Theories and illusions

(an IR, in Goldman's terms), one must also consider the relation between this IR and some other entity. Contrary to Gopnik's claim, it is the relation of one's psychological state to the content of that state, and the relation of the content to the world, and our idea of the world (considered as a thing in itselfe.g., as the thing that gives rise to our perceptions), that are hypothetical entities, not one's own direct awareness of the contents of one's mental states. The latter awareness is directly given in fact, it is the only thing of which one can ever be directly aware: The rest is noumenal. Gopnik's instantiation of the psychologist's fallacy most likely contributes to her misreading of Searle (1990). Searle claims that states that are not at least in p' inciple accessible to consciousness lack intrinsic intentionalicy, and Gopnik takes this to mean that "the intentionality of psychological states is known directly in the first-person case' (sect. 2, para. 5). Conscious brain states surely are intentional (Zelazo & Reznick 1990); it is a different thing altogether to claim that their intentionality is known. So, 3-year-olds may be directly aware of the content of their mental states. And these mental states are necessarily about something, and so are intentional (Brentano 1973). When 3-year-olds report that they think there are pencils in the box, they directly access and report the contents of a mental state. What they do not understand is that their mental states have content, and that there is some other reality (defined in terms of the noumenal world or in terms of other people's mental states), that the content of their mental state is a representation of. This is an understanding of a higher-order relation among terms (some of which are hypothetical) that is hypothetical, and it is a late development. The logical structure of tasks that assess this understanding is the same for tasks that require reasoning about one's own mental states and about other people's mental states. As such, it is not surprising that performance on these tasks is correlated. There are differences, however, between reporting on one's mental states and reporting on other people's mental states. When one reports on another's mental states, one clearly does not have direct access to those states. Contra Goldman, one uses knowledge of functional relations to infer those states. Goldman is right that one may rely on simulation and on analogy to one's own IRs to understand another's mental states. However, simulation and analogy plainly rest on functional information. How does one know which situation to put oneself in to simulate another's mental state? One must identify the relevant inputinternal state-output relations and imagine oneself as participating in those relations. The need for functional information becomes clearer when one cannot duplicate another's situation exactly, as when one says, "I have never experienced being discriminated against on the basis of race, but it may be something like . ," drawing an analogy to a similar (in the relevant functional respects) situation. Direct access to one's own past mental states is necessary here but so is functional information and a certain level of logical sophistication.