The head of a 'red herring'

I

This post is about the ‘red herring’ that is Representational Theory of Mind. It appears that the Tractatus is deficient because it accepts such a theory whilst the later works is at pains to reject this psychological account. I think it is misleading to equate the Tractatus with RTOM where it makes clear that it is up to psychology (and not philosophy) to find out how we come to mean what we do by our signs. It also obscures the explanatory debt psychology has which is later criticised by PI. Secondly, while PI does argue against some of the ontological implications that RTOM may mislead us into taking, this doesn’t mean that RTOM is necessarily a bad psychological theory.

Given the length of what I have to say, and the time it may take me to complete it, I will write it in three separate posts. This post very long by blog standards as it is! This one deals with my motivations for dealing with the questions, what questions are being addressed, and what answers I will be giving. The next post on this topic will specifically deal with the Tractatus and the third with PI.

II

I am writing this post about the ‘representational theory of mind’ in relation Wittgenstein’s philosophy for two reasons. First, because of a view of Roger White’s (that he has mentioned in passing) that he quite sympathetic to a large point of the Philosophical Investigations, that the Representational Theory of Mind (RTOM from hereon) is false, but that that is quite compatible with a Tractarian theory of meaning. I don’t know whether by this he means:

i) The Tractatus does support a RTOM but whilst that is wrong, it does not mean the whole edifice of the Tractatus crumbles or…

ii) RTOM (or at least, anything that reasonably looks like RTOM) was no part of the Tractatus to begin with. Whilst a) there may be features that resemble the approach of RTOM theorists and b) RTOM is compatible with the Tractatus; it is not a position that the Tractatus endorsed.

Because of this, none of what I write should be taken as outlining his position. However, I will say this much. If he is thinking of i) above, then I believe him to be wrong and will do so on two grounds. First, the Tractatus position does not bear close relationship to anything that is ‘currently on the market’ in psychology. In other words, I will be arguing that ii) is correct. However, the second ground will be the difficulties, the ones that have lead people to assume (incorrectly) that he does accept RTOM, are not escaped by that very denial. That meaning must represent an object and that this must be effected by the mind a) is part of the Tractatus b) is essentially so and c) it is this which is the subject of his later criticisms. In other words, you cannot divorce these problematic features from the Tractatus itself.

What I am doing here may seem very odd indeed. I am/ will be saying that the Tractatus does not endorse a RTOM but does imply a theory of mind whereby the mind is responsible for the representation of states of affairs. Now, the first thing to note is my qualification “(or at least, anything that reasonably looks like RTOM)”. Here the RTOM theories are not any that might be labelled as such for whatever reason, but the theories that actually do go by that name. Now, whilst one might say that a theory of mind that supports a Tractarian theory of meaning as belonging to that category, we have good reason not to. Firstly, such a conflation would lead us to assume that the Tractatus makes philosophical mistakes that it does not, in fact, make. Secondly, there are important differences between W and RTOM theorists in their approach to answering questions about meaning. Sometimes the questions themselves are different. Thirdly, it obscures where the real mistake of the Tractatus qua psychology lies; and thus the target of criticisms in the PI. As such, my approach allows me to accept ii) (above) and yet, retain the feature that is subject to later criticism

III

The second reason for writing this post (and again this may ‘seem very odd indeed’ given what I have written above) is the way that Wittgenstein scholars ride ‘rough shod’ over RTOM or at least its motivations. That the Philosophical Investigations rules out any sort of RTOM is a bit rash. This may just be a misguided sentimental attachment to (something-resembling) RTOM. My BSc was in Psychology-Philosophy and many of my upper-year modules were in cognitive neuro/science and my dissertation grew out the theoretical backwaters of just such an approach (based on a suggestion I read by Carruthers). However, it is not just sentiment…. there are massive motivations for modularity and for there being innate constraints on the mind’s processing. For example, the evidence that Pinker presents in The Language Instinct for ‘innate language’ is overwhelming and just cannot be accounted for by rival psychological theories like those of connectionism. If mentalese or language of thought is needed to account for psychological thought then so be it. What the philosophical implications of it are, or whatever the wisdom of calling it language; it can help psychologically explain certain elements of language acquisition.

Where people like Norman Malcolm make it seem ‘primitive’ to accept RTOM, I find myself cringing. People like Fodor are far from the psychological dogmatists that they are made out to be. In The Mind Doesn’t Work that Way he basically says that whilst it would be very nice if the brain were fully computational, that just isn’t the case. Certain modules or operations can be defined in terms of their computational structure, the overall working of the brain (e.g. in terms of which information is considered relevant, and where processing stops) cannot be.

Even back then, I was wary of some of the philosophical commitments that RTOM theorists tended to have. For example, in my dissertation I wrote:

Carruthers (2002) disagrees, as he is a realist about animal thought, taking animals to be capable of discrete, structured, semantically evaluable, causally effective states. He argues that the evidence of animal thought above would not be possible without structured propositional thought involving relationships of individuals, properties and relations. Whilst he is probably not correct, philosophically speaking, this does not matter for the purposes of this study, which is empirically based. The problem with the anti-realist models is that, because there is no shared representation between animals and humans, it is far harder to frame empirical hypotheses about how human thought evolved from animal thought. This study did not require that logical structures actually do supervene on neurons or that a computational theory of mind is correct. All it requires is a plausible theoretical framework that can be used to investigate the role of language in human cognition.

In the end I asserted, “A theoretical assumption of this paper then, is that all minds including those of animals and pre-linguistic infants are modular.” The theoretical assumption about modules was intentionally free from Fodor’s philosophy as I talked about modules that differ from each other phylogenetically, ontogenetically and functionally. Here (as I wrote in another essay) “many of the above explanations for massive modularity were biological and do not necessarily rely on a strict computational theory of mind”. However, in calling them modules we do have to accept what Fodor posits as a basic claim of modularity: the presence of “functionally individuated cognitive mechanisms”.

However, as my large quote above indicates I was taking a stronger line than just this. That line was my only theoretical assumption; however, I did take on the theoretical machinery of a full-blown RTOM for the purpose of an empirical investigation. That is, whilst I wasn’t too concerned with the ontological implications of this, that or the other view; I was concerned with predicting and analysing brain function (and in my case, the purpose of language in cognition). I felt a) Fodor’s strict modularity stopped us making empirical investigations about central brain function (which includes language) because of a philosophical quandary b) people who are anti-RTOM for whatever philosophical reason also hamper empirical investigation. RTOM, for good or bad, gives us a framework for understanding the mind which connectionism (or whatever) lacks etc.

Back to the topic of Wittgenstein. I think the later Wittgenstein could accept RTOM minus philosophical confusion. That is, so long as we sort out what the direction of explanation is, get rid of a certain mythology of mind, debunk notions of a mentalese that explains our connection to the world or explains meaning etc. Maybe this is over-stated in that the philosophical assumptions of RTOM theorists are so tied up with their view, that you could not get rid of these and still be called RTOM. Indeed, Wittgenstein would not like it called a ‘theory’ of mind. We could as such call it by a different name. However, what I will seek to show is that the research carried out by psychologists who currently agree with RTOM is certainly compatible with the later Wittgenstein.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say (and this is radical I know and would certainly upset White’s notion of PI’s benefit) that PI is MORE FRIENDLY to RTOM than the Tractatus!!! The very things that I will argue show that the Tractatus is not committed to RTOM, added to the theoretical commitments that psychology must account for in its theory of meaning, will disallow current RTOM research looking anything like a final psychology. It will not furnish the Theory of Knowledge which is required. Where PI removes the explanatory debt of theoretical psychology, it is freer to carry out the research it does. This is especially so, given that the subjects of psychology include things like the subject-predicate form which is part of our ordinary language as conceived by PI.

NEXT TIME (The Body of the Red Herring)… sections IV dealing with ontological claims of RTOM and the claims of the Tractatus that seem similar, V showing where the Tractatus is importantly dissimilar to RTOM, VI showing the troubling ‘representational’ claims of the Tractatus that remain over.