Review: [Untitled] Reviewed Work(s): The Meaning of Behaviour by J. R. Maze W. D. Hart The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 35, No. 4. (Dec., 1984), pp. 411-414. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0007-0882%28198412%2935%3A4%3C411%3ATMOB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0 The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science is currently published by Oxford University Press.
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odologically untoward practice however. It does so by requiring independent confirmation of the claim implicit in such a modular hypothesis: that the 'interfering' system is responsible for the incompatibility between the consequences of the grammatical theory and the intuitive judgments at issue. These, then, are some of the basic methodological tools employed by linguists working in the Chomskian tradition. As I have said, Lightfoot provides a clear and concretely illustrated account of these tools and of the ways in which they are put to use. Julia, on the other hand, rejects the project in which they are wielded, though he also seems, inconsistently, to agree with Chomsky and Lightfoot, that (p. 134) 'science. . . proceeds in steps, approaching complex phenomena through the analysis of their contributing simpler parts'. FRED D'AGOSTINO Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University
MAZE,J. R. [1983]: The Meaning of Behaviour. George Allen and Unwin. vi+ 186 pp. Rage is a natural human passion, and voiding it cleanly is fun; it is, I suspect, an engine which drives some, including apparently some psychologists, to philosophical criticism. Another man's rage can entertain and, on occasion, move us. But unrelieved bombast soon draws only contempt, not sympathetic rage; it is too little cooled by intelligence in spurting from its infantile sources. Wit stirs the anger restrained by intelligence without breaking the restraints; thus, whatever our practice, we prefer the idea of Horace to the idea of Juvenal. T h e pythoness at Delphi sat on a tripod to deliver her oracles. Maze's tripod is the conventional one amongst us, Science, and its three feet seem to be empiricism, determinism and central state materialism. When behaviour is decoded according to this legend, its meaning seems to be this: There are innate in the brain certain drive centres. We do not know what these are, but they are best specified by their bodily sources and probably include sexuality, hunger, thirst, respiration, avoiding activation of the pain nerves, and temperature control. They are natural engines; certain keys fire them up, and as they chug along, they cause the organism to motor about the world. In causal transactions between the nervous system and the rest of the world, traces are left in that system which can somehow hook up with its native engines, either fore or aft; in this way, both the conditions under which the engines fire up and their subsequent arabesques can become baroquely elaborated. T h e result is human life. In a sense, this rendering
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follows our understanding of actions in terms of desires and beliefs. T h e engines are the instincts which, elaborated, we misconceive as our desires, while the traces left by the world on our nervous systems are our beliefs. And that, plus a few references to feedback, is that. Maze's sketch of mechanisms in the central nervous system is certainly a sketch of deterministic causation realised in matter; and if we could trace out these long reflex arcs, watching them pulse would be as empirical as observation gets. So Maze appeases Science. But his sketch is far and away the prevailing orthodoxy among contemporary philosophers, however opinion may sort itself out among psychologists. So how does his engine elaborate into a book; and anyhow, what justifies faith in its sketch of a blueprint? That is where the rage comes in. First and foremost, his is an offering to Science, and while Her metropolitans may offer Her substance, the more peripheral Her acolytes, the more they are reduced to propitiating Her with invective against their superstitious neighbours. But then, what other service is there? Isn't anything other than Science mere superstition? In the large, Maze's is a what-else argument: the alternatives to his account are thus and such; but thus is rubbish; and such is fatuous; so what else is hard sense but his account? Once upon a time Hilary Putnam used to teach philosophy students to suspect what-else arguments; they are no better than the range of alternatives they suppose, and that range merits no more trust than the philosophical imagination sporting in a wilderness not yet pruned to perspicuity by Science, by an explanation of why those and only those are the alternatives. Maze puts no trust in intentionality. For the mentality of a mental state to be constituted by its intentionality is for it to be constituted by 'its' relations to other things which, alarmingly, may not exist. But nothing could be constituted wholly by its relations to other things. Each thing must have its own intrinsic nature; relations arise through transactions between things by virtue of their natures. So, at any rate, Maze seems to argue. At this point I began to wonder whether questions arise about the preferable sort of mind-body identity theory. Grant that we describe beliefs by their (intentional, analogous to semantic) relations with their subject matter; this is an epistemic point, and may be no more than that. Turning to metaphysics, any identity theorist presumably holds that for each belief, there is something or other in the central nervous system with which the belief is identical; and that for whatever is identical with the belief, there is a nature both share. A type-type identity theorist could also hold that for each belief there is a nature which it shares with whatever in the nervous system is identical with the belief; such shared natures found psycho-physical laws and make possible a natural science of interpretation. Token-token identity theorists who deny that there are any genuine psycho-physical laws presumably deny the type-type theorist's AEA thesis, and may owe us an apology for interpretation. It is very difficult to tell whether Maze takes a
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position in this dispute, but his critique of representation suggest that he might take the token-token theorist's side. Indeed, despite occasional pronouncements otherwise, much of the time he seems to mean that ultimately there will be no mention of beliefs in explanations of actions; neurophysiology will explain away action and belief. Here it might have been interesting to have had a psychologist's critique of Davidson's argument in 'Mental Events' from rationality against psycho-physical laws, or of Kaplan's causal theory in 'Quantifying In' of the rapport between a person with a de re belief and the subject matter of his belief; subtle and complex thought invite subtle and complex responses. Instead, Maze tells us that 'dual-aspect' conceptions of mind-body relations, according to which some nervous processes have 'mental properties' which cause them to work differently from nervous processes that lack them, do not deserve serious consideration. 'It is mere verbalism to speak of "mental properties of nervous processes" if by that is meant localised, embodied, intrinsic properties; any imaginable properties of nerve cells and events in them are plain physical ones' (p. 57). While Davidson argued from the incongruity between holistic attributions of rational propositional attitudes and one-byone attributions of physical states to the impossibility of psycho-physical laws, Maze preaches a sermon against the 'peculiar aura of sanctity attaching to the word "holistic" ' (p. 34); he makes no serious attempt to articulate the virtues and vices implicit in the notion of holism; he betrays no sensitivity to the analogues of inverted spectrum examples, like putting this in your mouth either because you are hungry and think this is food or because you are suicidal and think this is poison, which might prompt considerations of holism. (But he does invoke similar considerations in chapter six to claim that drives must be specified by their bodily sources.) Maze has no patience with subtlety, largely, I think, because he enjoys venting impatience. He fulminates against desire, intention, purpose, choice and agents not simply on the ground that they evaporate through being constituted by their relations to other things. All talk of the appetites and the will is incoherent because it involves the idea of an agent who has several really possible options open, who chooses one and who applies himself to doing it. But because of determinism, there is never any real choice about what to do; and self-starters are unintelligible because there would be nothing prior in terms of which they could be explained. T h e only way not to be 'pre-scientific, pseudo-explanatory and inescapably obscurantist' (p. 36) is to suppose in people's bodies nothing but mechanisms which, turned on through efficient causality, move those bodies. There is, I think, some sort of good sense here, but my willingness to make the mechanist supposition weakens the louder it is shouted at me. Indeed, the shout causes in me impious worries about whether, and if so why, people must ultimately be intelligible. When he turns on his peers, he goes to town. He ridicules behaviourists for refusing to look inside the black box, and on Chomsky's ground that there is no general account of what reinforces save what pleases. He ridicules
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the phenomenologists and the existentialists for their 'inability to generate any useful or intelligible psychological theory' (p. 126); here, he rounds up the usual suspects, like the transcendental ego, freedom and authenticity. I am not sure that there is any more argument here than Sartre calling determinists like Maze stinkers, or whatever Sartre's technical term was. I wish a gifted analytic philosopher would write a sensitive and sympathetic critique of phenomenology and existentialism; I am tired of my youthful prejudices. Maze admires Freud; indeed, Maze uses his own views to re-work Freud's. Parents so arrange a child's world that satiating some instinctual drives frustrates satiating others. This eventually splits the drives into two groups, one the ego and the other the id; the former are those of which the parents approve and the latter are those subject to parental disapproval. As the child grows up, all this is repressed and replaced by the delusion of virtue whose economic function is that 'if he retained in consciousness the realisation that he had given in to the arbitrary demands of others, that would be humiliating and painful' (p. 171). Of course, none of this can be explaining action by giving its motives. Good art and science, unlike morality, are expressions of the repressed. An impressive idea of Freud's is his programme to explain the detail of dreams, neurotic symptoms and mistakes like slips of the tongue on the hypothesis that they are actions whose detail is accounted for by the detailed content of the beliefs and desires invoked to explain them; no other psychology explains the detail of these phenomena. If the propositional attitudes lack natures, and thus details linked by psycho-physical laws to aspects of neurological mechanisms, will Maze have to give up the Freudian enterprise of interpretation ? Or does Maze want from psychoanalysis only a device with which to ipater les bourgeois? T h e distinctions between the disciplines and departments are largely illusions imposed on the life of the mind by university administrators mostly for budgetary reasons. Hence, the idea of a psychologist conversant with philosophy writing about action is attractive. Anything which reduces ignorant contempt between disciplines is good, anything, that is, except perhaps undiluted expressions of contempt. W . D . HART
University College London
