Toward a naturalism of intentionality and consciousness

The fundamental barriers to a naturalistic understanding of intentionality and consciousness are conceptual in nature. One central metaphysical presupposition is of ancient provenance, and others are more recent descendents of and variations on this central error. I will outline this conceptual framework — a substance metaphysics — and show how shifting away from it is, on the one hand, both conceptually and scientifically motivated, and, on the other, how undoing its constraints enables a naturalistic model of the emergence of normativity (specifically, in this discussion, of normative function and representation) and of consciousness.

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Descriptive epistemology and normativity: a Humean approach

The project of naturalization is an essential aspect of the general project of analysis. Naturalizing a theoretical domain amounts to redefining its essential notions and relations in terms of a different domain, which is considered acceptable by the standards of natural science.

Mathematics and logic challenge the general problem of naturalization precisely because of their formal character. Nevertheless, the kind of formality proper of logic is different from the kind of formality proper of mathematics, and thus the enquiries on the status of mathematics and about the status of logic in the general context of the naturalization project have distinctive aspects and are logically independent.

In this paper I will be concerned with the project of naturalizing logic. Logic is the science of valid inferences, inferences are sets of propositions and propositions are the outputs of certain speech acts. Logic is independent of mathematics, but it is not independent of our linguistic practices. For this reason, logic can only be naturalized in a relative way, in a second step as it were. The foundational level of a complete process of naturalizing logic is the naturalization of content and meaning, i. e. the naturalization of our linguistic practices and their results.
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An attempt is made to present the possible influence of the development of cognitive sciences on psychopathological conceptions. Presentation concentrates on the basic symptoms in dissociational and schizophrenic disorders (delusions). Analyzing the cognitive concept of mental causality, the author attempts to identify the consequences which derive from the concept for understanding of mental pathology. He pinpoints the limitations of the classical science of cognition, especially the lack of distinction between the functional and intentional level. He advocates that the concept of causality and subpersonal explanations be complemented with phenomenological and hermeneutic description of human experience. It is especially important in psychiatry in the context of the latter’s practical and ethical aspects.

Understanding and explanation in psychopathology will be presented in the wider context of the controversy in the philosophy and social sciences (Hempel, Dilthey, Jaspers, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Dennett, Chalmers). This may help to develop the philosophy of psychiatry on the basis of continental and analytical traditions.

In my presentation I would like to demonstrate that artificial life
research can be regarded as verificator of the philosophical program of naturalism. Refering to Knowles' (2003) distinction in the types of naturalism, I will try to show that epistemological analyses must be based on the scientific bacgrounds. This statement especially applies to the ways of thinking about evolutionary cognitive systems. I agree with Anderson (2005) that:

(1) Cognition, like every other adaptation, has an evolutionary history that can be useful in understanding its function.
(2) Cognition evolved in specific environments, and its solutions to survival challenges can be expected to take advantage of the concrete structure or enduring features of those environments.
(3) Cognition evolved in organisms with pre-existing sets of behavioral possibilities, instincts, habits, needs, purposes, and the like. The evolutionary process would have taken advantage of these possibilities, preserving some and altering others, and incorporating them into its solutions-for instance, taking advantage of certain pre-existing dispositions to manipulate the environment or one's relation to it, which dispositions may have evolved for reasons unrelated to cognitive enhancement.

In the case of natural cognitve systems, it is obvious that epistemological research should be based on the results of the evolutionary biology, psychology or antrophology. But what about the artificial cognitive systems? Is it necessary to allow the postulates (1), (2), (3) to construct complete AL system? During my presentation I will try to consider this question.

The ratio of more or less naturalistic or naturalized approaches have been increasing in modern human sciences and philosophy. In many such cases, the naturalization have meant some kind of reduction of human, mental, or self-normative phenomena into physical, physiological, evolutionary, or developmental phenomena so that the concepts referring to human mental sphere are explained or redefined in terms of physics or biology. The main criticisms of this tendency contain accusations of falling into some kind of naturalistic errors in their naturalizations, of narrowing our understanding of these phenomena by removing the essential from the mentalistic concepts.
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A naturalistic approach to epistemology seeks to explain human knowledge – and justification in particular – as a phenomenon in the natural world. ‘Naturalism’ is not a univocal term, but the position encompasses a commitment to the methods of science as the only legitimate means by which we can come to know about the spatiotemporal world. As Quine characterizes it in Theories and Things: Naturalism is the “abandonment of the goal of first philosophy” and “the recognition that it is within science itself that ... reality is to be identified and described.”

A commitment to scientific method is often thought to entail a commitment to empiricism, and hence, any non-trivial form of a priori justification is often seen as standing in opposition to naturalism. But the methods of science rule out a priori justification only if they do not presuppose any a priori elements. This further claim must be established in order to show that a priori justification and naturalism are incompatible.

In this paper, I argue that a priori justification is, in principle, compatible with naturalism, if the a priori is understood in a way that is free of some inessential properties that historically have been associated with the concept. I argue that the most prominent naturalistic projects in epistemology allow for the possibility of a priori justification. These include reliabilism, evaluativism, and an interpretation of Quine’s view according to which our fundamental norms are a product of science – and so could turn out to be a priori. A priori justification is incompatible with Quine’s more narrow thesis that epistemology should be replaced by descriptive psychology, but only because the notion of justification itself is jettisoned from epistemology on this view. Thus a priori justification need not be seen as standing in opposition to the more plausible naturalistic epistemologies.

There are two competing approaches to the problem of the nature of illocutionary acts. According to the first one - which can be called Austinian - performing an illocutionary act consists in following a pertinent convention; in other words, all illocutionary acts are essentially conventional. Proponents of the second approach - which can be called Gricean - claim, instead, that some basic illocutionary acts are natural acts of expressing the speaker's communicative intention - the intention to induce a certain reaction on the part of the hearer by means of the hearers recognizing the intention - and as such can be performed in the absence of any conventions.

Adopting the Austinian approach Searle claims that all illocutionary acts are to be differentiated and grouped according to their conventional outcomes rather than by the speaker's communicative intentions. The conventional outcome of a given act is defined by means of the formula "X counts as Y in context C", where "X" is to be replaced by a description of a behaviour that produces the conventional state of affairs Y.

The paper is aimed to show that Searle fails to provide an adequate account of the nature of illocutionary communication. In other words, the description of speaking as following certain constitutive rules cannot be counted as explanatory. The point is that although descriptions of the form "X counts as Y in context C" capture some important aspects of language use, they fail to account for them. Adopting Ruth G. Millikan account of natural conventionality the author claims that following a conventional rule consists in reproducing a relevant conventional pattern of action. It is not the case, therefore, that people behaves in a conventional way because certain rules are in force within their society. The rules are in force, rather, because people frequently reproduce certain coordinating patterns. In some cases - though not in all - the reproduction is aimed at inducing a certain reaction on part of the hearer. It turns out, therefore, that both the Gricean approach and the Austinian approach are complementary and to some extent adequate, each in its own way.