Herramientas tecnológicas para despliegue y desarrollo de la propuesta

Before concluding I would like to briefly mention two more approaches to the problem of cognitive contact that a modificationist might take. The first is not so much a possible solution to the problem of cognitive contact as a flat denial that it is a theory of content’s job to provide such a solution. The idea here is that phenomenal intentionality theory and its subspecies, modificationism, are theories concerned with psychological content, not semantic relations such as cognitive contact, reference or truth. In the words of Jerry Fodor:

“Truth, reference and the rest of the semantic notions aren’t psychological categories. What they are is: they’re modes of Dasein. I don’t know what Dasein is, but I’m sure there’s lots of it around, and I’m sure that you and I and Cincinnati have all got it. What more do you want?” (Fodor, 1981)

Again, I will not belabour this point too much because my focus is on the possibilities the modificationist has for facing the problem of cognitive contact, not how she might avoid it.

The final avenue down which a modificationist might venture in pursuit of some way to address the problem of cognitive contact is what I dub reconstructive realism. Before going briefly into the view, a caveat: The following is but the barest of sketches—one that I have spent very little time on, but one that strikes me as extremely interesting. It was suggested to me that what it is to be an object for us is to be something like the locus of engagement, or interaction possibilities78_{. This view has some intuitive}

force: the reason why the thing in my left hand is a pen is because of certain ways I can engage or interact with it. And for this very reason, the thing in my left hand cannot be a pen for my dog. It can be a fetch toy, a stick (and most likely a chew toy to be shredded into inky pieces on my new duvet). But it cannot be a pen for my dogs. Of course, certain logical snafus are bound to arise. For instance, if I throw the pen for my dog, then what I throw and what he fetches are different objects. Perhaps this kind of problem can be resolved by appeal to overlapping possibilities. The pen can also be such that I can engage it as a fetch toy for my dog, and so there is some overlap in how I can engage the pen, and how my dog can. At any rate, we are bidden, according to this line of thought, to reconstrue the world of ordinary objects as loci of interaction/engagement possibilities (Bickhard, 2010).

Undoubtedly, this kind of view smacks of idealism: Ordinary objects are not defined independently of our impressions of them, but are defined instead in terms of how we might interact with them. Maybe this sounds too far-fetched to be a metaphysical account of ordinary objects, but consider the phenomena of invention and discovery. Ancient man needed some way of transporting heavy things over great distances. One day, someone noticed that it was easier to move fallen trees by rolling them rather than lifting them, and all of a sudden circular objects became more than just sections of

fallen trees…they became wheels. What were loci of engagement possibilities that included, for instance, fuel for the fire, poles for simple hut construction, etc. became new things; they became wheels.

Though this is a mere sketch, it might be further fleshed out along similar lines to the enactive approach to perception developed in (Noë, 2004). Briefly, Noë’s view is that perception is something we do, not something that happens to us. “Think of a blind person tap-tapping his or her way around a cluttered space, perceiving the space by touch, not all at once, but through time, by skilful probing and movement” (Noë, 2004 p. 1). The world, according to Noë, “makes itself available to the perceiver through physical movement and interaction” (Noë, 2004 p. 1). To see the tree over there is to see something up which one might climb. “It is to see it, directly, as affording certain possibilites” (Noë, 2004 p. 106).

To be sure, modificationism and Noë’s enactive model are incompatible in many other ways. For instance, according to Noë, one implication of the enactive approach is that we ought to “reject the idea—widespread in both philosophy and science—that perception is a process in the brain whereby the perceptual system constructs an internal representation of the world” (Noë, 2004 p.2). But that need not prevent the modificationist from adopting certain Noë-esque metaphysical views about the nature of ordinary objects. The important point is that there is this view of what it is to be an object: To be an object is to be the loci of interaction possibilities, or, in Noë’s words, to be such as to afford certain possibilities. And this view might be co-opted by the modificationist in her account of cognitive contact.

How exactly could reconstructive realism help the modificationist in her pursuit of some account of cognitive contact? Well, all along, the assumption

has been that the problem of cognitive contact is a problem about how to account for what’s going on in the mind of a cognizer such that what is going on there manages to reach out into the world and make contact with things. But on the present view, our focus ought to be on how we conceive of, and account for, the things we take ourselves to be in contact with, such that they can be possible candidates for cognitive contact. In slightly more earthy language: The present line contends that the problem of cognitive contact is not a problem about how we fix the mind such that it can contact the world, but about how we conceive of the world such that it is the kind of thing that could be in contact with the mind. And indeed, how you might go about engaging/interacting with something seems, at least prima facie, to be the kind of thing for which one’s phenomenal intentional experiences could play a central role. Perhaps reconstructive realism could even be combined with the descriptive space view such that what it is to determine a descriptive space is to determine a space of interaction possibilities. Again, I realize this is extremely underdeveloped and exceedingly vague, but for the modificationist, it might be worth pursuing.