One of the few orthodoxies in contemporary
analytic philosophy of mind is the view that
the solution to the mind-body problem lies
in the doctrine of materialism or physicalism,
the view that, roughly speaking, the mental
is not something over and above the material.
Of course, questions arise as to what exactly
"not over and above" means, but anyway, roughly
the mental just is in some sense the material,
and so materialism and physicalism predominates
in analytical philosophy of mind. The famous
linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, however,
has argued, in opposition to this, that the
mind-body problem really has no coherent formulation
because we have no coherent concept of "matter" 
or "body" or "the physical" with which to contrast
"the mental". What do you think of that line
of thought? Well, I think it's a polemically
elegant move, but I actually think it’s a bit
of a red herring, for the following reason.
As far as anybody knows -- I mean, this is
probably not a point of universal consensus,
but I’ll bet it's pretty close -- as far as anybody
knows, if there’s going to be a physicalistic
account of how the mind works, it's gonna be
in terms of the macro-structure of the brain --
by "macro-structure" I mean something like
at the level of cells or proteins or fibers or
something of that sort -- but not at the level
of the micro-structure of matter. If it turned out
that the mental phenomena went "all the way
down", down to, as it were, protons or electrons
or quarks or whatever they’ve got down there,
I think physicalism would be in deep trouble.
Part of the story about materialism or physicalism
or whatever one ought to call that stuff is that
the relation between psychological phenomena,
mental phenomena and neurological phenomena
is sort of like the relation between, I don’t know,
geology and chemistry or something of that kind.
If it turned out that before you got
something that had both psychological
and physical properties, you had to go down
to quarks, that would be very puzzling indeed.
In fact, part of the story is that psychological
laws or explanations are not supposed to take place
at the level of basic science. And what’s
being contemplated, I suppose, is that
it's the internal basic structure of matter
that might matter for the psychological and
that seems to me very unlikely. Is it just a 
mind-brain problem then? I think to all intents
and purposes it is, yeah. That is, if it's not, then
nobody has any idea what to do about it at all.
The reasonable assumption I think is
that if there's gonna be a physicalistic
story about the mind, it’s gonna be at the
level of middle-sized objects like the brain.
I mean, after all, there are a lot of other
things that are made of the same kind of stuff
that the brain is made of, like, for
example, rocks or finger nails or whatever,
but they don’t think and they’re not conscious.
So it’s a reasonable guess, I would've supposed,
that it's gonna be what’s characteristic
of the structure of brains rather than what’s
characteristic of the structure of physical
objects as such that’s going to tell us the
story about psychology or the mental, if
anything does. You’re often described as a
paradigmatic functionalist. How would you
describe the basic idea behind the kind of
functionalism that you favor? I think I’m
inclined to plead innocent to the charge.
If I’m a functionalist, I think I’m a pretty
unparadigmatic one. A functionalist is somebody
who says, I guess, that mental states & processes
and so on, are susceptible of functional analysis
where functional analysis is one in
which you characterize whatever it is that
you’re analyzing in terms of its causal
properties -- that is, what kinds of things
it causes to happen, what kinds of things cause
it to happen -- rather than, say, its mechanical
or physical structure or something
of that kind. So, the idea would be
look, if you wanna know what a fan is,
it's something that’s used to move the air,
and to a first approximation anyway,
it doesn’t matter what it's made out of.
You can have electrical fans & hand fans
and feather fans and so forth and so on.
What makes the thing a fan is not what it's made
out of, but its function in moving the air around.
So now, the question is whether what makes
something a belief or a desire or whatever, is its
causal structure too, its causal properties.
And I guess if you’re really an honest to God
true blue functionalist like, say, Dan Dennett,
then you think the answer to that question is yes.
So to believe that it's gonna rain or something
is to be in some sort of dispositional state
to carry your umbrella or to look out the
window and say "I hope it doesn’t rain"
or whatever. I actually think that view is
probably pretty hopeless. I think whatever
it is that gives a mental state the content
that it does, whether it’s the content of a
belief or the -- as one says -- qualitative
content of a sensory state, isn’t something
that has to do with function. I don’t think
that the theory of content can be functional.
On the other hand, I do think that probably
the difference between believing that it's going
to rain and wanting it to rain or hoping
that it's going to rain, probably is a difference
in functional role. So, my own view is
that probably semantics and the intentional
and conscious contents of mental states
are not going to get a functional analysis;
this leaves open of course the question what
kind they do. So, the amount of functionalism
that one ends up with on this kind of story
is pretty minimal. Your latest book is called
"Hume Variations" and it’s a reference to the
18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume.
What’s Hume’s contribution to the study
of the mind and how significant is it?
What I stressed in the book is that he’s
running what would these days be called a
representational theory of mind. That is, the
basic idea is that mental states are relations
to some sort of, what other folk -- Hume’s
terminology is extremely misleading but what
other philosophers have called "Ideas" with
a capital letter. So, what you have in your head
is a lot of Ideas: Ideas of cows and Ideas of
typewriters and Ideas of people and so on,
"concepts" these days. These have two
interesting properties. One is the sort of
referential prop--that is, in some way
or other, they apply to things in the world.
And the other property is causal, so they
interact causally with one another. And
Hume's project was to make a psychology--quite 
explicit project, in fact--was to make a psychology
using those basic notions of Ideas, semantical
properties, referential properties of Ideas and
causal properties of ideas as the basic
materials. Now, there are obviously lots of
differences in the details and some differences
even in the main picture, but to a first approximation
that’s what we’re still doing. In that sense
I think, cognitive science we’re running
these days is a sort of footnote to Hume,
not in the sense that one accepts exactly his
notion of how mental mechanisms work, but
rather in that the idea of having a naturalistic
theory of mind built around the notion of
mental representation was, I guess, the one
that he was the first to state with any
degree of clarity, and it's still the idea
that we’re running on. Where does Hume
go wrong? Oh, in all sorts of ways, that is,
unless we’ve gone wrong. One thing is
that he thought that ideas were pictures
and that their semantic properties are to be 
understood in terms of something like resemblance.
For all sorts of famous reasons now, not plausible.
He also thought, however -- and I think this is
where there has been some real honest to
God progress -- he also thought that the causal
relations among these mental objects,
ideas or mental representations or whatever
are fundamentally associationistic.
The basic idea is that mental processes,
at least insofar as they're shaped
by learning, and most associationists
took for granted, in fact, claimed as a virtue
of the theory that basically everything that’s
in your head is learned. So, the idea is that
mental processes insofar as they're shaped by
learning depend upon associated bonds. And
associated bonds are just mechanical couplings
that come into being as a result of frequency
of pairings and that kind of relation among ideas.
So, if somebody encounters, I don’t know,
salt often enough in the company of pepper,
then he’ll come to think pepper when
he thinks salt. Various elaborations of that
basic suggestion are possible. And some of
the elaborations are quite elaborate elaborations,
but that’s the basic idea. So frequency,
contiguity, that sort of thing produces causal
relations among ideas, and these causal relations
among ideas are the basic structures out of which
mental processes are made. There are 
again all sorts of reasons why that won’t work.
And in fact, I think what happened to
Hume’s project was that the associationism
seemed more and more clearly unsatisfactory.
This is a point that was made against association
against empiricists like Hume by Kant and 
then again by Frege. For all sorts of rather
deep reasons, an associationistic account
of the causal relations among mental states
and objects is hopelessly inadequate and 
nobody knew what to replace it with. I think
the main idea that anybody’s had in cognitive
science since Hume was, in effect, Turing’s idea
that you don’t need an associative picture
of mind, you can have a computational picture.
That’s really a very different account than was
available to Hume of the character of mental processes
and a whole lot of questions that seem
hopeless from the associationist point of view
seem a lot better from the computational
point of view that we’ve inherited from Turing.
So there was plenty wrong, but still, I think
Hume was maybe the first person to have
a clear picture of what ought to be done,
if not of how one ought to go about doing it,
and that’s a great achievement. Why do you
think that the mind is like a computer or that
some mental processes are "computational
processes" as it’s sometimes put? And why
should we give up associationism and go
for a computational view? What’s the driving
motivation there? There’s a complex of considerations
but one of them is this. A way to put it that might be
familiar to a philosophical audience 
might be something like this. Philosophers
are sort of used to the idea that thoughts have
logical form. There are conjunctive thoughts and
disjunctive thoughts and quantified thoughts
and so on. There isn’t any way to reconstruct
that sort of picture in an associationist model,
and that’s very worrying for an associationist
because it looks like it's in virtue of their logical
logical forms that thoughts have their inferential roles.
It's because John and Mary went swimming as
a conjunctive thought, that one infers from it that
John went swimming & Mary went swimming. 
That whole picture of logical form in thought
and inferential consequences of logical form simply
can’t be recovered on any known associationist picture.
So the computational model allows us
to say things about how the mind works
that an associationist simply seems to
be unable to say. I would've preferred to
summarize that by saying that we know that
some mental processes or a lot of mental processes
are in a sense rational processes, and that
the computational view is one of the only
ones that can, in your view, that can make
sense of the rationality of mental processes.
Yeah that’s fine -- I mean to a first approximation
anyway, that seems exactly right. The point is
associative relations aren’t rational
relations. And to reconstruct the notion of
rational relations you need to give an account
of the rationality of mental processes, and
those kinds of properties of thoughts
simply aren’t available to an associationist.
You often cite the thought processes of Conan
Doyle’s famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes
as an example of the rationality of mental
processes. And of course the computational
theory is supposed to be very good as explaining
the rationality of mental processes. Holmes’s
thought processes are rational and of course
he’s often called a master of deduction.
And we know that logically deductive 
inferences can be implemented computationally.
We know this because of the work by Alan 
Turing and various others. But of course,
Holmes' great powers of thought do not
really lie in their logically deductive nature.
After all, Holmes isn’t really a brilliant
logician, he’s a brilliant detective. And
what what makes him a brilliant detective is his
power of "abduction" as it's called sometimes or
his power of inferring to the best explanation.
Now, much of both scientific reasoning and
everyday reasoning of us lesser mortals too
is abductive in nature. Are computational
models of the human capacity to reason
by inference to the best explanation likely to
be forthcoming, do you think? Well, here as
in the discussion on functionalism, I’m inclined
to be a good deal less optimistic than is
currently fashionable. I would be very surprised
if, where computational means something
like Turing’s notion of computational, that is,
some operations that apply to representations
in terms of something like their logical form
or their logical syntax. If that’s the picture
of computation one has, and it’s the only one
that I know of, then it seems to me very
unlikely and for just the reasons you say
that much of what goes on in the mind is gonna,
in the very long run, turn out to be computational.
For a number of reasons of which the most
striking is that if you start to look at non-deductive
rationality, for example, confirmation belief
formation, that sort of thing, how evidence
is martial to constrain beliefs, it doesn’t
look like it's fundamentally a syntactic relation.
And logical syntax, as I say, is the force that
drives the Turing picture. It also doesn’t look
like it depends on local relations. And if
you think for a while about what Turning did,
it seems to me, that it's reasonable to
say about his notion of computation that it's
actually restricted to a very small set of even
syntactic properties of mental representations.
That is, what Turing-type processes operate
on is relations between complex symbols and
their constituents. So, Turing will tell you
how to get from P and Q to P, and part of the
reason he can do that is that the inference
from P and Q to P depends on nothing except
the syntactic structure of the premise. P’s
a constituent of P and Q, it’s a syntactical part
of P and Q. I doubt that that kind of locality
is a general property of mental processes.
In fact, a lot of the most characteristic and
most puzzling properties of mental processes
seem to be sensitive to non-local global properties
of belief systems. This is why when one tries
to build an artificial intelligence machine,
one starts running into frame problems and
globality problems, all of which have the same
basic structure: namely, I believe an enormous
number of things; what I believe is relevant
to what inference I’m going to make from
whatever it is that I currently have in mind,
but I don’t wanna search all the enormous
number of things I believe to determine 
what the relevance relation is. That’s a highly
non-local kind of worry. And Turing’s notion of
computation, at least as far as anybody knows
and at least on the surface, doesn’t seem to
be well-equipped to handle those kinds of issues.
And since I agree with you that it's
abduction or inference to the best explanation
it's pretty global in those kinds of ways,
that is a large part of what’s characteristic of
not only what Sherlock Holmes was good
at, but what everybody’s good at: namely,
sort of getting around in the world on the
basis of fragmentary information. I’d be
very surprised if any computational model
recognizably of the kind that we have now
turned out to be most of the story about 
most of the mind. However, having said that,
the computational picture works in a lot of places
where what was previously available some variety
of associationism didn’t. And there’s
some point to looking where the light is.
We know, roughly speaking, how computational
explanations go and there do seem to be cognitive
processes of some interest. Perception's a
plausible candidate, what they call low-level
perception, that is, early stages in perceptual
analysis. There are processes going on in
the mind of some complexity and a great deal
of interest which do look very much like they
might be susceptible to computational treatment.
There’s been some real progress in the attempt
to analyze such processes computationally.
So, there’s something to work on and I think
we’ve got a hold of a part of the story, but
I suspect, that we’re a long way from the
rest of it. What I suspect is that there’s
some reconstructed notion of computation or
mental process other than the one that
we got from Turing and that we’re gonna
need to face the real problem about the
mind which is of course how people think.
So the computational theory of mind isn’t really
a theory about how people think. I mean, it can
possibly give an account of deductive thinking
and it can possibly give an account of various
processes that we might want to call "mental
processes" such as perceptual processes,
but these processes aren’t conscious really,
are they? That’s certainly true. I don’t think
that the distinction between what’s
computationally tractable and what isn’t,
is the same as the distinction, is co-extensive
with the distinction between what’s conscious and
what isn’t. I think some perfectly straightforward 
conscious thinking probably is computational and
certainly a lot of the computational processes
that go on in the mind, unless we’ve got things
terribly terribly wrong are equally certainly
unconscious. So, I suspect that these are
more or less orthogonal distinctions.
It’s roughly true that the big successes with
computational analysis have been concerned
with processes which one can’t introspect
like the analysis of visual form and perception.
Does the computational theory of mind have
anything to contribute to the study of consciousness
and does that matter to you? I think the answer
to the first question is pretty clear: namely,
no. In fact, I suspect that nobody has anything
to contribute to the study of consciousness
as of the latest tally. Chomsky somewhere--
we started with him--Chomsky somewhere
makes a distinction between what he calls problems
and mysteries. Problems are things you can
work on. You may not know how to solve them,
but at least you know how to work on them
or at least you know how to formulate some
of the questions you would like to have answered
about them. Mysteries meet none of those conditions
and consciousness is a mystery. We not
only don’t know what it is and not only don’t
have a theory of it, but we don’t even know
what it would be LIKE to have a theory of it.
It's very popular in the current philosophical
literature and to some extent in the Cog-Psy
literature. But the popularity, if you look
at it closely, it consists of dozens, scores,
hundreds of people writing papers saying
in effect: consciousness is terribly important,
somebody really ought to have a good idea
about consciousness. And indeed, I agree,
somebody ought to, but nobody has. And I don’t
see myself how anything like a computational story
is gonna do any good. Does it bother me?
Sure, I’d like to have something interesting to
say about consciousness, but I haven’t.
I think of that as sort of like I’d like to be
rich and famous, but I’m not. What
you can’t do you can’t do. I have a friend
who is in the consciousness line of work
and he once said something like that the
nice thing about being in the consciousness
line of work is that you can drop out for 30 or
40 years and not miss a thing. And I think
that’s exactly the current situation. Right.
Can the idea of computation help in any way to
explain the nature of creativity and imagination
or are they really to be lumped with consciousness?
Pessimism is my normal state. And here I think
what makes one pessimistic isn’t that we
don’t know how to state hardly any clear issues
hardly anywhere in cognitive science and there’s
a sort of sense that if we did we'd have thereby
solved the problems. No, I think the problem
about creativity and imagination and emotion
is that it's not clear that they’re the KINDS
of things that you can have a science about.
It's not clear that they’re, as some
philosophers like to say, "natural kinds",
that they’re the sorts of states over which law-like,
reliable, counterfactual supporting generalizations
can be stated and in terms of which 
theories can be elaborated. I like to refer to the
sad career of a guy who thought he was going
to develop a science of Tuesdays. And it sort of
worked for a while, he discovered some
generalizations about Tuesdays. That is, they
come after Mondays, they come before Wednesdays,
they last about 24 hours and so forth and so on,
and then the subject seemed to dry up.
And the reason it dried up is that the
property of being a Tuesday doesn’t provide
a scientific domain nor unfortunately do most
of the properties of most of the things that
we’re humanly interested in. What I would
guess is that emotion & creativity & imagination
and all that stuff that we humanly and properly
care about just aren’t going to prove appropriate
domains for the kind of theory construction
that scientists do, though they may be a perfectly
appropriate domain for, as it were, writing novels.
I mean, there were things to do other
than science and the peculiar restrictions
that hold on scientific theory-construction
really are restrictions. I mean, there are
just aspects of the world which scientific
theory construction doesn’t seem to be the
appropriate way to approach. If you wanna know
about emotions, read Henry James, is my view.
And I suspect that when we’ve gotten
as far as we can in a science of the mind,
my guess is it’ll still be true if you want to
find out about emotions read Henry James.
Don’t people have genuine imaginative abilities
that science might be able to explain? Imagination's
a sort of syncategorematic notion. I mean,
you can be an imaginative chef & an imaginative
mathematician, and it's very hard to believe
that among the various things that are going on
in their head there’s something that counts,
as it were, as what makes them imaginative
in their various ways and which is identical
over these differences. It’s a bit like being good.
You can get good knives and you can get
good philosophers, and it’s not at all clear
that there’s anything that they have
in common, qua good, though it’s a form
of evaluation that applies to both. My guess
is that to look for a process of imagination
as such, I suspect, is going to be like
looking for a faculty of intelligence as such.
Very unlikely that there is such a thing, 
or at least, quite likely that there isn’t.
There's just intelligent ways of doing one kind
of thing or another, and when you look closely
at what gets done, the notion of intelligence
drifts out of the explanation and what actually
has an explanation is how you do the particular
kind of thing that you’re either good or bad at.
The imagination has historically been
seen as a kind of faculty. I mean, Aristotle
and Aquinas and Descartes and Hume all 
bring in the imagination and they seem to treat it
as a kind of faculty. Right. Well, one of the
things that tends to confuse the discussion
is that there’s a notion of imagination as
the capacity for forming mental images.
That’s close to what it is, I think, in Kant
and Hume. That is, it’s something like being
able to form a mental representation of a
particular which satisfies a certain kind of
abstraction. So you’ve got the concept
"dog" and imagination comes in, say, in the
Kantian story as what allows you to construct
mental representation of the kinds of individuals
that fall under that concept. So, that sense
of imagination, you know--either there is some
use to it or not is clearly debatable--but it's
not what people have in mind when they say
he’s an imaginative chemist or an imaginative
chef, or she’s an imaginative mathematician
or whatever. I doubt there’s any science
of the ability to think up new ideas which is
really what the imagination in this informal
non-Kantian, Humean sense is supposed to do.
I don’t think we’re going to do any better at
answering questions like "How do you think up
new ideas?" than by saying "Well, you know,
concentrate, learn as much as you can, keep
your fingers crossed and keep at it until
something occurs to you". It’s like, you know,
"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" Practice.
There’s not going to be a theory, I think, of
creativity in that--or of imagination--in
that sense. It’s not that all the creative
processes form a domain which have something
interesting in common from the point of view
of explanation. Why not say the same thing
about consciousness? That may be true. I mean,
the intuition about consciousness is 
there IS something that all the conscious
states have in common--pains and sensations
and so forth and so on--in virtue of being conscious.
In a way, that seems to just present
itself as a fact of the mental life in a way
that it's not obvious that there's something
that all the creative or intelligent or imaginative
mental processes have in common. This could
be an illusion. I mean, it could be that there’s
really nothing that, as it were, a conscious
visual sensation and a conscious thought have
in common simply qua conscious. Maybe that’s
true, but it seems counterintuitive and I wouldn’t
bet on consciousness disappearing as a
problem in the way that I’m sort of inclined to
think that creativity and emotion and so on
will. Generally speaking, what do you think
is the role of philosophers in studying the
mind? Are they just junior partners in the
enterprise of cognitive science or do they
have something special to contribute? Well,
if you think of the problems about the mind
as the traditional metaphysical and ontological
problems, then I suppose they're philosophical
problems only because nobody else wants them.
But if the problems about the mind are
Hume’s kind of problems, namely constructing
in some sense empirical model of how
it works, I would've thought that there’s
no particular field that that undertaking
belongs to. There are all sorts of things
that might help, there are all sorts of investigations
that might help. And as things now stand, those
investigations cut across a whole variety
of traditionally distinct disciplines from
philosophy to physiology and back. What I
think philosophers are pretty good at is thinking
about methodological and conceptual issues;
issues that arise in theory construction, issues
of what actually follows from what or what
might be a reasonable thing to hypothesize
given what else. That’s the kind of thing that
philosophers are professionally trained to do,
it's what they cut their teeth on. And in
the cognitive sciences at least, it's almost
true, I think, that what we have is sort
of pre-science. I mean, we're not really at
the point where we have well entrenched theories
and well entrenched research methodologies
and we know what to do if only we could
get the grant to do it with. There’s a great deal
of methodological confusion and a great
deal of conceptual confusion, and we simply
don’t know what we ought to take to follow
from what, how to map out the consequences of
the kinds of theories that we do hold and 
the relations between the theories. That it
seems to me is something that philosophers
might do if they can’t think of anything else
to do of an afternoon. And at this stage
at least in the development of theories of
cognition, it's extremely important. If you
read systematic books in psychology, I mean,
books where the author wants to set out,
as it were, the big picture as he sees it,
the way it works is you get a first chapter on
methodology and it tells you about the nature
of science and the relation between psychology
and biology, and the relation between the mind and
the body and between the mental and the 
behavioral, all that sort of stuff, very grand, which
makes very little sense actually and which
is hard to take very seriously as philosophy
and which the author tends to ignore properly
so through the rest of the book. This is the
law of the irrelevance of first chapters, which
holds pretty well in cognitive science publication.
Well, that’s a gap in which the way people--
the resources people have at hand for doing the
kind of things that psychologists & cognitive
scientists are trying to do--those resources are
pretty inarticulate and their sense of
how the project should be described is often
pretty inarticulate. To take one example, the
notion of representation plays an absolutely
central role in standard theories of cognitive
processes & nobody really has any very clear idea
either about just what kind of role it's
playing or just what kind of a representational
relation it is or what kinds of demands a
psychological theory is likely to place on it.
That seems to me a kind of project which it's
natural for a philosopher to look at. And in my
own case, it's actually the kind of project
I'm interested in. I really would like to know
how the mind works & some of the tradecraft
that you pick up in doing philosophy seems
to be of some help in approaching that issue.
Jerry Fodor, thanks very much for talking to us.
