School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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    World in mind : a commonsense externalist functionalism for cognitive science
    Beattie, James Phillip Winspear ( 1996)
    Functionalism has established itself as the dominant philosophical theory of the mind over the past thirty-five years. But it is not without its critics. Among the most persistent have been those who claim that the mind is essentially world-involving in such a way that functionally identical individuals can lead different mental lives because of differences in their physical, social and metaphysical contexts. Hilary Putnam's seminal (1975) argument turns on the claim that the meanings of certain of our terms, in particular natural kind terms, are tied to the hidden structure shared by instances of those kinds, even if this structure has no impact on our cognitive competence. This has been taken by many to mean that the mental states of functionally identical individuals can have different contents. Tyler Burge (1979) extends this line of argument by alleging that socially shared concepts play an essential role in specifying the content of our thoughts. And Stephen Stich (1978a) argues that our everyday belief-ascribing practices are ill-fitted to play a role in cognitive science because, according to those practices, physically identical individuals (Doppelgangers) can have different thoughts in spite of being contextually related to qualitatively indistinguishable objects. In this thesis I argue that Putnam, Burge and Stich fall to make a successful case against an externalist, functionalist interpretation of our commonsense belief-ascribing practices. I argue, instead, that these practices are strongly grounded in an attempt to characterise a person's functional-role profile in terms of contextual features that actually have some bearing on the nature of that profile. In ascribing mental states for the purpose of explaining and predicting behaviour, it is therefore not our aim to incorporate the public meanings of a person's words (Burge), the "real essence" of the things her thoughts are about (Putnam), or the "metaphysical thisness" of some object of thought (Stich) into the content of her thoughts, at the expense of an accurate functional characterisation. If such elements feature in our ascriptions, it is because we have priorities other than behavioural explanation, or because we lack relevant information. I therefore endorse what I call the Doppelganger Principle-the principle that individuals identical in every intrinsic physical respect belong to the same categories for purposes of psychological explanation. My position is nevertheless externalist, in that it is not merely in virtue of their identical physical natures that Doppelgangers belong to the same psychological categories. It is also because they are similarly related to those external factors that shape their functional-role profiles-in particular, certain properties of worldly objects, and certain concepts (which I call proto-concepts) that they share. This means that our common sense concept of mental states is suitable for many of cognitive science's explanatory purposes, subject to the sort of regimentation appropriate to all scientific contexts. As a consequence, I argue that there are two reasons for rejecting Jerry Fodor's (1987) notion of narrow content: first, because it fails to do justice to the world-involving nature of mental states; and second, because it fails to endorse our commonness goal of tracking a person's functional-role profile when we seek to explain her behaviour.