"Deconstructing the Mind" (Chapter 1) by Stephen Stich 2/24/11 2:00 PM

"Deconstructing the Mind" (Chapter 1) by Stephen Stich 2/24/11 2:00 PM Deconstructing the Mind Stephen Stich Rutgers University 1. Deconstructing a Deconstruction: A Preview of Coming Attractions Developing and defending a philosophical position is a bit like weaving an intricate piece of fabric. When things go well each strand of the argument adds strength and support to the others, and gradually interesting patterns begin to emerge. But when things go poorly - when one of the strands breaks - it sometimes happens that the entire fabric begins to unravel. A little gap becomes a big gap and soon there is nothing left at all. This book is about the unraveling of a philosophical position. In some of the chapters, including this one, I'll tell the tale in the first person, since the position that came unraveled was my position, or at least one that I was seriously tempted to endorse. Though it was not mine alone, of course. Several very distinguished philosophers, including Quine, Rorty and Feyerabend, had advanced versions of the view while I was still wearing philosophical knee pants, and a number of well known philosophers continue to advocate the position with considerable passion. The doctrine in question is sometimes called eliminative materialism, though more often it's just called eliminativism. And whatever one thinks of the merits of the view, there can be little doubt that its central thesis is provocative and flamboyant. In its strongest form, what eliminativism claims is that beliefs, desires and many of the other mental states that we allude to in predicting, explaining and describing each other do not exist. Like witches, phlogiston, and caloric fluid, or perhaps like the gods of ancient religions, these mental states are the fictional posits of a badly mistaken theory._ Though a wide variety of arguments have been offered for this rather startling conclusion, all of them share much the same structure. They begin with the Premise_ that beliefs, desires and various other mental states, whose existence the argument will challenge, can be viewed as "posits" of a widely shared commonsense psychological theory -- "folk psychology" as it is often called. Folk psychology, the Premise maintains, underlies our everyday discourse about mental states and processes, and terms like "belief" and "desire" can be viewed as theoretical terms in this folk theory. The Second Premise is that folk psychology is a seriously mistaken theory because some of the central claims it makes about the states and processes that give rise to behavior, or some of the crucial presuppositions of those claims, are false or incoherent. This step in the argument has been defended in many different ways, with different writers focusing on different putative defects. After defending these two Premises, an eliminativist's argument can take one of two routes. The simplest route goes directly from the Premises to the conclusion that beliefs, desires and other posits of folk psychology do not exist. And, of course, if that's right, it follows that no mature science which succeeds in explaining human behavior will invoke the posits of folk psychology. Beliefs, desires and the rest will not be part of the ontology of the science that ultimately gives us a correct account of the workings of the human mind/brain. The second route that an eliminativist's argument can follow reverses the order of these two conclusions. From the Premises it initially concludes that folk psychological posits will not be part of the ontology of any mature science. This, in turn, is taken to support the stronger conclusion that these folk psychological states do not exist. http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/stich.html Page 1 of 70 "Deconstructing the Mind" (Chapter 1) by Stephen Stich 2/24/11 2:00 PM The Premises of the argument that I've just sketched can be unpacked in many different ways, just about all of which generate controversy. In subsequent chapters I'll take a careful look at several of those controversies. But in this chapter, I propose to put these disputes to one side. For even when the Premises are unpacked in a way that is most favorable to the eliminativists' arguments, and even if we assume, for argument's sake, that these Premises are true, neither of the two conclusions that eliminativists wish to draw follows directly. Some additional premises are necessary. And it is my contention that none of the premises that will do the trick are defensible. If that's right, then obviously eliminativists are in trouble. For even if we grant that their Premises about folk psychology are correct, their ontological conclusions simply do not follow. To support this claim, I'll begin, in Section 2, by elaborating on what I take to be best version of the First Premise, from the eliminativists' point of view, and then assembling, in Section 3, a catalog of the complaints that eliminativists have leveled against folk psychology. The remainder of the chapter will be devoted to setting out my argument that there is no way of getting from the eliminativists' Premises to their conclusions, and exploring the options that are available if my argument is correct. It is a bit odd that, despite its fundamental importance in eliminativists' arguments, the step linking the Premises to the conclusions has not been the focus of much attention in the literature. In my own writing, at least until recently, it was a step I took quite unselfconsciously. Along with most of the other participants on both sides of the debate, I assumed that the battle would be lost or won by deciding who was right about the virtues and shortcomings of folk psychology. Once it becomes clear how much of folk psychology is denied or abandoned in the mature sciences of the mind/brain, it would be obvious what to say about the extent to which the ontology of folk psychology and of the successful sciences overlap. But gradually over the last several years I have come to realize that this crucial step in eliminativists' arguments is anything but obvious. My first serious inkling that perhaps all was not well came while I was polishing a paper that I had written with Bill Ramsey and Joey Garon in which we set out one particularly trendy argument for eliminativism. That argument begins with some speculations about the future success of connectionist models of human memory, and notes that the interactions among the states posited by those models are quite different from the interactions among beliefs, as they are construed by commonsense psychology. The argument goes on to conclude that if those connectionist speculations prove to be correct, then the ontology of scientific psychology will not include beliefs. The paper that Ramsey, Garon and I wrote is reprinted as the second chapter in this volume. Though nothing much in this first chapter turns on the details, you might want to give it a quick read before going on, if you haven't done so already. It will give you a feel for what the eliminativist fabric looks like before it begins to unravel. Just as we were finishing that paper, I had occasion to re-read a characteristically acute essay by William Lycan in which he notes that the conclusion in arguments like ours doesn't follow unless some additional premise is added, and goes on to suggest that the additional premise which is (often tacitly) assumed by most eliminativists is some version of the description theory of reference for theoretical terms. I suspect that Lycan is quite right about what others authors had been assuming, and he is certainly right about me. In Section 4, I'll explain in some detail where the additional premise comes from and how it works. Lycan has never been much tempted by eliminativism, and in the essay that woke me from my dogmatic slumbers, he explains why. Description theories of reference have come in for a great deal of criticism in recent years, and he favors a very different account of reference. Moreover, if that account is correct, then premises detailing untenable features of folk psychology, conjoined with suitable premises about the reference of theoretical terms, will not support the sort of eliminativist conclusions that Ramsey, Garon and I were proposing. Section 5 is devoted to setting out Lycan's argument and exploring some of its implications. In a http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/stich.html Page 2 of 70 "Deconstructing the Mind" (Chapter 1) by Stephen Stich 2/24/11 2:00 PM footnote to our paper, Ramsey, Garon and I offered a hasty rebuttal designed to show that the theory of reference Lycan favors is just as problematic as the description theoretic account that he rejects._ But since we had no better alternative to offer, we hurried on with our own argument, granting that the decision on whether our premises sustained our conclusion would have to be something of a "judgement call." I wasn't all that happy with this "quick fix," and I resolved that at some point I would try to work out a better theory of reference - one that was more likely to be correct than either Lycan's or the description- theoretic one on which I had been relying. Before I could start on that project, however, there was a prior question to be confronted. If the goal was to produce a correct theory of reference, I would have to get clear on what it is that makes a theory of reference correct or incorrect. What exactly are the facts that a correct theory of reference is supposed to capture? And how can we find out whether a theory has succeeded in capturing those facts? These are the questions I'll take up in Section 6.

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