Page 78 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language and Mind
about the mind without theorizing about talk about the mind, but on the other hand it is important to avoid intellectualist or sententialist fallacies. It would be clearly fallacious to infer, from the fact that a true ascription of a thought was in English, the conclusion that the thought itself was in English. Equally, one cannot argue that the content of a person's perception was conceptualized by that person, simply from the fact that an ascriber conceptualizes the perception when he reports it. Yet it is sometimes legitimate to base a hypothesis about a mental representation upon facts and intuitions about the correctness or incor- rectness of certain ways of reporting it or talking about it. Many of the arguments employed by philosophers in the late twentieth century have attempted to do just this.
4. Contemporary Philosophical Background
Discussion has been strongly influenced by scientific naturalism, and by the idea that mental discourse is a 'folk theory.'
4.1 Science and Mental Phenomena
The natural sciences constitute our most successful and systematic body of knowledge. The scientific world view eschews supernatural entities and forces. Intentional phenomena have not yet been fully ex- plained by science, but it is desirable that psychology be integrated eventually with biology and physics. If this cannot be done, something will have to give, and naturalists fear that the likely loser will be our current conception of the mind. Philosophers have seen their task as that of investigating, in cooperation with the sciences, whether the mind can in principle be natu- ralized, and if so, how.
4.2 Folk Psychology
The terms and generalizations that ordinary people use to describe the mind (in particular concerning beliefs and desires) constitute a theory, so it is said, because the terms purport to denote states which are hidden inside the person, and the generalizations yield predictions and explanations by adverting to inter- actions among such states. It is nfolk theory, because it is taken for granted by everybody in the culture and is unreflectively transmitted by one generation to the next. From the ordinary person's point of view, it does not seem to be a theory at all. Philosophers, distancing themselves from the mental 'language game,' have sought to evaluate folk psychology by the same cri- teria they use to assess empirical theories in the phil- osophy of science. Are the theoretical terms to be construed in a realist or an instrumentalist way? If realist, do the terms in fact refer to real states and properties, and are the generalizations true? If there are such states and properties, are they reducible to the states and properties recognized by other branches of science? If they are not reducible, are they ground-
able? In the space of possible answers, almost every position has been occupied by someone or other (for surveys, see Fodor 1985; Dennett 1987).
There exist, of course, professionals concerned with mental states; academic and clinical psychologists bor- row these popular constructs. The question is whether this is good policy. The rise of interdisciplinary cog- nitive science has inspired searching critical reflection upon the very idea of mental representations. Prob- ably the dominant view has been that although folk psychology is flawed in some ways, much of it seems sound. Is it possible, permissible, or necessary to indi- viduate psychological states by their intentional con- tents? Eliminativists say it is retrograde (Churchland 1981) and observer-relative (Stich 1983), but their cen- sures have not persuaded many to drop the habit. What criteria of individuation should cognitive sci- ence use? Should it be methodologically solipsist? At what processing levels (personal and subpersonal) should contentful states be postulated?
Prescriptions for science are not the same as descrip- tions of folk psychology as it is. It seems sensible to get clear about the principles of classification which people actually use before passing judgment upon them. Many important discoveries about content- taxonomies were made in the 1980s.
4.3 Semantic Information Theory
Philosophers have also drawn upon the resources of a content-based theory that is distinct from folk psychology, namely, semantic information theory. Dretske (1981) has shown how to analyze the inten- tionality of natural information bearers (signals) in a wholly physicalist way. There can be no objection to employing this notion in science. Questions do arise, however, concerning its relation to the notion of men- tal intentionality. Some theorists hope that the notion of information will open the door to a reductive analy- sis, while others hold the two notions to be mutually irreducible.
4.4 Causal Efficacy of Content
Why does mental intentionality have question marks hanging over it? One reason is the suspicion that it is a mere epiphenomenon. Folk psychology treats the contents of mental states as causally relevant. When a desire and a belief jointly produce an action, their combined contents jointly determine which type of action is produced. But many theorists doubt whether contents can be causally efficacious; the popular assumption may be a myth. Their doubts spring from reflection upon the Hobbesian idea, exploited in Arti- ficial Intelligence, that ratiocination equals compu- tation. A digital computer is useful precisely because its internal states can be assigned external semantic values. The computer is programmed to juggle its internal states according to rules and thereby to model real-world operations upon the entities that are the
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