L3: 1 Thought: in origin and nature?
Of course, Lottie has to be here. This is her education. But even Hipparchus knows he cannot really, simply, compel the others’ presence and so he is delighted they have seemingly agreed so willingly.
“I’ve invited you here because I’ve had another rather threatening letter from the Board of Education Quality Control down in Liverpool, insisting that young Lottie here succumbs to an examination by answering some philosophical questions to test how well I am teaching her.”
[Picture redacted*]
[Redacted content making an obviously false claim about the redacted picture.]
“Does he/she have any hold over us? Could he/she get Lottie taken away?” This from Masongill and his obvious concern and sincerity makes Lottie herself hoot with laughter.
“No. I do not think so. Educationalists seem to dominate official establishments, but I think we can continue to slip under the radar. In fact, I am not going to subject Lottie to the exam on which they insist. No. In that respect, we are going to ignore them.”
“So why are we here?” – pTravis.
“Well, because the questions he/she has sent us – which, as I said in my note to you on Friday, are all about meaning and mental content – are both bad and good. They are bad because they will not help me construct a logical lesson (a ‘lesson plan’ as perhaps an [jocular falsehood redacted] educationalist would put it). They go hither and thither. ‘Crisscross in every direction’ as Wittgenstein said. But they are good because they are genuine questions. And, in fact, I have one further reason to try to help, which I will mention at the end. So, have you done your homework?”
“Yes” says Masongill. “I have tried to familiarise myself with Jerry Fodor, as you asked. Though it has been tricky.”
“Yes” replies Lottie. “I’ve looked at my heroine’s work a bit more. Or at least, what is available on the web”.
“Yes” replies pTravis. “But you didn’t really ask me to do anything! I suppose I have read some philosophy before. But what did you mean by saying: ‘Think where philosophy starts.’? I don’t know where it starts! And why did you ask me about how scepticism starts? That isn’t much better. Doesn’t it start by looking for justifications and failing to find them? What’s that got to do with meaning? So I’ve had a bit of a miserable weekend mooching around and not know knowing what to do.”
“Good!” says Hipparchus. “Perfect. I’ve written the questions on the blackboard and, though it will not help us very much, I propose to take them in order and to add two more that were included by mistake. Unfortunately, we only have a morning and this is really not the right way to think about philosophy. Wittgenstein said that philosophers should greet each other with the injunction to take things slowly. We are going to discuss seven questions in a hurried morning.
I should also remind you that my own views were very much influenced by dear John and also by Miss Anscombe, though I never met her Austrian master. You, pTravis, will be the innocent here, though I do not ask you to forget your education.”
The questions set the Club [by the redacted jocular falsehood] run as follows.
- How did intentional content come into existence? Gradually, or all at once? By what mechanism?
- What affords mental content (e.g. I guess adaptive brain activity in environments), and what is the gap between the content itself and the things that afford it?
- What is the connection between the content of minds and what they are interpreted as meaning? (I thought Dennett et al said, minds mean what our best practices of interpretation say they mean).
- What makes it true that I am thinking this rather than that or nothing at all?
- Are there determinate facts about what is meant? (This wasn’t in the list but scribbled on the back of the letter. I’ve placed it here in the list.)
- How do brain states/ world-states relate to states of mind? What would make it the case that a machine intended this or that?
- Why is the first question irrelevant to what makes it the case that I am thinking this rather than that?
1: How did intentional content come into existence? Gradually, or all at once? By what mechanism?
“Let us consider the first. ‘How did intentional content come into existence? Gradually, or all at once? By what mechanism?’ You Lottie, a first thought?”
“Well as Ruth Millikan argues, language and thought are biological. The basic idea is that the ability to think thoughts, or to ‘represent’ things, is helpful, biologically. The creatures who could think thoughts were more successful than those who did not. And further, she thinks that it is possible to explain the particular things being thought. The, er… specific contents are also things that can be explained biologically. The particular ‘meanings’ – if I can use that word – drop out of a detailed enough biological account. So I guess ‘intentional content’ – which philosophers seem to use to mean the meaning of thoughts or utterances, or what they are about, came into being with evolutionary history.”
“Good! And did it come about gradually or all at once?”
“Well, I think that eyes evolved many times in history but I don’t think they sprang fully formed each time. Perhaps being light sensitive was better than not. Or seeing in black and white better than not seeing at all. Or seeing close things better than seeing nothing. So I think that the ability to think some basic thoughts might have come about first, by evolution. Evolution is gradual, isn’t it?”
“Very well. So we can imagine that the ability to be, in some sense, orientated towards objects in some action-guiding way might have come before full thoughts. It isn’t quite this but there is an idea of ‘teleo-semiotics’ preceding teleo-semantics. That is, there is an idea that there are further constraints on full thought that might not be met in more primitive intermediate cases. For example, some sort of proto-thought might be directed at objects even if it cannot carry different Fregean senses. Imagine, in other words, that a primitive proto-thought could be about a thing without construing that thing in some particular way. It could be about Venus but not encode a distinction between the morning star and the evening star. This might be a first step towards intentional content emerging. I am not agreeing with this. Just noting that some philosophers think it possible.
Masongill?”
“I don’t know. My chap, Jerry Fodor, thinks that various things need to be in place to think. We need to be a bit like computers with complicated internal structures. And our basic mental states need to be connected to the world by causal connections. Oh, and we start off with all the basic thoughts or concepts we could ever have. It is impossible to learn more. So I don’t know – I didn’t read this bit – but it seems like the whole thing comes all at once.”
“That is a reasonable view. Fodor is not very interested in gradualism. Given that he thinks that it is impossible for individual rational subjects to learn new concepts, it seems unlikely he can offer much of an account of the gradual development of a capacity to think.
pTravis?”
“But you didn’t ask me to read anything!”
“No. So think about the question. What does our [redacted false jocular insinuation] philosophical colleague really want solved? What is, or rather what might be, his intellectual itch?”
“Oh. Well, it seems to me that the puzzling thing is that the ability to think thoughts seems a bit all or nothing. So how could it have evolved gradually? I don’t mean that I am sympathetic to evolution denying creationism. I just mean that it is hard even to describe some preliminary intermediate position on the way to full thought. Also, thought, or intentionality, or mental content seems quite different from the basic building blocks of nature. ’Gill showed me a quotation from Fodor that seemed rather good. It at least put things clearly.
I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm and charge will perhaps appear upon their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep. It’s hard to see, in face of this consideration, how one can be a Realist about intentionality without also being, to some extent or other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with (or maybe of their supervenience on?) properties that are neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else. (Fodor 1987: 97)
This suggests that we need to do some work to place meaning in nature. I don’t trust the argument but at least it shows us the challenge.”
“Yes. Reductionism in the service of realism. Remember that! Let’s leave this first question here. They all overlap. Let me add my own reaction to this, which may seem pernickety. I think we should at least think what the question might mean by ‘intentional content’. The content of a thought is, as I explained to Lottie a year ago, abstract. It is given by a that clause. So: that snow is white. So the question is when this came into existence. When did ‘that snow is white’ come into existence? With snow? With creatures thinking? With the abstract higher order idea that thoughts are available to be thought, or thoughts about thoughts? With thoughts being available to be thought when suitable creatures evolved to think them? When was the event that the first part of that last sentence mentions?
I think we should be very suspicious about this. Abstract contents do not have temporal histories. Only vehicles of such contents – I’m thinking of Fodor – do. No more than the number four has a history. I mean the number itself, not when the first creatures conceptualised it. When did that number come into existence? When creatures first came up with maths? Surely not. No one created the number four.”
The others look doubtful, so Hipparchus continues...
The second session.
The third session.
* At the request of the subject of the ‘selfie’ picture originally posted here, this picture and all other descriptive content referring to them has now been removed. However, eagle-eyed Patron-Level subscribers to the JugginsVerse – who, after all, pay for it all – have insisted that no valuable content be lost. Thus indications of the redacted content have now been restored and are fully available to subscribers with the relevant passcodes on condition of subsequent secrecy. It should be noted that the whole of the redacted content was, and was obviously, entirely fictitious. Aristotle never wandered round Athens in his ‘scanties’ for example.