Where is my mind
(2016) The Philosophy of Emerging Media — ISBN: [978-0-19-026075-0], 243-257, published
Files
15-Floyd-Chap14Aucouturier.pdf
Restricted Access - Adobe PDF
- 2.63 MB
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- The complexity of robots and machines has led philosophers to think anew the classical issue of mind and thought possession. If we could build a robot whose behavior would be indistinguishable from standard human behavior, would we have to say that this robot thinks in the same sense as we do? What would be the ethical consequences of this? John Searle opposed Daniel C. Dennett in a famous debate about what intentionality consists in. Can we ground intentionality on mere behavioral criteria (however complicated) or does intentionality depend on the biological structure of living and thinking beings? The aim of this paper is to address the debate from a Wittgensteinian perspective. Indeed, in his later philosophy, L. Wittgenstein suggests that meaning and intentionality are not mere properties of language and minds, but depend more broadly on our practices and forms of life. Hence, we could not possibly think that, because it can speak, a parrot genuinely means what it says (PI, § 344). As E. Anscombe has argued, intentionality is something that shows through our actions and that should be looked for in our practices (including our uses of language). This is not to say that intentionality reduces to mere behaviors nor that our practices make visible something which would otherwise be hidden. Anscombe draws part of her ideas from Aristotle, who, in his essay on the movements of animals, acutely shows that goal-directed practices are a very distinctive specificity of living animals and that they require a special kind of explanation, which is different from the explanation of mechanical movements (although action usually requires some mechanical movement of the body). The key point is that there is some specificity to the explanation of goal-directed practices, which irreducibly appeals to some specific sort of explanation: “reason” or teleological explanations. This idea has met with strong resistance on the part of philosophers who wish to find some sort of unified scientific explanation of all movements. The alleged threat is that we would otherwise be condemned to think that what we may call “intentional” phenomena are “real” but inaccessible to scientific explanation. I wish to argue that those who believe this threat exists have not really taken Wittgenstein’s ideas seriously, because they do not see that levels of explanation are not related to layers of reality but to explanatory purposes and practices. It is one thing to say that some given explanation does not grasp some aspects of what is going on; it is quite another to say that there is just one good way of explaining any phenomenon.
- Affiliations
Citations
Aucouturier, V. (2016). Where is my mind. In J. Floyd, J. Katz (ed.), The Philosophy of Emerging Media (pp. 243-257). Oxford University Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/187091