🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep26.010553.19020@sophia.smith.edu> orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke) writes:

>>But are thoughts _just_ dispositions to behave.  I think not.
>
>I agree with you here.  Incidentally, I'm not sure Dennett would
>disagree with this either.  He says quite explicitly (in "Consciousness
>Explained") that qualia are just complex dispositions to react in
>certain ways in certain circumstances, but he treats qualia
>differently from intentional mental states.

Well, no-one has held the simple view "mental states are just
dispositions to behave" since Gilbert Ryle, and even in Ryle's
case it's not clear that his position was so simple (for a start
he was ambiguous between the behaviour and the disposition; for
another thing, he invoked other mental states in his dispositional
analyses, so that e.g. vanity is among other things a disposition
to think certain sorts of thoughts).  But the modern functionalist
view has inherited the essentials of this notion, with a good dollop
of holism, internal causation, and environmental contribution thrown
in too.  Certainly there's not much room for quasi-magical extra
components to belief, as there seems to be with consciousness.  So
the "dispositional" position is generally much easier to hold
for beliefs than for phenomenal states.

As for Dennett, he's more or less the modern heir to the Rylean
position (having been his graduate student at Oxford), and his
positions are really quite close.  For all his cognitive-science
sophistication, he's more or less a logical behaviourist with a
few extra trappings when it comes to intentional mental states --
at least as much for these as for qualia (indeed, his "behaviourist"
treatment of intentional mental states forms the basis for his
similar treatment of qualia).  See _The Intentional Stance_ for his
observer-relative analysis of intentional states.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."