Notes on Ned Block’s
“Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology”
Harminder Riarh
Introduction
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Why is his paper an “advertisement”?
o It is a framework not a fully worked-out theory
o Even two factors not specified
o Very sketchy – more of an outline
What is “a semantics for psychology”?
o A theory of meaning, specifically in this case the theory of mental
meaning
o He proposes TFCRS
What are his desiderata?
o Why Block adopts this particular format for his paper? He seems to think
(as he says in the beginning of the paper), that most of theories of meaning
don’t really seem to answer all questions about meaning.
o The main point about the desiderata is that a theory of meaning must
answer some basic questions about meaning i.e. explain the phenomena of
meaning.
o Sure, there are all kinds of theories meaning (Such as indicator semantics,
Katzian semantics, Gricean theories etc, etc). However, they do not really
explain what we call meaning.
o His claim is that only some sort of conceptual role theory of meaning has
any hope of actually explaining meaning. Specifically TFCRS
Block seems to think that there is more to “meaning” than most of standard
approaches seem to think. “On the whole, most of the standard…” (pp 650, T1)
QUESTION: Is there really more to the nature of meaning? Do we really need
to explain more than what standard externalist approaches, say Dretske,
explain?
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I think it is better to return to desiderata after knowing what TFCRS is. But before
that we should discuss narrow and wide meaning
Narrow/wide Meaning Distinction and its Importance
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Two aspects of meaning relevant to psychological explanation: narrow, wide, not
different kinds of meaning but aspects of meaning
Consider the example on page 619
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o Believing (1) or (2) would make a difference in terms of causation of
behaviour as well in terms of causal explanation. Hence, they must have
different contents.
o However, (1) and (2) express the same proposition. Hence, they must have
the same content.
QUESTION: How much of the wide content depends on the existence of
propositions? Quine’s arguments against the existence of propositions
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Narrow meaning is “in the head.”
o Indicates supervenience on physical constitution
o Captures the semantic aspect of what is in common to utterances of (1) by
different people.
o NM of a sentence believed is more informative about the mental state of
the believer. Better suited to predicting/explaining behaviour if external
world is ignored
o “Narrow meaning also determines a function from expressions and
contexts of utterance onto referents and truth-values.” (p621) What does
this mean?
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Wide meaning is not “in the head”
o Depends on what individuals outside the head are referred to
o WM may be more useful for predicting in one respect: to the extent that
there are nomological relations between the world and what people think
and do, WM will allow predicting what they think and do without
information about how they see things.
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Wide individuation groups token sentences together if they attribute the same
properties to the same individuals. Narrow individuation groups sentence tokens
together if they attribute the same properties using the same descriptions of
individuals (irrespective of whether individuals referred to are the same) – I did
not understand this token/type talk.
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Wide meaning does not include narrow meaning; they are independent – this is
important
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Same narrow/different wide meaning and content:
o Teen and Twin Teen and their hero
o Putnam’s Twin Earth Case – referential dimension of meaning
o Burge’s Arthritis Case – social dimension of meaning – could some one
explain this.
The point is that certainly the meaning is not all “in the head” as shown by all
these cases. However, there is something common to the teen and twin teen.
“There are two basic facts on which the narrow/wide distinction is based. One is
how you represent something that you refer to can affect your psychological states
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and behaviour…the second fact is that there is more to semantics than what is just
“in the head.”” (pp622 B1)
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A theory of content
o Mental objects (representations)
o Relation between mental objects and the world (wide content)
o Relations between mental objects (narrow content)
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The main point of all this narrow/wide talk is that semantics for psychology must
explain both the narrow and the wide aspects of meaning.
QUESTION: How important/real is the narrow/wide distinction? For example,
Fodor, etc deny there is narrow content (“Life without narrow content?” - Fodor)
Two-Factor Conceptual Role Semantics (TFCRS)
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Block’s Metaphysical Commitments
o Functionalism, specifically Representational Theory of Mind - the claim
that we are semantic engines, whose semantics just follows its syntax.
o Block takes the issue of whether mind is a semantic engine as empirical
and contingent question. “My representationalist assumption is in spirit of
Smart’s claim that pain is a brain state: an empirically based thesis about
what reasoning most likely is.” (pp642)
QUESTION: Does a representational system have any real need of the narrow
component of meaning? Semantics, in a RS, is in a sense public; it is simply the way
it interfaces with the world. We don’t really need to explain this by postulating the
internal factor.
QUESTION: How would you go about testing the representational assumption?
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The main idea here is that there are two components to meaning:
o A conceptual role component i.e. narrow meaning i.e. “in the head”
o An external component that has to do with the relations between
 the representations in the head (with their internal conceptual
roles) and
 the referents and/or truth conditions of these representations in the
world
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TFCRS can be seen as a making a conjunctive claim for a sentence: to know the
meaning of a sentence, two questions must be asked:
o What is the conceptual role of the sentence?
o What its truth conditions are? That is, what is its relation to the real world?
The answers to these two questions give us the meaning of the sentence.
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What is the external factor? – completely open
o causal theory of reference?
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o theory of truth conditions?
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What is the internal factor? Alternatively, what is a conceptual role? (pp 628)
o a matter of the causal role of the expression in reasoning and deliberation
and, in general, in the way the expression combines and interacts with
other expressions so as to mediate between sensory inputs and behavioural
outputs.
o Conceptual role = functional role = inferential role i.e. role played by a
concept in inference
o Sentence’s conceptual role is matter of how it participate in inductive and
deductive inferences
o Word’s conceptual role is a matter of its contribution to the role of
sentences
o The total causal role is all causal relations of something. Conceptual role
is total causal role, abstractly described. Elements of language have a total
causal role. Conceptual role abstracts away from all causal relations
except the ones that mediate inferences, inductive or deductive, decision
making and the like.
QUESTION: In what sense can a conceptual role be an inferential role? To reason,
we usually use concepts as well as rules. In what sense can a rule be a conceptual
role?
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Individuating conceptual roles: THE crucial question for TFCRS is what counts
as identity and difference of conceptual roles (i.e. when are two conceptual roles
the same or different?) Example: From TIGER to DANGEROUS: How are
conceptual roles played by the TIGER different in the minds of two people?
o I don’t know how to do it, although some semantics (Katzian) can do it
o This is the job of the future investigators
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We must give a nonsematic (and nonintentinal) description of conceptual roles. A
daunting task but no more than many other tasks in philosophy, otherwise it
would not be reductive.
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The status of language and its role in Block’s theory is not clear to me. He
claims that spoken language and mentalese have standard association between
them i.e. Spoken language is translated into mentalese when information gets into
our brains
o He claims that the conceptual role of spoken language and mentalese are
the same. However, it seems to me their causal properties are different.
How can their roles be the same
Why Field’s (1977) TFCRS is not good enough for Block?
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His conceptual roles are not causal
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He uses Bayesian account of reasoning which does not allow for new hypotheses
formation
Bayesian reasoning seems far removed from actual reasoning.
Various criticisms of TFCRS and CRS
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Harman’s CRS
o Although Harman claims he can handle the world with just conceptual
role factor, he does not make it clear how.
o Fails twin case – Traveler who goes to Twin Earth, lands in water radios
home that he is surrounded by water. His statement is true for Harman
while Putnam considers it false
o Elm/beech case: Harman includes in my conceptual rile for ‘elm’ its role
in the minds of experts who actually know the difference – This is really
invoking the external factor without admitting it.
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Fodor’s Use/mention Fallacy criticism
o “If meaning is identified with the causal interactions of elements of
language, sentences would be about language, not the world.” (pp638, T)
o Answer: The connection to world is handled by the external factor. Only
the “narrow” meaning is identified with conceptual roles of sentences. We
still need the external factor to “fix” content to the world.
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Dretske’s “ice-cream” criticism of Churchlands
o Conceptual roles themselves cannot give you any meaning because
meaning is about the world. A representation by itself is nonsense unless it
is representation of something. The referential factor is the “cream” in icecream
o Answer: Cream for TFCRS are conceptual role + representational role
QUESTION: Before we move on to “satisfying desiderata”, what do you think of
TFCRS as a theory of semantics?
Satisfying the Desiderata
A classification of theories of meaning (pp640): Reductionism and non-reductionism as
forming a continuum
 Reductionist semantics – characterizes semantics in non-semantic terms
o TFCRS
o Gricean semantics – all meaning is mental meaning
o Indicator semantics – the nomological relation between the indicator and
what it indicates as the prime semantic relation
 Non-reductionist semantics- not antireductionist but not reductionist
o Possible world semantics
o Model-theoretic aspect of situation semantics
o Davidsonian semantics
o Katzian semantics
 None of these theories satisfies all desiderata.
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What is the relation between meaning and reference/truth?
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What is the relation between meaning and the world? The question boils down to
what is the relation between the two factors.
“Conceptual role is primary in that it determines the nature of the referential
factor, but not vice versa.” (p643, T3)
The conceptual role “determines” content, but does not “fix” it. That is, it
specifies what the representation refers to, but does not tell us what properties are
assigned to the object of representation.
What makes a given theory of causal theory of reference?
o Answer: facts about how our language works; facts about how referring
terms function in our thought processes
o Since this is primarily an aspect of conceptual role, the conceptual role of
referring expressions determines what theory of reference is true.
o Conclusion: the conceptual role factor determines the nature of the
referential factor.
The referential factor i.e. the external factor “fixes” reference.
Conceptual role determines the function from context to reference and truthvalue. For example, in the Twin Earth Case, it is the externalist theory that
explains why “water” picks out H2O on Earth and XYZ on Twin Earth
QUESTION: What exactly is the mechanism by which this happens? What can be
say more about this? How does “narrow meaning” explain the “wide meaning”?
What is keeping them together?
What is the connection between the meaning of an expression and
knowing or learning its meaning?
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What is the “meaning of an expression”?
o Answer: The conceptual role played by the expression in the
representational system (or mind, brain, semantic engine)
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How do we “learn the meaning of an expression”?
o The expression acquires conceptual role in person’s brain.
o Example: we learn to use the word dog by leaning how to use it i.e. by
giving it a conceptual role in our brains.
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Hence, TFCRS allows us to see
o Why evidence for proper use of an expression is evidence for knowing the
meaning of that expression
o How knowing meaning is related to our ability to use language
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“To know the meaning of an English word is it to function in a certain way, and
the obtaining of this function, together with certain psychological facts explains
correct external usage.” (p644, B2)
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Does the meaning of a sentence consist in just knowing its truth conditions? The
converse is more plausible. If we know what truth conditions of a sentence are
then we know what it means.
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TFCRS’s fix to Fodor’s argument (Paradox) for innateness of all concepts
o A paradox because the conclusion is unacceptable – how can all new
terms/words/concepts we come-up with be innate?
o Second premises “when we learn a new English term, we can do so only
by hypothesizing definitions in terms already known” (p646, B) is false
 Learning is not matter of definitions at all
 The new term acquires a function in the brain of the learner
 Example: we do not learn concepts of physics in analytic terms,
but simply by learning how to use the new terminology i.e. by
giving it a function in my brain.
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In summary: the meaning of an expression is the conceptual/functional role
played by the expression in the functional organization of the system. And, we
learn to use a new term correctly by linking it to a terms we already has that
functions appropriately.
What makes meaningful expressions meaningful?
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Why do some expressions such as ‘cat’ have meaning and others such as ‘glurg’
don’t?
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“According to CRS, what makes an expression meaningful is that it has a
conceptual role of certain type, one that we may call “appropriate.”” (pp649)
o The difference between ‘cat’ and ‘glurg’ is that the first has an appropriate
role and the second does not.
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Why do some sentences have appropriate roles and others don’t? Answer: certain
causal properties.
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Since TFCRS is reductionist i.e. it reduces semantics to non-semantics, it can
reduce meaning of expressions down to causation.
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Non-reductionist theories reduce semantics to other semantics. Hence, they just
put off explaining semantics.
Reductionist theories
o Gricean semantics – reduces meaning to mental content i.e. reduces
speaker’s meaning to the contents of speaker’s intentions.
 Not really naturalistic about content
 What exactly is the intentional content?
 It is primitive – cannot satisfy my desiderata
 Physiological reductionism – prohibits semantics to
computers
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Searle’s reduction of intentionality to the brain or whatever
has “equivalent causal powers.” These “equivalent causal
powers” for Searle are primitive – cannot satisfy my
desiderata
 Schiffer and Loar couple the reduction of meaning to the
mental with a functionalist reduction of the mental i.e. they
seek to explain the intentional in terms of functionalism.
They are non-representationalists.
o This is nearly the same as my theory. We only
differ in regard to how the mind works rather than
about the functional source of meaning
 Loar’s criticism of TFCRS
 A theory of meaning should not depend on a speculative
psychological claim such as representationalism i.e. why
make your theory depend on empirical question of is mind
representational or not
 But even the one that does not commit to
representationalism is still open to the empirical question
o Indicator semantics
 Dretske and Stampe’s corelational version
 Error not possible
 Barwise’s solution (??)
 Fodor’s teleological version - there are cognitive mechanisms
which put sentences in the belief box if and only if they are true
 Teleological wheel
o Proper function as historically (evolution)
determined
 but swamp man argument
 evolution itself may cause the proper
function to change
 Epistemic idealization wheel
o What exactly are these?
Why is meaning relative to representational system?
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A symbol may have different meanings in different languages
The conceptual role of a symbol is a matter of how it functions in a
representational system. How a representation functions in a system depends on
the system
If meaning is function, then meaning is system relative.
QUESTION: Is not this a problem? This makes whole enterprise of meaning
relative
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What is the relation between meaning and mind/brain?
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How does our brain grasp meanings? What is its role in acquiring new meanings?
We need to give a causal account of this relation.
Brain confers meaning on its representations by conferring the right causal roles
on the representations.
What is the relation between autonomous and inherited meaning?
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Ideas are represented on the page using sentences. Our brain must translate them
in the language of thought before we can understand them. On the other hand,
representation in the brain requires no such translation. The representations that
require no translation have autonomous meaning and the ones that do have
inherited meaning.
What are autonomous and inherited meaning? What is the relation between them?
Compositionality
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The meaning of a sentence is in some sense a function of the meanings of the
words in it. What exactly is the relation between the semantic values of sentences
and words?
Only sentences have semantic value. The semantic values of words are a matter of
their contributions to the conceptual roles of sentences.
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Notes on Fodor and Lepore’s
“Ned Block: Meaning Holism and Conceptual Role”
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Can only TFCRT satisfy the desiderata?
o (D1) Meaning and reference
 Frege and Putnam examples show that “narrow” content does not
determine reference
 CRS wants to solve by giving more fine-grained account of
the conceptual roles of the “morning star” and the “evening
star.” Frege problem only solved if we have a way of
individuating between conceptual roles i.e. if we could
individuate between the conceptual role of morning star
and the conceptual role of the evening star. This, as Block
admits, is the problem for TFCRS
 Twin Case requires a less fine grained account
 What makes these two factors stuck together?
 Block’s answer is that the conceptual role factor is more
primary. It is not clear, however, how this would explain
the connection between two factors
 What is the ontological status of narrow propositions?
o (D5) Meaning’s relation to brain
 Block takes the connection between narrow meaning and wide
meaning to be essential
 All you really need is a reliable connection.
Block’s argument for TFCRT not decisive
Conceptual role semantics is untenable
 Inferential roles are not compositional and meanings are.
 Hence, meanings can’t be inferential roles
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