11.3—
Dialectical Possibilities

How does one arrive at the Received View? One story about the underlying train of thought goes as follows: You start by looking at a few physical sciences (particularly mechanics, thermodynamics, and chemistry) and a few notable episodes of scientific accomplishment involving intertheoretic connections (the atomic theory, the derivation of thermodynamic equations from statistical mechanics, etc.). On the basis of observations of these actual domains of scientific research and actual interdomain connections, you form second -order theories about the proper form of all scientific discourse (or even all metaphysically respectable discourse), and about the proper relations between discourses. The resulting view is one in which the objects of the special sciences are differentiated by the kinds of physical processes they study, and more particularly by the levels of complexity of the processes they study. The more basic sciences study simpler objects that form the proper parts of objects studied by the higher-level sciences, and ultimately you should be able to explain the higher-level properties as derivative from the lower-level properties. Let us call this picture the "Hierarchical Picture." The Hierarchical Picture is a second-order theory about the canonical form of discourses in the special sciences (and indeed for all discourses speaking about real objects) and about the connections between them. Because its paradigm examples all involve straightforwardly physical objects, a materialistic inventory seems implicit in the model. The Received View then applies the Hierarchical Picture as a norm for looking at actual discourse about the mind and actual attempts to form connections between mentalistic discourse and other kinds of discourse, such as that of neuroscience.

This is arguably a very charitable way of interpreting the emergence of the Received View. One might well point out, for example, that the essentials of the Hierarchical Picture were already present in Hobbes,

Figure 14

who tried to make the Galilean method of resolution and composition into the basis for a metaphysics long before most of the scientific accomplishments that might plausibly be thought to support the Hierarchical Picture. One might well take the view that it is the Hierarchical Picture that is driving the interpretation of science, and not vice versa. Or, one might point out the many advances in special sciences that would not have taken place had the scientists of the day placed a higher priority upon conformity with the Hierarchical Picture than with discoveries in their respective local discourses. But it is, I think, the kind of story that adherents of the Received View like to tell, and we can grant it for present purposes.

What I wish to point out about this story is the complex dialectic between four separate kinds of concerns (see fig. 14):

(1) the state internal to each of the separate discourses (e.g., the actual state of commonsense discourses about action, neuroscience, psychophysics, physics),

(2) one's theories about the forms individual discourse do or ought to take (e.g., the philosophy of psychology, the philosophy of physics),

(3) the state of connections between discourses (actual intertheoretic reductions, localizations, correlations), and

(4) one's theories about the forms connections between discourses do or ought to take (e.g., reductionism, supervenience, the Neutral Project).

Behind this prevailing naturalistic current in contemporary philosophy of mind is an assumption that the status of our discourse about the mind is to be held up to the litmus of conformity with metatheories about the nature of particular discourses and about the connections one ought to be able to find between discourses. In particular, it is assumed that real intentional states would play a role in a causal-nomological science of the mind, and that they would ultimately be derivative from nonintentional phenomena in much the way that, say, thermodynamics is derivative from statistical mechanics. Thus this Received View canonizes certain metatheoretical assumptions about the nature of sciences and the connections between science and ontology, and then applies these assumptions as norms for judging the form of actual work in psychology and connections forged between psychology and other domains.

While the dialectic underlying the Received View may seem very compelling, it is by no means the only serious approach that has been taken. Recent philosophy of science, for example, has increasingly moved towards an approach that looks first and foremost at the actual dynamics of discourse within the special sciences—with the result, for instance, that the teleological categories of evolutionary biology have won increasing acceptance against older mechanistic objections. On another front, writers like Ryle and Wittgenstein have insisted that intentional explanation is not scientific discourse, or even protoscientific discourse, at all, and should not be forced into that model. And continental philosophy has decided that the Geisteswissenschaften or "sciences of mind and culture" are fundamentally different in their form than the natural sciences, and have adjusted their metatheoretical views in light of this observation.

This brings up two questions. First, does the Hierarchical Picture really capture the form of current work even in the natural sciences? And, second, is the healthiest dialectic between (a ) actual practice in the local discourses of the special sciences (and, for that matter, nonscientific discourses) and (b ) our metatheories of the same, one in which the metatheories are applied as a test for legitimacy of the assumptions of special discourses—or should things, perhaps, be the other way around? And to these one might well add a third question: namely, do all of the considerations relevant to the assessment of specifically scientific discourses apply more generally as well? In other words, must discourse be scientific to be respectable, and must object kinds appear in scientific explanations in order to be real?

In the remainder of this chapter, I shall deal principally with the sec-

ond question regarding the healthiest form of the dialectic between the successes of local discourses and our metatheoretical views about the forms of those discourses and the relations between them. I shall argue that the Received View has the proper dialectical relationship backwards, even by standards expressed in the pieties of many of its proponents. To wit, it is principally our metatheories that stand in the dock against successes of special discourses, and not vice versa. And, as a consequence, intentional categories stand in no need of vindication. Along the way, I shall point to a very few of the possible examples of important work in the physical sciences that have strayed from the course the Received View might have urged. I shall also make a case for separating science and ontology in such a fashion that the metaphysical legitimacy of mental categories in no way depends upon the possibility of a science that deals with them.

My plan, then, is to look at the assumptions underlying the perceived need for a vindication of intentional psychology, and to show how the dialectic that drives the perception of this need for vindication is wrongheaded. I shall first consider concerns about extending the causal-nomological model of explanation to psychology, and then treat of the desires for materialism and the generality of physics together.