Searle’s (1963/1991) account of the communicative intentions in speech acts purports to be an advance over that of Grice (1957), in acknowledging the ineliminable role of the linguistic (usage) rules in enabling the hearer to recognize the speaker’s communicative intentions. In this paper we argue that, given some plausible assumptions about ordinary speech exchanges, Searle’s insight on this score is incompatible with his (1983) commitment to internalism in the philosophy of mind. As a result, Searle cannot have it both ways: (...) either he must give up his core insight regarding the ineliminable role of linguistic (usage) rules in the hearer’s recognition of a speaker’s communicative intentions, or he must give up his commitment to internalism the philosophy of mind. We conclude by arguing that this lesson is generic: the forced choice is one thatalltheorists must face, insofar as we theorize about the role of language in the communication of thought through speech. (shrink)

Seattle rain smelled different from New Orleans rain…. New Orleans rain smelled of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder, and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smelled of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath.— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug PerfumeMuch of the philosophical literature on perception has focused on vision. This is not surprising, given that vision holds for us a certain prestige. Our visual experience is incredibly rich, offering up a mosaic (...) of apparent three-dimensional objects. For this reason, it is commonplace to suppose that visual experience is world-directed, with the view taking its most popular form in the representational, or content, view. World-directed views contrast with what we might call subjectivist views — views according to which experiences are raw feels or mere sensations. (shrink)

Many people think the mind evolved. Some of them think it had to evolve. They think the mind not only has a history, but a history essential to its very existence.

‘According to informational semantics, if it's necessary that a creature can't distinguish Xs from Ys, it follows that the creature can't have a concept that applies to Xs but not Ys.’ There is, indeed, a form of informational semantics that has this verificationist implication. The original definition of information given in Dretske'sKnowledge and the Flow of Information, when employed as a base for a theory of intentional representation or ‘content,’ has this implication. I will argue that, in fact, most of (...) what an animal needs to know about its environment is not available as natural information of this kind. It is true, I believe, that there is one fundamental kind of perception that depends on this kind of natural information, but more sophisticated forms of inner representation do not. It is unclear, however, exactly what ‘natural information’ is supposed to mean, certainly in Fodor's, and even in Dretske's writing. In many places, Dretske seems to employ a softer notion than the one he originally defines. I will propose a softer view of natural information that is, I believe, at least hinted at by Dretske, and show that it does not have verificationist consequences. According to this soft informational semantics, a creature can perfectly well have a representation of Xs without being able to discriminate Xs from Ys. (shrink)

One goal of recent philosophy of mind has been to ‘naturalize’ intentionality by showing how a purely physical system could have states that represent or are about items (objects, properties, facts) in the world. The project is reductionist in spirit, the aim being to explain intentional relations—to say what they really are—and to do so in terms that do not themselves utilize intentional or semantic concepts. In this vein there are attempts to explain intentional relations in terms of causal relations, (...) informational relations, teleological or functional relations, relations involving abstract similarity or isomorphism, and various combinations thereof. What makes these accounts naturalistic is the presumed objectivity and scientific respectability of the properties appelated to in the explanans. What makes them all reductive is their shared presumption that intentionality can be explained in terms that have a wider application to intentional systems as well as to systems that have no mental properties at all. (shrink)

Humans are part of the animal kingdom, but their minds differ from those of other animals. They are capable of many things that lie beyond the intellectual powers ofthe rest of the animal realm. In this paper, I want to ask what makes human minds distinctive. What accounts for the special powers that set humans aside from other animals?

I examine an argument that has recently appeared in the cognitive science literature in favor of thinking that the mind is mostly composed of Fodorian-type cognitive modules; an argument that concludes that a mind that is massively composed of classical cognitive mechanisms that are cognitively modular is more evolvable than a mind that is not cognitively modular, since a cognitive mechanism that is cognitively modular is likely to be biologically modular, and biologically modular characters are more evolvable. I argue that (...) the notion of cognitive modularity needed to make this argument plausible will have to be understood in terms of the biological notion of variational independence, as follows: a cognitive feature is cognitively modular only if few or no other morphological changes are significantly correlated with variations of that feature arising in members of the relevant population as a result of ontogeny. I also argue that most of the connotations contained in a cluster of notions of classical cognitive modularity are, as far as we know, irrelevant to the argument, and that only the presence of selective impairments—also known as cognitive dissociations—can be considered as strong indicators of the type of modularity that genuinely enhances evolvability. (shrink)

Most cognitive scientists nowadays tend to think that at least some of the mind’s capacities are the product of biological evolution, yet important conceptual problems remain for all scientists in order to be able to speak coherently of mental or cognitive systems as having evolved naturally. Two of these important problems concern the articulation of adequate, interesting, and empirically useful concepts of homology and variation as applied to cognitive systems. However, systems in cognitive science are usually understood as functional systems (...) of some sort. Thus, to be able to talk about functional systems being homologous requires having a solid, adequate, and empirically articulated concept of functional homology—and the same is true about functional variation. Here I construct an original concept of functional homology that, in my view, adequately systematizes a number of actual uses of the word “functional homology” in a variety of biological disciplines and in ethology. I also propose a number of criteria for the empirical application of the concept that are analogous to the criteria that are currently used in comparative biology, ethology, and molecular developmental genetics. Then I construct a concept of functional variation on the basis of this concept of homology. (shrink)

In this essay, the tension that Benacerraf identifies for theories of mathematical truth is used as the vehicle for arguing against a particular desideratum for semantic theories. More specifically, I place in question the desideratum that a semantic theory, provided for some area of discourse, should run in parallel with the semantic theory holding for the rest of the language. The importance of this desideratum is also made clear by means of tracing out the subtle implications of its rejection.

There is an idea, going back to Aristotle, that reasons for action can be understood on a parallel with reasons for belief. Not surprisingly, the idea has almost always led to some form of inferentialism about reasons for action. In this paper I argue that reasons for action can be understood on a parallel with reasons for belief, but that this requires abandoning inferentialism about reasons for action. This result will be thought paradoxical. It is generally assumed that if there (...) is to be a useful parallel, there must be some such thing as a practical inference. As we shall see, that assumption tends to block the fruitful exploration of the real parallel. On the view I shall defend, the practical analogue of an ordinary inference is not an inference, but something I shall call a practical step. Nevertheless, the practical step will do, for a theory of reasons for action, what ordinary inference does for an inferentialist theory of reasons for belief. The result is a general characterization of reasons, practical and theoretical, in terms of the correctness conditions of the relevant sorts of step. (shrink)

There are two general approaches to characterising biological functions. One originates with Cummins. According to this approach, the function of a part of a system is just its causal contribution to some specified activity of the system. Call this the ‘C-function’ concept. The other approach ties the function of a trait to some aspect of its evolutionary significance. Call this the ‘E-function’ concept. According to the latter view, a trait's function is determined by the forces of natural selection. The C-function (...) and E-function concepts are clearly quite different, but there is an important relation between them which heretofore has gone unnoticed. The purpose of this paper is to outline that relation.This is not the first paper to discuss the relation of C-function and E-function. Previous attempts all follow either one of two strategies. The first proposes that the two concepts are ‘unified.’ The other proposes that they are radically distinct and apply to wholly different fields within biology. (shrink)

This paper is written in response to controversial judicial decisions following separation surgery on conjoined twins “Jodie” and “Mary”. The courts, it is argued, seem to have conceptualised the twins as “entangled singletons” requiring medical intervention to render them physically separate and thus “as they were meant to be”, notwithstanding the death of the weaker twin, “Mary”. In contrast, we argue that certain notions, philosophical and biological, of what human beings are intended to be, are problematic. We consider three compelling (...) conceptualisations of conjoined twins and advocate a model that conceives them as two psychologically separate individuals who happen to share a body, the sharing of a body being integral to the individuality of each twin. While we reject an “essentialist” view of the conjoined state, a view which might render separation surgery unthinkable in all cases, we nevertheless argue against an “adversarial” interpretation of conjoined twins’ respective best interests. We maintain that the physical entanglement should be regarded as a shared problem rather than one posed by one twin to the other. And if, after deliberation, separation surgery is deemed the “least detrimental alternative” or the “lesser of two evils”, then there should be recognition of what conjoined twins will lose, as well as gain, through separation. The current drive to separate twins at all costs may evince a deeper unease with bodily configurations that appear to threaten the premium that the Western ethical and legal tradition places on personal sovereignty, and the physical circumscription that such sovereignty assumes. (shrink)

Both the quantity of information and the informational content of a signal are defined in the context of signaling games. Informational content is a generalization of standard philosophical notions of propositional content. It is shown how signals that initially carry no information may spontaneously acquire informational content by evolutionary or learning dynamics. It is shown how information can flow through signaling chains or signaling networks.

In spite of contemporary theoretical disagreement on the nature of language, there is a widespread informal agreement about what linguistic facts are. This article argues that a functional approach to language can provide the foundation for an explicit account of what the informal consensus implies. The account bridges the ‘internalist’ and the ‘externalist’ views of language by understanding mental constructs such as those involved in human languages as aspects of a dynamic social equilibrium. As in evolutionary biology, processes of selection (...) can work to stabilize certain features while others vary; and this process (in which ‘function’ plays a key role) is a necessary supplement to a purely mentalist account. This position is seen as a development of the position of Searle on social facts and Keller on language change. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of objectivism vs constructivism in two areas,biology and cognitive science, which areintermediate between the natural sciences suchas physics (where objectivism is dominant) andthe human and social sciences (whereconstructivism is widespread). The issues inbiology and in cognitive science are intimatelyrelated; in each of these twin areas, the objectivism vs constructivism issue isinterestingly and rather evenly balanced; as aresult, this issue engenders two contrastingparadigms, each of which has substantialspecific scientific content. The neo-Darwinianparadigm in biology is closely resonant (...) withthe classical cognitivist paradigm in cognitivescience, and both of them are intrinsicallyobjectivist. The organismic paradigm inbiology, based on the concept of autopoiesis,is consonant with the paradigm of enaction incognitive science; the latter paradigms are bothprofoundly constructivist.In cognitive science, the objectivism vsconstructivism issue is internal to thescientific field itself and reflexivity isinescapable. At this level, strong ontologicalobjectivism is self-contradictory and thereforeuntenable. Radical constructivism isself-coherent; but it also rehabilitatesa weak form of objectivism as a pragmaticallyviable alternative. In conclusion, there is aneven-handed reciprocity between objectivistand constructivist perspectives. Finally, thearticle examines the consequences of thisconclusion for fields other than cognitivescience: biology; physics and the naturalsciences; and the human and social sciences. (shrink)

The original publication can be found at www.springerlink.com.

...the deepest motivation for intentional irrealism derives not from such relatively technical worries about individualism and holism as we.

I would like to nominate one more principle for initial inclusion in the science of teleonomy. This principle is that the nature of the stimuli that initiate and regulate a response may be no indication of the function of the response.George Williams could not have anticipated the special relevance his principle has for contemporary analyses of representational content. In particular, his principle provides both a concise statement of where a currently popular strategy for naturalizing representational content has gone wrong and (...) a positive suggestion for how we should right this wrong. I characterize the kind of naturalistic analysis of representation I have in mind as bottom-up because it seeks to build representation up from a non-intentional, and hence naturalistically unimpeachable, correlation relation. Many authors have suggested such an approach to naturalizing intentionality, but for clarity and completeness perhaps Fred Dretske's Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes ought to be construed as the exemplary source. (shrink)

I was dreaming about Delores when the phone interrupted us. It was the Chief, or ‘Stress,’ as we liked to call him, telling me to get part of my anatomy down to Shakey’s Funeral Parlor. My head ached. I thought I must be the only sucker who gets a hangover from being drunk on life. I got up, put two eggs, a spoonful of wheatgerm, the remains of the scotch, and the phonebill into the blender and fed the whole lot (...) to the cat. It helped, but not as much as Delores would have. I should have married her even if she was a Hubot. At least she could play chess. I was still Rumanating over Delores as I hit the curb outside Shakey’s.I had the notion that Shakey’s was once a pizza joint but I could have been wrong. I found Stress, disheveled as usual, in the lobby.‘You’re late,’ he said. I wasn’t, but he’s thatkinda guy. He says ‘Jump!’ and you say ‘With or without my legs?’ We got our free Cokes from Shakey himself, who led us down the hall. (shrink)

IntroductionIt is at least a bit embarrassing, perhaps even scandalous, that debate should still rage over the sheer existence of qualia, but they continue to find able defenders after decades of being attacked as relics of ghostly substances, epiphenomenal non-entities, nomological danglers and the like; the intensity of the current confrontation is captured vividly by Daniel Dennett:What are qualia, exactly? This obstreperous query is dismissed by one author by invoking Louis Armstrong's legendary reply when asked what jazz was: “If you (...) gotta ask, you ain't never gonna get to know.” … If I succeed in my task, this move … will look as quaint and insupportable as a jocular appeal to the ludicrousness of a living thing-a living thing, mind you! -doubting the existence of elan vital. (shrink)