Feser: Augustine on semantic indeterminacy

Augustine on semantic indeterminacy

Materialist or naturalist accounts of thought and its content typically suppose that they can be explained in terms of causal relations of some kind.  The idea is that a thought will have the content that (say) the cat is on the mat if it bears the right sort of causal relation to the state of affairs of the cat’s being on the mat.  Spelling out what the “right” sort of causal relation would be is where things get very complicated.  And the main issue is that indeterminacy problems afflict every attempt to spell out the analysis.  For the state of affairs we call the cat’s being on the mat can also be described as a state of affairs involving a domesticated mammal’s being on the mat.  So why does the fact that this state of affairs causes the thought entail that the thought has the content the cat is on the mat as opposed to the content a domesticated mammal is on the mat?  You can add details to the description of the causal relation to get around this problem, but the revised account of the causal relation will in turn face indeterminacy problems of its own.  (An example would be Fred Dretske’s account of semantic content, which I discussed in a post a few years ago.)

At the end of the day, the indeterminacy can only be eliminated by simply conceptualizing the relevant causal relata in this specific way rather than that way.  That is to say, it can be eliminated only when there is an intellect present which can do the needed conceptualizing.  Yet the whole point of the causal theory of content was to explain where thoughts having a certain conceptual content come from.  So any such theory must fail.  It inevitably must presuppose the very thing it was supposed to be explaining.  (This is a point which has been made in different ways by Karl Popper and Hilary Putnam, and which I develop in “Hayek, Popper, and the Causal Theory of the Mind,” also reprinted in Neo-Scholastic Essays.)

The deep point implicit in what Augustine says, then -- though again, this isn’t really the set of issues he was addressing -- is that the intellect’s grasp of meanings is more fundamental than any behavior, gestures, utterances, aspects of the communicative context, etc. that might be used to teach or express meanings.  Hence you are not going to be able explain the former in terms of the latter.  You are not going to be able to reduce intelligence to patterns of behavior or dispositions to behavior (as the behaviorist holds), or explain it in terms of causal relations between the human organism and aspects of its environment (as causal theories of content hold), etc., because the behavior, causal relations, etc. have whatever semantic associations they have only by reference to an intellect which grasps those associations.  The intellect is itself the central and irreducible element of the semantic situation.  (It is irreducible to inner “utterances” and other mental imagery too.  When I entertain the thought that the cat is on the mat, I might “hear” in my mind the English sentence “The cat is on the mat,” but that auditory image is not itself the thought.  See “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought” for more on this subject.)