Much Ado About "Aboutness":
How can Words, Concepts or Ideas be “About” Things in the World?
The capacity to have or make beliefs,
disagreements, statements, arguments etc. about specific things in the world
seems an important part of our humanity (whatever the extent that other animals
share that capacity.) Our explanations of human behavior routinely assume
the capacity to think or speak about things and events in the world; the
PhiloCafe could not function without it! Is there anything mysterious
about “Aboutness” or can we easily explain it?
Let us take a belief
involving “aboutness”: I believe that my cat is male. On the face of it,
this is some kind of relationship between me and my cat: the ascription of
maleness to my cat. This relationship seems to be conceptual not physical
in nature, even though this relationship can have material consequences for my
cat's future (I might get it spayed.) So, on the face of it, an
immaterial entity (my belief about my cat's sex) can physically impact a
material object. But according to the dominant Naturalist and scientific
understandings of the world only physical forces and entities can impact other
physical forces and entities. So it should be impossible for an
immaterial, non-physical, entity such as a belief of mine to have such an
intimately physical impact on my poor cat. Explanations of human behavior
invoking the capacity for “aboutness”, it has been argued, seem to contradict
our basic naturalistic understanding of the world; they seem to assume a
dualism of causal effects, if not one of mind and body.
Another way of
highlighting the problem is made by British philosopher, Michael Luntley. According to Luntley, “aboutness” (he talks
about intentionality and meaning) is a normative concept that determine rules
on how we refer to things rather than the objective physical causes and effects
that affect (or are affected by) those things . Materialist and natural
scientific discourse deal with objective physical causes and effects, not
norms.
Materialists will not
take this lying down. One line of response, the eliminativist one,
resolves this dilemma by denying that “aboutness” actually involves a
non-material connection between our concepts and things in the world..
Another line of riposte is to claim that underlying the apparently
immaterial phenomenon of aboutness are all-too material processes, involving
our sense-receptors, our brains, and physical objects in the world. The
former line is taken by eliminativists. The latter by Jeremy Fodor.
The presenter of
January's topic will argue, shamelessly plagiarizing from the thought of Hilary Putnam,that both lines of materialist argument fail. With
respect to the eliminativist line of argument, if one assumes that what we
mistakenly thought of as the relationship of aboutness is really an
organization of neurons in the brain, one has to still explain how an
organization of neurons can provide an account of things in the world.
The only possible response, it seems to me, is to say that the
organization of neurons constitutes a particular representation. But to
ascribe the power of representation to a set of neurons is to ascribe them a
capacity for aboutness. Aboutness forces itself back in, without being
clarified in any way! Fodor would argue that there is a physical
explanation of why a particular representation has a particular meaning: the
meaning of a particular representation is the entity that routinely causes its
invocation (I call cats "cats" because growing up the word
"cat" was routinely associated with the presence of a cat, or
cat-like object (such as a drawing.) Putnam argued that there is no
evidence for this and that it doesn't make sense. We learn the meaning of
terms describing things that we may not be able to identify and were never
consciously exposed to (Putnam's example is an elm tree. Many people who
could not identify an elm tree, and were never shown what it looks like can
nevertheless make meaningful statements about elm trees. Sometimes the
absence of something (food or drink) can generate representations of it (people
asking for respite from hunger or thirst.) as much as the presence.
Besides, without a pre-given intentional sense, how does one learn what
aspects of a "cat experience" for example to identify as defining of
"cat-ness."?
Questions to Consider:
1) Is some notion
of “aboutness” really indispensable as claimed above? Might the sciences
not find an alternative set of concepts for explaining human behavior?
2) Can Fodor's
model withstand the criticisms lobbed against it?
3) Assuming that
no materialist account of aboutness is possible, Putnam argues that the concept
of mental representations plays no useful philosophical or psychological role.
Is he right?
4) How do we
understand the “aboutness” in fictional discourse?
5) Is it possible that since all thought
presupposes aboutness, thought is inherently incapable of critically
understanding it? (An analogy could be made to the impossibility of
seeing your own eyeballs. You can only see reflections etc. of them!)
Readings:
Stanford Encyclopedia on
Eliminative Materialism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/
Stanford Encyclopedia on
Causal Theories of Meaning: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-causal/
Stanford Encyclopedia on
Semantic Externalism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-externalism/
