Quote:
This sort of theory
proposes that the meaning or intentional content of any particular mental state
(a belief, desire, or whatever) derives from the role it plays within a system
of mental states, all of which, as we’ve seen, seem logically interrelated in
the manner briefly discussed in chapters 3 and 6, since to have any one mental
state seems to require having a number of others along with it. The idea is
that what gives the belief that Socrates is mortal the precise meaning it has
is that it is entailed by other beliefs meaning that all men are mortal and
that Socrates is a man, that together with a belief meaning that all mortals
will eventually die it entails a belief meaning that Socrates will eventually
die, and so on. If we think of beliefs, desires, and the like as a vast system
of logically interconnected elements, the theory holds that each element in the
system gets its meaning from having precisely the place in the system it has,
by bearing exactly the logical and conceptual relations it bears to the other
elements. (More precisely, it is the objects of beliefs, desires, and the like
— sentences of Mentalese according to the CRTT, or, more generically and for
those not necessarily committed to the CRTT, “mental representations” of some
other, non-sentential sort — that bear meaning or intentional content. But for
the sake of simplicity, we can ignore this qualification in what follows.)
There seems to be a serious problem with the conceptual role approach, namely
that even if it is granted that mental states have the specific meaning or
content they do only because of their relations to other mental states, this
wouldn’t explain how mental states have any meaning at all in the first place.
That a particular belief either implies other beliefs or is implied by them
presupposes that it has some meaning or other: nothing that was completely
meaningless could imply (or be implied by) anything. The very having of logical
and conceptual relations assumes the prior existence of meaning, so that no
appeal to logical and conceptual connections can (fully) account for meaning.
Moreover, if belief A gets its content from its relations to beliefs B and C,
and these get their content from their relations to beliefs D, E, and F, we
seem destined to be led either in a circle or to an infinite regress.
Either way, no ultimate explanation of intentional content will have been
given. To provide such an explanation thus inevitably requires an appeal to
something outside the network, something which can impart meaning to the whole.
John Searle, who endorses something like the conceptual role theory of meaning,
acknowledges that logical and conceptual relations between mental states cannot
be the whole story if circularity or infinite regress is to be avoided. He therefore
postulates that the entire “Network” of intentional mental states (he
capitalizes Network to signify its status as a technical term) rests on what he
calls a “Background” of non-intentional capacities to interact with the world
around us. We have, for example, such intentional mental states as the desire
to have a beer and the belief that there is beer in the refrigerator, and these
mental states do, in part, get the specific meaning they have via their
relations to each other and to other mental states in the broader Network.
But ultimately these mental states, and the Network as a whole, function only
against a Background of capacities, such as the capacity to move about the
world of physical objects, pick them up, manipulate them, and so on. This capacity
is not to be identified with the belief that there is a real external world of
physical objects; for if it were such an intentional mental state, then it
would have to get its meaning from other mental states, and thus couldn’t serve
as part of the Background that ends the regress of mental states. The capacity
in question is rather something unconscious and without intentionality, a way
of acting rather than a way of thinking. One acts as if one had the belief in
question, though one in fact does not. While this capacity could in principle
become a conscious, intentional mental state — one could come to have the
explicit belief that there is a real world of external physical objects that I
can manipulate and move about within — this would mean that this particular
capacity has moved out of the Background and into the Network, and now rests on
some other unconscious, non-Intentional Background capacity or way of acting.
There is, in short, always some set of capacities or other that comprises the
Background (even if it is not always the same set for different people, or even
for the same person at different times), and these capacities serve to ground
the Network of intentional mental states. There is much to be said for Searle’s
hypothesis of the Background, but it seems that it cannot save the conceptual
role theory, for to speak of a “non-intentional capacity for acting” is to
speak ambiguously. Consider that when you act without the conscious belief that
there is an external world of physical objects, but merely manifest a capacity
to interact with the world of physical objects, your capacity isn’t
non-intentional in the same sense that an electric fan’s capacity to interact
with the world of physical objects is non-intentional. You behave “as if’ you
had a conscious, intentional belief in a world of physical objects, but of
course you don’t, because it typically never even occurs to you either to
believe or doubt that there is such a world: you just interact with the world,
period. The fan also behaves “as if” it believed there was a world of external
physical objects (that it “wants” to cool down, say); but of course it doesn’t
really have this belief (or any wants) at all. In the case of the fan, this is
not because it just hasn’t occurred to the fan to think about whether there is
such a world, for the fan isn’t capable of such thoughts; it is rather because,
strictly speaking, the fan doesn’t really “act” or “behave” at all, as opposed
to just making movements. And the reason we don’t regard it as acting or
behaving in the same sense we do is precisely because it doesn’t have
intentionality — it is a dumb, meaningless, hunk of steel and wires.
We on the other hand don’t merely make physical movements: the waving of your
hand when your friend enters the room isn’t just a meaningless movement, but an
action, the action of greeting your friend. If it were just a meaningless
movement — the result of a seizure, say — we wouldn’t count it as an action at
all; it wouldn’t in that case be something you do, but rather something that
happened to you. The fan, however, is capable of making nothing but meaningless
movements. For something genuinely to behave or act as we do requires that it
does have intentionality — action and behavior of the sort we exhibit are
themselves manifestations of intentionality, and thus presuppose it. But in
that case, an appeal to a “capacity for action” cannot provide the ultimate
explanation of intentionality. We need to know why our capacities for action
are different from the mere capacities for movement that a fan exhibits. Merely
noting, à la Searle’s Background hypothesis, that our capacities are
non-intentional ways of acting cannot help, for that they are genuinely ways of
acting is precisely what needs to be explained. Indeed, since they are ways of
acting, they cannot be literally non-intentional, for if they were, they would
no more be true ways of acting than are the capacities of an electrical fan. A
capacity for action is, as a matter of conceptual necessity, an intentional
capacity. In fairness to Searle, it isn’t clear that he intends his hypothesis
of the Background to serve as a complete explanation of intentionality. His aim
may be just to draw out some implications of the fact that mental states are
logically and conceptually related to one another in a Network.
The point, though, is that his way of avoiding the circularity or regress that
threaten any conceptual role theory cannot be appealed to in order to vindicate
such a theory as a complete theory of meaning — and that it may even be
incoherent, if Searle holds that the capacities and ways of acting that form
the Background are literally devoid of intentionality.
End Quote —from Edward
Feser’s Philosophy of Mind
The following is from "Conjuring Teleology" at https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2016/03/conjuring-teleology.html
“….Hence to write many paragraphs about the scientific banishment of teleology from everywhere else in nature while insisting that teleology is real in the case of human beings, and then casually to insinuate that the history of that banishment gives hope that someday a scientific explanation of the teleology of human consciousness will also be possible… to do that is something of a conjuring trick, a bit of sleight of hand….”
https://metachristianity.blogspot.com/2020/01/most-egregious-of-naturalisms-deficiencies.html
https://metachristianity.blogspot.com/2020/01/reason-itself-the-parasite-upon-irrational.html
https://metachristianity.blogspot.com/2020/01/intentionality-mental-states-searle.html
https://metachristianity.blogspot.com/2020/01/consciousness-and-emergence-and-formation.html
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