January 19th Philo Cafe Topic ( 7:30 pm, Democracy Center, Cambridge MA)

 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 Intentionality: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/

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/