Thoughts Without Masters: Incomplete Understanding and the Content of Mind

Abstract

When we explain Bruno’s taking the train by attributing to him the belief that safety is more important than price, we attribute to him a thought involving the concept of safety, as opposed to (say) the concept of comfort. Most leading theories of mental content presuppose what I call the achievement view – that for a thought to involve a given concept is, roughly speaking, for the thinker to have a disposition to satisfy a condition associated with the concept, such as a disposition to make certain inferences. I show that it follows from the achievement view that a thinker must fully grasp (in a sense I make precise) a concept in order to have attitudes involving it (though most theorists would allow an exception for cases in which the thinker defers to others). I claim, to the contrary, that thinkers can have attitudes involving concepts no one fully grasps. Further, I argue that this phenomenon, which I call incomplete understanding, is the key to otherwise intractable problems in the philosophy of mind.

My attack on currently standard theories of content has two prongs. I first argue that such theories are unsatisfactory on their own terms – i.e., apart from the issue of incomplete understanding – and that their problems can be traced back to the achievement view. I then turn to my argument that the theories cannot account for incomplete understanding. I marshal a range of examples in which thinkers plausibly have attitudes – not through deference to others – involving concepts they do not fully grasp. I argue that potential reinterpreting responses fail to provide a persuasive overall account.

In contrast to the achievement view, I propose the responsibility view: for a belief to involve a particular concept is for the thinker to be responsible to, or subject to, a standard associated with the concept. I argue that the responsibility view has the potential not only to avoid the difficulties encountered by the achievement view, but also to account for our having thoughts with incompletely understood contents. Since a thinker can be responsible to a standard she lacks the ability to satisfy, the responsibility view has better prospects than the achievement view for explaining how a thinker can have thoughts involving a concept that she does not fully grasp.

Keywords: mental content, philosophy of mind, theory of content, informational theory of content, conceptual role theory of content, inferential role theory of content, concepts, incomplete understanding, conceptual mastery, full grasp, Fodor, Peacocke, Kripke, possession conditions, deference