Intentionality and Thought

okay hello and welcome to this online lecture for my philosophy of mind class my name is dr. Richard Brown and this week we're going to be discussing intentionality and thoughts and just to remind you about what the general plan was from the previous introduction excuse me the previous introductory lecture it seems to me that if you want to know what the mind is the first thing you should do is start thinking about what kinds of properties the mind has come to some basic understanding of what those properties are and then once you have some grasp of the thing that you're interested in then you can ask questions about is it physical where does it belong and the in where is its place in reality and so forth so it seems to me that's sort of some basic features of mind identified by common-sense at least at the beginning three broad categories are thinking rationality and and thought and then sensation and perception consciousness seem to me to be somehow essential when we think about the mind these are the things that we generally talk about now there are other things that we'll talk about mental imagery for instance imagination the will memory so there's a lot of things here that are mental that might not be in one of these categories or maybe they are that's something we can discuss later but I think it's fruitful to try to get a handle on these three things and then after that we can ask questions about where in nature what would find them so this week we're talking about thinking next week sensation and perception the following week we'll talk about consciousness okay so turning to intentionality then which is a technical term that philosophers used it was introduced into the contemporary discussion by Franz Brentano in the late 18-hundreds but the basic idea of what we'll talk about here is that somehow in thought were able to represent the way the world is we're able to think about the way the world is we're able to think about and talk about things in the world so if I'm sitting here you walk in you say what Fresa Brown what are you thinking about that's a question that makes perfect sense and in answer I would most likely say I'm thinking about some thing in the world like I might say oh I'm thinking about where I have to be tomorrow or how to get to the Empire State Building or what time my appointment is or which thing I should do first this thing or the other thing so we we often say that our thoughts are about things that we our thoughts have content is a kind of common-sense way to describe this and whatever this property is this is the property that's called intentionality and notice that it's related to but not the same as the English word intentional which is much more prevalent in common sense English so intentional in this sense means you know what you meant to do what you did on purpose so I intentionally robbed the bank or I'd I'm intending to go to the bank tomorrow these are ways of talking about things that I'm meaning to do or meant to do and it's related to this technical philosophical notion of intentionality because in these cases when you intend to go to the bank you're sort of aimed at a certain action or a certain place you're intending or focused on going to that place as opposed to some other place and so the word intentionality in more the more philosophical technical sense is related to that in that to what we're trying to get at here is the idea that in thought we represent things in the world we think about the way the world is now the the question of intentionality one of the main questions is what are the things that we think about what are the objects of thoughts now as I said the word intentionality introduced by Franz Brentano in the 1800's but on one way of looking at this it's a very old question and so Parmenides who is an ancient philosopher of the pre-socratic era if you like this technical terminology that simply means that he's roughly 600 or so years before year 1 and so a very long time ago about 2,400 years ago Parmenides seemingly suggests that we're all thoughts are directed at some kind of object and that it's not even possible to think about something excuse me that it's not even possible to have a thought which is about nothing so for instance when you think about a unicorn that's not you're not thinking about nothing you're thinking about a particular kind of thing a horse with a horn which we'll talk about more in a second but you might wonder can you think about nothing and Parmenides makes the surprising claim that you cannot think about nothing because every time we try to do you end up thinking about something for instance if you think about just like a expanse of black space well that's something you're thinking of an expanse of black space if you think of oh just pure white everywhere well again you're thinking of something so maybe thought is essentially of something so it's an interesting question what is it that thought connects us to now Bronk brentano pointed out that whatever it is it has a funny kind of property the property that he called intentional in existence and one way of bringing out this property is by pointing out that all of these things that that we call intentional states which we would generally include under the category of thinking things like wandering or doubting or being angry notice you can be angry about something being jealous of something suspicious so there are many different kinds of intentional states believing and intending to do something and wanting that something happen those are kind of the paradigm ones that we'll focus on but there are many of them but one of the interesting things here is that you're able to think about non-existent objects for instance suppose that I think unicorns are flying horses you know I might wonder are unicorns flying horses I might be angry damn it unicorns were flying horses that just makes me mad for some reason now if I'm thinking this in some way or other we want to say my thought is false unicorns are not flying horses they in fact are horses with horns this is a common confusion that you see people making Pegasus is a flying horse a unicorn doesn't fly or at least not doesn't have wings it's not a winged horse but how is it false which thing is it that I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about that when excuse me which thing is it that I'm thinking about when I think the thought unicorns are flying horses well there are no unicorns so it doesn't seem like I'm thinking of a physical object so you might say well you know you're thinking of a mentally your concept of a unicorn but if it's my concept of a mental thing that I'm thinking of then how are you able to think about it because mine is private if it's a if it's a mental thing it doesn't seem like it's public in the way that allows us both to be thinking the same excuse me both to be thinking about the same thing when we talk about unicorns and you may be okay with that but that is too many people something that's puzzling here now if it's something else then what is it and how do we interact with it so famously Plato suggested that the things that we're thinking about turn out to be these abstract non-physical entities what he called the I dos the forms when you think about read says Plato you actually are in contact with this non-physical abstract item some other more contemporary philosophers like Frigga himself thought that this was the right way to think about intentional content that there are these non-physical abstract objects other people think no no there are actually physical things that you think about and still further other people give different answers so what exactly is it that we're connected with him thought has been a puzzle and just before we move on here I'll point out one other puzzle which is associated closely with these other things we've been talking about and what by the way if you read Bertrand Russell his account of Parmenides basically turns Parmenides in his view into an early precursor of this puzzle so the basic problem is if you have a thought about unicorns and you think well unicorns don't exist so it's natural to say look that is a thought and so it's directed to or about something in this case unicorns but if that's true then there's a question about how my thought can be true there's a question about how it can be the case that I can think about something if doesn't exist right so which thing am i saying doesn't exist now there may be an answer to that in fact what Russell claimed the answer was was that this thought is really simply should be cashed out in logical terms as saying there are no unicorns and that there's no mystery about how a thought like that could be true now Brentano himself thought that intentionality was very special this idea that you could represent something in thought even if the thing didn't exist that you could think about unicorns you could be looking for a unicorn you could be afraid that a unicorn is chasing you all of these things could be true even though there are no unicorns but it still seems as though there's something that you're afraid of if you're afraid of a unicorn chasing you that seems interesting so in if you're looking at things brentano thought this was a particularly nice place to look for something that was distinctive of mental phenomenon versus physical phenomena and in particular he thinks it does a better job than some of the other kinds of earlier accounts so Descartes famously claimed that physical things were extended in space and mental things were unacceptable occupies a certain area but my thought about the table doesn't seem to occupy a certain area so Descartes thought ah that's a nice distinction there brentano wonders if this distinction is accurate and this is where he engages in some phenomenology and that's what's kind of nice about reading his pieces he brings up some of these interesting phenomenological questions so for instance think about sounds or smelling and we're talking about the way that sounds or smells are presented to one in your own experience so brentano is clearly thinking of these things that's physical as you know when you when you see when you hear something you're hearing something that's physical and that's a view about perception that we're gonna be talking about in the next week's video but for now we'll just take it seems sort of common sensical but if you listen to a sound you you might think huh does it seem located in space somewhere like the sound itself does it seem like it's in a particular position in space in the same way that colors seem to be located in space for instance you cannot even I'm really imagine a color without imagining it occupying some volume or area of space or you imagine the color red spread out smeared out occupying an oval area square looking like a bunch of splotches either way though you have to imagine it taking up some space so you might think huh our sounds like that our colors and sounds the same in this respect what about smells can you imagine a smell but not imagine it being located in a particular volume of space now I don't know the answers to these questions and we're gonna talk about this stuff more fully in the section on perception and sensation but at this point we can just note that some people say yes some people say no and you can think about your own experience you know listen to something and then sort of notice that you're listening to it and try to see what it seems like to you it seems like a strange exercise but that's the idea here is to sort of get at these experiences as that are going on and think about what they're like now on the other hand so so Brentano says gee I don't know I'm not sure about this extension and unex tension thing because on the one hand it looks like there are physical things that might not be extended we could debate about that but even the fact that it's debatable Brentano suggests is already an indication that something a better distinction maybe didn't necessary and then on the other hand he says well maybe you know some people say that there are some mental things that are extended and things like bodily sensations hunger and pain seem to be prime candidates commonsensical II at least for this kind of stuff so it really feels like the pain is located in my knee that seems like it's extended over a certain area of my body that the pain and it's it's hard to imagine what it would be like to have that very same pain the knee pain without it being in the knee so maybe that's a mental thing that's extended somehow people will deny that but the point is that while we could look somewhere else because there's a debate here now so then one other thing that we might discuss here is the case of emotion so some people have said look and emotions don't seem like they're intentional states when you're afraid or something like that doesn't seem like there's something you're that the fear is directed at but Brentano actually says well that sounds strange to me because if you're afraid of a unicorn then your fear is directed at unicorns you're afraid of that thing so the emotions do look like they have intentionality and so perhaps they are his criterion is doing a better job here even if they are extended or whatnot and that's an interesting thing and we might wonder about the perceptions the bodily sensations and stuff do they have intentionality and that's going to be the kinds of questions that we'll discuss on the section on sensation and perception one of the questions is do they have intentionality and the another question is if they do which many philosophers think that they do is that all there is to them are they merely intentional States that's a very difficult question but we'll put that off until the next week so the one of the things I want to say right now though is that these issues are complex so whether you think that every mental state is intentional or if you think intentionality is the mark of the mental whether you think intentionality can be somehow itself physical or whether you think that because it's mental that means that somehow it's not part of the physical those are questions we'll discuss but whatever you say about them it's fairly clear that intentionality is a central feature of the mind and we're gonna have to offer some kind of account of what's going on when we think now one kind of account that has been given is to point out that a lot of our mental states that are intentional are dispositional in nature so for instance while I am sleeping I still believe that the earth is roughly spherical in shape I'm still afraid of flying I still hope that Hilary rode one run for office in 2016 but none of those things that I believe hope for or I'm afraid of are actually going on at the moment so while I'm sleeping I'm not literally in fear of flying but it still is true that I am afraid of flying and how do you make sense of that well it's easy if you were to wake me up and ask me I would say yeah I have a fear of flying so a lot of the things that we say about people are true because of these kinds of dispositional features namely what you would do or say notice it's not just what you would say it's also what you would do so part of why it's true that I have a fear of flying while I'm sleeping is that well you know if I were to start to go towards the airport to get on a plane I would have a certain feeling in my stomach and my pollen will be sweating so I have a disposition to behave in these various ways and a lot of the things that are intentional our dispositions in this way their dispositions to have our manifest certain kinds of behavior or other mental states but even though that is true and I think it's we have it's clear that that's true even though that's the case there are times when these intentional states actually occur in the mind there are times when the belief that I have dispositional II is actually there as for instance when I said while you're asleep you probably still believe the earth is spherical and you probably thought about that you probably had the thought that this vehicle and you price it yeah I do believe that so there are occasions where these thoughts are real occurring mental states and so we want to give a theory of what these things are what is it to say that an intentional state occurs in the mind and to give you an example of how such a theory would go I'm gonna give you one that I'm fairly familiar with it's one that's given by Jerry Fodor and it's gonna talk specifically about a paper of his from his 1978 propositional attitudes and I'm not gonna say that photo is right although I'm gonna go I do think that he's on the right track about this stuff and we'll talk about why that is a little bit later and if you disagree I'd like to hear it the basic idea though and the reason why I think this particular paper is worthwhile and gives us a nice framework to present this stuff in is because he goes through and draws out from a lot of discussion like two thousand years of discussion the various things that people have said about thinking and some of the things we think we know about it like its fundamental features and he lists five of these kinds of things if you want to give a theory of thought you should at least be able to account for these five things and so it's a way of throwing down the gauntlet and saying look if we want to be serious and give an account of intentionality then we've got to explain these five things so now because I like the history more than I like numerical ordering I'm gonna sort of present these semi historically as opposed to the way that voter does in his paper where he lists them in a certain order so I've listed the order tonight this would occur in his paper should anyone be looking in the book at the footer 1978 paper okay so but the first thing that we should note here is something that voter attributes to Aristotle and it's this basic idea which photo puts this way the objects of thought propositional attitudes they have logical form now what does that mean well what that means is that mental states intentional mental states mental states that have intentionality they interact causally with each other and these causal relations occur because of or at the very least respect the nature of logical properties embodied by the intentional contents of thought let me give you a kind of less technical example so suppose that I you know that I'm prone to headaches I tend to get migraines now suppose I have a strange belief I don't really have this belief but I could have it so like imagine that I have this weird belief suppose that I believe that's one way to get rid of headaches is by eating a pizza right when the headache is starting to occur so I have the following belief if I have a excuse me I have the following belief if I eat a pizza that will cure my headache so we can sort of state this as follows I believe the following conditional thing that curing a headache is causally dependent on eating this pizza okay now I also desire that my headaches cease right so I have it there's this another thing there which means that we're desiring that my headache seeks cease excuse me means that I want somehow the consequence of this conditional to be brought about logic dictates that one way of doing that is by getting the antecedent to occur so if you really believe that these two things are connected in this way if P then Q then the way you get Q is by bringing about P so I might form an intention to get and eat pizza now these things these intentional states are posited as the explanation for certain kinds of behavior of mine like certain things I say certain things I do if you see me kind of oh you know clutching my head and then suddenly going oh no and grabbing my phone and hitting the Domino's button on my speed dial that's a certain bit of behavior and you might say well what explains that behavior well common sense tells us ah what explains that behavior are these kinds of things the mental intentional states the things you believe the things you want in the things you intend to bring about sometimes that's called common-sense psychology sometimes that's called belief desire psychology whatever it is if we're gonna give a theory of thoughts we're gonna have to make sure that that when we're done the theory is able to account for this very basic datum namely thoughts with intentional content are part of the process of producing behavior okay so that's one criteria so here's another one and this one is associated with a person named Zeno ven ler and you don't need to know who Z no vendor is but one thing that you notice is that there is a kind of nice lining up of verbs which Express mental states on the one hand and verbs which Express linguistic items on the other hand so here's the way Fodor puts that the things we can be said to believe what hope regret etc are the very same things that we can be said to say assert state etc so a more common-sense way of sort of putting this is that we express thoughts in language and it looks like there is this interesting correspondence between the way we talk about thought thoughts or mental states and the things that we use to express those thoughts and you want to have a theory which accounts for that relationship okay so now well so hopefully that stuff is common sense mental states are somehow involved in producing behavior we express thoughts and language there's a parallelism the things we believe are the things we can state the things we wonder it of things we can ask there's this nice kind of relationship we want to give an account of that but now things are going to get a slightly bit more technical in the next two so on the one hand we have what Fodor calls frege's condition in this condition as he puts it is that a theory of thought or propositional attitudes should account for the opacity of thought and opacity is a weird technical concept thoughts being opaque we can bring out the contrast by thinking about beliefs so for instance suppose that you know that I believe that freaky Ziqi is a founding member AB Dipset the heart diplomats along of course with Jim Jones and Juelz Santana those other guys right so these are the Harlem diplomats aka Dipset so freaky Ziqi is a founding member of Dipset and I believe that that's a belief that I have now freaky Zeki is also known by Ezekiel Geils but suppose that I did not know that I looked that up on Wikipedia actually but suppose you never did that right so you just didn't know that Ezekiel Geils was the so-called given name of freaky Zeki so well then you could believe the first thing but not believe the second thing for instance you might come up to me and say hey professor Brown I didn't know you knew who Ezekiel Geils was and I say it's ego Geils who's that I don't I don't know who that is you might say oh he's the founding member of Dipset I said no no no that's freaky Zeki not this person who is zekiel guys I don't know that person now of course I'd be wrong because those are just two different names for the same person but the point is that somehow thoughts presents this person to me under a certain or mode thinking about this person as freaky zqij is not the same as thinking about this person as Ezekiel Kyle's a theory of propositional attitudes has got to say something about that and you've got to explain how it is that people can have these thoughts and yet even though they're thinking about the same person and it's not just people this happens all the time so you might believe that water is wet and you might not believe that h2o is wet right if you don't know that water is h2o so for instance Aristotle did not believe that h2o is what if you said hey Aristotle you believe h2o is way he would say no no I believe water is what water is though is the thing that's wet what is this h2o I have no idea what that is now of course again he would be wrong water is h2o so they pick out the same thing in some sense but that doesn't mean that you represent them the same way in thought thinking about water and water being wet doesn't necessarily mean you're thinking that h2o is way you might deny that you have that I don't believe that I don't believe in doubt about h2o okay and this is closely related to what's called the puzzle of informative identity statements because to be told that water is water is trivial and if you went to aristotle and said hey aristotle did you know water is water you'd say yeah i didn't know that as a matter of fact but if you said hey aristotle did you know water is h2o he would say no i didn't know that in fact i don't believe that water is h2o and blah blah blah so how can one be totally uninformative in the other be very very informative and yet in some sense they're both about the same stuff that's a puzzle now Freya has an answer to that puzzle the answer that he has is that the way that you think about something matters so someone who thirsty so let's take a person here and let's suppose that this person says oh I'm excuse me they're not saying this that keno doesn't have a thought bubble so I'm talking about thinking here not exactly speaking although obviously you can express that thought in language but I want to focus on the thinking so you're thinking to yourself oh so thirsty I want water and if you saw a glass sitting off yonder and you believe that the glass contained water you would most likely grab the glass because you want water and you're really thirsty right ah I believe that's water but of course that's consistent with having some other wacky beliefs like suppose that you believe that h2o is poison right you don't know that water is h2o you might have a weird belief that h2o is a strange chemical maybe it's the chemical they use in fracking its leeching into our water you know this h2o it's getting into our water our groundwater oh my god it's poison so you might think oh I need to make sure there's no h2o in my water because I don't want to be poisoned now of course that's not true h2o is water so you're having a very confused and thought but nonetheless you're having those two thoughts you're having the thought I don't want any h2o in my water and you can think that thought so we have to give some kind of account of what's going on that allows you to be able to have those account excuse me those kinds of thoughts now Frigga suggested that the solution here was to make a distinction a distinction between the reference of the thought on the one hand where the reference of the thought is the thing which is picked out in the world in this case that's h2o and on the other hand what he called the sense and in this is in German it's sin and be jointing and knowing people debate does I really mean sense and ok whatever so we'll just you sense and reference and so he can explain what's going on you see sense is this thing which is mental its concept maybe or something like that and you can have different senses associated with the same reference and Fraga thought that there is a special kind of relationship that the sense determined the reference and people have puzzled about what that means and we'll talk about that in a bit more detail in in in a second but commonsensical ii you can say yeah all right so you're thinking of this stuff in a certain way and it may pick out the same stuff right when you say that h2o is poison h2o picks out water and you're saying of water that is poisonous which is false so you have a false belief and we can explain why it's false but what's interesting is that even though water is h2o thinking water is poisonous is not the same thing as thinking h2o is poisonous that's a property that thoughts have that we want to account for now sometimes people use the word intention as contrasted with extension and that's unfortunate for us because we already have intention and intention to different words that sound the same and now we're adding a third word that sounds the same so we have intention in the sense of intentionality and we have intention in the sense of I meant to do that I intended to do that those are already two different senses of the word intention and now we have a third word intention with an S which is usually associated with language like this is a property of sentences is what people would usually say but we'll just sort of ignore that although if you care about that stuff and technically it's supposed to be a sentence which is intentional or a sentence was its extensional but we can say intention versus extension simply extension commonsensical II what the concept picks out in the world intention often thought to be the meaning of the word what the person knows about the stuff or what they associate with the thing that's picked out so if you think that h2o is poisonous then the intention of h2o is somehow including poisonous in it even though that ought not to be there it's not part of the reference so some people said AHA you see this intention extension thing is a very nice any interesting thing and you might say look look at the concept water so water has the referent or excuse me water has the extension h2o that's what it picks out that's what water refers to that's its reference but it also has this other thing called an intention you might think and the intention may be is something like this a clear odorless substance that fills the lakes and falls from the skies right so that sounds like a description and many people have thought yeah you see that's what intentions are intentions are kind of descriptions they describe things so that's what it means to be thinking about these things are these little descriptions here and so when you think about water you're thinking about h2o but the way that you think about h2o is by thinking of it as water the clear odorless substance that fills the lakes and falls from the sky now you could also think about it as h2o which is the more technical chemical concept so that many people will say yes you see these intentions are just like concepts there are the things in the mind that the thinker uses to think about the stuff external to you now the problem with this way of thinking can be brought out by noticing that many people have thought thinking has this kind of relational character to it and so that if you look at the way we talk about beliefs oh professor Brown believes that Fodor is on the right track about propositional attitudes that's something that I believe and it looks like it expresses a relation it just looks like it right some one thing professor Brown that's me the other thing the relation believing it looks like you have you know it's like Sally loves Jesse and you have the relation of loving relating Sally on the one hand and Jesse on the other hand and so here you might have people have thought a relation the believing relation which is holding between me on the one hand and the thing that I believe now some people have said the thing that I believe is a kind of abstract object a proposition or a fact or something that's abstract in that way for instance Russell thought that when you believe that these kinds of things you actually are related to this abstract object which is composed of the thing the person themselves in a weird way and you're attributing to that person a certain property so you kind of just have this relation to the thing and you're saying of the thing it has this property and that's sort of the intentional content of the thought how do we make sense of that is what's the right way of talking about this relational aspect of thought even more disturbingly it was pointed out by saul kripke that it doesn't seem as though intentions can be descriptions or at least that there are some kinds of cases where we have thoughts that are what people call singular thoughts thoughts that are about a particular person and pick them out in a way that doesn't seem to depend on any kind of description so suppose that you have the following thought suppose that you think Richard Brown is my favorite philosopher with a youtube channel that's a very nice thought I wish more people had that thought so in this thought that you're thinking we have two different ways of thinking about me Richard Brown so on the one hand it seems that you're thinking about me as Richard Brown that seems the pick that's like my name and on the other hand you're employing this kind of description my favorite philosopher was a YouTube channel and crickey gives a lot of arguments which suggests that these two come apart that they don't behave the same way and so therefore cants no description is really gonna be the thing which matters for picking objects out here's a kind of easy way to illustrate this is one of trapeze arguments so here are two different thoughts and they seem like they mean different things and it seems like they have different truth conditions so for instance Richard Brown might not have been Richard Brown that seems like close to contradictory that I might not have been me how possibly even be the case that I wasn't me that seems weird but the seconds sentence seems easily possible easily true excuse me not easily true but easily possibly true so Richard Brown might not have been my favorite philosopher on YouTube well I don't know I might never have started a YouTube channel you know perhaps if things had gone slightly differently I just thought Oh YouTube's for suckers I'll never start a YouTube channel and if that had happened I would have never been on YouTube so I couldn't have been your favorite philosopher on YouTube but it's still what still would be the case that I'd be Richard Brown I'd still be me whether or not I have this channel on YouTube so and you can do this with any kind of description you might associate with me oh the philosopher I saw on philosophy TV oh the philosopher that err who talks about higher order theories a lot no the philosopher who talks about higher order representations of representations and zombies and bla bla bla well you know someone else could have been the person talking about those things I may have never gone in the philosophy I may have just decided to be a postman or decided to be a machine operator or a woodworker or who knows what so if those had been those alternate scenarios had played out I would still be me whether I was a philosopher or not so any kind of description you associate with me you can say well that comes apart and you can imagine me not having that but then the question is how are you picking me out because you know the description isn't doing it we just said it's false in this hypothetical scenario now what this has taken what this shows according to many people is that even though it's true that we think about things maybe in a certain way it's also true that it seems that we think about them kind of immediately or there's some kind of connection between us and the thing that we think about this relational kind of thing all right and we can bring this out it's not only true of names many people have thought it but also true of many of our thoughts thoughts about what are called natural kinds a natural kind is a technical term and what is supposed to pick out is that there are these kind of groups of things in the world that are there naturally like a group of things out of water it's sort of just naturally a thing water it's a kind of thing gold Tigers you know these are the traditional examples so natural kinds are very interesting and it turns out that people like Kripke and people like Hilary Putnam have argued that these kinds of thoughts are surprisingly similar to the kinds of thoughts about people and individuals in other words singular thoughts that we were just looking at so one way of illustrating what's at stake here is with putnams famous twin earth thought experiment so you know it's science fiction but it's science fiction that's supposed to help us get clear about what's going on in these cases so we're to imagine that we're getting a spaceship and we fly to Mars people have been telling us that they've been finding evidence of water on Mars so suppose that they find a big frozen chunk of ice and they go and they get it and they want to look at it and they bring it and it melts and it turns into water and we go look at that that's fantastic there's water on Mars it's amazing and then suppose that we start doing our tests on it and we discover that this substance is not h2o suppose that we come up with a name for what it is Putnam imagines that it's a very long and complicated chemical structure abbreviated by X Y Z now it certainly seems possible that we could that this could happen right that we'd find something that looks just like water but it's actually chemically different than water fool's gold looks just like gold but it's not the same chemical compound and there are other examples of stuff like that where it looks just like the other thing but isn't because it's micro physical nature the way it is at a micro physical scale is different it's a different thing so now if that's the case now imagine you know we go further you know past Mars let me go to some other planet and we find out an advanced civilization much like our own and we can sort of spice up the science-fiction by imagining that these people speak a version of our language and that they have stuff that they call water and that they drink and that falls from the sky and that is in the oceans and lakes and which they make cubes of and put into their drinks and etc and etc and suppose that they call that stuff water now suppose also that it's really X Y Z so puting them spend some time saying well we would say about water means X Y Z over there and by water they mean X Y Z and so far than so on but here by water we mean h2o so that's all very interesting but the twist of this sort of science fiction is that we imagine that you're kidnapped and taken to this twinners place and we are to imagine that you know it's at a time before anyone knows anything about the microstructure of anything around them so that neither on earth nor this place will call twin earth do people know that water is h2o or they don't know that it's not and they don't know that water is X Y Z and they don't know that's not they just haven't got to that stage yet so in the 1500s you can imagine this so you're to imagine you you grew up on earth and now you're taking the twin earth and you wake up and you don't know that you've been kidnapped so you know you totally you think oh man I was out last night I just woke up at some at a friend's house so you come out and you go okay I really need some water feel funny I need water so you're looking around for water and you see someone with a glass and in the glass has is clear liquid and you point out and you go that's give me that water and your friend and says oh this water so you say give me that water and your friend says oh this water and now citron twin earth in that glass there's really XYZ but you're from Earth where water is h2o so the question for us is are you and your friend thinking the same thought are you thinking about the same stuff when you say give me that water Putnam thinks well since you grew up on earth your thoughts about water or thoughts about h2o whether you know that it's h2o or not your thoughts are about that kind of stuff the stuff that's on our planet that's what you've been thinking about your whole life so Putnam claims your thought is not about the stuff in the glass because the stuff in the glass is h2 excuse me the stuff in the glass is XYZ it's a different kind of substance now of course Putnam argues and many people think that if you spend enough time on twin earth eventually you will come to have thoughts about XYZ so if you are kidnapped and you like say I'm gonna stay here for a while so you'd like retire on twin earth then after well we don't know how long actually but after some amount of time eventually when you say I want some water you will come to mean I want some XYZ as opposed to I want some h2o but the point is that at the beginning you guys are in this very same mental state so everything physically about you is the same everything mentally about you is the same but you have different thoughts that's putt intuition that you're thinking different thoughts because one person is thinking about h2o and the other person is thinking about XYZ and what this shows according to Putnam is that the contents of our thoughts are importantly dependent on things external to the mind that you could have two people in exactly the same mental state and not know what they're thinking about because they may be in different environments and therefore their thoughts may be connected to different things and you would know that simply by looking inside their mind okay so those are they're all those are all the philosophically heavy challenging conceptually challenging criteria though the last one is simply that we can't neglect science this is something that further explicitly builds it and this is part of what I like about it so we we want to look at an empirical account of how mental processes work but I want to open a psychology book and look at the things that they say and we want our theory of thoughts to mesh with that we don't want to give a theory of thoughts that somehow is totally incompatible with the discoveries of cognitive science now how that's going to play out is not clear okay so those are the five criteria that further lays out though the Aristotle's condition Venn lers condition frege's condition the those are the three named ones the idea that our theory of thought must mesh with empirical science and what we might call you know Parmenides condition jokingly that thoughts are relational that thought seem relational but my own forget with my what we might call Kripke's condition that thoughts are relational in a kind of special way that they seem to relate us to the things we're thinking about so now voters argument is that we can give in a theory which takes care of all these things and while I'm not claiming that the theory is true I do think that it sets the bar for the kind of thing that we're looking for so here's his theory thoughts or thinking are the relations between thinkers and sentences in a mental language that we can call mental ease to make sure that we understand that it's not an actual spoken language it's not English it's not Arabic it's not Latin it's something that's distinctively mental and you know psychology then would be in the job of figuring out what that mental language is but the idea is that it's got to be language like in some sense this is the idea that there is a language of thoughts and that what thinking is is having sentences in this language going through the mind and that the thinker is somehow importantly related via the thinking relationship one might say to those occurring individual sentences that are running through the mind so for instance if you wanted to say that you believe that it's raining then that's like saying there's a little sentence it's raining and that sentence is doing something it's performing a task it's playing a role that we call believing like producing certain kinds of behavior and being connected to other things like desires and intentions and that that sentence therefore has all the properties which we think sentences have like that you know words are have references and words have senses so do these mental words or the analogues of them which we might call concepts so Fodor's claim is look we have something that we like a lot it's called language and language has certain structure language has certain properties and thoughts have all of these interesting structures and properties and the one way to explain how thoughts have these properties is to say that they somehow language like in these essential characteristics at least now of course this is a controversial claim whether lengua mental language is required in order to have thoughts or whether thinking consists in a mental language but Fodor's argument is that's the best account of these phenomenon that we've been discussing and I'm not going to say that photo is right but I think that he raises an important challenge what alternative account can you give that respects all of these things that we've been talking about and I look forward to a discussion of that now finally in conclusion I'll simply mention some other theories in this area and in particular I mention that the area Fred Gretzky and Ruth Milliken and some other people like Ned block um and Chris peacock so one might think look what we have here is a pretty good argument that something like mental sentences have to exist and that cognitive science is in the business of discovering the mental language and what it is like and how it works and how language like how out like outwardly language like it is whether these internal representations really are like sentences and whether they're therefore composed of words or what is an important question now one alternative model is to model intentionality on more natural kinds of information carrying States so for instance the classic example here would be the rings inside of a tree so if you cut a tree down you'll notice that there are these rings there and if you count the rings you will come to find out how many years the tree has been so you can say 100 rings means that the tree has been there 100 years and when we use the word means that way we're getting at this idea that there is a kind of information that's carried by those rings we say smoke means fire if you see smoke that gives you kind of information namely that there's fire around somewhere and that seems like a perfectly natural thing it's out there in the world this meaning this intentionality perhaps so people like directs Gretzky's say this is the basis of intentionality tracking information so that when a system has an internal state that tracks some kind of information and is able to use that information to control its behavior then that system has intentionality and it doesn't have to be as fancy as mines he thinks that symbol thermometers have intentionality and especially the kinds of systems that use thermometers which provide the information about temperature to like turn on a fan or turn off a fan so you know take your your garden-variety air-conditioner something that in New York we don't need at the moment I'm recording this but soon hopefully summer will come and we will need it so if you say your air conditioner for 72 degrees then the air conditioner uses a sensor that it has to determine what the room temperature is and if it's not 72 degrees that keeps blowing but if it ever reaches 72 degrees it turns itself off so people like Gretzky say ah you see even the air conditioner has an intentional state a state that represents the temperature of the room now of course that thing was built by us and the reason it has intentional States is because of us but by analogy then the tree has a state that represents its age now it doesn't use that information for anything so it's not like the kind of state that we're interested in but it's easy to see how a natural system could come to have internal states that represent information and they are used in this way and so address key thinks this causal information theory theoretic approach to the contents of thought is going to be very fruitful now notice that it could be compatible with the language of hypothesis because we could say that what gives the sentences their meaning are these tracking relations information tracking so you know people will debate this and I'm not trying to convince you one way or the other we're just trying to canvas this stuff and get some feedback on and you know have a discussion about it so that's one popular theory are these causal information theories another popular set of theories are what are called thelia semantic theories and I'll talk a bit about Ruth Millikan's paper partially cuz it's in the book that we're using and partially because I think it's plausible and partially because I know something about it having studied with Ruth so one thing that she's interested in is taking an evolutionary approach like this is taking or not the idea that intentionality is a naturally evolved feature of certain systems and that these systems come to represent their environment and use these representations to communicate and share and so that systems that produce representations and systems that use representations sort of evolve in tandem and that meaning or the intentionality of these inner representations is determined by the purpose or evolutionary feature that the representation produced system was selected for as well as the features that the consuming system was selected for I know that's a bit abstract but let me give you a simple example one that Milliken likes to talk a lot about so these are B dances and I have a link here to a video of a B dance if you want to actually see one I can't click it on it and bring it into this video but maybe I'll go into the annotations later and provide the link so you can click on it but the basic idea here is that the B dance represents the location of a food source relative to the position of the bees in relation to the position of the Sun at the moment so if you take wherever the Sun is and you draw a straight line from the center of the Sun to where the bees are and you take that as the vertical axis then the line that the bee is dancing along is the line that's perpendicular to that vertical axis axis and therefore points in the direction of the food source the speed that the bee Wiggles tells you how far roughly the distance is faster or slower wiggles indicating further or shorter distances and I'm not exactly sure which one is which to be honest with you though we could look that up if you were interested in it so Millikan's claim is that this is a representation the bee dance itself is a representation and more specifically it's the that be dancing that way at that time at that place that's the representation excuse me in that orientation at that speed also have to be included in there now why is that a representation why does that count as representing the location of the honey well Millikan's answer is comes in two parts so first of all that evolution selected a certain kind of mechanism in bees to produce stance what it means for evolution to have selected it is simply to say that there were competing mechanisms which produced different kinds of behavior maybe different dances and that that though those ones failed because they weren't as useful so you know this particular kind of dance that they do the Wagle and then the looping around and the logging and the looping around that particular thing competed against other kinds of things and eventually won out because it was successful at doing this job of conveying a certain kind of information so that evolution selected that but that's not the only reason the other half of the reason is that evolution also selected some consumers of these representations things that depend on those representations to do their job now in this case the things which are consuming the representations are the other B's they're watching the dance they have there's some kind of internal mechanisms that these B's have which interpret this inferred ants and get the information and part of the reason why that dance carries that information according to Milliken is because these bees have mechanisms which interpret it that way which have been selected to consume those representations so those two things the fact that evolution has produced a system which makes a certain kind of representation and that evolution has produced a system which uses that kind of representation the purpose that it was being made and used is to find the location of the honey so that's what it represents or stands for or is intentionally directed at according to Milliken she wants to extend that basic account which he thinks is just a natural biological account of meaning and intention she wants to extend that to human so that when we think about stuff you've got to give in roughly a similar kind of answer in terms of brain structures producing representations being selected to produce those representations other brain structures being selected to consume those representations and that this is going to be an account of what's going on now notice that this also it seems to me is in principle compatible with the language of thought hypothesis since one could say yeah well what gives these thoughts their meanings is this evolutionary biological selection thing now of course you may say let the inner sentence model is completely wrong but of course the challenge is what you put in its place that's the big challenge what other things do we have there and we'll look at some of this stuff later when we get to talk about computation and some people think well look there's you know computer science it gives us a different model here or excuse me computer science ought to adopt a different model here not the one that this computational psychology stuff here but maybe something that involves connections or is more neuroscience like involving more neurons and their behavior and less of this kind of map schector okay so we're coming to the close here so let me just end by talking about one other popular kind of approach called conceptual role semantics which is supposed to give account for intentionality in terms of the kinds of inferences that occur between thoughts so for instance if you this is the best and easiest way to do this is a talk about logical terms like and' and or' so if you think the sentence soup or salad then if someone said you I think to myself I can have soup or salad then meaning of that thought is that I confer from that either soup or salad okay so that somehow the meaning or the what gives it what why the thought is about disjunction or about these two options is that I can make an inference from there the inference being the one which is licensed or somehow by the meaning of course that's a much more needs to be said about that and we talked about this a bit more in the logic class to be honest with you but that concludes our overview of intentionality and I look forward to the ensuing discussion thank you you

Channel: Richard Brown

Views: 14,100

Rating: 4.9550562 out of 5

Keywords: mind, thought, intentional inexistence, Frege's puzzle, kripke, dretske, Intentionality, singular thought, language of thought, jerry fodor, sense and reference, intentinality, intentional content, Philosophy (Field Of Study)

Id: eBWJjQB6A3k

Length: 70min 21sec (4221 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 12 2014