I will now take it that Adams and Aizawa ought to concede that there is no difference in content between my thought that ‘the harbour Bridge looks beautiful in the sunlight this morning’ and my utterance to you that ‘the Harbour Bridge looks beautiful in the sunlight this morning.’ Indeed I might think that very sentence to myself in my head before uttering it to you. If Adams and Aizawa are happy to accept this conclusion, then we really have no disagreement, because we have an example of thinking in natural language (English in this instance). Similarly it seems obvious to me that a Venn diagram that I am imagining now has the same meaning as the Venn diagram that I am drawing on the page now.Menary seems to me not to respect the difference between having a thought that P and have an English sentence with the content that P in one's head. Sure, one can have a thought with the content that the harbour Bridge looks beautiful in the sunlight this morning, and one can even "think this in English", but that's not to admit that there is an English sentence in the head that has the content "that the harbour Bridge looks beautiful in the sunlight this morning".
So, I now think that maybe A&A indulged the Clark and Menary discussion of these cases a bit too much. Spending a lot of time explaining their view may have obscured our view, which I think is pretty simple.
1) All thought is in mentalese (a system of mental representation that differs from all natural languages) which gets its semantic content by way of satisfying conditions on non-derived representations.
2) Thinking in English is forming mentalese representations of English sentences; it is not a matter of having tokens of English sentences in the head.
3) Thinking in images is forming mentalese representations of pictures; it is not a matter of having tokens of pictures in the head.
These are just statements of our view. There is a huge literature on mental imagery and a large literature on thinking in a natural language, so I would think it would take a lot of work on Menary's part to show that we are wrong on any of 1)-3). And, he is trying to show, or maybe is just assuming, that we are wrong on 1)-3).
I don't think it would require a lot of work to show the A&A view is mistaken, or at least that it is unparsimonious in comparison to alternative models. One would need only point to the empirical literature supporting the view that most thought is simply subvocal speech, or "inner speech". Developmental psychology since Vygotsky has attempted to demonstrate that thinking is merely subvocal speech that has been completely internalized.
ReplyDeleteFor evidence and theoretical explication, see Morin (2005) "Possible Links Between Self-Awareness and Inner Speech Theoretical background, underlying mechanisms, and empirical evidence", Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 12, Numbers 4-5, pp. 115-134(20)
Well, A&A do believe that there is thinking in English, but that's just not a matter of having a sound stream tokened in the head. That's crazy and I think Menary knows it. But, that's what he appears to need to cause A&A any trouble.
ReplyDeleteBut, I'll put this paper on my reading list.
"that's not to admit that there is an English sentence in the head ..."
ReplyDeleteBut there may be in essence. I hypothesize that the long-term memory of a proposition P comprises the motor commands necessary to vocalize that proposition. If so, it seems likely that the thought P would be those same motor commands only stored in short-term memory and manifested as verbal mental imagery. If something along these lines were the case, the difference between the remembered P, the thought P, and the vocalized P would be memory type (long-term, short-term, none, respectively) and manifestation (none, verbal mental imagery, vocalization, respectively).
Deciding whether those have the same "content" would then seem to turn on one's definition of that word.
"a Venn diagram that I am imagining now has the same meaning as the Venn diagram that I am drawing on the page now."
Given the hypothesis above and my further hypothesis that what I assume to be the content of an "imagining" is a (possibly illusory) manifestation of a latent verbal description of the "imagined" object, the drawing would be the material result of translating that manifestation (or the underlying verbal description, if the manifestation is illusory) into appropriate motor commands. In which case, the quote would seem likely wrong, depending on how "meaning" is interpreted.
But, maybe I should add a clarificatory comment. When I say that there is a huge literature on these topics, I mean that it will be relatively easy to find those who maintain that we think in English or that we think in pictures. What is relatively hard is to adjudicate all the literature and come to the right conclusion.
ReplyDelete" I hypothesize that the long-term memory of a proposition P comprises the motor commands necessary to vocalize that proposition. "
ReplyDeleteOk. But, a proposition is not an English sentence, right?
But, suppose you let proposition = sentence here. Still, the motor commands are not an English sentence, right? They are the implements that enable you to produce an English sentence. And the motor commands can be in mentalese, not English.
Don't forget how Menary is trying to refute A&A. It is by claiming that there are literally English sentence in the head that get their content via convention. There is a lot one can say about thinking in English short of buying in to that.
"But, a proposition is not an English sentence, right?"
ReplyDeleteI've tried sorting all that out several times, with little success. The SEP entry for "proposition" quotes David Lewis as saying "the conception we associate with the word.. may be something of a jumble". So, I can only say what my (mis?)understanding is:
For a string or words to be a "sentence" requires only that it follow the appropriate rules of syntax.
A "proposition" is a sentence that can take a truth value.
In his book "Modern Philosophy", Roger Scruton says (p. 16) that a proposition is "the meaning of [a] sentence", but he doesn't say why and I can't accept that without some justification. He also says that a proposition p is "identical with the thought that p", but doesn't elaborate. I don't know if the "that" has special significance, but in the absence of elaboration I can't accept that either.
"the motor commands are not an English sentence, right?"
Sure, but they are a latent sentence vocalization.
"the motor commands can be in mentalese, not English."
Not in my concept. I don't know enough neuroscience to describe them in any detail, but I envision them as being in some sense "neural states". But however they might be implemented, they aren't "commands" in a linguistic sense, they're latent motor neuron activations.
"Menary is ... claiming that there are literally English sentence in the head that get their content via convention."
I don't quite understand this sentence, but it sure sounds wrong.
Well, here is what Menary appears to want to do. He wants to say that English sentences have derived content (which is what A&A maintain) and that they occur in mental processes (which we deny). He needs this conjunction to create a problem for us. But, it seems to me highly problematic to cash out "thinking in English" so that it is a thing that had non-derived content that occurs in one's mental processing. Maybe you, Charles, don't want to go that far. Maybe even Gary doesn't want to go that far. The point is, according to me, that there are different ways of understanding the phenomenon of "thinking in English" other than having literal tokens of English sentences occuring in the brain. They are not bits of English orthography or sound streams, right? So, if not, there is some way of parsing this that may not have it turn out that they have derived content.
ReplyDeleteCharles, "proposition" does have this ambiguity. I take it that a sentence expresses a proposition. The important thing in the present context is that the thing that bears the derived content, e.g. a bit of orthography or a sound stream,is not the same as the motor commands for producing it.
ReplyDeleteI can grant that a motor command in a latent English sentence, but that does not mean that the motor command has derived content. As far as I can tell it's ok to say that the motor command (occurs in mentalese) is a) a latent sentence vocalization, b) occurs in the mind or brain, and c) has non-derived content, but the English sentence is a) an actual vocalization, b) does not occur in the mind, and c) has derived content.
This is what I mean by saying that Menary needs a lot in order to create trouble for us. But, he does not really touch on this kind of complexity.
I've frankly had a bit of trouble following all this because as usual, I'm unfamiliar with much of the lingo (eg, "derived content") and some of the concepts. But I think I now get the point and can perhaps make you happy despite insisting on thoughts being unvocalized sentences.
ReplyDeleteHere's how I understand the situation at this point. The "derived content" of a sentence is its meaning as determined by social practice; non-derived content is meaning that is not so determined. You want to say that while vocalized sentences must have derived content, thoughts must not. Menary wants you to admit that one can have a thought which is some sense an unvocalized sentence S. Then because S could be vocalized and would at that point have derived content, he claims that thought S must have that same derived content.
You are resisting the hypothesis that a thought is an unvocalized sentence because you are accepting the claim that the derived content of a thought that is an unvocalized sentence takes on the derived content of the vocalized sentence. But why accept that? The meaning of a vocalized sentence S is its public meaning. But thinking is private, so the public meaning of a thought S has no application. Menary (et al?) is apparently assuming that the public meaning of a vocalized sentence S remains attached to S independent of context. But how is one to interpret the concept of "public meaning" in a private context?
Does this help?
Here's how I understand the situation at this point. The "derived content" of a sentence is its meaning as determined by social practice; non-derived content is meaning that is not so determined. You want to say that while vocalized sentences must have derived content, thoughts must not. Menary wants you to admit that one can have a thought which is some sense an unvocalized sentence S. Then because S could be vocalized and would at that point have derived content, he claims that thought S must have that same derived content.
ReplyDeletePrecisely.
You are resisting the hypothesis that a thought is an unvocalized sentence because you are accepting the claim that the derived content of a thought that is an unvocalized sentence takes on the derived content of the vocalized sentence.
Be careful here. I am resisting the hypothesis that a thought is an unvocalized sentence insofar as I want to resist the claim that the unvocalized sentences have derived content. Here is where the caution needs to enter just regarding clarity about what is being discussed. It's the derived part that I am resisting. I am not going in the direction that you appear to be going, namely, to say that there is public content and there is private content and they are not the same, e.g. an utterance of a sentence, say, has one meaning, but that meaning is not the one one intends.
And Menary does seem to have a Sellarsian kind of picture of thought content acquisition. In the paper on which I have been commenting (at length), the writes,
"Indeed most of the content that is relevant to cognition will be formulated in terms of conventional representations such as sentences of a natural language and depends upon meaning
that is publically created and shared."
and later
I will make my position clear: meaning is public and determined by the patterns of
interaction between language users; it’s the same meaning whether or not language is
being used privately or publically.
So, all this is by way of just getting the views on the table, right? So far, so good it seems.
Now, regarding unvocalized sentences, I think they are not really sentences in much the way that bitmap image files on my hard disk are not pictures.
ReplyDeleteSo, I think all of this kind of stuff is much trickier than Menary lets on.
"there is public content and there is private content and they are not the same, e.g. an utterance of a sentence, say, has one meaning, but that meaning is not the one one intends"
ReplyDeleteNo, I definitely am not going down that road - we appear to be in synch on this issue. It seems almost a tautology, but one might express it this way: S has public meaning when vocalized in public but not when unvocalized in private.
"this kind of stuff is much trickier than Menary lets on"
I think this captures the essence of the problem. For example, if one views language users as fundamentally stimulus-response systems, it's natural to think of a public utterance as a stimulus intended to produce a specific response in members of a specific community of hearers. And in that sense, the speaker's public meaning can be viewed as being that response. (Eg, "speaking to the base".) But looked at that way, even if one accepts the claim that a thought is just an unvocalized rehearsal of a sentence, the thought can't have a "meaning" that is independent of the target audience. So, in Menary's example about Harbour Bridge, the thought has no public meaning in the absence of a context. OTOH, if the thought is viewed as a "rehearsal" of a sentence in preparation for vocalization directed at specific hearers with the intent of creating a shared feeling of joy in that person, one might argue that the thought then becomes associated with a public meaning. But then it seems that the (arguably unanswerable) question becomes "at what point does that meaning attach - conception or birth?"
"it’s the same meaning whether or not language is being used privately or publically"
If one accepts Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument, it isn't clear what this might mean. I assume it's another statement of the idea that the "public meaning" of a sentence is context independent, a view inconsistent with how "tricky" we take "this stuff" to be.
Re unvocalized sentences and bit maps: I assume this analogy has to do with "representations", but I'm unclear how that word is being used in this discussion. Could you elaborate a bit?
Hi, Charles,
ReplyDeleteSo, I think we are in agreement on a great deal of the early material. I am pretty sure that Menary does not think humans are stimulus-response type organisms. I think he thinks of mental processing in terms of what connectionist networks do, but that does not loom large in the papers I have read by him.
I don't accept the private language argument.
I take it that there are mental representations (in mentalese) and these used to generate behavior, such as the production of public utterances. My point about unvocalized sentences (construed as motor commands) and bit map images is only to draw a superficial kind of analogy. We describe certain mental structures, e.g. motor commands or data sets, as unvocalized speech or an image in a derivative kind of way, namely, deriving from the things they are used to generate (i.e. an utterance or an image).
I think we agree on the destination but not on the route. Since I don't know what paper you mean by "Menary 2010", I don't know why it is important to show that thoughts don't have derived meaning. But if that's the objective, it seems clear to me that the more direct route is to argue that they don't have meaning at all. And I think we can get that via Davidson even if you don't accept W's PLA (although I view both - and Sellars in EPM - as making essentially the same argument).
ReplyDeleteDavidson claims that public meaning arises via an intersubjective process - that he calls "triangulation" - which involves speaker, hearer, and the world (as commonly experienced by both), where the speaker and the hearer are members of a community that share a common (but not static) vocabulary. Thus, as Rorty repeatedly emphasizes, remove any corner of the triangle and "meaning" evaporates. An unvocalized sentence, no matter to what ontological category one wants to assign it, is missing one corner - a hearer known to be a member of the relevant community.
As a concrete example of this idea, refer back to my comment of 1/6, 5:35 PM, last line. Before you wrote the sentence S to which I referred, you had the thought S. And once written, S had meaning to Gary, Andrew, and presumably other readers. But not to me because I am not a member of the community to which you were writing and had not triangulated regarding "content" or "convention" in order to attach the meaning appropriate to that community. Now I have triangulated and think I understand the sentence pretty well. But if Menary is right and the thought S has intrinsic meaning whether expressed or not, what happened to that meaning between your thought S and my reading S the first time?
BTW, this seems an appropriate opportunity to say how grateful I am for the opportunity to interact with people like you (and Andrew over at his blog, Peter at CE, et al) - ie, to triangulate. It probably isn't the primary intent when specialists set up blogs, but for unaffiliated people like me they function as classroom, dorm bull session, one-on-one tutor, et al. Many thanks.
Menary 2010 = "The holy grail of cognitivism: a response to Adams and Aizawa" This is the paper I have been raking over the coals for the past two weeks. =)
ReplyDeleteI do think that we may be getting to the same destination via a different path. I have a vague familiarity with the Sellars and Davidson stuff from both grad school and a 1993 NEH seminar(I'm old), but I'm not really buying. I spent some time learning about syntax from a Chomskyan perspective and read about vision and even if there is something right about S&D, I don't see how it speaks to the work that has been done in this area.
I appreciate you stopping by Charles. My sense is that there is a bona fide exchange of ideas.
best wishes,
Ken