This Post Knows Something

Reflecting on the implication of Richard Dawkins' scientific work, Steven Pinker argues that "we can sensibly apply mentalistic terms to biology without shudder quotes." If that's so, he continues,

we would have a deep explanation of our own minds, in which parochial activities like our own thinking and wanting would be seen as manifestations of more general and abstract phenomena.

By "mentalistic" Pinker means dispositions like 'want,' 'try,' 'know, 'want,' or 'think,' properties like selfishness or intelligence, and so forth. Thus, for example, we might seek

a generic characterisation of “knowing” (in terms of the storage of usable information) that would embrace both the way in which people know things (in their case, in the patterns of synaptic connectivity in brain tissue) and the ways in which the genes know things (presumably in the sequence of bases in their DNA).

Pinker recognizes that such extended uses of folk terms are fraught with error (as with the "tendency to confuse the various entities to which a given mentalistic explanation may be applied"), but notes (by way of example) that such confusions are corrigible.

It might butress Pinker's argument to say that we use mentalistic terms with respect to the actions of human agents even when arguably they have no more basis in consciousness than the corresponding actions of a bot. E.g., while Al is asleep, a fly alights on his nose; Al intermittently shoos the fly away with his hand, the fly shortly returning to his erstwhile perch; and the cycle repeats.

If awoken, Al would report having no knowledge of his action; nonetheless, few would quibble with the statement that "Al was trying to get the fly off his nose." (If there's a challenge to such useage, it's a challenge to folk useage--quod erat disputandum in any case.)