millgram. an apprentice argument- on collins ''the nature of mental things
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8/11/2019 Millgram. an Apprentice Argument- On Collins ''the Nature of Mental Things''
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International Phenomenological Society
An Apprentice ArgumentThe Nature of Mental Things by Arthur W. CollinsReview by: Elijah MillgramPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), pp. 913-916Published by: International Phenomenological Society
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8/11/2019 Millgram. an Apprentice Argument- On Collins ''the Nature of Mental Things''
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Philosophy nd Phenomenological esearch
Vol. LIV,No. 4,
December 994
An ApprenticeArgument*
ELIJAHMILLGRAM
Princeton University
In
The
Nature
of
Mental
Things,
ArthurCollins argues
that beliefs
cannot
be
identified with innerstates. If they could, one could be in a position to say,
I
have
the inner
state,
and
so
believe thatp;
but whether
p
is
true
remains
an
open question ;
but
one
cannot
be licensed to make assertions of
the
form
I
believe
that
p, but p's
truth is an
open
question.
David Finkelstein has
pointed out that
this
argumentbegs
the
question against
inner
state theories,
since a
satisfactory
nner state
theory
would
identify
the belief
that
p
with
an
inner state the havingof which would precludethe problematicassertion.In-
vestigating (say)
the
state
of
one's
brain and
determining
that
one
has
the
brain
state
B,
which
one's
preferred
heory
identifies
with the belief that the
cat is on
the
mat,
is not to have
inquired
nto
the
whereabouts
of the
cat;
but
if
the theory
is at
all
adequate,
when
one
is
in
B,
one will
agree
that
the cat
is
on the mat.'
If the
objection
is
well-taken,
the
argument
doesn't
work,
but
I
am
in-
clined to
think
that
it nonetheless
expresses
an
insight
that
is importantand
correct.
If
this is right,
it should be
possible
to
recast Collins' insight
in an
argument
that
sidesteps
Finkelstein's
objection.
I
will outline
such
an
argu-
ment here.
(Since
Collins'
argument
has come to be
called his masterargu-
ment,
I
suppose
this
argument
hould
be called an
apprentice rgument. )
Two preliminarypoints. First,
we
need a characterization
f the theories
that the
apprenticeargument
will
be directed
against. ( Inner
tates will not
do: if
the
argument
works
at
all,
it will work
against
some
theories
that iden-
tify beliefs with facts thatare not inner ;and to call somethinga state s
to
say nothing
at
all.)
As
a
first
approximation,
his will do: the
target theory
must be
ambitious-that
is,
it
must
purport
o
say
what it is to
believe that
*
A
version
of
this
material was
presented
to
the
Cognitive
Studies
Colloquium
at
Princeton
University.
I'm
grateful
to the audience
for
comments;
I have also benefited
from
comments
from
and discussion with
Alyssa Bernstein, Hilary Bok,
Robin
Briggs,
Sarah
Buss,
Arthur
Collins,
Alice
Crary,
Oren
Etzioni, David Finkelstein,
Gilbert
Har-
man,
Jenann
Ismael,
Brian
Loar,
Robert
Nozick, Hilary Putnam, Tim Scanlon,
and
CandaceVogler.
1
Collins, 1987, chap.
2.
I
discuss
the
argument,
and
Finkelstein's
objection, in Mill-
gram,
1991.
COLLINS
YMPOSIUM
913
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p for a sufficiently
wide
range of p-and it must
be
subject-irrelevant-that
it, it must say what it is to believe thatp in terms that, often enough, are not
tantamount
o the assertion
of
p.
A
theory
that
identified beliefs that
pi
with
brain
states
Bi
would
be
ambitious;
and
such
a
theory
would
be
subject-irrel-
evant, since facts
about
your
brain states are not about the
objects
of
your
be-
liefs (except
when
your
beliefs
are
about
your
own brain
states). By contrast,
a theory that distinguished beliefs from desires, but which lacked the re-
sources
to
distinguish
beliefs
on the
basis
of
their
contents,
would
fail
to sat-
isfy the first condition; and a Davidsonian theory
of
belief might
well
fail to
satisfy the second condition,
if its
invocation
of the
principle
of
charity
meant using the facts
pi
to ascribecorresponding
eliefs
that
pi.
The second preliminary o the apprenticeargument nvolves eliciting two
observations rom Moore's
Paradox.
Moore's
Paradox s the familiar act that
sentences
of the
form
p,
but
I don't
believe
that
p
sound
self-contradictory.
(Moore thoughtthis
was
paradoxicalbecause
the state of affairs described
by
the sentence is not
contradictory,
s
its
third-person
estatement
makes
clear.
There is nothing wrong with p, but he doesn't believe that
p. )
Moore's
Paradox
s
broader han its standard
ormulation.
For
example,
I believe that
p,
but
p's
truth
is an
open question -the
assertion whose
illegitimacy
is
central to Collins' argument-is
also a
Moore's Paradox sentence. For our
purposes,
the
following
constraint s
sufficiently
broad: asserted
strength
of
belief must matchstrengthof assertion of the belief's object. If I insist thatI
strongly
believe
that
p,
I should be
willing
to insist that
p
is
true;
if
I
say
that
I
half-heartedly
believe that
p,
I
should be
willing
to
say something
along
the lines
of It is
likely
that
p.
Call
this
constraint
coassertability:
failure
to
satisfy
the
coassertabilityconstraint nvolves producing
an
instance
of
Moore's
Paradox.
Call the sentences
pairedby
the
coassertability
onstraint Moore's
pairs.
The
move from
one
member
of a
Moore's pair to the other conserves inferen-
tial
warrant.
If
I
say
that I
believe
it's
raining outside,
I should be
willing
to
go
ahead and
say,
with
the
correspondingdegree
of
force,
that it is
raining
outside;
and when
I do
that, my
warrant or the second
assertion s
the
same
as
my
warrant or the
first.
I do not
acquireany
new
reasons, or lose any old
ones,
when
I
make such a
transition.
t is an
observation hat warrant onser-
vation holds across
Moore's pairs;
but warrant
onservationcan also be sup-
ported by
an
argument
rom
coassertability.
The
argument s an inference to
the best explanation:whatcould betteraccountfor the matching forces of I
believe
that
p
and
p,
f not
that they
are
supportedby the same reasons?2
2
The
closest competing explanation
has the
statements
of
belief supported by a faculty
of
introspection.
But there are
good
reasons to think that
we have no such faculty, if
the
deliverances
of the
faculty
are
supposed
to
differ from
conclusions from the
evi-
dence for the truth
of the
propositional objects
of one's
beliefs. For an argument to
this
effect,
see
Shoemaker,
1988.
914 ELIJAHMILLGRAM
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With these
preliminarypoints made,
we
can
proceed
to the
apprentice
ar-
gument. Suppose
that
an
ambitious
and
subject-irrelevant heory
of belief
T
is true,
and
suppose,
for
purposes
of
illustration,
that
T
identifies
particular
beliefs
with
specified
brain
states.
We can
imagine that
T
is
embodied
in
a
belief
oracle: an
appliance
hat sits on
my
kitchentable and answers
questions
about
my
beliefs. One
morning,
I am
sitting
in
my kitchen, groggy
and
hung
over, and my niece comes up to me and asks me whether there is life on
Mars.3 I have an opinion about this, but it would be too much of an effort
just
now to collect
my
wits and
figure
out what it is.
Fortunately,
I
have
prepared myself
for occasions like this.
I
turn to the belief oracle and ask
whether I believe there
is life
on Mars. It scans
my
brain and
tells
me that I
do.
I
now turn back
to
my
niece
and
tell her
that there
is, indeed,
life
on
Mars. (This is licensed by the coassertability onstraint.)My niece
goes
back
to
her
game
of
space invaders,
and I am struck
by
the
thought
that warrant s
conserved when I
move from
one member
of
a Moore's
pair
to the other:
I
have
asserted hat
there
is life on Mars on the basis of facts
about my brain-
facts that
(I agree)
are irrelevant to the
question
of whether there is life on
Mars. (One would
not
appeal to the brain states of a Weekly World News
reader o determine
whether
here s
life on
Mars,
and
nothing
n
the
story
has
ruled out
my being
a
Weekly
WorldNews
reader.)
It cannot be
legitimate
to make assertionson the
basis
of
facts that are
ac-
knowledgedto be irrelevant.Havingan ambitiousandsubject-irrelevanthe-
ory
of
belief, together
with
Moore's
Paradox,
seems to make
just
such asser-
tions
legitimate;
so
something
has
to
go.
Moore's Paradox s
too
basic a
fact
about belief to abandon.It follows
that
we
must
give up
the
notion that
an
ambitiousand
subject-irrelevantheory
of belief
could be right.
I am
quite puzzled by
the
apprenticeargument. t seems too
outlandish o
work, but I have not yet come across a successful objection to it.
The argu-
ment
seems to be pulling
a
very large rabbitout of an empty hat;
and there
are as
yet unformulated,
but nonetheless
very real, conservation aws in phi-
losophy: rabbits (even small ones, and certainly not large ones)
cannot be
pulled
from
empty
hats. The
conditions
imposed
on
target theories are satis-
factory
as first
approximations,
but
evidently have
a
lot
of
room for
tighten-
ing up. Consequently,
I
don't
think it's
entirely clear just what the rabbit
looks like. But it seems to
include dualism, behaviorism,
materialism
and
functionalism-until
very recently,
the full
menu
of
positions
in
philosophy
of mind. The problemhere is: either to figure out why the apprenticeargu-
ment does not
work,
or
to
say just
what is
being pulled out of the
hat, and
what Moore's
Paradox
puts
into the hat
in
the
first place. Doing
this
would
tell us
a
good
deal about
beliefs, and
other
mental states to which
beliefs
can
be
inferentially
elated.
3
The
setting and example
are due
to ArthurCollins and David Finkelstein.
COLLINS
YMPOSIUM
915
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References
Collins,
A.
W.,
1987.
The Nature
of
Mental Things. University
of Notre
Dame Press,
Notre Dame,
Indiana.
Millgram, E., 1991.
Review of
Arthur
Collins,
The
Nature of
Mental
Things. Mind,
100(1),
147-49.
Shoemaker, S.,
1988. On Knowing One's Own Mind. Philosophical
Per-
spectives, 2 (Epistemology), 183-209.
916 ELIJAH
MILLGRAM
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