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Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness. by Daniel C. Dennett
Review by: Nicholas Humphrey
The Journal of Philosophy,
Vol. 94, No. 2 (Feb., 1997), pp. 97-103
Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
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BOOK REVIEWS 97
philosophical and scientific work than its predecessors. Skinner does
not, of course, fall into the trap of downgrading the philosophy of
Leviathan because of its rhetorical character. But he does fail to con-
vince me, at least, that understanding its rhetorical character should
affect our philosophical appreciation of the work.
Skinner hopes that he "may have succeeded in raising anew the
question of which style [rhetorical and dialogic, or rational and
monologic] is more deserving of our intellectual allegiances" (16).
Hobbes reluctantly accepted the need to persuade, but he never saw
it as substitute for demonstration. We may understandably be less
optimistic than Hobbes about the prospects of attaining demonstra-
tive certainty in civil science, but I see no grounds for us to transfer
our philosophical allegiance to the art of eloquence.
DAVID GAUTHIER
University of Pittsburgh
Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness. DANIEL C.
DENNET. New York: Basic Books, 1996. 184 p. Cloth $20.00.
When the old blind monk, St. Mael, had inadvertently baptized the
penguins of Penguin Island, mistaking them for men, there was-so
Anatole France' relates-a considerable stir in heaven. The Lord him-
self was embarrassed. He gathered an assembly of clerics and doctors,
and asked them for an opinion on the delicate question of whether the
birds must now be given souls. It was a matter of more than theoretical
importance. 'The Christian state," St. Cornelius observed, "is not with-
out serious inconveniences for a penguin.... The habits of birds are, in
many points, contrary to the commandments of the Church." After
lengthy discussion, the learned fathers settled on a compromise. The
baptized penguins were indeed to be granted souls-but, on St.
Catherine's recommendation, their souls were to be of small size.
Daniel C. Dennett's new book is about the natural history of the
souls-or intentional systems, as he would call them-that have
evolved on earth. He begins with the very smallest, such as those of
DNA, and works his way up to very largest, such as those of modern
human beings, telling the story of their evolutionary relationships. It
is a story of unashamed progress from lower to higher forms of men-
' Penguin Island, A. W. Evans, trans. (London: Watts, 1908/1931).
0022-362X/97/9402/97-103 C 1997 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
98 THEJOURNAL
OF PHILOSOPHY
tal life, in which large souls have amassed their powers by cunningly
incorporating armies of relatively small ones. Dennett makes quite
clear his belief that, if we human beings now see further than our
distant ancestors, it is because we stand on the shoulders of dwarfs.
It is a book for laymen, attractively
and simply written, taking
little for
granted, and avoiding much factual detail. But it is also a book that de-
serves close attention from those already familiar with Dennett's work.
Dennett2 has remarked elsewhere how his mentors, Gilbert
Ryle and W.
V. Quine, showed him "the importance of addressing an audience of
non-philosophers even when they know that philosophers will be per-
haps 95% of the actual and sought-for audience" (ibid., p. 243). But,
here, he shows how the converse can be true as well. For, while writing
in this case primarily for nonphilosophers, he has kept the argument at
a level that is clearly
meant to interest and provoke his philosophical col-
leagues, too. Although he covers some familiar ground, he continually
brings fresh perspectives to it: taking the opportunity to float new ideas,
to revise some of his earlier ones, and generally to advance his cam-
paign against those reactionary
forces which still insist on there being an
explanatory gap between the physical
and mental worlds.
The most surprising development comes in his discussion of "the body
and its minds." The idea that a person's body should be considered an
integral part of his mind was latent in some of Dennett's earlier
writings.
But it seems to have been his reading of the neurologist Antonio Dama-
sio's book, Descartes'Error,3
that has now given him the confidence to
make the idea fly.
What Dennett now proposes is that the mind is distrib-
uted throughout the body. "One cannot tear me apart from my body
leaving a nice clean edge, as philosophers have often supposed [includ-
ing the author himself in his famous parable "Where am I?"]. My body
contains as much of me,
the values and talents and memories and disposi-
tions that make me who I am, as my nervous system
does" (77).
He is saying, in effect, that my mind needs my body not merely, as
has always been recognized, as a means of gathering information
and taking action in relation to the external world, but internally
also-as a consultant, a judge, a resolver of disputes between other-
wise unvalenced ideas. When confronted by a problem, my mind
questions itself about what will work or make best sense, and begins
the potentially vast search through a space of competing answers.
But before you can say "combinatorial explosion!" my body on the
basis of its evolved know-how and worldy expertise has already re-
2 "Dennett, Daniel C.," in Samuel Guttenplan, ed., A Companion
to the Philosophy
of Mind (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 236-44.
' New York: Putnam, 1994.
BOOK REVIEWS 99
turned its own wise judgments. In due course, these judgments may
be experienced by my conscious self as intuitions or gut feelings of
pleasure or unpleasure, but probably not until well after they have
already been decisive in directing my mind's business. The body, in
short, is playing a role somewhere between Sigmund Freud's "id," a
New Age angel, and a Prime Minister's "kitchen cabinet": and life,
quite literally, would be unthinkable without it.
I expect anyone who reads of this idea-in Damasio's book or in
the much clearer version here-will be struck by how obviously right
it is. They will find they know in their bones that this idea of "know-
ing in one's bones" is a very good idea. But it may be even better
than it immediately seems. For, as Dennett shows, it can be ex-
tended-fractally-in both directions: in from the body into the
brain, and out from it into the external world. On one side, there
are, as it were, mini wise bodies within the main body and mini-mini
wise bodies within those. On the other side, there are mega bodies
outside it in the culture and mega-mega bodies outside those.
Going inward, to start with, Dennett is set to wondering whether
this stored bodily wisdom is to be found not just at the level of the
sense organs or the muscles or the gut but in the elements of the
brain itself. Indeed, maybe every individual nerve cell with its associ-
ated synaptic junctions should be considered to be in its own way a
wise little bit of the mind: not simply a passive gate for information
transfer but an embodied little intentional system in its own right-
with its own beliefs, desires, and rationality. Only someone who, as
Dennett does, thinks of all intentionality as being derivative rather
than intrinsic, and believes in a version of what William Lycan has
called homuncularfunctionalism,
would want to talk this way. But early
in the book he has explained these views, especially in the excellent
chapter on intentionality, where he argues as plainly as can be that
the whole basis for the complex intentionality of higher minds is the
delegation of work to relatively simple suibminds. "Big minds"-so to
speak-"have little minds within themselves to light 'em, and little
minds have lesser minds, and so ad infinitum"
(except that, since the
minds do get simpler and simpler, this regress can eventually stop).
Dennett, as a homuncular functionalist, remains still committed to
the general philosophy of functionalism. But he now becomes the
first to acknowledge that, once we appreciate that the homunculi are
not merely subminds but subbodies, too, classical functionalism is in
some kind of trouble. It has been a central tenet of functionalism
that, if mental states are the same thing as functional states, it does
not matter what physical system is responsible for realizing them.
100 THEJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Hence all the thought experiments about minds made of beer cans,
or Chinamen, or silicon chips. Even so, it has always been recognized
that there are limits to such multiple realizability. While the mind's
central processing can, in principle, be done by anything, the infor-
mation gathering and the acting clearly cannot. You cannot, for ex-
ample, make an eye
to see with out of beer cans because beer cans are
not photoreceptive, or a mouth to kiss with
out of the Chinese popula-
tion because the Chinese population is not wet. So, everyone agrees
that functionalism has to yield to physicalism at the body's boundary,
where the receptor and effector organs are. The new point, however,
is that, if the brain is made up of body-like subunits, the same argu-
ment applies all the way in.
Thus, every nerve cell must be able to recognize particular pat-
terns of electrical stimulation, chemical transmitters, and circulating
hormones: it must "know" about morphine, or serotonin, or acetyl-
choline, for example, and it must adjust its own electrical and/or
chemical output accordingly. But, in this case, you cannot make
even a single nerve cell out of silicon chips, because silicon does not
have the right sort of biochemistry. Let alone, can you make a full-
blown human brain that can function in conjunction with a real hu-
man body.
As Dennett hastens to say, these considerations do not mean that
functionalism is wrong as a metaphysical hypothesis. But they help
make it clear that it is just that: a metaphysical hypothesis, and not a
recipe-even in principle-for actually engineering a natural mind.
That is going inward. But going outward, Dennett joins up with
another set of his old preoccupations. He has long been interested
in how the use of well-designed tools and instruments can help make
people smarter: a man with a pair of scissors, for example, is not just
handier, he is in effect brainier-because he can now exploit his
brain power in new ways. (I remember hearing Richard Gregory, to
whom Dennett attributes this insight, wondering aloud about how
much more of a genius he himself would have been if he had not
been born fifty years before the invention of the personal com-
puter.) But, by far, the most remarkable example of this trick of "im-
porting intelligence from the cultural environment" is the use that
human beings have learned to make of the mind tools of language.
So Dennett comes with gusto to a favorite theme: how the use of
language has raised the minds of human beings to a new and supe-
rior order of reflection and inventiveness compared to any nonlin-
guistic animal. Now, however, he has a new way of talking about what
language does for the human mind (although, surprisingly, he
BOOK
REVIEWS 101
leaves it to his readers to draw the metaphor out). It is that language
provides, in effect, a kind of culturally evolved body, a "body
of expe-
rience and knowledge" if you like, which can function to speed up
the mind's business in much the same way the corporeal body does.
Human languages are rich in acquired know-how, common sense,
manners, and mores. Hence, the body of language, just like the body
of flesh and blood, can act as a sounding board against which to test
the mind's evolving answers to its problems: expressing preferences,
arbitrating between possible alternatives, and generally helping to
bring matters to a quick and sensible conclusion. Language is not
just a medium in which we think, it actually does
some of the thinking
with us and for us. Nor, in Dennett's hands, is this merely an "airy
fairy" notion, that tells us little about human mentality in practice.
As just one example of its fruitfulness, he goes on to make some
quite specific-and so far as I know entirely original-suggestions
about the way in which heard words may begin to form patterns in a
child's mind before they have acquired any external referent, and in
so doing prestructure the conceptual world.
Dennett is returning to his roots as he develops these themes. He
prefigured many of the present arguments about the role of lan-
guage in Content and Consciousness4-and he has never been one to
abandon good ideas just because they have in the meantime become
relatively unfashionable. Indeed, I detect that the air is loud with the
sound of chickens coming home to roost. "My way of asking ques-
tions," he writes in the "Preface," "has a pretty good track record
over the years.... Other philosophers have offered rival ways
of asking
the questions about minds, but the most influential of these ways, in
spite of their initial attractiveness, lead to self-contradictions, quan-
daries, or blank walls of mystery" (vii). There will no doubt be read-
ers-including followers of those other philosophers-who bridle at
being thus warned in advance that they had better agree with Den-
nett or join the losers. But, though he says it himself, he has been
right about many things, and on the evidence of this book he will
have been
right about a good many more.
A good many, but not all, I think. The strengths of the book are
manifold. The weakness lies in the one area where Dennett has al-
ways seemed weak even to some of his friends, namely, in his cavalier
treatment of the problems of sentience and qualia. In the present
book he does not, as he has done sometimes in the past, simply-push
4New York: Routledge, 1969.
102 THEJOURNAL
OF PHILOSOPHY
these problems to one side. In fact, he raises the issue of sentience
early on and then returns to it again and again-like a Quiner return-
ing to the scene of his crime. He asks: Is there a critically important
difference between mere sensitivity and sentience? Is there a missing
link-"an x factor"-which makes sensory experiences conscious? Is
there a threshold, on one side of which lies nonconscious informa-
tion processing, on the other side phenomenally rich experience?
These are for Dennett rhetorical questions, to which he is sure the an-
swer must be "no."
The fact that most sensible people would still imag-
ine the answer to all of them is "yes" (think, for example, of the
difference between painful stimuli processed during sleep and waking
consciousness) does not faze him in the least He is determined to scoff
at the sentientialists.
Among the several devices he uses to help him in
this bad cause, I reckon the leastjustifiable is the appeal he now makes
to moral sentiment Our moral concern, Dennett suggests, should ex-
tend only to consciously sentient organisms. But everyone will agree, he
goes on, that there is not and ought not to be a threshold of moral con-
cern-an absolute dividing line between organisms that do and do not
merit it Hence, he implies, there cannot be any threshold for sentience.
As an argument this simply will not wash; and I am not sure Den-
nett himself really expects it to. But the fact that he argues this way
at all only illustrates, I think, his frustration at not being able to get
through and make his case in other ways. The pity is that he does not
see that he may be making a strategic as well as a philosophical mis-
take in pursuing this campaign. For I would say that Dennett, of all
philosophers, really has least need to be so embarrassed by the possi-
ble existence of an "x
factor." Indeed, he could and should be lead-
ing the inquiry into what makes the difference between sensitivity
and sentience, rather than obfuscating it. As we have seen, in other
areas Dennett has been one of the first to argue that there have been
qualitative leaps in the evolution of the mind. He himself has pro-
vided some of the best reasons for supposing that the involvement of
language, for example, has made all the difference to human intelli-
gence. Then why should not his own next move be to argue that the
involvement of the body has made all the difference to sentience? I
myself have suggested one scheme for how this could have come
about.5 Dennett says in his endnotes that he has not yet come to
terms with my proposals. But I think that, without loss of philosophi-
cal face, he could come to terms with them-and no doubt, in doing
so, improve on them. Indeed, I look forward to the day.
I
A History
of the Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
BOOK REVIEWS 103
Dennett has not been right about this yet. But, maybe, after all, this
is one more thing about which he wUill
have been right when the day
comes. I am reminded of an illusion that Dennett himself has helped
to make famous, color "phi."
If a red light goes out and a green light
comes on a moment later a short way to one side, then when condi-
tions are right an observer will see a light apparently moving
smoothly across the space between and turning from red to green
half-way across. The paradox is, of course, that it is as if the light
somehow knows to turn green even before the green light has actu-
ally come on. Perhaps what we are seeing in this book is the spectacle
of the world's most original philosopher of mind already beginning
to change color, half way toward a still-to-be-formulated
new theory of
sentience, yet so far not ready to acknowledge it even to himself.
NICHOLAS HUMPHREY
New School for Social Research
A Realist Conception
of Truth.
WILLIAM P. ALSTON. Ithaca, NY Cornell
University Press. xii + 274 p. Cloth $35.00.
William Alston defends alethic realism, which he defines as the con-
junction of two theses: (a) the realist conception of truth is the cor-
rect account of what it is for a proposition, statement, or belief to be
true; (b) truth is important. The realist conception of truth is in turn
summarized by a substitutionally quantified biconditional (28):
RCT (p) The proposition
that
p is true iffp.
Alston is willing to go beyond RCT to a minimalist correspondence
account (38):
MCA (p) If the proposition
that p is true it is made true by the fact that
p.
He gives no account of facts, except to insist that they need not be
mere shadows of propositions. He explains the application of 'true'
to sentences as derivative from its application to the propositions
that they express.
Alston usefully distinguishes between the concept and the prop-
erty of truth. He intends RCT and MCA as accounts of the ordinary
concept of truth, not of the property that it picks out. He allows that
another concept of truth might pick out the same property by speci-
fying its hidden essence; for example, the concept might embody a
0022-362X/97/9402/103-06 i 1997 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
