In her original and contentious
book, The Structure of Thinking, Laura Weed takes to task the
"logical and mechanical reductivist program" in analytic philosophy
for failing to give an adequate account of thought.  Analytic philosophers, she claims, have tended to concentrate too
much on reducing thought to the manipulation of abstract structures in a formal
system (e.g., the mathematico-logical systems of Bertrand Russell or W.V.
Quine), and not enough on the first-person experiential basis of thought.  Cognitive scientists who work within the
computational approach to thought–according to which thought is defined in
terms of computational processes over syntactically structured
representations–are equally guilty of ignoring the experiential aspect of
thought.  Weed agrees that some aspects
of thought can and should be characterized in these abstract terms, but
maintains that this cannot be the entire story.  For, if a formal system cannot be grounded in experience, then
there is a risk that, floating free of reality, the abstract structures are
nothing more than meaningless strings. 

At the heart of her book is a
distinction between two types of thinking: thinking about objects in a
first-personal, experiential way, which she calls "x-type thinking,"
and thinking about the relations between concepts and propositions, which she
calls "y-type thinking."  (The
terminology comes from Aristotle, who in the Posterior Analytics claims
that all knowledge has the form ‘x is y,’ where ‘x‘
represents some object and ‘y‘ a property or concept applied to
it.)  X-type thinking, according to
Weed, essentially involves direct, private, and first-personal sensory
experience with an object.  The product
of an x-type thought process, as in Russell’s knowledge by acquaintance, is an
object about which one is directly and personally aware.  But, unlike Russell’s notion, an object here
is an indexically located "this" that is named (i.e., identified and,
to some extent, categorized) by the thinker through a dynamic causal process
that incorporates the thinker’s intentions and point of view.  Weed spends several chapters describing in
detail the process of object-positing, and along the way develops distinctive
accounts of intentional causation (what she dubs "kausation"), stable
objects, and existence.  As Weed
acknowledges briefly, there is a Kantian flavor to her approach to these
subjects, albeit one that incorporates more of an active role for the
experiencing subject.  She cites some
recent work in cognitive science that corroborates her account of causation,
though I am not quite convinced that Andy Clark’s externalist views offer much
support.  (More support might be found
in Susan Hurley’s Consciousness in Action.) 

Y-type thinking, on the other hand,
is abstract and removed from experience, and concerns the attribution of
properties to objects.  From y-type
thinking processes, one gets conceptual knowledge of objects and their relations
to each other, knowledge of possibilities and hypothetical scenarios, and
mathematical, logical, and scientific theories.  The stock and trade of y-type thinking is the proposition,
encoded in an abstract structure and manipulated according to rules in a formal
system.  Weed contends that much of
analytic philosophy and current cognitive science has been committed to
characterizing all thinking as y-type thinking.  The preference for y-type thinking is an
outgrowth of the development of formal logic (and later the influence of
Turing’s work with computers), as well as the widespread suspicion of
subjectivist elements in logic and psychology–in particular, Frege’s rejection
of psychologism and the ascent of behaviorism as a reaction to the excesses of
introspectionism.  Quine is the paradigm
example of the philosopher who hoped to do away with "fuzzy" x-type
thinking, going so far as to reduce objects (names) to sets of properties
(predicates).  Weed devotes the bulk of
a chapter arguing that Quine’s reductive system is susceptible to a modern
version of the Third Man Argument: working within a purely property-oriented
system that is free of reference, propositional knowledge is not anchored to
reality but to a regress of theoretical structures that occupy merely a realm
of possibility.  "Reality is only
to be met with in experience," Weed claims, and no purely y-type account
of thinking can be grounded in experience. 
This conclusion extends to certain computational accounts of thought as
well.  Absent a mechanism for connecting
symbol structures to experienced reality, thinking is nothing more than empty
symbol crunching.

The grounding problem is not
unfamiliar to contemporary philosophers of mind.  Much has been written in the last twenty years about the problem
of intentionality–how to account for the "aboutness" of thought–and
it is a shame that very little of this literature is discussed by Weed.  John Searle’s account of intentional content
is cited favorably throughout the book, but aside from a weak dismissal of Fred
Dretske’s early causal-informational account of content, practically no other
theory of intentionality is so much as mentioned.  Frankly, I find it incredible that none of the major attempts to
solve the problem of intentionality–which would include the work of Jerry
Fodor, Robert Cummins, Ruth Millikan, and later Dretske among many others–are
discussed by Weed.  This oversight is
especially egregious, I think, because these philosophers offer genuine
alternatives to her own account.  She
would likely argue that these alternative accounts are designed to explain the
intentionality of properties (e.g., the concept RED), and so are
themselves susceptible to a version of the Third Man Argument.  But these accounts at least attempt to
characterize intentionality at a fundamental level.  Weed’s account of object-positing, by relying on the intentions
and other propositional attitudes (what she calls "points of view")
of a thinker, already presupposes intentionality.  Philosophy needs a solution to the problem of (original) intentionality,
but one cannot solve it by appealing to full-blown intentional states. 

This is a book written for a
philosophically sophisticated audience. 
Many fairly technical philosophical notions are mentioned throughout the
book–sometimes in the context of a crucial argument–without even a brief
explanation.  It would be helpful to be
reminded, for example, what Joseph Almog means when he says that Kripkean
causal chains of reference are "presemantic," or why Pylyshyn’s claim
that psychological states must be "cognitively penetrable" militates
against Stalnaker’s propositional view of mental representation.  Weed assumes knowledge of so many complex
philosophical notions–possible world semantics, the de re/de dicto
distinction, D-N explanations, the slingshot argument, Cummins-style functional
explanation, to name a few–that the reader unfamiliar with contemporary
analytic philosophy will surely have a very difficult time following the
arguments.  That’s fine, of course; one
may use technical terms when addressing a professional audience.  However, Weed sometimes uses expressions
that have a commonly accepted technical meaning in an idiosyncratic way, and
that frustrates the professional philosopher as well.  For example, it is standard in contemporary philosophy to reserve
the term "intentionality" for the directedness or
"aboutness" of a mental state, and many philosophers go to great
lengths to distinguish it from intending or having an intention.  Intending is just one type of intentional
state, according to standard philosophical practice.  Throughout my first reading, I had suspicions that Weed was using
"intentionality" and "intentional" colloquially.  But even after rereading the section in
which she discusses Searle’s notion of intentionality–and Searle is one of
those philosophers who very clearly distinguishes the colloquial and technical
senses of "intentionality"–I have to confess that I still don’t
quite understand what she means. 
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the book should
have been edited one more time.  There
are numerous typographic errors, running from the minor (e.g., excessive use of
commas, bibliographic entries out of order, incorrect index citations) to the
more severe (e.g., "collaborates" instead of "corroborates,"
"prescribes to" rather than "subscribes to," and,
cryptically, a reference to the research of someone named
"Frank"). 

Overall, this is a rich and
intriguing treatment of a difficult subject. 
Weed’s criticism of the reductivist program is especially worth reading,
and she deserves credit for offering her own solution to the grounding
problem.  Readers interested in the
re-integration of consciousness and cognition would find much here of interest. 

©
2003 Ray Rennard

Ray
Rennard earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.  Among other topics, he is interested in intentionality, the role of
intentional concepts in explaining behavior and cognitive capacities, and the
debate over whether there is any need for a notion of "narrow
content" in cognitive science. 
He will join the Department of Philosophy and Religion at James Madison
University in Fall 2003. 

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology