Chapter Nine—
Prospects for a Naturalistic Theory of Content

In the previous chapters it has been argued that CTM does not itself provide the explanation of intentionality that is claimed for it, and as a result it cannot produce the kind of "vindication" of intentional psychology it set out to perform. At best, a bowdlerized version of CTM might provide a way of describing the form of mental processes, and this in turn might form a part of a larger theory that would supply an independent theory of content. In our project of assessing CTM, it would not be completely unjust to leave the matter where it now stands. It is strictly speaking false that CTM explains intentionality, and this belies much that is commonly said about it. With the imposture unmasked, we could go straight to the credits and the final curtain without being truly unjust. However, one does not have to look very hard to see that, while BCTM does not itself supply an account of intentionality, it could be a part of a larger theory that does so if it were only to be supplemented by what is commonly called "a theory of content for mental representations." Indeed, in at least some places (e.g., the introduction to RePresentations ) Fodor himself seems to view the situation in this way. And however you slice the pie, the overall explanatory agenda for the computational-representational project is pretty much the same. Perhaps the more common (if mistaken) interpretation has been that the semantics of mental states have been explained by appeal to meaningful symbols, but now the meaningfulness of the symbols needs explanation, and that is what calls for a naturalistic theory of content (see fig. 12). If you take the semantic vocabulary for mental representations to be theoretical in char-

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Figure 12

acter, the middle level simply falls out, and you need an account that directly ties the meaningfulness of mental states to some unknown properties of functionally delimited proper parts of the mind or brain that are sufficient to explain mental-semantics. Either way, you ultimately need a pathway from nonsemantic and nonintentional properties of your "representations" or cognitive counters to mental-semantic properties of intentional states. All that is lost in moving from Fodor's narrative to BCTM is the (paralogistic) illusion of having made some progress on the semantic front along the way. So the idea that BCTM is really a theory of the form of mental states and processes that is still in search of an explanation of semantics and intentionality might not be all that repugnant to many in the computationalist camp. The burgeoning industry of naturalizing content, after all, is keeping plenty of philosophers employed, and holds out the hope of someone playing Watson and Crick to Fodor's, Putnam's, or Pylyshyn's Mendel.

It thus behooves us to give at least a brief examination of the prospects of completing this project by explaining the mental-semantic properties of mental states in nonintentional terms in a fashion compatible with

BCTM. This is a big undertaking, and it is very different in character from the rest of this book. The preceding sections have been concerned with assessing the limitations of a particular theory. A complete assessment of the prospects for a naturalistic account of intentionality, by contrast, would require us to examine not only all those theories that have actually been proposed (variations on which seem to multiply by the hour) but also all possible theories that have not been thought of as well. Quite a daunting task, really, and definitely beyond the intentions of this book.

What I propose to do in this chapter is much more modest. I shall endeavor to do four things: First, I shall distinguish weaker and stronger ways of "giving an account," which I will refer to respectively as "weak naturalization" and "strong naturalization" of the mental. Second, I shall point to some different classes of mental states to which the word 'intentionality' is applied and make a case that what needs to be explained in these different classes may indeed be very different (e.g., broad versus narrow content, phenomenology versus functional relations and behavior). Third, I shall try to make a case that at least some kinds of "intentional states" (the ones with a phenomenology) have properties that it seems unlikely that we shall be able to naturalize. And finally, I shall make a case that, with the remainder of "intentional states," it seems dubious that the explanation of meaningfulness (as opposed to the demarcation of meaning assignments) will focus on localized cognitive counters, as required by BCTM, but rather will require an examination, at the very least, of an entire thinker or organism, and very likely its situation in its social and ecological environment as well.

9.1—
Strong and Weak Naturalization

We are thus brought to the question of evaluating the prospects for a naturalistic theory of content that could be grafted onto BCTM. In recent years it seems to have become almost a kind of religious commitment in some corners of the philosophy of mind that one believe that there can be a naturalization of content. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that naturalism is not only loosely argued for, but loosely defined as well. For even among people espousing a commitment to "naturalism" or "naturalization" you will find enormous disagreement about what would count as a naturalization of the mind, including differences as to what is constitutive of the "natural" (is it the domain of physical objects? of causal interactions? of lawful causation? the non-normative and nonteleological?) and differences as to what kind of

"account" or "theory" is at issue. Is it enough to count as naturalization if you specify brain states (or abstract states realized in brains) with which content varies without specifying any relationship stronger than logically contingent covariation? Or does a naturalization of psychology require something more: say, a metaphysical relationship such as reduction or supervenience, or an explanatory relationship such as conceptual adequacy? Just getting a grip on the different possible moves here is a daunting task, and would probably require a book entirely devoted to that topic. What I wish to do here is to make a kind of first Dedekind cut that will separate two very different kinds of projects.

First, consider an ambitious form of naturalism: a naturalism that seeks to bring the mind wholly within the realm of nature by showing how it is possible to subsume our special discourses about thought within the framework of the natural sciences. As a model for the kind of strong explanatory relationship such a project seeks, we might take such strong intertheoretic relationships as the famous proofs that thermodynamics can be derived from the mechanics of particle collisions, or the ability of the atomic theory to explain features of the periodic table and combinatorial laws of nineteenth-century chemistry. Statistical mechanics provides a kind of explanation of thermodynamics that has important properties both metaphysically and as explanation. Metaphysically, the mechanical laws are logically sufficient for the thermodynamic laws: that is, basic mechanical laws, in combination with necessary truths of logic and mathematics, are enough to entail the thermodynamic equations. Moreover, this entailment is epistemically transparent: a person with an adequate understanding of mathematics and mechanics could derive the thermodynamic equations even if she lacked a prior acquaintance with thermodynamics as a branch of physics. I call this kind of explanation "conceptually adequate explanation." A is a conceptually adequate explanation of B just in case the conceptual content of A is enough to derive the conceptual content of B without the addition of contingent bridge laws.^[1]

I shall refer to the project of explaining the mind in a fashion that is in similar fashion metaphysically sufficient and conceptually adequate as strong naturalization . A strong naturalization of an intentional property I would explain I by appeal to some "naturalistic" properties N , where the term 'naturalistic' implies at least (a ) that the properties that comprise N are themselves nonintentional, and (b ) that they do not presuppose intentional properties. (For example, conventions are not themselves intentional, but arguably presuppose intentional states.) Obviously,

important candidates for the properties in N are properties found in the discourses of sciences such as neurology and biology, but I have deliberately left the description of the "natural" open to possibilities that properties of natural objects that are not relevant to the other sciences might prove important for psychology.^[2]

In contrast with strong naturalization, consider a much weaker kind of project: that of specifying, so far as possible, the mechanisms in the nervous system through which mental states are "realized"—where "realization" implies some special connection whose metaphysical nature may be left vague. (Such a project need not confine itself to relations between minds and single organisms—it could also, of course, specify any crucial relationships between the thinker and her social or ecological environment with similar metaphysical neutrality.) Such a project need not produce intertheoretic relationships that are necessary or sufficient, and the naturalistic properties specified need not explain the mental properties to which they are linked. This kind of account suffers no lack of precedent. The relationships between variables within a given theory are generally of this sort (though they are sometimes explained by an additional theory that provides a microexplanation), as are bridge laws and statements such as that of the wave-particle duality of matter. The psychophysical regularities in such a theory would serve as a kind of contingent bridge law between an intentional psychology and a nonintentional neuroscience.

We might call this kind of project in psychology weak naturalization in contrast to the "strong naturalization" described above. However, it is with some misgivings that I apply the name "naturalization" to it at all, as (a ) most people calling themselves "naturalizers" seem to have strong naturalization in mind, and (b ) many people who would normally be considered something other than naturalists could subscribe to this "weak naturalization" project as well. Indeed, it is a project in which Descartes was an important pioneer, to which Spinoza explicitly subscribed, and which even Berkeley might have been able to endorse in connection with empirical research. As a result, I am sometimes more inclined to refer to it as the "Neutral Project."

BCTM can be located, with minor variations, within either kind of project: strongly or weakly naturalistic. However, a strong naturalization of the mental is required if CTM is to accomplish either of the two philosophical goals that it has set out for itself. To account for the intentionality of mental states, it is not enough to specify some contingent correlations between mental-state type and some physical or abstract

property. For this would not explain why meaningfulness appears on the scene at all; and that, after all, is the primary puzzle for the naturalist. Contingent correlations are simply not explanatory. And to vindicate intentional psychology, it is necessary to show that mental states can be understood in a way that meets the desired criteria. And this, in turn, requires explanation that is epistemically transparent.

Machine computation shows, for example, that for formalizable domains, the semiotic-semantic properties of the symbols can be linked to the physical-causal properties of the machine. The physical-causal properties of the machine, indeed, entail its description (or describability) in terms of a machine table (though not uniquely). Yet the physical-causal properties of the machine do not explain the semiotic-semantic properties, because these depend upon conventions as well. I think that this much is likely to prove to be much the same in the case of mental states. Where the two situations diverge (and this is what affects vindication) is the fact that, in the case of symbols in computers, we can make it transparent that the objects of the semiotic description are the very same objects as the objects of physical-causal description (the series of bistable circuits and whatnot), whereas identity ascriptions between mental and physical states are at best mere guesswork. The reason you can see this in the case of symbols in computers and not in the case of mental states turns upon the fact that there is something about the notion of a symbol that entails that a symbol have criteria involving a physical pattern. A token signifier is necessarily a token marker, and a token marker is necessarily a token physical object. But there is no similar connection with material objecthood built into the notion of a mental state. The connection between symbolhood and physical objecthood is conceptually necessary. That between mental states and physical objecthood is contingent at best. And to show the compatibility of mentalism with materialism, you need more than guesswork; you need to make the identity transparent. Otherwise there is no proof of compatibility, hence no vindication. This only makes a difference to those who are really sold on the premise that intentional psychology is in need of vindication, but it should matter quite a lot to them.

9.2—
What Is "The Mental"?

If assessing the possibility of "naturalizing the mental" requires some discussion of the notion of naturalization, it is equally in need of some discussion of its intended domain, "the mental" and even "the intentional."

Thus far, with the exception of a few hedges in chapter 1, we have proceeded as though there were a clear and shared understanding of the population of the intentional bestiary and of the "ordinary" or "pretheoretic" notion of intentionality. However, I have become convinced in recent years that this is not so. There are really several different kinds of things that are called "mental" and even "intentional states." Most important, I think, is the distinction between conscious episodes like perceptual experiences, conscious judgments, and episodes of recollection on the one hand, and dispositional states like beliefs and desires on the other. Their salient properties are very different from one another, and hence require very different accounts. Moreover, different groups of philosophers take different classes of states as their paradigm examples and, as a result, operate under very different assumptions about what a "theory of mind" or an "account of intentionality" would have to explain.

9.2.1—
Four Kinds of "Mental State"

I have argued elsewhere (Horst 1995) that we may usefully distinguish four kinds of entities that go under the name of "mental."

(1) Conscious Occurrent Episodes (judgments, perceptions) . Until fairly recently, people interested in the mental in general and intentionality in particular tended to concentrate on episodes of conscious thought in which some object or state of affairs was, as it were, "before the mind's eye." It seems quite clear that this is the sort of thing that the pioneers of modern work in intentionality like Brentano and Husserl had in mind, and it is surely true as well of work on the mind by most of the Early Modern philosophers such as Descartes, the British empiricists and Kant, as well as living philosophers such as Geach (1957), Nagel (1986), Goldman (1992, 1993a, 1993b), and Searle (1983, 1992). Such states would include things like perceptual gestalts, in which an object or scene is presented visually, occurrent judgments ("By gum! That's a dingo!"), conscious wishes ("Oh, that Rhett would come back to Tara!"), recollections, imagination, free fancy, and so on. Such things are events, they are conscious or at least consciously accessible, they have a phenomenology, and there is a quite palpable sense in which it makes sense to say they are "directed" towards something and have an "intentional object" that need not be a real object. In these cases the mind in some sense not only intends the object, but attends to it as well. Such episodes are, to a certain extent (and not infallibly), susceptible to introspection, and are certainly

not "purely theoretical" in the sense that protons are theoretical or that Pluto was theoretical before its existence was confirmed by telescopy. (That is, we have direct, quasi-observational evidence for their existence as well as retroductive evidence.)

(2) Dispositional States (beliefs, desires) . Most recent writers in cognitive science have concentrated, by contrast, on things like beliefs and desires, generally construed (with varying degrees of strictness) in dispositional terms. Dispositions are by definition unobservable. And where 'belief' means something other than "conscious judgment" (which it is sometimes used to mean), it does seem to indicate something that is truly theoretical and indeed cannot be confirmed through direct observation. Perhaps some dispositions have a phenomenology—say, believing that there is a loving God fosters a sense of inner peace and believing that the Mob has put out a contract on you produces a sickening anxiety—but the connection between the dispositional belief or desire and its phenomenology is far less direct (and arguably less essential) than that between occurrent states and their phenomenology. The "aboutness" of a perceptual gestalt is very closely related to the fact that I am appeared to in a fashion that involves an image of a dog, presented from a particular perspective (say, from behind), and under a particular interpretation (i.e., "That's Marco's dog, and she's chewing on my shoe!"). And all of this has a phenomenology. For the most part, beliefs only acquire a distinctive phenomenology when they eventuate in conscious episodes.

(3) The Freudian Unconscious . Freud speaks of "unconscious" mental states. These seem to be built on the model of conscious states, and are taken to be of the same kind, with the sole proviso that they are repressed. They can (it is said) be brought to conscious awareness in therapy. I do not intend to pursue Freudian theory here, but merely to point out that such events start out as theoretical entities, and particular ones may cease to be purely theoretical when made conscious. They may have a vague and extrinsic phenomenology that manifests itself in some of the complaints that bring the patient to the therapist's couch, but these are not particular to the content of the state in the way that, say, the phenomenology of perception is connected to how I am thinking of the object of perception (for a similar view, see Searle 1992).

(4) Infraconscious States . Finally, cognitive scientists often speak of things lying below the level of the consciously accessible in mentalistic terms. We hear talk of cognitive subsystems, for example, cashed out in terms of "beliefs" and "desires" of the subsystems. Such states are surely nonconscious, have a phenomenology only incidentally, and indeed may

bear no more than analogical relations to other things called "beliefs" and "desires," as argued by Searle (1992). Such states are also clearly theoretical in the strong sense that protons are theoretical. (In other words, our only warrant for believing in them is that doing so gives us a certain amount of explanatory payoff.)

Now clearly, when you are asking for an account of "mental states" it will make a great deal of difference what kinds of "mental states" you have in mind. In fact, there are plenty of people who are committed to one or more of these categories while remaining skeptical about others. Many people think Freudian psychology is bunk, for example, but believe in conscious states or beliefs; and outside of cognitive science it is common to find people who agree with Searle and myself that many of the attributions of "beliefs" to infraconscious states and processes are true only if interpreted metaphorically. Indeed, some of us think that nothing could be more clearly real than conscious states but harbor deep-seated misgivings about dispositional beliefs and desires. Conversely, some people seem not to understand talk of phenomenology and subjectivity at all (perhaps in the way some people do not experience imagery), and others think that the conscious experience of mental states is merely a gaudy epiphenomenon that is irrelevant to the "real" (i.e., causal) nature of beliefs and desires.

What you choose as your paradigm examples will have a significant impact on what you consider "essential" to the "mental" and hence what stands in need of explanation. Perception, imagination, recollection, judgment, conscious yearnings, and the like all involve a kind of directedness of the sort reported by Brentano, which in turn involves at least the possibility of consciousness, a phenomenological "what-it's-like," a perspectival character of the object-as-presented (we see and think about objects under only some of their aspects), and a kind of subjectivity (this experience is essentially my experience). All of this seems to be bound up in what writers like Brentano, Husserl, Searle, and Nagel mean when they talk about intentionality in particular and the mental in general. If this is how you are using those words, on the one hand, it is only natural to assume that an "account" of "the mental" or of "intentionality" should account for all these features. If your paradigm example of the mental is a dispositional belief, on the other hand, you are unlikely to include such features in your list of things needing explanation, and rightly so.

I happen to think that these distinctions explain a lot of the contemporary impasses in the philosophy of mind. People who think mental states are "theoretical" tend to be thinking of dispositional beliefs, the

unconscious, or the infraconscious. People who are thinking of perception and judgment regard characterizations of the mental as "theoretical" as outrageous. People in the occurrent-state camp also tend to regard phenomenology, subjectivity, and consciousness as crucial to the mental in general and to intentionality in particular, while those concerned with beliefs and desires often do not. It seems to me (see Horst 1995) that there is room for a dissolution of these impasses that saves face for all: namely, that things like judgments, imagination, and perception are not theoretical entities, and do essentially involve phenomenology, subjectivity, and consciousness, while dispositional states and infraconscious states are theoretical in character and do not involve these features, except incidentally.^[3]

9.2.2—
Intentionality and Directedness

I think that there is likewise some variety in the literature in how the words 'intentionality' and 'intentional state' are used. When the word was reintroduced into philosophical parlance by Brentano (1874), it seems clear that he meant 'intentionality' to denote a feature of certain kinds of whole mental states (and not their proper parts). Indeed, Brentano speaks of intentionality as being the distinctive feature of his "mental" as opposed to "physical" phenomena, but it is clear on closer inspection that his "physical" phenomena are not physical objects but qualia! This may seem mysterious at first glance, but the mystery is resolved when one recognizes that Brentano is starting from the empiricist starting point of examining the contents of the mind from the first-person perspective (see McAlister 1974, 1976). His "phenomena" are literally "things that appear"—some of which (those he unfortunately calls "physical") involve only sensation, others of which (those he calls "mental") involve the presentation of some object as an object. Brentano's empiricist foundations, as well as his examples, make it clear that he is dealing with mental episodes in which one is conscious of some "intentional object" as it is presented, as it were, "before the mind's eye." The reason for speaking of the "directedness" of such states is quite palpable: when I have perceptual experience of a dog, or imagine a dog, or have a recollection of the family dog, my mental gaze is, as it were, directed towards the object of my thought. And famously, of course, this kind of "directedness" does not require the existence of an extramental object corresponding to our ideas. From the empiricist standpoint, or under Husserl's phenomenological "bracketing," "directedness" is a feature of experience itself—

the fact that it is an experience that presents us with a putative object and not just a sensation—and not a relation to extramental reality.

So in Brentano, the "mental states" that are characterized by his notion of "intentionality" are conscious episodes and not dispositional beliefs or desires. Indeed, it is not clear that the kind of "directedness" one finds in Brentano's examples can be applied to unconscious dispositions. Brentano also uses the term 'intentionality' to apply to whole mental states, and not to their proper subparts. This leaves the exact application of the term open to some interpretation. Writers like Husserl and Searle have taken the notion of intentionality to include the whole phenomenologically rich network of mental states that is involved in the directedness of conscious thoughts. When my thoughts are directed towards an object, there is a conscious experience in which

—I am present as the subject of the thought,

—an object is presented under certain aspects and not others, and

—the experience has a phenomenology.

Someone starting from this vantage point will naturally expect an "account of intentionality" to explain all of the salient aspects of such states, including their phenomenological feel and subjectivity.

Through the middle part of the century, however, discussions of intentionality interbred with discussions of the semantics of linguistic entities, with the result that many people now seem to use the word 'intentionality' or the 'directedness' of mental states to be more or less equivalent to the linguistic notions of meaning and reference. And those influenced by the view of formal semantics argued against in chapter 6 may be inclined to view both simply in terms of whatever establishes a mapping from words or thoughts to world. This notion of intentionality, unlike its predecessor, seems applicable to beliefs and desires as well as to conscious mental episodes. And it seems natural, if you use the word 'intentionality' in this way, not to view things like consciousness and subjectivity as being essential to intentionality.

9.2.3—
Broad Content, Narrow Content, Phenomenological Content

Significantly, the problem of accounting for "content" shapes up differently depending on which tradition you are starting from. In recent years, analytic philosophy has given a great deal of discussion to "broad" ver-

sus "narrow" content. But the natural construal of "content" from the phenomenological standpoint does not exactly map onto either of these. There the natural distinction is between what we might call the "intentional character" of mental states (the features that are invariant over all possible assumptions about extramental reality) and "veridicality" (hooking up to the world in a felicitous way). The notion of "content" that is a part of intentional character is neither wide nor narrow content exactly.

The basic idea behind the distinction between broad and narrow content is that at least some words and concepts depend for their semantics upon things outside of the mind. Writers like Kripke (1971) and Putnam (1975) have argued, for example, that it is part of the semantics of our notion of "water" (and likewise the word 'water') that it refer to H₂ O, and that it did so even prior to the discovery that water was H₂ O. Indeed, on this view, "water" would have referred to H₂ O even if we all believed that water was of some other molecular type. If there were beings on Twin Earth who were phenomenologically, functionally, and physically identical to us but were exposed to some other compound XYZ in the same contexts we are exposed to water, their concept "water" would mean not H₂ O but XYZ. (Of course, to make this work, you have to bracket the problems that arise from using a substance that comprises most of our body weight for the example. I suggest substituting another kind of substance if this distracts you.) A second kind of argument is raised by Burge (1979, 1986), who claims that many words, such as 'arthritis', are often used by people who do not know their full sense. According to Burge, we may use such words felicitously even without knowing their sense because we are tied into a social-linguistic network with experts who do know the sense of the words: when I say 'arthritis', I intend to refer to whatever condition it is that the experts refer to when they employ the word. "Broad" content—or perhaps the broad notion of content—is thus something that depends on mind-world relations. This kind of "externalist" view comes in two varieties: the "ecological" kind, which ties semantics to the thinker's environment through relations like causation, adaptation, learning, and selection, and the "social" kind, which embeds semantics within a social, and particularly a linguistic framework. "Narrow" content (or the narrow notion of content), by contrast, is often characterized as what is "in the head." It is often said that molecular (or functional) duplicates (quaintly called doppelgängers ) would necessarily share narrow content, though they might differ with respect to broad content due to being thrust into different social and natural environments.

From the phenomenological starting point, however, the natural distinction to make is not the distinction between broad and narrow content, but between those properties that are contained within the experience itself, regardless of the relation of the experience to extramental reality, and those properties that depend upon extramental reality as well. Thus Husserl invites the reader to perform an epoché or "bracketing" of everything that is dependent upon extramental reality in order to study intentional states as they are in their own right. And Chisholm and others resort to turns of phrase like "seeming to see a tree" or "being appeared-to-treewise" to distinguish the sense of verbs like 'see' that merely report the character of the experience from those that imply a kind of success as well. I shall mark this distinction by speaking of the notion of intentionality that implies a correspondence with extramental reality as veridical intentionality . The aspect of intentionality that does not vary with assumptions about extramental reality I shall call the intentional character of the mental.^[4] What I mean by this latter expression are those aspects of an intentional state that do not vary with variations in extramental reality. And there are two kinds of invariants here: invariants in modality and invariants in content .

Let us consider an example of an intentional state. Suppose, for example, that I experience a perceptual gestalt of a unicorn on my front lawn. That is, I have an intentional state with the intentional modality VISUAL PRESENTATION and the content [unicorn on my front lawn]. Now there are certain things that one can say about such a mental state that do not depend upon issues such as whether there really is a unicorn there (or anywhere) or what causes me to have the experience that I have. Regardless of whether there is a unicorn there (or anywhere), it remains the case (a ) that my experience has the intentional modality of VISUAL PRESENTATION (it appears to me as though there is a unicorn on my lawn), and (b ) that my experience has the content of presenting a beast of a certain form and with certain associations (it appears to me as though there is a unicorn —rather than a cat or a rock—and it appears as though it is on my lawn ). Each of these aspects of my experience has a certain phenomenology to it. There is a "what-it's-like" to having a perceptual gestalt, and it is different from what it is like to have a recollection, however vivid, or to have a desire accompanied by imagery, and so forth. Perhaps there are pathologies in which such distinctions are lost, and in some cases we may not differentiate adequately between modalities (e.g., between different strengths of conviction of belief or between imagination and perception); but in ordinary cases, we can quite simply tell

what intentional modality is at work. Imagine how much more complicated life would be if we were systematically unable to distinguish experiences that were perceptual gestalts from those that were memories!

There is likewise a "what-it's-like" for having an experience with the content [unicorn on my front lawn], and it is very different from what it is like to be presented with an experience having the content [cat on my front lawn]. To determine whether I am having a gestalt of a cat or a unicorn, I do not have to consider my behavioral dispositions or the functional relations of my state of mind to other states of mind, any more than I have to do so to identify the feeling of pain as pain.^[5] There is simply a difference in what different kinds of intentional states are like. So occurrent states have an intentional character that arguably dispositional beliefs do not have, and the notion of "content" that emerges from this perspective—which we may call phenomenological content —is a proper part of intentional character, which also involves an intentional modality as well.

It should be clear that phenomenological content is not equivalent to broad content, since the former partitions the mental in a way that is insensitive to relations to extramental reality while the latter depends essentially upon such relations.^[6] The relationship between phenomenological content and narrow content is more difficult. Narrow content is sometimes associated with the notion of "methodological solipsism" (Fodor 1980), which seems to imply slicing the intentional pie according to things that are invariant for the thinker qua thinker. (It seems hard to see how a third -person functionalist approach could merit the name of "solipsism"!) This would seem to imply in turn that narrow content is just phenomenological content. But narrow content has also become associated with characterization in terms of what is (necessarily) shared by physical or functional doppelgängers, and that seems to be different from phenomenological content. After all, it seems epistemically possible both that I do have a body and that I do not (the Cartesian demon scenario). Similarly it seems conceivable, hence logically possible, that there be a being that is my phenomenological doppelgänger but not my physical or functional doppelgänger, and vice versa. In the absence of any way of deriving a particular phenomenology from a particular physical or functional description (or vice versa), it seems to me we should assume that these notions diverge—perhaps in real cases, but certainly in counterfactual ones. I suspect and hope that talk of narrow content is really a way of getting at phenomenological content, with incorrect assumptions being made about the necessity of relationships between the

two. But for purposes of clarity, I shall treat the notion of narrow content here as though it were defined in terms of what physical or functional duplicates would necessarily share in common.

9.2.4—
The Plan of Attack

My plan of attack on naturalistic theories of content, then, is as follows. There are different issues about explaining the phenomenologically pregnant notion of directedness associated with occurrent states, on the one hand, and explaining the broad and narrow content of dispositional states like beliefs and desires, on the other. I shall argue that, if one is concerned with things like perceptions, recollections, and judgments, then explaining the directedness of these does involve one in explaining their subjectivity, perspectival character, and phenomenology, and that writers like Searle and Nagel are right in saying that these features cannot be reduced to a third-person naturalistic discourse. Moreover, no naturalistic discourse can provide necessary or sufficient conditions for the invariants distinctive of intentional character and phenomenological content. But these arguments do not transfer directly to beliefs and desires. There I shall argue not that no naturalistic theory can provide an account of content (though I happen to believe it), but merely that the likely form of any such theory, were it to emerge, would not place the explanation of meaningfulness where BCTM says it ought to be—namely, in the so-called "representations." This is fairly obvious in the case of broad content. I shall argue that it is very likely true of narrow content as well.

9.3—
Phenomenology and the Mental

Our first aim, then, is to examine phenomenological content and the phenomenologically rich properties of consciousness, perspective, aspect, and subjective "feel." In what follows, I wish to separate three major sorts of issues concerning phenomenologically typed mental states. First, we shall examine the legitimacy of the phenomenological approach: whether the phenomenological features are real , whether they are essential to intentional states (or particular kinds of intentional states), and whether they make for a viable classification of mental states. Second, we shall examine the question of whether phenomenological properties, however legitimate or real they might be, are likely to play much of a role in the formation of a scientific psychology. Finally, we shall consider

whether phenomenological properties are the sorts of things that can be strongly naturalized.

9.3.1—
The Legitimacy of the Phenomenological Approach

It is one of the strange turns of twentieth-century philosophy that the phenomenological properties that provided the epistemic bedrock of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy are now thought by many to be in need of legitimation. There are really a number of separate issues here. One important issue is that of the connection between phenomenology and science. That will be considered in a later section. In this section we shall consider the following questions:

(1) Are phenomenological properties

—real as opposed to unreal?

—observational as opposed to theoretical?

—accurately described as opposed to inaccurately described?

—fundamental as opposed to nonfundamental?

(2) Are phenomenological features such as subjectivity, perspective, and "feel" essential to the occurrent conscious states to which they attach themselves, and more particularly, are they essential to the intentionality of those states?

(3) Does the phenomenological approach provide the basis for a classification of mental states (especially a classification according to "phenomenological content")?

9.3.2—
The Reality of Phenomenological Features

First, let us consider whether phenomenological features are real features. But "real" as opposed to what? They are certainly not unreal in the sense that fictions are unreal. I suppose that it is possible that there are people who do not have the kinds of phenomenological properties that I have, or that they do not have any at all, in much the way that it appears likely that some people do not experience any mental imagery while others do so very vividly. But for those of us who do report phenomenological properties, it seems as clear as anything could be that there is a what-it's-like to, say, seeing a dog in the yard, and that it's different from the "feel" of imagining the same scene or seeing something different. Likewise, subjectivity and perspective seem to be indubitably legitimate features to

attribute to my experience. For those of us who report a phenomenology, the claim that phenomenological features fail to be real the way fictions fail to be real is clearly a nonstarter.

It is quite another matter, however, if the issue is one of whether particular claims about phenomenology, or even particular descriptions of it, are as accurate as they might be. People who complain about phenomenology are often really concerned only about claims of special access that imply incorrigibility . But this is a red herring. I do not know any major philosopher in the phenomenological camp who has claimed that phenomenology was easy, or that we could not be mistaken about it, especially at the level of abstract characterization. Husserl was continually stressing the difficulty of phenomenological description to the point of describing himself as a "perpetual beginner" at it; and contrary to the common libel, Descartes acknowledged that we could be quite mistaken about our mental states, even in such seemingly straightforward cases as pain (see Principles 1.67 [AT VIIIA.32-33]). I am not aware of anyone who seriously thought that a thoroughgoing phenomenological account could be naively "read off" from introspection of one's own experience. (Though British empiricists and common sense philosophers sometimes spoke this way.) If the existence of phenomenological features is indisputable, it is equally clear that we have no definitive word on the topography of phenomenological space, nor even firm evidence that such a definitive description might be forthcoming.

I think, however, that there is an important sense in which this implies that our talk about phenomenology is "theory-laden," but also an important sense in which phenomenological properties are not "theoretical." There is a weak sense of "theory-ladenness" which implies only that the way we describe a thing (any thing) is set against a set of background assumptions about the world and a network of interrelated concepts or words. If this kind of network theory of meaning is true of language generally, it is surely true of our language for describing our own minds as well (unless, perhaps, one embraces the kind of phenomenalist atomism that Russell espoused at one point). But there is also a stronger sense of "theory" that implies retroduction , and this has implications about the kind of epistemic access we have to a thing. An entity or property that is "theoretical" in this strong sense is one supposed to exist just because this supposition explains something else. Pluto was "theoretical" in this sense until it was observed with a telescope. Protons are still "theoretical" in this sense. But it seems clear to me that phe-

nomenological properties are almost by definition not "theoretical" in this strong sense (unless perhaps to someone who has heard about them but not experienced them, if that is indeed possible). If you experience phenomenological properties, it cannot be the case that your only access to them is inferential. You may, of course, hold some theory-laden beliefs about them (especially if you are a philosopher), just as we may still hold many theory-laden beliefs about Pluto (or, for that matter, about rocks and rabbits). But they are not retroductive in origin or warrant.

Finally, questions about the "legitimacy" of phenomenological categories are sometimes questions about whether such categories "cut nature at the joints." In particular, one might wonder if they are (a ) fundamental as opposed to derivative properties, and (b ) relevant to the systematic description of the world characteristic of science or merely epiphenomenal. Now I think that raising the question of whether phenomenological properties are fundamental is important and appropriate at some point. But it is surely a ridiculous issue to bring up early in the game as an attempt to discredit phenomenology. Cartesian physics taught that light, magnetism, and gravitation were derivative from mechanical collision. Newtonian physics treated gravitation, light, and mechanical force as separate fundamental forces. Many people objected to the Newtonian view on the grounds that it seemed to involve action at a distance. And perhaps they were right and perhaps they were wrong to do so. But no one (at least no one whom we remember) suggested that the irreducibility of gravitation to contact interactions would undercut the legitimacy of the phenomenon (as opposed to the theory) of gravitation. To do so would have been sheer madness, not to mention bad scientific practice. Science aims at being systematic and universal, but it does so by integrating discourses that are initially local and particular. If we should arrive at a unified field theory in physics, it will be because we first had serious theories of mechanics, gravitation, electromagnetism, and strong and weak force. We reduced chemistry to physics because we first had a serious chemistry. Likewise, if phenomenology is reducible to something else, the only way we will discover this is by taking phenomenological properties seriously in their own right, and this means countenancing the possibility that they might be fundamental in the sense of not being derivable from nonphenomenological properties. A posteriori arguments on this subject are for the endgame, not the outset. I have never heard a vaguely plausible a priori argument to the effect that mental properties must not be fundamental.

9.3.3—
Is Phenomenology Essential to Some Mental States?

Next, let us consider whether phenomenological properties are essential to certain kinds of intentional states. Questions of essentiality are always difficult, but we might approach the issue by considering some examples of conscious mental episodes and then ask whether they could remain the same kind of episode if deprived of their phenomenology. Consider first a simple kind of perceptual experience, such as having a perceptual experience of a square, where the expression 'perceptual experience of a square' is interpreted in that distinctively intentionalistic way that does not imply a relation to an actual square. Of course, one never simply has perceptual experiences; they are always perceptual experiences in some particular modality—a tactile experience, say, or a visual experience. So let us say the experience in question is one of VISUAL PRESENTATION [square]. Normally, such an experience has a particular kind of phenomenology, both in terms of its qualitative elements (not just any configuration of qualia can be constituted as a square) and its conceptual ones (squares have a different "feel" from circles or triangles).^[7] Normally, such experiences have very complicated relations to environmental and behavioral counterfactuals as well. Our natural-language attributions tend to be based on assumptions about such normal cases. But suppose that a being were to have states that were very similar to ours in its relations to the environment and behavior, but a radically different phenomenology or no phenomenology at all. We might well say that it was in some kind of perceptual state, but would we want to say that that state was VISUAL PRESENTATION ? The answer, I think, is not easy.

Consider first that we can ourselves have perceptions of the same things, and behave in similar ways, on the basis of several perceptual modalities. We can feel squares as well as see them, and blind humans can form most of the same concepts and negotiate most of the same environments as sighted humans. It is just that none of their perceptual states is visual in nature. The same goes for echolocation in bats: presumably, echolocation plays a very similar role in bat navigation that sight plays in human navigation, but it is a different modality and presumably has a different phenomenology.

But to make the point more clearly, Sur, Garraghty, and Roe (1988) performed experiments with ferrets in which the optic nerve was severed and reconnected to nonvisual tissue in the brain. The ferrets were able to respond to visual stimuli in a striking display of equipotentiality. Sup-

pose that the same thing could be done with human beings: the evil Dr. No rewires your nervous system so that your optical signals do not go to the visual cortex, but somewhere else. Now the human brain is probably significantly more specialized than are ferret brains, which lessens the probability that the special-purpose functions of the human visual cortex could be duplicated by other tissue; but it is at least worth entertaining the possibility (a ) that visual stimuli would produce, say, auditory qualia, and (b ) that you could be conditioned to distinguish some kinds of objects on the basis of these stimuli, thus forming a new kind of perceptual gestalt. Your experience might have the content [square], but would be accompanied by acoustical rather than visual qualia. Now ordinary language might well describe such an experience as "hearing shapes" or the like, but a more sober assessment would probably be that the victim of such rewiring was in fact experiencing a new kind of perceptual experience. Even if the process could be done so seamlessly that the patient could respond to the full panoply of visual stimuli that normal humans do with the same range of behaviors, I think most of us should be loath to call his experiences VISUAL PRESENTATION , precisely because of the differences in qualia. Indeed, even if someone's brain were wired like a normal human brain, I should be disinclined to call his states VISUAL PRESENTATIONS if I somehow came to believe that their phenomenology was acoustical.

Likewise with other intentional states. Suppose I have a recollection of my first day at college. This may or may not be accompanied with visual or auditory imagery; but in order to be a RECOLLECTION it must be presented as something that happened to me in the past . This is really a bit tricky, though. It is possible to become so engaged in memories, imagination, and particularly dreams that one mistakes them for current experiences. However, it is important to distinguish two different issues here. Sometimes, calling something a "memory" reports its causal history. Memories are experiences whose contents are dredged up out of previous experiences, whereas, say, perceptions are caused by one's environment. Thus the distinction between memory and perception can be a distinction of the source of the experience. But one might also use the same words to mark a distinction in the kind of experience involved: that is, a difference in intentional character —and more specifically in modality. In the ordinary cases, experiences that are dredged up from memory have the modality of RECOLLECTION and those caused by our environments have the modality of PERCEPTUAL PRESENTATION . In pathological cases and in dreams, however, this need not be so. We may take an image

from memory in a dream and have it presented under the modality of PERCEPTUAL PRESENTATION . (That is, we mistakenly believe that we are having veridical perceptions when in fact we are replaying old imagery under the modality of PERCEPTUAL PRESENTATION .) Likewise it is possible for imagination to cause states with the modality of PERCEPTUAL PRESENTATION . And of course it is possible to have states of RECOLLECTION that are false memories, or episodes presented as FREE FANCY that are in fact images that are remembered, and so on. So when I say that, say, states of recollection have a distinctive phenomenology, I mean precisely that states that present themselves as recollections do so, and not that states that in fact draw upon memory share a phenomenology.

The same may be said for many other intentional states. Some, for example, have a particular emotional phenomenology. I cannot experience remorse about some action of mine, for example, without having certain experiences, regardless of how I act. A sociopath might fake remorse even if he cannot feel it. Likewise, I cannot feel remorse over an action unless I represent it as my action, and so on. The point here is that if we take away the experiential character of such states, or change it too drastically, we are no longer left with the same kind of state. Let me hasten to caution the reader, however, about several things that are not implied by this.

(1) The phenomenological properties of such states need not be noticed or attended to . One can, for example, see features of a scene that one does not actively notice . One sign of this is the ability to notice later things about a previous experience that were not noticed at the time. One notices a square and later realizes that it was set against a lighter background.

(2) Not all psychological distinctions need be reflected in phenomenological distinctions. It is not clear, for example, that different kinds of judgment—judgment with certainty, conjecture, scientific hypothesis—are distinguishable by phenomenological features for everyone.

(3) Phenomenological typing need not be the only valid typing of psychological states, and states that differ with respect to phenomenology may be grouped together under a different typing. For example, there are undoubtedly typings that group together psychological mechanisms we share with other species regardless of whether animals are experiencing subjects. There is nothing particularly out of the ordinary for two objects or events to share one typing and diverge with respect to another, nor for two divergent typings each to be useful for a different kind of inquiry.

9.3.4—
Does Phenomenology Yield a Classification of the Mental?

There are really a variety of questions here. It certainly seems true that at a certain level of granularity of description, our natural distinctions between conscious mental states (e.g., between judgments and perceptual gestalts and imaginings) are accompanied by corresponding phenomenological differences. Likewise, it seems clear that we are in a significantly different epistemic position with respect to states that have a phenomenology and those that do not, such as beliefs and desires. If the latter are truly dispositional in nature, there is arguably a significant ontological difference there as well. It is far less clear that all meaningful psychological distinctions, even between states that have a phenomenology, are reflected in phenomenological differences. For the ordinary language classification of mental states is likely to prove as much a mixed bag of phenomenological, behavioral, and theoretical features as is the ordinary language classification of speech acts, which includes lots of cognitive, social, and emotional features as well as distinctions in illocutionary force. The project of taxonomizing speech act verbs turned out to be a mare's nest because of this (see Austin 1962, McCawley 1973, Vendler 1972, Fraser 1981, Bach and Harnish 1979, and Searle 1969 and 1971), and the same may hold true of the commonsense list of mental states. The difference between, say, speculating and hypothesizing may not consist in something that has a phenomenology, but upon something like our social conventions about kinds of thinking.

The really vital question for our purposes, however, concerns the typing of intentional attitudes and contents according to experiential invariants. Now, whatever experiential invariants there are, it seems clear that they will yield some partition of possible worlds: for example, between those in which I (or my counterpart) have exactly the same phenomenological properties that I actually have and all the rest. The issue is not whether phenomenology yields some classification, but whether the classification it yields is a good one. But good for what? It is certainly a good one for describing the mental from a first-person viewpoint. (What kind of classification could be better for that?) And if you think that phenomenology is crucial to the mental, this is itself good reason for liking this classification. But there is also another reason for liking it: it seems really crucial to all the other ways we have of classifying the mental.

It seems to me that all of the talk about "functional classification of

the mental" is deeply misleading at best. People speak of functional classification of intentional modalities and even of contents. But you never see such a characterization produced. I think this is quite ironic, as one of the stock arguments against the behaviorists turns upon exactly the same inability actually to produce a single definition of the sort their theory depends upon. When characterizing intentional modalities, rather, writers like Fodor appeal to the kind of mental state we are in when we think, as it were, "Lo! a horse!" But this is clearly an appeal to something on the model of a conscious occurrent state. We all know what kind of mental state is meant, but only because we associate the description with a kind of state we have experienced. It might be the case that an ideal psychology could produce a psychological Turing table from which one could derive characterizations of each kind of mental state holding the rest as constant. But this is surely not how we actually go about classifying the mental—probably not even in the case of beliefs and desires, and certainly not in the case of perceptual gestalts and judgments and imaginings. Rather, phenomenology gives us at least a rough initial classification to start with, and we test this against observations of people's behavior and try to systematize and refine it through rigorous modeling (including computer modeling). It is not as though the "functional classification" of the mind implied by some discussions of narrow content was carried out in isolation from a phenomenologically based starting point. (Indeed, it is not as though such a classification has ever actually been carried out at all—a point that is missed with shocking regularity.) Any functional classification of the mental there might be is a distillation of a classification that started out in phenomenology—and which, I shall argue in the next section, must answer to phenomenology as well. The notion of "narrow content" is really a kind of theory-laden abstraction from phenomenological content. (And, I expect, the functional notion of belief is ultimately a theory-laden abstraction from conscious judgments as well.)

As for broad content, that certainly goes beyond what is present, strictly speaking, in phenomenology (that is, in intentional character). But, first, it contains implications of intentional character: a veridical perception is, among other things, a perceptual gestalt. And, second, it seems to me that writers like Husserl have been correct in saying that intentional states in some sense carry with them their own "conditions of satisfaction." Having a veridical perception of a dog requires us to be in the right causal relationship with a dog. Why? Because that is built into the notion of the intentional modality of PERCEPTUAL PRESENTION . This

is no great empirical discovery. It is simply an explication of what is implicit in the phenomenology of this particular intentional modality. Likewise, if the broad content of "water" is fixed by something in the environment, it is because the intentional character of the state implies that it should be so. So in short it seems to me that it is simply bootless to deride phenomenological classification in favor of some other kind of classification, since the other kinds of classification that have been proposed turn out to depend heavily upon our prior phenomenological understanding.

9.4—
Phenomenology and Scientific Psychology

As often as not, those who minimize the role of phenomenological properties (or, for that matter, of the mental in general) do so not so much as a rejection of the reality of such properties or of their utility in commonsense predictions as they do as a rejection of the idea that such properties will play a role in an explanatory science of psychology. Of course, it is not uncommon on the current scene for a concept's inclusion in the theoretical vocabulary of a science to be held up as a standard of its ontological legitimacy—a view I shall argue against in chapter 11—but really that is a stronger position than one need take here. It is enough for the moment to say that phenomenological properties, albeit real, are not the sorts of properties that enter into causal-nomological relations (except perhaps insofar as they are reliably produced as epiphenomena of brain events), and that phenomenological typing will correspond to the typing of a mature psychology accidentally if at all.

I think that there are certain things that are right about this view, but many more that are mistaken. On the one hand, it is surely right that there are large domains of psychology that cannot be explained in terms of conscious mental states at all, much less in terms of their phenomenological features. While perception eventuates in conscious states with a phenomenology, the processes that produce this product are almost entirely infraconscious. Likewise memory and imagination have conscious products, but also involve mechanisms that must be of an entirely different sort. And while there are conscious processes of reasoning, association, and inference, there are also nonconscious processes that go by the same names—and even the conscious ones must have their own nonconscious mechanisms which support them. So if the issue is one of whether conscious states with a phenomenology can provide the bulk of

[Full Size]

Figure 13.
From Gaetano Kanizsa,
"Subjective Contours,"
Scientific American 234
(April 1976): 51.
Copyright © 1976 by
Scientific American, Inc.
All rights reserved.

the explanatory resources needed by psychology, the answer is surely no .

On the other hand, there are clearly some kinds of explanation that do call for appeal to states with a phenomenology. Notably, when we ask why a person spoke or acted in the manner that she did, we will often appeal not just to dispositional beliefs and desires, but to conscious judgments and perceptions—and in particular, we will appeal to the phenomenological content of her judgments and perceptions. Why did Jane pick up the flyswatter? Because the thing flying around looked like a fly to her . Note that questions of broad content are irrelevant here—the explanation is unaffected if all of Jane's fly-gestalts were caused by midges. Likewise narrow content, if defined in purely functional-causal terms, does us no good here: it won't do to say that Jane picked up the flyswatter because she was in the kind of mental state caused by flies and resulting in flyswatter grabbing behavior.

Perhaps even more clearly, we need to appeal to phenomenological content to explain why people behave the way they do in the case of optical illusions like subjective contour figures, in which the subject "sees" a figure that is "not really there" in the sense that there is no objective reflectance gradient that makes up a figure of the type that is seen. For example, a subject seeing the Kanizsa square (fig. 13) will report seeing a light square against a slightly darker background, and will experience borders making up the edges of the square, even though there is no reflectance gradient to be found in those positions in the stimulus (see Kanizsa 1976 and 1979). Now suppose we ask our subject to respond in one way when she sees a square and another way when she sees a figure that is not a square. When presented with the Kanizsa square, she behaves as though presented with a square. How are we to explain this? What unites the cases of being presented with an actual square with the

cases of being presented with the Kanizsa square, and hence unites the behaviors involved? I submit that it is precisely that they share a certain phenomenology—namely, the phenomenology of experiences having the intentional character of VISUAL PRESENTATION [light square against darker background].

In short, it seems to me that, whenever it is necessary to appeal to conscious states like judgments or perceptions to explain behavior, it will very likely be a typing according to phenomenological content that will be relevant. Now whether typing by phenomenological content will produce the kinds of regularities needed for something systematic enough to count as a nomological science is still to be determined (as is the distinct yet related question of whether we could catch such regularities if they were there). But it does seem plausible that at least some such explanations will resort to phenomenological typing.

But there is another connection between phenomenology and scientific psychology that is, to my mind, far more important. If phenomenological properties make up a relatively small portion of the explanatory apparatus of psychology, they comprise a significantly larger portion of the phenomena that a scientific psychology needs to explain . That is, they make up much of the data of psychology. I think that the case can be made most forcefully here in the case of the relationship between psychophysics and theoretical work in perception. Psychophysics, which is viewed by many as the one area of psychology that has already attained some of the benchmarks of scientific maturity, is largely concerned with the measurement of relationships between stimuli and the percepts that they produce. The properties of the stimuli to be studied include things such as the objective intensity of the stimulus and the spatial and temporal patterns of intensity in stimuli. Percepts, however, are experiences—they are phenomenological in character. They involve properties like how intense a stimulus seems or whether one seems more intense than another, or the way the percept is organized into a perceptual gestalt. I shall discuss two well-known experimental results from the psychophysical literature and show how phenomenology is essential to psychophysics.

First, consider the Weber laws that describe the relationship between stimulus intensity and percept intensity in terms of a logarithmic law (Fechner 1882), or, in alternative versions, a power law (Stevens 1951, 1975). Here the relata are an absolute property of a stimulus (say, its luminance) and the subjective property of a percept (the word 'brightness' is often used in contrast with 'luminance' for this subjective property).

Now, first of all, it seems just inescapable here that the phenomenon we are after involves a phenomenological property. Take away the property of perceived brightness and there is no Weber law left. Second, it seems equally clear that the kind of description of human perception that the Weber law presents is exactly the sort of thing that we should require of our theories of perception. A model of perception that does not obey the Weber law or that does not produce the optical illusions that humans experience is, to that extent at least, a bad (or at least an incomplete) model (see Todorovic^[*] 1987). Qualitative phenomenology is essential to psychophysical data such as the Weber law and provides much of the data for theories of vision and other perceptual modalities.

The same can be said for phenomena involving at least simple forms of intentionality. Consider again the Kanizsa square. Here the psychophysical data show that there is a certain class of conditions under which we "see" something that "is not there"—in this case, we perceive a square where there is no square and perceive it as brighter than its background when in fact the "interior" of the "square" and its "background" are actually equal in luminance. This kind of mismatch between the "objective" features of the stimulus and the "subjective" features of the percept tends to be what makes a given stimulus-percept pair an "effect" and renders it of particular psychological interest. (You can't make your reputation in experimental psychology by finding that people see squares when they are presented with squares; if they see squares when presented with circles, you get to have an effect with your name in front of it.) And the ability to reproduce such effects is precisely the sort of thing that can be used to test the adequacy of a particular model of how perception works in human beings. Again, our data involve a relationship (a mismatch) between an objective property of luminance distribution and a phenomenological property of seeing a particular kind of figure. Take away the phenomenology and there is no effect. Take away the effects and there is no psychophysics. Take away the psychophysics and there is nothing for theoretical psychology of perception to explain.

Unlike the Weber law, moreover, subjective contour features involve at least a primitive form of intentionality. The subject does not merely experience more and less intense qualia—she constitutes them as a figure of a particular kind and shape and constitutes the figure as being in a particular relationship to its background. Moreover, this kind of illusion vividly illustrates what Chisholm has cited as the cardinal property of intentionality and intentional objects: the subject can "see" a square when there is no square there to be seen.

I think that some other phenomenological properties likewise provide data that set tasks for psychological theories. It seems clear, for example, that the object-directed character of intentional states is something that needs to be mirrored in any successful theory. (It has surely motivated much work in artificial intelligence.) Likewise the perspectival character of conscious experiences: a theory of thinking must do more than provide for the fact that we think about objects; it must provide for the fact that we think about them under particular aspects and from particular points of view. It must, for example, account for the fact that we can infer the hidden edges of familiar three-dimensional objects, or move between different things we know about an object we are viewing without keeping all of its known properties before the mind's eye at once. The ultimate source of our knowledge that thought has these properties is phenomenological, and so once again phenomenology sets constraints on the form of a scientific psychology.

9.5—
Why Phenomenology Cannot Be Naturalized

A number of kinds of arguments have been offered over the years to the effect that some one or more features of the mental cannot be naturalized—features such as subjectivity, the what-it's-like of experience, the first-person perspective, and consciousness. I shall examine some variations on arguments of this sort in this section, as well as adding one of my own at the end.

9.5.1—
The Argument from Epistemic Possibility (Cartesian Demons Revisited)

The kinds of epistemological issues involved in old-style thought experiments involving Cartesian demons stem from the phenomenological perspective on content. The Cartesian demon experiment is, if nothing else, a marvelous tool for driving a wedge between the intentional character of my mental states and all questions of their veridicality. As Descartes points out, I can be mistaken about the causes of my experiences and about whether they correspond to extramental reality, but I cannot be mistaken in the same way about what kind of ideas I am experiencing.^[8] I can be sure that I am experiencing a particular kind of perceptual gestalt, but I cannot be similarly sure, for instance, that there is indeed a cat before me.

Thought experiments involving such exotica as brains in vats and Cartesian demons do not enjoy the popularity that once they enjoyed. There are no doubt a number of factors contributing to their decline. One would probably be the shift away from epistemological interests in the philosophy of mind. Another would be a shift in interest from providing accounts involving logically necessary and sufficient conditions to finding accounts that are empirically adequate. Considerations of necessity and sufficiency do seem to be in order with accounts that purport to provide a strong naturalization, though. If mental-semantic properties are to supervene upon naturalistic properties, those naturalistic properties must provide sufficient conditions for them. And if the resulting account is to be an account of the nature or essence of mental-semantics or intentionality, it had best be necessary as well: if an object could have a property A while lacking B , then B cannot be essential to A .

Now I think that some of the traditional thought experiments are well suited to showing that naturalistic properties are neither necessary nor sufficient for intentionality or mental-semantics. Let us begin with necessity. The notions of supervenience and of instantiation analyses themselves claim nothing about the necessity of the conditions they provide. If A supervenes upon B , it does not follow that B is a necessary condition for A ; and if A is given an instantiation analysis in terms of B , it similarly does not follow that B is a necessary condition for A . But this is in some ways very misleading. When people say that the supervenience of A upon B does not involve a necessary relation from A to B , what they tend to be concerned with is the lower-order physical properties through which a mental property is realized—with the fact that it does not matter whether the underlying structure is wetware or hardware or whatever. But when people try to give a naturalistic account of intentionality, they tend not to be specifying the instantiating system at that low a level, but in terms of notions such as causal covariation, adaptational role, or information content. These notions form an intermediate level of explanation that is neutral as to underlying structure. And theorists who propose such theories generally do take it that the conditions they articulate at these intermediate levels are necessary conditions for intentionality and mental-semantics. Millikan, for example, is quite clear about this: a being that does not share our adaptational history not only does not share our particular beliefs, it does not have beliefs at all! Similarly strong views might be imputed to causal covariation theorists. In Fodor's account, it is a necessary condition for a representation of type MR to mean "P " that MR 's are sometimes caused by P 's. Similarly, with

Dretske's account, a representation cannot mean "P " if its type was never caused by a P in the learning period. So while the language of supervenience and token physicalism suggests that naturalistic explanations do not provide necessary conditions, this is belied by actual practice of theorists. Either accounts in terms of causal covariance and adaptational role are not naturalistic accounts, or the best-known contemporary naturalistic accounts of intentionality involve a commitment to providing necessary conditions . And this seems quite appropriate in a way, since such theorists claim to provide accounts of the nature or essence of mental-semantics and intentionality.

This being said, I think that there is good reason to believe that naturalistic accounts of these sorts do not succeed in providing necessary conditions, for reasons that may be developed by way of some familiar sorts of thought experiments. Consider the Cartesian scenario of a being that has experiences just like ours, not because he is in fact coming into contact with elm trees and woodchucks, but because he is being systematically deceived by a malicious demon. Such a scenario is clearly imaginable, since one cannot reach Cartesian certainty that it is not in fact an accurate description of one's own case. (There is, after all, no experiment one can perform to determine whether one's experiences are veridical or systematically misleading.) And there seems little reason to deny that such a scenario is logically possible. Now a being in such a state would be in many of the same sorts of intentional states that we are in-that is, states with the same attitude and the same phenomenological content. (Whether you have perceptual gestalts or recollections, after all, does not depend on whether you turn out to be the victim of a Cartesian demon.) But it would not share most of our naturalistic properties. In particular, the intentional states it has would not be hooked up to the world in the ways called for by a respectable naturalistic psychology. Thoughts about dogs are not caused by dogs, nor are beliefs about elm trees caused by elm trees, and the being may not even have the ancestors requisite for an adaptational history. All of his beliefs are demon-caused (although they are not about demons).

Here we have an example of a being that has meaningful intentional states but does not share the naturalistic descriptions that apply to us. A fortiori, it is possible for a being to be in a state with a mental-semantic property M while lacking naturalistic property N . Therefore N cannot be a necessary condition for M . Therefore naturalistic properties cannot be necessary conditions for mental-semantic properties.

It remains to consider sufficiency. In order for there to be an instan-

tiation analysis of some mental-semantic property M in terms of some naturalistic property N , it must be the case that N is sufficient for M . Indeed, it must be the case that someone who had an adequate understanding of N would be able to infer M from N . So if there can be cases of an entity possessing N but lacking M, N is not a sufficient condition for M , and hence one cannot have an instantiation analysis of M in terms of N .

Let us now bring some modal intuitions into play. It seems to be imaginable, and hence plausibly metaphysically possible, that there might be beings who were completely like us in physical structure and in behavioral manifestations, yet lacked the kind of interiority, or first-person perspective, that we have. When one stubs her toe, she says "Ouch!" and withdraws her foot, but she has no experience of pain. When one is asked to comment upon Shakespeare, she utters things that sound every bit as intelligent as what a randomly selected human being might say, but she never has any mental experiences of pondering a question or hitting upon an insight. If one could come up with a talented telepath, the telepath would deliver the verdict that nothing mental is going on inside this being. These beings, by stipulation, share all of our natural properties, yet they do not enter into any of the paradigm examples of mental states. Hence naturalistic properties do not provide sufficient conditions for intentional states, either.

9.5.2—
An Objection: Metaphysical and "Nomological" Sufficiency

One concern I can expect this argument to raise would be that people interested in supervenience accounts tend to view the kind of sufficiency involved not as logical or metaphysical sufficiency, as I have assumed, but as something called "nomological sufficiency." I must confess to some puzzlement about what is meant by "nomological sufficiency." It must mean something more than material sufficiency, since materially sufficient conditions may be completely unrelated to what they are conditions for. If the tallest man who ever lived was in fact married to the first woman to climb Everest, and was her only husband, then being married to the first woman to climb Everest is materially sufficient for being the tallest man who ever lived. But surely nomological sufficiency amounts to more than this. Perhaps nomological sufficiency amounts to something like "material sufficiency in all possible worlds that have the same natural laws as the actual world." But, according to the thought

experiment above, the world described is like the actual world in all physical laws. If these assured that the psychophysical relationships must be the same the way fixing your statistical mechanics fixes your thermodynamics, we should be able to derive this fact the way we can do so in the case of thermodynamics. But this seems plainly to be impossible. It seems, then, that naturalistic conditions would not be nomologically sufficient for intentionality either. But perhaps nomological sufficiency does not apply to all worlds with natural laws like our own, but only ones specified by a certain counterfactual. But which counterfactual? And how do we know that a world like the one described above does not fall within the scope of it? Indeed, how does one know that the actual world meets the desired criterion? But perhaps nomological sufficiency is material sufficiency in all worlds sharing psycho physical laws with the actual world. This stipulation, however, would be inadmissible for two reasons. First, this violates the condition of strong naturalism that the relation be metaphysically necessary and epistemically transparent. Second, we do not know that the naturalistic criteria are met in the actual world.

Finally, let us be quite clear about separating the question of logical possibility from the question of warranted belief. No one is claiming that it is reasonable to believe that one is, for example, in the clutches of a Cartesian demon. And while some people do claim that there are nonmaterial thinking beings, their use in this kind of example is not based upon the likelihood of their existence, but upon their possibility. If one has an account of what it is to be in a meaningful mental state, it had better apply to all possible beings that could have such mental states. Regardless of the likelihood of Cartesian demons or nonembodied spirits, if they are possible, then an account of the nature of intentionality had best apply to them too.

9.5.3—
The Phenomenological "What-It's-Like"

A number of writers have argued that at least some mental states (the conscious ones) have an experiential quality for the subject of the experience that is not captured in any third-person "objective" characterizations. This point now seems widely accepted with respect to qualitative states such as pain: even if we know that C-fiber firings are the physiological basis of pain, a complete knowledge of the neurology of C-fiber firings could not yield an understanding of what pain feels like . To know what pain feels like, you have to feel it. And likewise for other qualia: a blind person who knows state-of-the-art theory in electro-

magnetism, optics, and the physiology of vision will not thereby gain a knowledge of how magenta looks, and so on (see Jackson 1982). Thomas Nagel has developed this point famously in an article entitled "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), in which he points out that a sensory modality like echolocation would, like vision, have its own phenomenology; and lacking this faculty, we cannot imagine what it would be like to have it.

While many writers in philosophy of mind acknowledge that there is a problem for naturalistic theories in trying to explain qualia, it is less often recognized that there is a similar problem for intentional states, which also have a phenomenology. Take perceptual experiences, like seeing a dog in the yard. There is a what-it's-like to seeing a dog in the yard, and it is different from what it's like to see a pine tree in the yard (change of content) and from what it's like to imagine a dog in the yard (change of intentional modality). And the differences here are not just differences in qualia. Suppose you are at the wax museum. You turn the corner and see a familiar face and say, "My gosh! That's Bill Clinton!" You have an intentional state of the form: VISUAL PRESENTATION [Bill Clinton]. But then you remember where you are and correct yourself. "Oh," you say, "that's just a wax replica of Bill Clinton! Boy am I a dope!" Your intentional state changes from VISUAL PRESENTATION [Bill Clinton] to VISUAL PRESENTATION [wax statue of Bill Clinton]. The qualia have not changed; it is just the content of the gestalt that has changed. But part of that gestalt is conceptual, and that conceptual part has a phenomenology. The difference between having an experience of seeing Bill Clinton and that of seeing a replica of Bill Clinton is not just a functional difference in how they relate to behavior and other mental states—they are different as experiences as well. Likewise in perceptual illusions like the Necker cube and the faces-vase illusion: the qualia remain the same while the interpretation changes; but clearly there is a difference in what it is like to see the faces and what it is like to see the vase.

The same point can be made with Nagel's bat. Perceptual modalities are among the sorts of things that have a phenomenology. But this phenomenology is not confined to individual qualia. There are ways of constituting things as objects in visual perception, in touch, in hearing; and in perception one situates oneself relative to the objects one constitutes as being in one's presence. A person lacking one of the sensory modalities is indeed unable to understand the qualia associated with that modality; but she is also unable to understand what it is like to constitute ob-

jects under that modality. For example, there are people blind from birth who have had operations that restore the integrity of the visual pathway and who, as a consequence, suddenly experience visual qualia. Many such people are already competent at identifying objects and persons by sound and touch, but this ability does not translate to the formation of visual gestalts. The person with restored visual pathways suddenly knows what visual qualia are like, but not visual perceptions . (In fact, they tend to feel quite disoriented by vivid but uninterpretable visual qualia.) Perception is characterized by a particular kind of intentional as opposed to qualitative experience that essentially involves constituting something as an object. Object experiences involving a sensory modality involve object-constituting operations that are modality-specific. Presumably the same would hold true with echolocation. We could perhaps build prosthetic devices that would duplicate the function of the bat's vocal cords and ears and surgically connect their output to some portion of the human brain. Perhaps the subject would even experience some new qualia. But this in itself would not add up to echolocation until there were also experiences corresponding to the conceptual representation of objects under particular aspects within this sensory modality. To know what it is like to be a bat, it is not enough to know what it is like to have the bat's qualia; we would also have to have the bat's experiences of constituting objects on the basis of those qualia as well.

Nagel and others urge upon us the idea that the what-it's-like of experiences cannot be accounted for in nonexperiential terms. In some cases, the argument appears to be an epistemic one: Jackson (1982), for example, appears to argue as follows:

(1) A person could know the neurophysiology of a mental state but fail to know what mental state it was.

(2) If you can give an account of P in terms of Q , then an adequate knowledge of Q should let you know you were dealing with P .

\ (3) You cannot give an account of mental states in terms of their neurophysiology.

Searle and Nagel, however, claim that their point is metaphysical as well: namely, that the phenomenological what-it's-like is a property of conscious mental states. Searle points out, for example, that some things have a what-it-feels-like while others do not, and argues further that the unit-

ing feature for those that do is consciousness:

The discussion of intentionality naturally leads into the subjective feel of our conscious states. . . . Suffice it to say here that the subjectivity necessarily involves the what-it-feels-like aspect of conscious states. So, for example, I can reasonably wonder what it feels like to be a dolphin and swim around all day, frolicking in the ocean, because I assume dolphins have conscious experiences. But I cannot in that sense wonder what it feels like to be a shingle nailed to a roof year in and year out, because in the sense in which we are using the expression, there isn't anything at all that it feels like to be a shingle, because shingles are not conscious. (Searle 1992: 131-132)

In a sense, though, the real crux of the matter is neither purely epistemological nor purely metaphysical: the real issue is whether you can give an account of the experiential what-it's-like in third-person naturalistic terms. If the kind of "account" you want is a strong naturalization, you need logical sufficiency and conceptual adequacy. And it does not look as though you are going to get either of those things. A person who did not have a commonsense notion of heat could still derive thermodynamic laws from the mechanics of particle collisions. But a person who did not know what a visual gestalt was like could not derive that from a knowledge of optics and the physiology of vision, or indeed from any list of sciences you might give. The sciences as we know them just do not seem to have the right conceptual resources to generate the necessary concepts. To be sure, the physiology of vision can explain why our phenomenological color space has some of the properties it has. (Given contingent relations between particular qualia and particular bodily states, it can explain why certain forms of color blindness occur, how color perception is affected by saturated lighting, why particular optical illusions occur and not others, etc.) Likewise, an account of the visual cascade through the visual cortex may explain why we can detect certain primitive shapes and not others and why we are subject to certain illusions. And they will hopefully tell us what brain processes are involved in the very experiences we describe in phenomenological terms. What they do not seem to have the resources to do is explain the phenomenological "feel" of those experiences. It is, of course, risky to make arguments about what cannot be done. On the other hand, it seems clear at this point that any assurance that we can derive phenomenology from neuroscience the way we can derive thermodynamics from statistical mechanics places a great deal of nonempirically based faith in the idea that

a particular paradigm of explanation can be applied universally. This kind of naturalism seems to be more ideology than well-argued position.

9.5.4—
Perspective, Subjectivity, and the Logical Resources of Natural Science

Next, let us consider two other features of intentional states that some writers think render them insusceptible to naturalization. First, Searle points out that intentional states are perspectival in character:

My conscious experiences, unlike the objects of the experiences, are always perspectival. They are always from a point of view. But the objects themselves have no point of view. . . . Noticing the perspectival character of conscious experience is a good way to remind ourselves that all intentionality is aspectual . Seeing an object from a point of view, for example, is seeing it under certain aspects and not others. . . . Every intentional state has what I call an aspectual shape . (Searle 1992: 131)

Second, an experience always involves a first-person perspective. And that first-person perspective is one of the identity conditions for the experience. You can have an experience just like mine, but you cannot have my experience. Even if you were a telepath or empath like the ones depicted in science fiction stories, you would not be experiencing my thoughts and emotions, but reproducing them in your own mind under some intentional modality distinctive to telepaths or empaths. Or, as Searle puts it, "For it to be a pain, it must be somebody's pain; and this in a much stronger sense than the sense in which a leg must be somebody's leg, for example. Leg transplants are possible; in that sense, pain transplants are not" (ibid., 94).

Here again it is possible to interpret the case in epistemic or in metaphysical terms. But here again I think the real issue lies in the possibility of explaining subjectivity and aspectual shape in third-person, "objective," naturalistic terms. And there is a weaker and a stronger variation of the case against naturalization here. First the weaker one. The project of explaining intentionality in naturalistic terms is one of uniting two bodies of discourse—the languages of two sciences, if you will. (Or, if you do not think discourse about experience is scientific, a science and a nonscience.) Let us call the language of our naturalistic discourse N and that of our phenomenological psychology P . The question is, does N have the right kind of conceptual resources for us to derive P from N

in the way, say, that we derive thermodynamics from statistical mechanics, or perhaps even the way we "derive" arithmetic from set-theoretic constructions? And there are features of aspectual shape and subjectivity that give us reason to suppose that the answer may well be no .

The reason subjectivity and aspectual shape pose problems for the would-be naturalizer is that a discourse that encompasses subjectivity and aspectual shape would seem to require logical features that do not seem to be present in the languages used for the natural sciences. This, I think, is what Searle is after when he says that "the world itself has no point of view, but my access to the world through my conscious states is always perspectival, always from my point of view" (Searle 1992: 94-95) and "my conscious experiences, unlike the objects of the experiences, are always perspectival. They are always from a point of view. But the objects themselves have no point of view" (ibid., 131). But if Searle is right about the basic issue here, he is wrong about the specific form it takes with respect to aspectual shape. It is true of course that objects themselves are nonperspectival; but it is also true that all of the sciences do represent objects under particular aspects: say, as bodies having a mass or as living beings. The problem is not in getting a perspective into our discourse, but with the fact that discourse about mental states requires that we build a second layer of perspective into that discourse: to attribute an intentional state to someone is not merely for us to represent an object under an aspect, but to represent a person as representing an object under an aspect. And it is not at all clear that the resources for this are present in the kind of discourse found in the natural sciences.

Likewise with subjectivity. The special problem here is that, in order to talk about my experience as experience, I have to talk about it as essentially mine, as experienced from a first-person perspective. And this seems to require a language that has resources for expressing first-person as well as third-person statements. But the languages of the natural sciences arguably lack such resources. As Nagel argues, a complete description of the world in third-person terms, including the person I happen to be, seems to leave out one crucial kind of fact: the fact that that person is me . I interpret Nagel to mean by this that third-person discourse, even third-person psychological discourse, lacks a way of linking itself into the first-person discourse that is vital to our description of our mental lives.

This seems to me to be a powerful objection to the project of strong naturalization. If the kinds of discourse employed in the natural sciences lack the logical and conceptual resources to generate the kind of discourse

needed to talk about subjectivity and aspectual shape, then these features of our mental lives cannot be strongly naturalized. And if these features are part and parcel of the phenomenon we call "intentionality," then intentionality cannot be strongly naturalized either.

9.5.5—
The Objective Self and the Transcendental Ego

An even more radical variation on the same sort of claim is, I think, to be found in the writings of Kant, Husserl, and Wittgenstein. These writers seem to note that every intentional thought requires an analysis that involves at least three features: (1) a thinker (the "transcendental ego"), (2) a content (meaning, or Sinn ), and (3) an object aimed at (the "intentional object"). However, it is important to note—as Kant, Wittgenstein, and Husserl do and many other writers do not—that these "features" in the analysis of intentional states do not function in experience as three things, but as aspects or features of a seamless unity . Wittgenstein expresses this as follows in the Tractatus:

Husserl similarly speaks of intentional experience as a unity encompassing subject, meaning, and object. He writes that

the experiencing Ego is still nothing that might be taken for itself and made into an object of inquiry on its own account. Apart from its "ways of being related" or "ways of behaving," it is completely empty of essential components, it has no content that could be unravelled, it is in and for itself indescribable: pure Ego and nothing further. (Ideas §80)

Kant likewise speaks of the transcendental ego only in the context of the transcendental unity of apperception—that is, the possibility of the "I think" accompanying every possible thought (Critique of Pure Reason, Sec. 2, §16, B131).

The reason this distinction seems important is that, if writers like Wittgenstein and Husserl are right, the great divide lies not so much between mental and physical objects as between discourse about the (logical) structure of experience and discourse about objects generally (including thoughts treated as objects). On this view, when one comes to a proper understanding of thinking, what one finds there are not several interrelated things (the self, the intentional state, the content, and the object-as-intended), but a single act of thinking that has a certain logical structure that involves it being (a ) the thinking of some subject (b ) aiming at some object (c ) by way of a certain content being intended under a certain modality. It is possible, of course, to perform an act of analysis whereby one directs one's attention separately to self, content, modality, and intentional object. And when one does that, each of these things comes to occupy the "object" slot of another intentional act. Indeed, from the perspective of the analysis of experience, what it is to be an object is to be a possible occupant of the object-slot of an intentional act .^[9] But if this is so, then the logical structure of intentional states is in some sense logically prior to the notion of object, and the tags 'experiencing self', 'content', and 'object', as they are applied to moments or aspects of experiencing, are not names of interrelated objects. Indeed, they are not objects and hence are not related (since relations can only relate objects).^[10]

Now if this is right, the task of relating objectival and experiential discourse becomes all the harder: relations are things that obtain between objects. If the "I" and the content that appear in experiential analysis do not appear there as objects, there can be no question of relating them to things appearing in discourse about objects. There can be no question of objectival-experiential relations, because in the experiential analysis,

the experiencing "I" and the content do not appear as objects at all. Nor is it possible to "cash out" the logical structure of intentional experience in terms of relations between objects, for reasons already described. (Or, as Husserl suggests, at least doing so necessarily involves a distortion of one's subject matter.) The only other way to bridge the Cartesian divide between mind and nature, it would seem, would be to find a way to subsume objectival discourse within experiential discourse, as Husserl tries to do in his transcendental phenomenology. I shall not pursue this possibility here, but shall point out that it seems right in at least one regard: namely, that intentional character is in a certain way conceptually anterior to the notion of an object in the world. For it is the content of an intentional state that lays down the satisfaction conditions determining what kind of object or state of affairs would have to exist in order for the state to be fulfilled. It is the content "unicorn" that specifies what criteria something would have to fulfill to be a real unicorn, and not vice versa. (It is, of course, possible simply to live with the dissatisfying result that there is an unbridgeable gap between two disparate realms of discourse. To those uneasy with such a gulf, I heartily recommend a careful consideration of the kind of combination of transcendental idealism and transcendental realism advocated by Husserl.)

9.5.6—
The Argument from the Character—Veridicality Distinction

Finally, it seems to me that there is a fairly straightforward argument to the effect that intentional character cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms. Intentional character was defined in terms of the aspects of intentional states that are invariant under alternative assumptions about extramental reality. Hence, it should be clear that any analysis we might give of intentional character must not depend upon anything outside the domain of experience. Notably, it must not depend upon any presumptions about (a ) correspondence to extramental objects, (b ) the causes of the intentional states, or (c ) ontological assumptions about the mind. For having an experience with the character of, say, VISUAL PRESENTATION [unicorn on my front lawn] is compatible (a ́) with there being or not being a unicorn there, (b ́) with the experience being caused by a unicorn under normal lighting conditions, a dog under abnormal conditions, LSD, or a Cartesian demon, and (c ́) with materialism, dualism, transcendental idealism, Aristotelianism, and Middle Platonism, to name a few possibilities. And it seems to follow straightforwardly from this that

any account of intentionality that is not similarly neutral cannot serve as an account of intentional character because such an account would have to be valid for all possible instances of the phenomenon it explains. In particular, an account framed in terms of assumptions about the actual nature of physical world, including human physiology, cannot be broad enough to cover all possible cases that would share a particular intentional content. Hence one cannot have a naturalistic theory of content—at least if by a "theory of content" one means something like "an account of the essential features of intentional character" as opposed to, say, "a specification of the natural systems through which intentional character is realized."^[11]

9.5.7—
Summary of Problems for Naturalizing Phenomenology

In short, then, the prospects for strongly naturalizing the phenomenological properties of mental states appear to be rather dim. Thought experiments about brains in vats and Cartesian demons cast significant doubt on whether there could be metaphysically necessary relations between phenomenologically typed states and naturalistic states. And properties like subjectivity, perspectival character, and the "what-it's-like" alluded to by Nagel do not seem to be susceptible to conceptually adequate explanation in naturalistic terms. Moreover, typing by intentional character necessarily classifies mental states in a way that is insensitive to extramental realities, so that it is impossible for a naturalistic theory to capture the same invariants. And finally, there is the tantalizing suggestion that discourse about "the experiencing self," "the thought," and "the intentional object" is not really discourse that relates objects at all, in which case it is hard to see how naturalistic discourse could have the right sorts of logical-grammatical resources to subsume it. If the kind of "content" we wish to naturalize is the kind that is delimited along phenomenological lines, weak naturalization (i.e., mathematical description and localization) is the best we are entitled to hope for.

9.6—
Naturalizing Broad Content

A very different set of issues confronts us when we turn to the broad notion of content. There has been a great deal of discussion in recent philosophical publications about the implications of broad content for a representational theory of the mind. It is not my intention to canvass these

or to discuss this already large conversation in any detail. Instead, I wish to focus on a very specific point. Unlike the arguments in the previous section, I shall not try to argue that broad content cannot be naturalized. (Though I suspect this is so.) Instead, I shall argue that the kind of theory that would be needed to naturalize broad content would not be able to focus its explanation on the properties of localized representations, as required by CTM, but would have to appeal to broader relations involving the entire organism and its environment as well.

Suppose, for example, that we want a naturalistic account of why a particular kind of thought means "arthritis," and that we accept Burge's contention that this story will have to be dependent upon the way the individual language user's words and concepts are tied in with those of expert users. We ask, "Why does this mental state M have the mental-semantic property (call it P ) of meaning (broad sense) 'arthritis'?" And here we might be asking one of two things: (1) why does M mean "arthritis" as opposed to meaning something else (the problem of meaning assignments), or (2) why does M mean "arthritis" as opposed to not meaning anything at all (the problem of meaningfulness)?

9.6.1—
Meaning Assignments

First, let us consider how CTM's explanation of semantics could be applied to the assignment of broad content. The schematic form of CTM's explanation of mental-semantics went as follows:

Schematic Account

Mental state M has mental-semantic property P because

(1) M involves a relationship to a mental representation MR , and

(2) MR has MR-semantic property X .

Now under the assumptions we have adopted, this schematic might be unobjectionable if the word 'because' were replaced by 'iff'. But in fact the schematic above is not intended merely as a biconditional but as an explanation. And as an explanation of broad content assignment, it seems to be barking up the wrong tree. The key issue in broad content assignment is what makes it the case that cognitive counters hook up with particular objects and properties and not with others. Whatever answer we give must explain the web of relations between organism and envi-

ronment that accounts for the relations that are thus established. It may be true that my brain has a state that has the broad content "arthritis" and my counterpart has a structurally identical state that means "osteoporosis" due to the fact that people on Twin Earth say "arthritis" when they want to refer to osteoporosis ('water' for XYZ, etc.). We might even say that my brain state has a property of meaning-arthritis (meaning-H₂ 0, etc.) while his has a property of meaning-osteoporosis (meaning-XYZ, etc.). But the fact that there is such a property would not explain broad content assignment, but be a by-product of such an explanation. The explanation of broad content assignment would have to focus not on localized properties of cognitive counters, but on the network of relations between organism, cognitive counter, and environment that endows those cognitive counters (and the mental states in which they play a part) with broad content. Properties of representations, in and of themselves, are just not the right sorts of things to explain broad content assignment. Moreover, once we have to appeal to properties of whole organisms and their environments to explain (simultaneously) the broad content of the cognitive counter and that of the mental state, it is no longer clear why we should try to localize the mental-semantics of thoughts to some properties of their proper parts in the first place.^[12]

9.6.2—
Meaningfulness

CTM fares no better with the explanation of broad-meaningfulness. Here the issue, above and beyond the issues involved in narrow-meaningfulness, is that of how thoughts manage to attach themselves to particular real-world objects and properties in a way that is underdetermined by their sense and by other factors internal to the organism. Now one might think that because cognitive counters are themselves internal to the organism, this should disqualify them from being explainers of broad contentfulness. But this is not exactly right: even though the cognitive counters themselves are internal to the organism, their properties may nonetheless be relational properties whose relata include ecological and social factors.

The problem, rather, lies once again with the focus of the explanation. If we ask why a particular thought is about water, as opposed to just consisting of a bunch of descriptions, it would seem that what we need is a story that shows us how to get broad content out of an amalgam of (1) the organism, (2) its narrow-contentfulness, (3) the cognitive

counters, and (4) the environment. The explanation cannot focus solely on properties of the cognitive counters, as CTM would seem to have it, because the properties that can be explained by looking just at these entities remain constant over the cases of me, my counterpart on Twin Earth, and indeed over counterparts who may fail to have broad-contentful states at all.^[13]

Let me make it clear what points I am and am not trying to make here. I am not saying that broad content cannot be strongly naturalized. (Though I happen to believe that it cannot.) Nor am I saying that some form of CTM—say, BCTM—cannot be making true assertions about the form of mental processes. Rather, I am saying that even if we grant both of these assumptions, and grant that semantic properties of mental states covary with properties of local states of cognitive counters, we cannot explain broad content merely by looking at the properties of these localized units, but must look back at the larger system embracing the whole thinker and her environment. And once we have done this, we might do well to reassess what is bought by trying to "reduce" the mentalsemantic properties of mental states to MR-semantic properties of their proper parts.

9.7—
Naturalizing Narrow Content

Finally, let us consider the question of whether narrow content can be strongly naturalized. The first problem we face here is in determining just what narrow content is supposed to be. An intuitive way of looking at narrow content is that it is the kind of content, or the portion of content, that is not dependent upon extramental factors such as ecological and social relations. This, however, sounds a great deal like phenomenological content. So one hypothesis about narrow content would be that it is the same thing as phenomenological content—that is, two mental states have the same narrow content just in case they are indistinguishable to the experiencing subject, and nothing lying outside of experience can be constitutive of a difference in narrow content. This also seems consistent with some discussions of "methodological solipsism" in the philosophy of mind (see Fodor 1980). However, most discussions of narrow content have concentrated not upon invariants of experience but invariants of structure and function. Narrow content is characterized as the property that molecular or functional duplicates would necessarily share. Now this would be consistent with the thesis that narrow content

is phenomenological content if it could be shown that molecular or functional duplicates were necessarily phenomenological duplicates as well, but that thesis is contentious at best. So rather than make assumptions about the nature of narrow content, I shall explore four possibilities: (1) narrow content is phenomenological content, (2) narrow content is defined in terms of the properties molecular duplicates would share, (3) narrow content is defined in terms of properties functional duplicates would share, (4) narrow content is defined in terms of some other property of cognitive counters.

First, if narrow content is just phenomenological content, then all of the problems of accounting for phenomenological content accrue to it as well. To account for phenomenological content, your theory has to explain subjective feel, consciousness, subjectivity, and the perspectival character of intentional states. We have argued in the previous section that there are significant obstacles to this kind of explanation, and they would simply carry over as problems for strong naturalizations of narrow content as well if narrow content is phenomenological content.

If narrow content is defined in terms of structural properties, one is faced with a number of messy problems. First, it is not transparent why something defined in structural terms ought to be called "content" at all. The mentalistic overtones require explanation here. Second, if narrow content is defined in structural terms, it is trivial that it can be strongly naturalized, as presumably structural descriptions are already cast in a discourse that is patently naturalistic. But, third, if this is the case, it is not clear that any explanation of the mental has taken place. Defining narrow content in structural terms would simply shuffle the mystery around—the mystery would then be how you get from structurally defined narrow content to the mental . To arrive at a strong naturalization of the mental, you need to have a road from your naturalistic description (in this case, a structural description) to your mentalistic description that enjoys metaphysical necessity and explanatory transparency. As anyone who has tried to supply such explanations knows, this is no trivial task. Defining narrow content in structural terms does not solve the problem here, it merely presents us with a special variation on the problem.

Similar problems arise if we define narrow content in functional terms. First, we must be careful to specify what use of the word 'functional' is operative here. At one level of abstraction (the "rich" level), we can look at the mental, qua mental, as a math-functionally describable system. At a second level (the "sparse" level), we can look at the functional de-

scription in purely formal terms, abstracting from the fact it was originally a description of mental states. A richly construed functional model of the mind does not really define mental states in functional terms, though it may provide a unique characterization of each particular kind of mental state in terms of its functional relations to the others and to stimuli and behavior. A rich model assumes some knowledge of what content is, and does not explain its nature in functional terms, any more than, say, Newton's laws explain what gravity is. But as we have seen, a sparse functional model cannot serve as a definition or explanation of the mental, on the grounds that (1) the same functional description can apply to many things (e.g., abstract number-theoretic entities) that are not mental, and (2) nothing about the functional description has the conceptual riches to generate the distinctively mental character of intentional states.

So it looks as though narrow content will have to be defined in some other way if it is to be a viable notion at all. I wish that I had a candidate for such a definition, but I don't. The intuitive notion of content that I work with is the notion of phenomenological content. Perhaps other people operate with a different notion, but if they do they have not made it very clear, beyond the constraints (1) that it is not to be broad, (2) that it is not to be phenomenologically based, (3) that it is somehow to map things in the head onto things in the world, (4) that it is necessarily to be shared by molecular or functional duplicates, and (5) that it is to be unproblematically mental in nature. I am not sure that there is anything that does fit this bill. (Similar skepticism about the category of narrow content is voiced by Baker [1987] and Garfield [1988].) But let us consider the possibility in any case, however vaguely specified.

First, note that this notion of content bears a peculiar dialectical relation to the project of strong naturalization. If one of the defining features of narrow content is that molecular duplicates must share narrow content, then the metaphysical side of strong naturalization is assured. Either there is such a thing as narrow content and narrow content assignments are implied by physical description, or else there is no such thing as narrow content. The other side of strong naturalization, however—the explanatory side—is probably less easy to come by. Whatever narrow content is supposed to be, a strong naturalization must not merely bind it to naturalistic conditions by contingent bridge laws, but demonstrate its presence from some lower-level theory. The viability of this will of course turn heavily upon what one means by "narrow content," but it is a tall order to fill in any case.

Second, it seems to me that there is a problem for explaining narrow content in terms compatible with CTM in just the way there was a problem for explaining broad content with these constraints. If we assume for purposes of argument that there are some naturalistic features of cognitive counters that covary with narrow content, we still do not have a strong naturalization of narrow content unless we can show why the fact that a proper subpart of an intentional system has particular naturalistic properties makes it the case that the system has a thought about objects or states of affairs in the world. I am not at all convinced that such an explanation is to be had at all, but if it is to be had, it seems clear that the place to look is not in properties of the cognitive counters themselves, but in relations between the overall system and its environment. Again, the point here is not that BCTM must be wrong as a theory of the form of mental states. Rather, the point is that, even if BCTM is right about its functional description of the mind, and cognitive counters are the things that covary with meaning assignment, we need a theory with a very different focus to account for meaningfulness. If the question is "Why does this thought mean X rather than Y?" it may be appropriate to look at cognitive counters. If the question is why the properties of cognitive counters are so intimately associated with the mentalistic property of meaningfulness, it seems that we shall have to look elsewhere, at a theory that embraces a larger system.

9.8—
Conclusion

This chapter has been a very quick examination of the prospects for what is commonly called a "naturalistic theory of content." We have seen that there are many issues lurking in the wings here—issues about what counts as "naturalization," what counts as a "theory," and what kind of "content," "intentionality," and "mental states" are at issue. What I have tried to argue here may briefly be summarized as follows: (1) If we are talking about conscious thoughts (the paradigms embraced by writers like Brentano, Husserl, and Searle, among others), these states do indeed seem indefeasibly to have properties like phenomenological feel, subjectivity, and the like, and there do seem to be serious obstacles to strongly naturalizing such properties. (2) If we are talking about dispositional states like beliefs and desires, and about their broad and narrow content, it may or may not prove possible to strongly naturalize these properties. But if it is possible to do so, it looks as though the kind of explanation we need will not focus on local properties of cognitive coun-

ters, as does CTM, but will appeal to relational properties of cognitive counters, the entire organism that is doing the thinking, and its environment.

I wish to draw both a weak moral and a strong one from this. The weak moral concerns where the burden of proof should lie. Much of the current discussion in the philosophy of mind assumes the possibility of a fairly strong sort of naturalization. But once we have distinguished the projects of strong and weak naturalization, we can see that strong naturalization calls for some fairly exacting (and rare) kinds of connections between discourses: namely, metaphysical sufficiency and conceptual adequacy. And once we look closely at the prospects of "explaining" the mental in these very stringent senses of "explanation," there seem to be some very large and glaring problems, especially if we add the further constraint of locating the nexus of meaning in properties of localized representations. Thus it seems to me that the burden of proof ought to be on the would-be strong naturalizer: we have reason to believe in strong naturalism when we see it accomplished and not before.

There is also a stronger moral one might draw, one that I want to state in a more assertive voice. All in all, it looks dubious that we shall ever have a strong naturalization of the mental. It looks even less likely that we should have one of the sort called for by CTM. CTM certainly does not provide such a theory of intentionality, and without it, those who doubt the propriety of intentional psychology have not been refuted. It is hard to see how to view computational psychology as a success if its success is to be judged by the standard of how well it naturalizes intentionality and vindicates intentional psychology. But perhaps these are not the right standards by which to judge computational psychology in the first place. Perhaps it is possible to separate issues about computational psychology as an empirical research programme from its relationship to more purely philosophical problems about the mind. In the final section of this book I shall attempt to present the beginnings of an alternative philosophical approach to computational psychology that frees it from the constraints of strong naturalization and vindication.