Propositional attitudes have an attitude type (belief, desire, etc.), and a content. A popular idea in the literature on intentionality is that attitude type is determined by functional role and content in some other way. One can find this view, for example, in Fodor (1987, 17), Dretske (1995, 83), or Loewer (2017, 716). I don't see how it could be correct.
I've decided to write somewhat regular short pieces on interesting papers I've recently read. This one is about Smithies, Lennon, and Samuels (2022).
Smithies, Lennon, and Samuels (henceforth, SLS) criticise the view that there are a priori connections between having a belief with a certain content and other states that would be rational given this belief. A simple example of the target view says that believing P is being disposed to act in a way that would bring one closer to satisfying one's desires if P were true. A more complicated example of the target view, on which SLS focus, is Lewis's. According to Lewis, for a mental state to be a belief state with such-and-such content, the state must, under normal conditions, be connected in a certain way to behaviour, perceptual experiences, and other propositional attitudes. SLS deny this.
Let's assume that propositional attitudes are not metaphysically fundamental: if someone has such-and-such beliefs and desires, that is always due to other, more basic, and ultimately non-intentional facts. In terms of supervenience: once all non-intentional facts are settled, all intentional facts are settled as well.
Then how are propositional attitudes grounded in non-intentional facts? A promising approach is to identify a characteristic "functional role" of propositional attitudes and then explain facts about propositional attitudes in terms of facts about the realization of that role. (We could also identify the attitude with the realizer, or with the higher-order property of heaving a realizer, but that's optional.)
Earlier this year, I read Tyler Burge's Origins of Objectivity. It's a very long book. Here is an abridged version. A few comments below.
Origins of Objectivity
Representation is a basic explanatory kind in psychology that should be distinguished from mere information-carrying. The most fundamental type of representational state is perception. In perception, an organism attributes properties to objects in its environment. To do this, the organism does not need linguistic capacities, nor does it need to know (or otherwise represent) necessary and sufficient conditions for being the relevant object. Instead, the science of perception reveals that it is sufficient that the organism stands in a suitable causal relation to the object and that its perceptual state involves certain constancies (for shape or colour or distance or whatever) which characterize the object "objectively", abstracting away from contingencies of the present stimulus.
I like the starting point — to think of intentional states as explanatory scientific kinds. Burge doesn't say what exactly he means by this. I would put it as a kind of functionalism: intentional states are characterized (at least in part) by their functional inter-connections and their relationship to environmental causes, behaviour and other psychologically relevant facts.
To what extent are the beliefs and desires of rational agents determined by their actual and counterfactual choices? More precisely, suppose we are given a preference order that obtains between a possible act A and a possible act B iff the relevant agent is disposed to choose A over B. Say that a pair (C,V) of a credence function C and a utility (desirability) function V fits the preference order iff, whenever A is preferred over B, then A has higher expected utility than B by the lights of (C,V). Now, to what extent does a rational preference order constrain fitting credence-utility pairs?
Stalnaker holds a combination of views that seem independent to me, but closely connected to him. One is a kind of reductive naturalism about intentionality. On this view, the point of attributing beliefs and desires is to give a high-level characterisation of the subject's behavioural dispositions, their functional architecture and their causal relations to the environment. Another of Stalnaker's views is externalism about mental content. This says that intentional characterisations are relational: even when two subjects are perfect intrinsic and functional duplicates, they may still differ in their beliefs and desires, depending on what objects and properties they are causally related to.
Some philosophers seem to believe that narrow content must be defined without resort to external objects, leaving only bizarre options like phenomenalism, conceptual role semantics and global descriptivism. But that's wrong. Narrow content can and should be defined by external causal relations just like wide content.
By narrow content, I mean a kind of mental content that doesn't much depend on the subject's environment. Completely narrow content is altogether intrinsic to the subject. But hardly anyone believes in completely narrow content. The question is whether there is an interesting kind of content shared between my intentional states and the states of my twin on twin earth -- and those of swampman and those of a brain in a vat.
One can think of perception as a relation between states (or acts) and objects, the objects that are perceived. Alternatively, one can think of it a relation between a state and a content, the information acquired or represented in the perception.
Content is something that excludes possibilities. Suppose I have a perception of an elephant standing in front of me. What possibilities are thereby excluded? There are at least two reasonable answers: 1) the exluded possibilities are possibilities where there is no elephant in front of me; 2) the excluded possibilities are possibilities where I do not have that experience. Regarded as sets of possible situations, on the first account, the content of my perception is a set of situations in which there is an elephant in front of me. On the second, it is a set of situations where I have the phenomenal experience I actually have, even if it is caused by evil scientists. (Strictly, "I" need not be me, but can be whatever is in the center of the relevant situation.)
Stalnaker's "Lewis on Intentionality" (AJP 82, 2004) is a very odd paper. The aim of the paper is to show that Lewis's account of intentional content as developed in "Putnam's Paradox" -- global discriptivism with naturalness constraints -- faces various problems and conficts with what Lewis says elsewhere.
The first thing that's odd about this is that in "Putnam's Paradox", Lewis doesn't develop an account of intentional content. Rather, he discusses Putnam's model-theoretic argument and suggests that if one holds something like global descriptivism about linguistic content, adding external naturalness constraints on the interpretation of predicates would be an attractive way to block Putnam's argument for underdetermination.
If the individuation of mental states depends at least partly on their causal roles, then it depends on the laws of nature (including possibly psychophysical laws). For if the laws differ between world 1 and world 2, a state with a given intrinsic nature can have causal role R in world 1 but lack R in world 2.
Assume world 1 is our world and world 2 is a world that contains a perfect spatiotemporal duplicate of our galaxy but lots of weird things elsewhere that contradict our laws. So the laws of world 2 are not the laws of our world. Then our duplicates in world 2 could have quite different mental states than we do.
But that sounds strange. I would have thought that my mental states do not depend upon what goes on outside the milkyway. We might also get the externalist problem about self-knowledge: If whether I believe P or Q depends on far away events, how can I know I believe P rather than Q if I don't know about these far away events?
This is still a bit vague, but anyway.
As I remarked in the first part of this little series, from an implementation perspective, it is not surprising that applying one's beliefs and desires to a given task requires processing. Consider a 'sentences in boxes' implementation of belief-desire psychology: I have certain sentence-like items stored in my belief module, and other such items in my desire module. When I face a decision, I run a query on these modules. Suppose the question is whether I should take an umbrella with me. The decision procedure may then somehow find the sentences "It is raining" and "If I take an umbrella, I don't get wet" (or rather, their Mentalese translations) in the belief box and "I don't get wet" in the desire box. From these it somehow infers the answer, that I should take the umbrella.
Why not simply use a notion of content on which belief isn't closed under strict implication? Then it will be much easier to say that reasoning always delivers new content.
There is no shortage of fine-grained notions of content. We could use English sentences, or classes of intensionally isomorphic sentences, or bundles of tuples of objects and properties ('singular propositions') together with modes of presentation, or whatever. The tricky part is to say what determines whether a subject has a belief or desire with such a content.
As Robbie Williams remarked in the comments, perhaps what we do when we reason is putting parts of our fragmented belief space together. However, I doubt that this will do as a general solution.
First, at least in the context of an interpretationist account of content, it doesn't suffice for fragmentation that the relevant beliefs are somehow stored in different parts of the brain. Rather, if my beliefs are fragmented, say, into a compartment in which I believe P and one in which I don't, this must show up in my behaviour, more or less as follows: 1) In some contexts, the best explanation of some of my actions involves the assumption that I take the world to be P; but also 2) in some contexts, the best explanation of some of my actions involves the assumption that I don't take the world to be P; Moreover, 3) the discrepancy can't be explained as a change of belief.
One might suggest that in fact resoning, like (factual) learning, always means acquiring new information. After all, it is possible to acquire new information by learning that P even if what one previously knew already entailed P. In this case the new information can't be P, but it can be something else. To use Robert Stalnaker's favourite example. when you learn that all ophtalmologists are eye-doctors, the possibilities you can thereby exclude are not possibilities where some ophtamologists aren't eye-doctors -- there are no such possibilites. Rather, they are possibilities where "ophtalmologist" means something different. You've acquired information about language. Perhaps what you learn when you learn that the square root of 1156 is 34 is similarly something about language, in this case about mathematical expressions. That explains why we can't replace synonymous expressions in the content attribution: Just as it would be wrong to say you've learned that all eye-doctors are eye-doctors, so here it would be wrong to say you've learned that the square root of 34*34 is 34.
What do we do when we draw inferences? We don't acquire new information, at least not if the reasoning is deductively valid. Rather, we try to find new representations of old information. The point of that is perhaps that we can only make our actions depend on representations of information, not directly on the information itself, and some forms of representation lend themselves more easily to guide certain actions than others.
The problem is familiar in programming: to accomplish a given task it is often crucial to find a data structure that makes the relevant properties of the stored data easily accessible. In principle, every data set could be represented as a huge number, but in pratice it helps a lot to represent it in terms of arrays or strings or objects with suitable properties.
Lewis defends a kind of best system theory both with respect to laws of nature and with respect to mental content: something is a law of nature iff (roughly) it is part of the best theory about our world; somebody believes that snow is white iff (roughly) this is what best makes sense of his behaviour according to our belief-desire psychology.
In both cases, it looks on first sight as if the theory introduces an implausible relativity into its subject matter: We don't want to say that the laws of nature depend on what we happen to find simple (but simplicity is part of what makes a theory good), and we don't want to say that what someone believes and fears depends on what we think about his behaviour.
I agree that it sounds fairly plausible to say that phenomenal states have a kind of representational content built into them. But I don't find that plausible anymore if it's combined with the assumption that being of phenomenal type Q is an intrinsic and essential property of phenomenal states. Here's an intuition pump.
Consider a world just like ours except that flying-pigs qualia have traded places with crooked-image qualia. That is, in this world, people have the kind of phenomenal experience we have when we look at flying pigs when they look at crooked images, and vice versa. But our duplicates at this world are not halluzinating flying pigs when looking at crooked images. No, they are not at all mislead by their experiences. For instance, they are not at all inclined to say that there are flying pigs, or that they are seeing flying pigs in these cases. Nor do they draw any of the inferences we would draw if we had the impression of seeing flying pigs. Instead, they typically infer that they are looking at a crooked image. And they would judge their experience to be veridical just in case there really is an image hanging crooked before them.
As promised here are some remarks on the content of phenomenal states. Or rather, on Horgan and Tienson's remarks on the content of phenomenal states in their paper "The Intentionality of Phenomenology and the Phenomenology of Intentionality". Dave Chalmers pointed me at that last week. I should say that this post is not meant to be a response to Dave's comment. I can't respond to it yet because I haven't understood it yet. I'll have to read the other papers he mentions.
I guess I should to clarify my argument. The position I want to argue against consists of the following two claims:
1) "pain" denotes a physical entity, say CFF.
2) For no P that only contains physical terms is "PI am in pain" a priori.
"" is the material conditional. I've chosen the pain example only for brevity: if you think it matters, feel free to replace "pain" by something like "the phenomenal quality of my current red-experience".
Brandt Van der Gaast points out that Michael McDermott proposes something like the semantics I sketched on behalf of type-B materialism in his "The Narrow Semantics of Proper Names" (Mind 1988). That's true. But I think McDermott is almost silent on the matter crucial to type-B materialism, and there is no acceptable way to fill the silence without spoiling type-B materialism.
First, on behalf of type-B materialism a reply to yesterday's post. (Thanks to Sven Rosenkranz for pointing out something like this to me.)
What makes it the case that the red-quale is the referent of "the distinctive quality of my current red-experience"? Not causal or counterfactual relations. Not demonstrative baptising. Not other kinds of verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Right. But these attempts to naturalize semantic properties are doomed anyway. They presuppose that semantic properties are generally independent of how things appear to us, which they are not. In fact, how things appear to us is an essential component in many "modes of presentation" determining the reference of terms. E.g., the referent of "red" is what appears to us under normal conditions in the way red things appear to us. In a same manner, the referent of "the distinctive quality of my current red-experience" is what appears to me in this distinctive way. Which is the red-quale, which in turn is a property of brain states. But no amount of physical information will tell you how this property of brain states appears to me. Phenomenalism as a semantic doctrine may have been too extreme, but it was not entirely wrong.
Some strings of symbols and noises and brain states have semantic properties. What makes it the case that a particular string or noise or state has the semantic properties that it has? One possible answer is that nothing does: semantic properties are fundamental, primitive and inexplicable. That's incredible. Not only because semantic properties just don't feel fundamental, as Fodor pointed out long ago. Much worse, it would make little sense of our use of semantic vocabulary: we believe that our expression "the moon" denotes that heavenly body up there; but how do we know? Maybe it really denotes the largest red thing in Alaska, or Gottlob Frege, or nothing at all. If reference is fundamental, facts about how "the moon" is used, how it got introduced, what conceptual role it plays, in what kinds of causal or counterfactual relations it stands to other things, how people verify statements containing it, what degree of naturalness various candidate referents have, etc. must all be considered irrelevant. On this view, there is a possible world where all these facts about use etc. obtain, but where "the moon" denotes Gottlob Frege. Obviously that's silly. Semantic properties are clearly determined by facts about use, baptising, causal chains, naturalness, etc. (In so far as they are determined at all, that is. No doubt sometimes the facts about use etc. are insufficient to settle whether a string or noise or state has semantic property A or B. But then it really is indeterminate which of the properties it has.)
Since narrow content is not determined by external factors, it depends much more on other propositional states than wide content. For example, if you believe that Aristotle was human whereas I believe he was a poached egg, the narrow content of all our beliefs about Aristotle will differ. When I believe that Aristotle was Alexander's teacher, you can't have a belief with exactly the same narrow content unless you also come to believe that Aristotle was a poached egg. Likewise for imaginings: When we both imagine Aristotle teaching Alexander, our imaginings cannot have the same narrow content.
Similarly, I think, if Ted believes that for any atoms there is a fusion, whereas Cian disbelieves this, they cannot share any imagining about atoms.