Consider upon the appearances expressed by ‘I seem to see something red, round, and spherical’ and ‘I seem to taste something sweet and slightly tart’. To infer cogently from these propositions to that expressed by ‘There is an apple before me’ we need additional information, such as that expressed by ‘Apples generally cause visual appearance of redness, roundness, and spherical shape and gustatory appearance of sweetness and tartness’. With this additional information., the inference is a good on e, and it is likely to be true that there is an apple there relative to those premiered. The cogency of the inference, however, depends squarely on the additional premise, relative only to the stated inferrability placed upon appearances, it is not highly probable that thee is an apple there.
Moreover, there is good reason to think that analytic phenomenalism is false. For each proposed translation of an object and eventfully external world into the inferrable propositions about appearances. Mainly enumerative induction is of no help in this regard, for that is an inference from premisses about observed objects in a certain set-class having some properties ‘F’ and ‘G’ to unobserved objects in the same set-class having properties ‘F’ and ‘G’, to unobserved objects in the same set-class properties ‘F’ and ‘G’. If satisfactory, then we have knowledge of the external world if propositions are inferrable from propositions about appearances, however, concerned considerations drawn upon appearances while objects and or events of the external world concern for externalities of objects and interactive categories in events, are. So, the most likely inductive inference to consider is a causal one: We infer from certain effects, described by promotional appearances to their likely causes, described by external objects and or event that profited emanation in the concerning propositional state in that they occur. But, here, too, the inference is apt to prove problematic. But in evaluating the claim that inference constitutes a legitimate and independent argument from, one must explore the question of whether it is a contingent fact that, at least, most phenomena have explanations and that be so, that a given criterion, simplicity, were usually the correct explanation, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if this is true it would be an empirical fact about our selves in discovery of an reference to the best explanation.
Defenders of direct realism have sometimes appealed to an inference to the best explanation to justify prepositions about objects and or events in the external world, we might say that the best explanation of the appearances is that they are caused by external objects. However, even if this is true, as no doubt it is, it is unclear how establishing this general hypophysis helps justify specific ordination upon the proposition about objects and or event in the external world, such as that these particular appearances of a proposition whose inferrable properties about appearances caused by the red apple.
The point here is a general one: Cogent inductive inference from the inferrable proposition about appearances to propositions about objects and or events in the external world are available only with some added premiss expressing the requisite causal relation, or perhaps some other premiss describing some other sort of correlation between appearances and external objects. So there is no reason to think that indirect knowledge secured if the prepositions about its outstanding objectivity from realistic appearances, if so, epistemological direct realism must be denied. And since deductive and inductive inferences from appearance to objects and or events in the external world are propositions which seem to exhaust the options, no solution to its argument that sustains us of having knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based on or upon propositions which describe the external world as it appears at which point that is at hand. So unless there is some solution to this, it would appear that scepticism concerning knowledge of the external world would be the most reasonable position to take
If the argument leading to some additional premise as might conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects if is directly and based on or upon the immediate knowledge of sensa, such that having knowledge of propositions about objects and or events in the external world based on or upon propositions about directly perceived sensa? Broadly speaking, there are two alternatives to both the perceptual indirect realism, and, of course, perceptual phenomenalism. In contrast to indirect t realism, and perceptual phenomenalism is that perceptual phenomenalism rejects realism outright and holds instead that (1) physical objects are collections of sensa, (2) in all cases of perception, at least one sensa is directly perceived, and, (3) to perceive a physical object one directly perceives some of the sensa which are constituents of the collection making up that object.
Proponents of each of these position try to solve the conditions not engendered to the species of additional persons ever of directly perceiving an external physical object, then no person ever gains immediate non-referential knowledge of such objects in different ways, in fact, if any the better able to solve this additional premise, that we would conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects than related doctrines for which time are aforementioned. The answer has seemed to most philosophers to be ‘no’, for in general indirect realists and phenomenalists have strategies we have already considered and rejected.
In thinking about the possibilities of such that we need to bear in mind that the term for propositions which describe presently directly perceived sensa. Indirect realism typically claim that the inference from its presently directly perceived sensa to an inductive one, specifically a causal inference from effects of causes. Inference of such a sort will perfectly cogent provides we can use a premiss which specifies that physical objects of a certain type are causally correlated with sensa of the sort currently directly perceived. Such a premiss will itself be justified, if at all, solely on the basis of propositions described presently directly perceived sensa. Certainly for the indirect realist one never directly perceives the causes of sensa. So, if one knows that, say, apples topically cause such-and-such visual sensa, one knows this only indirectly on the basis of knowledge of sensa. But no group of propositionally perceived sensa by itself supports any inferences to causal correlations of this sort. Consequently, indirect realists are in no p position to solve such categorically added premises for which knowledge is armed with additional premise, as containing of external objects , it is indirect and based on or upon immediate knowledge of sensa. The consequent solution of these that are by showing that propositions would be inductive and causal inference from effects of causes and show inductively how derivable for propositions which describe presently perceived sensa.
Phenomenalists have often supported their position, in part, by noting the difficulties facing indirect t realism, but phenomenalism is no better off with respect to inferrable prepositions about objects and events responsible for unspecific appearances. Phenomenalism construe physical objects as collections of sensa. So, to infer an inference from effects to causes is to infer a proposition about a collection from propositions about constituent members of the collective one, although not a causal one. Nonetheless, namely the inference in question will require a premise that such-and-such directly perceived sensa are constituents of some collection ‘C’, where ‘C’ is some physical object such as an apple. The problem comes with trying to justify such a premise. To do this, one will need some plausible account of what is mean t by claiming that physical objects are collections of sensa. To explicate this idea, however, phenomenalists have typically turned to analytical phenomenalism: Physical objects are collections of sensa in the sense that propositions about physical objects are analysable into propositions about sensa. And analytical phenomenalism we have seen, has been discredited.
If neither propositions about appearances or propositions accorded of the external world can be easily solved, then scepticism about external world is a doctrine we would be forced to adopt. One might even say that it is here that we locate the real problem of the external world. ‘How can we avoid being forced into accepting scepticism’?
In avoiding scepticism, is to question the arguments which lead to both propositional inferences about the external world an appearances. The crucial question is whether any part of the argument from illusion really forces us to abandon the incorporate perceptual direct realism. To help see that the answer is ‘no’ we may note that a key premise in the relativity argument links how something appears with direct perception: The fact that the dish appears elliptical is supposed to entail that one directly perceives something which is elliptical. But is there an entailment present? Certainly we do not think that the proposition expressed by ‘The book appears worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old’ entails that the observer directly perceives something which is worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old. And there are countless other examples like this one, where we will resist the inference from a property ‘F’ appearing to someone to claim that ‘F’ is instantiated in some entity.
Proponents of the argument from illusion might complain that the inference they favour works only for certain adjectives, specifically for adjectives referring to non-relational sensible qualities such as colour, taste, shape, and the like. Such a move, however, requires an arrangement which shows why the inference works in these restricted cases and fails in all others. No such argument has ever been provided, and it is difficult to see what it might be.
If the argument from illusion is defused, the major threat facing a knowledge of objects and or events in the external world primarily by perceiving them. Also, its theory is realist in addition that objects and events in the external world are typically directly perceived as are many of their characteristic features. Hence, there will no longer be any real motivation for it would appear that scepticism concerning knowledge of the external world would be the most reasonable position to take. Of course, even if perceptual directly realism is reinstated, this does not solve, by any means, the main reason for which that knowledge of objects in the external world seem to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-reference, along with many of their various features, exist independently of and are generally unaffected by perceivers and acts of perception in which they engage. That problem might arise even for one who accepts perceptual direct realism. But, there is reason to be suspicious in keeping with the argument that one would not know that one is seeing something blue if one failed to know that something looked blue. In this sense, there is a dependance of the former on the latter, what is not clear is whether the dependence is epistemic or semantic. It is the latter if, in order to understand what it is to see something blue, one must also understand what it is fort something to look blue. This may be true, even when the belief that one is seeing something blue is not epistemically dependent on or based upon the belief that something looks blue. Merely claiming, that there is a dependent relation does not discriminate between epistemic and semantic dependence. Moreover, there is reason to think it is not an epistemic dependence. For in general, observers rarely have beliefs about how objects appar, but this fact doe not impugn their knowledge that they are seeing, e.g., blue objects.
Along with ‘consciousness’, experience is the central focus of the philosophy of mind. Experience is easily thought of as a stream of private events, known only to their possessor, and baring at best problematic relationship to any other events, such as happening in an external world or similar stream of either possessors. The stream makes up the conscious life of the possessor. The stream makes up the conscious life of the possessor. With this picture there is a complete separation of mind and world, and in spite of great philosophical effort the gap, once opened, proves impossible to bridge both ‘idealism’ and ‘scepticism’ are common outcomes. The aim of much recent philosophy, therefore, is to articulate a less problematic conception of experience, making it objectively accessible, so that the facts about how a subject experiences the world are in principle as knowable as the facts about how the same subject digests food. A beginning on this task may be made by observing that experience have contents: ‘Content’ has become a technical term in philosophy for whatever it is a representation has that makes it semantically evaluable. Thus, a statement is something said to have a proposition or truth condition as its content: A term is sometimes said to have a concept as its content. Much less is known about how to characterize the contents of non-linguistic representations than is known about characterizing linguistic representations. ‘Content’ is a useful term precisely because it allows one to abstract away from questions about what semantic properties representations have, a representation’s content is just whatever it is that underwrites its semantic evaluation.
A great deal of philosophical effort has been lavished on the attempt to naturalize content, e.g., to explain in non-semantic, non-intentional terms what it is for something to be representation (have ‘content’), and what it is for something to gave some particular content than some other. There appear to be only our types of theory that have been proposed: Theories that ground representation in (1) similarity, (2) covariance (3) functional role, and (teleology.
Similarity theories hold that ‘r’ represents ‘χ’ in virtue of being similar to ‘χ’. This has seemed hopeless to most as a theory of mental representation because it appears to require that things in the brain must share properties with the thingos they represent: To represent a cat as furry appears to require something furry in the brain. Perhaps, a notion of similarity that is naturalized and does not involve property sharing can be worked out, but it is not obvious how.
Covariance theories hold that r’s representing ‘χ’ is grounded in the fact that r’s occurrence covaries with that of ‘χ’. This is most compelling when one thinks about detection systems: The firing of neural structure in the visual system is said to represent vertical orientations if its firing covaries with the occurrence of vertical lines in the visual field. Dretske (1981) and Fodor (1987) have, in different ways, attempted to promote this idea into a general theory of content.
Teleological theories hold that ‘r’ represents ’χ’ if it is r’s function to indicate (i.e., covary with) ‘χ’. Teleological theories differ depending on the theory of functions they import. Perhaps, the most important distinction is that between historical theories and functions, as historical theories individuate functional states, hence content, in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of the state, i.e., to factors such as the way the state was ‘learned’, or the way it evolved. An historical theory might hold that the function of ‘r’ is to indicate ‘χ’ only if the capacity to token ‘r’ was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates ‘χ’. Thus, a state physically indistinguishable from ‘r’ (physical stares being a-historical) but lacking r’s historical origins would not represent ‘χ’ according to historical theories.
Theories of representational content may be classified according to whether they are atomistic or holistic and according to whether they are externalistic or internalistic. Primarily, the alternative was for something expressed or implied by the intendment for integrating the different use of the terms ‘internalism’ and ‘externalisms’ has to do with the issue of how the content of beliefs and thoughts is determined: According to an internalist view of content, the content of such intentional states depend’s only on the non-relational, internal properties of the individual’s mind or brain, and not at all on his physical and social environment. While according to an externalist view, content is significantly affected by such external factors.
As with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist in character. The main argument for externalisms derives from the philosophy of language, more specifically from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexical, etc., that motivate the views that have come to be known as ‘direct reference’ theories. Such phenomena seem, at least, to show that the belief of thought content that can be properly attributed to a person is dependent on facts about his environment ~ e.g., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what in fact he is pointing at, the classificatorial criteria employed by the experts in his social group etc. ~ not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain.
An objection to externalist accounts of content is that to know the contents of our beliefs or thoughts ‘from the inside’, simply by reflection. If content is dependent on external factors, then knowledge of content should depend on knowledge of these factors ~ which will not in general be available to the person whose belief or thought is in question.
The adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem to support an externalist way: If part or all of justification in which if only part of the content of a belief is inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to that content and the status of the content as justifying further beliefs will be similarly inaccessible, thus contravening the internalist requirement for justification. An internalist must insist that there are no justification relations of these sorts, that only internally accessible content can either be justified or justly anything else, but such a response appears lame unless it is coupled with an attempt to show that the externalist account of content is mistaken.
Atomistic theories take a representation’s content to be something that representation’s relation to other representations. What Fodor (1987) calls the crude causal theory, for example, takes a representation to be a
cow
~ a mental representation with the same content as the word ‘cow’ ~ if its tokens are caused by instantiations of the property of being-a-cow, and this is a condition that places no explicit constraints on how
cow
’s must or might relate to other representations. Holistic theories contrast with atomistic theories in taking the relations a representation bears to others to be essential to its content. According to functional role theories, a representation is a
cow
if it behaves like a
cow
behave in inference.
Internalist theories take the content of a representation to be a matter determined by factors internal to the system that uses it. Thus, what Block (1986) calls ‘short-armed’ functional role theories are internalist. Externalist theories take the content of a representation to be determined, in part at least, by factors external to the system that uses it. Covariance theories, as well as teleological theories that invoker an historical theory of functions, take content to be determined by ‘external’ factors. Externalist theories (sometimes called non-individualistic theories, following Burge, 1979) have the consequence that molecule for molecule identical cognitive systems might yet harbor representations with different contents. This has given rise to a controversy concerning ‘narrow’ content. If we assume some form of externalist theory is correct, then contents is, in the first instance ‘wide’ content, i.e., determined in part by factors external to the representing system. On the other hand, it seems clear that, on plausible assumptions about how to individuate psychological capacities, internally equivalent systems must have the same psychological capacities. Hence, it would appear that wide content cannot be relevant to characterizing psychological equivalence, philosophers attached to externalist theories of content have sometimes attempted to introduce ‘narrow’ content, i.e., an aspect or kind of content that is equivalent in internally equivalent systems. The simplest such theory is Fodor’s idea (1987) that narrow content is a function from contexts (i.e., from whatever the external factors are) to wide contents.
The actions made rational by content-involving states are actions individuated in part by reference to the agent’s relations to things and properties in his environment, wanting to see a particular movie and believing that building over there is a cinema showing it makes rational the action of walking in the direction of that building. Similarly, for the fundamental case of a subject who has knowledge about his environment, a crucial factor in masking rational the formation of particular attitudes is the way the world is around him. One may expect, then, that any theory that links the attributing of contents to states with rational intelligibility will be committed to the thesis that the content of a person’s states depends in part upon his relations to the world outside him we can call this thesis of externalism about content.
Externalism about content should steer a middle course. On the one hand, the relations of rational intelligibility involve not just things and properties in the world, but the way they are presented as being ~ an externalist should use some version of Frége’s notion of a mode of presentation. Moreover, many have argued that there exists its ‘sense’, or ‘mode of presentation’ (something ‘intention’ is used as well). After all, ‘is an equiangular triangle’ and,‘is an equilateral triangle’ pick out the same things not only in the actual world, but in all possible worlds, and so refer ~ insofar as to the same extension, same intension and (arguably from a causal point of view) the same property, but they differ in the way these referents are presented to the mind. On the other hand, the externalist for whom considerations of rational intelligibility are pertinent to the individuation =of content is likely to insist that we cannot dispense with the notion of something in the world ~ an object, property or relation ~ being presented in a certain way, if we dispense with the notion of something external being presented in a certain way, we are in danger of regarding attributions of content as having no consequences for how an individual relates to his environment, in a way that is quite contrary to our intuitive understanding of rational intelligibility.
Externalism comes in more and less extreme versions: Consider a thinker who sees a particular pear, and thinks a thought ‘that pear is ripe’, where the demonstrative way of thinking of the pear expressed by ‘that pear’ is made available to him by his perceiving the pear. Some philosophers, including Evans (1982) and McDowell (1984), have held that the thinker would be employing a different perceptually based way of thinking were he perceiving a different pear. But externalism need not be committed to this, in the perceptual state that makes available the way of thinking, the pear is presented as being in a particular direction from the thinker, at a particular distance, and as having certain properties. A position will still be externalist if it holds that what is involved in the pear’s being so presented is the collective role of these components of content in making intelligible in various circumstances the subject’s relations to environmental directions, distances and properties of objects. This can be held without commitment to the object-dependence of the way of thinking expressed by ‘that pear’. This less strenuous form of externalism must, though, addressed the epistemological argument offered in favour of the more extreme versions, to the effect that only they are sufficiently world-involving.
Externalism about content is a claim about dependence, and dependence comes in various kinds. The apparent dependence of the content of beliefs on factors external to the subject can be formulated as a failure of supervenience of belief content upon facts about what is the case within the boundaries of the subject’s body. In epistemology normative properties such as those of justification and reasonableness are often held to be supervening on the class of natural properties in a similar way. The interest of supervenience is that it promises a way of trying normative properties closely to natural ones without exactly reducing them to natural ones: It can be the basis of a sort of weak naturalism. This was the motivation behind Davidson’s (1917-2003) attempt to say that mental properties supervene into physical ones ~ an attempt which ran into severe difficulties. To claim that such supervenience fails is to make a modal claim: That there can be two persons the same in respect of their internal physical states (and so in respect to those of their disposition that are independent of content-involving states), who nevertheless differ in respect of which beliefs there have. Putnam’s (1926- ) celebrated example of a community of Twin Earth , where the water-like substance in lakes and rain is not H2O, but some different chemical compound XYZ ~ ‘water’ ~ illustrates such failure of supervenience. A molecule-for-molecule replica of you on twin earth has beliefs to the effect that ‘water’ is thus-and-so. Those with no chemical beliefs on twin earth may well not have any beliefs to the effect that water is thus-and-so, even if they are replicas of persons on earth who do have such beliefs. Burge emphasized that this phenomenon extends far beyond beliefs about natural kinds.
In the case of content-involving perceptual states, it is a much more delicate matter to argue for the failure of supervenience, the fundamental reason for this is that attribution of perceptual content is answerable not only to factors on the input side ~ what in certain fundamental cases causes the subject to be in the perceptual state ~ but also to factors on the output side ~ what the perceptual state is capable of helping to explain amongst the subject’s actions. If differences in perceptual content always involve differences in bodily described actions in suitable counterfactual circumstances, and if these different actions always have distinct neural bases, perhaps, there will after all be supervenience of content-involving perceptual states on internal states
This connects with another strand in the abstractive imagination, least of mention, of any thinker who has an idea of an objective spatial world ~ an idea of a world of objects and phenomena which can be perceived but which are not dependent upon being perceived for their existence ~ must be able to think of his perception of the world as being simultaneously due to his position in the world, and to the condition of the world at that position. The very idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world brings with it the idea of the subject as being in the world, with the course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. That also, of perception it is highly relevant to his psychological self-awareness to have of oneself as a perceiver of the environment.
However, one idea that has in recent times been thought by many philosophers and psychologists alike to offer promise in the connection is the idea that perception can be thought of as a species of information-processing, in which the stimulation of the sense-organs constitutes an input to subsequent processing, presumably of a computational form. The psychologist J.J. Gibson suggested that the senses should be construed as systems the function of which is to derive information from the stimulus-array, as to ‘hunt for’ such information. He thought, least of mention, that it was enough for a satisfactory psychological theory of perception that his logical theory of perception that his account should be restricted to the details of such information pick-up, without reference to other ‘inner’ processes such as concept-use. Although Gibson has been very influential in turning psychology away from the previously dominant sensation-based framework of ideas (of which gestalt psychology was really a special case), his claim that reliance on such a notion of information is enough has seemed incredible to many. Moreover, its notion of ordinary one to warrant the accusation that it presupposes the very idea of, for example, concept-possession and belief that implicates the claim to exclude. The idea of information espoused bu Gibson (though it has to be said that this claim has been disputed) is that of ‘information about’, not the technical one involved in information theory or that presupposed by the theory of computation.
There are nevertheless important links between these diverse uses, however, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception and can never observe anything but the perception. However, the idea is that specifying the content of as perceptual experience involves saying what ways of filling out a space around the origin with surfaces, solids, textures, light and so forth, are consistent with the correctness or veridicality of the experience. Such contents are not built from propositions, concepts, senses or continuants of material objects.
Where the term ‘content’ was once associated with the phrase ‘content of consciousness’ to pick out the subjective aspects of mental states, its use in the phrase ‘perceptual content’ is intended to pick out something more closely akin to its old ‘form’ the objective and publicly expressible aspects of mental states. The content of perceptual experience is how the world is represented to be. Perceptual experiences are then counted as illusory or veridical depending on whether the content is correct and the world is as represented. In as much as such a theory of perception can be taken to be answering the more traditional problems of perception. What relation is there between the content of a perceptual state and conscious experience? One proponent of an intentional approach to perception notoriously claims that it is ‘nothing but the acquiring of true or false beliefs concerning the current state of the organism’s body or environment, but the complaint remains that we cannot give an adequate account of conscious perception, given the ‘nothing but’ element of this account. However, an intentional theory of perception need not be allied with any general theory of ‘consciousness’, one which explains what the difference is between conscious and unconscious states. If it is to provide an alternative to a sense-data theory, the theory need only claim that where experience is conscious. Its content is constitutive, at least in part, of the phenomenological character of that experience. This claim is consistent with a wide variety of theories of consciousness, even the view that no account can be given.
An intentional theory is also consistent with either affirming or denying the presence of subjective features in experience. Among traditional sense-data theorists of experience. H.H. Price attributed in addition an intentional content to perceptual consciousness. Whereby, attributive subjective properties to experience ~ in which case, labelled sensational properties, in the qualia ~ as well as intentional content. One might call a theory of perception that insisted that all features of what an experience is like ae determined by its intentional content, a purely intentional theory of perception.
Mental events, states or processes with content include seeing the door is shut, believing you are being followed and calculating the square root of 2. What centrally distinguishes states, events or processes ~ henceforth, simply stares ~ with content is that they involve reference to objects, properties or relations. A mental state exists a specific condition for a state with content a specific condition for a state with content to refer to certain things. When the state has correctness or fulfilment by whether its referents have the properties the content specifies for them.
This highly generic characteristic of content permits many subdivisions. It does not in itself restrict contents to conceptualized content, and it permits contents built from Frége’s sense as well as Russellian contents built from objects and properties. It leaves open the possibility that unconscious states, as well as conscious states, have contents. It equally, allows the states identified by an empirical computational psychology to have content. A correct philosophical understanding of this general notion of content is fundamental not only to the philosophy of mind and psychology, but also to the theory of knowledge and to metaphysics.
Perceptions make it rational for a person to form corresponding beliefs and make it rational to draw certain inferences. Belief s and desire s make rational the formation of particular intentions, and the performance o the appropriate actions. People are frequently irrational of course, but a governing ideal of this approach is that for any family of content, there is some minimal core of rational transition to or from states involving them, a core that a person must respect if his states are to be attributed with those contents of all rational interpretative relations. To be rational, a set of beliefs, desires, and actions as well s perceptions, decisions must fit together in various ways. If they do not, in the extreme case they fail to constitute a mind at all ~ no rationality, no agent. This core notion of rationality in philosophy f mind thus concerns a cluster of personal identity conditions, that is, holistic coherence requirements upon the system of elements comprising a person’s mind, it is as well as in philosophy where it is often succumbing to functionalism about content and meaning appears to lead to holism. In general, transitions among mental states and between mental states and behaviour depend on the contents of the mental states themselves. In consideration that I infer from sharks being in the water to the conclusion that people shouldn’t be swimming. Suppose I first think that sharks are dangerous, but then change my mind, coming to think that sharks are not dangerous. However, the content that the first belief affirms can’t be the same as the content that the second belief denies, because the transition relations, e.g., the inference form sharks being in the water to what people should do, so, I changed mt mind functionalist reply is to say that some transitions are relevant to content individuation, whereby others are not. Appeal to a traditional analytic clear/synthetic distinction clearly won’t do. For example, ‘dogs’ ‘and cats’ would have the same content on such a view. It could not be analytic that dogs bark or that cats meow, since we can imagine a non-barking breed of dog and a non-meaning breed of cat. If ‘Dogs are animals’ is analytic, as ‘Cats are animals’. If ‘Cats are adult puppies ‘. Dogs are not cats ~ but then cats are not dogs. So a functionalist’s account will not find traditional analytic inferences of ‘dogs’ from the meaning of ‘cat’. Other functionalist accept holism for ‘narrow content’, attempting to accommodate intuitions about the stability of content be appealing to wide content.
Within the clarity made of inference it is unusual to find it said that, an inference is a (perhaps very complex) act of thought by virtue of which act (1) I pass from a set of one or more propositions or statements to a proposition or statement and (2) it appears that the latter is true in the former is or are. This psychological characterization has occurred widely in the literature under more of less inessential variations.
It is natural to desire a better characterization of inference, but attempts to do so by construing a fuller psychological explanation fail to comprehend the grounds on which inference will be objectively valid ~ a point elaborated made by Gottlob Frége. And attempts to a better understand the nature about inference through the device of the representation of inference by formal-logical calculations to the informal inference they are supposed to represent or reconstruct, and (2) leaves us worried about the sense of such formal derivation. Are these derivations inferences? And aren’t informal inferences needed in order to apply the rules governing the constructions of forma derivation (inferring that this operation is an application of that formal rule)? These are concerns cultivated by, fr example, of Wittgenstein. That, insofar as coming up with a good and adequate characterization of inference ~ and even working out what would count as a good and adequate characterization ~ is a hard and by no means nearly solved philosophical problem.
It is still, of ascribing states with content to an actual person has to proceed simultaneously with attribution of a wide range of non-rational states and capacities. In general, we cannot understand a person’s reasons for acting as he does without knowing the array of emotions ans sensations to which he is subject: What he remembers and what he forgets, an how he reasons beyond the confines of minimal rationality. Even the content-involving perceptual states, which play a fundamental role in individuating content, cannot be understood purely in terms relating to minimal rationality. A perception of the world as being a certain way is not (and could not be) under a subject’s rational control. Though it is true and important that perceptions give for forming beliefs, the beliefs for which they fundamentally provide reason ~ observational beliefs about the environment ~ have contents which can only be elucidated by inferring which can only be elucidated by inferring back to perceptual experience. In this respect (as in others), perceptual states defer from those beliefs and desires that are individuated by mentioning what they provide reasons for judging or doing: For frequently these latter judgements and actions can be individuate without reference back to the states that provide reasons for them.
What is the significance for theories of content to the fact that it is almost certainly adaptive for members of a species to have a system of states with representational content which are capable of influencing their actions which are capable? According to teleological theories of content, a constitutive account of content ~ one which says what it is for a state to have a given content ~ must make use of the notions of natural function and teleology. The intuitive idea is that for a belie f state to have a given content ‘p’ is for the belief-forming mechanism which produced it to have the function (perhaps derivatively) of producing that state only when it is the case that ‘p’. But if content itself proves to resist elucidation in terms of natural function and selection, it is still a very attractive view that selection must be mentioned ~ such as a sentence ~ with a particular content, even though that content itself may be individuated by other means.
Contents are normally specified by ‘that . . .’ clauses, and it is natural to suppose that a content has the same kind of sequential and hierarchical structure as the sentence that specifies it. This supposition would by widely accepted for conceptual content. It is, however, a substantive thesis that all content is conceptual. One way of treating one sort of perceptual content is to regard the content as determined by a spatial type, the type under which the region of space around the perceiver must fall if the experience with that content is to represent the environment correctly. The type involves a specification of surfaces and features in the environment, and their distances and direction from the perceiver’s body as origin. Supporters of the view that the legitimacy of using these spatial types in giving the content of experience does not undermine the thesis that all content is conceptual, such supporters will say that the spatial type is just a way of capturing what can equally be captured by conceptual components such as ‘that distance’, or ‘that direction’, where these demonstratives are made available by the perception in question.
In specifying representative realism the significance this theory holds that (1) there is a world whose existence and nature is independent of it, (2) perceiving an object located in that external world necessarily involves causally interacting with that object, and (3) the information acquired in perceiving an object is indirect: It is information most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about the object itself. Traditionally, representative realism has been allied with an act/object analysis of sensory experience. In terms of representative realism, objects of perception (of which we are ‘independently aware’) are always distinct from objects of experience (of which we are ‘directly aware’) Meinongians, however, may simply that object of perception as existing objects of experience.
Armstrong (1926- ) not only sought to explain perception without recourse to sense-data or subjective qualities but also sought to equate the intentionality of perception with that of belief. There are two aspects to this: the first is to suggest that the only attitude towards a content involved in perception is that of believing, and the second is to claim that the only content involved in perceiving is that which a belief may have. The former suggestion faces an immediate problem, recognized by Armstrong, of the possibility of having a perceptual experience without acquiring the correspondence belief. One such case is where the subject already possesses the requisite belief ~ rather than leading to the acquisition of, belief. The more problematic case is that of disbelief in perception. Where a subject has a perceptual experience but refrains from acquiring the correspondence belief. For example, someone familiar with Muller-Lyer illusion, in which lines of equal length appear unequal, is likely to acquire the belief that the lines are unequal on encountering a recognizable example of the illusion. Despite that, the lines may still appear unequal to them.
Armstrong seeks to encompass such cases by talk of dispositions to acquire beliefs and talk of potentially acquiring beliefs. On his account this is all we need say to the psychological state enjoyed. However, once we admit that the disbelieving perceivers still enjoys a conscious occurrent experience, characterizing it in terms of a disposition to acquire a belief seems inadequate. There are two further worries. One may object that the content of perceptual experiences may play a role in explaining why a subject disbelievers in the first place: Someone may fail to acquire a perceptual belief precisely because how things appear to her is inconsistent with her prior beliefs about the world. Secondly, some philosophers have claimed that there can be perception without any correspondence belief. Cases of disbelief in perception are still examples of perceptual experience that impinge on belief: Where a sophisticated perceiver does not acquire the belief that the Müller-Lyer lines are unequal, she will still acquire a belief about how things look to her. Dretske (1969) argues for a notion of non-epistemic seeing on which it is possible for a subject to be perceiving something whole lacking any belief about it because she has failed to notice what is apparent to her. If we assume that such non-epistemic seeing , nevertheless, involves conscious experience e it would seem to provide another reason to reject Armstrong’s view and admit that if perceptual experiences are intentional states then they are a distinct attitude-type from that of belief. However, even if one rejects Armstrong’s equation of perceiving with acquiring beliefs or disposition to believe, one may still accept that he is right about the functional links between experience and belief, and the authority that experience has over belief, an authority which, can nevertheless be overcome.
It is probably true that philosophers have shown much less interest in the subject of the imagination during the last fifteen tears or so than in the period just before that. It is certainly true that more books about the imagination have been written by those concerned with literature and the arts than have been written by philosophers in general and by those concerned with the philosophy of mind in particularly. This is understandable in that the imagination and imaginativeness figure prominently in artistic processes, especially in romantic art. Still, those two high priests of romanticism, Wordsworth and Coleridge, made large claims for the role played by the imagination in views of reality, although Coleridge’s thinking on this was influenced by his reading of the German philosopher of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly Kant and Schelling. Coleridge distinguished between primary and secondary imagination, both of them in some sense productive, as opposed to merely reproductive. Primary imagination is involved in all perception of the world in accordance with a theory which, as Coleridge derived from Kant, while secondary imagination, the poetic imagination, is creative from the materials that perception provides. It is this poetic imagination which exemplifies imaginativeness in the most obvious way.
Being imaginative is a function of thought, but to use one’s imagination in this way is not just a matter of thinking in novel ways. Someone who, like Einstein for example, presents a new way of thinking about the world need not be by reason of this supremely imaginative (though of course, he may be). The use of new concepts or a new way of using already existing concepts is not in itself an exemplification of the imagination. What seems crucial to the imagination is that it involves a series of perspectives, new ways of seeing things, in a sense of ‘seeing’ that need not be literal. It thus involves, whether directly or indirectly, some connection with perception, but in different ways. To make clear in the similarities and differences between seeing proper and seeing with the mind’s eye, as it is sometimes put. This will involve some consideration of the nature and role of images, least of mention, that there is no general agreement among philosophers about how to settle neurophysiological problems in the imagery of self.
Connections between the imagination and perception are evident in the ways that many classical philosophers have dealt with the imagination. One of the earliest examples of this, the treatment of ‘phantasia’ (usually translated as ‘imagination’) in Aristotles ‘De Anima III. 3. seems to regard the imagination as a sort of half-way house between perception and thought, but in a way which makes it cover appearances in general, so that the chapter in question has as much to do with perceptual appearances, including illusions, as it ha s to do with, say. Imagery. Yet, Aristotle also emphasizes that imagining is in some sense voluntary, and that when we imagine a terrifying scene we are not necessarily terrified, any more than we need be when we see terrible things in a picture. How that fits in with the idea that an illusion is or can be a function of the imagination is less than clear. Yet, some subsequent philosophers, Kant on particular. Followed in recent times by P.F. Strawson have maintained that all perception involves the imagination, in some sense of that term, in that some bridge is required between abstract thoughts and their perceptual instance. This comes out in Kant’s treatment of what he calls the ‘schematism’, where he rightly argues that someone might have an abstractive understanding of the concept of a dog without being able to recognize or identify any dogs. It is also clear that someone might be able to classify all dogs together without any understanding of what a dog is. The bridge that needs to be provided to link these two abilities Kant attributes to the imagination.
In so arguing Kant goes, as he so often does, beyond Hume who thought of the imagination in two connected ways. Firs t, there is the fact that there exist. Hume thinks, ideas which are either copies of impressions provided by the senses or are derived from these. Ideas of imagination are distinguished from those of memory, and both of these from impression and sense, by their lesser vivacity. Second, the imagination is involved in the processes, mainly associated of ideas, which take one form on ideas to another, and which Hume uses to explain, for example, our tendency to think of objects as having no impression on them, ideas or less images, is the mental process which takes one from one idea to another and thereby explains our tendency to believe things go beyond what the senses immediately justify. The role which Kant gives to the imagination in relation to perception in general is obviously a wider and fundamental role than that Hume allows. Indeed, one might take Kant to be saying that were there not the role that he, Kant insists on there would be no place for the role which Hume gives it. Kant also allows for a free use of the imagination in connection with the arts and the perceptions of beauty, and this is a more specified role than that involved in perception overall.
In the retinal vision by the seeing of things we normally see them as such-and-such, is to be construed and in how it relate s to a number of other aspects of the mind ‘s functioning ~ sensation, concept and other things of other aspects of the mind’s functioning ~ sensation, concepts, and other things involved in our understanding of things, belief and judgement, the imagination, our action is related to the world around us, and the causal processes involved in the physics, biology and psychology of perception. Some of the last were central to the considerations that Aristotle raised about perception in his ‘De Anima’.
Nevertheless, there are also special, imaginative ways of seeing things, which Wittgenstein (1889-1951) emphasized in his treatment of ‘see-as’ in his ‘Philosophical Investigations II. Xi. And on a piece paper as standing up, lying down, hanging from its apex and so on is a form of ‘seeing-as’ which is both more special and more sophisticated than simply seeing it as a triangle. Both involve the application of concepts to the objects of perception, but the way in which this is done in the two cases is quite different. One might say that in the second case one has to adopt a certain perceptive, a certain point of view, and if that is right it links up with what had been said earlier about the relation and difference between thinking imaginatively and thinking in novel ways.
Wittgenstein (1953) used the phrase ‘an echo of a thought is sight’ in relation to these special ways of seeing things, which he called ‘seeing aspects’. Roger Scruton has spoken of the part played in it all by ‘unasserted thought’, but the phrase used by Wittgenstein brings out more clearly one connection between thought and a form of sense-perception. Wittgenstein *1953) also compares the concepts of an aspect and that of seeing-as with the concept of an image, and this brings out a point about the imagination that has not been much evident in what has been said so far ~ that imagining something is typically a matter of picturing it in the mind and that this involves images in some way, however, the picture view of images has come under heavy philosophical attack. First, there have been challenges to the sense of the view: Mental images are not with real eyes: They cannot be hung on real walls and they have no objective weight or colour. What, the, can it mean to say, that images are pictorial? Secondly, there have been arguments that purport to show that the view is false. Perhaps, the best known of these is founded on the charge that the picture theory cannot satisfactorily explain the independency of many mental images. Finally, there have been attacks on the evidential underpinning of the theory. Historically, the philosophical claim that images are picture-like rested primarily on an appeal to introspection. And today less about the mind than was traditionally supposed. This attitude towards introspection has manifested itself in the case of imagery in the view that what introspection really shows about visual images is not that they are pictorial but only that what goes on in imagery is experimentally much like what goes on in seeing. This aspect is crucial for the philosophy of mind , since it raises the question of the status of images, and in particular whether they constitute private objects or stares in some way. Sartre (1905-80), in his early work on the imagination emphasized, following Husserl (1859-1938), that images are forms of consciousness of an object, but in such a way that they ‘present’ the object as not being: Wherefore, he said, the image ‘posits its object as nothingness’, such a characterization brings out something about the role of the form of consciousness of which the having of imagery may be a part, in picturing something the images are not themselves the object of consciousness. The account does less, however, to bring out clearly just what images are or how they function.
As part of an attemptive grappling about the picturing and seeing with the mind’s eye, Ryle (1900-76 ), has argued that in picturing, say, Lake Ontario, in having it before the mind’s eye, we are not confronted with a mental picture of Lake Ontario: Images are not seen. We nevertheless, can ‘see’ Lake Ontario, and the question is what this ‘seeing’ is, if it is not seeing in any direct sense. One of the things that may make this question difficult to answer is the fact that people’s images and their capacity for imagery vary, and this variation is not directly related to their capacity for imaginativeness. While an image may function in some way as a ‘presentation’ in a train of imaginative thought, such thought does not always depend on that: Images may occur in thought which are not really representational at all, are not, strictly speaking, ‘of’ anything. If the images are representational, can one discover things from one’s images that one would not know from otherwise? Many people would answer ‘no’, especially if their images are generally fragmentary, but it is not clear that this is true for everyone. What is more, and this affects the second point, fragmentary imagery which is at best ancillary to process of though in which it occurs may not be in any obvious sense representational, even if the thought itself is ‘of’ something.
Another problem with the question what it is to ‘see’ Lake Ontario with the mind’s eye is that the ‘seeing’ in question may or may not be a direct function of ‘memory’. For one who has seen Lake Ontario, imaging it may be simply a matter of reproduction in some form in the original vision, and the vision may be reproduced unintentionally and without any recollection of what it is a ‘vision’ of. For one who has never been it the task of imagining it depends most obviously on the knowledge of what sort of thing Lake Ontario is and perhaps on experiences which are relevant to that knowledge. It would be surprising, to say the least, if imaginative power could produce a ‘seeing’ that was not constructed from any previous seeing. But that the ‘seeing’ is not itself a seeing in the straightforward sense is clear, and on this negative point what Ryle says, and other s have said, seems clearly right. As to what ‘seeing’ is in a positive way, Ryle answers that it involves fancying something and that this can be assimilated to pretending. Fancying that one is seeing Lake Ontario is thus, at least, like pretending that one is doing that thing. But is it?
Along the same course or lines, there is in fact a great difference between say, imaging that one is a tree and pretending to be a tree. Pretending normally involves doing something, and even when there is no explicit action on the part of the pretender, as when he or she pretends that something or other is the case, there is at all events an implication of possible action. Pretending to be a tree may involve little more that standing stock-still with one’s arms spread out like branches. To imagine being a tree (something that is founded that some people deny to be possible, which is to my mind a failure of imagination) need imply no action whatever, (Imagining being a tree is different in this respect from imagining that one is a tree, where this means believing falsely, that one is a tree, one can imagine being a tree without this committing one to any beliefs on that score). Yet, of imagining being a tree does seem to involve adopting the hypothetical perspective of a tree, contemplating perhaps, that it is like to be a fixture in the ground with roots growing downward and with branches (somewhat like arms) blown by the wind and with birds perching on them.
Imagining something seems in general to involve change of identity on the part of something or other, and in imagining being something else, such as a tree, the partial change of identity contemplated is in oneself. The fact that the change of identity contemplated cannot be completely does not gainsay, the point that it is a change o f identity which is being contemplated. One might raise the question whether something about the ‘self’ is involved in all imaginings. Berkeley (1685-17530 even suggests that imagining a solitary unperceived tree involves a contradiction, in that a imagine that is to imagine oneself perceiving it. In fact, there is a difference between imagining a object, solitary or not, and imagining oneself seeing that object. The latter certainly involves putting oneself imaginatively in the situation pictured: The former involves contemplating the object from a point of view, that from that point of view which one would oneself have if one were viewing that point of view to which reference has already been made, in a way that clearly distinguishes picturing something from merely thinking of it.
This does not rule out the possibility that an imagine might come into one’s mind which one recognizes as some kind of depiction of a scene. But when actually picturing a scene, it would not be right to say that one imagines the scene by way of a contemplation of an image which plays the part of as picture of it. Moreover, it is possible to imagine a scene without any images occurring, the natural interpretation of which would be that they are pictures of that scene. It is not impossible for one imagining say, the GTA is to report on request the occurrences of images which are not in any sense pictures of the GTA ~, not of that particular city and perhaps not even of a city at all. That would not entail that he or she was not imagining the GTA: A report to or associated with the GTA, thought by others to be of the GTA.
This raises a question which is asked by Wittgenstein (1953) ~, ‘What makes my image of him into an image of him’? To which Wittgenstein replies ‘Not its looking like him’, and furthering he suggests that a person’s account of what his imagery represents is decisive. Certainly it is so when the process of imagination which involves the imagery is one that the person engages in intentionality. The same is not true, as Wittgenstein implicitly acknowledges in the same context, if the imagery simply comes to mind without there being any intention, in that case, one might not even know what the image is an image of.
Nevertheless, all this complicates the question what the status of mental images is. However, it might seem that they stand in relation to imagining as ‘sensations’ stand to perception, except that the occurrence of sensations is a passive set-organization of specific presentiments, while the occurrence of an image can be intentional, and in the context of an active flight of imagination is likely to be so. Sensations give perceptions a certain phenomenal character, providing their sensuous, as opposed to conceptual content. Intentional action has interesting symmetric and asymmetric to perception. Like perceptual experience, the experiential component of intentional action is causally self-referential. If, for example, I can now walking to my car, then the condition of satisfaction of the preset experience is that there be certain bodily movements, and that this very experience of acting cause those bodily movements. Furthering, like perceptual experience, the experience of acting is topically a conscious mental event, is that perception is always concept-dependent at least in the sense that perceivers must be concept possessors and users, and almost certainly the sense that perception entails concept-use in its application to objects. It is, at least, arguable that those organisms that react in a biologically useful way to something but that are such that the attribution of concepts them is implausible, should not be said to perceive those objects, however, much the objects figure causally in their behaviour. There are, nevertheless, important links between these diverse uses. We might call a theory which attributes to perceptual states as content in the new sense as ‘an intentional theory’ of perception. On such a view, perceptual states represent to the subject how her environment and body are. The content of perceptional experiences is how the world is presented to be. Perceptual experiences are then counted as illusory or veridical depending on whether the content is correct and the world is as represented. In as such as such a theory of perception can be taken to be answering the more traditional problems of perception, such will deal with the content of consciousness. The ruminative contemplation, where with concepts looms largely and has, perhaps the overriding role, it still seems necessary for our thought to be given a focus in thought-occurrences such as images. These have sometimes been characterized as symbols which are the material of thought, but the reference to symbols is not really illuminating. Nonetheless, while a period of thought in which nothing of this kind occurs is possible, the general direction of thought seems to depend on such things occurring from time to time. The necessary correlations that are cognizant, insofar as when we get a feeling, or an ‘impression’, thereof: Which of us attribute a necessity to the relation between things of two particular kinds of things. For example, an observed correlation between things of two kinds can be seen to produce in everyone a propensity to expect a thing to the second sort given an experience of a thing on the first sort. That of saying, there is no necessity in the relations between things that happen in the world, but, given our experience and the way our minds naturally work, we cannot help thinking that there is. In the case of the imagination images seem even more crucial, in that without therm it would be difficult, to say, at least, for the point of view or perspective which is important for the imagination to be given a focus.
Of the same lines, that it would be difficult for this to be so, than impossible, since it is clear that entertaining a description of a scene, without there being anything that a vision of it, could sometimes give that perceptive. The question still arises whether a description could always do quite what an image can do in this respect. The point is connected with an issue over which there has been some argument among psychologists, such as S.M. Kosslyn and Z.W. Pylyshyn, concerning what are termed ‘analogue’ versus ‘propositional’ theories of representation. This is an argument concerning whether the process of imagery is what Pylyshyn (1986) calls ‘cognitively penetrable’, i.e., such that its function is affected by beliefs or other intellectual processes expressible in propositions, or whether, it can be independent of cognitive processes although capable itself of affecting the mental life because of the pictorial nature of images ( the ‘analogue medium’). One example, which has embarked upon that argument, is that in which people are asked whether two asymmetrically presented figures can be made to coincide, the decision on which may entail some kind of material rotation of one or more of the figures. Those defending the ‘analogue’ theory, point to the fact that there is some relation between the time taken and the degree of the rotation required, this suggests that some processes involving changing images is identify with. For some who has little or no imagery this suggestion, may seem unintelligible. Is it enough for one to go through an intellectual working out of the possibilities, as based on features of the figures that are judged relevant? This could not be said to be unimaginative as long as the intellectual process involved reference to perceptive or points of view in relation to the figures, the possibility of which the thinker might be able to appreciate. Such an account of the process of imagination cannot be ruled out, although there are conceivable situations in which the ‘analogue’ process of using images might be easier. Or, at least, it might be easier for those who have imagery most like the actual perception of a scene: For others situation might be difficult.
The extreme of the former position is probably provided by those who have so-called ‘eidetic’ imagery, where having an image of a scene is just like seeing it, and where, if it is a function of memory as it most likely is, it is clearly possible to find out details of the scene imagined by introspection of the image. The opposite extreme is typified by those for whom imagery, to the extent it occurs at all, is at best ancillary to propositionally styled thought. But, to repeat the point made unasserted, will not count as imagination unless it provides a series of perspectives on its object. Because images are or can be perceptual analogues and have a phenomenal character analogous to what sensations provide in perception they are ,most obviously suited. In the working of the mind, to the provision of those perspectives. Bu t in a wider sense, imagination enters the picture whenever some link between thought and perception is required, as well as making possible imaginative forms of seeing-as. It may thus justifiably be regarded as a bridge between perception and thought.
The plausibility to have a firm conviction in the reality of something as, perhaps, as worthy of belief and have no doubt or unquestionably understood in the appreciation to view as plausible or likely to apprehend the existence or meaning of comprehensibility whereas, an understandable vocation as to be cognizant of things knowably sensible. To a better understanding, an analogous relationship may prove, in, at least, the explanation for the parallels that obtain between the ‘objects of contents of speech acts’ and the ‘objects or contents of belief’. Furthermore, the object of believing, like the object of saying, can have semantic properties, for example:
What Jones believes is true.
And:
What Jones believes entails what Smith believes.
One plausible hypophysis, then, is that the object of belief is the same sort of entity as what is uttered in speech acts (or what is written down).
The second theory also seems supported by the argument of which our concerns conscribe in the determination of thought, for which our ability to think certain thoughts appears intrinsically connected with the ability to think certain others. For example, the ability to think that John hit Mary goes hand in hand with the ability to think that Mary hits John, but not with the ability to think that Toronto is overcrowded. Why is this so? The ability to produce or understand certain sentences is intrinsically connected with the ability to produce or understand certain others. For example, there are no native speakers of English who know how to say ‘John hits Mary’, but who do not know how to say ‘Mary hits John’. Similarly, there are no native speakers who understand the former sentence but not the latter. These facts are easily explained if sentences have a syntactic and semantic structure, but if sentences are taken to be atomic, these facts are a complete mystery. What is true for sentences is true also for thoughts. Thinking thoughts involving manipulating mental representations. If mental representations with a propositional content have a semantic and syntactic structure like that of sentences. It is no accident that one who is able to think that John hits Mary is thereby, able to think that Mary hits John. Furthermore, it is no accident that one who can think these thoughts need not thereby be able to think thoughts, having different components ~ for example, the thought that Toronto is overcrowded. And what goes here for thought goes for belief and the other propositional attitudes.
If concepts of the simple (observational) sort were internal physical structures that had in this sense, an information-carrying function, a function they acquired during learning, then instances as such types would have a content that (like a belief) could be either true or false. After learning, tokens of these structure types, when caused by some sensory stimulation, would ‘say’ (i.e., mean) what it was their function to ‘tell’ (inform about). They would therefore, quality as beliefs ~ at least of the simple observational sort.
Any information-carrying structure carries all kinds of information. If, for example, it carriers information ‘A’, it must also carry the information that ‘A’ or ‘B’. As I conceived of it, learning was supposed to be a process in which a single piece if this information is selected for special treatment, thereby becoming the semantic content ~ the meaning ~ of subsequent tokens of that structure type. Just as we conventionally give artefacts and instruments information-providing functions, thereby making their activities and states ~ pointer readers, flashing lights, and so on ~ representations of the conditions, so learning converts neural states that carry information ~ ‘pointers readers’ in the head, so to speak ~ into structures that have the function to providing some vital piece of the information they carry are also presumed to serve as the meanings of linguistic items, underwriting relations of translation, definition, synonymy, antinomy and semantic implications. Much work in the semantics of natural language takes itself to be addressing conceptual structure.
Concepts have also been thought to be the proper objects of ‘philosophical analysis’. ‘Analytic’ philosophers when they ask about the nature of justice, knowledge or piety and expect to discover answers by means of introspective reflection, yet the expectation that one sort of thing could serve all these tasks went hand in hand with what has come to be called the ‘Classical View’ of concepts, according of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for their satisfaction, which are known to any competent user of them, the standard example is the especially simple one [bachelor], which seems to be identified to [eligible unmarried male]. A more interesting, but problematic one has been [knowledge], whose analysis was traditionally thought to be [justified true belief].
The notional representation that treat relations as a sub-class of property brings to contrast with property is ‘concept’, but one must be very careful, since ‘concept’, has =been used by philosophers ans psychologists to serve many different purposes. One use has it that certain factors of conceiving of some aspect of the world. As such, concepts have a kind of subjectivity as having to contain the different individuals might, for example, have different concepts of birds, one thinking of them primarily as flying creatures and the other as feathered. Concepts in this sense are often described as a species of ‘mental representation’, and as such they stand in sharp contrast to the notion of a property, since a property is something existing in the world. However, it is possible to think of a concept as neither mental nor linguistic and this would allow, though it doesn’t dictate, that concepts and properties are the same kind of thing. Nonetheless, the function of learning is naturally to develop, as things inasmuch as they do, in some natural way, either (in the case of the senses) from their selectional history or (in the casse of thought) from individual learning. The result is a network of internal representations that have, in different ways, the power to represent: Experiences and beliefs.
This does, however, leave a question about the role of the senses in this total cognitive enterprise. If it is learning that, by way of concepts, is the source of the representational powers of thought, from whence comes the representational powers of experience? Or should we even think of experience in representational terms? We can have false beliefs, but are there false experiences? On this account, then, experience and thought are both representational. The difference resides in the source of heir representational powers, learning in the case of thoughts, evolution in the case of experience.
Though, perception is always concept-dependent, at least in the sense that perceivers must be concept possessors and users, and almost certainly in the sense that perception entails concept-use in its application to objects. It is at least, arguable that those organisms that react in a biologically useful way to something, but that are such that the attribution of concepts to them is implausible, should not be said to perceive those objects, however, much is as there is much that the object figures causally in their behaviour. Moreover, that consciousness presents the object in such a way that the experience has certain phenomenal character, which derived from the sensations which the causal processes involved set up. This is most evident is the case of ‘touch’ (which being a ‘contact sense’ provides a more obvious occasion for speaking of sensations than do ‘distance senses’ such as sight). Our tactual awareness of the texture of a surface is, to use a metaphor, ‘coloured’ by the nature of the sensations that the surface produces in our skin, and which we can be explicitly aware of if our attention is drawn to them (something that gives one indication of how attention too is involved in perception).
It has been argued, that the phenomenal character of n experience is detachable from its contentual content in the sense that an experience of the same phenomenal character could occur even if the appropriate concepts were not available. Certainly the reverse is true ~ that a concept-mediated awareness of an object could occur without any sensation-mediated experience ~ as in an awareness of something absent from us. It is also the case, however, that the look of something can be completely changed by the realization that it is to be seen as ‘χ’ rather than ‘y’. To the extent that, that is so, the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience should be viewed as the result of the way in which sensations produced in us by objects blend with our ways of thinking of and understanding those objects (which, it should be noted, are things in the world and should not be confused with the sensations which they produce).
In the study o ff other parts of the natural world, we agree to be satisfied with post-Newtonian ‘best theory’ arguments: There is no privileged category of evidence that provides criteria for theoretical constructions. In the study of humans above the neck, however, naturalistic theory does not suffice: We must seek ‘philosophical explanations’, require that theoretical posits specified terms of categories of evidence selected by the philosopher (as, in the radically upon unformulated notions such as ‘access in principle’ that have no place in naturalistic inquiry.
However, one evaluates these ideas, that clearly involve demands beyond naturalism, hence, a form of methodological/epistemological dualism. In the absence of further justification, it seems to me fair to conclude, that inability to provide ‘philosophical explanation’ or a concept of ‘rule-following’ that relies on access to consciousness (perhaps ‘in principle’) is a merit of a naturalistic approach, not a defect.
A standard paradigm in the study of language, given its classic form by Frége, holds that there is a ‘store of thoughts’ that is a common human possession and a common public language in which these thoughts are expressed. Furthermore, this language is based on a fundamental relation between words and things ~ reference or denotation ~ along with some mode of fixing reference )sense, meaning). The notion of a common public language has never been explained, and seems untenable. It is also far from clear why one should assume the existence of a common store of thoughts: The very existence of thoughts had been plausibly questioned, as a misreading of surface grammar, a century earlier.
Only those who share a common world can communicate, only those who communicate can have the concept of an inter-subjective, objective world. As a number of things follow. If only those who communicate have the concept of an objective world, only those who communicate can doubt whether an external world exists. Yet I is impossible seriously (consistently) to doubt the existence of other people with thoughts, or the existence of an external world, since to communicate is to recognize the existence of other people in a common world. Language, that is, communication with others, is thus essential to propositional thought. This is not because it is necessary to have the words to express a thought (for it is not); it is because the ground of the sense of objectivity is inter-subjectivity, and without the sense of objectivity, of the distinction between true and false, between what is thought to be and what is the case, there can be nothing rightly called ‘thought’.
Since words are also about things, it is natural to ask how their intentionality is connected in that of thoughts. Two views have been advocated: One view takes thought content to be self-subsistent relative to linguistic content, with the latter dependent on or upon the former. The other view takes thought content to be derivative upon linguistic content, so that there can be no thought without a bedrock of language. Appeals to language at this point are apt to founder on circularity, since words take on the powers of concepts only insofar as there express them. Thus, there seems little philosophical illumination to be got from making thought depend upon language. Nonetheless, it is not entirely clear what it amounts to assert or deny, that there is an inner language of thought. If it means merely that concepts (thought-constituents) are structured in such a way as to be isomorphic with spoken language, then the claim is trivially true, given some natural assumption. But if it means that concepts just are ‘syntactic’ items orchestrated into strings of the same, then the claim is acceptable only in so far as syntax is an adequate basis for meaning ~ which, on the face of it, it is not. Concepts n doubt have combinatorial powers comparable to those of words, but the question is whether anything else can plausibly be meant by the hypothesis of an inner language.
Yet, it appears undeniable that the spoken language does not have autonomous intentionality, but instead derives its meaning from the thoughts of speakers ~ though language may augment one’s conceptual capacities. So thought cannot post-date spoken language. The truth seems to be that in human psychology speech and thought are interdependent in many ways, but that there is no conceptual necessity about this. The only ‘language’ on which thought essentially depends is that of the structured system of concepts itself: Thought depends on or upon there being isolable concepts that can join with others to produce complete propositions. But this is merely to draw attention to a property of any system of concepts must have; it is not to say what concepts are or how they succeed in moving between thoughts as they do.
Finally, there is the old question of whether, or to what extent, a creature who does not understand a natural language can have thoughts. Now it seems pretty compelling that higher mammals and humans raised without language have their behaviour controlled by mental states that are sufficiently like our beliefs, desires and intentions to share those labels. It also seems easy to imagine non-communicating creatures who have sophisticated mental lives (they build weapons, dams, bridges, have clever hunting devices, etc.). at the same time, ascriptions of particular contents to non-language-using creatures typically seem exercises in loose speaking (does the dog really believe that there is a bone in the yard?), and it is no accident that, as a matter of fact, creatures who do not understand a natural language have at best primitive mental lives. There is no accepted explanation of these facts. It is possible that the primitive mental failure to master natural languages, but the better explanation may be Chomsky’s, that animals lack a special language faculty to our species, as, perhaps, the insecurity that is felt, may at best resemble the deeper of latencies that cradles his instinctual primitivities, that have contributively distributed the valuing qualities that amount in the result to an ‘approach-avoidance’ theory. As regards the wise normal human raised without language; this might simply be due to the ignorance and lack of intellectual stimulation such a person would be predetermined to. It also might be that higher thought requires a neural language with a structure comparable to that of a natural language, and that such neural languages are somehow acquired: As the child learns its native language. Finally, the ascription states of languageless creatures is a difficult topic that needs more attention. It is possible that as we learn more about the logic of our ascriptions of propositional content, we will realize that these ascriptions are egocentrically based on a similarity to the language in which we express our beliefs. We might then learn that we have no principled basis for ascribing propositional content to a creature who does not speak something a lot like one of our natural languages, or who does not have internal states with natural-language-like structure.. It is somewhat surprising how little we know about thought’s dependence on language.
The relation between language and thought is philosophies chicken-or-egg problem. Language and thought are evidently importantly related, but how exactly are they related? Does language come first and make thought possible, or is it vice versa? Or are they on a par, each making the other possible.
When the question is stated this generally, however, no unqualified answer is possible. In some respects thought is prior, and in other respects neither is prior. For example, it is arguable that a language is an abstract pairing of expressions and meaning, a function in the set-theoretic sense from expressions onto meaning. This makes sense of the fact that Esperanto is a language no one speaks, and it explains why it is that, while it is a contingent fact that ‘La neige est blanche’ means that snow is white among the French. It is a necessary truth that it means that in French. But if natural languages such as French and English are abstract objects in this sense, then they exist in possible worlds in which there are no thinkers in this respect, then, language as well as such notions as meaning and truth in a language, is prior to thought.
But even if languages are construed as abstract expression-meaning pairings, they are construed that way as abstractions from actual linguistic practice ~ from the use of language in communicative behaviour ~ and there remains a clear sense in which language is dependent on thought. The sequence of inscribes ‘Naples is south of Rome’ means among us that Naples is south of Rome. This is a contingent fact, dependent on the way we use ‘Naples’. Rome and the other parts of that sentence. Had our linguistic practices been different, ‘Naples is south of Rome’ means among us that Naples is south of Rome has something to do with the beliefs and intentions underlying our use of the words and structures that compose the sentence. More generally, it is a platitude that the semantic features that inscribes and sounds have in a population of speakers are, at least, partly determined by the ‘propositional attitudes’ those speakers have in using those inscriptions and sounds or in using the parts and structures that compose them. This is the same platitude, of course, which says that meaning depends at least partly on use: For the use in question is intentional use in communicative behaviour. So, here, is one clear sense in which language is dependent on thought: Thought is required to imbue inscriptions and sounds with the semantic features they have in populations of speakers.
The sense in which language does depend on thought can be wedded to the sense ion which language does not depend on thought in the ways that: We can say that a sequence of ascriptions or sounds (or, whatever) σ means ‘q’ in a language ‘L’, construed as a function from expressions onto meaning, iff L(σ) = q. this notion of meaning-in-a-language, like the notion of a ;language, is a mere set-theoretic notion that is independent of thought in that it presupposes nothing about the propositional attitudes of language users: σ can mean ‘q’ in ‘L’ even if ‘L’ has never been used. But then we can say that σ also means ‘q’ in a population ‘P’ just in case members of ‘P’ use some language in which σ ,means ‘q’: That is, just in case some such language is a language of ‘P’. The question of moment then becomes: What relation must a population ‘P’ bear to a language ‘L’ in order for it to be the case that ‘L’ is a language of ‘P’, a language members of ‘P’ actually speak? Whatever the answer to this question is, this much seems right: In order for a language to be a language of a population of speakers, those speakers in their produce sentences of the language in their communicative behaviour. Since such behaviour is intentional, we know that the notion of a language’s being the language of a population of speakers presupposes the notion of thought. And since that notion presupposes the notion of thought, we also know that the same is true of the correct account of the semantic features expressions have in populations of speakers.
This is a pretty thin result, not one likely to be disputed, and the difficu01lt questions remain. We know that there is some relation ‘R’ such that a language ‘L’ is used by a population ‘P’ iff ‘L’ bears ‘R’ to ‘P’. Let us call this relation, whatever it turns out to be, the ‘actual-language reflation’. We know that to explain the actual-language relation is to explain the semantic features expressions have among those who are apt to produce those expressions. And we know that any account of the relation must require language users to have certain propositional attitudes. But how exactly is the actual language relation to be explained in terms of the propositional attitude of language users? And what sort of dependence might those propositional attitudes in turn have those propositional attitudes in turn have on language or on the semantic features that are fixed by the actual-language relation? Let us, least of mention, begin once again, as in the relation of language to thought, before turning to the relation of thought to language.
All must agree that the actual-language relation, and with it the semantic features linguistic items have among speakers, is at least, partly determined by the propositional attitudes of language users. This still leaves plenty of room for philosophers to disagree both about the extent of the determination and the nature of the determining propositional attitude. At one end of the determination spectrum, we have those who hold that the actual-language relation is wholly definable in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. This position in logical space is most famously occupied by the programme, sometimes called ‘intention-based semantics’, of the late Paul Grice and others. The foundational notion in this enterprise is a certain notion of speaker meaning. It is the species of communicative behaviour reported when we say, for example, that in uttering ‘ll pleut’, Pierre meant that it was raining, or that in waving her hand, the Queen meant that you were to leave the room, intentional-based semantics seeks to define this notion of speaker meaning wholly in terms of communicators’ audience-directed intentions and without recourse to any semantic notion. Then it seeks to define the actual-language relation in terms of the now-defined notion of speaker meaning, together with certain ancillary notions such as that of a conventional regularity or practice, themselves defined wholly in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. The definition of the actual-language relation in terms of speaker meaning will require the prior definition in terms of speaker meaning of other agent-semantic notions, such as the notions of speaker reference and notions of illocutionary act, and this, too, is part of the intention-based semantics.
Some philosophers object to the intentional-based semantics because they think it precludes a dependence of thought on the communicative use of language. This is a mistake. Even if the intentional-based semantic definitions are given a strong reductionist reading, as saying that public-language semantic properties (i.e., those semantic properties that supervene on use in communicative behaviour) it might still be that one could not have propositional attitudes unless one had mastery of a public-language. However, our generating causal explanatory y generalizations, and subject to no more than the epistemic indeterminacy of other such terms. The causal explanatory approach to reason-giving explanations also requires an account of the intentional content of our psychological states, which makes it possible for such content to be doing such work. By the early 1970s, and many physicalists looked for a way of characterizing the primary and priority of the physical that is free from reductionist implications. As we have in attestation, the key attraction of supervenience to physicalists has been its promise to deliver dependence without reduction. For example, of moral theory has seemed encouraging as Moore and Hare, who made much of the supervenience of the moral on the naturalistic, were at the same time, strong critics of ethical naturalism, the principal reductionist position in ethical theory. And thee has been a broad consensus among ethical theorists that Moore and Hare were right, that the moral, or more broadly the normative, is supervening on the non-moral without being reducible to it. Whether or not this is plausible (that is a separate question), it would be no more logically puzzling than the idea that one could not have any propositional attitudes unless one had one’s with certain sorts of contents. there is no pressing reason to think that the semantic needs to be definable in terms of the psychological. Many intention-based semantic theorists have been motivated by a strong version of ‘physicalism’, which requires the reduction of all intentional properties (i.e., all semantic and propositional-attitude properties) to physical , or at least, topic-neutral or functional properties, for it is plausible that there could be no reduction of the semantic and the psychological to the physical without a prior reduction of the semantic to the psychological. But it is arguable that such a strong version of physicalism is not what is required in order to fit the intentional into the natural order.
So, the most reasonable view about the actual-language relation is that it requires language users to have certain propositional attitudes, but there is no prospect of defining the relation wholly in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. It is further plausible that any account of the actual-language relation must appeal to speech acts such as speaker meaning, where the correct account of these speech acts is irreducibly semantic (they will fail to supervene on the non-semantic propositional altitudes of speakers in the way that intentions fail to supervene on an agent’s beliefs and desires). If this is right, it would still leave a further issue about the ‘definability’ of the actual-language relation, and if so, will any irreducibly semantic notions enter into that definition other than the sorts of speech act notions already alluded to? These questions have not been much discussed in the literature as there is neither an established answer nor competing school of thought. Such that the things in philosophy that can be defined, and that speech act notions are the only irreducibly semantic notions the definition must appeal to.
Our attention is now to consider on or upon the dependence of thought on language, as this the claim that propositional attitudes are relations to linguistic items which obtain at least, partly by virtue of the content those items have among language users. This position does not imply that believers have to be language users, but it does make language an essential ingredient in the concept of belief. However, we might then learn that we have no principled basis for ascribing propositional content to who does not speak something, a lot like, does not have internal states with natural-language-like structure. It is somewhat surprising how little we know about thought’s dependence on language.
The Scottish philosopher, born in Edinburgh, David Hume (1711-76) whose theory of knowledge starts from the distinction between perception and thought. When we see, hear, feel, etc. (In general, perceive) something we are ware of something immediately present to the mind through the senses. But we can also think and believe and reason about things which are not present to our senses at the time, e.g.,, objects and events in the past, the future or the present beyond our current perceptual experience. Such beliefs make it possible for us to deliberate and so act on the basis of information we have acquired about the world.
For Hume all mental activity involves the presence before the mind of some mental entity. Perception is said to differ for thought only in that the kinds of things that are present to the mind in each case are present to the mind in each case are different. In the case of perception it is an ‘impression’: In the case of thought, although what is thought about is absent, what is present to the mind is an ‘idea’ of whatever is thought about. The only difference between an impression and its corresponding idea is the greater ‘force and liveliness’ with which it ‘strikes upon the mind’.
All the things that we can think or believe or reason about are either ‘relations of ideas’ or ‘matters of fact’. Each of the former (e.g., that three times five equals half of thirty) holds necessarily: Its negation implies a contradiction, such truths are ‘discoverable by the operation of pure thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe. Hume has no systematic theory of this kind of knowledge: What is or is not included in a given idea, and how we know whether it is, is taken as largely unproblematic. each ‘matter of fact’ is contingent: Its negation is distinctly conceivable and represents a possibility. That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible and no more implies a contradiction than the proposition that it will rise. Thought alone is therefore, never sufficient to assure us of the truth of any matter of fact. Sense experience is needed. Only what is directly present to the senses at a given moment is known by perception. A belief in a matter of fact which is not present at the time must therefore be arrived at by a transition of some kind from present impressions to a belief in the matter of fact in question. Hume’s theory of knowledge is primarily an explanation of how that transition is in fact made. It takes the form of an empirical ‘science of human nature’ which is to be based of careful observation of what human beings do and what happens to them.
Its leading into some tangible value, that approves inversely qualifying, in that thoughts have contents carried by mental representations. Now, there are different representations, pictures, maps, models, and words ~ to name only some. Exactly what sort of representation is mental representation? Insofar as our understanding of cognizant connectionism will necessarily have implications for philosophy of mind. Two areas in particular on which it is likely to have impact are the analysis of the mind as a representational system and the analysis of intentional idioms. That is more, that imagery has played an enormously important role in philosophy conceptions of the mind. The most popular view of images prior to this century has been what we might call ‘the picture theory’. According to this view, held by such diverse philosophers as Aristotle, descartes, and Locke, mental images ~ specifically in the way they represent objects in the world,. Despite its widespread acceptance, the picture theory of mental images was left largely unexplained in the traditional philosophical literature. Admittedly, most of those accepted the theory held that mental images copy or resemble what the present, but little more was said. Sensationalism, distinguishes itself as a version of representationalist by positing that mental representations are themselves linguistic expressions within a ‘language of thought’. While some sententialists conjecture that the language of thought is just the thinker’s spoken language internalized. An unarticulated, internal; language in which the computations supposedly definitive of cognition occur. Sententialism is as a natural consequence to take hold a provocative thesis.
Thoughts, in having contents, posses semantic properties, yet, that does not imply that they lack an unspoken, internal, mental language. Sententialism need not insist that the language of thought be any natural spoken language like Chinese or English. Rather it simply proses that psychological states that admit of the sort of semantic properties are likely relations to the sort of structured representations commonly found in, but not isolated to, public languages. This is certainly not to say that all psychological states in all sorts of psychological agents must be relations to mental sentences. Rather the idea is that thinking ~ at least, the kind Peter Abelard (1079-1142) exemplifies ~ involves the processing of internally complex representations. Their semantic properties are sentences to those of their parts much in the manner in which the meanings and truth conditions of complex public sentences are dependent uopn the semantic features of their components. Abelard might also exploit various kinds of mental representations and associated processes. A sententialists may allow that in some of his cognitive adventures Abelard rotates mental images or recalcitrates weights on connections among internally undifferentiated networked nodes. Sententialism is simply the thesis that some kinds of cognitive phenomena are best explained by the hypothesis of a mental language. There is, then, no principled reason of non-verbal creatures precludes the language of thought.
It is tempting to sleek over the representational theory by speaking of a language thought, nonetheless, that Fodor argues that representation and the inferential manipulation of representations require a medium of representation, least of mention,, in human subjects than in computers. Say, that physically realized thoughts and mental representations are ‘linguistic’, such that of (1) they are composed of parts and are syntactically structured: (2) Their simplest parts refer to or denote things and properties in the world, (3) their meanings as wholes are determined by the semantical properties of their basic parts together with the grammatical rules that have generated their overall syntactic structures, (4) they have truth-conditions, that is, putative states of affairs in the world that would make them true, and accordingly they are true or false depending on the way the world happens actually to be: (5) They bear logical relations of entailment or implication to each other. In this way, they have in accordance to the representational theory: Human beings have systems of physical states that serve as the elements of a lexicon or vocabulary, and human beings (somehow) physically realize rules that combine strings of those elements into configuration having the plexuities of representational contents that common sense associates with the propositional altitudes. And that is why thoughts and beliefs are true or false just as English sentences are, though a ‘language of thought’ may differ sharply in its grammar from any natural language.
Thought and language, in philosophy are evidently importantly related, but how exactly are they related? Does language come first and make thought possible or vice versa? Or are they on a par, each making the other possible?
When the question is stated this generally, has nonetheless no unqualified answer is possible. In some respects language is prior, in other respects thought is prior. For example, it is arguable that a language is an abstract pairing of expressions and meanings, a function, in the set-theoretic sense, from expressions onto meanings. This makes sense of the fact that Esperanto is a language no one speaks, and it explains why it is that, while it is a contingent fact that, ‘snow is white’, it is a necessary truth that it means that snow is white. However, if natural languages such as French and English are abstract objects in this sense, then they exist whether or not anyone speaks them: They even exist in possible worlds in which there are no thinkers. Once, again, language, as well as such notions as meaning and truth in a language, is prior to thought.
Yet, even if languages are construed as abstract expression-meaning pairings, they are construed that way as abstractions from actual linguistic practice ~ from the use of language in communicative behaviour ~ and there remains a clear sense in which language is dependent on thought. The sequence of succession is that, ‘Naples is south of Rome’ mans among us that Naples is south of Rome. This is a contingent fact, dependent on the way we use ‘Naples’, ‘Rome’ and the other parts of that sentence. Had our linguistic practices been different, ‘Naples is south of Rome’ might have meant something entirely different or nothing at all among us. Plainly, the fact that ‘Naples is south of Rome’ means among us that Naples is south of Rome has something to do with the ‘beliefs’ and ‘intentions’ underlying our use of the words and structure that compose the sentence. More generally, it is a platitude that the semantic features that decide on or upon the mark and sounds have in population of speakers at least, partly determined by the propositional altitudes, those speakers have in using those marks and ssounds, or in using the parts and structure that compose them. This is the same platitude, of course, which says that meaning depends at least partly on use: For the use in question is intentional use in communicative behaviour. So here is one clear sense in which is required to imbue marks and sounds with the semantic features they have in populations of speakers.
We know that there is some relation such that a language ‘L’ is used by a population ‘P’ iff ‘L’ bears ‘R’ to ‘P’. This relation, however, of whatever it turns out to be, the actual-language relation is to explain the semantic features expressions, least of mention, have among those who are apt to produce those expressions, and we know that any account of the relation must require language users to have certain propositional attitudes. But how exactly is the actual-language relation to be explained in terms of the propositional attitudes of language users? And what sort of dependence might those propositional attitudes in turn have on language or on the semantic features that are fixed by the actual-language relation?
Some philosophers object to intention-based semantics only because they think it precludes a dependence of thought on the communicative use of language. This is a mistake. Even if intention-based semantic definitions are given a strong reductionist reading, as saying that public-language semantic properties (i.e., those semantic properties that supervene on us in communicative behaviour) just are psychological properties. It might still be that one could not have propositional attitudes unless one had mastery of a public language. The idea of supervenience is usually thought to have originated in moral theory, in the works of such philosopher s as G.E. Moore and R.M. Hare, nonetheless, Hare, for example, claimed that ethical predicates are ‘supervenient predicates’ in the same sense that no two things (persons, acts, states of affairs) could be exactly alike in all descriptive or naturalistic respects but unlike in that some ethical predicate (‘good’, ‘right’, etc.) truly applies to one but not to the other. That is, there could be no difference in a moral respect without a difference in some description, or non-moral respect. following Moore and Hare, from whom he avowedly borrowed the idea of supervenience, Davidson went on to assert that supervenience in the sense is consistent with the irreducibility of the supervenient to their 0‘subvenient’, or ‘base’, properties. ‘Dependence or supervenience of this kind does not entail reducibility through law or definition . . .’.
Thus, three ideas have come to be closely associated with supervenience: (1) ‘Property covariation’ (if two things are indiscernible in base properties, they must be indiscernible in supervenience properties). (2) ‘Dependence’ (supervenient properties are dependent on, or determined by, their subvenient bases, and (3) ‘Non-reducibility’ (property covariation and dependence involved in supervenience can not reducible to their base properties). Whether or not this is plausible (that is, a separate question), it would be no more logically puzzling that the idea that one could not have propositional attitudes unless one had ones with certain sorts of content, Tyler Burge’s insight, that the contents of one’s thoughts is partially determined by the meaning of one’s words on one’s linguistic community is perfectly consistent with any intention-based semantics, reduction of the semantic to the psychological. Nevertheless, there is reason to be sceptical of the intention-based semantic programme.
So the most reasonable view about the actual-language relation is that it requires language users to have certain propositional attitudes, but there is no prospect of defining the relation wholly in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. It is further plausible that any account of the actual-language relation ,must appeal to speech acts sch as speaker meaning, where the correct account of these speech acts is irreducibly semantic (they will fail to supervene on the non-semantic propositional attitudes of speakers in the way that intentions fail to supervene on an agent’s beliefs and desires). Is it possible to define the actual-language relation, and if so, will any irreducibly semantic notions enter into that definition other than the sorts of speech act notions already alluded to? These questions have not been much discussed in the literature, there is neither an established answer nor competing schools of thought. However, the actual-language relation is one of the few things in philosophy that can be defined, and that speech act notions are the only irreducibly semantic notions the definition must appeal to (Schiffer, 1993).
An substantiated dependence of thought on language seems unobtainably approachable, however, a useful point is an acclaimed dependence that propositional attitudes are relations to linguistic items which obtain, in, at least, in part, by virtue of the content those items have among language users. This position does not imply that believers have to be language users, but it does make language an essential ingredient in the concept of belief. The position is motivated by two considerations: (a) The supposition that believing is a relation to thing believed, which things have truth values and stand in logical relations to one another, and (b) the desire not to take things believed to be propositions ~ abstract, mind and language-independent objects that have essentially the truth conditions they have. As to say that (as well motivated: The relational construal of propositional attitudes is probably the best way to account for the quantification in ‘Harvey believes something irregular about you’. But there are problems with taking linguistic items, than propositions, as the objects of belief. In that, if ‘Harvey believes that irregularities are founded grounds held to abnormality’ is represented along the lines of Harvey, and abnormal associations founded to irregularity, then one could know the truth expressed by the sentence about Harvey without knowing the content of his belief: For one could know that he stands in the belief relation to ‘irregularities are abnormal’ without knowing its content. This is unacceptable, as if Harvey believes that irregularity stems from abnormality, then what he believes ~ the reference of ‘That irregularity is abnormal’ ~ is that irregularities are abnormal. But what is this thing, that irregularities are abnormal? Well, it is abstract, in that it has no spatial locality: It is mind and language independent, in that it exists in possible world in which whose displacement is neither the thinkers nor speakers, and necessarily, it is true iff irregularly is abnormal. In short, it is a proposition ~ an abstract mind- and-language thing that has a truth condition and has essentially the truth condition it has.
A more plausible way that thought depends on language is suggested by the topical thesis that we think in a ‘language of thought’. As, perhaps, this is nothing more than the vague idea that the neural states that realize our thoughts ‘have elements and structure in a way that is analogous to the way in which sentences have elements and structure’. But we can get a more literal rendering by relating it to the abstractive conception of language already recommended. On this conception, a language is a function from ‘expressions’ ~ sequence of marks or sounds or neural states or whatever ~ onto meanings, which meanings will include the propositions our propositional-attitude relations relates us to. We could then read the language of thought hypothesis as the claim that having in a certain relation to a language whose expressions are neural states. There would mow be more than one ‘actual-language relation’. One might be called the ’public-language relation’, since it makes a language the instrument of communication of a population of speakers. Another relation might be called the ‘language-of-thought relation’ because standing in the relation to a language makes it one’s ‘Lingus mentis’. Since the abstract notion of a language has been so weakly construed, it is hard to see how the minimal language-of-thought proposal just sketched could fail to be true. At the same time, it has been given no interesting work to do. In trying to give it more interesting work, further dependencies of thought on language might come into play. For example, it has been claimed that the language of thought of a public-language user is the public language she uses: her neural sentences in something like her spoken sentences. For another example, it might be claimed that even if one’s language of thought is distinct from one’s public language, the language-of-thought relation makes presuppositions about the public-language relation in ways that make the content of one’s thoughts dependent on the meaning of one’s words in one’s public-language community.
Tyler Burge has in fact shown that there is as sense in which thought content is dependent on the meaning of words in one’s linguistic community (Burge, 1979). Alfred, for instance, uses ‘arthritis’ under the misconception that arthritis is not confined to the joints, he also applies the word to rheumatoid ailments not in the joints. Noticing an ailment in his thigh that is symptomatically like the disease in his hands and ankles, he says to his doctor, ‘I have arthritis in the thigh’. Here Alfred is expressing his false belief that he has arthritis in the thigh. But now consider a counterfactual situation that differs in just one respect (and whatever it entails): Alfred would be expressing a true belief when he says ‘I have arthritis in the thigh’. Since the proposition he believes is true while the proposition that he has arthritis in the thigh is false, he believe’s some other proposition. This shows that standing in the belief relation to a proposition can be partly determined by the meaning of words in one’s public language. The Burge phenomenon seem real, but it would be nice to have a deep explanation of why thought content should be dependent on language in this way.
Finally, there is the old question of whether, or to what extent, a creature who does not understand a natural language can have thoughts. Now it seems pretty compelling that higher mammals and humans raised without language have their behaviour controlled by mental states that are sufficiently like our beliefs, desires and intentions to share those labels. It also seems easy to imagine non-communicating creatures who have sophisticated mental lives (they build weapons, dams, bridges, have clever hunting devices, etc.) At the same time, ascriptions of particular contents to non-language-using creatures typically seem exercises in loose speaking (does the dog really believe that there is a bone in the yard?), and it is no accident that, as a ,matter of fact, creatures who do not understand a natural language have at best, primitive mental lives. There is no accepted explanation of these facts. It is possible that the primitive mental lives of animals account for their failure to master natural language, but the better explanation may be Chomsky’s, that animals lack a special language faculty unique to our species. As regards the inevitable primitive mental life of an otherwise language, this might simply be due to the ignorance and lack of intellectual stimulation such a person would be doomed to. As such, it might require a neural language with a structure comparable to that of a natural language, and that such neural languages are somewhat acquire, as the child learns its native language. Finally, the ascription of content to the propositional attitudes states of language creatures is a difficult topic that needs more attention. It is possible that we as we learn more about the logic of our ascriptions of propositional content, we will realize that these ascriptions are egocentrically based on a similarity to the language in which we express our beliefs. We might then learn that we have no principled basis for ascribing propositional content to a creature who does not speak languages, or who does not have internal states with natural-language-like structure. It is somewhat surprising how little we know about thoughts’s dependence on language.
All of this suggests a specific ‘mental organ’, to use Chomsky’s phrase, that has evolved in the human cognitive system specifically in order to make language possible. The specific structure of this organ simultaneously constrains the range of possible human languages and guides the learning of the child’s target language, later ,making rapid on-line language processing possible. The principles represented in this organ constitute the innate linguistic knowledge of the human being. Additional evidence for the early operation of such an innate language acquisition module is derived from the many infant studies that show that infants selectively attend to sound-streams that are prosodically appropriate, that have pauses at clausal boundaries, and that contain linguistically permissible phonological sequences.
A particularly strong form of the innateness hypothesis in the psycholinguistic domain is Fodor’s (1975, 1987), ‘Language of Thought’ hypothesis. Fodor argues not only that the language learning and processing faculty is innate, but that the human representational system exploits an innate language of thought which has all of the expressive power of any learnable human language. Hence, he argues, all concepts are in fact innate, in virtue of the representational power of the language of thought. This remarkable doctrine is hence even stronger than classical rationalist doctrine of innate ideas: Whereas, Chomsky echoes Descartes in arguing that the most general concepts required for language learning are innate, while allowing that more specific concepts are acquired, Fodor echoes Plato in arguing that every concept we ever ‘learn’ is in fact innate.
Fodor defends this view by arguing that the process of language learning is a process of hypothesis formation and testing, where among the hypotheses that must be formulated are meaning postulates for each term in the language being acquired. But in order to formulate and test a hypothesis of the form ‘χ’ means ‘y’, where ‘χ’ denotes a term in the target language, prior to the acquisition of that language, the language learner. Fodor argues, must have the resources necessary to express ‘y’. Therefore, there must be, in the language of thought, a predicate available co-extensive with each predicate in any language that a human can learn. Fodor also argues for the language of thought thesis by noting that the language in which the human information cannot be a human spoken language, since that would, contrary to fact, privilege one of the world’s languages as the most easily acquired. Moreover, it cannot be, he argues, that each of us thinks in our own native language since that would (a) predict that we could not think prior to acquiring a language, contrary to the original argument, and (b) would mean that psychology would be radically different for speakers of different languages. Hence, Fodor argues, there must be a non-conventional language of thought, and the facts that the mind is ‘wired’ in mastery of its predicates together with its expressive completeness entail that all concepts are innate.
The dissertating disputation about whether there are innate qualities that infer on or upon the innate values whereby ideas are much older than previously imagined. Plato in the ‘Meno’ (the learning paradox), famously argues that all of our knowledge is innate. Descartes (1596-1650) and Leibniz (1646-1716) defended the view that the mind contains innate ideas: Berkeley (1685-1753), Hume (1711-76) and Locke (1632-1704) attacked it. In fact, as we now conceive the great debate between European Rationalism and British empiricism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the doctrine of innate ideas is a central effectuality of contention: Rationalists typically claim that knowledge is impossible without a significant stock of general innate ‘concepts’ or judgements, empiricists argued that all ideas are acquired from experience. This debate is replayed with more empirical content and with considerably greater conceptual complexities in contemporary cognitive science, most particularly within the domain of psycholinguistic theory and cognitive developmental theory. Although Chomsky is recognized as one of the main forces in the overthrow of behaviourism and in the initiation of the ‘cognitive era’ ! His relation between psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology has always been an uneasy one. The term ‘psycholinguistics’ is often taken to refer primarily to psychological work on language that is influenced by ideas from linguistic theory. Mainstream cognitive psychologists, for example when they write textbooks, oftentimes prefer the term ‘psychology of language’ the difference is not, however, merely in a name, least be of mention, that both Fodor and Chomsky, who argue that all concepts, or all of linguistic knowledge is innate, lend themselves to this interpretation, against empiricists who argue that there is no innate appeal in explaining the acquisition of language or the facts of cognitive development. But this debate would be a silly and a sterile for obvious reasons, something is innate. Brains are innate, and the structure of the brain must constrain the nature of cognitive and linguistic development to dome degree. Equally obviously, something is learned and is learned as opposed to merely grown as limbs or hair grow. For not all of the world’s citizens end up speaking English, or knowing the Special Theory of Relativity. The interesting questions then all concern exactly what is innate, to what degree it counts as knowledge, and what is learned, and what degree its content and structure are determined by innately specified cognitive structures. And that is plenty to debate about.
Innatist argue that the very presence of linguistic universals argue for the innateness of linguistic knowledge, but more importantly and more compelling that the fact that these universals are, from the standpoint of communicative efficiency, or from the standpoint of any plausible simplicity criterion, adventitious. There are many conceivable grammars, and those determined by universal grammar are not ipso facto the most efficient or the simplest. Nonetheless, all human language satisfy the constraints of universal grammar. Since neither the communicative environment nor the commutative task can explain this phenomenon. It is reasonable to suppose that it is explained by the structure of the mind ~ and, therefore, by fact that the principles of universal grammar lie innate in the mind and constrain the language that a human can acquire.
Linguistic empiricists, answer that there are alternative possible explanations of the existence of such adventitious universal properties of human languages. For one thing, such universals could be explained, Putnam (1975, 1992) argues, by appeal to a common ancestral language, and the inheritance of features of that language by its descendants. Or it might turn out that despite the lack of direct evidence at present the features of universal grammar in fact do serve either the goals of communicative efficacy or simplicity according to a metric of psychological importance. Finally, empiricist point out , he very existence of universal grammar might be a trivial logical artefact (Quine, 1968): for one thing, any finite set of structures will have some feature s in common. Since there are a finite number of languages, it follows trivially that there are features they all share. Moreover, it is argued, many features of universal grammar are interdependent. So in fact the set of functional principles shared by the world’s languages may be rather small. Hence, even if these are innately determined, the amount of innate knowledge thereby required may be quite small as compared with the total corpus of general linguistic knowledge acquired by the first language learner.
These replies are rendered less plausible, innatists argue, when one considers the fact that the errors language learners make in acquiring their first language seem to be driven far more by abstract features of grammar than by any available input data. So, despite receiving correct examples of irregular plurals or past tense forms for verbs, and despite having correctly formed the irregular forms for those words, children will often incorrectly regularize irregular verbs once acquiring mastery of the rule governing regulars in their language. And in general, not only the correct inductions of linguistic rules by young language learners, but more importantly, given the absence of confirmatory data and the presence of refuting data, children’s erroneous inductions are always consistent with universal grammar, often simply representing the incorrect setting of a parameter in the grammar. More generally, innatists argue, that all grammatical rules that have ever been observed satisfy the structure-dependence constraint. That is, many linguists and psycholinguists argue that all known grammatical rules of all the world’s languages, including the fragmentary languages of young children must be stated as rules governing hierarchical sentence structures, and not governing, say, sequence of words. Many of these, such as the constituent-command constraint governing anaphor, are highly abstract indeed, and appear to be respected by even very young children (Solan, 1983 & Crain, 1991). Such constraints may, innatists argue, be necessary conditions of learning natural language I the absence of specific instruction, modelling and correction conditions in which all first language learning acquire their native languages.
An important empiricist answer for these observations derives from recent studies of ‘connectionist’ models of the first language acquisition (Rummelhart & McClelland, 1986, 1987). Connectionist systems, not previously trained to represent any sunset of universal grammar that induce grammar which include a large set of regular forms and a few irregulars also tend to over-regularize, exhibiting the same U-shape learning curve seen in human language acquirers. It is also noteworthy that conceptionist learning systems that induce grammatical systems acquire ‘accidentally’ rules on which they are not explicitly trained, but which are consistent with those upon which they are trained, suggesting that s children acquire position of their grammar, they may accidentally ‘learn’ other consistent rules, which may be correct in other human language, but which then must be ‘unlearned’ in their home language. Yet, such ‘empiricist’ language acquisition systems have yet to demonstrate their ability to induce a sufficiently wide range of the rules hypothesized to be comprised by universal grammar to constitute a definite empirical argument for the possibility of natural language acquisition in the absence of a powerful set of innate constraints.
The poverty of the stimulus argument has been of enormous influence in innateness debates, though its soundness is hotly contested. Chomsky notes that (1) the examples of the target language to which the language learner is exposed are always jointly compatible with an infinite number of alternative grammars, and so vastly undermine the grammar, of the language, and (2) the corpus always contains many examples of ungrammatical sentences, which should in fact, serve as falsifiers of any empirically induced correct grammar of the language, also (3) there is, in general, no explicit reinforcement of correct utterances or correction of incorrect utterances, either by the learner or by those in the immediate training environment. Therefore, he argues, since it is impossible to explain the learning of the correct grammar ~ a task accomplished by all normal children within a very few years ~ on the basis of any available data or known learning algorithms, it must be that the grammar is innately specified, and is merely ‘triggered’ by relevant environmental cues.
Opponents of the linguistic innateness hypothesis, however, point out that the circumstance that Chomsky notes in this argument is hardly specific to language. As well known from arguments due to Hume (1978). Wittgenstein (1953), Goodman (1972) and Kripke (1982), in all cases of empirical abduction, and of training in the use of a word, data under-determine theories. This moral is emphasized by Quine (1954, 1960) as the principle of the undertermination of theory by data. But we, nonetheless, do abduce adequate theories in science, and we do lean the meaning of words. And it would be bizarre to suggest that all correct scientific theories or the facts of lexical semantics are innate.
But, innatists reply, that when the empiricist relies on the underdetermination of theory by data as a counterexample, a significant disanalogousness with language acquisition is ignored: The abduction of scientific theories is a difficult, labourious process, taking a sophisticated theorist a great deal of time and deliberate effort. First language acquisition, by contrast, is accomplished effortlessly and very quickly by a small child. The enormous relative ease with which such a complex and abstractive domain is mastered by such a naïve ‘theorist’ is evidence for the innateness of the knowledge achieved.
Empiricists such as Putnam (1926- ) have rejoined that innateness under-estimate the amount of time that language learning actually takes, focussing only on the number of years from the apparent onset of acquisition to the achievement of relative mastery over the grammar. Instead of noting how short this interval, they argue, one should count the total number of hours spent listening to language and speaking during this time. That number is in fact, quite large, and is comparable to the number of hours of study and practice required in the acquisition of skills that are not argued to derive from innate structures, such as chess playing or musical composition, hence, they argue once the correct temporal parameters are taken into consideration, language learning looks like one more case of human skill acquisition than like a special unfolding of innate knowledge.
Innatists, however, note that while the ease with which most such skills are acquired depends on general intelligence, language, is learned with roughly equal speed, and to roughly the same level of general syntactic mastery regardless of general intelligence. In fact, even significantly retarded individuals, assuming no special language deficit, acquire their native language on a time-scale and to a degree comparable to that of normally intelligent children. The language acquisition faculty hence, appears to allow access to a sophisticated body of knowledge independent of the sophistication of the general knowledge of the language learner. This is, language learning and utilization mechanisms are not outside of language processing. They are informationally encapsulated ~ only linguistic information is relevant to language acquisition and processing. They are mandatory ~ language learning and language processing are automatic. Moreover, language is subserved by specific dedicated neural structures, damage to which predictably and systematically impairs linguistic functioning, and not general cognitive functioning.
Again, the issues at stake in the debate concerning the innateness of such general concepts pertaining to the physical world cannot be s stark a dispute between an innate and one according to which all empirical knowledge is innate. Rather the important ~ and again, always empirical questions concern just what is innate, and just ‘what’ is acquired, and how innate equipment interacts with the world to produce experience. ‘There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience . . . experience it does not follow that all arises out of experience’.
Philosophically, the unconscious mind postulated by psychoanalysis is controversial, since it requires thinking in terms of a partitioned mind and applying a mental vocabulary (intentions, desires, repression) to a part to which we have no conscious access. The problem is whether this merely uses a harmless spatial metaphor of the mind, or whether it involves a philosophical misunderstanding of mental ascription. Other philosophical reservations about psychoanalysis concern the apparently arbitrary and unfalsifiable nature on the interpretative schemes employed. Basically, least of mention, the method of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic therapy for psychological disorders was pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the method relies on or upon an interpretation of what a patient says while ‘freely associating’ or reporting what comes to mind in connection with topics suggested by the analyst. The interpretation proceeds according to the scheme favoured by the analyst, and reveals ideas dominating the unconscious, but previously inadmissible to the conscious mind of the subject. When these are confronted, improvement can be expected. The widespread practice of psychoanalysis is not matched by established data on such rate of improvement.
Nonetheless, the task of analysing psychoanalytic explanation is complicated is initially in several ways. One concerns the relation of theory to practice. There are various perspectives on the relation of psychoanalysis, the therapeutic practice, to the theoretical apparatus built around it, and these lead to different views of psychoanalysis’ claim to cognitive status. The second concerns psychoanalysis’ legitimation. The way that psychoanalytic explanation is understood has immediate implications for one’s view of its truth or acceptability, and this of course a notoriously controversial matter. The third is exegetical. Any philosophical; account of psychoanalysis must of course start with Freud himself, but it will inevitably privilege some strands of his thought at the expense of others, and in so doing favour particular post-Freudian developments over others.
Freud clearly regarded psychoanalysis as engaged principally in the task of explanation, and held fast to his claims for its truth in the course of alterations in his view of the efficacy of psychoanalysis’ advocates have, under pressure, retreated to the view that psychoanalytic theory has merely instrumental value, as facilitating psychoanalytic therapy: But this is not the natural view, which is that explanation is the autonomous goal of psychoanalysis, and that its propositions are truth-evaluable. Accordingly, it seems that preference should be given to whatever reconstruction of psychoanalytic theory does most to advance its claim to truth. Within, of course, exegetical constraints (what a reconstruction offers must be visibly present in Freud’s writings.)
Viewed in these terms, psychoanalytic explanation is an ‘extension’ of ordinary psychology, one that is warranted by demands for explanation generated from within ordinary psychology itself. This has several crucial ramifications. It eliminates, as ill-conceived, the question of psychoanalysis’ scientific status ~ an issue much discussed, as proponents of different philosophies of science have argued for and against psychoanalysis’ agreement with the canons of scientific method, and its degree or lack of correspondence. Demands that psychoanalytic explanation should be demonstrated to receive inductive support, commit itself to testable psychological laws, and contribute effectively to the prediction of action, have then no more pertinence than the same demands pressed on ordinary psychology ~ which is not very great. When the conditions for legitimacy are appropriately scaled down. It is extremely likely that psychoanalysis succeeds in meeting hem: For psychoanalysis does deepen our understanding of psychological laws, improve the predictability of action in principle, and receive inductive support on the special sense which is appropriate to interpretative practices.
Furthermore, to the extent that psychoanalysis may be seen as structured by and serving well-defined needs for explanation, there is proportionately diminished reason for thinking that its legitimation turns on the analysand’s assent to psychoanalytic interpretation, or the transformative power (whatever it may be) of these. Certainly it is true that psychoanalytic explanation has a reflective dimension lacked by explanations in the physical sciences: Psychoanalysis understands its object, the mind, in the very terms that the mind employs in its unconscious workings (such as its belief in its own omnipotence). But this point does not in any way count against the objectivity of psychoanalytic explanation. It does not imply that what it is for a psychoanalytic explanation to be true should be identified, pragmatically, with the fact that an interpretation may, for the analysand who gains self-knowledge, have the function of translating their directed-causes to set about unconscious mentality into a proper conceptual form. Nor does it imply that psychoanalysis’ attribution of unconscious content needs to be understood in anything less than full-bloodedly realistic terms. =truth in psychoanalysis may be taken to consist in correspondence with an independent mental reality, a reality that is both endorsed with ‘subjectivity’ and in many respects puzzling to its owner.
In the twentieth-century, the last major, self-consciously naturalistic school of philosophy was American ‘pragmatism’ as exemplified particularly in the works of John Dewey (1859-1952). The pragmatists replaced traditional metaphysics and epistemology with theories and methods of the sciences, and grounded their view of human life in Darwin’s biology. Following the second world war, pragmatism was eclipsed by logical positivism and what might be called ‘scientific’ positivism, a philosophy of science as the defining characteristic of all scientific statements. Ernst Mach is frequently regarded as the founder of logical positivism, however, in his book The Conservation of Energy, that only the objects of sense experience have any role in science: The task of physics is ‘the discovery of the laws of the connection of sensations (perceptions): And ‘the intuition of space is bound up with the organization of the senses . . . (so that) we are not justified in ascribing spatial properties to things which are not perceived by the senses’. Thus, for Mach, our knowledge of the physical world is derived entirely from sense experience, and the content of science is entirely characterized by the relationships among the data of our experience.
Nevertheless, pragmatism is a going concern in philosophy of science. It is often aligned with he view that scientific theories are not true or false, but are better or worse instruments for prediction and control. For Charles Peirce (1839-1914) identifies truth itself with a kind of instrumentality. A true belief is the very best we could do by way of accounting for the experiences we have, predicting the future course of experience, etc.
Peirce (1834-1914) called the sort of inference which concludes that all A’s are B’s because there are no known instances to the contrary ‘crude induction’. It assumes that future experience will not be ‘utterly at variance’ with past experience. This is, Peirce says, the only kind of induction in which we are able to infer the truth of a universal generalization. Its flaw is that ‘it is liable at any moment to be utterly shattered by a single experience’, that is to say, that warranted belief is possible only at the observational level. Induction tells us what theories are empirically successful, and thereby what explanations are successful. But the success of an explanation cannot, for historical reasons, be taken as an indicator of its truth.
The thesis that the goal of inquiry is permanently settled belief, and the thesis that the scientific attitude is a disinterested desire for truth, are united by Peirce’s definition of ‘true’. He does not think it false to say that truth is correspondence to reality, but shallow ~ a merely nominal definition, giving no insight into the concept. His pragmatic definition identifies the truth with the hypothetical ideal, which would be the final outcome of scientific inquiry were it to continue indefinitely. ‘Truth is that concordance of . . . [a] statement beliefs’: any truth more perfect than this destined conclusion, any reality more absolute than what is thought in it, is a fiction of metaphysics’. These reveal something both of the subtlety and of the potential for tension, without Peirce’s philosophy. His account of reality aims at a delicate compromise between the undesirable extremes of transcendentalism and idealism, his account of truth at a delicate compromise between the twin desiderata of objectivity and (in-principle) accessibility.
The question of what is and what is not philosophy is not a simply a query of classification. In philosophy, the concepts with which we approach the world themselves become the topic of enquiry. A philosophy of a discipline such as history, physics, or law seeks not so much to solve historical, physical, or legal questions, as to study the concepts that structure such thinking,. And to lay bare their foundations and presuppositions. In this sense philosophy is what happens when a practice becomes self-conscious. The borderline between such ‘second-order’ reflection, and, ways of practising the first-order discipline itself, is not always clear: Philosophical problems may be tamed by the advance of a discipline, and the conduct of a discipline may be swayed by philosophical reflection. But the doctrine neglects the fact that self-consciousness and reflection co-exist with activity. At different times there has been more or less optimism about the possibility of a pure or ‘first’ philosophy, taking from the stand-point from which other intellectual practices can be impartially assessed and subjected to logical evaluation and correction, in that he task of the philosopher of a discipline would then be to reveal the correct method and to unmask counterfeits. Although this belief lay behind much ‘positivist’ philosophy of science, few philosophers now subscribe to it. The contemporary spirit of the subject is hostile to any such possibility, and prefers to see philosophical reflection as continuous with the best practising employment of intellectual fields of rationalizations intended reasons for enquiry.
Nonetheless, the last two decades have been an intermittent interval of extraordinary change in psychology. Cognitive psychology, which focuses on higher mental processes like reasoning, decision making, problem solving, language processing and higher-level visual processing, has become a ~ perhaps the ~ dominant paradigm among experimental psychologists, while behaviouristic oriented approaches have gradually fallen into disfavour. Largely as a result of this paradigm shift, the level of interaction between the disciplines of philosophy and psychology has increased dramatically.
One of the central goals of the philosophy of science is to provide explicit and systematic accounts of the theories and explanatory strategies exploited in the sciences. Another common goal is to construct philosophically illuminating analyses or explications of central theoretical concepts invoked in one or another science. In the philosophy of biology, for example, there is a rich literature aimed at understanding teleological explanations, and there has been a great deal of work on the structure of evolutionary theory and on such crucial conceptual perspectives proposed in biological function.
Typically, a functional explanation in biology says that an organ χ’ is present in an animal because ‘χ’ has function ‘F’. What does that mean?
Some philosophers maintain that an activity of an organ counts as a function only if the ancestors of the organ’s owner were naturally selected partly because they had similar organs that performed the same activity. Thus, the historical-causal property, having conferred a selective advantage, is not just evidence that ‘F’ is a function, it is constitutive of F’s being purposively functional.
If this reductive analysis is right, a functional explanation turns out to be sketchy causal explanation of the origin of ‘χ’. It makes the explanation scientifically respectable. The ‘because’ indicates a weak relation of partial causal contribution.
However, this construal is not satisfying intuitively. To say that ‘χ’ is present because it has a function is normally taken to mean, roughly, that ‘χ’ is present it is supposed to do something useful. Yet, this normal interpretation immediately makes the explanation scientifically problematic, because the claim that ‘χ’ is supposed to do something useful appears to be normative and non-objective.
The philosophy of physics is another area in which studies of this sort have been actively pursued. In undertaking this work, philosophers need not ans do not assume that there is anything wrong with the science they are studying. Their goal is simply to provide accounts of the theories, concepts and explanatorial strategies that scientists are using ~ accounts that are more explicit, systematic and philosophically sophisticated than the often rather rough-and-ready accounts offered by the scientists themselves.
This account of intentionality is characteristic to perception and action, so that the paradigms that are usually founded of belief or sometimes beliefs and desires are key to understanding intentionality whose representation in a special sense of that word that we can explain intentional states in general, as having both a propositional content and a psychological mode, and the psychological mode which determines the direction with which the intentional state represents its conditions of satisfaction. These considerations are characteristic of all those intentional states with propositional content which do not have a mind-to-world or world-to-mind direction: All of these contain beliefs and desires, and the component beliefs and desires do have an initial direction of fit.
Once, again, of intentionality that the paradigm cases discussed are usually beliefs or sometimes beliefs and desires. However, the biologically most basic forms of intentionality are in perception and intentional action. These also have certain formal features which are not common to beliefs and desires. Consider a case of perception. Suppose I see my hand in front of my face. What are the conditions of satisfaction? First, the perceptual experience of the hand in front of my face has as its condition of satisfaction that there is a hand in front of my face. Thus far the condition of satisfaction is the same as the belief that there is a hand in front of my face. Bu t with perceptual experience there is this difference: In order that the intentional content be satisfied, the fact that there is a hand in front of my face must cause the very experience whose intentional content is that there is a hand in front of my face. This has the consequence that perception has a special kind of condition of satisfaction that we might describe as ‘causally self-referential’. The full conditions of satisfaction of the perceptual experience are, first, that there be a hand in front of my face, and second, that there is a hand in front of my face caused the very experience of whose conditions of satisfaction it forms a part. We can represent this in our canonical form as:
Visual experience (that there is a hand in front of my face and the fact that there is a hand in front of my face is causing this very experience.)
Furthermore, visual experience have a kind o conscious immediacy not characteristic of beliefs and desires. A person can literally be said to have beliefs and desires while sound asleep. But one can only have visual experiences of a non-pathological kind when one is fully awake and conscious because the visual experience are themselves forms of consciousness.
Event memory is a kind of halfway house between the perceptual experience and the belief. Memory, like perceptual experience Has the causally self-referential feature. Unless the memory is caused by the event, of which it is the memory. It is not a case of satisfied memory, but unlike the visual experience, it need not be conscious. One can be said to remember something while sound asleep. Beliefs, memory and perception all have the mind-to-world direction and memory and perception have the world-to-mind direction of causation.
Increasingly, proponents of the intentional theory of perception argue that perceptual experience is to be differentiated from belief not only in terms of attitude, but also in terms of the kind of content the experience is an attitude towards ascribing contents to be in a certain set-class of content-involving states is for attributes of these states to make the subject as rationally intelligible as possibility, in the circumstances. In one form or another, this idea is found in the writings of Davidson (1917-2003), who introduced the position known as ‘anomalous monism’ in the philosophy of mind, instigating a vigorous debate over the relation between mental and physical descriptions of persons, and the possibility of genuine explanation of events in terms of psychological properties. Although Davidson is a defender of the doctrine of the ‘indeterminacy of radical translation and the ‘indisputability of references, his approach has seemed to many to offer some hope of identifying meaning as a respectable notion, even within a broadly ‘extentionalized’ approach to language. Davidson is also known for rejection of the idea of a ‘conceptual scheme’, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is anything to translate.
Intentional action has interesting symmetries and asymmetries to perception. Like perceptual experiences, the experiential component of intentional action is causally self-referential. If, for example, I am now walking to my car, then the condition of walking to my car, then experience is that satisfaction of the present experience is that there be certain bodily movements, and that this very experience of acting cause those bodily movements. What is more, like perceptual experience, the experience of acting is typically a conscious mental event. However, unlike the perception memory, the direction of the experience of acting is world-to-mind. My intention will only be fully carried out if the world changes so as to match the content of the intention (hence world-to-mind direction (hence world-to-mind proves directional) and the intention will only be fully satisfied if the intention itself causes the rest of the condition of satisfaction, hence, mind-to-world direction of causation.
The word ‘intensional’ was coined as the converse of ‘extensional’ and both notions figure prominently in semantics and logic. When logicians speak of the extension of a predicate such as, for example, ‘is a horse’, they have in mind the set of creatures that this predicate picks out. But in addition to its extension: A predicate can be understood to have an intension, some feature - grasped by anyone who has some feature - grasped by anyone who has linguistic mastery of the predicate - that determines the extension. There are various proposals in the literature for more specific accounts of intension in respect of predicates. For example, some think of the intension as something like the meaning of the predicate, while others prefer to think of it in more formal terms as the principle [function] that would determine the set of things which are horses in any possible world.
Predication is not the only linguistic construction which have extensions as well as intensions. Most importantly, and due mainly to the work of the logician and philosopher Gottlob Frége (1848-1925), whose first important work, the Begriffsschrift (‘concept writing’, 1879) is also the first example of a formal system in the sense of modern logic. In it Frége undertakes to devise a formal system within which mathematical proofs may be given. It was his discovery of the correct representation of generality, the notion of ‘quantifier’ and ‘Variable’, that opened the possibility of successfully achieving this aim. With that notation Frége could represent sentences involving multiple generality (such as the form for every small number as ‘e’ there is a number ‘n’ such that . . . ‘] on which the validity of such mathematical reasoning depends. The Begriffsschrift also contains the elements of the ‘propositional calculus’, including an informal presentation of the notion of a ‘truth-function’. It is universally acknowledged to mark the beginning of modern logic. In 1884 Frége published the der Arthritic, and then propounds his own approach to the subject, analysing the basic concepts of mathematics in such a form that a reduction of arithmetic to operations that are fundamentally logical in nature becomes a real possibility. The first volume of the Grundgestze der Arithmetic (1893, translated as, The Basic Laws of Arithmetic, 1964) formalized the mathematical approach of the Grundlagen: A task that necessitated giving the first formal theory of classes: It was this theory that was later shown inconsistent by Russel’s paradox. Volume ii of the Grundgesetze, concerned mainly with the theory of real numbers, and was published in 1903. Frége’s own reaction to Russell’s [paradox, after understandable initial consternation, was to modify one of his own axioms, the result, however, was not eventually tenable, and it was only with Zermelo’s work that the modern conception of ‘set theory’ was put on a satisfactory footing.
Frége’s distinction as a logician is matched by his deep concern with the basic semantic concepts involved in the logical foundations of his work. In a succession of papers he forgets the basic concepts and distinctions that have dominated subsequent philosophical investigation of logic and language. The topics of these writings include sense (*Sinn) and ‘reference’, concepts’, ‘functions’, and ‘objects’, identity’, ‘negation’, ‘assertion’, ‘truth/falsity’, and the nature of thought. Although his relations to the philosophical surroundings of his time are debatable, these concerns and his approach ti them stamp Frége as the founding figure of ‘analytical philosophy’. However, his concern to protect a timeless objectivity for thought and its contents has led in accusations of Platonism, and his own views of the objects of mathematics troubled him until the end of his life.
Yet, its most important, and due mainly to the work of the logician and philosopher Frége. It is usually to describe sentences as having tem. Thus, the extension of a sentence is taken to be a truth value (either true or false, or, in multi-valued logics, some further value). And the intension of a sentence could be variously understood as the thought expressed by it. Its meaning, or the function from the sentence to a truth value in any possible world. Additionally, one can think of proper names as having both intension and extension. The extension of the name ‘Mark Twain’ is the human being who wrote various well-known books. Its intension is less easy to describe in everyday terms: Some think of it as the individual concept that determines the author, while others prefer to stick with the possible-world definition and say that the intension of - ‘Mark Twain’ is the function that picks out that author in any possible world. In logic and philosophy of language, the whole question of how to understand intension is fraught with difficulties, but the outlines of the notion are clear enough.
Of special importance in the philosophy of mind is the use of this pair of terms in connection with sentences attributing propositional attitudes. Consider the sentence ‘John believes that Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn’. The sentence contained within this attitude report. ‘Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn’ happens to be true. In the terminology introduced above, one would say that its extension was the truth value true. Moreover, since Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens, one could replace the author’s name in this sentience without changing its extension, for ‘Samuel Clemens wrote Huckleberry Finn’ is also true. When such replacement or substitution does not change the truth value, the sentence within which the substitutions are made is said to make up an ‘extensional context’. Returning now to the attitude report that contains the sentence about Mark Twain, one can see problems for substitution. The believer, John, may not know that ‘Mark Twain’ was the name adopted by Samuel Clemens and many feel that, in this event, it is just false to say: ‘John believes that Samuel Clemens wrote Huckleberry Finn’. The fact that substitution fails in this way to preserve extension (truth value) is captured by saying that the belief report make up an intensional context. That is, it is a context where one can preserve truth value only by substituting expressions with the same intension. (It should be marked and noted that it is controversial whether one ought to appeal to intension in saying what is going on in this case.)
Though the word ‘intension’ has a technical sense in semantics deriving from its opposite number ‘extension’, there is what can be an initially confusing similarity between ‘intensional’ and ‘intentional’. The second of this pair - the one spelled with a ‘t’ in place of ‘s’ - has been widely used to describe the feature of propositional attitudes by which they are said to be about or directed to something: Thus, with the earlier example in mind, one would say that John’s belief is about or directed to Mark Twain and his authorship of Huckleberry Finn. Propositional attitudes have what philosophers call ‘intentionality’. And confusion can arise because, as was noted fusion can arise because, as of propositional attitude reports, constitute intensional (with an ‘s’) contexts.
Again, our concept of ‘intention’ is a central part of a web of concepts at the heart of our common-sense conception s of intelligent agency. Included also in this web are concepts of various attitudes, like belief, knowledge, and desire: General notions of meaning, and concepts that classify actions - for example, concepts of intentional action and of free action. The Brentano’s thesis takes aim of the ‘Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint’ (1874), it is the ‘intentionality’ or ‘directedness’ of mental states that marks off the mental from the physical. Folk psychology was originally a disparaging term, now widely used, for the process of attributing thoughts, beliefs, intentions, and meaning to each other (the ‘folk’ referred to include such masters of human understanding as Shakespeare and Tolstoy from administering to that of an ordinary processes of attribution do not seem ‘scientific’, and the categories they use fit with difficulty into categories of physical science. Often the term invites contrast with a supposed future when there will be a science whose terms will quite eclipse the categories with which we normally describe each other, perhaps by being more comprehensive, less vague, and better matched to a scientific understanding of ourselves.
Reductionism has provoked a somewhat different reaction among which philosophers of mental properties, prompting such that of a reductionist that holds that the facts or entities apparently needed to make true the statement of some area of discourse are dispensable in favour of some other facts or entities. Reductionism is one solution to the problem of the relationship between different sciences. Thus, one might advocate reducing biology to chemistry, supposing that no distinctive biological facts exist, or chemistry to physics, supposing that no distinctive chemical facts exist, so that, the doctrine that the special science - biology, chemistry, geology, economics, psychology - can eventually be reduced to one overarching science, usually thought of as physics. The reduction will be accomplished by providing an ‘image’ of the special science in the universal science, so that the laws of the special science turned out to be special cases of the universal way things are. The ideal was a central part of ‘logical positivist’ thinking about science, and still influences many philosophers of a ‘physicalists bent’.
Moreover, reductionist positioning in philosophy include the belief that mental descriptions are made true purely by facts about behaviour (behaviourism), that statements about the external world are made true by facts about the structure of experience (phenomenalism), that statements about moral issues are really statements about natural facts (naturalism) and many others. Reductionism is properly speaking not a form of ‘scepticism’ (for the claim in the reduced area may be true and known to be true: Indeed, one purpose of the reduction will typically be to show how this is so). Nor is it necessarily a form of anti-realism, for which the standard opposition between those who affirm, and those who deny, the real existence of some kind of thing, or some kind of fact or state of affairs one influential suggestion, associated with the British philosopher of logic and language, Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett (1925-) whose work centres upon the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mathematics, and shows a marked sympathy with ‘verificationist’ and ‘constructivist’ ideals. Dummett is also known for an uncompromising re-evaluation of the western tradition, viewing writing before the rise of ‘analytic philosophy’ as fatally flawed by having taken epistemology to be fundamental, whereas the correct approach, giving a foundational place to a concern with language, only too k wing with the work of Frége. . however, reductionist claims were popular in the earlier years of ‘analytic philosophy’ and were pursued by such writers as Russell and the German logical positivist Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), in the form of programmers of translating the theses from the target science or discourse into theses from the domain to which it was to be reduced. Subsequent recognition of the ‘holism of meaning’ and the apparent failure of these reductionist programmers, switched attention to other ways of obtaining the benefits of reduction without incurring the costs of providing the promised translation.
The notion of supervenience is exploited in many areas: For example, biological properties plausibly supervene upon chemical ones, and mental properties and powers upon categorical ones, and so forth. One promise the notion holds out is that by its means we can understand the relation of such different layers of description without attempting a reduction of the one area to the other. The value of this promise depends on how well we understand the supervenience relation itself. If it is a dangling, inexplicable, metaphysical fact that the F’s relate in this way to the G’s, then supervenience inherits rather than solves the problem of understanding the various areas. Descriptions of a thing at one level can be true in virtue of some underlying properties, in this way that the description of a computer as running such-and-such a program is true in virtue of the configurations of its circuitry. It may then be true, that other configurations at the lower level could have had the same result, and where this is so it is said that the higher-level properties can be variably realized by the lower-level ones. In the philosophy of mind, it is plausible to think that a person’s psychological stares could be realized by a variety of different configurations at the neural level. The point is sometimes used to argue the superiority of ‘functionalism’ over ‘mind-brain’ identity theories.
Seemingly, to have an intention is to be in a state of mind that is favourably directed towards bringing about for maintaining, or avoiding some state of affairs, but which is not a mere desire or wish, since it also sets the subject on a course to bring that state of affairs about. The notion thus inherits all the problems of ‘intentionality’. The specific problems it raises include characterizing the difference between doing something accidentally and doing it intentionally. However, the suggestion that the difference lies in a preceding act of mind or volition is not very entertained, since one may automatically do what is nevertheless intentional. For example, putting one’s foot forward while walking. Conversely, unless the formation of a volition is intentional, and thus raises the same questions, the presence of a volition might be unintentional or beyond one’s control. Intentions are more finely grained than movements: One set of movements may both be answering the question and starting by its wagering of war, yet the one may be intentional and the other not.
The term ‘intentionality’ was used by the scholastics, but revived in the 19th century by the German philosopher and psychologist Franz Clemens Brentano (1838-1917), whose major work was Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874, and translated as, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, 1973) which rehabilitates the medieval concentration upon the ‘directedness’ or ‘intentionality’ of the mental as a fundamental aspect of thought and consciousness. Brentano also wrote on theological matters, and on moral philosophy, where the directedness of emotions allows a notion of their correct and incorrect objects, thus permitting him a notion of moral objectivity. The Brentano’s thesis proposed in, Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), that it is the ‘intentionality’ or ‘directedness’ of mental states that mark off the mental from the physical.
Our beliefs, thoughts, wishes, dreams, and desires are about things. Equally, the words we use to express these beliefs and other mental states are about things. The problem of intentionality is that of understanding the relation obtaining between a mental state, or its expression, and the things it is about. A number of peculiarities attend this reflation. First, if I am in some relation to a chair, for instance, by sitting on it, then both it and I must exist. But while mostly one thinks about things that exist, sometimes, although this way of putting it has its problems, for which one has beliefs, hopes, and fears about things that do not, as when the child expects Santa Claus, and the adult fears the wrath of God. Secondly, if I sit on the chair, and the chair is the oldest antique to be seen in all of Toronto, then I sit on the oldest antique in Toronto. But if I plan to avoid the mad axeman, and the mad axeman is in fact my letter-carrier, I do not therefore plan to avoid my friendly postman. As a distinction between the context into which referring expressions can be put, a context is referentially transparent if any two terms referring to the same thing can be substituted in it as, i.e., without altering the truth or falsity of what is said. A context is referentially opaque when this is not so. Thus, if the number of the planets is nine, then ‘the number of the planets is odd’ has the same truth-value as ‘nine is odd’. Whereas, ‘necessarily the number of planets is odd’ or ‘x knows that the number of planets is odd’ need not have the same truth-value just as ‘necessarily nine is odd’ or ‘x knows that nine is odd’. So while’ . . . is odd’ provides a transparent context, ‘necessarily . . . is odd’ and that ‘x knows that . . . is odd’, do not.
To a greater extent, the extension of a predicate is the class of objects that it describes: The extension of ‘red’ in the class of red things. The intension is the principle under which it picks them out, or in other words the condition of a thing must satisfy to be truly described by the predicate. Two predicates (‘ . . . is a rational animal’ . . . is a naturally featherless biped’) might pick out the same class but they do so by a different condition. If the notions are extended to other items, then the extension of a sentence is its truth-value, and its intension of thought or proposition, and the extension of a singular term is the object referred to by it, if it so refers, and its intension is the concept by means of which the object is picked out. A sentence puts a predicate or other term in an extensional context if any other predicate or term with the same extension can be substituted without it being possible that the truth-value changes: If John is a rational animal, and we substitute the co-extensive ‘is a naturally featherless biped. Other contexts, such as ‘Mary believes that John is a rational animal’, may not allow the substitution, and are called intensional context of use.
Again, intentional relations seem to depend on how the object is specified, or as Frége had implicated, on the mode of presentation of the object. This makes them quite unlike the relation whose logic we can understand by means of the ‘predicate calculus, and this peculiarity has led some philosophers, notably the American philosopher of the latter half of the 20th century Willard van Orman Quine (1908-2000), whose approaches to the major problems of philosophy have been attacked as betraying undue scientism and sometimes behaviouralism, the clarity of his vision and the scope of his writing made him the major focus of Anglo-American work of the second half of the 20th century in logic, semantics, and epistemology.
Basic to eliminativism is the view that the terms in which we think of some areae sufficiently infected with error for it to be better to abandon them than to continue to try to give coherence theories of their use. Eliminativism should be distinguished from scepticism, which claims that we cannot know the truth about some area: Eliminativism claims rather that there is no truth there to be known, in the terms with which we currently think. An eliminativist about theology simply counsels abandoning the terms of discourse of theology, and that will include abandoning worriers about the extent of theological knowledge. Eliminativists in the philosophy of mind counsel abandoning the whole network of terms min d, consciousness, self, qualia that usher in the problems of mind and body. Sometimes the argument for doing this is that we should wait for a supposed future understanding of ourselves, based on cognitive science and better than any our current mental descriptions provide: Sometimes it is supposed that ‘physicalism’ shows that no mental descriptions of ourselves could possibly be true.
More widespread is the view that since the concept is indispensable, we must either declare serious science unable to deal with the central feature of the mind, or explain how serious science may include intentionality. One approach is to suggest that while the linguistic forms in which we communicate fears and beliefs have a two-faced aspect, involving both the objects referred to, and the mode of presentation under which they are thought or, we can see the mind as essentially directed onto existent things, and extensionally related to them. Intentionality then becomes a feature of language, than a metaphysical or ontological peculiarity of the mental world.
Nonetheless, one might try to come to terms with commitment while staying within the desire-belief framework by emphasizing the relation between an intention to ‘A’ and a belief that one will. Of course, many beliefs about one’s future conduct are not intentions, as I might believe I will miss a shot in a basketball game and yet, not intend to miss, and I a foot race I might believe I will wear down my sneakers but not intend to wear them down. The English philosopher of law, language and ethics, Jeremy Bentham (1784-1832) states that of one’s belief as termed for which that I might be said ‘obliquely’ to intend to wear down my sneakers, whereas I ‘directly’ intend to run. However, our concern here is with so-called ‘direct’ intention. A defender of a belief-conception of intention will need to specify further the type of belief about my own conduct in which my intention consists. Velleman (1989), for example, argues that my intention to ‘A’ is my belief, adopted out of my desire for its truth, that I will ‘A’ as a result of this very belief. This introduces two further ideas. The idea that intentions involve a kind of self-reverentially is developed in a number of recent studies, many of which reject the identification of intention and belief. The idea that intentions are beliefs that are adopted out of relevant desires raises issues that had been subjected by the English philosopher of language Paul Herbert Grice (1913-88)(1971).
Grice had argued that my intention to ‘A’ does indeed require a belief on my part that I will ‘A’. In this respect Vellenians’s account follows Grice’s. But Grice went on to argue that my intention cannot just be identified with some such belief. Suppose I intend to go to London tomorrow. If this is a belief of mine that I will go, we may ask what my justification is for that belief. Grice worried, roughly, that if my justification for my belief were my desire to go, that would make my case one of wishful thinking. But if my justification were instead some form of inductive evidence (as when I expect I will sneeze when I am exposed to your cat) then my belief would be an ordinary predication and not an intention. Grice concluded that my intention to go, while involved my belief that I will go, could not be identified simply with my belief. Instead, my intention also involves a special attitude of ‘willing’ that I go. Willing that I go does not itself involve something like wishing wholeheartedly that I go - so willing is not merely desiring. To intend to go is to will that I go and to believe that, as a result of such willing, I will go. My intention involves that belief that I will go, but this belief is based on evidence that includes my knowledge that, that is what I will.
Grice and Velleman agree that an intention to ‘A’ at least involves a belief that one will ‘A’. In a later examination (1980, essay 5) Davidson gave on his earlier claim that talk of intention was never talk about some state or even of intending. But he also argued that an intention to ‘A’ does not require a belief that one will ‘A’ (though it does require that one not think it impossible that one wills ‘A’). I might intend to achieve some goal and yet be doubtful about my ultimate success. Rather than understand intention as consisting, at least in part, in a belief that one will so act. Davidson argues that we could see intention as a special kind of evaluation of conduct. Continuing, that Davidson treats a desire to act in a certain way as a prima facie judgement that so acting would be, in some respect, desirable judgement, but it is not merely a prima facie judgement. It is what Davidson calls an ‘all-out judgement’. My intention to go to London, for example, is my ‘all-out judgement’ that my so acting would be best. In reaching such an all-out evaluation judgement I am settled on so acting. And Davidson took great pains to argue that, contrary to initial appearances, this view is compatible with the possibility of weak-willed intentions - intentions that are contrary to one’s best judgement about what to do.
The presence of a reason for believing or acting does not necessarily make it rational for one to believe or act in that way. However, the overall view is that of one may have other belief s which provide conflicting evidence, or conflicting desires. To establish what is rational to believe or do overall we would need to take into account principles for weighing competing beliefs and desires. Of course, we do not always believe what is rational, or act in the light of what we judge best, as, perhaps, a sliding implication toward self-deception or as we have made mention, to the weakness of will. Nonetheless, a minimum of rationality must be present in the pattern of a person’s beliefs, desires, intentions and actions before they can be regarded as an agent with intentional states at all.
It is common to see such reasoning as consisting in the weighing of desire-belief reasons for and against conflicting alternatives. But we also sometimes decide to act a certain way and then reason about how. I can decide - and so form an intention - to go to London next week. Given this new intention I will need to reason about how I am going to get there. In such reasoning my intention to go to London provides an end, and my reasoning aims at settling on appropriate means. A general conception of practical reasoning should make room for, and explain the inter-relations between, both kinds of practical reasoning - the weighing of desire-belief reasons, and reasoning about how to do what one already intends to do.
These observations suggest yet another way of approaching intention. Castanēda (1975) has developed a version of this approach. He sees intention as the acceptance of a distinctive kind of content - what he calls a ‘first-person practition’. A practition is, roughly, the content normally involved in commands and prescriptions. If, for example,, I order you to open the window my command has the content: You to open the window. Typical commands are addressed to others. But intentions are analogous to self-addressed commands - to intend is to accept a first-person practician. To intend to open the window is to endorse the practician: I to open the window. This is not to say that for me so to intend I must literally perform a speech act of commanding myself so to acting have a structure and logic analogous to that of the contents of ordinary commands and prescriptions.
Castanēda tries to develop an account of the special logical relations between such practicians and ordinary propositions, the contents of beliefs. At the heart of this special logic is the idea that a practician, ‘S’ to ‘A’. Neither implies nor is implied by its underlying motivation for trying to develop such a special logic includes two ideas. (a) We understand intention in large part in terms of its roles in practical reasoning: (b) We understand those roles by articulating a special logic of the contents that are distinctive of intention.
Nonetheless, we can accept the tenet (a) without following Castanēda in also accepting (b). We can try to lay out the roles of intention in practical reasoning - including its roles as a distinctive input to such reasoning - without supposing that we need some special logic of the contents of intending. For we can distinguish a theory of reasoning from a theory of logical implication.
The idea is to say what intentions are in part by saying how they function in practical reasoning, without assuming that to do this we must articulate a special logic of the distinctive contents of intentions. In particular, we try to articulate the roles of future-directed intentions in practical reasoning, and we try to say how these roles differ from those played by desire and beliefs.
An account of the roles of intentions in practical reasoning should support, and be supported by, answers to our earlier question: Why bother with intentions for the future anyway? Here one may argue that there are two main answers. First, we are not frictionless deliberations. Deliberation is a process that takes time and uses other resources, so there are limits of action. By settling on future-directed intention we allow present deliberation to shape later conduct, thereby extending the influence of Reason on our lives. Second, we have pressing needs for coordination, both intra-personal and social: And future directed intentions play a central role in our efforts at achieving such coordination.
Future-directed intention typically plays roles as elements of larger, partial plans. My inhesions to go to London this Sunday helps coordinate my various activities for this weekend, and my activities with the activities of others, by entering into a large plan of action. Such plans will typically be partial and will need to be filled in as time goes by with appropriate specifications of means, preliminary steps, and the like. In filling in such partial plans in stages we engage in a kind of practical reasoning that is distinctive of planning agents like us and that is, on the view being considered, central to our understanding of intention. Such approaches seek to articulate the basic principles involved in such planning. In this way they try to shed light on the nature of psychological attitudes, like belief and desire.
Such planning conceptions of intention focus on intention as a state of mind, and pay special attention to future-directed intentions and plans. But it can be asked whether the structures that are thereby revealed are peculiar to the special case of sophisticated agents engaged in planning for the future, and not generally applicable to all cases of intentional action. Are there agents capable of intentional action but not capable of such future-directed planning? Even for planning agents, are there some intentional activities (e.g., relatively spontaneous and yet intentional conduct) that do not plausibly involve the kinds of psychological structures highlighted by a focus on future-directed intention?
We are reminded of these queries from which Anscombe’s (1963) general question of how to understand the relation between intention as a state of mind and the characterization of action as intentional or done with a certain intention. According to what has been called ‘the Simple View’ intentional A-ing always involves intending to ‘A’. But some argue that there are cases in which one intentionally ‘As’ and yet, though one does intend something one does not, strictly speaking, intend to ‘A’. The concerns raised in the previously suggest that planning conceptions of intention may drive an even greater wedge between intention as a state of mind and the characterization of action as intentional. If so, we need to ask whether that is an acceptable conclusion. Anscombe (1963) had argued that it is implausible that ‘intention’ is equivocal in these different contexts. In contrast, Velleman argues that we should give up on the search for a unitary meaning of ‘intention’.
These debates about intention interact with a wide range of issues, for example, it is common to suppose that an agent’s desires and beliefs give to reason for their action. If we see an intention as a distinctive attitude, over and above an agent’s desires and beliefs, we will want to know how this attitude affects what reasons the agent has to act in various ways and what it is to act in various ways and what it is rational for the agent to do.
The formulation ‘Actions are doing that are intentional under some description’ reflects the minimizing view of the individuation of actions. The idea I s that for what I did to count as an action, there must be a description ‘V-ing’ of what I did, such that I V’d intentionally. These descriptions of my one action of greeting you by telephone, I presumably did not know or care about the modification I was causing in the current. Still, since (on the minimizing view) my causing the modifications was the ame event as my greeting you, and I greeted you intentionally, this event was an action on the phone, I Thought it was my spouse. Still, I said ‘Good morning’ intentionally, and that suffices for this event, however described, to be an action. My snoring and involuntary coughing, however, are not intentional under any verbal description, and so are not actions.
The distinction between reason and causes is motivated in good part by a desire to separate the rational from the natural order. Many who have insisted on distinguishing reasons from causes have failed to distinguish two kinds of reason. Consider my reason for sending a letter by express mail. Asked why I did so, I might say I wanted to get it there in a day, or simply: to get it there in a day. Strictly, the reason is expressed by ‘to get it there in a day’. But what this expresses are my reasons only because I am suitably motivated, in that I am in a reason state, wanting to get the letter there in a day. ~ especially wants reason states, beliefs and intentional ~ and not reasons strictly so called, that are candidates for causes. The latter are abstract contents of propositional altitudes, as the former are psychological elements that play motivational roles.
It has also seemed to those who deny that reasons are causes that the former justifies, as well as explain the actions for which they are reasons, whereas the role of causes is at most to explain. Another claim is that the relation between reasons (and here reason states are often cited explicitly) and the action they explain is non-contingent: Whereas, the relation of causes to their effects is contingent. The ‘logical connection argument’ proceeds from this claim to the conclusion that reasons are mot causes.
All and all, the explanation as framed in terms of reason and causes, and there are many differing analyses of such concepts as intention and agency. Expanding the domain beyond consciousness. Freud maintained, in addition, that much human behaviour can be explained in terms of unconscious wishes. These Freudian explanations should probably be construed as basically causal.
Problems arise when teleological explanations are offered in other context. The behaviour of non-human animals is often explained in terms of purpose, e.g., the mouse ran to escape from the cat. In such cases the existence of conscious purpose seems dubious. The situation is still more problematic when a super-empirical purpose is invoked ~, e.g., the explanation of living species in terms of God’s purpose, or the vitalistic explanation of biological phenomena in terms of an entelechy or vital principle. In recent years an ‘anthropic principle’ has received attention in cosmology. All such explanations have been condemned by many philosophers as anthropomorphic.
The preceding objection, for and all, that philosophers and scientists often maintain that functional explanations play an important and legitimate role in various sciences such as evolutionary biology, anthropology and sociology. For example, the case of the peppered moth in Liverpool, the change in colour and back again to the light phase provided adaption to a changing environment and fulfilled the function of reducing predation on the species. In the study of primitive societies anthropologists have maintained that various rituals, e.g., a rain dance, which may be inefficacious in brings about their manifest goals, e.g., producing rain. Actually fulfil the latent function of increasing social cohesion at a period of stress, e.g., theological and/or functional explanations in common sense and science often take pains to argue that such explanations can be analysed entirely in terms of efficient causes, thereby escaping the change of anthropomorphism, yet not all philosophers agree.
Mainly to avoid the incursion of unwanted theology, metaphysics, or anthropomorphism into science, many philosophers and scientist ~ especially during the first half of the twentieth century ~ held that science provides only descriptions and predictions of natural phenomena, but not explanations. Beginning in the 1930s, however, a series of influential philosophers of science ~ including Karl Pooper (1935) Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim (1948) and Hempel (1965) ~ maintained that empirical science can explain natural phenomena without appealing to metaphysics and theology. It appears that this view is now accepted by a vast majority of philosophers of science, though there is sharp disagreement on the nature of scientific explanation.
The previous approach, developed by Hempel Popper and others became virtually a ‘received view’ in the 1960s and 1970s. According to this view, to give scientific explanation of an natural phenomenon is to show how this phenomenon can be subsumed under a law of nature. A particular rupture in a water pipe can be explained by citing the universal law that water expands when it freezes and the fact that the temperature of the water in the pipe dropped below the freezing point. General laws, as well as particular facts, can be explained by subsumption. The law of conservation of linear momentum can be explained by derivation from Newton’s second and third laws of motion. Each of these explanations is a deductive argument: The premisses constitute the explanans and the conclusion is the explanandum. The explanans contain one or more statements of universal laws and, in many cases, statements describing initial conditions. This pattern of explanation is known as the ‘deductive-nomological model’ any such argument shows that the explanandum had to occur given the explanans.
Moreover, in contrast to the foregoing views ~ which stress such factors as logical relations, laws of nature and causality ~ a number of philosophers have argued that explanation, and not just scientific explanation, can be analysed entirely in pragmatic terms.
During the past half-century much philosophical attention has been focussed on explanation in science and in history. Considerable controversy has surrounded the question of whether historical explanation must be scientific, or whether history requires explanations of different types. Many diverse views have been articulated: the foregoing brief survey does not exhaust the variety.
In everyday life we encounter many types of explanation, which appear not to raise philosophical difficulties, in addition to those already of mention. Prior to take-off a flight attendant explains how to use the safety equipment on the aeroplane. In a museum the guide explains the significance of a famous painting. A mathematics teacher explains a geometrical proof to be a bewildered student. A newspaper story explains how a prisoner escaped. Additional examples come easily to mind. The main point is to remember the great variety of context in which explanations are sought and given.
Another item of importance to epistemology is the widely held notion that non-demonstrative inference can be characterized as the inference to the best explanation. Given the variety of views on the nature of explanation, this popular slogan can hardly provide a useful philosophical analysis.
There are various ways of classifying mental activities and states. One useful distinction is that between the propositional attitudes and everything else. A propositional attitude in one whose description takes a sentence as complement of the verb. Belief is a propositional attitude: One believes (truly or falsely as the case may be), that there are cookies in the jar. That there are cookies in the jar is the proposition expressed by the sentence following the verb. Knowing, judging, inferring, concluding and doubts are also propositional attitudes: One knows, judges, infers, concludes, or doubts that a certain proposition (the one expressed by the sentential complement) is true.
Though the propositions are not always explicit, hope, fear, expectation. Intention, and a great many others terms are also (usually) taken to describe propositional attitudes, one hopes that (is afraid that, etc.) there are cookies in the jar. Wanting a cookie is, or can be construed as, a propositional attitude: Wanting that one has (or eat or whatever) a cookie, intending to eat a cookie is intending that one will eat a cookie.
Propositional attitudes involve the possession and use of concepts and are, in this sense, representational. One must have some knowledge or understanding of what χ’s are in order to think, believe or hope that something is ‘χ’. In order to want a cookie, intend to eat one must, in some way, know or understand what a cookie is. One must have this concept. There is a sense in which one can want to eat a cookie without knowing what a cookie is ~ if, for example, one mistakenly thinks there are muffins in the jar and, as a result wants to eat what is in the jar (= cookies). But this sense is hardly relevant, for in this sense one can want to eat the cookies in the jar without wanting to eat any cookies. For this reason(and this sense) the propositional attitudes are cognitive: They require or presuppose a level of understanding and knowledge, this kind of understanding and knowledge required to possess the concepts involved in occupying the propositional state.
Thought there is sometimes disagreement about their proper analysis, non-propositional mental states, yet do not, at least on the surface, take propositions as their object. Being in pain, being thirsty, smelling the flowers and feeling sad are introspectively prominent mental states that do not, like the propositional attitudes, require the application or use of concepts. One doesn’t have to understand what pain or thirst is to experience pain or thirst. Assuming that pain and thirst are conscious phenomena, one must, of course, be conscious or aware of the pain or thirst to experience them, but awareness of must be carefully distinguished from awareness that. One can be aware of ‘χ’, ~ thirst or a toothache ~ without being aware that, that, e.g., thirst or a toothache, is that like beliefs that and knowledge that, are a propositional attitude, awareness of is not.
As the examples, pain, thirst, tickles, itches, hungers are meant to suggest, the non-propositional states have a felt or experienced [‘phenomenal’] quality to them that is absent in the case of the propositional attitudes. Aside from who it is we believe to be playing the tuba, believing that John is playing the tuba is much the same as believing that Joan is playing the tuba. These are different propositional states, different beliefs, yet, they are distinguished entirely in terms of their propositional content ~ in terms of what they are beliefs about. Contrast this with the difference between hearing John play the tuba and seeing him play the tuba. Hearing John play the tuba and seeing John play the tubas differ, not just (as do beliefs) in what they are of or about (for these experiences are, in fact, of the same thing: John playing the tuba), but in their qualitative character, the one involves a visual, the other an auditory, experience. The difference between seeing John play the tuba and hearing John play the tuba, then, is a sensory not a cognitive difference.
Some mental states are a combination of sensory and cognitive elements. Fear and terror, sadness and anger, joy and depression, are ordinarily thought of in this way sensations are: Not in terms of what propositions (if any) they represent, but (like visual and auditory experience) in their intrinsic character, in how they feel to the person experiencing them. But when we describe a person for being afraid that, sad that, upset that (as opposed too merely thinking or knowing that) so-and-so happened, we typically mean to be describing the kind of sensory (feeling or emotional) quality accompanying the cognitive state. Being afraid that the dog is going to bite me is both to think (that he might bite me) ~ a cognitive state ~ and feel fear or apprehension (sensory) at the prospect.
The perceptual verbs exhibit this kind of mixture, this duality between the sensory and the cognitive. Verbs like ‘to hear’, ‘to say’, and ‘to feel’ is [often] used to describe propositional (cognitive) states, but they describe these states in terms of the way (sensory) one comes to be in them. Seeing that there are two cookies left by seeing. Feeling that there are two cookies left is coming to know this in a different way, by having tactile experiences (sensations).
On this model of the sensory-cognitive distinction (at least it is realized in perceptual phenomena). Sensations are a pre-conceptual, a pre-cognitive, vehicle of sensory information. The terms ‘sensation’ and ‘sense-data’ (or simply ‘experience’) were (and, in some circles, still are) used to describe this early phase of perceptual processing. It is currently more fashionable to speak of this sensory component in perception as the percept, the sensory information store, is generally the same: An acknowledgement of a stage in perceptual processing in which the incoming information is embodied in ‘raw’ sensory (pre-categorical, pre-0recognitional) forms. This early phase of the process is comparatively modular ~ relatively immune to, and insulated from, cognitive influence. The emergence of a propositional [cognitive] states ~ seeing that an object is red ~ depends, then, on the earlier occurrence of a conscious, but nonetheless, non-propositional condition, seeing (under the right condition, of course) the red object. The sensory phase of this process constitutes the delivery of information (about the red object) in a particular form (visual): Cognitive mechanisms are then responsible for extracting and using this information ~ for generating the belief (knowledge) that the object is red. (The belief of blindness suggests that this information can be delivered, perhaps in degraded form, at a non-conscious level.)
To speak of sensations of red objects, tuba and so forth, is to say that these sensations carry information about an object’s colour, its shape, orientation, and position and (in the case of audition) information about acoustic qualities such as pitch, timbre, volume. It is not to say that the sensations share the properties of the objects they are sensations of or that they have the properties they carry information about. Auditory sensations are not loud and visual sensations are not coloured. Sensations are bearers of nonconceptualized information, and the bearer of the information that something is red need not itself be red. It need not even be the sort of thing that could be red: It might be a certain pattern of neuronal events in the brain. Nonetheless, the sensation, though not itself red, will (being the normal bearer of the information) typically produce in the subject who undergoes the experience a belief, or tendency to believe, that something red is being experienced. Hence the existence of hallucinations.
Just as there are theories of the mind, that would deny the existence of any state of mind whose essence was purely qualitative (i.e., did not consists of the state’s extrinsic, causal, properties) there are theories of perception and knowledge ~ cognitive theories ~ that denies a sensory component to ordinary sense perception. The sensor y dimension (the look, feel, smell, taste of things) is (if it is not altogether denied) identified with some cognitive condition (knowledge or belief) of the experienced. All seeing (not to mention hearing, smelling and feeling) becomes a form of believing or knowing. As a result, organisms that cannot know cannot have experiences. Often, to avoid these striking counterintuitive results, implicit or otherwise unobtrusive (and, typically, undetectable) forms of believing or, knowing.
Aside, though, from introspective evidence (closing and opening one’s eyes, if it changes beliefs at all, doesn’t just change beliefs, it eliminates and restores a distinctive kind of conscionable experience), there is a variety of empirical evidence for the existence of a stage in perceptual processing that is conscious without being cognitive (in any recognizable sense). For example, experiments with brief visual displays reveal that when subjects are exposed for very brief (50 msec.) Intervals to information-rich stimuli, there is persistence (at the conscious level) of what is called an image or visual icon that embodies more information about the stimulus than the subject can cognitively process or report on. Subjects cab exploit the information in this persisting icon by reporting on any part of the absent array of numbers (the y can, for instance, reports of the top three numbers, the middle three or the bottom three). They cannot, however, identify all nine numbers. The y report seeing all nine, and the y can identify any one of the nine, but they cannot identify all nine. Knowledge and brief, recognition and identification ~ these cognitive states, though present for any two or three numbers in the array, are absent for all nine numbers in the array. Yet, the image carries information about all nine numbers (how else accounts for subject’s ability to identify any number in the absent array?) Obviously, then, information is there, in the experience itself, whether or not it is, or even can be. As psychologists conclude, there is a limit on the information processing capacities of the latter (cognitive) mechanisms that is not shared by the sensory stages themselves.
Perceptual knowledge is knowledge acquired by or through the senses. This includes most of what we know. Some would say it includes everything we know. We cross intersections when we see the light turn green, head for the kitchen when we smell the roast burning, squeeze the fruit to determine its ripeness, and climb out of bed when we hear the alarm, ring. In each case we come to know something ~ that the light has turned green, that the roast is burning, that the melon is overripe, and that it is time to get up ~ that the light has turned green ~ by use of the eyes. Feeling that the melon is overripe in coming to know a fact ~ that the melon is overripe ~ by one’s sense of touch. In each case the resulting knowledge is somehow based on, derived from or grounded in the sort of experience that characterizes the sense modality in question.
Seeing a rotten kumquat is not at all like the experience of smelling, tasting or feeling a rotten kumquat. Yet all these experiences can result in the same knowledge ~ Knowledge that the kumquat is rotten. Although the experiences are much different, they must, if they are to yield knowledge, embody information about the kumquat: The information that it is rotten. Seeing that the fruit is rotten differs from smelling that it is rotten, not in what is known, but how it is known. In each case, the information has the same source ~ the rotten kumquat ~, but it is, so top speak, delivered via different channels and coded and re-coded in different experiential neuronal excitations as stimulated sense attractions.
It is important to avoid confusing perceptual knowledge of facts, e.g., that the kumquat is rotten, with the perception of objects, e.g., rotten kumquats. It is one thing ro see (taste, smell, feel) a rotten kumquat, and quite another to know (by seeing or tasting) that it is a rotten kumquat. Some people, after all, don not know what kumquats look like. They see a kumquat but do not realize (do mot see that) it is a kumquat. Again, some people do not know what a kumquat smell like. They smell a rotten kumquat and ~ thinking, perhaps, that this is a way this strange fruit is supposed to smell ~ do no t realize from the smell, i.e., do not smell that it is a rotted kumquat. In such cases people see and smell rotten kumquats ~ and in this sense perceive rotten kumquat ~ and never know that they are kumquats ~ let alone rotten kumquats. They cannot, not at least by seeing and smelling, and not until they have learned something about (rotten) kumquats. Since the topic as such is incorporated in the perceptual knowledge ~ knowing, by sensory means, that something if ‘F’ ~, we will be primary concerned with the question of what more, beyond the perception of F’s, is needed to see that (and thereby know that) they are ‘F’. The question is, however, not how we see kumquats (for even the ignorant can do this) but, how we know (if, that in itself, that we do) that, that is what we see.
Much of our perceptual knowledge is indirect, dependent or derived. By this is that it is meant that the facts we describe ourselves as learning, as coming to know, by perceptual means are pieces of knowledge that depend on our coming to know something else, some other fat, in a more direct way. We see, by the gauge, that we need gas, see, by the newspapers, that our team has lost again, or see, by her expression that is nervous. This derived or dependent sort of obtainable knowledge is particularly prevalent in the case of vision but it occurs, to a lesser degree, in every sense modality. We install bells and other noise-makers so that we can, for example, hear (by the bells) that someone is at the door and (by the alarm) that its time to get away. When we obtain knowledge in this way. It is clear that unless one sees ~ hence, comes to know. Something about the gauge (that it reads ‘empty’), the newspaper (which is says) and the person’s expression, one would not see (hence, know) what one is described as coming to know by perceptual means. If one cannot hear that the bell is ringing, one cannot ~ not at least in this way ~ hear that one’s visitors have arrived. In such cases one sees (hears, smells, etc.) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, coming to know thereby that ‘a’ is ‘F’, by seeing (hearing, etc.) that some other condition, b’s being ‘G’, obtains. When this occurs, the knowledge (that ‘a’ is ‘F’) is derived, or dependent on, the more basic perceptual knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’.
Though perceptual knowledge about objects is often, in this way, dependent on knowledge of fats about different objects, the derived knowledge is sometimes about the same object. That is, we see that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing, not that some other object is ‘G’, but that ‘a’ itself is ‘G’. We see, by her expression, that she is nervous. She tells that the fabric is silk (not polyester) by the characteristic ‘greasy’ feel of the fabric itself (not, as I do, by what is printed on the label). We tell whether it is an oak tree, a Porsche, a geranium, an igneous rock or a misprint by its shape, colour, texture, size, behaviour and distinctive markings. Perceptual knowledge of this sort is also deprived ~ derived from the more basic facts (about ‘a’) we use to make the identification. In this case the perceptual knowledge is still indirect because, although the same object is involved, the facts we come to know about it are different than the facts that enable us to know it.
Derived knowledge is sometimes described as inferential, but this is misleading, at the conscious level there is no passage of the mind from premise to conclusion, no reasoning, no problem-solving. The observer, the one who sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ (or ‘a’ itself) is ‘G’, need not be (and typically is not) aware of any process of inference, any passage of the mind from one belief to another. The resulting knowledge, though logically derivative, is psychologically immediate. I could see that she was getting angry: so, I moved my hand. I did not ~ at least not at any conscious level ~ infer (from her expression and behaviour) that she was getting angry. I could (or, so it seemed to me) see that she was getting angry. It is this psychological immediacy that makes indirect perceptual knowledge a species of perceptual knowledge.
The psychological immediacy that characterises so much of our perceptual knowledge ~ even (sometimes) the most indirect and derived forms of it ~ does not mean that learning is not required to know in this way. One is not born with (may, in fact, never develop) the ability to recognize daffodils, muskrats and angry companions. It is only after a long experience that one is able visually to identify such things. Beginners may do something corresponding to inference: They recognize relevant features of trees, birds, and flowers, factures they already know how to perceptually identify, and then infer (conclude), on the basis of what they see, and under the guidance of more expert observers, that its an oak a finch or a geranium. But the experts (and we are all experts on many aspects of our familiar surroundings) do not typically go through such a process. The expert just sees that its an oak, a finch or a geranium. The perceptual knowledge of the expert is still dependent, of course, since even an expert cannot see what kind of flower it is if she cannot first see its colour and shape, but it is to say, that the expert has developed identificatorial skills that no longer require the sort of conscious inferential processes that characterize a beginner’s efforts.
Coming to know that ‘a’ is ‘F’ by seeing that ‘b’ is ‘G’ obviously requires some background assumption on the part of the observer, an assumption to the effect that ‘a’ is ‘F’ (or perhaps only probable ‘F’) when ‘b’ is ‘G’. If one does not assume (as taken to be granted) that the gauge is properly connected, and does not, thereby assume that it would not register ‘empty’,unless the tank was nearly empty, then even if one could see that it registered ‘empty’, one would not learn ( hence, would not see) that one needed gas. At least, one would not see it by consulting the gauge. Likewise, in trying to identify birds, its no use being able to see their markings if one doesn’t know something about which birds have which marks ~ sometimes of the form: A bird with these markings is (probably) a finch.
It would seem, moreover, that these background assumptions, if they are to yield knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’, as they must if the observer is to see (by b’s being ‘G’) that ‘a’ is ‘F’, must themselves qualify as knowledge. For if this background fact is not known, if it is not known whether ‘a’ is ‘F’ when ‘b’ is ‘G’, then the knowledge of b’s being ‘G’, taken by itself, powerless to generate the knowledge that ‘a; is ‘F’. If the conclusion is to be known to be true, both the premises used to reach that conclusion must be known to be true. Or so it would seem.
Externalists, however, argue that the indirect knowledge that ‘a’ is ‘F’, though it may depend on the knowledge that ‘b’ is ‘G’, does not require knowledge of the connecting fact, the fact that ‘a’ is ‘F’ when ‘b’ is ‘G’. Simple belief (or, perhaps, justified belief, there are stronger and weaker versions of externalism) in the connecting fact is sufficient to confer a knowledge of the fact is sufficient to confer a knowledge e of the connected fact. Even if, strictly speaking, I don’t know she is nervous whenever she fidgets like that, I can nonetheless, see and hence know, that she is nervous by the way she fidgets, if I (correctly) assume that his behaviour r is a reliable expression of nervousness. One need not know the gauge is working well to make observations (acquire observational knowledge) with it. All that is required, besides the observer believing that the gauge is reliable, is that the gauge, in fact, be reliable, i.e., that the observer’s background beliefs be true. Critics of externalisms have been quick to point out that this theory has the unpalatable consequence that knowledge can be made possible by ~ and, in this sense, be made to rest on ~ lucky hunches (that turn out true) and unsupported (even irrational) beliefs. Surely, internalist argue, if one is going t o know that ‘a’ is ‘F’ on the basis of b’s being ‘G’, one should have (as a bare minimum) some justification for thinking that ‘a’ is ‘F’, or is probably ‘F’, when ‘b’ is ‘G’.
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