Abstract
Our remaining task in this part is to construct a coherently conceivable account of the realization of thoughts which are not experiences or quasi-experiences. But, for economy, we will attempt an account which is plausible as well, or at least not implausible for all we know so far. We will proceed by pulling several threads together. From Chapter Three, we have a sense of the content generation operations. From Chapter Nine, we know how infinity and normativity provide little obstacle to the concrete realization of our thought. From Chapter Ten, we have a somewhat detailed understanding of how thoughts are mediated by words, and how word-mediated thoughts are rooted in the interanimation of thoughts which are not mediated by words. From Chapter Eleven, we have a sense of how neural resources plausibly underwrite the interanimation of our thoughts. It is because experiences are primary thoughts, 1 which involve in particular contexts particular patterns of neural firing, that it is possible to develop an account, not only of quasi-experience but of our other thoughts beyond experience, which can mesh with both objectual and non-objectual accounts of experience. From Chapter Twelve, we have a sense of how quasi-experience might be realized, and a coherently conceivable if finally implausible objectual account of the realization of experience. Finally, we know from Chapter Eleven that there are only two sorts of cases which we need to treat explicitly here. Those sorts are primary thoughts, and thoughts of the mixed sort. Virtual thoughts will take up the slack. In fact, we know that even thoughts of the mixed sort are fixed by primary thoughts and their virtual components, or more exactly by primary thoughts and the kinds of resources which lead us to ascribe virtual thoughts. Still, some important instances of the mixed sort deserve special treatment here. And it will be revealing to give each of the content generation operations some explicit attention in what follows, even if thoughts with any human content might be mediated by words in roughly the manner of the essentially word-mediated contents noted in Chapter Three. Even if thoughts with contents generated by certain operations are not always realized in the particular ways we will discuss, it is useful to explicitly discuss at least one special mechanism for each.
Chapter PDF
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Notes
At least for the most part. There is also the virtual experience introduced in Chapter Eleven.
Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Erroralso deploys something like the empiricist elements of this picture.
The quote marks indicate that the firing which helps constitute the introspected thoughts may not be spatially localized. And of course the firing patterns constitute the thoughts only given lots of specific context.
Barring, of course, the general worries about humanly conceivable things we will face in Chapter Nineteen.
“Same context” varies somewhat elastically over what follows.
Christopher Peacocke considers such a model. See A Study of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 6.
I am presuming that the thoughts are of the same type, say both beliefs.
Or sequences of primary thoughts or dispositions for sequences of primary thoughts.
One might reasonably wonder what sort of modal force, if any, governs the co-variation of firing patterns required. But, as before, let me walk by this complication.
Though, as I said in the last chapter, we are presuming that in the case of at least experience and quasi-experience the relevant neural context doesn’t vary in a quick and interesting way.
Since there may be no intuitively single feature shared by all the disjuncts.
For an introduction to connectionist resources, see David Rumelhart and James McClelland (editors), Parallel Distributed Processing, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).
If we have but one experience at a moment, then it might be certain features of experiences, and hence certain sorts of abstracted thought, which are associated together.
For one model of this sort see Gerald Edelman, Neural Darwinism.
This involves some analogue of the persistence of objects, but it is something we can reconstruct without recourse to artifacts of the approach apparatus. When I speak of one’s continuing to execute a plan over time, that carries basic content, even if that particular way of speaking also carries some artifacts.
Words may be tied to features of present experience which can yet exist outside of that present experience. Ditto for certain features we can abstract. So we can have the thought of those features outside of experience. We can think or speak of temporal relations, which we experience, existing also outside of our experience. There is no great mystery in this. The content of experience is not marked as present within experience.
Gerald Edelman, The Remembered Present (New York: Basic Books, 1989), especially 119–139.
Bartlett W. Mel, “A Connectionist Learning Model for 3-Dimensional Mental Rotation, Zoom, and Pan”, Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986), 562–571.
Roger Shepherd, “Internal Representation of Universal Regularities”, in Nadel, Cooper, Culicover, and Harnish (editors), Neural Connections, Mental Computation, 103–134, 127.
This issue introduces some interesting complexities. For instance, it may be intuitive to distinguish between intentions to move in the world and to utter certain words simply because the introspected content of intentions to utter is in fact a rather unusually abstracted motor intention, which conceives alternatives phonetically. This may be good grounds to postulate more than one causal field of experience, but, because it involves abstraction, it does not require modification of C.
Michael Dummett, “The Reality of the Past”, in Truth and Other Enigmas, 358–374. John McDowell, “On ‘The Reality of the Past’”, in C. Hookway and P. Pettit (editors), Action and Interpretation(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 127-144. Christopher Peacocke, Thoughts: An Essay on Content(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 65-85. Crispin Wright, Realism, Meaning and Truth(Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 85-106.
Maybe there are real sense data of unicorns, though no ghostly unicorns. But then in imagination we wouldhave experience of those objects.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mendola, J. (1997). Thought Beyond Experience. In: Human Thought. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5660-8_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5660-8_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-4402-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-5660-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive