Replies to Comments: [Neale, Acero, Pineda] Robert Stalnaker Philosophical Issues, Vol. 9, Concepts. (1998), pp. 389-395. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1533-6077%281998%299%3C389%3ARTC%5BAP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7 Philosophical Issues is currently published by Ridgeview Publishing Company.
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http://www.jstor.org Wed Apr 18 07:24:37 2007
PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES, 9 Concepts, 1998
Replies to Comments Robert Stalnaker
Let me start by thanking my four commentators for their stimulating comments. I cannot adequately respond to all of their points, but I will make a few remarks about some of the many issues they have raised: first, on the distinctions between conceptual and nonconceptual states and contents, second on the subject-centered character of perception and thought, third about naturalism and reduction, and fourth about the identity conditions for contents.
1 Kinds of States and Kinds of Content The sound bite that I threw in at the end of my paper gets much of the attention from my commentators. Stephen Neale refers to my "overt claim that all content is nonconceptual", Juan Josd Acero says that I reject a distinction between two kinds of content, and David Pineda takes me to be "arguing for the claim that all there is to content is nonconceptual content". I do not want to disown my concluding suggestion that content is "nonconceptual all the way up", but I also do not want to deny that there may be various abstract objects, some of which might be appropriately thought of as conceptual contents, that are useful for describing intentional mental states. My
main point was not to argue for a restrictive thesis about content, but only to raise questions about what sorts of objects conceptual and nonconceptual contents might be, and about the role of a distinction between them in the debate between McDowell and Evans about the relation between perception and thought. I continue to be puzzled about just what background assumptions underlie the debates between Evans, McDowell, Peacocke, and others who distinguish conceptual from nonconceptual content, even though Neale tells me that "the debate in which they are engaged is clear". I posed my questions as questions about the nature of the objects -conceptual and nonconceptual contents -since I was suspicious, as Neale notes in his comments, that there is in this debate "slippage between talk of mental states as conceptual (nonconceptual) and talk of the contents of such states as conceptual (nonconceptual)" (p. 354). Neale thinks that this suspicion shows that I have "not fully appreciated the antecedently Fregean nature of the conceptual-nonconceptual debate" (p. 354), but I am not sure why he thinks this, or what the relevant Fregean assumptions are. In fact, Neale's own discussion reinforces my suspicion that the waters of this debate have been muddied by a conflation of a distinction between two kinds of content with a distinction between two kinds of mental states. To my suggestion that one might regard Fregean thoughts (a kind of sense that consists of senses) as conceptual contents and Russellian propositions (composed of properties and objects) as nonconceptual, Neale responds that "this is not the sense of 'conceptual' that is meant to be at issue: the representational content of a belief or judgment is said to be 'conceptual', according to Evans, in the sense that entertaining a belief or forming a judgment involves the exercise of conceptual capacities" (p. 356). But this is not a sense in which content is conceptual; one cannot just assume that a fact about forming judgments and beliefs -that these activities involve the exercise of a certain kind of c a p a c i t y is reflected in a distinctive feature of the contents of judgments and beliefs. A theory might hypothesize that a distinction between representational acts and states -those that involve the exercise of conceptual capacities and those that do n o t corresponds to a distinction between the kinds of representational content used to characterize those states, but one still has to say what the corresponding difference in content is. Perhaps Neale is suggesting that I have misconstrued the nature of the debate by taking it to be about a distinction between kinds of content at all. He attributes to m e the belief that the contrast between conceptual and nonconceptual states "can best be answered by reflecting on what kinds of objects can serve as these different
types of content" (p. 357), (that is, as the contents of these different types of states). But in fact my belief is just the opposite of this: I think it is a mistake to think that differences between perceptual and belief states are reflected in differences in the contents of those states -a mistake that has distorted the debate between Evans and McDowell about the relation between the information received in perception and the contents of judgments and reasoning about what is perceived. But I think it is clear that Evans, McDowell, Peacocke, Tim Crane, and others have taken it for granted that they are arguing about different kinds of content. The slippage from a distinction between kinds of state to a distinction between kinds of content in the writing of those who talk of nonconceptual content is brought out in Gomez-Torrente's helpful discussion of Tim Crane's way of drawing the distinction, which quite explicitly defines a difference in content in terms of a difference in the states with content. Gomez-Torrente's arguments show some of the problems with this kind of definition. I agree with him that "this is not a picky point".
2
The First Person Point of View
As Juan Acero says, "most of the information we gain and use wears a first-person dress" (p. 364). Both perception and thought involve the perceiver and thinker in the contents of what is perceived and thought about. Both Acero and Gomez-Torrente discuss an example that Peacocke uses to argue that differences in perspective must be included in any adequate description of the contents of perceptual experience. If I see the mist to the north while you see it to the northeast, then things appear differently to us, even if we don't disagree about the way things appear to be. Similarly with Acero's example of the difference between his perspective on the items on his desk and that of the visitor facing him. Now I would agree that we need to account both for the sense in which the contents of our experience (the way things appear to be) are different in such examples, and for the way that they are the same. And I would agree that neither Russellian propositions, Fregean thoughts, or sets of possible worlds are suitable, in themselves, for representing the perspective of the perceiver.(Gomez-Torrente seems to want to resist Peacocke's argument that there is an ineliminable perceiver perspective in the content of perception, but I find Peacocke's argument persuasive.) But I don't think that the essentially perspectival character of perception can be used to motivate a distinction between conceptual
and nonconceptual content, or that it is relevant to the difference between perception and thought. It is a familiar fact that judgments and beliefs can be essentially indexical; the fact that I believe the dictionary is to my right, while you believe it is to your left, can explain why we behave differently whether or not those beliefs are based on perception. And despite what Acero suggests, I don't think that Peacocke's point that differences between experiencers' perspectives must be reflected in the contents of their experiences indicates a conflict between his approach and mine. Peacocke's notion of a positioned scenario (as a candidate for a kind of content) is close in spirit to the more abstract notion of a set of possible situations (or, to include the perspectival element, a set of centered possible situations) -a candidate for the contents of judgments and thoughts as well as perceptual experience.
3
Naturalism and Normal Conditions
In the paper I sketched the outlines of a familiar account of the facts that give content to the states of what Evans called "the informational system". According to this account, the content of a state is determined relative to some notion of normal conditions. David Pineda and Juan Acero both raise questions about how the normal conditions presupposed by attributions of informational content are to be specified. One kind of account, discussed by Pineda, is an evolutionary or teleological account. Normal conditions are defined in terms of the functions of a system, and functions are defined in terms of how the system came to be disposed to behave as it does. I think such a teleological account might appropriate for some applications of the information theoretic story, but I would resist the idea that this kind of account is essential, in the general case, to the concept of normal conditions. I take the information theoretic story to be one that explains how content is determined relative to any given account of the normal conditions --conditions that may vary from one context in which the story is applied to another. If one finds an object (such as swampman, or swampcamera) that tends, under certain conditions, to vary systematically with variations in some features of its environment, then whatever the origins of the thing, and whatever the explanation for the fact that such a systematic causal correlation exists, one may correctly say that it's internal states tend (under those conditions) to carry the information. So I agree with Pineda's doubts that the teleological account should be "read as a conceptual analysis" (p. 385) of what it is for a state to
carry information. And since I don't think that the abstract account of information, because it takes normal conditions as given, can provide a naturalistic reduction of intentionality, I would agree with the kind of naturalism that Acero endorses -a naturalism that "does not require the reduction of content notions to non-intentional ones" (p. 367). I take it that what is required for a defense of naturalism is an explanation of how it is possible for physical objects that are part of the natural order to have the capacities (such as the capacities for perceiving, remembering, reasoning and communicating) that we human beings have. If we can give such explanations without an eliminative reduction of the intentional to the physical, then we can have a nonreductive naturalism.
4 Identity Conditions for Co'ntents The minimal notion of content that I defended -content as truth conditions, represented by the set of possible situations in which the truth conditions are realized- faces a familiar and daunting problem: since the account holds that necessarily equivalent propositions are identical, it is seems to be committed to the view that for any equivalent P and Q, the property of perceiving or believing that P is the same as the property of perceiving or believing that Q -a consequence that seems intuitively to be obviously false. Informational content, it seems, is just too coarse-grained to be a plausible candidate for the kind of content that we attribute when we describe either a person's judgments or her perceptions. I have elsewhere floated various ideas about how to reconcile this account of content with the phenomena. Here I want just to make some general remarks about this problem, and about some of the examples that Neale and Pineda use to raise it. First, I want to emphasize that in a sense, the most coarse-grained concept of content is a neutral concept o n e that all parties, at least all those who are willing to talk of representational content at all, should admit can be used to characterize perceptual and intentional states. Representational contents, whatever they are, have truth conditions, and so states with any kind of representational content are states that can be characterized with coarse-grained informational content. Perhaps they can also be characterized, more informatively, with a finer-grained concept -for example Russellian propositions or Fregean thoughts- but for the characterization to be more informative, one needs to be able to say how the difference in structure between different but necessarily equivalent fine-grained propositions is reflected in differences
between the representational states. It is not difficult to describe notions of content that are more fine-grained than the minimal notion of informational content (although if such objects contain concepts or senses as constituents, one has to say what concepts or senses are); what is more challenging is to give a plausible account of the role of the distinctions that the finer grained notions of content allow for in distinguishing between different intentional states. Mat hematical belief (distinguishing, for example, the belief that 2 2 = 4 from the belief that there is no greatest prime) indeed presents a serious problem for the coarse-grained conception of content, but I am in any case independently puzzled about what mathematical beliefs are about. The other examples that Neale and Pineda mention seem to me much easier to deal with. One can, using only coarse-grained contents, distinguish the belief that Hesperus is a planet from the belief that Phosphorus is a planet if one assumes, with the Fregean, that "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" have different senses that might have determined distinct referents. On this assumption, "Hesperus is a planet" and "Phosphorus is a planet" may be only contingently equivalent. This kind of example, which is a problem for the Russellian, but not necessarily for the defender of simple truth-conditional content, points to an oversimplification in Neale's characterization of the "descending order of fineness of grain" of the different notions of content (most fine-grained, Fregean thoughts, next Russellian propositions, most coarse-grained, informational contents). It is true that Fregean thoughts are more fine-grained than Russellian propositions in the sense that different Fregean thoughts may correspond to the same Russellian proposition, and it is also true that distinct Russellian propositions may have the same truth conditions. But these correspondences are not transitive. Different Fregean propositions that correspond to the same Russellian proposition may in some cases have different truth conditions. A problem (such as is posed by the Hesperus-Phosphorus example) for the Russellian is not necessarily a problem for the defender of purely truth-conditional content. Whether one believes such names have senses or not, it seems intuitively natural to say that the person who believes Hesperus is a planet, while disbelieving that Phosphorus is a planet, is a person who recognizes the possibility that the thing he refers to as "Phosphorus" (or at least the thing presented to him in one of the ways -the "Phosphorus" way- that Venus is actually presented) is a different thing from the thing he calls "Hesperus". I think one can say the same kind of thing about the informational difference between water attitudes and H 2 0 attitudes, and between Pierre's
+
different beliefs. Pineda objects to my strategy (spelled out in other places) for responding to these examples, which he regards as unacceptably metalinguistic. I agree that the relevant beliefs of Pierre, of the Babylonian who denies that Hesperus is Phosphorus, and of the chemical innocent who is ignorant of the composition of water are beliefs about urban aesthetics, astronomy and chemistry, respectively, and not about language, and I don't think the response to the counterexamples that I am defending needs to deny this. But this is a large issue for another occasion.
