Topic:  Burge’s “Individualism and the Mental”
 

*Distinguish oblique and non-oblique occurrences of terms.  Intentional discourse is mentalistic discourse with oblique expressions. (p. 76)

Thought Experiment #1:  Arthritis, in 3 steps.

    --We are asked to consider a counterfactual situation just like the actual world, but that the authoritative language users (e.g.,
    “physicians, lexicographers, and informed laymen”) use ‘arthritis’ to refer to rheumatoid ailments outside the joints as well. (p.
    78)

    “However we describe the patient’s attitudes in the counterfactual situation, it will not be with a term or phrase extensionally
    equivalent with ‘arthritis’.  So the patient’s counterfactual attitude contents differ from his actual ones.

    The upshot of these reflections is that the patient’s mental contents differ while his entire physical and non-intentional mental
    histories, considered in isolation from their social context, remain the same.” (p. 79)

    [On p. 84 Burge explains how the arthritis story could be told in reverse.]

*On pp. 80-81, Burge discusses the many ways in which we incompletely understand certain terms.  This incomplete understanding is essential for generating arthritis-style cases.

*Big point:  Burge argues that our environment and linguistic community partially determine not only what our words mean (this point has been well-known), but also what mental states we are in (e.g., see footnote 2).

    “We have to take account of a person’s community in interpreting his words and describing his attitudes—and this holds in the
    foreign case as well as in the domestic case.

    The reversal of the thought experiment brings home the important point that even those propositional attitudes not infected
    by incomplete understanding depend for their content on social factors that are independent of the individual, asocially and
    non-intentionally described.  For if the social environment had been appropriately different, the contents of those attitudes would
    have been different.” (pp. 84-85).

    More of Burge’s anti-individualism:
    “Approaches to the mental that I shall later criticize as excessively individualistic tend to assimilate environmental aspects of
    mental phenomena to either the factive-verb or indexical-reference paradigm.  (Cf. note 2.)  This sort of assimilation suggests
    that one might maintain a relatively clearcut distinction between extra-mental and mental aspects of mentalistic attributions.
    And it may encourage the idea that the distinctively mental aspects can be understood fundamentally in terms of the individual’s
    abilities, dispositions, states, and so forth, considered in isolation from his social surroundings.  Our argument undermines this
    latter suggestion.  Social context infects even the distinctively mental features of mentalistic attributions.  No man’s intentional
    mental phenomena are insular.  Every man is a piece of the social continent, a part of the social main.” (p. 87)

*Burge thinks that the first step of the arthritis example is the most likely point of attack, and he spends much time defending it from objections.

    Objection 1:  “In fact, there is a line of resistance that is second nature to linguistically oriented philosophers.  According to this
    line, we should deny that, say, the patient really believed or thought that arthritis can occur outside of joints because he
    misunderstood the word ‘arthritis’.  More generally, we should deny that a subject could have any attitudes whose contents he
    incompletely understands.” (p. 89)

    E.g., think of hearing a foreigner misuse a word (p. 89) or someone thinking that an orangutan is a fruit drink (pp. 90-91).

        Burge’s response:  “But even our brief discussion of the matter should have suggested the beginnings of generalizations
        about differences between cases where reinterpretation is standard and cases where it is not.  A person’s overall linguistic
        competence, his allegiance and responsibility to communal standards, the degree, source, and type of misunderstanding, the
        purposes of the report—all affect the issue.  From a theoretical point of view, it would be a mistake to try to assimilate the
        cases in one direction or another.  We do not want to credit a two-year-old who memorizes ‘e=mc²’ with belief in relativity
        theory.  But the patient’s attitudes involving the notion of arthritis should not be assimilated to the foreigner’s
        uncomprehending pronunciations.” (pp. 91-92)

    Objections 2-5 are objections that grant that we can attribute content that contains terms that the subject understands
    incompletely.

    Objection 2:  The subject has a (true) de re attitude that is mischaracterized by the word ‘arthritis’. (p. 92)

        Burge’s response:  “The subject will probably have such a belief in this case.  But it hardly accounts for the relevant
        attributions.  In particular, it ignores the oblique occurrence of ‘arthritis’ in the original ascription.  Such occurrences bear on
        a characterization of the subject’s viewpoint.  The subject thinks of the disease in his thigh (and of his arthritis) in a certain
        way.  He thinks of each disease that it is arthritis.  Other terms for arthritis (or for the actual trouble in his thigh) may not
        enable us to describe his attitude content nearly as well.” (p. 92)

    Objection 3:  The subject’s content is indefinite. (p. 93)

        Burge’s response:  Burge flatly denies this.  The content of the subject’s belief is definite—he believes that it is arthritis in his
        thigh.

    Objection 4:  Use a term that makes the subject’s belief true, even if we have to make up the term (e.g., ‘chofa’). (p. 93)

    Objection 5:  The subject is committing a meta-linguistic error. (p. 93)

        Burge responds to these last two objections together.  Here are some of his responses:

        1. We do not make these moves when the subject incompletely understands a term but has what we normally describe as a
        true belief—e.g., that he has arthritis in his wrist.
        2. It is unclear how we should re-interpret the belief.
        3. When corrected, the subject generally changes his belief.
        4. Objections 4 and 5 could both be true, but they wouldn’t yet deny that the subject also believes that he has arthritis in his
        thigh.

    Objections 6-8 are “philosophical arguments for revising ordinary discourse or for giving it a nonliteral reading”. (p. 99)

    Objection 6:  “One holds that the content clauses we ascribed must be reinterpreted so as to make reference to words because
    they clearly concern linguistic matters—or are about language.” (p. 99)

        Burge immediately responds:  “Even if this argument were sound, it would not affect the thought experiment decisively.  For
        most of the mental contents that vary between actual and counterfactual situations are not in any intuitive sense “linguistic.”
        The belief that certain armchairs are sofas is intuitively linguistic.  But beliefs that some sofas are beige, that Kirkpatrick is
        playing a clavichord, and that Milton had severe arthritis in his hands are not.” (p. 99)

    Objection 7:  A principle of charity requires that we not attribute such irrational beliefs.

        Burge’s response:  No, these errors are perfectly understandable.

    Objection 8:  The speaker must mean something different by ‘arthritis’ than we do, so we should not attribute to him a belief
    with a content containing that term. (p. 100)

        Burge’s response:  Of course the subject (partially) misunderstands the meaning of ‘arthritis’, but as was already argued
        people can be attributed content containing terms that they only incompletely understand. (p. 101)  Plus, such subjects
        normally will submit to correction by those experts who establish the word’s meaning (e.g., doctors).

        [See Burge’s more “big picture” comments on this objection, on p. 102.]

*‘Individualistic’ is loosely characterized on p. 103.  The term applies to introspective accounts of the mind, like those of Plato, Descartes, and Russell, in which direct acquaintance and infallibility about one’s mental states is assumed.

    In contrast, Burge claims:
    “…that a person’s thought content is not fixed by what goes on in him, or by what is accessible to him simply by careful
    reflection.  The reason for this last point about ‘accessibility” need not be that the content lies too deep in the unconscious
    recesses of the subject’s psyche.  Contents are sometimes “inaccessible” to introspection simply because much mentalistic
    attribution does not presuppose that the subject has fully mastered the content of his thought.” (pp. 104-105)

*Burge takes his arthritis example to refute functionalistic accounts of beliefs and thoughts:

    “Functionally equivalent people—on any plausible notion of functional equivalence that has been sketched—may have
    non-equivalent mental-state and event contents, indicated by obliquely non-equivalent content clauses.  Our argument indicates
    a systematic inadequacy in attempts of the sort I described.” (p. 107)

    --Note the possibility Burge discusses on p. 108 of distinguishing mental states from psychological states.

    --He also takes this the example to refute Lewis-style token (or type) identity theories as well (see pp. 110-111).  (The identity
    theorist could bite the bullet and hold that the very same mental state could occur with a different content.)

*Summarizing comment:

    “Crudely put, wherever the subject has attained a certain competence in large relevant parts of his language and has (implicitly)
    assumed a certain general commitment or responsibility to the communal conventions governing the language’s symbols, the
    expressions the subject uses take on a certain inertia in determining attributions of mental content to him.  In particular, the
    expressions the subject uses sometimes provide the content of his mental states or events even though he only partially
    understands, or even misunderstands, some of them.” (p. 114)