A Critique of the Learning Brain

Home , Critique, Mentalism (philosophy), Methodological solipsism, Vincent Descombes

A CRITIQUE OF THE LEARNING BRAIN

JOAKIM OLSSON

Department of Philosophy Master Thesis in Theoretical Philosophy (45 ECTS) Autumn 2020

Supervisor: Sharon Rider Examiner: Pauliina Remes

Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 1.1 A Brief Overview ...... 1 1.2 Method, Structure and Delimitations ...... 4 2. BACKGROUND ON THE LEARNING BRAIN ...... 8 2.1 The Learning Brain and Its Philosophical Foundation ...... 9 2.2 Cognitivism’s Three Steps: Mentalism, Mind-Brain Identity and Computer Analogy . 14 3. A CRITIQUE OF COGNITIVISM ...... 24 3.1 A Critique of Mentalism ...... 24 3.1.1 The Exteriorization of the Mental ...... 25 3.1.2 The Intentionality of Mind Seen Through Intentional Action ...... 32 3.2 A Critique of the Mind-Brain Identity Theory ...... 54 3.3 A Critique of the Computer Analogy ...... 58 3.3.1 Discrepancies in Re-Descriptions ...... 58 3.3.2 The Formal Calculator vs. the Engaged Architect ...... 60 4. A CRITIQUE OF THE LEARNING BRAIN ...... 69 5. CONCLUSION ...... 82 Glossary ...... 83 Bibliography ...... 85

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 A Brief Overview The guiding question for this essay is: who is the learner? The aim is to examine and criticize one answer to this question, sometimes referred to as the theory of the learning brain, which suggests that the explanation of human learning can be reduced to the transmitting and storing of information in the brain’s formal and representational architecture, i.e., that the brain is the learner. This essay will argue that this answer is misleading, because it cannot account for the way people strive to learn in an attempt to lead a good life as it misrepresents the intentional life of the mind, which results in its counting ourselves out of the picture when it attempts to provide a scientific theory of the learning process. To criticize this theory of the learning brain, this essay will investigate its philosophical foundation, a theory of mind called cognitivism, which is the basis for the cognitive sciences. Cognitivism is itself built on three main tenets: mentalism, the mind-brain identity theory and the computer analogy. After a background-investigation into the learning brain and cognitivism, each of these tenets will be criticized in turn, before the essay moves to criticize the theory of the learning brain itself. The purpose of the investigation into cognitivism is to render the criticism of the learning brain in the last section more substantial and philosophically grounded. The focus of this essay is, in other words, mainly negative, as its purpose is to show that the idea of the learning brain is inadequate as a theory about human learning. The hope is that this criticism will lay the groundwork for an alternative view of mind, one that is better equipped to give meaningful answers to the important questions we have about what it means to learn, i.e., what we learn, how we do it and why. This alternative will emphasize the holistic and intentional character of the human mind, and consider the learning process as an intentional activity performed, not by isolated brains, but by people with minds that are extended, embodied, enacted and embedded in a sociocultural and physical context. This essay will, however, not attempt to provide a positive account of this alternative theory of mind, nor will it attempt a detailed characterization of the learning process that follows from it. All it aims to do is to thoroughly examine and criticize the theory of the learning brain and its philosophical foundation in order to prove it unsound. It is common today to consider ourselves as reducible to our brains, and to speak of learning as something that goes on solely inside our heads. Research programs are formed within the cognitive sciences, books are written for public consumption, and new strategies are created in order to revolutionize education, all seemingly based on the idea that we can optimize our

learning capabilities if only we had a better understanding of what the brain does in order to learn and the ways it stores and transmits the information that constitutes the knowledge that we seek to attain. It is this framework that needs to be analyzed, its origins and problems revealed, for better models to emerge. Here is a short introduction to cognitivism and its three main tenets—mentalism, the mind- brain identity theory, and the computer analogy—that work as a foundation for this framework. Mentalism is the theory that detaches mind from body and world in order to study it as an isolated and observable object; it is often traced back to the works of René Descartes, who, in contemporary philosophy of mind, is usually credited as its architect. However, this thesis will emphasize that this theory is more likely a modern phenomenon, one stemming from a certain interpretation of Cartesianism. Consequently, this thesis will make a distinction between Descartes and modern Cartesianism.1 Cognitivism adopts this mentalism, but rejects the Cartesian understanding of the mind as an immaterial object. The mentalist foundation of cognitivism, and much of contemporary philosophy of mind in general, is the treatment of mental life as made up of mental states and processes relating to representations of the world, which in turn, though locked up and isolated from this world, have the capacity to cause us to act in it. This is why mentalism leads to, what is often called, the representational theory of mind. In order to modernize this theory in light of the epistemological demands set by the natural sciences, cognitivism adopts the computational theory of mind, which proposes a nuanced version of the mind-brain identity theory, an idea that originated with the works of J. J. C. Smart and Herbert Feigl in the 1950s, and then works from the supposition that this mind as brain functions like a computer, an idea influenced by Hilary Putnam’s functionalism of the 1960s. Even though the mind-brain identity theory was originally proposed as an alternative to mentalism, and functionalism was proposed as an alternative to the identity theory, cognitivism attempts to find a way to combine these theories into one. By doing this, cognitivism hopes to show that mental states and processes are really brain states and processes. But contrary to some of the stricter mind-brain identity theories, cognitivism still conceives of the mind as brain as working with mental representations. This is supposed to be made possible through the

1 Lilli Alanen (1989), for example, argues that the way we view Descartes’ dualism today as a distinction between “an immaterial soul or mind working ‘inside’ an extended material body functioning according to the mechanical laws of the universe” can be attributed to Gilbert Ryle’s interpretation of Descartes in The Concept of Mind (1949: 115-116), where Ryle labels the Cartesian mind the myth of the “Ghost in the Machine.” Alanen criticizes what she calls “the Myth of the Cartesian Myth,” and shows why Ryle’s interpretation of Descartes is confused (391- 392). On her account, Descartes’s view, as it is revealed particularly in the Sixth Meditation (1641), is that everyday experience shows how the relationship between mind and body is much more complex, nuanced and unified (which makes it, at times, more reminiscent of the view presented in this essay). According to Alanen, in other words, Descartes is not a Cartesian.

computer analogy, which is meant to allow the cognitivist to view mental life as re-describable in physical terms, and vice versa. A computer playing chess can be described both physically and psychologically, either as a machine or as a chess-player. The cognitivist hope is that the computational theory of mind will allow us to do the same with human minds as brains (even though Putnam’s functionalism originally intended to show that we cannot reduce ourselves to our brains). The goal of cognitivism thus understood is to provide a philosophical foundation for the scientific study of mental life by naturalizing the mind in a way that still allows us to talk of a “mental life” in a mentalist sense. At the core of this naturalization is the attempt to translate teleological descriptions of intentional mental life into brain mechanisms in terms of natural and efficient causes. The research program of cognitivism has been a success to the extent that many of its basic tenets are assumed in ideas that have become pervasive, such as the notion of the learning brain. This essay should be read as a cautionary tale. There is no denying that the brain holds a central role in the biological functioning of the human being. The purpose here is not to argue that studying the brain in an attempt to understand the human being is in itself in any way damaging, superfluous or unhelpful. In no way is this a critique of natural science. Rather to the contrary, the point is to show that scientific questions can and should be posed, for which only scientific answers will be satisfactory. But, it will be argued, there are other questions that can and should be posed for which there are no “scientific answers,” properly speaking, but for which there are answers that can be found elsewhere than in the methods of the natural sciences. The assumption that there must be scientific answers or no answers at all leads only to confusion or mystification. This is especially evident when we view our brains as the sole source of our agency and the basis of our mental lives insofar as it inhibits our understanding of the life of the mind in general, and the learning process in particular. The purpose of this essay is to show where the idea of the learning brain fails by analyzing each step in the cognitivist process towards their theory of mind, and to lay the philosophical groundwork for an alternative holistic theory of mind that in a future scenario should allow us to ask philosophically relevant questions about what, how and why we learn that acknowledges the life of the learner in its answers. This alternative begins by breaking with mentalism by exteriorizing the mind in order to view the intentionality of mental life as expressed and revealed through our intentional actions as they are performed in the sociocultural context in and out of which they arise. Furthermore, this alternative shows that we are not simply our brains, and that our abilities far outmatch those of the computer where intentionality is

concerned. If this claim is correct, the consequences for questions regarding autonomy, rationality, desire, knowledge and learning are far-reaching.

1.2 Method, Structure and Delimitations The interrogative nature of this essay takes inspiration from R. G. Collingwood’s (1939) philosophical method of question and answer, which emphasizes the need to contextualize propositions historically in order to figure out which questions these propositions are meant to answer. Only when we attempt to understand a proposition in light of what questions it is meant to answer can we understand what it means (32-43). This essay asks: who (or what) is learning? The answers considered here, for example, that a brain or a person learns, are interpreted in light of the questions preceding these answers. There are reasons for supporting “the learning brain” or “the learning person.” In the former case, as we shall see, the main aim seems to be to provide a scientific account of the mind and the learning process. In the latter case, the aim, as it is formed in this essay, is to retain a philosophical capacity to discuss meaningful aspects of mental life and of learning. But these reasons often do not become evident from a simple study of the arguments later made for the respective views, at which point the conditions for how to approach the problem are already fixed. As we shall see, an especially decisive example in this regard is the contemporary mentalist consensus that we have to speak of the mind as consisting of mental states, processes and representations. For most contemporary philosophers of mind, whether it is right or wrong to speak this way is not an issue at all, but only how we should interpret the nature of these things. In this essay, the necessity of speaking in such terms is precisely what is at issue. Consequently, it will often not suffice simply to study the propositions (answers) that the cognitivists give for their account(s) of the mind. Rather, the accounts will be read in the context of the conceptual apparatus that needs to be assumed and the presuppositions concerning the demands that must be satisfied. Such an understanding of what the program is intended to achieve is a prerequisite for any adequate criticism. The same goes for the alternative view, which is meant to show that we cannot reduce ourselves to impersonal, material and ahistorical objects of scientific inquiry if we want to make room for the possibility of giving meaningful answers to the important questions of the conditions and prospects of human learning. Although it would be interesting to extend the use of Collingwood’s method of question and answer to pose questions about the learning process itself, this essay will in the end only hint at this possibility. Consequently, his method is mainly an inspiration for the way this essay is conducting its investigations of the theories it considers.

The subject of this thesis is thematic in so far as it is concerned with the rather vast topic of learning as such, and not in the first instance with some particular philosopher or theory. The goal is to examine and interrogate the idea of the learning brain because this notion—combined with certain prevalent tendencies in science, philosophy and education to neglect questions about what is meaningful and important in our lives—risks damaging the way we view the purpose of learning and what it involves. Many people have testified to the personal experience of dissatisfaction with fact-based learning from primary school all the way up to university. But what is the source of this dissatisfaction? One answer is that too little attention has been paid to questions about what it means to know, why we should want to learn, and what we have to do to become better at it. The fear that fueled this thesis is that a sole focus on “brain-learning” will only make this situation worse. The question is: where to begin? What choices and delimitations should be made regarding the vast philosophical landscape of possible source material? The path chosen here is made in two steps. The first is to provide two opposing representatives of the ways we approach the brain in order to understand more about learning through the cognitive sciences. The second is to offer two main representatives of the philosophical theories that underlie these two views. Wolf Singer and Kurt W. Fischer will represent a tension in cognitive science because, on the one hand, they both work closely to each other in the field of “neuroeducation,” and, on the other hand, their views appear to depart from each other precisely on the points that this essay wants to address. Jerry Fodor and Vincent Descombes will represent cognitivism and the alternative, termed here “anthropological holism,” respectively, because Descombes inspired many of the arguments that this essay will make, and because Fodor functions as the main representative of cognitivism in Descombes’ works. In order to situate these two views in a philosophical context, both Fodor and Descombes will repeatedly be compared both with their influences and with other closely related philosophers and theories. Fodor’s cognitivism will mainly be contrasted with other theories of mind that adopt either mentalism, the mind-brain identity theory or the computer analogy. Descombes will be discussed mostly in relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Elizabeth Anscombe, who inspired much of his work, but also, for example, in relation to the phenomenological view of mind that comes close to his view, especially as it is presented through the philosophical program called enactivism.2 Much of the inspiration for the

2 The enactivism that is discussed in this essay is mainly gathered from Evan Thompson’s work Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind (2007). Thompson was one of the originators of the term

arguments made in this essay has been taken from Descombes, who manages to situate the somewhat idiosyncratic language of both Wittgenstein and Anscombe in a contemporary philosophical discussion about the mind. Consequently, this essay presents many of his ideas, but hopes to develop them, particularly in relation to the question of learning, which is not Descombes’ focus. By comparing his views to other likeminded thinkers and theories, which he does not consider, the essay likewise hopes to show that this Wittgensteinian theory of mind may find allies in other corners of the philosophical landscape, even among philosophers who do not normally adopt this language-oriented method. Overall, Singer and Fodor will together represent the views that support the learning brain, while Fischer and Descombes support the view of learning as a social activity performed by people. The key is to read these sources and all the rest as representatives of more general ideas or even worldviews. This essay is not an attempt to provide “philosophological” interpretations of any philosopher or theory. Robert M. Pirsig (1991) writes that “[p]hilosophology is to philosophy as musicology is to music, or as art history and art appreciation are to art, or as literary criticism is to creative writing.” (376). This distinction will have consequences later on, as there is a difference between learning how to do philosophy, art, literature, mathematics etc., and learning about these subjects. Due to the academic nature of this essay, Pirsig would likely consider it as a contribution to philosophology rather than philosophy, even if that is not the author’s intention. The essay is divided into three sections (2, 3, 4), within which we find chapters (e.g., 2.1) and subchapters (e.g., 3.1.1). The first section characterizes the learning brain, the tension we find in the cognitive sciences regarding it, and the cognitivism it relies on, with its mentalism, mind-brain identity, and computer analogy. The second section is partly a criticism of this idea and partly an introduction to the alternative. It is divided into three main chapters, where the first chapter breaks with mentalism and the attempt to objectify the mind by using the language of the natural sciences. Instead it will be shown how the intentionality of the mind needs to be exteriorized through our intentional actions, which should be seen as criteria for mental life rather than as symptoms of inner causal mechanisms. The second chapter criticizes the mind-brain identification by considering the logic of parts and wholes. By emphasizing the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions for mind it shows how the mind-brain identity theory turns the brain into a homunculus (a little person) who is doing the work for us. But the brain on its own is not

“enactivism” together with Eleanor Rosch and Francisco R. Varela in their combined work The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1993: 9).

a person; it cannot act intentionally, and consequently lacks the intentionality that defines mental life. The third chapter considers the extent to which we can compare ourselves with computers and look to them for answers about the learning mind. Since the computer runs on formal algorithms and shows no sign of intentionality, it is arguably a poor analogy for human thought. Ultimately, if we want to base our view of the human on our capacity for reason, we need to unify this latter concept with the intentionality of the mind. This is, however, not to say that computers, if they would express intentionality, would not express mental life. Consequently, this criticism does not claim anything about the future possibility of intentional AI. The point with this thesis is not to criticize the work of neurologists and computer scientists, but to criticize the philosophers of mind who base their theories on speculations about the nature and possibilities of the brain and the computer without much knowledge of either. The third section aims to criticize the theory of the learning brain, i.e., the idea that learning involves brains storing and transmitting information, by showing that the holistic conception of mind that situates the active human being in her way of life is better equipped to answer questions about what, how and why we learn. This chapter emphasizes the practical and intentional nature of both learning and knowing, which are activities aimed at a good life that we engage in as parts of the sociocultural environment that makes mind possible. The purpose of this section, however, is mainly negative. Consequently, it does not claim to give any detailed answers to the question of learning. All it aims to do is to show that what has been said so far about the intentionality of mental life against the cognitivist’s conception of the mind has detrimental consequences for the possibility that the theory of the learning brain can give relevant answers to such questions about learning. Lastly, this essay goes through quite a few theories and positions within contemporary philosophy of mind, which means that we will encounter some technical vocabulary and different “–isms” along the way. The meaning of many of these terms will often be explained in the text. However, a glossary has been provided at the end of the essay in order to facilitate the reading for anyone who feels confused or annoyed by the way certain terms are used and sometimes repeated long after they have been introduced. The general rule is that most terms should be taken as generally as possible. This means that some terms might deviate from certain particular or even common definitions. “Cognitivism,” for example, is meant to denote a widespread tendency within contemporary philosophy of mind which means that the term is often used as broadly as possible; it applies to anyone who ascribes to some form of combination between mentalism, mind-brain identity and computer analogy, even if they, for some reason, would not call themselves “cognitivists.” In general, therefore, whenever different

“–isms” are mentioned they are often formulated broadly in order to detach whatever is said about them from any particular philosopher or reading of that philosopher; another case in point is “Cartesianism,” which is used as a label which does not necessarily attach to Descartes himself (see footnote 1). In the cases where a term is used more specifically, the explicit reference is made explicit. Any further delimitations that have been deemed necessary are mentioned in the footnotes.

2. BACKGROUND ON THE LEARNING BRAIN

The following background is divided into two chapters which together constitute the first section of the essay. Chapter 2.1 introduces the concept of the “learning brain,” a phrase that suggests that the brain is the part of us that is doing the learning. In this chapter, the philosophical doctrine of cognitivism, which identifies the mind with the brain, is shown to be an integral element of the research program of cognitive science for understanding the brain. Not all cognitive scientists, however, share this view of the brain as the source of human agency and learning. Recounting this tension in the debate will show the necessity of investigating the matter further. Chapter 2.2 offers a short historical account of the rise of cognitivism. The purpose of tracing these steps is to show some of the main moves towards naturalizing the mind made within the philosophy of mind over the last century, setting the stage for later developments that have culminated in the dominance of cognitivism that we see today. The three steps are: (1) the resuscitation of “Cartesian” mentalism in an attempt to understand the mind by treating it as an isolated, observable and penetrable object with intentional mental states and processes dealing with representations, thus making it amenable to scientific study and explanation; (2) the identification of the mind with the brain, which avoids the problems associated with Cartesian immaterial causes, allowing the cognitivist to probe the mind from an external point of view rather than through introspection, thus furthering the possibility of studying the mind through the methods of natural science by treating people’s minds as material, impersonal objects; and (3) the analogy between the brain and the computer, which allows the cognitivist to avoid issues arising out of strict identity theories by treating physiological and psychological descriptions as translatable rather than reducible to one another, thus making the computer a rational model for the mind as brain.

2.1 The Learning Brain and Its Philosophical Foundation What is the learning brain? This chapter introduces the concept and its applications in both academic and popular discourse. Reasons for caution about saying that the brain learns are then presented. Finally, it is argued that the notion of the learning brain is predicated on a philosophical position towards the mind here called cognitivism. If we want to take issue with “the learning brain,” then we first need to characterize cognitivism in order to show why it provides an unsustainable approach to the question of learning. To illustrate what sort of problem motivated this study, we will start off with a little anecdote. When I was developing the idea for this thesis, I sat down with a friend and told her that I wanted to write a philosophical reflection on the subject of learning. After having spent some time trying to explain my research question, my friend paused me to tell me that she had read a book on the subject. It had explained that learning has something to do with the nerve fibers in the brain making new “connections,” and how these nerve fibers become “covered with fat” as we learn, which strengthens them and thereby solidifies what we have learned, and so on. This explanation suggested that if only we could explain exactly what happens in the brain, we would surely have all the answers to the question of learning: what, how and why the brain learns. It seems my friend could not see the point in philosophizing about something that science has already explained. Here is a typical example, from an article named Inside the Learning Brain written by Nick Dam (2013), of the kind of colloquial explanation my friend was referring to:

Sophisticated brain-imaging tools allow researchers to study the brain and revolutionize the understanding of how we learn. […] [C]ognitive neuroscience looks at how the brain learns, stores, and uses the information it acquires. It is through learning that the brain enables us to adapt to our ever-changing environment. […] Learning is a physical process in which new knowledge is represented by new brain cell connections. The strength and formation of these connections are facilitated by chemicals in the brain called growth factors.

Neuroscientist Singer (2009) provides an academic characterization of a comparable idea in an article he has published in the anthology The Educated Brain: Essays in Neuroeducation:

It is the functional architecture, the blueprint of connections and their respective weight, that determines how brains perceive, decide and act. Hence, not only the rules according to which brains process information but also all the knowledge that a brain possesses reside in its functional architecture. It follows from this that the connectivity patterns of brains contain information and that any learning, i.e. the modification of computational programs and of stored knowledge, must occur through lasting changes of their functional architecture. […] Every time an organism develops, this information is transmitted from the genes through a complicated developmental process into specific brain architectures which then translate this knowledge into well adapted behavior (98).

It has indeed become the norm to speak of brains that “perceive, decide, act and learn,” how they “store, possess, process, transmit and translate knowledge,” and why they do all this so that we can function properly in our lives by producing “well adapted behavior.” At the center of this explanatory scheme we find the computer, which influences not just the language we use to explain our mental lives (“computational programs” and “functional architectures”), but the way we perceive ourselves, as machines downloading and storing information that program us to act in certain ways. Presumably, we all understand what we mean when we say that a brain or computer learns. There is an apparent familiarity between the adaptive capacities of modern computational systems and what we call learning. It is also undeniable that the brain has a central role in the functioning and development of the biological entity that is the human being. Furthermore, it is for neuroscience to decide if the brain’s physiological structure is comparable to a computer’s mechanical set-up. But, we should be careful when we make such comparisons, lest we lose sight of important differences. Consider the following example. A computer signals that it cannot find the printer. What we want to show is that this proposition has a different meaning when a person says the same thing. In the first scenario, the printer might be right next to the computer. When it seeks the printer, it is therefore not engaging in the same activity as a person looking for a printer in a room. The circumstances which determine what it means “to look for” and “to find” in these cases are so different that the meaning of the phrases have only a superficial resemblance. When a computer seeks, but cannot find the printer, we can examine the computer and printer in order to locate the problem. In other words, the problem and the solution are internal to the two functional systems in question. Supporters of the learning brain suggest, as we shall see, that this is likewise how we need to approach problems with regards to human beings, as they attempt to exclude contextual considerations from their account of the human mind. But when a person cannot find the printer, the problem and the solution are most likely external, i.e., contextual. We could imagine a scenario where someone has been asked by a colleague to go into her office and print some documents on her computer that she needs for some urgent task while she is working from home. Let us say that the office is a mess, and the printer is hidden under a pile of papers, books and scattered clothing. The colleague may then ring the one who needs the papers and say that he cannot find the printer. In this case, the glitch has nothing to do with the internal mechanics of that person’s brain. He simply cannot find the thing he is looking for in the room, so both the problem and the solution are external and contextual.

This scenario is intended to illustrate a basic thesis of the argument to follow, namely, that we mean different things when we say that someone is trying to learn or has learned something and when we say that a computer is trying to learn or has learned something. The aim is not to argue against the idea that future, more advanced AI might be able to consider the context in search for solutions in a human-like way. The aim is rather to criticize the idea, prevalent among many current philosophical theories, that human life is reducible to the workings of the brain, which can be likened to the ways computation works in the computers we have today. Consequently, this will be an argument against philosophers who theorize about computation without much knowledge of computer science (just as it criticizes philosophers who theorize about the brain without much knowledge of how it works), not against computer scientists and the potential of their work. This essay will, however, attempt to show that computational systems, as they currently function, lack intentionality, and that this is the determining factor which makes human searching and learning distinguishable from mere internal computation, because this intentionality is based in a desire to reach some future goal that is contextually determined and discernable. This capacity for desire and personal goal-setting is lacking in the computer when it searches for the printer, which is something that we rather program it to do. “Looking for” and “finding” has an intentional structure in human action that is usually ignored or misconstrued by philosophers who base their idea of human cognition on a particular understanding of computation to support ideas such as the learning brain. This essay will make the point that if we treat cases with humans and computers as identical or analogous, we miss crucial differences that may be fundamental for understanding what human learning is and entails for human life. Here is an example of someone who argues in this direction. Fischer is a prominent neuroscientist who, like Singer, works in neuroeducation. A few years before his retirement in 2015 as the director of the Mind, Brain and Education Program at Harvard University Graduate School of Education, he wrote an article on the prospects and aims of his program, Mind, Brain, and Education: Building a Scientific Groundwork for Learning and Teaching (2009). That same year, Singer’s article was published in a book edited by Fischer. Fischer begins his article by describing two common misconceptions about learning, knowing and the brain, or what he calls “neuromyths.” Contrary to what one might expect after having read works such as Singer’s, the first neuromyth he mentions is precisely the identification of the learner with the brain:

The modern model of the human mind puts the brain as the core organ that carries most of consciousness and learning— what Vidal calls brainhood, the brain as the source of personhood and self. In a dominant and simple form, people are mostly equated with their brains, as if a person could

be a brain in a bucket or a laboratory vat or as if the fundamental nature of a person is contained in his or her brain. A person’s body, relationships, and culture are treated as secondary at best. Using this model, people talk as if learning occurs in the brain, leaving out the ways that the body contributes to learning, as well as the roles that a person’s environment plays in shaping learning and providing information. When people learn, according to this model, they store knowledge in their brain, and there it sits until they need to recall it, as if the brain is primarily a repository (library, computer memory) for information. In one caricature, we can wake up in the morning, download the information that we need for the day, and process that information as we need it in our work (5).

The second neuromyth is the one he calls “the conduit model of knowledge transmission,” which says: “[w]hen people learn something, they obtain an object (an idea, concept, or thought), which they then possess. To teach it to someone else, they need simply transmit it, as if through a conduit, giving or pumping the information into the person” (ibid.). Thus, Fischer disagrees with Singer’s view both regarding who or what is learning, and how this learning process works. To Fisher, these neuromyths hinder our capacity to reason adequately about the brain and its role in human learning. Much of his article aims to show where it is likely that neuroscience could help us in gaining a better understanding of the necessary physical conditions within the brain for learning. This is first and foremost where the brain is damaged or not yet fully developed.3 Fischer is humbly hopeful that neuroscience will contribute to the development of appropriate educational strategies by replacing these neuromyths with better models for understanding what happens in the brain as we learn, especially where young children and people with disabilities are concerned. In the end, however, he emphasizes that learning is a socially constituted practice. Neuroscience can tell us about what happens in the brain when we learn, that is, how learning affects the brain. But the learning is done by people who engage in particular learning practices:

Cognitive and neuroscience research shows that knowledge is based in activity. When animals and people do things in their worlds, they shape their behavior. Based on brain research, we know that likewise they literally shape the anatomy and physiology of their brains (and bodies)” (ibid.).

On Fischer’s account, we shape our brains as we learn, not the other way around. The comparison between Fischer and Singer makes evident a clear conceptual tension within the cognitive sciences regarding how we should conceive of the brain’s role in the process of

3 Their main area of research concerns cases of the not yet fully developed brains of young children and the brains of people with cognitive impairment, that is, where the physical conditions for learning are limited or nonexistent. Fischer describes, for instance, studies conducted with children suffering from severe epilepsy who, despite having had half of their brains removed, and against all medical prognoses, learned to draw. How could this be possible? In Fischer’s view, this is a paradigmatic area for investigation for neuroeducation (2009: 6-7).

learning. Despite its current dominance, the theory of the learning brain is far from universally accepted, even among the neuroscientists themselves. How is it that a picture so widely embraced by so many cognitive scientists can be dismissed as an unsophisticated and damaging myth by leading researchers in the same field? Descombes’ (1995) explanation for these kinds of conflicts between and even within disciplines in cognitive science is that philosophers generally know nothing about the brain, which means that the “brain” of which philosophers speak is a speculative or theoretical entity having little to do with the actual brain studied by neuroscientists (109). Singer and Fischer would probably both object that they are concerned with the physical object that is the brain and not some speculative entity. Nonetheless, their disagreement suggests otherwise, especially considering Fischer’s view of “the learning brain” as a myth. In this respect, Descombes would seem to be on to something, at least insofar as we are at least partly faced with a conceptual problem of how to conceive of the mind (or more precisely in our case, the learning mind, or the learner). Thus, the following questions arise: (1) which conceptual framework underlies the idea of the learning brain as it is presented by Singer? and (2) how would we go about supporting Fischer’s criticism of this idea? In the second section of this essay, an attempt will be made to answer the latter question. In what follows in this section, we will address the former. We will begin by examining the claims of cognitivism. What is often left out from the discourse on the learning brain is that it is predicated on a particular philosophical theory that identifies the mind with the brain, a theory that is yet to be proven. Nevertheless, it is a popular theory, deeply rooted in an effort to turn the mind into an object of scientific inquiry that arguably originated with Descartes and has evolved over the last century to become the leading scientific approach to the mind. The term “cognitivism” will be used here to designate prominent modern research programs that promotes some version of this mind-brain identity theory, and the philosophical program that “seeks to change the sciences of the mind into cognitive sciences” (Descombes 1995: 67). Cognitive science, in turn, is centered on the hypothesis “that thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures” (Thagard 2019). To accept this hypothesis as the starting point of inquiry is thus to take a stance with regards to how the mind as well as the discipline in question should be understood and approached: “the fact that one calls a given discipline—linguistics or anthropology, say—a ‘cognitive science’ means that one has taken a particular position regarding both its object and its method. This position is cognitivism” (Descombes 1995: 66). The hope of cognitivism is that by fusing mentalism—which began in the Cartesian isolation and objectification of the

mind and has given birth to the representational theory of mind—with the computer as a model for the brain’s mechanics, we will finally have a scientific theory of mind that adheres to the epistemological criteria posed by the natural sciences, which in this case means that the thing studied needs to be an isolated material object governed by causal mechanisms and natural laws. In short, we will be able to naturalize the mind. In what follows, it will be argued that Singer’s characterization of the learning brain implicitly assumes a form of cognitivism as a working hypothesis and a body of theoretical groundwork for cognitive science in general. But in order to see how cognitivism supports this picture, in the next chapter, we will first unpack the main steps that cognitivism has taken since the birth of the “philosophy of mind” in its attempt to naturalize the mind.

2.2 Cognitivism’s Three Steps: Mentalism, Mind-Brain Identity and Computer Analogy In this chapter, we will trace the development of cognitivism from its proclaimed origin in Descartes. The question guiding our attempt to characterize cognitivism is: why do we feel the need to naturalize the mind? This essay, however, will not focus on the arguments presented by the cognitivist for their conclusions. Instead, we will look closer at the arguments made in support of their presuppositions (or premises). The reason for this approach is that the interest here is in the cognitivist requirement that one works from the hypothesis, recounted in the last chapter, “that thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures” (Thagard 2019), which we suggested arises out of a fusion of mentalism, the mind-brain identity theory and the computer analogy as a response to the perceived need to naturalize the mind. And while modern philosophy of mind is often set in opposition to Cartesian dualism, it is perhaps better understood as a continuation of the Cartesian attempt to realize a scientific study of the mind. Let us begin by reflecting on the following quote from Simon Critchley (2001):

As we are all acutely aware, we live in a scientific world, a world where we are expected to provide empirical evidence for our claims or find those claims rightly rejected. The scientific conception of the world, which dates back to the early decades of the 17th century in England and France, dominates the way we see things and, perhaps even more importantly, the way we expect to see things. We expect to see things somewhat like spectators in a theatre where we can inspect them theoretically […] Things are present as objects that are empirically and immediately given in the form of sensations or representations. Science gives us knowledge of the nature of such things. These things are then called ‘facts’ (4).

What Critchley describes is what is sometimes called “scientism,” the view that “that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all” (Monk 1999). This chapter will attempt to show that many of the theories of mind since the birth of modern philosophy of mind share this scientistic spirit and with it certain presuppositions about the nature of the mind that follow from such a philosophical worldview. One could describe the agenda as a collective attempt to explain the mind scientifically, where this possibility is presupposed rather than demonstrated, on the assumption that if a phenomenon cannot be explained using scientific methods, it cannot be explained at all. The re-engagement with mentalism, the identification of the mind with the brain, and the computer analogy, it will be argued, are necessary moves towards the naturalization of mind, which works as the cognitivist foundation for the idea of the learning brain. Considering that these theories have themselves often been presented in opposition to each other, the hope is that by the end of this chapter, we will have made enough sense of the way cognitivism combines them in order to be able to criticize cognitivism in the next section of this essay.4 Modern philosophy of mind is generally conceived of as originating with Descartes (1637, 1641), who, “desirous of being a spectator rather than an actor in the plays exhibited on the theatre of the world (1637: 30), conceives of himself as a thinking thing (1641: 21). With his

4 Two notes regarding delimitations in this chapter. Firstly, one might object that the “naturalization of mind” probably owes more to the early empiricists and naturalists, such as David Hume, Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei, than Descartes’ rationalism. Indeed, they were the ones who rejected not only Aristotle’s physics, but likewise his rhetoric, by reducing his four causes to two in order to explain both the natural world and the human in terms of effective and material causes (see Descombes 1995: 43). There are three reasons for not following this route. (1) There is some need for historical sensitivity in these matters. Scientism is a modern phenomenon, which we should not be too quick to attribute to even the most radical of the early empiricists. The reason for treading lightly around historical philosophers in this essay (especially Descartes) is precisely this: their problems (questions) were not the same as ours, and whatever doctrines and theories have been attributed to their solutions (answers) today may be very different from the problems with which they grappled (see Collingwood 1939: 65). (2) This essay will eventually argue for the revival of Aristotelian causality regarding the mind in subchapter 3.1.2. For now, however, we will begin our inquiry with Descartes, since this is generally where one starts, even if it might be argued that Descartes himself is more Aristotelian than both the Cartesian and the Galilean traditions (Alanen 1989: 392; Descombes 1995: 42). (3) While such an inquiry would doubtlessly shed much light on many of the issues that this essay is concerned with, such a task would simply be overwhelming. A second reservation is in order regarding the explication of cognitivism. As we will see, cognitivism is not meant to be a simple reduction of the mind to the brain, in the sense that some earlier attempts to naturalize the mind envisioned it, but as a form of re-description of the mental to the physical (as we will see in chapter 3.3). It is possible that this should urge us to talk about epiphenomenalism or principles of supervenience in this chapter. However, Fodor (1987) denies that his cognitivist theory is a form of epiphenomenalism: “This is not, by the way, any sort of epiphenomenalism; or if it is, it’s patently a harmless sort” (140). Descombes (1995), who wants to propose an alternative to cognitivism, likewise does not consider his view of the mind to be in any particular conflict with theories that argue for the supervenience of the mental on the physical, mainly because the view of mind that he presents calls into question the intelligibility of this idea as well as the relationship between the mental and the physical on which it relies (229-236; see also below sections on the relationship between the mental and the physical in chapter 3.1.2, the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions for mind in chapter 3.2, and the temporality of mental states in chapter 4). In short, the particularities of the various theories would not seem to play a significant role for the discussion of the problems at hand. For the sake of simplicity and focus, then, such technical distinctions will not be addressed.

exclamation cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am” (1637: 35)—he is credited with creating the mind-body problem that puzzles philosophers to this day. Since it is possible that Descartes is not the Cartesian dualist that modern philosophy of mind has made him out to be (Alanen 1989: 392; see footnote 1 and 4), we are mostly concerned with how Descartes is generally understood through the Cartesianism that serves as the foundation for the mentalism adopted by cognitivism and the theory of the learning brain. We should, therefore, spend some time characterizing this Cartesianism and how it relates to its modern counterparts. Cartesian dualism is mostly rejected in contemporary philosophy due to the immaterial nature of the Cartesian mind. But the mentalism that follows from this interpretation of Descartes’ meditations has remained. The idea is that the methodological solipsism of Descartes’ doubt5 detaches the mind from the body and the world, thereby suggesting that the mind only has access to representations of reality. In this way, Cartesianism “presupposes a definition of thought (cogitation) that excludes action itself from the mental, in order to retain only the will” (Descombes 1995: 25). The actions we perform with our bodies are conceived of as mere symptoms or effects of the mind’s work. This detachment of mind which leads to representationalism is central to all “mental philosophies,” or in short, “mentalism” (Fodor 1980: 63). It is this aspect of Cartesianism that lives on in many modern theories about the mind, and it plays a central role in cognitivism, even if cognitivism rejects Cartesian dualism in an effort to naturalize the mind (Descombes 2005). The upside with mentalism for the cognitivist, is that this detachment allows theorization to isolate the mind and treat it as an object in the form of a closed system, which entails that any contingent contextual influences can be disregarded as irrelevant for a study of the “mental.” It is this detachment and objectification that makes it possible to treat the mind as an ahistorical, asocial and impersonal entity, one that cognitivism takes further steps to turn into a material object that functions as a part of a law-bound universe to be explained in terms of efficient and material causality. In short, the idea that human action can be seen as caused by internal mechanisms in the mind is born with mentalism in its Cartesian form. What cognitivism adds is the attempt to show that this causation can be naturalized. Next, we will try to spell out how this transformation takes form.

5 Descartes’ (1637) solipsism is indeed methodological, aimed towards grounding his beliefs in theoretical certainty: “Not that in this I imitated the Sceptics who doubt only that they may doubt, and seek nothing beyond uncertainty itself; for, on the contrary, my design was singly to find ground of assurance, and cast aside the loose earth and sand, that I might reach the rock or the clay” (1637: 30-31).

Descartes’ philosophy of mind could be said to be a philosophy of consciousness, as it conceives of a subject that has (1) direct access to her mental sphere which is essentially (2) an internal, subjective experience of being this thinking thing.6 In order to naturalize the mind, cognitivism inverts this original conception by viewing mental life as both (1) indirectly manifested—from brain to mind, where the brain acts as the cause, and the experiences we have are seen as effects or symptoms of the brain’s causal mechanisms—and (2) externally located— where the mind is no longer seen as a subjective experience, but as something that can be found and objectively studied in all human brains (Descombes 1995: 13). We should spend some time to explicate the consequences of this shift in perspective. Whether the mind is (1) directly or indirectly manifested concerns the question of what level of access we have to it. For the cognitivist, the brain is seen as the mind. When we feel pain, that is because certain neurons fire in the brain. To understand what pain is, then, we need to study these neurons firing, not the personal experience or sensation of pain. And if we want to understand learning, it does not suffice to consider how we experience the learning process; we must study the brain, because our own expressions and performances are seen merely as indirect manifestations of what is actually going on inside our heads. This also suggests that we could give an account of something which the states of the brain should be able to disprove. In theory, we could exclaim a feeling of pain, or an experience of having learned something, which then

6 Modern versions of this philosophy of consciousness that are concerned with the direct and internal experience of consciousness can arguably be found, on the one hand, in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (see, for example, Cartesian Meditations 1931). On the other hand, we can see similar concerns regarding the phenomenal experience of consciousness in the analytic debates concerning the so-called “hard problem of consciousness” stemming from David Chalmers’ “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” (1995), as well as in the works of Thomas Nagel, perhaps most notably in his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974). Another response to Cartesianism and the philosophy of consciousness can also be found in the psychoanalytical theories of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud holds that psychoanalysis provides a critical response to Descartes’ apparent trust in his own self-knowledge (see, for example, “The Unconscious” 1915). The theory of the unconscious proposes that we only have flawed and indirect access to our inner mental lives. But it could be argued that the Freudian theory nevertheless stays within the Cartesian tradition by thinking about the mind as an internal and subjective experience. This conception of the interiority of the unconscious, in turn, is complicated as the psychoanalytic theories evolves, perhaps especially in the works of Jacques Lacan, who fuses psychoanalysis with the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure (see Course in General Linguistics 1916) in order to explain the unconscious as a linguistically constituted phenomenon based on a conception of language as a structural network of signifiers—see, for example, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious: or Reason Since Freud,” which can be found in Lacan’s Ecrits (1966), in particular the pages 418-419. What the theories of the unconscious and much of modern analytic philosophy of mind have in common, according to Descombes (1995), is their treatment of the mind as a “‘theoretical entity,’ i.e., an entity whose (hidden) presence and efficacy the theory invites us to postulate in order to account for observed phenomena” (17). For an in-depth analysis of this apparent conceptual connection between these otherwise disparate theories, see chapters 1.5, 3 and 5 in Descombes’ The Minds Provisions (1995). Besides a short reflection on Husserl in subchapter 3.1.2, none of these theories will be dealt with in this essay, since they would bring us too far afield from our current concern with the cognitivist’s conception of the learning brain. It goes without saying that such an inclusion would be preferable, had the scope of this essay only been larger. One suggestion for how to approach psychoanalysis from a holistic perspective regarding the question of learning will, therefore, be presented in chapter 4.

could be fact-checked through some form of cerebroscopic investigation into the brain’s workings to see how it differs from our ordinary accounts. In other words, if the pain is real, we will see the neurons firing, and if the learning is achieved, we would find a brain state of knowing existing in the brain. Or, as Singer puts it, we would find the knowledge in the brain’s architecture. This localization of the mind means that we should be able to investigate the mental without ever having to address or pose questions to ourselves as to the subject whose mind we are investigating. In this program, the middle-man, the human being, the person, is cut out of the process. We are cut out of the process. Whether the mind is to be seen as (2) internal or external is a question of where we can find it. Since, for the cognitivist, the brain is where the mind is to be located, this also means that we can find it in anyone with a brain. So, in contrast with the Cartesian view, the mind is now seen as external to the conscious experience of mental life. It is no longer available from a first- person perspective. We can, however, approach it from a third-person, objective point of view. Thus, the mind can be treated as any other natural object in the world and studied objectively with scientific means. To be clear, this is not to equate the internal view with the first-person perspective or the external view with the third-person perspective. Rather, the way Cartesianism sees the mind as internal allows for first-person introspection, and the way cognitivism sees the mind as external allows for objective research. The reason we should not equate these two localizations with these two perspectives will become evident in subchapter 3.1.2, where we will present a third alternative that is directly accessed and externally located, that differs from how cognitivism understands this “externalization.” This third view will not lead to the possibility to treat the mind scientifically and objectively from a third-person perspective in the same sense that cognitivism strives to achieve. Overall, however, the questions of where the mind is located and how it is accessed becomes a question about which perspective we consequently can adopt in order to study it. We will now consider the normative purpose behind this change towards cognitivism’s position, before we turn to see how it was made theoretically possible. In the middle of the 20th century, before cognitivism took form, behaviorism was the dominant approach to providing a scientific theory of mind. But this theory, like cognitivism, is arguably equal to no response at all to the questions posed by Descartes. Richard Rorty (1979) suggests that Descartes’ introspective approach and behaviorism’s naturalistic approach constitute diametrically opposed ways of explaining the nature of the mind, and he thinks that the choice of approach depends:

[n]ot so much on difficulties in psychology or philosophy but on one’s general notion of what wisdom is like, and thus of what philosophy is good for. Is it to emphasize the aspects of man reached by public methods of common conversation and scientific enquiry? Or rather a personal and inarticulate sense of “something far more deeply interfused”? (105).

The consequence of this division in purpose is that the two approaches are attempting to answer two very different sets of questions. In light of Rorty’s distinction, one could say that the view presented later as an alternative to cognitivism’s naturalism, is Cartesian insofar as it shares Descartes’ view of the point of philosophy, where philosophical reflections on the mind concern questions about what it means for us as human beings to attempt to live (a good) life. These latter questions are of no interest to the naturalist, whose aims are rather to construct “a philosophy so scientific that no one whose life was not a life of pure research could appreciate it,” to use Collingwood’s (1939) words (51). We might say that the former attempts to answer scientific questions about the observable properties of thought and sensation, whereas the latter engages in thought (instead of observing it) by investigating “the life of the mind,” to borrow Hannah Arendt’s term (1977). With this brief overview of the aims and starting points of the naturalistic development from Descartes to cognitivism, the next step is to take a closer look at how these theories were construed so as to achieve this transformation of the mind into a natural object. Behaviorism, to begin with, neglects all explanation with reference to interiority in favor of describing the mind solely in terms of external behavior. This solution was eventually seen as unsatisfactory, even among those who agreed with the behaviorist’s effort to naturalize the mind, because it fails to account for the complexities of mental life. We might, for example, feel pain without expressing it, and behaviorism is inadequate when it comes to explaining such possibilities. Despite this failure, however, behaviorism could be seen as an important step in the naturalistic direction through its effort to turn the mind into a natural object, as opposed to its Cartesian immaterial counterpart. Feigl (1958) and Smart (1959) are recognized as having reinstated the “mental” as a topic of interest by opposing behaviorism and reintroducing the Cartesian mind-body problem to the analytic audience. Their theories about the identification of the mind with the brain (the mental with the physical) are meant to avoid the problem of immaterial causes arising out of Cartesian dualism by retaining behaviorism’s materialism, but proposing a possibility of investigating the complexities evident within the “black box” that behaviorism fails to account for. Instead of having to look “inside the mind” through introspection, this “mind-brain identity thesis”

suggests that we can explain the mental by studying physical occurrences in the brain. Thus, mentalism is back, but in a new naturalized form. For Smart (1959), this reduction appears necessary because he doubts that the mental (more precisely, sensation) could be the only thing in the universe that cannot be explained by physical laws. His mind-brain identity thesis uses Occam’s razor to argue from simplicity for a strict identity between mind and brain, suggesting that the mind is the brain; sensations are nothing “over and above” brain processes; they are the very same thing. This provides an alternative to behaviorism that retains the replacement of the Cartesian subjective first-person perspective of conscious experience with a scientific objective third-person study of the mind, this time through the brain. In an ingenious move, Smart turns the Cartesian conception on its head. But, as we shall see in 3.2, this theory creates a new dualism between brain and body, and loses the capacity to speak in psychological terms about the mind, something which cognitivism attempts to solve with a more nuanced conception of this theory that adds to it the computational theory of mind. This takes us to the next step in the development. This reduction is then criticized in the 1960s by proponents of functionalism, among them most notably Hilary Putnam (1967), who argues that sensation should instead be understood as a “functional state of a whole organism,” for which he takes the Turing Machine as a model. He likens the human being with a machine, or what he calls a “Probabilistic Automaton,” which is supposed to have the capacity for sensation as long as it has the “appropriate kind of Functional Organization” with sensory inputs that is unable to experience the same sensations if it is divided into parts—meaning that an explanation of the mind cannot be reduced to the brain, but must involve the whole organism. Putnam suggests that there must be included in this functional setup some form of “preference function,” capable of ordering things, and “something that resembles an ‘inductive logic’ (i.e., the Machine must be able to ‘learn from experience’)” (200). In this paper, Putnam does not explain precisely how these functions are meant to work, and he later abandons the functionalist movement he started in order to propose a form of externalism instead (1975). In Chapter 3.3, we will come back to suggest that Putnam was on the right track, even if we share his later doubts as to the extent to which we could rightly be compared with computers. John Searle (1980) remarks, in turn, that a machine would be unable to function like a human mind. His famous Chinese Room thought experiment7 is meant to show that even if a machine

7 For those unfamiliar with it, David Cole provides a short and eloquent summary of Searle’s thought experiment in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2020): “The heart of the argument is Searle imagining himself following an [sic] symbol processing program written in English (which is what Turing called ‘a paper machine’).

could pass the Turing test, it would be incapable of attaching meaning to the symbols it learns to manipulate. To Searle (1990), it comes down to a difference between comprehending the syntax and the semantics of language. He argues that semantics cannot be simulated. A brain causes mental events “by virtue of specific neurobiological processes.” It is not enough for a machine to simulate this causation; it must “be able to duplicate the specific causal powers of brains, and it could not do that just by running a formal program” (29). Paul and Patricia Churchland (1990) later agree with Searle that the Turing test is insufficient, but suggest that, in the future, we might be able to construct Artificial Intelligence with a more “brain-like architecture” capable of doing all the things our brains do. “An artificial brain might use something other than biochemicals to achieve the same ends” (37). To the Churchland’s, the brain is the answer, but the promise of creating minds in the future will depend on the development of artificial systems capable of “mimicing” the complexities of the brain. A brief recap like this cannot accurately and fairly represent all these theories in the detail that they deserve, and naturally it covers a very limited selection of relevant work. But the aim is simply to sketch the main lines of the debate concerning the extent to which the mind could be naturalized and how the relationship between the mental and the physical ought to be conceived. It also indicates a growing consensus in the conception of the human mind in terms of physical processes, which can be explained with the help of the computer as an analogous model. Above all, we see an idealized picture of a future science (be it physics, neurology or information technology) as the final arbiter to prove the validity of the ideas discussed. In this respect, they rely on what Fischer called “neuromyths,” a scientism bordering, at times, on science-fiction. This section began with a description of cognitivism as an attempt to naturalize the mind through the working hypothesis “that thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures” (Thagard 2019), which we claimed to be a fusion of Cartesian mentalism with the brain identity theory and the computer analogy. We have suggested that one might see this attempt as the result of a deeply ingrained scientism which holds that only scientific explanation provides genuine understanding; there is no other alternative. We will now attempt to unpack

The English speaker (Searle) sitting in the room follows English instructions for manipulating Chinese symbols, whereas a computer ‘follows’ (in some sense) a program written in a computing language. The human produces the appearance of understanding Chinese by following the symbol manipulating instructions, but does not thereby come to understand Chinese. Since a computer just does what the human does – manipulate symbols on the basis of their syntax alone – no computer, merely by following a program, comes to genuinely understand Chinese.”

the cognitivist program and its hypothesis by summarizing answers to three follow-up questions: (1) why should we adopt mentalism? (2) why should we identify this mentalist conception of the mind with the brain? and (3) why should we compare this mentalist conception of the mind as the brain with the mechanisms of a computer? These three steps are essential for the cognitivist’s attempt to naturalize the mind.8 (1) Why should we adopt mentalism? Cognitivism seemingly takes notes from all sides of the debate recounted so far. Fodor (1968; 1980; 1987), one of the more prominent contemporary defenders of cognitivism (and Putnam’s student), repeatedly proclaims that “cognitivism is the rehabilitation of the representational theory of mind” (Descombes 1995: 68).9 As a way of explaining why we should embrace this view, the self-described “modern mentalist” Fodor (1980) writes that we need to: “adopt some such theory as a sort of working hypothesis, if only because there aren’t any alternatives which seem to be even remotely plausible and because empirical research carried out within this framework has, thus far, proved interesting and fruitful” (63). So, there are two reasons why we should adopt mentalism: (a) because there are no other plausible alternatives, and (b) because it benefits empirical research to view the mind in these terms. In other words, cognitivism agrees with the claim that theories about the mental must be revived, since behaviorism, seen as the only other viable scientifically acceptable alternative, fails to account for all aspects of mental life. This is the step that necessitates a re- engagement with mentalism, which we can see already in the works of Smart and Feigl. The upside of adopting this view, then, is that it lays a plausible foundation for a scientific approach to the problem just because it treats the mind as an isolated object that we should, in theory, be able to investigate through empirical observation. But Cartesian mentalism is on its own insufficient due to its dualism between the material body and the immaterial mind. That is why the second step needs to be taken. (2) Why should we identify this mentalist conception of the mind with the brain? Mentalism is again seen as a viable option because the cognitivist’s modern version of this theory avoids issues with immaterial causes as it replaces Cartesian spiritualism with a materialism that holds

8 The main inspiration for the following three-step summary of the cognitivist’s project comes from chapter 4, “The New Mental Philosophy,” in Descombes’ The Mind’s Provisions (1995: 68). Descombes takes inspiration from Fodor (in particular his work Psychosemantics from 1987) from which he generalizes. It suits our purposes to keep in Descombes’ spirit and characterize cognitivism as broadly as possible at this stage in order to grasp its main features, and hence to see the following quotes from Fodor as representative of something larger than his own specific theories. 9 This is Descombes’ phrasing. In Fodor’s (1987) own words: “[w]hat I’m selling is the Representational Theory of Mind […] At the heart of the theory is the postulation of a language of thought: an infinite set of ‘mental representations’ which function both as the immediate objects of propositional attitudes and as the domains of mental processes” (16-17).

that everything in the world, including the mind, is in the end material. This is essentially what Smart already suggests when he uses Occam’s razor to propose that there is no justification for positing just one thing, “the mind,” that cannot be explained by reference to physics. The cognitivist’s solution to naturalizing the mind is to naturalize intentionality (see Descombes 1995: 75) by translating mental concepts into physical counterparts and replacing all teleological explanation of human activity with scientific explanations based on physical causes that concern a complex network of relations between mental (or brain) states, processes and representations. The cognitivist’s position, however, is meant to be more complex and subtle than Smart’s in that it does not view the mind as simply reducible to the brain, which takes us to the third step. (3) Why should we compare this mentalist conception of the mind as the brain with the mechanisms of a computer? The naturalistic explanation of the mind is finally seen as possible for the cognitivist when the computer is found to be a suitable model for the mechanics of the human mind, since a computer can perform “mental tasks” such as calculating or playing chess that could be explained in terms of what Aristotle would call material and efficient causes. If a computer can display intelligence that could be explained in such naturalistic terms, we should be able to reveal the same mechanical procedures in human physiology. In this way, cognitivism fuses the reduction of the mind to the brain with the functionalist analogy with the machine (much like the Churchlands), thus adopting alongside “the representational theory of mind” what is called “the computational theory of mind” (Fodor 1980: 63). These two theories, representationalism and computationalism, are the cornerstones of modern cognitivism. In the foregoing, we have traced cognitivism from Cartesianism through modern philosophy of mind as a collective historical attempt to understand the mind scientifically. The claim has been that cognitivism relies on mentalism as a detachment of mind from world and body, which allows it to adopt methodological solipsism to study the mind isolated from its context. This isolated and objectified mind is supposed to consist of intentional mental states with representations that explain human activities and behaviors in terms of efficient causality, where our actions are seen merely as symptoms or effects caused by the inner workings of the mind, hence the representational theory of mind. Cognitivism differs from traditional Cartesianism in that it wants to locate these mental states and representations in the brain and explain its causal mechanics materially with the help of the computer as an analogous model, hence the computational theory of mind. This way of viewing the mind is adopted as a presupposed necessity, as cognitivism joins its predecessors in the attempt to naturalize the mind. In the next part of this essay we will criticize and consider an alternative to this view.

3. A CRITIQUE OF COGNITIVISM

In the three main chapters that constitute the second section of this essay, we are going to construct three criticisms, one against each step in the cognitivist’s transition from Cartesianism. In the first chapter 3.1, we break with mentalism by criticizing and providing an exteriorized and holistic alternative. The goal here is to show why we should not look inside the mind for answers, but instead look at the intentional actions we perform as agents in a social environment as expressions of mental life. In the second chapter 3.2, we will present an argument against the identification of the mind with the brain as a way of criticizing the idea that we can talk about brains that act and learn intentionally. Those who support the mind-brain identity thesis do not adhere to the logic of parts and wholes, but they treat the brain as a little person (homunculus) with its own intentions living inside us. Instead of naturalizing the mind, they mentalize nature. In the third chapter 3.3, we will show why today’s computer is a weak analogy for the mind and consequently a bad model for us to adopt when we want to understand what learning involves. This is because a computer neither knows nor cares about the things its mechanisms concern, but these are important aspects of the intentionality of the mind and of learning. The first chapter aims to cut cognitivism at its roots. The bulk of the argumentation will, therefore, be made here. The two following chapters will then follow suit by showing that what has been said about the exteriorization of the mental in the previous chapter makes the steps taken towards both the mind-brain identity theory and the computer analogy unsatisfactory. Those chapters will, therefore, be significantly shorter than this first.

3.1 A Critique of Mentalism

“At these times,” said Dumbledore, indicating the stone basin, “I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.” “You mean . . . that stuff’s your thoughts?” Harry said, staring at the swirling white substance in the basin. “Certainly,” said Dumbledore. “Let me show you.” —J. K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000: 597)

Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of “I think that,” but of “I can.” —Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception (1945: 159)

In the following subchapters (3.1.1-3.1.2), we will consider a critique of, and an externalized, holistic, embedded and enacted alternative to, mentalism’s treatment of mental life as something that goes on inside our heads in the form of intentional mental states and processes with causal powers that have no connection to the outside world as they deal only with representations of reality. The picture painted here suggests that mentalist theories treat mental life in the manner of Dumbledore’s Pensieve, allowing us to read the contents of the mind through observation. In the end, we want to show that mental life is shown in our intentional actions, not inside our minds, which is why Merleau-Ponty’s definition of mental life as capability should be a preferable guiding theme. 10

3.1.1 The Exteriorization of the Mental We will begin here by considering a certain interpretation of Wittgenstein’s exteriorization of mental life as an alternative to mentalism. This alternative view rejects “metaphysical monism,” i.e., the position that we need to construct a philosophy of mind with the language used by the natural sciences. The purpose of this first subchapter is to show what is at stake by considering this alternative in its philosophical context, and by thus showing what it means to study the mind by studying various forms of life, which the next subchapter intends to do by instead considering the language we use to discuss intentional action as expressions of mental life. Wittgenstein scholar and biographer Ray Monk (2005) has suggested that Wittgenstein’s “greatest achievement […] was to have undone 300 years of Cartesianism” (88). Given what we have learned so far, we should be able to replace the word “Cartesianism” with “mentalism” here. Descombes (2005) likewise argues that the significance in Wittgenstein’s break with the tradition set in philosophy of mind consists in his “exteriorization of the mental” which wants to show “that we cannot assimilate the mental life just to a flux of (either conscious or unconscious) representations;” a view shared by modern “enactivists,” who deploy this term to

10 Since Fodor devotes energy to criticizing something of a holistic conception of mind in some of his works, it might have been considered suitable to include his thoughts on the matter here. The reason for not doing this is that the holism we are presenting does not resemble whatever Fodor seems to think holism stands for. Descombes (1996) reflects upon the work Holism: A Shopper’s Guide by Fodor and Ernest LePore (1992) and concludes that instead of discussing a holism of the system as totality which they claim to criticize, they discuss only a Quinean form of holism of the collection as plurality (98-103). At another instance, Fodor (1980) rather seems to take pride in not having read the works of his critics, where he sums up the exteriorized view as “folk psychology” (66) with the Heideggerian term Dasein (“Being in the World”), and ends his article with the sarcastic comment, “I don’t know what Dasein is, but I’m sure that there’s lots of it around” (71), but that he knows that it comes from Martin Heidegger, “about whom I know nothing” (72; emphasis added). Needless to say, the version of holism that we are presenting here is probably not whatever Fodor has in mind when using the term. Consequently, his criticism is not relevant here.

“emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs” (Rosch et al. 1993: 9). Enactivists see mental life as embodied in the whole subject’s body, enacted by the subject, embedded in a social and physical environment, and extended into this environment (Rowland 2010: 3). As we shall see, the same points are made by Wittgenstein’s exteriorization of the mental and the intentional view of the mind that derives from Wittgenstein and Anscombe via Descombes, which has nothing to do with the external localization of the mind in the brain or bodily behavior that find in cognitivism and behaviorism. The reason, according to Descombes (1995), for accepting mentalism and regarding the mind as something isolated “inside the head,” would be the existence of some purely internal phenomena. But Descombes (1995) points out that there is nothing we can do in thought which we cannot equally do, so to speak, “out loud.” The reason we can calculate in silence is because we once learned to calculate by hand. To Descombes, this “suggests that it is advisable to exteriorize all mental descriptions” (121). Perhaps more importantly, some things that concern the mind cannot be actualized unless they are exteriorized, that is, unless they are performed in some way through action, as we will argue in the next subchapter, and in relation to learning in section 4. But before we move there, we need to characterize this “exteriorization,” especially in order to distinguish it from behaviorism, because the point that both the Wittgensteinian view and enactivism share is that human action is not simply reducible to bodily movements in the behavioristic sense, nor is it reducible to internal mechanisms in a mentalist sense. In criticizing the distinction between the “inner” and the “outer” on which mentalism, behaviorism and cognitivism is based, we eventually want to show that physical human action performed by people has a mental dimension in the form of the intentional life of the mind, and that this mental aspect can be exteriorized in our sociocultural language about intentions. While it is doubtful that Wittgenstein saw himself as undoing the works of Descartes—he had after all little interest in the history of philosophy—he did, as Monk (2005) recounts, think of himself as working against a certain spirit of his time (94-98). This is a spirit characterized particularly by the scientism that we mentioned earlier:

His work is opposed, as he once put it, to “the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand.” Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face (Monk 1999).

According to Mary McGinn, in The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1997), Wittgenstein finds problematic the ways in which science and philosophy explain the mind by studying mental phenomena as if they were versions of natural phenomena (107; see also PI: §149).11 It is likely that Wittgenstein’s rejection of mentalism through his exteriorization of the mental is what has made some interpret him as a behaviorist. A common cause for this interpretation is what has later been called Wittgenstein’s “private language argument,” roughly, the thought that there can be no such thing as a personal, subjective language about sensations because language is by definition public (PI: §§244-271). Putnam (1975) has made a similar argument for his externalist view of semantics, and this is essentially Descombes’ point about anything mental: it begins outside as an external operation that can be interiorized. In the literature, however, there are numerous examples of prominent philosophers who interpret the argument as a behavioristic response to the problem of the mind. Smart (1959), for example, sees that Wittgenstein wants to do away with Cartesian dualism, but interprets him as being both a behaviorist and a materialist: “[On Wittgenstein’s] view there are, in a sense, no sensations. A man is a vast arrangement of physical particles, but there are not, over and above this, sensations or states of consciousness. There are just behavioral facts about this vast mechanism” (143). Others have maintained that to call Wittgenstein a behaviorist is to misunderstand what he is trying to accomplish. Ray Monk (2005), for example, writes: “[r]eading the later Wittgenstein as a behaviorist is analogous to reading the early Wittgenstein as a Logical Positivist. In both cases, it is a mistake that could not possibly be made by anybody who knew Wittgenstein or who understood what kind of man he was” (96). Marie McGinn (1997) argues similarly:

It misinterprets Wittgenstein’s thought here to say that the criteria for understanding are purely behavioural. This rendering of his thought does not capture the particular form of complexity that he is drawing attention to. He does not, for example, claim that the sense of the word ‘understand’ consists in the behavioral criteria for its application” (107).

And, reiterating the point made initially, Descombes (1996) writes: “Wittgenstein exteriorizes the mental not because he denies the existence of interior acts but because he denies that interior acts have powers that the same acts would not when exteriorized in language” (82; emphasis

11 Following convention, titles from Wittgenstein’s works are abbreviated (PI = Philosophical Investigations, BB = The Blue and Brown Books, OC = On Certainty, CV = Culture and Value), with section (§) or page numbers, and full citation and initials (e.g., PI) in the Bibliography.

added). To exteriorize mind in language is not to reduce mind to matter or behavior; language is an external, sociocultural, phenomenon. To say that intentional actions are expressions of the mental is not the same thing as to reduce the one to the other. The influence of the behavioristic interpretation notwithstanding, there are numerous examples of remarks by Wittgenstein that speak against such a reading. To take just one, consider a person who is learning how to read. Wittgenstein invites us to imagine someone who is just pretending as opposed to someone who is actually reading, and the outward behavior being the same in both instances. What is the difference? Wittgenstein’s answer is that a person who is actually reading would have “feelings more or less characteristic of reading,” such as “feelings of hesitating, of looking more closerly [sic], of misreading, of words following on one another in a more or less familiar fashion, and so on,” whereas someone pretending to read “will have none of the feelings that are characteristic of reading, and will perhaps have various feelings characteristic of cheating” (PI: §159). These are hardly the words of a behaviorist. To make this distinction between exteriorization and behaviorism clearer, we might distinguish between exteriorization and externalization. The word “exterior” denotes the outside surface of an object, whereas “external” is a broader term that could denote this surface but also whatever is in the area outside the object. It is possible that we might benefit from instead talking about the “externalization of the mental” in order to emphasize that Wittgenstein is not simply referring to the exterior surface of the body. For simplicity’s sake, however, we will go on using the established terminology, if only to avoid any further confusion. It has been suggested that what Wittgenstein wants is rather to do away with this dichotomy between the “inner” and the “outer,” between mentalism and behaviorism, altogether (Stenlund 2000: 9-10). Or, perhaps rather, to take away the sense of mystery implied by this distinction, as if what was internal could not be exteriorized, and vice versa.12 For Descombes (2005), Wittgenstein’s analysis of mental life reveals the mistake that both approaches make:

For [Wittgenstein], it is by no means a question of observing anything whatsoever; hence, there are no phenomena to observe that might occur in me and of which I would be the only observer—the introspective approach. But nor are there behaviors outside of us to observe, and so no basis for saying, “That behavior is what we call ‘thinking’”! Wittgenstein says in fact that one needs to consider the verb ‘to think’ itself.

12 Descombes (2005): “For Wittgenstein, however, the internal-external opposition has meaning—indeed, several meanings—in different contexts, but it is also no great mystery. For example, there’s no mystery in saying that when I have a thought, I don’t necessarily express it, and so can keep it for myself. If this is all one means in talking about having one’s thoughts being “internal”, that’s fine; there’s no mystery since this thought that I keep for myself is just a thought I don’t want to express, which means that I could express it. There is nothing private about this thought inside me. And as for the “external”, it’s quite simply what one expresses in language, or manifests in various expressions or actions. There is no mystery here either.”

Again, Cartesian mentalism wants to observe the mind as an immaterial object, a “thinking thing,” through introspection. Behaviorism wants to explain the mind by observing the material object that is the human body through its external behavior. Cognitivism, on the other hand, wants to observe the mind from an external, objective, third-person point of view by studying the brain, which again is an object, this time both material and external, but with internal content. Thus, cognitivism fuses mentalism with the naturalistic demands of natural (empirical) science. The most central aspect of this approach is the view of the mind as an observable object. Sören Stenlund (1980) aptly calls this inclination in philosophy “object-thinking,” the tendency to treat every subject of philosophical inquiry as if it were just another object, like those studied by the natural sciences (109). Wittgenstein rejects this underlying presupposition shared by mentalism, behaviorism and cognitivism, i.e., that mind must be conceived of as such an object. The Wittgensteinian view is rather that “the mind” is not an object we can observe, and, therefore, that we cannot “know” it in the same way that we can attain empirical knowledge of objects such as trees. Trying to understand the mind this way would mean that we could read mental content in the same way that Dumbledore observes his thoughts in his Pensieve. The exteriorization of mind is a way to show how funny this story is. For Wittgenstein, philosophy is not a natural science (CV: 29), and it should, therefore, not study natural objects, but various forms of life (PI: §23). What does this entail? We will argue that it means that we need to adopt an alternative language to the language used by the natural sciences by appealing to the language we already use to make sense of human life in our ordinary lives. This means abandoning the language found in the cognitivist hypothesis about mental states, processes, representations and efficient causes, and the associated treatment of the mind as an (observable) natural object. Descombes (1995)13 writes that both traditional Cartesianism and cognitivism adhere to what he calls “metaphysical monism.” The term “metaphysical” does not denote something beyond the laws of physics, i.e., something spiritual or immaterial here, but rather the system of classifications used in one’s explanations. What the term “metaphysical monism” is meant to point out is that for the Cartesian, the word “substance” has the same meaning when he speaks about the difference between material and immaterial substances.14 Likewise, when

13 The following reflection on metaphysics is mainly inspired by the subsection NOTE ON THE CONCEPT OF METAPHYSICS in Descombes’ The Minds Provisions (1995: 78-83). 14 Descartes (1641) writes: ”For when I think that a stone is a substance, or a thing capable of existing of itself, and that I am likewise a substance, although I conceive that I am a thinking and non-extended thing, and that the stone, on the contrary, is extended and unconscious, there being thus the greatest diversity between the two concepts, yet these two ideas seem to have this in common that they both represent substances” (36).

cognitivists speak of mental states and brain states, the term “state” means the same thing in both instances, and they both have the same meaning as any other natural state of an object studied by the natural sciences. When they treat the mental in the same way as they treat natural objects in the world, they are counting the mental as just another kind of object, and the term “object” means the same thing in both cases. Wittgenstein clarifies his criticism of this approach when he writes:

In either case it confuses everything to say “the one is a different kind of object from the other”; for those who say that a sense datum is a different kind of object from a physical object misunderstand the grammar of the word “kind”, just as those who say that a number is a different kind of object from a numeral. They think they are making such a statement as “A railway train, a railway station, and a railway car are different kinds of objects”, whereas their statement is analogous to “A railway train, a railway accident, and a railway law are different kinds of objects” (BB: 64).

“They” here refers to anyone who adheres to metaphysical monism, by treating the mind as if it were like any other natural object. In Stenlund’s terms, they are “object-thinkers.” Whereas the words “train,” “station,” and “car” refer to objects, it is doubtful if we would call an “accident” or a “law” an object and mean the same kind of thing. The question is if the mental is more like trains, stations and cars, or if it differs from these things in the way accidents and laws do. In other words:

[i]n the context of the study of the mind, the metaphysical problem is not one of counting the varieties of substance (within the unique category called “substance”). It is to know whether the sciences of the mind are to work with the same system of categories as do some or all of the sciences of nature or whether, on the other hand, they should not instead take their metaphysical system from disciplines that deal with human affairs like law, rhetoric (Descombes 1995: 83).

So, this question comes down to asking which language we should adopt when discussing the mind. Cognitive science and the cognitivism on which it is built follows Smart and the rest of the naturalists by suggesting that we should adopt the language of the natural sciences and treat the mind as a material object like any other. But it is Descartes who sets the stage here, by speaking of the mind as a substance to begin with, as something in which we are supposed to find answers to the problems of mental life. The alternative would be to break with this attempt before it is even made, and thus to break with mentalism and the treatment of the mind as an object. Descombes (1995) suggests that we do this by adopting another metaphysical system, one which takes as its starting point what we

know from the study of human forms of life, their institutions, beliefs, artifacts, customs and norms, all of which belongs properly to the social sciences and the humanities, or what Descombes labels the “moral sciences:”

Our concept of mind does not exist in a void: it is the general name of a vast network of concepts used by people to explain themselves and to talk to one another. Moreover, these concepts have already been subject to a certain systematization, particularly in the rhetorical arts as used by judges and lawyers, political orators and historians. The application of these kinds of concepts to the material furnished by historical experience is the daily bread of the moral sciences, so called because they are the study of mores, the ways of doing and thinking of various people (29).

The term “moral sciences” has a historical and cross-cultural significance in philosophy, the way it references the German Geisteswissenschaften and the French sciences de l’esprit, where the terms “Geist” and “esprit,” has often been rendered “spirit” in English translations, such as in G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit [Phänomenologie des Geistes] or Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws [Esprit the lois]. But the term could just as well be translated as “mind.” This means that the “moral sciences,” which is sometimes also referred to as the “human sciences,” could be rendered simply the “sciences of the mind.” Stephen Adam Schwartz makes this clarification in the translator’s note to Descombes’ The Mind’s Provisions (1995), where he concludes that Descombes:

might be seen as bringing together the two English meanings of “esprit,” by defending the holistic and externalist thesis that the individual mind is inconceivable outside the impersonal spirit of the institutions of meaning, i.e., that these are its necessary conditions” (251 n. 1).

In order to distinguish this broader concept of mind from the Anglophone use of, and work in, so called, “philosophy of mind” or “mental philosophy,” we are going to stick with the term “moral sciences,” so as to emphasize that the study of the mental is a study of human life, or “the life of the mind,” to again use Arendt’s term (1977), as opposed to a study of some impersonal and material object. Monk (1999) similarly insists that Wittgenstein’s “forgotten lesson” was that there are forms of genuine understanding that do not derive from the natural sciences, including our understanding of the mind:

There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music—all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better. There is a widespread feeling today that the great scandal of our times is that we lack a scientific theory of consciousness. And so there is a great interdisciplinary effort, involving

physicists, computer scientists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, to come up with tenable scientific answers to the questions: what is consciousness?

To sum up, we have argued that in order to exteriorize the mind we need to reject metaphysical monism. We can see how metaphysical monism fits in with the scientism we characterized in the last chapter. If there is only one acceptable metaphysical system that we can use to explain and understand anything, then we must adopt this language and discard all other alternatives. Descombes and Monk, both following Wittgenstein, are posing the same question: what if we could show that the mind is not such a mystery if only we adopt another language to discuss it? Both argue that this language is already available to us: it can be found in the moral sciences, that is, in the language we already use in order to explain human affairs and understand them better. In Wittgenstein’s view, the exteriorization of the mental is at the same time an exteriorization in language. We will argue that one implication of this alternative characterization is that the mind is expressed through our external and social language of intentions, that is, through intentional acts.

3.1.2 The Intentionality of Mind Seen Through Intentional Action The aim of what follows is to show that if we abandon mentalism’s conception of the mind as an object detached from the world, we will have no reason to seek for answers about its nature in the inner workings of the brain, because we would find mental life already expressed, or exteriorized, in human activity. The main objective of this chapter is to show how understanding intentional action as an expression of the intentionality of mind helps us make better sense of mental life and ultimately make it possible to conduct a meaningful inquiry into the question of intentional learning (see section 4). Furthermore, this chapter will attempt to show that this is a position shared among several critics of both the mentalist’s representational theory of mind and the related attempt to translate intentionality into causal mechanisms. Specifically, it will be shown that we can draw parallels between the language-oriented Wittgensteinian/Anscombian Descombes, on the one hand, and the phenomenologically influenced enactivist Thompson, on the other. It will be argued that these philosophies of mind share a broad understanding of intentionality as a form of openness and potentiality, which is irreducible to a transitive, direct relationship between subject and object. The nature of this

openness requires that we situate the mind in the world, which makes this chapter a first blow against the cognitivist’s mentalist foundation on which the learning brain relies.15 For most of the twentieth century, intentionality has often, although not always, been viewed as the distinguishing feature of the mental. Its meaning is usually derived from Franz Brentano’s third thesis, commonly abbreviated as: “all consciousness is consciousness of something.” This proposition insists that our mental lives are always directed towards something, that any mental act has an object (Brentano 1874: 68). In much of contemporary philosophy of mind, intentionality is understood in a mentalist sense, where the term refers to the mind’s power to represent things in the world (Jacob 2019). Others, however, have attempted to show that the mind’s intentionality is the very thing that makes the representational theory of mind untenable, because it is what connects the mind to the world, which makes the mentalist’s attempt to isolate mental life impossible. To Edmund Husserl (1931), who is often credited with having popularized Brentano’s thesis, intentionality means that the mind transcends itself by always forming a connection to the things it concerns, which ultimately provides an opportunity for philosophy to go “back to the things themselves.” Despite the phenomenological reduction that Husserl deploys through his epoché—i.e., the separation of the real object from the intentional object that he makes in order to focus solely on the phenomenological experience of reality— he insists that “the perception of this table still is, as it was before, precisely a perception of this table” (32-33). In other words, he insists that the mind is concerned with real things in the world, not simply representations of these things. At other times, he describes this intentional relation rather as a possibility, i.e., as a possible relation between the mind and the real object:

In the case of most objects, to be sure, evidence is only an occasional occurrence in conscious life; yet it is a possibility and, more particularly, one that can be the aim of a striving and actualizing intention in the case of anything meant already or meanable. Thus it points to an essential fundamental trait of all intentional life (57-58).

15 A note regarding delimitations in this subchapter. One might think that any contemporary account on intentional action should at the very least mention the works of Donald Davidson on the subject, in particular, perhaps, his work Essays on Actions and Events (1980). There are two reasons for leaving him out here. On the one hand, limitations simply had to be made. On the other hand, it could be argued that it would be superfluous to add Davidson to the list of sources here. Davidson represents a view of intentions that builds on Anscombe’s Intention (1957), which likewise will be the main source for our treatment below. However, he tries to fuse her work into the Cartesian tradition by translating the teleological structure of Anscombe’s view of intentions into the language of efficient mental causes, like any mentalist. Since we are already opposing this view, Davidson will be left out, even though a deeper engagement with this topic would probably benefit from making him the main representative of the causal interpretation of intentional action. For a more extensive comparison between Anscombe and Davidson, and an account of the ways he attempts to naturalize intentionality, see Frederick Stoutland’s “Introduction: Anscombe’s Intention in Context” in Essays on Anscombe’s Intention (2011: 1-22).

So, it seems Husserl is presenting two ways in which the mind can intentionally relate to its object: one that forms an actual relation, and another that consists of a potential relation. However, he is, as we shall see, often seen as wanting to establish the former. Thompson (2007) makes a distinction between a narrow and a broad conception of the phenomenological understanding of intentionality, which appears to correlate with this difference between an actual and a potential relation:

Phenomenologists distinguish between different types of intentionality. In a narrow sense, they define intentionality as object-directedness. In a broader sense, they define it as openness to the world or what is “other” (“alterity”). In either case, the emphasis is on denying that consciousness is self- enclosed” (22).

Whereas the narrow sense is often traced to Husserl’s works, the broader sense is usually attributed to his followers, most notably, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger (cf. Dreyfus 1993). Descombes (1996) makes an argument against Husserl, in which he seems to attack the narrow sense in particular. His argument is that Husserl fails to show how he can come back from the epoché and establish that the intentional object is ultimately the same as the real object. To Descombes, the epoché, which brackets the real world, is implausible to begin with, because whenever the phenomenological perspective refers to the intentional object, say, a phenomenological experience of a tree, this point of view must always, first and foremost, refer to the real tree itself. Instead of showing how the intentional object is in fact the same as the real object, Descombes argues that Husserl’s solution is really suggesting the opposite, namely that the real object is the same as the intentional object. In short, the core of his criticism is that Husserl fails to show how the mind forms a direct relationship to the real object in the world (55-64). Others (cf. Bengtsson 2001: 31) have noted a similar problem in Husserl’s work, especially as his theorizing progresses from what might seem as an attempt at a “realist” conception of the mind to what he later concludes is a form of “phenomenological- transcendental idealism” (Husserl 1931: 150). Nevertheless, there are those who argue that the broader conception of intentionality succeeds where it might be argued that Husserl’s often narrow conception fails. In what follows, Husserl will not be our concern, but it will be argued that there is indeed one sense in which a broad phenomenological understanding of intentionality as openness establishes a connection between the intentional mind and the real world, and that this is a view broadly shared between Descombes’ language-oriented anthropological holism and Thompson’s phenomenological enactivism, even though they come to this conclusion from different directions.

Descombes (1995; 1996) argues that the Brentanian conception of intentionality confuses it with transitivity (22; 26). A transitive verb constitutes a direct relationship between an agent and an object. Kicking a ball on the ground forms a transitive relationship between the action and the physical object. “To kick” is, therefore, a transitive verb that reveals that something also must have been kicked. An intransitive verb, by contrast, does not have such a relationship to any object. One example would be “to suffer,” in its intransitive sense, where the suffering has no object that is suffered. Again, mentalism interprets Brentano’s thesis as saying that consciousness must have a direct relationship with an intentional object in the form of a representation (Jacob 2019). What it describes is, in other words, a transitive relation that is similar to Husserl’s narrow conception of intentionality, but is further complicated as it adds representations to the equation. This provides a challenge for the mentalist who must explain this mental transitivity (Descombes 1996: 32-36). How can mental activity directly affect its object? A kick certainly affects the thing kicked. That act constitutes an authentic, real, physical relation between a subject and an object. But the object of a mental act is not directly affected in this way. If John loves Lucy that certainly affects him. But the fact that Lucy is loved by John does not necessarily affect Lucy at all, especially if John never lets her know. He might, of course, do all sorts of things to show his love, which affects Lucy in various ways. But those actions hinge on his loving her in the first place. The thoughts he might have that he loves her, seen through mentalism as intentional mental states with her as the intentional object in the form a representation, do not affect her at all. Similarly, if Karen does not believe that the Holocaust happened, that does not make it the case that the Holocaust did not happen. The mentalist might want to argue that this is wrongly reasoned because the mind is isolated from the world, and intentional mental states only concern representations of reality, not the things that these representations represent. The mental act, therefore, only needs to affect the representation and not the real thing. Fair enough. But this response opens a whole new set of issues for the mentalist, who must now explain how the representation is grounded in what is represented and how, in the end, the mind’s causal mechanisms that only concern representations can affect what is represented. The detachment of the mind does not appear to allow either since it cuts off the representation from what it represents in the outside world. (In chapter 3.3 we will show that this idea that “representations represent” is something that cognitivism indeed not only struggles to explain, but ultimately does not allow.) To Descombes (1995), the only verbs that the solipsistic mind can accept as truly mental would seem to be of an intransitive sort, since those require no direct object, and consequently no direct relation to

the world outside the mind (202). But that would of course mean that the mentalist would have to abandon intentionality as well as representationalism, which seems to undermine the explanatory power of mentalism as a thesis about the mind. Thompson (2007) agrees with Descombes that it is a mistake to confuse intentionality with transitivity, and he argues that the failure of the representational view lies precisely in its understanding of intentionality solely in this narrow sense as object-directedness, of mental states representing intentional objects. Firstly, Thompson questions the very idea of “representation,” as he argues that the only cases where the mind actually “re-presents” objects are in memory and imagination, where the mind relates to something absent. But Thompson holds that such re-presentations ultimately depend on the mind’s original embeddedness in the world, where “re-presentations do not float freely, as it were, but arise in relation to ongoing presentational experiences of one’s surroundings” (25-26). This argument is similar to Descombes’ critique of Husserl’s epoché in that the mind must first and foremost relate to (or present) the real objects in the world. In other words, in order to “re-present” objects through memory or imagination, we must first have experienced a relation to the things remembered or to the things that fuel our imagination. Secondly, Thompson emphasizes that there are many ways in which intentional mental life is not relating to any object in particular: “bodily feelings of pain, moods such as undirected anxiety, depression, and elation, and absorbed skillful activity in everyday life” are all everyday experiences that do not concern any direct object (23). While Descombes conceives of such feelings and moods as intransitive in a grammatical sense, the similarity in their views becomes particularly interesting with regard to the question of human intentional action and “skillful activity.” Thompson (2007) borrows the latter term from Hubert Dreyfus, who considers it the typical example of the broad sense of intentionality as openness (313-316). Dreyfus (1993) writes:

In everyday absorbed coping, the experience of acting is instead the experience of steady flow of skillful activity in response to one’s sense of the environment. […] When everyday coping is going well, one experiences something like what athletes call flow, or playing out of their heads. One’s activity is completely geared into the demands of the situation (81).

Consequently, even if “skillful activity” might be best represented by professionals acting in their area of expertise, it is equally applicable to more mundane activities that we engage in out of habit in life, “like driving to the office or brushing one’s teeth,” where one might not have to think deliberately about every move one makes (83). Most importantly, “skillful coping does not require a mental representation of its goal at all. It can be purposive without the agent

entertaining a purpose” (84), which means that the “aboutness” (or “directedness”) of this broad sense of intentionality is “not the mind which is thinking about something, but the embodied person going about his or her business” (87). In Thompson’s (2007) words: “intentional experiences are conceptualized not as states having content but as acts having directedness” (25). In other words, the mind is no longer conceived of as a passive thinking thing; the broad conception of intentionality instead emphasizes the ways in which the mind is actively expressed and revealed by people’s actions in the world they inhabit. Dreyfus (1993), however, suggests that, whereas skillful and habitual activity occurs on an almost unconscious level of experience, we go back to the narrow form of direct subject-object intentionality whenever we struggle with situations in life and need to focus (89). Since this essay is concerned with the question of learning, in which we are not experts but need to pay attention and focus on the problem at hand, this suggests that learning still involves this transitive form of intentionality. We will contest Dreyfus on this particular point, as we will reject the narrow sense of intentionality by arguing that mental acts never directly affects its objects. And as we argue for the broader conception, we will show how this openness can indeed be purposive without having to entertain a purpose in skillful practice, but that “entertaining a purpose” in more focused activities does not amount to a direct relationship between subject and object. In order to be able to make this argument and eventually relate it to the practice of learning (in section 4), we need to delve deeper into the connection between the intentionality of mind and intentional action, especially considering that this is a connection that mentalism denies. The mentalist consensus today is that the intentionality of the mental has nothing to do with intentions as we speak of them in ordinary language with respect to intentional actions (as in “it was my intention to kick the ball, not to miss it”) (Jacob 2019). Many philosophers likewise consider it necessary, as we have seen, to detach human action from an understanding of the mind in order to follow the Cartesian device of retaining only the will, in the form of some intentional mental state, as a source of causal power. Since the mental is normally set in opposition to the physical, and intentionality is seen as the mark of the mental, it might seem appropriate to make such a distinction, considering that human intentional action involves the body, i.e., the physical. Descombes (1995; 1996), however, opposes this consensus. Instead of viewing our actions as symptoms of mental activity (where mental states cause bodily movement), he suggests that we view intentional action, and the language we use to express our intentions, as one aspect of the intentionality of mind, and hence as a possible criterion of mind, i.e., as proof of mental life (1995: 12, 18). It is this view that the broader

phenomenological conception of intentionality as openness appears to agree with, at least to enactivism, considering that the term “enactivism” is meant to emphasize that mental life is enacted. By going back in time, before Descartes, to scholastic logic, Descombes wants to show that there is a close relationship between the term “intentionality” in its logical use (often seen as relating to mind and language), and the word “intention” in its practical use (relating to action). One might question the necessity of going back this far for an answer. But this is where Brentano found inspiration for his conception of the logical use of intentionality (Descombes 1995: 21), and all contemporary uses of Brentano’s thesis similarly claim this scholastic origin (Descombes 1996: 14). Descombes wants to show that Brentano’s interpretation, which has given rise to the narrow conception of intentionality as a form of object-directedness, was a mistake from the start. He (1996) asserts that “[t]he idea shared by the practical and logical uses of the concept of intention is that of an intentional relation” (13; emphasis added). The logical use refers to the intentional relation that a word has to its referent, i.e., “what the mind aims at in the use of the term” (ibid.). An intentional action likewise forms an intentional relation between the action and the goal with which this intentional action is performed (ibid.). Descombes (1995) argues, therefore, that the problems that we face when considering the intentionality of language or mind are the same as for the intentionality of action, since both concern how we should make sense of this intentional relation. Hence, we should include intentional action in our conception of the mind and consider philosophy of mind as part of or related to philosophy of action (25). Descombes (1996) proposes that the key to understanding intentional relations is to consider intentional verbs as separate from their transitive and intransitive counterparts, as a form of transitivity, but only in what we will call an “indirect” sense:

an intentional verb, by itself, is not transitive; nevertheless, it must not be classed among the intransitive verbs, for it can become transitive, not by itself but through its association with another verb that is usually transitive. […] The proposed solution is this: intentional verbs are transitive because they are intentional in a system that must contain transitive verbs (that are really transitive) (77).

In other words, intentional relations are triadic, not dyadic or direct in nature (240). A typical example of this that Descombes (1995; 1996) uses is the system or triadic relation formed between the verbs “to look for” and “to find” (22; 83-86). “To find” describes an encounter which is a transitive verb that forms a dyadic, one-to-one relationship between the agent and the object or person encountered. “To look for,” on the other hand, is a purely intentional verb

that constitutes a triadic relationship with the verb “to find.” Grammatically speaking, “looking for” has an object, but logically speaking, it is a possible rather than a direct object, just as the broader phenomenological conception holds (you might not find the murderer that you are looking for, or it may turn out that she does not exist, since the death that precipitated your look might have been an accident or a suicide). As we shall see, this “indirectness” characterizes intentional verbs, which makes them impossible to isolate from the context within which they form a system with the transitive verbs that makes these intentional verbs intelligible (for you to look for a murderer, it must be at least possible that someone has committed a murder). It is the indirectness of these verbs that constitutes the openness of intentionality from a grammatical point of view. There are three interconnected points coming out of this reflection that we will address: (1) this conception grounds the intentionality of the mind in the real world; (2) intentions and their objects are always “under a description;” and (3) the language of intentional action is constituted as a response to the questions why we act as we do; our answers to these questions form a teleological chain. We will explicate the meaning of each of these claims in turn. (1) This conception of intentionality constitutes a proper relationship between the mind and the world, since every intentional mental act must be thought capable of resulting in a transitive relation with a real object in the world. We would not look for something that we thought impossible to find. (We can, of course, look for something that we think exists but does not. But in that case, we stop looking the moment we find out.) The systems that intentional verbs form with these possible transitive relations constitute a connection between the mental and what it concerns in the world. If it were not for the thing itself that we seek, we would not look for it in the first place. To Descombes (1996), therefore, “[t]his response boils down to saying that the intentionality of the mental is nothing but an aspect of the holism of the mental” (77). In other words, intentionality is contextually dependent. Holism is the thesis that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is contrasted with atomism which suggests that we can break down this whole into parts (or “atoms”) and subsequently get our answers by investigating each part separately. By insisting that we cannot break down intentionality by detaching the mind from the world, we are consequently suggesting that the mind needs to be considered holistically. Furthermore, this holism is anthropological because it depends on the institutions of meanings that we share within a given context, such as laws, languages, kinship systems etc., each with its own practices and norms determining what is possible and not possible to intend within that context. (This brings us back to the difference between the exterior and the external.

Anthropological holism does not simply exteriorize the mind, it externalizes it by locating the mind in a social and cultural context. But since this is a minor point, we will continue to use the established terminology so as to avoid any unnecessary confusion.) On this point, Descombes (1995) writes:

By attributing an intention to someone, we presuppose an entire context made up of institutions and customs. The intention to play chess is the intention to play a well-defined game, with its own rules. The rules of chess are fixed, they are imposed on individuals, and they are transmitted through instruction: they thus have the characteristics of a social institution. If this institution did not exist, nobody would have the intention to play chess. The impossibility here is not, of course, empirical, as if the claim were simply that nobody would think to play chess, that the idea would not occur to one. The impossibility here is a logical one: no matter what idea occurs to one, it cannot be the idea of playing chess unless chess has an institutional presence in one’s world (Descombes 1995: 224- 225).

The difference between the verbs “to look for” and “to find” is similarly not empirical, nor is it simply linguistic because both verbs do have objects. The difference is a matter of what is logically possible, since we can look for something that does not exist, but we cannot find something that does not exist. The point is that what determines what is logically possible or not in this case is contextual, not internal to the person’s mind. This view is in a general sense shared by Thompson as well as Dreyfus, even if some terms and methods are not shared among the three. Dreyfus and Charles Taylor (2015) opts for a holistic conception of the mind that finds inspiration from both Wittgenstein and Heidegger. If anything, Thompson’s (2007) enactivism is even broader than these views’ focus on the agent’s social context, as it gives equal weight to the physical circumstances in which the acting subject finds herself, especially the body’s role in the person’s embeddedness in her activities and her world:

mental life [is] a temporally extended and dynamic process of flowing intentional acts. These acts are animated by precognitive habits and sensibilities of the lived body. Intentional acts are performances of a person, a living bodily subject of experience, whose cognitive and affective life is constituted by communal norms, conventions, and historical conditions” (24).

In chapter 2.1 we considered the difference between a computer searching for a printer in a room and a person doing the same thing. We concluded that if a computer has problems finding the printer, this problem is internal to the searching mechanisms found within the computer or the printer. If we want to find a solution to this problem, we would therefore have to do a failure search by looking inside either the software or the physical apparatus in question. If a human

being, by contrast, cannot find the printer, this is most likely because of the relation between the seeker, the printer and everything else in the room, including lighting, papers strewn over the desk, items of clothing lying about, and so forth. In this case, the problem is not “in the apparatus” (the person). Whereas the mentalist would locate the problem in the person’s (solipsistic) mind, we are instead proposing a holistic conception of the mental in order to accommodate such situations where the problem as well as the solution is “out there” or exteriorized. In this sense, we can see how both Descombes’ holistic conception of intentionality and the enactivist-phenomenological position allows for the exteriorization of the mental that we suggest as an alternative to mentalism. (2) Thompson (2007) insists that neither the act nor the object can be understood in isolation (25). We will argue that this is because, whereas an encounter is always with the real thing, an intentional action such as “to look for” as well as its object are always “under a description” (Descombes 1996: 85; Dreyfus 1993: 77). This is where the logical or grammatical analysis of the language-oriented philosophy following Wittgenstein becomes particularly pertinent. Descombes borrows the phrase “under a description” from Wittgenstein’s student and friend Anscombe (1957, 1979), which he notes is a recasting of the classical distinction between considering something in itself as opposed to considering that thing from a particular point of view, as something in particular (Descombes 1996: 62). Consequently, to say that something belongs to a thing “under a description” (“qua”) is to say that that characterization does not belong intrinsically to the nature of the thing as such, but to the description given to it at any given moment. The example he gives is the difference between a walk as such and a walk, say, to the store. The walk as such is neither intentional nor unintentional, that is, if we simply consider the physical movements of a person walking without describing this walk in some way. A walk to the store, by contrast, is most likely intentional. Anscombe (1979) gives her own example of a person who puts down a book on a table, but accidently puts it down on a puddle of ink:

“Under the description ‘putting the book down on the table’ my action was intentional, though it was unintentional under the description ‘putting the book down on a puddle of ink’,” has the subject simply “my action” and as predicates “intentional under the description” is “qua” [which then] belongs to the predicate, not to the subject” (219).

Whether an action is intentional does not depend on the action itself but on the description given to that action. The intentionality is not an intrinsic part of the bodily movements involved in that action. In other words, there is no such thing as an “A qua B,” e.g., “an action qua

intentional,” because whether an action can be counted as intentional depends on how we describe that action. To say “A qua B” amounts to saying “A insofar as it is B…” which forms an incomplete sentence. The reality is, as Descombes (1996) puts it, that: “[t]he locution ‘qua + description” introduces a property that belongs to the predicate and not the subject of the proposition” (63). In short, the characterization of an action as intentional belongs to the description given of that action, not the action “in itself.” This is why “a walk” as such is neither intentional nor unintentional, but “a walk qua a walk to the store” can introduce the property “intentional,” which then belongs to the description qua “a walk to the store,” or more precisely, to the predicate “to the store,” not to the subject “walk.” For the mentalist, who wants to assert that intentions take the form of intentional mental states that cause bodily movements, this likewise proves to be a problem. We could begin by asking how the mentalist imagines that we could locate these intentions in the mind or brain in the first place, since it would require that these internal states are somehow labeled “intentions.” One would imagine that neuroscientists perform experiments with subjects who act and express themselves in certain ways whereupon the scientists study the correlating differences that occur in the brain as these people act and talk about their actions. This is at least the view that Fischer (2009) appears to propose as he argues that we can show how our behavior affects the brain. By first acknowledging the intentional action, the scientist can then see what occurs in the brain at the time the action is performed. But it would be cheating if the mentalist would want to argue that they have located intentions in the mind if they are at the same time observing people’s actions or talking to them about what they are intentionally doing, since the mentalist insist that the intentional mental state can be considered solely as an isolated internal phenomenon. That means that we could locate thoughts and intentions in the mind in the same way as Dumbledore extracts his thoughts from his mind into the Pensieve in order to look at them, one by one, as distinct, labeled and neatly organized objects. Dumbledore does not have to describe his thoughts or intentions to Harry, who has direct access to Dumbledore’s mind through the Pensieve. The mentalist similarly seems to want to assert that it is possible to study other minds without involving the person whose mind they are studying. Anscombe shows the problems that arise from this way of thinking about intentions. In the last chapter, a distinction was made between “cars,” “accidents” and “laws” to point out that not all these words refer to objects. It was proposed that the mind should be treated differently to how the natural sciences treat their objects. What we are trying to show here is why this is. On the one hand, we have the objects studied, described and defined by the natural sciences where the definitions apply to the objects as such. On the other hand, we have our

intentional actions, which are not objects, where the intention belongs to the particular sociocultural description of an action. Consequently, if intentional actions are viewed as expressions of mental life, we can now begin to see in what way the sociocultural life of the mind differs from the objects studied by the natural sciences. If you place a book on the table but accidently put it on a puddle of ink, you are simultaneously, with one action, doing something intentionally and another thing unintentionally depending on the description. Anscombe (1979) writes:

I have on occasion stared dumbly when asked: “If one action can have many descriptions, what is the action, which has all these descriptions?” […] The proper answer to [this question] is to give one of the descriptions. Anyone, it does not matter which; or perhaps it would be best to offer a choice, saying “Take whichever you prefer” (220).

The point is that an intention is neither an internal nor a material phenomenon. It belongs to the language we use to describe human activity in a sociocultural context. In other words, it is not something that we could simply locate in the movement of the body (behaviorism), a mental state (mentalism), or a brain state (cognitivism). This is not to say that there are not actions that we can usually read as intentional solely by acknowledging the actions themselves, without talking about them. If a student is reading aloud in a classroom, we do not need to interrogate her to figure out if her act of reading is intentional. It most likely is, because it seems hard to imagine a case where someone reads unintentionally. But the reason we can say this is not due to the sum of the bodily movements made by the student. It is because she is performing an intelligible action that is in the end a socioculturally established, and as such immediately recognizable, practice. The act of reading as a form of description of action has an institutional meaning that is most likely always intentional (for a discussion on descriptions of actions that are seemingly always intentional, see Anscombe 1957: 85). We might, however, imagine that the student, unbeknownst to herself, is simultaneously reverting to her native local dialect as she reads. Maybe she is nervous and does not notice how she pronounces certain words as she might when talking to classmates or her teachers. Just like “putting down the book on a puddle of ink,” this description of her act is unintentional. The point is that the action itself seen as a sum of physical movements is neither intentional nor unintentional. But certain descriptions of our actions are always intentional, whereas other descriptions can be intentional or not depending on the situation. The context will tell us which it is. So far we have primarily been concerned with the practical use of intention. Let us now consider the logical use, i.e., “what the mind aims at in the use of the term” (Descombes

1996:13), to see how the conditions for the intentional relation involved in both scenarios mirror each other. That intentional verbs are “under a description” should similarly have consequences for the mentalist’s conception of the intentional object (such as “the store” in our example above) if this is seen as a description that similarly depends on the real object it describes. We have already suggested that the transitive conception of intentionality runs into problems here, as the mentalist must explain either how the mental act affects the real thing it concerns, or, if the mental act is only meant to concern detached representations in the form of intentional objects, how the representation relates to the thing it represents. It might be that the mentalist accepts that the representation should be characterized as a description of the real thing. In that case, the explanation could presumably go something like this. If Peter is looking for Simone, he has a representation (an idea or a mental picture) of who Simone is in his mind. This representation is the sum of all the descriptions Peter has for Simone concerning, for example, her name, her looks, her manners, her nationality, her job, her friends, where she lives, and so on. Whatever Peter knows or thinks he knows about Simone consists in the possibility of giving one or more descriptions of who she is, which he might utilize as he tries to find her. He might, for example, go to the place where he thinks she works and ask around for someone named Simone, who looks like this, works in that department with those colleagues, and so on.16 The mentalist will say that what matters in a psychological account of Peter’s conception of Simone is this internal representation. The real Simone has no influence over Peter’s belief. This is because, in a psychological account, it does not matter whether a belief is true or not. What matters is that the person believes it to be true or not true. That is, if Lucy thinks that John does not love her, it will not matter if it is true or not. Her belief is what affects her, which is why the mentalist wants to say that she is locked up in her mental sphere, and why it is possible, even necessary, to detach the real world from an understanding of the mental. But this is arguably where the mentalist goes wrong. Because, even if the truth does not affect the belief a person has if this person does not know the it, this does not mean that the real world is detached from the mental, and it does not diminish the impact that the truth might have if it were recognized. Since the intentional verb “to look for” is “under a description” and forms a system with the transitive verb “to find,” this suggests that the object of the intentional description belongs to a larger descriptive system where the real object likewise must be referenced. Proper names have, what Descombes (1996) calls “impersonal usage,” meaning that what they refer to is decided

16 The following argument takes inspiration from two different sections in Descombes’ works but is not an exact rendering of any of the arguments Descombes makes there (see 1995: 212-223; 1996: 55-77).

not by the subject but by the context. The name “Simone” “bears upon the person so named” (76). The intentional relation that Peter has to the person named Simone depends on a possible real relation with the person who fits his description. This person is the real Simone, even if the description Peter has of her turns out to be lacking or mistaken. In short, what Peter’s “mind aims at in the use of the term” “Simone” is the real Simone. This is the logical use of intentionality, which mirrors the practical use due to its being grounded in a possible transitive relation to the real thing. It is, in other words, not Peter’s mental activity, his thoughts about Simone, that determines if she is a real person who can be found. But since mentalism cuts the connection to the real world and the real Simone, it cannot tell whether Peter knows at all what he is talking about. This is why Descombes (1995) argues that mentalism’s detachment of mind cannot account for the difference between hallucination and perception. But, in a psychological account of Peter’s mind, it does matter if Simone actually exists, and it matters to Peter himself, because if he finds out that she does not, he will stop looking. Mentalism likewise cannot account for the difference between a person who is sometimes wrong and someone who is often or always wrong. Surely there is a psychological difference here, just as there is between a person who is jealous for no reason and a person who is jealous because he in fact has a rival for his love. But mentalism “disassociates the subject of mental operations from the subject of transitive actions” (219). The argument thus far is intended to suggest that this disassociation is untenable because: (1) the triadic nature of intentional mental acts shows that they form a system with the transitive actions that function as ends to the intention, which connects the mind to the world, and suggests that we need to consider the intentionality of the mind holistically; and (2) intentions are “under a description,” which means (a) that the intention belongs to the description of the action, not the action as such, and (b) that the description we have of the intentional act constitutes a relation to an object that belongs to a larger descriptive system, which includes references to a possible transitive relation with a real object. This means that neither the “intentional mental state” nor the “intentional object” can be isolated in the head and thus detached from the sociocultural context that gives our intentions and what they concern their meaning, just as Thompson insists. This takes us to the third and last point on intentional action, which concerns its teleological structure. (3) Thompson (2007) writes that “[m]ental life is animated by an intentional striving that aims toward and finds satisfaction in disclosure of the intentional object. In this way, intentionality is teleological” (24). This is the idea of the purposiveness of intentionality that Dreyfus described. It is now the idea that we want to unpack, again with the help of Anscombe.

Anscombe (1957) argues that the form of description of intentional action is the result of our socially constituted custom of asking “why?” (9). In other words, if we were not accustomed to asking why in relation to people’s actions we would not have a language about intentional action. When we explain our intentions, we are giving reasons for our actions, not (efficient) causes (34). We give reasons when people question our actions, i.e., when they ask why we are doing whatever we are doing. The thing to notice here is that these explanations are not referring to some internal mechanism but to the goals with which we act. If someone asks Julia why she works as a waitress, she would not give the explanation that her brain causes her to do so. She might, however, say that she does it because she wants to provide for her family. This difference is the difference between giving explanations in the form of efficient causes and final causes respectively. Where human action is concerned, we give the latter, which means that in everyday life, we think in teleological terms. This is because the triadic nature of the intentionality of the mental is construed teleologically, where the present action (“looking for”) can only be explained in relation to the goal of that action (“to find”). Dreyfus characterizes this type of example of “looking for” and “finding” as intentionality in the narrow sense, where the goal acts as the object which the intention is directed towards. The Fodorian, on the other hand, would likely call this “folk psychology” and argue that our use of these explanatory terms only shows that we are ignorant of how the mind actually works (see footnote 10 above). We want to show that there is good reason to reject both the narrow conception and the Fodorian criticism of this teleological structure, and we will begin with the latter. The cognitivist follows in the empiricist tradition by wanting to reduce Aristotle’s four causes (efficient, material, formal and final) to two (see footnote 4 above). Here is why we should not try to translate teleological explanations of human action into the language of efficient and material causes. Stoutland (2011) interprets Anscombe as claiming that our actions are not mediated but direct, which is the same thing as saying that our actions should not be viewed as symptoms of but rather as criteria for the mental, as Descombes, following Wittgenstein, has put it. If an action is seen as mediated or as a symptom, this means that it is seen as an effect of some inner efficient cause. This is how Stoutland reasons:

To act is not to have one’s bodily movements caused by one’s beliefs and desires; it is to exercise the power to move one’s body directly and intentionally. Further, to exercise that power is not primarily to cause events outside one’s body; it is to perform actions that extend beyond one’s body and its movements. […] We can run or walk only on a surface, that is, only in a world outside ourselves that also acts on us. We can eat or drink only by eating or drinking something that is edible or drinkable. To use a hammer is not to cause it to move, and to ski is not to cause skis to move:

those are extended bodily movements. All these bodily activities require that the bodily movement occur as constituents of a structured activity that is more than the sum of the movements (19).

Stoutland is here showing how mental life is extended into the world by providing a holistic explanation of intentional action where the action itself is more than the sum of bodily movements and internal thoughts involved in that action. We need to speak of the action as a whole, as something performed intentionally by people taken as indivisible agents in a given context. In the beginning of chapter 3.1.1, we said that some mental acts cannot be done unless exteriorized. What this comes down to is that an intentional action cannot be an intentional action unless it is acted out. If you intend to buy a loaf of bread, then in order for this to become an intentional action you must buy a loaf of bread. You can, of course, change your mind to buy something else or nothing at all. But you cannot claim to have the intention to buy a loaf of bread without ever buying one. In other words, intentions are not merely talk of “intentional mental states” and what they concern, but include whatever people are actually doing, since it is those actions that reveal our intentions. The point here is once more that the subject of mental action and the subject of physical action are one and the same subject. The intention is expressed in and through the action. We have established that in everyday life we answer the question why we act in certain ways by giving reasons that reveal our intentions, and that any one action can be described in numerous ways. Anscombe (1957) shows that these reasons then take on a particular structure, since it is possible to have more than one or even a sequence of intentions built into one action. In other words, these intentions, which are the mental aspects of our actions, form a teleological chain (37-41; 45-47). To exemplify this, consider our helpful employee who is in her colleague’s office searching frantically for the printer. Let us suppose that someone asks why she is in her colleague’s room tossing about books, paper and clothing. She might answer that she is helping her colleague print some important documents, which at the moment might not seem to make much sense. But if the question is pressed, the ensuing conversation might sound something like this: “Why are you throwing her stuff around?” “Because I promised to print out some documents for her.” “Why?” “Because I am going to bring them with me to her house after work.” “Why?” “Because she needs them now; she is working from home, and asked me to help her.” And so on. There is only one action she is performing at that instance, “looking for the printer,” but it involves several interconnected intentions. This order of intentions takes on the structure of someone “doing A in order to B in order to C in order to D etc.” This sequence of “in order to’s” is what constitutes a teleological chain in the realm of intentional

action. And this chain is not exhaustive: we can add and subtract as much detail as we want into this order of intentions, making the chain go from A—F or A—W, and so on, depending on how detailed we want to be in our descriptions. It is this complex nature of intentional action that Dreyfus’ narrow understanding of focused action seemingly misses, as he conceives of the act as direct one-to-one relationship between one action and one goal, whereas there are usually several interconnected goals involved, even in such actions. This complexity also reveals another reason why translating this teleological chain into efficient causes becomes a problem. Fodor (1968) argues that even the most simplistic intentional actions, such as tying one’s shoes, can be explained as a sequence of internal causes (628). He is likewise constructing a chain of events from the act performed, but this explanatory chain moves inwards. Fodor might be able to say something about our motor functions involved in tying one’s shoes, by spelling out every step the person takes in order to get them tied, but then he has not said anything at all about the intention with which this action is performed. Someone might tie his shoes in order to go shopping. Looking inside the mind for a causal chain that explains what he is doing will not provide this answer. In this case, it might not even be enough to simply observe his actions (say, if he places a shopping bag by his feet before he ties his shoes). To find out the intention, one might have to ask him: “Where are you going?” The biggest problem for the mentalist, however, is to explain the final cause of this teleological chain, which, we will argue, has crucial importance for our understanding of human life (and shows why mental life never retreats to a narrow sense of intentionality). Following Aristotle, Anscombe (1957) argues that there is always one final cause, one end goal, that is the organizing principle for the whole sequence of intentional “in order to’s” that we perform (46- 47). If the description we give of a sequence goes from A—D, we might, for simplicity’s sake, call the final goal Z. To Anscombe, Z is what makes the action, taken as a whole, what it is. It is both the origin and the aim, the beginning and the end. In our example of the printer, she might want to help a colleague because she wants to be a good friend, or perhaps she just wants to be diligent. In either case, she is aiming for some good. In Aristotelian terms, what this comes down to is the difference between action and activity. Being a good friend, being serious about one’s work, leading a good life, and so forth, are not distinct goals which we can fulfill by doing any one thing or performing any sequence of acts that, once achieved, are completed. Nor are they means to other ends. “[Aristotle] says, not that happiness is virtue, but that it is virtuous activity. Living well consists in doing something, not just being in a certain state or condition. It consists in those lifelong activities that actualize the virtues of the rational part of the soul”

(Kraut 2018). In our example, throwing papers around in that office is merely a means to an end; if Z is the ultimate answer to why, then A—D can be seen as means, answers as to how to achieve Z, where achievement is a continuous activity. Contrary to Dreyfus’ account we do not move between engaging in actions and activities; all actions, whether habitual, skillful or focused, are always performed as part of a larger, more important teleological activity. Anscombe (1957) describes this distinction between how (A—D) and why (Z) we act as the difference between an “intention of doing” and an “intention in doing” (9). Hannah Arendt (1961) makes the same distinction between doing something “in order to” (how: A—D) and “for the sake of” (why: Z), spelling out the way in which modern mentalism and its scientistic tendencies reduce human life to basic internal causal mechanisms:

It is as though men were stricken suddenly blind to fundamental distinctions such as the distinction between meaning and end, between the general and the particular, or, grammatically speaking, the distinction between “for the sake of . . .” and “in order to . . .” (as though the carpenter, for instance, forgot that only his particular acts in making a table are performed in the mode of "in order to," but that his whole life as a carpenter is ruled by something quite different, namely an encompassing notion "for the sake of" which he became a carpenter in the first place). And the moment such distinctions are forgotten and meanings are degraded into ends, it follows that ends themselves are no longer safe because the distinction between means and ends is no longer understood, so that finally all ends turn and are degraded into means (78-79).

Arendt’s description of the carpenter is of a man whose acts are purposive towards a larger goal without having to have this purpose constantly in mind, which makes it comparable to Dreyfus’ characterization of “skillful activity.” But as Arendt insists, this purposiveness encompasses all actions that the carpenter performs in his work, which makes its meaning irreducible to some intermediary end, such as finishing a table. For Arendt, “the growing meaninglessness of the modern world is perhaps nowhere more clearly foreshadowed than in this identification of meaning and end” (ibid.). In an effort to scientifically account for the human mind by explaining it mechanistically as an isolated entity, the mentalist excludes all context from their explanation. The translation of all teleological explanations to efficient causality takes away all that is meaningful from human affairs as all meanings are degraded into ends, until finally all ends are degraded into means. Or in other words, as all final causes are degraded into present intentions (as in the narrow conception of intentionality), until all such intentions are degraded into unconscious internal efficient causes of which we are not even aware (as in mentalism at large). Arendt pins down the issue at stake when she characterizes this as a descent into meaninglessness. She (1961) also makes another point in this context that illuminates what is at stake, as she argues that the final meaning “for the sake of” which we are acting in the first

place cannot beforehand be known to us (78). This might appear contradictory to our case since the final goal is meant to be the ultimate reason for our actions. Surely, we must know what this ultimate goal is if our explanation is going to be coherent. Her answer is that we learn from our collective life that some goal is attainable and worth striving for, but we cannot know when or that we have achieved it, since, as an activity, it has no end. Because it has no end we can always continue to look into the future and perform actions with the goal of living according to this goal, but we cannot experience what it means to be in that future before it has occurred. Consequently, we cannot isolate and identify what such an activity entails. Anscombe (1957) writes that intentional action begins with a desire or “wanting” which takes the form of “trying to get” something or somewhere, and she insists that “there are two features present in wanting: movement towards a thing and knowledge (or at least opinion) that the thing is there” (68; emphasis added). As we perform some of the more rudimentary actions in our lives, we might know more or less where these particular actions will lead. But, generally, we can only go by opinion as we perform actions in order to reach some goal post for the sake of, say, leading a good life. As we engage intentionally in the world we only form indirect relations to the goals that we strive towards, whether it is some present goal “in order to” or some larger goal “for the sake of” which we act. That is why the broad conception of intentionality as openness is an appealing characterization. Descombes (1996) agrees with this view, and he reasons that this is likely how the phenomenologists think about the potentiality inherent in intentional activity as a form of openness or “Being in the World:”

[I]ntentionality is not so much a relation of a subject to an object as it is the condition for such a real relation to result from an intentional act. An example would be an empty intentional relation, such as the situation of lookouts or watchmen who have nothing to report. If they have not seen anything, they are not in relation with anything. Yet we do not deny that they are turned toward the world, that they are “open” to the world. They are in an attitude such that, should something present itself—a sail on the horizon or a movement on the road—they will see it. This availability is “relational” without yet being a fact of relation (218-219).

Beyond this small reflection, however, he does not give this phenomenological perspective much thought, besides criticizing the way Husserl imagines it. This chapter has attempted to show that Descombes’ language-oriented view is indeed in agreement with this broad phenomenological conception of intentionality. Another way of putting this openness would be to borrow John Dewey’s (1910) words, and conclude that “[a] thinking being can, accordingly, act on the basis of the absent and the future” (14). In section 4, we will argue that this understanding of intentionality as potentiality is crucial if we want to provide meaningful

answers to the questions of what, how and why we learn. As we shall later see in chapter 3.3, the cognitivists, however, characterisically move in the opposite direction, since for them meaningfulness has no place in an explanation of the mind, just as Arendt fears. Providing an alternative to mentalism and the scientism that guides its metaphysical monism means suggesting another way of viewing what the mind is and the most appropriate language for describing it. We have proposed a break with the prevalent tendency to describe the mind in language and concepts borrowed from the natural sciences in favor of the language of intentions used in the institutions and practices of life, which, we have argued, is the proper object of what we have called, the moral sciences. This gives us an alternative concept of mind that questions the hegemony of mentalism, with its talk of mental representation and causal mechanisms. Descombes (2005) invites the possibility that this effort to break with the Cartesian tradition by viewing human life as potentiality and speaking of intentionality in the form of final causes is one way of rediscovering the life of the human mind in Aristotelian terms. This reversal might be seen as expected from an alternative to mentalism, since Cartesianism has often been hailed for dethroning Aristotle’s once strong influence on our understanding of human life. In chapter 2.2 we said that Cartesian mentalism views the mind as directly accessed through introspection, and internally located within the thinking subject. Cognitivism turns this conception on its head by viewing the mind as indirectly accessed, since the mind is in the brain, and our mental states and representations are mere symptoms of neurological activity. The mind is now also seen as externally located in all brains. What the two conceptions have in common, however, is the mentalism which isolates the representational mind from the world. We have attempted to show that this detachment brackets out from explanation not only the body and the world, but ourselves. The third alternative presented here places the human agent as whole, the intentionally acting subject, in the world and at the center. It views mental life as directly accessible through our intentional actions, and externally located, in all intentional actions that people engage in as part of the natural and social context we share together. This is what allows us to agree with Thompson’s enactivist characterization of mental life as embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted in the world, which for Descombes (1995) means that “[i]n general, the mind consists in the person’s abilities (1995: 181). If there is one short definition that captures the essence of this chapter’s attempt to oppose mentalism, it is, therefore, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s words: “Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that,’ but of ‘I can’” (1945: 159).

In this chapter, we have presented an externalized and holistic alternative to mentalism, which rejects metaphysical monism, i.e., the position that we need to use the language of the natural sciences to objectify the mind, by instead viewing the intentionality of the mind as expressed through our intentional actions, and the language we use express these intentions in everyday life, which is studied in, what we have termed, the moral sciences, i.e., the social study of various human forms of life. In this second subchapter, we have distinguished between a narrow conception of intentionality as object-directedness and a broad conception of intentionality as openness. We have criticized the intelligibility of the narrow conception by showing that intentionality takes the form of an “indirect” transitivity where intentional acts, (such as to look for something) depends on the possibility of ending in a transitive relation with a real object (such as when the thing sought is found). As such, the attempt has been to show how the Wittgensteinian language-oriented approach to the mind is in agreement with the broad phenomenological and enactivist conception of the intentionality of mental life as a form of openness, potentiality or possibility. A detailed summary of this subchapter is warranted, since it covered much important ground for what follows, especially for the criticism of the learning brain in section 4. Firstly, both the Wittgensteinian and the broad enactivist-phenomenological approach views intentional actions as expressions of mental life. This breaks with the mentalist consensus that our bodies and our actions are irrelevant in an account of the mind. The account of intentional action is warranted, because the intentionality of the mind in the logical sense, which is characterized as involving potential intentional relations, shares this character with intentional action in the practical sense. By investigating the nature of these intentional relations, we have seen how intentionality can only be understood if exteriorized, which means that the intentionality of the mental is one aspect of the holism of the mental. This holism has been characterized as specifically anthropological because the intentions are formed by people living under certain sociocultural circumstances within a particular environment and with local practices and customs. One cannot have the intention to play chess unless one lives in a society where chess is established as a game that can be played; this necessity is logical. This Descombian view is on a general level shared by the enactivist’s broad phenomenological view which likewise views the intentional subject as embedded in a social and physical context. Secondly, intentions are always “under a description,” which means that they are neither material nor internal, but exteriorized in language, which is a sociocultural phenomenon. There can be no such thing as an intentional mental state that is localized in the mind or the brain because the intention belongs, not to the action, i.e., the subject of the sentence, but to the

description of that action, i.e., the predicate of the sentence. There can likewise be no such thing as an intentional object in the form of a representation that is completely detachable from the real object outside the mind, since to be under a description means to be part of a larger descriptive system where the real object is described as represented. This showed, again, how the logical and practical uses of intentionality mirror each other. Thirdly, we discussed the teleological nature of intentionality through the language used to explain intentional action by giving reasons to questions why we act as we do. An intentional action can be explained as consisting of a teleological chain of reasons that take the form of things done “in order to” in a series of goals where all these intentions lead to some final goal “for the sake of” which we are acting in the first place. Here we made an Aristotelian distinction between action and activity. The list A—D which make up the sequence of “in order to’s” explain how we attempt to achieve the final goal Z which is the ultimate reason why we are doing A—D. This means that all actions done “in order to” constitute a part of something greater, which is this final cause that is both the source of the desire and its satisfaction, which taken as a whole is an ongoing activity such as leading a good life. A given action may be described in numerous ways, all of which could be part of this ultimate goal. Furthermore, we might have some sense of what this final goal entails, but, due to its being a continuous activity without end, the intentionality of the mental is essentially characterized by its potentiality and openness, or in other words, by its relation to the future and the absent, which is what gives intentionality the triadic, “indirect” nature that distinguishes it from mere transitive dyadic physical action. This intentionality is characterized by its potentiality to be realized; one could say that this potentiality or openness is the essential feature of the life of the mind. Having presented this alternative as a criticism of mentalism, we now want to show why this intentionality cannot be attributed to the brain, and further, that the analogy with computers is misleading because the latter lacks the capacity for intentionality. In so doing, we will begin to address the issue of learning, which will be worked out in the final section in a specific criticism of the learning brain.

3.2 A Critique of the Mind-Brain Identity Theory

[M]ental life is also bodily life and is situated in the world. The roots of mental life lie not simply in the brain, but ramify through the body and the environment. Our mental lives involve our body and the world beyond the surface membrane of our organism, and therefore cannot be reduced simply to brain processes inside the head. —Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of the Mind (2007: ix)

We are not bringing up a soul; we are not bringing up a body; we are bringing up a man. —Michel de Montaigne, “On Educating Children,” in Essays (1580: 185)

The following argument against the mind-brain identity theory relies on what Descombes (1995) calls Wittgenstein’s “principle of narrative intelligibility” (182). We can see what this principle entails by taking note of the logic of parts and wholes, which is meant to support both Thompson’s and Montaigne’s claims against reductionism, because reducing intentional mental life to a part of the whole embedded person is untenable. To ascribe intention to a part, such as the brain is to attribute it autonomy, and hence to produce a new dualism: the brain-body problem. To avoid such a dualism, the mental subject must be identified with the subject of action. Thus, we have further reason to consider philosophy of mind within the realm of philosophy of action. Recall Singer’s (2009) remark that “brains perceive, decide and act,” as well as learn (98). Now, consider the following sentences:17

I am practicing calculations. I am having my sister practice calculations for me. I am practicing calculations by hand. My hand is practicing calculations. My brain is having my hand practice calculations. My brain is practicing calculations.

The first sentence is perfectly intelligible. So is the second, even if having someone else do one’s homework is most likely an inefficient “practice,” if the goal is to learn oneself. The third sentence would make sense in a context where I could choose to have done it, say, on a computer instead. All these examples are intelligible from a narrative standpoint. They are grammatically correct, in that the action-verb belongs to the correct subject. One can also

17 These sentences are reconstructed from a similar example given by Descombes in The Mind’s Provisions (1995: 186), and the reasoning regarding parts and wholes that follows comes from the subsequent pages in Descombes work (186-188).

imagine situations in which the last three sentences could be used in an intelligible way. I might, for example, say that my hand practices calculations if I am recovering from an injury. But they do not make narrative sense in the general way that Singer would suggest. This is because “I” and “my sister” are examples of the wholes to which such an action-verb belongs, whereas “my hand” and “my brain” are only parts of such wholes. “Practicing calculations” is an action belonging to a concrete subject. To say that it is wrong to claim that my hand or my brain is practicing calculations is not just a matter of how we normally speak about such matters. It is wrong on the conceptual level, because it does not follow the logic of parts and wholes. To make such claims is to treat the hand or the brain as wholes, that is, as concrete subjects capable of independent actions. But neither a hand nor a brain can act independently in this way. They only work as parts of the whole that is the real concrete subject of action, i.e. the person. This impossibility might on the surface appear to be merely a matter of idiom, but just as before, this grammatical point reveals something about logical possibility, in this case with regard to parts and wholes. Descombes (1995), therefore, writes:

Only in a figural way can a part or a faculty be represented as acting. The proof is precisely the price that one pays for treating such a part as the suppositum of the action of the whole: as soon as I claim that my hand strikes a blow, I have stripped that hand of its status as an organ and turned it into an independent entity able to move on its own. The same is true of a faculty: to speak of it as an entity with its own behavior is to make of it a concrete subject (185).

While it might be practically inefficient to do so, we could ask a sibling to do our homework for us. In that case, as Descombes points out, they would in fact replace us in the performance of the task. But a hand or a brain cannot replace a person in this way. Neither could they do their own practicing, as if they had their own homework, independently of the subject to which they belong. Just to make this clear, let us consider another example. Descombes compares the brain with the stomach and asks (rhetorically) if we could not say that a brain takes care of cognition in the same way that my stomach digests food for me and independently of my doing anything. This case is tricky, because it seems to support the conception of the learning brain if we simply allow the stomach’s digestion to serve as an analogy for the brain’s cognitive mechanisms. True, the stomach takes care of the digestion on its own, and, if it fails, we go to a doctor to find out what is wrong with it. But, this is where the analogy breaks down. We do not attribute, say, practicing calculations to the brain in the same way. If a calculation is wrong, it is the person, not the brain, who has miscalculated and will have to do it over. The stomach cannot

be told to try again, whereas insofar as we can “try again,” we can have control over the calculations. We are the ones engaging in the actions we deem necessary in order to learn. We will return to this connection between trying and learning in the last section. Of course, there could be situations where a cognitive or intellectual failure can be traced to neurological dysfunction. Fischer (2009) provides such examples in his article: cases of dyslexia and children who have had half of their brains removed due to severe forms of epilepsy (see footnote 3 in chapter 2.1). In such cases, it makes perfect sense to consult a neurologist, since there is reason to believe that there is a problem in the brain. But it does not follow from this that the learning involved in performing calculations is something that the brain is doing. As Fischer shows, neuroscience can only tell us about the necessary conditions for a brain to perform its functions as part of a human being. We shape our brains as we learn, not the other way around (5). Similarly, Descombes (1995) insists that:

Perhaps it will one day be discovered that it is impossible for a creature constituted as humans are to carry out the mental act whose intentional content is expressed by the sentence ‘It is 3 o’clock; I must go to the bank,’ unless its brain takes the configuration XYZ” (230).

But, again, this concerns only the necessary conditions of the brain as part of a fully functioning whole. It goes without saying that a human without a brain would not be able to learn anything. The investigation of the necessary conditions for full neurological functioning is indispensable for research into cognitive disabilities and their treatment. But “enumerating the necessary conditions for the exercise of an activity does not necessarily play any part in the explanation of the forms that this activity takes” (ibid.). We cannot translate necessary conditions into sufficient conditions by investigating the complexity of the former. If neuroscience found that a certain brain state was necessary for a certain thought to be able to take form, then that would be an interesting neurophysiological finding, but it would not be a discovery about the mind. Cognitivist theorizing notwithstanding, unless neuroscience can provide us with the sufficient conditions for mental activities, then it cannot explain the mental. To repeat, the brain is necessary but not sufficient for mental life. In the last chapter, we argued that other equally necessary conditions for the individual mind can be found in our shared institutions of meaning, i.e., the social context, that constitutes what Descombes describes as the impersonal spirit of our environment (see particularly Descombes 1995: 251 n. 1). Notice that while Fischer (2009) writes that studies show that it is possible to develop certain cognitive abilities without a whole brain (see footnote 3 above), he does not notice that it is logically impossible to learn the game

of chess unless there is a game called chess. In this respect, the content of our mental lives is provided by the context. Consequently, it is what determines the content of intentional action. The problem with Singer’s conceptualization is not just his sole focus on the brain, but the way he describes this brain as if it were itself a living, active and autonomous subject. This might very well be a consequence of doing the opposite of what the cognitivist intends to do: instead of naturalizing the mind, it mentalizes nature. Ascribing desires and abilities to the brain runs the risk of doing what scientifically-minded people have warned against for centuries: the anthropomorphization of the non-human. Mind-brain identity theories in the manner of Singer creates a homunculus, a little person living inside the brain of a person with its own psychology: a part that acts as a whole. This is not just accusations levelled by critics of the theory; Fodor (1968) both embraces and embellishes it, suggesting that the brain is made up of many little homunculi, instead of just one. But this does not solve the problem under discussion here. If anything, it would rather seem to make matters worse. Considered from the point of view on the intentionality of the mind argued in this thesis, the cognitivist must now explain how he can ascribe intentions to this one little man or many little men in the brain. The homunculus or homunculi cannot have desires and goals independent from ours. All the steps involved in intentional action covered in the last chapter are things we can say about people, but not about brains. The question is, again, whether the subject of mental action (I think, I fear, I judge) should be considered as the same as the subject of physical action (I walk, I eat, I kick), i.e. a person considered as a whole and not a part. Cartesian mentalism and its modern naturalized heir suggest that the answer should be no: mental action resides in a part of the subject of physical action, namely the soul or the brain. If learning is considered something that involves the mind, and the practicing in order to learn involves any physical activity at all, then the subject that learns is not the same as the person who practices, according to these views, which should be an odd conclusion to draw. So, the answer we are proposing is instead yes: the person who learns is the same as the person who writes down calculations on a paper. Descombes says that we can thank Wittgenstein’s principle of intelligibility for allowing “us to understand why dualisms of the soul (whether spiritual or material) and the body are doomed to incoherence” (Descombes 1995: ix). The mind-brain identity thesis claims to provide a theory of mind that gets rid of Cartesian dualism. We have argued that it only offers a new version of it. We want to assert, with Montaigne (1580), that: “[w]e are not bringing up a soul; we are not bringing up a body” (185), and with Thompson (2007) that neither are we bringing up a brain (ix); we are bringing up a person.

In this chapter, we have extended our criticism of cognitivism by providing an argument against the mind-brain identity theory through the logic of parts and wholes in order to show that people learn, not brains. In the next chapter, we will consider the computer analogy which is meant to save cognitivism from some of the arguments that can be made against a strict identification between mind and brain.

3.3 A Critique of the Computer Analogy

The essence of education is natality, the fact that human beings are born into the world. —Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future (1961: 174)

Industrial technology, instead of adapting itself to life, attempts to adapt life to itself by treating life as merely a mechanical or chemical process, and thus inhibits the operation of love, imagination, familiarity, compassion, fear, and awe. It reduces responsibility to routine, and work to ‘processing.’ It destroys the worker’s knowledge of what is being worked upon. —Wendell Berry, “Quantity versus Form,” in The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (2004: 227)

The purpose of this chapter is to show why the intentionality of mind is lost when we compare ourselves with computers that lack desire, a capacity for knowing, and a sense of what is meaningful. If we want rationality to be central to the notion of the human, then it needs to involve intentionality. But first a short technical distinction that shows why the comparison between computer and brain stands on shaky ground from the outset.

3.3.1 Discrepancies in Re-Descriptions Cognitivism is meant to differ from Smart’s strict reduction of mind to brain by adding the computer as a model for the mind, where psychological descriptions are said to be something “over and above” physiological descriptions. A computer playing chess can be described either in psychological or in mechanical terms, i.e., either as a player or as a computing machine. The hope is that by taking the computer as a model, we will be able to give the same explanation regarding the human mind where the mental can ultimately be re-described in mechanical physiological terms, even if the psychological description cannot be reduced to a mechanical description. We are going to show why this re-description is incoherent, since cognitivism wants to use the computer as a model for two incompatible things, in one instance for the brain’s physiology, and in another instance for a person’s psychology.

In chapter 2.2, we saw how Putnam (1967) proposes that the computer can be used as an analogy for the human mind by presenting us with a model for the human as a functional system. In Putnam’s view, the computer is meant to represent the whole human being, which, as he writes, would not be functional if it were divisible into parts. This theory is proposed as a critique of the mind-brain identity theory, i.e. against the reduction of mind to brain and of whole to part. As the debate unfolds, however, this distinction between whole and part appears to disappear from the discourse, while the computer analogy remains. The Churchlands (1990), for example, in their response to Searle’s criticism of functionalism, hope that the development of intelligent AI will eventually make it possible to create a computer with a “brainlike architecture.” It would seem as if the computer is now meant to be used as a model for the brain, not the whole functional system that is meant to be analogous with the person. Without taking a stance on whether or not this is the Churchland’s actual position, we can see its relevance for cognitivism and cognitive science in their theorizing today. Consider, again, the terms used by Singer (2009) to describe the computing brain. He writes about how brains perceive, decide and act, and about how they learn, as well as store, possess, process, translate and transmit knowledge. And he suggests that all this is explained by an analysis of the brain’s “functional architecture” that runs “computational programs” (98). We have argued that it is unintelligible to speak of the brain as if it could act in this way. We will now suggest that the computer analogy does not solve this issue for the cognitivist. On the one hand, we have a computer as a functional system that can be described both mechanistically and psychologically. On the other hand, we have a person that can be described in psychological terms and a brain that the cognitivist wants to describe mechanistically. The problem, as we can see, lies in the relations involved in this re-description. The computer cannot simultaneously provide us with a “psychological model of the person and a physical model of the person’s brain” (Descombes 1995: 182). It appears as if the cognitivist, therefore, has two choices. The first would be to compare the computer’s mechanisms with the whole person’s physiological functioning, in order then to be able to compare, on another level, the computer and the person in psychological terms. This would, however, seem to suggest that we should not isolate questions about the brain from biology as a whole, or even the study of human beings’ actions and artefacts under specific conditions (the moral sciences), which would clearly defeat the whole point of cognitivism. The second solution, therefore, to keep the focus on the brain’s functional structure, would require that the cognitivist shows us how we can intelligibly speak of a brain’s psychology. But, as we have already seen, any theory that wants

to attribute psychological concepts and action-verbs to a part, like a brain, is conceptually confused. This is the argument we made in the last chapter. Consequently, neither option seems to be attractive to the cognitivist.18 We have enough reason to doubt the solidity of the foundations on which the learning brain is built, but since we are already halfway there, let us bear this conclusion in mind and proceed to see whether the computer is at all an apt psychological model for the person.

3.3.2 The Formal Calculator vs. the Engaged Architect We will now consider the comparison between the psychology of computers and humans. We want to show that a computer is an unsuitable model for the human mind because it neither knows nor cares about the things its mechanisms concern. Because of this, it does not accurately represent the psychological life of the intentional mind. Ultimately, this argument is solely against the cognitivist’s attempt to model the human mind on the computer, and not against the attempt to model computers on the human mind. In such a case, this essay is only suggesting that computer scientists take the intentionality of the mind into serious consideration if they wish to create AI with human-like characteristics. The underlying idea in Putnam’s functionalism is that we are like computers in the respect that we could be said to function in similar ways. It does not matter what substances we are made of. What matters is the form and functionality. This is entirely reasonable, according to Descombes, as it considers these functions in a larger contextual environment (1995: 135-164; 2005). A computer playing chess is indeed playing chess. It then functions as a part of the world we live in, where the playing of the game of chess is socially established. The question becomes: what is required of its functionality to make it sufficiently like us so that we can begin to speak of computers in general as being like people? What would be the decisive psychological or mental trait that would allow us to claim that the computer has a mental life? It is often claimed that the key to human exceptionalism is our rationality, and that computers that can play chess, for example, show signs of this rationality. Let us, therefore, begin by examining the implicit concept of rationality at work in such claims. What is rationality?19 Thomas Hobbes (1651) is credited with being the first to suggest that rational thinking involves computation, i.e., complex calculation and symbol-manipulation in

18 We should note that to make this argument is not to claim anything about whether the computer is an appropriate physical model for the brain. As Descombes (1995) insists, “[t]his is for neurology to determine” (181). 19 The idea of the human being as the “rational animal” is generally credited to Aristotle. However, it is still a matter of much dispute what precisely Aristotle means when he on several occasions and in different ways states along the lines that “man alone of the animals has logos,” since alternative translations of logos are “word,”

the form of addition and subtraction (155). Fodor (1980) appears to follow this Hobbesian definition as he suggests that mental processes are rule-governed algorithms (68). If the primary function of the human mind (thinking or reason) is calculation, and the computer can calculate, then the computer is indeed an apt psychological model for the human mind. Let us take a step back in order to see what this might entail, and whether it is reasonable to hold that calculation is the defining trait of mental life or of rationality. Fodor’s (1980) cognitivism relies on both the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. We want to show that these theories clash with one another. Again, the representational theory that derives from mentalism suggests that what is psychologically interesting can be located inside the mind in the form of isolated mental states that concern only representations of the world, not the actual world itself. Now, on the one hand, it is supposedly “the nature of representations to represent” (65), i.e., to have what is called content, meaning or semantic value. The representations stand for something. Computation, on the other hand, deals only with formal-syntactic relations, that is, the manipulation of symbols without concern for what these symbols represent or mean. A computer calculating “3 x 2 = 6” does not, and need not, know what these symbols mean. In other words, it does not need to understand what it is doing. The formulas are programmed into its memory so that it can perform the “mental task” of calculating by manipulating these symbols in the right way, but it has no access to their meaning and therefore no knowledge of what it is doing. In short, a computer can calculate “3 x 2 = 6,” but it does not know what this means. This is the cognitivist’s “formality condition,” which Descombes (1995) compares to a “poorly designed database” that would put the names “Pierre Dupont,” Pierre-André Dupont,” and “P.A. Dupont” in different categories as separate entries, even though the meaning and the referent of all of them is the same. That would be a formal distinction without semantic difference (216). The question is what good it would do to reduce our understanding of the mind’s capacity to this. Searle (1980; 1990), it will be recalled, points out this difference in his argument against the computer analogy, by suggesting that what makes humans different from computers is our capacity to comprehend the semantics, and he proposes that this understanding can be located in the biological brain. Descombes (1995), however, argues that Searle’s argument only serves to highlight the misconceived understanding of the logic of parts and wholes shared among

“account,” “argument” or “ratio.” Others consequently emphasize his view of the human being as “the political animal,” “the social animal,” the animal with speech,” and so on (cf. Berns 1976: 177). We will not engage with this debate.

such reductionist theories, and criticizes Searle for his superficial portrayal of the ideas behind functionalism (127-134). In the “Chinese Room” thought experiment, the room is meant to symbolize the whole functional system, i.e., the machine, and Searle himself is intended to symbolize the internal mechanism, the computer, that manipulates the symbols, using a rulebook and sheets of paper with symbols written upon them. He is then handed new sheets from a window with other symbols written on them, whereupon he is asked to hand back papers with corresponding symbols. The rulebook states which symbol he needs to replace for which. Thus, whenever he receives one sheet of paper with one symbol, he sends back another sheet of paper with another symbol according to the rulebook. Searle’s conclusion is that neither he nor the system, i.e., the room “as a whole,” can be said to know Chinese, and, therefore, that computers cannot comprehend semantics, which requires having a biological brain. Descombes argues that Searle is certainly right that neither he (Searle) nor the room knows Chinese, but that Searle’s Chinese Room is nowhere near anything that actually resembles a functional system:

[w]hat is missing is any sort of subordination of part to whole, a way for the activities of the part to depend, at least as regards their meaning, on the activities on the whole. The operations engaged in by the human operator are not partial operations. There is no interaction between this “part” of the system and other parts (131).

The reason that the Chinese Room does not know Chinese is not that it lacks a brain, but rather that it does not work as a functional whole. Searle is simply a man in a room who does not know Chinese. The only functional whole that his experiment makes use of is the little man sitting inside the room doing the work. Searle is thinking of himself as the little homunculus working inside this machine (which is not really a machine, but only a box with a window). As we have shown in the last chapter, to think of any one part of a functional system as itself working as a functional whole is misleading. So, while Searle is making an interesting distinction between syntax and semantics, his solution is ultimately inadequate. The problem with the computer analogy, as we shall see, is not that the computer lacks a brain, but that the symbols it manipulates are not its own. Fodor (1980), by contrast, argues that the only thing that matters for a psychology of the mind is the formality condition, which concerns only the syntax, because “truth, reference and the rest of the semantic notions aren’t psychological categories” (71). What is supposed to direct a person’s thinking and her actions are her beliefs. Whether these beliefs are true is irrelevant in an explanation of mental life. It seems that the little homunculi live and know in our brains

in a manner comparable to how Singer envisions our knowledge as ingrained in the brain’s formal architecture. But we, as whole human beings, have no access to this knowledge at all. This is where Fodor’s employment of the computer analogy begins to make less sense, since the argument based on the formality condition speaks against the idea that “representations represent” (which is an idea that we have already discussed at length in chapter 3.1.2). Descombes (1995) points out that “this tautology is precisely one that Fodor’s ‘strategy’ does not respect: he proposes representations whose nature is not to represent” (220). By restricting his conception of the mind to the formal-syntactical level, Fodor does not account for “the moment of appearances” (ibid.). This is an accurate description of a computer, which has no relation to the world through the meaning of the symbols it manipulates; Fodor (1980) is thus entirely correct when he remarks that the computer “doesn’t know what it’s talking about, it doesn’t care” (65; emphasis added). But we humans do. For this reason, we will argue that knowing and caring what we are talking about should count, if we want to provide an account of the intentional character of mind, and especially of learning. When we set out to learn something, we strive towards knowing something. This potentiality depends on our already having a relation to the world in which we operate. When we intentionally learn something new, we are aware of what it is that we are learning, and we often proceed systematically in order to learn that particular thing. The calculating computer might proceed according to rule-governed algorithms, whereas even when our learning requires following certain rules, we first have to learn how to do that. As we shall emphasize in the next chapter, learning involves trial and error. Many of the things we set out to learn take time and practice in the correct application of a rule, and involve repeated failure. Fischer (2009) acknowledges the involvement of trial and error in learning when he writes that we cannot exclude the practical and social aspects from our account. Descombes (1995) points out that “a psychology that treats knowledge as outside its scope also gives up the possibility of discussing error,” which means that it can speak neither of “apprenticeship nor of the formation of habits” (220). He continues: “[o]ne may well wonder whether everything interesting in psychology has not been cavalierly thrown overboard in order to make room for the calculating mind” (ibid.). This observation is central to our point: Fodor’s cognitivist theory of mind cannot account for the moment of our engagement in practice or study in order to learn. The reason that cognitivism cannot account for this aspect of the learning process is that it does not situate the mind in the world that constitutes the conditions for its exercise. Descombes (1995) argues that cognitivism ultimately fails to account for “the problem of universals” since it cannot explain how we derive abstract concepts from particulars in the

world (223). He proposes that this is where we differ from mere passive, detached minds that are supposed to be comparable with computers: we derive these abstractions from particulars, and we use these concepts as we engage in the world. That is, we develop “mental abilities to classify things and their aspects, to recognize, to construct, to locate, and so on[.] Abilities are defined through their exercise, and an exercise is defined by its effective content, i.e., by what must be carried out in order for the exercise to take place” (ibid.). This argument comes down to saying that mental life is a result of first being born into the world, or as the enactivists say, being embedded in the world. This position is the essence of anthropological holism and it is shared by many who might not have heard of this particular “- ism.” We might consider, for instance, the quotation from Arendt (1961) previously mentioned, that “the essence of education is natality, the fact that human beings are born into the world” (174). But Albert Camus (1942) expresses a similar insight, when he argues that philosophy should take the life we live as its starting point: “[w]e get into the habit of living before we get into the habit of thinking” (6), echoing Merleau-Ponty’s prioritization of “I can” over “I think.” Nussbaum (2006) argues in such a vein when she asks us to see ourselves as “needy temporal animal beings,” and prioritize our animality over our rationality, in order to see how these two aspects of human life can be unified (159-160). Another way of putting this is that we need to unify our intentionality with our rationality. Anscombe (1957) emphasizes that “‘Intentional action’ always presupposes what might be called ‘knowing one’s way about’ the matters described in the description under which an action can be called intentional, and this knowledge is exercised in the action and is practical knowledge” (89; emphasis added). “Knowing one’s way about” involves knowing what we are doing and what we are talking about (and we will explain the importance of this statement in the next section). Finally, Wittgenstein is at pains to show that: “[g]iving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; —but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game (OC: §204); “[a]s if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting” (OC: §110). This is precisely enactivism’s point, that mental processes are embodied, extended, embedded and enacted in the world (Rowland 2010: 3). In all these cases, the emphasis is on life as lived as grounding all human endeavor. The exteriorized and enacted view of the mental entails taking into consideration the fact that we are born into this world, this society, these customs and norms as inextricable from any understanding of what human thinking and action are. For Pär Segerdahl (2017), this means that learning presupposes that the learner is always in a process of becoming (539). What this

comes down to, once again, is the potentiality and openness that characterizes human intentionality, which, in turn, arises from the fact that we are thrown into the world from the start. The computer, on the other hand, is not thrown into the world. It is created for humanly defined purposes, and even if these purposes involve a capacity to adapt to new data, that capacity itself is decided beforehand. The life of the human learner is much more uncertain and open. We might program a computer to perform certain tasks for us, but in this case, we set the goals for it. And this is the important thing. It is not the complexity of the task, nor the level of logical or “rational” sophistication needed in order to successfully perform these tasks that is of interest to us. In other words, what is distinctively human is not the capacity to attain goals already set, but to determine those goals in the first place. The capacity to do this goes hand in hand with the capacity to understand what the symbols manipulated mean, which requires that these symbols are our own. This is, according to Thompson (2007), where cognitivism misunderstands the point of symbol-manipulation and computation, as he writes:

Cognitivism derives from taking what is in fact a sociocultural activity—human computation—and projecting it onto something that goes on inside the individual’s head. The cognitive properties of computation do not belong to the individual person but to the sociocultural system of individual- plus-environment (7).

As we learn we set our knowledge-goals using symbols that are ours. We are not detached minds, but beings who engage with the world, using a language that we adopt from others in a sociocultural context. This is a point that has been emphasized throughout this essay with reference to Wittgenstein, Putnam, Descombes, and now also enactivism. In contrast with the computer, we set goals for our own reasons, and these reasons are defined by their content, that is, they are meaningful for us as socioculturally embedded and intentionally acting agents, which takes us to the next point. A computer does not know what it is doing or what it is talking about due to its being cut out from the world in which it exists. Moreover, it does not care. But we do. We have our reasons for doing the things we do. We care whether we know. And we try and fail to learn new things because we want to (or have to) gain this knowledge. This is why the intentionality of the mental becomes the essential factor to consider in our account of the learning process. An intentional action begins with a desire for some final goal such as “leading a good life.” This is the “for the sake of” we provide in our descriptions of our actions. This desire might require from us that we do some things that we might not necessarily want to do. So, actions

performed “in order to,” such as studying or practicing in order to learn, are often required if we want to reach the goal that we are learning “for the sake of.” In the end, however, this desire, this “for the sake of,” this caring about what we do and what we know, is the determining factor that explains most human behavior; as we shall see in the next chapter, that includes much of our learning. A calculating or chess-playing computer, on the other hand, cannot become bored with its tasks and choose to change its goals to lose or to miscalculate in the hopes of being reassigned to some other task. Likewise, a computer is never a sore loser. Indeed, it does not care what happens. It lacks its own desires and goals, and therefore, the criteria for ascribing an intentionality to it. Based on these two points, it seems Putnam (1967) was onto something when he proposed that his functional system must have some form of “preference function,” capable of ordering things, as well as a capacity to “learn from experience” (200), even if we do not simply learn from experience. To have preferences suggests a capacity to care to do one thing rather than another, and to proceed by ordering them in something like a hierarchical structure of importance according to one’s priorities. For Descombes (1995), this capacity for “order and finality” is the mark of intentionality and of the mental (rather than “consciousness or representation”) (26), which makes it the main criterion we need to consider when judging the capacity of any functional system. That is why he proposes that we would be better off thinking of the mind as “an architect,” rather than as a calculator:

Many philosophers of mind think of the mind in Hobbesian terms according to which to think is to calculate. Leibniz proposes an alternative image of the mind as a constructor rather than a calculator. To think may well be to manipulate symbols, but it is above all to invent an order in which they take on a meaning or to find an arrangement in which they offer a solution to a problem we have put to ourselves (ibid.).

He concludes that “[t]he condition of mind is neither interiority, nor subjectivity, nor calculating power, but rather, autonomy in determining the goals it undertakes” (viii). It is ultimately what the intentionality of the mind comes down to, which is why we are suggesting, following Merleau-Ponty and the enactivists, that “I can” is a better description of the mental than “I think.” We now want to show why the priority of “I can” over “I think” does not set intentionality against rationality. In a discussion of John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), Leo Strauss (1941) writes that rationality is the ability to choose, and freedom of thought is the freedom to do so. This definition seems to suggest the potential to choose not to go along with predefined notions of what is the right thing to put our minds to (488-489). By allowing the comparison with

machines, we are implicitly accepting the idea that we have no such choice concerning what we do (or learn) or what we should want to do (or learn). To insist on human autonomy, is at one and the same time an insistence on human rationality. The passive, adaptive learner, viewed as a storage unit vis-à-vis computer memory is, on this view, a model of irrationality, since rational action involves intentionally choosing one’s goals and priorities. In sum, rationality and intentionality are not at odds, but, to the contrary, a truly rational being cannot act rationally without also acting autonomously and intentionally with aim and with purpose. The computational sense of rationality showcased by modern day computers can be impressive due to its complexity and efficiency, but it is ultimately lacking if we want to present a full-fledged account of human life and the human learning process. All in all, this resonates with Thompson’s (2007) criticism of cognitivism, which he claims replaces Cartesian dualism with three new forms of dualisms (6-7):

(1) The phenomenological mind-body problem: how can a brain have experiences? (2) The computational mind-body problem: How can a brain accomplish reasoning? (3) The mind-mind problem: What is the relation between computational states and experience?

Thompson writes about “experience” from a phenomenological perspective in a way that this essay has not prioritized. But if this “experience” could be translated as the intentional life of the mind in the broad sense as openness, as we have argued, then we should be able to conclude the following. (1) and (2) are together comparable to the brain-body dualism that we characterized in the last chapter, as we then criticized the characterization of the brain as an intentional (experiencing and reasoning) homunculus. As cognitivism adds the computational theory of mind it aims to show that mental life is re-describable as computational states. But as their view of computation as formal symbol-manipulation cannot account for the knowing, caring, autonomous goal-setting and sense of meaningfulness, i.e., the intentionality, involved in human computation and symbol-manipulation, this attempt at re-description becomes insufficient, and they end up creating and having to solve (3). At last, a clarification regarding the consequences of this criticism against the computer analogy is warranted, since what has been said here is only a criticism of the way cognitivism uses the computer as a model for human cognition, not of the idea that machine intelligence could someday exhibit intentionality. There is a difference between, on the one hand, using the computer as a model for the human mind, and, on the other, using the human mind as a model for the computer, perhaps in the attempt to create human-like AI. In this thesis, the point has been to show that the human mind differs importantly from how computers typically operate

due to the intentionality of the human mind, which computers lack. This is not to claim anything about the future possibility or impossibility of human-like machine intelligence. All it says is that we cannot rely on a future hope or possibility for AI when we strive for a model for the human mind. To make this point clear, we could, again, emphasize the difference between functionalism and cognitivism, the way this thesis has tried to distinguish these theories. According to Putnam’s functionalism, humans and machines are comparable to the extent that both can be treated as functional systems, where the functions matter rather than the substances these systems are made of. If a computer plays chess, it is indeed, from a functional perspective, comparable to a human being playing chess. Consequently, if a computational machine were to show signs of intentionality (knowing, caring, autonomously setting goals and having a sense of meaningfulness), it would be comparable to the intentionality that characterizes the human mind. This is a view that this thesis is entirely in agreement with (even if this thesis has tried to show that the computer has a long way to go in order to exhibit the form of contextual embeddedness that characterizes the human intentional life of the mind). But the view that cognitivism presents is quite different. Besides reducing the human being as a whole functional system to the brain, which is only a part of that system, they want to model the human mind as brain on the computer, not the other way around. Consequently, this is a matter of reducing human autonomy, desire, care, meaningfulness, intelligence, rationality, intentionality, knowledge and learning to formal computation based on how computers generally function today. This thesis is suggesting that this is the wrong way to think about this issue. But in doing so it is not making any claims about neither the human brain nor about the current state or future possibility of advanced machine intelligence. These are areas of research that belong to neurologists and computers scientists respectively, not philosophers of mind. In this last chapter, we have brought the argument against cognitivism full circle by returning to the issues of intentionality and the exteriorization of the mental. We have tried to show why the computer (1) is a bad model for the brain’s psychology, because we cannot speak about brains as having their own mental lives, and (2) that the computer is a bad model for human rationality, since the concept of rationality involves the notion of autonomy, but autonomy only makes sense as a capacity that can be actively and intentionally exercised in the world, one which computers do not possess. With this criticism in mind, we will turn to criticize the specific theory of the learning brain by comparing it to the theory of mind that has emerged throughout this section, and show why the latter view may be better equipped to answer questions about learning, as it allows us to capture the life of the learner.

4. A CRITIQUE OF THE LEARNING BRAIN

“Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. —David Foster Wallace, This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living a Compassionate Life (2009: 53-55)

In this concluding chapter, we will use the criticism of cognitivism to criticize the theory of the learning brain. We will show why the alternative holistic and enacted view of the mind where intentionality is conceived broadly as openness can offer more adequate answers to the questions of what, how and why we learn. The following is only a sketch of the kind of issues we need to address, and a suggestion as to how one would go about addressing them. A continuation of this thesis would focus on treating these particular questions in much more detail, if we were to provide a positive account of the learning process based on this alternative concept of mind. The purpose of the following is to show that the theory of the learning brain fails to account for some aspects of learning that the alternative view will reveal to be relevant. “To learn” means “to gain knowledge or understanding of or skill in by study, instruction, or experience” (Learn 2020). According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it is a transitive verb (ibid.). We want to show that, while it is grammatically correct to view the learning process as transitive (we learn something after all), it is logically correct to view it as intentional, at least when we engage intentionally in particular practices in order to learn. The first thing to note is that we clearly go through life learning things unintentionally. Take, for example, all the things that a child learns without aiming towards that particular knowledge, such as the ability to speak her native language, which rather appears to come as an unintentional effect of the child’s attempt to navigate her surroundings and fulfill her basic needs. Presumably, this knowledge could be said to come about as a result of a combination of instruction and experience. Since this learning often does not involve conscious intentional effort on the child’s part, it can presumably be seen as transitive when it occurs. Having said that, it should not be far-fetched to suggest that even this form of learning ultimately comes as a result of the child’s intentionally “Being in the World,” even if her focus is to express a certain desire, and not particularly, to learn her native tongue. In education, however, we learn from a combination of instruction, experience and study. In this essay, we are consequently particularly interested in the kind of learning that we engage in through study or practice. These are the kinds of activities that we engage in intentionally “in

order to” learn. They are examples of intentional actions that form triadic relationships with a possible future goal of knowing. In what follows, we will do three things. First, we will consider what it means to know something, which is a question about what we learn. Here we will present an argument against Singer’s (2009) way of talking about knowledge as information that the brain “possesses” and “stores” in its “functional architecture” (98), which is the language that Fischer (2009) criticizes in his characterization of the first neuromyth where the brain is conceived of as a “library, computer memory for information” (5). Instead, we want to support Fischer’s account of knowledge as “based in activity” (ibid.). Secondly, we will consider how it is we go about learning this knowledge, and present an argument against “the conduit model of knowledge transmission” (Fischer’s second neuromyth, ibid.), where gaining knowledge is a matter of transferring facts or information into the brain’s architecture in the same way as a computer downloads information into its memory. This myth will be replaced with a view of learning that involves intentional actions performed “in order to” learn. Lastly, we will consider the question of why we learn, or should want to learn, by considering what it is “for the sake of” which we learn, which is something that the theory of the learning brain completely neglects. How do we know when someone has learned what he or she has set out to learn? Do we need to look inside to confirm this knowledge, or is it possible to see knowledge in the light of intentional action, as something performed? We will argue the latter, and in doing so we will come back to the exteriorization of the mental. According to the first neuromyth and Singer’s view, knowing means storing information in the brain’s architecture which functions as a computer memory. We have also seen that cognitivism relies on a conception of the mind as made up of mental (or brain) states and processes. If knowledge is seen as such a mental state, we should begin here by asking: what is a mental state? This term is so casually thrown around in contemporary philosophy of mind that we rarely stop to consider its meaning. It is clear that it has a particular meaning for the cognitivist. We want to show that this understanding is flawed. Timothy Williamson (2002), a proponent of interpreting knowledge as a mental state, defines mental states thus:

A state of mind is a mental state of a subject. Paradigmatic mental states include love, hate, pleasure, and pain. Moreover, they include attitudes to propositions: believing that something is so, conceiving that it is so, hoping or fearing that it is so, wondering whether it is so, intending or desiring it to be so. […] On the standard view, believing is merely a state of mind but knowing is not, because it is factive: truth is a non-mental component of knowing” (22-23).

In contrast, Stoutland (2011) interprets Anscombe as saying that actions are not mediated but direct. Likewise, Descombes (1995) underlines the distinction between criteria and symptoms: “an intentional action is not an effect of the actor’s thought, it is an expression of it” (Descombes 1995: 20). In short, the alternative view is that intending is not a mental state that causes action, but something that is directly expressed through our actions. What about knowing? Fodor (1980) follows the standard view in Williamson’s example, since he excludes the truth from his account of the mental (71), although he does at one point (1968) present a position more reminiscent of Singer’s in his article on “tacit knowledge,” where he argues that the mind is made up of many little knowing homunculi. Neither of them follow Williamson’s example by viewing knowing as a conscious mental state, but their position still suggests that knowing can be explained as some form of an internal state or process, i.e., as something stored inside the brain, even if we are not supposed to be consciously aware of what is going on in there. In what follows, we will show why it is problematic to speak of cognition in general as some internal mechanism in this sense. For simplicity’s sake, we will stick with terms such as mental states and processes, since the goal of cognitivism is to explain cognition in terms of mental states, processes and representations. Descombes (1995) remarks that there is a difference in temporality between verbs relating to psychological states (such as fear, sadness, joy, anger etc.) and what we might call mental, intellectual or “cognitive” verbs (such as “to consider,” “to believe,” “to think,” “to know,” “to learn,” etc.). He writes:

In ancient rhetoric, [the former] would have been called ‘passions.’ What makes them states are their temporal traits. […] a state must begin, take hold, last (whether continuously or intermittently), and then come to an end. It follows that intellectual verbs […] are generally not verbs describing states. One cannot be continually (i.e., without interruption) in something like a state of belief or in a state of planning something. Not that we stop believing one thing when we begin thinking of another; just that the continuity of belief is not that of a state (201-202).

If we compare the ways we use the words “to understand” and “to feel pain” we could see that what they denote are not similar kinds of states. As Wittgenstein notes: “Compare: ‘When did your pains get less?’ and ‘When did you stop understanding that word?’ (PI: §149). The former question makes sense in a way the latter does not. Understanding does not have the same temporality as pain, which suggests that they are not similar mental states. Wittgenstein and Descombes ask us to rethink the way we usually use these different kinds of words in order to gain some clarity regarding the question of what knowledge and knowing means. Wittgenstein challenges the reader:

Just for once, don’t think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all! – For that is the way of talking which confuses you. Instead, ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we say “Now I know how to go on”? I mean, if the formula has occurred to me. – In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes) which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a mental process. (A pain’s increasing or decreasing, listening to a tune or a sentence – mental processes.) (PI: §154).

Wittgenstein proposes that we think differently. This brings us back to the topic of metaphysical monism, since, as Descombes (1995) argues, speaking of the mental in terms of states and processes in the first place means that:

everything is already decided long before one declares one’s allegiance to a given philosophical doctrine. […] The mentalist’s trick is to have put in place a metaphysics of states and processes modeled on the natural philosophy of physical processes and of things that are in a particular state (201).

What kind of state are we in when we are damned sure that we know something? According to Wittgenstein, the mental, internal or psychological aspect of this is simply a feeling of certainty or conviction. But this internal feeling, passion or psychological state can relate to either ignorance or to knowledge (OC §42). Our knowledge is not dependent on whether we think we know or not. This internal psychological process is therefore unrelated to the question of knowledge. The cognitivist might agree, at least in part. But the question arises: if knowledge is not an internal mental state or process, what is it? As Wittgenstein tries to wean us off this idea, he asks what determines the point at which we learn how to read. Is it when a certain amount of fat has been added to the nerve fibers in the brain? Or, is it at the point when a new conscious or unconscious state of understanding has been formed in the mind? Can we somehow point to this object and say “there it is!”? He answers by asking us to look at what we actually do when we learn: “The change when the pupil began to read was a change in his behaviour; and it makes no sense here to speak of ‘a first word in his new state’” (PI: §157). He then follows this statement with what he assumes his opponent would answer in response:

But isn’t that only because of our too slight acquaintance with what goes on in the brain and the nervous system? If we had a more accurate knowledge of these things, we would see what connections were established by the training, and then when we looked into his brain, we would be able to say: “Now he has read this word, now the reading connection has been set up” (PI: §158).

This is, of course, the cognitivist’s response, which only muddies the waters further by suggesting that we only have indirect access to our knowledge, which is hidden from view in the brain’s architecture. “If only we knew more about the brain, we would surely have all the answers we seek.” But is this not a very contradictory answer? “If only we knew more.” Has the cognitivist not excluded the possibility that we can know anything? How is it that we have access to this knowledge, and can conduct studies of the brain for answers, if knowing is something our brains can do without involving us? Wittgenstein asks us to pause and reconsider our starting points: “But when we think the matter over, we’re tempted to say: the one real criterion for anybody’s reading is the conscious act of reading, the act of reading the sounds off from the letters” (PI: §159). To Wittgenstein, “explanations come to an end somewhere” (PI: §1). They end where action begins, which Descombes (1995) interprets as: “we justify actions through reasons for acting, the end point of the justification is the same as the starting point of the action itself” (126). Instead of searching within for a cause outside of our control that would explain our capacity to read, this account instead suggests that the answer lies in the intentional act of reading itself and the reasons a person might give for calling that act “reading” (reasons that can only make sense in a given context). In this essay, we suggest that one way to understand this is by again taking note of the distinction between symptoms and criteria, in this case as two ways of knowing something to be the case.20 The mentalist treats knowledge as a symptom of some internal mechanism, i.e., as a relation of cause and effect. This is why, for Fodor (1968), the ability even to tie one’s own shoes needs to be explained as the result of a complex causal mechanism in the brain (628), even though this only serves to complicate the issue, since, for someone who has already learned how, the habit of tying one’s shoes rarely involves any thought or effort at all. That is why Descombes (1995) says: “In what way can habits or abilities be said to be inside our head? Surely not in the form of present representations” (213). The point is that intentional action should be conceived of as the criterion for, rather than as a symptom of, knowledge (and, as we have argued throughout, for the mental in general). Descombes (1995) offers an example: “How

20 Wittgenstein writes: “‘How do you know that so-and-so is the case?’, we sometimes answer by giving ‘criteria’ and sometimes by giving ‘symptoms’. If medical science calls angina an inflammation caused by a particular bacillus, and we ask in a particular case ‘why do you say this man has got angina?’ then the answer ‘I have found the bacillus so-and-so in his blood’ gives us the criterion, or what we may call the defining criterion of angina. If on the other hand the answer was, ‘His throat is inflamed’, this might give us a symptom of angina. I call ‘symptom’ a phenomenon of which experience has taught us that it coincided, in some way or other, with the phenomenon which is our defining criterion. Then to say ‘A man has angina if this bacillus is found in him’ is a tautology or it is a loose way of stating the definition of ‘angina’. But to say, ‘A man has angina whenever he has an inflamed throat’ is to make a hypothesis” (BB: 24-25).

do we know whether a student knows Latin? We ask him to translate a page of De viris illustribus. If he translates correctly, he knows Latin” (12). The only way to determine whether someone has achieved the appropriate knowledge would be to ask that person to show it in one way or another. “To translate necessarily shows, in the very act of doing it, that one can translate, and to be able to translate is precisely what we mean by knowing the language whose sentences one translates” (13). This knowing is an ongoing activity, in the Aristotelian sense, since knowing, say, how to speak a language involves continuous use of that language, where each application is a successfully performed intentional action. On the one hand, there is nothing mysterious or unnecessarily complex in what we have said here: it is, in one sense, quite obvious that having learned how to do something means being able to do it. On the other hand, we seem to struggle to comprehend this, presumably because we are so accustomed to a certain way of seeking explanation in cognitivist terms, which involves treating knowledge as a symptom of some internal mental state, process or brain mechanism, just as we are inclined to explain the mind at large this way. Cognitivism strives to provide answers in terms of efficient causality that both complicates the issue and reduces our capacity to make these actions intelligible. We can make yet another distinction that is relevant for this discussion, namely, between what is often called practical and theoretical knowledge. Anscombe (1957) clarifies this distinction with a story of a man who is “going around town with a shopping list,” and “a list made by a detective following him about” (56). The detective notes every item that the man buys. If his list in the end does not match what is in the man’s grocery basket, then the detective’s mistake has been a mistake in judgement (or observation). To correct his judgement, the detective would have to adjust his list in order to be able to assert theoretical knowledge about the situation. What he cannot do is tell the man that he made a mistake, since the items in his basket does not match the detective’s list. Where the man’s list is concerned, however, it is the other way around. If the items in the basket in the end fails to match the list, then this was a mistake in performance. To rectify the situation, the man cannot simply say that the list was wrong and correct it; he must return to the store and buy the right things. Anscombe writes that if he himself wrote the list, it can be seen as an expression of the man’s intention, and the knowledge he has of the situation if he succeeds to do the things he intended is practical. In contrast, contemporary mentalist philosophers reduce knowing how to a form of knowing that. Anscombe (1957) argues that contemporary philosophy’s lack of understanding of the connection between action and knowledge is a result of our neglect and misunderstanding of practical knowledge:

Can it be that there is something that modern philosophy has blankly misunderstood: namely what ancient and medieval philosophers meant by practical knowledge? Certainly in modern philosophy we have an incorrigibly contemplative conception of knowledge. Knowledge must be something that is judged as such by being in accordance with the facts. The facts, reality, are prior, and dictate what is to be said, if it is knowledge. And this is the explanation of the utter darkness in which we found ourselves. For if there are two knowledges—one by observation, the other in intention—then it looks as if there must be two objects of knowledge; but if one says the objects are the same, one looks hopelessly for the different mode of contemplative knowledge in acting, as if there were a very queer and special sort of seeing eye in the middle of the acting (57).

In chapter 2.2 we began with a quote from Critchley where he claims that we live in a fact- based world. It is not just that we prioritize factual knowledge: it is the only kind of knowledge that we expect to be able to gain about anything. Scientism holds that it is the only kind of knowledge that is acceptable, or even available. Anscombe is saying something similar here. Seeking this “different mode of contemplative knowledge in acting” assumes that knowing how is simply a form of knowing that. This is what the cognitivist does when he goes to such great lengths trying to provide a scientific, observational and fact-based account of the mind, and when he describes learning in terms of observing, storing and transferring fact-based information. But much of the knowledge that we strive for in education is rather practical in nature. As noted in the introduction, this essay takes inspiration from Collingwood’s (1939) method of question and answer, which he claims to be exemplified in Plato’s dialogues. For Collingwood, this “questioning activity” (26; emphasis added) is essentially practical. This relates to another thing from the introduction, namely Pirsig’s distinction between philosophy and “philosophology,” where learning philosophy is a question of learning how to do philosophy, and learning “philosophology” is concerned with learning about philosophers, i.e., with learning that. Instead of asking whether knowing how is just a matter of knowing that, perhaps we should instead ask ourselves how much practice and action is involved in the efforts we make to learn what might otherwise appear to be mainly theoretical endeavors. In this essay, we have proposed a conception of rationality that involves the capacity to autonomously and purposefully perform intentional actions. One suggested outcome from this is to think of the seemingly theoretical effort to educate your reason as a way towards learning how to think, which should, therefore, be seen as a practical effort, involving much practical know-how. As we educate ourselves, we are not just trying to learn facts about things, we want to be able to do things. A mathematician wants to do mathematics; an economist wants to learn how to make economic predictions; someone who studies sales or marketing wants to learn how to

make a sale or market a product; a swimmer wants to be the best swimmer, not just learn about other swimmers; and a philosopher wants to learn how to philosophize, not just learn about other philosophers, theories or “-isms.” None of this is to suggest that thinking does not involve theoretical knowledge in the form of making correct judgements. Of course, it does. But we are suggesting that the steps we take towards learning both how to do something and about those things involve practical intentional actions. This idea should not be considered too controversial, considering that it is the basis for the classical idea of Bildung, which “describes an activity, a way of thinking, rather than a specific body of knowledge, or canon” (Rider 2017: 507). But in our time, the idea of Bildung is separated from the idea of education, where the latter is rather seen as a process of memorizing or “downloading” factual knowledge about things into the storage unit that is our brains, and applying techniques that are programmed in them through instruction. The source of dissatisfaction with this fact-based form of education that we discussed as a problem in the introduction to this thesis might now appear more lucid. The reason we feel dissatisfied with this form of learning is simply because it does not work as a template for reaching the goal of being able to do whatever it is we are trying to learn. Fischer (2009) writes:

Wouldn’t it be great if learning were so simple? Knowing some topic or skill would involve learning a compendium of facts about it—the location of a good tract of farmland in Minnesota, the month when a crop can be planted there, the depth that seeds need to be planted, the normal rainfall that can be expected, and so forth. Put together a few of these facts, and a farmer knows how to grow food in Minnesota— not! Being a successful farmer requires so much more than a list of facts. It requires using the knowledge in a series of activities over months and years to plan, plant, harvest, and keep learning how to improve growing conditions (ibid.).

This is Fischer’s response the second neuromyth, “the conduit model of knowledge transmission.” How are we to understand the capacity to learn and use knowledge that Fischer describes above? In other words, how do we go about learning if not by memorizing facts? Anscombe (1957) writes that: “‘[i]ntentional action’ always presupposes what might be called ‘knowing one’s way about’ the matters described in the description under which an action can be called intentional, and this knowledge is exercised in the action and is practical knowledge” (89; emphasis added). In other words, in order to perform an intentional action (such as solving a mathematical problem), we must have practical knowledge regarding the thing we intend to do. In the last chapter, we emphasized the fact that human learning involves trial and error. We then argued that a solipsistic psychology that detaches mind from reality, meaning and truth cannot account for this step in the learning process because it cannot make

sense of error and failure. We now want to emphasize the latter, i.e., the role of ignorance and misunderstanding, as an incapacity to do certain things. The reason why we cannot solve the problem of learning by simply “transferring information” into the student is because the knowledge is practical: it involves performance and action. A computer does not act intentionally, so we cannot even begin to make sense of the human learning process by thinking about ourselves in terms of computation. From the perspective of intentional action, learning can be seen as an attempt to figure out the right way towards the solution, by setting the right order of steps in the teleological chain of “in order to’s” (A—D or A—M, and so on) that is needed to reach the point where one “knows how to go on,” or in other words, up until the point where this becomes a habitual or skillful activity, to use Dreyfus’ terms. The point is that a rational and intentional being who knows how to form intentions and act on them will have an idea of what a rule-bound activity involves. She might not know how to do this particular thing, but she knows in general, due to her foundational embeddedness in the world, what it means to act intentionally in order to reach her goals. So, she “knows her way about” many things in her surroundings, which makes it possible for her to intentionally and practically try to engage with this new problem. Another way to characterize the learner’s unknowing position is to say that she is uncertain about how to proceed, which hints as something more than theoretical ignorance. Dewey (1910) considers uncertainty as being “the antecedent of judgement” (101). In other words, good judgement presupposes doubt about the right answer and approach. What characterizes the learner’s initial feeling to a new problem if not such a sense of uncertainty? The experience of uncertainty that Dewey describes is, just as the knowledge we have so far tried to characterize, fundamentally practical rather than theoretical in nature. This doubt is not the typical “philosophical” doubt of, say, the world’s existence that we find, for example, in Cartesian foundationalism, where the attempt is to doubt in order to reach a point where we can construct a theoretical foundation for our knowledge. For Wittgenstein, such a doubt does not make sense, because we are first and foremost socioculturally (and physically) embedded beings, or, in other words, our original stance is “Being in the World,” living a particular “way of life” (to suggest at the similarities between Wittgenstein and Heidegger). We cannot rid ourselves of this practical starting position, without which reason and doubt would be impossible. Wittgenstein writes that the foundation for the possibility of our knowledge lies in “an ungrounded way of acting” (OC: §110), i.e., in “knowing one’s way about,” as Anscombe writes, or “knowing how to go on,” to use Wittgenstein’s words. The point that is made here is that we cannot doubt the very thing that makes doubt possible, which is “the fact that some propositions are exempt from

doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn” (OC: §341); “[i]f you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty” (1969, §115), and this certainty is not theoretically asserted but practically given. This view is shared by Merleau-Ponty (1945), who writes that “to ask whether the world is real is not to understand what we are saying, since the world is not a sum of things which might always be called into question, but the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are drawn” (401). Just because this foundational embeddedness, which is the source of our capacity to experience doubt and uncertainty, is theoretically ungrounded, that does not mean that it is unreliable or undesirable; it is what makes learning and knowing possible to begin with. Dreyfus and Taylor (2015) argues, therefore, along with these thinkers and the enactivists, that this embeddedness needs to be considered central if we want to provide an epistemology that is realistically human. They see a lack of accounting for this embeddedness as the main flaw in both “Classical Cartesian and empiricist epistemologies” as well as the modern computational counterpart. And they suggest, like this thesis has done, that the underlying motivation for the attempt to detach the mind from the world, and fact from meaning and value, is an attempt to conform “to the protocols of a disengaged natural science, viewing the world from nowhere” (92). But as embedded learners, we cannot engage a view from nowhere. The uncertainty we experience comes not from a disengaged and non-caring mind, but is the result of a sense of disorientation and dissatisfaction with a given situation in life. Being uncertain how to solve a problem means that we do not already practically know how to go on in such a situation; learning involves figuring this out. Knowing (say geometry or chess) in a general sense is an activity without end that involves knowing how to solve various similar problems and not just the particular problem in front of us. We should be able to make the same distinction with regards to learning, since it is one thing to learn how to solve one particular problem, or even to learn how to generally solve such problems. It is another thing to think of learning as an activity that is good in itself, as something we engage in throughout all kinds of situations in life with regards to all kinds of problems. To learn how to be a good learner could be viewed as an ongoing activity with no end, where we are, as Segerdahl (2017) puts it, in a continuous process of becoming (539). In this life-long and fundamentally practical activity, uncertainty and doubt are not things to be conquered once and for all, but constituting parts of what makes learning continuously both possible and desirable. This raises one final question: why engage in such an activity (i.e., what makes learning desirable)? The answer to this question is not to be found in models of brain function, but in the ordinary language of giving reasons: that “for the sake of” (Z) which we engage in this

learning practice to begin with. It is this desire for a future goal of knowing, any intention in the ordinary sense, that is both the start and the endpoint of any intentional attempt to learn. In an educational setting, when asking students why they learn we might get all kinds of answers. The student might say that she does it because it is fun. Or she might give the reason that she is taking a particular course because this will allow her to take a more interesting advanced course in the future. Or she might study this particular subject because she wants a degree that will eventually land her this or that job (which seems to be the most common answer today). Or maybe she studies just because she wants to please her parents. There are countless possible answers to this question. And any given answer would reveal what the student thinks learning is about and why she should do it. As a consequence, especially if most of the answers came down to needs and requirements where the learning is seen as a means to some other end, we might be able to see why the level of dedication varies among students with different aims. What we want to emphasize here, however, is that none of these answers are answers to the question why “for the sake of” we are learning. They are answers that fit in the category of actions performed “in order to” reach some present goal that is a step or stage in the learning process. They are answers to questions about how to reach the next step in a teleological chain. What they do not answer is why in the end we want to have fun, do something interesting, get a job or please our parents. Arendt (1961) argues that the modern world has forgotten the importance of this distinction between how and why we act, between the meaning, the goal and the means, a forgetfulness that has led us to reduce our understanding of the meaning to the goal, until finally everything is just seen as a rather mechanical system of means. We have argued that cognitivism does just this when it treats the human mind and learning as mere effects of internal causes. And we have even suspected Dreyfus’ idea, that focused action retreats to a transitive and narrow conception of intentionality as a form of object-directedness, of losing sight of this larger goal “for the sake of” which we act, which is the organizing principle of all our actions, even when we might have a particular purpose in mind, such a solving a particular problem. Arendt claims that we lose the capacity to gain a meaningful understanding of human life the instance we lose sight of this ultimate reason why we act, or forbid ourselves from philosophically pondering such reasons. In this essay, we have attempted to bring back what is meaningful to our study of the mind in general and of learning in particular. In doing so it has been argued that knowing should be seen as primarily as a practical activity. From an Aristotelian point of view, the activity of knowing is good in itself. Anscombe (1957) argues that, whereas theoretical judgement and knowledge has the truth as its goal, practical knowledge, which begins in wanting or desiring something, has the good as its goal: “an

account of ‘wanting’ introduces good as its object, and goodness of one sort or another is ascribed primarily to the objects, not to the wanting: one wants a good kettle, but has a true idea of a kettle (as opposed to wanting a kettle well, or having an idea of a true kettle)” (76). Even if learning is today construed largely as a means to some other end, we should not forget that it can be, and has been, seen as fundamentally having to do with leading a meaningful life: setting one’s own goals, and reflecting on why they are goals to begin with. What is the connection between the question of why we do want to learn and the question of why we should want to learn? The former seems to be a question about knowing ourselves and our own desires, whereas the latter is normative. Regarding why we do in fact desire to know, it would be interesting to turn to the psychoanalytic theories about the unconscious (e.g., Freud 1915), not in order to view the unconscious as a form of internal, hidden, causal power, but as a way to examine how well people know their own reasons for why they do the things they do, and specifically why they want to know or learn something. There is perhaps an important difference in what Freud says and does in his works. In theory, Freud is simultaneously both building upon and rejecting parts of Cartesianism (see footnote 6 in chapter 2.2). In practice, however, it might be argued that he is simply interrogating his patients in order to get them to realize the ultimate reasons they have for their ways of acting, i.e., “for the sake of” which they live their lives the way they do. Such an approach to psychoanalysis could be beneficial from the perspective of intentional action, particularly regarding the originating desires that form our intentions to learn. The normative dimension (why should we want to learn?) allows us to place even more emphasis on the learner in a sociocultural context. Anscombe (1957) argues that Aristotle’s practical syllogism corresponds to her order of intentions as answers to the question “why?”, and insists that it is a question about the good practical intentional life as distinct from the ethical life: “[Aristotle’s] practical syllogism as such is not an ethical topic” (78). Martha Nussbaum (2006), another Aristotelian, suggests that Aristotle’s notion of human flourishing and dignity can be seen as a question about developing one’s capabilities (69-71). The question of developing capabilities is directly related to a key theme in the present essay, that is, the need to conceptualize the human life of the mind in terms of “I can” rather than “I think:” “[i]n general, the mind consists in the person’s abilities” (Descombes 1995: 181). If learning is seen as a life-long activity of developing one’s capabilities, it becomes a cornerstone in the realization of the mind’s potential for autonomy, reason, and intentionality that is both purposeful and meaningful.

In this chapter, we have attempted to give answers to what, how and why we learn by emphasizing the conception of the learner as an intentional and practically engaging agent. In doing this, we have showed that, in many cases where learning and education is concerned, knowing means being able to do something, which can be defined as “knowing how to go on” on one’s own. We have shown that the steps we take towards learning something new can be viewed through the lens of intentional action as links in the teleological chain towards a future goal of knowing. And we have attempted to show that both knowing and learning are life-long activities that are good in themselves. On a final note, we should stress that, when we investigate the topic of learning, the study of the brain will help us understand how it facilitates and adapts to our learning, especially, as Fischer (2009) insists, where the learner’s brain is either not fully developed or suffers from some disability. The relationship between disabilities and capabilities is clearly an important area of research. But, since cognitivism and the idea of the learning brain rejects that intentional action has anything to do with the mind and demands that all answers to questions about what, how and why we learn can be found within the brain, we have in turn rejected this approach because it is ill-equipped for conducting an inquiry into some of the most fundamental aspects of the learning process. These answers, we have argued, lie not in the brain, but in how people go about learning and the reasons they have for doing so. For this reason, we have said that we must consult the moral sciences, i.e., the study of human forms of life, their institutions, practices, norms, beliefs, ideas, customs, rules and artefacts. And these moral sciences, for the most part, need to be able to use the language of intentional action to do so. But the theory of the learning brain does not allow this approach. This essay has been constructed so as to reveal this fact, and to show why it is problematic. What has been suggested, in turn, is that the intentional learning process is the perfect example of the intentionality of the mental, the way it aims towards the present absence of some potential future of knowing. By investigating the topic of learning, we should be able to learn a great deal about the life of the mind.

5. CONCLUSION

This essay has been an attempt to criticize the theory of the learning brain by asking who the learner is. The first section characterized the learning brain as built upon the philosophical theory of mind presented by cognitivism, which in turn realizes its attempt to naturalize the mind by adopting mentalism, the mind-brain identity theory and the computer analogy. The second section set out to criticize each of the three steps that cognitivism takes in order to form its position. Instead of adopting mentalism and its talk of mental states, processes and representations, we considered an alternative view called anthropological holism that exteriorizes mental life by viewing the intentionality of mind as expressed through our intentional actions, and we situated this view in a philosophical landscape by showing how much it shares with the broad phenomenological perspective on intentionality as openness, especially the way it is presented in enactivism’s view of the mind as embodied, extended, embedded and enacted. The mind-brain identity theory was then criticized by showing that we cannot attribute this form of intentionality to brains, but only to people. Lastly, in the second section, we showed why the computer is an unsatisfactory model for the mind and the learner because it lacks the knowledge, desire and goal-setting that characterizes human intentionality. Any attempt to explain human rationality needs to take this intentionality into account. The third and last section attempted to bring the argument against the theory of the learning brain full circle, by showing that the way this theory conceptualizes learning as a way of storing and transferring information is misleading. Instead, it was proposed that the alternative view of the mind is better equipped to answer questions about what, how and why we learn by emphasizing the learner as an intentional, autonomous, desiring and knowledge-seeking agent who strives, through learning, to lead a good life. Learning is a kind of thinking, and thinking is an activity, continuous and never-ending, which means that the attempt to think through the issues of the life of the mind and of learning in this essay is not done with these concluding words; there is clearly still much more to learn. But the hope is that this essay has opened the possibility to conduct a positive inquiry into the topic of learning without having to reduce our answers by solely making references to the brain.

Glossary

Anthropological Holism says that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Here this holism means that the mind needs to be considered in its totality because if it is broken into isolated parts (e.g., by detaching mind from body and world or identifying it with the brain) we cannot account for the function and purpose of the whole person even if we attempt to explain the connections between the different parts involved. To say that this holism is anthropological means that the mind as a whole needs to be considered in its social context. Behaviorism The doctrine which construes of mental life solely in terms of external behavior. Cartesianism The modern conception of Descartes’ theories which emphasizes the dualism between mind and body that is often credited to Descartes’ philosophy. Cognitive science A coordinated interdisciplinary research program aimed towards the creation of a study of the mind that fits within the natural sciences. Cognitivism The philosophical position underlying cognitive science which promotes a view of the mind as a combination of mentalism, the brain identity theory and the computer analogy (or, in other terms, the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind). Computational The theory that the mind’s mechanisms function like a calculator or theory of mind computer through formal symbol manipulation, i.e., computation. Computer analogy The idea that we are in some important sense comparable to computers and that we therefore can examine the computer for answers to how the mind works. Empiricism The philosophical position that experience is the only legitimate source of knowledge. Contrasted with rationalism. Enactivism A theory of mind which sees mental life as embodied in the whole subject’s body, enacted by the subject, embedded in a social and physical environment, and extended into this environment. Exteriorization The attempt to consider something as revealed outside of itself, as in the exteriorization of the mind where the mind is seen as revealed in the actions performed by the agent, not within. In many ways, this term is used in opposition to naturalization even though they do not form a strict dichotomy, which it rather does with mentalism, since mentalism views the mind as something internal. Functionalism This theory of mind considers the mind as a functional system and holds that what counts in a characterization of the mind are the functions performed by this system considered as a whole, and not the substance

it is made of. This theory has often been used to support the computer analogy and the computational theory of mind, but not always. Intentionality A term often used to refer to Brentano’s thesis that “all consciousness is consciousness of something.” Here it means whatever is characterized by involving intentional relations, which includes the logical use that influenced Brentano as well as the practical use of the word intention as it is used to speak about human action. Materialism The ontological view that all existence is made up of physical matter and hence that only matter is real. This term is sometimes used interchangeably with naturalism. The opposite is spiritualism. Mental As opposed to the physical, it denotes every verb that is usually considered mental, such as “to consider,” “to think,” “to feel,” “to believe,” “to know,” “to learn,” etc. This term is sometimes used interchangeably with the term psychological. Mental states and The mentalist insists that everything mental takes the form of states and processes processes where these terms have the same sense as their physical counterparts have for the natural sciences. Mentalism The theory that the mind can and should be investigated as an observable and penetrable object detached from the world. Metaphysical Metaphysical denotes the different systems of classifications used to monism characterize and classify terms within a given field of study. Monism means that only one such system is used. In the case of the mind this is usually the conceptual apparatus used by the natural sciences. Mind-brain The theory that the mind is the brain. Here sometimes used even when identity theory the identification is more nuanced than a pure reduction of mind to brain. Naturalism The methodological view that philosophy should follow science by studying nature as the primary object of philosophical inquiry. This term is sometimes used interchangeably with materialism. Naturalization The attempt to consider something as a natural or material object ready for scientific investigation, as in naturalization of the mind where the mind is seen as an observable natural object that we can investigate. In many ways, this term is used in opposition to exteriorization even though they do not form a strict dichotomy. Rationalism The philosophical position which regards reason as the primary source for knowledge, without having to take empirical observation or experience into consideration. Contrasted with empiricism. Reality Here taken in the most general sense as denoting the world we live in and all the chairs, computers and people in it.

Representational The theory that mental life is made up of mental states and processes theory of mind that are concerned with representations of reality. Here seen as a consequence of mentalism. Sometimes referred to as simply representationalism. Scientism The position that every intelligible question demands a scientific explanation or no explanation at all. Spiritualism The idea that there is an immaterial dimension of reality. The opposite is materialism. The thing itself This term should not be considered in a Kantian sense, but just like reality as something denoting the real thing in the world, such as that chair, or that tree. The thing “under a The thing itself considered from a particular point of view, such as a description” person considered in her role as a waitress or an action considered as an attempt to study in order to learn.

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