structure has been isolated which provides both a context and a reason for achieving overall rational unity. This rational structure is, therefore. a condition that would suffice to support and account for the sort of commitment to the nonnative ideal of overall rational unity that characterizes persons. and makes it possible for persons to engage in rational influence. to treat one another as persons. and to satisfy the ethical criterion of personhood. So I conclude that anything that satisfies this condition is a person---even if it is a multiple person coexisting alongside others within the same human being. or a group person comprised of many human beings. But is this a necessary. as well as a sufficient. condition of personal identity? Once the ethical criterion of personhood is accepted. I think the answer to this question must be yes. For any other proposed condition of personal identity-such as the physical and phenomenological conditions considered above-is such that something could satisfy it without having a nonnative commitment to overall rational unity within itself. Such a thing would therefore fail to satisfy the ethical criterion-and not necessarily because it housed no rational powers at all. but because the ex~rcise of those rational powers proceeded from a rational point of view that did not coincide with that thing. This concludes the argument that I wish to present for a nonnative analysis of personal identity. in tenns of the condition that gives rise to a nonnative commitment to overall rational unity. I must admit that the argument is not completely sealed. For there are a great many difficulties and objections that must be raised and answered before this nonnative analysis of personal
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identity is likely to be accepted. Here are some consequences of the analysis on which a critic is likely to fasten: Whether the condition of personal identity obtains or not is a matter of degree: it is not ruled out that a single intentional episode might belong to more than one person; the boundaries between persons are both fuzzy and fluid; it seems that persons supervene on animals, but this supervenience relation needs to be explicated; it is perhaps not ruled out that a single intentional episode might belong both to a person and to an animal on which the person supervenes; the duplication objection that so often arises in connection with psychological analyses of personal identity arises here; the normative analysis is in some sense a reductionist analysis, for it says that a person consists in a certain rational struc27 ture of intentional episodes ; it must be considered whether the analysis can afford an adequate account of self-consciousness and the first person. c, I am sure that I have omitted from this list some important issues that remain to be addressed. But I think it is clear from the nature of the list as it stands that the likeliest objections to the nonnative analysis are not ones that Dennett would be likely to raise. For in large part, they are motivated by the sorts of philosophical preoccupations that he would regard as absolutist in tendency. As a matter of fact, Dennett's gradualism virtually guarantees that any view he might take of personal identity would be vulnerable to many of the same objections, especially concerning the fuzziness and fluidity of boundaries, and the possibility of overlap. Furthermore. I cannot imagine that he would have scruples about the reductionist aspects of the analysis, for he already regards persons and selves as things that emerge when certain sorts of psychological and rational structures are in place. All this should not be surprising, since after all I have tried throughout to show that the specific positive considerations on which the nonnative analysis rests--especially the ethical criterion of personhood and the normative ideal of overall rational unity-are really implicit in Dennett's own positive account of the concept of a person. So in the end I have only two very minor scruples about foisting my conclusions on Dennett. First I am not aware of any specific discussion in his work of group agency, and so I am not really sure what he would have to say about the possibility of group persons (though I am sure that I think he ought to grant it). And second, he has investigated the phenomenon of mUltiple personality, but seems to have come away from that investigation disinclined to take the possibility of multiple persons very seriously.c'J After discussing at length the surprising extent to which alter personalities manifest the very properties that he takes to be definitive of personhood, and also, the extent to which interactions with alter personalities are just like ordinary interpersonal interactions, he offers the following conclusion: "Yet alters must in general know perfectly well that they are not 'people'; they are basically sane and well informed, and capable of roughly normal reality testing. But if they are not people, what are they? They are what they are-selves,
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for want of a better word."'" I am not sure I hear the difference. What I especially do not hear is a normative difference. Yet if Dennett is right. then that is what we must find. And the exciting and important thing is that he is right. The concept of a person is, as he says, an irreducibly normative concept with a moral component. As I understand it, what this means is that the concept is to be applied on normative grounds, without metaphysical prejudice. I have not managed to cover everything in Dennett's work that bears on the philosophical study of the person. For example, I have not examined his accounts of consciousness and self-consciousness, nor his theory of the self as a center of narrative gravity. Even so, the field that I have traversed in this article is wide. Given Dennett's broad-stroke manner of philosophy, no response to him could do otherwise. But broad though his strokes may be, the emerging picture is not merely impressionistic, nor once over lightly, but genuine grappling with big subjects at the level of their bigness. \1
NOTES 1. "Condition, of Personhood:' in A. Rorty. ed .. The Identities oj' Persons (Los Angeles:
Univen,ity of California Press, 1976): reprinted in D. Dennett, Brainstorms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT PrcsslBradford Books, 1978). Page numbers cited refer to Brainstorms. (For those who are somewhat mystificd by the title "Conditions of Personhood." think of these conditions as being very much like nc(;essary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of a person. The difference is that these conditions are less clear cut. They are the best that a philosopher can hope to provide once certain ambitions of analyti(; philosophy are relinquished.) 2. Daniel Dennett. Eff)()fI' Room: The Varieties of Free Wi I! Worrh WOl1lil1g (Cambridge. Mas,,: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 198.+). 3. See especially chapter 13 of COllsciollsness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co .. 1991) .+. I should say for the record that Dennett's moral views seem to include some consequentialist as well as Kantian commitments, His consequentialist leanings are in 'ev'idence in his a(;(;ount of punishment, which lays emphasis on the deterrent power of punishment. and legal sanction generally. See ElhOlt' Room, 159-63. 5. Williams sees this ethical domain as being circumscribed by the Socratic question, "How should one live"" See his £lilies and rhe Limirs (~jPhilosopln (London: Fontanil Press, 1985). 6. Here I part company with Williams. He notes that moral principles may often connict with a person's private prilctical coml1litment~, and they may also be quite external to the particular social context in which the person has an'ived at those commitments. He finds this objectionable. In fact. his primary motive for drawing the distinction between ethics and moral theory is to set the stage for rejecting the second half of it. And so his inV'ocation of Socrates's question. as defining a large and amorphous domain of ethical renection, is reillly part of his effort to debunk moral theory. Although I will use the term "ethics" to refer to that same large domain of practical reflection, I will not join in Williams's general opposition to moral theory. In other words, I will use the term "ethics" to refer to a domain of reflection that is open to anyone who can ask William,s's Socratic question, "How should one livc'}" lind who may then, after raising that broad ethical question, also find it reasonable to engage in specifically moral renection as well. Since ethics in my sense is not opposed to moral theory, it i~ perhaps even more neutral. from a moral point of view, than Williams's.
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7. "Conditions of Personhood," 268-9. 8. Ibid .. 285. 9. Strictly speaking, this point does not hold for all normative concepts, but rather for an important class of normative concepts, namely those that owe their normative force to something besides conventions. For conventional norms such as traffic regulations, positive law. and the rules of chess typically do not articulate ideals which are not attainable. Indeed such conventions are usually undertaken with the aim of generating perfect conformity to their requirements. But of course. the norms of rationality and morality are not generated by conventions. And one important respect in which they differ from conventional norms is that they do, as Dennett insists, articulate ideals which are not attainable by actual persons. (I thank Robert Adams for pointing out that Dennett's conception of norms as ideals needs to be restricted in this way.) 10. My language here is a bit exaggerated. The connotation of "mere thing" is something without any feeling at all-that is. something that is incapable of happiness and suffering. Of course the principle of utility is not likely to dictate that a person ever be treated as a mere thing in that sense. What I really mean by "mere thing" is ·'nonperson." and it is c lear that some interpretations of the principle of utility do put persons on a par with other sentient things that are not persons. II. Some may object that it is always a form of prejudice to deny personhood to any human being. Yet such objectors must concede that it is not a form of prejudice to hold that some human beings cannot be treated as persons. For it is a plain fact that some human beings cannot be so treated. simply because they lack the requisite rational and social capacities. It is important to see that conceding this fact is perfectly compatible with according a special moral status to such human beings. They may be accorded a special moral status because they have the potential to develop the capacities by virtue of which they could be treated as persons. or because they once had these capacities, or because in the normal course of things they would have developed these capacities. or simply because they. like other animals. are sentient things. But whatever moral status might be accorded such human beings. they do not have the distinctive ethical significance that persons alone possess. They cannot be treated as persons. And there is no interesting or important moral ground on which to insist that such human beings must be persons nevertheless. 12. See H. Frankfurt. "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person." Journal of Philosoph\' 68 (1972) and P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment." Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962): 1-25. 13. For an introduction to this line. see part I of Brainstorms. 14. The clearest example of such a philosopher who combine~ a general bias against essentialism with an absolutist conception of the person is Donald Davidson. See his "Rational Animals." Dialectica 36 (1982): 318-27. IS. The standard objections to instrumentalism begin with the thought that adopting the intentional stance towards a thing may sometimes 'work' without actually giving a true description of its nature. So for example. it is useful to describe thermostats as 'wanting' to maintain a steady temperature. and it is convenient to say that squirrels bury nut~ in autumn because they 'believe' that doing so will ensure them a steady food supply through the winter. From an absolutist or realist perspective. such intentional descriptions are often just useful and convenient fictions. and to take them as true just on the ground of their utility and convenience would amount to instrumentalism. Dennett's general strategy of response to the charge of instrumentalism is to lodge a demand. He demands that realists provide an adequate account of the difference between when the intentional stance provides a true description and when it merely works. Dennett holds that there are two standard accounts of this difference, i.e., two standard ways of pressing the charge of instrumentalism, and he has standard replies to each. On one account. the difference lies in whether the intentional stance is dispensable or not. Thus. insofar as the behavior of thermostats and squirrels can be predicted without appeal to intentional explanations. the intentional stance is entirely dispensable in their caseand thal makes it a mere stance rather than a true description of the actual nature of thermostats and squirrels. Dennett's reply to this first account is that the intentional stance is always in principle dispensable, even in the case of persons. and since this dispensability
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16.
17.
18.
19.
of the intentional stance is not a reason for supposing that persons do not really have intentional states, it is not a reason for supposing that anything else does not really have them either. The other standard way of trying to specify when the intentional stance is a mere stance is to specify a particular kind or degree of rational sophistication that a thing must exhibit in order to count as really having intentional attitudes (a thing might have to be able to speak, for example). On such accounts, the intentional stance would not capture the real nature of thermostats and squirrels-i.e., it would be a mere stanceinsofar as thermostats and squirrels failed to exhibit the requisite kind and degree of rational sophistication. To this line of thought Dennett answers as follows: Since nothing is ideally rational, it is impossible to say how much rational sophistication is really enough (0 count as really having intentionality, and so it is impossible to show that what thermostats and squirrels have i~ really not enough for them to have intentionality. As 1 said. I do not claim that these arguments will necessarily convince realists and other absolutists that Dennett is not an instrumentalist. But 1 do claim that the outcome of the arguments is a consistent position with great explanatory range and fertility. And it would be precipitate to dismiss the position on the charge of instrumentalism, unless and until Dennett's demand for a positive account of when things 'really' have intentionality is satisfactorily met. Dennett offers a rich and insightful discussion of manipulative control in ElhOH' Room. which. unfortunately, I do not have the space to discuss here. But there is just one point in his discussion that I cannot pass over without remark. Del'nett notes that philosophical discussions of freedom often introduce the possibility that we might be unwitting victims of diabolical manipulations. For we tend to regard the prospect of such manipulation as constituting a threat to our freedom. But Dennett asks. along with Noziek, why is it that we do not mind the prospect of being manipulated when that takes the form of coercive argument delivered by a well-informed and truthful person') My answer is that the latter is not manipulation, but rational influence. We do not mind it precisely because it is aimed at helping us to live up to our own normative commitments-which means that it is aimed at voluntary compliance. and hence poscs no threat to our freedom. (J should say for the record that I do not agree with Nozick's description of argument as coercive-though I see what he means. In my view genuinely coercive acts. unlike argument. are carried out with complete disregard for whether the intended result would be in conformity with the victim's own normative commitments. This is something that coercion has in common with manipulation. There is, of course, much more to be said about the concept of coercion-about what distinguishes it from manipulation and what distinguishe~ it from more respectful forms of interpersonal influence. Any adequate account would have to take up the many subtle points raised hy Nozick in "Coercion." in Morgenbesscr. Suppe,. and White. eds .. PhilosophY. Science alld Meth()d: Esson' ill HOllor o(Emest Nagel [New York: Sl. Martin's Press. 19691.) Michael Della Roca has suggested that if my interpretation work~ better. then that compromise, the pragmatic justification for Dennett's alternative interpretation. But whether this is so depends on which kind of pragmatist Dennett is. A good Jamesian might say whatever works is true. period-no matter what else happens to work too. In fact. to argue for skepticism about reflective rationality on the ground that it is always possible to dispense with an intentionalist interpretation and give a Humean interpretation instead. would be rather like arguing for skepticism about intentionality in general on the ground that it is always possible to dispense with the intentional stance altogether and give a physical or (anti-intentionalist) functional account of a thing's behavior instead. Since Dennett is emphatically unimpressed by the second sort of argument. he will naturally, for consistency's sake, want to take a similarly dismissive attitude towards the first sort. Of course a great many other ohjections have been pressed. Given Grice's professed goal of giving a strict analysis of what it is for someone to mean something, some of these objections are fatal. But Dennett is right that the analysis is important and illuminating nonetheless. For even if it fails as an analysis of what Grice called "utterer's meaning," it succeeds as an analysis of a certain kind of communicative interaction-a kind that I will argue is possible only among persons.
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20. Dennett, "Conditions of Personhood." 277. He bases this formulation on Grice's two seminal papers, "Meaning," Philosophical Review 66 (1957): 377-88 and "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions," Philosophical Review 78 (1969): 147-77. 21. My analysis of insincerity implies that not all insincere assertions need be lies in this sense-for it implies that I may be insincere even though I speak what is the truth by my lights. I may, for example, know that I rely on standards of evidence (such as gut feelings) that you reject. In such a circumstance, I might intend that you believe something which I know you would not find it reasonable to believe. By the lights of my analysis, this would constitute insincerity on my part even though what I said was an accurate expression of my own belief. Robert Adams has protested that I would be disingenuous in such a circumstance but not insincere. Although his choice of words does conform better to standard English usage, that does not affect my main point here. My point is that Grice' s analysis of meaning illuminates a broad class of deceptive communications to which both insincerity and disingenuousness belong-the class of communicative acts which at the same time invoke and abuse an audience's trust. due to the way in which they both appeal to and yet disregard the audience's own normative commitments. 22. These remarks owe much to Isaac Levi's account of rationality. He extends the category of normative commitments in such a way that it includes not only broad ideals of rationality of the sort that I just mentioned in the text but. also. psychological attitudes themselves. Thus in his view. beliefs. desires. and other attitudes are not just dispositions to act: they are literally commitments that an agent undertakes. For an introduction to this model of rationality and the psychological attitudes. see chapter 2 of his The Fixation of Belief(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1991). 23. Elbow Room. 87. 24. I base these remarks on the biography Syhil. hy Flora Rheta Schreiher (New York: Warner Books, 1973). 25. The importance of this fact about alter personalities. viz .. that they do have rational powers. ought not to he underestimated. This fact has led some courts to disallow the insanity plea for defendants with mUltiple personality disorder. And in general. the ""hole phenomenon of multiple personality has defied usual legal classification. See lanny Scott. "Multiple-Personality Cases Perplex Legal System:' Nell' York Times. 26. I have also put forward and defended this sort of normative analysi, of personal identity in an article entitled "Charity and Identity:' in Wolfgang Kohler. ed .. Donald D(Il'id,lol7 '.1 Philosophie Des Men/alen, Fnrllll1 fiir Philosophie (Frankfurt: forthcoming). 27. It is a difficult question whether. and in what sense. person> are reducible to subpersonal facts. Given my normative analysis. the existence of a person does not consist in anything over and above the existence of certain events standing in certain sorts of relation~. That would seem to imply that my analysis is ontologically reductionist. Yet the normative terms of the analysis include principles of rationality that make ineliminable reference to the idea of a sil181e person. So my analysis is not reductionist in the sense that it atfords completely impersonal description~ of all of the facts about persons. Derek Parfit ha, provided by far the most extensive and penetrating discussion of the topic of reductionism as it pertains to the study of the person. See part three of his Reasolls and PerSO/l.1 (New York: Oxford University Press. 1984). 28. This last issue I have dealt with at some length in "Self-Reference: The Radicalization of Locke." Journal of Philo.\oph. 90 (1993): 73-97. 29. See N. Humphrey and D. Dennett, "Speaking for Ourselves: An Assessment of MUltiple Personality Disorder.·' Raritan 9 ( J 978): 68-98. 30. Ibid .. 97. 31. Many thanks to the following people for helpful conversations during the writing of this paper: Robert Adams. Akeel Bilgrami, Patricia Blanchette, Donald David,on, Michael Della Roea. Kenneth Gemes. Isaac Levi. Derek Parfit. David Pears. Derk Perehoom. and Stephen White.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPTCS VOL.
22 NO. 1 & 2, SPRING AI\'D FALL 1994
The Problem of Moral Luck
Michael Slote University of Maryland,
Colll'~1'
Park
Philosophers are not usually very comfortable with the idea of luck. To the extent philosophy seeks to make sense of things, the admission of luck or accident is a recognition that philosophy cannot. or at least will not. have its own way everywhere. And the admission of luck causes specific problems for specific areas of philosophy. If there is such a thing as moral luck-if the moral character and especially the praiseworthiness or blameworthiness of oneself or one's actions can depend on merely accidental factors beyond one's control or ken-then, as Thomas Nagel and others have recently argued. most of our tidy moral theories are in a good deal of trouble. However. not so ironically, the enormous problems raised by moral luck for moral theory generally have been given relatively short shrift subsequent to Nagel's original article: and prior to Nagel the topic and the difficulties were hardly ever mentioned. much less discussed, in the entire history of philosophy. Nagel cites Adam Smith's The Theory {~ftlle Moral Sentiments as a prior locus of appreciation and discussion of moral luck. and there is at least one much earlier reference to the problem in Cicero's Ad ArricllIll (9. 7 A)' where it is said that "most people are accustomed to approve the plans of even the most highly placed individuals on the basis of the outcome (fortunate or unfortunate). not the intention" (Hetiam amplissorum virorum consilia ex eventu. non ex voluntate a
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plerisque probari solent"). There may be a few other, similar references to the issue of moral luck, but whether there are or not. clearly the topic has been almost totally neglected throughout the history of ethics. But, of course, luck of a non-moral kind also causes problems in the field of philosophy. For example, if the intersection of explicable causal chains yields something inexplicable, as philosophers from Aristotle to Dan Dennett have said or implied, then the modal logic relevant to such situations is far from standard, and we must revise and amplify our understanding at least of natural or empirical modalities. Dennett, in Elbow Room, has been at the forefront of attempts to do so, and he has indeed been one of the philosophers most appreciative of the challenge luck poses to philosophy. Moreover, as is so often the case in our field and with Dan Dennett in particular. a virtue has been made of necessity. If luck threatens our initial hopes for philosophical tidiness. we can at least make a study-as tidily as we can-of all the untidiness. In the present essay, because I am a moral philosopher, I want to concentrate on the problem of moral luck and first show you how untidy a mess it presents to ethics. Then I shall try to sketch some of the ways out of the mess. ways that in varying degrees leave things reasonably satisfactory but not as neat as we had originally hoped or believed possible. This is exactly the strategy Dennett pursues in discussing the issues of luck he mainly focuses on in Elbow Room, and I hope the present treatment of moral luck will be recognized as something of a tribute to his example. The paradoxes and indeed contradictions that arise for ordinary moral thought in connection with the idea of moral luck most closely or irrecusably affect our use of concepts like moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness (and related concepts like culpability and reprehensibility, though I shall not discuss them very much). These. in other words. are the notions or terms it is hardest to make sense of in the light of those examples that most forcefully present us with the philosophical problems attendant on the idea of moral luck. Thus consider someone driving a car along a country road and pointing out noteworthy sights to his passengers. As a result of his preoccupation, the car suddenly swerves to the middle of the road, but fortunately there are no cars coming in the opposite direction and no accident occurs. However, in another scenario the person is similarly occupied and. because a truck happens to be coming in the opposite direction, has a major accident. He is then responsible for a great deal of harm to others and would normally be accounted blameworthy in a way that he would not be thought blameworthy in the first-mentioned case. The example is borrowed from Thomas Nagel's paper "Moral Luck:,1 But as Nagel also points out, something in us revolts at the idea of moral luck, inclining us to the view that the driver must have the same degree of blameworthiness in both cases mentioned above. There is something
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repelling in the idea that one can be more or less blameworthy or culpable depending on events outside one's ken or control. And in regard to the justmentioned pair of examples, therefore, it may seem as if we should be able to insert some kind of probability estimate so that whether the driver who swerves is blameworthy and the degree, if any, of his blameworthiness would depend solely on whether he was sufficiently aware of the likelihood of an accident and on how likely an accident was, given his preoccupation with the scenery-judgments that are constant between the two imagined cases and that might allow us to say that the man was blameworthy, or not blameworthy, in both cases to the same extent for having paid attention to the scenery while driving. But (following Nagel) I think that no such solution really squares with the moral judgments we make in the ordinary course of events before we begin to worry about moral luck in a self-conscious way. I think no matter how constant one imagines the (awareness of) probability in the two situations, common-sense thinking tends to ascribe different (degrees of) culpability or blameworthiness to the agent in the two sorts of cases. And because common sense also tends, rather strongly, to hold that blameworthiness cannot be a matter of luck or accident, common sense appears to subscribe to a mutually contradictory set of assumptions about such cases of inattention and negligence (and also about a host of other cases too numerous to go into here). The issue of blameworthiness is at the very heart of the issue of moral luck, because it is the idea that luck or accident can make a difference to blameworthiness (or culpability or reprehensibility)-rather than the idea, for example, that such factors can make a difference to the rightness of one's actions-that most grates against our antecedent moral intuitions. Moreover, a similar paradox or inconsistency is also derivable with respect to the notion of moral praiseworthiness, as the morally positive analogue of moral-responsibility-implying blameworthiness. (However, we shall shortly consider whether there can be moral praise and criticism that doesn't hinge on responsibility and that can accommodate luck comfortably.) If common sense subscribes to inconsistent views in this area, then ethical theory presumably will wish to find a way out of the inconsistency, and any such way wilL of course, involve rejecting one or another element in inconsistent common sense. Thus utilitarianism evades the inconsistency by holding, reductively, that for something or someone to be blameworthy is nothing more than for it to be the case that blaming it or the person would c have good or the best consequences. (This way of regarding blameworthiness seems so distant from our ordinary thinking about and with the notion that one might well wonder whether we are really being offered a reduction rather than an elimination and replacement of the notion of blameworthiness and, analogously, of praiseworthiness.) Once blameworthiness is conceived as a matter of what consequences blaming would produce, one can accept the idea of moral luck as easily as one accepts the idea that good
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consequences can be a matter of luck or accident, and so utilitarianism evades the paradox of moral luck by effectively denying our intuitive belief that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness cannot in any way depend on factors of luck. Of course, in saying all this, utilitarianism may seem to be embracing its own form of paradox, but the point is that any solution to the problem will have to reject some common-sense intuition, and considerations of overall theory might dictate moving in the utilitarian direction. However, there are other possibilities. Some have sought to evade the problems of moral luck by defending the possibility of luck with respect to blameworthiness on other than strictly consequentialistic grounds. Robert Adams takes such an approach in "Involuntary Sins,'" and it is perhaps more generally familiar from certain Calvinistic doctrines having to do with sin and predestination. This has not generally been considered a very attractive approach to human moral responsibility. and it has considerable disadvantages as a way out of the problem of moral Juck-though every way out seems at the very least to have problems. And I might just mention that Adams's highly sophisticated defense of luck with regard to blameworthiness crucially depends on arguing that ethical criticism automatically involves a commitment to blaming or to an attribution of (some degree of) blameworthiness. He says. in particular. that where an agent has negligently hurt only himself. we would not only criticize him for being negligent but hold him "to blame for" the damage he has done himself. and this is taken to show that all ethical criticism commits one to blaming. But we can hold a hurricane to blame for damage (and it can be "responsible for" the damage) without having any tendency or desire to blame the hurricane, and similarly we might not blame an agent for negligently hurting himself or find him blameworthy for having done so, even though the idiom "he has only himself to blame" clearly applies. Moreover, if there is a difference between criticizing someone as selfnegligent and blaming him or finding him blameworthy. then the fact that we can criticize people sometimes for things they cannot help doesn't necessarily get us to the conclusion that people can be blameworthy for things they cannot help or that are outside their ken or controL and in the absence of further discussion, those, like Adams, who defend such a conclusion seem to be in a very difficult position. There is much to worry about in such a way out of the paradox or inconsistency involved with moral luck. The Kantian solution to the problem of moral luck is to deny that we can be properly blamed or praised for what is outside our control or ken and to bring in the concept of noumenal freedom in order to account for when and how we are to be regarded (or regard ourselves) as blameworthy and praiseworthy. Kant holds us morally responsible only for our willings or choices, not for their consequences, and says that the very practice and thought of morality requires us to think of ourselves as in some sense above or independent of nature and capable of initiating causal chains ab initio. To be sure,
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sometimes Kant also seems to say that circumstance and predisposition (e.g .. how difficult it is for someone with a certain sort of upbringing or certain habits to do her duty on certain occasions) can affect overall praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. But on the whole the drift of Kant's views is toward the elimination of all moral luck. and since the circumstances. predispositions, and causal connections that give shape and substance to empirically understandable human action bring factors of luck or accident unavoidably in their train, Kant crucially relies on the idea of noumenal freedom as the basis for valid morality. And many people-myself among them-would want to resist a noumenal metaphysics (even one in which the noumenal was regarded merely as the inevitable postulate of the active moral point of view) as the price to be paid for luck-free moral judgment and evasion or transcendence of the paradoxes of our ordinary thinking in the area of moral luck. But there is another possible way out of the paradoxes consistent with a desire to deny that blameworthiness, praiseworthiness. and the like can be matters of luck, one that involves less arcane metaphysical or epistemological maneuvering. We might simply deny the possibility of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness in a world like ours, because we wanted to deny human freedom or because we thought that (our thought about) human choice and volition cannot be as completely prized apart from empirical and accidental factors as the Kantian noumenal approach insists. Such an eliminative approach one finds in Spinoza's Ethics. But notice that Spinoza doesn't go on to argue that all moral or ethical distinctions are useless and illusory. He speaks of virtues and of vices. and thus allows for ethical or moral criticism, while denying that such criticism entails moral praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. And so one might extricate oneself from the paradoxes and inconsistencies of moral luck by denying the applicability of the concepts that chiefly give rise to them. Now in fact I don't think anyone has produced a very convincing argument against human free will. The best arguments I know make use of modal inferences that we have recently been urged to regard with some suspicion (Dan Dennett and I have been among those urging the suspicion): and so I think we at this point lack the sorts of reasons Spinoza thought he had for denying moral responsibility, blameworthiness. and the like. But the other possibili ty mentioned just above-the possibility that. because of the pervasiveness of factors of luck. it is better to drop notions like blameworthiness altogether rather than to deny the fundamental or persisting intuition that (degree of) blameworthiness cannot be (validly regarded as) a matter of luck or accident-is an idea that deserves some attention and further exploration. In other words, the idea of omitting notions like blameworthiness. culpability, reprehensibility. praiseworthiness. etc., from our theories" presents itself as a possible solution-desperate. you may say. but are any of the others less so?-to the problem of moral luck.
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If one moves in this direction, one commits oneself to the idea, e.g., of moral criticism without moral blame, of wrong actions and morally deplorable motives or attitudes that, because they involve or are based in at least some factors beyond an agent's control and are at least partly a matter of luck, do not count as morally blameworthy. (Here I am ignoring a similar distinction between what we can say morally good things about and what we regard as morally praiseworthy. but the same points apply as in the case of negative characterizations.) The distinction between moral criticism and blame, or certainly something very close to it, seems present in Spinoza's Ethics and is mentioned, though not developed, in Larry Blum's Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, in Elizabeth Beardsley's "Determinism and Moral Perspectives," and in a number of other places.;;' And we are moved at least part of the way toward this distinction by the consideration that we can at least have higher or lower aesthetic regard for artists or intellectual regard for scientists or mathematicians depending on factors largely outside the artists', scientists', or mathematicians' control and (therefore) independently of any issues of moral praise or blame. For if, as we all assume. admired and admirable intellectual or aesthetic talents or gifts or even achievements may to some extent be a matter of luck or accident, we might well wonder why a person's moral nature or character, for better or worse. couldn't in some degree depend on factors outside her control. Someone who has been abused or tortured as a child and who becomes a serial killer or rapist or child molester as a result-and even if the childhood treatment by itself doesn't determine such an outcome, it may still be true that the outcome wouldn't have resulted if very different childhood treatment had occurred-is perhaps. as we say, a moral monster. But if the term "monster" indicates a lack of control and also perhaps of blameworthinessnonhuman monsters presumably can't help being monsters-still the adjective "moral" indicates that moral criticism of some kind is intended (many storybook monsters aren't moral monsters). Similarly. certain children seem innately more fearful than others in their dealings with the shocks, surprises. and dangers of their environment (including other people). Aristotle denies that children who show less fear are (already) truly courageous. But in fact such given differences between children often arouse differences in our fundamental regard for different children. One can think better of the less fearful child than of the more fearful one-parents often find themselves having such differentially favorable thoughts about their own children, even when they love them, and are resolved to treat them, all equally-and one has to ask: Does such thinking have nothing to do with morality and ethics? If one thinks more highly of the less fearful child, under what rubric, in what category, is such a higher opinion if not the moral?7 One might at this point, however, argue that moral considerations are fundamentally other-regarding and that moral reasons fundamentally
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concern treating others well in a way that the nonfeaIfulness of young children fails to exemplify. After all, we don't commonsensically consider someone who is resourceful or prudent in regard to his own welfare to be morally superior to someone who is less so, and so greater or lesser fearfulness may also fail to signify any sort of moral difference. But to construe morality in such a narrow and partisan way (remember that utilitarians consider moral thought to be impersonal rather than exclusively otherregarding) in any event opens up the possibility of a distinction between ethics and morality that helps us make the essential point of the present discussion. If prudence and resourcefulness or discretion or equanimity are not moral virtues, they nonetheless are typically regarded as virtues of some sort, and even if consideration of such virtues is not a moral matter in some narrow sense, it is clearly an ethical matter in some broad or broader sense. So we can make the point we need here by speaking of the ethical rather than the moral and by pointing out that when we think well of a child's (relative) fearlessness or boldness, we can naturally be viewed as thinking ethically, in some sufficiently broad sense, rather than aesthetically, intellectually, or, if one insists. morally. The distinction between the fearful and less feaIful child may make less difference than we might think over the long run-perhaps the initial tendency to feaIfulness can be combatted with energy and persistence so as to render a person ultimately more courageous than those who were or are initially more ethically "gifted." But still there is a difference here that affects our good opinion to a certain extent in some initial period before effort and training have had time to take hold, and the difference concerns factors that to that extent lie beyond the choice or control of those affected and differentiated. In any event, the case of moral monsters remains one where the slide or retreat from the idea of the moral to the idea of the more broadly ethical seems even less inevitable than in the case of initial fearfulness or fearlessness. So there is reason to think a vocabulary and conceptual apparatus allowing for moral criticism without blame is necessary to our intuitive understanding of some cases and that a broader range of intuitive cases (and I have kept illustrative examples deliberately to a minimum) moves us in the direction of the idea of more generally ethical criticism without blame. I then want to argue here that this (these) valid distinction(s) could and perhaps should be extended to the entire moral-ethical realm for reasons having to do with the problem of moral luck. If in our theorizing we allow ourselves to speak of morally better and worse, or morally right and wrong, courses of action but don't permit such talk to take us in the direction of attributions of moral praiseworthiness or blameworthiness, then the paradoxes of moral luck are fairly well staunched. Certainly. to speak of some people as morally better or worse. or as better or worse persons, is to imply at least a possible connection to differences in their moral praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. but the kind of theorizing
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I here am recommending would simply point out that the connection doesn't have to obtain and, according to its theoretical lights, never in fact obtains, and it could cite the examples and arguments offered above in support of such a conclusion. And similar points apply, if, either generally or in regard to certain ranges of cases, we prefer to talk (presumably in an ethical fashion that is not specifically moral)~ of certain virtues and vices, but, again, and like Spinoza, we claim that such talk entrains no commitment to applying the concepts that entangle us in the paradoxes of moral luck. However, at this point, I want to consider a criticism that threatens to make the whole previous discussion of the theoretical moves one can make to avoid the paradoxes of moral luck seem entirely beside the point. Peter Vallentyne has recently suggested to me that it is really quite easy to avoid the inconsistency or inconsistencies of our ordinary thinking about moral 1uck, and in that case we need no recourse to theory in order to make sense of this area. In that case, furthermore, the rather counterintuitive results of utilitarianism and of (the view or set of views we can call) "MoralitylEthics without Blame"" would have more force against such approaches-there would be no need to swallow their unintuitive implications in order to be able satisfactorily to deal with the paradoxes and inconsistencies of moral luck. Vallentyne makes his point(s), roughly. as follows. The likelihood of accident may (as I mentioned earlier) be constant as between a case or cases where an accident occurs and a case or cases where none does, and even if common sense doesn't base its judgments of blameworthiness. etc., entirely on such factors. it is possible and may well be advisable to treat such attributions as entirely derivative from such constant probability estimates. One would then have to give up on one element of common-sense thinking, the tendency to allow actual results and thus luck a role in determining judgments of blameworthiness. but the price presumably would be a small one to pay. There is, after alL some intuitive force behind the notion that blameworthiness should depend on probability estimates rather than actual outcomes, and if we accept this idea, we can easily eliminate the inconsistencies that exist in our ordinary prereftective thinking about morality and luck. We retain the powerful intuitive idea that moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness cannot hinge on factors of luck or accident, and the price we have to pay in the coinage of abandoned intuitions in order to free ourselves of paradox and contradiction is relatively minor-compared with all the theoretical huffing and puffing outlined earlier. If only matters were that easy! And let us go one step at a time. First consider, shorn of its connection to the technical-epistemic notion of probability estimates, the idea that despite our tendencies to assign different levels of blameworthiness depending on results, the level or degree of blameworthiness (or culpability or reprehensibility or what have you) has to be or
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simply is the same in the automobile case where an accident occurs as in the case where an accident doesn't occur. What if one sought to evade the paradox of moral luck by making such a claim and saying, in addition, that nothing more needs to be said? Could that work? I think not and for a reason that immediately looms rather straightforwardly. It is a mistake to say that nothing more needs to be said, if one has in mind the needs of theoretical understanding in this area, because if one says that the degree or level of blameworthiness is the same, one still hasn't said anything whatever about what that level is. That is why it seems necessary to bring in the question of probability estimates and relativize culpability to such estimates concerning serious injury and damage. But that seems to mean that. if the likelihood of anything serious happening in the automobile cases mentioned earlier was extremely low, then if a very serious accident occurs and many school children (riding say in a vacation bus) are killed, the person whose looking out of the window and swerving causes the multiply fatal accident has very little (validly) to reproach himself with, or, at least, is no more blameworthy than if no accident had occurred. And. given the extremely low probability, if no accident occurs. we intuitively would assign a low level of blameworthiness (if any) to the person who swerved. If. then, we must make everything depend on probability. we must likewise assign a low degree of blameworthiness to the person whose inattention results in a multiply fatal accident. and this seems unintuitive. In that event. we end up denying two items of common sense. not just one: a) the difference of blameworthiness between cases where an accident occurs and cases where none occurs and h) our intuitive sense that the person whose negligence leads to an accident doesn't enjoy a low degree of blameworthiness (simply because of the extreme unlikelihood of an accident). So if we theoretically base blameworthiness in probability estimates, we go against two tendencies of common sense in regard to cases where the probability estimate is low. But what about cases where the estimate is high? There too we go against two elements of common sense, but the elements are not exactly the same as with situations of low probability estimates. If the estimate is high, then common sense would assign a high degree of blameworthiness or reprehensibility to the person who had taken such a big chance with people's lives and caused, as a result. so much harm or death. But if everything depends on damage-probability estimates that are constant as between cases where a horrible accident occurs and cases where one doesn't. then we are left with the un intuitive consequence that someone who takes a big chance but actually causes no deaths is as reprehensible and blameworthy as if he had killed many people. And this too, I think, grates against our ordinary intuitive moral sense. With respect, then, to cases where the probability of great harm is great (I am deliberately speaking elliptically in order to simplify the discussion).
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the present way out of the inconsistency or paradox of moral luck goes against common sense, again, in two ways, not just one: a) as before, it goes against the tendency to assign differential blameworthiness as between cases of actual deaths and cases where no one dies (again I simplify) and b) it goes against our intuitive sense that the person whose actions risk enormous harms but who in fact causes no harms is not horribly blameworthy (just because someone who in fact caused enormous harms in similar epistemic circumstances would be horribly blameworthy). Thus the suggestion made by Vallentyne about how to extricate ourselves from the problem of moral luck denies more of common sense than one might initially think, and it yields some pretty counterintuitive judgments in regard both to lowprobability-of-harm and high-probability-of-harrn situations. In regard to the former situation, it entails that the person whose actions or negligence lead to serious harms is blameworthy only to a low degree, and thus is not nearly as blameworthy as it seems reasonable to think he is; in the regard to the latter, it entails that the person whose actions or negligence lead to no harms is extremely culpable or blameworthy, and thus much more blameworthy than seems intuitively to be justified. And we can perhaps combine some of these conclusions by pointing out that on the conception Vallentyne recommends, the person who takes an enormous chance but causes no harm whatever is far more culpable, reprehensible, and/or blameworthy than the person who takes less of a chance but actually causes enormous harm to people. This might be true, but it seems more than a bit odd and certainly a great deal more would have to be said before such an approach would be proven useful and become acceptable. And, in part, that is just my point. There is no easy way out of the difficulties or paradoxes of moral luck. What seems like an easy way out. Vallentyne's, actually engenders problems as we play out its implications, rather than relatively simply putting an end to our moral-luck difficulties. Moreover, I am not even finished yet with the problems that arise as one tries to nail down the form of solution to the problems of moral luck that Vallentyne proposes. For there is also an issue about the character of the probability estimates Vallentyne wishes to ground judgments of blameworthiness and the like in. I don't mean issues about objective versus subjective probabilities, though such issues would eventually have to be dealt with, but, rather, the question whether the probability estimate in question is to be that of a reasonable person or is to be relativized to the individual actually in a given situation. Is culpability or blameworthiness a matter of what the individual agent actually thought about likely harms, etc., or does it depend on what she should have thought, could have reasonably been expected to think? Either way, difficulties develop. If everything is to depend on what the individual actually thought, then if the individual was negligent enough
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about facts, she escapes all or most blame. Surely that won't do. But if we hold the individual to some standard of reasonable evidence gathering and inference, what about people who lack the capacity for reasonable evidence gathering and inference either because of a lack of intellectual capacity or, say, because they are in mourning for a loved one and too emotionally distressed and distracted to conform to standards of epistemic reasonableness? It would seem that luck can playa role in one's ability to process data in accordance with epistemically acceptable or reasonable standards, but this is the luck not exclusively of results but of constitutional endowment and of the circumstances one finds oneself in. Those who have discussed moral luck have also considered these other forms of luck as they affect moral evaluation, and though we have not spent the sort of time on them that we have been devoting to the issue of luck with respect to results or consequences, the problem of moral luck encompasses the wider set of problems. And if, in attempting to deal with luck in regard to consequences, one ends up having to deal with problems connected with constitutional or circumstantialluck, then Vallentyne's (sketchily) proposed solution to moral luck with respect to results is just too simple to work all on its own. It raises, and there can be raised for it, a host of (other) problems that are not easily resolved or . h. 10 done away Wit So I want to stand by my original claims that the problem of moral luck-i.e., the large set of difficulties that tend to be collected under that rubric-is extremely vexing and difficult and that attempts to make progress with the problem that require us to throwaway elements of common sense within some larger theoretical framework for dealing with ethics have something to recommend them. Whether, in the end, moral Kantianism or utilitarianism or Robert M. Adams's Calvinistic view or the approach I am calling '"MoralitylEthics without Blame" represents the best overall theoretical framework to encompass a solution to the paradoxes of moral luck. I have not tried to determine. But I do think Vallentyne's suggestions, if they are ultimately to be useful, must be incorporated in some larger way of approaching ethics. and I believe that we must at any rate enter into considerations of theory and theory construction in ethics before we can have a satisfactory treatment of moral luck. Hempel and Goodman have pointed out (in regard to the paradoxes of confirmation) that a clash of intuitions or pretheoretical convictions justifies the theorist in throwing away some elements in the clash and working toward a general theory (in a given area like confirmation) that saves as many of the original convictions as possible compatibly with theoretical and explanatory desiderata. II And I have myself elsewhere urged a similarly theoretical approach to ethics, in the light of what I take to be inconsistencies and paradoxes in our ordinary thinking about or in morality (not the least of which are, though hardly exclusively, the paradoxes of moralluck).I: But where (he
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effort to find a general substantive theory in ethics will ultimately take us and what kind of solution or dissolution of the problem of moral luck it will bring in its train we do not know. This essay has distinguished a number of possibilities, but we, or I, have very likely missed a host of other possibilities that future theorizing will eventually bring to light, though perhaps the path to those new ways of thinking will be partly smoothed by considering the options we have been at such pains to discuss here.
NOTES I. See his Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 2. I do not mean to suggest that utilitarians hold the position they do about the character of blameworthiness as a means to evading the problems and paradoxes of moral luck. Given the lack of awareness of the problem of moral luck in the historic traditions of ethics generally, one doesn't. as far as I know, find utilitarians using the problem of luck as a reason for adopting their view of blameworthiness. But effectively this view, useful as they take it to be for dealing with other issues in ethics, has the additional feature of allowing one to evade at least the inconsistency of our common-sense beliefs in the area of moral luck. and it is that fact I want to emphasize in the main text above. 3. Adams. "Involuntary Sins," The Philosophical Rel'iell' 94 (1985): 3-31. 4. Which is not necessarily to eliminate them from our everyday lives. There might be reasons, similar to those familiar from utilitarian theory. to deny the valid or true applicability of notions like blameworthiness and praiseworthiness (or free will) in our (best) theory of morality while allowing and even encouraging their everyday usage. 5. See Blum's Friendship, Altruism, and Morality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1980). esp. 189: Beardsley's "Determinism and Moral Perspectives." PhilosophY and Phenomenological Research 21 (1960): 1-20, and also my Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1983/1990). ch. 2. 6. If one can have moral criticism without moral blame. why didn't the approach taken in my From Morality to Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1992) take advantage of that option rather than ruling out all specifically or explicitly moral notions" Largely because of the common-sensism of that work. I there defended the view that our commonsense intuitive moral thinking is incoherent even apart from the issues of blameworthiness and the like that arise in connection with moral luck. But in that case, if one wants (as I did) to rely on common-sense intuitions. one had better rely on common-sense intuitions about what is (ethically) admirable and deplorable-what counts as a virtue and what counts as a vice-rather than on common-sense intuitions about moral right and wrong. The latter lead one into contradiction and/or paradox. but the former, I argued. do not. 7. It seems rather stretched and tendentious to try to argue that the difference between such children is merely an aesthetic one. Note. just for one thing. that there may be an aesthetic element in (or. if Plotinus is correct. an aesthetic basis for) morality, so the outreach to aesthetics doesn't necessarily undercut the relevance of the moral or ethical in the case of seemingly innate differences in fearfulness and boldness. 8. From Morality to Virtue contains a lengthy discussion, or set of discussions. of the distinction between the specifically moral and the ethical, and it seeks to justify such a distinction, at least in theory-relative terms, against various forms of criticism. 9. Chapter 7 of From Morality to Virtue contains a lengthier and somewhat different discussion (with additional supporting examples) of the character of (one form of) what I have just been calling "MoralitylEthics without Blame." But let me here just briefly address an
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issue that that book doesn't discuss, but which we have focused on in this paper: the question what to say about cases where luck makes a difference to whether an accident occurs. Since there are in fact a number of very different ways in which ethics can dispense with judgments of blameworthiness (some of them not considered in From Morality 10 Virrue), there are a variety of possibilities here. We could insist on some sort of ethical difference between cases where an accident occurs and cases where one doesn't occur and attempt to explain how such a thing is possible. (Something like this approach is taken in my Common-sense Morality and COlIsequentialislI1 [London: Routledge. 1985]. ch. 7.) Or we can develop a theory that. not only allows us to say that luck makes no moral or ethical difference, but also permits us to specify roughly what degree of ethical badness or goodness is common to various familiar pairs of cases that differ only in factors of luck. (Certain kinds of agent-based virtue ethics will try to seek such a solution. but then may wish to distinguish purely moral descriptions from juridical notion~ and the implications of a just legal system.) Whichever way we go. however. some common-sense intuition~ will have to be abandoned. 10. One problem I have not had time to discuss concerns the objectivity of the probability estimates that judgments of culpability, etc .. can be based on. If these are entirely or mainly objective and statistical. then basing culpability in such estimates yields another problem of moral luck beyond those discussed in the main text. For consider the case where. because of highway statistics and other empirical data. it is highly unlikely that an accident will occur and compare it with a different J\"Orlel in which such an accident is much more likely. If everything depends on statistics. then the neglectful person in the first case or world is less blameworthy than the person in the second el'en if he or she had /10 way o{knmt'ing (lnd couldn't he expected 10 knOll" the statistics in question. Blameworthiness would then depend on the circumstantial luck of what kind of world one (unknowingly) lived in. and so the suggestion that we rely on probability estimates not only yield, the difficulties mentioned in the text above but. in its more objective versions. threatens us with new forms and problems of moral luck. Those who want to base everything in probability estimates typically make that suggestion in order to free our judgments of blame. etc .. from dependence on luck. but if they aren't extremely carefuL that suggestion is likely to backfire in the way just mentioned (as well as the other ways discussed in the main text). II. See Nelson Goodman. Fact, Fiction. and ForecaSI (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. J965). 68n: and Israel Scheffler. The Anatomy of Inquiry (New York: Knopf. 1963). 253. 12. See From Moralitl· to Virtue. esp. chs. 1.2. and 6. for sustained consideration of the paradoxes and oddities of our common-sense moral thinking.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 22 NO. j & 2, SPRING AND
FALL
1994
Interior Colors
Joseph Thomas Tolliver University of ArizOl1a
INTRODUCTION In "'Color as a Secondary Quality," Paul Boghossian and David Velleman briefly discuss, and dismiss, the suggestion that in having an experience of red one is not thereby representing something as red. They find this suggestion unacceptable because it does unacceptable violence to the concept of visual experience. Seeing something as red is the sort of thing that can be illusory or veridical. hence the sort of thing that has truth-conditions, and hence the sort of thing that has content. The content of this experience is that the object in question is red: and so the experience represents an object as having a property. about which we can legitimately ask whether it is a property that objects so represented really tend to have.'
They are contending that there is no avoiding an apparent conflict between the deliverances of science and our manifest conception of visual experience. When I have a visual experience as of a red apple I am in a sensory state that represents the apple as possessing the color property present therein.: My visual experience of the apple attributes to the apple the sensuous redness presented in the experience. Thus. my experience is
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veridical just in case it is true of the apple, i.e., just in case the truth condition of my experience is fulfilled. Color science and perceptual psychology suggest that my red-apple sensations are illusory because they attribute to apples properties, sensuous color properties, that they simply do not possess. My visual experience of a red apple says something false about it, viz., that it shares the redness that is a part of my visual experience of it. The content of my experience is false because the homogeneous region of surface redness my sensation attributes to the apple in fact constitutes no real part of it. All the apple's parts are nothing but discrete collections of colorless particles. Boghossian and Velleman are contending that we cannot avoid this conflict by denying that visual experiences attribute sensuous color properties to physical objects. The validity of a distinction between veridical and illusory visual experiences depends upon treating them as representational states the content of which includes presented color properties. It is my intention to defend the suggestion that they reject. It is the suggestion that the visual system does not represent objects as having the color properties presented in those experiences. Rather, these sensuous color properties are part of an internal code for the type-individuation of visual representations: i.e., color experience is part of a system of internal bookkeeping. Any content our color experiences have is best thought of as information content rather than representational content. The assumption that the sensuous redness of our visual perceptions is part of a representation of those objects as red is natural enough. It is part of both objectivist and subjectivist theories of the ontology of color. Color illusions are assimilated to the category of misconceptions. In color illusions. the visual system misapplies a representation of sensuous redness by using it in a sensory attribution of such a property to things that lack it. I accept that visual sensations both possess and reveal color to us, however, the property revealed is not a property shared by external physical things. Physical objects are not bearers of color properties. I will suggest that there is no good reason to suppose that visual perception involves the systematic error of attributing to physical objects a collection of properties that they do not possess. It certainly is not necessary for maintaining a distinction between veridical and illusory color perceptions. My argument will proceed in stages: (i) I will argue that consideration of what visual sensation reveals about the nature of color shows that no form of color objectivism is tenable. All objectivist accounts of color either make the mistake of rejecting the revelation of color in sensation or misapply this doctrine. (ii) I will argue that once a subjectivist rejects the idea that physical objects are literally colored he has no reason to attribute to the visual system the systematic illusion of a world of colored physical objects. This argument has two parts: (a) a proposal for an information-theoretic account of the representational content of sensations and (h) an account of color illusions that does not imply that color sensations represent objects as colored.
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1. NAIVE COLOR REALISM Color appears to be a genuine, nonrelational, mind-independent property of physical things. In the case of color in opaque objects, it appears to be spread over their surfaces. Surfaces appear to be colored in the Sherwin-Williams"Cover the Earth"-sense. Color seems to be a physical property of objects in that: (1") the surfaces of objects appear to be physically similar to and different from each other in just the way colors are similar to and different from each other; and (ii) the colors of physical objects appear to be invol ved in our perception of them. The view that colors are just what they appear to be, i.e., that they are intrinsic objective properties of physical things that are revealed in visual perception, I call Naive Color Realism (NCR). Naive Color Realism is a collection of theses about: (i) the nature of color as a property of physical objects, (ii) the perceptibility of this property by human faculties, (iii) the relationship between phenomenal features of sensations of color and color in physical objects, Uv) the perceiver independence of color in physical objects. Most theories of color take NCR as a starting point and either attempt to vindicate the naive view and/or justify the rejection of some of its elements. Surface color. in the aesthetically interesting sense. appears to be a feature of the object surface. It is a feature that makes red things similar to and different from green things in just the way red and green are similar to and different from each other. NCR is committed to the claim that green things have a distinctive physical property. call it G. and that red things have a distinctive physical property, call it R, and that the greenness of green things is identical to their having G and the redness of red things is identical to their having R. and that G differs from R in ways that are revealed in our visual experiences of red things and green things. The doctrine that visual experience reveals the nature of colors has a complement in the idea that color is a sensible quality of colored things. In fact one of the first sophistications of the naive view is the positing of a faculty of color vision. It is sometimes thought that vision properly so called is nothing but our faculty of color perception. that what is seen. strictly speaking. are colored expanses or regions. with all else being some sort of inference or judgment based on these primary visual objects.' Our reliable visual access to color enables us to use this property as part of a fast. efficient. and reliable means for detecting and recognizing objects and substances by the way they look.~ Another element of the perceptibility of color is the idea that the colors themselves playa role in the process of our perception of them. Colors are a cause of our perception of the color of opaque objects and transparent volumes. Also connected with the earlier points about revelation and perceptibility is the idea that there are analytic links between being red and looking
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red-although there are conflicting intuitions here. On the one hand, being red seems to be definable in tenus of looking red, for the revealed contents of our visual sensations seem to set the standard for what counts as redness and, thereby, for what being red amounts to. On the other hand, looking red appears to be definable, at least in part, in tenus of being red. For what is it that makes a sensation of red of red? Surely part of the story is the role that red objects typically play in causing sensations of a particular phenomenological type. Of course not both of the above claims can be true. We cannot really understand being red in tenus of looking red and understand looking red in tenus of being red. This is too small a circle to be informative to anyone who did not already know what one of these states of affairs was. Finally, NCR includes the perceiver independence of physical-object color, for objects have colors even when we are not looking at them. They have their colors in the dark or when the light is too dim for us to make them out. We recognize that some people are color blind, that some people have a systematic color-perception deficit. Red-green color-blind people cannot visually distinguish certain objects that differ only in possessing certain hues of red or green. We recognize that there can be color illusions, perceptions of merely apparent colors as distinct from the real color of things. Some of these are everyday occurrences, such as the shift towards green of certain shades of blue when viewed by indoor incandescent light rather than full sunlight. Others are special cases, such as the rainbow of colors that can be seen in gasoline when it is spilled on asphalt. Unfortunately, the science of the physical causes of color phenomena and the psychology of color perception tend to undermine the viability of Naive Color Realism. Color science disproves the suggestion that there is some microphysical property that all green things have in common. Instead we get a picture of a disjoint collection of physical states and processes that can give rise to the same color phenomena. The physiology of color vision indicates that color cannot be reduced to any particular light emitting or light reflecting property. In addition we see variations in the chromatic responses of nonual perceivers to the same stimuli. These facts about the experience of color seem to indicate that color experience does not infonu us about any objective property. Both objectivism and subjectivism in the theory of color involve a response to the realization that Naive Color Realism cannot be true in all of its elements. Objectivists tend to sacrifice the revelatory powers of sensory experience in favor of vindicating the physicality and (relative) perceiver independence of color and the epistemic reliability of color vision. Subjectivists tend to sacrifice the physicality and perceiver independence of color in favor of vindicating the revelatory powers of sensory experience or the reduction of physical-object color to phenomenal color. Both responses are misdirected, for the only element of NCR worth preserving is the idea
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that visual experience reveals much about the nature of color properties. All of the other claims of Naive Color Realism are either false or an artifact of the semantics of our color predicates, not a reflection of the nature of color . , propertIes.
2. OBJECTIVISM IN THE THEORY OF COLOR Objectivism is committed to the claims that: (i) colors are identical to (or supervenient upon) certain physical features of objects, and (ii) color perception consists in the appropriate detection of this physical complex of features and its registration in the nervous system. Objectivism aims to vindicate Naive Color Realism by: (i) identifying the surface structure property (or light transmitting property or light emitting property) R that red things have in common and by identifying the surface structure G that green things have in common and that differentiates green things from red things, and blue things, etc., and (ii) doing so in such a way that the structures identified have features that are consistent with as many elements of the naive view as possible. These structural properties may be characterizable with reference to either the experiences of perceivers or to their physiology or psychology, but, once identified by means of these characterizations. they must be definable in some observer-independent way. Ideally, these structural properties will be either identical to physical properties of the colored things or supervenient upon physical properties and magnitudes. As noted earlier, there are many elements of our common-sense beliefs about color that point to our holding an objectivist concept of color. Objects are said to have colors even when we are not looking at them. Even objects we physically cannot see are thought to be colored: e.g .. if there are five ounces of nickel at the gravitational center of Mercury. we will never see any sample of it, but we believe that any sample has color, in fact the same color as samples we have seen here on Earth. This intuition about color could be understood as an expression of a concept of colors as objective properties of physical things. Unseen colors would be undetected but detectable physical features of some objects that are no more problematic than the mass of unweighed objects. The color blind would simply lack a properly working infonnation gathering faculty of the appropriate type. The infonnation about color would be there in the world; some people simply have no access to it. Color illusions would have a status similar to size illusions such as the Miiller-Lyer illusion. Facts about the color of an object would be objective in just the same way as facts about the size of an object. But color science informs us that any reducing property for colors would not be any microstructural property of physical things. There is no
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color-producing microstructural property shared by all things that are the same color." Take blue for example. There is incandescent blue, fluorescent blue, phosphorescent blue, electric blue, metallic blue, liquid-crystal blue, gemstone blue, water blue, scatter-and-interference-effect blue, neon blue, thin-film blue, etc. As forms of blue they have their differences. For example, gun-metal blue and sky blue are both forms of blue, but the sky is not gunmetal blue in color. Metallic colors have a sheen that the color of the sky lacks. But, all forms of blue are similar in one important respect. They all have the same hue (or are members of the same hue family). There does not, however, appear to be any corresponding point of microstructural similarity among blue things. One might think that this diversity of microstructural causes of color phenomena implies only that the reducing property of color is some disjunction of microstructures. One might suggest that the property of being blue is identical to the property of having microstructure m I or m 2 or In, or ... or m,. In being disjunctive, the property of being colored would be like another perfectly objective property, viz., the property of being a United States citizen. This property is identical to the property of being born in one of the fifty states, or in one of the United States territories, or being naturalized. or having parents who are citizens. But while this latter is a perfectly determinate property (we can specify all of the disjuncts of this disjunctive property), understood disjunctively, the property of being blue is an essentially indeterminate property, for we can never close this disjunction. We cannot specify some collection of microproperties m l , • • • , m" such that any blue thing must have one of those microproperties and such that all non blue things lack all of them. The reason is that any physical object that we discover that looks blue to normal observers under normal conditions surely counts as blue (we can accept this general truth even if we are not willing to accept it as an analysis of being blue), regardless of what microstructural properties it happens to possess. So no matter how inclusive our disjunction of microstructures becomes, we can never regard any such disjunctive property as specifying the property of being blue. Another problem concerns the need to do justice to the essence of the colors as they are revealed to us in visual experience. Johnston offers an extended discussion and critique of a doctrine of the revealing power of visual experience, where this is understood as the idea that "The nature of canary yellow is supposed to be fully revealed by visual experience so that once one has seen canary yellow there is no more to know about the way canary yellow is.,,7 Examples of such essential properties of colors include: Red is more similar to orange than it is to canary yellow; although all oranges are reddish and some reds are bluish, there are no bluish oranges; there are so-called unique shades of red, yellow, green, and blue-shades of red that are neither bluish nor orange, shades ofyeJIow that have no trace of orange or green in them, and so on; red and green contrast more sharply than
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green and blue. There are no relations among the microstructural properties of things that correspond to these and other such relations among colors. Red and green are about as dissimilar as colors get, so if there were some microstructural reduction for color, one would expect a corresponding microstructural dissimilarity between, for example, ruby and emerald. We would expect ruby and emerald to bear a microstructural dissimilarity to each other at least as great as the dissimilarity of greenness to redness. But ruby and emerald turn out to be quite similar. Both consist of materials that are colorless in their pure state and derive their color from impurities in their crystal lattice. The color-inducing impurity is chromium in each case. Ions of chromium replace aluminum in a small percentage of locations in the crystal in each case. In each case the chromium ions are surrounded by six oxygen ions in an octahedral configuration. The most significant difference is in the ionic character of the chemical bonds between the chromium ions and the surrounding oxygen ions, i.e., in how much time the shared electrons spend in orbitals of one versus the other atom. The differences make for differences in the energy needed to lift the electrons from one energy state to another. As a consequence ruby and emerald differ in their pattern of spectral absorption, i.e., in the energy, and therefore wavelength, of light that they absorb. The microstructural and spectral differences are quite small here, yet ruby and emerald differ in color as much as any two things can. The case of ruby and emerald is just a particularly obvious case of what seems to be true in general. The microstructural properties of things that seem to be relevant to determining their color exhibit patterns of similarity and difference among each other that have no resemblance to the patterns of similarity and difference among the colors. The conclusion that these facts suggest is that the color of a thing is not identical to any of its microstructural properties. This is not welcome news for NCR. but does not falsify it. for NCR is merely committed to color being a physical or supervenient property of colored objects that exists in them in just the way the colors appear to us. NCR is saved if color is plausibly viewed as a physical but nonmicrostructural property of colored objects. This is the suggestion David R. Hilbert defends in his book, Color and Color Percepti()n.~ Surface color, according to Hilbert. is surface spectral reflectance, i.e., the tendency of a surface. for each wavelength of incident light. to reflect a particular percentage of that light. Hilbert calls his view "anthropocentric realism." It is a realistic view because. so understood, color is an objective property of physical things that is both observer and illumination independent. It is anthropocentric realism because Hilbert concedes that the color categories are not physically natural kinds. For reasons that we have already seen, red things do not constitute a natural kind of physics. not even a disjunctive kind. "Specification in physical terms of those aspects of color that we see and talk about will depend on prior knowledge of the characteristics of the human visual system."" So, although color properties are
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physical properties, color categories are not physically natural kinds. Color categories are specified relative to the chromatic responses of the human visual system. Kinds so specified, however, exist independently of human perceivers. Suppose surface redness is identified with surface reflectance property K"o. Hilbert contends that surface redness exists independently of the existence of human perceivers because Kreo is a perfectly objective property (as all reflectance properties are) that exists independently of the anthropocentric means we must employ to specify it as the reducing property for surface redness. Hilbert proposes an analogy with constellations to illustrate this point. Although the composition of the constellation Orion is surely based on human interests and perceptions, the constellation would have existed even if humans had never appeared and would not cease to exist if humans went out of existence, for the constellation is nothing but the stars that make it up, and these predate human evolution, and will, perhaps, exist long after human extinction. One might suggest an additional analogy with weight. Weight is a quality of objects that can be experienced in sensations that accompany the lifting and the heft of objects. Yet when one lifts an object and feels its weight one experiences what we all agree is a quality of the object. Physical science affords a means for an observer-independent specification of weight in terms of mass and force. The suggestion is then that an objective specification of color might be just as reasonable to expect. Hilbert bases the defense of his proposed reduction of object color to spectral reflectance on a functional analysis of human color vision. It has two major interrelated parts: (i) an argument that the function of color vision is to detect a distal objective property of physical things and (ii) an argument that the computational explanation of color constancy suggests that surface spectral reflectance is the effective stimulus of human color perception. The first argument proceeds from the presumably analytic premise that the function of the color-vision system is to detect color and from the empirical premise that color is an objective illumination-independent property of distal objects. I suggest that Hilbert takes the first claim to be analytic, but it is an analytic part of a robustly empirical theory. It is a claim in line with the method of functional analysis of biological capacities. Under objectivist analysis, having color vision does not consist in having any particular physiological or chemical structure but in having some structure that serves to detect some distal property of physical surfaces. III That there is indeed some such property that is detected by all creatures that possess color vision is an empirical matter. That this property, if it exists, is color is settled, in part, by our concept of color vision. The second argument is offered in support of the claim that there is an objective, mind-independent, distal property that color-vision systems detect. Computational theories of color vision provide an explanation for the constancy of perceived surface color over variations in illumination. The explanation picks out surface spectral reflectance as the effective stimulus for
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the experience of surface color. Since surface spectral reflectance is an illumination-independent property, perceived color can remain relatively independent of the spectral composition of the ilIuminant. When this empirical hypothesis is combined with the analytic claim, it appears that the reduction of surface color to reflectance would explain color constancy by positing color as an illumination-independent property of physical things. Therefore the suggestion is that the most plausible scientific account of the function of color vision is that it serves for the detection of surface reflectance. Since what the color-vision system detects is color, color is surface reflectance. The claim that the color-vision system detects color is essential to this argument. Without it the argument suffers from proposing a theoretical posit, i.e., colors as reflectances, that goes beyond what is necessary to explain the empirical facts cited by the objectivist. The argument is probably correct in the assumption that the effective stimulus for the chromatic response of the visual system is surface spectral reflectance. It is probably also correct in supposing that the best explanation of the constancy of perceived color is the illumination-independence of reflectance. The problem is that the illumination-independence of reflectance completely explains the relevant phenomenon, viz., that our chromatic responses to a sUlface are constant over a wide range of illumination conditions. The constancy of color is not needed to explain this phenomenon, so the reduction of color to reflectance adds nothing to the proposed explanation. It adds nothing and is thus unmotivated. The supposition that color is constant over a wide range of illumination conditions (and not just perceived color) needs some independent motivation. The analytic claim would provide just this. But I for one think that the analyticity of a claim is absolutely no reason to believe that it is true. The plausibility of the empirical part of the argument rests upon the plausibility of the claim that the function of the color-vision system is to detect surface reflectance. In fact this assumption has recently been called into question on the grounds that it is an oversimplification to be blamed on 11 a preoccupation with the human perceptual context. The suggestion is that color vision serves a wide variety of functions in different species: In fish it affords the detection of movement; in birds, the detection of gradients in the ambient illumination; in several species it serves as part of various systems of biological signalling and social organization. Ie This challenge at least places the second argument in serious question. Are there any major objections to be raised against this version of objectivism? Edward Averill raises an objection based on what we might call "the problem of counterfactual colors."I' He asks us to consider the possibility that we might change in such a way that some objects that formerly appeared yellowish to us appear reddish to us after this change. For example. suppose that the vitreous humor (the liquid in the eyeball between the lens and the retina) in all human eyes is replaced by a fluid that absorbs all and only the light in the lower
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part ofthe yellow frequencies of the spectrum, i.e., light between 587nm and 590nm. is absorbed.'·
Or, to equivalent effect, our environment might change. For example, suppose a gas is released into the atmosphere that absorbs all and only the light in the lower part of the yellow frequencies of the spectrum, i.e., light between 587nm and 590nm is absorbed.';
Some objects that appeared yellow before the change will also look yellow after the change. Some that appeared yellow before the change will appear black after the change. Some, such as gold, that appeared yellow before the change may appear red after the change. However, since the spectral reflectance of gold will not have changed, by the reflectance theory of color, the color of gold will not have changed. Averill claims that this has two unwelcome consequences: (i) When seeing gold we will always be suffering a color illusion, for this substance will look red but still be yellow; Ui) "after the change in our eyes, the color of gold objects could not be used as part of a quick and simple way we identify gold objects by the way they look."'~ Since we would always be misperceiving the color of gold, many of the background beliefs that form the basis of our perceptual judgments would no longer be reliable. These include our beliefs that under normal conditions. yellow objects look yellow and that under normal conditions, red appearances are caused by red objects. We would have to compensate for these changes when attempting perceptual classifications or identifications of gold. Averill concludes that contrary to the judgment a reflectance theorist must make. we would judge that after the change the color of gold has changed. Gold would have changed from a yellowish metal to a reddish one. So. reflectance theories of color must be mistaken. i" Both of these arguments fail however. The first is straightforwardly question begging against a reflectance theorist such as Hilbert. Calling our postchange visual perceptions of gold "color illusions" amounts to assuming that after the change gold will not look the way it ought to look. But what is the force of the "ought" here? It would not support an attribution of color illusion here to understand "looking (in color) the way gold ought to look" as "looking to have the color gold normally appears to have." The normal conditions have changed in this case; gold has a new norma) appearance. After the change people who see gold as a reddish metal are not suffering an illusion in this sense. We might try to understand color illusions in terms of misinformation; illusory color experiences fail to indicate the color of their objects. Prior to the change, our color experiences indicate the presence of a color property common to samples of gold and distinct from the color property possessed by reddish metals such as copper. After the change, our color experiences no longer indicate that samples of gold and samples of copper possess
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distinct color properties. After the change, gold and some reddish metal are metamers. Metamers are any physically distinct objects that can cause the same color experience in perceivers. The notion of metameric matching can be relativized to different populations of perceivers and different circumstances of perception.l~ Thus two samples of cloth that may be metameric matches under candlelight may be distinguishable in daylight. Likewise, swatches that may be indistinguishable in hue to a red-green color-blind observer may be clearly distinguishable by a normally sighted observer. So, the suggestion we are considering is that the postchange color illusion may consist in our postchange color experiences not containing information sufficient to distinguish the color of some substances that were not metamers before the change. Our response to this suggestion should be much the same as our response to the previous one: The normal conditions of observation have changed, so substances that were not metamers before the change are after the change. That gold and copper produce similar color experiences after the change is no more a color illusion after the change than the fact that gold and iron pyrites are metamers now means that we are all suffering a color illusion when we observe either gold or fool's gold. Metamerism under normal conditions of observation should not be regarded as a variety of color illusion. So we might do better by trying to link our understanding of the "ought" here to the beliefs about color we are justified in acquiring on the basis of visual experience. We might understand "0 looks (in color) the way it ought to look" as "visual experiences of 0 justify one in believing that 0 has color K and 0 has K." But illusion in this sense will persist only until people learn about the change and change their habits of belief fixation. There just is no clear sense of "color illusion" under which the reflectance theory of color condemns postchange normal perceivers to color illusions. The second argument alleges that the only way that we can explain the preservation of color as a quick and easy way to identify objects by the way that they look is to suppose that we judge that gold has changed color, i.e" the truth-value of "Gold is a yellowish meta)"' changes. But "Gold is a yellowish metal" can change its truth-value without gold changing its color. for we can simply decide to use the words "yellowish" and "reddish" differently after the change. The reflectance theorist can observe that although the color of gold has not changed, the kind of perceptual response it tends to evoke in normal observers has changed. The very considerations Averill cites motivate us to include this l'e,'}' color property in the denotation of "reddish" where before we had included it in the denotation of "yellowish." The change in us has motivated semantic change in our color predicates, not a change in the color properties of gold. Both stories, the color-change story and the semantic-change story, seem to do roughly equal justice to the relevant facts, so this case does not seem to provide any compelling reason to reject the reflectance theory.
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The problem with these two arguments is that they do not directly address the root problem with reflectance theories of color. The root problem is the complete denial of the revelatory nature of visual experience. Thompson, et aI., point to reflectance theory's failure to do justice to the revealed features of color. We have already seen that colors have certain properties and bear certain relations to each other: color varies along the three dimensions of hue, saturation. and brightness; hues are either unique or binary and are organized into opponent pairs, etc. Now if color is just surface reflectance, we should be able to match these features of color with corresponding features of surface reflectance. But there are no such corresponding features. Surface reflectances can be classified according to whether they reflect more or less light in the short-, middle-, and/or long-wave regions of the spectrum, but they cannot be classified as being unique or binary. nor can they classified as standing in opponent relations to other reflectances. I '
In addition, for the reflectance theorist the qualitative character of our visual sensations has only a contingent connection to color and our knowledge of it. It is a fact, but only a contingent one. that we can employ our experience of sensuous color presentations to detect similarities and differences in the reflectance properties of surfaces. But the fact that we experience sensuous color presentations has no essential connection to the fact that these surfaces are colored or that they have the colors that they do. For the reflectance theorist, color vision does not essentially involve the occurrence of sensuous color presentations. Consider the result of restructuring the patterns of correlation between objects and experiences in such a way that instead of objects of given reflectance looking red they present a tactile appearance that is warm. and instead of looking blue they appear wet, instead of looking green they appear cool, and instead of looking yellow they appear dry. Orange objects would appear warm and dry. Turquoise objects would appear cool and moist; and so on. For the reflectance theorist, objects would still be colored and still have the same colors that they do now.~(] Believe it if you can. As an alternative to reflectance theory. Averill and Johnston take a moderate position, adopting what Averill calls "Minimal Objectivism." They both construe object color as a disposition to cause certain types of responses in populations of observers, what Johnston calls "a response disposition." The sensuous look of things reveals facts about the similarity. difference, contrast, and other such properties of the colors, but is misleading in seeming to be of an occurrent property. Both take advantage of the observation that dispositional properties can be ordered in a similarity network by means of similarity relations among their manifestations. Take elasticity. A pair of rubber bands, hi and h2' are quite reasonably regarded as more similar to each other than either is to a third, h" if the manifestations of their dispositional properties, elongation to some length I before breaking, are more
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similar to each other than either is to the third. If b) stretches to I), be to 12 , and b, to l" and the difference between I) and l2 is less than the difference between either II and I, or 12 and I" then b) and b 2 are more similar to each other, qua elastic objects, then either is to b,. So the colors, qua response dispositions, have a similarity structure that is derived from the similarity structure of their manifestations. Color as a response disposition has a relational structure just like that revealed in color sensations. This is certainly an advance over the reflectance theorist's position, but response-dispositional theories have problems of their own. To define colors by means of response dispositions of the objects and substances requires that one incorporate some specification of what counts as standard conditions of observation. Hardin has pointed out many difficulties with doing this in some 21 principled way that reflects the alleged objectivity of color. Let me mention another difficulty. Even if colors are response dispositions, we must often make use of information about the microstructure of things to decide what conditions of observation are standard conditions. For example, the rainbowlike colors that we see when looking at spilled gasoline are not the "true" color of gasoline. The colors we see arise from interference effects due to the thin films gasoline tends to form on surfaces. Light waves bouncing off the front of this film interact with light waves which have refracted through the front surface and bounced off the rear surface and refracted back through the front. The rainbow quality is due to variations in the thickness of the film and, thus, variations in the summation and cancellation effects of the wave interactions. The same process causes rainbow colors on soap bubbles. Here we judge that we are not seeing the color of gasoline or soap, but the color of spilled gasoline and soap blown into bubbles. This is because they are transparent liquids and our standard procedure for observing the color of such liquids is to place them in some transparent container and observe the color they transmit. not spill them on a floor. The problem here is that our judgments concerning which conditions of observation disclose the color of the disposed thing are essentially tied to our beliefs about the microstructure of the disposed thing and our purposes in making such judgments. A vivid illustration of this fact is provided by the gemstone alexandrite. The color-generating impurities of alexandrite are the same as in ruby and emerald, i.e .. chromium ions. The crystal field that sets the energy scale of the chromium ions is stronger than that in emerald but weaker than that in ruby, with the result that the red and green transmission bands are quite evenly balanced. The near equality of the two bands has an extraordinary consequence: in blue-rich sunlight the gemstone appears blue-green. but in the redder light of a candle flame or 2c an incandescent lamp it appears red.
What color is alexandrite? Suppose that I am looking at it under sunlight. It looks blue-green to me now. But I know that were I to look at it indoors,
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under tungsten-filament illumination, it would look red to me. So, what color is it now? It looks blue-green to me now, so, assuming I am a normal observer and these are standard conditions, then it is blue-green now. But if the standard conditions are defined broadly enough to include the indoor conditions, then it is also red now. Some dispositionalists would insist that this cannot be, so either: (i) these conditions, more narrowly specified, are standard, but those inside are not; or (ii) those indoors are standard, and these are not (and the stone is red now despite looking blue-green). However one resolves these puzzles (I am inclined to think that the stone is both red and blue-green). for the dispositionalist there can be no fact of the matter about what color it is apart from some specification of standard observation conditions for this substance, and setting these conditions cannot be separated from our understanding of the underlying color-producing mechanisms. Our problem is that there is every reason to believe that there are many substances in the universe whose response dispositions manifest color-producing mechanisms about which we have no current information. Thus, there can be no fact of the matter about what would constitute standard conditions for the observation of their colors. and thus no fact of the matter about what colors they have. Dennett has recently defended another version of the relational theory. one that suggests that evolutionary science has an important role in determining the nature and locus of color." Like other relational theories, color is alleged to be a disposition of its bearers to produce certain kinds of visual experiences (chromatic responses) in a specific population of sentient creatures. Canonical ascriptions of colors to objects specify a particular kind of chromatic response the object is disposed to produce in a specified population of perceivers. The specification of population tells us for whom the object is so colored. The distinctive feature of the evolutionary approach is the suggestion that this relational property is created by the mutual action of sentient creatures and the plants and animals in the environment. On the one hand, animals gain a selective advantage from being able to exploit the chromatic structure of Lhe environment to enhance their ability to discriminate. recognize, and manipulate objects, maneuver in their environment identify conspecifics, predators, or prey, etc. On the other. if a plant or animal exists in an environment that includes sentient creatures that are capable of some chromatic responses. it might gain some selective advantage if it can acquire an appropriate secondary quality, i.e .. acquire some basis for a power to evoke those responses. This alignment of chromatic structure in some environment'" wiLh chromatic responses in some population of sentient creatures, when iL is an outcome of evolutionary forces, is color-coding and coloration. Some things in nature "needed to be seen" and others needed to see them, so a system evolved that tended to minimize the task for the latter by heightening the salience of the former. Consider the insects. Their color vision coevolved with the colors of the plants they pollinated, a good trick of design that benefited both.
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Without the color-coding of the flowers, the color vision of the insects would not have evolved and vice versa."
Is this approach an improvement over other relational theories'? In some respects, yes. The appeal to evolutionary processes provides a principled means for identifying the populations that are constituents of the relative colors. There will not be a different spectrum of colors corresponding to every gerrymandered collection of perceivers. Real colors include populations whose behavior (or that of their ancestors) contributed to a particular chromatic structuring of the environment. Also, evolution provides a means for fixing standard conditions for the observation of the real color of some objects and substances (a vexing problem for all dispositional theories). The standard conditions for the observation of the color of ripe bananas would be those that were typical during the period when bananas were influential cn in the development of chromatic responses to the stimulus they provided. Of course it is no ht'lp in determining standard observation conditions of objects and substances that were not involved in the coevolution of color coding and coloration, e.g., lasers. dichromic filters. gemstones. stars. and Benham disks. So, the evolutionary theory provides no general solution to the problem of specifying standard conditions for distinguishing real from merely apparent colors. Despite its advantages. the evolutionary relativism Dennett defends is not the great hoped-for vindication of color objectivism. First. the view does no better than other relational theories at resolving problems of counterfactual colors. i.e., of deciding whether the colors of various types of familiar objects would be the same or different in certain counterfactual situations. Consider Averill's atmospheric-change hypothesis: A gas is introduced into the atmosphere that changes the atmosphere's spectral-absorption characteristics. This results in gold now appearing reddish rather than yellowish. The hypothesis raises the question whether in this counterfactual situation the color of gold has changed. We saw earlier that there is little reason to prefer a color-change story (gold is now a reddish metal because il has a new disposition to produce visual experiences relative to the postchange human population) to a semantic-change story (the semantics of human color concepts or predicates change so that the unchanged color property of gold is now classified as a reddish one rather than a yellowish one). The evolutionary version of relative-color theory faces the same situation. There is little reason to prefer a color-change story (gold is now a reddish metal because the terrestrial environment has been altered resulting in a change in the secondary qualities of gold) to an appearance-change story (the unchanged local chromatic structure of gold now simply looks different than it did before). One may say. on the one hand. that color is the quintessential superficial visual quality. To change the visually detectable chromatic properties of a surt-ace just is to change its color! So. if the color-producing properties of a surface look different (under standard conditions). they are 425
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different-different in color. On the other hand, one may say that the color of gold has not really changed. After all, if we were to move the gold and the human population to another planet that has an atmosphere similar to the one earth used to have, or were to view gold in an artificial environment here on Earth that replicates the old terrestrial atmosphere, or were to wear special glasses that counteracted the effects of the new gas, then gold would look just the same as it did before the atmospheric change. The true color of gold is just obscured by the change. Second, Dennett's evolutionary relativism implies that in a world in which the existence of humans is not a result of some developmental process connected to the local environment, the objects in that environment are not colored for them, despite appearances to the contrary. This just seems like a mistake. After all, the creation hypothesis might have been true. In the world at which it is true, humans (and all other of God's creatures) do not have color vision despite possessing all of the physiological and psychological bases of color coding. If the same reasoning that Dennett applies to color holds for visible shape, size, texture, orientation, distance, etc., physical objects would be completely invisible at such a world. Worse yet, the objects at our world would be colorless for the human inhabitants of that world as well! Humans at the creationist world would not be part of the population for which objects at our world are colored. Of course objects at the creationist world would be colored for us. This is because color is a transworld property. If apples are red for us here, they are red for us at various alternatives to the actual way things are, e.g., apples are still red for us at the world where Oliver North did not lie to the Congress of the United States. Thus, if there are apples at the world where God created humans by a process that did not involve evolution and the apples there are pigmented as they are here, the apples are red there (for us). One might try to avoid this implication by including humans at the creation world in the population of observers relative to which color is defined here for us. We might say that their similarity to us means that they count as just more of the same relevant population. But this means that at their world. color exists for them because of the mere possibility of evolutionary processes. Worse still, suppose there is a world alternative to both the actual world and the creation world where creatures similar to us do not develop color coding. At this world the plants and animals are colorless according to evolutionary color relativism. If we are sufficiently similar to the humans at the colorless world, we would be part of the popUlation relative to which colorlessness is defined for them. If color is a transworld property, so is colorlessness. Therefore, the plants and animals at our world would be both colored and colorless for us~ There might be some way of defining the trans world relations and specifying the population parameter in our definition of color so as to avoid these problems, but
1 do not see how to do it. Better to '3.\'0\0. the prob\eTI\<:> '3.\\ \.oge\.\\e~ awl no\. link evolution and the existence of color so closely.
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3. SUBJECTIVISM IN THE THEORY OF COLOR Subjectivists deny that, strictly speaking, color is a property of physical objects and substances. Subjectivists accept that our experience of sensuous color does reveal the nature of color properties, and as so revealed they conclude that colors cannot be properties of physical things. They are instead properties of visual sensations or of visual processing more broadly construed. However, since they also tend to accept that the sensuous color of our visual sensations has representational significance, they tend to also conclude that our color experience is in some measure false. Visual sensations involve attributing to physical things a property that they do not have. So what is the motivation for this attribution of content, and thereby systematic illusion, to visual sensations? Two subjectivists that have addressed this question, Paul Meehl and C. L. Hardin, have pointed to the cognitive significance of color. Paul Meehl has argued that the qualitative character of sense impressions makes a differ7 ence to the cognitive abilities of persons who have them.c Meehl admits that someone whose sensations lacked quality could have all the same theoretical knowledge about objects and the way they appear to humans that a normal human observer has, but such persons would lack the ability to apply this knowledge easily and systematically to particular cases. Consider our system of semantic rules that includes. '''Pink' means pink." A person who had no sensations of color might be able to apply this rule, but only with the aid of scientific instruments. And such a person would find great difficulty in applying our overall system of color names. This system includes a mechanism for generating new color names for new color experiences. We do not learn all the English color names by some process that associates each possible color presentation with a color word. Rather, what seems to be the case is that the language provides a set of name-bases which are introduced by association with a set of color presentations (we might call them "basic colors") and, for any nonbasic color presentation. a color name is determined by which basic color it most closely resembles. Unless one can determine the similarity and difference relations among color presentations one cannot learn to apply this name-generation mechanism, and thus one must lack a form of language understanding, i.e .. our use of nonbasic color words. Hardin finds special cognitive significance in the role that color plays in object recognition. object categorization. and biological signalling. Endowing perceptual representations with color codes facilitates great increases in the efficiency and reliability of these cognitive operations. The suggestion is, then, that we should regard these properties as part of the content of perceptual representations because they have an influence on cognitive processes. All features of experience that facilitate a cognitive ab,\,ty, ~uch as \anguage understandi.ng or object recogni.tion. must convey
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some form of content to relevant cognitive mechanisms. Since the similarity and difference relations among sensory presentations are the relevant features in this case, the content is sensory content. So, the distinctively qualitative features of experience have a representational content because these features have a cognitive role to play, and this representational content is sensory content because the content-bearing features are sensory properties. Let me observe that it would surely be unwarranted to regard every feature of a representational state that contributes to the cognitive significance of that state as part of its representational content. For example, the fact that a person finds a thought exciting or interesting is surely relevant to its cognitive significance. but these features of a thought are not thereby other representational elements of the thought. It is a commonplace of computational accounts of cognition that the functional architecture within which some function is represented makes a difference to many cognitive features of that system of representations-its speed. productivity, reliability, ease of detection and correction of breakdown. etc. Functional architecture is the formal structure that makes possible the construction of complex representations within the symbolic system. But the functional architecture is not another representation over and above the representations defined by means of it. There is lively debate over just how one should draw the distinction between the form and content of a representation. But surely no one should claim that having cognitive significance is just the same thing as having representational content. So, the fact that the qualitative features of our sensory states have cognitive significance does not imply that these features have representational content. For another illustration of this point consider modeling military engagements by using miniature planes. tanks. and surface ships. The size. weight. and shape of these models have cognitive significance. i.e .. influence how well or ill they serve their function of facilitating the representation of the disposition. movement. and loss of forces. But these features are not themselves of any representational significance. So, the cognitive significance of color qualia does not entail that they are part of the representational content of visual experience. We are not forced to think of color sensations in this way by the very idea that they are important to our conceptual. judgmental, verbal, and behavioral responses to visual experiences. In the next sections I will argue that there are reasons why we should reject the suggestion that normal visual experiences represent objects as possessing the qualities presented in sensations of color. First, I will argue for the need to apply a more charitable interpretation of visual experience. In addition, I will argue that a representational role for color qualia is not necessary for understanding either color illusions or the cognitive role of color qualia.
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4. A CHARITABLE INTERPRETATION OF VISUAL EXPERIENCE Consider seeing a cube of pink ice and seeing that it is pink. In the normal case, seeing the cube of pink ice will include having a visual experience of the cube. This visual experience or sensation normally will include a presentation of a color quality in a portion of one's visual field. This sensation will be a visual sensation of the cube of pink ice because the color presentation stands in some appropriate causal relationship to a visually detectable feature of the cube. What makes this a sensation of the pinkness of the ice cube? An intentional theory of the qualitative content of visual experience will have it that the sensation of pink ice is a sensation of the pinkness of the ice cube in virtue of being a representation of the cube as pink. An error theory of the qualitative content of visual experience incorporates this idea that sensations of color are representations and adds that the sensation represents the ice cube as having the color property presented in the sensation, a property the ice cube does not possess. So. an error theory is a position that resembles Hardin's and Boghossian and Velleman's in rejecting that physical objects possess color properties while accepting that visual sensations represent physical objects as possessing color properties presented in visual experience. Are there reasons to reject the intentional ism about sensations that makes this error theory possible? What is troublesome here is not the intentionalism itself. rather it is the notion that our sensation of a pink ice cube represents the cube as pink by attributing to it the pinkness presented in the sensation. There is a basis for a more charitable interpretation of visual experiences in an information-theoretic account of their content. Such an account proposes that the function of sensory systems is to extract from physical inputs information about distal objects and make this information available for cognitive exploitation. Thus. the color-vision system has the function of coding for higher cognitive faculties the information about surfaces of objects extracted from the structure of the ambient light. Color vision produces color experiences that have a content that is based upon this information about external surfaces (and transparent volumes and radiant sources). So understood. our sensory experience is always an accurate reflection of the input received (whatever that may be). Error arises from our conceptual response to color experiences when we interpret them as containing information that they do not have. For example. if one views a red surface illuminated by narrow-spectrum red light. it appears black. However. under any illuminant that contains components of short, middle, and long wavelength light, the red surface appears red."' So, a surface that looks black is either a black surface or perhaps a red one illuminated with red light. In
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an environment that normally contains broad-spectrum illumination, surfaces that look black probably are black. Appearing black does not indicate with certainty that an object is black, but when there is information about the spectral composition of the illuminant, or when the assumption of broad-spectrum light is reliable, appearing black does reliably indicate black color. So, the reliability of decisions to apply the concept BLACK to something that looks black varies with the reliability of one's information about the conditions of observation. Perception therefore requires solving two difficult problems: (i) how to build sensory channels to extract information from the flux of stimulus energy and (ii) how to interpret the sensory output so as to build an accurate and useful representation of the external scene. One complicating element in the second problem is the fact that our sensory systems deliver large amounts of information in a wide variety of forms. The visual system delivers more information about a scene than can be readily preserved and exploited by higher cognitive mechanisms. Hardin refers to this as the "optic bottleneck:,2Y Hardin cites the following advantage of color coding. In order to appreciate properly the benefits that color brings to object recognition tasks. it is important to bear in mind the distinction between a target's \'isihilit\, and its accessibility to visual search. In one sense of the term, a person's face may be fully visible in a crowd, but only if it is pointed out to you. The presence of so many other faces distracts your gaze, and makes it hard to locate the face of interest. Now let the person in question paint her face green. and your task will be made simpler by far. provided, of course. that the others have not followed suit. Contrast is, of course. one of the operative principles here, but it is by no means the only one. Human factors research has thrown light on what some of these other factors are: Just rendering a visual display in color rather than black and white shortens the time required to find a particular object in the display by as much as one-third. Giving the object a distinctive shape or other achromatic attribute shortens search time less than giving it a distinctive color. (1)
Chromatic coding sorts sensations into equivalence classes, i.e., sensations that all count as cognitively identical with respect to this dimension of comparison; family resemblance classes, i.e., sensations that are cognitively similar yet discernibly different; and contrast classes, i.e., sensations that are cognitively dissimilar. As Hardin makes clear, these features seem to contribute to the speed, efficiency, and reliability of perceptual and retrieval processes. What gives colors these desirable properties is a nice balance of qualitative diversity and simplicity. Red, yellow, green. and blue hues are qualitatively distinct from each other; there is no quantitative variation that carries one into the other. But the diversity is sharply limited; there are only four hue qualities of which one
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needs to keep track. The set of evolutionary compromises that gave us three photopigments and a way around the "optic bottleneck" also provided us with the elegant four-part chromatic system. 'I
So, sensory states have color. in part. because chromatic coding enhances the cognitive exploitation of perceptual infonnation. Color qualia afford a solution to the optic bottleneck problem and therefore have a cognitive function that does not depend on the qualitative features themselves having representational significance. These features solve the bottleneck problem by fonning the basis of an internal coding scheme for representations that need not include attributing the elements of the code to the items represented. But what exactly is information and how does it differ from representation? To receive information is to be able to exclude some possibilities as nonactual and include others as possible. Viewed information-theoretically a sensory state contains information because the processes that led to its occurrence partition the set of possible ways the world might be, i.e .. divide the set of possible worlds into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subsets, and imply that the actual way things are is in one of these subsets. We can say that this partition is effected by means of the compatibility relations that obtain between the content -bearing properties of the sensory state and various ways the world might be. In sensory systems the compatibility relations are causal ones, the causal process that produced the sensory state is compatible with some distal possibilities and incompatible with others. These compatibility relations can be indexed to circumstances: i.e .. we can define the information content of a sensory state in circumstances C as the set of possible worlds compatible with the production of sensory state 5 in circumstances C. A sensory state's information content includes a particular proposition or state of affairs p just in case p holds at every possible world compatible with the content-detennining properties of that state. One consequence of this notion of information content is that it is always true. i.e., if s contains the infonnation that p. then p. If 5 contains the information that p. then p holds at every world compatible with the production of p. If s is produced, then the actual world is compatible with the production of p, thus p must be the case. This means that information content is different from representational content (as least as the latter is normally understood), since representational content, unlike infonnation content, can be false. Infonnation content and representational content differ in other ways also. Information content is closed under deductive relations; representational content is not. If a state s contains the infonnation that p, then p is true at every world compatible with s. If p entails q, then q is true at every world where p is true. Thus q will be true at every world compatible with s if pis and will be part of the infonnation content of s. In contrast, we do not usually treat representations as signifying everything that they entail. Also, if
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compatibility is understood causally as suggested above, states are informative about events to which they are causally related. Unicorns, frictionless planes, and the gravitational center of Jupiter are likely not part of the information content of any state of mine because 1 have no reliable causal relation to them, but I can form beliefs about them or have desires for them. In addition, the representational content of cognitive states depends upon the conceptual resources of the cognizer in a way the information content of its states do not. Consider the cognitive state that I might express by the form of words, "My dog Simon's food dish is empty." The concepts employed: MINE. DOG, FOOD, DISH. etc., are part of the means by which I represent this sad state of affairs to myself. While Simon is fully capable of detecting that his food dish is empty. he cannot represent this to himself in the way I can. For example, he lacks my concept of FOOD. Surely he has a concept of food. but it likely does not include the notions of nutrition that mine does. Or consider this way of representing the same state of affairs: "The plastic receptacle. utilized for providing Eukanuba for the member of the species Canis famifiaris that is designated by the singular referring expression 'Simon' and which I co-own with my wife. is empty." This way of representing his empty food dish is quite beyond Simon, although he can generate a perceptual state that contains the information that his food dish is empty. in exactly my sense of FOOD. DISH. and EMPTY. Cognitive states can contain information about properties that those states are incapable of representing. So sensory information content, unlike representational content. is always true. is closed under deductive relations. is limited to causally related events, and can outstrip the conceptual machinery of the cognizer. Although a sensory state's information content is different from its representational content. a plausible suggestion is that its representational content depends upon its normal information content. i.e., that a sensory state would not be a representation that p unless in normal circumstances states of this type contain the information that p. The suggestion is based on the idea that vision, audition, taste. etc .. exist in evolved organisms. at least in large part. because these sensory faculties provided useful information for the organisms that acquired them. While our higher cognitive processes may include conceptual content that outstrips the information acquisition capacity of our sensory systems, the representational capacities of sensory processes are directly tied to the information pickup capacity of those processe<,;. Sensory channels produce states that contain information about distal states and events, and these products (or some transformation of them) come to be used as symbols for those distal states and events. In the case of color sensations, the picture I am suggesting looks as follows. Information about the spectral reflectance of a surface (or spectral transmittance of a transparent volume or spectral luminance of a radiant source) is extracted by means of an analysis of the incoming flux of ambient light. The analysis involves sampling light that originates from several
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regions of the surface so as to cover any luminance boundaries. The luminance boundaries contribute information about the spectral composition of the light source. Inputs to the analysis include samples of the brightness levels across the scene taken by three different types of cone cells tuned to different but overlapping ranges of sensitivity. The ratios of brightness levels thus obtained plus the information about the light source extracted enables a calculation of a spectral reflectance for each of the luminance regions in the scene. Although calculation of reflectance does appear to be the target of the color-analysis system, because of the optic bottleneck problem this information is not passed on explicitly to higher levels of perceptual representation. Instead the information is coded as an assignment of qualitative character. i.e., as an assignment of color to a representation of the surface. Color categories are definable using a three-dimensional similarity space. Each color is a quality similar to and different from every other in point of hue, saturation, and hrightness. There are four unique hues: red. yellow, green. and blue. with all other hues (called "binary hues") being admixtures of the unique hues. Saturation is a measure of the percentage of hue or chroma versus white or black that the color contains. Brightness is the amount of black versus white that the color contains. So. each color is a unique position in this three-dimensional space. Color coding assigns surface representations a position in this space. A red surface representation has some feature that makes it similar to and different from other surface representations in respects isomorphic to the red position in the color space.': This assignment normally carries information about the surface represented. The infonnation is comparative. Red is that hue that is more similar to orange than it is to yellow. more similar to purple than it is to blue. is not similar in hue to any hue that is similar to green. etc. So. a surface coded as red normally must be similar to and different from other surfaces in just these ways if the sensory state is to inform us about that surface. But how can this be'? We saw earlier that there are no microstructural features of physical objects that have the relations of comparative similarity that define the colors. Here I suggest we take a page from the dispositional theories of color and hypothesize that the information content of color sensations includes response dispositions of physical things. Physical surfaces coded as red have a dispositional property that is (i) grounded in some occurrent microstructural feature and that is (ii) manifested when nOlmally sighted observers code representations of them as phenomenally red. Dispositionalists identify this or some similar property with color. I have not been persuaded by the arguments for this analysis. but while response dispositions may not be colors. they are a good candidate for the information content of color sensations. Color sensations inform us about a disposition of physical things to cause sensations of certain types. Sensing a cube of pink ice informs us of a disposition of the volume of ice to cause sensations that occupy a particular region of the color space. One advantage of this use
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of response dispositions is that one does not need to solve the standard observer and conditions problems. In nonstandard conditions the information content of a sensation is simply different from what it normally is. Our conceptual response to our sensation of the pinkness of the cube involves applying our concept PINK to the volume represented in the sensation. This conceptual response is just as spontaneous but more naive than the sensory information content, for it involves conceiving of this pink volume as bearing an occurrent color property rather than a response disposition. \3 The pinkness presented in our sensory representation of the cube of pink ice is conceived as an occurrent property of the volume in the SherwinWilliams sense, as a quality of the volume through and through. When we perceive the pink ice cube as pink we attribute this color property soconceived to the ice cube. This is a mistake. The ice cube is not pink in this sense. But the locus of the mistake is not at the level of sensation, for the sensation merely indicates a power of the cube to cause a sensation of this type. This gives us a reason to reject the second part of the error theory of color sensations. i.e., that a sensation of a pink ice cube represents the cube as pink by attributing to it the pinkness presented in that very sensation. Since the cube is not occurrent-phenomenal-property pink, the sensation does not indicate that it is occurrent-phenomenal-property pink. We should allow that the ice cube is, in some sense. pink and that it is. in some way, perceived as pink. but should reject that any of this involves sensory representations of the cube as phenomenally pink. An account of the cognitive significance of color sensations need not include any elements of the error theory of sensations. When this point is combined with the suggested information-theoretic account of the representational function of color sensations we see that not only is error theory unnecessary, there are positive reasons to avoid it-it is incompatible with the most plausible understanding of the representational function of sensations.
5. COLOR ILLUSIONS Finally, we are left with the argument that we began with, Boghossian and Velleman's argument that sensations of color must be representations of some property if we are to make sense of the distinction between veridical and illusory color experiences. Their idea seems to be that in veridical perception the visual system produces a visual experience that is a representation of an object as having some property that the object actually has. In illusion, on the other hand, the visual system produces a visual representation of an object as having a property that it does not have. So, we have a kind of transcendental argument from the possibility of color illusion. The best explanation of the possibility of color illusions is that some sensations
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are true and others are false. Color illusions are false sensory representations. Understood this way veridical perception and illusion both involve representation of objects as having some property; they differ in whether the object has the color property in question. Therefore color experiences are a kind of representation. But what kind specifically. and is this hypothesis of sensory representations the best explanation of the possibility of color illusions? What kind of mistake or falsehood is a color illusion? Mistaken color judgments can take a variety of forms. One form is a semantic or conceptual mistake wherein as a result of false beliefs about the correct range of application of a color term or concept one misapplies that term or concept. For example, one might believe that the shade of green used on interstate highway signs is British Racing Green and thus judge of a car that one observes to closely match such a sign in color that it is British Racing Green when it is actually lime green. Although a mistake is made, no one need suffer a color illusion for it to occur. Another mistake of the semantic/ conceptual variety would be to believe that a piece of turquoise one happened upon is chartreuse in color because of the false belief that chartreuse is a shade of bluish green rather than a shade of yellowish green. Again, no color illusion is involved. A rather different form of mistaken color judgment arises from false beliefs about what objects or substances match each other in color. One might judge that a swatch of chartreuse fabric would match a sample of turquoise stone in color, Here the best explanation of the error is that one misremembers or is under a mistaken impression about what turquoise looks like, This case exemplifies a feature of our earlier characterization of color illusion, i.e., representing an object as having a color property it does not in fact possess, One represents the substance turquoise as having the color property exemplified by the fabric swatch. But has someone undergone a color illusion in this or the other cases? I do not think that we would ordinarily classify any of these examples as instances of color illusion. They are simply mistakes of color identification or classification. So. not every instance offalse perception-based attribution of color or color-related property constitutes a color illusion. What notion of color illusion is required to sustain Boghossian and Velleman's argument for the claim that color sensations represent physical objects as colored? Since Boghossian and Velleman are subjectivists about color. they are committed to the position that color experiences attribute to objects a property they never have, Thus all color experiences are illusory. What then do they think is the point of the illusory-veridical distinction among color experiences? They claim that it is justified by its utility. "Correct" color judgments and experiences classify an object on the basis of the color it appears to have under some set of standard conditions, and classifying an object by the color that it appears to have under so-called standard conditions is the most reliable and most informative way of classifying it, for the purposes of drawing useful
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conclusions about how the object will appear under conditions q of any kind.
One wants color categories that are intersubjectively stable and that can be used easily, quickly, and reliably. It is necessary that members of a community using color categories for purposes of public classification and reidentification of objects be able to determine a number of things: How would another member of the community classify this object were he perceiving it now? How would another member of the community (or one's self at another time) classify it were he to perceive it under some of the various kinds of circumstances in which the object is likely to be encountered? These and other determinations must be made by persons who have no knowledge of the occurrent basis. either in the objects or the physiology of the observers. of the chromatic responses of the persons using the color categories. Assignment of a standard color on the basis of the way the object looks when viewed under standard conditions is well suited to providing a system of color categories that meet these requirements provided that: (I) Objects that are to be assimilated to the color categories are often encountered in standard conditions by persons learning the color terms and utilizing the color categories; and (2) there is a readily learned system for inferring what appearance an object would present in standard conditions from the appearance it presents when it is encountered in nonstandard conditions. The first provision is supplied when ordinary daylight conditions are accepted as standard. Boghossian and Velleman claim that the second is supplied by the principles of additive and subtractive color mixing. Thus. an object that looks bluish green in light that is blue deficient we can predict will look blue under light this is more spectrally balanced. What Boghossian and Velleman offer us is a kind of irrealism about color terms and concepts. There is no such property as physical-object color. The veridicality of some of our color experiences consists in nothing more than accordance with a community wide standard for the application of color language. They represent objects in a manner those standards endorse as appropriate. Correlative with this notion of veridicality, some color experiences are illusions simply because they were produced under nonstandard conditions. We therefore have two notions of color illusion at work in Boghossian and Velleman's discussion. One is metaphysically robust and forms part of their error theory. This notion of color illusion requires that color experiences have truth conditions. But it amounts to no more than the vague claim that color illusions are false representations. The other is metaphysically irrealist and requires no more than that color sensations have something corresponding to assertibility conditions. This notion will be of no help in their argument that color sensations represent objects as colored. for their argument aims to establish that color sensations have truth conditions. It appears that Boghossian and Velleman have no more to tell us about the notion of color illusion involved in their argument than that they are false 436
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representations. So, one way to answer their argument is to propose an understanding of the notion of color illusion that does not involve false color experiences. And this is exactly what I propose. Color illusions are possible not because color sensations can be false sensory representations, but because they can contain misleading information. We saw earlier that information content cannot be false. If a sensory state contains the information that p, then p. However, information while true can be misleading. If you believe that Kent Nagano and Claudio Abbado are compatriots and receive the information that Abbado is Italian, you may be led to the opinion that Nagano is Italian. Information combined with false beliefs can produce more false beliefs. Just such an interaction between information-laden sensory states and the misapplication of concepts is the source of what are properly considered color illusions. My suggestion requires that we accept several different levels at which color language and concepts might be applied: (i) at the level of physical objects (here physical objects have attributed to them, but fail to possess, color properties): (ii) at the level of the intrinsic features of sensations (here sensations present color properties to us by possessing them): (iii) at the level of the content of perceptual judgments (here we have cognitively spontaneous representations of objects as possessing the color properties presented in color sensations): and (iv) at the level of the content of beliefs (here we might reject the perceptual judgments formed at level (iii) and go irrealist about physical object color). What we understand as color illusions do not occur at either level (ii) or level (h'). They occur instead at the level of perceptual judgments. Perceptual judgments are a special kind of judgment characterized by being, among other things, noninferentiaL cognitively spontaneous, and incorporating special observational concepts. I offer my earlier remarks about color illusions in support of the claim that there is nothing like color illusion at level (i~'). To have false beliefs about the colors of things or about relationships among the colors of things is not to suffer a color ilIusion. I offer the information-theoretic account of the representational content of color sensations developed in section 4 in support of the claim that there are no color illusions at level (ii). In addition I invite you to consider another type of illusion, the moon illusion. When low on the horizon the moon looks larger than it does at its zenith-this despite the fact that the image of the moon subtends the same visual angle in both situations. The moon's image can be occluded by an opaque object of the exactly the same size placed at exactly the same distance from the eye in both cases. This suggests that the illusion consists in the perceptual judgment that the moon is larger when seen on the horizon than it is when seen higher in the sky. One's visual experience of the moon and its size is not in anyway false, but for a variety of reasons, this experience gives rise to a spontaneous perceptual judgment that is false."; So, here we have a clear example of a visual illusion where the
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locus of error is not the visual experience itself, but is instead the perceptual judgment it evokes. This analysis of the moon illusion suggests that color illusions are likewise errant judgments rather than inaccurate experiences. The colors in the rainbow that one sees in gasoline spilled on a smooth smface are not colors of the gasoline. The rainbow of colors is a color illusion. But there is nothing false about one's experience of the colors. The colors arise from variations in the spectral power distribution of the incoming light. These variations are caused by interference effects arising from variations in the thickness of the thin film that the gasoline forms when spilled. When these variations in the spectral composition of the light coming off the film are detected by the visual system, they are encoded in its usual way, as variations in color. All is as it should be. Your experience contains information about these variations in the way the film interacts with light. You commit an error if you judge that the rainbow of colors represents a rainbow-colored surface, a surface that has real color swirling about it. One might respond to this argument by insisting that while some perceptual illusions do not involve false sensory experiences, surely it seems that some do. A seemingly clear example of an illusory sensory experience is made possible by stereophonic music reproduction. When a pair of loudspeakers produce tones that are carefully matched in frequency, amplitude, and phase, a listener hears a single tone seeming to originate from a point midway between the loudspeakers. Since there is no sound source there, this is an auditory illusion. Since it sounds like the tone is being produced by a source where there is none, this looks like a case where an auditory experience misrepresents. But, again we need to distinguish between the content of the experience and the content of the perceptual judgments based on it. The content of the auditory experience conveys information about the location of the acoustical center of a sound event. That sound event is produced by the mechanical actions located at the loudspeakers and is indeed centered at a point midway between them. There is no error here. Error is introduced when one perceptually judges that the sound source is located at the acoustical center of the sound event. It is an understandable mistake, for the sound source and the sound event can usually be expected to coincide. The waves of compression and rarefaction in the air that is the sound event usually expand outward from a mechanical disturbance that is their source. In stereophonic music reproduction, a distributed sound source is used to produce a sound event that is acoustically centered at a location where there is no mechanical disturbance. The auditory illusion results because our immediate, noninferential, conceptual response is keyed to the usual information content of our sensory experience. So, even here we can account for illusion without needing to attribute representational error to sensory experience. Consider the color illusions produced by a Benham disk. The disk is
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half white and half black with the white side marked with concentric line segments grouped from its center to the edge of the disk. When the disk is rotated at a rate between five and ten times per second, bands of weak colors are seen on its surface. The disk can produce this phenomenon because of the luminance summation that occurs in the visual system over brief periods of time. The patters of light and dark and the sequences of line segments produce flickering stimuli that mimic those of a colored surface. Again here the sensations do not lie. They indicate either the presence of a surface with a constant spectral reflectance or a surface with rapidly changing luminance contrasts. From the standpoint of the visual system, a stationary disk with a particular surface reflectance and the Benham disk are relevantly similar. There is no "mistake" in so treating them. Our mechanisms of spontaneous noninferential conceptual response apply our concept of surface coloring to both, and so we see the surface of the rotating disk as exhibiting chromatic hues we know it lacks. The error lies with the conceptual response, not with the sensory presentation. That is as it should be. Luminance summation over spatial and temporal gradients must take place since the visual system has finite resources for analyzing the structure of the ambient light. Our color sensations contain finite but useful information. I conclude therefore that there is no need to suppose that color experiences mistakenly represent objects as colored in order to account for the existence of color illusions. These all involve mistaken conceptual responses to our sensory experience-errors in perceptual judgment.
6. CONCLUSION I have offered some arguments in support of subjectivism about colors, i.e., for the view that visual experiences are colored but external objects and substances are not. I have also proposed an alternative to the error theory of color sensations that so many subjectivists accept. I find the popularity of this view curious since there is so little to be said in favor of it (neither science, nor introspection, nor folk psychology delivers the error theory to us). The view seems to have its source in the idea that mechanisms of visual 3 sensation embody some form of Naive Realism about color. ' I think Naive Realism is too sophisticated a doctrine for Mother Nature to have bothered to build into our sensory systems. And for what payoff? I think visual sensation is naive, but the naivete takes the form of simply functioning to deliver in a digestible form the information that visual sensation extracts from the ambient light about distal surfaces and volumes. Gilding and staining natural objects is not the business of our senses. They just deliver the plain unvar37 nished information.
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NOTES I. Paul Boghossian and David Velleman, "Color as a Secondary Quality," Mind 98 (1989): 82 n. 4. 2. I employ a notion of presence here that merely marks the quality present in an experience as a part of that experience. The notion is neutral with respect to various possible accounts of how qualities are parts of experiences, e.g., as phenomenal properties of nonphysical objects of direct perception, as modes or manners of sensing physical objects, or as directly perceived properties of physical objects. 3. Colin McGinn defends such a view in chapter 6 of The Subjective Viel-t· (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 J. 4. This role for color perception is a central motivation for Edward Averill's relational theory of color in, "The Relational Nature of Color." Philosophical Rel'iew 10 I (1992): 551-88. 5. What I am calling Naive Color Realism is not alleged to be the content of our ordinary concept of color, rather it is a jumping off point for most philosophical theories of color. Mark Johnston describes a cluster concept of color that includes some of the elements of NCR (and more besides) which he does think captures our ordinary concept of color. See his "How to Speak of the Colors," Philosophical Studies 68 (1992): 221-63. 6. There are at least fifteen different causes of color that subdivide into roughly five major groups. The most common microstructural causes of color are energy-state transitions of free electrons in various atomic and molecular structures. For more on the physics of color see Kurt Nassau, The Physics and Chemistry o{Color: The Fifteen Causes of Color (New York: Wiley, 1983). 7. Mark Johnston. op. cit.. 225. 8. David Hilbert, Color and Color Perception: A Study in Anthropocentric Realism (Stanford, Calif.: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications, 1987). 9. Ibid" 14. 10. See David Hilbert, "What Is Color Vision?" Philosophical Studies 68 (1992): 362. I I. See Thompson. Palacios. and Varela. "Ways of Coloring," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1992): 1-74. 12. David Hilbert defends the hypothesis of color vision as a reflectance-detection system in "What Is Color Vision')" 351-70. He suggests that in all of these cases either the species in question does not really possess color vision or these other functions of their colorvision systems an~ dependent on the detection of reflectances. 13. Edward Averill. op. cit.. 552-7. 14. Ibid., 552. 15. Ibid., 554. 16. Ibid .. 553. 17. Actually Averill's target is rather broader than reflectance theories of color. He thinks his argument raises problems for any account that accepts that color predicates rigidly denote a nonrelational property of physical things. 18. For more information in metamerism see C. L. Hardin, Color for Philosophen: Unweaving the Rainbo ..... (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988),28. 19. Francisco 1. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 166. 20. Another way of putting this point is that for the reflectance theory there are no types of observers or conditions for determining what colors should look like-no sense to be given to the "true" or "real" appearance of a colored object. 21. C. L Hardin, op. cit., ch. 2. 22. Kurt Nassau, "The Causes of Color," Scientific American, Oct. 1980, 136. 23. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1991), ch. 12. Evan Thompson, Adrian Palacios, and Francisco J. Varela have also developed a version of this biological approach in "Ways of Coloring."
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24. By "the chromatic structure of the environment"" I mean the distribution of diverse fcatures underlying the power of things in the environment to produce chromatic responses in sentient creatures. 25. Daniel Dennett, op. cit., 377. 26. But even these cases can be misleading. for the real colors of things might have been masked throughout evolutionary time. Imagine a world where all plants with chlorophyll must incorporate in their interior a phosphorescent yellow substance. Suppose that this substance radiates yellow light with sufficient intensity that the green surface color of plants is so obscured that they appear to be surface-yellmv to normal human observers. Here the appropriate conditions for observing the real surface color of plants would require some means for counteracting the interior glow. Since the real surface color of the plants might be irrelevant to the evolutionary explanation of the chromatic responses of human observers. the requirements of biological explanation might be at odds with the requirements for an adeyuate metaphysics of the local color. For an extended discussion of the significance of masking phenomena for the ontology of colors see Johnston. op. cit. 27. Paul Meehl, "The Compleat Autocerbroscopist: A Thought-Experiment on Professor Feigl's Mind-Body Identity Thesis," in P. K. Feyerabend and G. Maxwell, eds., Mind. Matter, and Method: Ess{/ys in PhilosophY and Science in Honor of HerberT Feigl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1966). 103-81. 28. This would be true even if the amount of reflected short. middle. and long wavelength light were the same as that reflected from a black surface. 29. C. L. Hardin. ''The Virtues of Illusion:' Philosophical Studies 68 (1992): 371-82. 30. Ibid .. 376. 31. Ibid .. 378. 32. Being a functionalist about the mind I am inclined to conceive the respects of similarity and difference as features of functional roles. Representations that are phenomenally red have functional roles that are in some respects similar to and different from the functional roles of representations that are phenomenally green. where the respects of similarity have a structure isomorphic to the color space. Thus conceived color is a third-order property of perceptual representations. But this functional treatment of the phenomenal qualities of mental representations is not essential here. What is important is that the mental states have an intrinsic phenomenal character in some way or other. 33. Boghossian and Velleman argue persuasively against the view that color experiences represent objects as possessing some dispositional property (op. cit., 86-96). 34. Boghossian and Velleman. op. cit.. 102. 35. For a psychological explanation of the moon illusion see Jacqueline LudeL Introduction to Sensor\" Processes (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company. 1978). ch. 4. 36. Boghossian amI Velleman endorse just this idea (op. cit.. 94). 37. Thanks to Robert Cummins. Alvin Goldman, and Keith Lehrer for comments on earlier drafts of this essay and to many others for conversations on these issues. especially Roben Kraut.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL.
22
NO.
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SPRING AND FALL
1994
Dennett, Drafts, and Phenomenal Realism
Robert Van Gulick Syraclise University
For more than twenty-five years Dan Dennett has pursued a two pronged program aimed at explaining the proper place of intentionality and consciousness in a naturalistic view of mind and world, I Though his views on both issues have grown increasingly detailed and sophisticated over the years, certain elements have remained more or less constant. His approach to both has been consistently spare and austere. almost minimalist; he has sought to avoid ontological and theoretical excess by remaining close to the observable facts and has tried to persuade his more extravagantly minded critics that there is less to intentionality and consciousness than is commonly believed. Moreover, he has always treated intentionality as the analytically prior aspect of mind; he has aimed first to explain the intentional without appeal to consciousness and then to explain consciousness in terms of intentionality. Although these two aspects of his work go a]] the way back to Content and Consciousness (quite pointedly not caJ]ed Consciousness and Content), they find their fu]]est expression in the mature statement of his intentional systems theory (The Intentional Stance) and in his Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness (Consciousness Explained}. According to Dennett having intentional states in the most literal and genuine sense is just a matter of being interpretable from a specific perspec2 tive, that of the intentional stance. Any system-be it a person. an animaL
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or an artifact-has beliefs and desires just if its behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable under an intentional-stance interpretation that attributes such states to it. Dennett defends his view as a version of realism and denies that it makes him a mere instrumentalist about intentional states; there is, he argues, an objective fact of the matter about whether or not a given system's behavior is predictable under a specific interpretation. In general Dennett refuses to pigeonhole his theories according to the standard taxonomies used in the philosophy of mind; he rejects the accepted categories as themselves embodying mistaken implicit assumptions about the nature of mind.' Nonetheless, I think it is fair to describe him as a sort of hybrid-half behavioral realist and half eliminativist.~ He asserts that his intentional systems theory reconstructs the reasonable core present in our use of intentional concepts and that it does so purely in terms of facts about actual and counterfactual patterns of behavior. According to Dennett this makes him a realist since statements about beliefs. desires, and other intentional attitudes are made true in the most literal sense by facts about behavioral patterns; the patterns are real and so too are the intentional facts that supervene on them, though they are apparent only from a particular interpretative perspective. His account of consciousness is similarly hybrid though a bit harder to pin down in clear, explicit terms. According to his positive theory-the Multiple Drafts model or MDM-the reality of our conscious mental life is solely a matter of many different content fixations that occur at diverse locations in the brain, some of which get recruited into a serial narrative constructed by a von Neumanesque virtual "machine" that spins a more or less consistent ongoing scenario of our situation.' The question of whether a given mental state is conscious turns out not to have a clear-cut answer; according to the Multiple Drafts model it's entirely a matter of the subsequent effects that the state has on action, memory, and other mental states." And what answer we get will depend on how and when we probe the system. Different probes will elicit different effects and thus different answers to the question. The model is clearly in keeping with Dennett's general strategy of treating intentionality as more basic; it regards nothing as relevant to consciousness except the contents of the intentional fixations (drafts) occurring throughout the system and the system's reactive dispositions to them. According to Dennett, even paradigmatically phenomenal states such as the visual experience I have when the computer screen seems turquoise to me involve nothing more than my making judgements or being disposed to make judgements about the screen and about my current mental state. He explicitly rejects as absurd the suggestion that there could be objective episodes of seeming that are anything over and above the totality of judgements that I am 7 disposed to make. If so, seeming can be fully understood in terms of judging, and if the latter notion can be unproblematically analyzed so too can the former.
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On the negative side, Dennett denies that consciousness is a matter of presentation to some specially privileged observer or of representation in some specially privileged location, format, or medium. There are just the many drafts occurring throughout the brain in their disparate locations and formats; it is they and their interactions alone that give shape to both our behavior and the narrative sequence of the von Neumanesque virtual machine. Describing the serial machine as "virtual" is in part a way of emphasizing that it does not involve producing a sequence in some special unit-the flow of consciousness module; it's just an emergent pattern among the drafts. Moreover, it has some at least mildly nonrealist properties. Like the patterns that are revealed by applying Dennett's intentional stance, the structure of the serial narrative emerges onl y at the level of intentional interpretation' and it has no reality independent of the particular perspective from which it is probed. Probe the flow of drafts in different ways and you will precipitate different serial narratives. but each is equally reflective of the subject's consciousness. Indeed. according to the MDM, descriptions of the flow of consciousness do not and cannot have any legitimate application independently of such perspectival interpretative contexts. It makes no sense to ask. "What is really going on in the flow of consciousness? Or which probing reveals the way it really is?" As Dennett is well aware, many critics find his theory too thin and just not adequate as an overall account of consciousness.~ They believe it leaves out and fails to explain the most central and philosophically most difficult Olspects of consciousness. How. for example. could phenomenal seeming involve nothing more than judging? He replies that the supposedly missing elements of consciousness they seek are nonexistent and illusory; he dismisses their demands for a more robust and phenomenally realist account of consciousness as just a reflection of their residual if unacknowledged Cartesian intuitions." He sees his job as that of a philosophical therapist; he aims to use examples, thought experiments. and arguments to free us of our illusions. Like many therapists he believes that if he can get us to recognize the true source of our difficulties, the battle will be largely won: once we see that our perplexities and our thirst for further explanation arise from implicit Cartesian commitments. our resistance to the MDM should vanish. Or at least that's what's supposed to happen. 1O However. like many other phenomenal realists I remain unpersuaded. I just cannot accept Dennett's story about consciousness as the whole story or as adequately explaining the critical case of phenomenal consciousness. No doubt this may be because I remain in the thrall of Cartesian materialism: indeed Dennett has cited me along with Ned Block as examples of just that. I I But I don't believe that I am a Cartesian materialist nor that my reservations can be explained away in that way. So for the balance of this essay J will explore in some detail what I believe gets left out of Dennett's theory and why I remain unpersuaded.
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The dialectic of the debate between Dennett and his phenomenal realist critics runs pretty much as follows. He presents his positive theory-the Multiple Drafts model. His critics attack it as not offering an adequate account or explanation of the phenomenal or felt subjective aspect of consciousness, the aspect that in Nagel's phrase makes it the case that there's something it's like to be a conscious thing. Dennett challenges his critics to say just what it is that supposedly gets left out. He then tries to show that the allegedly omitted features are either in fact covered by his model or are not only nonexistent but incoherent and impossible. Though verificationism is out of philosophical favor in many quarters, Dennett appeals to it unashamedly in his attempt to show that the elements his critics find missing from his model come to nothing. 12 In so far as his critics are willing to play his game up to that point, their task is to show how there could indeed be a fact of the matter about the phenomenal aspects of the mind whose absence from his model they decry. However, before picking up this challenge I need to say something about the boundaries of the debate. Dennett argues for his view by arguing against Cartesian materialism, implying, if not explicitly asserting, that it's the only real alternative if one doesn't accept the MDM. Like any good debater, he tries to saddle his opposition with as much questionable philosophical baggage as possible. Cartesian materialism commits one not only to the view that there is something special about phenomenal consciousness but that it involves presentation to a specially privileged observer in a special format at some unique and specially privileged location in the brain-the Cartesian Theater where it all comes together for the benefit of the inner Cartesian ego which "sits" watching the phenomenal show. 13 It also involves the claim that every feature of every episode of consciousness is fully determinate; there must always be a fact of the matter about just what was and what was not on the theater's screen at a given moment. I think it's obvious that those who think there is more to phenomenal consciousness than Dennett's theory allows would be well advised to keep their distance from full-blown Cartesian materialism. Thus I will define phenomenal realism as simply the view that there is more to phenomenal consciousness than jUdging and believing; l~ it involves at least representation in some special way and form that is not present in nonphenomenal mental states. Having laid out at least the main outlines of the debate, let us tum to perhaps the most important of Dennett's examples and the one which best 15 illustrates his mode of argument, that of color phi. The example drawn from the psychophysical literature concerns what happens when a subject views two spots of light that are flashed rapidly in succession and separated by a small interval (e.g., two spots each flashed for 150 msec. with a 50 msec. interstimulus interval and a separation of up to 4 degrees of visual angle). Subjects report seeing not two separated spots of lights but one spot moving from the first location to the second. If the stimuli are of different colors-
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e.g., red followed by green-the subjects still report seeing one moving spot but describe it as changing color abruptly halfway between the two locations. The puzzle as Dennett presents it is how the subjects could have known to change the color from red to green when the spot was halfway across the separation apparently before they had experienced or had perceived the green spot at the second location. He then presents two intuitively appealing alternative explanations which he cleverly labels Orwellian and Stalinesque. According to the Orwellian account, the subject first experiences a stationary red spot at the first location followed by a stationary green spot at the second location. However, almost immediately after the second experience the subject's memory of the whole sequence is revised (falsified) so that what gets stored and subsequently recalled is the experience of a moving spot changing color in midtrajectory; the revision is motivated by the general coherence of the revised account and the likelihood that it offers a more accurate account of external facts than does the original experience of discontinuity. According to the alternative Stalinesque account, there is a time delay between sensory stimulation and experience, so the subject does not experience either of the spots until infonnation about the entire sequence has been processed. By the time the resulting product arrives at consciousness it has already had the illusory motion and midtrajectory color change inserted. Thus there is no need for a postexperiential memory revision. With these two interpretations in hand, Dennett is ready to present his argument against Cartesian materialism. Although he does not offer it in explicit argumentative fonn, I believe it can be fairly reconstructed as the following reductio. Pl.
If Cartesian materialism/phenomenal realism is true, then there must be a fact of the matter about which interpretation-the Orwellian or the Stalinesque-is correct. Either revision occurred before conscious experience of motion or afterward.
P2.
But there can be no fact of the matter about which interpretation is correct since both are equally compatible with all the actual and possible third-person and first-person facts about the experimental subjects.
C3.
Thus Cartesian materialism and the picture of consciousness it forces on us is committed to drawing distinctions to which no matters of fact could correspond.
C4.
Thus Cartesian materialism/phenomenal realism is false.
As noted above, the mode of argument is straightforwardly verificationist; if the Orwellian-Stalinesque dispute cannot be resolved in the color phi case on the basis of first-person or third-person observations, then Dennett concludes the distinction has no possible application in that context and marks no matter of fact. Both of the argument's inferences-that to C3 as well as that to C4 -rely on verificationist assumptions about which I have serious reservations. Nonetheless, for present purposes I am inclined to
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concede them and focus critical attention instead on the reconstruction's two premises; both of which strike me as problematic. Premise PI is far from obvious, especially if as stated above it extends its commitment not just to Cartesian materialism but to phenomenal realism in general. The latter holds just that there is more to consciousness than intentionality-that consciousness is not just a matter of judging and believing but involves phenomenal properties and a mode of representation not present in nonphenomenal mental states. Why should holding such a view commit one to the reality of the Orwellian-Stalinesque distinction in extraordinary cases such as that of color phi?16 Such a commitment might follow from Dennett's metaphor of the Cartesian Theater; the special and unique location where phenomenal representations are presented on the "inner movie screen" to the Cartesian observer or self. The screen in the theater is completely and determinately filled in at each instant; at a given time either a particular feature is present or it is not. Thus the OrwellianStalinesque dispute would have a clear-cut answer; either the second spot of light appeared on the screen before the presentation of motion and midtrajectory color change or it did not. If it did, then the Orwellian story is the correct one, and the subject's current reports must be explained by appeal to his revised memory. If it did not, then the Stalinesque interpretation is correct, because what appears on the screen is canonical for what's conscious, and the midmotion color change was present on the screen right from the start. Thus if one accepts the Cartesian Theater metaphor, then it seems that there must be an answer in every case to the Orwell-Stalin question. But the phenomenal realist need not and should not buy into that metaphor. As noted above, Dennett sets up full-blown Cartesian materialism with its inner theater metaphor as his explicit opponent, and that's obviously to his advantage since it is a position fraught with difficulties and vulnerabilities. But he clearly intends his attack to refute phenomenal realism (Prealism) in general, which does not carry any obvious commitment to the Cartesian Theater metaphor. P-realism. for example, does not entail that there is some special location in the brain where "it all comes together," a spot where consciousness occurs. 17 Phenomenal consciousness could just as easily involve some sort of global integrative pattern that ties together varying ensembles of specific representations scattered around the brain, its diffuse physical location would shift from moment to moment changing with the flow of conscious content. Indeed this is far more likely than the discovery of a unique dedicated consciousness module and it is just what one would expect if one takes seriously the integrated field theory of Dennett's 1K sometime collaborator Marcel Kinsbourne. Of more direct relevance to the Orwell-Stalin issue is the issue of how detailed and determinate experience must be. Dennett implies that if one is a realist about phenomenal representation then one is committed to experience being determinate in every detail
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during every temporal interval, and indeed that's just what follows if one accepts the Cartesian Theater metaphor; there's always a fact of the matter about what's on the screen and what isn't. But no such commitment follows from P-realism per se. Dennett credits his MDM with an advantage because it allows consciousness to be indeterminate or blurry, but I see no reason why that can't be equally true in P-realist models. Gaps or blurs could occur in at least two ways. The integrated representation underlying phenomenal consciousness might simply fail to incorporate any local elements concerned with the particular features that were omitted. Alternatively, with very short intervals such as those involved with color phi, the field might not have enough time to fall into one stable configuration or another. It might begin to cohere into a global representation of two separate spots of light and then get pulled into another pattern supporting consciousness of motion with midway color change, perhaps under the influence of what Dennett aptly calls content-sensitive settling. I" In such a case, would the presence of the initial pattern constitute a momentary consciousness of two separate spots or not? I don't see that the question has a clear answer nor that the phenomenal realist is committed to giving one. What's true is that had that pattern stabilized and been retained for a sufficiently longer duration, it would have constituted a phenomenal awareness of two distinct spots. In more typical cases, longer durations and stable patterns underlying more complete phenomenal experiences would be the norm. If the neural basis of phenomenal representation involves getting disparate representations to cohere or "bind" in relatively stable and mutually cross-activating ensembles-as some theorists have recently suggested,o-then it should come as no surprise that degenerate phenomenal states result when insufficient time is provided to produce the requisite global patterns. Nor do we need to decide whether such instances count as degenerate cases of conscious experience or as cases of near consciousness. In summary, it seems that once P-realism is distinguished from full-blown Cartesian materialism and its commitment to the Cartesian Theater metaphor, the claim of premise P I is no longer plausible; P-realism does not entail that the Orwell-Stalin distinction has clear application in every case of phenomenal consciousness. Dennett's claim with respect to premise P2 is, not merely that the Orwell-Stalin dispute is unresolved with respect to all the evidence we have at present concerning color phi, but that it will remain unsettled no matter what future evidence we might ever get.: 1 He tries to prove this strong negative existential claim by considering various types of evidence that might seem to favor one interpretation over the other and showing in each case that the evidence is compatible with both. He claims that the distinction would make no difference to either the behavior or the reports of the subjects and that how things seem from the first-person perspective also would not differ. Regardless of whether the subjects briefly experience two spots and then immediately forget doing so (Orwellian) or they experience only one moving
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spot from the start (Stalinesque), it will still seem to them that they saw just a single moving and color-changing spot, and that's what they will report. Typical of the evidence he discusses and rejects is the need for a time delay on the Stalinesque view. Remember that in the color phi experiments the interval between the presentation of the red and green spots was 200 msec. Since red spots are not always followed by displaced green spots, how can the brain "know" that it should "insert" experiences of spots at intermediate positions and a midtrajectory color change until after the green spot has registered? Barring precognition it would seem that the only way to achieve the result would be to delay constructing any conscious experience for at least 200 msec. Thus the brain would be able to register the green spot before any consciousness of the red spot occurred and the necessary adjustments could be made to produce a conscious experience of motion and color change. But as Dennett notes, there does not seem to be any room for the requisite time delay.22 Subjects asking to press a button as soon as they see a red spot have the same reaction time when responding to a red spot followed by a green spot as they do to a red spot presented alone. Nor, Dennett argues, could there always be a built in 200 msec. delay since the reaction time in both cases occurs with the near minimum latencies that physical science allows given the speed of signal propagation on the upward and downward paths in the nervous system. Thus it would seem that Orwell wins out over Stalin-but not so. Dennett rightly observes on the Stalinist's behalf that the button-push response need not result from a conscious experience of a red spot but could instead be produced by an unconscious registration of the 20 stimulus. It is possible for a subject to react selectively to a stimulus before becoming consciously aware of it. Thus the fast reaction times do not rule out a possible universal time delay in onset of conscious experience. The Stalinist is able to parry the evidence and protect his position. First-person evidence might seem to provide better prospects for resolving the dispute, but Dennett claims that it is equally unable to do so."-I As noted just above, he claims that the Orwellian and Stalinesque cases would feel just the same to the experimental subjects. I assume he means things would feel the same to an Orwellian subject post facto, i.e., after the memory revision had been made following the initial experience of two spots. It would seem that on the Orwellian account things would not seem the same during the very brief period before the memory revision. The difficulty is that the prerevision experience of two distinct spots would be too brief to allow the subject to attend to it and generate a report. But that supports the claim that things would feel the same to both sorts of subjects only if one makes the ability to generate a report criterial for having had a conscious experience. There is a long history in Dennett's writing going all the way back to Content and Consciousness and explicitly stated in Brainstonns that tightly links consciousness and reportability.25 Though it is often hard t'o provide an alternative measure of consciousness in experimental
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contexts, the general equation seems doubtful in both directions. It seems easy to imagine conscious episodes in the absence of reportability-as in infants or nonlinguistic animals. Nor does the ability to report on a mental state non inferentially or otherwise guarantee that the state was a conscious one in the sense that it involved an experiential component. In some cases we may just be able to say what nonconscious states we are in. One could of course stipulatively define conscious mental states as just those of which we are conscious as evidenced by our ability to noninferentially report on them, but doing so would not seem to adequately capture our intuitive notion of consciousness. If we reject the equation between conscious experience and reportability, then contrary to Dennett's claims first-person evidence may provide a basis for saying there is a fact of the matter about whether the modification was preconscious (Stalinesque) or postconscious (Orwellian). It may be a matter of fact that is difficult if not impossible to detect in the experimental situation, but if there is for even a brief period a difference in how things feel to subjects in the Orwellian case, that should be enough to say there is a fact of the matter about which one is correct. To argue that there cannot be a fact of the matter unless there is a practice we can put in place that will actually resolve the dispute is to embrace an especially strong and especially implausible form of verificationism. Dennett nonetheless embraces a closely related position he terms firstperson operationalism which as he puts it "brusquely denies the possibility in principle of consciousness of a stimulus in the absence of the subject's belief in that consciousness.,,26 Indeed if one takes the ability to report having the experience as criterial for having the requisite belief (as Dennett seems inclined to do), then first-person operationalism collapses into the equation of reportability with consciousness. Dennett mocks an imaginary opponent of first-person operationalism as speaking nonsense: Opposition to this operationalism appeals, as usual, to possible facts beyond the ken of the operationalist's test, but now the operationalist is the subject himself, so the objection backfires: "Just because you can't tell, by your preferred ways, whether or not you were conscious of x, that doesn't mean you weren·t. Maybe you were conscious of x but just can't find any evidence for it!" Does anyone, on reflection, really want to say that? Putative facts that swim out of reach of both "outside" and "inside" observers are strange facts indeed.';
Having duly reflected I want to say that I do not find it impossible that there should be facts about a subject's experience that he or she is unable to report on or provide evidence of in a way that could resolve questions such as the Orwell-Stalin dispute. As I hope to have shown just above, if one rejects an absolute equation of reportability and consciousness, as I believe one should, there can be facts of the matter about experience that cannot be empirically detected. There may be a briefly transient fact about how experience is for
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the subject, but if the duration of that experience is insufficient to fix a belief or generate a report, it will systematically elude detection. What can be determined given the limits of our belief formation and reporting abilities does not determine the limits of what can be the case metaphysically. I am willing to grant that the two come apart only in extreme cases such as that of color phi in which the durations are so short, but it is Dennett who wishes to focus on those limiting cases. They are the ones he needs to make his argument that the phenomenal realist cannot apply his distinctions everywhere his theory supposedly requires him to do so. Moreover, though such episodes are undetectable at present, future theoretical discoveries regarding the neural basis of consciousness may provide a means to verify their existence. Phenomenal realists believe there are important structural and functional differences between mental states with phenomenal properties and those without, and I have elsewhere tried to cK suggest what some such differences might be. Phenomenal states, for example, seem to play an especially privileged role in the initiation of intentional behavior: though perceptual information present without phenomenal consciousness-as in blindsight patients-can be elicited by indirect measures, it does not lead to the initiation of voluntary actions even when its content would make such action appropriate. On the structural side, phenomenal states typically involve highly integrated representations that incorporate multimodal information and rich networks of connections among interrelated items in the represented scene or situation. The sort of global integrated fields posited by Marcel Kinsbourne that I mentioned above might provide a possible neural basis for such representations. Future theory development may follow a co-evolutionary pathway as complementary lines of research jointly and mutually refine our functional and neural models of phenomenal states. The primary data for such theories would concern states that have much longer durations than those involved in the Orwellian account of color phi. But having used such data to determine what neural structures and processes underlie normal phenomenal consciousness and to establish explanatory connections between those underlying elements and phenomenal features, it might be possible to determine by neural monitoring whether even for a very brief interval the brains of color phi subjects were in neural states that would constitute the phenomenal experience of two distinct nonmoving spots before a memory revision occurred. If so, there is the possibility of third-person theoretically grounded neural evidence that could be used to settle the Orwell-Stalin dispute. Dennett will of course reject the possibility of any such theoretical developments. Given his commitment to first-person operationalism, the notion of transient states of consciousness in the absence of beliefs about their occurrence is incoherent. However, the phenomenal realist who does not understand consciousness solely in terms of higher-order beliefs and reportability but rather understands it in terms of phenomenal or experiential
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properties and representations should justifiably reject first-person operationalism, as I argued above. If it is rejected, then the path remains open at least in principle to the sort of theoretical developments tying phenomenal states to their neural bases that could provide clear third-person evidence about which interpretation best fits a given subject's experience with respect to color phi. It is time to sum up. Where does Dennett's argument stand in light of the objections raised above? I certainly have not shown that phenomenal realism is correct and the MDM is false. I have discussed only one of his many intriguing examples, and even in that case I have not shown that future research will in fact provide the evidence needed to resolve the Orwell-Stalin dispute for color phi. But in terms of the dialectic of the debate between Dennett and the phenomenal realists, J don't really need to do either of those things. Given the radical nature of his proposals and the verificationist nature of his argument, it is Dennett who bears the positive burden of proof. It is he who aims to show that much of what others seek by way of explaining consciousness is a search after illusory and impossible features, and he tries to do so by claiming that no future evidence of any sort could resolve the Orwell-Stalin dispute in cases such as that of color phi. In response I hope to have shown at least two things: First, that phenomenal realism need not be committed to applying the Orwellian-Stalinesque distinction in cases such as color phi, and, second, that even in the color phi case future evidence to resolve the dispute may be possible if one rejects first-person operationalism as phenomenal realists surely do. Of course Dennett raises many other examples in support of the MDM; Consciousness Explained is a philosophical tour de force and pretty much unparalleled in its richness of examples. But the color phi case is not just one among the many; it illustrates perhaps most clearly the verificationist mode of Dennett's attack on phenomenal realism. and ifthe objections raised above against that particular argument are as cogent as I hope they are, then I think there is reason to doubt in general that Dennett has made a convincing case for the impossibility of the views his more realist opponents hold. However. there can be no doubt that he has shifted the terms of the debate: critics of his theory can no longer just assert that it leaves out the phenomenal or qualitative aspect of mind; P-realists are clearly now required to back up their claims that there are any such features that get left out on intentional theories such as Dennett's; they can no longer take the existence of such features for granted as just plain obvious. In that respect alone, Dennett's book must be regarded as a major milestone in the contemporary philosophical discussion of consciousness. But having shifted the terms of the debate is not the same thing as having won it. and as I hope I have shown above, the phenomenal realists still have lots of arrows to shoot in defense of their demand for a thicker theory of consciousness. The debate has been changed but it's far from over.
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NOTES I. The major stages in this developmental process can be found in Content and Consciousne.l"s (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969); "Intentional Systems," Journal o/Philosophy 68 (1971): 87-106; Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Montgomery, Vt.: Bradford Books, 1978); The Intentional Stance (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. 1987); and Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co .. 1991). 2. See his "True believers," in A. F. Heath, ed., Scientific Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981),53-75. Reprinted in The Intentional Stance. 3. See his "The Message Is: There Is No Medium," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 919-31, esp. 919. 4. Dennett seems to accept such a self-categorization in 'The Message Is: There Is No Medium." 923. Earlier supporting evidence can be found in the introduction to Brainstorms, esp. xx. where he describes himself as a homuncular functionalist about some mental states and an eliminativist about others. 5. See Consciousness Explained. esp. chs. 5 and 9. 6. See, for example. the last paragraph of "The Message Is: There Is No Medium." where Dennett states. "Consciousness is cerebral celebrity-nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere. that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and 'symptomatic' effects----{)n memory. on the control of behavior and so forth" (929). 7. In Consciousness Explained he writes, "Postulating a 'real seeming' in addition to the judging or 'taking' expressed in the subject's report is multiplying entities beyond necessity. Worse. it is multiplying entities beyond possibility" (134). 8. See, for example. Ned Block's review of Consciousness Explained in the Journal of Philosophy 90 (1993): 181-93 and the papers by Michael Tye, Frank Jacbon, and Sidney Shoemaker in the symposium on Dennett's book in PhilosophY and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993). In developing my own critical views of the MDM I have benefited from all four of the above reviews. 9. Dennett has taken this tack both in Consciousness Explained and in replying to critics of his book as in "The Message Is: There Is No Medium." 10. ] have expressed these reservations earlier in brief fonn in "Time for More Explanations" which appeared as a commentary on 'Time and the Observer" which Dennett coauthored with Marcel Kinsbourne, both of which appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 ( 1992). In their reply Dennett and Kinsbourne claim that my objections rely upon a distinction between what's phenomenally conscious and what isn't that can't be drawn. a matter about which 1 will have more to say in this paper. II. In "The Message Is: There Is No Medium," 920. 12. See CO/lsciousness Explained. esp. 132 and 461. 13. See Consciousness Explained, esp. 107- 11. 14. I borrow the tenn phenomenal realism from Michael Tye, "Reflections on Dennett and Consciousness," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 983-7. 15. See Consciousness E.xplained. esp. ch. 5, and "Time and the Observer." 16. Reservations on this point are also expressed though not elaborated by Sydney Shoemaker in "Lovely and Suspect Ideas," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 909. 17. I also make this point in "Time for More Explanations." 18. See Marcel Kinsboume, "Integrated Field Theory of Consciousness." in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds., Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988),239-58. 19. Consciousness Explained, 152.
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20. See. for example, Hans Flohr, "Brain Processes and Phenomenal Consciousness: A New and Specific Hypothesis," Theory and Psychology I (1991): 245-62; and Francis Crick and Christof Koch, "Towards ii Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness." Seminars in the Neurosciences 2 (1990): 263-75. 21. "Both models can deftly account for all the data-not just the data we already have. but the data we can imagine getting in the future" (Consciousness E'p/ained, 124). 22. Consciousness Explained, 121-2. 23. Ibid., 122-3. 24. Ibid., 123-5. 25. See, for example. his distinction between aware, and aware, in ContenT and Consciousness, ch. 6, and "Toward a Cognitive Theory of Consciousness." in Brainstormr, which links conscious states with the contents and outputs of a speech center or "public relations office." 26. Consciousness Explained, 132. 27. Ibid., 132-3. 28. In "What Difference Does Consciousness Make?" Philosophical Topics 17 (1989): 211-31, and in "Understanding the Phenomenal Mind: Are We All Just Armadillos?" in M. Davies and G. Humphreys. eds .. COllsciousness: A Mind and Language Reader (Oxford: Basil BlackwelL 1993). 137-54.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 22 ~O. I & 2, SPRING AND
FALL
1994
Witnessed Behavior and Dennett's Intentional Stance 1
Stephen Webb Rutgers University
A professor is sitting in her office; her keys are in front of her on the desk. A friend of hers knocks on the door, and she gets up to answer. The friend asks the professor if she would like to go to lunch. The professor responds, "Sure-just let me get my keys," and turns toward her desk. The friend sees the keys, which are clearly visible on the desk, which is directly in the professor's line of vision; and he naturally assumes that the professor knows that they are there. But the professor doesn't see them and asks: "Now, where did I put them? They must be around here somewhere ...." Occurrences like this are fairly common; depending on what one's friends are like, one might say that such things happen every day. But Daniel Dennett's theory of intentionality-which he calls "the intentional stance"faces a number of difficulties in attempting to account for such events. Dennett has not yet offered any account of how to incorporate behavioral evidence into the intentional stance; it is my contention that attempting to do so while maintaining a coherent view will comer Dennett into a position not to his taste: either a fairly radical irrealism concerning intentionality or a position indistinguishable from logical behaviorism. The fundamental structure of my paper shall thus be to argue, first, that the intentional stance, if it does not consider behavioral evidence, will make drastically incorrect intentional attributions; and, second, that the most obvious methods of incorporating behavioral evidence lead to some
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undesirable position. Two other issues must be cleared up before I can present Dennett with this dilemma, however: We need to look at Dennett's position concerning the metaphysical status of intentional states, and at Dennett's account of intentional attribution under the intentional stance.
I The first issue we shall consider, prior to presenting the dilemma facing the intentional stance, is the ontology inherent in Dennett's account of intentionality. I propose studying the intentional stance by looking only at the method of attribution for intentional states; one might wonder why so much effort should be exerted in investigating this area. To philosophers proposing any realist account of the nature of intentional states, how we know which intentional states a system possesses would indeed be an important question; but it would be an epistemological question, not one that need be answered by the theory of intentionality. But according to Dennett, to know how to attribute intentional states, and how to use the states attributed to predict behavior, is to know all there is to know about intentionality. This can be seen clearly in a definition of belief Dennett offers: (x)(x believes that snow is white == x can be predictively attributed the belief that snow is white).:
"Predictive attribution of beliefs" (as well as of desires) is then given a specific interpretation in terms of the intentional stance. This is why Dennett's actual account of attribution is important: He equates the intentional state really possessed with the intentional state attributable according to a certain method, namely the intentional stance. He claims that the existence or nonexistence of an intentional state is determined by its attributability or lack thereof, given a certain method of attribution working from a specific evidential base. This last qualification merits further comment. Dennett equates belief possession with belief attributability according to a specific plan. It is important to see that this does not rule out the use of other methods of attribution--only their primacy. Once the favored method of attribution is specified, determining which intentional states are possessed (as far as this is determinate), a user of the intentional stance can go on to use whatever alternative methods of attribution he pleases: Gallup polls, horoscopes, divine revelation-whatever works. Some of these methods will be effective, others virtually useless; but there is a definitive standard against which they may be measured. Their effectiveness as strategies of intentional attribution will, on Dennett's view, be a direct function of their matching the attributions of the intentional stance.
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The next order of business is to investigate Dennett's presentations of the intentional stance. He has presented it many times in his assorted writings; and each presentation is at least slightly different from the rest. However, he has given one account preeminence: that in "True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works," which he calls "the flagship expression of my position."l I shall therefore focus on the position developed in that article. The intentional stance, as Dennett describes it, attributes to a being every belief and every desire it ought to have. Dennett considers two classes of beliefs an intentional system ought to have. The first of these is the class of all the important facts the system has been exposed to: "[A]ttribute as beliefs all the truths relevant to the system's interests (or desires) that the system's experience to date has made avai1able."~ The second class of beliefs a system ought to have is some class of the logical consequences of the beliefs it previously had. Once we have attributed one set of beliefs to an intentional system. we can also attribute to it some of the logical consequences of those beliefs. Just which consequences we are to attribute is left unclear; certainly Dennett does not think that all logical consequences will be attributed. Even if the set of beliefs attributed by the first set is finite, the set of its logical consequences will be infinite. But Dennett does not even think that the second method-logical consequences-leads to vel)' many of our beliefs. He actually estimates that "less than ten percent" of our beliefs are so acquired." In discussing the desires intentional systems ought to have, Dennett considers three classes. The first is the class of "basic goods" or "fundamental desires"; this class he specifies through examples, naming "survival. absence of pain. food, comfort, procreation, and entertainment:,6 The second class of desires an intentional system ought to have is the class of desires deduced by reason. As was the case with beliefs, we can attribute desires on the basis of logical relations. Furthermore, the derivations can be a bit more complex, since our beliefs can combine with our 7 desires in dictating other things that we (should) desire. The third class of desires one ought to have is of a different sort and is of particular interest to the current discussion: In this one case, the intentional stance does call for consideration of witnessed behavior in making intentional attributions. The third class of desires is that of desires which may be attributed on the basis of linguistic (behavioral) evidence. As Dennett puts it: The interaction between belief and desire becomes trickier when we consider what desires we attribute on the basis of verbal behavior. The capacity to express desires in language opens the floodgates of desire attribution. >
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Dennett says very little else about this method of attribution; he instead proceeds to argue that the desires which we attribute based on linguistic evidence are ones which the agent could not have had except for having had language. The theory faces a blizzard of difficult questions at this point; for instance, one would have liked Dennett to have made clear just how we recognize utterances which call for desire attributions and how we know (based on what we hear) which desire to attribute. For the moment, however, we can ignore these issues and only need to keep in mind one fact about Dennett's proposed method of intentional attribution: It does allow for the attribution of desires based upon the evidence of linguistic behavior. Strangely, having thus considered the role of verbal behavior in attributions of desires, Dennett makes no mention in "True Believers" of desire attribution on the basis of nonverbal behavior and no mention of belief attribution on the basis of either verbal or nonverbal behavior. Furthermore, immediately after this passage, Dennett appears to deny that there are any other methods of attribution for beliefs or desires than the five methods discussed above: "There may someday be other strategies for attributing belief and desire and for predicting behavior," he says, "but this is the only one we all know now."9 That other mechanisms should fail to make this list is hardly surprising, given Dennett's initial description of intentional attribution: "[Y]ou figure out what beliefs the agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have. on the same considerations."lo The only things one is "given," from which to figure out the intentional states a system ought to have, are "its place in the world" and "its purpose." Thus the intentional stance, as Dennett has described it in his "flagship" presentation of his theory, does not allow consideration of most witnessed behavior in making intentional attributions. Elsewhere, I have attempted to show that Dennett never. throughout his writings. amends his method of intentional attribution so as to include behavioral evidence. I I My present constraints of space do not allow me to rehearse this work; and in any case, it is of little consequence to the main point of this paper. There are, to be sure, ways to interpret Dennett's words as allowing the use of behavioral evidence. I, I believe that most readers have interpreted him in some such way, and not without reason; in many places Dennett's words appear to require consideration of behavioral evidence, although none of these passages hint at how consideration of such evidence could actually be incorporated. I' In any case, I do not need to defend my reading; my chief task is that of demonstrating the difficulties faced by the intentional stance, whether or not it attempts to incorporate witnessed behavior.
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II I believe that even brief consideration will show that the intentional stance simply cannot do without intentional attributions on the basis of witnessed behavior. If it does not incorporate such evidence, those who adopt it will be forced to maintain wildly implausible intentional attributions. This can be seen from the example with which I began this paper: The professor who has lost her keys. What will the intentional stance say about her? After she has said that she wants her keys and has looked at her desk, her friend will attribute to her the beliefthat the keys are on the desk; after all, this is a belief she "ought to have, given her place in the world and her purpose." That makes sense: We would in fact attribute such a belief to her. Then she wonders aloud where her keys are. If the friend continues to follow the intentional stance, he must continue to attribute to her the belief that the keys are on the desk. The intentional stance calls for belief attribution solely on the basis of facts the agent is exposed to. with some extra beliefs added by virtue of being conclusions easily derived from other beliefs; and even after she starts asking where her keys are, the professor continues to be exposed to a relevant fact: that the keys are on the desk. Therefore, she believes that her keys are on her desk, and indeed she will have more specific beliefs along the lines of "My keys are right there, on my desk, in front of my nose!" These are strange beliefs to be attributing to someone whose behavior you presumably want to describe and explain as unsuccessful key-searching. We should pause for a moment to notice just what sorts of evidence the intentional stance appears to exclude. As noted above. Dennett does allow that linguistic evidence is useful in the ascription of desires. The ascriptions licensed are also all "positive" ascriptions, in the sense that they add new ascriptions to those which can be attributed on the basis of what the system (speaker) ought to desire. A "negative" ascription would be one which retracted a previous ascription. Two kinds of evidence (verbal and nonverbal), licensing two kinds of ascription (positive and negative), for each of two kinds of intention (beliefs and desires), make eight varieties of behaviorbased intentional ascription; of which Dennett recognizes one. The example of the professor's keys demonstrates that we need to be able to make negative ascriptions of beliefs on the basis of witnessed verbal behavior. It is an easy matter to construct examples illustrating that behavioral evidence is relevant to intentional ascriptions in the remaining six cases as well, but I leave this exercise to the reader. I hope that it is clear already that if the intentional stance does not allow corrections of this sort, it will frequently call for implausible attributions of intentional states. Dennett has previously faced objections that the intentional stance will make implausible attributions. I.) In response, he has admitted that the
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intentional stance occasionally fails to present a coherent explanation of the behavior of (usually) intentional systems, but he has also claimed that such failures of the intentional stance occur only in those cases in which folk psychology faces similar difficulties. In the important cases, he claims, folk psychology and the intentional stance posit the same beliefs, desires, and reasoning processes to explain the same behaviors. IS This will not do at all as a response to my objection, however. Folk psychology frequently calls for unambiguous intentional attributions which can only be made on the basis of witnessed behavior. For example, the beliefs attributed by folk psychology don't break down at all in.the story of the professor's keys. Our folk analysis is that she did not believe that her keys were on her desk, not that we can't really say whether she believed they were there or not. There may be a kind of breakdown in some other area; for example, a difficulty in describing what exactly the professor did see. But the breakdown is not at the level of beliefs attributed.
III So, for the intentional stance to give plausible answers, it will need to be self-correcting on the basis of behavior. Readers of Dennett have typically assumed that his account does allow for such corrections, and perhaps the relative plausibility of this view counts in favor of their interpretation. But Dennett cannot overcome these problems simply by saying that the intentional stance calls for some intentional attributions on the basis of observed behavior. His whole view rests upon having a more or less specific proposal concerning intentional attribution. Unfortunately, the only readily apparent specific proposals to incorporate behavioral evidence lead to some rather prickly difficulties. My plan shall be to develop two main lines along which it seems plausible that Dennett might develop the intentional stance so as to incorporate behavioral evidence, and to show that each of these lines of development encounters various problems. The two paths of development differ in their specifications of how much behavior-and of what sort-is to be included. The first proposal T shall consider incorporates actual behavior; the second includes counterfactual behavior as well. But before considering these plans, Tneed to mention two boundaries on the evidence I am considering for inclusion into the intentional stance; and before considering these boundaries, I want to discuss briefly reasons Dennett should want to place any limits whatsoever on the evidence to be incorporated. The reason some limits will have to be placed on what sort of evidence is relevant to the official intentional stance assignment of intentional states
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is that the existence of each intentional state is supposed to be determined by the evidence we have (or could get) for it. The more varieties of evidence which are considered, the more difficult it will be to specify the system of intentional attribution; if the varieties of evidence are unlimited, the task of (finitely) specifying the method of attribution will be impossible. Now. as mentioned above, once he has specified how the intentional stance worksand has thus specified what intentional states are-Dennett is as free as any other theorist of intentionality to encourage the de facto use of any sort of evidence whatsoever for the attribution of intentional states. The disadvantage of using such evidence is that even if one uses it perfectly, one risks attributing the wrong intentional state; whereas when one uses only the official intentional stance and does so perfectly, one does not risk error. This is so because Dennett's view is that intentional states are possessed in virtue of being attributable according to the intentional stance. So Dennett need not comment on the varieties of evidence which may be epistemologically useful in attributing intentional states; but he needs to select a limited range of evidence which will be used in the intentional stance itself, and which will therefore be determinative of intentional state possession. In order to specify a method of attribution, one must be able to delimit the evidence upon which attributions may be based. And only insofar as he is able to specify the method of intentional attribution does Dennett have an account of what intentional states are. This is why there must be boundaries on the evidence considered by the intentional stance. We are now ready to specify the two particular limitations I take these considerations to warrant. The first of these is a minimum requirement: If a body of behavioral evidence is to be worked into the intentional stance. it must be a body of all evidence available in principle. That is. the intentional state really possessed must be the one which would have been attributed on the basis of all evidence available in principle. In a certain sense, this works against one of the goals of the intentional stance: Ideally, since the intentional stance is fundamentally a method of prediction, In only behavior which was actually witnessed should be considered. But it would be absurd to think that the beliefs and desires which people actually had depended upon whether anyone was watching them. Imagine someone who has never smoked cigarettes before but has decided to start, and who has written a shopping list which includes "Carton of cigarettes" as an entry. If the intentional stance were to allow the consideration of witnessed behavior in attributing intentional states. but were to restrict itself to the behavior actually observed, then whether or not this person wanted cigarettes could depend upon whether or not anyone had read his shopping list. The intentional stance needs to base some of its intentional ascriptions on behavior available only in principle.
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The second required boundary to the body of evidence which must be considered is a restrictive boundary: namely, that any behavior the intentional stance considers must be displayed at the surface of the systems in question. I say this to rule out responses which try to solve Dennett's troubles through consideration of "internal behavior," such as neuronal activity, in addition to external behavior. 17 Admittedly, it does seem likely that complete knowledge of a system's brain state would be sufficient in principle for attributing it the correct mental state, at least if we put worries about externalism to one side. If nothing about the physical state of my body and environment could have shown that I believed that p, then presumably I did not believe that p. So one might think that the intentional stance could be extended so as to include neurophysiological facts in its ideal evidential base. But this approach is plainly not open to Dennett. Rather than solving the problems of the intentional stance, it would amount to its death. To see this, it is important to notice (again) the distinction between evidence which may be used in practice and evidence which is determinative. On Dennett's view, like any other, we can use any evidence we please to help us decide which intentional states to attribute. But to Dennett, some body of evidence is determinative of the existence of the intentional states. And Dennett cannot include neurophysiological evidence in this determinative evidential base. Neurophysiology is the study of the design of one of the body's chief organs: the brain. If Dennett were to include brain states in the determinative evidential base of intentional states, the intentional stance would not be another strategy of predicting behavior at a more abstract level than the design stance; it would be an instance of the design stance. The advantage of the intentional stance was supposed to be that it picked out a pattern of behavior at a level more abstract than that of the system's design: the above proposal would show that intentional states were, in the end, no more abstract than design states. So if Dennett wants to maintain that there is an intentional stance, the attributions of that stance must be made on the basis of evidence intentional systems manifest at their surfaces.'~ Having noted these boundaries on the evidential base, we can proceed to develop a specific plan according to which the intentional stance could incorporate the evidence of witnessed behavior into its intentional attributions. I shall consider first a natural line of thought which restricts itself to the behavior actually exhibited; the upshot of this plan is a kind of radical irrealism concerning intentional states. This plan-which I shall call Plan One-begins by deciding to incorporate all behavioral evidence available in principle into the intentional stance. An intentional state is thus defined as whatever intentional state would be attributed on the basis of the intentional system's environment and exhibited behavior, where the "exhibited behavior" is to include all and only the behavior which (actually) occurred prior to the attribution. (I shall call this the "First Pass" at Plan One.)
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This characterization runs into trouble with intentional attributions made at different times. Consider again the example of the professor's keys. When we assumed that intentional attributions made under the intentional stance could not be influenced by any behavior the system had exhibited, it appeared that the friend would attribute the belief that the keys were on the desk both before and after the professor asked where they were. This First Pass allows the friend to correct his attribution; once he hears the professor ask where her keys are and sees her searching for them, he is able to attribute the lack of belief that the keys are on the desk. But it is entirely plausible that before the professor started asking about her keys, the friend made the same attribution he would have made on the basis of all evidence available in principle. Perhaps the correct intentional attribution~onsidering not only the professor's environment but all of the behavior she has exhibited so far in her life-is that she believes her keys to be on the desk. If this is the case, even this extension of the intentional stance will call for attributing to the professor the belief that her keys are on the desk, until the instant she starts asking where they are. But to Dennett, this is just the same as saying that she believes that her keys are on the desk until she starts asking where they are, and at that instant stops believing it. This is an implausible story, to say the least. A way to repair the view, however. is not far to seek. The difficulty for the First Pass arises because '"what the professor believes" is just another way to say "the beliefs the intentional stance says you should attribute." Thus the professor's beliefs change precisely when the opportunities for attribution change; and this leads immediately to unattractive consequences. But a step toward differentiating the two could be made simply by adding appropriate indices in order to differentiate beliefs on the basis of their time of attribution. I shall call this indexed version the Second Pass at Plan One. The Second Pass, and its differences from the First Pass, can best be illustrated through use of an example; so consider again our professor and her keys. Pick an instant after she has said that she wants her keys but before she has asked where they are, and call this instant til: pick an instant shortly after she has asked where her keys are, and call it fl' The argument against the First Pass was that it didn't stop positing the belief that the keys are on the desk until the professor started looking for them. But for explanatory purposes, the belief needs to be absent before it becomes proper to posit its absence. In terms of the instants we have picked out: at to, the First Pass posits the belief-at-to that the keys are on the desk; and at fl' the First Pass posits a lack of the belief-at-t l that the keys are on the desk. The First Pass allowed us to correct our attributions when (but only when) we obtained the evidence licensing the correction; so we got the result that the professor stopped believing that the keys were on the desk precisely when she started asking where they were.
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Having introduced these temporal indices, however, one can see how to improve the method of intentional attribution so as to avoid the problem which crippled the First Pass. In fanning a behavior-observing version of the intentional stance, we need to let intentional ascriptions change, not just simultaneously with, but retroactively to the receipt of new behavioral infonnation. To distinguish between time of attribution and time of belief, two indices will be needed: an index for time of belief attribution, and another for time of belief possession. This shall be the Second Pass, and it works as follows: At any given time tl' the intentional stance gives an answer as to what beliefs and desires to attribute to each agent at each time to' When it does call for such an attribution, it calls for the attribution of a belief-at-toattributed-at-t l or for a desire-at-to-attributed-at-t]. It is perfectly possible to have a belief-at-to-attributed-at-t] while lacking a belief-at-to-attributed-at-t2 : that is what will allow for corrected attributions. Consider again our running example: At to (i.e., an instant after the professor has said that she wants her keys but before she has asked where they are), the proper attribution of current intentional states includes the belief that the keys are on the desk; thus the professor has a belief-at-toattributed-at-to that the keys are on the desk. At tl (i.e., an instant shortly after she has asked where her keys are), the proper attribution of intentional states at til does not include the belief that the keys are on the desk; thus it posits a lack of belief-at-to-attributed-at-t l that the keys are on the desk. These indices would make a rather untidy addition to the intentional stance. It is an apparent-but strange-consequence of the Second Pass that it fragments every "belief' into an infinity of beliefs-at-a-momentattributable-at-various-times. (The belief-at-to-attributed-at-t l will be a distinct entity for each of continuously many tu's and for each of continuously many tl 's.) Perhaps the burden of these indices is worth bearing. since their use allows us to avoid the massively counterintuitive results of the First Pass. But the Second Pass has further difficulties of its own. Most significantly: It is a drastically irrealist proposal and faces the difficulties faced by all drastically irrealist accounts of intentionality. This can be seen by reiterating our original question: What did the professor believe at t e,? One option in answering this, I suppose, is to say that there is no answer; that at each moment tl there is an answer as to which beliefs you can attribute to the professor at to, but none of these are authoritative. This account is irrealistic to such an extent that it clashes violently with our ordinary usage of intentional language. We want to be able to say that the friend was mistaken at to when he attributed the belief-at-to that the keys were on the desk. But this way of interpreting the Second Pass provides no obvious way of capturing this claim. A second option is to select one of these attributions as definitive: to choose a t" such that the professor had a belief-at-to(full stop) just in case she
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had a belief-at-to-attributable-at-t". But choosing this til is not as easy as one might hope. Since the revelatory behavior could occur arbitrarily long after the moment of belief, til will have to be much later than to: perhaps not until the death of the agent or even later-maybe the mere metaphysical possibility of resurrection draws things out indefinitely. But in any case, tn will have to be after t", and just how long after is relatively unimportant. However small the gap may be, its existence opens the possibility that an agent's intentional states at a time do not depend upon anything in the world up to that time. Since it is at least possible that our world is not deterministic, it may not be determined at t" whether or not evidence for the belief will ever be elicited. If this occurs, the belief possessed at to will not depend upon things which have occurred as of to' There might be, as yet, no fact of the matter as to whether the professor believes her keys are on the desk-although it could tum out tomorrow that she did believe they were after all or that she did not. That is, this second interpretation leaves it possible not just that tomorrow's events could show us what she believes today but that tomorrow's events could determine what she believes today. By my lights, this is a radically irrealistic account of intentionality. 19
IV Maybe these difficulties suggest that the evidential base proposed in Plan One was insufficiently broad. Dennett might attempt to avoid these various irrealist difficulties by saying that the intentional states people actually have are determined by their behavior in counterfactual as well as actual situations. Let us call the extension of the intentional stance which allows consideration of counterfactual behavior "Plan Two." The case of the professor's keys, for example, can be sorted out via counterfactual analysis. The professor does not believe that her keys are on the desk when the friend knocks because if the friend had then asked where the keys were, the professor would have responded that she did not know. If only the friend had had this counterfactual information, he could have made the correct prediction of the professor's behavior. If Dennett were to adopt this counterfactual analysis, it would require quite a bit more work. What I have called Plan Two isn't really a single plan; it specifies neither which counterfactuals are to be admissible nor how they are to be worked into the intentional stance. The project of fixing these parameters within a recognizably Dennettian program appears difficultindeed, on this approach, the intentional stance seems to drop out of the picture.
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I have heard it said that Dennett wants to be a behaviorist without being a behaviorist;'!) and it is here that Dennett risks giving up the intentional stance in exchange for the logical behaviorist dispositional account. I shall not offer a full-fledged argument for this here, but the general difficulty is that, for purposes of determining which intentional state is possessed, counterfactual behavior would almost certainly swamp any other evidence one could procure. If the belief an agent actually has is the one I would attribute to him if I knew (among other things) how he would behave in any counterfactual situation, then the agent's actual behavior, environment, and even design are going to be of little importance in making my intentional attribution. The counterfactual behavior wilL by itself, militate for one intentional attribution (indeed, greatly overdetermine that attribution) in virtually every case in which we think there is a correct intentional attribution to be made; and it is hard to see how the counterfactual evidence could fail to trump any other sort of evidence. should the two. disagree. Furthermore, it seems plain that any difference between "how one would behave in various counterfactual situations" and "how one is disposed to behave" is purely verbal. And so, on Plan Two, the intentional stance would become the view that a belief is (the attributability of) a disposition to behave in a certain way. And here we are on the well-trampled ground of logical behaviorism.
v Dennett's account of intentionality thus faces some rather serious problems. The intentional stance is centered around an account of intentional attribution. Intentional states are identified with the attributions called for by this theory: Dennett thinks that the whole story about beliefs is that they are attributed by a certain specific useful method for the prediction of behavior. Therefore, difficulties faced by Dennett's method of intentional attribution will be difficulties fundamental to his theory of intentionality. One requirement apparently faced by any method of intentional attribution which purports to be complete is that it call for the attribution of some intentional states on the basis of witnessed behavior. The intentional stance, as presented so far. offers no method for considering evidence of this sort; and there is no obvious way that it could coherently do so without collapsing into either radical irrealism or logical behaviorism.
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NOTES I. I am indebted to Gene Witmer. Brian McLaughlin, Frances Egan, Jerry Fodor. Barry Loewer, Christopher HilL and Daniel Dennett for many helpful suggestions: and. rather more profoundly, to Stephen Stich, for the continual. extensive criticism and encouragement he has given since the paper's inception. 2. Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT PresslBradford Books. 1978). xvii. See also Dennett, The intentional Stance (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT PresslBradford Books, 1987).50. 3. Dennett, The Intentional Stance. 3. 4. Dennett, 'True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works," in A. F. Heath. ed., Scientific Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1981). Reprinted in Dennett. The Intentional Stance, 19. 5. "True Believers." in The Intentional Stance, 17-19. 6. Ibid., 20. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 21. 10. Ibid., 17. II. Stephen Webb. "Dennett Never Said You Could Do That," ms. 12. For example. Dennett used to say that his account was a kind of instrumentalism concerning intentionality. (See. e.g .. Dennett, The Intenrional Stance. 52-3, 60.) When one imagines fleshing out such an account. one imagines that witnessed behavior will function crucially. But Dennett has recently said that the lahel "instrumentalism" is really rather inappropriate. and therefore asks us to ignore the unclear label and judge him on his position (Dennett. "Real Patterns." journal of Philosophy 88 (1991): 27-51. esp. 51). I have attempted to take him at his word. 13. See Dennett. Brainstorms. 18-21: Elhm.. · Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press/Bradford Books. 1984). 26. 30, 31: The Intentional Stance, 84-5. 100.237-86. esp. 248. 251. 252n. 271. Dennett also suggests. in a number of places, that behavioral evidence is relevant for determining whether, or to what extent. an agent is an intentional system. See Dennett. Content and Consciollsness (London: Routledge and Kcgan Paul. 1969). 75: Brail1srorms. 9-12. 238-9: The Intentional Stance, 21-5.32.84-5: "Real Patterns:' 47. But this is not what is needed either. 14. See especially Stephen Stich. "Dennett on Intentional Systems." Philosophical Topics 12 (1981 ): 39-62. IS. In Dennett, "Making Sense of Ourselves," Philosophical Topics 12 (1981): 63-81. (Dennett's response to Stich's "Dennett on Intentional Systems.") Reprinted in Dennett, The Intentional Stance. See esp. 84. 87 of the reprint. 16. The relative roles of explanation and prediction assumed hy the intentional stance are certainly still a matter of debate. In the official account of "True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works," the intentional stance is simply called a "predictive strategy" (see Dennett. The Intentional Stance. 15). This claim may be tempered slightly by Dennett's more recent claim that our ability to interpret action as intentional "depends upon" our ability to predict behavior (Dennett. "Real Patterns:' 29). 17. Such a plan sounds very foreign to Dennett's approach. but it was once advanced by Dennett himself as (he way out of difficulties concerning intentional attribution. See Dennett. Content and Consciollsness, 39-40. 18. Note added in proof. The point isn't so much that the intentional stance collapses to the design stance, as that it collapses to functionalism, which is the received view to which the intentional stance supposedly provides an alternative. The issue of consideration of internal and external behavior by those adopting the intentional stance is explored in much greater depth by Brian McLaughlin and John O·Leary-Hawthorne. "Dennett's Logical Behaviorism." this issue.
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19. One might disagree with my terminology-after an, which belief is possessed really is determinate, at least eventually. whether or not anyone can ever find out which way it was determined. But surely there are few who would disagree that such a view was strange and unattractive. 20. This quip has recently found expression in print. Bo Dahlbom writes that Dennett has spent his career advancing one message: behaviorism. (Bo Dahlbom, ed., Dennett and His Critics [Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993]. 4.) Similarly, P. S. Churchland and V. S. Ramachandran speak of "the background behaviorist ideology that is endemic in Dennett's work from the very beginning" (HFiliing In: Why Dennett Is Wrong," in Dahlbom, op. cit., 48). Dennett, in his response to their articles, mentions that they have called him a behaviorist and agrees "that there is a historical justification for the label"; nevertheless, he says, it is "a label I abhor" ("Back from the Drawing Board," in Dahlbom, op. cit., 210).
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 22 NO. 1 & 2. SPRING AND
FALL
1994
Color and Notional Content
1
Stephen L. White Tufts University
Those who, like Daniel Dennett, favor a broadly functionalist approach to qualia face a perennial challenge: Such an approach seems ill-equipped to account for the subjective character of the mind. Whereas functionalism has seemed to many promising as an account of the representational properties of experience, such qualitative features as what it is like to see something red appear to elude functional characterization. The response that Dennett has done much to make plausible takes content as more fundamental than consciousness and looks for an account of qualia in tenns of content.' This response, however, is open to serious objections, and the success of such an account will depend on the details of its application over a wide range of issues. In what follows I offer an account of this kind for color experience and attempt to address a number of the objections that have been raised.
1. THREE PROBLEMS FOR INTENTIONALISM REGARDING QUALIA Sitting in an outdoor cafe, you glance at a blank wall across the street. The wall fills your visual field and appears a unifonn shade of red. What is it in virtue of which you have an experience as of something red?
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According to one account, the wall's being red is (roughly) its being disposed to look red, or to produce an experience as of its being red, in normal observers under normal circumstances. This account has at least two attractive features. First, in making the color of an object depend on its tendency to produce a particular response in suitable subjects, it makes color a secondary quality of the object. And the assumption that the color of an object is a function of how it looks is a natural one; the notion offool's gold is clearly intelligible, whereas the idea of an object's being fool's red-that is, of its being indistinguishable in color from red objects under normal circumstances without being red-is less obviously coherent.' Second, on this account there is no need to make sense of experiences having color properties, as there would be if a red object were one that was appropriately disposed to produce a certain kind of qualia. All the account requires is that we make sense of experiences having certain representational properties. And this we are committed to doing in any case. Call such an account of color an intentionalist seconda1}' quality account. And call an account of qualitative experience according to which qualitative properties supervene on intentional properties intentionalism regarding qualia. This account has a disadvantage, however, that may seem fatal. For the wall to be red is simply for it to be disposed under appropriate circumstances to look red or to produce experiences as of its being red. But for an experience of the wall to be as of its being red is simply for the content of the experience to be that the wall is red. We seem caught in an obvious circle. There are, on the face of it, three ways out of the circularity. We might pin the concept of redness down on the subjective side by supposing that there are qualitative properties of experiences that are independent of their representational properties and that they are also either independent of the color properties of objects or related in a way that avoids the circularity issue. We could then characterize an object as red just in case it has a disposition to produce experiences (under appropriate circumstances) with the appropriate qualitative content thus understood. This would be to abandon the second advantage of the intentional secondary quality account of color. Call this the qualitative content strategy. Alternatively, we could pin redness down on the objective side. We could suppose that the content (i.e., the broad content) of 'is red' consists in a physical property that could be specified independently of any subjects' experiences. Call this the objective strategy. This strategy has advantages and disadvantages of its own. But since I shall be concerned primarily with accounts of the subjective experience of color, I shall consider it only in conjunction with such accounts. The third strategy is to deny that the circularity is vicious. That we can only characterize the general notion of belief by using the notion of desire and can only characterize the content of any particular belief or desire by
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reference to the contents of many other particular beliefs and desires has not seemed problematic. So it might be claimed that no problem is raised by the fact that we can define 'is red' only by using 'experience as of red' and vice versa. Call this the holistic strategy. The circularity problem and the available strategies are well known. Ned Block has proposed a variation on this problem. however. that makes the holistic strategy look distinctly unpromising: Recall the experience of seeing the red wall. Block asks what the content of the experience is that makes it an experience as of something red rather than an experience as of something green. To be sure, our beliefs about the color red-for example, about its extension or our past experiences of it-are very different from our beliefs about green. But in Block's version of the problem you are to imagine that just prior to looking at the red wall you suffer amnesia with respect to your color experiences and beliefs. Thus there is no descriptive content that could distinguish this experience as of a red wall from an experience as of a green one. And in the absence of any such descriptive content. it is difficult to see how the characterizations of 'red' and 'experience as of red' could fail to be viciouslv circular. Another way to see the problem with the holistic strategy is this. To be a particular belief (arguably) is just to be related in appropriate ways to other beliefs and desires (as well as perceptual inputs and motor outputs). And the beliefs and desires referred to in the characterization can only be characterized in the same way. What saves these holistic characterizations from vacuity is the fact that the circles of intentional terms are large and the fact that they are governed by a priori constraints on the coapplication of such terms. The combination of a priori constraints and large circles ensures that any set of states that purport to be beliefs and desires must instantiate a large and highly structured network of relations. Thus there is reason to suppose that these characterizations of particular beliefs and desires will involve enough content to fix an appropriately determinate extension. That is. that. besides distinguishing beliefs from desires and intentional from nonintentional states. these characterizations will distinguish each belief from every other. And we will have grounds to hope that in so doing they will preserve our most important pretheoretical intuitions. Where color ascriptions are concerned there is no analogue of this strategy. In the case of the amnesiac who has forgotten his or her color beliefs. the circle of expressions 'is red' and 'an experience as of something red' could hardly be smaller. and there is no adequate analogue of the constraints that govern the ascription of intentional terms. Of course, the same object (allegedly) cannot be. and cannot be seen as. completely red and completely green at the same time, colors can be categorized along the dimensions of hue. saturation and brightness. and so forth.' But it seems clear that adding these constraints to the intentionalist version of the
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secondary quality characterization of color properties cannot provide the content that would distinguish red from green. In other words, the holistic characterizations of beliefs and desires seem to involve enough content to define the relevant notions; for colors the opposite is true. I shall call this problem of Block's the content problem. Block's response to the problems for the holistic strategy combines aspects of both the qualitative content strategy and the objective strategy. Block's position, like the qualitative content strategy, entails that our experiences have qualitative properties that do not supervene on their representational properties. The objective strategy provides Block's account of the content of 'is red' in the public language." But if the objective strategy works to give us the content of 'is red' in the public language, then as far as the content problem is concerned, we could employ this strategy by itself and avoid any commitment to qualitative properties of experience. Block's second argument, however, is an argument against intentionalism regarding qualia and thus is designed to show that a commitment to qualitative properties is unavoidable. Block imagines a planet, Inverted Earth, that is a near perfect physical duplicate of Earth and its inhabitants, except that the actual colors of things are the complements of their colors here. The midday sky is yellow and sunsets are greenish blue. The color inversion is accompanied by an inversion of the color words. The word 'blue' denotes the color yellow, the word 'red' denotes green and similarly for the rest of the color vocabulary. The net result is that the inhabitants of Inverted Earth assent to the same sentences we do, for example, 'the sky is blue'. What they mean in doing so, however, is different. Imagine now that you and your identical twin are born on Earth and have no counterparts (i.e., duplicates or near duplicates) on Inverted Earth. Though you remain here, your twin is immediately fitted with inverting lenses that reverse colors and their complements and is transported to Inverted Earth to be raised by the counterparts of your parents. (Your twin's body pigments must, of course, be changed so that he or she will appear normal on Inverted Earth.) Block claims that since your twin's lenses cancel the differences in your perceptual inputs, you and your twin's experiences will have exactly the same qualitative properties, or, in his terminology, have the same qualitative contents. And Block's claim about this intersubjective case is supported by the following intrasubjective possibility: If you were given inverting lenses and a skin pigment change and substituted for your twin, you would never notice the difference. Though the qualitative contents of your and your twin's color experiences are identical, their intentional contents, according to Block, will differ. When, for example, you both look at the sky, you both have an experience in virtue of which you are both disposed to assent to the sentence 'The sky is (and looks) blue'. The intentional content of your experience, however, is
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that the sky is and looks blue, whereas the intentional content of your twin's experience is that it is and looks yel/ow. This is intuitively plausible since your and your twin's experiences both represent the sky as being a certain way-one that we could convey as the way things are that are correctly described using the term 'blue'. But, as we have seen, 'blue' on Inverted Earth does not mean what it means here, namely, blue; it means yellow. Thus 7 the intentional contents of the color experiences are reversed. The Inverted Earth example is intended to refute the claim that the qualitative content of an experience is identical with its intentional content. Here we have two subjects whose experiences have all the same qualitative properties, and hence the same qualitative content, but different intentional contents. Thus the identity claim fails. But though the Inverted Earth example rules out the identity claim, a difference in intentional content with no corresponding difference in qualitative content is compatible with the following weaker claim: that there cannot be a difference in qualitative content without some difference in intentional content-i.e., that qualitative content supervenes on intentional content. Block points out, however, that an extension of the example undermines x this claim as well. Imagine that both you and your twin are looking at the sky. Since your twin is wearing the inverting lenses, your experiences have the same qualitative contents and different intentional contents. Now imagine that your twin turns to look at a lemon while you continue to look at the sky. Since lemons on Inverted Earth are blue, your experience and your twin's are experiences of the same color and have the same intentional contents in all relevant respects. But because your twin's lenses invert the actual colors, the two experiences differ in their qualitative contents. Thus, according to Block, qualitative content cannot supervene on intentional content. As Block recognizes, the argument against intentionalism that stems from the Inverted Earth example depends on a specific conception of intentional content: content as truth conditions, where for statements about color these are determined by the primary qualities of the external colored objects. In other words, for the purposes of this example, intentional content must be understood as broad content. Block acknowledges that the argument will not work against an intentionalist account that appeals to a notion of narrow content-that is, to content that is "inside the head" and shared by all func9 tional and/or physical duplicates. Since you and your twin are functional and physical duplicates under many relevant descriptions, your intentional states could have the same narrow contents as your twin's, even though their broad contents differed. But though this concession of Block's might seem to indicate a gap in his argument, the content problem and the Inverted Earth example can be seen to work in tandem. The Inverted Earth example shows that broad content cannot explain the qualitative content of experience. And the content problem purports to show the same for narrow content. It is
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narrow content that seems to be missing as a result of the lack of any descriptive content that could distinguish red from green. As Block says, "it is not hard to see that the "narrow content" of looking red and looking green must be the same.,,10 A fortiori, for Block, the narrow contents of 'is red' and 'is green' are identical as well. Block's argument against intentionalism is strengthened by the third problem he raises for such an account, the four-stage intrasubjective spectrum inversion. I I Stage I: A normal subject experiences colors in the usual way. Stage II: The subject experiences an intrasubjective spectrum inversion. During this period the subject is disposed to say that the sky looks yellow, that lawns look red, and so on. Stage III: The subject's use of color terms has returned to normal. The subject says that the sky is blue and (under normal circumstances) that it looks blue. The subject does. however, remember that to him or her things used to look different. Stage IV: Gradually the subject's memories of the earlier color experiences fade. Stage IV begins when the last memory is extinguished. This raises the following problem for the intentionalist. Block claims that at stage IV the qualitative content of the subject's experience is inverted relative to stage L This is because at stages I-III the subject can report that an inversion has taken place. and the only difference between stage III and stage IV is that the subject loses some memories. The underlying intuition is that a reinversion of one's qualitative experiences could not consist in the loss of memories alone. However, at stages I and IV the subject is functionally equivalent (in all relevant respects). Thus. on the assumption that the subject's intentional states supervene on the functional states. there is a qualitative content to experience that cannot be explained in terms of intentional properties. Block's third problem strengthens his overall position in three respects. First. the four-stage intrasubjective inversion example gives Block not only the conclusion that there is no intentionalist account of qualia but that there is no functionalist account. Functionalists might grant the former claim while pointing out that there can be functional states that are not intentional states and proposing a functionalist but nonintentionalist account of qualia. The inversion example rules this out. Second. the four-stage inversion example. if it works, rules out the narrow content response to the Inverted Earth example. The version of the latter example in which you look at the sky and your twin wearing inverting lenses on Inverted Earth looks at a lemon involves a qualia difference without any (relevant) broad content difference. The four-stage inversion example. however. involves a qualia difference without any (relevant)functiona! difference. And on the assumption that narrow content supervenes on
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functional makeup, we have a case not only of the nonsupervenience of qualia on broad content but of the nonsupervenience of qualia on narrow content. Third, those who are skeptical about qualitative properties of the kind Block defends can respond to the Inverted Earth example by denying that intersubjective qualia comparisons are meaningful. The four-stage inversion example explicitly shifts the focus of debate from the intersubjective to the intrasubjective realm. Moreover, the conclusion can be strengthened still further if we notice not only that stages I and IV are functionally equivalent but that there are no physical or environmental differences that could plausibly account for an intentional difference of any kind. Thus Block can claim to have shown the nonsupervenience of the qualitative on the intentional without assuming that the intentional supervenes on the functional. Block's three examples work together, then, to provide a strong argument against either an intentionalist or a functionalist account of qualia and against an intentionalist secondary quality account of color. J'
II. INVERTED EARTH AND THE INVERTED SPECTRUM Let us begin with Inverted Earth. Consider the example in which the normal subject on Earth (NS) looks at the sky and her Inverted Earth counterpart (INS) looks at a lemon. Block's claim is that in this case the color experiences of NS and INS have the same intentional content but different qualitative content. This is because they are both in the presence of things that reflect or transmit blue light. Let us assume now for the sake of simplicity that reflecting or transmitting light of a certain wavelength is the objective feature that distinguishes blue things. Then if the intentional content of a term is determined by the objective characteristics of the objects to which it applies, NS's predicate 'is blue' and INS's predicate 'is yellow' will have the same intentional content. However, though they both receive light of the same wavelength, the light that INS receives is inverted. Thus for INS the color experience is what she would have on Earth looking at a lemon without her lenses. Therefore, the qualitative content of her color experiences and of NS's will differ. We must claim, on the other hand, that unless there is some difference in intentional content there is no difference in the qualitative properties. Let us consider the following account in terms of what I shall call the filekeeping metaphor. Suppose that NS goes to Inverted Earth and INS (without having her lenses removed) goes to Earth; they will both say that lemons on Inverted Earth look the same color as the sky on Earth. We can make the situation more concrete by making the following assumptions. Assume that the sky on Earth transmits blue light, which has a wavelength in band B. For
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NS, light in band B triggers receptors of type B, and the images that result are filed in file B, which is associated with the word 'blue'. For INS on Inverted Earth, light in band B is reflected by lemons, is inverted by the lenses, and triggers receptors of type Y. The resulting images are filed in file y, which is associated with 'blue' by INS. When NS goes to Inverted Earth (without having any lenses inserted), lemon images will be filed in file B along with images of the Earth's sky. And when INS goes to Earth (without having her lenses removed), the image of the sky will be filed in file Yalong with images of lemons from Inverted Earth. (See diagram 1. Subscripts have been added to disambiguate the color words and the colored objects.) The upshot, as we have seen, is that both will say that the sky on Earth and lemons on Inverted Earth look exactly alike in color. And once they have recognized the differences in their languages, they will apply the same color terms to the color-i.e .. 'blueE ' and 'yellowlE:' Indeed, they will make all the same judgments regarding color similarities and differences and the application of the color vocabularies. The facts on which NS and INS agree are relational facts: facts about the similarity structure that holds between colors as they are experienced by each subject. But what about the fact that NS sees the Earth's sky through the operation of the same receptors and files that operate in INS when she
DIAGRAM 1 NS 'BLUE E' 'YELLOW IE '
FILE B
RECEPTOR TYPE B
NO LENSES
SKY E' LEMONS IE , OTHER THINGS REFLECTING LIGHT IN WAVELENGTH BAND B
• •
• •
• •
• •
'YELLOW E' 'BLUE 1E '
FILE Y
RECEPTOR TYPEY
NO LENSES
• • LEMONS , SKY , OTHER
E 1E THINGS REFLECTING LIGHT IN WAVELENGTH BAND Y
INVERTING LENSES
SKYE' LEMONS IE , OTHER THINGS REFLECTING LIGHT IN WAVELENGTH BAND B
INS 'BLUE E' 'YELLOW IE '
FILE B
.><. • •
'YELLOW E' 'BLUE IE '
FILE Y
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RECEPTOR TYPEB
.><. • •
RECEPTOR TYPEY
INVERTING LENSES
• •
LEMONS E, SKY IE' OTHER THINGS REFLECTING LIGHT IN WAVELENGTH BAND Y
White, Stephen L., Color and Notional Content , Philosophical Topics, 22:1/2 (1994:Spring/Fall) p.471
sees lemons grown on Earth? We seem to have no choice but to say that NS sees blue things the way INS sees yellow things and yellow things the way INS sees blue things-in other words, that their color experiences are reversed in absolute value. There is a second and even more intuitively persuasive argument for the same point. If INS were to remove her lenses at some time t, blue things would look to her the way yellow things had looked before t, and similarly for the other color complements. Since INS after the lenses are removed is physically just like NS, this seems to show that before t INS's and NS's color experiences were reversed. The second argument is one that I shall consider shortly in connection with Block's four-stage intrasubjective inversion problem. The answer to the first argument is implicit in the file-keeping metaphor itself. On this account, the facts concerning color experience simply are the relational facts on which NS and INS agree; there are no absolute values that could be reversed as between NS and INS. Thus it is important that we think of the images themselves as uncolored. On this model, a subject's having an experience as of something's being red is a matter of an image's appearing in a certain file, not of that image's being red itself. Moreover, the difference between the files in question is no more significant intrinsically than the difference between two computer addresses. Nor should we suppose that there is any significant difference between the receptors or the channels connecting the receptors and files, apart from the differences in the receptors' range of physical sensitivities. And these differences are cancelled by INS's inverting lenses. INS's inverting lenses in combination with her receptors of type Y provide the same range of physical sensitivity as NS's receptors of type B, and similarly for her combination of lenses and receptors of type Band NS's receptors of type Y. Of course there are physical differences between INS's lens and receptor combinations and NS's corresponding receptors. But the reason for supposing that these physical differences do not constitute a qualitative difference is twofold. First, as I shall argue, the contrary assumption has no explanatory value. A system that functions according to the filekeeping model would have all the same capacities that we have. Second, the assumption that qualitative properties could consist in these kinds of physical differences seems incoherent. The second point is one for which I have argued at length elsewhere. [3 But it is unnecessary to rehearse that argument here, since Block's examples purport to force the intentionalist regarding qualia to embrace the qualitative properties that he champions, and the present argument is merely designed to show that they do not. An intentionalist account of color experience will only be plausible, however, to the extent that there is an answer to the following argument. When INS's lenses are removed she will undergo an intrasubjective inversion that will make her qualitative experiences identical to NS 's. Thus. while her
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lenses are in, her experiences and NS's must be inverted relative to one another. Thus there is more to qualitative experience than a relationalist account incorporating the file-keeping metaphor can allow. This argument leads directly to Block's four-stage inversion example. Let us interpret the example in the file-keeping terms that we used in describing NS and INS. There are two types of receptors: those of type 1 triggered by light at the red end of the spectrum (wavelength band R) and those of type 2 triggered by light at the green end (wavelength band G). As before there are two channels and two files that correspond to memory functions; we can think of them as preserving the history of images received by the type 1 and type 2 receptors. Now consider each of the four stages in the light of the metaphor. At the first stage images of sunsets are produced among the subject'S type 1 receptors, transmitted over channel I, and stored in file I. Similarly for images of shrubs and hedges, receptors of type 2, channel 2, and file 2. Moreover, the system associates the expressions 'red' and 'looks red' with images that appear in file 1, 'green' and 'looks green' with images that appear in file 2. We are assuming again that the images are uncolored and that there is no (interesting) intrinsic difference between file 1 and file 2; the system has no access to the wavelengths of the light to which the type 1 and type 2 receptors are sensitive. All it has access to is the fact that images of sunsets are consistently stored in one file and images of shrubs and hedges in the other. At the second stage images of shrubs and hedges begin to show up in file 1, sunsets in file 2. (We can think of this as a result of the channels being crossed. Channel 1 now goes to file 2 and channel 2 to file 1.) Ordinarily this would signal that the things in question had changed color, since 'red' is now associated with shrubs and hedges, but the subject quickly eliminates this possibility. The subject, nonetheless, continues to associate 'appears red' with images in file 1. At the third stage the subject's use of language has returned to normal and he or she associates 'red' and 'appears red' automatically with things whose images appear in file 2. The system still has access, however, to the fact that the kinds of images that once appeared in file I now appear in file 2, and conversely. If we can think of the images in the files as dated, then for dates up to the beginning of the second stage, the images in file I will include sunsets but not shrubs, and for later dates the converse will be the case; the opposite is true for file 2. And in virtue of the system's having access to this information, the subject can still say that red things now look (to him or her) the way green things looked in the past and vice versa. At the last stage the images in each file that predate the inversion at the beginning of the second stage are erased.
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To see the force of the relationalist perspective on the inversion example. we should notice a number of points. As I have already claimed. a subject whose capacities were explained by a system of this sort could do anything we could do. But the file-keeping metaphor provides detailed support for the claim. In addition to being able to discriminate red from green objects on the basis of the files, he or she could discriminate red objects from those that merely looked red. Red objects would appear in one file under normal circumstances but not necessarily under abnormal ones. Objects that merely looked red would appear in that file under abnormal conditions but not under a full range of normal ones. And, as we have seen, such a subject could discriminate between a change in the colors of objects themselves and an intrasubjective qualia inversion. Collateral information would establish that the way the objects looked to the subject was not the way they looked to others. Thus it would overturn the assumption that a change in the way the objects looked to the subject was an indication of a change in the objects themselves. What about our apparent ability to report our experience in a sense datum vocabulary rather than the vocabulary of external properties and events? To the extent that this ability is one that any account must accommodate, this one seems to do so. The system in question (and in virtue of the system, the subject) has access to information that determines which part of a uniformly colored surface is in shadow and which is not; in a version of the system with a large number of different types of receptors and a corresponding number of channels and files, the image of each part will be stored in a different file. Nonetheless, the content ofthe complete perceptual experience for the subject will be that the parts of the surface in and out of shadow are the same color. This representational content consists in part in the subject's disposition to treat shadows differently from colored patches on the wall. The subject, for example, is not disposed to try to remove a shadow by altering the surface on which it is cast and will not try to cover it with another object. Nor does the subject expect it to remain fixed if the object casting it is moved or to retain its size and shape if the relation of the object to the light is changed. Similar points apply to highlights, though the subject will expect them to move in response to his or her movements. And since highlights will trigger different receptors from those triggered by their surroundings, for at least some purposes, they will be filed differently. Again. however, the subject will see the object on which they appear as uniform in color. Similar points could be made about the subject's ability to distinguish between the size an object is represented as having by a subject's perceptual experience and its phenomenal size as characterized by the number of retinal receptors triggered by the object. And receptor fatigue will cause images to be filed that are a function of the subject's past history and not the actual state of the subject's perceptible environment.
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Thus our ordinary ability to recognize and describe the phenomenal aspects of our experience can be accommodated. That we have such an ability is relatively uncontroversial given our facility in acquiring the techniques of representational painting. But it does not follow from this account that there could be qualitative distinctions that do not supervene on representational distinctions. Shadows, highlights, and afterimages. for example, all produce areas of impoverished content where the representation of the more objective features of our visible environment is concerned. Of course, if we considered a more complex model with a large number of receptor types, channels, and files, we would almost certainly need to postulate an analogue structure among the files. Such a structure would account for the similarity relations among colors in perception and memory. the fact that some colors seem to be composed of others, the fact that colors seem to vary along a number of dimensions, and so on. Similarity among memory images. for example, would consist in similarity among the files in which those images were stored. This in tum might consist in the fact that relative to some method of access, some files were "closer" to each other than others and thus more likely to be mistaken for each other. And such an analogue structure seems to cohere well with the basic intuition behind the relationalist account. On this model, then. the subject at the final stage is not interestingly different from the subject at the first stage. This is exactly the conclusion that functionalists and intentionalists regarding color experience need and that Block denies. For the antirelationalist like Block, it seems clear that at no stage before the final one has a reinversion taken place and that such a reinversion could not consist in a loss of memories alone. Thus it seems clear that at the final stage the subject must be inverted relative to his or her stageone self. On the file-keeping interpretation, however. it is equally clear that the last stage culminates in a subject who is psychologically identical (in all relevant respects) to his or her earlier self. The only difference between the subject at the first and final stages is that objects whose images used to be filed in one location are now filed in a different one. And we are assuming that there is no intrinsic significance in the location. Indeed, a subject who had been wired from birth in the way the inversion subject is wired at the final stage would not strike us as in any way different psychologically from a subject wired at birth as the inversion subject is at the initial stage. Nor, on this account, would there be a psychological difference; what we would have would be trivially different physical realizations of the same psychological makeup. Thus. although the relationalist may (as we shall see shortly) want to redescribe the sequence of stages in the inversion example, he or she has no difficulty in seeing how the sequence as a whole could "add up" to a reinversion.
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III. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF REINVERSION The relationalist response to Block's four-stage inversion problem goes some way toward dispelling the feeling that functionalism could not possibly give an adequate account of an experience of inversion. But not the whole way. A commitment to antirelationalism is sufficient to generate skepticism about the functionalist account of the example, but it is not necessary. Imagine that one is in principle not unsympathetic to a relationalist account but is puzzled by the following fact. The intrasubjective inversion has a very distinct phenomenological component. Even if there is no such thing as what it is like to experience red in the absolute sense, there is something it is like to experience the apparent reversal of the familiar color properties. Why, then, is the subject's return to the state in which he or she started not accompanied by a symmetrical experience of the inversion of the colors? After alL we have no difficulty in making sense of the perception of differences in the quality of our experience. And since we experience a difference in the way we perceive red objects when the inversion takes place, should we not be suspicious of the fact that there is no comparable perception of differences in our experience in the process that returns us to our original state? Indeed, it may be this thought that drives antirelationalism and not the converse. We can imagine what it would be like to experience an intrasubjective inversion, and whether our experiences are inverted relative to an earlier state seems to involve more than just the presence or absence of memories. To see whether relationalism can accommodate this intuition, let us reanalyze the process of inversion and reinversion in more detail, substituting five stages for Block's four. (See diagram 2.) At stage 1 we can again think of the subject as having two receptor types, 1 and 2, two files for the storage of images, and two color predicates, 'red' and' green'. Receptors of type 1 are triggered by the cover border of Time magazine, which reflects light in wavelength band R, those of type 2 by the cover of the Irish Sporting Gazette, which reflects light in wavelength band G. As a result, images of Time and the Gazette are stored respectively in file I, associated with the word 'red', and file 2, associated with the word 'green'. At stage I, then, which ends at the beginning of week 1 on Sunday at 12:01 AM, file 1 contains only images of Time and file 2 of the Gazette. (We can imagine for simplicity's sake that, the magazine SUbscriptions aside, the subject lives in the chromatic equivalent of Proust's cork-lined room.) Stage 2: The channels from receptors of type 1 are rerouted to file 2 and from type 2 to file 1. The image of the latest copy of the Gazette then appears in file 1 and the latest copy of Time in file 2. As a consequence the subject believes that the magazines have changed colors. Stage 2 lasts just as long as it takes the subject to realize that the change is actually an intrasubjective qualia switch.
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DIAGRAM 2 STAGE 1
'RED'
FILE 1
RECEPTOR TYPE 1
TIME
-- -- -- --
,.... TIME, ISSUES
TIME
w PRIORm
PERIOD UP TO WEEK 1, SUN, 12:01 AM
'GREEN'
FILE2
RECEPTOR TYPE 2
GAZETTE
iL WEEK 1(W1)
STAGE 2
'RED'
FILE 1
RECEPTOR TYPE 1
TIME
,.... TIME, ISSUES w ....I PRIORmW1
TIME
iL GAZETTE,W1
GAZETTE GAZETTE
-- -><- - -
WEEK 1 SUN, 12:01 AM TO WEEK 1 SUN, NOON 'GREEN'
FILE 2
RECEPTOR TYPE 2
GAZETTE
STAGE 3
FILE 1
RECEPTOR TYPE 1
TIME
WEEK 1 SUN, NOON TO WEEK 8
STAGE 4 WEEKS TO WEEK 16
STAGE 5 PERIOD FROM WEEK 160N
'RED'
-:><-><-- - - -
--
'GREEN'
FILE 2
RECEPTOR TYPE 2
GAZETTE
'RED'
FILE 1
RECEPTOR TYPE 1
TIME
-:><-><-- - - -
--
'GREEN'
FILE 2
RECEPTOR TYPE 2
GAZETTE
'RED'
FILE 1
RECEPTOR TYPE 1
TIME
- - - -
-><-><'GREEN'
FILE 2
RECEPTOR TYPE 2
GAZETTE
....I
iL WEEK 1(W1) N
GAZETTE
GAZETTE ISSUES
w ....I PRIORm
N
GAZETTE ISSUES
w ....I PRIOR TOW1 iL TlME,W1
TIME TIME
TIME, ISSUES ~ PRIORTOW1 iL GAZETTE. W1-8 N GAZETTE. ISSUES ~ PRIORTOW1 iL TIME. W1-8 ,....
,.... TIME. ISSU ES
w PRIORTOW1 ....I iL GAZETTE. W1-16 N
GAZETTE. ISSUES w PRIORTOW1 ....I iL TIME. W1-16
GAZffiE. ISSUES
GAZETTE GAZETTE TIME
iIIIiI
TIME
I
GAZETTE GAZETTE TIME GAZETTE
AFTERW1
TIME, ISSUES
TIME
AFTERW1
Stage 3: At this stage the subject is disposed to say that the covers of Time are red and that in nonnal circumstances they look red_ But it is equally true that the subject is disposed to say that the (postinversion) covers of Time are and look green_ The subject has in fact two distinct kinds of dispositions. The one (indicated in the diagram by the gray line) connects 'red' and Time and thus, by extension, any postinversion image in file 2. This I shall call the considered di.sposition. It is based on the subject's overwhelming evidence that the colors of external objects remain unchanged. It is this disposition that governs the way the subject actually responds if asked either about the colors of objects or about the way they look. The other disposition, which we might call the spontaneous disposition, is based on the
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strength of the association, which still persists, between 'red' and file I. 'green' and file 2. The spontaneous disposition is more basic than the considered disposition in that it would emerge if the evidence or the arguments that support the considered disposition were forgotten. Stress, computational overload, or damage to the system would also reveal the more basic, spontaneous disposition. This is analogous to the way in which they would reveal the disposition to see the Mtiller-Lyer lines as being unequal in length, a disposition that stands behind the disposition to say that their length is the same. The disanalogy, of course, is that we can say that the lines look unequal. Because the inversion subject's spontaneous disposition is idiosyncratic, however, this locution is unavailable as a way of giving public expression to the disposition. It is not even clear that "Time looks green to me" is an apt expression of the disposition. Indeed there may be no way of expressing the spontaneous disposition publicly, short of a description of the intrasubjective inversion. For our purposes, however, the interesting transition is from stage 3 to 4. It is in this transition that the dispositional links between words and files change in such a way that the spontaneous disposition comes to link 'red' and file 2. This is a change that must take place if the example is to be one in which there are no relevant functional differences between the first and last stages. Thus it cannot be charged that a version of the example with this feature is inappropriate because it poses a less difficult challenge to relationalism than would some other version. What. then, could the change from the considered to the spontaneous links between 'red' and file 2, 'green' and file I consist in? One possible source of such a change is simply the increased number of associations between the words and the respective files as new images of the things that are actually red and green continue to appear in files 2 and I respectively. We can think picturesquely of images of Time replacing those of the Ga::ette in file 2 and the converse in file 1. (See diagram 2.) Since the subject's actual use of 'red' (before and after stage 2) links it consistently to Time, the process by which most of the images of Time come to be in file 2 and most of the images in file 2 come to be of Time could in itself be a strong force in reversing the spontaneous links. Apart from the changes in the relative percentages of images of each type in the two files, there are other possible processes that could bring about the reversal of the spontaneous links. If the subject's mental operations tended to involve the most recent images, this would provide another possible mechanism for the reversal. As an example of the kinds of mental operations that might be involved, consider the request that one imagine something red. Suppose that at least part of what is involved in imagining a red object is the self-stimulation of parts of the system of receptors that would be activated in the normal perception of such an object. I. Assume that in the ordinary case the system does this by going to the receptors linked to
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the file associated with the word 'red'. At stage 3, however, there are two such files and two such sets of receptors. How, then, should one carry out the request? Think of yourself as the inversion subject, and suppose that a relative wants you to remember the house in which you were born and which you have not seen since childhood. This person says, "Imagine the house next door, but red." Since the idea is to produce an image that will trigger a memory image of the house, you should (at stage 3) follow the spontaneous link from 'red' to file 1, since it is file I that contains the images of red things viewed prior to the inversion. Suppose, on the other hand, that a psychologist friend asks you to imagine a red object while looking at a screen. One of the possibilities is that red images will appear on the screen, and the experiment is designed to measure the interaction of perceptual and imaginative processes involving color. Since you want to maximize the chances that the experiment will succeed, you do what involves following the considered link from 'red' to file 2 and then stimulating the associated set ofreceptors-the set (type I) currently stimulated by red things. The increase in the number of operations of the latter sort, then, would be another possible mechanism tending toward the reversal of the spontaneous links. Both processes, however, are merely examples of the kinds of mechanisms that could account for the reinversion. The claim is not that any particular mechanism must be realized but that there must be some mechanism underlying the reinversion. And as we have seen, the reinversion must take place if the example is to have the relevance for functionalism that Block claims for it. The dispositional and computational sources of the spontaneous links described so far between color words and files have two features. First, the links are subpersona1. Second, they are multiple and heterogeneous. At the subpersonallevel, then, we could well imagine them shifting slowly and gradually over time. Our goal, however, is to describe the phenomenology of the reinversion. And at the phenomenological level the description might be quite different. At this level it seems more plausible to think of something less like a gradual change and more like a gestalt switch. We could, for example, imagine the subpersonal changes remaining unconscious until they reach a critical point at which the spontaneous links are reversed. Alternatively, we can imagine a sequence of gestalt switches in which the reversed state lasts longer and longer until it finally becomes permanent. And obviously this account allows for a number of other possibilities. This still leaves open, however, the question of what the reinversion is like. But the answer is implicitly contained in the requirement that the spontaneous links reverse themselves. After the switch it must seem natural to apply the term 'red' to things whose images appear in file 2 rather than file 1, and this must be one's most basic disposition. Imagine, for example, that following a two month period of calling fire engines 'red' only after resisting
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the temptation to call them 'green', one wakes up one morning and finds it natural to call them 'red'. And imagine that as before one does call them 'red' but that now one does so with complete spontaneity. In fact, one will find it difficult to imagine how one could have been tempted to call fire engines 'green' the day before---even though one will easily recall thefact that one was. This is because in the transition from stage 3 to stage 4 the change does not involve the loss of any memories but rather it involves their phenomenological status. At stage 3 it is the memory images of Time magazine before the inversion that appear in the file (i.e., file 1) that one spontaneously associates with 'red'. And it is current perceptual images of Time that appear in the file (i.e., file 2) that one associates with 'red' only by way of a considered judgment. Thus at stage 3 it is the (preinversion) memories that seem natural and the perceptual experiences alien. At stage 4 this is reversed. At the beginning of stage 4, then. one's memories of the preinversion issues of Time will seem as unbelievable and as alien as one's perceptual experiences seem immediately after the inversion. And this shows that there is an important sense in which the process of reinversion is independent of memory loss. The substance of the reinversion occurs between stages 3 and 4 and thus entails no memory loss whatsoever---even though the reinversion is complete only with the transition to stage 5, by which time some memory loss must have occurred. Indeed, after the transition to stage 4 one will have to force oneself not to say that one remembers Time magazine looking green before the inversion, just as one had to force oneself, immediately after recognizing that an inversion had taken place, not to say that Time looked green. And the reason one censors oneself in this way is the same in each case-'looks x' is a locution in the public language, and nothing on the external side has changed. What one remembers is Time looking the way it has always looked, and that can only be red. Thus the fact that at stage 4 one has a spontaneous disposition to call all the things in file 1 'green' and all the things in file 2 'red' coexists wi th considered links between 'red' and some of the contents in file I and 'green' and some of those in file 2. One knows that for the preinversion images in file 1 the spontaneous disposition leads to error, just as at stage 3 one knew that for postinversion images in file 1 the application of the term 'red' would be erroneous. Therefore one quickly develops a considered disposition to call the things with preinversion images in file I 'red' and those with such images in file 2 'green'. Hence the symmetry indicated in the diagram; not only do the spontaneous links reverse but the nonspontaneous links reverse as well. There is one further aspect of the symmetry between the phenomenology of the inversion and the reinversion. If the first colored objects that the subject sees after the inversion could be either red or green, then there is likely to be a period immediately after the inversion during which the subject
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makes mistakes in color ascriptions. And in the process of reinversion there is likely to be the following paralleL When the inversion takes place one learns to compensate for the inaccuracy of one's spontaneous dispositions by applying the term for the complement of the color one is immediately tempted to ascribe. Now suppose that overnight the temptation to ascribe the color green to red things disappears and that red itself is the color we are spontaneously tempted to ascribe. If on awakening one continues to follow the policy of ascribing the complement of the color one is spontaneously tempted to ascribe, one will again make mistakes in one's ascriptions, this time as a result of overcompensation. At stage 5 the last remaining memories of one's preinversion experiences are erased. That this stage is an anticlimax is really the point of this reply to the antirelationalist or the antifunctionalist. The antirelationalist claims that the reinversion could not consist in the loss of memories alone, and on the current account the relationalist agrees. There is a reinversion, the experience of which is, for the subject, parallel to the experience of the inversion itself. And that this is largely independent of the loss of the memories of the preinversion experience can be seen in the fact that we have just discussed-that the most important part of the reinversion experience can occur before the memories are lost. But it can also be seen in the fact that we could have the memory loss without any significant reinversion. One could lose the memories and still go on being tempted to apply 'red' spontaneously to green things, with or without any tendency to correct oneself. And on the relationalist account it is not qualitative properties of experience that change in the process of inversion and reinversion. Rather, what changes in the process is the spontaneous tendency to find one kind of application of the color terms natural and another alien and the dispositional and computational links that underlie it. The file-keeping metaphor, then, gives us a model for an account of qualitative experience that addresses the problem raised by Block's fourstage spectrum inversion example. The opponent of relationalism, however, might make one final point. An account couched in terms of the file-keeping metaphor is an empirical hypothesis for which, as yet, no empirical psychological evidence has been offered. The implication is that the account is simply unsupported speculation. The claim that such an account is an empirical hypothesis, however, though it is not false, is misleading. I have referred to the file-keeping metaphor, but it is equally a high-level functional description intended to address conceptual issues in the foundations of psychology. And it is designed to do so in terms that are sufficiently general to provide a framework in which future empirical results can be interpreted. If it succeeds. then to appeal to such an account is not to make oneself vulnerable to refutation in the light of future psychological discoveries.
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IV. NOTIONAL CONTENT The defense of relationalism in the face of Block's Inverted Earth and inverted spectrum examples leaves our initial problem untouched. It is one thing to argue that qualitative properties understood in Block's way are not required to explain our behavior or to do justice to crucial aspects of the phenomenology of our color experience. It is another thing entirely to explain how color experience could be characterized in representational terms. If the goal, then, is to defend an intentionalist secondary quality account of color experience, we must be able to answer the question with which we began: What is the content of the belief that one is having an experience as of something red? Block's argument in favor of qualitative properties depends on an assumption about the possible sources of intentional content. On the one hand, content may be broad and have its source in the subject's environment. Thus 'is water' has as its content the property of being H,O because being H:O is the property of substances in the environment that bears the right causal relation to our use of the word 'water'. Analogously, the broad content of 'is red' would be the objective color property of objects in the environment that bears the right causal relation to 'red' and that differs as between Earth and Inverted Earth. Alternatively. content may be narrow and have its source in the descriptions that the speaker has internalized. The narrow content of 'is water'. then. would be made up of the contents of descriptions such as 'colorless. odorless liquid that fills the lakes and flows from the faucets'. The analogous narrow content of 'is red' would be the content of 'the color of stop lights. fire engines. and so forth '-exactly the sort of thing that the amnesiac staring at the red wall has forgotten. In either case. Block's arguments seem to show that intentional content alone cannot explain our color experience. Elsewhere I have developed a conception of content to which this dichotomy does not apply. IS The conception allows us to capture the narrow content of a subject's intentional states in terms of a set of notional worldsthat is, the set of possible worlds where things are the way the subject takes them to be at the actual world. It; This cannot mean. however, the set of worlds where the subject's beliefs are true, since this is just the broad content of the subject's beliefs. Nor can we say that the notional worlds are the worlds where the subject's beliefs are accurate or veridicaL if this merely amounts to helping ourselves to an undefined semantic notion. And. obviously, we cannot characterize narrow content in phenomenal terms if the goal is to show that there is no qualitative content independent of intentional content. Consider, though, that a possible world where a subject's beliefs are accurate is one where the subject's actions have a certain character-namely, the subject makes no mistakes; the subject's action in each set of circumstances (assuming that the action is not irrational by the subject's own lights)
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represents the best choice among the available alternatives. Suppose, for example, that because of Apple's new product line, you purchase some of its stock. And suppose that the action is subjectively optimal in the sense that it represents the best choice given the available information. the time allotted to making the decision, and so forth. However, because of a general shakedown among manufacturers of pes, the stock does poorly and your action turns out to be objective(v suboptimal. That is, given your actual opportunities (the money available for investment, the investment possibilities), the money could have been better invested elsewhere. But there are possible worlds where the action is objective!.}' as well as subjectively optimalprecisely those at which the stock does well and the investment turns out to have been the best of the available alternatives. Clearly, however, it is not a sufficient condition of a world's being a notional world for a subject that his or her actions or behavior at that world are optimal. There are worlds at which the subject is merely lucky and his or her actions tum out to be right for the wrong reasons. The nearsighted Magoo, for example, approached by a mugger demanding his money, thinks he is being asked directions and swings his umbrella to point the way. In so doing he knocks out a second mugger whom he had not seen, thereby frightening off the first and foiling the attempted robbery. Such worlds at which the subject's actions are optimal only accidentally will not be worlds that are the way the subject takes the actual world to be. In order to determine the subject's beliefs at t, then, we should look not only at the subject's actual behavior at t but at the subject's behavior at other times and at other possible worlds. But which counterfactual actions and behavior are relevant? Just as the subject's actual actions after t will reflect the subject's belief set at a time later than t. the subject's actions at worlds other than the actual one will reflect the subject's beliefs at those worlds. The solution is to start with all of the actual and counterfactual behavior for a given subject (with a given functional makeup) for all of the possible histories of inputs and internal transitions subsequent to t. We then assign notional content consisting of sets of possible worlds simultaneously to the intentional states (e.g., beliefs, desires, and intentions) according to the following principle: Assign possible worlds to internal states of a subject at time t in such a way as to produce a practical syllogism whose premises internally justify or rationalize its conclusion and whose conclusion is the intention to perform the action that the subject performs at t. For example, if the action consists in your buying shares in Apple, then consider the following assignment: (a) the belief whose notional content consists in the set of
worlds where ownership of Apple shares purchased at t makes the greatest contribution to your net worth of any of the states that you could bring about at t,
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(b)
the desire whose notional content is the set of worlds where your net worth is maximized, and
(e) the intention whose notional content is the set of worlds
where you secure ownership of the stocks as a result of purchasing them.
Such an assignment of intentional contents will rationalize your intention, l your action in purchasing the stock, and the behavior in which it is realized. ? Actual and possible actions and behavior are rationalized subject to the following constraint. Differences in the contents of beliefs ascribed over time and across possible worlds must be explained as the result of input differences and transitions between internal (physical) states of the subject, and such transitions must be Justified whenever possible. (Differences in the desires ascribed must also be explained and the formation of instrumental desires justified.) Thus we must rationalize the conclusions of both theoretical and practical inferences. (Deductive inferences will be rationalized in the usual way: The set of worlds corresponding to the set of premisesi.e., the intersection of the sets of worlds associated with the individual premises-is a subset of the set associated with the conclusion.) To see the application of these constraints to the Magoo case, consider the possible world at which, just prior to Magoo's swinging the umbrella, the person whom he knocks out at the actual world steps well out of range. Since Magoo is unaware of him in either world, he swings in the same way, his gesture is seen as a threat, and the results are disastrous. However, the assignment of notional content according to which Magoo's action at the actual world is objectively optimal ascribes the following belief to Magoo: that the second mugger is within range and that knocking him out is the best way to foil the robbery attempt. And at the world where his action is disastrous, he has just as good a view of the mugger and can see that he is out of range. Since he swings the umbrella just the same, it is difficult to suppose that what he intends is to knock the mugger unconscious. But then, given the lack of any relevant difference between the actual world and the world in question, the initial assignment of notional content at the actual world will almost certainly have been wrong. Thus we can rule out the actual world as one of Magoo's notional worlds. It is not a world that is the way he takes the actual world to be. The assignment of content to a subject's utterances and internal states on the basis of a complete description of his or her actual and counterfactual states and behavior in nonintentional terms is, of course, just the project of ls radical interpretation. Such an assignment is to be made holistically, subject to the simultaneous satisfaction of certain a priori constraints constitutive of intentional content. The most general constraint has been assumed to be some version of the principle of charity, which requires that we should maximize, all other things being equal, the number of true beliefs ascribed. Thus
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it has been assumed that the content ascribed in the interpretation of the subject's belief states would consist in the conditions under which those states were true. On the account I am now proposing, we ascribe sets of possible worlds to a subject's actual and counterfactual intentional states in such a way as to rationalize (i.e., internally justify) and explain the subject's actual and counterfactual actions and behavior. And notional content thus understood is not truth-conditional content or broad content as these are ordinarily understood. It is not truth-conditional content, since for a normal subject on Earth and her Twin Earth duplicate, if neither knows any chemistry, the beliefs they would express in uttering sincerely 'Water is wet' will have the same notional content. For each subject, this sentence will be associated with the set of worlds at which the colorless, odorless substance that fills the lakes and flows from the faucets is wet. And for each subject. conditions on either Earth or Twin Earth will suffice to ensure that this set includes the actual world. Indeed for each subject these sets will be the same. even though on the current understanding of truth-conditional content, the content will be different for the two subjects. Conversely, for an otherwise normal subject who is not aware that Hesperus is identical with Phosphorus, 'Hesperus is inhabited' and 'Phosphorus is inhabited' will have different notional contents: The former will be associated with the set of worlds (say) where the brightest planet in the evening is inhabited, the latter with the set of worlds in which the brightest planet in the morning is. And since both sets include worlds in which the brightest planet in the morning is not the brightest planet in the evening, these notional contents will differ. On the ordinary understanding of truth-conditional, broad content. however, the truth conditions of these two sentences will be the same. Unlike broad content. then, notional content does not depend on the nature of the physical objects and natural kinds that make up the environment with which the subject interacts. Nor does it depend on the ways the subject's words are used in the relevant community. Because notional content is defined in terms of the internal justification of the subject's actions and behavior, it depends not on what the environment is actually like but on what the subject takes it to be like. Similarly, it depends not on how others use the subject's words but on how the subject uses them. Though notional content is not broad content as that is ordinarily understood, neither is it purely narrow content. At least it is not narrow content in the usual sense of content that supervenes on the (type of) functional and/or physical makeup of the subject in question. Suppose that you believe that you are being stalked by a bear and act accordingly. Your actions and behavior will be internally justified and rationalized by just those worlds where you are being stalked by a bear, whereas the actions of a molecule-formolecule duplicate in a qualitatively indistinguishable environment will be
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rationalized by those worlds where he or she is being stalked by a bear. Thus the contents of the two beliefs are distinct. Finally, as this last example shows, notional content is not necessarily limited by the descriptions available to the subject. An amnesiac in a blinding snowstorm may believe that he is being stalked by a bear, even though he neither has, nor believes that he has, a description that picks him out uniquely. (For example, he believes that many other snow-covered amnesiacs are being menaced by bears in the midst of similar storms.) Nonetheless, his efforts to keep moving are rationalized by precisely those worlds at which he is indeed being threatened by a bear. Because notional content is neither broad content based on the physical objects, objective properties, and natural kinds in the subject's environment, nor narrow content based solely on the descriptions available to the subject. it escapes the dilemma that underpins Block's version of the content problem. Notional content involves a correlation between internal dispositional states of a subject (and their physical bases) and sets of possible worlds that characterize the intentional contents of those states. And it is grounded in the subject's practical and theoretical rationality and in the requirements for the internal justification of the subject's choices, actions, and behavior. Thus the satisfaction of Frege's constraint-that ascriptions of content should preserve cognitive significance in Frege's sense-is built l into notional content from the outset. There can be no counterpart for notional content of problems like the following: Pierre believes that he is living in London, wants more than anything else to visit the home of Oscar Wilde if he is in London, and fails to make any attempt to do so-without any sense that in so doing he is acting weakly.~11 There can be no such example because the constraints on the ascription of notional content that require us to rationalize Pierre's inaction are the most basic constraints on notional interpretation. And we rationalize the inaction by assigning to the relevant belief states sets of worlds at which Pierre's inaction will be internally justified. Thus we assign worlds at which there are two cities-the city in which he lives and the city of Oscar Wilde. This exposition of radical interpretation aimed at the ascription of notional content, or, as J shall call it, notional interpretation, has been motivated by the following requirement. We must tum a necessary condition for a possible world Ws being a notional world for a subject 5 at t-i.e., that 5's action at Wand at t is objectively optimal-into a necessary and sufficient condition. The upshot is that the characterization of notional interpretation and ofthe ascription of content to individual intentional states is conceptually prior to the assignment of notional worlds for 5 at t. That is, it is conceptually prior to the assignment of notional worlds so as to represent 5's total belief set at 1. The set of notional worlds for 5 at 1 emerges from the ascription of notional content to 5's individual intentional states as the intersection of the sets of worlds assigned to 5's beliefs at t by the correct notional interpretation. ,!
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In fact, the assignment of content to individual beliefs, desires, and intentions is itself an unnatural stopping point in the project of intentional interpretation. If we want to display the generative structure of the subject's language, we must assign content to subsentential units. including predicates and singular terms. Thus the constraints on notional interpretation include not only those imposed by the requirement that we explain (and, whenever possible, justify) the causal relations between internal states of the brain. They also include all that is entailed by the requirement that we reveal a generative system of representations. There is, then, no obvious reason to assume that the results will exceed a tolerable level of indeterminacy. And, of course, there is nothing new in the requirement that we assign possible-worlds content to subsentential units-for example, by associating functions from possible worlds to sets of objects at those worlds with predicate expressions. What is new are the constraints that govern the assignment of notional content. The project of notional interpretation might be thought of as an analogue of radical interpretation as that is ordinarily understood. On the basis of a complete nonintentional or physical description of the subject. radical interpretation ascribes intentional states whose contents consist in truth conditions, whereas notional interpretation ascribes notional worlds content on the basis of the same nonintentional facts. But this, I think. is a misleading way of picturing the relation between notional and radical interpretation. Because notional content by its very nature rationalizes action and behavior, it has always been an essential component of radical interpretation, even if this has not been explicitly recognized. Imagine watching Kind Hearts and Coronets with the natural but mistaken belief that the murder victims are not all played by the same actor. In such a case, some of one's beliefs about Alec Guinness will inevitably be contradictory iftheir content is specified in terms of truth conditions. One may thirk to oneself. for example, 'That actor" (pointing to Guinness in one role) "is older than that one" (pointing to Guinness in a different role). This makes one look irrational. since it is a fundamental a priori truth that no one can be older than himself. For notional content, however. there is no problem. The notional worlds ascribed when one's remark has been rationalized will be worlds in which there are two actors in the two roles, the first of whom is older than the second. Thus notional content is independent of, and, plausibly, prior to, truthconditional content. We can assign notional content without assigning truth conditions. But in order to assign propositional content in the form of truth conditions to a subject's beliefs and desires, we need to know a great deal about the modes of presentation under which the subject believes those propositions. And notional content grounded in rationality and the internal justification of action provides a systematic characterization of these modes of presentation. Hence notional content is integral to the project of radical interpretation, even if its ultimate aim is the ascription of truth conditions.
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V THE CONTENT PROBLEM Notional content was introduced in section IV to solve the content problem: that we seem to have no way of saying what the content of one's experience is when it is an experience as of something's being red. This is particularly true when (say because of amnesia) one associates no descriptive content with 'red'. Whatever kind of content we postulate to solve this problem cannot be broad content as Block understands it. This is because to pin down color concepts on the objective side (by appeal to wavelengths, for example) would take colors out of the category of secondary qualities. Moreover, since the content in question is introduced to account for the qualitative features of color experience, it should supervene on the subject's (token) functional and/or physical makeup and satisfy Frege's constraint. And the fact that notional content is based on our discriminative skills and capacities seems promising in another respect besides that of addressing the content problem for amnesiacs. Basing content on discriminative skills addresses Block's assumption that besides broad content as he understands it there is only narrow content and that the narrow contents of the terms for invertible colors are identical. Regardless of what descriptions we have available. the discriminative skills underlying our uses of 'red' and 'green' seem distinct. But how, if it does. does this difference in skills translate into a difference in content? Consider again the normal subject on Earth. NS. and her Inverted Earth counterpart, INS. If we ask how NS and INS differ. the answer seems to be that they associate different (internalized) samples with their color words. Of course. in the light of the file-keeping metaphor we shall not want to think of a sample literally as an entity instantiating a color property. Instead. we should think of such a sample as involving an association between a word and a specific receptive sensitivity-for example. a sensitivity to a specific band of wavelengths. We can. if we like. oversimplify somewhat and think of an association between a word like 'red' and a type of physical receptor triggered (under normal circumstances) by light of just the appropriate wavelengths. For words like 'red' that express secondary qualities, such an association can be thought of as providing the most fundamental (and in some cases-for example. that of the amnesiac-the only) interpretation available. We can say. therefore. that NS and INS, before their color terms are disambiguated, differ in their interpretations of those terms. NS and INS differ in terms of notional content, then, just as Block claims that they differ in the broad content associated with their beliefs. The answer to Block's claim that Inverted Earth provides examples of intentional differences without qualia differences (when NS and INS both look at the sky on their respective planets) and qualia differences without intentional differences (when NS looks at the Earth's sky and INS looks at a lemon on Inverted Earth) is the answer implicit in relationalism and the file-keeping
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metaphor. Where the intentional states are the same, there are no differences in which distinct qualitative states could plausibly consist. Notional content is required in order to make it clear that color beliefs have content and what that content is. It is also required to show that this content is consistent with a secondary quality account of color, even in the case of the amnesiac. Thus the account of the content of terms like 'red' cannot be analogous to the natural kinds account of the content of 'water', nor can it depend on the descriptions to which the subject has access. But it is relationalism and the file-keeping metaphor (together with the discussions of the phenomenology of color experience) that address the problems raised by Inverted Earth and the inverted spectrum. It is important to contrast the constitutive role played by the physical nature of the receptors in the notional account of content and the role played by the objective properties of external objects on Block's account. On Block's version of the objective account, if the property that explains our grouping red things together is the property of reflecting light of a certain wavelength, then that property provides the content of 'is red'. But if the only content associated with 'red' were that property, then 'is red' would no longer be an observable predicate. We could discover a class of objects whose color we could not distinguish from red under normal circumstances, even though they did not reflect red light (that is, a class of objects that triggered the same response in us as red objects through some alternative mechanism). On this account, the existence of fool's red objects would be an open possibility. 'Red' would become a natural kind term on a par with 'water', and red things would have a hidden, that is, an unobservable, essence. Thus the concept of red would lose its status as a secondary quality concept. To specify the content of a belief or a statement that something is red in notional terms and in terms of the file-keeping metaphor, however, has none of these consequences. For an object to be red is still for it to trigger a particular reaction in an appropriate subject, and although it might be all and only objects reflecting a certain wavelength that have this effect at the actual world. there will be possible worlds at which the same types of physical receptors are triggered in significantly different ways. Objects that have such an effect will count as fool's red on the version of objectivism Block favors, 21 but on this view they will count as red. Since 'is red' remains a secondary quality concept and not a natural kind concept, it will not raise the versions of Frege's problem that motivate the introduction of narrow content for terms like 'water'. Regarding a sample of a colorless, odorless liquid that we cannot distinguish by observation from water, to be told that it is indeed water is informative. But it will be uninformative to be told of a color sample that meets the observational test for being red (for a normal subject under normal conditions) that it is in fact red or of one that fails that it is not. On this view, then, there is nothing more to
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being red than matching our internalized sample (i.e., triggering the appropriate receptive sensitivity) under appropriate conditions. And the notion of an object's matching a sample for a particular subject is to be cashed out in terms of the subject's similarity judgments and discriminative capacities. The apparent upshot is that because the intentional content of color experience satisfies Frege's constraint, it will capture the way the subject takes the world to be. And because of the constitutive role of the subject's receptors in determining the intentional content, it will supervene on the subject's functional and/or physical makeup and be independent of the descriptive content that the subject associates with the color terms. Thus the notional account of content, in conjunction with the file-keeping metaphor, seems to remove the most serious obstacles to an intentional account of qualia. The foregoing might suggest, however, that given the file-keeping metaphor, the notion of an internalized sample or receptive sensitivity, and the treatment of 'is red' as expressing a secondary quality, the appeal to notional content is unnecessary to solve the content problem. The way out of the circle constituted by 'is red' and 'looks red' is provided by the association of 'red' and the physical sensitivity embodied in a particular receptor type. The physical natures of the receptors determine the classes of objects that '"match the samples," and they thereby establish the extensions, with respect to each possible world, of the color predicates. Roughly speaking, the objects that trigger the physical sensitivity corresponding to 'red' in normal subjects will count as looking red in the circumstances in question. And those that trigger the sensitivities of normal subjects under normal circumstances will count as being red. If there were nothing more to being red than triggering the appropriate sensitivity, then the broad and notional content of 'red' might seem to coincide. But there are good reasons to suppose that the distinction between the notional and broad content of 'is red' does not collapse. Consider a nonnormal subject whose similarity metric is atypical and who sees a significantly narrower band of the spectrum as red than does a normal subject. Then it is plausible to suppose that the broad content of 'is red' consists in the set of shades that the subject's community associates with the expression, whereas the notional content is the set of shades that the expression picks out for the subjecl. Suppose, for example, that the subject knows that if a red light appears on a certain control panel he should shut off the machine. Suppose that a light goes on that is within the range of shades associated with 'red' in the community, but near the orange end of the range. It seems clear that whether the subject is intemally justified in shutting off the machine depends on whether the lighl matches a shade that he or she associates with 'red'. But whether the subject's belief that no red light has appeared is true depends on the set of shades that the community associates with 'red'.
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Thus truth conditions (i.e., broad content) and notional content can come apart, even for terms that express secondary qualities. But as we can see in the cases of Alec Guinness. Pierre, and Hesperus and Phosphorus, truth-conditional content may abstract from psychologically relevant differences in the way the subject represents the world. Similarly, as the case of water shows. truth-conditional content may incorporate environmental factors that have no relevance to the subject's internal psychology. The claim to be defended. however. is that the qualitative properties of experience supervene on the representational properties. And given that qualitative properties supervene on internal psychology. if the claim is to be made as plausible and as informative as possible. we must have at our disposal some account of narrow or notional content. There is one final issue to consider in this context. The concept of matching an internalized sample (or. less picturesquely, of triggering a receptive sensitivity) raises problems that require comment, even though the difficulties cannot all be settled here. Notice. first that the most serious problems arise for the opponents of intentionalism who believe in the existence of irreducible qualitative properties of experience. If such properties are taken to be identical if and only if they are indistinguishable for the subject of the experience in question. then the notion of such a property is incoherent. since identity is transitive and indistinguishability is not. That is, a subject could have three experiences, A. B. and C, such that the color properties of A and B were indistinguishable and hence identical. as were those of Band C. while the color properties of A and C were distinguishable. Thus the color properties of A and C would have to be both identical and nonidentical. However, if the term for a single shade such as 'scarlet' has as its notional extension the set of shades that match the subject's sample-i.e., the set of shades that the subject could not distinguish from the sample under ideal conditions-won't the same problem arise? The short answer is that there is no problem as long as we think in the first instance of the subject making comparisons solely between a single. internalized sample and shades of color in the world. The necessary and sufficient condition for a shade's belonging to the extension of 'scarlet' is that it be indistinguishable in direct comparisons with the sampJe associated with 'scarlet'. not that the shade be indistinguishable from anything indistinguishable from the sample, and so forth. Thus the apparent problem of the nontransitivity of indistinguishability can be met. Michael Dummett has made essentially this point but claims that if 22 'scarlet' is treated in this fashion it is not an observational term. More specifically, Dummett's claim is that this sort of treatment will establish boundaries between color bands that cannot be detected by observation alone. Imagine, for a moment, that the external causal sources of our color
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experiences correspond one-to-one to the points on a spectrum. And imagine that the minimum difference that one can detect between the external sources corresponds (for some suitable scale) to a distance of exactly d on the spectrum. Thus if the sample for scarlet corresponds to the point p on the spectrum, then the notional extension of 'scarlet' will be a band of indistinguishable shades 2d wide, centered on p. Dummett's claim is. then, that the boundaries at p + d and p - d cannot be detected by observation alone, because shades 51 and 52' located at p + d - e and p + d + e (where e is smaller that d/2) will be on the opposite sides of such a boundary but too close to distinguish from each other by observation. On the account according to which color ascriptions are modelled on comparisons to an internalized sample, however, this conclusion does not follow. The subject can (and does) distinguish between 51 and 52 by observation alone, since when confronted with SI the subject will apply the term 'scarlet' and when confronted with S2 the subject will not. More plausibly, if we think of the subject's responses as having a probability distribution, then the subject can distinguish between SI and Sc by observation in virtue of the fact that he or she is more likely to apply the term 'scarlet' to SI than to 52 and will in fact do so in a larger percentage of trials. The boundary, then. is established by the subject's considered judgments alone. and no argument that observationality requires more than this has been forthcoming. Of course, the notion of a color's matching. or being close enough to. a single, internalized sample is very considerably oversimplified. As the preceding points suggest. a more sophisticated approach would treat our dispositions to make color ascriptions probabilistically. Moreover. it would very likely can for mUltiple samples, or considerable context dependence in the way that the samples function, or both. Nonetheless. the fact that there is a sequence of shades between red and blue. adjacent members of which cannot be distinguished in direct comparison with each other, does not lead us to call blue shades 'red'. Thus. modelling color ascriptions on the notion of an internalized sample. because it makes intelligible our possession of a coherent color vocabulary, seems the right basis for a more sophisticated account.
VI. CONCLUSION Opponents of relationalism may insist of course, that such an account could never do justice to our intuitions regarding qualia. My own view is that on this subject our intuitions go both ways. We do have the strong intuition that there is more to seeing something red than being disposed to act on the basis
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of a network of similarities and differences among our perceptual experiences. There seems to be something it is like to see red over and above its similarity to seeing orange and its difference from seeing green and over and above even the naturalness and spontaneity of our use of the term in accordance with an internalized sample. Our intuitions here are less clear, however, when we consider that the relationalist is not committed to the claim that with regard to our color experience we are like those subjects who lack anything resembling absolute pitch. On the contrary, the relational conception of color experience is perfectly adequate to account for what we might call rich discrimination. For example, we might make extremely accurate color comparisons based on experiences separated by decades. And the comparisons might involve not simply similarity or similarity along a number of different color dimensions. They might also involve similarity judgments based on the metaphorical application of predicates that are not literally true of colors. We might, for example, be very adept at applying such terms as 'receding' and 'advancing' .21 We might also be very accurate in recognizing the same color on the surface of opaque objects, in transparent solids, in liquids, and in light. And we might have no difficulty imagining the results of combining colors, juxtaposing colors, viewing colored objects through transparent media and in different light, and radically altering the spatial scale of colored areas. We might. then. actually have something a good deal richer than absolute pitch where colors are concerned. Thus if we think seriously about the full range of discriminative skills that a relational account can allow, the inadequacy of 2 such an account is no longer obvious. " Not only do some intuitions suggest that a relational account need not be inadequate. some cast doubt on the conception of qualitative content to which the opponents of relational ism appeal. The intelligibility of blindsight is generally cited by those who distinguish between qualitative and intentional content. But those who would make this distinction are committed to the intelligibility not only of the empirical phenomenon of blindsight but to what we might call perfect blindsight-a condition in which a subject has all the intentional or representational content of a normal subject but lacks any of the qualitative content. Of course, if such a subject is necessarily unconscious. then we cannot even attempt to imagine from the inside what it would be like to be one. But if perfect blindsight is intelligible, we should be able to imagine a case of near-perfect blindsight-that is, a case like that of perfect blindsight but in which we have our ordinary stream of conscious thoughts with whatever qualitative experience that involves. Thus, in nearperfect blindsight, as in perfect blind sight, our perceptual experiences of the external world will lack any qualitative properties while retaining their normal representational content. Notice that in such a case one would have
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the same capacities for skilled action as a normal subject. But is it really intelligible that one could drive through downtown Boston at rush hour, obeying (most of) the traffic laws, avoiding pedestrians and construction, making the necessary detours, looking for parking spaces, and avoiding tickets without an)' qualitative experience? In answering we should bear in mind that not only must one be able to perform the feat, one must be able, if asked, to provide a detailed account of the reasons behind each of one's actions as they occur. This means that, just as a normal subject, one must be able to give an indefinitely detailed account of the phenomenal character of one's experience. This is because the explanation of one's choices depends not only on the objective configurations of objects but on how the objects appear to one. And one's beliefs about the character of one's own experience, insofar as that experience plays a role in the determination of one's choices, have by hypothesis the same intentional or representational content as those of a normal subject. As a near-perfect blindsight subject one has, to use a term of Block's, the same access consciousness as a normal subject. ,5 In particular, one will have the same capacity for describing one's "sense data" as the normal subject. And just to the extent that they are for a normal subject, the character of the descriptions will be grounded in an appropriately reliable way in the objective features of one's internal states. Can we really make sense to ourselves of what it is that we would lack in this situation? Notice how different all of this is from an everyday situation in which we do have something akin to blindsight. If one is walking and preoccupied, one may find oneself moving one's head quickly to the side and only subsequently discover that one was avoiding a low branch at the periphery of one's field of vision. In this case one discm'ers what kinds of informational inputs must have triggered the movement by working backward from one' s response and one's objective spatial relation to the branch. The contrast with one's spontaneous access to one's own point of view on one's route through downtown Boston is clear. But even the perfect or near-perfect blindsight case is not the most difficult for the friends of qualitative content. If qualitative content is independent of intentional content. we should be able to imagine being in excruciating pain and yet believing consciously and after calm reflection that we are in a state that is mildly pleasurable. And at this point we have arrived at something that is not just difficult to imagine but apparently incoherent. On this subject, then, the appeal to intuitions seems inclusive. And it is precisely the need for such an appeal that Block's arguments were designed to eliminate. If those arguments have been met. then the prospects for a more fully developed version of intentionalism regarding color and qualia cannot be dismissed out of hand.
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NOTES I. This is a revised version of an invited talk delivered at the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, December 29. 1993. I am grateful to my commentator, Mark Johnston, and to Ned Block, Mark Richard. and Michael Tye for their comments and suggestions. 2. Daniel Dennett. Consciousness Expfained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1991),457. 3. Although the assumption that the color of an object is determined by how it looks is a natural one. it is not required by the intentionalist account that I shall present. This is because the account recognizes a distinction between the truth-conditional (or broad) content and the notional content of color experiences and color beliefs. I cannot. however. explore the implications of this issue here. 4. In conversation. 5. The alleged incompatibility of red and green has been denied by C. L. Hardin. See Cofor for Philosophers (Indianapolis: Hackett. 1988). 121-7. 6. Ned Block. "Inverted Earth:' in James Tomberlin. ed., Philosophical Perspectives, 4: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind (Atascadero. Calif.: Ridgeview Publishing Company. 1990). 55 and 58. 7. Ibid., 62ff. 8. In conversation. 9. Block, op. cit.. 69. 10. Ibid., 79 n. 26. 11. Ibid., 61. 12. Block does not dispute this account of his position hut points out that it should he regarded as a rational reconstruction rather than an exposition of his views. 13. "Curse of the Qualia." S\'nthese 68 (1986): 333-68 (reprinted as chapter 3 of The Unity of the Self [Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. 1992]) and "Transcendentalism and Its Discontents," Philosophical Topics 17 (1989): 23 l...{j I (reprinted as chapter 4 of The Unit)' of the Se/j). 14. There is some empirical evidence for the idea that the neural circuitry involved in sensuous imagining overlaps with the circuitry involved in perceiving. See Hardin. op. cit.. 201 n. 7. and Stephen Kosslyn. Image and Mind (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1980)' 270ff. Nothing in my argument. however. requires that this conception of imagination should be empirically accurate. The idea of the self-stimulation of receptors functions simply to provide an example of the kind of mental operation that could contribute to the reinversion of the spectrum. 15. The Unity of the Self. ch. 2. 16. More accurately we should say that notional worlds are maximally specific worlds that belong to a set whose disjunction corresponds to the way the subject takes the actual world to be. In other words, each notional world is a maximally specific world compatible with everything the subject believes about the actual world. The use of sets of maximally specific worlds to represent sets of beliefs that are indeterminate on many issues is sufficiently familiar that the less accurate locution ~eems harmless. 17. A more sophisticated account would appeal to a substantive theory of rationality-for example, one resembling a version of Bayesian theory. For our purpose~. however. the less sophisticated account is sufficient. 18. See Donald Davidson, "Radical Interpretation." in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1984). 125-39 and David Lewis, "Radical Interpretation," in his Philosophical Papers, voL I (New York: Oxford University Press. 1983), 108-21. 19. There are a variety of more precise formulations. See Stephen Schiffer. "The Basis of Reference." Erkenntnis 13 (1978): 180. Remnants of Mean in!? (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Pres" 1987),63; Brian Loar. Mind and Meanin!? (Cambrige: Cambridge University Pres,.
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20.
21. 22. 23. 24.
25.
1981), 98-107; Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 18-22; Christopher Peacocke, A Study of Concepts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 2. In this context the less precise formulation will be adequate. This is similar to a variation of Brian Loar's on Saul Kripke's example. See Loar's "Social Content and Psychological Content," in D. Merrill and R. Grimm. eds., Contents of Thought (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986), 103. For the original example, see Kripke's "A Puzzle about Belief," inAvishai Margalit, ed., Meaning and Use (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979). Of course at the actual world there is apparently no natural property associated with all, or even most, red objects. See Hardin, op. cit., 59-67. Michael Dummett. "Wang's Paradox," in his Truth and OTher Enigmas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978),265. See Hardin, op. cit., 129. My claim is not that we have such a rich discriminative capacity but that there would be no difficulty accounting fur such a capacity on a relationalist model. Moreover, it may well be that prior to any knowledge of the empirical data we credit ourselves with something like this capacity and that our doing so helps to explain the inescapable feeling that in seeing something red there is something before the mind that could never be explained in functional, or perhaps even physical. terms. See Block's review of Dennett's Consciousness Explailled in The Journal of Philosoph\' 90 (1993): 182.
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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS VOL. 22 NO. 1 & 2, SPRING A!'lD FALL 1994
Get Real
Daniel Dennett Tufts University
There could be no more gratifying response to a philo'iopher's work than such a bounty of challenging, high-quality essays. I have learned a great deal from them and hope that other readers will be as delighted as I have been by the insights gathered here. One thing I have learned is just how much hard work I had left for others to do, by underestimating the degree of explicit fonnulation of theses and arguments that is actually required to bring these issues into optimal focus. These essays cover my work from top to bottom. Just about every nook and cranny is probed and tested in ways I could never do for myself. The essays thus highlight the areas of weakest exposition of my views: they also show the weak points of the views themselves-and suggest repairs. which I am sometimes happy to accept. but not always. since there are a few cases in which one critic deftly disanns another. sight unseen. I will be fascinated to learn how the individual authors react to each other's essays, since they side with me on different points and disagree about what is still in need of revision or repair. To me the most interesting pattern to emerge is the frequency with which the criticisms hinge on mistaken assumptions about the empirical facts. Since I have long maintained that ignoring the relevant science is the kiss of death in philosophy of mind. no project could be dearer to my heart than showing how paying attention to such nontraditional details is the key
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to progress. So I will give pride of place to my responses to Ivan Fox and Fred Dretske, whose essays show most vividly the need for joining forces with cognitive science. Then I will turn to the others, following my usual order: considering content first, then turning to consciousness. and finally, to the ethical considerations of personhood. It hardly needs saying that this essay, long as it is, would be twice as long if I responded to all the points raised that deserve discussion. '
1. SCALE UP IN THE FOX ISLANDS THOROFARE"
Ivan Fox's essay may very well be the most important essay in the collection, an original breakthrough in phenomenology that can really move us into a new understanding-or it may not be. I just can't tell. I have by now spent many hours struggling with it, an experience that puts me in mind of one of the delights of sailing on the coast of Maine: The exhilarating phenomenon known as scale up. You are sailing along in a dense pea-soup fog, the sails dripping, the foghorn moaning nearby but unlocatable in the whiteout. visibility less than fifty yards: you move cautiously. checking and double-checking the compass. the depth sounder. the chart. looking out for dangers on all sides. working hard and feeling tense and uncertain. and then all of a sudden you sail out of the fog bank into glorious sunshine. with miles of visibility, blue sky. sparkling water, a fresh breeze. Yeehah! That's the way I felt reading his paper. There were long patches of fog that I struggled through, unsure I knew where I was or where I was headed, and then suddenly I'd find myself bathed in clear, insightful going, a novel course through recognizable landmarks. Yeehah! Then back into the fog. anxiously waiting for the next scale up. We Down-easters have learned to take a perverse pleasure in living through the foggy passages for the rewards of a good scale up. But in philosophy there ought to be a better way. It is not that Fox has overlooked an easy way of proceeding: anyone who has actually tried hard to say what happens in conscious perception will appreciate that he is not making up difficulties and fancy ways of dealing with them. The more straightforward ways of saying what happens are all seriously confused and deeply misleading, for the reasons he enunciates-a verdict my commentaries on some of the other essays will support in due course. A better way-not an easier way-would get clearer about what the rules of such an enterprise are, what counts as being right or wrong, what sorts of implications and applications these ideas have. Here is my methodological proposal. JfFox is on an important new track, as I suspect. then it ought to be possible to recast all of it-all of it-in terms that have a direct and helpful bearing on a project I am working on these days: the Cog project in robotics, directed by Rodney Brooks and Lynn Andrea Stein at the AI Lab
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at MIT. Cog is a humanoid robot, situated in real (not virtual) space and time, with human-sized eyes, arms, hands, and torso that move like human body parts, innervated by sensors for "touch" and "pain" (scare-quotes for the squeamish), and designed to undergo a long period of "infancy." not growing larger, but learning hand-eye coordination and much, much moree.g., folk physics and even folk psychology-the way we human beings do: by being experientially embedded in a concrete world of things that can harm, help, and otherwise "interest" it. 3 Cog will have to track individual objects, reidentify them, interact gracefully with them, protect its own bodily integrity and safety, and-in our fondest blue sky aspirations---come to talk about its life, its subjectivity, in this concrete world it shares with us. Among the opportunities and problems that Cog will confront are instances very much like Fox's example of pulling the thorn from the finger. So will Cog's cognitive architecture have to incorporate his "surrogates"representati\'es instead of "representations"? That sounds very much like the idealogy for which Rodney Brooks is famous in AI circles. He is, after all, the author of "Intelligence without Representation;,-l one of the most influential manifestos of the new anti-GOFAI (and hence anti-LOTf school of AI. and like Fox, he has all along stressed the practical importance of not interposing intellectualist systems of sentential objects between input and output in robots that must cope in real time and space. When Fox speaks of our creating the Cartesian modes as a reflection that does not disturb the underlying Empedoclean modes of acquaintance, this is thus tantalizingly close to Brooks's subsumption architecture, in which new sophistications have to be piled on top of earlier systems of distributed perceptuo-locomotory prowess, One might well wonder if Fox has simply reinvented some of Brooks's wheels. in a daunting new vocabulary. so perhaps. after all. he has no new insights to offer to the Cog team, who long ago turned their backs on High Church Computationalism, in spite of their domicile at the East Pole." Or perhaps he has seen. from his phenomenological and philosophical vantage point. some crucial sharpenings and advances that the Cog team must come to appreciate and somehow honor in their engineering ifthey are ever to get Cog to do what they want Cog to do. My first ambition was to figure out for myself what the "take home message" of Fox's essay would be for the Cog group. Translating phil-speak points into their terms is a task I often undertake these days. and I find it is always a salutary exercise. The faculty and graduate students in the group are both open-minded and astonishingly quick studies-utterly unfazable by technicalities, both theoretical and empirical. But they are also deeply practical; they are embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious and difficult project. and any advice offered had better actually rule something out that they might have been tempted to try or rule something in that they might otherwise have overlooked. They won't be impressed if you tell them that unless they ensure
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that Cog has x, Cog won't have, say, intrinsic intentionality-unless you can go on to demonstrate that without intrinsic intentionality (whatever you take that to be) Cog will blunder about, or fail to acquire the sought-for competences, or go all Hamlet-like in some combinatorial explosion of futile looping, or destroy itself. If Cog can locate the thorns, readily recognize their negativity, be moved somehow by this recognition to attempt to remove them, and succeed (in jig time), it will be hard to sell the Cog team on the complaint that Cog nevertheless lacks the je ne sais quai that distinguishes our own acts of thorn removal. But I have been simply unable to state to myself with any confidence what Fox's message is, in the end. Cog's manifest image, he seems to be saying, must incorporate an ontology that is irreducibly naive-an ontology that resists going in either of the two directions sophisticated philosophical analysis demands. I think this is an extremely promising idea, but what does it mean in implementation terms? What shouldn't be there and what should be there? How does one get ""gestalting" into Cog's processes, for instance, and how do you tell if you've succeeded? I cannot answer these questions yet. I encourage Fox to pose the problems for himself. I am not so swept up in this robotics project. or so doctrinaire, as to require that anything worth doing in philosophy of mind be translatable into valuable Cog-speak. There may well be many important projects in philosophy of mind or phenomenology that have scant bearing, or no bearing at alL on the particular problems of engineering and robot psychology confronting the Cog team. But for an enterprise that is in danger of losing its grip on reality-a common enough danger in all areas of philosophy-this is at least a way of virtually guaranteeing that whatever one asserts or denies tackles a real problem (however wrongheadedly). There are plenty of passages in Fox's essay that encourage me to think that he does aspire to inform such engineering projects. Since he readily allows fish to have surrogates in thought,7 I doubt if he would tum up his nose at robot cognition. He dismisses one model of how one picks up a cup by saying "Life is too short, and there is too much of routine in action to make this a feasible or worthwhile cognitive architecture.'" He also speaks of the "Mac-wiring of the two-worlds system" as the feature that ensures that the external object is appropriately treated by the agent's fears, desires, and plans. Here (and elsewhere) he seems to be giving "the specs"-but in philosophical, not engineering, terms-for the only sort of system that can achieve good, real, effective (or at any rate our kind (~{) cognition. As he says, ''This experienced directness is the entitlement of cognition naively accomplished through surrogate objects. It is not available to a mind that perceives by way of representations and acts solely on information."" At other times, it seems as if he chickens out, recanting this aspiration altogether. For we learn in the end that "if we cannot distinguish behaviorally"
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between a Cog that has surrogates and a Cog that uses representations, "this shows the limitation of behaviorism.,,10 He goes right on to say that his distinction is "as objectively determinable as any fact of cognitive architecture," but one wonders what practical importance (e.g., for the rush of controlling behavior in real time) this difference of cognitive architecture has, and how, from the third-person point of view, we can determine this objective difference." I do not think this is a minor criticism. When Husser! made his famous distinction between the hyletic and noetic phase, he neatly saved Phenomenologists from dirtying their hands with the grubby physical details of the hyletic phase, but only at the very serious risk of trivializing Phenomenology for all time. The breath of fresh air (and sparkling sunshine) in Fox's phenomenology is his recognition, at many points and in many ways, that his enterprise is a species of extremely abstract engineering. but then he too often seems to me to shrug off the hard questions as somebody else's responsibility.,e When Fox says "The body of the Other warps the structure of phenomenal space-time and draws mine to it along the geodesic of desire,"" that's a nifty description of the wonderful effect achieved by our brains. But we want to know: How is it done? His claims about surrogates strike me as a very useful proposal, somewhat along the lines of similar suggestions by Ruth Millikan,'" and these promise a route for getting away from the language of thought. Fine, but now either you pass the buck entirely to the engineers and just declare that the problem has a solution (no doubt it does), or you attempt to contribute to the solution. I'm not asking for wiring diagrams. but just for a closer rapprochement-something I could tell to the Cog team that they could understand. by insensible phylogenetic degrees, the phenomenal world emerges at the turning point of the reflex arc .... Consequently. I do not doubt that there is something which it is like to be a bat. or a bee .... The dimwitted orgasm of an earthworm is as truly phenomenology as our own multimedia experience. What is marvelous about human phenomenology is not that it is phenomenology but that it is 11I001'eloliS phenomenologynature's three-billion-year solution to the problem of achieving in one state the surrogate of the perceived world: a world within a world conceived by nature in its own image. No doubt this engineering feat requires very special properties. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and the phenomenal world is silkpurse phenomenology."
And what does Fox have to say about how to accomplish this engineering feat? His opening gambit of explaining the phenomenal world via the metaphor of the Mac user-interface is cute, but I fear it backfires.'" If "'the phenomenal world is the end of the line,"'- this implies that there are no further internal users or appreciators or perceivers, but then this is a major
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disanalogy with the user illusion of the word processor. He seems to be saying-and I very much agree-that the phenomenal world is the emergent product of all the comer-turning, l~ not the preamble or final raw material before the comer of consciousness is turned. The Mac user-interface, however, isn't the end of the line; it is designed to present material to a user-that's the whole point of it. And its engineering is indeed tricky, but nowhere near as tricky as the engineering that seems to be required for Fox's phenomenal world, in which round-Jor-all-intents-and-purposes and its brethren must be implemented. If this is virtual roundness-like the virtual hardness of the virtual cast on Marcel Marceau's arm 19_then an abyss opens up. How do you make it true that "surrogate objects and their properties track external objects and their properties,,?20 Zenon Pylyshyn has often warned cognitive scientists not to posit what he memorably calls "mental clay," a magical material out of which to fashion internal surrogates whose causal properties automatically track the physics of their external counterparts. Donald Knuth, a hero of computer programmers everyWhere, made a lovely innovation in text-formatting technology when he invented virtual "glue," a virtually elastic and virtually sticky substitute for the rigid space called up by the typewriter space bar. Putting a varying virtual dab between each pair of words. depending on their relative lengths. his formatting program then virtually stretched the word-string by virtually pulling on its virtual ends till it fit perfectly between the left and right margins. apportioning just the right amount of extra white space for each gap between words. Fortunately, Knuth didn't also have to make his word-processing glue virtually shiny. tasty, and smelly, but Fox's surrogates, in contrast, seem to have a full complement of for-all-intents-and-purposes perceptual properties. "To serve as a surrogate for an F thing in this system, an internal object must have such causal properties as enable it to be the target of F-relevant object attitudes and to govern the ensuing action in Frelevant ways.,,21 Beyond allowing that so far as he is concerned, surrogates can literally have some of the relevant causal properties-they can be literally ellipsoid, or "an unindividuated color" for instance 2:-Fox is silent on how to deal with this problem. I fear his silence is proxy for "And then a miracle happens." I hope I have misunderstood him. If Fox's surrogates are not lite ra ll." surrogates, made of mental clay, what are they? If they are intentional objects, Fox's phenomenology reduces to my heterophenomenology. an account of the believed-in entities. only on occasion and indirectly an account of the internal states and processes. That is fine with me, but then his claim to have pushed beyond heterophenomenology to a radically different ontology must evaporate. Too bad. since we all need to push further into the engineering and not just revel in the specs. 23
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II. DRETSKE'S BLIND SPOT Fred Dretske is wonderfully direct in his essay. No glancing blows here; one of us is flat wrong. And surprisingly, for a philosophical essay, our differences-if I understand him-have quite directly testable empirical consequences. In a passage Dretske quotes, I say that "the richness of the world outside, in all its ravishing detail ... does not 'enter' our conscious minds, but is simply available," to which he forthrightly retorts: "This is false .... Our experience of this ravishing detail does cease to exist when we close our eyes. So the ravishing detail is not only 'in' the world." I do not know why he thinks this last bit follows, unless he is mistakenly assuming that our experience of ravishing detail must itself be ravishingly detailed, but this is just what is called in question by recent experiments that dramatically support my version of the facts. Even more telling, a recent thought experiment of Dretske' s 24 perfectly anticipates one of these real experiments and encourages us to imagine an outcome seriously at odds with the actual results.:5 But before we get to that denouement, I must set the stage. Dretske has bet'n a firm believer in the importance of "nonepistemic seeing" ever since his 1969 book, Seeing alld Knowing, which I did read and admire when it came out, but he did not at all persuade me of the importance ofnonepistemic seeing.:" Dretske uses nonepistemic seeing to mark what he takes to be a theoretically important category: "entering conscious experience." His isolation of nonepistemic seeing struck me in 1969 as at best a harmless tidbit of ordinary language philosophy; now I think it is worse: A theorist's illusion, pure and simple. an artifact of taking ordinary language too seriously. There is no important difference-no difference that makes a difference-between things nonepistemically seen (e.g., the thimble in front of Betsy's eyes before she twigs) and things not seen at all (e.g., the child smirking behind Betsy's back).2c Common usage does, as he says, endorse a third-person use of "see." As he puts it now: "Ask someone! Other people may be able to supply information which. together with what you already know. helps you to discover what (or who) you saw:':' For instance, you're standing deep in the waving crowd as Hillary Rodham Clinton's motorcade passes by-"r wonder if she saw me!" you exclaim, and your companion says "Sure-you're tall enough. her eyes were open, and she kept looking back and forth from one side of the street to the other.1fyou saw her. she saw you." Big deal. (While we're doing ordinary language philosophy, notice that your companion might just as naturally have said "Since you could see her. she could see you." This raises a difficult question for Dretske to answer: How does l'isible to A aT time t differ in meaning from l/OIZepiSTemical/)' seen by A (If fime t? Does it foIIow from the fact that Ms. Clinton cOlild see you that she did see you?)
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The third-person-attributable usage Dretske draws to our attention is common enough, but it survives on ignorance-the everyday ignorance of ordinary folk about how their visual systems work. It assumes, roughly, that if your eyes are wide open and you're awake, then everything that is "right in front of your eyes" has a common marked status-the status Dretske marks as seen (in the nonepistemic sense). The idea is that this is all it takes, normally, to get a visible thing registered (or "exhibited" as he now says) in the sighted person's "consciousness". Not being able to see inside people's heads to confirm that the imagined normal registration has in fact taken place, we treat the outward signs as proof enough. We can honor this status in a sort of legalistic way if we desire, but the facts about human vision render this understanding Pickwickian in the extreme. (If your transpacific plane touches down for refueling in Tahiti and you sleep through the landing and takeoff, can you say you've been to Tahiti? Yes, you can. Big deal.) Ordinary folk do not realize that one's "visual field" is gappy, degrades shockingly in resolution in the parafoveal regions, and-most important of all-is not recorded for comparison from moment to moment. Long before there was film, there were cameras. The camera obscura is literally a dark room with a pinhole opening (perhaps enhanced by a lens) in one wall, and on the opposite wall a full-color (upside-down) image of the outside world is exhibited, evanescently. for onlookers inside the camera to see and enjoy. The room doesn't see, of course, even though the information is there on the wall. Suppose I walk by a vacant camera obscura and make a face in the direction of its pinhole. This guarantees that my smirk, in high resolution color, was briefly present on the opposite wall-an inert historical fact. Big deal. A camera obscura does not in any sense see what is exhibited on its wall. Or consider a camcorder, turned on but not recording. Unlike the wall of the camera obscura, there are photosensitive elements here that are evanescently changed by the photons raining down on them, but they change back immediately, leaving no trace. Even when the camcorder is recording, it still doesn't see, of course, but intuitively it takes a step in the right direction, since it records (some of) that information, for some later use, appreciation, analysis. A trace is made; the information sticks around. But presumably a camcorder doesn't do enough with the information to count as seeing, even when it makes a record of what happens. It is a problem for Dretske to say what more is needed for nonepistemic seeing to occur. He makes an analogy: "seeing is like touching.,,2" We may ask: Is it like a rock touching the soil it is embedded in, or like a tree's roots touching that soil, or is it like a mole's paws touching it? Presumably the last of these, but why? Not, apparently, because moles have "conceptual" categories that can sort the information; seeing can occur "in the absence of conceptual uptake,"'" and "your experience can exhibit even though you
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may not be able to judge that something is <\>.,,)1 Presumably, the mole's experience "exhibits" the soil, but the tree is just as much in contact with the soil and responds, slowly, to that contact. What more would be needed for the tree to exhibit the soil in its experience? This is a good place to see the stark contrast between Dretske's view and mine. "The difference," he says, "between a visual experience and a belief about what you experience seems reasonably clear pretheoretically.")~ I agree-it seems to be, but this is one of those treacherous philosophical observations. He says it is impossible to give a plausible theory of consciousness as long as experience and belief are conftated; I say it is impossible to give a plausible theory of consciousness as long as experience is deemed to be entirely independent of belief~r something rather like belief. Belief is not quite the right term for the job, as I have noted. When Dretske says that the microcognitions I substitute for beliefs do "precisely" what potential or suppressed beliefs did for Armstrong and Pitcher, he misses a major point: 1 was deliberately getting away from their mistaken personal-level treatment of the issue, so my microcognitions do an importantly (precisely) different job. The personal-level treatment misconstrues the facts-in the ways and for the reasons that Dretske points out: One has certainly /lot shown that seeing an object. being perceptually aware of a thimble. consists in a judgment that it is a thimble (or anything else) in anything like the ordinary sense of the word "judgment.'·"
Exactly right. You have to go to a nonordinary sense ofthe word 'judgment' to make this claim hold. and hold it must. since otherwise we are stuck unable to telJ the camera obscura from the genuine seer. What a genuine seer must do is somehow take in and "categorize" or "recognize" or "discriminate" or "identify" .... (each term stretched out of its ordinary field) ... or in some other way "judge" the presence of something (as a thimble or as something else). With such uptake there is seeing. Otherwise not. Dretske asks "Are we really being told that it makes no sense to ask whether one can see. thus be aware of. thus be conscious of. objects before being told what they are?"qYes. in one sense. and no. in another. 1 am indeed challenging the claim that there is a coherent sense of "conscious" and "aware" and "see" linked in the manner of his question, but I quite agree that it "makes sense" to ask Dretske's question in the course of some ordinary affairs: it also makes sense to speak of the sun setting, and of breaking somebody's heart. Notice that Dretske' s sense of "see." ordinary and familiar though it is, is utterly powerless to deal with the following questions: (I) Does the bJindsight subject see objects in the blind field? He can react to them in some JO ways and not others. (2) Does the blue-eyed scallop see'? It has eyes.
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(3) Does a sleepwalker see? He engages in visually guided locomotion. (4) Does the anesthetized person with open eyes see? (5) Does the hysterically blind person see? (6) Do you see objects that are parafoveal in your visual field? How far parafoveal? It is obvious that in order to answer any of these questions, we have to go beyond the ordinary grounds for attributing seeing-which draw a blank-and ask what is going on inside. To a first approximation, the question then becomes: Is what is going on inside more like what happens in a vacant camera obscura or more like what happens in a camcorder when it is recording? Is there uptake, and if so, of what? And the answer is that to a surprising degree, the visual part of your brain is more like a camera obscura than you might have thought. On the last page of Consciousness Explained, I described an experiment with eyetrackers that had not been done and predicted the result. The experiment has since been done, by John Grimes at the Beckmann Institute in Champaign Urbana,'" and the results were much more powerful than I had dared hope. I had inserted lots of safety nets (I was worried about luminance boundaries and the like-an entirely gratuitous worry as it turns out). Grimes showed subjects high-resolution color photographs on a computer screen and told the subjects to study them carefully, since they would be tested on the details. (The subjects were hence highly motivated, like Betsy, to notice, detect, discriminate, or judge whatever it was they were seeing.) They were also told that there might be a change in the pictures while they were studying them (for ten seconds each). If they ever saw (yes, "saw," the ordinary word) a change, they were to press the button in front of them--even if they could not say (or judge, or discriminate) what the change was. So the subjects were even alerted to be on the lookout for sudden changes. Then when the experiment began, an eyetracker monitored their eye movements and during a randomly chosen saccade changed some large and obvious feature in each picture. (Some people think I must be saying that this feature was changed, and then changed back, during the saccade. No. The change was accomplished during the saccade, and the picture remained changed thereafter.) Did the subjects press the button, indicating they had seen a change? Usually not; it depended on how large the change was. Grimes, like me, had expected the effect to be rather weak, so he began with minor, discreet changes in the background. Nobody ever pressed the button, so he began getting more and more outrageous. For instance, in a picture of two cowboys sitting on a bench, Grimes exchanged their heads during the saccade and still, most subjects didn't press the button! In an aerial photograph of a bright blue crater lake, the lake suddenly turned jet black-and half the subjects were oblivious to the change, in spite of the fact that this is a portrait of the lake. (What about the half that did notice the change? They had apparently done what Betsy did when she saw the thimble in the epistemic sense: noted, judged, identified, the lake as blue.)
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What does this show? It shows that your brain doesn't bother keeping a record of what was flitting across your retinas (or your visual cortex), even for the fraction of a second that elapses from one saccade to the next. So little record is kept that if a major change is made during a saccade-during the changing of the guards, you might say-the difference between the scene thereafter and the scene a fraction of a second earlier, though immense, is typically not just unidentifiable; it is undetectable. The earlier information is just about as evanescent as the image on the wall in the camera obscura. Only details that were epistemically seen trigger the alarm when they are subsequently changed. If we follow Dretske's usage, however, we must nevertheless insist that. for whatever it is worth, the changes in the before and after scenes were not just visible to you; you saw them, though of course you yourself are utterly clueless about what the changes were. or even that there were changes. Dretske says: "Part of what it means to say that Sarah sees all five fingers is that if you conceal one of the fingers, things will look different to Sarah .... There will not only be one less (visible) finger in the world, but one less finger in Sarah's experience of the world.,,37 Then I suppose it follows, trivially, that in Grimes' experiments, things "look different"even hugely different-to his subjects after the saccadic switcheroo. This is, however. vacuous, given subjects' utter lack of uptake of the difference. In what sense do things look different to them? Things "look different" in the vacant camera obscura when I duck out of sight after my smirk. but they don't look different to anybody. The difficulty with Dretske's view of nonepistemic seeing comes out even more strikingly in an experiment recently conducted by Rensink. O'Regan. and Clark.'~ Provoked by Grimes' result, and thinking it had nothing to do with saccades (but everything to do with "uptake" of some kind), they presented subjects with pictures that are interrupted. every quarter of a second (250 msec) with a black screen which remains on for 150 msec. The resulting phenomenology is rather annoying: A stable picture briefly interrupted, again and again and again. But in fact, subjects are told. the picture changes during each interruption, going back and forth between two pictures, with a rather large and visible difference between them. For instance, the huge airplane that almost fills the picture grows an extra engine on its wing twice a second. Back and forth. back and forth go the two pictures of the plane. but you can't see any change at all! The two pictures appear to you to be exactly the same. You study them. focussing, scanning. inventorying, and then eventually. after perhaps twenty or fifty back-andforths, you notice the change. Sometimes. in spite of thirty seconds of steady hunting, the subjects still fail to see (epistemically) the change. This produces the same helpless and frustrating state of Betsy hunting for the thimble. She knows it's there. right in front of her nose. and she can't see it!
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But on Dretske's account, the difference is there, back and forth, being "exhibited" in consciousness, in nonepistemic seeing. In fact, he gives an example of just such a pair of pictures, which he calls Alpha and Beta. J~ The difference between them is that Spot (a goodsized round dot) is in Alpha but absent in Beta. Everyone who looks at Alpha and then at Beta, Dretske says, is "thing-aware of Spot" even though many people may not be "fact-aware" of the difference. In saying that the reader is conscious of Spot-and, hence, in this sense, the difference between Alpha and Beta-without being conscious of the fact that they differed, we commit ourselves to the possibility of differences in conscious experience that are not reflected in conscious belief.'"
He imagines an objection: The differences are out there in the objects, yes, but who can say whether these differences are registered [my emphasis] in here, in our experience of the objects? ... This is a way of saying that conscious experiences, the sort of experiences you have when looking around the room, cannot differ unless one is consciously aware that they differ. ... This objection smacks of verificationism, but calling it names does nothing to blunt its appeal."'
Right. Dretske recognizes that he needs something better than name calling to fend off this objection, so he offers a final example, drawn from Kluver's studies of size discrimination in monkeys. But he begs the question in his account of how one would have to describe the monkeys' capacity, so it 4c doesn't in fact provide any further support for his way of looking at seeing. There is no doubt that the periodic changes in the Rensink et al. experiment are "exhibited" on one's retinas, and hence one's primary visual cortex, to anybody who looks at them with the right equipment. But if you (or your homuncular agents) do not in fact "look at" most of these exhibits with any equipment at all, the only sense in which these changes are "registered" is the sense in which the changes are also registered inside a camcorder that is turned on but not recording. This is, in fact, the normal situation-powerfully revealed in this abnormal environment. If Dretske wants to say that this is all he meant by nonepistemic seeing, he is welcome to the concept, but it is not a persuasive model of "conscious experience." I may have just slightly exaggerated the evanescence of the "registration" in primary visual cortex in comparing it to the temporary changes in a camcorder's photo-sensitive elements. Perhaps there is enough long term uptake in the brain so that, although you can't readily notice changes, if given a forced-choice guess about whether or not there has been a change, you will do better than chance. Suppose we show subjects two kinds of picture pairs: pairs like the most difficult of those in the Rensink experiment, and pairs that are in fact identical. They will look just alike to subjects-
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they will detect no changes. But if required to guess which pictures do involve a change, they might well do better, even much better, than chance, in spite of their utter inability to say what these changes might be. (This experiment is currently under development in Rensink's lab.) If subjects can make good forced-choice guesses, this would conclusively show that some information was preserved from moment to moment, that there was some nonephemeral "registration" after all. This would not serve Dretske's purposes, however, by giving him a "difference which makes a difference" on which to hang nonepistemic seeing in conscious experience, since this performance on forced-choice guessing is precisely the evidence standardly relied on to demonstrate unconscious information preservation in blindsight. I doubt that Dretske would want blindsight to count as nonepistemic seeing. So. to revert to the confrontation with which we began, Dretske noted what he takes to be a clear mistake of fact in my theory of consciousness. I say the detail only seems to be "in there" and he disagrees. I agree that it is in the eye (focused on the retina), but that is surely not enough, for in that sense, the detail is also in the camera obscura. Most of this detail is notand cannot be-picked up at all. but some of it is. The few details that are picked up are picked up by being identified or categorized in some fashionif only as blobs worthy of further consideration, as Treisman's experiments D show.- It does indeed seem as if all the details are "in here" in some stronger sense-a difference that makes a difference-but that is an illusion.
III. TRUTH-MAKERS, COW-SHARKS, AND LECTERNS McLaughlin and O'Leary-Hawthorne have succeeded where others have tried and failed. They have obliged me to respond, in detail worthy of their challenge, to the question: Why don't I take Swampman. Blockheads, and their friends seriously? They have obliged me by writing an exemplary essay. fair, patient, and reasonable. setting out the problems with my view as they (and many other philosophers) see them. They provide a compelling exhibition of something philosophers should more often strive for: A consideration of ideas that transcends questions of who said what. when. Which of the many variations of the ideas they consider is mine? Which did I mean'? It doesn't much matter. since they canvass all the possibilities, and try to show which is the best-given my purposes-and why. If I didn't say or mean that. I should have. Or so they claim. with supporting reasons. First let me confirm a suspicion that they hint at occasionally: I have not thought that such fanatic attention to precise formulations was work worth doing: I still think that this is largely make-work. but there are many, apparently, who think I am wrong, and lowe them, in my response to this challenge. a proper reply.
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It cannot have escaped philosophers' attention that our fellow academics in other fields---especially in the sciences---often have difficulty suppressing their incredulous amusement when such topics as Twin Earth, Swampman, and Blockheads are posed for apparently serious consideration. Are the scientists just being philistines, betraying their tin ears for the subtleties of philosophical investigation, or have the philosophers who indulge in these exercises lost their grip on reality? . These bizarre examples all attempt to prove one "conceptual" point or another by deliberately reducing something underappreciated to zero, so that What Really Counts can shine through. Blockheads hold peripheral behavior constant and reduce internal structural details (and-what comes to the same thing-intervening internal processes) close to zero, and provoke the intuition that then there would be no mind there; internal structure Really Counts. Manthra is more or less the mirror image; it keeps internal processes constant and reduces control of peripheral behavior to zero, showing. presumably, that external behavior Really Doesn't Count. Swampman keeps both future peripheral dispositions and internal states constant and reduces "history" to zero. Twin Earth sets internal similarity to maximum, so that external context can be demonstrated to be responsible for whatever our intuitions tell us. Thus these thought experiments mimic empirical experiments in their design, attempting to isolate a crucial interaction between variables by holding other variables constant. In the past I have often noted that a problem with such experiments is that the dependent variable is "intuition"-they are intuition pumps-and the contribution of imagination in the generation of intuitions is harder to control than philosophers have usually acknowledged. But there is also a deeper problem with them. It is child's play to dream up further such examples to "prove" further conceptual points. Suppose a cow gave birth to something that was atom-for-atom indiscernible from a shark. Would it be a shark? What is the truth-maker for sharkhood? If you posed that question to a biologist, the charitable reaction would be that you were making a labored attempt at ajoke. Suppose an evil demon could make water tum solid at room temperature by smiling at it; would demon-water be ice? Too silly a hypothesis to deserve a response. All such intuition pumps depend on the distinction spelled out by McLaughlin and O'LearyHawthorne between "conceptual" and "reductive" answers to the big questions. What I hadn't sufficiently appreciated in my earlier forthright response to Jackson is that when one says that the truth-maker question requires a conceptual answer, one means an answer that holds not just in our world, or all nomologically possible worlds. but in all logically possible worlds!· Smiling demons, cow-sharks, Blockheads, and Swampmen are all, some philosophers think, logically possible, even if they are not nomologically possible, and these philosophers think this is important. I do not. Why should
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the truth-maker question cast its net this wide? Because, I gather, otherwise its answer doesn't tell us about the essence of the topic in question. But who believes in real essences of this sort nowadays? Not I. Consider the fate of "logical behaviorism" with regard to magnets. Here are two candidate answers to the question of what the truth-maker is for magnets: (a) all magnets are things that attract iron, and (b) all magnets are things that have a certain internal structure (call it M-alignment). Was the old, behavioral criterion (a) eventually superseded by the new, internal structure criterion (b), or did the latter merely reductively explain the former? To find out, we must imagine posing scientists the following Swampman-style questions. Suppose you discovered a thing that attracted iron but was not Maligned (like standard magnets). Would you call it a magnet? Or: Suppose you discovered a thing that was M-aligned but did not attract iron. Would you call it a magnet? The physicists would reply that if they were confronted with either of these imaginary objects, they would have much more impor45 tant things to worry about than what to call them. Their whole scientific picture depends on there being a deep regularity between the alignment of atomic dipoles in magnetic domains and iron-attraction, and the '"fact" that it is logically possible to break this regularity is of vanishing interest to them. If they are "logical behaviorists" about magnets, this is no doubt due to William Gilbert's early phenomenological work in the seventeenth century. which established the historical priority, if nothing else, for the classification of magnets by what they do, not what they have inside. (He built upon, and improved. the folk physics of magnets, in short.) What is of interest however, is the real covariance of "structural" and "behavioral" factorsand if they find violations of the regularities. they adjust their science accordingly. letting the terms fall where they may. Nominal essences are all the essences that science needs. and some are better than others, because they capture more regularity in nature. In "Do Animals have Beliefs?" I say, commenting on a point of agreement between Fodor and me: We both agree that a brain filled with sawdust or jello could not sustain beliefs. There has to be structure: there have to be elements of plasticity that can go into different states and thereby secure one revision or another of the contents of the agent's beliefs.'"
Doesn't this passage concede everything McLaughlin and O'LearyHawthorne have been pressing on me? When I say "could noC and "have to," am I speaking of "conceptual" or "nomological" necessities? I am speaking of serious necessities. If I ever encounter a plausible believer-candidate that violates them, what to call it will be the least of my worries. since my whole theory of mind will be sunk.
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So why do I lean towards "logical behaviorism" and away from the specifics of internal activity and structure that McLaughlin and O'LearyHawthorne go to such lengths to highlight? For the reasons that Lynne Rudder Baker explains so well in her essay. Like Gilbert, I start with folk theory, which is remarkably robust in the case of folk psychology. It is a discovered fact, already well confinned, that "peripheral narrow behavior" of the sorts commonly observed by everyday folk, is readily predicted and explained by folk psychology. Thus the order of explanation is from outer to inner, not vice versa. We want a theory of the innards that can account for all that regularity. It might have gone otherwise; it is logically possible, I suppose, that we could have found "belief boxes" in people's heads that causally explained their behavior and well-nigh identical "belief boxes" in the cores of redwood trees that were entirely inert. We would then have put a premium on explaining that regularity of internal structure, and let the differences in behavioral consequences tag along behind. But we didn't find any such thing. It is not just logically possible but already demonstrated that there are in fact many internally different ways of skinning the behavioral cat, while it is at best logically possible, and Vanishingll7 unlikely, that we will ever encounter Manthra, or anything else that is an internal twin lacking the behavioral prowess.~>< This all depends, of course, on how closely we look at the innards for signs of similarity. How different do internal ways have to be to count as different? McLaughlin and O'Leary-Hawthorne see a contradiction between my various positions on behaviorism. and I guess they are right. I should have explained why I thought that the difference between molecular and molar behaviorism didn't amount to anything important. rather than burking the distinction altogether. Of all the molecular differences that there might be, the only ones that would make a difference to psychology (as ordinarily understood) would be those that made a difference to the "peripheral narrow behavior" that is predicted and explained by folk psychology. Consider: Tweedledum and Tweedledee both hear a joke and both laugh; both also would laugh at various other jokes, would find others unfunny, etc. Nevertheless their overall joke-getting machinery has some differences-differences that would never show up in any peripheral behavior. These differences are clearly (I would think) below the level of psychology. In particular, these differences would not license a different attribution of belief. Start with what is probably a safe limiting case. Tweedledum's brain makes somewhat different use of potassium in its regulation of axonal transmission than Tweedledee's brain does. Otherwise, their brains always "do the same thing"-they are not quite molecular behavioral twins, but pretty close. Though not molecular behavioral twins, they are nevertheless psychological twins, for the differences are just too fine-grained to show up in interesting psychological differences-such as different belief
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attributions on anybody's story of belief attributions. Suppose next a much larger-scale difference: Tweedledum and Tweedledee have entirely different subcognitive systems of face recognition; one relies on a sort of featuredetection checklist, and the other on some global, holistic constraint49 satisfaction scheme. Now, we may suppose, they do exhibit different psychological profiles (at least in relatively abnormal circumstances): Under experimental conditions, one can readily recognize faces that the other cannot, and hence they will not share just the same beliefs. If, contrary to plausibility, their radically different "face-recognition modules" had exactly the same competence under all experimental conditions, we would see the difference as an interesting physiological difference but too fine-grained to "count" as psychology. But where we draw the line is not a big deal, one way or the other. Some philosophers may still think that in spite of all this, Blockheads illustrate an important principle, so before taking my leave of Blockheads I cannot resist pointing out that the "principle" relied upon by Block in his original thought experiment is mistaken in any case. One of the most intelligent things any thinking agent can do is plan ahead. engaging in what we might call temporally distal se(f-control. Anticipating that when push comes to shove at some later time, it may be difficult or impossible to Do the Right Thing-to figure out and execute the rationally optimal response to current circumstances-the wise agent arranges to tie his hands a little and cede temporally local control to a policy figured out long ago, in cooL dilatory reflections "off line." Dieters. knowing their urges. arrange to locate themselves in places bereft of snacks, and when they later act in an environment that does not include "shall I have a snackT as a live option, this is a feature of the environment for which they themselves are responsible. as a result of their own earlier intentional actions. not a mere external constraint on performance. The practical navigator. John Stuart Mill reminds us (in Utilitarianism), goes to sea with the hard problems of spherical trigonometry and celestial motion precomputed. their answers neatly stored in a rather large (but portable) look-up table. It is thus no sign of mindlessness. but rather of foresight. if we encounter the navigator mechanically determining his position by looking up the answers. SWiftly. in a book. We think of Oscar Wilde as a great wit. It would no doubt diminish his reputation considerably if we learned that he lay awake most nights for hours, obsessively musing "Now what would I reply if somebody asked me . . . . and what might my pithy opinion be of .... T Suppose we learned that he patiently worked out. and polished. several dozen bon mots per night. ingeniously indexing them in his memory. all freshly canned and, if the occasion should arise. ready to unleash without skipping a beat-for brevity is indeed the soul of wit. They would still be his bon mots. and their funniness would depend. as the Polish comedian said. on timing. Timing is important
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for almost any intelligent act-which is why It is intelligent to anticipate and pre-solve problems wherever possible. Wilde's brute force witticismproduction scheme might disappoint us, but in fact it draws attention to the fact that all intelligent response depends on costly "R and D", and it doesn't make much difference how the work is distributed in time so long as the effects are timely. So, contrary to Block's guiding intuition. discovering that some Turing Test contestant was (one way or another) looking up the responses in a giant look-up table should not at all rule out the hypothesis that this was the manifestation of an intelligent agent at work. Local inspection would perhaps often leave us in doubt about who the intelligent agent was (or who they were), but we should have no doubt at all that the witticisms on the transcripts were the product of intelligent design, responsive to the meaning of the inputs. and just temporally removed by being solved in the hypothetical. Intelligent design is the only way witticisms can be made. Am I saying it is actually logically necessary that any such giant look-up table of clever responses would have such an etiological history? Heavens no. A cow-shark could give birth to one. But in our world. the only way anything will ever pass the Turing Test is by being an intelligent. thinking agent. Mark Richard provides a close encounter that is long overdue. confronting my "pretty pernicious instrumentalism" with a relentless challenge from one of those who think that the way to make a proper theory of belief is to construct and defend formal definitions of its terms. I turned my back on the efforts of the Content Mafia (otherwise known as the Propositional Attitude Task Force) in 1982. after publishing "Beyond Belief." in which I gave my reasons for rejecting their methodology and enabling a<;sumptions. The tradition has continued in force without my blessing. of course, and few participants have felt the need either to respond to my criticisms or to show how their way of philosophizing shows what is wrong with mine. so it is high time to see how the scales balance today. Richard offers a three-pronged attack on my account of believers as intentional systems: I cannot solve the lectern problem, he claims, and two avenues which might seem to offer escape hatches for me. Stich's attempt to distinguish beliefs from subdoxastic states via a condition of "inferential promiscuity," and Evans' Generality Constraint, tum out to be flawed. If, as Richard notes, I can't adequately answer the question "What isn't a belief?" I can't answer the question "What is a belief?" either. Not a good verdict for a theory of belief. I claim to solve the lectern problem, as Richard observes, by showing how, when predicting lectern "behavior," the intentional stance gives a predictor no purchase over using the physical stance. "That no single event is unpredictable from the Laplacean perspective does not imply that every behavioral pattern is perceptible from the perspective," Richard notes, but
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he then tries to shoehorn my position into the assertion that such behavioral patterns can be identified with the "instantiation of a ceteris paribus law of property instantiation by an individual."'o No, the impressive patterns cannot be reported in single generalizations of the sort Richard illustrates; the patterns that inspire adoption of the intentional stance consist in the success (with n% noise) of a myriad of such ceteris paribus generalizations. No one predictive success counts for much at all-witness the lectern's readily predicted null behavior. The predictive power of the intentional stance does not derive from our having induced kazillions of psychological "laws" which we are reminded of whenever we see their antecedent conditions being satisfied. Where would all these "laws" come from? We surely aren't taught them by the score. Rather, we effortlessly generate our predictions from an appreciation of the underlying normative principle of intentional stance prediction-rationality. What we need the strategy to explain is our power to generate these predictions-describe these patterns-ad lib and ad hoc in any number we wish, and find the vast majority of them to be predictive way better than chance. That's why I spoke of intentional systems whose behavior is "voluminously" predictable, a theme Richard notes in passing. but underestimates. Richard then goes on to interpret my claim about the ineliminability of the intentional characterization of people (and other true believers) as the claim that the presumptive intentional laws governing lecterns, unlike the intentional laws governing believers, have equally predictive-indeed coextensive-"physical equivalents," and hence are eliminable. This misconstrues my case. I am quite willing to grant that some unimaginably long but finite disjunction of physically characterized conditions exhausts by brute force the entire predictive power of any intentional stance prediction whatsoever. So what? Such claims are not interesting; the same move could be used to strike down every biological category (for instance), since the Heat Death of the Universe, if nothing else. guarantees that "there is" a huge but finite disjunction of predicates constructible by Boolean means from terms drawn strictly from subatomic physics that would be exactly as predictive as "is a herbivore" or "is hemoglobin" or "reproduces asexually." And yet the patterns referred to by these biological terms are perfectly real. The guaranteed existence of such an unwieldy predicate doesn't diminish the actual value. for purposes of prediction, of an intentionalistic predication, and it doesn't explain what an intentionalistic claim explains. I have improved on my Martian predictor example in Darwin '.<; Dangerous Idea, in the riddle of the two black boxes.'] I show that there are short, readily tested causal generali::ations whose almost exceptionless truth would be manifest to super-Laplaceans but utterly mysterious and inexplicable by them unless they adopted the intentional stance. The fact that the superLaplaceans could predict each instance of the generalization-could
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generate, given enough time, every disjunct in the unimaginably long listwould not impress them, since they would see clear as day in the totality of their predictions a simple regularity that they could not explain. Why does Richard go to such pains to translate my thesis into the alien language of "ceteris paribus laws" and then interpret its central claim in terms of the nonexistence of equivalent sentences composed in nonintentional vocabulary? The reason, I think, is methodological: Richard simply cannot use the tools of his trade unless he can first tum the object of scrutiny into such a claim. This methodological imperative comes out more sharply when we tum to his painstakingly constructed arguments against Stich's distinction and Evans' Generality Constraint. Here he helps himself on several occasions to the tempting surmise that there is a language of thought, even though he concedes that this hypothesis may not, in the end, make much sense when applied to human believers. Why does he do this? Because he cannot construct his arguments without it. He is not alone, but his forthrightness on this occasion helps to underscore a point I have made in the past: All the fine arguments spun from the intricate examples posed by the Propositional Attitude Task Force depend on isolating rather special cases of what I have called opinions-linguistically infected states quite distinct from beliefs-and showing how. if these presumably clearly identified propositional attitudes are held constant in imagination, troubles can be raised. Without the language of thought as a crutch to keep the "fatal" examples from toppling over under the weight of their often bizarrely top-heavy loads of specific content. there would be no research program here at all. 'c Even if our thought is not invariably realized in a linguistic medium. the existence of something whose thought was invariably so realized and in whom we would identify the possession of concepts with lexical mastery. isn't impossible."
Or. rather. such a being better not be impossible, since a cottage industry of philosophical research depends on it. Part of my evidence for this claim is the studied indifference of these philosophers, almost without exception. to the efforts by various researchers in Artificial Intelligence and cognitive psychology to construct and defend models of belief that do utilize something like a language of thought. Is Douglas Lenat's CYC project the sort of entity Richard has in mind? It is a "belief box" containing millions of hand-coded propositions, and insofar as it has any concepts at all, it is in virtue of the "lexical mastery" provisioned by all those carefully wrought definitions, as interanimated by its attached inference engine. Is CYC a believer'? The general run of opinion in cognitive science is that CYC is a brave attempt at an impossible project. At the very least, the burden of proof is on those who think that it is possible for something we would recognize as a believer or thinker to be composed as Richard assumes. (Of course it is possible to con-
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struct large boxes of interanimated sentences-CYC is an actual instancebut few would think that a theory about which sentences appeared where under what conditions in such boxes would be a theory of belief. That is, however, one way of reading the underlying assumption of a language of thought.) Richard appeals at one point to the supposition "I think in English," and at another point tells us of Jane, who believes "Twain's here" expresses a truth but doesn't realize that Mark Twain is Clemens. Later he alludes to Smith, the poorly integrated bilingual, and finally to Jan, the bilingual Dutchman. He needs these special cases because he has to be able to point to propositions crisply "identified" as only a specific sentence in a particular language can do (one can speak about sets of possible worlds. but the only practical way of saying which set you have in mind is to go piggyback on a specific sentence). For instance, Jan's belief that lions are in zoos has to be identified with a specific sentence in one of Jan's languages of thought, so it can be clung to. as one of Jan's beliefs, in spite of the evidence that Jan is really a bit dense about lions and zoos, so dense that he can't even "think the thought" in his other language of thought. Richard tells us the point of the exercise: "What Jan provides us with is all example of a believer for whom the Generality Constraint fails."'.! The grandfather of all such cases is Kripke's Pierre," who believeswell. what does he believe about London? While hundreds of pages have been published about Pierre. I have not bothered adding to them. since the proper response seemed to me to be so obvious.'" Thanks to Kripke's clear setting out of the conditions under which Pierre fell into his curiously illinformed state. we know exactly what his state of mind is. What is the problem. then? The problem is saying. fonnally and without fear of embarrassing contradiction elsewhere. exactly what Pierre believes. Which propositions, please. should be inscribed on Pierre's belief list. and how are they to be individuated? Well. it can't be done. That's the point of the Pierre case; it neatly straddles the fence, showing how the nonnally quite well-behaved conditions on belief pull against each other in abnonnal circumstances. What should one do in such a dire circumstance? Chuckle and shrug. and say. "Well. what did you expect? Perfection'? Pierre is an imperfect believer. as we all are." How can I say we know exactly what Pierre's state of mind is while cheerfully admitting that we cannot say. exactly. what his state of mind is in terms (~lpropositiol1(Jl attitudes'? Simple: Propositional-attitude talk is a hugely idealized oversimplification of the messy realities of psychology. Whenever push comes to shove in borderline cases. its demands become unanswerable. That is my pretty pernicious instrumentalism showing. I guess. I don't call my view instrumentalism anymore. but whatever it should be called, my view is that propositional-attitude claims are so idealized that it is often impossible to say which approximation. if any, to use. There is
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nothing unprecedented about this: Biologists shrug when asked whether herring gulls and lesser black-backed gulls are truly different species,57 and electrical engineers are unperturbed when you point out that it is quite possible to take a perfectly good FM tuner and, by making a few minor revisions, tum it into something that is maybe a genuine but lousy PM tuner and maybe not an PM tuner at all. How close to the (ideal) "specs" does something have to be to count as a genuine PM tuner? What if it can receive only one station? What if it tends to receive two stations at a time? What if a cowshark swallows it, and its stomach acid turns it into a television set? The various predicaments that Richard treats as counterexamples to theories could better be considered to be shortcomings in the particular believers, faIlings short from the ideal of inferential promiscuity, or Generality, for instance. (Pierre is a true believer, of course, but a decidedly suboptimal one. Believers aren't supposed to get themselves into the sort of epistemic pickle Pierre has blundered into.) Since all believers fall short of the ideaL Stich's useful idea about how to tell beliefs from other "subdoxastic states" should be treated as a desideratum of beliefs, not a litmus test. Then we can see a gradation of cases, from truly embedded or encapsulated subdoxastic states to more and more "movable" and inferentially available states. The question of how, in the species and in the individual. this transition to more and more versatile cognitive states occurs is fast becoming a 5 major theoretical issue in cognitive science. ' It wisely ignores the question of how to define belief formally. If, on the other hand, you insist on setting up a definition of belief as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. in the fashion that Richard assumes obligatory. you merely guarantee that there are no true believers, not among ordinary mortals. So Richard is mistaken in thinking from the outset that I take on the obligation to offer a "principled account of the distinction between (having) propositional attitudes as against (having) psychological states which, though they produce and regulate behavior and can be assigned informational content, are not propositional attitudes."'" And hence he is mistaken about the role that either Stich's or Evans' claims might play for me, whatever role they have played in the work of others. I myself have always thought that the Generality Constraint nicely captured the ideal-the same ideal Fodor captures by speaking of belief fixation as "Quinian and isotropic." It is an ideal no believer meets but all-all worthy of the nameapproximate. One of the best arguments against CYC-style models of belief could in fact be put thus: Since it is at least very hard (and maybe impossible) for them to meet Evans' Generality Constraint, even in approximation, there must be some other way of organizing the innards of a believer that accounts for the fact that believers are in general quite able to honor that constraint. The trouble with the tools of the trade of the Propositional Attitude Task Force is that they cut too fine! Propositions are abstract objects and
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(according to theory) just as distinct and well-behaved as, say, integers. If propositions measure psychological states the way numbers measure physical states (as Paul Churchland has noted),60 then the belief that p is not identical to the belief that q if p is not identical to q. But the principles of propositional identity are tied to sentence identity in a language. In theory, of course, proposition identity can be specified in terms of sets of possible worlds, but in practice. the way such a set is referred to is as the set in which a particular (English) sentence is true. In reality, propositions are, for this reason, more like dollars than numbers, and the precision aspired to is an illusory goal. hi Lynne Rudder Baker gives a wonderful account of the reasons why the patterns discernible from the intentional stance should not be assumed to be repeated, somehow, in the brain. In this regard I especially commend her discussion of the bogus question about the location of the money 62 making. As she says, "Such questions are not serious spurs to inquiry:' But other rather similar questions are. It is the confusion of the nonserious ones with the serious ones that causes a lot of the confusion. As Alan Turing noted, in one of his many prophetic asides, I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is. for instance. something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localize it.'"
The reality of consciousness does not require its localization in the brain. but it still depends on features of brain activity. and if we want to confirm or disconfirm hypotheses about specific conscious experiences. what we need to test is the truth of the claims that constitute somebody's heterophenomenology. "It occurred to me that winters in Vermont are long" is not about the weather: and I might be wrong in asserting it. Nothing of the kind may have occurred to me. (Baker's analysis of this case would be much helped by honoring David Rosenthal's distinction between expressing and reporting: In uttering this sentence, I would be expressing a higher-order thought about my mental life in reporting a lower-order thought-about the weather.) Heterophenomenology exhausts the intentional-stance theory of consciousness. but we want more (and so we should). Consider a parallel: There is undoubtedly a real pattern in the tales told (and believed) these days by self-styled victims of satanic ritual abuse, but are any of their beliefs true? We'd like to know. Similarly. there is certainly a real pattern in the tales told (and believed) by subjects about what occurs to them at various times. what they "do" in their minds at various times. and we'd like to know which of these beliefs of theirs are true. That is where "brain mapping" comes in. Baker sees a deep tension between the intentional stance and this brainmapping move, mainly because she misinterprets me as thinking the brain
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mapping will be a "deeper" theory (in her terms), and thus nonintentional. Not at all. The theory of content I espouse for the whole person I espouse all the way in. The neurobiological theory of content is homuncular functionalism, to dress it in its most vivid metaphorical costume, and hence the very same principles of interpretation are used to endow subpersonal parts with contents as are used to endow whole persons. (David Rosenthal's interpretive "hypothesis" on this score is thus correct. Since he has to work to arrive at this position, and Baker misses it, I cannot have done a proper job of expounding it.) The way in which personal-level attributions of belief and other intentional properties get confirmed (in the crunch) by subpersonal attributions of (nonordinary) intentional properties is roughly parallel to the way in which one might confirm one's attribution of culpable motives to, say, the British Empire, or the CIA, or IBM, by discovering a pattern of beliefs, desires, intentions, among the agents whose joint activity compose the actions, beliefs, and intentions ofthe superpersonal agent (see the discussion of Carol Rovane, at the end of this essay, for more on this). So in the case of Eve. the story goes like this. Eve expresses the higherorder thought "I was suddenly conscious of the fact that 1 was not alone in the house," thereby reporting (truly or falsely) that she had a certain firstorder thought to the effect that she was not alone in the house. Did she? We' 11 have to look at our record of what went on in her brain at the relevant time. Hmm, sure enough. here's a brain event that had the content (roughly): "Who's there!?!?!" That's close enough. We confirm her report, in this case. But we might not have confirmed it. We might have found circumstantial evidence to the effect that Eve has rationalized the whole event and wasn't the least bit driven. at the relevant time. by contents concerning the presence of others. Some of this evidence might be our secret videotape of her externally visible behavior at the time. (We see her humming contentedly throughout the relevant period, right up to the time when she answered the phone and began answering our questions about her recent phenomenology. There is no sign of apprehension, no abrupt change of trajectory, and the record of heart rate and skin conductance shows no alarm.) But we might actually get some even better (because closer to the gist of her self-report) evidence from our neurocryptography unit, which. applying the intentional stance to Eve's brain parts, has tentatively identified a homunculus whose duties include signalling a general fire drill whenever it detects the presence of another-it's hooked up to the vertical symmetry detector in the vision M system, for instance. That's the sort of story 1 had in mind. And it uses the intentional-stance theory of content all the way in. At one point, Baker wonders what 1 would conclude if "the neuroscientist could find no brain state or process with which to identify the putatively conscious belief."'" And she says either alternative would leave half of my project in the lurch. It's worse than that: Paraphrasing the physicists
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who were confronted with the nonmagnet (if that's what it was), I'd have a much worse problem than which half of my project to cling to. I'd be worried that my whole project was on the verge of collapse. But she is right that in this terrible eventuality, I'd cling to the intentional stance aspect (which I know works very well) and do my best to explain why so many people have so many false beliefs about what is going on in their minds. Why would I be so eager to show that people were mistaken in these beliefs? Because my whole worldview resists as an utterly last resort any alternative explanation--e.g., a frankly dualistic explanation--of these undeniably real patterns. To pursue the parallel, suppose we can't confirm any of the peoples' stories about satanic cult abuse. No physical evidence of the events reported can be found. What would we do then? We would try to show that these folks, however sincere in their reports. were just wrong. But if the pattern defied that diagnosis, as it might. in principle, we'd have to start toying with the idea that the satanic ritual abuse happened in another dimension or some other equally extravagant departure from conservative physics and metaphysics. We're talking seriously spooky last resorts. folks! Stephen Webb's dexterous navigation of the shoals of Plan One and the various Passes is largely for nought. since it misconstrues the intentional stance in a different way. It overlooks a key feature of the intentional stance: One is allowed to revise one's attributions in the light of falsified predictions. As soon as one hears the professor's surprising (in the circumstances) words. one revises the attribution: She must not have seen her keys. one easily concludes. So behavioral evidence has all along been front and center in the intentional stance. What is the heterophenomenological method, after all, but an application of this obvious principle? One patiently gathers behavioral evidence (largely but not entirely verbal behavioral evidence). hypothesizing interpretations and refining one's attributions untiL in the limit, they account for (""predict." make sense of) all the behavior. The standard limit myth may be invoked: The beliefs and desires (and other intentional states) of an intentional system are those that would be attributed to it by an ideal observer with a God's-eye-point-of-view. Prediction and retrodiction are all one to the intentional stance. which explains as it attributes. It would not be a very useful stance if it couldn't be harnessed reliably for real-time prediction. but after-the-fact explanation of behavior is hardly off limits to it. and the behavior itself is obviously a main source of evidence. Webb patiently tries to corral me at various other choice points. overlooking reasons I have already given for resisting his alternatives. Much of what I have said above in response to McLaughlin and O'LearyHawthorne. and Baker. applies here as well. To reiterate: The skin is not that important as a boundary. as Skinner famously conceded (with my concurrence), so "internal" behavior is in principle not off limits to the interpretive exercise, and it can, in particular cases, crucially supplement the
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stock of relevant data, but it gets interpreted by the same rules as behavior outside the skin: The carton of cigarettes listed on the scrap of paper has the same evidentiary status as the carton of cigarettes referred to by some cerebral shopping list, if and when science can discern it. I have pointed out that the line between the design stance and the intentional stance is not sharp in any case; subpersonal cognitive psychology is a design stance enterprise conducted with the aid of liberal intentional stance characterizations of homunculi.
IV. SUPERFICIALISM VERSUS HYSTERICAL REALISM <JW'HV -ra <paWOf.1EVa
[Save the phenomena.]
-Plato Save the surface and you save all. -Sherwin-Williams
Thus Quine opens his Pursuit of Truth."" Georges Rey is surely right that the key to the profound disagreements he and other Fodorians have with me is that I espouse a view he deftly labels "superficialism." Who would ever want to be called a superficialist? Well, Quine, for one, might not shrink from the label. One good term deserves another. In the past I've called Fodor an "industrial strength realist," but the connotations of that term are all too positive, and I think Rey's blithe self-description as a "common-sense" realist is amusingly belied by the convolutions of doctrine he presents to us, so I'll change the epithet. Rey is an advocate of hysterical realism. Now you can choose: Which would you rather be, a hysterical realist or a superficialist like me? Rey is far from being alone when he responds to the siren song of hysterical realism. The defense of what Richard Rorty mockingly calls "Our Realist Intuitions" is a fervent activity in many quarters, and while I am not hereby endorsing Rorty's brand of resistance, I do think he has touched one of the untouchable sore spots in contemporary philosophy. Hysterical realism"; deserves its name, I will argue, because it is an overreaction, a rationally unmotivatable spasm brought on by peering into the abyss of certain indeterminacies that really should not trouble anybody so much. For Rey the particular topic is consciousness, a contentious topic, but we can begin cautiously. I trust we can all agree on this much: We find people asking questions about consciousness, using ordinary language, of course, with its ordinary presuppositions enshrined. Then once we start examining the real, causal complexities of what happens in brains, we find, I claim, a strikingly poor match between the pretheoretical presuppositions and the messy details. Here is another place where a disagreement over empirical facts looms large. Those who have not looked very closely are apt to think
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that I am exaggerating when I claim that this is a serious theoretical impasse. But since this isn't the place to review the empirical details, let's just suppose for the sake of argument that I am not exaggerating. Faced, then, with the striking nonalignment of everyday talk with scientific talk, what, as philosophers, should we do? My view, "superficialism," holds that we should relax our grip on the conviction that our everyday terms must find application--Dne application or another-in any acceptable solution. There may be, I say, no fact of the matter of just which events are-to use the ordinary termconscious and which are not (in the rather special cases raised by the Orwell versus Stalin impasse). Fie! Scandalous irrealism! Verificationism! Rey exposes my position with thorough scholarship. He relentlessly tracks down virtually all the points of confrontation, and he has organized the whole in proper marching order. Time and again as I read his essay, I found myself thinking "but I've dealt with that" only to turn the page and find the very passage I had in mind duly cited and discussed. There is one exception. To advert to what may be the only relevant passage in my work Rey doesn't discuss, the situation with regard to consciousness is like that hK confronted by the theorists who are asked what fatigues are. The natives in this imaginary land, you may recalL have a curious doctrine of "fatigues"too many fatigues spoil your aim, a fatigue in the legs is worth two in the arms, and Mommy, where do fatigues go when I sleep? We modern scientists arrive in their midst and they ask us to solve their traditional mysteries about fatigues. The hysterical realist takes on the thankless task of finding something real in the body to declare to be the fatigues so favored by the local folk. And I say "Gimme a break! We already knoH' enough about fatigues to know that they are not a good category for precision science: you simply cannot motivate a realist theory of fatigues. There's nothing left to discover that could be relevant to what the right theory of fatigues would be." That is superficial ism, by definition. but the question remains: Is this in fact a superficial response? Does it fall prey, as Rey suggests. to my own charge of mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity? I say that we already know enough empirical facts about what consciousness isn't to know that the ordinary concept of consciousness. like the concept of fatigues. is too frail; it could never be turned into the sort of scientific concept that could wring answers to the currently unanswerable questions. On the contrary. says the hysterical realist. we can dimly imagine that science will someday uncover grounds. currently unsuspected or even unimaginable by us, for settling such questions as the Orwell versus Stalin question, or the question of whether some subset of human beings might turn out to be zombies after alL etc. "Never say never" is the advice offered by 64 Owen Flanagan. I'm all for open-mindedness and scientific optimism. but surely Rey. Flanagan. and the others would agree that there are some occasions when
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the jig is up-when it is just silly to hold out hope for such a scientific revelation. Consider Einsteinian physics. Einstein noted that it is impossible to distinguish by local observation between a gravitational field and an accelerated frame of reference. This led him to postulate the equivalence that is at the heart of relativity theory. Now insert the "realist," who says "Oh just because you can't distinguish the two doesn't mean they aren't different! There might be a difference that is indistinguishable by any current test! Never say never!" Yeah, there might be, but in the meantime, tremendous 70 progress is made by concluding that there isn't. I am proposing similar simplifications: Since you can't distinguish between the Orwellian and Stalinesque models of metacontrast, or between a zombie that acts just as if it's conscious and a conscious being, they are equivalent. If Rey et al. agree with me that the superficialist response is sometimes appropriate, the question that divides us is whether the empirical facts support consciousness being such an instance. I say yes. and what some philosophers don't appreciate is that when I say this, I'm not just putting forward a philosophical thesis meant to ride piggyback on whatever the current scientific consensus might be. I'm making a fairly bold proposal about empirical theory in cognitive neuroscience, and basing it on a fairly detailed analysis of a wide variety of experimental and theoretical results. The Multiple Drafts model is deliberately sketchy about many details. but it is a scientific model, not just a philosophical toy. Rey sketches his alternative, the CCC theory of consciousness. and suggests that in many regards I could go along with his way of speakingall my multiple drafts being carried along as sentences of LOT in all his registers. And he acknowledges that his theory will have to be-shall we say-innovative in the way it settles many of the issues left open in the traditional understanding. But he imagines that there might be good scientific reasons in favor of such innovations, though of course he can't now say what they might be. This is one place where I think he has clearly underestimated the grounds I have given for my view. It is in the details of the account of the problems about time that the incoherence of Cartesian Materialism emerges, and when Rey says that the problems of so-called temporal anomaly can be "easily sorted out" by a threefold distinction in his CCC theory, his optimism counts for nothing till we see just how this is to be accomplished when he turns his philosophical theory into a scientific theory with some detail.?1 David Rosenthal takes the first few steps of this project in his own attempt to describe a possible brain mechanism that could resolve the Orwell-Stalin issue, and arrives at the conclusion that his mechanism "blurs the contrast between Stalinesque and Orwellian .... [There is reason 1 to reject a firm distinction between Stalinesque and Orwellian models.,,72 (More about this later.) Rey admits he hasn't a clue whether Orwell or Stalin would prevail in his CCC theory, but sees no reason "to leap to the conclusion" that there is
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no fact of the matter. My claim was no leap; it was brought home by a careful examination of the possibilities. [This is a good opportunity to point out that Ranagan's discussion similarly underestimates the difficulties raised by the Multiple Drafts model. He cites the Logothetis and Schall experiment with macaques,n but it is systematically inconclusive: Suppose we find that the activity in the STS region in macaques (parallel to MT in the human cortex) is also found in human subjects who deny awareness of the shift to which the macaques have been trained to respond, while making some other behavioral indication (e.g., a saccade) that they have detected the shift? Would this be evidence showing that MT activity was not, after all, associated with consciousness? Flanagan overlooks my discussion of the issue: There is a region in the cortex called MT, which responds to motion (and apparent motion). Suppose then that some activity in MT is the brain's concluding that there was ... motion. There is no further question. on the Multiple Drafts model, of whether this is a pre-experiential or post-experiential conclusion. It would be a mistake to ask. in other words, whether the activity in MT wa~ a "reaction to a conscious experience" ... as opposed to a "decision to represent motion" [in conscious experience].'·
And it is interesting to note that Logothetis and Schall themselves acknowledge the gap, and do not attempt to close it: The interpretation of the results is by no means conclusive. The differential modulation of these STS neurons in response to rivalrous stimuli was evident much earlier than subjects typically resolve the rivalrous perception. Thus further processing is clearly involved, and the data do not exclude the possibility that the perception-related modulation observed in these neurons may be a result of feedback from higher centers.-'
What would closing the gap entail? It would entail singling out some privileged comer-turning as the one that the conscious sLlI~ject presided over or witnessed. but there is no such inner sanctum for such events to happen in. Flanagan has jumped to conclusions about the proper heterophenomenology of the macaques and its relation to activity in STS, begging the question. Flanagan also speculates that either forty-herz synchrony or the Squire Zola-Morgan theory of hippocampal involvement might provide the leverage to resolve the quandaries I say are unresolvable, but these two popular themes are already tidily tucked in among the factors that are powerless to settle the questions, as a careful examination shows.)" Until you work through the details, it is indeed hard to see that these ideas utterly fail to provide any further leverage on the Orwell-Stalin question. And if they can't help, what could? It is no use just saying "Well, I can't imagine anything now that could upset your claim, but still, something could!"]
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I think there are abundant empirical grounds for eschewing Rey's proposed way of speaking about "registers" in the brain containing various sentences in a language of thought, but I'll go along with the gag this far: If Rey could motivate a categorization of all these registers into c-registers and u-registers, I would grant that he could thereupon handily discover, by brute inspection, facts of the matter where I say there are none. Some of these might tum out to be mighty strange facts-it could tum out that left-handers aren't conscious after all, or that the order in which successive perceived events become conscious in subjects is seldom if ever the order in which they seem to subjects to occur, or that people are conscious of multiple interpretations of every sentence they hear, without realizing it-but who ever said science couldn't surprise us? But precisely because such bizarre "discoveries" are not just possible but already upon us, the demand for a motivation for the proposed identifications is going to be very, very high. We already know that the tasks that would have to be normally accomplished by the imagined c-registers are broken up and distributed around to many different structures, asynchronously making their particular contributions. Singling out anyone variety of these, or even some salient team of these, and labeling them the c-registers is going to look awfully ad hoc. Superficialism is attractive whenever the task of motivating a particular hard line looks hopeless. Hilary Putnam's classic paper, "Dreaming and Depth Grammar,,,77 did a number on superficialism from which it has never, till now, recovered. Norman Malcolm and the other mavens of ordinary language philosophy had raised their brand of "conceptual analysis" to a deeply regressive. hyperconservative. pitch. Science, it seemed, could never discover anything that the Folk didn't already know about their phenomena. If science discovered anything truly surprising, it would have to be about something else-"you've changed the concept." as the saying went. Putnam showed how lamentably thin this philosophy of language was,7H but I think the pendulum has swung too far. Used in moderation, the superficialist response to mismatches between folk psychology and academic psychology (like the mismatch between folk physiology -"fatigues"-and scientific physiology) is just the ticket. Ordinary folk think that dreams are experiences that occur during sleep. Suppose science were to discover that the content-fixing series of neural events that generate the stories people tell on waking actually occur, unbeknownst to their subjects, during waking life. At this very minute, let's suppose, your brain is composing ("having"?) the dream you will report on waking tomorrow. Now in this imagined eventuality, "what would we say?" Would we say "It turns out that dreams aren't experiences after all" or would we say "It turns out that there aren't any dreams at all" or what? The superficialist about dreams says that this may be an interesting question but it is not a question of discovery, but one of policy, just like the fatigues case-or the magnets case. The hysterical realist says that it all depends on what the scien-
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tists have learned. If there is a deep enough theory (we can't imagine it now, of course), there could be conclusive grounds for the claim that scientists had discovered that dreams happen while you're awake and are not experiences at all. But, says Malcolm, rising from the grave, now you're just changing the concept. You have discovered a scientific truth, but not a truth about dreams. The concept of a dream may not be a good scientific concept, but it is our very own. He would say the same about the alternative claim-the scientists had discovered that there simply were no dreams after all. Eliminativism about dreams is as myopic and needlessly tendentious as proclaiming the weird identification. The main point. in any event, is that if dreams (as ordinarily understood) turned out not to have a good fit with scientific discoveries, then it would be a gratuitous exercise in special pleading to try to force one scientific identification of dreams or another; whatever we decided was best to say, our decision would not be a scientific discovery but a more or less political decision about how best to avoid misunderstandings. It must count against any novel scientific recategorization of an ordinary term that it creates huge dislocations of common understanding (dolphins tum out not to be fish, but when we are told that tomatoes are fruit, not vegetables, we blithely conclude that scientists have some other, technical concept of fruit in mind, not the ordinary one). That's just a point about language-a close kin to Quine on the constraints on radical translation and also, as Rey notes, to Malcolm and Wittgenstein on "changing the concept.,,79 Putnam is commonly thought to have put a stop to this line of thought, not 80 just in his trouncing of Malcolm, but in his more recent insistence that, thanks to the division of linguistic labor, natural kinds can be what people are really talking about. even when, as individuals, they are incompetent to discriminate between alternative possibilities. The fundamental idea is that we can escape our local epistemological limitations by ceding our referential authority to Nature itself: What I mean (whether I know it or not) by my own word "water" is whatever natural kind the stuff I paradigmatically call "water" turns out to be. This is a fine idea when Nature cooperates-or rather. to put the responsibility where it belongs, when our linguistic community happens to have hit the nail on the head (or close enough). But whenever our everyday terms carve Nature less well (in spite of our Putnamian goal of naming natural kinds) there is no forcing the issue. It is thus the overextension of Putnam's doctrine of natural kinds that is a bulwark of hysterical realism. an attempt to tum the nominal essences of science into real essences." This comes out clearly if we contrast a case in which Putnam's doctrine looks plausible with one that does not look compelling at all. Suppose Twin Earth is just like Earth except for having shmust where we have dust-behind the books on the bookcase. along country roads during dry spells, etc. But surely. you protest. the concept of dust isn't the concept of a natural kind-shmust is dust, in spite of what
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anybody says! Exactly. It's a superficial concept, a nominal essence of scant interest or power. We already know enough about dust to know that science couldn't discover that dust was really something else-or that there wasn't any dust. Science could not uncover the secret nature of dust, because dust qua dust couldn't have a secret nature. In contrast, we already know enough about water, and gold, to know that they are natural kinds. The question then that divides Rey and me might seem to be: Are the concepts of folk psychology like the concept of dust or like the concept of water? Rey thinks they are like the concept of water, good candidates for natural kindhood. I think we already know enough about many of them to know that even though they may aspire to name natural kinds (unlike the concept of dust), they aren't good enough to succeed. That is a difference of opinion arising from different readings of the empirical facts, but there is also an underlying philosophical disagreement. Rey, as a hysterical realist, thinks there is always the further question to be answered: Which natural kinds do our terms in fact name? This question cannot be forced, since natural kinds can be nested, an undeniable fact (though Putnamians have ignored it for years) that leads us right back to superficialism. Consider Putnam's standard case of water. Presumably, H 20 and XYZ are subkinds of some larger natural kind. Putnam disguises this implication by calling his alternative "XYZ" and not, say, "X 20," which we would be more inclined to consider a novel variety of water, like 0 20, deuterium oxide or heavy water. K2 How could H 20 and XYZ not be instances of some single natural kind, given that they are as interchangeable in the physical world as Putnam requires us to imagine? Suppose, then, that H 20 and XYZ are both instances of some broader natural kind, K. Which natural kind did the folk mean by their prescientific word "water"? Since they lacked any scientific purchase on the difference between H 2 0 and K and could not, ex hypothesi, distinguish them, there cannot have been grounds in their usage or understanding for favoring one over the other. Might we invoke a "general principle" to the effect that whenever people use a term with the understanding that it names a natural kind, they mean the term to refer to the narrowest natural kind that fits their historical usage? We might, but the arbitrariness of the principle will haunt us in cases in which isolation forces bizarrely narrow answers. K3 For instance, if there is life anywhere in the universe that is not carbon based, such life forms could not be called "alive" by unscientific earthlings, since the only life forms that have ever been called alive on this planet are exclusively carbon based, and carbon-based life is surely a natural kind. Adopting the proposed repair to Putnamian doctrine, we would have to say that anyone who called a Martian alive would be making the same mistake as the person who called a glass of XYZ water. Not very persuasive. So if we abandon the minimalist principle as arbitrary and unmotivatable, we are left with two choices: Either there is a fact of the matter, but
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one that is systematically indiscernible from every possible perspective (now that's truly hysterical realism!), or there is no fact of the matter-it's a policy question at best-and we are back at superficial ism. Try it. You'll like it. I find it a lot easier to swallow than hysterical realism.
V. OTTO AND THE ZOMBIES
As Joseph Levine says, "it's terribly difficult to get clear about just what is being affirmed and denied" in the qualia debate. His response is to meet my case against qualia with a methodical, sympathetic, and accurate rebuttal, very usefully shining light on the issues from the other side. It might seem at first as if his botanizing of species of bold and modest qualophilia, reductionism, and eliminativism is an indictment of the whole enterprise, showing it to be one more instance of philosophers playing burden tennis instead of engaging in a serious investigation. His use of the common philosophical diction of "available strategies" belies the fact that for him, as for me, the point in the end isn't to win but to uncover the truth. Let me try to reframe the issue slightly. We begin as people with opposing hunches-it's as simple as that-and neither side knows just what to say. One side feels pretty uncomfortable with the prospect of a materialistic account of subjectivity, and the other side is pretty sure all the real problems with such a theory can be worked out. So they put their heads together (face to face and opposed) and see what happens. Strong moves by one side (e.g .. "bold qualophilia") are readily rebuffed-not refuted once and for all, but made to seem gratuitous or extravagant. worth putting on the back burner for awhile if not abandoned utterly-while more modest forays are explored. Out of this actually quite constructive interplay of opposing hunches, genuine progress is made. or can be made. It is important to recognize this interplay or dialectic. for otherwise it can seem as if people are always talking past each other-or worse: deliberately attempting to confound the opposition. Robert Van Gulick. for instance, describes my method in the following terms: "Like any good debater, he tries to saddle his opposition with as much questionable philosophical baggage as possible."H4 That would not be a constructive move on my part, and I sincerely hope I haven't done that. Let's leave debating tricks to the debaters. What I have tried to do is to show that the "questionable philosophical baggage" comes along for the ride under surprisingly innocent-seeming circumstances. I can see how my arguing that somebody's apparently innocent "realism" or "mild qualophilia" had embarrassing implications might look like a debater's trick to somebody on the receiving end, but if that were all it was, it should not be admired or even tolerated; it should be dismissed as unhelpful and unserious shenanigans. It has seemed
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to some as if I am shooting down strawmen with arguments against (only) bold qualophilia, when in fact I aim some arguments-appropriatelyagainst the bold views and others-appropriately-against the modest views. This comes out clearly in Levine's deft peeling of the onion, as he follows me down the path to what he Considers Otto's "trap," acknowledging-and explaining-how each move on his side is neatly countered by a move on my part. I will return to Otto, and Levine's attempt to escape with an intact view, in a moment, but first I want to highlight a feature of the interplay that comes out intermittently in Levine's discussion but to which he does not draw explicit attention. This is what we might call unrecognized allegiances. In this phenomenon, people on one side or the other explicitly disavow any allegiance to a strong view as soon as a good objection to it is pressed, thereby allowing themselves to concede without further examination that the other side's arguments would indeed demolish that strawman, but precisely because they never bother to defend the strong view, they fail to see just how much they are giving up-and giving up for good-as they move to the more modest and defensible versions. Then they later unwittingly revert to an appeal to some feature that belongs only to the strong view, and we go round and round in circles. I believe this problem of unrecognized allegiances is a common foible, and one of my countermeasures is to set up vivid reminders of what one is renouncing-never to return. Figment, for instance. It is an attractive feature to qualophiles until I find a suitably abusive way of characterizing it, and I am always gratified when some brave qualophile admits that, yes, something along the lines of figment was just what she was hankering for. WelL you can't have it. Figment doesn't properly come up, of course, in discussions with modest qualophiles, who have officially renounced such extravagances, but without the frontal attack on it, it would, I am sure, continue to fuel the motivation of some modest qualophiles behind the scenes. On his journey to Otto, Levine acutely describes the challenge of heterophenomenology, and sees that the only escape for qualophiles is to maintain "that conscious experiences themselves, not merely our verbal judgments about them, are the primary data to which a theory must answer."x, Leopold Stubenberg has seen the same cliff edge looming and has resisted in the same terms.'!> Here is my response (and note that its force is somewhat acknowledged, at various points, in Levine's discussion): You defenders of the first-person point of view are not entitled to this complaint about the "primary data" of heterophenomenology, since by your own lights, you should prefer its treatment of the primary data to any other. Why? Because it manifestly does justice to both possible sources of nonoverlap. On the one hand, if some of your conscious experiences occur unbeknownst to you (they are experiences about which you have no beliefs, and hence can
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make no "verbal judgments"), then they are just as inaccessible to your firstperson point of view as they are to heterophenomenology. Ex hypothesi. you don't even suspect you have them-if you did, you could verbally express those suspicions. So heterophenomenology's list of primary data doesn't leave out any conscious experiences you know of or have any first-person inklings about. On the other hand, unless you claim not just reliability or normal incorrigibility, but outright infallibility, you should admit that some-just some--of your beliefs (or verbal judgments) about your conscious experiences might be wrong; in all such cases, however rare they are. what has to be explained by theory is not the conscious experience, but your belief in it (or your sincere verbal judgment, etc.). So heterophenomenology doesn't include any spurious "primary data" either, but plays it safe in a way you should approve.R7 Levine's response to this impasse, like Stubenberg's, takes us right to Otto, who anticipates it, in his plea for "real seeming." And Levine notes, correctly I dare say, that if I am right when I say "there is no difference between being of the heartfelt opinion that something seems pink to you, and something really seeming pink to you," then there is "nothing left about which to argue." So we are closing in. (For more on real seeming, see below.) And it is true, as Levine says, that in my immediate response to Otto, I don't really argue for this claim; I just assert it. Elsewhere in Consciousness Explained, however, I do give grounds for believing it-in my own account of what consciousness comes to, and in my arguments about what no empirically realistic model of consciousness can tolerate: a Cartesian Theater. But I surely didn't make it clear enough why those considerations guaranteed my assertion to Otto on this occasion. Thanks to Levine, I can now repair that gap, for the issue is exposed with unprecedented clarity in his attempt to characterize the modest qualophile's inability to provide "an account of the mechanisms of first-person epistemic access."KK So suppose B is a state of conscious experience. I want to understand how a cognitive state. A, carries the information that B. It seems that in order for me to understand that relation. r must first understand how B is realized in those very physical mechanisms by which the infonnation that B is to be carried to A. But, by the qualophile's own hypothesis. this understanding is not currently available. That is, I don't understand how B is itself realized in physical mechanisms. So. it follows that I abo don't understand how information concerning B flows 10 A [my emphasis J. Hence. I don't have an account of first-person epis• !'9 temlC access.
Think of what lurks in this "flowing to A." There is a (functional) place, A, which either "has access to" the information that B or doesn't. How on earth does the information get there? These are the terms in which Levine's qualophile frames the issue. But since this is to be an account offirst-persoll
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epistemic access, the place in question must be none other than the place where I reside, the Cartesian Theater. There is no such place. Any theory which postulates such a place is still in the grip of Cartesian Materialism. What (and where) is this I? It is not an organ, a subfaculty, a place in the 911 brain, a medium-or medium -into which information gets transduced. My attack on the Cartesian Theater is among other things an attack on the very practice-illustrated here in an otherwise remarkably sure-footed performance-Df positing an unanalyzed "I" or "we" or "self' or "subject" who "has access" to x or y, as if we could take this as a primitive of our theorizing. Any sane account of the mechanisms of consciousness must begin with the denial of Cartesian Materialism; and that leads irresistibly to the view that the "me" has to be constructed out of the interactions, not vice versa. This is the point of what I sometimes think is the most important. and underappreciated, passage in Consciousness Explained. How do I get to know all about this? How come J can tell you all about what was going on in my head? The answer to the puzzle is simple: Because that is 'what J am. Because a knower and reporter of such things in such terms is what is me. Myexistence is explained by the fact that there are these capacities in this body."'
But then what about the zombie problem? Levine is excellent on the zombie problem. In particular, he shows exactly why, as I have urged. there is really nothing left of modest qualophilia unless you hang tough on the conceivability of zombies. So, hanging tough on zombies is just what he does, with resourcefulness and an acute appreciation of the pitfalls the qualophobe has prepared for him. I hope no qualophiles find fault with his treatment, since he seems to me to have captured the dialectic and strategy of both sides just about perfectly. Certainly he has done justice to my campaign against zombies--except for one delicate matter, alluded to in his polemical closing, but not directly addressed. Levine deplores the defensive position into which qualophiles have been thrust by my attack on their belief in zombies. No, he says. truly modest qualophilia is not "a philosophically infantile obsession" and modest qualophiles "practice their puzzlement in a spirit of profound respect for science." I gather, in other words. that he finds my ridiculing of the belief in zombies to be unfair. at best a cheap shot. I confess that try as I might. I cannot summon up conviction for any other verdict: Zombies are ridiculous! By my lights, it is an embarrassment to philosophy that what is widely regarded among philosophers as a major theoretical controversy should come down to whether or not zombies (philosophers' zombies) are possible or conceivable. I myself try hard to avoid the issue, and the term. in discussions of consciousness with scientists. since I invariably find that any attempt at serious discussion of the zombie problem meets with ill-suppressed hilarity. This does philosophy and philosophers no good, and I deplore it just
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as much as Levine does. Clearly a massive public relations job needs to be done, and just as clearly I am not the one to attempt it, since I myself don't yet see how a philosopher as acute and sure-footed and wise as Levine can stomach the position he staunchly maintains about zombies. I have helped drive him there, thinking the campaign would cure him. If he chooses instead 2 to outsmad me, then perhaps he himself should take on the delicate task of explaining to a general audience, not to philosophers, why the belief in zombies is not a reductio ad absurdum. His paper in this volume is a fine foundation, but it is still manifestly written for a philosophical audience, and even in it, he fails (in my biased opinion) to secure much of a leg for a zombie to stand on. But on the strength of his showing here, he can do it if anybody can. I responded above to Robert Van Gulick's suggestion that I was cleverly trying "'to saddle the opposition with as much questionable philosophical baggage as possible" by denying that this was a debater's trick on my part. Now it is time to address the substantive issue: Can one be a phenomenal realist (in Van Gulick's sense) without taking on the bad baggage? I have said no. but he is not convinced. His paper usefully clarifies the conditions under which one can be a phenomenal realist. in his sense, but in the process it seems to me that he ends up with a position that is scarcely distinguishable from mine after all. He thinks, for instance, that Marcel Kinsboume's "integrated field" theory might be a good empirical fleshing out of his phenomenal realism, but Kinsboume's theory and mine are one and the same; we worked it out in collaboration. and so far as I know we do not part company--except by inadvertence or forgetfulness--on any of the issues, differing only in which aspects of the shared theory to emphasize at various moments. What keeps Kinsboume and me from being phenomenal realists too, then? Phenomenal realists believe there are important structural and functional differences between mental states with phenomenal properties and those without. . . . Phenomenal states. for example. seem to play an especially privileged role in the initiation of intentional behavior. ... On the structural side. phenomenal states typically involve highly integrated representations that incorporate multimodal information and rich networks of connections among interrelated items in the represented scene or situatIOn. •
•
ljl,
Kinsboume and I certainly agree about the importance to consciousness of these "structural and functional differences," which is why they each get special treatment in the MUltiple Drafts model (e.g .. the discussions of blindsight, "hide the thimble." and prosthetic vision in Consciollslless ErplailIed). But what work are "phenomenal properties" doing over and above the role played by the integration and the rich network? Kinsboume and I vv'onder what we can be supposed to be leaving out. We insist upon the functional and
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structural differences, and on their importance. I go on to say, wearing my philosopher's hat, that these features are the very features typically misdescribed by philosophers as somehow "phenomenal." What difference are we disagreeing about? Perhaps this one (leaning on the usual crutch); Kinsboume and I would see no reason in principle why a robot (like the proverbial zombie that lacks phenomenal consciousness) could not exhibit both sides of the distinctions observable in blindsightbeing unable to initiate or guide intentional actions by benefiting from the information in its scotoma, while showing the normal responsiveness, etc., to the visual information gleaned from the rest of its visual field. If so, then the difference could not, ex hypothesi, be a difference in phenomenal consciousness, the robot having none under the best of conditions. Would phenomenal realists dig in their heels here, and if so, how? Would they insist that no robot could have highly integrated, action-initiating vision? A daring and implausible empirical claim. Would they insist that any robot that did exhibit normal visual competence would show ipso facto that robots have phenomenal consciousness after all? That would be a clarification or revision of the meaning of "phenomenal consciousness" that would put Kinsboume and me squarely in the camp of the phenomenal realists (see my discussion of Cog, in the first section of this essay). A third possibility is that the phenomenal realist would declare that in the case of such a robot, we wouldn't know (from all we've been told so far) whether this robot had, or didn't have, phenomenal consciousness to go along with its (otherwise) normal vision. But then what has happened to the importance of phenomenal properties? What leg would they then stand on? There is one window through which the presumed difference can be clearly seen. Van Gulick thinks he has shown that there can be facts of the matter about experience that cannot be empirically detected. There may be a briefly transient fact about how experience is for the subject, but if the duration of that experience is insufficient to fix a belief or generate a report, it will systematically elude detection."'
Kinsboume and I opened our joint paper by quoting a sentence from Ariel Dorfman's novel Mascara that was supposed to exhibit the dubiousness of this assumption:
r m really not sure if others fail to perceive me or if, one fraction of a second after my face interferes with their horizon, a millionth of a second after they have cast their gaze on me, they already begin to wash me from their memory: forgotten before arriving at the scant, sad archangel of a remembrance. In my discussion of Rosenthal and Block, below, I will respond further to his claim.
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VI. HIGHER-ORDER THOUGHTS AND MENTAL BLOCKS David Rosenthal and Ned Block are both unpersuaded by the radical implications of my Multiple Drafts model of consciousness, and their essays deal with many of the same issues, but they take opposite approaches to the task confronting them. Rosenthal looks closely at the MDM and attempts to show how to sever its connections to its most disturbing feature, "first-person operationalism" (FPO), in the process very usefully highlighting the reasons I have found for uniting them. Block, in contrast, turns his back on the details of the MDM, thereby confirming the folk wisdom that if you don't look at something, you can't see it. Rosenthal, like Dretske, tries to establish something like a medium of representation (of "sensory content") midway between stimulation and the sort of (mis-)taking that is constitutive of how it seems (in at least one sense). They are both trying to find a home for what r call real seeming, in short. And once again, Rosenthal directly confronts a problem that is being underestimated by others. In his discussion of "Hide the Thimble." he notes that there is a prima facie problem with any view that insists, contrary to Betsy's firstperson disavowals. that a "sensation" of the thimble is somehow part of her consciousness. As he observes, "It seems that such a sensation could be conscious in name only, that is, in some technical sense that fails to make contact with our intuitive conception of consciousness.""O But he also notes that "theories often considerably expand our ability to discriminate among phenomena that are indistinguishable independent of theory:·46 echoing the positive thinking of Owen Flanagan and Georges Rey. True. but as I have stressed in my discussion of them, we have to be able to motivate the extension of the theory. Rosenthal recognizes this burden and claims that the apparent adhocness of any such theory extension is removed by reflection on the existence of "'fleeting auditory and visual sensations that occupy the periphery of our consciousness.,,97 Are we in fact conscious of any such fleeting auditory and visual sensations? It certainly seems so. We know that they are there, it seems, since although we can never quite catch them individually in the net of recollection, if they weren't there. we'd notice their absence. (Whatever we catch in the net of recollection is always, ipso facto, something picked out by attention, something the existence of which is known to us in the manner Dretske calls fact awareness.) But would we in fact notice their absence if they weren't "there"? The experiments by Grimes and Rensink et a!. show that we don't notice huge differences "'in them," and the existence of such counterintuitive pathologies as Anton's Syndrome (people who have become totally blind but don't yet realize it!) show that our everyday intuitions about these matters are not to be trusted. In what interesting sense does the occurrence of these putative ,·tleeting sensations"
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register on us at all? Rosenthal thinks he can slip between Scylla and Charybdis here: "All that's necessary for this to happen is a momentary event of being transitively conscious of the sensation, albeit too briefly to register as part of the subject's first-person point of view.,,~8 But why speak of transitive consciousness here at all, if it leaves the first-person point of view unaffected?')') What is called for (by both Dretske and Rosenthal) is some form of ephemeral effect on some informational medium in the brain. That is easily found, in abundance: The brief irradiation of one's retinas by the thimble's image should do the trick, or the equally brief modification of V I, the "first" visual area of the cortex. We could say, then, that people have transitory transitive consciousness (thing awareness, in Dretske's terms) of any stimuli whose image irradiates the retinas and/or modifies VI. Why not? Because, once again, you can't motivate the claim that any such medium counts as the medium of consciousness,lO() or the claim that such transitory modification counts as seeing (Dretske), or that the units composing such a medium count as the c-registers (Rey). Rosenthal's deliberate reexpression of my MDM leaving out FPO forces him to encounter from a different angle the problems that led me to incorporate FPO into my account. At one point, describing the Orwellian option, he says: "Perhaps, the initial stimulus does reach consciousness ... but that conscious sensation does not last long enough to have any noticeable mental effects; it commands no attention, and when it ceases any traces in memory are immediately expunged:,ILlI Making sense of such a claim requires one to have some theory or model of consciousness that permits the normal mental effects of consciousness to be gathered, as it were, into a family under some tolerant umbrella, so that getting under the umbrella counts, even if one goes on to achieve few, if any, of the normal effects. 10: But not all phenomena are amenable to such treatment. Fame is my favorite exception. 10' Consider the parallel claim, made about somebody: "In his life, he did achieve fame, but that fame didn't last long enough to have any noticeable effects in the world; he commanded no attention, and when he died. all memory of him was expunged." What on earth could this mean? Unless it meant something "technical" and unmotivated, along the lines of "he was inducted into some Hall of Fame," the claim just contradicts itself. Rosenthal attempts to rehabilitate real seeming by discovering several different levels of seeming. He shows how to drive a wedge between the "second-level" seeming of the first-person point of view as constituted by heterophenomenology and a "first-level" variety of seeming, which would be revealed by such phenomena as somebody swerving to avoid a truck, without that truck entering his or her heterophenomenological world. This distinction is real enough, a descendant of my distinction between awareness l and awareness z,'f>4 now abandoned because I saw that instead of there being sharp levels of seeming, there was something more blurry, something
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more like a continuum, as revealed most vividly in Marcel's experiment requiring subjects to make multiple "redundant" responses to the same stimulus.1U5 Normally, all the responses of a person (or animal) pull together in favor of one reading of how things seem "to" that unitary agent, but in pathological or just extreme circumstances, the "transcendental unity" of seeming can come apart. When it does, we are not entitled to assume that some still unidentified property of consciousness (a "player to be named later") belongs to some subset of the seemings. Rosenthal recognizes this, in part: He allows me the category of unconscious seemings (what, in the old days, I would have called cases of awareness, without awareness l ), but in spite of his several recognitions of the onset of bluniness in his own account as he develops the details, he persists in holding out for a sharp divide between the unconscious and the conscious, and he persists in trying to make the divide distinct from the brutally incisive rule of first-person operationalism: If the subject can't report it, it isn't part of the subject's consciousness. Heterophenomenological reports give us our best evidence about how people's conscious mental lives appear to them. But things aren't always as they seem. So Dennett's methodological appeal to these reports is neutral about whether sincere reports truly describe the conscious [emphasis added] events that go into a subject's first-person viewpoint or simply express the subject's beliefs about those mental events, events which may be entirely notional. 1«.
In a passage I quoted earlier, Rosenthal claims that in "Orwellian" cases, there are putatively conscious events that do not "go into a subject's firstperson viewpoint," and here he claims that there can be "entirely notional" events that are part of that viewpoint but are not conscious (you only think you are "transitively" conscious of such events). He has not met the burden of establishing independent grounds for these categories, nor do I think that any such grounds can be motivated. Ned Block's essay is his fourth in a series criticizing my theory of consciousness, and they arrive again and again at the same verdict: He can't see anything radical about it. I(s either trivial or obviously false on any interpretation he can muster. He has so far overlooked the reading I intended. We all have fixed points-assumptions so obvious to us that we don't even consider them up for debate-and I have long thought that Block's inability to encounter my theory must be because he just couldn't bring himself to take seriously the idea that I was challenging some of his fixed points. Now he has confirmed this diagnosis, not just avowing that he has not taken it seriously but flatly urging no one else to take it seriously as well! He says "I hope it is just obvious to virtually everyone that the fact that things look, sound, and smell more or less the way they do to us is a basic biological feature of people, not a cultural construction that our children 1()7
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have to learn as they grow up." I must dash his hopes; it is neither obvious nor so much as true. He goes on to offer quite a list of ideas "we should not take seriously." It is not just, as I had suspected, that he was simply incapable of taking my hypotheses seriously. "My point," he says, "is that we should not take this question seriously. It is a poor question that will just mislead us." No wonder he has been so unmoved by my account! He has discarded it on general principles, without a hearing. That is a serious failure of communication, but we can now repair it. Block agrees with me that consciousness is a "mongrel notion" and follows my strategy of titration-breaking down the ungodly mess into its components-but he underestimates the importance of the difference that language (and reportability) makes. I took a shot at it in 1969 with my distinction between the awareness I that language-using creatures have to the contents that "enter" their "speech centers" and the awareness c that marks appropriately discriminative uptake and is "enjoyed" equally by anteaters, ants, and electric-eye door-openers. As I have just acknowledged in my discussion of Rosenthal, that postulated speech center was all too Cartesian, and the role that language plays in consciousness is much more interesting and indirect than I saw in 1969, so I have had to make major adjustments to that doctrine. But the continuing importance of seeing a major distinction between the consciousness of language users and the so-called consciousness of all other entities is made particularly clear by Block's work, which, by ignoring it, creates a powerful theoretical illusion. Block puts his major division between "access" and "phenomenal" consciousness and, without further ado, declares that the "access" of awareness c is all the access that matters. Block deliberately frames access consciousness so that language and hence reportability does not playa role. "My intent in framing the notion is to make it applicable to lower animals in virtue of their ability to use perceptual contents in guiding their actions."ICJK As we shall see, this enhances the illusion that there is an "obvious" sense of consciousness in which lower animals and infants are conscious, and to make matters worse, Block actually enjoins people not to pursue the questions that would expose this illusion. My own efforts to convince Block of this in the past have all been frustrated, but he and I have kept plugging away, and now I have hopes of straightening it all out. At least he should now be able to see, for the first time, what my position is and always has been. Again and again in this paper he asks what he takes to be crushing questions, questions to which he thinks I can have no answer. He will "surely" be surprised by my answers-and even more, I expect, when I point out that these have always been my answers to them. Block's attitude in the current essay towards his own major division (between "access" and "phenomenal" consciousness) is curiously ambivalent: He wields it, acknowledges that I have rejected it, but excuses himself
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from mounting the defense I say it needs. "We needn't worry," he tells us, "about whether access-consciousness is really distinct from phenomenal consciousness, since the question at hand is whether either of them could be a cultural construction. I am dealing with these questions separately, but I am giving the same answer to both, so if I am wrong about their distinctness it won't matter to my argument." lOY But it does matter, since it is the very move of supposing that he can make this cleavage between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness that conceals from him the way in which consciousness could be a cultural construction. By looking at two misisolated components of the phenomenon, Block has convinced himself that since neither "separately" could be a cultural construction, consciousness cannot be a cultural construction. But these supposed sorts of consciousness don't make sense "separately"-they only seem to do so. To put it bluntly,"°Block can't distinguish phenomenal consciousness from phenomenal unconsciousness without introducing some notion of access, a point he almost sees: "There is a 'me' -ness to phenomenal consciousness." Like Dretske, he needs there to be some sort of uptake to ensure that the "phenomenal" is to or for some subject--Dr could phenomenal itches and aromas just hang around being conscious without being conscious to anyone? Rosenthal enunciates as if it were a constitutive principle the intuitive demand that raises these problems for Dretske and Block: "Still, if one is in no way transitively conscious of a particular mental state, that state is not a conscious state." III This "transitive" consciousness must be a variety of "access" consciousness, for it relates "one" to what "one is conscious of." But once we let access come back in, we will have to ask what sort of access we are talking about (for "phenomenal" consciousness, mind you). Is the access to color-boundary information enjoyed by the part of your brain that controls eye movements sufficient? If it is. then the anesthetized subject (a monkey, most likely) whose eyes move in response to these "perceived" colors is enjoying phenomenal consciousness. And so forth. (In this area I think Ivan Fox's essay has valuable further lessons to offer.) Block doesn't tell us anything about which features of access would suffice for phenomenal consciousness, but in any case, however Block would resolve this issue, I resolve it. as he correctly notes. via the concept of cerebral celebrity. This idea "seems more a theory of access-consciousness than any of the other elements of the mongrel," but it is also, I claim. a theory of phenomenal consciousness (after all, I deny the distinction). Can this really be so? Could the sort of access requisite for phenomenal consciousness really be "constructed" out of cerebral celebrity. and could this feature in turn be a cultural construction? Block is forthright in his incredulity. "I hope Dennett tells us how, according to him, cerebral celebrity could be a cultural construction." But I already have, at great length, over more than a decade. He just didn't notice.
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He helpfully italicizes his main error for us: "But surely it is nothing
other than a biologicalfact about people-not a cultural construction-that some brain representations persevere enough to affect memory, control behavior, etc."112 Surely? No. Here Block completely overlooks all my patient efforts to explain precisely why cerebral celebrity is not a biologically guaranteed phenomenon. This is the point of all my discussion (going back to Elbmv Room) of the evolution of consciousness: to open up as a serious biological possibility the idea that our brains are not organized at birth, thanks to our animal heritage, in ways that automatically guarantee the sorts of mutual influence of parts that is the hallmark of "our access" to conscious lI3 contents. My little thought experiment about talking to oneself is central. It suggests a way-a dead simple way, just to get our imaginations moving in the right direction-in which a culturally "injected" factor, the use of language. could dramatically alter the functionally available informational pathways in a brain. Now does Block think that my story is inconceivable? Does he think it is inconceivable that human infants. prior to rudimentary mastery of a language, and the concomitant habits of self-stimulation, have brain organizations that do not yet support "access" consciousness beyond the sorts "lower" animals enjoy? Probably not. But tempting though it undoubtedly is, he may not now fall back on his undefended distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness. He is in no position to say: "Surely" these lower animals, even if they do lack human-style access consciousness, have phenomenal consciousness?!II~ In an elegant paper. "Cued and Detached Representations in Animal Cognition," Peter Gardenfors points out "why a snake can't think of a mouse." It seems that a snake does not have a central representation of a
mouse but relies solely on transduced information. The snake exploits three different sensory systems in relation to prey. like a mouse. To strike the mouse, the snake uses its ~'isual system (orthermal sensors). When struck, the mouse normally does not die immediately, but runs away for some distance. To locate the mouse, once the prey has been struck, the snake uses it~ sense of smell. The search behavior is exclusively wired to this modality. Even if the mouse happens to die right in front of the eyes of the snake, it will still follow the smell trace of the mouse in order to find it. This unimodality is particularly evident in snakes like boas and pythom, where the prey often is held fast in the coils of the snake's body. when it e.g. hang:.. from a branch. Despite the fact that the snake must have ample proprioceptory information about the location of the prey it holds, it searches stochastically for it, all around, only with the help of the 1 olfactory sense organs. " Finally, after the mouse has been located, the snake must find its head in order to swallow it. This could obviously be done
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with the aid of smell or sight, but in snakes this process uses only tactile information. Thus the snake uses three separate modalities to catch and eat a mouse. 1H.
Can we talk about what the snake, itself, "has access" to, or just about what its various parts have access to? Is any of that obviously sufficient for "phenomenal" (or any other kind of) consciousness? What-if any thingis it like to be a (whole) snake? Postponing consideration of that question, does such an example render plausible-at least worth exploring-my hypothesis? My radical proposal is that the sorts of internal integrating systems the snake so dramatically lacks but we have are in fact crucial for consciousness, and they are not ours at birth but something we gradually acquire, thanks in no small measure to what Block calls "cultural injection." I hope that, unlike Block, you think these are ideas that just might be worth taking seriously. Block says: "True, culture modulates cerebral celebrity, but it does not create it." Since this flat assertion directly contradicts my claim about the role of culture in creating the conditions for cerebral celebrity, some supporting argument is called for. Presumably Block doesn't realize that this is the phantom Dennettian claim he makes such a labor of searching for. He's utterly right about the banality of the view that it takes culture to think of oneself as a federal self: the interesting view is that it takes culture to become a federal self. But he doesn't consider this view. Whenever Block says "Surely," look for what we might call a mental block. Here is another: "Surely, in any culture that allows the material and psychological necessities of life, people genetically like us will have experiences much like ours: There will be something it is like for them to see and hear and smell things that is much like what it is like for us to do these things.""- Block says "in any culture"-and 1 have never claimed that consciousness is a product of a very spec~fic culture. since all sorts of human cultures for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years have had the perquisites. So Block ignores here the appropriate case, given my claims. What about the (fortunately, imaginary) case of Robinson Crusoe human beings, each raised in total isolation, in an entirely depopulated, a-sociaL a~ cultural world. with no mother to cuddle and feed them, no language to learn. no human interactions at all? Is it obvious that "there will be something it is like for them to see and hear and smell things that is much like what it is like for us to do these things"? I don't think so. But "surely," you retort. however appallingly different it would be, it would be like something! WelL here is where "what it is like" runs into trouble. Is it obvious that it is "like something" to be an eight-month fetus in the womb? Is it obvious that it is "like something" to be a python'? The less the functional similarities between normal adult. socialized consciousness and the test case under consideration, the less obvious it is that we are entitled to speak of "what it is like." Block's confidence about phenomenal consciousness masks this growing
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tension by supposing, optimistically, that of course there is something we can hold constant, in spite of all these differences in "access" consciousness: phenomenal consciousness. With this I flat disagree, and that is the primary source of our miscommunication up to now.ll~ When we tum to Block's discussion of my comparison between consciousness and money, I must first correct a misrepresentation of my view. I don't say-let alone "repeatedly"-that you can't have consciousness unless you have the concept (~f consciousness, but that the phenomenon of consciousness depends on its subjects having a certain family of concepts (none of them necessarily any concept of consciousness). In Consciousness Explained, I speak of consciousness depending on "its associated concepts."II" Block finds the one passage in my homage to Jaynes in which I deliberately overstated this point (while drawing attention to its "paradoxical" flavor). Let me try to undo the damage of that bit of bravado. Acquiring a concept is, on almost any view of concepts I have encountered, partly a matter of acquiring a new competence; before you had the concept of x, you couldn't really y, but now thanks to your mastery of the concept of x (and its family members and neighbors--don't try to pin some sort of atomism on me here), you can y, or more easily y, or more spontaneously y. Now if consciousness is "good for something "-if having it gives one competences one would lack without it-then there should be nothing surprising or metaphysically suspect about the claim that the way you make something conscious is by giving it (however this is done) some concepts that it doesn't already have. And so it is somewhat plausible-at least worthy of consideration, I would have thought-that acquiring concepts is partly a matter of. or contributes to, building new accessibility relations between disparate elements of a cognitive system. Concepts, you might say, are software links, not hardware links. Well then, here's an idea: Maybe consciousness just is something that you gain by acquiring a certain sort of conceptual apparatus that you aren't born with! If you say, but "surely" that couldn't be true, since you have to be conscious to have concepts in the first place, I reply: that is a Big Mistake that Jaynes helped overthrow. "It is hard to take seriously the idea that the human capacity to see and access [emphasis added] rich displays of colors and shapes is a cultural construction that requires its own concept." It is too hard for Block to take seriously, that's for sure. But if he were right, why don't the experimenters run the same color experiments on nonhuman mammals? Hint: Because nonhuman mammals don't "have access" to all the richness of the colors and shapes their nervous systems nevertheless discriminate in one way or another.121J Now perhaps you want to insist that the animals do "have access" to all this richness but just can't harness it the way we can, to answer questions, etc., etc. That, however, is a surmise that is fast losing ground, and rightly so. The idea that we can isolate a notion of "access"-"you know,
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conscious access"-that is independent of all the myriad things that access thereby enables is just an artifact of imaginative inertia. It has no independent warrant whatever.
VII. QUALIA REFUSE TO GO QUIETLY What is color? Joseph Tolliver clearly describes the logical space and the motivations behind the various theories of color that have recently been proposed. By my lights, however, he has been insufficiently critical of the shared assumptions of the literature he considers: what should be seen as differences of emphasis have been pumped up into differences of doctrine, rendered spuriously at odds by being forced into the procrustean bed of essentialism, leading, as we have seen. to hysterical realism. In fact, thanks to Tolliver, hysterical realism can be seen in a particularly clear light. Consider his lovely example, alexandrite, the philosopher's stone indeed. In sunlight it looks blue-green and in incandescent light or candlelight, it looks red. lei What color is it really? What makes anybody think this question must have an answer? Essentialism. They think color has a real essence, and hence they cannot tolerate a view that leaves the answer to such questions indeterminate. Thus Edward Averill, raising his problems of counterfactual colors. poses a litmus test for theories of color parallel to my stumper about magnets. What would we say: that gold had changed its color or that the true color of gold had been obscured? As Tolliver notes, when my evolutionary theory faces this situation. it fails to resolve it. I don't view that as a criticism. however. for I don't think that the question of what color gold really is (in "all possible worlds") deserves attention. He sees that my evolutionary account gives you a "principled means" of identifying the normal conditions. relative to the functions. and hence the standards. by which we identify the class of observers. But it must be essentialism ("color is a transworld property") that leads him to think that these evolutionary considerations don't suffice. since they don't provide similarly "principled" ways of fixing the standard viewing conditions of colored things that played no role in our evolution. such as "lasers. dichromic filters, gemstones. stars. and Benham disks."122 So what? All such colors should be considered mere byproducts of the perceptual machinery designed to respond to the colors that have had evolutionary significance for us or our ancestors. If the sky's being blue (to us) is just a byproduct of the evolutionary design processes that adjusted human color vision. then no functional account (which would assume that the sky "ought" to look some particular color under some canonical circumstances) is needed. If. however. some features of our responsivity to color (e.g .. the pleasure we take in seeing blue) itself derives. indirectly, from some later evolutionary response
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to this byproduct, then the sky's being blue is "right"-but now for a reason that is purely anthropocentric, and none the worse for that! Tolliver also makes the minor error of elevating my evolutionary expla~ nation of the grounding of color into some sort of constitutive claim on my part. Evolution answers the question for us, since evolution is the source of our functionality, but if the Creationists' story were true, then God the Artificer would have to hold the key. That's fine with me, as a fantasy. For I take it that we can readily imagine a race of robots endowed by their creators with a sort of "color" vision (scare-quotes to mollify the scaredy-cats), in which an entirely different set of patterns ruled, and ruled for equally "prin~ cipled" reasons. In that world, thanks to the design decisions of the robots' creators, undesigned things (gemstones, stars, the sky) could fit into color~ equivalence classes different from ours. On either this story or our nonfan~ tastic evolutionary story, we anchor the standard conditions to the class of normal observers by functional considerations. Tolliver's own functionalism is clearly superior to the alternatives he considers, but I think he misses a few crucial points. Functional architecture is the formal structure that makes possible the construction of complex representations within the symbolic system. But the functional architecture is not another representation over and above the representations defined by l means ofit. "
True, but the functional architecture does contribute content-just not by "being a representation." There are many other ways of contributing content. Since this is an oft~ignored possibility, I wish 1 had hammered harder on this theme when I first raised it, in my example of the "thing about redheads" in "Beyond Belief."lc-l The idea that content must all be packaged in symbols or syntactic properties of representations is a very bad idea. Tolliver shows how a color~coding system can be implemented by ordered triples, since every perceivable color can be uniquely placed in a three~space. the color solid. I" "Surely," one is inclined to argue, a system of color coding all by itse(f doesn't amount to subjective color experience; there is nothing exciting or pleasurable, for instance, about ordered triples! Adding a fourth variable to represent the appropriate "affect" would not be a step in the right direction, and '"translating" the ordered triples back into "subjective colors" (or qualia) would be a step in the wrong direction-a step back into the Cartesian Theater. We take a step in the direction of genuine explanation by postulating that these ordered triples are ensconced in a functional archjtec~ ture in such a way that they have the right sorts of high-powered functionsthe sort of thing Hardin and (earlier) Meehl note. That, the excitement potential of colors, and their capacity to soothe and delight us is part of the content of color properties, and it is-must be--embodied in the functional architecture of the color system. The person who cannot use color as an
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alarm, as a reminder, as an ease in tracking or aide-memoire, does not have our color system. My view of colors is an instance of what Stephen White calls the holistic strategy towards the problem of saying what experienced colors are, but Ned Block has raised his "Inverted Earth" fantasy against any such view. J did not discuss Block's thought experiment in Consciousness Explained, thinking its intricacies would not repay the time and effort it would take to present and criticize them, especially since I thought I had provided all the tools necessary to scuttle his case for anyone who sought them. That was wrong. White's analysis of the difficulties facing Block's thought experiment as published, and its subsequent postpublication variations, goes far beyond anything I had laid the ground for. And since I have failed to convince large and important segments of the philosophical audience. I have been making at least a tactical error which White's work repairs. White treats patiently what I rush by with a few gestures. For instance, his expansion of Block's four-stage example to five stages permits him to spell out-in enough imaginative detail to persuade-the sorts of thoughts "from the inside" that would go on in you were you to be in Block's posited circumstances. This was what I was getting at in Consciousness Explained,'"' especially the example of the shade of blue that reminds you of the car in which you once crashed. But White works it out so carefully. so crisply, that the point cannot be lost. See especially his nice observation on the inevitability of overcompensation. should your old hard-to-suppress inclination spontaneously disappear faster than you expected. Another excellent point: The subpersonallevel could change in a gradual way while the personal level might stick for awhile. until it flipped in a "gestalt switch." White then takes on notional worlds. an idea that J left rather vague and impressionistic in "Beyond Belief," and sharpens it up with a variety of his own insights and innovations to meet a host of objections. For the reasons discussed in the section on cow-sharks, I have no stomach for discussions of amnesiacs in blinding snowstorms who think they are being attacked by a bear (and are under the impression that other snow-covered amnesiacs are currently in the same pickle!), but for those who think such counterexamples are telling, White has a detailed response. thus forcing the antirelationalists to take these ideas seriously. As he concludes from his examination. "Thus if we think seriously about the full range of discriminatory skills that a relational account can allow. its inadequacy as an account of our experience is far less obvious.',J:' Hear. hear. White's analysis also sharpens some points in Block's thought experiment that then invite a short-cut objection that can be used to forestall whole families of similar enterprises. In one of Block's variations, you have an identical twin, who is sent otT to Inverted Earth with contact lenses chronically installed. As White notes: "Here we have two subjects whose
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experiences have all the same qualitative properties, and hence the same qualitative content, but different intentional contents."m Block's argument requires this assumption, but where does it come from? Must qualia "supervene on" physical constitution? Thomas Nagel once claimed otherwise, in conversation with me; he insisted that there was no way to tell of two identical twins whether they had identical qualia. Whether or not qualia do supervene on physical constitution, something else definitely does, and that is what we might call functional micro-implementation-e.g" Tolliver's ordered triples of something small in the brain. Thus in "Instead of Qualia," I describe color-discriminating robots that use numbers in registers to code for the different "subjective" colors they discriminate. The particular number systems they use (functionally parallel to the "file-keeping" system White describes) are physical microdetails that anchorfunctions, but the numbers (which are arbitrary) could all be inverted without any detectable functional change. These, presumably, are not qualia that many qualophiles could love; they are in fact what I propose instead of qualia. And I claim that they can do. without mystery, all the work qualia were traditionalIy supposed to doincluding telling qualia-inversion fantasies! We can retell Block's thought experiment with two identical robots, one of whom is sent off to Inverted Earth with contact lenses chronically instalIed. Then we will have two robots whose "experiences" have alI the same details of functional micro-implementation but different intentional contents. Since everything Block says of you and your twin would also be true of the robot and its twin on Inverted Earth. for exactly the same reasons, and since qualia are not enjoyed by the robots (ex hypothesi). Block's argument cannot be used to show why a functionalist needs to posit qualia. Functional micro-implementation schemes will do just as well. Jeff McConnell takes equal pains in his examination of another fantasy, Frank Jackson's case of Mary the color scientist who is, in Diana Raffman's fine phrase, chromatically challenged. I gave Mary short shrift in Consciousness Explained, and McConnell gives her long shrift in the attempt to demonstrate that Jackson's Knowledge Argument "remains alive and well" in the wake of my criticisms. I think he has drastically underestimated their subversiveness. They challenge not just the details but the whole strategy of attempting to prove anything by Jackson's methods. I am claiming that it counts for nothing-nothing at all-that Jackson's (or McConnell's or anybody's) intuitions balk at my brusque alternative claim about Mary's powers. Their fixed points are not my fixed points. but precisely the target of my attack. The most that can be said for an intuition pump such as Jackson's, then, is that it dramatizes these tacit presumptions, without giving them any added support. Now of course I might be wrong, but one cannot defeat my counterargument by blandly describing as an "insight"' something I have been at considerable pains to deny.
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In any case, McConnell gradually concedes some ground, if only for the sake of argument, adding proviso after proviso to the original story. By the time he is through, Jackson's deceptively crisp scenario has given way to the utterly imponderable hypothesis that "it does not seem inconsistent to suppose" that there could be a neuro-omniscient but imaginationally challenged person who, in virtue of the latter and in spite of the former, lacked the ability to construct a special sort of knowledge to be called "imaginative knowledge" (defined in terms of the suspect category of phenomenal properties). McConnell may think that the Knowledge Argument is still "alive and well" after this exercise. but it sure looks like a shadow of its former self to me, barely able to hold our attention, let alone vivify our convictions. At one juncture McConneIl points to the gap in his own case: "My counterargument shows that unless there is a defect in the mechanics of the Knowledge Argument or a deep flaw in our common sense about what Mary knows. then the standard positions about the nature of the mind are untenable."!2Y But all along I have been claiming that there is just such a deep flaw UIl in our common sense. Our common sense is strongly if covertly committed to the Cartesian Theater, and since many philosophers have wondered who on earth I can be arguing against (since the\' certainly weren't committed to there being a Cartesian Theater!), it will be instructive to show how McConnell's own commitment to the Cartesian Theater arises. especially since it is nicely concealed in his quite standard exploitation of familiar philosophical assumptions. He builds his case by extending the received wisdom about external reference in ordinary language to internal reference: The success of demonstrative reference depends upon the demonstratum's being picked out for demonstrator and audience by a mode or manner of presellfatiun-by something that individuates the cognitive significance of referring expressions.I'I [emphasis added]
These assumptions are widely shared. It has seemed harmless to many philosophers of mind to couch their discussions of reference in perception. knowledge by acquaintance. inner ostension. and the like in the terms so weIl analyzed by philosophers of language dealing with reference. ostension, and similar phenomena in ordinary language. But as this passage nicely illustrates. these are poisoned fruits that quietly force the hand of the theorist: We have to have an inner audience. to whom things are presented. if we are to take these familiar extensions of linguistic categories literally (and if nol literally. exactly what is left to be asserted?). Thus philosophers have debates about "modes of presentation '. versus "definite descriptions in the language of thought" and the like. but these only make sense if we are presupposing an inner agent, capable of appreciating or perceiving presentations, or understanding the tenm of the definite descriptions, but still in need of being informed about the matter in question. which is sti II somehow
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external to the agent. In other words, these discussions all presuppose a Cartesian Theater occupied by a Central Meaner who either has or has not yet been apprised of some fact that must somehow be borne to him on the vehicle of some show that must be presented or some inner speech act that must be uttered, heard, and understood. But this is forlorn. As I argued at length in Consciousness Explained, this too-powerful inner agent has to be broken down, and all its work has to be distributed in both space and time in the brain. When that is done, the properties by which "agents" are "acquainted with" this and that have to be broken down as well. That is the point, once again, of my answer to the question of how I know these things: because a knower and reporter of such things is what is me.l3c But see how McConnell puts it: We are able to know our qualitative mental states by acquaintance, picking them out by direct reference as states "like this," so to speak, producing examples in imagination [for whose perusal, pray tell?] or ostending to ourselves [to our selves?] occurrent states. I." .
This isn't common sense: this is disaster, for as he himself shows, it leads quite inexorably to "irreducibly mental properties:' Loar. on McConnell's reading, is thus headed in the right direction in trying to forestall this development. McConnell's objection to Loar-the imagined Marcy-is thus question begging: "Imagine someone. for example, who can, without physical evidence, report and categorize many of her own brain states, even states that lack qualitative character [emphasis added]."l'" But what is "qualitative character" that might thus be absent? Who says that there are any states that even hm'e "qualitative character"? It seems obvious to McConnell that there are "phenomenal properties." and so he never truly confronts the denial I am issuing. Perhaps the most telling instance-telling. because it strikes him as so tangential that he buries it in note nineteen-is the following: The critic of the Knowledge Argument. however. must take the position that Mary's neuroscientific expertise would not just enable her to do this but would constitute the grasping of phenomenal red, and this is implausible. For it seems easy to imagine a person in Mary's shoes. someone perhaps unlike Mary biologically, who doesn't have the powers of hallucination Flanagan supposes but about whom we would say the things Jackson says of Mary.
I have at least tried to cast doubt on any such appeals to what "seems easy to imagine" in these cases, claiming that after one undergoes a certain amount of factual enrichment about the nature of color perception and related topics, these things no longer seem so easy to imagine after all. That they seem so to McConnell is thus a biographical fact of no immediate use in an argument-at least not in an argument against me.
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Eric Lormand brings out vividly how the Friends of the Cartesian Theater can cling to their fantasies. He shows how many different escape hatches there are for Theater lovers and points out that I can't block them all at once. No doubt. For instance, you can always "postulat(e] a distinctive. nonprimitive but also nonrational, means of access"!" or some other variety of "access mechanism" if you want to, but why? Whose access to what? My point was to remove the motivation, but if you still ~vanI to posit qualia, I doubt that I can show that you will inevitably contradict yourself. I did not claim to prove a priori that there could not be a Cartesian Theater; I claimed to prove, empirically, that there was no Cartesian Theater, and that since there wasn't one, theories that presuppose otherwise must be wrong.!)(- There is an empirical point and then there is an a priori point, and the two have not yet been clearly enough distinguished-by me or my readers. Consider the Brobdingnagians, the giant people of Gulliver's Trm'e[s, and suppose we set out to do some anthropology there, and decided that the best way to do this was to make a giant humanoid puppet of sorts, controlled by Sam. a regular sized human being in the control room in the giant head. (l guess that is at least as "logically possible" as the scenarios in other thought experiments that are taken seriously.) Sam succeeds in passing for Brobdingnagian in his giant person suit, but then one day he encounters Brobdingnagian Dennett sounding off on the unreality of the Cartesian Theater with its Central Meaner. Risky moment~ Sam pushes the laugh button and directs the giant speech center to compose the appropriate response (in translation): "Ha Ha! Who could ever take seriously the idea that there was a control room in the head, the destination of all the input. and the source of all the output! Such a fantasy~"-al1 the time hoping that his ruse would not be uncovered. Yes, this thought experiment shows that a Cartesian Theater is ··possible." but we already know that there are no such places in our own brains-that's the empirical point. We also know-this is the a priori point-that sooner or later as we peel the layers off any agent. we have to bottom out in an agent that doesll 'f have a central puppeteer. and this agent will accomplish its aims by distributing the work in the space and time of whatever counts as its brain. Putting the two points together. we see that we have to live with these implications sooner, not later. We have to live with them now. Lormand vividly supports my contention that qualia and the Cartesian Theater stand or fall together. The reason he is a Friend of the Theater is that he thinks he has to have qualia, and qualia without a Theater is no show at all. But then we must ask: What does the claim that there really are qualia get him? What does it explain? I'm not asking for a lot. I'd be content ifhis only answer was: "It explains my unshakable belief that I've got qualia!" But even this Lomland concedes to me. It would be quite possible. he says. to believe you had qualia when you didn't. Philosophically naive zimbos,
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for instance, would fervently believe they have qualia. As I said in my discussion of Levine, I view zimbos as a reductio. Others don't, but that's their problem, not mine. The hydra-headed qualia live on, in Lormand's various options, shifting from one version to another. That is enough to establish one of my main points for me: You simply cannot talk about qualia with the presumption that everyone knows what you're talking about. These different avenues are too different. It is only equivocation that permits the various different qualophiles to claim they agree about something, to wit: qualia.
VIII. LUCK, REGRET, AND KINDS OF PERSONS Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger across a crowded roomor you may not, and it may make all the difference, as the song suggests. For the stranger might have tempted you into moral dilemmas that you were not "ethically gifted" enough to resolve honorably, and then your life might end in ignominy, disgrace, and bitter regret. Or the stranger might have provoked you to embark in a direction that led you to acts of great courage and self-sacrifice, bestowing on you a hero's role that otherwise would have been inaccessible to you. In such a case, luck makes a huge difference. we can reasonably suppose, and has nothing to do with the prospect of negligence. or the capacity to estimate probabilities, important though those considerations often are. I take myself to have been, so far. quite a good fellow: I have no terrible sins on my conscience. But I am also quite sure that there are temptations that, had they been placed before me. I would not have been able to resist. Lucky me; I have been spared them, and hence can still hold my head up high. It is not just luck, of course; policy has had something to do with it. 1 don't go looking for trouble, but I also don't go looking for opportunities to be a hero. Some people face life with a different attitude: They play for high stakes-hero or villain, with little likelihood of a bland outcome. And surely Michael Siote is right that some people are more ethically gifted than others by accident of birth-and other accidents. Perhaps in the best of all possible worlds, only the ethically gifted would be inspired to play for high stakes lives, while we more cowardly and self-indulgent folks just tried to keep our noses clean. I am very glad Slote didn't give up on me altogether. After Elbow Room, in which I put some of his good work to good use, he proposed we join forces on an article developing further our shared views about luck, modality, and free will, to which I readily agreed. He sent me some notes and sketches, but for reasons unknown to me, J never picked up my end. The
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engine was running, but somehow I couldn't let out the clutch. His essay on this occasion reminds me of how fruitful I find his perspective, and makes me regret all the more my strange inactivity in response to his previous sally. On this occasion, the focus is on the curious role of luck in rendering our acts blameworthy or praiseworthy. When it comes to assigning blame and credit, Slote suggests, we are confronted by an irresoluble war of competing intuitions. Blame should not be a matter of luck at all, proclaims one intuition. but living by that standard would seem to force us to absolve everyone always, which goes equally against the grain. One variety of compromise would be what Slote calls moral criticism without blame. This would extend to adults at their most responsible the attitude we tend to endorse towards young children; since we want them to improve, we are firm in our condemnation of their bad behavior, but we don't condemn them. We hold them quasi-responsible. you might say, not thereby illuminating anything. Isn't it the case that any policy, any ethical theory, must accept luck as part of the background? Given that luck is always going to playa large role. what is the sane, defensible policy with regard to luck? Set up a system that encourages individuals to take luck into consideration in a reasonable way by not permitting them to cite bad luck when it leads them astray. The culpability of the driver is settled as a matter of higher-order holding accountable: We have given you sufficient moral education so that from now on you are a person (in Carol Rovane's sense), deemed accountable, like it or not. not only for your acts but for your policies. If you are reckless and get away with it, you are just lucky, but if you are reckless and thereby bring about great harm, you will have no excuse. If you are not reckless but bring about great harm. your blame will be diminished. Slate expresses mild sympathy for such a policy'r but thinks it won't do. The problem. I gather. is that since there would still be unsupportably counterintuitive implications in any such policy (in Slote' s eyes). it could be maintained only by slipping in one way or another into the sort of systematic disingenuousness Bernard Williams identifies in "Government House utilitarianism:"" Peter Vallentyne has suggested to him that the situation is not so grim: tying praise and blame to probabilities. not outcomes. has some intuitive support in any case. so some of the jarring intuitions might be ignored. Slate finds this attractive, but thinks that "it is a mistake to say nothing more needs to be said.""" Let me try to fill that gap a little. Slate lists two items of common sense that obtrude: the difference of blameworthiness between cases where an accident occurs and cases where none occurs and h) our intuitive sense that the person whose negligence leads to an accident doesn't enjoy a low degree of blameworthiness (simply because of the extreme unlikelihood of an accident). 141' a)
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I suggest that our intuitions are playing tncks on us here-at least to some extent. With regard to a), consider the case in which you learn that Jones has enticed your child to play Russian roulette with a loaded revolver. Fortunately. both survive unharmed, but your moral condemnation of Jones will be scarcely diminished compared to the case in which your child actually dies. Is he blameworthy? He most certainly is. We don't get to put him in prison for murder, thanks to his undeserved luck, but we might think it entirely appropriate to ensure that nobody ever forgot, for the rest of his days. what an evil thing he did. In other words, I think Jones is just as blameworthy in both cases, even though there is vastly more harm to regret, and therefore vastly more justifiable anger, in the case in which there is a catastrophric outcome: and I think common sense is comfortable with this, after all. Now go to the other extreme and imagine the following variation on the scenic drive. You are showing friends the mountain scenery. and see a scenic lookout turnoff up ahead. "Let's just stop. so I can show this magnificent view to you!" you say, but your friends demur. "Don't bother, we can see it well enough while moving along." But you persist, and as you turn off the highway into the lookout, sunlight glinting off your windshield momentarily blinds the school-bus driver. and calamity ensues. In this case. you broke no laws, you weren't negligent in any way. you were a good, safe driver. But for the rest of your life you will surely be racked with regret. thinking "if only I hadn't persisted!" This regret is not self-reproach: you know in your heart that you did nothing wrong. But this regret about that awful free choice of yours will perhaps overwhelm your thoughts-and the thoughts of all the parents of those dead schoolchildren-for years. Now alter the circumstances ever so slightly: In order to enter the scenic turnoff. you had to brake rather more suddenly than cars typically do. and it was the distraction of the bus driver in response to your (arguably) negligent braking that caused the accident. A tiny bit of negligence now and at least as much regret. How much self-reproach? How much moral blameworthiness'? Can we isolate in our imaginations the regret that any bad-outcome act is likely to provoke and distinguish it clearly and reliably from the moral (self-)condemnationif any-that is provoked in unison? If not. then perhaps-this is just a hypothesis for further thought-experimental exploration-Slote's conviction that a) and b) are worthy items of common sense can be undermined. But there is still more to be said. of course. Saving the best for last, I come to Carol Rovane's wonderfully constructive essay. She takes the main ideas in "Conditions of Personhood" and fixes them. They needed fixing. It is great to see ideas I like a lot protected from second-rate versions of them-my own. She wonders whether I will reject her revisions and elaborations or embrace them. I embrace them, with a few further amendments and virtually no reservations worth mentioning. Thus she is right that (I) my six conditions of personhood fall naturally into
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two groups of three; (2) I would be in much better position if I retreated from Kant as she recommends, opening up ethical disagreement among persons: (3) persons are committed to all-things-considered judgments, even though we can't actually make them; (4) I can have my naturalism and gradualism, and still have a rather sharp watershed dividing the persons from the nonpersons; (5) her alternative is a "more integrated, and explanatorily complete. conception of the person, in which the ethical and metaphysical dimensions of personhood are in perfect accord."I-ll Indeed, Ijust made use of points (4) and (5) in my commentary on Slote. Although different human beings may not be equally "ethically gifted," those that have the capacity to treat others as persons, are precisely those who are fit to be run through the mill of reason giving. Those who are disqualified for personhood by not being up to the exercise are excused, but for those who are fit. there is indeed a choice, and if you are in this special category. you can stand convicted of having made a wrong (but informed, rational) choice. This watershed permits us to settle the inevitable penumbral cases of near-persons. persons-to-be. persons on the verge of incompetence, etc .. in an ethically stable and satisfying way. (It doesn't settle all the morally troubling cases, of course-that would be too much to ask for-but it lays the ground for settling them as best we can.) As she says, she argues 'from the ethical criterion of personhood to Dennett's list of conditions of metaphysical personhood, thereby preserving his uncompromisingly normative approach."lo2 What about her discussion of rationality, evaluation, and higher-order intentionality in animals'? I have come to realize in recent years that human rationality is so much more powerful than that of any animaL that. as she says, my list of six conditions "does not capture a spectrum of rational sophistication at all.',I-l' I have begun discussing alternative spectra in recent years (in Dan",'in's DallRcrolls Idea. and "Learning and Labeling"(-l and I intend to develop these ideas further. in a little book to be called Kinds of Minds, which will soon be completed, Therein I will offer a somewhat different account from the one sketched by Rovane. but not different in any way that undercuts her points. I have been stumbling along towards this for years. Ashley's dog was just the first of many cases to consider. Reading. listening to. and even working with ethologists over the years has taught me a lot about the differences. as well as the similarities. between animal and human minds. Discussing Gricean communication. she notes that "it is the absence of a guarantee for the first sort of reliability that affords the possibility of sincerity and insincerity:·l-l' Yes, as Gibsonians would say, there are aflordances here, affordances that simply do not exist for nonpersons, such as vervet monkeys and other animal quasi communicators. (I now think. by the way, that Sperber and Wilson 'SI-10 vision of communication is much more realistic than Grice's and would save some minor errors of overidealization in her account.)
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What, finally, of her punch line about mUltiple and group persons? I have already granted MPD-with suitable caveats-as she notes. In my discussion of Lynne Rudder Baker above, I opened the door to group persons, not quite for the first time. There is rpy brief definition and discussion of FPD, "Fractional Personality Disorder," in Consciousness Explained. 147 Since my theory of the self (or personhood) "predicts" FPD, I am now on the lookout for instances of its acknowledgment in print. My favorite to date is the comment by one of the actors in the Coen brothers' film Barton Fink when asked what it was like to act in a film with two directors. The reply: "Oh, there was only one director; he just had two bodies."
NOTES I. I am grateful for constructive feedback from Nikola Grahek and Diana Raffman. at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts, and Derek Browne and his colleagues and students at Canterbury University. Christchurch. New Zealand. where drafts of this essay were prepared and discussed. 2. The Fox Islands Thorofare is a beautiful but treacherous passage between the Scylla of North Haven and the Charybdis of Vinal Haven. in Penobscot Bay. 3. See Dennett. "The Practical Requirements for Making a Conscious Robot." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 349 ( 1994): 133-46. 4. Rodney Brooks. "Intelligence without Representation:' Artificial Imel/igence jo 1I rna I 4 7 (]99]): 139-59. 5. For a discussion of Good Old Fashioned AI. see]. Haugeland. Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (Cambridge. Mass.: Bradford BooksfMIT Press. 1985): and for an exposition of the Language of Thought. see 1. Fodor. The Lal1/?uQ/?e of Thought (Scranton. Pa.: CrowelL 1975). 6. See Dennett. "The Logical Geography of Computational Approaches: A View from the East Pole." in Harnish and Brand. eds .. Prohlenzs ill the Representation of Knmr/edge (The University of Arizona Press. 1987). 7. Fox. "Our Knowledge of the Internal World:' this issue. 80. 8. Ibid .. 75. 9. Ibid .. 81. 10. Ibid .. 101. 11. Dedictomorphs are zombies. he tells m (ibid .. 103). and I wonder how one can tell whether a particular implementation of Cog is a dedictomorph. Not by behavior. since a dedictomorph "may conform to the outward behavior of persons with de re states." But then why should the Cog team worry about getting de re states into Cog? 12. By far the best model of a research program in phenomenology that uses the fruits of careful introspection to discern the features of engineering modeb is Douglas Hofstadter Fluid Analogy Research Group. See Hofstadter. Fluid Concepts and Crearil'e Analo/?ies (New York: Basic Books. 1995): Melanie Mitchell, Analo/?r-Makin/? as Perception: A Computer Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993): Robert French. The Suhllety of Sameness (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Pres~, forthcoming): and my review of Hofstadter (op. cit.). forthcoming in Complexin'_ 13. Fox, op. cit., 98. 14. E.g .. Ruth Millikan, "On Mentalese Orthography," in Bo Dahlbom. ed .. Dennett and His Critics: DemrslifrinR Mind (Oxford: Blackwell. 1993).
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IS. Fox, op. cit., 95. 16. I was surprised that Fox didn't use the standard term "user illusion." It fits his case rather well, since he claims that the phenomenal world is a benign, designed illusion of sorts (a philosophical illusion). 17. Fox, op. cit .. 68, 18. See Dennett. Consciousness Exp/ained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co .. 1991 J. 108-11. 19. See ibid., 211. 20. Fox, op. cit., 67. 21. Ibid., 76. 22. Ibid. 23. At just one point, I thought Fox's phenomenology fell into error. He claims to be able to remember "melodies which (for me) have an intervalic structure but no pitch" (ibid., 70). I cannot do this, any more than I can remember or imagine a melody which reels off in no particular tempo. Melody seems entirely unlike imagined speech in this regard: imagined speech, for me and others I have queried, can have tempo and prosodic contour without any pitch. I raised the melody issue with Diana Raffman and Ray lackendoff, both accomplished musicians; neither of them can do what Fox says he can do, so either he has a rare talent or has given us a demonstration of how phenomenologists can be wrong about even their carefully considered claims. 24. In his "Conscious Experience," Mind 192 (1993): 263-83. 25. In the same article Dretske also cites the amazing case of eidetic imagery reported by C. F. Stromeyer and 1. Psotka in "The Detailed Texture of Eidetic Images," Nature 225 (1970): 346-9, in support of his theory of "thing-awareness." But Stromeyer and Psotka's report turned out to be too good to be true. Their subject refused to cooperate with those who wanted to replicate the original experiment. and it is now generally presumed that the results were fraudulent. a practical joke played on the experimenters. most likely. This is not a trivial matter; Dretske needs something like this imaginary result to support his position, just as my theory needs support of the sort provided by Grimes' experiments, and more recently, those of Rensink. O'Regan and Clarke, to be described shortly. (Dretske also cites, in note 18. the "well-known experimental demonstration" by C. W. Perky. This series of experiments---conducted in 191 O~-is in fact seldom cited any more and is perhaps best known for not being replicated by others. For a neutral account. see Roger Brown and Richard 1. Herrnstein, PS\'ch%gy [Boston: Little. Brown & Co .. 1975 J. 435-6.) 26. Many of the diftlculties I saw were picked up hy Virgil Aldrich. in his review of Dretske', hook in the jOllrlla/ ojPhiiosopin 67 (1970): 995-1006. '27. The game of Hide the Thimble actually exploits something very close to Dretske's concept of nonepistcmic seeing. The rules are clear: You must hide the thimble ill plain siKhr. It must not he concealed behind anything, for instance, or too high on a shelf to fall within the visual tield~ of the sear~hers. Or one might say: The "hidden" thimble must he \·isihle. Is something that is \isible seen as soon as it call he seen by someone looking at it'J That set'ms to he what Dretske's concept of nonepistemic seeing insists upon. 28. Dretske. "Differences that Make No Difference." this issue, n. 21. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.
Ibid .. 43. Ihid .. 42. Ibid., 51. Ibid .. 48. Ibid .. 49. Ibid., 44. Dretske misses the point of my claims ahout the lack of clarity of animal consciousnessa fact that I would think would have become obvious to him when he noted. as he does, the passages in which I calmly grant sight---color vision-to birds and fish and honeybees. It must be. mustn't it. that I don't think seeing is a matter settled by experience
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(conscious experience-of the sort he finds obvious). He does see the way out: "being aware of colors does not require consciousness" (ibid., 45), but he can't see how this can be taken seriously. Why not? Because, I think, he is still committed to ordinary language philosophy. But vision, and color vision, can be, and routinely are, investigated in complete disregard of the ordinary senses of "aware" and "see" and "conscious." There is no doubt at all that honeybees have color vision: whether they are conscious in any interesting sense is quite another matter. 36. "On the Failure to Detect changes in Scenes across Saccades," in Kathleen Akins. ed" Perception, Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science, vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press. forthcoming). 37. Dretske, "Differences that Make No Difference," 50. 38. Rensink. O'Regan, and Clark, "Image Flicker Is as Good as Saccades in Making Large Scene Changes Invisible" (paper presented at the European Conference on Visual Perception. Summer, 1995). 39. Dretske, "Conscious Experience," 273. 40. Ibid .. 275. 41. Ibid .. 277. 42. Blindsight in Nicholas K. Humphrey's monkey. Helen. is a particularly challenging case for Dretske. (See Humphrey. "Vision in a Monkey without Striate Cortex: A Case Study." Perception 3 [1974]: 241. and Consciousness Regained lOxford: Oxford University Press. 1984)). To put it with deliberate paradox. did Helen see-in Dretske's sense-in spite of her blindness? Humphrey and I once showed his film of Helen to a group of expertspsychologists and primatologists-at a meeting at Columbia University. and asked them if they could detect anything unusual about Helen. and if so what. For ten minutes they watched the film of Helen busily darting about in her space. picking up raisins and pieces of chocolate and eating them. avoiding obstades. never making a false move or bumping into anything. Nobody suggested that there was anything wrong with her vision. but her entire primary visual cortex had been surgically removed. She was cortically blind. Would Dretske say that this was a case of epistemic seeing without nonepistemic seeing" 43. In note 19. Dretske mistakenly dismisses this as an avenue unworthy of my explorationa measure of how much mi,understanding there has been between us. 44. This was also brought home to me by Christopher Hill. "Riding the Whirlwind: The Story of My Encounter with Two Strands in Dennett's Theory of Intentionality" (paper presented at the University of Notre Dame. April I. 1995), and the ensuing discussion. 45, See Dennett, "Features of Intentional Action;.:' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 29 (1968): 234. 46. "Do Animals Have Beliefs')" in Herbert Roitblat. ed .. ColllparaJiI'e ApproL/c!ze.1 [() CORniri\'e Science (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Pres;.. forthcoming). 47. Dennett. DarH'in's Dangerous Idea: f:l'(ilwion and rile Meanings of" Lif"e (New York: Simon & Schuster. 1995). 109. -1-8. What about real ca;.es of peripheral paralysis') First. the only real cases havc to be people who have lived an unparalyzed life for years-all other imaginable casc;. are cow-sharb-. only logically po"ible and rudely dismissable. Second. the persi;.tent integrity of the internal structures on which their continuing mental lives putatively depends is not a foregone conclusion. To the extent that the paralysis is truly just peripheral (unaccompanied by the atrophy of the internal). then, of course, such a sorry subject could go on living a mental life (as I imagined myself doing in the vat. in "Where am p"). But all good things come to an end. and in the absence of normal amounts of "peripheral narrow behavior," mental life will surely soon fade away, leaving only historical traces of the vigorous ahoutness its activities once exhibited. How long would it take" A gruesome empirical question. whose answer has no metaphysical significance. 49. See Dennett. Brainstorms: Philosophical Essavs on Mind and Psycho lORY (Montgomery. Vt.: Bradford Boob" 1978), 23-8. 50. Richard. "What Isn't a Belief?" this issue, 297.
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51. Seepages 412-9. 52. If all these examples concern opinions, not beliefs, then why not just reconstrue the theory of propositional attitudes as the theory of opinions? Because there could be no such theory-for the same reason there is not a theory of things said: People say the darndest things. People can be got to say all manner of crazy things for all manner of weird reasons: the set of things they say, or would say under various provocations. is not a tidy set of phenomena for which one might reasonably aspire to provide a theory. The set of opinions is very much like-is scarcely distinct from-this set of things said. 53. Richard, op. cit., 311. 54. Ibid., 313. 55. See Saul Kripke. "A Puzzle about Belief." in A. Margolit. ed., Meaning and Use (Dordrecht: Reidel. 1979). 239-83. 56. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge. Mass.: Bradford BookslMIT Press. 1987). 208n. 57. See Dary,in's Dangerous Idea. 45. 58. See. esp .. A. Clark and A. Karmiloff-Smith, "The Cognizer's Innards." Mind and Language 8 (1993): 487-519. 59. Richard. op. cit .. 292. 60. In Churchland, Scientific Realism and the Plasticit\' afMind (Cambriugc: Cambridge University Press. 1979). 61. Dennett. The Intentional Stallce. 208. 62. Baker. "Content Meets Consciousness." this issue. n. 58. 63. Turing. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Milld (1950): 447. 64. See COl1sciousness Explained. 179. 65. Baker. op. cit.. 7. 66. Quine. Pursuit (){Truth (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1990). 67. Rony has warned me that feminists will object to my use of the word "hysterical." but I am confident that few if any feminists would be so insensitive to irony as to overlook the recursion that woulu occur were they to object to my usage. It's a fine word. the only word we have for a real phenomenon. and it would be cretinous to denigrate it because of it> ignoble etymology. 68. See Brainsrorms. xix-xx. 69. In Owen Flanagan. Consciollsness Reconsidered (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. 1992). 14-15. 70. Cf. Hartry Field. "Quine and the Correspondence Theory:' Philosophical Re\'iell' 83 ( 1974): 200-28. and "Con\'entionalism and Instrumentalism in Semantics:' Nous 9 (1975): 375--405. 71. While he is at it. he might tell us how he would show that there is a fact of the matter about just when-i.e .. to the day or week-the British Empire learned of the signing of the treaty ending the war of 1812. Is it determined by the dates and postmarks on the various documenb. or bv their time of arrh'al at various critical places, or by some combination of such factors" He had better not say that the question is meaningless. and hence has no proper answer-that would be raving superficial ism about empires. 72. Rosenthal, "First-Person Operationalism and Mental Taxonomy:' this issue. 332. 73. Flanagan, op. cit.. 15-6. 74. Consciousness Explained. 128n. 75. N. Logothetis and 1. D. Schall. "Neuronal Correlates of Subjective Visual Perception," Science 245 (1989): 761--63.
76. See. for instance. Jeffrey Grey. "The Content of Consciousness: A Neuropsychological Perspective." presenting his model of the role of the hippocampus in consciousness. and my commentary "O\'erworking the Hippocampus." both in Bellm'ioral alld Braill Sril'llcc.I' 18 (forthcoming).
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77. Putnam, "Dreaming and Depth Grammar," in R. J. Butler, ed., Analytical Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 78. See also Dennett, "Features of Intentional Action." 79. In spite of the gulf of disagreement, it is good to see that Rey joins me in giving the back of his hand to wmbies and their ilk. The trouble I see with his way of doing it is that the qualophiles and wmbists can complain, with some justice, that he is just changing the subject, redefining the problem out of existence. 80. See his, 'The Meaning of 'Meaning' ," in Keith Gunderson, ed .. Language, Mind. and Knowledge: Minnesota Studies in the Philosoph\' of Science, vol. 7 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975). 81. See Dennett, Dandn '05 Dangerous Idea. 82. In heavy water, the heavy isotope of hydrogen, H' or D, replaces the ordinary hydrogen atom. Heavy water is found in about one part per 5000 in ordinary water; it has slightly higher freezing and boiling temperatures than ordinary water; seeds can't germinate in it, and tadpoles can't live in it. XYZ must be more like H,O than deuterium oxide is, and deuterium oxide is a kind of water. 83. In "Beyond Belief' (in A. Woodfield. ed .. Thought and Object: Essays on Intentionality !Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982]; reprinted in The Intentional Stance), my example was the scientifically backward people who had a word for "gas" or perhaps "gaseous hydrocarbon"-surely a fine natural kind, but on this minimalist principle it would have to be translated "methane." since this is in fact the only gaseous hydrocarbon they have encountered. 84. Van Gulick. "Dennett. Drafts. and Phenomenal Realism." this issue. 446.
85. Levine. "Out of the Closet: A Qualophile Confronts Qualophobia." this issue. 115. 86. See Stubenberg, "Dennett on the Third-Person Perspective" (paper presented at the University of Notre Dame. April I. 1995). 87. Besides. it seems to me that if you renounce the neutrality of heterophenomenology. you make it systematically impossible to close the putative explanatory gap. because you give up ab initio on the goal of finding a rapprochement between the first- and third-person point of view. What shape could a closing of "the explanatory gap" take,) It seems to me it would have to be an explanation that permitted one to tell a third-person. scientific story about subjectivity. I don't see how anything else would count as a closing of the gap. So far as I know. nobody has defended another framework. 88. Levine. op. cit.. 124. 89. Ibid. 90. Dennett. "The Message Is: There Is No Medium." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 889-931. 91. Consciousness Explained, 410. 92. "Outsmart. v. To embrace the conclusion of one's opponent's reductio ad absurdum argument. 'They thought they had me. but I outsmarted them. I agreed that it was sometimes just to hang an innocent man'" (Dennett, ed .. The Philosophical Lexicon. 7th ed. [distributed by the American Philosophical Association]). 93. Van Gulick, op. cit .. 452. 94. Ibid., 451-2. 95. Rosenthal. op. cit.. 326. 96. Ibid., 325. 97. Ibid., 327. 98. Ibid. 99. Rosenthal says at one point that "It can happen that, even though one doesn't consciously see an object. one later recalls just where it was and what it looked like" (ibid., 330). I wonder what his evidence for this startling claim is. Wouldn't this be confounded with high-quality blindsight beyond anything yet reported in the literature'? How would Rosenthal tell the two phenomena apart')
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lOll See Bruce Mangan, "Dennett. Consciousness. and the Sorrows of Functionalism," Consciousness and Cognition 2 (1993): 1-17. 101. Rosenthal, op. cit., 324. 102. This is the illusion typically engendered by functionalistic "boxology" (see Consciousness Explained, 270n, 358n). One defines a box in a flow chart in terms of the functional role anything entering it plays, and then forgets that if this is how "entrance" into that particular "box" is defined, it makes no sense to excuse an occupant of any of the defining powers. The boxes are not automatically salient tissues, organs. or separate media in the systems described, such that entrance into them can be distinguished independently of fulfilling the defining functional roles. 103. See Dennett. "Consciousness: More like Fame than Television." in Ernst Poppel. ed., Munich conference volume. forthcoming. 104. Made in Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1969). 105. See Consciousness Explained. 248. 106. Rosenthal. op. cit.. 339. 107. Block. "Begging the Question against Phenomenal Consciousness." Behm'ioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1992): 205-6: review of Consciousness E ,plained by Daniel C. Dennett. Journal of Philosophy 90 (1993): 181-93: and "On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995). 108. Robert Van Gulick correctly notes the strong tie between consciousness and reportability I have always endorsed. Since inability to report is in fact our most heavily relied upon grounds for presuming nonconsciousness-in blindsight, for instance-when you loosen the tie to reportability. as Van Gulick suggests. you face the problem of motivation in a particularly severe form. 109. Block. "What Is Dennett's Theory a Theory thi, issue. 26. 110. For a few more details. see "The Path Not Taken:' Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 ( 1995 l. my commentary on Block. "On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness." Ill. Rosenthal. op. cit.. 326. 112. Block. "What Is Dennett's Theory a Theory of?" 27. 113. First pre~ented in Elbaii' Room. 38-43. and. elaborated. in Consciousness Explained. I 93ff. 114. Cf. Michael Lockwood. "Dennett's Mind:' Inquiry 36 (1993): 59-72: Thomas Nagel. "What We Have in Mind When We Say We're Thinking." \t'all Street Journal. 11/7/91 (review of Consciousness Explained): Dennett. "Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why." Puhlic Affairs (forthcoming). 115. S. Sjolander. "Some Cognitive Breakthroughs in the Eyolution of Cognition and Consciousness. and Their Impact on the Biology of Language." Emilltion and Cognition 3(1993):3. 116. Peter Gardenfon,. "Cued and Detached Representations in Animal Cognition." Behal'ioral Processes (forthcoming). 117. Block. "What Is Dennett's Theory a Theory of''' 33. 1J 8. I am partly to blame. since r have myself often introduced Nagel'S famous formula into the discussion. without being sufficiently explicit in announcing my rejection of its presuppositions. It is. I think. a chief source of this illusion of constancy of meaning in our questions about consciousness. 119. See CO/lSCiOIiSIlCS.I Etplaillcd. 2~. 120. Cf. note 35 above on Dretske on color vision in animals. 121. Wanting to obtain a hunk of alexandrite (to see for myself). I consulted a geologist friend. who provided the appropriate literature. including color photographs of thi~ marvelous mineral-but no samples. sad to say. Alexandrite is rare. and consequently commands a price commensurate with other gemstones. 122. Tolliver. "Interior Colors." this issue. 425.
or"
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123. Ibid .. 428. 124. On 33-4; as reprinted in The Intentional Stance, 148-9. 125. See also Dennett. "Caveat Emptor," Consciousness and Cognition 2 (1993): 48-57 (reply to Mangan. Toribio, Baars. and McGovern); "Instead of Qualia," in A. Revonsuo and M. Kamppinen. eds., Consciousness ill Philosoph\" and Cognitive Neuroscience (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994), where these ideas are developed further. 126. See 393ff. 127. White. "Color and Notional Content." this issue, 500. 128. Ibid .. 475. 129. McConnell. "In Defense of the Knowledge Argument," this issue, 166. 130. I am unmoved, then, by his advice to Churchland and me that we adopt a different strategy. I'm speaking for myself, and will not venture an opinion about Churchland's argument or McConneJr s criticisms of it, since I don't rely on it. 131. McConnelL op. cit., 177. 132. See Consciousness Explained, 410. 133. McConnell, op. cit., 178. 134. Ibid .. 181. 135. Lormand. "Qualia l (Now Showing at a Theater near You)." this issue. 135. 136. At one point. Lormand says: "My retinal and other very early visual representations are as rich as or richer than the osprey experience in difficult-to-express information. yet I can say exactly what it's like to have them: nothing.'" (ibid., 141). Why does he think this is true? Presumably because he thinks that while "very early visual representations" are unconscious. some "late visual representations" are conscious. But this is a terrible model of consciousness. It is true that "Iater" cerebral effects (not necessarily representations) are necessary for one to become conscious of the contents of one', early visual representations. but when those normal effects are there. no "later" visual representation has to occur. So normally it is like something for us to have them. 137. Slote. "The Problem of Moral Luck." this issue. n. 4. 138. In Williams. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1985), 101. 139. Siote, op. cit., 405. 140. Ibid. 141. Rovane. "The Personal Stance." this issue. 362. 142. Ibid. 143. Ibid .. 381. 144. Dennett. "Learning and Labeling." Mind and Lanf;uaf;e 8 (1993): 540--7. (Commentary on A. Clark and A. Karmiloff-Smith, "The Cognizer's Innard,.") 145. Rovane, op. cit.. 379. 146. See Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, RelewJ/lce: A Theon of Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1986). 147. On 422-3.
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