Burge on Perception
Jerry Fodor, Rutgers University
Tyler Burge has written a long,(fn) disputatious, and sometimes difficult book about
cognition,fn
---------------fn The Origin of Objectivity is approximately 20 times longer than the reference copy of Winnie
The Pooh that I keep on my desk to use in emergencies; and it contains many, many fewer jokes.
--------------------------with special emphasis on the relation between perception and conceptualization. Among its other
virtues, it is a serious work of scholarship. People like me, who can only rarely manage to get their
references to stay put, will be awed by its fifty-odd pages of bibliography, which cites not just the usual
standards in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, but also such exotica as, for
example,: `development in young infants reasoning about the occlusion of objects’, `exoskeletal sensors
for walking’ and a lot of other papers drawn from the professional journals of psychology and related
sciences. It is a contention of Burge’s that an embarrassing number of the theses that philosophers of
mind have held to be true a priori, turn out, in light of empirical findings, not to be true at all. (Burge’s
favorite examples are theses about what, in light of their lack of language, animals and prelinguistic
infants can and can’t perceive.) Burge is surely right to consider that a scandal. In the old days,
philosophers thought that they could arrive at conceptual truths by performing conceptual analyses; so it
is perhaps understandable that, when they got around to the philosophy of mind, they ignored scientific
results and did their stuff from armchairs. But then Quine pointed out that successful conceptual
analyses have been remarkably thin on the ground; indeed, that nobody seems to be able to say just
what a conceptual analysis is. The prospects for an analytic theory of perception now seem about as
promising as the prospects for an analytic theory of continental drift; and much the same can be said of
the prospects for analytic theories of believing, thinking, remembering and other cognitive states and
processes .
I think that Burge’s methodological observations about how philosophical research
on perception and cognition should be conducted are patently correct; this paper will take them for
granted. My primary concern will be the question: `Given that theories of perception/cognition (fn) must
be
---------------------(fn) To conserve back-slashes, I’ll use `theory of perception’ as short for `theory of perception or other
aspects of cognition’ except when I think it matters which of the disjuncts is being discussed. I assume
(untendentiously, I hope) that percepton is a branch of cognition, hence that the science of perception is
a branch of cognitive science. Much of this paper is about which branch of cognitive science it is and how
that part differs from some of the others.
--------------------1
responsible both to empirical findings and to reasonable demands for conceptual coherence, what theory
of percepption ---or, at a minimum, what kind of theory of perception--- should we endorse?’ Burge’s
book repeatedly asks philosophers, psychologists, linguists, ethologists and anybody else who is
prepared to lend a hand, what is required of a creature, and of its environment, such that the one should
be able to perceive the latter ‘objectively’fn I think this is indeed a sort of question that we should all be
asking and that those are the sorts of people we should ask it of. But I’ll argue that Burge gets the answer
wrong; interestingly wrong, but wrong all the same .
-----------------------------Fn, To see a thing `objectively’ is, at very least, not to see it as having properties that it hasn’t got. In
particular, it involves distinguishing properties of the percept from artifacts of the perceptual process
(like the apparent di minution of distant objects.) On Burge’s view, a number of features of perception
are explained by their being conducive to objectivity, the paradigms are the perceptual constancies.
----------------------------So what, according to Burge, does one discover if one addresses theories of perception with due
attention to the available empirical results? Primarily that philosophers have over-intellectualized their
accounts of how perception works (and also, perhaps, their accounts of how thought does). In
particular, Burge thinks that philosophers have done so by holding:
i. that perception typically requires the conceptualization of the percept, so what you can perceive
depends on which concepts you have,
and
II. that which concepts you have depends on which beliefs you hold. (fn)
-----------------Fn This sort of view of the semantic content of concepts is often called `Internalism,' or ‘Individualism'.
Burge uses both terms.
-------------------This, however Is where exegesis gets sticky. As far as I can tell, Burge thinks that he thinks that (i) and (ii)
are both false. I think, however, that his position with respect to (II) is, in fact, equivocal; and that the
equivocation matters a lot to what he says about related issues of importance. By contrast, his position
with respect to (ii) is entirely clear: it Is the core of what Burge calls `anti-Individualism’. I’ll start with (i).
I want to remind you of the traditional distinction between seeing a thing that is an F and seeing a thing
(whether of not it is an F) as an F. Both seeing and seeing as can, of course, be instances of objective
perception. Burge is perfectly aware of the `see’/’see’ as distinction, but he seems not to think it bears
much weight. In fact, he sometimes uses the two expressions more or less interchangeably. That is, in
my view, a Very Bad Mistake; I think that Burge’s treatment of the relation between perception and
conceptualization depends on his making it.
A revealing passage on p.244 is germane. Burge is arguing (rightly I think) that, in the paradigm cases,
the object of sensation is the same as the object of perception: What we sense, like what we see, is a cat
lurking in the bushes (not a glimpse, or a `sense datum`, or an array of shapes. colors and textures.... and
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so forth.) Burge remarks: “...one can immediately and fully apprehend something as a body... It is not
evident that it takes extra time, beyond the moment of viewing, to see a body or to see something as a
body.” This sounds to me like a confusion of two claims: On the one hand, there’s the (as Wittgenstein
might have said ) `grammatical’ observation that, if there really is a cat in the bushes, then seeing it and
sensing it may be the very same experience. (They come apart, however, if there isn’t a cat.) On the other
hand, there’s the question whether seeing a cat as a cat ”takes longer” than (merely) seeing a cat. Only
the second question bears on the issue whether inferential (hence conceptual) process mediate seeing..
This is an empirical issue, as Burge would surely agree; and, to the best of my knowledge, Burge is wrong
about the empirical facts. There is lots of evidence that perception of the `sensory` properties of a
stimulus typically takes less time than perception of its `object’ properties. You’re faster at seeing a red
pencil as red than at seeing it as a pencil (though evaluation of such findings is complicated because the
registration of sensory properties is quite often subconscious.) Unsurprisingly, we typically see things as
things; but that doesn’t settle whether we typically see them as something else first.
Just what I think has gone wrong is a longish story, but a rough approximation fits in a nutshell: On the
one hand, there is no perceiving without perceiving as; and, on the other, there is no perceiving as
without conceptualization; and, on the third hand, there is no conceptualization without conceptual
content.. That is what’s right about (i) and the tradition in the philosophy of mind and the psychology
of perception that endorses it. What’s wrong with that tradition is its forever wanting to infer from
`perception requires conceptualization’ to, `perception must be subject to epistemic constraints'. The
link between premise (which is true) and the conclusion (which isn’t) is the idea that there are typically
epistemic constraints on concept possession; an idea that I take to be false root and branch. Accordingly,
the path of virtue is to concede that perceiving requires conceptualization (because perceiving requires
perceiving as and perceiving as requires conceptualization ), hence that ( contrary to Burge) a viable
theory of perception presupposes a viable theory of concept possession. What should, however, be
denied to the last ditch is that a theory of concept possession requires epistemological foundations.
Burge accuses Conceptualists (fn) of having over-
Fn. By stipulation, a Conceptualist is someone who holds that perception requires the conceptualization
of the percept. On the Conceptualist view, seeing a thing is rather like thinking about the thing: thought
and perception both rerquire the application of conceps to their objects. Conceptualists hold that `no
concepts no thoughts’ and `no concepts no percepts’ are both true.
-------------------------intellectualized the psychology of perception. But that’s the wrong charge and the wrong target.
Conceptualism is OK; seeing something at all requires seeing it as something or other, and seeing
something as F requires having the concept F. What’s wrong with the tradition Burge opposes isn’t that it
intellectualizes perceiving; what’s wrong is that it epistemologizes concept possession. I’m going to
argue that the conditions for concept possession are, in general, not epistemic; so Burge is right to say, as
he repeatedly does, that having the concept F does not require knowing ` what it is’ for something to be
an F; or ‘how to tell’ whether something is an F’; or `what it’s like’ to see an F (still less `what it’s like` to
be an F’); or what the criteria for F-ness are; or what belongs to `the F stereotype’... and so on all the
other epistemological theses about conditions for concept possession that philosophers and
psychologists have championed from time to time. In particular, you can be a Conceptualist without
holding that concept possession is subject to epistemic constraints; you might, for example, hold that it
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supervenes on mind- world causal connections. So (i) and ii can both be true; Conceptualism, and Antiindividualism, can both be true. That is, after all, unsurprising; Individualism is about the metaphysics of
conceptual content, not about the role of concepts in perceptual processes. Of course there is a robust
sense in which you can think about water without thinking about H20 (there is also a robust sense in
which you can't). Theories of mind can thus contrive to have the best of both worlds. But, only at a price:
They are required to treat the perceive/perceive as distinction with due respect; which is what I think
Burge fails to do. That's the short form; details to follow.
Seeing something as an F requires seeing it as an F; just seeing an F does not since you can perfectly well
see an F by seeing it as a G. For some reason not clear to me, philosophers like to say this sort of thing in
the formal mode: `perceives an F that is G` is transparent at the G position, but `perceives an F as G’ is
opaque at the G position. If you see a dog, and the dog you see is brown, then it follows that you see a
brown dog. That’s so whether or not you notice that it is brown; indeed, whether or not you notice that it
is a dog. By contrast, to see a thing as a brown dog is to see it as brown and as a dog; that is so whether
or not it is, in fact, either. To see a red geranium as a brown dog is to see a red geranium as brown and
as a dog, even though it is neither the one nor the other. This really is puzzling; there is no rug under
which to sweep it. Inthe case imagined, all there is in the world is a you and a red geranium, so how did a
brown dog get in?
The immensely plausible answer is that that it got in via the concepts deployed in the seeing. A cat may
look at a queen and, in favorable conditions, a cat may even see one. But, though I hold them in great
esteem, I doubt that a cat can see a queen as a queen. The reason it can’t is, surely, that doing so
requires having the concept QUEEN; which cats do not. At one point (p. 347) Burge remarks that a
science of vision will need to “take perceptual states as representational [sic] in a psychologically
distinctive sense”, Quite so; but in what psychologically distinctive sense? Answer: it requires a
distinction between what is seen and what it is seen as; and `see as ...’ is an opaque context; and seeing
something as F requires deploying the concept F. Compare zoology; that a thing is a cat does not raise
the question `what is it a cat as?’
So then: On the one hand, nothing that lacks the concept QUEEN can see a queen as such. But, on the
other, a cat can’t see a queen without seeing her as something-or-other. All that being so, a cat can’t see
anything at all if it hasn’t no concepts at all. Cats without concepts are blind. (Didn’t Kant say something
of the sort some while ago?)
I don’t know what Burge would say about that; as I remarked, he seems not to make much of the
`see’/’see as’ distinction. It is no help in sorting this out that (as far as I can tell) Burge regularly uses
versions of the locution `perception as of an F’ both for perceiving and for perceiving as, thereby eliding
the distinction between them. So, for example, when Burge is discussing the way that the constancies
militate in favor of the objectivity of perception, he speaks of the perception of a round plate as being
`as of something round’ even when the plate is tilted. (p. 383; I’ve slightly altered Burge’s example, but
not in a way that affects the present issues). But (in a passage about the mental mechanisms that
mediate the constancies) he says that “the transformational story begins with two-dimensional retinal
sensory representation and ends with visual perception as of attributes in the physical environment.”
358). This way of talking raises a crucial question that Burge doesn’t answer: Whether you can have a
perception `as of an attribute in the physical environment` if there is, in fact, nothing in the physical
environment that has that attribute; this is , in effect, the question whether perception `as of an F` can
have an opaque reading. That question is crucial; in a moment’ we’ll come to why it is. First, what is
almost certainly a digression:
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There’s some rough going c. page 152-168 that I think traces to Burge’s not having a robust notion of
seeing as . Consider a case where a distal orange orange is displayed in a green light. A subject duly
reports seeing a green orange. I would think the natural way to describe this situation is that an orange
orange being seen as green, hence as a misperception of an orange orange. This is just the sort of work
that `see as’ is good at. But (to repeat) Burge doesn’t have a notion of `seeing as’; so what he says instead
is that the representational content of the subject’s perceptual state should be specified relative to the
proximal stimulus, not relative to the distal stimulus. Since, as we may assume, the proximal stimulus
you get when an orange orange is seen in green light is the same as the proximal stimulus you get when a
green orange is seen in a white light, Burge says that the content of perceptual state that subject is in
when seeing an-orange orange in green light is `as of’ seeing a green orange. So, to see an orange
orange in green light as green isn’t, after all, to misperceive the orange. It counts as veridical perception
according to Burge’s way of counting.
But this is surely counterintuitive; and, it’s a strange thing for Burge, of all people, to say. Burge is a
committed externalist whatever else he is; and an externalist should specify perceptual content relative
to its distal cause. To see something that looks just like water as water is to misperceive it unless the
distal stimulus is water. And, anyhow , if seeing an orange orange in green-light as green is veridical,
what on earth is it veridical of? Not the distal stimulus since, by assumption, the distal stimulus is
orange. Not the proximal retinal array because (unless you are very oddly wired), you can’t see your
retina without a mirror. Not your brain, because brains are gray (more less). Not an intentional object
that is green; or a green sense datum, or anything of that sort; Burge has no truck with any of those
(rightly, I think. Whatever seeing as is, it’s not a relation to a queer object. So what then?
Burge says that his way of understanding this sort of case is not a matter of philosophical interpretation
but “of scientiific fact.” (388). I suspect, however, that it’s an artifact of his failure to appreciate the
extent to which psychology needs some notion of seeing as even to describe the phenomena that it is
trying to explain. If `see as’ makes problems for semantics, or epistemology, or ontology (or all three at
once), they will just have to be faced and coped with.
The digression ends here.
As previously remarked , `see’, `perceive’ and the like are typically `transparent` in the sense that, if you
see/percieve an x, there is an x that you see/perceive. By contrast, ‘see as’, ‘perceive as’ , and the like are
typically opaque; you can see something as an F even though no F is in view. (Indeed, you can
see/perceive something as an F if even if there isn’t anything that you perceive as an F; as when, in a
hallucination, you see/perceive the surround as populated by elves. In such a case `the surround’
functions a dummy; it pretends to be a referring expression but really isn’t. ) No news so far.
Suppose, then, that you can have a perception of a plate `as of something round’ even though the plate
is square. Then, to put it crudely, a Conceptualist will want to know where the roundness comes from.
Well, where does it come from? Not from the plate since, by assumption, the plate is square; but. if
Burge is right, not from the plate seen (as one says) `under the concept round , because, according to
Burge, perception doesn’t involve conceptualization. This is essential to his case; indeed, Burge’s
argument that
---------------------Fn, This isn’t a request for an analysis of the ( putative) opaque reading of `perception of X as of an F’. I
doubt that there are any such things as analyses, and I suspect that Burge does too. Rather, what’s
5
requested is some suggestion of what’s going in a perceiver’s head when he sees a square plate as
round . A Conceptualist says that what ‘s going on is the (mis)application of the concept round I do
think he’s right about that; I can’t imagine what other story there could be.
-------------------------the philosophy of mind is hyperintellectual consists mostly of his claim that phillosophers hold that
percetion is a species of conceptualization ; which, as a matter of fact, it isn’t. By contrast, the point of
the Conceptualist’s traditional arguments from perceptual illusions, perceptual errors and the like is
that, when a square plate is seen as round, the` round` has to come from somewhere; and (short of
Disjunctivism which neither Burge nor I take very seriously) the only place that it could come from is a
concept.
Still, it may be that perception doesn’t need much by way of conceptual sophistication; externalists may
be almost right in saying that what seeing needs is mostly that the thing that’s seen is causally
responsible (`in the right way’) for the seeing. But, that won’t do except as a first approximation much in
want of refinement; that’s because there is no seeing a thing without seeing it as something or other;
when something looks to you to be something-or-other, you must have some-or-other concept that it
looks to you to fall under; that seems plausible, surely ,whether not your preferred ontology is
committed to such things as looks. So, the chain of inference goes like this: No seeing without seeing as;
no seeing as without conceptualization; no conceptualization without concepts. Thus do intentionality
and conceptualiization enter into the psychology of perception; and they enter very early; certainly not
later than perceptual errors and illusions do. I don't say that's all self evident; things really are a mess in
this part of the woods. But If, when you see a cat that is moving in the bushes over there, you don’t see it
as something that is moving in the bushes over there, there, why do you turn your head towards the
bushes over there when you want to see the cat better?
`But Isn’t that just another instance of the very hyperintellectualization that Burge complains about?
Plants don't turn towards the Sun because they see it as the Sun or as anything else; plants don’t have
percepts, they have tropisms.’ Burge makes this sort of point again and again by way of deflating
Intellectualist accounts of perception. But it’s beside the point. Unlike plants, we do see things (and so
surely, do infants and cats), and our having seen a thing often enters into the explanation of how we
behaved. Having seen a cat moving in the bushes may well be part of the story about why we turned
towards the bushes; but not unless we saw the cat as something moving in the bushes. What enters into
the explanation of our behavior isn’t what we see saw per se; it’s what we see what we saw as. Take
concepts away, and psychology looses seeing as. Take seeing as away, and it loses the junction between
perception and action. That’s what used to be called `The Problem of The `Effective Stimlus.’ It must not
be begged.
So much for what’s true a priori; but here empirical considerations are also germane since they strongly
suggest, at very least, that monkeys and infants do sometimes see things as such-and-suches. For
example, there is evidence that babys and monkeys are sensitive to the ambiguity of bi-stable figures
like the Necker Cube. (See eg `Depth Perception with ambiguous displays in humans and monkeys’, R
von der Heydt, Qui and K Endo, Perception 30, 2001, ECVP Abstract Supplement) This is relevant not only
because it involves their seeing two dimensional figures as three dimensional, but also because there is
reason to suppose that seeing a Necker Cube `switch’ requires seeing some of the line intersections as
line intersections on one interpretation and seeing them as junctures of intersecting sides on the other.
(This is, I believe, the account of such illusions that perceptual psychologists usually offer, (Pylyshyn xxx
) Indeed, there is evidence that monkeys see figures in `Escher’ drawings as impossible objects (!)
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Shuwairi Marc K. Albert, Scott P. Johnson (2007). Discrimination of Possible and Objects in Infancy
Psychological Science, 18 (4), 303-307). So it would seem, at a minimum, that Burge’s anti-Conceptualist
claims about the perceptual capacities of baby’s and infra-human creatures argue much ahead of the
relevant science.
Why, then, is Burge so set against Conceptualist accounts of perception? There are places where he
seems to argue that, in order for a mental representation really to be a concept, it must function as a
constituent of `propositional’ thoughts. I suspect that Burge thinks that the constituents of one’s thoughts just are one’s concepts. So if, as
Burge takes more or less takes for granted) infants/cats haven’t got propositional thoughts, they don’t have concepts either. But, as far as I
can tell, Burge doesn’t argue for any such tight connection between having concepts and having propositional thoughts. He therefore
begs the question against a quite standard version of modularity theory, according to which the contents of modular systems, though
or any other `higher’
cognitive processes). In any case, Burge needs an argument why only constituents of propositional
thoughts can be concepts; why shouldn’t concepts also , and independently, have a role in the perceptual
integration of sensory registrations? This seems to be a paradigm of a question that can’t be settled
from the armchair. To the best of my knowledge, as the empirical findings now stand, it’s wide open that
perceptual processes are often both encapsulated and conceptualized . If I had to make a bet, that’s
what I’d bet on. fn
conceptualized, is encapsulated. ( By definition, encapsulated contents can’t make their way into thinking
-------------------Oddly enough, Burge makes a quite similar point in an argument against Spelke (c. P 439.) Spelke
contrassts two hypotheses about the representation of bodies `as such’ ; according to one it is
intramodal , according to the other it is transmodal. Burge replies `why not both?’ This question is
entirely pertinent; but it would seem to apply whenever issues about relations between perception and
conceptualization arise
---------------------You may think that that is the end . But it’s not.
Rather surprisingly, the question we’ve been discussing --how should psychology understand the
distinction between seeing and seeing as? --- bears interesting analogies to a problem that seems, first
blush, to live in a quite different part of the woods: How should evolutionary biology understand the
distinction betwen selection (as in ’homo sapiens was selected, but Neanderthal became extinct’) and
selection for (as in ` having an opposed thumb was selected for in monkeys because it heled them to
grasp things’.) I want to say a bit about this, not just because interesting analogies sometimes prove to
be interesting, but also because it bears on Burge’s treatment of the content of mental representations.
To begin with a couple of terminological points: Standard biological usage generally has it that the
objects of selection are kinds of creatures, typically species. So, the monkey was selected, but the Dodo
was not. (Perhaps the Dodo was selected against; or perhaps it just died out.) By contrast, the objects of
selection for are the traits that are the innate in the members of a species; in particular, their
`phenotypic’ traits. The core of the Theory of Natural Seelction (TNS) ---the thesis that is, common
ground among Darwinists--- is that the traits that are phenotypic in a species are ones that contribute to
the adaptedness/fitness of members of the species (fn)
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(fn() More precisely, they’re the are traits that contributed to the adaptedness /fitness of members of
the species in the ecology it in which the species evolved).
--------------------So the motto is: In the paradigm case, it’s the fitness of their phenotypic traits that explains why creatures
have the phenotypes that they do; which is to say that the it’s the fitness of their phenoptypi9c traits that
explains why there are the kinds of creatures that there are. This claim is, by general consensus, the heart
of TNS. Fn
-----------------------Fn. It’s sometimes said to be true by definition that the fitness-conducive traits are the ones that
wsereselected for; (references) but that can’t be right and people really should stop saying it. TNS is the
claim that its having been selected for its contribution to adaptivity explains why a trait belongs to a
phenotype. But that couldn’t be so if the connection between being phenotypic and being selected for
were conceptual. John’s being unmarried doesn’t explain his being bachelor; John’s being unmarried is
his being a bachelor.
--------------------------Thus TNS But here’s a point of logical syntax that really does matter; and that Darwinists have very
largely been confused about: `Select’ is transparent (like `see’); but `select for’ is opaque, like `see as’. If
an F is selected, and if being F is coextensive with being G, then the selection of an F is ipso facto the
selection of a G. But, even if being F and being G are coextensive, it does not follow that selection for
being F is coextensive with is selection for being G (unless, of course being G happens to be the same
trait).
So, suppose two phenotypic traits are so linked that a creature that has either has both. It would not
follow that if either of these traits was selected for, so too was the other. The reason it wouldn’t follow is
that, by Darwinist assumption, selection is for traits that contribute to adaptedness; and it’s easily
imagined that, of a pair of linked traits, one is adaptive and the other is neutral, or even tha having it
tends to reduce a creature’s adaptedness.) So, because `select for’ is opaque to the substitution of
coextensives,, it’s perfectly possible that a creature has some phenotypic traits that were selcted for
contributing to fitness and some that were not. In fact, It’s not just `perfectly possible’; it happens all
the time. But the central thesis of Darwisnism is that selection of creatures is selection for the adaptivity
of their phenotypes. So the situation we’ve just been imagining is a counter example to TNS. That makes
Darwinist teleology a shaky foundation on which to build an account of conceptual content. fn
--------------------Fn . Darwin was himself aware of the phenonenon of linkage; it shows up in breeding, where the
phenoptypethat you breed for is often not the one that you get. But he failed to notice that `select for’,
`like breed for’, is intensional; or that its being so undermines the general claim that phenotypes are
selected for their adaptivity. For example, the posssible phenotypes are constrained “from below” (eg.
by facts of bio-chemistry), and, very likely, “from above” as well (eg. by “laws of form”). See Fodor and
Piatelli, 2010 for extensive discussion. In our view, linkage is not an odd exception to TNS but a salient example of how properties of a
creature’s internal structure, (i.e.non-ecological) properties) can shape the fixation of phenotypes.
That this line of thought was, and remains, widely misunderstood by its critics argues against the critics, not against the book.
8
---------------------------------------------Now back to Burge (fn) .
Burge very much needs a notion of biological function as part of the story he tells about the content of
mental, states; mental content; biological function is one of the things that Burge appeals to when he
wants to distinguish adventious erffects of a mental state from the ones that are, in his term
’constituitive of’ its content.
I’m not, in fact, quite certain what view of biological teleology Burge endorses. Through most of the
book, his view seems to be pretty straight-forwardly Darwinian: to a first approximation, phenotypic
traits, mental or otherwise, are selected for their contribution to the fitness of individuals (or, perhaps of
species); and the function of a phenotypic trait is to do what it was selected for doing. Accordingly,
there is, as you would expect, much talk about the `basic’ biological needs of creatures, and the roles of
their phenotypes in securing the satisfaction of such needs . (For one typical passage among many, se c.
376-377). But there is also a beif passage in which Burge suggests that traits can function to augment a
creature’s “flourishng “ and I’m unclear how these two kinds of functioning are supposed fit together.
What seems clear is that flourishing can’t explain what selection for fitness is alleged to: viz why there
are teh phenotypes that there are. Also, thought it’s clear enough that many creatures manage to
survive, it’s far from obvious that there’s a lot of flourishing around. Lots of us are pretty depressed;
and, for all I knw, lots of dinosaurs were too.In what follows, I’ll suppose that Burge’s notion of teleology
is Darwinian more or less.
Since their contents are constituitive of the identity of mental states, and since coextensive mental
states can differ in their contents, Burge needs a story about how the process that mediates selection for
fitness distisnguishes among coextensive mental stattes that differ in content . Here’s a more or less
standard example: Frogs are famous for snapping at flies, which they ingest whenever they can. It’s thus
natural to say that flies are the `intensional objects` of fly snaps; flies are what frogs snap at. But what
excludes the alternative thesis that it’s little ambient black dots that frog’ s snap at? That is: what
excludes the thesis that little ambient black dots are what frogs see the flies they snap at as. On this
account, ambient black dots are what frogs like to eat, and catching them is what frogs have in mind
when they snap. In an ecology where the ambient black dots are generally flies and vice versa a
phenotypic disposition to snap at either would be equally good to satisfy the frog’s apatite. So, then ,
which do frogs have?
These kinds of puzzles about mental content are called `disjunction problems’ by philosophers whom
they trouble. Burge thinks that they are frivolous because they ignore the function of the traits that
constitute a creature’s phenotype. In the present case, frogs snap at flies because doing so provides
them with dinner, which is among the frog’s basic needs. So, a Darwinian sort of account of the
evolution of fly-snapping behavior solves its disjunction problem, but only if relevant facts about the
frog’s ecologicay are born nin mind. So: the notion of selection-for provides a notion of biological
function, which, in turn, fills the gap between mental states that are merely co-extensive and identical
mental states. Putative instances of the disjunction problem’ are artifacts of the characteristic
philosophic mistake of ignoring th empirical facts. Given TNS,there are no disjunction problems, so long
as all of the candidates are required to meet the test of `ecological validity’.
But that won’t do. Here as often elsewhere, Burge begs the issue by ignoring the intensionality of key
notions; in particular, the intensionality of `select for’ and `needs’. As previously remarked, since it’s
true (by assumption) that the ambient black dots generally are flies (and vice versa) in the frog’s ecology,
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a snap at either will serve a frog’s needs just as well as a snap at the other; in that ecology, frogs can get
flies to eat by snapping at ambient black dots. So the question `what does the frog see the thing it snaps
at as’ remains wide open, even if you attend to the frog’s needs, as Burge suggests that you should.
Likewise, of course, the question `what function was the frog’s snap selected for performing See how
high the tides of intensionality run. (fn)
---------------------Fn I think that appeals to ecological validity is a red herring in this context. Saying that snapping at flies
is what’s `ecologically vaild’ and that snapping at ambient black dots is not is just a way of saying that (all
else equal) the frog-snap wouldn’t have evolved in nearby worlds where there aren’t flies, but would
have evolved in (some) nearby worlds where there aren’t ambient black dots (perhaps, in those worlds,
the flies are red. ) So the appeal to ecological validity just replaces the worry about disjunction with a
worry about how the process of selection could distinguish between mental states that differ in
extension only in possible but nonactual worlds?’ After all, only actual causes can actually have effects.
See, once again, Fodor and Piatelli, (2010) where such matters are discussed at length). (Fat lot of good
that did us.)
-----------------It is, short, trivial to provide truth conditions for `creatures of type X need…’ and for `phenotypic trait T
is selected for…’ when TNS is assumed and `need’ and `select for’ are construed transparently. The
problem is to provide truth conditions in cases where `needs...’ and ‘ selected for...’ are construed
opaquely and, so far as I can tell, the sort of account of mental, content that Burge offers provides no
slightest clue. And they` can‘r be allowed to take in one and another’s wash.
This is, of course, not just an argument against Burge’s treatment of mental content; it is also an
argument of any Darwinan account of biological teleologyy. Biologists have told me, from time to time,
that TNS must be true because biological explanation must have access to a notion of biological function,
and only TNS can provide one. I don’t know whether it’s true that biology requires a notion of biological
function; it’s pretty clear that Burge thinks that psychology does. But whether or not it does is beside
the present question since TNS doesn’t provide one. Or rather, it does so only by playing on the
intensional ambiguity of `need’ ,`select for’ (and, for that matter, `explain’); which nobody ought to be
allowed to do. Not even Darwin.
Short form: It’s primarily in discussing `disjunction problems’ that Burge uses `perceive as’ explicitly and
extensively. That’s not surprising since a very natural way of phrasing a disjunction problem is: `what do
frogs see their prey as?’ Burge likes the idea that such questions are answered (or, perhaps, dismissed)
by appeals to psychological theories together with ecological facts of the sort that investigations in
macrobiology, physiology, zoology, and related empirical sciences may be assumed to provide. But that
doesn’t help; it just moves the problems about intensionality from one guy’s desk to another’s. `See as’
is intensional; but so too are `select for’. `function as’ (and, by the way, `explain’); so analogues to the
question `what do frogs snap at?’ arise, sooner or later, in every science whose domain extends
to`intensional systems’. (Gibsonians take note: `Affords’ is intensional too.) So, what do ambient flies
`afford’ to frogs? Food?, ambient Flies?, Lunch?, instantiated ambient-black-dotness? (Cf Fodor and
Pylyshyn (19xx)
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Conclusion
There are lots of morals to be drawn from the discussion we’ve been having. One is that it’s a bad idea to
beg questions about intensionality; another is that it’s a good idea not to ignore matters of empirical fact;
another is that that Darwin didn’t, after all, solve the problems about the empirical under-determination
of intensional content. I want to emphasize the first of these to round off the discussion.
Philosophers have, by and large, taken it for granted that intensionality is, par excellence, a topic in the
theory of mind (or perhaps in modal logic, which some hoped might solve the iintensionality problem in
the theory of mind.) There have been various suggestions about what psychology should do about
intensionality: One explicitly recommends that that psychology should give up on the mind and make do
with just the material brain. Another is that it should give up on matter and make do with the
immaterial mind. Another is that psychologists should give up on both matter and minds since
intensional explanation and neurological explanation are both just `stances’, hence merely `optional’.
And so forth. But whichever story is preferred, the view is that only psychologists and philosophers need
to worry about the problems intensional explanation appears to raise for psycbhology; and, on second
thought, maybe psychologists had better not bother.
In the event, however, that view has proved to be wildly optimistic. Issues about intensionality turn up
all over the place; not just in psychological and evolutionary explanations insofar as they are teleological,
but also in biological explanations insofar as they rely on such notions as `selection for’; and in historical
explanations; and in explanations in economics; and in political science; and God only knows where else
we would find them if we chose to look. The moral is: It’s overdue that we try to understand, in some
detail, just how intensional explanation works and, in particular, when it is appropriate in science and
when it isn’t. My objection to Burge’s book is largely that, by eliding the distinction between `see’ and
the like and `see as’ and the like, it distracts attention from that project.
I don’t know where such an inquiry might lead (though I suspect that, at a minimum, major revisions are
going to be required in theories about the fixation of phenotypes, TNS included). Suffice it that if, as
Burge rightly urges, it would be a good idea for philosophers to pay attention to relevant findings in the
sciences, it would likewise be a good idea for scientists to pay attention to relevant findings in
philosophy. Just for a change.
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