Representation and Reality.by Hilary Putnam

Mind Association

Representation and Reality. by Hilary PutnamReview by: Marianne TalbotMind, New Series, Vol. 98, No. 391 (Jul., 1989), pp. 453-457Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2254857 .

Accessed: 24/06/2014 23:23

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press and Mind Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Mind.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.20 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 23:23:08 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mind

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2254857?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Book Reviews 453

express universality, and according to Barwise and Etchemendy (and Tarski2 before them) the universality of colloquial language is the issue raised by the liar.

University College, London W. D. HART

Representation and Reality. By Hilary Putnam. Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford Books, I987. Pp. xv + 136. kI4-95-

i. Introduction

This book is an exercise in intellectual honesty. In it Hilary Putnam, a man with more claim than anyone else to be called the Father of Functionalism, argues that functionalism is false, that it won't answer the questions philosophers want to answer about the nature of intentionality. The arguments of the book show, claims Putnam, that we must drop a certain view of the mind, the view that what is real is somehow 'under', 'below' or 'more fundamental than' everyday appearances. His reasons for the conclusion are three:

(i) Intentionality is not reducible (to physical and/or computational proper- ties or relations)

(ii) Intentionality is not primitive (there is no property such that all instances of a given intentional phenomena have it in common) and yet:

(iii) Intentionality is not eliminable/mythical (unless truth is too) Putnam concentrates on establishing the first and second claims, but the argument for the third claim, to which chapter four is devoted, is ingenious and deserves careful attention. I won't discuss it here in the detail it deserves but urge readers to study it themselves, especially if they find Eliminativism attractive.

Putnam's arguments are basically very few and very simple but his style sometimes makes it difficult to see this. In places the book manages to be repetitious yet confusing and Putnam has a disconcerting tendency to veer off into mathematical proofs accessible only to the mathematically sophisticated, which won't endear him to the average reader (see especially chapter four and the appendix). About a third of the book is devoted to the old arguments for environmental and social determination of meaning (for which we once again owe a debt to the younger Putnam), but this is not really a criticism, because we are shown how these arguments are thought by Putnam to work with the new arguments derived from the normativity and holism of meaning, to falsify any possible version of functionalism.

It is important while reading the book to keep in mind a distinction between the reduction, in Putnam's sense, of mental states such as believing Fa, (there would be a reduction of the state of believing Fa to a physical/ computational state if we were to find a physical/computational property or relation co-extensive with,

2 Alfred Tarski, 'The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages', in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, trans. J.H. Woodger, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1956, pp. 164-5. Russell too deserves a nod here: see 'Mathematical Logic as based on the Theory of Types', in Logic and Knowledge, ed. Robert C. Marsh, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1956, pp. 59-102. This is not to suggest that Russell's and Austin's views do not contrast as Barwise and Etchemendy suggest.



454 Marianne Talbot

obeying the same laws as and explaining the same effects as the state of believing Fa) and the scientific explicability of such mental states. Putnam is arguing only against the former, not the latter. He believes that whilst all intentional states are physical/computational states in the sense that there will be a physical/computational explanation of them, they are not physical or computational states in the sense there is a physical or computational state or relation that we can describe, which is such that it meets the requirements above and every creature believing Fa is in it. If this distinction isn't kept in mind it would be easy to see Putnam's conclusion as more far reaching than it actually is (see section 3 for a discussion of this point).

2. Outline of the arguments of the book

There are basically three types of argument in the book. The arguments of the first type I have already mentioned; these are the familiar arguments for the 'external' determination of meaning, the division of linguistic labour argument showing that meaning is determined socially and the Twin Earth argument showing that meaning must be determined by appeal to the environment. According to Putnam these arguments show that a certain traditional theory of intentionality, Mentalism, is false because nothing can satisfy the three requirements on meaning that constitute the theory-that meanings are mental represen- tations (i) in the head, (ii) which determine synonymy (sameness of meaning is sameness of mental representation) (iii) and determine reference. These arguments show, claimed the younger Putnam, that whatever they are 'meanings ain't in the head'.

The mature Putnam thinks these arguments also show that the more modern versions of Mentalism, the currently popular theories of Narrow Content put forward by Block and Fodor, won't work either. Even if there is something psychologically interesting in the head, he claims, it isn't meaning and an account of narrow content will not be an account of meaning. I will say more about this later. Having dismissed all versions of Mentalism with these well known arguments, Putnam obviously thinks that it will become tempting to embrance Eliminativism, the view that Folk Psychological states are mythical and will be replaced by the states of a more scientific psychology. Not so fast, says Putnam in chapter four: we can only eliminate intentionality if we are prepared to eliminate truth and to adopt a similarly disparaging attitude towards 'Folk Logic'. He argues that the notion of truth is parasitic upon the notion of intentionality and that to adopt Eliminativism is to accept the responsibility of finding a successor notion to truth. As I said in the introduction I think that this chapter is a high point of the book and I recommend it.

So Mentalism is false and Eliminativism has unacceptable consequences, but what about the so-called 'externalist' theories of Functionalism, the theories according to which mental states are computational states of organisms-cum- environments? Such theories will not, of course, fall foul of the first type of argument because they were formulated in response to such arguments. It is at this point Putnam introduces his new argument, the argument I will call the 'discounting differences argument'.

What is important, claims Putnam, in the attribution of mental states, is its



Book Reviews 455

dependence upon the possibility of discounting differences in belief. If you, for example, believe that women are feather-brained, good only for kitchen duties and childcare and I do not, I nevertheless take you to be having false beliefs about women. I do not withhold the attribution to you of the concept 'woman' because your theory of women differs from mine. According to Putnam this sort of decision-when to discount differences in belief and when to see them as being serious enough to warrant a difference in translation-involves the bringing to bear of all our intellectual powers.

The determination of synonymy/co-referentiality is a judgement of reason and to attempt to give a computational description of possession of a concept is to attempt to formalise these judgements of reason. The idea that such attempts have any chance of success is, says Putnam, a Utopian dream. Even in principle, he claims, we will not find a computational property or relation which will be accepted as being co-extensive with, obeying the same laws as and explaining the same effects as, for example, entertaining the concept P. Indeed, if the theory covers creatures whose intelligence far exceeds our own, as it must, then we would not be able even to grasp the theory, never mind evaluate it. (Those familiar with Davidson's arguments against psycho physical laws will justifiably be experienc- ing a feeling of deja vu.)

The versions of Functionalism Putnam claims to refute by the discounting of differences argument are those which claim (i) that there is one physical and/or computational state such that all creatures who believe Fa are in it. (A version Putnam cheerfully admits has never actually been defended) (ii) that there is an equivalence relation defined over physical and/or computational states, one class of which is equivalent to the class of states of creatures who believe Fa, as isolated by the practice of good interpretation.

Both these theories are wrong, claims Putnam, the first because the discounting differences argument shows that even if two creatures of the same species are entertaining the same concept their brains will differ physically and computation- ally because they will differ with respecrt to their desires and their current subjective probabilities. And it will be no good looking for a set of 'core beliefs' because holism rules out the possibility that all concepts can be defined in terms of a set of basic concepts. The second theory is ruled out because the possibility of finding an equivalence relation equivalent to the relation of believing Fa as determined by good interpretative practice is ruled out by the fact that we would have to survey all possible theories and know everything there is to know about the environment. It will be noted that the first claim appears to be metaphysical and the second epistemological.

The coup de grace of Functionalism, the third type of argument, is aimed at the theories of Lewis and the younger Putnam, theories according to which the state of believing Fa is picked out by the role it plays in Folk Psychological theory (rather than by the practice of interpretation). If there is something which realises this causal role then that thing is the belief Fa (for that creature/species); if not then there is nothing that is the state of believing Fa. Such a theory, claims Putnam, is either equivalent to Behaviourism or it is vacuous-if there is no constraint on what counts as a realisation of a Folk Psychological theory then anything will count as a realisation-any creature who behaves in such a way as to make the generalisations true will be in physical/computational states which count



456 Marianne Talbot

as a realisation of the theory. Such a theory is nothing other than a behaviourist theory. But there is no conceivable notion of how to constrain realisers so as to make the theory more acceptable-the only thing such states have in common is that they are realisers of the state of believing Fa. (As is shown by the fact that there is no one physical or computational state such that all creatures who believe Fa are in it.)

So, Functionalism, the computational view of mind, won't work. Any such theory falls foul of the externality arguments, the discounting differences argument, the behaviourist argument, or a combination of all three. Intentional- ity, claims Putnam, cannot be reduced. No other reductionist theory is examined by Putnam and it is clear that he sees Functionalism as the reductionists' last stand. In chapter seven he addresses very briefly his positive view, but so briefly that I suggest that if that is what you are interested in you should look elsewhere.

3. Discussion

There is not enough space in a short review to say all that I would like to say about the arguments in this book, but I will make a few remarks about what I consider to be the main weak points. Firstly, I think that the argument against Narrow Content is not wholly satisfactory (which is not to say that such theories would not fall to the other arguments embodied in the book). Putnam believes that all such theories are refuted by the externalist arguments, the claim that content must be individuated by appeal to social and environmental considerations. It is not obvious to me that all such theories would be so refuted. In Psychosemantics Fodor claims that meaning is determined by Narrow Content plus context, where the appeal to context should not be taken as an appeal in the sense of that made in the case of indexicals, i.e. place, speaker, time, but should be seen as a very complicated notion involving social and environmental considerations. Narrow Content, however, the other determinant of meaning, that which is in the head, cannot, according to Fodor be described without appeal to such a context, which includes all the elements Putnam wants to include in the individuation of meaning.

It looks as if we might have to distinguish between Methodological Solipsism with respect to whatever causes behaviour-whatever causes behaviour cannot be outside the head-and Methodological Solipsism with respect to the description of whatever causes behaviour-whatever causes behaviour can only be described by appeal to non-external considerations. Fodor's account is certainly Methodologi- cally Solipsistic in the first sense, but not in the second, indeed his account is very definitely non-solipsistic in the second sense. We cannot, according to Fodor, individuate concepts (what is in the head) without appeal to external considerations.

Would Putnam accept this Fodorian account as a vindication of Mentalism? It is not clear from the book because he does not ever discuss it. His argument against Narrow Content rests on his claim that so long as we have to describe Narrow Content in terms of syntax and procedures we will never be able to make sense of the notion of core belief needed to make sense of the notion of Narrow Content. But if Fodor is right then we need not, indeed we cannot restrict ourselves to describing Narrow Content in non-external terms.



Book Reviews 457

However, I think that even if Putnam accepted this he would claim that Fodor's theory, seen as a reductionist theory, would fall foul of the other arguments of the book-in particular the third one-because on Fodor's theory to mean P is to have tokened in the head in a certain way a symbol meaning P, where that symbol may differ syntactically not merely from species to species but from creature to creature or even for one creature from time to time. Fodor's theory is at most successful in showing that the states of Folk Psychology are physically explicable, in the sense acceptable to Putnam. It cannot show that they are reducible in the sense that Putnam is arguing against. The book would, I think, have benefited from a discussion of theories such as Fodor's and a clearer account of exactly what sort of 'scientific account' of intentionality Putnam took himself to be ruling out, and what sort would be acceptable.

Another (minor) difficulty is similar to that which arises for Davidson's (very similar) arguments against psycho-physical laws. Is Putnam's claim metaphysical or epistemological? That it is the latter is suggested by the fact that he talks of our inability to find a property or relation coinciding with (for example), reference, and of the impossibility of our being able to evaluate any putative theory. He also says in the introduction that he still believes that:

In principle, a machine, a human, a creature with silicon chemistry and a disembodied spirit could all work the same way when described at the relevant level of abstraction. (p. xii)

So, whilst the argument against the first (never argued for) Functionalist theory seems to be a metaphysical one-there is no one physical/computational state such that every creature who believes Fa is in it-he seems to believe that there is at least a grain of truth in the weaker sorts of Functionalism which do not require the existence of an identical state-believing Fa-in each creature, but which see every creature who believes Fa as being a creature-cum-environment in a state which falls into an equivalence relation holding between these creatures-cum- environments. The argument against such theories is epistemological. Putnam believes that research projects based on the hope of finding and describing such relations is doomed, a claim which seems to me to be very reasonable.

Corpus Christi College, Oxford MARIANNE TALBOT

Epistemic Responsibility. By Lorraine Code. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, I987. Pp. 283. ?21.00.

The Theory of Epistemic Rationality. By Richard Foley. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, I987. Pp. 344- ?27-95.

These two books illustrate how epistemology has expanded and diversified since the days when Gettier counter-examples were staple fare. They are very different. Lorraine Code announces that she will propose a reorientation in epistemology, setting out a new framework in which the questions that arise cut across those of existing coherentist and foundationalist theories. These are set aside by her as 'arid', and focussing on only a small part of the range of questions which may fruitfully be addressed by philosophers interested in human cognition and



Documents

Representation and Reality.by Hilary Putnam