This is great work. Glad that folks here take these Ryle-influenced ideas seriously and understand what it means for a putative problem about mind or agency to dissolve. Bravo.
To take the next (and I think, final step) towards dissolution, I would recommend reading and reacting to a 1998 paper by John McDowell called “The Content of Perceptual Experience” which is critical of Dennett’s view and even more Rylian and Wittgensteinian in it’s spirit (Gilbert Ryle was one of Dennett’s teachers).
I think it’s the closest you’ll get to de-mystification and “de-confusion” of psychological and agential concepts. Understanding the difference between personal and subpersonal states, explanations, etc. as well as the difference between causal and constitutive explanations is essential to avoiding confusion when talking about what agency is and what enables agents to be what they are. After enough time reading McDowell, pretty much all of these questions about the nature of agency, mind, etc. lose their grip and you can get on with doing sub-personal causal investigation of the mechanisms which (contingently) enable psychology and agency (here on earth, in humans and similar physical systems).
For what it’s worth, one thing that McDowell does not address (and doesn’t need to for his criticism to work) but is nonetheless essential to Dennett’s theory is the idea that facts about design in organisms can reduce to facts about natural selection. To understand why this can’t be done so easily, check out the argument from drift. The sheer possibility of evolution by drift (non-selective forces), confounds any purely statistical reduction of fitness facts to frequency facts. Despite the appearance of consensus, it’s not at all obvious that the core concepts that define biology have been explained in terms of (reduced to) facts about maths, physics, and chemistry.
Here’s a link to Roberta Millstein’s SEP entry on drift (she believes drift can be theoretically and empirically distinguished from selection, so it’s also worth reading some folks who think it can’t be).
This is great work. Glad that folks here take these Ryle-influenced ideas seriously and understand what it means for a putative problem about mind or agency to dissolve. Bravo.
To take the next (and I think, final step) towards dissolution, I would recommend reading and reacting to a 1998 paper by John McDowell called “The Content of Perceptual Experience” which is critical of Dennett’s view and even more Rylian and Wittgensteinian in it’s spirit (Gilbert Ryle was one of Dennett’s teachers).
I think it’s the closest you’ll get to de-mystification and “de-confusion” of psychological and agential concepts. Understanding the difference between personal and subpersonal states, explanations, etc. as well as the difference between causal and constitutive explanations is essential to avoiding confusion when talking about what agency is and what enables agents to be what they are. After enough time reading McDowell, pretty much all of these questions about the nature of agency, mind, etc. lose their grip and you can get on with doing sub-personal causal investigation of the mechanisms which (contingently) enable psychology and agency (here on earth, in humans and similar physical systems).
For what it’s worth, one thing that McDowell does not address (and doesn’t need to for his criticism to work) but is nonetheless essential to Dennett’s theory is the idea that facts about design in organisms can reduce to facts about natural selection. To understand why this can’t be done so easily, check out the argument from drift. The sheer possibility of evolution by drift (non-selective forces), confounds any purely statistical reduction of fitness facts to frequency facts. Despite the appearance of consensus, it’s not at all obvious that the core concepts that define biology have been explained in terms of (reduced to) facts about maths, physics, and chemistry.
Here’s a link to Roberta Millstein’s SEP entry on drift (she believes drift can be theoretically and empirically distinguished from selection, so it’s also worth reading some folks who think it can’t be).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/genetic-drift/
Here’s the jstor link to the McDowell paper:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2219740
Here are some summary papers of the McDowell-Dennett debate:
https://philarchive.org/archive/DRATPD-2v1
https://mlagflup.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/sofia-miguens-c-mlag-31.pdf