Queen of Hearts Psychology

A tag for extreme externalism & rejection of transparency of sense:

Queen of Hearts Psychology.

From Alice in Wonderland:

"The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said, without even looking round."

Someone who thinks that rationality "ain't in the head" might be described as following a similar policy.

Millikan provides a suggestion in "WQP" for developing a moderate view of meaning rationalism, but dismisses it on the grounds that the meaning rationalist is committed to meaning and rationality being completely in the head. Her suggestion is roughly that we can count as knowing sameness and difference of thought content a priori so long as we inhabit a favorable environment. But since we cannot know a priori that we are in a favorable environment, it seems that we can't know sameness and difference of content a priori.

That argument assumes that if we know a priori that two contents are the same or different, then we know a priori that the environment is favorable. Why not reject that assumption?

Rejecting it would go along with denying that to know a priori whether two contents are the same or different requires excluding all possible doubt that they are different or the same.

In favorable circumstances, we could then credit a subject with a priori knowledge of the contents of his thoughts. In unfavorable circumstances (twin-Earth switching cases, the presence of lots of barn facades, zookeepers painting donkeys to look like zebras), one's ability to tell sameness and difference of content a priori breaks down.

Adopting this approach would even make dynamic thoughts possible: the standard worries about dynamic thoughts (e.g., that it is never in principle impossible that one is mistaken when one reidentifies an object at different times) could be handled. A subject could maintain a single singular sense for an object through time and across different sensory modalities.

This is a way of working out the view Campbell argues for in "Is Sense Transparent" and that Evans takes for granted in parts of VoR (in the discussion of "here" thoughts, e.g. in Ch. 7).

The point of all of this is to make externalism compatible with a circumscribed version of what Millikan calls "meaning rationalism".

White Queen Psychology

Two extreme, opposed views of rationality and externalism: Boghossian (pro-transparency, anti-externalism); Millikan (pro-externalism, anti-transparency).

Moderate views: Campbell, Evans.

Is the moderate position tenable? I think you could occupy such a position if you thought:

(1) Transparency is not a universal condition; it is only the normal condition for thought

and

(2) Though we cannot rule out all possible doubts about failure of judgements about sameness and difference, we can usually rule out all relevant doubts.

Both extreme positions (radical externalism and radical anti-externalism) rely, I think, on a skeptical assumption: that we must be able to exclude all possible doubt about sameness and difference of contents before we are entitled to claim transparency for thoughts.

This puts a new twist on these positions: you can have transparency, if you are lucky (if you are in the right environment, etc.). We can preserve the old-fashioned, Cartesian understanding of rationality, provided we aren't in a bad epistemic situation (which isn't completely up to us).

Cognitive Access and Semantic Puzzles

Kripke's Puzzle About Belief:

Pierre assents to both:

(1) London is pretty

and

(2) London is not pretty.

And, by stipulation, Pierre is rational--he doesn't let contradictory beliefs pass.

Options to resolve the puzzle:

(A) Reject disquotation: Though he assents to them, Pierre doesn't actually believe (1) or (2) (Marcus).

(B) Reject assumption of Cartesian access: Pierre can believe both without impugning his rationality if he doesn't have immediate access to sameness and difference of content (Owens, Brown).

(C) Adopt subjective senses: "London" has different senses associated with it in (1) and (2), so the associated contents of belief are different. Pierre is not irrational.

Or:

(D) Reject assumption of Cartesian rationality: Pierre is not perfectly rational. He holds two contradictory beliefs. Rationality is not completely the subject's responsibility: he can be irrational without recognizing it (Millikan). Thinking (with Boghossian, Owens, Kripke, others) that rationality is completely within the subject's control is another version of Quine's dogmas of empiricism: it represents a fundamental cleavage between the domain of rationality and the domain of empirical inquiry. Maintaining such a cleavage requires an unacceptably formal understanding of rationality. (Marcus argues plausibly against the rationality of someone who holds contradictory beliefs.)

There is luck involved in rational culpability just as there is luck involved in claims to know, and in the ethical assessment of actions.

Varieties of Reference, Ch7

Evans argues against treating judgements involving "here" Ideas as having two components in his discussion of the super-light earphones. The argument, as I understand it, is as follows:

(1) "Here" Ideas get their content in virtue of the way they are connected with dispositions to act (in response to a noise heard off to the left, one turns one's head to the left, e.g.).

(2) In a situation where a subject has been (or suspects that he has been) outfitted with the earphones, the dispositions to act are severed from "here" thoughts, so that one can wonder, "Are those noises coming from around here, or are they coming from somewhere else?"

(3) A situation like (2) can't be normal, though it is possible. If it were normal, then we wouldn't receive information from our environment in the immediate way that we do receive it. We would need an additional judgement to the effect that "those noises are coming from around here".

Notice that Evans's comments on "here" are incompatible with the way he formulates the ICD on p. 19. If difference of sense follows from the mere possibility of coherently doubting that a = b, then the senses/Ideas associated with "here" and "where those sounds are coming from" must always be distinguished.

The ICD so formulated builds in skepticism to our understanding of sense, and stands in the way of a project like Evans's: a project of describing our actual cognitive lives (rather than the structure of merely possible cognitive lives).

So it is important to reformulate the ICD so that it does not build in skeptical requirements.

Some possibilities:

1. If a rational subject does actually doubt that a = b then a and b must have different senses.

2. If it is relevant to doubt that a = b then a and b must have different senses.

I think (1) is untenable, since it makes sense far too dependent on the details of a single subject.

(2) is more plausible, and hooks up with similar debates in the externalist and anti-skeptical literature in epistemology.

Whether a doubt is relevant depends on all sorts of features of a situation, and it may not reflect what the subjects involved in fact doubt. So there would be the possibility of a subject (a) doubting that a = b when no doubt is relevant (if the subject is unjustifiably skeptical, e.g.) and (b) not doubting that a = b when such a doubt is relevant (I'm not aware I'm in a bad situation).

So a subject might not realize that two senses are the same (failure of transparency of sameness) or that they are different (failure of transparency of difference). But these failures would occur in situations where a subject's assessment of the situation differs from how the situation actually is (when their assessment of relevance is incorrect). If a subject is a reliable epistemic judge, then sense will be transparent (transparency in sameness and in difference).

I take it that such a position would not be non-Fregean: it would not maintain that the content of a thought (object of a prop. attitude) was just a Russellian proposition--in cases in which a reliable epistemic subject correctly assesses the relevance of doubt and doubts that a = b, then a and b have different contents/senses. This position is also not really Fregean, if a Fregean position requires holding onto transparency of sameness across all situations.

Maybe it's best described as a Wittgensteinian position.

I'm here assembling ideas I found in Brown Anti-Indiv. & Know, Lawlor, New Thoughts About Old Things, and Campbell, "Is Sense Transparent?".

Anti-Individualism and Knowledge

Brown, Anti-Individualism and Knowledge

Why does Brown think there can be "no motivation" for the Fregean position of denying transparency of difference of sense but affirming transparency of sameness? You might think that transparency of sameness is a requirement for recognizing that inferences are valid at all, and that failure of transparency of difference is a feature of making inferences in a changing world.

What would happen if there was no transparency of sameness for sense? You couldn't immediately (without additional empirical information) know that two tokens co-referred (and not just demonstratives--names too). And one might wonder what the status of the empirical information would have in making an inference valid: wouldn't you need to know, of a premise linking the sense of one token with the sense of another, that its terms shared sense with the terms it was meant to link? It seems that without some transparency of sameness, there can be no such thing as a valid inference (in Campbell's neo-Fregean sense of validity: that is, knowing that an inference is valid so that it can extend our knowledge).

So it looks like there is some motivation for holding onto transparency of sameness while rejecting transparency of difference of sense.