The Representational Theory of MInd Chapter 1

Question: What makes a mental state the distinctive mental state it is, e.g. anger?
Possible answer: Its introspective, experiential quality.
Problems with this answer: (a) absence of introspectible qualities- person can be angry without being able to tell that fact about themselves. (b) Not distinct- not obvious that experiential sensations of anger are different from other emotional states of great arousal, such as fear, excitement. (c) Anger seems to have cognitive component, involving special types of belief and desire. But cognitive states (i) need not be conscious; (ii) are not distinguished from one another by their experiential quality.
Alternative answer: Functionalism- mental kinds/properties are identified by what they do, or what they are for, not what they are made of. So there is the following role/occupant distinction that provides us with two different, but complementary, ways of describing human mental life:
(1) It is a mental life in virtue of its functional description- specifies the causal roles of the full range of human psychological states.
(2) Description which specifies the physical nature of the occupiers/realizers of those causal roles.
Two features of functionalism that Sterelny points out:
(1) Availability of double descriptions (role/occupant) is not distinct to psychology- e.g. computer science, hardware description/information flow description. And the discovery of the gene illustrates how a theory of function can be developed independently of a theory of physical realization.
(2) Multiple realization (here, one mental state having wildly varied physical realizations) is not restricted to psychology.
Machine functionalists- cognitive processing is a special case of running a progam; cognitive states are states of the machine on which the mind-program is running. It was thought that anything whose behavior fits a machine table (a la Turing machine) is a functional system. But this turned out to be a bad idea [For more exposition on what was wrong with early functionalism, see Block (1978) “Troubles with Functionalism” in Block ed. Readings in Philosophy of Psychology Volume One]: 1) This makes functional descriptions too cheap/weak, because too many things (like the Brazilian economy, a pail of water in the sun, and the solar system) would qualify as functional systems. So the existence of entirely accidental correlations between physical states and symbols on a table isn’t enough for something to be a functional system. 2) Mysterious realization- in general, natural kinds are realized by more physically fundamentally natural kinds. But in machine functionalism, the relation is mysterious- it is a relation between a mathematical object (the mathematical function the machine table specifies) and a physical device.
So machine functionalism doesn’t capture what is distinctive about a functional system. Functional systems are systems whose existence and structure have a teleological explanation. Teleological account of the mind- the mind has “an internal organization designed to carry out various perceptual, cognitive and action-guiding tasks. It has that organization and those purposes in virtue of its evolutionary history.” [For more on the teleological response to early functionalism, see Lycan 1981 “Form, Function, and Feel”. Journal of Philosophy 78, pp. 24-50; Millikan 1986 “Thoughts Without Laws; Cognitive Science With Content”. Philosophical Review 95, pp. 47-80]
What kinds of creatures are intentional systems? Intentional system must (a) have perceptual systems, so there is a flow of info from the world into the system; (b) have a reasonably rich system of internal representation (thermostats aren’t intentional systems in pat because they represent only temperature); (c) have cognitive mechanisms that enable it to use perceptual info to update and modify the internal representations of the world, and (d) have mechansims that translate its internal representations into behavior that is adaptive if those representations fit the world.
So intentional systems can be psychologically very different from each other. So, actually, there are not two theories of the mind, a functional theory and a physical theory. For psychological states vary in the degree to which they are independent of their physical realization, and in the extent to which they are tied to particular psychological organization. This leads us to homuncular functionalism, where intentional systems have a multiplicity of psychological structures [exactly why, I don’t really get. For more on homuncular functionalism, see Lycan “Form, Function, and Feel” and Lycan (1981) “Towards a homuncular theory of believing” Cognition and Brain Theory 4 pp 139-59.]
Homuncular functionalism: (1) Functionalism- essence of a mental state is what it does, not what it is. (2) Mind is modular. (3) Each homunculus is in turn made up of more specialized simpler homunculi, until we reach a level where the tasks the homunculi must carry out are so simple that they are psychologically primitive.
2 big defenders of homuncular functionalism- Dennett and Lycan (maybe also Simon). They like the example of our specialized cognitive mechanism for face recognition.