Mind in a Physical World

For any given animal, the sources of mechanical disturbances inducing tissue deformation define environment from the perspective of the animal's haptic perceptual system. The system's achievements include perceiving the body, attachments to the body, and the surfaces and substances adjacent to the body. Among the perceptual systems, it stands alone in having no defined medium. There is no articulated functional equivalent to air and water, the media that make possible the energy transmissions and diffusions underpinning the other perceptual systems. To identify the haptic system's medium the authors focus on connective tissue and the conjunction of muscular, connective tissue net, and skeletal (MCS) as the body's proper characterization. The challenge is a biophysical formulation of MCS as a continuum that, similar to air and water, is homogeneous and isotropic. The authors hypothesized a multifractal tensegrity (MFT) with the shape and stability of the constituents of each scale, from individual...

The medium of haptic perception: a tensegrity hypothesis.

Inference to the best explanation provides a
promising response to the threat of external world skepticism. An
attractive version of this sort of response to skepticism is what I
call the "Explanationist Response". The Explanationist Response
involves arguing that our commonsense view that there is an
external world composed of mind-independent objects is the best
explanation of the involuntary and spontaneous nature of our
sensory experiences as well as their coherence with one another.
Since it is rational to believe that the best explanation of these
features of our sensory experiences is true, we can have knowledge
of the external world. This Explanationist Response to skepticism
is often gestured at as a promising way of responding to
skepticism, but for too long it has remained a schema for how a
successful response to skepticism might go rather than a
full-fledged response to skepticism. This thesis takes important
steps toward transforming the Explanationist Response from an
outline into a complete reply to skepticism and defends the
Explanationist Response from a variety of
objections.

Inference to the Best Explanation and the External World: A Defense of the Explanationist Response to Skepticism

Donald Davidson used triangulation to do everything from explicate psychological and semantic externalism, to attack relativism and skepticism, to propose conditions necessary for thought and talk. At one point Davidson tried to bring order to these remarks by identifying three kinds of triangulation, each operative in a different situation. Here I take seriously Davidson’s talk of triangular situations and extend it. I start by describing Davidson’s situations. Next I establish the surprising result that considerations from one situation entail the possibility that at any one time one language is partially untranslatable into another. Because the possibility is time-indexed, it need not conflict with Davidson’s own argument against the possibility of untranslatability. I derive the result, not to indict Davidson, but to propose a new kind of triangulation, the reconciliation of untranslatability, which I investigate. Insofar as triangulation is central to Davidson’s views, getting a handle on his various triangular situations is key to getting a handle on his contributions to philosophy. Insofar as those contributions have enriched our understanding of how language, thought, and reality interrelate, extending Davidson’s model promises to extend our understanding too.

Triangulation, Untranslatability, and Reconciliation

Let us call representations such as concepts and terms ‘response-dependent’ just in case they are connected in an a priori manner to responses of suitably situated subjects to their referents. To possess the concept RED and master the term ‘red’, on this view, is to possess the concept and master the term that are linked to the responses of normal human beings to objects that appear red to them under normal conditions. Notions of response-dependence trace to John Locke’s (1979) analysis of secondary-quality concepts (or ‘ideas’). On one reading of Locke, the concept RED is the concept of something to which normal human beings respond by perceiving that it is red under normal conditions. Tracing the notion forward, on one reading of Immanuel Kant (1998), all concepts are connected in an a priori manner to responses that normal human beings have to objects that appear to them in particular ways. Because he understands all concepts in terms of how they relate to human beings, Kant has been called the first to give a thoroughgoing ‘anthropocentric’ account of knowledge. For Kant, all concepts are connected in an a priori manner to paradigmatic anthropocentric responses. Recently there has been much interest among analytic philosophers in response-dependence theories. Most theories proposed have been, like Locke’s, local. They concern only some concepts. One prominent response-dependence theory, however, takes its cue not from Locke but from Kant. Philip Pettit (2005b) has proposed a global response-dependence theory, according to which all concepts and terms are linked to human responses. In fact Pettit himself explicitly calls all such representations ‘anthropocentric’ (2005b: 13–7, 53–8). While Pettit introduces his global theory to rebut skepticism about rule-following (1990; 1996: chs. 2, 4; 2005b: essay 1), my interest is not in whether Pettit succeeds in doing so. It is instead in the price that Pettit must pay to be a global response-dependence theorist in the first place. As Michael Smith and Daniel Stoljar (1998) explain, Pettit’s theory entails noumenalism, the thesis that reality possesses an intrinsic nature that remains unknowable. Though Pettit acknowledges that his global response-dependence theory does entail noumenalism, he argues contra Smith and Stoljar that this commitment is not particularly problematic. For Pettit claims that his noumenalism, like Kant’s own, admits of ontological and epistemic construals. Pettit takes Smith and Stoljar to construe noumenalism ontologically, according to which there is some ‘nature’ or ‘realm’ of existence that is separate and inaccessible from the one in which we reside. Pettit himself construes noumenalism epistemically. While there

Response-Dependence, Noumenalism, and Ontological Mystery

How can abductive reasoning be physical, feasible, and reliable? This is Fodor’s riddle of abduction, and its apparent intractability is the cause of Fodor’s recent pessimism regarding the prospects for cognitive science. I argue that this riddle can be solved if we augment the computational theory of mind to allow for non-computational mental processes, such as those posited by classical associationists and contemporary connectionists. The resulting hybrid theory appeals to computational mechanisms to explain the semantic coherence of inference and associative mechanisms to explain the efficient retrieval of relevant information from memory. The interaction of these mechanisms explains how abduction can be physical, feasible, and reliable.

Fodor's riddle of abduction

The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com and website listed below.

Incommensurability, relativism, scepticism: reflections on acquiring a concept

As conceived by Kim, the causal exclusion argument targets all forms of nonreductive physicalism equally, but by restricting its focus to functionalist varieties of nonreductivism, I am able to develop a version of the argument that has a number of virtues lacking in the original. First, the revised argument has no need for Kim’s causal exclusion principle, which many find dubious if not simply false. Second, the revised argument can be adapted to either a production-based conception of causation, as Kim himself favors, or to any of a number of dependence-based conceptions, like the ones favored by many of Kim’s critics. And, finally, the revised argument does not have the objectionable consequence that all so-called higher-level properties are epiphenomenal, for it does not generalize in the way that Kim’s original version of the argument arguably does. Nor does it concede much to narrow the scope of the argument in the way proposed. Those who adopt nonreductive theories of mind do so, by and large, on the strength of functionalist arguments for the multiple realizability of mental states. If functionalism entails that mental properties are epiphenomenal, this thus deals a critical, if not quite fatal, blow to nonreductivism.

Strengthening the exclusion argument

I argue for the epiphenomenality of functional properties by means of thought experiments and general principles. General principles suggest that an object’s causal powers nomologically supervene on its intrinsic properties and that its functional role does not. This implies that it is possible for an object to lose its functional role without undergoing any change to its intrinsic properties or causal powers. Nor is it difficult to conceive of such scenarios. Various thought experiments are introduced for just this purpose. But properties that can vary independently of an object’s causal powers in this way are epiphenomenal, for their instantiation by an object at a time makes no difference to the causal processes the object is involved in at that time. The same processes would have occurred even if such properties hadn’t been instantiated. The intrinsicness thesis is controversial, but it is not controversial that it is true of productive causation, and many believe that productive causation is the only form of mental causation worth having. Nevertheless, in the paper’s final section I consider dependence-based accounts of causation, which do not presuppose the intrinsicness of causal powers, and show that they too have difficulties accounting for the efficacy of functional properties.

Functional Properties are Epiphenomenal

Representationalism is widely thought to grease the skids of ontological reduction. If phenomenal character is just a certain sort of intentional content, representationalists argue, the hard problem of accommodating consciousness within a broadly naturalistic view of the world reduces to the much easier problem of accommodating intentionality. I argue, however, that there’s a fatal flaw in this reasoning, for if phenomenal character really is just a certain sort of intentional content, it’s not anything like the sort of intentional content described by our best naturalistic theories. These theories make intentional content a mere Cambridge property of intentional states, a property that can be gained or lost through changes to distinct and causally disconnected objects. But consciousness is manifestly not like this; consciousness cannot suffer a mere Cambridge change. Thus, whatever ground is gained by explaining the phenomenal in terms of the intentional is lost again by undermining our best attempts to explain the intentional in terms of the natural. A Pyrrhic victory at best.

Matthew Rellihan

Papers

Fodor's riddle of abduction

Incommensurability, relativism, scepticism: reflections on acquiring a concept

Strengthening the exclusion argument

Functional Properties are Epiphenomenal

Content, Consciousness, and Cambridge Change