7.14—
Semiotic-Semantics and the Vindication of Intentional Psychology

Up to this point, this chapter has been directed towards showing that CTM cannot provide an account of the intentionality and semantics of mental states based upon the semiotic-semantic properties of mental representations. What about CTM's other claim—the claim to provide a vindication of intentional psychology? There is a fairly straightforward case that, because the semiotic-semantic version of Fodor's account cannot explain the mental-semantic properties of mental states, it proves

unable to vindicate intentional psychology as well. The reason this is so is that the vindication of intentional psychology turns out to be dependent upon an account of intentionality in ways that may thus far have been unforeseen. To see how this is so, consider how CTM was supposed to provide a vindication of intentional psychology.

What the computer paradigm was supposed to show was that the semantic properties of symbols in computers can be coordinated with their causal powers because semantics can be coordinated with syntax, and in a computer a symbol's syntactic type determines its causal role. If we assume that the mind is a computer, and that the semantic properties of mental states are inherited from the symbols which it uses in its computations, then explanations cast in intentional vocabulary can (in principle) pick out psychological categories in a fashion that gets the causal regularities right.

This line of reasoning, however, is compromised by the analysis of symbols and semantics in chapters 4 and 5. For what we need for a vindication of intentional psychology is an account of how the mental-semantic properties of mental states can be coordinated with causal properties, and the most that a computational theory of mind can give us, it seems, is an account of how the semiotic-semantic properties of mental representations can be coordinated with causal powers. Of course, if one could account for the mental-semantic properties of mental states in terms of the semiotic-semantic properties of mental representations, the vindication of intentional psychology could proceed intact. But what we have seen in this chapter is that one cannot account for mental-semantic properties in this fashion. So even if there are mental representations with semiotic-semantic properties, and even if the semiotic-semantic properties of these are coordinated with causal roles, this does intentional psychology little good, because it does not explain how the kind of semantic properties ascribed to beliefs and desires can link up with causal regularities.