In his recent book Nicholas Shea asks-
how do mental states manage to be about things in the external world?
They don't. Aboutness is a predicate which is about predication or, put another way, predication is what aboutness is about.
Predication can now be done by a machine not just a mind. There is a 'noesis' (to use Husserl's vocabulary) and a 'noema'- i.e. a 'process' and 'content'- aspect to the activity of predication. One may speak of intentionality or representation or naturalism or anything else in this context but this too is mere predication. No doubt, some predication is useful and some is mischievous but most is idle or inconsequential.
Mental states are important to us. Changing them may be easier than changing our physical state. Indeed, it may be essential to change your mental state if you want to change your physical state. How we do predication can matter a great deal. But, most predication is useless or mischievous.
One possible predicate of a mental state is that it is about a thing in the external world. Another predicate someone else may apply is that it only pretends to be about a thing in the external world because it actually wants to fuck Mummy and kill Daddy. Anybody can attach any predicate they like to any object they like whether or not the object is real, imaginary or incompossible. True, each such predication may hinge on implicitly predicating something really magical to the object in question. Some peeps get worked up about 'mental states'. Others might speak of the mysteries of the soul which enable it to be raised up to God by listening to the St. Matthew Passion or damned to perdition for watching porn.
The truth is there is an ontologically dysphoric aspect to predication. It isn't at home in this world. 'Naturality' is category theoretical. But categories are either 'intensional' (non-substitutable or context dependent) or 'transcendental' in the sense of being a priori or outside experience. I suppose, one could say 'intention' is 'intensional' or non-substitutable and arises out of arbitrary or uncorrelated asymmetries. But is it useful to say any such thing? Not for me. I should concentrate on jocular farting. I could be the next big thing on Tik Tok.
Shea, sadly, is unlikely to attain such eminence. Still, considered as a verbal fart, the following is not too shabby.
That mental representations are about things in the world, although utterly commonplace, is deeply puzzling.
A representation has some object as its predicate. That object may not be real. I think I see a snake. I have a vivid mental representation of the thing hanging in front of me utterly motionless yet malevolently poised to strike. But the snake does not exist. It is a rope. Thus 'snake' is a predicate of the rope, as far as I was concerned, but it was unreal and delusive. However, it is obvious that it is useful to have mental representations like 'snake!' because snakes, where I come from, really are dangerous. If we evolved by natural selection we would be bound to make mistaken predication of that sort. There is nothing puzzling here whatsoever.
How do they get their aboutness? … This is an undoubted lacuna in our understanding, a void hidden away in the foundations of the cognitive sciences
This assumes that 'cognitive sciences' have 'foundations'. There is a 'matam' (doctrine) corresponding to the vigyan (techne). If such is the case, surely the object-predicate relation lies there? Shea, in the immediately preceding passage, says
there is very good reason to believe that thinking is the processing of meaningful physical entities, mental representations.
This is silly. 'Mental representation' is a predicate like 'snake'. It may have an object which is a meaningful physical entity. It may not.
That insight is one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century—it may turn out to be the most important.
This would be the case only if we had a means to produce mental representations of any sort or change those which arise. Suppose there was a small, inexpensive, device which would cause any woman viewing me to see a gorgeous hunk of a man who speaks words of wit and wisdom. Then, I'd agree that that a very important discovery has been made. But not otherwise.
But I have to admit that the question of meaning is a little problem in the foundations. We’ve done well on the ‘processing’ bit but we’re still a bit iffy about the ‘meaningful’ bit.
I'm not. The meaning of a woman's mental representation of me as a hunky dude would be that they would not scream and run away when I smile at them. Meaning is pragmatic or utilitarian. In Sanskrit the word for meaning- Artha- is also the word for Economics. The reason I'd pay for a device of the sort I mentioned is because it would have cash-value for me.
We know what processing of physical particulars is,
If we can reprocess them to a utilitarian end- sure. Superior reprocessing would require superior knowledge. I suppose I could pay a lot of money to hair-dressers and make-up artists and dentists and tailors and personal trainers and so forth to make myself look marginally less like a gargoyle but Science has a long way to go before it can either cause women to see me as sexy or cause me to appear less hideous.
and how processing can respect the meaning of symbols.
Processing can do no such things. I can respect the fuck out of all sorts of symbols. I can even assign them more or less the right meaning- e.g this is the flag of my country, this is the emblem of my religion- but an assignment is not 'symbol processing' unless by symbol a mere character- e.g. a letter or a number- is meant. However, we don't really know why some people with certain medical conditions can't process some character strings the way most people can nor do we really know if such accurate processing is 'multiply realizable'.
For example, we can make a machine whose manipulations obey logical rules and so preserve truth.
No. All we can say is that a machine language does so within a particular context. We can't say machines infallibly follow rules unless we had a way to infallibly implement machine languages. To our best knowledge, this is impossible.
But we don’t yet have a clear idea of how representations could get meanings, when the meaning does not derive from the understanding of an external interpreter.
By stipulation to solve a coordination game or create a discoordination game. That's all that happens when philosophers write for each other. They are playing a game which involves stipulations which are merely a type of more or less protocol bound predications.
Shea takes a different view. He quotes Putnam
An ant is crawling on a patch of sand. As it crawls, it traces a line in the sand. By pure chance the line that it traces curves and recrosses itself in such a way that it ends up looking like a recognizable caricature of Winston Churchill. Has the ant traced a picture of Winston Churchill, a picture that depicts Churchill?
If we stipulate that 'depicts' equals 'looks like', then sure. If we say 'depicts' is the same predicate as 'an intention to represent' then, no. Depicts is a predicate and the protocols governing it may differ in a legal context, a theological context, an aesthetic context and so on. I may say 'the only true depiction of Churchill that we have is that of the laborious ant which, in an aleatory manner, composed- quite accidentally- this marvel. Surely, God himself has chosen this most insignificant of creatures to depict the likeness of one our Nation's greatest heroes!' Furthermore, it may be that the ant's depiction shows Churchill as graver or more tormented than his cherubic features would warrant. We would see some aesthetic quality in the ant's workmanship which gave us a new understanding of the Katechon which keeps the Day of Wrath at bay.
Shea, however, won't accepts that 'depict' is a predicate which may, by stipulation, be governed by protocols.
The lines on the sand look like Churchill, but they do not represent him.
Save by express stipulation. If the Queen in Parliament declares that the thing does represent him then certain consequences may follow- e.g. that patch of sand is protected by law for future generations to marvel at. Over the course of centuries, a cult of Churchill is built up and this becomes its Veronica- or true icon. Zealots destroy all other pictorial or other depictions of Churchill as the work of heretics and blasphemers. Such things are the snares of the devil. The ant alone depicted Churchill. It would be a sin against the Holy Ghost to seek to improve upon it.
It is a familiar point that resemblance or similarity is not sufficient for representation.
Nor is it necessary. However stipulation, for certain practical purposes and in certain contexts, suffices. My passport photo does not represent me- Mummy says I'm cute- but rather depicts a horrible gargoyle. Yet it alone represents me for certain official purposes by express stipulation of HMG. This may be cruel, this may be unfair, but it is the way the world works.
It is often claimed that resemblance is not necessary either. As a point about representation in general, this is easily demonstrated by the phenomenon of linguistic representation, since words do not resemble what they represent.
Neither do two dimensional pictures of three dimensional objects. But what they represent is a matter where stipulation plays a great role.
But this is only relevant because we are talking about representation in general. After all, it might be relevant to a theory of pictorial representation that if a certain kind of picture depicts someone, then it usually resembles them in some way; so the fact that philosophers move so quickly to conclude that resemblance is not necessary for representation indicates that they are looking for a general account of representation, not just an account of pictorial representation.
With pictorial representation we are dealing with protocol bound predication. When I was 5 I produced a picture of my Mum which greatly pleased her. Everybody agreed I had captured her grace and beauty though what I had drawn resembled a hideous space monster. I continued to produce such masterpieces till, when I was around the age of 35, Mummy suggested I give up painting as a career. Picasso may have said that every child is a genius up to the age of 5 but most people get better at drawing by the time they are 10. Also, darling, you mustn't eat so many of your crayons. You are getting very fat and your hair has fallen out.
Putnam wrote
To have the intention that anything … should represent Churchill, I must have been able to think about Churchill in the first place.
This is not the case. A group of artisans supplied only with numerical information of a certain type might place dynamite on a rock face and then proceed to smooth it out. Only after this labor has been accomplished could they gather on a promontory which others had constructed and see that what they had done was to carve the depiction of a man's face. Later they learn that the man in question is the Prime Minister of the Queen across the Seas. As for the civil servant who sent the numerical information, it turns out he thought he was ordering some latex masks for the No. 10 Christmas party. He hadn't realized that through a hilarious series of comical mix-ups the Nabob of Kuch Nahin would wind up thinking that Queenji Gor' bless 'er, wanted him to create a Mt. Rushmore type depiction of England's greatest public servant in its finest hour.
If lines in the sand, noises, etc., cannot ‘in themselves’ represent anything,
save by predication or stipulation
then how is it that thought forms can ‘in themselves’ represent any thing?
in the same way that 'thought forms' exist- i.e. by predication or stipulation.
Or can they? How can thought reach out and ‘grasp’ what is external?
By telekinesis. This involves quantum entanglement and the fact that you were bitten by a radio-active spider from the fifth dimension. Sadly, our scientists haven't got to a point where this technology is readily available. On the other hand, you can buy X-ray specs which enable you to see what type of panties girls are wearing. I don't know why anyone would want to- but it is a comforting thought.
Shea says
If we look more closely at the passage we see that Putnam does not just say ‘thought’, but ‘thought forms’. What are thought forms?
They are predicates applied to thoughts for different purposes which are more or less useful depending on who is doing the classifying.
The introduction of the word ‘form’ is not an accidental slip of the pen on Putnam’s part; it embodies an assumption that is needed to make the parallel with lines on the sand intelligible.
It is a way of tarting up or dignifying his argument. An assumption was needed for his ant to depict Churchill and another assumption is needed for him to get that assumption to do some work for him. What we have here is a predicate of a predicate. There is an object and one predicate of it- viz a thought- is given another predicate- viz having a form. It is perfectly possible that a string of predicates can have a further predicate- viz. the quality of profundity or intelligibility or the quality of being meaningless bullshit,
For the only way to make sense of the parallel is if there is something that relates to thoughts as mere shapes relate to meaningful words, or as lines in the sand relate to a picture in the sand. Putnam himself does not defend the hypothesis that there are such things as thought forms, but without it the argument cannot move forward.
An argument could be a string of predicates about an object that could exist. But if it is about an incompossible object and serves no good purpose, there is an argument to reject it. Of course, we could stipulate that some set of assumptions should be made. But, in that case, stipulation is doing the heavy lifting. That's what moves things along.
Putnam’s overall argument can therefore be represented as follows:
(1) No physical representation represents intrinsically
Representation is a predicate but so is 'intrinsic'. We might say 'this is a closer representation than that or 'a photograph is more intrinsically representational than an abstract painting'. Some physical processes- e.g photography- are intrinsically representational. When we look at still water we may see our reflection. That is a representation of us. We can't see our image in the falling rain.
(2) What goes for physical representations also goes for mental representations
I can imagine special training such that mental representations become better and better at capturing details of the physical object. An expert witness may be able to authoritatively identify particular objects of a similar nature.
(3) Therefore no mental representation represents intrinsically
But some mental representations are intrinsically realistic and determined by the object. Through training or experience they may become more so. Others are imaginative or stereotyped.
(4) Therefore mental representation must represent via some non-intrinsic connection
No. The representation must intrinsically be mental. Different minds may, for evolutionary reason, be intrinsically different.
Causation is the leading candidate for a non-intrinsic connection which is proposed to underpin representation.
But it is also the leading candidate for an intrinsic connection.
And of course, one of Putnam’s aims in the beginning of Reason, Truth & History is to use the causal theory of representation to argue against the coherence of the idea that we might be brains in vats. I will not discuss this additional argument here, since my interest is only in his argument which begins with the thought-experiment about the ant and ends with the conclusion labelled (4) above. Premise (1) is supposed to be illustrated by the thought experiment about the ant. But a couple of things need to be clarified. First, ‘intrinsically’ is not explained — for the moment we can take it to mean, ‘in itself’, or ‘in isolation from anything else’ or ‘not in relation to anything else’.
Why? Intrinsic means endogenous- without any further outside input. Let us suppose I am asked to describe a person of interest to the police. I am not intrinsically good at remembering faces or noticing height and weight. However, it may be that a hypnotist can help me recover that memory. That would be an example of an extrinsic or exogenous factor shaping a representation. However 'recovered memories' may not be accurate. I remember the person as black whereas he was white because the hypnotist projected his own racial bias on to me.
Second, strictly speaking the thought experiment is only about pictures; but it is easy to draw the same conclusion if the ant had made the shapes WINSTON CHURCHILL on the sand, and maybe we can generalise from that to all physical representations.
Perhaps there is a way to manipulate ants to do that by applying a spray of some sort.
Or maybe not; this is not my focus here. Let’s agree for the sake of argument that premise (1) is true. Premise (3) follows from (1) and (2) obviously, and (4) follows from (3) on the assumption that mental representations represent via some kind of connection.
Some mental representations are intrinsically naturalistic and concerned with capturing salient features of the object.
The crucial premise of the argument, then, is (2).
Surely 'representation' is a thing minds do? Would physical objects without minds bother to produce representations?
To assess the validity of the argument, we have to make precise what ‘goes for’ means;
Why? It means the same predicate applies.
and to assess its soundness, we have to figure out whether premise (2) is true.
It is meaningless. It is non-informative. It is neither true nor false.
So what does (2) mean? The most plausible reading of (2) is something like this: what is true about physical representations with respect to their representational powers is also true of mental representations.
But physical representations only represent things to minds. We may feel joy at seeing a picture of our sweetheart. But she suddenly looks hideous now we know she is fucking the football team.
After all, it cannot be true in general that everything that is true of physical representations is true of the mental;
'True' is a predicate. I may say 'nothing is fixed about about a physical representation and therefore any predicate applied to it is as false of any predicate applied to a mental representation- except for pictures of Mummy at any age or my mental representation of Mummy at any age- both are always Divine.'
the issue here is rather the representational character of these representations, and where it comes from.
The same place from which sexiness of the sexy comes from. It is a very sill place which quickly turns into an infinite regress. Where does the sexy nature of sexiness come from? What about the sexiness of sexy nature or the sexy nature of that meta-meta- sexiness?
So what is the reason for believing in (2), so understood?
To earn a little money pretending to be a philosopher.
Given that a physical representation is a representation in which we can distinguish representational properties from non-representational properties,
e.g a picture of Churchill in a magazine is made of paper, whereas Churchill was made of flesh and blood.
the the truth of (2) depends on whether there are ‘thought forms’ as described above: something that, by definition, represents but has properties other than its representational properties.
My mental picture of a table is not made of wood.
So our question becomes, why believe that there are such things as thought forms?
No. The question is why we use certain words or phrases. The answer is that this solves a coordination problem.
In the tradition in which Putnam is writing, I think it is plausible to say that there are two broad reasons for believing in thought forms.
Actually focal solutions of coordination problems can be 'believed in' for any reason at all provided that's the game we want to play.
The first is physicalism;
Or Buddhism which pays a lot of attention to 'thought forms'.
the second is what I call a semantic picture of all representation.
Semantics looks at solutions to coordination and discoordination games. We use words or ascribe meanings to them for one of those two reasons.
Physicalism says that everything is physical,
But it hasn't actually contributed to physics. It is non-informative.
or that everything is determined by the physical, or supervenes upon the physical, or constituted by the physical, or grounded in the physical.
But what is the physical? Does it feature 'action at a distance'? If so, how is it different from Spiritism? Is the Universe a hologram? Physicalism can't contribute to the discussion. It is useless. On the other hand it is definitely true that the Universe is pervaded by a bloke who has the head of an elephant.
These formulations are perhaps progressively less clear, but not in a way that matters for my purposes here. Nor does it really matter here how exactly we define the physical, though that is important in other contexts.
It is the only thing which matters. If there is a definition of the physical then this is a falsifiable theory. If not, it is non-informative 'matam' with no vigyan associated with it. This is not to say 'cognitive science' does not exist but philosophy isn't its meta-language. It is physics. What is philosophy's meta-language? It is logic which does deal with predication.
What matters is that the subject-matter of physics, whatever that precisely is, has ontological priority — everything else has to be understood or explained relative to this subject matter, to the physical.
Structural Causal Models have to be physicalist so that mechanisms can be designed so that 'cognitive science' develops tools to improve or repair cognition. Currently, I can get my teeth fixed at the dentist. I'd love to get my thinking fixed at a brain shop. That way I wouldn't write like shit.
So physicalism requires that anything which is not obviously part of the fundamental physical world must be explained in physical terms
This is silly. Plenty of mathematicians have contributed both to physics and to economics precisely because the latter is not physicalist, it is strategic and involves coordination and discoordination games and hedging and arbitrage between them.
. This reductionist doctrine has dominated analytic philosophy of mind in the last half century or more.
But analtickle philosophy hasn't dominated shite. It can't contribute to physics or econ or anything else. The thing is a wank.
Intentionality and consciousness are typically taken as the central mental phenomena
except in blokes like me- who represent the vast majority of our species. Soliciting Food and Sex and snarling or purring composes the totality of our mental activity.
which do not seem to fit easily into the world as conceived by physics. Jerry Fodor, in a well-known passage, writes: I suppose that sooner or later, the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm and charge will perhaps appear upon their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep… If aboutness is real, it must really be something else. (Fodor 1987: 97)
Suppose physics gets a theory of everything and 'carves the world at its joints', would Knightian uncertainty disappear?- i.e. would all possible states of the world and their associated probability distribution be known? No because of the impredicativity associated with knowledge agents themselves being part of physical reality. Incidentally, language would disappear if there were no Knightian Uncertainty. Thus strategic predication will always remain a feature of discourse. Thus intentionality will become more not less important. Indeed, in Buddhism, which had a background physicalist theory in Samkhya, intentionality (cetana) becomes all important. There is neither future nor past just the empty present briefly illumined by the lightning flash of intention.
Buddhism has flourished much more than analtickle philosophy because it is concerned with making people have better, happier, cognition. Now if only some nice Buddhist Lama could invent a Nirvana double cheese bacon burger, I too would get on board.
If we start with this metaphysical assumption, then it is natural to see how the introduction of thought forms is required for an understanding of intentionality.
Nonsense! The fact is our understanding hasn't been advanced in any way by Putnam or other such psilosophers. It may be that CBT or Mindfulness or some such thing can improve our understanding and ability to control our own intentions. That's a type of thinking which has 'cash value'.
The basic idea is that you postulate something in the brain of the thinker, call this the ‘vehicle’ of representation, and then explain its representational content in terms which are acceptable to physicalism (e.g. in causal or informational terms). In fact this is what Fodor (1987) himself does; as does Hartry Field in a famous paper (1978). Fodor’s view is that these vehicles of representation are sentences in a ‘language of thought’ (1987, appendix).
Why not notes in a melody of thought or strokes in a masturbation of thought? Such statements are all equally non-informative.
Physicalism gives you a reason to believe in thought forms, whether conceived as sentences in a language of thought, or in some other way.
Which Kavka's toxin will this belief help you quaff? Just the one which keeps you employed in a shitty Department of a University where your STEM subject colleagues are doing useful research and the Law faculty and the Business faculty are helping kids rise up socially and economically.
Understood in this way, it’s clear that what motivates the postulation of thought forms is physicalism, not some general concern about the possibility of representation. (Cf. here Shea: ‘The physical and biological sciences offer no model of how naturalistically respectable properties could be like that’ (Shea 2018: 5)).
Why be concerned about something which adolescents do very vividly while wanking? I get that peeps wot teach shite might want to pretend that they are connected to prestigious disciplines like Physics. But there was a time when physicists took an interest in philosophy. But then people like Putnam started saying silly things about Quantum Mechanics and the technology involved in and budget for experimental physics expanded exponentially. Meanwhile armchair thinkers were senilely soiling their chairs in Philosophy Departments.
Putnam’s argument, however, was supposed to be a quite general argument — the argument does not anywhere state that it is assuming physicalism. So although appealing to physicalism does give a reason to believe in thought forms, it makes the Putnam argument redundant. If you are a physicalist you will have already rejected ‘intrinsic intentionality’ (perhaps for Fodor’s reasons) and maybe you will postulate something like thought forms instead.
So, instead of saying 'this guy intends to murder me which is why he keeps shooting at me.' we would need to say 'this guys' thought forms are causing him to shoot at me so as to ensure I die'. One may as well say 'the infernal machinations of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat have resulted in the guy I cuckolded shooting at me.'
So you do not need Putnam’s argument.
It is not an argument. It is non-informative.
The starting point of Putnam’s argument — as expressed too in the quotes from Dickie, Shea and Williams — is that we will find intentionality philosophically problematic (‘puzzling’, ‘spooky’).
No. We find philosophy shite. But there's no great puzzle as to why it should be so. The thing is useless. It is adversely selective. Stupid peeps go in for it and become professors. They have to teach the yet stupider or downright crazy. Cretins sometimes crave academic credentials. They can dash off what looks like 'philosophy' without doing any thinking whatsoever. They can then smuggle in their own craziness- like Jason Stanley or Amia Srinivasan- and get to virtue signal on the basis of a meretricious virtuosity.
Shea's paper concludes that intentionality
... naturalism — understood as a view distinct from, though compatible with, physicalism — does not require an answer to the question of aboutness.
Unless we think of it in category theoretical terms as 'naturality' or 'non arbitrariness'- in other words any sufficiently developed and useful theory will have pretty much the same concept of it. But this arises because predication has to be constrained for a protocol bound discourse to be useful. Mathematical logic will constantly improve this.
Sometimes it looks as if there are only two choices: giving an account of intentionality by answering the question of aboutness in general, reductive terms;
Predication is strategic- i.e. game theoretic. Game theory is not necessarily reductive. Its 'Tarskian primitives' can evolve or change discontinuously.
and proudly declaring oneself to be a non-reductionist who is not concerned with these scientistic questions.
Which is cool if you are not just concerned with but actively involved in making the world a better place.
And it can seem as if the first approach is the only respectable approach for a naturalist to take.
Useless people are often concerned with being 'respectable'. But dressing like a toff doesn't mean you are actually a toff. Similarly babbling about 'physicalism' doesn't make you a physicist not talking of 'naturalism' make you a naturalist. A naturist or nudist maybe. But that won't keep you of jail if you run around Waitrose stark naked and with a radish up your bum. I'm not talking about myself. This happened to a bloke I know. We were in the SAS together so I can't tell you his name for reasons of National Security.
In this paper I have questioned this false dichotomy. The first approach is not obligatory for naturalists,
or naturists
and the second involves putting one’s head in the sand (or perhaps leaving it in the clouds).
make up your mind, Shea. Stuff like this matters!
I conclude that it is possible to explain intentionality naturalistically without being required to answer the question of aboutness.
Aboutness is predication. Saying everything is 'naturalistic' is fine, more especially if you are streaking through Waitrose with a radish up your bum. It is quite unfair to be accused of trying to steal the radish if you fully intended to put the radish back but couldn't coz the cops turned up and took you away in the paddy wagon and the magistrates, taking account of your previous record, decided to pass a custodial sentence coz all them guys be racist as fuck.
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