Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge

Julia Tanney

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674071728
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Julia Tanney offers a sustained criticism of today's canon in philosophy of mind, which conceives the workings of the rational mind as the outcome of causal interactions between mental states that have their bases in the brain. With its roots in physicalism and functionalism, this widely accepted view provides the philosophical foundation for the cardinal tenet of the cognitive sciences: that cognition is a form of information-processing. Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge presents a challenge not only to the cognitivist approach that has dominated philosophy and the special sciences for the last fifty years but, more broadly, to metaphysical-empirical approaches to the study of the mind.Responding to a tradition that owes much to the writings of Davidson, early Putnam, and Fodor, Tanney challenges this orthodoxy on its own terms. In untangling its internal inadequacies, starting with the paradoxes of irrationality, she arrives at a view these philosophers were keen to rebut—one with affinities to the work of Ryle and Wittgenstein and all but invisible to those working on the cutting edge of analytic philosophy and mind research today. This is the view that rational explanations are embedded in "thick" descriptions that are themselves sophistications upon ever ascending levels of discourse, or socio-linguistic practices.Tanney argues that conceptual cartography rather than metaphysical-scientific explanation is the basic tool for understanding the nature of the mind. Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge clears the path for a return to the world-involving, circumstance-dependent, normative practices where the rational mind has its home.

PART THREE

Philosophical Elucidation and Cognitive Science

CHAPTER NINE

How to Resist Mental Representations

1. Tim Crane’s The Mechanical Mind is a very readable, introductory book that weaves together various threads of contemporary discussions on mental representation to present a systematic and up-to-date defense of the view that mental states are physically realized, representational states that causally interact to produce other mental states and behavior in accordance with natural, irreducible laws of psychology.¹ Since the early chapters are carefully written in a style that does not presuppose a philosophical background, the later, more difficult discussions of the arguments for and against various ways of naturalizing content should still be relatively accessible to the general reader who starts from the beginning. The book will thus serve as an introduction to the method of, as well as to one of the most important and hotly debated topics in, contemporary analytic philosophy. It will certainly serve as a useful course text for introducing undergraduates or postgraduates to the problem of mental representation and its place in contemporary philosophy of mind.

The view discussed here is not original, nor does it claim to be. The merit of this book is that it attempts to mount as strong a case as possible (keeping within the author’s aim to attract a nonspecialist audience) by canvassing a variety of familiar sources. The importance of the view cannot be ignored. The belief in physically realized, causally efficacious, content-bearing states has grown steadily and widely in the last twenty-five years, becoming the current orthodoxy in American philosophy of mind and psychology, and gaining wide acceptance in Britain. It has encouraged research programs in the “cognitive” branches of anthropology, biology, psychology, linguistics, and computer science, and has spawned the ubiquitous attempts of the last fifteen years of philosophy of mind to “naturalize content.” Since Crane’s aim in writing this book is to make this view accessible to the general reader and since he succeeds in delivering one of its simplest and clearest defenses, I think it will be worthwhile to describe the book in detail, and to remind the reader of a strategy for resisting its central claims.

2. The book begins by looking at the problem of representation in general. What it is for pictures, for example, to represent objects or states of affairs cannot be a matter of mere resemblance: even if resemblance were necessary it does not seem sufficient, since, say, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment itself does not determine whether Christ is passing judgment or extending his hand in a greeting. Interpretation seems to be needed for pictorial representation, as it seems to be when we ask what it is for words to represent objects or sentences to represent states of affairs. Interpretation is “something the mind bestows on words,” and thoughts are what make interpretation possible. So, since thoughts (and other mental states) are representational, too, it would seem that mental representation is more basic than other forms. Since the representational or intentional content of a mental state cannot itself be the result of interpretation (on pain of regress), it must be an example of intrinsic (as opposed to derived) intentionality. A propositional attitude is cashed out as a content-bearing state that may not be conscious. Thus the agenda is set for the rest of the book. A prima facie case has been made for the existence of mental representations, as content-bearing, possibly nonconscious states, which are necessary for an account of representation in general and hence whose own intentional or representational properties must be underived. The task now is to understand more about mental representation and how it functions.

The mind–body problem which would have forced us to choose between dualism and materialism (physicalism) is dismissed as irrelevant on the grounds that deciding whether or not the mind is fundamentally different from the physical does not answer the question how one bit of substance (material or immaterial) can represent another. In taking us through some of the other traditional problems in philosophy of mind, Crane uses the discussion of analytical behaviorism to introduce the idea that common-sense psychology is a theory consisting of principles, knowledge of which enables us to explain the behavior (and other mental states) of others.

The behaviorist idea that there is no internal state of the individual that accounts for the disposition to behave under certain circumstances and causes the relevant actions is rejected on the familiar grounds that such a view thwarts the possibility of a (scientific) explanation of the action. Davidson’s argument that reasons are causes is marshaled to lend further support to the idea that the mental states posited by commonsense psychology are causally efficacious and Churchland’s eliminativist arguments (which depend on the idea that common-sense psychology is a theory) are rejected. We are left with the idea that we find out about other minds by exploiting a theory of mind; we can find out about the nature of the mind by investigating the theory of mind employed. Crane hints that a plausible rendering of common-sense psychology is that it posits causally efficacious content-bearing states that enter into computational relations. It is the task of his next few chapters to discuss in detail what “computational” means in this context.

Before examining the next chapters, it would be worth noting how one might resist even some of these preliminary steps. One may agree that a recalcitrant interpretation might always defeat any candidate (set of) sufficient condition(s) for a sign to represent something without agreeing that interpretation itself is a necessary part of such an account. Thus, the move that forced us to think of mental representations as a necessary component in an account of, and hence more basic than, public representations would be blocked. One may agree, in addition, that we ascribe propositional attitudes in order to make sense of one another: for example, we ascribe them to categorize (rationalize) certain patterns in a person’s linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior, taking into account his relations to the social and physical environment. Note that propositional attitudes are often legitimately ascribable even on the assumption that there is no particular interior process occurring (or any particular interior state which obtains), a fortiori, one to which the ascriptions allegedly refer or in which the properties ascribed are realized. To be sure, there are “mental acts” (to use Geach’s term) in which there is some particular internal occurrence (when a person is struck by a thought, talking to himself, or having mental images), but it is clear that this sort of phenomenon cannot carry the explanatory burden that is intended for mental representations in general. In particular, it could explain neither action nor a subsequent grasp of a language. This brief sketch needs filling out, but it provides an indication, at least, of how someone might begin to resist the idea that ascriptions of propositional attitudes function to pick out internal states of the individual, and that when “mental acts” do occur, they can provide the explanatory power required of mental representations.

3. The third chapter introduces the reader to simple computational devices to illustrate an example of a causal mechanism that “processes” or “computes” representations in a systematic way. The difference between instantiating and computing a function is discussed, and it is argued that the latter is needed if we are to understand the idea that minds are partly computers; only if the mind is a system that performs computations on mental representations will we be able to distinguish the idea that minds are computers from the weaker view that a theory of mind may be modeled on a computer. This distinction is crucial, since only the stronger would require us to posit causally efficacious, content-bearing mental states over which computations are performed. Crane goes on to consider whether machines can think and considers Dreyfus’s objection that thinking requires know-how and cannot simply consist in rule-governed symbol manipulation; knowhow requires the ability to form judgments about relevance. If such judgments were construed as higher-order rules, then it is unclear how it could be decided which of them were relevant to the case at hand without positing even higher-order rules, ad infinitum. Searle’s Chinese Room argument is sympathetically considered and Crane admits that it is unlikely that something can think merely by manipulating symbols: a thinker has to be responsive to the meaning of the symbols and not just their shape. According to Crane, however, this does not tell against the idea that minds think partly by manipulating symbols, or by processing mental representations, and he points to familiar patterns of systematicity, consistency, and rationality in our thought processes as prima facie candidates for rule-governed processes. This leads to the suggestion that some representational states of mind (in particular propositional attitudes) are related to one another in the way that representational states of a computer are related: they are processed by means of algorithmic, or sometimes heuristic, rules. Set against a careful and sympathetic discussion of Fodor’s Language of Thought (LOT) hypothesis, the computer analogy is invoked to do double work. First, it allows us to explain how mental representations (sentences of Mentalese) might be physically realized in the neuronal structure of the brain (as an English sentence might be stored in a computer). Second, it allows us to see how a brain might perform computational operations by mirroring the syntactic properties of sentences/thoughts so that semantically interpretable properties (like truth-preservation) will obtain in virtue of these causal structures (just as the computer processes symbols in accordance with their syntactic properties).

But the admission that manipulating symbols is not sufficient for thinking is more damaging than might be supposed. The argument that minds process mental representations is an argument that is based on the analogy with computers. We have an idea of what a mind’s processing mental representations would involve, so the argument goes, because we know what it is for a computer to process representations. But it turns out that processing representations (construed as “mere” symbol manipulation) is not sufficient for thinking. To reject the analogy on the grounds that computers do not contain real representations would be, to quote Dennett, “[to discard] one of the most promising conceptual advances ever to fall into philosophers’ hands.”² To take the analogy seriously, however, would seem to lead to an embarrassing result: if the mind processes representations in the same way that a computer does, and if a computer’s processes are not sufficient for thinking, then neither are the mind’s. But it was the systematicity, consistency, and rational patterns displayed in thinking that led us to suppose that the operations over mental representations are rule-governed.

One response to this embarrassment (the one Crane opts for) is that something else is required for thinking, which partly consists in symbol manipulation. Presumably, the “something else” required is that the thinker be responsive to the meaning of the symbols and not just their shape. But now there is a danger that “being responsive to meaning” requires interpretation, and this is not allowed since mental representations were introduced (in part) to explain interpretation. Crane himself concedes that the supposed “interpretability” of the formal properties of mental representations gives rise to the “homunculus” fallacy: although we can make sense of the interpretability of a computer’s representations by supposing that a programmer, say, is there to do the interpreting, we cannot suppose this to be the case for Mentalese. So, if we were to stick to the analogy with computers, we would have to posit homunculi to do the interpreting, which would lead to a vicious regress.

Crane agrees with Searle in rejecting Dennett’s proposal for avoiding the regress problem (the proposal is to suppose that the homunculi posited become stupider and stupider until they finally drop out of the picture) on the grounds that even at the basic “switch” level, the position of the switches is semantically interpretable and would still depend on a programmer or designer to do the interpreting. Instead, setting up the discussion for the final chapter of the book, Crane suggests that the way to solve the problem is to say that mental representations get their meaning in a different way from other representations (i.e., they are not interpreted and thus not subject to the homunculus fallacy). The problem with this move, however (which Crane mentions but does not develop), is that as long as one is willing to admit that there are certain alleged representations (viz., the sentences of Mentalese) that get their meaning in a way that does not involve interpretation, why not just say the same about public-language sentences or signs? If we were able to say the same about public representations, this would at least liberate the investigation of thought and propositional attitude ascription from the requirement that the representational power of the mind must be explanatorily basic.

4. Before leaving the Language of Thought hypothesis, Crane considers Searle’s objection from “rule-following,” which is credited to Quine’s criticism of Chomsky. The argument is that the LOT hypothesis is committed to saying that our tacit knowledge of the rules of Mentalese and our (tacit) following of these rules is supposed to explain the systematicity and overall rationality of our thought and reasoning processes.

Quine’s criticism is that with the introduction of tacit knowledge, it is difficult to see how one can make sense of the difference between genuinely following rules and merely acting in accordance with them. If merely acting in accordance with them were sufficient for thinking (or for language use), then there would be no reason to suppose that the rules are represented within the system at all, and the Mentalese (or innate grammar) hypothesis would collapse. Saying that the rules governing the operations of Mentalese are represented raises the specter of regress in two different ways. First, it suffers from the “homunculus” problem discussed above, which is that the very concept of representation seems to require that there be someone external to the system of representations (an “exempt agent”) who uses or interprets it. This is a feature of representation in general and is simply inherited by the demand that the rules that govern the operations over (first-order) representations are also represented. The second regress arises because the contents of the representations now under consideration are supposed to consist in the alleged rules governing computations over lower-level representations. This is a problem, because if we require the existence of rules to govern the computational relations between representations, and if we suppose that these rules are themselves represented, then we shall presumably need higher-order rules to tell us how these rules-qua-representations are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Rules and Normativity
• II. Reason-Explanation and Mental Causation
• III. Philosophical Elucidation and Cognitive Science
• IV. Self-Knowledge
• Acknowledgments
• Provenance of Essays
• Index