what do you understand by “philosophy of mind” and how is it related to psychology?
Philosophy of mind is the study of the mind, the part of us that thinks and feels, perceives and desires, imagines and dreams. It asks what the mind is, how it works, what its powers are, and how it relates to the body and the rest of the world. all this is related to psychology because there is a continuity in the subject. philosophers of mind think about the same things that psychologists think: the nature of thought, perception, emotion, will, consciousness, etc. in the past, if you look at david hume or thomas reid in the 18th century, for example, there was no distinction between philosophy and psychology. Psychology split from philosophy in the 19th century, when people began to develop experimental ways of studying the mind, much like techniques used in other areas of science. therefore, detailed experimental investigation of the mind is now the province of psychology and the neurosciences. but, despite this, there is still much work to be done for philosophers of mind.
You are reading: Books on philosophy of mind
The special thing about the questions philosophers of mind ask is that they are more fundamental and more general than those asked by psychologists. there are different aspects to this. on the one hand, philosophers think about the metaphysics of the mind. what kind of things are minds and mental states? Are they physical things that can be explained in standard scientific ways? (The view that they are is known as physicalism or materialism.) Or are minds totally or partially non-physical? these are questions about the boundaries of psychology rather than questions within psychology.
Philosophers of mind also think about conceptual issues. Let’s take the question of whether we have free will. we might be able to do some relevant science experiments. but to answer the question we also need to understand what we mean by ‘free will’. what exactly are we affirming when we say that we do or do not have free will? what kind of experiments would settle the matter? Do we have a consistent concept of free will, or does our daily conversation about it conflate different things? we can ask similar questions about other mental concepts, such as those of perception, belief, or emotion. many philosophers see this kind of work as the articulation of an everyday theory of mind, “folk psychology”, and go on to ask how this everyday theory relates to scientific psychology. Are the two approaches in conflict or are they compatible? In part, this is a contrast between the first-person view we have as possessors of minds (the inside view, so to speak) and the third-person view of scientists who study other people’s minds. Are the two views compatible? could science correct our first person image of our own minds?
That’s not all. many contemporary philosophers do work that is continuous with scientific psychology. they seldom do experimental work themselves, but do read widely and contribute to psychological theory. One way to do this is to think about the concepts used in scientific psychology—concepts like mental representation, information, and consciousness—and help clarify and refine them. its goal is not just to analyze the concepts we already have, but to think about what concepts we need for scientific purposes. (I like to think of this activity as conceptual engineering, as opposed to traditional conceptual analysis). philosophers of mind are also increasingly engaging in substantive psychological theories, trying to synthesize experimental results and paint a broad theoretical picture, for example of nature. of conscious thought, the architecture of the mind or the role of bodily processes in cognition. Broad theoretical speculation like this is something experimental psychologists are often wary of doing, but it is an important activity, and philosophers are licensed to speculate.
It strikes me that the best philosophy of mind has rejoined psychology and particularly neuroscience. We are much closer to the kind of interdisciplinary study that was going on in the eighteenth century, in a way, compared to what was going on in 1950s oxford philosophy, which is easily caricatured as a bunch of professors sitting splitting their hair in the comfort of their ivory-towered chairs, not using examples informed by the latest science, or seeing any lack in their ignorance of contemporary psychology. whereas now you couldn’t really be a serious philosopher of mind without immersing yourself in neuroscience and the best contemporary psychology.
yes. the modern study of the mind, cognitive science, is interdisciplinary, and many philosophers contribute to it without much concern as to whether they are doing philosophy or science. they just bring the tools they have to this joint venture. that is not to dismiss old-fashioned conceptual analysis. it is interesting to reflect on how we intuitively conceptualize the mind and how our mind appears to us from the inside, but in the end these are just psychological facts about us. we should not assume that our intuitive picture of the mind is correct. if we want to understand the mind as it really is, then we must go beyond armchair musing and engage in the science of mind and brain.
this idea actually leads to his first choice of book, because one of the dominant ways of thinking about the mind, within neuroscience and philosophy, is as a material thing, in the sense that it is intimately connected with the brain. His first book is A Materialist Theory of Mind by David Armstrong. tell us a bit why you chose this.
is a classic work that helped lay the groundwork for contemporary philosophy of mind. it’s kind of a bridge between the armchair philosophy of mind you mentioned (armstrong studied at oxford in the early 1950s) and the later more scientifically oriented approach he was talking about, and sets the stage for a lot that would follow throughout the next quarter century. (In the 1993 reprint, Armstrong added a preface discussing what he thought was missing in the original; not a great deal.) The book also works as a good introduction for anyone new to the philosophy of mind because Armstrong begins with a review of different views of the metaphysics of mind, including Cartesian dualism (the idea that we have an immaterial soul). which is completely distinct from the body) and other important theories, such as behaviorism, the viewpoint associated with Gilbert Ryle.
armstrong clearly rejects what ryle calls “the ghost in the machine myth”: the cartesian dualistic theory that there are two kinds of things, one material and one immaterial, and that the mind is an immaterial soul that interacts with the material body. Armstrong’s rejection is obviously implied in the title of his book. armstrong is presenting a materialist theory, so he clearly opposes cartesianism. but where does it stand in terms of behaviorism?
Behaviorism is itself a materialist view, since it denies that minds are immaterial things. indeed, behaviorists deny that minds are things at all. They argue that when we talk about a person’s mind or state of mind we are not talking about a thing inside the person, but about how the person is willing to behave. thus, for example, to have a sudden pain in the knee is to be ready to flinch, scream, rub the knee, complain, etc. or (to take an example that ryle himself uses) believing that the ice on a pond is thin is out to warn people about the ice, be careful when ice skating, etc. – the nature of the actions depends on the circumstances.
armstrong is quite sympathetic to behaviorism and explains its advantages over cartesian dualism and other views. he sees his own view of it as a natural step out of behaviorism. He agrees with Ryle that there is a very close connection between being in a certain state of mind and being disposed to behave in a certain way, but instead of saying that state of mind is the disposition to display a certain pattern of behavior, he says that it is the state of the brain that makes us show that pattern of behavior. A pain in the knee is the state of the brain that tends to cause wincing, screaming, chafing of the knees, etc. the belief that the ice is thin is the brain state that tends to cause giving warnings, skating carefully, etc. the idea is that there is some specific brain state (the activation of a certain group of nerve fibers) that tends to produce the relevant set of actions, and that this brain state is the mental state: the pain or the belief, or whatever. Armstrong’s motto is that mental states are “states of the person that are apt to elicit behavior of a certain kind.” then the mind turns out to be the same as the brain or the central nervous system. Armstrong calls this view central state theory. also known as mind-brain identity theory or core state materialism.
armstrong was an australian, and it is remarkable to me that, for a country with a relatively modest population, australia has produced some of the most prominent philosophers of mind in the recent history of the subject.
yes, australian philosophers played a central role in the development of mind-brain identity theory, not only armstrong, but also jj c smart and u t place (smart and place were british, but smart moved to australia and place lectured there for a few years). indeed, identity theory was sometimes referred to as Australian materialism, sometimes with the (unwarranted) implication that it was an unsophisticated view. Australia has continued to produce important philosophers of mind, for example Frank Jackson and David Chalmers, although both of these have been critical of materialism.
To be clear, Armstrong presents a theory that the mind is the brain explained in terms of its causal powers. how do you present that argument?
is in three parts. In the first part of the book, Armstrong makes a general case for the view that mental states are brain states (the central state theory). he establishes the advantages of sight, for example, by explaining what distinguishes one mind from another, how minds interact with bodies, and how minds arise. then in the second part, which takes up most of the book, he shows how this view could be true, how mental states could be nothing more than brain states. he examines a wide range of different mental states and processes and argues that they can all be analyzed in causal terms, in terms of the behavior they tend to cause and also, in some cases, the things that cause them. so when we talk about someone willing, believing, or perceiving, or whatever, we can translate it into talking about causal processes, that there is an internal state that was caused in a certain way and tends to have certain effects. these analyzes are very detailed and often illuminating, and go a long way toward demystifying the mind. armstrong shows how mental phenomena that may initially seem mysterious and inexplicable can naturally be understood as complex but not mysterious causal processes.
What then makes that explanation in terms of cause and effect a materialistic theory?
well, causal analysis shows that mental states are just states that have certain causes and effects, that play a certain causal role. that does not establish that they are brain states. they could be states of an immaterial soul. but it shows that they could be brain states. and putting that together with the general case for mind-brain identity presented in the first part of the book, it is reasonable to conclude that they are actually brain states. There is a brief third part of the book in which Armstrong argues that there is no reason to think that brain states cannot play the correct causal roles, and therefore concludes that the central state theory is true.
your first book was published in 1968 and obviously there has been a lot of thought about the nature of the mind since then. The second book he has chosen, Daniel Dennett’s confidently titled Consciousness Explained, published in 1991, is another classic. but dennett is not really happy with the type of account that armstrong offers, would it be fair to say?
well, dennett is more cautious about identifying mental states with brain states. not that he thinks there is anything non-physical about the mind, far from it, he is a committed physicalist. but he doubts that our everyday talk about mental states corresponds neatly to the scientific talk about brain states: that for every mental state a person has, there will be a distinct brain state that will cause all the associated behavior. he sees folk psychology as selecting for patterns in people’s behavior, rather than internal states. (So his point of view is closer to that of Ryle, with whom he studied in the early 1960s). that is an important theme in his work. but in this book he is addressing a different subject. In the years following Armstrong’s writing, the idea that mental states are brain states became widely accepted, although it was modified in various ways. but some people argued that sight could not explain all the features of mental states, in particular, consciousness. These people agreed with Armstrong that the mind is a physical thing, but argued that it is a physical thing with some non-physical properties, properties that cannot be explained in physical terms. this view is known as property dualism (as opposed to Cartesian or substance dualism, which holds that the mind is a non-physical thing).
In simple terms, what is the phenomenon that needs explanation that you have labeled “consciousness”?
There is a standard story about what consciousness is. when you’re having an experience, say, seeing a blue sky, there’s brain activity going on. nerve impulses from your retinas travel to your brain and produce a certain brain state, which in turn produces certain effects (produces the belief that the sky is blue, predisposes you to say the sky is blue, etc.). this is the armstrong family story. and in principle a neuroscientist could identify that brain state and tell you everything. but, as the story goes, something else is also happening. For you it is like something to see the blue sky: the experience has a subjective quality, a phenomenal sensation, a quale (from the Latin word ‘qualis’, which means of what kind; the plural is ‘qualia’). and this subjective quality is something that neuroscientists could not detect. only you know how it is for you to see blue (maybe blue things look different to other people). so it is with all other sensory experiences. there is an inner world of qualia – of colors and smells and tastes, pains and pleasures and tickles – that we experience like a show in a private indoor theater. now if you think of consciousness in this way, then it seems incredibly mysterious. how could the brain, a spongy pinkish-gray mass of nerve cells, create this internal spectacle of qualia that is undetectable by scientific methods? this is what david chalmers has called the hard problem of consciousness.
Dennett’s title explanation of consciousness suggests that he believes he has an answer to that problem…
Not exactly an answer to the hard problem. it’s more that he thinks it’s a pseudo-problem. he thinks the whole picture of consciousness is wrong: there is no internal theater and no qualia to show there. Dennett thinks that image is a relic of Cartesian dualism, and he calls the supposed interior theater Cartesian theatre. we used to think that there really was an internal observer: the immaterial soul. Descartes thought that signals from the sense organs were channeled to the pineal gland in the center of the brain, from where they were somehow transmitted to the soul. Few philosophers today believe in the soul, but Dennett thinks they still cling to the idea that there is a kind of arena in the brain where sensory information is assembled and presented to consciousness. he calls this view Cartesian materialism, and thinks it is deeply misconceived. once we abandon Cartesian dualism and accept that mental processes are simply enormously complex patterns of neural activity, we must abandon the image of consciousness that went with it. you have to break this idea of the inner spectacle that stands between us and the world. there is no need for the brain to recreate an image of the external world for the benefit of some internal observer. it’s kind of an illusion.
How then does dennett explain consciousness? because that sounds like a machine.
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i think dennett would say that’s exactly what it should sound like: after all, if materialism is true, then we are machines, biological machines, made of physical materials. if you’re going to explain consciousness, then you need to show how it’s made up of things that aren’t conscious. The 17th-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz said that if you could explode your brain to the size of a building and walk around it, you would see nothing there that corresponded to thought and experience. that can be seen as a problem for materialism, but in fact it is just what materialism claims. the materialist says that consciousness is not something extra, above the various brain systems; it’s just the cumulative effect of those systems working the way they do. and dennett thinks that one of the effects of those brain systems is to create in us the sense that we have this inner world. when we reflect on our experiences it seems to us that there is an inner spectacle, but that is an illusion. Dennett’s goal in the book is to break that illusion, and he uses a variety of thought experiments to do so.
By thought experiment, do you mean an imaginary situation used to clarify our thinking?
yes, that’s right, although dennett’s thought experiments are often based on scientific findings. here’s one he uses in the book. You see a woman running past. she doesn’t wear glasses, but she reminds you of someone who wears them, and that memory immediately contaminates your memory of the woman running, so you’re convinced that she was wearing glasses. Dennett now asks how this memory contamination affected his conscious experience. Did the contamination occur after consciousness, so that you had a conscious experience of the woman without glasses, and then the memory of this experience was erased and replaced by a false memory of her with glasses? Or did it happen preconsciously, so that her brain constructed a false conscious experience of her as having glasses? if there was a Cartesian theater, then there should be a fact: what scene was shown in the theater, with or without glasses? But Dennett argues that given the short period of time in which this all happened, there won’t be a fact of the matter. neuroscience couldn’t tell us.
“some critics say dennett should have called his book ‘consciousness explained'”
Suppose we were monitoring his brain as the women passed by and discovered that his brain detected the presence of one woman without glasses before activating the memory of the other woman with glasses. that still wouldn’t prove you had a conscious experience of a woman without glasses, since the detection could have been done non-consciously. Not even asking you would have solved it. Suppose that as we women passed by we had asked her if she was wearing glasses. if we had asked the question one moment you could have said no, but if we had asked the question a fraction of a second later you could have said yes. what report would have captured the content of your consciousness? We can’t tell, and neither can you. all we, or you, can be really sure of is what you sincerely believe you saw, and that depends on the precise moment of the question. the book is full of thought experiments like this, all designed to undermine the intuitive but misleading image of the Cartesian theatre.
if you were to characterize dennett’s position, and some people find it quite difficult to pin down what his actual position is, what is it? It would be very helpful to know what you think Dennett believes about the nature of the mind.
The first thing to stress is that he is not trying to provide a theory of consciousness in the qualia-show sense, since he thinks that consciousness in that sense is an illusion. Some critics say Dennett should have called his book “Consciousness Explained,” and to some extent they are right. he is trying to explain consciousness in that sense. he thinks that conception of consciousness is confused and useless, and his goal is to persuade us to adopt a different one. In this respect, Dennett’s book is a kind of philosophical therapy. he is trying to help us abandon a bad way of thinking, which we easily fall into.
As for what we put in place of the Cartesian theatre, there are two main parts to Dennett’s story. the first is what he calls the “multiple drafts” model of consciousness. this is the idea that there is no canonical version of the experience. the brain continually constructs multiple interpretations of sensory stimuli (woman without glasses, woman with glasses), such as multiple drafts of an essay, circulating and competing for control of speech and other behaviors. which version we report will depend on exactly when we are asked, which version has more influence at that time. In a later book, Dennett speaks of consciousness as fame in the brain. the idea is that those interpretations that are conscious are the ones that have a lot of influence on other brain processes, which become neurally famous. This may sound like a pretty vague account, but again I think Dennett would say that this is how it should sound, since consciousness itself is vague. It’s not about an interior light turning on or off, or a show playing or not.
The second part of Dennett’s story is his account of conscious thought: the stream of consciousness that James Joyce described in his novel Ulysses. Dennett argues that this isn’t really a brain system at all; it is a product of a certain activity in which we humans engage. we actively stimulate our own cognitive systems, primarily by talking to ourselves in inner speech. this creates what dennett calls the joycean machine, a kind of program that runs in the biological brain and has all sorts of useful effects.
but is there any way to empirically or conceptually decide between the cartesian theater view and dennett’s view? Is it simply what gives the best explanation?
dennett thinks there are both conceptual and empirical reasons for preferring the multiple draft view. he thinks that the idea of a qualia show contains all kinds of confusions and inconsistencies; that is what thought experiments are designed to discover. but he also cites a lot of scientific evidence in support of the multi-draft view, for example, about how the brain represents time. and he certainly thinks his offers a better explanation of our behavior, including our insights about consciousness. postulating a private show of undetectable qualia explains nothing. Of course, Dennett’s views are controversial, and there are many leading philosophers who take a very different view, most notably David Chalmers in his 1996 The Conscious Mind. but for my money, dennett’s line on this is correct, and i think time will tell.
What about your third book, Ruth Millikan’s Varieties of Meaning? I’m not familiar with this book.
I chose it to represent another important line of contemporary philosophy of mind, and that is the work on mental representation. mental states (thoughts, perceptions, etc.) refer to things in the world and can be true or false, precise or inaccurate. for example, I was thinking about my car, thinking that it is parked outside. philosophers call this property of intentionality, and say that what a mental state is about is its intentional content. Like consciousness, intentionality poses a problem for materialist theories. if mental states are brain states, how do they come to have intentional content? how can a brain state be about something and how can it be true or false? many materialists think that the answer involves postulating mental representations. we are familiar with physical things that are representations of other things, for example, words and images. and the idea is that some brain states are representations, perhaps as sentences in a brain language (“mentalese”). so the next question is how brain states can be representations. Much work in contemporary philosophy of mind has been devoted to this task of constructing a theory of mental representation. There are plenty of books on this subject that you could have chosen, by Fred Dretske, for example, or Jerry Fodor. but ruth millikan’s work on this is, in my opinion, some of the best and most insightful, and this book, which is based on a series of lectures she gave in 2002, is a good introduction to her views. /p>
Is this the same as meaning? How do mental representations of some kind acquire meaning for us?
yes, the problem is how mental representations come to mean, signify or represent things. if there is a brain language, how do the words and sentences of that language get their meaning? As the title indicates, Millikan thinks there are many varieties of meaning. to begin with, he argues that there is a natural form of meaning that underlies everything. we say that dark clouds mean rain, footprints on the ground mean pheasants have been there, geese flying south mean winter is coming, and so on. there is a reliable connection, or mapping, between the occurrences of the two things, making the first a sign of the second. you can get information about the second from the first. Millikan calls these natural signs. Other philosophers, including Paul Grice and Fred Dretske, have discussed natural meaning like this, but Millikan’s account improves on previous work in several ways, and I think is the best. so this is a basic form of meaning, but it is limited. one thing is a sign of another, it carries information about it, only if the other thing is really there. clouds mean rain only if the rain is coming. tracks mean pheasants only if they were made by pheasants, and so on. so natural signs, unlike our thoughts and perceptions, cannot be false, they cannot misrepresent.
So, are mental representations different from natural signs?
Yes, they are what Millikan calls intentional signs. but normally they are also natural signs. Generally speaking (Millikan’s account is very subtle and I am cutting corners), an intentional sign is a sign that is used for the purpose of conveying some information to a recipient. take a sentence of English, rather than a mental representation. (The sentences of human language are also intentional signs, as are the calls of animals.) take “the rain is coming”. we say this for the purpose of alerting someone to the fact that it is going to rain, and we can do it successfully only if it is going to rain. (I can’t alert you to the fact that it’s going to rain if it isn’t). then, if we succeed in our purpose, the prayer we produce will be a natural sign that it is going to rain, just like dark clouds. there is a reliable connection between the two things. Now, if we utter the prayer by mistake, when it is not raining, then of course it will not be a natural sign that it will rain. however, it will still be an intentional signal that it is raining by virtue of the fact that we use it for the purpose of signaling to someone that it is raining. (Millikan argues that intentional signs are always designed for some recipient or consumer.) so roughly, an intentional sign of something is a sign whose purpose is to be a natural sign of it.
but then how can mental representations have meaning? we don’t use them for a purpose.
no, but our brains do. Millikan has a completely evolutionary approach to the mind. evolution has built biological mechanisms to do certain things, to have certain purposes or functions. (This doesn’t mean that evolution had intentions and intelligence, just that the mechanisms were naturally selected because they did these things, rather than because of other things they did.) And the idea is that the mind is made up of a wide variety of systems designed to perform specific tasks: sensing features of the world, interpreting them, reacting to them, and selecting actions to take. these systems pass information to each other using representations that are designed to serve as natural signs of certain things and are therefore intentional signs of those things. In very general terms, then, the view is that mental representations derive their meaning from the purposes for which they are used. this kind of view is called the teleological theory of meaning. (‘Teleological’ comes from the Greek word ‘telos’, which means purpose or end).
what about non-human animals? does millikan have an opinion on them?
oh yes. Like I said, Millikan takes an evolutionary approach to the mind. she thinks that to understand how our minds represent things we need to look at the evolution of mental representation, and she devotes an entire section of the book to this, with lots of information on animal psychology and fascinating observations of animal behavior. Millikan believes that the basic type of intentional signs are what she calls pushmi-pullyu signs, which simultaneously represent what is happening and how to react to it. an example is the rabbit punch. when a rabbit hits its hind leg, it signals to other rabbits that danger is present and they should take cover. the sign is both descriptive and directive, and if used successfully it will be a natural sign of both what is happening now and what will happen next. Millikan thinks that most mental representations are of this type; they represent both what is happening and the response to be given. this allows creatures to take advantage of opportunities for intentional action as they present themselves. but creatures whose minds only have pushmi-pullyu representations have limited abilities: they can’t think ahead, they can’t verify that they’ve achieved their goals, and they can get stuck in behavioral loops.
“This is not an easy book. you will have to work hard and you may have to reread the book several times. but worth the effort”
Millikan argues that more sophisticated behavioral control requires separating descriptive and directive roles, so that the creature has separate representations of objects and their goals, expressed in a common mental code, and devotes two chapters of the book to exploring how could this have happened. finally, he argues that even with these separate representations, non-human animals are still limited in what they can represent. they can only represent things that have practical meaning for them, things relevant in some way to their needs. we, on the other hand, can represent things that have no practical value for us. we can think of distant times and places, and of things we will never need or find. Millikan describes us as collectors of “representational garbage” although, of course, it is this collection of theoretical knowledge that allows us to do science, history, philosophy, etc. To represent this kind of theoretical information, Millikan argues, a new means of representation with some kind of structure was needed, and she thinks this was provided by language. it is language that has allowed us to collect representational garbage and do all the wonderful things we do with it.
does millikan also analyze language and linguistic meaning?
yes. in fact, there is another section of the book on what she calls “external intentional signs” (called animal and linguistic signs). Millikan argues that linguistic signs arise from natural signs and are normally read in exactly the same way as natural signs. we read the word ‘pheasant’ like we read pheasant tracks on the ground, as a natural sign of pheasants. we do not need to think about what the speaker intended or had in mind. This vision has some surprising consequences, which Ella Millikan tracks down. one of them is that we can perceive things directly through language. When we hear someone say ‘Johnny has arrived,’ we perceive Johnny as if we were going to hear his voice or see her face, Millikan argues. the idea is that the words are a natural sign of johnny just like the sound of his voice or the pattern of light reflected on her face. They’re just ways to get information on Johnny’s whereabouts. Of course, there is processing involved in moving from the sound of words to a belief about Johnny, but Millikan argues that the processes involved are not fundamentally different from those involved in sensory perception. it’s a controversial point of view, but it fits in with the broader views on perception and language that she develops.
Perhaps I should say that this is not an easy book. Millikan writes clearly, but the discussion is complex and subtle. you’ll have to work at it, especially if you’re new to the subject, and you may need to reread the book a few times. but it rewards the effort. it’s packed with insights and you’ll gain a much deeper understanding of how our minds hold on to the world.
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now let’s move on to the fourth book, the architecture of the mind by peter carruthers. Is this a book with a different mindset?
to some extent. it is a work of substantive psychological theorizing. Carruthers defends the massive modularity thesis: the view that the mind is made up of numerous separate subsystems or modules, each of which has a specialized function. this view has been popular with people working in evolutionary psychology as it explains how the human mind could have developed from simpler precursors by adding or reusing specific modules. Carruthers argues that this view offers the best explanation of a large amount of experimental data.
And why did you choose this particular book?
First, it is an excellent example of what philosophy can bring to psychology. Carruthers reviews a wide range of scientific papers in the cognitive sciences and integrates them into one big picture. As I said, this is something that experimental psychologists are often wary of doing, because it means going beyond their own particular area of expertise. Second, the massive modularity thesis is important, and Carruthers’ version is the most detailed and persuasive I have come across. Third, because of the way Carruthers argues his views, drawing on a lot of empirical data from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology, it’s a very informative work. Even if you don’t agree with Carruthers’ conclusions, you’ll learn a lot from this book.
what exactly does carruthers mean by a mental “module”?
This notion of a mental module was made famous by Jerry Fodor in his 1983 book, The Modularity of Mind. as I said, a module is a specialized system to perform some specific task, for example, to process visual information. Fodor had a strict conception of what a module was. in particular, he thought of modules as encapsulated: they could not extract information from other cognitive systems, except for certain specific inputs. Fodor thought that sensory processes were modular in this way, but he denied that core conceptual processes were: processes of belief formation, reasoning, decision making, etc. in fact, he could not see how these processes could be modular, since in order to make judgments and decisions we need to rely on information from a variety of sources. Obviously, if the mind is massively modular, then it cannot be so in Fodor’s sense, and Carruthers proposes a broader definition that, among other things, rules out the claim that modules cannot share information. he argues that evolution equipped animals with numerous modules like this, each dedicated to a specific task that was important for survival. there are sets of these modules, he thinks: learning modules, to form beliefs about direction, time, number, availability of food, social relationships, and other topics; motivational modules, to generate different types of desire, emotion and social motivation; memory modules to store different types of information, etc. he argues that the human mind also has these modules, along with several additional modules, including a language module and modules for reasoning about the minds of people, living things, physical objects, and social norms.
what is the argument for thinking that the mind is massively modular in this way?
carruthers has several arguments. one is evolutionary. this is how complex systems evolve. nature builds them little by little from simpler components, which can be modified without altering the whole system. this is true of genes, cells, organs, and whole organisms, and we should expect it to be true of minds as well. another argument is from animals. Carruthers argues that nonhuman animal minds are modular, and since our minds evolved from such minds, they will have retained their basic modular structure, with several new modules added. a third argument revolves around computability considerations. Carruthers argues that the mind is a computational system; it works by manipulating symbols into something like a language of thought. and for these calculations to be manageable, they cannot be performed by a general system that is based on all potentially relevant information. it would just take too long. instead, there must be specialized computational systems (modules) that each access only a limited amount of the information available in the larger system. this doesn’t mean modules can’t share information, just that they don’t share much of it. Of course, these are arguments only for the general principle of massive modularity; the arguments for the existence of specific modules appear later in the book.
but if our minds are collections of modules designed to deal with specific problems of survival, how do we manage to do so many other things? I guess evolution didn’t equip us with modules to do science, create art or play football.
This is the big challenge for the massive modularity view. How can a collection of specialized modules support flexible, creative and scientific thinking of the kind we are capable of? we can think about things that are not of immediate practical importance, we can combine concepts from different domains, and we learn to think in new and creative ways. how can we do this if our minds are modular? Carruthers devotes much of the book to responding to this challenge in its various forms. It’s a long story, but the core idea is that these abilities involve the co-opting of systems that originally evolved for other purposes. Language plays a crucial role in the story, as it can combine outcomes from different modules, and Carruthers argues that flexible and creative thinking involves rehearsing statements and other actions in the imagination, using mechanisms that were originally developed to guide action. (You’ll notice this picks up a theme from Dennett and Millikan: that language is key to the distinctive powers of the human mind.) account of the nature of conscious thought. it’s a very compelling tale in its own right (another reason to read the book) and you could support it even if you’re skeptical of the modular imagery that goes with it. Carruthers has further developed his description of conscious thought in his most recent book, The Centered Mind.
doesn’t carruther’s story about modules sound a bit speculative? it’s not like we can open our brains and see modular systems. Are there any empirical consequences for this kind of theorizing?
modules may not be obvious from the anatomy. Carruthers does not claim that each module is located in a specific region of the brain. a module can be spread over several regions, since the circulatory system is spread throughout the body. but the modular theory should generate many testable predictions. for example, we should find distinctive patterns of response under experimental conditions (for example, when a task makes high demands on one module but not another), distinctive types of breakdown (such as when a hit damages one module but leaves others intact), and distinctive patterns activation in neuroimaging studies. What Carruthers is doing is setting up a research program for cognitive science, and only by following the program will we know if it’s any good. Does the program lead us to new knowledge and new discoveries? this is a far cry from armchair conceptual analysis.
And finally, which one did you choose for your latest book?
andy clark, supersizing the mind. it is about how the mind incarnates and extends. Clark is a fascinating philosopher, and has always been a bit ahead of the field. he has played the role of alerting philosophers to the latest advances in cognitive science and AI, such as connectionism, dynamical systems theory, and predictive coding. If you want to know what philosophers of mind will be thinking five or ten years from now, check out what Andy Clark is thinking today.
for me, andy clark’s extended mind theory is fascinating because it is an example of the philosopher who, a bit like dennett, makes us rethink something we thought we understood. It’s also a very compelling picture that he presents of the way things that we might not have considered to be part of our mind, really are part of our mind.
yes. one way to think of it is in terms of a contrast between two models of the mind. both are physicalists, but they differ in the range of physical processes that make up the mind. One is what Clark calls the brain junction model. this sees the mind confined to the brain, sealed in the skull. it’s armstrong’s view: it’s in the name of “central state materialism”, where “central” means the central nervous system. In this model, the brain does all the processing work and the body plays an auxiliary role, sending sensory data to the brain and receiving commands from the brain. this means that there is a lot of work for the brain to do. you need to model the outside world in great detail and accurately calculate how to move your body to achieve your goals. This is in contrast to what Clark calls the “extended model.” this considers that mental processes involve the broader body and external artifacts. One aspect of this concerns the role of the body in cognition. the brain can offload some of the work on the body. for example, our bodies are designed to do some things automatically, by virtue of their structure and dynamics. walking is an example. therefore, the brain does not need to issue detailed muscular commands for these activities, but can only monitor and modify the process as it unfolds. Another example is that instead of building a detailed internal model of the world, the brain can simply probe the world with the sense organs when it needs information, using the world as its own model, as roboticist Rodney Brooks says. therefore, the job of controlling behavior is not just done in the head, but involves interaction and feedback between the brain and the body. Clark lists many examples of this, using data from psychology, neuroscience, and robotics.
There is a more familiar element to this theory which suggests that storage outside the brain could be part of the mind, which is a fascinating idea.
yes, that’s the other aspect of the extended model. mental processes not only involve the body, but can also extend to external objects and artifacts. This was an idea made famous by a 1998 article, “The Extended Mind,” that Clark co-wrote with David Chalmers and which is included in the book. (Chalmers also contributed a foreword to the book, giving his later thoughts on the subject.) the argument involves what is called the parity principle. this is the claim that if an external object performs a certain function that we would consider to be a mental function if it were performed by a part of the brain, then that external object is part of your mind. what matters is what a thing does, not where it is located. take memory. our memories store our beliefs (for example, about names or quotes), which we can access as needed to guide our behavior. now suppose someone has a memory problem and writes down bits of information in a notebook that he carries around and consults regularly. then the notebook functions as his memory used to, and the bits of information it contains function as beliefs. then, the argument goes, we should think of the notebook as literally part of the person’s mind and its contents as one of the person’s mental states. This view may seem counterintuitive, but it’s not that far from where we started with Armstrong and the claim that mental states can be defined in terms of their causal functions—the work they do within the mind/brain system. the new claim is simply that these causal roles can be played by things outside the brain. it also fits nicely with the massive modularity of carruthers. if the brain is made up of modules, why couldn’t there be more modules or subsystems external to the brain? these external modules would have to interface with the brain, of course; in the case of the notebook, this would be through the person’s eyes and fingers. but, as clark points out, internal modules will also need interfaces.
That goes some way to explaining the psychological phenomenon people have when they lose a key address book or family album, they really have lost something that is crucial to their mental functioning.
yes. Of course, this only applies to things that are closely integrated with your brain processes, things that you carry around with you, that you check on a regular basis. Clark is not claiming that whatever you consult is part of your mind; for example, a book you look at only once a year.
could a room or a bookshelf play the same role?
Yes, I think I could. Clark talks about how we build cognitive niches: external environments that serve to guide and structure our activities. for example, the layout of materials and tools in a workplace could act as a workflow diagram, guiding the activities of workers. Clark has a good historical example of this in the Elizabethan theatre. the physical design of the set and scenery, combined with a schematic summary of the plot, allowed the actors to master long plays in a short time. we see this with older people as well. As a person’s mental faculties decline, they become increasingly dependent on the cognitive niche they have created in their own home, and if you take them out of that niche and place them in an institution, they may not even be able to do anything. simple everyday things. things.
so the suggestion is that an elderly person’s wardrobe and bedside table are actually part of their mind?
yes. or rather, the suggestion is that there is a perspective from which they can see themselves that way. Clark is not dogmatic about this. the point is that the extended model offers a perspective from which we see patterns and explanations that are not visible from the narrower brain perspective. again, this takes us away from this Cartesian view of the mind as something locked away from the world. We have an intuitive picture of our minds as private inner worlds, somehow separate from the physical world, but modern philosophy of mind is increasingly dismantling that picture.
With your book choices, there’s an interesting set of different ways to think about ourselves. Thus, Armstrong is primarily reacting against the Cartesian mind/body dualism, which sees the mind as an immaterial substance. dennett rejects the inner cinematic image of the mind and urges us to rethink what it means to be conscious. millikan is exploring how our thoughts and perceptions evolved from simpler, more basic signs and representations. Carruthers is suggesting that our mental processes are the product of different systems working with a degree of independence to produce what we consider our unique experience. And Clark is changing us back to thinking that we think too much about the mind, that another way to understand mental activities is to see them potentially extending far beyond the skull. It is a very interesting range of books that you have chosen.
perhaps there is a dennett metaphor that can help us sum this up. dennett speaks of consciousness as an illusion of the user. he’s thinking of the graphical user interface on a computer, where he has a picture of a desktop with files, folders, a trash can, etc., and he can do things by moving the icons around, deleting a file by dragging it to the trash can, for example . now these icons and operations correspond to things inside the computer, to complex data structures, and ultimately to millions of micro-settings in the hardware, but they do so only in a very simplified and metaphorical way. so the interface is a kind of illusion. but it is a useful illusion, allowing us to use the computer in an intuitive way, without requiring any knowledge of its programming or hardware. dennett suggests that our awareness of our own minds is a bit like that. my mind seems to me to be a private world populated by experiences, images, thoughts and emotions, which I can inspect and control. and dennett’s idea is that this is also a kind of user illusion. It is useful; it gives us some access to what is going on in our brain and some control over it. but it represents the states and processes there only in a very simplified and schematic way. I think that’s right and what these books are doing, and what much of modern philosophy of mind is doing, is deconstructing this illusion of the user, showing us how it’s created and how it relates to what’s actually happening as that our brains interact with our bodies and the world. around us.
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