L3: 3 Thought: in origin and nature?
5: Are there determinate facts about what is meant?
This continues from the last point. Consider the person who is experiencing pain and hearing piano tuning and who says that ‘it’ will stop soon. It is interesting that Wittgenstein flirts with the idea that, in what they say later, they are creating a connection. That would be a matter of thinking it making it so of the idealistic sort. Let us construe thinking of the putative fact as that they are thinking of the noise. What makes it the case that that holds? Well, an idealist might say: that they think that that is what they are thinking. We can make this more obvious by saying: that they say that that is what they are thinking. And we can imagine that this ‘after the fact’ comment – after the fact of thinking – might create the object of thought.
In fact, Crispin Wright claims that the content of intentions is created by retrospective judgements about them. He thinks this because, for reasons he also infers from Wittgenstein, he does not think that a mental state could have the sort of properties that intentions seem to have and so, rather than an intention itself fixing what action would satisfy it, subsequent judgements must do this work. But I do not think that Wittgenstein really means this. (Nor, for example, does John McDowell who says: ‘Suppose I form the intention to type a period. If that is my intention, it is settled that only my typing a period will count as executing it… if that is the intention that… I form, nothing more than the intention itself is needed to determine what counts as conformity to it. Certainly it needs no help from my subsequent judgements.’)
I think Wittgenstein just means that what they would have answered, had they been asked, reports a connection already there, but not a connection made true in any explanatory sense by anything else. Their meaning the noise rather than the pain is all there is!”
pTravis jumps in. “But there have been philosophers who have argued that there is a problem with thinking of ‘determinate facts about what is meant’ either in the sense of general word meaning or the intention of a speaker or even the mental acts of a thinker. Quine and Kripke spring to mind.”
“Yes. Kripke even uses Wittgenstein’s own texts to suggest a sceptism about meaning from which the following ontological – not even merely epistemological – claim emerges: there are no facts about meaning. Every application of a word is a leap in the dark.”
“Tsk!” mutters Lottie, giggling a little. “Strong stuff!”
“Now, Philosophy Club members! Indulge me. What is the root cause of philosophical scepticism about any matter?”
No one says a word for quite a while and then pTravis says: “Oh: you told us to remember something earlier even though you didn’t actually tell us this answer. Fiend! Reductionism in the service of realism. I’m going to say, as some sort of magic maxim: reductionism as a route to realism is also a route to scepticism! I am going to trust in this.”
“First rate! Except for calling me a fiend. If one assumes that realism can only be bought by, or at the price of, reductionism and if reductionism fails, then that motivates scepticism. Masongill’s fine choice of quotation from Fodor is exactly expressive of this basic error of thought. Why would anyone – including our questioner even ask this? Because, I suspect, he/she is falling prey to reductionism. Of course I do not know this. This is one reason I said this was not the way to do philosophy. We should afford an [redacted jocular falsehood] interlocutor a chance to explain their thought. We are not here to police philosophical views but to explore them. If we had more time I’d explain my qualm about scepticism in both the cases of Quine and Kripke but in Quine’s case it falls very quickly out of his scientism.
But let us move question 7 up one place on our list and answer it here. I didn’t know we would want to do this but it seems natural given how the conversation is going. No lesson plan survives contact with actual collective learning!
7: Why is the first question irrelevant to what makes it the case that I am thinking this rather than that?
And, to remind you, the first question was: How did intentional content come into existence? Gradually, or all at once? By what mechanism?
So, first, is he right to assume that the first question is irrelevant to the fact about what I meant or what I thought? I should add that I am not at all sure that he does think this in propria persona. He may well be asking us to justify it, thinking that we do hold it. If so, that is an excellent approach. If he were here I would say: well done! And, after all, two of us do think this!”
“No!” Lottie stamps on the floor with one of her big feet. “My heroine says that causal history is precisely what makes it the case that being in some biological inner state means what it means. Its meaning that is what it was selected for. Or, what it was selected for is what it means.”
“Yes. So Ruth Garrett Millikan would disagree that the history of thinking creatures, thought of over generations, is independent of facts about meaning now.
We decided that even though he is also a reductionist, Jerry Fodor seems to have rather less interest in history except insofar as his theory of reference – his asymmetric causal dependence – has implications for performance over time. He does advance a mechanistic account of our capacity to think thoughts and that is what underpins facts about meaning and intending. But how all that came about is not a focus of his attention. One of these days I really must read his book: What Darwin Got Wrong.
So… pTravis. The floor is yours to put a different view.”
“Well your comment about Fodor reminds me of something Davidson says. He imagines that a lightning strike might randomly rearrange the molecules of a swamp to form an identical copy of Davidson himself: ‘Swampman’! He then asks whether Swampman can think thoughts or meaning anything when he speaks, when he makes noises. And he denies this because Swampman does not stand in the right causal connections to give his noises meaning or his brain events mental contents. But as we have discussed, Davidson holds that mental events just are physical events whose physical properties underwrite Humean causal laws. So if Swampman is molecule for molecule identical to Davidson, his dispositional properties will be all the same. The only difference is his causal history. Further, surely if a radical interpreting anthropologist were to encounter Swampman they would be just as successful – or unsuccessful – as they would be with Davidson? They won’t spot any difference because, after all, Swampman’s dispositions are all the same as Davidson’s when described in non-mental terms. But surely that means that the evidential basis for ascriptions of meaning will seem just the same to them? I must say, I have always been surprised that Davidson took this route.”
“What would you prefer him to have said?”
“That the facts about meaning are those available in Radical Interpretation and so they depend on causal dispositions not causal history.”
“So on your account of Davidson, the history of putative mental content matters because that history fixes facts about what someone means and Swampman lacks that history. But on your preferred variation of Davidson, you think that history does not matter because meaning is what can be interpreted now, albeit in a temporarily extended process of interpretation?
I think I agree, on the assumption that you suggested earlier that it is not that the act of interpretation makes up the meaning – as Davidson seems to suggest in his account of triangulation – but rather that radical interpretation stands to subjects meaning things much as the Paris metre stands to objects having lengths.
I do think that there is a complication or difficulty for us non-reductionists. As I said, teleosemanticists have the possibility of deploying more primitive notions of meaning that might have been evolutionary precursors to full blown meaning. For example, a notion of object-directedness that, perhaps, simply cannot accommodate, or perhaps does not bother with, differences of Fregean sense. Perhaps, for them, the problem then becomes earning the right to full blown semantics (which can accommodate differences of Fregean sense) for these evolutionary just-so stories? (I think this is a problem.)
But pTravis and I may have the opposite problem. It is hard to characterise what a precursor to being able to think thoughts might be and thus it is hard even to sketch an evolutionary history of the capacity to think thoughts itself. What would be a precursor to thinking that Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem by demonstrating that all semi-stable elliptic curves are modular, a result that, when combined with previous work, logically excludes the possibility of solutions to Fermat's equation? Would it be having mathsy notions?
Remind me, pTravis, why did Davidson wish to deny thought to languageless brutes?”
“Because thought is intensional, it is sensitive to differences of Fregean sense. But without language, one cannot so much as express such differences. So one cannot think thoughts, at least as we understand the notion of thought.”
“And we might add in other such necessary conditions for conceptual thought as Evans’ Generality Constraint. You will tend to find that when asked about the origins of thought – both at the level of species but also individuals – Wittgensteinians make heavy and increasingly desperate use of the phrase ‘light dawns gradually over the whole’... John McDowell does, for example. I am going to leave this point here. But should we be worried about it? We could talk about Elizabeth Anscombe ascribing intention to hunting animals. We might mention McDowell’s use of the idea of different species of a genus, stressing that they need not have common elements. The one does not need to build on the other. Does anyone want to pursue this now?”
No one seems to!
6: How do brain-states/ world-states relate to states of mind? What would make it the case that a machine intended this or that?
Hipparchus points out that there are these last two last connected questions and then the reason he has been motivated to ask them all to put in this work. It is clear that Lottie has reached the end of her patience, as she eyes her unused football. Masongill probably wants to be alone again. Moles are solitary introverts. pTravis suddenly realises that he’d like to stay long enough to be offered a pre-lunch gin and tonic. How strange! He suddenly wants to be treated as the grown-up he technically is! This is perhaps the only reason he sets about answering this question.
“Let me say really quickly what Lottie’s and Masongill’s philosophers would say! Evolutionary history or computational structure! That, too, answers the second bit. I don’t know, but I think Millikan would deny an artefact, without evolutionary history, intentional content, except in some way derivative of ours. Her view of functions depends on actual causal history. There is another view of functions in philosophy but it is not the one she supports. For Fodor, it is obvious since he thinks we are computers of sorts.
But I interrupted because that leaves a question for anyone like me who isn’t a reductionist. If one does not have a theory of how states that can be specified in non-mental terms also carry mental content, what, if any, is the relation between the two realms?
Now I do recall that Davidson has an explicit official answer to this question. Each token mental event just is a brain event. I say ‘token’ because he denies that there is any lawlike relation between types of mental event, or mental properties and types of physical event or physical properties.
Further, he adds a further constraint: supervenience. Two physically type-identical individuals would have to be mentally identical, too. I must say that I’ve never been very clear how independent these two constraints are. Could you have token-identity without supervenience or supervenience without token identity?”
“Yes to the latter” the tutor replies. “John Haugeland gives an example where the global state of affairs described in one vocabulary would – intuitively – constrain that in another without there being any common elements in how they divide up or ‘chunk’ aspects of the whole world. I think that this is plausible. Supervenience without common elements. He calls this ‘weak supervenience’ but do be careful as that is also sometimes used to name a form of supervenience with weak modal properties.
As to the former, it is harder to imagine since the main purpose of Davidson’s picture is to allow mental events to have causal effects underpinned by physical causal properties. If supervenience did not hold, two physically identical individuals could differ in mental aspects even though their physical behaviour was constrained to remain the same. (I am assuming determinism, of course.) On some pictures of mental content that is possible because objects themselves play a role in fixing content. If meanings ‘ain’t in the head’ then supervenience on bodily states only obviously fails. But it is harder to see that it fails over physical properties in general.”
“Hang on” Masongill interrupts. “So this means that we can say a priori that the physical realm constrains the mental real even though we cannot say why or in virtue of what? It constrains it despite an absence of laws of nature to underpin the constraint?! What sort of thing is supervenience. It sounds like voodoo!”
“I am afraid that that impression is correct. It appears to be a brute metaphysical relation. And yet, it can seem quite compelling. That said, as Hugh Mellor once pointed out: to frame an argument for supervenience seems always to require the assumption of a premiss remarkably like supervenience itself. In other words, it seems like a commitment we find natural but for which we cannot offer a justification. Rather like a hinge proposition on a traditional reading of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty.”
“But you don’t believe Wittgenstein’s account of knowledge and certainty?! So you cannot rest with that...” pTravis interrupts but he gets no further.
“Bored now!” – Lottie is suddenly firm. Hipparchus reads his audience and lets the matter drop. He says instead:
“So, pTravis, what would a non-reductionist say about the supplementary question: What would make it the case that a machine intended this or that?
“This sounds like an invitation to think about science fiction. Otherwise, after all, we are machines of a sort. What would make it the case that I intended this or that? As we have been discussing, for a non-reductionist, that I did so, coupled with the fact that my capabilities to think such a thought are connected to methods of interpretation. Also, what you said about Strawson!”
“But what of the sort of specific scepticism that Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment suggests? The machine merely looks as though it is thinking thoughts. But really it is just brutely following a programme. It is a matter of syntax not semantics. What stand for putative thoughts fail to be about anything. Swampman, again!”
“On that, I would bite the bullet and favour the ‘Robot Reply’ to the Chinese Room. As David Papineau once said, one sign of genuine intelligence would be a robot capable of playing an imaginative mid field role in a football team… Can we now say we’re done? You said you’d tell us why we have spent the morning answering these questions even though you are not going to make Lottie sit this [redacted jocular falsehood] educationalist’s exam.”
“I have made notes as we have talked and I will send them to our [redacted]. I think they may help. I will do this because there was a further message in the letter, although only implicit. Pressed into the paper was the imprint of a question he/she must have asked themself. When I rubbed lightly with a 6B pencil - old habits! - this is what they had written onto the previous piece of paper:
I’d be glad to know what my general philosophical malady is. I just feel confused!”
“That sounds a little mad” says Lottie, with unusual sympathy.
“It is what they wrote. And is it really so ‘mad’?” Hipparchus replies gently. “I think that this is exactly what we all think much of the time when thinking about philosophy. ‘About logic and our sins’, as Wittgenstein put it. We compare our confusion to an illness. We suffer it.”
“So what is their problem?” Masongill asks neutrally.
“I don’t think they have ‘a problem’. I suspect he or she has as many conceptual confusions as anyone who studies philosophy seriously and thinks hard about it. And they may also have the intellectual cramp that comes from wanting to adopt some particular general view when one can also spot a problem within it. I hope that if Lottie were to continue to study philosophy she might come to see that, while Ruth Garrett Millikan is obviously a brilliant philosopher, there are grave challenges to her account. You, Masongill, were merely asked at short notice to represent Jerome Fodor. Thank you. I had no reason to think you’d find him sympathetic. Did you?”
“I like the way he sets about making as much as he can from the idea that the mind is a computer. I like the way he writes too. He is funny! But also, he has an argument that we can never learn a new concept. Now that must be daft! But he doesn’t play it down. He goes with it. I cannot decide whether that makes him a genius or a dickhead, if you’ll pardon the phrase.”
“Indeed. Exactly. The mot juste. Today, Lottie has played up being a teleosemanticist; Masongill, a Fodorian causal reductionist, pTravis a troubled Davidsonian and I have been studiedly neutral” – the others smirk a little – “But this is a kind of fiction. The truth in the fiction is in the effort to answer multiple questions coming at the same topic from different angles. I really don’t know how much we can ever be satisfied with the results. The problem, as so often in philosophy, is that so much is predetermined by our different starting points and those are selected as much for aesthetic reasons as rational ones.”
“Sorry” pTravis interrupts. “Do you mean that the aesthetic isn’t rational?...”
But at this point with a cry of frustration Lottie grabs her ball and barges out and Masongill, with a sigh, sets off after her to check she is OK leaving pTravis looking hopefully at the bottle of gin. It is 12:01pm and he is an adult, after all.
“By the way. The pictures?”
“Steve Pyke! Popped round. Didn’t you notice the clicking?”
“Sweet!”
