Nonconceptual Content and the Elimination of Misconceived Composites

Published in 1993: "Nonconceptual Content and the Elimination of Misconceived Composites!", Mind and Language, volume 8, number 2, Summer 1993, (pp. 234-252)

Nonconceptual Content and the Elimination of Misconceived

Composites!

Adrian Cussins

[email protected]

(1) How good are the arguments against eliminativism?

Much of the critical discussion of eliminativism has been ineffective because it has

been unclear as to its target. Powerful arguments ('self-defeating!', 'scientistic!') have been

made against claims that eliminativism does not make, and only weak arguments ("put up

or shut up") against claims that are made by eliminativism. In section (1) I show how its

critics have tacitly assumed that the only kind of representational content is propositional or

conceptual content. They have therefore begged the question against eliminativism's

argument to substitute embodied representation for propositional meaning and for the

propositional attitudes. I then outline a form of eliminativism which is not only not self-

defeating — it is probably correct.

What does eliminativism propose to eliminate? There are three[1] quite different

alternatives:

(1) Folk psychological or commonsense psychological practice

(2) Content or meaning or belief or rationality ...

(3) The purported referents of Propositional Attitude theories of psychology

According to the first alternative, eliminativism proposes to eliminate

the practice by which people interpret each others behaviour, and generally find our way in

the human world. 'Folk-psychology' in this sense is not a theory but a highly sophisticated

practice by which we locate ourselves and others in the community-based activities of

communication, responsibility, duty and trust. To propose to eliminate such a practice

cannot be false (it has the status of a political proposal not an empirical judgement), but it

would be grotesque. However, I know of no sustained attempt to defend such a construal

of eliminativism. (Were there to exist an adherent of such a doctrine, I would rather refer

them to a psychiatrist than a philosopher).

The second alternative (to eliminate content, etc.) is not so much grotesque as

impossible (short of armageddon). Meaning, content, belief and rationality are in the world

and likely to remain so. As a philosophical proposal, eliminativism involves a claim about

the eliminability of certain theoretical entities. But meaning and content are part of the

ontology of the world, and can be neither reduced nor eliminated nor vindicated.[2] The

elimination of meaning and content would be like the elimination of witches. Witches are

alive and well and on the streets of London (Luhrmann 1989); their elimination would land

one in jail (or—in America—result in one's own elimination). Rather, it is a witch-theory-

of-schizophrenia etc. which is abandoned in favour of a medical theory.[3]

What it is proposed to eliminate is the third alternative: the purported referents of a

particular theory of psychological practice. To claim that meanings are propositions and

that beliefs are propositional attitudes is to make contentious theoretical claims about the

nature of meaning and belief. Eliminativism—the real eliminativism—eliminates

meanings-as-propositions and beliefs-as-propositional-attitudes by rejecting the

propositional theory of meaning and the propositional attitude theory of belief. In the sense

of propositional attitude theory, there are no beliefs and meanings. These theoretical

referents are eliminated in favour of the entities of other theories of meaning and belief:

theories of nonconceptual meaning and content, as carried by neuroscientific or

computational or activity-theoretical representational vehicles.

Most of the arguments marshalled against eliminativism do not carry any weight

against this third construal of eliminativism. Let us consider briefly the arguments

reviewed in the target article: (1) that folk-psychology is not a theory vulnerable to being

falsified by science, (2) that there are no alternatives to propositional attitude theory, (3)

that eliminativism is self-defeating, (4) that eliminativism cannot explain "rational,

stimulus-independent behaviour" and (5) that the consequences of eliminativism are

epistemically too extensive and too disturbing to be accommodated. My purpose here is

not to consider all the details of these arguments, but to point out how theyall depend on a

simple failure to understand what it is that eliminativism proposes to eliminate and what it

is that eliminativism proposes to substitute.

The first argument is that eliminativism rests on the assumption that "commonsense

propositional attitude psychology is a protoscientific empirical theory that purports to

explain the nature of mental phenomena" and this assumption is false. But whether

eliminativism rests on this assumption depends on what is meant by the phrase

"commonsense propositional attitude psychology" [Hannan, p.3]. Sometimes it appears

that what is meant by the target article is a way of structuring our everyday practice:

"commonsense propositional attitude psychology exists for practical purposes of facilitating

human interaction" [Hannan, p.9]. It would consist of ways of behaving, words that we

utter to each other and to ourselves, and some rules-of-thumb, analogues in the

psychological realm of folk-physics 'judgments' of the form 'you can't push over

houses'. As Hannan points out, this is no theory,[4] and its elimination would be

immoral. (Of course!) But the problematic assumption employs the phrase "propositional

attitude psychology", and this refers to something quite different from commonsense

practices and rules of thumb. It refers to a philosophical and psychological theory of what

beliefs and meanings are. I will say more about this below, but the theory includes the

claims that beliefs, desires and intentions are attitudes to propositions, so that a sentence

ascribing a belief, etc. to a person can be analysed as a believing, etc. relation between a

person and a proposition, and that propositional attitude states play a causal role in the

production of behaviour. Propositions are either Fregean Thoughts, Russellian

propositions, syntactic forms or else other abstract objects identified by semantic theory in

the tradition that runs from Frege, Russell and Carnap to Montague, Davidson and situation

semantics. Eliminativism does assume that "Propositional Attitude Psychology" refers to a

cluster of theories that model our everyday practice of finding our way in the human world

of communication, belief and rationality. Eliminativism is the claim that this cluster of

theories provide such poor models that its theoretical entities should be eliminated.

When Paul Churchland speaks of 'folk-psychology' he is talking about the body of

theory that governs "the 'Propositional Attitudes', as Russell called them" [Churchland

1981, p.70]. The propositional attitudes are said to be analogous to the 'numerical attitudes'

in the physical sciences: the analogue of the quantitative relations amongst the numbers

referred to in a statement of numerical attitude is the logical relations of entailment,

equivalence, etc. amongst the propositions referred to in a statement of propositional

attitude. In other words by 'folk psychology' he means an account which models

psychology on logic. It is unfortunate that many people have been misled by the use of the

phrases 'folk-psychology' and 'commonsense psychology' into supposing that the

elimination of logical models of psychology entails the elimination of our ordinary practice

of finding our way in the cognitive and social worlds. There are excuses: Churchland says,

for example, that "beliefs and desires are of a piece with phlogiston, caloric and the

alchemical essences" [1989, p.125], but a reading of the context always makes clear that

what he means by 'a belief and a desire' is a believing attitude to a proposition and a

desiring attitude to a proposition.

Against this it can be argued that the propositional attitude theory is a recent

development going back no further than Frege, whereas Churchland says things like "The

folk psychology of the [ancient] Greeks is essentially the folk psychology we use today"

[1981, p.74]. But here I think the idea is that although the ancient Greeks didn't themselves

formulate propositional attitude theory, it makes sense for us, informed as we are by that

theory, to interpret their inscriptions about human behavior as manifesting a loose and tacit

theory of the mind that, if made articulate and rigorous, would resemble our theory of the

propositional attitudes. I don't know whether this is correct about the ancient Greeks, but

then I have no wish here to go further into the past in my endeavours of historical

hermeneutics than the inscriptions of the Churchlands. The point about them, it seems to

me, is that they are struck by the insensitivity of most philosophical talk in the present and

in the past to the ways in which meaning and belief are embodied. What is most

characteristic of propositional attitude theory is that meaning and belief are analysed in

terms of abstract propositions whose structure is wholly independent of the structure of

embodiment. It is a reaction to this anti-naturalism which drives the claims of

eliminativism.[5] So the core claim of Churchlandish eliminativism is that we should reject

those theories of behaviour (and eliminate their posits) which employ notions of content

which are explanatorily independent of embodiment, and that therefore we should reject

propositional attitude theory. If it is propositional attitude theory of our folk-practice which

is eliminativism's target, rather than a loose collection of practical folk-platitudes, then the

argument that 'folk-psychology' is not vulnerable to being shown false by 'natural

philosophy' has no force.

While the first argument mistakes what is to be eliminated, the other four arguments

mistake what theory they are to be eliminated in favour of. The view amongst

eliminativism's critics seems to be either that there is no theory of meaning and belief to

substitute for the propositional attitude theory, or else that the eliminativist aims to

reject all theories of meaning and belief (ie., all theories of representational content). Both

of these views are false. It is no part of the Churchlands' program to engage in the

dubiously coherent exercise of rejecting all possible theories of representational

content. Their neuroscientific and computational accounts of mental activity are explicitly

and intentionally shot through with representational notions (eg., P.S. Churchland and T.

Sejnowski 1992 and P.M. Churchland 1989, ch. 5 and chs. 9-14). Consider, for example,

how Paul Churchland responds to the 'self-defeating' charge in (Churchland, 1984, p.48):

"the hole in this argument is the premise concerning the conditions necessary for a

statement to be meaningful. It begs the question. If eliminative materialism is true, then

meaningfulness must have some different source".[6] That is, meaningfulness is preserved

because it has a source other than in the propositional attitudes. Hence worries about

whether eliminativism is self-defeating, whether it can provide explanatory generalizations

that cover stimulus independent behaviour and whether it entails the impossibility of our

'cognitive lives' are at best premature. We need to look carefully at the alternative 'source'

of meaning, and thereby determine what norms and generalizations it can support. It is

quite wrong to suggest independently of such an analysis, as Hannan reports Rudder Baker

as suggesting, that taking eliminativism seriously involves abandoning the idea that there is

a difference between lying and telling the truth, between an intentional act and an accident,

even the idea that there are persons. These consequences would follow if eliminativism

abandons representational content, but it does not, so we cannot yet conclude that they do.

How can these misunderstandings occur so often? One answer is that we have

allowed ourselves to assume that the only theory of representational content is the

conceptual theory of propositional content. After all, where are the alternatives? Thus

Hannan repeatedly slides between content and propositional-attitude-content: for example,

"In order for rational, stimulus-independent behavior to occur, the meanings of stimuli must

be internally represented. And, if the meanings of stimuli are internally represented, then

there are internal states appropriately characterised as having propositional content" [p.17];

also, "we are constrained by the very concept of cognition ... to recognize the existence of

causally-relevant, representational states of persons (propositional attitudes)" [p.19, my

emphasis]; and "As things stand, propositional attitude concepts appear to be not only

essential to our self-conception, but clearly exemplified. According to the only conceptual

scheme we have, people obviously possess contentful mental states and act rationally"

[p.21]. Given this assumption, it would be right to conclude that eliminativism entails the

elimination of meaning and belief. (If there is only one theory of content, which is rejected

and its referents eliminated, then there would be nothing left for meaning or belief to

be.) The assumption also accounts for the typical tacit slide between structured practice

and theory which is indicated by the hybrid phrase "commonsense propositional attitude

psychology", which we encountered in the first objection to eliminativism. When a theory

presents itself as the only theory of a subject matter, one has to work much harder to keep

in mind the ontological difference between the theory and the practice of which it is a

theory. The very success of the formal tradition in logic has blinded us to the fact that this

tradition explores only a tiny sub-space of the whole territory available to the theory of

representational content. My moral, then, is that any good contemporary discussion of

eliminativism should discuss non-propositional and non-conceptualist conceptions of

representational content in order to discover which of the different theories of

representation give the best account of human psychological practice and whether

propositional attitude theory is explanatorily autonomous from the level of nonconceptual

content, or is reduced to it, or is eliminated in favour of it. I shall try to follow my own

moral.

Another explanation for why eliminativism has often been misinterpreted has to do

with an incorrect assimilation of two quite different components in the work of

the Churchlands: the argument for the elimination of beliefs and meanings as propositional

attitudes, and the suggestions for how our ordinary psychological practice may be modified

in the light of discoveries, metaphors and artefacts employed by the neurosciences, by the

cognitive sciences and by our increasing philosophical understanding of the nature of

representation. The argument for the elimination of beliefs-as-propositional attitudes has

been confused by critics of eliminativism with the claims about the modifiability of our

ordinary practices and ways-of-thinking to yield the outlandish claim that somehow our

ordinary practice and understanding should be eliminated. Consider just one example of

how badly wrong this gets the position of the Churchlands. In (1979, pp. 30-36) Paul

Churchland describes a modification of our ordinary practice of observation of the night

sky given our understanding of the Copernican theory of the arrangement and motions of

the solar system. After providing a sort of manual by which the reader can attempt to be

"more at home in our solar system", he writes that "what I do advocate at the social level is

that we do what we can to assist the concepts used in common sense to evolve

towards whatever counterparts they may have in the wider conception that science has

provided ... presumably this is precisely what common sense has always been doing —

evolving in pursuit of the ever-advancing front of new and successful theory — so I am

advocating only that we assist a process that has been underway for many millennia" [his

emphasis]. This overstates his case, because the modifications should be conceived of more

symmetrically: commonsense practice in the light of theory, but also theory in the light of

our evolving commonsense practice.[7] However, even in the overstatement, it

is emphatically clear that what is envisaged is not elimination but modification of practice.

The insight behind the claim that our ordinary practice and understanding is

modifiable by science is that our folk thought is not and should not be insulated from our

more institutional (scientific and philosophical) thought. One sometimes detects an almost

fundamentalist disposition amongst the critics of eliminativism to wall-off our 'folk

psychology' in a protected explanatory space where it cannot be 'threatened' by

science. However stagnant folk-psychology may, or may not, have been in the the past, it

would surely become so in the future if eliminativism's critics were to have their

way. Worse: it would become a dangerous model for how a realm of knowledge and

practice can gain an illegitimate authority. The authority of "walled-off folk-psychology"

would derive from boundaries established between its truth and the truth which belongs to

the rest of culture on the far side of the boundary. This contrasts badly with democratic

authority that derives internally to a practice because that practice can sustain itself

in open communication with the rest of intellectual culture (instead of

deriving externally from the boundary walls themselves). In order to maintain open

communicative exchange in our culture we must temper the pressures towards explanatory

pluralism with the pressures towards unity (explanatory exchange), as well as tempering the

pressures towards unity with the pressures towards pluralism. Elsewhere, I consider some

arguments against what I take to be an excessive pluralism.[8]

One of the great virtues of eliminativism has been the encouragement which it has

provided to the search for naturalistic theories of meaning and psychological practice that

are radically unlike "propositional theory". It is false to claim, as the target article does in

several places, that "we have absolutely no idea what it would be like to describe human

action, and human life as subjectively experienced, without propositional attitude

concepts". The nonpropositional, nonconceptual theories of representation provide just

such alternative conceptions. There are two components to nonpropositional theories of

representation: theories of representational vehicleswhich are typically highly unlike

sentential vehicles, and theories of representational contents which are unlike propositional

contents. Thus, the Churchlands and Paul Smolensky [1988] amongst others have explored

accounts that appeal to representational vehicles such as connectionist vectors and vector-

spaces, gradient descent through weight / error space and partitions of activation-vector

space. And Gareth Evans [1982], Christopher Peacocke [1989, 1992a & 1992b] and

Adrian Cussins [1990 and 1992b] amongst others have explored accounts of

nonconceptual contents which are experiential modes of presentation whose structure is

dependent on how they are embodied in animals and embedded in the physical and social

environment.[9] Nonconceptual contents and multi-dimensional phase-spaces fit well

together to provide a multitude of interesting ways to modify and extend our ordinary

understanding of "human life as subjectively experienced". If eliminativism is ultimately to

withstand the self-defeating charges and the charges of 'calamitous consequences', then it

must combine theories of non-sentential vehicles with theories of nonconceptual contents to

reveal new ways in which for animals like us, in environments like ours, a world is

presented to subjects of experience.

(2) Of Conflations and Misconceived Composites

In section (3) I will provide a thumbnail sketch of my favoured theory of

nonconceptual content in order to show that conceptualist propositional contents should be

eliminated in favour of a quite different conception of our conceptual capacities. But first I

want to consider briefly in section (2) what is involved in the posits of one theory being

eliminated in favour of those of another rather than being reduced to them. This is a large

topic in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science, so I shall not attempt to do

justice to it here. But I do want to sketch what I hope will be an intriguing suggestion of

which more can be made elsewhere.

What distinguishes elimination from reduction? What is the difference between the

relation that Phlogiston theory bears to Lavoisier's theory and the relation that our

understanding of temperature in gases bears to the theory of mean molecular kinetic energy

in gases?[10] The accounts of the distinction between elimination and reduction in the

literature are disappointing. Consider, for example, what Ramsey, Stich and Garon (1990)

say:

There is, in the philosophy of science literature, nothing that even comes

close to a plausible and fully general account of when theory change sustains

an eliminativist conclusion and when it does not. In the absence of a

principled way of deciding when ontological elimination is in order, the best

we can do is to look at the posits of the old theory — the ones that are at risk

of elimination — and ask whether there is anything in the new theory that

they might be identified with or reduced to. If the posits of the new theory

strike us as deeply and fundamentally different from those of the old theory,

in the way that molecular motion seems deeply and fundamentally different

from the "exquisitely elastic" fluid posited by caloric theory, then it will be

plausible to conclude that the theory change has been a radical one, and that

an eliminativist conclusion is in order. But since there is no easy measure of

how "deeply and fundamentally different" a pair of posits are, the conclusion

we reach is bound to be a judgment call.

No doubt it is a 'judgment call', but it would be nice to gain a better theoretical grip on what

it is that underlies such a decision, what it is that would make the judgment true rather than

false.[11] (One might wonder why DNA is not 'deeply and fundamentally different' from the

Mendelian conception of a gene, or why wave-motion is not 'deeply and fundamentally

different' from sound.) Often it is said that theories whose posits are eliminated are 'very

badly false'; more so than theories whose posits are reduced. But this gets things back to

front: we say that a theory is very badly false because it exhibits those characteristics that,

in relation to another theory, lead us to eliminate its posits. We have no independent grip—

at least in the interesting cases of theories which exhibit good predictive success—on

'degree of falsity'. What, then, are these characteristics?

I want to distinguish relations between an early theory and a successor theory where

some of the concepts of the early theory areconflations of concepts of the successor theory

from relations between two theories where some of the concepts of the early theory

aremisconceived composites of concepts of the successor theory and / or elsewhere. My

hypothesis is that where there are only conflations, the early theory may be reduced to the

successor theory. But where there are misconceived composites, the early theory is

eliminated in favour of the successor theory.[12]

A conflated concept is a semantically unstructured joining together of two or more

concepts which are from the same explanatory domain (where which concepts belong to the

same explanatory domain is determined from the point of view of the successor theory) and

which subserve the same or linked functional interests. The use of conflated concepts often

leads to imprecision in science but can be a useful feature of discourse where more

structural precision would be inappropriate. One example is the everyday notion of weight

which is a conflation of the notions of mass and force. Mass and force both belong to the

same explanatory domain from the point of view of mechanics, and subserve common

functional interests in equations of the form, F=m*a. Thus, a conflation of mass and force

yields imprecision, but not incoherence. I use the ordinary term 'conflation' here because

whether it bears a pejorative sense depends on which community is using it: for

philosophers conflation is bad news, but for historians and lexicographers it is an aspect of

their skill. Thus whether the conflation of weight is a matter for reprimand depends on

whether it is employed within a community of physicists or a community of weight-

watchers. We speak of the reduction of weight to force and mass because the more basic

terms reveal useful structure which is invisible to a weight perspective. From the

perspective of physical theory we may criticize the concept of weight as imprecise, whilst

recognizing that that degree of vagueness may be appropriate, even useful, in the context of

concerns which are remote from those of physics. (Compare our use of indexicals like

'around here'). But we don't criticize it as misconceived or illegitimate, a joining together

of aspects of concepts which do not subserve the same explanatory purposes.

Contrast misconceived composites where the early theory employs concepts which

are a combination of components of other concepts which come from distinct explanatory

domains, or which subserve quite different functional interests, and are therefore

illegitimate from the perspective of the successor theory. In these cases the composite

conceptions lead us to form arguments (or engage in practices) which are conceptually

confused (from the successor perspective), not merely imprecise or insufficiently revealing

of microstructure. I will mention a number of plausible examples of misconceived

composites, although no doubt a more detailed analysis of any one of the examples might

lead to a different diagnosis of how the concept fails. Consider first the phrenologist's

conception of physiology (or mental organs). I shall follow the account in Shapin (1979),

according to which the formal codified corpus of phrenology owed its origins to the work

of Franz Joseph Gall (1758 - 1828) and his associate Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776 -

1832). The brain was held to be a "congeries of organs, topographically distinct, each of

which subserved a distinct mental function". There were from 27 to 33 mental organs such

as organs of 'adhesiveness' (clinginess to surrounding objects, such as one's house); of

'hope' and of 'philoprogenitiveness' (the tendency to procreate and nurture children). The

size of the cerebral organ was a measure of the power of its functioning so that a small

organ of 'tune' might render its possessor insensitive to melody. The contours of the skull

followed the variations in the sizes of the underlying cerebral organs so that one could

make a mental diagnosis on the basis of visible bumps and depressions in the skull. Shapin

describes the 'physiological' relation between structure and function in phrenology as

follows:

Three sources for the organology were repeatedly mentioned by Gall and

Spurzheim. Gall himself liked to emphasize how he observed clear

correlations between the behaviour of his school-mates and their external

cranial contours. Later on, he and Spurzheim displayed busts and portraits

of individuals celebrated for certain traits and abilities, pointing out their

possession of the appropriate 'bumps'. Thus engravings of Chaucer

('ideality' large) and Locke ('ideality' small) were crucial visual confirmation

of the organology. The second alleged line of research derived from cranial

comparative anatomy. The skull shapes of various animals were displayed

as evidence of their accurate reflection of the beasts' 'known' psychic and

behavioural attributes. Thus, the 'bump' for amativeness is appropriately

large in rabbits; that for 'cautiousness' is well-reflected in the crania of

birds. And, finally, 'knowledge' of racial and sexual traits was also brought

to bear in the construction of an organology. 'Veneration' was found to be

large amongst the superstitious and credulous Negroid races; 'amativeness'

was well-known to be small in women. This sort of evidence, which

correlated structure and function and made each illuminate the other, the

phrenologists liked to term 'physiological', and it was by physiological, and

not by anatomical, investigations that the enumeration and mapping of

organs was achieved. The skull did not require to be opened up and the

brain displayed in order for the system to be established. [Shapin, 1979,

pp.142-3]

The phrenologist's concept of physiology is a misconceived composite of notions linking

brain anatomy with a mix of psychological, social and evaluative notions such as hope,

veneration, ideality, cautiousness, adhesiveness and amativeness. This concept of

physiology is such that its acceptance would render reasonable the diagnostic use of the

three kinds of evidence described in the quotation. But from the perspective of a successor

neuropsychology the diagnostic use of these three kinds of evidence is not reasonable: the

two sets of concepts employed in the phrenologist's notion of physiology neither serve

linked explanatory goals nor share a common functionality. In this example, they do not, as

they are intended, stand to each other as structure and function, for the successor theory

treats them as belonging to distinct explanatory domains. That degree of veneration or

degree of caution should be reflected in brain organ size in the way required by the

phrenologists borders on incoherence from a successor perspective, and the arguments that

were made about the social (eg. educational) consequences of phrenology are radically

misconceived. The failure here is not merely a failure to be precise or revealing of

structure, and hence the phrenologist's conception of physiology is an appropriate target for

eliminativism.

Some more examples: A familiar idea is that an epistemologically robust sense of

reality takes our knowledge and interaction with middle-sized dry material goods as being

paradigmatic. Our notion of, and access to, reality should, according to this idea, be

modelled on our notion of and access to material objects like chairs and trees. But

sometimes in philosophy one comes across a notion of the physical which is a

misconceived composite formed from this notion of the material and also from the notion

of being characterized in the physical sciences. Two quite different conceptions of the

physical, which come from distinct explanatory domains, are joined together in a way

which licenses misconceived claims by concealing the argumentative transitions on which

such claims would have to be based. Thus the misconceived composite notion of the

physical allows us to argue as follows: An epistemologically robust sense of reality takes

the physical as paradigm, and the physical is explicated in the physical sciences, therefore

an epistemologically robust sense of reality takes the physical sciences as paradigm. Such

a misconceived philosophical notion of the physical is ripe for elimination.

Or consider mermaids: Nowadays, mermaids are mostly fictional, mythical

creatures. Given our contemporary conception ofmermaid, a voyage of exploration to

discover marine animals that are mermaids is not merely unlikely to succeed, for it involves

a conceptual misunderstanding. But 200 years or so ago the mermaid concept was not like

this. At these times the concept was a misconceived composite of mythical and scientific

elements, as judged and described from our successor perspective. Stories of a fish-tailed

siren "provide an eloquent expression of latent eagerness to believe in one of the most

romantic myths created. Born from the 'Mother and love of men, the sea' and embodying a

sexual fantasy of universal appeal, the mermaid is clearly too glamorous a creature to be

understood by the laws of science alone. Forever alluring, yet never to be possessed by a

living man, her reality is embedded deep in the collective unconscious, the magnetic focus

of a ceaseless inchoate longing to dare the wild Unknown" [Phillpotts, 1980]. For someone

employing the misconceived conception, it makes good sense that a marine voyager might

come across a sea mammal which is a mermaid in the sense of the mythical animal

"embedded deep in the collective unconscious". How shocking that would be! And people

have 'identified' surfacing sea cows (dugongs and manatees) and basking seals as

mermaids.[13]

Or, to use an idea of Brian Smith's, recent work in non-linear dynamics and chaos

theory has shown the need to pull apart two components in the familiar philosophical

notion of determinism: the idea of being patterned or non-random and the idea of being

predictable. Chaos theory reveals that philosophical notion to be a misconceived composite

because it shows how the ideas of non-randomness and of predictability subserve quite

different functional interests. It is therefore misconceived to use the concept of

determinism to license the inference from the non-randomness of the world to the

predictability of the world. (It might be that the world itself is the most efficient 'predictive'

algorithm for physical effects such as the weather.) One could also argue from a feminist

successor perspective that the notion of Man is a misconceived composite formed from the

idea of universal humankind and the idea of certain masculine qualities. It licenses

illegitimate inferences to the form or nature of humanity. And again the proper response is

eliminativist: in that sense of Man, there is no Mankind.

(3) The Nonconceptual Construction of Concepts

I argue that the successor theory of representational content shows that the

propositional or conceptualist notion of concept is a misconceived composite of three

notions which have quite distinct functional purposes, and hence it conceals illegitimate

inferential transitions. Conceptualist concept should therefore be eliminated. Given that

the conceptualist nature of content is a fundamental assumption of propositional attitude

psychology[14] and given the claim in section (1) that the eliminative materialism of the

Churchlands is targeted at propositional attitude theory, it follows that the argument of this

section for the elimination of conceptualist content is an argument for the more general

eliminativist conclusion.

Content is a mode of presentation of the world in experience or in thought, and is

therefore normatively assessable. Perception (or memory, imagination, 'thinking', ...)

typically carries both a conceptual and a nonconceptual content. The conceptual content is

the content which is canonically specified in terms of the realm of reference of the content,

and the nonconceptual content is the content which is canonically specified in terms of

the realm of embodiment of the content.[15] The realm of reference of the content is that

domain of objects, properties and states of affairs with respect to which the content is

evaluated as being correct or incorrect, true or false, accurate or inaccurate, satisfied or

not. The realm of embodiment of the content is that range of skills, abilities, dispositions or

activities in virtue of which the animal-in-its-environment grasps and manifests the

content. Conceptualist theory of content includes the claim that realm of reference

specifications of content are explanatorily basic and can be understood independently of

realm of embodiment specifications of content. Nonconceptualist theory includes the

denial of this claim. A concept is an objective content and is therefore either assessable as

true or false, or is a constituent in a content which is assessable as true or

false. Conceptualist and nonconceptualist theories give different accounts of what concepts

are. Since conceptualist theory takes realm of reference specifications to be explanatorily

independent of realm of embodiment specifications it has the consequence that what it is

for a content to be true or correct can be understood and specified independently of the

nature of the embodiment of the content. This consequence is a crucial component of

propositional attitude theory, and provides much of the motivation for the eliminativist's

rejection of propositional attitude theory.

One aspect of this motivating naturalism is the idea that representational theory

should not begin with the notions of truth and reference in place. We can begin only with

brain processes and environmental, historical and social activities. I have developed an

account of representational theory according to which these processes and activities can be

understood as representational without having to presuppose some prior notions of truth

and reference.[16] The naturalist's task is to explain what truth and reference (the world!) is

by means of an understanding of embodied animal activity; to explain a conceptual scheme

as an adaptive ecological system of animal and environment. To presuppose the

conceptual resources of late twentieth century, western intellectual human culture (folk and

scientific) in explaining the nature of cognition and rationality would be to assume that our

very parochial, contingent animal ecology is the center of the explanatory universe, and

would thus be to give up on naturalism's rejection of the privilege of 'our' perspective. That

is, for our theory of objectivity in representation to presuppose the conceptual resources by

means of which the world is given to us would be to give up on the explanatory ambitions

of naturalism. But, equally, to confine oneself to non-representational notions in the

description of activity is to render impossible the naturalist's ambitions. The solution is to

provide an account of activity in terms of nonconceptualrepresentational content: a non-

referential mode of experiential access. By making the primary mode of content be the

experiential accessibility of embodied skills and ways of negotiating the environment, the

nature of our embodiment is no longer invisible (as it is for the conceptualist) because

located at the point of origin of our vision. If we can explain how conceptual contents are

constructed from nonconceptual contents, then we can explain how our conceptual scheme

is an out-growth of our mode of embodiment.

Truth and reference are properties of concepts: objective contents. Beginning, then,

without truth and reference in place in our ecology, is beginning without objectivity in

place. Objectivity is the gap between mind and world, between representation and

represented in virtue of which it is possible to be wrong or in error, and therefore in virtue

of which it is possible to be right. Thus naturalism requires that the explanatory base for

our account of activity is representation for which there is (as yet) no gap or divide between

mind and world: a field of activity which is partially both mind and world because it is not

initially either yet develops into both. Or, better, a field of environs - mental activity. The

character of any cognitive phenomenon may be described as the negotiation or structuring

of this field of environs - mental activity. We may plot the course of this structuring by

means of two variables: what I call "pd ratio" and "stabilization". PD ratio is a measure of

how well the field of activity supports way-finding through the field. In a jungle or a

prairie, way-finding is supported by trails through the territory. Trails are a function of

both the landscape itself and also of the passage of creatures through it. So we can use the

idea of trails through environs - mental activity ("cognitive trails") to mark the idea of a

structuring of the field of activity which is not thought of as being due to independent mind

and world components: a stored 'map' within the mind of the creatures, which allows them

to navigate through a territory of mind-independent features, some of which are marked on

the map. Rather, the navigational ability can't be assigned to either mind or world (or some

combination of mind and world components) because it consists in the network of trails

themselves. PD ratio, then, is a measure of how extensive the network of cognitive trails is

with respect to the whole extent of the field of environs - mental activity. If the network

covers most of the field then the PD ratio will be close to 1, and if the network is

fragmentary then the PD ratio will be close to 0.

If a network of cognitive trails is unstabilized, then the intersections of trails must

be constantly negotiated and renegotiated. This is like a troop of baboons each member of

which must repeatedly renegotiate their kinship, friendship and sexual relationships by

means of the changing spatial relations amongst all the members of the troop, because these

relationships are not marked by names, labels, clothing or other visible, stable signs. It

involves an immense amount of hard, real-time experiential work. Compare negotiating a

business deal in a board room where all the principal banks, suppliers, customers,

shareholders and management is represented, and where none of the parties can count on

prior established relationships of friendship, trust or obligation. Stabilization of the

network of cognitive trails provides a way of putting a 'black box' around some part of the

network of relations so that part of the network stays put whilst one works on renegotiating

some other part. Signs, institutions, the relative stability of the physical world, reliable

artefacts and public language (our technology) do this work of stabilization for

us. Landmarks in the network of trails are partially stabilized regions by means of which

navigation around the field of activity is enhanced. (Likewise, whole networks can be

stabilized, as in 'relativity theory' or 'F=m*a'). Thus the structuring of environs - mental

activity is a function of both pd ratio and degree of stabilization.

The course of a cognitive phenomenon (a dynamic, representational activity) may

be plotted on a graph whose axes are the pd ratio of the cognitive trails and the degree of

stabilization of the cognitive trails. Let us suppose that an activity starts out with low pd

ratio and low stabilization. As the field starts to become structured — the creatures start to

find their way around a landscape (as the theorist would say) — pd ratio will increase. A

network of cognitive trails is temporarily established, and this provides for the possibility

of stabilization. Both stabilization and pd ratio continue to increase, until the work

concentrates almost entirely on the stabilization of trails that are in place. However, once a

network of trails is tightly stabilized it becomes less flexible, and as the nature of the field

of activity changes over time, pd ratio will start to decrease as stabilization

increases. Further improvement in way-finding will then require that a stabilized region of

cognitive trails be destabilized for a period of time in order to allow pd ratio to increase

again. In other words, virtuousrepresentational activity is the effective trade-off of the

relative merits and demerits of pd ratio and stabilization. Virtuous activity may itself be

represented as a figure, a shape, in the two dimensional space of the pd ratio / stabilization

graph. It is not hard to see that the virtuous form of representational activity has the shape

of a spiral:

What, in terms of this diagram, is a concept? There are three main contenders: (a)

the highly stabilized cusps at each layer of the spiral, (b) a point in the graph which has the

maximum value on both dimensions (or else, that point on the graph which is such that the

line from the origin to it is longer than all other lines from the origin to other points on the

graph), and (c) the virtuous shape of the graph itself. Each of (a), (b) and (c) has quite

different functionality, yet each has a claim to be the representation of a concept. Often

what we folk-call a concept functions like a stabilized cusp. A word or a phrase or a

sentence has a meaning which is linguistically highly stabilized: appropriate use of or

response to the linguistic item does not require that we go inside the nonconceptual content

of the meaning and renegotiate its form. We say that the word expresses a concept, and we

allow our analysis of meaning to stop with atomic concepts. But if the cusps of each layer

have a claim on conceptuality, then surely so does that point of the graph which maximizes

not only stabilization but pd ratio as well? Yet we also want our notion of conceptuality to

capture all that is virtuous in meaningful representational activity, and we know that

maintaining a highly stabilized condition for too long may be

counterproductive. Fundamentalist ideologies are just such over-stabilized cusps, where a

very high price is paid in inflexibility for the virtues of maintaining old, familiar

forms. Perhaps, then, the virtuous shape of the whole spiral should be treated as the

representation of a concept?

What we have here is an example of that familiar phenomenon whereby a successor

theory (in this case a successor theory of representational content) identifies a more basic

level of description which reveals structure invisible to the earlier theory. Where

conceptualist theory operates with just one notion of concept, nonconceptualist theory

identfies three quite different notions, each of which answers to some aspect of the

conceptualist notion of concept.[17] So we must ask: is the conceptualist concept a

conflation of the nonconceptualist notions, or a misconceived composite of them?

That it is a misconceived composite, and should therefore be eliminated, can be

seen from the following: Within conceptualist theory, conceptuality—if measured at all—is

always measured along one dimension, usually called "generality".[18] Stabilization and pd

ratio are thus treated as equivalent, so reduction in generality (conceptuality) is always

equivalent to reduction in the contentfulness of the phenomenon. No gap opens between

concept and content, so that it is hardly surprising that we so often find the slide referred to

earlier between content and propositional attitude content. The very character of

conceptualist theory impedes us in our search for alternative theories. But where the

notion of concept is formed as a composite not only from maximum stabilization and

maximum pd ratio, but also from the virtuous shape of diachronic representational activity,

the consequences are not merely unfortunate but dangerous. The misconceived composite

licenses the illegitimate transition from 'greater conceptuality is always to the

representational good' (where conceptuality is read as virtuous form) to the conclusion that

'greater stabilization is always to the representational good'. But, as we saw, with

stabilization we can easily have too much of a good thing: excessive stabilization is an

ideology. And the maintenance of ideology is hegemonic and exclusionary.

Let us not transform 'folk-psychology' into an ideology![19]

References

Boghossian, P. 1990: "The Status of Content", The Philosophical Review, vol. XCIX, no.2

(April 1990), pp.157-184

Churchland, Pat 1986: Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain,

Cambridge: M.I.T. Press

Churchland, Paul 1979: Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, Cambridge

University Press

—— 1981: "Eliminative Materialism and The Propositional Attitudes", Journal of

Philosophy 78, no. 2 (1981); also in Churchland (1989); and in Mind and Cognition:

A Reader, (ed) Lycan, W., Blackwell, 1990

—— 1984: Matter and Consciousness, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press

—— 1989: A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of

Science, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1989

Churchland, P.S. and T. Sejnowski 1992: The Computational Brain, Cambridge: M.I.T.

Press

Crane, T., 1992: "The Nonconceptual Content of Experience" in Crane (ed) The Contents of

Experience: Essays on Perception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Cussins, Adrian 1990: "The Connectionist Construction of Concepts" in M. Boden ed. The

Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, in theOxford Readings in Philosophy Series,

Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.368-440

—— 1992a: "Limitations of Pluralism" in D. Charles and K. Lennon eds. Reduction,

Explanation and Realism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 179-223

—— 1992b: "Content, Embodiment and Objectivity: the theory of Cognitive Trails", Mind,

101, October 1992, pp. 651-688

Evans, G. 1982: The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Hannan, B. 1993: "Don't Stop Believing: The Case Against Eliminative Materialism," Mind and

Language

Luhrmann, T.M. 1989: Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England,

Harvard University Press

Peacocke, C 1989: "Perceptual Content" in "Themes from Kaplan", edited by J.Almog,

J.Perry, H.Wettstein, pp.297-329, Oxford: Oxford University Press

——1992a: "Scenarios, Concepts and Perception" in Crane (1992) (ed) The Contents of

Experience: Essays on Perception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

—— 1992b: A Study of Concepts, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press

Philpotts, Beatrice 1980: Mermaids, New York: Random House

Putnam, H. 1988: Representation and Reality, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press

Ramsey W; Stich S; and Garon J, 1988: "Connectionism, Eliminativism, and the Future of

Folk Psychology" in Tomberlin (ed.)Philosophical Perspectives 4: Action Theory

and Philosophy of Mind, Ridgeview

Rudder Baker, Lynne 1992: Review of "A Neurocomputational Perspective" by Paul M.

Churchland, Philosophical Review, vol. 101, October, pp.906-908

Shapin, S 1979: "The Politics of Observation: Cerebral Anatomy and Social Interests in the

Edinburgh Phrenology Disputes" in R. Wallis (ed) The Sociological Review

Monography No. 27: On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of

Rejected Knowledge, University of Keele.

Smolensky, P. 1988: "On the Proper Treatment of Connectionism" Behavioral and Brain

Sciences, 11:1-71, with continuing comentary from Behavioral and Brain Sciences,

1990 2:399-412

[1] I restrict myself to eliminativism in the general area of belief and meaning, and so don't consider

eliminativism with respect to qualia, etc.

[2] It's not that I deny that there are philosophical positions with respect to which meaning and content are

theoretical posits. For example, with respect to a debate over the Lockean view of the world as atoms-in-the-

void, meaning is a theoretical posit. The debate over eliminativism with which I am concerned is not

conducted at that level of philosophical granularity, but rather with respect to competing theories of meaning

and belief. As I take the first question in the debate over eliminativism to be whether content is essentially

embodied (that is, whether the theory of content is, or is not, explanatorily isolated from the theory of

embodiment), I take content to be an ontological category with respect to the eliminativist debate. That is, the

falsity of the atoms-in-the-void view is apresupposition of the debate. So while there is a debate over the

elimination of content, that is not the debate of principle concern to the Churchlands, and both kinds of debate

have been compromised by failing to clearly separate them: a failure that arises because of the tacit

assumption of the uniqueness of the propositional theory of content.

[3] Compare Pat Churchland (1986, pp.280-1): "By making theories the fundamental relata, much of the

metaphysical bewilderment and dottiness concerning how entities or properties could be reduced simply

vanished". Likewise for theoretical posits and elimination.

[4] The 'words that we utter' include 'belief' and 'desire' as phonemically or graphemically identified. Nothing

follows about the role of the propositional attitude, or any other, theory of belief and desire. Our practice may

be modified over the centuries so that there may come a time when we do not use the words 'belief' and

'desire'. Again, nothing follows about whether there are beliefs and desires, and what the theory of behaviour

should look like for them, or for us.

[5] So the criticisms of Lynne Rudder Baker (1992, pp.906-908) that Churchland "conflates views on the

nature of knowledge and views on the mechanisms that encode it" and "confuses what is thought about (here,

theories) with neural mechanisms that enable us to think about them" beg the question. Propositional attitude

theory puts a lot of weight on the distinction between the representational content and its embodiment in

different kinds of representational vehicles, and it has done this in order to protect our aspirations to the

universality of truth. What it is that we know (the objects of knowledge) has to be kept explanatorily isolated

from the ways in which animals like us are able to know (the media of knowledge) if our science and the rest

of our 'high status' knowledge is not to be polluted by the contingencies of our psychology and our

evolutionary past. In rejecting propositional attitude psychology, eliminativism denies that much

weight can be put on the distinction between what it is that we know and how we know it. The open question

then becomes: how much of our aspiration to the universality of truth can be recovered within a naturalistic

theory of representation?

[6] See also Churchland 1981, p.89: "one cannot simply assume that particular theory of meaning without

begging the question at issue". Nor is this a position which combines 'irrealism about mental content' with

'realism about linguistic content', as suggested by Boghossian (1990), p.170. This is an especially odd

position to ascribe to the Churchlands, given the characteristically Churchlandish move to deny that linguistic

representation is basic. Rather, the view is that mental content and linguistic content have a common source

explained in a successor theory which eliminates the posits of the propositional theory of meaning and the

propositional attitude theory of belief.

[7] He is much closer to a symmetric view in the present volume where he writes of the "intimate connection

of theory with practice" and the skill-based nature of theory.

[8] Cussins, 1992a

[9] Eliminativism of the kind I am defending requires both a theory of representational vehicles and a theory

of representational contents. Appeal to theories of nonconceptual content strikes me as the proper response to

criticisms such as those of Rudder Baker that "Churchland offers no naturalistic account of what makes a

given activation vector represent a particular environmental feature" (Rudder Baker, 1992, p.907).

[10] By 'reduction' here I mean that explanatory relation or relations, whatever it (they) turn out to be, between

theories or their posits that hold in the 'classic examples of reduction': thermodynamics, temperature, sound,

genes, etc. It may be that this relation (or, one of these relations) is best analysed not in terms of the

traditional account of reduction, but in terms of some notion of 'construction' (Cussins, 1992a). Here I just

wish to note that we will need an account of the reduction / elimination distinction however weak or strong

our account of the classic cases of reduction.

[11] The reading of 'judgment call' according to which the decision between eliminativism and reduction is just

indeterminate cannot be correct exegesis of Ramsey, Stich and Garon because they go on to give arguments

that elimination, and not reduction, is the correct response to the propositional attitudes.

[12] This account presupposes an explanation of what makes one theory a successor to another. I am not

aiming to provide such an explanation here.

[13] In 1842 an advertisement for a show at "Mr. P.T. Barnum's American Museum and Gardens" appeared,

announcing that "the manager being ever desirous to gratify his Numerous Patrons ... has in accordance with

Universal Desire! effected an engagement for a short time longer with the Proprietor of the most wonderful

curiosity ever discovery [sic], the Real Mermaid! Which was exhibited during the past week at Concert Hall,

in Broadway, and which elicited the wonder and amazement of Hundreds of Naturalists and other Scientific

Persons ...

[14] See footnote 5 and surrounding discussion. The attempt to isolate content from embodiment entails

conceptualism becuase it prevents the possibility of a nonconceptual level of analysis: see below.

[15] In (Cussins, 1990) I attempted to provide a neutral characterization of nonconceptual content that would

apply equally well to the accounts given by Evans, Peacocke, Dretske and myself. Tim Crane discusses this

characterization in Crane (1992). But in this brief summary I describe things from within my own

perspective.

[16] In (Cussins 1992b) where I offer an argued explication of the theory sketched here. Since I think that the

debate over eliminativism really comes down to a debate between those who take the space of

representational theory to be small and well explored and those who take it to be very large and poorly

explored, I think there is some value in giving even just a little sense of what ways of talking about

representation that belong to the latter camp might look like.

[17] Because those concepts which are thoughts are the primary bearers of truth, (and given that I am assuming

a Fregean-style tight connection between meaning and truth) a theory of concepts must also be a theory of

truth. So there are resources here to answer Putnam's question to Paul Churchland (Putnam 1988, p. 60). And

also to resist Boghossian's assumption that "contents just are truth conditions" or that content "consists simply

in the idea of a truth condition" (Boghossian 1990, pp.173-4).

[18] See Evans's 'generality constraint' in Evans (1982).

[19] I would like to thank Pat and Paul Churchland, Charis Cussins, Stefan Heck, Joe Ramsey, Brian Smith

and Steve Yalowitz for discussion and lots of help with the examples of misconceived composites. And Pat

and Paul for their love of life.