Fred Dretske

Laws of Nature

It is a traditional empiricist doctrine that natural laws are universal truths. In order to overcome the obvious difficulties with this equation most empiricists qualify it by proposing to equate laws with universal truths that play a certain role, or have a certain function, within the larger scientific enterprise. This view is examined in detail and rejected; it fails to account for a variety of features that laws are acknowledged to have. An alternative view is advanced in which laws are expressed by singular statements of fact describing the relationship between universal properties and magnitudes.

Précis of Knowledge and the Flow of Information

A theory of information is developed in which the informational content of a signal (structure, event) can be specified. This content is expressed by a sentence describing the condition at a source on which the properties of a signal depend in some lawful way. Information, as so defined, though perfectly objective, has the kind of semantic property (intentionality) that seems to be needed for an analysis of cognition. Perceptual knowledge is an information-dependent internal state with a content corresponding to the information producing it. This picture of knowledge captures most of what makes knowledge an important cpistcmological notion. It also avoids many of the problems infecting traditional justificational accounts of knowledge (knowledge as [justified, true belief’). Our information pickup systems are characterized in terms of the way they encode incoming information (perception) for further cognitive processing. Our perceptual experience is distinguished from our perceptual beliefs by the different way sensory information is encoded in these internal structures. Our ropositional attitudes – those (unlike knowledge) having a content that can be either true or false (e.g., belief) – are described in terms of the way internal (presumably neural) structures acquire during learning a certain information-carrying role. The content of these structures (whether true or false) is identified with the kind of information they were developed to carry

The Explanatory Role of Information [and Discussion]

The mind can be viewed as an information-driven control system. To make this work, the idea of information must be operationalized in such a way as to give semantic properties (meaning, content) a role in the explanation of system behaviour. This can be achieved by exploiting a statistical concept - mutual information - from communication theory. On this interpretation, some of the behaviour of information-driven control systems is causally explained by the statistical correlations that exist between internal states and the external conditions about which they carry information.

The epistemology of belief

By examining the general conditions in which a structure could come to represent another state of affairs, it is argued that beliefs, a special class of representations, have their contents limited by the sort of information the system in which they occur can pick up and process. If a system—measuring instrument, animal or human being—cannot process information to the effect that something is Q, it cannot represent something as Q. From this it follows (for simple, ostensively acquired concepts at least) that if an organism that has the information-processing capabilities for knowing that something is Q.

Perception and Other Minds

Assuming for the moment that I know it, how do I know that there are any other people in the world besides myself, conscious human beings who think and feel in ways similar to the way I think and feel? One of the answers that I can think to give to this question-an answer that strikes me as both true and appropriately responsive-is that I can see that there are other people, a great many of them. If asked how I know that there are any other Volkswagens in the world (besides my own) I would reply, similarly, that I see them wherever I go. Volkswagens, after all, are easy to spot. But so are people. We may someday have a more difficult time (Is this a person or a cleverly contrived robot? Is this a person or a highly evolved orangoutang ?), but as things now stand a person is, in normal circumstances, quite an easy thing to pick out-easier, certainly, than apple pie. This being so, what or where is the problem of other minds ? Being minded is, I take it, part of what we mean to attribute to something when we speak of it as a person. If there is no problem about identifying people, there should be no special problem about deciding whether there are other minds or how we come to know this. We routinely speak about seeing that there are some people in the waiting room, passengers on the bus, students in the office, and a crowd of people listening to the speaker. If what we routinely say is true, if we do see this sort of thing, then this is how we know (or, at least, one of the ways we know) that there are other minds. Furthermore, there are a great many other things of a more specific nature that we commonly say we see that imply that we know that there are other conscious beings in the world besides ourselves. I do not always know when my wife is angry, and some of the times that I do know this it is not because I can see that she is; but there are occasions, or so I believe, when I can see that she is angry. Knowing her as I do I can also see when she is tired, bored, irritated, uncomfortable, frustrated, and interested. Since

Externalism and Modest Contextualism

Externalism about knowledge commits one to a modest form of contextualism: whether one knows depends (or may depend) on circumstances (context) of which one has no knowledge. Such modest contextualism requires the rejection of the KK Principle (If S knows that P, then S knows that S knows that P) - something most people would want to reject anyway - but it does not require (though it is compatible with) a rejection of closure. Radical contextualism, on the other hand, goes a step farther and relativizes knowledge not just to the circumstances of the knower, but to the circumstances of the person attributing knowledge. I reject this more radical form of contextualism and suggest that it confuses (or that it can, at least, be avoided by carefully distinguishing) the relativity in what S is said to know from the relativity in whether S knows what S is said to know.

Precis of "Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes"

Why do human beings move? In this lucid portrayal of human behavior, Fred Dretske provides an original account of the way reasons function in the causal explanation of behavior. Biological science investigates what makes our bodies move in the way they do. Psychology is interested in why persons -- agents with reasons -- move in the way they do. Dretske attempts to reconcile these different points of view by showing how reasons operate in a world of causes. He reveals in detail how the character of our inner states -- what we believe, desire, and intend -- determines what we do.

Minds, Machines, and Money: What Really Explains Behavior

According to a certain philosophical picture of the way mind and body are related, the mind is to intentional action what money is to the behavior of a vending machine. Just as coins are in (or get deposited in) vending machines, beliefs, desires, and intentions are in us. Just as the right coins deposited in the machine cause the machine to behave in a certain way — to yield its contents: cokes, cigarettes, or candy, as the case may be — so the right mental entities occurring in us cause us to perform various actions. Furthermore, just as what makes money money is not its intrinsic character — shape, size and density of the coins, for example — but certain extrinsic or relational facts about these coins (the fact that they possess monetary value) so too what makes a belief a belief is not its intrinsic neurobiological character, but, rather, certain extrinsic facts about it — the fact that it has a certain meaning or content, the fact that it has certain intentional properties.

Reply to Commentators: [Horwich, Biro, Kim, Lara]

As they will doubtless notice, this is not so much a reply to my four commentators as it is a way of acknowledging their criticisms and indicating the general direction I would take if someone made me compose a more responsible answer. In these remarks I do little more than clarify my view -say where I stand, the position I would argue for, if I had more time. I thank each of my commentators for their perceptive and helpful remarks.

The Fragility of Reason

Steven Stichs The Fragmentation of Reason will get the adrenalin pumping. At least it will for-reactionaries (like me) who cling to truth, reason and knowledge as cognitive values. Steve Stich sets himself to undermine the entire analytic tradition in epistemology. His book is infused with the spirit of the “radical epistemic reformer.” I do not think he succeeds. Reformations are hard to launch in philosophy. Nonetheless, he raises some deep and troubling issues.