The Meaning Wars
by rsbakker
Apologies all for my scarcity of late. Between battling snow and Sranc, I’ve scarce had a moment to sit at this computer. Edward Feser has posted “Post-intentional Depression,” a thorough rebuttal to my Scientia Salon piece, “Back to Square One: Toward a Post-Intentional Future,” which Peter Hankins at Conscious Entities has also responded to with “Intellectual Catastrophe.” I’m interested in criticisms and observations of all stripes, of course, but since Massimo has asked me for a follow-up piece, I’m especially interested in the kinds of tactics/analogies I could use to forestall the typical tu quoque reactions eliminativism espouses.
Three Pound Brain 
Feser wrote:
>>it is, to say the least, by no means clear how the eliminativist can state his position in a way that does not entail that at least some intentional notions track reality. For the eliminativist claims that commonsense intentional psychology is false and illusory; he claims that eliminativism is evidentially supported by or even entailed by science; he proposes alternative theories and models of human nature; and so forth. Even if the eliminativist can drop reference to “beliefs” and “thoughts,” he still typically makes use of “truth,” “falsehood,” “theory,” “model,” “implication,” “entailment,” “cognitive,” “assertion,” “evidence,” “observation,” etc. Every one of these notions is also intentional. Every one of them therefore has to be abandoned by a consistent eliminativist. <<
You're basically going to have to address how each one of those words are heuristic shortcuts for something that is ultimately physical. "Truth" for instance… when they brain detects a 'truth', what is actually happening? There's not some Magic Platonic Realm that is suddenly accessed. No, it's just lipid membranes fusing and releasing neurotransmitter in response to certain other neurotransmission patterns. Truth is a FORM, a relationship that has been selected for because it has Darwinian implications, not because it Ultimate and Holy.
That's a hard sell, but it's what you're peddling. (It's an even harder to sell when you argue that something tightly linked to our value systems, like pain qualia are to be viewed exactly the same way, which paves the way for the complete elimination of morality/ethics/normativity.)
Off topic: What do you mean by elimination, Jorge? That seems to suggest an organised responce by individuals to the matter, so they all enforce upon themselves responding the same way?
I think truth is a wonderful heuristic, an example of how imposing all or nothing clarity (bivalence) on problems makes them far, far cheaper to solve. The frustrating thing is that all I need do is pose this to demolish the tu quoque. All I need is an alternative interpretation, no matter how sketchy, and then their claim that I’m begging one of the millions of interpretations offered by intentionalists goes up in smoke. So the question is, why can’t they see this?
Truth seeking is the intrinsically efficacious act of solving of problems to produce solutions. An alternative interpretation of “truth as heurestic” that challenges the belief of intrinsic efficacy still looks to a truth seeker like an attempt to “solve for the problem of what is truth” since it unavoidably “challenges what is held as true.” And as we already know how to classify this kind of activity, regardless of Scott’s protestations that he’s doing something different, he’s really not doing anything different than garden variety truth seeking. Tu quoque! You’ve demolished nothing!
The circularity of “explanation are X, all alternative statements are still explanations, therefore all alternatives are still X” cannot be countered by anything that looks like an explanation, since posing any particular alternative doesn’t actually make the activity of posing explanations itself look any less like an attempt at problem solving.
considering that image:
100 (base 8) = 64 (base 10)
100 (base 10 = 64 (base 16)
100 (base 16) = 64 (base 42)
sequence ends as there is no integer N such that
100 (base 42) = 64 (base N)
How many rows must a mouse walk down?
Between battling snow and Sranc
So TUC has Sranc in it?
REVELATION! 🙂
One way to forestall tu quoque objections is to make them the center of attention. Obviously we’re dealing with a species of self-refutation argument, i.e., arguments that attempt to justify the rejection of t on the basis of t’s purportedly being self-refuting.
In fact, though, these arguments are generally taken to do more, at least by those who advance them: namely, they’re seen not only as licensing the rejection of t1, but also the adoption of (or, more likely, the continued assent to) t2. Here’s where self-refutation meets abduction. It’s worth at least noting, though, that these are two very distinct argumentative steps. Even if BBT is self-refuting, that does not in itself license us in assenting to any competing theory.
No theory can live off abduction alone, nor abduction + pragmatism (of whatever stripe) — at least, not with a clear and honest intellectual conscience. (What if suspension of judgment is the most rational position to take with respect to theory?)
I’ve noticed a curious asymmetry in how philosophers respond to purportedly self-refuting arguments. The difference turns on whether the arguments are seen as underwriting a consequent abductive move. There may well be a technical term for it, but it’s just something I’ve noticed. ‘T’ stands for ‘theory.’ If t1 undermines p1, where p1 is a proposition which we passionately accept on the basis of t2, then t1’s purported self-refutation is seen as sufficient to license the rejection of t1 and the continued acceptance of p1 and t2. Now consider t3, which undermines p2, which is a proposition we take to be trivially true. In this case, the tendency is to continue assenting to p2 while considering t3 to present us with a perplexing paradox, one that requires, from a purely rational perspective, a straightforward response (though the need, of course, is not pressing).
Some examples. The BBT undermines p1 (some proposition of folk psychology), which we accept (let us suppose) on the basis of t2 (= folk psychology). It is argued that, by the lights of t2, the BBT is self-refuting. Therefore, (a) the BBT must be mistaken, (b) the BBT requires no direct response, i.e., it does not require refutation, and (c) we are licensed in continuing to assent to t2… by the lights of t2. (Circularity rears its head.)
Now consider an Eleatic paradox. T3, the argument to the effect that coming-to-be is impossible, undermines p3, the commonsense proposition that coming-to-be is possible. Here, t3 (which presumably came to be, in some sense) is self-refuting. Yet we do not passionately assent to p3; we simply take it to be trivially true and so assume that there must be a response to t3. In this case, t3 is treated as a genuine problem that requires direct refutation. Even if t3 is not believed, it remains a puzzle; and its ‘incredibility’ is in no way seen as licensing the acceptance of any alternative theory of being and becoming.
All of this is pretty crude, and perhaps the examples aren’t the best ones; but the point is significant, more so than it probably seems, I think. What it points to is one of the myriad ways in which the prejudices of philosophers inform their reasoning.
One question to pose vis-a-vis the BBT is the extent to which it is immanent, i.e., the extent to which it involves a reductio ab absurdum of folk psychology. For in that case, the BBT would (like ancient skepticism, in my view) — at least insofar as it is a theory — function like a purgative that drains itself away along with the humors it was administered to treat, i.e., it would incorporate self-refutation as a positive argumentative moment.
In short: one person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens.
The whole thing turns on our prior, generally unspoken commitments. As Nietzsche put it: “In every philosophy there is a point where the philosopher’s ‘conviction’ steps onto the stage: or, to use the language of an ancient Mystery, ‘in came the ass / beautiful and very strong.'”
“In short: one person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens”
Copyright that!
I think you’re dead on with ‘Trivially True T2,’ and that this means that rationalization is pretty much all the intentionalist can do. This is what makes all the metacognition stuff so dialectically crucial, why I’m always asking intentionalists to evidence their ‘intuitive picture.’ But this is the thing: NONE OF THEM HAVE, EVER! Not one. And I have pressed and pressed and pressed. It strikes me as such an obviously religious moment in their positions… but…
“The whole thing turns on our prior, generally unspoken commitments.”
I actually don’t think this is the case at all, though I think the notion (what Churchland calls ‘linguaformalism’) is all but forced on us by where reflection finds itself on within the greater brain-environment food chain. The nature of the implicit is the very thing at stake in this debate. Because our own verbal reports are all we have access to, we have a strong tendency to attribute verbal properties to what makes this or that verbal report possible–the same way we naturally personify God. I’m saying that we have no implicit commitments whatsoever, though the positing of commitments helps us solve a good number of nontheoretical communicative imbroglios, the same as fetishizing money does. The larger argument is that we need some new way of understanding ourselves as linguistically post-facto… Oof! That just gave me a Lacanian shudder! I should have said as post-intentionally linguistically post-facto.
So my frustration begins, you could say, right at the ‘presupposition presupposition.’
Sure — I’m happy to accept the idea that talk of ‘presuppositions’ and the like is heuristic. But whatever they actually ARE, they’re quite important, just as beliefs (whatever they are) are important. (Or is this too much agnosticism for you?)
Not at all. They’re absolutely crucial posits in everyday discourse. The question is one of whether they begin to short-circuit when extended to theoretical contexts. This is basically what the ancient Greeks taught us to do: to systematically apply domain specific cognitive systems to domain general problems. Heuristic neglect allows us to understand why the ancient skeptics were actually pretty sharp cognitive scientists! They enumerate all the discursive phenomena pertaining to heuristic misapplication, which they can only diagnose as a general incapacity given the information available, then propose that we restrict the application of our cognitive tools to more tractable problem-ecologies. But since they lacked the information to decisively distinguish their theoretical case from the theoretical activity of philosophers, they found themselves singing their own version of the tu quoque blues!
The last time I got into a debate about morality and suggested that I could commit to liberal humanist moral values without believing in their intrinsic justification because I felt my emotional attachments alone were enough for me, I got yelled at by a supposedly disinterested third party that “morality without reason is no morality at all.” Suffice it to say, my views were not taken to be very convincing.
I foresee this talk around beliefs going down a similar road. Righteousness or Love may feel like the most self evidently important things in the world when you’re in the throes of them, and they may have important functions in promoting social cohesion or gene propagation, but the functionalist “importance” of the latter is not the kind of intrinsic importance that’s so intensely felt, and felt to be backed by some inexplicable yet obvious form of reason.
Beliefs in general and the arguments that surround them may not turn out to be so different. “Beliefs are functionally important as heurestic problem solving tools” is not the kind of reasoned justification that’s demanded by the feelings of “beliefs are intrinsically important in the way it elevates us as human beings.” Even offering the physicalist underpinnings of how such a heuristic system could operate on say a biochemical level is not going to satisfy those intensely felt cravings for the objective confirmation of their specialness.
Thus the inevitability of Akratic Society…
Were there ever completely non-akratic societies ?
Societies are nothing but machines that use humans as spare parts.
There always is some degree of akrasia (from a singular-human POV) when dealing with a society, though of course the degree and kind differs between societies
What is so-called “patriotism” if not a severe, dangerous and widespread form of akrasia ?
I actually don’t think this is the case at all, though I think the notion (what Churchland calls ‘linguaformalism’) is all but forced on us by where reflection finds itself on within the greater brain-environment food chain.
That doesn’t qualify as a commitment?
Or am I off on the common use of the word commitment? I’ll pay that I could well be. But I don’t know unless I’m told.
I made a post but maybe wordpress spam thing ate it? Tried to repost and it said it was a duplicate, so the post did get to the server.
Okay, I’ll try posting it as a reply instead:
I dunno if you’ve got this base covered already, but that ‘performative contradiction’ stuff is super annoying. From a discussion over at concious entities (sample size of one, though), it’s a two fold problem – the first is the contradiction stuff. But even if you say the idea is what if the denail of concious content came from something other than concious content, then there is the next stage. That being they shift your intention (don’t move the goalpost – move the ball!) and treat it as if you are purely making a claim and you need to prove it. This is the hardest part since they have given up on speculating on things, like speculating how a denial could come from something other than their ‘concious content’ notion. Well, to me that seems the hardest part as their speculative imagination on this matter seems to have been snuffed out by them. I think the imagination is a kind of ‘want to’ thing, and trying to force it to activate not only probably wont work but is also a bit morally wrong as I measure it (yeah, yeah, I’m bringing ‘moral’ into an argument like this). Forcing their imagination is like forcing a players imagination (or DMs imagination) in D&D. Just because your imagination is raring to go on it doesn’t mean that everyones ready to go on this.
At the very least though you can pitch it not as you having to prove it, but as an invitation to them to speculate on a source of a denial that does not come from concious content. Then, going by CE, they stop talking to you, heh!
Scott, I posted anonymous on his blog:”Very interesting article and reply to Scott. Maybe what the fantasy author has done is taken an extreme position, but it doesn’t need to be proven because it is actually happening in the world now. We may call it science but it is no different than what the fantasy author, philosopher, political scientist or financial person traffics in when they buy and sell toxic assets that cause stock market crashes. Science is not special because it is just another system of language shared across people from the same cultures so the outsider who doesn’t speak it may not understand the food he is buying, the candidate he votes for, the investments he puts his life savings into etc. or dehumanization of the “customer”. The apocalyptic scenario is under way right now.”
Or can we say, the lump under the hallway carpet is actually the human person.
Cool. I wonder, though. Is Feser a techno-optimist? I haven’t had a chance to check out any of his other views.
But you may be onto something: pressing the intentionalist into the thresher of the posthuman tends to give them fits.
It has echos of the Chalmers Zombie debate because two eliminativists talking to one another don’t have to exchange intentional terms, just when they are forced to talk to an intentionalist, they can simulate intentional concepts.
Or like the military strategists discussing a map of battle and calculating collateral damage.
The extent that your rhetoric resembles fundamentalist Christian eschatology makes me want to
throw a bible at ittread carefully.I mean I think you’re probably right. But to someone who’s fully assured you’re wrong and doesn’t believe your so called signs of the apocalypse are already evident, any insistence that it doesn’t matter what they believe because the Truth will come knocking soon enough, is going to smell a lot less like disinterested reporting and a lot more like irrational chest beating.
I fear that until the apocalyptic scenario is so evident as to be impossible to ignore any longer, motivated reasoning won’t have any trouble dismissing any such “reality cudgel” affirmations out of hand.
Okay, first things first, do I understand correctly that your “opponent” here is of some, shall we say, supernatural and/or idealistic position (I don’t recall reading Feser’s works, but his staunch insistence on using “scientism” as an insult is indicative of a certain predisposition to shall we say non-materialistic theories of mind) ?
If so, mayhaps it would be prudent not to engage, since there is obviously little merrit in debating with people who live in goddamn Lovecraft County?
I mean, you get nothing, and you distract him from the obviously 🙂 important job of fending off Yog-Sothoth.
Either neuroscientists or AI folks will eventually eat his philosophical lunch, and also maybe his literal lunch (when his tenure gets cut because anyone can buy a supernaturalistically-inclined AI philosopher lifetime license from Microsoft for 100$).
Also, I have found the following amusing:
For we cannot possibly be wrong about commonsense intentional psychology
What a pitifully blinkered thing for a philosopher to say.
In the words of a certain fictional character quite dear to my heart, oh, such a limited imagination!
I mean, I find it entirely plausible that the human mind can not effectively function without “intentionality” (it appears that Dr. Feser’s certainly can’t), but to claim that this confers any information regarding the “rightness” of ” commonsense intentional psychology” (and “obviously” so) is downright pathetic.
Our dear sense of intentionality and/or “aboutness” could be as real as our sense of uninterrupted motion when watching an animated cartoon, or as any other of our perceptions subverted by numerous well-documented and popular perceptive illusions.
There is absolutely nothing obvious in this affair (and do note that I say this despite not exactly being partial to the “hard” intentionality skepticism of BBT due to experience as a programmer, but I have commented on this issue numerous times and probably there’s no reason to do this one more time)
Even if “commonsense intentional psychology” is the only mode of thought we (as, sadly, merely human thinkers) are capable of entertaining, it could still turn out that “commonsense intentional psychology” is very wrong.
And all that would mean is that future philosophical discoveries will be made by a better mind.
A perfect philosopher. Its cognitive perfection matched only by its sincerity.
A thinker… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or burdens of humanity.
😀
Why not?
For we cannot possibly be wrong…
Man, that’s both the hardest and the easiest to argue, all in one.
Well, if one is cursed with a very limited imagination, “cannot possibly be wrong” / “this is obvious/self-evident” lines of reasoning probably do become surprisingly easy to argue!
I look at all these encounters as opportunities to rattle and be rattled. What I would really like to see from at least one of them is some different kind of approach: arguing against the tu quoque certainly does feel like arguing against religion – you’re right about that!
Actually, exocerebrum suggests that Edward Feser is an actual, real-life Thomist.
So you are, indeed, arguing against religion in this particular instance 😀
You can’t debate with those who deny what is necessary and self-evident, only demonstrate that in doing so they also necessarily assume it and are contradicting themselves. This is why Aristotle in his Metaphysics says that the first principles (e.g. principle of non-contradiction) can’t be demonstrated but only defended via Reduction ad absurdum.
What I think Dr. Feser is pointing out is that aspects of human psychology are necessary and evident to every conscious (or perhaps better, thinking) human being. You, for example, are either conscious or you are not. But any time you are certain you are conscious, then you are affirming something known to yourself – you wouldn’t need to ask people if you are conscious (for most, that would just be begging the question in a way – imagine someone asking you your opinion – there’d be no point in telling an unconscious person my opinion!).
Again if, for example, you are faking sleeping I cannot be certain from looking at you whether you are thinking or not; you, however, would know (and wouldn’t need anyone else to tell you). Thus when people make the point that every thought is always about something, they are appealing to a necessary truth that is evident to every thinker and evident in every thought. If you are not thinking about something, then you can’t be talking about anything either. So intentionalists can always push that point.
Well, there are numerous psychiatric conditions where people explicitly deny being conscious or alive (and are not swayed when the very fact of participating in a discussion about their state is pointed out)
A person with “classical” (there are others) version of Cotard delusion “knows” that s/he is not alive and is convinced this “fact” is self-evident, much like an intentionalist is convinced intentional thought is self-evident.
Apparently, being “alive” and “conscious” is neither necessary nor self-evident for having a chat for someone with Cotard, and an unusually smart person with Cotard could use the very argument Feser uses
But hey, that’s a delusion, let’s get something more weird.
People in various trance-like states and during sleepwalking carry out acts that appear intentional and later deny any involvement in them.
I’ve once had an hour-long discussion about edge detection neurobiology in feline eyesight with a woman who was in, ah, shall we say, a particularly unconventional trance state at the time (It was kind of unfortunate when she snapped out of it mid-sentence. I should have taken notes, cat eyesight is kinda cool) and was completely incoherent (unable to meaningfully answer even simple questions a-la “are you okay”) outside of cat discussion.
Was the precious “intentionality” still there while the “self” was seemingly on a figurative vacation ?
Do people who carry out coherent actions during a sleepwalking episode have “intentionality” intact? Do people who talk when sleepwalking talk “about” something?
You see, I am, myself, not partial to the very radical claim that intentionality does not exist in the sense phlogiston does not exist, but the whole schtick with asserting intentionality as “necessary” on the basis of your opponent “having an intentionality” kind of bursts at the seams when one but glances at the vast array of documented “altered” mind-states (and there probably are ones we haven’t yet documented because they have no overt signs or medical relevance).
At most, he can prove that I or Scott are unavoidably intentional.
That says exactly zilch about whether this “intentional experience” is a strict prerequisite for human-level cognition (It may just be a particularly common feature, much like a “verbalized stream of consciousness” is a common feature) , and says exactly zilch about whether “intentionality” as usually defined in philosophical discourse (“the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs”) has any particular, well, “function” beyond “being a quirk of how the most common philosopher brain model operates”
Hello 01,
People can also explicitly deny that 2+2=4. A person could do addition all day long and after deny they were doing any math. What is your point?
Hi Timocrates!
My point is, simply, that Feser’s objection does not confer anything beyond observation that “intentionality” (presumably the “mental” kind, because “dispositional” intentionality does not appear to be incompatible even with most vicious and vulgar reductionism/eliminativism) is an inalienable feature of both Feser’s and Scott’s current thought process (upon some contemplation, it doesn’t even live up to being a claim about how “typical philosopher brain” works, merely how a typical brain works in its “current”, “default” state)
It would be fine and dandy if there weren’t a large number of exotic mind-states where seemingly crucial and self-evident aspects of “thought” are conspicuously absent.
I mean, it could very well be that “intentionality” is a necessary feature of “conscious thought” and is intrinsically linked to some crucial aspect of “thinking things”, but it is not something you prove by an argumentative trick that boils down to “why don’t you try ‘thinking’ and ‘proving’ without ‘intentionality’, har har har har!”.
The fact that you and me happen to be “intentionality-enabled” and can’t think without “intentionality” does not prove anything beyond a trivial statement about how the brains of yours and mine currently operate.
Timocrates, say, do you have a “verbalized stream of consciousness”, that is, are your “thoughts” constructed of a kind of words (usually, but not necessarily, in your native language) ? This is not a trick/rhetorical question.
I’ve had Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and intentionalists tell me this, only for them, the demonstration lies in the afterlife. You need to appreciate how unconvincing this tack is for people who don’t already agree with you.
How do you to distinguish between 1) Every thought is about something, and 2) Every thought is metacognized as ‘about something’?
Keep in mind that insisting on (1) creates far more problems that it solves. You’re literally arguing for interminable controversy, insofar as no intentionalist has a clue as to what aboutness is. An emergent property of the brain? A functional property of the mind? A functional property of social interactions?
“You’re literally arguing for interminable controversy, insofar as no intentionalist has a clue as to what aboutness is. An emergent property of the brain? A functional property of the mind? A functional property of social interactions?”
OOooooh, I wanna bite this one!
Suggestion (not really a definition, more like, freeform bullshit inspired by all this philosophical outpouring 🙂 ):
aboutness is a property of all systems that extract actionable information from sensory/data feeds, build predictive models, and carry out specific actions that alter so-called “external world” to maximize probability of specific events (“ends” if you will).
It’s kind of hard to properly “pin down”, but this definition of aboutness does appear open to a more formal redefinition (with criteria and whatnot) and even making some sort of prediction that is falsifiable (for instance, we would be liable to find some kind of structure containing some kind of medium establishing the set of criteria for detecting external circumstances the probability of which system is supposed to maximize. Like, say, congenital connectome features in living beings with a nervous system)
It might have fucked up edge cases (does natural selection have some kind of “aboutness”? Do species of bacteria that have “evolvability adaptations” have aboutness at the species scale?) but they aren’t very problematic (even if natural selection has an “aboutness” of sorts under this proto-definition, so fucking what? there’s no reason why profoundly inhuman processes can’t have an aboutness of their own)
Why not just say that systems possess manifold environmental relationships that they cannot access/cognize and so must cognize in some manner that neglects these relationships, and that this is what strikes us as ‘aboutness’ in reflection? There doesn’t need to be any mystery.
I think because important information about properties of a certain kind of systems would be lost.
Some systems don’t just possess a manifold relationships (a rock possesses a lot of complex relationships with the world around it, just ask any geologist).
The “analytic/predictive” ability as well as posession of some kind of “goal system” (however philosophically arbitrary and implementationally trivial might such goal system be) is not a trivial distinction.
This set of properties makes such systems very dangerous (compared to systems that lack such properties, such as the rocks).
In fact, the more complex and flexible the information-processing and prediction/anticipation part gets, the more dangerous system becomes (a single tiger is more dangerous than a whole shitton of flesh-rending tropical ants)
If I were fond of evopsych kind of perspective :), I would have said 🙂 that it’s exactly why we have a heuristic for finding such properties in non-cospecifics, and why this heuristic tends to overdetect so wildly (so that we tend to ascribe intentional/”aboutness”-like properties to any dangerous shtick we stumble upon).
If it was just a matter of social interactions, some stupid pheromone crap would fit the bill just as well.
The cost of failing to detect a thing that is capable of “goal-oriented, adaptive behavior” simply because it doesn’t look like a cospecific is huge.
The cost of accidentally ascribing “aboutness-like” properties to a storm or a buttload of rocks falling from an unstable cliff is tiny
BTW, maybe that’s why the most “intuitive” AI trope is the murderous, destructive AI. We are biased to see “other’s aboutness” as an inherently perilous thing.
And there isn’t any proper “mystery” in the proposed pseudo-definition of aboutness as well.
There’s weirdness (bacteria and abstractish groups such as “species” end up having a kind of “aboutness), but no mystery.
And oh, BTW, I have my own (somewhat half-arsed) answer to this particular “why not” question, but it is strictly materialist (though perhaps not as massively eliminative as BBT) 🙂
Contrary to Feser, I think it’s pretty clear that an eliminativist doesn’t have to worry about whether her pseudosymbols are “coherent,” since coherence is a noncausal relation between symbols, the existence of which the eliminativist denies. Does the eliminativist need to say even that eliminativism is true whereas intentional psychology is false? In other words, does the eliminativist need to step into the arena of illusions and do a little song and dance which she must consider to be an absurd and trivial byproduct of the mechanistic flow of natural reality?
The incoherence objection raised by Feser (and by me in my discussions with RSB) always leads me to meditate on what a thoroughgoing eliminativist would actually do. Would she say anything at all? That is, would she use a language? Perhaps, but only with the thought “in mind” that she uses the symbols purely for their causal power, not for their meaning. She says X or Y to have this or that effect. This means she’s not interested in the question of whether eliminativism and scientific “theories” are true, coherent, logical (free of fallacies), or reasonable (offering reasons by way of recommending that others should share her “beliefs”). None of that should matter to someone who “thinks” that the world consists solely of patterns of causes and effects.
As far as I can see, then, the eliminativist is committed to pragmatism, to being interested more in consequences than in meanings or reasons. It’s not a question of whether eliminativism “entails” pragmatism, as Feser would say, but of whether the eliminativist would choose to participate in the real world or in the screen of illusions.
Need an illusion be understood in terms of meaning or falsehood? It certainly could be, but an illusion could also be a type of disempowering experience. That’s how an eliminativist should see it, anyway.
But again, Ben, how are you interpreting ‘coherence’? As things systematically hanging together in actually or potentially effective relationships that we have developed? Or as something intrinsically normative, belonging to a noncausal order of existence independent of the natural? What you need to demonstrate is 1) the necessity of the latter story, and 2) the evidential basis of the latter story. But of course, no one has even come close to providing either (1) or (2).
We have these heuristic ways of seeing the world, ways that allow us to navigate environments sans causal information. This is simply a fact of bounded cognition. When you reflect on these ways, they strike you as more than simply ways, I appreciate that. We have no direct metacognitive access to nature of our cognitive toolbox, the kinds of tools in it, or their limitations – this is just another fact. I talk about money doing things all the time. Does the fact that I talk about money this way mean I’m committed to the claim that money has some kind of intrinsic efficacy? Of course not. I need to use these heuristic systems, not your supernatural interpretations of them.
What you continually do is equivocate the idiom with your interpretation of the idiom. No is disputing that we use the idiom, just your interpretation. Pending (1) and (2), you have offered no reason why anyone should buy your interpretation.
Scott, I was actually trying to defend eliminativism from Feser’s objections, since I don’t care for the smug Catholic type. But I don’t think your redefinition of “coherent” is the way to go. The sense which Feser assumes is the word’s primary meaning, and it has to do with the logical, normative relationship which the eliminativist rejects as illusory. This isn’t my “interpretation” of the idiom, though. It’s the number one definition of the word in all English dictionaries.
The secondary meaning has to do with a physical sticking together or a harmony of parts. I don’t think the latter meanings apply since there’s no sense in which the parts of eliminativism hang together once we ignore the symbols’ meanings as irrelevant. The symbols become mere squiggles.
Do the symbols have a pattern of causes and effects? Is there anything “systematic” in the coherence of parts? Most importantly, can that reductive definition capture the patterns in view in the first definition? If not, this definition merely changes the topic. That is, you might as well use a different word and say that the question of eliminativism’s coherence is irrelevant and Feser’s begging the question in favour of normativity and intentionality, given his assumption that eliminativism should be logical in the primary (i.e. standard, conventional) sense.
We are a captive of our cognitive capacities as they are: we simply cannot intuitively follow complicated sets of relationships, but we need to, desperately, in order to successfully navigate our environments. As a result, certain kinds of circumstances trigger certain, unconscious ‘simplifying assumptions’: rather than cognize the evolutionary and personal history that knapped our mechanic into someone who can repair, rather than look at him differentially, we look at him substantivally, as possessing knowledge. Same with words and their ‘meanings.’ We are likewise adrift when it comes to the question of what governs these apparent ‘things’: they certainly don’t behave the way other things do! Suddenly you need a dynamics to account for these simplifying assumptions.
Certain ‘squiggles’ articulated in certain ways possess the structure required to cue the application of noncausal cognitive systems. This is just a fact of human cognition. When you map the perpetually confounded notion of symbols across this fact, suddenly you have a way to dissolve the confounds. Symbols are a kind of indispensable, simplifying assumption. Lacking any information to this effect, they strike metacognition as something more.
So you ask:
“Do the symbols have a pattern of causes and effects? Is there anything “systematic” in the coherence of parts? Most importantly, can that reductive definition capture the patterns in view in the first definition? If not, this definition merely changes the topic. That is, you might as well use a different word and say that the question of eliminativism’s coherence is irrelevant and Feser’s begging the question in favour of normativity and intentionality, given his assumption that eliminativism should be logical in the primary (i.e. standard, conventional) sense.”
Simplifying assumptions have a pattern of causes and effects, certainly, but ones inaccessible to the simplifying assumer. Since the pattern cognized in the first instance amounts to a way to solve absent causal information, it should come as no surprise that the provision of that information jams the works. But how does this ‘change the topic’? The explanandum remains the same. The only way I can see your point if you’re making the normativist mistake of assuming that the inability of causal cognition to do the things that noncausal cognition can do somehow means that noncausal cognition can only be solved via noncausal cognition, which is to say, that it is something intrinsically noncausal.
I don’t know what knowledge is supposed to be if it lacks simplifying assumptions. I suppose a set of symbols or squiggles that doesn’t simplify the facts would amount to a doppelganger universe, one as complex as the present one, each part of which bearing a correspondence relation to the twin part of this universe. Short of creating that second universe made of symbols, we simplify. Scientists simplify too, which is why their laws are really ceteris paribus or more like context-sensitive models than universally applicable generalizations. They’re true only in situations that meet the conditions assumed by the models and because the real-world conditions seldom do so perfectly, the model ends up simplifying the facts.
You’ve lost me regarding coherence and changing the topic. Do you want to say that eliminativism as a theory should be in some sense coherent? If so, what’s the sense? Are the squiggles that make up the “theory” supposed to physically hang together, which suffices to make them coherent in a way that should silence Feser’s objection? I honestly don’t see the point of such a response. Why not just admit that coherence as the standard concept it is is part of the problem (the illusion) and say that eliminativism’s strength lies elsewhere, namely in its pioneering work to get us to appreciate the underlying mechanistic reality?
But the issue is one of what those simplifying assumptions are: part of a spooky, intrinsically intentional ontology possessing some mysterious connection to nature, or simply more nature, only embedded in human cognition in such a way as to perennially generate the illusion of spooky ontologies. I’m saying that if you look at these simplifications via the lens of heuristics and neglect, you no longer need the traditional circus of intentional philosophical claims.
That said, I’m still not clear on what you argument for the intentional circus is. What is it?
Let me phrase the coherence issue as a question. How does refusing to attribute intrinsic intentionality to coherence amount to changing the topic unless you assume that intrinsic intentionality is essential to coherence? What evidences this assumption? Why can’t coherence be mechanical?
I actually think I know what’s tripping you up, but I’m interested in hearing your responses to these.
Now I am fully convinced biologists have exorcised thick notions of design or of purposes from their explanatory purview scott. Monod’s essay I think was classically wishy washy on this matter! But I think he is right to start with information at the molecular level and to work up to how certain selectivities could scale up the levels, and so on.
I am NOT, rather
I’d say that the entire “coherence argument” is a red herring.
Whether a human mind can indeed formulate its claims regarding a given theory without invoking intentional constructs has no bearing on whether intentional “phenomena” are anything more than cognitive “bugs”.
A human mind is incapable of perceiving the concave interior side of a mask as anything other than a “properly convex” face (unless afflicted by certain diseases), yet we don’t claim that the mask is actually “geometrically anomalous” and “convex on both ends”.
A smarter man that me would probably tackle this by taking some perceptually counterintuitive but experimentally verified scientific concept like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as a parallel example and apply as many of Feser’s same folk objections and as much of his incredulity as possible. So “solidicism” born of folk physics has to be true and it’s incoherent that a “probabilicist” who speak of “post-positionality” can still talk about shapes, boundaries, and even objects, while flippantly insisting that there’s not such thing as a traditionally conceived solid that can rest in what normal people would call a set location because really everything consists of probability superpositions. We can and indeed constantly do describe something as here, 4 by 6 by 10, or across the room, without ever bringing probability into it. Yet the everyday and more importantly inescapable notion of position itself becomes incoherent when it’s made quantitatively dependent on some other factor such as momentum.
But then again I think this won’t actually convince anyone who doesn’t already believe you. Examples like this only work when they are both counterintuitive and verified, but it’s so blatantly counterintuitive that any comparison to post-intentionality is just going to make that argument seem even more obviously and inherently wrong.
And I have used this tack on many occasions: it’s very good at reminding everyone that human cognition is bounded, and that the information provided by the sciences often shows our prescientific intuitions to blinkered in very deceptive ways. I’m not quite as pessimistic as you are on the dialectical front, though, Frank. No one is ever convinced by any philosophical argument, but they do have their eyes opened to the possibility of alternatives, and this is what makes it possible for individuals to jump ship once they finally understand just how fruitless traditional philosophy can be. I think, anyway.
Scott, you aren’t their tenure’s rescue ranger.
Why do you care if they fail to jump ship?
They’ve had a good run, they wrote a ton of books (and thus murdered a fuckton of trees 🙂 ), they’ve had tenure, fancy conferences, maybe even wanton sex (do philosophers have orgies at their weird conferences, or do they sit there all day, discussing minutiae of highbrow hypothetical constructs? Honest question, since I’ve never been to a philosophy conference).
It was a good life of a not-so-good movement.
But now, all their models and beliefs and precious hypotheses will be lost in time like tears in rain… Time… to die (for their philosophical project, that is)
If all else fails, trust the Cudgel.
Scott, if I may ask (an easy one).
If I understand correctly, BBT proposes that “intentional phenomena” are either implementation peculiarities of heuristic processes a mind uses to make predictions about external agents in a computationally efficient way (predicting what Alice would do without having to actually somehow implement a “copy” of Alice), and, on some occasions, glitches/neglects in said heuristics (which is supposed to be more common when we try to clumsily introspect our own selves, and end up with a turbulent, vivid “ecosystem” of various ill-organized absurdities like “Id” or shit whatnot)
Right?
If so, my question is, how come this is even considered “eliminativist” ?
Eliminative materialism is supposed to explain away “weird stuff” by demonstrating that it simply does not exist, and here we see that said “stuff” is actually a thing that exists, at least to the extent the server OS supporting this blog or a “database backend” can be said to “exist”.
Am I mistunderstanding EM? BBT? Both?
Because it eliminates intrinsic (or ‘original’) intentionality from the picture, the last of the ghosts. Philosophy and cognitive science remain rife with these ghosts, as absurd as I know it sounds to many from outside the institutions. Whether we keep or eliminate a given intentional term entirely depends on the effectiveness of those terms in different problem ecologies.
“Because it eliminates intrinsic (or ‘original’) intentionality from the picture, the last of the ghosts.”
But by that kind of standard, anything short of a literal god coming down from the heavens to massage potions into a philosopher’s figurative wounds and give the philosopher in question a (hopefully somewhat less figurative) blowjob would be considered “eliminativist” !
Even if we discover that organic brains contain a previously undocumented substance directly responsible for intentional phenomena (with humans simply having the highest concentration of this hypothetical chemical), that would still be “eliminativist” because that will just mean that intentional phenomena are just a special kind of “doped up” neurochemistry (which is in no way better than “a cunning heuristic algorithm”)
I’m not sure I follow.
My objection is, basically, that any kind of explanation (even absurdly fantastic) short of outright magical one (a god, preferably a blowjob god) would be considered “eliminative” by that kind of standard.
I think it’s a little bit strange to claim that Einstein’s relativity is “eliminative” to Newtonian laws of motion in the same sense that oxidation is eliminative with regards to phlogiston and phlogistication.
By same token, it’s a little bit strange (to me, lol 🙂 … to paraphrase an uncanny joke, I’m not a philosopher, I just stole a mask of one) to claim that a theory that proposes that “intentionality” is a kind of heuristic somehow “eliminates” intentionality.
Okay, here’s an opinion suggested by a shoulder-surfing third party:
It is doubtful whether BBT eliminates the original meaning of “intentionality”, at least as long as we take the original meaning to be simply “the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs”.
Intentionality could be anything, from a quantum shenanigan to implementation quirk of algorithm for efficient modelling of complex environments to outright magical “soul goastes” and still satisfy that kind of vague definition.
Eliminativism is primarily concerned with scientific theoretical vocabularies, how we need to naturalistically understand everyday things like ‘aboutness’ to advance beyond all the old controversies. Aboutness will continue to be used, but like ‘design’ in evolutionary discourse, it will no longer belong to the ontology of scientific discourse. It will have been eliminated.
But current definition of “mental” intentionality hardly belongs to scientific discourse anyway.
Current “default” definition is a vague hodge-podge that doesn’t really qualify as “scientific” and thus does not fail/get eliminated under pressure from any imaginable scientific discovery about intentionality, or rather, it fails as hard as it always did but not worse
(that’s what kind shoulder-surfing lady was trying to convey)
I thought about tackling the specificities of their inability to define, let alone explain their explainers. But I thought the obvious fracas that is traditional philosophical disputation was more than to make my point.
I think that sloppy definitions are important to this “struggle”.
When people claim that BBT eliminates “intentionality” (and object to such a “transgression”), for the debate to proceed in orderly fashion it is essential to understand what exactly is “at stake”, and if we’re using the classical informal definition I quoted above, what is at stake borders on being a goddamn sepulka
There do exist more formal definitions of intentional states.
In fact, the whole argument of “dispositional intentionalists” hinges upon the fact that it is possible to make use of certain “loopholes” found in more formal definitions of “intentional states” in order to demonstrate a kind of equivalence, or at the very least an isomorphism, between “intentional” properties attributable to “mental intentional phenomena” and dispositional properties that can be found in definitely non-living objects.
Yeah, it’s kind of a bit like panpsychism, and yeah, it allows one to proceed to demonstrate “dispositional intentionality” in things like guns, whips, robot dogs, wasps, ants, cruise control cars, bacteria, and perhaps even highly abstract statistical phenomena like “natural selection” or even “Pareto principle”.
That too, kind of eliminates “mental” intentionality, or at least reduces its ontological status (and I find it deliciously ironic that some commenters in your thread at Feser’s blog have chosen “dispositional intentionality” as their defense of intentional constructs against empirico-materialistic “onslaught”)
We’re pretty clearly hardwired to game ambiguities to boot.
Why not?
Ambiguity is opportunity 🙂
BBT proposes that information absences, and lack of information concerning said absences has conditioning force over the shape of phenomenalities and that cognition is an energetic miser and so has managed to exapt this brute fact to its advantage. From my reading it does indulge in computationalist or functionalist arguments and so does not draw any particular force from “implimentations”, or “computations”. It uses a metaphysically thin (and arguably ambiguous) notion of information as difference that makes a difference. That lack of information is a lack of a difference which is not itself a positive difference among actualities which nevertheless makes a difference (its not a differential relation). The lack of information concerning lacks is what shores up the phenomenon of sufficiency or how intentionalist cognition supposes that what its got is all there is, and that what it’s got is eternal. Read that thread, they literally said that the world as it is from within intentionalism is never going anywhere. Anything that posits that its never going anywhere is dangerous hubris.
Okay, so more or less boils down to “intentionality and related phenomena arise due to lack of information further exacerbated by lack of information about lacking information” ?
Basically, it posits that intentionality isn’t some coolio clever algo, some useful heuristic or somesuch, but something that’s less than your average coding bug, a sort of “placeholder intersection”, right?
I got a reply on the other blog from a Daniel ( http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/01/post-intentional-depression.html?showComment=1421215046978#c2223913441489611215 ), which was interesting in regards to what gets named as intentional. He said :
there is no reason why another materialist should not just claim that all it shows is that electricity ‘buzzing back and forth’ accounts for intentionality, as opposed to there being no intentionality in the first place.
And I said to him that’s like saying sleight of hand accounts for magic.
If you were inclined to treat magic as just physics/sleight of hand to begin with, that works out.
Same for intentionalism if you were inclined to call it physics to begin with.
But if you’re treating intentionality as something very much different, then that’s the problem.
But that’s almost exactly what proponents of “Dispositional intentionality” claim!
They claim that intentionality is a kind of sleight of hand, and that mental intentionality (the weird “the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs” kind) we know and
lovehatelove to hate is just a little and not particularly special case of dispositional properties that can be found in many entirely non-human and even non-living objects!It’s kinda weird, and seems to imply some very strong dispositional essentialism as far as I understand, but it shows that you can “collapse” mental intentionality into a strictly physical “sleight of hand / electricity / dispositional relations between physical items” account without invoking BBT stuff.
Do dispositional theories of intentionality (of which there seems to be more that one) explain or explain away intentionality?
the fan account now has over 6,000 followers!
Happened on this passage from Metzinger’s BNO yesterday that’s intriguing me a lot. Metzinger argues that the phenomenology of intentionality is independent of the existence of intentional properties. You could, he claims, have the former without the latter since the first is locally supervenient while the latter (if it exists) ain’t.
‘If we succeed in anchoring our concept of the PMIR [Phenomenal Model of the Inentional Relation] on the functional and neurobiological levels of description, then the notion could even survive a dynamicist revolution. If some day it turns out that, strictly speaking, something like mental content does not even exist (because it never existed in the first place), if what is now the most important level of analysis—the “representational stance”—should eventually be abandoned by a science of the mind advanced beyond anything imaginable today, then we would still possess building blooks for a theory about how it was possible, and necessary, for beings like ourselves to consciously experience themselves as possessing”contentful” intentional states as described by classical theories of mind.’ (BNO 415)
Very cool. This is the claim anyone entertaining meaning skepticism has to commit to, certainly: the tradition has to be misinterpreting something! It’s the silence of eliminativist accounts on this ‘something’ that puts them in an abductive bind. But I’m not convince that Metzinger’s PM approach could actually survive a thoroughgoing eliminativist reevaluation of cognitive science. It all depends on how thoroughgoing it is. A theory “about how it was possible, and necessary, for beings like ourselves to consciously experience themselves as possessing contentful intentional states” could also take a wild variety of forms. On a heuristic neglect account like mine, for instance, there’s simply no need for a PMIR (which is an artifact of philosophical reflection) or for supervenience (which is an artifact of the need to square such artifacts of philosophical reflection with biology). So much stuff that he wants to tie down to Phenomenal Models can be better seen, I think anyway, as forced misteps, blind-alleys, compulsive confusions. The ‘Subject-Object Paradigm’ is far more likely the result of systematic metacognitive errors than the expression of some fundamental PMIR, which is why no one can agree on its nature – I think.
honestly I think you have reached the spade-turning- bed-rock-bottom of these debates and the best thing to do is to offer as clear an explanation of what your for (rather than against) and if people end up in a place where they can gear into it than it will be there for them, if they are not yet (ever?) response-able in such ways than it will be a stumbling block they can’t engage.
I’ve had some luck in some quarters, but ultimately, you’re probably right. But there’s nothing wrong with getting to know the beast, to experiment with a variety of different electrodes…
this debate he’s having with feser reads no differently than the one he had with the deontic scorekeeper at his blog. It comes down to the very weak “but you are using a word that we philosophers insist evidences the truth of intentionalism.”
“you cant be an eliminativist and use the words ‘evidence’, ‘prediction’, ‘science’.”
well it’s yer forehead so bang away, one of the things I learned from Rorty (who said it but often fell back into the flyjar) is that some questions/questioners are better left alone.
I seem to be hearing this a lot lately: http://machineslikeus.com/videos/daniel-dennett-stop-telling-people-they-dont-have-free-will
Dennett’s real claim: neuroscience is socio-cognitive pollution.
There’s a way to pose the problematic that has more teeth. There always is, and a bruised forehead will be exactly what it takes to find it.
agree with DMF. Though I really like Feser’s line of criticism here, and think its worth engaging with. I just think the answer is going to come from biophysics and neuroscience rather than the philosophy of biology or neuroscience. There is an aporia between the irreflexive mode of efficient causation that is followed at the neural level with the inductive structures of leaning and behavior that arise at the level of biological phenemenon proper (“whole” organisms in environments). I like Rosens term the best. There really are anticipatory systems and they have to be squared away with efficient causation. But what anticipation is, is going to turn out to be nothing like the synchronic space of reflection that philosophers think they are partaking in. Scott are you familiar with the details of Kandels work that Rosenberg thinks forecloses on there being any determinate propositional content instantiated in neuronal states?
” There really are anticipatory systems and they have to be squared away with efficient causation. But what anticipation is, is going to turn out to be nothing like the synchronic space of reflection that philosophers think they are partaking in. Scott are you familiar with the details of Kandels work that Rosenberg thinks forecloses on there being any determinate propositional content instantiated in neuronal states?”
Dunno about Scott, but…
could you post links for us all to peruse?
Also, what is particularly insufficient about “synchronic space of reflection” ?
Oh so that’s what an ‘intuition pump’ is – a fable! Took me this long to figure the new clothes.
No counter fable? The neuroscientist affirms the persons free will, even though they’ve identified the person as vulnerable to becoming an alchoholic. Well, he goes proudly on with his publically affirmed free will – and feeling he could stop whenever he wants because of free will, he starts drinking. And drinks some more. Feeling free all the way through.
But the traditional carries a legitimacy that the joking neuroscientist doesn’t?
Say, do you have a post of BBT for Dummies? It’s … uh … for a friend.
Have you looked around on the Second Apocaylpse Forum? I seem to recall Jorge posting a nice overview of BBT there.
Thank you! Here is a link to Jorge’s posts for anyone else interested:
http://www.second-apocalypse.com/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts;u=3
could use the BBT for Dummies post. it would improve my benjuka game.
btw there are 42 objective truths. thats how come the infinity gauntlet.
t100 = 1%/1%/1%
also O christmas comes but once a year except november forty two. thats the year the storms will level cities.
hainish huh?
Scott needs to show them where your explaining away, nevertheless respects the shape of experience, and how your position was in fact motivated by finding some naturalistic account to the shape of experience and how it seems to be unintegrable within the merely natural. Otherwise they just confuse BBT with ‘vulgar’ reductionism (I think even Callan and Murden here typically are confusing BBT with which in many cases indeed thinks there is nothing at all to explain with the quixotic shape of the experiential pegs which refuse to fit into the naturalistic pegboard as commonly concieved. I don’t think they are clear that BBT, on your account, predicts wy this would seem to be the case. This in my view is a massive differentiation between the kind of reductionism or materialism associated with Dennett, and popularly Dawkins, Harris, Wilson, etc.
I think even Callan and Murden here typically are confusing BBT with which in many cases indeed thinks there is nothing at all to explain with the quixotic shape of the experiential pegs which refuse to fit into the naturalistic pegboard as commonly concieved.
I’m not sure – apart from the actual physical architectural features, I posted a link a week or so ago where I describe it as the collapsing of inputs as a method of processing inputs and a failure to track that collasping past a certain stage of it occuring. The experiential seems to be a large number of claims – I’m not sure how you’d touch them all in some broad sense. To use crass terms, that would be kind of like explaining thousands of computer programs – from word processing to traffic light control to video games. I’m sure it’d be generalised effort and I don’t know where my understanding would have seperated from the generalised.
Feel free to set me some homework, DBZ, and give some specific pages of the BBT piece I’m to read in regard to what you’re saying I might have missed. 🙂
I agree with dmf. To elaborate, could it be simply a matter of attention?
Looking over the comments there, it seems everyone is so focused on the *negative* general attack on intentionality that all eliminativisms share, that they miss your specific *positive* account of how heuristics function in BBT. I personally would have understood BBT a lot sooner if you had been more aggressive about highlighting the role of heuristics. Without heuristics, BBT is just another eliminativist attack on the soul.
Maybe you just need to retool the attention economy, and shove heuristic cognition to the forefront of the discussion, spell its role out clearly, and make sure people respond to it? Just an idea, I really have no idea 😛
Or trying a different angle, push this to the front of the debate: intentional words don’t work by being intentional, they work by solving problems. Intentionality and intentional terms, as Metzinger suggests, are *separable.* If I am correct, this is the central issue that your account of heuristics addresses: what do intentional words actually DO?
Off-topic: I would argue that the loss of intentionality is not the crisis that it appears to some, because on all the evidence that I’ve seen so far, the intentionality of “intentional” terms seems a relatively recent and aberrant development in the history of Homo sapiens. We were fine without it for millions of years. As Nietzsche suggests in his Genealogy of Morals, most terms we take to be intentional today were meant in a horrifically concrete way when they were first used: words were originally, as you would put it, cudgels. Read a Bronze Age text and tell me if something strange isn’t going on regarding intentionality. You might as well be reading the communications of aliens, it is only our OWN intentionality that leads us to rationalize otherwise. Maybe the History Channel got something right…
Or simply look at the very English we are using now to communicate, and if you have any background in etymology, you can see the process of abstraction in action. You can almost smell the well-preserved corpse of pre-intentionality. Consciousness is NEW: this is the solid insight that pushed the unfairly marginalized Julian Jaynes to develop his speculative theory of the bicameral brain. Theory of mind is actually two separable phenomena: the prediction of behavior, and the development of consciousness.
While I’m on theory of mind: cognitive science is one of the two fields I am considering for graduate school. You mentioned that cogsci is also haunted by intentional ghosts; I’m curious. What aspects of cognitive science are most infested, and how?
I’m with you on the pragmatism part but not the relative newness of intentionality but that’s a whole other tangent. Hard to think of an area in mainstream cog-sci that isn’t rife with these sorts of intuitions but I’d be interested in any recommendations folks have of such a dept.
corroborates the jaynes story but without the speculative neuropsychiatiry
https://archive.org/details/discoveryofmindg00sneluoft
Cool, thanks! I went to St. John’s College (Socratic dialogue, Great Books, etc…) so this stuff is catnip
I think the substance of the comments is less missing the “specific positive account of how heuristics function in BBT” than it is denying that said positive account is sufficient to meet the objection.
Heuristics by definition are not sufficient to serve as what Putnam called a “successor concept” to logical notions of e.g. truth, reference, and logical inference (among others) within an eliminativist account. This is not just a matter of “interpretations of intentional terms”, should anyone be inclined to state it as such — these notions are essential for giving statements, whether in English, Japanese, Spanish, or theoretical statements within some idealized formal language of science, content. If statements do not have any way to be “about” something (they lack truth conditions), then they are empty static, and this includes BBT and the theoretical statements that it consists in. Even Paul Churchland had to stop and issue a vague promissory note on this point.
The upshot: If BBT is true, then BBT itself is not merely false: it lacks sense. It is literally meaningless, as is every other scientific theory, belief, mental state, and whatever else.
The way around this is to give an account of these “folk logical” notions, which give meaning, truth-conditions, and content to statements, in solely causal, heuristic, mechanistic (or whatever) terms, and to do this without sneaking intentionality back into the definitions.
It remains for those of you persuaded by the eliminativist account to provide such an account. As it stands this has not been done, and this is not solely because we’re restricted by necessity to articulating the point in English (or whichever natural language you think and communicate with). It is also not simply a matter to be articulated by a notion of “metacognitive blindness” or by treating truth as a “heuristic” — a heuristic account of truth is no account of truth at all! (And the same applies for meaning, reference, inference, etc.)
Such an account has not been given is because this is an extraordinarily difficult problem, and one for which there is no clear indication that there is a solution even in principle. You might make some headway in getting rid of mental phenomena, but if you eliminate intentionality full stop, there goes logic — and you can’t even express the theory without logic.
This is wonderfully put, and indeed substitutional redefinition is where the issue between the intentionalist (the normativist in particular) and the eliminativist becomes most interesting. The point is simply that any redefinition of normative terms – particular those belonging to the cognitive lexicon – clearly cannot replace those idioms. Kripke’s plus/quus argument is perhaps the most notorious demonstration of this constitutive inability of non-normative concepts to do the kind of heavy lifting that normative concepts do. So as you say, anonymous:
This is exactly the ‘extraordinarily difficult problem’ I’m claiming that heuristics and neglect allow us to see our way through.
First, note that the use of mathematical and logical idioms does not, in of itself, validate the existence of intrinsic intentionality. Intrinsic intentionality just happens to be the most intuitive way to understand them. The obvious problem, of course, is that all the theoretical interpretations arising out of this ‘intuitive understanding’ remain 1) woefully underdetermined, and 2) impossible to square with our understanding of the natural world. This should strongly suggest at least the possibility that things are not what they seem. I say this because equivocation of explanans and explanandum remains the perennial temptation of intentionalism (thus all the tu quoque question begging).
Second, note that to say that only logical idioms are capable of doing what logical idioms do is exactly what we should expect from a heuristic standpoint. Our socio-cognitive systems have evolved to solve problems on the cheap, to work around the lack of information to generate solutions. They do this by engaging specific, characteristic features belonging to a particular set of problems – a ‘problem ecology.’ On a heuristics and neglect account, then, the question becomes one of why anyone should expect causal cognition to do the kinds of things intentional cognition does. Of course logical idioms cannot be replaced with causal idioms without scuttling problem-solving power. The question is one of why the specificity of logical idioms (our shared explanandum) should be taken as evidence for the existence of intrinsic intentionality (the intentionalist explanans), rather than the existence of a certain heuristic system. Only logical idioms can solve what they solve because they belong a to specific heuristic system, one that picks out and solves certain problems in the absence of detailed mechanical information.
And this is where the classic case falls apart. What the intentionalist wants to say is that the inability of causal idioms to replace intentional idioms means that intentional idioms can only be explained intentionally! But why should this be? Why should the explanation of intentional cognition also possess the ability to replace instances of intentional cognition? There’s no reason. We don’t expect explanations of computers to do the work of the computer explained. What we do expect, however, is that a good explanation of a computer should allow us to build more computers. Likewise, a good explanation of intentional idioms should provide us a way to reverse-engineer intentional idioms. If one accepts this, then it should be clear that intrinsic intentionality, if anything, actually diminishes our understanding. And indeed, when one looks at the history of attempts to provide intentional interpretations of intentional idioms, one finds endless controversy. Think about it: after all this time we still lack any canonical understanding as to what ‘rules,’ or ‘truths,’ or ‘wrongs’ could possibly be. For all the noise intentionalists make about the eliminativist’s inability to account for intentional idioms, you would think they would actually have something other than perpetual controversy to offer! But they don’t.
And as it turns out, this is exactly what we should expect on a heuristics and neglect account. On this view, the intentionalist needs to explain why it is she thinks that intentional idioms belong to the problem ecology of intentional idioms: Why should we think that a specialized system adapted to solving specialized problems (in the absence of detailed causal information) should have the capacity to solve the question of its own nature? It seems pretty clear that we shouldn’t, given that intentional cognition is dedicated to the solution of problems absent high-dimensional information.
And this is why I think the bulk of philosophy will be written off as an artifact of neglect, the systematic misapplication of intentional cognition to the problem of intentional cognition. Not only, then, is the heuristics and neglect approach far more parsimonious than the intrinsic intentionality approach, it possesses far, far more explanatory power. This is what makes it a clear winner on abductive grounds, I think. Logic doesn’t go anywhere. Nor does mathematics. What goes are the centuries of theoretical interpretation of logic and mathematics attributing intrinsic intentionality to them. The philosophy of math and logic need to be tossed into the dustbin of history, our understanding of them, not the understanding they so obviously provide. That awaits a naturalistic – post-intentional – reinterpretation.
Thanks for the response. Two comments:
“First, note that the use of mathematical and logical idioms does not, in of itself, validate the existence of intrinsic intentionality.”
I agree, for the reason that validating the existence of intentionality was not the point of claim regarding logical-semantical concepts. The problem is not validating whether XYZ term or concept or whatever is intentional, the problem is whether there can be accounts of those terms which is not intentional.
(I’ll pass over for now the shift from “intentionality” to “intrinsic intentionality”, which deserves to be elaborated, but it can wait.)
“Second, note that to say that only logical idioms are capable of doing what logical idioms do is exactly what we should expect from a heuristic standpoint. Our socio-cognitive systems have evolved to solve problems on the cheap, to work around the lack of information to generate solutions.”
There is a serious confusion here that needs to be untangled. Given the objection sketched in my original comment, “to say that only logical idioms are capable of doing what logical idioms do” is precisely the problem at hand. If there are to be replacement or successor concepts for any of these terms, let alone all of them, the onus is on you, as the defender of the alternative, to provide them.
Why can’t this work, then? Because, when you write that “our socio-cognitive systems have…”, you’re already appealing to logical and semantic notions, because the sciences are already (even if only tacitly) relying on these in their methods and their theory-construction.
To lay it out more clearly: your posited replacement for intentional terms/statements is a product of scientific investigation. But those scientific investigations (all scientific investigations) already rely on logical notions (at the least) to produce those findings. The posited replacement successor concept(s) depend on intentional logical terminology to exist at all; you wouldn’t have any notion of a “heuristic” or a “socio-cognitive system” or any other conceptual product of science if the processes and methods of science didn’t have logical notions of truth, reference, etc.
The upshot, again, is that if you are right, then there is no truth, no content to any theoretical terms, no rational justifications, no Bayesian priors, in short, there is no scientific knowledge or explanation. It should go without saying that you cannot eliminate a tool from your ontology while simultaneously holding it out as a replacement for the very thing you’ve eliminated.
So this response
“Why should the explanation of intentional cognition also possess the ability to replace instances of intentional cognition? There’s no reason.”
fails, but I want to make sure you see why it fails. The very notion of “explanation” is already intentional, and it cannot be anything else.*
* I use the term “cannot” not in a strong sense of ruling out in principle a successor concept, but in a looser sense to indicate that Paul Churchland has not been able to give anything more than a vague promissory note for several decades now, and if such a thing is possible then pretty much nobody has any idea of what it is going to look like. So it appears that there is, indeed, a very good reason to preserve the intentional: without it you have no way to articulate the very concepts you’ve offered as replacement terms.
To reiterate, the solution is (emphatically) not a matter of going out into the empirical world and picking out something that might fit the bill using scientific methods; you also have to show how you can go out into the world with science and articulate that very something without the notion you’re trying to eliminate. And given what scientific knowledge, explanation, etc. consist in — at the ground, it’s some form of logical concept — that is not a trivial challenge at all.
“To lay it out more clearly: your posited replacement for intentional terms/statements is a product of scientific investigation. But those scientific investigations (all scientific investigations) already rely on logical notions (at the least) to produce those findings. The posited replacement successor concept(s) depend on intentional logical terminology to exist at all; you wouldn’t have any notion of a “heuristic” or a “socio-cognitive system” or any other conceptual product of science if the processes and methods of science didn’t have logical notions of truth, reference, etc. ”
They rely on… what? Intentional idioms, our explanandum. You need to make a quite different argument to prove that they relied on this or that theoretical explanans of intentional idioms, I fear.
I’m saying that truth, rationality, explanation, and so are simply not what you or the tradition has historically taken them to be. I’m saying that instances of intentional cognition involve the application of heuristics adapted to solve different families of problems in the absence of detailed causal information. These heuristic systems are biomechanical, evolutionary and social artifacts. They are generally applied automatically and effortlessly. When we use intentional idioms we are engaging these devices (what else would we be doing?). There’s no spooky functional realm, no need for transcendence or emergence or any other inexplicables. We have our own metacognitive appraisals of these applications, but we really have no reason to think philosophical reflection will reveal much of their nature, and we have a growing mountain of evidence that suggests it will be regularly duped if left to its own devices. The notion of ‘successor concepts’ is a great case in point: the goal is to understand what intentional cognition is, not to duplicate its operations via a different heuristic mode. If theoretical metacognition possessed the capacity to apprehend the fractionate, heuristic nature of human cognition, the notion of needing a ‘successor concept’ to drain the intentional swamp would be an obvious nonstarter. Instead all we have are these vague intuitions that we take as gospel.
Are you arguing that this story is impossible? How does that argument work?
Otherwise, since I’m not making Churchland’s case, I’m not sure what it has to do with mine.
“They rely on… what? Intentional idioms, our explanandum. You need to make a quite different argument to prove that they relied on this or that theoretical explanans of intentional idioms, I fear.”
Your fear is trivial, I’m afraid to day, because you still have no touched the actual objection. Whether you simply don’t understand it, or refuse to do so, I cannot say.
To wit: I’m now going to ask you to provide an account of explanation, inclusive of explanandum and explanans, in purely causal, or if you prefer, non-intentional, terms.
You can’t do it, at least not easily, and that reveals what this move really is: a rearguard action that just pushes the intentionality you deny an extra step away. You’ve bought a little breathing room perhaps, but there it is: for your explanation to be about anything at all, for the explanans and explanandum to have content, well, I fear you’ve got to appeal to intentionality.
I brought up Churchland for a very good reason, as despite your insistence his project is and has been very much your project, and to shift tack slightly, let’s move the debate from the epistemic reasons to accept or deny intentionality to a pragmatic one: if the move is this easy, as easy as looking to the sciences of the brain, then why are you the first to think of it? Why didn’t Churchland bring this up as a response to Putnam?
One of the first things you learn in doing philosophy past a certain point is that hasty moves are often sloppy moves, and I’m afraid that your entire argument here is a hasty move indeed. There is no clear account of how you’ll give an account of what gives your theory, its terms, its statements, its explanations, any content; you can push this regress as far as you want to take it, and eventually you’re going to ground it out in “aboutness” of some sort. All you’ve done, or so it seems from everything you write, is claim that sciences give reason to deny intentionality, and then use scientific terms and resources, which are already relying on an account of truth, reference, and other logical terms.
You’re being held up by a bridge and then using your vantage point over the valley to say that you can’t see a bridge at all!
Sloppy is always in the eye of the beholder isn’t it? No one has a consensus-commanding definition of explanation, or any other intentional term. You don’t know what explanation is, so you’re essentially demanding I provide a replacement to a concept you yourself don’t understand. Meanwhile, I’ve already explained why, on a heuristics and neglect approach, the demand that one use one cognitive system to mimic the functions of another is an indicator of metacognitive blindness. I’m saying the lesson of ‘successor concepts’ isn’t what you think it is, that the difficulty we have replacing intentional idioms in no way evidences intrinsic intentionality… Quite the contrary.
To which you reply, ‘Show me a successor concept!”
Simply reverting to this suggests you don’t understand my position, and that this is why is why you see it as the same of Churchland’s.
So to avoid wasting our time arguing cross-purposes, and since you insist you know my position, simply explain to me what it is, and why the notion of substitutional redefinition, by the lights of my position, makes no sense.
“Your fear is trivial, I’m afraid to day, because you still have no touched the actual objection.”
Typo central here: Your fear is trivial, I’m afraid to say, because you still have not touched the actual objection.
“You don’t know what explanation is, so you’re essentially demanding I provide a replacement to a concept you yourself don’t understand.”
I could give it a go, but my ability to give an account is not in question, and this is another attempt at deflecting the actual objection. I don’t deny that basic logic exists and that expressions can have content.
This is your problem because you do, at least sometimes, deny that intentionality exists at all (when you aren’t moving to your back-up claim, that intentionality is “merely” redescribed in causal or heuristic or whatever terms).
“Meanwhile, I’ve already explained why, on a heuristics and neglect approach, the demand that one use one cognitive system to mimic the functions of another is an indicator of metacognitive blindness. I’m saying the lesson of ‘successor concepts’ isn’t what you think it is, that the difficulty we have replacing intentional idioms in no way evidences intrinsic intentionality… Quite the contrary.”
No, Scott. No. That’s not how this works.
Firstly: You haven’t “explained” anything, at all. You’ve gestured in a direction, waved a hand around, and said “it’ll all work out, promise!”
Secondly: You have made exactly zero headway in explaining how you can even talk about what you’re talking about without intentionality
To which you reply, ‘Show me a successor concept!”
I do indeed, because you’ve given no reason to justify your constant assertion that “heuristics and neglect” are (1) terms you can articulate without tacitly drawing on basic intentional notions foundational to science and (2) that these are in any way sufficient to do the work of the giving your own terms the meaning they need within your own theory
Read those again. Read them twice, thrice. Read them with green eggs and meat. You need to understand why this is a problem, and you do not. You keep attacking this on the level of science, and I’m telling you that you do not get science and its concepts without a deeper level of logical terms that can give you meaning, truth, reference, etc.
You can eliminate lots of things but logic does not go away if you want access to the resources of science.
“So to avoid wasting our time arguing cross-purposes, and since you insist you know my position, simply explain to me what it is, and why the notion of substitutional redefinition, by the lights of my position, makes no sense.”
I will be blunt: I can’t do this because you don’t even know what your position is. You waffle between some confused muddle of naturalism, reductionism, and eliminativism, and seem to have no clear idea of what any of these positions commit you to or entail in turn. One minute you’re denying intentionality and prophecy apocalypse, the next you retreat to the claim that you’re “just” redescribing the intentional because of MRI scans, and then you’re going on about “interpretations”.
At this point I’m not sure you even have a position (and it wouldn’t matter because if you said what you think you are saying, “position” would be a sense-less notion)
“I will be blunt: I can’t do this because you don’t even know what your position is. You waffle between some confused muddle of naturalism, reductionism, and eliminativism, and seem to have no clear idea of what any of these positions commit you to or entail in turn. One minute you’re denying intentionality and prophecy apocalypse, the next you retreat to the claim that you’re “just” redescribing the intentional because of MRI scans, and then you’re going on about “interpretations”.”
LOL! I had a feeling this is what you would say! It’s a pretty convenient position to hold: ‘I don’t need to try to understand you because you are unintelligible.’ Almost too convenient, one might suspect. Life would be a lot easier for me if I had that kind of assurance, I tell you! I remember quite well, what it was like, and how obviously cracked people like me used to sound. The good old days!
Well, as a courtesy to the hundreds following our exchange, lets try to get clear on what your argument is at least (since I apparently have nothing worthy of the name!).
1) The primary reason I’m unintelligible is that I use intentional idioms, and using intentional idioms commits me to some form of intentionalism (or, the primary reason I’m unintelligible is that I rely on science, and science relies on intentional idioms, and science is therefore committed to some form of intentionalism).
2) Intentionalism refers to a family of theoretical approaches that purport to explain the use of intentional idioms in intentional terms.
Is this fair enough so far?
“1) The primary reason I’m unintelligible is that I use intentional idioms, and using intentional idioms commits me to some form of intentionalism (or, the primary reason I’m unintelligible is that I rely on science, and science relies on intentional idioms, and science is therefore committed to some form of intentionalism).
2) Intentionalism refers to a family of theoretical approaches that purport to explain the use of intentional idioms in intentional terms.
Is this fair enough so far?”
Let’s clarify each of these, as there is much to unpack:
1. The primary reason your theory is unintelligible is not “that you use intentional idioms”. It is unintelligible for the two reasons I’ve consistently mentioned:
(a) You are articulating a theory. It’s right there in the title, “Blind Brain Theory“. In order for this to be the case, that theory must refer to something in the world. It must be about how things are; otherwise there is no theory. It’s just an empty string of marks, like what happens when I stub my toe and go “oowwwwww!”.
(b1) You can, in principle, get around this by saying exactly how you can make this theory (any theory) about the world. This is why you need successor concepts to truth, reference, and so on, which must be elaborated without explicitly appealing to intentionality, or by appealing to concepts which are themselves intentional concepts.
(b2) The burden is then on you to provide this account, or even a plausible way towards it.
(b3) You respond to this challenge by claiming that either: you have done this, by accounting for it in terms of “heuristics and neglect”, and alternatively, by denying that you must give any such account because that isn’t how you interpret them.
These are claims you’ve made right here in our exchange. What I want to see is how your theory gets content by its own terms. How are you in any way describing some aspect of the world, let alone explaining that aspect? These are intentional terms.
How does “explanation” cash out as a concept in terms of “heuristic”, and even if you make it do so, how can you say this talk is talk about the actual entities in your ontology? You have denied yourself the ability to pick out entities in the world, and then want to proceed in picking out entities in the world. How does “heuristic” overcome this challenge? How can you even arrive at the notion of heuristic without implicitly appealing to intentionality?
2. “Intentionalism refers to a family of theoretical approaches that purport to explain the use of intentional idioms in intentional terms.”
This is incoherent, unless you can provide a non-“intentionalist” account of “theoretical approach”. Let’s restate it this way:
“Logicalism refers to a family of theoretical approaches that purport to explain the use of logical idioms in logical terms.”
The question is clear here: if you’re not going to give an account of logic in logical terms, then what are you giving it in? As above, “heuristics” and “neglect” can’t meet the muster; they are either intentional terms themselves or else you can only articulate them by appealing to implicit (if hidden) intentional terms.
So where is your account? Show how “theory”, “explanation”, “theoretical vocabulary”, and so on, have meaning. Show how you can account for these notions that you are making use of with the conceptual resources of your account.
If you can’t — and to be explicit about this, you have not — then at least show how it’s plausible. If you cannot do this on your terms, then your theory is literally sense-less.
I’m not sure I understand your response to my prior second question: Are you saying intentionalism doesn’t purport to explain intentional terms in further intentional terms? This would be a very curious claim to make.
Once again, let us remind ourselves and everyone that for all your certainty no intentionalist has anything approaching a ‘true theory’ of ‘truth,’ or ‘theory,’ or ‘logic,’ or whatever intentional term you choose. This despite thousands of years of philosophical reflection. This fact alone suggest the possibility that something is deeply wrong with the intentionalist approach. Given this possibility, any attempt at radical reconceptualization should be viewed with interest. ‘Feeling right’ is as much a symptom as being wrong as being right.
I had assumed that you had checked out the two intro oriented pieces I had linked on Ed’s site, but your comments regarding the absence of any positive account lead me to think you might have missed them (which is understandable, given the 100s of comments on his post!). So, regarding neglect, you can check out, https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/cognition-obscura-reprise/ . Regarding heuristics, check out, https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/meaning-fetishism/ . I have many, many more detailed posts on a wide variety of intentional phenomena, both as a whole (such as, https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/discontinuity-thesis-a-birds-of-a-feather-argument-against-intentionalism/ , or https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/the-eliminativistic-implicit-ii-brandom-in-the-pool-of-shiloam/ ) or on a wide variety of more particular phenomena.
I appreciate that you think you have me in a logical bind. I still can’t fathom how the absence of an eliminativistic account (a liability I don’t share with eliminativism more generally) is anything other than an abductive problem. It strikes me as an obvious case of ‘God of the Gaps’ argumentation.
Nevertheless, I’m assuming you respect the power of naturalistic cognition (so long as it knows it’s place!), so let me walk you through the way I move from the scientific realm to the realm you hold to be somehow inviolable.
1) Do you think intentional cognition is heuristic? Do you think intentional cognition neglects vast amounts of potentially useful information?
2) Do you think metacognitive cognition is heuristic? Do you think philosophical reflection neglects vast amounts of potentially useful information?
I want to clarify something that seems to have become muddled. The scientific method is not based on validating affirmative truths – a theory is never proven but consistently fails to be unproven (until it is anyway). The scientific method can only affirm negative truths, and in doing so it allows the community a certain facility with previous explanations or ‘successor concepts’ we might call them. This mechanism, in part, does much to counter our native proclivity for convictions – after all new information is always framed by the old. Our tendency to double-down when presented with the honest possibility of our error. Like some might say you’ve done here.
BBT is, at least in part, an attempt to countenance the scientific method in terms of cognition. Any account of truth can only be negative, yet you seem to be demanding an affirmative. BBT after all is not attempting to account for truth. If our baseline is self-delusion we are far better served by not pandering to ourselves with flattering affirmations.
Do you know what hueristics are? Really? Because reading your responses I’m not sure you do. Ever seen an optical illusion?
Can you not at least see how BBT is, if NOTHING else, an important cautionary tale or lesson in humility?
By the way, the line “a heuristic account of truth is no account of truth at all!”
It’s a functionalist account of truth at least, and by denying that you’re kind of playing right into BBT, itself claiming no account of truth but instead that the functions of accounts of truth, hell even the function of your outrage in that line, is part of an inborn strategy that aids our decision making in a reality where we never have ‘all the information’ and never will. A strategy of ad hoc rationalization and survival.
BBT is about something, and as you said its right in the name. BBT is about our blind brains!! Proof? Go look at an opitcal illusion yourself. That’s one very simple example. In fact this delightful conversation has been full of them!!
Tee-Hee!!!
one last note:
“if you eliminate intentionality full stop, there goes logic”
you said this already as if logic were something we only bring up when it suits our intentions! What good is your logic if this is the case then? I suppose it could muddy the water, distract from the underlying confusion of your objection.
You DO know that eliminativism is not trying to prove anything whatsoever only disprove what is already there, correct? Asking for a sustainable accounting of cognition from eliminativism speaks to a misunderstanding of it. Our willingness to demand a sustainable, verifiable account of our cognitive systems is itself highly problematic and any such account likely a facile and ultimately dangerous lie – same with intentionality.
Don’t confuse my present intention to clarify this with intentionality itself, and do not assume I believe I always know everything or anything about my own intentions. It is highly unlikely at the best of times.
🙂
“I’m not sure I understand your response to my prior second question: Are you saying intentionalism doesn’t purport to explain intentional terms in further intentional terms? This would be a very curious claim to make.”
No, I’m saying that you don’t get an account of “explanation” without relying on some intentional concepts. If you think you can make it otherwise, by all means show how.
The re-statement I gave, which is equivalent to substituting “logicalism” for “intentionalism” helps clarify this point:
“Logicalism refers to a family of theoretical approaches that purport to explain the use of logical idioms in logical terms.”
The presence of the terms “theoretical approach” and “explain” in the definition of “logicalism” (“intentionalism”) is incoherent because these are already logical terms. If you want to say otherwise, then let’s see the account.
How do “heuristics and neglect” give you an account of “theory” and “explanation”?
“Once again, let us remind ourselves and everyone that for all your certainty no intentionalist has anything approaching a ‘true theory’ of ‘truth,’ or ‘theory,’ or ‘logic,’ or whatever intentional term you choose.”
What gives you even the faintest impression that “certainty” has anything to do with this? There’s been epistemology since Descartes, you do realize? “Certainty” is the reddest of herrings.
(But hey, maybe that’s the problem: you’re still stuck in a pre-Kantian subject-object dualism and corresponding epistemology where “certainty” is even remotely relevant to one’s warrant for a belief.)
As for the rest of this little content-free rhetorical flourish, the response is a little bit of “so what?” and a lot more “that’s the entire point”. The point is, by not denying intentionality, there is at least the possibility of having the basic tools you need to do science in the first place. You’ve yet to explain how you’re talking about anything. Your theory isn’t actually about anything unless you can pony up how this is the case without falling back to intentional concepts (which you do).
So, as I’ve asked (and asked and asked and asked, and will certainly ask again when you reply and skate around it again), where is the concept that can do the work of letting you articulate a scientific theory to begin with?
“This fact alone suggest the possibility that something is deeply wrong with the intentionalist approach.”
Where do you get science, theoretical content, explanation, etc., without “intentionalism”? You’re stepping out to the branch and then cutting it off at the base.
“Given this possibility, any attempt at radical reconceptualization should be viewed with interest. ‘Feeling right’ is as much a symptom as being wrong as being right.”
Sure. Now tell me how you’re going to achieve this radical reconceptualization without drawing on any intentional vocabulary. Hell for that matter just explain how you’re going to translate intentional vocabularies into non-intentional terms.
“but your comments regarding the absence of any positive account…”
Let’s say I decide that “intentionalism” is a fundamentally flawed program. All these terms and concepts that those crusty old philosophers use are not only misguided but based on assumptions broken at the very bottom.
So I start to ask myself what the world looks like if I get rid of those assumptions and come up with a new interpretation of those vocabularies. I have a look around and decide that what intentional vocabularies really are is my farts.
I give a presentation on my new theory, call it the Flatulence Semantics Theory. But some old codger raises his hand at the end and tells me that there’s no way this can work, because I can’t give any account of meaning or truth or reference in terms of farts.
Stupid old man, I think. He’s begging the question! He doesn’t understand that I’ve re-interpreted his intentional idioms, and that he’s just wrong about what these vocabularies are. He hasn’t been able to give an explanation at all! And here I am with my theory of farts which can explain everything. After all, it just makes so much sense to me; how could it be wrong?
But the stubborn old codger won’t give up. He wants to know how I can give an account of explanation in terms of farts. He doesn’t believe I’ve done it at all. But what he doesn’t know is that I have given a positive account! I did it all along, and stupid philosopher, he just doesn’t get it. My good luck, then, that I ate a hefty plate of beans before my talk, so I quickly provide him with empirical evidence. There’s your explanation, intentionalist!
Do you find this problematic? I hope so. The thing is, it’s exactly what you’re doing. Farts don’t get to stand in for linguistic and logical terms. Farts rely on linguistic and logical terms to be articulated in language and formulated as concepts. And if I want to give an account of the linguistic and logical role of farts, I’ve got a hell of a challenge ahead of me.
Substitute “heuristics and neglect” for “farts” and we’ve got your argument (which I’ve come to see is really a rhetorical strategy based on asking “but when will you stop beating your wife?” sorts of questions and not really giving a carefully-reasoned position).
“I appreciate that you think you have me in a logical bind. I still can’t fathom how the absence of an eliminativistic account (a liability I don’t share with eliminativism more generally) is anything other than an abductive problem. It strikes me as an obvious case of ‘God of the Gaps’ argumentation.”
Abduction is an intentional concept. It has content. It is about the objects it explains. If you think you can “infer to the best explanation” without giving any account of what your inference and what your explanation are — what are they, heuristics? The brain ignoring perceptual information? How is this even supposed to begin to work? They might as well be farts — then let’s see it. I’ll be waiting awhile, because I don’t expect you have the first idea of how to even start going about it.
I understand the trope, Anonymous. For you, the only way to escape the intentionalist interpretation of intentional idioms is to explain intentional idioms without using a single intentional idiom. For me, using intentional idioms amounts to tackling problems too complex to be readily solved using causal cognition. Almost all discursive problems occur across this level, as it happens. This means that, pending a far more mature neuroscience, tackling discursive problems requires using intentional idioms. But why does using intentional idioms automatically, unquestionably, presuppose the intentionalist interpretation? This is a VERY STRONG claim. On what grounds to you make this claim? Why should anyone find them convincing? Is it the mere lack of mature neuroscientific account?
I’m dismayed by the amount of vitriol these debates provoke (I’ve had to trash quite a few, ahem, colourful assessments of my character and intelligence on this thread already), but I actually understand it. ‘Man the meaning maker’ is the sacred cow of modernity. But you have to realize you’re not doing your position any favours by resorting to it.
Missed this:
“Nevertheless, I’m assuming you respect the power of naturalistic cognition (so long as it knows it’s place!), so let me walk you through the way I move from the scientific realm to the realm you hold to be somehow inviolable.
1) Do you think intentional cognition is heuristic? Do you think intentional cognition neglects vast amounts of potentially useful information?
2) Do you think metacognitive cognition is heuristic? Do you think philosophical reflection neglects vast amounts of potentially useful information?”
To respond to both of these at once, since the response to (2) will follow on the response to (1): I think that cognition is an interesting topic and that at least some of our psychological function is heuristic (e.g. Simon, Kahneman, Stanovich, etc. I believe have all made a good case for this.) Of course, this literature also recognizes that there are other functions which may not be solely heuristic.
(This assuming that this literature is reliable, and that we aren’t seeing statistical illusions; see e.g. Andrew Gelman on problems in drawing conclusions from this entire research program.)
I also think that the science itself has had little to say on whether or not those cognitive functions are exclusively “a-rational”, since “rationality” or lack thereof is a normative notion, and that isn’t something that will be decided by empirical findings. What the brain does insofar as filtering information need not be troublesome here, either. Picking out what is relevant may indeed be part of what it means to be rational. This might be support, but it need not be.
Of course all of this is presuming that methodological individualism is the way to go about studying cognition in the first place. There’s a lot of good reason to think that language (see anything analytic after Quine and Sellars) and knowledge and rationality (see e.g., the fact that we have science, Goldman’s social epistemology, Popper’s critical rationalism) are not the sorts of things that are confined to a single brain and best understood in those terms.
If e.g. meanings are dependent on external as well as internal elements then cognition of the sort we are interested in need not be heuristic at all — and if it is, we won’t find it by retreating into the Cartesian subject (whether we understand this naturally or otherwise).
“For you, the only way to escape the intentionalist interpretation of intentional idioms is to explain intentional idioms without using a single intentional idiom. For me, using intentional idioms amounts to tackling problems too complex to be readily solved using causal cognition.”
What I want to see is how you get to the point of even defining what “problems” are, and how one goes about “tackling” them — normative notions if there ever were any — by cashing them out without any intentional notions.
That’s all I want to see. That’s all Ed Feser and the commenters there want. Show how you articulate these concepts without any intentional building-blocks while simultaneously upholding your thesis that denies there is intentionality.
“But why does using intentional idioms automatically, unquestionably, presuppose the intentionalist interpretation? This is a VERY STRONG claim. On what grounds to you make this claim? Why should anyone find them convincing? Is it the mere lack of mature neuroscientific account?”
Because you’ve given no indication of how to even articulate, formulate, conceptualize, whatever, the neuroscientific account without some idea of “aboutness”.
I’ve said that since the beginning. The fact that “philosophy” hasn’t produced a consensus notion of truth (etc.) is already a red herring, since there are convincing accounts, and the debates do remain live. (It doesn’t get you off the hook for providing an account of your own terms in your own terms, either; if there is a tu quoque fallacy going on here, look no further.)
“I’m dismayed by the amount of vitriol these debates provoke (I’ve had to trash quite a few, ahem, colourful assessments of my character and intelligence on this thread already), but I actually understand it. ‘Man the meaning maker’ is the sacred cow of modernity. But you have to realize you’re not doing your position any favours by resorting to it.”
Firstly: if I’ve made any attacks on your character, I do apologize. This isn’t meant to be a personal attack despite my acknowledged sarcasm.
Secondly: if you think I’m appealing to some vague notion of “making meaning” like this is a chat about von Uexkull or Heidegger, rest assured I am not. I’m doing just fine by working within the Fregean tradition of truth-conditional semantics and it’s post-Quinean developments.
You, on the other hand, are not doing so well by trying to articulate logical notions in terms that presuppose logical notions.
Does aboutness involve neglect?
I am not convinced intentionality is new.
It seems to me that intentionality concepts that are more universalist (perhaps at their own peril, since that makes them uncannily like some asinine panpsychism) are getting something very right.
It seems to me that some sort of “intentionality-like” feature is needed for any practical system that exploits regularities in the so-called “real world” to achieve a particular specific end by means of gathering information and making predictions.
And such systems include parasitoid wasps and ICBMs
Well, you could go into cogsci to exorcise those intentional ghosts if you feel like it.
On an unrelated note, me and 01 tried following your blog, but it’s “protected”.
Did this humble philosophical argument attract chan-beasts somehow ?
Sorry about that. Nah it attracted misapplied heuristics 😛 As I mentioned to Dirk, I’m also facing some serious health issues, so my brain isn’t up to the herculean task of thwarting assumptions.
I’ll be back.
these are the consult questions. ask them to anyone to determine if they are a skin spy or not….
do you think hell is real and if so can it be shut?
would you sacrifice the humyn species to ensure that life on earth would not die off?
could you accept a reality in which scarlett johansson was actually really allah?
did you know that dinosaurs were actually smarter than humyns and that everything we do is based upon the foundation that they laid for us?
lol, hey lukas! what’s the going bet that Kellhus only programmed one skinspy to do the paradox trick for Mimara? 🙂
also what is narnias jati compared to middle earths jati compared to terras jati compared to earwas jati? and what is wonderlands jati to boot?
but this question isnt really fair. wonderland doesnt have a jati.
I’m curious Scott, do you consider terms like empathy, imagination, or compassion intentional? Or in your view can they be employed in a non intentional context? They certainly don’t seem like it to me. (This is something I have been pondering for quite some time)
Nothing is ‘intentional’ in the traditional sense – everything is natural – so your question becomes one of whether this or that mental term can be reliably plugged into our intentional heuristic systems. Here the answer has to be ‘depends on the problem.’
Stephen Turner uses empathy (or on other contexts, ‘following’) in what I think is a clearly post-intentional way. But so much depends on definition. One of the advantages I think my view offers is that it actually allows us to understand why we should find issues like this confusing at all. If intrinsic intentionality is something real, then why does it seem so fuzzy all the time? Why should their be borderline cases, or an endless well of counterexamples? We know from religion that intentional cognition is situationally promiscuous: it is easily triggered in inappropriate problem-ecologies. We are prone to anthropomorphize. This makes it something we can potentially see everywhere, in everything – why we can argue that a Watt governor bears content, or information about, for instance. On other hand, we should expect to always be stranded on the outside looking in when it comes to instances where intentional cognition works. Given the complexity of the world, we should expect that various keys in our custodial ring will unlock surprising problems, then to find ourselves stymied when the solution doesn’t generalize to other problem-ecologies that we assume possess the same structure.
In other words, it explains it’s ad hoc utility.
Oh, okay. So if I were a neuroscientist, for example, determined to purge my vocabulary of those magical terms of intentionality, it would be permissible to use them so long I show that they do not need intrinsic or derived intentionality? I am debating this with a friend, who is arguing that eliminativist cannot use the aforementioned terms. I disagree, however
The idiom is powerful. Why not use it? Think of the use of ‘design’ in evolution.
Intentionalists would like to think they have the market cornered on the legitimate use of intentional terms, but this simply does not follow. No eliminativist denies the efficacy of intentional idioms; they deny the traditional intentional accounts of what that efficacy consists in. These accounts have led a great number of intentionalists to populate their theoretical ontologies with all kinds of exotic, naturalistically inexplicable conceptual beasts: ‘representations,’ ‘norms,’ ‘minds,’ ‘beliefs,’ ‘attitudes,’ and so on. This what global eliminativists like myself want to eliminate and/or attenuate: the inclusion of intrinsically intentional phenomena in the inventory of nature, where they are – quite obviously, I think – confounding a good deal of scientific progress. Either we get rid of them, or we scarequote them the way we do ‘design’ in evolutionary discourse.
This causes problems for old style, dogmatic eliminativists, I think, because they were at a loss as to how to explain 1) the apparent metacognitive phenomenology of intentionality, and 2) the specificity of the problem-solving power of intentional idioms. My brand of critical eliminativism actually offers a way to parse our different uses of different intentional terms in different kinds of contexts. Using intentional idioms to solve everyday social problems, for instance, is the very thing you should do on my account. The more general and theoretical the problem to be solved becomes, the more wary we need to be. The final shape of this ‘applicability landscape’ is ultimately something that can only be empirically mapped. It’ll be complex and contingent and doubtless filled with many surprises.
In the meantime, we can shut down the philosophy of mind – at least in its traditional incarnation!
I do not doubt their efficacy either. I was posing a hypothetical scenario (perhaps very absurd), in which I have some sort of entity, which for whatever reasons cannot or will not use intentional language. I know that it depends on context, but would I think this eliminativistbot would be able to use terms like imagination, empathy, or even love for that matter, simply because they are reducible.
Recharging my batteries for going over there, so thinking an analogy out loud over here:
If you imagine my words like the set on a stage – like the fake trees with a prop at the back to keep them up – then my adding more and more words would make no difference as to them being a prop. Me using the word ‘tree’ would not make the prop tree a real tree.
If intentional words are actually props, using them no more makes ‘the intentional’ real than using the prop tree made for a real tree. Using more props to describe that the props are props wouldn’t make those props real, of course.
I had another analogy where words were made on the ground by shaping (for the time being, sleeping) snakes to form the letters, the words being ‘You are safe’ and the intentionalist is trapped in a pit with these words. But that is probably a bit too metal.
Still does not quite answer my question about the words “love” or “empathy. I suppose I shrink have been more specific.
“Should”
I’m not sure if you’re asking ‘well if intentionality isn’t what’s the power behind the words, what is?’, rgkrail? If so, I’d look at Kat Craig’s comments about heuristics.
On using words like those, well imagine you were faced with a wall covered in numbers. Now to you it might be a wall covered in numbers, but say some super brain could distinguish the patterns between numbers. You or I would see a wall of numbers, the super brain would see the pattern or the function of it.
Your ‘love’ or ’empathy’ is you seeing the wall covered in numbers. It’s a low resolution understanding of what is being seen. And if you are stuck at a lower resolution, you are always going to use lower resolution terms to some degree. As Scott said, that’s why the word ‘design’ still gets used in evolution discussion – because it’s the resolution we’re at.
Though I warn against xeno rejection at this point. It seems a thing and a pet peeve of mine that if people find something less attractive or personable than they first took it to be, they suddenly reject it.
I think the issue is that the two sides are not understanding intentionality ( not intentional idioms) the same way. Bakker understands by intentionality a spooky aboutness, something that must be a kind of shorthand and not original, a collapsing of a variety of connections/relations which he construes as causal connections/relations. The paradigm perhaps would be a naive conception of a cognitive subject standing over against an object or a world, whose only connection therewith is the blunt standing-over-against. The standing-over-against is the aboutness or intentionality in Bakker’s sense. It is a bare, spooky relation. Sometimes all that needs to be said is, say, I am thinking about Paris. As Bakker says: “Since the actual relation between ‘you’ (or your ‘thought,’ or your ‘utterance,’ or your ‘belief,’ and ‘etc.’) and what is cognized/perceived—experienced—outruns experience, you find yourself stranded with the bald fact of a relation, an ineluctable coincidence of you and your object, or ‘aboutness'”. And truth, for example, is a binary heuristic for Bakker, forcing an answer that is either true or false. Seemingly we always can ask of a proposition “is that true?” or treat any statement as entailing the further statement that the first statement is true, and can be stuck in an infinite regress of binary true/false values. These are the kinds of issues motivating Bakker’s theory. Neglect is a result of our finitude.
All of this discussion really has me wondering how a post-intentionalist cognitive science of philosophy would approach, for example, the visuospatial metaphors we use to process philosophical intuitions. None of the textbook definitions of metaphors that I have seen so far have really addressed the extent to which these metaphors function more as cognitive processing engines than functional qualia. I’ve noticed Scott referencing these visual metaphors frequently, describing them as mappings. A possible empirical question would be the link between visuospatial processing ability and philosophical imagination. How would one reinterpret this question heuristically in BBT? This is a more precise way of asking my earlier question about how to avoid ghosts in cognitive science.
I’m exploring this problem from many different angles: it seems like you can’t really develop a complete BBT without being able to explain the disagreement with BBT. But why, neuroscientifically speaking, is BBT incommunicable to intentionalists? Could it be related to visuospatial processing?
When I think about intentionality, I visualize the entire intentionalist “realm” as something very similar to Hofstadter’s strange loop. I don’t see why it would not be possible to pose this as an empirical question: can we find these sorts of looping structures in the brain, instantiated in various neural circuits that effect philosophical metacognition? Is there some crucial connection between the circuits that process visual data and the circuits in metacognitive areas of the PFC? And does post-intentional thought make information regarding this loop available to some other area of cognition (where would that be), thus dissolving its “spell?” I keep going back to this thought: in order to understand this problem, we would have to understand the neurobiological processes in the internationalist vs the eliminativist!
The odd part of it is that in order to escape the loop, one has to be able to visualize it clearly, to “step outside” of it, to receive new information pertaining to it. This process of looping and then realizing the existence of the loop is interesting because it is completely consistent with both a possible neurobiological description and with a subjective report. In philosophical terms, it clearly describes this sort of debate which cycles between describing the loop and describing from *within* the loop. Both sides are describing the same phenomenon, one just has more information. Do I sound totally crazy here? You’re right, there is something truly bizarre about the nature of these persistent disagreements.
DYAC! That was “intentionalist,” not “internationalist!”
on the to do list:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/55073-the-innocent-eye-why-vision-is-not-a-cognitive-process/
The power of abstraction in the PFC. He knows where he found the food supply yesterday. He can perform the reduction of retracing his steps. If he doesn’t the knowledge just hangs there in the PFC.
Well, that seems to be falsifiable, and thus it is waaaay more scientific than all the stuff that tends to get passed there-and-back-again during “intentionalist debates”.
So congrats! It’s good (or at least better) because it’s falsifiable!
BBT is starting to look to me like the only possible inroad into metacognitive theory that doesn’t rely on magic to explain the phenomena at hand. It relies on how ready our cognitive systems are to chose magic over just about everything furnished by BBT. The final trap a gaudy cage made of the convictions of our vanity. Am i NOT supposed to worry that BBT is just the crown jewel, the least wrong of all our entirely wrong conceits?
and what does the company think of the book caliban and the witch?? im reading it now. death to the consult.
Lol – LL, there is a forum for such rampant speculation ;): http://www.second-apocalypse.com . Feel free to engage.
coolfool. seokti and i just signed up. awaiting moderation….
Just remember to keep your posts on topic, Lukas. I think I cut a couple of your previous entries because of this. The thread is already too long, and for whatever reason it seems to attracting a large number of trolls. It’s almost like the ‘Dude’ days all over again!
Welcome otherwise.
Scott, I mean no offense, but the more I read your posts about this supposed “Semantic apocalypse”, the more convinced that it neurotic, baseless, narrative masquerading as legitimate scientific speculation. Love your books, (pardon the slang), but dude just chill.
“neurotic, baseless, narrative masquerading as legitimate scientific speculation”
That would be foot-stomping. No offense, but if you’re going by your ‘gut’ here, then I think I would be asking my gut some hard questions. Otherwise, you’re wasting my time unless you give me arguments.
I apologize Scott, came home from.a rather bad work day and did took it out on the internets. I find the BBT quite an interesting theory, and you have laid it out quite coherently. I just don’t buy into speculation about that dark area known as the future. I suffer from severe depression and this talk of the apocalypse makes it hard to function, to the detriment of my family. Once again, I’m sorry. At the end.of the day I just need to know that basic human emotions are real
No problem, neuro. I know the feeling.
[…] BBT is a profoundly counterintuitive theory that cautions us against intuition itself. And ironically, it substantiates my skeptical intuitions. In short, it shows I’m not the only one who has no clue what she’s doing. If BBT is correct, non-neurotypical individuals aren’t really “impaired.” They simply fit differently with other people. Fewer intersecting lines, that’s all. Bakker has developed his theory further since he published this paper, building on his notion of post-intentional theory (see here for a more general introduction). BBT has stirred up quite a lot of drama. […]
My first philosophical blog post: a perspective on BBT from someone who is neurobiologically non-normative, if anyone is interested. Intentional, Post-Intentional, and Unintentional Philosophy
Coolus beanus!
apologies if we spooked you, it was a valuable bit of writing but I can certainly understand the concerns around going public, peace
Don’t worry I wasn’t spooked. I was trying to challenge people’s assumptions, I succeeded in a couple cases, but ended up confirming more assumptions than I challenged. (It’s a really hard thing to change assumptions, isn’t it)? I’m dealing with a serious health situation too, so my brain is just not up to the task, so I had to the blog. I’ll be back later *evil cackle*
More recharging batteries (delete if it’s not contributing to thread)
I’m thinking of an example where someone has been trapped in a white room since birth – and can’t move as they are strapped down. They have had wifi probes put into their optical nerves, so various shapes can be projected into their vision – the software running the projection keeps track of eye and head movement, so the image projected does not move with either movement. Making it appear to be IN the white room.
I think we could agree the subject would think the projection is actually there.
Okay, so here’s the thing – what if you wanted to tell the subject the projections are just an illusion, but the only means you had of communicating with him was by sending more illusions?
He’d be stuck – he’d be faced by this thing that is, to him, definately is there saying it is not there! It’d seem this ridiculous performative contradiction. The thing that is right there is saying it’s not right there!
Even further he’d ask ‘Why should I listen to you if you entirely lack content!?’
The only way he could understand it is if he could humour what he takes to be real is at best described as not being the entirety of the thing that (just) seems to be showing it’s entirety. Instead it’s a product of something he is unable to percieve.
This is Plato’s Cave for sure. The difference is that I’m telling them their Forms are the real shadows on the wall.
Your body is the dream of shadows.
Post-intentional poetry? Charles Gocher, 1952-2007
Dream of Shadows
Could be. There’s a lot of po-mo stuff bent on deconstructing selfhood and traditional constructs of subjectivity, but remains thoroughly invested in the ontologization of the rest of the intentional lexicon.
They seem like a group of good people but the debate seems to have devolved into “Scott, why can’t you teach Spanish For Beginners to Spanish Speaking People?”
For the guy who had his walls painted yellow and the painter charged him for brand new yellow paint, did he know the painter used left over red and white paint from the last job?..neglect
As I pointed out to them, St Thomas was a modern, educated man for his day and his philosophy was modern thinking for the middle ages. They are like the polytheists lamenting the introduction of monotheism into the world. Maybe all of those angels in the architecture were St Thomas isolating neurons and structures in the brain?
Christianity? Who could ever introduce the literary genre of story about innocent people being crucified by a dominating empire, unwed teenage girls who find themselves pregnant and subject to death, poor people being on the same level as emperors and high rabbi’s….naaaaaaaaaah, no way, this was the adopted state religion of the Roman Empire, no way they could have edited the stories…….monotheism that raises up the human person!
As they say it’s complicated but we are a free people, free to open up our minds….There are plenty of precedents for this behavior.
How many intentionalists and EM’s can you fit on a blog thread?
I’m actually amazed there’s a debate at all, truth be told. Most all the eliminativists I’ve met are in the closet, and they’ve warned me away from these kinds of exchanges. But as you know, I have this thing about ingroup confirmation. And besides, maybe we really will encounter something new, something game-changing.
Both sides should just declare victory and go home. I think that to the extent heuristics are built into the structure of the brain human beings literally can’t think without them, so when intentionalists argue intentionality is indispensable they may have a point. When Scott argues that intentionality is neurological rather than transcendental he may have a point. The question whether intentionality is neurological or transcendental is one that neither side can answer definitively yet. As for handicapping the contest I agree with Scott that the smart money is on neurological because so much else, from volcanoes to stars, that we once thought was transcendental turned out to be natural.
That is must be stranded with some heuristic is likely based on the brains structure and development, but which heuristics it is stranded with at any given moment is presumably open to revision.
They’re equivocating the indispensability of the idiom with the necessity of their intuitive interpretations of the idiom. (Note that no one has yet explained why we should trust those intuitions…) Neglect welds the equivocation shut.
“The question whether intentionality is neurological or transcendental is one that neither side can answer definitively yet.”
I agree, but I think the science is definitely trending in the wrong direction for the traditionalist. Also, BBT only need be plausible to render this issue an empirical one. It’s the religious short-circuit in their case that I’m trying to find ways to prise apart, to get them to abandon the embarrassing notion that theirs is the only seat at the table.
[…] BBT is a profoundly counterintuitive theory that cautions us against intuition itself. And ironically, it substantiates my skeptical intuitions. In short, it shows I’m not the only one who has no clue what she’s doing. If BBT is correct, non-neurotypical individuals aren’t really “impaired.” They simply fit differently with other people. Fewer intersecting lines, that’s all. Bakker has developed his theory further since he published this paper, building on his notion of post-intentional theory (see here for a more general introduction). BBT has stirred up quite a lot of drama. […]
Oxymoron’s, all the way down. The position of denying intention (in animals with brains, especially humans) is self contradictory, as Feser and his minions have been patiently explaining. As such, it is really difficult to avoid the ‘tu quoque’ – save that it is no fallacy in this case ‘cause the proposition just makes no sense. This is what science looks like without a sound philosophy behind it.
Most of the supporting arguments equate to: Science can’t find a cause, so it must not be there, as if gravity had waited for Newton. It is trivially possible to recognize intentionality, just as it is gravity. Think of finding its ‘cause’ as an opportunity.
As in many problems in biology, there are two categories to solve, a proximate cause and an ultimate cause. The ultimate cause seems pretty straightforward: A willful, intentional beast should have significant advantage in novel problem solving and unpredictability – such as a sea turtle vs. a jellyfish, or an early bird vs. a worm.
Toward developing a proximate cause, it was probably far simpler (if not absolutely essential) to evolve a neural structure that was willful over a functional deterministic one. The world is just far too dynamic and unpredictable. Too much variety in terrain, too much variety in opportunity – fruits, veggies and prey animals, all with different characters and abilities. Too much variety in threats and capabilities of predators.
Add to that, the neural structure of every brain is different, requiring a somewhat unique series of responses to effect the same movements. Every skeleton is slightly different as is every musculature. Skeletons and muscles change as an individual matures then ages, muscle tone changes through any day and as one trains or practices. All these changes require modifying the necessary neural responses.
The free will exhibited by humans evolved out of an evolutionary necessity to adapt to potentially unique external environmental situations and necessarily unique internal states in fractions of a second, not generations.
We don’t learn simple pattern matching but models and relationships. We do not simply react, we create dynamic simulations and anticipate. Some of this comes through to our conscious mind as dreams and daydreams, but most goes on in our subconscious. Free will (an intentional behavior) is one name we have given to the conscious part of this dynamic problem solving our brains are constantly engaged in.
Oh for the love of cyborg ninjas, did you just imply that “willful” systems are non-deterministic ?
That’s confusing “intentionality” and “free will”.
Those are definitely not the same, at least if you use the so-called adequacy criteria of intentional phenomena (Directionality/aboutness, NTF (non-truth functionality) features, Inexistence, Indeterminacy and referential opacity)
Also, what the hell makes you believe humans are non-deterministic? Anything other than a deeply held belief regarding your own … er… freewheeliness?
What is the difference between a stochastic system (say a vanilla robot with a “hardware” random number generator) and a free-willed system?
Love whom or what you want (free will, after all), I don’t think you can really separate intentionality from free will. I don’t think you (where you would be a bird or mammal) could achieve intention save by the exercise of will. Nor do I see an application for free will save an intentional one. It looks to me that they evolved together, though upon reflection, it would probably make a better argument to posit intention first and will as an emergent property with higher complexity problem solving brains.
I do not see how anything more than a touch of common sense is required to reject determinism in humans (or as noted above, in birds or mammals in general). Consider the range and dynamics of language – to include regional dialects. Consider as well art, fads and fashion. Athletics, politics and war. Rates of innovation. Determined systems are unlikely to innovate.
The difference between a stochastic system and a free-willed system would be its intentionality. As that would probably not be directly measurable, I would evaluate the appropriateness of the response to the challenge. I would anticipate random, inappropriate responses from a stochastic system, varied but primarily appropriate responses from a willful system.
One very clear marker for free will in humans is sarcasm. Two clear markers for intentionality are walking and talking.
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I don’t think you can really separate intentionality from free will.
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According to formal criteria of intentional phenomena (see “adequacy criteria”) you very well can (or at least, philosophers starting from Fodor onwards can)
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I don’t think you (where you would be a bird or mammal) could achieve intention save by the exercise of will.
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Current understanding of intentional phenomena does not stipulate one needs a “will”, unless you equivocate will with directionality (which would be a funny thing to do, but hardly correct)
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I do not see how anything more than a touch of common sense is required to reject determinism in humans (or as noted above, in birds or mammals in general). Consider the range and dynamics of language – to include regional dialects. Consider as well art, fads and fashion. Athletics, politics and war. Rates of innovation. Determined systems are unlikely to innovate.
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Nothing of that implies non-determinism.
Deterministic systems can produce extremely complex outputs, including outputs from which the full scope of inputs can not be recovered (hash functions being an appropriate, if sarcastic example) and various self-modifying communication protocols (think smart ad-hoc networks or what have you).
Deterministic systems have been observed innovating in the wild (though stochastic systems with RNGs are usually a bit better at that), in applications ranging from automatic gait readjustment for injury compensation in robotics, to fully automatic microbiological research (that’s a thing!)
So unless there’s some formula to compute “proper” innovation rate for a “willful” system, approach-from-innovation seems hollow.
That’s not a problem for mental intentionality per se, though, since nothing in its currently existing definitions prohibits deterministic constructs from having mental-intentional states.
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I would anticipate random, inappropriate responses from a stochastic system, varied but primarily appropriate responses from a willful system
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So a stochastic system with some kind of constraint, like a post-filter that removes outright pointless and dangerous responses leaving ones that sorta fit some definition of appropriateness (a definition you would need anyway if you want to calculate some appropriateness-score) would fare about as good as “willfull” one.
Also, humans do a metric crapton of stuff they, when questioned, admit being inappropriate by their own definition.
So humans might as well be stochastic system, it seems.
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One very clear marker for free will in humans is sarcasm.
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Yes, indeed …
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Holding to my stipulation of starting with a bird or mammal, I do not see Fodor isolating intention from will. In other systems, I concede it is arguably possible.
But let us consider three flavors of intentionality: intrinsic, derivative and as-if. Leaving the general categories of fauna aside for now, humans (I contend) possess intrinsic intentionality and free will, neither of which can be uncoupled from their behaviors.
Watches and computers possess derivative intentionality, imposed upon them by their designers which cannot be uncoupled from the will of their designers. Any response or behavior they present could be considered a result of the will of said human, one step removed.
As-If intentionality, such as evolution as outlined by Darwin, only has an appearance of intentionality. A first cut to distinguish this from (actual) intentionality might be to determine if what appears could be innovation occurs within an individual or within a population across generations.
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Current understanding of intentional phenomena does not stipulate one needs a “will”
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I’m not sure that would work, but realized it might. So I slipped in ‘bird or mammal’ as an afterthought. You may find intentional phenomena without will, but not a bird or mammal. But you may not find such a phenomenon either. Simply describing a hypothetical phenomenon which is independent of will does not generate it. In the real world that may turn out to be illusory, or ‘as-if’ intention. A bird I claim, has will and intention. A worm? Probably neither, but possibly intention. They appear intentional to a degree, but I am dubious.
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So a stochastic system with some kind of constraint, like a post-filter that removes outright pointless and dangerous responses leaving ones that sorta fit some definition of appropriateness would fare about as good as “willfull” one.
So humans might as well be stochastic system, it seems.
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Why not? And if nature can stumble upon a ‘willful’ system, there’s no reason I see innovation could not do so deliberately. I model humans as an artful blend of determined and stochastic processes with a wonderfully complex filter. My model of preference here is the Kalman Filter – elegant and scalable. Developed to allow a ’60s era computer to navigate the Apollo to the moon vs. brains evolved to allow beasts to navigate. It is a massively scalable algorithm (the brain in your handy GPS has orders of magnitude more capability than that in the Apollo) that could also be ‘taught’ a wide range of pattern recognition, discrimination and generation.