11.7—
Final Words

While the final picture I have presented does not do all of the things that CTM was touted as doing, I hope that I have made a case (1) that computational psychology could, in principle, do some very important things for empirical science and (2) that the specifically philosophical desiderata of strongly naturalizing intentionality and vindicating intentional psychology should never have been viewed as imperatives in the first place.

On the one hand, computation may provide the mathematical resources for a successful psychology of cognition. On purely scientific grounds, this is a good thing even if it does not bring a solution to the mind-body problem in its wake. And on metaphysical grounds, those inclined to strong naturalism on the basis of what they have seen happening in the sciences can only be consistent by holding their strong naturalism accountable to the ultimate state of psychology, and not the other way around. As for the vindication of the mental, I am inclined to view the situation in the following way: If Smith accuses Jones of trespassing

on Smith's property, Jones may very well need to vindicate himself by showing that he did not break the law. But if Smith accuses Jones of trespassing on Jones's own property, there is no need for vindication, because walking on your own property is not a crime. Similarly with intentional states: there is no need to vindicate them, because failure to conform with materialism and the generality of physics are not philosophical crimes. Strong naturalizers may not like unreduced mental kinds, much as Smith may not like Jones's domestic perambulations. But you need more than a violation of taste or ideology to call for a vindication. (Of course, one might well have concerns in the opposite direction. That is, one might view successes in intentional psychology, and the inability of nearly four centuries of modern philosophers to reduce the mental to the physical, as casting substantial doubt upon materialism and strong naturalism. If that is the real concern of naturalizers, it seems to me to be a concern that is well founded.)

Where does one go from here? I think that the results of this inquiry point in two directions. First, there are questions that are purely about the philosophy of psychology: For example, how do rival research programmes in psychology today confer good-making qualities upon the psychological enterprise? To what are they committed? What are their underlying methodological assumptions? In short, it is important to do careful case studies in contemporary psychology just as it is to do other case studies in the history and philosophy of science. Second, the present discussion of the relationship between psychology and the metaphysics of the mind has only scratched the surface. If "naturalism" has become a kind of shibboleth in recent times, this disguises the fact that there is enormous variety in the kinds of projects that are called "naturalistic." I have given some reasons here for skepticism about naturalistic platitudes, and suggested that the Neutral Project is all that one really needs for science and all one is likely to get in metaphysics. But really this is not the end of that topic but only the beginning. We need a much more serious examination of the roots of contemporary naturalism and the assumptions it encodes. We need a more thorough examination of how well its normative models of explanation and of intertheoretic relations are supported by actual examples of scientific theories even in the natural sciences. We need a more systematic categorization of kinds of "explanation," and an application of these to actual work done, both in psychology and the other sciences.

My hope is that this book will have separated what is truly useful about the computer paradigm from false hopes based upon incautious

uses of language. If I am right, both science and metaphysics will be better off if they see that beyond a certain point they must follow separate paths. I do not claim to know whether the computational path in psychology will end up leading to Oz or leading nowhere. But I think we will be better off if we turn around the map.