Content and Consciousness
‘It presents a compelling and sometimes profound conception of the subject; it is ambitious without being grandiose; it employs scientific information effectively and ingeniously; its style, moreover, is enviably witty, clear, fluent and relaxed. One rarely encounters a difficult work of technical philosophy that is such a pleasure to read.’
Thomas Nagel, Journal of Philosophy
‘Content and Consciousness is an extraordinarily interesting and original book, and one which will raise the level of current discussion in the philosophy of mind.’
Richard Rorty, Philosophical Studies
‘I have certainly been greatly stimulated by reading the book, and I recommend it to all others who have an interest in the problems of mind and body and of physicalism and its alternatives.’
J.C.C. Smart, Mind
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Daniel C. Dennett
Content and Consciousness
With a new preface by the author
London and New York
First published 1969
by Routledge & Kegan Paul
Second edition published by Routledge 1986
First published in Routledge Classics 2010
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© 1969, 1986, 2010 Daniel C. Dennett
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For
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CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION XI
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION XV
PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION XIX
PART I The Language of Mind 1
1 The Ontological Problem of Mind 3
I The Mind and Science 3
II Existence and Identity 6
2 Intentionality 20
III The Problem of Intentionality 20
IV Two Blind Alleys 35
V The Way Out 42
3 Evolution in the Brain 46
VI The Intelligent Use of Information 46
VII The Evolution of Appropriate Structures 51
VIII Goal-directed Behaviour 70
4 The Ascription of Content 80
IX Function and Content 80
X Language and Content 92
XI Personal and Sub-personal Levels of Explanation: Pain 101
PART II Consciousness 109
5 Introspective Certainty 111
XII The Certainty of Certain Utterances 111
XIII A Perceiving Machine 117
6 Awareness and Consciousness 128
XIV The Ordinary Words 128
XV Awareness and Control 137
XVI Consciousness 142
7 Mental Imagery 149
XVII The Nature of Images and the Introspective Trap 149
XVIII Colours 158
8 Thinking and Reasoning 164
XIX People and Processes 164
XX Reasons and Causes 175
9 Actions and Intentions 184
XXI Intentional Actions 184
XXII Willing 192
XXIII The Importance of Intentional Actions 197
10 Language and Understanding 201
XXIV Knowing and Understanding 201
XXV Language and Information 209
XXVI Conclusions 213
NOTES 217
INDEX 233
PREFACE TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION
It has been a quarter century since I wrote the foreword to the first paperback edition. The cognitive science movement was well underway in 1984 and it is now going stronger than ever, with more and more philosophers playing the sorts of roles in it that I applauded then. Perhaps not so surprising is that in the interim something of a backlash has set in among a small coterie of philosophers who practise resolutely old-fashioned aprioristic philosophy of mind. I have yet to encounter anything worth more than a moment’s reflection in that literature, but I grant that it is logically possible that something will emerge from it that other researchers on the mind will find worth their attention. I am not holding my breath.
Rereading my book, I have learned something curious about how my own thinking has changed. There are some passages that I find I no longer wish to endorse strongly, but at the same time don’t wish to recant. I have moved from conviction to bland agnosticism, and find that I don’t even have much to say about why my allegiance has waned. For this very reason, there would be little or no point in my listing these passages; it would be of biographical interest at best and I don’t wish to handicap them. So caveat lector; some of these passages may be best ignored or they may well be on to something important, may, for all I know, be gems I can no longer appreciate.
There is one set of ideas, however, mainly concentrated in Chapter 4, ‘The Ascription of Content’ that I do particularly want to commend to the reader. Here I set out for the first time (I think) the ideas that later became known as ‘teleofunctionalism,’ and drew out the implication that attributions of content were inextricably bound up with evaluations of aptness or appropriateness or rationality, an implication that later was dubbed and deplored as ‘meaning holism’ by Jerry Fodor. In spite of the fact that there has been a vigorous campaign by Fodor and others against these ideas, they continue to be reinvented. Recently, in LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2008), Fodor has broadened his target and rechristened it pragmatism. If you think that ‘abilities are prior to theories’ or that ‘knowing how is the paradigm cognitive state and it is prior to knowing that in the order of intentional explanation’ (2008, p. 10), then you are a pragmatist, according to Fodor’s expansive definition, along with not just Dewey and Quine, but Wittgenstein, Ryle, Sellars, Putnam, Rorty, Dummett, Brandom, McDowell, Dreyfus, Vygotsky, Piaget, Bruner, and Gibson. Pretty good company, say I. All these folks have been utterly misled, Fodor insists, by their pragmatism, ‘perhaps the worst idea that philosophy ever had’ (p. 9). Doesn’t that make you want to learn more?
What sweeter encomium for my favourite idea could there be? Fittingly, the opposite of a pragmatist in this taxonomy is a Cartesian, a label Fodor now proudly sports. So here we have a fine confrontation. Which path should you take, the pragmatist or the Cartesian? I guess I should have belaboured my case for pragmatism more vigorously over the years, since there manifestly remain pockets of unpersuaded philosophers. But the reason I didn’t think I had to do this was that I thought I had sufficiently made the case in this book. I still think so.
Daniel Dennett
Cold Spring Harbor
June 1, 2009
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
It is now just twenty years since the first draft of this book was submitted (as a D. Phil. thesis at Oxford), and sixteen years since it was first published. In the intervening period the field of philosophy of mind has grown and changed enormously, a development that is perhaps made easier to see and appreciate by a reconsideration of the way the problems looked (to me) in the late 1960s.
When I was working on the book, its resolute naturalism and earnest concern with what science could tell us about the mind struck me as quite pioneering – or quite eccentric, depending on my mood. Philosophers of mind made something of a fetish of their distance from any empirical investigations, except of the most informal linguistic sort. Times have changed. Now we have cognitive science. There are now more than a few philosophers of mind who are vastly more knowledgeable about the brain than I was then (or am now). A fairly professional knowledge of the other cognitive sciences – psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics – is now considered a virtual qualification for professional status in the discipline.
So what strikes me now about my book is not its pioneering stand, for we are almost all naturalists today, but its intermittent naiveté. This is mildly embarrassing, but not nearly so embarrassing as would be the discovery that I hadn’t managed to achieve any advance in outlook over the years. There are also the unalloyed errors, of course, and these are indeed embarrassing. In fact, the only alterations to the text I have made, save for some typographical errors, are the elimination of a few preposterous howlers. (A good measure of what has been changed is the correction in example (4) in the second chapter: it was Ponce de Leon, not Hernando de Soto, who searched for the Fountain of Youth!) The more substantive errors, some of which I have still not recognized or recanted, alas, are left intact.
The task I set myself in the original Preface was ‘to determine the constraints within which any satisfactory theory [of the mind] must evolve’, and judging by the subsequent short span of theory evolution, I give myself high marks, at least for identifying the crucial issues and often even getting the matter right. For instance a voluminous debate on the identity theory has come – and gone – in the intervening years, leaving us with a residue of a few ‘token-token’ identities and a good deal of ‘eliminative materialism’, with the slack taken up by various sophisticated versions of ‘supervenience’ and accounts of psychology as an irreducible special science which is nonetheless properly deemed materialistic. In short, we are left with just about exactly the position I maintained (plus some useful sophistications) in Chapter 1.
Chapter 2, ‘Intentionality’, draws heavily on Chisholm and others, and introduces the problem of intentionality that has dominated much recent theorizing. There is little I would change in it today (except for those silly mistakes in the examples, which I have changed). The term ‘intentional system’ appears several times in the chapter and later in the book, but not with the precise sense I later developed for this term (in ‘Intentional Systems’, Journal of Philosophy, 1971, and a number of other papers, all cited in the references of my Elbow Room, 1984). How fares ‘centralism’, the recommended theoretical approach to the problem of intentionality that consists in making an initial characterization of the phenomena to be studied in intentional terms, ‘describing the events to be related in law-like ways using either ordinary, or semi-ordinary, or even entirely artificial Intentional expressions’? Except that no one calls his theory ‘centralism’, it fares well indeed, as the recent discussions of ‘folk psychology’ and its semi-ordinary and artificial alternatives in cognitive science attest. The debates on the ground rules have not diminished, with much attention being devoted to Putnam’s and Fodor’s methodological solipsism, its strengths, weaknesses, and rivals. This is one of the areas in which I have been provoked to embellish, adjust, revise and extend my thinking considerably – but not recant. In particular, my claims throughout the book about the relationships between inner and outer, function and meaning, rationality and meaning, and rationality and belief have been supported and wonderfully extended by a number of recent books, especially Ruth Millikan’s Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories and Robert Stalnaker’s Inquiry (both MIT Press, 1984).
Chapter 3, on ‘Evolution in the Brain’, stands up well, I think, in spite of its technical naiveté. The very recent upsurge in enthusiasm among neuroscientists for theories of learning as intracerebral evolution is particularly gratifying. While Edelman at Rockefeller, Changeux in Paris, the ‘New Connectionists’ in artificial intelligence and others are now developing ‘evolutionary’ models at a level of empirical detail and sophistication I could not imagine in the 1960s, I am pleased to see that their accounts appeal heavily to the concerns I outlined in this chapter. But it is also true that having said what I said, I simply didn’t know what to do next with the ideas, so that the recent developments have opened new horizons for me.
The account of consciousness in Part II has some fairly dramatic shortcomings, in my eyes. The account of introspective certainty has some important and salvageable points (in particular about the identity conditions of states and their relations to reports about them), but also some large confusions, which I have tried to correct in more recent writings. The distinction I draw in Chapter 6 between two different senses of awareness has been dropped from my later work on consciousness, not out of a conviction that it was entirely mistaken, but for strategic reasons: formulating it properly did not promise to be worth the time and effort. Recent discussions, however, have convinced me that something like that distinction is indeed a strategic necessity if various confusions are to be avoided, so I plan to refurbish a version of the awareness distinction in forthcoming work. Chapter 7, on mental imagery, has been almost entirely swept aside by subsequent empirical and theoretical work on the topic, but perhaps it is useful as an extremely simple and provocative introduction to the issues that are currently being explored. The last three chapters, on thinking and reasoning, action and intention, and language and understanding provide some foretastes of more recent discussions, and seem to me today to be not obviously wrong anywhere, but perhaps only because they are less detailed and ambitious than much current work on these central topics.
My own views of personal identity over time, and of responsibility, permit me to take a rather distanced and objective view of this book and its callow author. I find that all things considered I am glad it was written as it was when it was, and also glad that it is now being made available again, this time in a paperback edition. I learned quite a lot from rereading it, and hope that others will find it informative as well.
Daniel C. Dennett
Tufts University
March, 1985
PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
Books attempting to tell the whole story of the mind have become rarer in recent years, for good reason. No one can hope to master the details, both of empirical data and of theoretical or conceptual nuance. In the face of staggering complexity, prudence has dictated to the student of mind that he must specialize – in the physiology of the nervous system, or in mathematical models of learning processes, or in the logic of key concepts such as belief, attention, or pain. This retreat from generality has been productive, but has left certain fundamental and pressing questions virtually untouched. What is the relation between a man’s mental life and the events in his brain? How are our
commonplace observations about thinking, believing, seeing, feeling pain to be mapped on to the discoveries of cybernetics or neurophysiology? These questions are important; their answers promise to bridge the specialties and consolidate their gains. But if attempts to answer them are confined, as they largely have been in the past, to philosophical guesswork on the one hand and the speculative perorations of retiring professors of neurology on the other, no adequate answers will be forthcoming and there will be no unification of theory.
In examining these broad questions of mind and body, I do not try in this book to tell the whole story, but to set out the conceptual background against which the whole story must be told, to determine the constraints within which any satisfactory theory must evolve. The book specializes by slicing a cross-section, as it were, at a ninety-degree angle to the other specialties. Limiting the task in this way does not rule out all the risks of generality, however. Ideally, anyone hoping to work effectively in this area would have to keep abreast of half a dozen different scientific fields in addition to the advances in the philosophy of mind, but this is out of the question, so I have leaned heavily on résumés of research written for the non-specialist, scientists’ gossip about current work, and especially the patient guidance of several colleagues in the different specialties. I have tried to couch all discussion of scientific matters in layman’s terms – indeed it is only in layman’s terms that I can understand it myself – and this course has side benefits as well as shortcomings. On the debit side, by the time any bit of science can be rendered in layman’s terms it is usually a bit out of date, which, added to the time-lag of publication, isolates the discussion from the true frontiers of research. This has its bright side, however, for we should not want our working framework for theory to stand or fall on the often evanescent results hot off the presses of the learned journals.
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