On intending

[Nick Thompson]

Dear All,

Here is where matters stand:

ERIC CHARLES WROTE:

Dear All,

I am Nick's Post-doc at Clark, and am going to attempt to do Nick-speak, which usually gets me in trouble. In particular, I am going to challenge him to be even more Nickish in his answer to one of the first points, and see where that leaves us.


Phil said: Can we agree that trying to describe the characteristics of whole system behavior, relating the simple to the complex, is a difficult challenge that prompts each of us to stretch the meanings of words in ways others feel uncomfortable with?

To which Nick replied: OH, Lordy Lordy yes.....  We sure can.

And I thought: ACK!!!!!

OK.  I guess I was thinking of stretching the application of words but keeping their meaning the same, if such a thing is possible.  Let us imagine a robot in every way indistinguishable from a Duck.   For most people, it would be a stretch to call it a duck, just because of its artificial nature.  But what we meant by a duck would stay  the same???  Mebbe not.  

I guess what I should have said was, "Contrary to the mythology built into ordinary language explanations of behavior, it is discriptive of our practices to say that we perceive and act on our perceptions of others intentions.  Given that their actual attentions do not reliably cohere with their stated intentions, we must assume that their data sources are non inherently better than ours.  Hence, it is NO STRETCH OF THE LANGUAGE to say that intentions are patterns of directedness in behavior. "  

But sucha postion would commit me to the belief that ALL.  meaning comes from experience, and this, clearly, is not the case.  PART of what gives "intend" meaning is the very Mythology of ordinary langauge explanations that imagines a space called the mind where images of teh future can be projected, compared, and chosen.  Thus to identify "intend" with behavior is to stretch the meaning for any one content with ordinary language explanations, as indeed we all are under most circumstances.

Damn it's hot.
Nick    

Nicholas Thompson
nickthompson at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson


----- Original Message -----
From: Eric Phillip Charles
To: sy at synapse9.com;ForwNThompson;friam at redfish.com
Cc: epcharles at ucdavis.edu
Sent: 7/16/2006 2:26:12 PM
Subject: On intending


Greetings all, and sorry for the lack of HTML in this. I am Nick's Post-doc at Clark, and am going to attempt to do Nick-speak, which usually gets me in trouble. In particular, I am going to challenge him to be even more Nickish in his answer to one of the first points, and see where that leaves us.


Phil said: Can we agree that trying to describe the characteristics of whole system behavior, relating the simple to the complex, is a difficult challenge that prompts each of us to stretch the meanings of words in ways others feel uncomfortable with?

To which Nick replied: OH, Lordy Lordy yes.....  We sure can.

And I thought: ACK!!!!!


I think the discussion hinges on the exact opposite of this point. In fact, 'trying to describe the characteristics of whole system behavior, relating the simple to the complex, is a difficult challenge' that must prompt us to strive as hard as possible to keep the meanings of words to be EXACTLY what we are familiar with! The challenge is to really understand our familiar usage. Many of the words we now take as 'cognitive' simply do not, or did not originally, imply internal things. Skinner had a very enjoyable, but not incredibly thorough article about this that can be found at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/skinner.htm .  He points out, for example that ?Since things also often move in the direction in which they are pulled, we say that we 'tend' to do things (from the Latin tendere, to stretch or extend) or that our behaviour expresses an 'intention', a cognitive process widely favoured by philosophers at the present time.?

So, to intend, means to ?stretch towards?, and it is a thing we can see an organism doing. Of course, the hard part is to distinguish between ?stretching toward? X, and merely stretching that happens to be in the direction of X. When I yawn, for example, my arms often stretch in the direction of the ceiling, but I am not ?stretching towards? the ceiling, and it would therefore be inaccurate to say my actions intend the ceiling. In contrast, if I stretch as high as I can, then try standing on a chair, and finally on the table, only stopping when I touch the ceiling, then the situation is quite different.

This leads us to the crux of the problem, if we dropped the bizarre cognitive usage of the word intend, and stick to talking about behavior as intending, we lose many of the problems which Nick and Phil are debating. I believe, and I believe Nick believes, contra the opening quotes of this paper, that this is the meaning we are most comfortable with: Let us say you have a friend who is a compulsive gambler, this friend says he intends to quit, and you do not believe he is lying about his internal monologue ? yet you continuously observe that his action?s indicate he has no intention of quitting! How do you resolve this? Probably, you fall back on the comfortable meaning of the word, based on his behavior, and assume he is speaking hypocritically, that his ?knowledge? of his own intentions is less accurate than your observations of his intentions!

Clearly, if you have ever made such a judgment about someone, you are already quite comfortable with the usage suggested. Even more clearly, most every adult alive has made this judgment repeatedly. What we really need to wonder is why people think they are uncomfortable with this usage, when they comfortably use it all the time.

Does that help get us anywhere?

Eric

P.S. Towards the end of Skinner's paper is a paragraph starting ?What is wrong?, the first half of which eloquently captures the beauty of the Behaviorist system better than any other short statement I have seen. I think it would jive well with the philosophy of the Redfish group.
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