It has long been a habit of the human race to anthropomorphize those things
with which it finds itself sharing it's environment. People have said that
the sun wanted to burn them and that their car fostered a dislike for them
and even that their computer smugly refused to do what it was told. When
talking about human tools, such as thermostats and guidance systems, it can
be extremely convenient to discuss them as if they had certain beliefs,
intentions and desires, such as believing it to be above a certain
temperature or intending to reach a certain destination. In the attempt to
explain the workings of the mental, this anthropomorphization has caused a
question to be raised: "Do these objects actually possess these mentalistic
properties?"
There are two fundamental ways of answering this question chosen by
philosophers of mind. Those of the first camp(in the tradition of Fodor and
Searle) would emphatically state: "No!". On the other hand, those of the
second camp(of whom Dennett is the most vocal, but counts Haugeland and the
Churchlands among his supporters) would say "No" with a smirk, and then
after a few moments add: "Well, maybe..."
The mentalistic properties known as beliefs, intentions and desires(among
others) are all propositional, they have a certain "aboutness". It is this
aboutness which is the crux of the debate. It is unclear at first how
something can be about something else. If a person believes that the sky is
blue, we say that that belief is "about" the sky; the belief has a direct
referrent in the real world. It is much less clear whether or not it can be
said that a painting of a blue sky is "about" the sky. Even more uncertainty
is introduced when one considers the idea of misrepresentation, such as when
a person believes they see a rock when actually looking at a turtle.
Searle quite happily agrees about the meaning of the person's belief that
the sky is blue as being about the sky. He calls this "Original Meaning" and
claims that it is irreducible to simpler assignations and that it is
precise(there is a specific object, the sky, which this belief is about).
Searle then labels the meaning of the painting as simply "Derived Meaning"
in that it is about the sky only in so much as the creator of the painting
was intending it to be about the sky and that alternate interpretations are
possible and valid in which the painting could perhaps be about the ocean.
Another example(this one taken from Dennett) is that of a quarter-detecting
device used in an American soda machine. This device emits a certain
response when certain conditions generally associated with the presence of
an American quarter are met. This device is a quarter-detector so long as it
is used in this capacity and for this period of time, it can be said to be
doing things which are in a certain way about quarters. If however this
device was transported to Panama and the residents there began using it for
the purpose of detecting the Panamanian Quarter-Balboa(which is in many ways
physically indistinguishable from an American quarter), it could then be
said that the machine is doing things which are about quarter-balboas. The
reason for this indeterminacy of meaning despite a consistency of behaviour
is due(according to Searle, Fodor, et al.) to the fact that the detector's
behaviour has only derived meaning and can said to be about quarters or
quarter-balboas only in so much as that is what it's human agent is
intending it to be about. In both these cases, it could be imagined that a
quarter-detector could misrepresent a quarter-balboa as a quarter, or
vice-versa, but still there is an alternate interpretation in which the
detector could be said to detect neither quarters nor quarter-balboas but
rather any object of a certain compostion(specifically, the precise
composition which elicits a certain response from the detector). It is
easily seen that in this interpretation there is no meaning, only
definition, and there is no possibility of a misrepresentation because
anything detected is necesarrily a member of the class of things which the
detector detects. Searle and Fodor hold that this is the proper
interpretation of the apparent mentalistic behaviour of artifacts, action
bereft of any meaning or representation except that bestowed upon it in a
derivative fashion by the manner of it's use or creation.
Dennett however goes on to observe that humans are(in a materialist
philosophy) to a certain extent simply machines designed by Nature and
Evolution for the purpose of survival. He holds that every human action is
interpretable as having meaning only in so much as it was intended to have
that meaning in order to survive. He claims that a system which in a
human(or other animal) identifies a predator, is only about predators in
that it is intended to be about predators in a survival sense. In this view
there is a second interpretation, devoid of original meaning, in which the
biological mechanism for detecting predators is as much about any object
misidentified as a predator as it is about bona fide predators. Dennett also
holds that there are parallel analogies in humans to the
quarter/quarter-balboa example where something so simple as a change in
locale could cause two fundamentally different objects to cause
fundamentally identical beliefs.
From here Dennett, having begun by agreeing that artifacts could have no
original meaning and having continued by extrapolating that humans could
possess no such thing either, goes on to say that, unless there was
conscious design behind the creation of the human mind, there can be no
original meaning at all. He holds that people are, in effect, just complex
thermostats and guidance systems with derived or, as he prefers, functional
meaning. So perhaps, in its own limited way, a thermostat has a belief
after all. Yet still, it seems quite likely that there is a significant line
to be drawn somewhere between the basic, manufactured, predictable
"beliefs" and "intentions" of simple artifacts and the emergent
unpredicatable mentalistic phenomena evident in humans.