Dennett begins this chapter by again restating and clarifying how he sees his project, ‘…if there is to be a rapprochement between the…physical sciences and the “language of the mind”…we must find a rationale…for ascribing content to certain internal…events of the behavioral control system…’ For someone who sees the organism in a monist way, as D- does, and who is willing to accept that the ‘physical’ description of the characteristics of the monads is the correct one, but who is not willing to entirely abandon (eliminate) all ‘mental’ descriptions; D- feels the burden of ‘finding a rationale’ for ascription of (semantic) content to (purely) physical events.
This began last chapter when Dennett argued that, ‘Intentional explanations presuppose appropriateness…’ and provided us with, ‘an account of the generation of structures to direct these generally appropriate sequences [of behavior].’ which he found in natural selection, ‘since environmental significance is extrinsic to any physical features of neural events, and since the useful brain must discriminate its events along lines of environmental significance, the brain’s discriminations cannot be a function of any extensional, physical descriptions of stimulation…some capacity must be found in the brain to generate and preserve fortuitously appropriate structures.’ I read this to be claiming: How many inputs must be excited to cause a particular neuron to ‘fire’ has nothing to do with the location of a tiger– but the nervous system as a whole needs to be able to determine the location of tigers, we need to find a (not purely physiological) way to keep the patterns of neuronal activity which work (find tigers) from those patterns of neural activity which don’t– and that way is Natural Selection. The monkeys who happen to have the firing patterns which work survive and pass those patterns on through their genes, and those who don’t get eaten by tigers. Thusly are ‘appropriate’ brains built, and that is why it is ‘correct’ to say ‘This neuronal event means tiger-there-now’.
Dennett’s definition of interpreting (sense-data) is: ‘producing within oneself states or events which normally co-occur with generalized conditions of objects within the system’s perceptual field…the capacity for afferent analysis’, but interpretation alone is not sufficient to make an Intentional System. We also need a ‘something else’ which D- describes as ‘a certain association between the results of afferent analysis and structures on the efferent side of the brain.’ In other words, not only does a brain have to have a firing pattern that happens whenever, and only when, there is a tiger around, it has to cause the organism of which it is a part to behave in a way which helps it survive and reproduce, e.g. fleeing. If the organism as a whole did not behave appropriately; we have no right to say that the firing pattern means ‘tiger-there-now’. In order to ascribe the content sentence, we must have behavior evidence, lacking such we might as well say that firing pattern meant ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ or ‘I’m tired’ or had ‘no meaning’ at all. In Dennett’s phrasing: ‘In the brain, discrimination of afferents according to their significance just is the production of efferent effects in differential response to afferents… No afferent can be said to have the significance “A” until it is “taken” to have the significance “A” by the efferent side…produced a response…appropriate to having been stimulated by an A.’ He stresses that this is not an epistemological limitation of behaviorism, but a necessary result of content ascription. It’s not just that we don’t know what the firing pattern ‘means’ until we see the behavior, but that it just can’t ‘mean’ anything if and until the appropriate behavior happens.
He speaks often of discrimination ‘of X as X’ (‘food as food’, ‘a circle as a circle’) which I think can be taken to mean, ‘discriminating X in the same way we do’, though I do not see immediate evidence that Dennett sees things this way. He seems to speak as a realist about these things, but I think this ontological attitude is unnecessary and his point is still valid even if we are radical relativists. What matters most here is that ‘The significance an item in the environment can have to a creature is limited by the creature’s behavioral repertoire.’ If a creature can’t flee (grass for example) then no sense data can be given the meaning ‘predator there-now’ because grass cannot exhibit behavior appropriate to having distinguished the location of a predator.
D- now states one conclusion, ‘The content, if any, of a neural event depends on two factors: its source in stimulation, and whatever appropriate further efferent effects it has… an event refers to those stimulus conditions that cause it to occur… what an event “means to” an organism also depends on what it does with the event.’ He mentions the famous frog experiments; we can watch the excitation of the frog’s nervous system for correlative evidence of neural events with environmental states (swinging a BB in front of it), but that correlation is not enough to ascribe a content– we also need to see the frog’s behavioral response to that event (shooting out its tongue to catch it) before we can legitimately hypothesize ‘The frog thought that was food’.
Dennett continues stressing what he finds a very important point, ‘Where events and states appear inappropriately linked one cannot assign content at all… Fido, who has not been fed all day, is handed a large chunk of beefsteak, but instead of eating it, he carefully gathers together a little pile of straw, puts the meat in the middle and sits down on the meat… we cannot say that state A has the content “this is food” for him, but if not, no other candidate is supported either. Fido’s behavior would be appropriate to a belief that the beef was an egg and Fido was a hen… but Fido’s behavior is also appropriate to other beliefs, e.g. “this is beef but if you pretend it’s an egg you’ll get twice as much beef tomorrow.”,’ this parallels a standard critique of behaviorist theories of mental content, of which D-‘s is a sort, but D-‘s differs in being ‘ontologically neutral’ aka, ‘pragmatic’ or ‘instrumental’ and D- is ok with the entailment that ‘The content one ascribes to an events is not, then, an extra feature that one discovers in it…Rather the relation between Intentional descriptions…and extensional descriptions of them is one of further interpretation.’ At least part of the time, Dennett accepts that intentional description has only ‘heuristic value’ which ‘varies with the complexity of the events’ in question. I think he should stick to this instrumental attitude, but more on this later.
I should record here, a relatively clear and final statement of Dennett’s position, ‘The ideal picture, then, is of content being ascribed to structures, events and states in the brain on the basis of a determination of origins in stimulation and eventual appropriate behavioral effects, such ascriptions being essentially a heuristic overlay on the extensional theory…two levels of explanation; the extensional account of the interaction of functional structures and a Intentional characterization of these structures…’
Importantly, ‘An event can be considered to have content only within a system as a whole.’ which follows from earlier considerations, but is often missed by critics of D-. As well, ‘Assigning content to an events must be relating the event to a particular verbal expression.’, I think this is D- the scientist, he wants to nail down intentional descriptions hard and fast so that they can be fairly tested empirically. Though he admits that this will come down to, ‘nothing more than the rather imprecise opinions we express in ordinary language’ but thinks that this lack of precision is a pragmatic advantage. ‘no rigorous, predictive way of ascribing content is possible…a looser but still explanatory assignment of meanings to events and states has been developed…certain types of physical entities are systems such that their operations are naturally to be described in the Intentional mode.’ D- just means by ‘naturally’ that, given the current state of affairs in a community’s conceptual scheme (for example, ours now) intentional description just works better than any alternatives, and that’s all that matters for him. Dennett is not entirely opposed to the Churchlandian possibility that some future civilization could do without intentional terminology, but merely claims that given the current state of affairs, we ought to use it, as long as it works for us, and it works for us! He says, ‘the “correct” scope of the Intentional mode is determined at any time by the current conceptual scheme.’
Philogging 