Let’s consider a couple of types of arguments to see what our situation is with respect to our mental states. Consider the case of the size of a brick wall, based on the positions of the bricks. In the case of the wall, given the state of the bricks, the question is closed as to whether or not the wall is there, or how tall it is. Even though none of the bricks is six feet tall, they can be added up in such a way that the height of the wall is a determinate fact based on the sizes of the bricks, and the sizes of the bricks are determinate facts based on the sizes of the elementary particles that make them up.
Contrast this with the case of whether a homicide was justified or unjustified. Here we can look at the homicide at every scientific level; the physical, the chemical, the biological, the psychological, and the sociological, and no entailment can be drawn as to whether or not the homicide was justified or unjustified. Something over and above the physical data must be brought in to make this kind of a judgment. Either there is some nonnatural fact that makes the statement concerning the rightness or wrongness of the homicide justified or unjustified, or the matter is a subjective matter, determined by the preferences of an individual or a society.
We might express this difficulty in the following way. Suppose we are given a complete list of physical facts, facts about where all the particles are. The information, thus given is insufficient to determine a unique mental state that a person is in. There is no entailment relation of any kind to the relevant mental state.
In virtue of what is some physical state about some other physical state? This is the familiar worry about intentionality, a worry made more difficult by my claim that the kind of intentional states involved in rational inference are states in which the content is understood by the agent and put into a propositional format. Is there a set of necessary and sufficient conditions which are physical in the sense in which we are understanding it here, and which jointly entail the conclusion that agent A is in the state of believing, or doubting, or desiring, or fearing, the proposition P is true? If the fact about what a person’s mental state is about does not follow from the state of the physical, then there is nothing else from which it can possibly follow. In the case of mental states, I do not see how the physical states can possibly “add up” to any determinate mental state. There is a qualitative difference between the physical base and mental content, that no amount of investigation can possibly overcome.
We might express this difficulty in the following way. Suppose we are given a complete list of physical facts, facts about where all the particles are. The information, thus given is insufficient to determine a unique mental state that a person is in. There is no entailment relation of any kind to the relevant mental state.
In virtue of what is some physical state about some other physical state? This is the familiar worry about intentionality, a worry made more difficult by my claim that the kind of intentional states involved in rational inference are states in which the content is understood by the agent and put into a propositional format. Is there a set of necessary and sufficient conditions which are physical in the sense in which we are understanding it here, and which jointly entail the conclusion that agent A is in the state of believing, or doubting, or desiring, or fearing, the proposition P is true? If the fact about what a person’s mental state is about does not follow from the state of the physical, then there is nothing else from which it can possibly follow.
You would think that this line of argument would be opposed by philosophers in the naturalistic camp, but this seems to be the upshot of, for example Quine’s argument for the indeterminacy of translation, and Davidson’s argument against psychophysical laws, and is defended by Daniel Dennett. As Dennett writes:
And why not? Here, I think, we find as powerful and direct an expression as could be of the intuition that lies behind the belief in original intentionality. This is the doctrine Ruth Millikan calls meaning rationalism, and it is one of the central burdens of her important book, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, to topple it from its traditional pedestal (Millikan, 1984. See also Millikan forthcoming). Something has to give. Either you must abandon meaning rationalism--the idea that you are unlike the fledgling cuckoo not only having access, but in having privileged access to your meanings--or you must abandon the naturalism that insists that you are, after all, just a product of natural selection, whose intentionality is thus derivative and potentially indeterminate.
So perhaps we can live without determinate mental content. Or can we?
Given naturalism’s commitment to the natural sciences, the naturalist must presuppose the existence of mathematicians as well as scientists. Therefore, some serious consequences follow from the indeterminacy of mental states. It would mean that what Dawkins means by atheism is indeterminate. It means that it is not literally true that Einstein developed his theories of relativity from Maxwell’s equations.
When we consider material entities that exhibit intentionality, we see that they do not have their intentional content inherently, but have it relative to human interests. The marks on paper that you are reading now are just marks, unless they are related to a set of users who interpret it as such. In other words, it possesses a “derived intentionality” as opposed to “original intentionality.” As Feser points out
More to the point, brain processes, composed as they are of meaningless chemical components, seem as inherently devoid of intentionality as soundwaves or ink marks. Any intentionality they would also have to be derived from something else. But if anything physical would be devoid of intrinsic intentionality, whatever does have intrinsic intentionality would thereby have to be non-physical. Sine the mind is the source of the intentionality of physical entities like sentences and pictures, and doesn’t get its intentionality from anything else (there’s no one “using” our minds to convey meaning) it seems to follow that the mind has intrinsic intentionality, and thus is non-physical.51
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