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From: de@cup.hp.com (Dan Epstein)
Subject: Chomsky on Consciousness and Dennett
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Culled from the Noam Chomsky archives at: 

http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu:/usr/tp0x/chomsky.html


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Subject: Chomsky on Consciousnesss & Dennett (fwd) 
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From: hagen@violet.berkeley.edu (Hagen Finley) 
Subject: Chomsky on Consciousnesss & Dennett 
  
       Last week Chomsky made a presentation at UC Berkeley where I attend. 
He made some general observations about issues in the Philosophy of Mind 
and made reference to Dennett's work so I thought I would pass his thinking 
on to the Dennett discussion. 
        These remarks are selective quotations from his lecture at the UC 
campus titled: "Naturalism and Dualism and the Study of Language and Mind" 
  
        I want to use the use the term [mental] roughly as we use such 
terms as chemical or optical or electrical. Certain phenomena, events, 
processes, states are informally called chemical, etc.. There is no 
metaphysical divide suggested by that. We merely select certain aspects of 
the world as a focus of inquiry. We don't seek to determine the true 
criterion of the chemical or the mark of the optical or the bounds of the 
electrical. I want to use `mental' in very much the same way, with 
something like the ordinary coverage, but with no deeper implications. By 
`mind' I just mean the metal aspects of the world, with no more interest in 
sharpening the boundaries or finding a criterion than in the case of the 
chemical. 
        Second, take `language' and `linguistic.' Again, we can focus 
attention on certain aspects of the world that fall under this informal 
rubric and we can try to understand them better. In the course of doing so, 
we may develop and apparently do develop the concept that more or less 
resembles the concept of langauge and we can postulate that such objects 
are amoung the things in the world along side of chemical bonds, electrical 
fields, and photons. The kind of inquiry I have in mind is ordinary 
scientific inquiry, what I will call `natuarlistic inquiry.' A naturalistic 
approach to language and mind investigates certain aspects of the world, 
the linguistic and mental aspects of the world as we do any others seeking 
to construct inteligible explanatory theories, taking as real whatever we 
are led to posit in this quest and hoping for eventual unification with 
what are sometimes called the core natural sciences. Notice that I said 
unification and not reduction. Reduction is rather rare in the history of 
sciences. Commonly the more fundimental sciences had to undergo radical 
revisions for unification to proceed, as in the case of chemistry and 
physics. Dogmatism aside, we have no idea how eventual unification of the 
study of cells and the study of language and mind might proceed, nor do we 
know if these are the right catagories to seek to unify, nor do we even 
know whether the question lies within the area of cognitive reach. 
  
        [By dualism] I simply mean non-naturalism in regard to mental and 
linguistic aspects of the world. The doctrine that we should abandon 
ordinary scientific rationality when we study humans above the neck, 
metaphorically speaking, imposing arbitrary stipulations and a priori 
demands of a sort that would never be contemplated in the natural sciences. 
Side comment; there are serious questions that can be raised about 
naturalistic inquiry and how it should proceed, but we can put these aside 
in the present context unless its  shown that they have some unique 
relevance to the mental and the linguistic aspects of the world. The place 
to look for answers to questions is where they are likely to be found. In 
this case the place answers are likely to be found is in the hard sciences, 
where richness of understanding may provide some insight and guidelines. To 
raise such questions with regard to inquiries that are less advanced is 
just a form of harrassment of emerging disciplines, not a serious pursuit 
in my opinion. So if certain kinds of questions can't be answered for 
chemistry or physics, we can put them aside here unless some argument is 
given to show that they have a special relevence, and I don't know that 
such arguments can be given. 
  
        I had three [theses] in mind: One thesis is that naturalistic 
inquiry into language and mind is uncontroversial, and furthermore it has 
been pursued with a certain amount of success. The second thesis is that 
dualistic approaches are highly controversial. And a third thesis is that a 
good deal of the most serious and thoughtful and influential work in 
philosophy and langauge and mind and the sort of reflective aspects of the 
cognitive sciences is dualist in the sense that I was using the term, 
including a good deal of what prides itself on its hard headed naturalist 
stance. 
  
        Baldwin quotes Dan Dennett as saying "This naturalization of 
philosophy is one of the happiest trends in philosophy since the 1960's. 
Philosophical accounts of our minds, our knowledge and our language must in 
the end be continous with and harmonious with the natural sciences." 
  
        "The view that mentalistic talk and mental entities will eventually 
lose there place in our attempts to describe and explain the world" 
(Birge). 
  
        Whether you propose it or criticize it [Dennett's and Birge's 
view], ther seems to be a problem, namely that the doctrine, as far as I 
can see is unintelligible and remote from the sciences. In fact the whole 
doctrine and the willingness to discuss it seems to me to be a form of 
methodological dualism, or under another interpretation, true and 
uninteresting. 
        Let's begin with eliminationism. This is the view that mentalistic 
talk and mental entities will eventually lose ther place in our attempts to 
describe and explain the world. Replace there `mental' by `physical' so we 
now have the thesis that physicalistic talk and physicalistic entities will 
eventually lose there place in our attempts to describe and explain the 
world. If by `physical' here we mean what the sciences develop as they 
proceed, then the thesis is trivially and uninterestingly false, and the 
same would be true of the study of language and mind. If we mean, on the 
other hand, common sense discourse, the thesis is true, but uninteresting 
for physicalistic entitites. That is, uncontroversially, ordinary 
physicalistic talk has long ago lost its place in the sciences, and there 
is no reason to expect mentalistic talk to fair differently. 
  
        In any event it is not clear what the thesis of eliminationism is 
trying to assert. At least I'd like to see how a cohrent thesis could be 
presented. Matters only become more obscure as we turn to Dennett's 
picture: "Philosophical accounts of our minds, our knowledge and our 
langauge must in the end be continous and harmonious with the natural 
sciences." The first question to ask is what are philosophical accounts as 
dintinct from naturalistic accounts, particularly if they are supposed to 
be continuous and harmonious? More seriously, what are the natural 
sciences? Well, surely not what is understood today - that may not be 
continuous and harmonious with tomorrows physics if the past is any guide. 
So perhaps some Percian ideal, although that doesn't seem very promising. 
Perhaps what the human mind can attain at a limit, that leaves us even in 
worse shape. Suppose that a 19th century philosopher had demanded that 
chemistry, in the 19th century sense, must be continuous with and 
harmonious with physics. If that were anything more than a hope for a 
eventual unification, it would have been a serious error. As you know, 
there was no continuity and no harmony until physics radically changed. If 
Dennett's thesis is that we should hope for unification of the science of 
the mental and other parts of  science, no one could disagree, but its a 
thesis of very little interest and not a happy trend in philosophy, just 
saying that we hope we will understand things better someday. It seems to 
me that a deep seated dualism, in my sense, underlies all of these 
discussions. Some belief, perhaps, that we have a grasp of the bounds of 
the physical and this grasp leaves the mental and the linguistic aspects of 
the world somehow outside in a way different from ordinary physicalistic 
talk, which is also outside for uninteresting reasons, and also different 
from the chemical, the optical and the electrical which were indeed 
determined to be outside what turned out to be inadequate and erroneous 
physics. 
  
  
  
  
Hagen Finley 
Berkeley, California 
. 
