1. Name of Author of Book: Ray Jackendoff
2. Word Counts: Abstract (59)
Main Text (1260)
References (66)
Entire Text (1385)
3. Review Title: Semantic Paralysis
4. Author Name: Fred Adams
5. Address: Department of Philosophy, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716
6. Corresponding Author Telephone No.: 302-831-8206
7. E-mail Address: fa@udel.edu
8. URL: http://www.udel.edu/Philosophy/famain.html
9. 60 Word Abstract: I challenge Jackendoff’s claim that semantics should not be paralyzed by a failure to solve Brentano’s problem of intentionality. I think his account of meaning is paralyzed.
I argue that his account of semantics fails to live up to his own standards of naturalization, has no
account of falsity, and gives the wrong semantic objects for words and thoughts.
10: Main Text:
“There is no reason to be paralyzed by the absence of a solution for intentionality….” [Jakendoff, 2002, p.280]
Of late, there are two big ideas at the extremes in cognitive science. One is that the mind itself, not just its referential content, extends beyond the head and into the environment (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). The other is that not even the content of thoughts extends into the environment, for that requires solving the problem of intentionality—how thoughts come to be about and mean things outside the head. Jackendoff defends this second idea in chapters 9 & 10 of Foundations. Elsewhere (Adams & Aizawa, 2001) I’ve said why the first idea is a bad one. Here I’ll say why the second idea is unhappy, as well.
Jackendoff accepts the following:
(1) People find sentences…meaningful because of something going on in their brains (p. 268).
(2) There is no magic…we seek a thoroughly naturalistic explanation [of meaning FA] that can be embedded in our understanding of the physical world (p.268).
(3) The basic problem is to situate the study of meaning in the study of the f-mind (p. 271).
(4) Meaningful f-mental entities in cognition direct attention and make judgments on the world as perceived through the senses (p. 271).
(5) Meaningful f-mental entities in cognitive processes connect linguistically conveyed messages with one’s physical actions (p. 272).
Jackendoff also signals departure from Jerry Fodor’s views. Fodor (1990) wants syntactic items in the language of thought ( LOT, Fodor’s version of f-mind) to represent things—entities in the world. The meaningful entities on this picture are meaningful because they represent things, are about things in the world. “Naturalized semantics” is all about how purely natural conditions and natural causes can make this happen (make things in the head mean or be about things outside the head). Finding a satisfactory account of the relations between the representing item and the represented is notoriously difficult. Jackendoff finds it so difficult (“…one cannot make naturalistic sense of intentionality…” p. 300) that he is ready to throw in the towel (“…there is no physically realizable causal connections between concepts and objects” p. 300). He says “Fodor’s problems arise from treating the combinatorial structures that constitute meanings/thoughts as symbols for something, representations of something, information about something. Instead, I am going to try to take them just as pure non-intentional structure…with phonology and syntax. The problem will then be to reconstruct the intuitions that the notion of intentionality is supposed to account for” (p. 279).
Jackendoff thinks that one can simply push “the world” into the head as a conceptual structure or reconstruction and dispense with the hard problem of naturalizing semantics in terms of causal relations to an external world (pp. 303ff). He spends a good deal of chapters 9 & 10 explaining why his constructivist semantics is not guilty of solipsism. Nevertheless, I think that he should leap at the chance for solipsism. After all, solipsists may wonder whether there is a world beyond their minds, but at least their terms have perfectly stable semantic contents. Their worry is largely epistemological (“How do I know there is more than just me?”), but the semantics of the terms in which they worry are perfectly ordinary meaningful terms. “Tree” means tree when they wonder whether there really are trees.
What would symbols in the conceptual semantics of Jackendoff mean? He says “A speaker (or thinker) S judges that a term or phrase in the f-mind refers to an entity E in the world conceptualized by S” (p. 304). He is proposing a mapping from terms in the f-mind to other objects in the f-mind E, where the first set of objects are the representational vehicles and the second set are the meanings. This way we don’t have to worry about counterfactuals or causal chains or what information is. “…in a conceptualist theory, reference is taken to be …dependent on a language user….” (304). Jackendoff retreats to the friendly confines of the head because this will somehow make semantics easier and because the conceptual structures inside the head “do exactly the things meaning is supposed to do….” (306). Language is meaningful because it connects to such conceptual structures. On the numbered list above, we just have to construe “world” and “physical” as referring to conceptual structures of a mental model when we do the semantics of terms in the f-mind.
So why is this not going to work? I have time for only few reasons (but there are more). First, even for objects inside the head, he has to give the naturalistic conditions under which one object represents another. He gives none. Second, what he does say violates his own principle (2) above. How can the origin of reference depend on a language user, unless there is already language with meaning to be used? It would be magic to invoke meaning in the explanation of the origin of a system of language use. Naturalized accounts of meaning must avoid magic.
Third, since everyone is familiar with Searle’s (1984) example of the Chinese Room, through reference to it I can register my strongest complaints. Jackendoff admits “On this picture our thoughts seem to be trapped in our own brains” (p. 305), but things are even worse, as if that weren’t bad enough. There is no sense in calling what is trapped in the brain thoughts. At most there are structures, perhaps even information-bearing structures delivered by the senses. But there seems little reason to think these are more than semantically uninterpreted squiggles and squoggles (in Searle’s terminology) that come in through the sensory oracles. They might as well be Chinese characters to non-Chinese speakers.
Here is an example: I see beer and say “beer, please” because I want a beer. Now on Jackendoff’s view there is in the f-mind a syntactic object that I would call my symbol for beer. He can’t call it that because it is not a symbol for beer. It is a symbol for a perceptual structure that may occur in me in the presence of beer (but also may not). There is no nomic semantic intentional relation between “beer” and beer on his picture. Normally we would say that it was because I wanted beer that I said “beer, please.” It was because of the semantic content of my thought (there is beer here) that I intentionally tried to order beer. Thoughts do that. They cause things like behavior because of their contents and they derive their contents, at least in part, from their causal connections to their environments. And they can be falsely tokened—I could mistakenly have thought there was beer.
Now how can any of these things constitutive of thoughts be true of Jackendoff’s conceptual structures? They can’t. Take just the last one. If I apply “beer” to the structure conceptualized by me now present in my head and that normally is tokened in the presence of beer (but can be tokened whether there is or is not actually beer nearby), how could my thought be false? It can’t. There is no mismatch with my reality and no falsity according to me. So it is not thoughts that are trapped in the brain on his picture. Thoughts really can be false (not just conceived false, whatever that comes to on his semantics (p. 329)).
Finally, at the end of the day one often wants a beer. On Jackendoff’s proposal what one actually wants is a beer percept or an as-perceived-beerly-by-me conceptual structure to be tokened. Not me—I
just want a beer.
11. Alphabetical Reference List:
Adams, F. & Aizawa, K. 2001. “The bounds of cognition,” Philosophical Psychology, 14, 43-64.
Clark, A. & Chalmers, D. 1998. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58, 10-23.
Fodor, J. 1990. A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT/Bradford.
Jackendoff, R. 2002: Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Searle, J. 1980. “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 417-424.