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The ‘theory theory’ of mind and the aims of Sellars’ original myth of Jones

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Abstract

Recent proponents of the ‘theory theory’ of mind often trace its roots back to Wilfrid Sellars’ famous ‘myth of Jones’ in his 1956 article, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’. Sellars developed an account of the intersubjective basis of our knowledge of the inner mental states of both self and others, an account which included the claim that such knowledge is in some sense theoretical knowledge. This paper examines the nature of this claim in Sellars’ original account and its relationship to more recent debates concerning ‘theory of mind’, in particular the theory theory. A close look reveals that Sellars’ original view embodied several distinctions that would enable more recent theory theorists to accommodate certain phenomenological objections that have been raised against that outlook. At the heart of the philosophical issue is an overlooked complexity involved in Sellars’ account of the ‘theory/observation’ distinction, involving a conception of the distinction that is both independently plausible and a key to the issue in dispute.

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Notes

  1. For reliable and insightful explorations of the topic of Sellars’ myth of Jones in relation to the theory theory, see DeVries (2006), Rosenberg (2007), Garfield (1989), and Parsell (2011). These articles properly distinguish, inter alia, between Sellars’ myth as an account of thought episodes in contrast to (but also including, derivatively) such propositional attitudes as belief or desire in general; and they also distinguish between Sellars’ philosophical considerations and certain empirical questions that Sellars’ view leaves open to scientific investigation (on this latter point see deVries in particular, as well as Rosenberg’s comments on the simulation view at pp. 192–4). The differences between Sellars’ view and the ‘eliminative materialism’ of his famous student Paul Churchland are examined by Garfield and by Parsell. The particular Sellarsian distinctions concerning ‘perception proper’ and between the ‘loose’ vs. ‘strict’ senses of the ‘theory/observation’ distinction that I explore in this paper are not discussed by these four authors.

  2. Cf. Churchland 1979, chapter 4 for an early conception of folk psychology as a theory of mind. Note that although Fodor, too, defends a conception of folk psychology as an implicit theory of mind, he rejects the holistic and inferentialist view of concepts that is embraced both by Sellars and by many contemporary theory theorists: see Fodor 1998, p. 112f., “Appendix 5B: The ‘Theory Theory’ of Concepts”.

  3. Herschbach (2008), however, argues that the phenomenological objections of Gallagher, Zahavi, and others to both the theory theory and the simulation view have force only to the degree that they are restricted to the ‘personal’ rather than the ‘sub-personal’ levels of social perceptual cognition. But we shall see that it follows from Sellars’ view that the theory theorist can and should address the ‘personal’ level issues head on.

  4. See, for example, Gopnik (1996), p. 510, and her contention that the application of a theory of mind is involved already in infant facial recognition. For further background, see Gopnik and Wellman (1992).

  5. The abbreviations standardly used to refer Sellars’ works are included in the bibliography below.

  6. For further detail on Sellars on the myth of the given and his philosophy of mind and meaning, see O’Shea (2007), chapters 3–5; and for his philosophy of science and his account of the theory/observation distinction to be discussed further below, see chapter 2 of the same work.

  7. DeVries (2006) correctly remarks that Sellars’ aim, in contrast to some simulationist as well as classical introspectionist views, is “to explain and not presuppose our access to our own psychologies” (p. 82); and more generally, that it “is important to remember that Sellars’s original philosophical point about the epistemological status of psychological concepts is separable from empirical debates about the mechanisms and the developmental process by which we come to employ these concepts” (p. 83). Furthermore, I think the coherence and plausibility of the theoretical positions taken within those empirical debates can depend in part upon the sorts of philosophical considerations raised by Sellars.

  8. On Sellars’ linking of ‘ordinary language’ conceptual analysis and the phenomenological tradition, as outlooks that have successfully furthered the central aim of the “perennial philosophy” to clarify the structure of the “manifest image of man-in-the-world,” see PSIM II, pp. 7–8. Elsewhere, Sellars appeals to “the standpoint of conceptual analysis (or phenomenology)” and comments that “for longer than I care to remember I have conceived of philosophical analysis (and synthesis) as akin to phenomenology” (SRPC §§5–6; see also Thomasson (2005)). As a young masters student at the University of Buffalo in 1933–1934, Sellars studied both Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Husserl’s philosophy under the important American phenomenologist Marvin Farber, whose “combination of utter respect for the structure of Husserl’s thought with the equally firm conviction that this structure could be given a naturalistic interpretation was undoubtedly a key influence on my own subsequent philosophical strategy” (Sellars 1975a AR 283). The subtle combination of phenomenological analysis and naturalistic explanation within Sellars’ philosophy will be exemplified throughout what follows. Finally, in unpublished lectures at Notre Dame that have recenty been transcribed and made publicly available, the importance of Husserl for Sellars’ analysis of perceptual experience is made explicit in the lecture entitled ‘Perceiving and Perception (1973)’, sections 1 and 2 of which are entitled, ‘Husserl’s Framework’ and ‘The Phenomenological Reduction’ (WSNDL pp. 297–324; see also SK Lec. I, §23 and elsewhere for Sellars’ use of Husserlian ‘bracketing’). For an outstanding example of Sellarsian logical phenomenology, as Jay F. Rosenberg once characterized it, one which in effect extends the aims of phenomenology to include the methods and aims of Sellars’ myth of Jones, see Rosenberg (1986/2008).

  9. See also Sellars SRPC (and SK Lec. II §5) for the contention that phenomenology must ultimately hand over to science and metaphysics in order to account for the nature of perceptual experience: “phenomenology or conceptual analysis takes us part of the way, but finally lets us down” (SRPC §35). In relation to the problem of perception, it “is by the introduction of visual sensations that we transcend phenomenology or conceptual analysis. They are not yielded by phenomenological reduction, but postulated by a proto-(scientific)-theory” (SRPC §42). In relation to the problem of inner thought episodes to be discussed in what follows, Sellars will argue that the mythic ‘proto-theory’ of genius Jones goes beyond phenomenology in positing inner mental events as imperceptible explanatory states of perceptible persons within the manifest image (cf. footnotes 11 and 27 below). The various similarities and differences between this and literal scientific theorizing are to be clarified in what follows.

  10. Sellars ends Part VIII of EPM, ‘Does Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation’, with his well-known conclusion that “empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.” Furthermore, in Part IX ‘Science and Ordinary Usage’ he argues that “what we call the scientific enterprise is the flowering of a dimension of discourse which already exists in what historians call the ‘prescientific stage’, and that failure to undertand this type of discourse ‘writ large’—in science—… has often led to a failure to appreciate its role in ‘ordinary usage’, and, as a result, to a failure to understand the full logic of even the most fundamental, the ‘simplest’ of empirical terms” (EPM §40). Sellars’ conception of the close relationship between ordinary and scientific modes of empirical explanation, and between both of those and the content of “even the ‘simplest’ empirical terms” in ordinary usage, is another clear respect in which his philosophy shares the spirit of later ‘theory theory’ conceptions.

  11. Sellars at one point raises the now familiar circularity objections to behaviorist analyses: roughly, that the attempted ‘if–then’ reductive analyses of any given silent mental state or attitude in terms of dispositions to overt behavior always presuppose or smuggle in background assumptions about further such mental states or attitudes: “The uncomfortable feeling will not be downed that the dispositional account of thoughts in terms of intelligent behavior is covertly circular” (EPM part XI, §XI). Elsewhere, Sellars remarks on what he takes to be several other explanatory deficiencies of the Rylean verbal behaviorist view that he reconstructs, here put in terms quite congenial to contemporary theory theorists: “…already at the commonsense level, I think people begin to sketch a richer [non-behaviorist] theory according to which … there are episodes which are not propensities to say things, but are part of a framework for explaining why these propensities occur as they do, how they are related to one another, and why they change with the speed with which they can change” (ME p. 333, italics added; cf. SK Lec II §§50–2, and cf. O’Shea 2007, pp. 93–4 for further references). In what follows, I focus on the italicized explanatory feature of Jones’s proto-theory in general.

  12. This is not to say that Sellars is a priori committed to it being the case that all dispositional analyses must in principle necessarily be capable of being cashed out in terms of categorical bases in this way. The point is rather that superior explanations, ones that among other explanatory merits have ‘surplus content’ beyond the relevant dispositional analyses, have often proceeded in this way; and furthermore Jones’s “proto-scientific” theory of rational human behavior (and of our propensities or dispositions to such behavior) in terms of occurrent episodes of thought is put forward as a theory having merits of this kind.

  13. For an interesting comparison of the similarities between Husserl’s and Sellars’ accounts of first-person introspective knowledge (including a discussion of the influence of the former upon the latter), see Amie Thomasson (2005). Thomasson’s characterization of Sellars’ account as what she calls an “outer observation” view of introspective knowledge does not really engage Sellars’ account of introspective knowledge per se, however, as I shall note briefly in closing.

  14. The qualifications on ‘language of thought’ are intended to reflect the fact that Sellars’ original language of thought hypothesis was not committed to the sorts of innateness claims that were later to be put forward by Fodor and others. In EPM, Sellars carefully remarks that his own account “is perfectly compatible with the idea that the ability to have thoughts is acquired in the process of acquiring overt speech and that only after overt speech is well established, can ‘inner speech’ occur without its overt culmination” (§58 #(3)). Sellars was clearly attracted to the latter broadly Wittgensteinian outlook, although as noted earlier he also later argued in MEV in 1981 in favor of a conception of animal representational systems according to which “a primitive RS [representational system] is also an innate endowment of human beings. The concept of innate abilities to be aware of something as something, and hence of pre-linguistic awarenesses is perfectly intelligible” (MEV §57).

  15. Here is a recent characterization of the typical target of explanation of both theory theorists and simulation theorists: “A core assumption of both theory theory and simulation theory is that we only perceive or experience the physical movements of persons, since mental states are unobservable. …For both folk psychological accounts, our perceptual experience is of mere behavior, and mental state understanding only comes when we perform some extra psychological process beyond perception” Herschbach (2008), p. 223.

  16. As noted earlier, one crucial respect in which Sellars takes the common sense ontology of physical objects to be strictly speaking false, and thus in principle open to replacement by a more adequate (scientific) conceptual framework, is ultimately the ‘location’ common sense assigns to the sensible qualities. Note, however, that this does not commit Sellars to a similar view about our common sense ‘post-Jonesean’ conception of thoughts as inner episodes, since Sellars argues that on his functionalist conception of thoughts it is primarily only the ‘vehicles’ of thought that are open to radical reconceptualization and replacement in the course of future science (cf. O’Shea 2011).

  17. See especially SRT pp. 314–321 on the observation framework and the various distinctions between ‘seeing of’, ‘seeing that’, ‘seeing as’, and so on; and see also Sellars 1965 SRII and Sellars 1963b TE for Sellars' earlier statements of his views on the theory/observation distinction.

  18. For example, Sellars 1981b FMPP Lec. I, Sellars 1978a IKTE, Sellars 1978b SRPC, SM Lec. I (implicitly), Sellars 1977 BD (esp. §VII), ME, and Sellars 2009 WSNDL (esp. lectures 8–9).

  19. Namely, the essays ‘Phenomenalism’ and the ‘Language of Theories’, both of which were reprinted in Sellars’ SPR (1963) but were originally written or published in 1959, just 3 years after EPM and the myth of Jones. I will not be examining Sellars’ argument for scientific realism here, but that it crucially involves the ambiguity concerning the theory/observation distinction that I am examining here is also claimed in O’Shea 2007, chapter 2; and see also Sellars TE, passim.

  20. Sellars’s scientific realism defends the idea of a “direct use of theoretical language in perceptual response to the world” (SM V 91). For remarks by Sellars on scientists seeing electrons in cloud chambers, etc., see also WSNDL pp. 274–5. Sellars in the end holds the radical view, as we saw earlier, that there are no physical objects with intrinsic color properties in the way that they are conceived in the “perceptual framework” of the manifest image (cf. EPM IX §42, and SRII parts I and V). See also the final paragraph of SRII on the “direct commerce of the conceptual framework of theory with the world,” a direct commerce that “exists already in limited contexts” (e.g., cloud chambers, etc.).

  21. In contrast to the myth of the given in sense-datum accounts, for example, ‘perception proper’ in Sellars’ sense is of sensible qualities conceived as properties of external physical objects in the common sense perceptible world, and thus on his view requires whatever conceptual or proto-conceptual abilities are required for the possibility of perceiving objects as persisting physical objects in space and time in the first place. (Cf. Sellars BD, part VII, for his remarks on how Kant corrected classical empiricism in this crucial respect.)

  22. Again, it should be noted that Jones’s ‘proto-scientific’ theory of thought episodes is an explanatory enrichment that takes place within the manifest image (rather than in the scientific image), as Sellars makes clear in various places: e.g., “Perhaps the most important point is that what the theory postulates in the way of new entities are processes and acts”—as states of the perceiver (as EPM XVI §61(1))—“rather than [new] individuals. In this sense, it remains within the manifest image. Persons remain the basic individuals of the system” (SK II §55). Jones’s proto-theory thus resembles and differs from literal postulational scientific theorizing in ways that we are in the process of attempting to clarify.

  23. Elsewhere, Sellars makes it clear that the pre-Jonesean Ryleans are conceived already to have the requisite normative vocabulary for these meaning-classifications, and thus can formulate ‘out-loud’ those ‘ought-to-be’ rules of criticism and ‘ought-to-do’ rules of action that form the basis of Sellars’ inferentialist semantics (and then derivatively, via Jones’s proto-theory, of the semantics and intentionality of inner thought-episodes). See O’Shea (2007), ch. 4 and p. 207 note 26 for further discussion of these issues and of related circularity objections of Roderick Chisholm and Ausonio Marras to Sellars’ account.

  24. This is not to say, however, that Jones or we must be in a position to provide the relevant categorical description either: “It is only when we come to think that some particular part of the body (e.g., the heart or the brain) is the locus of these activities that the term ‘inner’ acquires richer meaning. And this begins to happen when the scientific revolution makes its impact on our concept of the world” (SK Lec. II §55), i.e., when we move beyond genius Jones’s initial posit, made within the manifest image, to the scientific image properly speaking.

  25. As noted earlier, none of this prevents either the epistemologist or the cognitve scientist from further analyzing or offering empirical hypotheses concerning the complex relationships between (a) and (b).

  26. It would be fruitful to compare the Sellarsian view of our perception of the mental states of others defended in this paper with the very interesting recent discussion of closely related issues in Joel Smith’s article, ‘Seeing Other People’ (2010), but unfortunately I cannot undertake that task here. See also the recent excellent exchange on the topic of the direct perception of emotions in Rowland Stout (2010) and Mitchell Green (2010). While I will not argue for this here, I would suggest that the account given here can provide a middle way that captures the perceptual directness that is rightly defended by both Stout and by Green, but which also (a) justifies a move beyond Stout’s sophisticated neo-behaviorist account to include a warranted conception of inner episodic mental events; and (b) avoids Green’s contrasting appeal to unconscious inferences from characteristic expressions to the emotions of which the former are typically a ‘part’, which arguably threatens the directness of the perception of emotions that is meant to be preserved in the account.

  27. Cf. EPM XV §59, XVI §62; SM III §26, VI §§11–12; SK II §§46–7; ME p. 264–5, 331–40; WSNDL pp. 88, 93; and see also Sellars’ correspondence with Hector Castañeda, available here: http://www.ditext.com/sellars/corr.html. For further discussion of Sellars’ views on this issue, see also O’Shea 2007, pp. 97–100.

  28. Note that the non-inferential nature of the highly reliable (‘privileged’) self-report is on this account already in the pre-Jonesean Rylean model. Once again, we see that Sellars’ account will preserve the theoretical-explanatory character of the theory theory but without requiring or entailing the following hypothesis made by some theory theorists: namely, that what is for us, now, non-inferential knowledge must in such cases be seen as having at some time been psychologically inferential and then become non-inferential through acquired expertise (although we have seen that the latter phenomenon can and does occur in some contexts of non-inferential theoretical expertise). Similarly, one need not appeal to hypotheses concerning unconscious or sub-personal ‘inferential’ processes in order to preserve the theoretical-explanatory character of the account, although neither are such sub-personal processes ruled out.

  29. Amie Thomasson’s comparison of Sellars and Husserl in ‘First-Person Knowledge and Phenomenology’ (2005) mentioned earlier does not actually discuss Sellars’s account of introspective knowledge per se, as Sellars outlines it in the locations referred to above. Her discussion is rather of the ways in which Sellars’ account of ‘looks’ and ‘appearances’ is both ‘outer directed’ and yet at the same time concerns the nature of our experiences of the world as such. That topic and her comparison to Husserl are interesting in themselves, but they are not the place to look for Sellars’ account of our first-person knowledge of our own occurrent mental states, which Sellars treats in the places noted earlier.

  30. Special thanks to Rasmus Jensen and Dermot Moran, and to the two excellent anonymous referees for the journal, for their detailed comments and queries. This research was supported by a University College Dublin (UCD) President’s Fellowship award, for which I am grateful.

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Correspondence to James R. O’Shea.

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In this paper, I follow the widespread convention among philosophers of using “double-quotation marks” for quotations from authors, while ‘single quotation marks’ are used for mentioning items and for ‘scare quote’ qualifications.

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O’Shea, J.R. The ‘theory theory’ of mind and the aims of Sellars’ original myth of Jones. Phenom Cogn Sci 11, 175–204 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9250-y

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