Michael J. Hegarty

This paper defends the conditional thesis: if non-human animals engage in instrumental practical reasoning involving individual innovation, then such animals are likely self-conscious. Against neo-Kantian views that tie rationality to conceptual self-consciousness, and against empiricist critiques that decouple animal rationality from self-consciousness, I argue for an intermediate position. Drawing on cases of animal tool use (hook-bending in birds), I show that representing non-actual states of affairs and combining such representations with goals—a hallmark of individual innovation—requires a form of active cognition best explained by positing nonconceptual self-representation. I distinguish this from teleofunctionalist explanations, which attribute representational combination to selection mechanisms (evolutionary, social, etc.) rather than individual cognition. Where teleofunctional accounts fall short, self-representation plays an explanatory role akin to the essential indexical in human action. The upshot is a novel case for the essential connection between self-consciousness and rationality that accommodates animal cognition while preserving key neo-Kantian insights.

According to ‘transformative’ theories of rationality, human rational mental capacities cannot be completely explained using the theories and concepts of natural science because rational mental states stand to one another in irreducibly normative relations of justification. Certain transformative theorists propose that a capacity counts as rational if a ‘Why?’ question is applicable to some exercises of that capacity. But ‘Why?’ questions are in principle applicable to any intentional action, like walking over there, or deliberately holding one’s breath. Transformative rationality therefore seems to entail that capacities for walking or breathing are rational and hence escape complete scientific explanation. Yet it would be surprising to learn that physiology, medicine, and biology could not completely explain such capacities. Given the ‘Why?’ question criterion for a rational capacity, there is a danger of ‘rationality’ creeping into capacities that (one might think) should submit to scientific explanation, and even into sub-individual processes. This is the ‘Problem of ‘Creeping Rationalism’’. After introducing the problem, I consider potential ways a transformative theorist could try to avoid the problem by limiting the scope of what capacities are ‘transformed’ by rationality. I argue that initially promising proposals to do this are either circular, or are incompatible with core commitments of the theory.

I argue that a dilemma arises for naturalistic philosophers of mind in the naturalised semantics tradition. Giving a naturalistic account of the mind is a pressing problem. Brentano’s Thesis — that a state is mental if, and only if, that state has underived representational content — provides an attractive route to naturalising the mental. If true, Brentano’s Thesis means that naturalising representation is sufficient for naturalising the mental. But a naturalist who accepts Brentano’s Thesis thus commits to an eliminativism about the category of the mental. This is because naturalistic theories of representation are reductive, and so over-generalise by applying to patently non-mental states. According to these theories, it has been argued, phenomena like tree rings and saliva come out as representational. Only proposing further Naturalistic conditions on representation could avoid the eliminativist conclusion. But this shows that Naturalists have made only limited progress towards naturalising the mental. And if a Naturalist rejects Brentano’s Thesis, then she gives up on a clear link between representation and mentality. Hence, it is incumbent on the Naturalist to propose another, naturalistically acceptable, mark of the mental. This, again, shows that Naturalists have made only limited progress on the issue of naturalising the mental.Keywords: Intentionality, representation, physicalism, eliminativism, Brentano, materialism, naturalism.