such, must involve language. Here Dennett can (and does) run the fol-
lowing argument. Atsomepoint in cognition structured, content-bearing,
states (whether thoughts or linguistic descriptions) need to be assembled in
a way which does not involve any encoding from prior thought. Plainly
this must be the case, on pain of vicious regress. So it is simpler to suppose
that such assembling takes place at the level of language, rather thanWrst
for thought which is then encoded into language. Here Dennett (1991)
endorses apandemonium modelof speech production, according to which
there is a vast array of lower-level (thoughtless) ‘word demons’ who
compete with one another by ‘shouting out’ a particular word or phrase.
This competition goes on in semi-chaotic fashion, inXuenced by context
and a variety of other factors (including the grammatical principles for the
language in question, presumably), until some of the word-demons emerge
as overall winners, and an assembled natural language sentence results.
We are also told that distinctively human thought was created when the
human brain became colonised, as a result of enculturation and com-
munication, bymemes– that is, by ideas, or concepts, acquired both with
and through natural language. These memes are carried by natural lan-
guage expressions, and their role in this new form of (conscious) cognition
results from the ways in which sentences act and react in the brain. And we
are told that the stream of inner verbalisation constitutes a new kind of
virtual machinein the computer which is the human brain. It is said to be a
sequential, sentence-based, programme running in a connectionist, highly
parallel, computer-architecture – aJoyceanstream of consciousnessma-
chine, in fact. Moreover, it is only with the arrival of language in the
hominid brain that we became capable of propositional thoughtsrealis-
tically construed– that is, which consist of discrete, structured, content-
bearing events having a causal role in virtue of their structure.
Dennett does not claim that the Joycean machine is wholly responsible
for, and exhaustive of, what is distinctive of human intelligence, however.
Rather, his position is that the Joycean machine is superimposed upon a
cognitive architecture containing many specialist processors, each of
which may have brought considerable adaptive beneWts, and contributed
to the success of earlier hominid species. Thus there may be specialist
mind-reading systems; co-operative exchange systems; processors for deal-
ing in naive physics and tool-making; processors for gathering and or-
ganising information about the living world; systems for selecting mates
and directing sexual strategies; a faculty for acquiring and processing
language; and so on – just as some evolutionary psychologists now sup-
pose (see Barkowet al., 1992; Mithen, 1996). Dennett’s distinctive claim is
that these processors not only operate in parallel, but that their internal
operations areconnectionistin nature, in such a way asnotto legitimate
robustly realist attributions of thought.
268 Consciousness: theWnal frontier?