Placing the quantification hypothesis in context
In closing, I would like to address a much broader question: Is the quantification
hypothesis supposed to provide the basis for all psychological explanations of behavior? The short answer is no; the hypothesis is meant to provide structure specifically for
intentional explanations, which appeal to an individual’s mental representations (i.e.,
what a person is thinking about) to explain behavior (Dennett, 1987; Haugeland, 1978).18
One way to view the contribution of the quantification hypothesis is that it attempts to structure intentional explanations when the possibility of non-localist, non-compositional representation is taken into account. The intentional explanations at which the
quantification hypothesis is aimed characterize the cognitivist, subjective tradition of empirical psychology. There is, however, a behaviorist, objective tradition as well, which regards mental representation as externally determined (De Houwer, 2011; Fodor, 1980; Putnam, 1975). Psychological explanations formulated from this latter perspective are effectively non-intentional, since any internal variance in mental representation is assumed not to play an explanatory role in the stimulus-response link. In its purest form, this approach assumes that behavior can be explained in terms of veridical perception of the environment.
Intriguingly, the cognitivist and behaviorist approaches to psychological explanation each appear to be valid, though under different conditions. For example, it has been found that perceptions of the size of objects are influenced by cognitive illusions, but that motor movements designed to interact with those objects are nevertheless well calibrated to their actual size (e.g., Aglioti, DeSouza, & Goodale, 1995; Goodale & Humphreys, 1998). Such findings suggest that a higher-order covariation thesis may be required to distinguish between the conditions under which behavior is better explained with cognitivist vs. behaviorist principles. In specifying the quantification hypothesis, I have
18
In Franz Brentano’s original formulation, intentionality is the mark of the mental; in other words, the capacity to represent, or be “about,” something else, is what distinguishes mental from physical phenomena. The present usage of the term intentional should not be confused with its more colloquial meaning, which typically denotes a planned behavior.
assumed that the world does not arrive at perception pre-categorized, and hence that quantification (i.e., the categorization of percepts) is an effortful process. But there may be senses in which the world can be viewed as pre-categorized, most obviously with regard to “natural” or biological kinds (e.g., Bird & Tobin, 2009; Millikan, 1984), and it is reasonable to think that cognition would have evolved to exploit these regularities— even though they are ultimately no less theoretical than ad hoc categories. Thus, the possibility of operating conditions that distinguish between cognitivist and behaviorist principles of cognition, and their potential interaction (i.e., the point of connection between “narrow,” subjective and “wide,” objective representation; Loar, 1988;
Pereboom, 1995) offer deeply interesting questions for future empirical and theoretical work.
4.5
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