Abstract
We review the current state of play in the game of naturalizing content and analyse reasons why each of the main proposals, when taken in isolation, is unsatisfactory. Our diagnosis is that if there is to be progress two fundamental changes are necessary. First, the point of the game needs to be reconceived in terms of explaining the natural origins of content. Second, the pivotal assumption that intentionality is always and everywhere contentful must be abandoned. Reviving and updating Haugeland’s baseball analogy in the light of these changes, we propose ways of redirecting the efforts of players on each base of his intentionality All-Star team, enabling them to start functioning effectively as a team. Only then is it likely that they will finally get their innings and maybe, just maybe, even win the game.
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Notes
Searle (1992) is squarely in the outfield, on the far right because his biological naturalism is explanatorily hollow (see Hutto and Myin 2013, ch. 7). For similar reasons, Haugeland (1990) placed Skinner on the warning track – up against the wall in center field, and observed that “Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida are out in left field. They both play pretty deep, Derrida perhaps closer to the foul line. The position in a nutshell: talk about mentality and intentionality is just that: talk” (p. 387).
The idea that defenders of second base are committed to an utterly deflationary or mere ascriptionist strategy is inspired by Dennett’s ‘all there is’ remarks – such as, when he writes “all there is to being a true believer is being a system whose behaviour is reliably predictable via the intentional strategy, and hence all there is to really believing that p (for any proposition p) is being an intentional system for which p occurs as a belief in the best (most predictive) interpretation” (Dennett 1987, p. 29). The charge of mere ascriptionism is also licensed by his definition of intentional systems, which he insists, “does not say that intentional systems really have beliefs and desires, but that one can explain and predict their behavior by ascribing beliefs and desires to them” (Dennett 1985, p. 7, emphasis added).
Thus, “when community members behave normally, how they behave is in general directly accountable in terms of what’s normal in their community; their dispositions have been inculcated and shaped according to those norms, and their behavior continues to be monitored for compliance” (Haugeland 1990, p. 406).
Tomasello (1999) gives reasons for believing “that the amazing suite of cognitive skills and products displayed by modern humans is the result of some sort of species-unique mode or modes of cultural transmission. The evidence [for this] … is overwhelming” (p. 4). Sterelny (2012) argues the story will turn out to be much more complex.
Unquestionably “none of the most complex human artifacts or social practices, including symbolic communication, were invented once and for all at a single moment by an individual or group of individuals” (Tomasello 1999, p. 5).
Elsewhere, these authors make the same point in various other ways too: “it’s hard to imagine how first-language learning could proceed in a creature that lacks quite a lot of prior conceptual sophistication” (Fodor and Pylyshyn 2015, p. 15).
Some may baulk at counting Ur-intentionality as any kind of intentionality, rejecting the very idea of Ur-intentionality out of hand. This is because they define intentionality and aboutness in terms of content. Intentionality is defined as “that property of many mental states and events by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world” (Searle 1983, p. 1). No naturalist should be swayed by arguments based on a stipulated definition of intentionality. Intentionality is a natural phenomenon and as such it can come in many forms. The extended use we propose resurrects the idea of intentionality as “a medieval notion with philosophical roots in Aristotle and etymological roots in the Latin verb ‘intendo’ meaning “to aim at” or “point toward” (Flanagan 1991, p. 28).
In order to explain the mechanisms that make possible mutual learning and interaction third basers can and must help themselves to a richer set of tools than the ones available to neo-Behaviourists like Quine. Thus, when appealing to biology to understand interaction and similarity in responses they must not understand the “individual tendencies to find certain things perceptually similar … [as] … a matter of effect on the subject: a question of reaction” (Quine 1995, p. 17). Rather the similarities in question must be understood in terms of subjects responding to the same things in the same basic ways.
See Tomasello (1999), Rakoczy et al. (2008) and Csibra and Gergely (2009). These authors claim that learning and teaching are biologically inherited capacities with species relative traits. They all argue that teaching and learning norm-abiding behaviour are to be understood as biologically inherited human capacities.
Truth-telling practices satisfy what McDowell calls “a familiar intuitive notion of objectivity” an idea that requires “the conception of how things could correctly be said to be anyway – whatever, if anything, we in fact go on to say about the matter” (McDowell 1998, p. 222).
Second basers realise that we cannot use evolution to justify any of our content attributing norms (Cash 2008, p. 100). Ascriptional practices involve a kind of circularity in that the only justification that can be given of a particular ascription is in terms of other contentful ascriptional devices (Davidson 1984).
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Hutto, D.D., Satne, G. The Natural Origins of Content. Philosophia 43, 521–536 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9644-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9644-0