However there are a large number of obstructions to overcome with the connectionist computational theory of mind, and although proponents of it want us to give up on rule-based systems of explanation such as the classicists version, these things need to be rectified before it can be considered a sufficient theory of mind.

Although the connectionist version has a viable approach to association processing it seems to fail on such tasks as language and reasoning. The hindrances range in magnitude from minute to monstrous and include quandaries such as problems with the concept of an individual, the problem of compositionality, the problem of quantification, recursive thoughts/propositional problems, trouble with commonsense questions and last but not least the problem of systematicity.

The problem with the concept of an individual is an painless point to understand but is not so easily solved. If we have a set of identical twins or even something a bit more general like two trees of the same species, height, age etc. the connectionist system is blind to the fact that they are actually separate entities. There are a number of proposed responses to this dilemma but none of them are adequate.

The archetypal property of all our languages is compositionality and this is where another predicament with the connectionist CTM occurs. Representations are built out of parts and have their meaning based on the meanings of all the parts and from the way they are combined. Subsequently, due to the fact that our thoughts are built out of concepts, and are not stored as whole entities within our mind, we encounter major problems and all the attempts to rectify them turn out to be substandard halfway measures. After all, babies eating slugs, and slugs eating babies are two very distinct ideas whose meanings are assembled on the fly using syntax, and even though you may never have seen either sentence before you can understand it with ease.

Systematicity on the other hand seems to be one of the more obtrusive problems the connectionist CTM must face, and was identified by Fodor & Pylyshyn (1988). It states that the ability to think/create/understand a sentence of a particular structure is intrinsically connected to the ability to think/create/understand a sentence that has a related structure, in that, there is no human that can understand the meaning of the sentence “Jason loves Ashley” but fails to understand the concept of “Ashley loves Jason”. Regrettably though, connectionist models, even once they have been trained to recognize one sentence of the previous example, still fail to recognize the second. Systematicity must be guaranteed to work in connectionist models for their theory of mind to be a viable option as this is a key component of human intelligence, and, according to Fodor & Pylyshyn, is a given in the classicists approach.

The connectionist computational theory of mind, although on distant inspection appears to be a much healthier option than other models, seems to have just as many drawbacks as them, and once again, cannot be considered a viable option for a complete theory of mind without at least some of these issues being overcome.

The ones we have discussed would be a good starting point but there are also other smaller, but still very relevant ones that must be addressed. Such as, the length of time it takes to train a connectionist model vs the length of time it takes a human to learn similar tasks, the fact that back propagation in connectionist models appears to ‘cheat’ as there is no evidence of our minds working in such ways and the fact that connectionist models fail to recognize our recursive thoughts i.e. a proposition embedded within another proposition. Until such times as these are solved, the connectionist CTM is promising, but still has a lot of work ahead of it.

Opponents questioned the portability and reliability of such external artifacts, and the fundamental differences between internal and external goings-on. They also raised concerns around the fact that the brain has total choice and control and that cognitive load is increased when one uses external resources.

The Clark and Chalmers hypothesis, and what is commonly referred to as the Parity Principle, states that if in performing a certain task, a part of the external world functions as a process that, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in considering as part of the cognitive process, then that external artifact is part of the cognitive process.

All of the hypothetical discussions involved in the initial Clark & Chalmers paper are centred on Inga and Otto. Inga relies solely on biological memory while Otto, who has Alzheimer’s disease, relies heavily on his notebook, that he carries everywhere, for information. Otto is considered coupled with his notebook as the external resource plays a pivotal role in his cognitive processes. Coupling is described as a reciprocal, causal link between an agent and an external resource in that an agent rarely makes any decisions without using said resource. Thus the artifact is not at the end of a long causal chain but has direct impact on the agents’ cognitive processes in such a way that, if decoupled, behavioural competence drops as if a part of the biological brain were removed.

The four requirements of external artifacts for them to be considered part of an agent’s cognitive system are that the artifact must be constantly available when it is needed, and must be available without difficulty. In the case of Otto this means that his notebook must be available when he needs to look something up, like an address or phone number, and that he can easily access it i.e. it is in his pocket and not at home in his bedside table. The other two requirements are that the resource must be automatically endorsed by the agent and any information used from the resource must have been previously endorsed. Again in the case of Otto this means that any information he finds in his notebook he accepts as true and that he has previously confirmed the information. Although this fourth requirement is debatable, as beliefs may be acquired through other means, the first three are essential to the extended mind hypothesis as we shall see later in this paper.

An important aspect of a coupled cognitive system is that in using external resources we commit epistemic actions. Such an action is conducted to help determine the procedure to be executed, such as physically rotating a shape to see if it will fit in a given hole, and help with the decision being made. Pragmatic actions on the other hand are executed as a result of internal cognitive processes having made a decision already and have no influence on said decision.

One of the simplest ways detractors attempt to disprove the extended mind hypothesis is by raising objections to an external resources portability, but such objections have a specious nature. External resources can be considered part of an extended mind if they are there when needed and without difficulty, there is nothing that states that occasional decoupling cannot occur. It is unlikely that when we are asleep or in an unconscious state that our internal resources are considered any less a part of our cognitive system than if we were in a conscious state so it seems foolish to treat external artifacts this way.

Upon accepting the idea that we do extend our mind when coupled with external resources, and that portability is not actually a problem we encounter a much more obstinate dilemma; what is to stop an outside agent from altering or even stealing our external resource? This is quite patently a very real quandary that makes the use of external resources fundamentally different to those of internal ones and raises a number of questions that could derail the extended mind hypothesis.

The foremost problem is that of actual altering or theft of such resources. Obviously in the case of Otto and his notebook the chance of his artifact being sabotaged or stolen is quite slim. It seems unlikely that anybody would go out of their way to attempt to steal it, and it seems even more unlikely that given the opportunity an outside agent would be able to alter the information in it without Otto realizing it had been altered. But in the case of mobile phones, laptop computers and other more technologically advanced external artifacts these problems become more apparent and harder to detect.

However this will not prove the extended mind hypothesis to be false, it is just more likely to limit the types of resources we can consider a part of our extended cognitive system. Security of such external resources seems to be the major concern here, in that if we can make an external resource as secure as our own biological ones then surely these can count as part of our cognitive system. Software security on technology such as password protection is obviously the first step but physical security needs to be considered also. With such items getting smaller by the day theft is becoming easier, as such an intelligent thief can easily acquire possession of your external resource and have it sold and shipped to the other side of the world using an online auction facility such as eBay within a matter of days.

Nonetheless, since the dawn of human intelligence we have encountered different types of threats in our social domain, and there is evidence to support the idea that evolution has made cheat-detection or the deployment of social guards central to our success as a species. Due to the deployment of such social guards, it is stated that our cognitive load is increased in such a way that it makes our external resources development and functional poise radically different to that of our internal states or information. The conclusion drawn from this is that by increasing cognitive load, our attention to the external must increase subsequently endangering automatic endorsability.

Not to worry! This idea of Sterelny’s seems to help the hypothesis as much as it detracts from it in that he states evolution has made the deployment of social guards central. One may tend to concede the point of increased cognitive load if the mind worked as a modularized system but it is more likely that it works as a highly distributed connectionist net (Footnote #1). Such a network is comprised of thousands of nodes across a number of separate layers, and because of these nets distributed nature, social guards deployed in this type of economy are not only naturally deployed, but spread across the entire net.

Hence the social guard part of our cognitive economy partakes in any processing that involves social exchange thus cognitive load is not increased and Parity prevails. It seems that social guards are not the only thing that evolution has made a central part of our cognitive processing and that denying such external artifacts would seem to deny a lot of our evolutionary history, not just the feasibility of the extended mind. Our brains have evolved in such a way as to take advantage of such resources, including the pliable, external environment, for example our visual processing system takes advantage of the structure of natural scenes as does it use bodily motion and locomotion to take cognitive shortcuts.

We can begin to see how cognitive niche construction plays a major role in our cognitive economy. Niche construction is defined as the activities, choices and metabolic processes of an organism through which they define, choose, modify and create their own niches. This refers not only to their choice of mate, habitats and resources but the construction of things in their local environment such as burrows, hives, nests, damns etc.

We as humans similarly construct cognitive niches, for example, expert bartenders not only line up differently shaped glassware but do so in temporal sequence to the likely drink orders coming in, hence the problem of remembering what drink to prepare next is transformed from an internal memory process to simply associating a drink with a certain glass shape. It is now clear how other items such as Otto’s notebook can be considered a cognitive niche, and that such niche construction appears to be linked quite causally to our evolutionary history, without which our competence as cognitive agents would drop substantially.

It is also possible to consider language as a niche constructed by human agents. We use internal language in a range of ways, most commonly to motivate ourselves or help revise complicated processes until such time as we complete the given task. Language, whether internal or external, is a form of scaffolding used to help us either remember things (such is the case with road signs) or in an example proposed by Daniel Dennett help a chess player remember not to get their Queen out early (by internally revising what not to do whenever said player reaches for the Queen early on in the game, Footnote #2).

A problem raised by Adam & Aizawa is the idea that because of the fundamental differences between internal and external goings-on in the way that they causally drive action that there can be no unified science of the extended mind. To suggest that external and internal resources must act in the same way for them to fall within the one scientific umbrella is too presume too much, they simply need to behave and follow the same set of laws. Evolution has made us capable of using the plethora of external resources available; this does not mean they have to be fundamentally the same. It could quite easily be entertained that somewhere in the future we come to the conclusion that intelligent behaviour or cognitive processing is simply the point at which a number of illuminating paradigms coalesce into one.

Along a similar line of thought, who is to say that the way in which our internal cognitive processes operate will be able to form a unified science? It is likely as we continue to learn more about the inner workings of the biological brain that somewhere down the line we discover that there are fundamental differences between abilities such as the way we do mathematics in our head versus the way our brains interpret signals of pain from our extremities. It is beginning to appear that unification is not an overly important consideration when it comes to the extended mind hypothesis.

To take a slightly different line of thought again about the fundamental differences between internal and external resources it has been claimed that Otto’s notebook represents an outdated theory of how biological memory works and therefore any text-based storage having role-parity with that of biological memory must be false. But there is, however slight, a definitional oversight to this claim; Clark & Chalmers were never attempting to claim that the notebook alone was a cognitive system simply that it plays a crucial role within Otto’s cognitive economy and hence does not need to have role-parity.

The idea that Otto’s notebook only supports derived content while inner symbols in a cognitive agent are considered intrinsic is another objection to the extended mind. They state: “The representational capacity of orthography is in this way derived from the representational capacities of cognitive agents.” and subsequently jump to the conclusion that the extended mind hypothesis must be false as the two types of content are fundamentally different from one another. But the problem here seems to be not the underlying facts of derived versus intrinsic content but why do we need to assume that an agents cognitive processing must be comprised solely of intrinsically content-bearing representations. Yes we can accept that these two types of content are different but to exclude external resources solely on the fact that they can contain only derived content seems outrageous, the relevance to the extended mind hypothesis is not an items’ content but the role it plays within the cognitive process.

The issue of choice and overall control was brought to light by Keith Butler who states that because the brain is the ultimate decision maker in a way that the external resources are not, the external resources cannot truly be considered part of an agent’s cognitive system, although they may occasionally participate in cognitive processing. This is an interesting thought but one that ultimately fails. To eliminate that which is external from the cognitive system based solely on this assumption leads us down a path towards eliminating a lot of the internal as well. With the current information we have regarding the mind it would be impossible to pinpoint the seed of consciousness where decisive control and choice actually occurs. One can only speculate as to how much of the biological brain is needed, and where in the brain these decisions occur. A single neuron obviously isn’t enough, but what of fifty neurons, or one thousand neurons? It doesn’t make sense to eliminate the external on the basis that it does not have the final say.

External resources versus internal ones leads us to another predicament, that because we have to perceive external information rather than introspect, this provides sufficient disanalogy as to exclude it as part of the cognitive. Closely shadowing this along the lines of perception, is the dilemma that mistakes could be made when an agent is attempting to access the information or external resource, but neither of these arguments have any force behind them.

Firstly, to exclude the external based on the way in which we relate to or perceive it depends entirely on our definition of the cognitive system. Clark & Chalmers definition treats the external artifacts as if they were internal, hence this objection fails on principle alone. However the problem with an error in accessing the information is genuine, for example, Otto could misread his notebook. Even when considering a case such as this it is obvious that our internal information can encounter the same sort of problems. If an agent is intoxicated or is highly emotional such as those under the influence of drugs/alcohol or people who are highly depressed/angry, then the chances of misreading information even from our own minds becomes possible. We also have the problem of false beliefs from simply forgetting things; an agent may believe they left their keys on the coffee table in the lounge room when they actually left them in their bedside table. These events show simply that an error has occurred during the retrieval of the data, not that the error is an error in perception.

In closing, it doesn’t seem that those who protest against the extended mind hypothesis have been exceedingly auspicious in proving their case beyond a reasonable doubt. Their demurrals, although some better than others, still fail. Minor problems and definitional oversights aside, it is unlikely that the use of external artifacts in a coupled cognitive system as laid out by the extended mind hypothesis can be shown to be incorrect. By evolutionary means alone the use of external resources seems to play a pivotal role in our cognitive economy.

Also the way we as human cognitive agents, especially in expert fields, use niche construction to help simplify cognitively demanding and complex situations, let alone how we all use language for similar means seem to permanently couple such external resources with our internal goings-on. There is likely to be a large amount of debate still to come on this topic, and a lot of issues that have not been covered in this paper but however one looks at the situation, it appears the extended mind hypothesis holds steady in the face of adversary, and it appears unlikely that it will be rocked at its foundations any time in the near future.

1. This is assuming that we are not symbolic engines and that we do operate more like a highly distributed connectionist net than a modularized economy. But in the event we do operate in such a way it is likely that social guards can still avoid cognitive bloat by off-loading into the environment.
2. There are a number of issues that we could discuss here but not all are relevant.

The main problems that the classical CTM encounters are Searle’s Chinese Room argument, the problem of homunculus, how there seems to be syntax without any semantics, the frame problem of relevance and updating and the cost of representational atomism.

Probably one of the more famous arguments against the classical CTM is that of the Chinese Room argument conducted by John R. Searle. The overall point of this argument is that we have the syntax in place but it is lacking semantics. A computer can use rules to interpret symbols but this does not mean it understands what is going on. To put it another way, semantics is not intrinsic to syntax, just because a computer can understand a set of predefined rules or algorithms doesn’t mean it actually understands what its doing.

Another more recent argument, again by Searle, that by his own confession he should have seen ten years ago is that syntax seems to be imposed on the system by its observers. The fact that we can make a machine out of just about anything and have it perform computation means that the processes are not intrinsic to the system but are completely abstract.

This spawns the problem of homunculus in that if syntax is not intrinsic to the system, and computation is defined syntactically, then nothing can intrinsically be a digital computer based exclusively on its corporeal properties. The computational theory of mind, always in some way commits the homunculus fallacy wherein they treat the mind as a little man inside the brain, and this little man uses the brain to execute his computations. However proponents of the CTM make a reasonable attempt at eradicating such a problem by supposing recursive decomposition. This states that there are multiple levels of homunculus within any system such that at the lowest level there is a ‘stupid’ homunculus doing simple yes-no, 1-0 type computations. Regrettably though the problem still remains in that the syntax is not intrinsic to the system, and we must therefore have a homunculus that stands outside the system to provide the system with its operating syntax.

There are a number of other problems that the classical computational theory of mind encounters which we have not had enough time to examine in depth here. The cost of representational atomism, together with the frame problem of relevance and updating, but also the fact that syntax has no causal powers other than those of the implementing medium all need to be explained and overcome. But that isn’t to say that the brain isn’t a digital computer, on the contrary, some other form of the computational theory of mind might contain a better explanation of how things work.

Stay tuned tomorrow for a short paper on the Connectionist Computational Theory of Mind…

Atomism refers to theories such as those under the social contract heading, as well as later theories that, although not entirely encompassed within the boundaries of social contract theory, do still have an underlying message along the lines of; doctrines from individuals whose ultimate goals and desires are purely individually motivated.

Social contract theory is a diverse subject with many different versions of it being considered over the years, all with their own purpose in mind; some were designed to protect the individual from oppression from a sovereign, while others were used to justify the power that the sovereign had. Atomism is also used to describe those theories or doctrines that portray a purely instrumental view of society or more contemporary doctrines such as those that defend individuals and their rights first, rather than societies. This is where primacy of rights emerges, where we can finally give a solid definition, in Taylor’s eyes, of what he believes atomism to be and ultimately examine the grounds behind him disagreeing with it.

Political and moral atomism in Taylor’s terms were those doctrines first outlined by John Locke and Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, at approximately the same time as the revolution, in terms of normative discourse, occurred. This was a period of time when philosophical norms were established through orderly conversation. Hobbes was always considered a psychological hedonist, as his views that all of mans voluntary actions are motivated by the desire for self-pleasure or selfpreservation shocked many a person. Locke on the other hand rejected metaphysics completely and was firmly of the belief that knowledge can only be obtained through experience and reflection on experience. It was for this reason he thoroughly despised the Scholastic philosophers. However when it came to finding a consistent moral theory in Locke’s writings it becomes impossible as he slides around from hedonist theories to the possibility of morality being like a mathematical science.

The characteristics of the aforementioned political and moral doctrines were all centralised around one core idea, the idea of primacy of rights. To put it in simple terms it states that certain rights should be granted to individuals but those same rights should not be granted to a society or a group. Primacy of rights theories such as these bind such rights unconditionally to men and take these rights as their fundamental principle, or at least as one of their fundamental principles. More precisely, what is meant by this is that the rights of the individual are of first concern and that our obligation to belong to a society or group, or to obey an authority that has been put in place, is seen as derivative i.e. it is laid on us conditionally and we need only consent to and accept it if it is to our advantage (as an individual). Atomism is a view about human nature, in that it affirms the self-sufficiency of man, even when he is outside a society.

One of the things that puzzled Taylor, and provided him with a reason to question political and moral atomism as a whole (if not even disagree with it) was that he found it hard to understand how such a doctrine can be started with an assertion of individuals rights over a societies, and on top of that to give them primacy. As he and most others against political and moral atomism conclude, this isn’t a good argument to start with. If someone was to come to you and say “The Prime Minister of Australia is actually a supernatural being from the core of the universe” any sane person would find this difficult to believe. They might do a better job of convincing you of this if they started somewhere a lot further down the line and gave you reasons why it is true, slowly working up to dropping this line on you.

In saying that man is self-sufficient on his own, it may have already been evident to some that political and moral atomism affirms this, but the primacy of rights doctrine needs to be giving this sort of background as there are a lot of philosophers, usually proponents of it, who will vigorously deny such statements. They attempt to maintain that the assertion of rights is not dependent on any particular view about man’s nature.

To put it another way, it is impossible to ascribe the natural right of an individual doing or enjoying something without manifesting a certain property or properties as it is an essential part of said rights i.e. if A has a natural, not just legal right to do or enjoy X, it is impossible for us to deny it E, as X is essentially a part of manifesting E (X is a causally necessary condition of manifesting E and E is essentially a part of the manifestation of X, X is doing or enjoying a given freedom based on the fact that all individuals are E’s; rational life-forms exhibiting essentially human capacities).

Thus asserting a right has a much wider range of issues falling under its belt, other than the aforementioned ones. Based on this it is hard to comprehend why any doctrines that assert the rights of an individual while denying those same rights to society can be believed. Taylor knew that asserting these rights needed a certain conceptual background outlining the worth of certain moral properties and capacities. As such, if all individuals have said property E in them (rational life forms exhibiting human capacities), it is an inescapable conclusion that these capacities and properties should be fostered and supported in appropriate ways and hence developed.

The atomist on the other hand would have you believe that we should simply leave individuals to their own devices and not interfere in any way. This is a difficult thing to comprehend, as we shall discuss shortly, the human capacity for choice is something that needs to be developed, it may be a natural right of a person to choose their mode of life or to decide what to do with their property but without development the capacity of choice can go askew. However those that support the ultra liberal view feel that the central consideration in their view is that of freedom of choice, and as such no choice can be judged morally better or worse.

Taylor wonders how then can we assert rights outside of a context of affirming the worth of certain capacities? Unless people can come to accept the utterly facile moral psychology of modern empiricism, ultra liberalism can never appear completely unconnected with any affirmation of the worth of these human capacities i.e. unless people accept that the capacity of choice is a skill that we are born with, rather than as a potential that needs to be developed and nurtured over time it can never be unconnected with such affirmations.

On the contrary, the proponents of this ultra liberal view are wary of agreeing that any assertion of rights involves an affirmation about realising certain human capacities as they fear that any affirmation of this sort offers a reason for restricting freedom.

Given that all this is true, it becomes blatantly obvious to Taylor that we can’t ascribe natural rights without affirming the worth of certain human capacities. As a result other consequences arise; the entire atomist doctrine can be undermined simply by showing that man is not self sufficient and that his human capacities cannot be developed outside of a society. There are so many easily noticed examples of why this is true, the most obvious having to be that of children growing up, their ability to make choices and come to independent moral convictions would never be fully developed if there was no society in which to develop them.

Based on this aspect alone it would appear that an atomist view built solely around the primacy of rights is fatally flawed, as to assert the primacy of rights one must affirm the capacities. This cannot be achieved by this particular atomist view as it denies the obligation to belong to a society.

Taylor uses a very good example to show the enormous contradiction of terms that emerges if the primacy of rights is asserted in the face of such a social thesis; For arguments sake let us say that men cannot develop the fullness of moral autonomy outside of a society where it can be developed. It is a contradiction on a grand scale to assert the right to your own independent moral convictions yet go on to assert the primacy of rights. The reason why this is a contradiction is because it pulls us both ways, if we are to undermine the society in which we developed our own independent moral convictions we are denying that same right of development to all those that come after us, and as such we cannot be justified in our convictions as the considerations that justify the first condemn the second. It does not matter from what this conflict arises, it is a moral dilemma for us, similar to the ‘free rider’ problem associated with other social contract theories in that we cannot justify doing away with the society we have been developing in simply because our capacity for choice and independent moral conviction is now considered whole.

Another appropriate way that Taylor shows the contradiction is to take the approach of a person that is currently living in said society but their capacity for choice and independent moral conviction is not yet fully developed. By asserting primacy of rights one condemns the society to ultimate destruction and therefore denying myself the ability to fully develop my human capacity for choice, and ultimately freedom.

We can judge a life to be either full or truncated based upon the assertion of certain rights which in turn involve affirming the worth of certain capacities, it is thereby impossible to claim the morality of a truncated form of life in defence of such rights. As Taylor says: Would I be respecting your right to life if I agreed to leave you alive in a hospital bed, in an irreversible coma, hooked up to life support machines? The answer is neither yes or no, as in situations such as these the human aspect of life and the capacities and faculties that make such a life human have been reduced to zero. It is difficult to believe that anybody could assert a right to life as simply breathing, without such things as free movement. Obviously the situation is slightly different when it comes to forensic medicine but in cases such as these an assertion of rights is also an affirmation of worth, an hence such claims become incomprehensible as the life of this person is now a mere shadow of what it used to be.

Most supporters of the primacy of rights will deny these arguments a they are quite different to what they believe, however for arguments such as Nozick’s, whose writings from , to be considered acceptable one needs to establish a valid argument from the primacy of rights thus defending social atomism. Nozick seems to think that he can start from our intuitions that people have certain rights and that we can then build a society that does not infringe on these rights from the ground up, but the one thing he fails to recognize is that any assertion of these rights alone breeds an obligation to belong.

But for atomists another factor that they tend to throw onto the field is that of sentience, which in short means ‘capable of feeling’. Although such things can be impaired it is commonly known to be a capacity held by living things such as humans and animals that does not need to be developed like the capacity to become a morally autonomous person. But if such a capacity does not need development then no social theses about its development can be a valid one. We are capable of sentience whether we are part of a society or not. In this particular regard we would be considered to be self sufficient.

However Taylor argues that not even this is true, as Hobbes states that our attachment to life is such that we desire to continue being agents of desire and consequently we are not guaranteed a properly human life simply by living, even this aspect of our life needs to be developed within a group or society.

It has been found though that those that assert the right to be able to do what you want with your possessions are citing such arguments in affirming capacities that can fail to be developed. One is inclined to believe that the capacity of ownership of property or possessions is not your typical capacity that can fail to be developed. All adults, even teenagers and sometimes younger are capable of owning things, of knowing what they own and making decisions as to what to do with or use said possessions for, yet proponents of primacy of rights put forward such capacities for asserting such rights.

From Locke comes one of the standard answers provided and that is that the right to property is an essential underpinning in life, however to Taylor this is blatantly not true. For thousands of years people have survived quite reasonably and easily in communal societies, be it Aboriginal tribes or native American Indians, these are just two, among hundreds if not thousands of different scenarios going all the way back to the Palaeolithic period.

The atomist may attempt to respond by rephrasing the question, citing that the issue at hand has been misinterpreted, such that what they mean is under what conditions is one independent enough of society as to not be at its mercy for ones life. It is hard to deny that if the motive for ownership of personal property is one that you may be secure in your life then it is again obvious that you are less likely to come to harm living in a communal society then you would if you were not.

Unfortunately for supporters of primacy of rights though they are still unlikely to accept such statements as a major sacrifice is still being made. He is sacrificing more than just his right to possessions; he is sacrificing his right to a life in freedom, a much direr problem.

Another consideration that the atomist may claim is that a persons development of their ability to make decisions and independent moral convictions can be completely developed within an operational family and that this does not leave any obligations. If in fact obligations still arose, they would be out of gratitude for your mother and father than out of a sense of moral responsibility. The only obligations you would in fact have are those to your children and even these can be cut once they have fully developed these capacities.

But Taylor disputes this as he finds it dubious that such capacities can ever be fully developed within the confines of one family group, surely these are the type of things that can only be completely developed in an entire society? If it took an entire civilisation for the genesis of freedom to be realised how could future generations discover what it is to be an autonomous agent without said civilization In closing, Taylor states a number of very strong arguments for disagreeing with political and moral atomism. Although our families do bring us to what we are today our capacities to be fully developed only come by virtue of the society and civilization in which our families are placed, without such the likelihood of us realizing and obtaining our full potential seems grim. All of this puts significant obligation on us to belong as an assertion of rights based on the affirmation of certain freedoms. An individual can only maintain his identity within a society of a certain kind and as such he must be ultimately concerned about the society as a whole, including things like nature and moral overtone.

The main dilemma facing the mind-body problem is that of interaction, and how a nonmaterial entity could possibly interact causally with a physical object. There are other dilemmas too; like the overwhelming evidence that the mind is the activity of the brain and how drugs and alcohol could affect and infringe on a non-physical thing. Subsequently the argument behind this particular theory of mind is fragile at best and we must contemplate alternatives that have stronger premises and make more sense.

Around the middle of last century a mathematician named Alan Turing helped break the Nazi enigma code in WWII, and more to the point, designed a hypothetical machine that used symbols and a set of predefined procedures (i.e. an algorithm) that when followed would produce the solution to a given problem in a finite amount of time. This machine was eventually called a Turing machine, and a thesis known as The Church-Turing thesis emerged alongside it.

A Turing machine consists of only a few elements; a read-write head that can read and write symbols, a tape that is divided into unique cells of a predetermined size, a pointer, and a set of mechanical reflexes. Without going into specifics, it was discovered that one could create a universal Turing machine that was able to impersonate the actions of any other Turing machine simply by feeding a description of said Turing machine into it. In this way, Alonzo Church, was led to conclude that any well defined set of instructions or steps that was guaranteed to deliver a solution could be implemented on a Turing machine.

But what does all this have to do with our theory of how the mind works? A Turing machine, although a hypothetical device, showed us how our mind may work and led Pinker to propose the idea of the language of thought, mentalese, and how this is an integrated and integral part of the computational theory of mind. He systematically shows and explains how the popular misconception that we think in our native tongue is wrong, and how a richer language is at work in our minds.

A good analogy for those who know how a computer and its software work would be to consider mentalese as the programming language. Within this language we have representations that are sets of symbols and correspond to aspects of the world, while the homunculus could be thought of as sub-programs or modules within our software. These modules are only required to respond to a small number of symbols, and subsequently the system becomes a lot simpler. As Pinker says “The intelligence of the system emerges from the activities of the not-so-intelligent mechanical demons inside it.”

The computational theory of mind thus has two key elements, our mental representations and the processes or programs (sometimes called demons) that access them. As Pinker states, any complete theory of psychology needs to take these into consideration and explain their use. If a task is considered more difficult than another is it likely that it uses a lot more symbols or simply requires a longer chain of demons to complete it. The way in which we generalize from experience, or react to different situations that may be similar to others is indicative of our use of representations.

The criticism we shall focus on in this paper stems from Paul Churchland and Stephen Stich. Although both adopt different ways of proving their arguments, the conclusion is the same.

Churchland believes that folk psychology suffers severe explanatory failures, that it has been stagnant and made no empirical progress in over twenty centuries, and that folk psychology lacks the ability to be reduced to that of neuroscience and is therefore false.

Stich, on the other hand, stipulates that the overall causal organization of the cognitive system probably doesn’t conform to the causal organization that folk psychology ascribes to it and there probably are no such events as beliefs, desires, and the like.

It seems though, that for folk psychology to come under attack from these arguments, that it must first be deemed a theory. Neither Churchland nor Stich seem willing to take this point onboard and seem to ignore the fact that folk psychology may not be open to reducibility or to being proven false through empirical evidence. For folk psychology to be considered a theory it needs to employ empirical generalizations, which it does not, it is simply “a network of social practices that includes ascribing such mental states to ourselves and others, and proffering explanations of human behaviour that advert to these states.”

That aside, let us examine some of the arguments against folk psychology a bit more closely, and for the moment assume that folk psychology is a theory that is open to falsification.

The first two arguments that Churchland puts forward are the ones with less force, and are strengthened by the third. Churchland raises the first argument, that folk psychology suffers severe explanatory failures, citing things such as creativity, memory and learning as examples of folk psychologies failings. Horgan and Woodward suggest firstly, that folk psychology at no time attempts to solve these problems, and secondly, although folk psychology itself does not appear to address these issues, concepts derived from the core elements of folk psychology do. Cognitive psychologists address visual perception, memory and learning using the folk psychological terms of belief and desire.

Churchland also places the demand that for any psychological theory to be successful, it needs to be able to explain or account for a set of pre-established phenomena and must do so in a unified way. A prime example of this being false, as stated by Horgan and Woodward, is that of early optical theories. These theories were forced to try and explain facts that have since been attributed to the physiology of sight. Horgan and Woodward rightly state “There is no good reason, a priori, to expect that a theory like folk psychology, designed primarily to explain common human actions in terms of beliefs, desires, and the like, should also account for phenomena having to do with visual perception, sleep, or complicated muscular coordination.”

Churchland, on top of this, suggests that any theory formulated from folk psychology should be discarded as false. Horgan and Woodward defend this by citing examples such as attribution theory or cognitive dissonance theory, as these are built primarily from folk psychological concepts. Churchland fails to provide any argument based on empirical evidence and as such his argument is discarded.

The second argument put forward by Churchland states that folk psychology has been stagnant and made no empirical progress in over 2000 years, but this is false also. Over the centuries folk psychology has modified its approach in all sorts of areas, and has definitely not been stagnant, it has advanced in empirically progressive ways over the years. For example, human behavior used to be attributed to things such as enduring character traits, but is now more likely attributed to situational factors. Another example of its failure to be stagnant is that of appealing to unconscious beliefs and desires, which have been widely accepted since Freud.

Still another reason to suggest that folk psychology has actually been progressive is to look at theories built on folk psychological terms such as belief and desire. We again turn to cognitive psychology, which has led to novel predictions and surprises, all of which were proven by experimentation. It could be argued that although cognitive psychology is largely based on folk psychology, that doesn’t mean that folk psychology has empirically progressed. However the claims being made by Churchland and Stich are that folk psychology is radically false; but folk psychology cannot be radically false if theories based on its terms are proven, through experiment, to be even slightly true.

On another point, it may be true, that folk psychology is not even open to falsification from lack of empirical progressiveness, as folk psychology is not a theory. Folk psychology is not interested in generating new causal generalizations; it is concerned with making particular causal judgments about particular instances of human behavior. Horgan and Woodward state “It is not appropriate, we submit, to assess these activities using a standard explicitly designed to assess theories that aim at formulating novel causal generalizations.”

This point emerges much more clearly if you examine an example, causal judgments that are non-psychological have barely changed, if at all, over thousands of years. If we throw a rock into the air we know it will fall to the ground. It would be rather foolish to conclude that simply because this observation is not part of an empirically progressive theory that it must be false.

Now for Churchland’s third and final argument for the falsity of folk psychology, that folk psychology lacks the ability to be reduced to neuroscience. This is his fundamental argument, and his other two are used to enforce its strength, however Horgan and Woodward raise some interesting arguments of their own to combat it. Even if folk psychology lacks the ability to be reduced to lower-level theories, and these lower-level theories themselves are able to account for the nature and behaviour of humans, it does not follow that folk psychology need to radically false. Folk psychology was quite obviously, due to its age, never formulated with an eye to reduction to today’s scientific methods and theories. “Churchland’s eliminative materialism is not the only viable naturalistic alternative to reductive materialism.” say Horgan and Woodward. There is at least one other alternative in that of Donald Davidson’s non-reductive, non-eliminative materialism. Strangely Churchland does not mention this version of identity theory anywhere, and one can infer many things from this. Some may take the approach that Churchland never considered this version of identity theory to be a threat to his arguments, and as such did not waste time examining it, but had he thought this was the case, one would think that the stronger approach would be to talk about it and prove it to be false. He at no time attempts to do this and as such his argument loses its force, as obviously, as stated by Horgan and Woodward, Churchland is simply mistaken; folk psychology does not have to be reducible to neuroscience so that it can be compatible with it.

Lets now look at Stich’s arguments against folk psychology, his arguments state, that the overall causal organization of the cognitive system probably doesn’t conform to the causal organization that folk psychology ascribes to it and there probably are no such events as beliefs, desires, and the like. He interprets this as; folk psychology is radically false because the psychological events that control verbal behaviour are essentially orthogonal (independent) to those that control non-verbal behaviour, and that in general, our verbal and non-verbal behaviour is controlled by two separate cognitive mechanisms. From this he establishes that there is no such thing as beliefs, and hence folk psychology must be false.

This seems all well and good, as he cites a study by Storms and Nisbett to support his arguments, but this does not address unconscious beliefs and desires. Folk psychology only asserts that beliefs and desires lead to verbal expression under appropriate elicitation conditions, it at no time asserts anything of the kind for unconscious beliefs and desires. This removes any power that Stich had in using the Storms and Nisbett study to support his argument as all the evidence can be explained within the natural and plausible realm of folk psychology as we can posit unconscious folk psychological causes.

Stich also appears to do considerable damage to his own arguments by using folk psychological terms such as belief and desire without explaining whether he actually wants them to mean what folk psychology stipulates they mean, this is hardly a good thing for somebody who is trying to argue that folk psychology is false, let alone attempting to convince us that therefore, there are no such things as beliefs or desires.

More so, Storms and Nisbett, as well as Timothy Wilson (a leading advocate of dual cognitive control) who’s position Stich makes much use of, all explicitly say that non-verbal behavioural criteria can exist, even when the subjects behaviour appears to contradict such ideas.

Let us look at a simple example of why dual cognitive control cannot be true. There are many areas where complex processing is taking place and we appear to have integrated verbal and non-verbal cognitive mechanisms. The example Horgan and Woodward use is that of a university lecturer, writing on a whiteboard whilst explaining something complex. It is difficult to believe that if we have dual cognitive control how something like this would work.

Finally Stich raises the modularity principle as an argument for the falsity of folk psychology, in that, beliefs, desires and the like must be identical to naturally isolable parts of the cognitive system. Folk psychology doesn’t meet the modularity principles requirements and hence beliefs do not exist. But it seems that the modularity principle may not be a plausible idea as an intertheoretic compatibility condition as we shall explain now.

Stich suggests that folk psychology violates this principle in a radical way in that meaning or content only emerges from “great webs of structure” hence folk psychology is false due to its inability to mesh with lower level theories. But it seems that Stich’s argument does more than what he wants it to; not only is folk psychology in violation of the modularity principle but cognitive science is also, for it appears that cognitive science would fail to mesh successfully with the lower level theory of neuroscience, and neuroscience with the lower level theory of physicschemistry etc. This points out the enormous implausibility of the modularity principle as an intertheoretic compatibility condition. It does seem plausible however that each folk psychological belief may be made up of various cognitive science events, this doesn’t prove in any way that beliefs do not exist, it simply enlightens us to the complexity of the event.

The bottom line is that it appears both Churchland’s and Stich’s arguments against folk psychology fall apart under attack from Horgan and Woodward. The severe explanatory failures of folk psychology and the apparent stagnation have been brushed aside with very little effort citing the fact that folk psychology does not attempt to explain the things that Churchland claims it should and that although folk psychology appears to be stagnant theories based on folk psychological terms and concepts are still in use today and continue to be proven true through experimentation.

It has also been established that folk psychology does not need to be reducible to neuroscience in order to maintain its truth or compatibility as there are other theories available which Churchland fails to even mention. Stich’s claims, while more radical and complicated, are also voided by Woodward and Horgan with simple examples. The idea of dual cognitive control has all its power removed by examining how a person can do complex calculations in their head while writing them down, and finally the modularity principle is proven to be false as it would prove false most of our theories including quite likely cognitive science, as well as neuroscience. Hence we must conclude that folk psychology is here to stay until such time as some plausible arguments against it are raised or it is proven that it really is a theory. Until such time as this happens, statements such as “He is just mistaken to assume that folk psychology must be reducible to neuroscience in order to be compatible with it.” shall continue to reign true.

Ayer’s argument for his particular form of non-cognitivism considered various forms of cognitivism and found them all to be questionable or improbable. He considered both naturalism and non-naturalism but ultimately found that all forms of cognitivism fail and thus concluded that the best, if not only way to make any sense of moral judgments was to opt for a completely different strategy towards them, thus he took the side of non-cognitivism and more to the point emotivism as a whole.

Ayer denied from the very beginning that moral judgements express beliefs, he concluded that moral judgements are more a case of communicating emotions, or your own personal sentiments of support or condemnation to the world. These particular emotions or sentiments never claimed to represent how the world was but simply put forward an individuals personal feelings or attitudes and therefore they cannot be scrutinised for truthfulness or falseness.

If you were to say to someone ‘Killing small defenceless children is wrong’ it is the same as saying that ‘I think you acted wrongly by killing those small defenceless children’. The content of the statement has not changed, you have simply added your own personal feelings, or expressed your own sentiments in regards to killing small defenceless children. Is this a true moral judgement? To emotivism it is, and whether this statement is true or open to discussion as they are your own sentiments or emotions and hence are not truth-apt as previously stated.

Another point to acknowledge is that if one is to state ‘There is a fire in a house down the street’, this can be assessed for truthfulness or falsity as you are making a claim about how the world is as opposed to the fear that the house could be yours and someone may be trapped inside. This second statement cannot be truth-apt and therefore cannot be assessed for truthfulness or falsity as it has no such representative function. It does not claim that the real world is a certain way, it does not state anything at all, it simply expresses your personal feelings about a statement that has been made. Even if one was to say aloud a sentence regarding your feelings it still does not try to represent anything, it simply states your personal emotions.

It is sometimes difficult to decipher the difference between a persons beliefs and a person emotions or sentiments, and this is what can make understanding emotivism that much harder as attention to detail and wording is needed at all times. A belief is defined as conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence, while an emotion is defined as;

A) the affective aspect of consciousness, feeling
B) a state of feeling
C) a psychic and physical reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling and physiologically involving changes that prepare the body for immediate vigorous action.

These two definations, although not as clear as one would like it to be, do shed some light on the difference between a belief and an emotion. A belief is something based on evidence and is asserted as being true, someone may give you reasons to support a particular belief but this does not mean it summons up any particular type of emotion or sentiment in you, while an emotion is not asserted as being true, it is simply your opinion, and is not based on any sort of evidence, it is also possible to associate a physiological effect with emotions where beliefs are devoid of this.

As you can see there is an extremely thin line between a belief and an emotion, and based upon the available definitions one tends to wonder whether the word ‘belief’ in common usage may be better replaced by the word ‘emotion’ as it is improbable that people who use the world ‘belief’ are describing things that are devoid of emotion. Generally though, people who have a certain belief also have an emotion attached to that belief, rightly or wrongly it is impossible for somebody to have a strong belief without any sort of emotional feeling attached to it. This is one of the problems troubling emotivism as a whole and is referred to as the implied error problem which we will discuss a bit later.

Ayer’s argument against non-naturalism was austere yet effective. Moore claims that all moral judgements are truth-apt, and are rendered true or false by the concrete ideals surrounding the non-natural, simple and unanalysable properties that define moral integrity. Now according to logical positivists, of which Ayer was one, there are only two ways that a statement can be considered to be literally significant. The first being that a statement must be empirically verifiable, or alternatively it must be analytic i.e. its truth is evident from the meaning of the words the proposition contains.

For example, one can quite easily claim that ‘If I drop a bowling ball off a tall building it will fall’, as per the definition of empirically verifiable, one needs to be capable of proving or disproving this statement by observation or experiment, hence such a claim is literally significant. Also a statement such as ‘All living human beings have a heart beat’ is literally significant. One could claim that this second statement is also empirically verifiable as it is quite easy to prove by experiment given the right resources or skills, but that is unlikely to be necessary as its truth is evident from the meanings of the words contained in the statement and no right-minded individual could objectively claim otherwise.

According to the logical positivist moral judgements come under the category of being literally significant and as such if a commonly accepted moral judgement or statement is neither empirically verifiable or analytic then it cannot be assessed in terms of truthfulness and falsity as it is not truth-apt.

However one thing to keep in mind is that not all statements are either empirically verifiable or analytic such as statements about the dawn of the universe. While no empirical or analytical evidence can be provided for such claims they are commonly accepted as true. Another thing to consider is that when Ayer attempted to construct a criterion with which to judge those statements that are empirically verifiable he encountered extensive amounts of trouble. He was unable to formulate a criterion that did not count any arbitrary statements.

Regretfully or not, Moore seems to sink his own ship by agreeing with Ayer that moral judgements are not analytical. What his reasoning behind this statement was is unclear however it does raise some very major issues for the non-naturalist as they are now left with the claim that moral judgements are literally significant based on the fact that they are empirically verifiable.

On the subject of naturalism though a much simpler rejection is called upon and is an application of the Open-Question Argument. Ayer quite simply states that “Since it is not self-contradictory to say that some pleasant things are not good, or that some bad things are desired, it cannot be the case that the sentence ‘x is good’ is equivalent to ‘x is pleasant’ or to ‘x is desired’. And to every other variant of utilitarianism with which I am acquainted the same objection can be made”.

As you can plainly see from this particular extract, the Open-Question Argument does not have the sort of weight that was actually attributed to it and thusly naturalism cannot be concluded to be a plausible claim.

Given that Ayer has denounced both naturalism and non-naturalism, but fails to provide a criterion with which to judge empirically verifiable moral judgements, his argument against non-naturalism is not convincing.

Ethical concepts are then sometimes referred to as pseudo-concepts by Ayer, and these thoughts are further strengthened by his comments about metaphysical concepts such as ‘Reality is one substance and not many’. What is Ayer trying to express by these statements? Ayer is simply saying that although moral judgements or statements are not empirically verifiable and are not analytic, and as such are not literally significant this does not result in moral nihilism. The fact that statements that are not literally significant are classified generally as nonsensical does not hold with moral judgements as they possess another sort of significance, emotive significance.

This generates a couple of problems for his theory that moral judgements are emotively significant, firstly how does Ayer evaluate those moral judgements that have emotive significance? What criterion does he use to make his evaluation? Secondly, and more challengingly, Ayer needs to state said criterion in such a way that it grants emotive significance to moral judgements but still denies it to statements made by the metaphysicians. Nowhere does Ayer attempt to resolve these two questions and as such his claims that moral judgements are emotively significant and not literally significant suffer, making them problematical to support or agree with.

The likely reason that Ayer does not attempt to answer either of these questions is because no adequate response can be formulated that can achieve what needs to be achieved. By denying metaphysics one eliminates a cavalcade of possibilities that cannot be tested nor answered with any sort of transcendental justification. It is impossible to test the nature of reality, one can only hypothesise on it within the realms of human knowledge.

Emotivism does suffer from other problems, all of which impact on its plausibility. The first of these is that expressivist theories, of which emotivism is one, commit what is know as the ‘speech-act fallacy’ by stating that even though a particular statement or judgement expresses an attitude there are plenty of times when these statements or judgements also say something. Based upon this a person would be lacking judgement if they relied solely on this in an argument for emotivism as a plausible theory, as it is an invalid argument.

To look at the definition of moral nihilism it means to deny that there are true moral principles. What exactly is a true moral principle and how do you define one? It is a difficult question and astoundingly troublesome to define as society knows all too well that different cultures around the world have different moral principles, and what may be considered heinous or evil in one culture may not be considered the same in another. For example, suicide bombers who believe they are doing the right thing and believe that by sacrificing their lives and destroying so many others that they will live forever in a heavenly afterlife where all their dreams will come true. It is challenging for most people to be able to understand or comprehend the motivation behind these actions and as such adds to the overall complexity of the emotivist view. This is one of the likely reasons why Ayer did not try and formulate a criterion with which to assess those moral judgements that are emotively significant. How can you formulate a criterion for assessing moral judgements if the emotions attached to certain actions differ the world over? In one country or society an emotion of outrage, loss and sadness for a man who murders his own wife for committing adultery is the customary reaction, and as such is considered to be morally wrong, but in another country it may be an accepted form of retribution to which no reaction or emotion is warranted.

This also leads us to another problematic scenario that Simon Blackburn brought to light. Emotivism also comes under the projectionism bracket and what we are actually doing when we make a judgement or statement is projecting our emotions onto the world. When we say ‘Rape is wrong’ we are treating ‘wrong’ as if it is a quality of rape, we are projecting our sentiments onto it in such a way that ‘wrong’ becomes a predicate of ‘rape’. What are the implications for moral judgements based on this? If we are to think and speak of goodness as a property, when said property doesn’t actually exist, isn’t our way of thinking and speaking critically flawed? This leads to the elimination of our particular form of moralizing, or at a bare minimum a re-evaluation and revision of it, as this way of thinking can realistically be nothing but a mistake.

This leads us closer to a text book definitional version of moral nihilism as if no clear moral judgements or values can be established due to contradictory ideas then how can there be any true moral principles? It begins to appear that although there are moral judgements and beliefs, there aren’t any, in the definitional sense, true moral principles. So if right and wrong are expressions of our own feelings or sentiments, and these are being projected onto the world, how can we take seriously any moral principles? This is the shocking reality of such a dilemma as to fully adopt an emotivist theory of moral judgements one needs to consider all its short comings, which unfortunately are vast and seem to establish a few critical flaws in it. Why would a person follow their own moral principles knowing that they are ungrounded? If right and wrong are attached to our feelings, emotions and sentiments then if any of these change our moral principles change too, this excites once again the hypothesis that there are no true moral principles and thus by definition moral nihilism occurs. It is likely to be impossible for the emotivist to separate morals from being mind dependent as this is where our sentiments, feelings and emotions stem from, if one takes away the mind you can no longer call it emotivism as the basis for moral principles now takes a sharp curve away from its initial origin toward some unknown.

It appears that moral nihilism is an unavoidable outcome of emotivism and it is likely that Ayer realised this as he, as previously stated, did not attempt to answer a couple of the problems that were particularly troublesome. As evidenced in the Introduction to his second edition of Language, Truth and Logic he states: “In putting forward the principle of verification as a criterion of the meaning, I do not overlook the fact that the word ‘meaning’ is commonly used in a variety of senses, and I do not wish to deny that in some of these senses a statement may properly be said to be meaningful even though it is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable”.

This unfortunately is a weak defence for emotivism and as such it appears that its explanations for the source of moral judgements and the theory as a whole suffer, the dilemmas it tries to work through are not successfully solved and regretfully moral nihilism is the outcome. This is somewhat disappointing because the theory as whole seems to have a lot of promise but until such times as a response to these problems can be formulated it cannot be treated as a plausible account of moral judgements.