ABSTRACT: The following paper will seek to do two things: succinctly outline Dennett’s defense of propositional attitudes as having causal powers over human behaviour using the intentional stance, and subsequently analyze the specific downfalls in his position which render his argument ineffective. Dennett’s wish to validate propositional attitudes stems from the desire to retain a certain degree of scientific certainty without doing away with the language of beliefs, values and intentions. His answer to the body-mind problem is to explain the how abstract sounding phenomena such as intentions are able to affect the physical actions of humans. A critical analysis, it will be argued, exposes the limitations of Dennett’s argument. Potential defenses Dennett might offer will be considered. However, each will be shown to either fail to meet the challenge set by criticisms, or else appeal to faulty reasoning. It will be concluded that the intentional stance is ultimately flawed.

A propositional attitude is an umbrella term used to refer to a certain set of beliefs one holds towards a certain state of affairs. The topic of propositional attitudes is met with controversy when discussion of their nature and function is raised. The question of the causal powers of propositional attitudes and their ability to affect intentionality is hotly debated among philosophers and psychologists alike. There are those adopt the realist stance, discarding propositional attitudes as folk psychology that only works in limited domains and is unreliable as a scientific theory. In opposition to this are interpretationists, who argue that the commonsense psychological approach of propositional attitudes is viable and that it provides a satisfactory explanation of human actions. In general, one might say that realists treat intentions as objective criteria, while the interpretationist view considers beliefs in a way that renders them relative and purely subjective. In his article “True Believers: The Intentional Stance and Why it Works”, Daniel Dennett expresses his views on the legitimacy of propositional attitudes. In relation to the polarizing positions of realism and interpretationism, Dennett occupies somewhat of an intermediary stance; he accounts for propositional attitudes as objective phenomena that may be explained through an appeal to rationality and beliefs using the intentional stance. This approach will be analyzed; following an exegesis of his position, the strengths and weaknesses of Dennett’s theory will be evaluated.

Work Cited

Abstract. In their article “The Extended Mind” (1998), Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduce a theory of extended cognition. In this paper I explain what extended cognition theories maintain by examining one such theory in particular- namely the Extended Mind thesis (EM), which Clark and Chalmers put forth. Following this, I consider two popular objections raised against EM- one based on concerns about what exactly constitutes a “part” of a cognitive system, and the other based on the intuition that the biological body is what marks the natural boundary between humans and their environments- and provide a defense of EM from each of these objections.

1.1. Introduction

In the past, philosophers have thought of the biological brain and body of the agent as being the sole physical substrates that make up the mind. But, over the last decade a theory of the mind has emerged which suggests that a human’s mind, in particular one’s mental states and cognitive processes, may at times “extend” into the environment that immediately surrounds their body. According to the Extended Mind thesis (EM), parts located beyond the agent’s body can serve as the material vehicles of the agent’s mind and, in such cases, these relevant parts should be viewed as constitutive parts of the mind. In this sense, contrary to what has been traditionally thought, EM claims that the mind “extends” beyond the body.

This paper has three major parts: first, I will outline the central claims of EM and the arguments put forth by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in favor of it (section 2.1.) and follow this with an example of the theory (2.2.); second, I will consider two objections to the theory, one based on concerns about what exactly constitutes a “part” of a cognitive system and the other on the intuition that the biological body is what marks the natural boundary between humans and their environments; and third, I will provide I defense of EM against both objections, in each case arguing that the theory is able to withstand the objection raised against it.

2.1. The Extended Mind thesis

Andy Clark and David Chalmers first introduced EM in an article called “The Extended Mind”. In this article the authors make two central claims- one regarding cognitive processes and the other regarding mental states. Mental states include things such as propositional thoughts, experiences, beliefs, desires, feelings, and so forth. Cognitive processes, on the other hand, are processes that take place within an agent’s mind, or cognitive system, such as “retrieval of memories, linguistic processes, and skill acquisition.”[1] The first claim EM makes is that an agent’s cognitive processes can be partially constituted by portions of the world that are not bound by their brain-and-body.
How I have phrased this claim is important since if, instead of “not bound by their brain-and-body,” I were to have said “non-biological” or “parts of their external environment, I would be begging the very question that EM is attempting to address. After all, the theory aims to redefine the very notion of what is internal or external to the agent. So, to say, for example, that an agent’s cognitive processes can be partially constituted by “parts of their external environment,” would be to assume that the relevant portions that lie beyond the agent’s body are external to the agent and a part of the agent’s environment, and thus, that they are not a part of the agent or the agent’s mind. Similarly, it would be wrong to use the phrase “non-biological” in this case since Clark and Chalmers remain open to the possibility that one agent’s mind may be partially constituted by the mind of another agent (further discussion of this in 4.3.).[2] Thus, by claiming the mind can be realized by vehicles outside of the traditional “shell” of a human (their brain and/or body), EM is arguing that what is internal to a human agent is not (always) just what is internal to its body. After all, if parts of the world beyond an agent’s body really are the physical realizers of that agent’s cognitive process then these parts should be seen as internal to the agent.

The second claim of EM is that an agent’s non-occurrent mental states, such as beliefs and desires, can be partially constituted by portions of the world that are not bound by their brain-and-body. A non-occurrent belief is one that is not currently being entertained, whereas an occurrent belief is one that you are entertaining right now. For example, if I were to ask you whether you believed the sky to be blue in color, you would surely say yes. If so, then before I had asked you this question, your belief that the sky is blue would have been non-occurrent (unless you were already entertaining the thought). But, having been asked about your belief regarding the color of the sky, you likely brought that belief into consciousness and thus, what was once your non-occurent belief has now become your occurrent belief that the sky is blue.

The distinction between occurrent and non-occurrent beliefs is important as Clark and Chalmers are clear that the EM thesis only makes claims about non-occurrent mental state extension, and not occurrent mental state extension.[3] This is likely because it is often held that our occurrent mental states have a phenomenally conscious feel to them, that is a feeling of “what it is like” to be in that occurrent mental state, but Clark and Chalmers both hold that consciousness cannot not be realized externally from the brain-and-body (although they are silent about why this is). So, in order to avoid committing themselves to the claim that consciousness extends, Clark and Chalmers limit their claims about extended mental states to non-occurrent ones. Furthermore, to avoid the same result with regards to their first claim, they must also limit the extension of cognitive processes to those that are not conscious.

Thus, for those who take the view that all cognitive processes and all mental states are conscious and occurrent, such as Galen Strawson, EM would be implausible since it only makes claims about mental states and processes that do not display consciousness. The view that all our mental states must be occurrent, however, does not seem plausible to me, and Clark and Chalmers would agree[4], because it denies the highly intuitive claim that one can have a belief, a desire, or knowledge that they are not currently entertaining. Still this is the position that Brie Gertler endorses in “Over-extending the Mind”[5] (denying premise four of the argument for EM, see section 3.1.) and also what Clark and Chalmers’ believe to be “the most consistent way to deny” EM.[6]

2.2. Otto and Inga: An illustration of EM

In The Extended Mind, Clark and Chalmers provide an example that attempts to draw a parallel between two people who want to go to the museum: one whose mind “extends” the other whose mind does not.[7] The latter individual is Inga. After deciding that she would like to go to the museum, Inga quickly recalls that the museum in located on 53rd street, so she proceeds in that direction. In this instance it is clear that Inga has successfully relied on her working memory to access the information she needs to find her way to the museum. Meanwhile, a man named Otto suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and thus can no longer rely on his memory to recall all of his standing beliefs. Otto is forced to rely on a notebook that he stores all of his important information in such as phone numbers, directions, medical information, and so forth. After deciding to go to the museum, Otto quickly reaches for his notebook, reads that the museum is located on 53rd street and promptly heads in that direction. He relies on his notebook on a regular basis, takes it with him everywhere he goes, and writes in it often so that he will not forget important information.

Clark and Chalmers argue that “in relevant respects the (two) cases are entirely analogous: the notebook plays for Otto the same role that memory plays for Inga.”[8]
In other words, if we consider the information in Otto’s notebook, then it seems that it plays the same explanatory role as the information in Inga’s memory. For example, in both cases we can explain why they headed toward 53rd street with reference to their desire to go to the museum and belief that it was located there. Inga’s belief was there before she accessed it (non-occurent) and likewise, Otto’s belief was in his notebook before he accessed it. To be sure, this is not the claim that Otto’s behavior is identical to Inga’s, but rather that “taken as a single integrated system, Otto-and-the-notebook exhibit enough of the central features and dynamics of a normal agent having… the dispositional belief (about the location of the museum) to warrant treating him as such.”[9] Thus, a proponent of EM would grant that in many trivial ways Otto’s actions do differ from Inga’s, but still would contend that what is relevant is the role that the information about the location of the museum plays in each case, and in Otto and Inga’s cases, the information plays the same functional role.

3.1. A representation of an argument for EM

In this section I will flesh out each of the premises of an argument for EM, spending the most time on what I believe are the most important premises. In doing this, I will introduce and spell out both the ‘parity principle’ and Clark and Chalmers’ conditions of a cognitive system. Gertler has extracted the following argument from Clark and Chalmers’ Otto and Inga example:[10]

1. “What makes some information count as a standing belief is the role it plays.”
2. “The information in the notebook functions just like [that is, it plays the same role as] the information constituting an ordinary non-occurrent belief.”
3. The information in Otto’s notebook counts as standing beliefs. (1,2)
4. Otto’s standing beliefs are part of his mind.
5. The information in Otto’s notebook is part of Otto’s mind. (3, 4)
6. Otto’s notebook belongs to the world external to Otto’s skin.
7. The mind extends into the world. (5, 6)

3.2. Premise one and the Parity Principle

The first premise of this argument states that what matters in labeling some thing as a part of a cognitive system is not its location or physical identity, but rather the “role that it plays.”[11] This premise follows from what Clark and Chalmers label the parity principle, which contends that if an object in the environment is playing the same role as an object that, were it located in the head, we would certainly count it as part of a cognitive system, then we should count the object in the environment as a part of the cognitive system also. So, if the information Inga’s mind (about the location of the museum) would surely count as a part of her belief (about where the museum is located) because of the role it plays in her memory, then, since the information in Otto’s notebook (about the location of the museum) plays the same role in his memory, it ought to count as a part of his standing belief as well.

If it weren’t the role that mattered but the physical identity, for instance, if the vehicles of cognition had to be biological (and within the body of the agent), then any non-biological resource, such as Otto’s notebook, would instantly be disqualified as cognitive. The parity principle is used to avoid this outcome. It maintains that regardless of how the information is physically realized, if the information in both cases plays the same functional role in driving the agent’s behavior, then it should be given the same cognitive status. After all, with no justifiable reason, it would be both ad hoc[12] and question begging to assume a priori that only a certain type of matter- biological matter -can constitute standing beliefs.

So, it follows from the parity principle that whatever turns out to be the necessary functional role for a thing to play in order to count as a part of a cognitive system it will have to be described without reference to any particular physical properties and in a sufficiently abstract way as to allow that the relevant functional role could be played by something beyond the agents body. At the same time, the cognitive system cannot be described so abstractly as to include all sorts of things as constitutive parts of the system. Otherwise too many things would be included as parts and EM would threaten to “over-extend” the mind. For example, the information in Inga’s head should count as her standing belief not because it is biological or internal to her body, but rather because of the role it plays in her successful retrieval of memory, which then causes her to head towards the museum. This presupposes that there actually exist some way of describing the relevant “functional role” that is sufficiently abstract to be realized both internally and externally to the agent’s body.

3.3. Premise Two

The second premise of the argument for EM claims that the information about the location of the museum plays the same functional role in Otto’s case as in Inga’s case. To outline this functional roll Clark and Chalmers provide three (tentative) conditions[13] to be met in order for any thing to be granted “recognition as part of the physical substrate of a cognitive system:”[14]

1. Constancy: The use of the resource must be a constant in the agent’s life.
2. Accessibility: The resource must be directly and easily available.
3. Reliability: The agent must trust and endorse the resource without hesitation; rarely doubting it’s veracity.

A fourth condition, which they are more tentative about labeling as necessary, requires that the information in the resource must be there as a consequent of having been consciously endorsed at some point in the past. It seems evident that these conditions are met by our ordinary, non-extended mental states and it is difficult to deny that Otto does not meet these conditions, since Clark and Chalmers developed the Otto and Inga example in order to support their argument for EM.[15] Thus, it seems the best way to object to the second premise would be to claim that parts of cognitive systems, like mental states and cognitive processes, meet some further condition not on this list. The two objections that I consider in the second part of this paper take this approach in rejecting EM.

So, because the information in both cases meets these conditions and we would surely call the information in Inga’s mind her non-occurrent belief, then, given the parity principle, the third premise of the argument follows: we ought to call the information in Otto’s notebook his non-occurrent belief as well (P3). And, if the information in the environment serves as the material vehicle of a part of Otto’s beliefs (P3), and his beliefs constitute a part of his mind (P4), then it follows that the information in the environment is a constitutive part of Otto’s mind (P5). Furthermore, it is clear that something like a notebook is a part of the world external to an agent’s skin and body (P6). Thus, portions of the would external to Otto’s body (the information in his notebook) serve as the physical substrates of a part of his mind (namely, his belief about the location of the museum), and in this sense Otto’s mind “extends” into the world (P7).

4.1. Problems facing EM

My discussion in this paper will be limited to a consideration of two objections, both of which I will defend EM against. Neither of these objections are to the parity principle itself, but rather, they both deny the similarity between cases of extended cognition and regular cognition that is needed for the principle to apply. In other words, both of these objections object to either the necessity or the sufficiency of the functional role, as Clark and Chalmers’ have described it, in determining whether or not some resource is a part of a cognitive system. While I recognize that there are other important and compelling objections that one could make to EM, unfortunately I will not be able to consider all of them in this paper.

4.2. Sufficient conditions for “parts of cognitive systems”

The first objection I will consider would likely arise if one were uncomfortable with the results of EM, believing that it casts too broad a definition of what is mental. In this case they could object to the joint sufficiency of the conditions proposed for a cognitive system- constancy, accessibility and reliability (as discussed in 3.3.) This would require that there is some quality unique to all parts of cognitive systems that the three conditions fail to pick out. For example, if one could find a condition that is common only to our internal mental states, of the sort Inga has, and not present in Otto’s case, then the two cases would not be analogous and so, the principle would not apply. One quality that has often been thought of as being unique to biological cognitive systems is their capacity to produce intrinsic content. It is argued that this marks a distinction between the biological substrates that traditionally compose cognitive systems and potential non-biological realizers like Otto’s notebook.

This notion of intrinsic content rests on the view that mental states are intentional states, which is to say that they “have content; they are typically about things.”[16] This is not unique to mental states, however, since certain non-biological things, such as books and road signs, also have content and so should equally be labeled intentional. So, according to this view, it therefore possible to draw a distinction between things with derived intentionality and things with intrinsic intentionality. Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa define derived content as content that is assigned by “intentional agents who already have thoughts with meaning.”[17] Non-derived content, or intrinsic content, on the other hand, does not require “the independent or prior experience of other content.”[18] If something has content, then “it is either mental or the content is derived from something that is mental.”[19] So, derived content is a product of intentional agents. It is argued that this marks an important variance between Otto’s case and Inga’s case- Otto’s notebook has derived content only and thus, it is argued that, its intentionality does not make it mental, whereas Inga’s memories are not derived, and therefore they do count as mental.

4.3. Responses to Intrinsic Content

In this section, I will argue that the objection based on the inclusion of intrinsic content as a necessary condition to be met by all parts of a cognitive system is actually no threat to EM. As Clark points out in “Intrinsic content, active memory and the extended mind”, the argument for intrinsic content is flawed for several reasons. First of all, the notion of “intrinsic content” is not uncontroversial and is surely not universally accepted.[20] Secondly, Adams and Aizawa give no reason to believe that external, non-biological structures are (logically or contingently) incapable of having intrinsic content. We should not assume that this is the case and as Clark points out in the future we can imagine there might be technology that has advanced enough to change this reality. For instance, imagine that we identified some internal part as a vehicle of intrinsic content. Now imagine that part is replaced with a “functionally equivalent silicon part.”[21] If the agent could still experience mental states with intrinsic content, then this should defeat concerns about intrinsic content as a criterion for mentality.[22]

Furthermore, even if we grant the claim that intrinsic content is a necessary condition for being considered a part of the mind, EM would still be true in cases where one agent’s standing beliefs are realized by biological structures outside its body, for example, in the mind of another agent (who is capable of intrinsic content). After all, according to this objection it is only the fact that non-biological structures are incapable of intrinsic content that would prevents Otto’s notebook being recognized as a part of his cognitive system. Thus, there is no reason why the biological realizers of an agent’s cognitive system must be located within their own brain or body. For example, Clark and Chalmers suggest that “(i)n an unusually interdependent couple, it is entirely possible that one partner’s beliefs will play the role for the other as the notebook plays for Otto.”[23] All that is necessary for the resource to count as a part of the cognitive system in this case is that it is capable of intrinsic content and meets the other three conditions laid out by Clark and Chalmers.

Finally, Clark’s third response is that even if intrinsic content is accepted as a valid notion and if non-biological structures were incapable of displaying it, this would not compromise EM. This is because in a system not every constitutive part of that system will necessarily have the qualities that the entire system, as a whole, has. According to Clark, all that is necessary for a given part to count as a vehicle of a mental state “is that it be appropriately linked… to representations whose content is (as Adams and Aizawa insist) intrinsic.”[24] Adams and Aizawa make this very same point about the relationship between systems and their components themselves, only in a different discussion, when they attempt to clarify Clark and Chalmers’ positions in EM.[25] Still, although they demonstrate that they are well aware of this relationship suggested by Clark, they do not seem to consider it when raising their objection to EM based on intrinsic content.

To spell out Clark’s claim I will use the example that Adams and Aizawa give of an air-conditioning system. In such a system only a portion of the components are responsible for actually cooling the air. The other parts play different roles- some “duct the air about the building, compress the refrigerant, directs the flow of refrigerant, monitors the room temperature, and so forth.”[26] Thus, for an air-conditioning system to be labeled as such it has to cool air. Cooling air, then, is a necessary feature of an air-conditioning system, and yet, not every part of an air-conditioning system actually cools air. I would contend that, in the same way, original content may be a necessary condition for cognitive systems, but this does not entail that every material vehicle responsible for a given mental state must display original content. Furthermore, I do not see how even a defender of intrinsic content could deny this, since one would have to hold the same view with regard to brain-and-body bound mental states as well.

Surely no one would argue that every neuron and atom of grey matter displays intrinsic content just because the whole mental state that arises from a system composed of neurons and grey matter does. In fact Adams and Aizawa as much as concede this point themselves: “Having argued that, in general, there must be non-derived content in cognitive processes, it must be admitted that it is unclear to what extent every cognitive state of each cognitive process must involve non-derived content.”[27] And, because we must remain neutral on where parts are located, as not to the beg question, we should apply the same standard to extended mental states. Thus, if EM is correct and mental states can extend into their environment, there should be requirement that external portions of the mental state be capable of intrinsic content in order to be recognized as constitutive parts.

5.1. Appeal to the dual boundaries of perception and action

Another objection to EM is based on the intuition that the natural boundaries that separate the mind from the external environment are the dual interfaces of perception and action and that these boundaries align with the boundaries of the body. In other words, the first claim is that our minds affect the world through our actions and likewise, our minds are affected by the world through our perceptions. If this is the case, then it follows that perception and action are the interfaces through which contact is made between our environment and us. The second claim of this objection is that these interfaces align with our body such that we perceive through bodily senses and we act through bodily motions. And, given these two claims, it follows that the mind must be body-bound.

For example, it is argued that because Otto must perceive the information in his notebook, this means that they will lie beyond his perception, and thus beyond the natural boundary that separates him from the world. Inga, however, does not need to engage in bodily perception to access her belief in the way that Otto does. In her case, her belief is realized by physical substrates located on the “inner” side of the perception and action boundary. So, because Otto must engage in this crucial act of bodily perception (and action) to access his beliefs, he would be taking in an extra step(s) that is not necessary in “ordinary” cases, such as Inga’s. What is more, because of this extra step that Otto takes, he would have a completely different phenomenological experience than Inga. If this is the case, then Otto and Inga’s cases are not entirely analogous and so the parity principle may not be applicable.

5.2. Response to the appeal to perception and action

There are a number of possible responses that a defender of EM could give to this objection. The first that Clark and Chalmers make is to point out that the objection begs the question.[28] This is true, after all, it is the legitimacy of this very boundary- between an agent and her environment- that is in question and that EM is trying to define (as discussed in section 2.1.). So, a defender of EM might agree with the first claim of this objection- that perception and action are the dual interfaces that separate the mind from the world- but reject the second premise- that we perceive and act only through our bodies. After all, it is the second claim where the question begging is really taking place. By rejecting the second claim we could allow that the mind lies strictly on one “side” of our perceptions and actions, and remain uncommitted as to where perception and action occur.

Consider Walid, for instance, who is blind and relies heavily on his white walking stick to aid his mobility. Since the stick is his only reliable way to detect objects in his path, Walid uses it constantly and must keep it with him at all times.[29] For Walid, this stick is more than just a helpful mobility tool- he uses it fluently and feels as though he were touching the pavement at the end of his stick. That is, he perceives the world at the end of the stick, not just his hand gripping the stick.[30] I believe that in this case we can accept that Walid’s perception is not limited to his bodily senses, and thus, we can reject the second premise and conclude that (under the right conditions) cognitive processes can extend to include non-biological structures. As long as the process remains explanatorily similar in every relevant way to how a person with regular vision might function, then as the parity principle contends, we ought to label both instances as cognitive processes.

I believe this response to be compelling, since as Clark and Chalmers argue, it would be incorrect to allow which “side” of the body-boundary the process falls on to bias us. Thus, the example of Walid seems to help in the defense of EM, however, it does not work so effectively in defending the example of Otto and Inga. It doesn’t seem reasonable to say that Otto’s perception is not limited to his bodily senses because he perceives what is inside the notebook. In seems more likely that in Otto’s case, unlike Walid’s, the interfaces of perception and action do align with his body. Furthermore, the Walid example does not overcome the objection over Otto and Inga’s different phenomenological experiences either. After all, Walid would surely be having a different phenomenological experience of walking down a busy sidewalk than a person with 20/20 vision.
Clark and Chalmers’ second move is to downplay the difference between the phenomenological experiences of Otto and Inga. They do this by arguing that in both cases the agent will still have some phenomenological experience and, though the experiences may be different, this should not affect their equal status as non-occurrent beliefs.[31] Chalmers expands on this idea by making an appeal to the notions of ‘introspection’ and ‘mental action’.[32] According to him, if these notions can be taken as parallel to (‘real’) perception and (‘real’) action, respectively, in the traditional sense, then the parity principle will apply.

This response will work only if there are no substantial differences between the notions of introspection and perception, or between mental action and action. I take this parallel to be a little far-fetched myself and Chalmers recognizes that not everyone will be sold on this parallel, so he correctly predicts the possible replies that will follow. For example, one who opposes EM could insist that introspection does not seem to involve bodily sensory perception in the way that “real” perception does. And likewise, mental actions do not involve any physical action.[33] Furthermore, one could insist that the differences in phenomenological experiences are too essential to be downplayed. Otto has a particular “perceptual and agentive experience” that Inga would not have, and so the cases are not analogous.[34]

6.1. Conclusion

In this paper I have attempted to give a thorough exposition of the central thesis of EM- that the material vehicles that realize certain mental states and cognitive processes of a human’s cognitive system are at times located beyond the body of that agent. I have laid out the arguments put forth by Clark and Chalmers in defense of EM and explained the rationale behind them. In the second part of this paper I discussed two popular objections to the second premise of the argument for EM (as laid out in section 3.1.) and in each case I have argued that EM is able to overcome these criticisms. While I believe that I have successfully defended EM from these objections, I understand that, other serious objections still face the theory. But, unfortunately, I could not address them all on this occasion.

Bibliography

Adams, Frederick and Kenneth Aizawa. “The Bounds of Cognition.” Philosophical Psychology, 14 (2001) 43-64.

Adams, Frederick and Kenneth Aizawa. “Defending non-derived content.” Philosophical Psychology. (2004).

Aizawa, Kenneth. “Clark’s conditions on Extended Cognition Are Too Strong.” (2005).

Chalmers, David. “Foreword to Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind.” Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. (Oxford, 2008) ix-xvi.

Chalmers, David. February 6, 2009. “Fodor on the extended mind.”

Clark, Andy. “Intrinsic Content, Active Memory, and the Extended Mind.” Analysis, 65 (2005): 1-11.

Clark, Andy. “Coupling, Constitution, and the Cognitive Kind: A Reply to Adams and Aizawa.”

Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. (Oxford, 2008).

Clark, Andy and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis, 58 (1998): 7-19.

Fodor, Jerry. “Where is My Mind?” London Review of Books. February 2009. Review of Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension by Andy Clark.

Gertler, Brie. “Overextending the Mind?” Arguing about the Mind. Brie Gertler and Lawrence Shapiro, eds. Routledge, 2007.

Notes

1. Andy Clark and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis, 58 (1998): 4.
2. Ibid, 10. It should also be noted that it is preferable to use the term “agent” in this case instead of “human” in order to allow for the possibility that human minds may include other non-biological realizers (as when a blind man relies on a seeing-eye dog), or even that animal minds themselves may extend (if they can be shown to adequately engage in tool use, for instance).
3. Clark and Chalmers, 6.
4. Clark and Chalmers agree. Ibid, 4.
5. Brie Gertler, “Overextending the Mind?” Arguing about the Mind. Brie Gertler and Lawrence Shapiro, eds. Routledge, 2007, 11.
6. Clark and Chalmers, 9.
7. Ibid, 6.
8. Clark and Chalmers, 6.
9. Andy Clark, “Intrinsic Content, Active Memory, and the Extended Mind.” Analysis, 65 (2005): 7.
10. Gertler quotes the first two premises from Clark and Chalmers, The Extended Mind. Gertler, 2.
11. Clark and Chalmers, 7. This is also what Gertler labels as premise one of the EM argument, 2.
12. Gertler agrees, 7.
13. Clark and Chalmers, 9.
14. Andy Clark. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. (Oxford, 2008), 88.
15. Gertler, 8.
16. Jerry Fodor. “Where is My Mind?” London Review of Books. February 2009. Review of Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension by Andy Clark, 5.
17. Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa. “Defending non-derived content.” Philosophical Psychology. (2004), 1.
18. Ibid 1.
19. Fodor, 5.
20. Clark, “Intrinsic Content, Active Memory, and the Extended Mind”, 4.
21. Ibid, 4.
22. Here we see an example of how functionalist reasoning is applied to support the EM argument.
23. Clark and Chalmers, 10.
24. Clark, “Intrinsic content, Active Memory, and the Extended Mind”, 4.
25. Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa. “The Bounds of Cognition.” Philosophical Psychology, 14 (2001), 50.
26. Aizawa, 2.
27. Adams and Aizawa, “The bounds of cognition,” 50.
28. Clark and Chalmers, 9.
29. The stick fulfills all of Clark and Chalmers’ three conditions- consistency, accessibility and reliability (see section 4.3.).
30. Clark gives a similar example of a blind man, Supersizing the Mind, 31.
31. Clark and Chalmers, 9.
32. Chalmers, “Foreword to Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind,” xii.
33. Ibid, xii.
34. Ibid, xii.

What is a Good Life?

When asked, ‘What do you want from life?’, or ‘What is a good life?’, many respond with the slogan, ‘All that really matters is that you’re happy’. Does this slogan capture all that is relevant to a good life?

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Imagine that in the future, scientists and engineers develop an ‘experience machine’. People can program into the machine whatever experiences they want to undergo, and hook themselves up to this machine such that once inside, the experiences are indistinguishable from reality. Subjects can choose to live out their entire lives in the machine, experiencing whatever joys and achievements their hearts desire just like it were really happening.  Once in the machine the person is ignorant of the fact that they are really just lying in a vat or on a table having their brains manipulated according to the plan they had previously invented.

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A machine like this seems sufficient to ensure a person’s happiness, but would a life in the experience machine be a good life?  Assuming that the machine is without flaws, would you agree to be hooked up to the machine and live out your dreams? Why or why not?

Prometheus welcomes the opportunity to publish Garrett’s essay in this issue’s online journal. Enjoy.

By Garrett Lasnier

In this paper I will first and foremost answer the question as it is stated: given the opportunity, would I allow myself to be hooked up to a machine that makes me feel as though I am authentically living out my wildest dreams? If it were actually the case that I were given this choice, considering that I would be basing my decision on personal and psychological factors (essentially telling them that this life was not good enough, how would my family and friends feel if I entered the experience machine? Even if they would be brainwashed after I did it, I could not bring myself to do this in the first place), I would not go into the machine. I am too attached to this life to follow through with this decision, even if I were to coldly reason out that it was in my best interest, even with the knowledge that my decision would be irrelevant once in the machine. However, while my philosophical reasoning would be largely irrelevant in my actual decision-making process, I will argue that, philosophically, based on my conception of the ‘good life’, I would still not enter the machine.

From a solely hedonistic position, it is highly unlikely that one would even be happier in this experience machine. The psychological research overwhelmingly shows, as is the thesis of Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness, that human beings are largely ignorant of what will make them happy in the future. As a 19-year old, the “wildest dreams” that I program into the machine are vastly different from what will make me happy when I am 40, 50, or even 75. I may program the machine so that I find the cure for Aids, I become President, and am the first person to travel to Mars but, as hard as it might be for me to imagine now, perhaps my values will change. Perhaps after the first great achievement I may be more inclined to live a life outside of the spotlight, perhaps I would rather live a simple life with my family. I have no idea what will make me happy in the future; I can only extrapolate from the present state of my 19-year old existence. While in this life I will not be able to control other variables so that I can live out all of my wildest dreams (although I do have a high level of self-efficacy), at least I will be able to make choices that are relevant to my constantly changing attitudes and values. Thus, making me happier in the long-run.

Moreover, happiness is a completely subjective state. Assume that our current relative life satisfaction rating, on a 1-10 scale, is a 7. We are fairly happy. Now, if we were to lose the ability to use our hands and feet, we would assume that our life satisfaction rating would go down to a 2-we imagine that our lives would be miserable by comparison. But, if a quadriplegic claims that his life satisfaction is a 7 out of 10, who are we to claim that what he is experiencing is actually a 2 out of 10? We have this dogma that happiness is directly related to the circumstances of our life. “If I could just accomplish this or do that I would be happy.” The truth is, a person’s relative happiness scale is generally stable over time. If one person were to win the lottery and another person were to lose a loved one, the common knowledge is that the lottery winner would be significantly more happy while the other would be significantly less happy. And while this common knowledge may be true in the short term, the psychological evidence suggests that as early as 2 years after both events, both individuals would revert, with almost no discrepancy, back to their base life satisfaction rating. Therefore, as it relates to the experience machine, there is evidence that living out my wildest dreams would not even make me significantly happier. So, if I were to consider a virtual experience machine from a solely hedonistic perspective, it would be more appropriate to have a machine that would make me a person who would feel happy in any situation in the simulator.

While hedonistic calculations certainly are a factor in deciding whether to enter the experience machine, there are more factors that need to be considered-the good life consists of far more than pleasure and pain. I think that the good life is strongly tied to making authentic choices. I do not understand how I could possibly have a sense of free will in the experience machine if all my life was predetermined beforehand. But, more interestingly, I do not know how I have this sense of free will right now. Neurologically, or even philosophically, there may be no way to prove that we are free agents. After all, can you point to the neuron that constitutes the you that is choosing to do x or not to do x? We are just a compilation of independently acting cells, which are just a bunch of atoms, which are just a bunch of subatomic particles. That we are free agents is an absurd notion. Still, I feel that I have free will and I would not give that up for all the pleasure in the world. So what if there is no way to prove (considering it is ‘indistinguishable from reality’) that I am not in this machine right now? Even if I only think I have free will, I would rather hold on to this sense of authenticity than go into another machine, even if in that machine I would feel the same authenticity. So, considering that this sense of authenticity is at the core of my being, I would be unwilling to part with it, even if it were to be restored once in the machine.

So, if I am currently in an experience machine that is indistinguishable from reality, I have a few things to say to my former self. First and foremost, you must be a heartless jerk for abandoning your previous family and friends. Even if they were to be brainwashed of your existence, how could you ever follow through with such a decision and not feel too much guilt? Second, you must have had a really lame life if you consider this to be your wildest dreams. I am very happy with my life, fortunately enough, but so far the evidence shows that you are a very uncreative person. Thirdly, you must have quite the naïve conception of how human beings account for pleasure; pleasure is a relative phenomenon and is largely irrelevant to life circumstances. And finally, I am utterly disappointed that you gave up your fundamental sense of agency, perhaps you did not deserve it in the first place.

Garrett Lasnier (’12) is a Philosophy and Psychology major at Johns Hopkins University.

Essentially, humans have evolved to be able to infer through computing and processing information at a complex level – more than any other biological being. This feature most likely occurred through the process of natural selection according to the theory of evolution, and thus human beings have adapted to such feature. Although it took sometime to develop computational skills, it is proven that humans have adapted adequately tracing back to antiquity based on our evidence provided by historical and anthropological records. And humans have continued to fulfill their cognitive capacities by developing more complex cognitive skills up through the present day. To illustrate this point, let us assume that the first evolved human may not have understood the inference used in the proposition ‘2 + 2 = 4’, but today, a young child could exercise her computational skills and combine two objects with another two objects and come to the conclusion that two and two make up four, though the child might not know the language, depending on her age.

Moreover, it appears that the computational adaptation has become a genetic trait among humans. Since humans are constantly thinking, and there are many out there that devote their time to inquiring especially into scientific problems, which entails rigorous reasoning, inference is a common phenomenon on a daily basis. We use inference in mathematics, physics, logic, chemistry and most, if not all, of the “professional” disciplines, but it is not just limited to these subjects, it is also used in more simple things such as directions, cooking a meal, and other ordinary activities that people partake daily. Sure, what I have given thus far is just a generic description of the use of inference, but what is an inference exactly other than reasoning between things to derive a conclusion? By this, I mean, what is the nature of inference?

The activity of inference concerning one’s experience is usually founded with symbols or objects, and because of external factors playing a fundamental role in the inference, it seems plausible that the phenomenon, in part, has somewhat of a metaphysical nature from a mind-world perspective. My aim in this essay is to explore the nature of inference and attempt to show how it may be possible that inferences made about the external world, in part, are not just something of a physical nature that is contained and occurs only within the brain, which I think most people nowadays believe that it is only a physical process and consciousness all together is contained within the brain. In doing such task, I will inevitably show that inference requires the two branches of consciousness – access and phenomenal consciousness where the latter will draw on the active externalism thesis.

§1. An Explanation of the Nature of Inference (Roughly Speaking)

As I have just stated, the activity of inference based on an experience is usually founded with symbols or objects to begin with. To use a basic inference in logic for example, imagine using modus ponens. I have a conditional statement, then an assertion (the antecedent of the conditional statement) and from that I can derive a conclusion (the consequent of the conditional statement) inferentially.

So:

A → B
A
∴ B

Or I could use a simple mathematical expression similar to the one in the introduction – a combination of one and two leading to the result of three:
1 + 2 = 3

In my above examples, I ought to conclude that both examples are familiar cases of simple inference that philosophers and mathematicians are well acquainted with. Each are represented by symbols, but inferences are not limited to just being represented by symbols, they can be represented with objects (through experience) as well. Now, a neuroscientist may advocate that these inferences are a purely physical process occurring within the brain. It might be due to some chemical signal, firing of neurons, and so on. A computer scientist and artificial intelligence supporter would most likely say something similar but in terms of computer hardware. With all of the new discoveries in neuroscience and intelligent systems, it would be hard for one to doubt that inference is entirely of a physical nature that only occurs within the brain (or computer system). However, the problem at hand is the lack of clarity of this being a physical phenomenon entirely. The water is still cloudy so to speak and I cannot be certain that this conclusion is accurate without a more thorough look.

I am not going to deny that the biological components of the brain, in part, play a crucial role in human inference. In fact, because of biological neural networks, information can be transmitted and processed through chemical signals. But there seems to be another part that is missing and is not explainable through these neural systems. The feature, partially being developed by the brain, is something beyond matter when we look at inference from a mind-world perspective. There is a relation between mind and world where certain aspects of the world are an external extension of the mind – meaning that consciousness is not just contained within the head – and this view is commonly referred to as active externalism (1) (Chalmers & Clark, 1998). Similarly, Alva Noë appears to be a supporter of this line of thought as well, but has applied it to experience, and this application to experience is what I will be most concerned with throughout the paper. In “Experience Without the Head,” Noë states:

…what we experience visually (for example) may outstrip what we actually see. From this it follows not that experience could not be in the head. What follows, rather, is that it might not be, or rather, that some aspects of some experiences might not always be. A modest conclusion, but one that allows that, at least sometimes, the world itself may drive and so constitute perceptual experience. The world can enter into perceptual experience the way a partner joins us in a dance, or – to change the image slightly – the way the music itself guides us (Noë, 2006).

Noë makes the modest conclusion of “well, it might be or might not be,” which seems to be “iffy” on the subject, but I don’t think that such modesty is needed. There are instances given that serve as proof for the active externalism thesis (2). And active externalism also appears to be obvious in the case of inferences made about the external world because one is unable to make an inference on the most basic (or complex) events that occur within the world if there are no external objects (or symbols of representation present) given to make an inference from. The objects themselves give us a starting point to make inferences.

One may argue, however, that we do not need external objects (nor symbols) given to us through experience to make an inference relevant to the external world, but rather, some inferences can be made based on innate knowledge (3), or the protester may attempt to coin this knowledge as a priori, but it is obvious that ‘a priori’ here is being used in the wrong sense. Moreover, it seems absurd to believe that we have any sort of innate knowledge, especially with what empiricism has taught us over the past few centuries. It does not seem absurd, however, to have a priori synthetic knowledge in the correct sense. What I have expressed as a counter-argument above does not address a priori knowledge in the correct Kantian sense. If we were to take Kant’s actual proposal of there being a priori synthetic knowledge, then yes, I do believe that an inference can be made independent of perceptual experience, but this is much more difficult to explain, which would entail an extensive analysis, and is a different topic for a different day. We can conclude, however, that Kant would agree that experience “awakens” our faculty of knowledge and, for our sake, a priori synthetic knowledge will have to take the backseat to experience as far as we will be concerned. What I am trying to get at is explaining how we make inferences about the external world in a general sense and not to nit pick at our knowledge of space, time, geometry and the like – I am taking for granted that these types of knowledge are already presupposed. Therefore, experience must play a role in the foundation of inferences made about the external world. Once there are objects that are given to one’s perception for that person to make an inference on, the inference, in part, appears to be a quale. Why does it appear to be a quale? It is because there is an unexplainable, sensational gap, in terms of matter, between mind and world at this point in time. Let me use a diagram to illustrate this:

Now the use of the term ‘gap’ (also referred to as the “explanatory gap” by some) is ambiguous here, but what I think the gap, preventing consciousness being declared one-hundred percent fully physical due to the brain, is qualia and in this case, inference, in part, counting as a quale. The problem here is a sensational one, and inference can be partially of access consciousness, but I believe that it can also be partially of phenomenal consciousness (4) (Clark, 2000), where the phenomenal feature of inference is the unexplainable part in terms of matter. The reason for it being split into two parts is due to the one aspect being part of the computational (access) – cognitive processing – and the other being sensational (phenomenal) through perceptually experiencing objects, which contain different qualities that can be sensed, within the world to make inferences on.

When one perceives say a man and woman kissing, she would infer that they are a couple (5). The image would be processed within the brain to make the inference that they are a couple, but the inference begins before the brain receives the image because the experience of the event is necessary to make the inference at all (the perceptual experience is the foundation of the inference) and this is where the unexplainable gap of inference occurs sensationally, or if it were not the case that certain aspects of the world function as an extension of the conscious mind by aiding our mental processes, then this inference would not be possible to make because one would not have the representational mental image of the man and woman kissing. Thus, the cause of the inference does not begin with computation in the brain; the cause of inference in most cases lies in one’s perceptual experience of the external world.

With this explanation of the two parts of consciousness being required in making an inference relevant to the external world, it appears that I am taking a Kantian approach. As Kant had described in his Critique of Pure Reason, the faculty of knowledge is distinguished by sensibility and the understanding. Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, which yield us intuitions, and the understanding allows intuitions to be thoughtful, which concepts arise. The effect of an object on the faculty of representation is called sensation. And the intuition that is in relation to an object through sensation is empirical. So, an empirical intuition gives us appearances of objects that can later become knowledge (Kant, 1929). If we stand on this latter notion only, however, we might run into a problem with giveness or simply putting it, fall into Sellars’s “Myth of the Given.” Luckily for us, that is not the case. Even though empirical intuition gives us appearances of objects, it cannot by itself constitute knowledge. Rather appearances are thought spontaneously through the understanding and concepts of the appearances develop from the understanding. Thus, I think it is safe to say that through concepts, we can have knowledge. Similarly, my approach to inference takes a resembling line of thought with emphasis on a holism of phenomenal and access consciousness being relevant in one making an inference. By only having the perceptions of objects, we cannot call that knowledge. Not only is that problematic, but the perceptions cannot be computed through phenomenal consciousness and thus we have no inference at all. In support of this idea, imagine perceiving an object at one instance and the object later becomes a concept that is cognitively accessible. If the object changes over time and we perceive it after the change, then we have a new perception of the object, which becomes a concept and clashes with the previous concept of that object. So the latter would replace the former, I think, and we would have a new cognitively accessible concept. However, such a process cannot occur in phenomenal consciousness because we would not recognize the change in the object that occurs between perceptual instances. So there is a dependence on access consciousness needed here to process images and output a conclusion inferentially. The dependence, however, is necessarily reciprocal, and that is the stressing point of this paper.

There still may be confusion lingering around on how inference, in part, can be a quale since what I have mentioned thus far are objects in general and not subjective qualities. However, I will attempt to address this issue now. When one perceives anything in the world, the perceiver’s experience of objects leads her to perceive qualities of the objects as well. The qualities are contained within all objects and necessarily predicate those objects. I do not think that it would even be conceivable to imagine an object absent of “secondary” qualities. For example, if a mysterious object had appeared to me in which the object looked though as the color was absent due to some aspect of the object being unfamiliar to me, I would be wrong in allowing myself to think this way because my perception surely could be matched up somewhere on the color spectrum. Moreover, since objects are the foundation of inferences made about the external world, and all objects necessarily contain various qualities within themselves, then that implies that the cause of inference (perceptual experience) necessarily contains qualia, and thus qualia is a necessity in phenomenal consciousness of an inference, which would make itself a broader version of qualia accounting for every sensational property and not just an individual sensation such as ‘seeing red’.

§2. An Attempt of Clarification

Clearly, my theory would seem obscure to most and it could be due to misunderstanding the theory since it is quite a task to explain it coherently6, but let me attempt to explain it analogously to a popular thought experiment. In Frank Jackson’s thought experiment about Mary and the black and white room, Mary was confined to a black and white room and was never exposed to any other colors. She knew everything there was to know about the physical world through her books on chemistry, physics and neurophysiology. One day, Mary was taken out of the room and shown a ripe, red tomato. Mary had no idea what the property red was since she had never experienced it before. Therefore, Mary learned something new and proved that she did not know all there is to know about the world (Jackson, 1986).

Similarly, imagine mechanical Mary, who is exactly the same as a human, in a room that is completely dark with no lighting of any sort. A constant temperature is kept so that Mary cannot sense a variation. There are no sounds, smells or things to be tasted in the room and the scientists of the experiment have developed devices that would temporarily disable Mary’s sense of taste, smell, touch and hearing, but she would remain a conscious being. Since the room is extremely dark, Mary would not be able to use her sight to view anything other than blackness. After several years, mechanical Mary is taken outside of the room and exposed to the real world and the scientists re-enable her senses. Obviously, she has no clue of what anything is that she perceives. But since she is like a human in every way, she has computational skills programmed in her. The scientists sit her at a little children’s play table with two wooden blocks on one side and two on the other. Mary sees the one set of blocks and instinctively moves her arm towards the blocks. The back of her hand smashes into the blocks causing the blocks to fall on the floor. Like a child, Mary recollects on the act and impulsively lets out a laugh, and then she begins to move her other arm towards the set of blocks that remain on the table and proceeds to push them onto the floor as well because she thought that the act was funny and it made her feel happy. So she inferred that by doing it again, she would obtain the same result.

From this experiment, the scientists have learned that mechanical Mary performed a basic computational inference through performing an instinctive act, which caused a mess and made Mary laugh and feel happiness for the first time. She had inferred by doing the same procedure again to the other set of blocks, she would obtain the same result. However, while confined to the black room, she had never inferred anything of this nature before other than the fact that she exists, but nothing about the actual world and her environment because she had never experienced anything sensationally beyond staring at the blackness of the room. Thus, an inference about the external world is dependent on perceptual experience. The world provides objects that eventually become representational mental states, which are sent and computed in the brain for one to make inferences on. Let us not forget that the objects give rise to non-representational mental states also. And since this type of inference is dependent on objects, inference extends over mind and world, which would entail inference partially due to cognitive processes and partially due to sensation where the latter is unexplainable in terms of the physical because of subjectivity and qualia being contained within the experience, which are necessary components in the perception of objects, and I think inference can be declared as a quale itself in certain respect on the phenomenal consciousness side.

Furthermore, the thought experiment regarding mechanical Mary also illustrates that the success of Mary’s adaptation to her environment is dependent on the active externalism thesis. Even though this is a fictional case, we are shown that if it were possible to insert a human into the situation with all of the necessary conditions, then we could conclude that the success of the adaptation to the environment is dependent on the environment providing the human with external “instruments” that would serve as an extension of the person’s consciousness by aiding their mental processes, which will allow them to make inferences.

To conclude, I have argued that inferences made on worldly experience rely on a holistic process. Not only is access consciousness, which does the work of computing information to output a conclusion, but phenomenal consciousness, where the inference begins, is required also since it is the starting point of the inference itself. Overall, I believe that this new analysis of inference has created another roadblock for physicalism since phenomenal consciousness entails subjectivity and qualia in perception. Qualia have been problematic for physicalists in the philosophy of mind and also have prevented a plausible materialist position of the mind from being developed.

References

Chalmers, D. & Clark, A. (1998) “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58, pp. 10-23

Clark, A. (2000) “A Case Where Access Implies Qualia,” Analysis 60: 265, pp. 30-38

Jackson, F. (1986) “What Mary Didn’t Know,” Journal of Philosophy 83: 5, pp. 291-295

Kant, I. (1929) Critique of Pure Reason, Translated by Norman Kemp Smith, New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillian, pp. 65-67

______(1977) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Translated by James Ellington,
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, pp. 10-11

Noë, A. (2006) “Experience Without the Head.” In Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne
(Eds.) Perceptual Experience, New York, NY: Oxford University Pres

Sellars, W. (1997) Empricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Footnotes

(1) This is a generalization made of Chalmers and Clark’s theory of the extended mind.

(2) See Chalmers & Clark, 1998. The Tetris case and the thought experiment regarding Otto who has Alzheimer’s.

(3) One might question why I have brought up innate knowledge. They may assume that I am still dwelling on the Cartesian notion of the mind having some innate knowledge, but rest assured that is not the case. It is the case, however, that some linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and even philosophers today still believe that the mind has some innate concepts. Thus, this counter-argument is not all that improbable.

(4) See Clark, 2000. Access consciousness, in brief, is when content of a mental state is available for control of rational action for use of verbal reports or reasoning. In contrast, phenomenal consciousness involves experiential properties such as ‘what it is like’ to see red and the like (qualia). This is a thesis that has been defended by Ned Block and others.

(5) The inference need not be true. P & Q will φ iff P & Q are a couple. It is not the case that this statement is necessarily true. P could be a man where Q is his mother, which would entail, in a strictly normal sense, that they are not a couple. In the latter case, the above statement would be false. Moreover, I am not particularly concerned with the truth or falsehood of the inference, just the inference in general.

(6) As you will notice, section one is somewhat scattered and ill-structured. But when read in its entirety, I think it forms a bigger picture.

L.J. Elkin (’09) is a Philosophy major at University of Pittsburgh.

In the late nineteenth century, psychologist and philosopher William James wrote in his Principles of Psychology, “So far as I know, the existence of such states [of consciousness] has never been doubted by any critic, however skeptical in other respects he may have been…. All people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves thinking… I regard this belief as the most fundamental of all the postulates of Psychology…” (185). James might have felt a bit naïve had he lived eighty years later and read the work of B.F. Skinner. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner is very skeptical of internal mental states, especially with regard to their scientific usefulness. The 20^th-Century behaviorist writes, “…we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior” (15). Skinner believed that, in order to standardize psychology and elevate it to the norms of a rigorously objective science like physics or biology, the scientist need only observe and describe real phenomena so as to make physical conclusions about them, rather than derive its conclusions from “autonomous man”, the indwelling being from whom all behavior supposedly emanates. In his book, Skinner describes a history of science in which people first attributed physical and biological events to nonphysical agents in order to determine their origin. For example, an arrow might move forward because of a certain impetus it contains. Science could only advance, he writes, when it rid itself of these indwelling agents and assessed only observable cause and effect. Similarly, psychology would need to do the same. Skinner writes that the autonomous man “naturally loses status as we come to know more about behavior” (14). The autonomous man has throughout history received the perquisite of living beyond what is physical only as a substitute for our true understanding of cause and effect, Skinner believed. It seems as though we must call on the supernatural until we finally understand the natural. As far as science is concerned, then, the autonomous man is dead weight. He is a superfluous step in the scientific process, and we can leave him at the coat rack.

But, then again, there is a specific reason autonomous man has survived until this point, and it is something more than human superstition – it is the fact that every human can contemplate his or her self and know that it would be cheating to claim that physicality is all that’s present. That is, there will always be a certain Cartesian “I” that the scientist can never get around. The reconciliation of behaviorism with autonomous man seems to require a certain act of recognition on the part of the behaviorist.

René Descartes writes in his Second Meditation, “I am, I exist,” and it seems to be this very idea that most of psychology according to Skinner has hinged on (Descartes 21). Psychologists assume that there is an internal agent because they perceive one within themselves and, therefore, project an equivalent onto the rest of humanity. It could even be considered irresponsible to discard an entity that probably exists in other people, even if it isn’t a physical entity. As far as science goes, the indwelling spirit that constitutes consciousness in people is, in fact, a necessary result of a simple inductive proof: “If a physical object that behaves a certain way is conscious, then other physical objects that behave similarly are probably also conscious by association. The scientist is conscious. Therefore, others like the scientist in their behavior are probably conscious.” Thus, science does concern the nonphysical simply because of its relationship with the scientist who studies it. The scientist seems to have no way of denying the basis – that his or her own inner self exists and behaves in an unobservable, nonphysical way – that is, it thinks. This basic, individual knowledge then allows for interpersonal discussions about inner selves involving a vocabulary that Skinner despises. Terms like “personalities,” “states of mind,” “feelings,” “plans,” and so on are descriptors of inner behavior. In fact, as James points out, there are two modes of observation when a psychologist deals with people and behavior. James summarizes one by writing, “These four squares contain the irreducible data of psychology. No. 1, the psychologist, believes Nos. 2 [The Thought Studied], 3 [The Thought’s Object], and 4 [The Psychologists Reality], which together form his total object…” (184). Thus, one mode involves sensory observation and its following conclusions. Summarizing the other, James writes, “Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always. The word introspection need hardly be defined – it means, of course, the looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover” (185). The second mode, dealing with a nonphysical realm, involves observation that is independent of the senses. It involves an immediate knowing of the facts that seem to constitute one’s entire mental world. The existence of such observation is undeniable because it is the truism that precedes any other fact. That is, if only the physical world exists, then, in a sense, it might as well not because there is nothing there to perceive it and affirm its existence. Of course, Skinner writes, “Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits…” (15). But psychology, on the other hand, can be an honest science only by recognizing that it studies a physical reality that accompanies a mental one.

The word “technology” seems to imply something physical. “A Technology of Behavior,” the title of the first chapter of Skinner’s book, evokes the idea that physical means can have behavioral consequences. Skinner’s central point is that any type of science in a physical world, and particularly a science of behavior, should only be concerned with physical rules and entities, as he says that we do not “need” to concern ourselves with the “perquisites of autonomous man.” Thus, despite the sheer obviousness of one’s own internal being, such a thing and its corresponding descriptors are not scientifically useful. Skinner writes, “The contingencies of survival responsible for man’s genetic endowment would produce tendencies to act aggressively, not feelings of aggression” (14). Skinner consigns such feelings to a status of “at best by-products” (14). In making a claim about the superiority of a behaviorist scientific approach, Skinner, in fact, makes a claim about our own language. Implicitly, he claims that any physical description of behavioral phenomena can supersede a mentalistic description. For every statement “One feels x,” there is a truer statement, “One behaves f(x),” that should replace it. In that sense, there is an isomorphism between statements of one’s mental status and statements of one’s behavioral status, such that every physical interpretation of either statement is captured by its alternative. At one point, Skinner protests the use of mentalistic statements for their lack of new information: “If we ask someone, ‘Why did you go to the theater?’ and he says, ‘Because I felt like going,’ we are apt to take his reply as a kind of explanation. It would be much more to the point to know what has happened when he has gone to the theater in the past…” (12-13).

The truth is that “I felt like going” does capture a certain amount of behavioral information. Skinner even notes that we are likely to accept such a statement “as a sort of summary of all this and are not likely to ask for details” (13). It says that one’s behavior is within a set of behaviors that, when considered, have in common a certain feeling-like-going associated with them. The listener to such a statement can determine which behaviors are being referenced by recalling what behaviors are within his or her own similar set. Skinner is correct in that “I felt like going” doesn’t list a single antecedent event to a behavior. However, it puts large constraints on what antecedent events are possible.

If such an isomorphism exists, then it should be perfectly acceptable to talk about one’s own thoughts and feelings in a scientific context. The very problem of dualism is that it involves an interaction between the physical world and an indwelling, nonphysical self. This interaction isn’t just roughly parallel – that is, there aren’t just certain thoughts that decide to become physically manifest and others that stay in the subjective realm – it is exact. It is isomorphic. The two, in fact, seem one and the same, and by neglecting one, one neglects the other. Skinner is correct in implying that physical and behavioral phenomena are subject only to physical rules. But if mental rules are actually physical rules, then everything is subject to both.

Skinner’s central quarrel with the scientific recognition of “autonomous man” is summed up in his statement, “The world of the mind steals the show. Behavior is not recognized as a subject in its own right” (12). But, evidently, from the fact every individual can know that he or she is an individual – something that in its most real sense is not actually physical (though it perceives a physical world) – and realize that his or her own reality has a type of dualist nature to it, behavior, at the most fundamental level, does not exist in its own right as a physical phenomenon. At the most fundamental level, there will always be a certain “I” whom behavior happens to.

Works Cited

Descartes, René. “Meditations on First Philosophy.” The Nature of Mind Ed. David M. Rosenthal. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. 21-9.

James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Skinner, B.F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002.

Julian Grove (’10) is a Cognitive Science major at Johns Hopkins University.

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Note: Homepage thumbnail taken from Tsuki-wo-Nusumu’s deviantART.

Though people use the term regularly, “believing” is a somewhat foggy notion in philosophy. It’s easy for a person to say that he or she has a belief, but saying what that even means is a completely different story; having a belief seems to be a very complicated endeavor from the analyst’s point of view. Jerry Fodor and Daniel Dennett are two contemporary philosophers who propose different accounts of what constitutes belief. Fodor takes up the phrase “propositional attitude” (or “PA”) to denote belief as a relationship a person can have with a proposition (325). If one believes something, then he or she is in a “belief-relation with that thing,” making belief a sort of interaction between two objects: person and proposition.  Other propositional attitudes are concepts like desiring and remembering, all of which Fodor calls “relations between organisms and internal representations” (325). In other words, Fodor ascribes to belief the characteristic of being represented inside one’s head as a sort of isolable fact..

Dennett, on the other hand, separates himself from such a view, which he calls “realist” (340).  To Dennett, belief is something that can be inferred over time rather than immediately pinned down. Dennett writes in the article “True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works” that belief “can be discerned only from the point of view of one who adopts a certain predictive strategy, and its existence can be confirmed only by an assessment of the success of that strategy” (340).  Such a predictive strategy applies the concepts of “belief” and “desire” to real-world individuals as tools for predicting their behavior. The individuals that best manifest the strategy’s predictions are the prodigies of intentionality (the attribute of believing, desiring, etc.). The idea is that, after sufficient experimentation with the strategy, human beings will most succumb to the strategy while lawnmowers and lampshades will fail miserably. What is important to Dennett’s strategy is that the beliefs used to predict an individual’s behavior successfully are beliefs that one can objectively say the individual has. Thus, like Fodor, Dennett claims that beliefs are objective. However, he claims that their existence fully fleshes out only after the fact. Belief, in this sense, is something that takes time and is observed externally because its attribution is just an abstract way of analyzing events and behavior (though, an objective one).

But, this is where Fodor’s position seems to beat Dennett’s. While Dennett has a point in proposing a versatile conception of belief – one that can apply to anything physical, successfully or unsuccessfully – it is still unconvincing that belief’s very structure might not necessarily be represented semantically in the brain. If a person “believes” something (or, as Dennett would say, acts in a way predictable by belief attribution), how could he or she believe it (or act that way) by virtue of anything other than the organ that produces behavior – that is, the brain?

To determine the exact nature of propositional attitudes, Fodor outlines five postulates about them that he considers to be self-evident in his article “Propositional Attitudes.” These postulates all aim at the eventual conclusion that the objects of propositional attitudes (what it is that one can believe) have important similarities to natural language (i.e., English). As Fodor eventually says, “the general characteristics of propositional attitudes appear to demand sentence-like entities to be their objects” (334). Thus, when one has a propositional attitude, one literally has a “sentence-like” entity. Fortunately for Dennett’s position, the argument that belief exists in the abstract characterization of previous events still seems to present an account of belief that meets Fodor’s criteria. Dennett, on the other hand, would simply say that the postulates are true by virtue of their usefulness in describing the beliefs that can be attributed after the fact. That is, the beliefs attributed to someone through a predictive strategy would have the same qualifications as Fodor’s propositional attitudes because a person contains a “sentence-like” entity in the sense that saying so leads to success. A person could be said to contain a belief when that belief accounts for their behavior. In no way would Dennett specify, however, that the person contains it within his or her cranium. Saying so is not necessary in order to be consistent with Fodor’s postulates, notably because the postulates themselves don’t really say anything about physical representation.

First, Fodor states: “propositional attitudes should be analyzed as relations. In particular, the verb in a sentence like ‘John believes it’s raining’ expresses a relation between John and something else” (325).  Well, by the predictive strategy, the specific relation could be construed as, say, acts in accordance with. That is, John will behave according to the statement “it’s raining,” and later on, after he has done so, you can point it out. Second, Fodor says, “A theory of PAs should explain the parallelism between verbs of PA and verbs of saying…. the things we can be said to believe… are the things that we can be said to say…” (327). By Dennett’s strategy, the beliefs one can successfully attribute are perfectly sayable because their vocalization is really the only way they exist. They are propositions one can be said to believe if doing so is productive. At one point, Dennett says, “all there is to being a true believer is being a system whose behavior is reliably predictable via the intentional strategy, and hence all there is to really and truly believing that p (for any proposition p) is being an intentional system for which p occurs as a belief in the best (most productive) interpretation” (346). Thus, it is practically inevitable for Dennett’s account to give belief the form of a sentence, which is then treated as a type of abstract object, because it is part of the predictive strategy’s definition to be implemented through language. At this point, the other postulates are somewhat irrelevant, given what they all point to (according to Fodor). The important idea is that propositional attitudes are sentence-like whether one considers them to be instantiated in the brain (like Fodor does) or instantiated in some abstract analysis of events (like Dennett does). The debate, then, isn’t settled at the level of Fodor’s postulates. However, this fact suggests that Dennett’s predictive strategy, something purely linguistic (as has been shown), seems to necessitate linguistic origins in order to work. In other words, the cause of the behavior that can be reliably analyzed in terms of propositional attitudes must reliably produce such behavior. But, then why not take out the extra step of analyzing the behavior according to propositional attitudes and go right to the cause itself – the brain.

Toward the end of his article, Dennett attempts to explain why a predictive strategy works. He brings up Fodor’s idea that beliefs in all their formality are somehow inside someone’s head: “A currently more popular explanation is… for each predictively attributable belief, there will be a functionally salient internal state of the machinery, decomposable into functional parts in just about the same way the sentence expressing the belief is decomposable into parts…” (348). However, he claims the following: “Those who think that it is obvious, or inevitable, that such a theory will prove true (and there are many who do), are confusing two different empirical claims. The first is that intentional stance descriptions yield an objective, real pattern in the world… The second is that this real pattern is produced by another real pattern roughly isomorphic to it within the brains of intelligent creatures” (348-349). This is where Dennett crucially departs from Fodor, and it is where he seems to be wrong. Fodor might actually concur on the point that the claim of an objective intentional stance does not directly imply an objective isomorphism in the brain. After all, he does say, “the theory that propositional attitudes are relations to internal representations is a piece of empirical psychology, not an analysis” (336). In fact, Fodor gets his point of view from empirical examples such as the ability of the mind to parse English sentences (335).  In a sense, it seems that the departure from Dennett is incidental – an artifact of empirical psychology. In that case, it would seem that Fodor is wrong too.

For, one would think that, if a predictive strategy works, it works because certain behavior is letting it work. And, certain behavior, it can be assumed, is caused by certain brain states. In that case, there is an indirect route from brain state to belief through the medium of behavior analyzable in terms of beliefs. Thus, belief is perfectly functional of brain processes in any way the term is used. But, as has been said, belief can only be talked about in terms of propositions (whether these propositions are taken to be brain states or tools for making predictions). Thus, there is effective mapping of brain processes onto propositions simply by discerning the behavior with which these brain processes line up. It seems as though there could be nothing else but a “language of thought,” as Dennett calls it (348). This language of thought dictates what one does, which is then analyzable to determine the beliefs instantiated in the language itself. To be intentional is to carry one’s intentionality around wherever one goes.

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Works Cited

Dennett, Daniel C. “True Believers: The intentional Strategy and Why it Works.” The Nature of Mind. Ed. David M. Rosenthal. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. 339-49.

Fodor, J.A. “Propositional Attitudes.” The Nature of Mind. Ed. David M. Rosenthal. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. 325-38.

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Julian Grove (’10) is a Cognitive Science major at Johns Hopkins University.