Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

Review: [untitled]Author(s): Nicholas HumphreySource: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Feb., 1997), pp. 97-103Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2940779Accessed: 15/10/2010 13:09

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jphil.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

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 support@jstor.org.

Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journalof Philosophy.

http://www.jstor.org

BOOK REVIEWS 97

philosophical and scientific work than its predecessors. Skinner does not, of course, fall into the trap of downgrading the philosophy of Leviathan because of its rhetorical character. But he does fail to con- vince me, at least, that understanding its rhetorical character should affect our philosophical appreciation of the work.

Skinner hopes that he "may have succeeded in raising anew the question of which style [rhetorical and dialogic, or rational and monologic] is more deserving of our intellectual allegiances" (16). Hobbes reluctantly accepted the need to persuade, but he never saw it as substitute for demonstration. We may understandably be less optimistic than Hobbes about the prospects of attaining demonstra- tive certainty in civil science, but I see no grounds for us to transfer our philosophical allegiance to the art of eloquence.

DAVID GAUTHIER

University of Pittsburgh

Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness. DANIEL C.

DENNET. New York: Basic Books, 1996. 184 p. Cloth $20.00.

When the old blind monk, St. Mael, had inadvertently baptized the penguins of Penguin Island, mistaking them for men, there was-so Anatole France' relates-a considerable stir in heaven. The Lord him- self was embarrassed. He gathered an assembly of clerics and doctors, and asked them for an opinion on the delicate question of whether the birds must now be given souls. It was a matter of more than theoretical importance. 'The Christian state," St. Cornelius observed, "is not with- out serious inconveniences for a penguin.... The habits of birds are, in many points, contrary to the commandments of the Church." After lengthy discussion, the learned fathers settled on a compromise. The baptized penguins were indeed to be granted souls-but, on St. Catherine's recommendation, their souls were to be of small size.

Daniel C. Dennett's new book is about the natural history of the souls-or intentional systems, as he would call them-that have evolved on earth. He begins with the very smallest, such as those of DNA, and works his way up to very largest, such as those of modern human beings, telling the story of their evolutionary relationships. It is a story of unashamed progress from lower to higher forms of men-

' Penguin Island, A. W. Evans, trans. (London: Watts, 1908/1931).

0022-362X/97/9402/97-103 C 1997 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

98 THEJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

tal life, in which large souls have amassed their powers by cunningly incorporating armies of relatively small ones. Dennett makes quite clear his belief that, if we human beings now see further than our distant ancestors, it is because we stand on the shoulders of dwarfs.

It is a book for laymen, attractively and simply written, taking little for granted, and avoiding much factual detail. But it is also a book that de- serves close attention from those already familiar with Dennett's work. Dennett2 has remarked elsewhere how his mentors, Gilbert Ryle and W. V. Quine, showed him "the importance of addressing an audience of non-philosophers even when they know that philosophers will be per- haps 95% of the actual and sought-for audience" (ibid., p. 243). But, here, he shows how the converse can be true as well. For, while writing in this case primarily for nonphilosophers, he has kept the argument at a level that is clearly meant to interest and provoke his philosophical col- leagues, too. Although he covers some familiar ground, he continually brings fresh perspectives to it: taking the opportunity to float new ideas, to revise some of his earlier ones, and generally to advance his cam- paign against those reactionary forces which still insist on there being an explanatory gap between the physical and mental worlds.

The most surprising development comes in his discussion of "the body and its minds." The idea that a person's body should be considered an integral part of his mind was latent in some of Dennett's earlier writings. But it seems to have been his reading of the neurologist Antonio Dama- sio's book, Descartes'Error,3 that has now given him the confidence to make the idea fly. What Dennett now proposes is that the mind is distrib- uted throughout the body. "One cannot tear me apart from my body leaving a nice clean edge, as philosophers have often supposed [includ- ing the author himself in his famous parable "Where am I?"]. My body contains as much of me, the values and talents and memories and disposi- tions that make me who I am, as my nervous system does" (77).

He is saying, in effect, that my mind needs my body not merely, as has always been recognized, as a means of gathering information and taking action in relation to the external world, but internally also-as a consultant, a judge, a resolver of disputes between other- wise unvalenced ideas. When confronted by a problem, my mind questions itself about what will work or make best sense, and begins the potentially vast search through a space of competing answers. But before you can say "combinatorial explosion!" my body on the basis of its evolved know-how and worldy expertise has already re-

2 "Dennett, Daniel C.," in Samuel Guttenplan, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 236-44.

' New York: Putnam, 1994.

BOOK REVIEWS 99

turned its own wise judgments. In due course, these judgments may be experienced by my conscious self as intuitions or gut feelings of pleasure or unpleasure, but probably not until well after they have already been decisive in directing my mind's business. The body, in short, is playing a role somewhere between Sigmund Freud's "id," a New Age angel, and a Prime Minister's "kitchen cabinet": and life, quite literally, would be unthinkable without it.

I expect anyone who reads of this idea-in Damasio's book or in the much clearer version here-will be struck by how obviously right it is. They will find they know in their bones that this idea of "know- ing in one's bones" is a very good idea. But it may be even better than it immediately seems. For, as Dennett shows, it can be ex- tended-fractally-in both directions: in from the body into the brain, and out from it into the external world. On one side, there are, as it were, mini wise bodies within the main body and mini-mini wise bodies within those. On the other side, there are mega bodies outside it in the culture and mega-mega bodies outside those.

Going inward, to start with, Dennett is set to wondering whether this stored bodily wisdom is to be found not just at the level of the sense organs or the muscles or the gut but in the elements of the brain itself. Indeed, maybe every individual nerve cell with its associ- ated synaptic junctions should be considered to be in its own way a wise little bit of the mind: not simply a passive gate for information transfer but an embodied little intentional system in its own right- with its own beliefs, desires, and rationality. Only someone who, as Dennett does, thinks of all intentionality as being derivative rather than intrinsic, and believes in a version of what William Lycan has called homuncularfunctionalism, would want to talk this way. But early in the book he has explained these views, especially in the excellent chapter on intentionality, where he argues as plainly as can be that the whole basis for the complex intentionality of higher minds is the delegation of work to relatively simple suibminds. "Big minds"-so to speak-"have little minds within themselves to light 'em, and little minds have lesser minds, and so ad infinitum" (except that, since the minds do get simpler and simpler, this regress can eventually stop).

Dennett, as a homuncular functionalist, remains still committed to the general philosophy of functionalism. But he now becomes the first to acknowledge that, once we appreciate that the homunculi are not merely subminds but subbodies, too, classical functionalism is in some kind of trouble. It has been a central tenet of functionalism that, if mental states are the same thing as functional states, it does not matter what physical system is responsible for realizing them.

100 THEJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

Hence all the thought experiments about minds made of beer cans, or Chinamen, or silicon chips. Even so, it has always been recognized that there are limits to such multiple realizability. While the mind's central processing can, in principle, be done by anything, the infor- mation gathering and the acting clearly cannot. You cannot, for ex- ample, make an eye to see with out of beer cans because beer cans are not photoreceptive, or a mouth to kiss with out of the Chinese popula- tion because the Chinese population is not wet. So, everyone agrees that functionalism has to yield to physicalism at the body's boundary, where the receptor and effector organs are. The new point, however, is that, if the brain is made up of body-like subunits, the same argu- ment applies all the way in.

Thus, every nerve cell must be able to recognize particular pat- terns of electrical stimulation, chemical transmitters, and circulating hormones: it must "know" about morphine, or serotonin, or acetyl- choline, for example, and it must adjust its own electrical and/or chemical output accordingly. But, in this case, you cannot make even a single nerve cell out of silicon chips, because silicon does not have the right sort of biochemistry. Let alone, can you make a full- blown human brain that can function in conjunction with a real hu- man body.

As Dennett hastens to say, these considerations do not mean that functionalism is wrong as a metaphysical hypothesis. But they help make it clear that it is just that: a metaphysical hypothesis, and not a recipe-even in principle-for actually engineering a natural mind.

That is going inward. But going outward, Dennett joins up with another set of his old preoccupations. He has long been interested in how the use of well-designed tools and instruments can help make people smarter: a man with a pair of scissors, for example, is not just handier, he is in effect brainier-because he can now exploit his brain power in new ways. (I remember hearing Richard Gregory, to whom Dennett attributes this insight, wondering aloud about how much more of a genius he himself would have been if he had not been born fifty years before the invention of the personal com- puter.) But, by far, the most remarkable example of this trick of "im- porting intelligence from the cultural environment" is the use that human beings have learned to make of the mind tools of language.

So Dennett comes with gusto to a favorite theme: how the use of language has raised the minds of human beings to a new and supe- rior order of reflection and inventiveness compared to any nonlin- guistic animal. Now, however, he has a new way of talking about what language does for the human mind (although, surprisingly, he

BOOK REVIEWS 101

leaves it to his readers to draw the metaphor out). It is that language provides, in effect, a kind of culturally evolved body, a "body of expe- rience and knowledge" if you like, which can function to speed up the mind's business in much the same way the corporeal body does. Human languages are rich in acquired know-how, common sense, manners, and mores. Hence, the body of language, just like the body of flesh and blood, can act as a sounding board against which to test the mind's evolving answers to its problems: expressing preferences, arbitrating between possible alternatives, and generally helping to bring matters to a quick and sensible conclusion. Language is not just a medium in which we think, it actually does some of the thinking with us and for us. Nor, in Dennett's hands, is this merely an "airy fairy" notion, that tells us little about human mentality in practice. As just one example of its fruitfulness, he goes on to make some quite specific-and so far as I know entirely original-suggestions about the way in which heard words may begin to form patterns in a child's mind before they have acquired any external referent, and in so doing prestructure the conceptual world.

Dennett is returning to his roots as he develops these themes. He prefigured many of the present arguments about the role of lan- guage in Content and Consciousness4-and he has never been one to abandon good ideas just because they have in the meantime become relatively unfashionable. Indeed, I detect that the air is loud with the sound of chickens coming home to roost. "My way of asking ques- tions," he writes in the "Preface," "has a pretty good track record over the years.... Other philosophers have offered rival ways of asking the questions about minds, but the most influential of these ways, in spite of their initial attractiveness, lead to self-contradictions, quan- daries, or blank walls of mystery" (vii). There will no doubt be read- ers-including followers of those other philosophers-who bridle at being thus warned in advance that they had better agree with Den- nett or join the losers. But, though he says it himself, he has been right about many things, and on the evidence of this book he will have been right about a good many more.

A good many, but not all, I think. The strengths of the book are manifold. The weakness lies in the one area where Dennett has al- ways seemed weak even to some of his friends, namely, in his cavalier treatment of the problems of sentience and qualia. In the present book he does not, as he has done sometimes in the past, simply-push

4New York: Routledge, 1969.

102 THEJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

these problems to one side. In fact, he raises the issue of sentience early on and then returns to it again and again-like a Quiner return- ing to the scene of his crime. He asks: Is there a critically important difference between mere sensitivity and sentience? Is there a missing link-"an x factor"-which makes sensory experiences conscious? Is there a threshold, on one side of which lies nonconscious informa- tion processing, on the other side phenomenally rich experience?

These are for Dennett rhetorical questions, to which he is sure the an- swer must be "no." The fact that most sensible people would still imag- ine the answer to all of them is "yes" (think, for example, of the difference between painful stimuli processed during sleep and waking consciousness) does not faze him in the least He is determined to scoff at the sentientialists. Among the several devices he uses to help him in this bad cause, I reckon the leastjustifiable is the appeal he now makes to moral sentiment Our moral concern, Dennett suggests, should ex- tend only to consciously sentient organisms. But everyone will agree, he goes on, that there is not and ought not to be a threshold of moral con- cern-an absolute dividing line between organisms that do and do not merit it Hence, he implies, there cannot be any threshold for sentience.

As an argument this simply will not wash; and I am not sure Den- nett himself really expects it to. But the fact that he argues this way at all only illustrates, I think, his frustration at not being able to get through and make his case in other ways. The pity is that he does not see that he may be making a strategic as well as a philosophical mis- take in pursuing this campaign. For I would say that Dennett, of all philosophers, really has least need to be so embarrassed by the possi- ble existence of an "x factor." Indeed, he could and should be lead- ing the inquiry into what makes the difference between sensitivity and sentience, rather than obfuscating it. As we have seen, in other areas Dennett has been one of the first to argue that there have been qualitative leaps in the evolution of the mind. He himself has pro- vided some of the best reasons for supposing that the involvement of language, for example, has made all the difference to human intelli- gence. Then why should not his own next move be to argue that the involvement of the body has made all the difference to sentience? I myself have suggested one scheme for how this could have come about.5 Dennett says in his endnotes that he has not yet come to terms with my proposals. But I think that, without loss of philosophi- cal face, he could come to terms with them-and no doubt, in doing so, improve on them. Indeed, I look forward to the day.

I A History of the Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).

BOOK REVIEWS 103

Dennett has not been right about this yet. But, maybe, after all, this is one more thing about which he wUill have been right when the day comes. I am reminded of an illusion that Dennett himself has helped to make famous, color "phi." If a red light goes out and a green light comes on a moment later a short way to one side, then when condi- tions are right an observer will see a light apparently moving smoothly across the space between and turning from red to green half-way across. The paradox is, of course, that it is as if the light somehow knows to turn green even before the green light has actu- ally come on. Perhaps what we are seeing in this book is the spectacle of the world's most original philosopher of mind already beginning to change color, half way toward a still-to-be-formulated new theory of sentience, yet so far not ready to acknowledge it even to himself.

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY

New School for Social Research

A Realist Conception of Truth. WILLIAM P. ALSTON. Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press. xii + 274 p. Cloth $35.00.

William Alston defends alethic realism, which he defines as the con- junction of two theses: (a) the realist conception of truth is the cor- rect account of what it is for a proposition, statement, or belief to be true; (b) truth is important. The realist conception of truth is in turn summarized by a substitutionally quantified biconditional (28):

RCT (p) The proposition that p is true iffp.

Alston is willing to go beyond RCT to a minimalist correspondence account (38):

MCA (p) If the proposition that p is true it is made true by the fact that p.

He gives no account of facts, except to insist that they need not be mere shadows of propositions. He explains the application of 'true' to sentences as derivative from its application to the propositions that they express.

Alston usefully distinguishes between the concept and the prop- erty of truth. He intends RCT and MCA as accounts of the ordinary concept of truth, not of the property that it picks out. He allows that another concept of truth might pick out the same property by speci- fying its hidden essence; for example, the concept might embody a

0022-362X/97/9402/103-06 i 1997 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.