Abstract
In Content and Consciousness, Daniel Dennett introduces a distinction between personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. Minding the distinction is key to avoiding false starts and dead ends, Dennett warns, especially when it comes to the areas of thinking and reasoning. Why is the distinction important? To what extent have cognitive scientists and philosophers honored this distinction? This paper will use the current debate over the extended mind hypothesis – roughly, the claim that ‘mental’ or ‘cognitive’ processes extend beyond the boundaries of the brain – to approach both questions. There are several reasons why investigating the extended mind debate is apt: not only has it garnered the attention of some of our most creative and important researchers in cognitive science, but as will be shown, lurking behind the debate are largely unacknowledged assumptions about how and why the personal/sub-personal distinction should be drawn. To show this, the paper will first look at some key differences in how Dennett and Jerry Fodor interpreted Gilbert Ryle and the way those differences showed up in their respective treatments of the personal/sub-personal distinction. The paper will then consider – and provide a partial defense of – a version of the extended mind hypothesis that honors the personal/sub-personal distinction. Finally, the paper will survey some of the recent literature on the extended mind hypothesis and argue that several of the ways the hypothesis has been discussed display the very confusions that Dennett warns us against.
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- 1.
In this case, the relevant propositional knowledge would be something like knowledge of instructions or procedures for doing multiplication, e.g., an algorithm.
- 2.
All Ryle references are to The Concept of Mind.
- 3.
Dennett (1978) is especially clear on this point.
- 4.
Dennett articulates and defends a “teleofunctional” account of content, and while a close examination of the details of this account is necessary for a full understanding of the vision of cognitive science provided by C&C, a close examination of those details is not required here. For present purposes, the constraints that the personal/sub-personal distinction places on explanations invoking intentionally characterized states and processes matter most, and those constraints turn more on the demands of explanation than they do on the particular shape Dennett’s theory of content takes.
- 5.
As the passage quoted on page 8 suggests, Dennett isn’t claiming that neural events and processes cannot be described in terms of computations. In fact, C&C contains a lengthy discussion of how we might provide such descriptions (Chap. 5). Dennett’s point is that even if such descriptions were key to justifying ascriptions of content, it would not follow that the contents ascribed are contents ascribable to persons. More to the point, such ascriptions cannot apply to persons if such ascriptions are part of what is required to explain personal level phenomena.
- 6.
The dangers of conflating meaning and content are explored further in Cummins and Roth (2012).
- 7.
The following passage suggests that such a bridge is required: “Since we cannot very well claim to have explained a mental phenomenon if we are unable to say (in the scientific language of our explanation) when a sentence heralding the occurrence of the phenomenon is true and when not, our task will involve at least this much: framing within the scientific language the criteria – the necessary and sufficient conditions – for the truth of mental language sentences” (p. 21). However, Dennett accepts that there are perfectly legitimate personal-level descriptions, e.g., descriptions in terms of thinking and reasoning. Nothing Dennett says indicates that those kinds of descriptions are incomplete (as personal level descriptions), and he does not urge that they be replaced by, or reduced to, sub-personal descriptions. In this way, the personal-level enjoys a kind of autonomy from the sub-personal level. These points apply, mutatis mutandis, to the relationship between sub-personal descriptions and descriptions couched in the language of physical science. The explanatory bridge thus should not be thought of as a reductive bridge.
- 8.
Orchestrated in a way that can be specified by an algorithm, e.g., a partial products algorithm.
- 9.
To infer that the pen and paper are part of a cognitive process from the fact that pen and paper enable a cognitive process is to commit what Adams and Aizawa call the “coupling-constitution fallacy” (2010, p. 91).
- 10.
See footnote 9.
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Roth, M. (2015). I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes: The Personal, the Sub-personal, and the Extended. In: Muñoz-Suárez, C., De Brigard, F. (eds) Content and Consciousness Revisited. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17374-0_7
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