To understand the way this is supposed to work, consider an ordinary example, ‘S’ identifies a banana (learns that it is a banana) by noting its shape and colour - perhaps, even tasting and smelling it (to make sure its not wax). In this case the perceptual knowledge that is a banana is (the direct realist admits) indirect, dependence on S’s perceptual knowledge of its shape, colour, smell, and taste. ‘S’ learns that it is a banana by seeing that it is yellow, banana-shaped, etc. Nonetheless, S’s perception of the banana’s colour and shape is not indirect. ‘S’ does not see that the object is yellow, for example, by seeing, knowing, believing anything more basic - either about the banana or anything else, e.g., his own sensations of the banana. ‘S’ has learned to identify such features, of course, but when ‘S’ learned to do is not an inference, even a unconscious inference, from other things be believes. What ‘S’ acquired was a cognitive skill, a disposition to believe of yellow objects he saw that they were yellow. The exercise of this skill does not require, and in no way depends on having of any other beliefs. S’s identificatorial successes will depend on his operating in certain special conditions, of course, ‘S’ will not, perhaps, be able to visually identify yellow objects in drastically reduced lighting, at funny viewing angles, or when afflicted with certain nervous disorders. But these facts about ‘S’ can see that something is yellow does not show that his perceptual knowledge (that ‘a’ is yellow) in any way deepens on a belief )let alone knowledge) that he is in such special conditions. It merely shows that direct perceptual knowledge is the result of exercising a skill, an identificatorial skill, that like any skill,. Requires certain conditions for its successful exercise. An expert basketball player cannot shoot accurately in a hurricane. He needs normal conditions to do what he has learned to do. So also, with individuals who have developed perceptual (cognitive) skills. They need normal conditions to do what they have learned to do. They need normal conditions to see, for example, that something is yellow. But they do not, any more than the basketball player, have to know they are in these conditions to do what being in these conditions enables them to do.
This means, of course, that for a direct realist direct perceptual knowledge is fallible and corrigible. Whether ‘S’ sees that ‘a’ is ‘F’ depends on his being caused to believe that ’a’ is ‘F’ in conditions that are appropriate for an exercise of that cognitive skill. If conditions are right, then ‘S’ sees (hence, knows) that ‘a’ is ‘F’. If they aren’t he doesn’t. Whether or not ‘S’ knows depends, then, not on what else, if anything, ‘S’ believes, but on the circumferences in which ‘S’ comes to believe. This being so, this type of direct realism is a form of externalism, direct perception of objective facts, pure perceptual knowledge of external events, is made possible because what is needed, by way of justification for such knowledge has been reduced. Background knowledge - and, in particular, the knowledge that the experience does, and suffices for knowing - is not needed.
This mans that the foundations of knowledge are fallible. Nonetheless, though fallible, they are in no way derived. That is what makes them foundations. Even if they are brittle, as foundations sometimes are, everything else rests upon them
The theory of representative realism holds that (1) there is a world whose existence and nature is independent of us and of our perceptual experience of it, and (2) perceiving an object located in that external world necessarily involves causally interacting with that object, (3) the information acquired in perceiving an object is indirect: It is information most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about the object itself:
Clause 1. Makes representative realism a species of realism.
Clause 2. Makes it a species of causal theory of perception.
Clause 3. Makes it a species of representative as opposed
to direct realism.
Traditionally, representative realism has been allied with an act/object analysis of sensory experience. Its act/object analysis is traditionally a major plank in arguments for representative realism. According to the act/object analysis of experience with content involves an object of experience to which the subject is related by an act of awareness (the event of experiencing that object). This is meant to apply not only to perceptions, which have material objects (whatever is perceived), but also to experiences like hallucinations and dream experiences, which do not. Such experiences nonetheless, appear to represent something,. And their objects are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act/object theorists may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which have been treated as properties, Meinongian objects (which may not exist or have any form of being), and, more commonly, private mental entities with sensory qualities. (The term ‘sense-data’ is now usually applied to the latter, but has also been used as a general term for objects of sense experiences, as in the work of G.E. Moore.) Act/object theorists may also differ on the relationship between objects of experience and objects of perception. In terms of representative realism, objects of perception (of which we are ‘indirectly aware’). Meinongians, however, may simply treat objects of perception as existing objects of experience.
Realism in any area of thought is the doctrine that certain entities allegedly associated with that area are indeed real. Common sense realism - sometimes called ‘realism’, without t qualification - says that ordinary things like chairs and trees and people are real. Scientific realism says that theoretical posits like electrons and fields of force and quarks are equally real. And psychological realism says mental states like pain and beliefs are real. Realism can be upheld - and opposed - in all such areas, as it can with differently or more finely drawn provinces of discourse: For example, with discourse about colours, about the past, about possibility and necessity, or about matters of moral right and wrong. The realist in any such area insists on the reality of the entities in question in the discourse.
If realism itself can be given a fairly quick characterization, it is more difficult to chart the various forms of opposition, for they are legion. Some opponents deny that there are any distinctive posits associated with the area of discourse under dispute: A good example is the emotivist doctrine that moral discourse does not posit values but serves only, like applause and exclamation, to express feelings. Other opponents deny that entities posited by the relevant discourse exist, or, at least, exists independently of our thinking about them: Here the standard example is ‘idealism’. And others again, insist that the entities associated with the discourse in question are tailored to our human capacities and interests and, to that extent, are as much a product of invention as a matter of discovery.
Nevertheless, one us e of terms such as ‘looks’, ‘seems’, and ‘feels’ is to express opinion. ‘It looks as if the Labour Party will win the next election’ expresses an opinion about the party’s chances and does not describe a particular kind of perceptual experience. We can, however, use such terms to describe perceptual experience divorced from any opinion to which the experience may incline us. A straight-stick half in water looks bent, and does so to people completely familiar with this illusion who has, therefore, no inclination to hold that the stick is in fact bent. Such users of ‘looks’, ‘seems’, ‘taste’, etc. are commonly called ‘phenomenological’.
The act/object theory holds that the sensory experience recorded by sentence employing sense is a matter of being directly acquainted with something which actually bears the red to me. I am acquainted with a red expanse (in my visual field): When something tastes bitter to me I am directly acquainted with a sensation with the property of being bitter, and so on and so forth. (If you do not understand the term ‘directly acquainted’, stick a pin into your finger. The relation you will then bear to your pain, as opposed to the relation of concern you might bear to another’s pain when told about it, is an instance e of direct acquaintance e in the intended sense.)
The act/object account of sensory experience combines with various considerations traditionally grouped under the head of the argument for illusion to provide arguments for representative realism, or more precisely for the clause in it that contents that our senorily derived information about the world comes indirectly, that what we are most directly acquainted with is not an aspect of the world but an aspect for our mental sensory responses to it. Consider, for instance, the aforementioned refractive illusion, that of a straight stick in water looking bent. The act/object account holds that in this case we are directly acquainted with a bent shape. This shape, so the argument runs, cannot be the stick as it is straight, and thus, must be a mental item, commonly called a sense-datum. And, ion general sense-data-visual, tactual, etc. - is held to be the objects of direct acquaintance. Perhaps the most striking uses of the act/object analysis to bolster representative realism turns on what modern science tells us about the fundamental nature of the physical world. Modern science tells us that the objects of the physical world around us are literally made up of enormously many, widely separated, tiny particles whose nature can be given in terms of a small number of properties like mass, charge, spin and so on. (These properties are commonly called the primary qualities, as primary and secondary qualities represent a metaphysical distinction with which really belong to objects in the world and qualities which only appear to belong to them, or which human beings only believe to belong to them, because of the effects those objects produce ion human beings, typically through the sense organs, that is to say, something that does not hold everywhere by nature, but is producing in or contributed by human beings in their interaction with a world which really contains only atoms of certain kinds in a void. To think that some objects in the world are coloured, or sweet ort bitter is to attribute to objects qualities which on this view they do not actually possess. Rather, it is only that some of the qualities which are imputed to objects, e.g., colour, sweetness, bitterness, which are not possessed by those objects. But, of course, that is not how the objects look to us, not how they present to our senses. They look continuous and coloured. What then, can be these coloured expanses with which we are directly acquainted be other than mental sense-data?
Two objections dominate the literature on representative realism: One goes back to Berkeley (1685-1753) and is that representative realism lead straight to scepticism about the external world, the other is that the act/object account of sensory awareness is to be rejected in favour of an adverbial account.
Traditional representative realism is a ‘veil of perception’ doctrine, in Bennett’s (1971) phrase. Lock e’s idea (1632-1704) was that the physical world was revealed by science to be in essence colourless, odourless, tasteless and silent and that we perceive it by, to put it metaphorically, throwing a veil over it by means of our senses. It is the veil we see, in the strictest sense of ‘see’. This does not mean that we do not really see the objects around us. It means that we see an object in virtue of seeing the veil, the sense-data, causally related in the right way to that object, an obvious question to ask, therefore, is what justifies us in believing that there is anything behind the veil, and if we are somehow justified in believing that there is something behind the veil,. How can we be confident of what it is like?
One intuition that lies at the heart of the realist’s account of objectivity is that, in the last analysis, the objectivity of a belief is to be explained by appeal to the independent existence of the entities it concerns: Epistemological objectivity, this is, is to b e analysed in terms of ontological notions of objectivity. A judgement or beliefs is epistemological notions of objectivity, if and only if it stands in some specified reflation to an independently existing determinate reality. Frége (1848-1925), for example, believed that arithmetic could comprise objective knowledge only if the numbers it refers to, the propositions it consists of, the functions it employs, and the truth-values it aims at, are all mind-independent entities. And conversely, within a realist framework, to show that the members of a given class of judgements are merely subjective, it is sufficient to show that there exists no independent reality that those judgements characterize or refer to.
Thus, it is favourably argued that if values are not part of the fabric of the world, then moral subjectivity is inescapable. For the realist, the, of epistemological notions of objectivity is to be elucidated by appeal to the existence of determinate facts, objects, properties, events and the like, which exit or obtain independent of any cognitive access we may have to them. And one of the strongest impulses towards platonic realism - the theoretical commitment to the existence of abstract objects like sets, numbers, and propositions - stems from the widespread belief that only if such things exist in their own right can we allow that logic, arithmetic and science are indeed objective. Though ‘Platonist’ realism in a sense accounts for mathematical knowledge, it postulates such a gulf between both the ontology and the epistemology of science and that of mathematics that realism is often said to make the applicability of mathematics in natural science into an inexplicable mystery
This picture is rejected by anti-realists. The possibility that our beliefs and theories are objectively true is not, according to them, capable of being rendered intelligible by invoking the nature and existence of reality as it is in and of itself. If our conception of epistemological objective notions is minimal, requiring only ‘presumptive universality’, then alternative, non-realist analysers of it can seem possible - and eve n attractive. Such analyses have construed the objectivity of an arbitrary judgement as a function of its coherence with other judgements, of its possession of grounds that warrant it,. Of its conformity to the a prior rules that constitute understanding, of its verifiability (or falsifiability), or if its permanent presence in the mind of God. On e intuitive common to a variety of different anti-realist theories is such that for our assertions to be objective, for our beliefs to comprise genuine knowledge, those assertions and beliefs must be, among other things, rational, justifiable, coherent, communicable and intelligible. But it is hard, the anti-realist claims, to see how such properties as these can be explained by appeal to entities as they are on and of themselves. On the contrary, according to most forms of anti-realism, it is only the basis of ontological subjective notions like ‘the way reality seems to us’, ‘the evidence that is available to us’, ‘the criteria we apply’, ‘the experience we undergo’ or ‘the concepts we have acquired’ that epistemological notions of objectivity of our beliefs can possibly be explained.
The reason by which a belief is justified must be accessible in principle to the subject hold that belief, as Externalists deny this requirement, proposing that this makes knowing too difficult to achieve in most normal contexts. The internalist-Externalists debate is sometimes also viewed as a debate between those who think that knowledge can be naturalized (Externalists) and those who do not (internalist) naturalists hold that the evaluative notions used in epistemology can be explained in terms of non-evaluative concepts - for example, that justification can be explained in terms of something like reliability. They deny a special normative realm of language that is theoretically different from the kinds of concepts used in factual scientific discourse. Non-naturalists deny this and hold to the essential difference between normative and the factual: The former can never be derived from or constituted by the latter. So internalists tend to think of reason and rationality as non-explicable in natural, descriptive terms, whereas, Externalists think such an explanation is possible.
Although the reason, . . . to what we think to be the truth. The sceptic uses an argumentive strategy to show the alternatives strategies that we do not genuinely have knowledge and we should therefore suspend judgement. But, unlike the sceptics, many other philosophers maintain that more than one of the alternatives are acceptable and can constitute genuine knowledge. However, it seems dubitable to have invoked hypothetical sceptics in their work to explore the nature of knowledge. These philosophers did no doubt that we have knowledge, but thought that by testing knowledge as severely as one can, one gets clearer about what counts as knowledge and greater insight results. Hence there are underlying differences in what counts as knowledge for the sceptic and other philosophical appearances. As traditional epistemology has been occupied with dissassociative kinds of debate that led to a dogmatism. Various types of beliefs were proposed as candidates for sceptic-proof knowledge, for example, those beliefs that are immediately derive by many as immune to doubt. Nevertheless, that they all had in common was that empirical knowledge began with the data of the senses, that this was safe from scepticism and that a further superstructure of knowledge was to be built on this firm basis.
It might well be observed that this reply to scepticism fares better as a justification for believing in the existence of external objects, than as a justification of the views we have about their nature. It is incredible that nothing independent of us is responsible for the manifest patterns displayed by our sense-data, but granting this leaves open many possibilities about the nature of the hypnotized external reality. Direct realists often make much of the apparent advantage that their view has in the question of the nature of the external world. The fact of the matter is, though, that it is much harder to arrive at tenable views about the nature of external reality than it is to defend the view that there is an external reality of some kind or other. The history of human thought about the nature of the external world is littered with what are now seen (with the benefit of hindsight) to be egregious errors - the four element theory, phlogiston, the crystal spheres, vitalism, and so on. It can hardly be an objection to a theory that makes the question of the nature of external reality much harder than the question of its existence.
The way we talk about sensory experience certainly suggests an act/object view. When something looks thus and so in the phenomenological sense, we naturally describe the nature of our sensory experience by saying that we are acquainted with a thus ans so ‘given’. But suppose that this is a misleading grammatical appearance, engendered by the linguistic propriety of forming complete, putatively referring expressions like ‘the bent shape on my visual field’, and that there is no more a bent shape in existence for the representative realist to contend to be a mental sense-data, than there is a bad limp in existence when someone has, as we say, a bad limp. When someone has a bad limo, they limp badly, similarly, according to adverbial theorist, when, as we naturally put it, I am aware of a bent shape, we would better express the way things are by saying that I sense bent shape-ly. When the act/object theorist analyses as a feature of the object which gives the nature of the sensory experience, the adverbial theorist analyses as a mode of sense which gives the nature of the sensory experience. (The decision between the act/object and adverbial theories is a hard one.)
In the best-known form the adverbial theory of experience proposes that the grammatical object of a statement attributing an experience to someone be analysed as an adverb. For example,
(1) Rod is experiencing a pink square
is rewritten as,
Rod is experiencing (pink square)-ly
This is presented as an alterative to the act/object analysis, according to which the truth of a statement like (1) requires the existence of an object of experience corresponding to its grammatical object. A commitment to the explicit adverbialization of statements of experience is not, however, essential to adverbialism. The core of the theory consists, rather, in the denial of objects of experience, as opposed to objects of perception, and coupled with the view that the role of the grammatical object is a statement of experience is to characterize more fully the sort of experience which is being attributed to the subject. The claim, then, is that the grammatical object is functioning as a modifier, and, in particular, as a modifier of a verb. If this is so, it is perhaps appropriate to regard it as a special kind of adverb at the semantic level.
Nonetheless, in the arranging accordance to the act/object analysis of experience, every experience with content involves an object of experience to which the subject is related by an act of awareness in the event of experiencing that object. Such as these experiences are, it is, nonetheless. The experiences are supposed to be whatever it is that they represent. Act, object theorist may differ on the nature of objects of experience, which h have been treated as properties. However, and, more commonly, private mental objects in which may not exist have any form of being, and, with sensory qualifies the experiencing imagination may walk upon the corpses of times’ generations, but this has also been used as a unique application to is mosaic structure in its terms for objects of sensory experience or the equivalence of the imaginations striving from the mental act as presented by the object and forwarded by and through the imaginistic thoughts that are released of a vexing imagination. Finally, in the terms of representative realism, objects of perception of which we are ‘directly aware’, as the plexuity in the abstract objects of perception exist if objects of experience.
As the aforementioned, traditionally representative realism is allied with the act/object theory. But we can approach the debate or by rhetorical discourse as meant within dialectic awareness, for which representative realism and direct realism are achieved by the mental act in abdication to some notion of regard or perhaps, happiness, all of which the prompted excitations of the notion expels or extractions of information processing. Mackie (1976( argues that Locke (1632-1704) can be read as approaching the debate ion television. My senses, in particular my eyes and ears, ‘tell’ me that Carlton is winning. What makes this possible is the existence of a long and complex causal chain of electro-magnetic radiation from the game through the television cameras, various cables between my eyes and the television screen. Each stage of this process carries information about preceding stages in the sense that the way things are at a given stage depends on the way things are at preceding stages. Otherwise the information would not be transferred from the game to my brain. There needs to be a systematic covariance between the state of my brain and the state unless it obtains between intermediate members of the long causal chain. For instance, if the state of my retina did not systematically remit or consign with the state of the television screen before me, my optic nerve would have, so to speak, nothing to go on to tell my brain about the screen, and so in turn would have nothing to go on to tell my brain about the game. There is no information at a distance’.
A few of the stages in this transmission of information between game and brain are perceptually aware of them. Much of what happens between brain and match I am quite ignorant about, some of what happens I know about from books, but some of what happens I am perceptually aware of the images on the scree. I am also perceptually aware of the game. Otherwise I could not be said to watch the game on television. Now my perceptual awareness of the match depends on my perceptual awareness of the screen. The former goes by means of the latter. In saying this I am not saying that I go through some sort of internal monologue like ‘Such and such images on the screen are moving thus and thus. Therefore, Carlton is attacking the goal’. Indeed, if you suddenly covered the screen with a cloth and asked me (1) to report on the images, and (2) to report in the game. I might well find it easier to report on the game than on the images. But that does not mean that my awareness of the game does not go by way of my awareness of the images on the screen. The shows that I am more interested in the game than in the screen, and so am storing beliefs about it in preference e to beliefs about the screen.
We can now see how elucidated representative realism independently of the debate between act/object and adverbial theorists about sensory experience. Our initial statement of representative realism talked of the information acquired in perceiving an object being most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about objects itself, in the act/object, sense-data approach, what is held to make that true is that the fact that what we are immediately aware of it’s mental sense-datum. But instead, representative realists can put their view this way: Just as awareness of the match game by means of awareness of the screen, so awareness of the screen foes by way of awareness of experience., and in general when subjects perceive objects, their perceptual awareness always does by means of the awareness of experience.
Why believe such a view? Because of the point that was inferred earlier: The worldly provision by our senses is so very different from any picture provided by modern science. It is so different in fact that it is hard to grasp what might be meant by insisting that we are in epistemologically direct contact with the world.
An argument from illusion is usually intended to establish that certain familia r facts about illusion disprove the theory of perception and called naïve or direct realism. There are,. However, many different versions of the argument which must be distinguished carefully. Some of these premisses (the nature of the appeal to illusion):Others centre on the interpretation of the conclusion (the kind of direct realism under attack). In distinguishing important differences in the versions of direct realism. One might be taken to be vulnerable to familiar facts about the possibility of perceptual illusion.
A crude statement of direct realism would concede to the connection with perception, such that we sometimes directly perceive physical objects and their properties: We do not always perceive physical objects by perceiving something else, e.g., a sense-data. There are, however, difficulties with this formulation of the view. For one thing a great many philosophers who are not direct realists would admit that it is a mistake to describe people as actually perceiving something other than a physical object. In particular, such philosophers might admit, we should never say that we perceive sense-data. To talk that way would be to suppose that we should model our understanding of our relationship to sense-data on our understanding of the ordinary use of perceptual verbs as they describe our relation to the physical world, and that is the last thing paradigm sense-data theorists had better want. At least, many of the philosophers who objected to direct realism would prefer to express what they were objecting to in terms of a technical and philosophical controversial concept such as acquaintance. Using such a notion we could define direct realism this way: In veridical experience we are directly acquainted with parts, e.g., surfaces, or constituents of physical objects. A less cautious version of the view might drop the reference to veridical experience and claim simply that in all parts or constituents of physical objects.
We know things by experiencing them, and knowledge of acquaintance. (Russell changed the preposition to ’by’) is epistemically prior to and has a relatively higher degree of epistemic justification than knowledge about things. Indeed, sensation has ‘the one great value of trueness or freedom from mistake’.
A thought (using that term broadly, to mean any mental state) constituting knowledge of acquaintance with thing is more or less causally proximate to sensations caused by that thing is more or less distant causal y, being separated from the thing and experience of it by processes of attention and inference. At the limit, if a thought is maximally of the acquaintance type, it is the first mental state occurring in a object to which the thought refers, i.e., it is a sensation. The things we have knowledge of acquaintance e include ordinary objects in the external world, such as the Sun.
Grote contrasted the imaginistic thoughts involved in knowledge of acquaintance with things, with the judgements involved in knowledge about things, suggesting that the latter but not the former are contentful mental states. Elsewhere, however, he suggested that every thought capable of constituting knowledge of or about a thing involves a form, idea, or what we might call conceptual propositional content, referring the thought to its object. Whether contentful or not, thoughts constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing as r relatively indistinct, although this indistinctness does not imply incommunicability. Yet, thoughts constituting knowledge about a thing are relatively distinct, as a result of ‘the application of notice or attention’ to the ‘confusion or chaos’ of sensation. Grote did not have an explicit theory of reference e, the relation by which a thought of or about a specific thing. Nor did he explain how thoughts can be more or less indistinct.
Helmholtz (1821-94) held unequivocally that all thoughts capable of constituting knowledge, whether ‘knowledge e which has to do with notions’ or ‘mere familiarity with phenomena’ are judgements or, we may say, have conceptual propositional contents. Where Grote saw a difference e between distinct and indistinct thoughts. Helmholtz found a difference between precise judgements which are expressible in words and equally precise judgement which, in principle, are not expressible in words, and so are not communicable.
James (1842-1910), however, made a genuine advance over Grote and Helmholtz by analysing the reference relations holding between a thought and the specific thing of or about which it is knowledge. In fact, he gave two different analyses. On both analyses, a thought constituting knowledge about a thing refers to and is knowledge about ‘a reality, whenever it actually or potentially terminates in’ a thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with that thing. The two analyses differ in their treatments of knowledge of acquaintance. On James’s first analyses, reference in both sorts of knowledge is mediated by causal chains. A thought constituting pure knowledge of acquaintance with a thing refers to and is knowledge of ‘whatever reality it directly or indirectly operates on and resembles’. The concepts of a thought ‘operating in’ a thing or ‘terminating in’ another thought are causal, but where Grote found chains of efficient causation connecting thought and referent. James found teleology and final causes. On James’s later analysis, the reference involved in knowledge of acquainting e with a thing is direct. A thought constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing as a constituent and the thing and the experience of it are identical.
James further agreed with Grote that pure knowledge of acquaintance with things, eg., sensory experience, is epistemically prior to knowledge about things. While the epistemic justification involved in knowledge about all thoughts about things are fallible and their justification is augmented by their mutual coherence. James was unclear about the precise epistemic status of knowledge of acquaintance. At times, thoughts constituting pure knowledge of acquaintance are said to posses ‘absolute veritableness’ and ‘the maximal conceivable truth’, suggesting that such thoughts are genuinely cognitive and that they provide an infallible epistemic foundation. At other times, such thoughts are said not to bear truth-values, suggesting that ‘knowledge’ of acquaintance is not genuine knowledge at all, but only a non-cognitive necessary condition of genuine knowledge, that is to say, the knowledge about things.
What is more, that, Russell (1872-1970) agreed with James that knowledge of things by acquaintance ‘is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truth’. That the mental states involved when one is acquainted with things do not have propositional contents. Russell’s reasons were to seem as having been similar to James’s. Conceptually unmediated reference to particulars is necessary for understanding any proposition mentioning a particular and, if scepticism about the external world is to be avoided, some particulars must be directly perceived. Russell vacillated about whether or not the absence of propositional content renders knowledge by acquaintance incommunicable.
Russell agreed with James that different accounts should be given of reference as it occurs in knowledge by acquaintance and in knowledge about things, and that in the former case reference is direct. But, Russell objected on the number of grounds to James’s causal account of the indirect reference involved in knowledge about things. Russell gave a descriptional rather than a causal analysis of that sort of reference. A thought is about a thing when the content of the thought involves a definite description uniquely satisfied by the thing referred to. Yet, he preferred to speak of knowledge of things by description, than of knowledge about things.
Russell advanced beyond Grote and James by explaining how thoughts can be more or less articulate and explicit. If one is acquainted with a complex thing without being aware of or acquainted with its complexity, the knowledge one has by acquaintance e with that thing is vague and inexplicit. Reflection and analysis can lead to distinguish constituent parts of the object of acquaintance and to obtain progressively more distinct, explicit, and complete knowledge about it.
Because one can interpret the reflation of acquaintance or awareness as one that is not epistemic, i.e., not a kind of propositional knowledge, it is important to distinguish the views read as ontological theses from a view one might call epistemological direct realism: In perception we are, on, at least some occasions, non-inferentially justified in believing a proposition asserting the existence e of a physical object. A view about what the object of perceptions are. Direct realism is a type of realism, since it is assumed that these objects exist independently of any mind that might perceive them: And so it thereby rules out all forms of idealism and phenomenalism, which holds that there are no such independently existing objects. Its being a ‘direct realism rules out those views’ defended under the rubic of ‘critical realism’, of ‘representative realism’, in which there is some non-physical intermediary - usually called a ‘sense-data’ or a ‘sense impression’ - that must first be perceived or experienced in order to perceive the object that exists independently of this perception. According to critical realists, such an intermediary need not be perceived ‘first’ in a temporal sense, but it is a necessary ingredient which suggests to the perceiver an external reality, or which offers the occasion on which to infer the existence of such a reality. Direct realism, however, denies the need for any recourse to mental go-between in order to explain our perception of the physical world.
This reply on the part of the direct realist does not, of course, serve to refute the global sceptic, who claims that, since our perceptual experience could be just as it is without there being any real properties at all, we have no knowledge of any such properties. But no view of perception alone is sufficient to refute such global scepticism. For such a refutation we must go beyond a theory that claims how best to explain our perception of physical objects, and defend a theory that best explains how we obtain knowledge of the world.
All is the equivalent for an external world, as philosophers have used the term, is not some distant planet external to Earth. Nor is the external world, strictly speaking, a world. Rather, the external world consists of all those objects and events which exist external to perceiver. So the table across the room is part of the external world, and so is the room in part of the external world, and so is its brown colour and roughly rectangular shape. Similarly, if the table falls apart when a heavy object is placed on it, the event of its disintegration is a pat of the external world.
One object external to and distinct from any given perceiver is any other perceiver. So, relative to one perceiver, every other perceiver is a part of the external world. However, another way of understanding the external world results if we think of the objects and events external to and distinct from every perceiver. So conceived the set of all perceivers makes up a vast community, with all of the objects and events external to that community making up the external world. Thus, our primary considerations are in the concern from which we will suppose that perceiver are entities which occupy physical space, if only because they are partly composed of items which take up physical space.
What, then, is the problem of the external world. Certainly it is not whether there is an external world, this much is taken for granted. Instead, the problem is an epistemological one which, in rough approximation, can be formulated by asking whether and if so how a person gains of the external world. So understood, the problem seems to admit of an easy solution. Thee is knowledge of the external world which persons acquire primarily by perceiving objects and events which make up the external world.
However, many philosophers have found this easy solution problematic. Nonetheless, the very statement of ‘the problem of the external world itself’ will be altered once we consider the main thesis against the easy solution.
One way in which the easy solution has been further articulated is in terms of epistemological direct realism. This theory is the realist insofar as it claims that objects and events in the external world, along with many of their various features, exist independently of and are generally unaffected by perceivers and acts of perception in which they engage. And this theory is epistemologically direct since it also claims that in perception people often, and typically acquire immediate non-inferential knowledge of objects and events in the external world. It is on this latter point that it is thought to face serious problems.
The main reason for this is that knowledge of objects in the external world seems to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-inferentially is claimed that I do not gain immediate non-inferential perceptual knowledge that thee is a brown and rectangular table before me, because I would know such a proposition unless I knew that something then appeared brown and rectangular. Hence, knowledge of the table is dependent upon knowledge of how it appears. Alternately expressed, if there is knowledge of the table at all, it is indirect knowledge, secured only if the proposition about the table may be inferred from propositions about appearances. If so, epistemological direct realism is false’
This argument suggests a new way of formulating the problem of the external world:
Problem of the external world: Can firstly, have knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based on or upon propositions which describe how the external world appears, i.e., upon appearances?
Unlike our original formulation of the problem of the external world, this formulation does not admit of an easy solution. Instead, it has seemed to many philosophers that it admits of no solution at all, so that scepticism regarding the eternal world is only remaining alternative.
This theory is realist in just the way described earlier, but it adds, secondly, that objects and events in the external world are typically directly perceived, as are many of their features such as their colour, shapes, and textures.
Often perceptual direct realism is developed further by simply adding epistemological direct realism to it. Such an addition is supported by claiming that direct perception of objects in the external world provides us with immediate non-referential knowledge of such objects. Seen in this way, perceptual direct realism is supposed to support epistemological direct realism, strictly speaking they are independent doctrines. One might consistently, perhaps even plausibly, hold one without also accepting the other.
Direct perception is that perception which is not dependent on some other perception. The main opposition to the claim that we directly perceive external objects comes from direct or representative realism. That theory holds that whenever an object in the external world is perceived, some other object is also perceived, namely a ''sensum'' - a phenomenal entity of some sort. Further, one would not perceive the external object if one would not perceive the external object if one were to fail to receive the ''sensum''. In this sense the ''sensum'' is a perceived intermediary, and the perception of the external object is dependent on the perception of the ''sensum''. For such a theory, perception of the ''sensum'' is direct, since it is not dependent on some other perception, while perception on the external object is indirect. More generally, for the indirect t realism., all directly perceived entities are ''sensum''. On the other hand, those who accept perceptual direct realism claim that perception of objects in the external world is typically direct, since that perception is not dependent on some perceived intermediaries such as ''sensum''.
It has often been supposed, however, that the argument from illusion suffices to refute all forms of perceptual direct realism. The argument from illusion is actually a family of different arguments rather than one argument. Perhaps the most familiar argument in this family begins by noting that objects appear differently to different observers, and even to the same observers on different occasions or in different circumstances. For example, a round dish may appear round to a person viewing it from directly above and elliptical to another viewing it from one side. As one changes position the dish will appear to have still different shapes, more and more elliptical in some cases, closer and closer to round in others . In each such case, it is argued, the observer directly sees an entity with that apparent shape. Thus, when the dish appears elliptical, the observer is said to see directly something which is elliptical. Certainly this elliptical entity is not the top surface of the dish, since that is round. This elliptical entity, a ''sensum'', is thought to be wholly distinct from the dish.
In seeing the dish from straight above it appears round and it might be thought that then directly sees the dish rather than a ''sensum''. But here too, it relatively sett in: The dish will appear different in size as one is placed at different distances from the dish. So even if in all of these cases the dish appears round, it will; also appear to have many different diameters. Hence, in these cases as well, the observer is said to directly see some ''sensum'', and not the dish.
This argument concerning the dish can be generalized in two ways. First, more or less the same argument can be mounted for all other cases of seeing and across the full range of sensible qualities - textures and colours in addition to shapes and sizes. Second, one can utilize related relativity arguments for other sense modalities. With the argument thus completed, one will have reached the conclusion that all cases of non-hallucinatory perception, the observer directly perceives a ''sensum'', and not an external physical object. Presumably in cases of hallucination a related result holds, so that one reaches the fully general result that in all cases of perceptual experience, what is directly perceived is a ''sensum'' or group of ''sensa'', and not an external physical object, perceptual direct realism, therefore, is deemed false.
Yet, even if perceptual direct realism is refuted, this by itself does not generate a problem of the external world. We need to add that if no person ever directly perceives an external physical object, then no person ever gains immediate non-inferential knowledge of such objects. Armed with this additional premise, we can conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects, it is indirect and based upon immediate knowledge of ''sensa''. We can then formulate the problem of the external world in another way:
Problems of the external world: can, secondly, have knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based upon propositions about directly perceived ''sensa''?
It is worth nothing the differences between the problems of the external world as expounded upon its first premise and the secondly proposing comments as listed of the problems of the external world, we may, perhaps, that we have knowledge of the external world only if propositions about objects and events in the external world that are inferrable from propositions about appearances.
Some philosophers have thought that if analytical phenomenalism were true, the situational causalities would be different. Analytic phenomenalism is the doctrine that every proposition about objects and events in the external world is fully analysable into, and thus is equivalent in meaning to, a group of inferrable propositions . The numbers of inferrable propositions making up the analysis in any single propositioned object and or event in the external world would likely be enormous, perhaps, indefinitely many. Nevertheless, analytic phenomenalism might be of help in solving the perceptual direct realism of which the required deductions propositioned about objects and or events in the external world from those that are inferrable from prepositions about appearances. For, given analytical phenomenalism there are indefinite many in the inferrable propositions about appearances in the analysis of each proposition taken about objects and or events in the external world is apt to be inductive, even granting the truth of a analytical phenomenalism. Moreover, most of the inferrable propositions about appearances into which we might hope to analyse of the external world, then we have knowledge of the external world only if propositions about objects and events in the external world would be complex subjunctive conditionals such as that expressed by ‘If I were to seem to see something red, round and spherical, and if I were to seem to try to taste what I seem to see, then most likely I would seem to taste something sweet and slightly tart’. But propositionally inferrable appearances of this complex sort will not typically be immediately known. And thus knowledge of propositional objects and or event of the external world will not generally be based on or upon immediate knowledge of such propositionally making appearances.
Consider upon the appearances expressed by ‘I seem to see something red, round, and spherical’ and ‘I seem to taste something sweet and slightly tart’. To infer cogently from these propositions to that expressed by ‘There is an apple before me’ we need additional information, such as that expressed by ‘Apples generally cause visual appearance of redness, roundness, and spherical shape and gustatory appearance of sweetness and tartness’. With this additional information., the inference is a good on e, and it is likely to be true that there is an apple there relative to those premiered. The cogency of the inference, however, depends squarely on the additional premise, relative only to the stated inferrability placed upon appearances, it is not highly probable that thee is an apple there.
Moreover, there is good reason to think that analytic phenomenalism is false. For each proposed translation of an object and eventfully external world into the inferrable propositions about appearances. Mainly enumerative induction is of no help in this regard, for that is an inference from premisses about observed objects in a certain set-class having some properties ‘F’ and ‘G’ to unobserved objects in the same set-class having properties ‘F’ and ‘G’, to unobserved objects in the same set-class properties ‘F’ and ‘G’. If satisfactory, then we have knowledge of the external world if propositions are inferrable from propositions about appearances, however, concerned considerations drawn upon appearances while objects and or events of the external world concern for externalities of objects and interactive categories in events, are. So, the most likely inductive inference to consider is a causal one: We infer from certain effects, described by promotional appearances to their likely causes, described by external objects and or event that profited emanation in the concerning propositional state in that they occur. But, here, too, the inference is apt to prove problematic. But in evaluating the claim that inference constitutes a legitimate and independent argument from, one must explore the question of whether it is a contingent fact that, at least, most phenomena have explanations and that be so, that a given criterion, simplicity, were usually the correct explanation, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if this is true it would be an empirical fact about our selves in discovery of an reference to the best explanation.
Defenders of direct realism have sometimes appealed to an inference to the best explanation to justify prepositions about objects and or events in the external world, we might say that the best explanation of the appearances is that they are caused by external objects. However, even if this is true, as no doubt it is, it is unclear how establishing this general hypophysis helps justify specific ordination upon the proposition about objects and or event in the external world, such as that these particular appearances of a proposition whose inferrable properties about appearances caused by the red apple.
The point here is a general one: Cogent inductive inference from the inferrable proposition about appearances to propositions about objects and or events in the external world are available only with some added premiss expressing the requisite causal relation, or perhaps some other premiss describing some other sort of correlation between appearances and external objects. So there is no reason to think that indirect knowledge secured if the prepositions about its outstanding objectivity from realistic appearances, if so, epistemological direct realism must be denied. And since deductive and inductive inferences from appearance to objects and or events in the external world are propositions which seem to exhaust the options, no solution to its argument that sustains us of having knowledge of propositions about objects and events in the external world based on or upon propositions which describe the external world as it appears at which point that is at hand. So unless there is some solution to this, it would appear that scepticism concerning knowledge of the external world would be the most reasonable position to take
If the argument leading to some additional premise as might conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects if is directly and based on or upon the immediate knowledge of ''sensa'', such that having knowledge of propositions about objects and or events in the external world based on or upon propositions about directly perceived ''sensa''? Broadly speaking, there are two alternatives to both the perceptual indirect realism, and, of course, perceptual phenomenalism. In contrast to indirect t realism, and perceptual phenomenalism is that perceptual phenomenalism rejects realism outright and holds instead that (1) physical objects are collections of ''sensa'', (2) in all cases of perception, at least one ''sensa'' is directly perceived, and, (3) to perceive a physical object one directly perceives some of the ''sensa'' which are constituents of the collection making up that object.
Proponents of each of these position try to solve the conditions not engendered to the species of additional persons ever of directly perceiving an external physical object, then no person ever gains immediate non-referential knowledge of such objects in different ways, in fact, if any the better able to solve this additional premise, that we would conclude that if there is knowledge of external objects than related doctrines for which time are aforementioned. The answer has seemed to most philosophers to be ‘no’, for in general indirect realists and phenomenalists have strategies we have already considered and rejected.
In thinking about the possibilities of such that we need to bear in mind that the term for propositions which describe presently directly perceived ''sensa''. Indirect realism typically claim that the inference from its presently directly perceived ''sensa'' to an inductive one, specifically a causal inference from effects of causes. Inference of such a sort will perfectly cogent provides we can use a premiss which specifies that physical objects of a certain type are causally correlated with ''sensa'' of the sort currently directly perceived. Such a premiss will itself be justified, if at all, solely on the basis of propositions described presently directly perceived ''sensa''. Certainly for the indirect realist one never directly perceives the causes of ''sensa''. So, if one knows that, say, apples topically cause such-and-such visual ''sensa'', one knows this only indirectly on the basis of knowledge of ''sensa''. But no group of propositionally perceived ''sensa'' by itself supports any inferences to causal correlations of this sort. Consequently, indirect realists are in no p position to solve such categorically added premises for which knowledge is armed with additional premise, as containing of external objects , it is indirect and based on or upon immediate knowledge of ''sensa''. The consequent solution of these that are by showing that propositions would be inductive and causal inference from effects of causes and show inductively how derivable for propositions which describe presently perceived ''sensa''.
Phenomenalists have often supported their position, in part, by noting the difficulties facing indirect t realism, but phenomenalism is no better off with respect to inferrable prepositions about objects and events responsible for unspecific appearances. Phenomenalism construe physical objects as collections of ''sensa''. So, to infer an inference from effects to causes is to infer a proposition about a collection from propositions about constituent members of the collective one, although not a causal one. Nonetheless, namely the inference in question will require a premise that such-and-such directly perceived ''sensa'' are constituents of some collection ‘C’, where ‘C’ is some physical object such as an apple. The problem comes with trying to justify such a premise. To do this, one will need some plausible account of what is mean t by claiming that physical objects are collections of ''sensa''. To explicate this idea, however, phenomenalists have typically turned to analytical phenomenalism: Physical objects are collections of ''sensa'' in the sense that propositions about physical objects are analysable into propositions about ''sensa''. And analytical phenomenalism we have seen, has been discredited.
If neither propositions about appearances or propositions accorded of the external world can be easily solved, then scepticism about external world is a doctrine we would be forced to adopt. One might even say that it is here that we locate the real problem of the external world. ‘How can we avoid being forced into accepting scepticism’?
In avoiding scepticism, is to question the arguments which lead to both propositional inferences about the external world an appearances. The crucial question is whether any part of the argument from illusion really forces us to abandon the incorporate perceptual direct realism. To help see that the answer is ‘no’ we may note that a key premise in the relativity argument links how something appears with direct perception: The fact that the dish appears elliptical is supposed to entail that one directly perceives something which is elliptical. But is there an entailment present? Certainly we do not think that the proposition expressed by ‘The book appears worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old’ entails that the observer directly perceives something which is worn and dusty and more than two hundred years old. And there are countless other examples like this one, where we will resist the inference from a property ‘F’ appearing to someone to claim that ‘F’ is instantiated in some entity.
Proponents of the argument from illusion might complain that the inference they favour works only for certain adjectives, specifically for adjectives referring to non-relational sensible qualities such as colour, taste, shape, and the like. Such a move, however, requires an arrangement which shows why the inference works in these restricted cases and fails in all others. No such argument has ever been provided, and it is difficult to see what it might be.
If the argument from illusion is defused, the major threat facing a knowledge of objects and or events in the external world primarily by perceiving them. Also, its theory is realist in addition that objects and events in the external world are typically directly perceived as are many of their characteristic features. Hence, there will no longer be any real motivation for it would appear that scepticism concerning knowledge of the external world would be the most reasonable position to take. Of course, even if perceptual directly realism is reinstated, this does not solve, by any means, the main reason for which that knowledge of objects in the external world seem to be dependent on some other knowledge, and so would not qualify as immediate and non-reference, along with many of their various features, exist independently of and are generally unaffected by perceivers and acts of perception in which they engage. That problem might arise even for one who accepts perceptual direct realism. But, there is reason to be suspicious in keeping with the argument that one would not know that one is seeing something blue if one failed to know that something looked blue. In this sense, there is a dependance of the former on the latter, what is not clear is whether the dependence is epistemic or semantic. It is the latter if, in order to understand what it is to see something blue, one must also understand what it is fort something to look blue. This may be true, even when the belief that one is seeing something blue is not epistemically dependent on or based upon the belief that something looks blue. Merely claiming, that there is a dependent relation does not discriminate between epistemic and semantic dependence. Moreover, there is reason to think it is not an epistemic dependence. For in general, observers rarely have beliefs about how objects appar, but this fact doe not impugn their knowledge that they are seeing, e.g., blue objects.
Along with ‘consciousness’, experience is the central focus of the philosophy of mind. Experience is easily thought of as a stream of private events, known only to their possessor, and baring at best problematic relationship to any other events, such as happening in an external world or similar stream of either possessors. The stream makes up the conscious life of the possessor. The stream makes up the conscious life of the possessor. With this picture there is a complete separation of mind and world, and in spite of great philosophical effort the gap, once opened, proves impossible to bridge both ‘idealism’ and ‘scepticism’ are common outcomes. The aim of much recent philosophy, therefore, is to articulate a less problematic conception of experience, making it objectively accessible, so that the facts about how a subject experiences the world are in principle as knowable as the facts about how the same subject digests food. A beginning on this task may be made by observing that experience have contents: ‘Content’ has become a technical term in philosophy for whatever it is a representation has that makes it semantically evaluable. Thus, a statement is something said to have a proposition or truth condition as its content: A term is sometimes said to have a concept as its content. Much less is known about how to characterize the contents of non-linguistic representations than is known about characterizing linguistic representations. ‘Content’ is a useful term precisely because it allows one to abstract away from questions about what semantic properties representations have, a representation’s content is just whatever it is that underwrites its semantic evaluation.
A great deal of philosophical effort has been lavished on the attempt to naturalize content, e.g., to explain in non-semantic, non-intentional terms what it is for something to be representation (have ‘content’), and what it is for something to gave some particular content than some other. There appear to be only our types of theory that have been proposed: Theories that ground representation in (1) similarity, (2) covariance (3) functional role, and (teleology.
Similarity theories hold that ‘r’ represents ‘χ’ in virtue of being similar to ‘χ’. This has seemed hopeless to most as a theory of mental representation because it appears to require that things in the brain must share properties with the thingos they represent: To represent a cat as furry appears to require something furry in the brain. Perhaps, a notion of similarity that is naturalized and does not involve property sharing can be worked out, but it is not obvious how.
Covariance theories hold that r’s representing ‘χ’ is grounded in the fact that r’s occurrence covaries with that of ‘χ’. This is most compelling when one thinks about detection systems: The firing of neural structure in the visual system is said to represent vertical orientations if its firing covaries with the occurrence of vertical lines in the visual field. Dretske (1981) and Fodor (1987) have, in different ways, attempted to promote this idea into a general theory of content.
Teleological theories hold that ‘r’ represents ‘χ’ if it is r’s function to indicate (i.e., covary with) ‘χ’. Teleological theories differ depending on the theory of functions they import. Perhaps, the most important distinction is that between historical theories and functions, as historical theories individuate functional states, hence content, in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of the state, i.e., to factors such as the way the state was ‘learned’, or the way it evolved. An historical theory might hold that the function of ‘r’ is to indicate ‘χ’ only if the capacity to token ‘r’ was developed (selected, learned) because it indicates ‘χ’. Thus, a state physically indistinguishable from ‘r’ (physical stares being a-historical) but lacking r’s historical origins would not represent ‘χ’ according to historical theories.
Theories of representational content may be classified according to whether they are atomistic or holistic and according to whether they are externalistic or internalistic. Primarily, the alternative was for something expressed or implied by the intendment for integrating the different use of the terms ‘internalism’ and ‘externalisms’ has to do with the issue of how the content of beliefs and thoughts is determined: According to an internalist view of content, the content of such intentional states depend’s only on the non-relational, internal properties of the individual’s mind or brain, and not at all on his physical and social environment. While according to an externalist view, content is significantly affected by such external factors.
As with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist in character. The main argument for externalisms derives from the philosophy of language, more specifically from the various phenomena pertaining to natural kind terms, indexical, etc., that motivate the views that have come to be known as ‘direct reference’ theories. Such phenomena seem, at least, to show that the belief of thought content that can be properly attributed to a person is dependent on facts about his environment - e.g., whether he is on Earth or Twin Earth, what in fact he is pointing at, the classificatorial criteria employed by the experts in his social group etc. - not just on what is going on internally in his mind or brain.
An objection to externalist accounts of content is that to know the contents of our beliefs or thoughts ‘from the inside’, simply by reflection. If content is dependent on external factors, then knowledge of content should depend on knowledge of these factors - which will not in general be available to the person whose belief or thought is in question.
The adoption of an externalist account of mental content would seem to support an externalist way: If part or all of justification in which if only part of the content of a belief is inaccessible to the believer, then both the justifying status of other beliefs in relation to that content and the status of the content as justifying further beliefs will be similarly inaccessible, thus contravening the internalist requirement for justification. An internalist must insist that there are no justification relations of these sorts, that only internally accessible content can either be justified or justly anything else, but such a response appears lame unless it is coupled with an attempt to show that the externalist account of content is mistaken.
Atomistic theories take a representation’s content to be something that representation’s relation to other representations. What Fodor (1987) calls the crude causal theory, for example, takes a representation to be a
cow
- a mental representation with the same content as the word ‘cow’ - if its tokens are caused by instantiations of the property of being-a-cow, and this is a condition that places no explicit constraints on how
cow
’s must or might relate to other representations. Holistic theories contrast with atomistic theories in taking the relations a representation bears to others to be essential to its content. According to functional role theories, a representation is a
cow
if it behaves like a
cow
behave in inference.
Internalist theories take the content of a representation to be a matter determined by factors internal to the system that uses it. Thus, what Block (1986) calls ‘short-armed’ functional role theories are internalist. Externalist theories take the content of a representation to be determined, in part at least, by factors external to the system that uses it. Covariance theories, as well as teleological theories that invoker an historical theory of functions, take content to be determined by ‘external’ factors. Externalist theories (sometimes called non-individualistic theories, following Burge, 1979) have the consequence that molecule for molecule identical cognitive systems might yet harbor representations with different contents. This has given rise to a controversy concerning ‘narrow’ content. If we assume some form of externalist theory is correct, then contents is, in the first instance ‘wide’ content, i.e., determined in part by factors external to the representing system. On the other hand, it seems clear that, on plausible assumptions about how to individuate psychological capacities, internally equivalent systems must have the same psychological capacities. Hence, it would appear that wide content cannot be relevant to characterizing psychological equivalence, philosophers attached to externalist theories of content have sometimes attempted to introduce ‘narrow’ content, i.e., an aspect or kind of content that is equivalent in internally equivalent systems. The simplest such theory is Fodor’s idea (1987) that narrow content is a function from contexts (i.e., from whatever the external factors are) to wide contents.
The actions made rational by content-involving states are actions individuated in part by reference to the agent’s relations to things and properties in his environment, wanting to see a particular movie and believing that building over there is a cinema showing it makes rational the action of walking in the direction of that building. Similarly, for the fundamental case of a subject who has knowledge about his environment, a crucial factor in masking rational the formation of particular attitudes is the way the world is around him. One may expect, then, that any theory that links the attributing of contents to states with rational intelligibility will be committed to the thesis that the content of a person’s states depends in part upon his relations to the world outside him we can call this thesis of externalism about content.
Externalism about content should steer a middle course. On the one hand, the relations of rational intelligibility involve not just things and properties in the world, but the way they are presented as being - an externalist should use some version of Frége’s notion of a mode of presentation. Moreover, many have argued that there exists its ‘sense’, or ‘mode of presentation’ (something ‘intention’ is used as well). After all, ‘is an equiangular triangle’ and,‘is an equilateral triangle’ pick out the same things not only in the actual world, but in all possible worlds, and so refer - insofar as to the same extension, same intension and (arguably from a causal point of view) the same property, but they differ in the way these referents are presented to the mind. On the other hand, the externalist for whom considerations of rational intelligibility are pertinent to the individuation =of content is likely to insist that we cannot dispense with the notion of something in the world - an object, property or relation - being presented in a certain way, if we dispense with the notion of something external being presented in a certain way, we are in danger of regarding attributions of content as having no consequences for how an individual relates to his environment, in a way that is quite contrary to our intuitive understanding of rational intelligibility.
Externalism comes in more and less extreme versions: Consider a thinker who sees a particular pear, and thinks a thought ‘that pear is ripe’, where the demonstrative way of thinking of the pear expressed by ‘that pear’ is made available to him by his perceiving the pear. Some philosophers, including Evans (1982) and McDowell (1984), have held that the thinker would be employing a different perceptually based way of thinking were he perceiving a different pear. But externalism need not be committed to this, in the perceptual state that makes available the way of thinking, the pear is presented as being in a particular direction from the thinker, at a particular distance, and as having certain properties. A position will still be externalist if it holds that what is involved in the pear’s being so presented is the collective role of these components of content in making intelligible in various circumstances the subject’s relations to environmental directions, distances and properties of objects. This can be held without commitment to the object-dependence of the way of thinking expressed by ‘that pear’. This less strenuous form of externalism must, though, addressed the epistemological argument offered in favour of the more extreme versions, to the effect that only they are sufficiently world-involving.
Externalism about content is a claim about dependence, and dependence comes in various kinds. The apparent dependence of the content of beliefs on factors external to the subject can be formulated as a failure of supervenience of belief content upon facts about what is the case within the boundaries of the subject’s body. In epistemology normative properties such as those of justification and reasonableness are often held to be supervening on the class of natural properties in a similar way. The interest of supervenience is that it promises a way of trying normative properties closely to natural ones without exactly reducing them to natural ones: It can be the basis of a sort of weak naturalism. This was the motivation behind Davidson’s (1917-2003) attempt to say that mental properties supervene into physical ones - an attempt which ran into severe difficulties. To claim that such supervenience fails is to make a modal claim: That there can be two persons the same in respect of their internal physical states (and so in respect to those of their disposition that are independent of content-involving states), who nevertheless differ in respect of which beliefs there have. Putnam’s (1926- ) celebrated example of a community of Twin Earth , where the water-like substance in lakes and rain is not H2O, but some different chemical compound XYZ - ‘water’ - illustrates such failure of supervenience. A molecule-for-molecule replica of you on twin earth has beliefs to the effect that ‘water’ is thus-and-so. Those with no chemical beliefs on twin earth may well not have any beliefs to the effect that water is thus-and-so, even if they are replicas of persons on earth who do have such beliefs. Burge emphasized that this phenomenon extends far beyond beliefs about natural kinds.
In the case of content-involving perceptual states, it is a much more delicate matter to argue for the failure of supervenience, the fundamental reason for this is that attribution of perceptual content is answerable not only to factors on the input side - what in certain fundamental cases causes the subject to be in the perceptual state - but also to factors on the output side - what the perceptual state is capable of helping to explain amongst the subject’s actions. If differences in perceptual content always involve differences in bodily described actions in suitable counterfactual circumstances, and if these different actions always have distinct neural bases, perhaps, there will after all be supervenience of content-involving perceptual states on internal states
This connects with another strand in the abstractive imagination, least of mention, of any thinker who has an idea of an objective spatial world - an idea of a world of objects and phenomena which can be perceived but which are not dependent upon being perceived for their existence - must be able to think of his perception of the world as being simultaneously due to his position in the world, and to the condition of the world at that position. The very idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world brings with it the idea of the subject as being in the world, with the course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. That also, of perception it is highly relevant to his psychological self-awareness to have of oneself as a perceiver of the environment.
However, one idea that has in recent times been thought by many philosophers and psychologists alike to offer promise in the connection is the idea that perception can be thought of as a species of information-processing, in which the stimulation of the sense-organs constitutes an input to subsequent processing, presumably of a computational form. The psychologist J.J. Gibson suggested that the senses should be construed as systems the function of which is to derive information from the stimulus-array, as to ‘hunt for’ such information. He thought, least of mention, that it was enough for a satisfactory psychological theory of perception that his logical theory of perception that his account should be restricted to the details of such information pick-up, without reference to other ‘inner’ processes such as concept-use. Although Gibson has been very influential in turning psychology away from the previously dominant sensation-based framework of ideas (of which gestalt psychology was really a special case), his claim that reliance on such a notion of information is enough has seemed incredible to many. Moreover, its notion of ordinary one to warrant the accusation that it presupposes the very idea of, for example, concept-possession and belief that implicates the claim to exclude. The idea of information espoused bu Gibson (though it has to be said that this claim has been disputed) is that of ‘information about’, not the technical one involved in information theory or that presupposed by the theory of computation.
There are nevertheless important links between these diverse uses, however, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception and can never observe anything but the perception. However, the idea is that specifying the content of as perceptual experience involves saying what ways of filling out a space around the origin with surfaces, solids, textures, light and so forth, are consistent with the correctness or veridicality of the experience. Such contents are not built from propositions, concepts, senses or continuants of material objects.
Where the term ‘content’ was once associated with the phrase ‘content of consciousness’ to pick out the subjective aspects of mental states, its use in the phrase ‘perceptual content’ is intended to pick out something more closely akin to its old ‘form’ the objective and publicly expressible aspects of mental states. The content of perceptual experience is how the world is represented to be. Perceptual experiences are then counted as illusory or veridical depending on whether the content is correct and the world is as represented. In as much as such a theory of perception can be taken to be answering the more traditional problems of perception. What relation is there between the content of a perceptual state and conscious experience? One proponent of an intentional approach to perception notoriously claims that it is ‘nothing but the acquiring of true or false beliefs concerning the current state of the organism’s body or environment, but the complaint remains that we cannot give an adequate account of conscious perception, given the ‘nothing but’ element of this account. However, an intentional theory of perception need not be allied with any general theory of ‘consciousness’, one which explains what the difference is between conscious and unconscious states. If it is to provide an alternative to a sense-data theory, the theory need only claim that where experience is conscious. Its content is constitutive, at least in part, of the phenomenological character of that experience. This claim is consistent with a wide variety of theories of consciousness, even the view that no account can be given.
An intentional theory is also consistent with either affirming or denying the presence of subjective features in experience. Among traditional sense-data theorists of experience. H.H. Price attributed in addition an intentional content to perceptual consciousness. Whereby, attributive subjective properties to experience - in which case, labelled sensational properties, in the qualia - as well as intentional content. One might call a theory of perception that insisted that all features of what an experience is like ae determined by its intentional content, a purely intentional theory of perception.
Mental events, states or processes with content include seeing the door is shut, believing you are being followed and calculating the square root of 2. What centrally distinguishes states, events or processes - henceforth, simply stares - with content is that they involve reference to objects, properties or relations. A mental state exists a specific condition for a state with content a specific condition for a state with content to refer to certain things. When the state has correctness or fulfilment by whether its referents have the properties the content specifies for them.
This highly generic characteristic of content permits many subdivisions. It does not in itself restrict contents to conceptualized content, and it permits contents built from Frége’s sense as well as Russellian contents built from objects and properties. It leaves open the possibility that unconscious states, as well as conscious states, have contents. It equally, allows the states identified by an empirical computational psychology to have content. A correct philosophical understanding of this general notion of content is fundamental not only to the philosophy of mind and psychology, but also to the theory of knowledge and to metaphysics.
Perceptions make it rational for a person to form corresponding beliefs and make it rational to draw certain inferences. Belief s and desire s make rational the formation of particular intentions, and the performance o the appropriate actions. People are frequently irrational of course, but a governing ideal of this approach is that for any family of content, there is some minimal core of rational transition to or from states involving them, a core that a person must respect if his states are to be attributed with those contents of all rational interpretative relations. To be rational, a set of beliefs, desires, and actions as well s perceptions, decisions must fit together in various ways. If they do not, in the extreme case they fail to constitute a mind at all - no rationality, no agent. This core notion of rationality in philosophy f mind thus concerns a cluster of personal identity conditions, that is, holistic coherence requirements upon the system of elements comprising a person’s mind, it is as well as in philosophy where it is often succumbing to functionalism about content and meaning appears to lead to holism. In general, transitions among mental states and between mental states and behaviour depend on the contents of the mental states themselves. In consideration that I infer from sharks being in the water to the conclusion that people shouldn’t be swimming. Suppose I first think that sharks are dangerous, but then change my mind, coming to think that sharks are not dangerous. However, the content that the first belief affirms can’t be the same as the content that the second belief denies, because the transition relations, e.g., the inference form sharks being in the water to what people should do, so, I changed mt mind functionalist reply is to say that some transitions are relevant to content individuation, whereby others are not. Appeal to a traditional analytic clear/synthetic distinction clearly won’t do. For example, ‘dogs’ ‘and cats’ would have the same content on such a view. It could not be analytic that dogs bark or that cats meow, since we can imagine a non-barking breed of dog and a non-meaning breed of cat. If ‘Dogs are animals’ is analytic, as ‘Cats are animals’. If ‘Cats are adult puppies ‘. Dogs are not cats - but then cats are not dogs. So a functionalist’s account will not find traditional analytic inferences of ‘dogs’ from the meaning of ‘cat’. Other functionalist accept holism for ‘narrow content’, attempting to accommodate intuitions about the stability of content be appealing to wide content.
Within the clarity made of inference it is unusual to find it said that, an inference is a (perhaps very complex) act of thought by virtue of which act (1) I pass from a set of one or more propositions or statements to a proposition or statement and (2) it appears that the latter is true in the former is or are. This psychological characterization has occurred widely in the literature under more of less inessential variations.
It is natural to desire a better characterization of inference, but attempts to do so by construing a fuller psychological explanation fail to comprehend the grounds on which inference will be objectively valid - a point elaborated made by Gottlob Frége. And attempts to a better understand the nature about inference through the device of the representation of inference by formal-logical calculations to the informal inference they are supposed to represent or reconstruct, and (2) leaves us worried about the sense of such formal derivation. Are these derivations inferences? And aren’t informal inferences needed in order to apply the rules governing the constructions of forma derivation (inferring that this operation is an application of that formal rule)? These are concerns cultivated by, fr example, of Wittgenstein. That, insofar as coming up with a good and adequate characterization of inference - and even working out what would count as a good and adequate characterization - is a hard and by no means nearly solved philosophical problem.
It is still, of ascribing states with content to an actual person has to proceed simultaneously with attribution of a wide range of non-rational states and capacities. In general, we cannot understand a person’s reasons for acting as he does without knowing the array of emotions ans sensations to which he is subject: What he remembers and what he forgets, an how he reasons beyond the confines of minimal rationality. Even the content-involving perceptual states, which play a fundamental role in individuating content, cannot be understood purely in terms relating to minimal rationality. A perception of the world as being a certain way is not (and could not be) under a subject’s rational control. Though it is true and important that perceptions give for forming beliefs, the beliefs for which they fundamentally provide reason - observational beliefs about the environment - have contents which can only be elucidated by inferring which can only be elucidated by inferring back to perceptual experience. In this respect (as in others), perceptual states defer from those beliefs and desires that are individuated by mentioning what they provide reasons for judging or doing: For frequently these latter judgements and actions can be individuate without reference back to the states that provide reasons for them.
What is the significance for theories of content to the fact that it is almost certainly adaptive for members of a species to have a system of states with representational content which are capable of influencing their actions which are capable? According to teleological theories of content, a constitutive account of content - one which says what it is for a state to have a given content - must make use of the notions of natural function and teleology. The intuitive idea is that for a belie f state to have a given content ‘p’ is for the belief-forming mechanism which produced it to have the function (perhaps derivatively) of producing that state only when it is the case that ‘p’. But if content itself proves to resist elucidation in terms of natural function and selection, it is still a very attractive view that selection must be mentioned - such as a sentence - with a particular content, even though that content itself may be individuated by other means.
Contents are normally specified by ‘that . . .’ clauses, and it is natural to suppose that a content has the same kind of sequential and hierarchical structure as the sentence that specifies it. This supposition would by widely accepted for conceptual content. It is, however, a substantive thesis that all content is conceptual. One way of treating one sort of perceptual content is to regard the content as determined by a spatial type, the type under which the region of space around the perceiver must fall if the experience with that content is to represent the environment correctly. The type involves a specification of surfaces and features in the environment, and their distances and direction from the perceiver’s body as origin. Supporters of the view that the legitimacy of using these spatial types in giving the content of experience does not undermine the thesis that all content is conceptual, such supporters will say that the spatial type is just a way of capturing what can equally be captured by conceptual components such as ‘that distance’, or ‘that direction’, where these demonstratives are made available by the perception in question.
In specifying representative realism the significance this theory holds that (1) there is a world whose existence and nature is independent of it, (2) perceiving an object located in that external world necessarily involves causally interacting with that object, and (3) the information acquired in perceiving an object is indirect: It is information most immediately about the perceptual experience caused in us by the object, and only derivatively about the object itself. Traditionally, representative realism has been allied with an act/object analysis of sensory experience. In terms of representative realism, objects of perception (of which we are ‘independently aware’) are always distinct from objects of experience (of which we are ‘directly aware’) Meinongians, however, may simply that object of perception as existing objects of experience.
Armstrong (1926- ) not only sought to explain perception without recourse to sense-data or subjective qualities but also sought to equate the intentionality of perception with that of belief. There are two aspects to this: the first is to suggest that the only attitude towards a content involved in perception is that of believing, and the second is to claim that the only content involved in perceiving is that which a belief may have. The former suggestion faces an immediate problem, recognized by Armstrong, of the possibility of having a perceptual experience without acquiring the correspondence belief. One such case is where the subject already possesses the requisite belief - rather than leading to the acquisition of, belief. The more problematic case is that of disbelief in perception. Where a subject has a perceptual experience but refrains from acquiring the correspondence belief. For example, someone familiar with Muller-Lyer illusion, in which lines of equal length appear unequal, is likely to acquire the belief that the lines are unequal on encountering a recognizable example of the illusion. Despite that, the lines may still appear unequal to them.
Armstrong seeks to encompass such cases by talk of dispositions to acquire beliefs and talk of potentially acquiring beliefs. On his account this is all we need say to the psychological state enjoyed. However, once we admit that the disbelieving perceivers still enjoys a conscious occurrent experience, characterizing it in terms of a disposition to acquire a belief seems inadequate. There are two further worries. One may object that the content of perceptual experiences may play a role in explaining why a subject disbelievers in the first place: Someone may fail to acquire a perceptual belief precisely because how things appear to her is inconsistent with her prior beliefs about the world. Secondly, some philosophers have claimed that there can be perception without any correspondence belief. Cases of disbelief in perception are still examples of perceptual experience that impinge on belief: Where a sophisticated perceiver does not acquire the belief that the Müller-Lyer lines are unequal, she will still acquire a belief about how things look to her. Dretske (1969) argues for a notion of non-epistemic seeing on which it is possible for a subject to be perceiving something whole lacking any belief about it because she has failed to notice what is apparent to her. If we assume that such non-epistemic seeing , nevertheless, involves conscious experience e it would seem to provide another reason to reject Armstrong’s view and admit that if perceptual experiences are intentional states then they are a distinct attitude-type from that of belief. However, even if one rejects Armstrong’s equation of perceiving with acquiring beliefs or disposition to believe, one may still accept that he is right about the functional links between experience and belief, and the authority that experience has over belief, an authority which, can nevertheless be overcome.
It is probably true that philosophers have shown much less interest in the subject of the imagination during the last fifteen tears or so than in the period just before that. It is certainly true that more books about the imagination have been written by those concerned with literature and the arts than have been written by philosophers in general and by those concerned with the philosophy of mind in particularly. This is understandable in that the imagination and imaginativeness figure prominently in artistic processes, especially in romantic art. Still, those two high priests of romanticism, Wordsworth and Coleridge, made large claims for the role played by the imagination in views of reality, although Coleridge’s thinking on this was influenced by his reading of the German philosopher of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly Kant and Schelling. Coleridge distinguished between primary and secondary imagination, both of them in some sense productive, as opposed to merely reproductive. Primary imagination is involved in all perception of the world in accordance with a theory which, as Coleridge derived from Kant, while secondary imagination, the poetic imagination, is creative from the materials that perception provides. It is this poetic imagination which exemplifies imaginativeness in the most obvious way.
Being imaginative is a function of thought, but to use one’s imagination in this way is not just a matter of thinking in novel ways. Someone who, like Einstein for example, presents a new way of thinking about the world need not be by reason of this supremely imaginative (though of course, he may be). The use of new concepts or a new way of using already existing concepts is not in itself an exemplification of the imagination. What seems crucial to the imagination is that it involves a series of perspectives, new ways of seeing things, in a sense of ‘seeing’ that need not be literal. It thus involves, whether directly or indirectly, some connection with perception, but in different ways. To make clear in the similarities and differences between seeing proper and seeing with the mind’s eye, as it is sometimes put. This will involve some consideration of the nature and role of images, least of mention, that there is no general agreement among philosophers about how to settle neurophysiological problems in the imagery of self.
Connections between the imagination and perception are evident in the ways that many classical philosophers have dealt with the imagination. One of the earliest examples of this, the treatment of ‘phantasia’ (usually translated as ‘imagination’) in Aristotles ‘De Anima III. 3. seems to regard the imagination as a sort of half-way house between perception and thought, but in a way which makes it cover appearances in general, so that the chapter in question has as much to do with perceptual appearances, including illusions, as it ha s to do with, say. Imagery. Yet, Aristotle also emphasizes that imagining is in some sense voluntary, and that when we imagine a terrifying scene we are not necessarily terrified, any more than we need be when we see terrible things in a picture. How that fits in with the idea that an illusion is or can be a function of the imagination is less than clear. Yet, some subsequent philosophers, Kant on particular. Followed in recent times by P.F. Strawson have maintained that all perception involves the imagination, in some sense of that term, in that some bridge is required between abstract thoughts and their perceptual instance. This comes out in Kant’s treatment of what he calls the ‘schematism’, where he rightly argues that someone might have an abstractive understanding of the concept of a dog without being able to recognize or identify any dogs. It is also clear that someone might be able to classify all dogs together without any understanding of what a dog is. The bridge that needs to be provided to link these two abilities Kant attributes to the imagination.
In so arguing Kant goes, as he so often does, beyond Hume who thought of the imagination in two connected ways. Firs t, there is the fact that there exist. Hume thinks, ideas which are either copies of impressions provided by the senses or are derived from these. Ideas of imagination are distinguished from those of memory, and both of these from impression and sense, by their lesser vivacity. Second, the imagination is involved in the processes, mainly associated of ideas, which take one form on ideas to another, and which Hume uses to explain, for example, our tendency to think of objects as having no impression on them, ideas or less images, is the mental process which takes one from one idea to another and thereby explains our tendency to believe things go beyond what the senses immediately justify. The role which Kant gives to the imagination in relation to perception in general is obviously a wider and fundamental role than that Hume allows. Indeed, one might take Kant to be saying that were there not the role that he, Kant insists on there would be no place for the role which Hume gives it. Kant also allows for a free use of the imagination in connection with the arts and the perceptions of beauty, and this is a more specified role than that involved in perception overall.
In the retinal vision by the seeing of things we normally see them as such-and-such, is to be construed and in how it relate s to a number of other aspects of the mind ‘s functioning - sensation, concept and other things of other aspects of the mind’s functioning - sensation, concepts, and other things involved in our understanding of things, belief and judgement, the imagination, our action is related to the world around us, and the causal processes involved in the physics, biology and psychology of perception. Some of the last were central to the considerations that Aristotle raised about perception in his ‘De Anima’.
Nevertheless, there are also special, imaginative ways of seeing things, which Wittgenstein (1889-1951) emphasized in his treatment of ‘see-as’ in his ‘Philosophical Investigations II. Xi. And on a piece paper as standing up, lying down, hanging from its apex and so on is a form of ‘seeing-as’ which is both more special and more sophisticated than simply seeing it as a triangle. Both involve the application of concepts to the objects of perception, but the way in which this is done in the two cases is quite different. One might say that in the second case one has to adopt a certain perceptive, a certain point of view, and if that is right it links up with what had been said earlier about the relation and difference between thinking imaginatively and thinking in novel ways.
Wittgenstein (1953) used the phrase ‘an echo of a thought is sight’ in relation to these special ways of seeing things, which he called ‘seeing aspects’. Roger Scruton has spoken of the part played in it all by ‘unasserted thought’, but the phrase used by Wittgenstein brings out more clearly one connection between thought and a form of sense-perception. Wittgenstein (1953) also compares the concepts of an aspect and that of seeing-as with the concept of an image, and this brings out a point about the imagination that has not been much evident in what has been said so far - that imagining something is typically a matter of picturing it in the mind and that this involves images in some way, however, the picture view of images has come under heavy philosophical attack. First, there have been challenges to the sense of the view: Mental images are not with real eyes: They cannot be hung on real walls and they have no objective weight or colour. What, can it mean to say, that images are pictorial? Secondly, there have been arguments that purport to show that the view is false. Perhaps, the best known of these is founded on the charge that the picture theory cannot satisfactorily explain the independency of many mental images. Finally, there have been attacks on the evidential underpinning of the theory. Historically, the philosophical claim that images are picture-like rested primarily on an appeal to introspection. And today less about the mind than was traditionally supposed. This attitude towards introspection has manifested itself in the case of imagery in the view that what introspection really shows about visual images is not that they are pictorial but only that what goes on in imagery is experimentally much like what goes on in seeing. This aspect is crucial for the philosophy of mind , since it raises the question of the status of images, and in particular whether they constitute private objects or stares in some way. Sartre (1905-80), in his early work on the imagination emphasized, following Husserl (1859-1938), that images are forms of consciousness of an object, but in such a way that they ‘present’ the object as not being: Wherefore, he said, the image ‘posits its object as nothingness’, such a characterization brings out something about the role of the form of consciousness of which the having of imagery may be a part, in picturing something the images are not themselves the object of consciousness. The account does less, however, to bring out clearly just what images are or how they function.
As part of an attemptive grappling about the picturing and seeing with the mind’s eye, Ryle (1900-76 ), has argued that in picturing, say, Lake Ontario, in having it before the mind’s eye, we are not confronted with a mental picture of Lake Ontario: Images are not seen. We nevertheless, can ‘see’ Lake Ontario, and the question is what this ‘seeing’ is, if it is not seeing in any direct sense. One of the things that may make this question difficult to answer is the fact that people’s images and their capacity for imagery vary, and this variation is not directly related to their capacity for imaginativeness. While an image may function in some way as a ‘presentation’ in a train of imaginative thought, such thought does not always depend on that: Images may occur in thought which are not really representational at all, are not, strictly speaking, ‘of’ anything. If the images are representational, can one discover things from one’s images that one would not know from otherwise? Many people would answer ‘no’, especially if their images are generally fragmentary, but it is not clear that this is true for everyone. What is more, and this affects the second point, fragmentary imagery which is at best ancillary to process of though in which it occurs may not be in any obvious sense representational, even if the thought itself is ‘of’ something.
Another problem with the question what it is to ‘see’ Lake Ontario with the mind’s eye is that the ‘seeing’ in question may or may not be a direct function of ‘memory’. For one who has seen Lake Ontario, imaging it may be simply a matter of reproduction in some form in the original vision, and the vision may be reproduced unintentionally and without any recollection of what it is a ‘vision’ of. For one who has never been it the task of imagining it depends most obviously on the knowledge of what sort of thing Lake Ontario is and perhaps on experiences which are relevant to that knowledge. It would be surprising, to say the least, if imaginative power could produce a ‘seeing’ that was not constructed from any previous seeing. But that the ‘seeing’ is not itself a seeing in the straightforward sense is clear, and on this negative point what Ryle says, and other s have said, seems clearly right. As to what ‘seeing’ is in a positive way, Ryle answers that it involves fancying something and that this can be assimilated to pretending. Fancying that one is seeing Lake Ontario is thus, at least, like pretending that one is doing that thing. But is it?
Along the same course or lines, there is in fact a great difference between say, imaging that one is a tree and pretending to be a tree. Pretending normally involves doing something, and even when there is no explicit action on the part of the pretender, as when he or she pretends that something or other is the case, there is at all events an implication of possible action. Pretending to be a tree may involve little more that standing stock-still with one’s arms spread out like branches. To imagine being a tree (something that is founded that some people deny to be possible, which is to my mind a failure of imagination) need imply no action whatever, (Imagining being a tree is different in this respect from imagining that one is a tree, where this means believing falsely, that one is a tree, one can imagine being a tree without this committing one to any beliefs on that score). Yet, of imagining being a tree does seem to involve adopting the hypothetical perspective of a tree, contemplating perhaps, that it is like to be a fixture in the ground with roots growing downward and with branches (somewhat like arms) blown by the wind and with birds perching on them.
Imagining something seems in general to involve change of identity on the part of something or other, and in imagining being something else, such as a tree, the partial change of identity contemplated is in oneself. The fact that the change of identity contemplated cannot be completely does not gainsay, the point that it is a change o f identity which is being contemplated. One might raise the question whether something about the ‘self’ is involved in all imaginings. Berkeley (1685-17530 even suggests that imagining a solitary unperceived tree involves a contradiction, in that a imagine that is to imagine oneself perceiving it. In fact, there is a difference between imagining a object, solitary or not, and imagining oneself seeing that object. The latter certainly involves putting oneself imaginatively in the situation pictured: The former involves contemplating the object from a point of view, that from that point of view which one would oneself have if one were viewing that point of view to which reference has already been made, in a way that clearly distinguishes picturing something from merely thinking of it.
This does not rule out the possibility that an imagine might come into one’s mind which one recognizes as some kind of depiction of a scene. But when actually picturing a scene, it would not be right to say that one imagines the scene by way of a contemplation of an image which plays the part of as picture of it. Moreover, it is possible to imagine a scene without any images occurring, the natural interpretation of which would be that they are pictures of that scene. It is not impossible for one imagining say, the GTA is to report on request the occurrences of images which are not in any sense pictures of the GTA -, not of that particular city and perhaps not even of a city at all. That would not entail that he or she was not imagining the GTA: A report to or associated with the GTA, thought by others to be of the GTA.
This raises a question which is asked by Wittgenstein (1953) -, ‘What makes my image of him into an image of him’? To which Wittgenstein replies ‘Not its looking like him’, and furthering he suggests that a person’s account of what his imagery represents is decisive. Certainly it is so when the process of imagination which involves the imagery is one that the person engages in intentionality. The same is not true, as Wittgenstein implicitly acknowledges in the same context, if the imagery simply comes to mind without there being any intention, in that case, one might not even know what the image is an image of.
Nevertheless, all this complicates the question what the status of mental images is. However, it might seem that they stand in relation to imagining as ‘sensations’ stand to perception, except that the occurrence of sensations is a passive set-organization of specific presentiments, while the occurrence of an image can be intentional, and in the context of an active flight of imagination is likely to be so. sensations give perceptions a certain phenomenal character, providing their sensuous, as opposed to conceptual content. Intentional action has interesting symmetric and asymmetric to perception. Like perceptual experience, the experiential component of intentional action is causally self-referential. If, for example, I can now walking to my car, then the condition of satisfaction of the preset experience is that there be certain bodily movements, and that this very experience of acting cause those bodily movements. Furthering, like perceptual experience, the experience of acting is topically a conscious mental event, is that perception is always concept-dependent at least in the sense that perceivers must be concept possessors and users, and almost certainly the sense that perception entails concept-use in its application to objects. It is, at least, arguable that those organisms that react in a biologically useful way to something but that are such that the attribution of concepts them is implausible, should not be said to perceive those objects, however, much the objects figure causally in their behaviour. There are, nevertheless, important links between these diverse uses. We might call a theory which attributes to perceptual states as content in the new sense as ‘an intentional theory’ of perception. On such a view, perceptual states represent to the subject how her environment and body are. The content of perceptional experiences is how the world is presented to be. Perceptual experiences are then counted as illusory or veridical depending on whether the content is correct and the world is as represented. In as such as such a theory of perception can be taken to be answering the more traditional problems of perception, such will deal with the content of consciousness. The ruminative contemplation, where with concepts looms largely and has, perhaps the overriding role, it still seems necessary for our thought to be given a focus in thought-occurrences such as images. These have sometimes been characterized as symbols which are the material of thought, but the reference to symbols is not really illuminating. Nonetheless, while a period of thought in which nothing of this kind occurs is possible, the general direction of thought seems to depend on such things occurring from time to time. The necessary correlations that are cognizant, insofar as when we get a feeling, or an ‘impression’, thereof: Which of us attribute a necessity to the relation between things of two particular kinds of things. For example, an observed correlation between things of two kinds can be seen to produce in everyone a propensity to expect a thing to the second sort given an experience of a thing on the first sort. That of saying, there is no necessity in the relations between things that happen in the world, but, given our experience and the way our minds naturally work, we cannot help thinking that there is. In the case of the imagination images seem even more crucial, in that without therm it would be difficult, to say, at least, for the point of view or perspective which is important for the imagination to be given a focus.
Of the same lines, that it would be difficult for this to be so, than impossible, since it is clear that entertaining a description of a scene, without there being anything that a vision of it, could sometimes give that perceptive. The question still arises whether a description could always do quite what an image can do in this respect. The point is connected with an issue over which there has been some argument among psychologists, such as, S.M. Kosslyn and Z.W. Pylyshyn, concerning what are termed ‘analogue’ versus ‘propositional’ theories of representation. This is an argument concerning whether the process of imagery is what Pylyshyn (1986) calls ‘cognitively penetrable’, i.e., such that its function is affected by beliefs or other intellectual processes expressible in propositions, or whether, it can be independent of cognitive processes although capable itself of affecting the mental life because of the pictorial nature of images (the ‘analogue medium’). One example, which has embarked upon that argument, is that in which people are asked whether two asymmetrically presented figures can be made to coincide, the decision on which may entail some kind of material rotation of one or more of the figures. Those defending the ‘analogue’ theory, point to the fact that there is some relation between the time taken and the degree of the rotation required, this suggests that some processes involving changing images is identify with. For some who has little or no imagery this suggestion, may seem unintelligible. Is it enough for one to go through an intellectual working out of the possibilities, as based on features of the figures that are judged relevant? This could not be said to be unimaginative as long as the intellectual process involved reference to perceptive or points of view in relation to the figures, the possibility of which the thinker might be able to appreciate. Such an account of the process of imagination cannot be ruled out, although there are conceivable situations in which the ‘analogue’ process of using images might be easier. Or, at least, it might be easier for those who have imagery most like the actual perception of a scene: For others situation might be difficult.
The extreme of the former position is probably provided by those who have so-called ‘eidetic’ imagery, where having an image of a scene is just like seeing it, and where, if it is a function of memory as it most likely is, it is clearly possible to find out details of the scene imagined by introspection of the image. The opposite extreme is typified by those for whom imagery, to the extent it occurs at all, is at best ancillary to propositionally styled thought. But, to repeat the point made unasserted, will not count as imagination unless it provides a series of perspectives on its object. Because images are or can be perceptual analogues and have a phenomenal character analogous to what sensations provide in perception they are ,most obviously suited. In the working of the mind, to the provision of those perspectives. But in a wider sense, imagination enters the picture whenever some link between thought and perception is required, as well as making possible imaginative forms of seeing-as. It may thus justifiably be regarded as a bridge between perception and thought.
The plausibility to have a firm conviction in the reality of something as, perhaps, as worthy of belief and have no doubt or unquestionably understood in the appreciation to view as plausible or likely to apprehend the existence or meaning of comprehensibility whereas, an understandable vocation as to be cognizant of things knowably sensible. To a better understanding, an analogous relationship may prove, in, at least, the explanation for the parallels that obtain between the ‘objects of contents of speech acts’ and the ‘objects or contents of belief’. Furthermore, the object of believing, like the object of saying, can have semantic properties, for example:
What Jones believes is true.
And:
What Jones believes entails what Smith believes.
One plausible hypophysis, then, is that the object of belief is the same sort of entity as what is uttered in speech acts (or what is written down).
The second theory also seems supported by the argument of which our concerns conscribe in the determination of thought, for which our ability to think certain thoughts appears intrinsically connected with the ability to think certain others. For example, the ability to think that John hit Mary goes hand in hand with the ability to think that Mary hits John, but not with the ability to think that Toronto is overcrowded. Why is this so? The ability to produce or understand certain sentences is intrinsically connected with the ability to produce or understand certain others. For example, there are no native speakers of English who know how to say ‘John hits Mary’, but who do not know how to say ‘Mary hits John’. Similarly, there are no native speakers who understand the former sentence but not the latter. These facts are easily explained if sentences have a syntactic and semantic structure, but if sentences are taken to be atomic, these facts are a complete mystery. What is true for sentences is true also for thoughts. Thinking thoughts involving manipulating mental representations. If mental representations with a propositional content have a semantic and syntactic structure like that of sentences. It is no accident that one who is able to think that John hits Mary is thereby, able to think that Mary hits John. Furthermore, it is no accident that one who can think these thoughts need not thereby be able to think thoughts, having different components - for example, the thought that Toronto is overcrowded. And what goes here for thought goes for belief and the other propositional attitudes.
If concepts of the simple (observational) sort were internal physical structures that had in this sense, an information-carrying function, a function they acquired during learning, then instances as such types would have a content that (like a belief) could be either true or false. After learning, tokens of these structure types, when caused by some sensory stimulation, would ‘say’ (i.e., mean) what it was their function to ‘tell’ (inform about). They would therefore, quality as beliefs - at least of the simple observational sort.
Any information-carrying structure carries all kinds of information. If, for example, it carriers information ‘A’, it must also carry the information that ‘A’ or ‘B’. As I conceived of it, learning was supposed to be a process in which a single piece if this information is selected for special treatment, thereby becoming the semantic content - the meaning - of subsequent tokens of that structure type. Just as we conventionally give artefacts and instruments information-providing functions, thereby making their activities and states - pointer readers, flashing lights, and so on - representations of the conditions, so learning converts neural states that carry information - ‘pointers readers’ in the head, so to speak - into structures that have the function to providing some vital piece of the information they carry are also presumed to serve as the meanings of linguistic items, underwriting relations of translation, definition, synonymy, antinomy and semantic implications. Much work in the semantics of natural language takes itself to be addressing conceptual structure.
Concepts have also been thought to be the proper objects of ‘philosophical analysis’. ‘Analytic’ philosophers when they ask about the nature of justice, knowledge or piety and expect to discover answers by means of introspective reflection, yet the expectation that one sort of thing could serve all these tasks went hand in hand with what has come to be called the ‘Classical View’ of concepts, according of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for their satisfaction, which are known to any competent user of them, the standard example is the especially simple one [bachelor], which seems to be identified to [eligible unmarried male]. A more interesting, but problematic one has been [knowledge], whose analysis was traditionally thought to be [justified true belief].
The notional representation that treat relations as a sub-class of property brings to contrast with property is ‘concept’, but one must be very careful, since ‘concept’, has =been used by philosophers ans psychologists to serve many different purposes. One use has it that certain factors of conceiving of some aspect of the world. As such, concepts have a kind of subjectivity as having to contain the different individuals might, for example, have different concepts of birds, one thinking of them primarily as flying creatures and the other as feathered. Concepts in this sense are often described as a species of ‘mental representation’, and as such they stand in sharp contrast to the notion of a property, since a property is something existing in the world. However, it is possible to think of a concept as neither mental nor linguistic and this would allow, though it doesn’t dictate, that concepts and properties are the same kind of thing. Nonetheless, the function of learning is naturally to develop, as things inasmuch as they do, in some natural way, either (in the case of the senses) from their selectional history or (in the casse of thought) from individual learning. The result is a network of internal representations that have, in different ways, the power to represent: Experiences and beliefs.
This does, however, leave a question about the role of the senses in this total cognitive enterprise. If it is learning that, by way of concepts, is the source of the representational powers of thought, from whence comes the representational powers of experience? Or should we even think of experience in representational terms? We can have false beliefs, but are there false experiences? On this account, then, experience and thought are both representational. The difference resides in the source of heir representational powers, learning in the case of thoughts, evolution in the case of experience.
Though, perception is always concept-dependent, at least in the sense that perceivers must be concept possessors and users, and almost certainly in the sense that perception entails concept-use in its application to objects. It is at least, arguable that those organisms that react in a biologically useful way to something, but that are such that the attribution of concepts to them is implausible, should not be said to perceive those objects, however, much is as there is much that the object figures causally in their behaviour. Moreover, that consciousness presents the object in such a way that the experience has certain phenomenal character, which derived from the sensations which the causal processes involved set up. This is most evident is the case of ‘touch’ (which being a ‘contact sense’ provides a more obvious occasion for speaking of sensations than do ‘distance senses’ such as sight). Our tactual awareness of the texture of a surface is, to use a metaphor, ‘coloured’ by the nature of the sensations that the surface produces in our skin, and which we can be explicitly aware of if our attention is drawn to them (something that gives one indication of how attention too is involved in perception).
It has been argued, that the phenomenal character of n experience is detachable from its contentual content in the sense that an experience of the same phenomenal character could occur even if the appropriate concepts were not available. Certainly the reverse is true - that a concept-mediated awareness of an object could occur without any sensation-mediated experience - as in an awareness of something absent from us. It is also the case, however, that the look of something can be completely changed by the realization that it is to be seen as ‘χ’ rather than ‘y’. To the extent that, that is so, the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience should be viewed as the result of the way in which sensations produced in us by objects blend with our ways of thinking of and understanding those objects (which, it should be noted, are things in the world and should not be confused with the sensations which they produce).
In the study of other parts of the natural world, we agree to be satisfied with post-Newtonian ‘best theory’ arguments: There is no privileged category of evidence that provides criteria for theoretical constructions. In the study of humans above the neck, however, naturalistic theory does not suffice: We must seek ‘philosophical explanations’, require that theoretical posits specified terms of categories of evidence selected by the philosopher (as, in the radically upon unformulated notions such as ‘access in principle’ that have no place in naturalistic inquiry.
However, one evaluates these ideas, that clearly involve demands beyond naturalism, hence, a form of methodological/epistemological dualism. In the absence of further justification, it seems to me fair to conclude, that inability to provide ‘philosophical explanation’ or a concept of ‘rule-following’ that relies on access to consciousness (perhaps ‘in principle’) is a merit of a naturalistic approach, not a defect.
A standard paradigm in the study of language, given its classic form by Frége, holds that there is a ‘store of thoughts’ that is a common human possession and a common public language in which these thoughts are expressed. Furthermore, this language is based on a fundamental relation between words and things - reference or denotation - along with some mode of fixing reference )sense, meaning). The notion of a common public language has never been explained, and seems untenable. It is also far from clear why one should assume the existence of a common store of thoughts: The very existence of thoughts had been plausibly questioned, as a misreading of surface grammar, a century earlier.
Only those who share a common world can communicate, only those who communicate can have the concept of an inter-subjective, objective world. As a number of things follow. If only those who communicate have the concept of an objective world, only those who communicate can doubt whether an external world exists. Yet I is impossible seriously (consistently) to doubt the existence of other people with thoughts, or the existence of an external world, since to communicate is to recognize the existence of other people in a common world. Language, that is, communication with others, is thus essential to propositional thought. This is not because it is necessary to have the words to express a thought (for it is not); it is because the ground of the sense of objectivity is inter-subjectivity, and without the sense of objectivity, of the distinction between true and false, between what is thought to be and what is the case, there can be nothing rightly called ‘thought’.
Since words are also about things, it is natural to ask how their intentionality is connected in that of thoughts. Two views have been advocated: One view takes thought content to be self-subsistent relative to linguistic content, with the latter dependent on or upon the former. The other view takes thought content to be derivative upon linguistic content, so that there can be no thought without a bedrock of language. Appeals to language at this point are apt to founder on circularity, since words take on the powers of concepts only insofar as there express them. Thus, there seems little philosophical illumination to be got from making thought depend upon language. Nonetheless, it is not entirely clear what it amounts to assert or deny, that there is an inner language of thought. If it means merely that concepts (thought-constituents) are structured in such a way as to be isomorphic with spoken language, then the claim is trivially true, given some natural assumption. But if it means that concepts just are ‘syntactic’ items orchestrated into strings of the same, then the claim is acceptable only in so far as syntax is an adequate basis for meaning - which, on the face of it, it is not. Concepts in doubt have combinatorial powers comparable to those of words, but the question is whether anything else can plausibly be meant by the hypothesis of an inner language.
Yet, it appears undeniable that the spoken language does not have autonomous intentionality, but instead derives its meaning from the thoughts of speakers - though language may augment one’s conceptual capacities. So thought cannot post-date spoken language. The truth seems to be that in human psychology speech and thought are interdependent in many ways, but that there is no conceptual necessity about this. The only ‘language’ on which thought essentially depends is that of the structured system of concepts itself: Thought depends on or upon there being isolable concepts that can join with others to produce complete propositions. But this is merely to draw attention to a property of any system of concepts must have; it is not to say what concepts are or how they succeed in moving between thoughts as they do.
Finally, there is the old question of whether, or to what extent, a creature who does not understand a natural language can have thoughts. Now it seems pretty compelling that higher mammals and humans raised without language have their behaviour controlled by mental states that are sufficiently like our beliefs, desires and intentions to share those labels. It also seems easy to imagine non-communicating creatures who have sophisticated mental lives (they build weapons, dams, bridges, have clever hunting devices, etc.). at the same time, ascriptions of particular contents to non-language-using creatures typically seem exercises in loose speaking (does the dog really believe that there is a bone in the yard?), and it is no accident that, as a matter of fact, creatures who do not understand a natural language have at best primitive mental lives. There is no accepted explanation of these facts. It is possible that the primitive mental failure to master natural languages, but the better explanation may be Chomsky’s, that animals lack a special language faculty to our species, as, perhaps, the insecurity that is felt, may at best resemble the deeper of latencies that cradles his instinctual primitivities, that have contributively distributed the valuing qualities that amount in the result to an ‘approach-avoidance’ theory. As regards the wise normal human raised without language; this might simply be due to the ignorance and lack of intellectual stimulation such a person would be predetermined to. It also might be that higher thought requires a neural language with a structure comparable to that of a natural language, and that such neural languages are somehow acquired: As the child learns its native language. Finally, the ascription states of languageless creatures is a difficult topic that needs more attention. It is possible that as we learn more about the logic of our ascriptions of propositional content, we will realize that these ascriptions are egocentrically based on a similarity to the language in which we express our beliefs. We might then learn that we have no principled basis for ascribing propositional content to a creature who does not speak something a lot like one of our natural languages, or who does not have internal states with natural-language-like structure.. It is somewhat surprising how little we know about thought’s dependence on language.
The relation between language and thought is philosophies chicken-or-egg problem. Language and thought are evidently importantly related, but how exactly are they related? Does language come first and make thought possible, or is it vice versa? Or are they on a par, each making the other possible.
When the question is stated this generally, however, no unqualified answer is possible. In some respects thought is prior, and in other respects neither is prior. For example, it is arguable that a language is an abstract pairing of expressions and meaning, a function in the set-theoretic sense from expressions onto meaning. This makes sense of the fact that Esperanto is a language no one speaks, and it explains why it is that, while it is a contingent fact that ‘La neige est blanche’ means that snow is white among the French. It is a necessary truth that it means that in French. But if natural languages such as French and English are abstract objects in this sense, then they exist in possible worlds in which there are no thinkers in this respect, then, language as well as such notions as meaning and truth in a language, is prior to thought.
But even if languages are construed as abstract expression-meaning pairings, they are construed that way as abstractions from actual linguistic practice - from the use of language in communicative behaviour - and there remains a clear sense in which language is dependent on thought. The sequence of inscribes ‘Naples is south of Rome’ means among us that Naples is south of Rome. This is a contingent fact, dependent on the way we use ‘Naples’. Rome and the other parts of that sentence. Had our linguistic practices been different, ‘Naples is south of Rome’ means among us that Naples is south of Rome has something to do with the beliefs and intentions underlying our use of the words and structures that compose the sentence. More generally, it is a platitude that the semantic features that inscribes and sounds have in a population of speakers are, at least, partly determined by the ‘propositional attitudes’ those speakers have in using those inscriptions and sounds or in using the parts and structures that compose them. This is the same platitude, of course, which says that meaning depends at least partly on use: For the use in question is intentional use in communicative behaviour. So, here, is one clear sense in which language is dependent on thought: Thought is required to imbue inscriptions and sounds with the semantic features they have in populations of speakers.
The sense in which language does depend on thought can be wedded to the sense in which language does not depend on thought in the ways that: We can say that a sequence of ascriptions or sounds (or, whatever) σ means ‘q’ in a language ‘L’, construed as a function from expressions onto meaning, iff L(σ) = q. this notion of meaning-in-a-language, like the notion of a ;language, is a mere set-theoretic notion that is independent of thought in that it presupposes nothing about the propositional attitudes of language users: σ can mean ‘q’ in ‘L’ even if ‘L’ has never been used. But then we can say that σ also means ‘q’ in a population ‘P’ jus t in case members of ‘P’ use some language in which σ ,means ‘q’: That is, just in case some such language is a language of ‘P’. The question of moment then becomes: What relation must a population ‘P’ bear to a language ‘L’ in order for it to be the case that ‘L’ is a language of ‘P’, a language members of ‘P’ actually speak? Whatever the answer to this question is, this much seems right: In order for a language to be a language of a population of speakers, those speakers in their produce sentences of the language in their communicative behaviour. Since such behaviour is intentional, we know that the notion of a language‘s being the language of a population of speakers presupposes the notion of thought. And since that notion presupposes the notion of thought, we also know that the same is true of the correct account of the semantic features expressions have in populations of speakers.
This is a pretty thin result, not one likely to be disputed, and the difficult questions remain. We know that there is some relation ‘R’ such that a language ‘L’ is used by a population ‘P’ iff ‘L’ bears ‘R’ to ‘P’. Let us call this relation, whatever it turns out to be, the ‘actual-language reflation’. We know that to explain the actual-language relation is to explain the semantic features expressions have among those who are apt to produce those expressions. And we know that any account of the relation must require language users to have certain propositional attitudes. But how exactly is the actual language relation to be explained in terms of the propositional attitude of language users? And what sort of dependence might those propositional attitudes in turn have those propositional attitudes in turn have on language or on the semantic features that are fixed by the actual-language relation? Let us, least of mention, begin once again, as in the relation of language to thought, before turning to the relation of thought to language.
All must agree that the actual-language relation, and with it the semantic features linguistic items have among speakers, is at least, partly determined by the propositional attitudes of language users. This still leaves plenty of room for philosophers to disagree both about the extent of the determination and the nature of the determining propositional attitude. At one end of the determination spectrum, we have those who hold that the actual-language relation is wholly definable in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. This position in logical space is most famously occupied by the programme, sometimes called ‘intention-based semantics’, of the late Paul Grice and others. The foundational notion in this enterprise is a certain notion of speaker meaning. It is the species of communicative behaviour reported when we say, for example, that in uttering ‘ll pleut’, Pierre meant that it was raining, or that in waving her hand, the Queen meant that you were to leave the room, intentional-based semantics seeks to define this notion of speaker meaning wholly in terms of communicators’ audience-directed intentions and without recourse to any semantic notion. Then it seeks to define the actual-language relation in terms of the now-defined notion of speaker meaning, together with certain ancillary notions such as that of a conventional regularity or practice, themselves defined wholly in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. The definition of the actual-language relation in terms of speaker meaning will require the prior definition in terms of speaker meaning of other agent-semantic notions, such as the notions of speaker reference and notions of illocutionary act, and this, too, is part of the intention-based semantics.
Some philosophers object to the intentional-based semantics because they think it precludes a dependence of thought on the communicative use of language. This is a mistake. Even if the intentional-based semantic definitions are given a strong reductionist reading, as saying that public-language semantic properties (i.e., those semantic properties that supervene on use in communicative behaviour) it might still be that one could not have propositional attitudes unless one had mastery of a public-language. However, our generating causal explanatory y generalizations, and subject to no more than the epistemic indeterminacy of other such terms. The causal explanatory approach to reason-giving explanations also requires an account of the intentional content of our psychological states, which makes it possible for such content to be doing such work. By the early 1970s, and many physicalists looked for a way of characterizing the primary and priority of the physical that is free from reductionist implications. As we have in attestation, the key attraction of supervenience to physicalists has been its promise to deliver dependence without reduction. For example, of moral theory has seemed encouraging as Moore and Hare, who made much of the supervenience of the moral on the naturalistic, were at the same time, strong critics of ethical naturalism, the principal reductionist position in ethical theory. And there has been a broad consensus among ethical theorists that Moore and Hare were right, that the moral, or more broadly the normative, is supervening on the non-moral without being reducible to it. Whether or not this is plausible (that is a separate question), it would be no more logically puzzling than the idea that one could not have any propositional attitudes unless one had one’s with certain sorts of contents. there is no pressing reason to think that the semantic needs to be definable in terms of the psychological. Many intention-based semantic theorists have been motivated by a strong version of ‘physicalism’, which requires the reduction of all intentional properties (i.e., all semantic and propositional-attitude properties) to physical , or at least, topic-neutral or functional properties, for it is plausible that there could be no reduction of the semantic and the psychological to the physical without a prior reduction of the semantic to the psychological. But it is arguable that such a strong version of physicalism is not what is required in order to fit the intentional into the natural order.
So, the most reasonable view about the actual-language relation is that it requires language users to have certain propositional attitudes, but there is no prospect of defining the relation wholly in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. It is further plausible that any account of the actual-language relation must appeal to speech acts such as speaker meaning, where the correct account of these speech acts is irreducibly semantic (they will fail to supervene on the non-semantic propositional altitudes of speakers in the way that intentions fail to supervene on an agent’s beliefs and desires). If this is right, it would still leave a further issue about the ‘definability’ of the actual-language relation, and if so, will any irreducibly semantic notions enter into that definition other than the sorts of speech act notions already alluded to? These questions have not been much discussed in the literature as there is neither an established answer nor competing school of thought. Such that the things in philosophy that can be defined, and that speech act notions are the only irreducibly semantic notions the definition must appeal to.
Our attention is now to consider on or upon the dependence of thought on language, as this the claim that propositional attitudes are relations to linguistic items which obtain at least, partly by virtue of the content those items have among language users. This position does not imply that believers have to be language users, but it does make language an eessential ingredient in the concept of belief. However, we might then learn that we have no principled basis for ascribing propositional content to who does not speak something, a lot like, does not have internal states with natural-language-like structure. It is somewhat surprising how little we know about thought’s dependence on language.
The Scottish philosopher, born in Edinburgh, David Hume (1711-76 ) whose theory of knowledge starts from the distinction between perception and thought. When we see, hear, feel, etc. (In general, perceive) something we are ware of something immediately present to the mind through the senses. But we can also think and believe and reason about things which are not present to our senses at the time, e.g.,, objects and events in the past, the future or the present beyond our current perceptual experience. Such beliefs make it possible for us to deliberate and so act on the basis of information we have acquired about the world.
For Hume all mental activity involves the presence before the mind o some mental entity. Perception is said to differ for thought only in that the kinds of things that are present to the mind in each case are present to the mind in each case are different. In the case of perception it is an ‘impression’: In the case of thought, although what is thought about is absent, what is present to the mind is an ‘idea’ of whatever is thought about. The only difference between an impression and its corresponding idea is the greater ‘force and liveliness’ with which it ‘strikes upon the mind’.
All the things that we can think or believe or reason about are either ‘relations of ideas’ or ‘matters of fact’. Each of the former (e.g., that three times five equals half of thirty) holds necessarily: Its negation implies a contradiction, such truths are ‘discoverable by the operation of pure thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe. Hume has no systematic theory of this kind of knowledge: What is or is not included in a given idea, and how we know whether it is, is taken as largely unproblematic. each ‘matter of fact’ is contingent: Its negation is distinctly conceivable and represents a possibility. That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible and no more implies a contradiction than the proposition that it will rise. Thought alone is therefore, never sufficient to assure us of the truth of any matter of fact. Sense experience is needed. Only what is directly present to the senses at a given moment is known by perception. A belief in a matter of fact which is not present at the time must therefore be arrived at by a transition of some kind from present impressions to a belief in the matter of fact in question. Hume’s theory of knowledge is primarily an explanation of how that transition is in fact made. It takes the form of an empirical ‘science of human nature’ which is to be based of careful observation of what human beings do and what happens to them.
Its leading into some tangible value, that approves inversely qualifying, in that thoughts have contents carried by mental representations. Now, there are different representations, pictures, maps, models, and words - to name only some. Exactly what sort of representation is mental representation? Insofar as our understanding of cognizant connectionism will necessarily have implications for philosophy of mind. Two areas in particular on which it is likely to have impact are the analysis of the mind as a representational system and the analysis of intentional idioms. That is more, that imagery has played an enormously important role in philosophy conceptions of the mind. The most popular view of images prior to this century has been what we might call ‘the picture theory’. According to this view, held by such diverse philosophers as Aristotle, Descartes, and Locke, mental images - specifically in the way they represent objects in the world,. Despite its widespread acceptance, the picture theory of mental images was left largely unexplained in the traditional philosophical literature. Admittedly, most of those accepted the theory held that mental images copy or resemble what the present, but little more was said. sensationalism, distinguishes itself as a version of representationalist by positing that mental representations are themselves linguistic expressions within a ‘language of thought’. While some sententialists conjecture that the language of thought is just the thinker’s spoken language internalized. An unarticulated, internal; language in which the computations supposedly definitive of cognition occur. Sententialism is as a natural consequence to take hold a provocative thesis.
Thoughts, in having contents, posses semantic properties, yet, that does not imply that they lack an unspoken, internal, mental language. Sententialism need not insist that the language of thought be any natural spoken language like Chinese or English. Rather it simply proses that psychological states that admit of the sort of semantic properties are likely relations to the sort of structured representations commonly found in, but not isolated to, public languages. This is certainly not to say that all psychological states in all sorts of psychological agents must be relations to mental sentences. Rather the idea is that thinking - at least, the kind Peter Abelard (1079-1142) exemplifies - involves the processing of internally complex representations. Their semantic properties are sentences to those of their parts much in the manner in which the meanings and truth conditions of complex public sentences are dependent upon the semantic features of their components. Abelard might also exploit various kinds of mental representations and associated processes. A sententialists may allow that in some of his cognitive adventures Abelard rotates mental images or recalcitrates weights on connections among internally undifferentiated networked nodes. Sententialism is simply the thesis that some kinds of cognitive phenomena are best explained by the hypothesis of a mental language. There is, then, no principled reason of non-verbal creatures precludes the language of thought.
It is tempting to gloss over the representational theory by speaking of a language thought, nonetheless, that Fodor argues that representation and the inferential manipulation of representations require a medium of representation, least of mention,, in human subjects than in computers. Say, that physically realized thoughts and mental representations are ‘linguistic’, such that of (1) they are composed of parts and are syntactically structured: (2) Their simplest parts refer to or denote things and properties in the world, (3) their meanings as wholes are determined by the semantical properties of their basic parts together with the grammatical rules that have generated their overall syntactic structures, (4) they have truth-conditions, that is, putative states of affairs in the world that would make them true, and accordingly they are true or false depending on the way the world happens actually to be: (5) They bear logical relations of entailment or implication to each other. In this way, they have in accordance to the representational theory: Human beings have systems of physical states that serve as the elements of a lexicon or vocabulary, and human beings (somehow) physically realize rules that combine strings of those elements into configuration having the plexuities of representational contents that common sense associates with the propositional altitudes. And that is why thoughts and beliefs are true or false just as English sentences are, though a ‘language of thought’ may differ sharply in its grammar from any natural language.
We know that there is some relation R such that a language L is used by a population P iff L bears R to P. This relation, however, of whatever it turns out to be, the actual-language relation is to explain the semantic features expressions, least of mention, have among those who are apt to produce those expressions, and we know that any account of the relation must require language users to have certain propositional attitudes. But how exactly is the actual-language relation to be explained in terms of the propositional attitudes of language users? And what sort of dependence might those propositional attitudes in turn have on language or on the semantic features that are fixed by the actual-language relation?
Some philosophers object to intention-based semantics only because they think it precludes a dependence of thought on the communicative use of language. This is a mistake. Even if intention-based semantic definitions are given a strong reductionist reading, as saying that public-language semantic properties (i.e., those semantic properties that supervene on us in communicative behaviour) just are psychological properties. It might still be that one could not have propositional attitudes unless one had mastery of a public language. The idea of supervenience is usually thought to have originated in moral theory, in the works of such philosopher s as G.E. Moore and R.M. Hare, nonetheless, Hare, for example, claimed that ethical predicates are ‘supervenient predicates’ in the same sense that no two things (persons, acts, states of affairs) could be exactly alike in all descriptive or naturalistic respects but unlike in that some ethical predicate (‘good’, right’, etc.) truly applies to one but not to the other. That is, there could be no difference in a moral respect without a difference in some description, or non-moral respect. following Moore and Hare, from whom they avowedly borrowed the idea of supervenience, Davidson went on to assert that supervenience in the sense is consistent with the irreducibility of the supervenient to their ‘subvenient’, or ‘base’, properties. ‘Dependence or supervenience of this kind does not entail reducibility through law or definition . . .’.Thus, three ideas have come to be closely associated with supervenience: (1) ‘Property covariation’ (if two things are indiscernible in base properties, they must be indiscernible in supervenience properties). (2) ‘Dependence’ (supervenient properties are dependent on, or determined by, their subvenient bases, and (3) ‘Non-reducibility’ (property covariation and dependence involved in supervenience can not reducible to their base properties). Whether or not this is plausible (that is, a separate question), it would be no more logically puzzling that the idea that one could not have propositional attitudes unless one had ones with certain sorts of content, Tyler Burge’s insight, that the contents of one’s thoughts is partially determined by the meaning of one’s words on one’s linguistic community is perfectly consistent with any intention-based semantics, reduction of the semantic to the psychological. Nevertheless, there is reason to be sceptical of the intention-based semantic programme.
So the most reasonable view about the actual-language relation is that it requires language users to have certain propositional attitudes, but there is no prospect of defining the relation wholly in terms of non-semantic propositional attitudes. It is further plausible that any account of the actual-language relation ,must appeal to speech acts sch as speaker meaning, where the correct account of these speech acts is irreducibly semantic (they will fail to supervene on the non-semantic propositional attitudes of speakers in the way that intentions fail to supervene on an agent’s beliefs and desires). Is it possible to define the actual-language relation, and if so, will any irreducibly semantic notions enter into that definition other than the sorts of speech act notions already alluded to? These questions have not been much discussed in the literature, there is neither an established answer nor competing schools of thought. However, the actual-language relation is one of the few things in philosophy that can be defined, and that speech act notions are the only irreducibly semantic notions the definition must appeal to (Schiffer, 1993).
An substantiated dependence of thought on language seems unobtainably approachable, however, a useful point is an acclaimed dependence that propositional attitudes are relations to linguistic items which obtain, in, at least, in part, by virtue of the content those items have among language users. This position does not imply that believers have to be language users, but it does make language an essential ingredient in the concept of belief. The position is motivated by two considerations: (a) The supposition that believing is a relation to thing believed, which things have truth values and stand in logical relations to one another, and (b) the desire not to take things believed to be propositions - abstract, mind and language-independent objects that have essentially the truth conditions they have. As to say that (as well motivated: The relational construal of propositional attitudes is probably the best way to account for the quantification in ‘Harvey believes something irregular about you’. But there are problems with taking linguistic items, than propositions, as the objects of belief. In that, if ‘Harvey believes that irregularities are founded grounds held to abnormality’ is represented along the lines of Harvey, and abnormal associations founded to irregularity, then one could know the truth expressed by the sentence about Harvey without knowing the content of his belief: For one could know that he stands in the belief relation to ‘irregularities are abnormal’ without knowing its content. This is unacceptable, as if Harvey believes that irregularity stems from abnormality, then what he believes - the reference of ‘That irregularity is abnormal’ - is that irregularities are abnormal. But what is this thing, that irregularities are abnormal? Well, it is abstract, in that it has no spatial locality: It is mind and language independent, in that it exists in possible world in which whose displacement is neither the thinkers nor speakers, and necessarily, it is true iff irregularly is abnormal. In short, it is a proposition - an abstract mind- and-language thing that has a truth condition and has essentially the truth condition it has.
A more plausible way that thought depends on language is suggested by the topical thesis that we think in a ‘language of thought’. As, perhaps, this is nothing more than the vague idea that the neural states that realize our thoughts ‘have elements and structure in a way that is analogous to the way in which sentences have elements and structure’. But we can get a more literal rendering by relating it to the abstractive conception of language already recommended. On this conception, a language is a function from ‘expressions’ - sequence of marks or sounds or neural states or whatever - onto meanings, which meanings will include the propositions our propositional-attitude relations relates us to. We could then read the language of thought hypothesis as the claim that having in a certain relation to a language whose expressions are neural states. There would mow be more than one ‘actual-language relation’. One might be called the ’public-language relation’, since it makes a language the instrument of communication of a population of speakers. Another relation might be called the ‘language-of-thought relation’ because standing in the relation to a language makes it one’s ‘Lingus mentis’. Since the abstract notion of a language has been so weakly construed, it is hard to see how the minimal language-of-thought proposal just sketched could fail to be true. At the same time, it has been given no interesting work to do. In trying to give it more interesting work, further dependencies of thought on language might come into play. For example, it has been claimed that the language of thought of a public-language user is the public language she uses: her neural sentences in something like her spoken sentences. For another example, it might be claimed that even if one’s language of thought is distinct from one’s public language, the language-of-thought relation makes presuppositions about the public-language relation in ways that make the content of one’s thoughts dependent on the meaning of one’s words in one’s public-language community.
All of this suggests a specific ‘mental organ’, to use Chomsky’s phrase, that has evolved in the human cognitive system specifically in order to make language possible. The specific structure of this organ simultaneously constrains the range of possible human languages and guides the learning of the child’s target language, later ,making rapid on-line language processing possible. The principles represented in this organ constitute the innate linguistic knowledge of the human being. Additional evidence for the early operation of such an innate language acquisition module is derived from the many infant studies that show that infants selectively attend to sound-streams that are prosodically appropriate, that have pauses at clausal boundaries, and that contain linguistically permissible phonological sequences.
A particularly strong form of the innateness hypothesis in the psycholinguistic domain is Fodor’s (1975, 1987), ‘Language of Thought’ hypothesis. Fodor argues not only that the language learning and processing faculty is innate, but that the human representational system exploits an innate language of thought which has all of the expressive power of any learnable human language. Hence, he argues, all concepts are in fact innate, in virtue of the representational power of the language of thought. This remarkable doctrine is hence even stronger than classical rationalist doctrine of innate ideas: Whereas, Chomsky echoes Descartes in arguing that the most general concepts required for language learning are innate, while allowing that more specific concepts are acquired, Fodor echoes Plato in arguing that every concept we ever ‘learn’ is in fact innate.
Fodor defends this view by arguing that the process of language learning is a process of hypothesis formation and testing, where among the hypotheses that must be formulated are meaning postulates for each term in the language being acquired. But in order to formulate and test a hypothesis of the form ‘χ’ means ‘y’, where ‘χ’ denotes a term in the target language, prior to the acquisition of that language, the language learner. Fodor argues, must have the resources necessary to express ‘y’. Therefore, there must be, in the language of thought, a predicate available co-extensive with each predicate in any language that a human can learn. Fodor also argues for the language of thought thesis by noting that the language in which the human information cannot be a human spoken language, since that would, contrary to fact, privilege one of the world’s languages as the most easily acquired. Moreover, it cannot be, he argues, that each of us thinks in our own native language since that would (a) predict that we could not think prior to acquiring a language, contrary to the original argument, and (b) would mean that psychology would be radically different for speakers of different languages. Hence, Fodor argues, there must be a non-conventional language of thought, and the facts that the mind is ‘wired’ in mastery of its predicates together with its expressive completeness entail that all concepts are innate.
The dissertating disputation about whether there are innate qualities that infer on or upon the innate values whereby ideas are much older than previously imagined. Plato in the ‘Meno’ (the learning paradox), famously argues that all of our knowledge is innate. Descartes (1596-1650) and Leibniz (1646-1716) defended the view that the mind contains innate ideas: Berkeley (1685-1753), Hume (1711-76) and Locke (1632-1704) attacked it. In fact, as we now conceive the great debate between European Rationalism and British empiricism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the doctrine of innate ideas is a central effectuality of contention: Rationalists typically claim that knowledge is impossible without a significant stock of general innate ‘concepts’ or judgements, empiricists argued that all ideas are acquired from experience. This debate is replayed with more empirical content and with considerably greater conceptual complexities in contemporary cognitive science, most particularly within the domain of psycholinguistic theory and cognitive developmental theory. Although Chomsky is recognized as one of the main forces in the overthrow of behaviourism and in the initiation of the ‘cognitive era’ ! His relation between psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology has always been an uneasy one. The term ‘psycholinguistics’ is often taken to refer primarily to psychological work on language that is influenced by ideas from linguistic theory. Mainstream cognitive psychologists, for example when they write textbooks, oftentimes prefer the term ‘psychology of language’ the difference is not, however, merely in a name, least be of mention, that both Fodor and Chomsky, who argue that all concepts, or all of linguistic knowledge is innate, lend themselves to this interpretation, against empiricists who argue that there is no innate appeal in explaining the acquisition of language or the facts of cognitive development. But this debate would be a silly and a sterile for obvious reasons, something is innate. Brains are innate, and the structure of the brain must constrain the nature of cognitive and linguistic development to dome degree. Equally obviously, something is learned and is learned as opposed to merely grown as limbs or hair grow. For not all of the world’s citizens end up speaking English, or knowing the Special Theory of Relativity. The interesting questions then all concern exactly what is innate, to what degree it counts as knowledge, and what is learned, and what degree its content and structure are determined by innately specified cognitive structures. And that is plenty to debate about.
Innatist argue that the very presence of linguistic universals argue for the innateness of linguistic knowledge, but more importantly and more compelling that the fact that these universals are, from the standpoint of communicative efficiency, or from the standpoint of any plausible simplicity criterion, adventitious. There are many conceivable grammars, and those determined by universal grammar are not ipso facto the most efficient or the simplest. Nonetheless, all human language satisfy the constraints of universal grammar. Since neither the communicative environment nor the commutative task can explain this phenomenon. It is reasonable to suppose that it is explained by the structure of the mind - and, therefore, by fact that the principles of universal grammar lie innate in the mind and constrain the language that a human can acquire.
Linguistic empiricists, answer that there are alternative possible explanations of the existence of such adventitious universal properties of human languages. For one thing, such universals could be explained, Putnam (1975, 1992) argues, by appeal to a common ancestral language, and the inheritance of features of that language by its descendants. Or it might turn out that despite the lack of direct evidence at present the features of universal grammar in fact do serve either the goals of communicative efficacy or simplicity according to a metric of psychological importance. Finally, empiricist point out , he very existence of universal grammar might be a trivial logical artefact (Quine, 1968): for one thing, any finite set of structures will have some feature s in common. Since there are a finite number of languages, it follows trivially that there are features they all share. Moreover, it is argued, many features of universal grammar are interdependent. So in fact the set of functional principles shared by the world’s languages may be rather small. Hence, even if these are innately determined, the amount of innate knowledge thereby required may be quite small as compared with the total corpus of general linguistic knowledge acquired by the first language learner.
These replies are rendered less plausible, innatists argue, when one considers the fact that the errors language learners make in acquiring their first language seem to be driven far more by abstract features of grammar than by any available input data. So, despite receiving correct examples of irregular plurals or past tense forms for verbs, and despite having correctly formed the irregular forms for those words, children will often incorrectly regularize irregular verbs once acquiring mastery of the rule governing regulars in their language. And in general, not only the correct inductions of linguistic rules by young language learners, but more importantly, given the absence of confirmatory data and the presence of refuting data, children’s erroneous inductions are always consistent with universal grammar, often simply representing the incorrect setting of a parameter in the grammar. More generally, innatists argue, that all grammatical rules that have ever been observed satisfy the structure-dependence constraint. That is, many linguists and psycholinguists argue that all known grammatical rules of all the world’s languages, including the fragmentary languages of young children must be stated as rules governing hierarchical sentence structures, and not governing, say, sequence of words. Many of these, such as the constituent-command constraint governing anaphor, are highly abstract indeed, and appear to be respected by even very young children (Solan, 1983 & Crain, 1991). Such constraints may, innatists argue, be necessary conditions of learning natural language I the absence of specific instruction, modelling and correction conditions in which all first language learning acquire their native languages.
An important empiricist answer for these observations derives from recent studies of ‘connectionist’ models of the first language acquisition (Rummelhart & McClelland, 1986, 1987). Connectionist systems, not previously trained to represent any sunset of universal grammar that induce grammar which include a large set of regular forms and a few irregulars also tend to over-regularize, exhibiting the same U-shape learning curve seen in human language acquirers. It is also noteworthy that conceptionist learning systems that induce grammatical systems acquire ‘accidentally’ rules on which they are not explicitly trained, but which are consistent with those upon which they are trained, suggesting that s children acquire position of their grammar, they may accidentally ‘learn’ other consistent rules, which may be correct in other human language, but which then must be ‘unlearned’ in their home language. Yet, such ‘empiricist’ language acquisition systems have yet to demonstrate their ability to induce a sufficiently wide range of the rules hypothesized to be comprised by universal grammar to constitute a definite empirical argument for the possibility of natural language acquisition in the absence of a powerful set of innate constraints.
The poverty of the stimulus argument has been of enormous influence in innateness debates, though its soundness is hotly contested. Chomsky notes that (1) the examples of the target language to which the language learner is exposed are always jointly compatible with an infinite number of alternative grammars, and so vastly undermine the grammar, of the language, and (2) the corpus always contains many examples of ungrammatical sentences, which should in fact, serve as falsifiers of any empirically induced correct grammar of the language, also (3) there is, in general, no explicit reinforcement of correct utterances or correction of incorrect utterances, either by the learner or by those in the immediate training environment. Therefore, he argues, since it is impossible to explain the learning of the correct grammar - a task accomplished by all normal children within a very few years - on the basis of any available data or known learning algorithms, it must be that the grammar is innately specified, and is merely ‘triggered’ by relevant environmental cues.
Opponents of the linguistic innateness hypothesis, however, point out that the circumstance that Chomsky notes in this argument is hardly specific to language. As well known from arguments due to Hume (1978). Wittgenstein (1953), Goodman (1972) and Kripke (1982), in all cases of empirical abduction, and of training in the use of a word, data under-determine theories. This moral is emphasized by Quine (1954, 1960) as the principle of the undertermination of theory by data. But we, nonetheless, do abduce adequate theories in science, and we do lean the meaning of words. And it would be bizarre to suggest that all correct scientific theories or the facts of lexical semantics are innate.
But, innatists reply, that when the empiricist relies on the underdetermination of theory by data as a counterexample, a significant disanalogousness with language acquisition is ignored: The abduction of scientific theories is a difficult, labourious process, taking a sophisticated theorist a great deal of time and deliberate effort. First language acquisition, by contrast, is accomplished effortlessly and very quickly by a small child. The enormous relative ease with which such a complex and abstractive domain is mastered by such a naïve ‘theorist’ is evidence for the innateness of the knowledge achieved.
Empiricists such as Putnam (1926- ) have rejoined that innateness under-estimate the amount of time that language learning actually takes, focussing only on the number of years from the apparent onset of acquisition to the achievement of relative mastery over the grammar. Instead of noting how short this interval, they argue, one should count the total number of hours spent listening to language and speaking during this time. That number is in fact, quite large, and is comparable to the number of hours of study and practice required in the acquisition of skills that are not argued to derive from innate structures, such as chess playing or musical composition, hence, they argue once the correct temporal parameters are taken into consideration, language learning looks like one more case of human skill acquisition than like a special unfolding of innate knowledge.
Innatists, however, note that while the ease with which most such skills are acquired depends on general intelligence, language, is learned with roughly equal speed, and to roughly the same level of general syntactic mastery regardless of general intelligence. In fact, even significantly retarded individuals, assuming no special language deficit, acquire their native language on a time-scale and to a degree comparable to that of normally intelligent children. The language acquisition faculty hence, appears to allow access to a sophisticated body of knowledge independent of the sophistication of the general knowledge of the language learner. This is, language learning and utilization mechanisms are not outside of language processing. They are informationally encapsulated - only linguistic information is relevant to language acquisition and processing. They are mandatory - language learning and language processing are automatic. Moreover, language is subserved by specific dedicated neural structures, damage to which predictably and systematically impairs linguistic functioning, and not general cognitive functioning.
Again, the issues at stake in the debate concerning the innateness of such general concepts pertaining to the physical world cannot be s stark a dispute between an innate and one according to which all empirical knowledge is innate. Rather the important - and again, always empirical questions concern just what is innate, and just ‘what’ is acquired, and how innate equipment interacts with the world to produce experience. ‘There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience . . . experience it does not follow that all arises out of experience’.
Philosophically, the unconscious mind postulated by psychoanalysis is controversial, since it requires thinking in terms of a partitioned mind and applying a mental vocabulary (intentions, desires, repression) to a part to which we have no conscious access. The problem is whether this merely uses a harmless spatial metaphor of the mind, or whether it involves a philosophical misunderstanding of mental ascription. Other philosophical reservations about psychoanalysis concern the apparently arbitrary and unfalsifiable nature on the interpretative schemes employed. Basically, least of mention, the method of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic therapy for psychological disorders was pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the method relies on or upon an interpretation of what a patient says while ‘freely associating’ or reporting what comes to mind in connection with topics suggested by the analyst. The interpretation proceeds according to the scheme favoured by the analyst, and reveals ideas dominating the unconscious, but previously inadmissible to the conscious mind of the subject. When these are confronted, improvement can be expected. The widespread practice of psychoanalysis is not matched by established data on such rate of improvement.
Nonetheless, the task of analysing psychoanalytic explanation is complicated is initially in several ways. One concerns the relation of theory to practice. There are various perspectives on the relation of psychoanalysis, the therapeutic practice, to the theoretical apparatus built around it, and these lead to different views of psychoanalysis’ claim to cognitive status. The second concerns psychoanalysis’ legitimation. The way that psychoanalytic explanation is understood has immediate implications for one’s view of its truth or acceptability, and this of course a notoriously controversial matter. The third is exegetical. Any philosophical; account of psychoanalysis must of course start with Freud himself, but it will inevitably privilege some strands of his thought at the expense of others, and in so doing favour particular post-Freudian developments over others.
Freud clearly regarded psychoanalysis as engaged principally in the task of explanation, and held fast to his claims for its truth in the course of alterations in his view of the efficacy of psychoanalysis’ advocates have, under pressure, retreated to the view that psychoanalytic theory has merely instrumental value, as facilitating psychoanalytic therapy: But this is not the natural view, which is that explanation is the autonomous goal of psychoanalysis, and that its propositions are truth-evaluable. Accordingly, it seems that preference should be given to whatever reconstruction of psychoanalytic theory does most to advance its claim to truth. Within, of course, exegetical constraints (what a reconstruction offers must be visibly present in Freud’s writings.)
Viewed in these terms, psychoanalytic explanation is an ‘extension’ of ordinary psychology, one that is warranted by demands for explanation generated from within ordinary psychology itself. This has several crucial ramifications. It eliminates, as ill-conceived, the question of psychoanalysis’ scientific status - an issue much discussed, as proponents of different philosophies of science have argued for and against psychoanalysis’ agreement with the canons of scientific method, and its degree or lack of correspondence. Demands that psychoanalytic explanation should be demonstrated to receive inductive support, commit itself to testable psychological laws, and contribute effectively to the prediction of action, have then no more pertinence than the same demands pressed on ordinary psychology - which is not very great. When the conditions for legitimacy are appropriately scaled down. It is extremely likely that psychoanalysis succeeds in meeting hem: For psychoanalysis does deepen our understanding of psychological laws, improve the predictability of action in principle, and receive inductive support on the special sense which is appropriate to interpretative practices.
Furthermore, to the extent that psychoanalysis may be seen as structured by and serving well-defined needs for explanation, there is proportionately diminished reason for thinking that its legitimation turns on the analysand’s assent to psychoanalytic interpretation, or the transformative power (whatever it may be) of these. Certainly it is true that psychoanalytic explanation has a reflective dimension lacked by explanations in the physical sciences: Psychoanalysis understands its object, the mind, in the very terms that the mind employs in its unconscious workings (such as its belief in its own omnipotence). But this point does not in any way count against the objectivity of psychoanalytic explanation. It does not imply that what it is for a psychoanalytic explanation to be true should be identified, pragmatically, with the fact that an interpretation may, for the analysand who gains self-knowledge, have the function of translating their directed-causes to set about unconscious mentality into a proper conceptual form. Nor does it imply that psychoanalysis’ attribution of unconscious content needs to be understood in anything less than full-bloodedly realistic terms. =truth in psychoanalysis may be taken to consist in correspondence with an independent mental reality, a reality that is both endorsed with ‘subjectivity’ and in many respects puzzling to its owner.
In the twentieth-century, the last major, self-consciously naturalistic school of philosophy was American ‘pragmatism’ as exemplified particularly in the works of John Dewey (1859-1952). The pragmatists replaced traditional metaphysics and epistemology with theories and methods of the sciences, and grounded their view of human life in Darwin’s biology. Following the second world war, pragmatism was eclipsed by logical positivism and what might be called ‘scientific’ positivism, a philosophy of science as the defining characteristic of all scientific statements. Ernst Mach is frequently regarded as the founder of logical positivism, however, in his book The Conservation of Energy, that only the objects of sense experience have any role in science: The task of physics is ‘the discovery of the laws of the connection of sensations (perceptions): And ‘the intuition of space is bound up with the organization of the senses . . . (so that) we are not justified in ascribing spatial properties to things which are not perceived by the senses’. Thus, for Mach, our knowledge of the physical world is derived entirely from sense experience, and the content of science is entirely characterized by the relationships among the data of our experience.
Nevertheless, pragmatism is a going concern in philosophy of science. It is often aligned with he view that scientific theories are not true or false, but are better or worse instruments for prediction and control. For Charles Peirce (1839-1914) identifies truth itself with a kind of instrumentality. A true belief is the very best we could do by way of accounting for the experiences we have, predicting the future course of experience, etc.
Peirce (1834-1914) called the sort of inference which concludes that all A’s are B’s because there are no known instances to the contrary ‘crude induction’. It assumes that future experience will not be ‘utterly at variance’ with past experience. This is, Peirce says, the only kind of induction in which we are able to infer the truth of a universal generalization. Its flaw is that ‘it is liable at any moment to be utterly shattered by a single experience’, that is to say, that warranted belief is possible only at the observational level. Induction tells us what theories are empirically successful, and thereby what explanations are successful. But the success of an explanation cannot, for historical reasons, be taken as an indicator of its truth.
The thesis that the goal of inquiry is permanently settled belief, and the thesis that the scientific attitude is a disinterested desire for truth, are united by Peirce’s definition of ‘true’. He does not think it false to say that truth is correspondence to reality, but shallow - a merely nominal definition, giving no insight into the concept. His pragmatic definition identifies the truth with the hypothetical ideal, which would be the final outcome of scientific inquiry were it to continue indefinitely. ‘Truth is that concordance of . . . [a] statement beliefs’: any truth more perfect than this destined conclusion, any reality more absolute than what is thought in it, is a fiction of metaphysics’. These reveal something both of the subtlety and of the potential for tension, without Peirce’s philosophy. His account of reality aims at a delicate compromise between the undesirable extremes of transcendentalism and idealism, his account of truth at a delicate compromise between the twin desiderata of objectivity and (in-principle) accessibility.
The question of what is and what is not philosophy is not a simply a query of classification. In philosophy, the concepts with which we approach the world themselves become the topic of enquiry. A philosophy of a discipline such as history, physics, or law seeks not so much to solve historical, physical, or legal questions, as to study the concepts that structure such thinking,. And to lay bare their foundations and presuppositions. In this sense philosophy is what happens when a practice becomes self-conscious. The borderline between such ‘second-order’ reflection, and, ways of practising the first-order discipline itself, is not always clear: Philosophical problems may be tamed by the advance of a discipline, and the conduct of a discipline may be swayed by philosophical reflection. But the doctrine neglects the fact that self-consciousness and reflection co-exist with activity. At different times there has been more or less optimism about the possibility of a pure or ‘first’ philosophy, taking from the stand-point from which other intellectual practices can be impartially assessed and subjected to logical evaluation and correction, in that he task of the philosopher of a discipline would then be to reveal the correct method and to unmask counterfeits. Although this belief lay behind much ‘positivist’ philosophy of science, few philosophers now subscribe to it. The contemporary spirit of the subject is hostile to any such possibility, and prefers to see philosophical reflection as continuous with the best practising employment of intellectual fields of rationalizations intended reasons for enquiry.
Nonetheless, the last two decades have been an intermittent interval of extraordinary change in psychology. Cognitive psychology, which focuses on higher mental processes like reasoning, decision making, problem solving, language processing and higher-level visual processing, has become a - perhaps the - dominant paradigm among experimental psychologists, while behaviouristic oriented approaches have gradually fallen into disfavour. Largely as a result of this paradigm shift, the level of interaction between the disciplines of philosophy and psychology has increased dramatically.
One of the central goals of the philosophy of science is to provide explicit and systematic accounts of the theories and explanatory strategies exploited in the sciences. Another common goal is to construct philosophically illuminating analyses or explications of central theoretical concepts invoked in one or another science. In the philosophy of biology, for example, there is a rich literature aimed at understanding teleological explanations, and there has been a great deal of work on the structure of evolutionary theory and on such crucial conceptual perspectives proposed in biological function.
Typically, a functional explanation in biology says that an organ χ’ is present in an animal because ‘χ’ has function ‘F’. What does that mean?
Some philosophers maintain that an activity of an organ counts as a function only if the ancestors of the organ’s owner were naturally selected, partly because they had similar organs that performed the same activity. Thus, the historical-causal property, having conferred a selective advantage, is not just evidence that ‘F’ is a function, it is constitutive of F’s being purposively functional.
If this reductive analysis is right, a functional explanation turns out to be sketchy causal explanation of the origin of ‘χ’. It makes the explanation scientifically respectable, ‘because’ it indicates a weak relation of partial causal contribution.
However, this construal is not satisfying intuitively. To say that ‘χ’ is present because it has a function is normally taken to mean, roughly, that ‘χ’ is present it is supposed to do something useful. Yet, this normal interpretation immediately makes the explanation scientifically problematic, because the claim that ‘χ’ is supposed to do something useful appears to be normative and non-objective.
The philosophy of physics is another area in which studies of this sort have been actively pursued. In undertaking this work, philosophers need not ans do not assume that there is anything wrong with the science they are studying. Their goal is simply to provide accounts of the theories, concepts and explanatorial strategies that scientists are using - accounts that are more explicit, systematic and philosophically sophisticated than the often rather rough-and-ready accounts offered by the scientists themselves.
This account of intentionality is characteristic to perception and action, so that the paradigms that are usually founded of belief or sometimes beliefs and desires are key to understanding intentionality whose representation in a special sense of that word that we can explain intentional states in general, as having both a propositional content and a psychological mode, and the psychological mode which determines the direction with which the intentional state represents its conditions of satisfaction. These considerations are characteristic of all those intentional states with propositional content which do not have a mind-to-world or world-to-mind direction: All of these contain beliefs and desires, and the component beliefs and desires do have an initial direction of fit.
Once, again, of intentionality that the paradigm cases discussed are usually beliefs or sometimes beliefs and desires. However, the biologically most basic forms of intentionality are in perception and intentional action. These also have certain formal features which are not common to beliefs and desires. Consider a case of perception. Suppose I see my hand in front of my face. What are the conditions of satisfaction? First, the perceptual experience of the hand in front of my face has as its condition of satisfaction that there is a hand in front of my face. Thus far the condition of satisfaction is the same as the belief that there is a hand in front of my face. Bu t with perceptual experience there is this difference: In order that the intentional content be satisfied, the fact that there is a hand in front of my face must cause the very experience whose intentional content is that there is a hand in front of my face. This has the consequence that perception has a special kind of condition of satisfaction that we might describe as ‘causally self-referential’. The full conditions of satisfaction of the perceptual experience are, first, that there be a hand in front of my face, and second, that there is a hand in front of my face caused the very experience of whose conditions of satisfaction it forms a part. We can represent this in our canonical form as:
Visual experience (that there is a hand in front of my face
` and the fact that there is a hand in front of my face is causing
this very experience.)
Furthermore, visual experience have a kind o conscious immediacy not characteristic of beliefs and desires. A person can literally be said to have beliefs and desires while sound asleep. But one can only have visual experiences of a non-pathological kind when one is fully awake and conscious because the visual experience are themselves forms of consciousness.
Event memory is a kind of halfway house between the perceptual experience and the belief. Memory, like perceptual experience Has the causally self-referential feature. Unless the memory is caused by the event, of which it is the memory. It is not a case of satisfied memory, but unlike the visual experience, it need not be conscious. One can be said to remember something while sound asleep. Beliefs, memory and perception all have the mind-to-world direction and memory and perception have the world-to-mind direction of causation.
Increasingly, proponents of the intentional theory of perception argue that perceptual experience is to be differentiated from belief not only in terms of attitude, but also in terms of the kind of content the experience is an attitude towards ascribing contents to be in a certain set-class of content-involving states is for attributes of these states to make the subject as rationally intelligible as possibility, in the circumstances. In one form or another, this idea is found in the writings of Davidson (1917-2003), who introduced the position known as ‘anomalous monism’ in the philosophy of mind, instigating a vigorous debate over the relation between mental and physical descriptions of persons, and the possibility of genuine explanation of events in terms of psychological properties. Although Davidson is a defender of the doctrine of the ‘indeterminacy of radical translation and the ‘indisputability of references, his approach has seemed to many to offer some hope of identifying meaning as a respectable notion, even within a broadly ‘extentionalized’ approach to language. Davidson is also known for rejection of the idea of a ‘conceptual scheme’, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is anything to translate.
Intentional action has interesting symmetries and asymmetries to perception. Like perceptual experiences, the experiential component of intentional action is causally self-referential. If, for example, I am now walking to my car, then the condition of walking to my car, then experience is that satisfaction of the present experience is that there be certain bodily movements, and that this very experience of acting cause those bodily movements. What is more, like perceptual experience, the experience of acting is typically a conscious mental event. However, unlike the perception memory, the direction of the experience of acting is world-to-mind. My intention will only be fully carried out if the world changes so as to match the content of the intention (hence world-to-mind direction (hence world-to-mind proves directional) and the intention will only be fully satisfied if the intention itself causes the rest of the condition of satisfaction, hence, mind-to-world direction of causation.
Increasingly, proponents of the intentional theory of perception argue that perceptual representational experience is to be differentiated from belief not only in terms of attitude, but, in terms of the kind of content that experience is an attitude toward a better understanding a person’s reasons for the array of emotions and sensations to which he ids subject: What he remembers and what he forges, and how he reasons beyond the confines of minimal rationality. Even the content-involving perceptual states, which take into consideration, a fundamental role in individuating content. This, however, cannot be understood purely in terms relational to minimal rationality. A perception of the world as being a certain way is not, and could not be, under a subject’s rational control. Though it is true and rational that perceptions give reasons for forming beliefs, the beliefs for which they fundamentally provide reasons - observational beliefs about the environment - have contents which can only be elucidated by referring back to perceptual representations belonging of experience. In this respect (as in others), perceptual states differ from those beliefs and desires that are individuated by mentioning that they provide reasons for judging or doing: For frequently, these latter judgements and actions can be individuated without reference back to the states that provide reasons for them.
We are acutely aware of the effects of our own memory, its successes and its failures, so that we have the impression that we know something about how it functionally operates. But, with memory, as with most mental functions, what we are aware of is the outcome of its operation and not the operation itself. To our introspections, the essence of memory is language based and intentional. When we appear as a witness in court then the truth, as we are seen to report it is what we say about what we intentionally retrieve. This is, however, a very restricted view o memory albeit, with a distinguished history. William James (1842-1910), an American psychologist and philosopher, whose own emotional needs gave him an abiding interest in problems of religion, freedom, and ethics: The popularity of these themes and his lucid and accessible style made James the most influential American philosopher of the beginning of the 20th century. Nonetheless, James said, that ‘Memory proper is the knowledge of a former state of mind after it has already once dropped from consciousness, or rather it is the knowledge of an event, or fact, of which meantime we have not been thinking, with the additional consciousness that we have thought or experienced it before’.
One clue to the underlying structure of our memory system might be its evolutionary history. We have no reason to suppose that a special memory system evolved recently or to consider linguistic aspects of memory and intentional recall as primary. Instead, we might assume that such features are later additions to a much more primitive filing system. From this perspective one would view memory ass having the primary function of enabling us (the organism as a whole, that is, not the conscious self) to interpret the perceptual world and helping us to organize our responses to changes that place in the world.
Considerations or other aspects in the content of memory are those with which contain the capacity to remember: to (1) recall past experiences, and (2) retain knowledge that was acquired in the past. It would be a mistake to omit (1), for not any instance of remembering something is an instance of retaining knowledge. Suppose that as a young child you saw the Sky Dome in Toronto, but you did not know at the time which building it was. Later you learn what the Sky Dome is, and you remember having seen it when you were a child. This is an example of obtaining knowledge of a past fact - by recalling a past experience, but not an example of retaining knowledge because at the time you were seeing it you did not know you were since you did not know what the Sky Dome was or represented. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to omit (2), for not any instance of remembering something is an instance of recalling the past, let alone a past experience. For example, by remembering my telephone number, I retain knowledge of a past fact, and by remembering the date of the next elections, of a future fact.
According to Aristotle (De Memoria), memory cannot exist without imagery: We remember past experiences by recalling images that represent therm. This theory - the representative theory of memory - was also held by David Hume and Bertrand Russell (1921). It is subject to three objections, the first of which was recognized by Aristotle himself. That if what I remember is an image present to me now, how can it be that what I remember belongs to the past, how can it be that it is an image now present to my mind? According to the second objection, we cannot tell the difference between images that represent actual memories and those that are mere figments of the imagination. Hume suggested two criteria to distinguish between these two kinds of images, vivacity and orderliness, and Russell a third, an accompanying feeling of familiarity. Critics of the representative theory would argue that these criteria are not good enough, that they do not allow us to distinguish reliably between true memories and mere imagination. This objection is not decisive, as it only calls for a refinement of the proposed criteria. Nevertheless, the representative theory succumbs to the third objection, which is fatal: Remembering something does not require an image. In remembering their dates of birth, or telephone numbers, people do not, at least not normally, have an image of anything. In developing an account of memory, we must, therefore, proceed without making images an essential ingredient. One way of accomplishing this is to take the thing that is remembered to be a proposition, the content of which may be about the past, present, or future. Doing so would provide us with an answer to the problem pointed out by Aristotle. If the position we remember is a truth about the past, then we remember the past by virtue of having a cognation of something present - the proposition that is remembered.
What, then, are the necessary and sufficient conditions of remembering a proposition, of remembering that ‘p’? To begin with, believing that ‘p’ is not a necessary condition, for at a given moment ‘t’, I, may not be aware of the fact that I still remember that ‘p’ and thus, do not believe that ‘p’ at ‘t’. It is possible that I remember that ‘p’ but, perhaps because I gullibly trust another person’s judgement, unreasonably disbelieve that ‘p’. It will, however,, be helpful to focus on the narrower question: Under which conditions is S’s belief that ‘p’ an instance of remembering that ‘p’? It is such an instance only if ‘S’ either (1) previously came to know that ‘p’, or (2) had an experience that put ‘S’ in a position subsequently to come to know that ‘p’. Call this the ‘original input condition’. Suppose, having learned in the past that 12 x 12 = 144 but subsequently having forgotten it. I now come to know again that 12 x 12 = 144 by using a pocket t calculator. Here the original input condition is fulfilled, but obviously this is not an example of remembering that 12 x 12 = 144. Thus, a further condition is necessary: For S’s belief that ‘p’ to be a case of remembering that ‘p’, the belief must be connected in the right way with the original input. Call this the ‘connection condition’. According to Carl Ginet (1988), the connection must be ‘epistemic’, at any time since the original input at which S acquires evidence sufficient for knowing that ‘p’, ‘S’ already knew that ‘p’. Critics would dispute that a purely epistemic account of the connection condition will suffice. They would insist that the connection be ‘causal’:' For ‘S’ to remember that ‘p’, there must be an uninterrupted causal chain connecting the original input with the present belief.
Not every case of remembering that ‘p’ is one of knowing that ‘p’, although I remember that ‘p’ I might not believe that ‘p’, and I might not be justified in believing that ‘p’, for I might have information that undermines or casts doubt on ‘p’. When, however, do we know something by remembering it? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowing that ‘p’ on the basis of memory? Applying the traditional conception of knowledge, we may say that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ on the basis of memory just in case (1) ‘S’ clearly and distinctly remembers that ‘p’: (2) ‘S’ believes that ‘p’ and (3) ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’. (Since (1) entail ss that ‘p’ is true, adding a condition requiring p’s truth is not necessary.) Whether this account of memory knowledge is correct, and how it is to be fleshed out in detail, are questions which concern the nature of knowledge and epistemic justification in general, and thus, will give rise to much controversy.
Memory knowledge is possible only if memory is a source of justification. Common-sense assumes it is. We naturally believe that, unless there are specific reasons for doubt, we believe that we do remember that we seem to remember, unless it is undermined or even contradicted by our background beliefs. Thus, we trust that we have knowledge of the past, however, would argue that this trust is ill-founded. According to a famous argument by Bertrand Russell (1927), it is logically possible that the world sprang into existence five minutes ago, complete with our memories and evidence, since as fossils and petrified trees, suggesting a past of millions of years. If it is, then, there is no logical guarantee that we actually do remember what we seem to remember. Consequently, so the sceptics would argue, there is no reason to trust memory. Some philosophers have replied to this line of reasoning by trying to establish that memory is necessarily reliable, that it is logically impossible for the majority of our memory beliefs to be false. Alternatively, our commonsense view may be defended by pointing out that the unreasonable to trust memory - does not follow from its premise, memory fails to provide us with a guarantee that we seem to remember is true. For the argument to be valid, it would have to be supplemented with a further premise: For a belief to be justified, its justifying reason must guarantee its truth. Many contemporary epistemologists would dismiss this premise as unreasonably strict. One of the chief reasons for resisting it is that accepting it is harder more reasonable than our trust in particular, clear and vivid deliverance of memory. To the contrary, accepting these as true would actually appear less error prone than accepting an abstract philosophical principle which implies that our acceptance of such deliverance is justified.
These altering distinctions of forms of memory is a crude one, and seems uncategorized by the varying degrees of enabling such terms as ‘conscious’ and ‘explicit’ are so cloud-covered. Their shadowy implication, is well known, according to Schacter, McAndrews and Moscovitch, 1988, have in accordance with, the memory loss or amnesia is an inability to remember recent experiences (even from the very recent past) and to learn various but limited resultants amounts in types of information, and dilate upon features from selective brain damage that leaves perceptual, linguistic, and intellectual skills abounding with the overflowing emptiness of being and nothingness. Memory deficit misfunction have traditionally been studied using techniques designed to elicit explicit memories. So, for example, memory-loose persons in that these amnesic people, might be instructed or otherwise asked to think back to a learning episode and either recall information from that intermittent interval of their lives, or say whether a presented item had previously been encountered in the episodic period of learning. That being said, is that the very same persons who performed uncollectible afflicted in the loose of decayed or deadened or lifeless memory cells. The acquisition of skills is a case in point, and there is considerable experimental evidence showing the consensus of particular amnesic implications over a series of learning episodes. Although, a striking example is the densely amnesic unfortunates who learned how to use a personal computer over numerous sessions, despite declaring at the beginning of each session that he had never used a computer before. In addition to this sort of capacity to learn over a succession of episodes, amnesics have performed well on single-short-lived episodes (such as completing previously shown words given to phraselogic 3-letter cues). So just as these amnesic people clearly reveal the difference between conscious and nonconscious memory, but similar dissociations can be observed in normal subjects, as when performances on indirect tasks reveal the effects of prior events that are not remembered.
Basely, the memory, as that of enabling us to interpret the perceptual world and helping us to organize our responses to the challenges of change, that take place in the world. For both functions we have to accumulate experiences in a memory system in such a way as to enable the productive access of that experience at the appropriate times. The memory, then, can be seen as the repository of experience. Of course, beyond a certain age, we are able to use our memories in different ways, both to store information and to retrieve it. Language is vital in this respect and it might be argued that much of socialization and the whole of schooling are devoted to just such an extension of an evolutionary (relatively) straightforward system. It will follow that most of the operation of our memory system is preconscious. That is to say, consciousness only has access to the product of the memory processes and not to the processes themselves. The aspects of memory that we are conscious of can be seen as the final state in a complex and hidden set-class of operations.
How should we think about the structure of memory? The dominant metaphor is that of association. Words, ideas, and, emotions are seen as being linked together in an endless, shapeless, and formless entanglement. That is, the way our memory can appear to us if we attempt to reflect on it directly. However, it would be a mistake to dwell too much on the problems of consciousness and imagine that theory represent the inner sanctions of structure. For a cognitive psychologist interested in natural memory phenomena there were a number of reasons for bing deeply dissatisfied with theories based on associative set-classes with which are entangling nets. One ubiquitous class of memory failure seemed particularly troublesome. This is the experience of being able to recall a great deal of what we know able an individual other than their name. One such referent classification would entail, that ‘I know the face, but I just can’t place the name’, if someone else produced name we, may have, perhaps, been able to retrieve the rest of the information needed.
How might various theories of memory account for this phenomenon? First we can take an associative network approach, and the idealized associative network, concepts, such as the concept of a person, are represented as nodes, with associated nodes being connected through links. Generally speaking, the links define the nature of the relationship between nodes, e.g., the subject-predicate distinction. Suppose that the name of the person we are trying to recall is Bill Smith. We would have a Bill Smith node (or a node corresponding to Bill Smith) with all the available information concerning Bill Smith being linked to form some kind of propositional Smith’s name. Now, failure to retrieve Bill Smith’s name, while at the same time Bill Smith, would have to due to an inability to traverse the links to the Bill Smith node. However, this seems contradictory - content addressability. That is to say, given that any one constituent of a propositional representation can be accessed, the propositional node, and consequently all the other nodes link to it, should also be accessible. Thus, if we are able to recall where Bill Smith lives, where he works, whom he is married to, then, we should, in principle, be able to access the node representing his name. To account for the inability to do so, some sort of temporality ‘blocking’ of content addressability would seem to be needed. Alternatively, directionality of links would hae to be specified, though this would have to be done on a morally justified basis.
Next, we are to consider schema approaches. In that, schema models stipulate that there are abstract representations, i.e., schemata, in which all invariant information concerning any particular thing are represented. So that we would have a person schema for Bill Smith, that would contain all the invariant information about him. This would include his name, personality traits, attitudes, where he lived, whether he had a family, etc. It is not clear how one would deal with our example, least of mention, since some-one’s name is the quintessentially invariant property, then, given that it is known. It would have to be represented in the schema or out-line for that person. And, from our example, we knew that other invariant information, as well as variant, non-schematic information, e.g., the last talk he had given, were available for recall. This must be taken as evidence that the schema for Bill Smith was accessed. Why, then, were we unable to recall one particular piece of information that would have to be represented in the schema we clearly had access to? We would have to assume that within the person-schema or out-line for Bill Smith are sub-schema, one of which contained Bill Smith’s name, another containing the name of his wife, and so forth. We would further have to assume that access to the sub-schemata was independent and that, at the time in question, the one containing information about Bill Smith’s name was temporarily inaccessible. Unfortunately the concept of temporary inaccessibility is without precedent in schema theory and does not seem to be independently motivated.
Nonetheless, there are two other set-classes of memory problem that do not fit comfortably into the conventional frameworks. One is that of not being able to recall an event in spite of most detailed cues. This is commonly found when one partner is attempting to remind the other of a shared experience. Finally, we all have to experience of a memory being triggered spontaneously by something that was just an irrelevant part of the background for an event. Common triggers of such experiences are specific locales in town or country, scents and certain pieces of music.
What we learn from these kinds of events are that we need a model with which readily allows of their containing properties:
(1) Not all knowledge is directly retrievable;
(2) The central parts of an episode do not
necessarily cue recall of that episode;
(3) Peripheral cues, which are non-essential parts
of the contexts, can cue recall.
In response to these requirements, the frameworks of reference within which the model is couched is that of information processing. In trying to solve the problem, we first supposed, that memory consists of discrete units, or ‘records’, each containing information relevant to an ‘event’, an event being, for example, a person or a personal experience. Information contained in a record could take any number of forms, with no restrictions being placed on the way information is presented, on the amount being represented or on the number of records that could contain the same nominal information. Attached to each of these records would be some kind of access key. The function of this access key, is singular: It enables the retrieval of the record and nothing more. Only when the particular access key is used can the record, and the information contained therein, be retrieved. As with the record we felt that any type of information could be contained in the access key. However, two features would distinguish it from the record. First, the contents of the access key would be in a different form to that of the record, e.g., represented in a phonological or other central code. Second, the contents of the access key would not be retrievable.
The nature of the match required between the ‘description’ and a ‘head recordings’ will be a function of the type of information in the description. If the task is to find the definition of a word or information on a named individual then a precise match may be required at least for the verbal part of the description. We assume that the ‘head recordings’ are searched in parallel. On many occasions there will be more than one head recording that matches the description. However, we require that only one record be retrieved at a time. What is more, evidence in support of this assumption is summarized in Morton, Hammersley and Bekerian (1985). The data indicate that the more recent of two possibilities, in that records are retrieved. We conclude first that once a match is made the search process terminates and secondly, that the matching process is biassed in favour of the more recent of headings. There is, of course, no guarantee that the retrieved records will contain the information that is sought. The records my be incomplete or wrong. However, in such cases, or in the case that no record had been retrieved, there are two options: Either the search is continued or it is abandoned. If the search is to be continued then a new description will have to be formed, since searching again with the same description would result in the same outcome as before. Thus, there has to be a list of criteria upon which a new description can be based.
Retrieval depends on or upon a match between the description and the heading record. The relationship between the given cue and the description is open. It is clear that there needs to be a process of description formation which will pick out the most likely descriptors from the given cue. Clearly, for the search process to be rational the set of descriptors and the set-class of head recordings should overlap. The only reasonable state of affairs would be that the creation of head recordings and the creation of descriptions is the responsibility of the same mechanism.
By means of distributive normal forms, the Finnish philosopher Jaakko Hintikka (1929- ), wherein his early works ‘Distributive Normal Forms’ (1953) and ‘Forms and Content in Quantification Theory’ (in Two Papers on Symbolic Logic, 1955), Hintikka developed two logical theories which he has later applied to many different areas: The theory of distributive normal forms for quantification theory, and the theory of model sets which yields semantically motivated proof procedures for quantification theory and model logics.
Briefly, Hintikka has worked in a wide area, his work shows a great deal of conceptual and theoretical unity. This is partly due to the logical and semantical methods he uses, partly to the transcendental character (in the Kantian sense) of his philosophy. Hintikka has emphasized the role of rule-governed human activities in knowledge acquisition and in cognitive representation: His game-theoretical approaches to meaning is a case in point. The structures of such activities can be taken to provide the synthetic a priori features of our knowledge. In this respect Hintikka’s philosophy is Kantian in spirit.
However, since it cannot be the case of topic, in that all terms of a language are explicitly definable in that language - that would involve circularity - the most one could hope for from explicit definition between the distinction of theoretical and observational term s can sustain, at first glance, the prospects of finding explicit definitions for all theoretical terms appear inadequately depressed. Some theoretical terms - particularly those involved in functional identities - looks like the stenographical ‘product of mass and velocity’. But others are not explicitly definable, in the most fundamental scientific sense, is that, to define is to delimit. Thus, definitions serve to fix boundaries of phenomena or the range of applicability of terms or concepts. That whose range is to be delimited is called the ‘definiendum’, and that which delimits the ‘definiens’. Social science practices tend to focus on specifying application of concepts through ‘formal’ operational definitions. Philosophical discussions have concentrated almost exclusively on articulating ‘definitional forms’ for terms.
Definitions are ‘full’ if the ‘definiens’ completely delimits the ‘definiendum’, and ‘partly’ if it only brackets or circumscribes it. ‘Explicit definitions’ are full definitions where the ‘definintium’ and the ‘definiens’ are asserted to be equivalent. Theories or models which are so rich in structure that sub-portions are functionally equivalent to explicit definitions are said to provide ‘implicit definitions’. In formal context our basic understanding is provided by the ‘Beth definability theorem’, stating, not only provides fundamental understanding of explicit definition, but that relaxing conditions on explicit definition enable an understanding of Carnap’s notion of partial interpretation: whereas, explicit definitions fully specify (implicitly define) the referents of theoretical terms within intended models of the theory, creative partial definitions serve only to restrict the range of objects in intended models that could be the referents of theoretical terms.
As an individuation of theories, what determines whether theories T1 and T2 are instances of the same theory or distinct theories? By construing scientific theories as partially interpreted syntactical axioms systems TC, positivism made specific of the axiomatization individuating features of the theory. Thus, different choices of axioms T or alternations in the correspondence rules - say, to accommodate a new measurement procedure - resulted in a new scientific theory. Positivist’s also held th at axioms and corresponding implicitly defined the meaning of the theory’s description terms τ. Thus significant alterations in the axiomatization would result not only in a new theory T’C’ but one with changed meanings τ’. Kuhn and Feyerabend maintained that the resulting changes could make TC and T’C’ non-comparable, or ‘incommensurable’. Attempts to explore individuation issues for theories via meaning change or ‘incommensurability’, proved unsuccessful and have been largely abandoned.
Feyerabend’s differences with Kuhn are that first, that Feyerabend’s variety of incommensurability is more global, and cannot be localized in the vicinity of a single problematic term or even a cluster of terms, that Feyerabend holds that fundamental changes of theory lead to changes in the meaning of all the terms in a particular theory. The other significant difference concerns the reason for incommensurability. Whereas, Kuhn thinks that incommensurability stems from specific translational difficulties involving problematic terms, Feyerabend’s variety of incommensurability seems to result from a kind of extreme holism about the nature of meaning itself.
One significant point of agreement between Kuhn and Feyerabend is that neither thinks that incommensurability is incomparability, in that, both countenance, and indeed recommend, alternative modes of comparison. Feyerabend says, that ‘the use of incommensurable theories for the purpose of criticism must be based on methods which do not depend on the comparison of statements with identical constituents, such methods are readily available’. But, although, he mentions a number of methods, he does not explicate them in full. For example, he says that theories can be compared using the ‘pragmatic theory of observation’, according to which you attend to causes of the production of a certain observational sentence, than the meaning of that sentence. Further, he argues that we do not compare ,meanings: We investigate the conditions under which a structural similarity can be obtained’. Insisting that ‘there may be empirical evidence against [theory], and for another theory without any need for similarity of meaning. On a more sarcastic, though revealing, Feyerabend states: ‘Of course, some kind of comparison is always possible (for example, one physical theory may sound more melodious when read aloud to the accompaniment of a guitar than another physical theory). At any rate, he insists that ‘it is possible to use incommensurability theories for the purpose of mutual criticism,’ adding that this removes ‘one of the main ‘paradoxes’ of the approach,’ that he suggests: And finally, and uses the same analogy that Kuhn uses to explain a scientist’s ability to learn a new theory, that of a child learning a new language. Rather than translating between languages, ‘[W]e can learn a language or a culture from scratch, as a child learns them, without detour through our native tongue’.
Nevertheless, it is commonly supposed that definitions are analytic specifications of meaning. In some cases, such as stipulative definitions, this may be so, however, some philosophers allow specifications of meaning to be synthetic. Reduction sentences are often descriptions of measurement apparatus specifying empirical correlations between detector output readings and values for parameters. These are synthetic and are rarely mere specifications of meaning. The larger point is that specification of meaning is only one of many possible means for delimiting the ‘definiendum’. Specification of meaning seems tangential to the bulk of scientific definitional practice.
Definitions are said to be ‘creative’ if their addition to a theory expands its content, and non-creative, if they do not. More general, we can say that definitions are creative whenever the ‘definiens’ asserts contingent relations involving the ‘definiendum’. Thus definitions providing analytic specifications of meaning are non-creative. Most explicit definitions are non-creative, and hence, ‘eliminable’ from theories without loss of empirical content. One could realize the distinction so that definitions redundant of accepted theory or background belief in the scientific context are counted as non-creative. Either way, most other scientific expressions of empirical correlation. Thus, for purposes of philosophical analysis, suppositions that definitions are either non-creative or meaning specifications demand explicit justification. Much of the literature concerning incommensurability and meaning change in science turns on uncritical acceptances of such suppositions.
The issue of incommensurability remains a live one. It does not arise just for a logical empiricist account of scientific theories, but for any account that allows for the linguistic representation of theories. Discussions on linguistic meaning cannot be banished from the philosophical analysis itself, and its place is not about to be taken prominently in the daily work of science itself, and its place is not about to be taken over by any other representational medium. Therefore, the challenge facing anyone who holds that the scientific enterprise sometimes requires us to make a point-by-point linguistic comparison of rival theories is to respond to the specific semantic problems raised by Kuhn and Feyerabend. However, then the challenge is to articulate another way of putting scientific theories in the balance and weighing them against one another.
Such confusion abound in scientific and philosophical discourse of both ‘operational’ and ‘definitions’. The notion, first introduced by P.W. Bridgman (1938) with reference to non-creative explicit full definitions specifying meaning in terms of operation as preformed in the measurement process. Behaviourist social scientist’s expanded the notion to include creative partial definitions, and in practice most operational definitions can be cast as synthetic creative reduction sentences specifying empirical relations between measurement procedures and intervening variables or hypothetical or subject to social scientists respond that it’s just a matter of quibbling over semantics - a response appropriate to Bridgman’s sort of operational definitions but not to their own.
Many philosophers have been concerned with admissible ‘definitional forms’. Some require ‘real definitions’ - a form of explicit definition in which the ‘definiens’ equate the ‘definiendum’ with an essence specified as a conjunction Α1 ∧ . . . ∧ Αn of attributes. By contrast, ‘nomianl definitions’ use nonessential attributes. The ‘Aristotelian definitional form’ further requires that real definitions be hierarchical, where the species of a genus share Α1, . . . Αn-1, being differentiated only by the remaining essential attribute Αn. Such definitional forms are inadequate for evolving biological species whose essence may vary. ‘Disjunctive polytypic definitions’ allow changing essences by equating the ‘definiendum’ with a finite number of conjunctive essence. But future evolution may produce further new essences, so partially specified ‘potentially infinite disjunctive polytypic definitions’ were proposed. Such ‘explicit definitions’ fail to delimit the species, since they are incomplete. A superior alternative is to formulate reduction sentences for each reduction sentences for subsequently evolved essences.
Wittgenstein (1953) claimed that many natural kinds lack conjunctive essences: Rather, their members stand only in a family resemblance to each other, however, an important extension to the original theory of natural kinds provided by Putnam (1926- ) and Kripke (1940- ). These philosophers presented their account as applying to natural kind terms in ordinary language, than to terms of theoretical science. Typical examples are ‘water’, ‘gold’, and ‘lemon’. They claimed, on the basis of intuitive hypothetical cases, that the intention to refer to a natural kind determined by the possibly unknown real essence in part of a correct account of the normal use of these terms in ordinary language. If this is right, then it is certainly reasonable to extend the account to the technical uses of theoretical terms in science. If the account cannot be sustained for the case of ordinary language kind terms, appeal to it as an account of scientific terms will be more problematic.
We then have a conception of theory as essentially an embodiment of analogies, both formal and material, which describe regularities among the data of a given domain (models of data and phenomenal laws), with unalogies between these and models of data in other domains, and so on in a hierarchy of levels of a unifying theoretical system. The ‘meaning of theoretical terms’ is given by analogies with familiar natural processes (e.g., mechanical systems), or by hypothetical models (e.g., Bohr’s planetary atom). In either case, descriptive terms of the analogues are derived metaphorically.
Inn evaluating the Kripke-Putnam theory, the crucial point to note for present purposes is that it rests on a strong ontological presupposition: Contrary to Locke, a large class of ordinary language kind terms must actually pick out (more or less) the requisite sort of natural kind. (Unless, at any rate, the theory of natural kind is based on massive metaphysical delusion.) And, in addition, we must have some sense, in advance of scientific illumination of the real essence of a kind, whether that kind is a natural kind. Putnam claims explicitly, for example, that the stuff on Twin Earth would not have been water even if the explorers from Eartg had arrived before any means had been discovered for distinguishing H2O from XYZ. The intention to refer to the real nature preexists the characterization of that nature.
Suppe (1918) urged that natural kinds were constituted by a single kind-making attribute (e.g., being gold), and that which patterns of correlation might obtain between the kind-making attribute and other diagnostic characteristics is a factual matter. Thus issues of appropriate definitional form (e.g., explicit, polytypic, or cluster) are empirical, not philosophical questions.
Definitions of concepts are closely related to explications, where imprecise concepts (explicanda) are replaced by more precise ones (explicata). The explicandum and explicatum are never equivalent. In an adequate explication the explicatum will accommodate all clear-cut instances of the explicandum and exclude all clear-cut non-instances. The explicatum decides what to do with cases where application of the explicandum is problematic. Explications are neither real nor normative definitions and are generally creative. In many scientific cases, definitions function more as explications than as meaning specifications or real definitions.
What is still, to motive considerations throughout the prehensibility in study, has an existence or a place consist with an exact definitiveness for having distinct or certain limits, however, in later developments of Kuhn’s view, less emphasis is placed on what might be call ‘evaluative incommensurability’, and more of ‘linguistic incommensurability’. By 1983, Kuhn appeared to have moved away from evaluative incommensurability entirely, by saying that speaking of differences in ‘methods’ he states, that this version of the is the same as the ‘origin version’ of the incommensurability thesis, which he characterized as' ‘The claim that two theories are incommensurable is then the claim that there is no language, neutral or otherwise, into which both theories, conceived as sets of sentences, can be translated without residue or loss. Therefore, incommensurability equals untranslatability, what is it about scientific paradigms that preclude translation into a single common language, so that their claims can be set side by side and their points of agreement and disagreement isolated?
Meanwhile, it is, nonetheless, characteristic of intuition and Russell’s philosophy by ‘acquaintance’, that, at least of the philosophers who objected to direct realism, which states that certain familiar facts about illusion disprove the theory of perception, however, many versions of the argument which must be distinguished carefully, as some of these distinctions centre on the content of the premises (the kind of the appeal to illusion): Others centre on the interpretation of the conclusion.
A scratchy or crude statement of direct realism might cause to be heard as in perception, we sometimes directly perceive physical objects and their properties: We do not always perceive physical objects by perceiving something else, e.g., a sense-data, with which is given by the senses. There are, however, difficulties with this formulation of the view. For one thing a great many philosophers who are not direct realists would admit that it is a mistake to describe people as actually perceiving something other than a physical object. In particular, such philosophers might admit, we should never say that we perceive sense-data. To reveal information that way would be to suppose that we should model our understanding of our relationship to sense-data on our understanding of the ordinary use of perceptual verbs as they describe our relation to the physical world, and that is the last thing paradigm sense-datum theories should want. At least many of the philosophers who objected to direct realism would prefer to express what they were objecting to in terms of a technical (and, philosophically controversial) concept such as ‘acquaintance’. Using such a notion we could define direct realism this way: In veridical experience we are directly acquainted with parts, e.g., as, surfaces or constituents of physical objects. A less cautious version of the view might drop the reference to veridical experience and claim simply that in all experience we are directly acquainted with parts or constituents of physical objects.
Complex expressions, about the possibility of such a frame of reference we need to bear in mind that within the limited sense that their can be of either ‘reporting’ or ‘instituting’ equivalences among verbal or symbolic expressions, in form, definitions and either explicit or implicit.
A definition that institutive explains how an expression will be used henceforth. A definition that reports or gives to account of how an expression has been used, as an explicit definition explains, by means of words given in use, how an expression given in mention has been or will be used, for instance, The words ‘the cat’ in mention, ‘The cat’ is on the mat: The words ‘the cat’ in use: The cat is on the mat. An explicit definition explains how an expression has been or will be used by using it, and, usually in conjunction with the use of other expressions.
Dictionary definitions are reportive and explicit. Symbols introduced in technical writings are usually institutive and explicit, ads when a word is leaned in the context of its use, that context,. In effect, provides a reportive, implicit definition. Formal axiomatic systems, in which the meaning of each expression is gathered from its formal-logical relationship with the other expressions, provide institutive, implicit definitions.
This same course of thought seemingly makes Plato suggest that it is possible to have knowledge only about Forms, and that knowledge about sensible objects is impossible. Moreover, he also seems to hold sometimes that we cannot have about Forms that kind of cognition, belief or opinion, that we do have of sensibles. Yet, he allows that it is possible to make mistakes about Forms, and also to be a cognitive state as assembled of Form, that seems indistinguishable from what he seems obliged to call false belief or opinion. This idea, too, requires some kind of further explanation of the distinction between Forms and sensibles - a requirement that Plato seems to see some difficulty in satisfying.
Although in this phase of his work Plato concentrates on constructing a metaphysics that will make room for the possibility of knowledge, he does, however, at the same time pay some attention to the problems that are characteristic of the first phase of his epistemology. In the ‘Meno’, the ‘Phaedo’ and the ‘Republic’, he develops what has been called the ‘method of hypothesis’, which seems to be demonstrated unconditionally. In the ‘Meno’ and the ‘Phaedo’, he indicates that hypotheses are to be accepted only provisionally and not regarded as certain or unrevisable. In the ‘Republic’, however, he seems to maintain that one an somehow reach an ‘unhypothesized’ principle which will somehow serve as the basis for demonstrating everything hitherto accepted merely hypothetically. He apparently implies that what is demonstrated thereby will have to do only with Forms. He also makes a suggestion, not clearly explained, that this ‘principle’ has something to do with the Form of the Good. There is no general accepted interpretation of what Plato says, however, it seems to indicate that he accepted or was seriously considering some kind of ‘foundationalist epistemology’ position, which would start from some unshakable principle and derive from it the rest of what there is to be known about Forms. (As often, however, Plato seems to waver between thinking of the principle and what is to be derived as possessing propositional structure and treating them as non-propositionally structured objects.)
This method of hypothesis is earlier offered as something that is used by ‘dialectic’, the style of philosophizing that takes place though conversational questions and answers. This justifies introducing a more sophisticated concept to account for the domain, on which the analysis is repeated. The result of dialectic analysis is an integrated network of concepts which specified the proper domain of each and which preserves the legitimate content of earlier concepts in the final, most comprehensive and adequate concept.
