From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Dualism
Date: 14 Oct 92 18:58:07 GMT
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

In article <Bv4C3v.GCK@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>In article <7561@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

>>Are there any philosophers who don't accept the "disposition
>>to behave" position?  Has it become an orthodoxy?  If so, I
>>guess the word is lost after all!
>
>I would say that some kind of functionalism about belief is more
>or less orthodoxy, yes, although that's not to say that it's
>uncontroversial.  Most of the controversy centers around other
>issues than the ones you're concerned about, however, such as the
>role of the environment.  (Motivated by "Twin Earth" cases and the
>like that show that beings with identical functional organization --
>indeed, identical physical structure -- can have different belief
>contents, if they have been brought up in different environments.)

Well, so far this seems pretty reasonable.  Indeed, when I read
about those issues (eg in Putnam's attack on functionalism book
whose title escapes me at the moment) I don't have the feeling
that I have when "dispositions to behave" comes up that I'm
dealing with some weird, crypto-behaviorist view of belief.

>I'd say it's commonly accepted that the major role of belief is
>in the explanation of behaviour.

Now it starts to seem strange.  Do philosophers really see
themselves as explaining behavior when they talk about belief?
If so, why isn't it more obvious that that's the case?

>  Relatively few people see the
>propositional attitudes as causing the same sorts of problems for
>functionalism as consciousness does.

It seems to be that's the conscious aspects of them that cause
the problems.  So, sure, it's _consciousness_ that causes the
problems.  But why is this any reason at all to say there aren't
conscious aspects to belief?  Why pick the behavioral side of
belief and say "that's belief" full stop?

I looks like some people want to say "we can explain belief"
rather than "we can explain the behavioral aspects of belief",
but why let them get away with it?  Indeed, the strategy seems
to be to drop the conscious aspects of all sorts of things so
as to be able to say: "look we can explain A, B, C, E, E, F, and
G all without any recourse to consciousness.  So consciousness
just isn't that important.  Forget it."  In this way, we may
eventually stop seeing consciousness as something in need of
explanation.

>The reason for this is straightforward, I think.  With beliefs,
>there just doesn't seem to be any "further fact" in need of
>explanation.  There is our behaviour, and the way it's caused;
>there is our conscious experience; and that's it.  There's no
>further "immanent facts" of beliefs hanging around the system
>to be explained.  The brute facts are causation and consciousness;
>beliefs seem to be derivative facts constructed from these.

This seems reasonable but doesn't (so far as I can tell) say
why "belief" should refer only to behavior and causation.

In short, I am puzzled.  I managed to read a fair amount of
philosophy without noticing the virtually everyone thought of
belief as a disposition to behave.  I thought that was something
only the logical behaviorists (eg Ryle) held.  Have I been
reading the wrong stuff, or what?

Anyway, if this view really is the dominant one, that's too bad,
because it suggests that the strategy I mentioned above may succeed.

-- jd
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech