Intentionality - a Causal Account

Reading

Paul. Churchland and Patricia Churchland, 'Stalking the Wild Epistemic Engine', Chapter 12 in Lycan. See also Lycan's introduction to Part V, p.279, penultimate three paragraphs.

Lecture where this is primarily covered

Week 17: Connectionism and intentionality

The idea of the causal account is this. Our senses pick up that a lion is approaching, and this causes a brain state, which then goes on to cause our muscles to move us to safety. The thought is that this state thus comes to represent the proposition 'the lion is approaching'. It comes to represent it as a result of being caused by the lion's approach.

What you have in a measuring instrument, eg a thermometer, a systematic relationship between two phenomena - the expansion of mercury in a tube, say, and rising temperature.

Once an organism has learnt all the essential lessons about its environment ou have the same sort of relationship between its brain states and events in the outside world.

Brain states may thus be thought to be 'calibrated'. Just as a thermometer is 'calibrated.'

'The backbone of what we are calling calibrational content is the observation that there are reliable, regular, standardised relations obtaining between specific neural responses on the one hand, and types of states of the world.' (The Churchlands, in Lycan, p.308.)

WHAT IS DISTINCTIVE ABOUT THE CONNECTIONIST VIEW OF MIND/BRAIN REPRESENTATIONS?

The Churchlands say the causal approach to understanding how mind/brain states can come to represent things in the outside world is promising, but stops being so if the assumption is that it is a proposition that has to be represented...

THE PIT ORGAN OF A SNAKE

Their own example is of a snake, which has what is called a pit organ. You can imagine the pit organ, and the rest of the nervous system, as a tuned - like a net - to certain features of the environment. It is tuned to go off if a warm moving thing occurs within half a metre.

If you have a set of neural cells which go off in this type of circumstance surely you can say that these cells represent the presence of a warm moving thing in the environment.

But, say the Churchlands, that doesn't mean there is anything with the structure of language in the neural system.

What do they say about more sophisticated organisms? - organisms which have the capacity to learn, like us.

They say we are forced to think there must indeed be a complex system of representations in a creatures like us. But there is no need, they say, to suppose that all representations in the different subsystems of the brain must be the same. Representation in the visual system, and the auditory system, the motor system may be different.

Some of these representations may be quasi-linguistically structured, they say. But probably not many.

END

Review Question

Could the triggering of the pit organ represent the proposition that 'there is a small warm something moving about within two metres of me'? Saith the wise

Poser

Try and formulate objections to the causal account of intentionality. Two ideas