Fregean Equivocation and Ramsification on Sparse Theories: Response to McCullagh

The paper, which begins with a brief summary of my anti-functionalist ‘Argument from Self-consciousness’, has two main goals. First, to show that this argument is not guilty of a Fregean equivocation regarding embedded mental predicates, as has been suggested by Mark McCullagh and others. Second, to show the argument cannot be avoided by weakening the psychological theory upon which reductive functional definitions are based. Specifically, it does no good to excise psychological principles involving embedded mental predicates. Why? Because reductive functional definitions based on the resulting sparse theories are exposed to an interesting new family of counterexamples. The goal of my paper on self-consciousness (1997) was to establish two main theses. Thesis (1): Self-conscious thought constitutes a fatal obstacle to the primary tenet of reductive functionalism—that the standard mental properties and relations can be defined wholly in terms of the general pattern of causal (or functional) interaction of ontologically prior realizations. The problem may be put as a dilemma. Either reductive functional definitions imply that the wrong sorts of things must be the contents of self-conscious thought: those contents would have to be propositions involving realizations rather than the mental properties themselves. Or else the right-hand sides of such ‘definitions’ must contain undefinable psychological expressions, in which case reductive functionalism would fail for that reason. Thesis (2): The only way out of the problem is to revise the functionalists’ definitions, specifically, to give nonreductive functional definitions in which the values of the predicate variables must be the very mental properties being defined (vs. their realizations). As a result, these definitions violate reductive functionalism’s primary tenet (just stated), for they endow mental properties with an ontological primacy inconsistent with reductive functionalists’ metaphysical picture. What makes this retreat to nonreductive functionalism important is that it undermines reductive functionalism’s main payoff—a materialist explanation of the relationship between I should like to express appreciation to Mark McCullagh for his illuminating paper, to the editors for proposing the present exchange, and to Mark Moffett for insightful comments. Address for correspondence: Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80302-0232, USA. E-mail: GeorgeBealerKcompuserve.com Mind & Language, Vol. 15 No. 5 November 2000, pp. 500–510.  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Response to McCullagh 501 our physical and mental properties and, in turn, a materialist solution to the Mind-Body Problem. In ‘Functionalism and Self-consciousness’ Mark McCullagh (this volume) proposes a way in which functionalists might try to avoid the damaging effects of the Self-consciousness Argument. In the course of developing his proposal, he also defends the auxiliary thesis that this is ‘the only way in which the functionalist can respond to [the Self-consciousness Argument].’ The argumentation for this auxiliary thesis is clear and persuasive (for example, the reasons why various ‘easy fixes’ fail). I agree that reductive functionalism is driven to something like the positive proposal that McCullagh suggests. Nevertheless, I will argue that this proposal is subject to an interesting new family of counterexamples and, therefore, that functionalists still have no alternative but to reject reductive functionalism and to retreat to nonreductive functionalism. Before turning to these matters, we must first clear up a confusion over Fregean equivocations which has beguiled many commentators, including McCullagh, and whose analysis sets the stage for McCullagh’s positive proposal. 1. Intensionality and Fregean Equivocation The argument for Thesis (1) proceeds in two stages—the first aimed at reductive functional definitions given in the form of second-order ‘Ramsified definitions’ and the second aimed at ‘language-of-thought’ functional definitions. Since McCullagh focuses on the first stage, in the present paper so will I. In the original argument I considered the following Principle P: If a person is in pain and engaging in introspection, the person will be self-consciously aware that he is in pain. (As McCullagh correctly emphasizes, p. 492, the Self-consciousness Argument ‘concerns not so much the details of this or that psychological principle, but the general possibility that our overall psychological theory will include statements in which mental predicates occur within the scope of mental predicates.’) I then supposed that the reductive functionalist’s standard recipe for constructing Ramsified definitions would have us replace the psychological predicates in Principle P in the following way: If x is R1 and R3, then x will be related by R4 to the proposition that he is R1. 1 Qualifiers may be added: ‘sharp pain’, ‘carefully and attentively engaging in introspection’, ‘ceteris paribus’, etc.; and P may be reconstrued as a subjunctive conditional or a conditional probability statement.  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000