Confusion is Corruptive Belief in False Identity
Summary (2 min read)
1 Introduction
- They think one thing is two or two things are one.
- Until recently, however, theorists did not pay much attention to the metaphysics of confused mental states.
- The rst is the Frege model already mentioned and the second is called the ‘Millikan model.’.
2 Two models of the mental state of confusion
- For convenience, I focus only on the more simple cases.
- Another dog who chases two similar rabbits, only ever seeing one of them at any given moment, might su er from combinatory confusion.
- If the rabbits switch roles behind a rock, appearing to the dog as if a single running rabbit disappears from sight only for a moment, he seems to have some kind of mental representation that is supposed to help him track a single rabbit but really tracks two rabbits.
3.1 Descriptive and explanatory adequacy
- As emphasized by Ruth Marcus (1983), if a theory of confused belief is to be descriptively adequate it must make room for the fact that nonlinguistic animals and prelinguistic infants are just as confusion-susceptible as other more intellectually sophisticated creatures.
- The proponent of the Frege model can in fact embrace much of the Millikan model, only insisting, along the way, that implicit or explicit belief in propositions involving identity ought to be postulated when possible and explanatorily fruitful.
- And, surely, this does not imply that the agent must explicitly represent that the subject of one thought token is identical to the subject of another thought token.11 I note here that part of her argument for this view is, precisely, that it is impossible to describe confusion in terms of belief states.
- Propositional identities do have, as Millikan argues, distinctive e ects on the functional organization of mental states.
- (2) is combinatory confusion and ‘ac’ is paired with two corresponding terms in the t-language.
4 Proper functions and malfunctions
- Given that I’ve shown that the Frege model best explains the mental state of confusion, the authors don’t need to construe confusion as ‘an error of its own kind’ (Millikan 2000: 173), as opposed to a false belief.
- Malformed and malfunctioning hearts are still ‘supposed to’ pump blood, i.e. serve the proper function whereby their proliferation is evolutionarily and historically explained.
- Going further, Millikan applies the notion of proper function to biological and cultural items alike.
- But even if imperatives produced compliance only on very rare occasions, it might still be the case, at least on Millikan’s theory as I understand it, that their proper function is to produce compliant behavior.
- On Millikan’s (2000) account the distorting e ects of confusion on basic cognitive processes are fairly straightforward.
4.1 The proper function of singular terms in communication
- Millikan holds that the stabilizing function of a proper name—a paradigm example of a singular term—is to ‘precipitate an act of identi cation of its referent’ (1984: 80).
- Matters are very di erent when a whole group of speakers, for example a whole scienti c community, is uniformly confused about the identity of objects or properties to which they intend to refer in speech (Camp 2002: ch. 2; Evans 1982: ch. 11; Field 1973).
- And this is precisely because of A’s false identity belief: if A is thoroughly confused, both individuals will equally count as what A intended to refer to.
- One objection in particular may come to mind here.
- And the answer is made easier by using the more detailed Gricean terminology.
5 Conclusion
- Minimally, the confused agent must either not believe a true proposition about identity or, less minimally, believe a false proposition about identity.
- The most serious objections to this account can be staved o by arguing that the beliefs can be implicit, but still, the agent must stand in some explicit attitude relations to the object(s) in question.
- Furthermore, I showed how this mental state has disrupting e ects on the proper function of singular terms in communication.
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Additional excerpts
...Cf. Bach (1987), Grice (1989), Schiffer (1981), Unnsteinsson (2014, 2016), Wilson and Sperber (2012)....
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Frequently Asked Questions (5)
Q2. What is the virtue of the stronger version of the Frege model?
It is a virtue of the stronger version that it gives a uniform account of success and failure characteristic of mental representations involving identity and distinctness.
Q3. What is the interpretationist view of confused thinking?
The local interpretationism envisaged here, as applied to object-confusion, holds that the Frege model provides the best and most intuitive theoretical description of the confused thinker’s internal mental state, at a particular level of abstraction.
Q4. What is the mechanism that underlies many important cognitive tasks?
The mechanism underlies many important cognitive tasks, such as recognition, expectation, and inference (cf. Lawlor 2001; Recanati 2012).
Q5. What is the motivation for doing away with propositional beliefs?
Since this argument fails the motivation for doing away with propositional belief is no longer a factor and the authors are free to use them to explain corepresentational capacities and their characteristic failures.