Mind: A Brief Introduction (Fundamentals of Philosophy Series)

Author:John R. Searle [Searle, John R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

I. HOW IS INTENTIONALITY POSSIBLE AT ALL?

This problem is supposed to be as difficult as the problem of consciousness, so the sorts of solutions that are supposed to solve it are much like the solutions proposed for the problem of consciousness.

The dualistic solution is to say that as there are two different realms, the mental and the physical, so the mental realm has its own sorts of powers not possessed by the physical realm. The physical realm is incapable of referring, but the mental realm is essentially capable of thinking, and thinking involves reference. I hope it is obvious that this dualistic solution is no solution at all. To explain the mystery of intentionality it appeals to the mystery of the mental in general.

I think that the most common contemporary philosophical solution to the problem of intentionality is some form of functionalism. The idea is that intentionality is to be analyzed entirely in terms of causal relations. These causal relations exist between the environment and the agent and between various events going on inside the agent. On this view there is nothing mysterious about intentionality. It is just a form of causation. The only special feature is that intentional relations exist between the agent's cerebral innards and the external world. And, by this time, I do not need to tell the reader that the most influential version of functionalism is computer functionalism, or Strong Artificial Intelligence.

Finally, there is the eliminativist view of intentionality: there really are no intentional states. The belief that there are such things is just a residue of a primitive folk psychology, one that a mature science of the brain will enable us to overcome. A variant of the eliminativist view is what we might call “interpretativism.” The idea here is that attributions of intentionality are always forms of interpretation made by some outside observer. An extreme version of this view is Daniel Dennett’s conception that we sometimes adopt the “intentional stance” and that we should not think of people as literally having beliefs and desires, but rather that this is a useful stance to adopt about them for the purpose of predicting their behavior.1

I will not spend much time criticizing these various accounts of intentionality because I have already criticized the general thrusts of these arguments in earlier chapters. What I want to do, as I did with the problem of consciousness, is bring the whole issue down to earth. If you ask, how is it possible that anything as ethereal and abstract as a thought process can reach out to the sun, to the moon, to Caesar, and to the Rubicon, it must seem like a very difficult problem. But if you pose the problem in a much simpler form, how can an animal be hungry or thirsty? How can an animal see anything or fear anything? Then it seems much easier to fathom. We are speaking, as we did about consciousness, of a certain set of biological capacities of the mind. And it is

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.