Tim Crane

The Nonconceptual Content of Experience

1 Concepts and perceptual experience To what extent do our beliefs about the world affect what we see? Our beliefs certainly affect where we choose to look, but do they affect what we see when we look there? Some have claimed that people with very different beliefs literally see the world differently. Thus Thomas Kuhn: ‘what a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual–conceptual experience has taught him to see’ (Kuhn 1970, p. 113). This view – call it ‘Perceptual Relativism’ – entails that a scientist and a child may look at a cathode ray tube and, in a sense, the first will see it while the second won’t. The claim is not, of course, that the child’s experience is ‘empty’; but that, unlike the scientist, it does not see the tube as a cathode ray tube. One way of supporting this claim is to say that one cannot see something as an F unless one has the concept F. Since the child plainly lacks the concept of a cathode ray tube, it cannot see it as a cathode ray tube. Although Perceptual Relativism is hard to believe, this supporting suggestion is not so implausible. After all, when we see (and more generally, perceive) the world, the world is presented to us in a particular way; so how can we see it as being that way unless we have some idea or conception of the way it is presented? We need not be committed to a representative theory of perception to think that perceptions in some sense represent the world. We can express this by saying that perceptions have content. Now it is a commonplace that the contents of beliefs and the other propositional attitudes involve concepts. The belief that this thing is a cathode ray tube involves, in some sense, the concept cathode ray tube. So the line of thought behind Perceptual Relativism may be expressed thus: seeing an F as an F is a state with content. So the content of this perception must involve the concept F – for if it did not, why should we say that the experience represents the F in question as an F? Thus Christopher Peacocke:

Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental

‘It is of the very nature of consciousness to be intentional’ said Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘and a consciousness that ceases to be a consciousness of something would ipso facto cease to exist.’ Sartre here endorses the central doctrine of Husserls phenomenology, itself inspired by a famous idea of Brentanos: that intentionality, the minds ‘direction upon its objects’, is what is distinctive of mental phenomena. Brentanos originality does not lie in pointing out the existence of intentionality, or in inventing the terminology, which derives from scholastic discussions of concepts or intentiones . Rather, his originality consists in his claim that the concept of intentionality marks out the subject matter of psychology: the mental. His view was that intentionality ‘is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon manifests anything like it.’ This is Brentanos thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental.

The Significance of Emergence

I argue that the metaphysics of the traditional doctrine of emergence is the same as that of non-reductive physicalism; but the doctrines differ in their explanatory ambitions. I am now (2006) not so sure that this is the right way to think about the difference between emergentism and non-reductive physicalism, and I hope to give a better account in some forthcoming work.Article; written in 1997

The Mental States of Persons and their Brains

Cognitive neuroscientists frequently talk about the brain representing the world. Some philosophers claim that this is a confusion. This paper argues that there is no confusion, and outlines one thing that ‘the brain represents the world’ might mean, using the notion of a model derived from the philosophy of science. This description is then extended to make apply to propositional attitude attributions. A number of problems about propositional attitude attributions can be solved or dissolved by treating propositional attitudes as models. 1. Does the Brain Think? Consider a picture of a domino with an arrangement of apparently concave and convex circles. The same picture rotated through 180 degrees makes the concavity and the convexity appear reversed. Why does this happen? Why does the very same picture, the same arrangement of pixels or ink on a page, appear so different when turned upside down? Chris Frith gives the following answer in Making Up The Mind: The light of the sun comes from above... this means that concave objects will be dark at the top and light at the bottom, while convex objects will be light at the top and dark at the bottom. Our brain has a simple rule built into its wiring. It uses this rule to decide whether an object is concave or convex. Frith claims that the brain has a rule built into it and uses this rule to makes decisions about how things seem. Taken literally, saying that the brain ‘uses’ a rule, as opposed to merely behaving in a rule-governed or law-like way, implies that the brain somehow represents the content of the rule. And saying that the brain makes decisions implies that the brain is something like a thinker; in short, the brain thinks. 1 Chris Frith,MakingUp theMind (Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell 2007), 128. 253 doi:10.1017/S1358246115000053 ©The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2015 Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 76 2015 For those like Frith, the idea that the brain represents the world (or ‘thinks’), should be accepted as part of the orthodox ideology of cognitive science or cognitive neuroscience. Others say that the question is totally confused. For them, this kind of talk embodies amistake; or even worse, a fallacy (and not all mistakes are fallacies).M.K. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker have argued that it is an instance of what they call the ‘mereological fallacy’: the ‘mistake of ascribing to the constituent parts of an animal attributes that logically apply only to the whole animal’. In this they take themselves to be following Wittgenstein, who famously said that ‘only of a human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensation; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’. A brain doesn’t resemble a living human being; it doesn’t even resemble something that resembles a living human being. A chimpanzee at least resembles something that has thoughts; the brain does not even resemble a chimpanzee. Bennett and Hacker think it’s not empirically or straightforwardly false that the brain represents the world. Rather, it is a conceptual truth ‘that perception, thoughts and feelings are attributes of human beings, not of their parts – in particular not of their brains’. So it is a fallacy to say something which is incompatible with this conceptual truth. But the supposed fallacy cannot derive from any conceptual principle that you cannot, in general, attribute things to the parts of a system that you would also attribute to the whole. There are many cases where you can do this (e.g. weight, colour etc.) which of course Bennett and Hacker will not deny. So if there is a fallacy here, it must be to do with the use of the terms ‘thought’ or ‘sensation’ or ‘consciousness’ or ‘thinking’ or ‘deciding’: mental terms in general. It is true that the paradigm applications of the concepts of thought, decision, sensation and so on are to organisms: things like human beings and those animals which it makes sense to describe as conscious or thinking. But often we extend the use of words creatively beyond their paradigm applications, to illuminate or illustrate some significant feature of the thing described. Stephen Mulhall makes this point in a recent discussion of the concept of a picture. 2 See M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003). 3 Ibid., 72. 4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §281. 5 M.K. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 3.

Dualism, monism, physicalism

Dualism can be contrasted with monism, and also with physicalism. It is argued here that what is essential to physicalism is not just its denial of dualism, but the epistemological and ontological authority it gives to physical science. A physicalist view of the mind must be reductive in one or both of the following senses: it must identify mental phenomena with physical phenomena (ontological reduction) or it must give, an explanation of mental phenomena in physical terms (explanatory or conceptual reduction). There is little reason to call a view which is not reductive in either of these senses “physicalism”. If reduction is rejected, then a non-physicalist form of monism is still available, which may be called “emergentism”.

The Efficacy of Content: A Functionalist Theory

Not all of the problems of mental causation are problems about the mind. Recent work on mental causation has been pre-occupied with a problem which arises if we accept that the physical world is causally closed or ‘complete’ — i.e. that every physical effect is completely fixed by its physical causes alone — and that there are mental causes of physical effects too. How can mental causes have physical effects if those effects are not overdetermined by their acknowledged physical causes, which most parties agree they are generally not? This problem is acute in contemporary theories of mind because they typically deny most versions of a thesis that would solve the problem: an identity theory of mental and physical causes.1 If mental causes are not identical to physical causes, and there is no massive overdetermination, then it seems we must reject either the causal closure of the physical world or the existence of mental causation.