Dennett - Content and consciousness

It is now just twenty years since the first draft of this book was submitted (as a D. Phil. thesis at Oxford), and sixteen years since it was first published. In the intervening period the field of philosophy of mind has grown and changed enormously, a development that is perhaps made easier to see and appreciate by a reconsideration of the way the problems looked (to me) in the late 1960s.

When I was working on the book, its resolute naturalism and earnest concern with what science could tell us about the mind struck me as quite pioneering or quite eccentric, depending on my mood. Philosophers of mind made something of a fetish of their distance from any empirical investigations, except of the most informal linguistic sort. Times have changed. Now we have cognitive science. There are now more than a few philosophers of mind who are vastly more knowledgeable about the brain than I was then (or am now). A fairly professional knowledge of the other cognitive sciences psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics is now considered a virtual qualification for professional status in the discipline.

So what strikes me now about my book is not its pioneering stand, for we are almost all naturalists today, but its intermittent naivet. This is mildly embarrassing, but not nearly so embarrassing as would be the discovery that I hadnt managed to achieve any advance in outlook over the years. There are also the unalloyed errors, of course, and these are indeed embarrassing. In fact, the only alterations to the text I have made, save for some typographical errors, are the elimination of a few preposterous howlers. (A good measure of what has been changed is the correction in example (4) in the : it was Ponce de Leon, not Hernando de Soto, who searched for the Fountain of Youth!) The more substantive errors, some of which I have still not recognized or recanted, alas, are left intact.

The task I set myself in the original Preface was to determine the constraints within which any satisfactory theory [of the mind] must evolve, and judging by the subsequent short span of theory evolution, I give myself high marks, at least for identifying the crucial issues and often even getting the matter right. For instance a voluminous debate on the identity theory has come and gone in the intervening years, leaving us with a residue of a few token-token identities and a good deal of eliminative materialism, with the slack taken up by various sophisticated versions of supervenience and accounts of psychology as an irreducible special science which is nonetheless properly deemed materialistic. In short, we are left with just about exactly the position I maintained (plus some useful sophistications) in .