L3: 2 Thought: in origin and nature?
“Hipparchus reads out the next question: 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? I suspect that the word ‘afford’ here isn’t what Gibson meant by ‘affordances’. I suspect it means what underpins and makes possible? So, you first, Masongill?”
“Brains, a bit like computers, running a language of thought. I mean: having inner mental representations that are syntactic structures governed by internal causal relations to other syntactic states. Plus the right sort of causal connection – the asymmetric causal connection – to things in the world. A mental representation means what causes it but then that link is fine-tuned by a priority of causal relations with the secondary causal connections corresponding to falsity.”
“Good. And what of the gap between the content itself and what affords it?”
“Well that’s a bit odd. I think Fodor thinks his theory is a sufficient explanation of thought. There is no gap between his explanation and what it is supposed to explain. Nothing else has to happen. But I suppose you could say that Fodor stresses a conceptual distinction between content and ‘vehicles’ of content (like the meaning of a sentence and the sentence itself). It is the vehicles that have causal properties. Thoughts, as such, do not have causal properties. Even Fodor must agree that thoughts are abstract. I assume. But he explains how it is possible for creatures like us to think abstract thoughts. (So he does not explain the abstract structure of thought. I admit: pTravis told me this!) Such thoughts are encoded in, and carried by, vehicles of thought. So perhaps that is the gap.”
“Lottie?”
“Well, what affords thought is biology. Evolved biology. Our selective histories. But like ’Gill I don’t really know what any gap would be. It seems a silly question. I don’t really like this [redacted jocular falsehood] educationalist jobs-worth. I don’t see why we need to answer their stupid questions!”
“We have no reason to think that those who are concerned, even from a distance, with the quality of your education are jobs-worths! I think they may be concerned that we approach education in an old fashioned manner and, as it were, merely force learning upon you.”
“Do you mean that they might think that teaching me Latin on Monday morning when I want to play football is cruel and unusual?!” Lottie suddenly sees an ally in the [redacted jocular falsehood] learning-theorist.
“No! In any case, right now, we are also here to help any [redacted jocular falsehood] interlocutors with philosophical inquiry. [Spurious and obviously false comment about Aristotle removed.] To those who ask...” her tutor replies calmly. “That is what our admirable Chairman would want. It is the ethos of the Potting Shed.”
pTravis, anticipating the question to him, changes the subject back to philosophy:
“What affords mental content is a thinking subject, someone with the natural capacities and the right education to think. If there is a gap between that and thought, it might be whether the subject – the person, the thinker – chooses to think. It is like: what is the gap between being able to act and acting?
I suppose Davidson – since, before, I have spoken up for him – would say that thought depends on what he calls ‘triangulation’. That is a social process. So, according to him, what affords thought is more than one person, and in an active process of interpretation. I must say, I’ve never liked this bit of Davidson. He makes the facts about what a thought picks out in the world depend on the views – almost literally – of others.”
Hipparchus waits and then says:
“This may be an opportunity to look at the next one.
3: 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).
I don’t think that Lottie’s or Masongill’s target philosophers address this so let us, you and I, have a dialogue about this, pTravis. Why don’t you like triangulation and might that connect to what our stripped questioner here says about Dennett?”
“If I remember correctly, Davidson uses triangulation to solve a problem with the way he uses causation to explicate reference. Although in a very different philosophical package of ideas to Fodor’s, Davidson thinks that thoughts are about what causes them. But the having of a thought is caused by all sorts of things going back along a specific causal chain. Photons enter the retina and are then processed by the brain. But they were reflected off objects which were themselves the product of causal processes. This goes back to the Big Bang. So what is the right element of the causal chain for the reference of a thought? Well, it is the one that is provided by two subjects triangulating on the world. But I am right, Davidson does not think this is merely an epistemological device to find out what was meant all along. No, the process of triangulation fixes what was meant. This offends me because it forces Davidson to say quite strange things about how one knows what one is thinking oneself. After all, it places what one is thinking partially within another person’s mind. One is no longer master of one’s own thinking. So he finds ways to try to dissolve this but they seem wrong to me.”
“I realise that we could discuss how he combines self-knowledge with the idea that the content of thought is constituted by external factors. Sadly we do not have time. Let’s us flag that as an issue. So, instead, what’s the alternative?”
“It is to say that it is an essential feature of thought that it is interpretable by interpersonal interpretation but to deny that a successful act of interpretation determines – in the sense of makes it the case rather than finding it to be the case – as to what was meant. No, what is meant is what the thinker thinks or what they intend in what they say. It is just that this practice is one essentially connected to the practices of ‘measuring’ meaning.”
“But…” Hipparchus interrupts “Doesn’t that contrast seem difficult? It is easy to see how interpretation and meaning could be connected if the results of interpretation fixed or determined or made it the case that someone meant something (including some specific something). But if interpretation is simply a very good, or even the best, way to find out about antecedent facts of meaning, surely that means there is no essential connection between interpretation and meaning?”
“Hmm. Drat. I agree that seems tricky. How about this? What we mean by ‘meaning’, or by being a thinker of thoughts, is connected to a way of making sense of one another. Roughly: Davidson’s radical interpretation or Dennett’s intentional stance. Roughly, again, fitting this schema is the price of admission to the status of being a thinker. But having enough of that ability then trumps individual interpretations. That is, one can think something silently and hide all behavioural consequences of it, but that is still what one thought.”
“Good. Yes. Try to keep up with me as this will be too quick. Strawson says something similar about personal identity. To earn the right to the idea that experiences are unified as the experiences of a particular subject (a person), there has to be some way to specify or identify that subject. Without some such criteria, the idea of a single subject is vacuous. But as Hume’s description of introspection reveals, conscious experience does not yield any criteria to identify a subject (or owner) for one’s experiences. It reveals only the experiences themselves. From this, Hume concludes that there is no substantial self.
But there are criteria for the identification of a subject available elsewhere: third-person criteria for the ascription of experiences to fellow human beings on the basis of what they say and do. Strawson suggests that these can provide substance to the idea of a self even though they are not appealed to in self-ascriptions of experiences. This is because, while self-ascription of experiences is made without any appeal to these (or any other) criteria to identify a subject, it is still made in accord with them. As Strawson puts it, ‘The links between criterionless self-ascription and empirical criteria of subject-identity are not in practice severed’ (Strawson 1966: 165). Thus, it is because we are identifiable from a third person perspective as embodied subjects located within the world that we can also self-ascribe experiences without appeal to, but still in accord with, those criteria. The third-person criteria substantiate the idea of a subject.
Self-knowledge of thought is a matter of spontaneously being able to a self-ascribe in a way that will dovetail with third person ascription via radical interpretation. We learn to self-ascribe, without radical interpretation of our own actions, in a way that dovetails what others would need radical interpretation to ascribe to us. I think that this idea may help answer our oddly naturist questioner...
Next question. Here I think we get to the crux of the matter.
Lottie sighs and says: “I’ve told you! I am in some biological state that has the right evolutionary history such that the best explanation of why I can get into this state is the representation of something. As an axolotl I may be pre-programmed to think a lot about wading birds like herons and storks, as well as large fish like tilapia and carp. I’m good at getting into a state which has them as its content!”
Masongill interjects. “I won’t repeat what I think Fodor would say – it is again his story about inner mental representations in a language of thought with the right causal connections to bits of the world etc – but can I say why I think he’d say that? He wants this question to have some answer. He wants there to be something to say here. This goes back to the quote I gave pTravis. What makes it the case that I’m thinking one thing rather than another, or nothing, has to be some state of me. It cannot be just that my thinking it so is the answer.”
“What do you mean? Isn’t your thinking it so the whole point?” – Hipparchus.
“I mean: my thinking it so – my thinking about say a heron – has to be constituted by something. Lottie says some biological state. Fodor says some computational state. The point is that I am thinking about a heron, say, in virtue of something else! In my case – Fodor’s, I mean – it is being in a computational state. That is how he hopes to reduce it to physics, in the end.”
“Good. Yes. But let’s be careful here. Sometimes the idea of thinking it so making it so undermines the idea of something being so. If beauty is a matter of our thinking it so, then that slights the objectivity of beauty. So you can understand those philosophers who think that philosophy is a bit like science responding to this by saying something explanatory. As Millikan (thank you Lottie) and Fodor (thank you Masongill) do. But I want to suggest something between those two poles…
I suggest that our thinking it so – let us imagine that we are all thinking worried thoughts about a heron who is about to eat Lottie – is a bit like an action (pTravis already mentioned this analogy). If you ask me what I’m doing and I reply that I am waiting for a bus, what makes it so that this is what I am doing is that I am waiting for the bus. That is my project! That my so doing creates the action in no way undermines the idea that this really is my action: what I am doing. And so, we can think that what makes it the case that I am thinking one thing, not another, is that this is just what I’m doing. Let me suggest some other prejudices that might affect us. Wittgenstein gives these examples.
§682. “You said, ‘It’ll stop soon’. – Were you thinking of the noise or of your pain?” If he answers, “I was thinking of the piano-tuning” a is he stating that the link existed, or is he making it by means of these words? – Can’t I say both? If what he said was true, didn’t the link exist a and is he not for all that making one which did not exist?
§683. I draw a head. You ask, “Whom is that supposed to represent?” – I: “It’s supposed to be N.” – You: “But it doesn’t look like him; if anything, it’s rather like M.” – When I said it represented N., was I making a connection, or reporting one? And what connection was there?
§684. What is there in favour of saying that my words describe an existing connection? Well, they refer to various things which didn’t materialize only with the words; they say, for example, that I would have given a particular answer then, if I had been asked. And even if this is only conditional, still it does say something about the past.
To be thinking one thing rather than another need not consist in saying anything to oneself. It need be nothing phenomenological.”
“Ah yes” pTravis interjects. “’Gill and I play chess and we’re not bad. We’re not mere beginners. But we are not that serious, either, so we play quickly. But when I’m playing, I think by moving. I do not say to myself: next, I will develop my queen’s side. I just do it. That is what I am doing, or trying to do, and so what I am thinking I am doing.”
“So in what does trying to develop your queen’s side consist? It cannot be just what you actually do because you may fail!”
“But it is what I would have said! It’s what I aimed to do!”
“And here I think we get to the second aspect of a philosophical agenda. Our [redacted jocular falsehood] questioner wants there to be facts in which thinking thoughts consist. He or she may want philosophically elucidatory thoughts. Or they may just want more basic experiential facts. But the perhaps surprising thing is that we can think thoughts and there be nothing other than that fact that we are so thinking itself to which to peg the thought.
So a very significant question is: does every status we have as thinkers require an informative account of what it is to possess that status. Not just an account of how someone else would ascribe it. But in what it consists?”
The third session.