The following is something I apparently handed in for my Philosophy of Mind class my senior year at Madison. I found it looking through an old external hard drive. I don’t remember writing any of this. I was really a wise-ass. If I remember right, I got a solid C+ in this class.

The file was saved as: “Pizza Pizza Yummy Yummy.”

            In Dretske’s “A Recipe for Thought,” the philosopher attempts to show how having a formula for a thought can give us an understanding of what thoughts are, or rather, that knowledge of these instructions is at least necessary for us to have a total comprehension of the product of these instructions. Whether what Dretske produces at the end of the paper, what he refers to as the makings of a thought, or something which is beginning to behave like one, really resembles what is going on in my mind when I say, for example, “There’s a snake in my boots!” or “Someone’s poisoned the water hole!” is up for debate (I don’t think it does even remotely), but since this is a philosophy paper, apparently that is a moot point. What matters, assuming the product of Dretske’s recipe is indeed a “thought,” is does the recipe have what it takes to create it? I will follow along Dretske’s claims, from his proposal for the inclusion of original intentionality in his recipe for an intentional creation (which I see no problem with) to his explanation of the mind’s ability to misrepresent (where I believe he makes two major errors, mainly dealing with the idea that meanings of representations are detached from their causes, and further, his appeal to “natural functions,” apparently in order to explain said detachment).

            A problem that arose for the naturalist when trying to describe all things mental, rich with intentionality, that ever-intriguing characteristic of “aboutness,” was how in fact to do this without using language that was itself intentional. For at first glance, as Dretske notes, one could not, for example, tell someone to build a cake by mashing many tiny cakes together, or if they could, the receiver of the information would be no better off than they were when they started in terms of grasping what cake “is.” Perhaps even a more straightforward example would be to say one cannot explain what a utopia is by saying, “something that has utopian characteristics.” How can I describe the mental characteristic of happiness? I could physically describe it as a release of a certain chemical C in the area of the brain D, but that doesn’t relate what it is like for me upon hearing that Bob Stinson has risen from the grave and will be touring and recording with a newly reunited The Replacements. I would have to say something like “I rejoice! I am elated!” But indeed, these words all point to a certain something. They are all “about” the news that happiness is about. They are, unfortunately, intentional.

            But Dretske says fret not oh ye desperate naturalists, for I have the solution to all of your troubles and worries! Why should we, he asks, be so quick to assume that we cannot use intentional speech to describe the intentional? Using his own example, an amplifier is something that conducts electricity, so does that mean that we cannot include copper wiring, which gasp! also conducts electricity, in a schematic for an amplifier? Of course it does not. I’m with Dretske one hundred percent here. Take the delicious Dr. Pepper I am drinking. Am I to believe I cannot list water, a main ingredient, because it quenches my thirst, which Dr. Pepper also does? The important thing to note is that we must use intentionality of a sort that is not mental.

            What’s even more bananas and awesome for Dretske is that intentionality is also natural. There are things that occur naturally that “point to” things in (kind of) the same manner that our thoughts do. Finding a literal “pointer,” Dretske has us consider a compass. While the creation of the object itself is dependent on us (there are no compass trees or compass wells, etc.) the mechanism that causes the compass to point at the artic pole does occur naturally, and has nothing at all to do with us. It is not derived. Next: “describing what this naturally occurring indicator indicates is to describe it in intensional terms. What one is describing with these intensional terms is, in this sense, and intentional state of the indicator”(492). Basically, while the arctic connotes the location of polar bears, the compass is not an indicator of polar bears. It is an indicator of a geographical location, the arctic, where a lot of polar bears live (but even that isn’t quite correct, as it’s not the geography that allows a compass to work, it’s magnetic fields).

Et cetera, et cetera.