have knowledge of propositions about objects and
events in the external world based upon propositions
about directly perceived sensa?
It is worth nothing the differences between the problems of the external world as expounded upon its first premise and the secondly proposing comments as listed of the problems of the external world, we may, perhaps, that we have knowledge of the external world only if propositions about objects and events in the external world that are inferrable from propositions about appearances.
Some philosophers have thought that if analytical phenomenalism were true, the situational causalities would be different. Analytic phenomenalism is the doctrine that every proposition about objects and events in the external world is fully analysable into, and thus is equivalent in meaning to, a group of inferrable propositions. The numbers of inferrable propositions making up the analysis in any single propositioned object and or event in the external world would likely be enormous, perhaps, indefinitely many. Nevertheless, analytic phenomenalism might be of help in solving the perceptual direct realism of which the required deductions propositioned about objects and or events in the external world from those that are inferrable from prepositions about appearances. For, given analytical phenomenalism there are indefinite many in the inferrable propositions about appearances in the analysis of each proposition taken about objects and or events in the external world is apt to be inductive, even granting the truth of a analytical phenomenalism. Moreover, most of the inferrable propositions about appearances into which we might hope to analyse of the external world, then we have knowledge of the external world only if propositions about objects and events in the external world would be complex subjunctive conditionals such as that expressed by ‘If I were to seem to see something red, round and spherical, and if I were to seem to try to taste what I seem to see, then most likely I would seem to taste something sweet and slightly tart’. But propositionally inferrable appearances of this complex sort will not typically be immediately known. And thus knowledge of propositional objects and or event of the external world will not generally be based on or upon immediate knowledge of such propositionally making appearances.
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 nor 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 give 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 ‘÷’ in virtue of being similar to ‘÷’. 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 ‘÷’ is grounded in the fact that r’s occurrence covaries with that of ‘÷’. 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 ‘÷’ if it is r’s function to indicate (i.e., covary with) ‘÷’. 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 ‘÷’ only if the capacity to token ‘r’ was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates ‘÷’. Thus, a state physically indistinguishable from ‘r’ (physical stares being a-historical) but lacking r’s historical origins would not represent ‘÷’ 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 between mental states and between mental states and 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, for 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 and 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, 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 being 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 . 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. But 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 subclass of property brings to contrast with property is ‘concept’, but one must be very careful, since ‘concept’, has =been used by philosophers and 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 . 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 ‘÷’ rather than ‘y’. To the extent 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 of 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 in 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 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 in which language does not depend on thought in the ways that: We can say that a sequence of ascriptions or sounds (or, whatever) ó means ‘q’ in a language ‘L’, construed as a function from expressions onto meaning, iff L(ó) = 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: ó can mean ‘q’ in ‘L’ even if ‘L’ has never been used? But then we can say that ó also means ‘q’ in a population ‘P’ jus t in case members of ‘P’ use some language in which ó ,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 difficult 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 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 there 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 o 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, which 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 upon 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 gloss 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 according 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.
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. 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 they 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 ‘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 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 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.
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 ‘÷’ means ‘y’, where ‘÷’ 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 na ve ‘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 ÷’ is present in an animal because ‘÷’ 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 ‘÷’. It makes the explanation scientifically respectable, ‘because’ it indicates a weak relation of partial causal contribution.
However, this construal is not satisfying intuitively. To say that ‘÷’ is present because it has a function is normally taken to mean, roughly, that ‘÷’ is present it is supposed to do something useful. Yet, this normal interpretation immediately makes the explanation scientifically problematic, because the claim that ‘÷’ 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 and 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:
` 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.
Increasingly, proponents of the intentional theory of perception argue that perceptual representational experience is to be differentiated from belief not only in terms of attitude, but, in terms of the kind of content that experience is an attitude toward a better understanding a person’s reasons for the array of emotions and sensations to which he ids subject: What he remembers and what he forges, and how he reasons beyond the confines of minimal rationality. Even the content-involving perceptual states, which take into consideration, a fundamental role in individuating content. This, however, cannot be understood purely in terms relational 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 rational that perceptions give reasons for forming beliefs, the beliefs for which they fundamentally provide reasons - observational beliefs about the environment - have contents which can only be elucidated by referring back to perceptual representations belonging of experience. In this respect (as in others), perceptual states differ from those beliefs and desires that are individuated by mentioning that they provide reasons for judging or doing: For frequently, these latter judgements and actions can be individuated without reference back to the states that provide reasons for them.
We are acutely aware of the effects of our own memory, its successes and its failures, so that we have the impression that we know something about how it functionally operates. But, with memory, as with most mental functions, what we are aware of is the outcome of its operation and not the operation itself. To our introspections, the essence of memory is language based and intentional. When we appear as a witness in court then the truth, as we are seen to report it is what we say about what we intentionally retrieve. This is, however, a very restricted view o memory albeit, with a distinguished history. William James (1842-1910), an American psychologist and philosopher, whose own emotional needs gave him an abiding interest in problems of religion, freedom, and ethics: The popularity of these themes and his lucid and accessible style made James the most influential American philosopher of the beginning of the 20th century. Nonetheless, James said, that ‘Memory proper is the knowledge of a former state of mind after it has already once dropped from consciousness, or rather it is the knowledge of an event, or fact, of which meantime we have not been thinking, with the additional consciousness that we have thought or experienced it before’.
One clue to the underlying structure of our memory system might be its evolutionary history. We have no reason to suppose that a special memory system evolved recently or to consider linguistic aspects of memory and intentional recall as primary. Instead, we might assume that such features are later additions to a much more primitive filing system. From this perspective one would view memory as having the primary function of enabling us (the organism as a whole, that is, not the conscious self) to interpret the perceptual world and helping us to organize our responses to changes that place in the world.
Considerations or other aspects in the content of memory are those with which contain the capacity to remember: to (1) recall past experiences, and (2) retain knowledge that was acquired in the past. It would be a mistake to omit (1), for not any instance of remembering something is an instance of retaining knowledge. Suppose that as a young child you saw the Sky Dome in Toronto, but you did not know at the time which building it was. Later you learn what the Sky Dome is, and you remember having seen it when you were a child. This is an example of obtaining knowledge of a past fact - by recalling a past experience, but not an example of retaining knowledge because at the time you were seeing it you did not know you were since you did not know what the Sky Dome was or represented. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to omit (2), for not any instance of remembering something is an instance of recalling the past, let alone a past experience. For example, by remembering my telephone number, I retain knowledge of a past fact, and by remembering the date of the next elections, of a future fact.
According to Aristotle (De Memoria), memory cannot exist without imagery: We remember past experiences by recalling images that represent therm. This theory - the representative theory of memory - was also held by David Hume and Bertrand Russell (1921). It is subject to three objections, the first of which was recognized by Aristotle himself. That if what I remember is an image present to me now, how can it be that what I remember belongs to the past, how can it be that it is an image now present to my mind? According to the second objection, we cannot tell the difference between images that represent actual memories and those that are mere figments of the imagination. Hume suggested two criteria to distinguish between these two kinds of images, vivacity and orderliness, and Russell a third, an accompanying feeling of familiarity. Critics of the representative theory would argue that these criteria are not good enough, that they do not allow us to distinguish reliably between true memories and mere imagination. This objection is not decisive, as it only calls for a refinement of the proposed criteria. Nevertheless, the representative theory succumbs to the third objection, which is fatal: Remembering something does not require an image. In remembering their dates of birth, or telephone numbers, people do not, at least not normally, have an image of anything. In developing an account of memory, we must, therefore, proceed without making images an essential ingredient. One way of accomplishing this is to take the thing that is remembered to be a proposition, the content of which may be about the past, present, or future. Doing so would provide us with an answer to the problem pointed out by Aristotle. If the position we remember is a truth about the past, then we remember the past by virtue of having a cognation of something present - the proposition that is remembered.
What, then, are the necessary and sufficient conditions of remembering a proposition, of remembering that ‘p’? To begin with, believing that ‘p’ is not a necessary condition, for at a given moment ‘t’, I, may not be aware of the fact that I still remember that ‘p’ and thus, do not believe that ‘p’ at ‘t’. It is possible that I remember that ‘p’ but, perhaps because I gullibly trust another person’s judgement, unreasonably disbelieve that ‘p’. It will, however, be helpful to focus on the narrower question: Under which conditions is S’s belief that ‘p’ an instance of remembering that ‘p’? It is such an instance only if ‘S’ either (1) previously came to know that ‘p’, or (2) had an experience that put ‘S’ in a position subsequently to come to know that ‘p’. Call this the ‘original input condition’. Suppose, having learned in the past that 12 x 12 = 144 but subsequently having forgotten it. I now come to know again that 12 x 12 = 144 by using a pocket t calculator. Here the original input condition is fulfilled, but obviously this is not an example of remembering that 12 x 12 = 144. Thus, a further condition is necessary: For S’s belief that ‘p’ to be a case of remembering that ‘p’, the belief must be connected in the right way with the original input. Call this the ‘connection condition’. According to Carl Ginet (1988), the connection must be ‘epistemic’, at any time since the original input at which S acquires evidence sufficient for knowing that ‘p’, ‘S’ already knew that ‘p’. Critics would dispute that a purely epistemic account of the connection condition will suffice. They would insist that the connection be ‘causal’‘: For ‘S’ to remember that ‘p’, there must be an uninterrupted causal chain connecting the original input with the present belief.
Not every case of remembering that ‘p’ is one of knowing that ‘p’, although I remember that ‘p’ I might not believe that ‘p’, and I might not be justified in believing that ‘p’, for I might have information that undermines or casts doubt on ‘p’. When, however, do we know something by remembering it? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowing that ‘p’ on the basis of memory? Applying the traditional conception of knowledge, we may say that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ on the basis of memory just in case (1) ‘S’ clearly and distinctly remembers that ‘p’: (2) ‘S’ believes that ‘p’ and (3) ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’. (Since (1) entail ss that ‘p’ is true, adding a condition requiring p’s truth is not necessary.) Whether this account of memory knowledge is correct, and how it is to be fleshed out in detail, are questions which concern the nature of knowledge and epistemic justification in general, and thus, will give rise to much controversy.
Memory knowledge is possible only if memory is a source of justification. Common-sense assumes it is. We naturally believe that, unless there are specific reasons for doubt, we believe that we do remember that we seem to remember, unless it is undermined or even contradicted by our background beliefs. Thus, we trust that we have knowledge of the past, however, would argue that this trust is ill-founded. According to a famous argument by Bertrand Russell (1927), it is logically possible that the world sprang into existence five minutes ago, complete with our memories and evidence, since as fossils and petrified trees, suggesting a past of millions of years. If it is, then, there is no logical guarantee that we actually do remember what we seem to remember. Consequently, so the sceptics would argue, there is no reason to trust memory. Some philosophers have replied to this line of reasoning by trying to establish that memory is necessarily reliable, that it is logically impossible for the majority of our memory beliefs to be false. Alternatively, our commonsense view may be defended by pointing out that the unreasonable to trust memory - does not follow from its premise, memory fails to provide us with a guarantee that we seem to remember is true. For the argument to be valid, it would have to be supplemented with a further premise: For a belief to be justified, its justifying reason must guarantee its truth. Many contemporary epistemologists would dismiss this premise as unreasonably strict. One of the chief reasons for resisting it is that accepting it is harder more reasonable than our trust in particular, clear and vivid deliverance of memory. To the contrary, accepting these as true would actually appear less error prone than accepting an abstract philosophical principle which implies that our acceptance of such deliverance is justified.
These altering distinctions of forms of memory is a crude one, and seems uncategorized by the varying degrees of enabling such terms as ‘conscious’ and ‘explicit’ are so cloud-covered. Their shadowy implication, is well known, according to Schacter, McAndrews and Moscovitch, 1988, have in accordance with, the memory loss or amnesia is an inability to remember recent experiences (even from the very recent past) and to learn various but limited resultants amounts in types of information, and dilate upon features from selective brain damage that leaves perceptual, linguistic, and intellectual skills abounding with the overflowing emptiness of being and nothingness. Memory deficit misfunction have traditionally been studied using techniques designed to elicit explicit memories. So, for example, memory-loose persons in that these amnesic people, might be instructed or otherwise asked to think back to a learning episode and either recall information from that intermittent interval of their lives, or say whether a presented item had previously been encountered in the episodic period of learning. That being said, is that the very same persons who performed uncollectible afflicted in the loose of decayed or deadened or lifeless memory cells. The acquisition of skills is a case in point, and there is considerable experimental evidence showing the consensus of particular amnesic implications over a series of learning episodes. Although, a striking example is the densely amnesic unfortunates who learned how to use a personal computer over numerous sessions, despite declaring at the beginning of each session that he had never used a computer before. In addition to this sort of capacity to learn over a succession of episodes, amnesiacs have performed well on single-short-lived episodes (such as completing previously shown words given to phraselogicial 3-letter cues). So just as these amnesic people clearly reveal the difference between conscious and nonconscious memory, but similar dissociations can be observed in normal subjects, as when performances on indirect tasks reveal the effects of prior events that are not remembered.
Basely, the memory, as that of enabling us to interpret the perceptual world and helping us to organize our responses to the challenges of change, that take place in the world. For both functions we have to accumulate experiences in a memory system in such a way as to enable the productive access of that experience at the appropriate times. The memory, then, can be seen as the repository of experience. Of course, beyond a certain age, we are able to use our memories in different ways, both to store information and to retrieve it. Language is vital in this respect and it might be argued that much of socialization and the whole of schooling are devoted to just such an extension of an evolutionary (relatively) straightforward system. It will follow that most of the operation of our memory system is preconscious. That is to say, consciousness only has access to the product of the memory processes and not to the processes themselves. The aspects of memory that we are conscious of can be seen as the final state in a complex and hidden set-class of operations.
How should we think about the structure of memory? The dominant metaphor is that of association. Words, ideas, and, emotions are seen as being linked together in an endless, shapeless, and formless entanglement. That is, the way our memory can appear to us if we attempt to reflect on it directly. However, it would be a mistake to dwell too much on the problems of consciousness and imagine that theory represent the inner sanctions of structure. For a cognitive psychologist interested in natural memory phenomena there were a number of reasons for bing deeply dissatisfied with theories based on associative set-classes with which are entangling nets. One ubiquitous class of memory failure seemed particularly troublesome. This is the experience of being able to recall a great deal of what we know able an individual other than their name. One such referent classification would entail, that ‘I know the face, but I just can’t place the name’, if someone else produced name we, may have, perhaps, been able to retrieve the rest of the information needed.
How might various theories of memory account for this phenomenon? First we can take an associative network approach, and the idealized associative network, concepts, such as the concept of a person, are represented as nodes, with associated nodes being connected through links. Generally speaking, the links define the nature of the relationship between nodes, e.g., the subject-predicate distinction. Suppose that the name of the person we are trying to recall is Bill Smith. We would have a Bill Smith node (or a node corresponding to Bill Smith) with all the available information concerning Bill Smith being linked to form some kind of propositional Smith’s name. Now, failure to retrieve Bill Smith’s name, while at the same time Bill Smith, would have to due to an inability to traverse the links to the Bill Smith node. However, this seems contradictory - content addressability. That is to say, given that any one constituent of a propositional representation can be accessed, the propositional node, and consequently all the other nodes link to it, should also be accessible. Thus, if we are able to recall where Bill Smith lives, where he works, whom he is married to, then, we should, in principle, be able to access the node representing his name. To account for the inability to do so, some sort of temporality ‘blocking’ of content addressability would seem to be needed. Alternatively, directionality of links would hae to be specified, though this would have to be done on a morally justified basis.
Next, we are to consider schema approaches. In that, schema models stipulate that there are abstract representations, i.e., schemata, in which all invariant information concerning any particular thing are represented. So that we would have a person schema for Bill Smith, that would contain all the invariant information about him. This would include his name, personality traits, attitudes, where he lived, whether he had a family, etc. It is not clear how one would deal with our example, least of mention, since some-one’s name is the quintessentially invariant property, then, given that it is known. It would have to be represented in the schema or out-line for that person. And, from our example, we knew that other invariant information, as well as variant, non-schematic information, e.g., the last talk he had given, were available for recall. This must be taken as evidence that the schema for Bill Smith was accessed. Why, then, were we unable to recall one particular piece of information that would have to be represented in the schema we clearly had access to? We would have to assume that within the person-schema or out-line for Bill Smith are sub-schema, one of which contained Bill Smith’s name, another containing the name of his wife, and so forth. We would further have to assume that access to the sub-schemata was independent and that, at the time in question, the one containing information about Bill Smith’s name was temporarily inaccessible. Unfortunately the concept of temporary inaccessibility is without precedent in schema theory and does not seem to be independently motivated.
Nonetheless, there are two other set-classes of memory problem that do not fit comfortably into the conventional frameworks. One is that of not being able to recall an event in spite of most detailed cues. This is commonly found when one partner is attempting to remind the other of a shared experience. Finally, we all have to experience of a memory being triggered spontaneously by something that was just an irrelevant part of the background for an event. Common triggers of such experiences are specific locales in town or country, scents and certain pieces of music.
What we learn from these kinds of events are that we need a model with which readily allows of their containing properties:
(2) The central parts of an episode do not
necessarily cue recall of that episode;
(3) Peripheral cues, which are non-essential parts
of the contexts, can cue recall.
In response to these requirements, the frameworks of reference within which the model is couched is that of information processing. In trying to solve the problem, we first supposed, that memory consists of discrete units, or ‘records’, each containing information relevant to an ‘event’, an event being, for example, a person or a personal experience. Information contained in a record could take any number of forms, with no restrictions being placed on the way information is presented, on the amount being represented or on the number of records that could contain the same nominal information. Attached to each of these records would be some kind of access key. The function of this access key, is singular: It enables the retrieval of the record and nothing more. Only when the particular access key is used can the record, and the information contained therein, be retrieved. As with the record we felt that any type of information could be contained in the access key. However, two features would distinguish it from the record. First, the contents of the access key would be in a different form to that of the record, e.g., represented in a phonological or other central code. Second, the contents of the access key would not be retrievable.
The nature of the match required between the ‘description’ and a ‘head recordings’ will be a function of the type of information in the description. If the task is to find the definition of a word or information on a named individual then a precise match may be required at least for the verbal part of the description. We assume that the ‘head recordings’ are searched in parallel. On many occasions there will be more than one head recording that matches the description. However, we require that only one record be retrieved at a time. What is more, evidence in support of this assumption is summarized in Morton, Hammersley and Bekerian (1985). The data indicate that the more recent of two possibilities, in that records are retrieved. We conclude first that once a match is made the search process terminates and secondly, that the matching process is biassed in favour of the more recent of headings. There is, of course, no guarantee that the retrieved records will contain the information that is sought. The records my be incomplete or wrong. However, in such cases, or in the case that no record had been retrieved, there are two options: Either the search is continued or it is abandoned. If the search is to be continued then a new description will have to be formed, since searching again with the same description would result in the same outcome as before. Thus, there has to be a list of criteria upon which a new description can be based.
Retrieval depends on or upon a match between the description and the heading record. The relationship between the given cue and the description is open. It is clear that there needs to be a process of description formation which will pick out the most likely descriptors from the given cue. Clearly, for the search process to be rational the set of descriptors and the set-class of head recordings should overlap. The only reasonable state of affairs would be that the creation of head recordings and the creation of descriptions is the responsibility of the same mechanism.
By means of distributive normal forms, the Finnish philosopher Jaakko Hintikka (1929- ), wherein his early works ‘Distributive Normal Forms’ (1953) and ‘Forms and Content in Quantification Theory’ (in Two Papers on Symbolic Logic, 1955), Hintikka developed two logical theories which he has later applied to many different areas: The theory of distributive normal forms for quantification theory, and the theory of model sets which yields semantically motivated proof procedures for quantification theory and model logics.
Briefly, Hintikka has worked in a wide area, his work shows a great deal of conceptual and theoretical unity. This is partly due to the logical and semantical methods he uses, partly to the transcendental character (in the Kantian sense) of his philosophy. Hintikka has emphasized the role of rule-governed human activities in knowledge acquisition and in cognitive representation: His game-theoretical approaches to meaning is a case in point. The structures of such activities can be taken to provide the synthetic a priori features of our knowledge. In this respect Hintikka’s philosophy is Kantian in spirit.
However, since it cannot be the case of topic, in that all terms of a language are explicitly definable in that language - that would involve circularity - the most one could hope for from explicit definition between the distinction of theoretical and observational term s can sustain, at first glance, the prospects of finding explicit definitions for all theoretical terms appear inadequately depressed. Some theoretical terms - particularly those involved in functional identities - looks like the stenographical ‘product of mass and velocity’. But others are not explicitly definable, in the most fundamental scientific sense, is that, to define is to delimit. Thus, definitions serve to fix boundaries of phenomena or the range of applicability of terms or concepts. That whose range is to be delimited is called the ‘definiendum’, and that which delimits the ‘definiens’. Social science practices tend to focus on specifying application of concepts through ‘formal’ operational definitions. Philosophical discussions have concentrated almost exclusively on articulating ‘definitional forms’ for terms.
Definitions are ‘full’ if the ‘definiens’ completely delimits the ‘definiendum’, and ‘partly’ if it only brackets or circumscribes it. ‘Explicit definitions’ are full definitions where the ‘definintium’ and the ‘definiens’ are asserted to be equivalent. Theories or models which are so rich in structure that sub-portions are functionally equivalent to explicit definitions are said to provide ‘implicit definitions’. In formal context our basic understanding is provided by the ‘Beth definability theorem’, stating, not only provides fundamental understanding of explicit definition, but that relaxing conditions on explicit definition enable an understanding of Carnap’s notion of partial interpretation: whereas, explicit definitions fully specify (implicitly define) the referents of theoretical terms within intended models of the theory, creative partial definitions serve only to restrict the range of objects in intended models that could be the referents of theoretical terms.
As an individuation of theories, what determines whether theories T1 and T2 are instances of the same theory or distinct theories? By construing scientific theories as partially interpreted syntactical axioms systems TC, positivism made specific of the axiomatizations individuating features of the theory. Thus, different choices of axioms T or alternations in the correspondence rules - say, to accommodate a new measurement procedure - resulted in a new scientific theory. Positivist’s also held th at axioms and corresponding implicitly defined the meaning of the theory’s description terms 'ô'. Thus significant alterations in the axiomatizations would result not only in a new theory T’C’ but one with changed meanings 'ô’. Kuhn and Feyerabend maintained that the resulting changes could make TC and T’C’ non-comparable, or ‘incommensurable’. Attempts to explore individuation issues for theories via meaning change or ‘incommensurability’, proved unsuccessful and have been largely abandoned.
Feyerabend’s differences with Kuhn are that first, that Feyerabend’s variety of incommensurability is more global, and cannot be localized in the vicinity of a single problematic term or even a cluster of terms, that Feyerabend holds that fundamental changes of theory lead to changes in the meaning of all the terms in a particular theory. The other significant difference concerns the reason for incommensurability. Whereas, Kuhn thinks that incommensurability stems from specific transactional difficulties involving problematic terms, Feyerabend’s variety of incommensurability seems to result from a kind of extreme holism about the nature of meaning itself.
One significant point of agreement between Kuhn and Feyerabend is that neither thinks that incommensurability is incomparability, in that, both countenance, and indeed recommend, alternative modes of comparison. Feyerabend says, that ‘the use of incommensurable theories for the purpose of criticism must be based on methods which do not depend on the comparison of statements with identical constituents, such methods are readily available’. But, although, he mentions a number of methods, he does not explicate them in full. For example, he says that theories can be compared using the ‘pragmatic theory of observation’, according to which you attend to causes of the production of a certain observational sentence, than the meaning of that sentence. Further, he argues that we do not compare ,meanings: We investigate the conditions under which a structural similarity can be obtained’. Insisting that ‘there may be empirical evidence against [theory], and for another theory without any need for similarity of meaning. On a more sarcastic, though revealing, Feyerabend states: ‘Of course, some kind of comparison is always possible (for example, one physical theory may sound more melodious when read aloud to the accompaniment of a guitar than another physical theory). At any rate, he insists that ‘it is possible to use incommensurability theories for the purpose of mutual criticism,’ adding that this removes ‘one of the main ‘paradoxes’ of the approach,’ that he suggests: And finally, and uses the same analogy that Kuhn uses to explain a scientist’s ability to learn a new theory, that of a child learning a new language. Rather than translating between languages, ‘We can learn a language or a culture from scratch, as a child learns them, without detour through our native tongue’.
Nevertheless, it is commonly supposed that definitions are analytic specifications of meaning. In some cases, such as simulative definitions, this may be so, however, some philosophers allow specifications of meaning to be synthetic. Reduction sentences are often descriptions of measurement apparatus specifying empirical correlations between detector output readings and values for parameters. These are synthetic and are rarely mere specifications of meaning. The larger point is that specification of meaning is only one of many possible means for delimiting the ‘definiendum’. Specification of meaning seems tangential to the bulk of scientific definitional practice.
Definitions are said to be ‘creative’ if their addition to a theory expands its content, and non-creative, if they do not. More general, we can say that definitions are creative whenever the ‘definiens’ asserts contingent relations involving the ‘definiendum’. Thus definitions providing analytic specifications of meaning are non-creative. Most explicit definitions are non-creative, and hence, ‘eliminable’ from theories without loss of empirical content. One could realize the distinction so that definitions redundant of accepted theory or background belief in the scientific context are counted as non-creative. Either way, most other scientific expressions of empirical correlation. Thus, for purposes of philosophical analysis, suppositions that definitions are either non-creative or meaning specifications demand explicit justification. Much of the literature concerning incommensurability and meaning change in science turns on uncritical acceptances of such suppositions.
The issue of incommensurability remains a live one. It does not arise just for a logical empiricist account of scientific theories, but for any account that allows for the linguistic representation of theories. Discussions on linguistic meaning cannot be banished from the philosophical analysis itself, and its place is not about to be taken prominently in the daily work of science itself, and its place is not about to be taken over by any other representational medium. Therefore, the challenge facing anyone who holds that the scientific enterprise sometimes requires us to make a point-by-point linguistic comparison of rival theories is to respond to the specific semantic problems raised by Kuhn and Feyerabend. However, then the challenge is to articulate another way of putting scientific theories in the balance and weighing them against one another.
Such confusion abound in scientific and philosophical discourse of both ‘operational’ and ‘definitions’. The notion, first introduced by P.W. Bridgman (1938) with reference to non-creative explicit full definitions specifying meaning in terms of operation as preformed in the measurement process. Behaviourist social scientist’s expanded the notion to include creative partial definitions, and in practice most operational definitions can be cast as synthetic creative reduction sentences specifying empirical relations between measurement procedures and intervening variables or hypothetical or subject to social scientists respond that it’s just a matter of quibbling over semantics - a response appropriate to Bridgman’s sort of operational definitions but not to their own.
Many philosophers have been concerned with admissible ‘definitional forms’. Some require ‘real definitions’ - a form of explicit definition in which the ‘definiens’ equate the ‘definiendum’ with an essence specified as a conjunction Á1 . . . Án of attributes. By contrast, ‘nomianl definitions’ use nonessential attributes. The ‘Aristotelian definitional form’ further requires that real definitions be hierarchical, where the species of a genus share Á1, . . . Án-1, being differentiated only by the remaining essential attribute Án. Such definitional forms are inadequate for evolving biological species whose essence may vary. ‘Disjunctive polytypic definitions’ allow changing essences by equating the ‘definiendum’ with a finite number of conjunctive essence. But future evolution may produce further new essences, so partially specified ‘potentially infinite disjunctive polytypic definitions’ were proposed. Such ‘explicit definitions’ fail to delimit the species, since they are incomplete. A superior alternative is to formulate reduction sentences for each reduction sentences for subsequently evolved essences.
Wittgenstein (1953) claimed that many natural kinds lack conjunctive essences: Rather, their members stand only in a family resemblance to each other, however, an important extension to the original theory of natural kinds provided by Putnam (1926- ) and Kripke (1940- ). These philosophers presented their account as applying to natural kind terms in ordinary language, than to terms of theoretical science. Typical examples are ‘water’, ‘gold’, and ‘lemon’. They claimed, on the basis of intuitive hypothetical cases, that the intention to refer to a natural kind determined by the possibly unknown real essence in part of a correct account of the normal use of these terms in ordinary language. If this is right, then it is certainly reasonable to extend the account to the technical uses of theoretical terms in science. If the account cannot be sustained for the case of ordinary language kind terms, appeal to it as an account of scientific terms will be more problematic.
We then have a conception of theory as essentially an embodiment of analogies, both formal and material, which describe regularities among the data of a given domain (models of data and phenomenal laws), with analogies between these and models of data in other domains, and so on in a hierarchy of levels of a unifying theoretical system. The ‘meaning of theoretical terms’ is given by analogies with familiar natural processes (e.g., mechanical systems), or by hypothetical models (e.g., Bohr’s planetary atom). In either case, descriptive terms of the analogues are derived metaphorically.
Inn evaluating the Kripke-Putnam theory, the crucial point to note for present purposes is that it rests on a strong ontological presupposition: Contrary to Locke, a large class of ordinary language kind terms must actually pick out (more or less) the requisite sort of natural kind. (Unless, at any rate, the theory of natural kind is based on massive metaphysical delusion.) And, in addition, we must have some sense, in advance of scientific illumination of the real essence of a kind, whether that kind is a natural kind. Putnam claims explicitly, for example, that the stuff on Twin Earth would not have been water even if the explorers from Earth had arrived before any means had been discovered for distinguishing H2O from XYZ. The intention to refer to the real nature preexists the characterization of that nature.
Suppe (1918) urged that natural kinds were constituted by a single kind-making attribute (e.g., being gold), and that which patterns of correlation might obtain between the kind-making attribute and other diagnostic characteristics is a factual matter. Thus issues of appropriate definitional form (e.g., explicit, polytypic, or cluster) are empirical, not philosophical questions.
Definitions of concepts are closely related to explications, where imprecise concepts (explicanda) are replaced by more precise ones (explicata). The explicandum and explicatum are never equivalent. In an adequate explication the explicatum will accommodate all clear-cut instances of the explicandum and exclude all clear-cut non-instances. The explicatum decides what to do with cases where application of the explicandum is problematic. Explications are neither real nor normative definitions and are generally creative. In many scientific cases, definitions function more as explications than as meaning specifications or real definitions.
What is still, to motive considerations throughout the prehensibility in study, has an existence or a place consist with an exact definitiveness for having distinct or certain limits, however, in later developments of Kuhn’s view, less emphasis is placed on what might be call ‘evaluative incommensurability’, and more of ‘linguistic incommensurability’. By 1983, Kuhn appeared to have moved away from evaluative incommensurability entirely, by saying that speaking of differences in ‘methods’ he states, that this version of the is the same as the ‘origin version’ of the incommensurability thesis, which he characterized as.’ ‘The claim that two theories are incommensurable is then the claim that there is no language, neutral or otherwise, into which both theories, conceived as sets of sentences, can be translated without residue or loss. Therefore, incommensurability equals untranslatability, what is it about scientific paradigms that preclude translation into a single common language, so that their claims can be set side by side and their points of agreement and disagreement isolated?
Meanwhile, it is, nonetheless, characteristic of intuition and Russell’s philosophy by ‘acquaintance’, that, at least of the philosophers who objected to direct realism, which states that certain familiar facts about illusion disprove the theory of perception, however, many versions of the argument which must be distinguished carefully, as some of these distinctions centre on the content of the premises (the kind of the appeal to illusion): Others centre on the interpretation of the conclusion.
A scratchy or crude statement of direct realism might cause to be heard as in perception, we sometimes directly perceive physical objects and their properties: We do not always perceive physical objects by perceiving something else, e.g., a sense-data, with which is given by the senses. There are, however, difficulties with this formulation of the view. For one thing a great many philosophers who are not direct realists would admit that it is a mistake to describe people as actually perceiving something other than a physical object. In particular, such philosophers might admit, we should never say that we perceive sense-data. To reveal information that way would be to suppose that we should model our understanding of our relationship to sense-data on our understanding of the ordinary use of perceptual verbs as they describe our relation to the physical world, and that is the last thing paradigm sense-datum theories should want. At least many of the philosophers who objected to direct realism would prefer to express what they were objecting to in terms of a technical (and, philosophically controversial) concept such as ‘acquaintance’. Using such a notion we could define direct realism this way: In veridical experience we are directly acquainted with parts, e.g., as, surfaces or constituents of physical objects. A less cautious version of the view might drop the reference to veridical experience and claim simply that in all experience we are directly acquainted with parts or constituents of physical objects.
Complex expressions, about the possibility of such a frame of reference we need to bear in mind that within the limited sense that their can be of either ‘reporting’ or ‘instituting’ equivalences among verbal or symbolic expressions, in form, definitions and either explicit or implicit.
A definition that institutively explains how an expression will be used henceforth. A definition that reports or gives to account of how an expression has been used, as an explicit definition explains, by means of words given in use, how an expression given in mention has been or will be used, for instance, The words ‘the cat’ in mention, ‘The cat’ is on the mat: The words ‘the cat’ in use: The cat is on the mat. An explicit definition explains how an expression has been or will be used by using it, and, usually in conjunction with the use of other expressions.
Dictionary definitions are reparative and explicit. Symbols introduced in technical writings are usually institutively and explicit, ads when a word is leaned in the context of its use, that context,. In effect, provides a reparative, implicit definition. Formal axiomatic systems, in which the meaning of each expression is gathered from its formal-logical relationship with the other expressions, provide institutively, implicit definitions.
This same course of thought seemingly makes Plato suggest that it is possible to have knowledge only about Forms, and that knowledge about sensible objects is impossible. Moreover, he also seems to hold sometimes that we cannot have about Forms that kind of cognition, belief or opinion, that we do have of sensibility. Yet, he allows that it is possible to make mistakes about Forms, and also to be a cognitive state as assembled of Form, that seems indistinguishable from what he seems obliged to call false belief or opinion. This idea, too, requires some kind of further explanation of the distinction between Forms and sensibilis - a requirement that Plato seems to see some difficulty in satisfying.
Although in this phase of his work Plato concentrates on constructing a metaphysics that will make room for the possibility of knowledge, he does, however, at the same time pay some attention to the problems that are characteristic of the first phase of his epistemology. In the ‘Meno’, the ‘Phaedo’ and the ‘Republic’, he develops what has been called the ‘method of hypothesis’, which seems to be demonstrated unconditionally. In the ‘Meno’ and the ‘Phaedo’, he indicates that hypotheses are to be accepted only provisionally and not regarded as certain or unrevisable. In the ‘Republic’, however, he seems to maintain that one an somehow reach an ‘nonhypothesized’ principle which will somehow serve as the basis for demonstrating everything hitherto accepted merely hypothetically. He apparently implies that what is demonstrated thereby will have to do only with Forms. He also makes a suggestion, not clearly explained, that this ‘principle’ has something to do with the Form of the Good. There is no general accepted interpretation of what Plato says, however, it seems to indicate that he accepted or was seriously considering some kind of ‘foundationalist epistemology’ position, which would start from some unshakable principle and derive from it the rest of what there is to be known about Forms. (As often, however, Plato seems to waver between thinking of the principle and what is to be derived as possessing propositional structure and treating them as non-propositionally structured objects.)
This method of hypothesis is earlier offered as something that is used by ‘dialectic’, the style of philosophizing that takes place though conversational questions and answers. This justifies introducing a more sophisticated concept to account for the domain, on which the analysis is repeated. The result of dialectic analysis is an integrated network of concepts which specified the proper domain of each and which preserves the legitimate content of earlier concepts in the final, most comprehensive and adequate concept.
It was relational conceptual representation that most interested Kant and of relational concepts, he thought the concept of cause-and-effect to be by far the most important. Kant wanted to show that natural science (which for him meant primarily physics) was genuine knowledge (he thought that Hume's sceptical treatment of cause and effect relations challenged this status). He believed that if he could prove that we must tie items in our experience together causally if we are to have a unified awareness of them, he would have put physics back on ‘the secure path of a science.’ The details of his argument have exercised philosophers for more than two hundred years. We will not go into them here, but the argument illustrates how central the notion of the unity of consciousness was in Kant's thinking about the mind and its relation to the world.
Consciousness may possibly be the most challenging and pervasive source of problems in the whole of philosophy. Our own consciousness is the most basic fact confronting us, yet it is almost impossible to say what consciousness is. Is mine like yours? Is ours like that of animals? Might machines come to have consciousness? Is it contingently possible for there to be disembodied consciousness? Whatever complex biological and neural processes go backstage, it is my consciousness that provides the theatre where my experiences and thoughts have their existence, where my desires are felt and where my intentions are formed. But then how am I to conceive the ‘I,’ or self that is the spectator of this theatre? A difficulty in thinking about consciousness is that the problems seem not to be scientific ones: Leibniz remarked that if we could construct a machine that could think and feel, and blow it up to the size of a mill and thus be able to examine its working parts as thoroughly as we pleased, we would still not find consciousness and draw the conclusion that consciousness resides in simple subjects, not complex ones. Eve n if we are convinced that consciousness somehow emerges from the complexity of brain functioning, we many still feel baffled about the way the emergence takes place, or why it takes place in just the way it does.
The nature of the conscious experience has been the largest single obstacle to physicalism, behaviourism, and functionalism in the philosophy of mind: These are all views that according to their opponents, can only be believed by feigning permanent anaesthesin. But many philosophers are convinced that we can divide and conquer: We may make progress by breaking the subject into different skills and recognizing that rather than a single self or observer we would do better to think of a relatively undirected whirl of cerebral activity, with no inner theatre, no inner lights, ad above all no inner spectator.
A fundamental philosophical topic both for its central place in any theory of knowledge, and its central place in any theory of consciousness. Philosophy in this area is constrained by several of properties that we believe to hold of perception. (1) It gives us knowledge of the world around us (2) We are conscious of that world by being aware of ‘sensible qualities,’ colours, sounds, tastes, smells, felt warmth, and the shapes and positions of objects in the environment. (3) Such consciousness is affected through highly complex information channels, such as the output of three different types of colour-sensitive cells in the eye, or the channels in the ear for interpreting pulses of air pressure as frequencies of sound. (4) There ensues even more neurophysiological coding of that information, and eventually higher-order brain functions bring it about that we interpreted the information so received (much of this complexity has been revealed by the difficulty of writing programs enabling commuters to recognize quite simple aspects of the visual scene.) The problem is to avoid thinking of there being a central, ghostly, conscious self. Fed information in the same way that a screen is fed information by a remote television camera. Once such a model is in place, experience will seem like a model getting between us and the world, and the direct objects of perception will seem private items in an inner theatre or sensorium. The difficulty of avoiding this model is especially acuter when we consider the secondary qualities of colour, sound, tactile feelings, and taste, which can easily seem to have a purely private existence inside the perceiver, like sensations of pain. Calling such supposed items names like sense data or percepts exacerbate the tendency. For sense data refers to the immediate objects of perceptual awareness, such as colour patches and shapes, usually supposed distinct from surfaces of physical objects. Their perception is more immediate, and because sense data are private and cannot appear other than they are, they are objects that change in our perceptual fields when conditions of perception change. Physical objects remain constant. Even so, just because physical objects can appear other than they are, there must be private, mental objects that have all of the qualities the physical objects appear to have. Nevertheless, perception gives us knowledge or the inner world around us, is quickly threatened, for there now seem little connection between these items in immediate experience and any independent reality. Reactions to this problem include scepticism and idealism.
A more hopeful approach is to claim that complexities of (3) and (4) explain how we can have direct acquaintances of the world, than suggesting that the acquaintance we do have at best an amendable indiction. It is pointed out that perceptions are not like sensations, precisely because they have a content, or outer-directed nature. To have a perception is to be aware of the world as bing such-and-such a way, than to enjoy a mere modification of sensation. Nut. Such direct realism has to be sustained in the face of the evidently personal (neurophysiological and other) factors determining how we perceive. One approach is to ask why it is useful to be conscious of what we perceive, when other aspects of our functioning work with information determining responses without any conscious awareness or intervention. A solution to this problem would offer the hope of making consciousness part of the natural world, than strange optional extra.
Even to be, that if one is without idea, one is without concept, and, in the same likeness that, if one is without concept he too is without idea. Idea (Gk., visible form) that may be a notion as if by stretching all the way from one pole, where it denotes a subjective, internal presence in the mind, somehow though t of as representing something about the world, to the other pole, where it represents an eternal, timeless unchanging form or concept: The concept of the number series or of justice, for example, thought of as independent objects of enquiry and perhaps of knowledge. These two poles are not distinct in meaning by the term kept, although they cause many problems of interpretation, but between them they define a space of philosophical problems. On the one hand, ideas are that with which we think. Or in Locke’s terms, whatever the mind may ne employed about in thinking Looked at that way they are inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presence. On the other, ideas provide the way in which objective knowledge can ne expressed. They are the essential components of understanding and any intelligible proposition that is true could be understood. Plato’s theory of ‘Form’ is a celebration of the objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and in this hand ideas are reified to the point where they make up the only real world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin, this doctrine, notably in the Timarus opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other-worldly aspect, until after Descartes ideas become assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being.
Together with a general bias toward the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like images, and a belief that thinking is well explained as the manipulation of images, this was developed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume into a full-scale view of the understanding as the domain of images, although they were all aware of anomalies that were later regarded as fatal to this doctrine. The defects in the account were exposed by Kant, who realized that the understanding needs to be thought of more through rules and organized principles than of any kind of copy of what is given in experience. Kant also recognized the danger of the opposite extreme (that of Leibniz) of failing to connect the elements of understanding with those of experience at all (Critique of Pure Reason).
It has become more common to think of ideas, or concepts as dependent upon social and especially linguistic structures, than the self-standing creatures of an individual mind, but the tension between the objective and the subjective aspects of the matter lingers on, for instance in debates about the possibility of objective knowledge, of indeterminacy in translation, and of identity between thoughts people entertain at one time and those that they entertain at another.
To possess a concept is able to deploy a term expressing it in making judgements: The ability connects with such things as recognizing when the term applies, and being able to understand the consequences of its application. The term ‘idea’ was formerly used in the same way, but is avoided because of its association with subjective mental imagery, which may be irrelevant to the possession of concept. In the semantics of Frége, a concept is the reference of a predicate, and cannot be referred to by a subject term. Frége regarded predicates as incomplete expressions for a function, such as, sine . . . or log . . . is incomplete. Predicates refer to concepts, which they are ‘unsaturated,’ and cannot be referred to by subject expressions (we thus get the paradox that the concept of a horse is not a concept). Although Frége recognized the metaphorical nature of the notion of a concept being unsaturated, he was rightly convinced that some such notion is needed to explain the unity of a sentence, and to prevent sentences from being thought of as mere lists of names.
Mental states have contents: A belief may have the content that I will catch the train, a hope may have the content that the prime minister will resign. A concept is something that is capable of being a constituent of such contents. More specifically, a concept is a way of thinking of something - a particular object, or property, or relation. Or another entity.
Several different concepts may each be ways of thinking of the same object. A person may think of himself in the first-person way, or think of himself as the spouse of May Smith, or as the person located in a certain room now. More generally, a concept ‘c’ is such-and-such without believing ‘d’ is such-and-such. As words can be combined to form structured sentences, concepts have also been conceived as combinable into structured complex contents. When these complex contents are expressed in English by ‘that . . . ‘ clauses, as in our opening examples, they will be capable of been true or false, depending on the way the world is.
Concepts are to be distinguished from stereotypes and from conceptions. The stereotypical spy may be a middle-level official down on his luck and in need of money, none the less, we can come to learn that Anthony Blunt, are historian and Surveyor of the Queen’s Picture, is a spy: We can come to believe that something falls under a concept while positively disbelieving that the same thing falls under the stereotype association with the concept. Similarly, a person’s conception of a just arrangement for resolving disputes may involve something like contemporary Western legal systems. But whether or not it would be correct, it is quite intelligible for someone to reject this conception by arguing that it does not adequately provide for the elements of fairness and respect that are required by the concept of justice.
A theory of a particular concept must be distinguished from a theory of the object or objects it picks out. The theory of the concept is part of the theory of thought and epistemology: A theory of the object or objects is part of metaphysics and ontology. Some figures in the history of philosophy - and perhaps even some of our contemporaries - are open to the accusation of not having fully respected the distinction between the two kinds of theory. Descartes appears to have moved from facts about the indubitability of the thought ‘I think,’ containing the first-person way of thinking, to conclusions about the non-material nature of the object he himself was. But though the goals of a theory of concepts theory is required to have an adequate account to its relation to the other theory. A theory of concepts is unacceptable if it gives no account of how the concept is capable of picking out the object it evidently does pick out. A theory of objects is unacceptable if it makes it impossible to understand how we could have concepts of those objects.
A fundamental question for philosophy is: What individuates a given concept - that is, what makes it the one is, than any other concept? One answer, which has been developed in great detail, is that it is impossible to give a non-trivial answer to this question. An alternative deals with the question by stating from the ideas that a concept is individuated by the condition that must be satisfied if a thinker is to posses that concept and to be capable of having beliefs and other attitudes whose contents contain it as a constituent. So to take a simple case, on e could propose the logical concept ‘and’ is individuated by this conditions: It is the unique concept ‘C’ to possess which a thinker has to find these forms of inference compelling, without basing them on any further inference or information: From any to premisses ‘A’ and ‘B,’ ‘ABC’ can be inferred: And from any premiss ‘ABC,’ to each one of the ‘A’ and ‘B’ can be inferred. Again, a relatively observational concept such as ‘round’ can be individuated in part by stating that the thinker find specified contents containing it compelling when he has certain kinds of perception, and in part by relating those judgements containing the concept and which are based on perception that individuates a concept by saying what is required for a thinker to possess it can be described as giving the possession condition for the concept.
A possession condition for a particular concept may actually make use of that concept. The possession condition for ‘and’ does not. We can also expect to use relatively observational concepts in specifying the kind of experiences that have to be of comment in the possession condition for relatively observational concepts. We must avoid, as mentioned of the concept in question as such, within the content of the attitudes attributed to the thinker in the possession condition. Otherwise we would be presupposing possession of the concept in an account that was meant to elucidate its possession, in talking of what the thinker finds compelling, the possession conditions can also respect an insight of the later Wittgenstein: That a thinker’s mastery of a concept is inextricably tied to how he finds it natural to go on in new cases in applying the concept.
Sometimes a family of concepts has this property: It is not possible to master any one of the members of the family without mastering the other. Two of the families that plausibly have this status are these: The family consisting of some simple concepts 0, 1, 2, . . . of the natural numbers and the corresponding concepts of numerical quantifiers there are 0 so-and-so's, as there are 1 so-and-so, . . . : And the family consisting of the concepts ‘belief’ ad ‘desire.’ Such families have come to be known as ‘local holism.’ A local Holism does not prevent the individuation of a concept by its possession condition. Rather, it demands that all the concepts in the family be individuated simultaneously. So one would say something of this form: Belief and desire form the unique pair of concepts C1 and C2 such that for a thinker to possess them is to meet such-and-such condition involving the thinker, C1 and C2. For these and other possession conditions to individuate properly, it is necessary that there be some ranking of the concepts treated, and the possession conditions for concepts higher in ranking must presuppose only possession of concepts at the same or lower level in the ranking.
A possession condition may in various ways make a thinker’s possession of some particular concept dependents upon his relations to his environment. Many possession conditions will mention the links between a concept and the thinker’s perceptual experience. Perceptual experience represents the world for being a certain way. It is arguable that the only satisfactory explanation of what it is for perceptual experience to represent the world in a particular way must refer to the complex relations of the experience e to the subject’s environment. That is, much greater of the experiences in a possession condition will make possession of that concept dependent in particular upon the environmental relations of the thinker. Also, from intuitive particularities, that evens though the thinker’s non-environmental properties and relations remain constant, the conceptual content of his mental state can vary if the thinker’s social environment is varied. A possession condition that properly individuates such a concept must take into account the thinker’s social relations, in particular his linguistic relations.
Concepts have a normative dimension, a fact strongly emphasized by Kripke. For any judgement whose content involves s a given concept, there is a correctness condition for that judgement, a condition that is dependent in part upon the identity of the concept. The normative character of concepts also extends into the territory of a thinker’s reason for making judgements. A thinker’s visual perception can give him good reason for judging ‘That man is bald’: It does not by itself give him good reason for judging ‘Rostropovich is bald,’ even if the man he sees is Rostropovich. All these normative connections must be explained by a theory of concepts. One approach to these matters is to look to the possession condition for a concept, and consider how the referent of the concept is fixed from it, together with the world. One proposal is that the referent if the concept is that object (or property, or function, . . . ) which makes the practices of judgement and inference in the possession condition always lead to true judgements and truth-preserving inferences. This proposal would explain why certain reasons are necessarily good reasons for judging given contents. Provided the possession condition permit s us to say what it is about a thinker’s previous judgements that make it the case that he is employing one concept rather than another, this proposal would also have another virtue. It would allow us to say how the correctness condition is determined for a newly encountered object. The judgement is correct if t he new object has the property that in fact makes the judgmental practices in the possession condition yield true judgements, or truth-preserving inferences.
Despite the fact that the unity of consciousness had been at the centre of pre-20th century research on the mind, early in the 20th century the notion almost disappeared. Logical atomism in philosophy and behaviourism in psychology were both unsympathetic to the notion. Logical atomism focussed on the atomic elements of cognition (sense data, simple propositional judgments, etc.), rather than on how these elements are tied together to form a mind. Behaviourism urged that we focus on behaviour, the mind being alternatively myth or something otherwise that we cannot and do not need of studying the mysteriousness of science, from which brings meaning and purpose to humanity. This attitude extended to consciousness, of course. The philosopher Daniel Dennett summarizes the attitude prevalent at the time this way: Consciousness may be the last bastion of occult properties, epiphenomena, immeasurable subjective states - in short, the one area of mind best left to the philosophers. Let them make fools of themselves trying to corral the quicksilver of ‘phenomenology’ into a respectable theory.
The unity of consciousness next became an object of serious attention in analytic philosophy only as late as the 1960s. In the years since, new work has appeared regularly. The accumulated literature is still not massive but the unity of consciousness has again become an object of serious study. Before we examine the more recent work, we need to explicate the notion in more detail than we have done so far and introduce some empirical findings. Both are required to understand recent work on the issue.
To expand on our earlier notion of the unity of consciousness, we need to introduce a pair of distinctions. Current works on consciousness labours under a huge, confusing terminology. Different theorists exchange dialogue over the excess consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, simple consciousness, creature consciousness, states consciousness, monitoring consciousness, awareness as equated with consciousness, awareness distinguished from consciousness, higher orders thought, higher orders experience, qualia, the felt qualities of representations, consciousness as displaced perception, . . . and on and on and on. We can ignore most of this profusion but we do need two distinctions: between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects, and between consciousness of representations and consciousness of self.
It is very natural to think of self-consciousness or, cognitive state more accurately, as a set of cognitive states. Self-knowledge is an example of such a cognitive state. There are plenty of things that I know bout self. I know the sort of thing I am: a human being, a warm-blooded rational animal with two legs. I know of many properties and much of what is happening to me, at both physical and mental levels. I also know things about my past, things I have done and that of whom I have been with other people I have met. But I have many self-conscious cognitive states that are not instances of knowledge. For example, I have the capacity to plan for the future - to weigh up possible courses of action in the light of goals, desires, and ambitions. I am capable of ca certain type of moral reflection, tide to moral self-and understanding and moral self-evaluation. I can pursue questions like, what sort of person I am? Am I the sort of person I want to be? Am I the sort of individual that I ought to be? This is my ability to think about myself. Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employing in my thought about other people and other objects.
When I say that I am a self-conscious creature, I am saying that I can do all these things. But what do they have in common? Could I lack some and still be self-conscious? These are central questions that take us to the heart of many issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of psychology.
Even so, with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might naturally assume that there is a single ability that all presuppose. This is my ability to think about myself. I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for autobiographical memories and moral self-understanding.
The proposing account would be on par with other noted examples of the deflationary account of self-consciousness. If, in at all, a straightforward explanation to what makes those of the ‘self contents’ immune to error through misidentification concerning the semantics of self, then it seems fair to say that the problem of self-consciousness has been dissolved, at least as much as solved.
This proposed account would be on a par with other noted examples as such as the redundancy theory of truth. That is to say, the redundancy theory or the deflationary view of truth claims that the predicate ‘. . . . true’ does not have a sense, i.e., expresses no substantive or profound or explanatory concept that ought to be the topic of philosophic enquiry. The approach admits of different versions, but centres on the pints (1) that ‘it is true that p’ says no more nor less than ‘p’ (so, redundancy’) (2) that in less direct context, such as ‘everything he said was true’, or ‘all logical consequences of true propositions as true’, the predicated functions as a device enabling us to generalize rather than as an adjective or predicate describing the things he said, or the kinds of propositions that follow from true propositions. For example, its translation is to infer that: ( p, Q)(P & p q q)’ where there is no use of a notion of truth.
There are technical problems in interpreting all uses of the notion of truth in such ways, but they are not generally felt to be insurmountable. The approach needs to explain away apparently substantive uses of the notion, such as . . . ‘science aims at the truth’ or ‘truth is a norm governing discourse. Indeed, postmodernist writing frequently advocates that we must abandon such norms, along with a discredited ‘objective’ concept ion of truth. But perhaps, we can have the norms even when objectivity is problematic, since they can be framed within mention of truth: Science wants to be so that whenever science holds that ‘p’, when ‘p’‘. Discourse is to be regulated by the principle that it is wrong to assert ‘p’. When not-p.
It is important to stress how redundancy or the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, and any theory of consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun, is motivated by an important principle that ha governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. This is the principle that the philosophical analysis of thought can only proceed through the philosophical analysis of language:
Thoughts differ from all-else, that are expressed in and among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable: It is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my thought is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without residue, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed. We communicate thought by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language, it is these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the employment of language, unaided by any supposed contact between mind and the senses that they carry. In order to analyses thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp. (Dummett, 1978)
So how can such thoughts be entertained by a thinker incapable of reflexively referring to himself as English speakers do with the first-person pronoun be plausibly ascribed thought with first-person contents? The thought that, despite all this, there are in fact first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been deployed by Hugh Mellor (1988-1989). The basic phenomenon he is interested in explaining is what it is for a creature to have what he terms as subjective belief, which is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. Mellor starts from the functionalist premise that beliefs are causal functions from desires to actions. It is, of course, the emphasis on causal links between belief and action that make it plausible to think that belief might be independent of language and conscious belief, since ‘agency entails neither linguistic ability nor conscious belief. The idea that beliefs are causal functions from desires to actions can be deployed to explain the content of a give n belief through which the equation of truth conditions and utility conditions, where utility conditions are those in which the actions caused by the conjunction of that belief with a single desire result in the satisfaction of that desire. To expound forthwith, consider a creature ‘x’ who is hungry and has a desire for food at time ‘t’. That creature has a token belief b/(p) that conjoins with its desire for food to cause it to eat what is in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there is food in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there is food in from it of ‘x’ at that time. Moreover, for b/(p) to cause ‘x’ to eat what is in front of it at ‘t’, b/(p) must be a belief that ‘x’ has at ‘t’. Therefore, the utility/truth condition of b/(p) is that whatever creatures have this belief faces food when it is in fact facing food. And a belief with this content is, of course, the subjective belief whose natural linguistic expression would be ‘I am facing food now.’ On the other hand, however, a belief that would naturally be expressed wit these words can be ascribed to a non-linguistic creature, because what makes it the belief that it is depending not on whether it can be linguistically expressed but on how it affects behaviour.
For in order to believe ‘p’, I need only be disposed to eat what I face if I feel hungry: A disposition which causal contiguity ensures that only my simultaneous hunger can provide, and only into making me eat, and only then. That’s what makes my belief refers to me and to when I have it. And that’s why I need have no idea who I am or what the time is, no concept of the self or of the present, no implicit or explicit grasp of any ‘sense’ of ‘I’ or ‘now,’ to fix the reference of my subjective belies: Causal contiguity fixes them for me.
Causal contiguities, according to explanation may well be to why no internal representation of the self is required, even at what other philosophers have called the sub-personal level. Mellor believes that reference to distal objects can take place when in internal state serves as a causal surrogate for the distal object, and hence as an internal representation of that object. No such causal surrogate, and hence no such internal representation, is required in the case of subjective beliefs. The relevant casual components of subjective beliefs are the believer and the time.
The necessary contiguity of cause and effect is also the key to =the functionalist account of a self-reference in conscious subjective belief. Mellor adopts a relational theory of consciousness, equating conscious beliefs with second-order beliefs to the effect that one is having a particular first-order subjective belief, it is, simply a fact about our cognitive constitution that these second-order beliefs are reliably, though of course fallibly, generated so that we tend to believe that we believe things that we do in fact believe.
The contiguity law in Leibniz, extends the principles that there are no discontinuous changes in nature, ‘natura non facit saltum,’ nature makes no leaps. Leibniz was able to use the principle to criticize the mechanical system of Descartes, which would imply such leaps in some circumstances, and to criticize contemporary atomism, which implied discontinuous changes of density at the edge of an atom however, according to Hume the contiguity of evens is an important element in our interpretation of their conjunction for being causal.
Others attending to the functionalist points of view are it’s the advocate’s Putnam and Stellars, and its guiding principle is that we can define mental states by a triplet of relations: What typically situations to them, in of what effectual dividing line they have on other mental states and what affects they have on conduct. The definition need not take the form of a simple analysis, but if we could write down the totality of axioms, or postulates, or platitudes that govern our theories about what things are apt to cause (for example) a belief state, what effects it would have on a variety of other mental states, and what effect it us likely to have on behaviour, then we would have done all that is needed to make the state a proper theoretical notion. It would be implicitly defined by these theses. Functionalism is often compared with descriptions of a computer, since according to it mental descriptions correspond to a description of a machine in terms of software, that remains silent about the underlying hardware or ‘realization’ of the program the machine is running. The principal advantage of functionalism includes its fit with the way we know of mental states both of ourselves and others are via their effects on behaviour and other mental states. As with behaviourism, critics charge that structurally complex items that do not bear mental states might nevertheless imitate the functions that are cited. According to this criticism functionalism is too generous, and would count too many things as having minds. It is also queried whether functionalism is too parochial, able to see mental similarities only when there is causal similarity, when our actual practices of interpretation enable us to ascribe thoughts and desires to persons whose causal structure may be rather different from our own. It may then seem as though beliefs and desires can be ‘variably realized’ in causal architectures, just as much as they can be in different neurophysiological stares.
The anticipation, to revolve os such can find the tranquillity in functional logic and mathematics as function, a relation that auspicates members of one class ‘X’ with some unique member ‘y’ of another ‘Y.’ The associations are written as y = f(x), The class ‘X’ is called the domain of the function, and ‘Y’ its range. Thus ‘the father of x’ is a function whose domain includes all people, and whose range is the class of male parents. Whose range is the class of male parents, but the relation ‘by that x’ is not a function, because a person can have more than one son. ‘Sine x’ is a function from angles of a circle function of its diameter x, . . . and so on. Functions may take sequences x1. Xn as their arguments, in which case they may be thought of as associating a unique member of ‘Y’ with any ordered, n-tuple as argument. Given the equation y f(x1 . . . Xn), x1 . . . Xn, is called the independent variables, or argument of the function. That when and if ‘y’ is the dependent variable or value, functions may be many-one in their meaning that differed not of members of ‘X’, but may take the same member of ‘Y’. As their value, or one-one when to each member of ‘X’ may take the same member of ‘Y’ as their value, or one-one when to each member of ‘X’ the corresponding distinction of members of ‘Y.’ A function with ‘X’ and ‘Y’ is called a mapping from ‘X’ to ’Y’ is also called a mapping from ‘X’ to ‘Y,’ written f X Y, if the function is such that (1) If x, y X and f(x) = if(y) then x’s = y, then the function is an injection from to Y, if also: (2) If y Y, then ( x)(x X & Y = f(x)). Then the function is a bisection of ‘X’ onto ‘Y.’ A di-jection are both an injection and a sir-jection where a subjection is any function whose domain is ‘X’ and whose range is the whole of ‘Y.’ Since functions ae relations a function may be defined asa set of ‘ordered’ pairs <x. Y> where ‘x’ is a member of ‘X’ sand ‘y’ of ‘Y.’
One of Frége’s logical insights was that a concept is analogous of a function, as a predicate analogous to the expression for a function (a functor). Just as ‘the square root of x’ takes you from one number to another, so ‘x is a philosopher’ refers to a function that takes us from his person to truth-values: True for values of ‘x’ who are philosophers, and false otherwise.’
Functionalism can be attached both in its commitment to immediate justification and its claim that all medially justified beliefs ultimately depend on the former. Though, in cases, is the latter that is the position’s weaker point, most of the critical immediately unremitting have been directed ti the former. As much of this criticism has ben directed against some particular from of immediate justification, ignoring the possibility of other forms. Thus much anti-Foundationalist artillery has been derricked at the ‘myth of the given’ to consciousness in pre-conceptual, pre-judgmental mode, and that beliefs can be justified on that basis (Sellars, 1963) The most prominent general argument against immediate justifications is whatever use taken does so if the subject is justified in supposing that the putative justifier has what it takes to do so. Hence, since the justification of the original belief depends on the justification of the higher level belief just specified, the justification is not immediate after all. We may lack adequate support for any such higher level as requirement for justification: And if it were imposed we would be launched on or upon the infinite regress, for a similar requirement would hold equally for the higher belief that the original justifier was efficacious.
The reflexive considerations initiated by functionalism evoke an intelligent system, or mind, and may fruitfully be thought of as the result of a number of sub-systems enacting of more simple tasks in coordinate change overs in circuiting through one and each of the other. The sub-systems may be envisaged as homunculi, or small, relatively half-witted persons or agents. The archetype is a digital computer, where a battery of switches capable of only one response (on or off) can make a machine that can play chess, write dictionaries, and so forth.
Nonetheless, we are confronted with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might assume that there is a single exponent that is presupposed. This is my ability to think about myself, and I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for autographical memories and moral self-understanding. These are ways of thinking about myself.
Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employ in my thoughts about other people and other objects. My knowledge that I am a human being deploys certain conceptual abilities that I can also can deploy in thinking that you are a human being. The same holds when I congratulate myself for satisfying the exacting moral standards of autonomous moral agencies. This involves concepts and descriptions that can apply equally to me and to others. On the other hand, when I think about myself, I am also putting to work a greater amount of force that I cannot put to work in thinking about other people and other objects. This is precisely the ability to apply those concepts and descriptions to myself. It has become common to refer to this ability as the ability to think of ‘I’-thoughts.
What is an, ‘I’-thought’? Obviously, an ‘I’-thought is a thought that involves self-reference. I can think an, ‘I’-thought only by thinking about myself. Equally obvious, despite the fact that, this cannot be all that there is to say on the subject. I can think thoughts that involve a self-reference but are not ‘I’-thoughts. Suppose I think that the next person to get a parking ticket in central downtown Toronto deserves everything he gets. Unbeknownst to be, the very next recipient of a parking ticket will be me. This makes my thought self-referencing, but it does not make it an ‘I’-thought. Why not? The answer is simply that I do not know that I will be the next person to get a parking ticket in central downtown Toronto. The phrasal idiom characterizes a distinctive feature of form ‘A’, which is that unfortunate person, then there is a true identity statement of the form ‘I = A,’ but I do not know that this identity holds, I cannot be ascribed the thoughts that I will deserve everything I get? And also I am not thinking genuine ‘I’-thoughts, because one cannot think a genuine ‘I’-thought if one is ignorant that one is thinking about oneself. So it is natural to conclude that ‘I’-thoughts involve a distinctive type of self-reference. This is the sort of self-reference whose natural linguistic expression is the first-person pronoun ‘I,’ because one cannot be the first-person pronoun without knowing that one is thinking about oneself.
This is still not quite right, however, because thought contents can be specific, perhaps, they can be specified directly or indirectly. That is, all cognitive states to be considered, presuppose the ability to think about oneself. This is not only that they all have of some commonality, but it is also what underlies them all. We can see in more detail what this suggestion amounts to. This claim is that what makes all those cognitive states modes of self-consciousness is the fact that they all have content that can be specified directly by means of the first person pronoun ‘I’ or indirectly by means of the direct reflexive pronoun ‘he,’ such they are first-person contents.
The class of first-person contents is not a homogenous class. There is an important distinction to be drawn between two different types of first-person contents, corresponding to two different modes in which the first person can be employed. The existence of this distinction was first noted by Wittgenstein , in an important passage from The Blue Book: That there are two different cases in the use of the word ‘I’ (or, ‘my’) of which is called ‘the use as object’ and ‘the use as subject.’ Examples of the first kind of use are these’ ‘My arm is broken,’ ‘I have grown six inches,’ ‘I have a bump on my forehead,’ ‘The wind blows my hair about.’ Examples of the second kind are: ‘I see so-and-so,’ ‘I try to lift my arm,’ ‘I think it will rain,’ ‘I have a toothache.’ (Wittgenstein 1958).
The explanations given are of the distinction that hinge on whether or not they are judgements that involve identification. However, one can point to the difference between these two categories by saying: The cases of the first category involve the recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error, or as: The possibility of an error has been provided for . . . It is possible that, say in an accident, I should feel a pain in my arm, see a broken arm at my side, and think it is mine when really it is my co-passenger. And I could, looking into a mirror, mistake a bump on his forehead for one on mine. On the other hand, there is no question of recognizing when I have a toothache. To ask ‘are you sure that it is you who have pain?’ would be nonsensical (Wittgenstein, 1958?).
Here, we are in attempt of drawing a distinction between two types of first-person contents. The first type, which is describes as invoking the use of ‘I’ as object, can be analysed in terms of more basic propositions. Such that the thought ‘I am B’ involves such a use of ‘I.’ Then we can understand it as a conjunction of the following two thoughts ‘a is B’ and ‘I am’. We can term the former a predication component and the latter an identification component (Evans 1982). The reason for separating the original thought down into these two components is precisely the possibility of error that the stresses in the second passages as stated. One can be quite correct in predicating that someone is ‘B’, even though mistaken in identifying oneself as that person.
To say that a statement ’a is B’ is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term ‘a’ means the following is possible: The speaker knows some particular thing to be ‘B,’ but makes the mistake of asserting ‘a is B’ because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he knows to be ‘B’ is what ‘a’ refers to (Shoemaker 1968).
The point, then, is that one cannot be mistaken about who is being thought about. In one sense, Shoemaker’s criterion of immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun (simply ‘immunity to error through misidentification’) is too cautionary. Beliefs with first-person contents that are immune to error through identification tend to be acquired on grounds that usually do result in knowledge, but they do not have to be. The definition of immunity to error through misidentification needs to be adjusted to accommodate them by formulating it in terms of justification rather than knowledge.
The connection to be captured is between the sources and grounds from which a belief is derived and the justification there is for that belief. Beliefs and judgements are immune to error through misidentification in virtue of the grounds on which they are based. The category of first-person contents being picked out is not defined by its subject matter or by any points of grammar. What demarcates the class of judgements and beliefs that are immune to error through misidentification is evidence base from which they are derived, or the information on which they are based. So, to take by example, my thought that I have a toothache is immune to error through misidentification because it is based on my feeling a pain in my teeth. Similarly, the fact that I am consciously perceiving you make my belief that I am seeing you immune to error through misidentification.
To say that a statement ‘a is b’ is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term ‘a’ means that some particular thing is ‘b,’ because his belief is based on an appropriate evidence base, but he makes the mistake of asserting ‘a is b’ because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he justified believes to be ‘b’ is what ‘a’ refers to.
Beliefs with first-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification tend to be acquired on grounds that usually result in knowledge, but they do not have to be. The definition of immunity to error through misidentification needs to be adjusted to accommodate by formulating in terms of justification rather than knowledge. The connection to be captured is between the sources and grounds from which a belief is derived and the justification there is for that belief. Beliefs and judgements are immune to error through misidentification in virtue of the grounds on which they are based. The category of first-person contents picked out is not defined by its subject matter or by any points of grammar. What demarcates the class of judgements and beliefs that ae immune to error through misidentification is the evidence base from which they are derived, or the information on which they are based. For example, my thought that I have a toothache is immune to error through misidentification because it is based on my feeling a pain in my teeth. Similarly, the fact that I am consciously perceiving you makes my belief that I am seeing you immune to error through misidentification.
A suggestive definition is to say that a statement ‘a is b’ is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term ‘a’ means that the following is possible: The speaker is warranted in believing that some particular thing is ‘b,’ because his belief is based on an appropriate evidence base, but he makes the mistake of asserting ‘a is b’ because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he justified believes to be ‘b’ is what ‘a’ refers to.
First-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification can be mistaken, but they do have a basic warrant in virtue of the evidence on which they are based, because the fact that they are derived from such an evidence base is closely linked to the fact that they are immune to error through misidentification. Of course, there is room for considerable debate about what types of evidence base are correlated with this class of first-person contents. Seemingly, then, that the distinction between different types of first-person content can be characterized in two different ways. We can distinguish between those first-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification and those that are subject to such error. Alternatively, we can discriminate between first-person contents with an identification component and those without such a component. For purposes rendered, in that these different formulations each pick out the same classes of first-person contents, although in interestingly different ways.
All first-person consent subject to error through misidentification contains an identification component of the form ‘I am’ and employ of the first-person-pronoun contents with an identification component and those without such a component. In that identification component, does it or does it not have an identification component? Clearly, then, on pain of an infinite regress, at some stage we will have to arrive at an employment of the first-person pronoun that does not have to arrive at an employment of the first-person pronoun that does not presuppose an identification component, then, is that any first-person content subject to error through misidentification will ultimately be anchored in a first-person content that is immune to error through misidentification.
It is also important to stress how self-consciousness, and any theory of self-consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun, are motivated by an important principle that has governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. This is the principle that the philosophical analysis of though can only proceed through the principle analysis of language. The principle has been defended most vigorously by Michael Dummett.
Dummett goes on to draw the clear methodological implications of this view of the nature of thought: We communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language, it is these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the mind other than via the medium of language that endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyse thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
Many philosophers would want to dissent from the strong claim that the philosophical analysis of thought through the philosophical analysis of language is the fundamental task of philosophy. But there is a weaker principle that is very widely held as The Thought-Language Principle.
As it stands, the problem between to different roles that the pronoun ‘he’ can play of such oracle clauses. On the one hand, ‘he’ can be employed in a proposition that the antecedent of the pronoun (i.e., the person named just before the clause in question) would have expressed using the first-person pronoun. In such a situation that holds that ‘he,’ is functioning as a quasi-indicator. Then when ‘he’ is functioning as a quasi-indicator, it is written as ‘he.’ Others have described this as the indirect reflexive pronoun. When ‘he’ is functioning as an ordinary indicator, it picks out an individual in such a way that the person named just before the clause of reality need not realize the identity of himself with that person. Clearly, the class of first-person contents is not a homogenous class.
There is canning obviousness, but central question that arises in considering the relation between the content of thought and the content of language, namely, whether there can be thought without language as theories like the functionalist theory. The conception of thought and language that underlie the Thought-Language Principe is clearly opposed to the proposal that there might be thought without language, but it is important to realize that neither the principle nor the considerations adverted to by Dummett, directly succumbing by conclusion to the existent determinates that on that point we cannot be but for that which awaits for the absence of language. According to the principle, the capacity for thinking particular thoughts can only be analysed through the capacity for linguistic expression of those thoughts. On the face of it, however, this does not yield the claim that the capacity for thinking particular thoughts cannot exist without the capacity for their linguistic expression.
Thoughts being wholly communicable not entail that thoughts must always be communicated, which would be an absurd conclusion. Nor does it appear to entail that there must always be a possibility of communicating thoughts in any sense in which this would be incompatible with the ascription of thoughts to a nonlinguistic creature. There is, after all, a primary distinction between thoughts being wholly communicable and it being actually possible to communicate any given thought. But without that conclusion there seems no way of getting from a thesis about the necessary communicability of thought to a thesis about the impossibility of thought without language.
A subject has distinguished self-awareness to the extent that he is able to distinguish himself from the environment and its content. He has distinguished psychological self-awareness to the extent that he is able to distinguish himself as a psychological subject within a contract space of other psychological subjects. What does this require? The notion of a non-conceptual point of view brings together the capacity to register one’s distinctness from the physical environment and various navigational capacities that manifest a degree of understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. One very basic reason for thinking that these two elements must be considered together emerges from a point made in the richness of the self-awareness that accompanies the capacity to distinguish the self from the environment is in direct proportion to the richness of the awareness of the environment from which the self is being distinguished. So no creature can understand its own distinction from the physical enjoinment without having an independent understanding of the nature of the physical environment, and since the physical environment is essentially spatial, this requires an understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. But this cannot be the whole story. It leaves unexplained why an understanding should be required of this particular essential feature of the physical environment. Afer all, it is also an essential feature of the physical environment that it is composed of a an objects that have both primary and secondary qualities, but thee is n reflection of this in the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. More is needed to understand the significance of spatiality.
First, to take a step back from primitive self-consciousness to consider the account of self-identifying first-person thoughts as given in Gareth Evans’s Variety of Reference (1982). Evans places’ considerable stress on the connection between the form of self-consciousness that he is considering and a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. As far as Evans is concerned, the capacity to think genuine first-person thought implicates a capacity for self-location, which he construes in terms of a thinker’s to conceive of himself as an idea with an element of the objective order. Thought, do not endorse the particular gloss that Evans puts on this, the general idea is very powerful. The relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because he world is spatial but also because the self-consciousness subject is himself a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Evans tends to stress a dependence in the opposite direction between these notions
The very idea of a perceived objective spatial world brings with it the ideas of the subject for being in the world, which the course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable in the way of the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere cannot be separated, and where he is given by what he can perceive (Evans 1982).
But the main criteria of his work is very much that the dependence holds equally in the opposite direction.
It seems that this general idea can be extrapolated and brought to bar on the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. What binds together the two apparently discrete components of a non-conceptual point of view is precisely the fact that a creature’s self-awareness must be awareness of itself as a spatial bing that acts up and is acted upon by the spatial world. Evans’s own gloss on how a subject’s self-awareness, is awareness of himself as a spatial being involves the subject’s mastery of a simple theory explaining how the world makes his perceptions as they are, with principles like ‘I perceive such and such, such and such holds at P; So (probably) am P and ‘I am, such who does not hold at P, so I cannot really be perceiving such and such, even though it appears that I am’. This is not very satisfactory, though. If the claim is that the subject must explicitly hold these principles, then it is clearly false. If, on the other hand, the claim is that these are the principles of a theory that a self-conscious subject must tacitly know, then affirm strongly would suddenly seem very uninformative as we await within the absence of a specification of the approximative forms of behaviour. That can only be explained by their ascription of such a body of tacit knowledge. We need an account of what it is for a subject to be correctly described as possessing such a simple theory of perception. The point, however, is simply that the notion of as non-conceptual point of view as presented, can be viewed as capturing, at a more primitive level, precisely the same phenomenon that Evans is trying to capture with his notion of a simple theory of perception.
But it must not be forgotten that a vital role in this is layed by the subject’s own actions and movements. Appreciating the spatiality of the environment and one’s place in it is largely a function of grasping one’s possibilities for action within the environment: Realizing that if one wants to return to a particular place from here one must pass through these intermediate places, or that if there is something there that one wants, one should take this route to obtain it. That this is something that Evans’s account could potentially overlook emerge when one reflects that a simple theory of perception of the form that described could be possessed and decoyed by a subject that only moves passively, in that it incorporates the dimension of action by emphasizing the particularities of navigation.
Moreover, stressing the importance of action and movement indicates how the notion of a non-conceptual point of view might be grounded in the self-specifying in for action to be found in visual perception. By that in thinking particularly of the concept of an alliance so central to Gibsonian theories of perception. One important type of self-specifying information in the visual field is information about the possibilities for action and reaction that the environment affords the perceiver, by which of bringing into a certain state about non-conceptual first-person contents. The development of a non-conceptual point of view clearly involves certain forms of reasoning, and clearly, we will not have a full understanding of the notion of a non-conceptual point of view until we have an explanation of how this reasoning can take place. The spatial reasoning involved in over which this reasoning takes place. The spatial reasoning involved in developing a non-conceptual point of view upon the world is largely a matter of calibrating different subordinated affiliations into a conjointly integrated representation of the world.
In short, any learned cognitive abilities are contractible out of more primitive abilities already in existence. There is good reason to think that the intrinsic perceptions of the world are innately existing in or belonging to an individual inherently. And so if, the perception of inordinate ambivalency is the key to the combining accumulation of an integrated spatial representation of the environment via the recognition of symmetric equalities, connective transitives, and associate identities, it is precisely conceivable that the capacities implicated in an integrated representation of the world could emerge non-mysteriously from innate abilities.
Nonetheless, there are many philosophers who would be prepared to allow the possibility of non-conceptual content without accepting that to use the theory of non-conceptual content so solve the paradox of self-consciousness. This is ca more substantial tasks, as the methodology that is adaptively rested on the first of the marks of content, namely that content-bearing states serve to explain behaviour in situations where the connections between sensory-data and behavioural production cannot be plotted in a law-like manner (the functionalist theory of the self-reference). As such, not of allowing that every instance of intentional behaviour where there are no such law-like connections between sensory-data and behavioural manners need to be explained by attributing to the creature in question of representational states with first-person contents. Even so, many such instances of intentional behaviour do need to be explained in this way. This offers a way of establishing the legitimacy of non-conceptual first-person contents. What would satisfactorily demonstrate the legitimacy of non-conceptual first-person contents would be the existence of forms of behaviour in pre-linguistic or non-linguistic creatures for which inference to the best understanding or explanation (which in this context includes inference to the most parsimonious understanding, or explanation) demands the ascription of states with non-conceptual first-person contents.
The non-conceptual first-person contents and the pick-up of self-specifying information in the structure of exteroceptive perception provide very primitive forms of non-conceptual self-consciousness, even if forms that can plausibly be viewed as in place rom. birth or shortly afterward. The dimension along which forms of self-consciousness must be compared is the richest of the conception of the self that they provide. All of which, a crucial element in any form of self-consciousness is how it enables the self-conscious subject to distinguish between self and environment - what many developmental psychologists term self-world dualism. In this sense, self-consciousness is essentially a contrastive notion. One implication of this is that a proper understanding of the richness of the conception that we take into account the richness of the conception of the environment with which it is associated. In the case of both somatic proprioception and the pick-up of self-specifying information in exteroceptive perception, there is a relatively impoverished conception of the environment. One prominent limitation is that both are synchronic than diachronic. The distinction between self and environment that they offer is a distinction that is effective at a time but not over time. The contrast between propriospecific and exterospecific invariant in visual perception, for example, provides a way for a creature to distinguish between itself and the world at any given moment, but this is not the same as a conception of oneself as an enduring thing distinguishable over time from an environment that also endures over time.
The notion of a non-conceptual point of view brings together the capacity to register one’s distinctness from the physical environment and various navigational capacities that manifest a degree of understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. One very basic reason for thinking that these elements must be considered together emerges from a point made from which the richness of the awareness of the environment from which the self is being distinguished. So no creature can understand its own distinctness from the physical environment without having an independent understanding of the nature of the physical environment, and since the physical environment is essentially spatial, this requires an understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. But this cannot be the whole story. It leaves unexplained why an understanding should be required of this particular essential feature of the physical environment. Afer all, it is also an essential feature of the physical environment that it is composed of objects that have both primary and secondary qualities, but there is no reflection of this in the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. More is needed to understand the significance of spatiality.
The general idea is very powerful, that the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is himself a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world.
The very idea of a perceivable, objectively spatiality would be the idea of the subject for 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. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere cannot be separated, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
One possible reaction to consciousness, is that it is only because unrealistic and ultimately unwarranted requirements are being placed on what is to count as genuinely self-referring first-person thoughts. Suppose for such an objection will be found in those theories that attempt to explain first-person thoughts in a way that does not presuppose any form of internal representation of the self or any form of self-knowledge. Consciousness arises because mastery of the semantics of he first-person pronoun is available only to creatures capable of thinking first-person thoughts whose contents involve reflexive self-reference and thus, seem to presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun. If, thought, it can be established that the capacity to think genuinely first-person thoughts does not depend on any linguistic and conceptual abilities, then arguably the problem of circularity will no longer have purchase.
There is no account of self-reference and genuinely first-person thought that can be read in a way that poses just such a direct challenge to the account of self-reference underpinning the conscious. This is the functionalist account, although spoken before, the functionalist view, a reflexive self-reference is a completely non-mysterious phenomenon susceptible to a functional analysis. A reflexive self-reference is not dependent upon any antecedent conceptual or linguistic skills. Nonetheless, the functionalist account of a reflexive self-reference is deemed to be sufficiently rich to provide the foundation for an account of the semantics of the first-person pronoun. If this is right, then the circularity at which consciousness is at its heart, and can be avoided.
The circularity problems at the root of consciousness arise because mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun requires the capacity to think fist-person thoughts whose natural expression is by means of the first-person pronoun. It seems clear that the circle will be broken if there are forms of first-person thought that are more primitive than those that do not require linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. What creates the problem of capacity circularity is the thought that we need to appeal to first-person contents in explaining mastery of the first-person pronoun, combined with the thought that any creature capable of entertaining first-person contents will have mastered the first-person pronoun. So if we want to retain the thought that mastery of the first-person pronoun can only be explained in terms of first-person contents, capacity circularity can only be avoided if there are first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun.
On the other hand, however, it seems to follow from everything earlier mentioned about ‘I’-thoughts that conscious thought awaits to the future subtracting its mastering linguistic supremacy of the first-person pronoun is a contradiction in terms. First-person thoughts have first-person contents, where first-person contents can only be specified in terms of either the first-person pronoun or the indirect reflexive pronoun. So how could such thoughts be entertained by a thinker incapable of a reflexive self-reference? How can a thinker who is not capable of reflexively reference? How can a thinker who is not the first-person pronoun be plausibly ascribed thoughts with first-person contents? The thought that, despite all this, there are real first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of the self-reference has been provided by Hugh Mellor (1988-1089). The basic phenomenon he is interested in explaining is what it is for a creature to have what he terms a ‘subjective belief,’ that is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. The explanation of subjective belief that he offers makes such beliefs independent of both linguistic abilities and conscious beliefs. From this basic account he constructs an account of conscious subjective beliefs and the of the reference of the first-person pronoun ‘I.’ These putatively more sophisticated cognitive states are casually derivable from basic subjective beliefs.
Mellor undertakes the functionalist premise that beliefs are causal functions from desire to actions. It is, of course, the emphasis in causal links between belief and action that make it plausible to think that belief might be independent of language and conscious belief ‘agency entails neither linguistic ability nor conscious belief’ (Mellor 1988). The idea that beliefs are causal functions from desires to action can be deployed to explain the content of a given belief via the equation of truth conditions and utility conditions, where utility conditions are those in which are actions caused by the conjunction of that belief with a single desire result in the satisfaction of that desire. We can see how this works by considering Mellor’s own example. Consider a creature ‘x’ who is hungry and has a desire for food at time ‘t’. That creature has a token belief b/(p) that conjoins with its desire for food to cause it to eat that there food in front of ‘x ‘ at that time. Moreover, for b/(p) to cause ‘x’ to eat what is in front of it at ‘t’. b/(p) must be a belief that ‘x’ has at ‘t’. For Mellor, therefore, the utility/truth condition of b/(p) is that whatever creature has this belief faces when it is actually facing food. And a belief with this content is, of course, the subjective belief whose natural linguistic expression would be ‘I am facing food now’ on the other hand, however, belief that would naturally be expressed with these words can be ascribed to a non-linguistic creature, because what makes it te belief that it is depends no on whether it can be linguistically expressed but on how it affects behaviour.
What secures a self-reference in belief b/(p) is the contiguity of cause and effect. The essence of subjectivity is conjointly placed with a desire or set of desires, and the relevant sort of conjunction is possible only if it is the same agent at the same time who has the desire and the belief. For in order to believe ‘p’, I need only be disposed to eat what I face if I feel hungry, a disposition which causal contiguity ensures that only my simultaneous hunger can provoke, and only into masking me eat, and only then.
Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometric and numerical relationships. We speculate that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece, as opposed to Chinese or Babylonian culture, partly because the social, political, and an economic climate in Greece was more open to the pursuit of knowledge with marginal cultural utility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigation, but this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential features in beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
All the same, newer logical frameworks point to the logical condition for description and comprehension of experience such as to quantum physics. While normally referred to as the principle of ‘complementarity’, the use of the word principle was unfortunate in that complementarity is not a principle as that word is used in physics. A complementarity is rather a logical framework for the acquisition and comprehension of scientific knowledge that discloses a new relationship between physical theory and physical reality that undermines all appeals to metaphysics.
The logical conditions for description in quantum mechanics, the two conceptual components of classical causality, space-time description and energy-momentum conservation are all mutually exclusive and can be coordinated through the limitations imposed by Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle.
The logical farmwork of complementarities is useful and necessary when the following requirements are met: (1) When the theory consists of two individually complete constructs: (2) when the constructs preclude one another in a description of the unique physical situation to which they both apply, (3) when both constitute a complete description of that situation. As we are to discover a situation, in which complementarity clearly applies, we necessarily confront an imposing limit to our knowledge of this situation. Knowledge can never be complete in the classical sense because we are able simultaneously to apply the mutual exclusive constructs that make up the complete description.
Why, then, must we use classical descriptive categories, like space-time descriptions and energy-momentum conservation, in our descriptions of quantum events? If classical mechanics are an indications of the actual physical situation, it would seem to follow that classically; indication categories are not adequate to describe this situation. If, for example, quantities like position and momentum is the abstraction with which properties that are ‘definable and observable only through their interactions with other systems,’ why should we represent these classical categories as if they were actual quantities in physical theory and experiment? However, these categories are rarely discussed, but it carries some formidable implications for the future of scientific thought.
Nevertheless, our journeys through which the corses of times generations we historically the challenge when it became of Heidegger' theory of spatiality distinguishes that concludes to three different types of space: (1) world-space, (2) regions (Gegend), and (3) Dasein's spatiality. What Heidegger calls ‘world-space’ is space conceived as an ‘arena’ or ‘container’ for objects. It captures both our ordinary conception of space and theoretical space - in particular absolute space. Chairs, desks, and buildings exist ‘in’ space, but world-space is independent of such objects, much like absolute space ‘in which’ things exist. However, Heidegger thinks that such a conception of space is an abstraction from the spatializing conduct of our everyday activities. The things that we deal with are near or far relative to us; according to Heidegger, this nearness or farness of things is how we first become familiar with that which we (later) represent to ourselves as ‘space.’ This familiarity is what renders the understanding of space (in a ‘container’ metaphor or in any other way) possible. It is because we act spatially, going to places and reaching for things to use, that we can even develop a conception of abstract space at all. What we normally think of as space - world-space - turns out not to be what space fundamentally is; World-space is, in Heidegger's terminology, space conceived as vorhanden. It is an objectivised space founded on a more basic space-of-action.
Since Heidegger thinks that space-of-action is the condition for world-space, he must explain the former without appealing to the latter. Heidegger's task then is to describe the space-of-action without presupposing such world-space and the derived concept of a system of spatial coordinates. However, this is difficult because all our usual linguistic expressions for describing spatial relations presuppose world-space. For example, how can one talk about the ‘distance between you and me’ without presupposing some sort of metric, i.e., without presupposing an objective access to the relation? Our spatial notions such as ‘distance,’ ‘location,’ etc. must now be reiterated for reason that from a standpoint within the spatial relation of self (Dasein) to the things dealt with. This problem is what motivates Heidegger to invent his own terminology and makes his discussion of space awkward. In what follows I will try to use ordinary language whenever possible to explain his principal ideas.
The space-of-action has two aspects: regions (space as Zuhandenheit) and Dasein's spatiality (space as Existentiale). The sort of space we deal within our daily activity is ‘functional’ or zuhanden, and Heidegger's term for it is ‘region.’ The places we work and live-the office, the park, the kitchen, etc.-all have different regions that organize our activities and conceptualized ‘equipment.’ My desk area as my work region has a computer, printer, telephone, books, etc., in their appropriate ‘places,’ according to the spatiality of the way in which I work. Regions differ from space viewed as a ‘container’; the latter notion lacks a ‘referential’ organization with respect to our context of activities. Heidegger wants to claim that referential functionality is an inherent feature of space itself, and not just a ‘human’ characteristic added to a container-like space.
In our activity, how do we specifically stand with respect to functional space? We are not ‘in’ space as things are, but we do exist in some spatially salient manner. What Heidegger is trying to capture is the difference between the nominal expression ‘we exist in space’ and the adverbial expression ‘we exist spatially.’ He wants to describe spatiality as a mode of our existence rather than conceiving space as an independent entity. Heidegger identifies two features of Dasein's spatiality - ‘de-severance’ (Ent-fernung) and ‘directionality’ (Ausrichtung).
De-severance describes the way we exist as a process of spatial self-determination by ‘making things available’ to ourselves. In Heidegger's language, in making things available we ‘take in space’ by ‘making the farness vanish’ and by ‘bringing things close’
We are not simply contemplative beings, but we exist through concretely acting in the world - by reaching for things and going to places. When I walk from my desk area into the kitchen, I am not directly switching locations from point ‘A’ to ‘B’ in an arena-like space, but I am ‘taking in space’ as I move, continuously making the ‘farness’ of the kitchen ‘vanish,’ as the shifting spatial perspectives are opened as I go along.
This process is also inherently ‘directional.’ Everything de-severing is aimed toward something or in a certain direction that is determined by our concern and by specific regions. I must always face and move in a certain direction that is dictated by a specific region. If I want to get a glass of ice tea, instead of going out into the yard, I face toward the kitchen and move in that direction, following the region of the hallway and the kitchen. Regions determine where things belong, and our actions are coordinated in directional ways accordingly.
De-severance, directionality, and regionality are three ways of describing the spatiality of a unified Being-in-the-world. As aspects of Being-in-the-world, these spatial modes of being are equiprimordial: Regions ‘refer’ to our activities, since they are established by our ways of being and our activities. Our activities, in turn, are defined in terms of regions. Only through the region can our de-severance and directionality are established. Our object of concern always appears in a certain context and place, in a certain direction. It is because things appear in a certain direction and in their places ‘there’ that we have our ‘here.’ We orient ourselves and organize our activities, always within regions that must already be given to us.
Heidegger's analysis of space does not refer to temporal aspects of Being-in-the-world, even though they are presupposed. In the second half of Being and Time he explicitly turns to the analysis of time and temporality in a discussion that is significantly more complex than the earlier account of spatiality. Heidegger makes the following five distinctions between types of time and temporality: (1) the ordinary or ‘vulgar’ conception of time; this is time conceived as Vorhandenheit. (2) world-time; this is time as Zuhandenheit. Dasein's temporality is divided into three types: (3) Dasein's inauthentic (uneigentlich) temporality, (4) Dasein's authentic (eigentlich) temporality, and (5) temporal originality or ‘temporality as such.’ The analyses of the vorhanden and zuhanden modes of time are interesting, but it is Dasein's temporality that is relevant to our discussion, since it is this form of time that is said to be set up for space. Unfortunately, Heidegger is not clear about which temporality plays this founding role.
We can begin by excluding Dasein's inauthentic temporality. This mode of time refers to our unengaged, ‘average’ way in which we regard time. It is the ‘past we forget’ and the ‘future we expect,’ all without decisiveness and resolute understanding. Heidegger seems to consider that this mode of temporality is the temporal dimension of de-severance and directionality, since de-severance and directionality deal only with everyday actions. As such, an inauthentic temporality must itself be founded in an authentic basis of some sort. The two remaining candidates for the foundation are Dasein's authentic temporality and temporal originality.
Dasein's authentic temporality is the ‘resolute’ mode of temporal existence. An authentic temporality is realized when Dasein becomes aware of its own finite existence. This temporality has to do with one's grasp of his or her own life as a whole from one's own unique perspective. Life gains meaning as one's own life-project, bounded by the sense of one's realization that he or she is not immortal. This mode of time appears to have a normative function within Heidegger's theory. In the second half of BT he often refers to inauthentic or ‘everyday’ mode of time as lacking some primordial quality which authentic temporality possesses.
In contrast, temporal originality is the formal structure of Dasein's temporality itself. In addition to its spatial Being-in-the-world, Dasein also exists essentially as ‘projection.’ Projection is oriented toward the future, and this futurist orientation regulates our concern by constantly realizing various possibilities. Temporality is characterized formally as this dynamic structure of ‘a future that makes present in the process of having been.’ Heidegger calls the three moments of temporality - the future, the present, and the past - the three ecstasies of temporality. This mode of time is not normative but rather formal or neutral; as Blattner argues, the temporal features that constitute Dasein's temporality describe both inauthentic and authentic temporality.
There are some passages that indicate that authentic temporality is the primary manifestation of temporalities, because of its essential orientation toward the future. For instance, Heidegger states that ‘temporality first showed itself in anticipatory resoluteness.’ Elsewhere, he argues that ‘the ‘time’ which is accessible to Dasein's common-sense is not primordial, but arises rather from authentic temporality.’ In these formulations, authentic temporality is said to found other inauthentic modes. According to Blattner, this is ‘by far the most common interpretation of the status of authentic time.
However, to ague with Blattner and Haar, in that there are far more passages where Heidegger considers temporal originality as temporality as distinct from authentic temporality, and founding for it and for Being-in-the-world as well. Here are some examples: Temporality has different possibilities and different ways of temporalizing itself. The basic possibilities of existence, the authenticity and inauthenticity of Dasein, are grounded ontologically on possible temporalizations of temporality. Time is primordial as the temporalizing of temporality, and as such it makes possibly the constitution of the structure of care.
Heidegger's conception seems to be that it is because we are fundamentally temporal - having the formal structure of ecstatic-horizontal unity - that we can project, authentically or inauthentically, our concernful dealings in the world and exist as Being-in-the-world. It is on this account that temporality is said to found spatiality.
Since Heidegger uses the term ‘temporality’ rather than ‘authentic temporality’ whenever the founding relation is discussed between space and time, on this assumption two interpretations of the argument are possible, but both are unsuccessful given his phenomenological framework.
The possibility that it is ‘authentic temporality’ which founds spatiality. Two interpretations are also possible in this case, but neither will establish a founding relation successfully, despite Heidegger's claim, an equiprimordial relation between time and space is most consistent with his own theoretical framework. The specific arguments in which Heidegger tries to prove that temporality founds spatiality.
The principal argument, entitled ‘The Temporality of the Spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein.’ Heidegger begins the section with the following remark: Though the expression `temporality' does not signify what one understands by ‘time’ when one talks about `space and time', nevertheless spatiality seems to make up another basic attribute of Dasein corresponding to temporality. Thus with Dasein's spatiality, existential-temporal analysis seems to come to a limit, so that this entity that we call ‘Dasein,’ must be considered as `temporal' `and' as spatial coordinately.
Accordingly, Heidegger asks, ‘Has our existential-temporal analysis of Dasein thus been brought to a halt . . . by the spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein . . . and Being-in-the-world?’ His answer is no. He argues that since ‘Dasein's constitution and its ways to being possible are ontologically only on the basis of temporality,’ and since the ‘spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein . . . belongs to Being-in-the-world,’ it follows that ‘Dasein's specific spatiality must be grounded in temporality.’
Heidegger's claim is that the totality of regions-de-severance-directionality can be organized and re-organized, ‘because Dasein as temporality is ecstatic-horizontal in its Being.’ Because Dasein exists futurely as ‘for-the-sake-of-which,’ it can discover regions. Thus, Heidegger remarks: ‘Only on the basis of its ecstatic-horizontal temporality is it possible for Dasein to break into space.’
However, in order to establish that temporality founds spatiality, Heidegger would have to show that spatiality and temporality must be distinguished in such a way that temporality not only shares a content with spatiality but also has additional content as well. In other words, they must be truly distinct and not just analytically distinguishable. But what is the content of ‘the ecstatic-horizontal constitution of temporality’? Does it have a content above and beyond Being-in-the-world? Nicholson poses the same question as follows: Is it human care that accounts for the characteristic features of human temporalities? Or is it, as Heidegger says, human temporalities that accounts for the characteristic features of human care, serves as their foundation? The first alternative, according to Nicholson, is to reduce the temporality to care: ‘The specific attributes of the temporality of Dasein . . . would be in their roots not aspects of temporality but reflections of Dasein's care.’ The second alternative is to treat the temporality as having some content above and beyond care: ‘the three-fold constitution of care stems from the three-fold constitution of temporality.’
Nicholson argues that the second alternative is the correct reading. As Dasein lives in the world by making choices, but ‘the ecstasies of temporality lies well before any choice . . . so our study of care introduces us to a matter whose scope outreaches care: the ecstasies of temporality itself.’ Accordingly, ‘What was able to make clear is that the reign of temporal ecstasies over the choices we make accords with the place we occupy as finite beings in the world.’
But if Nicholson's interpretation is right, what would be the content of ‘the ecstasies of the temporality itself,’ if not some sort of purely formal entity or condition such as Kant's ‘pure intuition?’ But this would imply that Heidegger has left phenomenology behind and is now engaging in establishing a transcendental framework outside the analysis of Being-in-the-world, such that this formal structure founds Being-in-the-world. This is inconsistent with his initial claim that Being-in-the-world is itself foundational.
The structure of a temporality should be treated as an abstraction from Dasein's Being-in-the-world, specifically from care. In this case, the content of temporality is just the past and the present and the future ways of Being-in-the-world. Heidegger's own words support this reading: ‘as Dasein temporalizes itself, a world is too,’ and ‘the world is neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand, but temporalizes itself in temporality.’ He also states that the zuhanden ‘world-time’, in the rigorous sense of the existential-temporal conception of the world, belongs to temporality itself.’ In this reading, ‘temporality temporalizing itself,’ ‘Dasein's projection,’ and ‘the temporal projection of the world’ is three different ways of describing the same ‘happening’ of Being-in-the-world, which Heidegger calls ‘self-directive.’
However, if this is the case, then the temporality does not found spatiality, except perhaps in the trivial sense that spatiality is built into the notion of care that is identified with temporality. The content of ‘temporality temporalizing itself’ simply is the various opening of regions, i.e., Dasein's ‘breaking into space.’ Certainly, as Stroeker points out, it is true that ‘nearness and remoteness are spatio-temporal phenomena and cannot be conceived without a temporal moment.’ But this necessity does not constitute a foundation. Rather, they are equiprimordial. The addition of temporal dimensions does indeed complete the discussion of spatiality, which abstracted from time. But this completion, while it better articulates the whole of Being-in-the-world, does not show that temporality is more fundamental.
If temporality and spatiality are equiprimordial, then all of the supposedly founding relations between temporality and spatiality could just as well be reversed and still hold true. Heidegger's view is that ‘because Dasein as temporality is ecstatic-horizontal in its Being, it can take along with it a space for which it has made room, and it can do so factorially and constantly.’ But if Dasein is essentially a factorial projection, then the reverse should also be true. Heidegger appears to have assumed the priority of temporalities over spatiality perhaps under the influence of Kant, Husserl, or Dilthey, and then based his analyses on that assumption.
However, there may still be a way to save Heidegger's foundational project in terms of authentic temporality. Heidegger never specifically mentions an authentic temporality, since he suggests earlier that the primary manifestation of temporality is authentic temporality, such a reading may perhaps be justified. This reading would treat the whole spatio-temporal structure of Being-in-the-world. The resoluteness of an authentic temporality, arising out of Dasein's own ‘Being-towards-death,’ would supply a content to temporality above and beyond everyday involvements.
Heidegger is said to have its foundations in resoluteness, Dasein determines its own Situation through anticipatory resoluteness, which includes particular locations and involvements, i.e., the spatiality of Being-in-the-world. The same set of circumstances could be transformed into a new situation with different significance, if Dasein chooses resolutely to bring that about. Authentic temporalities, in this case can be said to found spatiality, since Dasein's spatiality is determined by resoluteness. This reading moreover enables Heidegger to construct a hierarchical relation between temporality and spatiality within Being-in-the-world rather than going outside of it to a formal transcendental principle, since the choice of spatiality is grasped phenomenologically in terms of the concrete experience of decision.
Moreover, one might argue that according to Heidegger one's own grasp of ‘death’ is uniquely a temporal mode of existence, whereas there is no such weighty conception involving spatiality. Death is what make’s Dasein ‘stand before itself in its own most potentiality-for-Being.’ Authentic Being-towards-death is a ‘Being toward a possibility - indeed, toward a distinctive possibility of Dasein itself.’ One could argue that notions such as ‘potentiality’ and ‘possibility’ are distinctively temporal, nonspatial notions. So ‘Being-towards-death,’ as temporal, appears to be much more ontologically ‘fundamental’ than spatiality.
However, Heidegger is not yet out of the woods. I believe that labelling the notions of anticipatory resoluteness, Being-towards-death, potentiality, and possibility specifically as temporal modes of being (to the exclusion of spatiality) begs the question. Given Heidegger's phenomenological framework, why assume that these notions are only temporal (without spatial dimensions)? If Being-towards-death, potentiality-for-Being, and possibilities were ‘purely’ temporal notions, what phenomenological sense can we make of such abstract conceptions, given that these are manifestly our modes of existence as bodily beings? Heidegger cannot have in mind such an abstract notion of time, if he wants to treat an authentic temporality as the meaning of care. It would seem more consistent with his theoretical framework to say that Being-towards-death is a rich spatio-temporal mode of being, given that Dasein is Being-in-the-world.
Furthermore, the interpretation that defines resoluteness as uniquely temporal suggests too much of a voluntaristic or subjectivistic notion of the self that controls its own Being-in-the-world as for its future. This would drive a wedge between the self and its Being-in-the-world, thereby creating a temporal ‘inner self’ which can decide its own spatiality. However, if Dasein is Being-in-the-world as Heidegger claims, then all of Dasein's decisions should be viewed as concretely grounded in Being-in-the-world. If so, spatiality must be an essential constitutive element.
Hence, authentic temporality, if construed narrowly as the mode of temporality, at first appears to be able to found spatiality, but it also commits Heidegger either to an account of time that is too abstract, or to the notion of the self far more like Sartre's than his own. What is lacking in Heidegger's theory that generates this sort of difficulty is a developed conception of Dasein as a lived body - a notion more fully developed by Merleau-Ponty.
The elements of a more consistent interpretation of an authentic temporality are present in Being and Time. This interpretation incorporates a view of ‘authentic spatiality’ in the notion of authentic temporalities. This would be Dasein's resolutely grasping its own spatio-temporal finitude with respect to its place and its world. Dasein is born at a particular place, but lives in a particular place, dies in a particular place, all of which can relate in an authentic way. The place Dasein lives is not a place of anonymous involvements. must be there where its own potentiality-for-Being is realized. Dasein's place is thus a determination of its existence. Had Heidegger developed such a conception more fully, he would have seen that temporality is equiprimordial with thoroughly spatial and contextual Being-in-the-world. They are distinguishable but equally fundamental ways of emphasizing our finitude.
The internal tension within his theory eventually leads Heidegger to reconsider his own positions. In his later period, he explicitly develops what may be viewed as a conception of authentic spatiality. For instance, in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking,’ Heidegger states that Dasein's relations to locations and to spaces inheres in dwelling, and dwelling is the basic character of our Being. The notion of dwelling expresses an affirmation of spatial finitude. Through this affirmation one acquires a proper relation to one's environment.
But the idea of dwelling is, in fact, already discussed in Being and Time, regarding the term ‘Being-in-the-world,’ Heidegger explains that the word ‘in’ is derived from ‘innan’ - to ‘reside,’ ‘habitare,’ ‘to dwell.’ The emphasis on ‘dwelling’ highlights the essentially ‘worldly’ character of the self.
Thus from the beginning Heidegger had a conception of spatial finitude, but this fundamental insight was undeveloped because of his ambition to carry out the foundational project that favoured time. From the 1930's on, as Heidegger abandons the foundational project focussing on the temporality, the conception of authentic spatiality comes to the fore. For example, in Discourse on Thinking, Heidegger considers the spatial character of Being as ‘that-which-regions (die Gegnet).’ The peculiar expression is a re-conceptualization of the notion of ‘region’ as it appeared in Being and Time. Region is given an active character and defined as the ‘openness that surrounds us’ which ‘comes to meet us.’ By giving it an active character, Heidegger wants to emphasize that region is not brought into being by us, but rather exists in its own right, as that which expresses our spatial existence. Heidegger states that ‘one needs to understand ‘resolve’ (Entschlossenheit) as it is understood in Being and Time: as the opening of man [Dasein] particularly undertaken by him for openness, . . . which we think of as that-which-regions.’ Here, Heidegger is asserting an authentic conception of spatiality. The finitude expressed in the notion of Being-in-the-world is thus transformed into an authentic recognition of our finite worldly existence in later writings.
The return to the conception of spatial finitude in the later period shows that Heidegger never abandoned the original insight behind his conception of Being-in-the-world. But once committed to this idea, it is hard to justify singling out an aspect of the self -temporality - as the foundation for the rest of the structure. All of the Existentiale, which constitute the whole of Being-in-the-world, are equiprimordial, each mode articulating different aspects of a unified whole. The preference for temporality as the privileged meaning of existence reflects the Kantian residue in Heidegger's early doctrine that he later rejected as still excessively subjectivistic.
Meanwhile, it seems that it is, nonetheless, natural to combine this close connection with conclusions by proposing an account of self-consciousness, as to the capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification, though misidentification varies with the semantics of the ‘self’ - this would be a redundant account of self-consciousness. Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking, ‘I’-thoughts, will have explained everything distinctive about self-consciousness. It stems from the thought that what is distinctive about ‘I’-thoughts are that they are either themselves immune to error or they rest on further ‘I’ -Thoughts that are immune in that way. However, this is still not quite right, that, nonetheless, the question of what is an ‘I’-thought? Obviously an ‘I’-thought is a thought that involves self-reference. In that, I can think an ‘I’-thought only but thinking about myself. Equally, obvious, though, this cannot be l that there is to say in the subject. I can think thoughts that involves self-reference but are not ‘I’-thoughts. Suppose I think that the next person to get a parking ticket in central downtown Toronto and deserves everything he gets. Unbeknownst to me, the very next recipient of a parking ticket will be me. This makes my thought self-referring, but it dos not make it an ‘I’-thought. Why not? The answer is simply that I do not know that I will be the next person to get a parking ticket in central downtown Toronto. If ‘A’ is that unfortunate person, then there is a true identity statement of the form I = A, but I do not know that this identity holds. Because I do not know that the identity holds, I cannot be ascribe the thought that I will deserve its consequent ticketing. And so I am not thinking directorially proper, as an ‘I-thought, because one cannot think a genuine ‘I’-though t if one is ignorant that one is thinking about oneself. So it is natural to conclude that ‘I’ Thought involve a distinctive type of self-reference. This is the sort of self-reference whose natural linguistic expression if the first-person pronoun ‘I’. Because one cannot use the first-person pronoun without that one is thinking about oneself.
There is an account of self-reference and genuinely first-person thought that can be read in as way that pose s just such a direct challenge to the account of self-reference underpinning the self-consciousness susceptible to a functional analysis. In that, if this is right, then the circularity of self-consciousness can be avoided.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been provided by Hugh Mellor (198-1989). The basic phenomenon he is interested in emplaning is what it is for a creature to have what he terms ‘subjective belief’, that is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular the present tense. The explanation of subjective beliefs that he offers makes such beliefs independent of both linguistic abilities and conscious beliefs. From this basic account he constructs an account of conscious subjective beliefs and then of the reference of the first-person pronoun ‘I’.
Mellor starts from the functionalist premise that beliefs are causal functions from desires to actions., and that make it plausible to think that belief might be independent of language and conscious belief, since ‘agency entails neither linguistic ability nor conscious belief. We can see how this works by considering Mellor’s own example (1988). Consider a creature ‘÷’ who is hungry and has a desire for food at time ‘t’. That creature has a token belief b(p) that conjoins with its desire for food to cause it to eat what is in front of it at that time. The utility condition of that belief is that there be food in front of ‘÷’ at that time. Moreover, for b(p) to cause ‘÷’ to eat what is in front of it ‘t, b(p)’ must be a belief that ‘÷’ has at ‘t’. For Mellor, therefore, th utility/truth condition of b(p) is that whatever creature has this belief faces food when it is actually facing food. And a belief with this content is, of course, the subjective belief whose natural linguistic expression would be ‘I am facing food now’. On the other has however, a belief that would naturally be expressed with these words can ascribe to a non-linguistic creature, because what makes it the belief that it is depends not on whether it can be linguistically expressed but on how it affects behaviour.
What cures self-reference in the belief b(p) is the contiguity of cause and effect. The essence of a subjective belief is the effects that it has on actions. It can only have those effects conjointly with a desire or set of desires, and the relevant sort of conjunction is possibly only if it s the same agent at the same time who has the desire and the belief.
For in order to believe ‘p’ I need only be disposed to eat what I face if I feel hungry: A disposition which causal contiguity ensues that only my simultaneous hunger can provoke, and only into making me eat, and only then. That’s what makes my belief refer to me and to when I have it. And tat’s why I need have no idea who I am or what the time is, no concept of the self or of the present, no implicit or explicit grasp of any ‘sense’ of ‘I’ or ‘now’, to fix the reference of my subjective beliefs: Causal contiguity fixes them for me. (Mellor, 1988-1989)
Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification, we will have explained everything about the capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts. As it would to claim of deriving from the thought that immunity to error through misidentification depends on the semantics of the ‘self.’
Once, again, that when we have an account of the semantics in that we will have explained everything distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification.
The suggestion is that the semantics of ‘self-ness’ will explain what is distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts immune to error through misidentification. Semantics alone cannot be expected to explain the capacity for thinking thoughts. The point in fact, that all that there is to the capacity of think thoughts that are immune tp error is the capacity to think the sort of thought whose natural linguistic expression involves the ‘self,’ where this capacity is given by mastery of the semantics of ‘self-ness.’ Yielding, to explain what it is to master the semantics of ‘self-ness,’ especially to think thoughts immune to error through misidentification.
On this view, the mastery of the semantics of ‘self-ness’ may be construed as for the single most important explanation in a theory of ‘self-consciousness.’
Its quickened reformulation might be put to a defender of ‘redundancy’ or the deflationary theory is how mastery of the semantics of ‘self-ness’ can make sense of the distinction between ‘self-ness contents’ that are immune to error through misidentification and the ‘self contents’ that lack such immunity. However, this is only an apparent difficulty when one remembers that those of the ‘selves’ content is immune to error through misidentification, because, those employing ‘’I’ as object, were able in having to break down their component elements. The identification component and the predication components that for which if the composite identification components of each are of such judgements that mastery of the semantics of ‘self-regulatory’ content must be called upon to explain. Identification component are, of course, immune to error through misidentification.
It is also important to stress how the redundancy and the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, and any theory of self-consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the ‘self-ness,’ are motivated by an important principle that has governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. The principle is the principle that the analysis of thought can only continue thought, the philosophical analysis of language such that we communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principle governing the use of language: It is these principles, which relate to what is open to view and mind other that via the medium of language, which endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyse thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
Still, at the core of the notion of broad self-consciousness is the recognition of what consciousness is the recognition of what developmental psychologist’s call ‘self-world dualism.’ Any subject properly described as self-conscious must be able to register the distinction between himself and the world, of course, this is a distinction that can be registered in a variety of way. The capacity for self-ascription of thoughts and experiences, in combination with the capacity to understand the world as a spatial and causally structured system of mind-independent objects, is a high-level way of registering of this distinction.
Consciousness of objects is closely related to sentience and to being awake. It is (at least) being in somewhat of a distinct informational and behavioural intention where its responsive state is for one's condition as played within the immediateness of environmental surroundings. It is the ability, for example, to process and act responsively to information about food, friends, foes, and other items of relevance. One finds consciousness of objects in creatures much less complex than human beings. It is what we (at any rate first and primarily) have in mind when we say of some person or animal as it is coming out of general anaesthesia, ‘It is regaining consciousness’ as consciousness of objects is not just any form of informational access to the world, but the knowing about and being conscious of, things in the world.
We are conscious of our representations when we are conscious, not (just) of some object, but of our representations: ‘I am seeing [as opposed to touching, smelling, tasting] and seeing clearly [as opposed too dimly].’ Consciousness of our own representations it is the ability to process and act responsively to information about oneself, but it is not just any form of such informational access. It is knowing about, being conscious of, one's own psychological states. In Nagel's famous phrase (1974), when we are conscious of our representations, it is ‘like something’ to have them. If, that which seems likely, there are forms of consciousness that do not involve consciousness of objects, they might consist in consciousness of representations, though some theorists would insist that this kind of consciousness be not of representations either (via representations, perhaps, but not of them).
The distinction just drawn between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects may seem similar to Form's (1995) contributes of a well-known distinction between P- [phenomenal] and A- [access] consciousness. Here is his definition of ‘A-consciousness’: ‘A state is A-conscious if it is poised for direct control of thought and action.’ He tells us that he cannot define ‘P-consciousness’ in any ‘remotely non-circular way’ but will use it to refer to what he calls ‘experiential properties,’ what it is like to have certain states. Our consciousness of objects may appear to be like A-consciousness. It is not, however, it is a form of P-consciousness. Consciousness of an object is - how else can we put it? - consciousness of the object. Even if consciousness is just informational excess of a certain kind (something that Form would deny), it is not all form of informational access and we are talking about conscious access here. Recall the idea that it is like something to have a conscious state. Other closely related ideas are that in a conscious state, something appears to one, that conscious states have a ‘felt quality’. A term for all this is phenomenology: Conscious states have a phenomenology. (Thus some philosophers speak of phenomenal consciousness here.) We could now state the point we are trying to make this way. If I am conscious of an object, then it is like something to have that object as the content of a representation.
Some theorists would insist that this last statement be qualified. While such a representation of an object may provide everything that a representation has to have for its contents to be like something to me, they would urge, something more is needed. Different theorists would add different elements. For some, I would have to be aware, not just of the object, but of my representation of it. For others, I would have directorial implications that infer of the certain attentive considerations to its way or something other than is elsewhere. We cannot go into this controversy here. As, we are merely making the point that consciousness of objects is more than Form's A-consciousness.
Consciousness self involves, not just consciousness of states that it is like something to have, but consciousness of the thing that has them, i.e., of ones-self. It is the ability to process and act responsively to information about oneself, but again it is more than that. It is knowing about, being conscious of, oneself, indeed of itself as itself. And consciousness of oneself in this way it is often called consciousness of self as the subject of experience. Consciousness of oneself as oneself seems to require indexical adeptness and by preference to a special indexical ability at that, not just an ability to pick out something out but to pick something out as oneself. Human beings have such self-referential indexical ability. Whether any other creatures have, it is controversial. The leading nonhuman candidate would be chimpanzees and other primates whom they have taught enough language to use first-person pronouns.
The literature on consciousness sometimes fails to distinguish consciousness of objects, consciousness of one's own representations, and consciousness of self, or treat one three, usually consciousness of one's own representations, as actualized of its owing totality in consciousness. (Conscious states do not have objects, yet is not consciousness of a representation either. We cannot pursue that complication here.) The term ‘conscious’ and cognates are ambiguous in everyday English. We speak of someone regaining consciousness - where we mean simple consciousness of the world. Yet we also say things like, She was haphazardly conscious of what motivated her to say that - where we do not mean that she lacked either consciousness of the world or consciousness of self but rather than she was not conscious of certain things about herself, specifically, certain of her own representational states. To understand the unity of consciousness, making these distinctions is important. The reason is this: the unity of consciousness takes a different form in consciousness of self than it takes in either consciousness of one's own representations or consciousness of objects.
So what is unified consciousness? As we said, the predominant form of the unity of consciousness is being aware of several things at the same time. Intuitively, this is the notion of several representations being aspects of a single encompassing conscious state. A more informative idea can be gleaned from the way philosophers have written about unified consciousness. As emerging from what they have said, the central feature of unified consciousness is taken to be something like this unity of consciousness: A group of representational relations related to each other that to be conscious of any of them is to be conscious of others of them and of the group of them as a single group.
Call this notion (x). Now, unified consciousness of some sort can be found in all three of the kinds of consciousness we delineated. (It can be found in a fourth, too, as we will see in a moment.) We can have unified consciousness of: Objectively represented to us; These are existent representations of themselves, but are contained in being alone, that in their findings are a basis held to oneself, that of something has of each the discerning character to value their considerations in the qualities of such that represents our qualifying phenomenon. In the first case, the represented objects would appear as aspects of a single encompassing conscious states. In the second case, the representations themselves would thus appear. In the third case, one is aware of oneself as a single, unified subject. Does (x) fit all three (or all four, including the fourth yet to be introduced)? It does not. At most, it fits the first two. Let us see how this unfolds.
Its collective and unified consciousness manifests as of such a form that most substantively awaken sustenance are purposive and may be considered for occurring to consciousness. Is that one has of the world around one (including one's own body) as aspects of a single world, of the various items in it as linked to other items in it? What makes it unified can be illustrated by an example. Suppose that I am aware of the computer screen in front of me and of the car sitting in my driveway. If awareness of these two items is not unified, I will lack the ability to compare the two. If I cannot bring the car as I am aware of it to the state in which I am aware of the computer screen, I could not answer questions such as, Is the car the same colour as the WordPerfect icon? Or even, As I am experiencing them, is the car to the left or to the right of the computer screen? We can compare represented items in these ways only if we are aware of both items together, as parts of the same field or state or act of conscious. That is what unified consciousness doe for us. (x) fits this kind of unified consciousness well. There are a couple of disorders of consciousness in which this unity seems to break down or be missing. We will examine them shortly.
Unified consciousness of one's own representations is the consciousness that we have of our representations, consciousness of our own psychological states. The representations by which we are conscious of the world are particularly important but, if those theorists who maintain that there are forms of consciousness that does not have objects are right, they are not the only ones. What makes consciousness of our representations unified? We are aware of many representations together, so that they appear as aspects of a single state of consciousness. As with unified consciousness of the world, here we can compare items of which we have unified consciousness. For example, we can compare what it is like to see an object to what it is like to touch the same object. Thus, (x) fits this kind of unified consciousness well, too.
When one has unified consciousness of self, it is to occur that at least one signifies its own awareness of oneself, not just as the subject but in Kant's words, as the ‘single common subject’ of many representations and the single common agent of various acts of deliberation and action.
This is one of the two forms of unified consciousness that (x) does not fit. When one is aware of oneself as the common subject of experiences, the common agent of actions, one is not aware of several objects. Some think that when one is aware of oneself as subject, one is not aware of oneself as an object at all. Kant believed this. Whatever the merits of this view, when one is clearly aware of oneself as the single common subject of many representations, one is not aware of several things. As an alternative, one is aware of, and knows that one is aware of, the same thing - via many representations. Call this kind of unified consciousness (Y). Although (Y) is different form (x), we still have the core idea: Unified consciousness consists in tying what is contained in several representations, here most representations of oneself, together so that they are all part of a single field or state or act of consciousness.
Unified consciousness of self has been argued to have some very special properties. In particular, there is a small but important literature on the idea that the reference to oneself as oneself by which one achieves awareness of oneself as subject involves no ‘identification.’ Generalizing the notion a bit, some claim that reference to self does not proceed by way of attribution of properties or features to oneself at all. One argument for this view is that one is or could be aware of oneself as the subject of each of one's conscious experiences. If so, awareness of self is not what Bennett call ‘experience-dividing’ - statements expressing it have ‘no direct implications of the form ‘I’ will experience C rather than D.’ If this is so, the linguistic activities using first person pronouns by which we call ourselves subject and the representational states that result have to have some unusual properties.
Finally, we need to distinguish a fourth site of unified consciousness. Let us call it unity of focus. Unity of focus is our ability to pay unified attention to objects, one's representations, and one's own self. It is different from the other sorts of unified consciousness. In the other three situations, consciousness ranges over many alternate objects or many instances of consciousness of an object (in unified consciousness of self). Unity of focus picks out one such item (or a small numbers of them). Wundt captures what I have in mind well in his distinction between the field of consciousness and the focus of consciousness. The consciousness of a single item on which one is focussing is unified because one is aware of many aspects of the item in one state or act of consciousness (especially relational aspects, e.g., any dangers it poses, how it relates to one's goals, etc.) and one is aware of many different considerations with respect to it in one state or act of consciousness (goals, how well one is achieving them with respect to this object, etc.). (x) does not fit this kind of unified consciousness any better than it fit unified consciousness of self? Here that we are not, or need not be, aware of most items. Instead, one is integrating most properties of an item, especially properties that involve relationships to oneself, and integrating most of one's abilities and applying them to the item, and so on. Call this form of unified consciousness (z). One way to think of the affinity of (z) (a unified focus) to (x) and (Y) is this. (z) occurs within (x) and (Y) - within unified consciousness of world and self.
Though this has often been overlooked, all forms of unified consciousness come in both simultaneous and across-time versions. That is to say, the unity can consist in links of certain kinds among phenomena occurring at the same time (synchronically) and it can consist in links of certain kinds among phenomena occurring at different times (diachronically). In its synchronic form, it consists in such things as our ability to compare items with one of another, for example, to see if an item fits into another item. Diachronically, it consists in a certain crucial form of memory, namely, our ability to retain a representation of an earlier object in the right way and for long enough to bring it as recalled into current consciousness of currently represented objects in the same as we do with simultaneously represented objects. Though this process across time has always been called the unity of consciousness, sometimes even to the exclusion of the synchronic unity just delineated, another good name for it would be continuity of consciousness. Note that this process of relating earlier to current items in consciousness is more than, and perhaps different from, the learning of new skills and associations. Even severe amnesiacs can do the latter.
That consciousness can be unified across time and at given time points merited of how central unity of consciousness is to cognition. Without the ability to retain representations of earlier objects and unite them with current represented objects, most complex cognition would simply be impossible. The only bits of language that one could probably understand, for example, would be single words; The simplest of sentences is an entity spread over time. Now, unification in consciousness might not be the only way to unite earlier cognitive states (earlier thoughts, earlier experiences) with current ones but it is a central way and the one best known to us. The unity of consciousness is central to cognition.
Justly as thoughts differ from all else that is said to correspond among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable, it is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my thought is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without excess, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed.
We communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language. Of these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the employment of language, unaided by any supposed contact between mind and mind other than a formal medium of language, which endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyses thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
By noting that (x), (y) and (z) are not the only kinds of mental unity. Our remarks about (z), specifically about what can be integrated in focal attention, might already have suggested as much. There is unity in the exercise of our cognitive capacities, unity that consists of integration of motivating factors, perceptions, beliefs, etc., and there is unity in the outputs, unity that consists of integration of behaviour.
Human beings bring a strikingly wide range of factors to bear on a cognitive task such as seeking to characterize something or trying to decide what to do about something. For example, we can bring to bear of what we want, and what we believe, and of our attitudinal values for which we can of our own self, situation, and context, allotted from each of our various senses: It has continuing causality in the information about the situation, other people, others' beliefs, desires, attitudes, etc.; The resources of however many languages we have possession in the availabilities for us, and include of the many-sided kinds of memory, bodily sensations, our various and very diverse problem-solving skills, . . . and so on. Not only can we bring all these elements to bear, we can integrate them in a way that is highly structured and ingeniously appropriate to our goals and the situation(s) before us. This form of mental unity could appropriately be called unity of cognition. Unity of consciousness often goes with unity of cognition because one of our means of unifying cognition with respect to some object or situation is to focus on it consciously. However, there is at least some measure of unified cognition in many situations of which we are not conscious, as is testified by our ability to balance, control our posture, manoeuver around obstacles while our
consciousness is entirely absorbed with something else, and so on.
At the other end of the cognitive process, we find an equally interesting form of unity, what we might call unity of behaviour, our ability to establish uninterruptedly some progressively rhythmic and keenly independent method for which to integrate our limbs, eyes, and bodily attitude, etc. The precision and complexity of the behavioural coordination we can achieve would be difficult to exaggerate. Think of a concert pianist bring about the complicated work.
One of the most interesting ways to study psychological phenomena is to see what happens when they or related phenomena break down. Phenomena that look simple and seamless when functioning smoothly often turns out to have all sorts of structure when they begin to malfunction. Like other psychological phenomena, we would expect unified consciousness to be open to being damaged, distorted, etc., too. If the unity of consciousness is as important to cognitive functioning as we have been suggesting, such damage or distortion should create serious problems for the people to whom it happens. The unity of consciousness is damaged and distorted in both naturally-occurring and experimental situations. Some of these situations are indeed very serious for those undergoing them.
In fact, unified consciousness can break down in what look to be two distinct ways. There are situations in which saying that one unified conscious being has split into two unified conscious beings without the unity itself being destroyed is natural or even significantly damaged, and situations in which always we have one being with one instance of consciousness. However, the unity itself may be damaged or even destroyed. In the former cases, there is reason to think that a single instance of unified consciousness has become two (or something like two). In the latter cases, unity of consciousness has been compromised in some way but nothing suggests that anything have split.
The point in fact, is that it is possibly the most challenging and persuasive source of problems in the whole of philosophy. Our own consciousness may be the most basic of fact confronting us, yet it is almost impossible to say that consciousness is. Is yours like yours? Is ours like that of animals? Might machines come to have consciousness? Is it possible that there might be disembodied consciousness? Whatever complex biological and neural processes go on backstage, it is my consciousness that provides the theatre where my experiences and thoughts have their existence: Where my desires are felt and where my intentions are formed. But then how am I to conceive the ‘I,’ or self that is the spectator of this theatre? One of the difficulties in thinking about consciousness is that the problems seem not to be scientific ones: Leibniz remarked that if we could construct a machine that could think and feel, and blow it up to the size of a mill and thus be able to examine its working parts as thoroughly as we pleased, we would still not find copiousness, and draw the conclusion that consciousness resides in simple subjects, not complex ones. Even if we are convinced that consciousness somehow emerges from the complexity of brain functioning, we may still feel baffled about the way the emergence takes place, or why it takes place in just the way it does.
Subsequently, it is natural to concede that a given thought has a natural linguistic expression. We are also saying something about how it is appropriate to characterize the contents of that thought. We are saying something about what is being thought. This ‘I’ term is given by the sentence that follows the ‘that’ clause in reporting a thought, a belief, or any propositional attitude. The proposal, then, is that ‘I’-thoughts are all and only the thoughts whose propositional contents constitutively involve the first-person pronoun. This is still not quite right, however, because thought contents can be specified in ways. They can be specified directly or indirectly.
In the examination of the functionalist account of the self-reference as a possible strategy, although it is not ultimately successful, attention to the functionalist account reveal the correct approach for solving the paradox of self-consciousness. The successful response to the paradox of seif
consciousness must reject the classical view of contents. The thought that, despite all this, there are first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been provided by Hugh Mellor (1988-1989). As, the basic phenomenon in the explaining to, is what it is for a creature to have what is termed as a subjective belief, that is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. The explanation of subjective beliefs that offers to makes such beliefs independent of both linguistic abilities and conscious beliefs. From this basic account of construing an account of conscious subjective beliefs and then of the reference of the first-person pronoun ‘I.’ These putatively more sophisticated cognitive states are causally derivable from basic subjective beliefs.
Another phenomenon where we may find something like a split without diminished or destroyed unity is hemi-neglect, the strange phenomenon of losing all sense of one side of one's body or sometimes a part of one side of the body. Whatever it is exactly that is going on in hemi-neglect, unified consciousness remains. It is just that its ‘range’ has been bizarrely circumscribed. It ranges over only half the body (in the most common situation), not seamlessly over the whole body. Where we expect proprioception and perception of the whole body, in these patients they are of (usually) only one-half of the body.
A third candidate phenomenon is what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder, now, more neutrally, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), everything about this phenomenon is controversial, including whether there is any real multiplicity of consciousness at all, but one common way of describing what is going on in at least some central cases is to say that the units if whether we call them persons, personalities, sides of a single personality, or whatever, ‘take turns’, usually with pronounced changes in personality. When one is active, the other(s) is usually(are) not. If this is an accurate description, then here to we have a breach in unity of some kind in which unity is nevertheless not destroyed. Notice that whereas in brain bisection cases the breach, whatever it is like, is synchronic (at a time), here it is diachronic (across time), different unified ‘package’ of consciousness taking turns. The breach consists primarily in some pattern of reciprocal (or sometimes one way) amnesia - some pattern of each ‘package’ not remembering having the experiences or doing the things had or done when another ‘package’ was in charge.
By contrast to brain bisection and ‘did’ cases, there are phenomena in which unified consciousness does not seem to split and does seem to be damaged or even destroyed together. In brain bisection and dissociative identity cases, the most that is happening is that unified consciousness is splitting into two or more proportionally intact units - two or more at a time or two or more across time. It is a matter of controversy whether even that is happening, especially in DID cases, but we clearly do not have more than that. In particular, the unity itself does not disappear, although it may split, but we could say, it does not shatter. There are at least three kinds of case in which unity does appear to shatter.
One is some particularly severe form of schizophrenia. Here the victim seems to lose the ability to form an integrated, interrelated representation of his or her world and his or her self together. The person speaks in ‘word salads’ that never get anywhere, indeed sometimes never become complete sentences. The person is unable to put together integrated plans of actions even at the level necessary to obtain sustenance, tend to bodily needs, or escape painful irritants. So on, here, saying that unity of consciousness has shattered seems correct than split. The behaviour of these people seems to express no more than what we might call experience-fragmentation, each lasting a tiny length of time and unconnected to any others. In particular, except for the (usually semantically irrelevant) associations that lead these people from each entry to the next in the word salads they create, to be aware of one of these states is not to be aware of any others - or so to an evidentiary proposition.
In schizophrenia of this sort, the shattering of unified consciousness is part of a general breakdown or deformation of mental functioning: pertain to, desire, belief, even memory all suffer massive distortions. In another kind of case, the normal unity of consciousness seems to be just as absent but there does not seem to be general disturbance of the mind. This is what some researchers call dysexecutive syndrome. What characterizes the breakdown in the unity of consciousness here is that subjects are unable to consider two things together, even things that are directly related to one another. For example, such people cannot figure out whether a piece of a puzzle fits into a certain place even when the piece and the puzzle are both clearly visibly and the piece obviously fits. They cannot crack an egg into a pan. So on.
A disorder presenting similar symptoms is simultagnosia or Balint's syndrome (Balint was an earlier 20th century German neurologist). In this disorder, which is fortunately rare, patients see only one object located at one ‘place’ in the visual field at a time. Outside of a few ‘degrees of arc’ in the visual field, these patients say they see nothing and seem to be receiving no information (Hardcastle, in progress). In both dysexecutive disorder and simultagnosia (if we have two different phenomena here), subjects seem not to be aware of even two items in a single conscious state.
We can pin down what is missing in each case a bit more precisely. Recall the distinction between being conscious of individual objects and having unified consciousness of a number of objects at the same time introduced at the beginning of this article. Broadly speaking, we can think of the two phenomena isolated by this distinction as two stages. First, the mind ties together various sensory information into representations of objects. In contemporary cognitive research, this activity has come to be called binding (Hardcastle 1998 is a good review). Then, the mind ties these represented objects together to achieve unified consciousness of a number of them at the same time. (The first theorist to separate these two stages was Kant, in his doctrine of synthesis.) The first stage continues to be available to dysexecutive and simultagnosia patients: They continue to be aware of individual objects, events, etc. The damage seems to be to the second stage: it is the tying of objects together in consciousness that is impaired or missing altogether. The distinction can be made this way: These people can achieve some (z), unity of focus with respect to individual objects, but little or no unified consciousness of any of the three kinds over a number of objects.
The same distinction can also help make clear what is going on in the severe forms of schizophrenia just discussed. Like dysexecutive syndrome and simultagnosia patients, severe schizophrenics lack the ability to tie represented objects together, but they also seem to lack the ability to form unified representations of individual objects. In a different jargon, these people seem to lack even the capacity for object constancy. Thus their cognitive impairment is much more severe than that experienced by dysexecutive syndrome and simultagnosia patients.
With the exception of brain bisection patients, who do not evidence distortion of consciousness outside of specially contrived laboratory situations, the split or breach occurs naturally in all the patients just discussed. Indeed, they are a central class of the so-called ‘experiments of nature’ that are the subject-matter of contemporary neuropsychology. Since all the patients in whom these problems occur naturally are severely disadvantaged by their situation, this is further evidence that the ability to unify the contents of consciousness is central to proper cognitive functioning.
Is there anything common to the six situations of breakdowns in unified consciousness just sketched? How do they relate to (x), (Y) or (z)?
In brain bisection cases, the key evidence for a duality of some kind is that there are situations in which whatever is aware of some items being represented in the body in question is not aware of other items being represented in that same body at the same time. We looked at two examples of the phenomenon connection with the word Taxable, and the doing of arithmetic. With respect to these represented items, there is a significant and systematically extendable situation in which to be aware of some of these items is not to be aware of others of them. This seems to be what motivates the judgment in us that these patients’ evidence a split in unified consciousness. If so, brain bisection cases are a straightforward case of a failure to meet the conditions for (x). However, they are more than that. Because the ‘centres of consciousness’ created in the lab do not communicate with one another except in the way that any mind can communicate with any other mind, there is also a breakdown in (Y). One subject of experience aware of itself as the single common subject of its experience seems to become two (in some measure at least).
In ‘did’ cases, and a central feature of the case is some pattern of amnesia. Again, this is a situation in which being conscious of some represented objects goes with not being conscious of others in a systematic way. The main difference is that the breach is at a time in brain bisection cases, across time in ‘did’ cases. So again the breakdown in unity consists in a failure to meet the conditions for (x). However, ‘did’ cases for being diachronic, there is also a breakdown in (Y) across time - though there is continuity across time within each personality, there seems to be little or no continuity, conscious continuity at any rate, from one to another.
The same pattern is evident in the cases of severe schizophrenia, dysexecutive disorder and simultagnosia that we considered. In all three cases, consciousness of some items goes with lack of consciousness of others. In these cases, to be aware of a given item is precisely not to be aware of other relevant items. However, in the severe schizophrenia cases we considered, there is also a failure to meet the conditions of (z).
Hemi-neglect is a bit different. Here we do not have in company of two or more ‘packages’ of consciousness and we do not have individual conscious states that are not unified with other conscious states. Not, as far as we know - for there to be conscious states not unified with the states on which the patient can report, there would have to be consciousness of what is going on in the side neglected by the subject with whom we can communicate and there is no evidence for this. Here none of the conditions for (x), (y) or (z) fail to be met - but that may be because hemi-neglect is not a split or a breakdown in unified consciousness in the first place. It may be simply a shrinking of the range of phenomena over which otherwise intact unified consciousness amplifies.
It is interesting that none of the breakdown cases we have considered evidence damage to or destruction of the unity in (y). We have seen cases in which unified consciousness it might split at a time (brain bisection cases) or over time (did cases) but not cases in which the unity itself is significantly damaged or destroyed. Nor is our sample unrepresentative; the cases we have considered are the most widely discussed cases in the literature. There do not seem to be many cases in which saying that is plausible (y), awareness of oneself as a single common subject, has been damaged or destroyed.
After a long hiatus, serious work on the unity of consciousness began in recent philosophy with two books on Kant, P. F. Strawson (1966) and Jonathan Bennett (1966). Both of them had an influence far beyond the bounds of Kant scholarship. Central to these works is an exploration of the relationship between unified consciousness, especially unified consciousness of self, and our ability to form an integrated, coherent representation of the world, a linkage that the authors took to be central to Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories. Whatever the merits of the claim for a sceptical judgment, their work set off a long line of writings on the supposed link. Quite recently the approach prompted a debate about unity and objectivity among Michael Lockwood, Susan Hurley and Anthony Marcel in Peacocke (1994).
Another point in fact, are the issues that led philosophers back within the unity of consciousness, is, perhaps, the next historicity, for which had the neuropsychological results of brain bisection operations, only that we can explore at an earlier time. Starting with Thomas Nagel (1971) and continuing in the work of Charles Marks (1981), Derek Parfit (1971 and 1984), Lockwood (1989), Hurley (1998) and many others, these operations have been a major themes in work on the unity of consciousness since the 1970s. Much ink has been spilled on the question of what exactly is going on in the phenomenology of brain bisection patients. Nagel goes insofar as to claim that there is no whole number of ‘centres of consciousness’ in these patients: There is too much unity to say ‘two,’ yet too much splitting to say ‘one.’
Some recent work by Jocelyne Sergent (1990) might seem to support this conclusion. She found, for example, that when a sign ‘6’ was sent to one hemisphere of the brain in these subjects and a sign ‘7’ was sent to the other in such a way that a crossover of information from one hemisphere to the other was extremely unlikely, they could say that the six is a smaller number than the seven but could not say whether the signs were the same or different. It is not certain that Sergent's work does support Nagel's conclusions. First, Sergent's claims are controversial - not, but all researchers have been able to replicate them. Second, even if the data are good, the interpretation of them is far from straightforward. In particular, they seem to be consistent with there being a clear answer to any precise ‘one or two?’ Question that we could ask. (’Unified consciousness of the two signs with respect to numerical size?’ Yes. ‘Unified consciousness of the visible structure of the signs?’ No). If so, the fact that there is obviously mixed evidence, some pointing to the conclusion ‘one’, some pointing to the conclusion ‘two’, supports the view expressed by Nagel that there may be no whole number of subjects that these patients are.
Much of the work since Nagel has focussed on the same issue of the kind of split that the laboratory manipulation of brain bisection patients induces. Some attention has also been paid to the implications of these splits. For example, could one hemisphere commit a crime in such a way that the other could not justifiably be held responsible for it? Or, if such splitting occurred regularly and was regularly followed by merging with ‘halves’ from other splits, what would the implications are for our traditional notion of what philosophers call ‘personal identity’, namely, being or remaining one and the same thing. (Here we are talking about identity in the philosopher's sense of being or remaining one things, not in the sense of the term that psychologists use when they talk of such things as ‘identity crises’.)
Parfit has made perhaps the largest contributions to the issue of the implications of brain bisection cases for personal identity. Phenomena relevant to identity in things others than persons can be a matter of degree. This is well illustrated by the famous ship of Theseus examples. Suppose that over the years, a certain ship in Theseus was rebuilt, boards by board, until every single board in it has been replaced. Is the ship at the end of the process the ship that started the process or not? Now suppose that we take all those rotten, replaced boards and reassemble them into a ship? Is this ship the original ship of Theseus or not? Many philosophers have been certain that such questions cannot arise for persons; identity in persons is completely clear and unambiguous, not something that could be a matter of degree as related phenomena obviously can be with other objects is a well-known example. As Parfit argues, the possibility of persons (or at any rate minds) splitting and fusing puts real pressure on such intuitions about our specialness; perhaps the continuity of persons can be as partial and tangled as the continuity of other middle-sized objects.
Lockwood's exploration of brain bisections cases go off in a different direction, two different directions in fact (we will examine the second below). Like Nagel, Marks, and Parfit, Lockwood has written on the extent to which what he calls ‘co-consciousness’ can split. (’Co-consciousness’ is the term that many philosophers now use for the unity of consciousness; Roughly, two conscious states are said to be co-conscious when they are related to another as finding conscious states are related of yet to another in unified consciousness.) He also explores the possibility of psychological states that are not determinately in any of the available ‘centres of consciousness’ and the implications of this possibility for the idea of the specious present, the idea that we are directly and immediately aware of a certain tiny spread of time, not just the current infinitesimal moment of time. He concludes that the determinateness of psychological states being in an available ‘centre of consciousness’ and the notion that psychological states spread over at least a small amount of time in the specious might present stand or fall together.
Some philosopher’s interests in pathologies of unified consciousness examine more than brain bisection cases. In what is perhaps the most complex work on the unity of consciousness to date, Hurley examines most of the kinds of breakdown phenomena that we introduced earlier. She starts with an intuitive notion of co-consciousness that she does not formally define. She then explores the implications of a wide range of ‘experiments of nature’ and laboratory experiments for the presence or absence of co-consciousness across the psychological states of a person. For example, she considers acallosal patients (people born without a corpus callosum). When present, the corpus callosum is the chief channel of communication between the hemispheres. When it is cut, generating what looks like a possibility that two centres of consciousness, two internally co-conscious systems that are not co-consciousness with one another. Hurley argues that in patients in whom it never existed, things are not so clear. Even though the channels of communication in these patients are often in part external (behavioural cuing activity, etc.), the result may still be a single co-conscious system. That is to say, the neurological and behavioural basis of unified consciousness may be very different in different people.
Hurley also considers research by Trewarthen in which a patient is conscious of some object seen by, say, the right hemisphere until her left hand, which is controlled by the right hemisphere, reaches for it. Somehow the act of reaching for it seems to obliterate the consciousness of it. Very strange - how can something pop into and disappear from unified consciousness in this way? This leads her to consider the notion of partial unity. Could two centres of consciousness be as integrated in ‘A’, only to find of its relation to ‘B’, though not co-conscious with one another, nonetheless these of them is co-conscious with some third thing, e.g., the volitional system B (the system of intentions, desires, etc.?). If so, ‘co-conscious’ is not a transitive relationship - ‘A’ is co-conscious with ‘B’ and ‘C’ could be co-conscious with B without A being co-conscious with ‘C’. This is puzzling enough. Even more puzzling would be the question of how activation of the system ‘B’ with which both ‘A’ and ‘C’ are co-conscious could result in either ‘A’ or ‘C’ ceasing to be conscious of an object aimed at by ‘B’.
Hurleys’ response to Trewarthen's cases (and Sergent's cases that we examined in the previous section) is to accept that intention can obliterate consciousness and then distinguish times. At any given time in Trewarthen's cases, the situation with respect to unity is clear. That the picture does not conform to our usual expectations for diachronic singularity or transitivity then becomes simply an artefact of the cases, not a problem. It is not made clear how this reconciles Sergent's evidence with unity. One strategy would be that the one we considered earlier was of making questions in incomparably precise comprehension. For precise questions, there seems to be a coherent answer about unity for every phenomenon Sergent describes.
Hurleys’ consideration of what she calls Marcel's case. Here subjects are asked to report the appearance of some item in consciousness in three ways at the same time - say, by blinking, pushing a button, and saying, ‘I see it’. Remarkably, any of these acts can be done without the other two. The question is, What does this allude to unified consciousness? In a case in which the subject pushes the button but neither blinks nor says anything, for example, is the hand-controller aware of the object while the blink-controller and the speech-controller are not? How could the conscious system become fragmented in such a way?
Hurleys’ stipulation is that they cannot. What induces the appearance of incoherence about unity is the short time scale. Suppose that it takes some time to achieve unified consciousness, perhaps because some complex reaction’s processes are involved. If that were the case, then we do not have a stable unity situation in Marcel's case. The subjects are not given enough time to achieve unified consciousness of any kind.
There is a great deal more to Hurley's work. She urges, for example, that theirs a normative dimension to unified consciousness - conscious states have to cohere for unified consciousness to result. Systems in the brain have to achieve her calls ‘dynamic singularity’ - being a single system - for unified consciousness to result.
A third issue that got philosophers working on the unity of consciousness again is binding. Here the connection is more distant because binding as usually understood is not unified consciousness as we have been discussing it. Recall the two stages of cognition laid out earlier. First, the mind ties together various sensory information into representations of objects. Then the mind ties these represented objects to one other to achieve unified consciousness of a number of them at the same time. It is the first stage that is usually called binding. The representations that result at this stage need not be conscious in any of the ways delineating earlier - many perfectly good representations affect behaviour and even enter memory without ever becoming conscious. Representations resulting from the second stage need not be conscious, either, but when they are, we have at least some of the kinds of unified consciousness delineated.
In the past few decades, philosophers have also worked on how unified consciousness relates to the brain. Lockwood, for example, thinks that relating consciousness to matter will involve more issues on the side of matter than most philosophers think. (We mentioned that his work goes off in two new directions. This is the second one.) Quantum mechanics teach us that the way in which observation links to physical reality is a subtle and complex matter. Lockwood urges that our conceptions will have to be adjusted on the side of matter as much as on the side of mind if we are to understand consciousness as a physical phenomenon and physical phenomena as open to conscious observation. If it is the case not only that our understanding of consciousness is affected by how we think it might be implemented in matter but also that process of matter is affected by our (conscious) observation of them, then our picture of consciousness stands as ready to affect our picture of matter as vice-versa.
The Churchlands, Paul M. and Patricia S. and Daniel Dennett (1991) has radical views of the underlying architecture of unified consciousness. The Churchlands see unity itself much as other philosophers do. They do argue that the term ‘consciousness’ covers a range of different phenomena that need to be distinguished from another but the important point that presents to some attending characteristic is that they urge that the architecture of the underlying processes probably consist not of transformations of symbolically encoded objects of representations, as most philosophers have believed, but of vector transformations in what are called phase spaces. Dennett articulates an even more radical view, encompassing both unity and underlying architecture. For him, unified consciousness is simply a temporary ‘virtual captain’, a small group of related information-parcels that happens to gain temporary dominance in a struggle for control of such cognitive activities as self-monitoring and self-reporting in the vast array of microcircuits of the brain. We take these transient phenomena to be more than they are because each of them holds to some immediacy of ‘me’, particularly of the moment; The temporary coalition of conscious states winning at the moment is what I am, is the self. Radical implementation, narrowed range and transitoriness notwithstanding, when unified consciousness is achieved, these philosophers tend to see it in the way we have presented it.
Dennett's and the Churchlands' views fit naturally with a dynamic systems view of the underlying neural implementation. The dynamic systems view is the view that unified consciousness is a result of certain self-organizing activities in the brain. Dennett thinks that given the nature of the brain, a vast assembly of neurons receiving electrochemical signals from other neurons and passing such signals to yet other neurons, cognition could not take any form other than something like a pandemonium of competing bits of content, the ones that win the competitions being the ones that are conscious. The Churchlands nonexistence tends to agree with Dennett about this. They see consciousness as a state of the brain, the ‘wet-ware’, not a result of information processing, of ‘software’. They also advocate a different picture of the underlying neurological process. As we said, they think that transformations of complex vectors in a multi-dimensional phase space are the crucial processes, not competition among bits of content. However, they agree that it is very unlikely that the processes that subserve unified consciousness are sentence-like or language-like at all. It is too early to say whether these radically novel pictures of what the system that implements unified consciousness is like will hold any important implications for what unified consciousness is or when it is present.
Hurley is also interested in the relationship of unified consciousness to brain physiology. Saying it of her that she resists certain standard ways of linking them would be truer, however, than to say that she herself links them. In particular, while she clearly thinks that physiological phenomena have all sorts of implications and give rise to all sorts of questions about the unity of consciousness, she strongly resists any simplistic patterns of connection. Many researchers have been attracted by some variant of what she calls the isomorphism hypothesis. This is the idea that changes in consciousness will parallel changes in brain structure or function. She wants to insist, to the contrary, that often two instances of the same change in consciousness will go with very different changes in the brain. We saw an example in the last section. In most of us, unified consciousness is closely linked to an intact, functioning corpus callosum. However, in acallosal people, there may be the same unity but achieved by mechanisms such as cuing activity external to the body that are utterly different from communication though a corpus callosum. Going the opposite way, different changes in consciousness can go with the same changes to structure and function in the brain.
Two philosophers have gone off in directions different from any of the above, Stephen White (1991) and Christopher Hill (1991). White's main interest is not the unity of consciousness as such but what one might call the unified locus of responsibility - what it is that ties something together to make it a single agent of actions, i.e., something to which attributions of responsibility can appropriately be made. He argues that unity of consciousness is one of the things that go into becoming unified as such an agent but not the only thing. Focussed coherent plans, a continuing single conception of the good, with reason of a good autobiographical memory, certain future states of persons mattering to us in a special way (mattering to us because we take them to be future states of ourselves, one would say if it were not blatantly circular), a certain continuing kind and degree of rationality, certain social norms and practices, and so forth. In his picture of moral responsibility, unbroken unity of consciousness at and over time is only a small part of the story.
Hills’ fundamental claim is that a number of different relationships between psychological states have a claim to be considered unity relationships, including: Being owned by the same subject, being [phenomenally] next to (and other relationships that state in the field of consciousness appear to have to one another), as both embrace the singularity of objects contained of other conscious states, and jointly having the appropriate sorts of effects (functions). An interesting question, one that Hill does not consider, is whether all these relations are what interests us when we talk about the unity of consciousness or only some of them (and if only some of them, which ones). Hill also examines scepticism about the idea that clearly bounded individual conscious states exist. Since we have been assuming throughout that such states do exist, it is perhaps fortunate that Hill argues that we could safely do so.
In some circles, the idea that consciousness has a special kind of unity has fallen into disfavour. Nagel (1971), Donald Davidson (1982), and Dennett (1991) have all urged that the mind's unity has been greatly overstated in the history of philosophy. The mind, they say, works mostly out of the sight and the control of consciousness. Moreover, even states and acts of ours that are conscious can fail to cohere. We act against what we know perfectly well to be our own most desired courses of action, for example, or do things while telling ourselves that we must avoid doing them. There is an approach to the small incoherencies of everyday life that does not requires us to question whether consciousness is unified in this way, the Freudian approach (e.g., Freud 1916/17). This approach accepts that the unity of consciousness exists much as it presents itself but argues that the range of material over which it extends is much smaller than philosophers once thought. This latter approach has some appeal. If something is out of sight and/or control, it is out of the sight or control of what? The answer would seem to be, the unified conscious mind. If so, the only necessary difference among the pre-twentieth century visions of unified consciousness as ranging over everything in the mind and our current vision of unified consciousness is that the range of psychological phenomena over which unified consciousness ranges has shrunk.
A final historical note. At the beginning of the 21st century, work on the unity of consciousness continues apace. For example, a major conference was recently devoted to the unity of consciousness, the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness Conference assembled inside Brussels in 2000, and the Encyclopaedias of philosophy (such as this one) and of cognitive science are commissioning articles on the topic. Psychologists are taking up the issue. Bernard Baars (1988, 1997) notion of the global workspace is an example. Another example is work on the role of unified consciousness in precise control of attention. However, the topic is not yet at the centre of consciousness studies. One illustration of this is that it can still be missing entirely in anthologies of current work on consciousness.
With a different issue, philosophers used to think that the unity of consciousness has huge implications for the nature of the mind, indeed entails that the mind could not be made out of matter. We also saw that the prospects for this inference are not good. What about the nature of consciousness? Does the unity of consciousness have any implications for this issue?
There are currently at least three major camps on the nature of consciousness. One camp sees the ‘felt quality’ of representations as something unique, in particular as quite different from the power of representations to change other representations and shape belief and action. On this picture, representations could function much as they do without it being like anything to have them. They would merely not be conscious. If so, consciousness may not play any important cognitive role at all, its unity included (Jackson 1986; Chalmers 1996). A second camp holds, to the contrary, that consciousness is simply a special kind of representation (Rosenthal 1991, Dretske 1995, and Tye 1995). A third hold that what we label ‘consciousness’ are really something else. On this view, consciousness will in the end be ‘analysed away’ - the term is too coarse-grained and presents things in too unquantifiable a way to have any use in a mature science of the mind.
The unity of consciousness obviously has strong implications for the truth or falsity of any of these views. If it is as central and undeniable as many have suggested, its existence may cut against the eliminativist position. With respect to the other positions, in that the unity of consciousness seems neutral.
Whatever its implications for other issues, the unity of consciousness seems to be a real feature of the human mind, indeed central to it. If so, any complete picture of the mind will have to provide an account of it. Even those who hold that the extent to which consciousness is unified has been overrated owing us and account of what has been overrated.
To say one has an experience that is conscious (in the phenomenal sense) is to say, that one is in a state of its seeming to one some way. In another formulation, to say experience is conscious is to say that there is something that stands alone, like for only one to have. Feeling pain and sensing colours are common illustrations of phenomenally conscious states. Consciousness has also been taken to consist in the monitoring of one's own state of mind (e.g., by forming thoughts about them, or by somehow ‘sensing’ them), or else in the accessibility of information to one's capacity for rational control or self-report. Intentionality has to do with the directedness or aboutness of mental states - the fact that, for example, one's thinking is of or about something. Intentionality includes, and is sometimes taken to be equivalent to, what is called ‘mental representation.’
It can seem that consciousness and intentionality pervade mental life -perhaps, but one or both somehow constitute what it is to have a mind. But achieving an articulate general understanding of either consciousness or intentionality presents, an enormous challenge, part of which lies in figuring out how the two are related. Is one in some sense derived from or dependent on the other? Or are they perhaps quite independent and separate aspects of mind?
One frequent understanding among philosophers, that consciousness is a certain feature shared by sense-experience and imagery, perhaps belonging also to a broad range of other mental phenomena (e.g., episodic thought, memory, and emotion). It is the feature that consists in its seeming some way to one to have experiences. To put it another way: Conscious states are states of its seeming somehow to a subject.
For example, it seems to you some way to see red, and seems to you in another way, to hear a crash, to visualize a triangle, and to suffer pain. The sense of ‘seems’ relevant here may be brought out by noting that, in the last example, we might just as well speak of the way it feels to be in pain. And - some may say - in the same sense, it seems to you some way to think through the answer to a math problem, or to recall where you parked the car, or to feel anger, shame, or elation. (However, that it is not simply to be assumed that saying it seems some way to you to have an experience is equivalent to saying that the experience itself seems or appears some way to you - that it, is - an object of appearance. The point is just that the way something sounds to you, the way something looks to you, etc., all constitute ‘ways of seeming.’) States that are conscious in this sense are said to have some phenomenal character or other - their phenomenal character being the specific way it seems to one to have a given experience. Sometimes this is called the ‘qualitative’ or ‘subjective’ character of experience.
Another oft-used means for trying to get at the relevant notion of consciousness, preferable to some, is to say that there is, in a certain sense, always ‘something it is like’ to be in a given conscious state - something it has, in the like for one who is in that state. Relating the two locutions, we might say: There is something it is like for you to see red, to feel pain, etc., and the way it seems to you to have one of these experiences is what it is like for you to have it. The phenomenal character of an experience then, is what someone would inquire about by asking, e.g., ‘What is it like to experience orgasm?’ - and it is what we speak of when we say that we know what that is like, even if we cannot convey this to one who does not know. And, if we want to speak of persons, or other creatures (as distinct from their states) being conscious, we will say that they are conscious just if there is something it is like for them to be the creature they are - for example, something it is like to be a nocturnal creature as inferred too as a bat.
The examples of conscious states given comprise a various lot. But some sense of their putative unity as instances of consciousness might be gained by contrasting them with what we are inclined to exclude, or can at least conceive of excluding, from their company. Much of what goes on, but we would ordinarily believe is not (or at any rate, we may suppose is not) conscious in the sense at issue. The leaf's fall from a tree branch, we may suppose, is not a conscious state of the leaf - a state of its seeming somehow to the leaf. Nor, for that matter, is a person falling off a branch held of a conscious state - is rather the feeling of falling the sort of consciousness, if anything is. Dreaming of falling would also be a conscious experience in this sense. But, while we can in some way be said to sense the position of our limbs even while dreamlessly asleep, we may still suppose that this proprioception (though perhaps in some sense a mental or cognitive affair) is not conscious - we may suppose that it does not then seem (or feel) any way to us sleepers to sense our limbs, as ordinarily it does when we are awake.
The way of seeming’ or ‘what it is like’ conception of consciousness I have just invoked is sometimes marked by the term ‘phenomenal consciousness.’ But this qualifier ‘phenomenal’ suggests that there are other kinds of consciousness (or perhaps, other senses of ‘consciousness’). Indeed there are, at least, other ways of introducing notions of consciousness. And these may appear to pick out features or senses altogether distinct from that just presented. For example, it is said that some (but not all) that goes on in the mind is ‘accessible to consciousness.’ Of course this by itself does not so much specifies a sense of ‘conscious’ as put one in use. (One will want to ask: And just what is this ‘consciousness’ that has ‘access’ to some mental goings-on but not others, and what could ‘access’ efforts that mean in of having it anyway? However, some have evidently thought that, rather than speak of consciousness as what has access, we should understand consciousness as itself a certain kind of susceptibility to access. For example, Daniel Dennett (1969) once theorized that one's conscious states are just those whose contents are available to one's direct verbal report - or, at least, to the ‘speech centre’ responsible for generating such reports. And Ned Form (1995) has proposed that, on one understanding of ‘conscious,’ (to be found at work in many ‘cognitive’ theories of consciousness) a conscious state is just a ‘representation poised for free use in reasoning and other direct ‘rational’ control of action and speech.’ Form labels consciousness in this sense ‘excess consciousness.’
Forms’ would insist that we should distinguish phenomenal consciousness from ‘excess consciousness’, and he argues that a mental representation's being poised for use in reasoning and rational control of action is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the state's being phenomenally conscious. Similarly he distinguishes phenomenal consciousness from what he calls ‘reflexive consciousness’ - where this has to do with one's capacity to represent one's mind's to oneself - to have, for example, thoughts about one's own thoughts, feelings, or desires. Such a conception of consciousness finds some support in a tendency to say that conscious states of mind are those one is ‘conscious of’ or ‘aware of’ being in, and to interpret this ‘of’ to indicate some kind of reflexivity is involved - wherein one represents one's own mental representations. On one prominent variant of this conception, consciousness is taken to be a kind of scanning or perceiving of one's own psychological states or processes - an ‘inner sense.’
Forming a threefold division of our phenomenon, whereby its access, and reflexive consciousness need not be taken to reflect clear and coherent distinctions already contained in our pre-theoretical use of the term ‘conscious.’ Form seems to think that (on the contrary) our initial, ordinary use of ‘conscious’ is too confused even to count as ambiguous. Thus in articulating an interpretation, or set of interpretations, of the term adequate to frame theoretical issues, we cannot simply describe how it is currently employed - we must assign it a more definite and coherent meaning than extant in common usage.
Whether or not this is correct, getting a solid ground here is not easy, and a number of theorists of consciousness would balk at proceeding on the basis of Form's proposed threefold distinction. Sometimes the difficulty may be merely terminological. John Searle, for example, would recognize phenomenal consciousness, but deny Form's other two candidates are proper senses of ‘conscious’ at all. The reality of some sort of access and reflexivity is apparently not at issue - just whether either captures a sense of ‘conscious’ (perhaps confusedly) woven into our use of the term. However, in contrast to both Form and Searle, there are also those who raise doubt that there is a properly phenomenal sense we can apply, distinct from both of the other two, for us to pick out with any term. This is not just a dispute about words, but about what there is for us to talk about with them.
The substantive issues here are very much bound up with differences over the proper way to conceive of the relationship between consciousness and intentionality. If there are distinct senses in which states of mind could be correctly said to be ‘conscious’ (answering perhaps to something like Form's three-fold distinction), then there will be distinct questions we can pose about the relation between consciousness and intentionality. But if one of Form's alleged senses is somehow fatally confused, or if he is wrong to distinguish it from the others, or if it is the sense of no term we can with warrant apply to ourselves or our states, then there will be no separate question in which it figures we should try to answer. Thus, trying to work out a reasoned view about what we are (or should be) talking about when we talk about consciousness is an unavoidable and non-trivial part of trying to understand the relation between consciousness and intentionality.
To clarify further the disputes about consciousness and their links to questions about its relation to intentionality, we need to get an initial grasp of the relevant way the terms ‘intentionality’ and ‘intentional’ are used in philosophy of mind.
Previously, some indication of why it is difficult to get a theory of consciousness started. While the term ‘conscious’ is not esoteric, its use is not easily characterized or rendered consistent in a manner providing some uncontentious framework for theoretical discussion. Where the term ‘intentional’ is concerned, we also face initially confusing and contentious usage. But here the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the relevant use of cognate terms is simply not that found in common speech (as when we speak of doing something ‘intentionally’). Though ‘intentionality,’ in the sense here at issue, does seem to attach to some real and fundamental (maybe even defining) aspect of mental phenomena, the relevant use of the term is tangled up with some rather involved philosophical history.
One way of explaining what is meant by ‘intentionality’ in the (more obscure) philosophical sense is this: it is that aspect of mental states or events that consists in their being of or about things, as pertains to the questions, ‘What are you thinking of?’ And, what are you thinking about?’ Intentionality is the aboutness or directedness of mind (or states of mind) to things, objects, states of affairs, events. So if you are thinking about San Francisco, or about the increased cost of living there, or about your meeting someone there at Union Square - your mind, your thinking, is directed toward San Francisco, or the increased cost of living, or the meeting in Union Square. To think at all is to think of or about something in this sense. This ‘directedness’ conception of intentionality plays a prominent role in the influential philosophical writings of Franz Brentano and those whose views developed in response to his.
But what kind of ‘aboutness’ or ‘of-ness’ or ‘directedness’ is this, and to what sorts of things does it apply? How do the relevant ‘intentionality-marking’ senses of these words (‘about,’ ‘of,’ ‘directed’) differ from? : the sense in which the cat is wandering ‘about’ the room; the sense in which someone is a person ‘of’ high integrity; the sense in which the river's course is ‘directed’ toward the fields?
It has been said that the peculiarity of this kind of directedness/aboutness/of-ness lies in its capacity to relate thought or experience to objects that (unlike San Francisco) do not exist. One can think about a meeting that has not, or will never occur; One can think of Shangri La, or El Dorado, or the New Jerusalem, as one may think of their shining streets, of their total lack of poverty, or their citizens' peculiar garb. Thoughts, unlike roads, can lead to a city that is not there.
But to talk in this way only invites new perplexities. Is this to say (with apparent incoherence) that there are cities that do not exist? And what does it mean to say that, when a state of mind is in fact directed toward’ something that does exist, that state nevertheless could be directed toward something that does not exist? It can well seem to be something very fundamental to the nature of mind that our thoughts, or states of mind more generally, can be of or about things or ‘point beyond themselves.’ But a coherent and satisfactory theoretical grasp of this phenomenon of ‘mental pointing’ in all its generality is difficult to achieve.
Another way of trying to get a grip on the topic asks us to note that the potential for a mental directedness toward the non-existent be evidently closely associated with the mind's potential for falsehood, error, inaccuracy, illusion, hallucination, and dissatisfaction. What makes it possible to believe (or even just suppose) something about Shangri La is that one can falsely believe (or suppose) that something exists? In the case of perception, what makes it possible to seem to see or hear what is not there is that one's experience may in various ways be inaccurate, non-existent, subject to illusion, or hallucinatory. And, what makes it possible for one's desires and intentions to be directed toward what does not and will never exist is that one’s desire and intentions can be unfulfilled or unsatisfied. This suggests another strategy for getting a theoretical hold on intentionality, employing a notion of satisfaction, stretched to encompass susceptibility to each of these modes of assessment, each of these ways in which something can either go right, or go wrong (true/false, veridical/nonveridical, fulfilled/unfulfilled), and speak of intentionality in terms of having ‘conditions of satisfaction.’ On John Searle's (1983) conception, intentional states are those having conditions of satisfaction. What are conditions of satisfaction? In the case of belief, these are the conditions under which the belief is true; Even so, the instance of perception, they are the conditions under which sense-experience is veridical: In the case of intention, the conditions under which an intention is fulfilled or carried out.
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