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Mind 6. Language, ISSN: 0268-1064
Vol. 11. No. 1 March 1996, p p 70-75.

Equal Rights for Swamp-persons

LOUISE ANTONY

I believe in democracy. I believe that it’s not important where you came
from or who your parents are-as Quine once said, albeit in a slightly differ-
ent context, ’to an enlightened mind, illegitimacy of origins is no disgrace’-
and I think it’s appalling the kind of narrow-minded (or should I say wide-
minded?) prejudice Swamp-persons face today, just because they were
cradled in a bog instead of a bassinet. Stop stigmatizing spontaneous coalesc-
ence, that’s what I say.
There are those who say that Swamp-persons have no minds, no thoughts,
no intentional states, and that their words, no matter how piteous or elo-
quent in form, have no meaning. I say, let me converse with any swamp-
person rather than with the likes of such bigots! Why should one’s back-
ground be relevant to the question whether one has thoughts or speaks
with meaning?
Donald Davidson appears to believe that the mindlessness of swamp-
persons follows from the philosophical doctrine of externalism (Davidson,
1987). This is an error. Externalism is the doctrine that mental states are
individuated (at least partly) by reference to things outside the thinker’s
head, and is motivated by the intuition that two individuals in two different
environments could be identical in all intrinsic respects, and yet think
thoughts with different contents. But the Swamp-persons share our environ-
ment, so externalism per se gives no reason to believe that their thoughts
differ in content from ours. We need to know exactly how environments
determine contents before we can draw any conclusions. It could be that
what’s important is simply what happens to be on the other side of a dispo-
sition-what’s actually out there when I’m disposed to think to myself
’there’s some water‘. This is what’s called the ’partial function’ view of nar-
row content, and it’s at least suggested by Hilary Putnam’s claim that terms
like ‘water’ and ‘gold’ are ‘indexical’ (Putnam, 1975).

Address for correspondence: Department of Philosophy, CB #3125 Caldwell Hall, Univer-

sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, N 27599-3125, USA.
Email: [email protected].
 Equal Rights for Swamp-persons 71
Davidson and others have apparently conflated the doctrine of externalism
with the doctrine that the meanings of one‘s words depend on the history
of one’s acquisition of those words, and then further conflated that view
with the view that the contents of one’s thoughts are determined by the
meanings of one’s words. There’s ample reason to resist this latter conflation,
and to hold instead that the intentionality of thought is independent of and
prior to the intentionality of language. For one thing, many non-linguistic
creatures (dogs, babies, ’wild’ children) appear to have contentful mental
states. For another, every semantic theory that I know of explains semantic
relations in terms of some kind of intention or intentional activity (excepting
perhaps some extreme forms of deconstructionism, where I concede there
may be no minds at work at all). Finally, it’s prima facie desirable to be able
to distinguish, as Saul Kripke does, semantic meaning from speaker’s mean-
ing-what my words actually convey versus what 1 mean for my words to
convey. (The same point militates against tying the semantics of language
too tightly to any particular speaker’s particular communicative intentions).
Tyler Burge has explicitly argued that, where we have linguistic creatures,
we ought to taxonomize thoughts by reference to words, but not everyone
has been convinced (Burge, 1979).’ If thoughts are not given content by their
connection to learned words, then even if there is an argument that the inten-
tionaIity of a word depends on a proper history of acquisition, that argument
would entail nothing about the intentionality of thought. Arguably, we are
born with a degree of intentionality, a degree that makes possible subsequent
cognitive interaction with the environment; Swampcreatures could be born
with thoughts, then, too.
Causal histories get brought into the externalist story, I think, in two ways:
one, via the intuition that I can keep my water-thoughts with me when I
change environments, and thus that my representation of water is precisely
not indexical (a point Burge has emphasized); and two, through the suppo-
sition that only a de fucto causal chain could make determinate a connection
between a particular mental state and something in the world. In response
to the first point, I suggest that, Putnam’s and Burge’s confidence notwith-
standing, it‘s an open question whether the semantics of the term ‘water‘
determines my thoughts to be about H 2 0 exclusively or whether my
thoughts may encompass XYZ, and thus an open question whether my and
my twin’s non-metalinguistic beliefs differ in content. With respect to the
second point, I say, first, the whole of the problem of naturalizing inten-
tionality cannot be solved by referring it to the causal history of word acqui-
sition because of the existence of thinking non-verbal creatures. Anyway,
causal contact with the flow of English verbiage is cheap: I, in concert with
other members of the Swamp-person Liberation Front have bestowed upon
every Swampcreature an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary mere

For the dissent, see Antony, 1990 and Fodor, 1990; also Loar, 1988 and Patterson, 1990.

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72 Mind €3 Language
moments after coalescence, which we urge them to use before speaking any
new word, so as to ensure the semantic content of their native vocabularies.
There’s a whole other line of apologetics rationalizing the oppression of
Swamp-persons, due to Ruth Millikan and Karen Neander (see Millikan,
1993; Neander, this issue). Their argument depends on two independent,
and independently questionable, steps. They maintain, first of all, that to fall
within the domain of psychology (and thus to be a thinker) is to instantiate
(in Millikan’s words) ’a biological function category’. Second, they claim that
biological function categories are diachronic rather than synchronic, historical
rather than dispositional or structural. Hence it follows that to be a thinker,
one must have had a particular kind of history. Let’s go backwards, and
consider the latter claim first.
In partial support of the claim that functional categories are based on his-
tory, Millikan and Neander appeal to the practice of biologists, who organize
living things and their parts into groups according to the presumed phylo-
genetic facts. Now I have no doubt that some biological categories, like spec-
ies categories, are de facto historical, and I therefore concede that Swamp-
persons are not, strictu dictu, human beings. But I also doubt that any bio-
logist other than a natural historian would much care. Although there are
some doctors who refuse to treat Swamp-persons, on the grounds that exist-
ing biological theories don’t cover them (not to mention existing insurance
policies), we know from the ministrations of other, nobler practitioners that
existing biological theories provide exactly the same degree of predictive
and explanatory power when applied to Swamp-persons ‘as if‘ they were
human, as they do when applied to humans themselves. The ’milk’ of
Swampcows has nourished many a human child; anyone interested in
nutrition will do well to find some way-in case biology doesn’t provide
one-of generalizing over milk and swampmilk, as well as over the creatures
who produce them.
The question is, which way of taxonomizing gives you more explanatory
power: keeping causal dispositions and history separate, or agglomerating
them? I see no conceivable advantage in insisting on keeping them together.
There was, in the past, a stable and reliable (or so we thought) contingency
that kept history and causal dispositions in phase in the case of plants and
animals-it used to be that the complexes of causal powers characteristic of
the larger mammals each corresponded to only one kind of origin. This per-
mitted the statement of a variety of de facto lawlike regularities that efficiently
encoded both causally significant intrinsic features of organisms and stable
(ha, ha) features of their environments. But the astonishing increase in spon-
taneous coalescence teaches us that this coincidence of history and dispo-
sition was a mere accident, one that could be explained, and exploited, but
an accident nonetheless. It’s precisely analogous to the discovery that tan-
ning booths, as well as the sun, produce the skin damage we rashly named
’sunburn’, and that the dreaded 20th-century plague AIDS was caused both
by the naturally occurring HIV and the artificially produced war agent
UVW. History may be, in certain circumstances, causally relevant, and thus
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 Equal Rights for Swamp-persons 73
potentially useful in scientific taxonomy, but it is not causally potent (for
discussion, see Antony, 1995).
Speaking of biology, it dawns on me that if biological function categories
are really historical, and if biology really depends on functional categories,
then biology is subject to an epistemological problem perfectly analogous to
the one externalism has seemed to pose for self-knowledgmnly worse.
Biologists do not, in general, have access to the evolutionary history of every
structure of every organism that they study; their assignments of function
are thus, of necessity, based on morphology, discernible causal role, and
(where possible) local history (see Amundsen and Lauder, unpublished). It
is possible in principle, then, that a structure that produces effects that are
of doubtless benefit to the organism, and that is assigned a function on that
basis, could turn out not to have been selected for the production of those
effects. The structure might not even have been selected at all-it might have
been a spandrel, as is the case with the ridged shell striations on the bottom-
dwelling clam (see Gould and Lewontin, 1979). In such cases, biologists
would be obliged to discard their taxonomies, no matter how empirically
useful they’ve been, or else to invent a new taxonomic parameter, ’pseudo-
function’, that plays the same role in explaining organisms‘ current interac-
tions with their environment that a genuine function would, just without the
right background.
Back to Millikan’s and Neander’s first step: the claim that to fall within
the domain of psychology is to instantiate a biological kind. I have already
suggested that interest in causal structure should (pardon the expression)
swamp curiosity about pedigree when we’re doing science, and thus that the
fact (in the past) that all persons were homo sapiens should not have influ-
enced the drawing of psychological boundaries. Let me remind us all that
the original arguments for an expansive conception of psychology antici-
pated the discovery of not only non-human persons, but non-biological ones
as well. Ironically, MiIlikan’s own theory honours the intuition that there
could be artificial persons, made from non-biological materials. Inten-
tionality-the power to represent-can, on her view, be passed on by delib-
erate acts of reproduction, even if such acts are not biological. Hence, her
own view permits psychology to encompass beings that are not in any ordi-
nary sense biological. I suggest that she explain to SwampDonald why E D 2
instantiates a biological function category and he doesn’t.
Neander, known to be tender-hearted, is willing to allow that Swamp-
persons might have ’narrow content’, as for example when a swamp-person
’thinks’ it is thinking, or ‘thinks’ that it is in pain. But these, if they are
anything, are thoughts with wide content, in my book. There is a persistent
tendency in the literature to view ‘narrow contents’ as thoughts whose refer-
ences are internal items. I think this unfortunate tendency may be the result
of Putnam’s early suggestion that stereotypes were ‘in the head’, even though
references weren’t. Putnam’s idea seemed to be that the contents of stereo-
types were scrutable, even if the ’real definitions’ of terms were not; but of
course if stereotypes are composed of things like ’animal’, ’roars’, ‘tail’ and
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74 Mind & Language
'striped', then stereotypes are subject to the same sorts of misapprehension
as 'tiger'. To have a serviceable stereotype of tigers, we need our internal
representation of 'animal' to mean animals, and whatever fixes that semantic
relation could jolly well fix the 'tiger'-tigers one, too. What Putnam called
a stereotype is actually a cluster of beliefs, and the doctrine he refuted with
the arguments about lemons and tigers was the doctrine that the reference
of a term is fixed by what a speaker believes about its referent.
Psychology has been exclusively about human minds throughout most of
history; arguably, psychology's greatest achievements to date have focused
on understanding the way a specific evolved structure has solved baffling
computational problems. But for philosophers, the imputation of a mind
ha-r should h a v e m o r a l resonance. We need a psychology that under-
writes a rationalist criterion of moral agency, one that warrants the extension
of moral concern to any creature with cognitive capacities identical to our
own, no matter how formed.

Department of Philosophy
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

References

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of Causal Role Function in Evolutionary Biology. Unpublished MS, available
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Antony, L. 1990: Semantic Anorexia: the Notion of 'Content' in Cognitive Science.
In George Boolos (ed.),Meaning and Method: Essays in Honor of H i l a y Putnam.
Cambridge University Press.
Antony, L. 1995: Law and Order in Psychology. In J. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical
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 Equal Rights for Swamp-persons 75
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0 Blackwell Publishen Ltd. 1996