Abstract
Back in the 1980s and 1990s there was a lively debate in the philosophy of mind between realists and anti-realists about propositional attitudes. However, as I argue in this paper, both sides of this debate agreed on a basic assumption: that the truth (or falsehood) of our ascription of propositional attitudes has direct ontological implications four our theories about their nature. In the current paper I argue that such an assumption is false, and that Dennett had hinted at its falsehood in the first part of Content and Consciousness. In an exercise of “counterfactual exegesis”, I suggest that, had this point been acknowledged then, this longstanding debate – which still survives to this date – could have probably been avoided.
Now once again is the view I am defending here a sort of instrumentalism or a sort of realism?
I think that the view itself is clearer than either of the labels, so I will leave that question
to anyone who still finds illumination in them.
(Dennett 1991)
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Notes
- 1.
Here’s a possible example of a theory that hasn’t produced successful predictions, not because of the falsity of its premises, but because scientists don’t know yet how to apply it in experimental or practical situations. Consider Schrödinger’s equation. Although it is sufficiently clear which mathematical outcomes could be expected from calculations involving it, some empirical interpretations of such calculations are either unclear or impracticable. Cramer (1988), for instance, suggested an interpretation of the nature of wave equations, such as Schrödinger’s, according to which a mixture of real and imaginary numbers is required. The problem is that these complex variables – as the mixed numbers are often called – are written as ± numbers, by virtue of which there are always two possible solutions. Alas, when used in equations involving the behavior of a system in time, the change in sign is supposed to be understood as “reversing” the direction of time, and that – as far as I understand – is still not quite easily interpretable in terms of empirical success. This impossibility, however, purports no harm to the acceptance of the equation as being true, and I suspect there may be similar examples in other areas of physics, perhaps even beyond quantum mechanics.
- 2.
Dennett articulated this point, before Churchland’s paper, in pieces like True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works (Reprinted in Dennett 1987).
- 3.
A different concern is to accuse folk physics of being unable to solve puzzles in the domain of scientific (organized, systematic) physics. This is also an unfair claim. Scientific physics deals with highly idealized objects and situations whereas folk physics has a more mundane domain and a very different purpose. I think it would be a mistake to reject folk physics on the basis that its generalizations don’t coincide with the generalizations of scientific (organized, systematic) physics. The same, I think, goes for folk psychology. As Andy Clark so eloquently put it once: “Folk psychology may not be playing the same game as scientific psychology, despite its deliberately provocative and misleading label” (1989).
- 4.
I have in mind the arguments in Fodor’s “Special sciences” (1974). For instance, the latter, very briefly, goes like this: a successful reduction of the psychological law like
-
(1)
S 1 x → S 2 x
is achieved as long as we can provide bridge laws of the form
-
(2a)
S 1 x iff P 1 x and
-
(2b)
S 2 x iff P 2 x,
guaranteeing the reduction of the psychological predicates S 1 and S 2 to neurophysiologic predicates P 1 and P 2 in a law of the form
-
(3)
P 1 x → P 2 x.
Alas, this sort of reduction is impracticable because bridge laws connecting type-psychological predicates with type-neurophysiologic predicates are, if not impossible, highly improbable (“an accident on a cosmic scale”). At most, all we can get are correlations between type-psychological predicates with heterogeneous disjunctions of type-neurophysiologic predicates like
-
(4)
Sx iff P 1 x or P 2 x or … or P n x
in which case the right side of the bi-conditional won’t correspond to a natural-kind of neurophysiology. Ultimately, the reduced law that uses type-neurophysiologic predicates would look like
-
(5)
P 1 x or P 2 x or … or P n x → P’ 1 x or P’ 2 x or … or P’ n x
where P i and P’ i are nomologically related. The problem, however, is that if the identity relation in the bridge laws (like 4) isn’t between natural-kinds, then they aren’t laws. But if they aren’t laws then (5) isn’t a law either. And when no laws, no reduction. QED.
-
(1)
- 5.
As mentioned, I’m confining my notion of intentional realism to Fodorian sentential realism. Because of that, the arguments in favor of (P3) and (P4) are his. Alternative accounts supporting (P3) and (P4) are not going tobe considered. It may be possible that my arguments apply to them as well, but they need not.
- 6.
Fodor uses “belief” as an illustration, but he’s actually talking about all propositional attitudes. As such, his claims are to be read as extending to all propositional attitudes, not only to beliefs.
- 7.
Contrast 1 with its Spanish translation “Quiero dormir” and its odd rendering into a canonical form: “Quiero que yo esté dormido”. Ditto for French: “Je veux dormir” versus “Je veux que je sois endormi”.
- 8.
Notice that this is not a problem of expressibility. It isn’t that Andrew does not know how to put into words what he does; it is rather that he may have no idea how he does it – he may not even know how to begin explaining what he does.
- 9.
A recent movement in epistemology, often called intellectualism, argues that know-how is a species of know-that (e.g., Stanley and Williamson 2001). If this was the case, then, it would follow that know-that statements should be translatable without semantic loss into know-how statements. Although arguing against intellectualism goes beyond the scope of the current essay, it may be worth pointing out that it remains a very controversial proposal, one that a growing number of philosophers reject (e.g., Noë 2005; see Fantl 2008, for a review).
- 10.
The claim, roughly, that if one’s best scientific (physical) theory [after regimentation onto first-order logic] requires existential quantification over certain entities, then one is ontologically committed to such entities (Azzouni 1998: 1).
- 11.
“Turn out” is short for: Take Px to be a formula with a free variable x, and take ∃ (x)(Px) to be directly deducible from S r but not from R r . Given Quine’s criterion for ontological commitment, one is here committed to the existence of the referent of the variable in Px bound by the existential quantifier. Now: take ∃(x)(Qx) to be deducible from R r but not from S r . I take that if the criterion is correct, then it “turns out” that one is committed also to the existence of the referent of the variable in Qx bound by the quantifier (All under the assumption that one can have regimented versions of both S and R, my S r and R r Quine 1948).
- 12.
If we allow the resources of a theory to explain this phenomenon, a connectionist approach sensitive to graceful degradation and assignment by omission may turn out to do a better job than the language of thought when it comes to explaining why Carl forgot Paderewski’s face to begin with.
- 13.
Free logic also allows to read existential quantifiers as ontologically innocent (Orenstein 1990).
- 14.
A final, personal note: I read C&C for the first time in the summer of 2006. It was part of my background reading toward writing my MA thesis on the nature of propositional attitudes. I had read Dennett’s work before, but never C&C. It also happened that, as soon as I finished part I of C&C, I went on to sail with Dennett and others on his boat Xanthippe, and at some point the subject of C&C emerged. ‘Have you read it?’ Dan asked. I told him that I had just finished the first part. ‘And what did you think?’ You see, at the time, I was not only working on my thesis; I was also working on my English, and my answer did not come across as intended. ‘I was disappointed’, I said, and laughter ensued. But what I meant to say is that I was disappointed to see that what I thought was an original idea in my MA thesis, turned out to have been there, masterfully articulated, in the first chapters of C&C! I did not abandon the project though, for notwithstanding the parallelisms between the claims in C&C and mine, I still thought it was worth showing how one could arrive at the same conclusion through a different path – this, I guess, is philosophy’s way of reaching convergent evidence. Thus, the present essay draws heavily from my MA thesis, and I hope it helps to clarify my poor choice of words back when we were on Xanthippe! I also would like to thank the following people for their helpful comments on previous drafts: Jamin Asay, Jody Azzouni, Max Beninger, Alex DeForge, Dan Dennett, Anne Harris, Thomas Hofweber, Joshua Knobe, Gualtiero Piccinini, Jesse Prinz, and Kate Ritchie.
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De Brigard, F. (2015). What Was I Thinking? Dennett’s Content and Consciousness and the Reality of Propositional Attitudes. In: Muñoz-Suárez, C., De Brigard, F. (eds) Content and Consciousness Revisited. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17374-0_3
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