Does intentional psychology need vindicating by cognitive science?

Does Intentional Psychology Need Vindicating byCognitive Science?

JONATHAN KNOWLESPhilosophy Department, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim,Norway; E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract. I argue that intentional psychology does not stand in need of vindication by a lower-level implementation theory from cognitive science, in particular the representational theory of mind(RTM), as most famously Jerry Fodor has argued. The stance of the paper is novel in that I claimthis holds even if one, in line with Fodor, views intentional psychology as an empirical theory, andits theoretical posits as as real as those of other sciences. I consider four metaphysical arguments forthe idea that intentional psychological states, such as beliefs, must be seen as requiring in-the-headmental representations for us to be able to understand their characteristic causal powers and arguethat none of them validly generate their desired conclusions. I go on to argue that RTM, or somecomputational version thereof, is not motivated by appeal to the nature of cognitive science researcheither. I conclude that intentional psychology, though an empirical theory, is autonomous from detailsof lower level mechanism in a way that renders RTM unwarranted.

Key words: abstract propositions, broad content, cognitive science, connectionism, folk psycho-logy, intentional psychology, language of thought, levels of explanation, modes of presentation,naturalisation, physicalism, representational theory of mind

1. Introduction

This paper is about the relationship between intentional psychology and a putat-ive level of explanation in cognitive science which is not intentional but which,according to some, should be seen as explaining intentional properties and gener-alisations. I will be arguing that intentional psychology does not need vindicatingby cognitive science in this way, but, unlike others who also take this line, I will bedoing so against a view of intentional psychology according to which the propertiesit posits are as fully real and as capable of featuring in explanatory laws as otherscientific properties.

To fix the framework of the debate, let us first consider the question of vin-dication in relation to folk psychology, where it first arose. Folk psychology isusually understood as the scheme of explanation that all normal humans, intuitivelyand naturally, use to explain the rational behaviour and thought processes of otherhumans (and possibly certain animals). A central part of this explanation involvesrelating people to features of the world (including objects, kinds of objects, objects’properties, as well as combinations of these things) by the use of locutions such as‘she thinks the stuff she’s drinking is vodka’ or ‘he wishes the stuff he’s drinkingwere vodka’ – i.e. locutions that relate thinkers in different epistemic ways to pro-positional or intentional contents. It has often been argued that one who believes

Minds and Machines 11: 347–377, 2001.© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

348 JONATHAN KNOWLES

in the ability of folk psychology to explain and predict behaviour owes us someaccount as to how come it works as well as it does: that folk psychology standsin need of some deeper explanation – of vindication – by a theory from scientificpsychology (i.e. cognitive science).1

To understand what this might mean, and how it relates to the question of thecurrent paper, we need briefly to consider the relationship between folk psychologyand cognitive science at a general level. According to most philosophers of mind,it could turn out that folk psychology is a radically inadequate and/or mistakentheory in the light of findings from cognitive science; that, in particular, explainingin terms of intentional content attributions fails to live up to certain standards ofgood scientific explanation, or to central features of the actual processes underly-ing cognition. Eliminativists hold further that this has already happened, or willhappen, and that we should therefore view intentional states and properties as,at best, a kind of fiction. On the other hand, there are those who maintain thatfolk psychology has an inherent explanatory autonomy from cognitive science,insulating it from the empirical results however these pan out. In this paper Iwill simply assume (a) that folk psychology is in principle susceptible to beingradically undermined by findings in cognitive science; and (b) that this possibilityis nevertheless remote in the light of the perennial success of the folk scheme and ofthe fact that the best work in current cognitive science seems to make ineliminableuse of intentional notions (cf. Marr, 1982; Chomsky, 1986; Baron-Cohen, 1995;Gopnik, 1997 for a representative sample of such theories).2 On this line, we canallow that folk psychology, or certain aspects of it, will need to be refined, modified,or completed in the light of scientific discoveries or criteria for systematic explan-ation. For example, if folk psychological explanations per se are, as many suppose,irreducibly context-dependent and holistic in nature, they may fail to conform tostandards of scientific tractability (cf. Fodor, 1983: Part V, 1990a: 175). Yet thiswould not preclude explanations of perception, belief-formation, language-use,decision-making, etc. proceeding in intentional terms, in accord with the centralassumption of the folk scheme, and as we find in actual cognitive science. The term‘intentional psychology’ can be used to capture this more refined version of folkpsychology, i.e. a version which, whilst still positing intentional states, is revisedin line with scientific explanations of cognitive phenomena.3

Now, the idea of intentional psychology (henceforth IP) as the scientific heir tofolk psychology (henceforth FP) might be viewed as one sense in which FP couldbe vindicated by cognitive science. All the same, it is a rather limited sense. Forone thing, the two explanatory schemes are meant to be essentially continuous withone another, whereas talk of vindication suggests a greater distinctness. Moreover,it is not the main sense in which a scientific theory of the mind has been taken to bein a position to vindicate FP by philosophers of mind. This sense is rather closer tothat in which we vindicate the existence and causal efficacy of genes through thetheory of DNA, or of heat by the theory of molecular motion. Yet it is not preciselythis either. The envisaged state of affairs is not meant to be straightforwardly reduc-

INTENTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 349

tionist, allowing us – at least in principle – to abandon our intentional vocabularyafter the vindication has been provided. Rather, it is suggested that, on the onehand, general methodological considerations concerning the status of non-basicsciences – including psychology, geology, economics, and many different branchesof biology – and, on the other, certain specific features of intentional states, makeit necessary for us to give a deeper, underlying theory of how intentional states canhave causal explanatory significance in the world, even though there is no chanceof reducing them to states and processes posited in this underlying theory. It is alsoclear from this description that this vindicatory relationship should apply betweenthe deeper theory and IP, rather than FP, for it is the former that represents the mostscientifically veridical picture of our functioning, and thus is in a position to beproved right.

For Jerry Fodor, the chief proponent of this line of thought, the required deepertheory is the representational theory of mind (RTM): mental states are relationsto physical tokens instantiated in the brain that (a) can be said to be about certainfeatures of the environment in the way beliefs, desires, etc. intuitively are; and (b)embody a kind of syntactic structure that explains the productive and systematicnature of thought processes (an idea that constitutes Fodor’s language of thoughthypothesis: LTH in what follows). Excogitated from the armchair, such a view ishighly speculative. Happily for those who hold it, independent developments incognitive science ostensibly provide an existence-proof of such a theory in the so-called computational theory of mind (CTM), the idea that thinking consists in themanipulation of internal symbols. (Cf. Fodor, 1987: ch. 1, Appendix.)

The idea of vindication of IP in this sense also raises new issues in connectionwith eliminativism. Whereas the elimination of intentional states was originallyregarded as dependent on whether FP, or IP, is a viable theory in its own right, manywho have accepted Fodor’s ideas about the need for vindication have claimed to seein them a further route to eliminativism: if IP requires vindication by an underlyingarchitecture along the lines suggested by CTM and LTH, and if these theoriesthrough scientific investigation turn out to be false, then we would be forced todeny the reality of IP’s theoretical posits, even though no flaw in its superficialexplanatory structure enjoined it. Thus, for example, should certain types of con-nectionist model of the mind turn out to be correct – in particular, those committedto the idea that cognition should be modelled using genuinely distributed, non-symbolic networks (cf. Smolensky, 1988) – then intentional states would have tobe regarded as non-existent, and IP as false, or perhaps without truth content at all.Many sympathetic to both connectionism and eliminativism would presumably notmerely accept but also detach such a conditional.4

In my view, these new eliminativist thoughts are mis-placed. For I hold thatthe vindicatory project which forms the backdrop for them is conceptually andmethodologically flawed. In other words, IP does not need vindicating by RTM,CTM, and LTH to be a good explanation of human behaviour. It is this claim I willbe arguing for in the following. The paper has two overarching lines of attack. On


the one hand, the supposed problematic features of intentional states which Fodorand others identify do not cry out for ‘causal surrogates’ or ‘mental representations’in the brains of individuals (Sections 1 and 2). On the other hand, the pictureof cognitive science presented by Fodor is distorted: an attempt to give the kindof direct physicalistic underpinning of IP which RTM, etc. constitute cannot bemotivated as an empirical strategy within extant cognitive science (Section 3).

My targets in this paper are thus in many ways the set of extant arguments forRTM, CTM and LTH, since it is these theories, taken altogether, that are taken to dothe vindicatory job in relation to IP. (More detail about what these different theoriesamount to and exactly how they relate to one another will be given along the way.)The arguments presented in Sections 1 and 2, of a more metaphysical character,concern explicitly RTM and LTH; those of Section 3, relating to methodologicalquestions in science, CTM and LTH. I will often use ‘RTM’ and ‘LTH’ to denotethe combination of, respectively, (RTM plus LTH) and (CTM plus LTH); in certainplaces ‘RTM’ should be understood as referring to the whole package. It is as sucha package I will be assuming the theories stand or fall, insofar as I will understandarguments for any one of them as an argument for the rest.

Before we begin, a couple of points about my strategy should be stressed.Firstly, my arguments against RTM, etc. are not those of the customary variety,which seek to place FP or any intentional explanatory scheme outside the realmof scientific theory and cognitive science altogether – because it is geared to ‘theintentional stance’, is normative, holistic or whatever (cf. note 3). I believe, likeFodor, that FP is essentially continuous with scientific psychology, and hence inthe idea of IP as a nomological scheme of explanation whose posits should befully realistically interpreted (i.e., as realistically as other scientific posits). UnlikeFodor, I do not see why IP is in need of vindication by some lower level or ‘in-the-head’ theory. I take this combination of views to be relatively novel and in need ofexplication and support.

Secondly, my arguments will not suffice to support the claim that RTM, CTM,and LTH are all completely false. What I will show is that they do not, as many havesupposed, follow (and I don’t mean just logically) from certain, perhaps plausiblemetaphysical assumptions about the nature of intentional states and properties. Inaddition, there is no reason to think that cognitive science will countenance them.This leaves it open that certain other arguments might be provided for RTM, etc.5

But as things stand there is no pressing reason to think IP needs them.

2. The Argument from Propositions

Various arguments for RTM have been offered over the years, some of a metaphys-ical stripe, others of a more empirical variety. In this and the following section Iwill be considering the former class.6

What I call the argument from propositions is a metaphysical argument againstthe causal efficacy of intentional contents, at least per se. It is taken to show the


need for positing something else corresponding to such contents in the heads ofindividual thinkers in order to explain intentional causation (Fodor, 1987: 141;Crane 1992: 197 ff.).

The argument from propositions (which I will refer to as [P])7 has as its firstpremise the idea that the content of beliefs (and other intentional states) are ab-stract objects – be they Fregean thoughts,8 structured Russellian proposition, orsets of possible worlds. The second premise is that my beliefs interact with otherintentional states in a way that is sensitive to their contents. Thus, if I believe thatsnow is white, and that all white things are beautiful, I may also come to believethat snow is beautiful as a result of having the first two beliefs. Clearly such aninference in general manifests a sensitivity to the content of the first two beliefs; ifI believed instead that all black things were beautiful, I would not be disposed todraw the conclusion. Something very similar is true of actions undertaken on thebasis of beliefs and desires.

But now, the argument continues, how can this be so? How can it be that re-lations to mere abstracta or possibilia can have a bearing on a real-world abilityto combine beliefs inferentially, and to combine beliefs and desires in practicalreasoning, in a way that is sensitive to the contents of those beliefs and desires?The answer is that we must posit some kind of concrete causal surrogate of theproposition that is instantiated in my brain, different kinds of causal surrogatefor different content-properties (it is such causal surrogates Fodor dubs ‘mentalrepresentations’). Only then we will be able to explain how intentional states causewhat they do partly in virtue of their content-properties.

One can also argue that if we are to capture the systematic way in which beliefsinteract with one another, we will need to posit structured causal surrogates – brainsyntax, i.e. a language of thought. My belief that snow is white has somethingcausally in common with my belief that the Taj Mahal is white, since this secondbelief could also combine with my general belief about the beauty of white thingsto produce the conclusion that the Taj Mahal is beautiful. What I seem to have hereis a reasoning ability which tracks the systematic relations that obtain between thecontents of the beliefs held. Surely then one needs to explain how this systematicityin the contents is preserved in my reasoning, which is a concrete process. We cando this by supposing that I am sub-consciously steered by syntactically structuredmental representations, which encode the semantic structure of my belief contentsin a way that renders them amenable to the kinds of integrations and transitions Iaccept.9

Is [P] a sound argument for RTM and LTH?10 One reaction to its first premisemight be to deny that beliefs involve genuine relations to abstract contents – to ar-gue that beliefs are monadic states that are merely indexed by abstract propositions,as physical magnitudes are indexed by numbers (cf. Churchland, 1979; Stalnaker,1984). As Crane (1990) argues however, such a view is untenable since there isnot an arbitrary relationship between a belief and the proposition it is characterisedby, as there is an arbitrary relationship between a magnitude and the number one


indexes it with. Thus, unless one holds content-ascriptions to be indeterminate(as e.g. Davidson, 1977 does), and thus contents to be in some sense unreal –a consequence which takes us outside the framework of our discussion – one isforced to see contents as an intrinsic part of the belief they characterise.

A more reasonable reaction to the first premise would be to demur at its pla-tonistic assumptions, embracing instead a kind of nominalism according to whichbeliefs have contents, but in which these contents are worldly, concrete objects.A view of this nominalist kind might of course be RTM itself (cf. Fodor, 1998:8 where he registers his attraction to such a construal of RTM); but, given whatwe have said so far, it is not clear why RTM is necessary to understand contentas causally relevant. If we view belief contents as constituted by the concrete en-vironmental objects and properties that the thinker thinks about, vindication of IPby RTM would not seem to be required, for the causal powers that beliefs acquirein virtue of their contents could be carried by these environmental objects insteadof by something in the head. We shall consider the idea that this conception ofcontent as broad itself involves a need to posit in-the-head causal surrogates in thefollowing section.

Supposing that nominalism is false, are there any relevant objections to thesecond premise? Much could no doubt be said about the relationship between beliefcontents and the extent to which these are respected in reasoning; the account onegives of propositional contents will clearly be crucial in spelling out the details.Nevertheless, going into these details is unlikely to lead to denying that content is(in general) one of the determiners of a belief’s causal powers, at least as long asone remains committed to the idea of IP as offering ordinary causal explanationsof behaviour. Denying this (as of course some do) involves, again, opting out of theframework of the present discussion.

Let us then turn to the transition in argument [P]. This seems doubtful (evengiven it is not meant to be deductively valid: see note 10). This does not con-cern an assumption of physicalism. Though physicalism is certainly a backgroundassumption of Fodor’s (and an important one, as we shall see in later sections),Crane’s argument makes clear that [P] itself does not obviously rest on it, sinceit trades on the idea that contents are abstract, not that they are not physical. Thedoubt concerns instead why the causal surrogates that are posited to carry the causalpowers of intentional contents should have to be instantiated in the brains of theindividuals in question. For Fodor it is clear that mental representations superveneon the brain, but even for Crane, who denies supervenience of anything on thephysical (Crane and Mellor op. cit.), causal surrogates are required to be in a similarway local (Crane loc. cit.). The question that naturally arises is why this must beso given that content also has something to do with objects and properties in theenvironment of the thinker – at least on most people’s account of the matter. Thisis certainly the case for Fodor, especially now he has eschewed narrow content (cf.his 1994), and is also the case for Crane (see below), even though he denies theintuitions behind twin-earth scenarios (cf. his 1991).


The thought being put forward in this section is thus that, whether we need toposit surrogates for abstract content, or whether belief content is something con-crete, there is no obvious route to the idea of local causal surrogates, i.e. to mentalrepresentations. For if the contents of beliefs depend on environmental properties,at least as well as on what is internal to the head, it seems that these environmentalfeatures might just as well carry the causal significance of beliefs – at least withoutfurther argumentation.11

Having said all that, it is also a view of Crane that the very fact that beliefsinvolve relations to environmental objects also mandates local causal surrogates(cf. Crane, 1991; Crane and Mellor op. cit.: 193). A line sympathetic to this wasonce also espoused by Fodor in his plea for methodological solipsism: we need toindividuate intentional states without reference to their intentional objects in orderto capture the significant generalizations of psychology; hence we need some no-tion of narrow content (cf. his 1980, 1987: chapter 2). Believing in narrow contentgives a prior explanation as to why any causal surrogates needed to vindicate thecausal efficacy of intentional contents should be in the head. But precisely thatexplanation has disappeared, at least for Fodor, since, as noted, he now disavowsthe need for narrow content. As we shall see, other explanations remain in place,and new ones have been offered. The immediate question for us however is thatraised by Crane: does the mere fact that beliefs involve relations to features of theirpossessor’s environment demand local causal surrogates?

3. The Arguments from Broad Content, Frege Cases, and Naturalisation

3.1. THE ARGUMENT FROM BROAD CONTENT

The argument for local casual surrogates from broad content has, of course, asone premise the idea that content is broad. This commitment is distinct from astance on the question whether content can vary independently of what is in thehead of individuals, or that it should to be taken to be essentially involved in theindividuation of intentional states, one or both of which commitments externalistscleave to. The idea that content is broad is simply that beliefs are, as such, aboutthe environment of the individual who has them: my belief that snow is white isabout snow and about the property of being white, to the effect that the formerinstantiates the latter. We will briefly consider those who would deny this idea atthe end of this section.

The second premise is that relations to such features cannot be causally effic-acious in the production of behaviour. Why not? Because only a thing’s intrinsicproperties can cause it to do things, and relations to environmental objects are notintrinsic properties – they are more like the property of sitting next to a computer,properties which do not, so to speak, belong ‘to the thing itself’ (cf. Crane, 1991:5; Shoemaker, 1984: 207; also Stich and Laurence, 1996: 183). So once again weneed to explain how beliefs can have causal powers in line with their contents, sincethese beliefs involve relations which cannot be causally efficacious. The move to


local causal surrogates, where these surrogates will correspond to the extra-cranial,content-determining properties and objects, seems once again enjoined.

Call this argument [B]. As I said, I will simply assume the first premise formost of this section. The second premise seems, however, confused. The objectionto letting beliefs have causal efficacy as they stand seems to be that they involvea relation to something outside the head; thus having a belief is not an intrinsicproperty. Let us assume that the distinction between relational and intrinsic prop-erties can be made reasonably clear and that it does indeed cast doubt on the causalefficacy of relations. An obvious dialectical problem is that beliefs are also relationsaccording to RTM: they are relations to mental representations. But presumablyRTM, if true, does not create problems for mental causation. And indeed this seemsreasonable to hold: a belief can be seen as a relation to a representation in virtueof the fact that the representation will be used by the cognitive system in variousways characteristic of beliefs. But then if that solution works for RTM, why can’t italso work for a view which regards the relata of beliefs to include worldly objectsand properties (or at least which regards the causal surrogates of abstract contentsto be worldly objects and properties)? My being related to these things may notbe causally efficacious, but that doesn’t seem to stop the objects being efficaciousthemselves in my behaviour, nor the thinker’s dispositions in relations to theseobjects conforming to those we would expect from a belief.

Moreover, even if one in some sense needs causal surrogates for beliefs, becausethey are relations, and one accepts that these must be local (since objects in theworld don’t have belief-like functions), such surrogates are hardly be enough todemonstrate a need to vindicate IP by positing internal representations. To do thiswe would also have to show there was a need to vindicate how our acting andreasoning is sensitive to intentional contents. Since these contents are just one ofthe relata of the belief relation, and since it is being a relation to something thatmakes problems for being causally efficacious, argument [B] does not show that theenvironmental features implicated in broad contents can’t themselves be causallyefficacious in intentional causation. In other words, [B] does not show that, forcontents to play a causally efficacious role in our acting and reasoning, there mustbe causal surrogates for these in individuals’ heads.

The alternative story I have alluded to in order to defeat [B] will to many soundbizarre – implying as it does a rather strong kind of externalism about intentionalstates. Indeed, it precisely this kind of bizareness which leads thinkers to deny theexternality of intentional states at the same time as cleaving to the idea of broadcontent (cf. e.g. Kim, 1996: 200). However, if that is the motivation for denyingexternalism, then [B] is superfluous in the argument for local causal surrogates.But it seems, by contrast, as if something like [B] is taken as the rational groundfor the reaction of bizarreness the mere contemplation of externalism elicits. Andwhen it is not [B], it is some view of content as other than a causally relevant aspectof beliefs – as something we use to characterise thinkers’ internal states but whichdoes not correspond to any causally efficacious or relevant aspect of their psyche –


views we are not considering in this piece. Thus, given [B] is in fact unsound, thereaction of bizarreness can be afforded little weight.

And indeed it is not difficult to undermine its intuitive hold. There is no a priorireason why the causal relations in a natural system should not be conceived asholding between components that are themselves constituted by relations betweenwhat, at a lower level of analysis, are separate components of that system. A planetis in some sense just a hunk of rock, but the causal powers of a planet obtain invirtue of its relations with other hunks of matter – as Fodor himself has pointedout (1987: 43). Again, it is often argued that purely ‘external’ differences betweenbeliefs could never make a difference to their causal powers, since the behaviourthey cause is local. But in fact there seem as good reasons to deny actions can becharacterised narrowly as to deny beliefs can. What a person is doing can in generalonly be characterised in intentional terms (she is planting seeds, he is eating asausage, etc.), which thus leaves it open for us to regard the objects and propertiesthese movements are directed towards as literally constitutive of the action (cf.Peacocke, 1981). Hence intentional causation does not have to be seen as speciesof mysterious action-at-a-distance.12

I conclude that argument [B] fails to motivate the need for local causal surrog-ates. Are there any other reasons for accepting RTM (or local causal surrogates)given that content is understood as broad?

3.2. THE ARGUMENT FROM FREGE CASES

An intuitive source of support for the idea that the causal powers of beliefs must gobeyond what we have been terming their broad content is that deriving from Frege(1892), that our intentional grasp of anything in the real world, any object, propertyor (given contents are not regarded as Fregean senses) content, must be grasped ina certain way – what we may (following Fodor 1990a, 1994, 1998) call a modeof presentation (MOP). For it seems to be a fact (a) that one and the same objector content can be apprehended under a variety of MOPs and (b) that MOPs arethe primary determiners of intentional causation, i.e. it is they that determine howone reasons and acts. Lois Lane is in love with Superman, but not with Clark Kent,even though SM = CK. But in explaining Lois’s behaviour, it seems we need to takeaccount of this diversity in her MOPs with respect to SM (i.e. CK), for otherwisewe won’t be able to explain why she sometimes flirts and sometimes doesn’t flirtwith one and the same person. We do not need to enter heated discussions aboutwhat content really is here (as Fodor 1990a, 1994: 47 has pointed out). It is enoughto note that the causal powers of intentional states seem to be sensitive to morethan broad contents and the environmental features implicated in broad contents;in addition, we need to postulate MOPs, corresponding to such contents, and totheir various different parts.

From this starting point, it is not very hard to see how an argument would go forsomething like mental representations qua in-the-head concrete objects. If modes


of presentation are viewed as concrete objects, then it seems they cannot be tiedto environmental objects or to broad contents alone, since these do not suffice toindividuate them finely enough. So they must lie within the head of those whopossess the intentional states, in which location they would appear to come veryclose to the kinds of mental representations posited by RTM. (This seems to bethe line of argument assumed in Fodor, 1994: 47–8.) On the other hand, if modesof presentation are viewed as abstract objects, then we can run argument [P] todemand concrete causal surrogates, and then simply plug this consequence into theprevious argument’s premises to demand that these be local. Fodor (1998: 17 ff.)has a further argument for the idea that modes of presentation must be concreterepresentations in the head, and not abstract objects. But for our purposes the exactnature of the argument is not important. What is important is that it looks as ifsuch in-the-head MOPs will correspond pretty directly with in-the-head mentalrepresentations – that RTM will follow from the very general nature of belief giventhe Fregean considerations. Call this argument [F].

Is [F] a convincing reason for holding to RTM? Unlike [P] it doesn’t seem torely on any tendentious hidden premises and unlike [B] it doesn’t seem confused.On the other hand, there is no doubt room for all kinds of dissent – that acknow-ledging the existence of modes of presentation should commit you to some versionof RTM would surely not, to take one central case, be simply conceded by a neo-Fregean thinker such as McDowell, who has stressed the object-dependent natureof Fregean senses (cf. e.g. McDowell, 1986). I will not develop this line. Instead Iwant to discuss two lines of thought which aim to deflate the very significance ofthe Fregean considerations for psychological explanation.

The first is due to Fodor himself. As already noted, Fodor has recently renegedon his view that we must posit narrow contents in order to give intentional explan-ations at the right level of grain. His reason, put very roughly, is that those caseswhere broad contents cut too thinly or too thickly can be regarded as aberrationsof some kind or other (cf. his 1994: lecture II). We will see that Fodor does not, allthe same, regard MOPs as just as dispensable as narrow contents, but I will suggestthat he really has no reason, independently of his general commitment to RTM, fornot doing this.

Let us first look at Fodor’s argument. The cases where broad content cuts toothinly are the familiar twin-earth kinds of scenarios, where the worldly objects oftwo people’s beliefs are different but where we want to treat them as psychologic-ally similar. Thus, though I want to drink water and do so, and my twin on TwinEarth wants to drink twater and does so, we would ideally like to treat these wantsas psychologically identical, since neither of us can tell water from twater. Fodorwants to suggest that these kinds of case are not systematic: barring accidents, ourmental representations will generally latch onto one natural property, not several.Hence twin cases can be regarded as aberrations and do not warrant divergencefrom broad content psychology (1994: 30 ff.). This line of reasoning is conducive tomy general line, though its motivation is a conception of psychological explanation


as narrow which it was important for us to reject as mandatory in the discussionof argument [B]. What the reasoning suggests is that, even if one didn’t find itattractive to classify twins differently in respect of the causally relevant aspects oftheir intentional states, this is no good reason for diverging from or supplementingbroad content explanations, since such twin cases are not systematic. (Even if weaccept this, however, it doesn’t add much to my case, since it seems likely thatthe conception of psychological explanation as narrow goes beyond the intuitionthat twins should be classified as alike in respect of the causally relevant aspects oftheir intentional states – many might, in other words, hold that we still need to positlocal causal surrogates for broad contents, even if twin-cases don’t systematicallyoccur.)

The cases where broad contents cut too thickly are those which are often takento motivate the existence of MOPs. If we just posit a broad content consisting ofthe man Superman and the property of being loveable as the object of one of Lois’sbeliefs, we will not be able to explain why she does not flirt with this man whenhe goes under the guise of Clark Kent. But again Fodor does not see such lines ofreasoning as sufficient to motivate narrow intentional laws. For he argues that suchcases must also be regarded as aberrations, given certain assumptions about thenature of rational action (1994: 40 ff.). To begin with, rational action is generallysuccessful. Secondly, this cannot be regarded as an accident. But, if Frege cases,as Fodor calls them (i.e. the Superman-Clark Kent-Lois Lane kind of case) areallowed to proliferate, the success of rational action will appear accidental. Forin general, if you don’t realise that two of your singular concepts, a and b, arecoextensive, you are unlikely to fulfil your desires when you act, since it may wellbe the case that object b has properties you find undesirable whilst object a hasproperties you find desirable, or at least that they have properties that affects whatone regards as desirable or not. For example, if Lex Luther wants to steal Lois’ice-cream, and he thinks he can because she is with Clark Kent, not Superman,he is unlikely to succeecd – only if CK/SM happened to be distracted during theattempt, or suddenly thought Lois should go on a diet, or was in some other waytemporarily compromised would he do so. Thus, even if you act fully rationally,you will only be successful by accident when you are in a situation of informa-tional impoverishment of the kinds typical in Frege cases. Thus, only a mechanismensuring that Frege cases don’t proliferate will make the success of rational actionin general other than accidental. Hence Frege cases must be regarded as aberrationsfrom the normal course of events, and in specifying the laws of IP, we may usebroad contents.

I will not assess the general soundness of this argument. As it stands, it mightseem to have an obvious flaw – this is something Fodor himself takes up in a follow-up discussion, and which I will return to below. First I want to draw attention to thefact that though Fodor accepts the conclusion as stated on the basis of the aboveargument, he does not see this as in any way reason to doubt the reality of MOPs.Frege cases, he says, can’t simply be dismissed, as twin-earth cases are, for lots of


them actually occur (Fodor, 1994: 49). They must therefore be explained away andsomething other than broad content must be posited to account for them – namelyMOPs. Thus RTM seems to follow through the line of thought embodied in [F]even though intentional laws are held to be conversant only about broad contents.

Now, though there is surely something a touch arbitrary about this reaction,taken in the dialectical context of Fodor’s overall discussion, the proposal is hardlyunreasonable. Fodor is assuming that thought processes are mediated by in-the-head, syntactically structured computational mechanisms, and that intentional statesgain their content through causal/nomological relations between in-the-head tokensand features of the environment (see argument [N] below). Positing MOPs, as in-the-head representations, to explain away Frege cases is surely just a felicitous anduncontroversial extension of this background theory. However, in our dialecticalcontext, such a background is precisely what is at stake. The question thus arisesas to what would motivate a need to posit MOPs given that the psychological lawsare couched in terms of broad content, and that Frege cases are viewed as a kindof aberration from these, independently of this background. That aberrations occurfrequently does not mean they are any the less aberrations; and in any case, thenotion of frequency Fodor appeals to seems inveterately vague.

Of course, it could be that MOPs just happen to be what underlie the kindsof aberrations we are assuming Frege cases to constitute. However, the principledpoint is that if we expunge reference to such things from the laws of IP – if werelegate talk of MOPs to the realm of the unsystematic and scientifically inexplic-able – there is no obvious route to the idea that they should exist. That commonsense intuition would countenance MOPs cannot be afforded weight since, thoughwe are assuming ‘the folk’ are onto something in their intentional explanations ofthought and behaviour, we are also assuming that FP may have to be refined in thelight of methodological and/or theoretical considerations (of which kind Fodor’sargument, assuming it is correct, may be viewed as an example). We are, that is,assuming that what the terms ‘belief’, ‘desire’, ‘content’, etc. refer to will be fixedby the theoretical apparatus of the correct and refined version of FP that we havebeen terming ‘intentional psychology’. (This view of reference as fixed by locationwithin a set of theoretical claims is due to Lewis, 1970, 1972.) If the laws of IPgive no general account of what happens in Frege cases, then there is no particularreason to suppose MOPs exist. It is not ruled out that intentional states may turnout to have properties in addition to those they are implicitly attributed throughthe laws of IP, or even properties which to an extent diverge from these latter (cf.Lewis, 1972: 10), but saying this gives no reason to suppose that amongst these wewill uncover the property of being associated with an MOP.

Thus, if Fodor’s conclusion from his argument about the success of rationalaction were accepted, it seems one would have no reason to posit MOPs, andthus no reason to think IP needs vindicating by RTM. Argument [F] would not beshown to be invalid, but rather its starting points to be too entrenched in unreflectivecommon sense.


But is Fodor’s argument for regarding Frege cases as aberrations after all sound?A crucial premise is that proliferation of Frege cases would make the success ofrational action accidental. But in fact it seems this should be worded more care-fully: it is presumably only proliferation of Frege cases that have implicationsfor the success of one’s actions that would make the success of rational actionaccidental. And on the face of it there would seem to be many Frege cases thatdo not have such implications. If – to take Fodor’s own example – he thinks ofwater as Granny’s favourite drink, and I don’t, this is hardly, it seems, going tohave any implications for the success of our respective actions (1994: 51). Such aconsideration might incline one to suppose that one must after all refer to MOPsin the laws of psychology, since differences of the kind described between me andFodor need not be regarded as aberrations.

However, though he endorses what leads up to it, Fodor resists this conclusion.Instead, he contemplates a picture in which there is a community of individualswho possess, for each intentional content (or object) thought about, a partiallyoverlapping but also partially divergent set of MOPs, such that it is unlikely thatthere is any one particular MOP or set thereof that every individual tokens in herhead when entertaining a particular content. But the overlap will be sufficient tojustify subsuming these individuals under laws couched in terms of broad content,specifying such dispositions as looking for water when one is thirsty, i.e. desireswater. What each individual’s MOPs concerning, say, water will have in commonis causal/nomological contact with the stuff water, plus certain regularities in thepatterns of behaviour they exhibit in relation to it. (Cf. Fodor; 1994: 51 ff.)

This picture of Fodor’s is of course full of references to MOPs, as we wouldexpect given his background assumptions (which, note, include a commitment to anaturalistic account of content, something we shall consider in the next subsection).Now I myself am not as convinced as Fodor is that there really are Frege cases thatdo not have implications for the success or failure of rational action (isn’t it infact quite easy to think of a situation where failing to think of water as Granny’sfavourite drink could, barring accidents, lead one to fail to get hold of desiredwater?). His central point, however, is surely just that even if there were cases ofdifferences in MOPs that did not have implications for the overall success of ouractions, IP would not – precisely because of this – need to refer to them. But that– in the light of our background assumptions, plus the Lewisean argument fourparagraphs back – would be enough to show that argument [F] does not provide anargument for positing MOPs, and nor, therefore, for RTM.

Having said all this, I would prefer it if my case against [F] did not hingeon Fodor’s precise assumptions about the nature of rational action. Happily forme, there is a simpler insight – one which Fodor’s follow-up discussion of Fregecases also brings to the fore – that can the form of the heart of a more generalargument against the need to posit MOPs. The insight is just this: MOPs are tooidiosyncratic to constitute the basis of a law-like IP. Though Frege originally sawthe realm of sense as something public and shared, it has become increasingly


clear in recent years that no such public entities can capture the fine contoursof human thought. Pierre may believe that the town he knows as ‘Londres’ ispretty whilst the town he knows as ‘London’ is not even though ‘London’ and‘Londres’ are public synonyms (Kripke, 1977). Jane may think the idea of killingrabbits detestable when playing with her pets, but happily sit down to rabbit pie fordinner (Higginbotham, 1987–8). The MOPs we would need to capture differentpeople’s behaviour in relation to the same objects is likely to run as deep as theexperiences they have individually undergone, and to enter into causal relations injust as complex a fashion as these experiences do. Given this background, whathope is there that anything like interesting generalisations invoking MOPs will beforthcoming – however we conceive of rational action? What hope is there forstatements that do not merely record unrepeateable personal histories, but capturesignificant patterns underlying all such histories? Put bluntly: what hope is there ofcapturing the objects of different people’s beliefs at a level lower than that of theworldly objects themselves? Frege’s remarks on the need to distinguish betweensense and reference are often taken as fundamental to an understanding of thepropositional attitudes. Yet if that understanding is going to respect the need togeneralise over individuals, this distinction cannot, it seems, be directly respected.In other words, given IP is concerned with relations between states that involveenvironmental objects, it would seem that differences between the ways in whichthe states of different organisms involve these objects are not going to be of in-terest to that psychology. Perhaps empirical knowledge of our cognitive processingmechanisms will one day provide an account of how it is that different individualsend up with what we might common sensically refer to as ‘different conceptionsof one and the same object’; perhaps such an account will also, one day, seem torender intentional psychological explanations superfluous or even false. But as faras IP itself is concerned, such an account would not seem to be in a position toplay a role in the explanations it offers. Frege cases would, in line with Fodor’sfirst suggestion, be relegated to the level of aberrations.

Given this conclusion, we can again apply the Lewisean argument above toderive the conclusion that there is no particular reason to suppose MOPs exist,given the nature of the generalisations of IP. Hence, argument [F], like [P] and[B] before it, fails to show the need for something like RTM in order to vindicateIP.13

3.3. THE ARGUMENT FROM NATURALISATION

The argument for the need for RTM to vindicate IP from naturalisation is po-tentially the most ramified of all the arguments we have so far considered. It’smotivating idea is this: the properties and regularities posited by IP must, if theyare to be real, be natural properties; they must supervene on, and, in some sense, beexplained by, non-intentional and/or physical properties and regularities. Section3 will be concerned with the claim about regularities. In this section, I will be


concerned with the claim about properties – the claim that, in Fodor’s words, ‘[i]faboutness is real, it must be really something else’ (1987: 91).

If one accepts the claim about properties, it can seem that one will be committedto something like RTM. Intentional properties like believing there’s a cow in frontof one must be renderable as properties that are either physical or else clearlynon-intentional. Then it might seem that any way in which one might understandthinking about a cow in non-intentional terms would have to involve positing somekind of causal relation between the cow, or cows in general, and something in thehead of the individual which could then be said to bear information about cows(most current accounts go beyond this idea, but they all have it as their startingpoint). But that in effect is to countenance internal mental representations, i.e.RTM. Hence IP needs RTM. Call this argument [N].

That [N] is valid is not something I want to dispute – in fact, given the natureof the literature on naturalistic semantics, it would be quite surprising if someonewere to come up with an account that did not involve a causal relation betweendistal stimuli and symbols in the head. Thus my objection to [N] lies in one ofits premises, in particular its first premise – the idea that intentional properties, tobe vindicated as natural, must be renderable in terms of properties that are eitherphysical or at least non-intentional. It is not the aim of this piece to make out a fullattack on this premise, since this work has been done by others. The thrust of thecriticism has been to point out how difficult it is to formulate a clear criterion ofwhen a property can be said to have been naturalised (cf. Stich and Laurence, 1996;Stich, 1996; Tye, 1992). Stich and Laurence in particular argue that there is nocriterion for being natural that is both remotely plausible, and which is not triviallyfulfilled by just about any property. Thus, if we fix all the non-intentional propertiesof an organism, including its relations to objects in the environment, we may nodoubt safely say that the organism’s intentional properties will supervene on thesewithout having to tell any story about causal or nomological or teleofunctional (orwhatever) relations between internal symbols and distal objects. On the other hand,if one demands much more of an account of what it is to be natural, it seems one islikely to start proscribing all sorts of properties that would seem perfectly kosher,in particular properties of respectable special sciences that no one would take tostand in need of a naturalistic rendering. Ultimately the issue comes down to theidea that a weak, background kind of physicalism imposes almost no constraints onany property whatsoever. And then the only other reasonable criterion for being anatural property would be that one pulls one’s weight in some or other predictivelyand explanatory successful theory14 – something which intentional properties exhypothesi do. Thus it seems that argument [N] must, like those before it, fail.

Further support for this conclusion derives from the fact that it is not obvi-ous that an adequate naturalistic semantic theory will be forthcoming (cf. e.g.Baker, 1991; Boghossian, 1991; Fodor, 1991 for relevant objections and discus-sion; Fodor, 1994: lecture III for discussion of the problems surrounding Quine’sdoctrine of the inscrutability of reference). These doubts, once taken in the context


of a general doubt about the viability of naturalisation, serve to strengthen thatdoubt rather than merely poke sceptical fingers at what would otherwise be perhapsthe only intellectually defensible approach. A naturalistic semantics is certainly atough undertaking; but perhaps its toughness is due to its misguidedness, becauseIP is not amenable to vindication in the way people like Fodor take it to be.

The following section will continue with an argument for RTM in relation tothe claim about the need to naturalise regularities. Since this issue is bound up withempirical and methodological issues in cognitive science, it deserves a discussionof its own. The considerations adduced here, however, will be borne in mind as weproceed.

Section 2 is drawing to a close, and it is time to review the discussion thusfar. In Section 1 we saw that argument [P], which takes as its one of its premisesthat belief contents are abstract objects, does not suffice to show the need forlocal causal surrogates corresponding to these contents, both because the view ofcontent as abstract is not obligatory, and, more fundamentally, because even if itwere, it does not show these causal surrogates must be local rather than carriedby the objects and properties our beliefs are about. In this section we have beenexamining various arguments aimed at establishing the need for something likeRTM given that content is conceived broadly; but we have seen that none of theseis compelling. I do not suppose that more could not be said on most of the mattersI have broached here. However, I do hope that the idea that IP is, for generalmetaphysical reasons, in need of support by some underlying theory of the stripeof RTM has been dislodged as a working assumption. In the following section Iwill show how an attempt to salvage RTM as the best scientific explanation ofintentional psychological regularities also breaks down.

Before that, a couple of further remarks are in order. First, what if one is inclinedto hold that content, after all, is not broad, but narrow; or perhaps that there is bothbroad and narrow content, as Fodor once held? As for the second idea, it strikes methat as good as all of the arguments for narrow content, given that our intentionalstates are first and foremost broadly characterised, coincide with those for RTMgiven the same fact. This leaves us with die-hard internalists. Do such internalistsneed to vindicate IP with RTM? If content is still conceived as an abstract quantity,one can see how [P] could be utilised to argue for this conclusion. Otherwise, how-ever, it should be clear that nothing would mandate RTM: arguments [B] and [F]would not apply, and [N] would be susceptible to criticism as before. Thus, if RTMis needed to vindicate IP, it at least only holds for one rather special combinationof views concerning the nature of intentional content: as internal and abstract – ifit is just internal, RTM would not be warranted.

Even in this restricted form, the concession is not a great one. Purely intern-alist views of content are not popular in view of problems of individuation, andindeed are only dubiously compatible with the central tenets of IP. According tointernalists, content as such has nothing to do with truth conditions, rather, it is,


typically, fixed by the internal conceptual/functional role of mental states; thusonly particular tokenings of mental state types are actually about anything in theworld, are true or false (cf. e.g. Botterill and Carruthers, 1999: chs. 6, 7). Manyargue that such conceptual/functional role theories lead to a form of holism aboutcontent that rules out shared contents and thus intentional generalizations (cf. e.g.Fodor, 1987: ch. 3). And even if one thinks these arguments can be rebuffed, aninternalist picture conflicts with the individuative and explanatory role afforded thetruth-conditional notion of content in FP, and I take this feature (unlike MOPs) tobe something IP must preserve on pain of changing the subject.

Secondly, an old chestnut: false beliefs. Given that we can have false beliefs, itseems clear that the causal powers of our beliefs must be mediated by somethingin the head, for false beliefs do not correspond to what is in the world, at least infull. Nevertheless, so long as there is some correspondence, it is unclear that a fullRTM will be in the offing. In addition, given the very fact that false beliefs will behighly idiosyncratic, it seems reasonable to regard them – along with Frege cases –aberrations from the general tendencies described by the laws of IP. If we do this,whatever would be required in order to make sense of them were they systematicwill not in fact be required.16

4. The Argument from Cognitive Science

So far I have argued that IP can’t be shown to be in need of vindication by RTM onthe basis of various metaphysical arguments. However, it is of course important thatRTM is not just a speculative theory of philosophy, but is supposed to be an ideathat meshes with, indeed in many ways is inspired by, an extant idea from empiricalcognitive science – the computational theory of mind, or CTM. According to CTMthinking is essentially computation, that is, the manipulation of symbols, wherethese may be understood as physical entities, but whose individuation conditionsdo not pertain to their physical constitution. Many have wanted to see CTM asthe paradigm or Lakatosian ‘hard core’ of contemporary cognitive science, i.e. ascientific account of our rational nature. And Fodor has emphasized how neatlyRTM, as an account of propositional attitudes, fits in with CTM. Of course, it doesnot follow that IP should have anything to do with CTM. The considerations tobe presented in the following two paragraphs are standardly taken to convince youthat it nevertheless is highly likely.

It seems reasonable to hold that, even if our IP does not reduce to any phys-ical theory, it is undoubtedly conversant about biological organisms that are of aphysical nature. It might also then seem reasonable to hold that we should be ableto understand how the regularities that IP supposes to obtain could be supportedby our physical natures. As Fodor has argued (cf. his 1987: Appendix; 1990b),IP – like geology, economics and a host of other disciplines – is a higher level,special science relative to the basic level of physics, and therefore needs somephysical underpinning, a theory of how the regularities it posits can obtain in a


physical world.17 Amongst these regularities are those manifested in our ability tospeak and, more fundamentally, think productively and systematically. Given theconcepts said, Joe, wept, if I can form the thought Joe said Joe wept, I can forman infinite number of thoughts by recursively applying the same concepts. Thisis productivity. Given in addition the concepts Jill and hit, I can be expected toform the thought Jill hit Joe just in case I can form thought Joe hit Jill: This issystematicity. (Cf. Fodor, 1987: Appendix; Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1988; Fodor andMcLaughlin, 1990.) Another aspect of systematicity has already been mentionedin relation to argument [P]: when we reason, we draw inferences in accord with thecontents of our thoughts. But how does a physical system comport itself so that itis able to support truth-preserving formal inferences? (Cf. Fodor, 1987: chapter 1;Davies, 1991.)

Now CTM seems to provide a neat and straightforward explanation of theseabilities by way of the idea that the physical symbols computed over form alanguage-like medium – a language of thought. According to the language ofthought hypothesis (LTH), the symbols posited by CTM fall into different syntactictypes. From this, the fact that thought is systematic may be explained by supposingthat the symbols in the first thought Jill hit Joe are simply ‘recombined’ in thesecond thought Joe hit Jill. A similarly syntactic explanation is offered of theability to think productively: we view our concepts as syntactic categories with therequisite properties for forming complex syntactic structures in a recursive manner.Finally, as is known from proof theory, a formal syntactic theory is able to respectthe truth-preserving transitions of a semantic theory (up to certain limits).

But then, given these abilities are physically embodied, and given that theyare productive and systematic, it seems that CTM, incorporating LTH, providesthe obvious – indeed, it has been urged, the only – explanation of them. Even ifone is an externalist about intentional content, it seems that the systematicity andproductivity of thinking can only be explained by reference to internal machinery,not features of the objects thought about. Hence IP, which of course acknowledgesthese abilities, looks at though it will after all be committed to the idea of vindica-tion by cognitive science. For if we subscribe to CTM, the full RTM will seem likean almost irresistible construal of what really underlies IP. The conclusion will bethat IP needs vindication by RTM, CTM, and LTH. Call this argument [CS].

I will be suggesting that [CS] is not cogent. The underlying motivating thoughtwill be similar to that put forward in relation to argument [N] in Section 2.3: thereis no obvious reason why we need to explain productivity and systematicity inphysicalistic terms. However, the dialectic is complicated (a) by the fact that thefocus is on patterns rather than properties, and (b) by the fact that cognitive scienceseems to involve an explanatory paradigm that has seemed, to some, to be preciselygeared towards providing lower level explanations of higher level patterns. In lightof this, I will first criticise a general argument for the idea that higher level pat-terns must be explained in terms of lower level ones, before going on to argue


that the understanding of cognitive science on which CTM seems so plausible is amisconstrual – indeed, that LTH is not a genuinely scientific hypothesis at all.18

4.1. INTER-LEVEL EXPLANATION

Let us begin with the physicalism that drives [CS]. This stipulates that intentionalpatterns, including those involved in our thinking productively and systematic-ally, must, since they are not themselves physical, be explained on the basis ofsome physicalistically respectable mechanism, where ‘physicalistically respect-able’ means that the mechanism is either physical itself or stands in a suitablyperspicuous relationship to the physical. According to one commentator on thedebate, it is a general commitment of science that

a certain explanatory relation must exist between the causal-explanatory positsof high-level theories of the macroscopic world and the ones at lower levels –ultimately, at the utopian most basic microphysical level – for the former to beacceptable (García-Carpintero, 1995: 379, my emphasis).

(Cf. Fodor 1987: Appendix, 1990b; Lycan, 1993 for similar commitments.) Thisinter-level explanatory principle (ILEP henceforth) is then used by supporters ofLTH to argue for classical language of thought architectures over, in particular,connectionist ones on the grounds that only the former can give an explanation ofsystematicity, etc.

But why exactly should one hold to ILEP? Note that it goes well beyond ageneral commitment to the supervenience of higher level generalisations and prop-erties on physical ones; yet for many commentators it seems to operate as just asaxiomatic as that less contentious assumption.

Fodor has in fact provided a principled argument for ILEP (cf. Fodor, 1990b:145, 155–6). Lower level explanatory commitments are entailed because higherlevel laws (e.g. intentional laws) are non-strict (i.e. they hold only ceteris paribus),so we need to explain the occasional deviations from these generalisations by ref-erence some underlying mechanism which fails to operate properly in those cases.For example, if a meandering river fails to erode its bank (contrary to a generallaw of geology), we must be able to point to some underlying state of affairswhich is necessary to sustain this connection and generally obtains, such as thewater carrying small particles, but in this particular case fails to. This need for amechanistic underpinning operates for each level of description except the level ofbasic physics, whose laws are strict.

This argument however faces a fatal dilemma. For given mechanisms are also tobe understood in terms of nomological regularities, as they are for Fodor, and thatdeviations from these regularities must always be explained by the malfunctioningof some lower level mechanism, then it seems there can be no strict laws even at thebasic level of physics. But if one admits this, one also admits that not all deviationsfrom laws need to be explained by lower level mechanisms, and the argument above


collapses. On the other hand, if one insists that physical laws must be strict, onecan ultimately give no explanation of deviations in higher level regularities – andagain the argument collapses.19

Perhaps a supporter of ILEP might simply insist that it is a generally acceptednorm of science. But is it? Well, insofar as it concerns a requirement on the ex-planation of inter-level relationships, it does not, at least, just represent an a prioriprejudice against non-physical properties, nor is it merely a very general superveni-ence claim. On the other hand, insofar as it seems to apply equally to relationshipsbetween different sciences, as well as merely different levels within a science, onecan wonder whether it can be as generally applicable as García-Carpintero sug-gests. And in fact, it seems clear that ILEP does not operate as a normative principlein much of science. To begin with, though no one would deny that science is attimes concerned with micro-details in the sense of structural accounts of the basisof higher level causal properties and capacities, the frequency and importance ofsuch projects is radically overestimated by philosophers (cf. Dupré, 1993: chapters5 and 6). What is even more dubious is the idea that micro-details are generally putforward with the aim of giving explanatory accounts of inter-level relationships.In biology, for example, population genetics and micro-genetics are distinct levelsof explanation, and there is interest in giving the structural, micro-genetic basisfor population genetics. But there is unlikely to be any fully explanatory accountof population genetics on the basis of micro-genetics, nor is this something thatbiologists regard as a goal of their research (ibid.).

Essentially, these remarks simply further the line against argument [N] in Sec-tion 2.3. But many might want to interject at this point that, however things stand invarious different areas of current science, ILEP is nevertheless a legitimate ideal.Moreover, it is an ideal to which cognitive science has come close to aspiring toprecisely through the idea of CTM and LTH. Thus it is simply not convincingto raise eyebrows at the ideal and provide a couple of ‘counter-examples’ frombiology.

Let us then instead shift dialectical tack and ask: in what way is LTH reallypart of the cognitive science enterprise – independently of simply assuming ILEP?In my view, a closer analysis of this question undermines the support for thevindication project which Fodor and his supporters see in contemporary cognitivescience. In what follows I will argue that LTH (and CTM) are not genuine empiricalhypotheses of cognitive science. Thus, the only reason one has for holding themwould be application of something like ILEP. But since there is already some doubtas to whether this is an ideal for science, our finding that cognitive science does notrespect it will simply lend further support to this doubt – the doubt that intentionalpsychological properties and regularities need naturalising in the way Fodor andothers assume.20


4.2. LTH AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE

What is cognitive science? It seems, essentially, to involve two distinct kinds oftheorizing: on the one hand theorising concerning the nature of our cognitive ca-pacities, and on the other how these capacities are realised in the brain. Cognitivecapacities fall into different categories, which we may roughly divide into percep-tual capacities, motor capacities, and capacities of higher thought. We will not bemaking any very detailed assumptions about these capacities, except that they arecouched at an intentional level, involving the attribution of propositional attitudesor contentful states of other kinds.

But of course we are also physical beings and there are real questions to askabout the nature of the physiological basis of our cognitive capacities. Considerlanguage and vision, both of which may be viewed as examples of cognitive capa-cities. Pure theoretical linguistics concerns the body or bodies of knowledge thatspeakers possess concerning the phonological, syntactical and semantically fea-tures of their language, whilst vision research seeks to map the principles accordingto which we transform retinal stimulation into 3-D representations of the externalworld. At the same time, we find work on the neurological basis of language, andon the neurophysiological basis of vision, which seek to draw connections betweenthe theories of the capacities and properties of our brains which, it is assumed, arein large part responsible for the capacities we possess.

The first thing to remark about this characterisation of cognitive science isthat there is no general assumption that a theory of capacities must relate in anystraightforward way to neural properties, and certainly no assumption that researchat the capacity-level may only proceed by reference to such properties. This doesnot make studies at the lower level constitutively irrelevant to the higher leveltheories, and it can be an aim of cognitive science to seek to develop theories atthese two levels which dovetail, more or less perfectly. There is no doubt somepressure to give an account of how two distinct levels with overlapping explanandabut conceptually distinct explanatory apparata march in step (to use the words ofAdrian Cussins (1990: 373)). However, it is important to stress that accepting thisdoes not commit one to the idea that the kind of implementation constraints theneurophysiological details may impose on the theory of a cognitive capacity willexhaust the content of, let alone supplant the need for, the higher level theory. Thefelicity of the latter is not dependent on uncovering any neat mapping betweenit and neurophysiology. In this respect cognitive science proceeds in accord withmuch of the rest of biology, where there is no a priori assumption of higher levelcapacities being explained exhaustively by physiological or anatomical or geneticproperties. On this characterisation, nothing would seem to warrant seeing ILEPas implicit in the methodological goals of cognitive science; a fortiori, LTH as ascientific hypothesis must seem questionable without further motivation.

At this point however it will no doubt have struck readers that I am deliberatelyignoring a very central feature of research in cognitive science, namely the use ofdigital computers and the software they run to provide models of our cognitive


capacities. Connectedly, it will seem that I am ignoring one of the three levels ofanalysis that is standardly, namely the level of the syntactic or algorithmic realisa-tion of the intentional or computational theory for a capacity (see note 20). And itmay seem that since the digital computer precisely involves symbolic representa-tions that reoccur stably across different internal configurations, then, to the extentthat the models built using these computers give an account of our cognitive func-tioning, cognitive science is, after all, committed to LTH as a scientific hypothesis.On this line, the physicalistic commitment, even if not a part of much practisedscience generally, would be identified as integral to cognitive science in view ofthe explanatory role it affords digital computers.

We should certainly not downplay the role of digital computers in cognitivetheorising, nor that of building appropriate algorithms for performing cognitivefunctions. Nor is the idea of different levels of explanation without methodologicalimport. But neither of these points, I submit, renders LTH part of an empiricalresearch programme in cognitive science. I will return to the question of levelsshortly. As for the role of digital computers in cognitive science, there are severalpoints that should make us wary of seeing this, of course, uncontested practiceas reason for holding to LTH as part of cognitive science’s overall research pro-gramme. To begin with, computer modelling in cognitive science can and fre-quently does involve machines that instantiate or at least simulate an architecturethat deviates from the traditional Turing/Von Neumann style of architecture that in-volves symbol-processing – namely, connectionist architectures. To the extent thatconnectionist architectures can be regarded as more realistic models of the brainand its mode of operation, and at the same time reveal promise in modelling ouractual performance in various domains, it seems they will have a more fundamentalexplanatory role to play in cognitive science than classical programmes, and willthus render the latter superfluous.

The justification for asserting this leads on to a second, more fundamental point,which is simply that the use of classical architectures to model the mind surelydoes not involve the assumption that the brain actually operates in this way – thatthese architectures give anything other than either a very approximate account ofhow the relevant part of the brain functions, or perhaps a heuristic device for thedevelopment of an adequate intentional theory of the relevant capacity. Althoughit may be true that our performance in certain domains may at present be bestsimulated by classical programmes, the idea that our brains are actually doing itthat way would not seem very credible. The reason for this is not (at least just) thefailure of strong AI,21 but rather the fact that in all of the domains where classicalmodelling is successful, our performance also involves aspects of behaviour whichare not predictable on that model. Thus, for example, chess, though certainly bestmodelled at one level by a classical programme – we need to distinguish clearlybetween the different pieces, for example – nevertheless involves in us abilitiesand tendencies that go far beyond those of the classical programme: abilities tothink quickly, fluidly and flexibly in relation to gross patterns in the input, and


the concomitant tendencies to make mistakes relative to an idealised conceptionof competence. In addition, an ability like chess is acquired – and potentially lost– in a way that involves more than simply the addition or subtraction of rules.An explanatory project that is concerned to give an account of how we actuallyperform and acquire certain operations and yet is not willing to provide some uni-fied account of this operation such that these non-systematic aspects are embracedwould seem to fall short of scientific respectability. I would like to stress that Iam not here arguing that all explanatory projects in cognitive science must or willbe concerned with these operations. As indicated above, a distinctive and arguablymore fundamental aspect of cognitive science involves the delineation of capacitiesand their nature. My point is that if you are interested in saying more about howthese capacities are realised physically in us, it is not scientific to stop at a pointwhere the explanation is blatantly incomplete. But this is where LTH stops.

To this it might be replied that connectionist models, given my criteria, can-not be scientific either, both because they are also hopelessly at odds with theactual structure of the brain, and because, at least according to many, they areblatantly inadequate as explanations of systematic behaviour. However, though itseems clear that our brains are no more a connectionist net than they are a Turingmachine, it is nevertheless the case that connectionism is inspired by and retainsthe aim of providing realistic models of the structure and functioning of the brain,something classical modelling disavows. The second charge also seems unwar-ranted. It may be that connectionism has problems modelling some systematicdomains. Nevertheless, certain aspects of systematicity have been modelled usingconnectionist models, such as that we find in systematic perceptual judgementsand in translating between text and speech (successfully modelled by the systemNETtalk: cf. Sejnowski and Rosenberg, 1986). Attempts to model other such abil-ities continue, based, amongst other things, on multi-layered systems that allowpatterns of activity in lower layers to be treated as the basis of processing at thehigher level (cf. Clark, 1993: 76 ff. for an overview of this research). In addition,connectionism retains the goal of explaining systematicity consonant with howthis relates to speed, fluidity and flexibility in the operation, acquisition and loss ofability, whilst LTH cannot have as one of its goals the explanation of fast, fluid andflexible operation. Connectionism thus seems to be at least empirically progressive,whereas LTH is blatantly not so.

Again it might be replied that we need not choose between connectionismand LTH, but rather must understand that different aspects of performance willbe explained best by the different architectures. However, the fact remains thatwhichever aspect of whichever domain of performance one examines, one willfind deviations from pure systematicity, both in acquisition and loss, and in on-lineoperation. A theory which is aimed at explaining the physical basis of cognitivecompetence and yet demurs on principle at explaining certain aspects of this basis,as LTH does, cannot be regarded as forming even a part of a respectable scientificenterprise. In a word what LTH proposes seems to be a purely metaphysical con-


straint on theories of systematic cognitive competences, a constraint that is – to putit Popperianly – unfalsifiable given the research methods currently employed bycognitive science.

To further clarify this last point, it is worth remarking that in the most recentdebates, it has been conceded that given suitable starting constraints, non-classical,connectionist architectures can be trained up to produce the kind of structurednessand systematicity in behaviour that classicists say favour their models. The point ofissue has then become how we can justify taking these initial constraints as given.A prevalent answer to this question has been that they can be taken as given only ifthe connectionist machine is seen as realising a classical machine in which the con-straints are explicitly encoded, i.e. a machine which realises a language of thought,for otherwise we would have to appeal to thoroughly serendipitous constraints fromthe environment. Classical models are thus the only feasible explanation of what itis we are doing, in a way no other kind of architecture is. (For an overview of thedebate, cf. Clark, 1993: chapter 9).

But this argument involves confusing the two different kinds of project in cog-nitive science identified above, or else a use of ILEP that is thoroughly gratuitousgiven those projects. In observing behaviour under a wide variety of circumstances,including development and cases of breakdown, one may become convinced thatit must be accounted for by a theory of that behaviour which views it as a mani-festation of a systematic capacity, a capacity which, under suitable idealisations,involves isolable elements that figure recurrently in various different configurationsof the behaviour. Given that is so, it seems that classical programmes may wellprovide a model of the relevant capacity, and in that sense tell us in a perspicuousway what it is we are doing in behaving in certain ways. But if it does so, thereis no reason – as I stressed above – to think that the model is anything but that:a model of the competence or capacity, a model which enables us to isolate anddevelop the theory of this systematic capacity, or perhaps provides an approximateaccount of how this capacity is realised in the brain. In particular, it does not licenceany inference to the idea that we actually have in our heads some physical orsyntactical substrate comparable to that we find in the computer or its programme.If we identify the constraints on a connectionist model of our abilities in a certaindomain with the systematic theory of the intentional capacity, there is no signific-ance in the idea of a syntactic substrate underlying the systematic capacity, giventhat our actual performance will always and in many ways go beyond and deviatefrom this systematicity – it would, to reiterate, be unfalsifiable within the researchprogramme of cognitive science. Hence to accuse connectionist architectures thatcapture the behaviour as merely realising a virtual classical machine is totallygratuitous: it is true that they are realising systematic intentional capacities, butfrom this it does not follow that the connectionist account is, at the realising level,anything other than totally in order, let alone that positing explicit syntax explainsanything. Of course, if one also assumes that any theory of an intentional capacitymust stand in some fairly direct relationship with whatever physically underpins


that capacity – if one accepts García-Carpintero’s ILEP – then one may also regardthe digital computer as giving an account of what we are doing in some more literalsense. But it should now be clear that such an account does not form part of thescientific enterprise that is cognitive science, and that it is highly unclear why anysuch account should be regarded as mandatory.

Let us now return to the question of levels of explanation. I have been arguingthat there is no space within empirical cognitive science for a level intermediatebetween that of the theory of the capacity and that of the realising hardware whichdetails just the symbolic operations underlying the latter. But what I am denyinghere is the idea of a level of explanation that corresponds to some set of genu-ine properties in the organism under study. In another sense of level, however,it seems clear that there can be many higher level theories of our neural hard-ware that abstract, for all sorts of practical reasons, from the physiological detailsof this hardware. Connectionist models do this to a greater or lesser extent, andLTH-models, to the extent they are not viewed as computer models of a cognitivecapacity, may themselves be seen as doing this. That digital computers are soamenable to LTH-models may even have led some researchers to suppose thatthis was a distinctive, reality-reflecting level of description. But, if what I havesaid about the use of the digital computers is correct, such higher level modelsmust always be understood as ultimately responsible to the level of the physicalhardware they are abstracted from, and viewed, accordingly, as partial and partiallyinaccurate conceptions of this basal level. Empirical progress is made in seekingto precisify these models and relate them in a more perspicuous way to what weknow of about our neurophysiology, and to what we learn about our performancein relation to certain areas of competence. Many connectionist models developedwithin cognitive psychology are precisely motivated by such attempts to precisifysymbolic models and to make better fits with observational data of performance (cf.Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986); and even though they are not always successfulin reducing symbolic models to non-symbolic ones (cf. e.g. Pinker and Prince,1988), this does not undermine the need to aim at such reduction in giving evermore adequate models, in view of the structure of the brain. The idea of levels ofexplanation intermediate between those of the cognitive capacity and that of theneural hardware is thus not something we need to give up, but we need to under-stand that such levels represent essentially epistemological rather than ontologicalcategories.

I conclude that LTH is not an empirical hypothesis of cognitive science. At bestit represents some kind of heuristic or regulative principle for the development ofmore adequate accounts of our capacities, and/or a highly abstract but essentiallypartial account of how these are realised in the brain. But it is not constitutivelyrelevant to an account of those capacities, nor can it plausibly be seen as an empiric-ally adequate account of how those capacities are realised. If one adopts ILEP, thenLTH may well have to be accepted as true. But nothing in the practice of cognitivescience suggests that we should adopt this principle. Since little in the practice of


other scientists does either, it seems reasonable to regard it as representing justanother aspect of the naturalistic prejudices which lie behind the motivation forRTM and LTH, but which we have seen no reason to pay heed to.

I do not doubt that many will react to my claims with incredulity, pointing toextant work within cognitive science that makes use of language-of-thought-stylearchitectures. I would thus like to precisify one more time that my claim does notdepend on the absence of such architectures from current work (though to whatextent they really are prevalent has also been questioned – cf. in particular Mat-thews, 1988). Rather it depends on their inherent limitations taken as the physicalsubstrate of thought, but limitations which can be ameliorated by moving to otherarchitectural models. And again if it is insisted that such higher-level theorisingis required, I would ask in what sense this is so once the intentional nature of thecapacity under study is properly explicated – even if doing this involves, as a matterof practical necessity, modelling on a digital computer.

5. Summary and Conclusion

In this essay I have argued against the idea that IP requires vindication by cognit-ive science, in particular by RTM, CTM and LTH. None of the general featuresof belief states – that they are relations to abstract contents, that they involverelations to feature’s of their possessor’s environment, that they exhibit Fregeanqualities, or that they are in some sense non-natural properties – warrant RTM.Moreover, RTM cannot be independently motivated by reference to extant researchwithin cognitive science. LTH is not an empirical hypothesis of cognitive science,for the latter involves work at essentially just two ontological levels: that of ourcognitive capacities, which involve intentional description; and that of the neuro-physiological mechanisms that realise these capacities. This does not make talkof intermediate levels misguided, for there is certainly room for theorising thatabstracts to a greater of lesser extent from neural detalls (connectionism itself doesthis). The aim of such theorising should be to assist in the development of thetheories of the different cognitive capacities, or else to work towards a satisfyingneurophysiological account of the causation of behaviour that can also be renderedconsistent as an account of how these capacities are realised. There is however noreason to think that the requirement that theories of intentional states and capacitiesmust be explained or vindicated by lower level theories, in the way RTM-supportersassume, is embodied in the working practice of cognitive scientists, any more thanit follows from the general features of beliefs we have mentioned.22

Notes1Jerry Fodor is the chief and clearest exponent of this view: cf. e.g. Fodor (1987: chapter 1, Ap-pendix); (1998: chapter 1). It is also held, explicitly or implicitly, by many other philosophers and


psychologists: Pylyshyn (1984) is a notable example of an explicit adherer, as is Lycan (1993); othersholding related views will be cited in this paper.2That intentional content has an individuative and/or explanatory role in cognitive science has beenquestioned, most recently and notably in relation to vision by Francis Egan; her arguments, however,are not generally accepted, and will not be discussed here (cf. Egan, 1992, and Bermúdez, 1995:360–361 for a critique).3On the status of folk and intentional psychology, I thus take myself to be in broad agreement withFodor, which I also take to be the received view in most contemporary cognitive science, and indisagreement with (to mention some of the main dissenters) Stich (1983), Churchland (1981) (whosupport eliminativism), Dennett (1987), Davidson (1971), McDowell (1985), Pickering and Chater(1995) and Clark (1993) – all of whom, in different ways, hold folk psychology to be autonomousfrom cognitive science. Cf. Knowles (2000) for arguments to the effect that folk psychology cannotcoherently be seen as giving anything other than scientific explanations, albeit of a low-grade variety,pace Davidson, McDowell and Pickering and Chater.4The Churchlands would be examples here – cf. Churchland (1979: §§ 18 ff.); Churchland andSejnowski (1988). For arguments in support of just the conditional claim cf. Ramsey et al. (1991);Davies (1991). Though Fodor himself does not see the relationship between IP and RTM, etc. asa priori in the way these authors do, he thinks it is clear that connectionism cannot explain certaincentral aspects of intentional thought processes. I will not be concerned in this piece with the questionof to what extent an inference from IP to RTM, etc. is, if correct, a priori. In Section 3, I will attemptto undermine any view which sees a deep conflict between IP and connectionism.5I have myself argued elsewhere that the prospects of a naturalistic (and possibly innately determ-ined) semantics is a central source of support for RTM: cf. Knowles (1998). But in fact sincethese arguments assume a certain, tendentious interpretation of naturalism, they beg the questionof the current piece. (See note 20 for further discussion of the relation between LTH and linguisticcompetence.)6It is perhaps questionable how much force metaphysical arguments should be taken to have giventhe broadly naturalistic framework within which Fodor and his sympathisers conduct their argu-mentation. In particular, the assumption that the concepts and theories of actual explanatory projectsconstitute something like a foundational basis for more speculative philosophical reflection mightseem to render illegitimate any argument that finds some inherent inadequacy in the propertiesposited by something as successful as IP. We will recur to this general point below in Section 2.3.However, it is also significant that the argument to be considered here, even if permitted, does notsupport RTM.7The precise form of the following argument, including the expression ‘causal surrogates’, is due toCrane loc. cit.8Note that there is a separate kind of argument for RTM if Fregean thoughts need to be posited: seeSection 2.9For arguments for LTH along roughly these lines, cf. Fodor (1987: 17–19, Appendix); Davies (op.cit.). Both of these arguments rely, not on the idea of contents being abstract, but rather on the needto give a physicalistically respectable account of systematic abilities, but on the face of it the formerprovides as good a motivation for LTH as the latter. I am holding these two ideas apart at the moment(Fodor does not) since it is precisely a question for me, as we shall see below, whether we canmotivate the need for causal surrogates independently of an assumption of physicalism (Crane, inlight of his anti-physicalism – cf. Crane and Mellor (1990) believes we can). Physicalism will be thefocus of attention in Section 3.10The question is not whether it is deductively valid – its superficial form is in fact abductive, but weneed not take a stand on the issue here (see also below).11A similar line of thought could be used to block a move from the causal efficacy of thoughts aboutabstract objects, such as numbers, to local causal surrogates: why not see the causal powers suchthoughts have as residing in the worldly objects these thoughts relate to through our actions?


12Others might react to this strongly externalist line on the grounds that it makes a mystery of howbeliefs are causally brought about. The standard picture of this is that I gain a belief in virtue of causalcontact with an object and its properties. How can this story apply if my belief literally embracesthese objects? But though there is no doubt something that should be said here, it is clearly not as ifthis question constitutes a knock-down argument against the externalist. As for what might be said,see Child (1992).13Perhaps someone might argue that since RTM allows one to retain both the idea of broad inten-tional laws, and idiosyncratic MOPs, both of which are deeply ingrained in common sense, it shouldstill be preferred. But this is not convincing. All hands are in agreement that not all aspects of thecommon sense scheme can be retained in a more sophisticated psychological theory. Since MOPs donot generalise across individuals, there are good reasons for not positing them in a more scientificpsychology. Given it is the latter that it taken to limn the true structure of reality, we lack any positivereason for thinking MOPs must be posited, and thus an argument for RTM.14Cf. Stich (1996) – a paper which would seem to answer an objection to Stich and Laurence (op.cit.) put forward in Crane (1998: 352–353).15This second objection also holds against the conception of internalistic content as syntacticallyindividuated recently put forward by McGilvray (1998) – which is not surprising given the similaritybetween such a syntactic view of content and Egan’s (op. cit.) conception of the cognitive science asusing syntactic individuation criteria (cf. note 2, above).16Note that abstracting away from false beliefs in IP would not substantially alleviate the problemsof giving a naturalistic theory of meaning, since the most serious of these concern the problemsconnected to Quine’s doctrine of the inscrutability of reference, i.e. the necessary coocurrence ofproperties with which mental tokens are supposed to covary (cf. Fodor, 1994: lecture III).17Note then that the following argument for CTM, LTH and RTM would not be available to ananti-physicalist such as Crane.18Note that this does not exclude that it be in some sense an empirical claim, i.e. that it be, iftrue, other than completely a priori. The claims I will be making concern rather the methodologyof cognitive science, and that LTH does not fit in with these.19This counter-argument is also used in Knowles (1999: 179–180) to argue against the idea thatmental properties must be realised by physical ones (which is what Fodor is most directly concernedto establish in the relevant passage).20The idea that LTH is not scientific may appear, at first blush, not particularly plausible insofar as ithas often been associated with Chomsky’s (we may take it) indubitably scientific claims concemingthe need for mentalistic structures to explain our linguistic competence (cf. Fodor, 1975: chapter1). Now Chomsky’s views are consonant with the idea of a language of thought in some sense,insofar as linguistic competence is viewed as something inexplicable purely on the basis of relationsbetween environmental stimuli and behavioural responses (cf. Chomsky, 1957). However it wouldbe a mistake to see Chomsky’s view as endorsing LTH as Fodor currently understands it and as itfeatures in CTM. Chomsky posits knowledge of syntactic structures in order to account for the roleplayed by structure in our linguistic competence; LTH does not concern knowledge of syntax, butrather a physical substrate for knowledge and thought generally that itself is syntactically structuredand that should explain intentional level properties. In a familiar idiom, theories of grammaticalcompetence are couched at the semantic level of analysis (cf. Haugeland, 1978; Pylyshyn, 1984; alsoMarr, 1982), not the syntactic, whereas LTH is precisely a theory at the latter level (notwithstanding,as we shall see below, that it seems questionable to regard the syntactic level as a genuine explanatoryconstruct in actual cognitive science).21The programme of building machines that can actually think and rationally behave as we do.22Sections 1 and 2 of this essay derive from various different papers written as a PhD-student inLondon between 1991 and 1994, and I would like to thank Martin Davies, Barry Smith, Tim Craneand Tom Stoneham for discussion of these. Section 3 formed the basis for a talk I gave at ESPP 98


in Lisbon, and I would like to thank those participants who offered me their (largely supportive!)comments.

References

Baker, L. (1991), ‘Has content been naturalised?’, in B. Loewer and G. Rey, eds., Meaning in Mind:Fodor and his Critics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Baron-Cohen, S. (1985), Mindblindness. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Bermúdez, J. (1995), ‘Non-conceptual content: from perceptual experience to subpersonal computa-

tional states’, Mind and Language 10, 203–218.Boghossian, P. (1991), ‘Naturalising content’, in B. Loewer and G. Rey, eds., Meaning in Mind.

Fodor and his Critics. Oxford: Blackwell.Botterill, G. and Carruthers, P. (1999), The Philosophy of Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Child, W. (1992), ‘Vision and experience: the causal theory and the disjunctive conception’, The

Philosophical Quarterly 42, pp. 297–316.Chomsky, N. (1959), ‘Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour’, Language 35, pp. 26–58.Chomsky, N. (1986), Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.Chomsky, N. (1995), ‘Language and nature’, Mind 104, pp. 1–61.Churchland, P.M. (1979), Scientific Realism and Plasticity of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press.Churchland, P.M. (1981), ‘Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes’, Journal of

Philosophy 78, pp. 67–90.Churchland, P.S. & Sejnowski, T. (1988), ‘Neural representation and neural computation’, in W.

Lycan, ed., Mind and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Clark, A. (1993), Associative Engines. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Crane, T. (1990), ‘An alleged analogy between numbers and propositions’, Analysis 50, pp. 224–230.Crane, T. (1991), ‘All the difference in the world’, Philosophical Quarterly’ 41, pp. 1–25.Crane, T. (1992), ‘Mental causation and mental reality’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 92,

pp. 186–202.Crane, T. (1998), ‘How to define your (mental) terms’, Inquiry 41, pp 341–354.Crane, T. and Mellor, H. (1990), ‘There is no question of physicalism’, Mind 99, pp. 185–206.Cussins, A. (1990), ‘Connectionism, competence, and explanation’, in M. Boden, ed., The Philo-

sophy of Artificial Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Davidson, D. (1971), ‘Philosophy as psychology’, reprinted in his Essays on Actions and Events.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.Davidson, D. (1977), ‘Reality without reference,’ reprinted in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpret-

ation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.Davies, M. (1991), ‘Concepts, connectionism, and the language of thought’, in D. Rumelhart,

W. Ramsey and S. Stich, eds., Philosophy and Connectionist Theory. New Jersey: LawrenceEarlbaum and Associates.

Dennett, D. (1987), The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Dupré, J. (1993), The Disorder of Things. Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Egan, F. (1992), ‘Individualism: computation and perceptual content’, Mind 101, pp. 443–459.Fodor, J. (1975), The Language of Thought. Sussex: Harvester Press.Fodor, J. (1980), ‘Methodological Solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psycho-

logy’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences 3, pp. 63–72.Fodor, J. (1983), The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Fodor, J. (1987), Psychosemantics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.


Fodor, J. (1990a), ‘Substitution arguments and the individuation of beliefs’, in his A Theory ofContent and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Fodor, J. (1990b), ‘Making mind matter more’, in his A Theory of Content and Other Essays.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Fodor, J. (1991), ‘Replies’, in B. Loewer and G. Rey, eds., Meaning in Mind: Fodor and his Critics.Oxford: Blackwell.

Fodor, J. (1994), The Elm and the Expert. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Fodor, J. (1998), Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Fodor, J. and McLaughlin, B. (1990), ‘Connectionism and the problem of systematicity: why

Smolenksy’s solution doesn’t work’, Cognition 35, pp. 183–204.Fodor, J. and Pylyshyn, Z. (1988), ‘Connectionism and cognitive architecture’, Cognition 28, pp.

3–71.García-Carpintero, M. (1995), ‘The philosophical import of connectionism: A critical notice of Andy

Clark’s Associative Engines’, Mind and Language 10, pp. 370–401.Gopnik, A. (1996), ‘Theories and modules; creation myths, developmental realities, and Neurath’s

boat’, in P. Carruthers and P. Smith, eds., Theories of Theories of Mind. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Haugeland, J. (1978), ‘The nature and plausibility of cognitivism’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences2, pp. 215–260.

Higginbotham, J. (1987–8), ‘Is semantics necessary?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 88,pp. 219–241.

Kim, J. (1996), The Philosophy of Mind. Colorado: Westview.Knowles, J. (1998), ‘The language of thought and natural language understanding’, Analysis 58, pp.

264–272.Knowles, J. (1999), ‘Physicalism, teleology and the miraculous coincidence problem’, The

Philosphical Quarterly 49, pp. 164–181.Knowles, J. (2000), ‘Is folk psychology scientific?’, unpublished ms.Kripke, S. (1979), ‘A puzzle about belief’, in A. Margalit, ed., Meaning and Use. Dordrecht: Reidel.Lewis, D. (1970), ‘How to define theoretical terms’, reprinted in his Philosophical Papers, Volume

1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.Lewis, D. (1972), ‘Psychophysical and theoretical identifications’, reprinted in N. Block, ed., Read-

ings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1980.

Lycan, W. (1993), ‘A deductive argument for the representational theory of thinking’, Mind andLanguage 8, pp 404–422.

Marr, D. (1982), Vision. San Francisco: Freeman.Matthews, R. (1988), ‘The alleged evidence for representationalism’, in S. Silvers, ed., Rerepresent-

ations. Dordrecht: Kluwer.McDowell, J. (1985), ‘Functionalism and anomalous monism’, in B. McLaughlin and E. Lepore,

eds., Actions and Events. Blackwell.McDowell, J. (1986), ‘Singular thought and the extent of inner space’, in J. McDowell and P. Pettit,

eds., Subject, Thought, and Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.McGilvray, J. (1998), ‘Meanings are syntactically individuated and found in the head’, Mind and

Language 13, pp. 225–280.Peacocke. C. (1981), ‘Demonstrative thought and psychological explanation’, Synthese 49, pp 187–

217.Pickering, M. and Chater, N. (1995), ‘Why cognitive science is not formalised folk psychology’,

Minds and Machines 5, pp. 309–337.Pinker, S. and Prince, A. (1988), ‘On language and connectionism: analysis of a parallel distributed

processing model of language acquisition’, Cognition 28, pp. 73–193.


Pylyshyn, Z. (1984), Computation and Cognition: Towards a Foundation for Cognitive Science.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Ramsey, W., Stich, S. and Garron, J. (1991), ‘Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folkpsychology’, in D. Rumelhart, W. Ramsey and S. Stich, eds., Philosophy and ConnectionistTheory. New Jersey: Lawrence Earlbaum & Associates.

Sejnowski, T. & Rosenberg, C. (1987), ‘Parallel networks that learn to pronounce English texts’,Complex Systems 1, pp. 145–168.

Shoemaker, S. (1984), Identity, Cause and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Smolensky, P. (1988), ‘On the proper treatment of connectionism’, Behaviourial and Brain Sciences

11, pp. 1–74.Stalnaker, R. (1984), Inquiry. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Stich, S. (1983), From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Stitch S. (1996), ‘Naturalism, positivism, and pluralism’, in his Deconstructing the Mind. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Stich, S. and Laurence, S. (1996), ‘Intentionality and naturalism’, in S. Stich Deconstructing the

Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Tye. M. (1992), ‘Naturalism and the mental’, Mind 101, pp. 421–441.

Does intentional psychology need vindicating by cognitive science?

Documents

Transcript of Does intentional psychology need vindicating by cognitive science?