Bonjour's argument against physicalism from intentionality

The Richard Carrier Fallacy

NormaJean: I agree that I have been away from a lot of these discussions. I don't know if I could call it "getting off scot-free." Sometimes if you aren't in a debate which goes on for awhile it's a little difficult to pick up the thread deep in the discussion.



But I think the discussion didn't exactly go in the direction that I would have taken it. The following is a discussion from Doctor Logic's first reply, to which I want to push him a little.



Suppose I consider the proposition "My dog is on the porch."How do I know what this proposition is about? If I see the neighbor's cat on the porch instead of my dog, how do I know that the proposition is false? And how can I assert the proposition in advance of actually making the observation?There's a simple and elegant (and natural) solution. Intentionality is about my own cognitive abilities, and my cognitive abilities are in a physical brain that does exist as the thought is processed. A proposition has meaning in light of me knowing (approximately) what experiences would increase or decrease my confidence in the truth of that proposition. That is, the proposition isn't a physical reference to actual dogs and porches (which may not exist), but is about my presently-existing faculties for recognizing dogs on porches if those things existed. Rocks and CD-ROMs lack intentionality because they lack thought and recognition. Deep Blue lacks intentionality because Deep Blue does not formulate propositions about its abilities to recognize states of affairs. It just recognizes them. For example, Deep Blue does not ponder the proposition that it will lose the game (in some abstract way), even though it is capable of recognizing a great many specific ways of losing a match. Deep Blue's intelligence is fish-like or insect-like. It does not have ability to recognize its own mental states.So the argument that we cannot see how one lump of matter could be about another just doesn't hold up under scrutiny. If the first lump has recognition and expectation, and the ability to recurse those abilities on its own faculties, then that lump can have intentional thought.



What I am failing to see here is that this is an account of intentionality in non-intentional terms. Intentionality is "about my cognitive abilities," you say. If these cognitive abilities presuppose intentionality, then we are shuffling intentional concepts around and calling it an explanation of intentionality. OK, you mention the brain, but that doesn't make it a physicalist explanation. Meaning no disrespect to you or Richard, I would have to call this the Richard Carrier Fallacy. (OK, I'm asking for someone to come up with a Victor Reppert fallacy. I know that.)



DL: A proposition has meaning in light of me knowing (approximately) what experiences would increase or decrease my confidence in the truth of that proposition.



This seems to me just backwards. Meaning is determined by what experiences would increase or decrease confidence in the truth of the proposition?? You have to know what the proposition means before you can figure out what experiences would make it more or less likely to be true.

Further, it is naturalists like BDK who insist most firmly that the presence of intentionality. doesn't require the entertaining of propositions. Indeed, nothing can entertain propositions unless it possesses intentionality to begin with. Deep Blue doesn't recognize it's own mental states, it doesn't ponder propositions, but these capacity are exactly what you are trying to offer a non-intentional explanation.



Here's the problem I am getting at with the numbered premise argument. Add up all the physical, non-intentional states you want, don't help yourself to any states that are intentional, and see if it is possible that these non-intentional states can entail some intentional state or propositional attitude. It looks to me that whatever physical information you give me, I can deny the existence of any propositional attitude, or affirm the existence of alternative propositional attitude, without contradicting myself. Hence, if there is a truth about what the propositional attitude, the explanation of it in terms of a physical, non-intentional substrate is incomplete.



Again, you introduce terms like recognition and expectation. If those terms mean "recognizing that p" or "expecting that p", then you aren't explaining the propositional state, you are slipping the propositional state in through the back door and calling it an explanation. Otherwise, what do you mean by "recognition" and "expectation?"

Intentionality and supervenience

III. Intentionality and the Supervenience Strategy

Another very popular view, which has even been accepted by some Christians, is a nonreductive materialist position. On this view, intentional states are not eliminated, they are not reducible to physical states, they are, however, supervenient upon physical states. Mental states are not identical to physical states, but given the state of the physical, there is only one way the mental can be.

Of course, earlier I indicated that supervenience of all non-physical states on physical states is part of what it takes for a world-view to be naturalistic. However, if mental states can be reductively analyzed in terms of physical states, then the supervenience is simply obvious. A difference in B requires a difference in A because, in the final analysis, Bs just are As. Again, if the B-states are eliminated from the ontology, then we don’t have to worry about a difference in B that is not guaranteed by a difference in A. However, for many, perhaps most philosophers who believe in a broadly materialist world-view, the reductionist and eliminativist positions are both implausible. For these philosophers, the supervenience relation has a job to do, it explains how it is possible for everything to be in the final analysis physical while at the same time maintaining the irreducibility and the autonomy of the mental realm.

Philosophers often distinguish between weak supervenience and strong supervenience. According to weak supervenience, B-properties weakly superven on A-properties if and only if things that are alike in their A-properties are always alike in their B-properties. What this establishes is a constant conjunction between A-properties and B-properties. It does not really show that there is anything about the A-properties that guarantees that the B-properties will always be the same. Nevertheless, we must remember what caused problems for reductionist accounts of mental states. The physical, I maintained, is incurably indeterminate with respect to propositonal states. Whatever story we tell at the physical level is compatible with a multiplicity of stories at the mental level. This kind of constant conjunction claim, however, explains little. There is, for example, a constant conjunction between increases in the homicide rate in New York City and increases in the rate of ice cream consumption. We could say that the homicide rate supervenes on the rate of ice cream consumption, but we will have explained nothing. We will not have shown that ice cream consumption is responsible for homicides, or vice versa, or whether these are just two unrelated effects of a common cause (an increase in the city’s temperatures).

I should add that a good deal of confusion in the discussion of neuroscientific discoveries and their relation to the philosophy of mind often occurs at this point. What neuroscience if often able to do is provide correlations between certain mental states and activity in certain parts of the brain. These are often taken as proof of materialism, but there is no good reason why dualists should not expect these correlations to exist. Further, it must be emphasized that correlation between mental states and physical states is not the same as identification of mental states with physical states.

Strong supervenience is the claim that B-properties strongly sueprvene on A-properties just in case things that are alike in A-properties must be alike in B-properties. On this view the supervenience isn’t just a brute conjunction, it is necessarily so. However, as an attempt to explain anything, this seems inadequate as well. Religious expalnations are often taken to task as being god-of-the-gaps explanations, this just seem to me to be a necessity-of-the-gaps explanation. “Why, if Jones’s beliefs could be 5 or 6 different ways given the physical, or perhaps, given the physical, Jones could be a zombie with no beliefs at all, does Jones have the beliefs he has?” If the answer is “Well, there’s this strong supervenience relationship that exists between the physical and the mental, so it’s necessary, it looks as if we are taken no closer to an explanation as to why Jones has the beliefs he has.

Why does the supervenience relation exist, if it does? It is pure dumb luck? Is it a Leibnizian pre-established harmony set up before the foundation of the world by God? (This might not be naturalistically acceptable). Presumably, it is not a physical relation, so why does it exist? Unless there is something about the physical that guarantees that the mental be only one way, the supervenience relation needs to be explained.

There is what James Stump calls a “classic reflexivity problem” for the suprevenience theorist. For supervenience theory, everything is either physical, or supervenes on the physical. So, the supervenience relation is going to have to be either physical or supervene on the physical, if supervenient physicalism is true. But does it. Stump summarizes an argument originally presented by Lynch and Glasgow to contend that the supervenience relation itself cannot be admitted into the supervenient materialism’s ontology, which I have altered slightly for the sake of congruence with previous discussion:

1. For physicalist, all fact must be materialistically acceptable. That is, th eyare facts about physical things, or about things which are ontologically distinct from the physical, but strongly supervene on the physical.

2. There must be some fact—the explanation—in virtue of which B-properties supervene on A-properties; call the S-facts. What kind of facts are S-facts? There are two options for materialistically respectable facts:

a) They themselves could suprevene on A-properties. But then there is an infinite regress problem, for now we have to explain this new supervenience relations, which in turn needs to be explained, and so on ad infinitum. So this is no good.

b) Or, the S-facts could not just be further A-properties, that is, facts about the physical entity. But then these facts do not bridge the explanatory gap betweent he B-facts and the A-facts.

Perhaps the supervenience theorist can simply accept the suerpvenience relation as an unexplained brute fact. If so, as Stump suggests, the apparent explanatory advantage of materialism over dualism, based on parsimony, is dissipated. In addition, there are more problems for this position when we come to the problem of mental causation.

Intentionality is more than just a puzzle for naturalism, it is a deep and profound problem distinct from, and as serious as, the “hard problem” of consciousness. Reduction of understood intentional states and propositional intentional states seems to be inherently impossible. Elimination of those states eliminates states essential to the operation of the natural sciences on which the credibility of naturalism is founded. Non-propositional successors to propositional attitudes cannot do the job assigned to them. Supervenient materialism commits the materialist to a materialistically unacceptable relation between the physical and the mental, and, as we shall see, presents serious problems in accounting for mental causation.

Theories of the universe that make the mental basic fact of reality, such as theism, pantheism, or idealism, do not have the problem of unacceptably terminating explanatory chains were mental states. Thus the problem of intentionality provides one good reason for preferring a broadly mentalistic world-view to a broadly materialist world-view.

Bees, Used Car Salesmen, and Misrepresentation

Now if we are working on the level of simple representation, the perhaps some solution to the problem of misrepresentation can be generated. Let us consider, for example the case of bee dances. Bees perform dances which “represent” the positions of flowers in a garden. The bees, based on this information, go out to the garden only to find no flowers, because in the intervening time between the bees’ discovery of the flowers and the time when the bees performed the dance, a child had picked all the flowers and taken them indoors. We might be able to cash out this fact of misrepresentation in causal terms: there is a normal casual relationship between the bees’ dance and the location of pollinated flowers, so the bees represented flowers in that location, but the representation was incorrect, because the flowers had been picked in the meantime.
But other kinds of misrepresentation seem more difficult to deal with at the level of simple representation. Let’s consider the kind of misrepresentation that goes on in, say, a used car dealership. Can we really imagine a bee from a competing hive going “sneaking in,” giving a dance which would send the swarm of bees to a place where there are no pollinated flowers, in order to secure the real flowers for its own hive? This kind of misrepresentation seems to require that the fifth-columnist bee, like the used car dealer, know that the dance was misleading, in other words, understand what it is that their own dance and know that it was a misrepresentation. This seems to be beyond the capabilities of bees, and requires a radically different set of abilities. Can we account for the difference between being sincerely mistaken an lying in terms of causal relationships? I rather doubt it.
There have, certainly, been causal theories of reference which have been advanced. But these do not suggest that causal relationships alone are sufficient to fix reference. Consider the following standard description of causal theories of reference.
This is the wikipedia account of the causal theory of reference
A name's referent is fixed by an original act of naming (also called a "dubbing" or, by Saul Kripke, an "initial baptism"), whereupon the name becomes a rigid designator of that object. later uses of the name succeed in referring to the referent by being linked to that original act via a causal chain.

In other words, what causation explains, according to this theory, is how references is transmitted once an initial act of naming, an intentional (both in the sense of being intended and in the sense of possessing “aboutness”) is performed. How such actions could be performed in the first place is accounted for in causal terms. It is true, that some have attempted to provide more radical accounts of reference which attempt to stay within the constraints imposed by physicalism; Devitt’s theories are a good example of this. However, I think this attempt has been shown to be a failure in Martin Rice’s essay “Why Devitt Can’t Name His Cat.”

More questions for causal theories

In fact, I question I have is how any specification of causal relations can entail the existence of meaning at all. Let us say a bird is hardwired to let out a certain squawk when a something approximately the shape of a hawk is nearby. There is a regular causal relation between the appearance of a hawk and the occurrence of the squawk. In one sense we can say that the squawk is about the hawk. Something could, of course, touch off the “hawk” signal and the subsequent evasive action without being a hawk. It does not mean that the bird has the ability to distinguish a hawk from various non-hawks. Expecting fire when one sees smoke is not the same as inferring fire from smoke. We say “smoke means fire,” but what this amounts to is that smoke and fire are constantly conjoined in experience. We quite often experience smoke before we experience fire, but it turns out upon examination of the causal relations that fire causes smoke and not vice-versa. We say “smoke means fire,” but that means that smoke and fire are conjoined in our experience. The “meaning” is imposed by human understanding, not in the world as it is in itself.

Blue Devil Knight and those unconscious bee people

This tracks back to a discussion we had with BDK on consciousness and intentionality. My question for him is this: could unconscious bee people have evolved science? Could they form hypotheses, perform experiments, interpret the data, and examine the results to see if their hypotheses were confirmed or disconfirmed, adjust their theories to fit the evidence, etc. etc. etc, all of this without consciousness?

Is it just intutional pie-throwing if I suggest that this is just insane? Furthermore, an affirmative answer would make the hard problem of consciousness harder. Apparently we could do just fine without it, so why do we have it?

On intentionality and causal theories

Lewis wrote this in his essay De Futilitate:
We are compelled to admit between the thoughts of a terrestrial astronomer and the behaviour of matter several light-years away that particular relation which we call truth. But this relation has no meaning at all if we try to make it exist between the matter of the star and the astronomer's brain, considered as a lump of matter. The brain may be in all sorts of relations to the star no doubt: it is in a spatial relation, and a time relation, and a quantitative relation. But to talk of one bit of matter as being true about another bit of matter seems to me to be nonsense.
Of course materialists are going to say that it is not a bit of matter that is about another bit of matter, it is a state of the brain (along, perhaps, with a set of causally related items outside the brain) that is about something else.
In virtue of what is some physical state about some other physical state? This is the familiar worry about intentionality, a worry made more difficult by my claim that the kind of intentional states involved in rational inference are states in which the content is understood by the agent and put into a propositional format. Is there a set of necessary and sufficient conditions which are physical in the sense in which we are understanding it here, and which jointly entail the conclusion that agent A is in the state of believing, or doubting, or desiring, or fearing, the proposition P is true?
When we consider material entities that exhibit intentionality, we see that they do not have their intentional content inherently, but have it relative to human interests. The marks on paper that you are reading now are just marks, unless they are related to a set of users who interpret it as such. In other words, it possesses a “derived intentionality” as opposed on “original intentionality.” As Feser points out
More to the point, brain processes, composed as they are of meaningless chemical componenets, seem as inherently devoid of intentionality as soundwaves or ink marks. Any intentionality they would also have to be derived from something else. But if anything physical would be devoid of intrinsic intentionality, whatever does have intrinsic intentionality whatever does have intrinsic intentionality would thereby have to be non-physical. Sine the mind is the source of the intentionality of physical entities like sentences and pictures, and doesn’t get its intentionality from anything else (there’s no one “using” our minds to convey meaning) it seems to follow that the mind has intrinsic intentionality, and thus is non-physical.
For example, clearly the relationship between brain states and states of affairs
cannot be a matter of resemblance. If what I perceive is a pine tree, then what I see is green, but there is nothing green in the gray matter of the brain that corresponds to the green tree in the world. So there must be something that connects the brain states to the mental states. But what could that be?
Some naturalistic theories have been developed to provide a physicalist account of intentionality. Feser delineates four types of theories of this nature: conceptual role theories, causal theories, biological theories, and instrumentalist theories.
Conceptual role theories explicate intentional states in terms of their conceptual roles, that is, in relation to other intentional states. Of course, this does not explain why there is a network of intentional states in the first place.
A more popular approach to coming up with a naturalistic account of intentionality are causal theories of intentionality. These appeal to the causal relations that intentional states stand to items in the external world. Thus if I believe that there is a computer monitor in front of me as I type these words, there is a causal connection between the monitor and my visual cortex, which causes states of my brain to be affected by it.
However there are some fairly obvious difficulties which must be confronted by any causal theories. First of all, how would we explain our relationship to non-existent objects? How could we meaningfully refer to Superman if Superman does not exist? How could a cat cause us to form the belief that a dog is on the mat? This is frequently called the misrepresentation problem. These are problems that causal theorist have been frequently discussed in the literature, and various responses have been proposed.

Virtual models.

This is a statement from Richard Carrier's critique of me:

Cognitive science has established that the brain is a computer that constructs and runs virtual models. All conscious states of mind consist of or connect with one or more virtual models. The relation these virtual models have to the world is that of corresponding or not corresponding to actual systems in the world.

Let's set aside the question of whether the brain has really been shown to be a computer. I take it that this is what a materialist position on intentionality is going to have to look like. But now I have to ask one simple question. In virtue of what is a something in the brain a model of something else, either concrete, or, to make things even harder, abstract. One way in which something can be a model of something else is it is resembles it. Then perhaps a mind is needed to recognize the resemblance, but perhaps one could argue that the modeling relationship exists even with no one there to recognize the modeling. (If a tree models in the forest...) But the trouble is that there is nothing in the squishy grey matter of my brain that resembles, say, a tree in the forest. If I see a green pine tree, where is the green thing in my brain the represents the green pine tree?

Now it is true that some things represent others without physical resemblance. So the word "red" is not red, but it represents red nonetheless. But that relationship seems relative to a mind who uses the term "red" for red things. But this relatioship does not seem to require an independently existing mind.

So, in virtue of what is a virtual model a model.

The link is to Darek Barefoot's excellent reply to Richard Carrier.

Plantinga and the argument from intentionality

From "Two Dozen or so Theistic Arguments"
(A) The Argument from Intentionality (or Aboutness)

Consider propositions: the things that are true or false, that are capable of being believed, and that stand in logical relations to one another. They also have another property: aboutness or intentionality. (not intensionality, and not thinking of contexts in which coreferential terms are not substitutable salva veritate) Represent reality or some part of it as being thus and so. This crucially connected with their being true or false. Diff from, e.g., sets, (which is the real reason a proposition would not be a set of possible worlds, or of any other objects.)

Many have thought it incredible that propositions should exist apart from the activity of minds. How could they just be there, if never thought of? (Sellars, Rescher, Husserl, many others; probably no real Platonists besides Plato before Frege, if indeed Plato and Frege were Platonists.) (and Frege, that alleged arch-Platonist, referred to propositions as gedanken.) Connected with intentionality. Representing things as being thus and so, being about something or other--this seems to be a property or activity of minds or perhaps thoughts . So extremely tempting to think of propositions as ontologically dependent upon mental or intellectual activity in such a way that either they just are thoughts, or else at any rate couldn't exist if not thought of. (According to the idealistic tradition beginning with Kant, propositions are essentially judgments.) But if we are thinking of human thinkers, then there are far to many propositions: at least, for example, one for every real number that is distinct from the Taj Mahal. On the other hand, if they were divine thoughts, no problem here. So perhaps we should think of propositions as divine thoughts. Then in our thinking we would literally be thinking God's thoughts after him.

(Aquinas, De Veritate "Even if there were no human intellects, there could be truths because of their relation to the divine intellect. But if, per impossibile, there were no intellects at all, but things continued to exist, then there would be no such reality as truth.")

This argument will appeal to those who think that intentionality is a characteristic of propositions, that there are a lot of propositions, and that intentionality or aboutness is dependent upon mind in such a way that there are a lot of propositions, and that intentionality or aboutness is dependent upon mind in such a way that there couldn't be something p about something where p had never been thought of.

Mental Representation on intentional content: a failure of entailment?

DI Post from Saturday, December 30, 2006

Ed Feser on the Argument from Intentionality

Originally dated Nov. 21 2006
The following is from Philosophy of Mind: an Introduction, by Edward Feser. Hat tip: Joe Markus from the Internet Infidels Discussion board.

When you draw your mother, you are creating a kind of representation of her. But notice that it is not the particular physical features of the drawing itself - the form of the lines you make, the chemicals in the ink you use, and so forth - which make it a representation of her.........Someone looking over your shoulder as you draw might later on produce an exact copy of the drawing you were making. Perhaps the person admires your craftsmanship and wants to see if he or she can do as well. But in doing so the person would not, strictly speaking, be drawing a respresentation of your mother - he or she may have no idea, nor any interest in, who it was that you were drawing - but rather a representation of your representation. And, in general, the very same image could count either as a drawing of an X, or as a drawing of a drawing of X - or indeed (supposing there's someone looking over the shoulder of the second artist and copying what he or she was drawing) as a drawing of a drawing of a drawing of an X, and so on ad infinitum.......Even if we count something as a drawing, and therefore as possessing some intentionality or other, exactly what it is a drawing of is still indeterminate from its physical properties alone. The same is true not just of drawings, but also of written and spoken words (for to say or write "cat" could be to represent cats, but it could also be to represent the word "cat") and indeed any material representation, including purported representations encoded in neural firing patterns in the brain. There seems in general to be nothing about the physical properties of a material representation that make it a material representation of an X as opposed to a material representation of a material representation of an X.......Sometimes, however, you are determinately thinking about a particular thing or person, such as your mother. Your thought about your mother is about your mother - it represents your mother, and doesn't represent a representation of your mother (representations, pictures, and the like might be the furthest thing from your mind). But then your thought, whatever it is, cannot be entirely material. Given that there's nothing about a material representation per se that could make it a representation of an X as opposed to a representation of a representation of an X, if your thought was entirely material then there would be no fact of the matter about whether your thought represented your mother as opposed to a representation of your mother. Your thought is determinate; purely material representations are not; so your thought is not purely material.

posted by Victor Reppert @ 3:49 PM
1 Comments:

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At 5:47 PM, Jim Lippard said…

"There seems in general to be nothing about the physical properties of a material representation that make it a material representation of an X as opposed to a material representation of a material representation of an X."

This seems patently false. What makes an image of my mother an image of my mother is the fact that it resembles my mother--the images on my retina, the images in my visual brain maps cause stimulation of the neurons associated with my mother due to that similarity; and those associated with my mother are there as a result of my visual experiences with my mother (and are linked to other neurons as a result of my memories of experiences and thoughts about my mother).

Likewise even for stipulated/dubbed representations--they only are recognized as representations because of the appropriate neural connections in my brain, which are there because of past experiences and memories.

Without the appropriate connections in somebody's neural systems (or equivalent memory stores causally connected up in the right way to the world), there's no representation.

Vallicella on the indeterminacy of the physical

This thread of discussions concerns something that I am going to be getting into, the indeterminacy of the physical and its relation to intentionality.

The Doglike mind

The doglike mind

I have tried to stress throughout the inevitableness of the error made about every transposition by one who approaches it from the lower medium only. The strength of the critic lies in the words "merely" or "nothing but. He sees all the facts but not the meaning. Quite truly, therefore, he claims to have seen all the facts. there is nothing else there, except the meaning. He is therefore, as regards the matter at hand, in the position of an animal. You will have noticed that most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all. His world is all fact and no meaning. And in a period in when factual realism is dominant we shall find people deliberately inducing upon themselves this doglike mind. A man who has experienced love from within will deliberately go about to inspect in analytically from outside and regard the results of this analysis as truer than his experience. The extreme limits of this self-binding is seen in those who, like the rest of us, have consciousness, yet go about the study of the human organism as if they did not know it was conscious. As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism. The critique of every experience from below, the voluntary ignoring of meaning and concentration on fact, will always have the same plausibility. There will always be evidence, and every month fresh evidence, to show that religion is only psychological, justice only self-protection, politics only economics, love only lust, and thought itself only cerebral bio-chemistry.

From "Transposition" in The Weight of Glory, pp. 71-72.

This seems like a good passage to begin exploring the idea of intentionality. What does it take to understand pointing. Do dogs have intentional states? If they do, it seems they don't recognize then as such.

The link here tracks back to an original DI post I did in 2006.

Against property dualism

What if you accept irreducibility arguments that defend the claim that mental states are ineliminable and irreducible to physical states. Many philosophers buy these arguments without denying an overall philosophical naturalism. What they accept, instead, is dualism of properties but a monism of substances. At least when I was in graduate school, it seemed to me as if the mainstream position amongst secular philosophers was a non-reductive materialism based on the supervenience of mental states on physical states. There were numerous opposing views about what kind of supervenience relationship had to obtain between mental and physical states.
William Hasker, in his response to me in Philosophia Christi, entitled “What about a Sensible Naturalism,” is talking about just this kind of naturalistic position. He describes a sensible naturalism as “a naturalism that makes a serious effort to accommodate, or at least makes sense of, our ordinary convictions about the mind and its operations—the things we think we all “know” about the mind, when we are not doing philosophy.”
The difficulty here is that the mental and the physical are defined in such a way as to exclude one another. So reductionist accounts of the mental have a tendency to be either fully or partly eliminativist. We have to back off from what we thought were out common-sense conceptions of what the mental is in order to accept a reduction to the physical. To accept reductionist accounts of the mental, for Hasker, is not to be a sensible naturalist.
There is, it seems to me, a paradoxical difficulty for naturalistic philosophies of mind. If you can reduce the mental to the physical, then the issue of mental causation, I think, becomes easier for the naturalist. If the naturalist is inclined in a reductionist/eliminativist direction, then the argument from propositional content becomes the main focus. However, many naturalist philosophers do not think reductionism is plausible. But if the naturalist buys a nonreductive materialism, which means that we accept a dualism of properties, then the argument from mental causation becomes the key argument.

Edward Feser presents the case against the non-reductivist view on mental causation as follows:
…Property dualism seems if anything to have a worse problem with epiphenomenalism than does Cartesian dualism. Recall that the Cartesian dualist who opts for epiphenomenalism seems to be committed to the absurd consequence that we cannot so much as talk about out mental states, because if epiphenomenalism is true, those mental states have no effect at all on our bodies, including our larynxes, tongues and lips. But as Daniel Dennett has pointed out, the property dualist seems committed to something even more absurd: the conclusion that we cannot even think about our mental states, or at least about our qualia! For if your beliefs—including your belief that you have qualia—are physical states of your brain, and qualia can have no effects on anything physical, then whether you have qualia has nothing to do with whether you believe that you have them. The experience of pain you have in your back has absolutely no connection to your belief that you have an experience of pain in your back; for, being incapable of having any causal influence on the physical world, it cannot be what caused you to have beliefs about it.

I had originally presented this on DI, so I am linking back to that, since it is already getting comments over there.

link to an attack on materialism by George Bealer

I read a number of Bealer essays when I was in grad school, and thought he was pretty challenging, though kind of technical. This is a well-known essay of his. HT: Joe Markus

Hasker on the divide and conquer strategy

Typically in the philosophy of mind we hear that there are two kinds of problems for naturalists. One is to account for raw experience or raw feels. Given physicalism, can we have the sorts of experiences that we would ordinarily think we have. The other concerns our intentional states.
Now many philosophers have suggested that the latter problem is less of a serious problem for physicalism than the former problem. The argument from reason deals primarily with the latter problem, and so in some sense it might be thought to be superfluous in this sense: if physicalists can get around the problem of qualia, dealing with intentionality or reasoning should be pretty easy.

Steven Stoljar in the essay on Physicalism for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it this way:

As with the knowledge argument, the issues surrounding Kripke's argument are very much wide open. But it is important to note that most philosophers don't consider the issues of intentionality as seriously as the issue of qualia when it comes to physicalism. In different vocabularies, for example, both Block (1995) and Chalmers (1996) distinguish between the intentional aspects of the mind or consciousness, and the phenomenal aspects or qualia, and suggest that it is really the latter that is the central issue. As Chalmers notes (1996; p. 24), echoing Chomsky's famous distinction, the intentionality issue is a problem, but the qualia issue is a mystery.

William Hasker, however, does not seem to see it quite this way. He writes:

A maneuver that has recently become somewhat popular needs to be taken account of here. Some philosophers have thought it plausible to accept a functionalist account specifically for intentional states, while conceding the "phenomenal properties" objection for qualia and giving some other account (e.g., token identity) for those states. Once again let us concede, for the sake of argument, that th functinoalisty can successfully identify intentional states in causal-functional terms. Even so, ther eare at least two reasons why this maneuver does not succeed in disposting of the materialist's problem with intentional states. For one thing, some intentional stattes do involve qualitative "feels"; being embarrassed about one's appearance is an example of such a stae. In general, emotional states involve both a particular qualitative feel and also an intentional reference to whatever it is that one is happy, sad, proud, indignant, or embarrassed about. For these particular states, the "divide and conquer"strategy can't succeed.

An even more fundamental problem, however, is encountered in the "aboutness"which is the very essence of an intentional state. There just is such a thing as thinking about something, worrying or hoping that something may happen, believing that so-and-so is the case, deciding on a certain course of action--and in such cases one ordinarily has a distinct, conscious awareness of the "intentional object" of one's mental state. This sort of mental state is utterly familiar to each one of us, and if anyone were to claim not to understand what is meant, such a claim would be entirely lacking in credibility. Furthermore, the claim that a person is in such an intentional state is clearly not equivalent, logically or conceptually, to any causal-functional description of the person. The causal-functional properties of the sate identified by functionalism can be completely described and explained in terms of the physical structure and behavior of the state in question and its relations to other physical states. There is simply no place in such a description for the "aboutness which is essential to intentional states as such. And so we can pose a question parallel to he one asked previously: Are these causal-functional states such that they essentially involve "aboutness"? If the do not involve "aboutness" then they just are not intentional states--once again, the subject has been changed. If they do, then a crucial, and logically essential, aspect of those states has been left unexplained; we still have no idea how "aboutness" is to be incorporated into a materialist world-view.

Carrier on Intentionality

This is a redated post on Carrier on intentionality

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Carrier on The Argument from Intentionality
This is a version of part of the paper I presented in England. I am bumping it up to today to help understand some of the intentionality issues we have been discussing.

I. The Argument from Intentionality
The first of the arguments that I presented is the Argument from Intentionality. Physical states have physical characteristics, but how can it be a characteristic of, say, some physical state of my brain, that it is about dogs Boots and Frisky, or about my late Uncle Stanley, or even about the number 2. Can’t we describe my brain, and its activities, without having any clue as to what my thoughts are about?
To consider this question, let us give a more detailed account of what intentionality is. Angus Menuge offers the following definition:
1) The representations are about something
2) They characterize the thing in a certain way
3) What they are about need not exist
4) Where reference succeeds, the content may be false
5) The content defines an intensional context in which the substitution of equivalents typically fails
So, if I believe that Boots and Frisky are in the back yard, this belief has to be about those dogs, I must have some characterization of those dogs in mind that identifies them for me, my thoughts can be about them even if, unbeknownst to me, they have just died, my reference two those two dogs can succeed even if they have found their way into the house, and someone can believe that Boots and Frisky are in the back yard without believing that “the Repperts’ 13 year old beagle” and “the Repperts’ 8 year old mutt” are in the back yard.
It is important to draw a further distinction, a distinction between original intentionality, which is intrinsic to the person possessing the intentional state, and derived or borrowed intentionality, which is found in maps, words, or computers. Maps, for example, have the meaning that they have, not in themselves, but in relation to other things that possess original intentionality, such as human persons. There can be no question that physical systems possess derived intentionality. But if they possess derived intentionality in virtue of other things that may or may not be physical systems, this does not really solve the materialist’s problem.
The problem facing a physicalist account of intentionality is presented very forcefully by John Searle:
Any attempt to reduce intentionality to something nonmental will always fail because it leaves out intentionality. Suppose for example that you had a perfect causal account of the belief that water is wet. This account is given by stating the set of causal relations in which a system stands to water and to wetness and these relations are entirely specified without any mental component. The problem is obvious: a system could have all those relations and still not believe that water is wet. This is just an extension of the Chinese Room argument, but the moral it points to is general: You cannot reduce intentional content (or pains, or "qualia") to something else, because if you did they would be something else, and it is not something else." (Searle, Rediscovery p. 51).
Admittedly, this is merely an assertion of something that needs to be brought out with further analysis. It seems to me that intentionality, as I understand it, requires consciousness. There are systems that behave in ways such that, in order to predict their behavior, it behooves us to act as if they were intentional systems. If I am playing chess against a computer, and I am trying to figure out what to expect it to play, then I am probably going to look for the moves it think are good and expect the computer to play those. I act as if the computer were conscious, even though I know that it has no more consciousness than a tin can. Similarly, we can look at the bee dances and describe them in intentional terms; the motions the bees engage in enable the other bees to go where the pollen is, but it does not seem plausible to attribute a conscious awareness of what information is being sent in the course of the bee dance. We can look at the bees as if they were consciously giving one another information, but the intentionality as-if intentionality, not the kind of original intentionality we find in conscious agents. As Colin McGinn writes:

I doubt that the self-same kind of content possessed by a conscious perceptual experience, say, could be possessed independently of consciousness; such content seems essentially conscious, shot through with subjectivity. This is because of the Janus- faced character of conscious content: it involves presence to the subject, and hence a subjective point of view. Remove the inward-looking face and you remove something integral—what the world seems like to the subject.If we ask what the content of a word is, the content of that word must be the content for
some conscious agent; how that conscious agent understands the word. There may be other concepts of content, but those concepts, it seems to me, are parasitical on the concept of content that I use in referring to states of mind found in a conscious agent. Put another way, my paradigm for understanding these concepts is my life as a conscious agent. If we make these words refer to something that occurs without consciousness, it seems that we are using the by way of analogy with their use in connection with our conscious life.

The intentionality that I am immediately familiar with is my own intentional states. That's the only template, the only paradigm I have. I wouldn't say that animals are not conscious, and if I found good evidence that animals could reason it would not undermine my argument, since I've never been a materialist about animals to begin with. Creatures other than myself could have intentional states, and no doubt do have them, if the evidence suggests that what it is like to be in the intentional state they are in is similar to what it is like to be in the intentional state that I am in.

In reading Carrier’s critique of my book we find, in his response to the argument from intentionality, terms being used that make sense to me from the point of view of my life as a conscious subject, but I am not at all sure what to make of them when we start thinking of them as elements in the life of something that is not conscious. His main definition of “aboutness” is this:
Cognitive science has established that the brain is a computer that constructs and runs virtual models. All conscious states of mind consist of or connect with one or more virtual models. The relation these virtual models have to the world is that of corresponding or not corresponding to actual systems in the world. Intentionality is an assignment (verbal or attentional) of a relation between the virtual models and the (hypothesized) real systems. Assignment of relation is a decision (conscious or not), and such decisions, as well as virtual models and actual systems, and patterns of correspondence between them, all can and do exist on naturalism, yet these four things are all that are needed for Proposition 1 to be true.
Or consider the following:
Returning to my earlier definition of aboutness, as long as we can know that "element A of model B is hypothesized to correspond to real item C in the universe" we have intentionality, we have a thought that is about a thing.
Or
Because the verbal link that alone completely establishes aboutness--the fact of being "hypothesized"--is something that many purely mechanical computers do.
Or again
Language is a tool--it is a convention invented by humans. Reality does not tell us what a word means. We decide what aspects of reality a word will refer to. Emphasis here: we decide. We create the meaning for words however we want. The universe has nothing to do with it--except in the trivial sense that we (as computational machines) are a part of the universe.
Now simply consider the words, hypothesize and decide that he uses in these passages. I think I know what it means to decide something as a conscious agent. I am aware of choice 1 and choice 2, I deliberate about it, and then consciously choose 1 as opposed to 2, or vice versa. All of this requires that I be a conscious agent who knows what my thoughts are about. That is why I have been rather puzzled by Carrier’s explaining intentionality in terms like these; such terms mean something to me only if we know what our thoughts are about. The same thing goes for hypothesizing. I can form a hypothesis (such as, all the houses in this subdivision were built by the same builder) just in case I know what the terms of the hypothesis mean, in other words, only if I already possess intentionality. That is what these terms mean to me, and unless I’m really confused, this is what those terms mean to most people.
Again, we have to take a look at the idea of a model. What is a model? A model is something that is supposed to resemble something else. But if we explain “X is about Y” at least partially in terms of “X is a model for Y,” I really don’t think we’ve gotten anywhere. How can X be a model for Y if it isn’t about Y in the first place.

Nevertheless we may be able to work though the critique and find how he proposes to naturalize the concepts.
Material state A is about material state B just in case “this system contains a pattern corresponding to a pattern in that system, in such a way that computations performed on this system are believed to match and predict behavior in that system.”
In correspondence with me Carrier said this:
As I explain in my critique, science already has a good explanation on hand for attentionality (how our brain focuses attention on one object over others). Combine that with a belief (a sensation of motivational confidence) that the object B that we have our attention on will behave as our model A predicts it will, and we have every element of intentionality.
But I am afraid I don’t see that this naturalization works. My objection to this is that in order for confidence to play the role it needs to play in Carrier's account of intentionality that confidence has to be a confidence that I have an accurate map, but confidence that P is true is a propositional attitude, which presupposes intentionality. In other words, Carrier is trying to bake an intentional cake with physical yeast and flour. But when the ingredients are examined closely, we find that some intentional ingredients have been smuggled in through the back door.

Here is another illustration:
The fact that one thought is about another thought (or thing) reduces to this (summarizing what I have argued several times above already): (a) there is a physical pattern in our brain of synaptic connections physically binding together every datum about the object of thought (let's say, Madell's "Uncle George"), (b) including a whole array of sensory memories, desires, emotions, other thoughts, and so on, (c) which our brain has calculated (by various computational strategies) are relevant to (they describe or relate to) that object (Uncle George), (d) which of course means a hypothesized object (we will never really know directly that there even is an Uncle George: we only hypothesize his existence based on an analysis, conscious and subconscious, of a large array of data), and (e) when our cerebral cortex detects this physical pattern as obtaining between two pieces of data (like the synaptic region that identifies Uncle George's face and that which generates our evidentially-based hypothesis that the entity with that face lives down the street), we "feel" the connection as an "aboutness" (just as when certain photons hit our eyes and electrical signals are sent to our brain we "feel" the impact as a "greenness").
Now did you notice the word “about” in step A of Carrier’s account of intentionality? If there is something in the brain that binds together everything about Uncle George, and that is supposed to explain how my thought can be about Uncle George, then it seems pretty clear to me that we are explaining intentionality in terms of intentionality.

What I think the deepest problem is in assigning intentionality to physical systems is that when we do that norms of rationality are applied when we determine what intentional states exist, but normative truths are not entailed by physical facts. In the realm of ethics, add up all the physical, chemical, biological, psychological, and sociological facts about a murder for hire, and nothing in that description will entail that it was a wrongful act. Similarly, scientific information about what is will not tell you what an agent ought to believe, but we need to know what an agent ought to believe in order to figure out what he or she does believe. According to Searle, for example, intentionality cannot be found in natural selection, because “intentional standards are inherently normative,” but “there is nothing normative about Darwinian evolution.” So any attempt to naturalize intentionality will end up bringing intentionality in through the back door, just as Carrier’s account does. When you encounter a new or unfamiliar attempt to account for intentionality naturalistically, look it over very carefully, and you should be able to find our where the bodies are buried.
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posted by Victor Reppert @ 3:56 PM