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«There are two major traditions in modern theorizing
about the mind, one that we will call representationalist, and one that
we’ll call eliminativist. Representationalists hold that
postulating representational states is essential to the theory of cognition
(…) Eliminativists, by contrast, think that psychological theories
can dispense with such semantic notions as representation. According to
eliminativists the appropriate vocabulary for psychological theorizing is
neurological or perhaps behavioral» Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988,
Conexionism and cognitive architecture, Cognition, 38.
1. Cognitive science, mind and method
Cognitive science research bears on our understanding of fundamental
questions about the mind, such as the nature of representation,
consciousness and action. Drawing on such research D. Dennett’s
work of the last thirty five years offers proposals about how to think
about each of these issues. His views are admittedly controversial
– he tends to be accused of insensitivity to the ‘real’,
first-person, problems of the mind , but in fact he provides a
comprehensive, cognitive science grounded, account of the nature of
subjectivity.
For Dennett intentionality, and not consciousness, is the most basic
issue about the mind , and the notion of interpreter is essential to deal
with it (Dennett 1987). His theory of consciousness involves a critique
of qualia and the Cartesian Theater, but also positive views, namely a
funcionalist model aimed at explaining the status of the centredness,
seriality and continuity of mental life and a belief-like, second-order,
account of self-awareness (Dennett 1991). It is from views on
intentionality and consciousness – which will be explored in this
article – that a practical philosophy arises, concerning what must
be in place in terms of cognition for the mentalistic concepts of
‘person’ and ‘action’ to apply to cognitive
systems (Dennett 1983, Dennett 2003).
Anti-representationalism is the core of Dennett’s view of the mind.
Anti-representationalism is the idea according to which for there to be
mind there need be no such thing as real inner representations in those
physical systems we take to be rational agents. For Dennett this means
that there’s no such thing as representations short of a stance, a
strategy towards certain physical systems. Many people consider these
formulation already unintelligible, or question begging . Critics in
general took it as interpretivism (i.e. mind would depend on a merely
instrumental attribution of mentality by an interpreter). In fact, in
order to fully understand Dennett’s brand of
anti-representationalism we must see it as a more sophisticated view,
including (i) the idea that mentalistic notions aplly to agents globally
considered and not to inner states, (ii) the fact that they apply depends
on recognition of patterns of behaviour and also on agents inner design
for recognition (which means questions of representation and design
should come together in the theory of mind ), (iii) a position about the
metaphysics of cognition, which involves taking seriously the difference
between vehicles of representation (e.g. neural events) and what is
represented. The whole view may arguably push Dennett into denying
metaphysical realism (Haugeland 1997: 267-304) but it is certainly not
instrumentalist.
Before addressing Dennett’s general positions I want to point out
something that may help a reader navigate through his work. Given his
dislike of tempting subjects such as qualia and zombies, and also his
dislike of overlinguistified and overargued approaches to questions of
mind, Dennett sometimes seems to be very far from protocols of argument
in philosophy, not so much a philosophers’ philosopher as a
philosopher for those outside of the discipline who are interested in
philosophical issues. He casts a suspicious look on some ongoing debates
in the philosophy of mind and often goes straight to cognitive science
work . This is on the one hand a symptom of what Dennett calls his
technophile inclinations - in his own words, if not for being born into a
arts and humanities academic family he would probably have become an
engineer (Self-Portrait )-, but we may also see it as a quinean,
naturalized epistemology, imperative put to practice in terms of method,
disrupting supposed boundaries between what should be scientific and what
should be philosophic in the theory of mind. In consequence,
Dennett’s work often takes the form of an effort to relate
cognitive science with phenomenological descriptions of mind (taking
phenomenology to mean a neutral description of mental goings-on, at the
personal level, the level we access our own minds ). Bringing together
this phenomenological take a cognitive system may have of itself with a
third-person approach involves specific problems: cognitive science is
involved in what Dennett calls (Dennett 1991) the dismantling of the
witness protection program or a close-up of the observer. There’s
no witness, no observer inside a cognitive system which we take to be
mental (ourselves included, of course) and still there’s mind.
Yet, although taking cognitive science seriously involves trying to find
out whether self-knowledge can be disrupted from a third-person point of
view, this may in fact go together with the impossibility of being an
eliminativist. And that is exactly the case with Dennett. Anyway if we
consider that self-knowledge stops - it goes only as far as the mind
goes, or rather, not even that far, and definitely does not reach
cognitive architecture or physical workings - Dennett’s decision
not to separate philosophical theory of mind from third-person approaches
to cognition doesn’t seem such a bad one.
2. A few remarks about the origins of Intentional Systems Theory
Since Dennett’s anti-representationalism results from what was
going on in philosophy in the 50s and 60s, I will take a step back to
reformulate the question about Dennett’s anti-representationalism
as a question about what makes for an antirepresentationalist such as
Dennett. In epistemological and ontological questions, Dennett’s
work was inspired by ideas of Ryle, Wittgenstein, Quine and Putnam. Ryle
showed him that the alternative between materialist and idealist monism
depended on an incorrect approach to the problem of mind , and
Wittgenstein the groundlessness of any presumption of epistemic authority
or direct access to the structure of the world in mental descriptions .
Wittgenstein and Ryle together provided an example of how description of
mind at the personal level should go, and of how talk of mind should be
taken, if not as authoritative introspective description of thinking
substances. From Quine, Dennett took the naturalist outlook and the
regard for natural science, and also (as Fodor put it) nihilism about
meaning – the idea that ‘there are no semantic
engines’. Putnam’s functionalism, a sophisticated kind of
materialism, allowed him to articulate his opposition to psychophysical
identity theory and gave him the idea of the mental as incorrigibility of
personal level acess. His thinking about action was influenced by Ch.
Taylor’s philosophical critique of psychological behaviourism, as
an utopian search of a pure data language to explain behaviour, as well
as by E. Anscombe’s analysis of intentional action in Intention.
The starting point for the theory of mind is thus
‘phenomenology’, and that’s what Wittgenstein (in the
Philosophical Investigations) and Ryle (in The Concept of Mind) do: a
report of mental happennings, whether these be feelings of pain or
mathematical thoughts, without any presumption of explanation, or inquiry
about physical basis of mind. Strangely enough, these philosophers, on
whose work Dennett molds his own, are often taken as behaviorists. Yet,
behaviourism, Skinner type of behaviourism, was exactly what stood
opposed to the methodological revolution in psychology which prompted
Dennett‘s philosophy, and which we can loosely call cognitivism, in
the sense of informational-computational approach to the mind. Dennett
has always opposed what he called ‘peripherist behaviorism’
and defended the indispensable role of intentional and teleological
descriptions of behaviour - initially he called this position centralism
(Dennett 1969), later Intentional Stance (Dennett 1987) . Psychological
and philosophical behaviorism have always been rather different anyway,
and it is philosophical behaviorists Dennett takes as models. But
there’s one point where Dennett profoundly disagrees with a
rylean-wittgensteinian approach to the mind: the ideia that a
self-sufficient conceptual analysis could be a proper philosophical method,
which easily pairs up with contempt for natural science . What’s
important about Wittgenstein and Ryle is the fact that they try to
conceive the status of the personal level – the level at which we
describe our minds from within, and where pulleys and levers questions,
i.e. mechanical considerations, are not legitimate. Such
personal/subpersonal distinction is vital, when dealing with mind and
cognition, to set apart what is descriptive and what is explanatory.
Still, even if personal level approach should consist of phenomenological
data-gathering for the theory of mind, this should be brought together
with scientific research about cognition. Luckily, to help him step past
the lack of interest in the philosophical bearing of science, he had
brought from America the influence of Quine, and the imperative, for a
proper quinean, not to overlook science . This led Dennett to a hybrid
philosophy / cognitive science style of approach, which sets him equally
apart both from Ryle and Wittgestein conceptual analysis as from much
contemporary philosophy of mind.
Putnam’s functionalism came as a final touch. In his manifests from
the 60s , Putnam declared the mind-body problem to be not an empirical
problem but a logical, linguistic one, with nothing to do with a
supposedly unique character of human subjective experience, since it
would arise for any system characterized by an assimetry of access to its
own physical and functional (logical) states. So from Putnam, Dennett
took not only functionalism as a critique of identity theory but also a
characterization of mind as incorrigible self-access to functional states
.
The result is Intentional Systems Theory (IST henceforth): a moderate
realism about the nature of representation (Dennett 1998, 95), going
together with a teleofunctionalist view of content and the refusal to
consider psychological explanation as explanation properly speaking. As
for consciousness, the theory includes a deflationary view of (so called)
qualia, and a second-order, belief-like, account of awareness, based on a
functionalist model – the Multiple Drafts Model (Dennett 1991).
Dennett’s gradualist position about ‘persons’ and
‘actions’ (Dennett 1983, Dennett 2003) comes of these.
3. Representation: sententialism, eliminativism or interpretation
But what is anti-representationalism, if not straight Churchland-style
eliminativism? In IST’s case it results from (i) a quinean option
for interpretation in the theory of mind (ultimatelly explored through
the idea of real patterns recognized from the Intentional Stance), (ii)
darwinism (it is design that accounts for both patterns and recognition,
and Darwinian principles of evolution by natural selection should account
for the origin and nature of design). This eventually leads to a denial
of metaphysical realism .
While a self-professed physicalism , IST’s first concern is in fact
the status of mentalistic language in the theory of cognition. It was
this option that eventually led to the defense of a real patterns (as
opposed to Language of Thought intentional realism) view of the nature of
representation. Whenever the behaviour of some physical system is being
understood or predicted mentalistically, the intentional stance is being
adopted (according to Dennett, there are other stances we may take
towards a physical system, namely the physical stance – the
physicist’s approach, and the design stance – the biologist,
or computer programmer, focus on function) . By taking the intentional
stance a cognitive system makes sense of the behaviour of another without
any idea of inner workings. How is it possible that minds read minds this
way? It is possible because patterns of behaviour, relations between the
system and those aspects of environment which matter to it, are being
recognized by another cognitive system. Before seeing this interpretivism
as untenably behavioristic and anti-naturalist we should consider that we
needn’t even be talking about humans here – what Dennett is
saying is that we cannot avail ourselves with the notion of
representation without considering relations between agents and their
environment. What we, in the theory, call representations depends on
interpretation in that it depends on recognizing, from the intentional
stance, the embeddeness of behaviour of agents in the environment. It is important
here that there are basic representations, which are action-oriented and
about what is, for specific agents, relevant in the environment .
Contrary to what instrumentalist readings assume, Dennett thinks that an
interpreter (until now, a mind-recognizer) does not arbitrarily create
intentional interpretations of other cognitive systems, rather
representation talk is made legitimate by recognition of
environment-embedded patterns of behaviour. This should be accounted for
as a matter of design-for-representation-using and and
representation-recognizing and inevitably it leads from the question of
representation to that of the nature of design. Thus, Dennett has to come
clear with his view of design: is it real or not? To sum up, he thinks
design is real in that it results from an algorithmic, mindless process
of evolution by natural selection (Dennett 1995), but depends on
interpretation in that functions – and functions of inner
design-for-representation included – depend on recognition to be
taken as specific functions .
So although representation relations depend on recognition, they do
subsist and more must be said about their content. Dennett does this in
terms of a telefunctionalist account: content is not within, where
vehicles of representation occur, it is a function of function,
externally determined. But what is external? If action-oriented
representations are the basic type of representations, the world is
represented differently by different cognitive systems. For instance,
different animal perceptive systems evolved to respond to the
enviroment’s affordances, so different cognitive systems will be
different world-makers (taking well known examples from the literature,
there will be worlds in which location-of-nectar is especially salient, worlds
where that’s the case with
possible-nutrition-which-flies-quickly-through-visual-field, or
toxic-surface-water-to-be-avoided, etc). This Dennett calls notional
worlds, a concept that does not apply to vehicles of representation
within a cognitive system, nor to the world directly, but rather to what
is represented .
What do these views about nature and content of representations amount to
when it comes to giving an account of psychological explanation?
Basically, they keep Dennett from subscribing to anything Fodor’s
hard-core representationalist realism buys him: causal thinking about the
intentional level of reality, psychological explanation as nomological,
and so proper explanation - the whole constellation of special sciences,
ceteris paribus laws, independence of psychological generalizations from
physical implementation. But for Dennett, Fodor’s
sentences-in-the-head view conflates intentionality with design: being an
engineering hypothesis Language of Thought commits the rylean sin of taking
a conceptual anwer to be a causal answer. The representational-
computational theory of mind takes notions (language, representation)
which aplly to the whole cognitive system as if they could do explanatory
work at the subpersonal level. For Dennett this amounts to letting a
ghostly central observer sneak in in the theory. Plus, Dennett sees no
reason to accept the common design (Dennett 1978: 90) of cognitive
systems Language of Thought implies – for him subpersonal cognitive
psychology is just a theory of implementation of that which,
intentionally interpreted, are representations and computations.
The next move is to clarify the relations between folk psychology,
(scientific) subpersonal cognitive psychology and IST as a philosophical
view of cognition (Dennett 1987, 43). And the way he sees it, there is no
reduction of intentional characterizations to physical descriptions
– but also no explanatory power of mentalistic notions.
Not only did the relation between representation and design lead Dennett
to Darwinism but also to what he calls, in Kinds of Minds (Dennett 1996)
an evolutionary point of view on ontology and metaphysics. From an
evolutionary perspective there’s a plurality of minds. But can
pluralism can be defended together with physicalism, understood as
priority given to the physical stance, and a constitutive reference to
physics, as basic science, when the question is what fundamentally
exists? Again, the question of reduction comes up. There are several ways
to be an anti-reductionist about the mind (i.e. to deny that the
intentional may be reduced to entities and laws situated below within the
framework of a hierarquical conception of nature), the main ones
represented in the philosophy of mind by Fodor and Davidson. To
understand Dennett’s anti-reductionism we must focus not on the
situation where a human instrumentally interprets another as mental, but
rather on the status of what is represented, and on the concept of an
interpreter.
What is the ‘interpreter’? Answering this question implies clearly
stating the metaphysical implications of IST. J.Haugeland does that in an
illuminating way, bringing IST together with an idea which is actually
one of its main targets: J. Searle’s concept of intrinsic
intentionality - the ideia that one can legitimately distinguish real
believers from which are merely predictable from the intentional stance .
Haugeland suggests that we use searlean intrinsic intentionality and
Dennett’s interpreter to clarify one another. Both Dennett and
Searle claim that intentionality is normative, and Searle proposes the
notion of aspectual shape (of anything mental) to say what is meant by
normativity . Now, whereas Searle simply characterizes aspectual shape,
and cannot account for it, Dennett, with his idea of interpreter, can.
Let’s formulate the problem as ‘how can physical
configurations of brains resulting from evolution by natural selection be
intrinsically normative’?, and take a game of chess as an example
of taking something as something. How does a player see that a horse
threatens a pawn? No causal history accounts for the perception of
horse-as-horse or pawn-as-pawn: only a stance, a constitutive commitment,
from which depends the very reality of chess phenomena, does. These are
not identifiable with physical pieces of ivory (or patterns on a screen,
or marks on a paper); rather they are constitued by standards . Whose
standards? The subject’s – and what Dennett is saying abut
representation is that the constitutive role of interpretation stands to
mentality as the subject stands to the reality of chess phenomena.
Haugeland sees the intentional stance view of representation as kantian
constitution: objects of perception, action or thought, are
understandable as what they are only in terms of a commitment of a
subjectivity-qua-unity (i.e. the interpreter). It is this interpreter we
need to understand in order to have a metaphysics of representation. The
interpreter is neither a place in the brain, nor a self, it’s more
like a taking-as function. This normativity is a feature of subjectivity
which for instance a neurobiological theory of consciousness cannot
account for, nor should, because it is not by itself a theory of
representation, but of the vehicles of representation. The chess analogy
is useful to dispel any suspicion about the mysterious character of
normativity – what is there is a stance, without which
there’s neither subjectivity nor objecthood: that’s the
two-sided nature of mind as representation, necessary for searlean
aspectual shape which distinguishes anything mental as mental. Through
this we can understand searlean intrinsic intentionality as subjectivity
to itself, or self-mental-interpretation, and also see the other side of
the problem of representation as what B. Cantwell Smith (Cantwell Smith
1996) calls the ‘origin of objects’. Cantwell Smith points
out that physics does not buy us objects - individuated, continuous
through time, discrete and identifiable represented objects – but
only particularity and locality. Physicalist theories of mind should take
into consideration, instead of assuming existence identity or persistence
across time of intentional objects. Being a represented object is not a
local property of a space-time region: objects (individuation in what is
represented) are there only for certains entities. Object is not a causal
notion, but an historical concept, and that’s the main reason why
representational notions should not be taken as physically effective.
Haugeland and Cantwell Smith help shaping Dennett’s
anti-representationalism and also his view of psychological explanation:
anti-representationalism is not a view about human agents’ capacity
for interpreting one another by means of strategically attributing mental
states, but a view about the nature and status of representation in the
world according to which it is only at the level of a subject / object
interface that ontologies (Dennett’s notional worlds) are defined
(even if it may still be claimed that the world is metaphysically one).
So, in spite of accusations of behaviourism and instrumentalism, IST in
fact involves the irreducibility of subjectivity – not of qualia
but of this essential role of an interpreter for representation. This
also means there are at least two different unities a theory of mind must
account for: the interpreter, the unity involved in intentionality, and
another unity, a represented unity in a mind, for itself - the self,
which, from a cognitive point of view, Dennett sees as virtual
unification in a multiple agents cognitive system. The first is a metaphysical
question about cognition; the latter is a question about the individual
subject’s subpersonal mechanisms of cognition, to be answered in
terms of brain . This is crucial for the next step in the theory of mind:
a theory of consciousness, partly built on this view of representation,
but also involving the proposal of a cognitive model, and a set of
epistemological considerations about qualia. The fact that Dennett
defends a representationalist theory of consciousness (i.e. consciousness
is a form of representation, principles for understanding intentionality
and consciousness are the same) makes it necessary, in order to
understand his anti-representationalism, to deal with intentionality and
consciousness together.
4. Consciousness as an imprecise Cartesian Theater
Dennett’s theory of consciousness is bound to frustrate fans of
phenomenal consciousness, qualia and zombies: it is a deflationary
theory, in which conciousness is explained in terms of representation,
self-access, and incorrigibility of self-reports (in fact, qualia and
zombies don’t even make sense within a representational theory of
consciouness). Dennett’s theory of consciousness deals not with the
so-called hard problem of consciousness, but with a set of problems (kinds
of access, unification of a stream of consciousness from multiple drafts
at the subpersonal level, self-representation and virtual center,
self-reports, the difference language makes in a mind, etc). The type of
solutions Dennett comes up with make it obvious that what he is offering
is at least partly a cognitive model. This earned him the accusation of
offering no arguments and no answer to the metaphysical problem of
phenomenal consciouness. For Dennett, though, this is how a theory of
consciousness should be, if it does not go after bogey-problems.
Dennett’s theory of consciousness is developped mainly through the
Multiples Drafts Model (put forward in the 90s, in Consciousness
Explained, as a successor of the Brainstorms model). Funcionalist models
(which are, in spite of the proclaimed opposition to the Cartesian
Theater , the starting point for a belief-like theory of inner awareness)
are the constructive part of Dennett’s theory of consciouness -
through them Dennett aims at filling the (supposed) abyss between
physiology and phenomenology. Plus, they allow him to deal with empirical
issues of cognitive science, such as the status of mental images and
dreams, production of language, blindsight, temporal anomalies (such as
color phi-phenomenon and Libet’s problems of backward referral in
time and delay of consciousness of intention) (Dennett 1992). The
destructive, and better known, part of his theory of consciousness is an
argument for quining qualia – decisive for rejecting the usual ways
of vindicating phenomenal consciousness: zombies, knowledge argument,
what-it’s-like.
How does one go from a cognitive model to the elimination of qualia?
Unlike what happens when dealing with intentionality (the agent’s
unity is simply assumed to consider behaviour and adaption to the
environment), dealing with consciousness involves zooming into cognitive
systems, characterized at subpersonal level(s) as (i) hardware-level
parallel distributed processing, (ii) functional level competing agents.
The assumption of a unity or center as given goes, and the unified
represention of the system by the system becomes part of what is to be
explained . Dennett’s critique of qualia is simply a matter of
exploring the epistemological consequences of this absence of a real
center where everything comes together for an observer -the Cartesian
Theater metaphor for the mind. Still, even if the close-up of the
observer reveals the absence of a real center, our own mind appears to
each of us as an (imprecise) Cartesian Theater, and that is what the
Multiple Drafts Model (MDM) aims at explaining. This means formulating
subpersonal level hypothesis about what makes conscious experience
unified, serial and continuous and also about what makes for our sense of
control of intention. According to the MDM, unification depends on a
user’s ilusion of a virtual serial machine implemented on parallel
distributed processing hardware (the brain of the body the self will call
its own). Virtual is obviously not unreal – the mental life of the
system is very much real for the system itself - and Dennett is not
saying consciouness is an illusion (the illusion would be to think of the
unified self as a separate substance, an out of the physical world pure
experiencing) but trying to account in terms of cognitive architecture
for the way we appear to ourselves. Self-representation is another
necessary condition for the sense of being owner and author of
phenomenology, and for the unification and centralization of control and
intention. The need for inner communication pushes for a represented
unity (in language using humans, eventually an ‘I’) . This
centralized virtual arena for unified control of behavior is necessary
for what phenomenologically is feeling a self from within. Still, unified
intention and initiation are also user’s illusions in the sense
that the ‘control-component’ (as the Brainstorms model has
it) is replaceable with autonomous agents which can be
‘dismissed’ (i.e. they are bottom-up explainable). In such
conditions, disunity and break-down lurk – the various pathologies
of identity which have always interested those interested in mind (from
schizophrenia and paranoia to multiple personality disorder and split
brain) reflect this absence of a real center.
Not only centredness and seriality but also continuity of phenomenology
has to be explained: part of Dennett’s exploration of consciousness
concerns the role of neglect and filling in for what may not be there in
experience (from memory, to dreams, to perception) and his basic thesis
is that if there’s no observer there’s no need for filling
in. More specifically, awareness of x cannot exist without a belief and
it is by principle impossible for the subject to decide, in what concerns
his awreness of x, between appearance and reality (this may be called first-person
verificationism) . The blind spot, in vision, is emblematic of the kind
of non-problematic neglect (we might call it normal anosognosia) Dennett
is after and thinks is significant. In where there are no agents anxious
for information, there’s no problem if no information arrives.
Dennett generalizes this to our feeeling of our own phenomenology .
Having replaced the observer with specialized agents and identified
awareness with availability, in memory, of knowledge-that is essential to
understand what is probably the main test-case for MDM and first-person
verificationism: the supposed stalinesque and orwellian revisions Dennett
tests on colour phi-phenomenon and several other examples (Dennett 1991).
It was already apparent in the Brainstorms model that memory was vital
for Dennett’s conception of consciousness. Personal level access of
the system to itself, which is ultimately what Dennett calls
consciousness, depends on different types of subpersonal accesses. Namely
expression, i.e. publication of any mental content, even to oneself (e.g.
thinking linguistically), involves subpersonal transit between memory and
mechanisms for reportability. If content of awareness is everything
registered in memory, it may decay or be interfered with before it is
recovered for public access. If ‘public’ should be identified
with personal and includes the linguistic acess the system has to itself,
this determines the epistemic prospects of introspective authority, since
what we call semantic intentions are based on the connection between
control and reportability. Given the absence of difference between
processing and status of contents of which we’re aware,
consciousness depends on probes – it is self-monitorization which
make consciousness as inner-awareness possible. This is developed through
an higher-order view of consciousness (Dennett 1991:303). A system is
conscious if and only if higher-order mental states, mental states which
are about other mental states of the system, occur. And these mental
states are, according to Dennett, beliefs, not perceptions .
It is based on these ideas about how mental life appears to conscious
beings such as ourselves that Dennet discusses and quines (i.e.
eliminates) qualia. For him, the term names intrinsic, ineffable, private,
uncorrigibly known characteristics of our mental lives. With qualia so
defined, the claim that there are no qualia, amounts to saying that there
could not be, in a subject's mental experience, something that is
immediately known and ineffable. There’s no real seem, no pure
non-conceptual appearing (Dennett 1991, 369-411) - there simply cannot be
any differences in conscious experience that subjects are not explicitly
aware of .
What follows from this? Dennett never says cognitive systems such as
ourselves (in which there are no qualia) are not conscious - in fact, the
very object of a theory of consciousness are those systems, among
intentional systems, which are conscious. Dennett theory of consciousness
applies exclusively to humans – other animals, or even babies,
simply are not subject to the Cartesian Theater illusion: those are minds
less centralized that adult, linguistic, human minds, and not self-aware
. So even if Dennett does away with any aprioristic distinction between
natural and artificial and intends to have us look at cognitive
performances of actual, biologically based, minds as situated, with other
(biological or not) possible kinds of minds, in the same design space
(Dennett 1995), he also proposes criteria for human minds as a specific
kind of minds. Cognitive architectures for communication and language
make for thresholds: there are characteristics the minds of linguistic
creatures possess because they are linguistic. Allowing namely for mental
acts such as endorsing and affirming one’s own beliefs and making
voluntary decisions, language simply makes human minds much more powerful
than those of any other animals – for Dennett although this is not
a difference in kind, only a difference in degree, it is still big enough
to make all the difference in moral terms .
7. Conclusion
The challenge in the study of cognition is whether it allows us to
think of the world as ultimately mindless and Dennett’s philosophy
is an answer to that challenge. It is, thus, especially significant that
his anti-representationalism does not in any way amount to an elimination
of subjectivity from our conception of the world. In fact, it is
remarkable that he has been accused of being something like a
third-person absolutist, insensitive to ‘real’, first-person
problems of mind, when in fact the central thesis of IST concerns the
indispensability of mentalism. It is one thing to keep us from an appeal
to intuition and to something unique about our kind of minds, and to
argue that frontiers between mental and non-mental may be fuzzier, and
the transition more gradual, than what we would intuitively believe,
another thing to think we could ever do away with semantic notions when
dealing with cognition.
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