Abstract
Part One is an account of the range of contents which human thoughts can have. This is not the only way to focus a theory of content, and it is not unproblematic. It is not unproblematic even if our human form is relevant to what we can think. Even if there is some single paradigm of normal adult human neurophysiology, still other humans differ from that paradigm in relevant ways. At best, we can hope only to provide an account of content for “normal” adult humans. And even “normal” adult humans may relevantly differ, so that some idealization unavoidably infects our account. Also, any biological constraints we humans now suffer may one day be broken by technological advance, which will allow us to alter our form. Despite the legitimacy of these worries, the account which follows will show that normal adult human capacities are, at least for now, at least enough alike to make a focus on “human” content reasonable.
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Notes
There may be other sorts of derivational operations and another sort of underived content which can generate all human content. My only claim here is that all the contents of our thoughts can be specified in the way I will sketch, not that they cannot be derived in some other way.
Another set of contents, other than the set of basic contents I will isolate, might also serve to fix truth, so another set might also be basic in truth. My claim here is only that my set is.
I say “match” rather than “correspond” in part because the second word is used by different philosophers in a variety of different ways.
Why “really are”? To distinguish this case from others introduced at the beginning of section 1. This characterization is only a first approximation of something which will become clearer as we proceed.
More than one basic content may be true, as we will see.
In a certain primary sense. It may be that thoughts with merely basic content might be considered “true” in another sense we will consider later in the chapter, via various semantic relations to other basic contents, even if they don’t match the world.
This ignores complications to which we will return at the end of the chapter.
Indeed, more precision would require still more explanation. For instance, the truth of something like “nothing is all red and all green” is fixed by truth dependencies and the nature of all the basic contents.
Perhaps there is a stronger sort of “making sense” which requires exhibiting all the basic contents which would make it true. In any case, this is just the first approximation of an account of coherent sense. It is for instance only applicable to contingent things, like us. And it will turn out that even in the case of certain sorts of contingent thoughts, for instance those mediated by words, there are two kinds of sense one can make of something. Further conditions must be met if things are to make literal sense. We will return to this point in Chapter Three.
It may be that there are dependencies which run the other way, that capacities for thoughts with more basic contents also require the presence of certain capacities for thoughts with less basic contents. For instance, maybe a capacity for thoughts with abstracted thoughts is required if someone is to be capable of experience. I do not mean to foreclose this possibility. Also, note that it will turn out that the three different roles it plays put some strain on the notion of basic content, since for instance along the axis of realization-dependency there is a sort of seed content which is yet more basic than even most basic contents. But for now I will ignore this complication.
Aside from classic empiricists—Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—see Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover, 1952), and Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, translated by Rolf A. George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). For older examples, see Frances A. Yates, “Essays on the Art of Ramon Lull”, in her Lull & Bruno: Collected Essays, volume 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 3-121. James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France 1600-1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975). Descartes to Mersenne, 20 Nov 1629, in Anthony Kenny (editor), Descartes’ Philosophical Letters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 3-6. Walter O’Briant (translator), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s General Investigations Concerning the Analysis of Concepts and Truth (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1968), 28-34.
Some may object that if analytic truths are true merely because of content dependencies, then this threatens to make their truth contingent on the existence of agents with thoughts with such contents. But this is a mistake. That the content dependencies give such a thought its truth does not imply that they are among its truth-conditions, that such thoughts are true in virtue of those dependencies does not imply that they are about such dependencies. To make an analogy, even synthetic sentences are true in part in virtue of the meanings they have, but they aren’t about their having those meanings. Some may of course object to the claim that there are analytic truths. But I’m only concerned here with how they would be true, if there were any.
Of course, analogous things can be said about thoughts with such contents, or sentences asserting such contents.
This is Ryle’s terminology, but the most resolute development may be Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962). A good short introduction to this aspect of Heidegger is the discussion by Hubert Dreyfuss in Bryan Magee, The Great Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 257-275.
Let me put this worry in another way: Some maintain that to know Italian is to know some facts about Italian, about its grammar and lexicon, and to make inferences with this knowledge. But others maintain that to know Italian is merely to have a certain capacity, to possess a certain ability for operating with Italian, independent of much knowledge about it. They may object to my treating thoughts with cognitive contents as central psychological phenomena, and note that even their opponents seem committed to some sort of know how—inferential capacities. Lewis Carroll’s tortoise and hare seem to show us that not all knowledge can be knowledge that, since they seem to show that every argument must use a principle of inference which does not appear in the argument as a premise.
It is more accurate to say that any differences in these contents are what I will call in Chapter Three “mere artifacts of the approach apparatus”.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
Many have insisted that the sentences “Turn up the flame”, “Will the flame be turned up?”, and “The flame will be turned up” have much in common, in meaning and not just in component words. Frege would say they share sense but not force, at least in the translation suggested by Dummett. See Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, second edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1-3, 83-84, 327-339. Searle following Austin would claim they are used to perform different illocutionary acts but have the same propositional content. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, second edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), and John R. Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Others would say they share a single sentence radical but not a mood, or a phrastic but not a neustic. See Erik Stenius, “Mood and Language Game”, Synthese 17, 1967, 254-274, and R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). Sentences may be used to question or command or promise rather than assert that the world is a certain way, but in doing those things they seem to invoke a kind of content which is true to a way the world is commanded or promised or questioned but not asserted to be. On the other hand, some psychological states mix cognitive and noncognitive elements in complex ways which make sense and force hard to disentangle. And some things we do with words suggest meanings that do not easily fit the sense-force model at all. Consider what happens when we say “Goodbye”, or count to choreograph something like a liftoff, or play ring-around-the-rosie. And the standard model utilizes distinctions, for instance between asserting, expressing, and presuming something, which may be too clean-edged to capture the messy facts of ordinary speech.
Young children may tempt us to resist this model. They have no abstract understanding of the categories of words or meanings or questionings, surely. And yet they meaningfully speak and question. There are a number of ambiguities which this objection deploys, and we aren’t yet in a position to properly expose. One ambiguity is revealed by the discussion of introspection in the next section. Another is the ambiguity of “thinking about what the words mean”, which can mean thinking something with the content of those words, or thinking that it is a content had by certain words. Still, we will see in Chapter Ten that plausible stories about the realization even of children’s speech invoke certain sorts of capacities for perceptual thoughts about words and for certain sorts of intentions to questioning behaviors, though not necessarily under the quite adult and abstract descriptions which my ways of characterizing those thoughts here have presumed. We will see that it may well be that an individual who may be properly said to understand a word in fact lacks explicit unconscious thought of the meaning of that word, but still we will see that they should be capable of explicit thought with content closely allied to that meaning.
In claiming that experience is a kind of thought with representational content, I put myself at odds with a tradition which holds that experience is not apt for truth and falsity. For instance, Descartes may be in this tradition. But Part Three will provide more than enough evidence for holding that experience is apt for truth and falsity. I believe that ordinary speech would call experience true and false in light of this evidence.
There is another way to initially characterize the content at issue which may be helpful: It is content of a kind that common sense recognizes. We might expect this, since in some cases we can introspect it. But even this characterization has its problems. As we will see, my account of content clearly involves some refinement of commonsense conceptions. And even some recalcitrant elements of common sense may suggest that if a field is full of grubs, whether or not that is “present to your mind”, it still makes a good deal of difference to whether you act so as to spit at such a thing when you spit at the field, or see such a thing when you see it. That characterization of the field, even if not present to your mind, may be relevant to some commonsense characterizations of the “content” of your action and thought. But still, there is another commonsense mode of characterization of your thoughts and action, in which you reason and act towards the field, in such a case, in exactly the same way whether it’s full of grubs or not. Representational content is what is invoked by this commonsense mode of individuation of thoughts and actions.
Donald Davidson, for instance, has sometimes favored an alternative.
As opposed, say, to causing it to have the thoughts that it does.
In fact, this case presumes that the contents of the various thoughts of each balloonist are easily disentwined, and as we will see this may be an implausible assumption. And there is another way to individuate even introspectible contents which implies that these thoughts differ in such content, irrespective of worries about the entanglement of thought contents. See for instance John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Searle’s treatment of these issues is admirable in many respects, but the kind of content he attributes to thoughts in accord with this maneuver is unfortunately too complex to be deployed in all the cases we need to consider, in particular in thecase of some thoughts with primarily basic contents.
Daniel C. Dennett, “Beyond Belief“, in A. Woodfield (editor), Thought and Object (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1–96, 6.
Certainly some aspects of anything might not be present in the thought of people about it. So in light of Chapter Five’s discussion of the “difference” between facts, objects, and properties, it may seem that there is another way to dispose of these troublesome cases than that I pursue here.
W.V.O. Quine, “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes”, in Ways of Paradox (New York: Random House, 1966), 183–194.
Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215–271.
Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
This move is attributed by Kripke to Robert Nozick. See also Searle, Intentionality.
The capacity to introspect such metalinguistic aspects in precisely that guise is quite a sophisticated capacity, which for instance young children lack. And yet even children who are capable of the kinds of speech which require this treatment have in some sense learned how to use the words. This learning, as I have suggested and will develop in Part Two, is reflected in their psychologies in ways which they may not be able to abstractly characterize. But still it is inthe relevant sense “present to mind”.
What I do not explicitly consider later is a mixed view, some seed intensionality generated by introspectibility which in turn constrains a kind of intensionality allowed by social practice. The second component of such a view is, however, implicitly treated in the rest of this section.
Externalists who worried before that I was assuming something inimical to their position may reasonably suspect my claims here. These are properly matters for later. But for now let me at least hint that this argument will be underwritten later on.
It would also surely tarnish my treatment of the “picturesque” case in section 2.
Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 27.
Some aspects of this are well developed by Gareth Evans, in The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), chapter 9. This also parallels Frege’s famous argument, in “The Thought”, translated by A. and M. Quinton, in P. F. Strawson (editor), Philosophical Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), for something different.
Bertrand Russell, “Descriptions”, in Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919).
And hence at least sometimes their truth.
Some may reject my treatment of those cases, a treatment which is in accord with intuitions fostered by the recent literature. But, in any case, we will see in the following chapters that the basic content of many experiences does need to be aimed.
Kripke, Naming and Necessity.
Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”.
Tyler Burge, “Individualism and the Mental” ,Midwest Studies in Philosophy IV, 1979, 73–121.
This point is made by Ned Block, “Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy X, 1986, 615–678.
Or at the very least the forthcoming cases, involving the content of experiences, to which I have alluded.
I owe something like this point to Pat Francken. It has also been deployed by Loewer and Lepore. For this reason also, certain forms of “short-armed” conceptual role semantics are not in themselves sufficient. See Block, “Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology”.
The other way Kripke uses examples like this is defused by what has gone before. It isn’t that something other than Gödel meets your full conception of Gödel, because part of that conception is that he is taggedby “Gödel”.
Keith Donnellan, “Reference and Definite Descriptions”, Philosophical Review 55, 1966, 281–304.
But there may be complications. For instance, given the various relations among contents we will sketch, in particular of various basic contents to abstract contents above them, it may be that there are reasons to call “true” in a lesser sense even thoughts with basic contents which don’t match the world, but which approximate basic contents which do get it right. But let me for the moment ignore this complication.
Peter Unger, Philosophical Relativity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
Not necessarily of their meaning.
On the other hand, the treatment I have adopted for the components of cognitive thoughts which we do not call true or false may suggest limits on the appropriate selections.
Questions about reference across possible worlds are what I will call “artifacts of the approach apparatus”.
For analogues of analytic truths, truth dependencies alone may suffice to underwrite truth, and even reference of a sort.
It would do this in a way which lets me explain a distinction I introduced earlier. If a (non-analytic) thought has a reference, then either it is a “concrete” reference, which can be matched by some basic content, or it is a “cheap” reference to a cheap object of the sort introduced in section 2. And even in the second case, the conditions required for reference can be matched by some basic content.
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Mendola, J. (1997). From Content to Representational Content. In: Human Thought. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5660-8_2
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