Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 8 Number 1, April 2007
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Cattel, Ray. An Introduction to Mind, Consciousness and Language. London, Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd June 2006. 256 pages. ISBN: 0 8264 5516 6. Paperback 19.99 (pounds sterling)
Reviewed by
This textbook takes us on a personalized tour of the mind-body problem as seen by selected linguists, philosophers and at least one neuroscientist, beginning with Descartes and ending with Antonio Damasio and Noam Chomsky. Its student-friendly features include summaries of key ideas such as reductionism, behaviorism and connectionism, a glossary of terms, and ample suggestions for further reading.
Ray Cattell seems to be a linguist primarily, though he admits uncertainty about his relative allegiance to philosophy. At any rate his approach to this topic is rooted in the work of linguist Noam Chomsky, and his favorite illustrative devices are sentence trees and other diagrammatic representations of language structures. His expository style, however, is far more casual and discursive than this might imply. In many ways, the book reads like the entrée to a cocktail party filled with luminaries on the topic, with the author sometimes acting as interlocutor, and sometimes as the narrator of a historical discussion, as if to say: Oh, and there’s Jerry Fodor and Dan Dennett jumping all over each other. Cattell advises, ”…people are still jumping on Jerry. Of course, he also jumps on them, often with great verve and wit.” Ray, himself, though unusually personal and chatty in his own editorializing, rarely jumps on anyone here, and is exceptionally even-handed in his personal assessments of the work of those thinkers that he synopsizes for us.
Even the way he introduces the fundamental topic of the book is unusually personal as he considers in his very first sentence [p.1]: “If someone asks ‘Where are you?’ you might reasonably give any of the following replies:” His first four answers describe various locations – a room, a city, a place of work, a position in a photo. Against these he counter-poses his favorite answer: “I’m just behind my eyes.” He immediately follows this intriguing statement with the anecdote of an acquaintance who would answer the question after the same fashion by locating herself in her own stomach, an assertion with which he disagrees, casually disclosing the idea that [ibid] “…there seems to be some scientific evidence that the frontal lobe of the brain may be where the self is…” It is not until we get to the next to the last chapter that we find any discussion of this controversial idea.
Herein we are introduced to an expository style that continues with enough consistency that I will segregate this review into two parts, a description of the content and a discussion of the expository style; but prefaced by this disclaimer: Cattell and most of the people he discusses - around a topic that has fascinated me for years - do not think the way I do. Therefore I have approached this book the way a somewhat unsympathetic student might. Unsympathetic, because I believe he has totally left out many of those thinkers that have addressed the topics of the book’s title with greater force and acuity, mainly Merleau-Ponti, Wittgenstein, Quine, and Dennett - to name a few; and a student because I am largely ignorant of the work of the thinkers he does present. Therefore, although I cannot assess with any authority how well or how completely he represents their work, he does so with such charm and even-handedness that my attention to these, often contentious, folks at the mind/body party remained earnest, even in the face of my continuously niggling and contrary inner dialogue.
After a brief tour in Chapter One of the views of ancient philosophers on the mind/body problem, he introduces us in Chapter Two to his main cast of characters, often by pairing them up as if they were in dialogue. He counters his introduction to ‘reductionism’ (the idea that mind can be reduced entirely to brain) with the ‘functionalist’ work of Hillary Putnam as well as that of Jerry Fodor,which believes that mind is best described by the functions it performs. He describes Chomsky’s early functionalist period and counter-poses it with the work of Gerald Edelman, who argued that ‘mind is a special kind of process depending on special arrangements of matter”. In Chapter Three he introduces us to Chomsky’s search for a universal grammar, countering Skinner’s behaviorism with a kind of rationalism. This is where the sentence trees and other diagrams feature in our introduction to Chomsky’s notoriously difficult explorations of ‘deep grammatical structures’.
Chapter Four introduces us to Fodor’s ‘representational’ theory of meaning, via the concept of ‘propositional attitudes’, as investigated through the medium of ‘folk psychology’; Paul and Patricia Churchland’s arguments with it, and the author’s dismissal of their arguments. Chapter Five introduces ‘connectionism’, which, drawing on analogies with binary computation, discusses input and output nodes, where input is sensory stimulus, and output remains a bit mysterious. Cattell points out that while both Fodor’s and the connectionist’s perspectives are computational, Fodor’s is serial and the connectionists’ is parallel. After giving us, in general terms, a description of how networks can learn, he proceeds to a fascinating discussion of the problems in rule formulation posed by the past tense forms of English verbs, and the ingenious, if somewhat cumbersome seeming way that J.L. McClelland, and D.E. Rumelhart show how neural networks might account for the way children learn the rules for forming the past tense of English verbs.
Chapter Six introduces us to a controversy of the late 1980’s by way of a series of ‘doubles matches’ wherein he outlines the clash between classical (it only becomes clear much later what constitutes the ‘classical approach’) and connectionist perspectives, through S. Pinker and A. Prince’s technical analysis and evaluation of McClelland, and Rumelhart’s neural network model, followed by a much more fundamental critique by Jerry Fodor and Z.W. Plyshyn.
In Chapters Seven and Eight, Cattell discusses consciousness directly. He begins by shading the difference between ‘conscious’ and ‘aware’; describes research into the dawn of awareness in infants; Thomas Nagel’s speculation on what it might be like to be a bat; and then Frank Jackson’s thought experiment about what happens when a specialist in the neurophysiology of vision, imprisoned in an entirely black and white world, is released into a color world - in an exploration of ‘physicalism’ - whether physical information is adequate to understanding experience. He also describes Chomsky’s remarkable take on the mind body/problem, wherein Chomsky attempts to debunk our intuition that we don’t know as much about mind as we do about body. Chomsky observes that our understanding of matter (body) is extremely tentative, but because of his own work, our understanding of mind is much greater!
The closest Cattell gets to being vituperative or dismissive is when he discusses ‘neurophilosopher’ Patricia Churchland’s reductionism, and it is Churchland’s purported dismissiveness of views other than her own that seems to peeve him the most. Reductionism in its various flavors is discussed through he rest of Chapter Eight, with the conclusion that, in Cattell’s estimation neither the neurophysiologists nor the philosophers have gotten very far with the nub of the mind/body problem.
The final two chapters are distinct, but in very different ways. To start off Chapter Nine [p.127] Cattell says “Of all the authors who write about consciousness, Antonio Damasio is the author I admire most.” before going on in the next three paragraphs to state Damasio’s qualifications as [ibid] “…the most brilliant neuroscientist in the world.” There’s no back and forth in this chapter; simply a clear straight out description of Damasio’s obliteration of Cartesian Dualism. Chapter Ten is focused on language, also with little counter-position of ideas, and almost exclusively on a description of the evolution of Chomsky’s ‘classical’ approach. After an initial discussion of the surprising complexity of language, and the distinction between language competence and language performance, he dives into a rigorous, though not exactly pellucid, explanation of ‘generative grammar’.
Doubtless you’ve noticed a profusion of ‘scare quotes” in the above descriptions. Cattell started off using them too, but then admits to having gotten tired of them. I’ve persisted, but before I get into why, I’d like to make one general observation on the content of the book. It seems to me that there are at least two very basic approaches to the relationship between language and the mind, and they have to do with where we feel the boundary between language and life to lie. For Chomsky, and apparently Cattell, the mysteries of language are to be unraveled by finding out more about the interactions of the mechanisms of grammar with innate features of mind. For Wittgenstinians like myself, it lies in a more profound understanding of the many functions of language in life, and how other neurophysiologic dispositions, (a crucial word, here) feed our language formation habits. For Chomsky, grammar is prescriptive, for me, grammar is descriptive (a poor kind of description at that), and this changes utterly our entire approach to these questions.
Now about the scare quotes. It’s my editorial shorthand for, ‘ I don’t really get this concept, but this is what they call it.’ Some part of this no doubt comes from my personal skepticism, lodged in what Dennett in Consciousness Explained, would call my own personal phenomenology, a prejudice that incorporates the belief that these terms are nothing but shallow fabrications, set up to forestall the collapse of a whole way of thinking. But some other part, I’m quite sure, derives from an excessively discursive style of exposition on Cattell’s part. The most egregious example of this occurs by way of explaining Chomsky’s bizarre seeming claim that we know less about matter than about mind. Cattell, rather than proceeding to make a point, or discussing the implications of the claim, launches into an elaborate, though very elementary discussion of the history of physics. This kind of digression is a commonplace enough tactic throughout the book, that I often felt quite distracted, and where he lost the thread, so did I. Also, although even-handed, his editorializing, while it did give us a wonderful flavor of the nature of the discourse, and philosophical discourse in general, was also, I found, often distracting from my concentration on the flow of ideas, and I would get lost following ‘who thought what’ and fail to understand ‘what it was, that who thought’.