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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Much discussed but still unresolved is whether a subject's internal physical structure is a sufficient condition for his beliefs and desires. The question has sometimes been expressed as a question about microstructurally identical Doppelgänger. Imagine two subjects who are identical right down to the ions traversing the synapses. Their senses are stimulated in all the same ways, their bodies execute the same motions, and identical physical events mediate between the sensory inputs and the behavioral outputs. Must they have the very same beliefs and desires? Let us call the thesis that they must, internalism. The internalist may hold that a physical similarity less complete than this will also guarantee identity in beliefs and desires, but certainly, he holds, perfect identity of internal physical histories will suffice.
Internalism will be opposed by those who sense that the nature of mentality is closely tied to the nature of explanation in terms of mental states and that in explaining a subject's behavior we cannot abstract, even in principle, from the character of the environment in which the subject is embedded. This essay offers a partial articulation of this point of view and shows how it conflicts with internalism. A consequence of the view to be described is that our attributions of belief must reflect the probabilistic regularities in the subject's environment. As we shall see, this consequence conflicts with internalism in two ways. The first conflict turns on the fact that there is no limit on the possible variety of such regularities. The second conflict turns on the fact that two subjects might by chance have the same micro-structural history though different probabilistic regularities obtain in their respective environments.
1 At least until recently, cognitive functionalism has been represented in the writings of Jerry Fodor. See his The Language of Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1975), especially 73, 199; and also 114 of Three Cheers for Propositional Attitudes,’ in his RePresentations (Cambridge: MIT Press 1981) 100-123. As I understand it, Fodor's formality condition in ‘Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Science,’ in RePresentations, 225-53, is nothing but a trivial consequence of his functionalism. Form determines content, he holds, but only relative to a ‘computational system.’ (See his reply to Georges Rey in ’Methodological Solipsism: Replies to Commentators,’ The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 [1980)106.) Two subjects realize the same computational system just in case they model the envisioned theory in virtue of the same assignment of states, or types of brain-inscription, to terms. The ‘form’ of a particular mental representation is just that feature of the content-bearing internal inscription in virtue of which it belongs to the type assigned to a theoretical expression for that content. Form determines content, relative to system, because the content of a mental representation is the meaning of the theoretical expression to which its form is assigned.
2 Natural functionalism is roughly the view that emerges from three papers by Dennett, Daniel: ‘Beyond Belief.’ in Woodfield, Andrew ed., Thought and Object: Essays on Intentionality (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1982) 1–95Google Scholar; ‘True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works.’ in Heath, A. ed., Scientific Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1981) 53–75Google Scholar; and ‘Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology.’ in Healey, R. ed., Reduction, Time and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981) 37–61Google Scholar.
3 Stephen Stich makes this sort of objection in ‘Autonomous Psychology and the Belief-Desire Thesis,’ The Monist 61 (1978) 573-91.
4 This, in brief, is Hilary Putnam's objection in Chapter 1 of Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981).
5 In French, P. A. Uehling, T. E. and Wettstein, H. K. eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. IV: Studies in Metaphysics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1979) 71–121Google Scholar.
6 In ‘Language as Tool,’ The American Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1987) 47-58.
7 This approach is pursued in greater detail in my paper, ‘The Principle of Charity,’ Synthese 69 (1986) 1-25.
8 This is a consequence of another methodological constraint. For the sake of predictive power, our attributions must establish correlations between types of environmental situation and types of doxastic response.
9 A subject's observing that pin this sense does not imply that p. Still, our attributions of observations in this sense will be at least partly determined by regularities having the form, ‘Whenever the subject is in a situation of type S, he forms a belief of type B.’
10 Only by envisioning such a theory can the psychological internalist ensure that his thesis is non-trivial. Otherwise, he might be charged with defining the pertinent realm of possibility in just such a way that if any two subjects in that realm have the same internal history then they have the same beliefs and desires.
11 Surely A and B may be psychologically as well as metaphysically possible, and so the argument of this paragraph is a further argument against psychological internalism.
