CONSCIOUS LECTURE 2
Review (Anglophone Philosophy of mind circa 1960)
1. An `intensional’ relation (/predicate/context) is one where two otherwise valid rules of
inference fail:
-Existential Generalization (a is F  something is F)
-Substitution of Identicals  (a=b & Fa) –> (Fb)
Many psychological contexts (in particular many propositional attitude contexts) are
intensional;. Hus, particular. ‘John wants a sloop’ does not entail `there is a sloop that
John wants’; `Brutus believes that Cicero is bald & Cicero = Tully’ does not entail
`Brutus believes that Tully is tall’.
A theory of the nature of the nature of such mental states might reasonably be expected to
answer such questions as: `How is it possible to want something if there is nothing that you
want?’
2. Classical Empiricism (eg Hume) endorsed a psychology that offered answers to such
questions. It consisted of the claim that:
i believing that Cicero is tall is a relation to a `Mental Representation’ .
ii. Mental representations are mental objects; they have causal powers.
(iii) Mental Representations are mental images.
(iv) Mental processes are associations of ideas. To believe that Cicero is tall is to have an
association between the idea CICERO and the idea TULLY (mental tokens of the former
reliably cause tokens of the latter). Thus the `Empiricist Synthesis’ (ES).
By the `60sd ESlhad begun to break down, because:
-It had been around ever so long, and people got bored with it.
-It raised, but didn’t solve, the problem of how minds and bodies can interact.
-Associationism didn’t worh, (Eg. no theory of predication; see Kant and Frege).
2.1 The interaction problem would go away if either (i) there just aren’t any mental
states/processes I, eliminativism’) or (ii) mental states/processes reduce to behavioral
dispositions (whatever, exactly `reduce to’ is taken to mean. But: almost nobody could take
eliminatiism
-Almost nobody could believe 1
- Materialism is compatible with eliminativism but also with behaviorism (which many
philosophers and psychologists took to be independently warranted either by the methodological
demands of science or by the `analysis’ of mental concepts or by both).
So, by mid-century, behaviorism became the fashionable metaphysics of mind, both in
philosophy (Ryle, Wittgenstein) and in psychology (Skinner, Hull).
However: Chomsky convinced practically everybody that behaviorism is untenable. (see
Chomsky on Skinner. )
So. if Materialism was to be viable, it seemed it must take the form of some sort of mindbrain identity thesis.
END OF REVIEW
-But a new kind of Materialism appeared on the horizon: Propositional attitudes are still
relations to Mental Representations, but MRs are language-like (in particular they are
syntactically structured) rather than imagistic.;
Mental processes are computations in something like Turing’s sense. The
Representation theory of mind is thus conjoined with the`Representational /
Computational Theory of Mind’; RTM and Associationsm could be abandoned. So
everything was fine and everybody was happy.
However, two embarrassing questions were unanswered: (1) It’s prima facie sort of clear
how images could represent things; viz. by resembling the things they represent. But how
do `language-like’ representations represent things (the semantic problem)?; (2)
Propositional attitudes are all very well, but what about sensations, feelings and the like?
(the problem of consciousness).
(It bears emphasis that neither behaviorism nor mind/brain identification offered a
plausible solution to either (1) or (2).
Then came Nagel’s bats, which suggested that no version of Materialism ---RTM
included--- could provide a plausible account of consciousness. So everybody started
writing papers about consciousness; and continues to do so.
3. Nagel’s Puzzle (the first of a number of arguments that purport to show that Materialism is
false).
i. There is (presumably) `something it is like (for a bat) to hear the cry of a bat.
Ii. But we can’t, even in principle, know what it is like (for a bat) to hear the cry of a bat.
iii. So, there are states of consciousness which we can’t know about even in principle.
iv. A theory of consciousness should illuminate this situation. Why can’t we know what
it’s like for a bat to hear the cry of a bat?
v. But neither behaviorism, nor mind-brain identification, nor RTM provided the
illumination required.. Since, as far as anybody knows these exhaust the varieties of
materialism, facts about consciousness show there is a something fundamentally wrong
with Materialism.
4. Nagel’s diagnosis of the bat puzzle
-We don’t know what bats cries sound like (to bats) because we are too different from bats to
share their subjectivity/ Point of View. Shared POV is (or requires? shared`subjectivity’. Nagel
doesn’t say what the relation beween subjectivity and consciousness is; presumably he takes
them to b e the same.
5, The Moral Nagel draws: There are some things that we couldn’t know about the subjective
character of experience even if we know all the objective facts. (Nagel assumes that the effects of
subjectivity with effects of consciousness; but he’s not very clear about what exactly he think the
connection is.)
In particular, there are some facts about the world that objective
inquiry (`science’) can’t discover. That’s because science seeks to abstract from
the effects of POV on subjective experience (it wants the facts as viewed “from
nowhere”.
-Since according to Materialism, all the `objective’ facts are facts about material things, it
follows that there must be something wrong with Materialism. QED.
6. Reasons for doubting that Nagel’s diagnosis is right:
-Presumably, even a talking bat couldn’t ’ tell another bat what it’s like to hear a bat’s cry We
have what seems to be the same problem with one another in respect of any sensory
experience. Try saying what it’s like to see something red.
This can’t be because we don’t share POVs
-See Locke on knowing what a pineapple tastes like.
-Likewise with skeptical puzzles about (eg.) inverted spectra; arguably, I can’t know what red
looks like to you. (Inverted spectra etc.) There is empirical evidence suggesting that it doesn’t.
-Scientific objectivity doesn’t seek a view from nowhere (i.e. a view that abolishes effects of
POV.) What it wants is a view from nowhere in particular; ie one that abstracts from the effects
of objectivity. (Views from one place or other fall out as special cases.( See the ‘cosmological
principle’ in Astronomy.)
-The reason there’s no such thing as a view from nowhere because there is no such place as
nowhere.
7. What I take to be the right story:
-some concepts are syntactically `primitive’ (RED) and others are syntactically `complex’
RED AND SQUARE) . (Remember, LOT says that mental representations are languagelike. The difference between simple and complex concepts corresponds (roughly) to the
linguistic difference between words and phrases.
-complex concepts can be acquired by construction.
-simple concepts can (only) be acquired from experience.
-the reason we can’t know what it’s like to hear a bat’s cry is that we have never
had the experience of hearing one.
-Another way to say the same thing: The concept BAT’S CRY is primitive for
bats; but it is complex for us (or any other creature that can’t hear bats cries,
The empiricists had this right, though they drew the wrong conclusion: viz that
you can only know what you can experience. ie they tried to deduce their
epistemology from their psychology,. THAT IS A TERRIBLE MISTAKE.
What’s true is that you can only lrearn your primitive concepts from experience.
If you have primitive concepts that you didn’/t learn from experience, they must
be innate.
- Much the same line of thought can be run on properties rather than concepts
(unsurprisingly since typical concepts express properties.)
-this raises the question `what property does the concept RED express?’
-it’s the property a thing has if it is normally seen (by us) as red. This makes the property
RED both relational and intensional. (An illustration of the ways in which consciousness
and intensionality are `entangled`).