Logical priority of conventional methods of determining thoughts over brain scanner
There is a causal dependence between brain activity and experience, but it is a leap to suggest that we can identify brain activity with experience.
Even if we found an incredible empirical correlation between brain activity and experience, if we suddenly had a conflict one day (brain scanner says that the subject thinks he’s drinking coffee, but we see him eating ice cream and he assures us he knows/believes he is eating ice cream), then we would conclude the brain scanner is wrong, not the
What it means to be a thought is not the same thing as what it means to be a brain state
Brain states connected by casual relationships. Cannot be ‘correct’ or incorrect.
Mental states occupy the space of reasons - the meaning of certain thought is identified by its relationships to other thoughts. Structured by normative relationships (can be correct or incorrect).
If brain scanner with amazing correlation says that someone is telling a lie by analyzing brain states, they may be lying 100% of the time that brain scanner says they’re lying, but it is not the brain state itself that makes them lying or not.
Drawing from thoughts of John MacDowell (“Mind and World”)
For a thought to be ‘about’ an object (world-directed, with empirical content) - it’s necessary that the correctness of the thought to be answerable to how things are.
For an intention to be an intention - it has to determine the correctness/incorrectness of some subsequent action.
A brain is not logically answerable to reality and is not overtly acting in the world, so it’s not fair to say it has thoughts or intentions.
This is not a general anti-skeptic argument, but other skeptical tactics might be addressable by similar reasoning.
Thus, Edward is proposing bottom up anti-skepticism, rather than some top-down “reason for knowing that the table is there”