Abstract
Daniel D. Hutto and Glenda Satne expose, and suggest a way to resolve, what they see as an “essential tension” which has plagued what they take to be, rightly I think, the most promising approach to the nature of contentful states, that is, the neo-pragmatist approach, according to which an adequate account of content essentially appeals to the notion of a social practice. This paper is a critical assessment of their proposal. On their view, the tension stems from the fact that participation in a social practice seems to require that, in order to participate in one, an individual must have contentful states, which entails that participation in social practices cannot explain the origin of contentful states. They argue that the tension dissipates once contentless forms of intentionality come into view. I show that the tension cannot be addressed in the way in which the authors suggest, for the intermediate steps between primitive intentionality and contentful intentionality cannot in fact fully be accounted for. Nevertheless, the authors shed valuable light on the location and scope of the gap in the transition between mindlessness and contentful mindedness.
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Notes
Daniel Hutto seems to distinguish between the question of the horizontal factors and the question of the vertical factors in Hutto 1999. But he conflates the problem of the vertical factors with the problem of misrepresentation or the disjunction problem (Hutto 1999, 44). The two problems are distinct, and the first one is more fundamental than the second. To repeat, the vertical problem is essentially the question of which of the indefinitely many aspects of the object are captured in representation, and it must be answered in order to understand how representations emerge. (Here I am using the notion of representation in a broad sense, without committing myself to the representational theory of mind.) The misrepresentation problem is the question of how it is possible for a representation to be false. If one is an informational semanticist, one might have good reason to think that solving one of the problems amounts to also solving the other one.
That which is viewed as tension may be captured equally satisfactorily by invoking the notion of circularity: neo-pragmatists fail to give satisfactory accounts of content because their explanations are circular, insofar as they presuppose what they are meant to explain. This strand of criticism has been raised against Davidson’s account (see, for example, Yalowitz 1999). See Myers and Verheggen, forthcoming, for a detailed treatment of it.
See Hutto and Myin 2013 for an elaborate account of contentless intentionality. The account is based on the claim that, “once one abandons the idea that mentality is essentially content involving there is no a priori reason to suppose that cognition is an exclusively heady affair” (2013, 12).
Because primitive intentionality lacks content, attributions of primitive intentionality, unlike attributions of content, do not generate intensional contexts, that is, contexts in which the substitution of co-referential terms may result in a change in the truth value of the sentence. Such attributions are fully extensional, and there is no reason to think that primitive intentionality cannot receive complete characterizations in extensional terms.
They write that, “what is missing from the story is an account of how to bridge the gap between the two [stages]. This is precisely what third basers [the neo-pragmatists] can provide” (Hutto and Satne, 24).
One might object by saying that functions are not tantamount to physical particulars, and yet there does not seem to be any principled reason for which an account of their emergence cannot be had. I hope that it has become clear by now, however, that the notion of content cannot be explained in terms of the notion of function.
This objection and the example that follows have been suggested by Dan Hutto.
I am not suggesting that no light can be shed on the acquisition of the novel kind of mentality, for that would be to ignore the progress that, say, developmental psychology has made in recent decades. Rather, I am suggesting that the explanations supplied are bound to shed light either on one or on the other of the two sides of the unbridgeable gap, and cannot bridge that gap.
Dorit Bar-On argues against continuity scepticism in her paper. Her strategy is to carve a middle ground between natural meaning and non-natural meaning. I do not have the space to discuss her proposal. I will just mention that it is not clear to me that expressive signals and behaviours, which are offered as middle ground, and constitute “natural precursors of objective thought” (2013, 324), cannot be elucidated in terms that are fully extensional (i.e., which do not generate intensional contexts). While Bar-On may be right to think that a “purely causal construal fails to do justice to the richness and complexity of these behaviours” (2013, 318), her arguments do not establish that a construal that is extensionally specified, in terms of targeted responses, is unsatisfactory, and so, to use the vocabulary introduced in this paper, they do not show that expressive signals and behaviours are not, in fact, mere instances of primitive intentionality. But if I am right, expressive behaviour cannot constitute a middle ground between primitive intentionality and full-blown intentionality. See also Bar-On and Green (2010) for a very illuminating discussion of the general project of “charting a path that could put a languageless creature on her way to language,” which is the very close vicinity of the general question addressed in this paper.
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Sultanescu, O. Bridging the Gap: A Reply to Hutto and Satne. Philosophia 43, 639–649 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9625-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9625-3