Bakker acknowledges that since giving up on intentionality entails giving up the mind, indeed the self, the consequences of eliminativism seem dire: You could say the scientific overthrow of our traditional theoretical understanding of ourselves amounts to a kind of doomsday, the extinction of the humanity we have historically taken ourselves to be. Billions of “selves,” if not people, would die -- at least for the purposes of theoretical knowledge! Here, as Bakker notes, he is echoing Jerry Fodor, who in Psychosemantics wrote: [I]f commonsense intentional psychology really were to collapse, that would be, beyond comparison, the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species; if we’re that wrong about the mind, then that’s the wrongest we’ve ever been about anything. The collapse of the supernatural, for example, didn’t compare; theism never came close to being as intimately involved in our thought and our practice -- especially our practice -- as belief/desire explanation is… We’ll be in deep, deep trouble if we have to give it up. I’m dubious, in fact, that we can give it up; that our intellects are so constituted that doing without it (I mean really doing without it; not just philosophical loose talk) is a biologically viable option. But be of good cheer; everything is going to be all right. (p. xii) Fodor’s certainly correct, both about the consequences of eliminativism, and about everything’s nevertheless being all right. Or at least, everything’s going to be all right for commonsense intentional psychology; for scientism and materialism, not so much. For we cannot possibly be wrong about commonsense intentional psychology. We know that eliminativism must be false. We needn’t worry about suffering post-intentional depression because there’s no such thing as our ever being post-intentional. But scientism and materialism really do entail eliminativism or post-intentionalism. Hence they must be false too. This is, of course, ground I’ve covered in great detail in several places. There is, for example, the very thorough critique I’ve given of Rosenberg’s book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality and some of his other writings in a series of posts. I there show that none of the arguments for eliminativism is any good, and that eliminativism cannot solve the incoherence problem -- the problem of finding a way to deny the existence of intentionality without implicitly presupposing the existence of intentionality. Bakker tells us that, though he once found the objections to eliminativism compelling, he now takes the post-intentional “worst case scenario” to be a “live possibility” worthy of exploration. It seems to me, though, that he doesn’t really say anything new by way of making eliminativism plausible, at least not in the present article. Here I want to comment on three issues raised in his essay. The first is the reason he gives for thinking that the incoherence problem facing eliminativism isn’t serious. The second is the question of why, as Bakker puts it, we are “so convinced that we are the sole exception, the one domain that can be theoretically cognized absent the prostheses of science.” The third is the question of why more people haven’t considered “what… a post-intentional future [would] look like,” a fact that “amazes” Bakker.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 01:14:10 +0000
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