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Inbetween mindless behaviour and thought

‘We have many vocabularies for describing nature when we regard it as mindless, and we have a mentalistic vocabulary for describing thought and intentional action; what we lack is a way of describing what is in between’ \citep[p.\ 11]{Davidson:1999ju}
Why suppose there is any role for philosophers rather than scientists? Part of the answer is provided by Donald Davidson.
The question is how humans come to know about objects, words, thoughts and other things.
In pursuing this question we have to consider minds where the knowledge is neither clearly present nor obviously absent.
This is challenging because both commonsense and theoretical tools for describing minds are generally designed for characterising fully developed adults.

‘if you want to describe what is going on in the head of the child when it has a few words which it utters in appropriate situations, you will fail for lack of the right sort of words of your own.

‘We have many vocabularies for describing nature when we regard it as mindless, and we have a mentalistic vocabulary for describing thought and intentional action; what we lack is a way of describing what is in between’

(Davidson 1999, p. 11)

Hood and colleagues make a related point.

‘there are many separable systems of mental representations ... and thus many different kinds of knowledge. ... the task ... is to contribute to the enterprise of finding the distinct systems of mental representation and to understand their development and integration’\citep[p.\ 1522]{Hood:2000bf}.

(Hood et al 2000, p.\ 1522)

This quote raises two issues
First, we should be cautious about the inference from separable systems to kinds of knowledge. (Think about modularity.)
Second, we should be cautious here in talking about knowledge at all.
To sum up so far, the question for this course is, How do humans come to know about---and to knowingly manipulate---objects, causes, words, numbers, colours, actions and minds?
I've been suggesting we can't answer it simply by appealing to nativism, empiricism or other grand myths.
Instead we need to focus on the particular mechanisms that are involved in different cases.
But then you might wonder, What philosophical questions arise here? Isn't this a narrowly pscyhological---and therefore scientific---issue?
The answer is no because thinking about how humans come to know things requires us to meet Davidson's challenge, to understand things that are neither mindless nor thought or knowledge but somewhere in between.
As Hood suggests in the quote I just showed you, this might involve rethinking what knowledge is.

summary

so what are we going to do in 3 days?

We're going to try to understand how humans come to know about things by examining what developmental psychology tells us about the acquisition of knowledge.
This turns out to be a partly philosophical project because understanding the apparently conflicting evidence requires us to re-think notions like knowledge and representation.
In practice, this means looking carefully, and in detail, at the scientific evidence.
If you want to know how minds work, you have to start with the evidence.