Hilosophicd Investigationr 18:l January 1995 ISSN 0190-0536

REVIEW ESSAY

Direct Reference, Mental Causation and Consciousness: Old Wine in New Bottles

Recanati, FranCois. Direct Reference: From Language to Thought, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993. pp. xiv and 420, A40; Heil, John and Mele, AEed. Eds. Mental Causation, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. x and 342, E35; Flanagan, Owen. Consciousness Reconsidered, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, pp. xiv and 234, E22.50.

Anthony Palmer, University of Southampton

In Philosophical Remarks Wittgenstein makes the following point: The Cretan liar paradox could also be set up with someone writ- ing the proposition: ‘This proposition is &e’. The demonstrative takes over the role of the ‘I’ in ‘I am lying’. The basic mistake consists, as in the previous philosophy of logic, in assuming that a word can make an allusion to its object (point at it &om a dis- tance) without necessarily going proxy for it. (XV 171 p.

It is clear that what, sixty years ago, Wittgenstein thought of as the previous philosophy of logic is now for many philosophers the pre- sent philosophy of logic. FranCois Recanati’s book Direct Reference which is subtitled ‘From Language to Thought’ seeks to defend it and its reverberations can be strongly felt in a collection of essays entided Mental Causation edited by John Heil and Alfied Mele. It also generates the basis of an otherwise eclectic account of con- sciousness by Owen Flanagan.

‘The intuitive (and largely metaphorical} notion of referentiality that is current in the philosophical literature’, Recanati writes, ‘emerges fi-om the following set of statements’:

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A (directly) referential term is a term that serves simply to refer. It is devoid of descriptive content, in the sense at least that what it contributes to the proposition expressed by the sentence where it occurs is not a concept, but an object. Such a sentence is used to assert of the object referred to that it falls under the concept expressed by the predicate expression in the sentence. Proper names and indexicals are supposed to be referential in t h i s sense; and although definite descriptions are not intrinsically referential, they have a referential use. @. 3)

So, in the sentence ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’ both the word ‘Caesar’ and the word ‘Rubicon’ serve simply to refer, while in the sentence ‘The man who crossed the Rubicon threatened Rome’ the word ‘the man who crossed the Rubicon’ may refer directly to Caesar but equally they may not. They may mean the man who crossed the Rubicon whoever he was. Proper names (and indexical expressions) are essentially referential while definite descriptions may have a referential use which the context will bring out. They are not, however, essentially referential.

This is the idea of direct reference which Recanati wishes to expound and explain. It is just the idea that some words, just because they are the kinds of signs they are, can make an allusion to their objects: they are signs which lead beyond themselves: what they contribute to the proposition expressed by any sentence in which they occur is an object to which they allude.

However, it is not, Recanati argues, the same in thought as it is in language. While the sentence ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’ is said to express a singular proposition by virtue of the fact that it contains a proper name ‘Caesar’ which is not only a type of expression which directly gefers to Caesar but also one which presents itself as being of such a type; no sense can be made of someone having the singular thought that Caesar crossed the Rubicon by thinking the type of thought that is directly a thought about Caesar. There can be no such type of thought as a thought that is directly about Caesar. Caesar, or anythmg else, can only be thought about in a certain way. Thoughts, unlike words can only refer via ‘modes of presentation which are private and incommunicable’ (Recanati, p. 53). So while some words directly refer to particular objects, no thoughts directly refer to particular objects, they only refer via private modes of pre- sentation. This presents problems of communication. How can one person communicate his thoughts about particular objects to others? How can he get his thoughts into their minds? 0 Bad B L c k d Lrd 1995

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Recanati’s answer is, in a word, that he cannot. But, fortunately, he thinks that this doesn’t hinder communication. A theory of prag- matics comes to the rescue. It is a theory of pragmatics, Recanati tells us, which hails &om Grice and is associated with Sperber and Wilson, and which deploys a peculiar notion of ‘interpretation’.

A thought or an utterance is said to represent the state of affairs which would make it true. However,

a different type of representing is achieved through resemblance between what is represented and what represents it; thus a cloud in the sky may be used to represent the shape of Brazil. Now among objects that can be used to represent other objects which they resemble are propositional representations themselves: a represen- tation with a certain propositional content may be used to represent something other than its content - it may be used to represent another representation which it resembles. (Recanati, p. 49)

Such representation is called ‘interpretation’ and verbal communica- tion is said to involve

a speaker producing an utterance as a public interpretation of one of her thoughts, and the hearer constructing a mental interpreta- tion of this utterance, and hence of the original thought. (From Sperber and Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, cited by Recanati p. 50)

You must not, however, expect too much of interpretation. While it is based upon resemblance it does not extend to replica- tion. In the case of our thoughts about particular objects, for example, this must be so, because they involve private modes of representation. So any public interpretation of a thought can only be the production of something which resembles the thought in its non private aspect.

By making an utterance which represents a certain state of affairs (the same as her own thought), the speaker invites the hearer to interpret the utterance by forming the thought also representing that state of affairs. The state of &in in question is singular and involves only a particular object (together with a property), but the hearer’s thought must involve a mode of presentation of that object for a thought cannot be singular, as we have seen. The hearer’s thought, like the speaker’s thought, will involve a singu- lar state of s i r s together with a ‘way of thinking’ about that state of aftiirs. The state of affairs represented by the hearer’s thought is the same as that represented by the speaker’s thought, but the ways of thinking are context-relative, hence presumably different for the speaker and the hearer. (Recanati p. 51)

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Recanati’s thesis is, in effect, that Russell was right about indexi- cals and proper names; they just directly refer to objects (while at the same time s igdmg that they do so): while Frege was wrong about them. Proper names and indexicals do not carry with them a mode of presentation, a sense (other than that of signalling that they directly refer), but their counterparts in thought do. It is because of this difference between thought and language that a theory of com- munication needs to be a pragmatic one. Pragmatics gets us &om private thoughts to public language and then to private thoughts. The movement is from private thought in one person to a public interpretation of it and thence to private thought in another. The process runs as follows.

Because there are some words which not only directly refer to objects but which also signal that they do so, we can take the sen- tences in which they occur as interpretations (in the required sense) of private thoughts, i.e. thoughts which cannot be communicated. This in turn can lead us to produce for ourselves thoughts of which the sentence in question would be an interpretation (in the required sense). Although the thoughts on either side of the interpretation cannot be communicated, communication st i l l takes place because the thoughts on both sides have the same interpretation, viz. the sentence which contains a word which not only directly refers but which also signals that it does so.

Readers of Philosophical Investigations will be only too well aware of the difficulties involved in such a theory of communication. It must begin with private thoughts and end with private thoughts and supply some mechanism to get &om one to the other. But since, by definition, we have no access to private thoughts it is difficult to see how any postulated mediating mechanism can be any more than a cog which connects with nothing. In Recanati’s case, what is sup- posed to prevent the cog &om idling is the direct reference of a word to an object which some types of words (e.g. indexicals and proper names) signal that they make. Such words are of a type that when they occur in a sentence they indicate that the truth condition of the sentence is singular. If, for example, someone says ‘This is round’, the indexical word indicates that the sentence is true if and only if a given object is round. If we were to ask ‘Which object?’ then the only answer which can be given is ‘The one to which $‘this object” directly refers’. If the speaker had pointed to his lefi when he said what he did, then, while this mode of presentation could have Q Bwl BLzckwdl Ltd. 1995

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served to idenhfy the object in question, the fact that it was to his left is not part of the truth condtions of what he said. ‘This’ con- tributes an object and not a concept to the proposition expressed by the sentence in which it occurs; it indicates that a particular object has been identified but the means of identification are irrelevant to the truth conditions of the proposition expressed. We are dealing with an object-dependent proposition: no object, no proposition.

It is this direct reference of a word to an object which is supposed to enable communication to take place despite the fict that our thoughts are private. I have the thought that this is round. However, I cannot think directly about a ‘ths’. I can only think about it in a particular way, and the way I think about it is incommunicable, it is private. Nevertheless, what I am thinking about, and what I think about it can still be singular so I can produce an interpretation of my thought which resembles it in this respect. Now all that someone seeking to understand me needs to do is to produce his own inter- pretation of the interpretation that I have produced. That interpretation, needless to say, will involve a mode of presentation which is private to him but its singularity will have been preserved, i.e. its truth conditions will have been preserved. Communication will have taken place. This in essence is Recanati’s thesis. Direct ref- erence enables us to connect language and thought. Understanding how it does is the business of truth-conditional pragmatics.

Not unexpectedly counterparts of the role that the idea of drect reference plays in the philosophy of language can be found in other areas of philosophy. Its counterpart in the philosophy of mind is the idea of an object-dependent thought. Just as some words are said to refer drectly to objects in that the sentence in which they occur would not express a proposition if there were no such object, so, it is argued, there are some thoughts that we could not have if the object of the thought did not exist. Moreover, it has seemed to some philosophers that when we give a psychological account of why a person behaves in the way in which he does his having such thoughts play a pivotal role.

A central debate in modern philosophy of mind is that between those dubbed externalist and those dubbed individualist. The debate has its origins in the work of Hilary Putnam who introduced Twin- Earth and Brain-in-Vat examples into philosophy. The aim of these examples was to show, as it is sometimes put, that ‘meaning isn’t just in the head’. The idea of object-dependent thoughts or propositions

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is just one version of this thesis. Harold Noonan, in one of the essays in the Heil and Mele collection, characterises it more pre- cisely and claims a Wittgensteinean provenance for it.

The intrinsic qualities of a mental state or event cannot determine what extra-mental events that mental state or event represents, or what features it represents them as having, any more than the intrinsic qualities of a physical occurrence can determine what it represents . . . Only its relations to something outside itself can determine the representationality of representation, whether it be a mental item or a physical item. @. 294)

An inhabitant of twin-earth may have the same internal constitu- tion (mental or physical) as an inhabitant of Earth, but his thoughts and words will not be about what an inhabitant of Earth’s words and thoughts are about since by definition he does not stand in the required relation to what that inhabitant’s words and thoughts are about. In other words there is an ineliminable indexicality in our ability to speak or think about things as we do. Putnam has recently stressed t h i s idea of the indexicality of language which lay behind his twin-earth examples.

To use a term suggested by Alan Berger, when we teach the meaning of the word ‘water’, wefoncc on certain samples. A sub- stance which doesn’t behave as these examples do will be counted as not the same substance . . . But the ‘property’ of ‘behaving the way this st& does’ isn’t what philosophers call a purely ‘qualita- tive’ property. It’s description involves a particular example - one given by pointing or ‘focusing’ on something. (Representation and Reality, MIT Press, 1989, p. 32)

That is why ‘water’ as used by the inhabitants of twin-earth cannot mean the same as ‘water’ as used by us if their water, unlike ours, is not H20, however otherwise qualitatively identical twin-earth water is to Earth water, and twin-earth representations (either inter- nal or external) of twin-earth water are to Earth representations of Earth water.

In Putnam’s hands this idea served to undermine a view about the nature of the mind which he himself had made popular. The idea was that mind is to brain as computer s o b a r e is to computer hard- ware. O n this account psychology gives us thefirnctional organisation of the brain. However, if the essential indexicality of language and thought is what the twin-earth and brain-in-vat examples succeed in demonstrating it turns out that functionalism cannot be correct.

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States of mind cannot be fknctionally characterised states of brain just because states of mind unlike states of brain cannot be charac- tensed without reference to the environment in which they develop or come about. The indexicality of thought and language rules out functionalism as an account of either.

Functionalism was invented to defend a materialistic monism. It was Hobbes with aid of a computer pitted against Descartes with aid of his ghost. With its demise, brought about to a considerable extent by Putnam himself by means of twin-earth and brain-in-vat argu- mentation, the supporters of materiahsm had to look for other lines of defence. It seemed, (and still seems to some) that it has at least a firm foundation in a version of a thesis put forward by J.J.C. Smart and U.T. Place in the late fifies that states of mind are just states of brain, the so called mind/brain identity thesis. However, in the ver- sion which they put forward it would fill victim to precisely the same line of reasoning that ruled out functionalism. If the identity is between type of state of mind and type of state of brain, then the external reference of states of mind but not states of brain works against the thesis in a way which can be brought out by twin-earth and brain-in-vat arguments. However, the thesis seemed capable of modification so as to avoid this. If the identity is thought of not as between type and type but as between token and token then a materiahstic monism might still be preserved. This version of the identity thesis (i.e. this version of materialistic monism) was given perhaps its most influential statement by Donald Davidson in a paper published in 1970 under the title ‘Mental Events’.

This version of the identity thesis took events as its basic items and reduced mental events to physical events while refusing to reduce the concept of the mental to the physical. Davidson called this an ontological as opposed to a conceptual reduction. Because no self-respecting ontology can tolerate the mental and because types of mental states or events, as twin-earth and brain-in-vat arguments purport to demonstrate, cannot be reduced to types of physical states, then, if some form of reduction is to be maintained, we are obliged to regard the mental as supervenient upon the physical. That thesis, it is claimed, cannot be ruled out by logical considera- tions of the twin-earth or brain-in-vat kind. It at least makes sense to suppose that the occurrence of a mental event might be one and the same occurrence as that of a physical event, i.e. monism might be true, even if it does not make sense to suppose that whenever a

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mental event of a particular kind occurs it is always identical with a physical event of a particular kind. If monism stands a chance of being true it must be an anomolous monism: there can be no ps ycho-physical laws.

Such a form of materialism might have remained only as a possibil- ity with little to incline anyone to accept it other than, as in the case of Place and Smart, a general admiration for the achievements of phys- ical science together with a confidence in what the hture of science might unfold. To insist that the identity thesis (in whatever form) might be true is one thing. To provide reasons for thinking that it actually is true is another. Davidson claimed in ‘Mental Events’ to do just that. His argument was that if, as is generally thought, the mental does have an effect on the physical, and that if, as most philosophers are inclined to hold, one event can only causally effect another if the relation between the two is an instance of a strict law relating events of one kind with events of the other, then given that there are no strict psycho-physical laws connecting mental events with physical events, and given that science does provide us with strict laws con- necting physical events with other physical events, the efficacy of the mental can only be safeguarded by effecting an ontological rather than a conceptual reduction of the mental to the physical, which is pre- cisely what the token-token identity theory does.

Since Davidson published the theory in 1970 a great deal of work in the philosophy of mind has been concerned with it. If anything can be called the current orthodoxy in the philosophy of mind this form of monism has, perhaps, the strongest claim. That, in any case, is how Owen Flanagan treats it in Consciousness Reconsidered. Although his book is in many ways a tour deforce, rich in the infor- mation it provides h m a variety of disciplines and showing all the confidence in the advance of science exhibited by Smart and Place, it is nevertheless predicated upon the idea that some form of identity thesis is true. ‘The most plausible hypothesis’, he tells us,

is that the mind is the brain, a Darwin machine that is a massively well-connected system of parallel processors interacting with each other &om above and below and every which way besides. @. 220)

And Just as ordinary water is H2O and is caused by H20, so too are experiences of colors, tastes and smells identical too and caused by activity patterns in certain brain pathways. Higher level sorts of consciousness also supervene on brain processes.

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It is on the basis of that plausible hypothesis that he impressively co- ordinates information from a variety of disciplines. But such coordination will be merely organisational if the orthodoxy of iden- tity theory cannot be secured. Subtract it, and Flanagan’s claim, announced in his preface, that ‘consciousness is a natural phenome- non’ for which ‘we can construct a theory about its nature, forms, roles, and origins by blending insights from phenomenology, psy- chology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology’ would founder. While the wealth of information from a variety of disciplines would be lefi, and as a compilation remain valuable, nev- ertheless a compilation is all it would be.

Some of the papers in the Heil-Mele collection lend credence to the view that it is an orthodoxy whose time has expired. What the anomalous version of monism started by treating as an obvious truth, viz. that the mental can be causally efficacious, may turn out to be inconsistent with that version itself. This is the criticism that, for example, Jaegwon Kim and others who contribute to the Heil and Mele volume have levelled not only at Davidson’s theory but against any version of monism which relies on multiple realisation or super- venience theories. If the identity thesis in its token-token (multiple realisation) or supervenience form is correct it is hard to prevent the mental &om turning out to be merely epiphenomenal. Anyone look- ing for a rehearsal of arguments for and against this form of monism could not do better than to consult this collection of essays.

Theories of mind and theories of meaning have always lived by taking in each other’s washing. So it was with ‘the way of ideas’ introduced by Descartes and taken up by Locke in the seventeenth century, and so it was with Russell’s doctrine of acquaintance and description at the beginning of this century. For a brief period in the middle of the twentieth century, largely under the influence of Wittgenstein, philosophers gave up the theorising enterprise largely as a result of reflection on the idea of a theory of meaning in which the idea of direct reference loomed large. The three books under review show that in the last quarter of the century the enterprise is once more in fill swing.

Department of Philosophy, University of Southampton, Hghjield, Southampton SO9 5NH

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