Stephen
Stich
Rutgers University
Developing and defending a philosophical position is a bit like weaving an intricate piece of fabric. When things go well each strand of the argument adds strength and support to the others, and gradually interesting patterns begin to emerge. But when things go poorly - when one of the strands breaks - it sometimes happens that the entire fabric begins to unravel. A little gap becomes a big gap and soon there is nothing left at all.
This book is about the unraveling of a philosophical position. In some of the chapters, including this one, I'll tell the tale in the first person, since the position that came unraveled was my position, or at least one that I was seriously tempted to endorse. Though it was not mine alone, of course. Several very distinguished philosophers, including Quine, Rorty and Feyerabend, had advanced versions of the view while I was still wearing philosophical knee pants, and a number of well known philosophers continue to advocate the position with considerable passion. The doctrine in question is sometimes called eliminative materialism, though more often it's just called eliminativism. And whatever one thinks of the merits of the view, there can be little doubt that its central thesis is provocative and flamboyant. In its strongest form, what eliminativism claims is that beliefs, desires and many of the other mental states that we allude to in predicting, explaining and describing each other do not exist. Like witches, phlogiston, and caloric fluid, or perhaps like the gods of ancient religions, these mental states are the fictional posits of a badly mistaken theory._
Though a wide variety of arguments have been offered for this rather startling conclusion, all of them share much the same structure. They begin with the Premise_ that beliefs, desires and various other mental states, whose existence the argument will challenge, can be viewed as "posits" of a widely shared commonsense psychological theory -- "folk psychology" as it is often called. Folk psychology, the Premise maintains, underlies our everyday discourse about mental states and processes, and terms like "belief" and "desire" can be viewed as theoretical terms in this folk theory. The Second Premise is that folk psychology is a seriously mistaken theory because some of the central claims it makes about the states and processes that give rise to behavior, or some of the crucial presuppositions of those claims, are false or incoherent. This step in the argument has been defended in many different ways, with different writers focusing on different putative defects. After defending these two Premises, an eliminativist's argument can take one of two routes. The simplest route goes directly from the Premises to the conclusion that beliefs, desires and other posits of folk psychology do not exist. And, of course, if that's right, it follows that no mature science which succeeds in explaining human behavior will invoke the posits of folk psychology. Beliefs, desires and the rest will not be part of the ontology of the science that ultimately gives us a correct account of the workings of the human mind/brain. The second route that an eliminativist's argument can follow reverses the order of these two conclusions. From the Premises it initially concludes that folk psychological posits will not be part of the ontology of any mature science. This, in turn, is taken to support the stronger conclusion that these folk psychological states do not exist.
The Premises of the argument that I've just sketched can be unpacked in many different ways, just about all of which generate controversy. In subsequent chapters I'll take a careful look at several of those controversies. But in this chapter, I propose to put these disputes to one side. For even when the Premises are unpacked in a way that is most favorable to the eliminativists' arguments, and even if we assume, for argument's sake, that these Premises are true, neither of the two conclusions that eliminativists wish to draw follows directly. Some additional premises are necessary. And it is my contention that none of the premises that will do the trick are defensible. If that's right, then obviously eliminativists are in trouble. For even if we grant that their Premises about folk psychology are correct, their ontological conclusions simply do not follow. To support this claim, I'll begin, in Section 2, by elaborating on what I take to be best version of the First Premise, from the eliminativists' point of view, and then assembling, in Section 3, a catalog of the complaints that eliminativists have leveled against folk psychology. The remainder of the chapter will be devoted to setting out my argument that there is no way of getting from the eliminativists' Premises to their conclusions, and exploring the options that are available if my argument is correct.
It is a bit odd that, despite its fundamental importance in eliminativists' arguments, the step linking the Premises to the conclusions has not been the focus of much attention in the literature. In my own writing, at least until recently, it was a step I took quite unselfconsciously. Along with most of the other participants on both sides of the debate, I assumed that the battle would be lost or won by deciding who was right about the virtues and shortcomings of folk psychology. Once it becomes clear how much of folk psychology is denied or abandoned in the mature sciences of the mind/brain, it would be obvious what to say about the extent to which the ontology of folk psychology and of the successful sciences overlap. But gradually over the last several years I have come to realize that this crucial step in eliminativists' arguments is anything but obvious.
My first serious inkling that perhaps all was not well came while I was polishing a paper that I had written with Bill Ramsey and Joey Garon in which we set out one particularly trendy argument for eliminativism. That argument begins with some speculations about the future success of connectionist models of human memory, and notes that the interactions among the states posited by those models are quite different from the interactions among beliefs, as they are construed by commonsense psychology. The argument goes on to conclude that if those connectionist speculations prove to be correct, then the ontology of scientific psychology will not include beliefs. The paper that Ramsey, Garon and I wrote is reprinted as the second chapter in this volume. Though nothing much in this first chapter turns on the details, you might want to give it a quick read before going on, if you haven't done so already. It will give you a feel for what the eliminativist fabric looks like before it begins to unravel.
Just as we were finishing that paper, I had occasion to re-read a characteristically acute essay by William Lycan in which he notes that the conclusion in arguments like ours doesn't follow unless some additional premise is added, and goes on to suggest that the additional premise which is (often tacitly) assumed by most eliminativists is some version of the description theory of reference for theoretical terms. I suspect that Lycan is quite right about what others authors had been assuming, and he is certainly right about me. In Section 4, I'll explain in some detail where the additional premise comes from and how it works. Lycan has never been much tempted by eliminativism, and in the essay that woke me from my dogmatic slumbers, he explains why. Description theories of reference have come in for a great deal of criticism in recent years, and he favors a very different account of reference. Moreover, if that account is correct, then premises detailing untenable features of folk psychology, conjoined with suitable premises about the reference of theoretical terms, will not support the sort of eliminativist conclusions that Ramsey, Garon and I were proposing. Section 5 is devoted to setting out Lycan's argument and exploring some of its implications. In a footnote to our paper, Ramsey, Garon and I offered a hasty rebuttal designed to show that the theory of reference Lycan favors is just as problematic as the description theoretic account that he rejects._ But since we had no better alternative to offer, we hurried on with our own argument, granting that the decision on whether our premises sustained our conclusion would have to be something of a "judgement call."
I wasn't all that happy with this "quick fix," and I resolved that at some point I would try to work out a better theory of reference - one that was more likely to be correct than either Lycan's or the description-theoretic one on which I had been relying. Before I could start on that project, however, there was a prior question to be confronted. If the goal was to produce a correct theory of reference, I would have to get clear on what it is that makes a theory of reference correct or incorrect. What exactly are the facts that a correct theory of reference is supposed to capture? And how can we find out whether a theory has succeeded in capturing those facts? These are the questions I'll take up in Section 6. The discussion there follows a line of thought that I developed in a series of papers which have appeared in the last few years._ But that line kept heading off in a very surprising direction. There are, I think, two quite different stories to be told about what a theory of reference is up to. On one of them, which I'll call the "proto-science" account, the theory of reference is attempting to characterize a word-world mapping that will be useful in one or another empirical discipline, like linguistics, or cognitive psychology, or perhaps the history of science. According to the other story, which I'll call the "folk semantics" account, the theory of reference is attempting to capture the details of a commonsense theory about the link between words and the world. This latter story appears to be favored, albeit tacitly, by most philosophers. However, as I'll argue in Section 7, if this is the view we adopt, then there probably is no correct account of reference for the theoretical terms invoked in a seriously mistaken theory. Reference, in these cases, is simply indeterminate. Moreover, whether or not I am right about the indeterminacy of reference in these cases, the folk semantics story suggests that reference is a quirky and idiosyncratic relation, and that there are lots of alternative relations that we might have used in its stead. There is nothing special about reference that distinguishes it from these alternatives. It just happens to be the member of this cluster that our culture has latched on to. If this is right, then the debate over eliminativism begins to look very odd indeed. For, as argued in Section 7, if reference is not a particularly interesting or important relation, and if the existence or non-existence of the posits of folk psychology turns on whether or not the theoretical terms of folk psychology refer, then it seems to follow that the eliminativists' conclusions themselves can't be all that interesting or important. Even if it turns out that the theoretical terms of folk psychology don't refer, just the opposite conclusion might have followed had we inherited a somewhat different notion of reference.
This was a rather radical conclusion to reach. But I had never let that bother me before. Indeed, I confess that I have a certain fondness for such conclusions. And anyhow, that was where the argument seemed to be leading, provided that we opt for the folk semantics account of the facts that a theory of reference is supposed to capture. Suppose we opt for the other account, the proto-science story? In that case, as noted in Section 8, there is no saying what follows from the eliminativists' Premises, since the relevant sciences have not yet determined which word-world relation will be of use to them. And even if we ignore this problem, the proto-science story leads to some pretty bizarre consequences of its own.
So it looked like I was stuck with the conclusion that an issue I had spent much of the last two decades thinking about was either unresolvable or not very interesting, and that I'd just have to learn to live with that conclusion. As part of the process, I did what many philosophers do these days: I took my show on the road, trying to defend my new view in front of a variety of audiences. Few were persuaded. But it took John Searle (with some help from Frank Jackson and Christopher Gauker) to convince me that there was something very wrong with the argument I was offering. What persuaded me was Searle's insistence that my argument, if sound, was perfectly general. It applied equally to the posits of folk psychology and to the posits of physics. So if my argument were correct, debates about the existence of black holes or the Big Bang should also be unimportant and uninteresting. And that is a crazy conclusion, even for someone with my high tolerance for views that fly in the face of conventional wisdom. Now I was in a real pickle. For while Searle and others had persuaded me that there must be something wrong with my argument, none of my critics had a plausible account of what was wrong with it. Where, exactly, had the argument gone wrong? I am, I admit, still not completely confident that I know the answer to this question. But in Section 9 I'll set out the best analysis I've come up with so far. It's rather a long story, and I won't ruin the suspense by trying to summarize it here. The bottom line, if I'm right, is that the mistake came right at the beginning when we turned to the theory of reference to try to settle whether the eliminativists' Premises supported their conclusions. On the view I'll set out in Section 9, the appeal to reference and the strategy of "semantic ascent" are complete non-starters when it comes to settling ontological questions like those that eliminativists raise.
But if we can't appeal to the theory of reference, what can we do? How do we settle questions about the existence of things spoken of in theories that we no longer take to be correct? One idea, considered briefly in Section 10, is that the notion of a "constitutive" or "conceptually necessary" property will help resolve the issue. That proposal, I'll argue, raises more problems than it solves.
Having reached this point it seemed prudent to look for some other way of determining what we should conclude from the eliminativists' Premises, a way which didn't rely on semantic notions or appeals to conceptual necessity. One idea that seems promising is to look to the history of science in the hope of finding principles of ontological inference that have been used in other cases. If we can locate some candidate principles, perhaps these can then be confirmed by looking at other historical cases, and by testing the principles against our intuitions in hypothetical cases. This would, I think, be an intriguing project. But as I argue in Section 11, there is no guarantee that it would succeed. For it might well be the case, indeed I think it is the case, that there are no principles in this area that are strong enough to specify what ontological conclusions we should draw when confronted with a seriously mistaken theory. Rather, I maintain, these issues are typically settled through a process of social negotiation in which politics, personalities and social factors can all play a role. I'm told that makes me a social constructionist, or at least a fellow traveler. But, as I'll argue in Section 12, the position I'm advocating can also be viewed as a close neighbor to the versions of pragmatism favored by Quine, Rorty and others. And ever since I started out in philosophy, I've thought that's the best neighborhood in town.
That brings me to the end of my preview of the current Chapter. The rest of the book consists of essays, some of which have been previously published, that were written while I was struggling with the ideas set out in this Chapter. Once the fabric of the eliminativist argument started to unravel, new holes seemed to pop up everywhere. On a closer look, some of the arguments aimed at showing that folk psychology was not a very promising theory -- arguments that I had once thought quite plausible -- now seemed much less plausible. My current view on these arguments is set out in Chapters 5 & 6. After a while even the first step of the eliminativists' argument, the one that claims there is a folk psychological theory that might turn out to be badly mistaken, began to look much less obvious than it once had. Chapter 3 explores some of the reasons why many philosophers and cognitive psychologists have accepted this assumption, and sets out some of the ways in which it might turn out to be untenable. Chapter 4 focuses on simulation theory, which is the basis of the most recent attack on the First Premise of the eliminativist argument.
Since most of these essays have more than one author, perhaps this is an appropriate place for few words about my collaborators. Throughout my professional career I have been exceptionally fortunate in having the opportunity to interact with many gifted, creative and enthusiastic students. They have always been my best critics and my best inspiration to explore new ideas and to say things more clearly. Many of them have gotten involved in my intellectual projects, or gotten me involved in theirs, and these interactions, more than anything else, are what makes academic life rewarding for me. All of my collaborators in this volume are my former students. And I owe them all a considerable debt. Without them the book would have been much less interesting to read and much less fun to write. At one time I planned to combine the material in this Chapter with Chapter 3, Chapter 5 and parts of Chapter 4, and publish it all together as a single book length study. But in each case my students and I decided it would be best to publish the collaborative work separately. One result of that decision is that there is a bit of overlap in these chapters. Ideas, arguments, and even a few sentences appear more than once.
I've made lots of promises about what I'm going to do in the pages that follow. Now it's time to get to work. But since all work and no play makes for dreary going, let me end this Section with a few mischievous observations on how my project in this Chapter might be construed. For some years now Deconstructionism has been a pretentious and obfuscatory blight on the intellectual landscape. But buried in the heaps of badly written blather produced by people who call themselves "Deconstructionists," there is at least one idea - not original with them - that is worth noting. This is the thesis that in many domains both intellectual activity and every day practice presuppose a significant body of largely tacit theory. Since the tacit theories are typically all but invisible, it is easy to proceed without examining them critically. Yet once these tacit theories are subject to scrutiny, they are often seen to be very tenuous indeed. There is nothing obvious or inevitable about them. And when the weakness of the underlying theories has been exposed, the doctrines and practices that rely on them can be seen to be equally tenuous. If, as I would suggest, this process of uncovering and criticizing tacit assumptions is at the core of Deconstructionism, then eliminativism is pursuing a paradigmatically Deconstructionist program. However, if I am right, the eliminativist deconstruction of commonsense psychological discourse has itself tacitly assumed a dubious package of presuppositions about the ways language and ontology are related. So if the goal of eliminativism is to provide a deconstruction of the mind, one goal of this chapter is to deconstruct that deconstruction.
A central thesis of this Chapter is that even if we grant the Premises in the eliminativists' arguments, there is no plausible way of getting from these Premises to the ontological conclusions that eliminativists want to establish. In this Section I'll set out one version of the eliminativists' First Premise, a version designed to make the job of getting from Premises to conclusions as easy as possible. There are lots of other ways in which this Premise might be unpacked, and in Chapter 3 Ian Ravenscroft and I have tried to explore them in a systematic way. But in this Chapter I propose to ignore these alternatives. There are also lots of reasons to suspect that the version of the Premise I'll set out here might turn out to be false. Some of these reasons will be considered in Chapters 3 and 4. Here, however, I will ignore them. Since I want to focus on the link between Premises and conclusions, I'll just explain what this version of the First Premise claims, and then assume that it is true.
It is an easy job to state the version of the First Premise that I think will give the eliminativists their best shot at drawing the conclusions they want to draw. Explaining it will take a bit more work. What the Premise claims is that our folk psychological capacities are subserved by a theory (that I'll call "folk psychology") which:
i) is largely tacit
ii) is encoded in a declarative linguistic format
iii) asserts (or presupposes) that beliefs, desires
and other intentional states that it invokes have representational (or semantic)
properties, and that these properties play an essential role in individuating
beliefs and desires
(iv) attributes an opulent array of causal powers to beliefs, desires, and
other intentional states, some of which are dependent on the representational
properties of those intentional states.
Obviously a fair amount of unpacking is in order. Let's start the with the notion of "folk psychological capacities". This is the term that Ravenscroft and I introduced to refer to a cluster of abilities, including: the ability to make predictions (which often turn out to be correct) about what people will do; the ability to attribute beliefs, desires and other intentional states to people in a way that other observers often agree with; and the ability to construct explanations of people's behavior that are couched in intentional terms and that other people often agree with. There are a number of other abilities that might be added to this list,_ but for current purposes this should suffice. One of the few claims that isn't controversial in this area is that normal adults in our culture do indeed have all three of these abilities.
To explain what I mean when I say that our folk psychological capacities are "subserved" by a theory, it will be useful to consider an analogy with another capacity, which might be called our "folk physics capacity". This capacity, too, consists of a cluster of abilities, including: the ability to make predictions (which often turn out to be correct) about the movements of middle sized physical objects (rocks that are dropped, or thrown, or rolled down hill, boxes that are pushed or pulled, swinging pendulums, etc.), and the ability to offer explanations (that other people often agree with) of why the objects behave as they do. How do people go about making these predictions and constructing these explanations? One very plausible answer is that people are relying on a commonsense theory (sometimes called "naive physics" or "folk physics") that includes principles specifying how objects will move under a variety of circumstances, along with other sorts of information that might be useful. The theory might well include terms for forces or for aspects of situations that are not readily observable and whose existence or magnitude must be inferred. Of course, the hypothesis that people rely on a theory to come up with physical predictions and explanations does not constitute a complete explanation of their folk physics capacity, even if the folk theory is specified in detail. We also need some account of how they use the theory -- how they apply it in various situations.
In recent years, cognitive scientists have offered a fair amount of evidence for the hypothesis that people's folk physics capacity is subserved by a commonsense theory. One of the most fascinating findings in this area is that many people seem to base their physical predictions and explanations on a physical theory that is mistaken, and that posits an unobservable internal force which, according to Newtonian (and post-Newtonian) accounts of the world, simply does not exist. McCloskey offers the following summary of this "naive theory of motion":
[The basic theory] makes two fundamental assertions about motion. First, the theory asserts that the act of setting an object in motion imparts to the object an internal force or "impetus" that serves to maintain the motion. Second, the theory assumes that a moving object's impetus gradually dissipates (either spontaneously or as a result of external influences), and as a consequence the object gradually slows down and comes to a stop. For example, according to the ... theory, a person who gives a push to a toy car to set it rolling across the floor imparts an impetus to the car, and it is this impetus that keeps the car moving after it is no longer in contact with the person's hand. However, the impetus is gradually expended, and as a result the toy car slows down and eventually stops._
This basic theory can be elaborated in a variety of ways. One particularly interesting elaboration deals with curvilinear motion.
Many subjects believe that an object constrained to move in a curved path acquires a curvilinear impetus that causes it to follow a curved trajectory for some time after the constraints on its motion are removed._
Evidence that people rely on this theory comes from a variety of experiments. In one set of experiments, subjects (all of whom were undergraduates at a highly selective American University) were presented with problems like the following:
Imagine that someone has a metal ball attached to a string and is twirling it at high speed in a circle above his head. In the diagram [Figure 1a] you are looking down on the ball. The circle shows the path followed by the ball and the arrows show the direction in which it is moving. The line from the center of the circle to the ball is the string. Assume that when the ball is at the point shown in the diagram, the string breaks where it is attached to the ball. Draw the path the ball will follow after the string breaks._
Thirty per cent of the subjects responded with drawings like Figure 1b, indicating that they believed the ball would continue in curvilinear motion after the string broke. Moreover, "most of the subjects who drew curved paths apparently believed that the ball's trajectory would straighten out."_ In another experiment, subjects presented with this and similar problems were interviewed at length about their answers. One subject offered the following explanation for the curved path that he predicted the ball would follow:
"You've got a force going around and [after the string breaks, the ball] will follow the curve that you've set it in until the ball runs out of the force within it that you've created by swinging."_
--------------------
Figure 1 About Here
--------------------
In another problem, subjects were shown Figure
2a, and told that it represents a side view of a metal ball swinging back
and forth at the end of a string. They are asked to draw the path the ball
will follow if the string is cut when the ball is in the position shown.
"Several subjects indicated that ... the ball would continue along
the original arc of the pendulum for a short time, and then would either
fall straight down [as in Figure 2b] or would describe a more or less parabolic
trajectory [as in Figure 2c].... One subject who made this sort of response
explained that when the string is cut, the ball has
"the momentum that it has achieved from swinging through this arc and
should continue in a circular path for a little while.... then it no longer
has the force holding it in the circular path, and it has the force of gravity
downward upon it so it's going to start falling in that sort of arc motion
because otherwise it would be going straight down."_
In a separate set of studies, Clement found that 88% of a group of entering freshmen engineering students made similar appeals to an impetus-like internal force in answering questions about the motion of a coin tossed straight up. After taking a freshman level course in mechanics, however, only (!) 72% of subjects gave responses that indicated a belief in impetus._
--------------------
Figure 2 About Here
--------------------
As McCloskey and Clement point out, these subjects have a lot of distinguished company. The claim that the act of setting an object in motion impresses an internal force in the object that serves to keep the object in motion played a prominent role in physical theories from the 14th century until the time of Newton. It was clearly endorsed by Galileo in his early writings, and it was invoked by Leonardo da Vinci who offered the following description of the motion of an object under conditions similar to those in Figure 1.
Everything movable thrown with fury through the air continues the motion of its mover; if, therefore, the latter move it in a circle and release it in the course of this motion, its movement will be curved._
These findings certainly make a plausible case for the hypothesis that people's folk physics capacity relies on a commonsense theory. And for eliminativists they offer an added attraction, since modern physics has shown that the theory being exploited by many subjects is simply mistaken. Moreover, one of its mistakes has a distinctly ontological flavor. The impetus theory posits the existence of an internal force in most moving objects, a force which obeys a fairly complex set of laws and which explains why the objects move as they do. But, modern physics assures us, that force does not exist. Sensible eliminativists will acknowledge that the facts about folk physics don't by themselves allow us to draw any strong conclusions about the posits of folk psychology. But I think the work on folk physics does make it plausible that the eliminativists' conclusions might be true. For it shows that it is possible that in their everyday dealings with the world -- dealings which are by and large pretty successful -- people rely on commonsense theories which appeal to forces that simply do not exist.
The next bit of jargon that needs explaining in my version of the eliminativists' First Premise is the claim that the theory subserving our folk psychological capacities is "largely tacit." Here another analogy will be helpful, this time an analogy with our linguistic capacities. Native speakers of a language can understand and produce an indefinitely large set of sentences of the language and make a wide array of judgements about the grammatical properties of those sentences. Also, there is an impressive degree of intersubjective agreement on those judgements. According to Chomsky and his many followers, the best explanation for these capacities includes the hypothesis that people have internally represented a generative grammar of their native language, and that the internalized grammar is exploited in various ways in producing, processing and judging sentences._ But, of course, this internalized grammar is stored in a way that makes it largely (perhaps completely) inaccessible to conscious access. People can't simply introspect and tell us the rules of the grammar they have internalized. If they could, the science of linguistics, which tries to specify the grammars that speakers have internalized, would be a lot easier than it is. Rather, Chomsky maintains, the grammars that people use are "tacitly known". The theory subserving our folk psychological capacities may be a bit more accessible to introspection than the grammar of our language. But there is good reason to think that much of the information (or mis-information) that we use in predicting and explaining people's behavior is stored in a way that makes it inaccessible to conscious access._ And that is what my version of the Premise claims.
Much of the debate in cognitive science over the last three decades has turned on the format in which information of various sorts is represented in the mind. Early on, it was widely assumed that most of the information stored in the mind is represented in linguistic or quasi-linguistic form. Some theorists argued that the natural language a person spoke (or something close to it) would be a suitable medium for storing most of what the person knows, while others maintained that natural languages would not do, and that one or more species wide "languages of thought" had to be posited._ But non-language like competitors were soon suggested, including quasi-pictorial representation, holographic representation, various sorts of mental models and, most recently, various sorts of connectionist representations._ Since eliminativists want to argue that folk psychology is false, it had better be the case that folk psychology is represented in a way that admits of such assessments. And, while various sorts of representation might arguably fit the bill, linguistic representations are the least problematic. So on my version of the First Premise, it's claimed that folk psychology is stored in a linguistic or quasi-linguistic format. Not just any linguistic representation will do, however. For there are lots of linguistic constructions -- imperatives, for example, and questions -- which can't be straightforwardly evaluated as true or false. Thus my version of the tacit theory Premise assumes that significant parts of our tacit folk psychological theory is stored declaratively.
According to both eliminativists and their staunchest critics, folk psychology takes beliefs, desires and other intentional states to be representational states. My belief that Reno is further west than Los Angeles represents the world as being a certain way, and so my belief is true if and only if the world is that way. That state of affairs is the truth condition of my belief. Desires represent the world as the person with the desire would like it to be. My desire to have sushi for dinner is fulfilled if and only if I do have sushi for dinner. That state of affairs is the fulfillment condition of my desire. Jargon abounds in this area. Truth and fulfillment conditions are sometimes collectively referred to as "conditions of satisfaction." Sometimes they are called the "content" of the beliefs and desires that have them. Having a satisfaction condition is sometimes called a "semantic property," or an "intentional property."
Many philosophers contend that semantic properties play an essential role in folk psychology's scheme for individuating instances (or "tokens") of propositional attitudes and classifying them into types. If we ask when a belief that a person has at a given time is identical with a belief she has at some later time, folk psychology's answer, according to these philosophers, is that the beliefs are identical if and only if they have the same content. Similarly, if we ask when two different people have the same belief (or "believe the same thing") folk psychology's answer, according to these philosophers, is that they have the same belief if and only if they have beliefs (or "belief tokens") with the same content. Though this account of how folk psychology individuates beliefs is not without it's critics, the version of the First Premise that I'm developing takes the account to be correct.
This is far from a complete account of the folk psychological scheme for individuating beliefs, however. To tell a more detailed story, we would have to specify the circumstances under which folk psychology counts two belief tokens as having the same content. And on this point controversy abounds. Some of the arguments surveyed in Section 3 assume that folk psychology relies on one set of principles for content identity, while other arguments assume that folk psychology relies on quite different principles. In my account of the First Premise, I propose to leave the matter unsettled. So the Premise, as I construe it, is compatible with any reasonable account of how contents are to be individuated.
Much of our ordinary folk psychological discourse can be construed as making causal claims in which intentional states figure prominently. We often say things like: "His mother's tone of voice led the child to believe that she was angry at him." and "The child looked under the chair because he believed his kitten was hiding there." Though terms like "led" and "because" might be interpreted in a variety of ways, it has become commonplace in philosophy to view them as making causal claims. The tone of voice was the cause (or at least a cause) of the belief, and the belief caused the child to look under the chair. The causal interpretation of such commonsense psychological claims was not always widely accepted by philosophers. I suspect that the two papers that did most to convince philosophers that this was the right interpretation were Brandt & Kim (1963) and Davidson (1963) -- they were certainly the two that convinced me. There have always been dissenters, however, and in recent years their ranks have grown as some philosophers have tried to fend off the challenge of eliminativism by denying that commonsense psychology attributes causal properties to beliefs and desires._ This is an important debate, and the matter is far from settled. But since my current aim is to set out the version of the eliminativists' First Premise that is most likely to support their conclusions, I will simply assume that the dissenters are wrong, and that ordinary folk psychological discourse does indeed make robust causal claims. This assumption does not, by itself, tell us anything about the tacit theory that subserves our commonsense discourse. But one very natural way to explain the fact that we often make causal claims involving intentional states is to suppose that the underlying tacit theory includes nomological generalizations specifying the causes and effects of intentional states, and that many of these generalizations are couched in terms of the content of intentional states. On my version, this is what the First Premise in the eliminativists' argument claims.
Horgan and Graham (1990) suggest some vivid terminology that can be pressed into service to characterize competing accounts of folk psychology. Accounts that portray folk psychology as making lots of substantive claims about the nature of intentional states, including lots of nomological generalizations, are opulent accounts, while accounts portraying folk psychology as making relatively few such claims are austere. Austere accounts have some appeal to those who would challenge the Second Premise in the eliminativists' argument, since the fewer claims a theory makes, the less likely it is to be wrong. But the First Premise of the argument, as I propose to construe it, opts for an account of folk psychology that is at the opulent end of the spectrum. Folk psychology, the First Premise insists, includes many putative laws and makes many claims about intentional states.
In the previous Section my goal was to explain the version of the First Premise that I think will give eliminativists their best shot at building an argument from their Premises to their conclusions. In this Section, my goal is to do the same for the Second Premise. My approach, however, will be quite different. It takes no great effort to state the best version of the Second Premise, and since it is so straightforward, there is no need to explain what it means. What it claims is that folk psychology is a seriously defective theory because many of the claims that folk psychology makes or presupposes are false. What does need some explaining is why eliminativists endorse this claim, and why many opponents of eliminativism take it very seriously and feel they have to refute it. To explain that, I will provide a brief tour of what I take to be the most influential arguments aimed at showing that folk psychology is bad psychology. In this Chapter I don't propose to dwell on the details, or to say much about the counter-arguments that have been urged by the friends of folk psychology, though in later Chapters I'll return to a few of these arguments and discuss them at greater length. This Section is intended mostly for readers who are new to the debate, and for those who would like a reminder of how some of the arguments go. The rest of you can scoot ahead to Section 4.
For heuristic purposes, the arguments I'll sketch can be divided into two categories. Those in the first category focus on what might be called the structural and nomological commitments of folk psychology - the claims it (allegedly) makes about the structure of the psychological states underlying behavior, and about how these states causally interact with one another and with other sorts of states. Arguments in this category typically try to marshall evidence indicating that structures or processes of the sort folk psychology appeals to are not likely to be found in the systems that actually produce behavior. Since the available evidence is often quite fragmentary and inconclusive, these arguments commonly indulge in more than a bit of futurology or science fiction. Arguments in the second category focus on the fact that folk psychology attributes semantic properties to many of the states it invokes, and that it exploits these semantic properties in some of its generalizations. These arguments try to show that, for one reason or another, semantic properties are ill suited to the role folk psychology would have them play. Though there is some appeal to science fiction in these arguments too, much of the work is done by metaphysical or methodological principles. There is, I should stress, no sharp divide between these two categories of arguments, and nothing much turns on how an argument is classified. I find that dividing things up in this way is a useful strategy for surveying the literature; I'm sure there are other taxonomies that would do equally well.
Except where explicitly noted, all the arguments I'll sketch work best if folk psychology is assumed to have all the characteristics specified in the previous Section. But in many cases these are not enough. To get the arguments going, it must be assumed that folk psychology has properties in addition to those already specified. I'll note these additional assumptions as we go along. Not surprisingly, all of them are controversial. And one standard strategy used by opponents of eliminativism is to deny that folk psychology has the additional property that the argument at hand needs. Though I'll note some of these controversies, I don't plan to take sides, since it's my view that even if the additional claims about folk psychology are granted, there is still no plausible way of getting to the ontological conclusions that the eliminativists want.
In his seminal paper, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," Sellars offers a mythical reconstruction of the birth of folk psychological theory._ In the myth, a great genius, Jones, puts forward a theory to explain the fact that people behave intelligently even "when no detectable verbal output is present."_ The explanation Jones offers posits internal events that he calls thoughts. And his model for these internal episodes is "overt verbal behavior itself." Thus, for Jones, thoughts are a kind of "inner speech," and the posited processes that produce intelligent behavior are "inner discourse." Since thinking is modeled on overt discourse, it inherits many of the semantical properties that apply to stretches of public language. Individual thoughts have meaning, and sequences of thoughts may be logically related in various ways. Indeed, when things go well, a sequence of thoughts can have the structure of a sound deductive or inductive argument, and these covert logically sound arguments play a central role in Jones' explanation of intelligent behavior._
It is an impressive testimonial to the importance of Sellars' work that a number of leading figures on both sides of the eliminativism debate take this account very seriously. These philosophers agree that folk psychology characterizes thinking and believing on the model of inner speech, and that it seeks to explain intelligent behavior by appealing to the logical cogency of covert quasi-linguistic episodes. They disagree totally, however, on the plausibility of this folk psychological theory.
Those who think that Jones and the folk who followed him have got it terribly wrong make much of the fact that non-linguistic creatures, like monkeys, cats and dogs, can behave in strikingly intelligent ways. They also stress that infants achieve some remarkably intelligent feats long before they have begun to talk. If Jones' hypothesis about the covert processes subserving intelligent behavior is plausible for human adults then, these eliminativists urge, it would be equally plausible for infants and animals. Yet surely, they insist, this is simply too absurd to take seriously. It is preposterous to suppose that science will discover a language in which the family dog thinks, and it's even more preposterous to suppose that our future science will explain Fido's clever behavior by appeal to his covert construction of deductive and inductive arguments._
This sort of reductio ad absurdum only works, of course, if it is conceded that the putative implications of folk psychological theory really are absurd. And it is certainly not the case that everyone is prepared to make that concession. Indeed, Jerry Fodor, who has long been one of the staunchest defenders of folk psychology, has advanced some very sophisticated arguments aimed at showing that some of the best of contemporary cognitive psychology presupposes a "language of thought"._ Moreover, since most of the psychological theories on which Fodor bases his arguments are equally applicable to people and their pets, Fodor concludes that some of the best animal psychology also presupposes a language of thought. As for children, here again Fodor and some of his followers are more than prepared to bite the bullet. Children certainly do lots of intelligent things before they learn to talk. Indeed, learning to talk is itself one of their more impressive accomplishments. But, Fodor insists, since the best explanations we have for how children succeed in learning to talk presuppose that they already have a language of thought, it must be the case that the language of thought is innate.
A second cluster of eliminativist arguments that rely heavily on Sellars' portrait of folk psychology looks to neuroscience to impugn the folk. If Jones were right, then there would have to be lots of sentence-like states bouncing around in the brain when people do intelligent things. But contemporary neuroscience seems to have little use for states modeled on sentences. And, gazing into their crystal balls, the advocates of this argument do not foresee the neuroscience of the future having any more commerce with brain writing. Patricia Churchland, for example, concedes that "there is some sentence crunching, almost certainly."_ But she goes on to endorse Hooker's prophesy that "language will surely be seen as a surface abstraction of much richer, more generalized processes in the cortex, a convenient condensation fed to the tongue and hand for social purposes."_ In Tim van Gelder's projection of the course of neuroscience there is even less place for "sentence crunching." He sees an "intimate association" between various non-symbolic "distributed" representational systems and "the actual machinery underlying human cognition." This intimate association, van Gelder maintains,
stands in plain contrast with the biological remoteness of symbolic representations. Though CTM [the Classical Theory of Mind] demands a language of thought, and CTM advocates insist that the expressions of this language are realized in the neural substrate, and consequently predict the eventual discovery of `symbols amongst the neurons,' neuroscience has never yet stumbled across syntactically structured representation in the brain. This discrepancy only becomes more embarrassing to CTM as the sum of neuroscientific knowledge increases, and provides at least a prima facie argument in favor of any biologically motivated alternative._
So if it is granted that intelligent behavior must ultimately be explained by what goes on in the brain, then if these futurologists are right, Jones and the folk were wrong, and so too is folk psychology. Of course, those who distrust the neurophilosophers' crystal ball are not much impressed by the argument.
Auntie says that it is crude and preposterous and unbiological to suppose that people have sentences in their heads. Auntie always talks like that when she hasn't got any arguments._
Before moving on, we should pause to note that eliminativists who endorse the argument just sketched can't also endorse the version of the First Premise that I set out in Section 2. For that version of the Premise stipulates that folk psychology itself is stored in quasi-linguistic form. So if neuroscience does indeed establish that there are no sentences in the head, the First Premise will be undermined. I don't think this is a devastating objection to eliminativists who advocate the Argument from Neuroscience, since it is open to them to adopt some other account of how folk psychology is stored in the brain. That's a delicate business, however, and not just any account will do. It has to be an account on which it makes sense to say that folk psychology makes claims or asserts propositions. For if folk psychology does not make claims, then it can't make false claims, and that would undermine the Second Premise. But, as we'll see in Chapter 3, there are several options available that might be adopted by eliminativists who are convinced that neuroscience will establish that there are no "symbols amongst the neurons."
It is conceded on all sides that natural languages are highly structured systems, and that well formed sentences in natural languages must comport with complex syntactic and semantic principles. So if Sellars is right - if folk psychology really does take natural language as the model on which to base its conception of thoughts and other propositional attitudes - then the commonsense conception of propositional attitudes will view them as highly structured as well. But many defenders of folk psychology would deny that the commonsense conception of propositional attitudes requires them to have syntactic structure._ And, on the other side of the fence, some of the structural arguments aimed at showing that folk psychology is mistaken do not assume that folk psychology claims propositional attitudes must have internal quasi-linguistic structure.
The argument set out in Chapter 2 that Ramsey, Garon and I developed is an example. That argument says nothing about the internal structure of beliefs. Indeed, as far as that argument is concerned, folk psychology might perfectly well claim that beliefs have no internal structure. The only special assumption about beliefs the argument requires is that folk psychology views beliefs as "propositionally modular" -- they are semantically interpretable states that can be causally implicated in some cognitive episodes and causally inert in others. If this is right, then not all of our beliefs need be causally implicated in each inference we make. Having tried to make this assumption plausible, the argument then indulges in a bit of science fiction. There is a family of connectionist models capable of storing a set of propositions in a widely distributed way. But these models have no functional parts that can be identified with the storage of individual propositions. Rather, as one critic of our paper put it, "there is a real sense in which all the information encoded in the network's connectivity matrix is causally implicated in any processing in which the network engages."_ Thus when one of these radically holistic models does its thing, it makes no sense to ask which of its encoded propositions were causally active and which were inert. Now if it turns out that models like this provide the best psychological account of human belief or propositional memory, then folk psychology, which rejects this radical causal holism, will have made a pretty serious mistake._
Another argument in which connectionist models play a central role is due to Martin Davies._ According to Davies, folk psychology assumes that there is "a single inner state which is active whenever a cognitive episode involving a given concept occurs and which can be uniquely associated with the concept concerned."_ But many advocates of connectionism take it to be a virtue of connectionist models that their strategy for conceptual representation can be "context sensitive." So, for example, in the sort of models that Smolensky favors, the representation of coffee when the coffee is in a cup will be somewhat different from the representation of coffee when the coffee is in a can._ And, Davies argues, if this sort of model turns out to be the right account of what goes on in human cognition, then folk psychology's conceptual modularity assumption is mistaken.
Yet another non-Sellarsian structural argument, one that does not appeal to connectionism, exploits some intriguing findings in cognitive social psychology. Those results suggest that, in some cases at least, people's sincere reports about their own mental states and processes do not match up very well with the mental states and processes that are actually responsible for their behavior. Rather, what people report in these cases seems to be driven by socially shared theories about how their behavior is to be explained. A bold hypothesis that has been proposed to explain the experimental results posits two largely independent cognitive sub-systems. One of them "mediates behavior (especially unregulated behavior), is largely unconscious, and is, perhaps, the older of the two systems in evolutionary terms. The other, perhaps newer, system is largely conscious, and its function is to attempt to verbalize, explain, and communicate what is occurring in the unconscious system," on the basis of "theories about the self and the situation."_ To turn this empirical speculation into an argument against folk psychology, we need an additional premise which claims that folk psychology embraces a more unified picture of the mind. According to this premise, folk psychology assumes that beliefs and desires play a central role in the processes guiding our non-verbal behavior and in the processes leading to our verbal behavior. Folk psychology claims that the very same pair of states which lead us to walk toward the refrigerator also lead us to explain our behavior by saying, "I want a beer." and "I think there is a beer in the refrigerator." If our verbal behavior and our non-verbal behavior really are subserved by independent systems, then this putative presumption of folk psychology is just wrong._
The version of the First Premise set out in Section 2 includes the claim that many of the nomological generalizations of folk psychology are couched in terms of content. It also claimed that content plays an essential role in folk psychology's scheme for individuating belief and desire tokens. A pair of belief tokens or a pair of desire tokens are (type-) identical if and only if they have the same content. But as we noted, this is far from a complete account of how folk psychology individuates propositional attitudes. To flesh it out, we have to say more about how folk psychology determines sameness or difference of content. The first of the semantic arguments that I'll sketch assumes that folk psychology exploits a "wide" account of content identity; the second assumes that folk psychology individuates contents holistically.
About twenty years ago, Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke put forward a famous argument which allegedly showed that "meanings just ain't in the head."_ The now familiar story on which the argument is based asks that we imagine a planet in some distant corner of the universe which is all but identical to our own. On this planet each of us has a Twin - a molecule for molecule replica. The only difference between Earth and Twin Earth is that the stuff in their lakes and rivers is not H2O, but another clear, tasteless liquid, XYZ. Now, it is claimed, when Twin Stich says "Water is wet" folk psychology takes the content of the belief he is expressing to be different from the content of the belief that I express when I utter the same sequence of words. My Twin's belief is true if and only if XYZ is wet, while mine is true if and only if H2O is wet. If this is right, then as folk psychology sees it, the contents of beliefs and other propositional attitudes do not supervene on the non-relational physical properties of the believer, since ex hypothesis my Twin and I are identical in all our non-relational physical properties._ In the colorful though occasionally misleading jargon that has become commonplace in the literature, folk psychology's account of content identity is wide.
To spring their trap, the critics of folk psychology must introduce one additional premise. This one is not a claim about the commitments of folk psychology or folk semantics. Rather, it is a metaphysical thesis (or perhaps it's a methodological thesis -- I confess that I'm less than clear about where methodology ends and metaphysics begins). What it claims is that the only properties that may legitimately be invoked in scientific explanations of behavior, and thus the only properties that may be legitimately invoked in scientific psychological theories, are properties that supervene on the non-relational physical properties of the subject._ If this is right, then whatever explanation a scientific psychological theory offers for the behavior of an organism will apply as well to the behavior of the organism's physical replicas. There is, to put it mildly, considerable controversy surrounding this thesis. Some writers, myself included (but I was younger and much more naive at the time), have claimed that it is intuitively obvious that scientific psychology should treat organisms that behave in the same way to be psychologically identical. And since Putnamian Twins behave identically in all possible settings, psychology should treat them as psychologically identical. Others have tried to defend the thesis by deducing it from other, perhaps less controversial, metaphysical doctrines._ And still others have claimed that it is simply false._ But if it is not clear whether the thesis is defensible, it is clear that if the thesis is accepted then the argument has all it needs to show that folk psychology is in trouble. For, according to the version of the First Premise set out in Section 2, folk psychology includes lots of nomological generalizations that are couched in terms of the content of intentional states. But the Twin Earth argument (putatively) demonstrates that content does not supervene on the non-relational physical properties of an organism. And the metaphysical principle insists that the properties invoked in the generalizations of scientific psychology must supervene. So if scientific psychology has it right, then folk psychology must have it wrong.
A second semantic argument begins with the contention that folk psychology takes the content of a propositional attitude to be dependent in part on the network of other propositional attitudes that a person has. Thus, if the doxastic networks surrounding a pair of belief tokens are sufficiently different, the tokens will differ in content. One example that is supposed to illustrate this phenomenon focuses on the case of an elderly woman, Mrs. T, who gradually loses beliefs as the result of some degenerative disease._ Before the onset of the disease, she believes that McKinley was assassinated, and she has a whole slew of related beliefs of just the sort one would expect. But as the disease progresses, she loses the belief that McKinley was a U.S. President; then she loses the belief that assassinated people are dead; then she loses most of her beliefs about the differences between the living and the dead - she no longer has any idea what death is. Even at this advanced stage of her disease, she is still capable of answering the question: "What happened to McKinley?" by saying "McKinley was assassinated." However, it is claimed, folk psychology does not count the belief that underlies this answer as having the same content as the belief she had before her illness began. She no longer believes that McKinley was assassinated. The change in the doxastic surround has altered, perhaps even destroyed, the content of the belief that remains.
One way to parlay examples like this into an argument against folk psychology is to add a premise which claims that on the account of psychological state individuation that will be embraced by scientific psychology, the psychological state that causes Mrs. T to say "McKinley was assassinated" need not have changed at all as her disease progressed. To support the premise, a bit of science fiction is required. Imagine it is the case that people store information the way certain computers models do. They have long lists of syntactically complex symbolic structures stored in memory. Imagine further that the causal interactions of these symbol structures are akin to the causal interactions of their analogs in computer memories. These interactions depend only on the "shape" of the individual symbols and on the syntactic properties of the structures into which they are assembled. This story may be wildly mistaken, of course. But it is hardly unfamiliar. On the view of many observers, it is just the sort of account that is presupposed by most computational models in cognitive psychology. As Fodor has observed, these models are "really a kind of logical syntax (only psychologized)."_ For our purposes, the essential fact about models of this sort is that their symbol structures are individuated without any appeal to the other structures stored in memory. The same symbol structure might at one time be surrounded by thousands of related structures and at another time be surrounded by only a few related structures, or by none at all. Thus in models of this sort, symbol structures are not individuated in ways that are sensitive to their "doxastic surround."
O.K. Now we have all the pieces needed to assemble the argument for the eliminativists' Premise. If we have drawn the right conclusion from the Mrs. T case, then the content of a belief is sensitive to its doxastic surround. When the surround is very different, the content is different. And, since folk psychology assumes that beliefs are individuated by their contents, if the surround is very different, then the belief itself is different. But if the computational paradigm that we've just sketched is on the right track, then the psychological states that actually cause behavior are not individuated in a way that is sensitive to their surround. Since beliefs are individuated in a way that is sensitive to their surround, and the actual causes of behavior are not, beliefs are not among the causes of behavior. Applying this argument to the Mrs. T. case may make the point a bit more vivid. Since folk psychological belief individuation is surround-sensitive, none of the beliefs that Mrs. T has when her illness is far advanced can be the same as the beliefs she had before she became ill. But since the individuation of computational symbol structures is not surround-sensitive, Mrs. T may well have some of the same symbol structures in memory before and after her illness. If one of these structures causes her utterances of "McKinley was assassinated" both before and after her illness, then neither of these utterance is caused by a belief. Since folk psychology claims that utterances like these are caused by beliefs, folk psychology is wrong.
With a bit of fiddling, this argument can be recast along lines quite parallel to the argument in 3.3.1: Folk psychology couches many of its nomological generalizations in terms of content, and content is surround sensitive. The nomological generalizations in computational models of cognition are couched in terms of the syntax of mental symbol structures, and syntax is not surround sensitive. So if the computational models have it right, then folk psychology must have it wrong.
The arguments just sketched rely on some heavy duty assumptions about the account of psychological state individuation that will be embraced by scientific psychology. For the arguments to work, scientific psychology has to buy into what I have elsewhere called the "Syntactic Theory of the Mind."_ Other writers have attempted to argue from meaning holism to the conclusion that folk psychology is mistaken without assuming anything as controversial as the Syntactic Theory of the Mind. But these arguments typically rely on a much more virulent version of holism. On the version of holism that is assumed in the Mrs. T example, content identity requires a similar network in the doxastic surround. On the more extreme version of holism, a pair of belief tokens are identical in content only if they are embedded in identical doxastic surrounds._ If that is right, then no two people will have beliefs that are identical in content, nor will two time slices of the same person, provided the person is awake and the time slices are separated by a minute or two. But this, the argument continues, would make appeal to content useless in the generalizations of scientific psychology, since the goal of scientific psychology is to find nomological generalizations that apply to many people, or many organisms._ So, while the generalizations of folk psychology appeal to content, the generalizations of scientific psychology will have to be stated in content free terms. And, once again, if scientific psychology is right, then folk psychology is wrong.
A third semantic argument begins with the premise that the belief tokens that folk psychology classifies as having the same content can be extremely heterogeneous. There are a variety of psychological dimensions on which people can differ enormously and still be classified by folk psychology as having beliefs that share the same content. Perceptual capacities provide one cluster of illustrations of this phenomenon. Some people have sharp vision, others see poorly, and still others are blind. Yet there are circumstances in which folk psychology would attribute the belief that the traffic light has just turned green to all three sorts of people. Even someone like Helen Keller, whose perceptual deficits are quite staggering, might perfectly well believe that the traffic light has just turned green (if she is told that this is the case by someone she trusts, for example, or if she knows that the car she's riding in has been stopped at a red light, and she feels it begin to accelerate.) Cognitive skills provide another cluster of illustrations. Some people are swift and agile in reasoning, they see lots of logical connections, and they are quick to draw valid conclusions. Others are much slower and much more prone to logical errors. And there may well be people who, as the result of illness or brain damage, are simply incapable of drawing one or another kind of basic logical inference. Yet, under appropriate circumstances, folk psychology will attribute a belief with the same content to the clever, the retarded and the brain damaged._ Indeed, the premise maintains, folk psychology is often quite comfortable in attributing belief tokens with the same content to both animals and people. The dog and his master may both believe that the stick has been thrown down the hill. In the right setting, folk psychology may even sanction the attribution of beliefs with familiar contents to fish, or to bees. So for many propositions, p, it looks like the class of mental states that folk psychology will count as having the content that p will be very heterogeneous indeed. The neurological states subserving these beliefs will differ drastically both physically and functionally.
To complete the argument, we need yet another premise speculating about what a mature science of the mind/brain will look like. What it claims is that the heterogeneous content-categories invoked in the generalizations of folk psychology, categories that group together belief tokens in Einstein's head, in a brain damaged person's head, and in a dog's head, will be too inclusive to be of any use in that future science. Sophisticated sciences categorize states in terms of their causal powers, and from that point of view the dog's belief and Einstein's are too different to be grouped together. The nomological generalizations of the cognitive science of the future will invoke much less heterogeneous categories. At best, the premise maintains, folk psychology, with its coarse grained content-based generalizations, is going to miss most of the interesting generalizations. More likely, it's going to turn out that there are no true content-based generalizations to be found. If that's right, then once again folk psychology will be in conflict with the future science of the mind.
One of the most widely discussed family of arguments aimed at showing that folk psychology is a defective theory begins by arguing that the intentional properties of beliefs and desires, and the other characteristically "mental" properties invoked by folk psychology, are neither identical with nor reducible to physical properties. The are various routes to this conclusion. Perhaps the most plausible turns on claims about the possibility of multiple physical realizations of beliefs. Humans can think that 2 + 2 = 4. But surely, the argument insists, there is no reason to be chauvinistic. If Martians exist, they too may be able to think that 2 + 2 = 4, even if their brains are made of "green slime" whose chemistry is quite different from ours. Computers of the future, like HAL in the movie 2001, will also be able to think that 2 + 2 = 4. And it is plausible to suppose that there are indefinitely many physically different ways to build such a computer. Thus there is a vast, open ended class of physical systems that could think that 2 + 2 = 4. Since these systems have different physical properties, no physical property can be identified with thinking that 2 + 2 = 4. Since the class is vast and open ended, no reduction of intentional properties to physical properties is possible. This argument has been challenged in various ways._ One strong motive for challenging the argument is that if the conclusion is correct, it can be used in a second argument aimed at showing that intentional properties are causally impotent.
Here is an abridged version of that second argument, modeled on a more detailed exposition due to Robert Van Gulick._
1. Token Physicalism: Every intentional event token (i.e. every event-token having intentional properties) is identical with some physical event-token (i.e some event-token having physical properties).
2. The causal powers of a physical event-token are completely determined by its physical properties.
3. The Non-Reducibility of the Intentional: Intentional properties are neither identical to nor reducible to physical properties.
4. Thus intentional properties are not causally potent; they are causally irrelevant.
If this is right, and if, as we assumed in the previous section, folk psychology includes an opulent collection of nomological generalization that are couched in terms of content, then folk psychology must be very seriously mistaken.
For many friends of folk psychology, the last semantic argument that I'll mention is the most worrisome. In some ways it is also the most puzzling. The premise about content with which this argument begins is the claim that content (and related intentional notions) can't be "naturalized" - there is "no place for intentional categories in the physicalistic view of the world," and they "will prove permanently recalcitrant to integration in the natural order."_ But, the argument continues, if semantic content can't be naturalized, then it's not real - it doesn't exist at all. Here is how Fodor puts the point:
It's hard to see ... how one can be a Realist about intentionality without also being, to some extent or other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and the intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with (or maybe of their supervenience on?) properties that are themselves neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else._
If it's true that intentional or semantic properties can't be naturalized, Fodor would insist, it follows that they can't be "reduced" to non-intentional, non-semantic properties. And if that's right, then they are not "real properties of things" at all.
To conclude the argument, we need only recall that, according to the version of the First Premise set out in Section 2, folk psychology assumes that propositional attitudes do have semantic content, it views sameness of content as a necessary element in individuating propositional attitudes, and it couches many of its generalizations in terms of content. Plainly, if content is not a real property of things, then folk psychology has got all this pretty badly garbled.
Before accepting that conclusion, however, there are at least three clusters of questions that need answering. First, what exactly would be required to "naturalize" content? In the brief passage I've quoted from Fodor, he mentions reduction, supervenience and property identity. In another paper he specifies that naturalizing content requires providing non-intentional necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of intentional predicates. And in still other places he says that sufficient conditions will do. Until we get a lot clearer on what "naturalizing" comes to, the remainder of the argument is going to be all but impossible to evaluate. A second set of questions focuses on the relation between naturalizing and being real. Why, one would like to know, would the fact that intentional properties can't be naturalized entail that they are not real properties of things? Is everything real reducible to (or supervenient upon, or definable in terms of) the physical (or the non-intentional, or the natural)? And if the answer is yes, what's the argument that makes this answer plausible? A third group of questions takes aim at the premise with which the argument begins. What reason do we have to think that content can't be naturalized? Is it simply that no one has figured out how to do it (whatever exactly it turns out to be)? If so, then it may well be that content has lots of company, since there are lots of things for which no one knows how to provide a reduction (or definition) or an account of how it supervenes on the physical. Are all of them unreal?
Good questions, these, but not easy ones. To address them seriously would require a whole paper. And, as it happens, Stephen Laurence and I have written just such a paper. It is reprinted as Chapter 5.
This completes my brief survey of arguments aimed at showing that folk psychology is a seriously defective theory. It isn't intended to be an exhaustive survey; there are a number of other arguments to be found in the literature. I've focused mostly on arguments that at one time or another I myself have been tempted to endorse. Nor do I claim to have presented the most subtle or persuasive version of each argument. Where brevity and subtlety conflict, I often opted for brevity. Still, I hope that some of these arguments strike you as plausible. For argument's sake, I'm going to assume that at least some of them are sound, and thus that some of the central claims made or presupposed by folk psychology are indeed mistaken. That assumption sets the stage for the questions I want to ask next: If folk psychology is a seriously mistaken theory, what conclusions ought we to draw about the existence or the scientific utility of intentional states? Should we conclude that a mature science of the mind/brain will not invoke beliefs and desires? Should we conclude that beliefs and desires are like witches and phlogiston -- they do not exist at all? 4. From Premises About Folk Psychology to Conclusions About the Existence of Beliefs and Desires: Lewis's Strategy
Eliminativists, of course, answer both of these questions in the affirmative, and as I noted earlier, by and large their opponents seem to agree. Most authors on both sides of the debate think that the battle over the virtues and shortcomings of folk psychology will be the decisive one. If folk psychology really is a seriously mistaken theory, then the eliminativists will have won._ But why is this conditional so widely accepted? Why, exactly, does the falsity of folk psychology lead to the eliminativists' conclusions? There is remarkably little sustained discussion of this question in the literature on eliminativism. So, rather than trying to extract an answer from the literature, I propose to take a different tack. In this Section I'll try as best I can to reconstruct the considerations that once persuaded me that if folk psychology is very wrong, then there are no such things as beliefs. Having said why I once accepted this crucial step in the eliminativists' argument, I'll go on, in Section 5, to recount how I came to doubt it, and I'll explain why I no longer find the line of argument set out in this Section to be very persuasive.
It's my guess that the cluster of views I'll recount in this Section has been widely, though often tacitly, accepted by lots of authors on both sides of the debate._ These views are the tacit theory that is most often lurking in the background when people impugn or defend the virtues of folk psychology and then draw ontological conclusions. I may, of course, be quite wrong about this. It may be that others saw (or thought they saw) some quite different link from premises about the shortcomings of folk psychology to conclusions about the non-existence of beliefs, desires and the like. I know of only two other likely candidates, however. I'll discuss one of them in Section 10 and the other in Sections 11 and 12.
For me the essential element linking the falsehood of folk psychology to the non-existence of the states it invokes was a theory about the meaning and reference of theoretical terms. Versions of the theory have been suggested by a number of distinguished philosophers including F. P. Ramsey and Rudolf Carnap, but the version that most influenced me was the one put forward by David Lewis. In a series of elegant and important papers Lewis developed an account according to which a theory typically provides an "implicit functional definition"_ of the terms it introduces. His "general hypothesis about the meanings of theoretical terms" is that "they are definable functionally, by reference to causal roles."_
To make his hypothesis plausible, Lewis offers the following illustration:
We are assembled in the drawing room of the country house; the detective reconstructs the crime. That is, he proposes a theory designed to be the best explanation of the phenomena we have observed: the death of Mr. Body, the blood on the wallpaper, the silence of the dog in the night, the clock seventeen minutes fast, and so on. He launches into his story:
X, Y and Z conspired to murder Mr. Body. Seventeen years ago, in the gold fields of Uganda, X was Body's partner... Last week, Y and Z conferred in a bar in Reading... Tuesday night at 11:17, Y went to the attic and set a time bomb... Seventeen minutes later, X met Z in the billiard room and gave him the lead pipe... Just when the bomb went off in the attic, X fired three shots through the French windows...
And so it goes: a long story. Let us pretend that it is a single long conjunctive sentence.
The story contains three names, `X', `Y' and `Z'. The detective uses these new terms without explanation, as though we knew what they meant. But we do not. We never used them before, at least not in the senses they bear in the present context. All we know about their meaning is what we gradually gather from the story itself. Call these theoretical terms (T-terms for short) because they are introduced by a theory. Call the rest of the terms in the story O-terms. These are all the other terms except the T-terms. They are the old, original terms we understood before the theory was proposed...._
In telling his story, the detective set forth three roles by X, Y and Z. He must have specified the meanings of the three T-terms `X', `Y' and `Z' thereby; for they had meanings afterwards, they had none before, and nothing else was done to give them meanings. They were introduced by an implicit functional definition, being reserved to name the occupants of the three roles...._
Suppose that after we have heard the detective's story, we learn that it is true of three people: Plum, Peacocke and Mustard. If we put the name `Plum' in place of `X', `Peacocke' in place of `Y', and `Mustard' in place of `Z' throughout, we get a true story about the doings of those three people. We will say that Plum, Peacocke and Mustard together realize (or are a realization of) the detective's theory._
...I claim [that] the T-terms are definable as naming the first, second and third components of the unique triple that realizes the story, ... [and thus] the T-terms can be treated like definite descriptions._
On Lewis's view, the moral to be drawn from this example applies quite generally. Theoretical terms are "defined as the occupants of the causal roles specified by the theory...; as the entities, whatever those may be, that bear certain causal relations to one another and to the referents of the O-terms."_ For Lewis, we have specified the sense of a term when we have specified its denotation in all possible worlds. And "[i]n any possible world, [T-terms] ... name the components of whatever uniquely realizes [the theory] in that world...."_
There are two further features of Lewis's account that deserve special emphasis. The first is the strategy Lewis urges for dealing with terms introduced by mistaken theories. Theoretical terms, Lewis tells us, are implicitly defined by the causal patterns specified in the theory that introduces the terms. Thus if no set of entities exhibit the specified causal patterns -- if the theory has no realization -- then the theory is mistaken. When this happens, Lewis maintains, the theoretical terms themselves will lack a denotation - they will refer to nothing.
[I]f we learnt that no triple realized the [detective's] story, or even came close, we would have to conclude that the story was false. We would also have to deny that the names `X', `Y' and `Z' named anything; for they were introduced as names for the occupants of roles that turned out to be unoccupied._
Now, as Lewis goes on to note, this is a rather extreme doctrine. For it entails that if a theory makes even a small mistake, then all of its theoretical terms will be denotationless. To make the view more palatable, Lewis offers "A complication:"
[W]hat if the theorizing detective has made one little mistake? He should have said that Y went to the attic at 11:37, not 11:17. The story as told is unrealized, true of no one. But another story is realized, indeed uniquely realized: the story we get by deleting or correcting the little mistake. We can say that the story as told is nearly realized, has a unique near realization. (The notion of a unique near realization is hard to analyze, but easy to understand.) In this case the T-terms ought to name the components of the near realization. More generally: they should name the components of the nearest realization of the theory, provided there is a unique nearest realization and it is near enough. Only if the story comes nowhere near to being realized, or if there are two equally near nearest realizations, should we resort to treating the T-terms like improper descriptions._
So it is only in those cases where the theory is very wrong that the theoretical terms refer to nothing. When the theory is only a little bit wrong the theoretical terms will still denote (provided there isn't more than one equally near "nearest realization").
Lewis does not say much about the boundary between these two sorts of cases. He makes no serious effort to specify how wrong a theory has to be before its theoretical terms fail to denote because it has no unique nearest realization that is "near enough". In the sentence following the passage just quoted he tells us that "scientific theories are often nearly realized but rarely realized, and that theoretical reduction is usually blended with revision of the reduced theory."_ This suggests that he thinks the boundary between theories that have near enough nearest realizations and those that do not is a blurry one, and perhaps that it has little theoretical significance. But, of course, in the context of arguments for and against eliminativism, the boundary is of enormous significance, since if we accept Lewis's account, it is the boundary that separates those false theories whose theoretical posits exist from those whose posits do not exist. If the boundary is a blurry one, then it may well turn out that even after all the scientific facts are in both about the mind/brain and about what folk psychology claims, there will be no way of determining whether or not the eliminativists' thesis is correct. The truth or falsehood of eliminativism may simply be indeterminate._ But even if it turns out that there is no sharp boundary between false theories whose posits exist and false theories whose posits do not exist, Lewis's account might still provide an essential step in arguments aimed at establishing that the entities invoked in one or another false theory do not exist. For the fact that a boundary is vague or indeterminate is fully compatible with there being clear cases on both sides of the divide. There is, after all, no sharp or principled divide between bald and hairy people, yet some people are clearly bald, while others are unmistakably hairy. So if Lewis is right about theoretical terms, then to show that the posits of a theory do not exist, it will suffice to show that the theory is very wrong and not just a little bit mistaken.
The second point about Lewis's account that merits special emphasis is that if we "think of commonsense psychology as a term-introducing scientific theory, though one invented before there was any such institution as professional science,"_ then everything he has claimed about theoretical terms in general can be applied straightforwardly to the theoretical terms of commonsense psychology. Moreover, on Lewis's view, this is the right way to think of commonsense psychology.
Imagine our ancestors first speaking only of external things, stimuli, and responses - and perhaps producing what we, but not they, may call Ausserungen of mental states - until some genius invented the theory of mental states, with its newly introduced T-terms, to explain the regularities among stimuli and responses. But that did not happen. Our commonsense psychology was never a newly invented term-introducing scientific theory - not even of prehistoric folk-science. The story that mental states were introduced as theoretical terms is a myth.
It is, in fact Sellars' myth.... And though it is a myth, it may be a good myth or a bad one. It is a good myth if our names of mental states do in fact mean just what they would mean if the myth were true. I adopt the working hypothesis that it is a good myth._
Putting together the two points that I've been emphasizing gives us just the link that the eliminativist needs to go from claims about the shortcomings of commonsense psychology to the conclusion that the posits of commonsense psychology do not exist.
If the names of mental states are like theoretical terms, they name nothing unless the theory ... is more or less true._
Indeed, if we suppose that commonsense psychology is an integrated theory containing or entailing claims about causal relations among various different kinds of psychological states, then, if Lewis's account is correct, problems in one part of commonsense psychology put our entire mental ontology in jeopardy.
[O]n my version of causal definability, the mental terms stand or fall together. If common-sense psychology fails, all of them alike are denotationless._
So, on Lewis's view, if folk psychology turns out to be seriously mistaken, it's not just beliefs and desires that will have to be dropped from our ontology. Pains, pleasures and other conscious states will have to go as well. Lewis himself sees little chance that things will work out this way. He identifies commonsense psychology with the psychological "platitudes which are common knowledge among us - everyone knows them, everyone knows that everyone else knows them, and so on."_ And he has no doubt at all that most of these platitudes will turn out to be correct. But we have been assuming that folk psychology is more than a collection of commonly accepted platitudes. My version of the eliminativists' First Premise takes folk psychology to be a largely tacit, opulent, internally represented theory. And if we grant that some substantial subset of the arguments set out in Section 3 are sound, then by any reasonable standard, folk psychology will turn out to be pretty badly mistaken. So it appears that Lewis's account of the meaning and reference of theoretical terms provides eliminativists with an attractive way of getting from the Premises of their argument to the conclusions._
In my own case, I blush to admit, Lewis's account was so attractive that until recently I was barely aware of how heavily I was relying on it. It had become one of the unnoticed and unquestioned assumptions on which the more controversial and fussed over parts of my philosophical view were built. But, as our deconstructionist friends are fond of noting, when the foundations are hidden so too are the cracks.
All this began to change, for me, while Ramsey, Garon and I were at work on the paper that is reprinted as Chapter 2. At that time, as luck would have it, I was asked to review Bill Lycan's book, Judgement and Justification. And while re-reading the essays in that volume I was brought up short by several brief passages that were not at all central to Lycan's projects. In those passages Lycan notes that most eliminativists seem to presuppose something like Lewis's theory about the meaning and reference of theoretical terms, and emphasizes that this is not an assumption that one gets for free. Accounts like the one Lewis develops are not the only game in town. Indeed, in the recent philosophy of language literature, they are not even the most popular game in town. On the very different account of reference that Lycan favors, premises detailing untenable features of the commonsense conception of beliefs and desires simply do not support the sort of ontological conclusions that eliminativists are wont to draw. Here are a couple of passages in which Lycan sets out his view:
I incline away from Lewis's Carnapian ... cluster theory of the reference of theoretical terms, and toward Putnam's causal-historical theory. As in Putnam's examples of `water,'`tiger,' and so on, I think the ordinary word `belief' (qua theoretical term of folk psychology) points dimly toward a natural kind that we have not fully grasped and that only mature psychology will reveal. I expect that `belief' will turn out to refer to some kind of information-bearing inner state of a sentient being, ... but the kind of state it refers to may have only a few of the properties usually attributed to beliefs by common sense._
I am entirely willing to give up fairly large chunks of our commonsensical ... theory of belief or of desire (or of almost anything else) and decide that we were just wrong about a lot of things, without drawing the inference that we are no longer talking about belief or desire._
There are a several points suggested in these passages that I want to emphasize and endorse. First, Lycan is certainly right to note that description based accounts of reference of the sort offered by Carnap and Lewis are not the only option available._ Putnam, Kripke, Devitt and others have suggested a quite different family of theories about reference which many philosophers find more plausible. According to these causal-historical accounts, the reference of a term is determined by the appropriate sort of causal chain connecting users of the term with previous users from whom they acquired the term, and ultimately proceeding back to an event or series of events in which the term is introduced to refer to a certain object or kind. Since serious alternatives to description theories have been proposed and defended with considerable ingenuity, eliminativists surely cannot legitimately do what I did for many years. They cannot simply take some version of the description theory for granted. If they are going to rely on it to get from their Premises to their conclusions, they will have to defend it against the competition. It is Lycan, I think, who deserves the credit for starting the deconstruction of the eliminativists' deconstruction by stressing that eliminativists themselves are relying on a barely acknowledged theory of reference that might well turn out to be unacceptable.
Second, Lycan is quite right in claiming that causal-historical theories will not sustain an argument from premises about the falsehood of folk psychology to conclusions about the non-existence of the mental states that folk psychology invokes. Indeed, it is one of the selling points of causal historical theories that they do a much better job than description theories at handling what Devitt and Sterelny call "the problem of error."_ One way to explain the problem is to imagine a community of ancient star gazers who have what we now know to be wildly mistaken views about the objects visible in the night sky. They think that most of them are holes in a black and otherwise solid celestial dome through which we can see the light in the heavenly region that surrounds the dome. But even though their theory about the stars is about as mistaken as it is possible to get, it seems to make perfectly good sense to say that when these ancients spoke about the objects in the night sky, they were talking about stars. It is plausible to suppose that there was a term in their language that referred to stars, and they sometimes used that term to make profoundly mistaken claims about stars. Now, as advocates of causal-historical accounts of reference often note, cases like this pose a serious problem for description based accounts of reference. For on description based accounts it seems to follow that the ancients in our little tale aren't talking about stars at all. Since their theory is so seriously mistaken, description theories will entail that the astronomical terms used by the ancients refer to nothing -- they are, as Lewis might say, "denotationless". Causal-historical accounts, by contrast, do not entail this sort of counter-intuitive conclusion. If one of the ancients' astronomical terms was introduced in settings that provided the right sort of causal links to stars, and if the history of transmission of that term was of the right sort, then their term refers to stars no matter how badly informed they may be about what stars really are. Thus, as Lycan rightly notes, causal-historical accounts of reference will not enable eliminativists get from their Premises to their conclusions.
These considerations are a clear indication that eliminativists have some work to do. But they do not suffice to show that the eliminativists' argument can't ultimately be made to work. While the "problem of error" argument certainly casts some doubt on description theories of reference, it is not, by itself, enough to show that description theories are untenable. Nor does it show that some causal-historical theory of the sort that Lycan favors is correct. For those theories seem to have problems of their own, and in just the opposite direction. If description theories sometimes make it too hard to refer, causal-historical theories sometimes make it too easy. To see the point, consider some of the parade cases of ontological elimination that eliminativists are fond of citing. There are no witches and there is no such thing as phlogiston. So when our forebears used the words `witch' and `phlogiston' they were referring to nothing. But if Lycan is right about reference, it's hard to see how this claim could be sustained. If the term `witch' was introduced and transmitted in the right way, then it actually refers to certain women who behaved in strange or socially unacceptable ways. Of course witches "may have only a few of the properties usually attributed to [them] by common sense." And the term may "dimly point toward a natural kind that we have not fully grasped." If we follow Lycan's lead, we should be "entirely willing to give up fairly large chunks of our commonsensical ... theory ... and decide that we were just wrong about a lot of things," without drawing the inference `witch' is a term that fails to refer. And, of course, the same can be said, mutatis mutandis for phlogiston. These conclusions are no less counter-intuitive than the conclusion that the ancient star gazers were not talking about the stars. So Lycan and other opponents of eliminativism can't simply assume that some version of the causal-historical theory of reference is correct, and thus that terms like `belief' and `desire' refer no matter how wrong we ultimately discover folk psychology to be.
Where does all of this leave us? Here's one assessment of the situation: The most promising way for eliminativists to get from their Premises to their conclusions is to invoke a theory of reference. And one well worked out theory (Lewis's) will do just fine. But there are problems with that theory and with other versions of the description theory as well. They seem to entail some quite counter-intuitive claims. Moreover, there is another widely accepted family of theories about reference on the market, causal-historical theories, and theories in that family will not enable eliminativists to get from their Premises to their conclusions. Causal-historical theories have problems of their own, however. They too seem to entail some quite counter-intuitive claims. So it looks like both eliminativists and their opponents would be well advised to turn their attention to the theory of reference. They have to determine which sort of account of reference is right, and find some plausible way of explaining away the objections to that account. Or perhaps the objections indicate that neither description theories nor causal-historical theories are right, and that some new, better theory_ of reference is needed. But in any event, the theory of reference has now moved to center stage. Before we can determine whether the eliminativists' Premises support their conclusions, we're going to have to settle which account of reference is correct.
At this juncture many philosophers who were trained to do philosophy the way I was would be tempted to roll up their sleeves and jump into the fray -- constructing new theories of reference (or fine tuning old ones), exploring the consequences of these theories, developing arguments, looking for counter-examples. That's what we do for a living; it's how the game is played. So, having persuaded myself that the assessment offered at the end of the previous section was correct, I set to work looking for a better theory of reference. But after lots of work and very little progress, I gradually became convinced that this is the wrong way to proceed. What changed my mind was not that it was hard to come up with alternative theories of reference. Quite the opposite, it was actually quite easy. I have a notebook full of them. But as my list of alternatives grew, I found that I got less and less clear about how I was supposed to evaluate these alternatives. How could I tell which one was the right one?
At first I assumed that the problem I was confronting was just another case of a familiar epistemic problem that has to be confronted by theory builders in almost every domain. Very few areas of inquiry have anything even close to established decision procedures for determining whether or not a theory is correct. There may be no obvious or generally accepted set of procedures for evaluating alternative theories of reference, but much the same can be said for theories in physics or biology or archeology as well. Gradually, however, I became convinced that the problem I was having in evaluating theories of reference was deeper than this. For in trying to assess theories of reference, the familiar epistemic problem is exacerbated by a quite basic methodological problem (or perhaps it's really a metaphysical problem -- I've already confessed that the distinction is one I have trouble drawing). Other domains may not be entirely free from this methodological problem, but in the theory of reference it arises in a particularly acute form. In just about every area of inquiry, it's hard to determine whether a given theory is successful in capturing or explaining the facts that it is intended to capture or explain. That's what I've been calling the "epistemic" problem. But in most parts of physics or biology or archeology it is pretty clear what the theory is expected to do. Though there may be a bit of squabbling about it from time to time, there is typically considerable agreement about the sort of facts that a theory is expected to describe or explain. In the theory of reference, by contrast, it is far from clear what sorts of facts the theory is supposed to account for. Indeed, it is my suspicion that, while the issue is only rarely a topic on which they have explicitly formulated views, different writers have quite different expectations. And, no doubt, some of the disagreement about which theories of reference are most promising can be traced to this underlying, largely tacit, disagreement about the job that a theory of reference is expected to do. Other writers have no coherent views at all about what a theory of reference is expected to do. It is not surprising that they have a particularly hard time figuring out which theory is best. My problem, in attempting to evaluate my growing collection of alternative theories, was that, without being clearly aware of it, I fell squarely into this latter category. I didn't know what a theory of reference was supposed to do.
When all of this finally came into focus, I decided to put my collection of theories on the back burner for a while and attend, instead, to the methodological question that had to be clarified before I could make any progress in assessing alternative accounts of reference. So I started thinking about the sorts of projects people might have in mind when they debate the virtues of various theories of reference. The decision to concentrate on the methodological question turned out to be a pivotal step in the intellectual adventure (or misadventure) that I'm recounting in this Chapter. For it ultimately led me to the conclusion that my entire conception of the eliminativism debate was radically mistaken. But here I am getting way ahead of myself. To explain how I reached that conclusion, I'll start by sketching the most plausible answers I have come up with to the question about what a theory of reference is supposed to do.
One family of answers begins with the observation that appeal to people's spontaneous judgements, or their intuitions as philosophers often call them, seems to play a central role in many debates about the virtues of competing theories of reference. Sometimes the intuitions invoked concern actual cases of language use. But often they are intuitions about hypothetical or imaginary cases, some of which can be more than a bit bizarre. We have already seen several examples of the way in which intuitions are invoked in these debates. In explaining "the problem of error" argument I imagined a community of ancient star gazers who had a seriously mistaken theory about the objects visible in the night sky. Description theories, I noted, typically entail that terms embedded in seriously false theories don't refer to anything, and thus if description theories are right then the ancients aren't actually referring to the stars. But this, the critics of description theories insist, is "counter-intuitive". Our intuitions tell us that the ancients were referring to the stars, and this conflict with our intuitions poses a problem for description theories. Similarly, the intuition that `witch' does not refer to anything played a crucial role in the objection I offered against Lycan's views on reference.
In his famous monograph, Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke sets out a number of cases designed to bring out our intuitions about the reference of proper names. With a bit of familiar elaboration, one of these cases might be put as follows: Suppose that in biblical times there really was a man who survived for three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish. After escaping from the fish, he was killed by bandits, and his memory has vanished without a trace. Suppose also that at roughly the same time there was another man who did not endure any such exciting adventure, but about whom, for some reason, people told increasingly tall tales. Over the years, one of these tales evolved into the Biblical story of Jonah, which has been passed down from generation to generation. Now if this is really what happened in history, to which of these men do readers of the Bible refer to when they ask questions or make claims about Jonah? Description theories will typically claim they refer to the first man, since most of the claims they would make using the name `Jonah' are true about him. But, many philosophers maintain, our intuitions support the opposite judgement. If the facts are as stipulated in the story, our intuitions tell us that when a reader of the Bible asks questions in which the name `Jonah' is used, the name refers to the second man, and thus most of what the Bible says about Jonah is false. Examples like this convinced many philosophers that description theories of the reference of proper names were wrong, and that causal-historical theories were more plausible._
Clearly, appeal to intuitions plays an important role in debates about the theory of reference. But why? Why should these intuitions be at all relevant to questions about the correctness or incorrectness of a theory of reference? There are a variety of answers that might be offered here. The most straightforward of them is that intuitions are relevant because capturing the relevant intuitions is what a theory of reference is supposed to do -- producing a theory that entails the intuitions is one of the goals of the theory of reference. This answer can be elaborated in two different ways. To pull them apart, it will help to consider the analogy between the theory of reference and grammatical theory.
In grammar, too, intuitions play a central role. They are far and away the most important source of data for the descriptive grammarian. One attempt to explain the role of intuitions in grammatical theory urges that a correct grammatical theory just is an idealized theory of grammatical intuitions. The goal of grammatical theorizing, on this account, is to produce the simplest and most elegant theory that captures most of a native speaker's grammatical intuitions._ An alternative account of the role of intuitions in grammatical theory urges that the real goal of the theory is not to capture intuitions but rather to characterize the grammatical principles used by the psychological mechanism that gives rise to the intuitions. This view typically assumes that there is a distinct underlying psychological mechanism that subserves grammatical processing, and that this same mechanism plays a central role in the production of grammatical intuitions. The grammar mechanism interacts with other components of the mind, including perceptual processors, attention mechanisms, short term memory, etc., and together these mechanisms produce the linguistic intuitions that people report. Thus the intuitions are a good source of evidence about the grammatical principles used by the mechanism. But they are not an infallible guide, since memory limitations, failures of attention and other factors may produce various sorts of "performance errors" including intuitions that fail to reflect a speaker's underlying "grammatical competence."_
Now one way to elaborate on the idea that the goal of a theory of reference is to capture the relevant reference intuitions is to view the theory of reference as analogous to the grammatical theory on the first account of grammar sketched above. On this view, a theory of reference just is an idealized theory of reference intuitions. The theorist's goal is to produce the simplest and most elegant set of principles that captures most of the intuitions that people have about reference._
The other way to develop the idea is to suppose there is a systematic body of information or a set of principles stored in the mind which plays a central role in producing reference intuitions. The goal of a theory of reference, on this view, is to give an accurate account of those mentally represented principles, or of the word - world mapping that they specify. In order to produce intuitions, the mentally represented principles must interact with other components of the mind including those responsible for attention, inference and short term memory. Thus the intuitions that people offer will not always be an accurate reflection of the principles, though they will be a rich source of data for a theorist to use in trying to determine what those principles actually are. On this account, theories of reference have much the same status as theories about people's internally represented "folk physics" discussed in Section 2. In both cases, the goal is to describe an internally stored body of information, and in both cases people's spontaneous judgements or intuitions provides a rich, though occasionally misleading, source of data for the theorist to use. Theories about folk physics and theories of reference, on this account, are both descriptive psychological theories. The theories are correct if they accurately describe the principles of an internally represented commonsense theory. So on this view, it seems natural to think of the theory of reference as an account of another sort of folk theory which might be called "folk semantics."_
The analogy between theories of reference and theories about folk physics and the analogy between theories of reference and grammatical theories are both useful in explaining the view that the goal of the theory of reference is to correctly describe our tacit "folk semantics". But there is an important distinction between these two analogies, and elaborating on that distinction will set the stage for a quite different account of the job of the theory of reference. To see the distinction I want to draw, it is crucial to keep in mind that in both grammar and folk physics there are two theories to keep track of. A researcher who is interested in characterizing the folk physics used by a group of subjects wants to describe a theory that is represented in the minds of her subjects. Her description of that theory is itself a theory -- a theory about what's represented in her subject's heads. And, of course, her theory about what's in her subject's heads might be wrong. It is also possible that the subject's theory might be wrong. Indeed, the work on folk physics recounted in Section 2 indicates that the physical theory inside the heads of many subjects is wrong. Now let's consider grammar. Here too, there are two theories to keep track of. The descriptive grammarian is attempting to specify a set of principles that are represented in the minds of speakers of the dialect the grammarian is concerned with. The specification that the grammarian offers is thus a theory about the principles her subjects are using. And, just as in the case of folk physics, the grammarian's theory may be wrong. She may mis-characterize the principles in her subject's heads. Moreover, as in the case of folk physics, the principles inside the subject's heads can themselves be regarded as a theory, since (we have been assuming) one of the things they do is entail lots of claims about the grammatical properties of sentences in the speaker's dialect.
Now we can raise the question that brings out the important distinction between grammar and folk physics: Can the grammatical theory inside the speaker's head be wrong in the way that folk physics can? Is it possible, for example, for a speaker's internalized grammar to entail that a sentence in the speaker's dialect is grammatical when it isn't? The answer to this question turns on the sort of answer we accept to a cluster of further questions about the nature of grammatical properties themselves, questions like: What is it for a sentence in a dialect to be grammatical? In virtue of what does a sequence of phonemes count as a grammatical sentence? There are various answers that might be explored here. The one that seems to be favored by Chomsky and some other leading figures in linguistics is that a sequence of phonemes is grammatical in a dialect if and only if it is classified as grammatical by the grammar inside the heads of the speakers. It is the grammar itself that determines whether or not a phoneme sequence is grammatical. If this is right, then it follows that the answer to the questions at the beginning of this paragraph is no. The grammatical principles inside a speaker's head can't be wrong in the way that folk physics can be wrong. For what makes it the case that a phoneme sequence is grammatical is that it is classified as grammatical by the rules or principles inside the speaker's head. Of course it is possible that a member of some community might have a set of grammatical rules inside his head that is slightly different (or very different) from the rules inside the heads of other members of the community. If this happened, it might well be the case that the non-conforming grammar classified as grammatical some phoneme sequences that the grammars inside other heads classified as ungrammatical. But, on the account of grammatical properties that I am attributing to Chomsky, this would not count as an error on the part of the non-conforming speaker or his grammar. Rather, it would be the case that the non-conforming speaker spoke a different dialect. Perhaps he is the only speaker of the dialect, in which case it is best described as an "idiolect." However, the claims entailed by the speaker's internalized grammar cannot possibly be wrong about sentences in his own idiolect, since the grammatical properties in that idiolect are determined by the internalized grammar of the idiolect._
Let's return, now, to the theory of reference and the analogies with grammar and with folk physics. Obviously, if the job of a theory of reference is to describe an internalized folk semantics, then any particular account that a theorist gives may be mistaken. The theorist may misdescribe the folk semantic theory inside people's heads. But what about the folk semantic theory itself. Can it be mistaken? Here, as before, the answer turns on what we say about some further questions -- this time questions about the nature of semantic properties (or relations), properties like reference: What is it for a term in a language to refer to an object? In virtue of what does a term count as referring to an object? If we push the analogy with the Chomskian account of grammatical properties, the answer is that it is the internalized folk semantic theory which specifies the conditions a term must meet if it is to refer to an object. The reference relation just is whatever the internalized folk semantics says it is. And if that's right, then of course, the internalized theory can't be mistaken. If two people have different internalized folk semantic theories, then the notions of reference that they are using are simply different. When they use the term `refer' they are talking about different relations. Occasionally such people may appear to be disagreeing about what refers to what in a particular case. But actually they are not disagreeing at all. Rather, their situation is much the same as the situation of people who speak different idiolects who appear to be disagreeing about the grammaticality of a particular sentence. They are not disagreeing at all. Assuming their judgements accurately reflect their internally represented theories, they are both right.
Suppose, however, that the right analogy to push is not the one between theory of reference and grammar but rather the one between theory of reference and folk physics. In that case, there will be no guarantee that our internalized folk semantic theory is correct. Folk semantics, on this view, is just a collection of commonsense beliefs about reference and what determines reference, and the real facts about reference, like the real facts about physics, are as they are quite independently of what our folk theory may say about them. So if folk semantics is like folk physics, then our attempt to describe the commonsense theory of reference may be an interesting bit of psychology, but there is no reason to suppose that it will tell us much about reference. If we want to learn about the laws governing motion we don't study what ordinary folks think, rather we study the science of physics; and if we want to learn about the nature of various diseases, we don't study folk theories of disease,_ we study medicine and pathology. So if folk semantics is like folk physics, then if we want to learn about reference, we shouldn't study the folk conception of reference. Rather we should study the science that tells us about reference. But, it would seem, at just this point the analogy between folk semantics and folk physics hits a snag. For while there is a well developed science of physics for the person interested in the laws of motion to study, and a well developed science of pathology for the person interested in disease to study, it is not clear that there is any science at all whose business it is to investigate the real nature of reference.
It might be thought that this shows that the analogy between folk semantics and folk physics is indefensible, and the analogy with grammar is the only tenable one. But I am inclined to think that this conclusion might be too hasty. For while it is true that the notion of reference plays no role in any well developed science, it might well be the case that one or another reference-like word-world mapping relation will prove to be of considerable importance in various domains of empirical investigation. Perhaps linguistics will be able to make good use of such a relation; or perhaps parts of cognitive psychology or evolutionary biology will find a need for such a relation. Or, turning to very different domains of inquiry, perhaps anthropology or history and sociology, particularly the history and sociology of science, will find an explanatory use for a word-world mapping that's not too different from the intuitive notion of reference. There is no way of knowing a priori whether any of these possibilities will pan out. The only way to find out is to elaborate various word-world mapping relations and then try to put them to use in one or another scientific or historical project. The job of hunting for scientifically useful word-world relations is, of course, not distinct from actually doing the science in question. Rather it is best thought of as an activity that might be pursued in the early stages of the development of the science, a sort of proto-science, if you will. So the alternative to viewing the theory of reference as attempting to characterize a relation specified by folk semantics is to view it as a kind of proto-science which tries to find or construct word-world relations that will be useful in some explanatory project or other.
Perhaps I am being too cautious here. I have met a few philosophers who think that there already are up and running sciences that invoke the notion of reference. Linguistics is the candidate most often mentioned, though various parts of cognitive psychology are sometimes mentioned as well._ I am inclined to be more than a bit skeptical about the claim that any of these areas of inquiry make genuinely explanatory use of a reference-like word-world relation. But for present purposes there is no need to enter into a debate on the matter. For if it is true that linguistics or parts of cognitive psychology, or some other discipline already exploits a notion of reference, then the project for the theory of reference can be viewed as providing an explicit description or explication of the reference relation that these disciplines are using. This sort of project is quite familiar in the philosophy of science. For even in well developed sciences it is sometimes the case that researchers will use a concept quite productively without providing a fully explicit or philosophically satisfying account of the concept. In these cases, philosophers of science sometimes step in and try to make the notion in question more explicit. In recent years there have been illuminating studies of fitness, space-time, grammaticality and a host of other notions._ Part of this work can be viewed as straightforward conceptual description, where the concepts being characterized are those of working scientists. Often however, philosophers of science discover that