Source
Block & Fodor (1972), “What Psychological States are Not”, LIT-641, read in NOTE-491.
What was actually shown
The target (§II, p. 165). The functional state identity theory (FSIT): every organism that satisfies psychological predicates has a unique best description as a probabilistic automaton, and each psychological state type is one of its machine-table state types. The uniqueness clause keeps FSIT from being trivial, since every organism realises some Turing machine (pp. 165–166).
Five arguments against the machine-table clause.
- Dispositions (pp. 168–170). Every machine-table state is a possible occurrent state; “believes that P” has no occurrent “is believing that P”.
- Simultaneity (pp. 170–172). An automaton is in one state at a time, so FSIT models sequential but not simultaneous interaction among states. Organisms need “a set of intercommunicating automata operating in parallel”; an equivalent single automaton exists, but it and the parallel set cannot both be the best description.
- Fineness (pp. 174–175). Saying “damn” where I say “darn” makes your pain type-distinct from mine, and with paths between all states, “any two automata which have less than all their states in common will have none of their states in common”.
- Productivity (pp. 175–177). Machine-table states form a list; a person’s possible psychological states are productive, specifiable “at best … by finite axiomatization”.
- Structure (pp. 177–179). Believing P is “somehow” a constituent of believing P & Q; lists have no notion of constituency. Productivity and structure are “two aspects of the same phenomenon”.
The escape each leaves. Psychological states may correspond to “some abstract property of the organization of machine tables”, or to computational states, “any state of the machine which is characterizable in terms of its inputs, outputs, and/or machine table states” (p. 177). NOTE-491 rates the case against FSIT’s stated form strong (C3), and the computational-state alternative moderate (C5).
What could have come out otherwise. Psychological states could have been one at a time, finitely many, unstructured and all occurrent. Each argument points to a feature of ordinary psychological description that rules this out.
What this does not say
- That functionalism is false. Each argument comes with an escape that keeps it. They show that FSIT’s machine-table clause fails (NOTE-491, Limitations).
- That qualia refute functionalism. Inverted or absent qualia are “only a prima-facie objection” (p. 172), with two replies left open. That is the one argument here aimed at functionalism broadly, and it is not part of this account. Block develops it later (LIT-407).
- That psychological states are computational states. The paper leaves it open; argument 6 has the constituency relation only “somehow” (n. 8: “Very much ‘somehow’”).
- That behaviourism and type physicalism are refuted a priori. §I says the decisive arguments against them are empirical (C1, moderate, with no data presented).
- That argument 1 is beyond dispute. It rests on English grammar (“is believing” is not said), backed by a conservatism principle. A theory might posit occurrent belief states.
Connections
- Which organisation. THEORY-043 takes organisation to be what makes a mind. This account says which organisation cannot be meant: not a machine table. That narrows THEORY-043’s premise to computational or psychofunctional organisation (NOTE-491, Bearing on the record).
- Block’s later work. “Troubles with Functionalism” (LIT-407, NOTE-366) turns the qualia argument into the absent-qualia argument and adds the homunculi-headed robot. Behavioural capacity not fixing intelligence is THEORY-092.
- Implementation. Chalmers (LIT-404, NOTE-342) answers the triviality worry that the “unique best description” clause blocks, with counterfactual conditions on implementation. Argument 2’s parallel automata have the shape of his combinatorial-state automata; that pairing is NOTE-491’s.
- The target. Putnam’s “Psychological Predicates” (LIT-396) is read only as an excerpt (NOTE-335).