Problems with Dennett on Hacker & Bennett

As certain friends have informed me, at the last meeting of the APA, someone thought it would be fun to submit the attack of P.M.S. Hacker and a neuroscientist named Bennett on neuroscience to both Searle and Dennett to rip to pieces. I haven't read the book by Hacker & Bennett, but I gather it's supposed to attack cognitive science from an ordinary language perspective. Given what I've read in Dennett's comments, along with Hacker and Bennett's response, I'm not sure it does that in the best way. But since professor Dennett is now putting the same arguments he makes against Hacker forth in my seminar on aspect perception, I want to try to make it clear what points should be made by an ordinary language philosopher when confronted with attacks like those of professor Dennett. To this end, I will list Dennettian claims about ordinary language dismissals of cognitive science, together with what I take to be the best responses to them, below.



1. "Examining the use of words is an empirical investigation, which often yields everyday garden-variety truths and falsehoods, and is subject to correction by standard observation and objections" (7).


Response:  It can be.  But it is not clear that the knowledge we, as speakers, have of our language is empirical knowledge.  After all, we do not need to conduct anthropological research in order to say something about how our words are used.  I've always thought it's an open question whether our knowledge language is "empirical" knowledge (in the sense of a posteriori) because we learn it through experience, and in certain cases learn the meanings of words the way we learn any other bit of what psychologists call semantic knowledge. 

Regardless of how we learn it, though, what people are getting at when they say , our knowledge of our language is non-empirical is just that we all have it, prior to any investigation.  I think the real distinction this points to is a distinction that, if it is not currently important in philosophy of action, should be, and that's the distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that.  We know our language backwards and forwards; we don't have to have its grammatical rules and definitions in the front of our minds to be able to use it with extraordinary adeptness.  In fact, if we try to think of the rules (say, if we're suddenly uncertain whether something we've said or are thinking of saying is grammatically correct), we will (most likely) lose the degree of fluency that we had when speaking unreflectively.  The fact that the rules of grammar (by which I mean the contents of grammar books) fade into the background when we become fluent speakers is just one in a series of similar phenomena: our deliberations fade into the background when we act; when we are virtuous people, our habituation fades into the background and we just act virtuously; musicians who know a piece well may slip up if they start to think about how to play it. 

The distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that, I want to say, can do much more work than commonly thought; it picks out a variety of the distinction between first and third person, and shows how what we know as agents practiced in something, is of a different kind from what we know as agents learning the same thing, or as scientists looking at the world from a non-agential perspective.



2. "[Hacker] still needs to confront the burden of showing how h[e]...avoids the pitfall of what we might call conceptual myopia: treating one's own (possibly narrow and ill-informed) concepts as binding on others with different agendas and training.  How, indeed, does he establish that he and those whose work he is criticizing are speaking the same language?" (10).


Response: First of all, if he and those whose work he's criticizing are not speaking the same language, it's not clear how cognitive science can employ ordinary psychological terms in the first place, or how progress in cognitive science can help us see philosophical problems in new lights.  So it would seem that those who hope it can must not deny that cognitive scientists share at least some of their vocabulary with non cognitive-scientists. That cognitive scientists use ordinary psychological terms to describe our subpersonal parts indicates that they use those terms in ordinary contexts, too.  Using them in the context of our subpersonal parts may be an extension of the ordinary use, but it does not constitute a different language.  I do not think, as Hacker does, that the extended use is necessarily wrong. But it may sometimes be imprecise: the frog's eye tells the frog's brain something that enables the frog to pick out moving fly-shaped specks, but the frog's eye does not tell the frog anything.  Where the whole frog is involved (or the whole person), the best decription of our phenomenology holds sway--inclusive of what it makes sense to say about us.

My second difficulty with these lines is the skepticism they intimate.  We need good reasons to suspect someone of speaking a "different language" (in the sense of meaning something different by what appear to be the same words we ourselves use).  We likewise need good reasons to show that our concepts are not "binding" on others.  As I have shown, we have no reason to think ordinary psychological concepts are not "binding" on cognitive scientists who use them in novel ways.  The fact that they have "different agendas and training" shows merely that they are interested in different questions, not that they somehow escape sharing humble uses of humble words with the rest of us. 



3.  "Since Hacker's philosophical problems are becoming obsolete..."  (13). 


Response: This brings me to the last point.  The problem ordinary language philosophers have with cogntive scientists usually is, and should be, with how they pose their questions.  Hacker and Bennett's complaints, on the other hand, seem to be about the mere divergence of cogntive scientists' use of ordinary words from the ordinary use of them.  I don't think this is an issue in itself; it becomes an issue if it steps over the boundary and applies the extended uses to us rather than to our sub-personal or sub-froggy parts.  This might be what Hacker and Bennett wanted to designate by the term "mereological fallacy," but I don't find their examples (at least not those cited in the proceedings) to be uniformly convincing.  

It is never entirely clear to me which philosophical problems philosophers of cognitive science are asking.  I, for one, do not know what consciousness is well enough to engage in research into what causes it, or where this causation takes place.  Nor does it seem like a philosophical problem to me to try to determine what the physiological causes of awareness or self-awareness or self-consciousness, or empathy or whatever are.  Nor does it seem like a philosophical problem whether or not they have physical causes.  Of course they do.  So I'm still not sure what the philosophical agendas of these philosophers are.

Professor Dennett fails to say what Hacker's "obsolete" philosophical problems are, or what makes them obsolete.  Let them be any number of standard philosophical problems other than the mind-body problem, including "what do I know for certain?" "how can I seek what I don't already know?" "what is knowledge?"  "what is virtue?"  "how do words relate to things?" and so on.  These questions may appear obsolete (or at least not occur to us) if we have different agendas.  If we are, for example, moved by the power of scientific explanation we may want to countenace only questions that can be answered that way.  In this case we might give mechanical kinds of answers to the last three questions, and never think of the first two, or give mechanical kinds of answers to all five.  It is my--so far undefended--claim that mechanical kinds of answers are not likely to address that which motivates the questions when asked from the agential standpoint.  This is probably what you readers don't buy, and need to be convinced of.  I am also unsure that anything can address what motivates these questions from the agential perspective.  The point of focusing on them, then, is not to answer or solve them, but to get a clearer view of how philosophical questions arise.  The point of doing this, in turn, is to make sure that our answers are faithful to our questions, to ensure that our accounts of various features of our lives are not only recognizable but maximally accurate.  The power of scientific explanation does not make philosophical questions asked from the agential standpoint obsolete.  It ignores them.  And this, I'm afraid, does not count as making progress toward answering them.

Personal, Subpersonal, Interpersonal

"Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses" (PI, 18).

Since I've been saying repeatedly how special the agential perspective is, I feel I should say something about what it can contain. This is a post about, for lack of better word, incorporation: what we can incorporate into our perspectives as agents, into what we do. One presupposition of this discussion is that what we do is more or less automatic, whenever we actually succeed in doing it; however much delberation and hesitation proceeded the action, these things slip to the side when we actually act. (Note: this does not mean we cannot do an action hesitantly or thoughtfully, or that we cannot include the activities of deliberation or procrastination in a bigger picture of the action--just that there is something about the action itself that is automatic, regardless of its surrounding circumstances.)

But there are any number of things we can do in this manner--including deliberation, for instance. Nagel's point (in The View from Nowhere and elsewhere) that we contain the "third person" perspective within our "first person" perspectives is indicative of the breadth of our activities. Insofar as there is a "third personal" perspective at all it is one we ourselves take. When we do this, sometimes we succeed in connecting our own interests with those of others, and in acting for those combined interests. We are capable of connecting our own interests with those of others to the point at which we unthinkingly look out for others' interests. In these cases, it could be said that our "practical identities" (to use Korsgaard's term) have expanded to include other people.

Now, it is also the case that we can become aware of at least some of our subpersonal processes: we can learn to recognize certain sensations, and to act on them in certain ways. This is a somewhat obvious point; but it struck me that there need not be a limit to which sensations we can recognize--if we have a reason to recognize them. Knowing how one's body feels is a lot like knowing what one is feeling emotionally, and in both there are variations in the individuals' ability to tell these things.

The (rather crazy) argument I had wanted to make here was this: there is a similarity between detecting the goings-on of our sensations and emotions and detecting anything else in the world--including other people's emotions, that such and such is the case, that these objects are distinct from those. In any of these cases there must be a point to picking out what we pick out; but we can imagine the use of monitoring our bodies and emotions in much more detail than we usually do (honestly it would be good just to know what we need when--whether we need sleep or tea or vitamins or prozac or to change our lives is--in nonobvious cases--often unclear). What we pick out and react to constitutes not only the culture we share with others, its semantics and ontology; it also sets the paramaters for what it makes sense to do. What we do, naturally, and what we consider an extension of ourselves, come out of which distinctions we can be brought with good reason to recognize. The world and the way we live in it affects the kinds of practical identities we can have. In that way it is perhaps the most significant source of normativity.

One thing this means is that "phenomenology" has by no means fixed contents. It can include non-first-personal perspectives on the world, conceptions of oneself that include other people and objects, and conceptions of the world whereby it is full of possible extensions of oneself. It can include habitual corrections of our initial perceptions of things--: we know that the pencil in the glass of water is probably not bent. And it can include habitual corrections for our tendencies to over-standardize our perceptions, as when we realize that the car windshield seen from the inside is not clearly windshield-shaped. All this is to say: it is all well and good to do "phenomenology" or to draw a distinction between first and third personal perspectives; but what figures in phenomenology or the first person is highly irregular (in much the same way that language, in Wittgenstein's vision of it, is highly irregular) and includes all perspectives we're capable of taking--includes, that is, much of the world.