8.7—
Summary

The general conclusion of these past two chapters is that CTM does not, in fact, provide an account of intentionality. It provides the illusion of such an account by saying that the semantic properties of mental states are inherited from those of mental representations. But on closer inspection, we have not found any properties of "mental representations"

(i.e., our hypothetical cognitive counters) that could serve to explain mental-semantic properties of mental states. Semiotic-semantic properties, as we saw in the last chapter, fail on a number of grounds, including the fact that they render the explanation circular and regressive.

One focus of this chapter was upon the possibility that the kind of causal covariation account of semantics championed by Fodor might actually be able to serve as a stipulative definition of semantic terms as applied to representations. I have serious doubts that this was Fodor's intention. But if one were to make such a move, it would seriously undercut the persuasive force of Fodor's apologia for CTM, since that involved explicit and implicit arguments that turn out to be blatantly fallacious if notions such as meaning and intentionality are defined in causal terms for mental representations. Moreover, causal covariation stories do not go very far towards providing an account of what it is for a mental state to be mental-meaningful or mental-intentional—they don't provide an explanation . First, the causal covariation story just seems like the wrong kind of "account": it appears to give a demarcation criterion that does not explain, and it seems to distinguish states that have different meanings instead of distinguishing the meaningful from the meaningless. That is, it seems to assume that it is dealing with meaningful entities, and then asks, "How can we distinguish the ones that mean X from the ones that mean Y ?" In addition, I have tried to make a case that, if the notion of causal covariation is too bland a notion to provide an explanation of intentionality or meaningfulness, this blandness seems the price one must pay for generality: naturalistic accounts become more explanatory as they become more detailed, but in the process they lose the generality one would want from an "account of intentionality." Finally, I have argued that even if CCTI were to succeed as an account of semantics for the primitive representations, it would need to be supplemented by a naturalistic account of compositionality as well, and it is hard even to imagine how such an account might proceed. The upshot of this is that causal covariation does not provide us with a notion of representational meaning that can explain mental-meaning or vindicate intentional psychology.

The theoretical definition of the semantic vocabulary for representations fares no better. On one construal (the de dicto construal), it provides a fallacious pseudo-explanation that appeals to dormative virtues. On another (the de re construal) it provides no explanation at all. This, I think, is as far as CTM can be made to stretch: it is a theory of the form of mental processes that stands glaringly in need of an account of semantics to supplement it. We saw as well that we cannot "vindicate" in-

tentional psychology in the way envisioned by CTM's advocates unless we have such an account—and indeed a naturalistic account—of semantics and intentionality in hand. In the next chapter, we shall explore the prospects for such a "naturalistic theory of content." In the final section of the book, we shall explore an alternative way of looking at the computer paradigm in psychology that renders unnecessary both the naturalization of the mental and its vindication.