Download A Materialist Approach to Cognitive Science

PsycCRITIQUES
January 20, 2014, Vol. 59, No. 3, Article 2
© 2014 American Psychological Association
Thinking About Thinking: A Materialist
Approach to Cognitive Science
A Review of
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
by Daniel C. Dennett
New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2013. 496 pp. ISBN
978-0-393-08206-7. $28.95
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0035378
Reviewed by
Gordon Pitz
It was Descartes (1641/1984) who first addressed the connection between mind and body
in a systematic way and defined the philosophical debate between dualism and materialism.
Dualists, including Descartes, have asserted that mental activity cannot fully be accounted
for by material events. Materialists assume that there is nothing beyond the physical and
that the mind can be completely explained by the activity of the body, especially the brain.
Dualism seems intuitively obvious to many nonscientists. We have a sense of self that
surely transcends the physiology of the brain. To be a dualist, though, is to believe that
there are mental activities that cannot be accounted for by empirically testable theories (for
if they were, they would be explainable in physical terms). Thus, scientific psychology rests
on a materialist philosophy.
Daniel Dennett is a philosopher who has devoted most of his career to explaining the
materialist view within psychology and cognitive science. He has written books on topics
such as consciousness, intelligence, evolution, and free will. Given the centrality of these
topics to the human experience, it is not surprising that his ideas have been controversial.
Nevertheless, or perhaps for this reason, his books make enjoyable reading for anyone with
more than a passing interest in the nature of mind.
In Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Dennett tries to present his ideas in a form
that requires no formal background in philosophy or cognitive science. The book, he says,
was developed as a text for a freshman seminar. I doubt that all freshmen would be willing
or able to understand everything in the book, but with a little effort anyone with an
intelligent curiosity about the mind, and who loves a good debate, should find it
comprehensible, interesting, and insightful.
Dennett claims that the book is about “exploring how to think carefully about methods of
thinking carefully” (p. 9). It is clear, though, that his purpose is a broader one. The book
restates his position on topics that have engaged him for many years. He adds little that is
new, but by casting his views in the form of a tutorial on thinking, he hopes to justify his
opinions and show how criticisms of the ideas are flawed.
The term intuition pump was coined by Dennett in some of his early writings. To explain the
term, I’ll use the example to which it was first applied. In a critique of theories of language
understanding, John Searle (1980) offered a thought experiment. Imagine a person who
knows no Chinese, sitting inside a room with a large book that contains all the rules
governing the Chinese language. Slips of paper containing Chinese text are fed to the
person. Using the book, the person produces perfect responses, also in Chinese. Obviously,
said Searle, the individual does not understand Chinese. Therefore, he concluded, theories
of language based only on rule-based processing must be fundamentally inadequate.
Dennett argues that Searle merely invented a powerful intuition pump. Without any
empirical or logical support Searle generated an intuitively appealing conclusion that
convinces almost everyone, at first. I’ll leave it to the reader to find the counter to Searle’s
argument. Suffice it so say that an essential tool for critical thinking is what Dennett calls
“turning the knobs” (p. 402). Try adjusting features of the thought experiment that should
not be relevant, and see if the power of the intuition remains the same. For example, does
the speed of the process matter? Why is it a person who does the processing? Who or what
should possess the “understanding”? As a further hint, readers might be amused by what
Dennett claims to be the briefest ever refutation of Searle, at http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/
assets/searle.jpg
In the first section of the book, Dennett presents a catalogue of techniques that have been
used in theoretical arguments. He invents a number of terms that may amuse some readers
and annoy others. Here are some choice examples. Rathering is using the word rather to
create an apparent dichotomy where none exists. Surelying uses the word surely to imply
that a conclusion is obvious when it is not. The Gould Two-Step is a device credited to,
although not unique to, Stephen Gould. Gould had a habit of destroying a caricature of the
position he opposed, then claiming he had won the original argument. And my favorite, the
deepity: a statement that seems to be important, true, and profound but that on closer
inspection is merely ambiguous (“Age is nothing but a number,” for example).
One of the most useful of Dennett’s invented terms is sorta, used primarily when one is
referring to the intellectual capacity of theoretical or nonhuman entities. For example,
consider the apparently intelligent behavior of optical character recognition programs. “Can
an OCR program read? Not really; it doesn’t understand what is put before it. It sorta reads”
(p. 126). Because materialist theories of the mind imply a mechanistic view of the mind,
and because the theories generally account for complex phenomena in terms of much
simpler mechanisms, the sorta terminology is very handy for describing the capabilities of
the theoretical mechanisms.
Topics to Think About
The bulk of Dennett’s book is devoted to four topics at the heart of cognitive science and the
dualist–materialist debate—meaning (including the nature of intelligence), evolution,
consciousness, and free will. Dennett has written extensively on these topics, and in the
current book he uses his tutorial style to present his ideas again.
An evolutionary approach may not be required for a materialist philosophy, but for Dennett
the theory is central to an explanation for every aspect of the mind:
If you attempt to make sense of the world of ideas and meanings, free will and
morality, art and science and even philosophy itself without a sound and quite detailed
knowledge of evolution, you have one hand tied behind your back. (p. 21)
Even some authors who claim to be materialists have quarreled with Dennett’s
uncompromising Darwinian approach. Many criticisms, though, betray a misunderstanding
of the theory being criticized. Consider, for example, the tendency of Darwinian theorists to
describe evolution in teleological (purpose-based) terms. Dennett makes it clear what this
means and what it does not mean. “Sponges do things for reasons; bacteria do things for
reasons; even viruses do things for reasons. But they don’t have the reasons; they don’t
need to have the reasons” (p. 235). The distinction he makes here is essential for
understanding how the theory works.
Dennett is also effective in encouraging the reader to take a clearer view of issues like
evolution. Consider evolutionary discussions of religion. Because religion is apparently
universal among human cultures, many psychologists assume that it must have some
adaptive function, that it must be good for something. “Well,” argues Dennett, “every
human culture has the common cold too. What is it good for? It’s good for itself” (p. 276).
Once one understands the central principle of Darwinian theory, the importance of this point
should be very revealing.
Free will is another controversial issue that generates its share of flawed arguments. One
might think that a materialist would see no point to the concept of free will. If behavior is
determined by the physical properties of heredity and environment, there is surely no room
for free will (notice the surely tool employed here). Dennett points out that the conclusion is
far from “sure.” For a materialist, the only alternative to determinism is randomness, and
few proponents of free will would want to argue that their behavior is random. What a
materialist requires is a material account of the phenomenon of free will.
Dennett’s account provides a useful basis for deciding issues of moral responsibility. He
rejects the idea that a materialist account absolves an individual from responsibility for his
or her actions. An explanation of behavior is not the same as an excuse.
Here is another issue that provides a chance to engage in critical thinking. Dennett returns
to the notion of intuition pumps and analyzes a moral argument made by Greene and Cohen
(2004). “Let us suppose . . . that a group of scientists has . . . create[d] an individual—call
him Mr. Puppet—who, by design, engages in some criminal behavior: say, a murder done
during a drug deal gone bad” (p. 403). What intuitions follow from this scenario? Surely
(surely again) this individual should not be held morally responsible for his actions.
But consider this scenario, produced after turning a few knobs. “Let us suppose . . . that an
indifferent environment has . . . create[d] an individual—call him Captain Autonomy—who,
with high probability, engages in some criminal behavior: say, a murder done to cover up an
embezzlement” (p. 404). The intuitions concerning moral responsibility are quite different.
Yet if the argument made by Greene and Cohen (2004) is valid, the changes to the scenario
should not matter.
No Need to Apologize for Being a Materialist
For many who encounter the science of mind and behavior, the materialist view is
frightening. Even many scientists seem to believe that, when it comes to human behavior,
materialism is a threat to fundamental human values.
In a book published at about the same time as Dennett’s, Patricia Churchland (2013) also
addresses these concerns. Her approach is different from Dennett’s. It is a more personal
statement of what it means to claim that the mind is nothing more than the brain in
action—that there is no need to adopt a nonscientific dualism.
Churchland (2013) has provided a comprehensive, up-to-date summary of current
knowledge about the brain [also reviewed in PsycCRITIQUES (Marshall, 2014)]. Dennett is
more concerned with a logically coherent account of current theories in cognitive science.
The two do not agree on some theoretical issues (e.g., the contributions made by
evolutionary psychology). However, the two books taken together provide a thorough
account of the materialist philosophy and how research conducted in the materialist
tradition contributes to a growing understanding of the mind.
If you are interested in understanding what it means to be a person, read both of these
books. Use them as a foundation for critical assessments of attacks on materialism by
nonscientists, as well as for evaluations of serious scientific theories of the mind.
References
Churchland, P. S. (2013). Touching a nerve: The self as brain. New York, NY: Norton.
PsycINFO →
Descartes, R. (1984). Meditations on first philosophy. In J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, & D.
Murdoch (Trans.), The philosophical writings of René Descartes (Vol. 2, pp. 1–62).
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1641)
Greene, J., & Cohen, J. (2004). For the law, neuroscience changes everything and nothing.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 359, 1775–1785. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1098/rstb.2004.1546
Marshall, P. (2014). The details are being worked out [Review of the book Touching a
nerve: The self as brain, by P. S. Churchland]. PsycCRITIQUES, 59(3) http://dx.doi.org/
10.1037/a0035376.
PsycINFO →
Searle, J. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 417–424.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00005756
PsycINFO →