โ Scribed by Philip Cam
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In various places Dennett deploys the following line of attack on the phenomenal features of mentality: Incorrigibility with regard to the content of one's mental states is necessary and sufficient for their having a phenomenology, and we are incorrigible only about our speech dispositions. Consequently, the phenomena of subjective awareness are just the contents of the inputs to the speech centre, and the phenomenal, seemingly program-resistant, features of mentality turn out to be propositional, and so program-receptive after all. 1 It is not clear to what extent Dennett still intends to rely upon such an argument, since he has retracted even the limited incorrigibility thesis that we cannot be mistaken about what we want to say. 2 Even so, Dennett still claims that "propositional episodes" or "thinking that p" constitute "our normal and continuous avenue to self-knowledge" and "exhaust our immediate awareness". 3 And while this may not exactly reinstate the argument (as the tie between immediate awareness and incorrigibility might suggest), it underlines Dennett's basic claim that phenomenological access, whether corrigible or not, is entirely propositional. This thesis is the primary target of my remarks.
One reason Dennett gives for denying the existence of a whole range of mental items is that nothing of that sort could occupy any possible psychological, functional role. This is a version of eliminative materialism. Thoughts, mental images, pains, and experiences in general, are not well-behaved theoretical entities, since nothing could have all of the features that we attribute to them. Therefore theoretical progress marks them out as candidates for elimination. 4 Such denials do not get the eliminative materialist very far, of course, unless nothing but the prejudical overlay of opposing theory prevents the associated experiential phenomena from being accommodated in principle within a materialist framework. Hence Dennett's claim that phenomenological access is propositional. In effect, what we see here is a dual strategy for dealing with the program-resistant features of mentality. First one attempts the weak form of elimination just outlined, and then one
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