He goes on to look at the definitions of voluntary and involuntary behaviors. He talks about the various types of behaviors, such as reflexive and instinctive behaviors. There have been ideas that there are behaviors which occur without the individual's intentions (involuntary behaviors, such as reflexive behavior), and that these behaviors can still be considered behaviors of that individual, as long as the cause of the action is within the individual. The idea is that the actions don't have to be considered as something which is other than behavior, just because the behavior doesn't seem to have an 'intension'. He also states that changes which occur within an individual can be considered as behaviors within that individual, or behaviors of parts of that individual. He states that the apparent disagreement as to what actions and behaviors are, arises mostly out of the definitions used as 'action' and 'behavior'. He more or less throws away definitions of what an action is, what voluntary is, what the difference is between types of behavior, and focuses instead upon behavior in general. He focuses not just on certain types of behavior, but on behavior in general, as actions or movements or things which are caused by something within the individual who is considered to have or do those things. He also points out that certain meanings are presupposed by the words chosen to represent a meaning. This change in semantics can cause people to make conclusions about events or things, based on the verb tense used, when the verb tense could be skewing the intended meaning, because words rarely mean the exact same thing as the concept the word is attempting to convey. This can cause somewhat incorrect, or happenstance conclusions, simply because the words in the language used happen to have a certain similarity in their alleged meaning (for example, that the verbs used in a certain language could both be representative of a passive tense, so the mistaken conclusion could be that the events in question are not actions). He goes on to say that some descriptions of action involve intentionality as part of their necessary condition, basically that semantic presupposition can lead to a presupposing of an internal presupposition. He does state, however, that certain kinds of 'actions' do seem to correctly presuppose that there is some kind of intension, and that regardless of whether the action can be considered as mistakenly or correctly a presupposition of intension or not, it is all still to be considered, for his purposes, as behavior.

His point is that behavior can be considered behavior without necessarily presupposing intentions, minds or as specific categories of behaviors. He also wants to say that simply because an individual seems to be doing something, and that people can talk about that individual as doing something, that if this action is simply the result of a property of the object and/or of the environment within which this object exists, then this is not actually behavior. That for something to be considered as behaving, it must have an internal-to-itself cause of this action, other than, for example, the fact that it falls in the presence of gravity.

The next point he makes is that it is difficult and overly simplifying to speak truthfully of the cause of a movement as being a separate and single event. That to consider cause as a specific event or identity is to hinder the study of the behavior in it's scope. It is also hindering to talk about the movement or action as a separate and specific identity. These lead to people wondering if the cause should be considered as important for study, as opposed to the movement being important for study, or vice versa. The idea is that the movement alone is often taken as the behavior, and reasons are given to explain this movement in terms of what the individual is doing. He states that behavior should be considered as a movement occurring in a causal relationship with some internal event. He mentions the idea (page 14, top paragraph) that it is not that behavior is movement, but that a specific behavior corresponds with a certain kind of movement. He goes on to say that we tend to describe some behaviors or actions without indicating specific movements, but that these actions do ultimately include some sort of change or movement of the individual's body (or continued state when there is a change of state expected). He wants the stress to be on the fact that the movement is caused by an internal state, and not to be stressed that there is a movement. The fact that an internal state causes a movement is the behavior, not the movement itself which is the behavior. He also makes the point that behaviors take up a time, and are not fully realized behaviors until they end. Behaviors can be taking place, but cannot have taken place until they are finished taking place. The idea is that the behavior is not to be associated with the movement/s only, or the cause/s only, but with the causing of the movement. He also makes the point that a behavior does not necessarily end with the first individual, depending on the action, and the scope of the behavior. That the behavior doesn't necessarily occur at a time and place, but that it can be occurring at specific times and places. This all is used to support his theory that behavior is a process, rather than a specific event, which includes causal chains, which occur within a time-span, within space, and are began more or less within an individual.

He then talks about the various factors involved in an event's occurring. The fact that it is difficult to say when an event has been caused by an internal or an external event. However, a behavior always incorporates some internal event, so the external stimulus can be considered as external factors which aid in the production of the behavior process. He mentions that for simplification purposes, or for reasons of valuation, specific factors are chosen to represent the most important cause, and therefore are considered the cause of the behavior. This seems to hinder the identification of the process as the individual's behavior, as an external event may be taken as the cause, possibly making the process seem more like a process happening to the individual. This is like a presupposition on the part of the observer of the behavior, and does not actually affect the behavior itself. He states that he is not so much interested in the identification of behavior as behavior or not, but rather that if something is behavior, it is the process of an internal event resulting in an external event (movement), as long as you speak about the behavior as this process, and not of a result alone, or a cause alone. External events can contribute to the process, but are not in themselves the cause of this process.

He also theorizes that there can be said to be different facets of the behavior, as each individual part of the behavior process can be seen as units in the causal chain of the behavior. He states (page 31, end of first paragraph) that each of these facets of the causal chain can be said to have an explanation as to why they happened, whereas the process itself, in it's entirety, is more difficult to explain. That each part of the process can be analyzed as contributors of why the final product (the effect, the action, the movement, the caused state) 'looks' the way it does. He mentions the fact that each of these facets could be considered behaviors in and of themselves, and that the facets of a larger behavior process could be variously voluntary and involuntary behaviors. He mentions the contributions to behaviors of genetics and of the environment. He states that behavior contains, along with this combination of voluntary and involuntary behaviors, the interaction of genetic and environmental factors. The idea is that genetics plays a role of providing potentials, and that the environment shapes, brings out, or hinders these genetically-given potentials.

Chapter 2 -

He tries to make it clear that the behavior is a process, which produces and contains a product (the movement, caused state, action, etc), as the product is often confused for the behavior itself. He mentions again that the behavior (process) is not to be considered finished until it results in its movement or defining external event (product). He states that the process of behavior is the bringing about of a final action or event, which is identified as the product, and that this product is brought about by the process, not the process's specific parts, but the process in it's entirety. He states that it is the fact that the parts of the process work together to cause the product that makes it a process, that it isn't the events themselves causing each other that makes this a process, it is the fact that they are related in this causal manner.

He brings the idea of mental states causing things, by stating that an individual believing or thinking a certain way about something, can explain why the process of an event or movement being caused occurs. He stresses that it is not the reasons why the product has been caused that can be explained, but the fact that this product is being produced by this process is what can be explained. He says (page38, third paragraph) that an easy way to say what the origin of the behavior is (or what specific parts of the behavior are), is to decide which individual is producing the product, and that the product of it can be recognized by asking oneself what it was that the behavior accomplished, or what was done by the behavior.

He then goes on to deal with the problem of 'what caused the cause'. He makes the claim of background conditions, which must be in place, in order for the process to be able to occur. The idea is that these background conditions, which are necessary for the cause to cause what it does, work with the cause being a possibility, to create the process. He states that we look to these background structures for reasons as to why the cause causes what it does cause. There are also triggering events, which work with the potential cause, and with the background conditions, through the cause, to begin the cause to occur at a specific time. The background structure gives the cause the ability to cause what it causes, and the triggering cause is what causes this process laid out by the structuring cause to begin.

He explains that the ways that certain processes happen the way they do is because of a genetic structuring cause. He states that this can generally be thought of as an adaptive structuring, developed circumstantially through the process we have come to call natural selection. However, while he tends to talk of this process as being caused, as if it happened with some purpose, I think it would have been better for him to talk about it as simply a process which occurs in the form of some individuals surviving long enough to pass on their genetics, while others do not, thereby 'selecting' certain genes which may or may not, as a result, give those offspring a greater chance of surviving long enough to pass on their genetics. He mentions that in studying the history of types of individuals, one may eventually discover an explanation as to why certain structuring causes exist.

He mentions how the structuring cause can be easily recognizable from the triggering cause, as the triggering cause is generally the event immediately preceding, or co-occurring with, the start of the causal process, while the structuring cause is generally began in the past, and it's effects continue into the causal process. He states that there must be some reason as to why the causal process produces a certain product, rather than some other product, and that this is the structuring cause. The structuring cause is also to be looked toward to determine why this causal process occurred when this triggering event occurred.

Chapter 3 -

In this chapter, Dretske is attempting to differentiate various systems, and what they represent and indicate, in order to divide them into one of three types of systems, which will help him create a system in which beliefs can be considered as having a causal role. There is the idea that body movements are obviously not enough to explain why this action took place, rather than some other action. He wants to find a system in which the meaning, or content, of a representation (belief) determines the causal role it would play in the process. Here, he begins to discuss representational systems. By representational system, he means any system whose function is to indicate something about external circumstances or events. He divides up the types of representational systems depending on how the system carries out this indicating function.

The first representational system (which will be called RS Type I, or simply Type I) is a system whose representation is merely an instrument. They are given the function of indicating something which does not relate to them at all, but are instead acting as symbols for some other thing. They normally do not indicate anything, nor do they normally represent anything. They are given their function by people, and people must know what they are supposed to be symbols of, so that they can interpret what the system has been assigned to indicate. In this system, anything can be made to be a representation of anything.

Type II are systems he calls 'natural signs'. Events and items belonging to this system represent things by themselves, but they are given the task of representing something else which is slightly related to what they actually indicate. For example, a clock represents the time, but is actually the regular movements of some kind of mechanism. The sign indicates one or more things on its own, and one of those things that it indicates is assigned by us as a representation of something we want it to represent. In this system, the indicators can only represent something they are able to indicate.

Type III are systems whose items and conditions can indicate things independently of other systems, and represent independently of external factors. These systems already have functions of their own, and indicate things for themselves, rather than being assigned by people to be indicators of some other system. He states that these are a part of every biological individual, and are required to be able to discern things about the external environment. These system's functions are discovered to exist, rather than being assigned to them.

He states that intentionality has been linked with mental states, and that one of the marks of intentionality is that it can be misrepresented. RS Type I and Type II are said to acquire their misrepresentational ability from us, who are said to have intentions, but RS Type III, if they can be shown to have intentionality, will have their own intentionality. He claims that the main point of this intentionality is that it can represent something as being the case, when it is not in fact the case. He claims that if a system itself can misrepresent a state, then when that system does not misrepresent, it has a meaning, based on philosophies of language and of mind (page 65, bottom of second-last paragraph). He makes it clear that a thing cannot be mis-indicated, but can be misrepresented. He states various ways that systems can be made to misrepresent; such as being taken out of their environment into an environment where they cannot correctly represent what they could correctly represent in the original environment, or by having a faulty system of representation in the first place. He claims that there are two components to misrepresentation. The first is that the world is somehow different than what is being represented, and the second is the way of representing the things in the world is somehow misrepresenting. There is the idea that these representations have a content or meaning to the system.

Chapter 4 -

This is the chapter where Dretske begins to talk about beliefs as possible causal powers. He claims that these representations, whose role in defining and explaining the process and product is dependant upon it's meaning or content, is correlated to beliefs. The fact that a thing has meaning, the fact that it holds information, is due to what it indicates, and this corresponds to beliefs. He claims that beliefs are representations, which become meaningful by the use of their information in the system they belong to. He comes up with the diagram, which states that the fact that the cause indicates some representation of an environmental condition explains why this process is producing this product. The indicator must have the function of indicating some external event, so that it can cause the process it was set up to be a part of. To have beliefs, or the possibility of beliefs, the indicators must not only indicate some representation of the external conditions, but must also mean something to the individual who contains that system, and they must use this information to do something in a purposeful way.

How Dretske's Theories Fit With The Claim

While Dretske's Theory seems to allow for mental events to take part in the causal process, he doesn't seem to try and answer the traditional questions of how a mental event could cause a physical event, or by what process mental events can interact with the physical world, but he states near the beginning that he does not want to explain how this interaction could take place. Instead, he posits how a mental event could play a part in the causal process.

The first part of the problem of mental causation, as stated in the claim at the beginning, was that it was unclear how mental events could correspond to one individual, not apparently being bound by space. Dretske does not address this directly in the first four chapters, but it seems to be the case that an individual, according to his theories, would in a sense have mental events, or contain mental events within them, automatically making the mental events correspond with their body, or their 'self'. The claim at the beginning seemed to be saying something more along the lines of the mental events occurring, and associating themselves with an individual, sort of like the mental events trying to have a body. Dretske's implied mental-state-having body seems to answer this problem better than would be implied by the claim's mental states trying to associate with a body.

The second part of the problem was that the cause must have something mental about it, to be a mental cause. Some part of the causal process must be considered to be mental, in order for a mental cause to occur. Dretske seems to have answered this one directly, in that his final theory at the end of chapter four allowed for part of the causal role to be mental, and still cause physical events.

So, except for Dretske's avoidance (at least overtly) of the old question of 'by what process can a mental event interact with a physical event?', he seems to have come up with a very plausible answer to the problem of mental causation.

Philosophy of Mind Essay 2
For Prof. R. Stainton
November/December 2000