User:AngelaChong/sandbox
 Title page of book | |
| Author | Daniel Dennett |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Philosophy of mind |
| Publisher | Routledge & Kegan Paul |
Publication date | 1969 |
| Publication place | Great Britain |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 198 |
Content and Consciousness, first published in 1969 in London, is Daniel Dennett’s pioneering work in philosophy of mind. This work is divided in two parts, which, taken together, comprise of ten chapters. The first part deals with the language of mind while part two deals with consciousness. This book aims to merge the approaches of philosophers and scientists to the mind. According to Dennett, it is a merging that must occur for there to be genuine analyses of the mind.[1] This unified approach allows even mental phenomena such as consciousness to be reduced into several distinct phenomena, each of which are given a foundation in physical, neural activity.
Content[edit]
Dennett attempts to defuse the mind-body problem. Dating back to Descartes, this problem was that of explaining the interaction between the mind and the physical body. Dennett lays out a framework to think about how the mind relates to the brain which, to date, he is continuing to develop. His approach is to divide the problem into a theory of mental content and a theory of consciousness. By doing so, he avoids positing mental items as brain events, as done in functionalism. On the other hand, he acknowledges that folk psychology is useful for stating facts about the mind. That is, while nothing in the brain counts as beliefs or desires, one nevertheless believes and desires.
Dennett's theory of mental content postulates the existence of thoughts, concept, memories and other mental items "inside" the mind that are capable of being formed and manipulated by mental processes. The fundamental units of the mind are often regarded as the propositional attitude of an agent, a set of beliefs towards a certain state of affairs. Given this definition, Dennett forwards Brentano’s concept of intentionality as a plausible property of the mind: “the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs”. The question of the causal powers of propositional attitudes and their ability to affect intentionality is hotly debated among philosophers and psychologists alike in the 1980s and 1990s. Within the answer lies Dennet’s solution to the body-mind problem: to explain how abstract sounding phenomena such as intentions are able to affect the physical actions of humans. Dennett does not expect that a novel, species-specific, mental organ is responsible for our ability to see rationales or to detect higher-order intentional patterns. Instead, he looks for a more parsimonious route and stresses the role of culture in anchoring these rationales, both within and outside the head. His view is a combination of hardcore evolutionary psychology along the lines of Cosmides and Tooby (1995, 1997) and socio-culturalism along the lines of Vygotsky (1979), positions that are often seen as diametrically opposed. For Dennett, intentionality is not specific to humans nor is it the mark of the mental, but it already exists in organisms built by natural selection to detect and exploit their various niches.
Part one: the language of mind[edit]
The introduction of language complicates the relationship of desires to beliefs. It appears as though, in some cases at least, desires would not be able to be attributed without language. This would reduce the consideration of propositional beliefs to mere linguistic analysis, thereby eliminating their causal power. However, Dennett is quick to make the claim that this does not reduce beliefs to “sentences stored in the head” (559).
Part two: consciousness[edit]
Dennett adopts a functionalist account of consciousness which asserts that a state of consciousness is identical to the functional role of a brain state in the system of brain states. While this is a physicalist theory, it is different from an identity theory of consciousness, also a physicalist type of theory. Instead, such a theory would assert that one’s beliefs are identical to the corresponding brain state rather than its functional role. For Dennett, the degree to which a state of the brain is conscious pertains to the degree to which it influences other brain states.
According to Dennett, the mind consists of a set of loosely related faculties or physical systems reducible to simpler physical sub-systems. The reducibility of sub-systems continues until the simplest systems whose operations are not recognizable as conscious.
The role of evolutionary theories in Dennett's views on consciousness is seen in the gradual elimination of teleology from science. Primitive forms of science explained everything by attributing consciousness or purpose to things: plants grew so that we have food and shadows. Gradually these explanations have been replaced by better, more mechanical ones. Evolution was a huge step forward in this process, since it meant we could explain how animals had developed without the need to assume that conscious design was part of the process. Dennett's work displaces a similar way of thinking into the mind itself.
Context[edit]
One of the decisive moves in the cognitive revolution was the rejection of empiricism as it existed at the high point of the twentieth-century.[2] It was thought that nothing exists beyond sensations (eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch) and the correlations of these inputs with behavioural outputs. The existence of some apparatus connecting inputs to outputs matters not as no such aparatus would be mental when the mental has always been understood. Dennett was one of those who charted a course beyond this form of empiricism when such empiricism pervaded the social sciences and some of the natural ones as well.
Anthropologists discovered that arbitrary, infinitely variable belief-systems in humans are incommensurable with one another. Whilst facing the pressures of class membership, sociologists invented value-systems to rationalize power. Economists would turn their axioms of rationality into repeated observations of choice-behaviour without further justification. Political scientists studied the patterns in voting and other political behaviour. Many biologists emphasized the extent to which species are chains of descent shaped by geological and other environmental accidents. While this might have been more spin than substance in the case of the biologists, the idea that contingent environmental forces drive all behavioural processes dominated the social sciences. This was the environment into which Dennett came as a student.
Reception[edit]
Whilst facing challenging advances in the field that came to be known as cognitive sciences, Dennett’s work came to be widely known as the book from which all of his future ideas developed. As one of the founding texts of philosophy of mind, it is his first rebuttal of Cartesian dualism.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- Dennett, Daniel. "Content and Consciousness", Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1969.
- Andrew Brook and Don Ross (editors) (2000). Daniel Dennett. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00864-6.
- ^ "Content and Consciousness", Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1969.
- ^ Andrew Brook and Don Ross (editors) (2000). Daniel Dennett. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00864-6.