Posted by alexandra_k on January 29, 2005, at 21:04:09
>We say ‘I hear a voice’, you’ll strain your voice’ and ‘I have lost my voice’. Now is a voice a thing? If so, just what sort of thing is a voice? The voice we strain may seem to be as unproblematic a physical part of the body as the back or the eyes we strain, perhaps the vocal cords; but surely one does not have tenor vocal cords or enjoy Sutherland’s vocal cords, or lose one’s vocal cords, and ones voice, unlike one’s vocal cords, can be sent by radio across the seas and survive one’s death on magnetic tape. Nor does one strain or recognize or lose any vibrations in the air or manifold of frequencies. It might be argued that ‘voice’ is ambiguous – perhaps with some neat and finite list of meanings, so that the voice that changes or is strained is a part of the body, and the voice one enjoys or recognizes or records is some complex of vibrations. Then what is the voice one loses? A disposition, perhaps.
>Dividing the word into these different senses, however, leads us into ludicrous positions: Sutherland’s voice on the record is not (numerically) the same voice as the one she strained last month, and the voice that is temporarily lost is not the voice we recognize. How many voices does Sutherland have? If we took this claim of ambiguity seriously, the sentence ‘Sutherland’s voice is so strong; listen to the purity of it in the recording of it that I made before she lost it’ would be a grammatical horror, with each ‘it’ in need of a different missing antecedent, but there is obviously nothing wrong with the sentence aside from a bit of repetitiveness. When the word is viewed (correctly) as unambiguous, attempts to delineate any portion or portions of the physical world which make up a voice will be fruitless – but also pointless.
>A voice is not an organ, disposition, process, event, capacity or – as one dictionary has it – a ‘sound uttered by the mouth’. The word ‘voice’ as it is discovered in its own peculiar environment of contexts, does not fit neatly the physical, non-physical dichotomy that so upsets the identity theorist [who says the mind is the brain], but it is not for that reason a vague or ambiguous or otherwise unsatisfactory word. This state of affairs should not lead anyone to become a Cartesian dualist with respect to voices; let us try not to invent a voice-throat problem to go along with the mind-body problem. Nor should anyone set himself the task of being an identity theorist with respect to voices. No plausible materialism or physicalism would demand it. It will be enough if all the things we say about voices can be paraphrased into, explained by, or otherwise related to statements about only physical things. So long as such an explanation leaves no distinction or phenomenon unaccounted for, physicalism with regard to voices can be preserved – without identification of voices with physical things...
>Consider voices again. We entertained the proposal to admit voices into our ontology [to say there are such physical things as voices] because under some circumstances ‘there is a voice…’ rings true in the ear, but there are better reasons for denying them. If the anatomist or physiologist or acoustician were to be concerned because among all the things encompassed by his theories there were still no *voices*; if he were to suppose this meant he had left something out, something perhaps even inaccessible to science, he would have been confused by our admitting voices in our ontology [saying they exist]. He assumed this meant he could safely reason: Is the voice identical with the larynx? No. Then is it the lungs? No. Is it a stream of air? No. Is it a sound? No. Then it must be some *other* thing I have not yet examined. We must rule out this series of questions… The point, then, in denying the existence of voices is to permit the claim that physicalists need not identify voices with any physical thing… That such a denial is to some extent counterintuitive is not contested...
>Certainly no one interested in voices ever fell into the misunderstanding just described, but it is tempting to suppose that not only philosophers but also psychologists, neurophysiologists and cyberneticians are bedeviled at times by a parallel confusion over the ontological status of the mental vocabulary [beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, pains]...
Dennett, Daniel C. (1969) Content and Consciousness p. 8-11
And that is why the mind is not the brain.
Beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, pains etc are not to be identified with brain states.
In a very real sense there are no such things as these.
They are not things.
We should rest content if everything we can say about these can be translated into the vocabulary of the sciences.I’d try to explain it myself, but I don’t think I could do better than Dennett.
I am not sure that I have seen anyone do it better than Dennett.Onward to functionalism, ho.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:449954
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20050118/msgs/449954.html