The Mind's Provisions
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The Mind's Provisions

A Critique of Cognitivism

Vincent Descombes

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The Mind's Provisions

A Critique of Cognitivism

Vincent Descombes

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About This Book

Vincent Descombes brings together an astonishingly large body of philosophical and anthropological thought to present a thoroughgoing critique of contemporary cognitivism and to develop a powerful new philosophy of the mind.Beginning with a critical examination of American cognitivism and French structuralism, Descombes launches a more general critique of all philosophies that view the mind in strictly causal terms and suppose that the brain--and not the person--thinks. Providing a broad historical perspective, Descombes draws surprising links between cognitivism and earlier anthropological projects, such as LĂ©vi-Strauss's work on the symbolic status of myths. He identifies as incoherent both the belief that mental states are detached from the world and the idea that states of mind are brain states; these assumptions beg the question of the relation between mind and brain.In place of cognitivism, Descombes offers an anthropologically based theory of mind that emphasizes the mind's collective nature. Drawing on Wittgenstein, he maintains that mental acts are properly attributed to the person, not the brain, and that states of mind, far from being detached from the world, require a historical and cultural context for their very intelligibility.Available in English for the first time, this is the most outstanding work of one of France's finest contemporary philosophers. It provides a much-needed link between the continental and Anglo-American traditions, and its impact will extend beyond philosophy to anthropology, psychology, critical theory, and French studies.

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CHAPTER 1
The Phenomena of Mind
The mental commodity, like any other,
indispensable, maintains its price.
—MALLARMÉ, Variations on a Subject
THE PHENOMENA of mind are also called mental phenomena. The question in what follows will not be whether there are such phenomena but rather where they are to be located.
That there are mental phenomena is not an empirical thesis in need of support. It is simply a question of definition. “Phenomenon” here means whatever may contradict our speculations and lead us to correct our initial descriptions. There are phenomena if there are facts that could result in the overthrow of even the most entrenched dogmas or in the rejection of the conclusions of even the soundest line of reasoning. “Phenomenon” certainly does not mean: what it is that will reveal to me what I am talking about at any given moment. What I am talking about is something I must have already understood or decided. Rather, phenomena are what I must inspect in order to know more or in order to discover anything at all about the things I want to talk about. If this is how we understand mental phenomena, the question of their existence need never be raised. Even those who utterly reject the idea that the mind is distinct from the brain or who maintain that the mental itself is merely a hypostatized entity do not go so far as to contest the difference between a pebble and, say, a high-school senior. They have no difficulty accepting that the difference between these things is manifested by various phenomena that can be examined. The difference is neither a speculative hypothesis that one might choose not to embrace nor a result that needs to be established by some sort of special investigation. No special acuity or methodical research is required in order to recognize this difference.
But the fact that there are, incontestably, mental phenomena in no way suggests that there is agreement about the correct way to understand them. In fact, the question of mind is the epitome of a contested philosophical problem. For there is indeed a point that cannot be decided simply by examining how things in fact happen, a point the determination of which cannot be exempted from philosophical disputes: the way in which to express and account for the difference between a pebble and a high-school senior. What should be emphasized? What sorts of distinctions should be drawn between things that are held to have a mind and things that are not? The entire debate regarding the phenomena of the mind bears in fact on the conception of these phenomena and preeminently on their place in a macrocosmic system.
The words “phenomena of mind” inevitably call to mind the illustrious tradition of the phenomenologies of mind, of which the most famous is that put forth by Hegel in his work by that name. And, in many ways, it is precisely the question of a phenomenology of mind that will be asked in what follows, provided that the phenomenology of mind is seen as an attempt to understand mind as it manifests itself. As it manifests itself: but where does mind manifest itself and how does it do so? In a person’s innermost soul in a private form that is difficult to communicate? Or, rather, within public space and, therefore, in a historical and social form?
Every philosophy of mind must begin as a “phenomenology of mind” in at least one sense: we expect such a philosophy to tell us where we can find its chosen subject. “Where do you locate the mind?” is a question asked of philosophers who refer to the mental. There have traditionally been two responses: within or without. Within, according to the mentalist heirs of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Maine de Biran and among whom one can also place the phenomenologists and the cognitivists. Without, according to the philosophers of objective mind and the public use of signs, for example, Peirce and Wittgenstein. I have two aims in this book. First, to support the thesis of the externality of mind: mind must be located outside, in exchanges among people, rather than inside, in the internal flux of representations. Second, to comprehend the difference between these two responses from the point of view of the moral sciences or Geisteswis-senschaften [sciences de l’esprit].1 Doing so will require a reassessment of the debates surrounding the human sciences that have persisted for a century: hermeneutics versus positivism, the philosophy of the subject versus structuralism, methodological individualism versus the holism of the mental. I believe that these debates must not be limited to methodological questions but should instead be considered ways of putting a philosophical conception of mind to the test in the terrain of anthropology.

1.1. Mental Things

The mental commodity, when MallarmĂ© uses this somewhat unusual expression, it is understood that he is referring to books.2 The poet relates that he had just taken a morning walk in the streets of Paris. This allowed him to ascertain that the public had not stopped reading, contrary to the rumor then circulating that there had been a “crash” in the book trade. In bookshop displays, merchandise meant to nourish the mind was displayed in abundance. The price of the mental commodity had not collapsed.
Is it only an audacious stylistic turn of phrase that allows the adjective “mental” to be associated here with voluminous and heavy things, the books that the booksellers pile into columns resembling, according to MallarmĂ©, the architecture of a bazaar? At first glance, Mallarmé’s expression seems to match his intentions perfectly: it seems self-explanatory and requires nothing in the way of annotations. Yet, if one is to believe the proponents of “cognitivism,” the most recent philosophy of mind, a book could not be described as a mental thing. This new philosophy of mind is a kind of mentalism. According to the explanations offered by its adherents, mentalism consists in the rejection of behaviorist psychology, which sought to explain the behavior of people without appeal to their mental life, that is, without attributing to them a mind lodged somewhere between the stimulations provided by the world and the responses of the organism. In the eyes of a mentalist philosopher, the mental commodity cannot, strictly speaking, be a book, because that is something given outside of human heads. Rather, it would have to be the set of operations concerning the book that must have been carried out in the author’s head or the set of those by which the reader will come to know it. After all, they point out, books do not write or read themselves. Without customers, a bookstore risks bankruptcy. The case of the book itself is even more serious: without readers, this book is nothing more than a stack of paper stained with printer’s ink. These sheets do not become the pages of a book until they happen to be represented as such in the mind of a reader.
It might well seem that the new mentalism thus supports the so-called “philosophy of the subject” (or of the cogito), which has always maintained, contrary to the various prophets of the “death of the author” or the “end of man,” that books do indeed have authors and readers. There are no books unless they are books for subjects, and precisely in virtue of this subordinate relationship. The confidence of the philosopher of the subject on this point has proven to be unshakable: if you tell him that a book exists, he assures you that at least one subject exists, namely the person who wrote the book. The philosopher of the subject is certain to have the public’s approval on this, even in situations where that public dare not admit it, having been intimidated by the vociferous “critiques of the subject.”
Like the philosopher of the subject, the mentalist also believes that books—and signs in general—have a subordinate mental status: the book would contain neither language nor meaning if these things did not exist in someone’s head. The attribute of mentality belongs first and foremost to what happens inside someone and only secondarily to what happens outside: words, gestures, and written signs. For such a philosopher, “mental” is a synonym of “intrinsically meaningful,” precisely because this word refers to whatever it is inside us that allows a meaning to be attached to external things which are otherwise devoid of meaning, like the sounds of a voice or the traces of a pen on paper. In order to be intrinsically mental or meaningful, the phenomena of mind must be internal and not external. They must be sought inside people and not in the world.
Yet it would be a mistake for the philosopher of the subject to hastily assume that the mentalist’s position bolsters his own. For the mental operations located within a person should not necessarily be held to belong to a subject, at least in the strict sense in which philosophers define the term “subject” as the origin of our meaningful utterances, that is, as the person who can claim recognition as their author and say, “I and I alone am speaking.” The new breed of mentalists—the cognitivists—differ from most of their predecessors in their adherence to a strict materialist doctrine. They make clear from the outset that, in their eyes, mental life is a physical process and that the mind that they seek to reestablish over and against behaviorism is a material system: quite simply, the brain. The new philosophy of mind, like the associationism that preceded it, sees itself as a mental mechanics. What keeps these new mentalists from calling a book a “mental thing” is not that a book is too material, physically heavy, ponderous, and subject to various kinds of physical deterioration. All of this, in their eyes, is just as true of the mind: it has a certain weight, it takes up space in the cranial cavity, it is vulnerable to excessively violent shocks and other deleterious actions. In fact, for these philosophers, the only reason that the merchandise for sale in the bookstore cannot be literally described as “mental” is that it is located on shelves and in displays and not inside people’s heads. So it is that, in their view, a division has been established: if what you are looking for is mental, you must seek it inside the skull. If, on the other hand, the object of your inquiry is outside the head, it is also external to mental life. The motivation behind this division is that, as long as the book remains outside of me, it can tell me nothing. In order for it to become thoughts for me to ponder or information from which I might benefit, the bookish commodity must first literally become a mental one. The intelligible content of the book must be detached from its material support in the printed pages and transferred, so to speak, into an internal support: that is, into a support that is sufficiently close to me that it can be said that I have come to know what the book says. Thus the new mentalist, who presents himself as the partisan of a doctrine called “cognitivism,” will point out that I cannot claim to know what a book says if my relation to it amounts to nothing more than having bought it at the bookstore and placed it on my bookshelf. As long as the book has not passed, partially or entirely, into my memory, it is not sufficiently close to me to enter into my mental operations. The mere possession of a book does not allow one to answer questions about its content or to conduct oneself according to its teaching. One is here reminded of the old but still pregnant image of the zealous reader who goes so far as to literally devour the sacred text in order to be all the more certain of carrying it in his heart and not just in his baggage. Had it even the slightest cognitive merit, this sort of transfer by physical incorporation would be a conventional way of reading books. If a student could succeed brilliantly in his exams simply by eating his crib notes rather than by committing them to memory, then eating a textbook would be an acceptable variety of the cognitive transfer known as “memorization.” In order for a cognitive transfer to take place, we are told, the key is that a thing laden with meaning—a cognitive entity, a representation—be transported to a point within the person where it can play an effective role in the control of his conduct.
The new mentalists, particularly the theorists attached to the cognitivist program, would deem the preceding considerations mere platitudes hardly worth mentioning at all but for the fact that powerful anti-mentalist prejudices have for a long time been widespread not only among the scientific public but also among the philosophical public under the influence of thinkers like Wittgenstein and Ryle. I cannot agree with them on this point. There is nothing banal or obvious in any of this. The idea that the mental must be something internal to a person is hardly a basic and obvious fact. Rather, it is an exacting thesis. To accept this thesis, we would have to modify profoundly our ordinary conceptions and ways of speaking. I assume that, for a neo-mentalist, the expression “mental commodity” could be applied to things that might be put on the market such as information, knowledge, techniques of calculation, and software programs. When the expression is applied to a book, it can only be through a figure of speech, since a book only has mental or semantic properties in a derivative way. Such a figure works through an expansion of the applications of a vocabulary that refers first and foremost to the mind itself. We are expected to concede that we know, through the science of physiology, that the mind is located in the brain and that we must conclude, according to this philosophy, that the mind is thus identical to the brain, unless we are prepared to admit that two active powers can effectively occupy the exact same place.
Notice, however, that all of the vocabulary of semantic verbs applies equally well to books and other such products of the mind. It is easy to imagine a librarian helping us in our research by pointing to different books in his department and saying: this book upholds such and such a proposition, this book professes such and such a doctrine, here is another book that shows that the first is in error, here is a book that refutes all of the others on the shelf. It might be claimed that, in this case, the vocabulary has been transferred from its original field of application to a secondary one. Indeed, it may well be that our understanding of these semantic verbs takes place in a derivative way: when we say that a book upholds a doctrine, it may just be a way of saying that the author of the book upholds the doctrine. But, in such case, the derivation would go from persons to books. The primary use of these verbs would be to say, when standing before Raphael’s painting of the School of Athens: “This is the philosopher who upheld such and such a doctrine while this one over here sought to refute him.” By contrast, it does not seem at all possible to apply these same verbs not to people but to brains. One cannot say: This brain professes the Platonic doctrine but has been refuted by this other brain. Such attempts to apply semantic language directly to brains must be immediately counterbalanced by a change in the application of the substantive “brain” so as to mean “person” rather than an organic part of a person. Moreover, it is worth noting that the same thing would be true of the direct application of such verbs to minds. “I am the mind that always negates”: we understand that it is Mephisto who always negates and not simply a material or immaterial part of his person.3
Such considerations of vocabulary are of course incapable of establishing anything from a philosophical point of view. We may well find we have excellent reasons for reforming our ordinary ways of speaking and may even decide to treat the brain henceforth as a subject to which we can attribute the cognitive properties that had hitherto been reserved for people. But to do so would be a major philosophical revision and not a simple return to common sense.
Another way to take stock of the conceptual revision recommended by mentalists is to consider in a more direct way the location of mental operations. We have no trouble admitting that knowledge of the contents of a book is to be located in the person who has read the book and not in the book itself sitting on the library shelf. Imagine, for example, that we belong to a team of explorers following the instructions given in a book written in an ancient language and that only one member of our team has proven able to read this book. The most important thing for our team would not be to know where the book is at any given moment but to know the whereabouts of our colleague who has understood its meaning and remembered the directions it gives. Our knowledge of the contents of the book moves with our colleague and not with the book itself. In other words, to the extent that the group’s knowledge of the book’s contents is located anywhere, it is located in the space occupied by our associate who has read it rather than wherever the book happens to be. If we were somehow to maintain possession of the book after having lost our knowledgeable companion, we would also have lost our knowledge of the book. Yet the reverse is not true: to lose the book is not to lose the knowledge, as long as our colleague remains with us. Thus, knowledge of information that is available somewhere is itself available somewhere, in another place, namely, in the knowing subject and, if one insists, “in his head.” In general terms, the place in which signs are actualized is not the place of their intellection (or of what Peirce called their “interpretant”).
Up to now, the role played by the topographical precision that locates a given mental resource “in so-and-so’s head” has been perfectly clear, since we have only been discussing ways of referring to the person who can give us the information we seek. Yet we s...

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