The Fragmented Mind

Abstract

This excellent volume contains 14 chapters exploring the idea of fragmentation: the division of a belief state into parts (“fragments”) that can represent the world in distinct, jointly incoherent ways. For instance, I might know that sea cucumbers are a type of animal related to starfish when I am asked in a biological context, but when I am at a restaurant and see them on the menu, I think that sea cucumbers are a vegetable. I have two ways of thinking of sea cucumbers, two fragments that are both sets of beliefs about the world but are in some sense separate from each other. Most of the contributions concentrate on whether fragmentation is a good model of belief and how a fragmented state of mind can be rationally evaluated, though the final section contains a paper by Gertler (chap. 13) applying a case of fragmentation and subsequent belief change to a question about agency.While fragmentation theories share the commitment to multiple (potentially) incoherent belief states, this volume reveals a deep divide between two families of views. The first, dispositionalism, holds that what it is to have a fragment is just to be disposed to exhibit a pattern of actions1 that is best explained by more than one set of beliefs (given one’s background beliefs and desires). On this view, fragments are by definition coherent within themselves, and also by definition at odds with one another. For Elga and Rayo (chap. 1) and Greco (chap. 2), at odds means picking out a different set of possible worlds whereas for Yalcin (chap. 6), it means partitioning possible space differently. Representationalists, on the other hand, such as Bendaña and Mandelbaum (chap. 3) or Murez (chap. 7) hold that a fragment is a psychologically real entity. This means that in principle we can ask whether fragments are internally coherent without triviality.This distinction between representationalism and dispositionalism is not just important to broader questions about belief, but directly bears on fragmentation. This is most clear when we consider that many of the questions raised in one of the two frameworks in this volume are not even able to be formulated on the alternative framework. I’ll give two examples.Bendaña and Mandelbaum ask: when do new fragments arise? Their answer is the “Environmental Principle”: new environments open up new fragments, so that if in my Portuguese class, I saw a chart of types of pastry, I might encode these separately (and potentially incoherently) from my stored knowledge of pastries acquired in other contexts. But notice that on the dispositionalist view, fragments arise if and only if one’s behavior is at odds with other parts of behavior, given background beliefs and desires. We can of course ask when behavior comes to be at odds in this way, and perhaps the answer might appeal to contexts. But this is not the same question at all, since Bendaña and Mandelbaum treat the creation of a new fragment as a mental event happening at a particular time. The question of when this event occurs is one that has ordinary efficient causes, such as the prior mental awareness of a new environment. On the contrary, the dispositionalist can only ascribe fragments to swathes of behavior, so there may be no clear beginning to a fragment. Likewise, the question of new fragments leaves open the possibility that, at least in principle, beliefs might be incoherent without acquiring a new fragment and, conversely, that new fragments can arise even when nothing contradictory is represented. That is, it can be true that I have a new fragment relative to Portuguese class without anything being contradictory. But of course, for the dispositionalist, this is conceptually impossible. Thus the question raised (and answered) by Bendaña and Mandelbaum means something quite different to the dispositionalist. Or rather, the real question they are asking, what psychological process makes me break off my representations into new fragments, cannot be asked at all—instead, new fragments are born (and expire) as a matter of conceptual necessity.From the dispositionalist side, Egan asks: “What constraints shall we impose on the proliferation of belief states in order to avoid collapse into triviality and maintain the status of doxastic states as explanatory of behavior rather than as a mere summary or redescription of it?” (123). This question, on the other hand, is ill posed for the representationalist. For her, there is a matter of fact about how many fragments you have and one that is not decided from the point of view of the external modeler. And more importantly, there is no problem of triviality—a person has the number of fragments that she has, and whatever number that is cannot be too many since it reflects her representational capacity.These two questions are instances of a deeper issue dividing this volume. In a sense, all of the fragmentation debate is motivated by incoherence. But there are two very different projects around understanding how we are less than fully logically consistent. The first is the project of understanding how, when, and why we strive to be coherent. (By “striving” I do not necessarily mean first-personal effort but rather the deployment of psychological processing). On the other hand, we might also ask whether and how it is conceptually possible to be incoherent. These questions are not just different but, I would suggest, require different standpoints: the former a view of incoherence between real representations, and the latter a view of incoherence as a function of a whole person. This divide is not a problem with the volume, but it does lend it a somewhat disjointed feeling as authors on either side use similar language and examples to speak at distinct levels.The middle section of the book is devoted to connecting work on fragmentation to the topic of mental files. A mental file is a way of understanding what is going on in Frege cases where, for instance, I inadvertently think of the very same person under two different descriptions (Havel the politician/Havel the playwright). There is obviously a connection between these and fragmentation cases—in fact, it is sometimes hard to distinguish between them, though a difference is that fragmentation emphasizes a difference in propositions that are represented between fragments, whereas mental files emphasize a difference in the mode of presentation of a referent. This connection, while intuitive, has not received much attention, and this kind of work, connecting similar topics across different literatures, is often neglected. Recananti (chap. 9) in particular puts forward an illuminating connection between the two.One doubt I began to have about fragmentation in general started with a point made by Egan. He describes a case where someone can answer the question “Was the youngest von Trapp child’s name ‘Gretl’?” but not “What was the name of the youngest von Trapp child?” (111). After this, he observes, “Here is a puzzling feature of this sort of case: the information required to answer the two questions is exactly the same” (112). This seems false. I need more information to answer the open question about the name. The information cannot be the same since I could much more easily guess the right answer to the yes/no question. Likewise, I could answer the yes/no question by lacking knowledge of the name and just knowing facts such as “the name started with an A.” The question that includes the name contains more information, and I need less information to answer it.Egan is wrong about this case in an interesting way: he, like many of the other authors, seeks to explain the phenomenon of seemingly incoherent patterns of action and behavior through ascribing a more complex mental state to the agent than standard, unified belief. But this excludes, or rather internalizes, the role of the environment. When someone asks you “was the child named Gretl?” she is giving you information that is withheld in the other way of asking the question. But what becomes of this difference on the fragmentation picture?Elga and Rayo get nearest to this question. On their view, belief states are not relations between persons and propositions, but among persons, elicitation conditions, and propositions. Thus, relative to the elicitation condition of being asked this or that question, you are related to different sets of propositions. This does acknowledge the role of the environment, insofar as the elicitation conditions are environmental, and it is not committed to the idea that your beliefs are independent of the environment. But at the same time, the role of the environment is minimized in two ways. First, by including possible environmental conditions in the belief state, Elga and Rayo treat the variability between contexts as a feature of you rather than one shared by anyone in your circumstances. Second, by compiling all the elicitation conditions in a list, they elide differences in information between them: a person who has an easier time answering more informative questions like the yes/no question and a person who has an easier time answering when she is spinning in a circle are modeled as sharing the same kind of relativity to circumstance, whereas intuitively, a question that conveys information has a different kind of influence on belief than a physical motion that merely disposes you to some frame of mind.More generally, I worry that the category of fragmentation cases is heterogeneous between informationally relevant conditions and mere nonrational shifts, and treating them alike would miss that we expect many agents to respond to the von Trapp questions differently and indeed find such a pattern to reflect a rational uptake of implicitly conveyed information. Our relationship to our environments is an important part of the story of how we come to be incoherent, when incoherence is maintained, and how it is even possible, and so a major missing piece from the important work in this book is a focus beyond the agent’s mind.Finally, a striking feature of this book is its contemporary framing. Fragmentation, as introduced in this volume, is an idea originating from Cherniak, Lewis, and Stalnaker. In fact, almost every chapter in this book discusses a case from Lewis revolving around a mental map of Nassau Street. This unity has upsides, in allowing the book to be tightly focused and well-integrated compared to similar volumes. But it did leave me with questions about the broader history of this debate.Among surely many other places, historical antecedents can be found in the many descriptions of internal conflict in the Confessions (Augustine, 2008). In book 7, Augustine begins by describing his state of mind as he in some sense comes to believe that God is immaterial, but at the same time is unable to shake a way of thinking of God as occupying space: My heart vehemently protested against all the physical images in my mind, and by this single blow I attempted to expel from my mind’s eye the swarm of unpurified notions flying about there. Hardly had they been dispersed when in the flash of an eye (i Cor. 15:52) they had regrouped and were back again. They attacked my power of vision and clouded it. Although you were not in the shape of the human body, I nevertheless felt forced to imagine something physical occupying space diffused either in the world or even through infinite space outside the world. Admittedly I thought of this as incorruptible and inviolable and unchangeable, which I set above what is corruptible, violable, and changeable. (111)A few features of Augustine’s presentation of division might shed light on the issue of fragmentation. First, unlike the paradigm cases of fragmentation from this volume, Augustine’s divided state persists despite him noticing it. He may not have had the full understanding of the contradiction he notes in the light of hindsight, but the description implies an effort to dispel the material conception that must reflect some degree of awareness. This seems intuitively possible, though it might already strain some of the views discussed above on which we only reason from one fragment at a time (e.g., Yalcin’s). Second, the conflict is not merely between propositions, or even between fine- and coarse-grained propositions, but between visual and abstract modes of thinking. We could even imagine these differences explain the first feature, why the division can persist despite being noticed.Most interestingly, an affective element pervades Augustine’s description: the relationship between the two states of mind is described as a war. I wonder whether the volume might have benefitted from more engagement with history, especially when it comes to exploring the connection between incoherence and affect that Loeb (1998) traces through the Stoics, Hume, and Peirce. While in Augustine’s case, the feeling of strife and division might draw on awareness of the conflict, there are surely ways to think of the affective side of fragmentation even in cases of partial or minimal awareness. This dimension is significant because it relates to questions of how and when fragments are combined, to the particular recalcitrance of core beliefs as noted by Bendaña and Mandelbaum, and even to the ethically and politically charged issues raised in the section on implicit beliefs. Many of the contributors appeal to the idea that beliefs are a set of maps that we use to steer, but the link with affect suggests that divided states of mind have a motivational force of their own—in the sense that we’re bothered or made uneasy by the division, or even in the sense of each belief substate pushing us and pushing against the others.Overall, this book is a tightly connected collection of papers on a topic at the heart of the intersection between metaphysics of mind and epistemology (with many more compelling contributions than I have room to discuss here). It will be a core resource to anyone interested in diving into this debate.